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Twenty-ninth of February, we have the principle | For our own share, we confess that we incline in its naked state: some old Woodcutter or to rank it as a recipe for dramatic tears, a Forester has fallen into deadly sin with his shade higher than the Page's split onion in wife's sister, long ago, on that intercalary day; the Taming of the Shrew. Craftily hid in the and so his whole progeny must, wittingly or handkerchief, this onion was sufficient for the unwittingly, proceed in incest and murder; deception of Christopher Sly; in that way atthe day of the catastrophe regularly occurring, taining its object; which, also, the Fate-invenevery four years, on that same Twenty-ninth; tion seems to have done with the Christopher till happily the whole are murdered, and there Slys of Germany, and these not one but many, is an end. So likewise in the Schuld, (Guilt,) a and therefore somewhat harder to deceive. much more ambitious performance, we have To this onion-superiority we think Dr. M. is exactly the same doctrine of an anniversary; fairly entitled; and with this it were, perhaps, and the interest once more turns on that good for him that he remained content. delicate business of murder and incest. In the Albanäserinn, (Fair Albanese,) again, which may have the credit, such as it is, of being Müllner's best Play, we find the Fate-theory a little coloured; as if the drug had begun to disgust, and the Doctor would hide it in a spoonful of syrup: it is a dying man's curse that operates on the criminal; which curse, being strengthened by a sin of very old standing in the family of the cursee, takes singular effect; the parties only weathering parricide, fratricide, and the old story of incest, by two self-banishments, and two very decisive selfmurders. Nay, it seems as if our Doctor positively could not act at all without this Fate-panacea: in König Yngurd, we might almost think that he had made such an attempt, and found that it would not do. This König Yngurd, an imaginary Peasant-King of Norway, is meant, as we are kindly informed, to present us with some adumbration of Napoleon Bonaparte; and truly, for the two or three first Acts, he goes along with no small gallantry, in what drill-sergeants call a dashing or swashing style; a very virtuous kind of man, and as bold as Ruy Diaz or any other Christian: when suddenly in the middle of a battle, far on in the Play, he is seized with some caprice, or whimsical qualm; retires to a solitary place, among rocks, and there, in the most gratuitous manner, delivers himself over, viva voce, to the Devil; who indeed does not appear personally to take seisin of him, but yet, as afterwards comes to light, has with great readiness accepted the gift. For now Yngurd grows dreadfully sulky and wicked, does little henceforth but bully men and kill them; till at length, the measure of his iniquities being full, he himself is bullied and killed; and the Author, carried through by this his sovereign tragic elixir, contrary to expectation, terminates his piece with reasonable comfort.

This, then, is Dr. Müllner's dramatic mystery; this is the one patent hook by which he would hang his clay tragedies on the upper spiritual world; and so establish for himself a free communication, almost as if by blockand-tackle, between the visible Prose Earth and the invisible Poetic Heaven. The greater or less merit of this his invention, or rather improvement, for Werner is the real patentee, has given rise, we understand, to extensive argument. The small deer of criticism seem to be much divided in opinion on this point; and the higher orders, as we have stated, declining to throw any light whatever on it, the subject is still mooting with great animation.

Dr. Müllner's Fate-scheme has been attacked by certain of his traducers on the score of its hostility to the Christian religion. Languishing, indeed, should we reckon the condition of the Christian religion to be, could Dr. Müllner's play-joinery produce any perceptible effect on it. Nevertheless, we may remark, since the matter is in hand, that this business of Fate does seem to us nowise a Christian doctrine; not even a Mohammedan or Heathen one. The Fate of the Greeks, though a false, was a lofty hypothesis, and harmonized sufficiently with the whole sensual and material structure of their theology: a ground of deepest black, on which that gorgeous phantas magoria was fitly enough painted. Besides, with them, the avenging Power dwelt, at least in its visible manifestations, among the high places of the earth; visiting only kingly houses, and world's criminals, from whom it might be supposed the world, but for such miraculous interferences, could have exacted no vengeance, or found no protection and purification. Never, that we recollect of, did the Erinnyes become mere sheriffs'-officers, and Fate a justice of the peace, haling poor drudges to the treadmill for robbery of henroosts, or scattering the earth with steel-traps to keep down poaching. And what has all this to do with the revealed Providence of these days; that power whose path is emphatically through the great deep; his doings and plans manifested, in complete. ness, not by the year, or by the century, on individuals or on nations, but stretching through eternity, and over the infinitude which he rules and sustains?

But there needs no recourse to theological arguments for judging this Fate-tenet of Dr. Müllner's. Its value, as a dramatic principle, may be estimated, it seems to us, by this one consideration: that in these days no person of either sex in the slightest degree believes it; that Dr. Müllner himself does not believe it. We are not contending that fiction should become fact, or that no dramatic incident is genuine, unless it could be sworn to before a jury; but simply that fiction should not be falsehood and delirium. How shall any one in the drama, or in poetry of any sort, present a consistent philosophy of life, which is the soul and ultimate essence of all poetry, if he and every mortal know that the whole moral basis of his ideal world is a lie? And is it other than a lie that man's life is, or was, or could be, grounded on this pettifogging princi ple of a Fate that pursues woodcutters and cowherds with miraculous visitations, on stated days of the month? Can we, with any profit,

hold the mirror up to Nature in this wise? When our mirror is no mirror, but only as it were a nursery saucepan, and that long since grown rusty?

lampoon: the German Joe Millers also seem familiar to him, and his skill in the riddle is respectable; so that altogether, as we said, he makes a superior figure in this line, which inWe might add, were it of any moment in deed is but despicably managed in Germany, this case, that we reckon Dr. Müllner's tragic and his Mitternacht-Blatt is, by several degrees, knack altogether insufficient for a still more the most readable paper of its kind we meet with comprehensive reason; simply for the reason in that country. Not that we, in the abstract, that it is a knack, a recipe, or secret of the much admire Dr. Müllner's newspaper procraft, which, could it be never so excellent, cedure; his style is merely the common-tavernmust by repeated use degenerate into a man- style, familiar enough in our own periodical nerism, and therefore into a nuisance. But literature; riotous, blustering, with some tincherein lies the difference between creation ture of blackguardism; a half-dishonest style, and manufacture; the latter has its manipula- and smells considerably of tobacco and spiritutions, its secret processes, which can be learned ous liquor. Neither do we find that there is by apprenticeship; the former has not. For the smallest fraction of valuable knowledge or in poetry we have heard of no secret possess opinion communicated in the Midnight Paper; ing the smallest effectual virtue, except this indeed, except it be the knowledge and opinion one general secret: that the poet be a man of that Dr. Müllner is a great dramatist, and that all a purer, higher, richer nature than other men; who presume to think otherwise are insufficient which higher nature shall itself, after earnest members of society, we cannot charge our inquiry, have taught him the proper form for memory with having gathered any knowledge imbodying its inspirations, as indeed the im- from it whatever. It may be, too, that Dr. perishable beauty of these will shine, with Müllner is not perfectly original in his journalmore or less distinctness, through any form istic manner: we have sometimes felt as if his whatever. light were, to a certain extent, a borrowed one; a rushlight kindled at the great pitch link of our own Blackwood's Magazine. But on this point we cannot take upon us to decide.

one.

Had Dr. Müllner any visible pretension to this last great secret, it might be a duty to dwell longer and more gravely on his minor ones, however false and poor. As he has no such pretension, it appears to us that for the present we may take our leave. To give any further analysis of his individual dramas would be an easy task, but a stupid and thankless A Harrison's watch, though this too is but an earthly machine, may be taken asunder with some prospect of scientific advantage; but who would spend time in screwing and unscrewing the mechanism of ten peppermills? Neither shall we offer any extract, as a specimen of the diction and sentiment that reigns in these dramas. We have said already that it is fair, well-ordered stage-sentiment this of his; that the diction too is good, wellscanned, grammatical diction; no fault to be found with either, except that they pretend to be poetry, and are throughout the most unadulterated prose. To exhibit this fact in extracts would be a vain undertaking. Not the few sprigs of heath, but the thousand acres of it, characterize the wilderness. Let any one who covets a trim heath-nosegay, clutch at random into Müllner's seven volumes; for ourselves, we would not deal further in that article.

Besides his dramatic labours, Dr. Müllner is known to the public as a journalist. For some considerable time, he has edited a literary newspaper of his own originating, the MitternachtBlatt (Midnight Paper); stray leaves of which we occasionally look into. In this last capacity, we are happy to observe, he shows to much more advantage; indeed, the journalistic office seems quite natural to him; and would he take any advice from us, which he will not, here were the arena in which, and not in the Fatedrama, he would exclusively continue to fence, for his bread or glory. He is not without a vein of small wit; a certain degree of drollery there is, and grinning half-risible, half-impudent; he has a fair hand at the feebler sort of

One of Müllner's regular journalistic articles is the Kriegszeitung, or War-intelligence, of all the paper-battles, feuds, defiances, and private assassinations, chiefly dramatic, which occur in the more distracted portion of the German Literary Republic. This Kriegszeitung Dr. Müllner evidently writes with great gusto, in a lively braggadocia manner, especially when touching on his own exploits; yet to us, it is far the most melancholy part of the MitternachtFlatt. Alas! this is not what we search for in a German newspaper; how “Herr Sapphir, or Herr Carbuncle, or so many other Herren Dousterswivel, are all busily molesting one another! We ourselves are pacific men; make a point "to shun discrepant circles rather than seek them:" and how sad is it to hear of so many illustrious-obscure persons living in foreign parts, and hear only, what was well known without hearing, that they also are instinct with the spirit of Satan! For what is the bone that these Journalists, in Berlin and elsewere, are worrying over; what is the ultimate purpose of all this barking and snarling? Sheer love of fight, you would say; simply to make one another's life a little bitterer, as if Fate had not been cross enough to the happiest of them. Were there any perceptible subject of dispute, any doctrine to advocate, even a false one, it would be something; but so far as we can discover, whether from Sapphire and Company, or the "Nabob of Weissenfels," (our own worthy Doctor,) there is none. And is this their appointed function? Are Editors scattered over the country, and supplied with victuals and fuel, purely to bite one another? Certainly not. But these Journalists, we think, are like the Academician's colony of spiders. This French virtuoso had found that cobwebs were worth something, could even be woven into silk stockings: whereupon, he exhibits a very handsome pair

of cobweb hose to the Academy, is encouraged | upper air. Not in despite towards the German to proceed with the manufacture, and so col-nation, which we love honestly, have we spolects some half-bushel of spiders, and puts ken thus of these its Playwrights and Jourthem down in a spacious loft, with every con- nalists. Alas! when we look around us at venience for making silk. But will the vicious home, we feel too well that the Germans might creatures spin a thread? In place of it, they say to us,-Neighbour, sweep thy own floor! take to fighting with their whole vigour, Neither is it with any hope of bettering the in contempt of the poor Academician's utmost existence of these three individual Poetasters, exertions to part them: and end not, till there still less with the smallest shadow of wish to is simply one spider left living, and not a shred make it more miserable, that we have spoken. of cobweb woven, or thenceforth to be ex- After all, there must be Playwrights, as we pected! Could the weavers of paragraphs, have said: and these are among the best of like these of the cobweb, fairly exterminate the class. So long as it pleases them to manuand silence one another, it would perhaps be facture in this line, and any body of German a little more supportable. But an Editor is Thebans to pay them, in groschen or plaudits, made of sterner stuff. In general cases, in- for their ware, let both parties persist in so deed, when the brains are out, the man will doing, and fair befall them! But the duty of die: but it is a well known fact in Journalistics, Foreign Reviewers is of a two-fold sort. For that a man may not only live, but support wife not only are we stationed on the coast of the and children by his labours, in this line, years country, as watchers and spials, to report after the brain (if there ever was any) has whatsoever remarkable thing becomes visible been completely abstracted, or reduced, by in the distance; but we stand there also as a time and hard usage, into a state of dry sort of Tide-waiters and Preventive-servicepowder. What then is to be done? Is there men, to contend, with our utmost vigour, that no end to this brawling; and will the unpro-no improper article be landed. These offices, fitable noise endure for ever? By way of palliative, we have sometimes imagined that a Congress of all German Editors might be appointed, by proclamation, in some central spot, say the Nürnberg Market-place, if it would hold them all: here we would humbly suggest | that the whole Journalistik might assemble on a given day, and under the eye of proper marshals, sufficiently and satisfactorily horsewhip one another simultaneously, each his neighbour, till the very toughest had enough both of whipping and of being whipped. In this way, it seems probable, little or no injustice would be done: and each Journalist, cleared of gall, for several months, might return home in a more composed frame of mind, and betake himself with new alacrity to the real duties of his office.

But, enough! enough! The humour of these men may be infectious; it is not good for us to be here. Wandering over the Elysian fields of German Literature, not watching the gloomy discords of its Tartarus, is what we wish to be employed in. Let the iron gate again close, and shut in the palid kingdoms from view; we gladly revisit the

it would seem, as in the material world, so
also in the literary and spiritual, usually fall
to the lot of aged, invalided, impoverished, or
otherwise decayed persons; but this is little to
the matter. As true British subjects, with
ready will, though it may be, with our last
strength, we are here to discharge that double
duty. Movements, we observe, are making
along the beach, and signals out sea-wards, as
if these Klingemanns and Müllners were to
be landed on our soil: but through the
strength of heaven this shall not be done, till
the "most thinking people" know what it is
that is landing. For the rest, if any one wishes
to import that sort of produce, and finds it
nourishing for his inward man, let him do so,
and welcome. Only let him understand that
it is not German Literature he is swallowing,
but the froth and scum of German Literature;
which scum, if he will only wait, we can fur-
ther promise him that he may, ere long, enjoy
in the new, and perhaps cheaper, form of sedi-
ment. And so let every one be active for him-
self.

Noch ist es Tag, da rühre sich der Mann,
Die Nacht tritt ein, wo niemand wirken kann.

VOLTAIRE.*

[FOREIGN REVIEW, 1829.]

COULD ambition always choose its own path, and were will in human undertakings synonymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters. Certainly, if we examine that love of power, which enters so largely into most practical calculations, nay, which our Utilitarian friends have recognised as the sole end and origin, both motive and reward, of all earthly enterprises, animating alike the philanthropist, the conqueror, the money-changer, and the missionary, we shall find that all other arenas of ambition, compared with this rich and boundless one of Literature, meaning thereby whatever respects the promulgation of Thought, are poor, limited, and ineffectual. For dull, unreflective, merely instinctive as the ordinary man may seem, he has nevertheless, as a quite indispensable appendage, a head that in some degree considers and computes; a lamp or rushlight of understanding has been given him, which, through whatever dim, besmoked, and strangely diffractive media it may shine, is the ultimate guiding light of his whole path: and here, as well as there, now as at all times in man's history, Opinion rules the world.

Curious it is, moreover, to consider, in this respect, how different appearance is from reality, and under what singular shape and circumstances the truly most important man of any given period might be found. Could some Asmodeus, by simply waiving his arm, open asunder the meaning of the Present, even so far as the Future will disclose it, how much more marvellous a sight should we have, than that mere bodily one through the roofs of Madrid! For we know not what we are, any more than what we shall be. It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has had a commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end! What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working Universe, and will also work there, for good or for evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time. But the life of every man is as the well-spring of a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed plain to all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omniscient can discern. Will it mingle with neighbouring rivulets, as a tributary; or receive them as their sovereign?

Is it to be a nameless brook, and will its tiny waters, among millions of other brooks and rills, increase the current of some world'sriver? Or is it to be itself a Rhine or Danaw, whose goings forth are to the uttermost lands, its flood an everlasting boundary-line on the globe itself, the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and continents? We know not only in either case, we know its path is to the great ocean: its waters, were they but a handful, are here, and cannot be annihilated or permanently held back.

As little can we prognosticate, with any certainty, the future influences from the present aspects of an individual. How many Demagogues, Cræsuses, Conquerors fill their own age with joy or terror, with a tumult that promises to be perennial; and in the next age die away into insignificance and oblivion! These are the forests of gourds, that overtop the infant cedars and aloe-trees, but, like the Prophet's gourd, wither on the third day. What was it to the Pharaohs of Egypt, in that old era, if Jethro the Midianitish priest and grazier accepted the Hebrew outlaw as his herdsman? Yet the Pharaohs, with all their chariots of war, are buried deep in the wrecks of time; and that Moses still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts and daily business of all civilized nations. Or figure Mahomet, in his youthful years," travelling to the horse-fairs of Syria!" Nay, to take an infinitely higher instance, who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus; inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero?

To us it is the most earnest, sad, and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing: Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos, et quæsitissimis pœnis affecit, quos per flagitia invisos, vulgus CHRISTIANOS appellabat. Auctor nominis ejus CHRISTUS, qui, Tiberio imperitante, per Procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat. Repressaque in præsens exitiabilis superstitio rursus erumpebat, non modo per Judæam originem ejus muli, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt, celebranturque. "So, for the quieting of this rumour,* Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the procurator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition, thereby repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but

* Mémoires sur Voltaire, et sur ses Ouvrages, par Longchamp et Wagnière, ses Secrétaires; suivis de divers Ecrits inédits de la Marquise du Châtelet, du Président Henault, &c., tous relatifs à Voltaire. (Memoirs concerning Voltaire and his Works, by Longchamp and in the City also, where from every side al! Vagnière, his Secretaries; with various unpublished pieces by the Marquise du Châtelet, &c., all relating to Voltaire.) 2 Tomes. Paris, 1826.

*Of his having set fire to Rome.

heaps of straw!" For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the Fable, the mild shining of the sun shall silently accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed. How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons, or immeasurable tumult of baggage-wagons, attends its movements: in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating, which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for Kings and Emperors will be among its ministering servants; it will rule not over, but in all heads, and with these its solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas bend the world to its will! The time may come, when Napoleon himself will be better known for his laws than for his battles; and the victory of Waterloo prove less momentous than the opening of the first Mechanics' Institute.

atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish." Tacitus was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation; and to such depth, and no deeper, has he seen into this transaction, the most important that has occurred or can occur in the annals of mankind. Nor is it only to those primitive ages, when religions took their rise, and a man of pure and high mind appeared not merely as a teacher and philosopher, but as a priest and prophet, that our observation applies. The same uncertainty, in estimating present things and men, holds more or less in all times; for in all times, even in those which seem most trivial, and open to research, human society rests on inscrutably deep foundations; which he is of all others the most mistaken, who fancies he has explored to the bottom. Neither is that sequence, which we love to speak of as "a chain of causes," properly to be figured as a "chain," or line, but rather as a tissue, or superficies of innumerable lines, extending in breadth as well as in length, and with a complexity, which will foil and utterly bewilder the most assiduous computation. In We have been led into such rather rite refact, the wisest of us must, for by far the most flections, by these volumes of Memoirs on Volpart, judge like the simplest; estimate im-taire; a man in whose history the relative importance by mere magnitude, and expect that what strongly affects our own generation, will strongly affect those that are to follow. In this way it is that conquerors and political revolutionists come to figure as so mighty in their influences; whereas truly there is no class of persons, creating such an uproar in the world, who in the long run produce so very slight an impression on its affairs. When Tamerlane had finished building his pyramid of seventy thousand human skulls, and was seen "standing at the gate Damascus, glittering, in steel, with his battle-axe on his shoulder," till his fierce hosts filed out to new victories and new carnage, the pale onlooker might have fancied that Nature was in her death-throes; for havoc and despair had taken possession of the earth, the sun of manhood seemed setting in seas of blood. Yet, it might be, on that very gala-day of Tamerlane, a little boy was playing ninepins on the streets of Mentz, whose history was more important to men than that of twenty Tamerlanes. The Tartar Khan, with his shaggy demons of the wilderness, "passed away like a whirlwind" to be forgotten for ever; and that German artisan has wrought a benefit, which is yet immeasurably expanding itself, and will continue to expand itself through all countries and through all times. What are the conquests and expeditions of the whole corporation of captains, from Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Bonaparte, compared with these "movable types" of Johannes Faust? Truly, it is a mortifying thing for your Conqueror to reflect, how perishable is the metal which he hammers with such violence: how the kind earth will soon shroud up his bloody footprints; and all that he achieved and skilfully piled together will be but like his own canvas city" of a camp,this evening loud with life, to-morrow all siruck and vanished, "a few earth-pits and

Tacit. Annal. xv. 44.

portance of intellectual and physical power is again curiously evinced. This also was a private person, by birth nowise an elevated one; yet so far as present knowledge will ena ble us to judge, it may be said, that to abstract Voltaire and his activity from the eighteenth century, were to produce a greater difference in the existing figure of things, than the want of any other individual, up to this day, could have occasioned. Nay, with the single excep tion of Luther, there is, perhaps, in these modern ages, no other man of a merely intellectual character, whose influence and reputa tion have become so entirely European as that of Voltaire. Indeed, like the great German Reformer's, his doctrines too, almost from the first, have affected not only the belief of the thinking world, silently propagating themselves from mind to mind; but in a high degree also, the conduct of the active and political world; entering as a distinct element into some of the most fearful civil convulsions which European history has on record.

Doubtless, to his own contemporaries, to such of them at least as had any insight into the actual state of men's minds, Voltaire already appeared as a note-worthy and decidedly historical personage: yet, perhaps, not the wildest of his admirers ventured to assign him such a magnitude as he now figures in, even with his adversaries and detractors. He has grown in apparent importance, as we receded from him, as the nature of his endeavours became more and more visible in their results. For, unlike many great men, but like all great agitators, Voltaire everywhere shows himself emphatically as the man of his century: uniting in his own person whatever spiritual accomplishments were most valued by that age; at the same time, with no depth to discern its ulterior tendencies, still less with any magnanimity to attempt withstanding these, his greatness and his littleness alike fitted him to produce an im. i mediate effect; for he leads whither the mului.

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