HISTORY OF EUROPE. UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA 101 XXVIII. 1800-48. 6. before the eenth cen middle ages in Germany, the land which gave the art of CHAP. printing and the discovery of gunpowder to the world, need be told to none at all acquainted with these subjects; and on the revival of letters she took an honour- Science and learning in able place both in scholarship and the exact sciences. Germany The country of Scaliger and Erasmus will ever be dear middle of to the lover of classical literature; that of Kepler, Leib- the eightnitz, and Euler, to the student of astronomy and mathe- tury. matics. Kepler might make with truth the sublime boast, "I may well be a century without a reader, since God Almighty has been six thousand years without an observer." The Teutonic race, if not the soil of Germany, may boast of Tycho Brahe, one of the greatest of modern observers, whose observatory still dignifies the Sound; and of Copernicus, the discoverer of the true system of the heavens, who was born at Thorn in Prussian Poland. But the intellect of Germany at this period, bred in cloisters and nourished by the study of classical literature or the exact sciences, was entirely of a learned caste. Its productions were, for the most part, written in Latin, and addressed only to scholars. Its national literature did not arise till the middle of the eighteenth century. 7. Winkel man. LESSING was the first of this school in Germany, and his writings indicate the period when original thought, Lessing and struggling for existence, was as yet fettered by the ideas and influence of classical and foreign literature. His works are chiefly critical, a circumstance which Madame de Staël considers as very singular, on the idea that original composition in natural order precedes the examination of others-an idea, however, directly contrary to the fact, as every schoolboy's thesis or student's essay at college attests. A bird learns to fly by imitating the motion of its parents' wings, long before it can take a flight for itself. Lessing's essays on the French and classical drama have great merit, chiefly from the correct taste, sound sense, and precision of expression by which 90 VINU AIMIORLIAD 102 HISTORY OF EUROPE. CHAP. they are distinguished, but they have little original genius. XXVIII. His dramas are still more mediocre ; fettered by the 1800-48. rules of the French stage, they are an imitation of Vol 8. Wieland. taire rather than a specimen of the powers of the Fatherland. His works, however, did an immense service to the cause of literature in Germany; they opened men's eyes to what had been done before them, and prepared the way for original conception in the admiration of that which had been already formed. What Lessing did in the drama, WINKELMAN did in art; and there is not to be found in the whole of modern literature a finer appreciation of the beauties of ancient sculpture, or a more correct exposition of the principles applicable to every species of composition on which it is founded. Lessing, with all his talent and taste, only led the way; his works mark the transition state from the classical to the national school. It was reserved for a mightier genius-that of WIELAND-to complete the passage, and show the world of what the ardent mind and romantic disposition of Germany was capable. This great man seems to have had his soul steeped, as it were, in the ideas of two different worlds; for he alternately exhibits the elegant mythology and charming images of the classics, and the chivalrous spirit and heart-stirring incidents of the feudal ages. Like Goethe and Sir Walter Scott, he is equally felicitous in prose and in verse. It is hard to say whether his poems or his novels bear away the palm, or most strongly fascinate the reader. In Agathon he has given a charming though sometimes too seducing a picture of the age of Aspasia, Alcibiades, and Cyrus the younger, in Greece; in Don Sylvio di Rosalva, a romance in Spain, he combines the delicate satire of Don Quixote with the imagery of the Arabian Nights. His poetry bears marks of the same combination; for if in Oberon he has rivalled Ariosto, and fascinated the world by the most charming conceptions that ever were formed of the romantic school, in his lesser poems he has rivalled Ovid XXVIII. in the skilful use he has made of classical imagery, and CHAP. the novel colours in which he has arrayed the immortal episodes of the Metamorphoses. 1800-48. 9. and excel The great reproach which is generally made against Wieland is, that he is too licentious; and Madame de His defects Staël, who has appreciated in so generous a spirit the lencies. literary excellence of Germany, has recorded her regret that a writer gifted with such a brilliant and creative imagination should have treated love as a passion rather than a sentiment, and dwelt more on the fascination of the senses than the melting of the heart. It cannot be denied, even by the warmest admirers of Wieland, that there is much truth in this observation; although his fault in this respect is redeemed by one peculiarity which cannot be said of Goethe, but which, while it renders his scenes sometimes more agreeable, unquestionably makes them more dangerous. He is rarely gross. His ideas are all cast in a refined and poetical mould; and even when treating of subjects on the confines of propriety, he throws a veil of elegance and refinement over his most voluptuous conceptions. He is by no means insensible to the influence of noble and elevated sentiments, and in many passages of his works they are treated in a lofty spirit, and with the greatest effect; but the development of such feelings is not, as in Tasso, the main object of his efforts. Variety of conception, brilliancy of imagery, interest of incident and situation, are his great characteristics, and in them he may fairly be said to be unrivalled by any author in ancient or modern times, for he has grasped the imagery of both, and the fecundity of his fancy has improved upon the conceptions of either. Fairy tales, classical myths, ballads of chivalry, the Arabian Nights, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the fancy of Ariosto, seem to be alike present to his ardent mind, stored, as it were, with the aerial literature of the whole world; and in his works, as in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, we see an epitome, brilliantly coloured, of the CHAP. creations of human fancy from the dawn of imagination to the present time. XXVIII. 1800-48. 10. Goethe. The same character in a great degree applies to the greatest of the German writers, though in him it is combined with many qualities which did not appear in so remarkable a manner in his brilliant contemporary. GOETHE is, by all writers of all tastes and schools, admitted to be the greatest writer of Germany; and his worldwide fame proves that, like Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Sir Walter Scott, he has struck into the deep recesses of the mind of man, which in every age and country are the same. Some of his works, in particular Iphigenia in Tauris, demonstrate that he was familiar with the literature and images of antiquity; but that was not his great characteristic, nor does therein lie his chief excellence. His mind was not, like that of Wieland, stored with the mythology and imagery of the classical times; he had worked out a richer mine, he had laboured in a wider field-the human heart. In that he perhaps stands unrivalled in the whole range of literature, ancient or modern. So varied are his conceptions, so vast his acquaintance with the secret springs of action, so immense the range of thought and event which he has gone over, that his works do not resemble those of any individual man, but rather of a cluster of gifted spirits, each great in a separate department, and each shining with the powers of imagination, and laden with the stores of knowledge. The Germans say he is viel seitig (many-sided), and that is certainly his great characteristic: but he is not merely infinitely varied in subject and incident, but ideas; and, contrary to what is often observable in men of original genius, the most minute scrutiny will not detect, in the whole of his voluminous works, a single repetition of the same idea, or one expression twice repeated. The fame of Goethe, both in his own and foreign countries, mainly rests on his Faust, which is certainly one of XXVIII. 11. the most extraordinary efforts of the human mind. Not, CHAP. however, that it is by any means faultless; on the contrary, it has many and serious blemishes. Some lines in 1800-48. the scenes on the Brocken, in particular, are a perfect dis- "Faust." grace to a man of his genius and taste. Its world-wide celebrity is mainly owing to the conception of the piece, and the profound knowledge of the human heart, and, above all, the secret springs of evil which it exhibits. There is in every mind, even the strongest, a certain tendency to superstition, and a belief in supernatural spirits, which exercise a paramount influence over our destiny; and when this illusion is embodied in a creation of Goethe's imagination, and adorned with the charms of his versification, it assumes a form of irresistible attraction. The imaginative see in it a realisation of many of their hidden dreams; the romantic, a picture of what fancy has often attempted to depict, but never in such glowing colours; the experienced, a portrait of what they know too often passes in the world. The young dwell with rapture on the beautiful visions of Margaret; the elder sometimes recognise in Memory the truth of the portrait of Evil presented by Mephistopheles. Thus all ages and dispositions find something to admire in this wonderful composition, and thence its immense and universal reputation. The different characters it presents are so many embodyings of the varied and contradictory qualities of the author's own mind. 12. lous contra Madame de Staël says, "Il y a dans le caractère de Goethe, comme de tous les hommes de génie, des étonnans His marvelcontrastes." There can be no doubt that this remark is dictions. strictly true of the great German, though she herself is a striking exception to the general observation as to genius, for she is always the same-elevated, refined, and impassioned; not so Goethe. The character of his works is as different as the various compartments of his mind, and unfortunately some are much less creditable than others. In a few, as Torquato Tasso, Iphigenia, Count Egmont, |