Such, seen through no uncoloured medium, immortality on writings; that charm which but in dim remoteness, and sketched in hurried, still, under every defacement, binds us to the transitory outline, are some features of Jean pages of our own Hookers, and Taylors, and Paul Friedrich Richter and his works. Ger- Brownes, when their way of thought has long many has long loved him; to England also ceased to be ours, and the most valued of their he must one day become known; for a man merely intellectual opinions have passed away, of this magnitude belongs not to one people, as ours too must do, with the circumstances but to the world. What our countrymen may and events in which they took their shape or decide of him, still more what may be his for- rise. To men of a right mind, there may tune with posterity, we will not try to foretell. long be in Richter much that has attraction Time has a contracting influence on many a and value. In the moral desert of vulgar Litewide-spread fame; yet of Richter we will say, rature, with its sandy wastes, and parched, that he may survive much. There is in him that bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the which does not die; that Beauty and Earnest- writings of this man will rise in their irregular ness of soul, that spirit of Humanity, of Love luxuriance, like a cluster of date-trees, with and mild Wisdom, over which the vicissitudes its greensward and well of water, to refresh of mode have no sway. This is that excellence the pilgrim, in the sultry solitude, with nouof the inmost nature which alone confers rishment and shade.

STATE OF GERMAN LITERATURE.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1827.]

We differ from the Père Bouhours in this matter, and must endeavour to discuss it differently. There is, in fact, much in the present aspect of German Literature, not only deserving notice but deep consideration from all thinking

giggle, than any dignified smile, or even any | of wit, in regard to this and so many other sufficient laugh with gravity succeeding it. subjects! For surely the pleasure of despising, This sentence is among the best we recollect at all times and in itself a dangerous luxury, of him, and will partly illustrate what we mean. is much safer after the toil of examining than We submit it, for the sake of its import before it. likewise, to all superfine speculators on the Reformation, in their future contrasts of Luther and Erasmus. Erasmus," says Horn, "belongs to that species of writers who have all the desire in the world to build God Almighty a magnificent church,-at the same time, how-men, and far too complex for being handled in ever, not giving the Devil any offence; to whom, accordingly, they set up a neat little chapel close by, where you can offer him some touch of sacrifice at a time, and practise a quiet household devotion for him without disturb ance." In this style of "witty and conceited mirth," considerable part of the book is written. But our chief business at present is not with Franz Horn, or his book; of whom accordingly, recommending his labours to all inquisitive students of German, and himself to good estimation with all good men, we must here take leave. We have a word or two to say on that strange literature itself; concerning which our readers probably feel more curious to learn what it is, than with what skill it has been judged of.

Above a century ago, the Père Bouhours propounded to himself the pregnant question: Si un Allemand peut avoir de l'esprit? Had the Père Bouhours bethought him of what country Kepler and Leibnitz were, or who it was that gave to mankind the three great elements | of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion, it might have thrown light on his inquiry. Had he known the Nibelungen Lied; and where Reinecke Fuchs, and Faust, and the Ship of Fools, and four-fifths of all the popular mythology, humour, and romance, to be found in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took its rise; had he read a page or two of Ulrich Hutten, Opitz, Paul Flemming, Logau, or even Lohenstein and Hoffmanns-waldau, all of whom had already lived and written in his day; had the Père Bouhours taken this trouble, who knows but he might have found, with whatever amazement, that a German could actually have a little esprit, or perhaps even something better? No such trouble was requisite for the Père Bouhours. Motion in vacuo is well known to be speedier and surer than through a resisting medium, especially to imponderous bodies; and so the light Jesuit, unimpeded by facts or principles of any kind, failed not to reach his conclusion; and, in a comfortable frame of mind, to decide negatively, that a German could not have any literary talent.

Thus did the Père Bouhours evince that he had "a pleasant wit;" but in the end he has paid dear for it. The French, themselves, have long since begun to know something of the Germans, and something also of their own critical Daniel; and now it is by this one untimely joke that the hapless Jesuit is doomed to live; for the blessing of full oblivion is denied him, and so he hangs suspended in his own noose, over the dusky pool which he struggles toward, but for a great while will not reach. Might his fate but serve as a warning to kindred men

the way of epigram. It is always advantageous to think justly of our neighbours; nay, in mere common honesty, it is a duty; and, like every other duty, brings its own reward. Perhaps at the present era this duty is more essential than ever; an era of such promise and such threatening, when so many elements of good and evil are everywhere in conflict, and human society is, as it were, struggling to body itself forth anew, and so many coloured rays are springing up in this quarter and in that, which only by their union can produce pure light. Happily, too, though still a difficult, it is no longer an impossible duty; for the commerce in material things has paved roads for commerce in things spiritual, and a true thought, or a noble creation, passes lightly to us from the remotest countries, provided only our minds be open to receive it. This, indeed, is a rigorous proviso, and a great obstacle lies in it; one which to many must be insurmountable, yet which it is the chief glory of social culture to surmount. For if a man who mistakes his own contracted individuality for the type of human nature, and deals with whatever contradicts him, as if it contradicteď this, is but a pedant, and without true wisdom, be he furnished with partial equipments as he may,-what better shall we think of a nation that, in like manner, isolates itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of examination?

+

Of this narrow and perverted condition, the French, down almost to our own times, have afforded a remarkable and instructive example; as indeed of late they have been often enough upbraidingly reminded, and are now themselves, in a manlier spirit, beginning to admit. That our countrymen have at any time erred much in this point, cannot, we think, truly be alleged against them. Neither shall we say, with some passionate admirers of Germany, that to the Germans in particular they have been unjust. It is true, the literature and character of that country, which, within the last half century, have been more worthy perhaps than any other of our study and regard, are still very generally unknown to us, or, what is worse, misknown: but for this there are not wanting less offensive reasons. That the false and tawdry ware, which was in all hands, should reach us before the chaste and truly excellent, which it required some excellence to recognise; that Kotzebue's insanity should have spread faster, by some fifty years, than Lessing's wisdom; that Kant's Philosophy should stand in the back-ground as a dreary and abortive dream, and Gall's Craniology be held out to us from every booth as a reality;—

all this lay in the nature of the case. That country has awaked in its old strength, our atmany readers should draw conclusions from tention to it has certainly awakened also; and imperfect premises, and by the imports judge if we yet know little or nothing of the Gertoo hastily of the stock imported from, was like-mans, it is not because we wilfully do them wise natural. No unfair bias, no unwise in- wrong, but, in good part, because they are disposition, that we are aware of, has ever been somewhat difficult to know. at work in the matter; perhaps, at worst, a degree of indolence, a blamable incuriosity to all products of foreign genius: for what more do we know of recent Spanish or Italian literature than of German; of Grossi and Manzoni, of Campomanes or Jovellanos, than of Tieck and Richter? Wherever German art, in those forms of it which need no interpreter, has addressed us immediately, our recognition of it has been prompt and hearty; from Dürer to Mengs, from Händel to Weber and Beethoven, we have welcomed the painters and musicians of Germany, not only to our praise, but to our affections and beneficence. Nor, if in their literature we have been more backward, is the literature itself without blame. Two centuries ago, translations from the German were comparatively frequent in England: Luther's Table-Talk is still a venerable classic in our language; nay Jacob Boehme has found a place among us, and this not as a dead letter, but as a living apostle to a still living sect of our religionists. In the next century, indeed, translation ceased; but then it was, in a great measure, because there was little worth translating. The horrors of the Thirty Years' War, followed by the conquests and conflagrations of Louis the Fourteenth, had desolated the country; French influence, extending from the courts of princes to the closets of the learned, lay like a baleful incubus over the far nobler mind of Germany; and all true nationality vanished from its literature, or was heard only in faint tones, which lived in the hearts of the people, but could not reach with any effect to the ears of foreigners.* And now that the genius of the

In fact prepossession's of all sorts naturally enough find their place here. A country which has no national literature, or literature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neighbours, at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and misestimated country. Its towns may figure on our maps; its revenues, population, manufactures, political connections, may be recorded in statistical books; but the character of the people has no symbol and no voice; we cannot know them by speech and discourse, but only mere sight and outward observation of their manners and procedure. Now, if both sight and speech, if both travellers and native literature, are found but ineffectual in this respect, how incalculably more so the former alone! To seize a character, even that of one man, in its life and secret mechanism, requires a philospher; to delineate it with truth and impressiveness, is a work for a poet. How then shall one or two sleek clerical tutors, with here and there a tedium-stricken esquire, or speculative halfpay captain, give us views on such a subject? How shall a man, to whom all characters of individual men are like sealed books, of which he sees only the title and the covers, decipher from his four-wheeled vehicle, and depict to us, the character of a nation? He courageously depicts his own optical delusions; notes this to be incomprehensible, that other to be insignificant; much to be good, much to be bad, and most of all indifferent; and so, with a few flowing strokes, completes a picture which, though it may not even resemble any possible object, his countrymen are to take for a national portrait. Nor is the fraud so readily detected: for the character of a people has such complexity of aspect, that even the honest observer knows not always, not perhaps after long inspection, what to determine regarding it. From his, only accidental, point of view, the figure stands before him like the tracings on veined marble,-a mass of mere random lines, and tints, and entangled strokes, out of which a lively fancy may shape almost any image. But the image he brings along with him is always the readiest; this is tried, it answers as well as another; and a second Voucher now testifies its correctness.

Thus

*Not that the Germans were idle; or altogether engaged, as we too loosely suppose, in the work of commentary and lexicography. On the contrary, they rhymed and romanced with due vigour as to quantity; only the quality was bad. Two facts on this head may deserve mention: In the year 1749, there were found, in the library of one virtuoso, no fewer than 300 volumes of devotional poetry, containing, says Horn, "a treasure of 33,712 German hymns ;" and, much about the same period, one of Gottsched's scholars had amassed as many as 1500 German novels, all of the 17th century. The hymns we understand to be much better than the novels, or rather, perhaps, the novels to be much worse than the hymns. Neither was critical study neglected, nor indeed honest endeavour on all hands to attain improvement: witness the strange books from time to time put forth, and the still stranger institutions established for this purpose. Among the former we have the "Poeti-each, in confident tones, though it may be with cal Funnel," (Poetische Trichter,) manufactured at Nürnberg in 1650, and professing, within six hours, to pour in a secret misgiving, repeats his precursor; the the whole essence of this difficult art into the most un- hundred times repeated comes in the end to be furnished head. Nürnberg also was the chief seat of the famous Meistersänger and their Sängerzünfte, or Singerguilds, in which poetry was taught and practised like ten 6048 poetical pieces, among which were 208 tragedies any other handicraft, and this by sober and well-mean- and comedies; and this, besides having all along kept ing men, chiefly artisans, who could not understand why house, like an honest Nürnberg burgher, by assiduous labour, which manufactured so many things, should not and sufficient shoemaking! Hans is not without genius, also manufacture another. Of these tuneful guild- and a shrewd irony; and above all, the most gay, childbrethren, Hans Sachs, by trade a shoemaker, is greatly like, yet devout and solid character. A man neither to the most noted and most notable. His father was a be despised nor patronized, but left standing on his own tailor; he himself learned the mystery of song under one basis, as a singular product, and a still legible symbol, Nunnebeck, a weaver. He was an adherent of his great and clear mirror, of the time and country where he lived contemporary Luther, who has even deigned to acknow- His best piece known to us, and many are well worth ledge his services in the cause of Reformation: how perusing, is the Fastnachtsspiel (Shrovetide Farce) of the diligent a labourer Sachs must have been, will appear Narrenschneiden, where the Doctor cures a bloated and from the fact, that, in his 74th year, (1568,) on examin-lethargic patient by cutting out half a dozen Fools frons ing his stock for publication, he found that he had writ- his interior!

believed; the foreign nation is now once for all understood, decided on, and registered accordingly; and dunce the thousandth writes of it like dunce the first.

among shiploads of yellow sand and sulphur. Gentle Dulness too, in this as in all other things, still loves her joke. The Germans, though much more attended to, are perhaps not less mistaken than before.

Doubtless, however, there is in this increased attention a progress towards the truth; which it is only investigation and discussion that can help us to find. The study of German litera

us, and its spreading so visibly, that by and by, as we believe, the true character of it must and will become known. A result, which is to bring us into closer and friendlier union with forty millions of civilized men, cannot surely be otherwise than desirable. If they have precious truth to impart, we shall receive it as the highest of all gifts; if error, we shall not only reject it, but explain it and trace out its origin, and so help our brethren also to reject it. In either point of view, and for all profitable pur

ledge is the first and indispensable preliminary.

With the aid of literary and intellectual, intercourse, much of this falsehood may, no doubt, be corrected: yet even here, sound judgment is far from easy; and most national characters are still, as Hume long ago complained, the product rather of popular preju-ture has already taken such firm root among dice than of philosophic insight. That the Germans, in particular, have by no means escaped such misrepresentation, nay, perhaps, have had more than the common share of it, cannot, in their circumstances, surprise us. From the time of Optiz and Flemming, to those of Klopstock and Lessing, that is, from the early part of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, they had scarcely any literature known abroad, or deserving to be known: their political condition, during this same period, was oppressive and every way un-poses of national intercourse, correct knowfortunate externally; and at home, the nation, split into so many factions and petty states, had lost all feeling of itself as of a nation; and its energies in arts as in arms were manifested only in detail, too often in collision, and always under foreign influence. The French, at once their plunderers and their scoffers, described them to the rest of Europe as a semi-barbarous people; which comfortable fact the rest of Europe was willing enough to take on their word. During the greater part of the last century, the Germans, in our intellectual survey of the world, were quietly omitted; a vague contemptuous ignorance prevailed respecting them; it was a Cimmerian land, where, if a few sparks did glimmer, it was but so as to testify their own existence, too feebly to enlighten us.* The Germans passed for apprentices in all provinces of art; and many foreign craftsmen scarcely allowed them so much.

Madame de Staël's book has done away with this; all Europe is now aware that the Germans are something; something independent and apart from others; nay, something deep, imposing, and, if not admirable, wonderful. What that something is, indeed, is still undecided; for this gifted lady's Allemagne, in doing much to excite curiosity, has still done little to satisfy or even direct it. We can no longer make ignorance a boast, but we are yet far from having acquired right knowledge; and cavillers, excluded from contemptuous negation, have found a resource in almost as contemptuous assertion. Translators are the same faithless and stolid race that they have ever been: the particle of gold they bring us over is hidden from all but the most patient eye,

* So late as the year 1811, we find, from Pinkerton's Geography, the sole representative of German literature to be Gottshed, (with his name wrong spelt,) "who first introduced a more refined style."-Gottsched has been dead the greater part of the century; and, for the last fifty years, ranks among the Germans somewhat as Prynne or Alexander Ross does among ourselves. A man of a cold, rigid, perseverant character, who mistook himself for a poet and the perfection of critics, and had skill to pass current during the greater part of his literary life for such. On the strength of his Boileau and Batteux, he long reigned supreme: but it was like Night, in rayless majesty, and over a slumbering people.

They awoke, before his death, and hurled him, perhaps

100 indignantly, into his native Abyss

Meanwhile, errors of all sorts prevail on this subject: even among men of sense and liberality we have found so much hallucination, so many groundless or half-grounded objections to German literature, that the tone in which a multitude of other men speak of it cannot appear extraordinary. To much of this, even a slight knowledge of the Germans would furnish a sufficient answer. But we have thought it might be useful were the chief of these objections marshalled in distinct order, and examined with what degree of light and fairness is at our disposal. In attempting this, we are vain enough, for reasons already stated, to fancy ourselves discharging what is in some sort a national duty. It is unworthy of one great people to think falsely of another; it is unjust, and therefore unworthy. Of the injury it does to ourselves we do not speak, for that is an inferior consideration: yet surely if the grand principle of free intercourse is so profitable in material commerce, much more must it be in the commerce of the mind, the products of which are thereby not so much transported out of one country into another, as multiplied over all, for the benefit of all, and without loss to any. If that man is a benefactor to the world who causes two ears of corn to grow where only one grew before, much more is he a benefactor who causes two truths to grow up together in harmony and mutual confirmation, where before only one stood solitary, and, on that side at least, intolerant and hostile.

In dealing with the host of objections which front us on this subject, we think it may be convenient to range them under two principal heads. The first, as respects chiefly unsoundness or imperfection of sentiment; an error which may in general be denominated Bad Taste. The second, as respects chiefly a wrong condition of intellect; an error which may be designated by the general title of Mysticism. Both of these, no doubt, are partly connected; and each, in some degree, springs from and returns into the other: yet, for present purposes, the divisions may be precise enough.

the Germans have a radically bad taste. This First, then, of the first: It is objected that

is a deep-rooted objection, which assumes | if he took his extracts from Mr. Egan's Tem many forms, and extends through many rami- and Jerry; and told his readers, as he might fications. Among men of less acquaintance truly do, that no play had ever enjoyed such with the subject of German taste, or of taste in currency on the English stage as this most general, the spirit of the accusation seems to classic performance? We think not. In like be somewhat as follows: That the Germans, manner, till some author of acknowledged with much natural susceptibility, are still in a merit shall so write among the Germans, and rather coarse and uncultivated state of mind; be approved of by critics of acknowledged displaying, with the energy and other virtues merit among them, or at least secure for himof a rude people, many of their vices also; in self some permanency of favour among the particular, a certain wild and headlong temper, million, we can prove nothing by such inwhich seizes on all things too hastily and im- stances. That there is so perverse an authov, petuously; weeps, storms, loves, hates, too or so blind a critic, in the whole compass of fiercely and vociferously; delighting in coarse German literature, we have no hesitation in excitements, such as flaring contrasts, vulgar denying. horrors, and all sorts of showy exaggeration. Their literature, in particular, is thought to dwell with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, spectres, and banditti; on the other hand, there is an undue love of moonlight, and mossy fountains, and the moral sublime: then we have descriptions of things which should not be described; a general want of tact; nay, often hollowness, and want of sense. In short, the German Muse comports herself, it is said, like a passionate, and rather fascinating, but tumultuous, uninstructed, and but half-civilized Muse. A belle sauvage at best, we can only love her with a sort of supercilious tolerance; often she tears a passion to rags; and, in her tumid vehemence, struts without meaning, and to the offence of all literary decorum.

Now, in all this there is a certain degree of truth. If any man will insist upon taking Heinse's Ardinghello, and Miller's Siegwart, and the works of Veit Weber the younger, and, above all, the everlasting Kotzebue, as his specimens of German literature, he may establish many things. Black Forests, and the glories of Lubberland; sensuality and horror, the spectre nun, and the charmed moonshine, shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws, also, with huge whiskers, and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts, and the like suspicious characters, will be found in abundance. We are little read in this bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be mostly relinquished as unproductive. Other forms of Unreason have taken its place; which in their turn must yield to still other forms; for it is the nature of this goddess to descend in frequent avatars among men. Perhaps not less than five hundred volumes of such stuff could still be collected from the book-stalls of Germany. By which truly we may learn that there is in that country a class of unwise men and unwise women; that many readers there labour under a degree of ignorance and mental vacancy, and read not actively but passively, not to learn but to be amused. But is this fact so very new to us? Or what should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from the Castle Spectre, Mr. Lewis's Monk, or even the Mysteries of Udolpho, and Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus? Or would he judge rightly of our dramatic taste,

But farther: among men of deeper views, and with regard to works of really standard character, we find, though not the same, a similar objection repeated. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, it is said, and Faust, are full of bad taste also. With respect to the taste in which they are written, we shall have occasion to say somewhat hereafter: meanwhile, we may be permitted to remark that the objection would have more force, did it seem to originate from a more mature consideration of the subject. We have heard few English criticisms of such works, in which the first condition of an approach to accuracy was complied with;-a transposition of the critic into the author's point of vision, a survey of the author's means and objects as they lay before himself, and a just trial of these by rules of universal application. Faust, for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art-magic: but it would scarcely be more unwise to consider Hamlet as depending for its main interest on the ghost that walks in it, than to regard Faust- as a production of this sort. For the present, therefore, this objection may be set aside; or at least may be considered not as an assertion, but an inquiry, the answer to which may, turn out: rather that the German taste is different from ours, than that it is worse. Nay, with regard even to difference, we should scarcely reckon it to be of great moment. Two nations that agree in estimating Shakspeare as the highest of all poets, can differ in no essential principle, if they understood one another, that relates to poetry.

Nevertheless, this opinion of our opponents has attained a certain degree of consistency with itself; one thing is thought to throw light on another; nay, a quiet little theory has been propounded to explain the whole phenomenon. The cause of this bad taste, we are assured, lies in the condition of the German authors. These, it seems, are generally very poor; the ceremonial law of the country excludes them from all society with the great; they cannot acquire the polish of drawing-rooms, but must live in mean houses, and therefore write and think in a mean style.

Apart from the truth of these assumptions. and in respect of the theory itself, we confess there is something in the face of it that afflicts us. Is it then so certain that taste and riches are dissolubly connected? that truth of feeling must ever be preceded by weight of purse, and the eyes be dim for universal and eternal Beauty, till they have long rested on gilt walls