So, indeed, is the whole Faust of Madame de Staël; all fire-colour bleached out of it; giant masses and groups, for example the Walpurgisnacht (Mayday Night), altogether cut away.

The following passage (Siebenkäs,1 book i. sec. 7) occurs in the Speech of the dead Christ from the Universe' (Songe, she more briefly translates the title of it), where Christ, after saying that there is no God, thus continues :

'I travelled through the worlds, I mounted into the suns, and flew with the galaxies through wastes of heaven; but there is no God. I descended as far as being casts its shadow, and looked into the Abyss and cried: Father, where art thou? but I heard only the eternal storm, which no one guides; and the gleaming Rainbow from the west, without a Sun that made it, stood over the Abyss, and trickled down. And when I looked up towards the immeasurable world for the Divine eye, it glared down on me with an empty, black, bottomless eye-socket; and Eternity lay upon Chaos, eating it, and re-eating it. Cry on, ye discords! cry away the shadows, for He is not!'

These barbaresque sentences have, like all the rest, grown into the following cultivated ones:

'J'ai parcouru les mondes, je me suis élevé au-dessus de soleils, et là aussi il n'est point de Dieu; je suis descendu jusqu'aux dernières limites de l'univers, j'ai regardé dans l'abîme, et je me suis écrié: Père, où es-tu? mais je n'ai entendu que la pluie qui tombait goutte à goutte dans l'abîme, et l'éternelle tempête, que nul ordre ne régit, m'a seule répondu. Relevant ensuite mes regards vers la voûte des cieux, je n'y ai trouvé qu'une ORBITE VIDE, noire, et sans fond. L'éternité reposait sur le chaos, et le rongeait, et se dévorait lentement elle-même: redoublez vos plaintes amères et déchirantes; que des cris aigus dispersent les ombres, car c'en est fait.'

He that loves the French must lament that people should decoy them over to us with beauties which are merely painted on with rouge; and should hide not only our fungous excrescences, but our whole adiposity in wide Gallic court-clothes. For, as Goethe's Faust actually stands, every good Frenchman, outdoing our Authoress, who wishes no second, must wish the first at Mephistopheles; and look

upon this written hell-journey as an acted Empedocles one into the cra

FAUST.

Thou who the wide world round outflowest,

Unresting Spirit, how I resemble thee!

THE SPIRIT.

Thou canst resemble spirits whom thou knowest,

Not me!'-T.

1 By Jean Paul himself. -T.

66

ter of the German Muse-volcano. To our Authoress he might even say: Madame, you had too much sense to lend your Germans any of those traits, pointes, sentences, that esprit, where with our writers have so long enchanted us and Europe. You showed us, in the German works, their brightest side, their sensibilité, the depth of their feelings. You have quite allured us with it. All that offended your taste, you have softened or suppressed, and given us yourself instead of the poem tant mieux! But who will give us you, when we read these German works in the original? Jean Jacques says, Let sciWe invert it, and say, Let

ence come, and not the deceiving doctor. the healing doctoress come, and not the sick poem, till she have healed it."

The Reviewer observes here, that in the foregoing apostrophe there is as cramp a eulogy as that with which Madame de Staël concludes hers on Schiller:

'Peu de tems après la première représentation de Guillaume Tell, le trait mortel atteignit aussi le digne auteur de ce bel ouvrage. Gesler périt au moment où les desseins les plus cruels l'occupaient: Schiller n'avait dans son âme que de généreuses pensées. Ces deux volontés si contraires, la mort, ennemie de tous les projets de l'homme, les a de même brisées.'

This comparison of the shot Gesler with the deceased Schiller, wherein the similarity of the two men turns on their resembling other men in dying, and thereby having their plans interrupted, seems a delicate imitation of Captain Fluellen, who (in Henry V.) struggles to prove that Alexander of Macedon and Henry Monmouth are in more than one point like each other.

But to return. Were this castrated edition of the German Hercules, or Poetic God, which Madame de Staël has edited of us, desirable, and of real use for any reader, it would be for German courts, and courtiers themselves: who knows but such a thing might prove the light little flame 2 to indicate the heavy treasure of their native country; which treasure, as they, unlike the French, have all learned German first, they could find no difficulty in digging out. But with such shows of possible union between two altogether different churches, or temples of taste, never let the good, too-credulous French be lured and balked!

Nay, the cunning among them may hit our Authoress with her own hand; for she has written : 3

1 Tom. iii. p. 97.

2 The little blue flame,' the

Springwurzel (start-root), &c. &c., are well

known phenomena in miners' magic. -T.

3 Tom. iv. p. 80.

VOL. II.

30

'Les auteurs français de l'ancien tems ont en général plus de rapports avec les Allemands que les écrivains du siècle de Louis XIV.; car c'est depuis ce tems-là que la littérature française a pris une direction classique.'

And shall we now, he may say, again grow to similarity in culture with those whom we resembled when we had a less degree of it? A German may, indeed, prefer the elder French poetry to the newer French verse; but no Frenchman can leave his holy temple for an antiquated tabernacle of testimony, much less for a mere modern synagogue. The clear water of their poetry will ever exclude, as buoyant and unmixable, the dark fire-holding oil of ours. Or to take it otherwise as with them the eye is everywhere the ruling organ, and with us the ear; so they, hard of hearing, will retain their poet-peacock, with his glittering tail-mirrors1 and tail-eyes, drawn back fan-like to the wings, his poor tones and feet notwithstanding; and we, short of sight, will think our unshowy poet-larks and nightingales, with their songs in the clouds and the blossoms, the preferable blessing. Perhaps in the whole of Goethe there are not to be found so many antitheses and witty reflexes as in one moving act of Voltaire; and in all, even the finest cantos of the Messias, the Frenchman seeks in vain for such pointes as in the Henriade exalt every canto, every page, into a perfect holly-bush.

And now, the Reviewer begs to know of any impartial man, What joy shall a Frenchman have in literatures and arts of poetry which advance on him as naked as unfallen Eves or Graces, he, who is just come from a poet-assemblée, where every one has his communioncoat, his mourning-coat, nay, his winding-sheet, trimmed with tassels and tags, and properly perfumed? What will a Fabre d'Olivet 2 say to such eulogising of a foreign literature? he who has so pointedly and distinctly declared:

'Oui, messieurs, ce que l'Indostan fut pour l'Asie, la France le doit être pour l'Europe. La langue française, comme la Sanscrite, doit tendre à l'universalité, elle doit s'enrichir de toutes les connaissances acquises dans les siècles passés, afin de les transmettre aux siècles futurs; destinée à surnoyer sur les débris de cent IDIOMES diverses, elle doit pouvoir sauver du naufrage des temps toutes leurs beautés, et toutes leurs productions remarquables.'

When even a De Staël, with all her knowledge of our language

1 In French poetry, you must always, like the Christian, consider the latter end, or the last verse; and there, as in life, according to the maxim of the Greek sage, you cannot before the end be called happy.

2 His Les Vers Dorés du Pythagore expliqués, &c., précédés d'un Discours sur l'Essence de Poésie, 1814.

and authors, and with a heart inclined to us, continues nevertheless Gallic in tongue and taste, what blossom-crop are we to look for from the dry timber? For, on the whole, the taste of a people is altogether to be discriminated from the taste of a period: the latter, not the former, easily changes. The taste of a people, rooted down, through centuries, in the nature of the country, in its history, in the whole soul of the body politic, withstands, though under new forms of resistance, all alterations and attacks from without. For this taste is, in its highest sense, nothing other than the outcome and utterance of the inward combination of the man, revealing itself most readily by act and judgment in art, as in that which speaks with all the faculties of man, and to all the faculties of man. Thus poetical taste belongs to the heart: the understanding possesses only the small domain of rhetorical taste, which can be learned and proved, and gives its verdict on correctness, language, congruity of images, and the like.

For the rest, if a foreign literature is really to be made a saline manure and fertilising compost for the withered French literature, some altogether different path must be fallen upon than this ridiculous circuit of clipping the Germans into Frenchmen, that these may take pattern by them; of first fashioning us down to the French, that they may fashion themselves up to us. Place, and plant down, and encamp, the Germans with all their stout limbs and full arteries, like dying gladiators, fairly before them; - let them then study these figures as an academy, or refuse to do it. Even to the Gallic speech, in this transference, let utmost boldness be recommended. How else, if not in a similar way, have we Germans worked our former national taste into a free taste; so that by our skill in languages, or our translations, we have welcomed a Homer, Shakspeare, Dante, Calderon, Tasso, with all their peculiarities, repugnant enough to ours, and introduced them undisarmed into the midst of Our national taste meanwhile was not lost in this process: in the German, with all its pliability, there is still something indeclinable for other nations; Goethe, and Herder, and Klopstock, and Lessing, can be enjoyed to perfection in no tongue but the German ; and not only our æsthetic cosmopolitism (universal friendship), but also our popular individuality, distinguishes us from all other peoples.

us ?

If, one day, we are to be presented to foreign countries, and every German, proud as he may be, will desire it, if he is a bookseller, the Reviewer could wish much for an Author like our Authoress, to transport us, in such a Cleopatra's ship as her's, into England. Schiller, Goethe, Klinger, Hippel, Lichtenberg, Haller, Kleist, might, simply as they were, in their naturalibus and pontifical

ibus, disembark in that Island, without danger of becoming hermits, except in so far as hermits may be worshipped there.

On the romantic 1 side, however, we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us for the Briton, to whom nothing is so poetical as the commonweal, requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age of poetry, the thick golden wingcovers of his epithet-poets; not the transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured butterfly-dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something.

But though this gifted Inspectress of Germany has done us little furtherance with the French, nay perhaps hindrance, inasmuch as she has spoken forth our praise needlessly in mere comparisons with the French, instead of speaking it without offensive allusions, — the better service can she do us with another people, namely, with the Germans themselves.

The

In this respect, not only in the first place may the critic, but also in the second place the patriot, return her his thanks. It is not the outward man, but the inward, that needs mirrors. We cannot wholly see ourselves, except in the eye of a foreign seer. Reviewer would be happy to see and enter a mirror-gallery, or rather picture-gallery, in which our faces, limned by quite different nations, by Portuguese, by Scotchmen, by Russians, Corsicans, were hanging up, and where we might learn how differently we looked to eyes that were different. By comparison with foreign peculiarity, our own peculiarity discerns and ennobles itself. Thus, for example, our Authoress, profitably for us. holds up and reflects our German longueurs (interminabilities), our dull jesting, our fanaticism, and our German indifference to the file.

Against the last error, against the rule-of-thumb style of these days, reviewers collectively ought really to fire and slash with an especial fury. There was a time, in Germany, when a Lessing, a Winkelmann, filed their periods like Plato or Cicero, and Klopstock and Schiller their verses like Virgil or Horace; when, as Tacitus, we thought more of disleafing than of covering with leaves; in short, of a disleafing, which, as in the vine, ripens and incites the grapes. There was such a time, but the present has had it; and we now write, and paint, and patch straightforward, as it comes to hand, and study readers and writers not much, but appear in print. Corrections, at present, seem as costly to us, as if, like Count Alfieri, we had them to make on printing-paper, at the charges of our printer and purse. The public book-market is to be our bleach-green; and

1 Romantisch, romantic,' it will be observed, is here used in a scientific sense, and has no concern with the writing or reading (or acting) of 'romances.'-T.