The French being the most classical of all modern poetry, is of all others least calculated to become familiar among the lower-orders of the people. The stanzas of Tasso are sung by the gondoliers of Venice; the Spaniards and Portugese, of all

"In their crusade against the French, in their naturalization of Shakspeare, and their furtherance of Herder's efforts towards the restoration of a ballad literature, and the taste for Gothic Architecture, these Romanticists were with the stream. They also flattered the national tendencies when they proclaimed 'mythology and poetry, symbolical legend and art, to be one and indivisible," whereby it became clear that a new Religion, or at any rate a new Mythology, was needed, for 'the deepest want and deficiency of all modern Art lies in the fact that the artists have no Mythology."

"While Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher were tormented with the desire to create a new philosophy and a new religion, it soon became evident that a Mythology was not to be created by programme; and as a Mythology was indispensable, the Romanticists betook themselves to Catholicism, with its saintly legends and saintly heroes; some of them, as Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, out of nothing more than a poetic enthusiasm and dilettanteism: others, as F. Schlegel and Werner, with thorough conviction, accepting Catholicism and all its consequences.

"Solger had called Irony the daughter of Mysticism; and how highly these Romanticists prized Mysticism is know to all readers of Novalis. To be mystical was to be poetical as well as profound; and our critics glorified mediæval monstrosities because of 'their deep spiritualism,' which stood in contrast with the pagan materialism of Goethe and Schiller. Once commenced, this movement rushed rapidly onwards to the confines of nonsense. Art became the handmaid of Religion. The universal canon was laid down (and still lingers in some quarters), that only in the service of Religion had Art ever flourished,-only in that service could it flourish. Art became a propagande. Fra Angelico and Calderon suddenly became idols. Theory was bursting with absurdities. Werner was proclaimed a Colossus by Wackenroder, who wrote his Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliehenden Klosterbruders, with Ticck's aid, to prove, said Goethe, that because some monks were artists, all artists should turn monks. Then it. was, men looked to Faith for miracles in Art. Devout study of the Bible was thought to be the readiest means of rivalling Fra Angelico and Van Eyck; a hair-shirt was inspiration. The painters went over in crowds to the Roman Church. Cornelius and Overbeck lent real genius to the attempt to revive the dead forms of early Christian art, as Goethe and Schiller did to revive the dead forms of Grecian art. Overbeck, who painted in a cloister, was so thoroughly penetrated by the ascetic spirit, that he refused to draw from the living model, lest it should make his works too naturalistic; for to be true to Nature was tantamount to being false to the

1 F. Schlegel: Gespräche über Poesie, p. 268.

Ibid., p. 274.

ranks, know by heart the verses of Calderon and Camoëns, Shakspeare is as much admited by the populace in England as by those of a higher class. The poems of Goethe and Bür ger are set to music, and repeated from the banks of the Rhine to the shores of the Baltic. Our French poets are admired wherever there are cultivated minds, either in our own nation, or in the rest of Europe; but they are quite unknown to the common people, and even to the class of citizens in our towns,

higher tendencies of spiritualism. Cornelius, more of an artist, had too much of the artistic instinct to carry his principles into these exaggerations; but others less gifted, and more bigoted, carried those principles into every excess. A band of these reformers established themselves in Rome, and astonished the Catholics quite as much as the Protestants. Cesar Masini, in his work Dei Puristi in Pittura thus describes them: 'Several young men came to Rome from Northern Germany in 1809. They abjured Protestantism, adopted the costume of the Middle Ages, and began to preach the doctrine that painting had died out with Giotto, and to revive it, a recurrence to the old style was necessary. Under such a mask of piety they concealed their nullity. Servile admirers of the rudest periods in Art, they duclared the pigmies were giants, and wanted to bring us back to the dry hard style and barbarous imperfection of a Buffalmacco, Calandrino, Paolo Uccello, when we had a Raphael, a Titian, and a Correggio.' In spite of the exaggerations of these admirers of the Trecentisti, in spite of a doo trine which was fundamentally vicious, the Romanticists made a decided revolution, and they still keep the lead in painting. Whatever may be thought of the 'German School,' it must be confessed that until Overbeck, Cornelius, Schadow, Hess, Lessing, Hübner, Sohn, and Kaulbach, the Germans had no painters at all; and they have in these men painters of very remarkable power.'

"Such was the new school and its doctrine. Raphael is not more antagonistic to Fra Angelico, Titian is not more antagonistic to Albert Durer, than Goethe and Schiller were to the hectic Novalis and the dandy Schlegel. Nevertheless, it is certain that their culture of Reflection on the one hand, and of Imitation on the other, aided the Romantic movement more than their own works and strivings retarded it. That movement has long come to a stand-still in literature, and its judgment has been pronounced; but with much obvious mischief it brought many obvious advantages, and no student of modern literature-will refuse his acknowledgment to the services rendered by Romanticism in making the Middle Ages more thoroughly understood."-(Lewes, Goethe's Life and Works, vol. ii. pp. 216–220.)—Ed.

1 Our own Pre-Raphaelite School is a child of the Romartie School. Success is assured by the genius of Millais and Hunt, in spite of the theoretical doctrines they maintain, and by their fidelity to Nature; in this latter respect they are the opposites of the Romanticista

because the arts, in France, are not, as elsewhere, natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed.

Some French critics have asserted that German literature is still in its infancy. This opinion is entirely false; men who are best skilled in the knowledge of languages and the works of the ancients, are certainly not ignorant of the defects and advantages attached to the species of literature which they either adopt or reject; but their character, their habits, and their modes of reasoning, have led them to prefer that which is founded on the recollection of chivalry, on the wonders of the middle ages, to that which has for its basis the mythology of the Greeks. Romantic literature is alone capable of further improvement, because, being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire fresh life: it expresses our religion; it recalls our history; its origin is ancient, although not of classical antiquity.

. Classic poetry, before it comes home to us, must pass through our recollections of paganism: that of the Germans is the Christian era of the fine arts; it employs our personal impressions to excite strong and vivid emotions; the genius by which it is inspired addresses itself immediately to our hearts, and seems to call forth the spirit of our own lives, of all phantoms at once the most powerful and the most terrible.

CHAPTER XII.

OF GERMAN POEMS.

FROM the various reflections contained in the preceding chapter, I think we must conclude that there is scarcely any classic poetry in Germany-whether we consider it as imitated from the ancients, or whether by the word classic we merely understand the highest degree of perfection. The fruitful im agination of the Germans leads them to produce, rather than

to correct; and therefore it would be very difficult to quote in their literature any writings generally acknowledged as models. Their language is not fixed; taste changes with every new production of men of genius; all is progressive, all goes on, and the stationary point of perfection is not yet attained; but is this an evil In all those nations which have flattered themselves with having reached it, the symptoms of decay have been almost immediately perceived, and imitators have succeeded classical writers, as if for the purpose of disgusting us with their writings.

In Germany there are as many poets as in Italy; the multitude of attempts, of whatever kind they may be, indicates the natural disposition of a nation. When the love of art is universal in it, the mind naturally takes a direction towards poetry, as elsewhere towards politics or mercantile interests. Among the Greeks there was a crowd of poets; and nothing is more favorable to genius than being surrounded with a great number of men who follow the same career. Artists are indulgent when judging of faults, because the difficulties of an art are known to them; but they exact much before they bestow approbation; great beauties and new beauties must be produced, before any work of art can in their eyes equal the chefsd'œuvre which continually occupy their thoughts. The Germans write extempore, if we may so express it, and this great facility is the true sign of genius in the fine arts; for, like the flowers of the South, they ought to bloom without culture; labor improves them; but imagination is abundant, when a liberal nature has imparted it to man. It is impossible to mention all the German poets who would deserve a separate eulogy; I will confine myself merely to the consideration, and that in a general manner, of the three schools which I have already distinguished, when I pointed out the historical progress of German literature.

Wieland in his tales has imitated Voltaire, and often Lucian also, who, in a philosophical point of view, might be called the Voltaire of antiquity; sometimes, too, he has imitated Ariosto, and unfortunately, also Crébillon. He has rendered several

tales of chivalry into verse-namely, Gandalin, Giron le Courtois, Oberon, &c., in which there is more sensibility than in Ariosto, but always less of grace and gayety. The German does not glide over all subjects with the ease and lightness of the Italian; and the pleasantries suitable to a language so overcharged with consonants, are those connected with the art of strongly characterizing a subject, rather than of indicating it imperfectly. Idris and the New Amadis are fairy tales, in which at every page the virtue of women is the subject of those everlasting pleasantries, which cease to be immoral, because they have become tiresome. Wieland's tales of chivalry appear to me much superior to his poems imitated from the Greek-Musarion, Endymion, Ganymede, the Judgment of Paris, &c. Tales of chivalry are national in Germany. The natural genius of the language, and of its poets, is well adapted to the art of painting the exploits and the loves of those knights and heroines, whose sentiments were at the same time so strong and so simple, so benevolent and so determined; but in attempting to unite modern grace with Grecian subjects, Wieland has necessarily rendered them affected. Those who endeavor to modify ancient taste by that of the moderns, or modern taste by that of the ancients, are almost always so. To be secure from this danger, we must treat each of these subjects entirely according to its own nature.

Oberon passes in Germany alınost for an epic poem. It is founded on a tale of French chivalry, Huon de Bourdeaux, of which M. de Tressan has given us an abstract; and Oberon the Genius, with Titania the Fairy, just such as Shakspeare has described them in the play of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," constitute the mythology of the poem. The subject is given by our old romantic writers; but we cannot too much admire the poetry with which Wieland has enriched it. Pleasantry, drawn from the marvellous, is there handled with much grace and originality. Huon is sent into Palestine, in consequence of various adventures, to ask the daughter of the sultan in marriage; and when the gravest personages who oppose that marriage are all set dancing, at the sound of the singular