Germany, by Madame the Baroness de Staël-Holstein; with notes and appendices by O. W. Wight.

GERMANY BY MADAME THE BARONESS DE STAEL-HOLSTEIN WITH NOTES AND APPENDICES BY O. W. WIGHT, A. M. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street otby Sibeoible >AS#, cambrti

Entered according to Act of Oongresa, in the year 18, BY O. W. WIGHT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COOMPA],

EDITOR'S PREFACE. MADAME DE STARL'S GERMANY, which we agree with Sir James Mackintosh in regarding as the greatest production of feminine genius, constitutes, in our series of French Classics, the fourth and fifth volumes of her works. The reader must look in the first volume for Biography, Critical Estimates, Bibliographical Notice, etc. We have used the translation published by Murray, in 1814. We know not who was its author. It shows a singular combination of ability and carelessness. We have spent almost labor enough in its careful revision to have made a new translation, and, if we are not mistaken, the result is a better translation than could have been made by either party alone. Madame de Stael's style, in which there is expressed a constant admixture (thus to speak) of indefinite sentiment and definite thought, is difficult to translate well. Madame de Stael's book abounds in quotations from the best German authors. The English translator took these all at second hand, through the French. Except in two or three iun stances, we have substituted translations made directly from the German. It is almost useless to remark what a shadow of a shadow must be an ode of Klopstock or a ballad of Goethe when distilled through a language wholly different from the German into English. Our notes, drawn from too many sources to be indicated here, are equal to nearly half the matter of the text. Our principal

6 EDITOR 8 PREFACE. object has been to give abundant and reliable information in regard to the period since Madame de Stael wrote. Important Appendices have been added, which complete the survey of German Literature, Philosophy, and Theology. We had intended to say something here in regard to the intellectual importance of Germany, but we find what we wished to say so much better expressed by Mr. Carlyle,-and who has a better title than he to speak of intellectual Germany?-that we gladly adopt his language: " There is the spectacle of a great people, closely related to us in blood, language, character, advancing through fifteen centuries of culture, with the eras and changes that have distinguished the like career in other nations. Nay, perhaps the intellectual history of the Germans is not without peculiar attraction on two grounds: first, that they are a separate unmixed people; that in them one of the two grand stem-tribes, from which all modern European countries derive their population and speech, is seen growing up distinct, and in several particulars following its own course; secondly, that by accident and by desert, the Germans have more than once been found playing the highest part in European culture; at more than one era the grand Tendencies of Europe have first imE )died themselves into action in Germany; the main battle between the New and the Old has been fought and gained there. We mention only the Swiss Revolt and Luther's Reformation. The Germans have not indeed so many classical works to ex Ilibit as some other nations; a Shakspeare, a Dante, has not yet been recognized among them; nevertheless, they too have tiad their Teachers and inspired Singers; and in regard to popular Mythology, traditionary possessions, and spirit, what we may call the inarticulate Poetry of a nation, and what is the element of its spoken or written Poetry, they will be found superior to any other modern people.

EDITOR'S PREFACE. 7 "The Historic Surveyor of German Poetry will observe a remarkable nation struggling out of Paganism; fragments of that stern Superstition, saved from the general wreck, and still, amid the new order things, carrying back our view, in faint reflexes, into the dim primeval time. By slow degrees the chaos of the Northern Immigrations settles into a new alnd fairer world; arts advance; little by little a fund of Knowledge of Power over Nature, is accumulated for man; feeble glim. merings, even of a higher knowledge, of a poetic, break forth; till at length in the Swabian Era, as it is named, a blaze of true though simple Poetry bursts over Germany, more splendid, we might say, than the Troubadour Period of any other nation; for that famous Nibdelngen Song, produced, at least ultimately fashioned in those times, and still so insignificant in these, is altogether without parallel elsewhere. "To this period, the essence of which was young Wonder; and an enthusiasm for which Chivalry was still the fit exponent, there succeeds, as was natural, a period of Inquiry, a Didactic period; wherein, among the Germans, as elsewhere, many a Hugo von Trimberg delivers wise saws and moral apothegms to the general edification: later, a Town-clerk of Strasburg sees his Ship of Fools translated into all living languages, twice into Latin, and read by Kings; the Apologue of Reynard the Fox, gathering itself together from sources remote and near, assumes its Low-German vesture, and becomes the darling of high and low; nay, still lives with us, in rude genial vigor, as one of the most remarkable indigenous productions of the Midle Ages. Nor is acted poetry of this kind wanting; the Spirit of Inquiry translates itself into Deeds which are poetical, as well as into words: already at the opening of the fourteenth century, Germany witnesses the first assertion of political right, the first vindication -.of Man against Nobleman, in the early history of the German Swiss. And again, two centuries later

3 EDITOR'S PREFACE. the first assertion of intellectual right, the first vindication of Man against Clergyman, in the history of Luther's Reforma. tion. Meanwhile the Press has begun its incalculable task; the indigenous Fiction of the Germans, what we have called their inarticulate Poetry, issues:n innumerable Volks-B3iicher, (People's-Books), the progeny and. kindred of which still live in all European countries; the People have their Tragedy and their Comedy; Tyll Eulenspieget shakes every diaphragm with laughter; the rudest hear;. quails with awe at the wila mythus of Faust. " With Luther, however the Didactic Ter.dency has reached its poetic acme; and now we must see it assume a prosaic character, and Poetry foc a long while decline. The Spirit of Inquiry, of Criticism, is pushed beyond the limits, or too exclusively cultivated: what had, done so much, is capable of doing all; Understanding is alone listened to, while Fancy and Imagination languish inactive, or are forcibly stifled; and all poetic culture gradually dies away. As if with the high resolute genius, and noble achievements, of its Luthers and ti lttens, the genius of the country had exhausted itself, we behoid generation after generation of mere Prosaists succeed these high Psalmists. Science indeed advances, practical manipulation in all kinds improves; Germany has its Copernics, Hevels, Guerickes, Keplers; later, a Leibnitz opens the path of true Logic, and teaches the mysteries of Figure and Number: but the finer education of mankind seems at a stand. Instead of Poetic recognition and worship, we have stolid Theologic controversy, or still shallower Freethinking; pedantry, servility, mode-hunting, every species of Idolatry and Affectation holds sway. The World has lost its beauty, Life its infinite majesty, as if the Author of it were no longer divine: instead of ad miration and creation of the True, there is at best criticism ond denial of the False; to Luther there has succeeded Tho.

EDITOR'S PREFAOE. 9 masius. In this era, so unpoetical for all Europe, Germany torn in pieces by a Thirty Years' War, and its consequences, is pre-eminently prosaic; its few Singers are feeble echoes of foreign models little better than themselves. No Shakspeare, no Milton appears there; such, indeed, would have appeared earlier if at all, in the current of German history; but instead, they have only at best Opitzes, Flemmings, Logans, as we had our Queen Anne Wits; or, in their Lohensteines, Gryphs, Hoffmannswaldaus, though in inverse order, an unintentional parody of our Drydens and Lees. " Nevertheless from every moral death there is a new birth; in this wondrous course of his, man may indeed linger, but cannot retrograde or stand still. In the middle of last century, from among the Parisian Erotics, rickety Sentimentalism, Court aperies, and hollow Dulness, striving in all hopeless courses, we behold the giant spirit of Germany awaken as from long slumber; shake away these worthless fetters, and, by its Lessings and Klopstocks, announce, in true German dialect, that the Germans also are men. Singular enough in its cir. cumstances was this resuscitation; the work as of a'spirit on the waters,'-a movement agitating the great popular mass; for it was favored by no court or king: all sovereign. ties, even the pettiest, had abandoned their native Literature, their native language, as if to irreclaimable barbarism. The greatest King produced in Germany since Barbarossa's time, Frederick the Second, looked coldly on the native endeavor, and saw no hope but in aid from France. However, the native endeavor prospered without aid. Lessing's announcement did not die away with him, but took clearer utterance, and more inspired modulation from his followers; in whose works it now speaks, not to Germany alone, but to the whole world. The results of this last Period of German Literature are of deep significance, the depth of which is perhaps but now be

10 EDITOR'S PREFACE. coming visible. Here, too, it may be, as in other cases, the Want of the age has first taken voice and shape in Germany: that change from Negation to Affirmation, from Destruction to Reconstruction, for which all thinkers in every country are now prepared, is perhaps already in action there. In the nobler Literature of the Germans, say some, lie the rudiments of a new spiritual era, which it is for this, and for succeeding generations to work out and realize. The ancient creative Inspiration, it would seem, is still possible in these ages; at a time when Skepticism, Frivolity, Sensuality, had withered Life into a sand desert, and our gayest prospect was but thefalsd mirage, and even our Byrons could utter but a death-song or despairing howl, the Moses'-wand has again smote from that Horeb refreshing streams, towards which the better spirits of all nations are hastening, if not to drink, yet wistfully and hopefully to examine. If the older Literary History of Germany has the common attractions, which in a greater or less degree belong to the successive epochs of other such Histories, its newer Literature, and the historical delineation of this, has an interest such as belongs to no other." Carlyle acknowledges that this book of Madame de Sta~l has done away with the prejudices against the Germans. We send it forth in a new dress, with careful and copious annotatation, and hope it may prove a true guide to those who are seeking information in regard to a great people. 0. W. WIGM. JICN, 1869.

CO NTENTS. Fpax P arACX.......................... 18 GENERAL OBSERVATIONS...................,,.... 21 PART I. OF GERMANY, AND THE MANNERS OF THE GERMANS. CHAPTER I.-Of the Aspect of Germany............................ 27 CHAP. II.-Of the Manners and Characters of the Germans........... 80 CHAP. III.-Of the Women........................................ 43 CHAP. IV.-Of the Influence of the Spirit of Chivalry on Love and Honor........................................................ 46 CHAP. V.-Of Southern Germany.................................. 52 CHAP. VI.-Of Austria............................................ 53 CHAP. VII.-Of Vienna............................................ 59 CHAP. VIII:-Of Society.......................... 66 CHAP. IX.-Of the Desire among Foreigners of imitating the French Spirit........................................................ 69 CHAP X.-Of supercilious Folly and benevolent Mediocrity.......... 75 CHAP. XI.-Of the Spirit of Conversation........................... 77 CHAP. XII.-Of the German Language, in its Effects upon the Spirit of Conversation.............................90 CHAP. XIII.-Of Northern Germany................................. 93 CHAP. XIV.-Y SaxC ry............................................. 97 CHAP. XV.-Weimar,............ 100 _HAP. XVI.-Prussia............................. 105 CHAP. XVII.-Berlin............................. 111 CHAP. XVIII.-Of the German Universities......................... 11C CHAP. XIX.-Of particular Institutions for Education, and Charitable Establishments.............................................. 128 THE FT:E OF INTERLACHEN........................:............ 18

12 CONTENTS PART II. ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. PAaG CHAP. I.-Why are the French unjust to German Literature........ 145 CHAP. II.-Of the Judgment formed by the English on the subject of German Literature.............................................. 50 CHAP. III.-Of the nrincipal Epcchs of German Literature........... lr3 CHAP. IV.-Wieland..............8............................. 158 CHAP. V.-Klopstock........................................... 161 CHAP. VI.-Lessing and Winckelmann............................. 168 CHAP. VII.-Goethe........................................... 175 CHAP. VIII.-Schiller............................................. 179 CHAP. IX.-Of Style, and of Versification in the German Language... 183 CHAP. X.-Of Poetry.............................................. 193 CHAP. XI.-Of Classic and Romantic Poetry........................ 198 CHAP. XII.-Of German Poems............................ 204 CHAP. XIII.-Of German Poetry................................. 224 CHAP. XIV.-Of Taste.................................... 249 CHAP. XV.-Of the Dramatic Art...................... 254 CHAP. XVI.-Of the Dramas of Lessing............................. 264 CHAP. XVII.-The Robbers and Don Carlos of Schiller............. 270 CHAP. XVIII.-Wallenstein and Mary Stewart...................... 280 CHAP. XIX.-Joan of Arc and the Bride of Messina.......... 308 CHAP. XX.-Wilhelm Tell...................................... 324 CHAP. XXI.-Goetz of Berlichingen and the Count of Egmont....... 336 CHAP. XXII.-Iphigenia in Tauris, Torquato Tasso, &c., &c........ 351 CHAP. XXIII.-Faust........................................... 361 CHAP. XXIV.-Luther, Attila, The Sons of the Valley, The Cross on the Baltic, The Twenty-Fo.urth of February, by Werner......... 391

PREFACE. 1st October, 1813., IN 1810, I put the manuscript of this work, on Germany, into the hands of the bookseller, who had published Corinne. As I maintained in it the same opinions, and preserved the same silence respecting the present government of the French, as in my former writings, I flattered myself that I should be permitted to. publish this work also: yet, a few days after I had dispatched my manuscript, a decree of a very singular description appeared on the subject of the liberty of the press; it declared "that no work could be printed without having been examined by censors." Very well; it was usual in France, under the old regime, for literary works to be submitted to the examination of a censorship; the tendency of public opinion was then towards the feeling of liberty, which rendered such a restraint a matter very little to be dreaded; a little article however, at the end of the new regulation declared, "that when the censors should hav6 examined a work and permitted its publication, booksellers should be authorized to publish it, but that the Minister of the Police should still have a right to suppress it altogether, if he should think fit so to do." The meaning of which is, that such and such forms should be adopted until it should be thought fit no longer to abide by them: a law was not necessary to decree what was in fact the absence of all law; it would have been better to have relied simply upon the exercise of absolute power. My bookseller, however, took upon himself the responsibility of the publication of my book, after submitting it to the censors, and thus our contract was made. I came to reside within

14 MADAME DE STAEL S GERIMANY. forty leagues of Paris, to superintend the printing of the work, and it was upon this occasion that, for the last time, I breathed the air of France. I had, however, abstained in this book, as will be seen, from making any reflections on the political state of Germany: I supposed myself to be writing at the distance of fifty years from the present time; but the present time will not suffer itself to be forgotten. Several of the censors examine(l my manuscript; they suppressed the different passages which I have now restored and pointed out by notes. With the exception, however, of these passages, they allowed the work to be printed, as I now publish it, for I have thought it my duty to make no alteration in it. It appears to me a curious thing to show what the work is, which is capable even now in France, of drawing down the most cruel persecution on the head of its author. At the moment when this work was about to appear, and when the ten thousand copies of the first edition had been actually printed off, the Minister of the Police, known under the name of General Savary, sent his gensdarmes to the house of the bookseller, with orders to tear the whole edition ici pieces, and to place sentinels at the different entrances to the warehouses, for fear a single copy of this dangerous writing should escape. A commissary of police was charged with the superintendence of this expedition, in which General Savary easily obtained the viztory; and the poor commissary, it is Baid, died of the fatigue he underwent in too minutely assuring himself of the destruction of so great a number of volumes. or rather in seeing them transformed into paper perfectly white upon which no trace of human reason remained; the price oi the paper, valued at twenty louis by the police, was the only indemnification which the bookseller obtained from the minister. At the same time that the destruction of my work was going on at Paris, I received in the country an order to deliver up the copy from which it had been printed, and to quit France in four-and-twenty hours. The conscripts are almost the only persons I know for whom four-and-twenty hours are considered

PREFACE. 15 a sufficient time to prepare for a journey; I wrote, therefore, to the Minister of the Police that I should require eight days to nriocure money and my carriage. The following is the letter wbAi(.c he sent me in answer: GENERAL POLICE, Minister's Office, Paris, 3d October. 1810. "I received, Madam, the letter that you did me the honor to write me. Your son will have apprised you, that I had no objection to your postponing your departure for seven or eight days. I beg you will make that time sufficient for the arrangements you still have to make, because I cannot grant you more. " The cause of the order which I have signified to you, is not to be looked for in the silence you have preserved with respect to the Emperor in your last work; that,would be a mistake; no place could be found in it worthy of him; but your banishment is a natural consequence of the course you have constantly pursued for some years past. It appeared to me, that the air of this country did not agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seek for models among the people you admire. " Your last work is not French; it is I who have put a stop to the publication of it. I am sorry for the loss the bookseller must sustain, but it is not possible for me to suffer it to appear. "You know, Madam, that you were only permitted to quit Coppet, because you had expressed a desire to go to America. If my predecessor suffered you to remain in the department of Loire-et-Cher, you were not to look upon that indulgence as a revocation of the orders which had been given with respect to you. At present, you oblige me to cause them to be strictly executed, and you have only yourself to accuse for it.'I desire M. Corbigny' to suspend the execution of the order I had given him, until the expiration of the time I now grant you. 1 Prefect of Loire-et-Cher.

16 MADAIE DE STAEL'S GERMANY. "I regret, Madam, that you have obliged me to commence my correspondence with you by a measure of severity; it would have been more agreeable to me to have had only to offer you the testimonies of the high consideration with whi.ch I have the honor to be, Madam, your very humble and verx obedient servant; (Signed) " THE DUKE DE RovIGO." " MAD. DE STAEL. "P. S. I have reasons, Madam, for mentioning to you the ports of Lorient, la Rochelle, Bourdeaux, and Rochefort, as being the only ports at which you can embark; I beg you will let me know which of them you choose."' I shall add some reflections upon this letter, although it appears to me curious enough in itself. " It appeared to me," said General Savary, "that the air of this country did not agree with you;" what a gracious manner of announcing to a woman, then, alas! the mother of three children, the daughter of a man who had served France vith so much fidelity, that she was banished forever from the place of her birth, without being suffered, in any manner, to protest against a punishment, esteemed the next in severity to death! There is a French vaudeville, in which a bailiff, boasting of his politeness towards those persons whom he takes to prison, says, " Aussi je suis aim de tout ceux que j'arrete." 2 I know not whether such was the intention of General Savary. He adds, that the French are not reduced to seek for models among the people I admire. These people are the English first, and in many respects the Germans. At all events, I think I cannot be accused of not loving France. I have shown but too much sensibility in being exiled from a country where [ have so many objects of affection, and where those who are lear to me delight me so much! But, notwithstanding this The object of this Postscript was to forbid me the Ports of the Channel s "So I am loved by all I arrest."

PREFACE. 17 attachment, perhaps too lively, for so brilliant a country, and its spiritual inhabitants, it did not follow that I was to be forbidden to admire England. She has been seen like a knight armed for the defence of social order, preserving Europe during ten years of anarchy, and ten years more of despotism. Her happy constitution was, at the beginning of the Revolution, the object of the hopes and the efforts of the French; my mind still remains where theirs was then. On my return to the estate of my father, the Prefet of Geneva forbade me to go to a greater distance than four leagues from it. I suffered myself one day to go as far as ten leagues, merely for an airing: the gensdarmes immediately pursued me, the postmasters' were forbidden to supply me with horses, and it would have appeared as if the safety of the State depended on such a weak being as myself. However, I still submitted to this imprisonment in all its severity, when a last blow rendered it quite insupportable to me. Some of my friends were banished, because they had had the generosity to come and see me; this was too much: to carry with us the contagion of misfortune, not to dare to associate with those we love, to be afraid to write to them, or pronounce their names, to be the object by turns, either of affectionate attentions. which make us tremble for those who show them, or of those refinements of baseness which terror inspires, is a situation from which every one, who still values life, would withdraw! I was told, as a means of softening my grief, that these continual persecutions were a proof of the importance that was attached to me; I could have answered that I had not deserved "Ni cet excis d'honeur, ni cette indignit;"2 - but I never suffered myself to look to consolations addressed zThe Maitre de Poste is one who has charge of a station of post-horses, Sudh stations are found, seven or eight miles from each other, on all the highways of Europe. They are regulated by government, and all travellers, by complying with certain forms, can demand horses at any station to convey them to the next. There is no corresponding system in this *ountry.-Ed. N " Neither this excess of honor, nor this indignity."

18 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. to my vanity; for I knew that there was no one then in France, from the highest to the lowest, who might not have been found worthy of being made unhappy. I was tormented in a] the concerns of my life, in all the tender points of my character, and power condescended to take the trouble of be. coming well acquainted with me, in order the more effectually to enhance my sufferings. Not being able then to disarm that power by the simple sacrifice of my talents, and resolved not to employ them in its service, I seemed to feel, to the bottomr of my heart, the advice my father had given me, and I left my paternal home. I think it my duty to make this calumniated book known to the public-this book, ths source of so many troubles; and, though General Savary told me in his letter that my work was not French, as I certainly do not lonsider him to be the representative of France, it is to Frenchmen such as I have known them, that I should with confidence address a production, in which I have endeavored, to the best of my abilities, to heighten the glory of the works of the human mind. Germany may be considered, from its geographical situation, as the heart of Europe, and the great association of the Continent can never recover its independence but by the independence of this country. Difference of language, natural boundaries, the recollections of a common history, contribute altogether to give birth to those great individual existences of r.nankind, which we call nations; certain proportions are necessary to their existence, certain qualities distinguish them; and, if Germany were united to France, the consequence would be, that France would also be united to Germany, and the Frenchmen of Hamburg, like the Frenchmen of Rome, would by degrees effect a change in the character of the countrymen of Henry the Fourth: the vanquished would in time modify the victors, and in the end both would be losers. I have said in my work that the Germans were not ao nation, assuredly, they are at this moment heroically disproving that assertion. But, nevertheless, do we not still see some German countries expose themselves by fighting against their country

PREFACE. 19 men, to the contempt even of their allies, the French? Those auxiliaries (whose names we hesitate to pronounce, as if it were not yet too late to conceal them from posterity) —those auxiliaries, I say, are not led either by opinion or even by interest, still less by honor; but a blind fear has precipitated their governments towards the strongest side, without reflecting that they were themselves the cause of that very strength before which they bowed. The Spaniards, to whom we may apply Southey's beautiful line, "And those who suffer bravely save mankind;" the Spaniards have seen themselves reduced to the possession of Cadiz alone; but they were no more ready then to submit to the yoke of strangers, than they are now when they have reached the barrier of the Pyrenees, and are defended by that mar of an ancient character and a modern genius, Lord Wellincgton. But to accomplish these great things, a perseverance was necessary. which would not be discouraged by events. The Germans have frequently fallen into the error of suffering themselves to be evercome by reverses. Individuals ought to submit to destirn-, but nat;ons never; for they alone can comu.and destiny' with a little mo:e exertion of the will, mis fortune would be conqueree.. The submission oe cne people t.c another is contrary to nature. Who would new belleve in te possibility of subduing Spain, Russia, England, or Fhance ) Why should it not be the same with Germarn S it the Germans could be subjugated, their misfortune would ere.d the heart; but) as Mlle. de Man cini said to Louis XIV, "You are a king, sire, and weep!" so we should always be tempted to say to them, "You are a nation, and you weep!" The picture of literature and philosophy, seems indeed foreign from the present moment; yet it will be grateful, perhaps, to this poor and noble Germany, to recall the memory of its intellectual riches amid-the ravages of war. It is three years since I designated Prussia, and the countries of the North

20 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. which surround it, as the conpy of thought; into how many noble actions has this thought been transformed! That to which the systems of Philosophers led the way is coming to pass, and the independence of mind is about to lay the foundation of the independence of nationa

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. TIIE origin of the principal nations of Europe may be traced to three great distinct races, —tie Latin, the German, and the Sclavonic. The Italians, the French, the Spaniards, and the I'ortuguese, have derived their civilization and their language from RtBorne; the Germans, the Swiss, the English, the Swedes, the [)anles, and the iollanders, are Te.tQpn!c peoples;' the Plolis and Rltussians occupy the first rank among the Sclavonic. Th,,ose lations whose intellectual culture is of Latin origin vwere the earliest civilized; they ha e for the most part inheritedt the quick sagacity of the Romans in the conduct of worldly:ilairs. Social institutions, founded on the Pagan reig ion, preceded among them the establishment of Christianity; and when the peoples of the North came to conquer them, those very peoples adopted in many respects the customs of the coiuntries which they conquered. These observationt must no doubt be modified by reference to clinmates governments, and the facts o4 each individual his tory. TIe ecclesiastical power has left indelible traces in Italy. Their long wars with the Arabs have strengthened the military habits and enterprising spirit of the Spaniards; but, generally speaking, all that part of Europe, of which the languages are derived from the Latin, and which was early initiated in the Roman policy, bears the character of a long-existing civilization of Pagan origin. We there find iess inclination to abstract reflection than among the Germanic nations; they are more 1 This word, in the plural, which supplies a real need, may now be regarded as naturalized in the English language. —Ed.

22 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. addicted to the pleasures and the interests of the earth, and, like their founders, the Romans, they alone know how to practice the art of dominion. The Germanic nations almost constantly resisted the Roman yoke; they were more lately civilized, and by Christianity alone; they passed instantaneously from a sort of barbarism to the refinement of Christian intercourse; the times of chivalry, the spirit of the middle ages, form their most lively recollections; and although the learned of these countries have studied the Greek and Latin authors more deeply even than the Latin nations themselves, the genius natural to German writers is of a color rather Gothic than classical. Their imagination delights in old towers and battlements, among sorceresses and spectres; and mysteries of a meditative and solitary nature form the principal charm of their poetry. The analogy which exists among all the Teutonic nations is such as cannot be mistaken. The social dignity for which the English are indebted to their constitution, assures to them, it is true, a decided superiority over the:est; nevertheless, the same traits of character are constantly met with among all the different peoples of Germanic origin. They were all distinguished, from the earliest times, by their independence and loyalty; they hnave ever been good and faithful; and it is for this very reason, perhaps, that their writings universally bear an impression of melancholy; for it often.happens to nations, as to individuals, to suffer for their virtues. The civilization of the Sclavonic tribes having been of much later date and of more rapid growth than that of other peoples, there has been hitherto seen among them more imitation than originality: all that they possess of European growth is French; what they have derived from Asia is not yet sufficiently developed to enable their writings to display the true character which would be natural to them. Throughout literary Europe, then, there are but two great divisions strongly marked: tlhe literature which is imitated from the ancients, and that which owes its birth to the spirit of the middle ages; that which in its origin received from the genius of Paganism its color and

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 23 its charm, and that which owes its impulse and development to a religion intrinsically spiritual. It might be said, with reason, that the French and the.ermans are at the two extremes of the moral chain; since the{ former regard external objects as the source of all ideas, and the latter, ideas as the source of all impressions. These two nations, nevertheless. agree together pretty well in their social relations; but none can be more opposite in their literary and philosophical systems. Intellectual Germany is hardly known to France: very few men of letters among us have troubled themselves about her. It is true that a much greater number have set themselves up for, her judges. This agreeable lightness, which makes men pronounce on matters of which they are ignorant, may appear elegant in talking, but not in writing. The Germans often rurn into the error of introducing into conversatilon what is fit only for books; the French sometimes commit the contrar- -fault of inserting in books what is fit only for conversation; and we have so exhausted all that is super ficial, that, were it only for ornament, and, above all, for the sake of variety, it seems to me that it would be well to'try something deeper. For these reasons I have believed that there might be some advantage in making known that country in which, of all Europe, study and meditation have been carried so far, that it may be considered as the native land of thought. The reflections which the country itself and its literary works have suggested to me, will be divided into four sections. The first will treat of Germany and the Manners of the Germans; the second, of Literature and the Arts; the third, of Philosophy and Morals; the fourth, of Religion and Enthusiasm. These different subjects necessarily fall into one another. The national character has its influence on the literature; the literature and the philosophy on the religion; and the whole taken together can only make each distinct part properly intelligible: it was necessary, notwithstanding, to submit to an apparent division, in vider ultimately to collect all the rays in the same focus. I do not conceal fiom myself that I am about to make, in

24 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. literature as well as in philosophy, an exposition of opinions foreign to those which are dominant in France; but, let them appear just or not, let them be adopted or combated, they will, at all events, yield scope for reflection. " We need not, I imagine, wish to encircle the frontiers of literary France with the great wall of China, to prevent all exterior ideas from penetrating within."' It is impossible that the German writers, the best-informed and most reflecting men in Europe, should not deserve a moment's attention to be bestowed on their literature and their philosophy. It is objected to the one, that it is not in good taste; to the other, that it is full of absurdities. It is possible, however, that there may be a species of literature not conformable to our laws of good taste, and that it may nevertheless contain new ideas, which, modified after our manner, would tend to enrich us. It is thus that we are indebted to the Greeks for Racine, and to Shakspeare for many of the tragedies of Voltaire. The sterility with which our literature is threatened may lead us to suppose that the French spirit itself has need of being renewed by a more vigorous sap; and as the elegance of society will always preserve us from certain faults, it is of the utmost importance to us, to find again this source of superior beauties. After having rejected the literature of the Germans in the name of good taste, we think that we may also get rid of their philosophy in the name of reason. Good taste and reason are words which it is always pleasant to pronounce, even at random; but can we in good faith persuade ourselves that writers of immense erudition, who are as well acquainted with all I These commas are used to mark the passages which the censors of Paris required to be suppressed. In the second volume they discovered nothing reprehensible; but the chapters on Enthusiasm in the third, anl, above all, the concluding paragraph of the work, did not meet their approbation. I was ready to submit to their censures in a negative manner; that is, by retrenching without making any further additions; but the gensdarmes, sent by the Minister of Police, executed the office of censors in a more bru-.al manner, by tearing the whole book in pieces.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 25 French books as ourselves, have been employed for these twenty years uolli mIere absurdities? In the ages of superstition, adi new opinions are easily accused of impiety; and in the ages of incredulity, they are not less easily charged with being absurd. In the sixteenth century, Galileo was delivered up to the Inquisition for having said that the world went round; and in the eighteenth, some persons wished to make J. J. Rousseau pass for a fanatical de,'otee. Opinions which differ from the ruling spirit, be that what it may, always scandalize the vulgar: study and examination can alone confer that liberality of judgment, without which it is impossible to acquire new lights, or even to preserve those which we have; for we submit ourselves to certain received ideas, not as to truths, but as to power; and it is thus that human reason habituates itself to servitude, even in the field of literature and philosophy. VOL. I.-2

PART I. OF GERMANY, AND THF MANNERS OF THE GERMANS. CHAPTER I. OF THE ASPECT OF GERMANY. THE number and extent of forests indicate a civilization yet recent: the ancient soil of the South is almost unfurnished o, its trees, and the sun darts its perpendicular rays on the earth which has been laid bare by man. Germany still affords some traces of uninhabited nature. From the Alps to the sea, between the Rhine and the Danube, you behold a land covered with oaks and firs, intersected by rivers of an imposing beauty, and by mountains of a most picturesque aspect; but vast heaths and sands, roads often neglected, a severe climate, at first fill the mind with gloom; nor is it till after some time that it discovers what may attach us to such a country. The south of Germany is highly cultivated; yet in the most delightful districts of this country there is always something of seriousness, which calis the imagination rather to thoughts of labor than of pleasure, rather to the virtues of the inhabitants than to the charms of nature. The ruins of castles which are seen on the heights of the mountains, houses built of mud, narrow windows, the snows which during winter covei the plains as far as the eye can reach, make a painful impression on the mind. An indescriba

28 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. ble silence in nature and in the people, at first oppresses the heart. It seems as if time moved more slowly there than elsewhere, as if vegetation made not a more rapid progress in the earth than ideas in the heads of men, and as if the regular furrows of the laborer were there traced upon a dull soil. Nevertheless, when we have overcome these first unreflecting sensations, the country and its inhabitants offer to the observation something at once interesting and poetical; we feel that gentle souls and tender imaginations have embellish ed these fields. The high-roads are planted with fruit-trees for the refreshment of the traveller. The landscapes which surround the Rhine are everywhere magnificent: this river may be called the tutelary genius of Germany; his waves are pure, rapid, and ma;estic, like the life of a hero of antiquity. The Danube is divided into many branches; the, streams of the, Elbe and Spree are disturbed too easily by the tempest; the Rhine alone is unchangeable. The countries through which it flows appear at once of a character so grave and so diversified, so fruitful and so solitary, that one would be tempted to believe that they owe their cultivation to the genius of the ri-ver, and that man is as nothing to them. Its tide, as it flows along, relates the high deeds of the days of old, and the shade of Arminius seems still to wander on its precipitous banks. The monuments of Gothic antiquity only are remarkable in Germany; these monuments recall the ages of chivalry; in almost every town a public museum preserves the relics of those days. One would say, that the inhabitants of the North, conquerors of the world, when they quitted Germany, left behind memorials of themselves under different forms, and that the whole land resembles the residence of some great people long since left vacant by its possessors. In most of the arsenals of German towns, we meet with figures of knights in painted wood, clad in their armor; the helmet, the buckler, the cuisses, the spurs,-all is according to ancient custom; and we walk among these standing dead, whose uplifted arms seem ready to strike their adversaries, who also hold their lances in rest. This motionless image of actions, formerly so

THE ASPECT OF GERMANY. 29 lively, causes a painful impression. It is thus that, long after earthquakes, the bodies of men have been discovered still fixed in the same attitudes, in the action of the same thoughts that occupied them at the instant when they were swallowed up. Modern architecture in Germany offers nothing to our contemplation worthy of being recorded; but the towns are in general well built, and are embellished by the proprietors with a sort of good-natured care. In many towns, the houses are paniined on the outside with various colors; one sees upon them the figures of saints, and ornaments of every description, which, though assuredly not the most correct in taste, yet cause a cheerful variety, and seem to indicate a benevolent desire to please both their fellow-countrymen and strangers. The dazzling splendor of a palace gratifies the self-love of its possessors; but the well-designed and carefully-finished decorations, which set off these little dwellings, have something in them kind and hospitable. The gardens are almost as beautiful in some parts of Germany as in England: the luxury of gardens always implies a love of the country. In England, simple mansions are often built in the middle of the most magnificent parks; the proprietor neglects his dwelling to attend to the ornaments of nature. This magnificence and simplicity united do not, it is true, exist in the same degree in Germany; yet, in spite of the want of wealth and the pride of feudal dignity, there is everywhere to be remarked a certain love of the beautiful, which, sooner or later, must be followed by taste and elegance, of which it is the only real source. Often, in the midst of the superb gardens of the German princes, are placed iEolian harps close by grottoes encircled with flowers, that the wind may waft the 3ound and the perfume together. The imagination of the aorthern people thus endeavors to create for ltself a sort of Italy; and, during the brilliant days of a short-lived summer, i t sometimes attains the deception it seeks.' 1 We will here add, from the Westminster Review (July, 1856, p. 72) a summary of W. H. Riehl's admirable view of the physical-geographica

30 BMADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. CHAPTER II. OF THE MANNERS AND CHARACTER OF THE GERMANS. ONLY a few general features are applicable to the wt.lte German nation; for the diversities of this country are such, that it is difficult to bring together under one point of view, religions, governments, climates, and even peoples so different. relations of the German people. IIerr Riehl's three books, —Land and People (Land und Leute), Town Society (Biirgerliche Gesellschaft), and The Family (Die Familie), which are the three parts of one work on the Natural History of the Germanic race (neaturgeschichte des Folkes), are incomparable models of their kind, at once interesting as literature, rich in reliable facts, and sober in theory. " The natural divisions of Germany, founded on its physical geography, are threefold; namely, the low plains, the middle mountain region, and the high mountain region, or Lower, Middle, and Upper Gnrmnany; and on this primary natural division all the other broad ethnographical distinctions of Germany will be found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany include all the seaboard the nation possesses; and this, together with the fact that they are traversed to the depth of six hundred miles by navigable rivers, makes them the natural seat of a trading race. Quite different is the geographical character of Middle Germany. While the northern plains are marked off into great divisions by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the Weser, and the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region is cut up like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and rivers. Here is the region in which you find those famous roofs from which the rain-water runs towards two different seas, and the m:vuntaintops from which you may look into eight or ten Gnrmnan States. The abundance of water-power, and the presence of extensive coal mines, allow of a very diversified industrial development in Middle Germany. In Upper Germany, or the high mountain region, we find the same symmetry in the lines of the rivers as in the north; almost all the great Alpine streams flow parallel with the Danube. But the majority of these rivers are neither navigable nor available for industrial objects, and instead of serving for communication, they shut off one great tract from another. The slow development, the simple peasant life of many districts, is here determined by the mountain and the river. In the southeast, however, industrial activity spreads through Bohemia towards Austria, and forms a sort of qalance to the industrial districts of the Lower Rhine. Of course, the

MANNERS OF THE GERMANS. 31 Southern Germany is, in very many respects, quite distinct from Northern; the commercial cities are altogether unlike those which are the seats of universities; the small States differ sensibly from the two great monarchies of Prussia and Ausboundaries of these three regions cannot be very strictly defined; but an approximation to the limits of Middle Germany may be obtained by regard4 ing it as a triangle, of which one angle lies in Silesia, another in Aix laChapelle, and a third at Lake Constance. "This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions of climate. In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and heavy; in the southern mountain region it is dry and rare, and there are abrupt changes of temperature, sharp contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms; but in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the roughnesses of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of this struggle; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft air of the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious anld sensitive to hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Solthern Germany. It is a curious ftct that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer from the North German coast towards Upper Gerirany, the average of suicides regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number; then Prussia; while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria. *'Both the northern and southern regions have still a large extent of waste lands, downs, morasses, and heaths; and to these are added, in the south, abundance of snow-fields and naked rock; while in Middle Germany, culture has almost overspread the face of the land, and there are no large tracts of waste. There is the samd proportion in the distribution of forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous continuity of wheatfields, potato-grounds, meadow-lands, and vast heaths, and there is the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces in the southern table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is a perpetual variety of crops within a short space; the diversity of land surfalce, and the corresponding variety in the species of plants, are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and this again encourages to the utmost lie motley character of the cultivation. " According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from Qentral Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by dis tinguishing the former as Centralized Land, and the latter as Individualized Land; a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact, that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is far richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the greatest length of railway within the smallest space. Disregarding superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schleswig-Holsteiners, the Mecklenburghers, and the Pomeranians. wre much more nearly allied to the old Bavarians, the Tyrolese, and the

32 MADAME DE STAELL S GERMANY. tria. Germany was formerly an aristocratical confederation, an empire without one common centra of intelligence and of public spirit; it did not form a compact nation, and the bond of union was wanting to its separate meumbers. This division of Germany, fatal to her political force, was nevertheless very favorable to all the efforts of genius and imagination. In matters of literary and metaphysical opinion, there was a sort of gentle and peaceful anarchy, which allowed to every man the complete development of his own individual manner of perception. As there is no capital city in which all the good company of Germany finds itself united, the spirit of society exerts but little power; and the empire of taste and the arms of ridicule are equally without influence. Most writers and reasoners sit down to work in solitude, or surrounded only by a little circle over which they reign. They abandon themselves, each separately, to all the impulses of an unrestrained imagination; and if any traces are to be found throughout Germany of the ascendency of fashion, it is in the desire evinced by every man to show himself in all respects different from the rest. In France, on —thcob ntary, every man aspires to deserve what Montesqumeu said of Voltaire: II a plus que personne l'esprit Styrians, than any of these are allied to the Saxons, the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in North and South Germany original races are still found in large masses, and popular dialects are spoken; you still find there thoroughly peasant districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, thorough cities; you still find there a sense of rank, In Middle Germany, on the contrary, the original races are fused together, or sprinkled hither and thither; the peculiarities of the popular dialects arm worn down or confused; there is no very strict line of demarkation between the country and the town population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being hardly distinguishable in their characteristics; and the sense of rank, as part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished. Again, both in the north and south, there is still a, strong ecclesiastical spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian sees Antichrist in the Pope as clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in Doctor Luther; while in Middle Germany the confessions are mingled; they exist peaceably side by side in very narrow space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely even in the popular mind."-Ed.

MANNERS OF THE GERMANS. 33 que tout le monde a. The German writers would yet more willingly imitate foreigners than their own countrymen. In literature, as in politics, the Germans have too much respect for foreigners, and not enough of national prejudices. In individuals it is a virtue, this denial of self, and this esteem of others; but the patriotism of nations ought to be selfish.l The pride of the English serves powerfully their political existence; the good opinion which the French entertain of themselves has always contributed greatly to their ascendance over Europe; the noble pride of the Spaniards formerly rendered them sovereigns of one; entire portion of the world. The Germans are Saxons, Prussians, Bavarians, Austrians; but the Germanic character, on which the strength of all should be founded, is like the land itself, parcelled out among so many different masters.: " With tl:e purest identity of origin, the Germans have shown always the weakest sentiment of nationality. Descended from the same ancestors, speaking a common language, unconquered by a foreign enemy, and once the subjects of a general government, they are the only people in Europe who have passively allowed their national unity to be broken down, and submitted, like cattle, to be parcelled and reparcelled into flocks, as suited the convenience of their shepherds. The same unpatriotic apathy is betrayed in their literary as in their political existence. In other countries, taste is perhaps too exclusively national; in Germany it is certainly too cosmiopolite. Teutonic admiration seems, indee4, _oi67 -isndfaly gehtmifugai; aiid literary partialities have in the Empire inclined always in favor W6'_the foreign. The Germans were long familiar with the literature of every other hation, before they thlought of cultivating, or rather creating, a literature of their own; and when this was at last attempted, Oaimpa Ttr&,7r6v-wv was still the principle that governed in the experiment.,It was essayed, by a process of foreign infusion, to elaborate the German tqngue into a vehicle of pleasing communication; nor were they contented to reverse the operation, until the project had been stultified by its issue, and the purest and only all-sufficient of the modern languages degraded into a Jabylonish jargon, without a parallel in the whole history of speech. A counterpart to this overweening admiration of the strange and distant, is the discreditable indifference manifested by the Germans to the noblest monuments qof native genius. To their eternal disgrace, the works of Leibnitz were left to be collected by a Frenchman; while' the care'denied by his countrymen to the great representative of German universality, was lavished, with an eccentric affection, on the not more important specula-:ions of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Cudworth." (Sir Wm. Hamilton Discuesions, etc., p. 204.)-Ed. 29

34 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. I shall separately examine Northern and Southern Germany, but will for the present confine myself to those reflections which equally suit the whole nation. The Germans are, generally speaking, both sincere and faithful; they seldom forfeit their word, and deceit is foreign to them. If this fault should ever introduce itself into Germany, it could only be through the ambition of imitating foreigners, of evincing an equal dexterity, and, above all, of not being duped by them; but good sense and goodness of heart would soon bring the Germans back to perceive that their strength consists in their own nature, and that the habit of rectitude renders us incapable, even where we are willing, of employing artifice. In order to reap the fruits of immorality, it is necessary to be entirely light armed, and not to carry about you a conscience and scruples which arrest you midway, and nfiake you feel, so much the more poignantly, the regret of having left the old road, as it is impossible for you to advance boldly in the new. It is, I believe, easy to show that, without morality, all is danger and darkness. Nevertheless there has often been observed among the Latin nations a singularly dexterous policy in the art of emancipating themselves from every duty; but, it may be said, to the glory of the German nation, that she is almost incapable of that practised suppleness which makes all truths bend to all interests, and sacrifices every engagement to,very calculation. Her defects, as well as her good quaiities, subject her to the honorable necessity of justice. The power of labor and reflection is also one of the distinctive traits of the people of Germany. They are naturally a literary and philosophical people; yet the separatipn into classes, whi more distinct in Germany than anywhere else, because society does not soften its gradations, is in some respects injurious to the understanding properly so called. The nobles have too few ideas, the men of letters too little practice n business. nderstanding is a combination of the knowledge of men and things; and society, in which men act without Dbject, and yet with interest, is precisely that which best derelops the most opposite faculties. It is imagination more

MANNERS OF THE GERMANS. 35 thank ulnderstanding that characterizes the Germans. Jean Paul Richter, one of their most distinguished writers, has said that the empire of the seas belonged to the English, that of the land to the French, and that of the air to the Germans: in fact, we discover in Germany the necessity of a centre and bounds to this eminent faculty of thought, which rises and loses itself in vacuum, which penetrates and vanishes in obscurity, whic'i perishes by its impartiality, confounds itself by the force of analysis, and stands in need of certain faults to circumscribe its virtues. In leaving France, it is difficult to grow accustomed to the slowness and inertness of the German people; the y neyer hasten to any object; they find obstacles to all; you hear "it is impossible" repeated a hundred times in Gerlnany for once in France. When actjon is necessary, the Germans know not how to struggle with difficulties, and their respect for power is more owing to the resemblance between power and destiny than to any interested motive. The lower classes are sufficiently coarle in their forms'of proceeding; above all, when any shock is intended to their favorite habits; they would naturally feel much more than the nobles that holy antipathy for foreign manners and languages, which in all countries seems to strengthen the national bond of union. The offer of money does not alte: thl.:ir plan of conduct; fear does not turn them aside from it; tiley are, in short, very capable of that fixedness in all things, which is an excellent pledge for morality; for he who is continually actuated by fear, and still more by hope, passes easily from one opinion to another, whenever his interest requires it. As we rise a little above the lower class, we easily perceive that internal vivacity, that poetry of the soul, which characterizes the Germans. The iAnha'1 tants of town and country the soldiers and laborers, are all acquainted with music. It has happened to me to enter small cottages, blackened by the smoke of tobacco, and immediately to hear not only the mistress but the master of the house improvising on the harpsichord, as the Italians improvise in verse. Almosl

36 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. everywhere, on market-days, they have players on wind instratments placed in the balcony of the town-house, which overlooks the public square; the peasants of the neighborhood are thus made partakers in the soft enjoyment of that iirst of arts, The scholars walk through the streets, on Sur.rday, ringing psalms in chorus. They say that Luther often took a. part in these choruses in early life. I was at Eisenach, a little town in Saxony, one winter day, when it was so cold that the very streets were blocked up with snow. I saw a long procession of young people in black cloaks, walking through the town, and celebrating the praises of God. They were the only persons out of doors, for the severity of the frost had driven all the rest of the world to their firesides; and these voices, almost equally harmonious with those of the South, heard amid all this rigor of the season, excited so much the livelier emotion. The inhabitants of the town dared not in the intense cold to open their windows; but we could perceive behind the glasses countenances, sad or serene, young or old, all receiving with joy the religious consolations which this swqe/,F ir.lody inspired. The poor Bohemians, as they wander, followed by their wives and children, carry on their backs a bad harp, made of common wood, from which they draw harmonious music. They play upon it while they rest at the foot of a tree on the high road, or near the post-houses, trying te awaken the attention of travellers to the ambulatory concert of their little wandering family. In Austria the flocks are kept by shepherds, who play charming airs on instruments at once simple and sonorous. These airs agree perfectly well with the soft and pensive impression produced by the aspect of the country. Instrumental music is as generally cultivated throughout Germany as vocal music in Italy. Nature has done more in this respect, as in so many others, for Italy, than for Germany; for instrumental music labor is necessary, while a southern sky is enough to create a beautiful voice: nevertheless the men of the working classes would never be able to afford to musici'the tim6e'wlch is necessary for -a~rning it, if they were not en

MANNERS OF THE GERMANS. 31 lowed with an organization peculiarly adapted to the acquirement. Those' people, who are musicians by nature, receive through the medium of harmony, sensations and ideas which their confined situations and vulgar occupations could never procure for them from any other source. The female peasants and servants, who have not money enough to spend in dress, ornament their heads and arms with a few flowers, that imagination may at least have some part in their attire: those who are a little more rich, wear on holidays a cap of gold stuff, in sufficiently bad taste, which affords a strange contrast to the simplicity of the rest of their costume; but this cap, which their mothers also wore before them, recalls ancient manners; and the dress of ceremony, with which the lcwer classes of women pay respect to the Sunday, has something solemn in it which interests one in their favor. We must also like the Germans for the good-will manifested in their respectful deference and formal politeness, which foreigners have so often turned into ridicule. They might easily have substituted a cold and indifferent deportment for that grace and elegance which they are accused of being unable to reach; disdain always silences ridicule, for it is principldly upon useless efforts that ridicule attaches itself; but benevclent characters choose rather to expose themselves to pleasantry, than to preserve themselves from it by that haughty and restrained air, which it is so easy for any person to assume. In Germany, we are continually struck by the contrast which exists between sentiments and habits, talents and tastes: civilization and nature seem to be not yet sufficiently amalgamated together. Sometimes the most ingenuous of men are very affected in their expressions and countenance, as if they had something to conceal; sometimes, on the other hand, gentleness of soul does not prevent rudeness in manners; frequently even this contradiction goes still further, and weakness of character shows itself through the veil of harshness in language and demeanor. Enthusiasm for the arts and poetry is joined to habits even low and vulgar in social life. There is no coun

38 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. Lry where men of ietters, and young men studying at the universities, are better acquainted with the ancient languages and with antiquity; yet there is none in which superannuated customs more generally exist even at the present day. The recollections of Greece, the taste for the fine arts, seem to have,reached them through the medium of correspondence; but feudal institutions, and the ancient customs of the German nation, are always held in honor among them, even though, unhappily for the military power of the country, they no longer possess the same strength. There is no assemblage more whimsical than that displayed in the military aspect of Germany: soldiers at every step, and all leading a sort of domestic life.' They are as much' afraid of fatigue and of the inclemency of the air, as if the whole nation were composed of merchants and men of letters; and vet all their institutions tend, and must necessarily tend, to inspire the people with military habits. When the inhabitants of the North brave the inconveniences of their climate, they harden themselves in a wonderful manner against all sorts i evil; the Russian soldier is a proof of this. But where the climate is only half rigorous, where it is still possible to guard against the severity of the heavens by domestic precautions, these very precautions render them more alive to theI physical sufferings of war. Stoves, beer, and the smoke oftobbacco, surround all the common people of Germany with a thick and hot atmosphere, from which they are never inclined to escape. This atmosphere is injurious to activity, which is of no less importance -fi war than courage itself; resolutions are slow, discouragement is easy, because an existence,-vo-d of pleasure in general, inspires no great confidence in the gifts of fortune. The habit I Riehl tells the story of a " peasant youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of the Westerwald, enlisted as a recruit. at Weilburg in Nassau. The lad, having never in his life slept in a bed, when he had to get into one for the first time began to cry like a child; and he deserted twice because he could not reconcile himself to sleeping in a bed, and to tbe'fine' life of the barracks."-Ed.

CHARACTER OF THE GERMANS. 39:i a peaceable and regular mode of life is so bad a preparation for the multiplied chances of hazard, that even death, coming in a regular way, appears preferable to a life of adventure. The demarcation of classes, much more positive in Germany than it used to be in France, naturally produced the annihilation of military spirit amQng the lower orders; this demarca-;ion has in fact nothing offensive in it; for I repeat, a sort of natural goodness mixes itself with every thing in Germany, even with aristocratical pride; and tilhe differences of rank are reduced to some court privileges, to some assemblies which do not afford sufficient pleasure to deserve envy: nothing is bitcer, under whatever aspect contemplated, when society, and ridioulle, which is the offspring of society, is without influence. Men cannot really wound their very souls, except by falsehood or mockery: in a country of seriousness and truth, justice and happiness will always be met with. But the barrier which separated, in Germany, the nobles from the citizens, necessarily rendered the whole nation less warlike. Inmagination, which is the ruling quality of the world of arts and letters in Germany, inspires the fear of danger, if this natural emotion is not combated by the ascendency of opinion and the exaltation of honor. In France, even in its ancient state, the taste for war was universal; and the common people willingly risked life, as a means of agitating it and diminishing the sense of its weight. It is a question of importance to know whether the domestic affections, the habit of reflection, the very gentleness of soul, do not conduce to the fear of death; but it tle whole strength of a State consists in its military spirit, it is of consequence to examine what are the causes that have, wakened this spirit in the German nation. Three leading motives usually incite men to fight,-the patriotic love of liberty, the enthusiasm of glory, and religious fanaticism. There can be no great patriotism in an empire d ivided for so many ages, where Germans fought against Germans almost always instigated by some foreign impulse: the i,1re of glory is scarcely awake where there is no centre, no society. That species of impartiality, the very excess of jus

40 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. tice, which characterizes the Germans, renders them mudc more susceptible of being inflamed with abstract sentiments, than of the real interests of life; the general whqo loses a battile, is more sure of indulgence than he who gains one is of applause; there is not enough difference between success and reverse, in the opinions of such a people, to excite any very lively ambition. Religion, in Germany, exists at the very bottom of the heart; but it possesses there a character of meditation and independ. ence, which breathes nothing of the energy necessary to exclusive sentiments. The same independence of opinions, individuals, and States, so prejudicial to the strength of the Gernianic empire, is to be found also in their religion: a great number of different sects divide Germany between them; and the Catholic religion itself, which, in its very nature, exercises a uniform and strict discipline, is nevertheless interpreted by every man after his own fashion. The political and social bond of the people, a general government, a general worship, the same laws, the same interests, a classical literature, a ruling opinion, nothing of all this exists among the Germans; each individual State is the more independent, each individual science the better cultivated; but the whole nation is so subdivided, that one cannot tell to what part of the empire this very nalme of nation ought to be granted. The love oft developed among the Germans; they have not learned, either by enjoyment or by privation, the value which may be attached to it. There are many ex.amples of federative governments, which give to the public spirit as much force as even a united administration, but these are the associations of equal States and free citizens. The German confederacy was composed of strong and weak, citizen and serf, of rivals, and even of enemies; they were old existing elements, combined by circumstances and respected by men. The nation is persevering and just; and its equity and loyalty secure it against injury from any institution, however vicious. Louis of Bavaria, when he took the command of the army, intrusted to Frederic the Fair, his rival, and at tha4

CHARACTER OF THE GERMANS. 41 time his prisoner, the administration of his States; and he had not to repent of this confidence, which in those days caused no astonishment. With such virtues, they never found the ill consequences of the weakness, or even the complication of the laws; the probity of individuals supplied their defects. The very independence which the Germans enjoyed, ill almost all respects, rendered them indifferent to liberty; independence is a possession, liberty its security; and on this very account nobody in Germany was molested either in his rights or his enjoyments: they could not feel the want of such an order of things as might secure them in the possession of this happiness. The imperial tribunals promised a sure though slow redress of every act of arbitrary power; and the moderation of the sovereigns, and the wisdom of the governed, seldom gave room for any appeals to their interference: people, therefore, could not imagine that they stood in need of constitutional fortifications, when they saw no aggressors. One has reason to be astonished, that the feudal code should have subsisted almost unaltered among a people so enlightened; but as, in the execution of these laws, so defective in themselves, there was never any injustice, the equality with which they were applied made amends for their inequality in principle. Old charters, the ancient privileges of every cityall that family history, which constitutes the charm and glory of little States, were singularly dear to the Germans; but they neglected that great national might, which it was so important to have founded among the colossal States of Europe. The Germans, with some few-exceptions, are hardly capable tf succeeding in any thing which requires address and dexterity; every thing molests and embarrasses them, and they have as much need of method in action as of independence in ideas. The French, on the contrary consider actions with all the freedom of art, and ideas with all the bondage of custom. The Cermans, who cannot endure the yoke of rules in literature, require every thing to be traced out before them in the line of their conduct. They know not how to treat with men;

42 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. and the less occasion is given them in this respect to iecide for themselves, the better they are satisfied. Political institutions can alone form the character of a nation; the nature of the government of Germany was almost in opposition to the philosophical illumination of the Germans. From thence it follows, that they join the greatest boldness o. thought to the most obedient character. The pre-eminence ol the military States, and the distinctions of rank, have accustomed them to the most exact submission in the relations of social life. Obedience, with them, is regularity, not servility; they are as scrupulous in the execution of the orders they recei-Te. as if every order became a duty. The enlightened men of Germany dispute vehemently among themselves the dominion of speculations, and will suffer no shackles in this department; but they give up, without difficulty, all that is real in life to the powerful of the earth. "This reality, which they so much despise, finds purchasers, however, who in the end avail themselves of their acqlisltion to carry trouble and constraint into the empire of the imagination itself."' The understanding and the character of the Germans appear to have no communication together: the one cannot suffer any limits, the other is subject to every yoke; the one is very enterprising, the other very timid; in short, the illumination of the one seldom gives strength to the other, and this is easily explained. The extension of knowledge in modern times only serves to weaken the character, when it is not strengthened by the habit of business and the exercise of the will. To see all, and comprehend all, is a great cause or uncertainty; and the energy of action develops itself only in those free and powerful countries where patriotic sentiments are to the soul like blood to the veins, and grow cold only with the extinction of life itself.' A passage suppressed by the censors. 2 I have no need of saying that it is England which I wished to point out by these words; but when proper names are not pronounced, the censors, in general, who are men of knowledge, take a pleasure in not com prehending. It is not the same with the police; the police has a sort of

THE WOMEN. 43 CHAPTER III. OF THE WOMEN. NATURE and society give to women a habit of endurance; and I think it can hardly be denied that, in our days, they are generally worthier of moral esteem than the men. At an epoch when selfishness is the prevailing evil, the men, to whom all positive interests are related, must necessarily have less generosity, less sensibility, than the women. These last are attached to life only by the ties of the heart; and even when they lose themselves, it is by sentiment that they are led away: their selfishness is extended to a double object, while that of man has himself only for its end. Homage is rendered to them according to the affections which they inspire; but those which they bestow are almost always sacrifices. The most beautiful of virtues, self-devotion, is their enjoyment and their destiny; no happiness can exist for them but by the reflection of another's glory and prosperity; in short, to live independently of self, whether by ideas or by sentiments, or, above all, by virtues, gives to the soul an habitual feeling of elevation. In those countries where men are called upon by political'nstitutions to the exercise of all the military and civil virtues which are inspired by patriotism, they recover the superiority which belongs to them; they reassume with dignity their rights, as masters of the world; but when they are condemned, in whatever measure, to idleness or to slavery, they fall so much the lower'as they ought to rise more high. The destiny of women always remains the same; it is their soul alone which creates it; political circumstances have no influence instinct that is really extraordinary, in prejudice of all liberal ideas, under whatever form they present themselves; and traces out, with the sagacity of a gocd hound, all that might awaken in the minds of the French then ancienlt love for light and liberty.

14 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. upon it. When men are ignorant or unable to employ their lives worthily and nobly, Nature revenges herself upon them for the very gifts which they have received from her; the activity of the body contributes only to the sloth of the mind; the strength of soul degenerates into coarseness; the day is consumed in vulgar sports and exercises, horses, the chase, or entertainments which might be suitable enough in the way of relaxation, but brutalize as occupations. Women, the while, cultivate their understanding; and sentiment and reflection preserve in their souls the image of all that is noble and beautifil. The German women have a charm exclusively their owna touching voice, fair hair, a dazzling complexion; they are modest, but less timid than Englishwomen; one sees that they have been less accustomed to meet with their superiors among men, and that they have besides less to apprehend from the severe censures of the public. They endeavor to please by their sensibility, to interest by their imagination; the language of poetry and the fine arts are familiar to them; they coquet with enthusiasm, as they do in France with wit and pleasantry. That perfect loyalty, which distinguishes the German character, renders ove less dangerous for the happiness of women; and, perhaps, they admit the advances of this sentiment with the more confidence, because it is invested with romantic colors, and disdain and infidelity are less to be dreaded there than elsewhere. Love is a religion in Germany, but a poetical religion, which tolerates too easily all that sensibility can excuse. It cannot be denied, that the facility of divorce in the Protestant States is prejudicial to the sacredness of marriage. They change husbands with as little difficulty as if they were arranging the incidents of a drama; the good-nature common both to men and women is the reason that so little bitterness of spirit ever accompanies these easy ruptures; and, as the Germans are en. dowed-with-more imagination than real passion, the most extravagant events take place with singular tranquillity; nevertheless, it is thus that manners and character lose every thing like consistency; the spirit of paradox shakes the most sacrec institutions, and there are no fixed rules upon any subject.

THE WOMEN. 4.5 One may fairly laugh at the ridiculous airs of some German women, who are continually exalting themselves even to a pitch of affectation, and who sacrifice to their pretty softnesses of expression, all that is marked and striking in mind and character; they are not open, even though they are not false; they only see and judge of nothing correctly, and real events pass like a phantasmagoria before their eyes. Even when they take it into their heads to be light and capricious, they still retain a tincture of that sentimentality which is held in so high honor in their country. A German woman said one day, with a melancholy expression, "I know not wherefore, but those who are absent pass away from my soul." A French woman would have rendered this idea with more gayety, but it would have been fundamentally the same. Notwithstanding these affectations, which form only the exception, there are among the women of Germany numbers whose sentiments are true and manners simple. Their careful education, and the purity of soul which is natural to them, render the dominion which they exercise gentle and abiding; they inspire you from day to day with a stronger interest for all that is great and generous, with more of confidence in all noble hopes, and they know how to repel that desolating irony which breathes a death-chill over all the enjoyments of the heart. /Nevertheless, we seldom find among them that quickness of apprehension, which animates conversation, and sets every idea in motion; this sort of pleasure is scarcely to be met with anywhere out of the most lively and the most witty societies of Parisl The chosen company of a French metropois can alone confer this rare delight; elsewhere, we generally find only eloquence in public, or tranquil pleasure in familiar life. Conversation, as a talent, exists in France alone; in all other countries it answers the purposes of politeness, of argument, or of friendly intercourse. In France, it is an art to which the imagination and the soul are no doubt very necessary, but which possesses, besides these, certain secrets, where, by the absence of both may be supplied.

46 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. CHAPTER IV. )F THE INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY ON L;)V~. AND HONOR, CHIVALRY is to modern, what the heroic age was to ancient limes; to it all the noble recollections of the nations of Europe are attached. At all the great epochs of history, men have embraced some sort of enthusiastic sentiment, as a universal principle of action. Those whom they called heroes, in the most distant ages, had for their object to civilize the earth; the confused traditions, which represent them to us as subduing the monsters of the forests, bear, no doubt, an allusion to the first dangers which menaced society at its birth, and from which it was preserved by the supports of its yet new organization. Then came the enthusiasm of patriotism, and inspired all that was great and brilliant in the actions of Greece and Rome: this enthusiasm became weaker when there was no longer a country to love; and, a few centuries later, chivalry succeeded to it. Chivalry consisted in the defence of the weak, in the loyalty of valor, in the contempt of deceit, in that Christian charity which endeavored to introduce humanity even in war; in short, in all those sentiments which substituted the reverence of honor for the ferocious spirit of arms. It is among the northern nations that chivalry had its birth;' 1 The origin of chivalry has often been traced to a custom of the Germans, described by Tacitus: "The Germans transact no business, public or private, without being Armed; but it is not customary for any person to assume arms till the State has approved his ability to use them. Then, in the midst of the issembly, either one of the chiefs, or the father, or a relation, equips the youth with a shield and javelin. These are to them the manly gown; this is the first honor conferred on youth: before this they are considered as part of a household; afterwards, of the State. The dignity of chieftain is

INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY. 47 buit in the south of France that it was embellished by the charm of poetry and love. The Germans had, in all times, treated women with respect, but the French were the first that tried to please them; the Germans also had their chanters of love (Minnesinger), but nothing that could be comnpared to our Trouveres and Troubadours; and it is to this source, perhaps, that we must refer a species of literature strictly national. The spirit of northern mythology had much more resemblance' to Christianity than the Paganism of the ancient Gauls; yet is there no country where Christians have been better knights, or knights better Christians, than in France. The Crusades brought together the gentlemen of all countries, and created out of the spirit of chivalry a sort of European patriotism, which filled every soul with the same sentiment. The feudal government, that political institution so gloomy and severe, but which, in some respects, consolidated/ the spirit of chivalry, by investing it with the character of, love; the feudal government, I say, has continued in Germany even to our own days. It was overthrown in France by Cardinal Richelieu; and, from that epoch to the Revolution, the French have been altogether destitute of any source of enthusiasm. I know it will be said that the love of their king was such; but, supposing it possible that this sentiment could bestowed even on mere lads, whose descent is eminently illustrious, or whose fathers have performed signal services to the public; they are associated, however, with those of mature strength, who have already been declared capable of service; nor do they blush to be seen in the rank of companions. For the state of companionship itself has its several degrees, determined by the judgment of him whom they follow; and there is a great emulation among the companions, which shall possess the highest place in the favor of their chief; and among the chiefs, which shall excel in the number and valor of his companions. It is their dignity, their strength, to be always surrounded with a large body of select youth-an ornament in peace, a bulwark in war. And not in his own country alone, but among the neighboring States, the fime and glory of each chief consists in being distinguished for the number and bravery of his companions. Such chiefs are courted by embassies, distinguished by presents, and often. by their reputation alone, decide a war."-(Tacitus, Germania, vii.) —gM, 2 Or, rather, being less barbarous, it was less opposed to Christianity. -Ed.

I8 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. extend to a whole nation, still it is confined so entirely to the nlere person of the sovereign, that during the administrations of the Regent and of Louis XV, it would have been difficult, I imagine, for the French to have derived any thing great from its influence. The spirit of chivalry, which still emitted some sparkles in the reign of Louis XIV, was extinguished with him, and succeeded, according to a very lively and sensible historian,' by the spirit of Fatuity, which is entirely opposite to it. Instead of protecting women, Fatuity seeks to destroy them; instead of despising artifice, she employs it against those feeble beings whom she prides herself in deceiving; and she substitutes the profanation of love in the place of its worship. Even courage itself, which formerly served as the pledge of loyalty, became nothing better than a brilliant mode of evading its chain; for it was no longer necessary to be true, but only to kill in a duel the man who accuses you of being other wise; and the empire of society in the great world made almost all the virtues of chivalry disappear. France then found herself without any sort of enthusiastic impulse whatever; and as such impulse is necessary to prevent the corruption and dissolution of nations, it is doubtless this natural necessity which, in the middle of the last century, turned every mind towards the love of liberty. It seems, then, that the philosophical progress of the human lace should be divided into four different periods: the heroic times, which gave birth to civilization; patriotism, which constituted the glory of antiquity; chivalry, which was the military religion of Europe; and the love of liberty, the history of which dates its origin fiom the epoch of the Reformation. Germany, with the exception of a few of its courts, which were inspired with the emulation of imitating France, had not been tainted by the fatuity, immorality, and incredulity, which I M. de Cretelle. Two of the name have been distinguished in lettersPierre-Louis and Charles-Joseph. The latter is here alluded to. He published h;s P'zteis Historiolte de la R]evolution Fr~angaise in 1801-1806.-Ed

INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY. 49 since the time of the Regency, had debased the natural character of Frenchmen. Feudality still retained among the Germans the maxims of chivalry: they fought duels, indeed, seldomer than in France, because the Germanic nation is not so lively as the French, and because all ranks of people do not, as in France, participate in the sentiment of bravery; but public opinion was generally much more severe with regard to every thing connected with probity. If a man had, in any manner, been wanting to the laws of morality, ten duels a day would never have set him up again in any person's esteem. Many men of good company have been seen in France, who, when accused of some blamable action, have answered, "It may be bad enough; but nobody at least will dare to say so before my face." Nothing can imply a more utter depravation of morals; for what would become of human society, if it was only necessary for men to kill each other, to acquire the right of doing one another, in other respects, all the mischief possible; to break their word, to lie, provided nobody dared to say, "You have lied;" in short, to separate loyalty from bravery, and transform courage into a mode'of obtaining social impunity? Since the extinction of the spirit of chivalry in France; since she possessed no longer a Godefroi, a Saint Louis, or a Bayard, to protect weakness, and hold themselves bound by a promise as by the most indissoluble chain, I will venture to say, contrary to the received opinion, that France has perhaps been that country of the world in which women are the least happy at heart. France was called the Paradise of women, on account of the great share of liberty which the sex enjoyed there; but this very liberty arose frdm the facility with which men detached themselves from them. The Turk, who shuts up his wife, proves at least by that very conduct how necessary she is to his happiness; the man of gallantry, a character of which the last century furnished us with so many examples, selects women for the victims of his vanity; and this vanity consists not only in seducing, but in afterwards abandoning them. IIe must, in order to justify it, be able to declare, in Vot,. I.- 3

50 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. phrases light and irreprehensible in themselves, that such a woman has loved him, but that he no longer cares about her. " My self-love tells me, let her die of chagrin," said a friend of the Baron de Bezenval; and this very friend appeared to him an object of deep regret, when a premature death prevented him from tihe accomplishment of this laudable design. One grows tired of every thing, my angel, writes M. de la Clos, in a novel which makes one shudder at the refinements of immorality which it displays. In short, at this very period, when they pretended that love reigned in France, it seems to me that gallantry, if 1 may use the expression, really placed women out of the protection of the! w. Wbhei their momentary reign was over, there was for them neither generosity nor gratitude-not even pity.'They counterlcited the accents of love to make them fall into the snare, like the crocodile, which imitates the voices of children to entrap their mothers. Louis XIV, so vaunted for his chivalrous gallantry, did he not show himself the most hard-hearted of men in his conduct towards the very woman by whom he was most beloved of all, Madame de la Vallieire? The details which are given of that transaction in the Mimoires de _Aadame are frightful. lIe pierced with grief the unfortunate heart which breathed only for him, and twenty years of teanrs, at the foot of the cross, could hardly cicatrize the wounds which the cruel disdain of the monarch had inflicted. Nothing is so barbarous as vanity; and as society, bonz-ton, fashion, success, all put this vanity singularly in play, there is no country where the happiness of women is in greater danger than that in which every thing depends upon what is called opinion, and in which everybody learns of others what it is good taste to feel. It must be confessed, that women have ended by taking part in the immorality which destroyed their own true empire; they have learned to lessen their sufferings by becoming worthless. Nevertheless, with some few exceptions, the virtue of women always depends on the conduct of men. The pretended lightness of women is the consequence of the fear they

INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY. 51 entertain of being abandoned; they rush into shame from the fear of outrage. Love is a much more serious quality in Germany than in France. Poetry, the fine arts, even philosophy and religion, have made this sentiment an object of earthly adoration, which sheds a noble charm over life. Germany was not infested, like France, with licentious writings, which circulated among all classes of people, and effected the destruction of sentiment among the high, and of morality among the low. It must be allowed, nevertheless, that the Germans have -more imagination than sensibility; and their upriglhtness is the only pledge for their constancy. The French, in general, respect positive duties; the Germans think themselves less bound by duty than affection. What we have said respecting the facility of divorce affords a proof of this; love is, with them, more sacred than marriage. It is the effect of an honorable delicacy, no doubt, that they are above all things faithful to promises which the law does not warrant; but those which are warranted by law are nevertheless of greater importance to the interests of society. The spirit of chivalry still reigns among the Germans, thus to speak, in a passive sense; they are incapable of deceit, and their integrity discovers itself in all the intimate relations of life; but that severe energy, which imposed so many sacrifices on men, so many virtues on women, and rendered the whole of life one' holy exercise, governed by the same prevailing sentiment, that chivalrous energy of the times of old, has left in Germany only an impression long since passed away. Henceforward nothing great will ever be accomplished there, except by the liberal iumpulse which, throughout Europe, has succeeded to chivalry.

52 MADAM E DE STAEL 8 GERMANY. CHAPTER V. OF SOUTHERN GERMANY. IT was pretty generally understood, that literature existed in the north of Germany alone, and that the inhabitants of the south abandoned themselves to the enjoyments of sense, while those of the north tasted more exclusively those of the soul. Many men of genius have been born in the South, but they have been formed in the North. Near the coasts of the Baltic we find the noblest establishments, the most distinguished men of science and letters; and from Weimar to K6nigsberg, from Kfnigsberg to Copenhagen, fogs and frosts appear to be the natural element of men of a vigorous and profound imagination. No country stands so much as Germany in need of the occupations of literature; for society there affording little charms, and individuals, for the most part, wanting that grace and vivacity which are inspired by nature in warm climates, it follows that the Germans are agreeable only when they are superior in mind, and that they want genius to be witty. Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria, before the illustrious establishment of the present academy at Munich, were countries singularly dull and monotonous: no arts, with the exception of music; no literature; a rude accent, whichl lent itself with lifficulty to the pronunciation of the languages of Latin origin; no aociety; large reunions, which looked more like ceremonies than parties of pleasure; obsequious politene;s to an inelegant iristocracy; goodness and integrity in every class; but a solt (of simpering stiffness, which is the reverse at once both of ease and dignity. One should not therefore be surprised at the criticisms and pleasantries which have been passed on German tediousness. The literary cities are the only objects of real nterest, in a country where society is nothing, and nature very ittle.

AUSTRIA. 53 Letters might perhaps have been cultivated in the south of Germany with as much success as in the north, if the sovereigns had ever properly interested themselves in the advancement of them; nevertheless, it must be acknowledged, that temperate climates are more favorable to society than to poetry. When the climate is neither inclement nor beautiful, when people live with nothing either to fear or to hope from the heavens, the positive interests of existence become almost the only occupation of the mind; both the delights of the South, and the rigors of the North, have stronger hold over the imagination. Whether we struggle against nature, or intoxicate ourselves with her gifts, the power of the creation is in both cases equally strong, and awakens in us the sentiment of the fine arts, or the instinct of the soul's mysteries. Southern Germany, temperate in every sense, maintains itself in a monotonous state of well-being, singularly prejudicial to the activity of affairs as well as of thought. The most lively desire of the inhabitants of this peaceful and fertile country is, that they may continue to exist as they exist at present; and what can this only desire producel It is not even sufficient for the preservation of that with which they are satisfied. CHAPTER VI. OF AUSTRIA. THE literati of Northern Germany have accused Austria of t eglecting letters and sciences; they have even greatly exaggerated the degree of restraint imposed there by the censure -f tlc press. If Austria has produced no great men in the literary career, it is to be attributed not so much to constraint as to the want of emulation. X This chapter was writte.i in the year 1808.

54 I~MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. It is a country so calm, a country in which competence is so easily secured to all classes of its inhabitants, that they think but little of intellectual enjoyments. They do more for the sake of duty than of fame; the rewards of public opinion are so poor, and its punishments so slight, that, without the mo-,tive of conscience, there would be no incitement to vigorous action in any sense. Military exploits must be the chief interest of the inhabitants of a monarchy, which has rendered itself illustrious by continual wars; and yet the Austrian nation had so abandoned itself to the repose and the pleasures of life, that even public events made no great noise till the moment arrived of their calling forth the sentiment of patriotism; and even this sentiment is of a tranquil nature in a country where there is nothing but happiness. Many excellent things are to be found in Austria, but few men really of a superior order; for it is there of no great service to be reckoned more able than another; one is not envied for it, but forgotten, which is yet more discouraging. Ambition perseveres in the desire of acquiring power; genius flags of itself; genius, in the midst of society, is a pain, an internal fever, which would require to be treated as real disease, if the rewards of glory did not soften the sufferings it produces. In Austria, and all other parts of Germany, the lawyers plead in writing, never viva voce. The preachers are followed because men observe the practical duties of religion; but they do not attract by their eloquence. The theatres are much negtected; above all, the tragic theatre. Administration is conducted with great wisdom and justice; but there is so mu'lh *method in all things, that the influence of individuals is scarcely perceptible. Business is conducted in a certain numerical order, which nothing can derange; it is decided by invariable rules, and transacted in profound silence; this silence is not the effect of terror; for what is there to be feared in a country, where the virtues of the sovereign and the principles of equity govern all things? but the profound repose of intellects, as of souls, deprives human speech of all its interests. Neither by

AUSTRIA. 55 trime nor by genius, by intolerance nor by enth usiasm, by passion nor by heroism, is existence either disturbed or exalted. The Austrian Cabinet during the last century was considered as very adroit in politics,-a quality which little agrees with the German character in general; but men often mistake for profound policy that which is only the alternative between ambition and weakness. History almost always attributes to individuals, as to governments, more combination of plans than really existed. Austria, concentrating within herself people so different from each other, as the Bohemians, Hungarians, &c., wants that unity which is so essential to a monarchy: nevertheless, the great moderation of her rulers has for a long time past produced a general bond of union out of the attachment to one individual. The emperor of Germany was at the same time sovereign over his own dominions and the constitutional head of the empire. In this latter character he had to manage different interests and established laws, and derived from his imperial magistracy a habit of justice and prudence, which he transferred from them to the administration of his hereditary States. The nations of Bohemia and Hungary, the Tyrolese and the Flemings, who formerly constituted the monarchy, have more natural vivacity than the genuine Austrians: these last employ themselves incessantly in the act of moderating instead of that of encouraging. An equitable government, a fertile soil, a wise and wealthy nation, all contributed to teach themn, that for their well-being it was only necessary to maintaitl their existing condition, and that they had no need whatever fbr the extraordinary assistance of superior talents. In neaceable times, indeed, they may be dispensed with; but Chat can we do without them in the grand struggles of em pires? The spirit of Catholicism, which was uppermost at Vienna, thougltrn-l'y with moderation, had nevertheless constantly luring the reign of Maria Theresa, repelled what was called the progress of light in the eighteenth century. Then came Joseph thie Second, who lavished all these lights on a country

56 MADAME DE STAEL S GERIANY. not yet prepared either for the good or the evil which they were qualified to produce. He succeeded, for the momellt, in the object of his wishes, because throughout Austria he met with no active emotion either in favor of, or contrary to his desires; but, " after his death, nothing remained of all his establishments,"' because nothing call last but that which advances by degrees. Industry, good living, and domestic enjoyments, are the principal interests of Austria; notwithstanding the glory which she acquired by the perseverance and valor of her armies, the military spirit has not really penetrated all classes of the nation. l1er armies are, for her, so many moving fortifications, but there is no greater emulation in this than in other professions; the most honorable officers are at the same time the bravest; and this reflects upon them so much the more credit, as a brilliant and rapid advancement is seldom the consequence of their efforts. In Austria they almost scruple to show favor to supcr'ior men, and it sometimes seems as if government wished to push equality even further than nature itself, and to treat talent and mediocrity with the same undistinguishing impartiality. The absence of emulation has, indeed, one advantage —it allays vanity; but often pride itself partakes of it; and, in the cnd, there remains only a sort of easy arrogance, which ih satisfied with the exterior of all things. I think that it was also a bad system, that of forbidding the importation of foreign books. If it were possible to preserve to a country the energy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by defending it from the writings of the eighteenth, this night perhaps be a great advantage; but as it is absolutely necessary, that the opinions and the discoveries of Europe must penetrate into the midst of a monarchy, which is itself in the centre of Europe, it is a disadvantage to let them reach it only by halves; for the worst writings are those which are amost sure to make their way. Books, filled with immoral pleasantries and selfish principles, amuse the vulgar, and al1 Suppressed by the censors.

AUSTRIA. 57 ways fall into their hands; while prohibitory laws are absolutely effective only against those philosophical works, which tend to elevate the mind, and enlarge the ideas. The constraint which these laws impose is precisely that which is wanting to favor the indolence of the understanding, but not to preserve the innocence of the heart. In a country where all emotion is of slow growth; in a ountry where every thing inspires a deep tranquillity, the slightest obstacle is enough to deter men from acting or writing, or even (if it is required) from thinking. What can we have better than happiness? they say. It is necessary to understand, however, what they mean by the word. Does happiness consist in the faculties we develop, or in those we suppress? No doubt a government is always worthy of esteem, so long as it does not abuse its power, and never sacrifices justice to its interest; but the happiness of sleep is deceitful; great reverses may occur to disturb it; and we ought not to let the steeds stand still for the sake of holding the reins more gently and easily. A nation may easily content itself with those common blessings of life, repose and ease; and superficial thinkers will pretend, that the whole social art is confined to securing these blessings to the people. Yet are more noble gifts necessary to inspire tie feeling of patriotism. This feeling is combined of tile remembrances which great men have left behind them, the admiration inspired by the chefs-d'oeuvre of national genius, and lastly, the love which is felt for the institutions, the religion, and the glory of our country. These riches of the soul re the only riches that a foreign yoke could tear away; it therefore material enjoyments were tile only objects of thought, might not the same soil always produce them, let who will be its masters? They believed in Austria, during the last century, that the cultivation of letters would tend to enfeeble the military spirit; but they were deceived. Rodolph of Habsburg' untied fi'om 1 Near the right bank of the Aar, in the Canton of Aargou, Switzerland, sanis the village of Habsburg. There may be seen the ruins of a eastle 3,;

58 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. his neck the golden chain which he wore, to decorate a then celebrated poet. Maximilian dictated the poem which he caused to be written. Charles the Fifth knew, and cultivated, almost all languages. Most of the thrones of Europe were formerly filled by sovereigns well informed in all kinds of learning, and who discovered in literary acquirements a new source of mental grandeur. Neither learning nor the sciences will ever hurt the energy of character. Eloquence renders men more brave, and courage renders them more eloquent; every thing that makes the heart beat in unison with a generous sentiment, doubles the true strength of man, his will: but Alat systematic selfishness, in which a man sometimes comrprehends his family as an appendage of himself; bult that phlil6sophy which is merely vulgar at bottomn, however elegant in appearance, which leads to the contempt of everyv thinrg that is called illusion, that is, of self-devotion and entl]m siasmn,-this is the sort of illumination lnost to be dreaded lor the virtues of a nation; this, nevertheless, is what no censors of the press can ever expel from a country surrounded by thle atmosphere of the eighteenth century: we can never escape front what is bad and hurtful in books, bult by freely admitting from all quarters whatever they contain of greatness and liberality. The representation of " Don Carlos" was forbiddcen at Vienna, because they would not tolerate his love for Elizabeth. In Schiller's "Joan of Arc," Agnes Sorel was ma(le tbIe lawful wife of Charles the Seventh. The public library was forbidden to let the "Esprit des Lois" be read; and while all this constraint was practised, the romances of Crebillon circulated in everybody's hands, licentiouls works found entrance, and serious ones alone were supprs'sed. The mischief of bad books is only to be corrected by good ones; the bad consequences of enlightenment are only avoided by rendering the enlightenment more complete. There are two roads to every thing-to retrench that which is dangerwhich was the original seat of the royal family of Austria. Hapsbourg the usual orthography, is erroneous.-Ed.

VIENNA. 59 Pus, or to give new strength to resist it. The latter is the only method that suits the times in which we live; ignorance cannot now have innocence for its companion, and therefore can only do mischief. So many words have been spoken, so many sophisms repeated, that it is necessary to know much, in order to judge rightly; and the times are passed when men confined their ideas to the patrimony of their fathers. We must think, then, not in what manner to repel the introduction of light, but how to render it complete, so that its broken rays may not present false colors. A government must not pretend to keep a great nation in ignorance of the spirit which governs the age; this spirit contains the elements of strength and greatness, which may be employed with success, when men are not afraid boldly to meet every question that presents itself: they will then find, in eternal truths, resources against transitory errors, and in liberty itself, the support of order and the augmentation of power. CHAPTER VII. VIENNA. VIENNA is situated in a plain, surrounded by picturesque hills. The Danube, which passes through and encircles it, -divides itself into several branches, forming Inany pleasant islets; but this river loses its own dignity in so many windIngs, and fails to produce the impression which its ancient renown promises. Vienna is an old town, small enough in itself, but begirt with spacious suburbs. It is pretended that the city, surrounded by its fortifications, is not more extensive now than it was at the time when Richard Coeur-de-Lion' was 1 Richard was arrested near Friesach, one hundred and fifty miles from Vienna, on the road to Venice; and it is not imlprobable that he was in-,risoned at the castle of Diirrenstein, on the frontier between Styria and.arinthia, at the entrance of the beautiful valley of the Olcza. —xd.

60 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. implisoned near its gates. The streets are as narrow as those in Italy; the palaces recall, in some degree, those of Florence; in short, nothing there resembles the rest of Germany, except a few Gothic edifices, which bring back the middle ages to tle imagination. The first of these edifices is the tower of St. Stephen, which rises above all the other churches of Vienna, and reigns majestically over the good and peaceful city, whose generations and glories it has seen pass away. It took two centuries, they say, to finish this tower, begun in 1100;1 the whole Austrian history is in some manner connected with it. No building can be so patriotic as a church; in that alone all classes of the nation are assembled,-that alone brings to the recollection not mlerely public events, but the secret thoughts and inward affections which both chiefs and people have carried into its sanctuary. The temple of the divinity seems present, like God himself, to ages passed away. The monument of Prince Eugene is the only one that has been, for some time past, erected in this church; he there lies waiting for other heroes. As I approached it, I saw a notice affixed to one of its pillars, that a young woman begged of those who should read this paper to pray for her during her sickness. The name of this young woman was not given; it was some unfortunate being, addressilng herself to beings uilknown, not for their alms, but for their prayers; and all this passed by the side of the illustrious dead, who had himself, perhaps, compassion on the unhappy living. It is a pious custom among the Catholics, and one which we ought to imitate, to leave the churches always open; there are so many moments in which we feel the want of such an asylum; and never do we enter it without feeling an emotion which does good to " Tie South Tower, begun in 1359, and carried to two thirds its present height, by an architect named George HIauser, was completed in 1423 by Anton Pilgram. It is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture, dimninishing gradutally fromn its base to its summit in regularly retreating arches and buttresses. It is four hundred and forty-fbour English f'et high." —-(fuerray's ]Jand-booEk fbr So'lthlercn Germany, p. 198.)-Ed.

VIENNNA. 61 the soul, and restores it, as by a holy ablution, to strength and purity. There is no great city without its public building, its promenade, or some other wonder of art or of nature, to which the recollections of infancy attach themselves; and I think that the Prater must possess a charm of this description for the inhabitants of Vienna. Nowhere do we find, so near the capital, a public walk so rich in the beauties at once of rude and ornamented nature. A majestic forest extends to the banks of the Danube; herds of deer are seen from afar passing through the meadow; they return every morning, and fly away every evening, when the influx of company disturbs their solitude. A spectacle, seen at Paris only three times a year, on the road to Longchamp,1 is renewed every day, during the fine season, at Vienna. This is an Italian custom-the daily promenade at the same hour. Such regularity would be impracticable in a country where pleasures are so diversified as at Paris; but the Viennese, from whatever cause, would find it difficult to relinquish the habit of it. It must be agreed that it forms a most striking coup d'oeil, the sight of a whole nation of citizens assembled under the shade of magnificent trees, on a turf kept ever verdant by the waters of the Danube. The people of fashion in carriages, those of the lower orders on foot, meet there every evening.2 In this wise country, even pleasures are looked upon in the light of duties, and they have this advantage-that they never grow tedious, however uniform. The people preserve as much regularity in dissipation as in business, and waste their time as methodically as they employ it. 1 The annual promenade de Lonycharnp takes place in the Champs Elysues and the Bois de Boulogne, on the Wednesday. Thursday, and Friday of Passion Week.-Ed. 2 "i The Prater, the Hyde Park of Vienna, consists of a series of lowv and partly wooded islands, formed by arms of the Danube, which seplarate front the Inain trunk to rejoin it lower down. The entran.ce to it is situated at the extremity of the street called Jdgerzeile. Ihere there is an open circular space, from which branch out six alleys or avenues. Close to the first alley is the Terminus of' the Xort/therm hRailroad-Kaiser Ferdinand's Nordvahn —extending to Brunn. The second, on the right (tlauptahllte), is the

62 MAIDAMFE DE S'IAEL S GERMANY. If you enter one of the redoubts where balls are given to the citizens on holidays, you will behold men and women gravely performing, opposite to each other, the steps of a minuet,' of most frequented, and leads to the Panorama, the Circus, and the coffeehouses, the resort of the better classes, round which they sit under the shade in the open air, and take their tea or coffee. At the end of this alley is a sort of pavilion, called the Lusthaus, close to an arm of the Danublc, commanding pleasing prospects through the trees. This building forms the boundary of'the drive;' carriages turn at this point, and, in the summner season, they are often so numerous as to form an unbroken line from St. Stephen's Place in the city up to this pavilion. "Upon Easter Monday, the great day for visiting the Prater, no less than twenty thousand persons collect here, and all the new equipages and liveries are then displayed for the first time. It is the Longchlnamps of Vienna. Paris, however, can hardly imatch the splendor of the Prater; and, except in London, such a display is probably nowhere to be seen. It is like the ring in Hyde Park, with this difference, that the humble fiacre is admitted by the side of the princely four-in-hand; and not unfrequently the emperor's ambling coursers are stopped by the clumsy hackney-coachman, who has cut into the line immediately before him. Thus, amid all the display of coats-of-arins, with quarterings innumerable, of crowns and coronets, scarlet and gold-laced liveries, Hungarian lacqueys in dolmans (the hussar dress), belted Bohemian Jagers, with swords at their sides and streaming feathers in their cocked hats, there is f:ar less aristocratic exclusiveness than in England. "' He who confines himself to the drive, however, has seen but half of the Prater, and that not the most amusing or characteristic portion. A few steps behind the coffee-houses, the Prater of the great world ends and that of the common people begins. It is called the Wiirstl Prater, probably from the quantity of sausages (wiirste) which are constantly smoking and being consumed in it. On Sundays and holidays it has all the appearance of a great fair. As far as the eye can reach, under the trees and over the greensward, appears one great encampment of sutlers' booths and huts. The smnoke is constantly ascending from these rustic kitchens, while long rows of tables and benches, never empty of guests, or bare of beerjugs and wine-bottles, are spread under the shade. Shows and theatres, mountebanks, jugglers, punchinellos, rope-dancing, swings, and skittles, are the allurements which entice the holiday folks on every side. But in order to form any tolerable notion of the scene-the laughter, the joviality,,he songs and the dances, the perpetual strains of music playing to the restless measure of the waltz, must be taken into consideration."-(Handbock for Southern Germany, p. 217.)-Ed. 1 The waltz has now taken the place of the minuet; but the spirit of the people has not changed. We have heard more than once, at Vienna, Englishmen and Americans exclaim, "How conscientiously these people iance!" —Ed.

VIENNA. 63 which they have imposed on themselves the amusement; the crowd often separates a couple while dancing, and yet each persists, as if they were dancing to acquit their consciences; each moves alone, to right and left, forwards and backwards, without caring about the other, who is figuring all the while with equal conscientiousness; now and then, only, they utter a little exclamation of joy, and then immediately return to the serious discharge of their pleasure. It is above all on the Prater that one is struck with the ease and prosperity of the people of Vienna. This city has the reputation of consuming more victuals than any other place of an equal population; and this species of superiority, a little vulgar, is not contested. One sees whole families of citizens and artificers, setting off at five in the evening for the Prater, there to take a sort of rural refreshment, equally substantial with a dinner elsewhere, and the money which they can afford to lay out upon it proves how laborious they are, and under how mild a government' they live. Tens of thousands return at night, leading by the hand their wives and children; no disorder, no quarrelling disturbs all this multitude, whose voice is hardly heard, so silent is their joy! This silence, nevertheless, does not proceed from any melancholy disposition of the soul; it is rather a certain physical happiness, which induces men, in the south of Germany, to ruminate on their sensations, as in the north on their ideas. The vegetative existence of the south of Germany bears some analogy to the contemplative existence of the north: in each, there is repose, indolence, and reflection. If you could imagine an equally numerous assembly of Parisians met together in the same place, the air would sparkle wit, bon mots, pleasantries, and disputes; never can a Frenchman enjoy any pleasure in which his self-love would not in some manner find itself a place. Noblemen of rank take their promenade on horses, or in 1 It must be remembered that the Austrian government is oppressive Dnly in apolitical sense. —Ed.

64 IMADAME DE STAEL' S GERMANY. carriages of the greatest magnificence and good taste; all their amusement consists in bowing, in an alley of the Prater, to those whom they have just left in a drawing-room; but the diversity of objects renders it impossible to pursue any train o, reflection, and the greater number of men take a pleasure in thus dissipating those reflections which trouble them. These grandees of Vienna, the most illustrious and the most wealthy' in Europe, abuse none of the advantages they possess; they allow the humblest hackney-coaches to stop their brilliant equipages. The emperor and his brothers even quietly keep their place in the string, and choose to be considered, in their amusements, as private individuals; they make use of their privileges only when they fulfil their duties. In the midst of the crowd you often meet with Oriental, Hungarian, and Polish costumes, which enliven the imagination; and harmonious bands of music, at intervals, give to all this assemblage the air of a peaceable fete, in which everybody enjoys himself without being troubled about his neighbor. You never meet a beggar at these promenades; none are to be seen in Vienna; the charitable establishments there are regulated with great order and liberality; private and public benevolence is directed with a great spirit of justice, and the people themselves having in general more industry and commercial ability than in the rest of Germany, each man regnlarly pursues his own individual destiny. There are few instances in Austria of crimes deserving death; every thing, in short, in this country, bears the mark of a parental, wise, and religious government. The foundations of the social edifice are good and respectable; "but it wants a pinnacle and columns to render it a fit temple of genius and of glory."2 I was at Vienna, in 1808, when the Emperor Francis the Second married his first-cousin, the daughter of the Archduke of Milan and the Archduchess Beatrix, the last princess of that house of Este so celebrated by Ariosto and Tasso. The Arch I With the exception of the English.-Ed. 2 Suppressed by the censors.

VIENNA. 65 luke Ferdinand and his noble consort found themselves both deprived of their states by the vicissitudes of war, and the young empress, brought up " in these cruel times,"' united in her person the double interest of greatness and misfortune. It was a union concluded by inclination, and into which no political'convenience had entered, although one more honorable could not have been contracted. It caused at once a feeling of sympathy and respect, for the family affections which brought us near to this marriage, and for the illustrious rank which set us at a distance from it. A young prince, the Archbishop of Waizen, bestowed the nuptial benediction on his sister and sovereign; the mother of the empress, whose virtues and knowledge conspire to exercise the most powerful empire over her children, became in a moment the subject of her daughter, and walked in the procession behind her with a mixture of deference and of dignity, which recalled at the same time the rights of the crown and those of nature. The b'others of the emperor and empress, all employed in the army or in the administration, all in different ranks, all equally devoted to the public good, accompanied them respectively to tlhe altar, and the church was filled with the grandees of the State, with the wives, the daughters, and the mothers, of the most ancient of the Teutonic nobility. Nothing new was produced for the fete; it was sufficient for its pomp to display what each possessed. Even the women's ornaments were hereditary, and the diamonds that had descended in every family consecrated the remembrances of the past to the decoration of youth; ancient times were present to all, and a magnificence was enjoyedl, which the ages had prepared, but which cost the people no new sacrifices. The amusements which succeeded to the marriage consecration had in them almost as much of dignity as the ceremony itself. It is not thus that private individuals ought to give entertainments, but it is perhaps right to find in all the actions of kings the severe impression of their august destiny. Not Suppressed by the censors.

66 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. far from this church, around which the discharge of cannons and the beating of drums announced the renewal of the union between the houses of Este and IIabsburg, we see the asylum, which has for these two centuries inclosed the tombs of the emperors of Austria and their family. There, in the vault of the Capuchins, it was that Maria Theresa, for thirty'years, heard mass in the very sight of the burial-place which she had prepared for herself by the side of her husband.' This illustrious princess had suffered so much in the days of her early youth, that the pious sentiment of the instability of life never quitted her, even in the midst of her greatness. We have many examples of a serious and constant devotion among the sovereigns of the earth; as they obey death only, his irresisti ble power strikes them the more forcibly. The difficulties of life intervene between ourselves and the tomb; but every thing lies level before the eyes of kings, even to the last, and that very level renders the end more visible. The feast induces us naturally to reflect upon the tomb' poetry has, in all times, delighted herself in drawing these two images by the side of each other; and fate itself is a terrible poet which has too often discovered the art of uniting them. CHAPTER VIII. OF. SOCIETY. THE rich and the noble seldom inhabit the suburbs2 of Vienna; and, notwithstanding that the city possesses in other respects all the advantages of a great capital, the good clmupany " " Every Friday, for thirteen years after the death of her husband, Maria Theresa descended into this vault to pray and weep by the side of his remains." At the present time, the most interesting sarcophagus in this "last home " of kings, is that of young Napoleon, Duke of Reichstadt.-Ed. 2 " Vienna differs from most other European capitals in this respect, that the old part of the town, and not the new, is the most fashionable. Within

SOCIETY. 67 is there brought together as closely as in a small town. These easy communications, in the midst of all the enjoyments of fortune and luxury, render their habitual life very convenient, and the frame of society, if we may so express it, that is, its habits, usages, and manners, are extremely agreeable. Among foreigners we hear of the severe etiquette and aristocratical pride of the great Austrian nobility; this accusation is unfounded; there is simplicity, politeness, and, above all, honesty, in the good company of Vienna; and the same spirit of justice and regularity, which governs all important affairs, is to be met with also in the smallest circumstances. People are as punctual to their dinner and supper engagements, as they would be in the discharge of more essential. promises; and those false airs, which make elegance consist in a contempt of the forms of politeness, have never been introduced among them. Nevertheless, one of the principal disadvantages of the society or Vienna is, that the nobles and men of letters do not mix together. The pride of the nobles is not the cause of this; but as they do not reckon many distinguished writers at Vienna, and people read but little, everybody lives in his own particular coterie, because there is nothing but coteries in a country where general ideas and public interests have so small need of being developed. From this separation of classes it results that men of letters are deficient in grace, and that men of the world are rarely abundant in information. The exactitude of politeness, which in some respects is a virtue, since it frequently demands sacrifices, has introduced into Vienna the most fatiguing of all possible forms. All the good company transports itself en masse, from one drawingroom to another, three or four times every week. A certain time is lost in the duties of the toilet, which are necessary in these great assemblies; more is lost in the streets, and on the the bastions lie the palaces of the emperor and some of the principal nobility; the stately dwellings of the Harrachs, Starembergs, Trautmnannsdorfs, etc.; the public offices, the finest churches, and most of the museums mnd public collections, together with the colleges, the exchange, and the most splen.;d shops."-E-d.

68 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. staircases, waiting till tile carriages draw up in order; still more in sitting three hours at table; and, it is impossible, in these crowded assemblies, to hear any thing that is spoken beyond the circle of customary phrases. This daily exhibition of so many individuals to each other, is a happy invention of mediocrity to annul the faculties of the mind. If it were established that thought is to be considered as a malady, against which a regular course of medicine is necessary, nothing could be imagined better adapted for the purpose than a sort of distraction at once noisy and insipid; such as permits the following up of no ideas, and converts language into a mere chattering, which may be taught men as well as birds. I have seen a piece performed at Vienna, in which Harlequin enters, clothed in a long gown and a magnificent wig; and all at once he juggles himself away, leaving his wig and gown standing to figure in his place, and goes to display his real person elsewhere. One might propose this game of legerdemnain to those who frequent large assermblies. People attend them, not for the sake of meeting any object that they are desirous of pleasing; severity of manners and tranquillity of soul concentre in Austria all the affections in the bosom of the family.' They do not resort to them for the purposes of ambition; for every thing passes with so much regularity in this country, that intrigue has little hold there; and besides, it is not in the midst of society that it can find room to exercise itself. These visits and these circles are invented for the sake of giving all people the same thing to do, at the same hour; and thus they prefer the ennui, of which they partake with their equals, to the amusement which they would be forced to create for themselves at home. Great assemblies and great dinners take place in other cities besides Vienna; but as at such meetings we generally see all the distinguished individuals of the countries where we assemble, we there find more opportunities of escaping from those X Vienna now has the reputation of being one of the most dissolute cap Itals in Europe.-Ed.

FOREIGNERS IMITATE THE FRENCH. 69 forms of conversation, which upon sucL occasions succeed to the first salutations, and prolong them in words. Society does not in Austria, as in France, contribute to the development or the animation of the understanding; it leaves in the head nothing but noise and emptiness; whence it follows, besides, that the more intelligent members of the community generally estrange themselves from it; it is frequented by women alone, and even that share of understanding which they possess is astonishing, considering the nature of the life they lead. Foreigners justly appreciate the agreeableness of their conversation; but none are so rarely to be met with in the drawingrooms of the capital of Germany, as the men of Germany itself. In the society of Vienna, a stranger must be pleased with the proper assurance, the elegance, and nobleness of manner, which reign throughout under the influence of the women; yet there is wanting to it something to say, something to do, an end, an interest. One feels a wish that to-day may be different from yesterday, yet without such variety as would interrupt the chain of affections and habits. In retirement, monotony tranquillizes the soul; in the great world, it only fatigues the mind. CHAPTER IX. OF THE DESIRE AMONG FOREIGNERS OF IMITATING THE FRENCH SPIRIT. TIIE destruction of the feudal spirit, and of the old chateau life, which was the consequence of it, has introduced a great deal of leisure among the nobility; this leisure has rendered the amusement of society necessary to their existence; and, as the French are reputed masters in the art of conversation, they have made themselves throughout Europe the sovereigns o. opinion, or rather of fashion, by which opinion is so easil: counterfeited. Since the reign of Louis XIV, all the good Sc

70 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. ciety of the continent, Spain and Italy excepted, has made its self-love consist in the imitation of the French. In England there exists a constant topic of conversation, that of politics, the interest of which is the interest of each individual and of all alike; in the South there is no society; there the brilliancy of the sun, love, and the fine arts, fill up the whole of existence. At Paris, we talk upon subjects of literature; and the spectacles of the theatre continually changing, give place to ingenious and witty remarks. But in most other great cities, the only subject that presents itself for conversation consists in the anecdotes and observations of the day, respecting those very persons of whom what we call good company is composed. It is a sort of gossip, ennobled by the great names that are introduced, but resting on the same foundation as that of the cornmon people; for, except that their forms of speech are more elegant, the subject of it is the same-that is to say, their neighbors. The only truly liberal subjects of conversation are thoughts and actions of universal interest. That habitual backbiting, of which the idleness of drawing-rooms and the barrenness of the understanding make a sort of necessity, is perhaps more or less modified by goodness of character; yet there is always enough of it to enable us to hear, at every step, at every word, the buzz of petty tattle, which, like the buzz of so many flies, has the power of vexing even a lion. In France, people employ the powerful arms of ridicule for mutual annoyance, and for gaining the vantage-ground, which they expect will afford them the triumph of self-love; elsewhere, a sort of indolent chattering uses up the faculties of the mind, and renders it incapable of energetic efforts of any description whatever. Agreeable conversation, even when merely on trifles, and Jeriving its charm only from the grace of expression, is capable of conferring a high degree of pleasure; it may be affirmed, without extravagance, that the French are almost alone ma.ters of this sort of discourse. It is a dangerous, but a lively exercise, in which subjects are played with like a ball, which in its turn comes back to the hand of the thrower.

FOREIGNERS IMITATE THE FRENCH. 71 Foreigners, when they wish to imitate the French, affect more immorality, and are yet more frivolous than they, from an apprehension that seriousness may be deficient in grace, and that their thoughts and reflections may fail of possessing the true Parisian accent. The Austrians, in general, have at once too much stiffness and too much sincerity, to be ambitious of attaining foreign manners. Nevertheless, they are not yet sufficiently Germans, they are not yet sufficiently versed in German literature; it is too much the fashion at Vienna to believe that it is a mark of good taste to speak the French language only; forgetting that the true glory, the real charm, of every nation, must consist in its own national spirit and character. The French have been the dread of all Europe, particularly of Germany, by their dexterity in the art of seizing and pointing out the ridiculous. The words elegance and grace possessed I know not what magical influence in giving the alarm to self-love. It seemed as if sentiments, actions, life itself, were, before all things, to be subjected to this very subtile legislation of fashion, which is a sort of treaty between the self-love of individuals and that of society; a treaty on which these several and respective vanities have elected for themselves a republican constitution of government, which pronounces the sentence of ostracism upon all that is strong and mlarked. These forms, these modes of agreement, light in ap: pearance and despotic at bottom, regulate the whole of existence: they have by degrees undermined love, enthusiasm, religion, all things except that selfishness which cannot be reached by irony, because it exposes itself to censure, but not to ridicule. The understanding of the Germans agrees less than that of any other people with this measured frivolity; that understanding has hardly any power over the surfaces of things; it must examine deeply in, order to comprehend; it seizes nothing on the wing; and it would be in vain that the Germans 1isencumbered themselves of the properties and ideas instilled nto them at their birth; since the loss of the substance would

72 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMAN-Y. not render them lighter in the forms, and they would rather become Germans without worth, than amiable Frenchmen. It must not be thence concluded that grace is denied them, imagination and sensibility confer it upon them, when they resign themselves to their natural dispositions. Their gayetyand gayety they possess, particularly in Austria —has not the smallest resemblance to the gayety of the French. The Tyro. lese farces, by which at Vienna the great are equally amused with the vulgar, are much more nearly allied to Italian buffoonery than to French ridicule: they consist in comic scenes of strong character, representing human nature with truth, but not social manners with delicacy. Yet still this gayety, such as it is, is worth more than the imitation of a foreign grace: such grace may well be dispensed with; but perfection, in whatever style, is still something. "The ascendency obtained by French manners has perhaps prepared foreigners to believe them invincible. There is but one method of resisting this influence; and that consists in very decided national hab. its and character."' From the moment that men seek to resemble the French, they must yield the advantage to them in every thing. The English, not fearing the ridicule of which the French are masters, have sometimes ventured to pay them in kind; and, so far from English manners appearing ungraceful even in France, the French, so generally imitated, became imitators in their turn, and England was for a long time as much the fashiQon at Paris, as Paris itself in all other parts of the world. The Germans might create to themselves a society of a most instructive cast, and altogether analogous to their taste and character. Vienna being the capital of Germany, that place in which all the comforts and ornaments of life are most easily to be found collected, might in this respect have rendered great services to the German spirit, if foreigners had not almost exclusively presided at all their assemblies. The generality of Austrians, who know not how to conform to the French lan. I Suppressed by the police.

FOREIGNERS IMITATE THE FRENCH. 73 guage and customs, lived entirely out of the world; from whence it resulted that they were never softened by the conversation of women, but remained at once shy and unpolished, despising every thing that is called grace, and yet secretly feering to appear deficient in it; they neglected the cultivation of their understandings under the pretext of military occupatiol.s, andl yet they often neglected those occupations also, bccause they never heard any thing that might make them feel the value and the charm of glory. They thought they showed themselves good Germans in withdrawing from a society in which foreigners had the lead, yet never dreamed of establishing another, capable of improving the understanding and unfolding the mind. The Poles and Russians, who constituted the charm of society at Vienna, spoke nothing but French, and contributed to the disuse of the German language. The Polish women have very seductive manners; they unite an Oriental imagination with the suppleness and the vivacity of France. Yet, even among the Sclavonic, the most flexible of all nations the imitation of the French style is often very fatiguing; the French verses of the Poles and Russians resemble, with some few exceptions, the Latin verses of the middle age. A foreign language is always, in many respects, a dead language. French verses are at the same time the easiest and the most difficult to be written. To tie hemistiches to one another, which are so much in the habit of being found together, is but a labor of the memory; but it is necessary to have breathed the air of a country, to have thought, enjoyed, or suffered, in its language, in order to describe poetically what is felt. Foreigners, who are above all things proud of speaking French correctly, dare not form any opinion of our writers otherwise than as they are guided by the authority of literary critics, lest they should pass for not understanding them. They praise the style more than the ideas, because ideas belong to all nations, and the French alone are judges of style in their own language. If you meet a true Frenchman, you take a pleasure in speaking with him on subjects of French literature; you find yourVOL. 1.-4

74 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. self at home, and talk about your mutual affairs; but a foreigner Frenchified does not allow himself a single opinion or phrase not strictly orthodox; and it is most frequently an obsolete orthodoxy that he takes for the current opinion of the day. (In many northern countries, people still repeat anecdotes of the court of Louis the Fourteenth. Foreicners, who imitate the French, relate the quarrels of M:;demnoiselle de Fontanges and Madame de Montespan, with a prolixity of Ictail, which would be tedious even in rec)rding a transaction ot yesterday. This erudition of the boudoir, this obstinate attachment to some received ideas, for no other reason than the difficulty of laying in a new stock of provisions of the same nature-all this is tiresome and even hurtful; for the true strength of a country is its natural character; and the iliitation of foreigners, under all circumstances whatever, is a want of patriotism. Frenchmen of sense, when they travel, are not pleased with finding among foreigners the spirit of Frenchmen; and, on the contrary, look out for those who unite national to individual originality. French milliners export to the colonies, to Germany, and to the North, what they commonly call their shopfund (fonds de boutique); yet they carefully collect the national habits of the same countries, and look upon them, with good reason, as very elegant models. What is true with regard to dress, is equally true with regard to the understanding. We have a cargo of madrigals, calembourgs, vaudevilles, which we pass off to foreigners when they are done with in France; but the French themselves value nothing in foreign literature but its indigenous beauties. There is no nature, no life, in imitation; and, in general, to all these understandings and to all these works, imitated from the French, may be applied the eulogium pronounced by Orlando, in Ariosto, upon his mare, while he is dragging her after him-" She possesses all the good qualities that can be imagined; but has one fault, that.he is dead."

FOLLY AND MEDIOCRITY. 75 CHAPTER X. OF SUPERCILIOUS FOLLY AND BENEVOLENT MEDIOCRITY, SUPERIORITY of mind and soul is seldom met with in any zountry, and, for this very reason, it retains the name of superiority; thus, in order to judge of national character, we should examine the mass of the people. Men of genius are fellowcitizens everywhere; but, to perceive justly the difference between the French and Germans, we should take pains to understand the communities of which the two nations are composed. A Frenchman can speak, even without ideas; a German_has always more in his head than he is able to express. We may

176 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. subject, that, with their assistance, a fool may discourse well enough for some time, and for a moment even seem a man of understanding; in Germany, an ignorant person never dares profess an opinion on any subject whatever with confideince; for, no opinion being received as incontestabe, you can advance none without being previously armed to defend it; thus orditlary people are, for the most part, silent, and contribute nothing to the pleasure of society, except the charm of good-nature. In Germany, distinguished persons only know how to talk; while, in France, every one is ready to bear his sharein conversation. People of superior minds are indulgent in France, and severe in Germany; on the contrary, French fools are malignant and jealous; while those of Ger. iny, however bounded in intellect, are yet able to praise and admire. The ideas circulated in Germany, on many subjects, are new, and often whimsical; fiom whence it follows, that those who respect them appear, for some time, to possess a sort of borrowed profundity. In France, it is by manners that men give themselves an illusory importance. These manners are agreeable, but uniform; and the discipline of fashion wears away all the variety that they might otherwise possess. A man of wit told me, that, one evening, at a masked ball, lie walked before a looking-glass; and that, not knowing how to point himself out to himself, from the crowd of persons wearing similar dominos with his own, he nodded his head to recognize himself: the same may be said of the dress with which the understanding clothes itself in the world; we almost confound ourselves with others-so little is the real character shown in any of us! Folly finds herself well off in all this Confusion, and would make advantage of it by contesting the possession of real merit. Stupidity and folly are essentially different in this,-stupid people voluntarily submit themselves to nature, while fools always flatter themselves with the hope of governing in society.

THE SPIRI OF CONVERSATION. 77 CHAPTER XI. OF THE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. IN the East, when men have nothing to say, they smoke; and, while they are smoking, from time to time, salute each other with their arms folded across their breasts, as a mark of friendship; but, in the West, people prefer to talk all day long-and the warmth of the soul is often dissipated in these conversations, where self-love is always on the wing to display itself; according to the taste of the moment, and of the circle in which it finds itself. It seems to me an acknowledged fact, that Paris is, of all cities in the world, that in which the spirit and taste for conversation are most generally diffused; and that disorder, which they call the mcal du pays, that undefinable longing for our native land, which exists independently even of the friends we have left behind there, applies particularly to the pleasure of conversation which Frenchmen find nowhere else in the same degree as at home. Volney relates, that some French emigrants began, during the revolution, to establish a colony and clear some lands in America; but they were continually quitting their work to go and talk, as they said, in town'-and this town, New Orleans, was distant six hundred leagues from their place of residence. The necessity of conversation is felt by all classes of people in France: speech is not there, as elsewhere, merely the means of communicating from one to another ideas, sentiments. and transactions; but it is an instrument on which they arc fond of playing, and which animates the spirits, like music among some people, and strong liquors among others. I Only a Parisian fully knows what it is causer a la ville.-Ed.

78 MIADAME DE STAEL S GIERMIAN. That sort of pleasure, which is produced by an animated Conversation, does not precisely depend on the nature of that conversation; the ideas and knowledge which it develops do not form its principal interest; it is a certain manner of acting upon one another, of giving mutual and instantaneous delight, of speaking the moment one thinks, of acquiring immediate self-enjoyment, of receiving applause without labor, of displaying the understanding in all its shades by accent, gesture, look; of eliciting, in short, at will, the electric sparks, which relieve some of the excess of their vivacity, and serve to awaken others out of a state of painful apathy. Nothing is more foreign to this talent than the character and disposition of the German intellect; theyrequire in all things a serious result. Bacon has said, that conversat'i'on is not the rod-d~edadiing- to the house, but a by-path where people walk with pleasure. The Germans give the necessary time to all things, but what is necessary to conversation is amusement; if men pass this line, tihe'y fall into discussion, into serious argument, which is rather a useful occupation than an agreeable art. It must also be confessed, that the taste for society, and the intoxication of mind which it produces, singularly in — capacitate for application and study, and the virtues of the Germans depend perhaps in some respects upon the very absence of this spirit. The ancient forms of politeness, still in full force almost all over Germany, are contrary to the ease and familiarity of clolversation; the most inconsiderable titles, which are yet tile longest to be pronounced, are there bestowed and repeated wenty times at the same meal;' every dish, everyp glass of I "One habit of German society, which cannot fail sometimes to occasion a smile to an Englishman, though it costs him some' trouble to acquire it, is the necessity of addressing everybody, whether male or female, not by their own name, but by the titles of the office which they hold. " To accost a gentleman, as is usual in England, with Sir (Mein IHerr), if.lot considered among the Germans themselves as an actual insult, is at least not complimentary; it is requisite to find out his office or profession. Madame and Mademoiselle, addressed to German ladies, are equally terma of inferiority. The commonest title to which evcrybody asyl res is that o

THE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. 79 wine, mulst be offered with a sedulity and a pressing manner, whi'C7I is mortally tedious to foreigners. There is a sort of goodncss at the bottom of all these usages; but they could.ot subsist for an instant in a country where pleasantry may Douncillor (Rath), which is modified and extended by various affixes and )refixes. There is a rath for every profession: an architect is a Baurath; an advocate a Justizrath, &c., &c.; and a person with no profession at all contrives to be made a Hofrath (court councillor), a very unmeaning title, which is generally borne by persons who were never in a situation to give advice to the court. The dignity of Staatsrath (privy councillor) is given to members of the administration; some real dignity is attached to it, and.he persons bearing it are further addressed by the title of excellency. The title of Professor is much abused, as it is certainly appropriated by many persons who have no real claim to it by their learning or office. It is bet-.er, in conversing with a German, to give a person a rank greater than he is entitled to than to fall beneath the mark. Geheimrath, for example, i; higher than Professor. It is upon this principle that an Englishman is sometimes addressed by the common people, to his great surprise, as HeI:, Graf (Mr. Count), and often as Ener Gnaden (Your Grace). "' Every man who holds any public office, should it be merely that of an under clerk, with a paltry salary of ~40 a year, must be gratified by hearing his title, not his name. Even absent persons, when spoken of, are generally designated by their official titles, however humble and unmeanng they may be. The ladies are not behind in asserting ther claims to honorary appellations. All over Germany a wife insists upon taking the title of her husband, with a feminine termination. There is Madame General-ess, Madame Privy Councillor-ess, Madame Daybook-keeper-ess, and a hundred others.'-RussELL. " Read and see Kotzebue's amusing ridicule of this, in his comedy called Die Deutschlen Kleinstidter. " These titles sometimes extend to an almost unpronounceable length. Only think, for instance, of addressing a lady as Frau Oberconsistorialdirectorin (Mrs. Directress of the Upper Consistory Court). This may be kvoided, however, by substituting the words Gnidige Frau (Gracious Maiame) in addressing a lady. It must at the same time be observed, that this fondness for titles, and especially for the prefix von (of, equivalent to the French de, and originally denoting the possessor of an estate), is, to a certain extent, a vulgarity from which the upper classes of German society tre free. The rulers of Germany take advantage of the national vanity, and lay those upon whom they confer the rank under obligation; while they, at the same time, levy a tax upon the dignity proportionate to its elevation; thus a mere Iofrath pays from thirty to forty dollars annually, and the highler dignities a more considerable sum. If, however, the title is acquired by mlerit, no tax is paid, but merely a contribution to a fund for the widows and children of the class. "' Certain formns and titles are also prefixed on the address of a letter: thus

S0 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. be risked without offence to susceptibility; and yet, where can be the grace and the charm of society, if it forbids that gentle ridicule which diverts the mind, and adds even to the charm of good-nature an agreeable mode of expression? The course of ideas for the last century has been entirely a count of the high nobility and ancient empire must be addressed Erlauclht (Illustrious); a count of the lesser noblesse, Hochgeborener Herr (Highborn Sir); a baron and a minister, even though not of a noble birth, is called Hochwohlgeboren; a merchant or roturier must content hinisel, with being termed Wohl (well) Geboren; while Hlochedel (high noble) is ironically applied to tradesmen. "'In one respect, in Germany, I think politeness is carried too far —I mean in the perpetual act of pulling off the hat. Speaking ludicrously of it, it really becomes expensive, for, with a man who has a large acquaintance in any public place, his hat is never. two minutes at rest.' —NiRoD's Lettersfrom Holstein. "A curious instance of the extent to which this practice of bowing is carried, occurred to the writer in a small provincial town in the south of Gcrnmany. At the entrance of the public promenade in the Grande Place he observed notices painted on boards, which at first he imagined to contain some police regulations, or important order of the magistracy of the town; upon perusal, however, it proved to be an ordinance to this effect:' For thle convenience of promenaders, it is particularly requested that the troublesome custom of saluting by taking off the hat should here be dispensed with.' It is not to friends alone that it is necessary to doff the hat, for, if the friend with whom you are walking meets an acquaintance to whom lie takes off his hat, you must do the same, even though you never saw him before. " German civility, however, does not consist in outward forms alone; a traveller will do well to conform, as soon as possible, to the manners of the country, even down to the mode of salutation, troublesome as it is. If he continue unbending, he will be guilty of rudeness; and on entering any public office, even the office of the schnellposts, the underlings of the place, down to the book-keeper, will require him to take off his hat, if he does it not of his own accord. An English traveller repaired to the police office %t Berlin to have his passport signed, and, having waited half an hour, said to the secretary to whom he had delivered it,'Sir, I think you have'orgotten my passport.''Sir,' replied the man of office,'I think you have forgotten your hat!' " In thus recommending to travellers the imitation of certain German customs, it is not meant, be it observed, to insist on the practice prevalent among the German men of saluting their male friends with a kiss on each side of the cheek. It is not a little amusing to observe this, with us, feminine mode of greeting, exchanged between two whiskered and mustachioed giants of the age of fifty or sixty." —(Hand-book for Northern Gernarn. pp. 214, 216.)-Ed.

THE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. 81 directed by conversation. They thought for the purpose o. speaking, and spoke for the purpose of being applauded, and whatever could not be said seemed to be something superfluous in the soul. The desire of pleasing is a very agreeable disposition; yet it differs much from the necessity of being beloved: the desire of pleasing renders us dependent on opinion, the necessity of being beloved sets us free from it: we may desire to please even those whom we would injure, and this is exactly what is called coquetry; this coquetry does not appertain exclusively to the women; there is enough of it in all forms of behavior adopted to testify more affection than is really felt. The integrity of the Germans permits to them nothing of this sort; they construe grace literally, they consider the charm of expression as an engagement for conduct, and thence proceeds their susceptibility; for they never hear a word without drawing a consequence from it, and do not conceive that speech can be treated as a liberal art, which has no other end or consequence than the pleasure which men find in it. The spirit of conversation is sometimes attended with the inconvenience of impairing the sincerity of character; it is not a combined, but an unpremeditated deception. The French have admitted into it a gayety which renders them amiable, but it is not the less certain, that all that is most sacred in this world has been shaken to its centre by grace, at least by that sort of grace that attaches importance to nothing, and turns all things into ridicule. The bon rmots of the French have been quoted from one end of Europe to the other. At all times they have displayed the brilliancy of their merit, and solaced their griefs in a lively and Agreeable manner; at all times they have stood in need of one another, as alternate hearers and admirers; at all times they have excelled in the art of knowing where to speak and where to be silent, when any commanding interest triumphs over their natural liveliness; at all times they have possessed the talent of living fast, of cutting short long discourses, of giving way to their successors who are desirous of speaking in their turn; at pll times, in short, they have known how to take from thought 40

82 MA)AME E DE STAELS GERMANY. and feeling no more than is necessary to animate conversation, without fatiguing the weak interest which men generally feel for one another. The F1itnch are in the habit of treating their distresses liglltly from Ethe fear of fatiguing their friends; they guess the ennui that they would occasion by that which they find themselves capable of sustaining; they hasten to demonstrate an elegant carelessness about their own fate, in order to have the honor, instead of receiving the example of it. The desire of appearing amiable induces men to assume an expression of gayety, whatever may be the inward disposition of the soul; the physiognomy by degrees influences the feelings, and that which we do for the purpose of pleasing others soon takes off the edge of our own individual sufferings. "A sensible woman has said, that Paris is, of all the world, the place where men can most easily dispense wvith being happiy:"' it is in this respect that it is so convenient to the unfortunate human race; but nothing can metamorphose a city of Germany into Paris, or cause the Germans, without entirely destroying their own individuality, to receive, like us, the benefits of distraction. If they succeeded in escaping from themselves, they would end in losing themselves altogether. The talent and habit of society conduce much to the discovery of human characters: to succeed in conversation, one must be able clearly to observe the impression which is produced at every moment on those in company, that which they wish to conceal or seek to exaggerate, the inward satisfaction of some, the forced smile of others; one may see, passing over the countenances of those who listen, half-formed censures, which may be evaded by hastening to dissipate them before self-love is engaged on their side. One may also behold there the first birth of approbation, which may be strengthened without however exacting from it more than it'is willing to bestow, 1 Suppressed by the literary censorship; because there must be happiness in Paris, where the emperor lives.

THE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. S3 There is no arena in which vanity displays itself in such a variety of forms as in conversation. I once knew a man, who was agitated by praise to such a degree, that whenever it was bestowed upon him, he exaggerated what lie had just said, and took such pains to add to his success that he always ended in losing it. I never dared to applaud him, from the fear of leading him to affectation, and of his making himself ridiculous by the heartiness of his selflove. Another was so afraid of the appearance of wishing to display himself, that he let fall words negligently and contemptuously. His assumed indolence betrayed one more affectation only, that of pretending to have none. When vanity displays herself, she is good-natured; when she hides herself, the fear of being discovered renders her sour, and she affects indifference, satiety, in short, all that can persuade other men that she has no need of them. These different combinations are amusing for the observer, and one is always astonished that self-love does not take the course, which is so simple, of naturally avowing its desire to please, and making the utmost possible use of grace and truth to attain the object. The tact which society requires, the necessity which it imposes of calling different minds into action, all this labor of thought, in its relation with men, would be certainly useful to the Germans in many respects, by giving them more of measure, of finesse, and dexterity; but in this talent of conversation there is a sort of address which always takes away something from the inflexibility of morality; if we could altogether dispense with the art of managing men, the human character would certainly be the better in respect of greatness and energy. The French are the most skilful diplomatists in Europe; and the very same persons, whom the world accuses of indiscretion and impertinence, know better than all the world besides how to keep a secret, and how to win those whom they find worth the trouble. They never displease others but when they choose to do so; that is to say, when their vanity conteives that it will be better served by a contemptuous than by

'84 MADAME1 DE STAEL'S GERMANY. an obliging deportment. The spirit of conversation has remarkably called out in the French the more serious spirit of political negotiation; there is no foreign ambassador that can contend with them in this departmnent, unless, absolutely setting aside all pretension to finesse, he goes straight forward in business, like one who fights without knowing the art of fencing. The relations of the different classes with one another were also well calculated to develop in France the sagacity, measure, and propriety of the spirit of society. The distinction of ranks was not marked in a positive manner, and there was constant room for ambition in the undefined space which was open to all by turns to conquer or lose. The rights of the Tiers-Etat, of the Parliaments, of the Noblesse, even the power of the King, nothing was determined by an invariable rule; all was lost, as may be said, in the address of conversation: the most serious difficulties were evaded by the delicate variations of words and manners, and it seldom happened to any one either to offend another or to yield to him; both extremes were avoided so carefully. The great families had also among themselves pretensions never decided and alwa) s secretly understood, and this uncertainty excited vanity much more than any fixed distinction of ranks could have done. It was necessary to study all that composed the existence of man or woman, in order to know the sort of consideration that was due to them. In the habits, customs, and laws of France, there has always been something arbitrary in every sense; and thence it happens that the French have possessed, if we may use the expression, so great a pedantry of frivolity: the principal foun. dations not being secured, consistency was to be given to the smallest details. In England, originality is allowed to individ. uals, so well regulated is the mass. In France, the spirit of imitation is like a bond of society; and it seems as if every thing would fall into confusion if this bond did not make up for the instability of institutions. In Germany, everybody keeps his rank, his place in society us if it were his established post, and there is no occasion fo!

THE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. 8b dexterous turns, parentheses, half-expressions, to show the advantages of birth or of title which a- -man thinks he possesses above his neighbor. Good company, in Germany, is the court; in France it consisted of all who could put themselves on an equality with the court; and every man could hope it, and every man also fear that he might never attain to it. Hence it resulted, that each individual wished to possess the manners of that society. In Germamy you obtained admission by patent; in France, an error of taste expelled you from it; and men were even more eager to resemble the gens du monde than to distinguish themselves, in that same world, by their personal merit. An aristocratical ascendency, fashion, and elegance, obtained the advantage over energy, learning, sensibility, understanding itself. It said to energy, " You attach too much interest to persons and things;" to learning, " You take up too much of my time;" to sensibility, " You are too exclusive;" to understanding, " You are too individual a distinction." Advantages were required that should depend more on manners than ideas, and it was of more importance to recognize in a man the class to which he belonged than the merit he possessed. This sort of equality in inequality is very favorable to people of mediocrity, for it must necessarily destroy all originality in the mode of seeing and expressing one's self. The chosen model is noble, agreeable, and in good taste, but it is the same for all. This model is a point of reunion; in conforming to it, everybody imagines himself more associated with others. A Frenchman would grow as much tired of being alone in his opinion as of being alone in his room. The French do not deserve to be accused of flattering power l:'om the calculations which generally inspire this flattery; they go where all the world goes, through evil report or good report, no matter which; if a few make themselves pass for the multitude, they are sure that the multitude will shortly follow'he-'n. The French revolution in 1789 was effected by sending t courier from village to village to cry, " Arm yourselves; for the neighbor:-g vSin age is armed r"'2d so all the world found

36 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. itself risen up against all the w:,rld, or rather apainst nobody. if you spread a report that such a mode of viewing things is universally received, you would obtain unanimity in vpite of private opinions; you would then keep the secret of the comedy, for every one would in private confess that all are wrong. In secret scrutinies the deputies have been seen to give their white or black ball contrary to their opinion, only because they believed the majority to be of different sentiments from their own, end because, as they said, they would not throw away their vote. It is by this necersity imposed in society of thinking like Dther people, th;;t the contrast of courage in war and pusillanimity in civil life, so often displayed during the revolution, r.:.y be best explained. There is but one mode of thinking with respect to military courage; but public opinion may be bewildered as to the conduct to be pursued in political life. You are threatened with the censure of those around you, with solitude, with desertion, if you decline to follow the ruling party; but in the armies there is no other alternative than that of death or distinction-a dazzling situation for the Frenchman, who never fears the one, and passionately loves the other. Set fashion, that is, applause, on the side of danger, and you will see the Frenchman blave it in every form; the social spirit exists in France from the highest to the lowest: it is necessary to hear one's self approved by one's neighbors; nobody will at any price expose himself to censure or ridicule; for in a country where conversation has so much influence, the noise ot words often drowns the voice of conscience. We know the story of that man who began by praising with enthusiasm an actress he had just heard; he perceived a smile on the lips of those near him, and softened his eulogium; the obstinate smile did not withdraw itself, and the fear of ridicule made him conclude by saying, Ma foi! the poor shrew did all she could. The triumphs of pleasantry are continually renewed in France; at one time it is thought fit to be religious, at another, the contrary; at one time to love one's wife, at another to appear nowhere in her company. There have been moments even, in which men have feared to pass for idiots if

TIlE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. ST they evinced the least humanity; and this terror of ridicule, which in the higher classes generally discovers itself only in vanity, is transformed into ferocity in the lower. What mischief would not this spirit of imitation do among the Germans! Their superiority consists in independence of spirift,-Iove of retirement, and individual originality. The French are all-powerful only en masse, and their men of grerills themselves always rest on received opinions when they meanl to push onward beyond them. In short, the impatience of the French character, so attractive in conversation, would deprive the Germans of the principal charm of their natural imnagination, that calm reverie, that deep. contemplation, which calls in the aid of time aiid perseverance to disccver all things. These are qualities almost incompatible with vivacity of spirit; and yet this vivacity is what above all things renders conversation delightful. When an argument tires, or a tale grows tedious, you are seized with I know not what impatience, similar to that which is experienced when a musician slackens the measure of an air. It is possible, nevertheless, to fatigue by vivacity even as much as by prolixity. I once knew a man of much understanding, but so impatient, ars to make all who talked with him feel the same sort of uneasiness that prolix people experience when they perceive that they are fatiguing. This man would jump upon a chair while you were talking to him, finish your sentences for you that they might not be too long: he first made you uneasy, and ended by stunnillg you; for, however quick you may be in conversation,,when it is impossible to retrench any further, except upon what is necessary, thoughts and feelings oppress you for want of room to unfold them. All modes of saving time are not successful; and a single sentence may be made tedious by leaving it full of emptiness: the talent of expressing one's thoughts with brilliancy and rapidity is that which answers best in society, where there is no time to wait for any thing. No reflection, no compliance, wan make people amuse themselves with what confers no amusement. The spirit of conquest and the despotism of suc

88 ZIMADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. cess must be there exerted; for the end and aim being little, you cannot console yourself for reverses by the purity of your motives, and good intention goes for nothing in point of spirit. The talent of narrating, one of the principal charms of con versation, is very rare in Germany; the hearers there'aretoo complaisant, they do not grow tired soon enough, and the nar-'rators, relying on their patience, are too much at ease in their recitals. In France, every speaker is a usurper surrounded.y jealous rivals, who must maintain his post by dint of success; in Germany, lie is a legitimate possessor, who may peaceably enjoy his acknowledged rights. The Germans succeed better in poetical than in epigrammatic tales; when the imagination is to be addressed, 6-ie may be pleased by details which render the picture more real; but when a bon mnot is to be repeated, the preamble cannot be too much shortened. Pleasantry alleviates for a moment the load of life: you like to see a man, your equal, playing with the burden which weighs you down, and, animated by his example, you soon take it up in your turn; but, when you discover effort or languor in that which ought tobe only amusement, it fatigues you more than seriousness itself, where you are at least interested in the results. The honesty of the German character is, perhaps, anBsstacle to the art of narration; the Germans have a gayety of disposition rather than of mind; they are gay, as they are honest, for the satisfaction of their consciences, and laugh at what they say a longr while before they have even dreamed of making others laugh at it. Nothing, on the contrary, is equal to the charm of a recital in the mouth of a Frenchman of sense and taste. He foresees every thing, he manages every thing, and yet sacrifices nothing that can possibly be productive of interest. Iis physiognomy, less marked than that of the Italians, indicates gayety, without losing any thing of the dignity of deportment and manners; he stops when it is proper, and never exhausts even amusement; though animated, he constantly holds in his hand the'eins of his judgment, to conduct him with safety and di8s

rilE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. 89 patch; in a short time, also, his hearers join in the conversation; he then calls out, in his turn, those who have been just applauding him, and suffers not a single happy expression to drop, without taking it up-not ain agreeable pleasantry, without perceiving it; and, for a moment at least, they delight and enjoy one another, as if all were concord, union, and sympathy in the world. The Germans would do well to avail themselves, in essential matters, of some of the advantages of the spirit of society in France: the Germans should learn from the French to show themselves less irritable in little circumstances, that they might reserve all their strength for great ones: they should learn from the French not to confound obstinacy witli-eniergy, rudeness with firmness; they should also, since they are capable of the entire sacrifice of their lives, abstain from recovering them in detail by a sort of minute personality, which even selfishness itself would not admit; in fine, they should draw out of the very art of conversation the habit of shedding over their books that clearness which would bring them within the comprehension of a greater number-that talent of abridgment, invented by people who practise amusement much more than business-and that respect for certain proprieties which does not require any sacrifice of nature, but only the management of the imagination. They would perfect their style of writing by some of the observations to which the talent of conversation gives birth; but they would be in the wrong to pretend to that talent such as the French possess it. A great city, that might serve as a rallying point, would be. useful to Germany, in collecting together the means of study, in augmenting the resources of the arts, and exciting emnulation; but if this metropolis should bring forth, in the Germans, the taste for the pleasures of society, in all their elegance, they would thus become losers in that scrupulous integrity, that abor in solitude, that hardy independence, which distinguishes their literary and philosophical career; in short, they would change their meditative habits for an external vivacity, af -v,,ich they would never acquire the grace and the dext,-it},

90 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY CHAPTER XII. OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, IN ITS EFFECTS UPON THE SPIRIT OF CONVERSATION. IN studying the spirit and character of a language, we learn the philosophical history of the opinions, manners, and habits;f nations; and the modifications which language undergoes must throw considerable light on the progress of thought; but such an analysis would necessarily be very metaphysical, and would require a great deal of learning that is almost always wanting to us in the understanding of foreign languages, and very frequently in that of our own. We must then confine ourselves to the general impression, produced by the idiom of a people in its existing state. The French, having been spoken more generally than any other European dialect, is at once polished by use and sharp-edged for effect. No language is more clear and rapid, none indicates more lightly or explains more clearly what you wish to say. The German accommodates itself much less easily to the precision and r —pidity of conversation. Iy- the very nature of its grammatical constructio'ni, the sense is usually not understood till the end of the sentence. Thus the pleasure of interrupting,-which, in -ance, gives so much animation to discussion, and forces one to utter so quickly all that is of importance to be heard, this pleasure cannot exist in Germany; for the beginnings of sentences signify nothing without the end; every man must- be left in possession of all the space he chooses to demand: this is better for the purpose of getting to the bottom of things; it is also more civil, but it is lessanimated. The politeness of the Germans is more sincere, but less varied than that of the French; it has more consideration for rank, and more precaution in all things. In France, they flatter more than they humor, and, as they possess the art of

THE GERMAN LANGUAGE. a1 expressing every thing, they approach much more willingly the most delicate subjects. The German is a language very brilliant in poetry, very copious in metaphysics, but very positive in conversation. The French language, on the contrary, is truly rich only in those turns of expression which designate the most complicated relations of society. It is poor and circumscribed in all that depends on imagination and philosophy.' The Germans are more afraid of giving pain than desirous of pleasing. Thence it follows, that they have, as far as possible, subjected their politeness to rule; and their language, so bold in their books, is singularly enslaved in conversation, by all the forms with which it i.; loaded. I remember having been present, in Saxony, at a metaphysical lecture given by a celebrated philosopher, who always quoted Baron Leibnitz, and never did he suffer himself to be led in the ardor of haranguing to suppress this title of baron, which scarcely belonged to the name of a great man, who died nearly a century ago. The German is better adapted for poetry than prose, and its prose is better in Writting than in spea~king; it is an instrument which answers very well when one desires to describe or to unfold every thing; but we cannot in German, as in French, glide over the different subjects that present themselves. To endeavor to adapt German phrases to the train of French conversation, is to strip them of all grace and dignity. The great merit of the Germans is that of filling up their time well; the art of the French is to make it pass unnoticed. Though the meaning of German periods is often not to be caught till the end, the construction does not always admit of a phrase being terminatedf-by wits most striking expression; and yet this is one of the great means of producing effect in conversation. The Germans seldom understand what we call ~ons mots; it is the substance of the thought itself, not the orilliancy communicated to it, that is to be admired. The Germans imagine that there is a sort of quackery in a'Madame de Stadl could hardly have been familiar with the older writers of uer own country-with Descartes, Malebranche, Pascal and Bossuet.-Ed.

92 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. brilliant expression, and prefer the abstract sentiment, because it is more scrupulous and approaches nearer to the very essence of truth; but conversation ought to give no trouble either in understanding or speaking. From the moment that the subject of discourse ceases to bear on the common interests of life, and we en+ter into the sphere of ideas, conversation in Germany becomes too metaphysical; there is not enough intr-~-ediate space between the vulg;ar and the sublime; and yet it is in that intermediate space that the art of conversation finds exercise. The German language possesses a gayety peculiar to itself; society has not rendered it timid, and good morals have left it pure; yet it is a national gayety, within reach of all classes of people. The grotesque sound of the words, their antiquated naivete, communicate something of the picturesque to pleasantry, from which the common people can derive amusement equally with those of the higher orders. The Germans are less restricted in their choice of expressions than we are, because their language, not having been so frequently employed in the conversation of the great world, is not, like ours, composed of words which a mere accident, an application, or an allusion may render ridiculous; of,words, in short, which having gone through all the adventures of society, are proscribed, unjustly perhaps, but yet so that they can never again be admitted. Anger is often expressed in German, but they have not made it the weapon of raillery, and the words which they make use of are still in all their force and all their directness of signification: this is an additional facility; but, on the other hand, one can express with the French language a thousand nice observations, a thousand turns of address, of which the German is up to the present time incapable. We should compare ourselves with ideas in German, with persons in French; the German may assist us in exploring, the Frenchl brings us directly to the end; the one should be used in painting nature, the other in painting society. Goethe, in his romance of Wilhelm lIeister, makes a German woman say that she perceives her lover wishes to abandon her because tie writes to her in French. There are in fact many phrases

NORTHERN GERMANY. 93 in our language by which we may speak without saying any thing, by which we may give hopes without promising, and p)romise without binding. The German is less flexible, and it does well to remain so; for nothing inspires greater disgust than their Teutonic tongue when it is perverted to the purposes of falsehood, of whatever nature it may be. Its prolix constrluction, its multiplied consonants, its learned grammar, refiuse to allow it any grace in supplhpuss; and it may be said to rise up in voluntary resistance to the intention of him who speaks it, from the moment that he designs to employ it in betraying the interests of truth. CHAPTER XIII. OF NORTHERN GERMANY. THE first impressions that are received on arriving in the north of Germany, above all in the middle of the winter, are extremely gloomy; and I am not surprised that these impressions have hindered most Frenchmen, who have been banished to this country, from observing it without prejudice. The frontier of the Rhine has something solemn in it. One fears, in crossing it, to hear this terrible sentence,- You are out of France. It is in vain that the understanding would pass an impartial judgment on the land that has given us birth; our affections never detach themselves from it; and when we are forced to quit it, existence seems to be torn up by the roots, and we become strangers to ourselves. The most simple habits as well as the most intimate relations, the lmnost important interests as well as the most trifling pleasures, all once centered in our native country, and all now belong to it no inmore. We.neet nobody who can speak to us of times past, nobody to attest to us the identity of former days with those that are present; our destiny begins again without the confidence of oul

as. MADAMIE DE STAEL S GERMANY, early years being renewed: we change our world without experiencing ally change of heart. Thus banishment operates as a sentence of self-survival; our adieus, our separations-all seem like the moment of death itself, and yet we assist at them with all the energies of life full within us. I was, six years ago, upon the banks of the Rhine, waiting for the vessel that was to convey me to the opposite shore; the weather was cold, thel sky obscure, and all seemed to announce to me some fatal presage. When the soul is violently disturbed by sorrow, we can hardly persuade ourselves that nature herself is indifferent to it: men may be permitted to attribute some influence to their griefs; it is not pride, it is confidence in the pity of heaven. I was uneasy about my children, though they were not yet of an age to feel those emotions of the soul which cast terror upon all external objects. My French servants grew impatient at German sluggishness, and were surprised at not making themselves understood in the language, which they imagined to be the only one admitted in all civilized countries. There was an old German woman in the passage boat, sitting in a little cart, from which she would not alight even to cross the river. " You are very quiet," I said to her. " Yes," she answered, " why should I make a noise?" These simple words struck me; why, in truth, should we make a noise? But even were entire generations to pass through life in silence, still misery and death would not the less await them, or be the less able to reach them. On reaching the opposite shore, I heard the horns of the postilions, seeming by their harsh and discordant tones to announce a sad departure for a sad abode. The earth was covered with snow; from the little windows, with which the houses were pierced, peeped the heads of some inhabitants, disturbed by the sound of carriage-wheels in the midst of their monotonous employments; a sort of contrivance, for moving the bar at the turnpike, dispenses with the necessity of the toll-gatherer's leaving his house, to receive the toll from trav. ellers. All is calculated for immobility; and the man who

NORTHERN GERMANY. 95 thinks, and he whose existence is merely material, are alike insensible to all external distraction. Fields deserted, houses blackened by smoke, Gothic churches, are all so many preparatives for stories of ghosts and witches. The commercial cities of Germany are large and well built; but they afford no idea of what constitutes the glory and interest of the country-its literary and philosophical spirit. Mercantile interests are enough to unfold the understanding of the French, and in France some amusing society may still be met with in a town merely commercial; but the Germans, eminently capable of abstract studies, treat business, when they employ themselves about it, with so much method and heaviness, that they seldom collect from it any general ideas whatever. They carry into trade the honesty which distinguishes them; but they give themselves up so entirely to what they are about, that they seek in society nothing more than a jovial relaxation, and indulge themselves, now and then, in a few gross pleasantries, only to divert themselves. Such pleasantries overwhelm the French with sadness; for they resign themselves much more willingly to grave and monotonous dulness than to that witty sort of dulness which comes, slowly and familiarly, clapping its paws on your shoulder. The Germans have great universality of spirit in literature and in philosophy, but none whatever in business. They always consider it partially, and employ themselves with it in a manner almost mechanical. It is the contrary in France; the spirit of business is there much more enlarged, and universality is admitted neither in literature nor in philosophy. If a learned man were a poet, or a poet learned, he would become suspected among us, both by learned men and poets; but it is no rare thing to meet, in the most simple merchant, with luminous perceptions on the political and military interests of his country. Thence it follows, that in France there are many men of wit, and a smaller number of thinkers. In France, they study menl; in Germany books. Ordinary faculties are sufficient to interest one in speaking of men, but it requires almost genius itself to discover a soul and an impulse in boc'ks,

9D MADAMIE DE STAEL S GERMANY. Gcrman-y can interest only those who employ themselves about past events and abstract ideas. The present andItf,Eraelong to France, and, until a new order of things shall arise, she does not appear disposed to renounce them. I think I am not endeavoring to conceal the inconveniencies of Germany, Even those small towns of the north, where we meet with mer: of such lofty conceptions, often present no kind of anmusemert —no theatre, little society; time falls drop by drop, and no s;-:nd disturbs the reflections of solitude. The smallest towns in England partake of the character of a free State, in sending their deputies to treat of the interests of the nation. The smaller towns of France bear some analogy to the capital, the centre of so many wonders. Those of Italy rejoice in the bright sky and the fine arts, which shed their rays over all the country. In the north of Germany there is no representative government, no great metropolis; and the severity of the climate, the mediocrity of fortune, and the seriousness of character, would combine to render existence very irksome, if the force of thought had not set itself free from all these insipid and narrowing circumstances. The Germans have found the means of creating to themselves a republic of letters, at once animated and independent. They have supplied the interests of events by the interest of ideas. They can do without a centre, because all tend to the same object, and their imagination multiplies the small number of beauties which art and nature are able to afford them. The citizens of this ideal republic, disengaged for the most part from all sort of connection either with public or private business, work in the dark like miners; and, placed like them in the midst of buried treasures, they silently dig out the intellectual riches of the huma- race.

SAXONY. 97 CHAPTER XIV. SAXONY. SINCE the Reformation, the princes of the house of Saxony have always granted to letters the most noble of protections, -independence. It may be said without fear, that in no country of the earth does there exist such general instruction as in Saxony, and in the north of Germany. It is there that Protestantism had its birth, and the spirit of inquiry has there maintained itself ever since in full vigor. During the last century the electors of Saxony have been Catholics; and, though they have remained faithful to the oath, which obliged them to respect the worship of their subjects, this difference of religion between prince and people has given less of political unity to the State. The electors, kings of Poland, were more attached to the arts than to literature, to which, though they did not molest it, they were strangers. Music is generally cultivated throughout Saxony; in the gallery of Dresden are collected together chefs-d'ouvre for the imitation of artists. The face of nature, in the neighborhood of the capital, is extremely picturesque, but society does not afford there higher pleasures than in rhe rest of Germany; the elegance of a court is wanting-its ceremoniousness only finds an easy establishment. From the quantity of works that are sold at Leipsic, we may judge of the number of readers of German publications; artisans of all classes, even stone-cutters, are often to be seen, resting from their labors, with a book in their hands. It cannot be imagined in France to what a degree knowledge is diffused over Germany, — Ii-;-seen'i ihnneepers and turnpikemen well verseid in French literature. In the very villages, we meet with professors of Greek and Latin. There is not a small town

98 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. without a decent library; and almost every place boasts of some men, worthy of remark for their talents or information. If we were to set ourselves about comparing, in this respect, the French provinces with Germany, we should be apt to believe that the two nations were three centuries distant from each other. Paris, uniting in its bosom the whole flower of the empire, takes from the remainder every sort of interest. Picard and Kotzebue have composed two very pretty pieces, both entitled The Country Town. Picard represents the provincials incessantly aping Parisian manners, and Kotzebue the citizens of his little community delighted with and proud of the place they inhabit, which they believe to be incomparable.' The different nature of the ridicule gives a good idea of the difference of manners. In Germany, every residence is an empire to its inhabitant; his imagination, his studies, or perhaps his mere good-nature, aggrandize it before his eyes; everybody knows how to make the best of himself in his little circle. The importance they attach to every thing affords matter of pleasantry; but this very importance sets a value upon small resources. In France, nobody is interested out of Paris; and with reason, for Paris is all France; and one who has lived only in the country can not have the slightest notion of that which characterizes this illustrious nation. The distinguished men of Germany, not being brought together in the same place, seldomi see each other, and communicate only by writing;each one makes his own road, and is continually discovering new districts in the vast region of antiquity, metaphysics, and science. What is called stuyin Germany is truly admirable: fifteen hours a day of solitude and labor, for several years in succession, appear to tem a iiaturaf moded o-f existence; the very ennui of society gives animation to a life of retirement. The most unbounded freedom of the press existed in Sax1 Picard is a celebrated French, Kotzebue a celebrated German, writer of plays.-Ed.

SAXOiY. 99 any; but the government was not in any manner endangered by it, because the minds of literary men did not tur.nr towards the examination of political institutions; solitoide tendls to deliver men up to abstract speculations or to p etry: on e must live in the very focus of human passions, to feel the de:;ire of employing and directing them to one's own purpoRes. The German writers occupied themselves only with theoretical doctrines, with erudition, and literary and philosophical researcPh; and tlhd-powerful of this world have nothing to apprehend from such studies. Besides, although the government of Saxony was not free by right, that is, representation, yet it was virtually free through the habits of the nation, and the moderation of its princes. The honesty of the inhabitants was such, that a proprietor at Leipsic having fixed on an apple-tree (which he had planted on the borders of the public walk) a notice, desiring that people would not gather the fruit, not a single apple was stolen from it for ten years. I have seen this apple-tree with a feeling of respect; had it been the tree of the Hesperides, they would no more have touched its golden fruit than its blossoms. Saxony was profoundly tranquil; they sometimes made a noise there about certain ideas, but without ever thinking of applying them. One would have said that thought and action were made to have no reference to each other, and that truth, among the Germans, resembled the statue of Hermes, without hands to seize or feet to advance. Yet is there nothing so respectable as these peaceful triumphs of reflection, which continually occupied isolated men, without fortune, without power, and connected together only by worship and thought. In France, men never occupied themselves about abstract truths, except in their relation to practice. To perfect the-art of government, to encourage population by a wise political aconomny-such were the objects of philosophical labor, especially in the last century. This mode of employing time is also very respectable; but, in the scale of reflection, the dignity of the human race is of greater importance than its happiness, and, still more, than its increase: to multiply human

100 ANADAME DE STALLES GERMANY. births witlhout ennobling the destiny of man, is only to prepare a more sumptuous banquet for death. The literary towns of Saxony are those in which the most benevo;lence and simplicity predominate. Everywhere else, literature has been considered as the appendage of luxury; in Germany, it seems to exclude it. The tastes which it engenders produce a sort of candor and timidity favorable to the love of domestic life; not that the vanity of authorship is without a very marked character among the Germans, but it does not attach itself to the triumph of society. The most itconsiderable writer looks to posterity for his reward; and, unfolding himself at his ease in the space of boundless meditations, he is less in conflict with other men, and less embittered against them. Still, there is too wide a separation in Saxony between men of letters and statesmen, to allow the display of any true public spirit. From this separation it results, that among the first there is too much ignorance of affairs to permit them any ascendency over the nation, and that the latter pride themselves in a sort of docile Machiavelism, which smiles at all generous feelings, as at the simplicity of a child, and seems to indicate to them, that they are not fit for this world. CHAPTER XV. WEIMAR. OF all the German principalities, there is none that makes us feel more than Weimar the advantages of a small State, when its sovereign is a man of strong understanding, and is capable of endeavoring to please all orders of his subjects, without losing any thing in their obedience. Such a State is as a private society, where all the members are connected together by intimate relations. The Duchess Louisa of Saxe Weimar is the true model of a woman destined by nature to

WEIMAR. 101 she most illustrious rank; without pretension, as without weakness, she inspires, in the same degree, confidence and respect; and the heroism of the chivalrous ages has entered her soul without taking from it any thing of her sex's softness. The military talents of the duke are universally respected, and his lively and reflective conversation continually brings tc our recollection, that he was formed by the great Frederick. It is by his own and his mother's reputation that the most distinguished men of learning have been attracted to Weimar. Germany, for thefist time, possessed a literary metropolis; butJa-s this metropolis was, at the same time, only an inconsiderable town, its ascendency was merely that of superior enlightenment; for fashion, which imposes uniformity in all things, could not emanate from so narrow a circle. Herder wasjust dead when I arrived at Weimar; but Wieland, Goethie, and Schiller, were still there. I shall paint each of these men separately in the following section; I shall paint them, above all, by their works; for their writings are the perfect resemblances of their character and conversation. This very rare concordance is a proof of sincerity: when the first obiect in writing is to produce an effect upon others, a man never displays himself to them, such as he is in reality; but when he writes to satisfy an internal inspiration, which has obtained possession of the soul, he discovers by his works, even without intending it, the very slightest shades of his manner of thinking and acting. The residence of country towns has always appeared to me very irksome. The understanding of the men is narrowed, the heart of the women frozen, there; pe'ople- live so much in each other's presence, that they are oppressed by their equals; it is no longer that distant opinion, the reverberation of which animates you from afar, like the report of glory; it is a minute;nspection of all the actions of your life, an observation of every letail, which prevents the general character from being comprehended; and the more you have of independence and ele-'ation, the less able you are to breathe amid so manv little

102 MADAME DIE STAEL'S GERMANY. impediments. This painful constraint did not exist at Weimar; it was rather a large palace than a little town; a select circle made its interest consist in the discussion of each new production of art. Women, the amiable disciples of some superior men, were constantly speaking of the new literary works, as of the most important public events. They called to themselves the whole universe by reading and study; they freed themselves, by the enlargement of the mind, from the restraint of circumstances; they forgot the private anecdotes of each individual, in habitually reflecting together on those great questions, which influence the destiny common to all alike. And in this society there were none of those provincial wonders, who so easily mistake contempt for grace, and affectation for elegance.' 1 " On a first acquaintance, Weimar seems more like a village bordering a park. than a capital with a court, and having all courtly environments. It is so quiet, so simple; and although ancient in its architecture, has none of the picturesqueness which delights the eye in most old German cities. The stone-colored, light-brown, and apple-green houses have high-peaked slanting roofs, but no quaint gables, no caprices of architectural fancy, none of the mingling of varied styles which elsewhere charm the traveller. One learns to love its quiet simple streets, and pleasant paths, fit theatre for the simple actors moving across the scene; but one must live there some time to discover its charm. The aspect it presented when Goethe arrived, was of course very different from that presented now; but by diligent inquiry we may get some rough image of the place restored. First be it noted that the city walls were still erect; gates and portcullis still spoke of days of warfare. Within these walls were six or seven hundred houses, not more; most of them very ancient. Under these roofs were about seven thousand inhabitants-for the most part not handsome. The city gates Rere strictly guarded. No one could pass through them in cart or carriage without leaving his name in the sentinel's book; even Goethe, minister and favorite, could not escape this tiresome formality, as we gather from one of his letters to the Frau von Stein, directing her to go out alone, and meet him beyond the gates, lest their exit together shoeald be known. During Sunday service a chain was thrown across the streets leading to the church to bar out all passengers,-a practice to this day partially retained: the chain is fastened, but the passengers step over it without cere-,nony. There was little safety at night in those silent streets; for if you were in no great danger from marauders, you were in constant danger of breaking a limb in some hole or other; the idea of lighting streets not having presented itself to the Thuringian. In the year 1685, the streets o. London were first lighted with lamps; and Germany, in most things E

WEIMAR. 103 In the same principality, in the immediate neighborhood of this first literary reunion of Germany, was Jena, one of the most remarkable centres of science. Thus, in a very narrow century behind England, had not yet ventured on that experiment. If in thi3 1954, Weimar is still innocent of gas, and perplexes its inhabitants with the dim obscurity of an occasional oil-lamp slung on a cord across the %treets, we may imagine that in 1't75 they had not even advanced so far. And our supposition is exact. " Saxe-Weimar has no trade, no manufactures, no animation of commercial, political, or even theological activity. This part of Saxony, be it remembered, was the home and shelter of Protestantism in its birth. Only a few miles from Weimar stands the Wartburg, where Luther, in the disguise of Squire George, lived in safety, translating the Bible, and hurling his inkstand at the head of Satan, like a rough-handed disputant as he was. In the market-place of Weimar stand, to this day, two houses from the windows of which Tetzel advertised his Indulgences, and Luther, in fiery indignation, fulminated against them. These records of religious struggle still remain, but are no longer suggestions for the continuance of the strife. The fire is burnt out; and perhaps in no city of Europe is theology so placid, polemics so entirely at rest. The Wartburg still rears its picturesque eminence over the lovely Thuringian valleys, and Luther's room is visited by thousands of pilgrims; but in this very palace of the Wartburg, besides the room where Luther struggled with Satan, the visitors are shown the Banqueting Hall of the Minnesingers, where poet challenged poet, and the Siingerkrieg, or Minstrels' Contest, was celebrated. The contrast may be carried further. It may be taken as a symbol of the intellectual condition of Saxe-Weimar, that while the relics of Luther are simply preserved, the Minstrel Hall is now being restored in more than its pristine splendor. Lutheran theology is crumbling away, just as the famous inkspot has disappeared beneath the gradual scrapings of visitors' penknives; but the Minstrelsy of which the Germans are so proud, daily receives fresh honor and adulation. Nor is this adulation a mere revival. Every year the Wartburg saw assembled the members of that numerous family (the Bachs) which, driven from Hungary in the early period of reform, had settled in Saxony, and had given, besides the great John Sebastian Bach, so many noble musicians to the world. Too numerous to gain l livelihood in one city, the Bachs agreed to meet every year at the Wartburg. This custom, which was continued till the close of the eighteenth century, not only presented the singular spectacle of one family consisting of no less than a hundred and twenty musicians, but was also the occasion if musical entertainments such as were never heard before. They began oy religious hymns, sung in chorus; they then took for their thene some popular song, comic or licentious, varying it by the improvisation of four, five, or six parts; these improvisations were named Quolibets, and arb considered by many writers to have been the origin of German opera."-(G. [. Lewes' Life of Goethe, vol. i. pp. 311-314.)-Ed.

104 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. space, there seemed to be collected together all the astonishing lights of the human understanding. The imagination, constantly kept awake at Weimar by the conversation of poets, felt less need of outward distractions; these distractions serve to lighten the burden of existence. but often disperse its powers. In this country residence, called a city, they led a regular, occupied, and serious life; one might sometimes feel weary of it, but the mind was never degraded by futile and vulgar interests; and if pleasures were wanting, the decay of faculties was at least never perceived. The only luxury of the prince is a delicious garden; and this popular enjoyment, which he shares in common with all the inhabitants of the place, is a possession on which he is congratulated by all. The stage, of which I shall speak in the second division of my work, is managed by the greatest poet in Germany, Goethe;' and this amusement interests all people sufficiently to preserve them from those assemblies, which answer no other end than to bring concealed ennui to light. Weimar was called the Athens of Germany; and it was, in I " It was in 1790, that the Weimar Theatre was rebuilt and reopened. Goethe undertook the direction with powers more absolute than any director ever had; for he was independent even of success. The court paid all expenses, and the stage was left free for him to make experiments upon. He made them, and they all failed..... Of him Edward Devrient, in his excellent history of the German stage (Geschichte der deu tschen Schauspiel-:Kunst), says:' He sat in the centre of the pit; his powerful glance governed and directed the circle around him, and bridled the dissatisfied or neutral. On one occasion, when the Jena students, whose arbitrary judgment was very unseasonable to him, expressed their opinion too tumultuously, he rose, commanded silence, and threatened to have the disturbers turned out by the hussars on guard. A similar scene took place in 1802, on the representation of Fr. Schlegel's Alarcos, which appeared to the public too daring an attempt, and the approbation given by the loyal party provoked a loud laugh of opposition. Goethe rose and called out with a voice of thunder,' Let no one laugh!' At last he went so far as for some time to forbid any audible expression on the part of the public, whether of approval or disapproval. He would suffer no kind of disturbance in what he held to be suitable. Over criticism he kept a tight rein; hearing that Bitticher was writing an essay on his direction of the theatre, he declared; Ihat if it appeared, he would resign his post; and Bitticher left the article nprinted."-(Lewes' Biography of Gosthe, vol. ii. pp. 242-245.)-Ed.

PRUSSIA. 105 reality, the only place where the fine arts inspired a national interest, which served for a bond of fraternal union among different ranks of society. A liberal court habitually sought the acquaintance of men of letters; and literature gained considerably in the influence of good taste which presided there. A judgment might be formed, from this little circle, of the good effect which might be produced throughout Germany by such mixture, if generally adopted. CHAPTER XVI. PRUSSIA. IN order to be acquainted with Prussia, you must study the character of Frederick II. A man created this empire which nature had not favored, which became a power only because a warrior was its master. In Frederick the Second there are two very distinct persons-a Gerlnanbynature, and a Frenchman by education. All that the German did in a German kingdo-mi has left durable traces; all that the Frenchman attempted has failed of producing fruit. Frederick the Second was fashioned by the French philosophy of the eighteenth century; this philosophy does injury to uati6fis,-when it dries up in them the source of enthusiasm; but where there exists such a thing as an absolute monarch, it is to be wished that liberal principles may temper in him the action of despotism. Frederick introduced into the north of Germany the liberty of thinking; the Reformation had already introduced there the spirit of inquiry, though not of toleration; and, by a singular contradiction, inquiry was only permitted in imperiously prescribing, by anticipation, the result of that intuiry. Frederick caused to be held in honor the liberty of speaking and writing, not only by means of those poignant and witty pleasantries, which have so much effect on men when Proceeding from the lips of a king; but also, still more power

106 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. fully, by his example; for he never punished those who libelled him, whether in speech or by publication, and he displayed in almost all his actions the philosophy whose spirit he professed. He established an order and an economy in the administration which have constituted the internal strength of Prussia, in spite of all its natural disadvantages. There was never a king who displayed so much simplicity in his private life, and even in his court: he thought himself bound to spare as much as possible lte wealth of his subjects. He entertained on all subjects a reeling of justice, which the misfortunes of his youth and the severity of his father had engraved on his heart. This feeling Is perhaps the most rare of all a conqueror's virtues; for they in general would rather be esteemed generous than just, because justice supposes some sort of equal relation with others. Frederick had rendered the courts of justice so independent, that, during his whole life, and under the reign of his successors, they have been often seen to decide in favor of the subject against the sovereign, in suits relating to political interests. It is true that it would be almost impossible to introduce injustice into a German tribunal. The Germans are well enough disposed to make themselves systems for abandoning politics to arbitrary power; but in questions of jurisprudence or administration, you cannot get into their heads any principles but those of justice. Their very spirit of method, to say nothing of their uprightness of heart, secures equity by the establishment of order in all things. Nevertheless, Frederick deserves praise for his integrity in the internal government of his country; and this is one of his best titles to the admiration of posterity. Frederick did not possess a feeling heart, but he had goodness of disposition; and qualities of a universal nature are those which are most suitable to sovereigns. Nevertheless,,his goodness of Frederick's was as dangerous as that of the lion, and one felt the talon of power in the midst of the most amiable grace and coquetry of spirit Men of independent characters could, with difficulty, submit themselves to the freeloom which this master fancied he gave them, to the familiarity which he imagined that he permitted them; and, even in their

PRTSSIA. 107 Admiration of him, they felt that they breathed more freely at a distance. Frederick's greatest misfortune was, that he had not sufficient respect for religion or morals. His tastes were cynical. Notwithstanding the love of glory had given an elevation to his ideas, his licentious mode of expressing himself on the most sacred subjects was the cause that his very virtues failed of inspiring confidence; they were felt and approved, yet they were believed to be the virtues of calculation. Every thing in Frederick appeared necessarily to imply a political tendency; thus, the good that he did ameliorated the state of the country, but did not improve the morality of the nation. He affected unbelief, and made a mockery of female virtue; and nothing was so un suita be' t &e- ~German character as this manner of thinking. Frederick, in setting his subjects free from what he called their prejudices, extinguished in them the spirit of patriotism; for,, to attach inhabitants to countries naturally gloomy and barren, they must be governed by opinions and principles of great severity. In those sandy regions, where the. earth produces nothing but firs and heaths, man's strength consists in his soul; and if you take from him that which constitutes the life of this soul, his religious feelings, he will no longer feel any thing but disgust for his melancholy country. Frederick's inclination for war may be excused by great political motives. His kingdom, such as he received it from his father, could not have held together; and it was almost for its preservation that he aggrandized it. He had two millions and a half of subjects when he ascended the throne, and left six millions at his death. The need he had of an army prevented him from encouraging in the nation a public spirit of imposing energy and unity. The government of Frederick was founded on military strength and civil justice: he reconciled them to each other by his wisdom; but it was difficult to combine two spirits of a nature so opposite. Frederick wished his soldiers to be mere military machines, blindly actuated, and his subjects to be enlightened,citizens, capable of patriotism. He did not establish

108 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. in the towns of Prussia secondary authorities, municipalities such as existed in the rest of Germany, lest the immediate action of the military service might be impeded by them; and yet he wished that there should be enough of the spirit of liberty in his empire to make obedience appear voluntary. He wished the military state to be the first of all, since it was that which was most necessary to him; but he would have desired that the civil state might support itself collaterally with the military. Frederick, in short, desired to meet everywhere with supports, and to encounter obstacles nowhere. The wonderful amalgamation of all classes of society is hardly to be obtained but through the influence of a system of laws the same for all. A man may combine opposite elements, so as to make them proceed together in the same direction, "but at his death they are disunited."' The ascendency obtained by Frederick, and supported by the wisdom of his successors, was still manifested for a time; but in Prussia there were always to be perceived two distinct nations, badly united together to form an entire one; the army, and the civil state. The prejudices of nobility subsisted at the same time with liberal opinions of the most decided stamp. In short, the figure of Prussia presented itself, like that of Janus, under a double face-the one military, the other philosophical. One of the greatest errors committed by Frederick, was that of lending himself to the partition of Poland. Silesia had been acquired by the force of arms; Poland was a Machiavelian conquest, "and it could never be hoped that subjects, so got by slight of hand, would be faithful to the juggler who called himself their sovereign."' Besides, the Germans and Sclavonians can never be united by indissoluble ties; and, when a nation admits alien enemies into its bosom, as natural subjects, she does herself almost as much injury as in receiving them for masters; for the political body then no longer retains that bond of union, which personifies the State, and constitutes patriotic sentiment. 1 Suppressed by the censors. 2 ibid.

PRUSSIA. 109 These observations respecting Prussia, all bear upon the means which she possessed of maintaining and defending her self; for there was nothing in her internal government that was prejudicial to her independence, or her security; il no country of Europe was knowledge held in higher honor, in none was liberty, at least in fact, if not by law, more scrupulously respected. I did not meet, throughout Prussia, with any individual that complained of arbitrary acts in the government, and yet there would not have been the least danger in complaining of them; but when, in a social state, happiness itself is only what may be called a fortunate accident, when it is not founded on durable institutions which secure to the human race its force and its dignity, patriotism has little perseverance, and men easily abandon to chance the advantages which are believed to be owing to chance alone. Frederick II, one of the noblest gifts of that chance which seemed to watch over the destiny of Prussia, had known how to make himself sincerely beloved in his country; and, since he is no neorer they still cherish his memory as if he were still alive. The fate of Prussia, however, has but too well taught us what is the real influence even of a great man, who, during his reign, has not disinterestedly labored to make his country independent of his personal services: the entire nation confidently relied on its sovereign for its very principle of existence, and it seened as if that nation itself must come to an end with him. Frederick II would have wished to confine all the literature of his dominions to French literature. He set no value on that of Germany. Doubtless it was, during his time, by many degrees short of having attained its present distinction; yet a German prince ought to encourage every thing German. Frederick formed the project of rendering Berlin in some respects similar to Paris, and flattered himself with having found among the French refugees some writers sufficiently distinguished to create a French world of literature. Such a hope was necessarily to be deceived; factitious culture never prospers; some individuals may struggle iint ie fiicuTt-es of nature, but the mass always follows the bent she gives them.

110 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. Frederick did a real injury to his country by proclaiming his [contempt for the genius of the Germans. It has thence resulted that the Germanic body has often conceived unjust suspicions against Prussia herself. Many German writers, of deserved celebrity, made themselves known towards the end of Frederick's reign; but the unfavorable opinion, which this great monarch had imbibed in his youth against the literature of his country, was never effaced; and, a few years before his death, he composed a little work, in which he proposed, among other changes, to add a vowel at the end of every verb, to soften the Teutonic dialect. This German, in an Italian mask, would produce the most comic effect in the world; but no monarch, even in the East, possesses so much power as to influence in this manner, not the sense, but the sound of every word that shall be pronounced throughout his dominions. Klopstock has nobly reproached Frederick with his having neglected the German muses, who, unknown to him, essayed to proclaim his glory. Frederick did not at all divine the real character of the Germans iijilterature and h"hi-osophy. He did not give them credit for being inventors. He wished to discipline men of letters as he did his armies. "We must conform ourselves," said he, in bad German-a;-in his instructions to the Academy, "to the method of Boerhaave in medicine, to that of Locke in metaphysics, and that of Thomnasius in natural history." His instructions were not followed. He never doubted that, of all men, the Germans were those who were least capable of being subjected to the routine of letters and philosophy: nothing announced in them that boldness which they have since displaye-ni —the field of aisttiaction.' 1 "Thus the two German Emperors, Fritz [Frederick the Great] and Wolfgang [Goethe], held no spiritual congress; perhaps no good result could have been elicited by their meeting. Yet they were, each in his own sphere, the two most potent men then reigning. Fritz did not directly assist the literature of his country, but his indirect influence has been indicated by Griepenkerl. He awoke the Germans from their sleep by the rolling of drums; those who least liked the clang of arms or the' divisions

BERLIN. 111 Frederick considered his subjects as strangers, and the Frenchmen of genius as his countrymen. Nothing, it must be,onfessed, is more natural than that he should have let himself be seduced by whatever was brilliant and solid in the French writers of this epoch; nevertheless, Frederick would have contributed still more effectually to the glory of his country, if he had understood and developed the faculties peculiar to the nation he governed. But how resist the influence of his times and where is the man, whose genius itself is not, in many respects, the work of the age he lives in? CHAPTER XVII. BERLIN. BERLIN is a large city, with very broad streets, perfectly straight, the houses handsome, and the general appearance regular; but, as it has been but lately rebuilt, it displays no traces of ancient times. Not one Gothic monument remains amid its modern habitations; and nothing of the antique interrupts the uniformity of this newly created courtry. What can be better, it will be said, either for buildings or for institutions, than not to be incumbered with ruins? I feel that, in America, I should love new cities and new laws: there, nature and liberty speak so immediately to the soul, as to leave no want of recollections; but, in this old world of ours, the past is needful to us. Berlin, an entirely modern city, beautiful as it is, makes no serious i{ifpf iesii;i t discovers no miars of a battle-field,' were nevertheless awakened to the fact that something Important was going on in life, and they rubbed their sleepy eyes, and tried to see a little into that. The roll of drums has this merit, at all events, that it draws men from their library table to the window, and so makes them look out upon the moving, living w orld of action, wherein the erudite may Fee a'considerable sensation' made even by men unable to conjugate a Greek verb in'/.' " —(G. H. Lewes' Life of Goethe, vol. i. p. 396.) —id.

112 MADAME DE STAEL"S GERMANY. of the history of the country, or of the character of its inhabitants, and its magnificent new-built houses seem destined only for the convenient assemblage of pleasures and industry. ThIN finest palaces in Berlin are built of brick; hardly any stone is to be found even in its triumphal arches. The capital of Prussia resembles Prussia itself; its buildings and institutions are of the age of man, and no more, because a single man was their founder. The court, over which a beautiful and virtuous queen presides, was at once imposing and simple; the royal family, which threw itself voluntarily into society, knew how to mix with dignity among the nation at large, and became identified in all hearts with their native country. The king had found the means of fixing at Berlin, J. von Miiller, Ancillon, Fichte, Humboldt, Hufeland, a multitude of men distinguished in different ways; in short, all the elements of a delightful society, and of a powerful nation, were there; but these elements were not yet combined or united together. Genius was attended with much more success, however, at Berlin than at Vienna; the hero of the nation, Frederick, having been a man of uncommon brilliancy, the reflection of his name still inspired a love for every thing that resembled him. Maria Theresa did not give a similar impulse to the people of Vienna; and whatever, in Joseph, bore the least appearance of genius, was sufficient to disgust them with it.1 1 " The city is situated in the midst of a dreary plain of sand, destitute of either beauty or fertility. It is surprising that the foundation of a town should ever have been laid on so uninteresting a spot, but it is far more wonderful that it should have grown up, notwithstanding, into the flourishing capital of a great empire. Previous to the reign of Frederick I, it was an unimportant town, confined to the right bank of the Spree, and to the island on which the palace and museum now stand.'Since that timne, in one hundred and fifty years, its population has increased tenfold, and its limits have extended until its walls are twelve miles in circumference. Frederick the Great, being ambitious to possess a capital proportionate to the rapid increase of his dominions, at once inclosed a vast space with walls, and ordered it to be filled with houses. As the population was scanty, the only mode of complying with the wishes of the sovereign was ey stretching the houses over as wide a space as possible. In consequence

BERLIN. 113 No spectacle in all Germany was equal to that which Berlin presented. This town, situated in the centre of the north of Germany, may be considered as its focus of enlightenment. Sciences and letters are cultivated there; and at dinners. both ministerial and private, where the men meet together, the some of the handsomest hotels are only two stories high, and have as many as twenty windows on a line. The streets are necessarily broad, and therefore generally appear empty. Owing to the want of stone in the neighborhood, the larger part even of the public buildings are of brick and plaster. The flatness of the ground, and the sandy soil, produce inconveniences which the stranger will not be long in detecting. There is so little declivity in the surface, that the water in the drains, instead of running off, stops and stagnates in the streets. In the Friedrichsstrasse, which is two miles long, there is not a foot of descent from one end to the other. In the summer season, the heat of the sun reflected by the sand becomes intolerable, and the noxious odors in the streets are very unwholesome as well as unpleasant. A third nuisance is, that the streets are only partially provided with trottoirs, so narrow that two persons can scarcely walk abreast; and many are infamously paved with sharp stones, upon which it is excruciating pain to tread. " The mere passing traveller, in search of amusement, will exhaust the sights of Berlin perhaps in a fortnight, and afterwards find it tedious without the society of friends. The stranger coming to reside here, provided with good introductions, may find an agreeable literary society, composed of the most talented men in Germany, whom the government has the art of drawing around it in an official capacity, or as professors of the University. The names of Humboldt, the traveller; Savigny, the jurist; Ranke and Raumer, the historians; Ehrenberg, the naturalist; Von Buch, the geologist; Ritter, the geographer; Grimm, the philologist, and editor of the Kinder and Haus-Marchen; Schelling, the metaphysical writer; Cornelius, the painter; Tieck, the author (who spends three months of the year here, the king having granted him a pension on that condition), all residents of Berlin, enjoy a European celebrity. The society of the upper classes is on the whole not very accessible to strangers, nor is hospitality exercised to the same extent among them as in England, chiefly because their fortunes are limited. The hotels of the diplomatic corps are an exception, and in them the most agreeable soirees are held in the winter season. " Notwithstanding the disadvantages of situation, Berlin is certainly one of the finest cities in Europe. Some of the most splendid buildings are concentrated in a very small space between the palace [Schloss) and the Brandenburg Gate, or very near it. Few European capitals can show so much architectural splendor as is seen in the colossal Palace, the beautiful colonnade of the Museum, the chaste Guard-house, the great Opera, and the University opposite."-(Murray'8 Hand-Book for Northern Ge r.an.y, r. 332.)- -Ed.

_14 hlMADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. separation of ranks, so prejudicial to Germany, is not rigidly enforced, but people of talent of all classes are collected. This happy mixture is not yet, however, extended to the society of women. There are among them some whose talents and accomplishments attract every thing that is distinguished to their circles; but, generally speaking, at Berlin, as well as throughout the rest of Germany, female society is not well amalgamated with that of the men. The great charm of social life, in France, consists in the art of perfectly reconciling all the advantages which the wit of the men and women united can confer upon conversation. At Berlin, the men rarely coniverse except with each other; the military condition gives lthem a sort of rudeness, which prevents them from taking any trouble about the society of women. When there are, as in England, great political interests to be discussed, the societies of men are always animated by a noble feeling common to all; but in countries where there is no representative government, the presence of the women is necessary, to preserve all the sentiments of delicacy and purity, without which the love of the beautiful must perish. The influence of women is yet more salutary to the soldier than to the citizen; the empire of law can subsist without them much better than that of honor, for they can alone preserve the spirit of chivalry in a monarchy purely military. Ancient France owed all her splendor to this potency of public opinion, of which female ascendency was the cause. Society at Berlin consisted only of a very small number ot men, a circumstance which almost always spoils the members of it by depriving them of the anxiety and of the necessity to please. Officers, who obtained leave of absence to pass a few months in town, sought nothing there but the dance or the gaming-table. The mixture of two languages was detrimental to conversation, and the great assemblies at Berlin afforded nc nigher interest than those at Vienna; or rather, in point o manners, there was more of the custom of the world at the latter than at the former of those capitals. Notwithstanding this, the liberty of the press, the assemblage of men of genius

BERLIN. 115 the knowledge of literature, and of the German language, which had been generally diffused of late, contributed to render Berlin the real metropolis of modern, of enlightened Germany. The French refugees somewhat weakened that entirely German impulse of which Berlin is susceptible; they still preserved a superstitious reverence for the age of Louis XIV; their ideas respecting literature became faded and petrified at a distance from the country which gave them birth; yet, in general, Berlin would have assumed a great ascendency over public spirit in Germany, if there had not still continued to exist (I must repeat it) a feeling of resentment for the contempt which Frederick had evinced towards the German nation. The philosophic writers have often indulged unjust prejudices against Prussia; they chose to see in her nothing but one vast barrack, and yet it was in this very point of view that she was least worthy of observation. The interest which this country really deserved to excite, consisted in the enlightenment, the spirit of justice, and the sentiments of independence, which are to be met with in a number of individuals of all classes; but the bond of union of these noble qualities had not yet been formed. The newly constructed State could derive no security, either from duration or from the character of the materials which composed it. The humiliating punishments generally resorted to among the German soldiery stifled the sentiments of honor in the minds of the soldiers. Military habits have rather injured than assisted the warlike sp'tli-t-huisePruissans. These habits were founded on those ancient methods which separated the army from the body of the nation, while in our liys, there is no real strength except In national character. This character, in Prussia, is more noble and more exalted than late events might lead us to imagine; "and the ardent heroism of the unhappy Prince Louis ought stil? to shed some glory over his -companions in arms."' 1 Suppressed by the censors. I struggled during several days to obtain

116 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. CHAPTER XVIII. OF THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. ALL the north of Germany is filled with the most learned universities in Europe. In no country, not even in England, are there so many means of instruction, and of bringing the faculties to perfection. How is it then that the nation is wanting in energy, that it appears generally dull and confined, even while it contains within itself a small number, at least, of men who are the most intellectual in all Europe? It is to the nature of its government, not to education, that this singular contrast must be attributed. Intellectual education is perfect in Germany, but every thigthe asses in theory: practical education depends solelyo.an affairs; it is by action alone that the character acquires the firmness necessary to direct in the conduct of life. Character is an instinct; it has more alliance with nature than the understanding, and yet circumstances alone give men the occasion of developing it. Governments are the real instructors of peoples; and public education itself, however good, may create men of letters, but not citizens, warriors, or statesmen.' the liberty of rendering this homage to Prince Louis, and I represented that it was placing the glory of the French in relief, to praise the bravery of those whom they had conquered; but it appeared more simple to the censors to permit nothing of the kind. 1 "By Germans themselves, German universities are admitted to have been incomparably inferior to the Dutch and Italian universities, until the foundation of the University of G6ttingen. Muenchhausen was for G6ttingen and the German universities, what Douza was for Leyden and the Dutch. But with this difference: Leyden was the model on which the younger universities of the Republic were constructed; Gottingen, the model on which the older universities of the Empire were reformed. Both were statesmen and scholars. Both proposed a high ideal for the schools bunded under their auspices; and both, as first curators, labored with parmuount influence in realizing this ideal for the same long period of thirty

THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 117 In Germany, the genius of philosophy goes further than any w here else; nothing arrests lt even he want of a political career, so fatal to the mass, affords a freer scope to the thinking part of the nation. But there is an immense distance between the first and second orders of minds, because there is no interest, no object of exertion, for men who do not rise to the height of conceptions the most vast. In Germany, a man who is not occupied with the universe, has really nothing to do. The German universities possess an ancient repuiifaoi'n of a date several centuries antecedent to the Reformation. Since that epoch, the Protestant universities have been incontestably superior to the Catholic, and the literary glory of Germany depends altogether upon these institutions.' The English unitwo years. Under their patronage, Leyden and Gittingen took the highest place among the universities of Europe, and both have only lost their relative supremacy by the application in other seminaries of the same measures which had at first determined their superiority. " From the mutual relations of the seminaries, states, and people of the Empire, the resort to a German university has in general been always mainly dependent on its comparative excellence; and as the interest of the several States was involved in the prosperity of their several universities, the improvement of one of these schools necessarily occasioned the improvernent of the others. No sooner, therefore, had G6ttingen risen to a decided superiority through her system of curatorial patronage, and other subordinate improvements, than the different governments found it necessary to place their seminaries, as far as possible, on an equal footing. The nuisance of professorial recommendation, under which the universities had so long pined, was generally abated; and the few schools in which it has been tolerated, subsist only through their endowments, and stand as warning monuments of its effect. Compare wealthy Greifswalde with poor Halle. The virtual patronage was in general found best confided to a smaU Sody of curators; though the peculiar circumstances of the country, and the peculiar organization of its machinery of government, have recently enabled at least one of the German States to concentrate, without a violation of our principles, its academical patronage in a ministry of public instruction. This, however, we cannot now explain. It is universally admitted, that since their rise through the new system of patronage, the universities ot Germany have drawn into their sphere the highest talent of the nation; that the new era in its intellectual life has been wholly determined by them; as from them have emanated almost all the most remarkable prodacts of German genius in literature, erudition, philosophy, and science." -(Sir Wm. Hamilton's Discussions, p. 381.)-Ed. A sketch of these institutions is presented to us in a work on the sul.

118 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. versities have singularly contributed to diffuse among the people of England that knowledge of ancient languages and literature, which gives to their orators and statesmen an information so liberal and so brilliant. It is a mark of good taste to be acquainted with other things besides matters of business, when one is thoroughly acquainted with them; and, besides, the eloquence of free nations attaches itself to the history of the Greeks and Romans, as to that of ancient fellow-countrymen. But the German universities, although founded on principles analogous to those of England, yet differ from them in many respects: the multitude of students assembled together at Gottingen, Halle, Jena, etc., formed almost a free body in the State: the rich and poor scholars were distinguished from each other only by personal merit; and the strangers, who came from all parts of the world, submitted themselves with pleasure to an equality which natural superiority alone could change. There was independence, and even military spirit, among the students; and if, in leaving the university, they had been able to devote themselves to the interests of the public, their education had been very favorable to energy of character; but they returned to the monotonous and domestic habits which prevail in Germany, and lost by degrees the impulse and resolution, which their university life had inspired. They retained nothing of it, but a stock of valuable and very extensive information. In every German university, several professors concurred together in each individual branch of instruction; thus, the masters themselves were emulous from the interest which they felt in attaining a superiority over each other in the number or scholars they attracted. Those who adopted such or such a particular course, medicine, law, etc., found themselves naturally impelled to require information on other subjects; and thence comes the universality of acquirements, which is to be remarked ject, just published by M. de Villers, an author who is always found at the head of all noble and generous opinions; who seems called, by the elegance of his mind and the depth of his studies, to be the representative of Franoe in Germany, and of Germany in France.

THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 119 in almost all the educated men of Germany. The universities had a separate property' in their possessions like the clergy, they had a jurisdiction peculiar to themselves; and it was a noble idea of our ancestors, to render the establishment of education wholly free. Mature age can submit itself to circumstances; but at the entrance into life, at least, a young man should draw all his ideas from an uncorrupted source. The study of languages, which, in Germany, constitutes the basis of education, is much more favorable to the evolution of the faculties, in the earlier age, than that of mathematics, or of the physical sciences. Pascal, that great geometer, whose profound thought hovered over the science which he peculiarly cultivated, as over every other, has himself acknowledged the insuperable defects of those minds which owe their first formation to the mathematics. This study, in the earlier age, exercises only the mechanism of intelligence. In boys, occupied so soon with calculations, the spring of imagination, then so fair and fruitful, is arrested; and they acquire not in its stead, any pre-eminent accuracy of thought,-for arithmetic and algebra are limited to the teaching, in a thousand forms, propositions always identical. The problems of life are more complicated; not one is positive, not one is absolute; we must conjecture, we must decide by the aid of indications and assumptions, which bear no analogy with the infallible procedure of the calculus. Demonstrated truths do not conduct to probable truths; which alone, however, serve us for our guide in business, in the arts, and in society. There is, no doubt, a point at which the mathematics themselves require that luminous power ol invention, without which it is impossible to penetrate into the secrets of nature. At the summit of thought, the imaginations f Homer and of Newton seem to unite; but how many of the young, without mathematical genius, consecrate their time to this science! There is exercised in them only a single faculty Most of the continental universities have been stripped of their estates within the last fifty years.-A-.

120 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. while the whole moral being ought to be under development at an age when it is so easy to derange the soul and the body, in attempting to strengthen only a part. Not hingis less applicableto9ife than a mathematical argument. A proposition, couched in ciphers, is decidedly either true or false. In all other relations the true and the false are so intermingled, that frequently instinct alone can decide us in the strife of motives, sometimes as powerful on the one side as on the other. The study of the mathematics, habituating to certainty, irritates us against all opinions opposed to our own; while that which is the most important for the conduct of this world is to understand others,-that is, to comprehend all that leads them to think and to feel differently from ourselves. The mathematics induce us to take no account of any thing that is not proved, while primitive truths, those which are seized by feeling and genius, are not susceptible of demonstration. In fine, mathematics, subjecting every thing to calculation, inspire too much reverence for force; and that sublime energy, which accounts obstacles as nothing, and delights in sacrifices, does not easily accord with the kind of reason that is developed by algebraic combinations. It seems to me, then, that, for the advantage of morality as well as that of the understanding, the study of mathematics should be taken in its course as a part of complete instruction, but should not form the basis of education, and consequently the determining principle of character and the soul. Among systems of education, there are likewise some which advise us to begin instruction with the natural sciences; in the earlier age they are only a simple diversion; they are learned rattles, which accustom to methodical amusement and superficial study. People have imagined that children should be spared trouble as much as possible, that all their studies should be turned into recreations, and that, in due time, collections of natural history should be given to them for playthings, and physical experiments for a show. It seems to me that this also is an erroneous system. Even if it were possible that a child should learn any thing well in amusing itself, I should

THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 121 still regret that its faculty of attention had not been developed, -a faculty which is much more essential than an additional acquirement. I know they will tell me that the mathematics call forth, in a peculiar manner, the power of application; but they do not hab;tuate the mind to collect, to appreciate, to concentrate; the attention they require is, so to speak, in a straight line; the human understanding acts in mathematics like a spring tending in a uniform direction.' Education, conducted by way of amusement, dissipates thought; pain in every thing is one of the great secrets of nature: the mind of the child should accustom itself to the efforts of study, as our soul accustoms itself to suffering. It is labor which leads to the perfection of our earlier, as grief to that of our later age: it is to be wished, no doubt, that parents, like destiny, may not too much abuse this double secret; but there is nothing important at any period of life but that which acts upon the very central point of existence, and we are too apt to consider the moral being in detail. You may teach your child a number of things with pictures and cards, but you will not teach him to learn; and the habit of amusing himself, which you direct to the acquirement of knowledge, will soon take another direction when the child is no longer under your guidance. It is not, therefore, without reason, that the study of the ancient and modern languages has been made the basis of all the establishments of education which have formed the most able men throughout Europe. The sense of an expression in a foreign language is at once a grammatical and an intellectual problem; this problem is altogether proportioned to the intellect of the child: at first he understands only the words, then he ascends to the conception of the phrase, and soon after, the charm of the expression, its force, its harmony-all the qualities which are united in the language of man, are gradually 1 On the study of mathematics, see Sir Wrir. Hamilton's Discussions on Philoso8hy and Literature, Education, and University Reform, second London edition, pp. 263-340. —Ed. VOL. I.-6

122 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. perceived by the child while engaged in translating. Ite makes a trial of himself with the difficulties which are presented to him by tvwo languages at a time; he introduces himself to ideas in succession, compares and combines different sorts of analogies and probabilities; and the spontaneous activity of the mind, that alone which truly develops the faculty of thinking, is in a lively manner excited by this study. The number of faculties which it awakens at the same time gives it the advantage over every other species of labor, and we are too happy in being able to employ the flexible memory of a child in retaining a kind of knowledge, without which he would be all his life confined to the circle of his own nationa circle narrow like every thing which is exclusive. The study of grammar requires the same sequence and the same force of attention as the mathematics, but it is much more closely connected with thought. Grammar unites ideas, as calculation combines figures; grammatical logic is equally precise with that of algebra, and still it applies itself to every thing that is alive in the mind: words are at the same time ciphers and images; they are both slaves and free, subject to the discipline of syntax and all powerful by their natural signification; thus we find in the metaphysics of grammar exactness of reasoning and independence of thought united; every thing has passed by means of words, and every thing is again found in words when we know how to examine them: languages are inexhaustible for the child as well as for the man, and every one may draw from them whatever he stands ip iced of. The impartiality natural to the spirit of the Germans, leads them to take an interest in the literature of foreign countries, and we find few men a little elevated above the common class who are not familiar with several languages. On leaving school they are in general already well acquainted with Latin and even with Greek. The education of the German universities, says a French writer, begins where that of most nations in Euroe.ends. Not only tbe professors are men of astonishing information, but what especially distinguishes them is,

INSTITUTIONS FOR EDUCATION. 123?heir extreme scrupulousness in instruction. In Germany, men have a conscience Tveymg-rhe r e is nothing that can dispense with it. If we examine the course of hurifan destiny,_ we shall see that levity of disposition may lead to every thing that is bad in this world. It is only in the child that levity has a charm; it seems as if the Creator still led the child by the hand, and assisted him to tread gently over the clouds of life. But when time abandons man to himself, it is only in the seriousness of his soul that he can find thoughts, sentiments, and virtues. CHAPTER XIX. OF PARTICULAR INSTITUTIONS FOR EDUCATION, AND CHARITABLE ESTABLISHMENTS. IT will at first sight appear inconsistent to praise the ancient method, which made the study of languages the basis of education, and at the same time to consider the school of Pestalozzi' as one of the best institutions of our age; I think, however, 1 " PESTALOZZI, JOHANN HEINRICH, was born January 12, 1746, at Zurich, in Switzerland. His father, who was a medical practitioner, died when Pestalozzi was about six years old; but his mother, with the assistance of some relatives, procured him a good education. He studied divinity and afterwards law, but instead of adopting either the clerical or legal profession, turned to farming as a means of support. At the age of twenty-three.ae married the daughter of a merchant of Zurich, purchased a small landed property which he named Neuhof, and went to reside upon it and cultivate it. The reading of Rousseau's'Emile' had drawn his attention to the subject of education, and he began in 1775 to carry out his views by turning his farm into a farm-school for instructing the children of the poorer classes of the vicinity in industrial pursuits as well as in reading and writing. In this, however, he was little more successful than he had been in his agricultural operations: at the end of two years his school was broken up, and he became involved in debt. In order to relieve himself from his mcumbrances, and to procure the means of subsistence, he produced his popular novel of'Leinhardt und Gertrud,' 4 vols., Basel, 1781; in which, under guise of depicting actual peasant life, he sought to show the neg

!'24 MADAME DE STAET. S GERMANY. that both these ways of viewing the subject may be reconciled. Of all studies, that which with Pestalozzi produces the most satisfactory result, is the mathematics. But it appears to me that his method might be applied to many other branches of education, and produce certain and rapid progress. Rousseau lected condition of the peasantry, and how by better teaching they might be improved both morally and physically. It was read with general interest, and the Agricultural Society of Berne awarded him for it a gold medal, which, however, his necessities compelled him at once to sell. It was followed by' Christoph und Else,' Zurich, 1782. During 1782-83, he edited a periodical entitled'Das Scihweizer-Blatt fir das Volk' (' Swiss-Journal for the People'), which was collected in two volumes.'Nachforschungen fiber den Gang der Natur in der Entwickelung des Menchengeschlechts' (' Investigations into the Process of Nature in the Improvement of the Human Race') appeared at Zurich, in 1797; and he wrote also other works of less importance. " In 1798, with the assistance of the Swiss Directory, he established a school for orphan children in a convent which had belonged to the Ursuline nuns at Stanz, in the canton of Unterwalden. Stanz had been sacked by a French army, and the children were such as were left without protectors to wander about the country. In the bare and deserted convent he had, without assistance and without books, to teach about eighty children of from four to ten years of age. He was driven by necessity to set the elder and better taught children to teach the younger and more ignorant; and thus struck out the monitorial or mutual-instruction system of teaching, which, just about the same time, Lancaster was under somewhat similar circumnstances led to adopt in England. In less than a year, Pestalozzi's benevolent labors were suddenly interrupted by the Austrians, who converted his orphan-house into a military hospital. He then removed to Burgdorf, eleven miles northeast from Berne, where he founded another school of a higher class, and produced his educational works. Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt' (' How Gertrude teaches her children'), lerne, 1801;'Buch der MuLtter' ('Mothers' Book'), Berne, 1803; and some others. During this period of political excitement, he joined the popular party, and in a considerable degree incurred the disapproval of the upper class. In 1802, the people of the canton of Berne sent him as their deputy to an educational conference summoned by Bonaparte, then First Consul, at Paris. His establishment at Burgdorf was prosperous, became celebrated, and was resorted to from all parts of Europe by persons vnterested in education, some for instruction, and others for inspection. In 1804, he removed his establishment to Miinchen-Buchsee, near Hofwyl.,n order to operate in conjunction with Fellenberg, who had a similar establishment at the latter place; but the two educational reformers disa. greed, and in the same year Pestalozzi removed to Yverdun, in the canton of Vaud, where the government appropriated to his use an unoccupied castle. This establishment became even more prosperous and more cele

INSTITUTIONS FOR EDUCATION. 125 was persuaded that children, before the age of twelve or thirteen, had not an understanding equal to the studies that were required of them, or rather to the method of instruction to which they were subjected. They repeated without comprehending, they labored without gsining instruction, and they frequently gathered nothing from their education but the habit of performing their task without Understanding it, and of evading the power of the master by the cunning of the scholar. All that Rousseau has said against this routine education is perfectly true; but, as it often happens, the remedy which he proposes is still worse than the evil. A child who, according to Rousseau's system, should have learned nothing till he was twelve years old, would have lost six of the most valuable years of his life; his intellectual organs would never acquire that flexibility which early infancy alone could give them. Habits of idleness would be so deeply rooted in him, that he would be rendered much more unhappy. by speaking to him of industry, for the first time, at the age of twelve, than by accustoming him, from his earliest existence, to consider it as a necessary condition of life. Besides, that kind of care and attention which Rousseau requires of the tutor, in order to supply instruction and necessary to secure brated than the one at Burgdorf, and had a still greater number of pupils and of visitors. Unfortunately, dissensions arose among the teachers, in which Pestalozzi himself became implicated, and which embittered the latter years of his life. The number of pupils rapidly diminished, the establishment became a losing concern, and Pestalozzi was again involved in debt, which the proceeds of the complete edition of his works ('Pestaozzi's Siinmtliche Werke,' 1'5 vols., Stuttgard and Tibingen, 1819-26) hardly sufficed to liquidate. This edition was the result of a subscription got up in 1818 for the publication of his works, the names of the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the King of Bavaria, standing at the head of the list. " In 1825, Pestalozzi retired from his labo-ious duties to Neuhof, where his grandson resided. Here he wrote his' Schwanengesang' (' Song of the [Dying] Swan'), 1826; and' Meine Lebensschicksale als Vorsteher meiner Erziehungsanstalten in Burgdorf und Iferten' ('My Lif'e's Fortunes as Superintendent of my Educational Establishments at Burgdorf and Yveraun'), 1826. He died February 17, 1827, at Brfig, in the canton of Aargau."'-El.

.126 MADAME DL STAEL S GERMANY. it, would oblige every man to devote his whole life to the education of another being, and grandfathers alone would find themselves at liberty to begin their own personal career. Such projects are chimerical; but Pestalozzi's method is real, applicable, and may have a great influence on the future progress of the human mind. Rousseau says, with much reason, that children do not comprehend what they learn, and thence concludes that they ought to learn nothing. Pestalozzi has profoundly studied the cause of this want of comprehension in children, and by his method, ideas are simplified and graduated so as to be brought within the reach of childhood, and the mind of that age may acquire, without fatiguing itself, the results of the deepest study. In passing with exactness through all the degrees of reasoning, Pestalozzi puts the child in a state to discover himself what we wish to teach him. There are no half measures in Pestalozzi's method: they either understand well, or not at all; for all the propositions follow each other so closely, that the second is always the immediate consequence of the first. Rousseau says, that the minds of children are fatigued by the studies which are exacted from them. Pestalozzi always lead them by a road so easy and so determinate, that it costs them no more to be initiated into the most abstract sciences than into the most simple occupations-each step in these sciences is as easy, by relation to the antecedent, as the most natural consequence drawn from the most ordinary circumstances. What wearies children is making them skip over the intermediate steps, and obliging them to get forward without their knowing what they think they have learned. Their heads are then in a state of confusion, which renders all examination formidable, and inspires them with an invincible disgust for learning. There exists no trace of this sort of inconvenience in the method of Pestalozzi The children amuse themselves with their studies, not that they are given to them as a play, which, as I have already said, mixes ennui with pleasure, and frivolity with study, but because they enjoy from their infancy the pleasure of grown

INSTITUTIONS FOR EDUCATION. 127 men, which is that of comprehending and finishing what they are set about. The method of Pestalozzi, like every thing that is truly good, is not entirely a new discovery, but an enlightened and persevering application of truths already known. Patience, observation, and a philosophical study of the proceedings of the human mind, have given him a knowledge of what is elementary in thoughts, and successive in their' development; and he has pushed further than any other the theory and the practice of gradation, in the art of instruction. His method has been applied with success to grammar, geography, and music; but it is much to be desired that those distinguished professors, who have adopted his principles, would render them subservient to every other species of knowledge. That of history in particular is not yet well conceived. No one has observed the gradation of impressions in literature, as they have those of problems in the.sciences. In short, many things remain to be done, in order to carry education to its highest point, that is, the art of going backward with what one knows, in order to make others comprehend it. I Pestalozzi makes use of geometry to teach children arithmetical calculation; this was also the method of the ancients. Geometry speaks more to the imagination than the abstract mathematics. To become completely master of the human mind, it is well to unite, as much as possible, precision of instruction with vivacity of impression, for it is not even the depth of science, but obscurity in the manner of presenting it, which alone hinders children from attaining it: they comprehend every thing by degrees, and the essential point is to measure the steps by the progress of reason in infancy; this progress, slow but sure, will lead as far as possible, if we ab stain from hastening its course. It is very singular and pleasing to see at Pestalozzi's the countenances of children, whose round, unmeaning, and delicate features naturally assume an expression of reflection: they are attentive of themselves, and consider their studies as a man of ripened ag, would consider his business. One remarkable

128 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. Circumstance is, that punishments and rewards are never necessary to excite them to industry. It is perhaps the first time that a school of a hundred and fifty children has been conducted without the stimulus of emulation and fear. How many evil sentiments are spared to the heart of man, when we drive far from him jealousy and humiliation, when he sees no rivals in his comrades, no judges in his masters! Rousseau wished to subject the child to the law of destiny; Pestalozzi himself creates that destiny during the course of the child's education, and directs its decrees towards his happiness and his improvement. The child feels himself free, because he enjoys himself amid the general order which surrounds him, the perfect equality of which is not deranged even by the talents of the children, whether more or less distinguished. Success is not the object of pursuit, but merely progress towards a certain point, which all endeavor to reach with the same sincerity. The scholars become masters when they know more than their comrades; the masters again become scholars when they perceive any imperfections in their method, and begin their own education again, in order to become better judges of the diffi culties attending the art of instruction. It is pretty generally apprehended that Pestalozzi's method tends to stifle the imagination, and is unfavorable to originality of mind. An education for genius would indeed be a difficult matter; there is scarcely any thing but nature and government which can either inspire or excite it; but the first principles of knowledge, rendered perfectly clear and certain, cannot be an obstacle to genius; they give the mind a sort of firmness which afterwards renders the highest studies easy to it. We must view the school of Pestalozzi as hitherto confined to childhood. The education he gives should be considered as final only for the lower classes, but for that very reason it may diffuse a very salutary influence over the national character. The education of the rich ought to be divided into two different periods: in the first, the children are guided by their masters; in the second, they voluntarily instruct themselves; and this sort of education, by choice, is that which should be adopt

INSTITUTIONS FOR ECUCATION. 129 ed in great universities. The instruction which is acquired at Pestalozzi's gives every man, of what class soever he may be, a foundation on which he may erect, as he chooses, either the cottage of the poor man or the palaces of kings. We should be mistaken in France, if we thought there was nothing good to be taken from the school of Pestalozzi, except his rapid method of teaching calculation. Pestalozzi is not himself a mathematician; he is not well acquainted with the languages; he has only that sort of genius and instinct, which enables him to develop the understandings of children; he sees the direction which their thought takes in order to attain its object. That openness of character which sheds so noble a calm over the affections of the heart, Pestalozzi has judged necessary in the operations of the mind. He thinks there is a moral pleasure in completing our studies. Indeed we contin. ually see that superficial knowledge inspires a sort of disdainful arrogance, which makes us reject as useless, dangerous, or ridiculous, all that we do not know. We also see that this kind of superficial knowledge obliges us artfully to hide what we are ignorant of. Candor suffers from all those defects of education, which we are ashamed of in spite of ourselves. To know perfectly what we do know, gives a quietness to the mind, which resembles the satisfaction of conscience. The Ppen honesty of Pestalozzi, that honesty carried into the sphere of the understanding, and which deals with ideas as scrupulously as with men, is the principal merit of his school. It is by that means he assembles round him, men devoted to the welfare of the children, in a manner perfectly disinterested. When, in a public establishment, none of the selfish calculations of the principals are answered, we must seek the spring which sets that establishment in motion, in their love of virtue: the enjoyments which it affords are alone sufficient, without either riches or power. We should not imitate the institution of Pestalozzi, merely by carrying his method of instruction to other places; it would be necessary also to establish with it the same perseverance in the masters, the same simplicity in the scholars, the same 60

130 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. regularity in their manner of life, and, above all, the religious sentiments which animate that school. The forms of worship are not followed there with more exactness than elsewhere; but every thing is transacted in the name of the Deity-in the name of that sentiment, noble, elevated, and pure, which is the habitual religion of the heart. Truth, goodness, confidence, affection, surround the children; it is in that atmosphere they live; and, for a time at least, they remain strangers to all the hateful passions, to all the proud prejudices of the world. An eloquent philosopher (Fichte) said, that he " expected the regeneration of the German nation, from the institution of Pestalozzi." It must be owned that a revolution founded on such means would be neither violent nor rapid; for education, however excellent, is nothing in comparison with the influence of public events. Instruction penetrates the rock, drop by drop, but the torrent carries it off in a day. We must, above all, render homage to Pestalozzi, for the care he has taken to place his institution within the reach oI persons without fortune, by reducing his terms as much as possible. He is constantly occupied with the poorer classes, and wishes to secure for them the benefit of pure light and solid instruction. In this respect, the works of Pestalozzi form a very curious kind of reading. He has written tales, in which the situations in life of the common people are depicted with a degree of interest, truth, and morality, which is admirable. The sentiments which he expresses in his writings are, thus to speak, as elementary as the principles of his method. We are astonished to find ourselves shedding tears over a word, a narration so simple, even so vulgar, that the warmth of our emotions alone gives it consequence. People belonging to the lower classes of society are of an intermediate state between savages and men of civilized life; when they are virtuous, they have a kind of innocence and goodness which cannot be met with in the great world. Society weighs heavily upon them; they struggle with nature, and their confidence in God is more animated and more constant than that of the rich. Inces Fantly threatened with misfortunes, having constantly recourse

INSTITUTIONS FOR EDUCATION. 131 to prayer, anxious all the day, and preserved every night, the poor feel themselves under the immediate hand of Him who protects those who are abandoned by mankind; and their integrity, when they have any, is singularly scrupulous. I recollect, in a tale of Pestalozzi's, the restitution of some potatoes by a child who had stolen them: his dying grandmother orders him to carry them back to the owner of the garden from whence he took them, and this scene affects us to the heart. This poor crime, if I may so call it, causing such remorse; the awfulness of death amid all the miseries of life; old age and childhood drawn together by the voice of God, which speaks equally to each of them;-all this is painful, very painful; for, in our poetic fictions, the pomp and splendor of destiny relieve us a little from the pity occasioned by its reverses; but we fancy we perceive, in these popular tales, a feeble lamp enlightening a small cottage, and goodness of soul springing forth in the midst of all the afflictions by which it is tried. As the art of drawing is to be considered as a useful art, it may be said, that among those which are merely pleasing, the only one introduced into the school of Pestalozzi is music, and we should praise him also for the choice of it. There is a whole order of sentiments, I might say a whole order of virtues, which belong to the knowledge of, or at least to the taste for, music; and it is great barbarity to deprive a numerous portion of the human race -of such impressions. The ancients pretended that nations had been civilized by music, and this allegory has a deep meaning; for we must always suppose that the bond of society was formed either by sympathy or interest, and certainly the first origin is more noble than the other. Pestalozzi is not the only person in Germanic Switzerland who is zealously occupied in cultivating the minds of the commonl people: in this respect I was much struck with the establishment of M. de Fellemberg. Many people came to it tc acquire new light on the subject of agriculture, and it is said that, in this respect, they have had reason to be satisfied; but

132 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. what principally deserves the esteem of the friends of human ity, is the care which M. de Fellemberg takes of the education of the lower classes; he causes village schoolmasters to be taught according to Pestalozzi's method, that they may in their turn teach children. The laborers, who cultivate his groinds, learn psalm tunes, and the praises of God will soon be heaid in the country, sung by simple, but harmonious voices, twhrich will celebrate at once both nature and its Author. In short, M. de Fellemberg endeavors by every possible means to form, between the inferior class and our own, a liberal tie-a tie which shall not be founded merely on the pecuniary interests of the rich and the poor. We learn from the examples of England and of America, that free institutions are found sufficient to develop the faculties and understandings of the people; but it is a step further to give them more than the instruction which is necessary to them. There is something revolting in the necessary, when it is measured out by those who possess the superfluous. It is not enough to be occupied in promoting the welfare of the lower classes with a view to usefulness only; they must also participate in the enjoyments of the imagination and the heart. It is in this spirit that some enlightened philanthropists have taken up the subject of mendicity at Hamburg. Neither despotism nor speculative economy have any place in their charitable institutions. It was their wish that the unfortunate objects of their care should themselves desire the labor which was expected from them, as much as the benefactions which were granted them. As the welfare of the poor was not with them a means, but an end, they have not ordered them employment, but have made them desire it. We constantly see in the different accounts rendered of those charitable institutions, that the object of their founders was much more to render men better than to make them more useful;' and it is this 1 "The charitable institutions of Hamburg are on a very munificen; gcale. The Orphan Asylum (Waisenhaus) provides for six hundred chil

CHARITABLE ESTABLISHMENTS. 133 high, philosophical point of view, that characterizes the spirit of wisdom and liberty which reigns in this ancient Hanseatic city. There is much real beneficence in the world, and he who is not capable of serving his fellow-creatures by the sacrifice of his time and of his inclinations, voluntarily contributes to their welfare with money: this is still something, and no virtue is to be disdained. But, in most countries, the great mass of private alms is not wisely directed; and one of the most eminent services which Baron Voght and his excellent countrymen have rendered to the cause of humanity, is that of showing, that without new sacrifices, without the intervention of the State, private beneficence is alone sufficient for the relief of the unfortunate. That which is effected by individuals is particularly suited to Germany, where every thing taken separately is better than the whole together. Charitable institutions ought indeed to prosper in the city of Hamburg. There is so much morality among its inhabit: ants, that for a time they paid their taxes into a sort of trunk without any persons seeing what they brought; these taxes were to be proportioned to the fortune of each individual, and when the calculation was made, they were always found to be scrupulously paid. Might we not believe that we were relating a circumstance belonging to the golden age, if in that golden age there had been private riches and public taxes? We cannot sufficiently admire how easy all things relating to instruction as well as to administration are rendered by honesty and integrity. We ought to grant them all the honors which dexdren, who are received as infants, reared, educated, and bound apprentices to some useful trade. The Great Hospital (Krankenhaus), in the suburb of Saint George, is capable of containing from four thousand to five thousand sick. The yearly cost of supporting this admirable institution is nearly ~17,000. Its utility is not confined to the poor alone, as even persons ot,he higher classes resort to the hospital to avail themselves of the advan-,ages of the excellent medical treatment which they may here obtain. Suck patients are admitted as lodgers, on payment of a sum varying from eight pence to eight shillings a day." —(furray's Hand-book qf Northern Gerinanry, p. 322.) —d.

134 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. terity usually obtains; for in the end they succeed better even in the affairs of this world.' 1 We here add, from a competent hand, a summary of the present intellectual condition of Germany. " In respect of mental cultivation, the German nation stands in a high rank; and according to Professor Berghaus it may be said without vanity that Germany stands on the highest step of the ladder of civilization. In no country of Europe, he continues, are education and true enlightenment so generally spread over all classes of society, from the richest to the poorest, as in his fatherland. This result has been brought about only in recent times, and it is ascribed to the unceasing exertions of the State governments to free their people from the darkness of ignorance and superstition. There is not a village in Germany that has not its school to spread intelligence among its people. " For the purposes of education there are, especially in Protestant Germany, numerous schools or institutions for elementary instruction in all the towns, for both the higher and the working classes. For the higher civic professions and employments, there are real professional and commercial schools, seminaries for the training of schoolmasters, gymnasiums and lyceums for the higher branches of education, and for the highest of all, there are twenty-three universities, to which may be added the German University of Kmnlgsberg, in East Prussia, making in all twenty-four. The institutions preparatory for the universities are the gymnasia, in which the educational course consists chiefly of classical studies, that is to say, Greek and Latin, with French, mathematics, and a considerable portion of the natural sciences. The basis of their constitution lies in remote times, and there have been but few and slight alterations in their plans of study since the beginning of the present century. Owing, however, to the smallness of the emoluments, and the consequent low estimation in which the office of teacher is held, there is not a sufficient number of qualified competitors to supply the vacancies that occur. The government has been obliged in consequence to raise their emoluments, and thereby obviate this increasing evil. " A more recent class of institutions are the real-schulen (or high townschools), in which Latin is the only ancient language taught, the other branches being modern languages, especially Fren6h and English, mathematics, and natural philosophy. These schools have for a long time enjoyed much approval as preparatory institutions for many departments of civil life. Industrial schools are of still more recent origin. They have been established by government in the larger towns of every province; the one half of the expense of maintaining them being defrayed by.he government, and the other half by the municipality. Their purpose s purely industrial; drawing, mechanics, mathematics, physics, and chem-,stry, are the subjects taught; languages are excluded. " The following table contains the names of the twenty-four universities; the dates of their respective foundations; the number of professors and other teachers' tne number of students that attended them dur.

THE FETE OF INTERLACHEN. 135 THE FETE OF INTERLACHEN. WE must attribute to the German character a great part ot the virtues of Germanic Switzerland. There is, nevertheless, more public spirit in Switzerland than in Germany, more patriotism, more energy, more harmony in opinions and sentimyg the winter session of 1853-4, and the numbers that attended each branch:NUMBER OF DATES OF PROFESSORS NUMBER OF NAMES. FOUNDATION. AND STUDENTS. TEACHERS. Berlin.................. 1810 173 2,204 Bonn.. 1818 87 888 Breslau. 1702.. 96 789 Erlangen 1743 48 479 Freiburg.. 1457 1.376 Giessen...... 1607 58 380 G6ttingen.. 1737 111 699 Grtz.............. 156 29 429 Greifswald............ ] 1456 54 222 Halle.............. 1694 71 650 Heidelberg 1386 87 718 Jena..1557 69 380 InAsprtsck...... 18673 22 278 Kiel............ 1655 42 142 Kinigsberg...... 1553 34 326 Leipzlg........... 1409 113 807 Mlarburg.......... 1527 61 268 Munich............... 1826 98 1,810 [ 1581 [ OlmLtz................. 1827 18 203 Prague.........1348 88 1,415 Rostock........ 1419 31 111 Tibingen.......... 1477 81 742 Vienna............. 1365 113 2,614 Wfarzburg.. 1403 47 706 Totals.........1...... 1,697 17,636 The teachers consisted of the following classes, viz.-1. Ordinary proessors; 2. Extraordinary professors; 3. Honorary professors; 4. Privata

136 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. ments; but the smallness of the States, and the poverty of the country, do not in any degree excite genius; we find there much fewer learned or thinking men than in the north of Germany, where even the relaxation of political ties gives free. teachers or tutors; 5. Language and exercise masters. The students consisted of1. Students of Protestant theology....... 1692 2. " Roman Catholic theology..... 1606 3. " Law, statecraft, and forestry...... 6394 4. " Medicine, surgery, and pharmacy.... 3644 5.' Philosophy and philology.:..... 2592 6. " not matriculated.......... 1708 " In the matter of education, Prussia is the ruler and guide, and whatever is established or pursued in that kingdom comes sooner or later into operation in other States. Since the beginning of the present century, education has occupied the attention and received a new impulse at the hands of the other governments; but it is only since 1848 that the school organization of Prussia has been transplanted into the Austrian territory, where, however, it still continues to experience the opposition of the nobles and clergy. The ignorance which formerly prevailed among the lower classes has almost entirely vanished in Northern Germany at least, and there is no class in which scholarly culture and scientific attainments may not be expected. The constant care, however, and determination of the government to make all partakers of a certain amount of education, has made it seem necessary to constrain all parents by fines or other punishments to send their children to school. Peculiar attention is at present being paid to educational institutions, and the governments are seeking to reform them so as to prevent the recurrence or continuance of those evils that are believed to have flowed from them, and to have occasioned, in a great degree, if not entirely, the popular outburst in 1848. "' Mental cultivation and the general diffusion of knowledge are largely promoted by means of numerous public libraries, established in the capitals, the university towns, and other places. The most celebrated public libraries are those of Vienna, Berlin, G6ttingen, Munich, Dresden, Hamburg, Wolfenbiittel, Stuttgart, Frankfort-on-the-Maine, and Weimar. Besides the public ones, there are throughout Germany many private libraries of extraordinary richness in literary treasures of all kinds. There are also numerous societies and unions, among which the most distinguished are the Academies of Sciences at Berlin and Munich, and the Society of Sciences at Gattingen, which are state institutions. With scientific collections of all kinds, every place is richly provided, either at the public expense or by the favor of private persons. The observatories of Altona, Berlin, Breslau, Gbttingen, Mannheim, Munich, Prague, Seeberg near Gotha, Vienna, and Konigsberg in Prussia, are distinguished for the prolaotion of astronomy and other branches of physical science. The taste

THE FETE OF INTERLACHEN. 137 domn to all those noble reveries, those bold systems, which are not subjected to the nature of things. The Swiss are not a poetical nation, and we are with reason astonished that the beauties of their country should not have further inflamed their for astronomy is very great in Germany, as is evidenced by the existence of many private observatories, among which those of Olbers at Bremen, and of Beer near Berlin, are the most celebrated. In this department, Germany can boast of the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Herschel, Olbers, Bessel, and many others. " The fine arts likewise are carefully fostered. There are academies at Berlin, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Vienna, whose object it is to spread a taste for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, and to improve the technics of art. The taste for art has struck deep root among all the educated Germans, particularly in the north, and is directed and represented by three schools, those of Berlin, Dusseldorf, and Munich, which have produced some of the finest proofs of German genius. Besides the academies, there are numerous art-museums and collections of pictures and antiquities, particularly in Berlin, Cassel, Dresden, Munich, and Vienna. In sculpture, German genius has of late years greatly excelled, as in the works of Dannecker, Schwanthaler, and Kiss; and architecture has received the greatest encouragement in the erection of both public and private buildings of great magnificence, of which the late King of Bavaria showed the most munificent example in the embellishment of his capital Munich, and the erection of the German Valhalla, near Ratisbon, though the attempt to adapt the Grecian temple style, without regard to climate and other circumstances, to modern buildings, intended for very different purposes, has failed as completely there as it has everywhere else. " The activity of the German mind on the wide fields of art and science has, through the effect of general intercourse and exchange of ideas, produced a liveliness of which the Germans believe there is no parallel to be found in any other country of Europe. The German book-trade, in respect of the position it has gradually acquired since the Reformation, must be considered as a prime mover in the mental culture of Germany; while, in a material point of view, it has acquired an extent and importance elsewhere unknown. Thousands of people find in it employment and maintenance, as printers, type-founders, machine-makers, paper-makers, and bookbindero; and the productions of the press are spread all over Germany with the most marvellous rapidity. Leipzig is the central point of this important branch of industry. The general taste for the beautiful has had its effect on the art of printing, in requiring the use of fine, close, white taper, clear type, and elegant binding, instead of the gray-brown blottingpaper, and worn-out and broken type, that were formerly used. The periodical press is very active; but political discussion is not free. On political subjects, freedom of speech does not suit the German governients, and offences of this kind are very severely punished, as happened m 1854 with Gervinus in Baden. On religion, however, and philosophy

138 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. imagination. A religious and free people are at all times sus ceptible of enthusiasm, and the daily occupations of life cannot entirely subdue it.' If this could have been doubted, we might still be convinced of it by the pastoral f6te, which was last year celebrated in the midst of lakes, in memory of the founder of Berne. This city merits more than ever the respect and interest of traveller,: it appears since its last misfortunes to have resumed all its virtues with new ardor; and, while losing its treasures, has redoubled its beneficence towards the unfortunate. The charitable establishments in this place are perhaps the best attended to of any in Europe: the hospital is the finest, and indeed the only magnificent edifice in the city. On the gate is written this inscription: CHRISTO IN PAUPERIBUS. Nothing can be more admirable. Has not the Christian religion told us, that it was for those who suffered that Christ descended on the earth? And who among us is not in some period of his life, either in respect to his happiness or his hopes, one of those unfortunate beings who needs relief in the name of God? Every thing throughout the city and canton of Berne bears marks of calm, serious regularity, of a kind and paternal government. An air of probity is felt in every object which we perceive; we may believe ourselves in our own family while in the midst of two hundred thousand men, who, whether nobles, citizens, or peasants, are all equally devoted to their country. the utmost freedom of publication is allowed; and the effect has been almost to root out ancestral faith and dogmatic theology from the minds of most educated people, though of late years an evangelical reaction seems to have made, or to be making, considerable progress. The publication of Kalenders, which have been of late years vastly improved, is of much importance in the instruction of tl;e people. Almost every town in Germany has its own daily newspaper, and of these, five have acquired a European reputation, if not for the excellence, at least for the importance of their contents. These are the Austrian Observer and the Prussian State Gazette, the organs of their respective governments; the Hamburg Correfpondent, and the Augsburg and Leipzig General Gazettes. Of the number Df weekly newspapers and popular instructive publications, their name says Dr. Berghaus, is legion. The higher branches of learning and of art are equally well attended to by their respective journalists."-(Encyceopelia Britan.ica, article Germany.)-Ed.

THE FETE OF INTERLACHEN. 139 In going to the fete it was necessary to embark on one of those lakes which, reflecting all the beauties of nature, seemed placed at the foot of the Alps only to multiply their enchanting forms. A stormy sky deprived us of a distinct view of the mountains; but, half enveloped in clouds, they appeared the more awfully sublime. The storm increased; and, though a feeling of terror seized my soul, I even loved the thunderbolt of heaven which confounds the pride of man. We reposed ourselves for a moment in a kind of grotto, before we ventured to cross that part of the lake of Thun which is surrounded by inaccessible rocks. It was in such a place that William Tell braved the abyss, and clung to the rocks in escaping from his tyrants. We now perceived in the distance that mountain which bears the name of the Virgin (Jungfrau), because no traveller has ever been able to attain its summit; it is not so high as Mount Blanc, and yet it inspires more veneration, because we know that it is inaccessible. We arrived at Interlachen; and the sound of the Aar, which falls in cascades near this little town, disposed the soul to pensive reflection. A great number of strangers were lodged in the rustic but neat abodes of the peasants; it was striking enough to see, walking in the streets of Interlachen, young Parisians at once transported into the valleys of Switzerland. here they heard only the torrents, they saw only the mountains, and endeavored in these solitary regions to find means of tiring themselves sufficiently to return with renewed pleasure, to the world. Much has been said of an air played on the Alpine horn, which made so lively an impression on the Swiss, that when whey heard it they quitted their regiments to return to their country. We may imagine what effect this air must produce when repeated by the echoes of the mountains; but it should be heard resounding from a distance; when near, the sensation which it produces is not agreeable. If sung by Italian voices,,he imagination would be perfectly intoxicated with it; but perhaps this pleasure would give birth to ideas foreign to the simplicity of the country. We should wish for the arts, for

110 MADAME DE STAEL'S:GERMANY. poetry, for love, where we ought to content ourselves with the tranquillity of a country life. On the evening preceding the flte, fires were lighted on the mountains; thus it was that the deliverers of Switzerland formerly gave the signal of their holy conspiracy. These fires, placed on the heights, resembled the moon, when, rising behind the mountains, she displays herself at once brilliant and peaceful. It might almost have been thought that new stars appeared to lend their aid to the most affecting sight which this world could offer. One of these flaming signals seemed placed in the heavens, from whence it illumined the ruins of the castle of Unspunnen, formerly possessed by Berthold [Berchtold], the founder of Berne, in remembrance of whom this festival was given. Profound darkness encircled this bright object; and the mountains, which during the night resembled vast phantoms, seemed like the gigantic shades of the dead, whose memory we were then celebrating. On the day of the fete, the weather was mild, but cloudy; it seemed as if all nature responded to the tender emotions of every heart. The inclosure chosen for the games is surrounded by wooded hills, behind which mountains rise above each other as far as the sight can reach. All the spectators, to the number of nearly six thousand, seated themselves in rows on the declivity, and the varied colors of their dress looked at a distance like flowers scattered over the meadows. No festival could ever have worn a more smiling appearance; but when we raised our eyes, the rocks suspended above us seemed, like destiny, to threaten weak mortals in the midst of their pleasures. If there is, however, a joy of the soul so pure as to disarm even fate, it was then experienced. When the crowd of spectators was assembled, the procession of the festival was heard approaching from a distance-a procession which was in fact a solemn one, for it was devoted to the celebration of the past. It was accompanied with pleasing music; the magistrates appeared at the head of the peasants; the young girls were clothed in the ancient and

THE FETE OF INTERLACHEN. 141 picturesque costumes of their cantons; the halberts and the banners of each valley were carried in front by old men with white hair, and dressed in habits exactly similar to those worn five centuries ago, at the time of the conspiracy of the Rutli. The soul was filled with emotion on seeing these banners, now so peaceful, with the aged for their guardians. Days long past were represented by these men, old in comparison with ourselves, but when considered in reference to the lapse of ages, how young! There was an air of trust and reliance in all these feeble beings which was touching in the extreme, because it could only be inspired by the honesty of their souls. In the midst of our rejoicing, our eyes filled with tears, just as they are wont to do on those happy and yet melancholy days when we celebrate the convalescence of those whom we love. At last the games began; and the men of the valley, and those of the mountains, displayed, in lifting enormous iveights or in wrestling with one another, a degree of agility and strength of body which was very remarkable. This strength formerly rendered nations more military; now, in our days, when tactics and artillery determine the fate of armies, it is only to be seen in the games of husbandmen. The earth is better cultivated by men who are thus robust, but war cannot be made without the aid of discipline and of numbers; and even the emotions of the soul have less empire over human destiny, now that individuals have been sunk in communities, and that the human species seems, like inanimate nature, to be directed by mechanical laws. After the games were ended, and the good bailiff of the place had distributed the prizes to the victors, we dined under tents, and sung songs in honor of the tranquil happiness of the Swiss. During the repast, wooden cups were handed round, on which were carved William Tell, and the three founders of Helvetic liberty. With transport they drank to peace, to order, to independence; and the patriotism of happiness was ex pressed with a cordiality which penetrated every soul. " The meadows are as flowery as ever, the mountains as ver

142 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. dant: when all nature smiles, can the heart of man alone be a mere desert?"' No, most undoubtedly, it was not so; the soul expanded with confidence in the midst of this fine country, in the presence of these respectable men-all animated with the purest sentiments. A country, poor in itself, and narrow in extent, without luxury, without power, without lustre, is cherished by its inhabitants as a friend who conceals his virtues in the shade, and devotes them all to the happiness of those who love him. During the five centuries of prosperity which the Swiss have enjoyed, we may reckon wise generations rather than great men. There is no room for exceptions where all are thus happy. The ancestors of this nation may still be said to reign there, ever respected, imitated, revived in their descendants. Their simplicity of manners, and attachment to ancient customs, the wisdom and uniformity of their lives, recall the past and anticipate the future; a history which is always the same seems like a single moment, lasting through ages.2 These words were the refrain of a song, full of grace and talent, composed for this frte. The author is Madame Harmes, well known in Germany by her writings under the name of Madame de Berlepsch. 2 We cannot help adding here the following description of Swiss scenery, -perhaps the finest of the kind ever drawn by the hand of a great artist,from Goethe's M'ilhelm beister's Wanderjare: "He succeeds in represenlting the cheerful repose of lake prospects, where houses in friendly approximation, imaging themselves in the clear wave, seem as if bathing in its depths; shores encircled with green hills, behind which rise forest mountains, and icy peaks of glaciers. The tone of coloring in such scenes is gay, mirthfully clear; the distances as if overflowed with softening vapor, which from watered hollows and river valleys mounts up grayer and mistier, and indicates their windings. No less is the master's art to be praised mn views from valleys lying nearer the high Alpine ranges, where declivities slope down, luxuriantly overgrown, and fresh streams roll hastily along by the foot of rocks. "With exquisite skill, in the deep shady trees of the foreground, he gives the distinctive character of the several species, satisfying us in the form of the whole, as in the structure of the branches, and the details of the eaves; no less so in the fresh green with its manifold shadings, where soft airs appear as if fanning us with benignant breath, and the lights as it thereby put in motion. "' In the middle-ground, his lively green tone grows fainter by degrees

THE FETE OF INTERLACHEN. 143 Life flows on, in these valleys, like the rivers which run through them; new waves indeed appear, but they follow the same course: may they never be interrupted! May the same festival be often celebrated at the foot of the same mountains! May the stranger admire them as wonders, while the Helvetian cherishes them as an asylum, where magistrates and fathers watch together over citizens and children! and at last, oh the more distant mountain-tops, passing into weak violet, weds itself with the blue of the sky. But our artist is above all happy in his paintings of high Alpine regions; in seizing the simple greatness and stillness of their character; the wide pastures on the slopes, where darig, solitary firs stand forth from the grassy carpet; and from high cliffs, foaming brooks rush down. Whether he relieves his pasturages with grazing cattle, or the narrow winding rocky path with mules and laden pack-horses, he paints all with equal truth and richness; still, introduced in the proper place, and not in too great copiousness, they decorate and enliven these scenes, without interrupting, without lessening their peaceful solitude. The execution testifies a master's hand; easy, with a few sure strokes, and yet complete. In his later pieces, he employed glittering English permanent colors, on paper: these pictures, accordingly, are of pre-eminently blooming tone; cheerful, yet, at the same time, strong and sated. " His views of deep mountain chasms, where, round and round, nothing fronts us but dead rock, where, in the abyss, over-spanned by its bold arch, the wild stream rages, are, indeed, of less attraction than the former: yet their truth excites us; we admire the great effect of the whole, produced at so little cost, by a few expressive strokes and masses of local colors. " With no less accuracy of character can he represent the regions of the topmost Alpine ranges, where neither tree nor shrub any more appears; but only amid the rocky teeth and snow summits, a few sunny spots clothe themselves with a soft sward. Beautiful, and balmy, and inviting as he colors these spots, he has here wisely forborne to introduce grazing herds; for these regions give food only to the chamois, and a perilous employment to the wild-hay-men."'-Ed. 2 "The poor wild-hay-man of the Rigiberg, Whose trade is, on the brow of the abyss, To mow the common grass from nooks and shelves, To which the cattle dare not climb." ScHILLEr's Wilhelm TeW

PART II, ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. CHAPTER I. WHY ARE THE FRENCH UNJUST TO GERMAN LITERATURE! I MIGHT answer this question in a very simple manner, by saying'that very few yeople in France are acquainted with the German language, and that its beauties, above all in poetry, cannot be translated into French. The Teutonic languages are easily translated into each other; it is the same with the.Latin languages; but these cannot give a just idea of German poetry. Music composed for one instrument is not executed with success on another of a different sort. Besides, German literature has scarcely existed in all its originality more than forty or fifty years; and the French, for the last twenty years, have been so absorbed in political events, that all their literary studies have been suspended. It would, however, be treating the question very superficially, merely to say that the French are unjust to German literature because they are ignorant of it: they have, it is true, stronfgE~di ck ainst it; but these prejudices arise from a confused sentiment of the wide difference, both in the manner of seeing and feeling, which exists between the two nations. In Germany there is no standard of taste on any one sub. ject; all'is indepenicent, all iiS indvi;dual. T.ey JudT eof ta work by the impression it makes, and never by any rule, because no rule is generally admitted; every author is at liberty VOL. I. —

146 MADAME DE STAELS8 GERMANY. to form a new sphere for himself. In France, the greater number of readers will neither be affected, nor even amused, at the expense of their literary conscience: their scruple therein finds a refuge. A German author forms his own publie; in France the public commands authors. As in France there are more people of cultivated minds than there are in Germany, the public exacts much more; while the German writers, eminently raised above their judges, govern instead of receiving the law from them. From thence it happens that their writers are scarcely ever improved by criticism: the impatience of the readers, or that of the spectators, never obliges them to shorten their works, and they scarcely ever stop in proper time, because an author, being seldom weary of his own conceptions, can be informed only by others when they cease to be interesting. From self-love, the French think and live in the opinions of others; and we perceive in the greater part of their works that their principal end is not the subject they treat, but the effect they produce. The French writers are always in the midst of society, even when they are composing; for they never lose sight of the opinion, raillery, and taste then in fashion, or, in other words, the literary authority under which we live at such or such a time. The first requisite in writing is a strong and lively manner of feeling. Persons who study in others what they ought to experience themselves, and what they are permitted to say, with respect to literature have really no existence. Doubtless, our writers of genius (and what nation possesses more of these than France?) have subjected themselves only to those ties which were not prejudicial to their originality; but we must compare the two countries en masse, and at the present time, to know from whence arises their difficulty of understanding each other. In France they scarcely ever read a work but to furnish matter for conversation; in Germany, where people live almost alone, the work itself musty; and what me ttse ociety can we form with a book, which should itself be only the echo of society I In the silence of retreat,

GERMAN LITERATURE. 14: nothing seems more melancholy than the spirit of the world, The solq!itary man needs an internal emotion which shall compensatefor the wantof exterior excitement. Perspicuity is in France one of the first merits of a writer; for the first object of a reader is to give himself no trouble, but to catch, by running over a few pages in the morning, what will enable him to shine in conversation in the evening. The Germans, on the contrary, know that perspicuity can never have more than a relative merit: a book is clear according to the subject and according to the reader. Montesquieu cannot be so easily understood as Voltaire, and nevertheless he is as clear as the object of his meditations will permit. Without doubt, clearness should accompany depth of thought; but those who confine themselves only to the graces of wit and the play on words, are much more sure of being understood. They have nothing to do with mystery,-why then should they be obscure? The Germans, through an opposite defect, take pleasure in darkness; they_geftn. orap.n obscurity what was before clear, rather than follow the baten.road; they have such a disgust for common ideas, that when they find themselves obliged to recur to them, they surround them with abstract metaphysics, which give them an air of novelty till they are found out. German writers are under no restraint with their readers; their works being received and commented apon as oracles, they may envelop them with as many clouds as they like: patience is never wanting- to draw these clouds aside; but it is necessary, at length, to discover a divinity; for what the Germans can least support, is to see their expectations deceived: their efforts and their perseverance render some great conclusion needful. If no new or strong thoughts are discovered in a book, it is soor disdained; and if all is pardoned in behalf of superior talent, they scarcely know how to appreciate the various kinds of address displayed in endeavoring to supply the want of it. The prose of the Germans is often too much neglected. They attach more importance to styleq inFrance than in.Gernany; it is a natural consequence of the interest excited by

L48 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. words, and the value they must acquire in a country where society is the first object. Every man with a little understanding is a judge of the justness or suitableness of such and such a phrase, while it requires much attention and study to take in the whole compass and connection of a book. Besides, pleasantries find expressions much sooner than thoughts, and in all that depends on words only, we laugh before we reflect. It must be agreed, nevertheless, that beauty of style is not merely an external advantage, for true sentiments almost always inspire the most noble and just expressions; and if we are allowed to be indulgent to the style of a philosophical writing, we ought not to be so to that of a literary composition: in the sphere of the fine arts, the form in which a subject is presented to us is as essential to the mind as the subject itself. The dramatic art offers a striking example of the distinct faculties of the two nations. All that relates to action, to intrigue, to the interest of events, is a thousand times better combined, a thousand times better conceived among the French; all that depends on the development of the impressions of the heart, on the secret storms of strong passion, is much better investigated among the Germans. In order to attain the highest point of perfection in either country, it would be necessary for the Frenchman to be religious, and the German more a man of the world. Piety opposes itself to levity of mind], which is the jdefect _ _the grace of the French nation; the knowledge of men, and of society, would give to the Germans that taste and facility in literature which is at present wanting to them. The writers of the two countries are unjust to each other: the French, nevertheless, are more guilty in this respect than the Germans; they judge without knowing the subject, and examine after they have decided: the Germans are more impartial. Extensive knowledge presents to us so many different ways of be. holding the same object, that it imparts to the mind the spirit of toleration which springs from universality.

GERMAN LITERATURE. 149 The French would, however, gain more by comprehending german genius, than the Germans would in subjecting themselves to the good taste of the French. In our days, whenever a little foreign leaven has been allowed to mix itself with French regularity, the French have themselves applauded it with delight. J. J. Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Chateaubriand, etc., are, in some of their works, even unknown to themselves, of the German school; that is to say, they draw their talent only out of the internal sources of the soul. But if German writers were to be disciplined according to the prohibitory laws of French literature, they would not know how to steer amid the quicksands that would be pointed out to them; they would regret the open sea, and their minds would be much more disturbed than enlightened. It does not follow that they ought to hazard all, and that they would do wrong in sometimes imposing limits on themselves; but it is of consequence to them to be placed according to their own modes of perception. In order to induce them to adopt certain necessary restrictions, we must recur to the principle of those restrictions without employing the authority of ridicule, whichis always highly offensive to them. Men of genius in all countries are formed to understand and esteem each other; but the vulgar class of writers and readers, whether German or French, bring to our recollection that fable of La Fontaine, where the stork cannot eat in the dish, nor the fox in the bottle. The most complete contrast is perceived between minds developed in solitude, and those formed by society. Impressions from external objects, and the inward recollections of the soul, the knowledge of men and abstract ideas, action and theory, yield conclusions totally opposite to each pther. The literature, the arts, the philosophy, the religion of these two nations, attest this difference; and the eternal boundary of the Rhine separates two intellectual regions, which, no less than the two countries, are foreign to each other.

150 CBMADAME DE STAEL'8 GERMANY CHAPTER II. 3) THE JUDGMENT FORMED BY THE ENGLISH ON THE SUBJECT OF GERMAN LITERATURE. GERMAN literature is much better known in England than in France.' In England, the foreign languages are more studied, and the Germans are more naturally connected with the English, than with the French; nevertheless, prejudices exist even in England, both against the philosophy and the literature of Germany. It may be interestinug to examine the cause of them. The minds of the people of England are not formed by a taste for society, by the pleasure and interest excited by conversation. Business, parliament, the administration, fill all heads, and political interests are the principal objects of their meditations. The English wish to discover consequences immediately applicable to every subject, and from thence arises their dislike of a philosophy, which has for its object the beautiful rather than the useful. The English, it is true, do not separate dignity from utility, and they are always ready, when it is necessary, to sacrifice the useful to the honorable; but they are not of those, who, as it is said in Hamlet, "-with the incorporal air do hold discourse "-a sort of conversation of which the Germans are very fond. The philosophy of the English is directed towards rebults beneficial to the cause of humanity: the Germans pursue truth for its own sake, without thinking on the advantages which m ienmay deri4-e from it. The nature of their different governments having offered them no great or splendid oppor It is now much better known in both countries than when Madame do 1tael wrote.-Ed.

GERMAN LITERATURE. 151 Lunity of attaining glory, or of serving their country, they at. tach themselves to contemplation of every kind; and, to indulge it, seek in heaven that space which their limited destiny denies to them on earth. Thetkt ae__easure in the ideal, because there is nothing in the actual state of things which speaks to their imagination. The English, with reason, pride themiselves in all they possess, in all they are, and in all that they may become; they place their admiration and love on their laws, their manners, and their forms of worship. These noble sentiments give to the soul more strength and energy; but thought, perhaps, takes a bolder flight, when it has neither limit nor determinate aim, and when incessantly connecting itself with the immense and the infinite, no interest brings it back to the affairs of this world. Whenever an idea is consolidated, or, in other words, when it is changed into effect, nothing can be better than to examine attentively its consequences and conclusions, and then to circumscribe and fix them; but when it is merely in theory, it should be considered in itself alone. Neither practice nor utility are the objects of inquiry; and the pursuit of truth in philosophy, like imagination in poetry, should be free from all restraint. The Germans are to the human mind what pioneers are to an army: they try new roads, they try unknown means: how can we avoid being curious to know what they say on their return from their excursions into the infinite? The English, who have so much originality of character, have nevertheless generally a dread of new systems. Justness of thought has been so beneficial to them in the affairs of life, that they like to discover it even in intellectual studies; and yet it is in these that boldness is inseparable from genius. Genius, provided it respect religion and morality, should be free to take any flight it chooses: it aggrandizes the empire of thought. Literature, in Germany, is so impressed with the reigning philosophy, that the repugnance felt for the one will influence the judgment we form of the other. The English have, however, for some time, translated the German poets with pleasure,

152 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. and do not fail to perceive that analogy which ought to result from one common origin. There is more sensibility in the English poetry, and more imamnation in that of Germany. Domestic affections holding great sway over the hearts of the English, their poetry is impressed with the delicacy and permanency of those affections: the Germans, more independent in all things, because thevy:bcar the impress of no oh institution, paint sentiments as well as ideas through a cloud: it might be saiid that'thle universe vacillates before their eyes; and even, by the uncertainty of their sight, those objects are multiplied, which their talent renders useful to its own purposes. The principle of terror, which is employed as one of the great means in German poetry, has less ascendency over the imagination of the English in our days. They describe nature with enthusiasm, but it no longer acts as a formidable power which incloses phantoms and presages within its breast; and holds, in modern times, the place held by destiny among the ancients. Imagination in England is almost always inspired by sensibility; the imaginations of the Germans is sometimes rude and wild: the religion of England is more austere, that of Germany more vague; and the poetry of the two nations must necessarily bear the impression of their religious sentiments. In England conformity to rule does not reign in the arts, as it does in France; nevertheless, public opinion holds a greater sway there than in Germany. National unity is the cause of it. The English wish, in all things, to make principles and actions accord with each other. Theirs is a wise and well-regulated nation, which comprises glory in wisdom, and liberty in order: the Germans, with whom these are only sub-;ects of reverie, have examined ideas independent of their application, and have thus attained a higher elevation in theory. It will appear strange, that the present men of literature in Germany, have shown themselves more averse than the English to the introduction of philosophical reflections in poetry. It is true, that men of the highest genius in English literature, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden in his Odes, etc., a-e poets, who

GERMAN LITERATURE. 153 do not give themselves up to a spirit of argumentation; but Pope, and many others, must be considered as didactic poets and moralists. The Germans have renewed their youth, the English are become mature.' The Germans profess a doctrine which tends to revive enthusiasm in the arts as well as in philosophy, and they will merit applause if they succeed; for this age lays restraints also on them, and there was never a period in which there existed a greater inclination to despise all that is merely beautiful; none in which the most common of all questions, What is it good for? has been more frequently repeated. CHAPTER III. OF THE PRINCIPAL EPOCHS OF GERMAN LITERATURE. GERMAN literature has never had what we are accustomed to call a golden age; that is, a period in which the progress of le'trrs" is encouraged by the protection of the sovereign power. Leo X, in Italy, Louis XIV, in France, and, in ancient times, Pericles and Augustus, have given their names to the age in which they lived. We may also consider the reign of Queen Anne as the most brilliant epoch of English literature; but this nation, which exists by its own powers has never owed its great men to the influence of its kings. Germany was.divided; in Austria no love of literature was discovered, and in Frederick II (who was'all Prussiatinh-ims-eIf'ailo6ne), no interest whatever for German writers. Literature, in Germany, has then never been concentrated to one point, and has never found support in the State. Perhaps it owes to this 1 The English poets of our times, without entering into concert with the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry has given place to the fictions of the middle ages, to the emnurpled colors of the East;,easoning, and eloquence itself, are not sufficient to an essentially creative art.

1054 MADAME DE STAEL'8 GERMANY. t~bandonmcnt, as well as to the independence consequent on it, much of its originality and energy. " We have seen poetry," says Schiller, " despised by Frederick, the favored son of his country, fly from the powerful throne which reffsed to protect it; but it still dared to call itself German; it felt proud in being itself the creator of its own glory. The songs of German bards, resounded on the summits of the mountain, were precipitated as torrents into the valleys; the poet, independent, acknowledged no law, save the impressions of his own soul —no sovereign, but his own genius." It naturally followed from the want of encouragement given hy government to men of literary talent in Germany, that their attempts were made privately and individually in different directions and that they arrived late at the truly remarkable period of their literature. The German language, for a thousand years, was at first cultivated by monks, then by knights, and afterwards by artisans, such as Hans-Sachs, Sebastian Brand, and others, down to the period of the Reformation; and latterly, by learned men, who have rendered it a language well adapted to all the subtleties of thought. In examining the works of which German literature is composed, we find, according to the genius of the author, traces of these different modes of culture; as we see in mountains strata of the various minerals which the revolutions of the earth have deposited in them. The style changes its nature almost entirely, according to the writer; and it is necessary for foreigners to make a new study of every new book which they wishto understand. The Germans, like the greater part of the nations of Europe in the times of chivalry, had also their troubadours and warriors, who sung of love and of battles. An epic poem has lately been discovered, called the Nibelu'ngen Lied, which was composed in the thirteenth century; we see in it the heroism Pind fidelity which distinguished the men of those tinies, when all was as true, strong, and determinate, as the primitive colors

GERMAN LITERATURE. 155 of nature. The German, in this poem, is more clear and simple than it is at present: general ideas were not yet introduced into it, and traits of character only are narrated. The German nation might then have been considered as the most warlike of all European nations, and its ancient traditions speak only of castles and beautiful mistresses, to whom they devoted their lives. When Maximilian endeavored at a later period to re, vive chivalry, the human mind no longer possessed that tendency; and those religious disputes had already commenced, which direct thought towards metaphysics, and place the strength of the soul rather in opinions than in actions.' 1 The unknown Singer of the Nibelungen, though no Shakspeare, must have had a deep poetic soul; wherein things discontinuous and inanimate shaped themselves together into life, and the Universe with its wondrous purport stood significantly imaged; over-arching, as with heavenly firmaments and eternal harmonies, the little scene where men strut and fret their hour. His Poem, unlike so many old and new pretenders to that name, has a basis and organic structure, a beginning, middle, and end; there is one great principle and idea set forth in it, round which all its multifarious parts combine in living union. remarkable it is, moreover, how long with this essence and primary condition of all poetic virtue, the minor external virtues of what we call Taste, and so forth, are, as it were, presupposed; and the living soul of Poetry being there, its body of incidents, its garment of language, come of their own accord.... With an instinctive art, far different from acquired artifice, this Poet of the Nibelungen, working in the same province with his contemporaries of the Heldenbuch, on the same material of tradition, has, in a wonderful degree, possessed himself of what these could only strive after; and with his'clear feeling of fictitious truth' avoided as false the errors and monstrous perplexities in which they vainly struggled.... The language of the Heldenbuch was a feeble half-articulate child's speech, the metre nothing better than a miserable doggerel; whereas here in the old Frankish (Oberdutsch) dialect of the Nibelungen, we have a clear decisive utterance, and in a real system of verse, not without essential tegularity, great liveliness, and now and then even harmony of rhythm. Doubtless we must often call it a diffuse diluted utterance; at the same time it is genuine, with a certain antique garrulous heartiness, and has a rhythm in the thoughts as well as the words. The simplicity is never silly, even in that perpetual Recurrence of epithets, sometimes of rhymes, as where two words, for in-,tance lib (body, life leib) and wip (woman, wife, weip) are indissolubly wedded together, and the one never shows itself without the other followmg —there is something which reminds us not so much of poverty, as of rustfulness and childlike innocence. Indeed a strange charm lies in those,ld tones, where, in gay dancing melodies, the sternest tidings are sung to

156 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Luther essentially improved his language by making it subservient to theological discussion: his translation of the Psalms and the Bible is still a fine specimen of it. The poetical truth and conciseness which he gives to his style, are, in all respects, conformable to the genius of the German language, and even the sound of the words has an indescribable sort of energetic frankness, on which we with confidence rely. The political and religions wars, which the Germans had the misfortune to wage with each other, withdrew the minds of men from literature; and when it was again resumed, it was under the auspices of the age of Louis XIV, at the period in which the desire of imitating the French pervaded almost all the courts and writers of Europe. The works of Hagedorn, of Gellert, of Weiss, etc., were only heavy French, nothing original, nothing conformable to the natural genius of the nation. Those authors endeavored to attain French grace without being inspired with it, either by their habits or their modes of life. They subjected themselves to rule, without having either the elegance or taste which may render even that despotism agreeable. Another school soon succeeded that of the French, and it was in Germanic Switzerland that it was erected: this school was at first us; and deep floods of Sadness and Strife play lightly in little curling billows, like seas in summer. It is as a meek smile, in whose still, thoughtful depths a whole infinitude of patience, and love, and heroic strength lie revealed."-(Carlyle's YEssays, 8vo edition, p. 249.)-Ed. I "Utz, Gellert, Cramer, Ramler, Kleist, Hagedorn, Rabener, Gleim, and a multitude of lesser men, whatever excellences they might want, certainly are not chargeable with bad taste. Nay, perhaps of all writers they are the least chargeable with it: a certain clear, light, unaffected elegance, of a higher nature than French elegance, it might be, yet to the exclusion of all very deep or genial qualities, was the excellence they strove after, and for the most part, in a fair measure attained. They resemble English writers of the same, or perhaps an earlier period, more than any other foreigners: apart from Pope, whose influence is visible enough, Beattie, Logan, Wilkie, Glover, unknown perhaps to any of them, might otherwise have almost teemed their models. Goldsmith also would rank among them; perhaps, in regard to true poetic genius, at their head, for none of them has left us a Vicar of Wakefield; though, in regard to judgment, knowledge, genera, talent, his place would scarcely be so high."-(Ibid.) p. 23.)-Ed.

CGERMAN LIrERATURE. 157T founded on an imitation of English writers. Bodmer, supported by the example of the great Haller, endeavored to show, that English literature agreed better with the German genius than that of France. Gottsched,' a learned man, without taste or genius, contested this opinion, and great light sprung from the dispute between these two schools. Some men then began to strike out a new road for themselves. Klopstock held the highest place in the English school, as Wieland did in that of the French; but Klopstock opened a new career for his succe-sors, while Wieland was at once the first and the last of the French school in the eighteenth century. The first, because no other could equal him in that kind of writing, and the last, because after him the German writers pursued a path widely different. As there still exist in all the Teutonic nations some sparks of that sacred fire, which is again smothered by the ashes of time, Klopstock, at first imitating the English, succeeded at last in awakening the imagination and character peculiar to the Germans; and almost at the same moment, Winckelmann in the arts, Lessing in criticism, and Goethe in poetry, founded a true German school, if we may so call that which admits of as many differences as there are individuals or varieties of talent. I shall examine separately, poetry, the dramatic art, novels, and history; but every man of genius constituting, it may be said, a separate school in Germany, it appears to me necessary to begin by pointing out some of the principal traits which distinguish each writer individually, and by personally characterizing their most celebrated men of literature, before I set about analyzing their works. 1 " 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 t was like Night, in rayless majesty, and over a slumbering people. They awoke, before his death, and hurled him, perhaps too indignantly, into his native byss.".-(Carlyle's Essays, 8vo edition, p. 18.)-Ed.

158 MADAME DE STAELUS GERMAYNV CHAPTER IV. WIELAND. OF all the Germans who have written after the French m nner, Wieland is the only one whose works have genius; and although he has almost always imitated the literature of foreign countries, we cannot avoid acknowledging the great services he has rendered to that of his own nation, by improving its language, and giving it a versification more flowing and harmonious. There was already in Germany a crowd of writers, who endeavored to follow the traces of French literature, such as it was in the age of Louis XIV. Wieland is the first who introduced, with success, that of the eighteenth century. In his prose writings he bears some resemblance to Voltaire, and in his poetry to Ariosto; but these resemblances, which are voluntary on his part, do not prevent him from being by nature completely German. Wieland is infinitely better informed than Voltaire; he has studied the ancients with more erudition than has been done by any poet in France. Neither the defects, nor the powers of Wieland allow him to give to his writings any portion of the French lightness and grace. In his philosophical novels, Agathon and Peregrinus Proteus, he begins very soon with analysis, discussion, and metaphysics. He considers it as a duty to mix with them passages which we commonly call flowery; but we are sensible that his natural disposition would lead him to fathom all the depths of the subject which he endeavors to treat. In the novels of Wieland(, seriousness and gayety are both too decidedly expressed ever to blend with each other; for, in all things, though contrasts are striking, contrary extremes are wearisome. In order to imitate Voltaire, it is necessary to possess a sap

WIELAND. 159 castic and philosophical irony, which renders us careless of every thing, except a poignant manner of expressing that irony. A German can never attain that brilliant freedom of pleasantry; he is too much attached to truth, he wishes to know and to explain what things are, and even when he adopts reprehensible opinions, a secret repentance slackens his pace in spite of himself. The Epicurean philosophy does not suit the German mind; they give to that philosophy a dogmatical character, while in reality it is seductive only when it presents itself under light and airy forms: as soon as you invest it with principles it is equally displeasing to all. The poetical works of Wieland have much more grace and originality than his prose writings. Oberon and the other poems, of which I shall speak separately, are charming, and full of imagination. Wieland has, however, been reproached for having treated the subject of love with too little severity, and he is naturally thus condemned by his own countrymen, who still respect women a little after the manner of their ancestors; but whatever may have been the wanderings of imagination which Wieland allowed himself, we cannot avoid acknowledging in him a large portion of true sensibility: he has often had a good or bad intention of jesting on the subject of love; but his disposition, naturally serious, prevents him from giving himself boldly up to it. He resembles that prophet who found himself obliged to bless where he wished to curse, and he ends in tenderness what was begun in irony. In our intercourse with Wieland we are charmed, precisely because his natural qualities are in opposition to his philosophy. This disagreement might be prejudicial to him as a writer, but it renders him more attractive in society; he is animated, enthusiastic, and, like all men of genius, still young even in his old age; yet he wishes to be skeptical, and is impatient with those who Would employ his fine imagination in the establishment of his faith. Naturally benevolent, he is nevertheless susceptible of illnumor; sometimes, because he is not pleased with himself, and sometimes because he is not pleased with others: he is not

160 MADAME DE STAEL'S GFRMANY. pleased with himself, because he would willingly arrive at a degree of perfection in the manner of expressing his thoughts, of which neither words nor things are susceptible. He does not choose to satisfy himself with those indefinite terms, which perhaps agree better with the art of conversation than perfection itself: he is sometimes displeased with others, because his doctrine, which is a little relaxed, and his sentiments, which are highly exalted, are not always easily reconciled. He contains within himself a French poet and a German philosopher who are alternately angry with each other; but this anger is still very easy to bear; and his discourse, filled with ideas and knowledge, might supply many men of talent with a foundation for conversation of various sorts.' " Wieland, born in 1'33. early displayed the characteristics of his later years, and preluded to that fluctuating imitation which, throuph life, was his inspiration. He confessed that he could read lothing with delight which did not set him to work at imitating it; and all his works are imitative. He began his studies at three vears of age, and at seven, read CornIelius Nepos with enthusiasm. Between his twelfth and sixteenth vears he read all the Roman writers, with Voltaire, Fontenelle, and Bayle. Xenophon and Addison followed; and, in his seventeenth year, he wrote an imitation of Lucretius ( 1751 ), and played off Bayle and Leibnitz against Aristotle, to the delight of a public which had the sublime stupidity to accept hinm as the' German Lucretius.' The young Realist boldly proclaimed that happiness was the aim of Creation, the greatest psalm which could be suing in the Creator's glory. lie changed about, however, and passed over to the Pietists for a time; but the imitative tendency which led him thither, as readily led him away again to Xenophon, Anacrcon, Lucian, and the French. He stood in terror of Lessing; and his own disposition, also, moved him towards lighter, cheerfuller views of life. LessBig had mnade him acquainted with Shakspeare, and his prose translation of our greatest poet, which appeared in 1762'-66, was the best service he rendered his nation. "In 1762 Wieland was brought into contact with'good society' through Graf Stadion, and made acquaintance not only with the world, but with many English and French writers of the moral deistical school. who completed his emancipation frtom the. Pietists, and taught him how to write for' the world.' He became the favorite poet of good society. His tales and poenis were all animated with an Epicurean morality, and written with a certain lightness and grace (German lightness and German grace-they never lost the national character) which gradually passed from lightness into voluptuousness and obscenity,-qualities not less acseptable to the mass of his readers, in spite of the indignation they roused

KLOPSTOCK. 161 The new writers, who have excluded all foreign influence fiom German literature, have been often unjust to Wieland; it is he, whose works, even in a translation, have excited the interested of all Europe; it is he who has rendered the science of antiquity subservient to the charms of literature; it is he also, who, in verse, has given a musical and graceful flexibility to his fertile but rough language. It is nevertheless true, that his country would not be benefited by possessing many imita tors of his writings: national originality is a much better thing; and we ought to wish, even when we acknowledge Wieland to be a great master, that he may have no disciples. CHAPTER V. KLOPSTOCK. ZN Germany, there have been many more remarkable men of the English then of the French school. Among the writers formed by English literature, we must first reckon the admirable Haller, whose poetic genius served him so effectually, as a learned man, in inspiring hinm with the greatest enthusiasm for the beauties of nature, and the most extensive views of its various phenomena; Gessner, whose works are even more valin sterner circles. He appealed, indeed, piteously against his critics, from his lax writings to his nioral life, and wished they' could see hi m In his quiet domestic home; they would thenjudge otherwise of him.' In truth, his life was blameless, and he might, with Martial, have thrown the blaine of his writings on his readers:' Seria cum possim, quod delectantis malim Scribere; tu causa es, lector amice, mihi Qui legis et tota cantas mea carmina Roma.'.kt the same time of Goethe's appearance, Wieland was in his bad odor, as we have before noted; but he lived through it, and wrote his masterpiece, Oberon, when Goethe was with him in Weimar."-(G(. II. Lowesr' Qoethe's Life and Works, vol. i. p. 252.)-Ed.

162 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. ued in France than in Germany; Gleim, Ramler, etc., and above them all, Klopstock. His genius was inflamed by reading Milton and Young; but it was with him that the true German school first began. He expresses, in a very happy manner, in one of his odes, the emulation of the two Muses. THE TWO MUSES.' "I saw-oh I saw I what the present views? Saw I the future?-for, with eager soul, I saw the German with the British Muse Flying Impetuous to the goal. "Two goals before me did the prospect close, And crown'd the race: the oaks o'ershadow'd one With their deep verdure: round the other rose Tall palms beneath the evening sun. "Used to the strife, the Muse of Albion stept Proud to the lists: as on the burning sand With the Mfmonian once, and her who kept The Capitol, she took her stand. "Her younger rival panted as she came, Yet panted manly; and a crimson hue Kindled upon her cheek a noble flame; Her golden hair behind her flew. "She strove with laboring bosom to contain Her breath, and leant her forward to the prize. The Herald raised his trumpet, and the plain Swam like a dream before her eyes. "Proud of the bold One, of herself more proud, The Briton with her noble glance regards Thee, Tuiscon6:' Ha I! in that oak-wood I grew with thee among the Bards, "' But the fame reach'd me, that thou wert no more I O Muse, who livest while the ages roll, Forgive me that I learnt it not before: Now will I learn it at the goal 1 We adopt the version of Mr. Wm. Nind. Odes of Aopsto*k, Londoc 3S48, p. 97.-Ed.

KLOPSTOCK. 163 "' It stands before us. But the farther crown Seest thou beyond? That courage self-possess'd, That silence proud, and fiery look cast down, I know the meaning they confess'd. "' Yet weigh the hazard ere the herald sound! Was I not her competitor who fills Thermopylse with song: and hers renown'd Who reigns upon the Seven Hills?' "She spake. The moment of decision stern Came with the herald. And with eyes of fire,'I love thee,' quick Teutona did return;'I love thee, Briton, and admire: "'But yet not more than immortality, And those fair palms! Reach, if thy genius lead, Reach them before me! but when thou dost, I Will snatch with thee the garland meed. "' And-how my heart against its barrier knocks!Perchance I shall be first to gain the wreath; Shall feel behind me on my streaming locks The fervor of thy panting breath.' "The herald sounds: they flew with eagle flight; Behind them into clouds the dust was toss'd. I looked; but when the oaks were pass'd, my sight In dimness of the dust was lost." It is thus that the ode finishes, and there is a grace in not pointing out the victor. I refer the examination of Klopstock's works, in a literary point of view, to the chapter on German poetry, and I now confine myself to pointing them out as the actions of his life. The aim of all his works is either to awaken patriotism in his country, or to celebrate religion: if poetry had its saints, Klopstock would certainly be reckoned one of the first of them. The greater part of his odes may be considered as Christian psalms; Klopstock is the David of the New Testament; but that which honors his character above all, without speaking ot his genius, is a religious hymn, under the form of an epic poem, called the Messias, to which he devoted twenty years. The Christian world already possessed two poems, the Inferno

[64 MADAME DE STAEL S GER'MVANY. of Dante, and Milton's Paradise Lost: one was full of images and phantoms, like the external religion of the Italians. Milton, who had lived in the midst of civil wars, above all excelled in the painting of his characters; and his Satan is a gigantic rebel, armed against the monarchy of heaven. Klopstock has conceived the Christian sentiment in all its purity; he consecrated his soul to the divine Savior of men. The fathers of the Church inspired Dante; the Bible inspired Milton: the greatest beauties of Klopstock's poem are derived from the New Testament; from the divine simplicity of the Gospel, he knew how to draw a charming strain of poetry, which does not lessen its purity. In beginning this poem, it seems as if we were entering a great church, in the midst of which an organ is heard; and that tender emotion, that devout meditation, which inspires us in our Christian temples, also pervades the soul as we read the Messias. Klopstock, in his youth, proposed to himself this poem as the object and end of his existence. It appears to me that men would acquit themselves worthily, with respect to this life, if a noble object, a grand idea of any sort, distinguished their passage through the world; and it is already an honorable proof of character to be able to direct towards one enterprise all the scattered rays of our faculties, the results of our labor. In whatever manner we judge of the beauties and defects of the Messias, we ought frequently to read over some of its verses: the reading of the whole work may be wearisome, but every time that we return to it, we breathe a sort of perfume of the soul, which makes us feel an attraction to all things holy and celestial. After long labors, after a great number of years, Klopstock at length concluded his poem. Horace, Ovid, etc., have expressed in various manners, the noble pride which seemed tc insure to them the immortal duration of their works: "Exegi monumentum are perennius;" and, "Nomenque erit indelibile nostrum." 1 I lhave erected a monument more durable than brass." "' Tle memory of my name shall be indelible."

XLOPSTOCK. 165 A sentiment of a very different nature penetrated the soul of Klopstock when his Messias was finished. He expresses it thus m his Ode to the Redeemer, which is at the end of his poem: "I hoped it for thee! and I have sung, O heavenly Redeemer, the new Covenant's song! Through the fearful course have I run; And thou hast my stumbling forgiven I "Begin the first harp-sound, O warm, winged, eternal gratitude I Begin, begin, my heart gushes forth I And I weep with rapture! "I implore no reward; I am already rewarded, With angel joy, for thee have I sungl The whole soul's emotion EVen to the depths of its first powerl " Commotion of the Inmost, the heaven And earth for me vanished! And no more were spread the wings of the Storm; with gentlest feeling, Like the Spring-time's morning, breathed the zephyr of life. 1 No approved metrical version of Klopstock's Hymn being at hand, we have undertaken a literal translation. We know how unsatisfactory such a rendering must be to those who are able to enjoy the original, yet it isor aims to be-an exact translation of the sense. The good translations of poetry, those fulfilling all the requirements of a proper standard, are very few; they might all be counted on the fingers of one hand. In a poem are many things to be rendered,-sense, rhythm, measure, rhyme, and, above all, that inner spirit, which poets alone can give, which poetic minds alone can feel,-all of which must be reproduced in another tongue in order to make a perfect translation. A sense and a measure, usually but a distorted shadow, or a faint semblance, of the sense and the measure, are usually given, and we are urged to believe that we have a faithful image of the original. Sometimes we get the measure, sometimes the sense, but rarely indeed the two combined. If we can have but one thing, let us have the sense. And often something of the melody of the original clings to a literal version, especially when the translation is made into a cognate language: when sound and sense are really wedded in a poem, one cannot be faithfully transferred, without it retaining at least a " shadowy recollec-,ion," a platonic remembrance, of the other. In translating this piece of Klopstock, we have preserved to the eye, and in part to the ear, the lines of the original; we have followed as closely as possible the succession of words. ~t have interrupted the measure whenever the same required it.-Ed.

166 MADAME DE STAEL S GERM]ANY "He knows not all my gratitude, To whom'tis but dimly revealed, That, when in its full feeling The soul o'erflows, speech can only stammer. "Rewarded am I, rewarded! I have seen The tears of Christ flowing, And dare yonder in the Future Look for tears divine! "E'en through terrestrial joy: In vain conceal I from thee My heart, of ambition full: In youth it beat loud and high; in manhood Has it beaten ever, only more subdued.' If there be any praise, if there be any virtue, On these things think! the flame divine chose I for my guide! High waved the flame before, and showed The ambitious a better path. "This was the cause, that terrestrial joy With its spell lulled me not to sleep; This round me oft to return And seek angel-joys! "These roused me also, with loud penetrating silver-tone, With intoxicating remembrance of the hours of consecration,These same, these same angel-joys, With harp and trombone, with thunder-call! "I am at the goal, at the goal! and feel, where I am, In my whole soul a trembling! so will it be (I speak Humanly of heavenly things) with us, in presence of Him, Who died! and arose! at the coming in heaven!'Up to this goal hast thou, My Lord I and My God! Over more than one grave me, With mighty arm, safely brought! "Recovery gavest thou me! gavest courage and resolution In the near approach of death! And saw I things terrible and unknown, That were to yield, since thou wast the shield? "They fled therefrom! and I have sung, O heavenly Redeemer, the new Covenant's songl Through the fearful course have I run I I hoped it for thee!"

KLOPSTOCK. 161 This mixture of poetic enthusiasm and religious confidence inspires both admiration and tenderness. Men of talents formerly addressed themselves to fabulous deities. Klopstock has consecrated his talents to God himself; and, by the happy union of the Christian religion with poetry, he shows the Germans how possible it is to attain a property in the fine arts, which may belong peculiarly to themselves, without being derived, as servile imitations, from the ancients. Those who have known Klopstock, respect as much as they admire him. Religion, liberty, love, occupied all his thoughts. His religious profession was found in the performance of all his duties; he even gave up the cause of liberty when innocent blood would have defiled it; and fidelity consecrated all the attachments of his heart. Never had he recourse to his imagination to justify an error; it exalted his soul without leading it astray. It is said, that his conversation was full of wit and taste; that he loved the society of women, particularly of French women, and that he was a good judge of that sort of charm and grace which pedantry reproves. I readily believe it; for there is always something of universality in genius, and perhaps it is connected by secret ties to grace, at least to that grace which is bestowed by nature. How far distant is such a man from envy, selfishness, excess of vanity, which many writers have excused in themselves in the name of the talents they possessed I If they had possessed more, none of these defects would have agitated them. We are proud, irritable, astonished at our own perfections, when a little dexterity is mixed with the mediocrity of our character but true genius inspires gratitude and modesty; for we feel from whom we received it, and we are also sensible of the limit which he who bestowed has likewise assigned to it. We find, in the second part of the Messias, a very fine passage on the death of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who is pointed out to us in the Gospel as the image of contemplative virtue. Lazarus, who has received life a second time lrom Jesus Christ, bids his sister farewell with a mixture of

168 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. grief and of confidence which is deeply affecting. From the last moments of Mary, Klopstock has drawn a picture of the death-bed of the just. When in his turn he was also on his death-bed, he repeated his verses on Mary, with an expiring voice; he. recollected them through the shades of the sepulchre, and in feeble accents he pronounced them as exhorting himself to die well: thus, the sentiments expressed in youth were sufficiently pure to form the consolation of his closing life. Ah I how noble a gift is genius, when it has never been profaned, when it has been employed only in revealing to mankind, under the attractive form of the fine arts, the generous sentiments and religious hopes which have before lain dormant in the human heart. This same passage of the death of Mary was read with the burial service at Klopstock's funeral. The poet was old when he ceased to live, but the virtuous mall was already in possession of the immortal palms which renew existence and flourish beyond the grave. All the inhabitants of Hamburg' rendered to the patriarch of literature the honors which elsewhere are scarcely ever accorded, except to rank and power, and the manes of Klopstock received the reward which the excellence of his life had merited. CHAPTER VI. LESSING AND WINCKELMANN. PERHAPS the literature of Germany alone derived its source froa criticism: in every other place criticism has followed the great productions of art; but in Germany it produced them rhe epoch at which literature appears in its greatest splendor L," The house in which Klopstock the poet lived thirty years (1774-1003) and died, is No. 27 in the Kdnigstrasse."-(Murray's Hand-book of Northern Germany, p. 322.)-Ed,

LESSING AND WINCKELMANN. 169 is the cause of this difference. Various nations had for many ages become illustrious in the art of writing; the Germans acquired it at a much later period, and thought they could do no better than follow the path already marked out; it was necessary then that criticism should expel imitation, in order to make room for originality. Lessing wrote in prose with unexampled clearness and precision: depth of thought frequently embarrasses the style of the writers of the new school; Lessing, not less profound, had something severe in his character, which made him discover the most concise and striking modes of expression. Lessing was always animated in his writings by an emotion hostile to the opinions he attacked, and a sarcastic humor gives strength to his ideas. He occupied himself by turns with the theatre, with philosophy, antiquities, and theology, pursuing truth through all of them, like a huntsman, who feels more pleasure in the chase than in the attainment of his object. His style has, in some respects, the lively and brilliant conciseness of the French; and it conduced to render the German language classical. The writers of the new school embrace a greater number of thoughts at the same time, but Lessing deserves to be more generally admired; he possesses a new and bold genius, which meets nevertheless the common comprehensions of mankind. His modes of perception are German, his manner of expression European. Although a dialectician, at once lively and close iu his arguments, enthusiasm for the beautiful filled his whole soul; he possessed ardor without glare, and a philosophical vehemence which was always active, and which by repeated strokes produced effects the most durable. Lessing analyzed the French drama, which was then fashionable in his country, and asserted that the English drama was more intimately connected with the genius of his countrymen. In the judgment he passes on Merope, Zaire, Semiramis, and Rodogune, he notices no particular improbability; he attacks the sincerity of the sentiments and characters, and finds fault with the personages of those fictions, as if they were real beings; his criticism is a treatise on the human heart, as much VOL. T. —8

170 MADAME DE STAELY8 GERMANY. as on theatrical poetry. To appreciate with justice the observations made by Lessing on the dramatic system in general, we must examine, as I mean to do in the following chapters, the principal differences of French and German opinion on this subject. But, in the history of literature, it is remarkable that a German should have had the courage to criticise a great French writer, and jest with wit on the very prince of jesters, Voltaire himself. It was much for a nation, lying under the weight of an anathema which refused it both taste and grace, to become sensible that in every country there exists a national taste, a natural grace; and that literary fame may be acquired in various ways. The writings of Lessing gave a new impulse to his countrymen: they read Shakspeare; they dared in Germany to call themselves German; and the rights of originality were established instead of the yoke of correction. Lessing has composed theatrical pieces and philosophical works which deserve to be examined separately; we should always consider German authors under various points of view. As they are still more distinguished by the faculty of thought than by genius, they do not devote themselves exclusively to any particular species of composition; reflection attracts them successively to different careers of literature. Among the writings of Lessing,' one of the most remark1'But it is to Lessing that an Englishman would turn with the readiest,ffection. We cannot but wonder that more of this man is not known among us, or that the knowledge of him has not done more to remove such misconceptions. Among all the writers of the eighteenth century — we will not except even Diderot and David Hume-there is not one of a more compact and rigid intellectual structure; who more distinctly knows what he is aiming at, or with more gracefulness, vigor, and precision, sent it forth to his readers. He thinks with the clearness and pierceness sharpness of the most expert logician; hut a genial fire pervades him, a wit, a heartiness, a general richness and fineness of nature, to which most logicians are strangers. He is a skeptic in many things, but the noblest of skeptics; a mild, manly, half-careless enthusiasm struggles through his indignant unbelief: he stands before us like a toil-worn, but unwearied and heroic champion, earning not the conquest but the battle; as indeed him. self admits to us, that' it is not the finding of truth, but the honest searcd

LESSING AND WINCKELMANN. 171 able is the Laocoin; it characterizes the subjects which are suitable both to poetry and painting, with as much philosophy in the principles as sagacity in the examples: nevertheless, it was Winckelmann who in Germany brought about an entire revolution in the manner of considering the arts, and literature also, as connected with the arts. I shall speak of him elsewhere under the relation of his influence on the arts; but his style certainly places him in the first rank of German writers. This man, who at first knew antiquity only by books, was desirous of contemplating its noble remains; he felt himself attracted with ardor towards the South; we still frequently find in German imagination some traces of that love of the sun, for it, that profits.' We confess we should be entirely at a loss for the literary creed of that man who reckoned Lessing other than a thoroughly cultivated writer, —nay, entitled to rank, in this particular, with the most distinguished writers of any existing nation. As a poet, as a critic, philosopher, or controversialist, his style will be found precisely such as we of England are accustomed to admire most: brief, nervous, vivid, yet quiet, without glittter or antithesis; idiomatic, pure without purism, transparent, yet full of character and reflex hues of meaning.' Every sentence,' says Horn and justly,' is like a phalanx;' not a word wrong placed, not a word that could be spared; and it forms itself so calmly and lightly, and stands in its completeness, so gay, yet so impregnable! As a poet, he contemptuously denied himself all merit; but his readers have not taken him at his words: here, too, a similar felicity of style attends him; his plays —his Minna von Barnhelm, his Emilie Galotti, his Nathan der Weise-have a genuine and graceful poetic life; yet no works known to us in any language are purer from exaggeration, or any appearance of falsehood. They are pictures, we might say, painted not in colors, but in crayons; yet a Vtrange attraction lies in them, for the figures are grouped into the finest attitudes, and true and spirit-speaking in every line. It is with his style chiefly that we have to do here; yet we must add, that the matter of his works is not less meritorious. His Criticism, and philosophic or religious Skepticism, were of a higher mood than had yet been heard in Europe, still more in Germany; his Dramaturgie first exploded the pretensions of the French theatre, and, with irresistible conviction, made Shakspeare known to his countrymen, preparing the way for a brighter era in their literature, the chief men of which still thankfully look back to Lessing as their patri. trch. His Lqocoin, with its deep glances into the philosophy of Art, his Dialogues of Freemasons, a work of far higher import than its title indieates, may yet teach many things to most of us. which we know not, and,ught to know."-(Carlyle's Essays, p. 22.)-Ed.

172 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. that weariness of the North, which formerly drew so many northern nations into the countries of the South. A fine sky awakens sentiments similar to the love we bear to our country When Winclkelmann, after a long abode ii Italy, returned to Germany, the sight of snow, of the pointed roofs which it covers, and of smoky houses, filled him with melancholy. He felt as if he could no longer enjoy the arts, when he no longer breathed the air which gave them birth. What contemplative eloquence do we not discover in what he has written on the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocooin! His style is calm and majestic as the object of his consideration. HIe gives to the art of writing the imposing dignity of ancient monuments, and his description produces the same sensation as the statue itself. No one before him had united such exact and profound observation with admiration so animated; it is thus only that we can comprehend the fine arts. The attention they excite must be awakened by love; and we must discover in the chefsd'zauvre of genius, as we do in the features of a beloved object, a thousand charms, which are revealed to us by the sentiments they inspire. Some poets before Winckelmann has studied Greek tragedies, with the purpose of adapting them to our theatres. Learned men were known, whose authority was equal to that of books; but no one had hitherto (to use the expression) rendered himself a pagan in order to penetrate antiquity. Wilckelmann possesses the defects and advantages of a Grecian amateur; and we feel in his writings the worship of beauty, such as it existed in a nation where it so often obtained the honors of apotheosis. Imagination and learning equally lent their different lights to Winckelianna; before him it was thought that they mutuAlly excluded each other. He I is shown us that to understand the ancients, one was as necessary as the other. We can give ufe to objects of art only by an intimate acquaintance with the country and with the epoch in which they existed. We are not interested by features which are indistinct. To animate recitals &nd fictions, where past ages are the theatres, learning must

LESSING AND WINCKELMANN. 173 ever assist the imagination, and render it, if possible, a spectator of what it is to paint, and a contemporary of what it relates. Zadig guessed, by some confused traces, some words half torn, at circumstances which he deduced from the slightest indications. It is thus that through antiquity we must take learning for our guide: the vestiges which we perceive are interrupted, effaced, difficult to lay hold of; but by making use at once of imagination and study, we bring back time, and renew existence. When we appeal to tribunals, to decide on the truth of a fact, it is sometimes a slight circumstance which makes it clear. Imagination is in this respect like a judge; a single word, a custom, an allusion found in the works of the ancients, serves it as a light, by which it arrives at the knowledge of perfect truth. Winkelmann knew how to apply to his inspection of the monuments of the arts, that spirit of judgment which leads us to the knowledge of men: he studied the physiognomy of the statue as he would have done that of a human being. He seized with great justness the slightest observations, from which he knew how to draw the most striking conclusions. A certain physiognomy, and emblematical attribute, a mode of drapery, may at once cast an unexpected light on the longest researches. The locks of Ceres are thrown back with a disorder that would be unsuitable to tne character of Minerva; the'oss of Proserpine has forever troubled the mind of her mother. Minos, the son and disciple of Jupiter, has in our medals the same features as his father; nevertheless the calm majesty of the one, and the severe expression of the other, distinguish the sovereign of the gods from the judge of men. The TorsG s a fragment of the statue of Hercules deified,-of him who ieceived from Hebe the cup of immortality; while the Farnesian Hercules yet possesses only the attributes of a mortal; each contour of the Torso, as energetic as this, but more rounded, still characterizes the strength of the hero; bilt of the hero who, placed in heaven, is thenceforth freed from the rude Jabors of the earth. All is symbolical in the arts, and nature shows herself under a thousand different appearances in those

1f74 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. pictures, in that poetry, where immobility must indicate motion, where the inmost soul must be externally displayed, and where the existence of a moment must last to eternity. Winckelmann has banished from the fine arts in Europe the mixture of ancient and modern taste. In Germany, his Influence has been still more displayed in literature than in the arts. We shall, in what follows, be led to examine whether the scrupulous imitation of the ancients is compatible with natural originality; or rather, whether we ought to sacrifice that originality in order to confine ourselves to the choice of subjects, in which poetry, like painting, having no model in existence, can represent only statues. But this discussion is foreign to the merit of Winckelmann: in the fine arts, he has shown us what constituted taste among the ancients; it was for the moderns, in this respect, to feel what it suited them to adopt or to reject. When a man of genius succeeds in displaying secrets of an antique or foreign nature, he renders service by the impulse which he traces: the emotion thus received becomes part of ourselves; and the greater the truth that accompanies it, the less servile is the imitation it inspires. Winckelmann has developed the true principles, now admitted into the arts, of the nature of the ideal; of that perfect nature, of which the type is in our imagination, and does not exist elsewhere. The application of these principles to literature is singularly productive. The poetic of all the arts is united under the same point of view in the writings of Winckelmann, and all have gained by it. Poetry has been better comprehended by the aid of sculpWure, and sculpture by that of poetry: and we have been led by the arts of Greece to her philosophy. Idealistic metaphysics originate with the Germans, as they did formerly with the Greeks, in the adoration of supreme beauty, which our souls alone can conceive and acknowledge. This supreme ideal beauty is a reminiscence of heaven, our original country; the sculptures of Phidias, the tragedies of Sophocles, and the doctrines of Plato, all agree to give us the same idea of it undet different forms.

GOETHE. 175 CHAPTER VII. GOETHE THAT which was wanting to Klopstock was a creative imag nation: he gave utterance to great thoughts and noble sentiments in beautiful verse; but he was not what might be called an artist. His inventions are weak; and the colors in which he invests them have scarcely even that plenitude of strength that we delight to meet with in poetry, and in all other arts which are expected to give to fiction the energy and originality of nature. Klopstock loses himself in the ideal. Goethe never gives up the earth, even in attaining the most sublime conceptions, his mind possesses vigor not weakened by sensibility. Goethe might be'regarded as the representative of all German literature; not that there are no writers superior to him in different kinds of composition, but that he unites in himself alone all th&tdistinguishes German genius; and no one besides is so remarkable for a peculiar species of imagination which neither Italians, English, nor French have ever attained. Goethe having displayed his talents in composition of various kinds, the examination of his works will find the greatest part of the following chapters; but a personal knowledge of the man who possesses such an influence over the literature of his country will, it appears to me, assist us the better to understand that literature.' 1" The Dechess Amalia was enchanted with her [Madame de Stael], and t-e duke wrote to Goethe, who was at Jena, begging him to come over, and be seen by her; which Goethe very positively declined. He said, if she wished very much to see him, and would come to Jena, she should be very heartily welcomed; a comfortable lodging and a bourgeois table would be offered her, and every day they could have some hours together when his business was over; but he could not undertake to go to court, and into

176 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Goethe possesses superior talents for conversation; and whatever we may say, superior talents ought to enable a man to talk. We may, however, produce some examples of silent men of genius: timidity, misfortune, disdain, or ennui, are often the cause of it; but, in general, extent of ideas and warmth of soul naturally inspire the necessity of communicating our feelings to others; and those men who will not be judged by what they say, may not deserve that we should interest ourselves in what they think. When Goethe is induced to talk, he is admirable; his eloquence is enriched with thought; his pleasantry is, at the same time, full of grace and of philosophy; his imaonination is impressed by external objects, as was that of the ancient artists; nevertheless his reason possesses but too much the maturity of our own times. Nothing disturbs the strength of his mind, and even the defects of his character, ill-humor, embarrassments, constraint, pass like clouds round the foot of that mountain on the summit of which his genius is placed. What is related of the conversation of Diderot may give some idea of that of Goethe; but, if we may judge by the writings of Diderot, the distance between these two men must be infinite. Diderot is the slave of his genius; Goethe ever society; he did not feel himself strong enough. In the beginning of 1804. however, he came to Weimar, and there he made her acquaintance, that is to say, he received her in his own house, at first tUte-6,-tete, and afterwards in small circles of friends. " Except when she managed to animate him by her paradoxes, or wit, he was cold and formal to her, even more so than to other remarkable people; and he has told us the reason. Rousseau had been drawn into a correspondence with two women, who addressed themselves to him as admirers; he had shown himself in this correspondence by no means to his advantage, now (1803) that the letters appeared in print. Goethe had read or heard of this correspondence, and Madame de Stael had frankly told him she intended to print his conversation. "This was enough to make him ill at ease in her society; and although she said he was ~ un homme d'un esprit prodigieux en conversation.... quand on le sait fairs parler il est admirable,' she never saw the real, but a factitious Goethe. By dint of provocation-and champagne-she managed to make him talk brilliantly; sue never got him to talk to her seriously. On the 29th of February, she left Weimnar, to the great relief boo If Goethe and Schiller."-(LJewes, Life of Goethe, vol ii. p. 274.)

GOETHE. 177 holds the powers of his mind in subjection: Diderot is affected, fromn the constant endeavor to produce effect; but in Goethe we perceive disdain of success, and that to a degree that is singularly pleasing, even when we have most reason to find fault with his negligence. Diderot finds it necessary to supply by philanthropy his want of religious sentiments: Goethe is inclined to be more bitter than sweet; but, above all, he is natural; and, in fact, without this quality, what is there in one man that should have power to interest another? Goethe possesses no longer that resistless ardor which ininspired him in the composition of Werther; but the warmth of his imagination is still sufficient to animate every thing. It might be said, that he is himself unconnected with life, and that he describes it merely as a painter. He attaches more value, at present, to the pictures he presents to us, than to the emotions he experiences; time has rendered him a spectator. While he still bore a part in the active scenes of the passions, while he suffered, in his own person, from the perturbations of the heart, his writings produced a more lively impression. As we do not always best appreciate our own talents, Goethe maintains at present, that an author should be calm even when he is writing a passionate work; and that an artist should equally be cool, in order the more powerfully to act on the imagination of his readers. Perhaps in early life, he would not have entertained this opinion; perhaps he was then enslaved by his genius, rather than its master; perhaps he then felt that the sublime and heavenly sentiment being of transient duration in the heart of man, the poet is inferior to the inspiration which animates him, and cannot enter into judgment on t, without losing it at once. At first we are astonished to find coldness, and even something like stiffness, in the author of Werther; but when we can prevail on him to be perfectly at his ease, the liveliness of his imagination makes the restraint which we first felt entirely disappear. He is a man of universal mind, and impartial be2ause universal; for there-s no indifference in his impartiality: his is a double existence, a double degree of strength, a double

178 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. light, which on all subjects enlightens at once both sides of the question. When it is necessary to think, nothing arrests his course; neither the age in which he lives, nor the habits he has formed, nor his relations with social life: his eagle glance falls decidedly on the object he observes. If his career had been a political one, if his soul had developed itself by actions, his character would have been more strongly marked, more firm, more patriotic; but his mind would not have taken so wide a range over every different mode of perception; passion or interests would then have traced out to him a positive path. Goethe delights in his writings, as well as in his converNation, to break the thread which he himself has spun, to destroy the emotions he excites, to throw down the image he nas forced us to admire. When, in his fictions, he inspires us with interest for any particular character, he soon shows the inconsistences which are calculated to detach us from it. He disposes of the poetic world, like a conqueror of the real earth; and thinks himself strong enough to introduce, as nature sometimes does, the genius of destruction into his own works. If he were not an estimable character, we should be afraid of this species of superioity which elevates itself above all things; which degrades and then again raises up; which affects us, and then laughs at our emotion; which affirms and doubts by turns, and always with the same success. I have said that Goethe possessed in himself alone all the principal features of German genius; they are all indeed found in him to an eminent degree: a great depth of ideas, that grace which springs from imagination-a grace far more original than that which is formed by the spirit of society: in short, a sensibility sometimes bordering on the fantastic, but for that very reason the more calculated to interest readers, who seek in books something that may give variety to their monotonous existence, and in poetry, impressions which may supply the want of real events. If Goethe were a Frenchman, he would be made to talk from morning till night: all the authors, who were contemporary with Diderot, went to derive ideas from his conversation, and affordec

SCHuLLER. 1 9 him, at the same time, an habitual enjoyment from the ad miration he inspired. The Germans know not how to make use of their talents in conversation, and so few people, even among the most distinguished, have the habit of interrogating and answering, that society is scarcely at all esteemed among them; but the influence of Goethe is not the less extraordinary. There are a great many people in Ger many who would think genius discoverable even in the direction of a letter, if it were written by him. The admirers of Goethe form a sort of fraternity, in which the rallying words serve to discover the adepts to each other. When foreigners also profess to admire him, they are rejected with disdain, if certain restrictions leave room to suppose that they have allowed themselves to examine works which nevertheless gain much by examination. No man can kindle such fanaticism without possessing great faculties, whether good or bad; for there is nothing but power, of whatever kind it may be, which men sufficiently dread to be excited by it to a degree of love io enthusiastic. CHAPTER VIII. SCHILLER. SCHILLER was a man of uncommon genius and of perfect sincerity; these two qualities ought to be inseparable at least in a literary character. Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth. Falsehood is still more disgusting in writing than in conduct. Actons even of the most deceitful kind still remain actions, and we know what we have to depend on, either in judging or hating them; but writings are only a vain mass of idle words, when they do not proceed from sincere conviction. There is not a nobler course than that of literature, when it ks pursued as Schiller pursued it. It is true, that in Germany

180 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. there is so much seriousness and probity, that it is there alone we can be completely acquainted with the character and the duties of every vocation. Nevertheless Schiller was admirable among them all, both with respect to his virtues and his talents. His Muse was Conscience: she needs no invocation, for we hear her voice at all times, when we have once listened to it. He loved poetry, the dramatic art, history, and literature in general, for its own sake. If he had determined never to publish his works, he would nevertheless have taken the same pains in writing them; and no consideration, drawn either from success, from the prevailing fashion, from prejudice, or from any thing, in short, that proceeds from others, could ever have prevailed on him to alter his writings; for his writings were himself: they expressed his soul; and he did not conceive the possibility of altering a single expression, if the internal sentiment which inspired it had undergone no change. Schiller, doubtless, was not exempt from self-love; for if it be necessary, in order to animate us to glory, it is likewise so to render us capable of any active exertion whatever; but nothing differs so much from another in its consequences as vanity and the love of fame: the one seeks successes by fraud, the other endeavors to command it openly; this feels inward uneasiness and lies cunningly in wait for public opinion; that trusts its own powers, and depends on natural causes alone for strength to subdue all opposition. In short, there is a sentiment even more pure than the love of glory, which is the love of truth: it is this love that renders literary men like the warlike preachers of a noble cause; and to them should henceforth be assigned the charge of keeping the sacred fire; for feeble women ire no longer, as formerly, sufficient for its defence. Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities. Our idea of goodness is sometimes debased by asso. ciating it with that of weakness; but when it is united to the highest degree of knowledge and of energy, we comprehend in what sense the Bible has told us, that " God made man after his own image." Schiller did himself an injury, when he first entered into the world, by the wanderings of his imagination;

SCHILLER. 181 but with the maturity of age, he recovered that sublime purity which gives birth to noble thought. With degrading sentiments he held no intercourse. He lived, he spoke, he acted, as if the wicked did not exist; and when he described them in his works, it was with more exaggeration and less depth &o observation than if he had really known them. The wicked presented themselves to his imagination as an obstacle in nature, as a physical scourge; and perhaps, in many respects, they have no intellectual being; the habit of vice has changed their souls into a perverted instinct. Schiller was the best of friends, the best of fathers, the best of husbands; no quality was wanting to complete that gentle and peaceful character which was animated by the fire of genius alone; the love of liberty, respect for the female sex, enthusiasm for the fine arts, adoration of the Divinity, inspired his mind; and in the analysis of his )works it would be easy to point out to what particular virtue we owe the various productions of his masterly pen. It has been said that genius is allsufficient. Ibelieve it, where knowledge and skill preside; but when we seek to paint the storms of human nature, or fathom it in its unsearchable depths, the powers even of imagination fail; we must posse.s a soul that has felt the agitation of the tempest, but into which the Divine Spirit has descended to restore its serenity.' 1 "Of his noble sense of truth, both in speculation and in action; of his deep, genial insight into nature; and the living harmony in which he renders back what is highest and grandest in Nature, no reader of his works need be reminded. In whatever belongs to the pathetic, the heroic, the tragically elevating, Schiller is at home; a master; nay, perhaps the greatest of all late poets. To the assiduous student, moreover, much else that lay in Schiller, but was never worked into shape, will become partially visible: deep inexhaustible mines of thought and feeling; a whole world of gifts, the finest produce of which was but beginning to be realized. To his high-minded, unwearied efforts, what was impossible, had length of years been granted him! There is a tone in some of his later pieces, which here and there breathes of the very nighest region of art. Nor are the natural or accidental defects we have noticed in his genius, even as it stands, such as to exclude him from the rank of great Poets. Poets whorr the whole world reckons great, have, more than once, exhibited the like. Milton, for t-ample, shares most of them with him: like Schiller, he dwel'i

182 2M1ADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. I saw Schiller, for the first time, in the saloon of the Duke and Duchess of Weimar, in the presence of a society as enlightened as it was exalted. He read French very well, but he had never spoken it. I maintained, with some warmth, the superiority of our dramatic system over that of all others; he did *pot refuse to enter the lists with me, and without feeling any uneasiness fiom the difficulty and slowness with which he ex pressed himself in French, without dreading the opinion of his audience, which was all against him, his conviction of being right impelled him to speak. In order to refute him, I at first made use of French arms-vivacity and pleasantry; but in what Schiller said, I soon discovered so many ideas through the impediment of his words; I was so struck with that simplicity of character, which led a man of genius to engage himself thus in a contest where speech was wanting to express his wit'i fill Iower, only in the high and earnest; in all other provinces ex hibiting:i certain inaptitude, an elephantine unpliancy: he too has little llui:)or; his coarse invective has in it contemptuous emphasis enough, yet scarcely any graceful sport. Indeed, on the positive side also, these two worthies are not without a resemblance. Under far other circumstances, with less massiveness, and vehement strength of soul, there is in Schiller the same intensity; the same concentration, and towards similar objects, towards whatever is sublime in Nature and in Art, which sublimities, they both, each in his several way, worship with undivided heart. There is not in Schiller's nature the same rich complexity of rhythm, as in Milton's with its depth of linked sweetness; yet in Schiller, too, there is something,)f the same pure, swelling forx,, some tone which, like Milton's, is deep, majestic, solemn. " It was as a dramatic author that Schiller distinguished himself to the world: yet often we feel as if chance rather than a natural tendency had led him into this province; as if his talent were essentially, in a certain style, lyrical, perhaps even epic, rather than dramatic. He dwelt within himself, and could not without effort, and then only within a certain range, body forth other forms of being. Nay, much of what is called his poetry seems to us oratorical rather than poetical; his first bias might have led him to be a speaker, rather than a singer. Nevertheless, a pure fire dwelt deep in his soul; and only in Poetry, of one or the other sort, could tlhis find utterance. The rest of his nature, at the same time, has a certain prosaic rigor; so that not without strenuous and complex endeavors, long persisted in, could its poetic quality evolve itself. Quite pure, and as the allsovereign element, it perhaps never did evolve itself; and among such complex endeavors, a small accident might influence large rortons in its ~ourse."-( Carlyle's Essays, 8vo edition, p. 238.)-Ed.

STYLE AND VERSIFICATION. 183 thoughts; I found him so modest and so indifferent as to what concerned his own success, so proud and so animated in the defence of what appeared to him to be truth, that I vowed to him, from that moment, a friendship replete with admiration. Attacked, while yet young, by a hopeless disease, the sufferings of his last moments were softened by the attention of his children, and of a wife who deserved his affection by a thousand endearing qualities. Madame von Wolzogen, a friend worthy of comprehending him, asked him, a few hours before his death, how he felt? "Still more and more easy," was his reply; and, indeed, had he not reason to place his trust in that God whose dominion on earth he had endeavored to promote? Was he not approaching the abode of the just? Is he not at this moment in the society of those who resemble him? and has he not already rejoined the friends who are awaiting us? CHAPTER IX. OF STYLE, AND OF VERSIFICATION IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE. IN learning the prosody of a language, we enter more intimately into the spirit of the nation by which it is spoken, than by any other possible manner of study. Thence it follows that it is amusing to pronounce foreign words: we listen to ourselves as if another were speaking; but nothing is so delicate, nothing so difficult to seize, as accent. We learn the most complicated airs of music a thousand times more readily than the pronounciation of a single syllable. A long succession of rears, or the first impressions of childhood, can alone render us capable of imitating this pronunciation, which comprehends whatever is most subtle and undefinable in the imagination, 9nd in national character. The Germanic dialects have for their original a motherJongue, of which they all partake. This common source re

184 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMIANY. news and multiplies expressions in a mode always conformable to the genius of the people. The nations of Latin origin enrich themselves, as w, may say, only externally; they must have recourse to dead languages, to petrified treasures, for the extension 4,f their empire. It is therefore natural that innovations in words shouli be less pleasing to them, than to those nations which emit shoots from an ever-living stock. But the French writers require an animation and coloring of their style, b)y the boldest measures that a natural sentiment can suggest, while the Germans, on the contrary, gain by restricting themselves. Among them, reserve cannot destroy originality; they run no risk of losing it but by the very excess of abundance. The air we breathe has much influence on the sounds we articulate: the diversity of soil and climate produces very different modes of pronouncing the same language. As we approach the sea-coast, we find the words become softer; the climate there is more temperate; perhaps also the habitual sight of this image of infinity inclines to revery, and gives to pronunciation more of effeminacy and indolence; but when we ascend towards the mountains, the accent becomes stronger, and we might say that the inhabitants of these elevated regions wish to make themselves heard by the rest of the world, firem the height of their natural rostra. We find in the Germani3 dialects the traces of the different influences I have now had occasion to point out. The German is in itself a language as primitive, and almost as Intricate in structure, as the Greek.' Those who have made I The subject of comparative philology is suggested,-a subject that specially reminds us of German erudition. We can here only refer tc lnose who have devoted themselves to the study of this noble branch ot Jarnllin, and thus guide the student to sources whence lie can obtain all the inf'.rmation le may desire. The leading article ill the New E.glander ftr August, 1858 (by Mr. Dwight), contains a clearly written sulnmary ot thle Hlistvry of Modern Phiology, from which we take the following: " Behold, now, the most important of the different names that we have mentioned, grouped in classes according to their merit. "1. Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Diefenbach, Benary, Schleicher, Curtius, Kuhn liez, Mommsen, and Aufrecht. " 2. Eichhoff, Ahrens, Giese, Hoefer, Heyse, Benfey, Donaldson.

SI'TYT.E AND F,EaSIFCk h TIO}N th e resefarches into thie rre~at filill" o a, h.... t 1 y discovered the historical reasons for this resemblance. It is certainly true, that we remark in the German a grammatical affinity with the Greek; it has all its difficulty, without its charm; for the multitude of consonants of which the words are composed, render them rather noisy than sonorous. It " 3. Kaltschmidt, Rapp, and Winning. "These writers may also be advantageously divided, for the reader's information, into different classes, according to the subjects that they have investigated. I. LANGOUAGE. "lst. The Indo-European languages generally: Schleicher (Sprachen Europa's): Max Miiller (Survey of Languages, 2d edition). "2d. Specially,' (1.) The Grseco-Italic: Schleicher (Sprachen, &c.); Mommsen (Rdmische Geschichte); E. Curtius (Griechische Gesch.); Aufrecht and Kirchhoff (tImbrische Sprachdenkmaler); Diez (Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen).'(2.) The Lettic: Schleicher (Sprachen, &c). "(3.) The Gothic; Grimm (Deutsche Grammatik und Geschichte); Schleicher; Diefenbach (Gothisches W6rterbuch). "(4.) Sclavonic: Schafarik; Schleicher; Miklosich. " (5.) Celtic: Diefenbach (Celtica); Pictet: Charles Meyer; Zouss (Grammatica Celtica); Ebel (Zeitschrift, &c.); Prichard (Celtic Nations). II., PHONETICS. "Benary, Hoefer; Grimm (Deutsche Grammatik und Geschichte); Bopp (Vergleich. Gramm.); Diez (Grammatik, &c.)..III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. "Becker's various works on Grammar, &c.; Heyse's System der Sprachwissenschaft, Lersch's Sprachphilosophie. IV. ETYMOLOGY. " Bopp (Vergleich. Gramm.); Schleicher (Litanische Grammatik); G. Curtius (Griechische Gramm.); Diez (Lexicon Etymologicum); Fritsch. " In Germany, by far the greatest attention has been paid, from spontageous impulse, to the claims of comparative philology; while in Russia,:he government has as far exceeded all other governments in its patronage of this delightful study, and of those who are devoted to it. This is one of the chief legacies left by the Empress Catharine, in her own zealous example, to her successors on the throne; and in accepting it, they have not forgotten to put it to good usury. The government publishes, at its own expense, the grammars, dictionaries, and treatises, prepared by the hest scholars, and sustains travellers at its own expense, in making explortng tours for philosophical purposes in the East. Vienna, however, is the most prolific of all single cities in the world, in oriental publications. In

1 86 MADAME DE STAEL'S GE:)MA1Y. might be said, that the words themselves were more forcible than the things represented by them, and this frequently gives a sort of monotonous energy to the style. We should be careful, nevertheless, not to attempt softening the pronunciation of the German language too much; there always results from it a certain affected gracefulness, which is altogether disagreeable: it presents to our ears sounds essentially rude, in spite of the gentility with which we seek to invest them, and this sort of affectation is singularly displeasing. J. J. Rousseau has said, that the southern languages were the daughters of pleasure, the northern, of necessity. The Italian and Spanish are modulated like an harmonious song; the French is eminently suited to conversation: their parliamentary debates, and the energy natural to the people, have given to the English something of expression, that supplies the want of prosody. The German is more philosophical by far than the Italian; more poetical, by reason of its boldness, than the French; more favorable to the rhythm of verses than the English; but it still retains a certain stiffness that proceeds, possibly, from its being so sparingly made use of, either in social intercourse or in the public service. Grammatical simplicity is one of the great advantages of modern languages. This simplicity, founded on logical prin ciples common to all nations, renders them easy to be understood: to learn the Italian and English, a slight degree of study is sufficient; but the German is quite a science. The period, in the German language, encompasses the thought; and like the talons of a bird, to grasp it, opens and closes on it again. A construction of phrases, nearly similar to that whllich existed among the ancients, has been introduced into it with greater facility than into any other European dialect; France, Prussia, and Denmark also, much more zeal is shown in this cap:ivating class of studies than in either England or America. The Sanskrit LSa been, indeed, as long taught in England as in Germany, and ever onger; but not for classical and philological purposes; for commercia. easons rather, under the patronage of the East India Company, at the college of Haileybury."-(New Englander, August, 1858, pp. 502-3.) —Ea

STYLE AND VERSIFIOATION. 187 but inversions are rarely suitable to modern languages. The striking terminations of the Greek and Latin, clearly pointed out the words which ought to be joined together even when they were separated: the signs of the German declensions are so indistinct, that we have a good deal of difficulty to discover, under colors so uniform, the words which depends on each other. When foreigners complain of the labor which is required to study the German language, they are told that it is very easy to write in that language with the simplicity of French grammar, while it is impossible in French to adopt the German period, and that therefore this should be considered as affording additional means of facility; but these means mislead many writers, who are induced to make too frequent use of them. The German is, perhaps, the only language, in which verse is more easy to be understood than prose; the poetic phrase, being necessarily interrupted even by the measure of the verse, cannot be lengthened beyond it. Without doubt, there are more shades, more connecting ties, between the thoughts in those periods, which in themselves form a whole, and assemble in the same point of view, all the various relations belonging to the same subject; but if we considered only the natural concatenation of different ideas, we should end by wishing to comprise them all in a single phrase. It is necessary for the human mind to divide, in order to comprehend, and we run a risk of mistaking gleams of light for truths, when even the forms of a language are obscured. The art of translation is carried further in the German language than in any other European dialect.' Voss has trans1 " Every literature of the world has been cultivated by the Germans; and to every literature they have studied to give due honor. Shakspeare and Homer, no doubt, occupy alone the loftiest station in the poetical Olympus; but there is space for all true Singers, out of every age and clime. Ferdusi and the primeval Mythologists of Hindostan, live in brotherly union with the Troubadours and ancient Story-tellers of the West. The wayward mystic gloom of Calderon, the lurid fire of Dante, the auroral light of Tasso, the clear icy glitter of Racine, all are acknowledged and reverenced: nay, in the celestial fore-court an abode has been

188 MADAME DE STAEL' 8 GERMANY. lated the Greek and Latin authors with wonderful directness; and W. Schlegel those of England, Italy, and Spain, with a truth of coloring which before him was unexampled. When the German is employed in a translation from the English, it loses nothing of its natural character, because both those languages are of Germanic origin; but whatever merit may ba found in Voss's translation of Homer, it certainly makes, both of the Iliad and Odyssey, poems, the style of which is Greek, though the words are German. Our knowledge of antiquity gains by it; but the originality, peculiar to the idiom of each nation, is necessarily lost in proportion. It seems like a contradiction to accuse the German language of having at once too much flexibility and too much roughness; but what is reconcilable in character may also be reconcilable in languages; and we often find that the quality of roughness does not exclude that of flexibility in the same person. These defects are less frequently discovered in verse than in prose, and in original compositions than in translations. I think then we may with truth affirm, that there is at present no poetry more striking and more varied than that of the Germans.' appointed for the Gressets and Delilles, that no spark of inspiration, no tone of mental music, might remain unrecognized. The Germans study foreign nations in a spirit which deserves to be oftener imitated. It is their honest endeavor to understand each with its own peculiarities, in its own special manner of existing; not that they may praise it, or censure it, or attempt to alter it, but simply that they may see this manner of existing as the nation itself sees it, and so participate in whatever worth or beauty it has brought into being. Of all literatures, accordingly, the German has the best as well as the most translations; men like Goethe, Schiller, Wfieland, Schlegel, Tieck, have not disdained this task. Of Shakspeare there are three entire versions admitted to be good; and we know not how many partial, or considered as bad. In their criticisms of him we ourselves have long ago admitted, that no such clear judgment or hearty appreciadon of his merits had ever been exhibited by any critic of our own."-.Carlyle's Essays, p. 24.)-Ed. I'- There are poets in that country who belong to a nobler class than aost nations have to show in these days, a class entirely unknown to some nations; and, for the last two centuries, rare in all. We have no hesitation in stating, that we see in certain of the best German poets, and ihose too of our own time, something which associates them, remotely o!

STYLE AND VERSIFICArION. 189 Versification is a peculiar art, the investigation of which is inexhaustible: those words, which in the common relations of life serve only as signs of thought, reach our souls through the rhythm of harmonious sounds, and afford us a double enjoy nearly we say not, but which does associate them with the Masters of Art, tile Saints of Poetry, long since departed, and, as we thought, without sueeussors, from the earth; but canonized in the hearts of all generations, and yet living to all by the memory of what they did and were. Glances we do seemn to find of that ethereal glory, which looks on us in its full brightness fioml the Transfiguration of Rafaelle, from the Tempest of Shakspeare; land in broken, but purest and still heart-piercing beams, struggling through the gloom of long ages, from the tragedies of Sophocles and the weatherworn sculptures of the Parthenon. This is that heavenly spirit, which, )best seen in the aerial embodiment of poetry, but spreading likewise over all the thoughts and actions of an age, has given us Surreys, Sydneys, Raleighs, in court and camp, Cecils in policy, Hookers in divinity, Bacons in philosophy, and Shakspeares and Spensers in song. All hearts that know this, know it to be the highest; and that, in poetry or elsewhere, it alone is true and imperishable. In affirming that any vestige, however feeble, of this divine spirit, is discernible in German poetry, we are aware that we place it above the existing poetry of any other nation. " To prove this bold assertion, logical arguments were at all times unavailing; and, in the present circumstances of the case, more than usually so. Neither will any extract or specimen help us; for it is not in parts, but in whole poems, that the spirit of a true poet is to be seen. We can, therefore, only name such men as Tieck, Richter, Herder, Schiller, and, above all, Goethe; and ask any reader who has learned to admire wisely our own literature of Queen Elizabeth's age, to peruse these writers also; to study them till he feels that he has understood them, and justly estimated both their light and darkness; and then to pronounce whether it is not, in some degree, as we have said. Are there not tones here of that old melody? Are there not glimpses of that serene soul, that calm harmonious strength, that smiling earnestness, that Love and Faith and Humanity of nature? Do these foreign contemporaries of ours still exhibit, in their characters as men, something of *at sterling nobleness, that union of majesty with meekness, which we must ever venerate in those our spiritual fathers? And do their works, in the new form of this century, show forth that old nobleness, not consistent only with the science, the precision, the skepticism of these days, but wedded to them, incorporated with them, and shining through them like their life and soul? Might it in truth almost seem to us, in reading the prose of Goethe, as if we were reading that of Milton; and of Milton writing with the culture of this time; combining French clearness with old English depth? And of his poetry may it indeed be said that it is poetry and yet the poetry of our owVn generation; an ideal world, and yet the world we even now live in?-These ques. tions we must leave candid and studious inquirers to answer for them

190 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMAMY. ment, which arises from the union of s'mnsation and reflection but, if all languages are equally proper to express what we think, they are not all equally so to impart what we feel; and the effects of poetry depend still more on the melody of words than on the ideas which they serve to express. The German is the only modern language which has long and short syllables, like the Greek and Latin; all the other European dialects are either more or less accented; but verse cannot be measured, in the manner of the ancients, according to the length of the syllables: accent gives unity to phrases, as well as to words. It is connected with the signification of what is said: we lay a stress on that which is to determine the sense; and pronunciation, in thus marking particular words, refers them all to the principal idea. It is not thus with the musical duration of sound in language; this is much more favorable to poetry than accent, because it has no positive object, and affords only a high but indefinite pleasure, like all other enjoyments that tend to no determinate purpose. Among the ancients, syllables were scanned according to the nature of the vowels, and the connection of their different sounds: harmony was the only criterion. In Germany, all the accessory words are short, and it is grammatical dignity alone, that is to say, the importance of the radical syllable, that determines its quantity; there is less of charm in this species of prosody, than in that of the ancients, because it depends more on abstract combinations than on involuntary sensation; it is nevertheless a great advantage to any language, to have in its prosody, that which may be substituted for rilyme. Rhyme is a modern discovery; it is connected with all our fine arts, and we should deprive ourselves of great effects by renouncing the use of it. It is the image of hope and of memiory. One sound makes us desire another, corresponding to it and when the second is heard, it recalls that which has just selves; premising only, that the secret is not to be found on the surface: that the first reply is likelyto be in the negative, but with inquirers of this sort, by no means likely to be the final one."-(Carlyle's Essays, 8vo edition, p. 28.) —Ed.

STYLE AND VERSIFICATION. 191 escaped us. This agreeable regularity must, nevertheless, be prejudical to nature in the dramatic art, as well as to boldness in the epic. We can scarcely do without rhyme, in idioms, where the prosody is but little marked: and yet the restraints of construction may, in certain languages, be such, that a bold and contemplative poet may find it needful to make us sensible of the harmony of versification without the subjection.of rhyme. Klopstock has banished Alexandrines friom German poetry; he has substituted in their stead, hexameters, and iambic verses, without rhyme, according to the practice of the English, which give much greater liberty to the imagination. Alexandrine verses are very ill adapted to German poetry; we may convince ourselves of this by the poems of the great Haller himself, whatever merit they may in other respects possess; a language, the pronunciation of which is so sonorous, deafens us by the repetition and uniformity of the hemistichs. Besides, this kind of versification calls for sentence and antitheses; and the German genius is too scrupulous and too sincere to adopt those antitheses, which never present ideas or images in their perfect truth, or in their most exact shades of distinction. The harmony of hexameters, and especially of unrhymed iambic verses, is only natural harmony inspired by sentiment; it is a mnarked and distinct declamation, while the Alexandrine verse imposes a certain species and turn of expression, from which it is difficult to get free. The composition of this kind of verse is even entirely independent of poetic genius; we may possess it without having that genius; and on the contrary, it is possible to be a great poet, and yet feel incapable of conforming to the restrictions which this kind of verse imposes. Our best lyrical poets, in France, are, perhaps, our great prose writers,-Bossuet, Pascal, Fenelon, Buffon, Jean-Jacques'Rousseau], etc. The despotism of Alexandrines often prevents Ls from putting into verse that which, notwithstanding, would be true poetry; while in foreign nations, versification being much more easy and natural, every poetical thought inspires verse, and, in general, prose is left to reason and argument. We might defy Racine himself to translate into French verse

L92 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Pindar, Petrarch, or Klopstock, without giving a character unnatural to them. These poets have a kind of boldness which is seldom to be found, except in languages which are capable of uniting all the charms of versification with perfect originality; and this, in the French, can only be done in prose. One of the greatest advantages of the Germanic dialects in poetry, is the variety and beauty of their epithets. The German, in this respect also, may be compared to the Greek; in a single word, we perceive many images, as in the principal note of a concord we have all the sounds of which it is composed, or as certain colors which revive in us the perception of those with which they are immediately connected. In French, we say only what we mean to say; and we do not see, wandering around our words, those clouds of countless forms which surround the poetry of the northern languages, and awaken a crowd of recollections. To the liberty of forming one epithet out of two or three, is added that of animating the language by making nouns of verbs; living, willing, feeling, are all expressions less abstract than life, will, and sentiment; and whatever chances thought into action gives more animation to the style. The facility of reversing the construction of a phrase, according to inclination, is also very favorable to poetry, and gives the power of exciting, by the varied means of versification, impressions analogous to those of painting and nullsic. In short, the general spirit of the Teutonic dialects is independence. The first object of their writers is to transmit what they feel; they would willingly say to poetry what Heloise said to her lover: "If there be a word more true, more tender, and more strongly expressive of what I feel, that word I would choose." In France the recollection of what is suita ble and becoming in society, pursues genius even to its most secret motions: and the dread of ridicule is like the sword of Damocles, which no banquet of the imagination can ever make us forget. In the arts, we often speak of the merit of conquering a dif ficulty; it is said, nevertheless, with reason, that either the dif ficulty is not felt, and then it is no diffculty, or it is felt, ana

POETRY. 193 is then not surmounted. The fetters imposed on the mind certainly give a spring to its powers of action; but there is often in true genius a sort of awkwardness, similar in some respects to the credulity of sincere and noble souls; and we should do wrong in endeavoring to subject it to arbitrary restrictions, for it would free itself from them with much greater difficulty than talents of a second-rate order. CHAPTER X. OF POETRY. THAT which is truly divine in the heart of man cannot be defined; if there be words for some of its features, there are none to express the whole together, particularly the mystery of true beauty in all its varieties. It is easy to say what poetry is not; but if we would comprehend what it is, we must call to our assistance the impressions excited by a fine country, harmonious music, the sight of a favored object, and, above all, a religious sentiment which makes us feel within ourselves the' -presence of the Deity. Poetry is the natural language of all worship. The Bible is full of poetry; Homer is full of religion: not that there are fictions. in the Bible, or doctrines in Homer; but enthusiasm concentrates different sentiments in the same focus; enthusiasm is the incense offered by earth to heaven; it unites the one to the other. The gift of revealing by speech the internal feelings of the heart is very rare; there is, however, a poetical spirit in all beings who are capable of strong and lively affections: expression is wanting to those who have not exerted themselves to find it. It may be said, that the poet only disengages the sentiment that was imprisoned in his soul. Poetic genius is an internal disposition, of the same nature with that which renders us capable of a generous sacrifice. The composition VOL. I.-9

194 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. of a fine ode is a heroic trance. If genius were not versatile, it would as often inspire fine actions as affecting expressions; for they both equally spring from a consciousness of the beautiful which is felt within us. A man of superior talent said that "prose was factitious, and poetry natural;" and, in fact, nations little civilized begin always with poetry; and whenever a strong passion agitates the soul, the most common of men make use, unknown to themselves, of images and metaphors; they call exterior nature to their assistance, to express what is inexpressible within themselves. Common people are' much nearer being poets, than men accustomed to good society; the rules of politeness, and delicate raillery, are fit only to impose limits, they cannot impart inspiration. In this world there is an endless contest between poetry and prose; but pleasantry must always place itself on the side of prose, for to jest is to descend. The spirit of society is, however, very favorable to that gay and graceful poetry of which Ariosto, La Fontaine, and Voltaire are the most brilliant models. Dramatic poetry is admirable in our first writers; descriptive, and, above all, didatic poetry have been carried b) the French to a very high degree of perfection; but it does not appear that they have hitherto been called on to distinguish themselves in lyric or epic poetry, such as it was formerly conceived by the ancients, and at present by foreigners. Lyric poetry is expressed in the name of the author himself; he no longer assumes a character, but experiences in his own person, the various emotions he describes. J. B. Rousseau, in his devotional odes, and Racine, in his Athalie, have shown themselves lyric poets. They were imbued with a love of psalmody, and penetrated with a lively faith. Nevertheless, the difficulties of the language and of French versification are frequently obstacles to this delirium of enthusiasm. We may quote admirable strophes in some of our odes, but have we any complete ode in which the Muse has not abandoned the poet? Fine verses are not always poetry; inspiration in the arts is an inexhaustible source, which vivifies the whole. fronm

POETRY. 195,he first word to the last. Love, country, faith, all are divinities in an ode. It is the apotheosis of sentiment. In order tc conceive the true grandeur of lyric poetry, we must wander in thought into the ethereal regions, forget the tumult of earth in listening to celestial harmony, and consider the whole universe as a symbol of the emotions of the soul. The enigma of human destiny is nothing to the generality of men; the poet has it always present to his imagination. The idea of death, which depresses vulgar minds, gives to genius additional boldness; and the mixture of the beauties of nature with the terrors of dissolution, excites an indescribable delirium of happiness and terror, without which we can neither comprehend nor describe the spectacle of this world. Lyric poetry relates nothing, is not confined to the succession of time, or the limits of space; it spreads its wings over countries and over ages; it gives duration to the sublime moment in which man rises superior to the pains and pleasures of life. Amid the wonders of the world, he feels himself a being at once creator and created; who must die, and yet cannot cease to be, and whose heart, trembling, yet at the same time powerful, takes pride in itself, yet prostrates itself before God. The Germans, at once uniting the powers of imagination and reflection (qualities which very rarely meet), are more,,apable of lyric poetry than most other nations. The moderns cannot give up a certain profundity of ideas, to'which they have been habituated by a religion completely spiritual; and yet, nevertheless, if this profundity were not invested with images, it would not be poetry: nature then must be aggrandized in the eyes of men, before they can employ it as the emblem of their thoughts. Groves, flowers, and rivers were sufficient for the poets of paganism; but the solitude of forests, the boundless ocean,.the starry firmament, can scarcely express the eternal and the infinite, which pervade and fill the soul of Christians. The Germans possess no epic poem any more than ourselves: this admirable species of composition does not appear to be granted to the moderns, and perhaps the Iliad alone completely

196 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. answers our ideas of it. To form an epic poem, a particulal combination of circumstances, such as occurred only among the Greeks, is requisite, together with the imagination displayed in heroic times, and the perfection of language peculiar to more civilized periods. In the middle ages, imagination was strong, but the language imperfect; in our days, language is pure, but the imagination defective. The Germans have much boldness in their ideas and style, but little invention in the plan of their subject: their essays in the epic almost always resemble the character of lyric poetry; those of the French bear a stronger affinity to the dramatic, and we discover in them more of interest than of grandeur. When the object is to please on the stage, the art of circumscribing one's self within a given space, of guessing at the taste of spectators, and bending to it with address, forms a part of the success; but in the composition of an epic poem, nothing must depend on external and transient circumstances. It exacts absolute beauties-beauties which may strike the solitary reader, even when his sentiments are most natural, and his imagination most emboldened. IIe who hazards too much in an epic poem would possibly incur severe censure fiorm the good taste of the French; but he who hazards nothing would not be the less condemned. It must be acknowledged, that in improving the taste and language of his country, Boileau has given to French genius a disposition very unfavorable to poetic composition. He has spoken only of that which ought to be avoided, he has dwelt only on precepts of reason and wisdom, which have introduced into literature a sort of pedantry, very prejudicial to the sub-.?imc energy of the arts. In French, we have masterpieces of versification; but how can we call mere versification poetry! To render into verse what should have remained in prose, to express, in lines of ten syllables, like Pope, the minutest details of a game at cards: or, as in some poems which have lately appeared among us, draughts, chess, and chemistry, is a trick of legerdemain in words: it is composing with words what we call a poem, in the same manner as, with notes of music, we ompose a sonata.

POETRY. 197 A great knowledge of the poetic art is, however, necessary to enable an author thus admirably to describe objects which yield so little scope to the imagination, and we have reason to admire some detached pieces in those galleries of pictures; but the intervals by which they are separated are necessarily prosaic, like that which passes in the mind of the writer. He says to himself, "I will make verses on this subject, then on that, and afterwards on this also;" and, without perceiving it, he intrusts us with a knowledge of the manner in which he pursues his work. The true poet, it may be said, conceives his whole poem at once in his soul, and, were it not for the difficulties of language, would pour forth his extemporaneous effusions, the sacred hymns of genius, as the sibyls and prophets did in ancient times. He is agitated by his conceptions as by a real event of his life; a new world is opened to him; the sublime image of every various situation and character, of every beauty in nature, strikes his eye; and his heart pants for that celestial happiness, the idea of which, like lightning, gives a momentary splendor to the obscurity of his fate. Poetry is a momentary possession of all our soul desires; genius makes the boundaries of existence disappear, and transforms into brilliant images the uncertain hope of mortals. It would be easier to describe the symptoms of genius than to give precepts for the attainment of it. Genius, like love, is felt by the strong emotions with which it penetrates him who is endowed with it; but if we dared to advise where nature should be the only guide, it is not merely literary counsel that we should give. We should speak of poets, as to citizens and heroes; we should say to them, Be virtuous, be faithful, be free; respect what is dear to you, seek immortality in love, and the Deity in nature; in short, sanctify your soul as a temple, and the angel of rnble thoughts will not disdain to appeal Jl it.

198 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMAXY. CHAPTER XI. OF CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC POETRY. THE word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the Troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of:hivalry and Christianity. If we do not admit that the empire of literature has been divided between paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the middle ages, chivalry and the institutions of Greece and Rome, we shall never succeed in forming a philosophical judgment of ancient and of modern taste. We sometimes consider the word classic as synonymous with perfection. I use it at present in a different acceptation, considering classic poetry as that of the ancients, and romantic, as that which is generally connected with the traditions of chivalry. This division is equally suitable to the two eras of the world,-that which preceded, and that which followed the establishment of Christianity. In various German works, ancient poetry has also been compared to sculpture, and romantic to painting; in short, the progress of the human mind has been characterized in every manner, passing from material religions to those which are spiritual, from nature to the Deity. The French nation, certainly the most cultivated of all that are derived from Latin origin, inclines towards classic poetry imitated from the Greeks and Romans. The English, the most illustrious of the Germanic nations, is more attached to that which owes its birth to chivalry and roinance; and it prides itself on the admirable compositions of this sort which it pos. sesses. I will not, in this place, examine which of these tw~ kinds of poetry deserves the preference; it is sufficient to

CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC POETRY. 199 show, that the diversities of taste on this subject do not merely spring from accidental causes, but are derived also from the primitive sources of imagination and thought. There is a kind of simplicity both in the epic poems and tragedies of the ancients; because at that time men were completely the children of nature, and believed themselves controlled by fate, as absolutely as nature herself is controlled by necessity. Man, reflecting but little, always bore the action of his soul without; even conscience was represented by external objects, and the torch of the Furies shook the horrors of remorse over the head of the guilty. In ancient times, men attended to events alone, but among the moderns, character is of greater importance; and that uneasy reflection, which, like the vulture of Prometheus, often internally devours us, would have been folly amid circumstances and relations so clear and decided, as they existed in the civil and social state of the ancients. When the art of sculpture began in Greece, single statues alone were formed; groups were composed at a later period. It might be said with equal truth, that there were no groups in any art: objects were represented in succession, as in basreliefs, without combination, without complication of any kind. Man personified nature; nymphs inhabited the waters, hamadryads the forests; but nature, in turn, possessed herself of man; and, it might be said, he resembled the torrent, the thunderbolt, the volcano, so wholly did he act from involuntary'impulse, and so insufficient was reflection in any respect, to alter the motives or the consequences of his actions. The ancients, thus to speak, possessed a corporeal soul, and its emotions were all strong, decided, and consistent; it is not the same with the human heart as developed by Christianity: the moderns have derived from Christian repentance a constat-. habit of self-reflection. But in order to manifest this kind of internal existence, a great variety of outward facts and circumstances must display, under every form, the innumerable shades and gradations of that which is passing in the soul. If in our days the fine arts

200 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. were confined to the simplicity of the ancients, we should never attain that primitive strength which distinguishes them, ahnd we should lose those intimate and multiplied emotions of which our souls are susceptible. Simplicity in the arts would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation. Honor and love, valor and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes-that romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied. The sources from which art derives its effect are then very different in classic poetry and in that of romance; in one it is fate which reigns, in the other it is Providence. Fate counts the sent1ments of men as nothing; but Providence judges of actions according to those sentiments. Poetry must necessarily create a world of a very different nature, when its object is to paint the work of destiny, which is both blind and deaf, maintaining an endless contest with mankind; and when it attempts to describe that intelligent order, over which the Supreme Being continually presides,-that Being whom our hearts supplicate, and who mercifully answers their petitions! - The poetry of the pagan world was necessarily as simple and well defined as the objects of nature; while that of Christianity requires the various colors of the rainbow to preserve it from being lost in the clouds. The poetry of the ancients is more pure as an art; that of the moderns more readily calls forth our tears. But our present object is not so much to decide between classic and romantic poetry, properly so called, as between the imitation of the one and the inspiration of the tliher. The literature of the ancients is, among the modernis4 transplanted literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous, and flourishes under the influence of our religion and our institutions. Writers, who are imitators of the ancients, have subjected themselves to the rules of strict taste alone; for, not being able to consult either their own nature or their own recollections, it is necessary for them to conform

CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC POETRY. 201 to those laws by which the chefs-d'ouvre of the ancients may be adapted to our taste; though the circumstances both political and religious, which gave birth to these chefs-d'ceuvre are all entirely changed. But the poetry written in imitation of the ancients, however perfect in its kind, is seldom popular, because, in our days, it has no connection whatever with our national feelings.' "A few words on this much-talked of school may not be unacceptable. Like its offspring, L'Ecole Romantique in France, it had a critical purpose which was good, and a retrograde purpose which was bad. Both were insurgent against narrow critical canons, both proclaimed the superiority of Mediaeval Art; both sought, in Catholicism and in national legends, meanings profounder than those current in the literature of the day. In other respects these schools greatly differed. The Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, and Werner, had no enemy to combat in the shape of a severe national taste, Buch as opposed the tentatives of Victor Hugo, Dumas, and Alfred de Vigny.'On the contrary, they were supported by a large body of the nation, for their theories only carried further certain tendencies which had become general. Thus in as far as these theories were critical, they were little more than jubilates over the victorious campaigns won by Lessing, HIerder, Goethe, and Schiller. The Schlegels stood upon the battle-field, now silent, and sang a hymn of victory over the bodies of the slain. Frederick Schlegel, by many degrees the most considerable critic of this school, began his career with an Anthology from Lessing's works: Lessing's Geist; eire Btlumezlese seiner Ansichten; he ended it with admiration for Philip the Second, and the cruel Alva, and with the proclamation that Calderon was a greater poet than Shakspeare. Frederick Schlegel thus represents the whole romantic school from its origin to its close. " Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Solger, are the philosophers of this school; from the two former carne the once famous, now almost forgotten, principle of' Irony,' which Hegel' not only disposed of as a principle, but showed that the critics themselves made no use of it. Indeed,:he only serious instance of its application I remember, is the ingenious ssay by Schleiermacher on the'Irony of Sophocles,' translated for the Classical Maseum by the present Bishop of St. David's. No one, not even Tieck, attempted to exhibit the'irony' of Shakspeare, the god of their idolatry. Among the services rendered by Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, the translation of Shakspeare nmust never be forgotten, for although that translation is by no means so accurate as Germans suppose, being often niscrably weak, and sometimes grossly mistaken in its interpretation ol the meaning, it is nevertheless a translation which; on the whole, has cerhaps no rival in literature, and has served to make Shakspeare as fatailiar to the Germans as to us. 1 Esthetik, i. po. 84-90. go'

202 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. 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 Shaksieare, and their furtherance of IIerder's efforts towards the restoration of a balla I 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.'2 "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 mediaeval 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 ot 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 Herzensergiesseungen eines KunstMiehenden Klosterbruders, with Tieck'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 Schiler did to revive the dead forms of Grecian art. Overbeck, who painted in cloister, was so thoroughly penetrated by the ascetic spirit, that he reCused to draw'from the living model, lest it should make his works too iatutralistic; for to be true to Nature was tantamount to being false to the - F. Schlegel: Gespriiche uiber Poesie, p. 263. a Ibid., p. 274.

CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC POETRY. 203 ranks, know by heart the verses of Calderon and Camoens. Shakspeare is as much admired by the populace in England as by those of a higher class. The poems of Goethe and Bur 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; hut they are quite unknown to the common people, and even to the class of citizens in our towns, nigher 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 Puricsti 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 declared 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 ot the exaggerations of these admirers of the Trecentisti, in spite of a doctrine 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, Hiibner, Sohn, and Kaulbach, the Germans had no painters at all; and they have in these men painters:f very remarkable power.' "1 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 onome to a stand-still in literature, and its judgment has been pronounced; rut with much obvious mischief it brought many obvious advantages, and uo student of modern literature will refuse his acknowledgment to the ser-,.ices rendered by Romanticism in making the Middle Ages more thoroughly understood."-(Lewes, Goethe's Life aed Works, vol. ii. pp. 216-220.) —ld. 1 Our own Pre-Raphaelite School is a child of the Romantic 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 opposite; tf the Ronnanticists.

204 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. 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 lhapter, 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 merel) understand the highest degree of perfection. The fruitful im. agination of the Germans leads them to produce, rather than

GERMAN POEMS. 20. 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'eauvre 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 Crebillon. He has rendered several

206 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. 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 almost 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

GERMAN POEMS. 207 horn which he possesses, we are never tired by the skilful repetition of the comic effect it produces; and the better the poet has described the pedantic gravity of the imaums and viziers at the court of the sultan, the more his readers are amused by their involuntary dance. When Oberon carries the two lovers through the air in a winged car, the terror of that prodigy is dissipated by the security with which love inspires them. "In vain," says the poet, "earth disappears to their sight; in vain night covers the atmosphere with her dark wings; a heavenly light beams in their tender glances; their souls mutually reflect each other; night is no longer night for them; elysium surrounds them; the sun enlightens the recesses of their hearts, and love every moment shows them objects, always new and always delightful." Sensibility is not in general much connected with the marvellous: there is something so serious in the affections of the soul, that we like not to see them drawn forth with the sports of the imagination; but Wieland has the art of uniting fantastic fictions with true sentiments, in a manner peculiar to himself. The baptism of the sultan's daughter, who becomes a Christian in order to marry Huon, is also a most beautiful passage: to change one's religion for the sake of love is a little profane; but Christianity is so truly the religion of the heart, that to love with devotion and purity is already to be a convert. Oberon has made the young people promise not to give themselves up to each other till their arrival in Rome; they are together in the same ship, and, separated from the world, love induces them to violate their vow. The tempest is then let loose, the winds blow, the billows roar, and the sails are torn; the masts are destroyed by the thunderbolt; the passengers bewail themselves, the sailors cry for help: at length the vessel splits, the waves threaten to swallow them up, and the presence of death can scarcely take from the young couple their sense of earthly happiness. They are precipitated in the ocean: an invisible power preserves and lands them on a des-!rt island, where they find a hermit, whom religion and misfortunes have led to that retreat.

208 MMADAME 1)E STAEL'S GERMANY. Amanda, the espoused of Hluon, after many difficulties, brings a son into the world; and nothing can be more delight. ful than this picture of maternal tenderness in the desert: the new being who comes to animate their solitude, the uncertain look, the wandering glance of infancy, which the passionate tenderness of the mother endeavors to fix on herself, all is full of sentiment and of truth. The trials to which the married pair are subjected by Oberon and Titania, are continued; but in the conclusion their constancy is rewarded. Although this poem is diffuse, it is impossible not to consider it as a charming work, and if it were well translated into French verse, it would certainly be thought so. There have been poets, both before and since Wieland, who have attempted to write in the French and Italian manner; but what they have done scarcely deserves to be mentioned: and if German literature had not assumed a peculiar character, it certainly would not form an epoch in the history of the fine arts. That of poetry must in Germany be fixed at the time when the Messias of Klopstock made its appearance. The hero of that poem, according to our mortal language, inspires admiration and pity in the same degree, without either of these sentiments being weakened by the other. A generous poet' said, in speaking of Louis XVI, " Jamais tant de respect n'admit tant de pitiU." This verse, so affecting and so delicate, might serve to express the tender emotions we experience in reading Klopstock's Messias. The subject of it is, without doubt, vastly superior to all the inventions of genius; a great deal, however, is requisite to display with so much sensibility the human nature in the divine, and with so much force the divine nature in the mortal. Much talent is also required to excite interest and anxiety in the recital of an event, previously determined by an all-powerful Will. Klopstock has, with great art, at once united all that terror and that hope which the fatality of the ancients and the providence of Christians can jointly inspire. l M. de Sabran.

GERMAN POEMS. 209 I have already spoken of the character of Abbadona, the repentant demon, who seeks to do good to man: a devouring remorse attaches itself to his immortal nature; his regret has heaven itself for its object-that heaven which he has known, those celestial spheres which were his habitation. What a situation is this return towards virtue, when the decree is irrevocable! to complete the torments of Hell, nothing is wanting but to make it the abode of a soul again awakened to sensibility! Our religion is not familiarized to us in poetry; and, among modern poets, Klopstock has known best how to personify the spirituality of Christianity, by situations and pictures the most analogous to its nature. There is but one episode which has love for its object in all the work; and this love subsists between two persons who have been raised from the dead-Cidli and Semida: Jesus Christ has restored them both to life, and they love each other with an affection pure and celestial as their new existence; they no longer consider themselves as subject to death; they hope to pass together from earth to heaven, and that neither of them will experience the anguish of approaching separation. What an affecting conception does such a love present to us in a religious poem! —a love which could alone harmonize with the general tenor of the work. It must nevertheless be owned, that from a subject so continually and so highly exalted there results a little monotony; the soul is fatigued by too much contemplation, and the author seems sometimes to require readers already risen firom the grave, like Cidli and Semida. This defect might, it seems to me, have been avoided, without introducing any thing profane in the Messias.: it would perhaps have been better to have taken the whole life of Jesus Christ for the subject of the poem, than to begin at the mon.ent when his enemries demand his death. The colors of the East might with more art have been employed to paint Syria, and to characterize, in a strong manner, the state of the human -ace under the empire of Rome. There is too much discourse, and too many long conversations in the Messias'. eloquence

210 MA. DAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. itself is less striking to the imagination than a situation, a char. acter, a picture, which leaves us something to guess at. The Logos, or the Divine Word, existed before the creation of the world; but with poets the creation ought to precede the Word. Klopstock has also been reproached with not having sufficiently varied the portraits of his angels. It is true, that in perfection it is difficult to point out variety, and that in general men are characterized by defects alone: some distinguishing traits, however, might have been given to this great picture; but, above all, as it appears to me, ten cantos should not have been added to that which terminates the principal action, which is the death of our Saviour. These ten cantos undoubtedly contain much lyrical beauty; but when a work, of whatever kind, excites dramatic interest, it ought to conclude whenever that interest ceases. Reflections and sentiments, which we should read elsewhere with the greatest pleasure, are most frequently tiresome when a more lively emotion has preceded them. We, consider books, nearly as we would consider men; and we always elact from them what they have accustomed us to expect. Throughout all Klopstock's work we perceive a mind highly elevated and sensitive; nevertheless, the impressions which it excites are too uniform, and funeral ideas are too numerous. Life goes on, only because we forget death; and it is for that reason, without doubt, that we shudder whenever the idea of death recurs to us. In the Messias, as well as in Young's Night Thoughts, we are too often brought back to the tomb: the arts would be entirely at an end, if we were always absorbed in that species of meditation; for we require a very energetic sentiment of existence, to enable us to look on the world with the animation of poetry. The Pagans, in their poems, as well as on the bas-reliefs of their sepulchres, always represented varied pictures, and thus made even of death an action of life; but the vague and uncertain thoughts which accompany the Christian in his last moments, are more connected with the emotions of the heart than with the livell colors of the imagination.

GERMAN POE1MS. 211 Klopstock has comp9sed religious and patriotic odes, with many other elegant productions on various subjects.' In his religious odes, he knows how to invest unbounded ideas with visible imagery; but sometimes this sort of poetry is lost in the immeasurable which it would embrace. It is difficult to quote any particular verses in his religious odes which may be repeated as detached sentences. The beauty of his poetry consists in the general impression which it produces. Should we ask the man who contemplates the sea-that immensity which is always in motion, yet always inexhaustible, which seems to give an idea of all periods of time at once, of all its successions become simultaneous; —should we ask him, while wave follows wave, to count the pleasures he experiences while ruminating on their progress? It is the same with religious meditations embellished by poetry; they are worthy of admiration if they inspire new zeal to attain higher degrees of perfection, if we feel ourselves the better for having indulged in them: and this is the criterion by which we should form our judgment of this species of composition. Among the odes of Klopstock, those written on the French Revolution scarcely deserve to be mentioned; the present moment has no inspiration for the poet; he must place himself at a distance from the age in which he lives, in order either to judge or to describe it well: but the efforts made by Klopstock to revive patriotism among the Germans are highly honorable to him. From the poetry composed with this laudable intention, I will endeavor to give his song of the Bards after the death of Hermann, called by the Romans Arminius: he was assassinated by the Princes of Germany, who were jealou, of his success and of his power. 1 "No one," says the German critic Gervinus, " had attained to the true tone of bardic inspiration, to the simple sublimity of Hebrew poetry, and to the genuine spirit of classical antiquity, in the same degree as Klop stock in his earlier Odes; where we seem to listen in turn to Horace, te D)wid, and, what is more extraordinary, to Ossian, before the world knew any thing about him. Such gifts were not possessed by even Lessing and Wieland. They first rekindled in Herder, but only to imitation, and after vards in Goethe to original production."-Ed.

212 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. "HERMANN.1 "THE BARDS WERDOMAR, KERDING, AND DARMOND. " WERDOMAR. "Upon this stone with ancient moss o'erlaid Rest we, 0 Bards, and be our song begun. Let none advance to gaze beneath the shade That shrouds in death Teutonia's noblest son. "For there he lies in blood, whose life Was erst the Romans' secret dread, When they in triumph to the jocund fife His own Thusnelda' led. "Cast not a glance! for ye would weel To see him lying in his gore. And not to tears the Telyn's string we sweep. We sing of those who die no more! " KERDING. " Bright are my locks of youthful hair, And first to-day I girded on the sword. Arm'd for the first time with the lyre and spear, Must I too sing the warrior-lord? "Ask not too much, 0 sires, of one so young, For I must dry up with my locks of gold These burning tears, before the harp be strung To sing the first of Mana's offspring bold. " DARMOND. " I weep for frantic ire! Nor would my tears assuage! Flow, flow adown my cheek of fire, Ye tears of rage! X We have adopted the version of Mr. Wm. Nind, Odes of Klopstock, ] e58.-Ed.' She was taken prisoner by Germanicus in his first battle with He: mann, and afterwards figured in his triumph. M'iana, son of Tuisco, mythological ancestor of the Germans

GERMAN POEMS. 213 "They are not dumb, not mute they flow! Hear, Hela,1 hear their curse of might. No traitor of the land that laid him low Die in the fields of fight. " WERDOMAR. " See ye the torrent dash Down through the rock-defile? And the torn fir-trees headlong crash For Hermann's funeral pile? "Soon is he dust, and laid In clay-marl of the tomb: And with the dust the hallow'd blade, On which he swore the conqueror's doom. " Thou spirit that hast left his form, Upon thy flight to SigmarP stay I And hear thy people's heart how warm It beats for thee to-day!' KERDING. "Tell not Thusnelda, tell her not, Here lies in blood her pride, her joy A wife, a hapless mother, tell her not Here lies the father of her beauteous boy! " Fetters already has she borne The triumph of the foe to swell. Thou hast a Roman heart, if, thus forlorn, To her thou canst the tidings tell. " DARMOND. " What sire begat thee, hapless one! Segestes,' with revengeful thirst His sword did redden in his bleeding son! Him curse not!-Hela has already cursed! Hela reigned over the dreary region whither the shades of the dead were taken who had not died in fight. The latter were admitted into Odin's hall. 2 Sigmar, Hermann's father. a Segestes, Thusnelda's father, quarrelled with his son-in-law, and eon. spired with those who slew him.

214 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. " WERDOMAR. "Name not Segestes, ye that sing! His name to mute oblivion doom; That, where he lies, her heavy wing May darken o'er his tomb! "The string that sounds the name Of Hermann bears disgrace, If but one note of scorn and shame Denounce the traitor base. For Hermann, Hermann to the mountain call, To the deep grove, the favorite of the brave, The bards in chorus sing. In chorus all Sing the bold chief, who did his country save. " Sister of Cannme, Winfeld's fight, I saw thee with thy bloody-waving hair, With flame-glance of avenging might Wave through Walhalla,'mid the minstrels there I' The son of Drusus' fain Would hide thy mouldering monument,The blanch'd bones of the fallen slain Together in the death-vale blent. "We suffer'd not, but strew'd in dust the mound, For these are vouchers of the mighty rout; And they shall hear, when flowers are on the ground, The war-dance and the victor's shout. " Sisters to Cannse would he yet have given, With Varus many a Roman would have laid; Had not the rival chiefs for envy striven, Crecina had sought Varus' shade! "In Hermann's soul of fire Slumber'd a thought of mighty will. At midnight, by Thor's altar, to the lyre He form'd his vow, impetuous to fulfil. "He thought thereon, when at the high repast The warriors danced amid the lances gay; And round about the daring dance he cast The blood-rings-to the boys a play. a Germanicus, the son of Drusus, upon arriving at the spot of Varus'l ]efeat, found the bones of his fellow-citizens, and buried them.

GERMAN POEMS. 215 "The storm-toss'd mariner his tale resolves:' Far in the North there lies a rocky isle, Where fiery vapor, like the clouds, revolves, Then flames, and flings forth rock for many a mile 1' "So Hermann kindled at the fight; Resolved, like floods of fiery foam, Over the ice-crown'd Alps to roll his might Down on the plains of Rome!-' To die there!-or the Capitol invade, And hard by Jove's high fane, demand Of mad Tiberius, and his father's shade, Right for his plundeird Fatherland. " Therefore he claim'd the chieftain's rule Among the princes: and they slew him then! He lies in blood, who cherish'd in his soul His country more than other men! " DARMOND. "O Hela, hast thou heard My tears, that burning fall?'Tis thine to give a just award: 0 Hela, hear their call! " KERDING. " In Walhalla Sigmar rests beneath the golden ash;' In his hand the victor's branch; the lances round him clash. By Tuisco beckon'd, and by Mana's hand led on, There the youthful hero-sire receives his youthful son. " WERDOMAR. "But Sigmar there in silent woe His Hermann greets again. Not now Tiberius, and the shades below, He challenges at Jove's high fane." X The- Gtolden As. —" Where,' asked Gangler,' is the chief or holiest seat of the gods'' It is under the ash, Yggdrasill,' replied Har,' where the gods assemble every day in council.... That ash is the greatest and best of all trees. Its branches spread over the whole world, and even reach above heaven.' "-Prose Edda.

216 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. There are several other poems of Klopstock in which, as well as in this, he recalls to the Germans the noble deeds of their ancestors; but those recollections have scarcely any connection with the present state of their nation. We perceive in these poems a vague sort of enthusiasm, a desire which cannot obtain its object; and the slightest national song of a free people causes a truer emotion. Scarcely any traces of the ancient history of the Germans are now remaining, and that of modern times is too much divided, and too confused, to be capable of producing popular sentiments; it is in their hearts alone that the Germans must discover the source of truly patriotic poetry. Klopstock frequently treats subjects of a less serious nature in a very graceful manner; and this grace is derived from imagination and sensibility; for in his poetry there is not much of what we call wit, which indeed would not suit the lyric character. In his Ode to the Nightingale he has given novelty to a worn-out subject, by imparting to the bird sentiments so tender yet so animated, both on nature and on man, that it seems like a winged mediator, carrying from one to the other the tribute of its love and praise. An Ode on Rhenish Wine is very original: the banks of the Rhine form a truly national image for the Germans; they have nothing in all their country superior to it. Vines grow in the same places that have given birth to so many warlike actions; and wine, a hundred years old, the contemporary of more glorious days, seems still to retain the generous warmth of former times. Klopstock has not only drawn from Christianity the greatest beauties of his religious works, but as it was his wish that the literature of his country should be entirely independent of that of the ancients, he has endeavored to give to German poetry a perfectly new mythology borrowed from the Scandinavians. Sometimes he uses it in rather too learned a manner, but at others he applied it very happily; and his imagination has felt the relations which subsist between the gods of the North and the aspect of nature over which they preside. There is a very charming ode of his, entitled The Art oJ

GERMAN POEMS. 2.17'ialf, in other words, The Art of Skating,' invented it is said by the Giant Tialf. He describes a young and beautiful female clothed in furs, and placed on a sledge formed like a car; the young people who surround it, by a slight push, drive it forwards with the rapidity of lightning. They choose for its path the frozen torrent, which during the winter offers the safest road. The locks of the young men are strewed over with shining particles of frost; the girls wl6o follow the sledge fasten to their feet little wings of steel, which in a moment carry them to a considerable distance; the song of the bards accompanies this northern dance; the gay procession passes under elms covered with flowers of snow; the ice cracks under their feet, a momentary terror disturbs their enjoyment; but 1 " This joyous exercise," says Goethe, " we owed also to Klopstock. 1 well remember springing out of bed one clear, frosty morning, and declaiming to myself (' Schon von den GCfiihle,' etc.)Already with the glow of health elate, Descending swift the frozen shore along, The crystal I have whiten'd with my skate, In mazes as to Braga's song.' My lingering and doubtful resolution was at once decided. I flew forthwith to the spot where so late a beginner could discreetly practise his first attempts. And in truth this exertion of strength well merited Klopstock's commendation. It brings us in contact with the freshness of childhood, culls the youth to the full enjoyment of his suppleness and activity, and is fitted to avert a stagnating old age. Hence we followed this sport immoderately. We were not satisfied with thus spending upon the ice a glorious day of sunshine, but we continued our motion late into the night; for while other modes of exertion weary the bcdy, this seems constantly to -end it new strength. The full moon emerging from the clouds over the white meadows frozen into fields of ice, the night air whistling to our onward motion, the solemn thunder of the ice falling in upon the receding water, the strange distinct echoes of our own movements, brought before us Ossianic scenes in all their perfection. Now one friend, and now another, sounded out in half-singing declamation one of Klopstock's Odes; and when we found ourselves together in the dim light, we were loud in sincere praises of the author of our joys.'For should he not immortal live, Whose art can healtn and joy enhance, Such as no mettled steed can give, Such, e'en, as pants not in the dance?"' (A us mneinem Lehen.)-Ed. VOL. I.-10

218 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMAN'~Y. soon shouts of joy, and the violence of the exercise preserving that heat in the blood of which the cold air would otherwise deprive it, in short, the contest with the climate revives their spirits; and at the end of their course they reach a large illuminated hall, where a good fire, with a feast and ball, offel to their acceptance easy pleasures, instead of those which they had gained from their struggle with the rigors of nature.' 1 "'In Klopstock, born 1724, we see Idealism once more victoriously asserting itself: Fatherland and Christianity were the two sources of his inspiration. But he was too much of a poet not to have a large admixture of Realism, and too much of a German not to have a strong imitative tendency. Very remarkable it is in the history of German culture, to notice how, in the dull stagnant periods, Imitation of foreigners is the ruling motive, and how also revolutions are made by the substitution of one imitation for another. Like premature republicans, they cut off the head of their king, to place another on the throne. The shout of freedom rouses them to revolt; no sooner are they free, than the cry is,' Whom shall we obey?' Gervinus has remarked that the dictum of the Klopstock school was' originality,' by which they opposed Winckelmann, who declared the only way to produce inimitable works was to imitate the ancients; and yet even this cry of originality was an imitation, borrowed from the English poet, Young.'Curiously enough, even this notion of original genius is not original with us; and the great English drama, which was so far from being a copy, was copied in every way by our " original" poets!'" Not only in the instance mentioned by Gervinus, but in the two great epochs of German literature which preceded, we notice a similar fact. The middle age culture is everywhere far more receptive and imitative than original, and the famous knightly-poetry is drawn from Arabia, through France, not from the German-Chlristian soil. Again, when with Opitz (1624) a new era begins, we see him drawing from French, Spanish, and Italian models the rules for his Buch von der teutschen Poeterey, declaring it impossible for Germans to surpass them. " In Klopstock we see the three elements of Imitation, Christiaelmt an Nature, all working towards Idealism. The poetry of Homer, Pinaar, and Ossian lured him almost as much as the psalms of David, and the bards of his fatherland. IIis Odes are inspired by this triple love; some of them are religious, some bardic, and some antique. His influence was instantalheous, immense, because it moved with the spirit of the time; if succeeding years have left him somewhat stranded on the shore, u wreck of the past, and not a living influence, we must not forget the services lihe pertbrmed in an age when he stood out as a giant. The very enthusiasm he excited, the high and priestly office which he gave the poet, as a rea Vates, the services he rendered to the rebellious German language, wi I Gervinus, iv. 419.

GERMAN POEMS. 21 9 The Ode on D)eparted Friends, addressed to Ebert, also de serves to be mentioned. Klopstock is less happy when he writes on the subject of love; like Dorat, he addressed verses to " his future mistress," and his Muse was not inspired by so secure for him a grateful recognition even among those wearied by his odes and epic. " Klopstock went back to Nature, as well as to the early Singers. He vindicated Realism by his free and joyous habits, by gymnastic exercises, by skating, of which he was passionately fond, and for which he wrote laws with something of Solonic gravity; by horsemanship, by bathing, and by admiration of pretty women. His Idealism was no asceticism. Like Milton, he was an accomplished cavalier, and, like Milton, passionately fond of music. Remembering Coleridge's sarcasm, I will hasten to add that the resemblance to Milton must not be pushed much further; if he is a German Milton, he is indeed very Gerr.an. All such parallels have necessarily an imperfect side, but if one must be made, I would call Klopstock a German Wordsworth rather than a German Milton; not so much in reference to the quality of his poetry, as to his life and his position in national literature. The first three cantos of the -Messias, published in 1748, a year before Goethe's birth, produced a wonderful impression. The rest of the poem was delayed till 1773, much to the regret of his admirers, who were tempted to curse the generous patron whose pension enabled the poet to be thus idle. But in truth a change had come over him. He grew melancholy, was troubled with desires for death, and only cared to live that he might finish his religious poem; and, as Lessing said, he began to correct his verses more with a view to orthodoxy than to art. "If in Klopstock we have the representative of German Idealism, in Wieland we have the representative of German Realism. They are conLlasts in all essentials. Wieland is sensuous where Klopstock is supersensuous, rational where Klopstock is sentimental; philosophy and history rule his muse, as religion and music ruled that of Klopstock; and he is eminently didactic where Klopstock is eminently lyrical. Wieland had s marked preference for the later classics, and the French and Italian poets, Ls Klopstock had for the northern and English. Voltaire was to Wieland what Young was to Klopstock. Even on English ground the same contrast is observable. Wieland takes up Shaftesbury and Shakspeare; Klop stock, —Young, Richardson, and Milton. Klopstock was'terribly in earaest,' as Kemble said of Kean; Wieland was a gay, light, wandering iature, incapable of any profound earnestness. If we have called one the herman Wordsworth, we may call the other, in the same loose way, the German Moore. It was the fashion to call Wieland a Greek, because he wrote pleasant tales, of a Frenchified Hellenic cast; but although in Agathon, for example, a certain reflex o0 Grecian culture and Grecian light is visible; yet, as in an old Palimpsest you may still trace the rugged, ineffaceable writing of some monkish homily, which has been made to cede he place to a pleasant legend, so under this surface-polish of culture tho

220 MADAME DE STrAEL'S GERMANY. far-fetched a subject; to sport with sentiment we should not have suffered from it, and when the attempt is made by a serious person, a secret constraint always prevents him from appearing natural. We must reckon as belonging to the school of Klopstock, not as his disciples but as members of his poetical fraternity, the great Hallel, who cannot be mentioned without respect, Gessner, and several others, who approached the English character with respect to truth of sentiment, and yet did not bear the truly characteristic stamp of German literature. Klopstock himself did not entirely succeed in presenting to Germany an epic poem at once sublime and popular, as a work of that sort ought to be. Vess's translation of the Iliad and Odyssev made Homer as much known as a sketched copy can render a finished original; every epithet is preserved, every word is in its proper place, and the impression made by the whole is forcible, although we do not find in the German all the charms of Greek, which was the finest language of the South. The men of literature in Germany, who seize with avidity every new kind of writing, endeavored to compose poems with the Homeric color; and the Odyssey, containing in itself many details of private life, appeared more easy to imitate than the Iliad. The first essay of this kind was an idyl in three cantos by Voss himself, entitled Luise: it is written in hexameters, which are generally acknowledged to be admirable; but the pomp of hexameters seems seldom to accord with the extreme naivete of the subject. Were it not for the pure and religious emotions which animate the poem, we should interest ourselves but little in the very quiet marriage of the venerable pastor of Graanau's daughter. Homer, always just in the application of his epithets, constantly says, in speaking of Minerva,' the blue-eyed daughter of Jupiter;" in the same manner Voss incessantly repeats, "the venerable pastor of Grinau" (der hBerman Wieland is unmistakably legible." —(G. H. Lewes, G/oethe's Lir mdt Works, vol. i. p. 249.)-Ed.

GERMAN POEMS. 221?ihrwiirdige Pfarrer von Griinau). But the simplicity of ITomer produces so great an effect, merely because it forms a noble contrast with the dignified grandeur of his hero and of the fate which pursues him; but when the subject treated of is merely a country pastor, and a notable woman, his wife, who marry their daughter to the man she loves, its simplicity has less merit. In Germany, descriptions are greatly admired like those in Voss's Luise, on the manner of making coffee, of lighting a pipe, etc., and those details are given with much skill and exactness; it is a well-painted Flemish picture; but it appears to me that the common customs of life cannot well be introduced into our poems, as they were in those of the ancients; for those customs among us are not poetical, and our civilization has something citizen like in it. The ancients lived almost always in the open air, preserving their relations with nature, and their manner of existence was rural, but never vulgar. The Germans consider the subject of a poem as of little consequence, and believe that every thing consists in the manner of treating it. Now this manner can scarcely ever be transfused into a foreign language, and yet the general reputation of Europe is not to be despised; besides, the remembrance of the most interesting details is soon effaced, when it is not connected with some fiction which the imagination can lay hold of. That affecting purity which constitutes the principal charm of Voss's poem is most conspicuous, as it appears to me, in the nuptial benediction of the pastor, at the marriage of his daughter; addressing himself to her with a flattering voice, he says:. " My daughter, may the blessing of God be with thee: amiable and virtuous child, may the blessing of God accompany thee, both on earth and in heaven. I have been young, and now am old; and in this uncertain life the Almighty has sent _ e much joy and much sorrow. May his holy name be blessed for both! I shall soon, without regret, lay my aged 1 We are obliged to content ourselves with a dimple literal versio 1.-Ed.

222 MADAME DE STAEL 8 GERMANY. head in the tomb of my fathers, for my daughter is happy; the is so because she knows that our souls are equally the care of our Heavenly Father in sorrow as in joy. What can be more affecting than the sight of this young and beautiful bride! In the simplicity of her heart, she leans on the arm of the friend who is to conduct her through the path of life; it is with him that in a holy union she will partake of happiness and of misfortune; it is she who, if it be the will of God, will wipe the last cold sweat fiom the forehead of her dying husband. My soul was also filled with presentiments when, on my wedding day, I brought my timid companion to this place; happy, but serious, I showed her at a distance the extent of our fields, the tower of the church, and the pastor's house, in which we have experienced so much good and so much evil. My only child! for thou alone remainest, the others whom God had given to me, sleep below under the church-yard turf; my only child, thou goest, following the path which led me hither. The chamber of my daughter will be deserted, her place at our table will be no longer occupied; in vain shall I listen' to hear her footsteps, the sound of her voice. Yes, when thy huslband takes thee far from me, sobs will escape me, and my eyes, bathed in tears, will long follow thee; for I am a man and a father, and I love with tenderness this daughter who also loves me sincerely. But soon restraining my tears, I shall lift to heaven my supplicating hands, and prostrate myself before the divine will, which has commanded the wife to leave her father and mother and follow her husband. Depart then in peace, my child; forsake thy family and thy father's house; follow the youngman who henceforth must supply to thee the place of those who gave thee birth; be in thy house like a fruitful vine, surround thy table with noble branches. A religious marriage is the purest of all earthly felicity; but if the Lord found not the edifice, how vain are the labors of man!" This is true simplicity, that of the soul; that which is equaly suitable to the monarch and to his people, to the poor and to the rich, in short, to all the creatures of God. We are soon tired of descptive poetry when it is applied t:) objects which

GERMAN POEMS. 223 have nothing great in themselves; but sentiments descend to us from heaven, and however humble be the abode which is penetrated with their rays, those rays lose nothing of their original beauty. From the extensive admiration which Goethe has acquired in Germany, his Hermann and Dorothea has obtained the name of an epic poem; and one of the most intelligent men of that or any other country, M. de Humboldt, the brother of the celebrated traveller, has composed a work on this subject, which contains several very philosophical and striking observations. Hermann and Dorothea is translated both into French and English, but we cannot in a translation have any idea of the charming effect produced by the original. From the first verse to the last, it excites a tender emotion, and there is also, in its minutest details, a natural dignity which would not be unsuitable to the heroes of Homer. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged, that the personages and events are ot too little importance; the subject is sufficient to keep up the interest when we read it in the original, but in a translation that interest is destroyed. With respect to epic poems, it appears to me allowable to establish a.certain literary aristocracy:'dignity, both of personages and of the historical recollections connected with them, can alone raise the imagination to a height equal to the composition of that species of poetry. An ancient poem of the thirteenth century, the NTAiebelungen Lied,' of which I have already spoken, seems in its time to have possessed all the characters of the true epic. The great actions of the hero of northern Germany, Siegfried, assassimnated by a king of Burgundy, and the vengeance inflicted on that 1 " To the Germans, this Niebelungen Song is naturally an object of no bommon love; neither if they sometimes overvalue it, and vague antiquarian wonder is more common than just criticism, should the fault be too heavily visited. After long ages of concealment, they have found it in the remote wilderness, still standing like the trunk of some almost antediluvian oak-nay, with boughs on it still green, after all the wind and weather of twelve hundred years. To many a patriotic feeling, which lingers 4ondly in solitary places of the Past, it may well be a rallying-point and Lovers' Trysting-Tree.' "- I rlyle's E8.says, p. 262.) —E&

224 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. king in the camp of Attila by the followers of Siegfried, which put an end to the first kingdom of Burgundy, are the subject of the work. An epic poem is scarcely ever the work of one man; ages, if we imay be allowed the expression, must labor to perfect it; patriotism, religion, in short, the whole existence of a nation, cannot be brought into action but by some of those singularly great events, which are not created by the poet, but which appear to him in greater magnitude seen through the obscurity of time. The personages of an epic poem ought to represent the primitive character of their nation. We should discover in them that indestructible mould from which all history derives its origin. The pride and boast of Germany were its ancient chivalry, its strength, its loyalty, the union of goodness and simplicity for which it was famed, and that northern roughness, which was, however, connected with the most exalted sensibility. We also admire that Christianity which is grafted on the Scandinavian mythology; that untamed honor, rendered pure and sacred by faith; that respect for women, which became still more striking from the protection it afforded to the weak; that undaunted contempt of death, that warlike paradise which has now given place to the most humane of all religions. Such are the elements of an epic poem in Germany. Genius should avail itself of this, and, with the art of Medea, reanimate with new blood ancient recollections. CHAPTER XIII. OF GERMAN POETRY. THE detached pieces of poetry among the Germans are, it appears to me, still more remarkable than their poems, and it is particularly on that species of writing that the stamp o originality is impressed; it is also true that the authors who have writteni most in this manner, Goethe, Schiller, Burger,

GERMAN POETRY. 225 etc., are of the modern school, which alone bears a truly na tional character. Goethe has most imagination, and Schillei most sensibility; but Biirger is more popular than either. By successively examining some poetical pieces of each of these authors, we shall the better be able to form an idea of the qualities which distinguish them. The productions of SchilleI bear some analogy to the French taste, yet we do not find in his detached poems any thing that resembles the fugitive pieces of Voltaire; that elegance of conversation, and almost of manners, transfused into French poetry, belongs to France alone; and Voltaire, in point of gracefulness, was the first of French writers. It would be interesting to compare Schiller's stanzas on the loss of youth, entitled the Ideal, with those of Voltaire, beginning, " Si vous voulez que j'aime encore, Rendez moi lage des amours, etc." We see in the French poet the expression of pleasing regret, which has for its object the pleasures of love and the joys of life; the German poet laments the loss of that enthusiasm and innocent purity of thought peculiar to early age, and flatters himself that his decline of life will still be embellished by the charms of poetry and of reflection. The stanzas of Schiller do not possess that easy and brilliant clearness which is generally so striking and attractive; but we may draw from them consolations which intimately affect the soul. Schiller never presents to us a serious or profound reflection without investing it with noble images; he speaks to man as nature herself would speak to him, for nature is also contemplative and poetical. To paint the idea of time, she brings before us an everflowing stream; and lest, through her eternal youth, we should forget our own transient existence, she adorns herself with flowers which quickly fade, and strips the trees in autumn of those leaves which spring beheld in all their beauty. Poetry should be the terrestrial mirror of this divinity, and by colors, sounds, and rhythm, reflect all the beauties of the universe. The poem entitled The Song of the Bell, consists of two 10:0

226 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. distinct parts: the alternate stanzas express the labor which is performed at a forge, and between each of these there are charming verses on the solemn circumstances and extraordinary events commonly announced by the ringing of bells, such as birth, marriage, death, fire, insurrection, etc. We may translate into French the fine and affecting images which Schiller derives from those great epochs of human life; but it is impossible properly to imitate the strophes in short verse, and composed of words whose rough and quick sound almost conveys to our ears the repeated blows and rapid steps of the workmen who direct the boiling metal. Can a prose translation give any just idea of a poem of this sort? It is reading music instead of hearing it; and yet it is easier to conceive the effect of' instruments which are known to us, than of the concords and contrasts of a rhythm and a language we are ignorant of. Sometimes the regular shortness of the metre gives us an idea of the activity of the workmen, the limited but regular force which they exert in their principal operations; and sometimes, immediately after this harsh and strong sound, we hear the aerial strains of enthusiasm and melancholy. The originality of this poem is lost, if we separate it from the effect of a versification skilfully chosen, where the rhymes answer each other like intelligent echoes modified by thought; and nevertheless, these picturesque effects of sound would be bold and hazardous in French. The vulgarity in point of style continually threatens us: we have not, like almost every other nation, two languages, that of prose and that of verse; and it is with words as with persons-wherever ranks are confounded familiarity is dangerous. Cassandra, another piece of Schiller's, might more easily be translated into French, although its poetical language is extremely bold. At the moment when the festival to celebrate the marriage of Polyxena and Achilles is beginning, Cassandra is seized with a presentiment of the misfortunes which wil. result fromn it; she walks sad and melancholy in the grove of Apollo, and laments that knowledge of futurity which troubles all her enjoyments. We see in this ode what a misfortune it

GERMAN POETRY. 227 would be to a human being, could he possess the prescience of a divinity. Is not the sorrow of the prophetess experienced by all persons of strong passions and superior minds? Schiller has given us a fine moral idea under a very poetical form, namely, that true genius, that of sentiment, even if it escape suffering from its commerce with the world, is frequently the victim of its own feelings. Cassandra never marries, not that she is either insensible or rejected; but her penetrating soul in a moment passes the boundaries of life and death, and finds repose only in heaven. I should never end if I were to mention all the poetical pieces of Schiller which contain new thoughts and new beauties.' He has composed a hymn on the departure of the Greeks after the siege of Troy, which might be supposed the production of a poet then living, so faithfully has he adhered to the complexion of those times. I shall examine, under the subject of dramatic art, the admirable skill with which the Germans transport themselves into ages, countries, and characters, different from their own,-a superior faculty, without which the personages produced on the stage would resemble puppets moved by the same wire, and made to speak in the same voice, namely, that of the author. Schiller deserves particularly to be admired as a dramatic poet: Goethe stands unrivalled in the art of composing elegies, ballads, stanzas, etc.; his detached pieces have a very different merit from those of Voltaire. The French poet has transfused into his verse the spirit of the most brilliant society; the German, by a few slight touches, awakens in the soul profound and contemplative imipressions.'2 Goethe is to the highest degree natural in 4hi&.seiesQa comifpositimn.- and not only so when he speaks from his own impressions, but even when he transports himself to new cli1 The lyrical pieces of Schiller have been very well translated by Sir Bulwer Lytton. They may be obtaired, together with Bulwer's Life of Schiller, for a very small sum, in the Tauchnitz reprint.-Ed. s Goethe's Poems and Ballads have been translated by Professor Aytoun itnd Mr. Theodore Martin of Edinburgh, and reprinted in New York by Delisser & Procter.-Ed.

22S MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. mates, customs, and situations, his poetry easily assimilates itself with foreign countries; he seizes, with a talent perfectly unique, all that pleases in the national songs of each nation, he becomes, when he chooses it, a Greek, an Indian, or a Morlachian. We have often mentioned that melancholy and meditation which characterizes the poets of the North: Goethe, like all other men of genius, unites in himself most astonishing contrasts; we find in his works many traces of character pecun liar to the inhabitants of the South; they are more awakened to the pleasures of existence, and have at once a more lively and tranquil enjoyment of nature than those of the North; their minds have not less depth, but their genius has more vivacity; we find in it a certain sort of na.-ete, which awakens at once the remembrance of ancient simplicity with that of the middle'ages: it is not the nuivete of innocence, but that of strenotlh vW"e perceive iin Gbietnhe"s"poetical compositions, that he disdains the crowd of obstacles, criticisms, and observations, which may be opposed to him. He follows his imagination wherever itleads him, and a certain predominant pride frees him from the scruples of self-love.!' Goethe is in poetry an absolute master "' In Goethe's mind, the first aspect that strikes us is its calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals to us its vastness and unmeasured strength. This man rules, and is not ruled. The stern and fiery energies of a most passionate soul lie silent in the centre of its being; a trembling sensibility has been inured to stand, without flinching or murmur, the sharpest trials. Nothing outward, nothing inward, shall agitate or control him. The brightest and most capricious fancy, the most piercing and inquisitive intellect, the wildest and deepest imagination; the highest thrills of joy, the bitterest pangs of sorrow: all these are his, he is not theirs. While he moves every heart from its steadfastness, his own is firm and still: the words that search into the inmost recesses of our nature, he pronounces with a tone of coldness and equanimity: in the deepest pathos he weeps not, or his tears are like water trickling from a rock of adamant. Ile is at king of himself and of this world; now does he rule it like a vulgar great man, like Napoleon or Charles the Twelfth, by the mere brute exertion of his will, grounded on no principle, or on a false one: his faculties and fee!ings are not fettered or prostrated under the iron sway of Passion, but led and guided in kindly union under the mild sway of Reason; as the fierce primeval elements of Chaos were stilled at the coming of Light, and bound together, under its soft vesture, into a glorious and beneficent Creation."-. Carlyle's Esay8s, p. 90.)-Ed.

GEIRMAN POETRY. 229 of nature, and most admirable when he does not finish his pictures; for all his sketches contain the germ of a fine fiction, but his finished fictions do not always equally convey the idea of a good sketch. In his elegies,: composed at Rome, we must not look for descriptions of Italy: Goethe scarcely does whatever is expected from him, and when there is any thing pompous in an idea i+ displeases him; he wishes to produce effect by an untrodden path hitherto unknown both to himself and to the reader. His elegies describe the effect of Italy on his whole existence, that delirium of happiness resulting from the influence of a serene and beautiful sky!.!Te'rla tes'ipIeaisure1s,;,even of the most common kind, in the manner of Propertius; and from time to time some fine recollections of that city, which was once the mistress of the world, give an impulse to the imagination, the more lively because it was not prepared for it. He relates, that he once met in the Campagna of Rome a young woman suckling her child and seated on the remains of an ancient column; he wished to question her on the subject of the ruins with which her hut was surrounded; but she was ignorant of every thing concerning them, wholly devoted to'the afl'ections which filled her soul; she loved, and to her the present moment was the whole of existence. We read in a Greek author, that a young girl, skilful in the art of making nosegays of flowers, entered into a contest with her lover, Pausias, who knew how to paint them. Goethe has composed a charming idyl on that subject. The author of that idyl is also the author of Werther. Goethe has run through all the shades and gradations of love, from the sentiment which confers grace and tenderness, to that despair which harrows up the soul, but exalts genius. After having made himself a Greek in Pausias, Goethe con lucts us to Asia in a most charming ballad, called the Gc, ond the Bayadere.' An Indian deity (Mahadoeh) clothes hir 1 B(dadera is a Portuguese wcrd signifying a dancing woman. —E.

230 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. self in a mortal form, in order to judge of the pleasures and pains of men from his own experience. He travels through Asia, observes both the great and the lower classes of people; and as one evening, on leaving a town, he was walking on the banks of the Ganges, he is stopped by a Bayadere, who persuades him to rest himself in her habitation. There is so much poetry, colors so truly oriental in his manner of painting tile (lances of this Bayadere, the perfumes and flowers with which she is surrounded, that we cannot, from our own manneis, judge of a picture so perfectly foreign to them. The Indian deity inspires this erring female with true love, and touched with that return towards virtue which sincere affection should always inspire, he resolves to purify the soul of the Bayadere by ti)e trials of misfortune. When she awakes, she finds her'over dead by her side. The priests of Brahma carry off the lifeless body to consume it on the funeral pile. The Bayadere endeavors to throw herself on it with him she loves, but is repulsed by the priests, because, not being his wife, she has no right to die with him. After having felt all the anguish of:ove and of shame, she throws herself on the pile, in spite of the Brahmins. The god receives her in his arms; he darts through the flames, and carries the object of his tenderness, now rendered worthy of his choice, with him to heaven. Zelter, an original musician, has set this romance to an air, by turns voluptuous and solemn, which suits the words extremely well. When we hear it, we think ourselves in India, surrounded with all its wonders; and let it not be said, that a ballad is too short a poem to produce such an effect. The first notes of an air, the first verse of a poem, transports the imagination to any distant age or country; but, if a few words are thus powerful, a few words can also destroy the enchantment. Magicians formerly could perform or prevent prodigies by the help of a few magical words. It is the same with the poet; he may call up the past, or make the present appear again, according as the expressions he makes use of are, or are not, conformable to the time or country which is

GERMAN POETRY. 231 the subject. of his verse, according as he observes or neglect. local coloring. and those little circumstances so ingeniously invented, which, both in fiction and reality, exercise the mind in the endeavor to discover truth where it is not specifically pointed out to us. Another ballad o' Goethe'j produces a delightful effect by the most simple means [ it.-is1he. Fisherman.....A poor- man, oin a summer's evening, seats himself on the bank of a river, and, as he throws in his line, contemplates the clear and limpid tide, which gently flows and bathes his naked feet. The nymph of the stream invites him to plunge himself into it; she describes to him the delightful freshness of the water during ",he heat of summer, the pleasure which the sun takes in cooling itself at night in the sea, the calmness of the moon when its rays repose and sleep on the bosom of the stream. At length, the fisherman, attracted, seduced, drawn on, advances near the nymph, and forever disappears. [ The story on which this ballad is founded is trifling; but what is delightful in it, is the art of making us feel the mysterious power which may proceed from the phenomena of nature. It is said there are persons who discover springs, hidden under the earth, by the nervous agitation which they cause in them: in German poetry, we often think we discover this miraculous sympathy between man and the elements. -The eGorman:-_poe'comprehends nature not only as a poet, but as a brother; and we might almost say, that the bonds of family union connect him with the air, the water, flowers, trees, in short, with all the primary beauties of the creation:. There is no one who has not felt the undefinable attraction which we experience when looking on the waves of the sea, whether from the charm of their freshness, or from the ascendency which a uniform and perpetual motion insensibly acqucires over our transient and perishable existence. i This ballad of Goethe's admirably expresses the" increasing pleasure we derive from contemplating the pure waters of a flowing stream: the measure of the rhythm and harmony is made to imitate the motion of the waves, and produces an analogous effect on the

232 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. imagination. The soul of nature discovers itself to us in every place, and under a thousand different forms. The fruitfu. country and the unpeopled desert, the sea as well as the stars, are all subjected to the same laws; and man contains within himself sensations and occult powers, which correspond with the day, with the night, and with the storm; it is this secret alliance of our being with the wonders of the universe, which gives to poetry its true grandeur. The poet knows how to restore the union between the natural and the moral world: his imagination forms a connecting tie between the one and the other? There is much- gayety in several of Goethe's pieces; biut we seldom find in them that sort of pleasantry to which we have been accustomed: he is sooner struck by the imagery of nature, than by ridiculous circumstances; with a singular instinct, he points out the originality of animals, always new, yet never varying. Lili's Park and the Wedding song in the Old Castle, describe animals, not like men, in La Fontaine's manner, but, like fantastic creatures, the sports of Nature. Goethe also finds in the marvellous a source of pleasantry, the more gratifying, because we discover in it no serious aim. A song, entitled the Magician's Apprentice, also deserves to be nlentioned. The apprentice of a magician having heard his master mutter some magical words, by the help of which he gets a broomstick to tend on him. recollects those words, and commands the broomstick to go and fetch him water from the river, to wash his house. The broomstick sets off and returnIs, brings one bucket, then another, and then another, and so on without ceasing. The apprentice wants to stop it, but lie has forgot the words necessary for that purpose: the broomstick, faithful to its office, still goes to the river, and still draws up water, which is thrown on the house at the risk of inundating it. The apprentice, in his fury, takes an axe and cuts the broomstick in two; the two parts of the stick 1 Mr. Lewes' Life of Goethe contains no passage at all approaching this in truth and delicacy of poetic criticism. Gervinus himself has nothing fetter.-S.

GERMAN POETRY. 233 then become two servants instead of one, and go for water, which they throw into the apartments, as if in emulation o. each other, with more zeal than ever. In vain the apprentice scolds these stupid sticks; they continue their business without ceasing, and the house would have been lost, had not the master arrived in time to assist his apprentice, at the same time laughing heartily at his ridiculous presumption. An awkward imitation of the great secrets of art is very well depicted in this little scene. We have not yet spoken of an inexhaustible source of poetical effect in Germany, which is terror; stories of apparitions and sorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of more enlightened minds: it is a relic of the northern mythology-a disposition naturally inspired by the long nights of a northern climate; and besides, though Christianity opposes all groundless fears, yet popular superstitions have always some sort of analogy to the prevailing religion. Almost every true opinion has its attendant error, which, like a shadow, places itself in the imagination at the side of the reality; it is a luxuriance or excess of belief, which is commonly attached both to religion and to history, and I know not why we should disdain to avail ourselves of it. Shakspeare has produced wonderful effects from the introduction of spectres and magic; and poetry cannot be popular when it despises that which exercises a spontaneous empire over the imagination. Genius and taste may preside over the arrangement of these tales, and in proportion to the commonness of the subject, the more skill is required in the manner of treating it: perhaps it is in this union alone that the great force of a poem consists. It is probable that the great events recorded in the Iliad and OdysBey were sung by nurses, before Homer rendered them the rhefs-d'oeuvre of the poetical art.' 1 "The poetry of Goethe we reckon to be Poetry, sometimes in the very highest stse of that word; yet it is no reminiscence, but something actually present and before us; no looking back into an antique Fairy-land, divided by impassable abysses from the real world as it lies about us and within us; but a looking round upon that real world itself, now rendered

234 MADAME DE STALL S GERMANY. Of all German writers, Btirger has made the best use of this vein of superstition which carries us so far into the recesses of the heart. His romances are therefore well known throughout Germany. Lenore, which is most generally admired, is not, I believe, translated into French, or, at least, it would be very difficult to relate it circumstantially either in our prose oI verse, A young girl is alarmed at not hearing from her lover holier to our eyes, and once more bkcome a solemn temple, where the spirit of Beauty still dwells, and, under new emblems, to be worshipped as of old. With Goethe, the mythologies of bygone days pass only for what they are; we have no witchcraft or magic, in the common acceptation, and spirits no longer bring with them airs from heaven or blasts from hell; for Pandemonium and the steadfast Empyrean have faded away: since the opinions which they symbolized no longer are. Neither does he bring his heroes from remote Oriental climates, or periods of Chivalry, or any section either of Atlantis or the Age of Gold, feeling that the reflex of these things is cold and faint, and only hangs like a cloud-picture in the distance, beautiful but delusive, and which even the simplest know to be delusion. The end of Poetry is higher; she must dwell in Reality, and become manifest to men in the forms among which they live and move. And this is what we prize in Goethe, and more or less in Schiller and the rest, all of whom, each in his own way, are writers of a similar aim. The coldest skeptic, the most callous worldling, sees not the actual aspects of life more sharply than they are here delineated: the nineteenth century stands before us in all its contradiction and perplexity,-barren, mean, and baneful, as we have all known it; yet here no longer mean or barren, but enamelled into beauty in the poet's spirit; for its secret significance is laid open, and thus, as it were, the life-giving fire that slumbers in it is called forth, and flowers and foliage, as of old, are springing on its bleakest wildernesses and overmantling its sternest cliffs. For these men have not only the clear eye, but the loving heart. They have penetrated Into the mystery of Nature; after long trial, they have been initiated; and, to unwearied endeavor, Art has at last yielded her secret; and thus can the Spirit of our Age, embodied in fair imaginations, look forth on us, earnest and full of meaning, from their works. As the first and indispensable condition of good poets, they are wise and good men: much they have seen and suffered, and they have conquered all this and made it all their own; they have known life in its heights and depths, and mastered it in both, and can teach others what it is, and how to lead it rightly. Their minds are as a mirror to us, where the perplexed image of our own being is reflected back in soft and clear interpretation. HIere mirth and gravity are blended together; wit rests on deep, devout wisdom, as the greensward with its flowers must rest on the rock, whose foundations reach downward to the centre. In a word, they are believers; but their faith is no sallow plant of darkness; it is green and flowery, for it grows in the sunlight

GERMAN POETRY. 235 who is gone to the army; peace is made, and the soldiers return to their habitations. Mothers again meet their sons, sisters their brothers, and husbands their wives; the warlike trumpet accompanies the songs of peace, and joy reigns in every heart. Lenore in vain surveys the ranks of the soldiers; she sees not her lover, and no one can tell her what has become of him. She is in despair; her mother attempts to calm her; but the youthful heart of Lenore revolts against the stroke of affliction, and in its frenzy she accuses Providence. From the moment in which the blasphemy is uttered, we are sensible that the story is to have something fatal in it, and this idea keeps the mind in constant agitation. At midnight, a knight stops at the door of Lenore's house; she hears the neighing o-f the horse and the clinking of the spurs; the knight knocks, she goes down and beholds her lover. He tells her to follow him instantly, having not a moment to lose, he says. before he returns to the army. She presses forward; he places her behind him on his horse, and sets off with the quickness of lightning. During the night he gallops through barren and desert countries; his youthful companion is filled with terror, and continually asks him why he goes so fast; the knight still presses on his horse by his hoarse and hollow cries, and in a low voice says, "The dead ride quick, the dead ride quick!" Lenore answers, " Ah! leave the dead And this faith is the doctrine they have to teach us,-the sense which, ander every noble and graceful form, it is their endeavor to set forth:'As all nature's thousand changes But one changeless God proclaim, So in Art's wide kingdoms ranges One sole meaning, still the same; This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress. And, serene through time and season, Stands for aye in loveliness.' Such indeed is the end of Poetry at fAl times; yet in no recent literature known to us, except the German, has it been so far attained-nay, perhaps, so much as consciously and steadfastly attempted."-(Carlyle's Essays, p %8.)-Ed.

236 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. in peace!" but whenever she addresses to him any anxious question, he repeats the same appalling words. In approaching the church, where he says he is carrying her to complete their union, the frosts of winter seem to change nature herself into a frightful omen: priests carry a coffin in great pomp, and their black robes train slowly on the snow, the winding-sheet of the earth; Lenore's terror increases, and her lover cheers her with a mixture of irony and carelessness which makes one shudder. All that he says is pronounced with a monotonous precipitation, as if already, in his language, the accents of life were no longer heard; he promises to bring her to that narrow and silent abode where their union was to be accomplished. We see, at a distance, the church-yard by the side of the church: the knight knocks, and the door opens; he pushes forward with his horse, making him pass between the tombstones; he then, by degrees, loses the appearance of a living being, is changed to a skeleton, and the earth opens to swallow up both him and his mistress. I certainly do not flatter myself that I have been able, ill this abridged recital, to give a just idea of the astonishing merit of this romance; all the imagery, all the sounds connected with the situation of the soul, are wonderfully expressed by the poetry; the syllables, the rhymes, all the art of language is employed to excite terror. The rapidity of the horse's pace seems more solemn and more appalling than even the slowness of a funeral procession. The energy with which the knight quickens his course, that petulance of death, causes an inexpressible emotion; and we feel ourselves carried off by the phantom, as well as the poor girl whom he drags with him into the abyss. There are four' English translations of this tale of Lenore, but the best beyond comparison is that of Wm. Spencer,3 who of all English poets is best acquainted with the true spirit oI 1 His romances are in verse.-Ed. 2 There are now many more. We know of nine, and there are doubtless many that we are ignorant of.-Ed. 3 Mr. Spencer's volume is more famous for the illustrations of Lad: Diana Beauclerc, than for any thing of his own.-hd.

GERMAN POETRT. 237 foreign languages. The analogy between the English and German, allows a complete transfusion of the originality of style and versification of BUrger; and we not only find in the translation, the same ideas as in the original, but also the same sensations; and nothing is more necessary than this to convey the true knowledge of a literary production. It would be difficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange or odd seems natural Barger has written another romance, less celebrated, but also extremely original, entitled the Wild Huntsman. Followedhby his servants ant a large pack of hounds, he set out for the chase on a Sunday, just as the village bell announces divine service. A knight in white armor presents himself, and conjures him not to profane the Lord's day; another knight, arrayed in black armor, makes him ashamed of subjecting himself to prejudices, which are suitable only to old men and children: the huntsman yields to these evil suggestions; he sets off, and reaches the field of a poor widow; she throws herself at his feet, imploring him not to destroy her harvest by trampling down her corn with his attendants; the knight in white armor entreats the huntsman to listen to the voice of pity; the black knight laughs at a sentiment so puerile; the huntsman mistakes ferocity for energy, and his horses trample on the hope of the pool and the orphan. At length the stag, pursued, seeks refuge in the hut of an old hermit; the huntsman wishes to set it on fire in order to drive out his prey; the hermit embraces his knee;, and endeavors to soften the ferocious being who thus threatens his humble abode: for the last time, the good genius, under the form of the white knight, again speaks to him; the evil genius, under that of the black knight triumphs; the huntsman kills the hermit, and is at once changed into a phantom, pursued by his own dogs, who seek to devour him. This story is derived from a populai superstition: it is said, that at mi tnight, in certain seasons of the year, a huntsman is seen in the clouds, just over the forest where this event is supposed to have passed, and that he is I rsued by a furious pack of hounds till daybreak.

238 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. What is truly fine in this poem of Bifrger's, is his description of the ardent will of the huntsman; it was at first innocent, as are all the faculties of the soul; but it becomes more and more depraved, as often as he resists the voice of conscience and yields to his passions. His headstrong purpose was at first only the intoxication of power; it soon becomes that of guilt, and the earth can no longer sustain him. The good and evil inclinations of men are well characterized by the white and black knights; the words, always the same, which are pronounced by the white knight to stop the career of the huntsman, are also very ingeniously combined. The ancients, and the poets of the middle ages, were well acquainted with the kind of terror caused in certain circumstances by the repetition of the same words; it seems to awaken the sentiment of inflexible necessity. Apparitions, oracles-all supernatural powers, must be monotonous; what is immutable is uniform; and in certain fictions it is a great art to imitate by words that solemn fixedness which imagination assigns to the empire of darkness and of death. We also remark in Butrger a certain familiarity of expression, which does not lessen the dignity of the poetry, but, on the contrary, singularly increases its effect. When we succeed in exciting both terror and admiration without weakening either, each of those sentiments is necessarily strengthened by the union: it is mixing, in the art of painting, what we see continually with what we never see; and from what we know, we are led to believe what astonishes us. Goethe has also made trial of his talents in those subjects which are at the same time terrifying both to children and tnen; but he has treated them with a death of thought that leaves us also a wide field for reflection. I will endeavor to give an account of one of his poems on apparitions which is the most admired in Germany; it is called the Bride of Corinth. I certainly do not mean in any respect to defend this fiction, either as considered in itself, or in its tendency; but it seems to me scarcely possible not to be struck with the warmth o imagination which it indicates.

GERMAN POETRY. 239 Two friends, one of Athens and the other of Corinth, had resolved to unite their son and daughter to each other. The young man sets out for Corinth to see her who had been promised to him, and whom he had never yet beheld: it was at the time when Christianity was first established. The family of the Athenian adhered to the old religion, but that of the Corinthian had adopted the new faith; and the mother, during a lingering illness, had devoted her daughter to the altar. The youngest sister is destined to fill the place of the eldest,-who is thus consecrated to religion. The young man arrives late at the house; all the family had retired to rest; the servants bring some supper to his apartment, and leave him alone; but he is soon afterwards joined by a very singular guest: he sees, advancing to the middle of the room, a young girl clothed in a veil and a white robe, her forehead bound with a black and gold ribbon; and when she perceives the young man she draws back with timidity, and, lifting her white hands to heaven, cries out:' " Is a stanger here, and nothing told me? Am I then forgotten even in name? Ah!'tis thus within my cell they hold me, And I now am cover'd o'er with shame!" She attempts to retire, but the young man holds her back; he learns that she is the person who was destined to be his wife. Their fathers had sworn to unite them, and therefore.very other vow appeared to him without effect. "'Maiden —darling I Stay, 0 stay!' and, leaping From the couch, before her stands the boy:'Ceres-Bacchus, lere their gifts are heaping, And thou bringest Amor's gentle joy! Why with terror pale? Sweet one, let us hail These bright gods-their festive gifts employ.'" The young man conjures his youthful companion to yield herself to his wishes. We use the translation of Professor Aytoun and Theo lore Martin. —E.

240) MADA~ME DE STAEL' GERMANY. "Oh, no-no! Young stranger, come not nigh me; Joy is not for me, nor festive cheer. Ah! such bliss may ne'er be tasted by me, Since my mother, in fantastic fear, By long sickness bow'd, To Heaven's service vow'd Me, and all the hopes that warm'd me here. "They have left our hearth, and left it lonelyThe old gods, that bright and jocund train. One, unseen, in heaven, is worshipp'd only, And upon the cross a Saviour slain; Sacrifice is here, Not of lamb nor steer, But of human woe and human pain. " But, alas! these limbs of mine would chill thee: Love! they mantle not with passion's glow; Thou wouldst be afraid, Didst thou find the maid Thou hast chosen, cold as ice or snow." At midnight, which is called the hour of spectres, the young girl seems more unconstrained; she eagerly drinks wine of the color of blood, like that which is taken by the ghosts in the Odyssey to renew their lost memory; but she obstinately refuses to taste a bit of bread: she gives a chain of gold to him whom she was to have married, and asks in return a lock of his hair: the young man, charmed with the beauty of his companion, presses her with transport in his arms, but he feels no heart beat responsive against his bosom; her limbs are frozen.'Round her waist his eager arms he bended, With the strength that youth and love inspire;'Wert thou even from the grave ascended, I could warm thee well with my desire!'" And then begins a scene as extraordinary as the frenzied Imagination can possibly conceive,-a mixture of love and terror, a formidable union of life and death. There is, as it were, a funereal voluptuousness in this picture where love

GERMAN POETRY. 241 forms an alliance with the grave, where beauty itself seems only a terrifying apparition.' At length the mother arrives, and convinced that one of her slaves has been introduced to the stranger, she gives way to her just indignation; but immediately the young girl increases in size, till like a shadow she reaches the vaulted ceiling,2 and then reproaches her mother with having caused her death by obliging her to take the veil: "Mother! mother! wherefore thus deprive me Of such joy as I this night have known? Wherefore from these warm embraces drive me? Was I waken'd up to meet thy frown? Did it not suffice That, in virgin guise, To an early grave you brought me down? "Fearful is the weird that forced me hither, From the dark-heap'd chamber where I lay; Powerless are your drowsy anthems, neither Can your priests prevail, howe'er they pray. Salt nor lymph can cool, Where the pulse is full; Love must still burn on, though wrapp'd in clay' To this youth my early troth was plighted, While yet Venus ruled within the land; Mother! and that vow ye falsely slighted, At your new and gloomy faith's command. But no god will hear, If a mother swear Pure frcm love to keep her daughter's hand. "Nightly from my narrow chamber driven, Come I to fulfil my destined part, Him to seek to whom my troth was given, And to draw the life-blood from his heart. I " An awful and undefined horror," says Mrs. Austin, " breathes throughout this poem. In the slow and measured rhythm of the verse, and the pathetic simplicity of the diction, there is a solemnity and stirring spell which chains the feelings like a deep mysterious strain of music." —&a 2 "And her form upright, As with ghostly might, Long and slowly rises from the bed." -Fd. VOL. I.-11

242 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. He hath served my will; More I yet must kill, For another prey I now depart.': Fair young man! thy thread of life is broken, Human skill can bring no aid to thee. There thou hast my chain-a ghastly tokenAnd this lock of thine I take with me. Soon must thou decay, Soon wilt thou be gray, Dark although to-night thy tresses be! "Mother! hear, oh hear my last entreaty! Let the funeral-pile arise once more; Open up my wretched tomb for pity, And in flames our souls to peace restore. When the ashes glow, When the fire-sparks flow, To the ancient gods aloft we soar." Without doubt, a pure and chastened taste will find many things to blame in this piece; but when it is read in the original, it is impossible not to admire the art with which every word is made to produce an increasing degree of terror; every word indicates, without explaining, the astonishing horror of this situation. A history, of which nothing in nature could have given the idea, is related in striking and natural details, as if the subject of it had really taken place; and curiosity is constantly excited, without our being willing to sacrifice a single circumstance, in order to satisfy it the sooner.' 1 We are happy to borrow from Professor Aytoun and Mlr. Martin the following account of the legend on which "The Bride of Corinth" is founded: " The legend on which this poem is based is to be found in the treatise etpl Iawpaa(lov, by Phlegon of Tralles, a freedman of the Emperor Adrian, where it forms the first of the series of marvels recorded by that singular writer. The opening of the story is lost, but its nature is made sufficiently obvious by what remains. "'She passed,' writes Phlegon,'to the door of the stranger's room, and there, by the shimmer of the lamp, beheld the damsel seated by the side,If Machates. At this marvellous phenomenon she was unable to command herself, and, hastening to the damsel's mother, called with a loud voice to Charito and Demostratus to arise and go with her to their daughter; for that she had come back to life, and was even now closeted with

GERMAN POETRY. 24? This piece, nevertheless, is the only one among the detached poems of celebrated GerInan authors against which French taste can find any thing to object: in all the others the two nations appear to agree. In the verses of Jacobi we almost the stranger in his room. IHearing this strange announcement, Charito, between fright at the intelligence and the bewilderment of the nurse, was at first distracted; then, remembering the daughter she had lost, she began to weep; and in the end, thinking the old woman crazed, she commanded her to betake herself to rest. To this the nurse rejoined by reproaches, insisting that she herself was in her right mind, but that the mother was unwilling from pure fear to behold her own daughter; and so at last Charito, partly constrained by the nurse, partly impelled by curiosity, repaired to the door of the stranger's apartment. But as a second message had been required to persuade her, a considerable space of time had in the mean while elapsed, so that by the time she reached the cham ber they were both in bed. Looking in at the doorway, she thought she recognized the dress and features of her daughter; but being unable to satisfy herself of the truth, she conceived it best to make no disturbance. Moreover, she hoped, by rising in the morning betimes, to take the damsel by surprise; or, even if she should fail in this, then she thought to put Machates to question as to the matter, when of a surety, seeing how momentous it was, he would not speak that which was untrue. And so she withdrew noiselessly from the door. By daybreak, however, she found the damsel already gone, peradventure through chance, peradventure according to the will of some god. Disconcerted by her so sudden withdrawal, the mother narrated to her young guest all that she had seen, and, embracing his knees, besought him to tell her the truth, and to conceal nothing. Upon this the youth was at first smitten with consternation and sore confusion; at length, however, with difficulty he mentioned her name, Philinnion-recounted how she had come to him on the first occasionwith what fondness she had encountered him, and how she had said that L er visit was made without the knowledge of her parents. Furthermore, to confirm his tale, he opened a chest and showed a certain gift presented to him by the damsel-to wit, a golden ring, and also a scarf from her bosom, which she had left behind her on the previous night. On seeing these proofs Charito shrieked, rent her robes in twain, tore the veil from her head, and, throwing herself upon the ground, kissed the well-known tokens, and broke forth anew into lamentations. When now the guest had reflected on what had transpired, and beheld them all weeping and wailing immoderately, as though they were now about for the first time tc lay the damsel in the tomb, he began, all confounded though he was, to speak words of comfort to them, and vowed to give them intimation if she should return. Tranquillized by these assurances, Charito returned to hem chamber, after conjuring the youth to deal truly with his promise. When night closed in, and the hour had some at which Philinnion was wont to riait him, the others held themselves in readiness for the tidings of her

244 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. discover the brilliancy and lightness of Gresset. Matthisson has given to descriptive poetry (the features of which are frequently too vague) the character of a picture as striking in its coloring as in its resemblance. The charm which pervades arri% al. And truly come she did; and when she had entered at the accustomed time and seated herself upon the bed, Machates unconcernedly took his place beside her, longing nevertheless with all his heart to come at the bottom of the business; for he could not bring himself to think that it was a dead maiden with whom he had holden intercourse, seeing that she returned so punctually always at the same time, and ate and drank with hin. Therefore did he mistrust the assurances of the nurse and of the parents, holding rather to the opinion that thieves had broken into and plundered the tomb, and sold the garments and the ornament of gold to the father of the damsel, who had in this wise made resort unto him. Wishing to be assured of the truth, therefore, he privily called his servants and sent them to the parents. Demostratus and Charito hastened with all speed to the apartment, and beholding the damsel there, they were for a time struck dumb with amazement at the wondrous apparition; but, recovering themselves, they ran forward with a great cry, and fell upon their daughter's neck. Then spoke Philinnion to them in this wise: " Oh, mother and father, unjust and ungentle are ye, in that you grant me not to tarry unmolested with this stranger but for three days at my father's house. Now, therefore, because of your busy curiosity, shall ye once again be made to mourn. But for me, I return unto my appointed place; for hither have I come not without the intervention of the gods." When she had so spoken, she fell back dead once more, and lay there stretched out upon the bed.' 1" The utmost excitement, says the chronicler, was occasioned in the household and the city by this singular event. The family-vault was searched, when all the bodies were found in their places, with the exception of Philinnion's; and where that had lain, a steel ring belonging to the guest was discovered, and a parcel-gilt goblet, both of which she had received from her companion on the occasion of her first visit. By the advice of an augur of great reputation, the body was burnt outside the city walls-an expiatory sacrifice was made to Hermes and the Eumenidesrustrations were performed in the temples-sacrifices offered up for the emperor and the public weal; and, as an appropriate consummation to the whllole, the youth Machates laid violent hands upon himself. " It is interesting to observe how dexterously Goethe has availed himself of the incidents narrated with so much circumstantiality in this striking egend, and what additional interest he has given it, by mamking so distinctly the period when the old mythological faith was passing away under the influence of the Phristian creed. With all reverence for the genius of Goethe, it is impossible to deny that he had strong Pagan tendencies, and'hese were never so forcibly exhibited as in the composition of this won. ierful poem. It is said that it cost him only two days' labor, and, whew

GERMAN POETRY. 245 the poetry of Salis makes us love its author as if he were oui friend. Tiedge is a moral poet, whose writings lead the soul Lo the purest devotional feelings. We should still, in short, have to mention a crowd of other poets, if it were possible to point out every name deserving of applause, in a country where poetry is so natural to all cultivated minds. A. W. Schlegel, whose literary opinions have made so much noise in Germany, has not, in any of his poems, allowed himself the slightest expression which can attract censure from the most severe taste. His elegies on the death of a young person; his stanzas on the union of the church with the fine arts; his elegy on Rome, are written throughout with delicacy and dignity. The two specimens I am about to give of his poetry will convey but a very imperfect idea of it; but they will serve, at least, to render the character of the poet better known. The sonnet, entitled Attachment to the World, appears to me charming.' "Oft will the soul her wings unfold, Invigorated by contemplation of purer things; To her seems, in the narrow circle she traverses, Her doing vain, and her knowing illusive. "She feels deeply an irresistible longing For higher worlds, for freer spheres of action, And believes, at the close of her earthly career, First lifted is the curtain revealing brighter scenes. "Yet let death touch her body, so that she must leave it, Then she shudders, and looks back with longing On earthly pleasures and mortal companions: "As once Proserpine, from Enna's meads In Pluto's arms borne off, childish in her complaints, For the flowers wept, which from her bosom fell." completed, required no corrections-an effort which deserves to be recorded, for few poems in any language have been so complete and absolutely Derfect in their structure as' The Bride of Corinth.' "-Ed. l Again we give a literal translation from the German, not being able to content ourselves with a second-hand version through the French. —Ea

246 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMALNY. The following piece of verses must lose even more by a translation than the sonnet; it is called the Melodies of Life; the swan is placed in opposition to the eagle,-the former as the emblem of contemplative existence, the latter as the image of active existence; the rhythm of the verse changes when the swan speaks, and when the eagle answers her; and the strains of both are nevertheless comprised in the same stanza united by the rhyme; the true beauties of harmony are also found in this piece, not imitative harmony, but the internal music of the soul. Our emotion discovers it without having recourse to reflection; and reflecting genius converts it into poetry. THE SWAN. "In the waters is pass'd my tranquil life, It traces only a slight furrow that vanishes, And never fail me in the watery mirror The curving neck and rounded form. THE EAGLE. "I dwell in the rocky cliffs, I sail in the stormy air, Trusting to the beating wings, In chase and battle and peril. THE SWAN. "Me delights the blue of the sky serene, Me sweetly intoxicates the spicewort's perfume, When I, in the glow of the evening-red, Rock my feather'd breast. THE EAGLE. "I triumph in tempests, When they root up the forests, I ask the lightning, whether it kills, With glad annihilating pleasure. THE SWAN. "By a glance from Apollo invited, Dare I bathe in harmony's tide, At his feet reposing, when the songs Resound in Temp6's vale.

GERMAN POETRY. 247 THE EAGLE. "I enthrone myself by Jupiter's seat; He winks and I bring him the lightning, Then drop I in sleep my wings Over his ruling sceptre. THE SWAN. "With the blessed power of the gods penetrated, Have I myself in Leda's bosom entwined; Flatteringly caress'd me her tender hands, As she her sense in rapture lost. THE EAGLE. "I came out of the clouds like an arrow, Tore him from his feeble companions: I bore in my talons the youthful GCanymede to Olympus on high. THE SWAN. " So bore she friendly natures, Helena and you, ye Dioscuri, Wild stars, whose brother-virtue, Changing, shadow-world and heaven share. THE EAGLE. "Now hands the nectar-beeker The youth to drinkers immortal; Never brown'd is the fair young cheek, As endlessly time hurries on. THE SWAN. "Prophetically contemplate I oft the stars, In the water-mirror the deep-arch'd immensity, And me draws an inner tender longing Towards my home in a heavenly land. THE EAGLE. "I spread my wings with joy, In my youth, towards the deathless sun, Can never to the dust myself accustom, I am akin to the gods.

248 MADAME DE STAEL S GERIMANY. THE SWAN. "Willingly yields to death a peaceful life; When the web of existence is unwoven, Loos'd is the tongue: melodiously celebrates Each breath the holy moment. THE EAGLE. "The torch of the dead makes young again:t A blooming phoenix, rises The soul free and unveil'd, And greets its god-like fortune.s It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that national taste in general differs much more in the dramatic art than in any other branch of literature. We will analyze the cause of this difference in the following chapters; but before we enter on the examination of the German theatre, some general observations on taste appear to me necessary. I shall not consider it abstractedly as an intellectual faculty; several writers, and Montesquieu in particular, have exhausted this subject. I will only point out why literary taste is understood in so different a manner by the French and the nations of Germany. 1 Among the ancients, an eagle rising from the funeral pile was an emblem of the immortality of the soul, and not unfrequently also that of deification. 2 We have again been obliged to give a literal, line-by-line version, in order to avoid the shadow of a shadow in a retranslation from a French rendering.-Ed.

TASTE. 249 CHAPTER XIV. OF TASTE. IHosE who think themselves in possession of taste are more proud of it than those who believe that they possess genius. Taste is in literature what bon ton is in society; we consider it as a proof of fortune and of birth, or at least of the habits which are found in connection with them; while genius may spring from the head of an artisan, who has never had any intercourse with good company. In every country where there is vanity, taste will be placed in the highest rank of qualifications, because it separates different classes, and serves as a rallying-point to all the individuals of the first class. In every country where the power of ridicule is felt, taste will be reckoned as one of the first advantages; for, above all things, it teaches us what we ought to avoid. A sense of the fitness of things, and of propriety, peculiarly belongs to taste; and it is an excellent armor to ward off the blows of the various con tending kinds of self-love, which we have to deal with; in short, it may so happen, that a whole nation shall, with respect to other nations, form itself into an aristocracy of good taste; and this may be applied to France, where the spirit of society reigned in so eminent a manner, that it had some excuse for Buch a pretension. But taste, in its application to the fine arts, differs extremely from taste as applied to the relations of social life; when the, bject is to force men to grant us a reputation, ephemeral as our own lives, what we omit doing is at least as necessary as what we do; for the higher orders of society are naturally so nostile to all pretension; that very extraordinary advantages are requisite to compensate that of not giving occasion to the 11:;

250 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. world to speak about us. Taste in poetry depends on nature, and, like nature, should be creative; the principles of this taste are therefore quite different from those which depend on our social relations. It is by confounding these two kinds of taste that we find such opposite judgments formed on subjects of literature; the French judge of the fine arts by the rules of social fitness and propriety, and the Germans judge of these as they would of the fine arts: in the relations of society we must study how to defend ourselves, but in those of poetry, we should yield ourselves up without reserve. If you consider surrounding objects as a man of the world, you will not be sensible to the charms of nature; if you survey them as an artist, you will lose that tact which society alone can give. If we are to subiect the arts to the regulations of good company, the French alone are truly capable of it; but greater latitude of composition is necessary, in order strongly to affect the imagination and the soul. /I know it may be objected to me, and with reason, that our three best dramatic authors are elevated to the most sublime height, without offending any established rule. Some men of genius, reaping a field before unculti' vated, have indeed rendered themselves illustrious in spite of the difficulties they had to conquer; but is not the cessation of all progress in the art, since that time, a strong proof that there are too many obstacles in the road which they followed? "Good taste in literature is in some respects like order under despotism; it is of consequence that we should know at what price we purchase it."' In a political point of view, M Necker said: The utmost degree of liberty should be granted which is consistent with order. I would change the maxim, by saying, that in literature, we should have all the taste which is consistent with genius; for if in a state of society the'chief object be order and quietness, that which is of most importance in literature is, on the contrary, interest, curiosity, and Suppressed by authority.

TASTE. 251 that sort of emotion which taste alone would frequently disapprove.' A treaty of peace might be proposed between the different modes of judgment adopted by artists and men of the world, 1 raste, if it mean any thing but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean i general susceptibility to truth and nobleness; a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration. "We venture to deny that the Germans are defective in taste; even as a Dation, as a public, taking one thing with another, we imagine they may stand comparison with any of their neighbors; as writers, as critics, they may decidedly court it. True, there is a mass of dulness, awkwardness, and false susceptibility in the lower regions of their literature; but is not bad taste endemical in such regions of every literature under the sun? Pure Stupidity, indeed, is of a quiet nature, and content to be merely stupid. But seldom do we find it pure; seldom unadulterated with some tincture of ambition, which drives it into new and strange metamorphoses. Here it has assumed a contemptuous, trenchant air, intended to represent superior tact and a sort of all-wisdom; there a truculent atrabilious scowl, which is to stand for passionate strength; now we have an outpouring of tumid fervor; now a fruitless, asthmatic hunting after wit and humor. Grave or gay, enthusiastic or derisive, admiring or despising, the dull man would be something which he is not and cannot be. Shall we confess, that, of these too common extremes, we reckon the German error considerably the more harmless, and, in our day, by far the more curable? Of unwise admiration much may be hoped, for much good is really in it: but unwise contempt is itself a negation; nothing comes of it, for it is nothing. " To judge of a national taste, however, we must raise our view from its transitory modes to its perennial models; from the mass of vulgar writers, who blaze out and are extinguished with the popular delusion which they flatter, to those few who are admitted to shine with a pure and lasting lustre; to whom, by common consent, the eyes of the people are turned, as to its lodestar and celestial luminaries. Among German writers of this stamp, we would ask any candid reader of them, let him be of what country or what creed he might, whether bad taste struck him as a prevailing characteristic. Was Wieland's taste uncultivated? Taste, we should say, and taste of the very species which a disciple of the Negative School would call the highest, formed the great object of his life, the perfection he unweariedly endeavored after, and, more than any other perfection, has attained. The most fastidious Frenchman might read him with admiration ~f his merely French qualities. And is not Klopstock, with his clear enthusiasm, his azure purity, and heavenly, if still somewhat co'd and

252 MADAME DE STAEL' S GERMANY. by Germans and Frenchmen. The French ought to abstain from condemning even a violation of rule, if an energetic thought or a true sentiment can be pleaded in its excuse. The' Germans ought to prohibit all that is offensive to natural taste; lunar light, a man of taste? His Messias reminds us oftener of no other poets than of Virgil and Racine. But it is to Lessing that an Englishman would turn with the readiest affection..... With Lessing and Klopstock might be joined, in this respect, nearly every one, we do not say of their distinguished, but even of their tolerated contemporaries. The two Jacobis, known more or less in all countries, are little known here, if they are accused of wanting literary taste. These are men, whether as thinkers or poets, to be regarded and admired for their mild and lofty wisdom, the devoutness, the benignity and calm grandeur of their philosophical views. In such, it were strange if among so many high merits, this lower one of a just and elegant style, which is indeed their natural and even necessary product, had been wanting. We recommend the elder Jacobi no less for his clearness than for his depth; of the younger, it may he enough in this point of view to say, that the chief praisers of his earlier poetry were the French. Neither are Hamann and Mendelsohn, who could meditate deep thoughts, defective in the power of uttering them with propriety. The Phsdon of the latter, in its chaste precision and simplicity of style, may almost remind us of Xenophon. Socrates, to our mind, has spoken in no modern language so like Socrates, as here, by the lips of this wise and cultivated Jew. " Among the poets and more popular writers of the time, the case is the same: Utz, Gellert, Cramer, Ramler, Kleist, Hagedorn, Rabener, Gleim, and a multitude of lesser men, whatever excellencies they might want, certainly are not chargeable with bad taste..... The same thing holds, in general, and with fewer drawbacks, of the somewhat later and more energetic race, denominated the GCttingen School, in contradistinction from the Saxon, to which Rabener, Cramer, and Gellert directly belonged, and most of those others indirectly. ITilty, Burger, the two Stolbergs, are men whom Bossu might measure with his scale and compasses as strictly as he pleased. Of Herder, Schiller, Goethe, we speak not here; they are men of another stature and form of movement, whom Bossu's scale and compasses could not measure without difficulty, or rather not at all. To say that such men wrote with taste of this sort, were saying little; for this forms not the apex, but the basis, in their conception of sty'le,-a quality not to be paraded as an excellence, but to be understood as it dispensable, as there by necessity, and like a thing of course. " In truth, for it must be spoken out, our opponents are so widely astray in this matter, that their views of it are not only dim and perplexed, but altogether imaginary and delusive. It is proposed to School the Germans min the Alphabet of taste; and the Germans are already busied with their Accidence. Far from being behind other nations in the practice or science af Criticism, it is a fact, for which we fearlessly refer to all competent

TASTE. 253 all that retraces images repulsive to our feelings: no philosophical theory, however ingenious it may be, can compensate for this defect; as, on the contrary, no established rule in literatute can prevent the effect of involuntary emotions. In vain Ado the most intelligent German writers contend, that, in order to understand the conduct of Lear's daughters towards their father, it is necessary to show the barbarity of the times in which they lived, and therefore tolerate the action of the Duke of Cornwall, who, excited by Regan, treads out the eye of Gloucester with his heel on the stage: our imaginations will always revolt at such a sight, and will demand other means of attaining the great beauties of composition. But, were the French to direct the utmost force of their literary criticisms against the prediction of the witches in Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo, etc., we should not the less feel, with the most lively emotion, the terrific effect which it is their endeavor to proscribe. We cannot teach good taste in the arts as we can bon ton in society; for the knowledge of bon ton assists us to hide the points in which we fail, while in the arts it is above all things necessary to possess a creative spirit. Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all. If we dared to speak our opinion on this subject, perhaps we should say, that in France there are too many curbs for coursers that have so little mettle, and that in Germany, great literary independence has not yet produced effects proportionably striking and brilliant. judges, that they are distinctly, and even considerably, in advance. We state what is already known to a great part of Europe to be true. Criticism has assumed a new form in Germany; it proceeds on other principles, and proposes to itself a higher aim."-( Carlyle's Essays, p. 20 et seq.) —di.

254 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. CHAPTER XV. OF THE DRAMATIC ART. THE theatre exercises a powerful influence over men; a tragedy which exalts the soul, a comedy which paints manners and characters, acts upon the mind of the people almost like a real event; but in order to obtain any considerable success upon the stage, it is necessary for the poet to have studied the -public which he addresses, and the motives, of every description, on which its opinion is founded. The knowledge of mani: kind is even equally essential to the dramatic author with imagination itself; he must touch sentiments of general interest without losing sight of the particular relations which influence his spectators; a theatrical performance is literature in action, and the genius which it demands is so rare only because it exhibits the astonishing combination of the perfect knowledge of circumstances with poetical inspiration. Nothing then would be more absurd than an attempt to impose on all nations the same dramatic system; when the object is to adapt a universal art to the taste of each particular country, an immortal art to the manners of the passing moment, mostimportant modifications are unavoidable; and from thence proceeds such a diversity of opinions as to what constitutes dramatic talent: in all other branches of literature men agree more easily. It cannot, I think, be denied, that the French are the most expert nation in the world in the combination of theatrical effects; they bear away the prize from all others, likewise, in the dignity of situations and of tragic style. But, even while we acknowledge this double superiority, we may experience more powerful emotions from less regular works; the conception is often more bold and striking in the foreign drama, and

THE DRAMATIC ART. 255 often comprehends I know not what power within itself which speaks more intimately to our heart, a-td touches more nearly those sentiments by which we have been personally affecte.,,_. As the French are easily tired, so they avoid prolixity in every thing. When the German attends the theatre, he, in general, sacrifices only a dull game at cards, the monotonous chances of which hardly serve to fill the vacant hour; he asks then nothing more than to seat himself peaceably at the play, and grants the author all the time that he wants to prepare his events, and develop his characters; the impatience of the Frenchman would never tolerate such delay. The German dramas usually resemble the works of the ancient painters: their physiognomies are fine, expressive, meditative; but all the figures are on the same plane, sometimes confused, sometimes placed, the one by the side of the other, as in bas-reliefs, without being grouped together before the eyes of the spectator. The French think, and with reason, that the theatre, like painting, ought to be subjected to the laws of perspective. If the Germans were expert in the dramatic art, they would be equally so in all the rest; but they are in every thing incapable of address, even innocent; their understanding is penetrating in a straight line; the fine and impressive of a positive kind are subject to their dominion; but relative beauties, those which depend on the knowledge of cause and effect, and the rapidity of expedients, are, generally speaking, beyond the reach of their faculties. It is singular, that, of the two people, the French are those who exact the most sustained gravity in the tone of tragedy; but it is precisely because the French are more accessible to pleasantry, that they refuse to admit it, while nothing deranges the imperturbable seriousness of the Germans: it is always by its general effect that they judge of a theatrical piece, and they wait till it is finished before they either condemn or applaud it. The impressions of the French are more ready; and they would in vain be forewarned that a comic scene is designed to set off a tragic situation,-they would turn the first into ridicule without waiting for the other; every detail must

256 MAI)AME DE STAEL S GERMANY. for them be of equal interest with the whole: they will not allow credit for an instant to the pleasure which they demand from the fine arts. The difference between the French and the German theatre may be explained by reference to the national characters; but to these natural diversities must be added some points of systematic opposition, of which it is important to ascertain the cause. What I have said already on the subjects of classical and romantic poetry, is also applicable to the theatre. The tragedies of mythological foundation are of a distinct nature from the historical; subjects drawn from fable were so well known, the interest which they inspired so universal, that it was enough to announce them, to strike the imagination at once. That which is eminently poetical in the Greek tragedies, the intervention of the gods and the action of fatality, renders their progress more easy; the detail of motives, the development of characters, the diversity of facts, become less necessary when the event is explained by supernatural power; every thing is cut short by a miracle. The action too of the Greek tragedy is astonishingly simple; the greater part of the events are foreseen and even announced at the first opening; a Greek tragedy is, in short, no other than a religious ceremony. The spectacle was presented in honor of the gods; and in hymns, interrupted by dialogue and recitation, were painted sometimes merciful, sometimes avenging, deities, but always Destiny hovering over the life of man. When these same subjects were transferred to the French theatre, our great poets bestowed upon them more of variety; they multiplied incidents, contrived surprises, and drew closer the knot. It was necessary in some sort to supply the want of that national and religious interest which the Greeks felt and we cannot experience; yet, not content with adding circumstances to the simplicity of the Greek action, we have lent to their personages our own manners and sentiments, our modern conduct, and modern gallantry; and it is on that account, that so great a number of foreigners are unable to conceive the admiration with which our chefs-d'oeuvre inspire us. In fact, when they

THE DRAMATIC ART. 257 are heard in another language, stripped of the magic beauty of style, one is surprised at the little emotion they produce, and the inconsistencies thev display; for that which accords neither with the age nor with the national manners of the personages represented, what is it but inconsistency? Is nothing ridiculous but that which is unlike ourselves? Those pieces of which the subjects are derived from Greece, lose nothing by the severity of our dramatic rules; but, would we taste, like the English, the pleasure of possessing an historical theatre, of being interested by our recollections, or touched by our religious feelings, how would it be possible rigidly to conform at once to the three unities, and to that sort of pomp which is become a law of our tragic poetry? The question of the three unities is one which has been so often agitated, that one hardly dares at present to talk of it; but, of all the three, there is but one of importance, the unity of action, and the others can never be considered but as subordinate to that. Now if the truth of the action is resigned to the puerile necessity of keeping the scene unchanged, and confining it to the space of twenty-four hours, to impose such necessity, is to subject the Genius of the Drama to a torture similar to that of acrostics —a torture which sacrifices the substance to the form. Of all our great tragic poets, Voltaire has most frequently treated modern subjects. To excite emotion, he has drawn his resources fi'om religion and chivalry, and whoever is sincere, must, I think, allowv that Alzire, Zaire, and Tancrcrde, cause more tears to flow than all the Greek and Roman chefsd'oecvre of our stage. Dubelloy, with a talent very inferior, has nevertheless attained to the art of awakening French recollections in a French theatre; and, even though he could not write, his pieces make one feel an interest similar to that which the Greeks must have experienced when they saw their own historical deeds represented before their eyes. What an advantage may not genius derive fiom such a disposition? And vet there are hardly any events of our era, of which the action Man be comprised in one day, or in the same place; the diver

258 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. sity Jf facts which is superinduced by a more complicated social order, the delicacies of sentiment which are inspired by a more tender religion; in short, the truth of manner which must be observed in pictures more nearly resembling ourselves, require a greater latitude in dramatic composition. A recent example may be cited of the difficulty of conforming, in subjects drawn fiom modern history, to our dramatic orthodoxy. The Templiers of M. Raynouard is certainly one of the pieces most deserving of praise that have appeared for a great length of time; yet what is more strange than the necessity which the author has imagined himself under of representing the whole order of Templars as accused, judged, condemned, and burned, in the space of twenty-four hours! The revolutionary tribunals were expeditious; but whatever might nave been their atrocious inclination, they never were able to proceed so rapidly as a French tragedy. I might point out the inconvenience attending the unity of time not less demonstrably in almost all our tragedies taken from modern history; but I have chosen the most remarkable only, in order to make these inconveniences the more conspicuous. One of the most sublime expressions ever heard on the stage occurs in this noble tragedy. In the last scene it is related that the Templars are singing psalms at the stake; a messenger is sent to convey to them the pardon which the king had resolved to bestow"' Mais il n' etait plus temps, les chants avaient cessd." " It was too late-the holy song had ceased." It is thus the poet gives us to understand that these generous martyrs have just perished in the flames. In what pagan tragedy can be found the expression of such a sentiment.? And why should the French be deprived at their theatre of all that is truly in harmony with themselves, their ancestors, and their belief. The French consider the unity of time and place as an in dispensable condition of theatrical illusion; foreigners make this illusion consist in the dilineation of characters, in the trutl

THE DRAMATIC ART. 259 3f language, and the exact observation of the manners of the age and country which they design to paint. We must properly understand the meaning of this expression, Illusion, when applied to the arts. Since we consent to believe that actors separated from ourselves by a few boards are Greek heroes dead three thousand years ago, it is very certain that what we call illusion is not the imagination, that what we behold really exists; a tragedy can only appear to us with the form of truth by means of the emotion which it inspires. Now if, according to the nature of the circumstances represented, the change of place and the supposed prolongation of time add to this emotion, the illusion thereby becomes the more lively. It is complained that the finest tragedies of Voltaire, Zaire and Tancrede, are founded on misunderstandings; but how do otherwise than have resource to the means of intrigue, when the developments are considered as taking effect in so short a space? The dramatic art then becomes a difficulty worth vanquishing; and to make the greatest events pass naturally through so many obstacles, requires a dexterity similar to that of jugglers, who cause the objects which they present to the spectator to vanish from his sight. Historical subjects accommodate themselves still less than those of invention to the conditions imposed upon our writers; that tragic etiquette which is thought necessary on our theatre is frequently opposed to the new beauties of which pieces taken from modern history would be susceptible. There is in the manners of chivalry a simplicity of language, a naivxetg of sentiment, full of charms; but neither those charms, nor that pathos which results from the contrast of cemmon circumstances with strong impressions, can be admitted into our tragedies: they require, throughout, dignified situations; andl yet the picturesque interest of the middle ages is entirely owing to that diversity of scenes and characters, from which the romances Af the Troubadours have drawn ef-''ects so touching. The pomp of Alexandrines is a still greater obstacle than even the routine of good taste, to any change in the form and

260 MADAME DE STAEL S G(ERMANY. substance of the French tragedies: it cannot be said ill an Al exandrine verse that one comes in or goes out, that one sleeps or wakes, without seeking some poetical turn by which to ex press it; and numberless sentiments and effects are banished from the theatre, not by the rules of tragedy, but by the very exigencies of the verse. Racine is the only French writer who, in the scene between Joas and Athalie, has once ventured to sport with these difficulties; he has managed to give a simplicity equally noble and natural to the language of a child: but this admirable effort of an unparalleled genius does not prevent the multiplication of artificial difficulties from being too frequently an obstacle to the most happy inventions. WI. Benj. Constant, in the so justly admired preface to his tragedy of Walstein, has remarked that the Germans painted characters, the French only passions, in their dramatic pieces. To dilineate characters, it is necessary to abandon the majestic tone which is exclusively admitted into French tragedy; for it is impossible to make known the faults and qualities of a man, but by presenting him under different aspects: in nature, the vulgar often mixes with the sublime, and sometimes relieves its effect: in short, the true action of a character cannot ble represented but in a space of time somewhat considerable, and in twenty-four hours there is no room for any thing but a catastrophe. It will perhaps he contended, that catastrophes are more suitable to the theatre than the minute shades of character; the emotion excited by lively passions pleases the greater part of the spectators more than the attention required for the observation of the human heart. The national taste alone can decide upon these different dramatic systems; but it is justice to acknowledge, that if foreigners have a different conception of the theatrical art from ourselves, it is neither through ignorance nor barbarism, but in consequence of profound reflections which are worthy of being examined. Shakspeare, whom they choose to call a barbarian, has, perhaps, too philosophical a spirit, too subtle a penetration, for the instantaneous perception of the theatre; he judges characters with the i;mpartiality of a superior being, and sometimes

THE DRAMATIC ART. 261 represents them with an irony almost Machiavelian; his compositions have so much depth, that the rapidity of theatrical action makes us lose a great part of the ideas which they contain: in this respect, his pieces deserve more to be read than to be seen. By the very force of his imagination, Shakspeare often suffers his action to grow cool, and the French understand much better how to paint their characters as well as their decorations with those striking colors which produce effect at a distance. What! will they say, can Shakspeare be reproached with having too much nicety in his perceptions, he who has indulged himself in situations so terrible? Shakspeare often reunites qualities, and even faults, that are contrary to each other; he is sometimes within, sometimes without the sphere of art; but he possesses the knowledge of the human heart even more than that of the theatre. In their dramas, their comic operas, and their comedies, the French evince a sagacity and a grace which only themselves possess in the same degree; and, from one end of Europe to the other, they perform scarcely any thing but translations of French pieces; but it is not the same with their tragedies. As the severe rules to which they are subjected, occasion their being all more or less confined within the same circle, the perfection of style is indispensable to the admiration which they are calculated to inspire. If any innovation on the rules of tragedy were risked in France, all the world would immediately cry out, a melodrama! But is it a matter of no importance whatever, to ascertain what it is that causes so many people to be pleased with melodramas? In England, all classes are equally attracted by the pieces of Shakspeare. Our finest tragedies in France do not interest the people; under the pretence of a taste too pure and a sentiment too refined to support certain emotions, the art is divided into two branches; the worst plays contain the most touching situations ill expressed, and the finest paint with admirable skill situations often cold, because they are dignified: we possess few tragedies capable of exciting at the same time the imaginations of all ranks of society.

262 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. These observations are not intended to convey the slightest blame against our great masters. In the foreign dramas there are scenes which produce more lively impressions, but nothing to be compared to the imposing and well-combined general effect of our dramatic chefs-d'ceuvvre: the point is only to know whether, in being confined, as at present, to the imitation of these chefs-d'oeuvre, we shall ever produce any new ones. Nothing in life ought to be stationary; and art is petrified when it refuses to change. Twenty years of revolution have given to the imagination other wants than those which it experienced when the romances of Cr6billon painted the love and the manners of the age. Greek subjects are exhausted; one man only, Le Mercier, has been able to reap new glory from an ancient subject, Agamemnon; but the taste of the age naturally inclines to historical tragedy. Every thing is tragic in the events by which nations are interested; and this immense drama, which the human race has for these six thousand years past been performing, would furnish innumerable subjects for the theatre, if more freedom were allowed to the dramatic art. Rules are but the itinerary of genius; they only teach us that Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, have passed that way; but provided we arrive at the same end, why cavil about the road? And is not the end that of moving, at the same time that we ennoble, the soul? Curiosity is one of the great excitements of the theatre; but the only inexhaustible interest is that which is inspired by deep affection. We love that species of poetry which discovers man to man; we love to see how a creature like ourselves combats with suffering, sinks under it, triumphs over it, is rendered subject, or rises superior, to the power of fate. In some of our tragedies we find situations equally violent with those of the English and German; but these situations are not represented in all their force; and their effect is sometimes softened, or even altogether effaced, by affectation. Our authors seldom depart from a sort of conventional nature which clothes in its own colors ancient manners with the resemblance of those of modern times, vice with that of virtue, assassination with that

THE DRAMATIC ART. 263 of gallantry. This nature is beautiful and adorned with care, out she fatigues us in the end; and the desire of plunging into deeper mysteries must obtain invincible possession of genius. It is much to be desired, then, that we could overleap the barriers with which this art is surrounded by the law of rhymes and hemistichs; we should allow greater boldness, and exact a more intimate acquaintance with history; for, if we confine ourselves exclusively to these every-day fainter impressions of the same great productions of genius, we shall at last see upon the stage nothing but so many heroic puppets, sacrificing love to duty, preferring death to slavery, inspired by antithesis in actions as in words, but without any resemblance to that astonishing creature which is called man, or any relation to that fearful destiny which by turns impels and pursues him. The defects of the German theatre are obvious: every thing that looks like want of acquaintance with the world, whether in art or in society, immediately strikes the most superficial observer; but, to feel the beauties which come from the soul, it is necessary to appreciate the works that are presented to us with a sort of candor which is altogether consistent with the highest superiority of mind. Ridicule is often only a vulgar sentiment translated into impertinence. The faculty of perceiving and admiring real greatness through all the faults of bad taste in literature, as through all the inconsistencies with which it is sometimes surrounded in the conduct of life, is the only faculty that does honor to the critic. In making my readers acquainted with a theatre founded on principles so different from our own, I certainly do not pretend that these principles are better, still less that they ought to be adopted in France: but foreign combinations may excite new ideas; and when we see with what sterility our literature is threatened, it seems to me difficult not to desire that our writers may enlarge a little the limits of the course: would they not do well to become conquerors, in their turn, in the empire of the imagination? It would cost the French but little to Follow such advice.

264 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. CHAPTER XVI. OF THE DRAMAS OF LESSING. THE German theatre did not exist before Lessing; they per. formed only translations and imitations of foreign dramas. The theatre requires, even more than any other branch of literature, a capital, a centre of union for the resources of wealth and of the arts; in Germany every thing is scattered abroad. In one town they have actors, in another, authors, in a third, spectators; and nowhere a focus in which to collect them together. Lessing exerted the natural activity of his character in giving a national theatre to his countrymen, and he wrote a journal entitled Dramaturgie, in which he examined most of the pieces translated from the French, which were then acted in Germany: the correctness of thought which he displays in his criticisms, evinces even more of a philosophical spirit than knowledge of the art. Lessing generally thought like Diderot on the subject of dramatic poetry. He believed that the strict regularity of the French tragedies was an obstacle to the adoption of a great many simple and affecting subjects, and that it was necessary to invent new dramas to supply the want of them. But Diderot, in his dramas, substituted the affectation of simplicity in the room of a more usual affectation, while the genius of Lessing is really simple and sincere. He was the first to give to the Germans the honorable impulse of following their own genius in their theatrical works. The originality of his character shows itself in his dramas: yet are they subjected to the same principles as ours; their form has lothing in it peculiar, and though he troubled himself little about the unity of time and place, he did not rise, like Goethe and Schiller, to the conception of a new system.. Minna von

THE DRAMAS OF LESSING. 265 Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti, and Nathan the Sage,' are the most worthy to be cited of all the works of Lessing. An officer of nobler character, after having received many wounds in the army, finds his honor on a sudden threatened by an unjust prosecution: he will not discover to the woman he loves, and by whom he is loved, the attachment he has for her, being determined not to make her a partaker in his misfortune by marrying her. This is the whole subject of M3iinna von Barnhelm. With means so simple, Lessing has known how to produce a great interest; the dialogue is full of spirit and attraction, the style very pure, and every character so well displayed, that the slightest shades of their several impressions create that sort of interest that is inspired by the confidence of a friend. The character of an old serjeant, devoted with his whole soul to a young officer who is the object of persecution, affords a happy mixture of gayety and sentiment; this sort of character always succeeds on the stage; gayety is the more pleasing when we know that it does not proceed from insensibility, and sentiment more natural when it displays itself only at intervals. In the same piece we have the part of a French adventurer, in which the author has altogether failed; one should have. a light hand to touch the ridiculous part of a Frenchman's character; and most foreigners have daubed it with coarse colors, which present nothing that is either delicate tir striking. Emilia Galotti is only the story of Vihginia invested with modern circumstances, and thrown into private life; its sentiments are too strong for the situation, its action too important to be attributed to an unknown character. Lessing felt, no doubt, a republican spleen against courtiers, which he has gratified in drawing the portrait of one who assists his master in dishonoring a young and innocent girl; this courtier, Martinelli, is almost too vile for probability, and the traits of his baseness are destitute of originality: we perceive that Lessing has represented him thus with a hostile intent, and nothing 1 Nathan der Weise.-E'd. VOL. I.-12

266 MA1)AME DE STAEL7S GERMANY. injures the beauty of a fiction so much, as the appearance of any design which has not that beauty for its object. The character of the prince is treated with greater nicety; that union of tumultuous passions with inconstancy of mind, so fatal in a person invested with power, is perceivable in all his conduct: an aged minister brings him papers, among which is a deathsentence; in his impatience to visit the object of his affections, the prince is about to sign, without having looked at it; the minister avails himself of a pretext to withdraw it, shuddering as he perceives the exercise of such power combined with such want of reflection. The part of the Countess Orsina, a young mistress of the prince, whom he abandons for Emilia, is drawn with the greatest genius,-a mixture of frivolity and violence, which we may well expect to find in a young Italian attached to a court. This woman shows us what society has produced, and what that same society has not been able to destroy,-the natural character of the South, combined with all that is most factitious in the manners of the great world, and the singular assemblage of haughtiness in vice and vanity in sentiment. Such a picture cannot present itself in our rules of verse, or in our established laws of dramatic poetry, yet is it not the less essentially tragic. The scene in which the Countess Orsina excites Emilia's father to kill the prince, in order to save his daughter from the disgrace which threatens her, is one of the greatest beauty; there we see virtue armed by vice, and passion suggesting all that the most rigorous austerity could dictate to inflame the )ealous honor of an old man; it is the human heart presented in a new situation, and it is in this that true dramatic genius consists. The old man takes the poniard, and being prevented from assassinating the prince, he uses it for the sacrifice of his daLughter. Orsina is the ignorant author of this terrible action; it was she who engraved her transitory fury on a mind of deep sensibility; and the senseless ravings of her guilty passion proved the cause of shedding innocent blood. One remarks in the principal characters of Lessing a certain family likeness, which leads one to imagine that he has painted

THE DRAMAS OF LESSING. 267 himself in several of his personages; Major Tellheim in Minna, Odoard, the father of Emilia, and the Templar in Nathan, all three are endued with a proud sensibility of a misanthropic cast. The finest of the works of Lessing is Nathan the Sage. There is no dramatic piece in which we see the principles of religious toleration brought into action with more nature and dignity. A Turk, a Templar, and a Jew are the principal characters of this play; the idea is taken from the story of the three rings in Boccaccio, but the conduct of the piece is entirely Lessing's own. The Turk is Sultan Saladin, who is represented, according to history, as a man of a truly great mind; the young Templar has in his character all the severity of the religious state to which he has consecrated himself; and the Jew is an old man, who has acquired a large fortune by trade, but whose liberal habits are the result of his extensive knowledge and natural benevolence. He comprehends in one sentiment all the modes of sincere belief, and sees the Divinity itself in the heart of every virtuous man. This is a character of admirable simplicity. One is astonished at the emotion which it excites, although not agitated by lively passions or powerful circumstances. Once, nevertheless, they attempt to tear away from Nathan a young girl to whom he had acted the part of a father, and whom he had carefully watched from the hour of her birth: the pain of Leparating himself from her would be bitter to him; and to defend himself against the injustice which would ravish her from him, he relates ill what manner she had fallen into his hands. The Christians immolated all the Jews at Gaza, and Nathan beheld his wife and seven children perish in a single night; he passed three days prostrate in the dust, swearing implacable hatred to the Christian name; by little and little his ieason returned, and he cried: " Yet there is a God, his will be done!" At this moment a priest came to beg him to take care of a Christian infant, an orphan from the cradle, and the old Jew adopted it. The emotion of Nathan in making this

968 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. recital is the more pathetic, as he endeavors to restrain it, and the shame of old age makes him wish to hide what he feels. His sublime patience does not fail, though attacked in his belief and in his pride, by their accusing him, as a crime, of having educated Reca in the Jewish religion; and his justification has no other end than to procure him the right of continuing to do good to the child whom chance bestowed upon him. The play of Nathan is yet more attractive by the delineation of character than by its situations. The Templar has something of the ferocious in his disposition, which arises from the fear of being susceptible of tenderness. The oriental prodigality of Saladin is opposed to the generous economy of Nathan. The sultan's treasurer, an old, austere dervise, informs him that his revenues are exhausted by his bounties. "I am sorry for it," says Saladin, "because I shall be forced to retrench my donations: for myself, I shall still retain that which has always constituted the whole of my fortune-a horse, a sword, and one only God." Nathan is a philanthropist; but the disgrace which the Jewish name has attached to him in society, mixes a sort of contempt for human nature with the expression of his benevolence. Every scene adds some lively and striking features to the development of these several personages; but their relations to each other are not close enough to excite any very powerful emotion. At the conclusion of the piece it is discovered that the?femplar and the girl adopted by the Jew are brother and sister, and that the sultan is their uncle. The author's intention has evidently been to give an example, in his dramatic family,:f the most extended religious fraternity. The philosophical end to which the whole piece is made to contribute, diminishes its theatrical interest; it is almost impossible to avoid a certain degree of coldness in a drama, of which the object is to develop a general idea, however fine it may be: it resembles a mere moral apologue; and one is apt to say that the persons of the drama are there, not on their own account, but to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. It is true that

THE DRAMAS OF LESSING. 269 there is no fictitious, nor even real event, from which some reflection may not be derived; but the event ought to lead the reflection, and not the reflection give birth to the event. Imagination, in the fine arts, ought always to be the first in action. Since Lessing, there have appeared an infinite number of German dramas; at last people begin to get tired of them. The mixed species of drama was introduced only by reason of the constraint which is imposed by tragedy; it is a sort of contraband in art; but when entire freedom is allowed, one no longer feels the necessity of having recourse to the drama for the use of simple and natural circumstances. The drama, then, would preserve only one advantage, that of painting, in the manner of romances, the situations of our own lives, the manners of the times in which we live; yet, when we hear only unknown names pronounced on the stage, we lose one of the greatest pleasures that tragedy can confer, the historical recollections which it traces. We expect to find more interest in the piece, because it represents to us what we are in the habit of seeing daily, forgetting that an imitation too near the truth is not what one looks for in the fine arts. The drama is to tragedy what waxen images are to statues; there is too much truth, and not enough of the ideal; too much, if we consider it in the light of art, yet not enough to render it nature. Lessing can never be reckoned a dramatic author of the first order; he attended to too many different objects to acquire great skill in any department whatever. Genius is universal; but a natural aptitude to one of the fine arts is necessarily exclusive. Lessing was, above all, a dialectician of the first eminence, which is an obstacle to dramatic eloquence, for sentiment disdains transitions, gradations, and motives; it is a continual and spontaneous inspiration which cannot render any account of itself. Lessing was, no doubt, far from the dryness of philosophy, yet he had more of vivacity than of sensibility in his character' dramatic genius is of a more capricious, a more sombre, a more unpremeditated cast, than suits a man who has devoted the greatest part of his life to the art of reasoning.

270 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY CHAPTER XVI1. THE ROBBERS AND DON CARLOS OF SCHILLER. SCHILLER, in his earliest youth, possessed a fervor of genius, a kind of intoxication of mind, which misguided him. The Conspiracy of Fiesco, Intrigue and Love, and, lastly, the Robbers, all of which have been performed in the French theatre, are works which the principles of art, as well as those of morality, may condemn; but, from the age of five-and-twenty, his writings were pure and severe. The education of life depraves the frivolous, but perfects, the reflecting mind. The Robbers has been translated into French, but greatly altered; at first they omitted to take advantage of the date, which affixes an historical interest to the piece. The scene is placed in the fifteenth century, at the moment when the edict of perpetual peace, by which all private challenges were forbidden, was published in the empire. This edict was no doubt productive of great advantage to the repose of Germany,; but the young men of birth, accustomed to live in the midst of dangers, and rely upon their personal strength, fancied that they fell into a sort of shameful inertness when they subjected themselves to the authority of the laws. Nothing was more absurd than this conception; yet, as men are generally governed by custom, it is natural to be repugnant even to the best of changes, only because it is a change. Schiller's Captain of the Robbers is less odious than if he were placed in the present times, for there was little difference between the feudal anarchy under which he lived and the bandit life which he adopted; but it is precisely the kind of excuse which the author affords him that renders his piece the more dangerous. It has produced, it must be allowed, a bad effect in Germany. Young men, enthusiastic admirers of the character and mode

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 271:f living of the Captain of the Robbers, have tried to imitate him. Their taste for a licentious life they honored With the name of the love of liberty, and fancied themselves to be indignant against the abuses of social order, when they were only tired of their own private condition. Their essays in rebellion were merely ridiculous, yet have tragedies and romances more importance in Germany than in any other country. Every thing there is done seriously; and the lot of life is influenced by the reading such a work, or the seeing such a performance. What is admired as art, must be introduced into real existence. Werther has occasioned more suicides than the finest woman in the world; and poetry, philosophy, in short, the ideal have often more command over the Germans, than nature and the passions themselves. The subject of the Robbers is the same with that of so many other fictions, all founded originally on the parable of the Prodigal. There is a hypocritical son, who conducts himself well in outward appearance, and a culpable son, who possesses good feelings among all his faults. This contrast is very fine in a religious point of view, because it bears witness to us that God reads our hearts; but is nevertheless objectionable in inspiring too much interest in favor of a son who has deserted his father's house. It teaches young people with bad heads, universally to boast of the goodness of their hearts, although nothing is more absurd than for men to attribute to themselves virtues, only because they have defects; this negative pledge is very uncertain, since it never can follow from their wanting eason, that they are possessed of sensibility: madness is often only an impetuous egotism. The character of the hypocritical son, such as Schiller has represented him, is much too odious. It is one of the faults of very young writers, to sketch with too hasty a pencil; the gradual shades in painting are taken for timidity of character, when, in fact, they constitute a proof of the maturity of talent. If the personages of the second rank are not painted with suffieient exactness, the passions of the chief of the robbers are

272 hMADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. admirably expressed. The energy of this character manifests itself by turns in incredulity, religion, love, and cruelty; having been unable to find a place where to fix himself in his proper rank, he makes to himself an opening through the commission of crime; existence is for him a sort of delirium, heightened sometimes by rage, and sometimes by remorse. The love scenes between the young girl and the chief of the robbers, who was to have been her husband, are admirable in point of enthusiasm and sensibility; there are few situation more pathetic than that of this perfectly virtuous woman, al ways attached from the bottom of her soul to him whom she loved before he became criminal. The respect which a woman is accustomed to feel for the man she loves, is changed into a sort of terror and of pity; and one would say that the unfortunate female flatters herself with the thought of becoming the guardian angel of her guilty lover in heaven, now, when she can never more hope to be the happy companion of his pilgrimage on earth. Schiller's play cannot be fairly appreciated by the French translation. In this, they have preserved only what may be called the pantomime of action; the originality of the characters has vanished, and it is that alone which can give life to fiction; the finest tragedies would degenerate into melodramas, when stripped of the animated coloring of sentiments and passions. The force of events is not enough to unite the spectator with the persons represented; let them love, or let them kill one another, it is all the same to us, if the author has failed of exciting our sympathies in their favor. Don Carlos is also a work of Schiller's youth, and yet it is considered as a composition of the highest rank. The subjec of this play is one of the most dramatic that history presents to us. A young princess, daughter of Henry the Second, takes leave of France and of the brilliant and chivalrous court of her father, to unite herself to an old tyrant, so gloomy and so severe, that even the Spanish character itself was altered by his government, and the whole nation for a long time afterwards bore the impress of its master., Don Carlos, at first betrothed te

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 273 Elizabeth, continues to love her though she has become his stepmother. Those great political events, the Reformation, and the Revolt of the Low Countries, are intermingled with the tragic catastrophe of the condemnation of the son by the father: the interests of individuals and of the public, in their highest possible degrees, are united in this tragedy. Many writers have treated this subject in France, but under the ancient regime its representation on the stage was prohibited; it was thought deficient in respect to the Spanish nation to represent this fact in their history. M. d'Aranda, that Spanish ambassador remarkable by so many features which prove the strength of his character and the narrowness of his intellect, was asked permission for the performance of the tragedy of Don Carlos, just finished by its author, who expected great glory from its representation: "Why does he not take anothei subject.?" answered M. d'Aranda. "M. l'Ambassadeur," said they to him, " consider that the piece is finished, and that the author has devoted to it three years of his life." " But, good heavens 1" returned the ambassador, "is there no other event in all history but this? Let hinm choose another." They never could drive him out of this ingenious mode of reasoning, which was supported by a firm resolutioll. Historical subjects exercise the genius ili an entirely different manner from that in which it is exercised by subjects of invention; yet it requires, perhaps, even more imagination to represent historical fact in a tragedy, than to create situations and personages at will. To alter facts essentially in transferring them to the theatre, is always sure to produce a disagreeable impression; we expect truth; and we are painfully surprised when the author substitutes in the room of it any fiction which it may have pleased him to adopt: nevertheless, history ~equires to be combined in an artistic manner, in order to produce its effect on the stage, and we must have at once united in tragedy, the talent of painting the truth, and that of rendering it poetical. Difficulties Af another nature present themselves when the dramatic art embraces the wide field of invention; it may be said to be then more at liberty, yet nothing 12a.

274 MADA)ME DE STAEL S GERMANY. Is more rare than the power of characterizing unknown personages in such a manner as to give them the consistency of names already illustrious. Lear, Othello, Orosmane, Tancrede, have received immortality at the hands of Shakspeare and Voltaire, without having ever existed; still, however, subjects o, invention are, generally speaking, dangerous to the poet. through that very independence which they confer upon him. Historical subjects seem to impose restraint; but when the writer avails himself properly of that support which may be derived from certain fixed limits, the career which they pre scribe, and the flights which they permit, even these very [ilmits are favorable to genius. The fidelity of poetry gives a relief to truth, as the sun's rays to colors, and restores to events which it graces the lustre which antiquity had ob scured. The preference is given in Germany to those historical tragedies in which art displays itself, like the prophet of the past.' The author who means to compose such a work as this, must transport himself -altogether to the age and manners of the personages represented, and an anachronism in sentiments and ideas is more justly obnoxious to the severity of criticism than in dates. It is upon these principles that some persons have blamed Schiller for having invented the character of the Marquis de Posa, a noble Spaniard, a partisan of liberty and of toleration, passionately zealous in favor of all the new ideas which then began to ferment in Europe. I imagine that Schiller may be justly reproached with having made the Marquis de Posa the channel for the communication of his own private opinions; but it is not, as is pretended, the philosophical spirit of the eighteenth century that is attributed to him. The Marquis de Posa, such as Schiller has painted him, is a German enthusiast; and this character is so foreign to our own times, that we may as well conceive him a personage of the sixteenth century, as An expression of Frederick Schlegel, on the penetration of a great his,orian.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 275 of that in which we live. It is, perhaps, a greatei error so suppose that Philip the Second could long listen with pleasure to such a man, or that he could have granted him his confidence even for an instant. Posa, speaking of Philip the Second, says with reason, " I have been vainly endeavoring to elevate his soul, for in this cold and thankless soil, the flowers of my imagination could never prosper." But Philip the Second would never, in reality, have conversed at all with such a young man as the Marquis de Posa. The aged son of Charles,the Fifth could never have seen, in youth and enthusiasm, any thing but the error of nature and the guilt of the Reformation; had he at any time bestowed his confidence on a generous being, he would have belied his character, and deserved the world's forgiveness. There are inconsistencies in every human character, even in that of a tyrant; yet do those very inconsistencies connect themselves by invisible ties to their nature. In the tragedy of Schiller, one of these peculiarities is seized with singular dexterity. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, a general advanced in years, who had commanded the Invincible Armada, dispersed by the English fleet and the tempests, returns to Spain, and al; are persuaded that he is about to be sacrificed to the resentment of Philip the Second. The courtiers retire to a distance; no man dares draw near him; he throws himself at the feet of Philip, and says to him, "Sire, you behold in me all that remains of that fleet, and of that valiant army, which you intrusted to my charge." " God is above me," replies Philip; "I sent you forth against man, not against the storms of heaven; be still considered as my faithful servant!" This is magnanimity: yet from whence does it proceed? From a certain respect for age, in a monarch who is surprised that nature has permitted him to grow old; from pride, which will not suffer Philip to attribute to himself his misfortunes, in acknowledging he has made a bad choice; from the indulgence ne feels in favor of a man dejected by fortune, because he desires that every species of pride may be humbled, excepting nis own; from the very character, in short, of a despot. whom

276 MAD)AME DE STAEL'S GI'ERMAlNY. natural obstacles revolt less than the most feeble voluntary resistance. This scene casts a strong light on the character of Philip the Second. No doubt the character of the Marquis de Posa may be considered as the work of a young poet, who has sought to engraft his own sentiments upon his favorite personage; yet is this character very fine in itself also, pure and exalted in the midst of a court where the silence of terror is disturbed only by the subterraneous voice of intrigue. Don Carlos can never be a great man: his father must necessarily have repressed his genius in infancy; the Marquis de Posa appears to be indispensably placed as an intermediate personage between Philip and his son. Don Carlos has all the enthusiasm of the affections of the heart, Posa, that of the public virtues; one should be the king, the other the friend; and even this change of situation in the characters is an ingenious idea; for how could the son of a gloomy and cruel despot become a patriotic hero? Where could he have learned to respect mankind? From his father, who despised them, or from his father's courtiers, who deserved that he should despise them? Don Carlos must be weak in order to be good; and the very space which love occupies in his existence, excludes from his soul all political reflections. I repeat, then, that the invention of this character, of the Marquis de Posa, appears to me necessary, in order to bring forward in the drama the great interests of nations, and that chivalrous elevation which was suddenly changed, by the increasing knowledge of the times, into the love of liberty. These sentiments, however modified, could never have been made suitable to the prince royal; in him they would have taken the form of generosity, and liberty must never be repre sented as the boon of power. The ceremonious gravity of the court of Philip II, is characterized in a very striking manner in the scene between Elizabeth and the ladies of honor. She asks one of them which she likes best, the residence at Aranjuez, or at Madridl. the lady answers that, from time immemorial, the queens o, Spain have been accustomed to remain three months a4

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 27, Madrid, and three months at Aranjuez. She does not allow herself the least mark of preference, thinking herself born to have no feeling, except as she is commanded to feel. Elizabeti asks for her daughter, and is told that the hour appointed for seeing her is not yet come. At last the king appears, and he banishes this same devoted lady for ten years, because she has left the queen to herself for a single half hour. Philip. is reconciled for a moment to Don Carlos, and, by one speech of kindness, regains all his paternal authority over htsn. "Behold," says Carlos, " the heavens bow down to assist at the reconciliation of a father to a son!" It is a striking moment, that in which the Marquis de Posa, hopeless of escaping the vengeance of Philip, entreats Elizabeth to recommend to Don Carlos the accomplishment of the projects they have formed together for the glory and happiness of the Spanish nation. "Remind him," he says, "when he shall be of riper years,-remind him that he ought to have respect for the dreams of his youth." In fact, as we advance in life, prudence gains too much upon all our other virtues; it seems as if all warmth of soul were merely folly; and yet, if man could still retain it when enlightened by experience, if he could inherit the benefits of age without bending under its weight, he would not insult those elevated virtues, whose first counsel is always the sacrifice of self. The Marquis de Posa, by a too complicated succession of circumstances has been led to imagine himself able to serve the interests of Don Carlos with his father, in appearing to sacrifice him to his fury. He fails of success in these projects; the prince is sent to prison, the marquis visits him there, explains to him the motives of his conduct, and while h; i' employed in justifying himself, is shot by an assassin commissioned by Philip, and falls dead at the feet of his friend. The grief of Don Carlos is admirable; he demands of his father to restore to him the companion of his vouth, who has been slain by him, as if the assassin retained the power of giving back fife to his victim. With his eyes fixel on this motionless corpse, but lately animated by so many noble thoughts, Dor

278 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Carlos, himself condemned to die, learns what death is in the frozen features of his friend. In this tragedy there are two monks, whose characters and modes of life are finely contrasted: the one is Domingo? the king's confessor; the other a priest living in the retreat of a solitary convent at the gate of Madrid. Domingo is nothing but an intriguing perfidious monk, and a courtier, the confidant of the Duke of Alva, whose character necessarily vanishes by the side of that of Philip, since Philip appropriates to himself all that is grand in the terrible. The solitary monk receives, without knowing them, Don Carlos and Posa, who had appointed a rendezvous at this convent in the midst of their greatest agitations. The calm resignation of the prior, who gives them reception,'produces a pathetic effect. "At these walls," says the pious recluse, " ends the bustle of the world." But there is nothing in the whole piece that equals the originality of the last scene but one of the fifth act, between the king and the grand inquisitor. Philip, pursued by the jealous hatred he has conceived against his own son, and by the terror of the crime he is going to cominit-even Philip envies his pages who are sleeping peacefully at his bed's foot, while the hell in his own mind robs him of repose. He sends for the grand inquisitor to consult him on the condemnation of Don Carlos. This cardinal monk is ninety years old; more advanced in years than Charles the Fifth, if alive, would then have been; and who has formerly been that monarch's preceptor; he is blind, and lives in a perfect solitude; the spies of the Inquisition bring him the news of what is passing in the world: he only informs himself whether there are any crimes,,,r faults, or ideas, to punish. To him, Philip the Second, in Lis sixtieth year, is still young. The most gloomy, the most cautious of despots, still appears to him an unthinking monarch, whose tolerating spirit will introduce the Reformation into Spain; he is a man of sincerity, but so wasted by time, that he looks like a living spectre, whom Death has forgotten to strike, because he believed him long since in his grave. He calls Philip to account for the death of Posa; and re,

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 279 proaches him with it, because it was for the Inquisition to have condemned him, regretting the victim only as he had been deprived of the right of immolating it himself. Philip interrogates him as to the condemnation of his son: " Would you," he says, " inspire me with a belief which strips the murder of a child of its horror?" The grand inquisitor answers him,;To appease eternal justice, the son of God died on the cross." What an expression! What a sanguinary application of the most affecting doctrine! This blind old man represents an entire century in his own person. The. profound terror with which the Inquisition and the very fanaticism of this period afflicted Spain, is painted to the life in this laconic and rapid scene: no eloquence is capable of so well expressing such a crowd of reflections ably brought into action. I know that many improprieties may be detected in the play of Don Carlos; but I have not taken upon myself this office, for which there are many competitors. The most ordinary men may discover defects of taste in Shakspeare, Schiller, Goethe, etc.; but when in works of art, we think only of undervaluing their merits, there is no difficulty in the operation. A soul, and genius, are what no criticism can bestow: these must be reverenced wherever they are seen, with whatever cloud these rays of celestial light may be surrounded. Far from rejoicing in the errors of genius, they ought to be felt as diminishing the patrimony of the human race, and the titles of honor in which it glories. The tutelary angel, so gracefully painted by Sterne, might he not have dropped one tear on the faults of a noble work, as on the errors of a noble life, in order to efface its remembrance? I shall not dwell any longer on the productions of Schilltr's youth; first, because they are translated into French; and, secondly, because in them he has not yet displayed that historical genius which has rendered him so justly the object of admiration in the tragedies of his maturer age. Don Carlos,tself, although founded on an historical fact, is little else than a work of the imagination. Its plot is too complicated; a char

280 MADAME DE STAEL S GERIMA~I. acter of mere invention, that of the Marquis de Posa, occupies a too prominent part; the tragedy itself may be classed as something between history and poetry, without entirely satis fying the rules of either: it is certainly otherwise with those of which I am now about to attempt giving an idea. CHAPTER XVIII. WALLENSTEIN AND MARY STUART. WALLENSTEIN is the most national tragedy that has ever been represented on the German stage; the beauty of the verses, and the grandeur of the subject, transported with enthusiasm all the spectators at Weimar, where it was first performed, and Germany flattered herself with possessing a new Shakspeare. Lessing, in censuring the French taste, and joining with Diderot in the manner of conceiving dramatic art, had banished poetry from the theatre, and left nothing there but romances in dialogue, which were but a continuation of ordinary life, only crowding together in representation events which are of less frequent occurrence in reality. Schiller thought of bringing on the stage a remarkable circuinstance of the Thirty Years' War, that civil and religious struggle, which, for more than a century, fixed in Germany the equilibrium of the two parties, Protestant and Catholic. The German nation is so divided, that it is never known whether the exploits of the one half are a misfortune or a glory for the other; nevertheless, the Wallenstein of Schiller has excited an equal enthusiasm in all. The same subject is divided into three distinct plays; the Camp of W(elenstein which is the first of the three, represents the effects of war on the mass of the people, and of the army; the second, the Piec colomini, displays the political causes which led to the dissen sions between the chiefs; and the third, the Death of W"aller

TIHE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER.'281 stein, is the result of the enthusiasm and envy which the reputation of Wallenstein had excited. I have seen them perform the prologue, entitled the Camp of Wallenstein. It seemed as if we were in the midst of an army, and of an army of partisans much more ardent and much worse disciplined than regular troops. The peasants, the recruits, the victualling women, the soldiers, all contributed to the effect of this spectacle; the impression it produces is so warlike, that when it was performed on the stage at Berlin, before the officers who were about to depart for the army, shouts of enthusiasm were heard on every side. A man of letters must be possessed of a very powerful imagination to figure to himself so completely the life of a camp, the spirit of independence, the turbulent joy excited by danger itself. Man, disengaged from all his ties, without regret and without foresight, makes of years a single day, and of days a single instant, he plays for all he possesses, obeys chance under the form of his general: death, ever present, delivers him with gayety from the cares of life. Nothing, in the Camp of Wallenstein, is more original than the arrival of a Capuchin in the midst of the tumultuous band of soldiers who think they are defending the Catholic cause. The Capuchin preaches to them moderation and justice in a language full of quibbles and puns, which differs from that of camps no otherwise than by its affectation and the use of a few Latin phrases: the grotesque and soldier-like eloquence of the priest, the rude and gross language of those who listen to him-all this presents a most remarkable picture of confusion. The social state in fermentation exhibits man under a singular aspect: all his savage nature reappears, and the remalants of civilization float like a wreck upon the troubled waves. The Camrp of Wallenstein forms an ingenious introduction to the two other pieces; it penetrates us with admiration for the general, of whom the soldiers are continually talking, in their games as well as in their dangers; and when the tragedy begins, we feel, from the impressions left by the prologue which has preceded it, as if we had witnessed the history which poetry is about to embellish.

282 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. The second of the pieces, called the Piccolomini, contains the discords which arise between the emperor and his general, the general and his companion in arms, when the chief of the army wishes to substitute his personal ambition in the place of the authority he represents, as well as of the cause he supports. Wallenstein was fighting, in the name of Austria, against the nations who were attempting to introduce the Reformation into Germany; but, seduced by the hope of forming to himself an independent power, he seeks to appropriate all the means which he ought to have employed in the public service. The generals who oppose his views,' thwart them not out of virtue, but out of jealousy; and in these cruel struggles everybody is concerned except those who are devoted to their opinions, and fighting for their conscience' sake. People will say, what is there in all this to excite interest! The picture of truth. Perhaps art demands the modification of this picture by the rules of theatrical effect; yet the representation of history on the stage is always delightful. Nevertheless, Schiller has known how to create personages formed to excite a romantic interest. He has painted Maximilian, Piccolomini, and Thecla, as heavenly beings, who pass through all the storms of political passion, preserving love and truth in their souls. Thecla is the daughter of Wallenstein; Maximilian, the son of the perfidious friend who betrays him. The two lovers, in spite of their parents, in spite of fate, and of every thing except their own hearts, love, seek each other, and are united in life and death. These two beings appear, in the midst of the tumults of ambition, as if predestined; they are the interesting victims which heaven has elected to itself, and nothing is so beautiful as the contrast between the purest self-devotion and the passions of men, as furiously eager for this earth as if it were their only inheritance. There is no winding up of the tragedy of the Piccolomini; it ends like a conversation broken off. The French would find it difficult to support these two prologues, the one burlesque and the other serious, which lead to the real tragedy, which is the Death of Wallenstein.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 283 A writer of great genius has reduced the Trilogy of Schiller into a single tragedy, a-cording to French form and method. The eulogies and criticisms of which this work has been the object, will give us a natural opportunity of concluding our estimate of the differences which characterize the dramatic system of the French and Germans. The French writer has been censured for not having been sufficiently poetical in his. verses. Mythological subjects allow all the brilliancy of images and of lyrical inspiration; but how is it possible to admit, in a subject drawn from modern history, the poetry of the recital of Theramenes? All this ancient poiup is suitable to the family of Minos or Agamemnon, but would be only ridiculous affectation in pieces of another sort. There are moments in historical tragedies, at which the elevation of the soul naturally inspires a more elevated tone of poetry: such is, for example, the vision of Wallenstein,' his harangue after the I1 est, pour les mortels, de jours myst6rieux, Oa, des liens du corps nu're ame degag6e, Au sein de l'avenir est tout k coup plongee, Et saisit, je ne sais par quel heureux effort, Le droit inattendu d'interroger le sort. La nuit qui preceda la sanglante journ6e Qui du h6ros du nord trancha la destinee, Je veillois au milieu des guerriers endormis. Un trouble involontaire agitoit mes esprits. Je parcourus le camp. On voyoit dans la plaine Briller des feux lointains la lumiere incertaine. Les appels de la garde et les pas des chevaux Troubloient seuls, d'un bruit sourd, l'universel repos. Le vent qui g6missoit a travers les vallees Agitoit lentement nos tentes 6branldes. Les astres, a regret perqant l'obscurit6, Versoient sur nos drapeaux une phle clarte. Que de mortels, me dis-je, a ma voix obeissent! Qu'avec empressement sous mon ordre ils fl6chissent I I1s ont, sur mres succes, plac6 tout leur espoir, Mais si le sort jaloux m'arrachoit le pouvoir, Que bient6t je verrois s'evanouir leur z6le! En est-il un du moins qui me restht fid6le I Ah! s'il en est un seul, je t'invoque. O destin I I)aigne me l'indiquer par un signe certain." Walstein, par M. Benjamin-ConstaDt de Rebecque, Acte II. -c. 1, p. 48

254 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. mutiny, his monologue before his death, etc. Still, the contexture and development of the piece, in German as well as in French, requires a simplicity of style, in which one perceives only the purity of language, and seldom its magnificence. In France we require an effect to be given, not only to every scene, but to every verse, and this is what cannot be made to agree with reality. Nothing is so easy as to compose what are called brilliant verses; there are moulds ready made for the purpose; but what is very difficult, is to render every detail subordinate to the whole, and to find every part united in the whole, as well as the reflection of the whole in every part. French vivacity has given to the conduct of their theatrical pieces a very agreeable rapidity of motion; but it is injurious to the beauty of the art to demand the succession of effect every instant, at the expense of the general impression. This impatience, which brooks no delay, is attended by a singular patience in enduring all that the established laws of propriety enjoin; and when any sort of ennui is required by the etiquette of art, these same Frenchmen, who are irritated by the least prolixity, tolerate every thing out of respect to custom. For example, explanations by way of recital are indispensable in French tragedy, and yet certainly they are much less interesting than when conducted by means of action. It is said that some Italian spectators once called out, during the recital of a battle, "Let them raise the curtain, that we may see the battle itself." One often experiences this desire at the representation of our tragedies, the wish of being present at the scene which is related. The author of the French Wallenstein was obliged to throw into the substance of his play the exposition which is produced in so original a manner by the prologue of the Camp. The dignity of the first scenes perfectly agrees with the imposing tone of French tragedy; but there is a sort of motion in the irregularity of the German, the want of which can never be supplied. The French author has also been censured for the double interest inspired by the love of Alfred (Piccolomini) for Thecla, and the conspiracy of Wallenstein. In France, they require

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 285 that a piece be entirely of love or entirely of politics, the mixture of subjects is not relished; and for a considerable time past, especially when the subject is an affair of state, they have been unable to comprehend how the soul should admit a thought of any thing else. Nevertheless, the great picture of the conspiracy of Wallenstein is only completed by the misfortunes which it brings upon his family; we are to be reminded how cruelly public events may rend the private affections; and this manner of representing politics as a world, apart from which sentiments are banished, is prejudicial to morality, harsh, and destitute of dramatic effect. A circumstance of detail has been much censured in the French tragedy. Nobody has denied that the farewell of Alfred (Alax. Piccolomini), in leaving Wallenstein and Thecla, is extremely beautiful; but people have been scandalized at the circumstance of music being, on this occasion, introduced into a tragedy: it is, to be sure, very easy to suppress it, but why refuse to participate in the effect which it produces? When we hear this military music, the prelude to the battle, the spectator partakes of the emotion which it is calculated to excite in lovers, whom it threatens with an eternal separation: the music gives relief to the situation; a new art redoubles the impression which another has prepared; the tones and the words by turns awaken our imagination and our hearts. Two scenes, also, entirely new to our stage, have excited the astonishment of French readers: after Alfred has killed himself, Thecla asks a Saxon officer, who brings the news, all the details of this horrible catastrophe; and when her soul has been satiated with grief, she announces the resolution she has taken to live and die by the tomb of her lover. Every expression, every word, in these two scenes, is marked by the deepest sensibility; but it has been pretended that dramatic interest can no longer exist when there is no longer any uncertainty. In France, they always hasten to conclude with what is irrepacable. The Germans, on the contrary, are more curious about what their personages feel than about what happens to them;

286 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. they are not afraid to dwell upon a situation terminated in respect of its being an event, but which still exists in the capacity of suffering. More of poetry, more of sensibility, more of nicety in the expressicns, are necessary to create emotion during the repose of action, than while it excites an always increasing anxiety: words are hardly remarked when facts keep us in suspense; but when all is silent, excepting grief, when there is no more change from without, and the interest attaches itself solely to what passes in the mind, a shade of affectation, a word out of place, would strike like a false note in a simple and melancholy tune. Nothing then escapes by the sound, and all speaks directly to the heart. The censure which has been most frequently repeated against the French Wallenstein is, that the character of Wallenstein himself is superstitious, uncertain, irresolute, and that it does not agree with the heroic model admitted for this class of character. The French lose an infinite source of effects and emotions in reducing their tragic characters, like the notes of music, or the colors of the prism, to some striking features always the same; every personage must be conformable with some one of the principal acknowledged types. Logic may be said to be with us the foundation of the arts, and this undulating (ondoyante) nature of which Montaigne speaks, is banished from our tragedies; nothing is there admitted but sentiments, entirely good or bad, and yet there is nothing that is not mixed together in the ihuman mind. In France, a character in tragedy is as much canvassed as that of a minister of state, and they censure him for what he does or for what he omits to do, as if they were judging his actions with the Gazette in their hands. The inconsistencies of the passions are admitted into the French theatre, but not the inconsistencies of characters. Passion being more or less understood by every heart, we can follow its wanderings, and anticipate in some degree its very contradictions; but character has always something unforeseen in it, that can be subjected to no fixed rules. Sometimes it directs itself towards itv end, sometimes strays firom it. When it is said of a per

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 287 son in France, that he knows not what he wants, nobody is any longer interested about him; while it is precisely the man who knows not what he wants in whom nature displays herself with a strength and an independence truly proper for tragedy. The characters of Shakspeare frequently excite very different impressions in the spectators during the course of the same play. Richard II, in the three first acts of the tragedy which bears his name, inspires us with contempt and aversion, but when overtaken by misfortune and forced to resign the throne to his enemy in full parliament, his situation and his courage move us to tears. We love that royal nobleness oi character which reappears in adversity, and the crown still seems to hover over the head of him whom they have stripped of it. A few words are enough for Shakspeare to dispose of the souls of his audience and make them pass from hatred to pity. The innumerable varieties of the human heart incessantly renew the springs of genius. It may be said that men are really inconsistent and whim. sical, and that the noblest virtues are often united with miserable defects; but such characters are hardly suitable to the theatre; dramatic art demanding rapidity of action, men cannot be painted on this canvas, but by strong touches and striking circumstances. But does it thence follow that it is necessary to confine ourselves to characters decidedly good and evil, which appear to be the invariable elements of the greater number of our tragedies? What influence could the theatre exercise over the morality of the spectators, if it displayed to them only a conventional nature. It is true that on this factitious soil virtue still triumphs, and vice is always punished; but how can this ever apply itself to what passes in life, since the persons that are presented to us on the stage.are not men such as really exist 9 It would be curious to see the play of Wallenstein performed on our stage; and if the French author had not so rigorously subjected himself to the rules of the French drama, it would be still more curious; but, to judge rightly of the spirit

288 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMIANY. of these innovations, we should carry with us to the contemplations of art a youth of the soul eager after the pleasures of novelty. To adhere to the masterpieces of the ancients is an excellent rule of taste, but not for the exercise of genius; unexpected impressions are necessary to excite it; the works which from our infancy, we have known by heart, become habitual to us, and no longer produce any striking effect upon the imagination. Mary Stuart appears to me the most pathetic and best conceived of all the German tragedies. The fate of this queen, who began her life in such prosperity, who lost her happiness through so many errors, and who was led, after nineteen years of imprisonment, to the scaffold, causes as much of terror and of pity as (Edipus, Orestes, or Niobe; but the very beauty of this story, so favorable to genius, would crush mediocrity. The scene is at Fotheringay Castle, where Mary Stuart is confined. Her nineteen years of captivity are already passed, and the tribunal appointed by Elizabeth is on the point of deciding the fate of the unfortunate Queen of Scotland. Mary's nurse complains to the governor of the castle, of the treatment which he makes his prisoner suffer. The governor, strongly attached to Queen Elizabeth, speaks of Mary with harsh severity. We perceive that he is a worthy man; but one who judges Mary as her enemies have judged her. He announces her approaching death; and this death appears to him to be just, because he believes that she has conspired against Elizabeth. In speaking of Wallenstein, I have already had occasion to notice the great advantage of exposition in action. Prologues, choruses, confidants, all possible methods to explain without fatiguing, have been resorted to, and it seems to me that the best of all is to enter immediately upon the action, and make known the principal character by the effect which it produces apon all around. It is to teach the spectator in what point of view he is to regard what is about to pass before him; it i to teach without telling it him; for a single word which ap

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 289 pears to be addressed to the public, destroys the illusion of thle drama. Our curiosity and our emotions are already excited, when Mary Stuart enters; we recognize her, not by a portrait, but by her influence both on friends and enemies. It is no longer a narrative to which we are listening, but an event which seems to pass immediately before our eves. The character of Mary Stuart is admirably supported, and never ceases to interest during the whole performance. Weak, passionate, vain of her person, and repentant of her life, we at once love and censure her. Her remorse and her errors excite compassion; we perceive, throughout, the dominion of that admirable beauty so celebrated in her time. A man, who forms the design of saving her, dares to avow, that Le devotes himself for her only from the enthusiasm which her charms have inspired. Elizabeth is jealous of those charms, and even Leicester, the favorite of Elizabeth, has become the lover o0 Mary, and has secretly promised her his support. The attraction and envy which are produced by the enchanting graces of this unfortunate woman, render her fate a thousand times more affecting. She loves Leicester: this unhappy woman experiences against that sentiment, which has already more than once dashed her cup with so much bitterness. Her almost supernatural beauty appears to be the cause and excuse of that habitual intoxication of the heart, which is the fatality of her existence. The character of Elizabeth excites attention in a very different manner: a female tyrant is a new subject for painting. The littlenesses of women in general, their vanity, their desire of pleasing, in short, all that results to them from servitude, tends to despotism in Elizabletlh, and that dissimulation, which is born of weakness, forms one of the instruments of her absolute power. Doubtless all tyrants are dissemblers. Men must be deceived, that they may be enslaved. In this case, they may require at least the politeness of falsehood. But what distinguishes the character of Elizabeth, is the desire of pleasing united to the utmost despotism of will, and all that is most refined in the self-love of a woman, manifested by the most VOL. I.-13

290 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. violent acts of sovereign authority. The courtiers, also, of the queen evince a sort of baseness which partakes of gallantry. They wish to persuade themselves that they love her, in order to yield to her a more noble obedience, and to conceal the slavish fear of a subject, under the semblance of knightly-subiection. Elizabeth was a woman of great genius. The lustre of hel reign evinces it. Yet, in a tragedy which represents the death,)f Mary, Elizabeth can appear only as the rival who causes her prisoner to be assassinated; and the crime which she commits is too atrocious not to efface all the good we might be disnpsed to say of her political genius. It might, perhaps, be considered as a still further perfection in Schiller, to have had the ar; of rendering Elizabeth less odious, without diminishing our r.terest for Mary Stuart; for there is more real talent in the shades of contrast than in the extremes of opposition, and the principal figure itself gains by none of the figures on the dramatic canvas being sacrificed to it. Leicester entreats Elizabeth to see Mary; he proposes to her to stop in the middle of a hunting party, in the garden of Fotheringay Castle, and to permit Mary to walk there. Elizabeth consents, and the third act opens with the affecting joy of Mary in again breathing the free air, after nineteen years' imprisonment. All the risks she runs have vanished'rom her eyes; her nurse endeavors in vain to recall them to her, to moderate her transports. Mary has forgotten all, in recovering the sight of the sun, and of nature. She feels again the happiness of childhood, at the view, new to her, of the flo-wer-s, the trees, and the birds; and the ineffable impressicn of those external -wonders cn one who has been long separa.ted from them, is Fa;nec' in the intoxicating emotion of the Unfortunate captive. The remembrance of France awakens her to delight, she charges the clouds which the north wind seems to impel towards that happy native land of her affection. -she charges them to bear to her friends her regrets and desires. " Go," she says to them, "go, you, my only messen gers! the free air is your inheritance-you are not the sub

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 2t91;ects of Elizabeth."' She perceives in the distance a fisherman guiding a crazy boat, and already flatters herself with the idea of escaping. At the sight of the heavens, all thin.gs seem to i6animate her with hope. She is not yet informed that they have permitted her to leave her prison, for the purpose of Elizabeth's meeting her. She hears the music of the hunt, and the pleasures of hei youth are retraced to her imagination as she listens to it. She would herself mount the fiery steed, and fly with the rapidity of lightning over vale and hill. The feeling of happiness is revived in her, without reason or motive, only because it is necessary that the heart should breathe again, and be sometimes reanimated on a sudden, at the approach of the greatest calamities, even as there is almost always a momentary interval of amendment before the agony of death. They come to inform Mary that Elizabeth is approaching. She had wished for this interview, but as the moment draws near a shuddering runs through all her frame. Leicester accompanies Elizabeth: thus all the passions of Mary are at once excited: she commands herself for a time; but the arrogant Elizabeth provokes her by her disdain, and the two rival queens end by alike abandoning themselves to the mutual hatred which they experience. Elizabeth reproaches Mary with her faults; Mary recalls to her mind the suspicions of Henry the Eighth against her mother, and what had been said of her illegitimate birth. This scene is singularly fine, on this very account-that their mutual rage makes the two queens transgress the bounds of their natural dignity. They are no The passage is as follows: "F ast fleeting clouds! ye meteors that fly! Could I but with you sail through the sky I Tenderly greet the dear land of my youth I Here I am captive! oppress'd by my foes, No other than you may carry my woes! Free through the ether your pathway is seen, Ye own not the power of this tyrant queen!" We adopt the version of Joseph Mellish, Esq., which has been revised for Mr. Bohn's Standard Library.-Ed.

292 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. longer any other than two women, rivals in respect or beauty even more than of power; they are no longer the one a sove reign, and the other a prisoner; and even though the one pos sesses the power of sending the other to the scaffold, the most beautiful of the two, she who feels that she is most made to please, enjoys even yet the pleasure of humbling the all-powerful Elizabeth in the eyes of Leicester, in the eyes of the lover, who is so dear to them both. Another circumstance that adds greatly to the effect of this situation, is the fear that we experience for Mary at every resentful phrase that escapes her; and when she abandons herself to all her fury, her injurious speeches, the consequences of which we know to be irreparable, make us tremble, as if we already witnessed her death. The emissaries of the Catholic party form the design of assassinating Elizabeth on her return to London. Talbot, the most virtuous of the queen's friends, disarms the assassin who attempts to stab her, and the people cry out aloud for the blood of Mary. It is an admirable scene, in which the Chancellor Burleigh presses Elizabeth to sign the death-warrant of Mary, while Talbot, who has just saved the life of his sovereign, throws himself at her feet to implore her to pardon her enemy: "That God, whose potent hand hath thrice preserved thee, Who lent my aged, feeble arm the strength To overcome the madman:-he deserves Thy confidence. I will not raise the voice Of justice now, for now is not the time; Thou canst not hear it in this storm of passion. Yet listen but to this! Thou tremblest now Before this living Mary-tremble rather Before the murder'd, the beheaded Mary. She will arise, and quit her grave, will range A fiend of discord, an avenging ghost, Around thy realm, and turn thy people's hearte From their allegiance. For as yet the Britons Hate her, because they fear her; but most surely Will they avenge her, when she is no more. They will no more behold the enemy Of their belief, they will but see in her

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 2()9 The much-lamented issue of their kings A sacrifice to jealousy and hate. Then quickly shalt thou see the sudden change When thou hast done the Moody deed; then go Through London, seek thy people, which till now Around thee swarm'd delighted; thou shalt see Another England, and another people; For then no more the godlike dignity Of Justice, which subdued thy subjects' hearts, Will beam around thee. Fear, the dread ally Of tyranny, will shudd'ring march before thee, And make a wilderness in every streetThe last, extremest crime thou hast committed. What head As safe, if the anointed fall?" The answe:. of Elizabeth to this discourse is a speech of remarkable address; a man in a similar situation would certainly have employed falsehood to palliate injustice; but Elizabeth does more, she wishes to excite interest, even in abandoning herself to her revenge; she would even, if possible, inspire compassion in perpetrating the most barbarous action. She has the spirit of a sanguinary coquetry, if we may be allowed the expression, and the character of the woman discovers itself through that of the tyrant: "Ah! Shrewsbury, you saved my life, you turn'd The murd'rous steel aside; why let you not The dagger take its course? then all these broils Would have been ended; then, released from doubt, And free from blame, I should be now at rest In my still, peaceful grave. In very sooth, I'm weary of my life, and of my crown. If Heav'n decree that one of us two queens Must perish, to secure the other's lifeAnd sure it must be so-why should not I Be she who yields? My people must decide; I give them back the sovereignty they gave. God is my witness, that I have not lived For my own sake, but for my people's welfare. If they expect from this false, fawning Stuart, The younger sovereign, more happy days, I will descend with pleasure from the throne, Again repair to Woodstock's quiet bowers,

294 MADAME DE STAEL's GERMANY. Where once I spent my unambitious youth; Where, far removed from all the vanities Of earthly power, I found within myself True majesty. I am not made to ruleA ruler should be made of sterner stuff: My heart is soft and tender. I have govern'd, These many years, this kingdom happily, But then I only needed to make happy: Now comes my first important regal duty, And now I feel how weak a thing I am." At this sentence, Burleigh interrupts Elizabeth, and reproaches her for all that she desires to be reproached with,her meekness, her indulgence, her compassion; he assumes the appearance of courage, in demanding of his sovereign with vehemence, that which she secretly desires more than himself. Rough flattery generally succeeds better than obsequious flattery; and it is well for courtiers when they are able to give themselves the appearance of being hurried on, at the moment when they most deeply reflect upon what they are saying. Elizabeth signs the warrant; and, left alone with her private secretary, the woman's timidity, which mixes itself with the perseverance of despotism, makes her desire this inferior personage to take upon himself the responsibility of the action which she is committing. He requires a positive order for sending the warrant, which she refuses, repeating that he must do his duty. She leaves this unfortunate man in a frightful state of uncertainty, out of which he is delivered by the chancellor snatching from him the paper, which Elizabeth has left in his hands. Leicester finds himself entangled by the friends of the Queen if Scotland, who have been imploring his assistance to save uer. He discovers that he has been accused to Elizabeth, and takes on a sudden the shocking resolution of abandoning Mary, and betraying to the Queen of England, with impudent artifice, a part of the secrets which he owes to the confidence of his unfortunate friend. Notwithstanding all these unworthy sacri ices, he only half succeeds in satisfying Elizabeth: she re4uires him to lead Mary to the scaffold himself, in order to

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER 295 prove that he does not love her. The woman's jealousy, that discovers itself in the punishment which Elizabeth commands as a monarch, ought to inspire Leicester with the most profound hatred for her. The queen causes him to tremble, who, by the laws of nature, should have been her master; and this singular contrast is productive of a very original situation. But nothing is equal to the fifth act. It was at Weimar that I was present at the representation of Mary Stuart, and I cannot even yet remember, without deep emotion, the effect of the concluding scenes. At first, we see enter Mary's female attendants, dressed in mourning, and in profound sorrow. The old nurse, the most afflicted of all, brings in her royal jewels, which she has ordered her to collect together, that she may distribute them among her women. The governor of the prison, followed by many of his servants, dressed in black also, as well as himself; fill the stage with mourning. Melvil, formerly a gentleman in Mary's court, arrives from Rome at this moment. Anne, the queen's nurse receives him with joy. She paints to him the courage of Mary, who, all at once resigned to her fate, is no longer occupied by the concerns of her soul, and is only afflicted at not having been able to obtain a priest of her own religion, to receive from him the absolution of her sins, and the holy communion. The nurse relates how, during the night, the queen and she had heard the sound of reiterated blows; and both hoped that it arose from their friends endeavoring to effect her deliverance; but that at last they had discovered the noise to proceed from the workmen, who were erecting the scaffold in the hall muderneath. Melvi: inquires how Mary supported this terrible discovery; and Anne informs him, that her severest trial was tha of learning the treason of the Earl of Leicester; but that, after undergoing this shock, she had recovered the composure and the dignity of a queen. Mary's women come in and go out, to execute their mistress's orders. One of them brings a cup of wine, which Mary nas called for, to enable her to walk with X firmer step to the scaffold. Another comes tottering upon

9296 ~MADAME DE STAELB8 GERMANY. the stage, having seen, through the door of the hall, where the execution is to take place, the walls hung with black, the scaffold, the block, and the axe. The fear of the spectator, always increasing, is already near its height, when Mary appears in all the magnificence of royal ornament, alone clad in white in the midst of her mourning attendants, with a crucifix in her hand, a crown on her head, and already irradiated with the celestial pardon which her misfortunes have obtained for her. Mary comforts her women, whose sobs affect her with lively emotion: "Why these complaints? Why weep ye? Ye should rather Rejoice with me, that now at length, the end Of my long woe approaches; that my shackles Fall off, my prison opens, and my soul Delighted, mounts on seraph's wings, and seeks The land of everlasting liberty. When I was offer'd up to the oppression Of my proud enemy, was forced to suffer Ignoble taunts, and insults most unfitting A free and sov'reign queen, then was the time To weep for me; but, as an earnest friend, Beneficent and healing Death approaches. All the indignities which I have suffer'd On earth, are cover'd by his sable wings. The most degraded criminal's ennobled By his last suff'rings, by his final exit; I feel again the crown upon my brows, And dignity possess my swelling soul." Mary perceives Melvil, and rejoices at seeing him in this solemn moment: she questions him about her kindred in France, about her ancient servants, and charges him with her last adieu to all that was dear to her: "Bear then, sir, my blessing To the most Christian king, my royal brother, And the whole royal family of France. I bless the Cardinal, my honor'd uncle, And also Henry Guise, my noble cousin. I bless the holy father, the vicegerent Of Christ on earth, who will, I trust, bless me. I bless the King of Spain, who nobly offer'd

THE DR AMAS OF SCHILLER. 297 Himself as my deliv'rer, my avenger. They are remember'd in my will: I hope That they will not despise, how poor soe'er They be, the presents of a heart which loves them." Mary then turns aside to her servants and says to them: "I have bequeathed you to my royal brother Of France; he will protect you, he will give you Another country, and a better home; And if my last desire have any weight, Stay not in England; let no haughty Briton Glut his proud heart with your calamities, Nor see those in the dust, who once were mine. Swear by this image of our sufi ring Lord, To leave this fatal land when I'm no more. MELVIL (touching the crucifix). "I swear obedience, in the name of all." The queen distributes her jewels among her women; and nothing can be more affecting than the details into which she enters respecting the characters of each of them, and the advice which she gives them for their future conduct. She particularly displays her generosity towards one, whose husband had been a traitor, in formerly accusing Mary herself before Elizabeth. She tries to console her for this calamity, and to prove to her that she retains no resentment on account of it.''The worth of gold, my Anna, charms not thee; Nor the magnificence of precious stones: My memory, I know, will be to thee The dearest jewel; take this handkerchief, I work'd it for thee, in the hours of sorrow, With my own hands, and my hot scalding tears Are woven in the texture: you will bind My eyes with this, when it is time: this last Sad service I would wish but from my Anna. Come all, and now receive my last farewell. [She stretches forth her hands, the WOMEN, violently weeping, fall successively at her feet, and kiss her outstretched hand Marg'ret, farewell-my Alice, fare thee well; Thanks, Burgoyn, for thy honest faithful service - Thy lips are hot, my Gertrude: I have been Much hated, yet have been as much beloved. 138,

298 3MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. May a deserving husband bless my Gertrude, For this warm glowing heart is form'd for love. Bertha, thy choice is better, thou hadst rather Become the chaste and pious bride of Heav'n;Oh! haste thee to fulfil thy vows; the goods Of earth are all deceitful;-thou mayst learn This lesson from thy queen. No more; farewell, Farewell, farewell, my friends, farewell forever." Mary remains alone with Melvil, and then begins a scene, the effect of which is very grand, however it may be open to censure in many respects. The only grief that remains to Mary, after she had provided for all her worldly cares, arises from her not being able to obtain a priest of her own religion to assist at her last moments. Melvil, after receiving the secret of her pious sorrows, informs her that he has been at Rome, that he has there taken orders that he might acquire the right of absolving and comforting her: he uncovers his head, to show her the holy tonsure, and takes out of his bosom a wafer, which the Pope himself had blessed for her:'Is then a heav'nly happiness prepared To cheer me on the very verge of death? As an immortal one on golden clouds Descends, as once the angel from on high, Deliver'd the Apostle from his fetters:He scorns all bars, he scorns the soldier's sword, He steps undaunted through the bolted portals, And fills the dungeon with his native glory; Thus here the messenger of Heav'n appears, When ev'ry earthly champion had deceived me. And you, my servant once, are now the servant Of the Most High, and his immortal ward! As before me your knees were wont to bend, Before you humbled, now I kiss the dust." The beautiful, the royal Mary, throws herself at Melvil's feet; and her subject, invested with all the dignity of the Church, suffers her to remain in that situation while he examines her. (It must not be forgotten, that Melvil himself believed Mary guilty of the last plot against the life of Elizabeth. I

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 299 should add, that the following scene should only be read; and that, on most of the German stages, they suppress the act of communion in the representation of this tragedy.) MELVIL (making over her the sign of the cross.) "Hear, Mary Queen of Scotland:-in the name Of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Hast thou examined carefully thy heart, Swear'st thou, art thou prepared in thy confession To speak the truth before the God of truth! MARY. "Before my God and thee, my heart lies open. MELVIL. "What calls thee to the presence of the Highest I MARY. I humbly do acknowledge to have err'd Most grievously. I tremble to approach, Sullied with sin, the God of purity. MELVIL. "Declare the sin which weighs so heavily Upon thy conscience, since thy last confession MARY. "My heart was fill'd with thoughts of envious hate And vengeance took possession of my bosom. I hope forgiveness of my sins from God, Yet could I not forgive my enemy. MELVIL. " Repent'st thou of the sin? Art thou, in sooth, Resolved to leave this world at peace with all? MARY. "As surely as I wish the joys of heav'n. MELVIL. " What other sin hath arm'd thy heart against thee?

300 1MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. MARY. "Ah! not alone through hate; through lawless love Have I still more abused the sovereign good. My heart was vainly turn'd towards the man, Who left me in misfortune, who deceived me. MELVIL. "Repent'st thou of the sin? And hast thou turn'd Thy heart, from this idolatry, to God? MARY. "It was the hardest trial I have pass'd; This last of earthly bonds is torn asunder. MELVIL. " What other sin disturbs thy guilty conscience MARY. "A bloody crime, indeed of ancient date, And long ago confess'd; yet with new terrors It now attacks me, black and grisly steps Across my path, and shuts the gates of heav'n: By my connivance fell the king, my husbandI gave my hand and heart to a seducerBy rigid penance I have made atonement; Yet in my soul the worm is gnawing still. MELVIL. " Has then thy heart no other accusation, Which hath not been confess'd and wash'd away? MARY. " All you have heard, with which my heart is charged MELVIL. "Think on the presence of Omniscience; Think on the punishments, with which the Church Threatens imperfect and reserved confession I This is the sin to everlasting death, For this is sinning'gainst his Holy Spirit. MARY. "So may eternal grace with victory Crown my last contest, as I wittingly Have nothing hid

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 301 MELVIL. "How? Wilt thou then conceal The crime from God, for which thou art condemn'd t Thou tell'st me nothing of the share thou hadst In Babington and Parry's bloody treason: Thou diest for this a temporal death; for this Wilt thou too die the everlasting death? MARY. "I am prepared to meet eternity; Within the narrow limits of an hour, I shall appear before my Judge's throne; But, I repeat it, my confession's ended. MELVIL. "Consider well-the heart is a deceiver. Thou hast perhaps, with sly equivocation, The word avoided which would make thee guilty, Although thy will was party to the crime. Remember, that no juggler's tricks can blind The eye of fire which darts through ev'ry breast. MARY. "'Tis true, that I have call'd upon all princes To free me from unworthy chains; yet'tis As true, that neither by intent or deed, Have I attempted my oppressor's life. MELVIL. "Your secretaries then have witness'd falsely. MARY. "It is, as I have said;-what they have witness'd The Lord will judge. MELVIL. "Thou mount'st then, satisfied Of thy own innocence, the fatal scaffold? MARY. "God suffers me in mercy to atone, By undeserved death, my youth's transgressions.

MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. MELVIL (making over her the sign of the cross). "Go, then, and expiate them all by death; Sink a devoted victim on the altar, Thus shall thy blood atone the blood thou'st spilt. From female frailty were derived thy faults, Free from the weakness of mortality, The spotless spirit seeks the blest abodes. Now then, by the authority which God, Hath unto me committed, I absolve thee From all thy sins-be as thy faith thy welfare! [ie gives her the host. Receive the body which for thee was offer'd[le takes the cup which stands upon the table, consecrates i, with silent prayer, then presents it to her; she hesitates to take it, and makes signs to him to withdraw it. Receive the blood, which for thy sins was shedReceive it-'tis allow'd thee by the Pope, To exercise in death the highest office Of kings, the holy office of the priesthood. [She takes the cup. And as thou now in this his earthly body Hast held with God mysterious communion, So mayst thou henceforth, in his realm of joy, Where sin no more exists, nor tears of woe, A fair transfigured spirit, join thyself Forever with the Godhead, and forever. [He sets down the cup; hearing a noise, he covers his head, and goes to the door; Mary remains in silent devotion, on her knees. MELVIL (returning). " A painful conflict is in store for thee; Feel'st thou within thee strength enough to smother Each impulse of malignity and hate? MARY. "I fear not a relapse. I have to God Devoted both my hatred, and my love. MELVIL. "Well, then, prepare thee to receive my Lords Of Leicester and of Burleigh. They are here.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 303 SCENE VIII. Enter BURLEIGH, LEICESTER, and PAULET. [LEICESTER remains in the background, without raising his eyes; BURLEIGH, who remarks his confusion, step between him and the QUEEN. BURLEIGH. "I come, my Lady Stuart, to receive Your last commands and wishes. MARY. "Thanks, my lord. BURLEIGH. "It is the pleasure of my royal mistress, That nothing reasonable be denied you. MARY. "My will, my lord, declares my last desires; I've placed it in the hand of Sir Amias, And humbly beg, that it may be fulfill'd. PAULET. "You may rely on this. MARY. " I beg that all My servants unmolested may return To France, or Scotland, as their wishes lead. BURLEIGH.'It shall be as you wish. MARY. " And since my body Is not to rest in consecrated ground, I pray you suffer this my faithful servant To bear my heart to France, to my relationsAlas!'twas ever there. BURLEIGH. " It shall be done. What wishes else? MARY. " Unto her Majesty Of England bear a sister's salutation;

304 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Tell her, that from the bottom of my heart I pardon her my death: most humbly too I crave her to forgive me for the passion With which I spoke to her. May God preserve her, And bless her with a long and prosp'rous reign! BURLEIGH. "Say, do you still adhere to your resolve, And still refuse assistance from the Dean? MARY. "My lord, I've made my peace with God. [To PAULET. Good sir, I have unwittingly caused you much sorrow,Bereft you of your age's only stay. Oh, let me hope you do not hate my name. PAULET (giving her his hand). "The Lord be with you! go your way in peace. SCENE IX. [ANNA KENNEDY, and the other women of the QUEEN, crowd into the room, with marks of horror. The SHERIFFfollows them, a white staff in his hand; behind are seen, through the open doors, men under arms. MARY. "What ails thee, Anna? Yes-my hour is o3meThe Sheriff comes to lead me to my fate, And part we must-farewell! KENNEDY. " We will not leave thee, We will not part from thee. MARY (to MELVIL). "You, worthy sir, And my dear faithful Anna, shall attend me In my last moments. I am sure, my lord Will not refuse my heart this consolation. BURLEIGH. "For this I have no warrant. MARY. " How, my lord; Can you deny me then this small petition?

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 305 Respect my sex; who shall attend me else, And yield me the last service?-sure it never Can be my sister's pleasure, that in me My sex should be insulted; that these men, With their rude hands, should touch my royal person. BURLEIGH. "'Tis order'd that no woman shall ascend The scaffold steps with you; their tears and moansMARY. "She shall not weep, my lord, she shall not moan; I answer for my Anna's resolution; Be merciful; divide me not so soon From my true foster-mother, fiom my friend. She bore me on her arms into this life, Let her then gently lead me to my death. PAULET (to BURLEIGH). Yield to her wishes. BURLEIGH. " Be it so. MARY. " I now Have nothing in this world to wish for more. [She takes the crucifix, and kisses it. My God! my Comforter! my blest Redeemer! As once thy arms were stretch'd upon the cross. Let them be now extended to receive me! [She turns round to go, at the same moment her eyes fall upon LEICESTEi, who, on her going, starts involuntary and turns his eyes towards her: at this sight MARY trembles, her knees fail her, she is about to fall, when LEICESTER catches at her, and receives her in his arms; she regards him for some time earnestly, and in silence; he cannot support her looks; at length she speaks. You keep your word, my Lord of Leicester: for You promised me your arm to lead me forth From prison, and you lend it to me now. At length the wish'd for day is come, and what Was oft the object of my fondest dreams Is now accomplish'd: and the Earl of Leicester, The long-expected, the long-wish'd for friend Appears at length in Fotheringay Castle.

306 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. I see him standing in my prison; all Is ready for the journey; all the gates Stand open, and at length I cross the threshold, Conducted by his hand; and now I leave These dismal walls behind me, and forever. All is fulfill'd, and you have saved your honor. [He stands as if annihilated; she continues, with a gentle voice Yes, Leicester; not for liberty alone 1 wish'd to be indebted to your hands. You should have made me bless that liberty. Led by your hand, and happy in your love, I hoped once more to taste the joys of life. Yes: now that I'm prepared from all the world To part, and to become a happy spirit, Whom earthly inclinations tempt no more, Now, Leicester, I may venture to confess Without a blush, the frailty I have conquer'dFarewell, my lord; and, if you can, be happy! To woo two queens has been your daring aim; You have disdain'd a tender, loving heart; Betray'd it, in the hope to win a proud one: Kneel at the feet of Queen Elizabeth! May your reward not prove your punishment. Farewell! I now have nothing more on earth." Leicester remains alone after the departure of Mary, the feeling of despair and shame that overwhelms him can hardly be expressed; he listens, be hears all that is passing in the hall of execution, and, when the business is ended, he falls senseless on the ground. We are afterwards told that he is gone to France, and the grief of Elizabeth at the loss of her lover is the beginning of her punishment. I shall make some observations on this imperfect analysis of a piece, in which the charm of the verse adds greatly to its other merits. I hardly know if they would permit, in France, an entire act on one decisive situation; but that repose of grief, which springs from the very privation of hope, produces the truest and the most profound emotions. This solemn iepose permits the spectator, as well as the victim, to descend into himself, and feel all that misery reveals to him. The scene of the confession, and above all, that of the comrn munion, would be condemned altogether, and with reason

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 307 but it is certainy not for want of effect that it would be censured: the pathetic never touches the heart more nearly than when founded on the national religion. The most Catholic country in Europe, Spain, and its most religious poet, Calderon, who had himself entered into the ecclesiastical order, have admitted as subjects for the stage, the ceremonies of Christianity. It seems to me that, without being at all wanting in the revence which we owe to the Christian religion, we may suffer it to enter into poetry and the fine arts, into all that elevates the soul, and embellishes life. To exclude it from these, is to imitate children who think they can do nothing but what is sad and solemn in their father's house. There is a religion in every thing that occasions a disinterested emotion of the mind; poetry, love, nature, and the Divinity itself; are connected together in the heart, whatever efforts we may make to separate them; and, if genius is prohibited from sounding all these strings at once, the full harmony of the soul will never be heard. This very Mary whom France beheld so brilliant, and En. gland so unhappy, has been the subject of a thousand different poems, celebrating her charms and her misfortunes. History has painted her as sufficiently light; Schiller has thrown more of the serious into her character, and the period at which he brings her forward may well account for the change. Twenty years of imprisonment, even twenty years of existence, in whatever manner they have been spent, are generally a severe lesson. The adieu of Mary to the Earl of Leicester appears to me to be one of the finest situations to be met with on the stage. There is some sweetness for her in that trying moment. She has a compassion for Leicester, all guilty as he is; she feels what a remembrance she bequeathes to him, and this vengeance of the heart is not prohibited. In short, at the moment oL death, of a death, the consequence of his refusal to save her, she again says to him that she loves him; and if any thing can console the mind under the terrible separation to which we are doomed by death, it is the solemnity which it gives to our parting words: no end, no hope, can mingle with them, and the purest truth is exhaled from our bosoms with life.

808 MMAfDAME DE STAEL'S GERMIANY. CHAPTER XIX. JOAN OF ARC! AND THE BRIDE OF MESSINA. SCtIILLER, in a copy of verses full of grace, reproaches the French with ingratitude towards Joan of Arc. One of the noblest epochs of history, that in which France, and her king, Charles the Seventh, were rescued from the yoke of foreigners, has never yet been celebrated by any writer worthy of effacing the remembrance of Voltaire's poem; and it is a stranger that has attempted to re-establish the glory of a French heroine, of a heroine whose unhappy fate might interest us in her favor, even though her exploits did not excite our just enthusiasm. Shakspeare could not judge of Joan of Arc but with the partiality of an Englishman; yet even he represents her, in his historical play of Henry the Sixth, as having been at first inspired by heaven, and subsequently corrupted by the demon of ambition. Thus, the French only have suffered her memory to be dishonored.' It is a great fault of our nation, to be incapable of resisting the ridiculous, when presented to us under a striking form. Yet, is there so much room in the world for the serious and the gay together, that we might impose it upon ourselves as a law, never to trifle with what is worthy of our veneration, and yet lose nothing, by doing so, of the freedom of pleasantry. The subject of Joan of Arc partaking at once of the historical and the marvellous, Schiller has intermingled in his play, pieces of lyrical poetry, and the mixture produces a fine effect, even in representation. We have hardly any thing in the French language, except the Monologue of Polyeucte, and the Choruses of Athalie and Esther, that can give us any idea The play of Schiller is entitled the Maid of Orleamn. —Ed.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 309 of it. Dramatic poetry is inseparable from the situation which it is required to paint; it is recitation in action, the conflict of man with fate. Lyrical poetry is almost always suited to religious subjects; it raises the soul towards heaven; it expresses I know not what of sublime resignation, which often seizes on us in the midst of the most tumultuous passions, and delivers us from our personal disquietudes, to give us for an instant the taste of divine peace. No doubt we must take care that the progressive advance of the interest shall not suffer by it; but the end of dramatic art is not simply to inform us whether the hero is killed, or whether he marries: the principal object of the events represented, is to serve to develop sentiments and characters. The poet is in. the right, therefore, sometimes to suspend the action of the theatre, to make us listen to the heavenly music of the soul. We may abstract ourselves in art, as in life, and soar for a moment above all that passes within us and around us. The historical epoch at which Joan of Arc existed, is peculiarly proper to display the French character in all its beauty, when an unalterable faith, an unbounded reverence for women, an almost imprudent generosity in war, signalized this nation throughout Europe. We must picture to ourselves a young girl of sixteen, of a majestic form, but with still infantine features, a delicate exterior, and without any strength but that which comes to her from on high; inspired by religion, poetical in her actions, poetical also in her speech, when animated by the divine spirit; showing in her discourses, sometimes an admirable genius, at others an absolute ignorance of all that heaven has not revealed to her. It is thus that Schiller has conceived the part of Joan of Arc. He first shows her at Vaucouleurs, in the rustic habitation of her father, where she hears of the misfortunes of France, and is inflamed by the recital. Her aged father blames her sadness, her thoughtfulness, her enthusiasm. Unaccustomed to penetrate the secret of what is extraordinary, he ni-nks that there is evil in all that is not habitual to him. A countryman brings in a helmet, which a gipsey had put into

310 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMIAXY. his hands in a very mysterious manner. Joan of Arc snatches it from him, and places it on her own head, while her family contemplate with astonishment the expression of her eyes. She prophecies the triumph of France, and the defeat of her enemies. A peasant, an esprit fort, tells her that there are no longer any miracles in the world. She exclaims: "Yes, there shall yet be one: a snow-white dove Shall fly, and, with the eagle's boldness, tear The birds of prey which rend her fatherland. She shall o'erthrow this haughty Burgundy, Betrayer of the kingdom; Talbot, too, The hundred-handed, heaven-defying scourge; This Sal'sbury, who violates our fanes, And all these island robbers shall she drive Before her like a flock of timid lambs. The Lord will be with her, the God of battle; A weak and trembling creature he will choose, And through a tender maid proclaim his power, For He i, the Almighty!"' The sisters of Joan of Arc retire to a distance, and her father orders her to busy herself in her rural labors, and remain a stranger to those great events with which poor shepherds have nothing to do. He goes out, Joan of Arc remains alone: about to depart forever from the abode of her infancy, a feeling of regret seizes her, and she says: "Farewell, ye mountains, ye beloved glades, Ye lone and peaceful valleys, fare ye well! Through you Johanna never more may stray! For aye, Johanna bids you now farewell. Ye meads which I have water'd, and ye trees Which I have planted, still in beauty bloom! Farewell, ye grottoes, and ye crystal springs! Sweet echo, vocal spirit of the vale, Who sang'st responsive to my simple strain, Johanna goes, and ne'er returns again. "Ye scenes where all my tranquil joys I knew, Forever now I leave you far behind! This, and other quotations from the Maid of Orlean8, we give in the translation of Miss Anna Swanwick, from Bohn's Standard Library.-E

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 311 Poor foldless lambs, no shepherd now have you! O'er the wide heath stray henceforth unconfined; For I to danger's field, of crimson hue, Am summon'd hence, another flock to find. Such is to me the Spirit's high behest; No earthly vain ambition fires my breast. "For who in glory did on Horeb's height Descend to Moses in the bush of flame, And bade him go and stand in Pharaoh's sight,Who once to Israel's pious shepherd came, And sent him forth, his champion in the fight,Who aye hath loved the lowly shepherd train,He, from these leafy boughs, thus spake to me:'Go forth! Thou shalt on earth my witness be. "'Thou in rude armor must -thy limbs invest, A plate of steel upon thy bosom wear; Vain earthly love may never stir thy breast, Nor passion's sinful glow be kindled there. Ne'er with the bride-wreath shall thy locks be dress'd, Nor on thy bosom bloom an infant fair; But war's triumphant glory shall be thine; Thy martial fame all women's shall outshine.'I For when in fight the stoutest hearts despair, When direful ruin threatens France, forlorn, Then thou aloft my oriflamme shalt bear, And swiftly as the reaper mows the corn, Thou shalt lay low the haughty conqueror; His fortune's wheel thou rapidly shalt turn, To Gaul's heroic sons deliv'rance bring, Relieve beleaguer'd Rheims, and crown thy king!' "The heavenly Spirit promised me a sign; He sends the helmet, it hath come from him. Its iron filleth me with strength divine, I feel the courage of the cherubim; As with the rushing of a mighty wind It drives me forth to join the battle's din; The clanging trumpets sound, the chargers rear, And the loud war-cry thunders in mine ear." This first scene is a prologue, but it is inseparable from the piece; it was necessary to put in action the instant at which Joan of Arc embraces her solemn resolution: had the poet

312 MADAME DE STAEL' GERMANY. contented himself with the bare recital, he would have deprived it of the movement and impulse which transport the spectator into that frame of mind which is demanded by the wonders he is obliged to believe. The play of Joan of Arc proceeds uniformly, according to the history, to the period of the coronation at Rheims. The character of Agnes Sorel is painted with elevation and delicacy, and adds effect to the purity of Joan of Arc; for all the endowments of this world vanish by the side of virtues truly religious. There is a third female character, that of Isabel of Bavaria, which it might be well to suppress altogether; it is gross, and the contrast is much too strong to produce any effect. Joan of Arc is rightly opposed to Agnes Sorel, a heavenly love to that which is earthly; but hatred and perversity in a woman are beneath the dignity of art, which degrades itself in painting them. Shakspeare gave the idea of the scene in which Joan of Arc brings back the Duke of Burgundy to the fealty he owes his king; but Schiller has executed it in an admirable manner. The Maid of Orleans wishes to revive in the duke's soul that attachment to France which was then so powerful in the minds of all the generous inhabitants of that noble country. "What wouldst thou, Burgundy? Who is the foe Whom eagerly thy murderous glances seek? This prince is, like thyself, a son of France,This hero is thy countryman, thy friend; I am a daughter of thy fatherland. We all, whom thou art eager to destroy, Are of thy friends; our longing arms prepare To clasp, our bending knees to honor thee. Our sword'gainst thee is pointless, and that face E'en in a hostile helm is dear to us, For there we trace the features of our king." The Duke of Burgundy rejects the supplications of Joan o Arc, fearing her supernatural seduction. She says: "'Tis not imperious necessity Which throws us at thy feet. We do not come

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 313 As suppliants before thee. Look around! The English tents are level with the ground, And all the field is cover'd with your slain. Hark! the war-trumpets of hile French resound: God hath decided-ours the victory! Our new-cull'd laurel garland with our friend We fain would share. Come, noble fugitive! Oh come where justice and where victory dwell! Even I, the messenger of Heaven, extend A sister's hand to thee. I fain would save And draw thee over to our righteous cause! Heaven hath declared for France! Angelic powers, Unseen by thee, do battle for our king; With lilies are the holy ones adorn'd. Pure as this radiant banner is our cause; Its blessed symbol is the Queen of Heaven. BURGUNDY. 6' Falsehood's fallacious words are full of guile, But hers are pure and simple as a child's. If evil spirits borrow this disguise, They copy innocence triumphantly. I'll hear no more. To arms, Dunois! to arms I Mine ear, I feel, is weaker than mine arm. JOHANNA. You call me an enchantress, and accuse Of hellish arts. Is it the work of Hell To heal dissension, and to foster peace? Comes holy concord from the depths below? Say, what is holy, innocent, and good, If not to combat for our fatherland? Since when hath nature been so self-opposed, That Heaven forsakes the just and righteous cause, While Hell protects it? If my words are true, Whence could I draw them but from Heaven above? Who ever sought me in my shepherd-walks, To teach the humble maid affairs of state? I ne'er have stood with princes, to these lips Unknown the arts of eloquence. Yet now, When I have need of it to touch thy heart, Insight and varied knowledge I possess; The fate of empires and the doom of kings VOL. I.-14

814 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. Lie clearly spread before my childish mind, And words of thunder issue from my mouth." At these words, the Duke of Burgundy is moved, is troub. led. Joan of Arc perceives it, and exclaims: "He weeps-he's conquer'd, he is ours once more!" The French bend their swords and colors before him. Charles the Seventh appears, and the Duke of Burgundy throws himself at his feet. I regret, for our national honor, that this scene was not conceived by a Frenchman; but how much genius, and, above all, how much nature is necessary to become thus identified with all that is great and true in all countries and in all ages! Talbot, whom Schiller represents as an atheist-warrior, intrepid against heaven itself, despising death, even though he thinks it full of horror-Talbot, wounded by Joan of Arc, dies on the stage blaspheming. Perhaps it would have been better to follow the tradition, which says that Joan of Are never shed human blood, and triumphed without killing. A critic, of a refined and severe judgment, has also reproached Schiller with having made Joan of Arc susceptible of love, instead of making her die a martyr, without having ever experienced any sentiment foreign to the object of her divine mission: it is thus that she should be painted in a poem; but I know not whether a soul of such unspotted holiness would not produce, in a piece designed for the stage, the same effect as marvellous or allegorical beings, whose actions are all foreseen, and -who, not being agitated by human passions, present to us no dramatic conflict or interest. Among the noble knights of the court of France, the brave Dunois presses forward the first to ask Joan of Arc to become his wife; and, constant to her vows, she refuses him. A young Montgomery, in the midst of a battle, implores her to spare him, and represents to her the grief which his death will occasion to his aged father; Joan of Arc rejects his prayer, and displays, upon this occasion, more inflexibility than her duty demands; but at the instant when she is about to strike a

TIHE DRAMAS OF SCHILLt R. 315 young Englishman, Lionel, she feels herself at once softened by his beauty, and love finds entrance into her heart. Then all her power is destroyed. A knight, black as fate, appears to her in the battle, and counsels her not to go to Rheimns She goes there, notwithstanding; the solemn pomp of the coronation passes on the stage; Joan of Arc walks in the first rank, but her steps are unsteady; she bears in a trembling hand the consecrated standard, and the holy spirit is perceived to protect her no longer. Before she enters the church, she stops short, and remains alone on the stage. From afar are heard the festive instruments that accompany the ceremony of the consecration; and Joan of Arc utters harmonious complaints, while the sound of flutes and hautboys floats gently in the air. " Hush'd in the din of arms, war's storms subside, Glad song and dance succeed the bloody fray, Through all the streets joy echoes far and wide, Altar and church are deck'd in rich array, Triumphal arches rise in vernal pride, Wreathes round the columns wind their flowery way, Wide Rheims cannot contain the mighty throng, Which to the joyous pageant rolls along. " One thought alone doth every heart possess, One rapt'rous feeling o'el each breast preside, And those to-day are link'd in happiness Whom bloody hatred did erewhile divide. All who themselves of Gallic race confess The name of Frenchman own with conscious pride, France sees the splendor of her ancient crown, And to her monarch's son bows humbly down. "Yet I, the author of this wide delight, The joy, myself created, cannot share; My heart is changed, in sad and dreary plight It flies the festive pageant in despair; Still to the British camp it taketh flight, Against my will my gaze still wanders there, And from the throng I steal, with grief oppress'd, To hide the guilt which weighs upon my breast.

MADAME DE STAEL'S GER1MANY. "What? I permit a human form To haunt my bosom's sacred cell? And there, where heavenly radiance shone Doth earthly love presume to dwell? The saviour of my country, I, The warrior of God most high, Burn for my country's foeman? Dare I name Heaven's holy light, nor feel o'erwhelm'd with shame? [The music behind the scene passes into a soft and moving melodg. "Woe is me! those melting tones! They distract my'wilder'd brain! Every note his voice recalling, Conjures up his form again! "Would that spears were whizzing round! Would that battle's thunder roar'd!'Midst the wild tumultuous sound My former strength were then restored. "These sweet tones, these melting voices, With seductive power are fraught! They dissolve, in gentle longing, Every feeling, every thought, Waking tears of plaintive sadness! [After a pause, with siore energy. "Should I have kill'd him? Could I, when I gazed Upon his face? Kill'd him! Oh, rather far Would I have turn'd my weapon'gainst myself! And am I culpable because humane? Is pity sinful?-Pity! Didst thou hear The voice of pity and humanity, When others fell the victims of thy sword? Why was she silent when the gentle youth From Wales entreated thee to spare his life? O cunning heart! Thou liest before high Heaven; It is not pity's voice impels thee now! -Why was I doom'd to look into his eyes! To mark his noble features! With that glance, Thy crime, thy woe commenced. Unhappy one! A sightless instrument thy God demands, Blindly thou must accomplish his behest! When thou didst see, God's shield abandon'd thee, And the dire snares of Hell around thee press'd! [Flutes are again heard, and she subsides into a quiet melancholy

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 317 "Harmless staff! Oh, that I ne'er Had for the sword abandon'd thee! Had voices never reach'd mine ear, From thy branches' sacred tree! High Queen of Heaven! Oh would that thou Hadst ne'er reveal'd thyself to me! Take back-I dare not claim it nowTake back thy crown,'tis not for me! "I saw the heavens open wide, I gazed upon that face of love! Yet here on earth my hopes abide, They do not dwell in heaven above! Why, Holy One, on me impose This dread vocation? Could I steel, And to each soft emotion close This heart, by nature form'd to feel? "Wouldst thou proclaim thy high command, Make choice of those who, free from sin, In thy eternal mansions stand; Send forth thy flaming cherubim! Immortal ones, thy law they keep, They do not feel, they do not weep! Choose not a tender woman's aid, Not the frail soul of shepherd maid! "Was I concern'd with warlike things, With battles or the strife of kings? In innocence I led my sheep Adown the mountain's silent steep. But thou didst send me into life,'Midst princely halls and scenes of strife, To lose my spirit's tender bloom: Alas, I did not seek my doom!" This soliloquy is a grand achievement of poetry; one perraling sentiment naturally brings us back to the same expressions; and it is in this very respect that the verse agrees so well with the affections of the soul; for it transforms into de-,cious harmony what might appear monotonous in the simple language of prose. The distraction of Joan of Are goes on always increasing. The honors they render her, the gratitude. they testify for her, nothing is capable of reassuring her, now

318 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMAN Y. what she feels herself abandoned by the all-powerful hand which had raised her up. At last her fatal presentiments are accomplished, and in what manner! In order to conceive the terrible effect of an accusation of witchcraft, we must transport ourselves to those ages in which the suspicion of this mysterious crime was ever ready to fix upon all extraordinary events. The belief of a principle of evil, such as it then existed, supposed the possibility of a frightful worship paid to the powers of hell; the terrifying objects of nature were the symbol, and grotesque signs and characters the language of this worship. All worldly prosperity, of which the cause was unknown, was attributed to this demoniacal contract. The word magic designated the unbounded empire of evil, as providence was applied to the dominion of infinite happiness. This imprecation, she is a witch, he is a sorcerer, become ridiculous in our days, made men shudder with horror a few centuries ago; all the most sacred ties were broken when these words were uttered; no courage could brave them, and the disorder with which they affected all spirits was such, that it might have been said, the demons of hell appeared in reality, when they fancied they saw them appear. The unhappy fanatic, Joan of Arc's father, is seized by this prevailing superstition; and far from being proud of his daughter's glory, he presents himself voluntarily amid the knights end lords of the court, to accuse her of witchcraft. Immediately every heart is frozen with fear; the knights, companions in arms of the heroine, press her to justify herself, and she remains silent. The king questions her, and still she remains silent. The archbishop conjures her to swear her innocence on the crucifix, and she remains silent. She will not defend herself against the crime of which she is falsely accused, while the feels herself guilty of another crime, which her heart cannot forgive itself. Thunder is heard, the people are overwhelmed with terror, and Joan of Arc is banished from the empire she has just preserved. No man dares come near her The crowd disperses; the unhappy victim quits the town, and wanders about in the fields; overcome by fatigue, she accepts

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 319 a refieshing beverage: the child who presents it, recollects her, and snatches from her hands this feeble consolation. It is as if the blasts of hell, with which she is thought to be surrounded, had been capable of defiling whatever she touched, and of plunging headlong into the eternal gulf whatever person dared to assist her. At last, pursued from one place of refuge to another, she who delivered France falls into the power of its enemies. Up to this point, this romantic tragedy-it is so that Schiller has styled it-is filled with beauties of the highest order: some tedious details may be found in it (this is a fault from which the German writers are never exempt); but events of such remarkable importance are made to pass before our eyes, that the imagination exalts itself to their elevation, and, judging of this piece no longer as a work of art, we are brought to consider the marvellous picture which it presents to us as a new reflection of the holy inspiration of the heroine. The only serious defect with which this lyrical drama is to be reproached, is the denofiment: instead of adopting that with which history furnished him, Schiller supposes that Joan of Arc, put in chains by the English, miraculously bursts her fetters, rejoins the French camp, decides the victory in their favor, and receives a mortal wound. The marvellous in invention, placed by the side of the marvellous transmitted to us by history, robs the subject of a great part of its seriousness. Besides, what could be more noble than the conduct and the very answers of Joan of Arc, when condemned at Rouen by the great English barons, %nd the Norman bishops? History records that this young girl united the most immovable courage to the most touching sorrow; she wept like a woman, but conducted herself like a hero. She was accused of having abandoned herself to superstitious practices, and she repelled this charge with arguments such as an enlightened person of our days might make uf.e of, but she constantly perlisted in declaring that she had had secret revelations, which decided her in the choice of her career. Overcome by horror of the punishment which threatened her, she gave constant

320 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. testimony, before the English, to the energy of the French, to the virtues of the King of France, even though he had abandoned her. Her death was neither that of a warrior, nor that of a martyr; but, through the softness and timidity of her sex, she displayed in her last moments a force of inspiration almost equally astonishing with that, the supposition of which had brought down upon her the charge of witchcraft. IHowever this might be, the simple recital of her end causes a much stronger emotion than the catastrophe imagined by Schiller When poetry takes upon herself to add to the lustre of an historical personage, she is bound at least carefully to preserve the physiognomy which characterizes it; for greatness is really striking only when it is known how to give it a natural air Now, in the subject of Joan of Arc, the real history not only has more of nature, but more of grandeur in it than the fictitious. The Bride of Messina was composed according to a dramatic system altogether different from that which Schiller had till then followed, and to which he happily returned. It was in order to admit choruses on the stage, that he chose a subject in which there is nothing of novelty but the names; for it is, fundamentally, the same thing as the Freres Ennemis. Schiller has merely added to it a sister, whom her two brothers fall in love with, ignorant that she is their sister, and one kills the other from jealousy. This situation, terrible in itself, is intermingled with choruses, which make a part of the piece. These are the the servants of the two brothers, who interrupt and congeal the interest by their mutual discussions. The lyric poetry, which they recite, all at the same time, is superb; yet are they not the less, whatever may be said of it, choruses of chamberlains. The assembled people alone possesses that independent dignity which constitutes it an impartial spectator. The chorus ought to represent posterity. If it were animated by personal affections, it would necessarily become ridiculous; for it would be inconceivable how several different persons should say the same thing, at the same time'f their voices were not supposed to be the unerring interpret, ers of eternal truths.

THE DRAMAS )F SCHILLER. 321 Schiller, in the preface to his Bride of Messina, complains, with reason, that our modern usages no longer possess those popular forms which rendered them so poetical among the ancients: " The palaces of kings are in these days closed; courts of iustice have been transferred from the gates of cities to the interior of buildings; writing has narrowed the province of speech; the people itself-the sensibly living mass-when it does not operate as brute force, has become a part of the civil polity, and thereby an abstract idea in our minds; the deities have returned within the bosoms of mankind. The poet must reopen the palaces-he must place courts of justice beneath the canopy of heaven-restore the gods, reproduce every extreme which the artificial frame of actual life has abolishedthrow aside every factitious influence on the mind or condition of man which impedes the manifestation of his inward nature and primitive character, as the statuary rejects modern costume:-and of all external circumstances adopts nothing but what is palpable in the highest of forms-that of humanity."' This desire of another time, another country, is a poetical sentiment. The religious man has need of heaven, and the poet of another earth; but it is difficult to say what religion, or what epoch, is represented to us by the Bride of Messina it departs from modern manners, without placing us in the times of antiquity. The poet has confounded all religions together, and this confusion destroys the high unity of tragedy -that of an all-directing destiny. The events are atrocious, and yet the horror they inspire is of a tranquil cast. The dialogue is as long, as diffuse, as if it were the business of all to speak fine verses, and as if one loved, and were jealous, and hated one's brother, and killed him, without ever departing from the sphere of general reflections and philosophical sentiments. The Bride of Messina displays, nevertheless, some admirable traces of the fine genius of Schiller. When one of the brothers has been killed by the other, who is jealous of him, the dead 1 We use the version made for Mr. Bohn. —E 14a

322 MAD)AME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. body is brought into the mother's palace; she is yet ignorant that she has lost a son, and it is announced to her by the chorus which walks before the bier, in the following words: " With Sorrow in his train, From street to street the King of Terror glides; With stealthy foot and slow, He creeps where'er the fleeting race Of man abides! In turn, at every gate Is heard the dreaded knock of Fate, The message of unutterable woe! " When in the sere And Autumn leaves decay'd, The mournful forest tells how quickly fade The glories of the year! When in the silent tomb opprest, Frail man, with weight of days, Sinks to his tranquil rest, Contented nature but obeys Her everlasting lawThe general doom awakes no shuddering awe! But, mortals, oh! prepare For mightier ills: with ruthless hand, Fell murder cuts the holy bandThe kindled tie: insatiate Death, With unrelenting rage, Bears to his bark the flower of blooming age! " When clouds athwart the lowering sky Are driven-when bursts with hollow moan The thunder's peal-our trembling bosoms own The might of awful destiny! Yet oft the lightning's glare Darts sudden through the cloudless air:Then in thy short delusive day Of bliss. oh! dread the treacherous snare; Nor prize the fleeting goods and vain, The flowers that bloom but to decay! Nor wealth, nor joy, nor aught but pain, Was e'er to mortal's lot secure:Our first best lesson-to endure!"1 1 We use the fine version of A. Lodge, Esq., A. M., which has been much praised by English critics -Ed.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 323 When the brother learns that the object of his love, for which he had slain his brother, is his sister, his despair knows no bounds, and he resolves to die. His mother offers to pardon him, his sister entreats him to live; but a sentiment of envy mixes with his remorse, and renders him still jealous of him that is no more. He says: " When one common tomb The murderer and his victim closes roundWhen o'er our dust one monumental stone Is roll'd —the curse shall cease-thy love no more Unequal bless thy sons; the precious tears Thine eyes of beauty weep, shall sanctify Alike our memories. Yes! In death are quench'd The fires of rage; and Hatred owns subdued, The mighty reconciler. Pity bends An angel form above the funeral urn, With weeping, dear embrace." His mother again conjures him not to abandon her. "No," he savs"I would not live the victim of despair; No! I must meet with beaming eye the smile Of happy ones, and breathe erect the air Of liberty and joy. While yet alike We shared thy love, then o'er my days of youth Pale Envy cast his withering shade; and now, Think'st thou my heart could brook the dearer ties That bind thee in thy sorrow to the dead? Death, in his undecaying palace throned, To the pure diamond of perfect virtue Sublimes the mortal, and with chastening fire Each gather'd stain of frail humanity Purges and burns away: high as the stars Tower o'er this earthly sphere, he soars above me; And as by ancient hate dissever'd long, Brethren and equal denisens we lived, So now my restless soul with envy pines, That he has won from me the glorious prize Of Immortality, and like a god In memory marches on to times unborn!" The jealousy inspired by the dead is a sentiment full of

324 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. refinement and truth. Who, in short, can triumph over regret? Will the living ever equal the beauty of that celestial image, which the friend who is no more has left engraven on our heart? Has he not said to us: "Forget me not?" Is he not defenceless? Where does he exist upon this earth, if not in the sanctuary of our soul? And who, among the happy of this world, can ever unite himself to us so intimately as his memory? CHAPTER XX. WILHELM TELL. SCHILLER'S Wilhelm Tell is clothed with those lively and brilliant colors which transport the imagination into the picturesque regions that gave birth to the venerable confederacy of the Rutli. In the very first verses we fancy ourselves to hear the horns of the Alps resound. The clouds which intersect the mountains and hide the lower earth from that which is nearer heaven; the chamois hunters pursuing their active prey fiom precipice to precipice; the life, at once pastoral and military, which contends with nature and remains at peace with men-every thing inspires an animated interest for Switzerland; and the unity of action, in this tragedy, consists in the art of making of the nation itself a dramatic character. The boldness of Tell is brilliantly displayed in the first act; of the piece. An unhappy outlaw, devoted to death by one of the subaltern tyrants of Switzerland, endeavors to save himself on the opposite side of the lake, where he thinks he may find an asylum. The storm is so violent that no boatman dares risk the passage to conduct him to it. Tell sees his distress, exposes himself with him to the danger of the waves, and succeeds in landing him safely on the shore. Tell is a Stranger to the conspiracy which the insolence of Gessler has excited. Stauffacher, Walter Furst, and Arnold of Melchtha7 lay the foundation of the revolt. Tell is its hero, but not its

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 325 author; he does not think about politics, and dreams of tyranny only when it disturbs his tranquil existence; he repels it with the force of his arm when he feels its aggression; he judges, he condemns it before his own tribunal; but he does not conspire. Arnold of Melchthal, one of the conspirators, has retreated to Walter's house, having been obliged to quit his father that he might escape the satellites of Gessler; he is troubled at the reflection that he has left him alone; he asks anxiously for news of him, when, on a sudden, he learns that, to punish the old man for his son's having withdrawn himself from the judgment pronounced against him, the barbarians have deprived him of sight with a red-hot iron. What despair, what rage can equal that which he feels! It becomes necessary that he should revenge himself. If he delivers his country, it is to put to death the tyrants who have blinded his father; and when the three conspirators bind themselves by a solemn oath to die or to set free their fellow-citizens from the frightful yoke of Gessler, Arnold exclaims: " Alas, my old blind father! Thou canst no more behold the day of freedom; But thou shalt hear it. When from Alp to Alp The beacon fires throw up their flaming signs, And the proud castles of the tyrants fall, Into thy cottage shall the Switzer burst, Bear the glad tidings to thine ear, and o'er Thy darken'd way shall Freedom's radiance pour."' The third act is filled by the principal action, both of the real history, and of the drama. Gessler has had a hat raised on a spear's head in the middle of the public square, with an order that all the country people shall pay it salutation. Tell passes before this hat without conforming to the will of the Austrian governor; but it is only from inadvertence that he nas not submitted to it, for it was not in the character of Tell, I For this and other quotations from Wilhelm Tell, we are indebted to tho fine version of Mr. Theodore Martin. (Bohn's Standard Iitrary).-Ed.

326 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. at least in that which Schiller has assigned him, to manifest any political opinion: wild and independent as the deer of the mountains, he lived free, but did not inquire into the right by which he did so. At the moment of Tell's being charged with his neglect of the salutation, Gessler arrives, bearing a hawk on his wrist: this single circumstance stamps the picture, and transports us into the middle ages. The terrible power of Gessler forms a striking contrast to the simple manners of the Swiss, and one is astonished at this tyranny exercised in the open air, with the hills and valleys for its solitary witnesses. Tell's disobedience is related to Gessler, and Tell excuses himself by affirming that it was unintentionally and through ignorance that he did not perform the enjoined act of salutation. Gessler, still irritated, says to him, after some momentF of silence: "I hear, Tell, you're a master with the bow,And bear the palm away from every rival." The son of Tell, twelve years of age, proud of his father', kill, exclaims: "That must be true, sir! At a hundred yards He'll shoot an apple for you off the tree. GESSLER. "Is that boy thine, Tell? TELL. " Yes, my gracious lord. GESSLER.'Hast any more of them? TELL. " Two boys, my lord. GESSLER. "And, of the two, which dost thou love the most t TELL. " Sir, both the boys are dear to me alike.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHLLER. 327 GESSLER. Then, Tell, since at a hundred yards thou canst Bring down the apple from the tree, thou shalt Approve thy skill before me. Take thy bowThou hast it there at hand-and make thee ready To shoot an apple from the stripling's head! But take this counsel,-look well to thine aim, See, that thou hitt'st the apple at the first, For, shouldst thou miss, thy head shall pay the forfeit. [AU give signs of horror TELL. "What monstrous thing, my lord, is this you ask? That I, from the head of mine own child!-No, no! It cannot be, kind sir, you meant not thatGod, in his grace, forbid! You could not ask A-father seriously to do that thing! GESSLER. "Thou art to shoot an apple from his head I I do desire-command it so. TELL. " What I! Level my crossbow at the darling head Of mine own child? No-rather let me die! GESSLER. "Or thou must shoot, or with thee dies the boy. TELL. "Shall I become the murd'rer of my child! You have no children, sir-you do not know The tender throbbings of a father's heart. GESSLER. "How now, Tell, so discreet upon a sudden? I had been told thou wert a visionary,A wanderer from the paths of common men. Thou lov'st the marvellous. So have I now Cull'd out for thee a task of special daring. Another man might pause and hesitate;Thou dashest at it, heart and soul, at once."

328 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. All who surround Gessler have compassion on Tell, and endeavor to soften the barbarian who has thus condemned him to the most frightful of punishments; the old man, the child's grandfather, throws himself at Gessler's feet; the child who is to have the apple placed on his head, raises him and says: "Grandfather, do not kneel to that bad man! Say, where am I to stand? I do not fear; My father strikes the bird upon the wing, And will not miss now when'twould harm his boy! STAUFFACHER. "Does the child's innocence not touch your heart? R[SSELMANN. "Bethink you, sir, there is a God in heaven, To whom you must account for all your deeds. GESSLER (pointing to the boy). " Bind him to yonder lime-tree straight! WALTER. "Bind me? No, I will not be bound! I will be still, Still as a lamb-nor even draw my breath! But if you bind me, I cannot be still. Then I shall writhe and struggle with my bonds. HARRAS. " But let your eyes at least be bandaged, boy! WALTER. "And why my eyes? No! Do you think I fear An arrow from my father's hand? Not I! I'll wait it firmly, nor so much as wink! Quick, father, show them that thou art an archer! He ddubts thy skill-he thinks to ruin us. Shoot then, and hit, though but to spite the tyrant! The child places himself beneath the lime-tree, and the apple is put upon his head; then the Swiss again press around Gessler, to obtain the pardon of Tell. Gessler, addressing himself to Tell, says:

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 329. Now, to thy task! Men bear not arms for naught.'Tis dangerous to carry deadly weapons, And on the archer oft his shaft recoils. This right, these haughty peasant churls assume, Trenches upon their master's privilege. None should be armed, but those who bear command. It pleases you to wear the bow and bolt;Well,-be it so. I will provide the mark. TELL (bends the bow, andfixes the arrow). "A lane there! Room!" All the spectators shudder. He tries to bend his bow, his strength fails him; a mist overshadows his eyes; he entreats Gessler to grant him death. Gessler is inflexible. Tell hesitates yet for a considerable time in a state of frightful anxiety, sometimes looking at Gessler, sometimes towards Heaven; then, on a sudden, he draws a second arrow out of his quiver, and places it in his girdle. He bends forward, as if to follow the arrow which he sends forth; it flies-the people cry, "May the child live!" The child darts into his father's arms, and says: "My father, here is the apple which thine arrow hath cleft; I well knew that it would not hurt me."' The father falls senseless to the earth with the child in his arms. His The whole scene is as follows: STAUFFAOHER. " What, Tell? You would-no, no You shake-your hand's unsteady-your knees tremble. TELL (letting the bow sink down). " There's something swims before mine eyes! WomEN. " Great Heaven I TELL. " Release me from this shot I Here is my heart I YTears open his breast. Summon your troopers-let them strike me down i!

330 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. companions raise and congratulate him. Gessler draws near, and asks him with what design he had prepared a second shaft. Tell refuses to inform him. Gessler insists. Tell asks a protection for his life if he shall answer truly; Gessler grants GESSLER. "I do not want thy life, Tell, but the shot. Thy talent's universal! Nothing daunts thee I Thou canst direct the rudder like the bow! Storms fright not thee, when there's a life at stake; Now, saviour, help thyself,-thou savest all! [TELL stanls fea/ful ly agitated by contending emotions, his hands moving convulsively, and his eyes turning alternately to the governor and Heaven. Suddenly he takes a second arrow from his quiver, and sticks it in his belt. The governor watches all these motions. WALTER (beneath the lime-tree). "Come, father, shoot! I'm not afraid! TELL. 1" It must be I [Collects himself and levels the bow. RUDENZ (who all the while has been standing in a state of violent excitement, and has with difficulty restrained himself, advances). "My lord, you will not urge this matter further. You will not. It was surely but a test. You've gain'd your object. Rigor push'd too far Is sure to miss its aim, however good, As snaps the bow that's all too straitly bent. GESSLER. "Peace, all your counsel's ask'd for I RUDENZ. "I will speak I Ay, and I dare! I reverence my king;, But acts like these must make his name abhorr'd. He sanctions not this cruelty. I dare Avouch the fact. And you outstep your powers In handling thus an unoffending people. GESSLER. "Ha I thou grow'st bold, methinks t

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 331 it. Tell then, looking at him with the eye of vengeance, says to him: "Well, my lord, Since you have promised not to take my life, RUDENZ. " I have been dumb To all the oppressions I was doom'd to see. I've closed mine eyes, that they might not behold them, Bade my rebellious, swelling heart be still, And pent its struggles down within my breast. But to be silent longer, were to be A traitor to my king and country both. BERTHA (casting herself between him and the governor). "O Heavens! you but exasperate his rage! RUDENZ. "My people I forsook-renounced my kindredBroke all the ties of nature, that I might Attach myself to you. I madly thought, That I should best advance the general weal, By adding sinews to the Emperor's power. the scales have fallen from mine eyes-I see rhe fearful precipice on which I stand. You've led my youthful judgment far astray,Deceived my honest heart. With best intent, I had well-nigh achieved my country's ruin. GESSLER. "Audacious boy, this language to thy lords RUDENZ. "The Emperor is my lord, not you I I'm free As you by birth, and I can cope with you In every virtue that beseems a knight. And if you stood not here in that king's name, Which I respect e'en where'tis most abused, I'd throw my gauntlet down, and you should give An answer to my gage in knightly fashion. Ay, beckon to your troopers I Here I stand; But not like these [Pointing to the peopU. -unarm'd. I have a sword, And he that stirs one step

332 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. I will, without reserve, declare the truth. [He draws the arrow from his belt, and fixes his eyes sternly upon the governor. If that my hand had struck my darling child, This second arrow I had aim'd at you, And, be assured, I should not then have miss'd." Gessler, furious at these words, orders Tell to be thrown into prison. This scene possesses, as may be seen, all the simplicity of an historical event related in an ancient chronicle. Wilhelm Tell is not represented as a tragic hero; he did not think of braving Gessler: he resembles, in all things, what the peasants of Switzerland generally are found to be, calm in their habits, lovers of repose, but terrible whenever those feeling are excited in their souls, which slumber in the retirement of a country life. We are still shown, near Altorf, in the Canton of Uri, a stone statue of coarse workmanship, representing Tell and his son after the apple has been pierced. The father holds his son by STAUFFACHER (exclaims). " The apple's down! [ While the attention of the crowd has been directed to the spot where BERTHA had cast herself between RUDENZ and GESSLER, TELL has shot. ROSSELMANN. "The boy's alive! MANY VOICES. "The apple has been struck! [WALTER FURST staggers, and is about tofaU. BERTHA sup. ports him. GESSLER (astonished). "How? Has he shot? The madman! BERTHA. " Worthy father l Pray you, compose yourself. The boy's alive. WALTER (runs in with the apple). "Here is the apple, father I Well I knew, You would not harm your boy." —Ed.

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 333 one hand, and with the other presses the bow to his heart, as if to thank it for having served him so well. Tell is put in chains into the same boat in which Gessler passes the Lake of Lucerne; the storm bursts during the passage; the barbarian is struck with fear, and asks his victim to succor him: Tell's chains are unbound; he guides the bark himself in the midst of the storm, and as he draws near the rocks, leaps swiftly on the craggy shore. The recital of this event begins the fourth act. Hardly has he reached his home, when Tell is informed that he must not expect to live there in peace with his wife and children, and he then takes the resolution of putting Gessler to death. His end is not to free his country from a foreign yoke; he scarcely knows whether Austria ought, or ought not, to govern Switzerland: he knows, however, that man has been unjust to man; he knows that a father has been compelled to shoot an arrow near the heart of his child, and he thinks that the author of such a crime deserves to die. His soliloquy is extremely fine: he shudders at the murder, and yet has no doubt of the lawfulness of his resolution. He compares the innocent purposes for which he has hitherto employed his arrow at the chase and in sport, with the terrible action that he is about to commit: he sits' on a stone bench to wait at the turn of a road for Gessler, who is about to pass by:' I'll sit me down upon this bench of stone, Hewn for the way-worn traveller's brief reposeFor here there is no home.-Each hurries by The other, with quick step and careless look, Nor stays to question of his grief.-Here goes The merchant, full of care,-the pilgrim, next, With slender scrip,-and then the pious monk, The scowling robber, and the jovial player, The carrier with his heavy-laden horse, That comes to us from the far haunts of men; For every road conducts to the world's end. 1 Or, rather, is about to seat himself.- B.

334 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. They all push onwards-every man intent On his own several business-mine is murder. [Sits down. "Time was, my dearest children, when with joy You hail'd your father's safe return to home From his long mountain toils; for, when he came, He ever brought some little present with him. A lovely Alpine flower-a curious birdOr elf-boat, found by wanderer on the hills.But now he goes in quest of other game: In the wild pass he sits, and broods on murder; And watches for the life-blood of his foe.But still his thoughts are fix'd on you alone, Dear children.-'Tis to guard your innocence, To shield you from the tyrant's fell revenge, He bends his bow to do a deed of blood!" [Rises. Shortly afterwards, Gessler is perceived from a distance descending the mountain. An unhappy woman whose husband is languishing in one of his prisons, throws herself at his feet, and conjures him to grant her his liberation; he contemns and repulses her; she still insists; she seizes his horse's bridle, and demands of him either to trample her under foot, or to restore to her him she loves. Gessler, indignant at her complaints, reproaches himself for having yet indulged the people of Switzerland with too great a portion of liberty: " I will subdue this stubborn mood of theirs, And crush the soul of liberty within them. I'll publish a new law throughout the land; I will-" As he pronounces this word, the mortal shaft reaches him; he falls, exclaiming, " That shot was Tell's." "Thou know'st the archer, seek no other hand," cries Tell, from the top of the rock. The acclamations of the people are soon heard, and the deliverers of Switzerland accomplish the vow they had made, to rid themselves of the yoke of Austria. It seems that the piece should naturally end here, as that of Mary Stuart at her death; but, in each, Schiller has added a

THE DRAMAS OF SCHILLER. 335 sort of appendix or explanation, which can be no more listened to after the principal catastrophe is terminated. Elizabeth reappears after Mary's execution; we are made to witness heI grief and vexation at hearing that Leicester has taken his departure for France. This poetical justice ought to have been supposed, and not represented; the spectator cannot bear the sight of Elizabeth, after witnessing the last moments of Mary. In the fifth act of Wilhelm Tell, John the Parricide, who assassinated his uncle Albert, because he refused him his birth-right, comes disguised as a monk, to demand an asylum of Tell; he persuades himself that their acts are similar, and Tell repulses him with horror, showing him how different were their motives. The putting these two characters in opposition to each other, is a just and ingenious idea; yet this contrast, so pleasing in the closet, does not answer on the stage. Genius is of very little importance in dramatic effects; it is necessary for the purpose of preparing them, but if it were also required for the purpose of feeling them, this is a task to which even the most refined audience would be found unequal. On the stage, the additional act of John the Parricide is suppressed, and the curtain falls at the moment when Gessler's heart is pierced by the arrow. A short time after the first representation of Wilhelm Tell, the fatal shaft struck also the worthy author of this noble performance. Gessler perished at the moment when he was occupied by the most barbarous intentions. The soul of Schiller was filled with generous ideas. These two states of mind, so contrary to each other, were equally interrupted by death, the common enemy of all human projects.

336 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY CHAPTER XXI. GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN AND THE COUNT OF EGMONT. THE dramatic career of Goethe may be considered in two different lights. The pieces he designed for representation have much grace and facility, but nothing more. In those of his dramatic works, on the contrary, which it is very difficult to perform, we discover extraordinary talent. The genius of Goethe cannot confine itself within the limits of the theatre;, and, endeavoring to subject itself to them, it loses a portion of originality, and does not entirely recover it till again at liberty to mix all styles together as it chooses,/ N6oart, whatever it be, can exist without certain limits; painting, sculpture, architecture, are subject to their own peculiar laws, and in like manner the dramatic art produces its effect only under certain conditions -conditions which sometimes restrain both thought and feeling; and yet the influence o the theatre is so great upon the assembled audience, that one is not justified in refusing to employ the power it possesses, by the pretext that it exacts sacrifices which the imagination left to itself would not require. As there is no metropolis in Germany to collect together all that is necessary to form a good theatre, dramatic works are much oftener read than performed; and thence it follows that authors compose their dramas with a view to the effect in reading, not in acting. Goethe is almost always making new experiments in litera ture. When the German taste appears to him to lean towards an excess in any respect, he immediately endeavors to give it an opposite direction. He may be said to govern the understandings of his contemporaries as an empire of his own, and his works may be called decrees, by turns authorizing or banishing the abuses of art.

THE DRA3MAS OF GOETHE. 337 Goethe was tired of the imitation of French pieces in Germany, and with reason; for even a Frenchman might be equally tired of it. He therefore composed an historical tragedy. in the manner of Shakspeare, Goetz von Berlichengen.; This piece was not destined for the stage; but it is nevertheless capable of representation, as are all those of Shakspeare of the same description. Goethe has chosen the same historical epoch a Schiller in his play of the Robbers; but instead of presenting a man who has set himself free from all the ties of moral and social order, he has painted an old knight, under the reign of Maximilian, still defending the chivalrous manners and the,feudal condition of the nobility, which gave so high an ascendency to their personal valor. - Goetz von Berlichingen was surnamed the Iron-handed, because having lost his right hand in war, he had one made for him with springs, by the aid of which he held and managed his lame with dexterity: he was a knight renowned in his time for courage and loyalty. This model is happily chosen to represent what was the independence of the nobles before the authority of the g.vernment became coercive on all men. In the middle ages every castle was a fortress, every noble a sovereign. The establizhment of standing armies, and the invention of artillery, effected a total change in social order; a sort of abstract power was introduced under the name of the state or the nation; but individuals lost, by degrees, all their importance. A character like that of Goetz must have suffered from this change, whenever it took place. The military spirit has always been of a ruder cast in Germany than anywhere else, and it is there that we might figure to ourselves, as real, those men of iron whose images are still to be seen in the arsenals of the empire. Yet the simplicity of chivalrous manners is painted in Goethe's tragedy with many charms. This aged Goetz, living in the midst of battles, sleeping in his armor, continually on horseback, never resting except when beeged, employing all his resources for war, contemplating nothing besides-this aged Goetz, I say, gives us the highest idea of the interest and activity which human life VOL I.-15

338 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. possessed in those ages. His virtues, as well as his defects, are strongly marked; nothing is more generous than his re. gard for Weislingen, once his friend, then his adversary, and often engaged even in acts of treason against him. The sensibility shown by an intrepid warrior, awakens the soul in an entirely new manner; we have time to love in our inactive state of existence; but these lightnings of passion which enable us to read in the bottom of the heart, through the medium of a stormy existence, cause a sentiment of profound emotion. We are so afraid of meeting with affectation in the noblest gift of heaven, sensibility, that we sometimes prefer in the expression of it even rudeness itself as the pledge of sincerity. The wife of Goetz presents herself to the imagination like an old portrait of the Flemish school, in which the dress, the look, the very tranquillity of the attitude, announce a woman submitted to the will of her husband, knowing him only, admiring him only, and believing herself destined to serve him, as he is to defend her. By way of contrast to this most excellent woman, we have a creature altogether perverse, Adelaide, who seduces Weislingen, and makes him fail in the promise he had given to his friend; she marries, and soon after proves faithless to him. She renders herself passionately beloved by ter page, and bewilders the imagination of this unhappy young man to such a degree as to prevail upon him to give a poisoned cup to his master. These features are strong, but perhaps it is true that when the manners of a nation ate generally very pure, the woman who estranges herself from them soon becomes entirely corrupted; the desire of pleasing is in our days no more than a tie of affection and kindness, but in the strict domestic life of a former age, it was an error capable of involving all others in its consequences. This guilty Adelaide gives occasion to one of the finest scenes in the play, the sitting of the secret tribunal. Mysterious judges, unknown to one another, always masked, and meeting at night, punished in silence, and only engraved on the poinard which they plunged into the bosom of the enlprit this terrible motto: THE SECRET TRIBUNAL. They

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 339 acquainted the condemned person with his sentence by having it cried three times under his window, Woe, wloe, woe! Thus was the unfortunate man given to know that, everywhere, in the stranger, in the fellow-citizen, in the kinsman even, he might find his murderer. In the crowd and in solitude, in the city and in the country, all places were filled by the invisible presence of that armed conscience which persecuted the guilty One may conceive how necessary this terrible institution might have been, at a time when every man was powerful against all men, instead of all being invested with the power which they ought to possess over each individual. It was necessary that justice should surprise the criminal before he was able to defend himself; but this punishment which hovered in the air like an avenging shade, this mortal sentence which might be harbored even in the bosom of a friend, inspired an invincible terror. There is another fine situation,-that in which Goetz, in order to defend himself in his castle, commands the lead to be stripped from the windows to melt into balls. There is in this character a contempt of futurity, and an intenseness of strength at the present moment, that are altogether admirable. At last Goetz beholds all his companions in arms perish; he remains wounded, a prisoner, and having only his wife and sister left by his side. He is surrounded by women alone-he who desired to live among men, among men of unconquerable spirits -that he might exert with them the force of his character ana the strength of his arm. He thinks on the name that he must leave behind him; he reflects, now that he is about to die. IIe asks to behold the sun once more, he thinks on God, who never before occupied his thoughts, Lut of whose existence he never doubted, and dies with gloomy courage, regretting his warlike pleasures more than life itself. This play is much liked in Germany; the national manners and customs of times of old, are faithfully represented by it, and whatever touches on ancient chivalry moves the hearts of ]he Germans. Goethe, the most careless of all men, because 3e is sure of leading the taste of his audience, did not give

340 MADA!'ME DE STAEL'S GERMANY, himself the trouble even of putting his play into verse; it is the sketch of a great picture, but hardly enough finished even as a sketch. One perceives in the writer so great an impatience of all that can be thought to bear a resemblance to affectation, that he disdains even the art that is necessary to give a durable form tc his compositions. There are marks of genius scattered h3re and there through his drama, like the touches of Michael Angelo's pencil; but it is a work defective, or rather which makes us feel the want of many things. The reign of Maximilian, during which the principal event is supposed to pass, is not sufficiently marked. In short, we may venture to censure the author for not having enough exercised his imagination in the form and language of the piece. It is true that he has intentionally and systematically abstained from indulging it; he wished the drama to be the action itself; forgetting that the charm of the ideal is that.which ought to preside over all things in dramatic works. The characters OT tragedies are always in danger of being either common or factitious, and it is incumbent on genius to preserve them equally from each extreme. Shakspeare, in his historical pieces, never {ceases to be a poet, nor Racine to observe with exactness the )manners of the Hebrews in his lyrical tragedy of Athalie. The dramatic talent car dispense neither with nature nor with art i art is totally distinct from artifice, it is a perfectly true and spontaneous inspiration, which spreads a universal harmony over particular circumstances, and the dignity -of lasting remembrances over fleeting moments. The Count of Egmont' appears to me the finest,_ qxoethe s tragedies; he wrote it, I believe, at the same time, when he.omposed Werther; the same warmth of soul is alike perceptible in both. The play begins at the moment when Philip II, weary of the mild government of Margaret of Parma, in the Low Countries, sends the Duke of Alva to supply her place Goethe's own title of the piece is simply Egmont.-Ed.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 341 The king is troubled by the popularity which the Prince of Orange and the Count of Egmont have acquired; he suspects them of secretly favoring the partisans of the Reformation. Every thing is brought together that can furnish the most attractive idea of the Count of Egmont. He is seen adored by the soldiers at the head of whom he has borne away so many victories. The Spanish princess trusts his fidelity, even though she knows how much he censures the severity that has been employed against the Protestants. The citizens of Brussels look on him as the defender of their liberties before the throne; and, to-complete the picture, the Prince of Orange, whose profbund policy and silent wisdom are so well known in history, sets off still more the generous imprudence of Egmont, in vainly entreating him to depart with himself before the arrival of the Duke ofAlva. The Prince of Orange is a wise and noble character; an heroic but inconsiderate self-devotion can alone resist his counsels. The Count of Egmontiresolves not to abandon the inhabitants of Brussels; he trusts himself to his fate, because his victories have taught him to reckon upon the favors of fortune, and he always preserves in public business the same qualities that have thrown so much brilliancy over his military character. These noble and dangerous qualities interest us in sis destiny; we feel on his account, fears which his intrepid soul never allowed him to experience for himself; the general effect of his character is displayed with great art in the impression which it is made to produce on all the different persons by whom he is surrounded. It is easy to trace a lively portrait of the hero of a piece; it requires more talent to make him act and speak conformably to this portrait, and more still to make him known by the admiration that ha inspires in the soldiers, the people, the great nobility, in all that bear any relation to him. The Count of Egmont is in love with a young girl, Clara, born in the class of citizens at Brussels; he goes to visit her in her obscure retreat. This love has a larger place in the heart of the young girl than in his own; the imagination of Clara is entirely subdued by the lustre of the Count ic EQ

342 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. mont, by the dazzling impression of his heroic valor and brilliant reputation. There are goodness and gentleness in the love of Egmont; in the society of this young person he finds repose from trouble and solicitude. "They speak to you," he says, " of this Egmont, silent, severe, authoritative; who is made to struggle with events and with mankind; hut he who is simple, loving, confiding, happy-that Egmont, Clara, is thine." The love of Egmont for Clara would not be sufficient for the interest of the piece; but when misfortune is joined to it, this sentiment which before appeared only in the distance, acquires an admirable strength. The arrival of the Spaniards with the Duke of Alva at their head being made known, the terror spread by that gloomy na tion among the joyous people of Brussels is described in a superior manner, At the approach of a violent storm, men retire to their houses, animals tremble, birds take a low flight, and seem to seek an asylum in the earth; all nature seemns to prepare itself to rmeet the scourge which threatens it: thus terror possessed the minds of the unfortunate inhabitants of Flanders. The Duke of Alva is not willing to have the Count of Egmont arrested in the streets of Brussels; he fears an insurrection of the people, and wishes if possible to draw his victim to his owr palace, which commands the city, and adjoins the citadel. H(. employs his own sor, young Ferdinand, to prevail on the man 1 The following's the entire passage in the version of Miss Anna swanwick: " Seest thou, Cara. Let me sit down! (ie seats l7imself, she kneels on a footstool before him, rests her arms on his knees, and looks up in his face.) That Egmont is a morose, cold, unbending Egmont, obliged to be upor his guard, to assume now this appearance and now that: harassed, misapprehended, and perplexed, when the crowd esteem him light-hearted and gay; beloved by a people who do not know their own minds; honored and extolled by the intractable multitude; surrounded by friends in whom he dares not confide; observed by men who are on the watch to supplant him; toiling and striving, often without an object, generally without a reward. Oh, let me conceal how it fares with him, let me not speak of his feelings I But this Egmont, Clara, is calm, unreserved, happy, beloved by the best of hearts, which is also thoroughly known to him, and which he presses to his own with unbounded confidence and love. (He embraces her.) This is thy Egmont."-Ed.

THE DRAMAS Or GOETHE. 343 he wishes to ruin, to enter his abode. Ferdinand is an enthusiastic admirer of the hero of Flanders; he has no suspicion of the horrid designs of his father, and displays a warmth and ardor of ch tracter which persuades the Count of Egmont that the father of such a son cannot be his enemy. Egmont consents to accompany him to the Duke of Alva; that perfidious and faithful representative of' Philip II expects him with an impatience which makes one shudder; he places himself at the window, and perceives him at a distance, mounted on a superb horse, which he had taken in one of his victorious battles. The Duke of' Alva feels a cruel and increasing joy at every step which Egmont makes towards his palace; when the horse stops, he is agitated; his guilty heart pants to effect his criminal purpose; and when Eginont enters the court he cries: "One foot is in the tomb, another step! the grated entrance closes on him, he is mine! 1 The Count of Egmont having entered, the duke discourses with him for some time on the government of the Low Countries, and on the necessity of employing rigor to restrain the progress of the new, opinions; he has no longer any interest in deceiving Egmont, and yet he feels a pleasure in his craftiness, and wishes still to enjoy it a few moments; at length he rouses the generous soul of Egmont, and irritates him by disputation in order to draw from him some violent expressions. He affects to be provoked by them, and performs, as by a sudden impulse, what he had calculated on and determined to do long before. Why so many precautions with a man who is already in his power,- and whom he has determined to deprive, in a few hours, of existence? It is because the political assassin always retains a confused desire of justifying himself, even m the eyes of his victim; he wishes to say something in his 1 Alva soliloquizes thus:-"'Tis he! Egmont! Did thy steed bear thee hither so lightly, and started not at the scent of blood, at the'spirit with the naked sword who received thee at the gate'i Dismount! Lo, now thou hast one foot in the grave! And now both! Ay, caress him, and for the last time stroke his neck for the gallant service he has rendered thee. And'or me no choice is left. The delusion, in which Egmont ventures here today, cannot a second time deliver him into my hands! "-Ed.

344 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. exculse even when all he can allege persuades neither himself nor any other person. Perhaps no man is capable of enter ng on a criminal act without some subterfuge, and theretore the true morality of dramatic works consists not in poetical justice which the author dispenses as he thinks fit. and of which history so often shows us the fallacy. but in;he art of painting vice and virtue in such colors as to inspire us with hatred for vle one and love for the other. The report of the Count of Egmont's arrest was scarcely spread through Brussels before it is known that he must perish. No one expects justice, his terrified adherents venture not a word in his defence, and suspicion soon separates those whom the same interest had before united. An apparent submission arises from the terror which every individual feels and inspires in his turn, and the panic which pervades them all, that popular cowardice which so quickly succeeds a state of unusual exaltation, is in this part of the work most admirably described. Clara alone, that timid girl who scarcely ever ventured to leave her own abode, appears in the public square at Brussels, reassembles by her cries the citizens who had dispersed, recalls to their recollection the enthusiasm which the name of Egmont had inspired, the oath they had taken to die for him: all who hear her shudder. JETTER,'Speak not the name,'tis deadly. CLARA. "Not speak his name? Not Egmont's name? Is it not on every to..gue. Does it not appear everywhere legibly inscribed? I read it emblazoned in golden letters among the stars. Not utter it? What mean ye? Friends! good, kind neighbors! ye are dreaming; collect yourselves. Gaze not upon me with those fixed and anxious,ooks! Cast not such timid glances on every side! I but give utter1nce to the wish of all. Is not my voice the voice of your own hearts? Who, in this fearful night, ere he seeks his restless couch, but on bended knee, will in earnest prayer seek to wrest his life as a cher ished boon from heaven? Ask each other! Let each ask his owlt heart! And who but exclaims with me-' Egmont's liberty, or death I

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 34 JETTEa. "God help us! This is a sad business. CLARA. "Stay! stay! Shrink not away at the sound of his name, to meet whom ye were wont to press forward so joyously!-When rumor announced his approach, when the cry arose,'Egmont comes! He comes from Gilent!'-then happy indeed were those citizens who dwelt in the streets through which he was to pass. And when the neighing of his steed was heard, did not every one throw aside his work, while a ray of hope and joy, like a sunbeam from his countenance, stole over the toilworn faces that peered from every window I Then, as ye stood in the doorways, ye would lift up your children in your arms and pointing to him, exclaim:'See, that is Egmont, he who towers above the rest!'Tis from him that ye must look for better times than those your poor fathers have known.' Let not your children inquire at some future day,' Where is he? Where are the better times you promised us?'-Thus we waste the time in idle words I do nothing,-betray him. SOEST. "Shame on thee, Brackenburg! Let her not run on thus; prevent the mischief. BRACKENBURG. "Dear Clara! -Let us go! What will your mother say? PerchanceCLARA. "Think you I am a child, a lunatic? What avails perchance?%With no vain hope can you hide from me this dreadful certainty. Ye shall hear me and ye will; for I see it, ye are overwhelmed, ye cannot hearken to the voice of your own hearts. Through the present peril cast but one glance into the past,-the recent past. Send your thoughts forward into the future. Could ye live, would ye live, were he to perish? With him expires the last breath of freedom., What was he not to you? For whose sake did he expose himself to the direst perils? His blood flowed, his wounds were healed for you alone. A dungeon now confines that mighty spirit that upheld you all, while around him hover the terrors of secret assassination. Perhaps, he thinks of you, —-perhaps he hopes in you, —he who has been %ccustomed only to grant favors to others and to fulfil their prayers. CARPENTER. "Come, gossip. 15*

846 MADAME DE STALEL'S GERMANY. CLARA. "I have neither the arms, nor the strength of a man; but I have that which ye all lack-courage and contempt of danger. Oh, that my breath could kindle your souls! That, pressing you to this bosom, I could arouse and animate you! Come! I will march in your midst! As a waving banner, though weaponless, leads on a gallant army of warriors, so shall my spirit hover, like a flame, over your ranks, while love and courage shall unite the dispersed and wavering multitude into a terrible host." Brackenburg informs Clara that they perceive, not far from them, some Spanish soldiers, who may possibly listen to them. BRACKENBURG. "Clara? See you not where we are? CLARA. " Where? Under the dome of heaven, which has so often seemed to arch itself more gloriously as the noble Egmlont passed beneath it. From these windows I have seen them look forth, four or five heads one above the other; at these doors the cowards have stood, bowing and scraping, if the hero but chanced to look down upon them! Oh! how dear they were to me, when they honored him! Had he been a tyrant, they might have turned with indifference from his fall; but they loved him! 0 ye hands, so prompt to wave caps in his honor, can ye not grasp a sword? And yet, Brackenburg, is it for us to chide them? These arms that have so often embraced him, what do they for him now? Stratagem has accomplished so much in the world. You know the ancient castle, every passage, every secret way." Brackenburg draws Clara to her own habitation, and goes out again to inquire the fate of the Count of Egmont. He returns, and Clara, whose last resolution is already taken, insists on his relating to her all that he has heard: "Speak to me of him! Is it true? Is he condemned? BRACKENBURG. "He is! I know it. CLARA. "And still lives? BRACKENBURG. "Yes, he still lives.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 347 CLARA.' How can you be sure of that? Tyranny murders its victim in the night! His blood flows concealed from every eye. The people, stunned and bewildered, lie buried in sleep, dream of deliverance, dream of the fulfilment of their impotent wishes, while, indignant at our supineness, his spirit abandons the world. He is no more! Deceive me not; deceive not thyself! BRACKENBURG. "No,-he lives! and the Spaniards, alas! are preparing for the people, on whom they are about to trample, a terrible spectacle, in order to crush, by a violent blow, each heart that yet pants for freedom. CLARA. " Proceed! Calmly pronounce my death-warrant also! Near and more near I approach that blessed land, and already from those realms of peace, I feel the breath of consolation. Say on. BRACKENBURG.' From casual words, dropped here and there by the guards, I learned that secretly, in the market-place, they were preparing some terrible spectacle. Through by-ways and familiar lanes I stole to my cousin's house, and from a back window looked out upon the marketplace. Torches waved to and fro, in the hands of a wide circle ot Spanish soldiers. I strained my unaccustomed sight, and out of the darkness there arose before me a scaffold, dark, spacious, and lofty! The sight filled me with horror. Several persons were employed in covering with black cloth such portions of the woodwork as yet remain exposed. The steps were covered last, also with black;-I saw it all.'l'hey seemed preparing for the celebration of some horrible sacrifice. A white crucifix, that shone like silver through the night, was raised on one side. As I gazed, the terrible conviction strengthened in my mind. Scattered torches still gleamed here and there; gradually they flickered and went out. Suddenly, the hideous birth of night returned into its mother's womb." The son of the Duke of Alva discovers that he has been made the instrument of Egmont's destruction, and he determines; at all hazards, to save him; Egmont demands of him only one service, which is to protect Clar'a when he shall be Io more; but we learn that, resolved not to survive the man

348 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. she loved, she has destroyed herself. Egmont is executed; and the bitter resentment which Ferdinand feels against his father, is the punishment of the Duke of Alva, who, it is said, never loved any thing on earth except that son. It seems to me that, with a few variations, it would be possible to adapt this play to the French model. I have passed over in silence some scenes which could not be introduced on our stage. In the first place, that with which the tragedy begins: some of Egmont's soldiers, and some citizens of Brussels, are conversing together on the subject of his exploits. In a dialogue, very lively and natural, they relate the piincipal actions of his life,, and in their language and narratives show the high confidence with which he had inspired them.'Tis thus that Shakspeare prepares the entrance of Julius Caesar; and the Cump of' Wallenstein is composed with the same intention. But in France we should not endure a mixture of the language of the people with that of tragic dignity; and this fiequently gives monotony to our second-rate tragedies. Pompous expressions, and situations always heroic, are necessarily few in number; besides, tender emotions rarely penetrate to the bottom of the soul,, when the imagination is not previously captivated by those simple but true details which give life to the smallest circumstances. The family to which Clara belongs is represented as completely that of a citizen; her mother is extremely vulgar; he who is to marry her is indeed passionately attached to her, but one does not like to consider Egmont as the rival of such an inferior man; every thing that surrounds Clara serves, it is true, to set off the purity of her soul; nevertheless, in France we should not allow in the dramatic art one of the first principles in that of painting-the shade which renders the light more striking. As we see both of these at once in a picture, we receive, at the same time, the effect of both: it, is not the same in a theatrical performance, where the action follows in succession; the scene which hurts our feelings is not tolersted, in consideration of the advantageous light it is to throw:n the following scene; and we expect that the contrast shar

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 349'3 consist in beauties, different, indeed, but which shall nevertheless be beauties.' The conclusion of Goethe's tragedy does not harmonize with the former part; the Count of Egmont falls asleep a few min1 "In Schiller's critique upon the tragedy of Egmont, Goethe is censured for departing from the truth of history, in the delineation of his hero's character, and also for misrepresenting the circumstances of his domestic life. The Egmont of history left behind him a numerous family, anxiety for whose welfare detained him in Brussels, when most of his friends sought safety in flight. His withdrawal would have entailed the confiscation of his property, and he shrank from exposing to privation those whose happiness was dearer to him than life;-a consideration which he repeatedly urged in his conferences with the Prince of Orange, when the lattei insisted upon the necessity of escape. We see here, not the victim of a blind and foolhardy confidence, as portrayed in Goethe's drama, but the hus.~and and father, regardless of his personal safety, in anxiety for the interests of his family. I shall not inquire which conception is best suited for the purposes of art, but merely subjoin a few extracts from the same critique, in which Schiller does ample justice to Goethe's admirable delineation of the age and country in which the drama is cast, and which are peculiarly valuable from the pen of so competent an authority as the historian of the Fall of the Netherlands. "' Egmont's tragical death resulted from the relation in which he stood to the nation and the government; hence, the action of the drama is intimately connected with the political life of the period-an exhibition of which forms its indispensable groundwork. But, if we consider what an infinite number of minute circumstances must concur, in order to exhibit the spirit of an age, and the political condition of a people, and the art required to combine so many isolated features into an intelligible and organic whole; and if we contemplate, moreover, the peculiar character of the Netherlands, consisting not of one nation, but of an aggregate of many smaller States, separated from each other by the sharpest contrasts, we shall not cease to wonder at the creative genius, which, triumphing over all these difficulties, conjures up before us, as with an enchanter's wand, the Netherlands of the sixteenth century. "' Not only do we behold these men living and working befcre us, we dwell among them as their familiar associates; we see, on the one hand, the joyous sociability, the hospitality, the loquacity, the somewhat I oastful temper of the people, their republican spirits, ready to boil up at the slightest innovation, and often subsiding again as rapidly, on the most trivial grounds; and on the other hand, we are made acquainted with tle burtens under wlich they groaned, from the new m;rtres of the bish )ps, to the French psalms which they were forbidden to sing: nothing is omitted, no feature introduced, which does not bear the stamp of nature and of truth. Such delineation is not the result of premeditated effort, nor can it ve commanded by art; it can only be achieved by the poet whose mind is

350 MADAME DE STAEL 9S GERMANY. utes before he ascends the scaffold. Clara, who is dead, appears to him during his sleep, surrounded with celestial brilliancy, and informs him that the cause of liberty, which he had served so well, will one day triumph. This wonderful denofiment cannot accord with an historical performance. The Germans are, in general, embarrassed about'the conclusion of their pieces; and the Chinese proverb is particularly applicable to them, which says, " When we have ten steps to take, the ninth brings us half way." The talent necessary to finish a composition of any kind, demands a sort of skill and measure which scarcely agrees with the vague and indefinite imagination displayed by the Germans in all their works. Besides, it requires art, and a great deal of art, to find a proper denotiment, for there are seldom any in real life: facts are linked one to the other, and their consequences are lost in the lapse of time. The knowledge of the theatre alone teaches us to circumscribe the principal event, and make all the accessory ones concur to the same purpose. But to combine effects thoroughly imbued with his subject: from him, such traits escape unconsciously, and without design, as they do from the individuals whose characters they serve to portray. "' The few scenes in which the citizens of Brussels are introduced, appear to us to be the result of profound study, and it would be difficult to find, in so few words, a more admirable historical monument of the Netherlands of that period. "' Equally graphic is that portion of the picture which portrays the spirit of the Government, though it must be confessed that the artist has here somewhat softened down the harsher features of the original. This is especially true in reference to the character of the Duchess of Parma. Before his Duke of Alva we tremble, without, however, turning from him with aversion; he is a firm, rigid, inaccessible character: " a brazen tower without gates, the garrison of which must be furnished with wings." The prudent forecast with which he makes his arrangements for Egmont's arrest, excites our admiration, while it removes him from our sympathy. The remaining characters of the drama are delineated with a few masterly strokes. The subtle, taciturn Orange, with his timid, yet comprehensivs and all-combining mind, is depicted in a single scene. Both Alva and Egmont are mirrored in the men by whom they are surrounded. This mode of delineation is admirable. The poet, in order to concentrate'he laterest upodn Egmont, has isolated his hero, and omitted all mention of count HorM, who shared the same melancholy fate.' " —(Miss Swanwick. Dramatic Works of Goethe, pp. xv. xvi. London, 1851.)-Ed.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 351 seems to the Germans almost like hypocrisy; and the spirit of calculation appears to them irreconcilable with inspiration. Of all their writers, however, Goethe is certainly best able to unite the skill of genius with its boldness; but he does not vouchsafe to give himself the trouble of arranging dramatic situations so as to render them properly theatrical. If they are fine in themselves, he cares for nothing more. IIis German audience at Weimar ask no better than to wait the development of his plans, and to guess at his intention; as patient. as intelligent as the ancient Greek chorus, they do not expect merely to be amused, as sovereigns commonly do; whether they are people or kings, they contribute to their own pleasure, by analyzing and explaining what did not at first strike them: such a public is truly like an artist in its judg ments. CHAPTER XXII. IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS, TORQUATO TASSO, ETC., ETC. IN Germany were represented familiar comedies, melodra mas, andc grand spectacles, filled with horses and knights. Goethe wished to bring back lite. re.to the severit __of ancient times, and he composed his fhizgeiiia in Tauri whie}'is the chef-d'oeuvre of classical poetry among the Germans. This tragedy recalls the sort of impression which we receive in contemplating Grecian statues; the action of it is so commanding, and yet so tranquil, that even when the situation of the personages is changed, there is always in them a sort of dignity wh-ch fixes the recollection of every moment on the memory. The subject of Iphigenia in Tauris is so well known, that it was difficult to treat it in a new manner. Goethe has, nevertheless, succeeded in giving a character truly admirable to his oeroine. The Antigone of Sophocles is a saint, such as a

352 MAD)AME DE STAEL S GERMANY. religion more pure than that of the ancients might have represented to us. The Iphigenia of Goethe has not less respect to truth than Antigone; but she unites the calmness of a philosopher with the fervor of a priestess: the chaste worship oDiana, and the asylum of a temple, satisfy that contemplative existence which the regret of being exiled from Greece imparts to her. She wishes to soften the manners of the barbarous zountry which she inhabits; and though her name is unknown, she sheds benefactions around her befitting a daughter of the King of Kings. Nevertheless, she ceases not to regret the beautiful country in which her infancy was passed, and her soul is filled with a firm yet gentle resignation, which it may be said holds the middle space between Stoicism and Christianity. Iphigenia somewhat resembles the divinity she serves; and imagination represents her as surrounded with a cloud, which conceals from her her country. In reality, could exile, and exile far from Greece, allow any enjoyment except that which is found in the internal resources of the mind? Ovid also, when condemned to spend his days not far from Tauris, in vain uttered his harmonious language to the inhabitants of those desolate shores: in vain he sought the arts, a favoring sky, and that sympathy of thought which makes us taste some of the pleasures of friendship, even in. the society of those who have no responsive feeling, and would be otherwise indifferent to us. His ienius recoiled on itself, and his suspended lyre breathed none but plaintive sounds, a mournful accompaniment to the northern blast. It appears to me that no modern work surpasses the Ilj7igenia of,Goethe in depicting the destiny which hung so heavily on "the race of Tantalus. and the dignity of the misfortunes caused by an invincible fatality. A religious dread is felt through the whole narration, and the personages themselves seem to speak prophetically, and to act under the immediate H influence of the gods. Goethe has made Thoas the deliverer of Iphigenia. A fero-ious character, such as many authors have represented him, would not have accorded with the general color of hae piece'

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 353 he would have destroyed its harmony. In many tragedies a tyrant is exhibited as a sort of machine on which the business of the piece depends; but the reflecting mind of Goethe would never have brought such a personage into action without developing his character. Now a criminal character is' always -too complicated to enter properly into a subject treated in so simple a manner as this is. Thoas loves Iphigenia; he cannot resolve to separate himself from her by suffering her to return into Greece with her brother Orestes. Iphigenia might indeed depart unknown to Thoas: she debates with her brother and with herself; whether she ought to allow herself to act in so deceitful a manner, and this forms the plot or the intrigue of the last part of the piece. At length Iphigenia avows her whole design to Thoas, combats his opposition to it, and obtains from him the word adieu, after which the curtain drops. Certainly the subject thus conceived is pure and noble, and it would be desirable that an audience might be interested and affected merely by a scruple of delicacy; but in the present state of the theatre this is not sufficient, and we are therefore interested more in reading this piece than in seeing it represented. Such a tragedy excites admiration rather than sympathy; we listen to it as to a canto of an epic poem; and the calm which pervades the whole reaches almost to Orestes himself. The scene in which Iphigenia and Orestes recognize each other is not the most'animated, though it is perhaps the most poetical part of the piece. The family of Agamemnon is recalled to remembrance in a manner so admirably skilful, that the pictures with which both history and fable have enriched antiquity seem all to pass before our eyes. We are interested also by the finest language and most elevated sentiments. Poetry so sublime raises the soul to noble contemplation, which renders dramatic variety and action almost unnecessary... -----.-... rong the great number of passages worthy of quotation in this piece, there is one which seems perfectly new. Iphigenia, in her affliction, recollects a song formerly known in her family, and taught her by her nurse in her infancy:'tis

354 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. the song which the Parcoe address to Tantalus in the infernal regions. They recall to his recollection his former glory, when he was the guest of the gods at the golden table; they describe the terrible moment when he was hurled from his throne, the punishment inflicted on him by the gods, the tran quillity of those deities who preside over the universe-a tran quillity not to be shaken even by the torments and lamenta tions of hell. These menacing Parcee inform the descendants of Tantalus that the gods will forsake them, because their features recall the remembrance of their father. The aged Tantalus, plunged in eternal night, hears this sad song, thinks on his children, and bows down his guilty head. Images the most striking, and a rhythm peculiarly adapted to the sentiment, give to this poetry the rir and energy of a national song. It is the greatest effort of talent thus to familiarize us with antiquity, and to seize at the same time what would have been popular among the Greeks, and what produces also, at the distance of so many ages, an impression equally solemn. The admiration of Goethe's Iphigenia in Zauris,~which it is impossible for us not to feel, does not contradict what I have said on the more lively interest and warmer degree of feeling which we may experience from modern subjects. Those manners and that religion, the traces of which are almost effaced through the lapse of ages, present man to us almost as an ideal being, who scarcely touches the earth on which he moves; but in the epochs and events of history which still influence the present moment, we feel the warmth of our own existence, and we expect affections similar to those by which we are agitated. It appears to me then that Goethe ought not to have placed in his piece of Torquato Tassos the same simplicity of action and calm dignity of dialogue which was suitable to'his Iphiye', nia::. That calmness and simplicity appears cold and unnatural in a subject so modern in every respect as that of the personal character of Tasso and the intrigues of the court of Ferrara. Goethe wished to display in this piece the opposition which exists between poetry and the relations of social life; between

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 355 the character of a poet and that of a man of the world. He has shown the injurious effect produced by the patronage of a prince on the delicate imagination of an author, even when that prince thinks himself a lover of literature, or at least takes a pride in appearing to be so. This contrast between nature highly exalted and cultivated by poetry, and nature chilled but guided by the narrow views of policy, is an idea which becomes the parent of a thousand others. A literary character in the court of a prince at first naturally thinks himself happy in being so situated; but in time it is impossible for him to avoid feeling some of the troubles which rendered the life of Tasso so miserable. Talents which are not perfectly free from restraint cease to be talents; and nevertheless it is very seldom that princes acknowledge the rights and privileges of the imagination, and know at once how to consider and guide it properly. It was scarcely possible to choose a happier subject than that of Tasso at Ferrara to display the different characters of a poet, a courtier, a princess, and a prince, acting in a little circle with a degree of selfish harshness sufficient to set the world in motion. The morbid sensibility of Tasso is well known, as well as the polished rudeness of his protector Alphonso, who, professing the highest admiration for his writings, shut him up in a madhouse, as if that genius which springs from the soul were to be treated like the production of a mechanical talent, by valuing the work while we despise the workman. Goethe has described Leonora d'Este, the sister of the Duke of Ferrara, who was in secret beloved by the poet, as enthusiastic in her desires, but weak from motives of prudence. He has introduced into his piece a courtier, wise according to the world, who treats Tasso with that superiority, which the man of business conceives he possesses over the poet, and who irritates him by the calmness and dexterity with which he wounds without precisely giving him any specific cause of offence. This cold-blooded man preserves his advantage, and provokes his enemy by dry and ceremonious manners which continually offend without affording ground of complaint. This is the

356 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. great evil arising from a certain sort of knowledge of the world; and in this sense eloquence and the art of speaking differ extremely, for to become eloquent it is necessary to free truth from all its restraints, and penetrate to the bottom of the soul, which is the seat of conviction; but dexterity of speech consists, on the contrary, in the talent of evading and parrying adroitly phrases which one does not choose to understand, making use of the same arms to indicate every thing offensive without its being in the power of your opponent to prove that you have said any thing which ought to give offence. This species of fencing inflicts much suffering on a mind imbued with truth and sensibility. The man who makes use of it seems your superior, because he knows how to awaken your feeling while he himself remains undisturbed; but we should not suffer ourselves to be imposed on by this sort of negative strength. Calmness of mind is excellent when it is the result of that energy which makes us support our own troubles, but when it arises from indifference to those of others, this calmness is nothing more than a disdainful selfishness. A year's abode in a court or a capital is sufficient to teach us with ease how to mix address and grace with this sort of selfishness: but to be truly worthy of distinguished esteem, it is necessary, in one's own character, as in a fine literary composition, to unite opposite qualities-the knowledge of affairs with a love of the beautiful, and that wisdom which results from our intercourse with mankind, with the flights of imagination inspired by feeling for the arts. It is true that such an individual would coIttam. in. himself two distinct- characters. — Thus6ioethe'in this very piece says that the two personages which he contrasts with each other, the courtier and the poet, are the two halves. of one man. But sympathy cannot exist between these two halves, because there is no prudence in the character of Tasso and no sensibility in that of his opponentsi The painful susceptibility of literary men was obviously displayed in Rousseau and Tasso, and is still more commonly manifested in the works of German authors. French writers have been more rarely affected by it; by living in confinement and

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 357 solitude, we find it difficult to support the external air. Society is in many respects painful to those who have not been early accustomed to it, and the irony of the world is more fatal to men of talent than to all others: good sense alone would support them better. Goethe might have chosen the life of Rousseau as an example of that struggle between society such as it is, and society such as a poetical imagination sees oi wishes it to be; but the situation of Rousseau afforded much les; scope for imagination than that of Tasso. Jean Jacques dragged a great genius into very subaltern situations. Tasso, brave as the knights he sung, in love, beloved, persecuted, crowned with laurel, and still young, dying with grief on the very eve of his triumph, is a striking example of the splendor and the misfortunes at~txant on distinguished.tani.... Itappears to me that in this composition the warmn coloring of the South is not sufficiently expressed, and perhaps it would be difficult to transfuse into the German language that sensation which is produced by the Italian. It is nevertheless above all in the characters that the traits of Germanic rather than of Italian nature, are discoverable. Leonora d'Este is a German princess. The analysis of her own character and sentiments with which she is continually occupied, is not at all in the spirit of the South. There the imagination recoils not on itself; it advances without a retrospective glance. It traces not an event to its source; it resists or yields to it without examining its cause. Tassc is also a German poet. That impossibility of getting rid of the difficulties which arise from the usual circumstances of common life, which Goethe attributes to Tasso, is a trait of the contemplative and confined life peculiar to northern writers The poets of the South have generally no such incapacity, they live more commonly in the open air, in public streets and squares, anid above all things, men are more familiar to them. The ianguage of Tasso, in this piece of Goethe, is often too metaphysical. The madness of the author of the Jerusalem lid not arise from an abuse of philosophical reflections, nor from a deep examination of what passes in the bottom of the

358 3MADAME DE STAHEL S GERMAINY. heart; it was occasioned rather by a too lively impression of external objects, by the intoxication of pride and of lovei he scarcely made use0of words but'as harmonious sounds; the secret of his soul was neither in his discourse nor in his writings: having never observed himself, how could he reveal himself to others? besides, he considered poetry as a very brilliant art, and not as a confidential disclosure of the sentiments of the heart. "It is clear to me both by his Italian constitution, his Like ant his Letters, and even by the poems he composed during his imprisonment, that the impetuosity of his passions rather than the depth of his thoughts occasioned his melancholy; there was not in his character, as in that of the German poets, that continual mixture of reflection and activity, of analysis and enthusiasm, by which existence is so singularly disturbed. There is'an incomparable elegance and dignity in the poetic style of Tasso, by which Goethe shows himself the Racine of Germany. But if Racine is reproached for the little interest inspired by Be'renice, we may with much more reason blame the dramatic coldness of Goethe's Tasso;, the design of the author was to penetrate into characters, merely by sketching their situations; but is this possible? From what sort of nature do we extract those long conversations, full of wit and imagination, which are held by all the different personages in turn? Who speaks thus of himself and of every thing? who would thus exhaust all that can possibly be said without thinking it necessary to act? Whenever the smallest action is perneivable in this piece, we feel ourselves relieved by it from the continual attention we have been paying to ideas alone' The scene of the duel between the poet and the courtier is extremely interesting; the rage of the one and the dexterity of the otnher,.develop their situation in a very striking manner.'It is exacting too much either from readers or spectators to expect them to renounce all interest in the circumstance of the performance, merely to attach themselves to the imagery and thoughts which it contains.' In that case it wouId be needIe.ss'. to pronounce proper names, to suppose scenes, acts, a beginaing or an end, or any thing, in short, which renders actior

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 359 necessary. In the quietness of repose we love contemplation, but when we are in motion whatever is dilatory is fatiguing. By a singular vicissitude in taste, the Germans first attacked our dramatic writers as transforming all their heroes into Frenchmen. They with reason appealed to historical truth, to animate their colors and vivify their poetry; then all at once they grew tired of their own success in this species of composition, and they composed abstract pieces, if we may be allowed so to call them, in which the social relations of men to each other are indicated in a general manner, independent of time, place, or individuality. It is thus, for instance, that in the Natural -Daughter,' another piece of Goethe, the author calls his personages, the duke, the king, the father, the daughter, etc., without any other designation,-considering the epoch in which the action of the play passes, the names of the personages, and the country in which they live, as so many vulgar concerns, too low for the dignity of poetry. Such a tragedy is indeed fit to be acted in the palace of Odin, where the dead are accustomed to continue the occupations which employed them during their lives; there, the huntsman, himself a shadow, pursues with ardor the shadow of a stag, and phantoms of warriors combat on a groundwork of clouds. It appears that for a time Goethe was quite disgusted with the interest taken in theatrical performances: that interest was sometimes found in bad compositions; he therefore thought it should be banished from the good. A superior writer ought not, however, to disdain what is universally pleasing; he ought not to abjure his resemblance to our common nature, if he wishes to be valued for that which distinguishes him. The point which was sought for by Archimedes, to enable him to lift up the world, is exactly that by which an extrardinary genius approaches the common class of mankind. This point of contact enables him to raise himself above others; he must set out from what he experiences in common with us all, to make us feel what he alone perceives. Besides, if it 1 N1atiuiche Tochter.-Ed.

360 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. be true that the despotism of our rules of propriety mixes often something factitious with our finest French tragedies, we do not find more truth in the extravagant theories of a systematic mind: and if there be a want of nature in exaggeration, a certain sort of calmness is also an affectation. It is a self-assumed superiority over the emotions of the soul which may suit philosophy, but which will not at all accord with the dramatic art. We may without fear address these criticisms to Goethe, for almost all his works are composed on different systems. Sometimes he abandons himself wholly to passion, as in Werther and Count Egmnont; at other times his fugitive poetry sets all the chords of imagination in vibration; again, he gives us historical facts with the most scrupulous truth, as in Goetz von Berlichingen; at another time he has all the simplicity of ancient times, as in Herman and Dorothea. In fine, he plunges himself with Faust into the stormy whirlwinds of life; then, all at once, in Tasso, the Natural Daughter, and even in Iphigenia, he considers the dramatic art as a monument erected among tombs. His works have then the fine forms, the splendor and dazzling whiteness of marble, but, like it, they are also cold and inanimate. We cannot criticise Goethe as a good author in one species of writing, while he is bad in another. He rather resembles nature, which produces every thing, and from every thing; and we may like his southern climate better than that of the north, without denying to him'hose talents which are suitable to all the various regions of.he soul

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 361 CHAPTER XXIII. FAUST. AMONG the pieces written for the performance of puppets, there is one entitled Dr. Faust, or Fatal Science, which has always had great success in Germany. Lessing took up this subject before Goethe. This wonderful history is a tradition very generally known. Several English authors have written the life of this same Dr. Faust, and some of them have even attributed to him the art of printing. His profound knowledge did not preserve him from being weary of life; in order to escape. from it, he tried to enter into a compact with the devil, who concludes the whole by carrying him off. From these slender materials Goethe has furnished the astonishing work, of which I will now try to give the idea. Certainly, we must not expect to find in it either taste, or measure, or the art that selects and terminates; but if Ithe imagination could figure to itself an intellectual chaos, such as the material chaos has often been painted, the Faust of Goethe should have been composed at that epoch. It cannot be exceeded in boldness of conception, and the recollection of this production is always attended with a sensation of giddiness. The devil is the hero of the piece; the author has not conceived him like a hideous phantom, such as he is usually represented to children; he has made him, if we may so express ourselves, the Evil Being par excellence, before whom all others, that of Gresset in particular, are only novices, scarcely worthy to be the servants of Mephistopheles (this Js the name of the!demo4 who has made himself the friend of Faust). Goethe wished to display in this character, at once real and fanciful, the bitterest pleasantry that contempt can inspire, and at the same time an audacious gayety that amuses. There is an inVOL. 1 —16

362 MIAADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. fernal irony in the discourses of Mephistopheles, which extends itself to the whole creation, and criticises the universe like a bad book of which the devil has made himself the censor. Mephistopheles makes sport with genius itself, as with the most ridiculous of all absurdities, when it leads men to take a serious interest in any thing that exists in the world, and above all when it gives them confidence in their own individual strength. It is singular that supreme wickedness and divine wisdom coincide in this respect,-that they equally recognize the vanity and weakness of all earthly things: but the one proclaims this truth only to disgust men with what is good, the other only to elevate them above what is evil. If the play of Fauzst contained only a lively and Fhilosophical pleasantry, an analogous spirit might be found in many of Voltaire's writings; but we perceive in this piece an imagination of a very different nature. It is not only that it displays to us the moral world, such as it is, annihilated, but that hell itself is substituted in the place of it. There is a potency of sorcery, a poetry belonging to the principle of evil, a delirium of wickedness, a distraction of thought, which make us shudder, laugh, and cry in a breath. It seems as if the government of the world were, for a moment, entrusted to the hands of the demon. You tremble, because he is pitiless; you laugh, because he humbles the satisfaction of self-love; you weep, because human nature, thus contemplated from the depths of hell, inspires a painful compassion. Milton has drawn his Satan larger than man; Michael Angelo and Dante have given him the hideous figure of the brute combined with the human shape. The Mephistopheles or Goethe is a civilized devil. He handles with dexterity that ridicule, so trifling in appearance, which is nevertheless often found to consist with a profundity of malice; he treats all sensibility as silliness or affectation; his figure is ugly, low, and,,rooked; he is awkward without timidity, disdainful without pride; he affects something of tenderness with the -oftien, because it is only in their company that he needs to deceive, in order to seduce: and what he understands by seduction, is

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 363 to minister to the passions of others, for he cannot even imitate love. This is the only dissimulation that is impossible to him. The character of Mephistopheles supposes an inexhaustible knowledge of social life, of nature, and of the marvellous. This play of'KFaust is the nightmare of the imagination, but it is a nightmare that redoubles its strength. it discovers the diabolical revelation of incredulity, of that incredulity which attaches itself to every thing that can ever exist of good in this world; and perhaps this might be a dangerous revelation, if the circumstances produced by the perfidious intentions of Mephistopheles did not inspire a horror of his arrogant language, and make known the wickedness which it covers. In the character of Faust all the weaknesses of humanity are concentered: desire of knowledge, and fatigue of labor; wish of success and satiety of pleasure. It presents a perfect model of the changeful and versatile being whose sentiments are yet more ephemeral than the short existence of which he complains. Faust has more ambition than strength; and this inward agitation produces his revolt against nature, and makes him have recourse to all manner of sorceries, in order to escape from the hard but necessary conditions imposed upon mortality. f:le'isscovereid, in ithe first scenei, isurounded by his ts, and by an infinite number of mathematical instruments and chemical phials. His father had also devoted himself to science, and transmitted to him the same taste and habits. A solitary lamp enlightens this gloomy retreat, and Faust pursues without intermission his studies of nature, and particularly of magic, many secrets of which are already in his possession. Hle invokes one of the creating Genii of the second order; the spirit appears, and counsels him not to elevate himself above the sphere of the human understanding.' --- 1 We gladly avail ourselves of the very fine version of Faust, by Mr. Charles T. Brooks. HIis elegant and faithful rendering of this marvellous poem, is a triumph of translation and a new glory of American litra-'ure. —Ed.

864 u MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. FAUST. "Awls y, intolerable sprite! SPIRIT. "Thou breath'st a panting supplication To hear my voice, my face to see; Thy mighty prayer prevails on me, I come!-what miserable agitation Seizes this demigod! Where is the cry of thought? Where is the breast? that in itself a world begot, And bore and cherish'd, that with joy did tremble And fondly dream us spirits to resemble. Where art thou, Faust? whose- voice rang through my ear Whose mighty yearning drew me from my sphere? Is this thing thou? that, blasted by my breath, Through all life's windings shuddereth, A shrinking, cringing, writhing worm! FAUST. "Thee, flame-born creature, shall I fear?'Tis I,'tis Faust, behold thy peer! SPIRIT. "In life's tide-currents, in action's storm, Up and down, like a wave, Like the wind I sweep! Cradle and graveA limitless deepAn endless weaving To and fro, A restless heaving Of life and glow,So shape I, on Destiny's thundering loom, The Godhead's live garment, eternal in bloom. FAUST. "Spirit that sweep'st the world from end to etrr, How near, this hour, I feel myself to thee! SPIRIT. "Thou'rt like the spirit thou canst comprehend, Not me [ Vanishes.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 365 FAUST (collapsing). "Not thee? Whom then? I, image of the Godhead, And no peer for thee!" When the Genius has disappeared, a deep despair seizes on Faust, and he forms the design of poisoning himself. "I, godlike, who in fancy saw but now Eternal truth's fair glass in wondrous nearness, Rejoiced in heavenly radiance and clearness, Leaving the earthly man below; I, more than cherub, whose free force Dream'd, through the veins of nature penetrating, To taste the life of gods, like them creating, Behold me this presumption expiating! A word of thunder sweeps me from my course. "Myself with thee no longer dare I measure; Had I the power to draw thee down at pleasure; To hold thee here I still had not the force. Oh, in that blest, ecstatic hour, I felt myself so small, so great; Thou drovest me with cruel power Back upon man's uncertain fate. What shall I do? what shun, thus lonely? That impulse must I, then, obey? Alas! our very deeds, and not our sufferings only, How do they hem and choke life's way! " To all the mind conceives of great and glorious A strange and baser mixture still adheres; Striving for earthly good are we victorious? A dream and cheat the better part appears. The feelings that could once such noble life inspire Are quench'd and trampled out in passion's mire. " Where Fantasy, erewhile, with daring flight Out to the infinite her wings expanded, A little space can now suffice her quite, When hope on hope time's gulf has wreck'd and stranded Care builds her nest far down the heart's recesses, There broods o'er dark, untold distresses; Restless she sits, and scares thy joy and peace away; She puts on,some new mask with each new day, Herself as house and home, as wife and child presenting, As fire and water, bane and blade;

366 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. What never hits makes thee afraid, And what is never lost she keeps thee still lamenting. "Not like the gods am I! Too deep that truth is thrust! But like the worm, that wriggles through the dust; Who, as along the dust for food he feels, Is crush'd and buried by the traveller's heels. " Is it not dust that makes this lofty wall Groan with its hundred shelves and cases; The rubbish and the thousand trifles all That crowd these dark, moth-peopled places? Here shall my craving heart find rest? Must I perchance a thousand books turn over, To find that men are everywhere distress'd, And here and there one happy one discover? Why grin'st thou down upon me, hollow skull? But that thy brain, like mine, once trembling, hoping, Sought the light day, yet ever sorrowful, Burn'd for the truth in vain, in twilight groping? Ye, instruments, of course, are mocking me; Its wheels, cogs, bands, and barrels each one praises. I waited at the door; you were the key; Your ward is nicely turn'd, and yet no bolt it raises. Unlifted in the broadest day, Doth Nature's veil from prying eyes defend her, And what she chooses not before thee to display, Not all thy screws and levers can force her to surrender. Old trumpery! not that I e'er used thee, but Because my father used thee, hang'st thou o'er me, Old scroll! thou hast been stain'd with smoke and smut Since on this desk, the lamp first dimly gleam'd before me. Better have squander'd, far, I now can clearly see, My little all, than melt beneath it, in this Tophet! That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, Earn and become possessor of it! What profits not a weary load will be; What it brings forth alone can yield the moment profit. "Why do I gaze as if a spell had bound me Up yonder? Is that flask a magnet to the eyes? What lovely light, so sudden, blooms around me? As when in nightly woods we hail the full-moon-rise. " I greet thee, rarest phial, precious potion! As now I take thee down with deep devotion, In thee I venerate men's wit and art. Quintessence of all soporific flowers, Extract of all the finest deadly powers,

THlE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 367 Thy favor to thy master now impart! I look on thee, the sight my pain appeases, I handle thee, the strife of longing c-:ases, The flood-tide of the spirit ebbs away. Far out to sea I'm drawn, sweet voices listening. The glassy waters at my feet are glistening, To new shores beckons me a new-born day. " A fiery chariot floats, on airy pinions, To where I sit! Willing, it beareth me, On a new path, through ether's blue dominions, To untried spheres of pure activity. This lofty life, this bliss elysian, Worm that thou wast erewhile, deservest thou? Ay,. on this earthly sun, this charming vision, Turn thy back resolutely now! Boldly draw near and rend the gates asunder, By which each cowering mortal gladly steals. Now is the time to show by deeds of wonder That manly greatness not to godlike glory yields; Before that gloomy pit to stand, unfearing, Where Fantasy self-damn'd in its own torment lies' Still onward to that pass-way steering, Around whose narrow mouth hell-flames forever rise; Calmly to dare the step, serene, unshrinking, Though into nothingness the hour should see thee sinking,': Now, then, come down from thy old case, I bid thee, Where thou, forgotten, many a year hast hid thee, Into thy master's hand, pure, crystal glass! The joy-feasts of the fathers thou hast brighten'd, The hearts of gravest guests were lighten'd, When, pledged, from hand to hand they saw thee pass. Thy sides, with many a curious type bedight, Which each, as with one draught he quaff'd the liquor, Must read in rhyme from off the wondrous beaker, Remind me, ah! of many a youthful night. I shall not hand thee now to any neighbor, Not now to show my wit upon thy carvings labor; Here is a juice of quick-intoxicating might. The rich brown flood adown thy sides is streaming, With my own choice ingredients teeming; Be this last draught, as morning now is gleaming, Drain'd as a lofty pledge to greet the festal light!" [Hte puts the goblet to his lips. At the moment when he is about tz swallow the poison, Faust

368 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. hears the town bells ringing in honor of Easter-day, and the choirs of the neighboring church celebrating that holy feast. CHORUS OF ANGELS. "Christ hath arisen! Joy to humanity! No more shall vanity, Death and inanity Hold thee in prison! FAUST. "What hum of music, what a radiant tone, Thrills through me, from my lips the goblet stealing! Ye murmuring bells, already make ye known The Easter morn's first hour, with solemn pealing? Sing you, ye choirs, e'en now, the glad, consoling song, That once, from angel-lips, through gloom sepulchral rung, A new immortal covenant sealing? CHORUS OF WOMEN. "Spices we carried. Laid them upon his breast; Tenderly buried Him whom we loved the best; Cleanly to bind him Took we the fondest care, Ah! and we find him Now no more there. CHORUS OF ANGEWS. "Christ hath ascended! Reign in benignity! Pain and indignity, Scorn and malignity, Their work have ended. FAUST. "Why seek ye me in dust, forlorn, Ye heavenly tones, with soft enchanting? Go, greet pure-hearted men this holy morn! Your message well I hear, but faith to me is wanting; Wonder, its dearest child, of Faith is born. To yonder spheres I dare no more aspire, Whence the sweet tidings downward float;

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 369 And yet, from childhood heard, the old, familiar note Calls back e'en now to life my warm desire. Ah! once how sweetly fell on me the kiss Of heavenly love in the still Sabbath stealing! Prophetically rang the bells with solemn pealing; A prayer was then the ecstasy of bliss; A blessed and mysterious yearning Drew me to roam through meadows, woods, and skies; And, midst a thousand tear-drops burning, I felt a world within me rise. That strain, oh, how it speaks youth's gleesome plays and feelings, Joys of spring-festivals long past; Remembrance holds me now, with childhood's fond appealings, Back from the fatal step, the last. Sound on, ye heavenly strains, that bliss restore me! Tears gush, once more the spell of earth is o'er me!" This moment of enthusiasm does not continue, Faust is an inconstant character, the passions of the world recover their hold upon him. He seeks to satisfy them, he wishes to abandon himself to them; and the devil, under the name of Mephistopheles, comes and promises to put him in possession of all the pleasures of the earth; but at the same time, he is able to render him disgusted with them all, for real wickedness so entirely dries up the soul, that it ends by inspiring a profound'ndifference for pleasures as well as for virtues. Mephistopheles conducts Faust to a witch, who keeps under her orders a number of animals, half monkeys and half cats (Meerkatzen). This scene may, in some respects, be considered as a parody of that of the witches in Macbeth. The witches in Macbeth sing mysterious words, of which the extraordinary sounds produce at once the effect of magic; Goethe's witches also pronounce strange syllables, of which the rhymes are curiously multiplied; these syllables excite the imagination to gayety, by the very singularity of their construction; and the dialogue of this scene, which would be merely burlesque in prose, receives a more elevated character from the charm of poetry. In listening to the comical language of these cat-monkeys, we think we discover what would be the ideas of animals, it 1640

370 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. they were able to express them, what a coarse and ridiculous image they would represent to themselves, of nature, and of mankind. The French stage has scarcely any specimens of these pleasantries founded on the marvellous, on prodigies, witchcrafts, transformations, etc.: this is to make sport with nature, as in comedies we make sport with men. But, to derive pleasure fiom this sort of comedy, reason must be set aside, and the pleasures of the imagination must be considered as a licensed game, without any object. Yet, is this game not the more easy on that account, for restrictions are often supports;.and when, in the career of literature, men give scope to boundless invention, nothing but the excess, the very extravagance of genius, can confer any merit on these productions; the union of wildness with mediocrity would be intolerable. Mephistopheles conducts Faust into the company of young persons of all classes, and subdues, by different means, the different minds with which he engages. He effects his conquests over them, not by admiration, but by astonishment. He always captivates by something unexpected and contemptuous in his words and actions; for vulgar spirits, for the most part, take so much the more account of a superior intellect, as that intellect appears to be indifferent about them. A secret instinct tells them that he who despises them sees justly. A Leipsic student, who has just left his mother's house, as simple as one can be at that age in the good country of Germany, comes to consult Faust about his studies; Faust begs Mephistopheles to take on himself the charge of answering him. He puts on a doctor's gown, and, while waiting for the scholar, expresses, in a soliloquy, his contempt for Faust. "This man," says he, " will never be more than half wicked. and it is in vain that he flatters himself with the hope of becoming completely so."' It is so in fact; whenever people' The following is the soliloquy: MEPHISTOPHELES (in FAUST'S long goto). "Only despise all human wit and lore, The highest flights that thought can soar

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 371 naturally well-principled turn aside from the plain road, they find themselves shackled by a sort of awkwardness that proceeds from uncontrollable remorse, while men who are radically bad make a mock of those candidates for vice who, with the best intention to do evil, are without talent to accomplish it. At last the scholar presents himself, and nothing can be more naif than the awkward, and yet presumptuous eagerness of this young German, on his entrance for the first time in his life into a great city, disposed to all things, knowing nothing; afraid of every thing he sees, yet impatient to possess it; desirous of information, eagerly wishing for amusement, and advancing with an artless smile towards Mephistopheles, who receives him with a cold and contemptuous air: the contrast between the unaffected good-humor of the one, and the disdainful influence of the other, is admirably lively. There is not a single branch of knowledge which the scholar desires not to become acquainted with; and what he desires to learn, he says, is science and nature. Mephistopheles congratulates him on the precision with which he has marked out his plan of study. He amuses himself by describing the four faculties, law, medicine, philosophy, and theology, in such a manner as to confound the poor scholar's head forever. Mephistopheles makes a thousand different arguments for him, Let but the lying spirit blir l thee, And with his spells of witchcraft bind thee, Into my snare the victim creeps. To him has destiny a spirit given, That unrestrainedly still onward sweeps, To scale the skies long since hath striven, And all earth's pleasures overleaps. He shall through life's wild scenes be driven, And through its flat unmeaningness, I'll make him writhe, and stare, and stiffen, And midst all sensual excess, His fever'd lips, with thirst all parch'd and riven, Insatiably shall haunt refreshment's brink; And had he not, himself, his soul to Satan given, Still must he to perdition sink!" —Ed.

372 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. all which the scholai approves one after the other, but the conclusion of which astonishes him, because he looks for serious discourse, while the devil is only laughing at every subject. The scholar comes prepared for general admiration, and the result of all he hears is only universal contempt. Mephistopheles agrees with him, that doubt proceeds from hell, and that the devils are those who deny; but he expresses doubt itself with a tone of decision, which, mixing arrogance of character with uncertainty of reasoning, leaves no consistence in any thing but evil inclinations. No belief, no opinion remains fixed in the head, after having listened to Mephistopheles; and we feel disposed to examine ourselves, in order to know whether there is any truth in the world, or whether we think only to make a mock of those who fancy that they think. SCHOLAR. " Yet in the word a thought must surely be. MEPHISTOPHELES. "All right! But one must not perplex himself about it; For just where one must go without it, The word comes in, a friend in need, to thee. With words can one dispute most featly, With words build up a system neatly, In words thy faith may stand unshaken, From words there can be no iota taken." Sometimes the scholar cannot comprehend Mephistopheles, but he has only so much the more respect for his genius. Before he takes leave of him, he begs him to inscribe a few lines in his Album, the book in which, according to the good-natured customs of Germany, every one makes his friends furnish him with a mark of their remembrance. Mephistopheles writes the words that Satan spoke to Eve, to induce her to eat the fruit of the tree of life. SCHOLAR (reads). "Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum. [Shuts it reverently, and bows himself out.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 373 MEPHISTOPHELES. "Let but the brave old saw and my aunt, the serpent, guide thee, And, with thy likeness to God, shall woe one day betide thee!" The scholar takes back his book, and goes away perfectly satisfied. Faust grows tired, and Mephistopheles advises him to fall in love. He becomes actually so with a young girl of the lower class, extremely innocent and simple, who lives in poverty with' her aged mother. Mephistopheles, for the purpose of introducing Faust to her, takes it into his head to form an acquaintance with one of her neighbors, named Martha, whom the young Margaret sometimes goes to visit. This woman's husband is abroad, and she is distracted at receiving no news of him; she would be greatly afflicted at his death, yet at least she would wish not to be left in doubt of it; and Mephistopheles greatly softens her grief, by promising her an obituary account of her husband, in regular form, for her to publish in the gazette according to custom. Poor Margaret is delivered up to the power of evil; the infernal spirit lets loose all his malice upon her, and renders her culpable, without depriving her of that rectitude of heart which can find repose only in virtue. A dexterous villain takes care not wholly to pervert those honest people whom he designs to govern; for his ascendency over them depends upon the alternate agitations of crime and remorse. Faust, by the assistance of Mephistopheles, seduces this young girl, who is remarkably simple both in niind and soul. She is pious though culpable; and when alone with Faust, asks him whether he has any re!igion. FAUST. "Leave that, my child! Enough, thou hast my heart; For those I love with life I'd freely part; I would not harm a soul, nor of its faith bereave it. MARGARET. "That's wrong, there's one true faith-one must believe it! FAUST. "Must one?

374 M:ADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. MARGARET. "Ah, could I influence thee, dearest! The holy sacraments thou scarce reverest. FAUST. "I honor them. MARGARET. "But yet without desire. Of mass and confession both thou'st long begun to tire Believest thou in God? FAUST. "My darling, who engages To say, I do believe in God? The question put to priests or sages: Their answer seems as irit sought To mock the asker. MARGARET.'Then believ'st thou not? FAUST. "Sweet face, do not misunderstand my thought I! Who dares express him? And who confess him, Saying, I do believe? A man's heart bearing, What man has the daring To say: I acknowledge him not? The All-enfolder, The All-upholder, Enfolds, upholds He not Thee, me, Himself? Upsprings not heaven's blue arch high o'er thee? Underneath thee does not earth stand fast? See'st thou not, nightly climbing, Tenderly glancing eternal stars? Am I not gazing eye to eye on thee? Through brain and bosom Throngs not all life to thee, Weaving in everlasting mystery Obscurely, clearly, on all sides of thee? Fill with it, to its utmost stretch, thy breast,

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 375 And in the consciousness when thou art wholly bledt, Then call it what thou wilt, Joy! Heart! Love! God! I have no name to give it! All comes at last to feeling; Name is but sound and smoke, Beclouding Heaven's warm glow." This morsel of inspired eloquence would not suit the character of Faust, if at this moment he were not better, because he loves, and if the intention of the author had not, doubtless, been to show the necessity of a firm and positive belief, since even those whom Nature has created good and kind, are not the less capable of the most fatal aberrations when this support is wanting to them. Faust grows tired of the love of Margaret, as of all the enjoyments of life; nothing is finer, in the original, than the verses in which he expresses at once the enthusiasm of science, and the satiety of happiness. FAUST (alone). "Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all For which I pray'd. Thou didst not lift in vain Thy face upon me in a flame of fire. Gav'st me majestic nature for a realm, The power to feel, enjoy her. Not alone A freezing, formal visit didst thou grant; Deep down into her breast invitedst me To look, as if she were a bosom friend. The series of animated things Thou bidst pass by me, teaching me to know My brothers in the waters, woods, and air. And when the storm-swept forest creaks and groans, The giant pine-tree crashes, rending off The neighboring boughs and limbs, and with deep roar The thundering mountain echoes to its fall, To a safe cavern then thou leadest me, Show'st me myself; and my own bosom's deep Mysterious wonders open on my view. And when before my sight the moon comes up With soft effulgence; from the walls of rock, From the damp thicket, slowly float around

376 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. The silvery shadows of a world gone by, And temper meditation's sterner joy. " Oh! nothing perfect is vouchsafed to man: I feel it now! Attendant on this bliss, Which brings me ever nearer to the gods, Thou gav'st me the companion, whom I now No more can spare, though cold and insolent; He makes me hate, despise myself, and turns Thy gifts to nothing with a word-a breath. He kindles up a wild-fire in my breast, Of restless longing for that lovely form. Thus from desire I hurry to enjoyment, And in enjoyment languish for desire." The history of Margaret is oppressively painful to the heart. Her low condition, her confined intellect, all that renders her subject to misfortune, without giving her the power of resisting it, inspires us with the greater compassion for her. Goethe, in his novels and in his plays, has scarcely ever bestowed any superior excellence upon his female personages, but he describes with wonderful exactness that character of weakness which renders protection so necessary to them. Margaret is about to receive Faust in her house without her mother's knowledge, and gives this poor woman, by the advice of Mephistopheles, a sleeping draught, which she is unable to support, and which causes her death. The guilty Margaret becomes pregnant, her shame is made public, all her neighbors point the finger at her. Disgrace seems to have greater hold upon persons of an elevated rank, and yet it is, perhaps, more formidable among the lower class. Every thing is so plain, so positive, so irreparable, among men who never, upon any occasion, make use of shades of expression. Goethe admirably catches those manners, at once so near and so distant from us; he possesses, in a supreme degree, the art of being perfectly natural in a thousand different natures. Valentine, a soldier, the brother of Margaret, returns from,he wars to visit her; and when he learns her shame, the Auffering which he feels, and for which he blushes, betrays.tself in language at once harsh and pathetic. A man severe

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 377 in appearance, yet inwardly endowed with sensibility, causes an unexpected and poignant emotion. Goethe has painted with admirable truth the courage which a soldier is capable of exerting against moral pain, that new enemy which he perzeives within himself, and which he cannot combat with his usual weapons. At last, the necessity of revenge takes possession of him, and brings into action all the feelings by which he was inwardly devoured. He meets Mephistopheles and Faust at the moment when they are going to give a serenade under his sister's window. Valentine provokes Faust, fights with him, and receives a mortal wound. His adversaries fly, to avoid the fury of the populace. Margaret arrives, and asks who lies bleeding upon the earth. The people answer: The son of thy mother. And her brother, dyirg, addresses to her reproaches more terrible, and more harrowing, than more polished language could ever express. The dignity of tragedy could never permit us to dig so deeply into the human heart for the traits of nature. Mephistopheles obliges Faust to leave the town, and the despair excited in him by the fate of Margaret, creates a new interest in his favor. FAUST. " What are the joys of heaven while her fond arms enfold me? Oh let her kindling bosom hold me! Feel I not always her distress? The houseless am I not? the unbefriended The monster without aim or rest? That, like a cataract, from rock to rock descended To the abyss, with maddening greed possess'd: She, on its brink, with childlike thoughts and lowly,Perch'd on the little Alpine field her cot,This narrow world, so still and holy, Ensphering, like a heaven, her lot. And I, God's hatred daring, Could not be content The rocks all headlong bearing, By me to ruins rent,Her, yea, her peace, must I o'erwhelm and bury I This victim, hell, to thee was necessary!

378 MADAME DE STAEL'S GIERMANY Help me, thou fiend, the pang soon ending! What must be, let it quickly be! And let her fiate upon my head descending, Crush, at one blow, both her and me." The bitterness and sang-froid of the answer of Mephistopheles are truly diabolical: MEPHISTOPHELES. "Ha! how it seethes again and glows! Go in and comfort her, thou dunce! Where such a dolt no outlet sees or knows, He thinks he's reach'd the end at once. None but the brave deserve the fair! Thou hast had devil enough to make a decent show of. For all the world, a devil in despair Is just the insipidest thing I know of." Margaret goes alone to the church, the only asylum that remains to her; an immense crowd fills the aisles, and the burial-service is being performed in this solemn place. Margaret is covered with a veil; she prays fervently, and when she begins to flatter herself with hopes of divine mercy, the evil spirit speaks to her in a low voice, saying: EVIL SPIRIT. "How different was it with thee, Margy, When, innocent and artless, Thou cam'st here to the altar, From the well-thumb'd little prayer-book, Petitions lisping, Half full of child's play, Half full of Heaven! Margy! Where are thy thoughts? What crimne is buried Deep within thy heart? Prayest thou haply for thy mother, who Slept over into long, long pain, on thy account? Whose blood upon thy threshold lies? -And stirs there not already Beneath thy heart a life, Tormenting itself and thee IWith bodings of its coming hour?

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 379 MARGERY. "Woe! woe! Could I rid me of the thoughts, Still through my brain backward and forward flitting, Against my will! CHORUS. "Dies irae, dies illa Solvet swclum in favill.'2 [Organ plays. EVIL SPIRIT. "Wrath smites thee! Hark! the trumpet sounds! The graves are trembling! And thy heart, Made o'er again For fiery torments, Waking from its ashes, Starts up! MARGERY. "Would I were hence! I feel as if the organ's peal My breath were stifling, The choral chant My heart were melting. CHORUS. " Judex ergo cum sedebit, Quidquid latet apparebit; Nil inultum remanebit.2 MARGERY. "How cramp'd it feels! The walls and pillars Imprison me! And the arches Crush me!-Air! 1 The day of wrath will come, and the universe will be reduced to ashes. s When the Supreme Judge appears, he will discover all that is hidden, %nd nothing shall remain unpunished.

380 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. EVIL SPIRIT. "What! hide thee! sin and shame Will not be hidden! Air? Light? Woe's thee! CHORUS. "Quid sum miser tune dicturus? Quem patronum rogaturus? Cum vix justus sit securus.' EVIL SPIRIT. "They turn their faces, The glorified, from thee. To take thy hand, the pure ones Shudder with horror. Woe! CHORUS.'Quid sum miser tune dicturus? MARGERY. "Neighbor! your phial!" [She swoor.s. What a scene! This unfortunate creature, who, in the asylum of consolation, finds despair; this assembled multitude praying to God with confidence, while the unhappy woman, in the very temple of the Lord, meets the spirit of hell! The severe expressions of the sacred hymn are interpreted by the inflexible malice of the evil genius. What distraction in the heart! what ills accumulated on one poor feeble head! And what a talent his, who knew how to represent to the imagination those moments in which life is lighted up within us like a funeral fire, and throws over our fleeting days the terrible reflection of an eternity of torments! Mephistopheles conceives the idea of transporting Faust to the Sabbath of Witches, in order to dissipate his melancholy; and this leads us to a scene of which it is impossible to give 1 Miserable wretch what then shall I say?-to what protector shall i address myself, when even the just can scarcely believe themselves saved

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 381 the idea, though it contains many thoughts, whica we shall endeavor to recollect: this festival of the Sabbath represents truly the saturnalia of genius. The progress of the piece is suspended by its introduction, and the stronger the situation, the greater we find the difficulty of submitting even to the inventions of genius when they so effectually disturb the interest. Amid the whirlwind of all that can be thought or said, when images and ideas rush headlong, confound themselves, and seem to fall back into the abysses from which reason has called them, there comes a scene which reunites us to the circumstances of the performance in a terrible manner. The conjurations of magic cause several different pictures to appear, and all at once Faust approaches Mephistopheles, and says to him: "Mephisto, seest thou not Yon pale, fair child afar, who stands so sad and lonely, And moves so slowly from the spot, Her feet seem lock'd, and she drags them only. I must confess, she seems to me To look like my own good Margery. MIEPHISTOPHELES. "Leave that alone! The sight no health can bring, It is a magic shape, an idol, no live thing. To meet it never can be good! Its haggard look congeals a mortal's blood, And almost turns him into stone; The story of Medusa thou hast known. FAUST. "Yes,'tis a dead one's eyes that stare upon me, Eyes that no loving hand e'er closed; That is the angel form of her who won me,'Tis the dear breast on which I once reposed. MEPHISTOPHELES.':Tis sorcery all, thou fool, misled by passion's dreams! For she to every one his own love seems. FAUST. "What bliss! what woe! Methinks I never My sight from that sweet form can sever.

382 MADAIME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Seest thou, not thicker than a knife-blade's back, A small red ribbon, fitting sweetly The lovely neck it clasps so neatly? MIIEPHISTOPHELES. "I see the streak around her neck. Her head beneath her arm, you'll next behold her; Perseus has lopp'd it from her shoulder. But let thy crazy passion rest! Come!" Faust learns that Margaret has murdered the child to which she had given birth, hoping thus to avoid shame. Her crime has been discovered; she has been thrown into prison, and is doomed to perish the next morning on the scaffold. Faust curses Mephistopheles in the bitterness of rage; Mephistopheles reproaches Faust in cold blood, and proves to him that it is himself who has desired evil, and that he has assisted him only because called upon by himself to do so. Sentence of death is pronounced against Faust for having slain Margaret's brother. He nevertheless enters the city in secret, obtains from Mephistopheles the means of delivering Margaret, and penetrates at night into her dungeon, of which he has stolen the keys. He hears from afar off the imperfect notes of a song, which sufficiently proves the derangement of her mind; the words of this song are very coarse, and Margaret was naturally pure and delicate. Mad women are generally painted as if madness accommodated itself to the rules of propriety, and only gave the right of breaking off sentences abruptly, and interrupting, at convenient times, the chain of ideas; but it is not so: real disorder of the mind almost always displays itself in shapes foreign even to the cause of the disorder, and the gayety of its unhappy victims is more harrowing to the soul than even their misery. Faust enters the prison: Margaret believes that they are'.ome to lead her to death. MARGARET (burying herself in the bed). "Woe! woe! They come! 0 death of bitterness I

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 383 FAUST (softly). "Hush! hush! I come to free thee; thou art dreaming. MARGARET (prostrating herself before him). Art thou a man, then feel for my distress. FAUST. Thou'lt wake the guards with thy loud screaming! [He seizes the chains to unlock them. MARGARET (on her knees). "Headsman, who's given thee this right O'er me, this power? Thou com'st for me at dead of night; In pity spare me, one short hour! Wilt't not be time when Matin-bell has rung? [She stands up. Ah! I am yet so young, so young! And death pursuing! Fair was I too, and that was my undoing. My love was near; far is he now! Torn is the wreath, the scatter'd flowers lie low. rake not such violent hold of me! Spare me! what harm have I done to thee? Let me not in vain implore thee. Thou ne'er till now saw'st her who lies before thee I FAUST. "Oh, sorrow worse than death is o'er me! MARGARET. "Now I am wholly in thy power. But first I'd nurse my child-do not prevent me. I hugg'd it through the black night hour; They took it from me to torment me, And now they say I kill'd the pretty flower. I shall never be happy again, I know. They sing vile songs at me!'Tis bad in them to do it l There's an old tale that ends just soWho gave that meaning to it? FAUST (prostrates himself). A' lover at thy feet is bending, Thy bonds of misery would be rending.

384 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. MARGARET (flings herself beside him). "Oh let us kneel, the saints for aid invoking! See!'neath the threshold smoking, Fire-breathing, Hell is seething! There prowling, And grim under cover, Satan is howling! FAUST (aloud). "Margery! Margery! MARGARET (listening). "That was the voice of my lover! [She springs up. The chainsfall off. Where is he? Where? He calls! I hear him. I'm free! Who hinders? I will be near him. I'll fly to his neck! I'll hold him! To my bosom I'll enfold him! He stood on the threshold-call'd Margery plainly! Hell's howling and clattering to drown it sought vainly,Through the devilish, grim scoffs, that might turn one tc stone, I caught the sweet, loving, enrapturing tone. FAUST. "'Tis I I MARGARET. "'Tis thou! Oh say it once again! [Clasping again.'Tis he!'tis he! Where now is all my pain? And where the dungeon's anguish? Joy-giver!'Tis thou! And come to deliver! I am deliver'd! Again before me lies the street, Where, for the first time, thou and I did meet. And the garden-bower, Where we spent that evening hour. FAUST (trying to draw her away) "Come! Come with me!

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 385 MARGARET. "0 tarry! I tarry so gladly where thou tarriest. [Caressing him. FAUST. "Hurry! Unless thou hurriest, Bitterly we both must rue it. MARGARET. "Kiss me! Canst no more do it? So short an absence, love, as this, And forgot how to kiss? What saddens me so as I hang about thy neck? When once, in thy words, thy looks, such a heaven of blisses Came o'er me, I thought my heart would break, And it seem'd as if thou wouldst smother me with kisses. Kiss thou me! Else I kiss thee! [She embraces him. Woe! woe! thy lips are cold, Stone-dumb. Where's thy love left? Oh! I'm bereft! Who robb'd me? [She turns from him. FAUST. "0 come! Take courage, my darling! Let us go; I clasp thee with unutterable glow; But follow me! For this alone I plead! MARGARET (turning to him). Is it, then, thou? And is it thou indeed? FAUST. "'Tis I! Come, follow me! MARGARET. "Thou break'st my chain, And tak'st me to thy breast again! How comes it, then, that thou art not afraid of me? And dost thou know, my friend, who'tis thou settest free? VOL. I.-17

386 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. FAUST. "Come! come! The night is on the wane. MARGARET. "Woe! woe! My mother I've slain! Have drown'd the babe of mine! Was it not sent to be mine and thine? Thine, too —'tis thou! Scarce true doth it seem, Give me thy hand!'Tis not a dream! Thy blessed hand!-But ah! there's dampness here I Go, wipe it off! I fear There's blood thereon. Ah God! what hast thou done! Put up thy sword again; I pray thee, do! FAUST. "The past is past: there leave it, th:, i. Thou kill'st me too! MARGARET. No, thou must longer tarry! I'll tell thee how each thou shalt bury: The places of sorrow Make ready to-morrowv; Must give the best place to my mother, The very next to my brother, Me a little aside, But make not the space too wide! And on my right breast let the little one lie. No one else will be sleeping by me. Once, to feel thy heart beat nigh me, Oh,'twas a precious, a tender joy! But I shall have it no more-no, never; I seem to be forcing myself on thee ever, And thou repelling me freezingly; And'tis thou, the same good soul, I see. FAUST. "If thou feelest'tis I, then come with me I MARGARET "Out yonder? FAUST. [Into the open air.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 38 MARGARET. "If the grave is there, If death is lurking; then come! From here to the endless resting-place, And not another paceThou goest e'en now? 0 Henry, might I, too! FAUST. " Thou canst!'Tis but to will! The door stands open. MARGARET. "I dare not go; for me there's no more hoping. What use to fly? They lie in wait for me. So wretched the lot to go round begging, With an evil conscience thy spirit plaguing! So wretched the lot, an exile roaming-And then on my heels they are ever coming! FAUST. "I shall be with thee. MARGARET. "Make haste! make haste! No time to waste! Save thy poor child! Quick! follow the edge Of the rushing rill, Over the bridge, And by the mill, Then into the woods beyond, On the left where lies the plank Over the pond. Seize hold of it quick! To rise'tis trying; It struggles still! Rescue! rescue! FAUst.'Bethink thyself, pray! A single step, and thou art free! MARGARET. "Would we were by the mountain! See! There sits my mother on a stone, The sight on my brain is preying I

3S8 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. There sits my mother on a stone, And her head is constantly swaying; She beckons not, nods not, helr head falls o'er, So long she's been sleeping, she'll wake no more. She slept that we might take pleasure. Oh, that was bliss without measure! FAUST. "Since neither reason nor prayer thou hearest, I must venture by force to take thee, dearest. MARGARET. "Let go! No violence will I bear! Take not such a murderous hold of me! I once did all I could to gratify thee. FAUST. "The day is breaking! Dearest! dearest! MARGARET. "Day! Ay, it is day! the last great day breaks in I My wedding-day it should have been! Tell no one thou hast been with Margery! Alas for my garland! The hour's advancing! Retreat is in vain! We meet again, But not at the dancing. The multitude presses, no word is spoke. Square, streets, all placesA sea of facesThe bell is tolling, the staff is broke, How they seize me and bind me! They hurry me off to the bloody block. The blade that quivers behind me, Quivers at every neck with convulsive shock; Dumb lies the world as the grave! FAUST. "Oh, had I ne'er been born! MEPHISTOPHELES (appears without) "Up! or thou'rt lost! The morn Flushes the sky. Idle delaying! Praying and playing! My horses are neighing; They shudder and snort for the bound.

THE DRAMAS OF GOETHE. 389 MARGARET.'What's that comes up from the ground? He! He! Avaunt! that face! What will he in the sacred place? He seeks me! FAUST. "Thou shalt live! MARGARET. "Great God in heaven! Unto thy judgment my soul have I given! MEPHISTOPHELES (to FAUST). "Come! come! or in the lurch I leave both her and thee! MARGARET. "Thine am I, Father! Rescue me! Ye angels, holy bands, attend me! And camp around me to defend me! Henry! I dread to look on thee. MEPHISTOPHELES. "She's judged! VOICE (from above). "She's saved! MEPHISTOPHELES (to FAUST). " Come thou to me! [ Vanishes with FAUST. VOICE (from within, dying away). "Henry! Henry! " After these words the piece is broken off. The intention ol the author doubtless is that Margaret should perish, and that God should pardon her; that the life of Faust should be pre-erved, but that his soul should be lost. )_ L t 4isL -! The imagination must supply the charm which a most exquisite poetry adds to the scenes I have attempted to translate; in the art of versification there is a peculiar merit acknowledged by all the world, and yet independent.of.Lthe subject o' which it is applied. In the play of Faust, the rhythm changes with the situation, and the brilliant variety that results from the change is admirable. The German language presents a

390 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY greater number of combinations than ours, and Goethe seems to have employed them all to express by sounds as well as images, the singular elevation of irony and enthusiasm, of sadness and mirth, which impelled him to the composition of this work. It would indeed be too childish to suppose that such a man was not perfectly aware of all the defects of taste with which his piece was liable to be reproached, but it is curious to know the motives that determined him to leave those defects, or rather intentionally to insert them. Goethe has submitted himself to rules of no description whatever in this composition; it is neither tragedy nor romance. Its author abjured every sober method of thinking and writing; one might find in it some analogies with Aristophanes, if the traits of Shakspeare's pathos were not mingled with beauties of a very different nature. FaustI astonishes, moves, and melts us; but it does not leave a tender impression on the soul. Though presumption and vice are cruelly punished, the hand of beneficence is not perceived in the administration of the punishment; it would rather be said that the evil principle directed the thunderbolt of vengeance against crimes of which it had itself occasioned the commission; and remorse, such as it is painted in this drama, seems to proceed from hell, in company with guilt.!. The belief in evil spirits is to be met with in many pieces of German poetry; the nature of the North agrees very well with this description of terror; it is therefore much less ridiculous in Germany, than it would be in France, to make use of the devil in works of fiction. To consider all these ideas only in a literary point of view, it is certain that our imagination figures to itself something that answers to the conception of an evil genius, whether in the human heart, or in the dispensa tions of nature: man sometimes does evil, as we may say, in a disinterested manner, without end, and even against his end, merely to satisfy a certain inward asperity that urges him to do hurt to others. The deities of paganism were accompanied by a different sort of divinities of the race of the Titans, who represented the revolted forces of nature; and, in Christianity

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 391.he evil inclinations of the soul may be said to be personified under the figure of devils..I.t.' is impossible to read Faus4 without being excited to reflection in a thousand diffrenit manners: we quarrel with'he author, we condemn him; we justify him; but he obliges us to think upon every thing, and, to borrow the language of a simple sage of former times, upon something more than every thing (de omnibus rebus et quibusdam alliis). The criticisms to which such a production is obnoxious may easily be foreseen, or rather it is the very nature of the work that provokes censure still more than the manner in which it was treated; for such a composition ought to be judged like a dream; and if good taste were always watching at the ivory gate, to oblige our visions to take the regulated form, they would seldom strike the imagination. Nevertheless, the drama of Faust is certainly not composed upon a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions, the crowd of thoughts is so great, that on every side they break through and trample down the barriers of art. CHAPTER XXIV. LUTHER, ATTILA, THE SONS OF THE VALLEY, THE CROSS ON TIIE BALTIC, THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF FEBRUARY, BY WERNER. SINCE Schiller is no more, and Goethe has ceased to write eor the stage, the first dramatic author of Germany is Werner:. obody has known better than he how to throw over tragedy the charm and the dignity cf lyric poetry; nevertheless, that which renders him so admirable as a poet, is prejudicial to his success in the representation. His pieces, which are of a rare

392 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. beauty, if we look only at the songs, the odes, the religious ana philosophical sentiments that abound in them, are extremely open to attack, when considered as dramas for action. It is not that Werner is deficient in theatrical talent, or even that he is not much better acquainted with its effects than the generality of German writers; but it seems as if he wished to propagate a mystical system of love and religion by the help of the dramatic art, and that his tragedies are the means he makes use of, rather than the end he proposes to himself.' 1 "What the new Creed specially was, which Werner felt so eager to plant and propagate, we nowhere learn with any distinctness. Probably, he might himself have been rather at a loss to explain it in brief compass. His theogony, we suspect, was still very much in posse; and perhaps only the moral part of this system could stand before him with some degree of clearness. On this latter point, indeed, he is determined enough; well assured of his dogmas, and apparently waiting but for some proper vehicle in which to convey them to the minds of men. His fundamental principle of morals does not exclusively or primarily belong to himself: being little more than that high tenet of entire Self —forgetfulness, that'merging of the Me in the Idea;' a principle which reigns both in Stoical and Christian ethics, and is at this day common, in theory, among all German philosophers, especially of the Transcendental class. Werner has adopted this principle with his whole heart and his whole soul as the indispensable condition of all Virtue. He believes it, we should say, intensely, and without compromise, exaggerating rather than softening or concealing its peculiarities. He will not have Happiness, under anvyform, to be the real or chief end of man; this is but love of enjoyment, di guise it as we like; a more complex and sometimes more respectable species of hunger, he would say, to be admitted as an indestructible element in human nature, but nowise to be recognized as the highest; on the contrary, to be resisted and incessantly warred with, till it become obedient to love of God, which is only, in the truest sense, love of Goodness, and the germ of which lies deep in the inmost nature of man; of authority superior to 1.11 sensitive impulses; forming, in fact, the grand law of his being, as subjection to it forms the first and last condition of spiritual health. He thinks that to propose a reward for virtue is to render virtue impossible. He warmly seconds Schleiermacher in declaring that even the hope of Immortality is a consideration unfit to be introduced into religion, and tending only to pervert it, and impair its sacredness. " Such was the spirit of that new Faith, which, symbolized under mythusetl of Baffometus and Phosphoros, and' Saviours from the Waters,' and Trinities of Art, Religion, and Love,' and to be preached abroad by the aid of Schleiermacher, and what was then called the New Poetical School, Werner seriously purposed, like another Luther, to cast forth, as good seed, %mong the ruins of decayed and down-trodden Protestantism I Whethe

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 393 Luther, though entirely composed with this secret intention, has met with the greatest success on the stage of Berlin. The Reformation is an event of high importance for the world, and particularly for Germany, which was its cradle. The hardihood and reflective heroism of Luther's character make a lively impression, especially in a country where thought fills up by itself alone all the measure of existence: no subject, then, is:apable of more strongly exciting the attention of Germans. Whatever regards the effect of the new opinions on the minds of men, is extremely well painted in this play of Werner's. The scene opens in the mines of Saxony, not far from Wittenberg, the dwelling-place of Luther: the song of the miners captivates the imagination; the burden of this song is always an address to the upper earth, the free air, and the sun. These uneducated men, already laid hold of by Luther's doctrine, discourse together about him and about the Reformation: and, in the obscurity of their subterraneous abodes, employ their minds about liberty of conscience, the inquiry after truth, this new day, in short, this new light, that is to penetrate the darkness of ignorance. In the second act, the agents of the Elector of Saxony come to throw open to the nuns the doors of their convents. This scene, which might be rendered comic, is treated with an affecting solemnity. Werner intimately comprehends all the diversities of Christian worship; and if he rightly conceives the noble simplicity of Protestantism, he also knows the severe Hitzig was still young enough to attempt executing his commission, and -nplying to Schlegel and Tieck for help; and if so, in what gestures of speechless astonishment, or what peals of inextinguishable laughter they answered him, we are not informed. One thing, however, is clear: that a man with so unbridled an imagination, joined to so weak an understanding, and so broken a volition, who had plunged so deep into Theosophy, and still hovered so near the surface in all practical knowledge of men and their affairs; who, shattered and degraded in his own private character, could meditate such apostolic enterprises, was a man likely, if he lived ong, to play fantastic tricks in abundance; and, at least, in his religious xistory, to set the world a-wondering. Conversion, not to Popery, but, if; so chanced, to Braminism, was a thing nowise to be thought impossiole." —(Carlyle's Essays, p. 45.)-Ed. 17'i

394 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. anctity of vows made at the foot of the cross. The abbess of the convent, in casting off the veil which had covered the dark ringlets of her youth, and now conceals her whitened locks, experiences a sentiment of alarm at once pathetic and natural; and expresses her sorrow in verses harmonious and pure as the solitude of her religious retirement. Among these female recluses is she who is afterwards to be united to Luther, and she is at that moment the most adverse of all to his influence. Among the beauties of this act, must be reckoned the portrait of Charles the Fifth, of that sovereign whose soul is weary of the empire of the world. A Saxon gentleman attached to his service thus expresses himself concerning him: " This gigantic man has no heart inclosed within his frightful breast. The thunderbolt of the Almighty is in his hand; but he knows not how to join with it the apotheosis of love. He is like the young eagle that grasps the entire globe of earth in one of his talons, and is about to devour it for his food." These few words worthily announce Charles the Fifth; but it is more easy to paint such a character, than to make it speak for itself. Luther trusts to the word of Charles the Fifth, although a hundred years before, at the Council of Constance, John Huss and Jerome of Prague had been burnt alive, notwithstanding the safe conduct of the Emperor Sigismund. On the eve of repairing to Worms, where the Diet of the Empire is held, Luther's courage fails him for a few moments; he feels himself seized with terror and misgiving. His young disciple brings him the flute on which he was accustomed to play to restore his depressed spirits; he takes it, and its harmonious concordsreproduce in his heart all that confidence in God which is tile wonder of spiritual existence. It is said that this moment excited great sensation on the Berlin stage, and it is easy to conceive it. Words, however beautiful, cannot effect so sudden a change of our inward disposition as music; Luther considered it as an art appertaining to theology, and powerfully conducive to the development of religious sentiment in the human heart. The part of Charles the Fifth, in the Diet of Worms, is not exempt from affectation, and is consequently wanting in gran

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 395 deur. The author has attempted to put in opposition the pride of the Spaniards and the rude simplicity of the Germans; but besides that Charles the Fifth was endowed with too vast a genius to belong either to this or that nation exclusively, it seems to me that Werner should have taken care not to represent a man of an arbitrary will, as openly, and above all uselessly, proclaiming that will. It loses itself, as it were, by being expressed; and despotic sovereigns have always excited more fear by what they concealed than by what they displayed to sight. Werner, with all the wildness of his imagination, possesses a very acute and a very observing mind; but it seems to me that, in the part of Charles the Fifth, he has made use of colors that are not varied like those of nature. One of the fine situations of this play, is the procession to the Diet of the bishops, the cardinals, and all the pomp of the Catholic religion on one side; and of Luther, Melancthon, and some of their disciples of the reformed faith, clothed in black, and singing in their national tongue the canticle beginning, Our God is our place of strength,' on the other. External magnificence has often been boasted as a means of acting upon the imagination; but when Christianity displays itself in its pure and genuine simplicity, that poetry which speaks from the bottom of the soul bears the palm from all others. The act in which Luther pleads in presence of Charles the Fifth, the princes of the empire, and the diet, opens with the discourse of Luther: but only its peroration is heard, because he is judged to have already said all that concerns his doctrine. After he has spoken, the opinions of the princes and deputies are collected respecting his suit. The different interests by which men are agitated, fear, fanaticism, ambition, are all perfectly characterized in these opinions. One of the voters, among others, says much in favor of Luther and of his doctrine; but he adds, at the same time, "that, since all the world affirms that the empire is troubled by it, he is of opinion, though much against his inclination, that Luther ought to be 1 Ein feste Buirg ist unser Gott. —Ed.

396 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. burnt." One cannot help admiring, in the works of Werner, the perfect knowledge of mankind that he possesses, and it were to be wished that he would descend from his reveries a little oftener, and place his foot on the earth to develop in his dramatic writings that observing spirit. Luther is dismissed by Clharles the Fifth, and shut up for some time in the fortress of WVVrtzburg, because his friends, with the Elector of Saxony at their head, believed him to be more secure there. He reappears at last in Wittenberg, where he has established his doctrine, as well as throughout the north of Germany. Towards the conclusion of the fifth act, Luther preaches in the middle of the night in the church against ancient errors. IHe announces their speedy disappearance, and the new day of reason that is about to dawn. At this instant, on the stage of Berlin, the tapers are seen to go out one after another, and the first break of morning appears through the windows of the Gothic cathedral. The drama of Luther is so animated, so varied, that it is easy to conceive how it must have ravished all the spectators; nevertheless we are often distracted from the principal idea by singularities and allegories, which are ill-suited to an historical subject, and particularly so to theatrical representation. Catharine on beholding Luther, whom she detested, exclaims, "Behold my ideal!" and immediately the most violent love takes possession of her soul. Werner believes that there is predestination in love, and that beings who are made for each other, recognize at first sight. This is a very agreeable doctrine of metaphysics, and admirably well fitted for madrigals, but which would hardly be comprehended on the stage; besides, nothing can be more strange than this exclamation of idealism as addressed to Martin Luther; for he is represented to us as a fat monk, learned and scholastic, very ill suited to have applied to him the most romantic expression that can be borrowed from the modern theory of the fine arts. Two angels, under the form of a young man, the disciple of Luther, and a young girl, the friend of Catharine, seem to pass through the whole performance with hyacinths and palms, as

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 397 symbols of purity and of faith. These two angels disappear at the end, and the imagination follows them into the air; but the pathetic is less strongly felt when fanciful pictures are made use of to embellish the situation; it is a new sort of pleasure, no longer that to which the emotions of the soul give birth; for compassion cannot exist without sympathy. We wish to;u ge of characters on the stage as of really existing persons; to censure or approve their actions, to guess them, to comprehend them, to transport ourselves into their places, so as to experience all the interest of real life, without dreading its dangers.' 1 Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft (Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Strength), " cannot," says Carlyle, " be named among the best dramas: it is not even the best of Werner's. There is, indeed, much scenic exhibition-many a' fervid sentiment,' as the newspapers have it; nay, with all its mixture of coarseness, here and there a glimpse of genuine dramatic inspiration; but, as a whole, the work sorely disappoints us; it is of so loose and mixed a structure, and falls asunder in our thoughts like the iron and clay in the Chaldean's Dream. There is an interest, perhaps of no trivial sort, awakened in the first act; but, unhappily, it goes on declining, till, in the fifth, an ill-natured critic might almost say, it expires. The story is too wide for Werner's dramatic lens to gather into a focus; besides, the reader brings with him an image of it, too fixed for being so boldly metamorphosed, and too high and august for being ornamented with tinsel and gilt pasteboard. Accordingly, the Diet of Worms, plentifully furnished as it is with sceptres and armorial shields, continues a much grander scene in History than it is here in Fiction. Neither, with regard to the persons of the play, excepting those of Luther and Catharine, the nun whom he weds, can we find much scope for praise. Nay, our praise even of these two must have many limitations. Catharine, though carefully enough depicted, is, in fact, little more than a common tragedy queen, with the storminess, the love, and other stage heroism, which belong prescriptively to that class of dignitaries. With regard to Luther himself, it is evident that Werner has put forth his whole strength in this delineation; and, trying him by common standards, we are far from saying that he has failed. Doubtless it is, in some respects, a significant and even sublime delineation; yet must we ask whether it is Luther, the Luther of History, or even the Luther proper for this drama, and not'ather some ideal portraiture of Zacharias Werner himself? Is not this Luther, with his too assiduous flute-playing, his trances of three days, his v,sions of the Devil (at whom, to the sorrow of the housemaid, he resoutely throws his huge ink-bottle), by much too spasmodic and brainsick a personage? We cannot but question the dramatic beauty, whatever is may be in history, of that three days' trance; the hero must before this aave been in want of mere victuals: and there, as he sits deaf and dumb

0898 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. The opinions of Werner, in respect to love and religion, ought not to be slightly examined. What he feels is assuredly true for him; but since, in these respects particularly, every individual has a different point of view and different impreswith his eyes sightless, yet fixed and staring, are we not tempted less to admire, than to send in all haste for some officer of the Humane Society? Seriously, we cannot but regret that these and other such blemishes hadl not been avoided, and the character, worked into chasteness and purity, been presented to us in the simple grandeur which essentially belongs to it. For, censure as we may, it were blindness to deny that this figure of Luther has in it features of an austere loveliness, a mild, yet awful beauty: undcubtedly a figure rising from the depths of the poet's soul; and, marred as it is with such adhesions, piercing at times into the depths of ours! Among so many poetical sins, it forms the chief redeeming virtue, and truly were almost in itself a sort of atonement. " As for the other characters, they need not detain us long. Of Charles the Fifth, by far the most ambitious,-meant, indeed, as the counterpoise of Luther,-we may say, without hesitation, that he is a failure. An empty Gascon this; bragging of his power, and honor, and the like, in a style which Charles, even in his nineteenth year, could never have used.' One God, one Charles,' is no speech for an emperor; and, besides, is borrowed from some panegyrist of a Spanish opera-singer. Neither can we fall in with Charles, when he tells us that'he fears nothing-not ever God.' We humbly think he must be mistaken. With the old Miners, again,-with Hans Luther and his wife, the Reformer's parents, there is more reason to be satisfied; yet in Werner's hands simplicity is always apt, in such cases, to become too simple, and these honest peasants, like the honest Hugo in the' Sons of the Valley,' are very garrulous. " This drama of'Martin Luther' is named likewise the' Consecration of Strength;' that is, we suppose, the purifying of this great theologian from all remnants of earthly passion, into a clear, heavenly zeal; an operation which is brought about, strangely enough, by two half-ghosts and one whole ghost,-a little fairy girl, Catharine's servant, who impersonates Faith; a little fairy youth, Luther's servant, who represents Art; and the' Spirit of Cotta's wife,' an honest housekeeper, but defunct many years before, who stands for Purity. These three supernaturals hover about in very whimsical wise, cultivating flowers, playing on flutes, and singing dirge-like epithalamiums over unsound sleepers: we cannot see how aught of this is to' consecrate strength;' or, indeed, what such jack-o'-lantcrn personages have in the least to do with so grave a business. If the author intended by such machinery to elevate his subject from the Common, and unite it with the higher region of the Infinite and the Invisible, we cannot think that his contrivance has succeeded, or was worthy to succeed. These Dalf-allegorical, half-corporeal beings, yield no contentment anywhere: Abstract Ideas, however they may put on fleshly garments, are a class of characters whom we cannot sympathize with or delight in. Besides, how

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 399 sions, it is not right that an author should make an art, which is essentially universal and popular, conduce to the propagation of his own personal opinion. Another very fine and very original production of Werner's is his Attila. The author takes up the history of this scourge qft Godc at the moment of his appearance before the gates of Rtolne. The first act opens with the lamentations of women and children who have just escaped from the ashes of Aquileia; and this exposition into action not only excites interest froml the first, but gives a terrible idea of the power of Attila. It is a necessary art for the stage to make known the principal characters, rather by the effect they produce on those about thein, than by a portrait, how striking soever. A single man, multiplied by those who obey him, fills Asia and Europe with consternation. What a gigantic image of despotic will does this spectacle afford us! Next to the character of Attila is that of a princess of Burgundy, Ilildegonde, who is about to be united to him, and by whom he imagines himself beloved. This princess harbors a can this mere embodiment of an allegory be supposed to act on the rugged materials of life, and elevate into ideal grandeur the doings of real men, that live and move amid the actual pressure of worldly things? At best, it can stand but like a hand in the mac gin: it is not performing the task proposed, but only telling us that it was meant to be performed. To our feelings, this entire episode runs like straggling bindweed through the whole growth of the piece, not so much uniting as encumbering and choking up what it meets with; in itself, perhaps, a green and rather pretty weed; yet here superfluous, and, like any other weed, deserving only to be altogether cut away. " Our general opinion of' Martin Luther,' it would seem, therefore, cor responds ill with that of the' overflowing and delighted audiences' over all Germany. We believe, however, that now, in its twentieth year, the work Imay be somewhat more calmly judged of even there. As a classical dlama it could never pass with any critic; nor, on the other hand, shall we ourselves deny that, in the lower sphere of a popular spectacle, its attractions are manifold. We find it, what, more or less, we find all Weraer s pieces to be, a splendid, sparkling mass; yet not of pure metal, but'f Irany-colored scoria, not unmingled with metal; and must regret, as ever, that it had not been refined in a stronger furnace, and kept in the 3rucible till the true silver-gleam, glancing from it, had shown that the process was complete."-(Essays, pp. 48, 49.)-Ed.

400 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. deep feeling of vengeance against him for the deaths of her father and lover. She is resolved to marry, only that she may assassinate him; and, by a singular refinement of hatred, she nurses him when wounded, that he may not die the honorable death of a soldier. This woman is painted like the goddess of war; her fair hair and her scarlet vest seem to unite in her person the images of weakness and fury. It is a mysterious character, which at first takes strong hold on the imagination; but, when this mystery goes on continually increasing, when the poet gives us to suppose that an infernal power has obtained possession of her, and that not only, at the end of the piece, she immolates Attila on the wedding night, but stabs his son, of the age of fourteen years, by his side, this creature loses all the features of womanhood, and the aversion she inspires gains the ascendency over the terror she is otherwise calculated to excite. Nevertheless, this whole part of Hildegonde is an original invention; and, in an epic poem, which might admit of allegorical personages, this Fury in the disguise of gentleness, attached to the steps of a tyrant, like perfidious Flattery, might doubtless produce a grand effect. At last this terrible Attila appears in the midst of the flames that have consumed the city of Aquileia; he seats himself on the ruins of the palace he has just destroyed, and seems charged with the task of accomplishing alone, in a single day, the work of ages. He has a sort of superstition, as it were, that centres in his own person,-is himself the object of his own worship, believes in himself, regards himself as the instrument of the decrees of heaven, and this conviction mingles a certain system of equity with his crimes. He reproaches his enemies with their faults, as if he had not committed more than all of them; he is a ferocious, and yet a generous barbarian,-he is despotic, and yet shows himself faithful to his word; to conclude, in the midst of all the riches of the world he lives a soldier, and asks nothing of earth but the enjoyment of subduing her. Attila performs the functions of a judge in the public square, and there pronounces sentence on the crimes that are brought

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 401 before his tribunal, with a natural instinct that penetiates deeper into the principles of action than abstract laws, which decide alike upon cases materially different. He condemns his friend who is guilty of perjury, embraces him in tears, but orders that he shall be instantly torn to pieces by horses; he is guided by the notion of an inflexible necessity, and his own will appears to him to constitute that necessity. The emotions of his soul have a sort of rapidity and decision which excludes all shades of distinction; it seems as if that soul bore itself altogether, with the irresistible impulse of physical strength, in the direction it follows. At last they bring before his tribunal a man who has slain his brother: having himself been guilty o~f the same crime, he is strongly agitated, and refuses to be the judge of the culprit. Attila, with all his transgressions, believed himself charged with the accomplishment of the divine justice on earth, and, when called upon to condemn another for an outrage similar to that by which his own life has been soiled, something in the nature of remorse takes possession of him to the very bottom of his soul. The second act is a truly admirable representation of the court of Valentinian at Rome. The author brings on the stage, with equal sagacity and justice, the frivolity of the young Emperor who is not turned aside by the impending ruin of his empire from his accustomed range of amusements; the insolence of the Empress-mother, who knows not how to sacrifice the least portion of her animosities to the safety of the state, and who abandons herself to the most abject baseness, the moment any personal danger threatens her. The courtiers, indefatigable in intrigue, still seek each other's ruin on the eve of the ruin of all; and ancient Rome is punished by a barbarian for the tyranny she exercised over the rest of the world: this picture is worthy of a poetical historian like Tacitus. In the midst of characters so true, appears Pope Leo, a sublime personage furnished by history, and the Princess Honoria, whose inheritance is claimed by Attila for the purpose of restoring it to her. Honoria secretly imbibes a passionate love r the ts ^ — — o'?.t whom she has never beheld, but whose

102 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. glory has inflamed her imagination. We see that the author't intention has been to make Hildegonde and Honoria the good and evil genius of Attila; and from the moment we perceive the allegory which we fancy to be wrapped up in these personages, the dramatic interest which they are otherwise calculated to inspire grows cold. This interest, nevertheless, is admirably revived in many scenes of the play, particularly when Attila, after having defeated the armies of the Emperor Valentinian, marches to Rome, and meets on his road Pope Leo, borne in a litter, and preceded by all the pomp of the priesthood. Leo calls upon him, in the name of God, to abstain from entering the eternal city. Attila immediately experiences a religious terror, till that moment a stranger to his soul. He fancies that he beholds St. Peter in heaven, standing with a drawn sword to prohibit his advance. This scene is the subject of an admirable picture of Raphael's. On one side, a calm dignity reigns in the figure of the defenceless old man, surrounded by other men, who all, like himself, repose with confidence in the protection of God; and on the other, consternation is painted on the formidable countenance of the king of the Huns; his very horse reals with affright at the blaze of celestial radiance, and the soldiers of the invincible cast down their eyes before the white hairs of the holy man, who passes without fear through the midst of them. The words of the poet finely express the sublime design of the painter; the discourse of Leo is an inspired hymn; and the manner in which the conversion of the warrior of the North is indicated seems to me also truly admirable. Attila, his eyes turned towards heaven, and contemplating the apparition which he thinks he beholds, calls Edecon, one of the chiefs of his army, and says to him: "Edecon, dost thou not perceive there on high a terrible giant? Dost thou not behold him even above the place where the old man is mnade conspicuous by the refulgence of heaven? EDECON. "I see only the ravens descending in troops over the dead bodies or which they are going to feed.

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 408 ATTILA. "No; it is not a phantom: perhaps it is the image of him who is plone able to absolve or condemn. Did not the old man predict it? Behold the giant whose head is in heaven, and whose feet touch the earth; he menaces with his flames the spot upon which we are standing; he is there, before us, motionless; he points his flaming sword against me, like my judge. EDECON. "These flames are the light of heaven, which at this moment gilds the domes of the Roman temples. ATTrILA. "Yes, it is a temple of gold, studded with pearls, that he bears upon his whitened head; in one hand he holds his flaming sword, in the other two brazen keys, encircled with flowers and rays of light; two keys that the giant has doubtless received from the hands of Odin, to open or shut the gates of Valhalla." 1 From this moment, the Christian religion operates on the soul of Attila, in spite of the belief of his'ancestors, and he commands his army to retreat to a distance from Rome. The tragedy should have ended here, and it already contains a sufficient number of beauties to furnish out many regular pieces; but a fifth act is added, in which Leo, who, for a pope, is much too deeply initiated in the mystic theory of love, conducts the Princess Honoria to Attila's camp on the very night in which Hildegonde marries and assassinates him. The Pope, who has a foreknowledge of this event, predicts. without preventing it, because it is necessary that the fate of Attila should be accomplished. Honoria and Pope Leo offer up prayers for him' on the stage. The piece ends with a Hallelqjah, and rising towards heaven like a poetic incense, evaporates instead of being concluded. Werner's versification is full of admirable secrets of harmony, but we cannot give in -: translation any idea of its merit in this respect. I remember, among other things, in one of his tragedies, the subject of which is taken from Polish his No German copy of Werner is at hand, and we have been obliged to taxc this passage from Madame de Stael's French version.-X-.

104 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. tory, the wondelful effect of a chorus of young phantom, appearing in the air; the poet knows how to change the Ger. man into a soft and tender language, which these wearied and uninterested shades articulate with half-formed tones; all the words they pronounce, all the rhymes of the verses, seem like vapor. The sense of the words, also, is admirably adapted to the situation; they paint a state of frigid repose, of dull indifference; they reverberate the distant echoes of life, and the pale reflection of faded impressions casts a veil of clouds over universal nature. If Werner admits into his tragedies the shades of the departed, we sometimes also find in them fantastic personages that seem not yet to have received any earthly existence. In the prologue to the Tartare of Beaumarchais, a Genius questions these imaginary beings whether they wish to have birth, and one among them answers: " I do not feel myself at all eager about it." This lively answer may be applied to most of those allegorical personages which they take pleasure in bringing.forward on the German stage. Werner has composed, on the subject of the Templars, a piece in two volumes, called the Sons of the Valley;' a piece 1 " The SShne des Thals is a drama, or, rather, two dramas, unrivalled at least in one particular, in length: each part being a play of six acts, and the whole amounting to somewhat more than eight hundred small octavo pages I To attempt any analysis of such a work would but fatigue our readers to little purpose: it is, as might be anticipated, of a most loose and formless structure; expanding on all sides into vague boundlessness, and, on the whole, resembling not so much a poem, as the rude materials of one. The subject is the destruction of the Templar order; an event which has been dramatized more than once, but on which, notwithstanding, Werner, we suppose, may boast of being entirely original. The fate of Jacques Molay and his brethren act here but like a little leaven; and lucky were we, could it leaven the lump; but it lies buried under such a mass ot Mystical theology, Masonic mummery, Cabalistic tradition, and Rosicrucian philosophy, as no power could work into dramatic union. The incidents are few, and of little interest; interrupted continually by flaring shows, and 1 ng-winded speculations; for Werner's besetting sin, that of loquacity, is here in decided action; and so we wander, in aimless windings, through scene after scene of gorgeousness or gloom, till at last the whole rises before us like a will phantasmagoria: cloud heaped on cloud, painted

THE DRAMAS OF WERNER. 40" which possesses great interest for those who are initiated into the doctrine of secret orders; for it is rather the spirit of these orders, than the historical color, that is principally remarkable in them. The poet seeks to connect the Free-Masons with the Templars, and applies himself to the task of showing that the same traditions, and the same spirit have been always preserved among both. The imagination of Werner singularly delights itself in these associations, which have the air of something supernatural, because they multiply, in an extraordinary degree, the force of each, by giving a like tendency to all. This play, or this poem, of the Sons of the Vulley, has caused a great sensation in Germany; I doubt whether it would obtain an equal degree of success among ourselves. Another composition of Werner's well worthy of notice, is that which has for its subject the introduction of Christianity into Prussia and Livonia. This dramatic romance is entitled the Cross on the Baltic. There reigns throughout a very lively sentiment of all that characterizes the North, the amberfishery, mountains rough with ice, the asperity of the climate, the rapid influence of spring, the hostility of nature, the rudeness which this warfare instils into man; and we recognize in indeed here and there with prismatic hues, but representing nothing, or at least not the subject, but the author. 1" In this last point of view, however, as a picture of himself, independently of other considerations, this play of Werner's may still have a certain value for us. The strange, chaotic nature of the man is displayed in it: his skepticism and theosity; his audacity, yet intrinsic weakness of character; his baffled longings, but still ardent endeavors after Truth and Good; his search for them in far journeyings, not on the beaten highways, but through the pathless infinitude of Thought. To call it a work of art would be a misapplication of names: it is little more than a rhapsodic effusio.:; the outpouring of a passionate and mystic soul, only half knowing what it utters, and not rtiling its own movements, but ruled by them. It is fair to add, that such also, in a great measure, was Werner's own view of the matter; most likely the utterance of these things gave him such relief, that crude as they were, he could not suppress them. For it )ught to be remembered, that in this performance one condition, at least, of genuine inspiration is not wanting: Werner evidently thinks that in these, his ultramundane excursions, he has found truth; he has something positive to set forth, and he feels himself as if bound on a high and holy mission, in preaching it to his fellow-men." (Carlyle's Essays, p. 38). —Ed.

406 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY.,hese pictures a poet who has had recourse to sensations he thas himself experienced for all that he describes and expresses. I have seen acted, at a private theatre, a piece of Werner's composition, entitled the T'wenty-foerth of Febrtuary, a piece on which opinions would be greatly divided. The author supposes that, in the solitudes of Switzerland, there dwelt a family of peasants, which had rendered itself guilty of the most atrocious crimes, and was pursued by a paternal malediction from father to son. The third of these accursed generations presents the spectacle of a man who, by an outrage, has caused the death of his father; the son of this unhappy wretch has, in his childhood, killed his own sister in a cruel sport, but without knowing what he was about. After this frightful event, he has disappeared. The labors of the parricidal father have been ever since visited by continual bad fortune; his fields have become barren, his cattle have perished; the most frightful poverty overwhelms him; his creditors threaten to seize his cottage, and throw him into prison; his wife wanders alone in the midst of the Alpine snows. All at once the son arrives, after an absence of twenty years. Ile is animated by tender and religious sentiments, and inspired with true repentance, though he had been guilty of no criminal intention. HIe returns to his father's house, and as he is too much altered to be recognized by him, forms the resolution of concealing from him 1" Of this Kreuz an de,' Ostsee, our limits will permit us to say but little. It is still a fragment; the Second Part, which was often promised, and. wee believe, partly written, having never yet been published. In some respects, it appears to Us the best of Werner's dramas: there is a decisive coherence in the plot, such as we seldom find with him; and a firmness, a rugged nervous brevity in the dialogue, which is equally rare. Here, too, the mystic, dreamy agencies, which, as in most of his pieces, he has interwoven with the action, harmonize more than usually with the spirit of the whole. It is a wild subject, and this helps to give it a corresponding wildness of locality. The first planting of Christianity among the Prussians by the Teutonic Knights, leads us back of itself into dim ages of antiquity of superstitious barbarism, and stern, apostolic zeal; it is a scene hanging as it were, in half-gh:mtly chiaroscuro, on a ground of primeval Night: where the Cross tnd St. Adalbert come in contact with the Sacred Oak ml the Idols of Romova, we are not surprised that spectral shapes peet orth on Is from the gloom." —(Carlyle's Essays, p. 48).-Ed.

''HE DRAMAS OF WlERNER. 47 his name at first, in order to gain his affection, before he con fesses himself to be his son; but the father, in his misery, becomes greedy and covetous of the money that is carried about him by his guest, whom he believes to be a vagabond foreigner, of suspicious character; and when the hour of midnight strikes, on the twenty-fourth of February, the anniversary of the paternal malediction, by which the whole family is visited, he plunges a knife into his son's bosom. The latter, in his last moments, reveals his secret to this double criminal, the assassin of his father and of his child'; and the miserable wretch goes to deliver himself up to the tribunal that must condemn him. These situations are appalling; it cannot be denied that they produce a great effect; nevertheless, the poetical color of the piece, and the gradation of motives derived from the passions, are more to be admired than the subject on which it is founded.' To transfer the fatal destiny of the house of Atreus to people of the lower ranks of society, is to bring the contemplation of crimes too familiarly before the eyes of the spectators. The splendor of rank, and the distance of ages, give to wickedness itself a species of grandeur which agrees better with the ideal in art; but when the knife is presented to you instead of the poniard, when the situation, the manners, the characters are sich as you may meet with every day, you are frightened, like children in a dark room, but it is not the noble horror that tragedy ought to awaken. Still, however, this potency of the paternal curse, which seems to represent a providence upon earth, agitates the soul very forcibly. The fatality of the ancients is the sport of destiny; but fatality, in the Christian doctrine, is a moral truth under a terrifying form. When man does not yield to remorse, the cery agitation which that remorse makes him experience, drives him headlong to the commission of new crimes; conscience, repulsed, changes itself into a phantom that disturbs the reason. " Of his Attila (1808), his Vier-und-zvanzigste Februar (1809), his U'unegunde (1814), and various other pieces written in his wanderings, we have not room to speak. It is the less necessary, as the Attila and Twrenty-fourth oJ Febriuary, by much the best of these, have already been forcibly, and, on the whole, fairly characterized by Madame de Stabl." —(Carl. E's., p. 52. —Ed.

1()8 MADAME DE STAELI S GERMANY. The wife of this guilty peasant is haunted by the remembrance of a ballad containing the recital of a parricide; and alone, in her sleep, she cannot help muttering it in an under voice, like those confused and involuntary fancies, of which the dismal recurrence seems an inward presentiment of fate. The description of the Alps, and of their vast solitude, is extremely beautiful; the abode of the culprit, the hovel in which the scene passes, is far from any other habitation; no church bell is heard there, and the hour is announced only tby a rustic clock, the last piece of furniture that poverty has not yet resolved to part with: the monotonous noise of this clock, in the deep recesses of mountains where the sounds of human existence never reach, produces a strange shuddering. We ask, what has time to do in a place like this; to what purpose the division of hours that no interest varies? And when that dreadful hour of crime is heard to strike, it recalls to us the fine idea of the missionary who imagined that in hell the damned spirits are incessantly asking,-" What's o'clock?" and that they are answered,-" Eternity." Werner has been reproached for admitting into his tragedies situations that are better adapted for the beauties of lyrical poetry than for the development of theatrical passions. Hie may be accused of a contrary fault in the Tweu ty-fourth of February. The subject of this piece, the manners it represents, bear too strong a resemblance to truth, and to truth of a description too atrocious to be admitted into the circle of the fine arts. The fine arts are placed between heaven and earth, and the genius of Werner sometimes rises above, someLimes sinks beneath, this native region of fiction. END OF VOL. I.

GERMANY BY MADAME THE BARONESS DE STAEL-HOLSTEIN WITH NOTES AND APPENDICES BY 0. W. WIGHT, A. M. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II. BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street Ace Iffitfersibe into##, Cambritge

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 18O, BY 0. W. WIGHT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMFPAN

CONTENT S. PART II. ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. (CONTINUED.) CHAP. XX V.-Various Pieces of the German and Danish Theatre.... 7 CHAP. XXVI.-Of Comedy........................................ 20 CHAP. XXVII.-Of Declamation................................... 31 CHAP. XXVIII.-Of Romances.................................... 50 CHAP. XXIX.-Of German Historians, and of J. Von MUller in particular.......................................................... 77 CHAP. XXX.-Herder.......................................... 84 CHAP. XXXI.-Of the Literary Treasures of Germany, and of its most Renowned Critics, A. W. and F. Schlegel....................... 89 CHAP. XXXII.-Of the Fine Arts in Germany...................... 99 PART III. PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS. C'HAP. I. —Of Philosophy.......................................... 115 CHAP. II.-Of English Philosophy............................... 119 CHAP. III.-Of French Philosophy................................. 132 CHAP. IV.-Of the Ridicule introduced by a certain Species of Philosophy................................................. 141 CHAP. V. -General Observations upon German Philosophy.......... 146 CHAP. VI.-Kant.............................. 157 CHAP. VII. —Of the most Celebrated Philosophers before and after Kant................... 180 ('HAP. VIII.-Influence of the new German Philosophy over the Development of the Mind..................................... 202 CHAP. IX.-Influence of the new German Philosophy on Literature and the Arts............................................... 205

6 CONTENTS. PAGE CHAP. X.-Influence of the new Philosophy on the Sciences.......... 211 CHAP. XI.-Influence of the new Philosophy upon the Character of the Germans............................... 227 CHAP. XII.-Of Ethics ibunded on PersyJnal Interest............... 231 CHAP. XIII.-Of Ethics founded on National Interest........... 239 CHAP. XIV.-Of the Principle of Ethics in the new German Philosophy...............................................:.... 248 CHAP. XV.-Of Scientific Ethics........................... 255 CHAP. XVI.-Jacobi..................... 257 CHAP. XVII.-Of Woldemar....................................... 264 ChAP. XVIII.-Of a Romantic Bias in the Affection of the Heart..... 2b6 CHAP. XIX.-Of Love in Marriage................................ 269 CHAP. XX.-Modern Writers of the Ancient School in Germany... 275 CHIAP. XXI.-Of Ignorance and Frivolity of Spirit in their Relations to Ethics........................................................ 281 PART IV. RELIGION AND ENTHUSIASM. CHAP. I.-General Considerations upon Religion in Germany........ 287 CHAP. II.-Of Protestantism............................. 293 CHAP. III.-Moravian Mode of Worship........................... 303 CHAP. IV.-Of Catholicism............................ 307 CHAP. V.-Of the Religious Disposition called " Mysticism"......... 316 CHAP. VI.-Of Pain............................................. 329 CHAP. VII.-Of the Religious Philosophers called Theosophists...... 337 CHAP. V 1II.-Of the Spirit of Sectarianism in Germany.............. 340 CHAP. IX.-Of the Contemplation of Nature........................ 347 CHAP. X. —Of Enthusiasm......................................... 360 CHAP. XI.-Of the Influence of Enthusiasm on Learning............. 363 ClHAP. XII.-Of the Influence of Enthusiasm upon Happiness........ 3(;7 APPENDIX A.-General Survey of German Literature to the close ot the Eighteenth Century. By Max Mfuller, M A., Professor of European Languages and Literature at Oxford................ 377 ALPENDIX B.-Hegel and Recer t German Philosophy.......... 410 APPENDIX C.-Recent Germar Theology......................... 425

PART II. ON LLTERATURE AND THE ARTS. (CONTINUED.) CHAPTER XXV. VARIOUS PIECES OF THE GERMAN AND DANISH THEATRE. THE dramatic works of Kotzebue' have been translated into several languages. It would therefore be superfluous to employ ourselves in making them known. I shall only observe, that no impartial judge can deny him a perfect understanding of theatrical effects. The Two Brothers, Misanthropy and Repentance, The Hussites, The Crusaders, Hugo Grotius, Jane of Montfaucon, The Death of Rolla, etc., excite the most lively interest wherever they are performed. It must still be con1 "August von Kotzebue, born at Weimar in 1761, was the son of a counsellor of legation, but lost his father before he was two years old. At six-'een he went to the university of Jena to study jurisprudence, and established himself as solicitor at Weimar. The law had, however, no attractions for him; he wrote several dramatic pieces, and had the gratification of seeing hlis productions favorably received by the public. But, having written some satirical poems against some ladies at Weimar, he found himself under the l-ecessity of leaving the place. He went to Petersburg, where he was first engaged as private secretary to General Bauer of the engineers, and subsequently became director of the German theatre. Kotzebue was now in his true vocation; but when soon afterwards the general died, the empress named him a judge of the court of appeals at Reval. In the following year, in his twenty-third year, he married a daughter of the wealthy General Essen, a lady of great beauty and high mental attainwr ents, and he was raised to nobility. He established a theatre of amateurs at Rev,o, for which he wrote several plays. His Mense.enhass und Reue, known

MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. fessed, that Kotzebue knows not how to give to his personages either the color of the times in which they lived, or national features, or the character that history assigns them. These personages, to whatever age or country they belong, always to the English public by the title of the Stranger, and Die Indianer in Engand, procured him great celebrity. His declining health about this time, induced him to return to Germany; he went to Weimar, where he had the misfortune to lose his wife after a union of six years. With the view of finding some relief in a change of scene, he went to Paris, and after some years returned to Esthland, and married a second time. He lived, however, retired from public life on his estate, and continued to write draInatic pieces. Two years after, he was invited to Vienna, to undertake the management of the Imperial theatre, which, however, he resigned after the expiration of the first year. He went again to Weimar, but some controversies with Goethe, who hated his obtrusive manners, and more particularly with the two Schlegels, caused him to return to Russia. Arrived here, he was, by order of the Emperor Paul, arrested, charged with being a spy, and exiled to Siberia, but after the lapse of two years restored to liberty, and created a privy counsellor. He again undertook the management of the theatre. After Paul's death he left Petersburg for Berlin, where he continued his literary labors for the stage. Here he published several of his larger works, and a collection of novels and tales; and began his Ancient History of Prussia. The war with France breaking out shortly after, he retired to Russia; upon the defeat of the French he followed the Emperor Alexander in the quality of privy counsellor, and edited in Berlin his Russo-German Gazette, in which his constant aim was to increase the hatred against the French. He was subsequently made Russian consul at K6nigsberg, but a few years afterwards recalled to Petersburg and desired by the emperor to fix himself at Weimar, in order to make from thence weekly reports upon new productions in the arts and sciences, both in Germany and France. But he had the mortification to find himself looked upon as a Russian spy; he was called a traitor to his country, and the hatred against him increased, when in a severe satire he declared himself an enemy to the then prevailing spirit of Germanism among the youths of Germany. In order to enjoy the society of some friends, he went to Manhelm, and was preparing for his journey to Russia, where he intended to spend the remainder of his days in quiet and retirement, when, on the 23d of March, 1819, he was stabbed to death by Charles Sand, a German student. When requested to declare his motives for such a deed, Sand thus wrote:'Kotzebue was the seducer of our youth, the calumniator of out history, and a betrayer of our country in the pay of Russia.' "Kotzebue's plays are most numerous. In most cases his principal attention is given to stage-effect. He had little conception of the ideal, but great shrewdness in discovering the foibles of the human heart. His chief care was to court the ephemeral applause of the day by pandering to th. vitiated taste promoted by himself."-Ed.

THE DRAMAS OF KOTZEBUE. 9 appear t be contemporaries and fellow-countrymen; they are invested with the same philosophical opinions, the same modern manners, and whether he is painting a man of our own days, or a Virgin of the Sun, nothing is to be discovered in either but a picture of the present times, at once natural and pathetic. If the theatrical genius of Kotzebue, which is unique in Germany, could be joined to the talent of painting characters such as history transmits them to us, and if his style of poetry elevated itself to the height of those situations of which lie is the ingenious inventor, the success of his pieces would be equally lasting and brilliant. Besides, nothing is so rare as to find united in the same individual the two faculties which constitute a great dramatic author -dexterity in his trade, if we may so term it, and the genius whose point of view is universal: this problem is the great difficulty of human nature itself; and it is always easy to distinguish among men, those in whom the talent of conception and that of execution predominate; those who stand in relation with all times, and those who are exclusively the portion of their own: nevertheless, it is in the union of opposite qualities that phenomena of every description consist. The greater number of Kotzebue's pieces are distinguished for some situations of striking beauty. In the Hussites, when Procopius, the successor of Ziska, besieges Nuamburg, the magistrates come to the resolution of sending all the children out of the town to the enemy's camp, to ask mercy for the inhabitants. These poor children must go alone, to implore the compassion of fanatic soldiers, who spare neither age nor sex. The burgomaster is the first to offer his four sons, the eldest of whom is only twelve years old, for this perilous expedition. The mother entreats that one at least may remain with her; the father appears to consent, and sets himself about summing up the faults of each of his children in succession, that the mother may declare who are those for which she feels herself Ihe least interested; but whenever he begins to throw blame upon either of them, the mother assures him that that is the ene which she prefers to all the rest, and the unhappy woman 1.

10 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. is at last forced to agree that the cruel choice is impossible and that it is better they should all share the same lot. In the second act, we are introduced into the camp of the Hussites; all the soldiers, of menacing figures, repose in their tents. A slight noise awakens their attention; they perceive in the plain a crowd of children, marching in procession, with oaken boughs in their hands; they cannot conceive the signification of this, and taking their lances, place themselves at the entrance of the camp to defend the approach. The children advance fearlessly in front of the lances, and the Hussites involuntarily recoil, angry at finding themselves affected, and unable to comprehend what it is they experience. Procopius comes out of his tent; he causes the burgomaster, who had followed his children at a distance, to be brought before him, and orders him to point out which are his. The burgomastel refuses; Procopius's soldiers lay their hands on him, and immediately the four children rush into their father's arms. " You know them now," says the burgomaster to Procopius, "they have named themselves." The piece ends happily, and the third act is full of congratulations; but it is the second that affords the greatest theatrical interest. Scenes fit for a novel constitute all the merit of the play ol the Crusaders. A young girl, believing her lover to have perished in the wars, has taken the veil at Jerusalem in a religious order consecrated to the care of the sick. A knight, dangerously wounded, is brought to the convent. She enters, veiled, and, without lifting up her eyes to look upon him, kneels to dress his wound. The knight, in this moment of anguish, articulates the name of his mistress; and the unfortunate object of his love thus recognizes her lover. He forms the design of eloping with her; the abbess discovers the plan, and the consent of her nun to its accomplishment. She condemns her, in her rage, to be buried alive; and the unhappy knight, wandering in vain round the church, hears the organ and the voices which are performing, underground, the buria' service of one who is still alive, and who loves him. This sit. iation is harrowing to the soul; but all ends, in like manner

THE DRAMAS OF KOTZEBUE. 11 happily. T. e Turks, led by the young knight, come to the deliverance of the victim. An Asiatic convent in the thirteenth century is treated in the same manner as the cloistered victims during the French Revolution; and a few sentiments, which are very gentle, but a little too easy, terminate the piece to the satisfaction of all the spectators. Kotzebue has composed a drama from the historical anecdote of the imprisonment of Grotius by the Prince of Orange, and his deliverance by his fiiends, who discover the means of conveying him out of the fortress where he is confined, hid in a chest of books. There are some situations in this piece worthy of notice: a young officer, in love with the daughter of Grotius, learns of her that she is trying to procure the escape of her father, and promises to assist her in this project; but the governor, his friend, being obliged to quit his charge for twenty-four hours, commits the keys of the citadel to his care. The governor is himself liable to the pain of death, if his prisoner escapes during his absence. The young lieutenant, in this manner made responsible for the life of his friend, prevents his mistress's father from saving himself, by forcing him back into his prison at the moment when he was ready to enter the boat prepared for his deliverance. The sacrifice made by this young lieutenant, in thus exposing himself to his mistress's indignation, is truly heroic; when the governor returns, and the officer, no longer fills the place of his friend, he finds means of drawing on himself, by a noble falsehood, the capital punishment denounced against those who shall have attempted, a second time, to rescue Grotius, and have at last succeeded in it. The joy of the young man, when his sentence of death insures him the return of his mistress's esteem, is of the most affecting beauty; but, in the conclusion, there is so much magnanimity in Grotius (who returns to deliver himself up again to save the young man's life), in the Prince of Orange, in the daughter, and in the author himself, that all we can do is to say amen to the whole. The situations of this piece have been transferred to a French play, but they are there ascribed to unknown Characters, and neither Grotius, nor the Prince of Orange, is

12 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMA NY. named in it. This is wisely done, for there is nothing in the German original that agrees in a particular manner with the characters of these two personages, such as history has represented them to us. Jane of Mont/fautcon being a chivalrous adventure of Kotzebue's own invention, he has used more freedom in that than in any other of his pieces, in the manner of treating his subject. A charming actress, Madame Unzelmann, used to play the principal part; and the manner in which she defended her heart and her castle against a discourteous knight produced a very agreeable impression on the stage. By turns warlike and desponding, her helmet and her dishevelled locks alike seemed to embellish her; but situations of this description are better suited to pantomime than to dialogue, and the words answer no other purpose than that of filling up the action. The Death of Rolla is of a merit superior to any that I have yet cited; the celebrated Sheridan has made a play from it entitled Pizarro, which was attended with the greatest success in England; a single expression at the conclusion of the piece produces an admirable effect. Rolla, the chief of the Peruvians, has for a long time fought against the Spaniards; he loved Cora, a Virgin of the Sun, and has nevertheless generously labored to vanquish the obstacles that separated her from Alonzo. A year after their marriage, the Spaniards carry off the infant son of Cora; Rolla exposes himself to every danger to recover him, and brings him back at last, covered with blood, in his cradle; Rolla observes the mother's terror at the sight. "Calm yourself," he says to her, " this blood is mine'" and he expires. Some German writers have not, I think, done justice to the dramatic talent of Kotzebue; but it is fit to acknowledge the estimable motives of this prejudice: Kotzebue has not always paid sufficient respect, in his plays, to strict virtue and positive religion; he has indulged himself in this error, not from adherence to system, as I conceive, but merely to produce, occasionally, a more powerful effect on the stage. It is not less true, however, that lie deserves to be censured in this respect

THE DRAMAS OF KOTZEBUE. 13 by rigid critics. Hie seems himself, for some years past, to have conformed to more regular principles, and so far from his genius losing by that conformity, it has in reality been considerably the gainer. Elevation and strength of sentiment always hold by some secret ties to the purity of morals.'' "The German Parnassus," says Carlyle, in his article on German Playwrights, "as one of its own denizens remarks, has a rather broad summit: yet only two Dramatists are reckoned, within the last half century, to have mounted thither-Schiller and Goethe; if we are not, on the strength of his Minna von Barnhelm and Ernilia Galotti, to account Lessing of the number. On the slope of the Mountain may be found a few stragglers of the same brotherhood; among these, Tieck and Maler Miller, firmly enough stationed at considerable elevations; while, far below, appear various honest persons climbing vehemently, but against precipices of loose sand, to whom we wish all speed. But the reader will understand that the bivouac we speak of, and are about to enter, lies not on the declivity of the Hill at all, but on the level ground close to the foot of it; the essence of a Playwright being that he works not in Poetry, but in Prose, which more or less cunningly resembles it. And here, pausing for a moment, the reader observes that he is in a civilized country; for there, on the very boundary line of Parnassus, rises a gallows, with the figure of a man hung in chains! It is the figure of August von Kotzebue, and has swung there for many years as a warning to all too audacious Playwrights, who nevertheless, as we see, pay little heed to it. Ill-fated Kotzebue, once the darling of theatrical Europe! This was the prince of all Playwrights, and could manufacture Plays with a speed and felicity surpassing even Edinburgh novels. For his muse, like other doves, hatched twins in the month; and the world gazed on them with an admiration too deep for mere words. What is all past or present popularity to this? Were not these Plays translated into almost every language of articulate-speaking men; acted, at least, we may literally say, in every theatre from Kamtschatka to Cadiz? Nay, did they not melt the most obdurate hearts in all countries, and, like the music of Orpheus, draw tears down iron cheeks? We ourselves have known the flintiest men, who professed to have wept over them, for the first time in their lives. So was it twenty years ago; how stands it to-day l Kotzebue, lifted up on the hollow balloon of popular applause, thought wings had been given him that he might ascend to the Immortals: gay he rose, soaring, sailing, as with supreme dominion; but, in the rarer azure deep, his windbag burst asunder, or the arrows of keen archers pierced it; and so at last we find him a compound-pendulrnm, vibrating in the character of scarecrow, to guard from forbidden fruit! O ye Playwrights, and literary quacks of every feather, weep over Kotzebue and over yourselves! Know that the loudest roar of the million is not fame; that the windbag, are ye mad enough to mount it, will burst, or be shot through with arrows, and your bones too shall act as scarecrows" —'Essays, p. 129.)-Ed.

14 MADAME lDE STAEL'S GERMANY. Kotzebue, and the greater part of the German writers, had borrowed the opinion of Lessing, that prose is the language proper for the theatre, and that tragedy should be brought as nearly as possible to the style of common life; Goethe and Schiller, by their latter works, and the writers of the new School, have overturned this system: these writers may rather be reproached with the contrary excess, that is, a poetry too exalted, and which turns aside the imagination from theatrical effect. In those dramatic authors who, like Kotzebue, adopted the principles of Lessing, we almost always meet with simplicity and interest; Agnes of Bernau, Julius of Tarentum, Don Dieyo, and Leonora, have been represented with great and deserved success; as these pieces have been translated in the collection of Friedel, it is useless to quote from them. It seems to me that Don Diego, and Leonora particularly, might, with some alterations, succeed upon the French stage. It would be necessary to preserve the touching picture of that deep and melancholy passion which forebodes misfortune, even before any reverse had announced it: the Scots call these presentiments of the heart a man's second sight; they are wrong in calling it the second, it is the first, and perhaps the only true sight. Among the prose tragedies that are elevated above the rank of melodrama, some essays of Gerstenberg deserve to be noticed. It has entered into his imagination to choose the death of Count Ugolino for the subject of a tragedy; the unity of place is there of necessity, since the piece begins and ends in the tower where Ugolino perishes with his three sons; as for the unity of time, more than twenty-four hours are needed to make a man die of hunger; but in the other respects the event is the same, and its progress is only marked by the increase of horror. There is nothing more sublime in Dante than the picture of this unhappy father, who has seen his three eons perish by his side, and who gluts himself in hell witl feeding on the skull of the ferocious enemy who made hirr. nis victim; but this episode is not fit for the subject of a lramatic piece; a catastrophe is not enough to furnish out a

THE DRAMA S OF KOTZEBITE. 1 tragedy.' The piece of Gerstenberg contains energetic beauties, and the moment when we hear the prison walled up, causes the most terrible impression that the mind is capable of experiencing, it is that of living death; but despair cannot sustain five acts; the spectator must either die or admit consolation; and we may apply to this tragedy what an intelligent American, Mr. G. Morris, said of the French in 1790: They have passed the bounds of Liberty. To pass the bounds of the pathetic, that is, to carry it beyond that degree of emotion which the soul is capable of supporting, is the same as to destroy the effect. Klinger, known by other writings, full of depth and sagacity, has composed a very interesting tragedy, called the Twins. The rage experienced by him who passes for the younger of the two brothers, his rebellion against the right of primogeniture, the effect of an instant, is admirably painted in this piece: some writers have pretended that to this species of jealousy is to be ascribed the destiny of the Iron Mask; however that may be, it is easy to comprehend how the hatred which this right of primogeniture is capable of exciting, may be more violent between twins. The two brothers go out together on horseback; their return is waited for; the day passes without their reappearing, but in the evening the horse of the elder is discovered returning alone to the paternal mansion: a circumstance so simple as this can hardly be found in any of our tragedies, and yet it freezes the blood in our veins: the brother has slain his brother, and the father, in his indignation, revenges the death of one son on the only survivor. This tragedy, full of warmth and eloquence, would produce a prodigious *;ffect, I conceive, if made to relate to celebrated personages; but one finds a difficulty in conceiving passions so violent exerting themselves for the birthright of a castle on the banks of the Tiber. It cannot be too often repeated, that tragedy requires historical subjects or religious traditions which awaGervinus calls Ug4olino " a piece without plan, exhibiting a hangman's antasy." -(Geschichte der Deittschen Dichtung, Vierter Band, S. 369.)-i-.,

16i MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. ken great recollections in the minds of the spectators; for in fictions, as well as in real life, imagination falls back on the past, however eager she may be after the future. The writers of the new school in Germany have more of the grandiose than all others, in the manner of conceiving the fine arts; and all their productions, whether successful upon the stage or not, are combined according to reflections and thoughts, of which the analysis is interesting; but men do not analyze in the theatre, and it is in vain to demonstrate that such a piece ought to succeed; if the spectator remains cold, the dramatic battle is lost; success, with some few exceptions, is the test of genius ill the arts; the public is almost always a very sensible judge, when its opinion is not influenced by passing circumstances. The greater part of those German tragedies which are not destined even by their authors for representation, are nevertheless very beautiful poems. One of the most remarkable is Genevieve of Brabant, of which Tieck' is the author: the 1 " Ludwig Tieck was born at Berlin, in 1773. At the age of nineteen he visited the university at Halle, and subsequently went to Gdttingen. On his return to Berlin, where he resided for several years, he became acquainted with Nicolai, the bookseller, and soon after, on his travels, saw the two Schlegels, with whom he formed a close intimacy. Their joint labors produced a new era in German poetry, which was styled' the romantic school.' In the year 1798, he went to Hamburg, where he married the daughter of Alberti, a clergyman. Thence he went to Jena, which in 1801 he left for Dresden, where he devoted himself exclusively to the study of art. From Dresden he retired to a poetical solitude near Frankfort on the Oder, and remained there for sonme time. In 1806, we find him at Rome, busily engaged in the study of the old German manuscripts, with which the library of the Vatican abounds. On his return to Germany, lihe led, on the whole, an unsettled life, till, 1825, he was appointed to the superintendence of the theatre at Dresden. It was under the patronage of Nicolai, the bookseller, that Tieck was ushered into public notice with his first works, Abdallah (1793), and William Lovell (1795). Some years after, he became one of the leaders of the romantic school, who, in their fondness of the middle ages, were apt to despise and ridicule modern light as unpoetical, and to become converts to Popery. Nicolai, the friend of Lessing, was thus, under the name of Nestor, exposed to laughter by Tieck, in his novel, Prince Zerbino (1799). Tieck's adhesion to the romantic school had rast been evidenced by his Peter lebrechts Volkrnaiirche.n by B'laubart, an~

THE DRAMAS OF KOTZEBUE. 17 ancient legend, that makes this saint live for ten years in a desert on herbs and fruits, without any other support for her child than the milk of a faithful doe, is admirably well treated in this romance in dialogue. The pious resignation of Genevieve is painted in the colors of sacred poetry, and the character of the man who accuses, after having attempted in vain to seduce her, is traced with a master's hand: this guilty person preserves, amid all his crimes, a sort of poetical imagination, which gives a gloomy originality to his actions, as well as his remorse. The exposition of this piece is made by St. Boniface, who relates the subject of it, and begins in these terms: "I am St. Boniface, who come hither to tell you," etc. It is not by chance that the author adopted this form; he shows too much depth and too much art in his other writings, and particularly in the very work which opens in this manner, not to show us clearly that it was his intention to render himself simple, like a contemporary of Genevieve; but, by dint of pretending to revive ancient times, we attain a certain affectation of simplicity, which only makes people laugh, whate'ver sober reason we may give them for being touched. Without doubt, we should know how to transport ourselves into the age the manners of which it is our intention to paint; yet we must not altogether forget our own. The perspective of pictures, whatever be the object they represent, should always be taken according to the point of view in which they are to be contemplated. Among the authors who have remained constant to the imitation of the ancients, Collin deserves the first rank. Vienna prides herself in this poet, one of the most highly esteemed by Der Gestiefelte Eater, all of which appeared in 1797. His Kaiser OctavMan and Genofeva are written in the same spirit, likewise his Phantasus, published in 1812. At a later period, he wrote Der Aufrulhr in den Cevenanen, and Vittoria Accorombona, novels of a less fanciful cast. His translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and, conjointly with W. Schlegel, of Shakspeare, are deemed the best that Germany possesses. In 1842, the King of Prussia invited him to his palace of Sanssouci. Though generally oelieved to be a convert to the Romish creed, he died as a Protestant, at Berlin, April 99th, 1853."-Ed.

18 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. in Germany, and perhaps, for a long while past, the only pout of Austria. His tragedy of Regulus would succeed in France if it were known there. In Collin's manner there is a mixture of elevation and sensibility, of Roman austerity and religious mildness, that seems made expressly to reconcile the taste of the ancients with that of the moderns. That scene in his tragedy of Polyxena in which Calchas commands Neoptolemus to sacrifice the daughter of Priam on the tomb of Achilles, is one of the finest things that has ever been heard. The appeal of the infernal deities, demanding a victim to appease the ghosts of the slain, is expressed with a gloomy strength, a subterraneous terror, that seems to lay open to us the abysses underneath our feet. No doubt we are continually recalled to the admiration of ancient subjects, and up to the present time, all the efforts of the moderns to draw out of their own funds sufficient to place them on an equality with the Greeks, have never succeeded; it is, nevertheless, desirable to reach that noble emulation; for not only does the principle of imitation exhaust itself, but the spirit of our age makes itself constantly felt in the manner of our treating the fables or the facts of antiquity. Collin himself, for instance, though he has conducted his play of Polyxena with great simplicity through the former acts, renders it complicated towards the conclusion, by a diversity of incidents. The French have incorporated the gallantry of the age of Louis XIV with subjects taken from antiquity; the Italians often treat them with pompous affectation; the English, always natural, have imitated only the Romans on their stage, because they perceived in them some relation with themselves. The Germans introduce the philosophy of metaphysics, or a variety of romantic events into their tragedies, founded on Grecian subjects. No writer of our days will ever attain to the composition of ancient poetry. It would be better, then, that our religion and our manners should create foi us a modern poetry, whose beauty should consist in its own peculiar nature, like that of the ancients. A Danish writer, CEhlenschliger, has himself translated his ~wn plays into German. The analogy between the two lan

THE DRAMMAS OF KOTZEBUE- 19 guages admits the possibility of writing equally well in both, and Baggesen, also a Dane, had already given the example of a great genius for versification in a foreign idiom. A fine dramatic imagination discovers itself in the tragedies of (Ehlenschlaiger. They are said to have met with great success on the stage of Copenhagen: in the closet, they are calculated to excite interest under two principal relations: first, because the author has sometimes found the means of reconciling the regularity of the French drama with the diversity of situations which the German taste requires; and secondly, because he has represented, in a manner at once true and poetical, the history and the fables of ancient Scandinavia. We are little acquainted with the North, which touches upon the confines of the habitable world; the long nights of the northern countries, during which only the reflection of the snow seems to enlighten the earth; the darkness which bounds the horizon in the distance, even when the vault of heaven is illuminated by the stars, all seem to give the idea of unknown space, of a nocturnal universe by which our world is encircled. The air, so piercing as to congeal the breath, drives all warmth backwards on the soul, and nature herself, in these climates, appears made only to concentrate man within himself. The heroes of northern poetical fiction have something gigantic in them. In their character, superstition is united to strength, while everywhere else it seems to partake of weakness. Images, drawn from the rigor of the climate, characterize the poetry of the Scandinavians; they call vultures the wolves of the air; the boiling lakes formed by volcanoes preserve during winter the birds that seek refuge in the atmosphere by which these lakes are surrounded; in these regions of cloud, every thing is impressed with a character of grandeur and gloom. The Scandinavian nations possessed a sort of physical strength that seemed to exclude deliberation, and impelled the will, like a rock precipitating itself to the bottom of the mountain. The iron men of Germany cannot make us suffi

2o0 MADAME DE STAEI' S GERMANY. ciently comprehend these inhabitants of the extremity of the earth: they unite the irritability of passion to the persevering coldness of resolution; and nature herself has not disdained to paint them with a poet's pencil, when she placed in Iceland a volcano which vomits torrents of fire from a bosom of eternal snow. (Ehlenschltiger has created for himself an entirely new career, in taking for the subjects of his plays the heroic traditions of his country; and, by following this example, the literature of the North may one day become equally celebrated with that of Germany. It is here that I choose to terminate the review which I meant to give of those pieces of the German theatre which partake in any degree of the character of tragedy. I shall not sum up the defects and beauties which this tableau may present to us. There is so much diversity of genius and of system among the dramatic poets of Germany, that the same judgment cannot apply to all. Besides, the greatest praise that can be bestowed upon them is that very diversity; for, in the empire of literature, as in others, unanimity is almost always a sign of servitude. CHAPTER XXVI. OF COMEDY. THE IDEAL of tragic character consists, says W. Schlegel, in the victory obtained by the will over destiny, or over our passions; that of comedy, on the contrary, expresses the empire of physical over moral existence: whence it follows that gluttony and poltroonery are, in all places, an inexhaustible subject of pleasantry. The love of life appears to man the most ridiculous and the most vulgar of feelings, and the laughter which seizes upon mortal beings, when contemplating the object of

GERMAN COMEDY. 21 one of their fellow-mortals suffering under the apprehension of death, is a noble attribute of the soul. But when we quit the circle, a little too common, of these universal pleasantries, when we arrive at the ridiculous extravagances of self-love, we find that they partake of an infinite variety, according to the habits and tastes of each nation. Gayety may flow either from natural inspiration, or social relations; in the former case, it is suitable to men of all courntries; in the latter, it differs with the difference of times, places, and customs; for the efforts of vanity being always directed towards making an impression on others, it is necessary to know what is attended with most success at such an epoch, and in such a place, in order to ascertain to what particular object those efforts should be applied: there are countries in which fashion renders ridiculous even fashion itself, which appears to have for its object to place every man out of the reach of ridicule, by giving to all a similar mode of existence. In the German comedies, the great world is, in general, but badly described; there are few good models to be imitated in this respect: society does not attract distinguished characters, and its greatest charm, which consists in the agreeable art of reciprocal pleasantry, would not succeed among them; it would soon dash in pieces the self-love which is accustomed to enjoy itself in tranquillity, and it might easily also wither that virtue which would take offence even at an innocent pleasantry. The Germans seldom bring forward on the stage objects of ridicule taken from the manners of their own nation; they do not observe others, and are still less capable of examining themselves, under external relations; they would fancy that in so:loing, they were in a manner wanting to the fidelity which whey owe to themselves. Besides, susceptibility, which is one )f the characteristic features of their nature, renders it very difficult to them to handle pleasantry with lightness; they frequently do not understand it, land, when they do understand it, it vexes them, and they dare not make use of it in their turn; it is like a gun, which they are afraid of seeing burst in \heir hands.

22 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. There are not, then, many specimens in Germany of that species of comedy which has the absurdities of society for its object. Natural originality would be better perceived among them; for every man lives after his own fashion in a country where the despotism of custom does not hold its sittings in a great capital; but, although there is a greater freedom of opinion in Germany than in England itself, English originality is invested with more lively colors, because the movement that exists in the political state in England, gives better opportunity to every man to display himself as he is. In the south of Germany, particularly at Vienna, a sufficient vein of gayety is discoverable in the farces. The Tyrolese buffoon, Casperle, has a character peculiar to himself; and in all these pieces, of somewhat low comedy, both authors and actors make it their rule to have no pretension to elegance, and establish themselves in the natural, with an energy and decision, which amply compensates the want of artificial refinements. The Germans prefer strong to delicate humor; they seek truth in their tragedies, and caricature in their comedies. All the intricacies of the heart are known to them; but the refinement of social wit does not excite them to gayety; the trouble that it costs them to comprehend, deprives them of the enjoyment of it. I shall have occasion to speak elsewhere of Iffland, the first actor of Germany, and one of her most lively writers; he has composed several pieces, which are excellent in the delineation of character, and the representation of domestic manners; and these family pictures are rendered the more striking, by the personages of a truly comic cast that are always introduced into them: nevertheless, we may sometimes find with these comedies the fault of being too reasonable; they are too carefully adapted to fulfil the purpose of the motto in front of the stage: to correct by laughing (corriger les mocurs en riant) They have too many young people in debt, too many fathers of families who have become embarrassed. Moral lessons are not the province of comedy, and there is even some danger in 3dmritting them into it; for when they prove fatiguing, it is toe

GERMAN COMEDY. 23 possible that the impression produced at the theatre may become the habitual feeling of real life. Kotzebue has borrowed from a Danish poet, Holberg, a comedy which has met with great success in Germany; it is entitled Don Ranudo Colibrados; it is a ruined gentleman, who tries to pass himself off for a man of fortune, and employs, in making a show, the little money he has, which is scarcely sufficient to keep himself and his family from starving. The subject of this piece serves as an appendage and contrast to Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who wishes to pass for a gentleman; there are many lively, and some truly comic scenes in the Poor Nobleman; but it is a barbarous sort of comedy. The point of ridicule that Molieire has seized is intrinsically gay, but there is real misery at the foundation of that which the Danish poet has adopted; no doubt, it almost always requires great intrepidity of'genius to treat human life as a jest, and comic force supposes a character at least of indifference; but it would be wrong to push this force so far as to brave the feeling of compassion; art itself would suffer by it, to say nothing of delicacy; for the slightest impression of grief is sufficient to tarnish all that is poetical in the full abandonment of the soul to gayety. The comedies of Kotzebue's own invention, in general, bear marks of the same talent as his tragic pieces, the knowledge of stage effect, and an imagination fruitful in the invention of striking situations. It has been for some time past pretended, that to laugh or cry proves nothing in favor either of comedy or tragedy; I am far from being of this opinion: the desire of lively emotions is the source of the greatest pleasures that can be derived from the fine arts; but we must not conclude from thence that tragedy should be changed into melodrama, or E omedies into Bartholomew Fair farces, but real talent consists in composing in such a manner, as to produce, in the same play, or even in the same scene of a play, food for the tears or the laughter of the populace, and an inexhaustible subject for the reflections of the thinking part of the audience. Parody, properly so called, can hardly be admitted on the

24 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. German stage; their tragedies almost always affording a mixture of heroic and subaltern personages, give little room to this species of humor. The pompous majesty of the French theatre is alone capable of giving force to the contrast of a burlesque. We remark in Shakspeare, and sometimes in the German writers also, a bold and singular manner of displaying, even in tragedy, the ridiculous side of human nature; and when the power of pathos can be set in opposition to this ilnpression, the effect of the whole becomes greater. The French is the only theatre in which the boundaries of comedy and tragedy are distinctly marked; everywhere else, genius, like the lot of nature, employs gayety as the means of sharpening grief. I have seen at Weimar some of Terence's plays literally translated into German, and played with masks, nearly resembling those of the ancients; these masks do not cover the whole countenance, they only substitute more comic or more regular features for the real features of the actor, and give tc his person an expression analogous to that of the character he is to perform. The physiognomy of a great actor is vastly superior to this; but the middling class of performers gains by it. The Germans seek to appropriate to themselves the ancient and modern inventions of all countries; nevertheless, they possess nothing really national, in respect of comedy, but popular buffoonery, and pieces in which the marvellous furnishes matter for pleasantry. An example of this may be cited in an opera which is performed on all the stages from one end of Germany to the other, called the Nymph of the Danube, or the Nymph of the Spree, just as the piece happens to be played at Vienna or at Berlin. A knight has become the object of a fairy's passion, and is separated from her by circumstance; a long while after he marries, and chooses for his wife a very worthy woman, but who has nothing seductive, either of wit or imagination: the knight accomodates himself as well as he can to this situation, which appears to him so much the more natural, as it is common; for few persons understand that it is superiority of sou

GERMAN C OMEDY. 25 and of int iel.: ilhat most nearly approaches to the original of our nature. The fhiry is unable to lose the remembrance of her lover, and pursues him by the wonders of her art; every time that Le beginls to establish himself in his domestic econorny, sle draws his attention by prodigies, and thus awakens in timn the recollection of their past affection. If the lknight approaches the banks of a river, he hears its wavets Inuriu1111rig the lays which the fairy was accustomed to sing to, hirm; if' }e invites guests to his table, winged genii place themselves at. the board, and spread a general consternation among the prosaic friends and relatives of his wife. Wherever he goes, flowers, dances, and concerts spring up to harass, like phantoms, the life of the faithless lover; and on the other side malignant spirits amuse themselves in tormenting his servant, who, in his way also, desires nothing so much as never more to hear poetry spoken of: at last the fairy is reconciled to the knight, on condition that he shall pass three days with her in every year; and his wife willingly consents to let her husband derive from the society of the fairy that enthusiasm which seems so well to insure the enjoyment of what we love. The subject of this piece appears to be more ingenious than popular; but the marvellous scenes are mixed and varied in it with so much art, that it equally amuses all classes of spectators. The new literary school, in Germany, has a system in comedy, as well as in every thing else; the delineation of manners does not suffice to excite its interest, it requires imagination in the conception of the subjects, and in the invention of the characters; the marvellous, allegory, history, no diversity of comic situations appears too much for it. The writers of this school have given the name of the arbitrary comic (comique arbitraire,) to that free range of all ideas without restraint and without determinate end. They rely, in this respect, on the example of Aristophanes, not assuredly because they approve the licentiousness of his pieces, but they are struck with the vein of gayety which they exhibit, and they would willingly introduce among the moderns that daring comedy which makes VOL. II.-2

MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. sport of the universe, instead of confining itself to what is ridicillous in the different classes of society. The efforts of the new school tend, in general, to give more force anl indepen. dence to the understanding in every province: alid whatever successes they experience in this attempt, would be a victory for literature, and still more for the energy of the German character itself; but it is always difficult to inlflnllce, by general ideas, the spontaneous effusions of the imagination; and besides, a comedy calculated to lead the populace, like that of the Greeks, would never agree with the actual state of European society. Aristophanes lived under a government so republican, that the people had a share in every part of it, and affairs of state were easily transferred from the forum to the theatre. He lived in a country where philosophical speculations were almost as familiar to all men as the chefs-d'ouvre of art, because the schools were held in the open air, and the most abstract ideas were clothed in the brilliant colors which the sky and nature lent to them; but how create anew all this animation of life amid the frosts of our atmosphere, and with our domestic habits of existence? Modern civilization has multiplied the means of observing the human heart; man is better acquainted with man; and the soul, as it were, disseminated, offers to the writer a thousand new shades of variety. Comedy takes advantage of these shades, and when able to give them the relief of dramatic situations, the spectator is delighted to recognize on the stage, characters such as he may easily meet with in the world; but the introduction of the people at large into comedy, of choruses into tragedy, of allegorical personages, of sects of philosophy, in short, of all that presents men en masse, and in an abstract manner, would never please the spectators of our times. They require specific names and individual characters; they seek the interest of romance even in comedy, and society on the stage. Among the writers of the new school, Tieck possesses, most of all, the true feeling of pleasantry; not that he has composed a single comedy that can be ed. -r that those he has wit

GERMAN COMEDY. 27 ten are well arranged, but they display brilliant traces of very original humor. At first he seized, in a manner which reminds us of La Fontaine, the handle for pleasantry which animals are calculated to furnish. He has composed a comedy entitled Puss in Boots, which is admirable in this manner. I know not what effect would be produced on the stage by speaking animals; perhaps they are more amusing to be imagined than to be seen; but these animals personified, and acting like men, give, notwithstanding, an idea of the real comedy which nature inspires. All comic, that is, selfish and sensual characters, have a touch of the animal. It matters little, then, whether the comedy is the animal imitating man, or man imitating the animal. Tieck also interests us by the direction he has known how to give to his talent for ridicule; he bends its whole force against a calculating and plodding spirit; and as most of the pleasantries of society have for their object to cast ridicule upon enthusiasm, we love the author who ventures himself, foot to foot against prudence, selfishness, all those qualities that pretend to the appellation of reason, behind which the middling sort of people think themselves securely placed to shoot their arrows, against superior characters or abilities. They rely on what they call a just medium to censure every thing distinguished; and while elegance consists in the superfluous abundance of objects of external luxury, it seems as if this same elegance interdicted all luxury in the mind, all exultation in sentiments-in short, all that does not immediately tend to improve the prosperity of worldly affairs. Modern selfishness has found out the art of praising reserve and moder ation in all things, so as to mask itself under the semblance of wisdom; and it was only at length perceived that such opinions might well annihilate genius, generosity, love, and religion: what would it leave that is worth the pain of living? Two of Tieck's comedies, Octavian and Prince Zerbino, are, both of them, very ingeniously combined. A son of the Emperor Octavian (an imaginary personage placed by a fairy tale under the reign of King Dagobert) while yet an infant in the

28 MADAME DE STAELIS GERMANY. cradle, is lost in a forest. A citizen of Paris finds him, brings him up with his own son, and makes himself pass for his father. At twenty years of age, the heroical inclinations of the young prince betray him under every circumstance, and nothing is more striking'than the contrast between his character and that of his pretended brother, whose blood does not belie the education he has received. The efforts of the sage citizen to cram the head of his adopted son with lessons of domestic economy are altogether useless: he sends him to market to purchase some bullocks; the young man, on his return, sees a hawk in the hands of a huntsman, and, enchanted with its beauty, exchanges the bullocks for the hawk, and comes back quite proud of having obtained such a bird at such a price. Another time he meets a horse, and is transported with its warlike air: he inquires the price of it, and when he is informed, angry at their asking so little for so noble an animal, he pays twice the value for it. The pretended father for a long time resists the young man's natural propensities, which animate him with ardor in the pursuit of danger and glory; but when he finds himself at last unable to prevent him from taking arms against the Saracens, who are besieging Paris, and when he hears his exploits made the subject of universal praise, the old citizen, on his side, is seized by a sort of poetical contagion; and nothing is more pleasant than the whimsical mixture of what he was, and of what he wishes to become, of his vulgar language, and the gigantic images with which his discourse is filled. At last the young man is recognized for the emperor's son, and each individual returns to the rank which is suitable to his character. This subject furnishes a number of scenes full of wit and true comic humor; and the contrast between common life and chivalrous sentiments was never better represented. Prince Zerbino is a very lively painting of the astonishment t f a whole court, at witnessing in its sovereign a propensity to enthusiasm, devotion, and all the noble imprudencies of a generous character. All the old courtiers suspect that he is mad, and advise him to travel, to set his ideas right as to things as

GERMAN COMEDY. 29 they really are. They assign to him a very reasonable man for his governor, to bring him back to the positive knowledge of life. One fine day in summer he is walking abroad with his pupil in a beautiful wood, while the birds are heard to sing, the wind gently stirs the leaves, and animated nature seems, on all side, to be addressing a prophetic language to man. The governor perceives in these vague and multiplied sensations nothing but noise and confusion; and when he returns to the palace, he congratulates himself on seeing the trees converted into household furniture, all the productions of nature rendered subservient to utility, and artificial order instead of the tumultuous movement of natural existence. The courtiers are reassured when, on his return from his travels, Prince Zerbino, enlightened by experience, promises to concern himself no longer about the fine arts, poetry, and exalted sentiments, or any thing else, in short, but what tends to the triumph of selfishness over enthusiasm. What the generality of men are most afraid of, is the being taken for dupes, and who think it much less ridiculous to appear wrapped up in themselves, under every circumstance, than deceived even in one. There is, therefore, wit, and a noble employment of wit, in turning incessantly into ridicule all personal calculation; enough of it will always remain to keep the world in motion, while, one of these days, the very remembrance even of a nature truly elevated, may vanish altogether. In Tieck's comedies is to be found a gayety arising out of characters, and not consisting in witty epigram, a gayety in which the imagination is inseparable from the pleasantry; but sometimes this very imagination sets comic humor at a distance, and brings back lyrical poetry into scenes where we expect to find only the ridiculous in motion. Nothing is so difficult to the Germans as to abstain from abandoning themielves, in all their works, to reverie; and yet comedy, and the theatre in general, are hardly proper for it, for of all impressions, reverie is precisely that which is the most solitary; we ean hardly communicate its inspirations to the most intimate

30 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. friend: how is it possible, then, to associate with them an assembled multitude? Among these allegorical pieces, must be reckoned the Trtumph of Seztimnentality, a little comedy of Goethe's in which he has very ingeniously availed himself of the double absurdity of affected enthusiasm and real inanity. The principal personage in this piece seems to be prepossessed with all the ideas which imply a strong imagination and a profound intellect; and yet he is in truth only a prince well educated, highly polished, and very obedient to the rules of propriety; he has taken it into his head to add to all this a sensibility at command, the affectation of which continually betrays him. He thinks he loves the gloom of forests, the moonlight, and starry nights; but, as he is afraid of cold and fatigue, he has scenes painted for him to represent these various objects, and never travels without being followed by a great wagon, in which all the beauties of nature are carried after him. This sentimental prince also fancies himself in love with a woman, whose wit and genius have been highly extolled to him. This woman, to try him, puts in her place a veiled puppet, which, as we may suppose, says nothing in the least degree improper, and whose silence passes for the reserve of good taste, and the melancholy thoughtfulness of a tender soul. The prince, enchanted with this companion, according to his wishes, asks the puppet in marriage, and only at last discovers that he is unhappy enough to have chosen a mere doll for his wife, while his court afforded him such a number of women, who might have upited in themselves all the principal qdvantages of such a partner. It cannot, however, be denied, that ingenious ideas are not enough to make a good comedy, and the French, in the quality of comic writers, have the advantage over all other nations. The knowledge of men, and the art of making use of that knowledge, secures to them the highest rank in this department; but we might perhaps sometimes wish, even in MoliBre's best pieces, that reasoning satire held less place, and

DECLAMATION. 8 that imagination had more scope in them. The Festin ds Pierre is, among all his comedies, that which has the nearest resemblance to the German system: a prodigy that makes one shudder, serves as the moving principle to the most comic situations; and the greatest effects of the imagination are mingled with the most lively shades of pleasantry. This subject, equally witty and poetical, is borrowed from the Spaniards. Bold conceptions are very rare in France; in literature, they like to work in safety: but whenever a fortunate circumstance has encouraged them to risk themselves, taste directs boldness with wonderful address; and a foreign invention, thrown into method by the art of a Frenchman, will always be a first-rate production of genius. CHAPTER XXVII. OF DECLAMATION. THE art of declamation, leaving only recollections behind it, and being incapable of erecting any durable monument, it has followed that men have reflected but little upon what it is composed of. Nothing is so easy as the moderate exercise of this art, but it is not unjustly that in its perfection it excites so high a degree of enthusiasm, and, far from depreciating this impression as a transient emotion, I think that regular causes may be assigned to it. We seldom attain, in life, to penetrate the secret thoughts of men; affectation and falsehood, coldness and modesty, exaggerate, vary, restrain, or conceal whatever passes at the bottom of the heart. A great actor puts in evidence the signs of truth in sentiments and in iharacters, and discovers to us the certain marks of real inclinations and emotions. So many individuals pass through life without considering the danger of their passions and their strength, that the theatre often reveals man to man, and inBplres him with a holy dread of the tempests of the soul. In'act, what words are capable of painting them like an accent,

32 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. a gesture, a look! Words tell us less than accent, accent less than physiognomy, and the inexpressible is precisely that with which a sublime actor brings us acquainted. The same differences that exist between the tragic system of the Germans, and that of the French, are also to be found in their mode of declaiming; the Germans imitate nature as closely as they are able,-they have no affectation but that of simplicity; but even this may be an affectation in the fine arts. The German actors sometimes touch the heart deeply, and sometimes leave the spectator in a state of perfect frigidity; they then trust themselves to his patience, and are sure of not being deceived. The English have more of majesty than the Germans in their mode of reciting verses, but they nevertheless want the habitual pomp which the French nation, and above all French tragedy, require of their actors; our style will not admit of mediocrity, for it brings us back to the natural only by the very beauty of art itself. The second-rate actors in Germany are cold and quiet; they are often wanting in tragic effect, but are hardly ever ridiculous: it is the same on the German stage as in society; we meet with people who sometimes fatigue us, and that is all; while, on the French stage, we become inpatient if our emotions are not excited: turgid and unnatural sounds then disgust us so entirely with tragedy, that there is no parody, however vulgar, which we do not prefer to the insipidity of mannerism. The accessories of art, machinery, and decorations ought to be more attended to in Germany than in France, since these means are more frequently employed in the former nation. Iffland has been able to accomplish, at Berlin, all that can be desired in this respect; but at Vienna, they neglect even the necessary means or the good representation of the material parts of tragedy. Memory is infinitely more cultivated by the French than by the German actors. The prompter at Vienna used to furnish most of the actors with every word of their parts; and I have seen him following Othello from one side-scene to another, to prompt him with the verses which he had to pronounce at the bottom of the stage, on poniarding Desdemona.

DECLAhATION. 8 The theatre at Weimar is infinitely better ordered in all rev dpects.1 The prince, himself an intelligent man, and the mar of genius, the connoisseur in the arts, who preside there, have found the means of uniting taste and elegance to that boldness which encourages new adventures. 1 "' The Weimar School,' says Devrient,2 who is here speaking ex professor and is worth attending to,' although it demanded of the artist " to produce something resembling nature," nevertheless set up a new standard of nobleness and beauty, by which every phenomenon in the region of art was to be tested. The tendency hitherto dominant had by no means neglected the beautiful, but it had sought only a beautiful reality, —now, with subtle distinction, beautifl1 truth was demanded from it. Hitherto, living nature had served as the standard; now, an enlightened taste was to be the rule. The actors were to disaccustom themselves to the native German manner, and find a freer, a more universal conception; they were to raise themselves out of the narrow limits of the special, of the individual, to the contemplation of the general, of the Ideal. "' These were astoundingly new and hard demands on the actor. Hitherto a plain understanding, with vivid and sensitive feelings, had tolerably well sufficed to make this natural talent tell; for the problems lay within the actor's circle of vision. Now, appeal was principally made to his taste; he was required to have a refined instinct, and ennobled sentiments, which, to a certain degree, presupposed scientific and antiquarian culture; for, instead of nature, as hitherto, the antique was now the model of speech and feature. The actual culture of the histrionic class was not in the remotest degree adequate to these demands; what, then, was to be done? The Weimar School must content itself with training; it must seek to supply by external drilling what ought properly to have proceeded from a higher intellectual life, from an intrinsically ennobled nature. Nothing else remained to it. The spirit of our literature was pressing forward with unexampled power to that summit on which it could from thenceforth measure itself with that of all other nations; it carried along with it theatrical art, such as it was. If the attempt had been made to advance the culture of actors as far as was necessary, in order to bring it even with the victorious iarch of our literature, the moment would have been lost in which the stage could render immeasurable service to the national culture. "' Goethe and Schiller had essentially this mission: to elevate poetry; to carry the intellectual life of the nation into higher ideal regions; literature was their immediate object, the stage only a secondary one; nay, it was with them only a means to an end. To work with entire devotion to dramatic art, solely for it and through it, as Moliire and Shakspeare did, lever occurred to them; nor would they imitate Lessing, who attached himself closely to art, to what it achieved, and could achieve. They placed 2 Geschichte der deutschen Schauspiel Kunst, p. 255. 2*

314 MADAME DE -STkAEL'S GERMANY. On this stage, as on all others in Germany, the same actors play both comic and tragic parts. It is said that this diversity stands in the way of their ever becoming eminent in either. Yet the greatest of theatrical geniuses, Garrick and Talma, themselves and their poems on the standpoint of the independent literary drama. The old schism between the genres again presented itself, the scholarly in opposition to the popular drama; and poetic art again won the supremacy over dramatic. Don Carlos and Wallenstein were not conceived for the actual stage, and could only be adapted to it with great labor and sacrifice; in writing Faust, Tasso, and the NYatiirliche Tochter, Goethe did not contemplate their representation, which must be considered purely as a theatrical experiment. It was a natural consequence that, since the two great poets adapted their works to the theatre just as it was, and were by no means excessively fastidious in their mode of doing it, they, with the same sort of violence, pushed forward the art of representation, and here also had to content themselves with what could be achieved by merely external discipline. Dramatic art had not reached that point of culture which could prepare it perfectly to comprehend and master their poems, and reproduce them independently..... Now if this new school was to make its authority in taste acknowledged, that authority must necessarily be exercised with a certain despotism; —with despotism towards the actors and the public, since both were deeply imbued with naturalism. Like the unfortunate Neuber, like Schroeder in his eightieth year, Schiller and Goethe placed themselves in decided opposition to the taste of the majority. They maintained a thoroughly aristocratic position with respect to the public, and defended the ideal principle with all the power of their pre-eminent genius; nay, they did not scorn to attack the prevalent taste with the sharpest weapons of satire. Their correspondence exhibits their aontempt for the masses, and for the champions of the popular taste, inl all that rudeness which seems inseparable from the enthusiasm of great souls for a more exalted humanity. Nowhere did they sue for the approbation of the multitude; nowhere did they accommodate themselves to the ruling taste, or even flatter it.' The despotic energy with which Goethe carried out the ideal principle, in spite of all difficulties, necessarily made itself felt in his direction of the theatre. He had to urge forward dramatic art, and to wring from the public a formal respect for the experiments of his school; a double task, Iwhich obliged him to surpass even Schroeder in the peremptoriness of his i ommands. "' How great the difficulty which was here to be overcome, can scarcely be appreciated in the present day, when every variety of verse is current on the most insignificant stage. The language of poetry was lost; the attempt to restore the Alexandrines had everywhere failed; rhythmic feeling, which the higher development of the opera had certainly extended among artists, was not yet understood, not yet applied to language. That even Mannheim, where attempts had most frequently been made with

DEOLAMATION. 35 have united them both. The flexibility of organs, which transmits differenl impressions with equal facility, seems to me the seal of natural talent; and in fiction, as in reality, melancholy and gayety are possibly derived from the same source. Beiambic verse, had remained far from clear as to its principle, was proved by Iffland's very defective treatise on this verse. Schroeder, in the repre sentation of Don Carlos at Hamburg, true to his system, had laid no weight on the rhetorical side. Thus there existed difficulties similar to those which, at the end of the seventeenth century, hindered the spread of the Alexandrine verse, and the influence of the Silesian school of poets on literature. It was fortunate, therefore, that the poets who introduced the new metrical language were consummate masters in its use, and that they had opportunity and power enough to solve the problem practically. When this had once been done, imitation might be calculated upon, and tihe influential mediator, Iffland, offered himself readily for that purpose. But immediately another problem urged itself-namely, how to treat correctly the doggerel rhymes in Wallenstein's Lager. The great poets feared the danger which lay for the reciter in the irregularity of the rhyme-in the ~temnptation to fall too perceptibly on the rhyume; but, remarkably enough, this point was soon settled. It was as if the mediaeval popular verse lay in the German blood; it only required a summons to call it forth againl naturally and flowingly, as in the time of Hans Sachs, and Jacob Ayrer...... The system of direction which was introduced by Schroeder, and in which the highest value was attached to reading-rehearsals as the basis of all artistic execution, was adopted by Goethe; in this case, in which the rhetorical part of the representation was so new and so surpassingly important, these rehearsals must not only be multiplied, but converted into formal exercises in reading. And so difficult was it to give rhythm its due, that Goethe, in the zeal of demonstration, went so far as to seize the arm of a principal and popular actress, and to move it backwards and forwards in iambic measure, so as make the rhythm intelligible by the accompaniment of a resentfully accentuated sch. The solution of the new problem involved hard trials of patience on all sides, and many a custom which had become prevalent under the old system, was a hindrance to the work. Thus, Goethe writes to Schiller, after a reading-rehearsal: M' lle. Teller read the Duchess yesterday so far well that she did not read Falsely, but too feebly, and too much in rehearsal fashion. She assures me that all will be different on the stage. As this is a universal whim with actors, I cannot blame her in particular for it, though this folly is the principal cause that no important part is properly learned, and that at last so much depends on chance."' "Not only were there difficulties of rhythm, but also of pronunciation to die overcome. The German language. harsh as it is at the best, becomes hideous in the careless licenses of pronunciation which various cities and classes adopt-as people who are too ugly tc hope for any admiration of t.heir persons, come at last entirely to neglect their appearance. The Sua

36 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. sides, in Germany the pathetic and the humorous so often succeed and are mingled with each other in tragedies, that it is very desirable for the actors to possess the power of expressing both alike; and the best German actor, Iffland, has given the example of it with deserved success. I have not met in Germany with any good actors in high comedy, marquises, coxcombs, etc. What constitutes grace in this description of parts, is that which the Italians call the disinvoltura, and which the French would express by the air degag6. The hab it which the Germans possess, of giving importance to every thling, is precisely that which is most contrary to this easy lightness. But it is impossible to carry originality, the comic vein, and the art of painting characters, to a greater length than Iffland has done in his parts. I do not believe that we have ever seen on the French stage a genius more varied or more unexpected than his, or an actor who ventures to render natural defects and absurdities with so striking an expression. There are certain given models in comedy, avaricious fathers, spendthrift sons, knavish servants, duped guardians; but Iffland's parts, such as he conceives them, can enter into none of these moulds: each of them must be designated by its name; for they are so many individuals remarkably different from each other, and in all of whom Iffland appears to exist as in himself. I-Iis manner of playing tragedy is also, in my opinion, of bians. Austrians, and especially the Weimarians, plagued Gqethe terribly with their snorting of that'language of horses,' as Charles V called it.'One would scarcely believe that b, p, d, and t, are generally considered to be four different letters,' said the poet to Eckermann,'for they only speak of a hard and a soft b, and of a hard and a soft d, and thus seem tacitly to intimate thatp and t do not exist.1 With such people, pein (pain) sounds,ike bein (leg), pass (pass) like bass (bass), and teckel (a terrier) like deckel (cover). Thus, an actor, in an impassioned moment bidding his mistress cease her reproaches, exclaimed, 0 ente (Oh, duck!) meaning 0 ende (Oh cease!) " —(Lewes, Life and Works *f Goethe, vol. ii. pp. 248-253.) —Ed. I "Ludecus, in his Aus Goethe's Leben: Wahrheit und keine Dichtung, tells story of Graf, Schiller's favorite actor, who, on seeing the great Talma, exclaimed,'.Dalma, ist ein Gott! I'

DECLAMATION. 37 grand effect. The calm simplicity of his declamation in the fine part of Wallenstein, can never be effaced from the memory. The impression he produces is gradual; it seems at first that his apparent coldness will prove incapable of exciting any emotion: but, as the play goes on, that emotion grows uwpon us in a continually accelerated progression, and the smallest word exercises a great power, when there reigns in the general tone a noble tranquillity, that sets off every shade, and constantly preserves the same color of character amid all the variations of passion. liffiand, who is as superior in the theory as in the practice of his art, has published several remarkably sensible works on declamation; he gives at first a sketch of the different epochs of the history of the German theatre, the stiff and heavy imitation of the French, the larmoyante sensibility of dramas, of a nature so prosaic, as to have made the writers even forget the art of versifying; finally, the return to poetry and imagi nation that constitutes the prevailing taste in Germany at the present time. There is not an accent, not a gesture, of which Iffland has not been able to discover the cause as a philosopher and an artist. One character in his pieces furnishes him with the most ingenious observations on comic performance; it is that of a man advanced in years, who all at once abandons his old sentiments and habits to clothe himself in the costume and opinions of the new generation. The character of this man has nothing wicked in it, and yet he is as much led astray by vanity, as if it had been intrinsically bad. He has suffered his daughter to contract a reasonable, though obscure alliance, and then, on a sudden, advises her to obtain a divorce. With some fashionable toy in his hand, smiling graciously, and balancing himself, now on one foot, then on the other, he proposes to his child to break the most sacred ties; but the existence of old age that discovers itself through a forced elegance, the real embarrassment struggling through his apparent indifference, these are traits which Iffiand has seized with adnmirable sagacity.

38 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. In treating of Franz Moor, the brother of Schiller's Captain of the Robbers, Iffland examines in what manner the parts ol villains should be played. " The actor," he says, " must take pains to make it appear by what motives the character has become what it is, what circumstances have contributed to the depravation of the soul; in shoit, the actor should become the sedulous defender of the part he represents." In fact, there can be no truth, even in villainy, unless we attend to the shades of character which evince that man becomes bad only by degrees. Iffland reminds us also of the prodigious sensation excited. in the play of Emilia Galotti, by Eckhoff, formerly a very celebrated German actor. When Odoardo is informed by the prince's mistress that the honor of his daughter is threatened, he wishes to conceal from this woman, whom he despises, the indignation and grief that she excites in his soul, and his hands, unknown to himself, were employed in tearing the plume on hi- hat, with a convulsive motion that produced an effect truly'errible. The actors who succeeded Eckhoff took care to tear their plumes also; but they fell to the ground without anybody's remarking it; for genuine emotion was wanting, to give to the most indifferent actions that sublime truth which agitates the soul of the spectators. Iffiand's theory of gestures is very ingenious. IIe laughs at those arms of windmills that can answer no purpose but in the declamation of moral sentences, and he thinks that, in general, gestures few in number, and confined within narrow limits, give better indication of real passions; but in this respect, as in many others, there are two very distinct classes of talentthat which bears the character of poetical enthusiasm, and that which springs from the spirit of observation; the one or the other must predominate, according to the nature of the piece and of the parts. The gestures which are inspired by grace, and by the sentiment of the beautiful, are not those best adapted to characterize particular personages. Poetry expresses perfection in general, rather than a peculiar mode ol existence or feeling. The art of the tragic actor consists ther

DECLAMATION. 39 in presenting in his attitudes the image of poetical beauty, without neglecting the distinguishing traits of character: the dominion of the arts always consists in the union of the ideal with the natural. When I saw the play of the Twenty-fourth of February performed by two celebrated poets, A. W. Schlegel and Werner, I was singularly struck by their mode of declamation. They prepared their effects by long anticipation, and plainly discovered that they would have been vexed to be applauded at the beginning. The whole was always present to their thought; and a partial success, which might have injured that general effect, would have appeared to them only in the light of a fault. Schlegel made me first perceive, by his manner of acting in Werner's play, all the interest of a part which I had scarcely observed in the reading. It was the innocence of guilt, the unhappiness of a worthy man, who has committed a crime at the age of seven years, when he did not yet know what was crime; and who, although at peace with his conscience, has been unable to dissipate the uneasiness of his imagination. I judged the man who was represented before me, just as we penetrate a real character, by motions, looks, and accents, which betray it unconsciously. In France, the greater part of our actors never appear not to know what they are about; on the contrary, there is something studied in all the means they make use of, and the effect is always foreseen. Schroeder, of whom all the Germans speak as an admirable actor, could not bear to have it said that he played well at such or such a moment, or that he spoke well such or such a verse. "Have I played the part well?" he would ask; "have I been the very person I represented?" And, in fact, his genius seemed to change its nature with every change of part. In France they would not dare to recite tragedy, as he often did, in the ordinary tone of conversation. There is a general color, an established accent, which is of strict necessity in the Alexandrine verse; and the most impassioned movements rest on this pedestal as on an essential postulate of art. The French actors, in general, look to receive applause, and

40 MADAME DE STAELL S GERMANY. deserve it, at almost every verse; the German actors pretend to it only at the conclusion of the piece, and scarcely ever obtain it sooner. The diversity of scenes and of situations in the German pieces, necessarily gives room to much greater variety in the talents of the performers. The dumb show tells to more advantage; and the patience of the spectators permits a number of details which render the pathetic more natural. The wit of an actor, in France, consists almost entirely in declamation; in Germany there is a much greater number of accessories to this principal art; and even speech itself is sometimes hardly necessary to affect the audience. When Schroeder, playing the part of King Lear, in a German translation, was brought sleeping upon the stage, it is said that this sleep of wretchedness and old age drew tears even before he was awakened, before his lamentations had made known his sufferings; and when he bore in his arms the body of his young daughter Cordelia, slain because she would not abandon him, nothing could be so fine as the strength given him by despair. A last hope supported him, he tried if Cordelia breathed still: he, so aged himself, could not believe that a being so young could have died already. A passionate grief, in an old man half consumed, produced the most distressing emotion. The German actors, in general, may be justly censured for seldom putting in practice the knowledge of the arts of design, so largely spread abroad in their nation: their attitudes are not fine; the excess of their simplicity often degenerates into awkwardness, and they scarcely ever equal the French in the nobleness and elegance of their deportment and motions. However, for some time past, the German actresses have studied the art of attitude, and perfect themselves in that sort of grace, which is so necessary on the stage. In Germany they never applaud till the end of the act, or vely seldom interrupt the actor to testify to him the admiralion ihe inspires. The Germans look upon it as a sort of barbarism to disturb, by tumultuous marks of approbation, the

DECLAMATION. 41 deep emotion with which they love to be penetrated in silence, But this is an additional difficulty for the actors; for it requires an astonishing force of genius to dispense, in declaiming, with the encouragement of the public. In an art which is entirely of emotion, assemblies of spectators communicate an allpowerful electricity which nothing can supply. From an habitual exercise in the practice of the art, it may happen that a good actor, in repeating a performance, shall pass over the same tracks, and employ the same methods, without the spectators animating him anew; but the first inspiration almost always proceeded from them. A singular contrhst deserves to be remarked. In those fine arts, of which the creation is solitary and reflective, we lose whatever is natural when we think of the public, and it is self-love only that makes us think of it. In those which are of sudden impression, above all in declamation, the noise of the plaudits acts upon the soul like the sound of military music. This animating sound makes the blood circulate more swiftly, and it is not cold vanity that is satisfied by it. When a man of genius appears in France, in whatever line, he attains almost always to a degree of perfection without example; for he unites the boldness that makes him deviate from the common road, with good taste, which it is of so much importance to preserve when the originality of talent does not suffer from it. It therefore seems to me that Talma' may be I " Franqois Joseph Talma, an eminent French tragedian, was born in Paris, January 15, 1763. His father, who was a dentist, went to England shortly after the birth of his son, and practised his profession some years in London. At nine years of age young Talma returned to France, and was placed in a school at Chaillot, which was kept by Monsieur Lamargui6re, a great admirer of the drama, who delighted to discover and encourage a similar taste in any of his pupils. A year after Talma had joined the school, he was entrusted with a part in an old tragedy, called' Simois, Fils de Tamerlane,' which Monsieur Lamarguiere had selected for perforrrance by his scholars; and, so deeply did the future tragedian enter into the feeling of the character, that he burst into tears at the recital of the sorrows of the hero, whose brother he represented. At the age of twelve be wrote a little drama, in the composition of which he further developed his knowledge of the stage. He again visited London, and returned as

42 WMADAMSE DE STAEL S GERMANY. cited as a model of boldness and moderation, of nature and of dignity. He possesses all the secrets of the different arts; his attitudes recall the fine statues of antiquity; his draperie, when he least thinks about it, is folded in all his motions, as if he had had time to arrange it with the greatest care. The exsecond time to Paris at the latter end of the year 1781, when he commenced the study oflogic in the College Mazarin. In 1783, he made a coup d'essai at the Thdhtre de Doyen, in the character of Seide, in the tragedy of' Mahomet.' A council of friends, appointed by himself, to judge of the performance, pronounced it a failure.'He had not le feu sacre.' Talma deferred to this unfavorable opinion, and quietly returned to the study of his father's profession; but a few years afterwards, the same friends were called upon to reverse their judgment and confess their mistake. On the 21st of November, 1787, he made his debult at the Th6atre Franqais, and in 1789, he created a great sensation by his performance of Charles IX. At the commencement of the French Revolution, he nearly fell a prey to a severe nervous disorder. On his recovery and the retirement of Larive, Talma became the principal tragic actor. He reformed the costume of the stage, and first played the part of Titus in a Roman toga. During the reign of Napoleon, he enjoyed the emperor's friendship; and was no less honored and esteemed by Louis XVIII. In 1825, he published some'Reflections' on his favorite art; and on the 11th of June, 1826, appeared on the stage for the last time, in the part of Charles VI. During his last illness, the audiences of the Theatre Francais every evening called for an official account of the state of his health previously to the commencement of the performances. He died on the 19th of October following, and was buried in the cemetery of Pe're la Chaise, in the presence of an immense crowd. MM. Arnault, Jouy, and Lafour pronounced orations over his grave. The Thehtre Fran.ais remained closed for three evenings, and the Opera Comique and Odeon were also closed on the day of his funeral. The actors of the Brussels Theatre (of which company he was an associate) wore mourning for him forty days, and a variety of honors were paid to his memory at the principal theatres throughout France and the Netherlands. Talma is said to have created seventy-one characters, among the most popular of which were those of Orestes, (Edipus, Nero, Manlius, Coesar, Cinna, Augustus, Coriolanus, Hector, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Leicester, Sylla, Regulus, Danville (in'L'Ecole des Veillards'), Leonidas, Charles VI, and Henry VIII. He has been accused, remarks one of his biographers, of having spoken the verse of tragedy as though it were prose; but this avoidance of the jingle of rhyine was one of the greatest improvements which he introduced upon the French stage. In person he was about the middle height, square built, and with a most expressive and noble countenance. His voice was exceedingly fine ar d powerful, his attitudes dignified and graceful. In private life he was distinguished for his manly frankness, his kind disposition, and unaffected manners. He spoke English perfectly, and was a great admirer of England and her institutions

DECLAMATION. 43 pression of his countenance, that of his eye, ought to be studied by all painters. Sometimes he enters with his eyes only half open, and, on a sudden, feeling makes rays of light spring from therm which seem to illuminate the whole theatre. The sound of his voice agitates from the moment he speaks, before even the sense of the words he utters can have excited any emotion. Where any descriptive poetry accidentally finds place in a tragedy, he has brought out its beauties with as much feeling as if he were Pindar himself reciting the odes of his own composition. Others have need of time to excite emotion, and they do well to take time for the purpose; but in the voice of this man there is I know not what magic which, at its first accents, awakens all the sympathies of the heart. The charm of music, of painting, of sculpture, of poetry, and above all, of the language of the soul, these are the means he employs to develop in his auditor all the force of the generous or of the terrible passions. What knowledge of the human heart he displays in his manner of conceiving his parts! he becomes their second author by his accents and his physiognomy. When (Edipus relates to Jocasta how he has killed Laius, without knowing him, his recital begins thus: J'etokis jeune et superbe.' Most actors, before him, thought it necessary to act the word superbe, and used to draw up their heads as a sign of it; Talhna, who feels that all the recollections of the proud (Edipus begin to affect him in the nature of remorse, pronounces in a timid voice these words, calculated to remind him of a confidence that he has lost. Phorbas arrives fiom Corinth at the moment when CEdipus has first conceived doubts respecting his birth; he demands a private conference with him. Other actors, before Talma, made haste to turn to their followers, and dismiss them with an air of majesty; Talma remains with his eyes fixed upon Phorbas: he cannot lose him from his sight, and only makes Fle was the friend and guest of John Kemble, and was present in Covent Wtarden Theatre when that great actor took his leave of the stage." — f -hglisbh Cqylopgedia.)-Ed. " I was young and proud."

44 MADAME DE STAEL'8 GERMANY. a sign by waving his hand to those around him. He has said nothing yet, but his bewildered motions betray the trouble of his soul; and when, in the last act, he exclaims, on quitting Jocasta, " Oui, Laius est mon pbre et je suis votre fils,"'' we think we see open before us the cavern of TDenarus, into which mortals are dragged by perfidious destiny. In Andromaque, when Hermione, out of her senses, accuses Orestes of having assassinated Pyrrhus without her participation, Orestes answers, " Et ne m'avez-vous pas Vous-meme, ici, tant6t, ordonn6 son trepas?" It is said that Le Kain, in reciting this verse, laid an emphasis on every word, as if to recall to Hermione all the circumstances of the order he had received from her. This would be very well before a judge; but, before a woman one loves, the despair of finding her unjust and cruel, is the only sentiment that fills the soul. It is thus that Talma conceives the situation: an exclamation escapes from the heart of Orestes; he pronounces the first words with emphasis, and those that follow with a sound of voice gradually weakening: his arms fall, his countenance becomes in an instant pale as death, and the emotion of the spectator augments in proportion as he seems to lose the power of expressing himself. The manner in which Talma recites the succeeding monologue is sublime. The kind of innocence that returns to the Feul of Orestes only to torture it, when he repeats this verse" J'assassine h regret un roi que je re'vre,"'' inspires a compassion which the genius of Racine itself could ha.rdly hlave foreseen altogether. Great actors have almost always made trial of themselves in the madness of Orestes; but it is there above all that the grandeur of gestures and of' "Yes, Laius is my father and I am your son." 2:'I assassinate with regret a king that I revere."

DECLAMATION. 45 features adds wonderfully to the effect of the despair. The power of grief is so much the more terrible, as it displays itself through the very repose and dignity of a noble nature. In pieces taken from Roman history, Talma displays a talent of a very different nature, but not less remarkable in its way. We understand Tacitus better after having seen him perform the part of Nero; he manifests in that part a great sagacity; for it is only by sagacity that a virtuous mind seizes the symptoms of guilt; nevertheless, he produces a still stronger effect, I think, in those parts where we love to abandon ourselves, in listening to him, to the sentiments he expresses. Ile has done Bayard, in du Belloy's play, the service of setting him free from those airs of rodomontade which other authors had thought it necessary to bestow upon him: this Gascon hero is again become, thanks to Talma, as simple in tragedy as in history. His costume in this part, his plain and appropriate gestures, recall the statues of knights that we see in old churches, and we feel astonished that a man who possesses so truly the feeling of ancient art, has been able to transport hirnself also to the character of the middle ages. Talma sometimes plays the part of Pharan in a tragedy by Ducis, on an Arabian subject, Abufar. A number of enchanting verses sheds a wonderful charm over this tragedy; the colors of the East, the pensive melancholy of the south of Asia, the melancholy which belongs to those regions where the sun consumes instead of embellishing nature, make themselves admirably felt in this work. The same Talma, the Grecian, the Roman, the chivalrous, becomes an Arab of the desert, full of energy and of love; his looks are guarded, as if to avoid the heat of the sun's rays; his gestures evince an admirable alternation of indolence and impetuosity; sometimes fate overwhelms him, sometimes he appears more powerful than nature herself, and seems to triumph over her: the passion which devours him, the object of which is a woman whom he believes to be his sister, is concealed in his bosom; one would say, by his uncertain pace, that he wishes to fly from himself; his eyes are avsrted from her he loves, his hands repel an image which

N6 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. he thinks he always sees at his side; and when at last he presses Salema to his heart, with this simple word, J'ai froid,' he finds means of expressing at once the shudder of soul, and the devouring ardor which he endeavors to hide. Many faults may be found in the plays of Shakspeare adapted to our theatre by Ducis; but it would be great injustice to deny them beauties of the first order; the genius of Ducis is in his heart, and it is there that he is great. Talma performs his characters like a friend to the talent of this noble old man. The scene of the witches, in Macbeth, is changed into recitation in the French play. Talma should be seen endeavoring to render something vulgar and uncouth in the accent of the witches, and to preserve at the same time, all the dignity exacted by our theatre. " Par des mots inconnus, ces etres monstrueux S'appelaient tour a tour, s'applaudissaient entre eux, S'approchaient, me montraient avec un ris farouche; Leur doigt mystdrieux se posait sur leur bouche. Je leur palle, et dans l'ombre ils s'dchappent soudain, L'un avec un poignard, l'autre un sceptre a la main; L'autre d'un long serpent serrait le corps livide; Tous trois vers ce palais ont pris un vol rapide, Et tous trois dans les airs, en fuyant loin de moi, M'ont laissd pour adieu ces mots:' Tu seras roi.' " The low and mysterious voice of the actor in pronouncing these verses, the manner in which he placed his finger on his mouth, like the statue of silence, his look, which altered to express a horrible and repulsive recollection,-all were combined to paint a species of the marvellous new to our theatre, and of which no former tradition could give any idea. Othello has not latterly succeeded on the French stage; it seems as if Orosmane prevented our rightly understanding Othello; but when Talma. performs this part, the fifth act occasions as strong an emotion as if the assassination actually passed before our eyes; I have seen Talma, in private company' "I am ocld.n

DECLAMATION. 47 declaim the last scene with his wife, whose voice and figure are so well suited to Desdemona; it was enough for him to pass his hand over his hair, and knit his brow, in order to become the Moor of Venice, and terror occupied all the distance of two paces from him, as if all the illusions of the theatre had encompassed him. Hamlet is his glory among the tragedies of foreign style. The spectators do not see the ghost of Hamlet's father on the French stage, the apparition passes only in the physiognomy of Talma, and it is certainly not at all the less terrifying. When, in the midst of a calm and melancholy conversation, he all at once perceives the spectre, all his motions are followed in the eyes that contemplate him, and we cannot doubt the presence of the phantom attested by such a look. When Hamlet enters alone in the third act, and recites in fine French verses the famous soliloquy, To be or not to be"La mort, c'est le sommeil, c'est un reveil peut-etre. Peut-etre!-Ah! c'est le mot qui glace, epouvante, L'homme, au bord du cercueil, par ]e doute arrete: Devant ce vaste abime, il se jette en arrinre, Ressaisit l'existence, et s'attache a la terre," Talma used no gesture, he only sometimes shook his head as if to question earth and heaven respecting the nature of death. Without motion, the dignity of meditation absorbed all his being. He was one man, among two thousand silent spectators. interrogating thought concerning the destiny of mortals! In a few years all that was there will exist no longer; but others will assist in their turn at the same uncertainties, and will plunge, in like manner, into the abyss without knowing its dlepth. When Hamlet wishes to make his mother swear on the urn tnat incloses the ashes of her husband, that she had no part in the crime which caused his destruction, she hesitates, is,roubled, and ends by confessing her guilt. Then Hamlet draws the dagger which his father commands him to plunge into the maternal bosom; but at the moment when he is about to strike, tenderness and compassion overcome him, and

ts: MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. tuinirg back towards the shade of his father, he exclaims, Grace, grace, mon pere! with an accent in which all the emotions of nature seem at once to escape from the heart, and throwing himself at the feet of his mother, who has swooned away, he speaks to her these two lines, which contain a sentiment of inexhaustible pity"Votre crime est horrible, execrable, odieux, Mais il n'est pas plus grand que la bont6 des cieux." To conclude, it is impossible to think of Talma without recalling Manlius. This piece produced little effect on the stage; it is the subject of Otway's Venice Preserved, applied to an event of Roman history. Manlius conspires against the senate of Rome; he confides his secret to Servilius, whom he has loved for fifteen years; he confides it to him in spite of the suspicions of his other friends, who distrust the weakness of Servilius, and his love for his wife, the consul's daughter. What the conspirators feared actually takes place. Servilius is unable to hide from his wife the danger to which her father's life is exposed; she immediately runs to reveal it to him. Manlius is arrested, his projects discovered, and the senate condemns him to be thrown headlong from the Tarpeian Hill. Before Talma, people had scarcely discovered in this piece, which is feebly written, th}e passion of friendship which Manlius experiences for Servilius. When a note of the conspirator Rutilius gives to understand that the secret is betrayed, and betrayed by Servilius, Manlius enters with this note in his hand; he draws nigh to his guilty friend, already devoured by remorse, and showing him the lines which accuse him, pronounces these words,- Qu'en dis-tu? I ask all who have heard them, can the countenance and the tone of the voice ever express, at one time, so many different impressions? that rage, softened by an inward feeling of pity-that indignation, rendered by friendship alternately more lively and more feeble 1 "What sayest thou of it I"

DECLAMATION. 49 -how make them understood, if not by that accent which passes from soul to soul, without the intermediate office even of words! Manlius draws his dagger to strike Servilius with it; his hand seeks his heart, and trembles lest it should find it: the remembrance of so many years, during which Servilius was dear to him, raises as it were a cloud of tears between his revenge and his friend. The fifth act has been less spoken of, and yet Talma is perhaps still more admirable in that than in the fourth. Servilius has encountered all hazards to expiate his fault and preserve Manlius. At the bottom of his heart he has resolved, if his friend should perish, to partake his lot. The grief of Manlius is softened by the regret of Servilius; nevertheless he dares not tell him that he forgives his frightful treason, but he takes the hand of Servilius in private, and presses it to his heart; his involuntary motions seek the guilty friend, whom he wishes to embrace once more before he parts from him forever. Nothing, or scarcely any thing in the play itself, pointed out this admirable beauty of a feeling soul still paying respect to ancient affection, in spite of the treason that has broken it. The parts of Pierre and Jaffier, in the English play, indicate this situation very forcibly. Talma has found means of giving to the tragedy of Manlius the energy it wants, and nothing does so much honor to his talent as the truth with which he expresses the invincibility of friendship. Passion may hate the object of its love; but when the tie is formed by the sacred relations of the soul, it seems that crime itself is incapable of destroying it, and that we look for remorse just as, after a long absence, we should look for the return. In speaking somewhat in detail about Talma, I do not consider myself as having rested on a subject foreign to that of my work. This artist gives as much as possible to French tragedy of what, either justly or unjustly, the Germans accuse it of wanting-originality and nature. He knows how to characterize foreign manners in the different parts he represents, and no actor more frequently hazards great effects by simple expedients. In his mode of declaiming, he has artificially VOL. II. —3

50 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. combined Shakspeare and Racine together. Why should not dramatic writers endeavor also to unite in their compositions what the actor has been able to amalgamate so happily in his performance? CHAPTER XXVIII. OF ROMANCES. OF all fictions, romances being the easiest, there is no career in which the writers of modern nations have more generally essayed themselves. The romance constitutes what may be called the transition between real and imaginary existence. The history of every individual is, with some modifications, a romance sufficiently similar to those which are printed, and personal recollections often, in this respect, take place of invention. It has been attempted to give more importance to this species of compositions, by mixing with it poetry, history, and philosophy; but it seems to me that this is to alter its nature. Moral reflections and impassioned eloquence may find room in romances, but the interest of situations ought always to be the first principle of action in this sort of writings, and nothing can ever properly supply its place. If theatrical effect is the indispensable condition for all pieces for representation, it is equally true that a romance can be neither a good work, nor a happy fiction, unless it inspires a lively curiosity; it is in vain that we would supply the want of this by ingenious digressions: the expectation of amusement frustrated would cause an insurmountable fatigue. The multitude of love romances published in Germany has somewhat turned into ridicule the light of the moon, the harps that resound at evening through the valley, in short, all known and approved methods of softly soothing the soul; and yet we have a natural disposition that is delighted with these easy sorts of reading, and it is the part of genius to avail itself of a

ROMANCES. 51 disposition which it would be in vain to think of combating. It is so sweet to love and to be loved, that this hymn 6f life is susceptible of infinite modulation, without the heart experiencing any lassitude; thus we return with pleasure to the first melody of a song embellished by brilliant variations. I shall not however dissemble that romances, even those which are most pure, do mischief; they have too well discovered to us the most secret recesses of sentiment. Nothing can be experienced that we do not remember to have read before, and all the veils of the heart have been rent. The ancients would never thus have made of the human soul a subject of fiction; it remained a sanctuary for them, into which their own looks would have feared to penetrate; but in fine, the class of romances once admitted, there must be interest in it; and it is, as Cicero said of action in the Orator, the condition trebly necessary. The Germans, like the English, are very fertile in romances descriptive of domestic life. The delineation of manners is more elegant in the English, but more diversified in the German. There is in England, notwithstanding the independence of characters, a generality of manner inspired by good company; in Germaxly nothing of this sort is matter of convention. Many of these romances, founded on our sentiments and manners, which hold among books the rank of dramas in the theatre, deserve to be cited; but that which is without equal and without parallel is Werther; there we behold all that the genius of Goethe was capable of producing when impassioned. It is said that he now attaches little value to this work of his youth; the effervescence of imagination, which inspired him almost with enthusiasm for suicide, may now appear to him deserving of censure. In youth, the degradation of existence not having yet any commencement, the tomb appears only a poetical image, a sleep surrounded with figures weeping for us on their knees; it is no longer the same in middle life, and we then learn why religion, that science of the soul, has mingled the horror of murder with the attempt upon one's own existence. Nevertheless, Goethe would be much in the wrong did he

52 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. despise the admirable talent that manifests itself in Werther it is not only the sufferings of love, but the maladies of the imagination, so prevalent in our times, of which he has painted the picture; those thoughts that press into the mind, without our being able to change them into acts of the will; the singular contrast of a life much more monotonous than that of the ancients, and of an internal existence much more tumultiuous, cause a sort of dizziness like that which we experience on the brink of a precipice, when the very fatigue of long contemplating the abyss below may urge us to throw ourselves into it. Goethe has been able to join to this picture of the inquietudes of the soul, so philosophical in its result, a fiction, simple, but of prodigious interest. If it has been thought necessary in all the sciences to strike the eyes by outward images, is it not natural to interest the heart, in order to impress it with great thoughts?' 1 "W erther is a masterpiece of style; we may look through German literature in vain for such clear, sunny, pictures, fulness of life, and delicately managed simplicity. Its style is one continuous strain of music, which, restrained within the limits of prose, fulfils all the conditions of poetry; dulcet as the sound of falling waters, and as full of sweet melancholy as an autumnal eve. " Nothing can be simpler than the structure of this book, wherein, as M. Marmier well remarks,2 every detail is so arranged as to lay bare the sufferings of a diseased spirit. Werther arrives at his chosen retreat, believing himself cured, and anticipating perfect happiness. He is painter and ooet. The fresh spring mornings, the sweet cool evenings, soothe and strengthen him. He selects a place under the limes to read and dream 1away the hours. There he brings his pencil and his Homer. Every thing interests him-the old woman who brings his coffee, the children who play amound him, the story of a poor family. In this serene convalescence he meets with Charlotte, and a new passion agitates his soul. His simple uniform existence becomes changed. He endeavors by bodily activity to charm away his desires. The days no longer resemble each other; now ecstatic with hope, now crushed with despair. Winter comes-cold, sad, gloomy. He must away. He departs and mingles with the world, but the world disgusts him. The monotony and emptiness of official life are intolerable to his pretensions; the parchment pride of the noblesse is insulting to his sense of superiority. He returns to the peaceful scene of his forrter contentment, and finds indeed Charlotte, the children, his favorite 2 Etudes s'ur Goethe, p. 11.

ROMANCES. 53 Romances by means of letters, always suppose mnore of sentiment than of fact; the ancients would never have thought of giving this form to their fictions; and it is only for two centuries past that philosophy has been sufficiently directed within woods and walks, but not the calmness which he seeks. The hopelessness of his position overwhelms him. Disgusted with the world-unsatisfied in his cravings-he dies by his own hand. Rosenkrantz, in the true spirit of that criticism which seeks everywhere for meanings more recondite than the author dreamed of, thinks that Goethe exhibits great art in making Werther a diplomatist, because a diplomatist is a man of shams (scheinthuer); but the truth is, Goethe made him precisely what he found him. His art is truth. He is so great an artist that the simplest realities have to him significance. Charlotte cutting bread and butter for the children-the scene of the ball-the children clinging round Werther for sugar, and pictures of that kind, betray so little inventive power, that they have excited the ridicule of some English critics, to whom poetry is a thing of pomp and classicality, not the beautiful vesture of reality. The beauty and art of Werther is not in the incidents (a Dumas would shrug despairing shoulders over such invention), but in the representation. What is Art but Representation? " The effect of Werther was prodigious.'That nameless unrest,' says Carlyle,' the blind struggle of a soul in bondage, that high, sad, longing discontent which was agitating every bosom, had driven Goethe almost to despair. All felt it; he alone could give it voice. And here lies the secret of his popularity; in his deep, susceptive heart he felt a thousand times more keenly what every one was feeling; with the creative gift which belenged to him as a poet, he bodied it forth into visible shape, gave it a local habitation and a name; and so made himself the spokesman of his generation. Wcrther is but the cry of that dim, rooted pain under which all thoughtful men of a certain age were languishing: it paints the misery, it passionately utters the complaint; and heart and voice all over Europe mludly and at once respond to it. True, it prescribes no remedy; for that was a far different, far harder enterprise, to which other years and a higher,,ulture were required; but even this utterance of pain, even this little for the present is grasped at, and with eager sympathy appropriated in every bosom. If Byron's life-weariness, his moody melancholy, and mad, stormful indignation, borne on the tones of a wild and quite artless melody, could pierce so deep into many a British heart, now that the whole matter e no longer new-is indeed old and trite-we may judge with what vehenient acceptance this Werther must have been welcomed, coming, as it did, like a voice from the unknown regions; the first thrilling peal of that impassioned dirge which, in country after country, men's ears have listened -to till they were deaf to all else. For Werther, infusing itself into the core and whole spirit of literature, gave birth to a race of sentimentalists who Iave raged and wailed in every part of the world, till the better light dawned on them, or, at worst, exhausted nature laid herself to sleep, and it was

54 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. ourselves, to enable the analysis of our feelings to hold so great a place in our books. This manner of conceiving romances is certainly not so poetical as that which consists entirely in narration; but the human mind is now much less disposed to be gratified by events even the best combined, than by observations on what passes within the heart. This disposition is the consequence of those great intellectual changes that have taken place inll man; he has in general a much greater tendency to fall back upon himself, and to seek religion, love, and sentiment, in the most inward recesses of his being. Many German writers have composed tales of ghosts and witches, and think that there is more genius in these inventions, than in a romance founded on the circumstances of ordinary life: it is very well for those who are led to it by natural inclination; but, in general, verse is necessary for the marvellous, prose is inadequate to it. When ages and countries, very different firom those we live in, are represented in fiction, the charm of poetry must supply the want of that pleasure which the resemblance to ourselves would make us experience. Poetry is the winged mediator that transports times past and foreign nations into a sublime region, where admiration fills the place of sympathy. Romances of chivalry abound in Germany; but they should have been more scrupulous in fastening them to ancient traditions: at present, they take the trouble of investigating these precious sources, and in a book called the Book of Heroes,' they discovered that lamenting was unproductive labor. These funereal choristers, in Germany a loud, haggard, tumultuous, as well as tearful class, were named the Kraftmdnner, or Powermen, but have long since, like sick children, cried themselves to rest.' " Perhaps there never was a fiction which so startled and enraptured the world. Men of all kinds and classes were moved by it. It was the comnanion of Napoleon when in Egypt; it penetrated into China. To convey in a sentence its wondrous popularity, we may state that in Germany it )ecame a people's book, hawked about the streets, printed on miserable paper, like an ancient ballad; and in the Chinese empire. Charlotte and Werthe, were modelled in porcelain."-(Lewes, Life and Works of Goethe vol. i. pp. 221-224.)-Ed. 1 Heldenbuch.-Ed.

ROMANCES. 5 have found a number of adventures related with force and naio,'ite; it is of importance to preserve the color of this ancient stiyle and of these ancient manners, and not to prolong, by th3 a-nalysis of sentiments, the recitals of times in which honorn andl love acted on the heart of man, like the fatality of the an icnts, with)out their reflecting on the motives of actions, oI te(lh!littirg ai;y uncertainty into their operations.' P1hilosopLh ical romance has, for some time past, taken the lead, inii Germany, of all other sorts; it does not resemble that of the French; it is not, like Voltaire's, a general idea expressed by a fact in form of apologue, but it is a picture of human life altogether impartial, a picture in which no impassioned interest predominates; different situations succeed each other in all ranks, in all conditions, in all circumstances, and the writer is present to relate them. It is upon these princi1 "Of the Heldenbuch, tried on its own merits, and except as illustrating that other far worthier Poem, or at most as an old national, and still in some measure popular book, we should have felt strongly inclined to say, as the curate in Don Quixote so often did, Al corral con ello, Out of window with it! Doubtless there are touches of beauty in the work, and even a sort of heartiness and antique quaintness in its wildest follies; but on the whole that George-and-Dragon species of composition has long ceased to find favor with any one; and except for its groundwork, more or less discernible, of old Northern Fiction, this Heldenbuch has little to distinguish it from these. Nevertheless, what is worth remark, it seems to have been a far higher favorite than the Nibelunyen, with ancient readers: it was printed soon after the invention of printing,-some think in 1472, for there is no place or date on the first edition; at all events, in 1491, in 1509, and repeatedly since; whereas the Nibelungen, though written earlier, and in worth immeasurably superior, had to remain in manuscript three centuries. onger. From which, for the thousandth time, inferences might be drawn as to the infallibility of popular taste, and its value as a criterion for poetry. However, it is probably in virtue of this neglect, that the Nibelungen boasts of its actual purity; that it now comes before us, clear and graceful,s it issued from the old singer's head and heart; not overloaded with. ss-eared Giants, Fiery Dragons, Dwarfs, and Hairy Women, as the Heldenbuch is, many of which, as charity would hope, may be the produce of L later age than that famed Swabian Era, to which these poems, as we now see them, are commonly referred. Indeed, one Casper von Roen is understood to have passed the whole Heldenbuch through his limbec, in the fifteenth century; but like other rectifiers, instead of purifying it, to have only drugged it with still fiercer ingredients to suit the sick appetite of the time." —-(Clyle's Es8ays, pp. 244, 245.)-Ed.

56 MADAME DE STAEL' GERMANI. ples that Goethe has conceived his Wilhelm Jliei.ster, a work greatly admired in Germany, but little known elsewhere. Wilhelm Meister' is full of ingenious and lively discussions; it would make a philosophical work of the first order, i.f the intrigue of a romance were not introduced into it, the interest of which is not worth what is sacrificed to it; we find in it very fine and minute pictures of a certain class of society, more numerous in Germany than in other countries; a class in which artists, players, and adventurers mix with those of the bourgeois who love an independent life, and with those of the nobility who esteem themselves the protectors of the arts: every picture, taken separately, is charming; but there is no other interest in the tout-ensemble but what we may feel in knowing the opinion of Goethe on every subject: the hero of his novel is an intruding third person whom he has placed, we know not why, between himself and his reader. Amid all these personages in Wilhelm Meister, more intelligent than important, and these situations so much more natural than prominent, a charming episode is scattered through many parts of the work, in which is united all that the warmth and originality of genius of Goethe is capable of producing of most animated. A young Italian girl is the child of love, and of a criminal and frightful love, which has taken hold of a man consecrated by oath to the worship of the divinity; the lovers, already so culpable, discover after their marriage that they are brother and sister, and that incest has been rendered for them the punishment of perjury. The mother loses her reason, and the father runs over the world like an unhappy wanderer who iefuses any shelter. The unfortunate fruit of this fatal love, without support from its birth, is carried away by a troop of rope-dancers; they exercise it to the age of ten years, in the wretched play which constitutes their own subsistence: the cruel treatment they make it undergo excites the interest of Wilhelm, and he takes into his service this young girl, in the dress of a boy, which she has worn ever since her birth. 1 It has been translated by Carlyle, and is within the reach of every mne.-Ed,

ROMANCES. 57 There is developed in this extraordinary creature, a singular mixture of childishness and depth of understanding, of seriousness and imagination; ardent like the women of Italy, silent and persevering like a person of reflection, speech does not seem to be her natural language. The few words she utters, however, are solemn, and answerable to sentiments much stronger than those natural to her age, and of which she does not herself possess the secret. She becomes attached to Wilhelm with love and reverence; she serves him as a faithful domestic, she loves him as an impassioned wife: her life having been always unhappy, it seems as if she had never known childhood, and as if having been doomed to suffering in an age which nature has destined only for enjoyments, she existed only for one solitary affection with which the beatings of her heart begin and end. The character of Mignon (this is the young girl's name) is mysterious like a dream; she expresses her longing for Italy in some enchanting verses which all people know by heart in Germany: " Dost thou know the land where citron-trees flourish?" etc. In the end, jealousy, that passion too strong for so tender organs, breaks the heart of the poor girl, who becomes a prey to grief before age has given her strength to struggle against it. To comprehend all the effect of this admirable picture, it would be necessary to enter into all the details of it. We cannot represent to ourselves without emotion the least of the feelings that agitate this young girl; there is in her I know not what of magic simplicity, that supposes abysses of thought and feeling; we think we hear the tempest moaning at the bottom of her soul, even while we are unable to fix upon a word or a circumstance to account for the inexpressible uneasiness she makes us feel. Notwithstanding this beautiful episode, we perceive in Wilhelm Meister the singular system that has developed itself of late in the German school. The recitals of the ancients, even their poems, however internally animated, are calm in form; and we are persuaded that the moderns would do well to imitate the tranquillity of the ancient authors; but, in respect of W3

58 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. imagination, what is not prescribed in theory seldom succeeds in practice. Events like those of the Iliad interest of themselves, and the less the author's own sentiments are brought forward, the greater is the impression made by the picture; but if we set ourselves to describe romantic situations with the impartial calmness of Homer, the result would not be very alluring.' Goethe has just produced a romance called the Elective Affinities, which is extremely obnoxious to the censure I have been remarking. A happy family has retired into the country; the husband and wife invite the one his friend, the other her niece, to partake their solitude; the friend falls in love with the wife, and the husband with the young girl, her niece. He abandons himself to the idea of recurring to a divorce in order to procure a union with the object of his attachment; the young girl is ready to consent: unfortunate events happen to bring her back to the feeling of duty; but as soon as she is brought to acknowledge the necessity of sacrificing her love, she dies of grief, and her lover shortly follows her. The translation of the Elective Affinities has not met with 1 " account it the most fortunate incident in my existence," says Schiller, " that I have lived to see the completion of this work; that it has taken place while my faculties are still capable of improvement; that I can yet draw from this pure spring; and the beautiful relation there is between us makes it a kind of religion with me to feel towards what is yours as if it were my own, and so to purify and elevate my nature, that my mind may be a clear mirror, and that I may thus deserve, in a higher sense, the name of your friend. How strongly have I felt, on this occasion, that the Excellent is a power; that by selfish natures it can be felt only as a power; and that only where there is disinterested love can it be enjoyed. I cannot describe to you how deeply the truth, the beautiful vitality, the simple fulness of this work has affected me. The excitement into which it has thrown my mind will subside when I shall have perfectly mastered it, and that will be an important crisis in my being. This excitement is the effect of the beautiful, and only the beautiful, and proceeds from the fact that my intellect is not yet entirely in accordance with my feelings. I understand,low perfectly what you mean when you say that it is strictly the beautiful, the true, that can move you even to tears. Tranquil and deep, clear, and yet, like nature, unintelligible, is this work; and all, even the most trivial collateral incident, shows the clearness, the equanimity of the mind whence it flowed."-Ed.

ROMANCES..59 success in France, because there is nothing characteristic in the general effect of the fiction, and it is difficult to comprehend with what view it was conceived: this uncertainty is not a matter for censure in Germany, as the events of this world often furnish only undecided results, people are satisfied to find in romances which pretend to describe them the same contradictions and the same doubts. Goethe's work contains a number of refined sentiments and observations; but it is true that the interest often languishes, and that we find almost as many vacancies in the novel as in the ordinary course of human life. A romance, however, ought not to resemble the memoirs of individuals; for every thing interests in what has really existed, while fiction can only equal the effect of truth by surpassing it, that is, by possessing greater strength, more unity, and more action. The description of the Baron's garden, and the embellishments made in it by the Baroness, absorbs more than a third part of the whole story, and it does not dispose the reader to be moved by a tragic catastrophe: the death of the hero and heroine seems no more than a fortuitous accident, because the heart is not prepared long beforehand to feel and to partake the pain they suffer. This work affords a singular mixture of a life of convenience with stormy passions; an imagination full of grace and strength draws near to the production of grand effects to let them go all of a sudden, as if it were not worth the pain to produce them; one would say that the author has been injured by his own emotion, and that, by mere cowardice of heart, he lays aside the one half of his talent for fear of making himself suffer in trying to move his readers. A more important question is, whether such a work is moral, that is, whether the impression derived from it is favorable to the improvement of the soul? The mere events of a fiction have nothing to do with this question; we so well know their dependence on the will of the author, that they can awa ken the conscience of no man: the morality of a novel consists, therefore, in the sentiments it inspires. It cannot be denied fhat there is in Goethe's book a profound knowledge of the

60 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. human heart, but it is a discouraging knowledge; it represents life as at best very indifferent, in whatever manner it passes; when probed to the bottom, sad and mournful, only tolerably agreeable when slightly skimmed over, liable to moral diseases which must be cured if possible, and must kill if they cannot be cured. The passions exist, the virtues also exist; there are some who assure us that the first must be counteracted by the second; others pretend that this cannot be see and judge, says the writer who sums up with impartiality the arguments which fate may furnish for and against each method of viewing the subject. It would be wrong to imagine, however, that this skepticism was inspired by the materialistic tendency of the eighteenth century; the opinions of Goethe are much more profound, but they do not present any greater consolation to the soul. His writings offer to us a contemptuous philosophy, that says to good as well as to evil: "It ought to be so because it is so;" a wonderful imagination, which rules over all the other faculties, and grows tired of genius itself, as having in it something too involuntary and too partial. In fine, what is most of all defective in this romance, is a firm and positive feeling of religion; the principal personages are more accessible to superstition than to faith; and we perceive that in their hearts religion, like love, is only the effect of circumstances, and liable to vary with them. In the progress of this work, the author displays too much uncertainty; the forms he draws, and the opinions he indicates, leave only doubtful recollections: it must be agreed that, to think a great deal sometimes leads to the total unsettling of our fundamental ideas; but a man of genius like Goethe should serve as a guide to his admirers in an ascertained road. It is no longer time to doubt, it is no longer time to place, on every possible subject, ingenious ideas in each scale of the balance; we should now abandon ourselves to confidence, to enthusiasm, to the admiration which the immortal youth of the soul may always keep alive within us; this youth springs forth again on'

ROMANCES. 61 of the very ashes of the passions; it is the golden boughl that can never fade, and which gives entrance to the Sibyl into the Elysian fields.' Tieck deserves to be mentioned in many different styles of " Among the Jena friends whom Goethe saw with constant pleasure, was Frommann, the bookseller, in whose family there was an adopted child, by name Minna Herzlieb, strangely interesting to us as the original of Ottilie in the V7ahlverwandtschaften. As a child she had been a great pet of Goethe's; growing into womanhood she exercised a fascination over himn which his reason in vain resisted. The disparity of years was great: but how frequently are young girls foufnd bestowing the bloom of their affections on men old enough to be their fathers! and how frequently are men at an advanced age found trembling with the passion of youth! In the Sonnets addressed to her, and in the novel of Elective A4nities, may be read the fervor of his passion, and the strength with which he resisted. Speaking of this novel, he says:' No one can fail to recognize in it a deep, passionate wound, which shrinks from being closed by healing, a heart which dreads to be cured.. In it, as in a burial-urn, I have deposited with deep emotion many a sad experience. The third of October, 1809 (when the publication was completed), set me free from the work; but the feelings it embodies can never quite depart from me.' If we knew as much of the circumnstances out of which grew the Elertive Affinities as we do of those out of which grew Werther, we should find his experience as clearly embodied in this novel as it is in Werther; but conjecture in such cases being perilous, I will not venture beyond the facts which have been placed at my disposal; and may only add, therefore, that the growing attachment was seen with pain and dismay, for no good issue could be found. At length it was resolved to send Minna to school, and this absolute separation saved them both. " It is very curious to read Die Wa.eldverwandtsc7aften by the light of this history, and to see in it not only the sources of its inspiration, but the way in which Goethe dramatizes the two halves of his own character. Eduard and Charlotte loved each other in youth. Circumstances separated them; and each made a mariaye de convenance, from which, after a time, they were released by death. The widower and the widow, now free to choose, naturally determine on fulfilling the dream of their youth. They marry. At the opening of the story we see them placidly happy. Although a few quiet touches make us aware of a certain organic disparity between them, not enough to create unhappiness, but enough to prevent perfect sympathy, the keenest eye would detect no signs which threatened the enduring stability of their happiness. Eduard has a friend, almost a brother, always called' The Captain,' whom he invites to come and live with them. Charlotte has strongly opposed this at first, having a dim presentiment of evil; but she yields, the more so as she desires that her adopted daughter )ttilie should now be taken from school, and come to live with them.': Thus are the four actors in the drama brought together on the stage:

62 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. composition; he is the author of a novel called SternbCald, which it is delightful to read; the events are but few, and even those few are not conducted to the denouiment; but we can nowhere else, I believe, meet with so pleasing a picture of the and no sooner are they brought together than the natural elective aftinities of their natures come into play. Charlotte and the Captain are drawn together Eduard and Ottilie are drawn together. This is shown to be as inevitable as the chemical combinations which are made to illustrate it. A real episode in the tragedy of life is before us; felt to be inevitable; felt to be terrible; felt also to present a dilemma to the moral judgment, on which two parties will pronounce two opposite opinions. "Those critics who reason about human life, and consequently t..,:ut Art from the abstract point of view-who, disregarding fact and necessity, treat human nature as a chess-board on which any moves may be made which the player chooses, the player himself being considered an impersonal agent untroubled by rashness, incapable of overlooking what is palpable to the bystanders,-those critics, I say, will unhesitatingly pronounce the situation an immoral situation, which the poet should not have presented, and which in real life would at once have been put an end to, by the stern idea of Duty. " Others again, whose philosophy is evolved from life as it is, not as it might be-who accept its wondrous complexity of impulses, and demand that art should represent reality-look upon this situation as terribly true, and although tragic, by no means immoral; for the tragedy lies in the collision of Passion and Duty-of Impulse on the one hand, and on the other of Social Law. Suppose Charlotte and Eduard unmarried, and these'affinities' would have been simple impulses to marriage. But the fact of Marriage stands as a barrier to the impulses: the collision is inevitable.'The divergence of opinion here indicated must necessarily exist among the two great classes of readers. Accordingly, in Germany and in England, the novel is alternately pronounced immoral, and profoundly moral. I do not think it is either the one or the other. When critics rail at it, and declare it saps the whole foundation of marriage, and when critics enthusiastically declare it is profoundly moral because it sets the sacredness of marriage in so clear a light, I see that both have drawn certain general conclusions from an individual case; but I do not see that they have done mnore than put their interpretations on what the author had no intention of being interpreted at all. Every work of art has its moral, says Hegel; but the moral depends on, him that draws it. Both the conclusion against marriage, and the conclusion in favor of marriage, may therefore be drawn from this novel, and yet neither conclusion be correct, except as the private interpretation of the reader. Goethe was an artist, not an advocate; he painted a true picture, and because he painted it truly, he necessarily presented it in a form which would permit men to draw from it those opposite conclusions which the reality itself would permit. Suppose the story aoo tually to have passed before our eyes, the judgments passed on it even by

ROMANCES. 63 life of an artist. The author places his hero in the fine age of the arts, and supposes him to be a scholar of Albert Durer, the contemporary of Raphael. He makes him travel in different countries of Europe, and paints with the charm of novelty those thoroughly acquainted with all the facts would have been dianletri-. cally opposite. It is not difficult to write a story carrying the moral legible in every page; and if the writer's object be primarily that of illustrar ting a plain moral, he need not trouble himself about truth of character. And for this reason: he employs character as a means to an end-he does not make the delineation of character his end; his purpose is didactic, not artistic. Quite otherwise is the artist's purpose and practice: for him human life is the end and aim; for him the primary object is character, which is, as all know, of a mingled woof, good and evil, virtue and weakness, truth and falsehood, woven inextricably together. " Those who object to such pictures, and think that truth is no warrant, may reasonably consider Goethe blamable for having chosen the subject. But he chose it because he had experienced it. And once grant him the subject, it is difficult to blame his treatment of it, if we except one scene which, to English readers, will always be objectionable. Two of the actors represent Passion in its absorbing, reckless, irresistible fervor, rushing onwards to the accomplishment of its aims. The two other actors represent, with equal force, and with touching nobleness, the stern idea of Duty. Eduard and Ottilie love rapidly, vehemently, thoughtlessly. Not a doubt troubles them. Their feeling is so natural, it so completely absorbs them that they are like two children entering on a first affection. But, vividly as they represent Instinct, Charlotte and the Captain as vividly represent Reason; their love is equally profound, but it is the love of two rational beings, who, because they reason, reason on the cirumstances in which they are placed; recognize society, its arrangements and its laws; and sacrifice their own desires to this social necessity. They subdue themselves; they face suffering, upheld by Conscience, which dictates to them a line of conduct never dreamed of by the passionate Eduard and Ottilie. " Eduard no sooner knows that he is loved than he is impatient for a divorce (allowable in Germany), which will enable him to marry Ottilie, and enal)le Charlotte to marry the Captain. Unfortunately, Charlotte, who has hitherto had no children by Eduard, feels that she is about to be a mother. This complicates a position which before was comparatively simple. Childless, she might readily have consented to a divorce. She cannot now. Every argument fails to persuade Eduard to relinquish the one nurpose of his life; and he only consents to test by absence the durability of his passion. " He joins the army, distinguishes himself in the field, and returns with passion as imperious as ever. Meanwhile, the Captain has also absented himself. Charlotte bears her fate meekly, nobly. Ottilie in silence cherishes her love for Eduard, and devotes herself, with intense affection, to Tharlotte's child. This child, in accordance with a popular superstition

34 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. the pleasure that must be caused by external objects when we belong to no country and no station exclusively, but are at liberty to range through all nature in search of inspiration and example. This state of existence, wandering and at the same time contemplative, is thoroughly understood nowhere but in Germany. In French romances we always describe social manners and the intercourse of society; yet there is a great secret of enjoyment in this sort of imagination, which seems to hover over the earth while it traverses, and mixes not at all in the active interests of the world. Unhappy mortals hardly ever receive from fate the blessing of a destiny in which the events succeed each other in the regular concatenation they desire; but insulated impressions are for the most part sufficiently gentle, and the present, when it can be contemplated apart from recollections and apprehensions, is still the happiest moment of life. There is a sort of poetical philosophy, then, of great wisdom in those instantaneous enjoyments which compose the artist's existence; the new points of view, the accidents of light which embellish them, are for him so many events that have their beginning and ending in the same day, and have nothing to do with the past or the future; the affections of the heart unveil the face which, by the way, physiology emphatically discredits), resembles in a striking manner both Ottilie and the Captain, thus physically typifying the passion felt by Eduard for Ottilie, and the passion felt by Charlotte for the Captain. "' Charlotte, who feels strong enough to bear her fate, never relinquishes the hope that Eduard will learn to accept his with like fortitude. But he remains immovable. Opposition only intensifies his desire. At length, the child is drowned while under Ottilie's charge.;In the depth of her affilction a light breaks in upon her soul; and now, for the first time, Ottilie becomes conscious of being wrong in her desire to be Eduard's wife. With this consciousness comes a resolution never to be his. The tragedy deepens. She wastes away. Eduard, whose passion was his life, lingers awhile in mute sorrow, and then is laid to rest by her side. " Such, in its leading motives, is the terribly tragic drama which Goethe'ass worked out with indefatigable minuteness in Die Wahlverwandtschaf-:en. The story moves slowly, as in life, through various episodes and;ircumstances, but if slow, it is always intelligible."-(Lewes, Life aund Works of Goethe, vol. ii. pp. 372-377.)-Ed.

ROMANCES. 65 of nature, and we are astonished, in reading Ticck's novel, by 11 the wonders that surround us without our perceiving it. The author has mingled in his work several detached pieces )f poetry, some of which are extremely fine. When verses ire introduced into a French novel, they almost always interrupt the interest, and destroy the harmony of the whole. It is not so in Sternbald; the story is so poetical in itself, that the prose seems like a recitative which follows the verse, or prepares the way for it. Among others, there are some stanzas on the spring, as enchanting as nature herself at that season. Infancy is represented in them under a thousand different shapes; man, the plants, the earth, the heaven, all things there are so young, all things so rich in hope, that the poet appears to be celebrating the first fine days, and the first flowers that ever attired the world. We have, in French, several comic romances, and one of the most remarkable is Gil Blas. I do not think any work can be mentioned among the Germans, in which the affairs of life are so agreeably sported with. The Germans have hardly yet attained a real world, how can they be supposed capable already of laughing at it? That serious kind of gayety which turns nothing into ridicule, buft amuses without intending it, and makes others laugh without laughing itself-that gayety which the English call hu-mor-is to be found also in many of the German writers; but it is almost impossible to translate them. When the pleasantry consists in a philosophical sentiment happily expressed, as in Swift's Gulliver, the change of language is of no importance; but Sterne's Tristram Shandy loses almost all its beauty in French. Pleasantries, which consist in the forms of language, speak to the mind a thousand times more, perhaps, than ideas; and yet these impressions so lively, excited by shades so fine, are incapable of being transmitted to foreigners. Claudius is one of the German authors who have most of hat national gayety, the exclusive property of every foreign literature. He has published a collection of various detached pieces or_ different subjects; some are in bad taste, others unim

56 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. portant, but there reigns in all of them an originality and a truth which render the least things attractive. This writer, whose style is clothed in a simple, and sometimes even in a vulgar habit, penetrates to the bottom of the heart by the sincerity of his sentiments. He makes you weep, as he makes you laugh, by exciting sympathy, and by giving you to recognize a fellow-creature and a friend in all he feels. Nothing can be extracted from the writings of Claudius; his talent acts like sensation, and to speak of it, it is necessary to have felt it. He resembles those Flemish painters who sometimes rise to the representation of what is most noble in nature, or to the Spanish Murillo, who paints poor beggars with the utmost exactness, and yet often gives them, unconsciously, some traits of a noble and profound impression. To mix the comic and the pathetic with success, it is necessary to be eminently natural in both; as soon as the artificial makes its appearance, all contrast vanishes; but a great genius full of simplicity may successfully represent a union, of which the only charm is on the countenance of childhood, a smile in the midst of tears. Another writer, of later date and greater celebrity than Claudius, has acquired great reputation in Germany by works which might be called romances, if any known denomination could suit productions so extraordinary. Jean Paul Richter' " John Paul Frederick Richter, commonly called Jean Paul, was born at Wunsiedel, near Baireuth, March 21, 1763, where his father was schoolmaster and organist, but whence he was soon after removed to a curacy at Sdlitz, a neighboring village. Here Jean Paul, in common with the other boys, attended the village school until he was ten years old, and at the age of thirteen was intrusted to the care of the rector in the adjacent town of Hof. Jean Paul's flther dying about this time, leaving his family in great indigence, his mother, with her four other sons, likewise removed to Hof. The love and veneration he felt for his widowed mother inspired him with greater zeal to apply himself to his studies, but it was with much difficulty that he obtained, as an author and tutor, sufficient means for the support of himself and his aged parent. At eighteen he went to Lcipsic to study theology, to which he applied with great assiduity, his constant ob. ject being to provide for his revered mother and to assist in the education ~f his four younger brothers. At the age of nineteen he wrote a witty sa. tire, Gronlandische Processe, but could not, for several years, succeed in Ending a publisher, and his necessities increased to such a degree, that he

ROMANCES. 67 is possessed of powers certainly more than sufficient to compose a work that would be as interesting to foreigners as to his own countrymen, and yet nothing that he has published can ever extend beyond the limits of Germany. His admirers saw himself at length obliged clandestinely to leave Leipsic in order to escape imprisonment for debt. At Hoof, whither he had gone, he continued his studies, still, however, incapable to meet with a publisher of those works, which were afterwards so eagerly sought after. He continued at Hof, where he lived in a small room, together with his mother and brothers. supported, in a great measure, by contributions from some of his academnical friends, and assisted in his studies by a clergyman of the name of Vogel, who provided him with books, when a landed proprietor in the vicinity engaged him as tutor to his children. His situation here was, however, very disagreeable, and he gladly accepted an offer of a similar situation at Schwarzenbach, where he had the satisfaction to find a publisher for his A'swahl aus des Tetifels Papieren. It met, however, with but small success, and much as he tried to publish others of his compositions, he had the mortification of seeing himself everywhere coldly received, notwithstanding the active intercession on the part of Weisse, Meissner, Herder, and Wieland. At last he determined upon writing a novel, Die unsichtbare Loge, in which he interwove a history of his own life. This he sent to Moritz, professor and member of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, through whose intercession he received one hundred ducats for his manuscript. He then returned to Hof, with a view of making his mother more comfortable, and composed his Iiesperus and Quintus Fizlein, the former of which, in particular, contributed to spread his fame and place him in more easy circumstances. In the summer of 1796 he received an invitation to Weimar, where he was most enthusiastically received. Yet, much as he was courted there, he did not prolong his stay beyond three weeks. His personal appearance had little to recommend him; strongly built and sinewy as he appeared, he was still of a delicate constitution, but his eve had all the splendor of the great mind within. His conversation, as were his writings, was flowery and elevated, and his voice musical but rather weak; li his expressions bore the impress of his mind,-purity and innocence, veracity and warmth of sentiment, and love towards mankind. Herder, who was delighted with his new acquaintance, writes of him to Jacobi:'I can only say of him, that he is all heart and soul, a finely-soundinl note on the golden harp of mankind....' In the summer of 1797 he lost his mother, and as nothing now retained him at Hof, he removed to Leipsic, which, a twelvemonth after, he left for Weimar, where he met with the same friendly reception as on his first visit. In the spring of 1800 he paid his first visit to Berlin, with which he was so much pleased, that he exchanged it for Weirnmar. In Berlin he made the acquaintance of his future wife, whom he married in 1801, when he went to settle at Meinngen. But although held in great respect here, and enjoying the intimate friendship of tht reigning duke, his roving disposition induced him to

38 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. will say that this results from the originality even of his genius; I think that his faults are as much the cause of it as his excellencies. In these modern times, the mind should be European; the Germans encourage their authors too much in that wandering spirit of enterprise, which, daring as it seems, is not always void of affectation. Madame de Lambert said to her son: "My friend, indulge yourself in no follies that will not afford you a very high degree of pleasure." We might beg Jean Paul never to be singular except in spite of himself: whatever is said involuntarily always hits some natural feeling; but when natural originality is spoiled by the pretension to originality, the reader has no perfect enjoyment even of what is true, from the remembrance and the dread of what is otherwise. Some admirable beauties are to be found, nevertheless, in the works of Jean Paul; but the arrangement and frame of his pictures are so defective, that the most luminous traits of genius are lost in the general confusion. The writings of Jean Paul deserve to be considered in two points of view, the humorous and the serious, for he constantly mixes both together. His manner of observing the human heart is full of delicacy and vivacity, but his knowledge of it is merely such as may be acquired in the little towns of Germany; and in his delineation of manners, confined as it is, there is frequently something too innocent for the age in which we live. Observations so delicate, and almost minute, on the moral affections, recall a little to our recollection the personage in the fairy tales who went by the name of Fine-Ear, because he could hear the grass grow. In this respect Sterne bears some analogy to Jean Paul; but if Jean Paul is very superior to him in the serious.eave it in 1803 for Gotha, on account of its more agreeable situation; nor did he stop long here, but went to settle permanently at Baireuth. His circumnstances were now in a flourishing condition, and he enjoyed a large pension till his death, which took place in 1825. "IHis most celebrated works are (besides the above mentioned): Da# Campaneerthal; Titan; Doctor Kazenbergers Badereife; Levana, oder Erzmi tungslehrefiir Tichter; torschule zur Aesthetit; Flegeljahre."-Ed.

ROMANCEb. 69 and poetical part of his works, Sterne has more taste and elegance in his humor, and we see that he has lived in societies less confined and more brilliant. Thoughts extracted from the writings of Jean Paul would, however, form a very remarkable work; but we perceive, in reading them, his singular custom of collecting from every quarter, from obsolete books, scientific works, etc., his metaphors and allusions. The resemblances thus produced are almost always very ingenious; but when study and attention are required to enable us to find out a jest, scarcely any but the Germans would consent thus to laugh after a serious study, and give themselves as much trouble to understand what amuses them as what is calculated for their instruction. At the bottom of all this we find a mine of new ideas, and if we reach it, we are enriched; but the author has neglected the stamp which should have been given to those treasures. The gayety of the French is derived from the spirit of society; that of the Italians from the imagination; that of the English from originality of character; the gayety of the Germans is philosophic. They jest with things and with books, rather than with men. Their heads contain a chaos of knowledge, which an independent and fantastic imagination combines in a thousand different ways, sometimes original, sometimes confused, but in which we always perceive great vigor of intellect and of soul. The genius of Jean Paul frequently resembles that of Montaigne. The French authors of former times are in general more like the Germans, than writers of the age of Louis XIV; for it is since that time that French literature has taken a classical direction. Jean Paul Richter is often sublime in the serious parts of his works, but the continued melancholy of his language sometimes moves till it fatigues us. When the imagination is kept too long in the clouds, the colors are confused, the outlines are effaced, and we retain of all that we have read rather a reverberation of the sound than a recollection of the substance. The sensibility of Jean Paul affects the soul, but does not suffi

t0o nMADAME DE STAEL. S GERMANY. ciently strengthen it. The poetry of his style resembles the sounds of a harmonica, which delight us at first, but give us pain a few minutes afterwards, because the exaltation excited by them has no determinate object. We give too great an advantage to cold and insipid characters, when we represent sensibility to them as a disease, while, on the contrary, it is the most energetic of all our moral faculties, since it imparts both the desire and ability to devote ourselves to others. Among the affecting episodes which abound in the writings of Jean Paul, where the principal subjects are seldom more than slight pretexts to introduce the episodes, I will now quote three, taken by chance, to give an idea of the rest. An English lord is blind in consequence of a double cataract; he has an operation performed on one of his eyes; it fails, and that eye is irretrievably lost. His son, without informing him of it, studies with an oculist, and at the end of a year-he is judged capable of operating on the eye, which may yet be preserved. The father, ignorant of his son's intention, thinks he is placing himself in the hands of a stranger, and prepares himself with fortitude for the moment which is to decide whether the rest of his life is, or is not, to be passed in darkness; he even directs that his son should be sent from his chamber, that he may not be too much affected by being present at so important a decision. The son approaches his father in silence; his hand does not tremble, for the circumstance is too momentous to admit of the common signs of tenderness. All his soul is concentered in a simple thought, and even the excess of his sensibility gives that supernatural presence of mind, which would be succeeded by phrensy, if hope were lost. At length the operation succeeds, and the father, in recovering his sight, beholds the instrument of its restoration in the hand of his own son! Another romance by the same author also presents a very affecting situation. A young blind man requests a description of the setting of the sun, whose mild and pure rays, he says he feels in the atmosphere, like the farewell of a friend. The person whom he interrogates describes nature to him in all its

ROMANCES. 71 beauty; but he mingles in his painting an impression of melancholy, calculated to console the unfortunate being who is deprived of sight. He incessantly appeals to the Deity, as to the living source of the wonders of the world; and bringing every thing within the scope of that intellectual sight which the blind man probably enjoys in a more perfect manner than we do, he makes his soul perceive what his eyes can no longer tehold. I will now venture a translation of a very strange composi tion, but which will assist us in forming an opinion of the genius of Jean Paul. Bayle has somewhere said, that atheism does not shelter us fromn the fear of eternal suffering: it is a grand thought, and it offers to us a wide field for reflection. The dream of Jean Paul which I am now about to cite, may be considered as this thought extended to action. This dream in some measure resembles the. delirium of a fever, and ought to be considered as such. In every respect, except that of displaying the powers of imagination, it is extremely liable to censure.' "The purpose of this fiction," says Jean Paul, "is the excuse of its boldness. Men deny the Divine Existence with as little feeling as the most assert it. Even in our true systems we go on collecting mere words, playmarks, and medals, as the misers do coins; and not till late do we transform the words into feelings, the coins into enjoyments. A man may, for twenty years, believe the Immortality of the Soul; in the one-and-twentieth, in some great moment, he for the first time discovers with amazement the rich meaning of this belief, and the warmth of this Naphtha-well. "A DREAM. "If we hear, in childhood, that the dead, about midnight, when our sleep reaches near the soul, and darkens even our {reams, awake out of theirs, and in the church mimic the W1 e use the translation of Carlyle.-Ed.

72 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. worship of the living, we shudder at Death by reason of the dead, and in the night-solitude turn away our eyes from the long silent windows of the church, and fear to search in their gleaming, whether it proceed from the moon. "Childhood, and rather its terrors than its raptures, take wings and radiance again in dreams, and sport like fire-flies in the little night of the soul. Crush not these flickering sparks! Leave us even our dark, painful dreams, as higher half-shadows of reality! And wherewith will you replace to us those dreams, which bear us away from under the tumult of the waterfall into the still heights of childhood, where the stream of life yet ran silent in its little plain, and flowed towards its abysses, a mirror of the Heaven? "I was lying once, on a summer evening, in the sunshine; and I feel asleep. Methought I awoke in the churchyard. The down-rolling wheels of the steeple-clock, which was striking eleven, had awoke me. In the emptied night-heaven I looked for the Sun; for I thought an eclipse was veiling him with the Moon. All the Graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house were swinging to and fro by invisible hands. On the walls flitted shadows, which proceeded from no one, and other shadows stretched upwards in the pale air. In the open coffins none now lay sleeping but the children. Over the whole heaven hung, in large folds, a gray sultry mist, which a giant shadow like vapor was drawing down, nearer, closer, and hotter. Above me I heard the distant fall of avalanches; under me, the first step of a boundless earthquake. The Church wavered up and down with two interminable Dissonances, which struggled with each other in it, endeavoring in vain to mingle in unison. At times, a gray glimmer hovered along the windows, and under it the lead and iron fell down molten. The net of the mist, and the tottering Earth, brought me into that hideous Temple, at the door of which, m two poison-bushes, two glittering Basilisks lay brooding. I passed through unknown Shadows, on whom ancient centuries were impressed. All the Shadows were standing round the empty Altar; and in all, not the heart, but the breast quivered

ROMANCES. 73 and pulsed. One dead man only, who had just been buried there, still lay on his coffin without quivering breast, and on his smiling countenance stood a happy dream. But at the entrance of one Living, he awoke, and smiled no longer; he lifted his heavy eyelids, but within was no eye; and in his beating breast there lay, instead of heart, a wound. He held up his hands, and folded them to pray; but the arms lengthened out and dissolved, and the hands, still folded together, fell away. Above, on the Church-dome, stood the dial-plate of Eternity, whereon no number appeared, and which was its own index: but a black finger pointed thereon, and the Dead sought to see the time by it. " Now sank from aloft a noble, high Form, with a look of ineffaceable sorrow, down to the Altar, and all the Dead cried out,'Christ! is there no God?' He answered,'There is none!' The whole Shadow of each then shuddered, not the breast alone; and one after the other, all, in this shuddering, shook into pieces. " Christ continued:'I went through the Worlds, I mounted into the Suns, and flew with the Galaxies through the wastes of Heaven; but there is no God! I descended as far as Being casts its shadow, and looked down into the Abyss and cried, Father, where art thou? But I heard only the everlasting storm which no one guides, and the gleaming Rainbow of Creation hung without a Sun that made it, over the Abyss, and trickled down. And when I looked up to the immeasurable world for the Divine Eye, it glared on me with an empty, black, bottomless Eye-socket; and Eternity lay upon Chaos, eating it and ruminating it. Cry on, ye Dissonances; cry away the Shadows, for He is not!' "The pale-grown Shadows flitted away, as white vapor which frost has formed with the warm breath disappears; and all was void. Oh, then came, fearful for the heart, the dead Children who had been awakened in the Churchyard into the temple, and cast themselves before the high Form on the Altar, and said,'Jesus, have we no Father?' And he answered, with streaming tears,' We are all orphans, I and you; we are without Father!' VOL. II.-4

74 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. " Then shrieked the Dissonances still louder,-the quivering walls of the Temple parted asunder; and the Temple and the Children sank down, and the whole Earth and the Sun sank after it, and the whole Universe sank with its immensity before us; and above, on the summit of immeasurable Nature, stood Christ, and gazed down into the Universe checkered with its thousand Suns, as into the Mine bored out of the Eternal Night, in which the Suns run like mine-lamps, and the Galaxies like silver veins. "And as he saw the grinding press of Worlds, the torchdance of celestial wildfires, and the coral-banks of beating hearts; and as he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the Sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves, then majestic as the Highest of the Finite, he raised his eyes towards the Nothingness, and towards the void Immensity, and said:'Dead, dumb Nothingness! Cold, everlasting Necessity! Frantic Chance! Know ye what this is that lies beneath you? When will ye crush the Universe in pieces, and me? Chance, knowest thou what thou doest, when with thy hurricanes thou walkest through that snow-powder of Stars, and extinguishest Sun after Sun, and that sparkling dew of heavenly light goes out as thou passest over it? How is each so solitary in this wide grave of the All! I am alone with myself! O Father, O Father! where is thy infinite bosom, that I might rest upon it? Ah, if each soul is its own father and creator, why can it not be its own destroyer too? "' Is this beside me yet a Man? Unhappy one! Your little life is the sigh of Nature, or only its echo; a convex-mirror throws its rays into that dust-cloud of dead men's ashes down on the Earth, and thus you, cloud-formed wavering phantoms, arise! Look down into the Abyss, over which clouds of ashes are moving; mists full of Worlds reek up from the Sea of Death; the Future is a mounting mist, and the Present is a falling one. Knowest thou thy Earth again?' "Here Christ looked down, and his eye filled with tears, and he said:'Ah, I was once there; I was still happy then;

ROMANCES. 75 I had still my Infinite Father, and looked up cheerfully from the mountains into the immeasurable Heaven, and pressed my mangled breast on his healing form, and said, even in the bitterness of death, Father, take thy son from this bleeding hull, and lift him to thy heart! Ah, ye too happy inhabitants of Earth, ye still believe in Him. Perhaps even now your Sun is going down, and ye kneel amid blossoms, and brightness, and tears, and lift trustful hands, and cry with joy-streaming eyes to the opened Heaven: "Me too thou knowest, Omnipotent, and all my wounds; and at death thou receivest me, and closest them all!" Unhappy creatures, at death they will not be closed! Ah, when the sorrow-laden lays himself, with galled back, into the Earth, to sleep till a fairer Morning full of Truth, full of Virtue and Joy, he awakens in a stormy Chaos, in the- everlasting Midnight,-and there comes no Morning, and no soft healing hand, and no Infinite Father! Mortal, beside me! if thou still livest, pray to Him; else hast thou lost him forever!' "' And as I fell down, and looked into the sparkling Universe, I saw the upborne Rings of the Giant-Serpent, the Serpent of Eternity, which had coiled itself round the All of Worlds,-and the Rings sank down, and encircled the All doubly; —and then it wound itself, innumerable ways, round Nature, and swept the Worlds from their places, and crashing, squeezed the Temple of Immensity together, into the Church of a Buryingground,-and all grew strait, dark, fearful,-and an immeasurably extended IIammer was to strike the last hour of Time, and shiver the Universe asunder,.. WHEN I AWOKE. "My soul wept for joy that I could still pray to God; and the joy, and the weeping, and the faith on him were my prayer. And as I arose, the Sun was glowing deep behind the full purpled corn-ears, and casting meekly the gleam of its twilightred on the little Moon, which was rising in the East without an Aurora; and between the sky and the earth a gay, transient air-people was stretching out its short wings and living, as I did, before the Infinite Father; and from all Nature around me flowed peaceful tones as from distant evening-bells."

76 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. I shall add no observations on this singular essay, the effect of which must depend entirely on the species of imagination possessed by the reader. I was struck by the gloomy cast of the talents it displays, and it appeared to me a fine idea, thus to carry beyond the grave the horrible despair which every creature would necessarily feel if deprived of God.' I should never lay down my pen if I were to analyze the multitude of witty and affecting ronmances to be found in Germany. Those of La Fontaine in particular, which are read at least once by every one with so much pleasure, are frequently 1 Richter's intellectual and Literary character is, perhaps, in a singular degree the counterpart and image of his practical and moral character: his Works seem to us a more than usually faithful transcript of his mind; written with great warmth direct from the heart, and, like himself, wild, strong, original, sincere. Viewed under any aspect, whether as Thinker, Moralist, Satirist, Poet, he is a phenomenon; a vast, many-sided, tumultuous, yet noble nature; for faults, as for merits,' Jean Paul the Unique.' In all departments, we find in him a subduing force; but a lawless, untiutored, as it were, half-savage force. Thus, for example, few understandings known to us are of a more irresistible character than Richter's; but its strength is a natural, unarmed, Orson-like strength: he does not cunningly undermine his subject, and lay it open, by syllogistic implements, or any rule of art; but he crushes it to pieces in his arms, he treads it asunder, not without gay triumph, under his feet; and so in almost monstrous fashion, yet with piercing clearness, lays bare the inmost heart and core of it to all eyes. In passion, again, there is the same wild vehemence: it is a voice of softest pity, of endless, boundless wailing, a voice as of Rachel weeping for her children; or the fierce bellowing of lions amid savage forests. Thus, too, he not only loves Nature, but he revels in her; plunges into her infinite bosom, and fills his whole heart to intoxication with her charms. He tells us that he was wont to study, to write, almost to live, in the open air; and no skyey aspect was so dismal that it altogether wanted beauty for him. We know of no Poet with so deep and passionate and universal a feeling towards Nature:'from the solemn phases of the starry heaven to the simplest floweret of the meadow, his eye and his heart are open for her charms and her mystic meanings.' But what most of all shadows forth the inborn, essential temper of Paul's mind, is the sportfulness, the wild heartfelt Humor, which, in his highest as:n his lowest moods, ever exhibits itself as a quite inseparable ingredient. His Humor, with all its wildness, is of the gravest and kindliest, a genuine Humor;'consistent with utmost earnestness, or rather, inconsistent with the want of it.' But on the whole, it is impossible for him tc write in other than a humorous man-or, be his subject what it may. Hib Philosophical Treatises, nay, his Autobiography itself, every thing tha

GERMIAN HISTORIANS. 77 more interesting in the detail than of the general plan or conception of the subject. To invent becomes daily more uncommon; and besides, romances which delineate manners, can with difficulty be rendered pleasing in different countries. The great advantage, therefore, which may be derived from the study of German literature, is the spirit of emulation which it imparts; we should rather seek in it the means of writing well ourselves, than expect from it works already written which may be worthy of being transmitted to other nations. CHAPTER XXIX. OF GERMAN HISTORIANS, AND OF J. VON MULLER IN PARTICULAR. HISTORY is the portion of literature most nearly connected with the knowledge of public affairs; a great historian is almost a statesman; for it is scarcely possible to form a right judgment of political events, without being, in a certain degree, able also to conduct them; thus we see that the greater nnumber of historians are well acquainted with the government of their country, and write only as they might have acted. In the first rank of historians we must reckon those of antiquity, because there is no period in which men of superior talents have exerted more influence over their country. The English historians occupy the second rank; but the appellation of great belongs rather to their nation, than to any particular individ comes from him, is encased in some quaint fantastic framing; and roguish eyes (yet with a strange sympathy in the matter, for his Humor, as we said, is heartfelt and true) look out on us through many a grave delineation. In his Novels, above all. this is ever an indispensable quality, and, indeed, announces itself in the very entrance of the business, often even )n the title-page. Think, for instance, of that Selection from the Papers of the Devil; Je.qperus, OR the Dog-post-days; Siehenkas's lWedded-life, Death wmD Nuptials!"-( Carlyle's Essays, p. 212.)-Ed.

78 LMADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. ual; and its historians are therefore less dramatic, but more philosophical than those of ancient times. The English affix more importance to general than to particular ideas. In Italy, Machiavelli is the only historian who has considered the events of his country in a comprehensive, though in a terrible manner; all the others have seen the world in their own city;. but this patriotism, confined as it is, still imparts interest and spirit to the writings of Italy.' It has been always remarked that in France, memoirs are much better than histories; courtintrigues formerly determined the fate of the kingdom, it was therefore very natural that in such a country private anecdotes should contain the secret of history. It is under a literary point of view that we should consider the German historians; the political existence of the country has not hitherto had power to give a national character to that class of writers. The talent peculiar to each individual, and the general principles of the historic art, have alone influenced this sort of production of the human mind. It appears to me that the various historical writings published in Germany, may be divided into three principal classes: learned history, philosophical history, and classical history, as far as the acceptation of that word is confined, as the ancients understood it to be, to the art of narration. Germany abounds with learned historians, such as Mascou, Sch6pfiin, Schllzer, Gatterer, Schmidt, etc. They have made profound researches, and have given us works where every thing is to be found by those who know how to study them; but such writers are fit only to refer to, and their works would be beyond all others estimable and liberal, if their only object had been to spare trouble to men of genius, who are desirous of writing history.' 1 M. de Sismondi has, in his writings, re rived the partial interests of the talian republics, by connecting them -with the great sl;bjects of inquiry which are interesting to the whole human race. 2 Niebuhr, Ranke, Neander, Bunsen, Mommsen, etc., are new names that indicate great changes in historical studies since Madame de Stad wrote. —Ed.

GERMAN HISTORIANS. 79 Schiller is at the head of the philosophical historians, that is, of those who consider facts as so many reasons for the sup port of their own opinions. The History of the Revolution in the Netherlands is written with as much warmth and interest, as if it were a plea in a court of justice. The Thirty Years' War is an epoch which called forth the energies of the German nation. Schiller has written its history with a sentiment of patriotism and love of knowledge and liberty, which does great credit both to his heart and his genius; the traits with which he characterizes the principal personages are of a very superior kind, and all his reflections are derived from the concentrations of an elevated mind; but the Germans reproach Schiller with not having sufficiently traced facts up to their sources; he could not entirely fill the great outlines chalked out by his uncommon talents; and the erudition on which his history is founded is not sufficiently extensive. I have frequently had occasion to observe, that the Germans were the first to feel all the advantages which imagination might derive from learning; circumstantial details alone give color and life to history; on the surface of our knowledge we scarcely find any thing more than a pretext for reason and argument. Schiller's history was written in that part of the eighteenth century, when ideas were used only as weapons of hostile argument, and his style is a little tinctured with the polemical spirit so prevalent in almost all the writings of that period. But when the object aimed at is toleration and liberty, and that we advance towards it by means and sentiments so noble as those of Schiller, we are always sure of composing a fine work, even though more or less room might be desirable in the part assigned to facts and reflections.' By a singular contrast, it is Schiller, the great dramatic poet, who has mingled perhaps too much philosophy, and consequently too many general ideas in his narrations; and it is Mfiller, the most learned of historians, who has been truly a poet in his manner of describing both X Among philosophical historians, we must not forget Heeren, who has ust published Thoughts on the Crusaders, in which perfect impartiality is tboh result of uncommon kuowledge and strength of judgment.

so MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. m(n and events. In the History of Switzerland we must distinguish the learned man and the able writer; and I think it is only by this means that we shall succeed in doing justice to Miller. He was a man of unparalleled knowledge, and his abilities, in that respect, really frightened those who were acquainted with them. We cannot conceive how the head of one man could contain such a world of facts and of dates. The six thousand years which are known to us, were perfectly arranged in his memory, and his studies had been so deepN that they were as fresh as if they were recollections. There is not a village in Switzerland, not a noble family, of which he did not know the history. One day, in consequence of a wager, he was requested to give the pedigree of the sovereign counts of Bugey; he repeated their names one after another immediately, only he did not clearly recollect whether one of those he mentioned had been regent, or sovereign in his own right, and he seriously reproached himself for this defect of memory. Men of genius among the ancients were not subjected to that immense labor of erudition which is augmenting with every century, and their imaginations were not fatigued by study. It costs much more to acquire distinction in our days, and we owe some respect to the persevering toil which is necessary in order to gain possession of the subject under investigation. The death of Muiller, of whose character there are various Opinions, is an irreparable loss to literature, and it seems as if more than one man were taken from us, when such talents are extinguished.' Muiller, who may be considered as the true classical historian of Germany, constantly read both the Greek and Latin authors mn the original; he cultivated literature and the fine arts as subservient to history. His unbounded erudition, far from X Among the disciples of Muller, the Baron von Hormayr, who wrote.he Austrian Plutarch, should be considered as one of the first; we know Slat his history is composed, not from books, but from original manuscripts. Doctor Decarro, a learned Genevese settled at Vienna, by whose beneficent activity the discovery of vaccination has been carried into Asia Es about to publish a translation of these lives of the great men of Austria hich must excite great interest.

GERMAN HISTORIANS. 81 diminishing his natural vivacity, was rather the foundation from whence his imagination took its flight, and the striking truth of his pictures was the result of the scrupulous fidelity with which they were drawn; but though he made admirable use of his learning, he was ignorant of the art of laying it aside when necessary. His history is much too long; he has not sufficiently compressed the different parts of it together. Details are necessary to give interest to the recital of events; but we ought to choose among those events such as are worthy to be recited. The work of Muller is an eloquent chronicle; if, however, all histories were thus conducted, the life of man would be entirely spent in reading the lives of men. It were much to be wished, therefore, that Muller had not suffered himself to be led astray even by the extent of his knowledge. Nevertheless, readers who have the more time at their command, because they make a better use of it, will always feel new pleasure in perusing those noble annals of Switzerland. The preliminary chapters are chefs-d'auvre of eloquence. No one has known better than Muller how to display in his writings the most energetic patriotism; and now that he is no more, it is by his writings alone that we can appreciate him. He describes, with the skill of a painter, the scenes in which the principal events of the Helvetic confederation took place. It would be wrong to become the historian of a country we have never beheld. Situations, places, nature itself, are like the'ody of the picture; and facts, however well they may be ielated, have not the character of truth, if the external objects with which men are surrounded, are not, at the same time, brought forward to our view. That erudition which led MUller to ascribe too much im jportance to every particular fact, is extremely useful to him, when the object is an event really deserving of being animated by the powers of imagination. He then relates it as if it had passed but yesterday, and knows how to give it all the interest vhioh we should feel from a circumstance still present to us. In history as well -as in fiction, we ought, as much as possi 4:;

32 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. ble, to leave to the reader the pleasure and opportunity of anticipating the characters of men and the progress of events. He is soon tired with what is told him, but he is delighted with what he himself discovers; and we assimilate literature to the interests of life, when we know how to awaken the anxiety of expectation by a mere recital; the judgment of the reader is exercised on a word, on an action, which makes him at once understand the character of a man, and often the spirit even of a nation or of a century. The conspiracy of RUtli, as it is related in the History of Mtiller, excites very great interest. That peaceful valley, where men equally peaceable resolved on the most perilous actions at the command of conscience; the calmness of their deliberation; the solemnity of their oath; their ardor in the execution of it; an irrevocable determination founded on the. will of man, while all without is changeable, what a picture! The imagery alone awakens thought; the heroes of this event, as the author relates it, are absorbed by the grandeur of their object. No general idea presents itself to their mind, no reflection occurs to diminish the firmness of the action, or the beauty of the recital. At the battle of Granson, in which the Duke of Burgundy attacked the small army of the Swiss Cantons, a simple trait gives the most affecting idea of those times and manners. Charles already occupied the heights, and thought himself master of the army which he saw at a distance on the plain; when all at once, at the rising of the sun, he perceived the Swiss, who, according to the custom of their fathers, fell on their knees before the battle to implore the protection of the Lord of lords; the Burgundians thought they were kneeling ihuis in order to yield up their arms, and began to shout triuniphantly; but all at once those Christian soldiers, fortified by prayer, rose from the ground, fell on their adversaries, and at length obtain the victory of which their pious ardor had rendered them so worthy. Circumstances of this sort are often found in Miiller's history, and his language affects the soul even when what he says is not in itself pathetic; there is

GERMAN HISTORIANS. 83;omething grave, noble, and chaste in his style, which powerfully awakens the recollection of ancient times. Miiller had nevertheless much versatility; but genius assumes all forms without being on that account subjected to the charge of hypocrisy. It is what it appears to be, but it cannot always continue in the same disposition, and external circumstances give it different modifications. It is above all to the coloring of his style that Muiller owes his power over the imagination; the old words which he makes use of so much to the purpose, give an air of Germanic faith which inspires us with confidence. Nevertheless, he is wrong in attempting to unite the conciseness of Tacitus with the naivete of the middle ages; these two imitations are inconsistent with each other. There is even no one but MUiller with whom the old German phraseology sometimes succeeds; in every one else it is affectation. Sallust alone among the ancient writers ventured to make use of the forms and language of a period anterior to his own; in general this sort of imitation is unnatural to us; nevertheless, the chronicles of the middle ages were so familiar to Muiller, that he often unintentionally wrote in the same style. Those expressions must certainly have been natural to him, since they inspire all that he wished us to feel.' In reading MUiller we have pleasure in believing that he possessed at least some of the virtues which he knew so well how to appreciate. His last will, which has been just pub" Comnparatively few, we imagine, even among diligent readers, have paid much attention to the history of Hlelvetia. It has not yet been well written. It is a thing for the future. The man is yet to arise, who, bringnig to this task scholarship, candor, industry, genius, and sympathy with the principle of freedom, shall make of Swiss history what it ought to be, a story as grand and far-reaching and inspiring as the views from those rugged and enduring mountains. Mfiller was great enough for the task, bu, he lived a century too soon, was seduced from his integrity as an his-'orian by the blandishments of the German courts, found naturally more scope for his genius in a universal than in a merely national record, and nas only left materials for some more loyal son of the land to recast and,omplete."-(horitl American Review, April, 1859, p. 480.)-Ed.

84 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. lished, is undoubtedly a proof of his disinterestedness. He leaves no fortune, but directs his manuscripts to be sold in order to pay his debts. He adds, that if the produce is sufficient to discharge them, he bequeathes his watch to his servant, "who will not," he says, "receive without tender emotion, the watch which he has daily wound up for twenty years." The poverty of a man possessed of such distinguished talents is always an honorable circumstance of his life: a thousandth part of the genius which confers a high literary reputation would certainly be sufficient to insure the success of all the calculations of covetousness. It is a fine thing to devote one's talents to the pursuit of fame, and we always feel esteem for those who ardently aspire after an object which lies beyond the grave. CHAPTER XXX. IERDER. THE literary men of Germany, as a united body, form in many respects the most respectable assemblage which the enlightened world can present to us; and among these, Herder' deserves a distinguished place: his mind, his genius, and his morality united, have rendered his life illustrious. His writings may be considered in three different points of view, those of history, literature, and theology. He was much occupied 1 "John Godfrey Herder, the friend and early patron of Goethe, was born, in 1744, at Mohrungen, a small place in East-Prussia, where his father was sexton and schoolmaster. He received from him the rudiments of his education, and at a very early age showed great diligence. But the small means of his parents, and a defect in one of his eyes, seemed a bar to his ever bming sent to a university. The clergyman of the place took him into his house in the capacity of a menial, but he had access to his library, and employed all his leisure time in reading. During the Seven Years' War, he became acquainted with an army surgeon who prevailed on him lo accompany him to K6nigsberg, to study surgery; but some sdhort time

HERDER. 85 mn the study of antiquity in general, and of the oriental languages in particular. His book entitled the Philosophy of History has more fascination in it than almost any other Gelrman production. We do not indeed find that it contains the same depth of political observation as the work written by Montesquieu on the Causes of the Grandeur and -Decline of the Romans; but as Herder's object was to penetrate the genius of the earliest times, perhaps the quality he most eminently possessed, which was imagination, proved more serviceable to him in that pursuit than any other would have done. That sort of torch is necessary when we walk in darkness: Herder's various chapters on Persepolis and Babylon, on the Hebrews and Egyptians, form a delightful kind of reading; it seems as if we were walking in the midst of the old world with an historical poet, who touches the ruins with his wand, and erects anew before our eyes all the fallen edifices. In Germany, so extensive a degree of information is expected even from men of the greatest genius, that some critics have accused Herder of not possessing a sufficient depth of learning. But what strikes us, on the contrary, is the variety of his knowledge; all the languages were familiar to him, and his Essay on the Poetry of the Hebrews,' is the work in which he afterwards he determined to embrace the profession of theology, and was appointed minister of the Lutheran church and rector of the high-school in Riga. He soon, however, resigned that situation, and, desirous to see the world, travelled through Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, to France. In Paris he had an offer of travelling as tutor with the Prince of Holstein, whom he went to meet at Eutin. After having accompanied him through a great part of Geriuany, he left him to accept an appointment as court-preacher at Biickeburg (1770). Five years afterwards, the professorship of theology in the University of Gbttingen was offered to him; but on his arrival there he received the disagreeable intelligence that his nomination had not been confirmed by the King of England. In 1789, the rank of vice-president of Consistory was bestowed on hin by the Duke of Weimar, in whose capital he took his final abode. He died in 1803, in his fifty-ninth year. " His principal works are: Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache; Geist der he5riiischeen Poe.ie; Ideen zur Philosophie der Ges.'.ichte der Meelschheit; Briefe iber die Fortschritte der uHnmanitiit; Vernunft und Menschlichkeit.'-Ed. 1 It has been well translated in this country by Professor Marsh.-Ed.

86 IMADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. most readily discovers how far he could adopt the spirit of foreign nations. The genius of a prophetic people, with whom poetical inspiration was an emanation from the Deity, was never better expressed. The wandering life of that nation, the manners of its people, the thoughts of which they were capable, the imagery habitual to it, are all pointed out by Herder with great sagacity. By the help of the most ingenious combinations, he endeavors to give us an idea of the symmetry of Itebrew versification, of that return of the same sentiment and of the same image in different terms of which every stanza offers us an example. Sometimes he compares this striking regular.. ity to two rows of pearls which surround the hair of a beautiful woman. " Art and nature," says he, " through all their varieties, still preserve an astonishing uniformity." Unless we were able to read the Hebrew Psalms in the original language, it is impossible to acquire a better idea of the charm with which they are accompanied, than by what Herder says of them. His imagination was straitened in the countries of the West; he delighted in breathing the perfumes of Asia, and in transfusing into his works the pure incense which his soul had collected. It was he who first made Spanish and Portuguese poetry known in Germany; the translations of Wi. Schlegel have since naturalized them. Herder published a collection entitled Popular Songs. It contains ballads and detached pieces, on which the national character and imagination of the people are strongly impressed. We may study in them that natural poetry which precedes cultivation. Cultivated literature becomes so speedily factitious, that it is good, now and then, to have recourse to the origin of all poetry, that is to say, to the impression made by nature on man before he had analyzed both the universe and himself. The flexibility of the German language alone, perhaps, admits a translation of those naivetis peculiar to that of different countries, without which we cannot enter into the spirit of popular poetry; the words in those poems have in themselves a certain grace, which affects us like a flower we have before seen, like an air that we have heard in our childhlood: these peculiar impressions contain not only the secrets

HERDER. 87 of the art, but those of the soul, from which art originally derived them. The Germans, in literature, analyze their sensations to the very utmost, even to those delicate shades which no language can convey to our ideas; and we may reproach them with attaching themselves too much, in every respect, to the endeavor of making us comprehend what can never be expressed. I shall speak, in the fourth part of this work, of Herder's theological writings; history and literature are often found united in them. A man of genius so sincere as Herder, must naturally mingle religion with all his thoughts, and all his thoughts with religion. It has been said that his writings resemble an animated conversation: it is true that he has not made use of that methodical form in his works, which is given to books in general. It was under the porticos, and in the gardens of the Academy, that Plato explained to his disciples the system of the intellectual world. We find in Herder that noble negligence of genius ever impatient to acquire new ideas. What we call a well-made book is a modern invention. The discovery of the art of printing has made necessary divisions, recapitulations, in short all the apparatus of logic. The greatest number of ancient works of philosophy, are treatises or dialogues, which we consider as written conversations. Montaigne also gave himself up to the natural course of his thoughts. To be allowed such a privilege, however, we should possess a decided superiority of intellect. Order supplies the want of that superiority; for if mediocrity were thus to deviate at random, we should commonly be brought back to the point from which we begun, with the fatigue of having taken many a wearisome step; but a man of genius interests us the more, by showing himself as he is, and by making his books appear rather as extemporaneous effusions than labored ocompositions. Herder1 possessed, it is said, admirable powers of conversa1 " Herder is the lineal descendant of Lessing, imitating his revolutioniLy efforts, helping to disseminate his ideas, and succeeded in carrying,Inem further by reason of the very qualities which distinguished him from Laissilg. The works published about this period, namely, Fragmente zua

88 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. tion, and from his writings we are sensible that it must have been so. We also perceive from them what indeed all his friends attest the truth of, that there never was a better man. When literary genius inspires those who do not know us with a disposition to love us, it is that gift of heaven from which, on earth we gather the most delightful fruit. Dsutschen Literatur, 1767; the Kritische Wiilder, 1769; and Von Deutsche? Art Knd iwanst, 1773, show Lessing's influence as the groundwork, with Hamann's and his own rhetorical and theologico-poetical tendencies as variations. If Lessing is now best known by his LaokoSn and Nhathan, Herder is almost exclusively known by his Ideas towards a Historp of Man, kind. Tile contrast between these works is all the greater because of the evident parelntage. Herder had something of the Hebrew Prophei in him, but the Hebrew Prophet fallen upon Deistical times, with Spinoza and Lessilg for teachers., To complete the contrast between Lessing and Herder, it may be added that both were critics rather than poets; but the clear rational poetry of Lessing survives, while the rhetoric of Herder is altogether forgotten. Both greatly influenced their nation, Herder perhaps more than Lessing at the time; but as the waves of time roll on they leave Herder more and more behind, scarcely washing any thing away of the great Lessing. "' Herder's merit, according to Gervinus, is, that he gave an impulse to poetic activity, less through his own example than through his union of imagination and fancy with vesthetical criticism, thus throwing a bridge over from criticism to poetry. From youth upwards there was something in him solitary, visionary, and sensitive: lie was never seen to leap and play like other boys, but wandered lonely with his thoughts. A vast ambition, resting on a most predomninating vanity, made him daring in literature, bitter, and to many unendurable in intercourse. His sensitive nerves forbidding the study of medicine, he chose that of theology. He became one of Germany's most renowned preachers; but although his loved wife weaned him from the early'freethinking,' he never to the last became tvhat could be called orthodox; he was, so to speak, a rhetorical 8pinozma in orders.' " Although Herder was not more a poet than Lessing, he had more ce the poetical element in his nature; but it was confused, and instead of ripening into fruit, ran to seed in rhetoric. This fault, which was also a quality, brought him nearer to his age and nation. It gave a charm to his Leaching. It roused enthusiasm. It aided his efforts towards the dissemination of Ossian, Hebrew poetry, and old German literature, especially old Dallads."-(Lewes, Life and Works of Gfoethe, vol. i. pp. 258, 259.) —Ed.

GERMAN CRITICS) ETC. 89 CHAPTER XXXI. OF THE LITERARY TREASURES OF GERMANY, AND OF ITS MOST RENOWNED CRITICS, A. W. AND F. SCHLEGEL. IN the picture which I have now given of German literature, I have endeavored to point out the principal works; but I have been obliged to omit naming a great number of men, whose writings, being less known, conduce more to the instruction of those who read them, than to the reputation of the authors themselves. Treatises on the fine arts, works of erudition and philosophy, though they do not immediately belong to literature, must, however, be counted among its treasures. There is in Germany a fund of ideas and knowledge which the other nations of Europe will not for a long time be able to exhaust. The poetical genius, if Heaven ever restores it to us, may also receive a happy impulse from the love of nature, of arts, and philosophy, which is kindled in the countries of Germany; but at least, I dare affirm that any man who now wishes to devote himself to a serious work of whatever sort, whether history, philosophy, or antiquities, cannot excuse himself from becoming acquainted with the German writers, who have been occupied with the study of those subjects. France may boast of a great number of learned men of the first rank, but they have seldom united knowledge and philosophical sagacity, while in Germany they are now almost inseparable. Those who plead in favor of ignorance, as a pledge of grace, mention many very sensible men who have had no Instruction; but they forget that those men have deeply studied lhe human heart, such as it shows itself in the world, and that their ideas are derived from that source. But if those mrnen, learned in society, would judge of literature without being ac

90 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. quainted it, they would be as tiresome as citizens are when they talk of the court. When I began the study of German literature, it seemed as if I was entering on a new sphere, where the most striking light was thrown on all that I had before perceived only in a confused manner. For some time past, little has been read in France except memoirs and novels, and it is not wholly firom frivolity that we are become less capable of more serious read. ing, but because the events of the revolution have accustomed us to value nothing but the knowledge of men and things: we find in German books, even on the most abstract subjects, that kind of interest which confers their value upon good novels, and which is excited by the knowledge which they teach us of our owdn hearts. The peculiar character of German literature is to refer every thing to an interior existence; and as that is the mystery of mysteries, it awakens an unbounded curiosity. Before we proceed to philosophy, which always makes a part of learning in countries where the empire of literature is free and powerful, I will say a few words on what may be considered as the legislation of that empire-I mean criticism. There is no branch of German literature which has been carried to a greater extent, and as in certain cities there are more physicians than sick people, there are sometimes in Germany more critics than authors; but the analyses of Lessing, who was the creator of style in German prose, are made in such a manner, that they may themselves be considered as works. Kant, Goethe, J von Miiller, the greatest German writers of every kind, have inserted in the periodicals, what they call recensions of different publications, and these recensions contain the most profound philosophical theory, and positive knowledge. Among the younger writers, Schiller and the two Schlegels have shown themselves very superior to all other critics. Schiller is the first among the disciples of Kant who applied his philosophy to literature; and indeed, to judge from the soul, of exterior objects, or from exterior objects to know what passes in the soul, is so different a progress, that all col:

GERMAN CRITICS) ETC. 91 nected with either, must be sensible of it. Schiller has written two treatises on the narf and the sentimental, in which, genius unconscious of its own powers, and genius which is self-observant, are analyzed with great sagacity; but in his Essay on Grace and Dignity, and in his letters on ZEsthetics, that is, the theory of the beautiful, there is too much of metaphysics. When we mean to speak of that enjoyment of the arts of which all men are susceptible, we should dwell on the impressions they have received, instead of permitting the use of abstract forms, which make us lose the trace of those impressions. Schiller was a man of literature by his genius, and a philosopher by his inclination to reflection; his prose writings border on the couftues of the two regions; but he often treads a little forward on the highest, and returning incessantly to what is more abstract in theory, he disdains the application as a useless consequence of the principles he has laid down. Animated descriptions of the chefs-d'oeuvre of literature give much more interest to criticism, than general ideas which skim over all subjects without characterizing any. Metaphysics may be termed the science of what is immutable; but all that is subj'ected to the course of time, is explained oftly- by the mixture of facts and reflections: the Germans would attain complete theories, independent of' circumstances, on all subjects; but as that is impossible, we must not give up facts from a fear lest they should circumscribe ideas; and examples alone m theory, as well as in practice, engrave precepts deeply in the memory. The quintessence of thoughts which some German works present to us, does not, like that of flowers, concentrate the most odoriferous perfumes; on the contrary, we may say with greater truth, that it is only a cold remnant of emotions that were full of life. We might, however, extract from those works a multitude of very interesting observations; but they are confounded with each other. The author, by great exertion of mind, leads his readers to that point where his ideas are too fine and delicate for him to attempt transmitting them o others.

92 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. The writings of A. W. Schlegel are less abstracted than those of Schiller; as his knowledge of literature is uncommon even in Germany, he is led continually to application by the pleasure which he finds in comparing different languages and different poems with each other; so general a point of view ought almost to be considered as infallible, if partiality did not sonmetimes impair it; but this partiality is not of an arbitrary kind, and I will point out both the progress and aim of it; nevertheless, as there are subjects in which it is not perceived, it is of those that I shall first speak. W. Schlegel has given a course of dramatic literature at Vienna, which comprises every thing remarkable that has been composed for the theatre from the time of the Grecians to our own days: it is not a barren nomenclature of the works of the various authors; he seizes the spirit of their different sorts of literature with all the imagination of a poet; we are sensible that to produce such consequences extraordinary studies are required; but learning is not perceived in this work except by his perfect knowledge of the chefs-d'oeuvre of composition. In a few pages we reap the fruit of the labor of a whole life; every opinion formed by the author, every epithet given to the writers of whom he speaks, is beautiful and just, concise and animated. W. Sehlegel has found the art of treating the finest pieces of poetry as so many wonders of nature, and of painting them in lively colors which do not injure the justness of the outline; for we cannot repeat too often, that imagination, far from being an enemy to truth, brings it forward more than ally other faculty of the mind, and all those who depend upon it as an excuse for indefinite terms or exaggerated expressions, are at least as destitute of poetry as of good sense. An analysis of the principles on which both tragedy and comedy are founded, is treated in VW. Schlegel's course of dramatic literature with much depth of philosophy; this kind of merit is often found among the German writers; but Schlegel has no equal in the art of inspiring enthusiasm for the great geniuses he admires; in general he shows himself attached to A simple taste, sometimes bordering on rusticity, but he devi

GERMAN CRITICS, ETC. 93 ates from his usual opinions in favor of the opinions of the inhabitants of the South. Their jeux de mots and their concetti are not the objects of his censure; he detests the affectation which owes its existence to the spirit of society, but that which is excited by the luxury of imagination pleases him in poetry as the profusion of colors and perfumes would do in nature. Schlegel, after having acquired a great reputation by his translation of Shakspeare, became equally enamored of Calderon, but with a very different sort of attachment from that with which Shakspeare had inspired him; for while the English author is deep and gloomy in his knowledge of the human heart, the Spanish poet gives himself up with pleasure and delight to the beauty of life, to the sincerity of faith, and to all the brilliancy of those virtues which derive their coloring from the sunshine of the soul. I was at Vienna when WV. Schlegel gave his public course of lectures. I expected only good sense and instruction where the object was only to convey information; I was astonished to hear a critic as eloquent as an orator, and who, far from falling upon defects, which are the eternal food of mean and little jealousy, sought only the'means of reviving a creative genius. Spanish literature is but little known, and it was the subject of one of the finest passages delivered during the sitting at which I attended. W. Schlegel gave us a picture of that chivalrous nation, whose poets were all warriors, and whose warriors were poets. He mentioned that Count Ercilla, "who composed his poem of the Araucana in a tent, as now on the shores of the ocean, now at the foot of the Cordilleras, while he made war on the devoted savages. Garcilasso, one of the descendants of the Incas, wrote love-poems on the ruins of Carthage, and perished at the siege of Tunis. Cervantes was dangerously wounded at the battle of Lepanto; Lope de Vega escaped miraculously at the defeat of the Invincible Armada; and Calderon served as an intrepid soldier in the wars of Flanders and Italy. "Religion and war were more frequently united among the Spaniards than in any other nation; it was they who, by per

94 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. petual combats, drove out the Moors from the bosom of theit country, and who may be considered as the vanguard of European christendom; they conquered their churches from the Arabians, an act of their worship was a trophy for their arms, and their triumphant religion, sometimes carried to fanaticism, was allied to the sentiment of honor, and gave to their character an impressive dignity. That gravity tinctured with imagination, even that gayety which loses nothing of what is serious in the warmest affections, show themselves in Spanish literature, which is wholly composed of fictions and of poetry, of which religion, love, and warlike exploits are constantly the object. It might be said, that when the new world was discovered, the treasures of another hemisphere contributed to enrich the imagination as much as the state; and that in the empire of poetry as well as in that of Charles V, the sun never ceased to enlighten the horizon." All who heard W. Schlegel, were much struck with this picture, and the German language, which he spoke with elegance, added depth of thought and affecting expression to those high-sounding Spanish names, which can never be pronounced without presenting to our imaginations the orangetrees of the kingdom of Grenada, and the palaces of its Moorish sovereigns.' We may compare W. Schlegel's manner of speaking of poetry, to that of Winkelmann in describing statues; and it is only by such a method of estimating talents, that it is honorable to be a critic: every artist or professional man can point out faults and inaccuracies which ought to be avoided, but the ability to discover genius and to admire it, is almost equal to the possession of genius itself. 1 William Schlegel, whom I here mention as the first literary critic oi Germany, is the author of a French pamphlet lately published under the title of Reflections on th-e Continental System. This same W. Schlegel printed a few years ago, at Paris, a comparison between the Pheedra of Euripides and that of Racine: it made a great noise among the Parisian literati but no one could deny that W. Schlegel, though a German, wrote Frencl well enough to be fully competent to speak of Racine.

GERMAN CRITTCS, ETC. 95 Frederick Schlegel being much engaged in philosophical pursuits, devoted himself less exclusively to literature than his brother; yet the piece he wrote on the intellectual culture of the Greeks and Romans, contains in small compass perceptions and conclusions of the first order. F. Schlegel' has more originality of genius than almost any other celebrated man in Germany; but far from depending on that originality, though it promised him much success, he endeavored to assist it by extensive study. It is a great proof of our respect for the humall species, when we dare not address it from the suggestions of our own minds, without having first conscientiously examined into all that has been left to us by our predecessors as an inheritance. The Germans, in those acquired treasures of the human mind, are true proprietors: those who depend on their "' It is not our purpose" says Carlyle, speaking of Schlegel's last work, "to offer any criticism of Schlegel's Book; in such limits as were possible here, we should despair of communicating even the faintest image of its significance. To the mass of readers, indeed, both among the Germans themselves, and still more elsewhere, it nowise addresses itself, and may lie forever sealed. We point it out as a remarkable document of the Time and of the Man; can recommend it, moreover, to all earnest Thinkers, as a work deserving their best regard: a work full of deep meditation, wherein the infinite mystery of Life, if not represented, is decisively recognized. Of Schlegel himself, and his character and spiritual history, we can profess no tthorough or final understanding; yet enough to make us view h.im with admiration and pity, nowise with harsh contemptuous censure; and must say, with clearest persuasion, that the outcry of his being' a renegade,' and so forth, is but like other such outcries, a judgment where there was neither jury, nor evidence, nor judge. The candid reader, in this Book itself, to say nothing of all the rest, will find traces of a high, far-seeing, earnest spirit, to whom' Austrian Pensions,' and the Kaiser's crown, and Austria altogether, were but a light matter to the finding and vitally appropriating of Truth. Let us respect the sacred mystery of a Person; rush not irreverently into man's Holy of Holies! Were the lost little one, as we said already, found' sucking its dead mother, on the. field of carnage,' could it be other than a spectacle for tears? A solemn mournful feeling comes over us when we see this last Work of Friedrich Schlegel, the unwearied seeker, end abruptly in the middle; and, as if he had?n yet found, as if emblematically of much, end with an'Aber-,' with t But-!' This was the last word that came frorn he Pen of Friedrich Bchlegel: about eleven at night he wrote it down, and there paused sick; &t one in the morning, Time for him had merged itself in Eternity; h. was, as we say, no more."-(Essaye, p. 807.) —a.

96 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. own natural understandings alone, are mere sojourners in comparison with them. After having done justice to the uncommon talents of the two Schlegels, we will now examine in what that partiality consists of which they are accused, and from which it is certain all their writings are not exempt. They are evidently prepossessed in favor of the middle ages, and the opinions that were then prevalent; chivalry without spot, unbounded faith, and unstudied poetry, appear to them inseparable; and they apply themselves to all that may enable, them to direct the minds and understandings of others to the same preference. W. Schlegel expresses his admiration for the middle ages in several of his writings, and particularly in two stanzas of which I will now give a translation. " In those distinguished ages Europe was sole and undivided, and the soil of that universal country was fruitful in those generous thoughts which are calculated to serve as guides through life and in death. Knighthood converted combatants into brethren in arms: they fought in defence of the same faith; the same love inspired all hearts, and the poetry which sung that alliance, expressed the same sentiment in different languages. "Alas! the noble energy of ancient times is lost: our age is the inventor of a narrow-minded wisdom, and what weak men have no ability to conceive, is in their eyes only a chimera; surely nothing truly great can succeed if undertaken with a grovelling heart. Our times, alas! no longer know either faith or love; how then can hope be expected to remain with them?" Opinions, who.e tendency is so strongly marked, must ne cessarily affect impartiality of judgment on works of art: withDut doubt, as I have continually repeated during the whole course of this work, it is much to be desired that modern literature should be founded on our history and our religion; it does not, however,:hllow that the literary productions of the middle ages should be considered as absolutely good. The energetic simplicity, the pure and loyal character which is dis.

GERMAN CRITICS, ETC. 97 played in them, interests us warmly; but on the other hand, the knowledge of antiquity and the progress of civilization have given us advantages which are not to be despised. The object is not to trace back the arts to remote times, but to unite, as much as we can, all the various qualities which have been developed in the human mind at different periods. The Schlegels have been strongly accused of not doing justice to French literature; there au:e, however, no writers who have spoken with more enthusiasm of the genius of our troubadours, and of that French chivalry which was unequalled in Europe, when it united in the highest degree, spirit and loyalty, grace and frankness, courage and gayety, the most affecting simplicity with the most ingenuous candor; but the German critics affirm that those distinguished traits of the French character were effaced during the course of the reign of Louis XIV; literature, they say, in ages which are called classical, loses in originality what it gains in correctness; they have attacked our poets, particularly, in various ways, and with great strength of argument. The general spirit of those critics is the same with that of Rousseau in his letter against French music. They think they discover in many of our tragedies that kind of pompous affectation, of which Rousseau accuses Lully and Rameau, and they affirm that the same taste which gives the preference to Coypel and Boucher in painting, and to the Chevalier Bernini in sculpture, forbids in poetry that rapturous ardor which alone renders it a divine enjoyment; in short, they are tempted to apply to our manner of conceiving and of loving the fine arts, the verses so frequently quoted from Corneille: " Othon A la princesse a fait un compliment, Plus un hommne d'esprit qu'en veritable amant." W. Schlegel pays due homage, however, to most of our great authors; but what he chiefly endeavors to prove, is, that from the middle of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected manner has prevailed throughout Europe, and that this prevalence has made us lose those bold flights of genius which animated both writers and artists in the revival of literature. VOL. Il.-5

98 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. In the pictures and bas-reliefs where Louis XIV is sometimes represented as Jupiter, and sometimes as Hercules, he is nakel, or clothed only with the skin of a lion, but always with a great wig on his head. The writers of the new school tell us that this great wig may be applied to the physiognomy of the fine arts in the seventeenth century: an affected sort of politeness, derived from factitious greatness, is always to be discovered in them. It is interesting to examine the subject in this point of view, in spite of the innumerable objections which may be opposed to it; it is however certain that these German critics have succeeded in the object aimed at, as, of all writers since Lessing, they have most essentially contributed to discredit the imitation of French literature in Germany; but from the fear of adopting French taste, they have not sufficiently improved that of their own country, and have often rejected just and striking observations, merely because they had before been made by our writers. They know not how to make a book in Germany, and scarcely ever adopt that methodical order which classes ideas inx the mind of the reader; it is not, therefore, because the French are impatient, but because their judgment is just and accurate, that this defect is so tiresome to them; in German poetry fictions are not delineated with those strong and precise outlines which insure the effect, and the uncertainty of the imagination corresponds to the obscurity of the thought. In short, if taste be found wanting in those strange and vulgar pleasantries which constitute what is called comic in some of their works, it is not because they are natural, but because the affectation of energy is at least as ridiculous as that of gracefulness. "I am making myself lively," said a German as he jumped out of window: when we attempt to make ourselves any thing, we are nothing: we should have recourse to the good taste of the French to secure us from the excessive exaggeration of some German authors, as on the other hand we should apply to the solidity and depth of the Germans to guard us against the dogmatic frivolity of some men in France

THE FINE &RTS. 99 Different nations ought to serve as guides to each other, and all would do wrong to deprive themselves of the information they may mutually receive and impart. There is something very singular in the difference which subsists between nations; the climate, the aspect of nature, the language, the government, and above all, the events of history, which have in themselves powers more extraordinary than all the others united, all comnbine to produce those diversities; and no man, however superior he may be,,:an guess at that which is naturally developed in the mind of him who inhabits another soil and breathes another air: we should do well then, in all foreign countries, to welcome foreign thoughts and foreign sentiments, for hospitality of this sort makes the fortune of him who exercises it. CHAPTER XXXII. OF THE FINE ARTS IN GERMANY. THE Germans in general understand the arts better than they practise them; no sooner is an impression made on their minds, than they draw from it a number of ideas. They boast much of mystery, but it is with the purpose of revealing it, and no sort of originality can be shown in Germany without exciting a general endeavor to explain from whence it is derived' this is a great disadvantage, particularly with respect to the arts, where all is sensation; they are analyzed before this inpiration is felt, and it is in vain afterwards to say, it was wrong to analyze them, we must denounce the practice, for we have tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and the innocence of genius is lost. I certainly do not recommend, with respect to the arts, that gnorance which I have always condemned in literature; but we should distinguish the studies which relate to the practice of the arts, from those whose only object is the theory of

o00 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. genius; these carried too far, stifle invention; we are per. plexed by the recollection of all that has been said on the subject of every different chef-d'cuvre, and think we perceive between ourselves and the object we mean to describe, a number of treatises on painting and sculpture, on the ideal and the real, till as artists, we feel that we are no longer in immediate communion with nature. Without doubt the spirit of those various treatises is encouragement; but genius is wearied by being brought too forward, as on the other hand it is extinguished by too much restraint; and in all that relates to the imagination, there is required so happy a combination of obstacles and facilities, that ages may pass away before we arrive exactly at the point most favorable for the display of the human mind in its highest degree of perfection. Before the period of the Reformation, the Germans had a school of painting which that of Italy would not have disdained. Albert Durer, Lucas Cranach, and Holbein, have in their manner of painting some affinity with the predecessors of Raphael, Perugino, Andrea Mantegna, etc. Holbein approaches nearer to Leonardo da Vinci; there is however in general more hardness in the German than in the Italian school, but not less expression and collectedness in the countenances. The painters in the fifteenth century had very little knowledge of the means which facilitate the practice of their art, but simplicity and modesty are everywhere displayed in their works; we see in them no pretensions to grand effect, we perceive only the expression of that strong and vivid emotion, for which all men of genius endeavor to find a language, that they may not leave the world without imparting a portion of their soul to their contemporaries. In the paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the folds of the drapery are quite straight, the head-dresses a iittle stiff, the attitudes very simple; but there is something in the expression of the figures which we are never tired of contemplating. The pictures inspired by the Christian religion, produce an impression like that of the Psalms, wherein poetry and piety are so charmingly united.

THE FINE ARTS. 101 The second, and the finest epoch of the art of painting, was Jlat in which the painters preserved the truth of the middle ages, and added to it all the more recently acquired splendor of the art: nothing among the Germans corresponds to the age of Leo X. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, on to the middle of the eighteenth, the fine arts almost everywhere fell into a singular decay; taste degenerated into affectation: Winckelmnann' then exerted the greatest influence not only over his own country, but over the rest of Europe; and it was his writings which directed the minds of different artists to the study and admiration of the monuments of antiquity: he was better skilled in sculpture than in poetry; and he therefore led painters into the practice of placing colored statues in their pictures rather than the animated forms of living nature. Painting also lost much of its charm by being so nearly allied to sculpture; the illusion necessary to the one is directly contrary to the immovable and decided forms of the other. When painters take their models exclusively firom the remains of ancient beauty, as it is only in statues that it can be discovered, we may address to them the reproach which has been applied 1 "J J. Winckelmann, the son of a poor shoemaker, was born December 9, 1717, at Stendall, in the Altmark. He studied theology at Halle, and, in 1743, became a schoolmaster at Seehausen. HIis leisure time there he gave to the study of the ancient classics, and his thoughts were altogether turned towards Greece and Rome. Appointed librarian (1748) to the Count Biinau, he had opportunities of examining the valuable collection of antiquities in Dresden, and of becoming acquainted with Lippert, Hagedorn, and Oeser, and more deeply initiated in the fine arts. Through Cardinal Archinto, who held out to him promotion at Rome, he became, in 1755, a convert to the Romish faith, and secretary to the Vatican library. lie hastened to Rome, where he led for more than ten years the happy life of a man enabled to indulge in his favorite pursuits. In 1768, when he returned to Germany, to visit his friends, the sight of snow and of smoky houses drove him back to Italy. On his way thither he was joined by an Italian who affected to be greatly interested in numismatics, and when Winckelmann, on their arrival at Trieste, readily displayed to him his collection of gold coins, assassinated him, June 8, 1768. "Winckelmann is founder of the school of art-criticism. His greatest ~elebrity is from the work Geschichtde Er.KUunt des Alterthums, which gave an inp rlse and a healthiness of tone to the whole literature of Ger. tlaily."' —d.

1(02 MAXDAME DE STAEL S GER3MANY. to modern classical literature, that it is not from the inspiration of their own minds that they produce the effects of their art. Mengs, a German painter, has given us many philosophical tllougllts, in his writings, on the subject of his art; he was the friend of Winckelmann, and participated in his admiration ot the antique; but he nevertheless avoided the faults for which the painters, formed by the writings of Winckelmann, have generally been censured, and which are mostly confined to their copying the ctlfs-d'aetvre of antiquity. Mengs had even taken Corregio for his model, whose pictures, of all others, are the farthest removed from any resemblance to sculpture, and whose chiaro-oscuro recalls to our minds the vague but delightinl impressions of melody. The German artists had almost all of them adopted the operations of Winckelmann, till the period when the new literary school also extended its influence over the fine arts. Goethe, whose universal genius meets us everywhere, has shown in his writings that he comprehends the true spirit of painting much better than Winckelmann; nevertheless, convinced like him that subjects drawn from the Christian religion are not favorable to the art, he endeavors to revive our enthusiam for ancient mythology, an attempt which it is impossible to succeed in; perhaps, with respect to the fine arts, we are not capable of being either Christians or Pagans; but at whatever period a creative imagination shall again spring up from among men, it will assuredly not be in an imitation of the ancients that its effects will be perceived. The new school maintains the same system in the fine arts as in literature, and affirms that Christianity is the source of all modern genius; the writers of this school also characterize, In a new manner, all that in. Gothic architecture agrees with the religious sentiments of Christians. It does not follow, however, from this that the moderns can and ought to construct Gothic churches; nether art nor nature admit of repetition; it is only of consequence to us, in the present silence of genius, to lay aside the contempt which has been thrown on all the conceptions of the middle ages; it certainly does not smt us tc

THE FINE ARTS. 103 adopt thelm, but nothing is more injurious to the developiaent of genius than to consider as barbarous every thing that is original. I have already said, in speaking of Germany, that there are very few modern buildings which are at all remarkable; in the North, we see nothing in general but Gothic edifices, and the dispositions of soul which they tend to excite are encouraged both by nature and poetry. Gorres, a German writer, has given an interesting description of an ancient church. " We see," he says, " figures of knights kneeling on a tomb-stone, with their hands joined together; above them are placed some wonderful curiosities from Asia, which are intended to attest, as so many dumb witnesses, the voyages of the deceased to the Holy Land. The dark arches of the church cover those who rest beneath them with their shade; we might almost imagine ourselves in the midst of a forest, the branches and leaves of which have been petrified by death, so that they will no longer move or be agitated when succeeding ages, like the midnight storm, shall roll through their lengthened vaults. The church resounds with the majestic tones of the organ; inscriptions in letters of brass, half destroyed by the humid vapors of time, confusedly indicate those great actions which are now become fabulous, after having been so long considered as incontestably true " In speaking of the arts in Germany we are led to mention writers rather than artists. The Germans are in every respect stronger in theory than in practice, and northern climates are so little favorable to those arts which strike our eyes, that we might almost be induced to think the spirit of reflection was bestowed on them merely because their inhabitants should be enabled to observe and appreciate the beauties of the South. There are many galleries' of pictures and collections of drawings in Germany, which indicate a love of the arts in all ranks of people. In the houses of the nobility and most dis1 Those of Dresden, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, are among the most.blebrated in Europe.-Ed.

104 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. tinguished men of letters, there are very fine copies of the chefs-d'oeuvre of antiquity; that of Goethe is remarkable in this respect; his object is not merely the pleasure which is felt from the sight of fine statues and pictures, he thinks both the genius and the soul are affected by it. "I should be a better man," said he, "if I had always under my eyes the head of the Olympian Jupiter, which was so much admired by the ancients." Several distinguished painters have established themselves at Dresden; the chefs-d'oeuvre which adorn the gallery are the objects of attraction, and excite both skill and emulation. The Virgin of Raphael, with two children gazing on her, is in itself a treasure of art; there is in this figure an elevation and a purity which is the perfect ideal of religion and inward fortitude. The perfection of the features is in this picture only a symbol; the long garments, as an expression of modesty, render the countenance still more interesting; and the physiognomy, even more admirable than the features, is like supreme beauty manifesting itself in that which is terrestrial. The Christ, who is in the arms of his mother, seems at most about two years of age; but the painter has wonderfully expressed the powerful energy of the divine being, in a countenance as yet scarcely formed. The looks of the angelic children who are placed at the bottom of the picture, are delightful; the innocence of that age alone can appear charming by the side of celestial candor; their astonishment at the sight of the Virgin, beaming with holiness and beauty, does not resemble the surprise which men might feel; they appear as if they adored her with confidence, because they acknowledge in her an inhabitant of that heaven from which they had just de-cended. The Night of Corregio is, next to the Virgin of Raphael, the finest chke-d'ceuv re in the Dresden Gallery. The adoration of ihe shepherds has often been well represented; but as novelty of subject goes but a little way in the pleasure we receive from painting, it is sufficient to observe the manner in which Corregio's picture is conceived, in order to admire it; it is ir the middle of the night that the child is placed on the knees

THE FINE ARTS. 105 of its mother, and that it receives the homage of the astonished shepherds; the light which beams from the holy aureola with which his head is surrounded, has something in it truly sublime; the personages placed in the background of the picture and far from the divine infant, are still in darkness; an emblem of the obscurity with which human life was environed before it was enlightened by revelation.' Among the various pictures of modern artists at Dresden, I recollect a head of Dante, which in character was a little like the figure of Ossian in the fine picture of Gerard. This analogy is a happy one. Dante and the son of Fingal may take each other by the hand through successive ages, and through the clouds that hang over them. A picture of Hartmann's represents the visit of Magdalen, and the two other Marys, to the sepulchre of Jesus Christ; the angel appears to announce to them that he is risen; the open tomb, which no longer incloses any mortal remains, and those women of most admirable beauty lifting their eyes towards heaven to behold him whom they have just been seeking in the shades of the sepulchre, form a painting at once picturesque and dramatic. Schick, another German artist, now settled at Rome, has, since his residence in that place, composed a picture which represents the first sacrifice of Noah after the deluge; nature, revived by the waters, seems to have acquired a new freshness; the animals appear familiarized with the patriarch and his children, as having escaped together from the flood. The verdure, the flowers, and the sky are painted in lively and natural colors, which recall the sensations excited by the landscapes of the East. Several other artists endeavored, like Schick, to follow in painting the new system introduced, or rather revived, in literary poetry; but the arts require the assistance of riches, and wealth is dispersed through the different cities of Germany; 1 Unsatisfying enough are these descriptions of great pictures, but if we begin to quote from Kfigler we shall completely bury the text, and so deaist altogether.-Ed. 50

106 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. and besides this the greatest progress which has hitherto been made in that country, results from properly understanding, and.opying in their true spirit, the works of the ancient masters; original genius has not yet decidedly displayed itself. Sculpture has not been cultivated with much success among the Germans;' in the first place because they want the marble which renders the chjfs.-d'wuvr'e of the art immortal, and also because they have no just idea of that delicacy and grace of attitude and gesture which gymnastic exercises and dancing alone can render natural and easy to us; nevertheless, a Dane, Thorwaldsen, educated in Germany, is at present the rival of Canova at Rome, and his Jason resembles that which Pindar describes as the model of manly beauty; a fleece lies on his left arm; he holds a lance in his hand, and the inactivity of strength characterizes the hero. I have already said that sculpture in general loses much by the neglect of dancing; the only phenomenon of that art in Germany is Ida Brunn, a young girl whose situation in life precludes her from adopting it as a profession; she has received from nature and from her mother a wonderful talent of representing, by simple attitudes, the most affecting pictures, or the most beautiful statues; her dancing is a course of transient chefs-d'oeuvre, every one of which we should wish to fix forever: it is true that the mother of Ida had before conceived in her imagination all that her daughter so admirably presents to our eyes. The poetry of Madame Brunn displays a thousand new treasures, both in art and nature, which from inattention hyd been before unnoticed. I saw the young Ida, when yet a child, represent Althea ready to burn the brand on which the life of her son, Meleager, depended; she expressed without words the grief, the struggles, the terrible resolution of the mother; her animated looks, without doubt, made us understand what was passing in her heart; but the art of varying her gestures, and the skilful manner in which she folded round her the purple mantle with 1 Famous sculptors, as well as painters, Germany has produced in the half century, but we cannot enumerate them here. —.Ed.

THE FINE ARTS. 107 which she was clothed, produced at least as much effect as hex -ounteriance itself; she often remained a considerable time in the same attitude, and at such times a painter could not have invented any thing finer than the picture which she improvised; a talent of this sort is unique. I think, nevertheless, that pantomimical dances would succeed better in Germany than those whllich consist entirely, ab in France, of bodily gracefulness and agility. The Germans excel in instrumental music;' the knowledge, "In orchestral music the Germans are generally far in advance of all other people. This pleasure, too, is more easily accessible than in any other country; it is best to be enjoyed in the late autumn and winter, when the world of artists and audiences has come home'from the baths.' The Symphonic Concerts of Berlin, and the subscription concerts at the Geuand Haus of Leipzig, will give the traveller the'true reading' of the works of the great German symphonists, and afford him also a chance of hearing the best solo players, home and foreign. They are also of a wise brevity, as compared with our more cumbrous and costly entertainments. The'high places' of chamber-nmusic were recently Berlin, Leipzig, and Brunswick, each of which towns possessed a resident quartette of stringed instrumnentalists, possessing very high renown. But all periodical music is more or less interrupted by fine weather, which tempts the world from home. "From June till Septermber the tourist has the chance of falling in with some celebration or festival, akin to our own provincial music meetings; but different, inasmuch as the chorus mainly consists of amateurs. These imeetings are, on the average, interesting in the music selected, excellent as regards execution, from the heartiness, zeal, and patience in cooperation which pervade it, and most pleasantly social. It is the fault of bad English manners, if any Englishman, having claims on good society in his own country, finds himself' a stranger among strangers' on these occasions-a very slight introduction (and, of course, some power of comnmunication) securing him a good-natured welcome. Those who winter in Berlin will, of course, make an effort to attend the meetings of the Sirg Acadenmie. This may be called the best and most renowned amateur vocal society in Europe, and its members occasionally, for purposes of charity, give public performances on a grand scale. Gentlemen, too, will do well to gain access to such meetings of the Lieder-tafel societies as may fall in their way. These are singing parties of gentlemen only, who execute the part-music of German composers with great spirit and energy, both the music and the execution calculated, by their difference of style, especially to interest those who care for glees and madrigals at home. "The best orchestral mass, probably, now to be heard in Europe, is that terformed in the cathedral at Cologne. The organs in Dresden, in the

108 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. it demands, and the patience necessary to execute it well, are quite natural to them; some of their composers have also much variety and fruitfulness of imagination; I shall make but one objection to their genius as musicians; they put too much mind in their works; they reflect too much on what they are doing. In the fine arts there should be more instinct than thought: the German composers follow too exactly the sense of the words; this, it is true, is a great merit, in the opinion of those who love words better than music, and besides, we cannot deny that a disagreement between the sense of the one, and the impression of the other, would be offensive: but the Italians, who are truly the musicians of nature, make the air and words conform to each other only in a general manner. In ballads and vaudevilles, as there is not much music, the little that there is may be subjected to the words; but in the great effects of melody, we should endeavor to reach the soul by an immediate sensation. Those who are not admirers of painting, considered in itself attach great importance to the subject of a picture: they wish, in contemplating it, to feel the impressions which are produced by dramatic representation: it is the same in music; when its powers are but feebly felt, we expect that it should faithfully conform to every variation of the words; but when the whole soul is affected by it, every thing, except the music itself, is importunate, and distracts the attention; provided there be no Sophien Kirche, the Catholic church, and one or two others, built by the Silbermanns, are well worth an effort to hear. "Lastly, for those who search less scientifically than the traveller to waom the above hints are addressed, most attractive cheap music abounds ii. Germany. Almost every town has its Casino, or private subscription club; its pleasure-garden, and other public resorts, to which every one is admitted, where a good band, often of wind-instruments alone, may be heard to play good music to good company for a very small price of entrance. And these unpretending concerts (the very absence of pretension of which is an evidence of popular taste, as distinct from fashion) are szmetimes diversified by very fair quartette singing. For the characteristic of German musical execution is, that, generally, every one occupied ir its production takes pains in its production because he likes it."-(iMuzrray' lHandbook for Northern Germany, p. 222.) —Ed.

THE FINE ARTS. 109 Contrast between the poetry and the music, we give ourselves up to that art which should always predominate over the oth ers; for the delightful reverie into which it throws us, annihilates all thoughts which may be expressed by words; and music awakening in us the sentiment of infinity, every thing which tends to particularize the object of melody, must necessarily diminish its effect.' I "At the close of the last, and commencement of the present century, the stronghold of German music was in South Germany. Every fifty years, however, the art seems to change its habitat, fobllowing in the steps of such individual and creative geniuses as a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Mendelssohn,-and thus the old glories of Prague, Munich, and Vienna may be revived. Meanwhile, they are somewhat in decadence. " The best operatic theatres within the scope of this volume are those of Vienna, Munich, Prague, Stuttgart. The first-mentioned was, and perhaps is, the best in Germany, for this simple reason,-that one of the best Italian operas out of Italy has always been that established in Vienna. Hence, to please in that city, the German vocalists have been compelled to cultivate a more refined style of execution than has been required in places where such schools of example do not exist. The worst seasons for grand opera everywhere are the late summer and the early autumn-when theatres are on'short allowance;' when the singers are bathing here, gambling there, or'starring it' in some third out-of-the-way corner-and audiences are drinking or dancing in beer-gardens. In some respects, however, the tourist profits by this, since, in consequence of such stagnation, he may chance to hear, not the poor novelties in fashion-Italian, French, English ephemera, badly translated and clumsily executed-but the standard masterpieces of the German repertory. The old unaccompanied Italian church music was, till recently at least, maintained with care in one or two of the churches at Munich. The more modern orches-.ral Catholic, to be heard on' high days and holidays' in St. Stephen's, at Vienna, was, a few years since, and probably still is, very fine.'" The grand orchestral and choral performances in the Riding School at Vienna, held principally in late autumn or early winter, are well worthy of attendance. The Austrian metropolis, too, has long been the Paradise of brilliant instrumental execution. Violin-players and pianists are, during the winter, to be heard there in great profusion; and testimony is agreed as to their meeting among their audiences with a quick and vivacious sympathy, as distinct from the enthusiasm of Frankfort or from the critical approval of Berlin, as south is from north. On the other hand, the graves of the great men men of South German music are neglected. The buryingplaces of Mozart and Gluck are imperfectly known, and I received three totally different directions in three different music-shops of Vienna as tc the cemetery where they lie. " The organs in the monasteries on the Danube are, so far as I know, su

110 MAT)AME )E STAEL S GERMANY. Gluck, whom the Germans, with reason, reckon among theil men of genius, has adapted his airs to the words in a wonderful manner, and in several of his operas he has rivalled the poet by the expression of his music. When Alcestis has determined to die for Admetus, and that this sacrifice, secretly offered to the gods, has restored her husband to life, the contrast of the joyful airs, which celebrate the convalescence of the king, and the stifled groans and lamentations of the queen, who is condemned to quit him, has a fine tragical effect. Orestes, in the Iphigenia in Tauris, says, "serenity is restored to my soul," and the air which he sings expresses the sentiment, but its accompaniment is mournful and agitated. The musicians, astonished at this contrast, endeavored, in playing it, to soften the accompaniment, when Gluck angrily cried out: "You must not hearken to Orestes, he tells you he is calm, but he lies." Poussin, in painting the dance of the shepherdperior instruments, bearing a high reputation. The military music of the Austrian regiments is surpassingly beautiful in tone and precise in execution. The dance music of Vienna has a value and a speciality which can hardly be rated too highly. Every traveller has heard of the waltzing in Austria, but few critics have been catholic enough to consider the waltzmusic of such composers as Strauss, Lanner, and Labitsky, a manifestation, after its kind, as national as the Italian cantilena, and as self-consistent as the organ-fugue in the hands of Sebastian Bach. This is no place for analyzing forms of composition; but the attention of the musical traveller may be unhesitatingly directed to the execution of the ball-room bands of Vienna, when stimulated by the sympathy of the dancers, as something admirable, unique, and fascinating. " Lastly, the amount of what may be called wild-music embraced within the range of this volume, is greater and more various than within the scope of almost any other Hand-book. Bohemria on the one side, and on the other Styria, Carinthia, and the Tyrol, are filll of village bands, village singers, village composers, village instruments, and village traditions-in the mountain districts especially, varying from parish to parish. In all these things the primitive forms of melody, harmony, and rhythm may be studied by the most severely scientific musical pilgrim. For the less learned, or less pedantic traveller, it is needless to dwell on the enchantmnent which a few good players, playing before the inns, or singing in the village school-room, or some most quaint and provocative dance-tune (if a wedding chance to be going on), give to the pleasures of the mid-day halt. )r the evening hours after the night quarters are reached."-(Murrab' Handbook for Southern Germany, p. 4.) —Ed.

THE FINE ARTS. 111 esses, places in the landscape the tomb of a young girl, on which is inscribed, " And I also was an Arcadian." There is thought in this kind of conception of the arts, as well as in the ingenious combination of Gluck; but the arts are superior to thought: their language is color, forms, or sounds. If we could form an imagination of the expressions of which our souls would be susceptible without the knowledge of words, we should have a more just idea of the effect to be produced by painting and music. Of all musicians, perhaps Mozart has shown most skill in.he talent of "marrying" the music to the words. In his operas, particularly in the Banquet of the Statue, he makes us sensible of all the gradations of dramatic representation; the songs are gay and lively, while the strange and loud accompaniment seems to point out the fantastic and gloomy subject of the piece. This ingenious alliance of the musician and poet, gives us also a sort of pleasure, but it is a pleasure which springs from reflection, and that does not belong to the wonderful sphere of the arts. At Vienna, I heard Haydn's Creation performed by four hundred musicians; it was an entertainment worthy to be given in honor of the great work which it celebrated; but the skill of Haydn was sometimes even injurious to his talent: with those words of the Bible, "God said, let there be light, and there was light," the accompaniment of the instruments was at first very soft, so as scarcely to be heard, then all at once they broke out together with a terrible noise, as if to express the sudden burst of light, which occasioned a witty remark, "that at the appearance of light it was necessary to stop one's ears." In several other passages of the Creation, the same labor of mind may often be censured; the music creeps slowly when the serpents are created; it becomes lively again with the singing of birds: and in the Seasons, by Haydn also, these allusions are still more multiplied. Effects thus prepared beorehand are in music what the Italians term concetti; without loubt, certain combinations of ]2arony may remind ce -' +he

112 hMAD VM11, DE SGTAEL'S GERMANY. wonders of nature, but their analogies have nothing to do with imitation, which is nothing more than a factitious amusement. The real resemblance of the fine arts to each other, and also to nature, depends on sentiments of the same sort which they excite in our souls by various means. Imitation and expression differ extremely in the fine arts: it is pretty generally agreed, I believe, that imitative music should be laid aside; but there are still two different ways of considering that of expression; some wish to discover in it a translation of the words; others, and the Italians are of this number, are contented with a general connection of the situations of the piece with the intention of the airs, and seek the pleasures of the art entirely in the art itself. The music of the Germans is more varied than that of the Italians, and in this respect, perhaps, is not so good; the mind is condemned to variety, its poverty is perhaps the cause of it; but the arts, like sentiment, have an admirable monotony, that of which one would willingly make an everlasting moment. Church music is not so fine in Germany as in Italy, because the instrumental part is too powerful. To him who has heard the Miserere, performed at Rome by voices only, all instrumental music, not excepting that of the Chapel at Dresden, appears terrestrial. Violins and trumpets make part of the orchestra at that place during divine service, and the music is consequently much more warlike than religious; the contrast between the lively impression it occasions, and the meditations suited to the church, is not agreeable: we should not bring animated life to the foot of the tomb; military music leads us to sacrifice existence, but not to detach us from it. The music of the Chapel at Vienna also deserves praise; of all the arts, music is that which the people of Vienna most value; and this leads us to hope that at some future day they will also become poets, for in spite of their taste, which is a little prosaic, whoever really loves music, is an enthusiast, without knowing it, of al. the sentiments which music recalls to our mind. I heard at Vienna the Requiem composed by Mozart a few days before Lis death, and which was sung in the church at his funeral

THE FINE ARTS. 113 it is not sufficiently solemn for the situation, and we still find in it, as in all his preceding compositions, many ingenious pas-' sages; what is there; however, more affecting and impressive than the idea of a minan of superior genius thus celebrating his own obsequies, inspired at the same time by the sentiment of his,ieathl and of his immortality! The recollections of life ought to decorate the tomb; the arms of a warrior are usually suspended on it, and the chefs-d'ceuvre of art cause a peculiarly solemn impression in the temple where the remains of the artist repose.

PART ii. PIIILOSOPHY AND ETHICS. CHAPTER I. OF PHILOSOPHY. THE world has been pleased, for some time past to throw great discredit upon the very name of philosophy. The case is common with all those terms, the signification of which is capable of much extension; they are the objects of benediction or blame among mankind, according to their use in fortunate or unhappy periods; but, in spite of the casual injustice or panegyric of individuals and of nations, philosophy, liberty, religion, never change their value. Man has spoken evil things of the sun, of love, and of life; he has suffered, he has felt himself consumed, by these lights of nature; but would he therefore extinguish them? Every thing that has a tendency to set bounds to our faculties, bears the stamp of a degrading doctrine. We ought to direct those faculties to the lofty end of our existence-our advance to moral perfection. But it is not by the partial suicide of this or that power of our nature, that we shall be rendered capable of rising towards such an object; all,ur resources are not too numerous to forward our approach to it; and, if Heaven had granted more genius to man, he would aave advanced so much the more in virtue. Among the different branches of philosophy, metaphysics have, especially, occupied the attention of the Germans. The

I116 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. objects which this science embraces, may be divided into three classes. The first relates to the mystery of the creation; that is, to the Infinite in all things; the second, to the formation of ideas in the human mind; and the third, to the exercise of our faculties, without ascending to their source. The first of these studies, that which applies itself to the discovery of the secret of the universe, was cultivated among the Greeks, as it now is among the Germans. It is impossible to deny that such an investigation, however sublime in its principle, makes us feel our imnpotencie at every step; and discouragement follows those efforts which cannot attain a result. The utility of the third class of metaphysical observations, that which is confined to the knowledge of the acts of our understanding, cannot be contested; but this utility is limited to the circle of daily experience. The philosophical meditations of the second class, those which are directed to the nature of our soul, and to the origin of our ideas, appear to me the most interesting of all. It is not likely that we should ever be able to know the eternal truths which explain the existence of this world: the desire that we feel for such knowledge is among the number of those noble thoughts which draw us towards another life; but it is not for nothing that the faculty of selfexamination has been given to us. Doubtless, to observe the progress of our mind, such as it exists, is already to avail ourselves of this faculty; nevertheless, in rising higher, in striving to learn whether this mind acts spontaneously, or whether we can only think when thought is excited by external objects, we shall cast additional light upon the free-will of man, and consequently upon vice and virtue. A crowd of moral and religious questions depends upon the manner in which we consider the origin and formation of our ideas. It is the diversity of their systems in this respect, above all others, that distinguishes the German from the French philosophers. We may easily conceive, that if the difference is at the fountain-head, it must show itself in the derived streams; t is impossible, therefore, to become acquainted with Germany without tracing the progress of that philosophy, which, from

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS. 117 the days of Leibnitz down to our own, has incessantly exerted so great a power over the republic of letters. There are two methods of considering the philosophy of the human mind; either in its theory or in its results. The examination of the theory demands a capacity which belongs not tc me: but it is easy to remark the influence which this or that metaphysical opinion exercises over the development of the mind and of the soul. The Gospel tells us, " that we must judge of prophets by their works:" this maxim may also guide our inquiry into the different systems of philosophy; for every thing that is of immoral tendency must be sophistical. This life has no value, unless it is subservient to the religious education of our hearts, unless it prepares us for a higher destiny,'by our free choice of virtue upon earth. Metaphysics, social institutions, arts, sciences, all ought to be appreciated accordingly as they contribute to the moral perfection of mankind; this is the touchstone granted to the ignorant as well as to the learned. For if the knowledge of the means belongs only to the initiated, the results are discernible by all the world. It is necessary to be accustomed to that mode of reasoning which is used in geometry, in order to gain a full comprehension of metaphysics. In this science, as in that of calculation, if we omit the least link in the chain of evidence, we destroy the whole connection. Metaphysical reasonings are more abstract, and not less precise, than mathematical; and yet their object is indefinite. We must unite, as metaphysicians, two of the most opposite faculties, imagination, and the power of calculation: we have to measure a shade of thought with the same accuracy as a field; and there is no study which requires such closeness of attention; nevertheless, in the highest questions there is always some point of view within the reach of everybody, and it is this point which I propose to seize and present. I one day asked Fichte, one of the greatest thinkers in Germany, whether he could not more easily tell me his ethical system than his metaphysical? "'The one depends upon the other," he replied; and the remark was very profound: it

118 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. cormlprehends all the motives of the interest that we can take in philosophy. We have been accustomed to regard it as destructivet of every belief of the heart; it would then indeed be the enemy of man; but it is not so with the doctrine of Plato, nor with that of the Germans; they consider sentiment as a fact, as the primitive fact of mind; and they look upon the power of philosophical reasoning as destined solely to investigate the mean ing of this fact. The enigma of the universe has wasted the meditations of many, who have still deserved our admiration, because they felt themselves summoned to something better than the present world. Minds of a lofty kind wander unceasingly around the abyss of thoughts that are without an end; but still they must turn themselves away from it, for the mind fatigues itself in vain in these efforts to scale the heavens. The origin of thought has occupied all true philosophers. Are there two natures in man? If there is but one, is it mind or matter? If there are two, do ideas come by the senses, or do they spring up in the soul? Or, in truth, are they a mixture of the action of external objects upon us, and of the internal faculties which we possess? To these three questions, which at all times have divided the philosophical world, is united the inquiry which most immediately touches upon virtue; to wit, whether free-will or fatality decides the resolutions of man. Among the ancients, fatality arose from the will of the gods; among the moderns, it is attributed to the course of events. Fatality, among the ancients, gave a new evidence to free-will; for the will of man struggled against the event, and moral resistance was unconquerable: the fatalism of the moderns, on the contrary, necessarily destroys the belief in freewill: if circumstances make us what we are, we cannot oppose their ascendency; if external objects are the cause of all that passes in our mind, what independent thought can free us from their influence? The fatalism whichl descended from heaven filled the soul with a holy terror, while that which

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 119 attaches us to earth only works our degradation. It may be asked, to what purpose all these questions? It may be answered, to what purpose any thing that bears no relation to them? For what is there more important to man, than to know whether he really is responsible for his actions; and what sort of a proportion there is between the power of the w ill and the empire of circumstances over it? What would become of conscience, if our habits alone gave birth to it; if it was nothing but the product of colors, of sounds, of perfumes, of circumstances, in short, of every kind, with which we may have been surrounded from our infancy? The department of metaphysics, that endeavors to discover what is the source of our ideas, has a powerful influence, by its consequences, upon the nature and energy of our will; it is at once the most exalted and the most necessary of all our knowledge; and the advocates of the highest utility, namely, of moral utility, cannot undervalue it. CHAPTER II. OF ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, EVERY thing seems to testify in us the existence of a double nature. The influence of the senses and that of the soul share our being between them; and accordingly as Philosophy inclines towards the one or the other, opinions and sentiments are in every respect diametrically opposite. We may also describe the dominion of the senses, and that of thought, by other terms: there is in man that which perishes with his earthly existence, and that which may survive him; that which experience enables him to acquire, and that with which his moral instinct inspires him, the finite and the infinite; but in what manner soever we express ourselves, it is always neces

120 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. sary to grant that there are two different principles of life in a creature subject to death, and destined to immortality. A tendency to spiritualism has been always very manifest among the people of the North; and even before the introduction of Christianity, this bias made itself perceptible through the violence of warlike passions. The Greeks had faith in external miracles; the German nations believe in the miracles of the soul. All their poetry is filled with presentiments, presages, prophecies of the heart; and while the Greeks united themselves to nature by pleasures, the inhabitants of the North raised themselves to their Creator by religious sentiments. In the South, Paganism deified physical phenomena; in the North, men were inclined to believe in magic, because it attributes to the mind a boundless power over the material world. The soul and nature, will and necessity, divide the dominion of existence, and accordingly as we place the force within ourselves or without us, we are the sons of heaven or the slaves of earth. At the revival of letters, some occupied themselves with the subtilties of the schools in metaphysics, and others believed in the superstitions of magic in the sciences: the art of observation reigned no more in the empire of the senses, than enthusiasm in the empire of the soul; with very few exceptions, there was neither experience nor inspiration among the philosophers. A giant appeared; this was Bacon: never were the discoveries of thought, nor the wonders of nature, so well conceived by the same intelligence. There is not a phrase of his writings which does not imply years of reflection and of study; he animates his metaphysics with his knowledge of the human heart; he knows how to generalize facts by philosophy. In physical science he has created the art of experiment, but it does not at all follow, as it has been attempted to make us believe, that he was the exclusive advocate of that system which grounds all our ileas upon sensations. He admits inspiration in every thing that belongs to the soul; and he thinks it even necessary, in order to interpret natural phenomena according to general principles. But, in his age, there

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 121 were still alchemists, diviners, and sorcerers; men were ignorant enough of Religion, in the greater part of Europe, to believe that there were some truths of which she forbade the promulgation, she who leads us into all truth. Bacon was struck with these errors; his age had a bias towards superstition, as our age has towards incredulity. At the epoch in which he lived, it was right to endeavor to bring experimental philosophy into favor; in our era, he would have felt the necessity of reanimating the internal source of moral beauty, and of incessantly reminding man that he exists in himself, in his sentiment, and in his will. When the age is superstitious, the genius of observation is timid, the physical world is ill known; when the age is incredulous, enthusiasm exists no more, and no more do we know any thing of the soul or of heaven. At a time when the progress of the human mind was in every way uncertain, Bacon exerted all his powers to trace out the way in which experimental philosophy ought to proceed; and his writings, even yet, serve as a guide to those who wish to study nature. As a minister of state, he was for a long time occupied with government and politics. The strongest heads are those which unite the taste and habit of meditation with a capacity for business. Bacon, under both these views, was a wonderful genius; but his philosophy and his character failed in the same point. He was not virtuous enough fully to feel the moral liberty of man: nevertheless, we cannot compare him to the materialists of the last century; and his successors have pushed the theory of experience much beyond his intention. He is far, I repeat it, from attributing all our ideas to our sensations, and from considering analysis as the sole instrument of discovery. He frequently pursues a bolder course; and if he adheres to experimental logic to remnove all the prejudices which encumber his progress, it is to the spring of genius alone that he trusts to forward his advance. "The human mind," says Luther, " is like a drunken peasant on horseback; when we put it up on one side, it falls down on the other." Thus man has incessantly fluctuated between Voa,. II.-6

122 MADAMEBI DE STAEL S GETMINY. hi' two natures; sometimes his thoughts have disentangled him from his sensations; sometimes his sensations have absorbed his thoughts, and he has wished, successively, to refer every thing to one or the other: it however appears to me that the moment for a fixed doctrine has arrived.' Metaphysics are about to undergo a revolution, like that which Copernicus has produced in the system of the world; they are about to replace the soul of man in the centre, and to make it, in every respect, like the sun, round which external objects trace their circle, and from which they borrow their light. The genealogical tree of the different branches of human knowledge, in which every science is referred to a certain faculty, is doubtless one of the titles of Bacon to the admiration of posterity; but what constitutes his real glory is this, that he has announced his opinion, that there was no absolute separation of one science from another;' but that general philosophy reunited them all. He is not the author of that anatomical method, which considers the intellectual powers severally, or each by itself; and which appears to be ignorant of the admirable unity in the moral being. Sensibility, imagination, reason, serve each other. Each one of these faculties would be nothing but a disease, but weakness, instead of strength, if it were not modified or completed by the totality of our being. The exact sciences, at a certain height, stand in need of the imagination. She, in her turn, must support herself upon the accurate knowledge of nature. Reason, of all our faculties, appears to be that which would most easily do without the assistance of the others; and yet, if a person were entirely unprovided with imagination and sensibility, he might by that very want become, if we may so express it, the fool of 1 "Bacon was the first, after the revival of letters, who essayed a distribution of the sciences and of philosophy. He divided all human knowledge into History, Poetry, and Philosophy. Philosophy he distinguished into branches conversant about the Deity, about Nature, and about Man; and each of these had their subordinate divisions, which, however, it is not necessary to particularize."-(Sir Wm. Hamilton, Lectures on.Metaphy. sics, vol i. p. 119.)-Ed.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 123 reason; and, seeing nothing in life but calculations and material interests, deceive himself as much concerning'the characters and affections of men, as the enthusiastic being whose?ancy pictures all around him disinterestedness and love. We follow a bad system of education, when we aim at the exclusive development of this or that quality of mind; for, to devote ourselves to one faculty, is to take up an intellectual trade. Milton says, with reason, "that our education is not good, excepting when it renders us capable of every employment in peace or war:" all that makes of man a man, is the true object of instruction. Not to know any thing of a science but that portion of it which individually belongs to us, is to apply the division of labor (inculcated by Smith) to the liberal studies, when it is only adapted to the mechanic arts. When we arrive at that height where every science touches upon all the rest in some particulars, it is then that we approach the region of universal ideas; and the air which breathes from that region gives life to all our thoughts. The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this ME, the centre and the moving power of our sentiments and our ideas. Doubtless, the imperfection of language compels us to make use of erroneous expressions; we are obliged to repeat, according to the customary phrase, Such a person is endowed with the power of reason, of imagination, or of sensibility, etc.; but, if we wish to be understood in a single word, we ought simply to say, He has soul, he has an abundance of soul.' It is this divine spirit that makes the whole man. Love teaches us more certainly what belongs to the mysteries of the soul, than the utmost metaphysical subtilty. We never attach ourselves to this or that qualification of the object 1 M. Ancillon, of whom I shall have occasion to speak in the Fourth Part of this work, has made use of this expression in a book, upon which Dne cannot grow tired of meditating.

124 MADAME DE STALL~ GERMANY. of our preference; and every madrigal reveals a great philo. sophical truth when it says-" I love I know not why!" for this " I know not why," is that collective character, and that harmony, which we recognize by love, by admiration, by all the sentiments which reveal to us what is most deep and most secret in the heart of another. The method of analysis, which can only examine by division, applies itself like the dissecting-knife to dead nature; but it is a bad instrument to teach us to understand what is living; and if we feel a difficulty in verbally defining that animated conception which represents whole objects to our mind, it is precisely because that conception clings more closely to the very essence of things. To divide, in order to comprehend, is a sign of weakness in philosophy; as to divide, in order to rule, is a sign of weakness in political power. Bacon adhered much more than is believed to that ideal philosophy, which, from the days of Plato down to our own, has constantly reappeared under different forms: nevertheless, the success of his analytical method in the exact sciences has necessarily had an influence over his metaphysical system. His doctrine of sensations, considered as the origin of ideas, has been understood in a much more positive sense than that in which he maintained it himself. We can clearly see the influence of this doctrine in the two schools which it has prod]uced, that of Hobbes, and that of Locke. Certainly they differ very much in their aim; but their principles are alike in many respects. Hobbes embraced to the letter that philosophy which derives all our ideas from the impressions of sense. He feared not the consequences; and he has boldly said, "that the soul is as much subjected to necessity, as society to despotism." He admits the fatalism of sensation as the controller of thought, and that of force as the controller of action. He annihilates moral as well as civil liberty; thinking, with reason, that one depends upon the other. He was an Atheist and a slave, and nothing is more consequent; for if there is in man but the impnress of sensations received from without, earthly power it

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 125 every thing, and our soul and our destiny equally Jepend upon it.' The cultivation of all pure and elevated sentiments is so consolidated in England, by political and religious institutions, that the speculations of the mind revolve around these imposing columns without ever shaking them. Hiobbes, accordingly. has gained few partisans in his country; but the influence of Locke has been more universal. As his character was moral and religious, he did not allow himself to use any of those dangerous reasonings which are necessarily derived from his metaphysical system; and the greater part of his countrymen, in adopting it, have shown like him the noble inconsistency of separating results from principles, while Hume and the French philosophers, having a, lmitted the system, made application of it in a much more logical manner. The metaphysical doctrines of Locke have had no other effect upon the minds of England, than to tarnish a little their natural originality; had they even dried up the source of high philosophical reflection, they would not have destroyed that religious sentiment which can so well supply the want of it; but these doctrines, so generally received throughout the rest of Europe, Germany excepted, have been one of the principal causes of that immorality, the advocates of which have formed it into a theory, in order to make its practice more certain. Locke exerted his especial endeavors to prove that there is 1' Hobbes, though a Materialist, admitted no knowledge of an external world. Like his friend Sorbiere, he was a kind of material idealist. According to him, we know nothing of the qualities or existence of any outward reality. All that we know is the'seeming,' the' apparition,' the aspect,' the' phenomenon,' the'phantasm,' within ourselves; and this subjective object of which we are conscious, and which is consciousness itself, is nothing more than the' agitation' of our internal organism, determined by the unknown mnotions,' which are supposed, in like manner, to constitute the world without. Perception he reduces to Sensation. Memory and Imagination are faculties specifically identical with sense, differing from it simply in the degree of their vivacity; and this difference of intensity, with Hobbes as with Hume, is the only discrimination between:ur dreaming and our waking thoughts."'-(Sir Wm. Hamilton, Lectures o Mletaphysics, vol. ii. p. 60.) —EI.

126 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. nothing innate in the mind. He was right in his own sense, for he always blended with the meaning of the word idea that of a notion acquired by experience; ideas thus conceived are the result of objects that excite them, of comparisons that collect them, and of language that facilitates their combination. But this is not the case with the sentiments, with the dispositions, and the faculties which constitute the laws of the human understanding, as attraction and impulse constitute the laws of physical nature. It is truly worth observing what kind of arguments Locke has been compelled to adopt, in order to prove that every thing in the mind came there by means of sensation. If these arguments led to the truth, doubtless we ought to overcome the moral aversion with which they inspire us; but in general we may trust to this sort of aversion as an infallible token of what must be avoided. Locke wished to show that consciousness of good and evil was not innate in man, and that we know nothing of justice or injustice, except from experience, as we learn to distinguish red froln blue. To arrive at this conclusion, he has carefully inquired after all those countries where the laws and customs honor crimes; those, for instance, in which it is thought a duty to kill an enemy; to despise marriage; to put a father to death when he has grown old. He attentively collects every thing that travellers have related of barbarities which have passed into daily practice. What then mustthat system be which excites in so virtuous a man as Locke eagerness for such facts? 1 " Reid did him [Locke] any thing but injustice in supposing him to maintain that ideas are objects either in the brain, or in the mind itself. Even the more material of these alternatives has been the one generally attributed to him by his critics, and the one adopted from him by his disciples. Nor is this to be deemed an opinion too monstrous to be entertained by so enlightened a philosopher. It was, as we shall see, the common Vpinion of the age; the opinion in particular held by the most illustrious of his countrymen and contemporaries-by Newton, Clarke, Willis, Hook etc.2 The English psychologists have indeed been generally very me2hanical." —(Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy, etc.)-Ed. 2 " We know not whether it has been remarked that Locke's doctrine of particle and impulse is precisely that of Sir Kenelm Digby; ard if Locke adopts one part o

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 127 Let these facts be melancholy or not, it may be said the important thing is to know if they are true. Allow them to be true, of what consequence are they? Do we not know, by our own experience, that circumstances, in other words, external objects, have an influence over the manner in which we interpret our duties? Amplify these circumstances, and you will find in them the causes of national error; but is there any nation, or any man, that denies that there are duties? Has it ever been pretended that the ideas of justice and injustice have no meaning? Different explanations of them may prevail in different places; but the conviction of the principle is everywhere the same; and it is in this conviction that the primitive impression consists, which we recognize in every human being. When the savage kills his aged father, he believes that he renders the old man a service; he does not act for his own interest, but for that of his parent: thfe deed he commits is horrible, and yet he is not, on that account, devoid of conscience; because he is ignorant he is not therefore vicious. The sensations, that is, the external objects with which he is surrounded, blind him; the inward sentiment which constitutes the hatred for vice and the love of virtue, does not the less exist within him because he has been deceived by experience as to the manner in which this sentiment ought to be manifested in his life. To prefer others to ourselves when virtue commands the preference, is precisely that in which the essence of moral beauty consists; and this admirable instinct of the soul, the opponent of our physical instinct, is inherent in our nature; if it could be acquired, it could also be lost; but it is unchangeable, because it is innate. It is possible for us to do evil, when so gross an hypothesis, what is there improbable in his adoption of the other f-that the object of perception is' a material participation of the bodies that work on the outward organs of the senses' (Digby, Treatise of Bodies, c. 82). As a specimen of the mechanical explanations of mental phenomena then considered satisfactory, we quote air Kenelm's theory of memory:' Out of which it followeth, that the little simili. tudes which are in the caves of the brain, wheeling and swimming about, almost in 3uch sort as you see in the washing of currants or rice by the winding about and cireular turning of the cook's hand, divers sorts of bodies do go their course for a pretty while; so that the most ordinary objects cannot but present themselves quickly,' q* etc."-/bid.

128 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. we believe we are doing good; a man may be culpable knowingly and willingly; but he cannot admit a contradiction for a truth, that justice is injustice. There is such a thing as indifference to good and evil, and it is the ordinary result of civilization, when its coldness has reached the point of petrifaction, if the expression may be allowed, and this indifference is a much greater argument against an innate conscience than the gross errors of savages; but the most skeptical of men, if they are sufferers from oppression in any relation of life, appeal to justice, as if they had believed in it all their days; and when they are seized with any vivid affection, and tyrannical power is exerted to control it, they invoke the sentiment of equity with as much force as the most severe of moralists. When the flame of any passion, whether it be indignation or love, takes possession of the soul, it makes the sacred characters of eternal laws reappear in us. If the accident of birth and education decided the morality of man, how could we accuse him for his actions? If all that composes our will comes to us from external objects, every one may appeal to his own particular relations for the motives of his whole conduct; and frequently these relations differ as much between the inhabitants of the same country, as between an Asiatic and a European. If circumstance then were to be the divinity of mortals, it would be in order for every man to have his peculiar morality, or rather a want of morals according to his respective practice; and to counteract the evil which sensations might suggest, no efficient reason could be opposed except the public power of punishment: now if that public power commanded us to be unjust, the question would be resolved thus: all sensations would produce all ideas, which would lead us on to the most complete depravity. The proofs of the spirituality of the soul cannot be discovcred in the empire of the senses. The visible world is abandoned to their dominion; but the invisible will not be subjected to!t; and if we do not admit spontaneous ideas, if thought and sentiment depend entirely on sensations, how could the soul, in such a servitude, be immaterial 8 And if, as

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 129 nobody denies, the greater part of the knowledge transmitted by the senses is liable to error, what sort of a moral being must that be, who does not act until aroused by outward objects, and by objects even whose appearances are often deceitful? A French philosopher, making use of the most revolting expression, has said, " that thought is nothing but the material product of the brain." This deplorable definition is the most natural result of those metaphysics which attribute to our sensations the origin of all our ideas. We are in the right, if it be so, to laugh at all that is intellectual, and to make what is impalpable synonymous with what is incomprehensible. If the human mind is but subtle matter, put in motion by other elements, more or less gross, in comparison with which even it has the disadvantage of being passive; if our impressions and our recollections are nothing but the prolonged vibrations of an instrument, which chance has played upon; then there are only fibres in the brain, only physical forces in the world, and every thing can be explained according to the laws by which these forces are governed. Still there remain some little difficulties concerning the origin of things, and the end of our existence; but the question has been much simplified, and reason counsels us to suppress within our souls all the desires and all the hopes that genius, love, and religion call to life; for, according to this system, man would only be another machine in the great mechanism of the universe; his faculties would be all wheel-work, his morality a matter of calculation, and his worship success. Locke, believing from the bottom of his soul in the existence of God, established his conviction, without perceiving it, upon reasonings which are all taken out of the sphere of ex perience; he asserts the existence of an eternal principle, the orimary cause of all other causes; thus he enters into the region of infinity, and that region lies beyond all experience: out Locke, at the same time, was so apprehensive lest the idea of God should pass for an innate idea in man, it appeared to bim so absurd that the Creator should have deigned to in6g

130 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. scribe his name, like that of a great painter, upon the tablet of the soul, that he set himself to discover, out of all the narratives of travellers, some nations who were destitute of any religious belief. We may, I think, boldly affirm, that such na tions do not exist. The impulse that exalts us towards the Supreme Intelligence discovers itself in the genius of Newton, as it does in the soul of the poor savage, who worships the stone upon which he finds rest. No man clings exclusively to the externa. world, such as it is; and all have felt in their hearts, at some period of their lives, an undefinable inclination towards the supernatural; but how can it happen, that a being, so religious as Locke, should try to change the primitive characters of belief into an accidental knowledge, which chance may confer or take away? I repeat it, the tendency of any doctrine ought always to be deemed of great account in the judgment which we form upon the truth of that doctrine; for, in theory, the good and the true are inseparable. All that is invisible talks to man of a beginning and an end, of decline and destruction. A divine spark is the only indication in us of immortality. From what sensation does this arise? All our sensations fight against it, and yet it triumphs over them all. What! it will be said, do not final causes, do not the wonders of the universe, the splendor of the heavens that strikes our eyes, declare the magnificence and the goodness of our Creator? The book of nature is contradictory; we see there the emblems of good and evil almost in equal proportion; and things are thus constituted, in order that man be able to exercise his liberty between opposite probabilities, between fears and hopes of almost equal power. The starry Leaven appears to us like the threshold of the Divinity; out all the evils and all the vices of human nature obscure these celestial fires. A solitary voice, without speech, but not without harmony, without force, but irresistible, proclaims a God at the bottom of the human heart: all that is truly beautiful in man springs from what he experiences within himself, and spontaneously: every heroic action is inspired by moral liberty; the act of devoting ourselves to the divine will, thai

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 131 act which every sensation opposes, and which enthusiasm alone inspires, is so noble and so pure, that the angels themselves, virtuous as they are by nature, and without impediment, might envy it to man. The metaphysical doctrine that displaces the centre of life, by supposing its impulse to come from without, despoils man of his liberty, and destroys itself; for a spiritual nature no longer exists, when we unite it in such a manner to a physical nature, that it is only by human respect that we distinguish them: such a system shrinks from its own consequences, excepting when it derives from them, as it has done in France, materialism built upon sensation, and ethics founded upon interest. The abstract theory of this system was born in England; but none of its consequences have been admitted there. In France they have not had the honor of the discovery, but in a great degree that of the application. In Germany, since Leibnitz, they have opposed the system and its consequences; and, assuredly, it is worthy of enlightened and religious men of all countries, to inquire whether those principles, whose results are so fatal, ought to be considered as incontestable truths. Shaftesbury, HIutcheson, Smith, Reid, Dugald Stewart, etc., have studied the operations of the human mind with a rare sagacity; the works of Dugald Stewart, in particular, contain so perfect a theory of the intellectual faculties, that we may consider them, so to speak, as the natural history of the moral being. Every individual must recognize in them some part of himself. Whatever opinion we may have adopted as to the origin of ideas, we must acknowledge the utility of a labor which has for its object the examination of their progress and direction; but it is not enough to observe the development of our faculties, we must ascend to their source, in order to give an account of the nature, and of the independence, of the will of man. We cannot consider that question as an idle one, which endeavors to learn whether the soul has an independent faculty of feeling and thinking. It is the question of Hamlet, " To be or not to be?"

182 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY CHAPTER III. OF FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. DESCARTES, for a long period, was the chief of French philosophy; and if his physics had not been confessedly er roneous, perhaps his metaphysics would have preserved a more lasting ascendency. Bossuet, F6nelon, Pascal, all the great men of the age of Louis XIV, had adopted the Idealism of Descartes; and this system agreed much better with the Catholic religion than that philosophy which is purely experimental; for it appeared singularly difficult to combine a faith in the most mysterious doctrines with the sovereign empire of sensation over the soul. Among the French metaphysicians who have professed the doctrine of Locke, we must reckon, in the first class, Condillac, whose priestly office obliged him to use some caution in regard to religion, and Bonnet, who, being naturally religious, lived at Geneva, in a country where learning and piety are inseparable. These two philosophers, Bonnet especially, have established exceptions in favor of revelation; but it appears to me, that one of the causes of the diminution of respect for Religion, is this custom of setting her apart from all the sciences; as if philosophy, reasoning, every thing, in short, which is esteemed in earthly affairs, could not be applied to Religion: an ironical veneration removes her to a distance from all the interests of life; it is, if we may so express ourselves, to bow her out of the circle of the human mind. In every country, where a religious belief is predominant, it is the ccentre of ideas; and philosophy consists in the rational interpretation Df divine truths. When Descartes wrote, Bacon's philosophy had not yet penetrated into France; and that country was then in the

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 133 same state of ignorance and scholastic superstition as at the epoch when the great English thinker published his works. There are two methods of correcting the prejudices of men: the recourse to experience, and the appeal to reflection. Bacon adopted the first means; Descartes the second. The one hlas rendered immense service to the sciences; the other to thought, which is the source of all the sciences. Bacon was a man of much greater genius, and of still am pler learning, than Descartes. Hle has known how to establish his philosophy ill the material world; that of Descartes was brought into discredit by the learned, who attacked with success his opinions upon the system of the world:1 he could reason justly in the examination of the soul, and deceived himself in relation to the physical laws of the universe; but the judgments of men resting almost entirely upon a blind and precipitate confidence in analogy, they believed that he who had observed so ill what passed without him, was no better instructed as to the world within. In his manner of writing, Descartes shows a simplicity and overflowing goodness of nature, which inspires his readers with confidence; and the energy of his genius will not be contested. Nevertheless, when we compare him, either to the German philosophers or to Plato, we can neither find in his works the theory of Idealism in all its abstraction, nor the poetical imagination, which constitutes its beauty. Yet a ray of light had passed over the mind of Descartes, and his is the glory of having directed the philosophy of his day towards the interior development of the soul. He produced a great effect by referring all received truths to the test of reflection; these axioms were'admired: 1 " Descartes,' says Voltaire,' was the greatest mathematician of his age; but mathematics leave the intellect as they find it. That of Descartes was too prone to invention. He preferred the divination to the study of nature. The first of mathematicians produced nothing almost but romances of philosophy.' A more felicitous expression had been preoccupied by Father Daniel:' The philosophy of Descartes is the romance ot aature.' But in fact, Descartes himself was author of the mot. —'My,heory of vortices is a philosophical romance.' "-(Sir Wm. Hamilton, Dio.'ussions on Philosophy, etc., p. 296.)-Ed.

13' MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. "I think, therefore I exist; therefore I have a Creator, the perfect source of my imperfect faculties; every thing without us ilay be called in question: truth is only in the mind, and the Inind is the supreme judge of truth." Universal doubt is the A B1 C of philosophy; every man begins to reason again by the aid of his own native light, when he attempts to ascend to the principles of things; but the authority of Aristotle had so completely introduced the dogmatic forms6 into Europe, that the age was astonished at the boldness of Descartes, who submitted all opinions to natural judgment. Tle Port-Royal writers were formed in his school; so that Fran,;e produced men of a severer turn of thought in the seventeental than in the eighteenth century. At the side of their gract fil and engaging genius appeared a certain gravity, which betra:yed the natural influence of a system of philosophy that attributed all our ideas to the power of reflection. Malebranche, the principal disciple of Descartes, was a man gifted with genius of soul in an eminent degree. They have been pleased to consider him as a dreamer in the eighteenth century;' and in France it is all over with that writer who has the character of a dreamer; for it implies the idea of total inutility, and this is peculiarly offensive to all reasonable persons, as they are called; but is this word utility noble enough to be applied to all the needs of the soul? The French writers of the eighteenth century excelled most in theb study of political liberty; those of the seventeenth in "I cannot concur in the praise of novelty and invention, which has always been conceded to the central theory of Malebranche. His' Visiont of all things in the Deity,' is, as it appears to me, simply a transfcrrence t-j man in the flesh, to the Vialor, of that mode of cognition, r aintained by many of the older Catholic divines, in explanation of how the Saints, as disembodied spirits, can be aware of human invocations, and, in generai, of what passes upon earth.' They perceive,' it is said,'all things tn Gol.' So that, in truth, the philosophical theory of Malebranche is noth ing but the extension of a theological hypothesis, long common in thtschools; and with scholastic speculations, Malebranche was even inti mnately acquainted."-(Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy etc. p. 199.)-Ed.

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 135 the study of moral liberty. The philosophers of the one pe. riod were combatants; of the other, anchorets. Under an absolute government, like that of Louis XIV, independence finds no asylum but in meditation; in the disorderly reigns of the last century, the men of letters were animated with the desire of winning over the government of their country to the liberal principle and ideas of which England displayed so fair an example. The writers who have not gone beyond this point, are very deserving of the esteem of their countrymen; but it is not the less true, that the works composed in the seventeenth century are more philosophical, in many respects, than those which have since been published; for philosophy especially consists in the study and the knowledge of our intellectual being. The philosophers of the eighteenth century have busied themselves rather with social politics than with the primitive nature of man; those of the seventeenth century, solely and precisely from their being religious men, had a more thorough knowledge of the human heart. During the decline of the French monarchy, the philosophers turned the direction of thought, which they used as a weapon, to what was passing without them; under the empire of Louis XIV, they were more attached to idealistic metaphysics, because reflection was to them more habitual and more necessary. In order to raise the French genius to its highest degree of perfection, it would be requisite to learn, from the writers of the eighteenth century, how to use our faculties to advantage; and from those of the seventeenth, how to study their source. Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche had much more resemblance to the German philosophers than the French writers of the eighteenth century; but Malebranche and the Germans differ in this, that the one lays down as an article of faith what the other reduce into a scientific theory; the one aims at clothing with dogmatic forms what is inspired by imagination, because he is afraid of being accused of enthusiasm; while the,thers, writing at the end of an era when analysis has been extended to every object of study, know that they are enthu

136 M&DAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. siasts, and are solely anxious to prove that enthusiasm accords with reason. If the French had followed the metaphysics of their great men of the seventeenth century, they would now hold the same opinions as the Germans; for in the progress of philosophy Leibnitz is the natural successor of Descartes and Malebranche, and Kant of Leibnitz. England had great influence over the writers of the eighteenth century; the admiration which they felt for that country inspired them with the wish of introducing into France her liberty and her philosophy. English philosophy was then only void of danger when united with the religious sentiments of that people, with their liberty, and with their obedience to the laws. In the bosom of a nation where Newton and Clarke never pronounced the name of God without bowing their heads, let the metaphysical systems have been ever so erroneous, they could not be fatal. That which is every way wanting in France, is the feeling and habit of veneration; and the transition is there very quick from the examination which may enlighten, to the irony which reduces every thing to dust. It seems to me that we may observe two perfectly distinct epochs in the eighteenth century; that in which the influence of England was first acknowledged, and that in which the men of genius hurried themselves into destruction: light was then changed to conflagration; and Philosophy, like an enraged enchantress, set fire to the palace where she had displayed her wonders. In politics, Montesquieu belongs to the first epoch, Raynal to the second; in religion, the writings of Voltaire, which had the defence of toleration for their object, breathed the spirit of the first half of the century; but his pitiable and ostentatious irreligion has been the disgrace of the second. Finally, in metaphysics, Condillac and Helvetius, although they were contemporaries, both bear the impress of these very different epochs; for, although the entire system of the philosophy of sensation was wrong in its principle, yet the consequences

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 137 which Helvetius has drawn from it ought not to be imputed to Condillac; he was far from assenting to them. Condillac has rendered experimental metaphysics more clear and more striking than they are in Locke; he has truly levelled them to the comprehension of all the world; he says, with Locke, that the soul can have no idea which does not come to it by sensation; he attributes to our wants the origin of knowledge and of language; to words, that of reflection; and thus, making us receive the entire development of our moral being from external objects, he explains human nature as he would a positive science, in a clear, rapid, and, in some respects, convincing manner; for if we neither felt in our hearts the native impulses of belief, nor a conscience independent of experience, nor a creating spirit, in all the force of the term, we might be well enough contented with this mechanical definition of the human soul. It is natural to be seduced by the easy solution of the greatest of problems; but this apparent simplicity exists only in the mode of inquiry; the object to which it is pretendingly applied does not the less continue of unknown immensity; and the enigma of ourselves swallows up, like the sphinx, thousands of systems which pretend to the glory of having guessed its meaning. The work of Condillac ought only to be considered as another book on an inexhaustible subject, if the influence of this book had not been sad. Helvetius, who deduces from the philosophy of sensations all the direct consequences which it can admit, asserts, that if the hands of man had been made like the hoofs of the horse, he would only have possessed the intelligence of this animal. Assuredly, if it were so, it would be very unjust to attribute to ourselves any thing blamable or meritorious in our actions; for the difference which may exist between the several organizations of individuals, would authorize and be the proper cause of the difference in their characters. To the opinions of Helvetius succeeded those of the System of Nature, which tended to the annihilation of the Deity in the universe, and of free-will in man. Locke, Condillac, IIelmetius, and the unhappy author of the System of Nature, have

138 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. all progressively advanced in the same path: the first steps were innocent; neither Locke nor Condillac knew the dangers of the principles of their philosophy; but very soon this black spot, which was hardly visible in the intellectual horizon, grew to such a size as to be near plunging the universe and man back again into darkness.' 1 " After the philosophy of Descartes and Malebranche had sunk into oblivion, and from the time that Condillac, exaggerating the too partial principles of Locke, had analyzed all knowledge into sensation, Scnsualism (or, more correctly, Sensuism), as a psychological theory of the origin of our cognitions, became, in France, not only the dominant, but alrnost the one exclusive opinion. It was believed that reality and truth were limited to experience, and experience was limited to the sphere of sense; while the very highest faculties of mind were deemed adequately explained when recalled to perceptions, elaborated, purified, sublimated, and transformed. From the mechanical relations of sense with its object, it was attempted to solve the mysteries of will and intelligence; the philosophy of mind was soon viewed as correlative to the physiology of organization. The moral nature of man was at last formally abolished, in its identification with his physical: mind became a reflex of matter; thought a secretion of the brain. " A doctrine so melancholy in its consequences, and founded on principles thus partial and exaggerated, could not be permanent: a reaction was inevitable. The recoil, which began about twenty years ago, lhas beer. gradually increasing; and now it is perhaps even to be apprehended, that its intensity may become excessive. As the poison was of foreign growth, so also has been the antidote. The doctrine of Condillac was, if not a corruption, a development, of the doctrine of Locke; and, in returning to a better philosophy, the French are still obeying an impulsion communlicated frorol without. This impulsion may be traced to two different sources,to the philosophy of Scotland, and to the philosophy of Germany. "In Scotland, a philosophy had sprung up, which, though professing, equally with the doctrine of Condillac, to build only on experience, did not, like that doctrine, limit experience to the relations of sense and its objects. Without vindicating to man more than a relative knowledge of existence, and restricting the science of mind to an observation of the fac of consciousness, it, however, analyzed that fact into a greater number of more important elements than had been recognized in the school of Con. dillac. It showed that phenomena were revealed in thought which could not be resolved into any modification of sense,-external or internal. It proved that intelligence supposed principles, which, as the conditions of its activity. cannot be the results of its operation; that the mind contained knowledges, which, as primitive, universal, necessary, are not to be explained as generalizations from the contingent and individual, about which &lonc all experie,. co-versant. The phenomena.-:;ind were tnus

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 139 External objects, it was said, are the cause of all our impressions; nothing then appears more agreeable than to give ourselves up to the physical world, and to come, self-invited guests, to the banquet of nature; but by degrees the internal source is dried up, and even as to the imagination that is requisite for luxury and pleasure, it goes on decaying to such a degree, that very shortly man will not retain soul enough to relish any enjoyment, of however material a nature. The immortality of the soul, and the sentiment of duty, are suppositions entirely gratuitous in the system which grounds all our ideas upon our sensations; for no sensation reveals to us immortality in death. If external objects alone have formed our conscience, from the nurse who receives us in her arms until the last act of arn advanced old age, all our impressions are so linked to each other, that we cannot arraign with justice the pretended power of volition. which is only another instance of fatality. I shall endeavor to show, in the second part of this section, distinguished from the phenomena of matter; and if the impossibility of materialism were not demonstrated, there was, at least, demonstrated the impossibility of its proof. " This philosophy, and still more the spirit of this philosophy, was calculated to exert a salutary influence on the French. And such an influence it did exert. For a time, indeed, the truth operated in silence; and Reid and Stewart hatd already modified the philosophy of France, before the French were content to acknowledge themselves their disciples. In the works of Degerando and Laromiguigre, may be traced the influence of Scottish speculation; but it is to Royer-Collard, and, more recently, to Jouffroy, that our countrymen are indebted for a full acknowledgment of their merits, and for the high and increasing estimation in which their doctrines are now held in France. M. Royer-Collard, whose authority has, in every relation, been exerted only for the benefit of his country, and who, once great as a professor, is now not less illustrious as a statesman, in his lectures, advocated with distinguished ability the principles of the Scottish school; modestly content to follow, while no one was more entitled to lead. M. Jouffroy, by his recent translation of the works of Dr. Reid, and by the excellent preface to his version of Mr. Dugald Stewart's Outlines of Moral Philosophy,' has likewise powerfully co-operated to the establishment, in France, of a philosophy equally opposed to the exclusive Sensualism of Condillac, and to the exclusive Rationalism of the new German school." —(Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions on Philoscphy, etc., p. 24)- Ed

140 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. that the moral system, which is built upon interest, so strenuously preached up by the French writers of the last age, has an intimate connection with the metaphysics which attribute all our ideas to our sensations, and that the consequences of the one are as bad in practice, as those of the other in theory. Those who have been able to read the licentious works published in France towards the close of the eighteenth century, will bear witness, that when the writers of these culpable performances attempt to support themselves upon any species of reasoning, they all appeal to the influence of our physical over our moral constitution; they refer to our sensations the most blamable opinions; they exhibit, in short, under all appearances, the doctrine which destroys free-will and conscience. We cannot deny, it may be said, that this is a degrading doctrine; but, nevertheless, if it be true, must we reject it, and blind ourselves on purpose? Assuredly those writers would have made a deplorable discovery, who had dethroned the soul, and condemned the mind to sacrifice itself, by employing all its faculties to prove that the laws which are common to every physical existence, are also proper for it; but, thanks be to God (and this expression is here in its peculiar place), thanks be to God, I say, this Vstem is entirely false in its principle; and the circumstance of those writers espousing it who have supported the cause of immorality, is an additional proof of the errors which it contains. If the greater part of the profligate have upheld themselves by the doctrine of materialism, when they have wished to become degraded according to method, and to form a theory of their actions, it is because they believed that, by submitting the soul to sensation, they would thus be delivered from the responsibility of their conduct. A virtuous being, convinced of this doctrine, would be deeply afflicted by it; for he would incessantly fear that the all-powerful influence of external objects would change the purity of his soul and the force of his resolutions. But when we see men rejoicing to proclaim themselves the creatures of circumstances in all respects, And declaring that all these circumstances are combined by

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 141 3hance, we shudder from our very hearts at their perverse satisfaction. When the savage sets fire to a cottage, he is said to warm himself with pleasure at the conflagration which he has kindled; he exercises at least a sort of superiority over the disorder of which he is guilty; he makes destruction of some use to him: but when man chooses to degrade human nature, who will thus be profited? CHAPTER IV. OF THE RIDICULE INTRODUCED BY A CERTAIN SPECIES OF PHILOSOPHY. THE philosophical system, adopted in any country, exerts a great influence over the direction of mind; it is the universal model after which all thought is cast; those persons even, who have not studied the system, conform, unknowingly, to the general disposition which it inspires. We have seen for nearly a hundred years past, in Europe, the growth and increase of a sort of scoffing skepticism, the foundation of which is the philosophy that attributes all our ideas to our sensations. The first principle in this philosophy is, not to believe any thing which cannot be proved like a fact or a calculation; in union with this principle is contempt for all that bears the name of exalted sentiment, and attachment to the pleasures of sense. These three points of the doctrine include all the sorts of irony of which religion, sensibility, and morals, can become the object. Bayle, whose learned Dictionary is hardly read by people of the world, is nevertheless the arsenal from which all the pleasantries of skepticism have been drawn; Voltaire has given them a pungency by his wit and elegance;' but the founda1 " Since the metaphysics of Locke crossed the channel, on the light and brilliant wings of Voltaire's imagination, Sensualism has reigned in France

142 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. tion of all this jesting is, that every thing, not as evident as a physical experiment, ought to be reckoned among dreams and idle thoughts. It is good management to dignify an incapacity for attention, by calling it a supreme sort of reason which rejects all doubt and obscurity; in consequence, they turn the noblest thoughts into ridicule, if reflection is necessary to comprehend them, or a sincere examination of the heart to make them felt. We still speak with respect of Pascal, of Bossuet, of J. J. Rousseau, etc.; because authority has consecrated them, and authority, of every sort, is a thing easily discerned. But a great number of readers being convinced that ignorance and idleness are the attributes of a man of wit, think it beneath them to take any trouble, and wish to read, like a paragraph in a newspaper, writings that have man and nature for their subject. In a word, if by chance such writings were composed by a German, whose name was not a French one, and it was as difficult to pronounce this name as that of the Baron in Candide, what collections of pleasantries would not be formed upon this circumstance! and the meaning of them all would be the following: "I have grace and lightness of spirit; while you, who have the misfortune to think upon some subjects, and to hold by some sentiments, you do not jest upon all with nearly the same elegance and facility." The philosophy of sensation is one of the principal causes of this frivolity. Since the time that the soul has been considered passive, a great number of philosophical labors have been despised. without contradiction, and with an authority of which there is no parallel in the whole history of philosophy. It is a fact, marvellous but incontestable, that from the time of Condillac, there has not appeared among us any philosophical work, at variance with his doctrine, which has produced the smallest impression on the public mind. Condillac thus reigned in peace; and his domination, prolonged even to our own days, through changes of every kind, pursued its tranquil course, apparently above the -each of danger. Discussion had ceased: his disciples had only to develop the words of their master; philosophy seemed accomplished." (M. Cousin. Journal des Savans, 1819.)-Ed.

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 143 The day on which it was said that there are no mysteries in the world, or at all events that it is unnecessary to think about them, that all our ideas come by the eyes and by the ears, and that the palpable only is the true, the individuals who enjoyed all their senses in perfect health believed themselves the genuine philosophers. We hear it incessantly said, by those who have ideas enough to get money when they are poor, and to spend it when they are rich, that they have the only reasonable philosophy, and that none but enthusiasts would dream of any other. In fact, our sensations teach nothing but this philosophy; and if we can gain no knowledge except by their means, every thing that is not subject to the evidence of matter must bear the name of folly. If it was admitted, on the contrary, that the soul acts by itself, and that we must draw up information out of ourselves to find the truth, and that this truth cannot be seized upon, except by the aid of profound meditation, because it is not within the range of terrestrial experience, the whole course of men's minds would be changed; they would not disdainfully reject the most sublime thoughts because they demand a close attention; but that which they found insupportable would be the superficial and the common; for emptiness grows at length singularly burdensome. Voltaire so well perceived the influence that metaphysics exercise over the general bias of the mind, that he wrote Candide, to combat Leibnitz.' He took up a curious whim against final causes, optimism, free-will; in short, against all the philosophical opinions that exalt the dignity of man; and he composed Candide, that work of a diabolical gayety; for it appears to be written by a being of a different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well pleased with our sufferings, Vnd laughing like a demon or an ape, at the miseries of that auman species with which he has nothing in common. The greatest poet of the age, the author of Alzire, Tancr&dt, Vlerope, Zaire, and Brutus, showed himself in this work igno. His object was to combat the optimism of Leibnitz.-Ed.

144 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. rant of all the great moral truths which he had so worthily celebrated. When Voltaire as a tragic author felt and thought in the character of another, he was admirable; but when he remains wholly himself, he is a jester and a cynic. The same versatility,which enabled him to adopt the part of the personages whom he wished to represent, only too well inspired the language which in certain moments, was suited to Voltaire. Candide brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in appearance, in reality so ferocious; it presents human nature under the most lamentable point of view, and offers us, in the room of every consolation, the sardonic grin, which frees us from all compassion for others, by making us renounce it for ourselves. It is in consequence of this system that Voltaire, in his Universal History, has aimed at attributing virtuous actions, as well as great crimes, to those accidental events which deprive the former of all their merit, and the latter of all their guilt. In effect, if there is nothing in the soul but what our sensations have imprinted upon it, we ought no longer to recognize more than two real and lasting motives on earth, force and well-being, tactics and gastronomy; but if the mind is still to be considered such as it has been formed by modern philosophy, it would very soon be reduced to wish that something of an exalted nature would reappear, in order at least to furnish it vith an object for exercise and for attack. The Stoics have often repeated that we ought to brave all the assaults of fortune, and only to trouble ourselves with what dleiends ulon the souls uvon our sentiments and our thQollits, The philosophy of sensation would have a totally opposite result; it would disembarrass us from our feelings and thoughts, with the design of turning our efforts towards our physical well-being; she would say to us: " Attach yourselves to the present moment; consider as a chimera everything which wanders out of the circle of the pleasures and affairs of this world, and pass your short career of life as well as you may, taking care of your health, which is the foundation of happiness'"

FRENCH PHILOsOPHY. 145 These maxims have been known in all times; but they were thought to be the exclusive property of valets in comedies; and in our days they have been made the doctrine of reason, founded upon necessity, a doctrine very different from that of religious resignation, for the one is as vulgar as the other is noble and exalted. The singularity of the attempt consists in deducing the theory of elegance from so plebeian a philosophy; our poor nature is often low and selfish, as we must grieve to confess; but it was novel enough to boast of it. Indifference and contempt for exalted subjects have become the type of the graceful; and witticisms have been levelled against those who take a lively interest in any thing which is without a positive result in the present world. The argumentative principle of this frivolity of heart and mind, is the metaphysical doctrine which refers all our ideas to our sensations; for nothing but the superficial comes to us from without, and the seriousness of life dwells at the bottom of the soul. If the fatality of materialsm, admitted as a theory of the human mind, led to a distaste for every thing external, as well as to a disbelief of all within us, there would still be something in this system of an inactive nobleness, of an oriental indolence, which might lay claim to a sort of grandeur; and some of the Greek philosophers have found means to infuse almost a dignity into apathy; but the empire of sensation, while it has weakened sentiment by degrees, has left the activity of personal interest in full force; and this spring of action has become so much the more powerful, as all the others have been broken into pieces. To incredulity of mind, to selfishness of heart, must still be added the doctrine concerning conscience, which Helvetius developed, when he asserted, that actions virtuous in themselves had for their object the attainment of those physical enjoyments which we can taste here below; it has followed from hence, that sacrifices made to the ideal worship of any opinion, or any sentiment whatever, have been considered as if those who offer them were dupes; and is men dread nothing more than passing for dupes, they have VOL II. —

146 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. been eager to cast ridicule upon every sort of unsuccessful enthusiasm; for that which has been recompensed with good fortune, has escaped raillery: success is always in the right with the advocates of materialism. The dogmatic incredulity, that, namely, which calls in question the truth of every thing that is not proved by the senses, is the source of the chief irony of man against himself: all moral degradation comes from that quarter. This philosophy, doubtless, ought to be considered an effect, as well as a cause, of the present state of public feeling: nevertheless, there is an evil of which it is the principal author; it has given to the carelessness of levity the appearance of reflective reasoning; it has furnished selfishness with specious arguments; and has caused the most noble sentiments to be considered as an accidental malady, which is the result of external circumstances alone. It is important, then, to examine whether the nation, which has constantly guarded itself against the metaphysics from which such consequences have been drawn, was not right in principle, and still more so in the application which it has made of that principle to the development of the faculties of man, and to his moral conduct. CHAPTER V. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS UPON GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. SPECULATIVE philosophy has always found numerous partisans among the Germanic nations, and experimental philosophy among the Latin nations. The Romans, expert as they were in the affairs of life, were no metaphysicians; they Lknew nothing of this subject, except by their connection with Greece, Pand the nations civilized by them, have, for the most part, inherited their knowledge in politics, and their indifference for those studies which cannot be applied to the business of the world. This disposition shows itself in France in its greatest

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 147 strength; the Italians and the Spaniards have partaken of it; but the imagination of the South has sometimes deviated froin practical reason, to employ itself in theories purely abstract. The greatness of soul that appeared among the Romans, gave a sublime character to their patriotism and their morals; but this consequence must be attributed to their republican institutions. When liberty no longer existed in Rome, a selfish and sensual luxury was seen to reign there, with almost an undivided empire; excepting that of an adroit sort of political knowledge, which directed every mind towards observation and experience. The Romans retained nothing of their past study of Grecian literature and philosophy but a taste for the arts; and this taste itself very soon degenerated into gross enjoyments. The influence of Rome did not exert itself over the northern nations. They were almost entirely civilized by Christianity;i and their ancient religion, which contained within it the principles of chivalry, bore no resemblance to the Paganism of the South. There was to be found a spirit of heroical and generous self-devotion; an enthusiasm for women, which made a noble worship of love: in a word, as the rigors of the climate prevented man from plunging himself into the delights of nature, he had so much the keener relish, for the pleasures of the soul. It may be objected to me, that the Greeks had the same religion and the same climate as the Romans; and that yet they have given themselves up more than any other people to speculative philosophy; but may we not attribute to the Indians some of the intellectual systems developed among the Greeks? The idealistic philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato ill agrees with Paganism, such as it appears to us; historical traditions also lead us to believe that Egypt was the medium through which the nations of southern Europe received the influence of the East. The philosophy of Epicurus is the only philosophy of truly Grecian origin. Whatever may become of these conjectures, it is certain that the spirituality of the soul, and all the thoughts derived Yom it, have been easily naturalized among the people of the

.148 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. North; and of all these nations, the Germans have ever showed themselves the most inclined to contemplativepilosophy. Leibnitz' is heir Bacon and their TDecartes. We find in this excellent genius all the qualities which the German philosophers, in general, glory to aim at-immense erudition, perfect good faith, enthusiasm hidden under strict forms and method. He had profoundly studied theology, jurisprudence, history, languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry; for he I " The comprehensive genius of Gottfried William Leibnitz embraced the whole circle of philosophy, and imparted to it, in Germany at least, a new and powerful impulse. All that can interest or exercise the understanding was attempted by his great and original mind, more especially in Mathe-.natics and Philosophy. He was ignorant of no one branch of learning, and in all he has shown the fertility of his mind by the discoveries he suggested or attempted. He was the founder of a school in Germany, which distinguished itself for the fundamental nature of the principles it embraced, and the systematic manner in which these were developed-a school which effected the final overthrow of the Scholastic system, and extended its beneficial influence over the whole range of the sciences. Leibnitz, by his example and his exertions, laid the foundations of this great revolution, by combining the philosophical systems which had prevailed up to his time-by his well-trained and original spirit-by his extraordinary learning-the liberality of his mind, and that spirit of toleration which led him always to discover some favorable point of view in what he criticised-something, even in the most despised and neglected systems, which might suggest matter for research. To this must be added his sense or harmony, and the infinitude of bright ideas, hints, and conjectures, which were perpetually, as it were, scintillating from his brilliant mind, though he left to others the task of collecting and combining them. " Ile was born, June 21, 1646, at Leipsic, where his father was professor of moral philosophy, and studied the same science under J. Thomasius (born 1622, died 1684), applying himself at the same time to the Mathematics2 and the study of Natural Law; read the classics in the original tongues, particularly Plato and Aristotle, whose doctrines he endeavored at an early.ge to combine. The cultivation of his mind was advanced, and the ver-,atiiity and address of his natural parts promoted, by immense reading ind a nmultifarious correspondence-by his early independence of mindny his travels, particularly to Paris and London-and by his acquaintance with the most distinguished statesmen and princes, and most illustrious sages of his time. He died, November 14, 1716, at Hanover, of which state he was a privy-councillor and keeper of the library; scarcely less honored after his death than during his life, as is testified, among other'hings, by a monument recently erected to him." —(Tennemann, Manua, of Philosophy, pp. 340, 341.)-Ed. 2 Under Erh. Weigel, at Jena (who died 1690.)

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 149 was convinced that a universality of knowledge was necessary to constitute a superior being in any department: in short, every thing iii~TntblpifaisTpyedye d those virtues which are allied to loftiness of thought, and which deserve at once our admiration and our respect. His works may be divided into three branches: the exact sciences, theological philosophy, and the philosophy of the mind, Every one knows that Leibnitz was the rival of Newton, in the theory of calculation. The knowledge of mathematics is very useful in metaphysical studies; abstract reasoning does not exist in perfection out of algebra and geometry: I shall endeavor to show in another place the unsuitableness of this sort of reasoning, when we attempt to exercise it upon a subject that is allied in any manner to sensibility; but it confers upon the human mind a power of attention, that renders it much more capable of analyzing itself. We must also know the laws and the forces of the universe, in order to study man under all his relations. There is such an analogy, and such a difference, between the physical and the moral world, their resemblances and their diversity lend each other such light, that it is impossible to be a learned man of the first rank without the assistance of speculative philosophy, nor a speculative philosopher without having studied the positive sciences. Locke and Condillac had not sufficiently attended to these sciences; but Leibnitz had in this respect an incontestable superiority. Descartes also was a very great mathematician; and it is to be remarked, that the greater part of the philoso phical partisans of idealism have made an unbounded use of their intellectual faculties. The exercise of the mind, as well as that of the heart, imparts a feeling of internal activity, of which all those beings who abandon themselves to the impressions that come from without are rarely capable. The first class of the writings of Leibnitz contains those which we call theological, because they are directed to truths which form part of the support of religion; and the theory of the human mind is included in the second class. In the first class he treats of the origin of good and evil, of the divine

t5O MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. prescience, in a word, of those primitive questions which lie beyond the bounds of human intelligence. I do not pretend to censure, by this expression, those great men who, from the times of Pythagoras and Plato down to our own, have been attracted towards these lofty philosophical speculations. Genius does not set bounds to itself, until it has struggled for a long time against this hard necessity. Who can possess the faculty of thinking, and not endeavor to learn the origin and the end of the things of this world? Every thing that lives upon earth, excepting man, seems to be ignorant of itself. He alone knows that he will die, and this awful truth awakens his interest for all the grand thoughts which are attached to it. From the time that we are capable of reflection we resolve, or rather we think we resolve, after our own manner, the philosophical questions which may explain the destiny of man; but it has been granted to no one to comprehend that destiny altogether. Every man views it from a different point; every man has his own philosophy, his poetry, his love. This philosophy is in accordance with the peculiar bias of his character and his mind. When we elevate ourselves towards the infinite, a thousand explanations may be equally true, although different; for questions without bounds have thousands of aspects, one of which may be sufficient to occupy the whole duration of existence. If the mystery of the universe is above the reach of man, rtill the study of this mystery gives more expansion to the mind. It is with metaphysics as with alchemy; in searching for the philosopher's stone, in endeavoring to discover an impossibility, we meet upon the road with truths which would have remained unknown to us; besides, we cannot hinder a meditative being from bestowing some time at least upon the transcendental philosophy; this ebullition of spiritual nature cannot be kept back without bringing that nature into disgrace. The Pre-established Harmony' of Leibnitz, which he believed " When an impression is made on a bodily organ by an external object. Jhe mind becomes percipient. When a volition is framed by the will, the

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 151 to be a great discovery, has been refuted with success; he flattered himself that he could explain the relations between mind and matter, by considering them both as instruments tuned beforehand, which re-echo, and answer, and imitate each other mutually. His monads,' of which he constitutes the simple bodily organs are ready to execute it. How is this brought about? The doctrine of a pre-"stablished harmony has reference to this question, an may be thus stated. " Before creating the mind and the body of man, God had a perfect knowledge of all possible minds and of all possible bodies. Among this infinite variety of minds and bodies, it was impossible but that there should come together a mind the sequence of whose ideas and volitions should correspond with the movements of some body; for, in an infinite number of possible minds and possible bodies, every combination or union was possible. Let us, then, suppose a mind, the order and succession of whose modifications corresponded with the series of movements to take place in some body, God would unite the two and make of them a living soul, a man. Here, then, is the most perfect harmony between the two parts of which man is composed. There is no commerce nor communication, no action and reaction. The mind is an independent force, which passes from one volition or perception to another, in conformity with its own nature; and would have done so although the body had not existed. The body, in like manner, by virtue of its own inherent force, and by the single impression of external objects, goes through a series of movemlents; and would have done so although it had not been united to a rational soul. But the movements of the body and the modifications of the mind correspond to each other. In short, the mind is a spiritual automaton, and the body is a material automaton. Like two pieces of clockwork, they are so regulated as to mark the same time; but the spring which moves the one is not the spring which moves the other; yet they go exactly together.'The harmony between them existed before the mind was united to the body. Hence this is called the doctrine of pre-established harmony. "' It may be called correspondence or parallelsm, but not harmony between mind and body-for there is no unity superior to both, and containing both, which is the cause of their mutual penetration. In decomposing human personality into two substances,'2 from eternity abandoned each to its proper impulse, which acknowledges no superior law in man to direct and control them, liberty is destroyed." -(Fleming, Vocabulary of Phiasophy, pp. 216, 217.)-Ed. 1 "According to Leibnitz, the elementary particles of matter are vital.frces, not acting mechanically, but from an internal principle. They are incorporeal or spiritual atoms, inaccessible to all change from without, but subject to internal movement. This hypothesis he explains in a treatise 2 Soul and body, however, constitute one suppositum or person.

152 MIADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. 3lenlents of the universe, are but an hypothesis as gratuitous as all those which have been used to explain the origin of things. But in what a singular state of perplexity is the human mind? Incessantly attracted towards the secret of it. being, it finds that secret equally impossible to be discovered, or to be banished from its thoughts. The Persians say that Zoroaster interrogated the Deity, and asked how the world had begun, when it would end, what was the origin of good and evil. The Deity answered to all these questions: Do good, and gain immortality. The point which particularly constitutes the excellence of this reply is, that it does not discourage man from the most sublime meditations; it only teaches him, that by conscience and sentiment he may exalt himself to the most lofty conceptions of philosophy. entitled Monadloloqie. le thought inert matter insufficient to explain the phenomena of body, and had recourse to the eatelechies of Aristotle, or the msbstantialformns of the scholastic philosophy, conceiving of them as primitive forces, constituting the substance of matter, atoms of substance but not of matter, real and absolute unities, metaphysical points full of vitality, exact as mathematical points, and real as physical points. These substantial unities which constitute matter are of a nature inferior to spirit and soul, but they are imperishable, although they may undergo transformation. "'LMcnadology rests upon this axiom-every substance is at the same time a cause, and every substance being a cause, has therefore in itself the principle of its own development: such is the monad; it is a simple force. Each monad has relation to all others; it corresponds with the plan of the universe; it is the universe abridged; it is, as Leibnitz says, a living muirror which reflects the entire universe under its own point of view. But every monad being simple, there is no immediate action of one monad upon another; there is, however, a natural relation of their respective development, which makes their apparent communication; this natural relation, this harmony which has its reason in the wisdom of the Supreme Directcr, is pre-established harmony.' —Cousin, Iist. Mod. Philos., vol. ii. p. 86. " Mr. Stewart (Dissert., part 2, note 1, p. 219) has said:' After studying, with all possible diligence, what Leibnitz has said of his monads in different parts of his works, I find myself quite incompetent to annex any precise idea to the word as he has employed it.' The most intelligible oassage which he quotes is the following. (Tom. ii. p. 50.)'A monad is not a material but a formal atom, it being impossible for a thing to be at once material, and possessed of a real unity and indivisibility. It is necessary, therefore, to revive the obsolete doctrine of.substantial forms (the es sence of which consists in.fowce), separating it, however, from the various sbuses to which it is liable.' "-(Fleming, Vocab. of Philos., pp. 320-322.) — Ea.

GERMAN PHILOSOQr Y. 153 Leibnitz was an idealist, who founded his system solely upon reasoning; and from thence it arises, that he has pushed his abstractions too far, and that he has not sufficiently supported his theory upon inward persuasion, the only true foundation of that which is above the understanding; in fact, reason upon the liberty of man, and you will not believe it; lay your hand upon your conscience, and you will not be able to doubt it. Consequence and contradiction, in the sense that we attach to either of these terms, do not exist within the sphere of the great questions concerning the liberty of man, the origin of good and evil, the divine prescience, etc. In these questions sentiment is almost always in opposition to reason; in order to teach mankind, that what he calls incredible in the order of earthly things, is perhaps the supreme truth under universal relations. Dante has expressed a grand philosophical thought by this verse: "A guisa del ver primo che l'uom crede." 1 We must believe certain truths as we believe our own exist ence; it is the soul which reveals them to us, and reasonings of every kind are never more than feeble streams derived from this fountain. The Theodicy2 of Leibnitz treats of the divine prescience, 1 " It is thus that man believes in primitive truth." 2 " This word was employed by Leibnitz, who in his Essais de Theodicda, sur la bontd de Dieu, la libertd de l'honlme et l'origine du mal, published in 1710, maintained that the existence of moral evil has its origin in the free will of the creature, while metaphysical evil is nothing but the limitation which is involved in the essence of finite beings, and that out of this both physical and moral evil naturally flow. But these finite beings are designed to attain the utmost felicity they are capable of enjoying, while each, as a part, contributes to the perfection of the whole, which of the many worlds that were possible is the very best. On this account it has been called the theory of optimism. "In Manuals of Philosophy, the term theodicy is applied to that part which treats of the being, perfections, and government of God, and the xmortality of the soul. "In the.Manuel de Philosophie, a Pusage des Colleges, 8vo, Paris, 1846, Tieodicde, which is written by Emille Saisset, is called Rational Theology, 70

154 MADAME DE STAfL'S GERMANY. and of the cause of good and evil; it is one of the most profound and argumentative works upon the theory of the infinite; the author, however, too often applies to that which is without bounds, a sort of logic to which circumscribed objects alone are amenable. Leibnitz was a highly religious man; but, from this very circumstance, he believed it a duty to ground the truths of religion upon mathematical reasoning, in order to support them on such foundations as are admitted within the empire of experience; this error proceeds from e respect, oftener felt than acknowledged, for men of cold and arid minds; we attempt to convince them in their own manner; we acknowledge that arguments in a logical form have more certainty than a proof from sentiment; and it is not true. In the region of intellectual and religious truths, of which Leibnitz has treated, we must use consciousness in the room of demonstration. Leibnitz, wishing to adhere to abstract reasoning, demands a sort of stretch of attention which few minds can support. Metaphysical works, that are founded neither upon experience nor upon sentiment, singularly fatigue the thinking power; and we may imbibe from them a physical and moral pain, so great, that by our obstinate endeavors to conquer it, we may shatter the organs of reason in our heads. A poet, Baggesen, has made Vertigo a divinity; we should or the Theology of Reason, independent of Revelation.' It proposes to establish the existence of a being infinitely perfect, and to determine his attributes and essential relations to the world.' It treats of the existence, attributes, and providence of God, and the immortality of the soul-which were formerly included under metaphysics. " According to Kant, the objections which a theodicy should meet are: 1. The existence of moral evil, as contrary to the holiness of God. 2. Of physical evil, as contrary to his goodness. 8. The disproportion between'he crimes and the punishments of this life as repugnant to his justice. He approves of the vindication adopted by Job against his friends, founded on our imperfect knowledge of God's ways. "' IWhen the Jewish mind began to philosophize, and endeavored tc troduce dialectic proofs, its theodicean philosophy, or justification of God stopped, in the book of Job, at the avowal of the incomprehensibility of'he destinies of mankind.' "-Bunsen, Iilppolytus, vol. ii. p. 7.-(Fleming Vocab. of Philos., p. 513.)-Ed.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 155 recommend ourselves to the favor of that goddess, when we are about to study these works, which place us in such a manner at the summit of ideas, that we have no longer any ladder to re-descend into life. The metaphysical and religious writers, who are eloquent and feeling at the same time (such as we have seen in some examples), are much better adapted to our nature. Far from requiring the suppression of our faculties of feeling, in order to make our faculty of abstraction more precise, they bid us think, feel, and wish, that all the strength of our souls may aid us to penetrate into the depths of heaven; but to cling close to abstraction is such an effort, that it is natural enough for the generality of men to have renounced the attempt, and to have thought it more easy to admit nothing beyond what is visible. The experimental philosophy is complete in itself; it is a whole, sufficiently vulgar, but compact, circumscribed, consequent; and while we adhere to the sort of reasoning which is received in the affairs of the world, we ought to be contented with it; theimmortal and the infinite are only felt through the.jeidium of the soul; tlie soul alone can diffuse an interest over the higher sort of metaphysics. We are very wrong to persuade ourselves that the more abstract a theory is, the more likely it is to guard us against all illusion; for it is exactly by these means that it may lead us into error. We take the connection of ideas for their proof; we arrange our rank and file of chimeras with precision, and we fancy that they are an army. There is nothing but the genius of sentiment that rises above experimental, as well as above speculative philosophy; there is no other genius but that, which can carry conviction leyond the limits of human reason. It appears then to me, that, notwithstanding my entire admiration for the strength of mind and depth of genius in Leibnitz, we should wish, in his writings upon questions of metaphysical theology, more imagination and sensibility, that we might repose from thought by the indulgence of our feelings. Leibnitz almost made a scruple of recurring to it, fearing that he should have the appearance of using seductive arts

1 t56 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. in favor of the truth; he was wrong, for sentiment is truth itself in questions of this nature. The objections which I have allowed myself to make to those works of Leibnitz which aim at the solution of truths insoluble by reasoning, do not at all apply to his writings on the formation of ideas in the human mind; those writings are of a most luminous clearness; they refer to a mystery which man, to a certain degree, can penetrate; for he knows more of himself than of the universe. The opinions of Leibnitz in this respect tend, above all, to our moral perfection, if it be true, as the German philosophers have attempted to prove, that free-will rests upon the doctrine which delivers the soul from external objects, and that virtue cannot exist without the perfect independence of the will. Leibnitz has combated, with admirable dialectic force, the system of Locke, who attributes all our ideas to our sensations. The advocates of this system had vaunted that well-known axiom, that there is nothing in the intellect which has not first been in the senses; and Leibnitz added to it this sublime restriction, except the intellect itself.' From this principle all the new philosophy is derived, which so much influences minds in Germany. This philosophy also is experimental, for it endeavors to learn what is passing within ourselves. It only substitutes the observation of internal feeling for that of our external sensations. The doctrine of Locke gained many partisans in Germany among those who endeavored, like Bonnet at Geneva, and many other philosophers in England, to reconcile this doctrine with the religious sentiments which Locke himself always professed. The genius of Leibnitz foresaw all the consequences of this sort of metaphysics; and that which has built his glory on an everlasting foundation, is his having maintained in Germany the philosophy of moral liberty against that of sensual fatalism. While the rest of Europe adopted those principles which regard the soul as passive, Leibnitz, with unshaken con-' Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectuts ipse.

KANT. 157 stancy, was the defender of the idealistic philosophy, such as his genius had conceived it. It had no connection with the system of Berkeley; nor with the reveries of the Greek skeptics upon the non-existence of matter; but it maintained the moral being in his independence and in his rights. CHAPTER VI. KANT. KANT lived even to a very advanced age, and never quitted K6nigsberg; there, in the midor of northern ice, he passed his whole life in meditation upon the laws of human intelligence. An indefatigable ardor for study enabled him to acquire stores of knowledge without number. Sciences, languages, literature, all were familiar to him; and without seeking for glory which he did not enjoy till a very late period (not having heard the noise of his renown before his old age), he contented himself with the silent pleasure of reflection. In solitude he contemplated his mind with close attention; the examination of his thought'ts~eiYfitiif new'strength to support his virtue; and although he never intermeddled with the ardent passions of men, he knew how to forge arms for those who should be summoned to combat those passions. Except among the Greeks, we have hardly any example of a life so strictly philosophical; and this life itself answers for the sincerity of the writer. To such an unstained sincerity, we must further add an acute and exact understanding, which served for a corrector to his genius, when he suffered it to carry him too far. This is enough, it seems to me, to make us judge at least impartially of the persevering labors of such a man. KANT' first published several works on the natural sciences; I " Immanuel Kant was born April 24, 1724, at K6nigsberg in Prussia Rere, as a student in the university, his youth was devoted to the indae

158 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. and he showed, in this branch of study, so great a sagacity that it was he who first foresaw the existence of the planet Uranus. Herschel himself, after having discovered it, acknowledged that it was Kant who announced the future event. His treatise upon the nature of thle human understanding, entitled Critique of Pure Reason, appeared near thirty years ago and this work was for some time unknown; but when at length the treasures of thought, which it contains, were discovered, it produced such a sensation in Germany, that almost all which has been accomplished since, in literature as well as in philosophy, has flowed from the impulse given by this work. To this treatise upon the human understanding succeeded the Critique of Practical Reason, which related to morals; and the Critique.of Judgment, which had the nature of the beautiful for its object. The same theory serves for a foundation to these three treatises, which embrace the laws of intellect, the principles of virtue, and the contemplation of the beauties of nature and of the arts. I shall endeavor to give a sketch of the principal ideas which.atigable study of natural and moral philosophy, and of the metaphysical sciences. In 1770, he was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics. Nine years afterwards he gave to the world his Kritik der reinen Ver'nunft. In this critical inquiry into the nature of Pure Reason, the attempt was made to define the extent and limits of the capacities of human thought, and the fundamental principles of Kant's philosophical system were first set forth. In order to avail himself of the labors of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, Kant studied the English language. In 1787, he followed up his former publication by Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, a work of great erudition and profound thought. Churchmen would find that this critique, though written ostensibly to combat the error of the Scotch philosopher, taught a greater skepticism than that it denounced; that'though in it he spoke of the Bible, and also of Christianity, in terms indicative of the highest reverence, admitting them to be designed as the medium by which the knowledge of practical truth should be generally diffused, yet the direct tendency of many of the propositions therein laid down is to deprive lhe Scriptures of any more authority than attaches to the Zendavesta or the Koran.'-' He assumed the ultimate judgment on such questions, and on historical truth of any kind, to be metaphysical not historical: the living light within a man, not the dead letter from any past age.' " Of Kant's other works the most important are: Die Kritikc der Urtheilh. traft and Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1798 Hle died in his native place on the 12th of February, 1804." —Ed.

KANT. 159 this doctrine contains; whatever care I may take to explain it clearly, I do not dissemble the necessity there is of incessant attention to comprehend it. A prince, who was learning mathematics, grew impatient of the labor which that study demanded. "It is indispensable," said his instructor, "for your highness to take the pains of studying, in order to learn the science; for there is no royal road in mathematics." The French public, which has so many reasons to fancy itself a prince, will allow me to suggest that there is no royal road in metaphysics; and that, to attain a conception of any theory whatever, we must pass through the intermediate ways which conducted the author himself to the results he exhibits. The materialistic philosophy gave up the human understanding to the empire of external objects, and morals to personal interest; and reduced the beautiful to the agreeable. Kant wished to re-establishlrimitive truths and spontaneous activity in the soul, conscience in morals, and the ideal in the arts. Let us now examine in what manner he has fulfilled these different undertakings. At the time the Critique of Pure Reason made its appearance, there existed only two systems concerning the human understanding among thinking men: the one, that of Locke, attributed all our ideas to our sensations; the other, that of Descartes and Leibnitz, endeavored to demonstrate the spirituality and the activity of the soul, free-will, in short, the whole doctrine of Idealism; but these two philosophers rested their opinions upon proofs purely speculative. I have exposed, in the preceding chapter, the inconveniences which result from these efforts of abstraction, that arrest, if we may use the expression, the very blood in our veins, until our intellectual faculties alone reign within us. The algebraic method, applied to objects that we cannot embrace by mere reasoning, leaves no durable trace in the mind. While we are in the act of perusing these writings upon high philosophical conceptions, we believe that we comprehend them; we think that we beieve them; but the arguments which have appeared mos 3onvincing, very soon escape from the memory.

160 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. If man, wearied with these efforts, confines himself to the knowledge which he gains by his senses, all will be melancholy indeed for his soul. Will he have any idea of immortality, w-hen the forerunners of destruction are engraven so deeply on the countenance of mortals, and living nature falls incessantly into dust? When all the senses talk of death, what feeble hope can we entertain of a resurrection? If man only con sulted his sensations, what idea would he form of the supreme goodness? So many afflictions dispute the mastery over our life; so many hideous objects disfigure nature, that the unfortunate created being curses his existence a thousand times before the last convulsion snatches it away. Let man, on the contrary, reject the testimony of his senses, how will he guide himself on the earth? and yet, if he trusts to them alone, what enthusiasm, what morals, what religion will be able to resist the repeated assaults to which pain and pleasure alternately expose him? Reflection wandered over this vast region of uncertainty, when Kant endeavored to trace the limits of the two empires, that of the senses and that of the soul; of external and of intellectual nature. The strength of thinking, and the wisdom with which he marked these limits, were perhaps never exhibited before: he did not lose himself among the new systems concerning the creation of the universe; he recognized the bounds which the eternal mysteries set to the human understanding, and (what will be new perhaps to those who have only heard Kant spoken of) there is no philosopher more adverse, in numerous respects, to metaphysics; he made himself so deeply learned in this science, only to employ against it the means it afforded him to demonstrate its own insufficiency. We might say of him, that, like a new Curtius, he threw himself into the gulf of abstraction, in order to fill it up. Locke had victoriously combated the doctrine of innate ideas in man, because he has always represented ideas as making a part of our experimental knowledge. The examination of pure reason, that is to say of the primitive faculties of which the intellect is composed, did not fix his attention

KANT. 161 Leibnitz, as we have said before, pronounced this sublime axiom: "There is nothing in the intellect which does not come by the senses, except the intellect itself." Kant has acknowledged, as well as Locke, that there are no innate ideas; but he has endeavored to enter into the sense of the axiom of Leibnitz, by examining what are the laws and the sentiments which constitute the essence of the human soul, independently of all experience. The Critique of Pure Reason strives to show in what these laws consist, and what are the objects upon which they can be exercised. Skepticism, to which materialism almost always leads, was carried so far, that Hume finished by overturning the foundation of all reason, in his search after arguments against the axiom, " that there is no effect without a cause." And such is the unsteadiness of human nature when we do not place the principle of conviction in the centre of the soul, that incredulity, which begins by attacking the existence of the moral world, at last gets rid of the material world also, which it first used as an instrument to destroy the other. Kant wished to know whether absolute certainty was attainable by the human understanding; and he only found it in our necessary notions, that is, in all the laws of our understanding, which are of such a nature that we cannot conceive any thing otherwise than as those laws represent it. In the first class of the imperative forIns of our understanding are space and time. Kant demonstrates that all our perceptions are subjected to these two forms; he concludes, from hence, that they exist in us, and not in objects; and that in this respect, it is our understanding which gives laws to external nature, instead of receiving them from it. Geometry, which measures space, and arithmetic, which divides time, are sciences of perfect demonstration, because they rest upon the necessary notions of our mind. Truths acquired by experience never carry absolute certain-'y with them; when we say:" The sun rises every day," "all alen are mortal," etc., the imagination could figure an exception to these truths, which experience alone makes us consider

1 62 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. indubitable; but Imagination herself cannot suppose ally thing out of the sphere of space and time; and it is impossible to regard as the result of custom (that is, of the constant repetition of the same phenomena) those forms of our thoughts which we impose upon things; sensations may be doubtful; but the.prism through which we receive them is immovable. To this primitive intuition of space and time, we must add, or rather give, as a foundation, the principles of reasoning, without which we cannot comprehend any thing, and which are the laws of our intellect: the connection of causes and effects, unity, plurality, totality, possibility, reality, necessity, etc.' Kant considers them all as equally necessary notions; and he only raises to the rank of real sciences such as are immediately founded upon these notions, because it is in them alone that certainty can exist. The forms of reasoning have no result, except when they are applied to our judgment of external objects, and in this application they are liable to error; but they are not the less necessary in themselves; that is, we cannot depart from them in any of our thoughts; it is impossible for us to imagine any thing out of the sphere of the relations of causes and effects, of possibility, quantity, etc.; and these notions are as inherent in our conception as space and time. We perceive nothing except through the medium of the immovable laws of our manner of reasoning; therefore these laws are in ourselves, and not out of us. In the German philosophy, those ideas are called subjective which grow out of the nature of our understanding and its faculties; and all those ideas objective,2 which are excited by I Kant gives tile name of Category to the different necessary notions of the understanding, of which he gives a list. 2 " The exact distinction of subject and object was first made by the schoolmen; and to the schoolmen the vulgar languages are principally indebted for what precision and analytic subtilty they possess. These correlative terms correspond to the first and most important distinction in philosophy; they embody the original antithesis in consciousness of self and not-self,-a distinction which, in fact, involves the whole science of mind; for psychology is nothing more than a determination of the sub. fictive and the objective, in themselves, and in their reciprocal relations

KANT. 163 sensations. Whatever may be the denomination which we adopt in this respect, it appears to me that the examination of our intellect agrees with the prevailing thought of Kant; namely, the distinction he establishes between the forms of our understanding and the objects which we know according to those forms; and whether he adheres to abstract conceptions, or whether he appeals, in religion and morals, to sentiments which he also considers as independent of experience, nothing is more luminous than the line of demarcation which he traces between what comes to us by sensation, and what belongs to the spontaneous action of our souls. Some expressions in the doctrine of Kant having been ill interpreted, it has been pretended that he believed in a pr';ori cognitions, that is, those engraved upon the mind before we have discovered them. Other German philosophers, more allied to the system of Plato, have, in effect, thought that the type of the world was in the human understanding, and that man Thus significant of the primary and most extensive analysis in philosophy, these terms, in their substantive and adjective forms, passed from the schools into the scientific language of Telesius, Campanella, Berigardus, Gassendi, Descartes, Spinosa, Leibnitz, Wolf, etc. Deprived of these terms, the Critical philosophy, indeed the whole philosophy of Germany, would be a blank. In this country, though familiarly employed in scientific language, even subsequently to the time of Locke, the adjective forms seem at length to have dropped out of the English tongue. That these words waxed obsolete was perhaps caused by the ambiguity which had gradually crept into the signification of the substantives. Object, besides its proper signification, became to be abusively applied to denote motive, end, final cause (a meaning not recognized by Johnson). This innovation was probably borrowed from the French, in whose language the word had been similarly corrupted after the commencement of the last century (Dict. de Trevoux, voce Objet). Subject in English, as sajet in French, had been Rlso perverted into a synonym for object, taken in its proper meaning, and had thus returned to the original ambiguity of the corresponding.erm in Greek. It is probable that the logical application of the word'subject of attribution or predication) facilitated or occasioned this confilion. In using the terms, therefore, we think that an explanation, but n: apology, is required. The distinction is of paramount importance, and of'nfinite application, not only in philosophy proper, but in grammar, rhet3ric, criticism, ethics, politics, jurisprudence, theology." —(Sir Winm. Hamlton, Discussions on Philosophy, etc., p. 5.)-Ed.

164 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. could not conceive the universe if he had not in himself the innate image of it; but this doctrine is not touched upon by Kant: he reduces the intellectual sciences to three-logic, metaphysics, and mathematics. Logic teaches nothing by itself; but as it rests upon the laws of our understanding, it is incontestable in its principles, abstractly considered; this science cannot lead to truth, except in its application to ideas and things; its principles are innate, its application is experimental. In metaphysics, Kant denies its existence; because he pretends that reasoning cannot find a place beyond the sphere of experience. Mathematics alone appear to him to depend immediately upon the notion of space and of time, that is, upon the laws of our understanding anterior to experience. He endeavors to prove, that mathematics are not a simple analysis, but a synthetic, positive, creative science, and certain of itself, without the necessity of our recurring to experience to be assured of its truth. We may study in the work of Kant the arguments upon which he supports this way of thinking; but at least it is true, that there is no man more adverse to what is called the philosophy of the dreamers; and that he must rather have had an inclination for a dry and didactic mode of thinking, although the object of his doctrine be to raise the human species from its degradation, under the philosophy of materialism. Far from rejecting experience, Kant considers the business of life as nothing but the action of our innate faculties upon the several sorts of knowledge which come to us from. without. Hie believed that experience would be nothing but a zhaos without the laws of the understanding; but that the laws of the understanding have no other object than the elements afforded it by experience. It follows, that metaphysics themselves can teach us nothing beyond these limits; and that it is to sentiment that we ought to attribute the foreknowledge and the conviction of every thing that transcends the bounds of the visible world. When it is attempted to use reasoning alone for the estab> kishnment of religious truths, it becomes a most pliable instru

KANT. 165 mnent, which can equally attack and defend them; because we cannot, on this occasion, find any point of support in experience. Kant places upon two parallel lines the arguments for and against the liberty of man, the immortality of the soul, the temporary or eternal duration of the world; and it is to sentiment that he appeals to weigh down the balance, for the metaphysical proofs appear to him of equal strength on either side.' Perhaps he was wrong to push the skepticism of reasoning to such an extent; but it was to annihilate this skepticism with more certainty, by keeping certain questions clear from the abstract discussions which gave it birth. It would be unjust to suspect the sincere piety of Kant, because he has maintained the equality of the reasonings for and against the great questions in the transcendental metaphysics. It appears to me, on the contrary, that there is candor in this avowal. So few minds are able to comprehend these reasonings, and those who are able are so disposed to combat each other, that it is rendering a great service to religious faith to banish metaphysics from all questions that relate to the existence of God, to free-will, to the origin of good and evil. Some respectable persons have said that we ought not to neglect any weapon, and that metaphysical arguments also ought to be employed, to persuade those over whom they have power; but these arguments lead to discussion, and discussion to doubt upon every subject. The best eras for the race of man have ever been those when truths of a certain class were uncontested in writing or discourse. The passions might then seduce into culpable acts; but no one called in question the truth of that religion which he disobeyed. Sophisms of every kind, the abuses of a certain philosophy, have destroyed, in different countries and different ages, that noble firmness of belief which was the source of heroic devotion. Then is it not a fine idea for a philosopher to shut, even to the science which he professes, the door of the sanctuary, 1 These opposite arguments on great metaphysical questions are called Antinornies" in Kant's writings.

166 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. and to employ all the power of abstraction to prove that there are regions from which it ought to be banished? Despots and fanatics have endeavored to prevent human reason from examining certain subjects, and Reason has ever burst these unjust fetters. But the limits which she imposes on herself; far from enslaving her, give her a new strength, such strength as always results from the authority of laws which are freely agreed to by those who are subjected to them. A deaf and dumb person, before he had been under the discipline of the Abb6 Sicard, might feel a full conviction of the existence of the'Divinity. Many men are as far removed from those who think deeply, as the deaf and dumb are from other men, and still they are not less capable of experiencing (if the expression may be allowed) within themselves primitive truths, because such truths spring from sentiment. Physicians, in the physical study of man, recognize the principle which animates him, and yet no one knows what life is; and if one set about reasoning, it would be easy to prove to men (as several Greek philosophers have done) that they do not live at all. It is the same with God, with conscience, and with free-will. You must believe, because you feel; all argument will be inferior to this fact. The labors of anatomy cannot be practised on a living body without destroying it; analysis, when attempted to be applied to indivisible truths, destroys them, because its first efforts are directed against their unity. We must divide our souls in two, in order that one half of us may contemplate the other. In whatever way this division takes place, it deprives our being oe all that sublime identity, without which we have not mufficient strength to believe that of which consciousness alone offers us assurance. Let a great number of men be assembled at a theatre or public place, and let some theorem of reasoning, however general, be proposed to them; as many different opinions will immediately be formed as there are individuals assembled. But if any actions, displaying greatness of soul are related, or

K ANT. 167 the accents of generosity heard, the general burst will at once proclaim that you have touched that instinct of the soul which is as lively and as powerful in our being as the instinct which preserves our existence. In referring to sentiment, which does not admit of doubts, the knowledge of transcendent truths, in endeavoring to prove that reasoning avails only when exerted within the sphere of sensations, Kant is very far from considering this faculty of sentiment as an illusion; on the contrary, he assigns to it the first rank in human nature; he makes conscience the innate principle of our moral existence: and the feeling of right and wrong is, according to his ideas, the primitive law of the heart, as space and time are of the understanding. Has not man been led by reasoning to deny the existence of free-will? And yet he is so convinced of it that he surprises himself in the act of feeling esteem or dislike even for the animals that surround him; so forcibly does he believe in the spontaneous choice of good and evil in all beings. The assurance of our freedom is only the feeling we have uf it; and on this liberty, as the corner-stone, is raised the doctrine of duty; for if man is free, he ought to create to himself motives powerful enough to combat against the operation of exterior objects, and to set his will free from the narrow trammels of selfishness. Duty is at once the proof and the security of the metaphysical independence of man. In the following chapters we shall examine Kant's arguments against morality as founded upon self-interest, and the sublime theory which he substitutes in the place of this hypo. critical sophism, or perverse doctrine. Different opinions may be entertained as to Kant's first work, the Critique of Pure Reason. Having himself acknowledged reasoning to be insufficient and contradictory, he ought to have anticipated that it would be made use of against him; but it appears to me impossible not to read with respect his Critique of Practical Reason, and the different works that he has written on morals. Not only are Kant's principles of morals austere and pure, is might be expected from the inflexibility of a philosopher,

168 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. but he always connects the evidence of the heart with that of the understanding, and is singularly happy in making his abstract theory as to the nature of the understanding serve as a support to sentiments at once the most simple and the most powerful. A conscience acquired by sensations may be stifled by them; and the dignity of duty is degraded in being made to depend on exterior objects. Kant, therefore, is incessantly laboring to show that a deep sense of this dignity is the necessary condition of our moral being, the law by which it exists. The empire of sensations, and the bad actions to the commission of which they lead, can no more destroy in us the notion of good or of evil, than the idea of space and time can be changed by an erroneous application of it. There is always, in whatever situation we may be placed, a power of reaction against circumstances, which springs from the bottom of the soul; and we cannot but feel that neither the laws of. the understanding, moral liberty, nor conscience, are the result of experience. In his treatise on the sublime and beautiful, entitled Critique of the Judgment, Kant applies to the pleasures of the ilnagination the system from which he has developed such fruitful deductions in the sphere of intelligence and of sentiment; or rather it is the same soul which he examines, and which shows itself in the sciences, in ethics, and in the fine arts. Kant maintains that there are in poetry, and in the arts which are capable, as poetry is, of painting sentiments by images, two kinds of beauty: one which may be referred to time and to this life; the other, to the eternal and the infinite. And so impossible is it to say that the infinite and the eternal are intelligible to our minds, that one is often tcmpted to take even the finite and the transient for a dream; for thought can see no limits to any thing, neither can being have a con ception of non-existence. We cannot search deeply into the exact sciences themselves, without meeting, even there, with the infinite and the eternal; and those things which are the most completely matters of fact, do, under some relations, belong to this infinite and eternal, as much as sentiment and imagination.

KANT. 169 From this application of the feeling of the infinite to the fine arts, arises the ideal, that is, the beautiful, considered, not as the assemblage and imitation of whatever is more worthy in nature, but as the realization of that image which is constantly present to the soul. Materialistic philosophers judge of the beautiful according to the agreeable impression which it causes, and therefore place it in the empire of sensations; spiritualistic philosophers, who ascribe every thing to reason, see in the beautiful what they call the perfect, and find in it some analogy to the useful and the good, which they consider to be the first degrees of perfection. Kant has rejected both these explanations. The beautiful, considered only as an agreeable thing, would be confined to the sphere of sensations, and consequently subject to the difference of tastes: it could never claim that universal acknowledgment, which is the true character of beauty. The beautiful, considered as perfection, would require a sort of judgment, like that on which esteem is founded. The enthusiasm that ought to be inspired by the beautiful, belongs neither to sensations nor to judgment; it is an innate disposition, like the feeling of duty, and the necessary notions of the understanding; and we discover ut when we it because it is the outward image of the ideal, the type of which exists in our intellect. Difference of taseray be applied ti what is agreeablelor our sensations are the source of this kind of pleasure; but all men must admire what is beautiful, whether in art or in nature, because they have in their souls sentiments of celestial origin, which beauty awakens, and of which it excites the enjoyment. Kant passes from the theory of the beautiful to that of the sublime; and this second part of his Critique of the Judgment is even more remarkable than the first: he makes the sublime consist in the mdral liberty of man struggling with his destiny, or with his nature. Unlimited power excites our fear, greatness overwhelms us; yet, by the vigor of the will, we escape from the sensation of physical weakness. The power of destiny, and the immensity of nature, are placed in endless opposition to VOL. II.-8

170 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. the miserable dependence of the creature upon earth; but one spark of the sacred fire in our bosoms triumphs over the universe; since with that one spark we are enabled to resist the impressions which all the powers in the world could make upon us. The first effect of the sublime is to overwhelm a man, ancd the second to exalt him. When we contemplate a storm curling the billows of the sea, and seeming to threaten both earth and heaven, terror at first takes possession of us, although we may be out of the reach of any personal danger; but when the clouds, that have gathered, burst over our heads, when all the fury of nature is displayed, man feels an inward energy, which frees him from every fear, by his will, or by resignation, by the exercise, or by the relinquishment of his moral liberty; and this consciousness of what is within him animates and encourages him. When we hear of a generous action, when we learn that men have borne unheard-of misfo tunes to remain faithful to their opinion even to the smallest shade, at first the description of the miseries they have suffered confounds our thought; but, by degrees, we regain our strength, and the sympathy that we feel excited within ourselves, by greatness of soul, makes us hope that we ourselves could triumph over the miserable sensations of this life, to remain faithful, noble, and proud, even to our latest day. Besides, no one can define, if I may thus speak, that which is at the summit of our existence; we are too much elevated in respect to ourselves, to comprehend ourselves, says St. Augustin. He must be very poor in imagination who thinks himself able to exhaust the contemplation even of the simplest flower; how then could we arrive at the knowledge of all that is comprised in the idea of the sublime? f do not certainly flatter myself that I have been able, in a few pages, to give an account of a system which, for twenty years, has occupied all thinking heads in Germany; but I hope to have said enough to indicate the general spirit of the philosophy of Kant, and to enable me to explain, in the follow

KANT. 17. ing chapters, the influence which it has had upon literature, science, and ethics. In order to reconcile experimental and ideal philosophy, Kant. has not made the one subordinate to the other, but he has given to each of the two, separately, a new degree of force. Germuany was threatened by that cold doctrine which regarded all enthllsiasm as an error, and classed among prejudices those sentirlents whiich form the consolation of our existence. It witas a: great satisfaction for men, at once so philosophical and so poe tical, so capable of study and of exaltation, to see all the fine affections of the soul defended. with the strictness of the mn-oost abstract reasonings. The force of the mind can never Le long in a negative state; that is, it cannot long consist principally in nx hat we do not believe, in what we do not undeistanld, in what we disdain. We must have a philosophy ot' belietf of enthusiasm, a philosophy which confirms by reason what sentimnent reveals to us. rTie adl ersaries of Kant have accused him of having merely rc'eat -1 tl. ai'-uments of the ancient idealists; they have p,'t'tlotudcd that t,.C doctrine of the German philosopher was onyi1 ail ol0t ystent in a new language. This reproach has no f Uandation. Trhere are not only new ideas, but a particular character, in the doctrine of Kant. It savors of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, aithough it was intended to refute the doctrines of that philosophy, because it is natural to man always to catch the spirit of the age in which he lives, even when his intention is to oppose it. The philosophy of Plato is more poetical than that of Kant, the philosophy of Malebranche more religious; but the great merit of the German philosopher has been to raise up moral dignity, by setting all that is fine in the heart on the basis of a theory deduced from the strongest reasoning.' 1 "In the following sublime passage, Kant finely illustrates the opposite influences of material and mental studies, and this by the contrast of the two noblest objects of our contemplation: "' Two things there are, which, the oftener and the more steadfastly

iT2 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. The opposition which it has been endeavored to show between reason and sentiment, necessarily leads reason to selfishness and sentiment to folly; but Kant, who seemed to be called to conclude all the grand intellectual alliances, has made the soul one focus, in which all our faculties are in contact with each other. The polemical part of the works of Kant, that in which he attacks the philosophy of the materialists, would be of itself a masterpiece. That philosophy has struck its roots so deeply into the mind, so much irreligion and selfishness has been the result of it, that those men ought to be regarded as benefactors to their country, who have even combated a system so pernicious, and revived the thoughts of Plato, of Descartes, and we consider, fill the mind with an ever new, an ever rising admiration and reverence,-the Starry Heaven above, the Moral Law within. Of neither am I compelled to seek out the existence, as shrouded in obscurity, or only to surmise the possibility, as beyond the hemisphere of my knowledge. Both I contemplate lying clear before me, and connect both immediately with the consciousness of my being. The one departs from the place I occupy in the outer world of sense; expands, beyond the limits of imagination, that connection of my being with worlds rising above worlds, and systems blending into systems; and protends it also to the illimitable times of their periodic movement-to its commencement and continuance. The other departs from my invisible self, from my personality; and represents me in a world, truly infinite indeed, but whose infinity is to be fathomed only by the intellect, with which also my connection, unlike the fortuitous relation I stand in to the world of seuse, 1 am compelled to recognize, as necessary and universal. In the former, the first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal nature, which, after a brief and incomprehensible endowment with the powers of life, is compelled to refund its constituent matter to the planet-itself an atom in the universe-on which it grew. The aspect of the other, on the contrary, olevates my worth as an intelligence, even to infinitude; and this through my personality, in which the moral law reveals a faculty of life independent of my animal nature, nay, of the whole material world: at least, if it be permitted to infer as much from the regulation of my being, which a conformity with that law exacts; proposing, as it does, my moral worth for the absolute end of my activity, conceding no compromise of its im-?merative to a necessitation of nature, and spurning in its infinity the limits and conditions of my present transitory life.' t —(Sir Wm. Hamilton Discussion8 on Philosophy, etc., p. 801.)-Ed. 1 Cr. d. pr. V. Beschluss. This suggests Prudentius

KANT. 173 of Leibnitz: but the philosophy of the new German school contains a crowd of ideas which are peculiar to it; it is fbunded upon immense scientific knowledge, which has been increasng every day, and upon a singularly abstract and logical mode of reasoning; for, although Kant blames the use of such reasoning, in the examination of truths which are out of the circle of experience, he shows in his writings a power of mind in metaphysics which places him, in this respect, in the first rank of thinkers. It cannot be denied that the style of Kant, in his Crittique of Pure Reason, deserves almost all the reproaches with which his adversaries have treated it. Ile has made use of a phraseology very difficult to understand, and of the most tiresome new creation of words. He lived alone with his own thoughts, and persuaded himself that it was necessary to have new words for new ideas, and yet there are words to express every thing.' 1 "Perhaps among all the metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century, including Hume and Hartley themselves, there is not one that so ill meets the conditions of a mystic as this same Imtmnuel Kant. A quiet, vigilant, clear-sighted man, who had become distinguished to the world in mathematics before he attempted philosophy; who, in his writings generally, on this and other subjects, is perhaps characterized by no quality so much as precisely by the distinctness of his conceptions, and the sequence and iron strictness with which he reasons. To our own minds, in the little that we know of him, he has more than once recalled Father Boscovich in Natural Philosophy; so piercing, yet so sure; so concise, so still, so simple; with such clearness and composure does he mould the complicacy of his subject, and so firm, sharp, and definite are the results he evolves from it. Right or wrong as his hypothesis may be, no one that knows him will suspect that he himself had not seen it, and seen over it; had not meditated it with calnness and deep thought, and studied throughout to expound it with scientific rigor. Neither, as we often hear, is there any superhuman thoulty required to follow him. We venture to assure such of our readers as are in any measure used to metaphysical study, that the Kritik der reiuen, Vernunft is by no means the hardest task they have tried. It is trae, there is an unknown and forbidden terminology to be mastered; but is:ot this the case also with Chemistry and Astronomy, and all other sciences that deserve the name of science? It is true, a careless or unprepared reader will find Kant's writing a riddle; but will a reader of this sort make much of Newton's Principia, or D'Alenmbert's Calculus of Variationst He will make nothing of them; perhaps less than nothing; for if he trust to his own judgment, he will pronounce them madness. Yet if the Philoso

174 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY'. In those objects which are in themselves most clear, Kant is frequently guided by a very obscure system of metaphysics; and it is only in those regions of thought where darkness prevails in general, that he displays the torch of light: like the phy of Mind is any philosophy at all, Physics and Mathematics must be plain subjects compared with it. But these latter are happy, not only in the fixedness and simplicity of their methods, but also in the universal acknowledgment of their claim to that prior and continual intensity of application, without which all progress in any science is impossible; though more than one may be attempted without it; and blamed, because without it thry will yield no result. " The truth is, German Philosophy differs not more widely from ours in the substance of its doctrines, than in its manner of communicating them. The class of disquisitions, named Kamin-Philosophie (Parlor-fire Philosopllhy) in Germany, is there held in little estimation. No right treatise on any thing, it is believed, least of all on the nature of the human mind, can be profitably read, unless the reader himself co-operates: the blessing o: half-sleep in such cases is;denied him; he must be alert, and strain every faculty, or:it profits nothing. Philosophy, with these men, pretends to be a Science, nay, the living principle and soul of all Sciences, and must be treated and studied scientifieally, or not studied and treated at all. Its doctrines should be present with every cultivated writer; its spirit should pervade every piece of composition, how slight or popular soever; but to treat itself popularly would be a degradation and an impossibility. Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine: her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not; whoso would behold her, must climb with long and laborious effort; nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.'" It is the false notion prevalent respecting the objects aimed at, and the purposed manner of attaining them, in German Philosophy, that causes, in great part, this disappointment of our attempts to study it, and the evil report which the disappointed naturally enough bring back with them. Le-t the reader believe us, the Critical Philosophers, whatever they r)ay be, ar: no mystics, and have no fellowship with mystics. What a mystic is, we have said above. But Kant, Fichte, and Schelling are men of cool judgment, and determinate energetic character; men of science and frofound and universal investigation; nowhere does the world, in all its bearings, spiritual or material, theoretic or practical, lie pictured in clearer or:ruer colors, than in such heads as these. We have heard Kant estimated as a spiritual brother of Boehme; as justly might we take Sir Isaac Newton for a spiritual brother of Count Swedenborg, and Laplace's Jfecthanism oJ'he Heavens for a peristyle to the Vision qf the New Jerusalem. That this is no extravagant comparison, we appeal to any man acquainted with any single volumne of Kant's writings. Neither, though Schelling's system liffers still more widely from ours, can we reckon Schelling a mystic. H

KANT. 175 Israelites, who had for their guide a pillar of fite by night, and a pillar of cloud by day. No one in France would give himself the trouble of studying works so bristling with difficulties, as those of Kant; but he is a man evidently of deep insight into individual things; speaks wisely, and reasons with the nicest accuracy, on all matters where we understand his data. Fairer might it be in us to say that we had not yet appreciated his truth, and therefore could not appreciate his error. But above all, the mysticism of Fichte might astonish us. The cold colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men: fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves of Academe I Our reader has seen some words of Fichte's: are these like words of a mystic? We state Fichte's character, as it is known and admitted by men of all parties among the Germans, when we say that so robust an intellect, a soul so calm, so lofty, massive, and immovable, has not mingled in philosophical discussion since the time of Luther. We figure his motionless look, had he heard this charge of mysticism; for the man rises before us, amid contradiction and debate, like a granite mountain amid clouds and wind. Ridicule, of the best that could be commanded, has been already tried against him; but it could not avail. What was the wit of a thousand wits to him? The cry of a thousand choughs assaulting that old cliff of granite: seen from the summit, these, as they winged the midway air, showed scarce so gross as beetles, and their cry was seldom even audible. Fichte's opinions may be true or false; but his character, as a thinker, can be slightly valued only by such as know it ill; and as a man, approved by action and suffering, in his life and in his death, he ranks with a class of men who were common only in better ages than ours. "The Critical Philosophy has been regarded by persons of approved judgment, and nowise directly implicated in the furthering of it. as distinctly the greatest intellectual achievement of the century in which it came to light. August Wilhelm Schlegel has stated in plain terms his belief, that, in respect of its probable influence on the moral culture of Europe, it stands on a line with the Reformation. We mention Schlegel is a man whose opinion has a known value among ourselves. But the worth of Kant's philosophy is not to be gathered from votes alone. The noble system of morality, the purer theology, the lofty views of man's nature derived from it; nay, perhaps, the very discussion of such matters, to which it gave so strong an impetus, have told with remarkable and beneficial influence on the whole spiritual character of Germany. No writer of any importance in that country, be he acquainted or not with the Critical Philosophy, but breathes a spirit of devoutness and elevation more or less Jircctly drawn from it. Such men as Goethe and Schiller cannot exist without effect in any literature or in any century: but if one circumstance more than another has contributed to forward their endeavors, and introJlce that higher tone into the literature of Germany, it has been this phil

i76 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. had to do with patient and persevering readers. This, certainly, was not a reason for his abusing their patience; per haps, however, he would not have been able to search so deeply into the science of the human understanding, if he had attachosophical system; to which, in wisely believing its results, or even in wisely denying them, all that was lofty and pure in the genius of poetry, or the reason of man, so readily allied itself. " That such a system must in the end become known among ourselves, as it is already becoming known in France and Italy, and over all Europe, no one acquainted in ally measure with the character of this matter, and the character of England, will hesitate to predict. Doubtless it will be studied here, and by heads adequate to do it justice: it will be investigated duly and thoroughly, and settled in our minds on the footing which belongs to it, and where thenceforth it must continue. Respecting the degrees of truth and error which will then be found to exist in Kant's system, or in the modifications it has since received, and is still receiving, we desire to be understood as making no estimate, and little qualified to make any. We would have it studied and known, on general grounds; because even the errors of such men are instructive; and because, without a large adimixture of truth, no error can exist under such combinations, and become diffused so widely. To judge of it we pretend not: we are still inquirers in the mere outskirts of the matter; and it is but inquiry that we wish to see promoted. " Meanwhile, as an advance or first step towards this, we may state something of what has most struck ourselves as characterizing Kant's system; as distinguishing it from every other known to us; and chiefly from the Metaphysical philosophy which is taught in Britain, or rather which was taught; for, on looking round, we see not that there is any such Philosophy in existence at the present day. The Kantist, in direct contradiction to Locke and all his followers, both of the French, and English or Scotch school, commences from within, and proceeds outwards; instead of commencing from without, and, with various precautions and hesitations, ende'avoring to proceed inwards. The ultimate aim of all Philosophy must be to interpret appearances,-from the given symbol to ascertain the thing. Now the first step towards this, the aim of what may be called Pripap -or Critical Philosophy, must be to find some indubitable principle; to fix ourselves on some unchangeable basis: to discover what the Germans call the Uqwahr, the Primitive Truth, the necessarily, absolutely, and eternally 2tr.e. This necessarily True, this absolute basis of Truth, Locke silently, and Reid and his followers with more tumult, find in a certain modified:xperience, and evidence of Seuse, in the universal and natural persuasions % f all men. Not so the Germans: they deny that there is here any absolute Truth, or that any Philosophy whatever can be built on such a basis; nay, they go the length of asserting, that such an appeal even to the universal persuasions of mankind, gather them with what precautions you may, amounts to a total abdication of Philosophy, strictly so called, and

KANT. 17 7 md more importance to the choice of the expressions which he made use of in explaining it. The ancient philosophers always divided their doctrines into two distinct parts; one which they reserved forothe initiated, and another which they professed in renders not only its further progress, but its very existence, impossible. What, they would say, have the persuasions, or instinctive beliefs, or whatever they are called, of men, to do in this matter? Is it not the object of Philosophy to enlighten, and rectify, and many times directly contradict these very beliefs? Take, for instance, the voice of all generations of men on the subject of Astronomy. Will there, out of any age or climate, be one dissentient against thefact of the Sun's going round the Earth? Can any evidence be clearer, is there any persuasion more universal, any belief more instinctive? And yet the Sun moves no hairsbreadth; but stands in the centre of his Planets, let us vote as we please. So is it likewise with our evidence for an external independent existence of Matter, and, in general, with our whole argument against Hume; whose reasonings, from the premises admitted both by him and us, the Germans affirm to be rigorously consistent and legitimate, and, on these premises, altogether uncontroverted and incontrovertible. British Philosophy, since the time of Hume, appears to them nothing more than a'laborious and unsuccessful striving to build dike after dike in front of our Churches and Judgment-halls. and so turn back from them the deluge of Skepticism, with which that extraordinary writer overflowed us, and still threatens to destroy whatever we value most.' This is Schlegel's meaning: his words are notbefore us "' The Germans take up the matter differently, and would assail Hume, not in his outworks, but in the centre of his citadel. They deny his first principle, that Sense is the only inlet of Knowledge, that Experience is the primary ground of Belief. Their Pikaitive Truth, however, they seek, not historically and by experiment, in the universal persuasions of men, but by intuition, in the deepest and purest nature of Man. Instead of attempting, which they consider vain, to prove the existence of God, Virtue, an immaterial Soul, by inferences drawn, as the conclusion of all Philosophy, from the world of sense, they find these things written as the beginning of a.1 Philosophy, in obscured but ineffaceable characters, within our inmost being; and themselves fistaffarding any certainty and clear meaning to that very world of sense, by which we endeavor to demonstrate them. Plod is, nay, alone is, for with like emphasis we cannot say that any thing else is. This is the Absolute, the Primitively True, which the philosopher seeks. Endeavoring, by logical argument, to prove the existence of God, a Kantist might say, would be like taking out a candle to look for the sun; nay, gaze steadily into your candle-light, and the sun himself may be invisible. To open the inward eye to the sight of this Primitively True; or, rather, we might call it, to clear off the Obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us, so that we may see it, and believe it not only to he true, but the foundation and essence of all other truth, may, in such 8S

17S.MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. public. Kant's manner of writing is quite different, when his theory, or the application of it, is the subject. In his metaphysical treatises, he makes use of words as arithmetical figures, and gives them whatever value he pleases, language as we are here using, be said to be the problem of Critical Philosophy. " In this point of view, Kant's system may be thought to have a remote affinity to those of Malebranche and Descartes. But if they in some nleasure agree as to their aim, there is the widest difference as to the means. We state what to ourselves has long appeared the grand characteristic of Kant's Philosophy, when we mention his distinction, seldom perhaps expressed so broadly, but uniformly implied, between Understanding and Reason ( Verstanld and Vernunft). To most of our readers this may seem a distinction without a difference: nevertheless, to the Kantists it is by no means such. They believe that both Understanding and Reason are organs, or rather, we should say, modes of operation, by which the mind discovers truth; but they think that their manner of proceeding is essentially different: that their provinces are separable and distinguishable, nay, that it is of the last importance to separate and distinguish them. Reason, the Kantists say, is of a higher nature than Understanding; it works by more subtle methods, on higher objects, and requires a far finer culture for its development, indeed in many men it is never developed at all; but its results are no less certain, nay, rather, they are much more so; for Reason discerns Truth itself, the absolutely and primitively True; while Understanding discerns only relationws, and cannot decide without if. The proper province of Understanding is all, strictly speaking, real, practical, and material knowledge, Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy, the adaptation o.f.Lu -tantoada in the whole business of life. In this province it is the strength and universal implement of the mind: an indispensable servant, without which, indeed, existence itself would be impossible. Let it not step beyond this province, however, not usurp the province of Reason, which it is appointed to obey, and cannot rule over without ruin to the whole spiritual man. Should Understanding attempt to prove the existence of God, it ends, if thorough-going and consistent with itself; in Atheism, or a faint possible Theism, which scarcely differs from this: should it speculate of Virtue, it ends in Utility, making Prudence and a sufficiently cunning love of Self the highest good. Consult Understanding about the Beauty of Poetry, and it asks, where is this Beauty? or discovers it at length in rhythms and fitnesses, and male and female rhymes. Witness also its everlasting paradoxes on Necessity and the Freedom of the Will; its ominous silence on the end and meaning of man; and the enigma which, under such inspection, the whole purport of existence becomes.'" Nevertheless, say the Kantists, there is a truth in these things. Virtue is Virtue, and not prudence; not less surely than the angle in a semicircle is a right angle, and no trapezium; Shrkspeare is a Poet, and Boileau is.one, think of it as you may: neither is it more certain that I myself exist

KSNT. 179 without troubling himself with that which they have derived from custom. This appears to me a great error; for the attention of the reader is exhausted in efforts to understand the language, before he arrives at the ideas, and what is known never serves as a s'tep to what is unknown. We must nevertheless give Kant the justice he deserves, even as a writer, when he lays aside his scientific language. In speaking of the arts, and still more of ethics, his style is almost always perfectly clear, energetic, and simple. IHow admirable does his doctrine then appear! How well does he express the sentiment of the beautiful and the love of duty! With what force does he separate them both fiom all calculations of interest or of utility! How he ennobles actions by their source, and not by their success! In a word, what moral grandeur does he not give to man, whether he examines him in himself, or in his external relations; man, that exile of heaven, that prisoner upon earth, so great as an exile, so miserable as a captive! We might extract from the writings of Kant a multitude of brilliant ideas on all subjects; perhaps, indeed, it is to this doctrine alone, that, at the present day, we must look for conceptions at once ingenious and new; for the notions of the materialists no longer offer any thing interesting or original. than that God exists, infinite, eternal, invisible, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. To discern these truths is the province of Reason, which therefore is to be cultivated as the highest faculty in man. Not by logic and argumeut does it work; yet surely and clearly may it be taught to work: and its domain lies in that higher region whither logic and argument cannot reach; in that holier region, where Poetry, and Virtue, and Divinity abide, in whose presence Understanding wavers and recoils, dazzled into utter darkness by that' sea of light,' at once the fountain and the termination of all true knowledge. " Will the Kantists forgive us for the loose and popular manner in which we must here speak of these things, to bring them in any measure before the eyes of our readers? It may illustrate this distinction still farther, if we say, that, in the opinion of a Kantist, the French are of all European nations the most gifted with Understanding, and the most destitute of Reason; that David Hume had no forecast of this latter, and that Shaks-,eare and Luther dwelt perennially in its purest sphere."-( Carlyle's Es. lays, pp. 31-34.)-Ed.

180 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANT. Smartness of wit against what is serious, noble, and divine, is worn out; and in future it will be impossible to restore to the human race any of the qualities of youth, but by returning tc religion by philosophy, and to sentiment by reason. CHAPTER VII. OF THE MOST CELEBRATED PHILOSOPHERS BEFORE AND AFTER KANT. THE philosophic spirit, from its nature, cannot be generally diffused in any country. In Germany, however, there is such a tendency towards habits of reflection, that the German nation may be considered, by distinction, as the metaphysical nation. It possesses so many men capable of understanding the most abstract questions, that even the public are found to take an interest in the arguments employed in discussions of this kind. Every man of talent has his own way of thinking on philosophical questions. Writers of the second and third rank, in Germany, are sufficiently deep to be of the first rank in other countries. Those who are rivals, have the same hatred towards one another there as elsewhere; but no one would dare to enter the lists, without having evinced, by serious study, a real love for the science with which he is occupied. It is not enough ardently to desire success; it must be deserved, before the candidate can be even admitted to compete for it. The germans, however indulgent they may be to defects of form in a work, are unmerciful with respect to its real value; and when they perceive any thing superficial in the mind, the feeling, or the knowledge of a writer, they try to borrow the very pleasantry of the French, to turn what is frivolous into ridicule. It is my intention to give, in this chapter, a hasty glimpse of the principal opinions of celebrated philosophers, before and since the time of Kant; the course which his successors have

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 181 taken cannot well be judged of, without turning back to see what was the state of opinions at the time when the Kantian doctrine first prevailed in Germany: it was opposed at the same time to the system of Locke, as tending to materialism, and to the school of Leibnitz, as having reduced every thing to abstraction. The ideas of Leibnitz' were lofty; but his disciples, Wolt I" Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was born in 1646, at Leipsic, where his father was professor. Having chosen the law as his profession, he entered the university in 1661, and in 1663 he defended for his degree of doctor in philosophy his dissertation de principio individui, a theme well characteristic of the direction of his later philosophizing. He afterwards went to Jena, and subsequently to Altdorf, where he became doctor of laws. At Altdorf he was offered a professorship of jurisprudence, which he refused. The rest of his life was unsettled and desultory, spent for the most part in courts, where, as a versatile courtier, he was employed in the most varied duties of diplomacy. In the year 1672 he went to Paris, in order to induce Louis XIV to undertake the conquest of Egypt. He subsequently visited London, whence he was afterwards called to Hanover, as councillor of the Duke of Brunswick. He received later a post as librarian at Wolfenbiittel, between which place and Hanover he spent the most of his subsequent life, though interrupted with numerous journeys to Vienna, Berlin, etc. He was intimately associated with the Prussian Electress, Maria Charlotte, a highly talented woman, who surrounded herself with a circle of the most distinguished scholars of the time, and for whom Leibnitz wrote, at her own request, his Theodic'e. In 1701, after Prussia had become a kingdom, an academy was established at Berlin, through his efforts, and he became its first president. Similar, but fruitless attempts were made by him to establish academies in Dresden and Vienna. In 1711 the title of imperial court councillor, and a baronage, was bestowed upon him by the Emperor Charles VI. Soon after, he betook himself to Vienna, where he remained a considerable period, and wrote his Monadology, at the solicitation of Prince Eugene. He died in 1716. Next to Aristotle, Leibnitz was the most highly gifted scholar that had ever lived; with the richest and most extensive learning, he united the highest and most penetrating powers of mind. Germany has reason to be proud of him, since, after Jacob Bcehme, he is the first philosopher of any note among the Germans. With him philosophy found a home in Germany. It is to be regretted that the great variety of his efforts and literary undertakings, together with his roving manner of life, prevented him from giving any connected exhibition of his philosophy. His views are for the most part developed only in brief and occasional writings and letters, composed frejluently in the French language. It is hence not easy to state his philoso. Dhy in its internal connection, though none of his views are isolated, but 11 stand strictly connected with each other."-(Schwegler, History of Phi losophy, translated by Seelye, pp. 312, 313.)-Ed.

182 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. at their head, encumbered them with logical and metaphysical forms. Leibnitz had said, that the notions which come by the senses are confused, and that those only which belong to the immediate perceptions of the mind are clear: without doubt his intention was to show by this that invisible truths are more certain and more in harmony with our moral being than all that we learn by the evidence of the senses. Wolf' and his disciples have drawn this consequence from it,-that every "' The philosophy of Leibnitz was taken up and subjected to a further revision by Christian Wolf. He was born in Breslau, in 1679. He was chosen professor at Halle, where he became obnoxious to the charge of teaching a doctrine at variance with the Scriptures, and drew upon himself such a violent opposition from the theologians of the university, that a cabinet order was issued for his dismissal on the 8th of November, 1723, and he was enjoined to leave Prussia within forty-eight hours, on pain of being hung. He then became professor in Marburg, but was afterwards recalled to Prussia by Frederic II, immediately upon his accession to the throne. He was subsequently made baron, and died 1754. In his chiet thoughts he followed Leibnitz, a connection which he himself admitted, though lie protested against the identification of his philosophy with that of Leibnitz, and objected to the name, Philosophia Leibnitio- Wolfiana, which was taken by his disciple Bilfinger. The historical merit of Wolf is threefold. First, and most important, he laid claim again to the whole domain of knowledge in the name of philosophy, and sought again to build up a systematic framework, and make an encyclopedia of philosophy in the highest sense of the word. Though he did not himself furnish much new material for this purpose, yet he carefully elaborated and arranged that which he found at hand. Secondly, he made again the philosophical method as such, an object of attention. His own method is, indeed, an external one as to its content, namely, the mathematical or the mathematico-syllogistical, recommended by Leibnitz; and by the application of this, his whole philosophizing sinks to a level formalism. (For instance, in his principles of architecture, the eighth proposition is-' a window must be wide enough for two persons to recline together collveniently,'-a proposition which is thus proved:'we are more frequently accustomed to recline and look out at a window in company with another person than alone, and hence, since the builder of the house should satisfy the owner in every respect (~ 1), he must make a window wide enough for two persons conveniently to recline within it at the same time.') Still this'ormalism is not without its advantage, for it subjects the philosophical montent to a logical treatment. Thirdly, Wolf has taught philosophy to speak German, an art which it has not since forgotten. Next to Leibnitz he is entitled to the merit of have made the German language forever the organ of philosophy." —(Schwegler, History of Philosophy, translated by Seelye, pp. 222, 223.)-Ed.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 183 thing, about which our mind can be employed, must be reduced to abstract ideas. Kant carried interest and warmth into this lifeless idealism; he assigned to experience, as well as to the innate faculties, its just proportion; and the art with which he applied his theory to every thing that is interesting to mankind, to ethics, to poetry, and to the fine arts, extended its influence. Three leading men, Lessing, Hemsterhuis, and Jacobi, preceded Kant in the career of philosophy. They had no school, because they founded no system; but they began the attack against the doctrine of the materialists. Of these three, Lessing is the one whose opinions on this point are the least decided; however, he had too enlarged a mind to be confined within the narrow circle which is so easily drawn, when we renounce the highest truths. Lessing's all-powerful polemics awoke doubt upon the most important questions, and led to new inquiries of avery kind. Lessing himself cannot be considered either as a materialist or as an idealist; but the necessity of examination and study fbr the acquisition of knowledge, was the main-spring of his existence. "If the Almighty," said he, " held truth in one hand, and search after truth in the other, it is the latter I should ask of him in preference." Lessing was not orthodox in religion. Christianity, in him, was not a necessary thing, like sentiment; and yet he was capable of admiring it philosophically. He understood its relations with the human heart, and he always considers opinions from a universal point of view. Nothing intolerant, nothing exclusive, is to be found in his writings. When we take our stand, in the centre of ideas, we never fail to have sincerity, depth, and extent of mind. Whatever is unjust, vain, and narrow, is derived from the desire of referring every thing to certain partial views, which we have taken and appropriated to ourselves, and which we make the objects of our self-love. Lessing expresses in a pointed and positive style, opinions 11ll of warmth. Hemsterhuis, a Dutch philosopher, was the filt,ho, in the middle of the eighteenth century, showed, in uis writings, the greater part of the liberal ideas, upon which

184 MADAME DE STAEL S GEI]RMANY. the new German school is founded. His works are also very remarkable, for the contrast which there is between the character of his style, and the thoughts which it conveys. Lessing is an enthusiast, with an ironical manner; Hemsterhuis, an enthusiast, with the language of a mathematician. Writers who devote the most abstract metaphysics to the defence of the most exalted systems, and who conceal the liveliness of imagination under the austerity of logic, are a phenomenon which is scarcely to be found, except among the German nations. Men, who are always upon their guard against imagination, when they have it not are more ready to trust those writers who banish talent and sensibility from philosophical discussions, as if it were not, at least, as easy to be absurd, upon such subjects, with syllogism as with eloquence. For a syllogism, which always takes for its basis that such a thing is or is not, reduces the immense crowd of our impressions to a simple alternative in every case; while eloquence embraces them all together. Nevertheless, although Hemsterhuis has too frequently expressed philosophical truths in an algebraic manner, there is a moral sentiment, a-pure love of the beautiful, in his writings, which cannot but be admired; he was one of the first to feel the union which exists between idealism, or (as I should rather say) the free-will of man, and the stoical ethics; and it is in this respect, above all, that the new doctrine of the Germans is of great importance. Even before the writings of Kant had appeared, Jacobi had attacked the philosophy of sensation, and still more victoriously the system of morality founded upon interest. Ile did not confine himself strictly in his philosophy to abstract forms of reasoning. His analysis of the human soul is full of eloquence and of charms. In the following chapters, I shall examine the finest part of his works, that which relates to ethics; but, as a philosopher, he deserves separate honor. Better instructed than any one else in the history of ancient and modern philosophy, he devoted his studies to the support of the most simple truths. The first among the philosophers of his day

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 185 he made religious feeling the foundation of our whole intellectual nature; and, it may be said, that he has only learnt the language of metaphysicians and the learned, to do homage, in it, to virtue and the Deity. Jacobi' has shown himself the opposer of the philosophy of Kant, but he does not attack it as if he was himself the partisan of the philosophy of sensation.2 On the contrary, his objection to Kant is, that he does not rely sufficiently upon the support of religion, considered as the only possible philosophy in those truths which are beyond the reach of experience. The doctrine of Kant has met with many other opponents in Germany: but it has not been attacked by those who have not understood it, or by those who opposed the opinions of Locke and Condillac, as a complete answer to it. Leibnitz still retained too great an ascendency over the minds of his countrymen, for them not to pay respect to any opinion which was analogous to his. A long list of writers have, for ten years, been incessantly engaged in writing commentaries on the works of Kant. But at the present day, the German phi-' "Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was born at Diisseldorf in 1743. His father destined him for a merchant. After he had studied in Geneva and becomne interested in philosophy, he entered his father's mercantile establishment, but afterwards abandoned this business, having been made chancellor of the exchequer and customs commissioner for Cleves and Berg, and also privy counsellor at Diisseldorf. In this city, or at his neighboring estate of Pempelfort, he spent a great part of his life devoted to philosophy and his friends. In the year 1804 he was called to the newly-formed Academy of Sciences in Munich. In 1807 he was chosen president of this institution, a post which he filled till his death in 1819. Jacobi had a rich intellect and an amiable character. Besides beipg a philosopher, he was also a poet and citizen of the world; and hence we find in his philosophizing an absence of strict logical arrangement and precise expression of thought. His writings are no systematic whole, but are occasional treatises written' rhapsodically and in grasshopper gait,' for the most part in the form of letters, dialogues, and romances.'It was never my purpose,' he says himself,'to set up a system for the schools. My writings have sprung from ray innermost life, and were the result of that which had taken place within me. In a certain sense I did not make them voluntarily, but they were drawn out of me by a higher power irresistible to myself.' "(Schwegler, Hist. of Philos., translated by Seelye, p. 271.)-Ed. 2 This philosophy has, in Germany, generally received the name of Em )irical Philoeaphy.

186 MADAME DE STAEL' GERMANY. losophers, although agreeing with Kant as to the spontaneous activity of thought, have adopted each a system of his own on this point. In fact, who has not endeavored, according to his abilities, to understand himself? But, because man has given an innumerable variety of explanations of his nature, does it therefore follow that such a philosophical examination is useless? Certainly not. This variety itself is a proof of the in. terest which such an examination ought to inspire. In our days, people would be glad to have done with the moral nature, and would readily pay its reckoning to hear no more of it. Some say, the language was fixed on such a day of such a month, and that, from this moment, the introduction of a new word would be a barbarism. Others affirm, that the rules of the drama were definitely settled in such a year, and that a genius who would now make any change in them, is wrong in not having been born before this year without appeal, in which every literary discussion, past, present, and future, was ended. At last, it has been decided in metaphysics above all, that since the days of Condillac it has been impossible to take a single step more, without erring. It is allowed that the physical sciences are making progress, because it'annot be denied; but, in the career of philosophy and literature, the human mind is to be obliged to incessantly run the ring of vanity around the same circle. To remain attached to this experimental philosophy which offers a species of evidence, false in principle, although specious in form, is by no means to simplify the system of the universe. By considering every thing as not existing which is beyond the reach of our sensations, it is easy to give light enough to a system, the limits of which we ourselves prescribe; it is a work which depends upon the doer of it. But does every thing beyond these limits exist the less, because it is counted as nothing? The imperfect truth of speculative philosophy is ever much nearer to the essence of things, than that appar. ent lucidity which belongs to the art of shunning difficulties )f a certain order. When one reads in the philosophical works of the last century these phrases so frequently repeated,

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 187 There is nothing true but that, Every thing else is chimerical, it puts one in mind of the well-known story of a French actor, who, before he would fight with a man much fatter than himself, proposed to chalk out on his adversary's body a line, the hits on the outside of which should go for nothing. Yet there was the same nature without that line as within it, and equally capable of receiving a mortal wound. In the same manner, those who place the Pillars of Hercules on the bound ary of their horizon, cannot prevent the existence of a nature beyond their own, in which there exists a higher degree of life, than in the sphere of matter to which they would confine us. The two most celebrated philosophers who have succeeded Kant, are Fichte and Schelling. They too pretended to sim. plify his system; but it was by putting in its place a philosophy still more transcendental than his, that they hoped to accomplish it. Kant had, with a firm hand, separated the two empires of the soul and of the senses. This philosophical dualism was fatiguing to minds which love to repose in absolute ideas. From the days of the Greeks to our own, this axiom has often been repeated, that All is one, and the efforts of philosophers have always been directed to find in one single principle, either in the soul or in nature, an explanation of the world. I shall, nevertheless, venture to say, that it appears to me to be one of the titles which Kant's philosophy has to the confidence ot enlightened men, that it affirms, what we feel to be the case, that there exists both a soul and an external nature, and that they act mutually one upon the other by such or such laws. I know not why a greater degree of philosophical elevation is to be found in the idea of one single principle, whether mate. rial or intellectual; there being one, or two, does not render the universe more easy of comprehension, and our feeling agrees better with those systems that acknowledge a distinction between physics and ethics.l 1 " The Kantian philosophy soon gained in Germany an almost undisut d rule. The imposing boldness of its standpoint, the novelty of itb

188 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Fichte and Schelling have divided between them the empire which Kant acknowledged to be a divided one, and each has chosen that his own half should be the whole. Both have gone out of the sphere of ourselves, and have been desirous of results, the applicability of its principles, the moral severity of its view of the world, and above all, the spirit of freedom and moral autonomy which appeared in it, and which was so directl3 counter to the efforts of that age, gained for it an assent as enthusiastic as it was extended. It aroused among all cultivated classes a wider interest and participation in philosophic pursuits, than had ever appeared in an equal degree among any people. In a short time it had drawn to itself a very numerous school: there were soon few German universities in which it had not had its talented representatives, while in every department of science and literature, especially in theology (it is the parent of theological rationalism), and in natural rights, as also in belles-lettres (Schiller), it began to exert its influence. Yet most of the writers who appeared in the Kantian school, confined themselves to an exposition or popular application of the doctrine as Kant had given it, and even the most talented and independent among the defenders and imnprovers of the critical philosophy (e. g., Reinhold, 1758-1823; Bardili, 1761-1808; Schulze, Beck, Fries, Krug, Bouterweck), only attempted to give a firmer basis to the Kantian philosophy as they had received it, to obviate some of its wants and deficiences, and to carry out the standpoint of transcendental idealism more purely and consistently. Among those who carried out the Kantian philosophy, only two men, Fichte and Herbart, can be named, who made by their actual advance an epoch in philosophy; and among its opposers (e. g., Hamann, Herder), only one, Jacobi, is of philosophic importance. These three philosophers are hence the first objects for us to consider. In order to a more accurate development of their principles, we preface a brief and general characteristic of their relation to the Kantian philosophy. "1. Dogmatism has been critically annihilated by Kant; his Critick of Pure Reason had for its result the theoretical indemonstrableness of the three ideas of the reason, God, freedom, and immortality. True, these ideas which, from the standpoint of theoretical knowledge, had been thrust out, Kant had introduced again as postulates of the practical reason; but as postulates, as only practical premises, they possess no theoretic certainty, and remain exposed to doubt. In order to do away with this uncertainty, and this despairing of knowledge which had seemed to be the end of the Kantian Philosophy, Jacobi, a younger contemporary of Kant, placed himself upon the standpoint of the faith philosophy in opposition to the standpoint of criticism. Though these highest ideas of the reason, the eternal and the divine, cannot be reached and proved by means of demonstration, yet it is the very essence of the divine that it is indemonstrable and unattainable for the understanding. In order to be certain of the highest, of that which lies beyond the understanding, there is only one or gan, viz., feeling. In feeling, therefore, in immediate knowledge, in faith

188 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Fichte and Slchelling have divided between them the empire which Kant acknowledged to be a divided one, and each has chosen that his own half should be the whole. Both have gone out of the sphere of ourselves, and have been desirous of results, the applicability of its principles, the moral severity of its view of the world, and above all, the spirit of freedom and moral autonomy which appeared in it, and which was so directl counter to the efforts of that age, gained for it an assent as enthusiastic as it was extended. It aroused among all cultivated classes a wider interest and participation in phil3sophic pursuits, than had ever appeared in an equal degree among any people. In a short time it had drawn to itself a very numerous school: there were soon few German universities in which it had not had its talented representatives, while in every department of science and literature, especially in theology (it is the parent of theological rationalism), and in natural rights, as also in belles-lettres (Schiller), it began to exert its influence. Yet most of the writers who appeared in the Kantian school, confined themselves to an exposition or popular application of the doctrine as Kant had given it, and even the most talented and independent among the defenders and inprovers of the critical philosophy (e. g., Reinhold, 1758-1823; Bardili, 1761-1808; Schulze, Beck, Fries, Krug, Bouterweck), only attempted to give a firmer basis to the Kantian philosophy as they had received it, to obviate some of its wants and deficiences, and to carry out the standpoint of transcendental idealism more purely and consistently. Among those who carried out the Kantian philosophy, only two men, Fichte and Herbart, can be named, who made by their actual advance an epoch in philosophy; and among its opposers (e. g., Hamann, Herder), only one, Jacobi, is of philosophic importance. These three philosophers are hence the first objects for us to consider. In order to a more accurate development of their principles, we preface a brief and general characteristic of their relation to the Kantian philosophy. "1. Dogmatism has been critically annihilated hvy Kant; his Critick of Pure Reason had for its result the theoretical indemonstrableness of the three ideas of the reason, God, freedom, and immortality. True, these ideas which, from the standpoint of theoretical knowledge, had been thrust out, Kant had introduced again as postulates of the practical reason; but as postulates, as only practical premises, they possess no theoretic certainty, and remain exposed to doubt. In order to do away with this uncertainty, and this despairing of knowledge which had seemed to be the end of the Kantian Philosophy, Jacobi, a younger contemporary of Kant, placed himself upon the standpoint of the faith philosophy in opposition to the standpoint of criticism. Though these highest ideas of the reason, the eternal and the divine, cannot be reached and proved by means of demonstration, yet it is the very essence of the divine that it is indemonstrable and unattainable for the understanding. In order to be certain of the highest, of that which lies beyond the understanding, there is only one or gan, viz., feeling. In feeling, therefore, in immediate knowledge, in faith

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS. 189 rising to a knowledge of the system of the universe; very different in this from Kant, who has applied as much power of mind to show those things at the knowledge of which the human mind can never arrive, as to explain those which are within its reach. No philosopher, however, before Fichte,' had extended the Jaccbi thought he had found that certainty which Kant had sought in vain on the basis of discursive thinking. "2. While Jacobi stood in an antithetic relation to the Kantian philosophy, Fichte appears as its immediate consequence. Fichte carried out to its consequence the Kantian dualism, according to which the Ego, as theoretic, is subjected to the external world, while as practical, it is its master, or, in other words, according to which the Ego stands related to the objective world, now receptively and again spontaneously. He allowed the reason to be exclusively practical, as will alone, and spontaneity alone, and apprehended its theoretical and receptive relation to the objective world as only a circumscribed activity, as a limitation prescribed to itself by the reason. But for the reason, so far as it is practical, there is nothing objective except as it is produced. The will knows no being but only an ought. Hence the objective being of truth is universally denied, and the thing which is essentially unknown must fall away of itself as an empty shadow.' Every thing whbch is, is the Ego,' is the principle of the Fichtian system, and represents at the same time the subjective idealism in its consequence and completion. " 3. While the subjective idealism of Fichte was carried out in the objective idealism of Schelling, and the absolute idealism of Hegel, there arose contemporaneously with these systems a third offshoot of the Kantian criticism, viz., the philosophy of Herbart. It had its subjective origin in the Kantian philosophy, but its objective and historic connection with Kant is slight. It breaks up all historic continuity, and holds an isolated position in the history of philosophy. Its general basis is Kantian, in so far as it makes for its problem a critical investigation of the subjective experience. We place it between Fichte and Schnelling."-(Schwegler, Hist, of Philos., translated by Seelye, pp. 268-271.)-Ed.': Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born at Ramnienau, in Upper Lusatia, 1762. A nobleman of Silesia became interested in the boy, and having committed him first to the instruction of a clergyman, he afterwards placed him at the high school at Schulpforte. In his eighteenth year, at Michaelmas, 1780, Fichte entered the university at Jena to study theology. He soon found himself attracted to philosophy, and became powerfully affected by the study of Spinoza. His pecuniary circumstances were straitened, but this only served to harden his will and his energy. In 1784 he became employed as a teacher in a certain family, and spent some time in this octupation with different families in Saxony. In 1787 he sought a place as'ountry clergyman, but was refused on account of his religious opinions.

190 MADAME DE STAFTLS GERMANY. system of idealism with such scientific strictness; he makes the whole universe consist of the activity of mind. All that can be conceived, all that can be imagined, comes from mind; it is on account of this system that he has been suspected of unlie was now obliged to leave his fatherland, to which he clung with his whole soul. He repaired to Zurich, where, in 1788, he took a post as private tutor, and where also he became acquainted with his future wife, a sister's daughter of Klopstock. At Easter, 1790, he returned to Saxony, and taught privately at Leipsic, where he became acquainted with the lMantian philosophy, by means of lessons which he was obliged to give to a student. In the spring of 1791, we find him as private tutor at Warsaw, and soon after in Kdnigsberg, where he resorted, that he might become personally acquainted with the Kant he had learned to revere. Instead of a letter of recommendation, he presented him his' Critick of all Revelation,' a treatise which Fichte composed in eight days. In this he attempted to deduce, from the practical reason, the possibility of a revelation. This is not seen purely apriori, but only under an empirical condition; we must consider humanity to be in a moral ruin so complete, that the moral law has lost all its influence upon the will, and all morality is extinguished. In such a case we may expect that God, as moral governor of the world, would give man, through the sense, some pure moral impulses, and reveal himself as lawgiver to them through a special manifestation determined for this end, in the world of sense. In such a case a particular revelationr were a postulate of the practical reason. Fichte sought also to determin apriori the possible content of such a revelation. Since we need to know nothing but God, freedom, and immortality, the revelation will contain naught but these, and these it must contain in a comprehensible form, yet so that the symbolical dress may lay no claim to unlimited veneration. This treatise, which appeared anonymously in 1792, at once attracted the greatest attention, and was at first universally regarded as a work of Kant. It procured for its author, soon after, a call to the chair of philosophy at Jena, to succeed Reinhold, who then went to Kiel. Fichte received this appointment in 1793 at Zurich, where he had gone to consummate his marriage. At the same time he wrote and published, also anonymously, his Aids to Correct Views qf the French Revolution,' an essay which the governmerits never looked upon with favor. At Easter, 1794, he entered upon his new office, and soon saw his public call confirmed. Taking now a new stantlpoint, which transcended Kant, he sought to establish this, and carry it out in a series of writings (the Wissenschaftslehre appeared in 1794, the Naturrecht in 1796, and the Sittenlehre in 1798), by which he exerted a powerful influence upon the scientific movement in Germany, aided as he was in this by the fact that Jena was then one of the most flourislring of the German universities, and the resort of every vigorous head. With Goethe, Schiller, the brothers Schlegel, William von Humboldt, and Hufeland, Fichte was in close fellowship, though this was unfortunately broker Pfter a few years. In 1795 he became associate editor of the' Philosoaphica

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 191 relief. He was heard to say, that, in his next lesson, he should create GOD, and the world was scandalized with reason at such an expression. What he meant by it was, that he should show how the idea of the Divinity arose, and was developed in the Journal,' which had been established by Niethammer. A fellow-laborer, Rector Forberg, at Saalfeld, offered for publication in this journal an article' to determine the conception of religion.' Fichte advised the author not to publish it, but at length inserted it in the journal, prefacing it, however, with an introduction of his own' On the ground of our faith in a divine government of the world,' in which he endeavored to remove, or at least soften, the views in the article which might give offence. Both the essays raised a great cry of atheism. The Elector of Saxony confiscated the journal in his territory, and sent a requisition to the dukes Ernest, who held in common the university of Jena, to summon the author to trial and punishment. Fichte answered the edict of confiscation, and attempted to justify himself to the public (1799), by his'Appeal to the Public. An essay which it is requested may be read before it is confiscated;' while he defended his course to the government by an article entitled-' The Publishers of th/e ~Philosophical Journal justified from the charge of Atheism.' The governInent of Weimar, being as anxious to spare him as it was to please the Elector of Saxony, delayed its decision. But as Fichte, either with or without reason, had privately learned that the whole matter was to be set"led by reprimanding the accused parties for their want of caution; and, lesiring either a civil acquittal or an open and proper satisfaction, he wrote a private letter to a member of the government, in which he desired his dismission in case of a reprimand, and which he closed with the intimation that many of his friends would leave the university with him, in order to establish together a new one in Germany. The government regarded this letter as an application for his discharge, indirectly declaring that the reprimand was unavoidable. Fichte, now an object of suspicion, both on account of his religious and political views, looked about him in vain for a place of refuge. The Prince of Rudolstadt, to whom he turned, denied him his protection, and his arrival in Berlin (1799) attracted great notice. In Berlin, where he had much intercourse with Frederick Schlegel, and also with Schleiermacher and Novalis, his views became gradually Irmodifed; the catastrophe at Jena had led him from the exclusive moral standpoint which he, resting upon Kant, had hitherto held, to the sphere of religion; he now sought to reconcile religion with his standpoint of tie Wissenshlaftslehre, and turned himself to a certain mysticism (the second form of the Fichtian theory). After he had privately taught a number of years in Berlin, and had also held philosophical lectures for men of culture, he was recommended (1805) by Beyme and Altenstein, chancellor of state of IIlardenberg, to a professorship of philosophy in Erlangen, an appointment which he received together with a permit to return to Berlin in the winter, and hold there his philosophical lectures before the public. Thus, n1 the winter of 1807-8, while a French marshal was governor of Berlin,

192 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. mind of man. The principal merit of Fichte's philosophy is, the incredible attention that it implies; for he is not contented with referring every thing to the inward existence of man, to the ME which forms the basis of every thing; but he goes on to distinguish in this ME what is transitory and what is permanent. In fact, when we reflect on the operations of the understanding, we think ourselves eye-witnesses of our own thoughts; we think we see them pass before us like a stream, while the portion of self which is contemplating them is immovable. It often happens to those who unite an impassioned character to an observing mind, to see themselves suffer, and to feel within themselves a being superior to its own pain, which observes it, and reproves or pities it by turns. We are subject to continual changes from the external circumstances of our life, and yet we always have the feeling oi our identity. What is it, then, that attests this identity, if not the ME, always the same, which sees another ME modified by. impressions from without pass before its tribunal? It is to this immovable soul, the witness of the movable soul that Fichte attributes the gift of immortality, and the pow( of creating, or (to translate more exactly), of drawing to a focu in itself the image of the universe. This system, which make, every thing rest on the summit of our existence, and places a pyramid on its point, is singularly difficult to follow. It strip our ideas of the colors which so well enable us to understand them; and the fine arts, poetry, the contemplation of nature, and while his voice was often drowned by the hostile tumults of the enelny through the streets, he delivered his famous' Addresses to the Germaru nation.' Fichte labored most assiduously for the foundation of th Beriin university, for only by wholly transforming the common educatioq. lid he believe the regeneration of Germany could be secured. As the new university was opened 1809, he was made in the first year dean of the philosophical faculty, and in the second was invested with the dignity of rector. In the'war of liberation,' then breaking out, Fichte took the liveliest participation by word and deed. His wife had contracted a nerv ous fever by her care of the sick and wounded, and though she recovered he fell a victim to the same disease. He died January 28,1814, not having vet completed his fifty-second year." —(Schwegler, Hist. of Philos., transated by Seelye, pp. 279-282.)-E/.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 193 disappear in abstractions, without any mixture of imagination or sensibility. Fichte considers the exterior world only as a boundary of our existence, on which thought is at work. In his system this boundary is created by the soul itself, the activity of which is constantly exerted on the web it has formed. What Fichte has written upon the metaphysical ME is a little like the waking of Pygmalion's statue, which, touching alternately itself and the stone on which it was placed, says by turns, This is I, and This is not I. But when, taking the hand of Pygmalion, it exclaims, This, too, is I! then a question is raised of a sentiment which is much beyond the sphere of abstract ideas. Idealism, stripped of sentiment, has nevertheless the advantage of exciting, to the highest degree, the activity of the mind; but nature and love, by this system, lose all their charms; for, if the objects which we see, and the beings whom we love, are nothing but the works of our own ideas, it is man himself that may be considered as the great celibate of worlds. It must be acknowledged, however, that the system of Fichte as two great advantages: the one is its Stoic morality, which imits of no excuses; for, every thing proceeding from ME, it s this ME alone which has to answer for the use it makes of he will: the other is an exercise of thought, at once so severe nd so subtile that a man who had mastered the system, even cough he should not adopt it, would have acquired a capacity )f attention, and a sagacity in analysis, which would afterwards nake any other kind of study a plaything to him. In whatever manner the utility of metaphysics is judged of,:; cannot be denied that it is the gymnastic of the mind. It s usual to set children on different kinds of wrestling in their arliest years, although it may never be necessary for them to fight in this manner. It may be truly said, that the study of the idealistic system of metaphysics is almost a certain means of developing the moral faculties of those who devote themselves to it. Thought, like every thing precious, resides at the bottom of ourselves; for on the surface there is nothing but folhy and insipidity. But when men are early obliged to dive VOL. II.-9

194 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. into their own minds, and to see all that passes within them, they draw from thence a power and sincerity of judgment which are never lost. For abstract ideas, Fichte has a mathematical head, like Euler or la Grange. He has a singular contempt for all expressions which in any manner relate to substance; existence even is too common a word for him. Being, principle, essence, are words scarcely airy enough to mark the subtile shades in his opinions. It might be said that he is afraid of coming in contact with realities, and is always shrinking from them. In reading his works, or conversing with him, one loses the consciousness of this world, and feels it necessary, like the ghosts described by Homer, to recall the remembrances of life. Materialism absorbs the soul by degrading it; the idealism of Fichte, by exalting it, separates it from nature. In both extremes, sentiment, which is the real beauty of existence, has tot the rank it deserves. Schelling' has much more knowledge of nature and the fine X "Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born at Leonberg, in Wrr temberg, January 27th, 1775. With a very precocious development, L entered the theological seminary at TUfbingen in his fifteenth year, and devoted himself partly to philology and mythology, but especially to Kant's philosophy. During his course as a student, he was in personal connee tion with Hollderlin and Hegel. Schelling came before the world as mi author very early. In 1792 appeared his graduating treatise on the thirk chapter of Genesis, in which he gave an interesting philosophical significa tion to the Mosaic account of the fall. In the following year, 1793, he published in Paulus' Memorabilia an essay of a kindred nature,' On the JMyths and Philosophemes of the Ancient World.' To the last year of his abode at Tiibingen belong the two philosophical writings:'On the Possibility of a Pobm for Philosophy,' and' On the Ego as a Principle qf Philosophy, or o. the Uinconditioned in Tluman Knowledge.' After completing his universit) studies, Schelling went to Leipsic as tutor to the Baron von Riedesel, bitl soon afterwards repaired to Jena, where he became the pupil and co-laborer of Fichte. After Eichte's departure from Jena, he became himself, 1798, teacher of philosophy there, and now began, removing himself from Fiohte's standpoint, to develop more and more his own peculiar views, He published in Jena the Journal of Speculative Physics, and also, in compahy with Hegel, the Critical Journal. In the year 1803 he went to Wiirzburg as professor ordinarius of philosophy. In 1807 he repaired to Muniobh as member ordinarius of the newly established academy of sciences there

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 195 uttls an Fichte, and his lively imagination could not be satis: fled with abstract ideas; but, like Fichte, his object is to reduce existence to a single principle. He treats with profound contempt all philosophers who admit two principles, and will not allow the name of philosophy to any system but that which unites every thing, and explains every thing. Unquestionably he is right in saying that this system would be the best; but where is it? Schelling pretends that nothing is more absurd than the form of expression, so commonly used, "the philosophy of Plato," " the philosophy of Aristotle." Should we say, "the geometry of Euler," "the geometry of la Grange.?" There is but one philosophy, according to Schelling, or there is none. Certainly if by philosophy we only understand the enigma of the universe, we may say, with truth, that there is no philosophy. The system of Kant appeared insufficient to Schelling, as it did to Fitche; because he acknowledges two natures, two sources of our ideas,-external objects, and the faculties of the. soul. But, in order to arrive at this unity, so much desired; in order to get rid of this double life, physical and moral, The year after he became general secretary of the Academy of the plastic arts, and subsequently, when the university professorship was established at Munich, he became its incumbent. After the death of Jacobi, he was chosen president of the Munich Academy. In 1841 he removed to Berlin, where he has sometimes held lectures. For the last ten years Schelling has written nothing of importance, although he has repeatedly promised an exposition of his present system. By far the greater portion of his writings belongs to his early life. Schelling's philosophy is no completed system of which his separate works are the constituent elements; but, like Plato's, it has an historical development, a course of formative steps which the philosopher has passed through in his own life. Instead of systenmltically elaborating the separate sciences from the standpoint of his principle, Schelling has gone back repeatedly to the beginning again, seeking ever for new fboundations and new standpoints, connecting these for the most part'like Plato) with some antecedent philosophemes (Fichte, Spinoza, New Platonism, Leibnitz, Jacob Beehme, Gnosticism), which, in their order, lie ittempted to interweave with his system. " Schelling died August 20th, 1854, at Ragaz, Switzerland, whither he aad gone for the benefit of his health, which had long been declining.-'Schwegler, Hist. of Philos., translated by Seelye, pp. 312-314.) —Ed.

196 MADAME DE STAEL S- GERMANY. which gives so much offence to the partisans of absolute ideas, Schelling refers every thing to nature, while Fitche makes every thing spring from the soul. Fitche sees nothing in nature but the opposite of soul: in his eyes it is only a limit or a chain, from which we are constantly to endeavor to free ourselves. The system of Schelling gives more rest, and greater dtelight, to the imagination; nevertheless it necessarily returns into that of Spinoza; but, instead of making the soul descend to the level of matter, which is the practice in our days, Schelling endeavors to raise matter up to the soul; and although his theory entirely depends upon physical nature, it is, nevertheless, a very idealistic one at bottom, and still more so in form. The ideal and the real hold, in his language, the place of intelligence and matter, of imagination and experience; and it is in the reunion of these two powers in complete harmony, that, in his opinion, the unique and absolute principle of the organized universe consists. This harmony, of which the two poles and the centre form the image, and which is comprised in the number three, so mysterious from all time, supplies Schelling with the most ingenious applications. He believes it is to be found in the fine arts, as in nature; and his works on physical science are thought highly of, even by those learned men who confine themselves to the consideration of facts, and their results. Indeed, in examining the soul, he endeavors to demonstrate how sensations and intellectual conceptions are confounded in the sentiment which unites whatever is involuntary and reflective in both of them, and thus contains all the mystery of life. What is most interesting in these systems is their developmcents. The first basis of the pretended explanation of the world is equally true, and equally false, in the greater number of theories; for all of them are comprised in the immense thought, which it is their object to embrace; but, in their application to the things of this world, these theories are very refined, and often throw great light on many particular objects. Schelling, it cannot be denied, approaches nearly to the -hilosophers called Pantheists, that is, those who attribute to

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 197 nature the attributes of the Divinity. But what distinguishes him is, the astonishing sagacity with which he has managed to connect his doctrine with the arts and sciences; he is instructive, and requires thought, in all his observations, and the depth of his mind is surprising, particularly when he does not pretend to apply it to the secret of the universe; for no man can attain a superiority which cannot exist between beings of the same kind, at whatever distance they may be placed from each other. To preserve religious ideas in the midst of the apotheosis of nature, the school of Schelling supposes that the individual within us perishes, but that the inward qualities which we possess, enter again into the great whole of the eternal creation. Such an immortality is terribly like death; for physical death itself is nothing but universal nature recalling to herself the gifts she had given to the individual. Schelling draws from his system some very noble conclusions on the necessity of cultivating in the soul its immortal qualities, those which are in relation with the universe, and of despising every thing in us which relates to our circumstances alone. But are not the affections of the heart, and even conscience itself, allied to the relations of this life? In most situations we feel two distinct motions, that which unites us with the general order, and that which leads us to our particular interests; the sentiment of duty, and personality. The noblest of these motions is the universal. But it is exactly because we have an instinct which would preserve our existence, that't is beautiful to sacrifice it; it is because we are beings, whose,centre is in ourselves, that our attraction towards the assemblage of all things is generous; in a word, it is because we exist individually and distinctly, that we can choose out and love one another. What then becomes of that abstract immortality which would strip us of our dearest recollections as mere accidental modifications? Would you, they say in Germany, rise again in all youi )resent circumstances? Would you be revived a baron, or r marquis? Certainly not. But who would not rise again a

1198 MADAME DE STAEL' GERMANY. mother or a daughter? and how could we be ourselves again, if we had no longer the same feelings of friendship? Vague ideas of reunion with nature will, in time, destroy the empire of religion over our souls; for religion is addressed to each of us individually. Providence protects us in all the details of our lot. Christianity is adapted to every mind, and sympathizes, like a confidential friend, with the wants of every heart. Pantheism, on the contrary, that is, nature deified, by inspiring religion for every thing, disperses it over the world, instead of concentrating it in ourselves. This system has at all times had many partisans among philosophers. Thought is always tending, more and more, to generalization; and the labor of the mind, in extending its boundaries, is often taken for a new idea. We think we shall succeed in comprehending the universe as space, by always removing barriers, and setting difficulties farther from us without resolving them; and yet we are no nearer to the infinite. Sentiment alone reveals it to us, without explaining it. What is truly admirable in German philosophy is the examination of ourselves to which it leads; it ascends even to the origin of the will, even to the unknown spring of the course of our life; and then penetrating the deepest secrets of grief and of faith, it enlightens and strengthens us. But all systems which aspire to the explanation of the universe, can hardly be analyzed with clearness by any expressions: words are not proper for ideas of this kind, and the consequence is, that, in making use of them, all things are overshadowed by the darkness which preceded the creation, not illuminated by the light which succeeded it. Scientific expressions, lavished on a subject in which every one feels that he is interested, are revolting to self-love. These writings, so difficult to comprehend, however serious one may be, give occasion to pleasantry, for mistakes are always made in the dark. It is pleasing to reduce, to a few leading and accessible assertions, that crowa of shades and restrictions which appear quite sacred to the author of them, but which the profane soon forget or con blind.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 199 The Orientalists have at all times been idealists, and Asia in no respect resembles the south of Europe. The excessive heat in the East leads to contemplation, like the excessive cold of the North. The religious systems of India are very melancholy and spiritualistic, while the people of the south of Europe have always had an inclination for rather a material kind of Paganism. The learned of England, who have travelled into India, have made deep researches about Asia; and Germans who have not had opportunities, like the princes of the Ocean, to inform themselves with their own eyes, have, by dint of study alone, arrived at very interesting discoveries on the religion, the literature, the languages, of the Asiatic nations; they have been led to think, from many indications, that supernatural light once shone upon the people of those countries, and that the traces of it still remain indelible. The philosophy of the Indians can be well understood only by the German idealists; a similarity of opinion assists them in comprehending it. Frederick Schlegel, not contented with the knowledge of almost all the languages of Europe, has devoted unheard-of labors to acquiring the knowledge of the country which was the cradle of the world. The work which he has just published on the language and philosophy of the Indians, contains profound views and real information worthy the attention of enlightened men in Europe. He thinks, and many philosophers (in the number of whom Bailly may be reckoned) have maintained the same opinion, that a primitive people inhab-;ted some parts of the world, and particularly Asia, at a period anterior to all the documents of history. Frederick Schlegel finds traces of this people in the intellectual culture of nations, and the formation of languages. He observes a remarkable resemblance between the leading ideas, and even the words which express them, among many nations of the world, even when, so far as we are informed by history, they have never Sad any connection with each other. Frederick Schlegel does rot adopt the very generally received opinion, that men began in the savage state, and that their mutual wants, by degrees,

200 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. formed languages. Thus to attribute the development of the human mind and soul to our animal nature, is to give it a very gross origin, and reason combats the hypothesis, as much as imagination rejects it. We can hardly conceive by what gradation it would be possible, from the cry of the savage, to arrive at the perfection or the Greek language; it would be said, that, in the progress necessary to traverse such an infinite distance, every step wou. d cross an abyss; we see, in our days, that savages do not civilize themselves, and that it is from neighboring nations that they are taught, with great labor, what they themselves are ignorant of. One is much tempted, therefore, to think that a primitive nation did establish the human race; and whence was that people formed; if not from revelation. All nations have, at all times, expressed regret for the loss of a state of happiness which preceded the period in which they existed: whence arises this idea, so widely spread? will it be said, it is an error? Errors that are universal are always founded upon some truth, altered and disfigured perhaps, but based on facts concealed in the night of time, or some mysterious powers of nature. Those who attribute the civilization of the human race to the effects of physical wants uniting men with one another, will have difficulty in explaining how it happens, that the moral culture of the most ancient nations is more poetical, more favorable to the fine arts, in a word, more nobly useless, in material relations, than all the refinements of modern civilization. The philosophy of the Indians is idealistic, and their religion mystical: certainly it is not the necessity of maintaining order in society, which has given birth to this philosophy, or to this religion. Poetry has almost everywhere existed before prose; and.he introduction of metres, rhythm, and harmony, is anterior to the rigorous precision, and consequently to the useful em. ployment of languages. Astronomy has not been studied foi the service of agriculture alone; but the Chaldeans, Egyp bans, etc., carried their researches much beyond the practical

GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS. 201 advantages to be derived from it; and the love of heaven and the worship of time are supposed to be shown in these profound and exact observations, respecting the divisions of the year, the courses of the stars, and the periods of their junction. In China, the kings were the first astronomers of their country. They passed nights in contemplating the progress of the stars, and their royal dignity consisted in those exalted species of knowledge, and in those disinterested occupations, which raised them above the vulgar. The magnificent system, which considers civilization as having for its origin a religious revelation, is supported by an erudition, of which the partisans of the materialistic doctrines are seldom capable; to be wholly devoted to study, is to be almost an idealist already. The Germans, accustomed to deep and solitary reflections, penetrate so far into truth, that,in my opinion, a man must be ignorant or conceited to despise any of their writings, without having long considered them. There were formerly many errors and superstitions, which were attributable to want of knowledge; but when, with the light of our times, and the immense labors of individuals, opinions are propounded which are beyond the circle of our daily experience, it is' a cause of rejoicing to the human race; for its actual treasures are very scanty, at least if one may judge by the use made of it. In reading the account which I have just given of the principal ideas of some of the German philosophers, their partisans, on the one hand, will discover, with reason, that I have noticed, very superficially, researches of great importance; and, on the other hand, the world will ask, of what use is all this? But of what use are the Apollo Belvedere, the pictures of Raphael, the tragedies of Racine? Of what use is every thing beautiful, if not to the soul. It is the same with philosophy; it is the beauty of thought, it attests the dignity of man, who Es able to occupy himself with what is external and invisible, although whatever is gross in his nature would remove him from them. I might cite many other names justly distinguished in the

202 MXDAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. career of philosophy; but it appears to me, that this sketch, however imperfect, is sufficient to serve as an introduction to the examination of the influence which the transcendental philosophy of the Germans has exercised over the development of the mind, and over the character and morality of the nation in which that philosophy prevails; and this, above all, is the object I propose to myself. CHAPTER VIII. INFLUENCE OF THE NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY OVER THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. ATTENTION is, perhaps, the most powerful of all the faculties of the human mind; and it cannot be denied, that idealistic metaphysics strengthen it in a surprising manner. Buffon pretended that genius might be acquired by patience; that was saying too much; but the homage thus rendered to attention, under the name of patience, does great honor to a man of so brilliant an imagnination. Abstract ideas require great efforts of meditation; but when to them is joined the most exact and persevering observation of the inward actions of the will, the whole power of intelligence is at once employed. Subtilty is a great fault in the affairs of this world, but certainly the Germans are not suspected of it. The philosophical subtilty, which enables us to unravel the minutest threads of our thoughts, is exactly the best calculated to extend the genius; for a reflection, from which the sublimest inventions, the most astonishing discoveries may result, passes unperceived within us, if we have not acquired the habit of examining with sagacity the consequences and connections of ideas apparently the most remote from each other. In Germany, a superior man seldom confines himself to one ine. Goethe has made discoveries in science: Schelling is r

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 203 excellent writer; Frederick Schlegel, a poet full of originality. A great number of different talents cannot, perhaps, be united; but the view of the understanding ought to embrace every thing. The new German philosophy is necessarily more favorable than any other to the extension of the mind; for, referring every thing to the focus of the soul, and considering the world itself as governed by laws, the type of which is in ourselves, it does not admit the prejudice which destines every man exclusively to such or such a branch of study. The idealists believe that an art, a science, or any other subject, cannot be understood without universal knowledge, and that from the smallest phenomenon up to the greatest, nothing can be wisely examined, or poetically depicted, without that elevation of mind which sees the whole, while it is describing the parts. Montesquieu says, that wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things which differ, and the difference of things which are alike. If there could exist q theory which would teach a man how to become a wit, it would be that of the understanding as the Germans conceive it; there is none more favorable to ingenious approximations between external objects and the facilties of the mind; they are the different radii of the same centre. Most physical axioms correspond with moral truths; and universal philosophy, in a thousand ways, represents nature always the same, and always varying; reflected, at full length, in every one of her works, and giving the stamp of the universe to the blade of grass, as well as to the cedar. This philosophy gives a singular attraction to all kinds of study. The discoveries which we make within ourselves are always interesting; but if it is true that they would enlighten us, on the mysteries even of a world created in our image, vhat curiosity do they not inspire! The conversation of a German philosopher, such as those I have named, calls to mind the dialogues of Plato; and when you question one of these men, upon any subject whatever, he throws so much light on it, that, in listening to him, you seem to think for the first time, if to think is, as Spinoza says, to identify one's self.with Nature by intelligence, and to become one with her.

204 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. So many new ideas on literary and philosophical subjects nave, for some years past, been in circulation in Germany, that a stranger might very well take a man, who should only repeat these ideas, for a superior genius. It has sometimes happened to me, to give men, ordinary enough in other respects, credit for prodigious minds, only because they had become familiarized with the system of the idealists, the aurora of a new life. The faults for which the Germans are commonly reproached in conversation, slowness and pedantry, are remarked infinitely less in the disciples of the modern school; persons of the first rank, in Germany, have formed themselves, for the most part, according to good French manners; but now there is established among the philosophers and men of letters, a sort of education, also in good taste, although of quite another kind. True elegance is considered as inseparable from a poetical imagination, and love for the fine arts, and politeness, as united to knowledge, and to the appreciation of talents and natural qualities. It cannot, however, be denied, that the new philosophical and literary systems have inspired their partisans with great contempt for those who do not understand them. The wit of the French always aims at humiliating by ridicule; its plan is to avoid the idea, in order to attack the person, and the substance, in order to laugh at the form. The Germans of the new school look upon ignorance and frivolity as diseases of prolonged infancy; they do not confine themselves to contests with strangers, but they attack each other with bitterness; and to hear them, one would suppose, that to possess a single qadditional degree, either of abstraction or of profundity, conferred a right to treat as vulgar and narrow-minded all those who would not or could not attain it. When men's minds are irritated by obstacles, exaggeration is mixed with that philosophical revolution, which, in other respects, is so salutary. The Germans of the new school pene-'rate into the interior of the soul, with the torch of genius. But when they are required to introduce their ideas into the minds of others, they are at a loss for the means, and begin t~

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 205 affect contempt for their hearers, because they are ignorant, not of the truth itself, but of the means of imparting it. Contempt, except for vice, argues almost always a limited mind: Cor, with a greater share of understanding, we could make our3elves understood even by vulgar minds, or at least we might sincerely endeavor to do so. The talent of methodical and clear expression is very rare in Germany: it is not acquired by speculative studies. We must, thus to speak, place ourselves without our own thoughts, to judge of the form which should be given to them. Philosophy teaches the knowledge of man, rather than of men. Habits of society alone teach us the relation our minds bear to those of others. Sincere and serious philosophers are led, first by candor, and then by pride, to feel irritated against those who do not think or feel as they do. The Germans seek for truth conscientiously; but they have a very warm spirit of party in favor of the doctrine which they adopt; for, in the heart of man, every thing degenerates into passion. But notwithstanding the diversity of opinions, which, in germany, form schools in opposition to one another, they tend rqually, for the most part, to develop activity of soul; so that here is no country where every man makes more advantage )f himself, at least in regard to intellectual labors. CHAPTER IX. INFLUENCE OF THE NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. WHAT I have just said on the development of the mind, is also applicable to literature; yet it may be interesting to add some particular observations to these general reflections. In those countries where it is supposed that all our ideas have their origin in external objects, it is natural to set a higher

206 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. value on the observance of graces or forms, the empire of which is placed without us; but where, on the other hand. men feel convinced of the immutable laws of moral existence, society has less power over each individual; men treat (d every thing with themselves; and what is deemed essential, a well in the productions of thought as in the actions of life, it the assurance that they spring from inward conviction and spontaneous feeling. There are, in style, some. qualities which are connected with the very truth of the sentiment, and there are others which depend on grammatical correctness. It would be difficult to make the Germans understand, that the first thing to look for in a work is the manner in which it is written, and that the execution of it should be of more importance than the conception. In experimental philosophy, a work is esteemed, above all things, according to the ingenious and lucid form under which it is presented; in the idealistic philosophy, on the contrary, where all attraction is in the focus of the mind, those writers only are admired who approach the nearest to that point. It must be admitted, too, that the habit of searching int the most hidden mysteries of our being, gives inclination f( what is deepest, and sometimes for what is most obscure ih thought. Thus the Germans too often blend metaphysics witL poetry. The new philosophy inspires us with the necessity of rising to thoughts and sentiments without bounds. This impulse may be favorable to genius, but it is so to genius alone, and i' often gives to those who are destitute of genius very ridiculoum pretensions. In France, mediocrity finds every thing too pow erful and too exalted; in Germany, it finds nothing so high as the new doctrine. In France, mediocrity laughs at enthusiasm; in Germany, it despises a certain sort of reason. A writer can never do enough to convince German readers that his ideas ire not superficial, that he is occupied, in all things, with the immortal and the infinite. But as the faculties of the mind are not always correspondent to such vast desires, it often

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 207 nappens that gigantic efforts produce but common results. Nevertheless, this general disposition assists the flight of tho-lght; and it is easier, in literature, to set bounds, than to,ive emulation. The taste which the Germans show for what is playful and simple, and of which I have already had occasion to speak, seems to be in contradiction with their inclination for metaphysics, an inclination which arises from the desire of knowing and of analyzing one's self; nevertheless, it is to the influence of a system that we are to refer this taste for playful simplicity; for, in Germany, there is philosophy in every thing, even in the imagination. One of the first characteristics of simplicity is to express what is felt or thought, without reflecting on any result, or aiming at any object; and it is in this respect that it agrees with the theory of the Germans on literature. In separating the beautiful from the useful, Kant clearly proves that it is not in the nature of the fine arts to give lessons. Undoubtedly, every thing that is beautiful ought to give birth to generous sentiments, and these sentiments excite,o virtue; but when the object is to put in proof a precept of norality, the free impression produced by masterpieces of art is necessarily destroyed; for the object aimed at, whatever it may be, when it is known, limits and confines the imagination. It is related, that Louis XIV once said to a preacher, who had directed a sermon against him, "I am ready enough to take to myself my share, but I will not have it allotted to me." These words might be applied to the fine arts in general: they ought to elevate the soul, and not to indoctrinate it. Nature often displays her magnificence without any aim, and often with a profuseness, which the partisans of utility would call prodigal. She seems to delight in giving more splendor to the flowers, to the trees of the forest, than to the vegetables which serve for the food of man. If what is useful held the first rank in nature, would she not adorn the nutrilious plants with more charms than roses, which are only aeautiful? And whence comes it, that to deck the altar of

208 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. the Divinity with flowers which are useless, should be preferred to doing it with the productions which are necessary tc us? How happens it, that what serves for the support of our lives, has less dignity than beauties which have no object? I" is because the beautiful recalls to our minds an immortal and divine existence, the recollection and the regret of which live at the same time in our hearts. It certainly is not from a want of understanding the moral value of what is useful that Kant has separated it from the beautiful it is to ground admiration of every kind on absolute disinterestedness; it is in order to give sentiments which render vice impossible, the preference over the lessons which only serve to correct it. The mythological fables of the ancients were seldom intended as moral exhortations or edifying examples, and it does not at all argue that the moderns are better than the ancients that they'oftener endeavor to give a useful result to their fictions; it is rather because they have less imagination, and carry into literature the habit which business gives, of always aiming at some object. Events, as they exist in reality, are not calculated beforehand, like a fiction, the winding up of which i moral. Life itself is conceived in quite a poetical manner; fol it is not, in general, because the guilty man is punished and the virtuous man rewarded that it makes a moral impression upon us; it is because it develops in the mind indignation against the guilty, and enthusiasm for the virtuous. The Germans do not, according to the common notion, consider the imitation of nature as the principal object of art; it is ideal beauty which appears to them the principle of all masterpieces, and their poetical theory accords, in this respect, with their philosophy. The impression made on us by the fine arts has nothing whatever in common with the pleasure we feel from any imitation; man has in his soul innate sentiments which real objects will never satisfy, and it is to these sentiments that the imagination of painters and poets gives form and life. Of what is music, the first of all arts, an imitation " And yet, of all the gifts of the Divinity, it is the most noble

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 209 for it may be said to be a superfluous one. The sun gives us light, we breathe the air of a serene atmosphere, all the beauties of nature are, in some way, serviceable to man; musio atlone has a noble inutility, and it is for this reason that affects is so deeply; the more it is without an object, the nearer it approaches to that inward source of our thoughts, which application to any object whatever checks in its course. The literary theory of the Germans differs from all others in not subjecting writers to customs, nor to tyrannical restrictions. It is a creative theory, a philosophy of the fine arts, which, instead of confining them, seeks, like Prometheus, to steal fire from heaven to give it to the poets. Did Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, I shall be asked, know any thing of all this? Did they stand in need of all this metaphysical reasoning to be great writers? Nature, undoubtedly, has not waited for philosophy, which means only, that the fact preceded the observation of the fact; but, as we have reached the epoch of theories, should we not be on our guard against those which may stifle talent I It must, however, be allowed, that many essential inconveniences result from the application of these systems of philosophy to literature. German readers, accustomed to peruse Kant, Fichte, etc., consider a less degree of obscurity as clearness itself; and writers do not always give to works of art that striking clearness which is so necessary to them. Constant attention may, nay, ought to be exacted where abstract ideas are the subject; but emotions are involuntary. In the enjoyment of the arts, indulgence, effort, and reflection can have no place: what we have to deal with there is pleasure, and not reasoning; philosophy may require attentive examination, but poetical talent ought to carry us away with it. Ingenious ideas, derived from theories, cause illusion as to the real nature of talent. They prove, with wit, that such or such a piece ought not to have pleased, but still it did please; and then they begin to despise those who like it. They prove that another piece, composed according to certain principles, aught to interest, and yet, when they would have it performed,

210 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. when they say to it, Arise, and walk, the piece does not go off; and then they despise those who are not amused with a work composed according to the laws of the ideal and the real, People are generally wrong when they find fault with th judgment of the public in the arts, for popular impressions ar more philosophical than even philosophy itself; and when th, ideas of men of information do not agree with this impression. it is not because they are too profound, but rather because they are not deep enough. It appears to me, however, infinitely better for the literature of a country that its poetical system should be founded upon philosophical notions, even if they are a little abstract, than upon simple external rules; for these rules are only barriers to prevent children from falling. In their imitation of the ancients, the Germans have taken quite a different direction from the rest of Europe. The conscientious character, from which they never depart, has prevented their mixing together modern and ancient genius: they treat fiction in some respects like truth, for they find means to be scrupulous even in regard to that; they apply the same disposition to acquire an exact and thorough knowledge of th( monuments which are left us of past ages. In Germany, the study of antiquity, like that of the sciences and of philosophy, unites the scattered branches of the human mind. Heyne, with a wonderful quickness of apprehension, embraces every thing that relates to literature, to history, and to the fine arts. From the most refined observations Wolf draws the boldest inferences, and, disdaining all submission to authority, adopts an opinion of his own of the worth and authenticity of the writings of the Greeks. In a late composition by M. Ch. de Villers, whom I have already mentioned with the high esteem he deserves, it may be seen what immense works are published every year in Germany on the classical authors. The Germans believe themselves called in every thing to act the part of observers; and it may be said that they are not ol,he age they live in, so much do their reflections and inclina-,ions turn towards another epoch of the world.

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 211 It may be that the best time for poetry was during the age of ignorance, and that the youth of the human race is gone forever; but, in the writings of the Germans, we seem to feel a new youth again reviving and springing up from the noble,hoice which may be made by those to whom every thing is known. The age of light has its innocence as well as the golden age, and if man, during his infancy, believes only in his soul, he returns, when he has learnt every thing, to confide in nothing else. CHAPTER X. INFLUENCE OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ON THE SCIENCES. THERE is 110o doubt that the ideal philosophy leads to the augmentation of knowledge, and by disposing the mind to turn back upon itself, increases its penetration and perseverance in intellectual labor. But is this philosophy equally favorable to the sciences, which consist in the observation of nature? It is for the examination of this question that the following reflections are designed. The progress of the sciences in the last century has generally been attributed to the experimental philosophy, and as the observation is of great importance to this subject, men have been thought more certain of attaining to scientific truths in proportion as they attached more importance to external objects; yet the country of Kepler and Leibnitz is not to be despised for science. The principal modern discoveries, gunpowder and the art of printing, have been made by the Germans; and, nevertheless, men's minds in Germany have always tended towards idealism. Bacon compared speculative philosophy to the lark, that mounts to the sky, and descends again without bringing any thing back from her flight; and experimental philosophy to the falcon, that soars as high, but returns with his prey.

212 MADAME DE ST.EL'S GERMANY. Perhaps in our days Bacon would have felt the inc onveniences of the purely experimental philosophy; it has turned thought into sensation, morality into self-interest, and nature into mechanism; for it tends to degrade all things. The Germans have combated its influence in the physical sciences. as well as in science of a higher order; and while they subrmit Nature to the fullest observation, they consider her phenomena, in general, in a vast and animated manner: the empire of an opinion over the imagination always affords a presumption in its favor; for every thing tells us, that the beautiful, in the sublime conception of the universe, is also the true. The new philosophy has already exerted its influence, in many respects, over the physical sciences in Germany. In the first place, the same spirit of universality, which I have remarked in literary men and philosophers, also discovers itself among the men of science. Humboldt' relates, like an accu"' Frederick Henry Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin, September 14, 1769. His father, Major von Humboldt, held the office of Chamberlain to Frederick the Great, and the early years of the son were passed under the tuition of Campe, on the paternal estate at Tegel, near Berlin. In 1786, when in his sixteenth year, Alexander entered the University of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, with his brother William; remained in that institution for two years, and was then transferred to the University of G6ttingen. In the latter, he made the acquaintance of the naturalists Blumenbach and Forster, and through the friendship of those distinguished men, was enabled to cultivate his natural tastes for scientific study. The brothers quitted college in 1789. William had conceived a fancy for political life, and departed for Paris. Alexander, whose education had been especially directed with a view to employment in the government mines, followed the bent of his inclinations for travel and discovery, and, in company with Forster, made his first scientific journey to the Rhine, through Holland, and to England, early in the ensuing year. His first literary production, Mineralogical Observations on some Basaltic Formations qf the Rhine, was the fruit of this journey. Returning home, he was sent to Hamburg tc acquire a knowledge of commercial affairs, studied book-keeping at an Institute, afterwards removed to Freeburg, and became a student in tha Mining Academy, where he remained until 1792. In that year, at the age of twenty-three years, he was appointed Superintendent of Mines in Fran-onia, an office which he held for three years. During this period, he zealously prosecuted his mineralogical and botanical studies, and made various experiments on the physical and chemical laws of metallurgy. Ir t795, he resigned his office, in order to devote himself to the subjects o'

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 213 rate observer, the perilous travels which he undertook like a brave chevalier; and his writings are equally interesting to naturalists and to poets. Schelling, Bader, Schubert, etc., have published works, in which the sciences are presented scientific research which had always been present to his mind. The plan of his great American journey seems to have been suggested during the period of his early intimacy with Forster; and having freed himself from the cares of public duty, he set himself in earnest to the necessary preparations for that expedition. The first step was a series of scientific explorations in different parts of Europe, undertaken with a view to enlarging his experience and improving his powers of observation. He made several visits to Switzerland and the mountains of Silesia, and afterwards assumed the burden of an official visit to Prussian Poland. This yearning desire to see strange lands and to devote himself to scientific exploration, is well described by himself in the opening chapter of his Personal Narrative: "'From my earliest youth, I felt an ardent desire to travel into distant regions, seldom visited by Europeans. This desire is characteristic of a period of our existence when life appears an unlimited horizon, and when we find an irresistible attraction in the impetuous agitation of the mind, and the image of positive danger. Though educated in a country which has no direct communication with either the East or the West Indies, living amid mountains remote from coasts, and celebrated for their numerous mines, I felt an increasing passion for the sea and distant expeditions. Objects with which we are acquainted only by the animated narratives of travellers have a peculiar charm; imagination wanders with delight over that which is vague and undefined; and the pleasures we are deprived of seem to possess a fascinating power, compared with which all we daily feel in the narrow circle of sedentary life appears insipid.' " Serious preparations for the journey to America were not possible, in consequence of family causes, the death of his mother, and the disposition of the paternal estates, until the year 1797. In that year Humboldt supplied himself with ample means for his new enterprise by the sale of the large inheritance which had fallen to him, and set out with his brother for a preliminary journey to Italy. On reaching Vienna, however, further progress was found to be impracticable, in consequence of the war then raging between France and Austria, and Alexander passed the winter of 1797-8 in Salzburg. In the following spring, receiving intelligence of the contemplated expedition of Baudin, intended for the exploration of the Southern Hemisphere, he hastened to Paris, but was again fated to meet with disappointment. The expedition was abandoned, and Humboldt saw no immediate prospect of carrying his enterprise into effect. During his stay in Paris, on this occasion, however, fortune favored him in one respect. He became acquainted with Bonpland, his future companion to South America, who had been appointed to the corps of naturalists to accompany Baudin's expedition. A close friendship sprang up between Bonpland and Humboldt. They entered together on a career of preparatory study and

214 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. under a point of view that captivates both our reflection and our imagination; and, long previous to the existence of modern metaphysicians, Kepler and Haller knew the art of observing Nature, and at the same time of conjecturing her operations. Humboldt united at the same time with the celebrated Gay-Lussac in a series of experiments on the atmosphere. In the fall of 1798, Humboldt, accompanied by Bonpland, went to Marseilles with the intention of embarking for Egypt, to join the scientific cotps which accompanied the army of Napoleon. But another disappointment awaited him. The Swedish fiigate in which he had been offered a passage, had been delayed by a storm, had put into a Portuguese port to repair damages, and could not sail until the following spring. After a delay of two months, the two friends, disliking the prospect of inaction in Marseilles, resolved to spend the winter in Spain, and proceeded to Madrid, taking astronomical and barometrical observations by the way. " This journey to Madrid proved a hit. After three successive disappointments, Humboldt found himself in a position far better than any he had hoped for. The prime minister, Urquizo, a man of enlightened sagacity, lent a willing ear to the memorial presented by the disappointed traveller, supported the project, overcame obstacles, and obtained for Humboldt enlarged privileges for undertaking a voyage to the New World and the Phillipine Islands.' Never,' says Humboldt,' had so extensive a permission been granted to any traveller, and never had any foreigner been honored with more confidence on the part of the Spanish government.' Humboldt, accompanied by Bonpland, left Madrid in May, 1799, for Corunna, where the corvette Pizarro lay, ready to receive him. The vessel was bound to Havana and Mexico, but her captain received orders to touch at the Canaries, and allow the travellers time to ascend the Peak of Teneriffe. Humboldt was now thirty years of age. The delays and disappointments which he had been compelled to encounter, had not only better fitted him for the task he had undertaken, by affording him leisure to enlarge his stock of knowledge, but had furnished him, in Bonpland, an able assistant and a fast friend. Humboldt has touchingly recorded his sensations, as he found himself fairly in the way of realizing the hopes of years. The vessel touched at the Canaries, the travellers ascended the Peak, recorded their observations, narrowly escaped capture by British vessels, and departed for Havana. A malignant fever which broke out on shipboard, however, occasioned a change in the destination. The vessel bore away for Venezuela, and the travellers met a favorable reception in that province, where they arrived in July, 1799. They immediately began their explorations, the history of which is familiar. The exploration of the Orinoco, from which 3o many interesting discoveries resulted, was undertaken in Novembet following. Some months were passed in general observations upon the sea-coast, but in February, 1800, Humboldt, still accompanied by Bonoland, struck into the interior, traversing vast plains under a heat so in-,ense that the journey was made chiefly by night, alnd on the 4th of April

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 215 The attraction of society is so great in France, that it allows nobody much time for labor. It is natural then not to place reliance upon those who attempt to unite many studies of different kinds. But, in a country where the whole life of a man after enduring extraordinary hardships, entered the Orinoco. On'he 10th of April the travellers began a canal exploration of that river, voyaged on the Rio Negro and the Cassiquiare, and finally reached the tributary streams of the Amazon. The extension of this voyage to the mouth of the Amazon was fortunately relinquished; else the travellers had fallen into the hands of the Brazilian officials, who had received orders from the jealous government to seize them and transport them to Lisbon. The little party started on its return on the 10th of May, and arrived at Angostura on the 16th of the following June. Thence they sailed for Havana, where they arrived in the middle of December. Tidings of the departure of Baudin's expedition from France reached Humboldt during his sojourn in Cuba, and he determined to sail for Carthagena, cross the Isthmus to the Pacific, and await the arrival of the expedition at Lima or Valparaiso. This journey gave occasion for the famous travels among the Andes. Reaching Carthagena on the 30th of March, 1801, Humboldt relinquished his purpose of proceeding across the Isthmus to Panama, and chose instead the route to Guayaquil, by way of Bogota and Quito. This change of direction gave him opportunity to trace the map of the Rio Magdalena. On the 22d of June, the ascent of Chimborazo was made. The next step was the exploration of the chain of the Andes, undertaken after the reception of further news from the unlucky expedition of Baudin, which, after all, altered its course, and did not touch at Chili or Peru. A visit to Mexico followed, and its results are recorded in Humboldt's volume on Yew Spain. In January, 1804, having completed the objects of their journey, Humboldt and Bonpland turned their faces homeward, making a brief trip of a few weeks through the United States, visiting Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, and sailing from this port for Bordeaux, where he arrived in August, 1804, after an absence of nearly five years. In the spring of 1805, he accompanied his sister-in-law to Rome, and spent part of the ensuing summer at Albano, with his brother Wilhelm. Their society was at that time still further enriched by the presence of Madame de Stail, Schlegel, and Sismondi. An anticipated eruption of Vesuvius led hinll to Naples, in company with Gay-Lussac, and he was fortunate in being able to witness the grand outbreak of the 12th of August. After completing his observations, he proceeded to Berlin, and did not return to Paris until 1807, when he established himself there permanently, to superintend the publication of his works. " Humboldt's journey through Russia, Siberia, and Tartary, was his next great enterprise. It was begun in the year 1828. His companions were Ehrenberg and Rose. The results were, like those of his American jouraey, extremely valuable to the science of physical geography. At his suggestion % regular system of meteorological observations was establish.d

216 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMAN'. may be given up to meditation, it is reasonable to encourage the multifariousness of knowledge; the student eventually confines his attention to that pursuit which he prefers; but it is, perhaps, impossible to attain a thorough comprehension of one science, and not to touch upon all. Sir Humphry Davy, although the first chemist in England, studies literature with as much taste as success. Literature and science reflect alternate light upon each other; and the connection which exists between all the objects in nature, must also be maintained among the ideas of man. Universality of knowledge necessarily leads to the desire of discovering the general laws of the order of nature. The Germans descend from theory to experience; while the French ascend from experience to theory. The French reproach the Germans with having no beauties but those of detail in their literature, and with not understanding the composition of a work. The Germans reproach the French with considering in Russia by order of the emperor; and during the twelve years which elapsed between the publication of his Asiatic Fragments (1831), and his Central Asia (1843), Humboldt was in constant communication with Russia, and was regularly furnished with the results of the system of observation which he had instituted. " In September, 1830, Humboldt was sent to Paris by Frederick William III, with a diplomatic mission to acknowledge Louis Phillippe and the new dynasty. Ile was sent a second time in 1831, and on his return visited Weimar, and spent a few hours with Goethe, whose death occurred six months afterwards. In the year 1835, he was called to mourn the loss of his brother William, who died on the 8th of April, and whose literary executor he became. " Since 1842, Humboldt has resided chiefly in Berlin, devoting himself to science and carrying on an enormous correspondence, which continued nearly down to the day of his death, May 6, 1859. The frequent acknowledgments of the labors of the young generation of scientific men, which have appeared from his pen, within the last four or five years, are a sufficient indication of his untiring zeal and well-preserved age. His elaborate work on physical science, entitled Kosmos, was interrupted in 1828, but resumed in 1842 on an enlarged scale, and occupied much of his time during his late years. Five volumes of this production have been published. His other principal works were his magnificent Collections on all subjects of science, published at great cost; the Personal Narrative, Views of Na. ture, Views in the Cordilleras, New Spain, Journey to the Ural, an ICestra. dsia."-Ed.

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 217 only particular facts in the sciences, and with not referring them to a system; in this consists the principal difference between the learned men of the two countries. In fact, if it were possible to discover the principles which govern the universe, this would be the point, indisputably, from which we ought to commence in studying all that is derived from those principles; but we are almnost entirely ignorant of the collective character of every thing, excepting in what detail teaches us; and nature is for man but the scattered Sibyl's leaves, out of which, even to this day, no human being has been able to compose a book. Nevertheless, the learned men of Germany, who are philosophers at the same time, diffuse a surprising interest over the contemplation of the phenomena of this world: they do not examine nature fortuitously, according to the accidental course of what they experience; but they predict, by reflection, what observation is about to confirm. Two great general opinions serve them for guides in studying the sciences: the one, that the universe is made after the model of the human soul; the other, that the analogy of every part of the universe with the whole is so close, that the same idea is constantly reflected from the whole in every part, and from every part in the whole. That is a fine conception, which has a tendency to discover the resemblance between the laws of the human understanding and those of nature, and considers the physical world as the representation of the moral. If the same genius was capable of composing the Iliad and of carving like Phidias, the Jupiter of the sculptor would resemble the Jupiter of the poet. Why then should not the supreme Intelligence, which formed nature and the soul, have made one the emblem of the other? There is no vain play of fancy in those continual metaphors, which aid us in comparing our sentiments with external phenomena; sadness, with the clouded heaven; composure, with the silver moonlight; anger, with the stormy sea: it is the same thought of our Creator, transfused into two different languages, and capable of reciprocal interpretation. Almost VOL. II.-10

218 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. all the axioms of physics correspond with the maxims of morals This species of parallel progress, which may be perceived between the world and the intellect, is the indication of 9 great mystery; and every mind would be struck with it, if any positive discoveries had yet been drawn from this source; but still, the uncertain lustre that already streams from it carries our views to a great distance. The analogies between the different elements of physical nature constitute the chief law of the creation,-variety in unity, and unity in variety. For example, what is there more astonishing than the connection between sounds and forms, and between sounds and colors? A German, Chladni, has lately proved by experiment that the vibrations of sound put grains of sand upon a glass plate in motion after such a manner, that when the tones are pure the sand arranges itself into regular forms, and when the tones are discordant there is no symmetry in the figures traced upon the glass. Sanderson, who was blind from his birth, said that the color of scarlet, in his idea, was like the sound of a trumpet; and a savant has wished tc make a harpsichord for the eyes, which might imitate, by the harmony of colors, the pleasure excited by music. We incessantly compare painting to music, and music to painting, because the emotions we feel discover analogies where cold observation would see only differences. Every plant, every flower, contains the entire system of the universe; an instant of life conceals eternity within it; the weakest atom is a world, and the world itself, perchance, is but an atom. Every portion of the universe appears to be a mirror, in which the whole creation is represented; and we hardly know which is most worthy of our admiration, thought always the same, or form always different. The learned among the Germans may be divided into two classes, those who entirely devote themselves to observation, and those who aspire to the honor of foreseeing the secrets of nature. Of the former we ought first to mention Werner, who has drawn from mineralogy his knowledge of the formation of the globe, and of the epochs of its history; Herschel and

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 219 Schroeter, who are incessantly making new discoveries in the heavenly regions; the calculating astronomers, such as Zach and Bole; and great chemists, like Klaproth and Bucholz; while in the class of philosophical naturalists we must reckon Schelling, Ritter, Bader, Steffens, etc. The most distinguished minds of these two classes approach and understand each other; for the philosophical naturalists cannot despise experience, and the profound observers do not deny the possible results of sublime contemplations. Attraction and impulse have already been the objects of novel inquiry, and they have been happily applied to chemical affinities. Light, considered as a medium between matter and mind, has given occasion for several highly philosophical observations. A work of Goethe upon colors is favorably mentioned. In short, throughout Germany emulation is excited by the desire and the hope of uniting experimental and speculative philosophy, and thus enlarging our knowledge of mall and of nature. Intellectual idealism makes the will, which is the soul, the centre of every thing: the principle of idealism in physical sciences is life. Man reaches the highest degree of analysis by chemistry as he does by reasoning; but life escapes him in chemistry, as sentiment does in reasoning. A French writer had pretended that thought was only a material product of brain. Another savant has said, that when we are more advanced in chemistry we shall be able to tell how life is made: the one outraged nature, as the other outraged the soul. We must, said Fichte, comprehend what is incomprehensible, as such. This singular expression contains a profound meaning: we must feel and recognize what will ever remain inaccessible to analysis, and what the soaring flight of thought alone can approach. Three distinct modes of existence are thought to have been discovered in nature: vegetation, irritability, and sensibility. Plants, animals, and men are included in these three sorts of life, and if we choose to apply even to individuals of our own species this ingenious division, we shall find it equally discerp

220 MADAME DE STAELSS GERMANY. ible among their different characters. Some vegetate like plants; others enjoy themselves, or are irritated like animals; and the more noble possess and display the qualities that distinguish human nature. However this may be, volition, which is life, and life, which also is volition, comprehend all the secret of the universe and of ourselves; and at this secret (as we can neither deny nor explain it) we must necessarily arrive by a kind of divination. What an exertion of strength would it not require to overturn, with a lever made upon the model of the arm, the weight which the arm uplifts! Do we not see every day anger, or some other affection of the soul, augmenting, as by a miracle, the power of the human body? What, then, is this mysterious power of nature, which manifests itself by the will of man? and how, without studying its cause and effects, could we make any important discovery in the theory of physical powers? The doctrine of the Scotch writer, Brown, more profoundly analyzed in Germany than elsewhere,1 is founded upon this eame system of central action and unity, which is so fruitful in its consequences. Brown believed that a state of suffering, or of health, did not depend upon partial evils, but upon the intensity of the vital principle, which is lowered or exalted according to the different vicissitudes of existence. Among the English learned, there is hardly one, besides Hartley, and his disciple Priestley, who has considered metaphysics, as well as physics, under a point of view entirely material. It will be said that physics can be only material; I presume not to be of this opinion. Those who make the soul itself a passive being, have the strongest reason to exclude every spontaneous action of the will of man from the positive Lciences; and yet there are many circumstances in which this power of willing influences the energy of life, and in which life acts upon matter. The principle of existence is, as it were, intermediary between body and soul, whose power cannot be calculated, but yet cannot be denied, unless we are ignorant see Sir Wm. Hamilton's Discussions on, Philosyphy, etc., pp. 40-99. —aEd

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 221:f what constitutes animated nature, and reduce its laws purely to mechanism. Whatever opinion we may form of the system of Dr. Gall,' he is respected by all men of science for his anatomical studies and discoveries; and if we consider the organs of thought as different from thought itself, that is, as the means which it employs, it appears to me that we may admit memory and calculation, the aptitude for this or that science, the talent for any particular art, every thing, in short, which serves as an instrument for the understanding, to depend in some measure on the structure of the brain. If there exists a graduated scale from a stone upwards to the life of man, there must be certain faculties in us which partake of soul and body at once, and of this number are memory and calculation, the most physical of our intellectual, and the most intellectual of our physical faculties. But we should begin to err the moment we attributed an influence over our moral qualities to the structure of the brain; for the will is absolutely independent of our physical faculties: it is in the purely intellectual action of this will that conscience consists; and conscience is, and ought to be, free from the influence of corporeal organization. What should tend to remove from us the responsibility of our actions would be false or bad. 1 "Dr. Joseph Francis Gall, born at Tiefenbrunn, in Suabia (some say in France), A. D. 1757, was led by his studies in cerebral anatomy and in connection with the nervous system, to the conclusion that the brain is not only the organ of the mind, but that it is moreover composed of compartnents corresponding to the mental faculties. Dr. Gall was regarded as a materialist, though many of his disciples have been decided immaterialists' mud he became early associated with his colleague, Dr. Spurzheim, a native -f Longwich, near Treves. Having met with little encouragement in Germany, they removed to Paris, where the new science was received with -pen arms. "Dr. Gall remained the latter part of his life in France, where he prose*uted his inquiries and promulgated his system with zeal and perseverance. tIe died in 1828. Dr. Spurzheim became the apostle of the new science in'ther and remoter lands, having held forth the doctrine of Craniology, before numerous and attentive audiences, in England and America, where ie died in 1832." —(Tennemann, Manual of Philosophy, p. 485.)-Ed.

222 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. A young physician of great ability, Koreff, has already attracted the attention of those who understand him by some entirely new observations upon the principle of life, upon the action of death, upon the causes of insanity. All this restlessness among the men of genius announces some revolution in the very manner of studying the sciences. It is impossible, as yet, to foresee the results of this change; but we may affirm with truth, that, if the Germans suffer imagination to guide them, they spare themselves no labor, no research, no study; and that they unite, in the highest degree, two qualities which seem to exclude each other, patience and enthusiasm. Some learned Germans, pushing their physical idealism still further, contest the truth of the axiom, that there is no action at a distance, and wish, on the contrary, to re-establish spontaneous motion throughout nature. They reject the hypothesis of fluids, the effects of which would, in some points, depend upon mechanic forces, which act and react without the guidance of any independent organization. Those who consider nature as an intelligence, do not attach to this word the same sense which custom has authorized; foi the thought of man consists in the faculty of turning back upon itself, and the intelligence of nature advances straight forward, like the instinct of animals. Thought has self-possession, for it can judge itself; intelligence without reflection is a power always attracted to things without. When nature performs the work of crystallization according to the most regular forms, it does not follow that she understands the mathematics; or, at all events, she is ignorant of her own knowledge, and wants self-consciousness. The German savans attribute a certain individual originality to physical forces; and, on the other side, they appear to admit, in their manner of exhibiting some phenomena of animal magnetism, that the will of. man, without any external act, exerts a very great influence over matter, and especially over metals. Pascal says, that astrologers and alchemists have some prin ziples, but that they abuse them. There were, perhaps, of old, more intimate relations between man and nature than now

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 223 exist. The mysteries of Eleusis, the religion of the Egyptians, the system of emanations among the Indians, the Persian adoration of the elements and the sun, the harmony of numbers, which was the basis of the Pythagorean doctrine, are vestiges of some curious attraction which united man with the universe. Spiritualism, by fortifying the power of reflection, has separated man more from physical influences; and the Reformation, by carrying still further his tendency towards analysis, has put reason on its guard against the primary impressions of the imagination. The Germans promote the true perfection of the human mind, when they endeavor to awaken the inspirations of nature by the light of thought. Experience every day leads the learned to recognize phenomena, which men had ceased to believe, because they were mingled with superstitions, and had been the subjects of presages. The ancients have related that stones fell from heaven; and in our days the accuracy of this fact, the existence of which had been denied, is established. The ancients have spoken of showers red as blood, and of earth-lightnings; we have lately been convinced of the truth of their assertions in these respects. Astronomy and music are the science and art which men have known from all antiquity: why should not sounds and the stars be connected by relations which the ancients perceived, and which we may find out again? Pythagoras maintained that the planets were proportionably at the same distance as the seven chords of the lyre; and it is affirmed, that he predicted the new planet which has been discovered be-'ween Mars and Jupiter.' It appears that he was not ignorant a' the true system of the heavens, the fixedness of the sun; since Copernicus supports himself in this instance upon the opinion of Pythagoras, as recorded by Cicero. From whence then arose these astonishing discoveries, without the aid of i M. Prevost, Professor of Philosophy at Geneva, has published a very interesting pamphlet on this subject. This philosophical writer is as well known in Europe as esteemed ir his own country.

224 MADAME DE STAELL S GERMANY. experience, and of the new machines of which the moderns are in possession? The reason is, that the ancients advanced boldly, enlightened by genius. They made use of reason, on which rests human intelligence; but they also consulted imagination, the priestess of nature. What we call errors and superstitions may, perhaps, depend upon laws of the universe, yet unknown to man. The relations between the planets and metals, the influence of these relations, even oracles and presages, may they not be caused by occult powers, of which we have no idea? And who knows whether there is not a germ of truth hidden under every apologue, under every belief, which has been stigmatized with the name of madness? It assuredly does not follow that we should renounce the experimental method, so necessary in the sciences. But why not furnish a supreme director for this method in a philosophy more comprehensive, which would embrace the universe in its collective character, and would not despise the nocturnal side of nature, in the expectation of being able to throw light upon it? It is the business of poetry, it may be answered, to consider the physical world in this manner; but we can arrive at no certain knowledge except by experience; and all that is not susceptible of proof may be an amusement to the mind, but can lead to no solid progress. Doubtless the French are right in recommending to Germans respect for experience; but they are wrong in turning into ridicule the presages of reflection, which perhaps will hereafter be confirmed by the knowledge of facts. Most great discoveries have at first appeared absurd; and the man of\genius will never do any thing if he dreads ridicule. Ridicule is nerveless when despised, and ascends in influence when feared. We see in fairy tales phantoms that oppose the enterprises of knights, and harass them until they have passed beyond the weird dominion. Then all the witchcraft vanishes, and the fruitful open country is spread before their sight. Envy and mediocrity have also their sorseries; but we ought to march on towards the truth, without Caring for the seeming obstacles that impede our progress.

NEW GERMA N PHILOSOPHY. 22 When Kepler had discovered the harmonic laws that regalate the motion of the heavenly bodies, it was thus that he expressed his joy: "At length, after the lapse of eighteen months, the first dawn of light has shone upon me; and, on this remarkable day, I have perceived the pure irradiation of sublime truths. Nothing now represses me; I dare yield myself up to my holy ardor; I dare insult mankind, by acknowledging that I have turned worldly science to advantage, that I have robbed the vessels of Egypt, to erect a temple to my God. If I am pardoned, I shall rejoice; if blamed, I shall endure it. The die is cast; I have written this book; whether it be read by posterity, or by my contemporaries, is of no consequence; it may well wait for a reader during one century, when God himself, during six thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself." This bold ebullition of a proud enthusiasm exhibits the internal force of genius. Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line. This comparison is so much the more just, because at many epochs the improvement of man seems to be checked, and then returns upon its own steps, having gained some degrees in advance. There are seasons when skepticism is necessary to the piogress of the sciences; there are others, when, according to Hemsterhuis, the marvellous spirit ought to supersede the mathematical. When man is swallowed up, or rather reduced to dust by infidelity, this marvellous spirit can alone restore the power of admiration to the soul, without which we cannot understand nature. The theory of the sciences in Germany has given minds an impulse like that which metaphysics had excited in the study of the soul. Life holds the same rank in physical phenomena, that the will holds in moral order. If the relations between these two systems have caused certain persons to interdict them both, there are those who will discover in these relations the double guarantee of the same truth. It is at least certain, that the interest of the sciences is singularly increased by this planner of referring them all to some leading ideas. Poets 10a

226 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. might find in the sciences a crowd of useful thoughts, if the sciences held communication with each other in the philosophy of the universe; and if this philosophy, instead of being abstract, was animated by the inexhaustible source of sentiment. The universe resembles a poem more than a machine, and if, in order to form a conception of it, we were compelled to avail ourselves of imagination, or of a mathematical spirit, imagination would lead us nearer to the truth. But again let me repeat, we must not make such a choice; since it is the totality of our moral being which ought to be employed in so important a meditation. The new system of general physics, which in Germany serves for a guide to experimental physics, can only be judged by its results. We must see whether it will conduct the human mind to new and established truths. But it is impossible to deny the connection which it proves to exist between the different branches of study. One student usually revolts from the other when their occupations are different, because they are a reciprocal annoyance. The scholar has nothing to say to the poet; the poet to the physicist; and even among savans, those who are differently occupied avoid each other, taking no interest in what is out of their own circle. This cannot be when a central philosophy establishes connections of a sublime nature between all our thoughts. The scientific penetrate nature by the aid of imagination. Poets find in the sciences the genuine beauties of the universe. The learned enrich poetry with the stores of recollection, and the savans with those of analogy. The sciences, represented as isolated, and as a domain foreign to the soul, attract not exalted minds. The greater part of those who have devoted themselves to the sciences, with some honorable exceptions, have given to our times that tendency towards calculation which so well teaches us, in all cases, which is the strongest. The German philosophy intro duces the physical sciences into that universal sphere of ideas where the most minute observations, as well as the most im portant results, pertain to the general interest.

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 227 CHAPTER XI. NFLUENCE OF TTIE NEW PHILOSOPHY UPON THE CHARACTER OF THE GERMANS. IT would appear that a system of philosophy, which attribntes an all-powerful action to what depends upon ourselves, namely, to our will, ought to strengthen the character, and to make it independent of external circumstances; but there is reason to believe that political and religious institutions alone can create public spirit, and that no abstract theory is efficacious enough to give a nation energy: for, it must be confessed, the Germans of our days have not what can be called character. They are virtuous, upright, as private men, as fathers of families, as managers of affairs; but their gracious and complaisant forwardness to support the cause of powei gives especial pain to those who love them, and who believe them to be the most enlightened speculative defenders of the dignity of man. The sagacity of the philosophical spirit alone has taught them, in all circumstances, the cause and the effects of what Happens; and they fancy, when they have found a theory for a fact, that it is all right. Military spirit and patriotism have exalted many nations to the highest possible degree of energy; but these two sources of self-devotion hardly exist among the Germans, taken as a mass. They scarcely know any thing of military spirit but a pedantic sort of tactics, which sanctions their being defeated according to the rules, and as little of liberty, beyond that subdivision into petty kingdoms, which, by accustoming the inhabitants to consider themselves weak is a nation, soon leads them to be weak as individuals.' Re1 1 beg to observe that this chapter, like all the rest of the work. was written at the epoch of Germany's complete servitude, Since, the Ger

228 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. spect for forms is very favorable to the support of law; but this respect, such as it exists in Germany, induces the habit of such punctual and precise proceedings, that they hardly know how to open a new path to reach an object, though it be straight before them. Philosophical speculations are only suited to a small number of thinking men; and, far from serving to combine the strength of a nation, they only place the ignorant and the enlightened at too great a distance from each other. There are too many new, and not enough common ideas circulating in Germany, for the knowledge of men and things. Common ideas are necessary for the conduct of life; business requires the spirit of execution rather than that of invention: whatever is odd in the different modes of thinking in Germany, tends to separate them from each other; for the thoughts and interests which unite men together must be of a simple nature, and of striking truth. Contempt of danger, of suffering, and of death, is not sufficiently universal in all the classes of the German nation. Doubtless, life has more value for men capable of sentiments and ideas, than for those who leave behind them neither trace nor remembrance; but, as poetical enthusiasm gathers fresh vigor from the highest degree of learning, rational firmness ought to fill the place of the instinct of ignorance. It belongs alone to philosophy, founded upon religion, to inspire an unalterable courage under all contingencies. If, however, Philosophy has not appeared to be all-powerful in this respect in Germany, we must not therefore despise her; she supports, she enlightens every man, individually; but a government alone can excite that moral electricity which makes the whole nation feel the same sentiment. We are more offended with the Germans, when we see them deficient in energy, than with the Italians, whose political situation has manic nations, awakened by oppression, have lent to their governments the force wanting to them, in order to resist the power of French armies and it has been seen, by the heroic conduct of sovereigns and peoples, how muach the fortune of the world is influenced by opinion.

NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 2'49 enfeebled their character for several centuries. The Italians, through the whole of life, by their grace and their imagination, preserve a sort of prolonged right to childhood; but the rude physiognomy and manners of the Germans appear to promise a manly soul, and we are disagreeably surprised not to find it. In a word, timidity of character is pardoned when it is confessed; and in this way the Italians have a peculiar frankness, which excites a kind of interest in their favor; while the Germans, not daring to avow that weakness which fits them so ill, are energetic flatterers and vigorous slaves. They give a harsh accent to their words, to hide the suppleness of their opinions, and they make use of philosophical reasonings to explain that which is the most unphilosophical thing in the world-respect for power, and the effeminacy of fear, which turns this respect into admiration. To such contrasts as these we must attribute that German gracelessness, which it is the fashion to mimic in the comedies of all countries. It is allowable to be heavy and stiff, while we remain severe and firm; but if this natural stiffness be clothed with the false smile of servility, then all that remains is to be exposed to merited ridicule. In short, there is a certain want of address in the German character, prejudicial even to those who have the selfish intent of sacrificing every thing to their inteiest; and we are so much the more provoked with them, because they lose the honors of virtue without attaining the profits of adroit management. While we confess the German philosophy to be inadequate to form a nation, we must also acknowledge that the disciples of the new school are much nearer than any of the others to the attainment of strength of character; they dream of it, they desire it, they conceive it; but they often fail in the pursuit. There are few Germans who can even write upon poli. tics. The greater portion of those who meddle with this subject are systematic, and frequently unintelligible. When there is a question of transcendental metaphysics, when an attempt ts made to plunge into the darkness of nature, any view, however indefinite it may be, is not to be despised; every presenti

230 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. ment may guide; every approach to the mark is something. It is not thus with the affairs of the world; it is possible to know them; it is necessary, therefore, to foresee them clearly Obscurity of style, when we treat of thoughts without bounds, is sometimes the very indication of a comprehensive understanding; but obscurity, in our analysis of the affairs of life, only proves that we do not comprehend them. When we introduce metaphysics into business, they confound, for the sake of excusing every thing; and we thus provide a dark fog for the asylum of conscience. This employment of metaphysics would require address, if every thing was not reduced in our times to two very simple and clear ideas, interest or duty. Men of energy, whichever of these two directions they follow, go right onward to the mark, without embracing theories which no longer deceive or persuade anybody. See, then, it may be said, you are reduced to extol, like us, experience and observation. I have never denied that both were necessary for those who meddle with the interests of this world; but it is in the conscience of man that we ought to find the ideal principle of a conduct externally directed by sage calculations. Divine sentiments are subject here below to earthly things; it is the condition of our existence. The beautiful is within our souls, and the struggle is without. We must fight for the cause of eternity, but with the weapons of time; no individual can attain the whole dignity of the human character either by speculative philosophy or by the knowledge of affairs exclusively; and free institutions alone have the advantage of building up a system of public morals in a nation, and of giving exalted sentiments an opportunity of displaying themselves in the practical conduct of life.

ETHICS. 231 CHAPTER XII. OF ETHICS FOUNDED ON PERSONAL INTEREST. TIIE French writers have been perfectly right in consider. ing the ethics founded on interest as the consequence of those metaphysics which attributed all our ideas to our sensations If there is nothing in the soul but what sensation has introduced, the agreeable or the disagreeable ought to be the sole motive of our volitions.' Helvetius, Diderot, Saint-Lambert, 1 "The philosophy of sensation, setting out from a single fact, agreeable or painful sensation, necessarily arrives in ethics at a single principle,-interest. The whole of the system may be explained as follows: " Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other. That is his first instinct, and this instinct will never abandon him. Pleasure may change so far as its object is concerned, and be diversified in a thousand ways: but whatever form it takes,-physical pleasure, intellectual pleasure, moral pleasure, it is always pleasure that man pursues. 1"The agreeable generalized is the useful; and the greatest possible sum of pleasure, whatever it may be, no longer concentrated within such or such an instant, but distributed over a certain extent of duration, is happiness. " Happiness, like pleasure, is relative to him who experiences it; it is essentially personal. Ourselves, and ourselves alone we love, in loving pleasure and happiness. " Interest is that which prompts us to seek in every thing our pleasure and our happiness. " If happiness is the sole end of life, interest is the sole motive of all our -ctions. " Man is only sensible to his interest, but he iUnderstands it well or ill. Nluch art is necessary in order to be happy. We are not ready to give ourselves up to all the pleasures that are offered on the highway of life, without examining whether these pleasures do not conceal many a pain. Present pleasure is not every thing,-it is necessary to take thought for the future; it is necessary to know how to renounce joys that may bring regret, and sacrifice pleasure to happiness, that is to say, to pleasure still, but pleasure more enduring and less intoxicating. The pleasures of the jody are not the only ones,-there are other pleasures, those of mind, wven those of opinion: the sage tempers them by each other.

232 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. have not deviated from this direction; and they have explained all actions (including the devotion of martyrs) by self-love. The English, who, for the most part, profess the experimental philosophy in metaphysics, have yet never brought themselves to support a moral system founded upon interest. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, etc., have declared the moral sense and sympathy to be the source of all virtue. Hume himself, the most skeptical of the English philosophers, could not read without disgust this theory of self-love, which deformed the beauty of the soul. Nothing is more opposite than this system to the whole of their opinions in Germany: consequently, their philosophical and moral writers, at the head of whom we must place Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, have combated it with success. " The ethics of interest are nothing else than the ethics of perfected pleasure, substituting happiness for pleasure, the useful for the agreeable prudence for passion. It admits, like the human race, the words good and evil, virtue and vice, merit and demerit, punishment and reward, but it explains them in its own way. The good is that which in the eyes of reason is conformed to our true interest; evil is that which is contrary to our true interest. Virtue is that wisdom which knows how to resist the enticement of passions, discerns what is truly useful, and surely proceeds to happiness. Vice is that aberration of mind and character that sacrifices happiness to pleasures without duration or full of dangers. Merit and demerit, punishment and reward, are the consequences of virtue and vice:for not knowing how to seek happiness by the road of wisdom, we are punished by not attaining it. The ethics of interest do not pretend to destroy any of the duties consecrated by public opinion; it establishes that all are conformed to our personal interest, and it is thereby that they are duties. To do good to men is the surest means of making them do good to us; and it is also the means of acquiring their esteem, their good-will, and their sympathy,-always agreeable, and often useful. Disinterestedness itself has its explanation. Doubtless there is no disinterestedness in the vulgar sense of the word, that is to say, a real sacrifice of self, which is absurd, but there is the sacrifice of present interest to future interest, of gross and sensual passion to a nobler and more delicate pleasure. Sometimes one renders to himself a bad account of the pleasure that he pursues. and in fault of seeing clearly into his own heart, invents that chimera of disinterestedness of which human nature is incapable, which it cannot even comprehend. " It will be conceded that this explanation of the ethics of interest is not overcharged, that it is faithful." —(Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Bea~ti. tul, and the Good, pp. 229-231.)-Ed.

ETHICS. 233 As the tendency of man towards happiness is the most universal and active of all his inclinations, some have believed that they built morality on the most solid basis, when they said it consisted in the right understanding of our personal interest. This idea has misled men of integrity, and others have purposely abused it, and have only too well succeeded in that abuse. Doubtless the general laws of nature and society make happiness and virtue harmonize; but their laws are subject to very numerous exceptions, and which appear to be more numerous than they really are. By making happiness consist in a quiet conscience, we elude the arguments drawn from the prosperity of vice, and the misfortunes of virtue; but this inward joy, which is entirely of a religious kind, has no relation to that which we designate upon earth by the name of happiness. To call self-devotion or selfishness, guilt or innocence, our personal interest, well or ill understood, is to aim at filling up that abyss which separates the criminal from the virtuous; is to destroy respect; is to weaken indignation; for if morality is nothing but right calculation, he who wants it can only be accused of a flaw in his understanding. It is impossible to feel the noble sentiment of esteem for any one because he is an accurate accountant; nor an energetic contempt for him who errs in his arithmetic. Men have arrived, therefore, by means of this system, at the principal end of all the profligate, who wish to put justice and injustice upon a level, or at least, to consider both as a game well or ill played: the philosophers of this school; accordingly, more frequently use the word fault than crime; for, in their mode of thinking, there is nothing in the conduct of life but skilful or unskilful combinations. We can form no better conception how remorse can be admitted into such a system: the criminal, when he is punished, ought to feel that sort of regret which is occasioned by the failure of a speculation; for if our individual happiness is our principal object, if we are the only end of ourselves, peace must soon be restored between these two near allies-between aim who has done wrong and him who suffers from it. It

234 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. is a proverb almost universally admitted, that every one is free in all that concerns himself alone; now, as in the mora. system, founded upon interest, self is the only question, I know not what answer could be returned to such a speech as the following: "You give me, as the motive for my actions, my own individual benefit; I am much obliged; but the manner of conceiving what this benefit is, necessarily depends upon the variety of character. I am courageous; I can therefore risk the dangers attached to an infraction of the laws better than another: I am ingenious; therefore I trust to more means of escaping punishment; lastly, if it turns out ill, I have sufficient fortitude to endure the consequences of having deceived myself; and I prefer the pleasures and the chances of high play to the monotony of a regular existence." How many French works, in the last century, have commented upon these arguments, which cannot be completely refuted; for, in a matter of chance, one out of a thousand is sufficient to rouse the imagination to every effort for obtaining it; and, certainly, the odds are not a thousand to one against the success of vice. " But," many of the honest partisans of the moral system founded upon interest will say, "this morality does not exclude the influence of religion over the soul." How weak and melancholy a part is left for it! When all the acknowledged philosophical and moral systems are contrary to religion, when metaphysics annihilate the belief of what is invisible, and morals the sacrifice of ourselves, religion remains in our ideas, as the king remained in that constitution which was decreed by the Constituent Assembly. It was a Republic, with a King; and I say the same of all these systems of metaphysical materialism and selfish morality, they are Atheism, with a God. It is easy, then, to foresee what will be sacrificed in the construction of our thoughts, when we only assign a superfluous place to the central idea of the world and of ourselves.' 1," Fontenlle seeing a man led to punishmeLt said,' There is a man who aas calculated badly.' Whence it follows that, if this man, in d',ing

ETHICS. 235 The conduct of man is not truly moral, excepting when he esteems as nothing the happy or unhappy consequences of those actions which his duty has enjoined him. In directing the affairs of the world, we must always keep in our minds the connection of causes and effects, of means and end; but this prudence is to virtue what good sense is to genius: all that is truly beautiful is inspired; all that is disinterested is religious. Calculation is the laborer of genius, the servant of the soul; but if it becomes the master, there is no longer any what he did, could have escaped punishment, he would have calculated well, and his conduct would have been laudable. The action then becomes good or ill according to the issue. Every act is of itself indifferent, and it is lot that qualifies it. "' If the honest is only the useful, the genius of calculation is the highest wisdom; it is even virtue I " But this genius is not within the reach of everybody. It supposes, with long experience of life, a sure insight, capable of discerning all the consequences of actions, a head strong and large enough to embrace and weigh their different chances. The young man, the ignorant, the poor in mind, are not able to distinguish between the good and the evil, the honest and the dishonest. And even in supposing the most consummate prudence, what place remains, in the profound obscurity of human things, for chance and the unforeseen I In truth, in the system of interest well understood, there must be great knowledge in order to be an honest man Much less is necessary for ordinary virtue, whose motto has always been: Do what you ought, let come what may. But this principle is precisely the opposite of the principle of interest. It is necessary to choose between them. If interest is the only principle avowed by reason, disinterestedness is a lie and madness, and literally an incomprehensible monster in well-ordered human nature. "Nevertheless humanity speaks of disinterestedness, and thereby it does not simply mean that wise selfishness that deprives itself of a pleasure for a surer, more delicate, or more durable pleasure. No one has ever believed that it was the nature or the degree of the pleasure sought that constituted disinterestedness. This name is awarded only to the sacrifice of an interest, whatever it may be, to a motive free from all interest. And the human race, not only thus understands disinterestedness, but it believes that such a disinterestedness exists; it believes the human soul capable of it. It admires the devotedness of Regulus, because it does not see what interest could have impelled that great man to go far from his country to seek, among cruel enemies, a frightful death, when he might save lived tranquil and even honored in the midst of his family and his felow-citizens."-(Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and t)he Good pp. 239. 240.)-Ed.

23 3 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. thing grand or noble in man. Calculation, in the conduct of life, ought always to be admitted as the guide, but never as the motive of our actions. It is a good instrument of execution; but the source of the will ought to be of a more elevated nature, and to contain in itself an internal sentiment which compels us to the sacrifice of our personal interests. When an attempt was made to prevent St. Vincent de Paul from exposing himself to too great danger, in order to succor the unfortunate, he replied, "Do you think me so base as to prefer my life to myself?" If the advocates of the ethical system founded upon interest would retrench from this interest all that concerns earthly existence, they would then agree with the most religious men; but still we might reproach them with the faulty expressions in which they convey their meaning. "In fact," it may be said, "this is only a dispute about words; we call useful what you call virtuous, but we also place the well understood interest of men in the sacrifice of their passions to their duties." Disputes about words are always disputes about things: for every man of honesty will confess, that he only uses this or that word from preference for this or that idea. How should expressions, habitually employed upon the most vulgar matters, be capable of inspiring generous sentiments? When we pronounce the words Interest and Utility, shall we excite the same thoughts in our hearts, as when we adjure each other in the name of Devotion and of Virtue? When Sir Thomas Moore preferred perishing on the scaffold to reascending the summit of greatness, by the sacrifice of a scruple of conscience; when, after a year's imprisonment, enfeebled by suffering, he refused to return to the wife and children whom he loved, and to give himself up again to those mental occupations which confer so much vivacity, and at the same time so much tranquillity upon existence; when honor alone, that worldly religion, made an aged king of France return to an English prison, because his son had not kept the promises by means of which he obtained his liberty; when

ETHICS. 237 Christians lived in catacombs, renounced the light of day, and felt the heavens only in their souls; if any one had said, " they had a right understanding of their interest," what an icy chill would have run through the veins at hearing such a speech, and how much better would a compassionate look have revealed to us all that is sublime in such characters! No, assuredly, life is not such a withered thing as selfishness has made it; all is not prudence; all is not calculation; and when a sublime action agitates all the powers of our nature, we do not consider whether the generous man, who sacrifices himself for a manifest good purpose, judiciously calculated his personal interest; we think that he sacrifices all the pleasures, all the advantages of this world; but that a celestial ray descends into his heart, and excites a happiness within him, which has no more resemblance to what we usually adorn with that name, than immortality has to life. It was not, however, without, a motive, that so much importance has been attached to this system of morals founded upon personal interest. Those who support it have the air of supporting a theory only; and it is, in fact, a very ingenious contrivance, for the purpose of riveting the yoke of every kind. No man, however depraved he may be, will deny the necessity of morality; for the very being who is most decidedly deficient in it, would wish to be concerned with those dupes who maintain it. But what address was there in fixing upon prudence as the basis of morality! what an opening it makes for the ascendency of power over the transactions of conscience, over the springs in the human mind by which events are regulated! If calculation ought to preside over every thing, the actions of men will be judged according to their success; the man whose good feelings have been the cause of misfortune, will be justly condemned; the corrupt, but adroit manager, will be justly applauded. In a word, individuals, only considering each other as obstacles or instruments, will hate those who impede them, and will esteem those who serve them, only as means of their success. Guilt itself has more grandeur when

238 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. it arises from the disorder of inflamed passion, than when per. sonal interest is its object; how then allege that to be tile principle of virtue which would dishonor vice itself!' I In Bentham's work on Legislation, published, or rather illustrated, by M. Dumont, there are several arguments on the principle of utility, which agree in many respects with the system of morals founded upon personal interest. The well-known anecdote of Aristides making the Athenians reject a project of Themistocles, by simply telling thenm it wals advantageous but unjust, is quoted by M. Dumont; but he refers the consequences which may be drawn from this trait of character, as well as many others, to the general utility admitted by Bentham as the basis of all our duties. The advantage of each individual, he says, ought to be sacrificed to the advantage of the whole; and that of the present moment to futurity, by taking one step in advance: we may confess, that virtue consists in the sacrifice of time to eternity, and this sort of calculation will certainly not be condemned by the advocates for enthusiasm; but whatever effort so superior a man as M. Dumont may make, he never will be able to render utility and self-devotion synonymous. He asserts, that pleasure and pain are the first motives of human actions; and he then supposes that the pleasure of noble minds consists in voluntarily exposing themselves to the sufferings of real life, in order to obtain enjoyments of a higher nature. Doubtless, we may make out of every word a mirror to reflect all ideas; but, if we are pleased to adhere to the natural signification of each term, we shall perceive, that the man who is told that his own happiness ought to be the end of all his actions, will not be prevented from doing the evil which is expedient for him, except by the fear or the danger of punishment;-fear, that passion braves; danger, that ingenuity hopes to escape.Upon what will you found the idea of justice or injustice, it may be said, if not upon what is useful or hurtful to the greater number? Justice, as to individuals, consists in the sacrifice of themselves to their families; as to families, in their sacrifice to the state; as to the state, in the respect for certain unchangeable principles which constitute the happiness and the safety of the human species. Doubtless, the majority of the generations of men, in the course of ages, will find their account in having followed the path of justice; but, in order to be truly and religiously honest, we ought always to keep in view the worship of moral beauty, independently of all the circumstances which may result from it. Utility is necessarily modiled by avents; virtue ought never to be liable to this influence.

ETHIrS. 239 CHAPTER XIII. OF ETHICS FOUNDED ON NATIONAL INTEREST, NOT only do the ethics founded on personal interest introlnce into the mutual relations of individuals calculations of prudence and selfishness, which banish sympathy, confidence, and generosity; but the ethics of public men, of those who act in the name of nations, must necessarily be perverted by this system. If it is true that the ethics of individuals may be founded upon their interest, it is because entire society tends to order, and punishes those who violate it; but a nation, and especially a powerful state, is an isolated existence, to which the laws of reciprocity cannot be applied. It may be said, with truth, that at the end of a certain number of years unjust nations succumb to the hatred which their injustice inspires; but several generations may pass away before these great crimes are punished; and I know not how we could convince a statesman, under all circumstances, that an action, blamable in itself, is not useful, and that political wisdom and morality are ever in accord: this point, therefore, is not proved; and, on the contrary, it is almost a received axiom, that the two objects cannot be united. Nevertheless, what would become of the human race if ethics were nothing but an old woman's tale, invented to console the weak, until they become stronger? How should it be honored in the private,relations of life, if the government, upon which all turn their eyes, is allowed to dispense with it? and how should this not be allowed, if interest is the foundation of morals? Nobody can deny that there are contingencies, in which those great masses called empires, those great masses which are in a state of nature with relation to each other, find a momentary advantage in committing an act of injustice; and what is momentary with regard to nations, is often a whole age.

240 MADAME DE STAEL' S GERMANY. Kant, in his writings on political ethics, shows, with the greatest force, that no exception can be admitted in the code of duty. In short, when we rely upon circumstances for the justification of an immoral action, upon what principle can we stop at this or that point?.Would not the more impetuous of our natural passions be of much greater power than the calculations of reason, if we admitted public or private interest as an excuse for injustice? When, at the most bloody era of the Revolution, they wished to authorize all crimes, they gave their government the;name of the Committee of Public Safety; this was to illustrate the received maxim, that the safety of the people is the suprene law. The supreme law is justice. When it shall be proved that the earthly interests of a nation may be promoted:by an act of meanness or of injustice, we shall still be equally vile and criminal in committing it; for the integrity of moral Iprinciples is of more consequence than the interests of nations. Individuals and society are answerable, in the first place, for that divine inheritance which ought to be transmitted to the successive generations of mankind. Loftiness of mind, generosity, equity, every magnanimous sentiment, in a word, ought first to be preserved, at our own expense, and even at the expense of others; since they, as well as we, are bound to sac-,rifice themselves to their sentiments. Injustice always sacrifices one portion of society to another. According to what arithmetical calculation is this sacrifice enjoined? Can the majority dispose of the minority, if the former only exceeds the latter by a few voices? The members of one and the same family, a company of merchants, nobles, ecclesiastics, whatever may be their numbers, have not the right of saying that every thing ought to yield to their several interests; but when any assembly of men, let it be as inconsiderable as that of the Romans in their origin; when this assembly, I say, calls itself a nation, then it should be allowed to do any thing for its own advantage! This term Nation would thus become synonymous with that of Legion, which the devil assumes in'the Gospel; but there is no more reason for giving

ETHICS. 241 up the obligations of duty for the sake of a nation than for that of any other collective body of men. It is not the number of individuals which constitutes their importance in a moral point of view. When an innocent person dies on the scaffold, whole generations attend to his misfortune, while thousands perish in a battle without any inquiry after their fate. Whence arises this astonishing difference which men make between an act of injustice committed against an individual, and the death of numbers? The cause is, the importance which all attach to the moral law; it is of a thousand times more consequence than physical life in the universe, and in the soul of each of us, which also is itself a universe. If we make morals only a calculation of prudence and wisdom, a species of economical management, there is something like energy in not wishing to possess it. A sort of ridicule attaches to persons of condition, who still maintain what are called romantic maxims, fidelity in engagements, respect for the rights of individuals, etc. We forgive these scruples in the case of individuals who are independent enough to be dupes at their own expense; but when we consider those who direct the affairs of nations, there are circumstances in which they may be blamed for being just, and have their integrity objected to them; for if private morals are fbunded upon personal interest, there is much more reason for public morals to be founded upon national interest; and these morals, upon occasion, may make a duty of the greatest crimes: so easy is it to reduce to an absurdity whatever wanders from the simple grounds of truth. Rousseau said, "that it was not allowable for a nation to purchase the most desirable revolution with the blood of one innocent person:" these simple words comprehend all that is true, sacred, divine, in the destiny of man. It assuredly was not for the advantages of this life, to secure some additional enjoyments to some days of existence, and to delay a little the death of some dying zreatures, that conscience and religion were bestowed upon man. It was for this, that geings in possession of free-will might choose justice and sacri. flee utility, might prefer the future to the present, the invisible VOL. II.-11

242 MADAMR DE STAEL S GERMANY. to the visible, and the dignity of the human species to the mere preservation of individuals. Individuals are virtuous when they sacrifice their private interest to the general good;1 but governments in their turn, are individuals, who ought to sacrifice their personal advan tages to the law of duty: if the morals of statesmen were only 1 "If the good is that alone which must be the mlost useful to the greatest number, where can the good be found, and who can discern it? In order to know whether such an action, which I propose to myself to do, is good or bad, I must be sure, in spite of its visible and direct utility in the present moment, that it will not become injurious in a future that I do not yet know. I must seek whether, useful to mine and those that surround me, it will not have counter-strokes disastrous to the human race, of which I must think before all. It is important that I should know whether the money that I am tempted to give this unfortunate who needs it, 6ould not be otherwise more usefully employed. In fact, the rule is here the greatest good of the greatest number. In order to follow it, what calculations are imposed on me? In the obscurity of the future, in the uncertainty of the somewhat remote consequences of every action, the surest way is to do nothing that is not related to myself, and the last result of a prudence so refined is indifference and egoism. Supposing you have received a deposit from an opulent neighbor, who is old and sick, a sum of which lie has no need, and without which your numerous family runs the risk ot dying with famine. He calls on you for this sum-what will you do? The greatest number is on your side, and the greatest utility also; for this sum is insignificant for your rich neighbor, while it will save your family from misery, and perhaps from death. Father of a family, I should like much to know in the name of what principle you would hesitate to retain the sum which is necessary to you? Intrepid reasoner, placed in the alterna. tive of killing this sick old man, or of letting your wife and children die of hunger, in all honesty of conscience you ought to kill him. You have the right, it is even your duty to sacrifice the less advantage of a single person to much the greater advantage of a greater number; and since this principle is the expression of true justice, you are only its minister in doing what you do. A vanquishing enemy or a furious people threaten destruction to a whole city if there be not delivered up to them the head of such a man, who is, nevertheless, innocent. In the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, this man will be immolated without scruple. It might even be maintained that innocent to the last, he has ceased to be so, since he is an obstacle to the public good. It having once been declared that justice is the interest of the greatest number, the only question is to know where this interest is. Now, here, doubt is impossible; there. iore, it is perfectly just to offer innocence as a holocaust to public safety. This consequence must be accepted, or the principle rejected."-(Cousin Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, pp. 267, 268.)-Ed.

ETHICS. 243 founded on the public good, their morals might lead them into sin, if not always, at least sometimes; and a single justified exception would be sufficient to annihilate all the morals in the world; for all true principles are absolute: if two and two do not make four, the deepest algebraic computations are absurd; and if, in theory, there is a single case in which a man ought not to do his duty, every philosophical and religious maxim is overturned, and nothing remains but prudence or hypocrisy. Let me be permitted to adduce the example of my father, since it is directly applicable to the point in question. It has been often repeated, that M. Necker was ignorant of human nature, because on many occasions he refused to avail himself of means of corruption or violence, the advantages of which were believed to be certain. I may venture to say, that nobody can read the works of M. Necker, entitled The History of the French Revolution, — The Executive Power in Great States, etc., without finding in them enlightened views of the human heart; and I shall not be contradicted by any of those who have lived in intimacy with M. Necker, when I assert, that, notwithstanding his admirable goodness of disposition, he had to guard himself against a too lively talent for ridicule, and rather a severe mode of estimating mediocrity of mind and soul: what he has written upon the Hajppiness of Fools appears to me enough to prove it. In a word, as, in addition to all these qualities, he was eminently a man of wit, nobody surpassed him in the delicate and profound knowledge of those with whom he was connected; but he was determined, by a decision of his conscience, never to shrink from any consequences whatever which might result from an obedience to the commands of duty. We may judge differently concerning the events of the French Revolution; but I believe it to be impossible for an impartial observer to deny that such a principle, generally adopted, would have saved France from the misfortunes under which she has groaned, and from what is still worse, the example which she has displayed. During the most fatal epochs of the reign of terror, many

244 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. honest men accepted offices in the administration, and even in the criminal tribunals, either to do good or to diminish the evil which was committed in them; and all defended themselves by a mode of reasoning very generally received, that they prevented a villain from occupying the place they filled, and thus rendered service to the oppressed. To allow ourselves the use of a bad means for an end which we believe to be good, is a maxim of conduct singularly vicious in its principle. Men know nothing of the future, nothing of themselves with respect to the morrow; in every circumstance, and at every moment, duty is imperative, and the calculations of wisdom, as to consequences which it may foresee, ought to be of no account in the estimate of duty. What right have those who were the instruments of a seditious authority to keep the title of honest men, because they committed unjust actions in a gentle manner? Rudeness in the execution of injustice would have been much better, for the difficulty of supporting it would have increased; and the most mischievous of all alliances is that of a sanguinary decree and a polite executioner. The benevolence we may exercise in detail is no compensation for the evil which we cause by lending the support of our names to the party that uses them. We ought to profess the worship of virtue upon earth, in order that not only our contemporaries, but our posterity may feel its influence. The ascendency of a brave example endures many years after the objects of a transitory charity have ceased to exist. The most important lesson that we can give to a man in this world, and particularly with relation to public affairs, is, not to compromise duty for any consideration. " When we set about bargaining with circumstances, all is lost; for there is nobody who cannot plead this excuse. One has a wife, children or nephews, who are in need of fortunes; others want active employment, or allege I know not what This is the passage which gave the greatest offence to the Literary Police.

ETHICS. 245 virtuous pretexts, which all lead to the necessity of their havy,ng a place, to which money and power are attached. Are we not weary of these subterfuges, of which the Revolution furnished incessant examples? We met none but persons who complained of having been forced to quit the repose they preferred to every thing, the domestic life into which they were impatient to return; and we were well aware that these very persons had employed their days and nights in praying that they might be obliged to devote their days and nights to public affairs, which could have entirely dispensed with their services." The ancient lawgivers made it a duty for the citizens to be concerned in political interests. The Christian religion ought to inspire a disposition of entirely another nature, that of obeying authority, but of keeping ourselves detached from the affairs of state, when they may compromise our conscience. The difference which exists between the ancient and modern governments explains this opposite manner of considering the relations of men towards their country. The political science of the ancients was intimately united with their religion and morals; the social state was a body full of life. Every individual considered himself as one of its members. The smallness of states, the number of slaves, which still further contracted that of the citizens, all made it a duty to act for a country which had need of every one of its children. Magistrates, warriors, artists, philosophers, almost the gods themselves, mingled together upon the public arena; and the same men, by turns, gained a battle, exhibited a masterpiece of art, gave laws to their country, or endeavored to discover the laws of the universe. If we make an exception of the very small number of free governments, the greatness of modern states, and the concentration of monarchical power, have rendered politics entirely negative, if we may so express ourselves. The business is, to prevent one person from annoying another; anid government is charged with the high sort of polices which permits every one to enjoy the advantages of peace and social order, while

246 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMSANY. he purchases this security by reasonable sacrifices. The divine Lawgiver of mankind, therefore, enjoined that morality which was most adapted to the situation of the world under the Roman empire, when he laid down as a law the payment of tributes, and submission to government in all that duty does not forbid; but he also recommended a life of privacy in the strongest manner. Men who are ever desirous of reducing their peculiar inclinations to a theory, adroitly confound ancient and Christian morals. "It is necessary, they say," "like the ancients, to serve our country, and to be useful citizens in the state:" "it is necessary," they say, "like the Christians, to submit ourselves to power established by the will of God." It is thus that a mixture of the system of non-resistance with that of action produces a double immorality; when taken singly, they had both claims to respect. The activity of the Greek and Roman citizens, such as it could be exercised in a republic, was a noble virtue. The force of Christian non-resistance is also a virtue, and one of great power; for Christianity, which is accused of weakness, is invincible in its own spirit, that is, in the energy of refusal. But the tricky selfishness of ambitious men teaches them the art of combining opposite arguments; so that they can meddle with every thing like Pagans, ond submit to every thing like Christians. "The universe, my friend, regards not thee.' is, however, what we may say to all the universe, phenomena excepted. It would be a truly ridiculous vanity to assign as a motive for political activity in all cases the pretext of that tervice which we may render our country. This sort of usei'alness is hardly ever more than a pompous name, which covers personal interest. The art of sophists has always been to oppose one duty to another. We incessantly imagine circumstances in which this frightful perplexity may exist. The greater part of dramatic fictions are founded upon it. Yet real life is more simple; we there frequently see virtues opposed to interests; but perhaps

ETHICS. 247.t ls true, that no honest man could ever doubt, on a y occa3ion, what his duty enjoined. The voice of conscience is so delicate, that it is easy to stifle it; but it is so clear, that it is impossible to mistake it. A known maxim contains, under a simple form, all the theory of morals: Do what you ought, happen what will. When we decide, on the contrary, that the probity of a public man consists in sacrificing every thing to the temporal advantages of his nation, then many occasions may be found, in which we may become immoral by our morality. This sophism is as contradictory in its substance as in its form: this would be to treat virtue as a conjectural science, and as entirely submitted to circumstances in its application. May God guard the human heart from such a responsibility I the light of our understanding is too uncertain to enable us to judge of the moment when the eternal laws of duty may be suspended; or, rather, this moment does not exist. If it was once generally acknowledged, that national interest itself ought to be subordinate to those nobler thoughts which constitute virtue, how would the conscientious man be at his ease I how would every thing in politics appear clear to him, when, before, a continual hesitation made him tremble at every step I It is this very hesitation which has caused honest men to be thought incapable of state affairs; they have been accused of pusillanimity, of weakness, of fear; and, on the contrary, those who have carelessly sacrificed the weak to the powerful, and their scruples to their interests, have been called men of an energetic nature. It is, however, an easy energy which tends to our own advantage; or, at least, to that of the ruling faction; for every thing that is done according to the sense of the multitude invariably partakes of weakness, let it appear ever so violent. The race of men, with a loud voice, demand the sacrifice of every thing to their interest; and finish by compromising this interest from the very wish for such a sacrifice: but it should uow be said to them, that their happiness itself, which has ieen made so general a pretext, is not sacred, excepting in its

248 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. compatibility with morals; for, without morals, of what con, sequence would the whole body be to each individual? When once we have said that morals ought to be sacrificed to national interest, we are very liable to contract the sense of the word Nation from day to day, and to make it signify at first our own partisans, then our friends, and then our family; which is but a decent synonym for ourselves. CHIPTER XIV. OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ETHICS IN THE NEW GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. THE idealistic philosophy has a tendency, from its very nature, to refute the ethics founded on individual or national interest; it does not allow temporal happiness to be the end of our existence; and, referring every thing to the life of the soul, it is to the exercise of the will, and of virtue, that it attaches our thoughts and actions. The works' which Kant has written upon ethics have a reputation at least equal to those which he has composed upon metaphysics. Two distinct inclinations, he says, appear manifest in man: personal interest, which he derives from the attraction of his sensations; and universal justice,' which arises from his rela1 Those who are unable to read Kant in German, may consult with profit Semple's translation of the Metaphysics of Ethics.-Ed. 2 1"The good for Kant is what is obligatory. But logically, whence comes the obligation of performing an action, if not from the intrinsic goodaess of this act? Is it not because that, in the order of reason, it is absolutely impossible to regard a deposit as a property, that we cannot appropriate it to ourselves without a crime? If one action must be performed and another action must not, it is because there is apparently an essentia difference between these two acts. To found the good on obligation, in%tead of founding obligation on the good, is, therefore, to take the effect for the cause, is to draw the principle from the consequence.

ETHICS. 249 tions to the human race, and to the Divinity: between these two impulses Conscience decides; she resembles Minerva, who made the balance incline, when the votes were equal in the Areopagus. Have not the most opposite opinions facts for their support? Would not " the for" and " the against" be': If I ask an honest man who, in spite of the suggestions of misery, has respected the deposit that was intrusted to him, why he respected it, he will answer me-because it was my duty. If I persist, and ask why it was his duty, he will very rightly answer,-because it was just, because it was good. That point having been reached, all answers are stopped; but questions also are stopped. No one allows a duty to be imposed upon him without rendering to himself a reason for it; but as soon as it is recognized that this duty is imposed upon us because it is just, the mind is satisfied; for it reaches a principle beyond which it has nothing more to seek, justice being its own principle. First truths carry with them their reason for being. Now, justice, the essential distinction between good and evil in the relations of men among themselves, is the primary truth of ethics. "' Justice is not a consequence, since we cannot ascend to another more elevated principle; and duty is not, rigorously speaking, a principle, since it supposes a principle above it, that explains and authorizes it, to wit, justice. " Moral truth no more becomes relative and subjective, to take for a moment the language of Kant, in appearing to us obligatory, than truth becomes relative and subjective in appearing to us necessary; for in the very nature of truth and the good must be sought the reason of necessity and obligation. But if we stop at obligation and necessity, as Kant did, in ethics as well as in metaphysics, without knowing it, and even against our intention, we destroy, or at least weaken the truth and the good. " Obligation has its foundation in the necessary distinction between good tlnd evil; and is itself the foundation of liberty. If man has duties, he must possess the faculty of fulfilling them, of resisting desire, passion, and interest, in order to obey law. He ought to be free, therefore he is free, or human nature is in contradiction with itself. The direct certainty of obligation implies the corresponding certainty of liberty.'" This proof of liberty is doubtless good; but Kant is deceived in supposing it the only legitimate proof. It is very strange that he should have preferred the authority of reasoning to that of consciousness, as if the former had no need of being confirmed by the latter; as if, after all, my liberty ought not to be a fact for me. Empiricism must be greatly feared to distrust the testimony of consciousness; and, after such a distrust, one must be very credulous to have a boundless faith in reasoning. We do not beleve in our liberty as we believe in the movement of the earth. The profoundest persuasion that we have of it comes from the continual experience that we carry with ourselves."-(Cousin, Lectures on the 1Tr', the Beauti f,. and the Good, pp. 284-286.)-Ed. 11*

250 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. equally true, if Conscience did not carry with her the supreme certainty. Man, who is placed between visible and almost equal argu ments, which direct the circumstances of his life in favor of good or evil, —man has received from heaven the sentiment of duty, to decide his choice. Kant endeavors to demonstrate that this sentiment is the necessary condition of our moral being; the truth which precedes all those the knowledge of which is acquired by life. Can it be denied that conscience has more dignity, when we believe it to be an innate power, than when we consider it in the light of a faculty acquired, like all others, by experience and habit? And it is in this point, especially, that the idealistic metaphysics exert a great influence over the moral conduct of man: they attribute the same primitive force to the notion of duty as to that of space and time; and, considering them both as inherent in our nature, they admit no more doubt of one than of the other. All our esteem for ourselves and for others ought to be founded on the relations which exist between our actions and the law of duty; this law depends, in no case, on the desire of happiness; on the contrary, it is often summoned to combat that desire. Kant goes still further; he affirms, that the first effect of the power of virtue is to cause a noble pain by the sacrifices which it demands. The destination of man upon this earth is not happiness, but the advance towards moral perfection. It is in vain that, by a childish play of words, this improvement is called happiness;,we clearly feel the difference between enjoyments and sacrifices; and if language were to adopt the same terms for such discordant ideas, our natural judgment would reject the deception. It has been often said, that human nature has a tendency towards happiness: this is its involuntary instinct; but the instinct of reflection is virtue. By giving man very little influ. ence over his own happiness, and means of improvement with. out number, the intention of the Creator was surely not to make the object of our lives an almost unattainable end. Deo

ETHICS. 251 vote all your powers to the attainment of happiness; control your character, if you can, to such a degree as not to feel those wandering desires, which nothing can satisfy; and, in spite of all these wise arrangements of self-love, you will be afflicted with disorders, you will be ruined, you will be imprisoned, and all the edifice of your selfish cares will be overturned. It may be replied to this: " I will be so circumspect, that I will not have any enemies." Let it be so; you will not have to reproach yourself with any acts of generous imprudence; but sometimes we have seen the least courageous among the persecuted. "I will manage my fortune so well, that I will preserve it." I believe it; but there are universal disasters, which do not spare even those whose principle has been never to expose themselves for others; and illness, and accidents of every kind, dispose of our condition in spite of ourselves. How then should happiness be the end of our moral liberty in this short life; happiness, which chance, suffering, old age, and death, put out of our power? The case is not the same with moral improvement; every day, every hour, every minute, may contribute to it; all fortunate and unfortunate events equally assist it; and this work depends entirely on ourselves, whatever may be our situation upon earth. The moral system of Kant and Fichte is very analogous to that of the Stoics; but the Stoics allowed more to the ascendency of natural qualities; the Roman pride is discoverable in their manner of estimating mankind. The disciples of Kant believe in the necessary and continual action of the will against evil inclinations. They tolerate no exceptions in our obedience to duty, and reject all excuses which can act as motives to such exceptions. The theory of Kant concerning veracity is an example of this; he rightly considers it as the basis of all morality. When the Son of God called himself the Logos, or the Word, perhaps he wished to do honor to that admirable faculty in language Df revealing what we think. Kant has carried his respect for truth so far, as not to permit a violation of it, even if a villain'ame and demanded, whether your friend, whom he pursued,

2.52 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. washidden in your house. He pretends, that we ought never to allow ourselves, in any particular instance, to do that which would be inadmissible as a general law; but, on this occasion, he forgets that we may make a general law of not sacrificing truth, excepting to another virtue; for, as soon as personal interest is removed from a question, we need not fear sophisms, and conscience pronounces with equity upon all things. The theory of Kant in morals is severe, and sometimes dry; for it excludes sensibility. He regards it as a reflex act of sensation, and as certain to lead to passions in which there is always a mixture of selfishness; it is on this account that he does not admit sensibility for a guide, and that he places morals under the safeguard of unchangeable principles. There is nothing more severe than this doctrine; but there is a severity which softens us, even when it treats the impulses of the heart as objects of suspicion, and endeavors to banish them all: however rigorous a moralist may be, when he addresses our conscience, he is sure to touch us. He who says to man, " Find every thing in yourself," always raises up in the soul some noble object, which is connected with that very sensibility whose sacrifice it demands. In studying the philosophy of Kant, we must distinguish sentiment from sensibility; he admits the former as the judge of philosophical truth; he considers the latter as properly subject to the conscience. Sentiment and conscience are terms employed almost as synonyms in his writings; but sensibility approaches much nearer to the sphere of emotions, and consequently to that of the passions which they originate. We cannot grow weary of admiring those writings of Kant. in which the supreme law of duty is held up as sacred; what genuine warmth, what animated eloquence, upon a subject, where the only ordinary endeavor is restraint I We feel penetrated with a profound respect for the austerity of an aged philosopher, constantly submitted to the invisible power of virtue, which has no empire but that of conscience, no arms but those of remorse; no treasures to distribute but the inward enjoyments of the soul; the hope of which cannot be offered

rETHrS. 253 as a motive for their attainment, because they are incomprehensible until they are experienced. Among the German philosophers, some men of virtue, not inferior to Kant, and who approach nearer to religion in their inclinations, have attributed the origin of the moral law to religious sentiment. This sentiment cannot be of the nature of those which may grow into passions. Seneca has depicted its calmness and profundity by saying, "In the bosom of the virtuous man I know not what God, but a God has habitation." Kant pretended, that it was to impair the disinterested purity of morals, to present the perspective of a fiuture life, as the end of our actions; many German writers have completely refuted him on this point. In effect, the immortality of heaven has no relation to the rewards and punishments, of which we form an idea on this earth. The sentiment which makes us aspire to immortality is as disinterested as that which makes us find our happiness in devoting ourselves to the happiness of others; for the first offering of religious felicity is the sacrifice of self; and it is thus necessarily removed from every species of selfishness. Whatever we may attempt, we must return to the acknowledgment; that religion is the true foundation of morality; it is that sensible and real object within us, which can alone divert our attention from external objects. If piety did not excite sublime emotions, who would sacrifice even sensual pleasures, however vulgar they might be, to the cold dignity of reason? We must begin the internal history of man with religion, or with sensation; for there is nothing animated besides. The moral system, founded upon personal interest, would be as evident as a mathematical truth, were it not for its exercising more control over the passions which overturn all calculations; nothing but a sentiment can triumph over a sentiment; the violence of nature can only be conquered by its exaltation. Reasoning, in such a case, is like the schoolmaster in la Fontaine; nobody listens to him, and all the world is crying out for help. Jacobi, as I shall show in the analysis of his works, has

254 MADAME DE STAEL S GFRMANY. opposed the arguments which Kant uses, in order to avoid the admission of religious sentiment as the basis of morality. He believes, on the contrary, that the Divinity reveals himself to every man in particular, as he revealed himself to the human race, when prayers and works had prepared the heart to comprehend him. Another philosopher asserts, that immortality already commences upon this earth, for him who desires and feels in himself the taste for eternal things: another affirms, that nature forces man to understand the will of God; and that there is in the universe a groaning and imprisoned voice, which invites us to deliver the world and ourselves, by combating the principle of evil, under all its fatal appearances. These different systems are influenced by the imagination of each writer, and are adopted by those who sympathize with him; but the general direction of these opinions is ever the same: to free the soul from the influence of external objects; to place the empire of ourselves within us; and to make duty the law of this empire, and its hope another life. Without doubt, the true Christians have taught the same doctrine at all periods; but what distinguishes the new German school, is their uniting to all these sentiments, which they suppose to be equally inherited by the simple and ignorant, the highest philosophy and the most precise species of knowledge. The era of pride had arrived, in which we were told that reason and the sciences destroyed all the prospects of imagination, all the terrors of conscience, every belief of the heart; and we blushed for the half of our nature which was declared weak and almost foolish. But men have made their appearance, who, by dint of thinking, have found out the theory of all natural impressions; and, far from wishing to stifle theml, they have discovered to us the noble source from which they spring. The German moralists have raised up sentiment and enthusiasm from the contempt of a tyrannical reason, which counted as gain only what is destroyed, and placed man and nature on the bed of Procrustes, that every part of them might be cut off, which the philosophy of materialism coulc not lmnderstand.

rrmcs. 255 CHAPTER XV. OF SCIENTIFIC ETHICS. SINCE the taste for the exact sciences has taken hold of men's minds, they have wished to prove every thing by dem onstration; and the calculation of probabilities allowing them to reduce even what is uncertain to rules, they have flattered themselves that they could resolve mathematically all the difficalties offered by the nicest questions, and extend the dominion of Algebra over the universe. Some philosophers in Germany have also pretended to give to ethics the advantages of a science rigorously proved in its principles as well as in its consequences, and not admitting either of objection or exception, if the first basis of it be adopted. Kant and Fichte have attempted this metaphysical labor, and Schleiermacher, the translator of Plato, and the author of several religious treatises, of which we shall speak in the next section, has published a very deep book, on the examination of different systems of ethics considered as a science. He wished to find out one, all the reasoning of which should be perfectly linked together, in which the principle should involve all the consequences, and every consequence reproduce the principle; but, at present, it does not appear that this object is attainable. The ancients also were desirous of making a science of ethics, but they included in this science laws and government; in fact, it is impossible to determine beforehand all the duties of life, when we do not know what may be required by the laws and manners of the country in which we are placed; it is in this point of view that Plato has imagined his Republic. Man entire is, in that work, considered in relation to religion, to politics, and to morals; but, as that republic could not exist, Due cannot conceive how, in the midst of the abuses of humar

256 MADAME DE STAELS8 GERMANY. society, a code of morals, such as that would be, could supply the habitual interpretation of conscience. Philosophers aim at the scientific form in all things; one would say, they flatter themselves that they shall thus chain down the future, and withdraw themselves entirely from the yoke of circumstances; but what frees us from them is the soul, the sincerity of our ~lward love of virtue. The. science of morals can no more teach us to be honest men, in all the magnificence of that expression, than geometry to draw, or literary rules to invent. Kant, who had admitted the necessity of sentiment in metaphysical truths, was willing to dispense with it in morals, and he was never able to establish incontestably more than this one great fact of the human heart, that ethics have duty, and not interest, for their basis; but to understand duty, conscience and religion must be our teachers. Kant, in separating religion from the motives of ethics, could only see in conscience a judge, and not a divine voice, and therefore he has been incessalntly presenting to that judge points of difficulty; the solutions of them which he has given, and which he thought evident, have been attacked in a thousand ways; for it is by sentiment alone that we ever arrive at unanimity of opinion among men. Some German philosophers, perceiving the impossibility of reducing into law all the affections of which our nature is composed, and of making a science, as it were, of all the emotions of the heart, have contented themselves with affirming that ethics consist in a feeling of harmony within ourselves. Undoubtedly, when we feel no remorse, it is probable we are not criminal; and even when we may have committed what are faults according to the opinions of others, if we have done our duty according to our own opinion, we are not guilty; but we must nevertheless be cautious in relying on this self-satisfaction, which ought, it should seem, to be the best proof of virtue. There are men who have brought themselves to take their own pride for conscience; fanaticism, in others, is a driinterested medium, which justifies every thing in their eyes; and in some characters, the habit of committing crimes giver

JACOBI. 257 a kind of strength which frees them from repentance, at least as long as they are untouched by misfortune. It does not follow from this impossibility of discovering a science in ethics, or any universal signs, by which to know whether its precepts are observed, that there are not some positive duties which may serve as our guides; but as there are in the destiny of man both necessity and liberty, so, in his conduct, there ought to be inspiration and method. Nothing that belongs to virtue can be either altogether arbitrary or altogether fixed: thus, it is one of the miracles of religion, that it unites, in the same degree, the exultation of love and submission to the law; thus the heart of man is at once satisfied and directed. I shall not here give an account of all the systems of scientific ethics which have been published in Germany; there are some of them so refined, that, although treating of our own nature, one does not know on what to rest for the conception of them. The French philosophers have rendered ethics singularly dry, by referring every thing to self-interest. Some German metaphysicians have arrived at the same result, by nevertheless building all their doctrines on sacrifices. Neither systems of materialism, nor those of abstraction, can give a complete idea of virtue. CHAPTER XVI. JACOBI. IT would be difficult in any country, to meet with a man of letters of a more distinguished nature than Jacobi; with every.dvantage of person and fortune, he devoted himself, from his Touth, during forty years, to meditation. Philosophy is ordinarily a consolation or an asylum; but he who makes choice of it when circumstances concur to promise him great success

258 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. in the world, is the more worthy of respect. Led by his character to acknowledge the power of sentiment, Jacobi busied himself with abstract ideas, principally to show their insunfficiency. His writings on metaphysics are much esteemed in Germany; yet it is chiefly as a great moralist that his reputation is universal.' "1 A friend of Hamann E. H. Jacobi, advanced a theory totally at variance with the Critical and Dogmatical systems which then divided the philosophical world, and allied to the more noble kind of mysticism. He possessed a profound and religious mind, with lively and genial powers of expression and a sincere hatred of the empty formularies of systemmakers. The last principle he carried so far as almost to show himself an enemy of philosophical reason itself, from a conviction that a consistent dogmatical theory, like that of Spinoza, which admitted no truth without demonstration, could conduct only to Determinism and Pantheism; while the Critical theory, by its prejudice in favor of demonstrative and mediate knowledge, was led to reject all cognitions of supersensuous objects, without being able to establish their reality by means of practical rational belief. He was thus led to found all philosophical knowledge on Belief, which he describes as an instinct of reason,-a sort of knowledge produced by an immediate feeling of the mind,-a direct apprehension without proof of the True and Supersensuous; drawing at the same time a clear distinction between such belief and that which is positive. All knowledge gives us only a second-hand conviction. The external world is revealed to us by means of the external senses; but objects imperceptible to the senses, such as the Deity, Providence, Free-will, Immortality, and Morality, are revealed to us by an internal sense, the organ of Truth, which assumed at a later date the title of Reason, as being the faculty adapted for the apprehension of Truth. This twofold revelation (of the material and the immaterial worlds) awakens man to self-consciousness, with a feeling of his superiority to external Nature, or a sense of Free-will. Man cognizes God and Freedom immediately through the reason. In the same manner, Jacobi would found the principles of Morality on Sentiment. Reason, as the faculty of the Ideas, which reveal themselves to the Internal Sense, supplies philosophy with its materials: the Understanding, or the faculty of logical conceptions, gives these a form. It is thus that he has expressed himself in his later works. }He admits the great merit of Kant in destroying the vain labor of theorists, and establishing a pure system of practical philosophy, but differs from him by asserting that not only practical but also theoretical cognitions, relative to real but supersensuous objects, are immediate; and alleges that the Critical system annihilates not only rational but also sensational apprehension (Wahrnehmung). At the same time he maintains the impossibility of any genuine philosophical Science. Jacobi at first expressed himself somewhat obscurely on this principle of wn internal revelation and consequent belief, the corner-stone of his syo

JACOBI. 259 He was the first who attacked ethics founded on interest; and, by assigning as the principle of his own system, religious sentiment considered philosophically, he has created a doctrine distinct from that of Kant, who refers every thing to the inflexible law of duty, and from that of the new metaphysicians, who aim, as I have just said, at applying the strictness of science to the theory of virtue. Sclliller, in an epigram against Kant's system of morals, says, " I take pleasure in serving my friends; it is agreeable to me to perform my duty; this makes me uneasy, for then I am not virtuous." This pleasantry carries with it a deep sense; for, although happiness ought never to be our object in fulfilling our duty, yet the inward satisfaction which it affords us is precisely what may be called the beatitude of virtue. This word Beatitude has lost something of its dignity; it must, however, be recurred to, for it is necessary to express that kind of impression which makes us sacrifice happiness, or at least pleasure, to a gentler and a purer state of mind. In fact, if sentiment does not second morality, how would the latter make itself respected? How could reason and will be united together, if not by sentiment, when the will has to control the passions? A German philosopher has said, that there is no philosophy but the Christian religion; and certainly he did not so express himself to exclude philosophy, but because he was convinced that the highest and the deepest ideas led to the discovery of the singular agreement between that religion and the nature of man. Between these two classes of moralists, that which with Kant, and others still more abstracted, refers all the actions of morality to immutable precepts, and that which with Jacobi declares that every thing is tem. In consequence of this obscurity arose a multitude of objections and misapprehensions, which were also provoked by his neglecting to discriminate accurately between Reason and Understanding; and by the opposition between his theistical theory of Belief and Sensation, and the systems of lis contemporaries, as well as the want of systematic arrangement it be. rayed. We must not, however, be blind to the indirect services which he kas rendered to the cause of philosophy in Germany."-(Tennemann~ l1anual of Philosophy, pp. 454-456.)-Ed.

260 MADAME DE STAELS8 GERMANY. to be left to the decision of sentiment, Christianity seems to show the wonderful point, at which the positive law has not excluded the inspiration of the heart, nor that inspiration the positive law. Jacobi, who has so much reason to confide in the purity of his conscience, was wrong to lay down as a principle, that we should yield entirely to whatever the emotions of the soul may suggest. The dryness of some intolerant writers, who admit ino modification or indulgence in the application of some precepts, has driven Jacobi into the contrary excess. When the French moralists are severe, they are so to a degree that destroys individual character in man; it is the spirit of the nation to love authority in every thing. The German philosophers, and Jacobi above all, respect what constitutes the particular existence of every being, and judge of actions by their source-that is, according to the good or bad impulse which causes them. There are a thousand ways of being a very bad man, without offending against any received law, as a detestable tragedy may be written, without any neglect of theatrical rules and effect. When the soul has no natural spring, it seeks to know what ought to be said, and what ought to be done, in every circumstance, that it may be acquitted towards itself, and towards others, by submitting to what is ordained. The law, however, in morality, as in poetry, can only teach what ought not to be done; but, in all things, what is good and sublime, is only revealed to us by the divinity of our heart. Public utility, as I have explained it in the preceding chapter, might lead us to be immoral by morality. In the relations of private life, on the contrary, it may sometimes happen, that a conduct which is perfect, according to worldly estimation, may proceed from a bad principle; that is to say, may belong to something dry, malicious, and uncharitable. Natural passions and superior talents are displeasing to those men who are too easily dignified with the name of severe; they avail themselves of their morality, which they say comes from God, as an enemy would take the sword of a father to destroy his children.

JACOBI. 261 At the same time, Jacobi's aversion to the inflexible rigor of law, leads him too far in freeing himself from it. " Yes," says he, "I would be a liar like the dying Desdemona;' I would deceive like Orestes, when he wished to die instead of Pylades; I would be an assassin like Timoleon; perjured like Epaminondas and John De Witt; I would resolve to commit suicide like Cato, or sacrilege like David; for I have an assurance within me, that in pardoning these things, which are crimes according to the letter, man exercises the sovereign right which the majesty of his nature confers upon him, fixes the seal of his dignity, the seal of his divine nature, to the pardon which he grants. "If you would establish a system universal and strictly scientific, you must submit conscience to that system which has petrified life: that conscience must become deaf, dumb, and insensible; even the smallest remains of its root, that is, of the human heart, must be torn up. Yes, as truly as your metaphysical forms fill the place of Apollo and the Muses, it is only by imposing silence on your heart that you will be able implicitly to conform to laws without exception, and that you will adopt the hard and servile obedience which they demand: thus conscience will only serve to teach you, like a professor in his chair, the truth that is without you; and this inward light will soon be no more than a finger-post set up on, the highway to direct travellers on their journey." Jacobi is so well guided by his own sentiments, that perhaps he has not sufficiently reflected on the consequences of this morality to ordinary men; for what answer could be given to those who should pretend, in departing from duty, that they obey the suggestions of their conscience? Undoubtedly, we may discover that they are hypocrites who speak thus; but we have furnished them with an argument which will serve to justify them, whatever they may do; and it is a great thing 1 Desdemona, in order to save her husband from the disgrace and danger sf the crime he has just committed, declares, as she is dying, that she has jlled herself.

262 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. for men to have phrases to repeat in favor of their conduct: they make use of them at first to deceive others, and end with deceiving themselves. Will it be said that this independent doctrine can only suit characters which are truly virtuous? There ought to be no privileges even for Virtue; for from the moment she desires them, it is probable she ceases to deserve them. A sublime equality reigns in the empire of duty, and something passes at the bottom of the human heart which gives to every man, when he sincerely desires it, the means of performing all that enthusiasm inspires, without transgressing the limits of the Christian law, which is also the work of a holy enthusiasm. The doctrine of Kant may in effect be considered as too dry, because it does not attribute sufficient influence to religion; but it is not surprising that he should have been inclined not to make sentiment the basis of his morality, at a time when there was so widely diffused, and especially in Germany, an affectation of sensibility, which necessarily weakened the spring of minds and characters. A genius like Kant's should have for its object, to give a new dye to the mind. The German moralists of the new school, so pure in their sentiments, to whatever abstract systems they abandon themselves, may be divided into three classes: those who, like Kant and Fichte, have aimed at giving to the law of duty a scientific theory, and an inflexible application; those,' at the head of I " The doctrine of Jacobi found numerous adherents, especially among men accustomed to raise faith and sentiment above the other faculties of the soul. But the vagueness that we have already pointed out in this philosophy, in connection with the relations that exist between the understanding and the reason, appears to have given rise to a kind of schism among those who devoted themselves to its development. Somne of them considered ideas as revelations of the Deity, through the medium of perception, and they attributed these ideas to reason, as to their special fac ulty; they maintain, moreover, that notions play a completely negative part in connection.with ideas: that is to say, that ideas could neither be reached, conceived, nor expressed by means of notions; that they manifest themselves in sentiment alone; and lastly, that belief precedes and exceeds all knowledge. Others conceded more to notions, and made philosophy to consist in the oneness of the reason and of the understanding; a one

JACOBI. 263 whom Jacobi is to be placed, who take religious sentiment and natural conscience for their guides; and those who, making revelation the basis of their belief, endeavor to unite sentiment and duty, and seek to bind them together by a philosophical interpretation. These three classes of moralists equally attack morality founded on self-interest. That morality has now scarcely any partisans in Germany; evil actions may be done there, but at least the theory of what is right is left untouched. ness that, according to them would derive its substance from reason, and its form from the understanding. This last opinion was adopted by Jacobi himself, but only in his later years. Among the advocates of the former of these doctrines must be included Frederic Kceppen, a professor of Landshut, and afterwards at Erlangen, a spiritual writer, and the author of an excellent digest of the system of this school. To the second party belong the labors of James Salat. Kceppen, a friend and disciple of Jacobi, starts from the idea of Freedom. According to him, liberty is a power that determines itself, and takes its start from itself; it is consequently a primary cause, the substratum of all existence; in a word, Being, properly so called. But at the same time, Freedom is perfectly inconceivable to the understanding; nay, its very possibility cannot be clearly perceived, or its reality demonstrated- it is a fact of knowledge and of activity, perceived iminediately, intuitively. Necessity is an order established by liberty. An unlimited, an absolute liberty, is the Divine Being. Reason is the faculty that is cognizant of lloerty. The nature of human Individuality consists in the relation between the exterior and the interior. By this relation, liberty is limited in man. Every philosophy is consequently dualistic. It is this dualism that causes the eternal and unavoidable contradiction of the science. It would follow, moreover, from this, strictly speaking, that philosophy is impossible; and that scientific pretension, properly so called, is always destined to rebound forever vainly on itself: The writings of Kceppen, like those of Jacobi, whatever may be our judgment of the substance of their doctrine, must be classed among the works that have exerted a salutary influence on the philosophy of our times, in as far as they combat the authority of scholastic philosophy and blind dogmatism; and that we find in them a lively development of numerous ideas, some of which are original, and others borrowed from Platonism. We must also place in this school Gaetan de Weiller, a friend of Jacobi, a Bavarian secret councillor, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and director of the public schools of Munich, who died in 1823, as well as Christian Weiss, a school and regency councillor at Merseburg, whose psychological researches are deserving of notice."-(Tennemann, cMawnal of Philosophy, pp. 456-458.) hi_._7

264 MADAME DE S''TAEL S GERMANY. IIAPTER XVII. OF WOLDEMAR. THE romance of Woldeemar is the work of the same philos opher, Jacobi, of whonm I have spoken in the last chapter This work contains philosophical discussions, in which the systerns of morality professed by the French writers are warmly attacked, and the doctrine of JacolAl is explained in it with admirable eloquence. In this retspect.Fo'IVdemar is a very fine book; but as a novel I neither like the conduct nor the end of it. The author, who, as a philosopher, refers all human destiny to sentiment, describes in his work, as it appears to me, sensibility differently from what it is in fact. An exaggerated delicacy, or rather a whimsical manner of considering the human heart, may interest in theory, but not when it is put in action, and thus attempted to be made something real. Woldemar feels a warm friendship for a person who will not marry him, although she partakes of his feeling. He marries a woman he does not love, because he thinks he has found in her a submissive and gentle character, which is proper fol marriage. Scarcely has he married her, when he is on the point of giving himself up to the love he feels for the other. She, who would not be united to him, still loves him, but she revolts at the idea that it is possible for him to love her; and yet she desires to live near him, to take care of his children, to treat his wife as her sister, and only to know the affections of nature by the sympathy of friendship. It is thus that a piece of Goethe, much boasted of, Stella,' finishes with a reso1 " A poorer production," says Mr. Lowes, " was never owned by a gres poet."-Ed.

WOLDEMAR. 265 lution taker, by two women, bound by sacred ties to the sanie man, to live with him in good understanding with each other. Such inventions only succeed in Germany, because in that country there is frequently more imagination than sensibility Southern souls would understand nothing of this heroism o1 sentiment: passion is devoted, bhnt jealous; and that pretended delicacy, which sacrifices love to friendship, without the injunction of duty, is nothing but an affected coldness. All this generosity at the expense of love is merely an artificial system. We must not admit toleration, or rivalry, into a sentiment which is then only sublime, when, like maternal and filial tenderness, it is exclusive and all-powerful. We ought not, by our own choice, to place ourselves in a situation where morals and sensibility are not of one accord; for what is involuntary is so beautiful, that it is alarming to be condemned to give orders to ourselves in all our actions, and to live as if we were our own victims. It is, assuredly, neither from hypocrisy, nor from dryness of character, that a writer of real and excellent genius has imagined, in the novel of Woldemar, situations in which every personage sacrifices sentiment by means of sentilnent, and anxiously seeks a reason for not loving what he loves. But Jacobi, who had felt from his youth a lively inclination towards every species of enthusiasm, has here sought out a romantic mysteriousness in the attachments of the heart, which is very ingeniously described, but is quite foreign to nature. It seems to me that Jacobi understands religion better than love, for he is too desirous of confounding them. It is not true that love, like religion, can find all its happiness in the renunciation of happiness itself. We change the idea that we ought to entertain of virtue, when we make it consist in a sort of exalted feeling which has no object, and in sacrifices for which there is no necessity. All the characters in Jacobi's novel are continually tilting with their generosity against their love; not only is this unlike what happens in life, but it has no moral beauty when virtue does not require it; for strong and passionate feelings honor human nature; and religion is so impressive VOL. II. —12

266 MADAME DE STAELES GERMANY. as it is, precisely because it can triumph over such feelings. Would it have been necessary for God himself to condescend to address the human heart, if there were only found in that heart some cold and graceful affections which it would be so easy to renounce? CHAPTER XVIII. OF A ROMANTIC BIAS IN THE AFFECTIONS OF THE HEART. THE English philosophers have founded virtue, as we have said, upon feeling, or rather upon the moral sense; but this system has no connection with the sentimental morality of which we are here speaking; this morality, the name and idea of which hardly exist out of Germany, has nothing philosophi. cal in it; it only makes a duty of sensibility, and leads to the contempt of those who are deficient in that quality. Doubtless, the power of feeling love is very closely connected with morality and religion; it is possible then that our repug. nance to cold and hard minds is a sublime sort of instinct, an instinct which apprises us, that such beings, even when their conduct is estimable, act mechanically or by calculation; and that it is impossible for any sympathy to exist between us and them. Ill Germany, where it is attempted to reduce all impressions into precepts, every thing has been deemed immoral which was destitute of sensibility, nay, which was not of a romantic character. Werther had brought exalted sentiments so much into fashion, that hardly any body dared to show that he was dry and cold of nature, even when he was condemned to such a nature in reality. From thence arose that forced enthusiasm for the moon, for forests, for the country, and for solitude: from thence those nervous fits, that affectation in the very voice, those looks which wished to be seen; in a word, all that apparatus of sensibility, which vigorous and sincere minds disdain.

a ROMANTIC BIAS. 267 The author of Werther was the first to laugh at these affectations; but as ridiculous practices must be found in all countries. perhaps it is better that they should consist in the somewhat silly exaggeration of what is good, than in the elegant pretension to what is evil. As the desire of success is unconquerable among men, and still more so among women, the pretensions of mediocrity are a certain sign of the ruling taste at such an epoch, and in such a society; the same persons who displayed their sentimentality in Germany, would have elsewhere exhibited a levity and superciliousness of character. The extreme susceptibility of the German character is one of the great causes of the importance they attach to the least shades of sentiment; and this susceptibility frequently arises from the truth of the affections. It is easy to be firm when we have no sensibility: the sole quality which is then necessary is courage; for a well-regulated severity must begin with self; but, when the proofs of interest in our welfare, which others give or refuse us, powerfully influence our happiness, we must have a thousand times more irritability in our hearts tran those who use their friends as they would an estate, and endeavor solely to make them profitable. At the same time we ought to be on our guard against those codes of subtle and many-shaded sentiment, which the German writers have multiplied in such various manners, and with which their romances are filled. The Germans, it must be confessed, are not always perfectly natural. Certain of their own uprightness, of their own sincerity in all the real relations of life, they are tempted to regard the affected love of the beautiful as united to the worship of the good, and to indulge themselves, occasionally, in exaggerations of this sort, which spoil every thing. This rivalship of sensibility, between some German ladies and authors, would at bottom be innocent enouglh, if tlhe ridiculous appearance which it gives to affectation did not always throw a kind of discredit upon sincelity itself. Cold and selfish persons find a peculiar pleasure in laughing at passionate affections; and would wish to make every thing appear arti

268 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. ficial which they do not experience. There are even persons of true sensibility whom this sugared sort of exaggeration cloys with their own impressions; and their feelings become exhausted as we may exhaust their religion, by tedious sermons and superstitious practices. It is wrong to apply the positive ideas which we have of good and evil to the subtilities of sensibility. To accuse this or that character of their deficiencies in this respect, is like making it a crime not to be a poet. The natural susceptibility of those who think more than they act, may render them unjust to persons of a different description. We must possess imagination to conjecture all that the heart can make us suffer; and the best sort of people in the world are often dull and stupid in this respect; they march right across our feelings, as if they were treading upon flowers, and wondering that they fade away. Are there not men who have no admiration for Raphael, who hear music without emotion, to whom the ocean and the heavens are but monotonous appearances? How then should thev comprehend the tempests of the soul? Are not even those who are most endowed with sensibility sometimes discouraged in their hopes? May they not be overcome by a sort of inward aridness, as if the Divinity was retiring from their bosoms? They remain not less faithful to their affections; but there is no more incense in the temple, no more music in the sanctuary, no more emotion in the heart. Often also does misfortune bid us silence in ourselves this voice of sentiment, harmonious or distracting in its tone, as it agrees, or not with our destiny. It is then impossible to make a duty of sensibility for those who own it suffer so much from its possession, as frequently to have the right and the desire to subjtct it to restraint. Nations of ardent character do not talk of sensibility without terror; a peaceable and dreaming people believe they can en-,'ourage it without alarm. For the rest, it is possible, that this subject has never been written upon with perfect sincerity; for every one wishes to do himself honor by what he feels, or by what he inspires. Women endeavor to set themselves out

LOVE IN MARRIAGE. 269 like a romance; men, like a history; but the human heart is still far from being penetrated in its most intimate relations. At one time or another, perhaps, somebody will tell us sin. cerely all he has felt; and we shall be quite astonished at dis. covering, that the greater part of maxims and observations are erroneous, and that there is an unknown soul at the bottom of that which we have been describing. CHAPTER XIX. OF LOVE IN MARRIAGE. IT is in marriage that sensibility is a duty: in every other relation virtue may suffice; but in that in which destinies are intertwined, where the same impulse, so to speak, serves for the beatings of two hearts, it seems that a profound affection is almost a necessary tie. The levity of manners has intro. duced so much misery into married life, that the moralists of the last age were accustomed to refer all the enjoyments of the heart to paternal and maternal love; and ended by almost considering marriage only in the light of a requisite condition for enjoying the happiness of having children. This is false in morals, and still more false with regard to happiness. It is so easy to be good for the sake of our children, that we ought not to make a great merit of it. In their first years they can have no will but that of their parents; and when they have arrived at youth, they exist by themselves. Justice and goodness compose the principal duties of a relation which nature makes easy. It is not thus in our connections with that half of ourselves, who may find happiness or unhappiness in the least of our actions, of our looks, and of our thoughts. It is there alone that morality can exert itself in its complete energy; it is there also that is placed the true source of felicity.

M70 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. A friend of the same age, in whose presence you are to live and die; a friend whose every interest is your own; all whose prospects are partaken by yourself, including that of the grave: here is a feeling which constitutes all our fate. Sometimes, it is true, our children, and more often our parents, become our companions through life; but this rare and sublime enjoyment is combated by the laws of nature; while the marriage-union is in accord with the whole of human existence. Whence comes it, then, that this so holy union is so often profaned? I will venture to say it, the cause is that remarkable inequality which the opinion of society establishes between the duties of the two parties. Christianity has drawn women out of a state that resembled slavery. Equality, in the sight of God, being the basis of this wonderful religion, it has a tendency towards maintaining the equality of rights upon earth; divine justice, the only perfect justice, admits no kind of privilege, and, above all, refuses that of force. Nevertheless, there have been left, by the slavery of women, some prejudices, which, combining with the great liberty that society allows them, have occasioned many evils. It is right to exclude women from political and civil affairs; nothing is more opposite to their natural destination than all that would bring them into rivalry with men; and glory itself would be for women only a splendid-mourning suit for happiness. But if the destiny of women ought to consist in a continual act of devotion to conjugal love, the recompense of this ievotion is the strict faithfulness of him who is its object. Religion makes no distinction between the duties of the two parties; but the world establishes a wide difference; and out of this difference grows intrigue in women, and resentment in men. " What heart can give itself entirely up, Nor wish another heart alike entire?" Who then, in good faith, accepts friendship as the price of love? Who sincerely promises constancy to voluntary infidelity? Religion, without doubt, can demand it; for she alone knows the secret of that mysterious land where sacrifices are enjoy

LOVE IN MARRIAGE. 271 mnents; but how unjust is the exchange to which man endeavsrs to make his companion submit! "I will love you," he says, " passionately, for two or three years; and then, at the end of that time, I will talk reason to you." And this, which they call reason, is the disenchantment of life. "I will show, in my own house, coldness and wearisomeness of spirit; I will try to please elsewhere: but you, who are ordinarily possessed of more imagination and sensibility than I am; you, who have nothing to employ, nor to distract you, while the world offers me every sort of avocation; you, who only exist for me while I have a thousand other thoughts; you will be satisfied with that subordinate, icy, divided affection, which it is convenient to me to grant you; and you will reject with disdain all the homage which expresses more exalted and more tender sentiments." How unjust a treaty! all human feeling revolts from it. There is a singular contrast between the forms of respect towards women, which the spirit of chivalry introduced in Europe, and the tyrannical sort of liberty which men have allotted to themselves. This contrast produces all the misfortunes of sentiment, unlawful attachments, perfidy, abandonment, and despair. The German nations have been less afflicted than others with these fatal effects; but they ought, upon this point, to fear the influence which is sure to be exerted at length by modern civilization. It would be better to shut up women like slaves, neither to rouse their understanding nor their imagination, than to launch them into the midst of the world, and to develop all their faculties, in order to refilse them at last the happiness which those faculties render necessary to them. There is an excess of wretchedness in an unhappy marriage which transcends every other misery in the world. The whole soul of a wife reposes upon the attachment of her husband: to struggle alone against fortune; to advance towards the grave without the friend who should regret us; this is an isolated rtate, of which the Arabian desert gives but a faint idea; and, when all the treasure of your youthful years has been resigned

272 MIDAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. in vaini; when you hope no longer, at the end of life, the refle. tion of those early rays; when the twilight has nothing more than can recall the dawn, but is pale and discolored as the phantom that foreruns the night; then your heart revolts; it seems to you that you are deprived of the gifts of God on earth; and if you still love the being who treats you as a slave, since he does not belong to you, and yet disposes of you, despair seizes all your faculties, and Conscience herself grows troubled at the intensity of your distress. VWomen might address those husbands who treat their fate with levity in these lines of the fable: "' Yes! for you it is but play, But it steals our lives away." And until some revolution of ideas shall take place, which changes the opinion of men as to the constancy which the marriage-tie imposes upon them, there will be always war between the two sexes; secret, eternal, cunning, perfidious war; and the morals of both will equally suffer by it. In Germany there is hardly any inequality in marriage between the two sexes; but it is because the women, as often as the men, break the most holy bonds. The facility of divorce introduces in family connections a sort of anarchy which suffers nothing to remain in its proper truth or strength. It would be much better, in order to maintain something sacred upon earth, that there were one slave in marriage, rather than two free-thinkers. Purity of mind and conduct is the first glory of a woman. What a degraded being would she be, deprived of both these qualities I But general happiness, and the dignity of the human species, would perhaps not gain less by the fidelity of man in marriage. In a word, what is there more beautiful in moral order than a young man who respects this sacred tie? Opinion does not require it of him; society leaves him free; a sort of savage pleasantry would endeavor to ridicule even the com. plaints of the heart which he had broken; for censure is easily turned upon the sufferer. He then is the master, but he im

LOVE IN MARRIAGE. 273 poses duties on himself; no disagreeable result can arise to himself from his faults; but he dreads the evil he may do to her who has intrusted herself to his heart; and generosity attaches him so much the more, because society dissolves his attachment. Fidelity is enjoined to women by a thousand different con. siderations. They may dread the dangers and the disgraces which are the inevitable consequences of one error. The voice of Conscience alone is audible by man; he knows he causes suffering to another; he knows that he is destroying, by his inconstancy a sentiment which ought to last till death, and to be renewed in heaven: alone with himself, alone in the midst of seductions of every kind, he remains pure as an angel; for if angels have not been represented under the characters of women, it is because the union of strength and purity is more beautiful, and also more celestial, than even the most perfect modesty itself in a feeble being. Imagination, when it has not memory for a bridle, detracts from what we possess, embellishes what we fear we shall not obtain, and turns sentiment into a conquered difficulty. But, in the same manner as in the arts, difficulties vanquished do not require real genius; so in sentiment security is necessary, in order to experience those affections which are the pledges of eternity, because they alone give us an idea of that which cannot come to an end. To the young man who remains faithful, every day seems to increase the preference he feels towards her he loves; nature has bestowed on him unbounded freedom, and for a long time, at least, he never looks forward to evil days: his horse can carry him to the end of the world; war, when to that he devotes himself, frees him, at least momentarily, from domestic relations, and seems to reduce all the interest of existence to victory or death. The earth is his own, all its pleasures are Zffered to him; no fatigue intimidates him, no intimate assot.iation is necessary to him; he clasps the hand of a companion in arrms, and the only tie he thinks necessary to him is formed. A time will, no doubt, arrive when Destiny will 12*

274 MADAME DE STAEL 8 GERMANY. reveal to him her dreadful secrets; but, as yet he suspects them not. Every time that a new generation comes into pos. session of its domain, does it not think that all the misfortunes of its predecessors arose from their weakness? Is it not persuaded that they were born weak and trembling, as they now are seen? Well I From the midst of so many illusions, how virtuous and sensible is he who devotes himself to a lasting attachment,-the tie which binds this life to the other I Ah, how noble is a manly and dignified expression, when, at the same time, it is modest and pure I There we behold a ray of that heavenly shame which beams from the crown of holy virgins, to light up even the warrior's brow. If a young man chooses to share with one object the bright days of youth, he will, doubtless, among his contemporaries, meet with some who will pronounce the sentence of dupery upon him, the terror of the children of our times. But is he, who alone will be truly loved, a dupe? for the distresses, or the enjoyments of self-love, form the whole tissue of the frivolous and deceitful affections. Is he a dupe who does not amuse himself in deceiving others? to be, in his turn, still more deceived, more deeply ruined perhaps than his victim? In short, is he a dupe who has not sought for happiness in the wretched combinations of vanity, but in the eternal beauties of nature, which all proceed from constancy, from duration, and from depth? No; God, in creating man the first, has made him the noblest of his creatures; and the most noble creature is that one which has the greater number of duties to perform. It is a singular abuse of the prerogative of a superior nature to make it serve as an instrument to free itself from the most sacre, ties, whereas true superiority consists in the power of the soul and the power of the soul is virtue.

MODERN WRITIERS. 275 CHAPTER XX. MODERN WRITERS OF THE ANCIENT SCHOOL IN GERMANY. BEFORE the new school had given birth in Germany to two tendencies which seem to exclude each other, metaphysics and poetry, scientific method and enthusiasm, there were some writers who deserved an honorable place by the side of the English moralists. Mendelssohn, Garve, Sulze, Engel, etc., have written upon sentiments and duties with sensibility, religion, and candor. We do not in their works meet with that ingenious knowledge of the world which characterizes the French authors, la Rochefoucauld, la Bruyere, etc. German moralists paint society with a certain degree of ignorance which is interesting at first, but at last becomes monotonous. Garve is the writer, of all others, who has attached the. highest importance to speaking well of good company, fashion, politeness, etc. There is, throughout his manner of expressing himself on this head, a great desire to appear a man of the world, to know the reason of every thing, to be knowing like a Frenchman, and to judge favorably of the court and of the town; but the common-place ideas which he displays in his writings on these different subjects prove that he knows nothing but by hearsay, and has never taken those refined and delicate views which the relations of society afford. When Garve speaks of virtue, he shows a pure understand. ing and a tranquil mind: he is particularly engaging and original in his treatise on Patience. Borne down by a cruel malady, he supported it with admirable fortitude; and whatever we have felt ourselves inspires new ideas. Mendelssohn,' a Jew by birth, devoted himself, from comrn "The history of Mendelssohn is interesting in itself, and full of encour %gement to all lovers of self-improvement. At thirteen he was a wander

276 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. merce, to the study of the fine arts and of philosophy, without renouncing, in the smallest degree, either the belief or the rites of his religion; and being a sincere admirer of the Phcedon, of which he was the translator, he retained the ideas and the sentiments which were the precursors of Jesus Christ; and, educated in the Psalms and in the Bible, his writings preserve the character of Hebrew simplicity. He delighted in making ethics plain by parables, in the Eastern style; and this style is certainly the more pleasing, as it deprives precepts of the tone of reproach. Among these fables I shall translate one which appears to me remarkable: "Under the tyrannical government of the Greeks, the Israelites were once forbidden, under pain of death, to read among themselves the divine laws. Rabbi Akiba, notwithstanding this prohibition, held assemblies, where he gave lectures on this law. Pappus heard of it, and said to him,' Akiba, dost thou not fear the threats of these cruel men?''I will relate thee a fable,' replied the Rabbi.'A fox was walking on the bank of a river, and saw the fishes collecting together in terror at the bottom of the river. "What causes your alarm?" said the fox. "The children of men," replied the fishes, "are throwing their lines into the river to catch us ing Jewish beggar, without health, without home, almost without a language, for the jargon of broken Hebrew and provincial German which he spoke could scarcely be called one. At middle age he could write this Phcedon; was a man of wealth and breeding, and ranked among the teachers of his age. Like Pope, he abode by his original creed, though often solicited to change it; indeed, the grand problem of his life was to better the inward and outward condition of his own ill-fated people, for whom he actually accomplished much benefit. He was a mild, shrewd, and worthy man, and might well love Pherdon and Socrates, for his own character was Socratic. He was a friend of Lessing's-indeed a pupil; for Lessing having accidentally met him at chess, recognized the spirit that lay struggling under such incumbrances, and generously undertook to help him. By teaching the poor Jew a little Greek, he disenchanted him from the Talmud and the Rabbins. The two were afterwards colaborers in Nicolai's Deutsche Bibliothek, the first German Review of any character which, however, in the hands of Nicolai himself, it subsequently lost. Mendelssohn's works have mostly been translated into French."- (Carlyle' Eisays, p. 23.)-Ed.

MODERN WRITERS, 277 snd we are trying to escape from them." "Do you know what you ought to do?" said the fox; " go there upon the rock, where men cannot reach you." "Is it possible," cried the fishes, " that thou canst be the fox, esteemed the most cunning among animals? If thou seriously givest us this advice, thou showest thyself the most ignorant of them all. The water is to us the element of life: and is it possible for us to give it up because we are threatened by dangers?" Pappus, the application of this fable is easy: religious doctrine is to us the source of all good; by that, and for that alone, we exist; if we are pursued into that refuge, we will not withdraw ourselves from danger by seeking shelter in death.' "1 The greater part of the world give no better advice than the fox; when they see persons of sensibility agitated by heartaches, they always propose to them to quit the air where the storm is, to enter into the vacuum which destroys life. Engel, like Mendelsohn, teaches morals in a dramatic manner. His fictions are trifling, but they bear an intimate relation to the mind. In one of thein he represents an old man become mad by the ingratitude of his son; and the old man's smile, while his misfortune is being related, is painted with heart-rending truth. The man who is no longer conscious of his own existence, is as frightful an object as a corpse walking without life. "It is a tree," says Engel, "the branches of which are withered; its roots are still fixed in the earth, but its top is already seized upon by death." A young man, at the sight of this unfortunate creature, asks his father if there is on earth a destiny more dreadful than that of this poor maniac 8? All the sufferings which destroy, all those of which our reason is witness, seem to him nothing when compared with this deplorable self-ignorance. The father leaves his son to unfold all the horrors of the situation before him; and then suddenly asks him, if that of the wretch who has been the cause of it is not a thousand times more dreadful? The graWe have not the original at hand, and retranslate from Madame;I# Otael -Ed.

278 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. dation of the ideas is very well kept up in this recital, and the picture of the agonies of the mind is represented with eloquence that redoubles the terror caused by the most dreadfu. of all remorse. I have in another place quoted a passage from the Messias, in which the poet supposes that, in a distant planet, where the inhabitants are immortal, an angel arrived with intelligence that there existed a world where human beings were subject to death. Klopstock draws an admirable picture of the astonishment of those beings who knew not the grief of losing those they loved. Engel ingeniously displays an idea not less striking. A man has seen all he held most dear, his'S and his daughter, perish. A sentiment of bitterness and of revolt against Providence, takes possession of him; an old friend endeavors to reopen his heart to that deep but resigned grief which pours itself on the bosom of God; he shows him that death is the source of all the moral enjoyments of man. Would there be affection between parent and child if man's existence was not at once lasting and transitory; fixed by sentiment, hurried away by time? If there was no longer any decline in the world, there would be no longer any progress; how, then, should we experience fear and hope? In short, in every action, in every sentiment, in every thought, death has its share. And not only in reality, but in imagination also, the joys and sorrows which arise from the instability of life are inseparable. Existence consists entirely in those sentiments of confidence and of anxiety with which the soul is filled, wandering between heaven and earth, and death is the principal cause of our actions in life. A woman, alarmed at the storms of the South, wished te remove to the frigid zone, where thunder is not heard, noI lightning seen. "Our complaints against our lots are much of the same sort," says Engel. In fact, nature must be disenchanted, if all its dangers are to be removed. The chaim of the world seems to belong to pain as to pleasure, to fear as much as to hope; and it may be said that human destiny if

MODERN WRITERS. 279 ordered like a drama, in which terror and pity are necessary. Undoubtedly these thoughts are not sufficient to heal up the wounds of the heart; whatever we feel we consider as the overturning of nature, and no one ever suffered without thinking that a great disorder existed in the universe. But when a long space of time has given room for reflection, repose is found in general considerations, and we unite ourselves to the laws of the universe by detaching ourselves from ourselves. The German moralists of the ancient school are, for the most part, religious and feeling; their theory of virtue is disinterested; they do not admit that doctrine of utility which would lead us, as it does in China, to throw children into the river, if the population became too numerous. Their works are filled with philosophical ideas, and with melancholy and tender affections; but this was not enough to struggle against the selfish morality, armed with its sarcastic irony. This was not enough to refute sophisms, which were used against the truest and the best principles. The soft and sometimes even timid sensibility of the ancient German moralists was not sufficient to combat with success an adroit system of logic, and an elegant style of raillery, which, like all bad sentiments, bowed to nothing but force. More pointed weapons are necessary to oppose those arms which the world has forged; it is therefore, with reason that the philosophers of the new school have thought that a more severe doctrine was requisite, a doctrine of more energy and closer in its arguments, in order to triumph over the depravity of the age. Assuredly all that is simple is sufficient for all that is good; but when we live at a time in which it has been attempted to range wit on the side of immorality, it is necessary to attempt to gain over genius as the defender of virtue. Doubtless it is a matter of much indifference whether we are accused of silliaess, when we express what we feel; but this word silliness causes so much alarm among understandings of mediocrity, that we ought, if possible, to pfesr:ve them from its infection. The Germans, fearing that we rnay turn their integrity into

280 MADAME DE STAELS8 GERMANY. ridicule, sometimes attempt, although much against their natu. ral disposition, to take a flight towards immortality, that they may acquire a brilliant and easy air. The new philosophers, by elevating their style and their ideas to a great height, have skilfully flattered the self:love of their adepts; and we ought to praise them for this innocent species of art; for the Ger. mans have need of a sentiment of superiority ever others to strengthen their minds. There is too much milk of human kindness in their characters, as well as in their understanding. They are, perhaps, the only men to whom we could recommend pride as the means of moral improvement. mWe cannot deny the fact that the disciples of the new school have followed this advice to rather too great a length; but they are, nevertheless, the most enlightened and the most courageous authors of their country. What discovery have they made, it will be abked. No doubt what was true in morals two thousand years ago is true at the present moment; but during this period the arguments of meanness and corruption have been multiplied to such an excess, that a philosopher of good feeling ought to proportion his efforts to this fatal progress. Common ideas cannot struggle against a systematic immorality; we must dig deeper inwards, when the exterior veins of the precious metals are exhausted. We have so often seen, in our days, weakness united to a large proportion of virtue, that we have been accustomed to believe in the energy of immorality. The German philosophers (and let them receive the glory of the deed) have been the first in the eighteenth century who have ranged free-thinking on the side of faith, genius on the side of moral. ity, and character on the side of duty.

IGNORANCE AND FRIVOLITY 281 CHAPTER XXI. OF IGNORANCE AND FRIVOLITY OF SPI'RIT IN THEIR RELATIONS TO ETHICS. IGNORANCE, such as it appeared some ages ago, respected knowledge, and was desirous of attaining it. The ignorance of our days is contemptuous, and endeavors to turn into ridicule the labors and the meditations of enlightened men. The philosophical spirit has spread over almost all classes a facility of reasoning, which is used to depreciate every thing that is great and serious in human nature, and we are at that epoch of civilization in which all the beauties of the soul are mouldering into dust. When the barbarians of the North seized upon the possession of the most fertile countries in Europe, they brought with them some fierce and manly virtues; and in their endeavors at self-improvement, they asked from the South her sun, and her arts and sciences. But our civilized barbarians esteem nothing except address in the management of worldly affairs; and only instruct themselves just enough to ridicule, by a few set phrases, the meditations of a whole life. Those who deny the perfectibility of the human understanding pretend that progression and decline follow each other by turns, and that the wheel of thought rolls round like that of fortune. What a sad spectacle is this! the generations of men employing themselves upon earth, like Sisyphus in hell, in constant and useless labor! And what would then be the destiny of the human race, when it resembled the most cruel punishment which the imagination of poetry has conceived? But it is not thus; and we can perceive a destiny always the same, always sequential, always progressive, in the history of man. The contest between the interests of this world and more

282 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. elevated sentiments has existed at every period, in nations as well as in individuals. Superstition sometimes drives the enlightened into the opposite party of incredulity; and sometimes, on the contrary, knowledge itself awakens every belief of the heart. At the present era, philosophers take refilge in religion, in order to discover the source of high conceptions, and of disinterested sentiments; at this era, prepared by ages, the alliance between philosophy and religion may be intimate and sincere. The ignorant are not, as formerly, the enemies of doubt, and determined to reject all the false lights which might disturb their religious hopes, and their chivalrous self-devotion; the ignorant of our days are incredulous, frivolous, superficial; they know all that selfishness has need to know; and their ignorance is only extended to those sublime studies which excite in the soul a feeling of admiration for nature and for the Deity. Warlike occupations formerly filled up the life of the nobility, and formed their minds for action; but since, in our days, men of the first rank take no part in government, and have ceased to study any science profoundly, all the activity of their genius, which ought to have been employed in the circle of affairs, or intellectual labors, is directed to the observation' of manners, and to the knowledge of anecdotes. Young persons, just come from school, hasten to put on idleness as soon as the manly robe; men and women act as spies upon each other in the minutest events, not exactly from maliciousness, but in order that they may have something to say when they have nothing to employ their thoughts. This sort of daily censoriousness destroys good nature and integrity. We are not satisfied with ourselves when we abuse the hospitality which we exercise or receive, by criticising those with whom we live; and we thus prevent the growth and the continuance of all sincere affection; for in listening to the ridicule of those who are dear to us, we tarnish all that is pure and exalted in that affection: sentiments in which we do not maintain perfect sincerity, do more mischief than indifference. Every one has his ridiculous side' it is only at a distance

IGNORANCE AND FRIVOLITY. 283 that a character appears perfect; but that which constitutes the individuality of each person being always some singularity, this singularity affords an opening to ridicule; man, therefore, who fears ridicule above everything, endeavors, as much as possible, to remove the appearance of all that may signalize him in any manner, whether it be good or bad. This sort of effaced nature, in however good taste it may seem to be, has also enough of the ridiculous about it; but few have a sufficiently delicate tact to seize its absurdities. Ridicule has this peculiarity-it is essentially attached to goodness, but not to power. Power has something fierce and triumphant about it which puts ridicule to death; besides, men of frivolous mind respect the wisdom of the flesh, according to the expression of a moralist of the sixteenth century; and we are astonished to discover all the depth of personal interest in those who appeared incapable of pursuing an idea or a feeling, when nothing could result from either, advanta. geous to their calculations of fortune or of vanity. Frivolity of understanding does not lead men to neglect the affairs of this world. We find, on the contrary, a much more noble carelessness, in this respect, in serious characters than in men of a trivial nature; for their levity in most cases only consists in the contempt of general ideas, for the purpose of more close attention to their personal concerns. There is sometimes a species of wickedness in men of wit; but genius is almost always full of goodness. Wickedness does not arise from a superfluity of understanding, but from a deficiency. If we could talk upon ideas, we should leave persons at rest; if we believed that we could excel others by our natural talents, we should not wish to level the walk that we are ambitious to command. There are common and moderate minds disguised under a poignant and malicious style of sarcasm; but true superiority is radiant with good feeling as;vell as with lofty thoughts. The habit of intellectual employment inspires an enlightened benevolence towards men and things. We no longer cling to ourselves as privileged beings, when we know much of the

284 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. destiny of man; we are not offended with every event as if it were unexampled; and as justice consists only in the custom of considering the mutual relations of men under a general point of view, comprehensiveness of understanding serves to detach us from selfish calculations. We have ranged in thought over our own existence as well as that of others, when we have given ourselves up to the contemplation of the universe. Another great disadvantage of ignorance, in the present times, is that it renders us entirely incapable of having an opinion of our own upon the larger portion of subjects which require reflection; consequently, when this or that manner of thinking becomes fashionable from the ascendency of events, the greater part of mankind believe that these words, " all the world acts, or thinks, in this manner," ought to influence every claim of reason or of conscience. In the idle class of society, it is almost impossible to have any soul without the cultivation of the mind. Formerly, nature was sufficient to instruct man, and to expand his imagination; but since thought, that fading shadow of feeling, has turned all things into abstractions, it is necessary to have a great deal of knowledge to have any good sentiment. Our choice is no longer balanced between the bursts of the soul, devoid of instruction, and philosophical studies, but between the importunate noise of common and frivolous society, and that language which has been held by men of real genius from age to age, even to our own times. How then can we, without the knowledge of languages, without the habit of reading, communicate with these men who are no more, and whom we feel so thoroughly our friends, our fellow-citizens, and our allies? We must be mean and narrow of soul to refuse such noble enjoyments. Those only, who fill their lives with good actions can dispense with study: the ignorance of idle men proves their aridness of soul, as well as their frivolity of understanding. After all, there yet remains something truly beautiful and moral, which ignorance and emptiness cannot enjoy: this is

IGNORANCE AND FRIVOLITY. 285 the union of all thinking men, from one end of Europe to the other. Often they have no mutual relations; often they are dispersed to a great distance from each other; but when they meet, a word is enough for recognition. It is not this religion, or that opinion, or such a sort of study; it is the veneration of truth that forms their bond of union. Sometimes, like miners, they dig into the foundations of the earth, to penetrate the mysteries of the world of darkness in the bosom of eternal night; sometimes they mount to the summit of Chimborazo, to discover, at the loftiest point of the globe, some hitherto unknown phenomena; sometimes they study the languages of the East, to fintd in them the primitive history of man; sometimes they journey to Jerusalem, to call forth from the holy ruins a spark, which reanimates religion and poetry; in a word, they truly are the people of God; they who do not yet despair of the human race, and wish to preserve to man the dominion of reflection. The Germans merit our especial gratitude in this respect. JIlgorance and indifference, as to literature and the fine arts, is shameful with them; and their example proves, that, in our days, the cultivation of the understanding preserves, in the independent classes of society, some sentiments and some principles. The direction of literature and philosophy was not good in France during the last part of the eighteenth century; but, if we may so express ourselves, the direction of ignorance is still more formidable; for no book does harm to him who reads every book. If idle men of the world, on the contrary, are busy for a few moments, the work they meet with is an event in their heads, like that of a stranger's arrival in the desert; and when this work contains dangerous sophistries, they have no arguments to oppose to it. The discovery of prin'ting is truly fatal for those who only read by halves, or by hazard; for knowledge, like the spear of Telephus, ought to cure the wounds which it has inflicted. Ignorance, in the midst of the refinements of society, is the mnost hateful of all mixtures: it makes us, in some respects,

286 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. like the vulgar, who value intrigue and cunning alone; it leads us to look but for good living and physical enjoyments; to make use of a little wit, in order to destroy a great deal of soul; to boast of our ignorance; to demand applause for what we do not feel; in a word, to unite a limited understanding with a hard heart, to such a degree, as to be deprived of that looking upwards to heaven, which Ovid has recorded as the noblest attribute of human nature: "Os homini sublime dedit; ccelumque tueri Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. " He, who to man a form erect has given, Bade his exalted looks be fix'd on heavei."

PART IV. RELIGION AND ENTHUSIASM. CHAPTER I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS UPON RELIGION IN GERMLNY. THE nations of German extraction are all naturally religious; and the zealousness of this feeling has given occasion to many wars among them. Nevertheless, in Germany, above all other countries, the bias of mind leans more towards enthusiasm than fanaticism. The sectarian spirit must manifest itself under a variety of forms, in a country where the activity of thought is most observable; but, in general, they do not mix theological discussions with human passions, and the different opinions in regard to religion seldom wander out of that ideal world which enjoys a profound peace. For a long time they were occupied, as I shall show in the following chapter, with the inquiry into the doctrines of Christianity; but for the last twenty years, since the writings of Kant have had great influence upon the public mind, there htave prevailed a liberty and a comprehensiveness in the manner of considering religion, which neither require nor.reject any form of worship in particular, but which derive from thecvenly things the ruling principle of existence. Many persons think that the religion of the Germans is too indefinite, and that it is better to rally round the standard of a more positive and severe mode of worship. Lessing says, in

2S8 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. his Essay on the Education of the Ituman Race,1 that religious revelations have been always proportioned to the degree of knowledge which existed at the time of their appearance. The Old Testament, the Gospel, and, in many respects, the Reformation, were, according to their seasons, perfectly in harmony with the progress of the understanding; and, perhaps, we are on the eve of a development of Christianity which will collect all the scattered rays in the same focus, and which will make us perceive in religion more than morality, more than happiness, more than philosophy, more than sentiment itself, since every one of these gifts will be multiplied by its union with all the others. However this may be, it is perhaps interesting to know under what point of view religion is considered in Germany, and how they have found means to connect it with the whole literary and philosophical system, of which I have sketched the outline. There is something imposing in this collective mass of thought, which lays the whole moral order completely open to our eyes, and gives this sublime edifice self-devotion for its base, and the Divinity for its capital. It is to the feeling of the infinite that the greater portion of German writers refer all their religious ideas; but it may be asked, Can we conceive the infinite? Do we not conceive it, at least in a negative manner, when, in the mathematics, we are unable to suppose any boundary to duration or to space? This infinite consists in the absence of limits; but the feeling of the infinite, such as the imagination and the heart experience it, is positive and creative. The enthusiasm which the ideally beautiful makes us feel, that emotion, so full of agitation and of purity at the same'ime, is excited by the sentiment of the infinite. We feel our. selves, as it were, disengaged by admiration from the shackles of human destiny; and it seems as if some wondrous scene was revealed to us, to free the soul forever from languor and decline. When we contemplate the starry heavens where the I A translation of this has recently been published in England.-Ed.

RELIGION. 289 sparks of light are universes like our own, where the brilliant dust of the milky way traces with its worlds a circle in the firmament, our thoughts are lost in the infinite, our hearts beat for the unknown, for the immense, and we feel that it is only on the other side of earthly experience that our real life will commence. In a word, religious emotions, more than all others together, awaken in us the feeling of the infinite; but when they awaken they satisfy it; and it is for this reason, doubtless, that a man of great genius has said, "that a thinking being is not happy, until the idea of the infinite becomes an enjoyment instead of a burden to his mind." In effect, when we give ourselves entirely up to reflections, to images, to desires which extend beyond the limits of experience, it is then only that we freely breathe. When xae wish to confine ourselves to the interests, the conveniences, the laws of this world, genius, sensibility, enthusiasm, painfully agitate the soul; but they overflow it with enjoyment when we consecrate them to this remembrance, to this expectation of the infinite, which appears in metaphysics under the form of innate dispositions, in virtue under that of self-devotion, in the arts under that of the ideal, and in Religion herself under that of divine love. The feeling of the infinite is the true attribute of the soul: all that is beautiful, of every kind, excites in us the hope and the desire of an eternal futurity, and of a sublime existence: we cannot hear the wind in the forest, nor the delicious concords of human voices; we cannot feel the enchantment of eloquence or of poetry; in a word, above all, we cannot innocently, deeply love, without being penetrated with religion and immortality. All the sacrifices of personal interest arise from our wish to bring ourselves into accord with this feeling of the infinite, of which we experience all the charm, without being able to express it. If the power of duty was confined to the short duration of this life, how then would it have morecommand than the passions over the soul? Who would sacrifice what is unbounded to what is bounded? All limited things are to short! said St. Augustine; the moments of enjoyment that VOL. II.-13

290 MADAME DE STAELS GERMANY. earthly inclinations may induce, and the days of peace that a moral conduct insures, would differ very little, if emotions without limit and without end did not spontaneously spring up in the bottom of that human being's heart who devotes himself to virtue. Many persons will deny this feeling of the infinite; and; Essuredly, they have very good ground to deny it, for we cannot possibly explain it to them; a few additional words will not succeed in making them understand what the universe has failed to teach them. Nature has arrayed the infinite in symbols which may bring it down to us: light and darkness, storm and silence, pleasure and pain, all inspire man with this universal religion, of which his heart is the sanctuary. A man, of whom I have already had occasion to speak, M. Ancillon, has lately published a work upon the new German philosophy, which unites the perspicuity of French wit with the depth of German genius. M. Ancillon had before acquired a celebrated name as a historian; he is, incontestably, what we are accustomed to call in France a good head; his understanding itself is positive and methodical, and it is by his soul that he has seized all that the tlought of the infinite can present most comprehensive and most exalted. What he has written on this subject bears a character entirely original; it is, so to speak, the sublime reduced to logic: he traces, with precision, the boundary where experimental knowledge is stopped, whether in the arts, or in philosophy, or in religion; he shows that sentiment goes much further than knowledge, and that, beyond demonstrative proofs, there is a natural evidence in it; beyond analysis, an inspiration; beyond words, ideas; beyond ideas, emotions; and that the feeling of the infinite is a fact of the soul, a primitive fact, without which there would be nothing in nl.4i but physical instinct and ca.lcuiation. It is difficult to be religious according to the manner intro. duced by some arid minds, or some well-meaning persons, who would wish to confer upon religion the honors of scientific demonstration. That which so intimately touches upon the

RELIGION. 291 mystery of existence, carmot be expressed by the regular forms of speech. Reasoning on such subjects serves to show where reasoning comes to an end; and at that conclusion commences true certainty; for the truths of feeling have an intensity of strength which calls all our being to their support. The infinite acts upon the soul so as to exalt and to disengage it from time. The business of life is to sacrifice the interests of our transitory existence to that immortality which even now commences for us, if we are already worthy of it; and not only the greater part of religions have this same object, but the fine arts, poetry, glory, love, are religions, into which there enters more or less alloy. This expression, it is divine, which has become general, in order to extol the beauties of nature and of art, this expression is a species of belief among the Gerinans; it is not from indifference that they are tolerant, it is because there is a univer. sality in their manner of feeling and conceiving religion. In fact, every man may find, in some different wonder of the universe, that which most powerfully addresses his soul: one admires the Divinity in the character of a father, another in the innocence of a child, a third in the heavenly aspect of Raphael's virgins,-in music, in poetry, in nature, it matters not in what: for all are agreed in admiring, if all are animated by a religious principle, the genius of the world, and of every human being. Men of superior genius have raised doubts concerning this or that doctrine; and it is a great misfortune that the subtilty of logic, or the pretences of self-love, should be able to disturb and to chill the feeling of faith. Frequently, also, reflection has found itself at a loss in those intolerant religions, of which, as we may say, a penal code has been formed, and which have impressed upon theology all the forms of a despotic government. But how sublime is that worship which gives us a foretaste of celestial happiness, in the inspiration of genius as in the most obscure of virtues, in the tenderest affections as in the severest pains, in the tempest as in the fairest skies, in the flower as in the oak, in every thing except calculation, except

292 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. the deadly chill of selfishness, which separates us from the be. nevolence of nature, which makes vanity alone the motive of our actions-vanity, whose root is ever venomous I How beautiful is that religion which consecrates the whole world to its Author, and makes all our faculties subservient to the celebration of the holy rites of this wonderful universe I Far from such a belief interdicting literature or science, the theory of all ideas, the secret of all talents belong to it; nature and the Divinity would necessarily be in contradiction to each other, if sincere piety forbade men to make use of their facul ties, and to taste the pleasure that results from their exercise. rhere is religion in all the works of genius; there is genius in all religious thoughts. Wit is of' a less illustrious origin; it serves for an instrument of contention; but genius is creative. The inexhaustible source of talents and of virtues is this feeling of the infinite, which claims its share in all generous actions, and in all profound thoughts. Religion is nothing, if it is not every thing; if existence is not filled with it; if we do not incessantly maintain in the soul this belief in the invisible, this self-devotion, this elevation of desire, which ought to triumph over the low inclinations to which our nature exposes us. But how can religion be incessantly present to our thoughts, if we do not unite it to every thing which ought to form the occupation of a noble existence, devoted affections, philosophical meditations, and the pleasures of the imagination? A great number of practices are recommended to the faithful, that their religion may be recalled to their minds every moment of the day by the obligations which it imposes; but if the whole life could be naturally, and without effort, an act of worship at every moment, would not this be still better? Since the admiration of the beautiful always has relation to the Divinity, and since the very spring of energetic thought makes us remount to our origin, why should not the power of feeling, love, poetry, philosophy, form the columns of the Temple of Faith?

PROTESTANTISM. 298 CHAPTER II. OF PROTESTANTISM. IT was natural for a revolution, prepared by ideas, to take place in Germany; for the prominent trait of this thinking people is the energy of internal conviction. When once an opinion has taken possession of German heads, their patience, and their perseverance in supporting it, do singular honor to the force of human volition. When we read the details of the death of John Huss, and of Jerome of Prague, the forerunners of the Reformation, we see a striking example of that which characterized the Protestant leaders in Germany, the union of a lively faith with the spirit of inquiry. Their reason did no injury to their belief, nor their belief any to their reason; and their moral faculties were always put into simultaneous action. Throughout Germany we find traces of the different religious struggles, which, for many ages, occupied the whole nation. They still show, in the cathedral at Prague, bas-reliefs where the devastations committed by the Hussites are represented; and that part of the church which the Swedes set fire to in the Thirty Years' War is not yet rebuilt. Not far from thence, on the bridge. is placed the statue of St. John Nepomucenus,1 who preferred "The massy bridge over the Moldan, connecting the Altstadt with the Kleinseite, begun in the reign of the Emperor Charles IV, 1358, finishw 1507, is celebrated as the longest in Germany; it measures one thousand seven hundred and ninety German feet, and is ornamented on each side vith twenty-eight statues of saints. The eighth on the right, in going dirm the A!tstadt, is a well-executed bronze statue of St. John lVNomuk (Nepomucentus), who, according to the Popish legend, was thrown from he bridge into the river and drowned (1383) by order of King Wenceslaus IV, because he refused to betray the secrets confided to him by the queen n the holy rite of confession. The spot whence he was cast into the river is still marked by a cross with five stars on the parapet, in imitation of the

29V4 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. perishing in the waves to revealing the weaknesses which an unfortunate queen had confessed to him. The monuments, and even the ruins, which testify the influence of religion over man, interest the soul in a lively manner; for the wars of opinion, however cruel they may be, do more honor to nations than the wars of interest. Of all the great men produced by Germany, Luther is the one whose character is the most German: his firmness had something rude about it; his conviction rose even to obstinacy; the courage of mind was in him the principle of the courage of action; what there was passionate in his soul did not divert him from abstract studies; and although he attacked certain abuses, and considered certain doctrines as prejudices, it was not a philosophical incredulity, but a species of fanaticism, that excited him. Nevertheless, the Reformation has introduced into the world inquiry in matters of religion. In some minds its result has been skepticism; in others, a stronger conviction of religious truths: the human mind had arrived at an epoch when it was necessary for it to examine in order to believe. The discovery of printing, the multiplicity of every sort of knowledge, and the philosophical investigation of truth, did not allow any longer that blind faith which was formerly so profitable to its teachers. Religious enthusiasm could not grow again except by inquiry and meditation. It was Luther who put the Old Testament and the Gospel into the hands of all the world; it was he who gave its impulse to the study of antiquity; for in learning Hebrew to read the Old, and Greek to read the New miraculous flames, which, three days after he was drowned, were seen Flickering over the place where his body lay under the water. They continued une.tinguished until curiosity was excited, the river dragged, and the body recovered. The honor of being enrolled in the calendar was deferred for centuries after his death. It was not till 1729 that St. John was received among the saints, and his body encased in the gorgeous silver shrine placed in the cathedral. From the circumstances of his death, this saint has become the patron of bridges in all Catholic countries, and his statue usually occupies elsewhere the same situation as at Prague."-'Murray's Hand-book for Southern Germany, p. 62.)-Ed.

PROTESTANTISM. 295 Testament, the students cultivated the ancient languages, and their minds were turned towards historical researches.1 Examination may weaken that habitual faith which men do well to preserve as much as they can; but when man comes out of his inquiries more religious than he was when he entered into them, it is then that religion is built upon an immutable basis; it is then that harmony exists between her and knowledge, and that they mutually assist each other. Some writers have declaimed much against the system of perfectibility; and, to hear them, we should think that it was a real crime to believe our species capable of perfection. It is enough in France that an individual of such a party should have maintained this or that opinion, to make it lad taste to adopt it; and all the sheep of the same flock, one after the other, hasten to level their wise attacks at ideas, which still remain exactly what they are by nature. It is very probable that the human species is susceptible of education, as well as each man in particular; and that there are epochs marked fbr the progress of thought in the eternal career of time. The Reformation was the era of inquiry, and of that enlightened conviction which inquiry produces. Christianity was first established, then altered, then examined, then understood; and these different periods were necessary to its development; they have sometimes lasted a hundred, some1 Madame de Stael forgets Reuchlin, and the Seminary of St. Agnes. " The character of Reuchlin." says Sir Wm. Hamilton (Discussions, pp. 211, 212), " is one of the most remarkable in that remarkable age; for it exhibits in the highest perfection, a combination of qualities which are in general found incompatible. At once a man of the world and of books, he excelled equally in practice and speculation; was a statesman and a philosopher. a jurist and a divine. Nobles, and princes and emperors honored him with their favor, and employed him in the most difficult affairs; while the learned throughout Europe looked up to him as the' trilingue miraculum,' the'phoenix litterarum,' the'eruditorum jdXa.' In Italy, native Romans listened with pleasure to his Latin declamation; and he compelled the jealous Greeks to acknowledge that'Greece had overflown Whe Alps.' Of his countrymen, he was the first to introduce the study of tncient literature into the German Universities; the first who opened the iates of the East, unsealed the word of God. and unveiled the sanctuary of Hebrew wisdom."-Ed.

296 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. times a thousand years. The Supreme Being, who draws time out of eternity, does not economize that time after our manner. When Luther appeared, religion was no more than a politi. cal power, attacked or defended as an interest of this world. Luther recalled it to the land of thought. The historical progress of the human mind, in this respect, in Germany, is worthy of remark. When the wars occasioned by the Reformation were set at rest, and the Protestant refugees were naturalized in the different northern states of the German empire, the philosophical studies, which had always made the interior of the soul their object, were naturally directed towards religion; and there is no literature of the eighteenth century in which we find so many religious books as in the literature of Germany. Lessing, one of the most powerful geniuses of his nation never ceased to attack, with all the strength of his logic, that maxim so commonly repeated, that there are some dangerous truths. In fact, it is a singular presumption, in certain individuals, to think they have the right of concealing the truth from their fellow-men, and to arrogate the prerogative of placing themselves, like Alexander before Diogenes, in a situation to veil from the eyes that sun which belongs alike to all; this pretended prudence is but the theory of imposture; is but an attempt to play the juggler with ideas, in order to secure the subjection of mankind. Truth is the work of God; lies are the works of man. If we study those eras of history in which truth has been an object of fear, we shall always find them when partial interests contended in some manner against the universal tendency. The search for truth is the noblest of employments, and its promulgation is a duty. There is nothing to fear for society, or for religion, in this search, if it is sincere; and if it is not sincere, truth no longer, but falsehood, causes the evil. There ts not a sentiment in man of which we cannot find the philosophical reason; not an opinion, not even a prejudice, gener%lly diffused, which has not its seat in nature. We ought the;

PROTESTANTISM. 297 to examine, not with the object of destroying, but to build oui belief upon internal, not upon borrowed conviction. We see errors lasting for a long time; but they always cause a painful uneasiness. When we look at the tower of Pisa, which leans over its base, we imagine that it is about to fall, although it has stood for ages; and our imagination is not at its ease, except in the sight of firm and regular edifices. It is the same with our belief in certain principles; that which is founded upon prejudices makes us uneasy; and we love to see reason supporting, with all its power, the elevated conceptions of the soul. The understanding contains in itself the principle of every thing which it acquires by experience. Fontenelle has justly said, that " we think we recognize a truth when first we hear it." How then can we imagine, that sooner or later just ideas, and the internal conviction which they cause, will not reappear? There is a pre-established harmony between truth and human reason, which always ends by bringing each nearer to the other. Proposing to men not to interchange their thoughts, is what is commonly called keeping the secret of the play. We only continue in ignorance because we are unconsciously ignoraLt; but from the moment that we have commanded silence, it appears that somebody has spoken; and to stifle the thoughts which those words have excited, we must degrade Reason herself. There are men, full of energy and good faith, who never dreamt of this or that philosophical truth; but those who know and conceal their knowledge, are hypocrites, or, at least, are most arrogant and most irreligious beings. Most arrogant; for what right have they to think themselves of the class of the initiated, and the rest of the world excluded from it? Most irreligious; for if there is a philosophical or natural truth, a truth, in short, which contradicts religion, religion would not be what it is, the light of lights. We must be very ignorant of Christianity, that is to say, of the revelation of the moral laws of man and the universe, to recommend to those who wish to believe -in it, ignorance, se13*

298 M~lMADAME DE STAELS8 GERMANY. crecy, and darkness. Open the gates of the temple; call to your support genius, the fine arts, the sciences, philosophy; assemble them in one focus to honor and to comprehend the Author of creation; and if Love has said, that the name of those we love seems written on the leaves of every flower, how should not the impress of God appear in every thought that attaches itself to the eternal chin? The right of examining what we ought to believe, is the foundation of Protestantism. The first Reformers did not so understand it: they thought they could fix the Pillars of Hercules of the human mind at the boundary of their own knowledge; but they were wrong in fancying that men would submit to their decisions as if they were infallible; they who rejected all authority of this sort in the Catholic religion. Protestantism then was sure to follow the development and the progress of knowledge; while Catholicism boasted of being immovable in the midst of the waves of time. Among the German writers of the Protestant religion different ways of thinking have prevailed, which have successively occupied attention. Many learned men have made inquiries, unheard of before, into the Old and New Testament. Michablis has studied the languages, the antiquities, and the natural history of Asia, to interpret the Bible; and while the spirit of French philosophy was making a jest of the Christian religion, they made it in Germany the object of erudition. However this sort of labor may, in some respects, wound religious minds, what veneration does it not imply for the book which is the object of so serious an inquiry I These learned men attacked neither dogmas, nor prophecies, nor miracles; but a great number of writers have followed them, who have attempted to give an entirely physical explanation to the Old and New Testament; and who, considering them both in the light only of good writings of an instructive kind, see nothing in the mys. teries but oriental metaphors. These theologians called themselves rational, because they believed they could disperse every sort of absurdity; but it was a wrong direction of the spirit of inquiry to attempt apply

PROTESTANTISM, 299 ing it to truths, of which we can have no presentiment, except by elevation and meditation of soul. The spirit of inquiry ought to serve for the demarcation of what is superior to reason, in the same manner that an astronomer defines the heights to which the sight of man cannot attain: thus therefore to point out the incomprehensible regions, without pretending to deny their existence, or to describe them by words, is to make use of the spirit of inquiry, according to its measure and its destination. The learned mode of interpretation is not more satisfactory than dogmatic authority. The imagination and the sensibility of the Germans could not content itself with this sort of prosaic religion, which paid the respect of reason to Christianity. Herder was the first to regenerate faith by poetry: deeply instructed in the Eastern languages, he felt a kind of admiration for the Bible like that which a sanctified Homer would inspire. The natural bias of the mind in Germany is to consider poetry as a sort of prophetic gift, the forerunner of divine enjoyments; so that it was not profanation to unite to religious faith the enthusiasm which poetry inspires. Herder was not scrupulously orthodox; but he rejected, as well as his partisans, the learned commentaries which had the simplification of the Bible for their object, and which, by simplifying, annihilated it. A sort of poetical theology, vague but animated, free but feeling, takes the place of that pedantic school which thought it was advancing towards reason, when it retrenched some of the miracles of this universe; though, at the same time, the marvellous is, in some respects, perhaps, still more easy to conceive, than that which it has been agreed to call the natural. Schleiermacher, the translator of Plato, has written discourses of extraordinary eloquence upon religion; he combated that indifference which has been called toleration, and that destructive labor which has passed for impartial inquiry. Schleiermacher is not the more on this account an orthodox theologian; but he shows, in the religious doctrines which he adopts, the power of belief, and a great vigor of metaphysical

300 MADAME DE STAEL8S GERMANY. conception. He has developed, with much warmth and clearness, the feeling of the infinite, of which I have spoken in the preceding chapter. We may call the religious opinions of Schleiermacher, and of his disciples, a philosophical theology.' " Frederic Schleiermacher, professor of theology, and preacher. first at Halle and afterwards at Berlin, was born at Breslau in 1768, and contributed greatly, by his addresses and writings, to a more liberal culture of philosophy in general, and especially of moral and religious philosophy. Religion, according to him. attends to the same object as metaphysics and moral science; they only differ as regards the form; their common object is the universe and the relation of man to this same universe. The essence of philosophy consists neither in thought nor in action; it consists in the union of Feeling with Perception. Hence arises a living perception, which ~annot take place without our perceiving the Divinity in ourselves as the,ternal unity of the universe, which alone in its turn brings God into the consciousness of man. Religion consists in representing all the events of this world as the acts of God; in loving the Being ( Weltgeist) who presides over the universe; in contemplating His operation with delight. Such is the end of religion. But it is necessary for man to find humanity in order to contemplate the world, and to rise to religion; and the only way by which he can rightly find it is in love and through love. To be united, through the finite, with the infinite, to be eternal for a moment, is the immortality imparted by religion. But religion necessarily appears always under some definite form; accordingly Schleiermacher rejects what is called natural religion. In his later works, he maintains that piety considered in itself is neither an acquired knowledge nor a praxis; piety is a particular direction and determination of feeling: in fine, the sublimest degree of feeling. By feelingbhe implies the immediate consciousness, inasmuch as it falls within the category of time, and appears under opposite forms, more or less marked, composing the agreeable and disagreeable. Feeling gives us, moreover, the consciousness of our dependence on a God, which constitutes the elevated element of all religions. " Schleiermacher exerted a still greater influence on the progress of philosophy by his Critique of Morality, a work displaying a true platonic power of dialects. He points out in this work, with a great display of talent, the defects of the various doctrines of morals from Plato to Kant and Fichte. He proceeds to show indirectly the conditions of Ethics, as a science, both in connection with its highest principle, and in connection with a perfect Development of the whole system. He effects his object in such a masterly btyle, that it would be impossible to treat of Ethics in a complete and fundamental manner without observing the rules that he lays down. Schleiermacher insists especially on the following point: that the notions of duty, nf virtue, and of the good or end of this life, are equally essential to more ality. Finally, Schleiermacher has deserved well of posterity, by various special treatises on history and philosophy."-(Tennemann, Manual oJ Philosophy, pp. 463-465.)-Ed.

PROTESTANTISM. 380 At length Lavater, and many men of talent, attached themselves to the mystical opinions, such as Fenelon in France, and different writers in all countries, conceived them. Lavater preceded some of the authors whom I have cited; but it is only for these few years past, that the doctrine, of which he may be considered one of the principal supporters, has gained any great popularity among the Germans. The work of Lavater upon Physiognomy is more celebrated than his religious writings; but that which rendered him especially remarkable was his personal character. There was in this man a rare mixture of penetration and of enthusiasm; he.observed mankind with a peculiar sagacity of understanding, and yet abandoned himself, with entire confidence, to a set of ideas which might be called superstitious. He had sufficient self-love; and this self-love, perhaps, was the cause of those whimsical opinions about himself, and his miraculous calling. Nevertheless, nothing could equal the religious simplicity and the candor of his soul. We could not see without astonishment, in a drawing-room of our own times, a minister of the Holy Gospel inspired like an apostle, and animated as a man of the world. The warrant of Lavater's sincerity was to be found in his good actions, and in his fine countenance, which bore the stamp of inimitable truth.' 1 " In June, Lavater also came to Frankfort. This was a few months before Klopstock's visit. He had commenced a correspondence with Goethe on the occasion of the Briefe des Pastors. Those were great days of correspondence. Letters were written to be read in circles, and were shown about like the last new poem. Lavater pestered his friends for their portraits, and for ideal portraits (according to their conception) of our Saviour, all cf which were destined for the work on Physiognonty on which Lavater was then engaged. The artist who took Goethe's portrait sent Lavater the portrait of Bahrdt instead, to see what he would make of it; the physiognomist was not taken in; he stoutly denied the possibility of such a.esemblance. Yet when he saw the actual Goethe he was not satisfied. He gazed in astonishment, exclaiming'Bist's? Art thou he?''Ich bin's. I am he,' was the answer; and the two fell on each other's necks. Still the physiognomist was dissatisfied.' I answered him with my native and acquired Realism, that as God had willed to make me what I was, he, Larater, must even so accept me.' "The first surprise over, they began to converse on the weightiest top.

802 HMADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. The religious writers of Germany, properly so called, are divided into two very distinct classes, the defenders of the Reformation and the partisans of Catholicism. I shall examine separately the writers who are of' these different opinions; but the assertion which it is important to make before every thing is this, that if northern Germany is the country where theological questions have been most agitated, it is also that in which reies. Their sympathy was much greater than appears in Goethe's narrative, written many years after the real characters of both had developed themselves;-Goethe's into what we shall subsequently see; Lavater's into that superstitious dogmatism and priestly sophistication which exasperated and alienated so many. "Lavater forms a curious figure in the history of those days: a compound of the intolerant priest and the factitious sentimentalist. He had fine talents, and a streak of genius, but he was ruined by vanity and hypocrisy. Born in Zurich, 1741, he was eight years Goethe's senior. In his autobiographic sketchl he has represented himself indicating as a child the part he was to play as a man. Like many other children, he formed for himself a peculiar and intimate relation with God, which made him look upon his playfellows with scorn and pity, because they did not share his' need and use of God.' He prayed for wonders, and the wonders came. God corrected his school exercises. God concealed his many faults, and brought to light his virtuous deeds. In fact, Lavater was a born hypocrite; and Goethe rightly named him' from the beginning the friend of Lies, who stooped to the basest flatteries to gain influence.' To this flattering, cringing softness he united the spirit of priestly domination. His first works maie a great sensation. In 1769 he translated Bonnet's Palingdnesie, adding notes in a strain of religious sentimentalism then very acceptable. At a time when the critics were rehabilitating Homer and the early singers, it was natural that the religious world should attempt a restoration of the early Apostolic spirit. At a time when belief in poetic inspiration was a first article of the creed, belief in prophetic inspiration found eager followers. I have already touched on the sentimental extravagance of the time; and for those whom a reasonable repugnance will keep from Lavater's letters and writings, one sentence may be quoted sufficiently significant. To the lovely Countess Branconi he wrote:' O toi chdri pour la vie, l'ame de mon ame! Ton mouchoir, tes cheveux, sont pour moi ce que mes jarretidres sont pour toi!' etc., which from a priest to a married woman is somewhat unctuous, but which is surpassed by what he allowed to be addressed by an admirer to himself, e. g.:'Oh, that I could lie on thy breast in Sabbath holy evening stillness —oh thou angel 1 One sees that this rhodomontade went all round. They wept, and were wept on."-(Lewes, Goethe's Life and Works, pp. 272-274.)-Ed. 1 See Gessner's Biographie Levaters.

MORAVIAN MODE OF WORSHIP..303 digious sentiments are most universal; the national character is impressed with them, and it is from them that the genius of the arts and of literature draws all its inspiration. In short, among the lower orders, religion in the north of Germany bears an ideal and gentle character, which singularly surprises us in a country where we have been accustomed to think the manners very rude. Once as I was travelling from Dresden to Leipsic, I stopped for the evening at Meissen, a little village situated upon an eminence over the river, and the church of which contains tombs consecrated to illustrious recollections. I walked upon the esplanade, and suffered myself to sink into that sort of reverie which the setting sun, the distant view of the landscape, and the sound of the stream that flows at the bottom of the valley, so easily excite in our souls; I then caught the voices of- some common persons, and I was afraid of hearing such vulgar words as are elsewhere sung in the streets. What was my astonishment, when I understood the burden of their song: They loved each other, and they died, hoping one day to meet again! Happy that country where such feelings are popular; and spread abroad, even into the air we breathe, I know not what religious fellowship, of which love for heaven and pity for man form the touching union! CHAPTER III. MORAVIAN MODE OF WORSHIP. THERE is perhaps too much freedom in Protestantism to satisfy a certain religious austerity, which may seize upon the man who is overwhelmed b.y great misfortunes; sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of

304 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane. A species of dreaming apathy equally seizes upon the Brahmin and the savage, when one by the force of thought, and the other by the force of ignorance, passes entire hours in the dumb contemplation of destiny. The only activity of which the human being is then siuscentible, is that which has divine worship for its object. Ile loves to do something for Heaven every moment; and it is this disposition which gives their attraction to convents, however great may be their inconvenience in other respects. The Moravians are the monks of Protestantism; and the religious enthusiasm of northern Germany gave them birth about a hundred years ago. But although this association is as severe as a Catholic convent, it is more liberal in its principles. No vows are taken there; all is voluntary; men and women are not separated, and marriage is not forbidden. Nevertheless the whole society is ecclesiastical; that is, every thing is done there by religion and for it; the authority of the church rules this community of the faithful, but this church is without priests, and the sacred office is fulfilled there in turn by the most religious and venerable persons. Men and women, before marriage, live separately from each other in assemblies, where the most perfect equality reigns. The entire day is filled with labor; the same for every rank; the idea of Providence, constantly present, directs all the actions of the life of the Moravians. When a young man chooses to take a companion, he addresses himself to the female superintendents of girls or widows, and demands of them the person he wishes to espouse. They draw lots in the church, to know whether he ought to marry the woman whom he prefers; and if the lot is against him, he gives up his demand. The Moravians have such a habit o. resignation, that they do not resist this decision; and as they only see the women at church, it costs them less to renounce their choice. This manner of deciding upon marriage, and 1pon many other circumstances of life, indicates the genera'

MOBAVIAN MODE OF WORSHIP. 305 spirit of the Moravian worship. Instead of keeping themselves submitted to the will of Heaven, they fancy they can learn it by inspirations, or, what is still more strange, by interrogating Chance. Duty and events manifest to man the views of God concerning the earth; how can we flatter ourselves with the notion of penetrating them by other means? We observe, in other respects, among the generality of Moravians, evangelical manners, such as they must have existed from the time of the Apostles, in Christian communities Neither extraordinary doctrines nor scrupulous practices constitute the bond of this association; the Gospel is there interpreted in the most natural and clear manner; but they are there faithful to the consequences of this doctrine, and they make their conduct, under all relations, harmonize with their religious principles. The Moravian communities serve, above all, to prove that Protestantism, in its simplicity, may lead to the most austere sort of life, and the most enthusiastic religion; death and immortality, well understood, are sufficient to occupy and to direct the whole of existence. I was some time ago at Dintendorf, a little village near Erfurt, where a Moravian community is established. This village is three leagues distant from every great road; it is situated between two mountains, upon the banks of a rivulet; willows and lofty poplars environ it; there is something tranquil and sweet in the look of the country, which prepares the soul to free itself from the turbulence of life. The buildings and the streets are marked by perfect cleanliness; the women, all clothed alike, hide their hair, and bind their head with a riband, whose color indicates whether they are married, maidens, or widows; the men are clothed in brown, almost like the Quakers. Mercantile industry employs nearly all of them; but one does not hear the least noise in the village. Everybody works in regularity and silence; and the internal action of religious feeling lulls to rest every other impulse. The girls and widows live together in a large dormitory, and during the night, one of them has her turn to watch, for the' uurpose of praying, or of taking care of those who may be ill

306 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. The unmarried men live in the same manner. Thus there exists a great family for him who has none of his own; and the name of brother and sister is common to all Christians. Instead of bells, wind instruments, of a very sweet harmony, summon them to divine service. As we proceeded to church by the sound of this imposing music, we felt ourselves carried away from the earth; we fancied that we heard the trlumpets of the last judgment, not such as remorse makes us fear them, but such as a pious confidence makes us hope them; it seemed as if the divine compassion manifested itself in this appeal, and pronounced beforehand the pardon of regeneration. The church was dressed out in white roses, and blossoms of white thorn; pictures were not banished from the temple, and music was cultivated as a constituent part of religion; they only sang psalms; there was neither sermon, nor mass, nor argument, nor theological discussion; it was the worship of God in spirit and in truth. The women, all in white, were ranged by each other without any distinction whatever; they looked like the innocent shadows who were about to appear together before the tribunal of the Divinity. The burying-ground of the Moravians is a garden, the walks of which ale marked out by funeral-stones; and by the side of each is planted a flowering shrub. All these gravestones are equal; not one of these shrubs rises above the other; and the same epitaph serves for all the dead: He was born on such a day; and on such another he returned into his native country. Excellent expression to designate the end of our life! The ancients said: He lived; and thus threw a veil over the tomb, to divest themselves of its idea. The Christians place over it the star of hope. On Easter-day, divine service is performe in the buryingground, which is close to the church, and the resurrection is Announced in the middle of the tombs. Every one who is present at this act of worship, knows the stone that is to be placed over his coffin; and already breathes the perfume of the young tree, whose leaves and flowers will overhang his.omb. It is thus that we have seen, in modern times, an en

CATHOLICISM. 307 tire army assisting at its own funeral rites, pronouncing for itself the service of the dead, decided in belief that it was to conquer immortality. The communion of the Moravians cannot adapt itself to the social state, such as circumstances ordain it to be; but as it has been long and frequently asserted that Catholicism alone addressed the imagination, it is of consequence to remark, that what truly touches the soul in religion is common to all Christian churches. A sepulchre and a prayer exhaust all the power of the pathetic; and the more simple the faith, the more emotion is caused by the worship. CHAPTER IV. OF CATHOLICISM. THE Catholic religion is more tolerant in Germany than in any other country. The peace of Westphalia having fixed the rights of the different religions, they no longer feared their mutual invasions; and, besides, this mixture of modes of worship, in a great number of towns, has necessarily induced the occasion of observing and judging each other. In religious as well as in political opinions, we make a phantom of our adversaries, which is almost always dissipated by their presence; sympathy presents a fellow-creature in him whom we believed an enemy. Protestantism being much more favorable to knowledge than Catholicism, the Catholics in Germany have put themselves in a sort of defensive position, which is very injurious to the progress of information. In the countries where the Catholic -eligion reigned alone, such as France and Italy, they have inown how to unite it to literature and to the fine arts; but I The allusion in this passage is to the siege of Saragossa.

30S MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. in Germany, where the Protestants have taken possession, by means of the universities, and by their natural tendency to every thing which belongs to literary and philosophical study, the Catholics have fancied themselves obliged to oppose to them a certain sort of reserve, which destroys almost all the means of distinction, in the career of imagination and of reflection. Music is the only one of the fine arts which is carried to a greater degree of perfection in the south of Germany than in the north; unless we reckon in the number of the fine arts a certain convenient mode of life, the enjoyments of which agree well enough with repose of mind. Among the Catholics in Germany there is a sincere, tranquil, and charitable piety; but there are no famous preachers, nor religious authors who are quoted; nothing there excites the emotions of the soul; they consider religion as a matter of fact, in which enthusiasm has no share; and one might say, that in a mode of religious worship so well consolidated, the future life itself became a positive truth, upon which we no longer exercise our thoughts. The revolution which has taken place among the philosophical minds in Germany, during the last thirty years, has brought them almost all back to religious sentiments. They had wandered a little from them, when the impulse necessary to propagate toleration had exceeded its proper bounds; but, by recalling idealism in metaphysics, inspiration in poetry, contemplation in the sciences, they have restored the empire of religion; and the reform of the Reformation, or rather the philosophical direction of liberty which it has occasioned, has banished forever (at least in theory) materialism, and all its fatal consequences. In the midst of this intellectual revolution, so fruitful in noble results, some writers have gone too far; as it always happens in the oscillations of thought. AVe might say, that the human mind is continually hurrying from one extreme to another; as if the opinions which it has just deserted, were changed into regrets to pursue it. The Reformation, according to some authors of the new school, has Been the cause of many religious wars; it has separated the

CATHOLICISM. 809 north from the south of Germany; it has given the Germans the fatal habit of' fighting with each other; and these divisions have robbed them of' the right of being denominated one nation. Lastly, the Reformation, by giving birth to the spirit of inquiry, has dried up the imagination, and introduced skepticism in the place of faith; it is necessary then, say the same advocates, to return to the unity of the church, by returning to Catholicism. In the first place, if Charles the Fifth had adopted Lutheranism, there would have been the same unity in Germany, and the whole country, like the northern portion of it, would have formed an asylum for the arts and sciences. Perhaps this harmony would have given birth to free institutions, cornbined with a real strength; and perhaps that sad separation of character and knowledge would have been avoided, which has yielded up the North to reverie, and kept the South in ignorance. But without losing ourselves in conjectures as to what would have happened, a sort of calculation always very uncertain, we cannot deny that the era of the Reformation was that in which learning and philosophy were introduced into Germany. This country is not perhaps raised to the first rank in war, in the arts, in political liberty: it is knowledge of which Germany has a right to be proud, and its influence upon the thinking part of Europe takes its date from Protestantism. Such revolutions neither proceed nor are brought to an end by arguments; they belong to the historical progress of the human mind; and the men who appear to be their authors, are never more than their consequences. Catholicism, disarmed in the present day, has the majesty of an old lion, which once made the world tremble; but when the abuses of its power brought on the Reformation, it put fetters on the human mind; and far from want of feeling being then the cause of the opposition to its ascendency, it was in order to make use of all the faculties of the understandinog and of the imagination that the freedom of thought was so loudly demanded again. If circumstances, of entirely divine origin, and in which tb3 hand of man was not in the least

310 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. operative, were hereafter to bring about a reunion between the two churches, we should pray to God, it appears to me, with new emotion, by the side of those venerable priests, who, in the latter years of the last century, have suffered so much for conscience' sake. But, assuredly, it is not the change of religion in a few individuals, nor, above all, the unjust discredit which their writings have a tendency to throw upon the ieformed religion, that can lead to the unity of religious opinions. There are in the human mind two very distinct impulses; one makes us feel the want of faith, the other that of examination. One of these tendencies ought not to be satisfied at the expense of the other; Protestantism and Catholicism do not arise from the different character of the Popes, and of a Luther; it is a poor mode of examining history to attribute it to accidents. Protestantism and Catholicism exist in the human heart; they are moral powers which ale developed in nations, because they are inherent in every individual. If in religion, as in other human affections, we can unite what the imagination and the reason suggest, there is harmony in the whole man; but in man, as in the universe, the power of creating and that of destroying, faith and inquiry, succeed and combat each other. It has been attempted, in order to harmonize these two inclinations, to penetrate deeper into the soul; and from this attempt have arisen the mystical opinions of which we shall speak in the following chapter; but the small number of persons who have abjured Protestantism have done nothing but revive resentments. Ancient denominations reanimate ancient quarrels; magic makes use of certain words to call up apparitions; we may say, that upon all subjects there are terms which exert this power; these are the watch-words which serve for a rallying-point to party spirit; we cannot pronounce them without agitating afresh the torches of discord. The German Catholics have, to the present moment, shown themselves very ignorant of what was passing on these points in the North. The literary opinions seemed to be the cause of the

CATHoLICISM.:31 small number of persons who changed their religion; and the ancient church has hardly regained any proselytes. Count Frederic Stolberg, a man of great respectability, both from his character and his talents, celebrated from his youth as a poet, as a passionate admirer of antiquity, and as a translator of Homer, was the first in Germany to set the example of these new conversions, and he has had some imitators. The most illustrious friends of the Count Stolberg, Klopstock, Voss, and Jacobi, separated themselves from him in consequence of this action, which seemed to disavow the misfortunes and the struggles which the reformed have endured during three centuries; nevertheless, Stolberg has lately published a History of the Religion of Jesus Christ,' which is calculated to merit the approbation of all Christian communities. It is the first time that we have seen the Catholic opinions defended in this manner; and if Count Stolberg had not been educated as a Protestant, perhaps he would not have had that independence of mind which enables him to make an impression upon enlightened men. We find in this book a perfect knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, and very interesting researches into the different religions of Asia, which bear relation to Christianity. The Germans of the North, even when they submit to the most positive dogmas, know how to give them the stamp of their philosophy. Count Stolberg, in his publication, attributed to the Old Testament a much greater importance than Protestant writers in general assign to it. lie considers sacrifices as the basis of all religion, and the death of Abel as the first type of that sacrifice which forms the groundwork of Christianity. In what ever way we decide upon this opinion, it affords much room for thought. The greater part of ancient religions instituted human sacrifices; but in this barbarity there was something remarkable, namely, the necessity of a solemn expiation. Nothing, in effect, can obliterate from the soul the idea, that there is a mysterious efficacy in the blood of the innocent, and It has been translated, by the order of Rome, into Italian. —Ed.

312 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. that heaven and earth are moved by it. Men have always believed that the just could obtain, in this life or the other, the pardon of the guilty. There are some primitive ideas in the human species which reappear more or less disfigured, in all times, and among all nations. These are the ideas upon which we cannot grow weary of reflecting; for they assuredly preserve some traces of the lost dignities of our nature. The persuasion, that the prayers and the self-devotion of the just can save the guilty, is doubtless derived from the feelings that we experience in the relations of life; but nothing obliges us, in respect to religious belief, to reject these inferences. What do we know better than our feelings? and why should we pretend that they are inapplicable to the truths of religion? What can there be in man but himself, and why, under the pretext of anthropomorphism, hinder him from forming an image of the Deity after his own soul? No other messenger, I think, can bring him news from heaven. Count Stolberg endeavors to show, that the tradition of the fall of man has existed among all the nations of the earth, and particularly in the East; and that all men have in their hearts the remembrance of a happiness of which they have been deprived. In effect, there are in the human mind two tendencies as distinct as gravitation and attraction in the natural world; these are the ideas of decay, and of advance to perfection. One should say, that we feel at once a regret for the loss of some excellent qualities which were gratuitously conferred upon us, and a hope of some advantages which we may acquire by our own efforts; in such a manner that the doctrine of per. fectibility, and that of the golden age, united and confounded, excite at the same time in man grief for having lost these bless ings, and emulation to recover them. Sentiment is melancholy, and mind is daring; one looks forward, the other back; and from this reverie and this energy together, springs the true superiority of man; that mixture of contemplation and of ac. tivity, of resignation and of will, which allows him to connect his worldly existence with heavbn. Stolberg calls those persons alone Christians who receive

CATHOLICISM. 313 the words of the Holy Scriptures with the simplicity of children; but he bestows upon the signification of these words a philosophical spirit which takes away all their dogmatism and intolerance from the Catholic opinions. In what then do they differ, these religious men by whom Germany is honored, and why should the names of Catholic and Protestant divide them? Why should they be unfaithful to the tombs of their ancestors, by giving up these names, or by resuming them? Has not Klopstock consecrated his whole life to the purpose of making P. fine poem the temple of the Gospel? Is not Herder, as well as Stolberg, the adorer of the Bible? Does he not penetrate into all the beauties of the primitive language, and of those sentiments of celestial origin which it expresses? Does not Jacobi recognize the Divinity in all the great thoughts of man a Would any of these men recommend religion merely as a restraint upon the people, as an instrument of public safety, as an additional guarantee in the contracts of this world? Do they not all know that every superior mind has more need of piety than the people? For the labor ordained by the authority of society may occupy and direct the working class in all the moments of life, while idle men are incessantly the prey of the passions and the sophistries that disturb existence, and reduce every thing to uncertainty. It has been pretended that it was a sort of frivolity in the German writers to represent as one of the merits of the Christian religion, the favorable influence that it exercised over the arts, imagination, and poetry; and the same reproach, with respect to this point, has been cast upon that beautiful work of MI. de Chateaubriand, the Genius of Christianity. The truly frivolous minds are those which take rapid glances for profound examinations, and persuade themselves that we can proceed with nature upon an exclusive principle, and suppress the greater part of the desires and wants of the soul One of the great proofs of the divinity of the Christian religion is its perfect analogy with all our moral faculties; at least it does not appear to me that we can consider the poetry of Christianity under the same aspect as the poetry of Paganism. VoL. II.-14

314 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. As every thing was external in the Pagan worship, the pomp of images was there prodigally exhibited; the sanctuary of Christianity being at the bottom of the heart, the poetry which it inspires must always flow from tenderness. It is not the splendor of the Christian heaven that we can oppose to Olymnpus, but grief and innocence, old age and death, which assume a character of exaltation and of repose, under the shelter of those religious hopes whose wings are spread over the miseries of life. It is not then true, it appears to me, that the Protestant religion is unprovided with poetry, because the ritual of its worship has less eclat than that of the Catholics. Ceremonies, better or worse, performed according to the richness of towns, and the magnificence of buildings, cannot be the principal cause of the impression which divine service produces; its connection with our internal feelings is that which touches us, a connection which can subsist in simplicity as well as in polnp. Some time ago I was present at a church in the country, deprived of all ornament; no picture adorned its white walls; it was newly built, and no remembrance of a long antiquity rendered it venerable: music itself, which the most austere saints have placed in heaven as the employment of the happy, was hardly heard; and the psalms were sung by voices without harmony, which the labor of the world, and the weight of years, rendered hoarse and confused; but in the midst of this rustic assembly, where all human splendor was deficient, one saw a pious man, whose heart was profoundly moved by the mission which he fulfilled.' His looks, his physiognomy, might serve for a model to some of the pictures with which other temples are adorned; his accents made the responses to an angelic concert. There was before us a mortal creature convinced of our immortality; of that of our friends whom we have lost; of that of our children, who will survive us by so little in the career of time! and the convincing persuasion o a pure heart appeared a new revelation. He descended from his pulpit to give the communion to the i M. Cel1rier, preacher at Satigny, nt-. —' -

CATHOLICISM. 315 faithful, who live under the shelter of his example. His son was with him, a minister of the church; and with more youthful features, his countenance also, like that of his father, had a pious and thoughtful expression. Then, according to custom, the father and the son gave each other the bread and wine, which, among Protestar.ts, serve for the commemoration of the most affecting of mysteries. The son only saw in his father a pastor more advanced than himself in the religious state that he had chosen to adopt; the father respected in his son the holy calling he had embraced. They mutually addressed each other, as they took the Sacrament, in those passages of the Gospel which are calculated to unite in one bond strangers and friends; and, both feeling in their hearts the same inward impulses, they appeared to forget their personal relations in the presence of the Divinity, before whom fathers and sons are alike servants of the tombs and children of hope. What poetical effect, what emotion, the source of all poetry, could be wanting to the divine service at such a moment! Men whose affections are disinterested and their thoughts religious; men who live in the sanctuary of their conscience, and know how to concentrate in it, as in a burning-glass, all the rays of the universe; these men, I say, are the priests ol the religion of the soul; and nothing ought ever to disunite them. An abyss separates those Nwho conduct themselves according to calculation, and those who are guided by feeling. All other differences of opinion are nothing; this alone is radical. It is possible that one day a cry of union may be raised, and that all Christians may aspire to profess the same theological, political, and moral religion; but before this miracle is accomplished, all men who have a heart, and who obey it, lought mutually to respect each other.

316 MADAME DE STAEL'S 3ERMA NT. CHAPTER V. OF THE RELIGIOUS DISPOSITION CALLED "'MYSTICISM.' THE religious disposition called Mysticism is only a more inward manner of feeling and of conceiving Christianity. As in the word mysticism is comprehended that of mystery, it has been believed that the Mystics professed extraordinary doctrines, and formed a separate sect. There are no mysteries among them but the mysteries of sentiment applied to religion; and sentiment is at once the clearest, the most simple, and the most inexplicable of things: it is necessary, at the same time, to distinguish the T/heosophists, that is, those who are busied with philosophical theology, such as Jacob Bhhme, St. Martin, etc., from the simple Mystics; the former wish to penetrate the secret of the creation; the second confine themselves to their own hearts. Many fathers of the church, Thomas a Kempis, Edtnelon, St. Frangois de Sales, etc., and among the Protestants a great number of English and German writers, have been Mystics; that is, men who have made religion a sort of affection, and have infused it into all their thoughts, as well as all their actions.' 1 "'The epithet sublime is strongly and happily descriptive of the feelings inspired by the genius of Plato, by the lofty mysticism of his philosophy, and even by the remote origin of the theological fables which are said to have descended to him from Orpheus.'-Stewart, Philosoph. Essays, ii. ehap. 5. "' Mysticism in philosophy is the belief that God may be known face to face, without any thing intermediate. It is a yielding to the sentiment awakened by the idea of the infinite, and a running up of all knowledge and all duty to the contemplation and love of Him.'-Cousin, Hist. de la Philosoph. Mod., 1st series, tom. ii. leqon 9, 10. "Mysticism despairs of the regular process of science; it believes that we may attain directly, without the aid of the senses or reason, and by au

MYSTICISM. 317 The religious feeling which is the foundation of the whole doctrine of the Mystics, consists in an internal peace full of life. The agitations of the passions leave no calm; the tranquillity of a dry and moderate understanding destroys the animation of the soul; it is only in religious feeling that we find a perfect union of repose and motion. This disposition is not continual, I think, in any man, however pious he may be; but the remembrance and the hope of these holy emotions decide the conduct of those who have experienced them. If we consider the pains and the pleasures of life as the effect of chance, or of a well-played game, then despair and joy ought to be, so to speak, convulsive motions. For what a chance is that which disposes of our existence! What pride or what respect ought we not to feel, when we have been considering a mode of action which may influence our destiny? To what torments of uncertainty must we not be delivered up if our reason alone disposed of our fate in this world? But if we believe, on the contrary, that there are but two things important to happiness, purity of intention, and resignation to the event, whatever it may be, when it no longer depends upon ourselves; doubtless many circumstances will still make us cruelly suffer, but none will break our ties to Heaven. To struggle against tlhe impossible is that which begets in us the most bitter tfeelings; and the anger of Satan is nothing else than liberty quarimmediate intuition, the real and absolute principle of all truth, God. It finds God either in nature, and hence a physical and naturalistic mysticism; or in the soul, and hence a moral and metaphysical mysticism. It has als" its historical views; and in history it considers especially that which represents mysticism in full, and under its most regular form, that is religicus; and it is not to the letter of religions, but to their spirit, that it clings; hence an allegorical and symbolical mysticism. Van Helmont Ames, and Pordage, are naturalistic mys.'ics; Poiret is moral, and Bourignon and Fdnelon are Dizvie mystics. Swedenborg's mysticism includes ihem all. "The Germans have two words for mysti mystimystik and mysticismus. The former they use in a favorable, the latter in an unfavorable sense. Just as we say piety and pietism, or rationality and rationalism; keeping the first of each pair for use, the second for abuse.-Vaughan, Hours with fie Mystics, vol i. p. 23.'-(Fleming, Vocab. of Philos., pp. 330, 331.)-Ed

318 MADA ME DE STAEL S GERMANY. relling with necessity, and unable either to subdue or to submit to it. The ruling opinion among the mystical Christians is this, that the only homage which can please God is that of the will which he gave to man; what more disinterested offering can we in effect offer to the Divinity? Worship, incense, hymns, have almost always for their object the attainment of the good things of this world; and it is on this account that worldly flattery surrounds monarchs; but to resign ourselves to the will of God, to wish nothing but that which he wishes, is the most pure religious act of which the soul is capable. Thrice is man summoned to yield this resignation,-in youth, in manhood, and in age: happy are they who submit at first! It is pride in every thing which puts the venom into the wound: the rebellious soul accuses Heaven; the religious man suffers grief to act upon him as the intention of him who sent it; he makes use of all the means in his power to avoid or to console it; but when the event is irrevocable, the sacred chalacters of the supreme will are imprinted there. What accidental malady can be compared to age and death? And yet almost all men resign themselves to age and death, because they have no defence against them: whence then does it arise that every one revolts against particular misfortunes, when all acquiesce in universal evil? It is because we treat destiny as a government which we allow to make all the world suffer, provided that it grants no privileges to any one. The misfortunes that we endure in company with our fellows are as severe, and cause as much misery, as our individual sufferings; and yet they hardly ever excite in us the same rebellious feeling. Why do not men teach themselves that they ought to support that which concerns them personally, as they support the condition of humanity in general? It is because we fancy there is injustice in our particular allotment. Singular pride of man! to wish to judge the Deity with that instrument which he has received from him! What does he know of the feelings of another? What does he know of himself? What does he know at all, except his internal feeling? And this

MY8STICIsM. 319 feeling, the more inward it is, the more it contains the secret of our felicity; for is it not in the bottom of our soul that we feel happiness or unhappiness? Religious love, or self-love, alone penetrates to the source of our most hidden thoughts. Under the name of religious love are included all the disinterested affections; and under that of self'love, all egotistical propensities: in whatever manner fortune may favor or thwart us, it is always the ascendency of' one of these affections over the other, upon which calm enjoyment, or uneasy disquiet depends. It is to be wanting entirely in respect for Providence, as it appears to me, to suppose ourselves a prey to those phantoms which we call events: their reality consists in their effect upon the soul; and there is a perfect equality between all situations and all circumstances, not viewed externally, but judged according to their influence upon religious improvement. If each of us would attentively examine the texture of his life, we should find there two tissues perfectly distinct: the one which appears entirely subject to natural causes and effects; the other, whose mysterious tendency is not intelligible except by dint of time. It is like a suit of tapestry hangings, whose figures are worked in on the wrong side, until, being put in a proper position, we can judge of their effect. We end by perceiving, even in this life, why we have suffered; why we have not obtained what we desired. The melioration of our own hearts reveals to us the benevolent intention which subiected us to pain; for the prosperities of the earth themselves would have something dreadful about them, if they fell upon us after we had been guilty of great faults: we should then think ourselves abandoned by the hand of Him, who delivered us up to happiness here below, as to our sole futurity. Either every thing is chance, or there is no such thing in tile world; and, if there is not, religious feeling consists in putting ourselves in harmony with the universal order, in spite of that spirit of rebellion and of usurpation with which selfishness inspires each of us individually. All doctrines, and all modes of worship, are the different forms which this religious

320 MADAME DE STAEL7S GERMANY. feeling has assumed according to times and countries; it may be depraved by fear, although it is built upon confident hope; but it always consists in the conviction, that there is nothing accidental in the events of life, and that our sole manner of influencing our fate lies in our internal commerce with ourselves. Reason is not the less operative in all that relates to the conduct of life; but when this housekeeper of existence has managed matters as well as it can, the bottom of our heart is after all the seat of love; and that which is called Mysticism, is this love in its most perfect purity. The elevation of the soul towards its Creator is the supreme act of worship among the Christian Mystics; but they do not address the Deity to pray for this or that worldly advantage. A French writer, who has some sublimely bright passages, M. de Saint-Martin, has said, that prayer was the breathing of the soul. The Mystics are, for the most part, convinced, that an answer is given to this prayer; and that the grand revelation of Christianity may be in some degree renewed in the soul, every time that it exalts itself with fervor towards Heaven. When we believe that there no longer exists any immediate communication between the Supreme Being and man, prayer is only a monologue, if we may be allowed the expression; but it becomes an act much more beneficial, when we are persuaded that the Divinity makes himself sensibly felt at the bottom of our hearts. In fact, it does not appear to me possible to deny, that there are emotions within us which do not, in the least, take their origin from external things, and which soothe and support us without the possibility of our attributing them to the ordinary concatenation of the events of life. Men who have introduced self-love into a doctrine entirely founded on the renunciation of self-love, have taken advantage of these unexpected instances of divine support, to deceive themselves with illusions of every description: they have faneied that they were elect persons, or prophets; they have beAeved in visions; in a word, they have become superstitious in looking at themselves. What must not be the power of human pride, when it insinuates itself into the heart, under the

MYSTICISM. 32.1 very shape of humility! But it is not the less true, that there is nothing more simple and more pure than the connections of the soul with the Deity, such as they are conceived by those whom it is the custom to call Mystics; that is, the Christians who introduce love into religion. In reading the spiritual works of Fenelon, who is not softened? where can we find so much knowledge, consolation, indulgence? There no fanaticism, no austerities but those of virtue, no intolerance, no exclusion appears. The differences of Christian communities cannot be felt at that height which is above all the accidental forms created and destroyed by time. He would be very rash, assuredly, who should hazard foreseeing any thing relating to such important matters: nevertheless, I will venture to say, that every thing tends to establish the triumph of religious feeling in the soul. Calculation has gained such an empire over the affairs of the world, that those who do not embrace it are naturally thrown into the opposite extreme. It is for this reason that solitary thinkers, from one end of the world to the other, endeavor to assemble in one focus the scattered rays of literature, philosophy, and religion. It is generally feared that the doctrine of religious resignlation, called Quietism in the last ages, will disgust us with the necessary activity of this life. But nature takes care to raise individual passions in us sufficiently to prevent our entertaining much fears of the sentiment that is to tranquillize them. We neither dispose of our birth, nor of our death; and more than three-fourths of our destiny is decided by these two events. No one can change the primitive effects of his nativity, of his country, of his period, etc. No one can acquire the shape or the genius that he has not gained from nature; and of how many more commanding circumstances still is not life composed? If our fate consists in a hundred different lotsj there are ninety-nine which do not depend upon ourselves; and all the fiury of our will turns upon the weak portion which vet seems to be in our favor. Now the action cf the will itself 14:

322 MADAME DE STAEL'8 GERMANY. upon this weak portion is singularly incomplete. The only act of liberty of the man who always attains his end, is the fulfil. ment of duty: the issue of all other resolutions depends entirely upon accidents, over which prudence itself has no command, The greater part of mankind do not obtain that which they vehemently wish; and prosperity itself, when it comes, often comes from an unexpected quarter. The doctrine of Mysticism passes for a severe doctrine, because it enjoins us to discard selfishness, and this with reason appears very difficult to be done. But, in fact, Mysticism is the gentlest of all doctrines; it consists in this proverb, Make a virtue of necessity. Making a virtue of necessity, in the religious sense, is to attribute to Providence the government of the world, and to find an inward consolation in this thought. The Mystic writers exact nothing beyond the line of duty, such as honest men have marked it out; they do not enjoin us to create troubles for ourselves; they think that man ought neither to invite affliction, nor be impatient under it whenl it arrives. What evil then can result from this belief, which unites the calm of stoicism with the sensibility of Christians? It prevents us from loving, some one may say. Ah! it is not religious exaltation which chills the soul; a single interest of vanity has done more to annihilate the affections than any kind of austere opinion: even the deserts of the Thebaid do not weaken the power of sentiment; and nothing prevents us from loving but the misery of the heart. A very weighty inconvenience is falsely attributed to Mysticism. In spite of the severity of its principles, it has been said that it renders us too indulgent in relation to actions, by referring religion to the internal impressions of the soul; and that it induces men to resign themselves to their defects as to inevitable events. Nothing, assuredly, would be more contrary to the Gospel than this manner of interpreting submission to the will of God. If we admitted that religious feeling, in any respect, dispensed with action, there would not only result firom this a crowd of hypocrites, who pretended that we must not iudge them by the vulgar proofs of religion, which are called

MYSTICISM. 323 works, and that their secret communications with the Deity are of an order greatly superior to the fulfilment of duties; but there would be also hypocrites with themselves, and we should destroy in this manner the power of remorse. In fact, who has not some moments of religious tenderness, however limited his imagination may be? Who has not sometimes prayed with fervor? And if this was sufficient for us to be released from the strict observance of duty, the greater part of poets might fancy themselves more religious than St. Vincent de Paul. But the Mystics have been wrongfully accused of this manner of thinking. Their writings and their lives attest, that they are as regular in their moral conduct as those who are subjected to the practices of the most severe mode of worship: that which is called indulgence in them, is the penetration which makes us analyze the nature of man, instead of confining ourselves to the injunction of obedience. The Mystics, always considering the bottom of the heart, have the air of pardoning its mistakes, because they study the causes of them. The Mystics, and almost all Christians, have been frequently accused of a tendency towards passive obedience to authority, whatever it ]nay be; and it has been pretended that submission to the will of God, ill-understood, leads a little too often to submission to the will of man. Nothing, however, is less like condescension to power than religious resignation. Without doubt it may console us in slavery, but it is because it then gives to the soul all the virtues of independence. To be indifferent by religion to the liberty or the oppression of mankind, would be to mistake weakness of character for Christian humility, and no two things are more different. Christian humility bends before the poor and the unhappy; and weakness of character always keeps well with guilt, because it is power-'ul in the world. In the times of chivalry, when Christianity had more ascendency, it never demanded the sacrifice of honor; but, for citi. tens, justice and liberty are also honor. God confounds human oride, but not the dignity of the human race; for this pridle

324 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. consists in the opinion we have of ourselves; and this dignity in our respect for the rights of others. Religious men have an inclination not to meddle with the affairs of this world, without being compelled to do so by some manifest duty; and it m}:ust be confessed, that so many passions are excited by political interests, that it is rare to mix in politics without having to reproach ourselves with any wrong action: but when the courage of conscience is called forth, there is nothing which can conten. with it. Of all nations, that which has the greatest inclination t Mysticism is the German.' Before Luther, many authors, 1 " Mysticism is a word in the mouths of all; yet, of the hundred, pertaps not one has ever asked himself what this opprobrious epithet properly signified in his mind; or where the boundary between true Science and this Land of Chimeras was to be laid down. Examined strictly, mystical, in most cases, will turn out to be merely synonymous with not understood. Yet surely there may be haste and oversight here, for it is well known, that, to the understanding of anything, two conditions are equally required: intelligibility in the thing itself being no whit more indispensable than intelligence in the examiner of it.' I am bound to find you in reasons, sir,' said Johnson,' but not in brains;' a speech of the most shocking unpoliteness, yet truly enough expressing the state of the case.' It. nlay throw some light on this question, if we remind our readers of the following fact. In the field of human investigation there are objects of two sorts: first, the visible, including not only such as are material, and may be seen by the bodily eye, but all such, likewise, as may be represented in a shape, before the mind's eye, or in any way pictured there; and, secondly, the invisible, or such as are not only unseen by human eyes, but as cannot be seen by any eye; not objects of sense at all; not capable, in short, of being pictured or imaged in the mind, or in any way represented by a shape either without the mind or within it. If any man shall here turn upon us, and assert that there are no such invisible objects; that whatever cannot be so pictured or imagined (meaning imaged) is nothing, and the science that relates to it nothing; we shall regret the circumstance. We shall request him, however, to consider seriously and deeply within hIimself what he means simply by these two words, GOD, and his own SOUL; and whether he finds that visible shape and true existence are here also one and the same? If he still persist in denial, we have nothing for it, but to wish him good speed on his own separate path of inquiry; and he and we will agree to differ on this subject of mysticism, as on so many more im. L ortant ones. " Now, whoever has a material and visible object to treat, be it of Natura; Science, Poll ical Philosophy, or any such externally and sensibly existing lepartment, may represent it to his own mind and convey it to the minds

MYSTICISM. 325 among whom we must cite Tauler, had written upon religion in this sense. Since Luther, the Moravians have shown this disposition more than any other sect. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Lavater combated with great strength the of others, as it were, by a direct diagram, more complex indeed than a geometrical diagram, but still with the same sort of precision; and provided his diagram be complete, and the same both to himself and his reader, he may reason of it, and discuss it, with the clearness, and, in some sort, the certainty of geometry itself. If he do not so reason of it, this must be for want of comprehension to image out the whole of it, or of distinctness to convey the same whole to his reader: the diagrams of the two are different; the conclusions of the one diverge from those of the other, and the obscurity here, provided the reader be a man of sound judgment and duo attentiveness, results from incapacity on the part of the writer. In such a case, the latter is justly regarded as a man of imperfect intellect; he grasps more than he can carry; he confuses what, with ordinary faculty, might be rendered clear; he is not a mystic, but what is much worse, a dunce. Another matter it is, however, when the object to be treated of belongs to the invisible and immaterial class; cannot be pictured out even by the writer himself, much less, in ordinary symbols, set before the reader. In this case, it is evident, the difficulties of comprehension are increased a hundred fold. Here it will require long, patient and skilful effort, both from the writer and the reader, before the two can so much as speak together; before the former can make known to the latter, not how the matter stands, but even what the matter is, which they have to investigate in concert. He must devise new means of explanation, describe conditions of mind in which this invisible idea arises, the false persuasions that eclipse it, the false shows that may be mistaken for it, the glimpses of it that appear elsewhere; in short, strive by a thousand well-devised methods, to guide his reader up to the perception of it; in all which, moreover, the reader must faithfully and toilsomely co-operate with him, if any fruit is to come of their mutual endeavor. Should the latter take up his ground too early, and affirm to himself that now he has seized what he still has not seized; that this and nothing else is the thing aimed at by his teacher, the consequences are plain enough: disunion, darkness, and contradiction between the two; the writer has written for another man, and this reader, after long provocation, quarrels with him finally, and quits him as a mystic. " Nevertheless, after all these limitations, we shall not hesitate to admit, that there is in the German mind a tendency to mysticism, properly so called; as perhaps there is, unless carefully guarded against. in all minds tempered like theirs. It is a fault; but one hardly separable from the excellences we admire most in them. A simple, tender, and devout nature, seized by some touch of divine Truth, and of this perhaps under some rude, rough symbol, is wrapt with it into a whirlwind of unutterable thoughts; wild gleams of splendor dart to and fro in the eye of the seer,'ut the vision will not abide with him, and yet he feels that its light is

326 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. system of rational Christianity, which the theologians of Berlin had supported; and his manner of feeling religion is, in many respects, completely like that of Fenelon. Several lyric poets, from Klopstock down to our days, have a taint of Mysticism in their compositions. The Protestant religion, which reigns in the North, does not satisfy the imagination of the Germans; and Catholicism being opposed by its nature to philosophical researches, the religious and thinking among the Germans were necessarily obliged to have recourse to a method of feeling religion, which might be applied to every form of worship. Besides, idealism in philosophy has much analogy with Mysticism in religion; the one places all the reality of things in this world in thought, and the other all the reality of things in heaven in feeling. The Mystics penetrate, with an inconceivable sagacity, into every thing which gives birth in the human mind to fear or hope, to suffering or to happiness; and no sect ascends as they lght from heaven, and precious to him beyond all price. A simple nature, a George Fox, or a Jacob Bbhme, ignorant of all the ways of men, of the dialect in which they speak, or the forms by which they think, is laboring with a poetic, a religious idea, which, like all such ideas, must express itself by word and act, or consume the heart it dwells in. Yet how shall he speak, how shall he pour forth into other souls that of which his own soul is full even to bursting? He cannot speak to us; he knows not our state, and cannot make known to us his own. His words are an inexplicable rhapsody, a speech in an unknown tongue. Whether there is meaning in it to the speaker himself, and how much or how true, we shall never ascertain; for it is not in the language of men, but of one man who had not learned the language of men; and, with himself, the key to its full interpretation was lost from among us. These are mystics; men who either know not clearly their own meaning, or at least cannot put it forth in formulas of thought, whereby others, with whatever difficulty, may apprehend it. Was their meaning clear to themselves, gleams of it will yet shine through, how ignorantly and unconsciously soever it may have been delivered; was it still wavering and obscure, no science could have delivered it wisely. In either case, much more in the last, they merit and obtain the name of mystics. To scoffers they are a ready and cheap prey but sober persons understand that pure evil is as unknown in this lower Universe as pure good; and that even in mystics, of an honest and deep. eeling heart, there may be much to reverence, and of the rest more to pity lhan to mock." —( Carlyle's Essays, pp. 80, 31.) —Ed.

MYSTICISM. 827 lo to the origin of emotions in the soul. There is so much interest in this sort of inquiry, that even those who are otherwise of moderate understanding enough, when they have the least mystical inclination in their hearts, attract and captivate by their conversation, as if they were endowed with transcendent genius. That which makes society so subject to ennui, is, that the greater portion of those with whom we live, talk only of external objects; and upon this class of things the want of the spirit of conversation is very perceptible. But religious Mysticism includes so extensive a knowledge, that it gives a decided moral superiority to those who have not received it from nature; they apply themselves to the study of the human heart, which is the first of sciences, and give themselves as much trouble to understand the passions, that they may lull them to rest, as the men of the world do to turn them to advantage. Without doubt, great faults may still appear in the character of those whose doctrine is the most pure; but is it to their doctrine that we should refer them? We pay especial homage to religion by the exactions we make from all religious men the moment we know they are so. We call them inconsistent if they commit any transgressions, or have any weak-, nesses; and yet nothing can entirely change the conditions of humanity. If religion always conferred moral perfection upon us, and if virtue always led to happiness, freedom of will would no longer exist; for the motives which acted upon volition, would be too powerful for liberty. Dogmatical religion is a commandment; mystical religion is built upon the inward experience of our heart; the mode of preaching must necessarily be influenced by the direction which the ministers of the Gospel may take in this respect; and perhaps it would be desirable for us to perceive in their discourses more of the influence of those feelings which begin to penetrate all hearts. In Germany, where every sect abounds, Zollikofer, Jerusalem, and many others, have acquired great reputation by the eloquence of the pulpit; and we may read upon all subjects, a quantity of sermons which contain excellent things; nevertheless, although it is very wise'to

328 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. teach morality, it is still more important to inspire motives to be moral; and these motives consist, above every thing, in re' ligious emotion. Almost all men are nearly equally informed as to the inconveniences and the advantages of vice and virtue; but that which all the world wants, is the strengthening of the internal disposition with which we struggle against the violent inclinations of our nature. If the whole business was to argue well with mankind, why should those parts of the service, which are only songs and ceremonies, lead us so much more than sermons to meditation and to piety? The greater part of preachers confine themhselves to declaiming against evil inclinations, instead of showing how we yield to them, and how we resist them; the greater part of preachers are judges who direct the trial of men: but the priests of God ought to tell us what they suffer and what they hope; how they have modified their characters by certain thoughts; in a word, we expect from them the secret memoirs of the soul in its relations with the Deity. Prohibitory laws are no more sufficient for the government of individuals than of States. The social system is obliged to put animated interests into action, to give aliment to human life: it is the same with the religious instructors of man; they can only preserve him from his passions by exciting a living and pure ecstasy in his heart: the passions are much better, in many respects, than a servile apathy; and nothing can moderate them but a profound sentiment, the enjoyments ot which we ought to describe, if we can, with as much force and truth as we have introduced into our descriptions of the charm of earthly affections. Whatever men of wit may have said, there exists a natural alliance between religion and genius. The Mystics have almost all a bias towards poetry and the fine arts; their ideas are in accord with true superiority of every sort, while incredulous and worldly-minded mediocrity is its enemy; that mediocrity eannot endure those who wish to penetrate into the soul; as i' has put its best qualities on the surface, to touch the core is to fiscover its wretchedness.

PAIN. 329 The philosophy of Idealism, the Christianity of Mysticism, and the poetry of nature, have, in many respects, all the same end, and the same origin; these philosophers, these Christians, and these poets, all unite in one common desire. They would wish to substitute for the factitious system of society, rot the ignorance of barbarous times, but an intellectual culture, which leads us back to simplicity by the very perfection of knowledge; they would, in short, wish to make energetic and reflecting, sincere and generous men, out of these characters without dignity; these minds without ideas; these jesters without gayety; these Epicureans without imagination, who, for want of better, are called the human species. CHAPTER VI. OF PAIN. THAT axiom of the Mystics has been much blamed, which asserts that pain is a good. Some philosophers of antiquity have pronounced it not an evil; it is, however, much more difficult to consider it with indifference than with hope.' In effect, if we were not convinced that pain was the means of moral improvement, to what an excess of irritation would it not carry us?'Why in that case summon us into life to be consumed by pain? Why concentrate all the torments and all the wonders of the universe in a weak heart, which fears and which desires? Why give us the power of loving, and snatch from us at last all that we hold dear? In short, why bring us to death, terrific death? When the illusion of the world has made us forget it, how is it recalled to our minds I It is in the midst of the splendors of this world that Death un.. furls his funereal ensign. 1 Lord Bacon says that prosperities are the benefactions of the Old Tes-,ament, and adversities of the New.

330 MADAME DE STAELS( GERMANY. "Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un giorno Della vita mortal il fiore e'1 verde; Ne perchU faccia indietro April ritorno, Si rinflora ella mai ne si rinverde." 1 We have seen at a fCte that princess,2 who, although the mother of eight children, still united the charm of perfect beauty to all the dignity of the maternal character. She opened the ball; and the melodious sounds of music gave a signal for the moments consecrated to joy. Flowers adorned her lovely head, and dress and the dance must have recalled to her the first days of her youth; nevertheless, she appeared already to fear the very pleasures to which so much success might have attached her. Alas! in what a manner was this vague presentiment realized! On a sudden the numberless torches, which replace the splendor of the day, are about to be changed into devouring flames, and the most dreadful sufferings will take the place of the gorgeous luxury of the fete. What a contrast! and who can grow weary of reflecting upon it? No, never have the grandeur and the misery of man so closely approached each other; and our fickle thoughts, so easily diverted from the dark threatenings of futurity, have been struck in the same hour with all the brilliant and terrible images which destiny, in general, scatters at a distance from each other over the path of time. No accident, however, had reached her, who would not have died but for her own choice. She was in safety; she might have renewed the thread of that life of virtue which she had been leading for fifteen years; but one of her daughters M as still in danger, and the most delicate and timid of beings precipitates herself into the midst of flames which would have made warriors recoil. Every mother would have felt what she did! But who thinks she has sufficient strength to imi1' Thus withers in a day the verdure and the flower of mortal life; it ia in vain that the month of spring returns in its season; life never resumes her verdure or her flowers."-Verses of Tasso, sung in the gardens of Armida. 9 The Princess Paulina of Schwartzenberg.

PAIN. 331 tate her? Who can reckon so much upon the soul, as not to fear those shudderings which nature bids us feel at the sight of a violent death? A woman braved them; and although the fatal blow then struck her, her last act was maternal: it was at this sublime instant that she appeared before God; and it was impossible to recognize what remained of her upon earth except by the impression on a medal, given by her clildren, which also marked the place where this angel perished. Ah! all that is horrible in this picture is softened by the rays of a celestial glory. This generous Paulina will hereafter be the saint of mothers; and if their looks do not dare to rise to Heaven, they will rest them upon her sweet figure, and will ask her to implore the blessing of God upon their children. If we had gone so far as to dry up the source of religion apon earth, what should we say to those who see the purest of victims fall? What should we say to those who loved this victim? and with what despair, with what horror for fortune and her perfidious secrets, would not the soul be filled? Not only what we see, but what we imagine, would strike our lninds like a thunderbolt, if there was nothing within us free from the power of chance. Have not men lived in an obscure dungeon, where every moment was a pang, where there was no air but what was sufficient for them to begin suffering again? Death, according to the incredulous, must deliver us from every thing; but do they know what death is? do they know whether this death is annihilation? or into what a labyrinth of terrors reflection without a guide may drag us? If an honest man (and the events of a life exposed to the passions may bring on this misfortune), if an honest man, I say, had done an irreparable injury to an innocent being, how could he ever be consoled for it without the assistance of religious expiation? When his victim is in the coffin, to whom must he address his sorrows if there is no communication with t]o t victim; if God himself does not make the dead hear the!arnentationq of the living; if the sovereign Mediator for man'lid not say to grief, "It is enough;" and to repentance, "You

332 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. are forgiven?" It is thought that the chief advantage of re. liglon is its efficacy in awakening remorse; but it is also very frequently the means of lulling remorse to sleep. There are souls in which the past is predominant; there are those which regret tears to pieces like an active death, and upon which memory falls as furiously as a vulture: it is for them that religion operates as the alleviation of remorse. An idea always the same, and yet assuming a thousand different dresses, fatigues at once, by its agitation and its monotony. The fine arts, which redoubled the power of imagination, augment with it the vivacity of pain. Nature herself becomes importunate when the soul is no longer in harmony with her; her tranquillity, which we once found so sweet, irritates us like indifference; the wonders of the universe grow dim as we gaze upon them; all looks like a vision, even in mid-day splendor. Night troubles us, as if the darkness concealed some secret misfortune of our own, and the shining sun appears to insult the mourning of our hearts. Whither shall we fly, then, from so many sufferings? Is it to death? But the anxiety of unhappiness makes us doubt whether there is rest in the tomb, and despair, even for heists, is as a shadowy revelation of an eternity of pains. W- at shall we do then,what shall we do, 0 my God! if we 3annot throw ourselves into thy paternal bosom? He who first called God our Father, knew more of the human heart than the most profound thinkers of the age. It is not true that religion narrows the heart; it is still less so, that the severity of religious principles is to be feared. I only know one sort of severity which is to be dreaded by feeling minds: it is that of the men of the world. These are the persons who conceive nothing, who excuse nothing that is involuntary; they have made a human heart according to their own will, in order to judge it at their leisure. We might address to them what was said to Messrs. de Port-Royal, who, otherwise, deserved much admiration: "It is easy for you tc zomprehend the man you have created; but, as to the res being, you know him not."

PAIN. 3'3 The greater part of men of the world are accustomed to frame certain dilemmas upon all the unhappy situations in life, in order to disencumber themselves as much as possible from the compassion which these situations demand from them. "There are but two parts to take," they say; "you must be entirely one thing, or the other, you must support what you cannot prevent, you must console yourself for what is irrevocable." Or rather, " He who wishes an end, wishes the means also; you must do every thing to preserve that which you cannot do without," etc., and a thousand other axioms of this kind, which all have the form of proverbs, and which are in effect the code of vulgar wisdom. But what connection is there between these axioms and the severe afflictions of the heart? All this serves very well in the common affairs of life; but how apply such counsels to moral pains? They all vary according to the individual, and are composed of a thousand different circumstances, unknown to every one but our most ntimate friend, if there is one who knows how to identify himself with us. Every character is almost a new world for him who can observe it with sagacity, and I know not in the science of the human hMart one general idea which is completely applicable to particular examples. The language of religion can alone suit every situation and every mode of feeling. When we read the reveries of J. T. Rousseau, that eloquent picture of a being preyed upon by an imagination stronger than himself, I have asked myself how a man whose understanding was formed by. the world, and a religious recluse, would have endeavored to console Rousseau. IIe would have complained of being hated and persecuted; lhe would have called himself the object of universal envy, and the victim of a conspiracy which extended even from the people to their monarchs; he would have pretended that all his friends had betrayed him, and that the very services which'hey had rendered him were so many snares: what then would the man of an understanding formed by society have answered to all these complaints? -' You strangely exaggerate," he would have said, "the effect

334 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. that you fancy you produce: you are doubtless a very distinl guished person; but, however, as each of us has his own affairs, and also his own ideas, a book does not fill all heads; the events of war or of peace, and still less interests, but which personally concern ourselves, occupy us much more than any writer, however celebrated he may be. They have banished you, it is true, but all countries ought to be alike to a philosopher like you; and to what purpose indeed can the morals and the religion, which you develop so well in your writings, De turned, if you are not able to support the reverses which have befallen you? Without doubt, there are some persons who envy you among the fraternity of learned men; but this cannot extend to the classes of society who trouble themselves very little with literature: besides, if celebrity really annoys you, nothing is so easy as to escape from it. Write no more; at the end of a few years you will be forgotten, and you will be as quiet as if you never had published any thing. You say that your friends lay snares for you, while they pretend to serve you. In the first place, is it not possible that there should be a slight degree of romantic exaltation in your manner of considering your personal relations? Your fine imagination was necessary to compose the Nouvelle H6loise; but a little reason is requisite in the affairs of this world, and, when we choose to do so, we see things as they are. If, however, your friends deceive you, you must break with them; but you will be very unwise to grieve on this account; for, one of two things, either they are worthy of your esteem-and in that case you are wrong to suspect them-or, if your suspicions ale well founded, then you ought not to regret such friends." After having heard this dilemma, J. J. Rousseau might very well have taken a third part, that of throwing himself into the river. But what would the religious recluse have said to him? " My son, I know not the world, and I am ignorant whether it is true that they wish you ill in the world; but if it were so, you would share this fate with all good men, who never theless have pardoned their enemies; for Jesus Christ and

PAIN. 335 Socrates, the God and the man, have set the example. It is necessary for hateful passions to exist here below, in order that the trial of the just should be accomplished. St. Theresa has said of the wicked: Unhappy men, they do not love! and yet they live long enough to have time for repentance. "You have received admirable gifts from Heaven; if they have made you love what is good, have you not already enjoyed the reward of having been a soldier of Truth upon earth? If you have softened hearts by your persuasive eloquence, you will obtain for yourself some of those tears which you have caused to flow. You have enemies near you, but friends at a distance, among the votaries of solitude, who read you; and you have consoled the unfortunate better than we can console yourself. Why have I not your talent, to make you listen to me? That talent, my son, is a noble gift; men often try to asperse it; they tell you, wrongfully, that we condemn it in the name of God: this is not true. It is a divine emotion, which inspires eloquence; and if you have not abused it, learn to endure envy, for such a superiority is well worth the pain it may make you suffer. " Nevertheless, my son, I fear that pride is mixed with your sufferings; and this it is which gives them their bitterness, for all the griefs that continue humble make our tears flow gently; but there is a poison in pride, and man becomes senseless when he yields to it: it is an enemy that makes her own champion, the better to destroy him. " Genius ought only to serve to manifest the supreme goodness of the soul. There are many men who have this goodness, without the talent of expressing it: thank God, from whom you receive the charm of those words formed to enchant the imagination of man; but be not proud, except of the feeling which dictates them. Every thing in life will be rendered calm for you, if you always continue religiously good: the wicked themselves grow tired of doing evil; their own poison exhausts them; and, besides, is not God above, to take care of the sparrow that falls, and of the heart of man that suffers? "You say that your friends wish to betray you Ake croe

336 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. that you do not accuse them unjustly: woe to him that has repelled a sincere affection, for they are the angels of heaven who send it us; they have reserved this part to themselves in the destiny of man! Suffer not your imagination to lead you astray; you must permit her to wander in the regions of the clouds; but nothing except one heart can judge another, and you would be very culpable if you were to forget a sincere friendship; for the beauty of the soul consists in its generous confidence, and human prudence is figured by a serpent. "It is possible, however, that in expiation of some transgressions, into which your great abilities have led you, you will be condemned upon this earth to drink that impoisoned cup, the treachery of a friend. If it is so, I lament your fate: the Divinity himself laments it while he punishes you. But do not revolt against his blows; still love, although love has distracted your heart. In the most profound solitude, in the cruellest isolation, we must not suffer the source of the devoted affections to be dried up within us. For a long while it was not believed that God could be loved as we love those who resemble ourselves. A voice which answers us, looks which are interchanged with our own, appear full of life, while the immense IIeaven is silent; but by degrees the soul exalts itself, even to feel its God near it as a friend. " My son, we ought to pray as we love, by mingling prayer with all our thoughts; we ought to pray, for then we are no more alone; and when resignation shall descend softly into your heart, turn your eyes upon nature; it might be said that every one there finds again his past life, when no traces of it exist among men. Think of your regrets as well as your pleasures, when you contemplate those clouds, sometimes dark and sometimes brilliant, which the wind scatters; and whether death has snatched your friends fromn you, or life, still more cruel, has broken asunder your bonds of union with them, you will perceive in the stars their deified images; they will ap pear to you such as you will see them again hereafter."

THEOSOPHIST PRIOSOPH ERS. 337 CHAPTER VII. OF TILE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHERS CALLED THEOSOPHISTS. W/HEN I gave an account of the modern philosophy of the Germans, I endeavored to trace the line of demarcation between that philosophy which attempts to penetrate the secrets of the universe, and that which is confined to an inquiry into the nature of our souls. The same distinction may be remarked among religious writers; those of whom I have already spoken in the preceding chapters have kept to the influence of religion upon our hearts; others, such as Jacob Bohme in Germany, St. Martin in France, and very many more, have believed that they found in the relation of Christianity mysterious words, which might serve to develop the laws of creation. We must confess, when we begin to think, it is difficult to stop; and whether reflection leads to skepticism, or to the most universal faith, we are sometimes tempted to pass whole hours, like the Faquirs, in asking ourselves what is life? Far from despising those who are thus devoured by contemplation, we cannot help considering them as the true lords of the human species, in whose presence those who exist without reflection are only vassals attached to the soil. But how can we flatter ourselves with the hope of giving any consistency to these thoughts, which, like flashes of lightning, plunge again into darkness, after having for a moment thrown an uncertain brilliance upon urrounding objects 8 It may, however, be interesting to point out the principal direction of the systems of the Theosophists;l that is, of those 1 "'The Tkeosophist8, neither contented with the natural light of human reason, nor with the simple doctrnes of Scripture understood in their literal sense, have recourse to an internal supernatural light, superior tc alJ VOL. II.-15

338 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. religious philosophers who have always existed in Germany, from the establishment of Christianity, and particularly since the revival of letters. The greater part of the Greek philosophers have built the system of the world upon the acticn of the elements; and if we except Pythagoras and Plato, who derived from the East their tendency to idealism, the thinking men of antiquity explain all the organization of the universe by physical laws. Christianity, by lighting up the internal life in the breast of man, naturally excited the mind to exaggerate its power over the body. The abuses to which the most pure doctrines are subject have introduced visions and white magic (that is, the magic which attributes to the will of man the power of acting upon the elements without the intervention of infernal spirits), all the whimsical reveries, in short, which spring from the conviction that the soul is more powerful than nature. The sects of Alchemists, of Magnetizers, and of the Illuminati, are almost all supported upon this ascendency of the will, which they carry much too far, but which, other illuminations, from which they profess to derive a mysterious and divine philosophy, manifested only to the chosen favorites of heaven.'Enficld, Hist. pf Phil., vol. ii. " The Theosophists are a school of philosophers who would mix enthusiasm with observation, alchemy with theology, metaphysics with medicine, and clothe the whole with a form of mystery and inspiration. It began with Paracelsus at the opening of the sixteenth century, and has survived in St. Martin to the end of the eighteenth. Paracelsus, Jacob Bohme, and St. Martin, may be called popular, while Cornelius Agrippa, Valentine Weigelius, Robert Fludd, and Van Helmont, are more philosophical in their doctrines. But they all hold different doctrines; so that they cannot be reduced to a system. "' The theosophist is one who gives you a theory of God, or of the works of God, which has not reason, but an inspiration of his own for its basis.'Vaughan, Hours with Mystics, vol. i. p. 45. "' Both the politics and the theosophy of Coleridge were at the mercy of a discursive genius, intellectually bold, but educationally timid, which, anxious, or rather willing, to bring conviction and speculation together, mooting all points as it went, and throwing the subtlest glancing lights on many, ended in satisfying nobody, and concluding nothing. Charles Lamb said of him, that he had the art of making the unintelligible appear intelligible."'-Hunt, Imagination and Fancy, 12mo, 1844, p. 276.-(Fleming, I'ocab. of Philos., pp. 518, 519.)-Ed.

THEOSOPHIST PHILOSOPHERS. 339 nevertheless, in some manner belongs to the moral grandeur of man. Not only has Christianity, by affirming the spiritual nature of the soul, led them to believe the unlimited power of religious or philosophical faith, but revelation has seemed to some men a continual miracle, which is capable of being renewed for every one of them; and some have sincerely believed that a supernatural power of divination was granted them, and that truths were manifested in them to which they testified more clearly than the inventors. The most famous of these religious philosophers was Jacob BShme, a German shoemaker, who lived at the beginning of the seventeenth century; he made so much noise in his time, that Charles the First sent a person to G6rlitz, the place of his abode, expressly to study his work, and bring it back to England. Some of his writings have been translated into French by M. de St. Martin; they are very difficult to comprehend; nevertheless we cannot but be astonished that a man without cultivation of mind should have gone so far in the contemplation of nature. He considers it in general as an emblem of the principal doctrines of Christianity; he fancies he sees everywhere, in the phenomena of the world, traces of the fall of man, and of his regeneration; the effects of the principle of anger, and of that of pity; and while the Greek philosophers attempted to explain the world by the mixture of the elements of air, water, and fire, Jacob B6hme only admits the combination of moral forces, and has recourse to passages of the Gospel to interpret the universe. In whatever manner we consider those singular writings, which for two hundred years have always found readers, or rather adepts, we cannot avoid remarking the two opposite roads which are followed, in order to arrive at the truth, by the spiritualistic philosophers, and by the materialistic philosophers. The former imagine that it is by divesting ourselves of all impressions from without, and by plunging into the ecstasy of thought, that we can interpret nature. The latter pretend that we cannot too much guard against enthusiasm and imagi

340 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. nation in our inquiry into the phenomena of the universe. They would seem to say that the human understanding must be freed from matter or from mind to comprehend nature, while it is in the mysterious union of these two that the secret of existence consists. Some learned men in Germany assert, that we find in the works of Jacob Bbhme very profound views upon the physical world. We may say, at least, that there is as much originality in the theories of the religious philosophers concerning creation, as in those of Thales, of Xenophon, of Aristotle, of Descartes, and Leibnitz. The Theosophists declare, that what they think, has been revealed to them, while philosophers, in general, believe they are solely conducted by their own reason. But, as both aspire to know the mystery of mysteries, of what signification, at this high point, are the words of reason and folly 8 and why disgrace with the name of insensate persons those who believe they find great lights in their exaltation of mind? It is a movement of the soul of a very remarkable nature, and which assuredly has not been conferred upon us merely for the sake of opposing it. CHAPTER VIII OF THE SPIRIT OF SECTARISM IN GERMANY. THE habit of meditation leads us to reveries of every kind upon human destiny; active life alone can divert our interest from the source of things; but all that is grand or absurd in respect to ideas is the result of that internal emotion which we cannot expend upon external objects. Many people are very angry with religious or philosophical sects, and give them the name of follies, and of dangerous follies. It appears to me that the wanderings even of thought are much less to be feared than the absence of thought, in respect to the repose and mo.

SPIRIT OF SECTARISM. 4 rality of men. When we have not within ourselves that power of reflection which supplies material activity, we must be ilces santly in action, and frequently at random. The fanaticism of ideas has sometimes led, it is true, to violent actions, but it has almost always been because the advantages of this world have been sought for by the aid of abstract opinions. Metaphysical systems are very little to be feared in themselves; they do not become dangerous till they are united to the interests of ambition, and it is therefore upon these interests that we must gain a hold, if we wish to modify such systems; but men who are capable of a lively attachment to an opinion, independently of the results which it may have, are always of a noble nature. The philosophical and religious sects, which under different names, have existed in Germany, have hardly had any connection with political affairs; and the sort of talent necessary to lead men to vigorous resolutions, has been rarely manifested in this country. We may dispute upon the philosophy of Kant, upon theological questions, upon idealism or empiricism, without producing any thing but books. The spirit of sect and the spirit of party differ in many points. The spirit of party represents opinions by that which is most prominent about them, in order to make the vulgar understand them; and the spirit of sect, particularly in Germany, always leads to what is most abstract. In the spirit of party we must seize the points of view taken by the multitude to place ourselves among them; the Germans only think of Theory, and if she was to lose herself in the clouds, they would follow her there. The spirit of party stirs up certain common passions in men which unite them in a mass. The Germans subdivide every thing by means of distinction and comment. They have a philosophical sincerity singularly adapted to the inquiry after truth, but not at all to the art of putting her into action. The spirit of sect aspires only to convince; that of party wishes to rally men round it. The former disputes about ideas, the latter wishes for power over men. There is discipline in the party spirit, and anarchy in the sectarian

342 MADAME DE STAEL'8 GERMANY. spirit. Authority, of whatever kind it may be, has hardly any thing to fear from the spirit of sectarism; we satisfy it by leaving a great latitude for thought at its disposal. But the spirit of party is not so easily contented, and does not confine itself to these intellectual contests, in which every individual may create an empire for himself without expelling one present possessor. In France, they are much more susceptible of the party spirit than of the sectarian: every one there too well understands the reality of life, not to turn his wishes into actions, and his thoughts into practice; but perhaps they are too foreign from the sectarian spirit: they do not sufficiently hold to abstract ideas, to have any warmth in defending them; besides, they do not choose to be bound by any sort of opinions, for the purpose of advancing the more freely in the face of all circumstances. There is more good faith in the spirit of sect than in the party spirit; the Germans, therefore, are naturally more fitted for one than the other. We must distinguish three sorts of religious and philosophical sects in Germany: first, the different Christian communities which have existed, particularly at the epoch of the Reformation, when all writings have been directed towards theological questions; secondly, the secret associations; and lastly, the adepts of some particular systems, of which one man is the chief. We must range the Anabaptists and the Moravians in the first class; in the second, that most ancient of secret associations, the Freemasons; and in the third, the different sorts of the Illuminati. The Anabaptists were rather a revolutionary than a religious sect; and as they owed their existence to political passions, and not to opinions, they passed away with circumstances. The Moravians, entirely strangers to the interests of this world, are, as I have said, a Christian community of the greatest purtEy. The Quakers carry into the midst of society the principles o the Moravians: the Moravians withdraw from the world, to be the more sure of remaining faithful to their principles.

SPIRIT OF SECTARISM. 343 Freemasonry' is an institution much more serious in Scotland and in Germany than in France. It has existed in all countries; but it nevertheless appears that it was from Germany especially that this association took its origin; that it was afterwards transported to England by the Anglo-Saxons, and renewed at the death of Charles the First by the partisans of the Restoration, who assembled somewhere near St. Paul's Church for the purpose of recalling Charles the Second to the throne. It is also believed that the Freemasons, especially in Scotland, are, in some manner, connected with the order of Templars. Lessing has written a dialogue upon Freemasonry, in which his luminous genius is very remarkable. He believes that this association has for its object the union of men, in spite of the barriers of society; for if, in certain respects, the social state forms a bond of connection between men, by subjecting them to the empire of the laws, it separates them by the differences of rank and government: this sort of brotherhood, the true image of the golden age, has been mingled with many other ideas equally good and moral in Freemasonry. However, we cannot dissemble that there is something in the nature of secret associations which leads the mind to independence; but these associations are very favorable to the development of knowledge; for every thing which men do by themselves and spontaneously, gives their judgment more strength and more comprehensiveness. It is also possible that the principles of democratic equality may be propagated by this speties of institution, which exhibits mankind according to their real value, and not according to their several ranks in the world. Secret associations teach us what is the power of numVer and of union, while insulated citizens are, if we may use Lhe expression, abstract beings with relation to each other. In this point of view these associations may have a great influence in the State; but it is, nevertheless, just to acknowledge, I We need remind no Masonic reader how faulty Madame de Sta1l', wccount of the ancient and honorable institution must be. —Ld.

344 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. that Freemasonry, in general, is only occupied with religious and philosophical interests. Its members are divided into two classes: the Philosophical Freemasonry, and the Hermetic or Egyptian Freemasonry. The first has for its object the internal church, or the development of the spirituality of the soul; the second is connected with the sciences, with those sciences which are employed upon the secrets of nature. The Rosicrucian brotherhoood, among others, is one of the degrees of Freemasonry, and this brotherhood originally consisted of Alchemists. At all times, and in every country, secret associations have existed, whose members have aimed at mutually strengthening each other in their belief of the soul's spirituality. The mysteries of Eleusis among the Pagans, the sect of the Essenes among the Hebrews, were founded upon this doctrine, which they did not choose to profane by exposing it to the ridicule of the vulgar. It is nearly thirty years since there was an assembly of Freemasons, presided over by the Duke of Brunswick, at Wilhelmsbad; this assembly had for its object the reform of the Freemasons in Germany, and it appears, that the opinions of the Mystics in general, and those of St. Martin in particular, had much influence over this society. Political institutions, social relations, and often those of the family even, comprehend only the exterior of life. It is then natural, that at all times men should have sought some intimate manner of knowing and understanding each other, and also those whose characters have any depth believe they are adepts, and endeavor to distinguish themselves, by some signs, from the rest of mankind. Secret associations degenerate with time, but their principle is almost always an enthusiastic feeling restrained by society. There are three classes of the Illuminati:' the Mystical, the " ILLU1MINATI, T/e.Enlightened, a name applied to the members of a secret society of the last century. It is said that a society had been formed by a disciple of Swedenborg, for the purpose of ostensibly bringing about a social reform in Europe; and that from this society, as well as from the societies of Jesuits and Freemasons, Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon-law at Ingolstadt, took the idea of forming a society whose pro. fessed object was, by one single tie, to unite men of all countries, in spite

SPIRIT OF SECTARISM. 345 Visionary, and the Political! The first class, that of which Jacob B1hme, and in the last age Pasqualis and St. Martin, might be considered as the chiefs, is united by many ties to that internal church which is the sanctuary of reunion for all religious philosophers; these Illuminati are only occupied with religion and with nature, interpreted by the doctrines of religion. The Visionary Illuminati, at the head of whom we must place the Swedish Swedenborg, believe that, by the power of the will, they can make the dead appear, and work other miracles. The late King of Prussia, Frederick William, has been led into error by the credulity of these men, or by their artifices, which had the appearance of credulity. The Ideal of different opinions, religions, and ranks; to instruct all classes, and to surround sovereigns with men of integrity, justice, truth, and courage. His adherents were at first called Perfectibilists, but afterwards designated themselves the Enlightened. From the ablest of his law students he chose apostles for his new scheme. These apostles he called areopagists, and sent to various parts of Europe to work out his system. Before the existence of the society was known at Ingolstadt, several lodges had been established at Bavaria, Suabia, Franconia, Milan, and Holland, numbering 1000 disciples. Weishaupt succeeded in gaining over the Baron de Knigge, and Bode, the philosopher, to his system. The whole society formed a hierarchy which consisted of eight grades, independent of minor subdivisions, viz., the Novice, the Minerval, the llluminatus Minor, the llluminatus Major, the Scottish Cavalier, the Priest, the Regent, and the King. Young men between eighteen and thirty were preferred, and Lutherans were taken rather than Catholics. The Baron de Kniggc was a zealous promoter of their views. At the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, 1783, when there were present men from all parts of the world, he made many converts. The society numbered 2000, of whom he himself had converted 500. A dispute arose between Weishaupt and Knigge; the latter was deposed, retired to Brdme, and wrote against the society. In 1785, the system was divulged, and Weishaupt retired to Ratisbon. On the seizure of the papers and documents of the leaders in the following year, Weishaupt fled to Halle, where he died in 1830, at the age of 83. " A new combination was soon formed, under the name of the Germarnie Union, the founder of which was Dr. Bahrdt. Its political intrigues favored and hastened on'the French Revolution. Mirabeau, Talleyrand, and others, are said to have adopted the principles of the new union, which Bode is said to have expounded in person at the Masonic lodges of Paris. It has been doubted, however, whether the society ever attained to a perect organization, or whether it ever exerted any extensive influence." — (Encyclopcedia Britannica.)-lEd. 15o

346 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. Illuminati look down upon these visionaries as empirics; they despise their pretended prodigies, and think that the wonderful sentiments of the soul belong to them only in an especial manner. In a word, men who have had no other object than that of securing the chief authority in all States, and of getting places for themselves, have taken the name of the Illuminati. Their chief was'a Bavarian, Weishaupt, a man of superior understanding, and who had thoroughly felt the power that we may acquire, by uniting the scattered strength of individuals, and by directing them all to the same object. The possession of a secret, whatever it may be, flatters the self-love of men; and when they are told that they are something that their equals are not, they always gain a command over them. Self-love is hurt by resembling the multitude; and, from the moment that we choose to assume public or private marks of distinction, we are sure to set in motion the fancy of vanity, which is the most active of all fancies. The political Illuminati have only borrowed from the others some signs of recognition; but interests, and not opinions, are their rallying-points. Their object, it is true, was to reform the social order upon new principles; but while they waited the accomplishment of this great work, their first aim was to seize upon public offices. Such a sect has adepts enough in every country, who initiate themselves into its secrets. In Germany, however, perhaps this sect is the only one which has been founded upon a political combination; all the others have taken their rise from some sort of enthusiasm, and have only had for their object the inquiry after truth. Among these men who endeavor to penetrate the secrets of nature, we must reckon the Magnetizers, the Alchemists, etc. It is probable that there is much folly in these pretended discoveries, but what can we find alarming in them? If we come to the detection of that which is called marvellous in physical phenomena, we shall have reason to think there are moments when Natufe appears a machine which is constantly moved by lhe same springs, and it is then that her inflexible regularity

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 347 alarms us; but when we fancy we occasionally see in her something voluntary, like thought, a confused hope seizes upon the soul, and steals us away from the fixed regard of necessity. At the bottom of all these attempts, and of all these scientific and philosophical systems, there is always a very marked bias towards the spirituality of the soul. Those who wish to divine the secrets of nature, are entirely opposed to the materialists; for it is always in thought that they seek the solution of the enigma of the physical world. Doubtless, such a movement in the mind may lead to great errors, but it is so with every thing animated; as soon as there is life there is danger. Individual efforts would end by being interdicted, if we were to subject ourselves to that method which aims at regulating the movements of the mind, as discipline commands those of the body. The difficulty then consists in directing the faculties without restraining them, and we should wish that it was possible to adapt to the imagination of men, the art yet unknown of still rising on wings, and of directing our flight in the air. CHAPTER IX. OF THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. IN speaking of the influence of the new philosophy upon the sciences, I have already made mention of some of the new principles adopted in Germany, relative to the study of nature. But as religion and enthusiasm have a great share in the contemplation of the universe, I shall point out, in a general manaer, the political and religious views that we may collect upon this point in the writings of the Germans. Many naturalists, guided by a pious feeling, have thought it their duty to limit themselves to the examination of final.auses. They have endeavored to prove that every thing in

348 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. the world tends to the support and the physical well-being of individuals and of classes. It appears to me that we may make very strong objections to this system. Without doubt it is easy to see, that, in the order of things, the means are admirably adapted to their ends. But in this universal concatenation, where are those causes bounded which are effects, and those effects which are causes? If we choose to refer every thing to the preservation of man, we shall find it difficult to conceive what he has in common with the majority of beings; besides, it is to attach too much value to material existence, to assign that as the ultimate object of creation. Those who, notwithstanding the great crowd of particular misfortunes, attribute a certain sort of goodness to Nature, consider her as a merchant, who, making speculations on a large scale, balances small losses by greater advantages. This system is not suitable even to the governments of men; and scrupulous writers in political economy have opposed it. What then will be the case, if we consider the intentions of the Deitv? A man, regarded in a religious light, is as much as the entire human race; and from the moment that we have conceived the idea of an immortal soul, we have no right to decide what is the degree of importance which an individual holds in his relation to the whole body. Every intelligent being is of an infinite value, because his soul is eternal. It is then in the most elevated point of view that the German philosophers have considered the universe. There are those who believe they see in every thing two principles, that of good and that of evil, continually opposing each other; and whether we attribute this contest to an infernal power, or whether, according to a simpler thought, the natural world may be the image of the good and bad propensities of man, it is true that the universe always offers to our observation two faces, which are absolutely contrary to each other. There is, we cannot deny it, a terrible side in nature as well as in the human heart, and we feel there a dreadful power of anger. However good may be the intention of the partisans of optimism, more depth is apparent, I think, in those

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 349 who do not deny evil, but who acknowledge the connection of this evil with the liberty of man, with the immortality which he may deserve by the right use of that liberty. The mystical writers, of whom I have spoken in the preceding chapters, see in man the abridgment of the world, and in the world, the emblem of the doctrines of Christianity. Nature seems to them the corporeal image of the Deity, and they are continually plunging further into the profound signification of things and beings. Among the German writers, who have been employed upon the contemplation of nature under a religious point of view, there are two who merit particular attention: Novalis as a poet, and Schubert as a naturalist. Novalis, who was a man of noble birth, was initiated from his youth in the studies of every kind which the new school has developed in Germany; but his pious soul has given a great character of simplicity to his poems. He died at the age of twenty-six; and, when he was no more, the religious hymns which he had composed acquired a striking celebrity in Germany. This young man's father is a Moravian; and, some time after the death of his son, he went to visit a community of that persuasion, and heard his son's hymns sung in their church, the Moravians having chosen them for their own edification, without knowing the author of them. Among the works of Novalis, some Hymns to the Night' " These Hymns to the Night, it will be remembered, were written shortly after the death of his mistress: in that period of deep sorrow, or rather of holy deliverance from sorrow. Novalis himself regarded them as his most finished productions. They are of a strange, veiled, almost enigmatical character; nevertheless, more deeply examined, they appear nowise without true poetic worth; there is a vastness, an immensity of idea; a still solemnity reigns in them, a solitude almost as of extinct worlds. Here and there, too, some lightbeam visits us in the void deep; and we cast a glance, clear and wondrous, into the secrets of that mysterious soul. A full commentary on the Hymns to the Night would be an exposition of Novalis's whole theological and moral creed; for it lies recorded there, though symbolically, and in lyric, not in didactic language. We have translated the third, as the shortest and simplest; imitating its.ight, half-measured style; above all, deciphering its vague, deep-laid

350 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY are distinguished, which very forcibly depict the train of recollections which it awakens in the mind. The blaze of day may agree with the joyous doctrines of Paganism; but the starry heaven seems the real temple of the purest worship. It is in the darkness of night, says a German poet, that immortality is revealed to man; the light of the sun dazzles the eyes, which imagine they see. Some stanzas of Novalis, on the life of miners, contain some spirited poetry, of very great effect.'He questions the earth which is found in the deep caverns, because it has been the witness of the different revolutions which nature has undergone; and he expresses a vehement desire to penetrate still further towards the centre of the globe. The contrast of this boundless curiosity with the frail life, which is to be exposed to gratify it, causes a sublime emotion. Man is placed on earth, between infinity in the heavens and infinity in the abysses; and his life, spent under the influence of time, is likewise between two eternities. Surrounded on all sides sense, as accurately as we could. By the word' Night,' it will be seen, Novalis means much more than the common opposite of Day.'Light' seems, in these poems, to shadow forth our terrestrial life; Night, the primeval and celestial life: "'; Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my Hope had melted away, and I stood solitary by the grave that in its dark narrow space concealed the Form of my life; solitary as no other had been; chased by unutterable anguish; powerless; one thought, and that of misery;-here now as I looked round for help; forward could not go, nor backward, but clung to a transient extinguished Life with unutterable longing; —lo, from the azure distance, down from the heights of my old Blessedness, came a chill Breath of Dusk, and suddenly the band of Birth, the fetter of Light was snapped asunder. Vanishes the Glory of Earth, and with it my Lamenting; rushes together the infinite Sadness into a new unfathomable World: thou Night's-inspiration, Slumber of Heaven, camest over me; the scene rose gently aloft; over the scene hovered my enfranchised new-born spirit; to a cloud of dust that grave changed itself; through the cloud I beheld the transfigured features of my Beloved. In her eyes lay Eternity; I clasped her hands, and my tears became a glittering indissoluble chain. Centuries of Ages moved away into the distance, like thunder-clouds. On her neck I wept, for this new life, enrapturing tears. It was my first, only Dream; and ever since then do I feel this changeless everlasting faith in the Heaven of Night, and its Sun Iv Be.'oved.' " —(Carlyke's Esways, p. 183.) —i.

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 351 by boundless ideas and objects, innumerable thoughts appeal to him like millions of lights, which throw their blaze together to dazzle him. Novalis' has written much upon nature in general; he calls 1' We might say that the chief excellence we have remarked in Novalis, is his to us truly wonderful subtlety of intellect; his power of intense abstraction, of pursuing the deepest and most evanescent ideas, through their thousand complexities, as it were, with lynx vision, and to the very limits of human Thought. He was well skilled in mathematics, and, as we can easily believe, fond of that science; but his is a far finer species of endowment than any required in mathematics, where the mind, from the very beginning of Euclid to the end of Laplace, is assisted with visible symbols, with safe implements for thinking; nay, at least in what is called the higher mathematics, has often little more than a mechanical superintendence to exercise over these. This power of abstract meditation, when it is so sure and clear as we sometimes find it with Novalis, is a much higher and rarer one; its element is not mathematics, but that Mathesie, of which it has been said many a Great Calculist has not even a notion. In this power truly, so far as logical and not moral power is concerned, lies the summary of all Philosophic talent: which talent accordingly we imagine Novalis to have possessed in a very high degree; in a higher degree than almost any other modern writer we have met with.:" In regard to the character of his genius, or rather perhaps of his literary significance, and the form under which he displayed his genius, Tieck thinks he may be likened to Dante.' For him,' says he,' it had become the most natural disposition to regard the commonest and nearest as a wonder, and the strange, the supernatural, as something common; men's every-day life itself lay round him like a wondrous fable, and those regions which the most dream of, or doubt of, as of a thing distant, incomprehensible, were for him a beloved home. Thus did he, uncorrupted by examples, find out for himself a new method of delineation; and in his multiTlicity of meaning, in his view of Love, and his belief in Love, as at once his Instructor, his Wisdom, his Religion; in this too that a single grand incident of life, and one deep sorrow and bereavement grew to be the essence of his Poetry and Contemplation,-he alone among the moderns resembles the lofty Dante; and sings us, like him, an unfathomable, mystic song, far different from that of many imitators, who think to put on mysticism and put it off, like a piece of dress.' Considering the tendency of his poetic endeavors, as well as the general spirit of his philosophy, this flattering comparison may turn out to be better founded than at first sight t seems to be. Nevertheless, were we required to illustrate Novalis in this way, which at all times must be a very loose one, we should incline rather to call him the German Pascal than the German Dante. Between Pascal and Novalis, a lover of such analogies might trace not a few points Df resemblance. Both are of the purest, most affectionate moral nature; both of a high, fine, discursive intellect; both are mathematicians and

3.52 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. himself, with reason, the disciple of Says, because in that city the temple of Isis was built, and the traditions that remain of the Egyptian mysteries lead us to believe that their priests had a profound knowledge of the laws of the universe. "Man," says Novalis,' "is united to nature by relations almost as various, almost as inconceivable, as those which he maintains with his kind; as she brings herself down to the comprehension of children, and takes delight in their simple hearts, so does she appear sublime to exalted minds, and divine to divine beings. The love of nature assumes various forms, and while it excites in some persons nothing but joy and pleasure, it inspires the arts with the most pious religion, with that which gives a direction and a support to the whole of life. Long since, among the ancient nations, there have been men of serious spirit, for whom the universe was the image of the Deity; and others, who believed they were only invited to the banquet of the world: the air, for these convivial guests of existence, was only a refreshing draught; the stars were only torches which lit the dance during the night; and plants and animals only the magnificent preparations "or a splendid feast: Nature did not present herself to their eyes as a majestic and tranquil temple, but as the brilliant theatre of entertainments ever new. " At the same time, however, some more profound minds were employed without relaxation in rebuilding that ideal world, the traces of which had already disappeared; they partook, like brothers, the most sacred labors; some endeavored naturalists, yet occupy themselves chiefly with Religion: nay, the best writings of both are left in the shape of' Thoughts,' materials of a grand scheme, which each of them, with the views peculiar to his age, had planved, we may say, for the furtherance of Religion, and which neither of them lived to execute. Nor in all this would it fail to be carefully remarked, that Novalis was not the French but the German Pascal; and from the intellectual habits of the one and the other, many national conzrasts and conclusions might be drawn; which we leave to those that have X taste for such parallels."-( Carlyle's Essays, pp. 185, 186.) —t. I We have no copy of Novalis at hand, and are obliged to content our selves with a second-hand version.-Ed.

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 353 to reproduce in music the voice of the woods and winds; others impressed the image and the presentiment of a more noble race upon stone and brass, changed the rocks into edifices, and brought to light the treasures hidden under the earth. Nature, civilized by man, seemed to answer his desires: the imagination of the artist dared to question her, and the golden age seemed to reappear, by the help of thought. " In order to understand Nature, we must be incorporated with her. A poetical and reflective life, a holy and religious soul, all the strength and all the bloom of human existence are necessary to attain this comprehension; and the true observer is he who can discover the analogy of that nature with man, and that of man with heaven." Schubert has composed a book upon Nature that never tires in the perusal, so filled is it with ideas that excite meditation; he presents the picture of new facts, the concatenation of which is conceived under new points of view. We derive two principal ideas from his work. The Indians believe in a descending metempsychosis, that is, in the condemnation of the soul of man to pass into animals and plants, as a punishment for having misused this life. It would be difficult for us to imagine a system of more profound misery; and the writings of the Indians bear the melancholy stamp of their doctrine. They believe they see everywhere, in animals as in plants, thought as a captive, and feeling enslaved, vainly endeavoring to disengage themselves from the gross and silent forms which imprisoq them. The system of Schubert is more consolatory. He represents Nature as an ascending metempsychosis, in which, from the stone to human life, there is a continual promotion, which makes the vital principle advance by degrees, even to the most complete perfection. Schubert also believes that there have been epochs, where pan had so lively and so delicate a feeling of existing phenomena, that, by his own impressions, he conjectured the most hidden secrets of Nature. These primitive faculties have betome dull; and it is often the sickly irritability of the nerves, which, while it weakens the power'of reasoning, restores to

354 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. man that instinct which he formerly owed to the very plenitude of his strength. The labors of philosophers, of learned men, and of poets, in Germany, aim at diminishing the dry power of argumentation, without in the least obscuring knowledge. It is thus that the imagination of the ancient world may be born again, like the phoenix, from the ashes of all errors. The greater number of naturalists have attempted to explain Nature like a good government, in which every thing is conducted according to wise principles of administration; but it is in vain that we try to transfer this prosaic system to creation. Neither the terrible, nor even the beautiful, can be explained by this circumscribed theory; and Nature is by turns too cruel and too magnificent to permit us to subject her to that sort of calculation which directs our judgment in the affairs of this world. There are objects hideous in themselves, whose impression upon us is inexplicable. Certain figures of animals, certain forms of plants, certain combinations of colors, revolt our senses, without our being at all able to give an account of the causes of this repugnance; we should say, that these ungraceful contours, these repulsive images, suggest the ideas of baseness and perfidy; although nothing in the analogies of reason can explain such an association of ideas. The physiognomy of man does not exclusively depend, as some writers have pretended, upon the stronger or weaker character of the features; there is transmitted through the look and the change of countenance, I know not what expression of the soul, impossible to be mistaken; and it is above all, in the human form, that we are taught what is extraordinary and unknown in the harmonies of mind and body. Accidents and misfortunes, in the course of nature, have something so rapid, so pitiless, and so unexpected about them, that they appear to be miraculous. Disease and its furies are like a wicked life, which seizes on a sudden upon a life of tran luillity. The affections of the heart make us feel the cruelty of that nature, which it is attempted to represent as so sweet

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 355 and so gentle. What dangers threaten a beloved person! under how many shapes is death disguised around us! There is not a fine day which may not conceal the thunderbolt; not a flower whose juices may not be impoisoned; not a breath of air which may not bring a fatal contagion; and Nature appears like a jealous mistress, ready to pierce the bosom of man at the very moment that she animates him with her kindness. How can we comprehend the object of all these phenomena, if we confine ourselves to the ordinary connection of our thoughts on these subjects. How can we consider animals without being plunged into the astonishment which their mysterious existence causes? A poet has called them the dreams of Nature, and man her waking. For what end were they created? what mean those looks which seem covered with an obscure cloud, behind which an idea strives to show itselfI what connection have they with us? what part of life is it they enjoy? A bird survives a man of genius, and I know not what strange sort of despair seizes the heart when we have lost what we love, and when we see the breath of existence still animate an insect which moves upon the earth, from which the most noble object has disappeared. The contemplation of Nature overwhelms our thoughts. We feel ourselves in a state of relation with her, which does not depend upon the good or evil which she can do; but her visible soul endeavors to find ours in her bosom, and holds converse with us. When darkness alarms us, it is not always the peril to which it exposes us that we dread, but it is the sympathy of night with every sort of privation or grief with which we are penetrated. The sun, on the contrary, is like an emanation from the Deity, like a glorious messenger, who tells us that our prayer is heard; his rays descend upon the earth not only to direct the labors of man, but to express a "eeling of love for Nature. The flowers turn towards the light, in order to receive it; they are closed during the night, and at morn and eve they seem in aromatic perfume to breathe their hymns of praise. When these flowers are reared in the fhade, they are of pallid hue, and ro longer clad in their ac

356 MADAME DE STAEL' S ERMANY. customed colors; but when we restore them to the day, in them the sun reflects his varied beams, as in the rainbow. And one should say, that he gazes upon himself with pride, in the mirror of that beauty which he has conferred upon them. The sleep of vegetables, during certain hours, and at certain seasons of the year, is in accord with the motion of the earth; the globe, in its revolving motion, hurries away, through various regions, the half of plants, of animals, and of man, asleep; the passengers in this great vessel, which we call the world, suffer themselves to be rocked in the circle which their journeying habitation describes. The peace and discord, the harmony and dissonance, which a secret bond unites, are the first laws of Nature; and whether she appears fearful, terrible, or attractive, the sublime unity, which is her character, always makes her known. Fire rushes in waves, like the torrent; the clouds that travel through the air sometimes assume the form of mountains and of valleys, and appear to imitate in their sport the image of the earth. It is said in Genesis, that the Almighty divided the waters of the earth from the waters of heaven, and suspended these last in the air. The heavens are in fact a noble ally of the ocean. The azure of the firmanent is reflected in the waters, and the waves are painted in the clouds. Sometimes, when the storm is preparing in the atmosphere, the sea trembles at a distance, and one should say that it answers, by the agitation of its waves, to the mysterious signal of the tempest which it has received. M. de Humboldt says, in his scientific and poetical Views of South America, that he has witnessed a phemomenon, which is also to be observed in Egypt, and which is called mirage. On a sudden, in the most arid deserts, the reverberation of the air assumes the appearance of a lake, or of the sea; and the very animals, panting with thirst, rush towards these deceitful images, hoping to allay that thirst. The different figures that the hoar-frost traces on the window, present another example of these strange analogies. The vapors condensed by the cold designate landscapes, like those which are remarked in north

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 357 ern countries: forests of pines, mountains bristling with ice, reappear in their robes of white, and frozen Nature takes pleasure in counterfeiting the productions of animated Nature. Not only does Nature reflect herself, but she seems to wish to imitate the works of man; and to give them, by these means, a singular testimony of her correspondence with them. It is related that in the islands near Japan, the clouds assume the appearance of regular fortifications. The fine arts also have their type in Nature; and this luxury of existence is more the object of her care than existence itself: the symmetry of forms, in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, has served for a model to architects; and the reflection of objects and colors in the water, gives an idea of the illusions of painting; the wind, whose murmurs are prolonged in the trembling leaves, discovers the secret of music; and it has been said, on the shores of Asia, where the atmosphere is most pure, that sometimes, in the evening, a plaintive and sweet harmony is heard, which Nature seems to address to man, in order to tell him that she herself breathes, that she herself loves, that she herself suffers. Often at the sight of a lovely country we are tempted to believe that its only object is to excite in man exalted and spotless sentiments. I know not what connection it is which exists between the heavens and the pride of the human heart; between the rays of the moon, that repose upon the mountain, and the calm of conscience; but these objects hold a beautiful language to man, and we are capable of wholly yielding to the agitation which they cause: this abandonment would be good for the soul. When, at eve, at the boundary of the landscape, the heaven appears to recline so closely on the earth, imaginalion pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope, a native.and of love, and Nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal. The continual succession of birth and death, of which the natural world is the theatre, would produce the most mournful impression, if we did not fancy we saw in that world the indication of the resurrection of all things; and it is the truly

358 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. religious point of view, in the contemplation of Nature, to regard it in this manner. We should end by dying of compassion, if we were confined in every thing to the terrible idea of what is irreparable: no animal perishes without our feeling it possible to regret it; no tree falls, without the idea that we shall never see it again in its beauty, exciting in us a mournful reflection. In a word, inanimate objects themselves affect us when their decay obliges us to quit them: the house, the chair, the table, which have been used by those we loved, interest us; and these objects even excite in us sometimes a sort of compassion, independent of the recollections which they awaken; we regret their well-known form, as if by this form they were made into beings who have seen our daily life, and who ought to have seen us die. If eternity were not the antidote to time, we should attach ourselves to every moment in order to retain it; to every sound, to prolong its vibrations; to every look, to fix its radiance; and our enjoyments would only last for that instant which is necessary to make us feel that they are going, and to bedew their traces with tears, traces which the abyss of days must also swallow up. A new thought struck me in some writings which were communicated to me by an author of a pensive and profound imagination; he is comparing the ruins of nature with those of art, and of the human species. " The first," he says, " are philosophical; the second poetical; the third mysterious." A thing highly worthy of remark, in fact, is the very different action of years upon nature, upon the works of genius, and upon living creatures. Time injures man alone: when rocks are overturned, when mountains sink into valleys, the earth only changes her appearance; her new aspect excites new thoughts in our minds, and the vivifying force undergoes a metamorphose, but not a destruction. The ruins of the fine Wrts address the imagination; Art rebuilds what time has defaced, and never, perhaps, did a masterpiece of art, in all its splendor, impress us with such grand ideas as its own ruins. We picture to ourselves half-destroyed monuments adorned with all that beauty which ever clothes the objects of out

CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE. 359 regret: but how different is this from the ravages of old age! Scarcely can we believe that youth once embellished that countenance, of which death has already taken possession: some physiognomies escape degradation by the lustre of the soul; but the human figure, in its decline, often assumes a vulgar expression which hardly allows even of pity. Aninmals, it is true, lose their strength and their activity with years, but the glowing hue of life does not with them change into livid colors, and their dim eyes do not resemble funeral lamps, throwing their pallid flashes over a withered cheek. Even when, in the flower of age, life is withdrawn from the bosom of man, neither the admiration excited by the convulsions of nature, nor the interest awakened by the wreck of monuments, can be made to belong to the inanimate corpse of the most lovely of created beings. The love which cherished this enchanting form-love itself cannot endure the remains of it; and nothing of man exists after him on earth but what makes even his friends tremble. Ah! what a lesson do the horrors of destruction thus incarnate in the human race afford! Is not this to announce to man that his life is to be elsewhere. Would nature humble him so low, if the Divinity were not willing to raise him up again. The true final causes of nature are these relations with our soul and our immortal destiny. Physical objects themselves have a destination which is not bounded by the contracted existence of man below; they are placed here to assist in the development of our thoughts, in the work of our moral life. The phenomena of nature must not be understood according.o the laws of matter alone, however well combined those laws Way be; they have a philosophical sense and a religious end, cf which the most attentive contemplation will never know the extent.

i360 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY CHAPTER X. OF ENTHUSIASM. MANY people are prejudiced against Enthusiasm; they confound it with Fanaticism, which is a great mistake. Fanaticism is an exclusive passion, the object of which is an opinion; enthusiasm is connected with the harmony of the universe: it is the love of the beautiful, elevation of soul, enjoyment of devotion, all united in one single feeling which combines grandeur and repose. The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it: enthusiasm signifies God in us. In fact, when the existence of man is expansive, it has something divine. Whatever leads us to sacrifice our own comfort, or our own life, is almost always enthusiasm; for the high road of reason, to the selfish, must be to make themselves the object of all their efforts, and to value nothing in the world but health, riches, and power. Without doubt, conscience is sufficient to lead the coldest character into the track of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty: there is in us a superfluity of soul which it is sweet to consecrate to what is fine, when what is good has been accomplished. Genius and imagination also stand in need of a little care for their welfare in the world; and the law of duty, however sublime it may be, is not sufficient to enable us to taste all the wonders of the heart, and of thought. It cannot be denied that his own interests, as an individual, surround a man on all sides; there is even in what is vulgar a certain enjoyment, of which many people are very susceptible, and the traces of ignoble passions are often found under the appearance of the most distinguished manners. Si perior talents are not always a guarantee against that degra

ENTHUSIASM. 361 dation of nature which disposes blindly of the existence of men, and leads them to place their happiness lower than themselves. Enthusiasm alone can counterbaiance th4e_tendency to, selfishness; and it is by this divine sign that we recognize the creatinles of immortality. When you speak to any one on subjects worthy of holy respect, you perceive at once whether he feels a noble trembling; whether his heart beats with elevated sentiments; whether he has formed an alliance with the other life, or whether he has only that little portion of mind which serves him to direct the mechanism of existence. And what then is human nature when we see in it nothing but arprudence, of which its own advantage is the object? The instinct of animals is of more worth, for it is sometimes generous and proud; but this calculation, which seems the attribute of reason, ends by rendering us incapable of the first of virtues, selfdevotion. Among those who endeavor to turn exalted sentiments into ridicule, many are, nevertheless, susceptible of them, though unknown to themselves. War, undertaken with personal views, always affords some of the enjoyments of enthusiasm; the transport of a day of battle, the singular pleasure of exposing ourselves to death, when our whole nature would enjoin us to love life, can only be attributed to enthusiasm. The martial music, the neighing of the steeds, the roar of the cannon, the multitude of soldiers clothed in the same colors, moved by the same desire, assembled around the same banners, inspire an emotion capable of triumphing over that instinct which would preserve existence; and so strong is this enjoyment, that neither fatigues, nor sufferings, nor dangers, can withdraw the soul from it. Whoever has once led this life loves no other. The attainment of our object never satisfies us; it is the action of risking ourselves which is necessary, rt is that which introduces enthusiasm into the blood; and, although it may be more pure at the bottom of the soul, it is stili of a noDle nature, even when it has been able to become an impulse almost physical. Sincere enthusiasm is often reproached with what belongs VOL. II.-16

36(2 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. only to affected enthusiasm; the more pure a sentiment is, the more odious is a false imitation of it. To tyrannize over the admiration of men is what is most culpable, for we dry up in them the source of good emotions when we make them blush for having felt them. Besides, nothing is more painful than the false sounds which appear to proceed from the sanctuary of the soul itself: Vanity may possess herself of whatever is external; conceit and disgrace are the only evils which will result from it; but when she counterfeits our inward feelings, she appears to violate the last asylum in which we can hope to escape her. It is easy, nevertheless, to discover sincerity in enthusiasm; it is a melody so pure, that the smallest discord destroys its whole charm; a word, an accent, a look, expresses the concentrated emotion which answers to a whole life. Persons who are called severe in the world, very often have in them something exalted. The strength which reduces others to subjection may be no more than cold calculation. The strength which triumphs over ourselves is always inspired by a generous sentiment. Euthusiasm, far from exciting a just suspicion of its excesses, perhaps leads in general to a contemplative disposition, which impairs the power of acting: the Germans are a proof of it; no nation is more capable of feeling or thinking; but when the moment for taking a side has arrived, the very extent of their conceptions detracts from the decision of their character. Character and enthusiasm differ in many respects: we ought to choose our object by enthusiasm, but to approach it by character; thought is nothing without enthusiasm, and action without character; enthusiasm is every thing for literary nations, character is every thing to those which are active; free nations stand in need of both. Selfishness takes pleasure in speaking incessantly of the dangers of enthusiasm; this affected fear is in truth derision; if the cunning men of the world would be sincere, they would say, that nothing suits them better than to have to do with persons with whom so many means are impossible, and who car so easily renounce what occupies the greater part of mankind.

INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM. 363 This disposition of the mind has strength, notwithstanding its sweetness; and he who feels it knows how to draw from it a noble constancy. The storms of the passions subside, the pleasures of self-love fade away, enthusiasm alone is unalterable; the mind itself would be lost in physical existence, if something proud and animated did not snatch it away from the vulgar ascendency of selfishness: that moral dignity, which is proof against all attempts, is what is most admirable in the gift of existence; it is for this that in the bitterest pains it is still noble to have lived as it would be noble to die. Let us now examine the influence of enthusiasm upon learning and happiness. These last reflections will terminate the train of thoughts to which the different subjects that I had to discuss have led me. CHAPTER XI. OF THE INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM ON LEARNING. THIS chapter is, in some respects, the recapitulation of my whole work; for enthusiasm being the quality which really distinguishes the German nation, we may judge of the influence it exerts over learning, according to the progress of human nature in Germany. Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible, and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world; no sentiment, therefore, is more adapted to the pursuit of abstract truths; they are, therefore, cultivated in Germany with a remarkable ardor and firmness. The philosophers who are inspired by enthusiasm are those, perhaps, who have the most exactness and patience in their labors, and at the same time those who the least endeavor to shine; they love science for itself, and set no value upon them%elves, when the object of their pursuit is in question; physical nature pursues its own invariable march over the destruction

364: MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. of individuals; the thought of man assumes a sublime character when it arrives at. the power of examining itself from a universal point of view; it then silently assists the triumphs of truth, and truth is, like nature, a force which acts only by a progressive and regular development. It may be said, with some reason, that enthusiasm leads tc a systematizing spirit; when we are much attached to our ideas, we endeavor to connect every thing with them; but in general, it is easier to deal with sincere opinions, than with opinions adopted through vanity. If, in our relations with men, we had to do only with what they really think, we should easily understand one another; it is what they affect to think that breeds discord. Enthusiasm has been often accused of leading to error, but perhaps a superficial interest is mnuch more deceitful; for, to penetrate the essence of things, it is necessary there should be an impulse to excite our attention to them with ardor. Besides, in considering human destiny in general, I believe it may be affirmed, that we shall never arrive at truth, but by elevation of soul; every thing that tends to lower us is falsehood, and, whatever the~ ja v say of it, the error lies on the side of vulgar sentiments Enthusiasm, I repeat, has no resemblance to fanaticism, and cannot mislead as it does. Enthusiasm is tolerant, not through indifference, but because it makes us feel the interest and the beauty of all things. Reason does not give happiness in the place of that which it deprives us of; enthusiasm finds, in the musing of the heart, and in depth of thought, what fanaticism and passion comprise in a single idea, or a single object. This sentiment, on account even of its universality, is very favorable to thought and to imagination. Society develops wit, but it is contemplation alone that forms genius. Self-love is the spring of countries where society prevails, and self-love necessarily leads to jesting, which destroys all enthusiasm. It is amusing enough, it cannot be denied, to have a quick perception of what is ridiculous, and to paint it with grace ano

INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM. 365 gayety; perhaps it would be better to deny ourselves this pleasure, but, nevertheless, that is not the kind of jesting the consequences of which are, the most to be feared; that which is attached to ideas and to sentiments is the most fatal of all, for it insinuates itself into the source of strong and devoted affections. Man has a great empire over man; and of all the evils he can do to his fellow-creature, the greatest perhaps is to place the phantoms of ridicule between generous emotions and the actions they would inspire. Love, genius, talent, distress itself, all these sacred things are exposed to irony, and it is impossible to calculate to what point the empire of this irony may extend. There is a relish in wickedness; there is something weak in goodness. Admiration for great things may be made the sport of wit; and he who attaches no importance to any thing, has the air of being superior to every thing: if, therefore, our hearts and our minds are not defended by enthusiasm, they are exposed on all sides to be surprised by this darkest shade of the beautiful, which unites insolence to gayety. The social spirit is so formed that we are often commanded to laugh, and much oftener are made ashamed of weeping: from what does this proceed? From this,-that self-love thinks itself safer in pleasantry than in emotion. A man must be able to rely well on his wit before he can dare to be serious against a jest; it requires much strength to disclose sentiments which may be turned into ridicule. Fontenelle said: Iam eighty years old; Iam a Frenchman, and I have never, through all my life, treated the smallest virtue with the smallest ridicule. This sentence argued a profound knowledge of society. Fontenelle was not a sensible man, but he had a great deal of wit; and whenever a man is endowed with any superiority, he feels the necessity of seriousness in human nature. It is only persons of middling understanding who would wish that the'oundation of every thing should be sand, in order that no man might leave upon the earth a trace more durable than their own. The Germans have not to struggle among themselves against

366 MADAME DE STAEL S iERMANY. the enemies of enthusiasm, which is a great obstacle, at least to distinguished men. Wit grows sharper by contest, but talent has need of confidence. It is necessary to expect admiration, glory, immortality, in order to experience the inspiration of genius; and what makes the distinction between different ages is not nature, which is always lavish of the same gifts, but the opinion which prevails at the epoch in which we live; if the tendency of that opinion is towards enthusiasm, great men spring up on all sides; if discouragement is proclaimed in one country, when in others noble efforts would be excited, nothing remains in literature but judges of the time past. The terrible events of which we have been witnesses have dried up men's hearts, and every thing that belongs to thought appeared tarnished by the side of the omnipotence of action. Difference of circumstances has led minds to support all sides of the same questions; the consequence has been, that people no longer believe in ideas, or consider them at best as means. Conviction does not seem to belong to our times; and when a man says he is of such an opinion, that is understood to be a delicate manner of expressing that he has such an interest. The most honest men, then, make to themselves a system which changes their idleness into dignity; they say that nothing can be done with nothing; they repeat, with the Hermit of Prague, in Shakspeare, that what is, is, and that theories have no influence on the world. Such men leave off with making what they say true; for with such a mode of thinking, they cannot act upon others; and if wit consisted in seeing the pro and con of every subject, it would make the objects which encompass us turn round in such a manner that we could not walk with a firm step upon this tottering ground. We also see young people, ambitious of appearing free from all enthusiasm, affect a philosophical contempt for exalted sentiments: they think by that to display a precocious force of reason; but it is a premature decay of which they are boasting. They treat talent like the old man who asked, whether love still existed. The mind deprived of imagination wouli

INFLUENCE OF ENTHJSIASM. 367 gladly treat even nature with disdain, if nature were not too strong for it. We certainly do great mischief to those persons who are yet animated with noble desires, by incessantly opposing them with all the argument which can disturb the most confiding hope; nevertheless, good faith cannot grow weary of itself, for it is not the appearance but the reality of things which employs her. WTith whatever atmosphere we may be surrounded, a sincere word was never completely lost; if there is but one day on which success can be gained, there are ages for the operation of the good which may be done by truth. The inhabitants of Mexico, as they pass along the great road, carry each a small stone to the grand pyramid which they are raising in the midst of their country. No individual will confer his name upon it, but all will have contributed to this monument, which must survive them all. CHAPTER XII. OF THE INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM UPON IHAPPINESS. THE course of my subject necessarily leads me here to treat of happiness. I have hitherto studiously avoided the word, Decause nrow, for almost a century, it has been the custom to place it principally in pleasures so gross, in a way of life so selfish, in calculations so narrow and confined, that its very image is sullied and profaned. It, however, maybe pronounced with confidence, that of all the feelings of the human heart, enthusiasm confers the greatest happiness, that indeed it alone confers real happiness, alone can enable us to bear the lot of mortality in every situation in which fortune has the power to place us. Vainly would we reduce ourselves to sensual enjoyments; the soul asserts itself on every side. Pride, ambition, self-love, all these are still from the soul, although in them a poisonous

368 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. and pestilential blast mixes with its essence. Meanwhile, how wretched is the existence of that crowd of mortals, who, play. ing the hypocrite with themselves almost as much as with others, are continually employed in repressing the generous emotions which struggle to revive within their bosoms, as diseases of the imagination, which the open air sh6uld at once dispel! How impoverished is the existence of those who content themselves with abstaining from doing evil, and treat as weakness and delusion the source of the most beautiful deeds, and the most noble conceptions! From mere vanity they imprison themselves in obstinate mediocrity, which they might easily have opened to the light of knowledge which every. where surrounds them; they sentence and condemn themselves to that monotony of ideas, to that deadness of feeling, which suffers the days to pass, one after the other, without deriving from them any advantage, without making in them any progress, without treasuring up any matter for future recollection. If time in its course had not cast a change upon their features, what proofs would they have preserved of its having passed at all? If to grow old and to die were not the necessary law of our nature, what serious reflection would ever have arisen in their minds? Some reasoners there are, who object that enthusiasm produces a distaste for ordinary life; and that, as we cannot always remain in the same frame of mind, it is more for our advantage never to indulge it: and why, then, I would ask them, have they accepted the gift of youth, why of life itself, since they well knew that they were not to last forever? Why have they loved (if indeed they ever have loved), since death at any moment might separate them from the objects of their affection? Can there be a more wretched economy than of the faculties of the soul? They were given us to be improved and expanded, to be carried as near as possible to perfection, even to be prodigally lavished for a high and noble encd. The more we benumb our feelings and render ourselves insensible, the nearer, it will be said, we approach to a state of material existence, and the more we diminish the dominion o'

INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM. 369 pain and sorrow over us. This argument imposes upon many; it consists, in fact, in recommending us to make an attempt to live with as little of life as possible. But our own degradation is always accompanied by an uneasiness of mind for which we cannot account, and which unremittingly attends upon us in secret. The discontent, the shame, and the weariness which it causes, are arrayed by vanity in the garb of impertinence and contempt; but it is very rare that any man can settle peaceablv in this confined and desert sphere of being, which leaves him without resource in himself when he is abandoned by the prosperity of the world. Man has a consciousness of the beautiful as well as of the virtuous; and in the absence of the former he feels a void, as in a deviation from the latter he finds remorse. It is a common accusation against enthusiasm, that it is transitory; man were too much blessed, if he could fix and retain emotions so beautiful; but it is because they are so easily dissipated and lost, that we should strive and exert ourselves to preserve them. Poetry and the fine arts are the means of calling forth in man this happiness of illustrious origin, which raises the depressed heart; and, instead of an unquiet satiety of life, gives an habitual feeling of the divine harmony, in which nature and ourselves claim a part. There is no duty, there is no pleasure, there is no sentiment, which Joes not borrow from enthusiasm I know not what charm, which is still in perfect unison with the simple beauty of truth. All men take up arms indeed for the defence of the land which they inhabit, when circumstances demand this duty of them; but if they are inspired by the enthusiasm of their country, what warm emotions do they not feel within them I The sun, which shone upon their birth, the land of their fathers, the sea which bathes their rocks,' their many recollections of the past, their many hopes for the future, every thing around It is easy to perceive, that by this phrase, and by those which follow, t have been trying to designate England; in fac,, I could not speak of wal with enthusiasm, without representing it to myself as the contest of a free Aation for her independence. 16o

370 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. them presents itself as a summons and encouragement for battle; and'in every pulsation of the heart rises a thought of affection and of honor. God has given this country to men who can defend it; to women, who, for its sake, consent to the dangers of their brothers, their husbands, and their sons. At the approach of the perils which threaten it, a fever, exempt from shuddering as from delirium, quickens the blood in the veins. Every effort, in such a struggle, comes from the deepest source of inward thought. As yet nothing can be seen in the features of these generous citizens but tranquillity; there is too much dignity in their emotions for outward demonstration; but let the signal once be heard, let the banner of their country wave in the air, and you will see those looks, before so gentle, and so ready to resume that character at the sight of misfortune, at once animated by a determination holy and terrible! They shudder no more, neither at wounds nor at blood; it is no longer pain, it is no longer death, it is an offering to the God of armies; no regret, no hesitation, now intrudes itself into the most desperate resolutions; and when the heart is entirely in its object, then is the highest enjoyment of existence! As soon as man has, within his own mind, separated himself from himself, to him life is only an evil; and if it be true, that of all the feelings enthusiasm confers the the greatest happiness, it is because, more than any other, it unites all the forces of the soul in the same direction for the same end. The labors of the understanding are considered by many writers as an occupation almost merely mechanical, and which fills up their life in the same manner as any other profession. It is still something that their choice has fallen upon literature; but have such men even an idea of the sublime happiness of thought when it is animated by enthusiasm? Do they know the hope which penetrates the soul, when there arises.n it the confident belief, that by the gift of eloquence we are about to demonstrate and declare some profound truth, some truth which will be at once a generous bond of union between u mnd every soul that sympathizes with ours?

INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM. 371 Writers without enthusiasm, know of the career of literature nothing but the criticisms, the rivalries, the jealousies which attend upon it, and which necessarily must endanger our peace of mind, if we allow ourselves to be entangled among the passions of men. Unjust attacks of this nature may, indeed, sometimes do us injury; but, can the true, the heartfelt internal enjoyment which belongs to talent, be affected by them? Even at the moment of the first public appearance of a work, and before its character is yet decided, how many hours of happiness has it not already been worth to him who wrote it from his heart, and as an act and office of his worship! How nany tears of rapture has he not shed in his solitude over those wonders of life, love, glory, and religion! Has he not, in his transports, enjoyed the air of heaven like a bird; the waters like a thirsty hunter; the flowers like a lover, who believes that he is breathing the sweets which surround his mistress In the world, we have the feeling of being oppressed beneath our own faculties, and we often suffer from the consciousness that we are the only one of our own disposition, in the midst of so many beings, who exist so easily, and at the expense of so little intellectual exertion; but the creative talent of imagination, for some moments at least, satisfies all our wishes and desires; it opens to us treasures of wealth; it offers to us crowns of glory; it raises before our eyes the pure and bright image of an ideal world; and so mighty sometimes is its power, that by it we hear in our hearts the very voice and accents of one whom we have loved. Does he who is not endowed with an enthusiastic imagination flatter himself that he is, in any degree, acquainted with the earth upon which he lives, or that he has travelled through any of its various countries? Does his heart beat at the echo of the mountains? or has the air of the South lulled his senses in its voluptuous softness? Does he perceive wherein countries differ, the one from the other? Does he remark the accent, and does he understand the peculiar character of the idioms of their languages? Does he hear in the popular song, ind see in the national dance, the manners and the genius of

,372 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. the people? Does one single sensation at once fill his mind with a crowd of recollections? Is Nature to be felt without enthusiasm? Can common men address to her the tale of their mean interests and low desires I What have the sea and the stars to answer to the little vanities with which each individual is content to fill up each day a But if the soul be really moved within us, if in the universe it seeks a God, even if it be still sensible to glory and to love, the clouds of heaven will hold converse with it, the torrents will listen to its voice, and the breeze that passes through the grove seems to deign to whisper to us something of those we love. There are some who, although devoid of enthusiasm, still believe that they have a taste and relish for the fine arts; and indeed they do love the refinement of luxury, and they wish to acquire a knowledge of music and of painting, that they may be able to converse upon them with ease and with taste, and even with that confidence which becomes the man of the world, when the subject turns upon imagination, or upon Nature; but what are these barren pleasures, when compared with true enthusiasm? What an emotion runs through the brain when we contemplate in the Niobe that settled look of calm and terrible despair which seems to reproach the gods with their jealousy of her maternal happiness! What consolation does the sight of beauty breathe upon us! Beauty also is from the soul, and pure and noble is the admiration it inspires. To feel the grandeur of the Apollo demands in the spectator a pride which tramples under foot all the serpents of the earth. None but a Christian can penetrate the countenance of the Virgins of Raphael, and the St. Jerome of Domenich]ino. None but a Christian can recognize the same expreesion in fascinating beauty, and in the depressed and grief-worn visage; in the brilliancy of youth, and in features changed by age and disfigured by suffering,-the same expression which springs from the soul, and which, like a ray of celestial light, shoots across the early morning of life, or the closing darkness of age.

INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM. 873 Can it be said that there is such an art as that of music for those who cannot feel enthusiasm? Habit may render harmonious sounds, as it were, a necessary gratification to them, and they enjoy them as they do the flavor of fruits, or the ornament of colors; but has their whole being vibrated and trembled responsively, like a lyre, if at any time the midnight silence has been suddenly broken by the song, or by any of those instruments which resemble the human voice? Have they in that moment felt the mystery of their existence in that softening emotion which reunites our separate natures, and blends in the same enjoyment the senses of the soul? Have the beatings of the heart followed the cadence of the music? Have they learned, under the influence of these emotions so full of charms, to shed those tears which have nothing of self in them; those tears which do not ask for the compassion of others, but which relieve ourselves from the inquietude which arises from the need of something to admire and to love? The taste for public spectacles is universal; for the greater part of mankind have more imagination than they themselves think, and that which they consider as the allurement of pleasure, as a remnant of the weakness of childhood which still hangs about them, is often the better part of their nature; while they are beholding the scenes of fictions, they are true, natural, and feeling; whereas in the world, dissimulation, calculation, and vanity, are the absolute masters of their words, sentiments, and actions. But do they think that they have felt all that a really fine tragedy can inspire, who find in the representation of the strongest affections nothing but a diversion and amusement? Do they doubt and disbelieve that rapturous agitation which the passions, purified by poetry, excite within us? Ah! how many and how great are the pleasures which spring from fictions! The interest they raise is without either apprehension or remorse; and the sensibility which they call forth has none of that painful harshness from which real passions are scarcely ever exempt. What enchantment does not the language of love borrow frm poetry and the fine arts! How beautiful is it to love at

874 MADAME DE STAEL'S GERMANY. once with the heart and with the mind! thus to vary in a thousand fashions a sentiment which one word is indeed sufficient to express, but for which all the words of' the world are but poverty and weakness! to submit entirely to the influence of those masterpieces of the imagination, which all depend upon love, and to discover in the wonders of nature and genius new expressions to declare the feelings of our own heart! What have they known of love who have not reverenced and admired the woman whom they loved, in whom the sentiment is not a hymn breathed from the heart, and who do not perceive in grace and beauty the heavenly image of the most touching passions? What has she felt of love who has not seen in the object of her choice an exalted protector, a powerful and a gentle guide, whose look at once commands and supplicates, and who receives upon his knees the right of disposing of her fate? How inexpressible is the delight which serious reflections, united and blended with warm and lively impressions, produce! The tenderness of a friend, in whose hands our happiness is deposited, ought, at the gates of the tomb, in the same manner as in the beautiful days of our youth, to fbrm our chief blessing; and every thing most serious and solemn in our existence transforms itself into emotions of delight, when, as in the fable of the ancients, it is the office or love to light and to extinguish the torch of life. If enthusiasm fills the soul with happiness, by a strange and wondrous charm, it forms also its chief support under misfortune; it leaves behind it a deep trace and a path of light, which do not allow absence itself to efface us from the hearts of our friends. It affords also to ourselves an asylum from the utmost bitterness of sorrow, and is the only feeling which can give tranquillity without indifference. Even the most simple affections which every heart believes Itself capable of feeling, even filial and maternal love, cannot be felt in their full strength, unless enthusiasm be blended with them. How can we love a son without indulging the flattering hope that he will be generous and gallant, without wishing him that renown which may, as it were, multiply his existence,

INFLUENCE OF ENTHUSIASM. 375 and make us hear from every side the name which our own heart is continually repeating? Why should we not enjoy with rapture the talents of a son, the beauty of a daughter? Can there be a more strange ingratitude towards the Deity than indifference for his gifts? Are they not from heaven, since they render it a more easy task for us to please him whom we love? Meanwhile, should some misfortune deprive our child of these advantages, the same sentiment would then assume another form; it would increase and exalt within us the feeling of compassion, of sympathy, the happiness of being necessary to him. Under all circumstances, enthusiasm either animates or consoles; and even in the moment when the blow, the most cruel that can be struck, reaches us, when we lose him to whom we owe our own being, him whom we lcved as a tutelary angel, and who inspired us at once with a fearless respect and a boundless confidence, still enthusiasm comes to our assistance and- support. It brings together within us some sparks of that soul which has passed away to heaven; we still li-e before him, and we promise ourselves that we will one day transinit to posterity the history of his life. Never, we feel assured, never will his paternal hand abandon us entirely in this world; and his image, affectionate and tender, still inclines towards us, to support us, until we are called unto him. And in the end, when the hour of trial comes, when it is for us in our turn to meet the struggle of death, the increasing weakness of our faculties, the loss and ruin of our hopes, this life, before so strong, which now begins to give way within us, the crowd of feelings and ideas which lived within our bosoms, and which the shades of the tomb already surround and envelope, our interests, our passions, this existence itself, which lessens to a shadow, before it vanishes away-all deeply distress us, and the common man appears, when be expires, to have less of death to undergo. Blessed be God, however, for the assistance which he has prepared for us even in that moment; our utterance shall be imperfect, our eye s3lali no longer distinguish the light, our reflections, before cigar and connected, shall wan

376 MADAME DE STAEL S GERMANY. der vague and confused; but enthusiasm will not abandon us, her brilliant wings shall wave over the funeral couch; she will lift the veil of death; she will recall to our recollection those moments, when, in the fulness of energy, we felt that the heart was imperishable; and our last sigh shall be a high and generous thought, reascending to that heaven from which it had its birth. "O France! land of glory and of love! if the day should ever come when enthusiasm shall be extinct upon your soil, when all shall be governed and disposed upon calculation, and even the contempt of danger shall be founded only upon the conclusions of reason, in that day what will avail you the loveliness of your climate, the splendor of your intellect, the general fertility of your nature Their intelligent activity, and an impetuosity directed by prudence and knowledge, may indeed give your children the empire of the world; but the only traces you will leave on the face of that world will be like those of the sandy whirlpool, terrible as the waves, and sterile as the desert!"' I This last sentence is that which excited in the French police the greatest2 indignation against my book. It seems to me, that Frenchmen at least cannot be displeased with it. I Madame de Stail bas said the same of another passage, p. 244. —d.

APPENDIX A. GENERAL SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE TO THE CLOSE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.1 BY MAX MULLER, M. A., PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE AT OXFORD. THERE is no country where so much interest is taken in the literature of Germany as in England, as there is no country where the literature of England is so much appreciated as in Germany. Some of our modern classics, whether poets or philosophers, are read by Englishmen with the same attention as their own; and the historians, the novel-writers, and the poets of England have exercised, and continue to exercise, a most powerful and beneficial influence on the people of Germany. In recent times, the literature of the two countries has almost grown into one. Lord Macaulay's History has not only been translated into German, but reprinted at Leipsig in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipsig and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and Goethe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes; and several works of German scholarship have met with more attentive and thoughtfuil read1 We take this from the introduction to Miller's German Ctlaics, re tently published in England.-Ed.

378 APPENDIX A. ers in the colleges of England than in the universities of Ger. many. Goethe's idea of a world-literature has, to a certain extent, been realized; and the strong feeling of sympathy, particularly between the middle classes of the two countries, holds out a hope that, for many years to come, the supremacy of the Teutonic race, not on.y in Euroe but over all the world, will be maintained in Common V7 the two champions of political freedom and of the liberty of thought-Protestant England and Protestant Germany. The interest, however, which Englishmen take in German literature, has hitherto been confined almost exclusively to the literature of the last fifty years, and very little is known of those fourteen centuries during which the German language had been growing up and gathering strength for the great triumphs which were achieved by Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Nor is this to be wondered at. The number of people in England, who take any interest in the early history of their own literature, is extremely small, and there is as yet no hi:tory of English literature worthy of that name. The history of literature reflects and helps us to interpret the political history of a country. It contains, as it were, the confession which every generation, before it passed away, has made to posterity. " Without Literary History," as Lord Ba con says, "the History of the World seemeth to be as the Statue of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life )f the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loth to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in the annals of every country. The student of German history should know something of Ulfilas, the great Bishop of the Goths, who anticipated the work of Luther by more than a thousand years, and who, at a time when Greek and Latin were the only two respectable

SURVEY OF GERMAN' LITERATURE. 379 and orthodox languages of Europe, dared for the first time to translate the Bible into the vulgar tongue of Barbarians, as if foreseeing with a prophetic eye the destiny of these Teutonie tribes, whose language, after Greek and Latin had died away, was to become the life-spring of the Gospel over the whole civilized world. He ought to know something of those early missionaries and martyrs, most of them sent from Ireland and England to preach the Gospel in the dark forests of Germany -men like St. Gall (died 638), St. Kilian (died 689), and St. Boniface (died 755), who were not content with felling the sacred oak-trees and baptizing unconverted multitudes, but founded missionary stations, and schools, and monasteries; working hard themselves, in order to acquire a knowledge of the language and the character of the people, and drawing up those curious lists of barbarous words, with their no less barbarous equivalents in Latin, which we still possess, though copied by a later hand. He ought to know the gradual progress of Christianity and civilization in Germany, previous to tile time of Charlemagne; for we see from the German trans. lations of the Rules of the Benedictine monks, of ancient Latin Hymns, the Creeds, the Lord's Prayer, and portions of the New Testament, that the good sense of the national clergy had led them to do what Charlemagne had afterwards to enjoin by repeated Capitularia.' It is in the history of German literature that we learn what Charlemagne really was. Though claimed as a Saint by the Church of Rome, and styled Empereur Franpais by modern French historians, Karl was really and truly a German king, proud, no doubt, of his Roman subjects, and of his title of Emperor, and anxious to give to hit uncouth Germans the benefit of Italian and English teachers, blut fondly attached in his heart to his own mother tongue, to the lays and laws of his fatherland: feelings displayed in his own attempt to compose a German grammar, and in his colU "Ut easdem homilias quisque (episcopus) aperte transferre studeat in rustiam romana-m linguam ant theodiscam, quo facilius cuncti possint intelligere qnae dicantur."-Conc. Tur., can. 17. Wackernagel, Geschichte dei Deuts~chen L'iteratur, ~ 26.

380 APPENDIX A. lection of old national songs, fragments of which may have been preserved to us in the ballads of Hildebrand and Hadubrand. After the death of Charlemagne, and under the reign of the good but weak King Ludwig, the prospects of a national literature in Germany became darkened. In one instance, indeed, the king was the patron of a German poet; for he encouraged the author of the Heliand to write that poem for the benefit of his newly converted countrymen. But he would hardly have approved of the thoroughly German and almosi heathen spirit which pervades that Saxon epic of the New Testament, and he expressed his disgust at the old German poems which his great father had taught him in his youth. The seed, however, which Charlemagne had sown had fallen on healthy soil, and grew up even without the sunshine of royal favor. The monastery of Fulda, under Hrabanus iMaurus, the pupil of Alcuin, became the seminary of a truly national clergy. Here it was that Otfried, the author of the rhymed Gospel-book, was brought up. In the mean time, the heterogeneous elements of the Carlovingian empire broke asunder. Germany, by losing its French and Italian provinces, became Germany again. Ludwig the German was king of Germany, Hrabanus Maurus, archbishop of Mayence; and the spirit of Charlemagne, Alcuin, and Eginhard, was revived at Aachen, Fulda, and many other places, such as St. Gall, Weissenburg, and Corvey, where schools were founded on the model of that of Tours. The translation of the Harmony of the Gospels gives us a specimen of the quiet studies of those monasteries, whereas the lay on the victory of Lewis III over the Normans, in 881, reminds us of the dangers that threatened Germany from.the West, at the same time that the Hungarians began their inroads from the East. The Saxon Emperors had hard battles to fight against these invaders, and there were few places in Germany where the peaceful pursuits of the monasteries and schools could be carried on without interrup. tion. St. Gall is the one bright star in the approaching gloom of the next centuries. Not only was the Bible read, and translated, and commented upon in German at St. Gall, as for

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 381 merly at Fulda, but Greek and Roman classics were copied and studied for educational purposes. Notker Teutonicus is the great representative of that school, which continued to maintain its reputation for theological and classical learning, and for a careful cultivation of the national language, nearly to the close of the eleventh centnry. At the court of the Saxon Emperors, though their policy was thoroughly German, there was little taste for German poetry. The queen of Otto I was a Lombard, the queen of Otto II a Greek lady; and their influence was not favorable to the rude poetry of national bards. If some traces of their work have been preserved to us, we owe it again to the more national taste of the monks of St. Gall and Passau. They translated some of the German epics into Latin verse, such as the poem of the Nibelunge, of Walther of Aquitain, and of Ruodlieb. The first is lost; but the other two have been preserved and published.' The storids of the Fox and the Bear, and the other animals,-a branch of poetry so peculiar to Germany, and epic rather than didactic in its origin,-attracted the attention of the monks; and it is owing again to their Latin translations that the existence of this curious style of poetry can be traced back so far as the tenth century.2 As these poems are written in Latin, they could not find a place in a German reading-book; but they, as well as the Latin plays of the nun Hrosvitha, throw much light on the state of German civilization during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The eleventh century presents almost an entire blank in the history of literature. Under the Frankish or Salic dynasty, Germany had either to defend herself against the inroads ot Hungarian and Slavonic armies, or was the battle-field of violent feuds between the Emperors and their vassals. The second half of that century was filled with the struggles between l Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jahrhuntaerts von J. Grimln und A. Schmeller: Gittingen, 1838. 2 Reinhard Fuchs, von Jacob Grimm: Berlin, 1834. Sendschreihen ar Karl Lachmann: Leipsig, 1840.

:382 APPENDIX A. Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. The clergy, hitherto the chief support of German literature, became estranged from the German people; and the insecurity of the times was unfavor able to literary pursuits. VWilliram's German had lost the classical correctness of Notker's language, and the Merigarto, and similar works, are written in a hybrid style, which is neither prose nor poetry. The Old High-German had become a literary language chiefly through the efforts of the clergy, and the character of the whole Old High-German literature is pre-eminently clerical. The Crusades put an end to the preponderance of the clerical element in the literature of Germany. They were the work of the clergy. By using to the utmost th- influence which they had gradually gained and carefully fomented, the priests were able to rouse a whole nation to a pitch of religious enthusiasm never known before or after. But the Crusades were the last triumph of the clergy; and with their failure the predominant influence of the clerical element in German society is checked and extinguished. From the first beginning of the Crusades the interest of the people was with the knight-no longer with the priest. The chivalrous emperors of the Hohenstaufen dynasty formed a new rallying-point for all national sympathies. Their courts, and the castles of their vassals, offered a new and more genial home to the poets of Germany than the monasteries of Fulda and St. Gall. Poetry changed hands. The poets took their inspirations from real life, though they borrowed their models from the romantic cycles of Brittany and Provence. Middle HighGerman, the language of the Swabian court, became the language of poetry. The earliest compositions in that language continue for awhile to bear the stamp of the clerical poetry of a former age. The first Middle High-German poems are written by a nun, and the poetical translation of the Books of Moses, the poem on Anno, Bishop of Cologne, and the Chronicle of the Roman Emperors, all continue to breathe the spirit of cloisters and cathedral-towns. And when a new taste for chivalrous romances was awakened in Germany; when the stories of Arthur and his knights, of Charlemagne and his

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 383 champions, of Achilles, ~Eneas, and Alexander, in their modern dress, were imported by French and Provencal knights, who came to stay at the castles of their German allies, on their way to Jerusalem, the first poets who ventured to imitate these motley compositions were priests, not laymen. A few short extracts from Konrad's Roland and Lamprecht's Alexander are sufficient to mark this period of transition. Like Charlemagne, who had been changed into a legendary hero by French poets before he became again the subject of German poetry, another German worthy returned at the same time to his native home, though but slightly changed by his foreign travels, Reinhard the Fox. The influence of Provence and of Flanders is seen in every branch of German poetry at that time: and yet nothing can be more different than the same subject, as treated by French and German poets. The German Minnesanger in particular were far from being imitators of the Trouveires or Troubadours. There are a few solitary instances of lyric poems translated from Provencal into German;' as there is, on the other hand, one poem translated from German into Italian,' early in the thirteenth century. But the great mass of German lyrics are of purely German growth. Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the Romans, the Italians, the Provencals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry as their own. It is Teutonic, purely Teutonic in its heart and soul, though its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, have been touched by the more genial rays of the brilliant sun of a more southern sky. The same applies to the great romantic poems of that period. The first impulse came from abroad. The subjects were borrowed from a foreign source, and the earlier poems, such as Heinrich von Veldecke's Eneid, might occasionally paraphrase the sentiments of French poets. But in the works of Hartmann von Aue, of Wolfram' Poems of Grave Ruodolf von Fenis, Her Bernger von Horheim; see ~ Des Minnesangs Friihling," by Lachmann and Haupt: Leipzig, 1857. 2 Poem of the Kferberger; see "Des Minnesangs Frahling," pp. I liud 280.

384 APPENDIX A. von Eschenbach, of Gottfried von Strassburg, we oreathe again the pure German air; and we cannot but regret that these men should have taken the subjects of their poems, with their unpronounceable names,'extravagant conceits, and licentioue manners, from foreign sources, while they had at home their grand mythology, their heroic traditions, their kings and saints, which would have been more worthy subjects than Tristan and Isold, Schionatulander and Sigune. There were new thoughts stirring in the hearts and minds of those men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A hundred years before Dante, the German poets had gazed with their eyes wide open into that infinite reality which underlies our short existence on earth. To Wolfram, and to many a poet of his time, the human tragedy of this world presented the same unreal, transitory, and transparent aspect which we find again in Dante's Divine Comedy. Every thing points to another world. Beauty, love, virtue, happiness,-every thing, in fact, that moves the heart of the poet, —-has a hidden reference to something higher than this life; and the highest object of the highest poetry seems to be to transfer the mind to those regions where men feel the presence of a Divine power and a Divine love, and are lost in blissful adoration. The beginning of the thirteenth century is as great an era in the history of German literature as the beginning of the nineteenth. The German mind was completely regenerated. Old words, old thoughts, old metres, old fashions were swept away, and a new spring dawned over Germany. The various branches of the Teutonic race which, after their inroad into the seats of Roman civilization, for a time became separated, had now grown up into independent nations,-when suddenly a new age of migration threatens to set in. The knights of France and Flanders, of England, Lombardy, and Sicily, leave their brilliant castles. They march to the East, carrying along with them the less polished, but equally enthusiastic nobility of Germany. From the very first the spirit of the Roman towns in Italy and Gaul had exercised a more civilizing influence on the Barbarians who had crossed the Alps and the Rhine, whereas the Germans of Germany proper hac

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 385 been left to their own resources, assisted only by the lessons of the Roman clergy. Now, at the beginning of the Crusades, the various divisions of the German race meet again, and they meet as strangers; no longer with the impetuosity of Franks and Goths, but with the polished reserve of a Godefroy of Bouillon, and the chivalrous bearing of a Frederick Barbarossa. The German emperors and nobles opened their courts to receive their guests with brilliant hospitality. Their festivals, the splendor and beauty of their tournaments, attracted crowds from tgreat distances, and foremost among them poets and singers. It was at such festivals as Heinrich von Veldecke describes,l that French and German poetry were brought face to face. It was here that high-born German poets learnt from French poets the subjects of their own romantic compositions. German ladies became the patrons of German poets; and the etiquette of' French chivalry was imitated at the castles of German knights. Poets made!bold tbr the first time to express their own feelings, their joys and sufferings, and epic poetry had to share its honors with lyric songs. Not only France and Germany, but England and Northern Italy were drawn into this gay society. Henry II married Eleanor of Poitou, and her grace and beauty found eloquent admirers in the army of the Crusaders. Their daughter Mathilde was married to Henry the Lion, of Saxony, and one of the Provengal poets has celebrated her loveliness. Frenchmen became the tutors of the soils of the German nobility. French manners, dresses, dishes, and dances were the fashion everywhere. The poetry which flourished at the castles was soon adopted by the lower ranks. Travelling poets and jesters are frequently mentioned, tind the poems of the Nibelunge and Gudrun, such as we now possess them, were composed at that time by poets who took 1heir subjects, their best thoughts and expressions, from the people, but imitated the language, the metre, and the manners of the court-poets. The most famous courts to which the German poets resorted, and where they were entertained with 1 At Mayence, in 1184, under Frederick I. VOL. II.-17

886 APPENDIX A. generous nospitality, were the court of Leopold, Duke of Austria (1198-1230), and of his son Frederick II.; of Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia, who resided at the Wartburg, near Eisenach (1190-1215); of Berthold, Duke of Zihringen 1186-1218); and of the Swabian emperors in general. At the present day, when not only the language, but even the thoughts of these poets have become to most of us unintelligible and strange, we cannot claim for their poetry more than an historical interest. But if we wish to know the men who took a leading part in the Crusades, who fought with the Emperors against the Pope, or with the Pope against the Emperors, who lived in magnificent castles like that of the Wartburg, and founded cathedrals like that of Cologne (1248), we must read the poetry which they admired, which they composed or patronized. The subjects of their Romances cannot gain our sympathy. They are artificial, unreal, with little of humanity, and still less of nationality in them. But the mind of a poet like Wolfram von Eschenbach rises above all these difficulties. He has thoughts of his own, truly humuan, deeply religious, and thoroughly national; and there are expressions and comparisons in his poetry which had never been used before. His style, however, is lengthy, his descriptions tiresome, and his characters somewhat vague and unearthly. As critics, we should have to bestow on Wolfram von Eschenlbach, on Gottfried von Strassburg, even on Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide, as much of blame as of praise. But as historians, we cannot value them too highly. If we measure them with the poets that preceded and those that followed them, they tower above all like giants. From the deep vestiges which they left behind, we discover that they were men of creative genius, men who had looked at life with their own eyes, and were able to express what they had seen and thought and felt in a language which fascinated their contemporaries, and which even now holds its charm over all who can bring themselves to study their works in the same spirit in which they read the trage. dies of LEschylus, or the Divina Commedia of Dante.

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 387 But the heyday of German chivalry and chivalrous poetry was of short duration. Towards the end of the thirteenth century we begin to feel that the age is no longer aspiring, and hoping, and growing. The world assumes a different aspect. Its youth and vigor seem spent; anrd the children of a new generation begin to be wiser anld sadder than their fathers. The Crusades languish. Their object, like the object of many a youthful hope, has proved unattainable. The Knights no longer take the Cross " because God wills it; " but because the Pope commands a Crusade, bargains for subsidies, and the Emperor cannot decline his demands. Walther von der Vogelweide already is most bitter in his attacks on Rome. Walther was the friend of Frederick II (1215-50), an emperor who reminds us. in several respects, of his namesake of Prussia. He was a sovereign of literary tastes, - himself a poet and a philosopher. Harassed by the Pope, he retaliated most fiercely, and was at last accused of a design to extirpate the Christian religion. The ban was published against him, and his own son rose in rebellion. Germany remained faithful to her Emperor, and the Emperor was successful against his son. But he soon died in disappointment and despair. With him the star of the Swabian dynasty had set, and the sweet sounds of the Swabian lyre died away with the last breath of Corradino, the last of the Hohenstaufen, on the scaffold at Naples, in 1268. Germany was breaking down under heavy burdens. It was visited by the Papal interdict, by famine, by pestilence. Sometimes there was no Emperor, sometimes there were two or three. Rebellion could not be kept under, nor could crime be punished. The only law was the " Law of the Fist." The Church was deeply demoralized. Who was to listen to Romantic poetry? There was no lack of poets or of poetry. Rudolf von Ems, a poet called Der Stricker, and Konrad von Wiirzburg, all of them living in the middle of the thirteenth century, were more fertile than Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von Strassburg. They complain, however, that no one takes notice of them, and they are evidently conscious themselves of their inferiority. Lyric poetry continued to flourish for a time, but

388 APPENDIX A. it degenerated into an unworthly idolatry of ladies, and af. fected sentimentality. There is but one branch of poetry in which we find a certain originality, the didactic and satiric. The first beginnings of this new kind of poetry carry us back to the age of Walther von der Vogelweide. Many of his verses are satirical, political, and didactic; and it is supposed, on very good authority, that Walther was the author of an anonymous didactic poem, Freidank's Bescheidenheit. By Thomasin von Zerclar we have a metrical composition on manners, the Italian Guest, which likewise belongs to the beginning of the thirteenth century. Somewhat later we meet, in the works of the Stricker, with the broader satire of the middle classes; and towards the close of the century, Hugo vonl Trimberg, in his Renner, addresses himself clearly to the lower ranks of German society, and no longer to princes, knights, and ladies. How is this to be accounted for? Poetry was evidently changing hands again. The Crusades had made the princes and kniglhts the representatives and leaders of the whole nation; and during the contest between the imperial and the papal powers, the destinies of Germany were chiefly in the hands of the hereditary nobility. The literature, which before that time was entirely clerical, had then become worldly and chivalrous. But now, when the power of the Emperors began to decline, when the clergy was driven into taking a decidedly anti-national position, when the unity of' the empire was wellnigh destroyed, and princes and prelates were asserting their independence by plunder and by warfare, a niew element of society rose to the surface - the middle classes - the burghers of the free towns of Germany. They were forced to hold together, in order to defend themselves against their former protectors. They fortified their cities, formed corporations, watched over law and morality, and founded those powerful leagues, the first of wlliclh, the Hansa, dates from 1241. Poetry also took refuge behind the walls of firee towns; and at the fireside of the worthy citizen had to exchange her gay, chivalrous, and romantic strains, for themes more subdued, practicaland homely. This accounts for such works as Hugo von Trim

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 389 berg's Renner, as well as for tile general character of thc poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Poetry became a trade like any other. Guilds were formed, consisting of master-singers and their apprentices. Heinrich Frauenlob is called the first Meistersinger; and during the fourteenth, the fifteenth, and even the sixteenth centuries, new guilds or schools were founded in all the principal towns of Germany. After order had been restored by the first Hapsburg dynasty, the intellectual and literary activity of Germany retained its centre of gravitation in the middle classes. Rudolf von Hapsburg was not gifted with a poetical nature, and contemporaneous poets complain of his want of liberality. Attempts were made to revive the chivalrous poetry of the Crusades by Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von Wolkenstein in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and again at the end of the same century by the " Last of the German Knights," the Emperor Maximilian. But these attempts could not but fail. The age of chivalry had passed, and there was nothing great or inspiring in the wars which the Emperors had to wage during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries against their vassals, against the Pope, against the precursors of the Reformation - the Hussites, and against the Turks. In Fritsche Closener's Chronicle there is a description of the citizens of Strassburg defending themselves against their Bishop in 1312; in Twinger's Chronicle a picture of the processions of the Flagellants and the religious enthusiasm of that time (1349). The poems of Suchenwirt and Halbsuter represent the wars of Austria against Switzerland (1386), and Niclas von Weyl's translation gives us a glimpse into the Council of Constance (1414) and the Hussite wars, which were soon to follow. The poetry of those two centuries, which was written by and for the people, is interesting historically; but, with few exceptions, without any further worth. The poets wish to amuse or to instruct their humble patrons, and they do this, either by giving them the dry bones of the romantic poetry of former ages, or by fables, or by telling them the quaint 3tories of the " Seven Wise Masters." What beauty there

'390 APPENDIX A. was in a Meistergesang may be fairly seenl fiom the poem of Michael Beheim; and the Easter play by no means shows the lowest ebb of good taste in the popular literature of that time. It might seem, indeed, as if all the high and noble aspirations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been lost and forgotten during the fourteenth and fifteenth. And yet it was not quite so. There was one class of men on whom the spirit of true nobility had descended, and whose works form a connecting chain between the great era of the Crusades and the still greater era of the Reformation. These are the so-called Mystics, - true Crusaders, true knights of the spirit, many of whom sacrificed their lives for the cause of truth, and who at last conquered from the hands of the infidels that Holy Sepulchre in which the true Christian faith had been lying buried for centuries. The name of Mystics, which has been given to these men, is apt to mislead. Their writings are not dark or unintelligible, and those who call them so must find Christianity itself unintelligible and dark. There is more broad daylight in Eckhart and Tauler than in the works of all the Thom ists and Scotists. Eckhart was not a dreamer. He had been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, and his own style is sometimes painfully scholastic. But there is a fresh breeze of thought in his works, and in the works of his disciples. They knew that whenever the problems of man's relation to God, the creation of the world, the origin of evil, and the hope of salvation come to be discussed, the sharpest edge of logical'easoning will turn, and the best defined terms of metaphysics die away into mere music. They did not handle the truths of Christianity as if they should or could be proved by the syllogisms of our human reasoning. Nevertheless these Mystics were hard and honest thinkers, and never played with words and phrases. Their faith is to themn as clear and as real as sunshine; and instead of throwing scholastic dust into the eyes of' the people, they boldly told them to open their eyes and to look at the mysteries all around them, and to feel the presence of God within and without, which the priests had veiled by the very revelation

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 391 which they had preached. For a true appreciation of the times in which they lived, the works of these Reformers of the faith are invaluable. Without them we should try in vain to explain how a nation which, to judge from its literature, seemed to have lost all vigor and virtue, could suddenlly rise and dare the work of a Reformation of the Church. With them we learn how that same nation, after groaning for centuries under the yoke of superstition and hypocrisy, found in its very prostration the source of an irresistible strength. The higher clergy contributed hardly any thing to the literature of these two centuries; and what they wrote would better have remained unwritten. At St. Gall, the monks, the successors of Notker, towards the end of the thirteenth century were unable to sign their names. The abbot was a nobleman who composed love-songs, - a branch of poetry at all events out of place in the monastery founded by St. Gall. It is only among the lower clergy that we find the traces of genuine Christian piety and intellectual activity, though frequently branded by obese prelates and obtuse magistrates with the names of mysticism and heresy. The orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in 1208 and 1215, and intended to act as clerical spies and confessors, soon began to fraternize in many parts of Germany with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry and thirsty after religious teaching. They had been systematically starved, or fed with stones. Part of the Bible had been translated for thle people, but what Ulfilas was free to do in the fourth century, was con-,lemned by the prelates assembled at the Synod of Trier in 1231. Nor were the sermons of the itinerant friars in towns and villages always to the taste of bishops and abbots. We possess collections of these discourses, preached by Franciscans and Dominicans under the trees of cemeteries, and from the church-towers of the villages. Brother Berthold, who died in 1272, was a Franciscan. He travelled about the country, and was revered by the poor like a saint and prophet. The doctrine he preached, though it was the old teaching of the Apostles, was as new to the peasants

392 APPENDIX A. who came to hear him, as it had been to the citizens of Athens who came to hear St. Paul. Men who called themselves Christians had been taught, and had brought them. selves to believe, that to read the writings of the Apostles was a deadly sin. Yet in secret they were yearning afier theft forbidden Bible. They knew that there were translations, and though these translations had been condemned by popes and synods, the people could not resist the temptation of reading them. In 1373, we find the first complete version of the Bible into German, by Matthias of Beheim. Several are mentioned after this. The new religious fervor that had been kindled among the inferior clergy, and among the lower and middle classes of the laity, became stronger; and, though it sometimes degenerated' into wvild fanaticism, the sacred spark was kept in safe hands by such men as Eckhart (died 1329), Tauler (died 1361), and the author of the German Theology. Men like these are sure to conquer; and, although their names are but little known at present, it should not be forgotten that, without the labors of these Reformers of the Faith, the Reformers of the Church would never have found a whole nation waiting to receive, and ready to support them. There are two other events which prepared the way of the German Reformers of the sixteenth century, the fbundation of universities, and the invention of printing. Their importance is the same in the literary and in the political history of Ge-many. The intellectual anld moral character of a nation is formed in schools and universities; and those who educate a people have always been its real masters, though they may go by a more modest name. Under the Roman empire public schools had been supported by the government, both at Rome and in the chief towns of the Provinces. We know of their existence in Gaul and parts of Germany. With the decline of the central authority the salaries of the grammarians and rhetors in the Prov inces ceased to be paid, and the pagan gymnasia were succeeded by Christian schools, attached to episcopal sees and monasteries. While the clergy retained their vigor and

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 393 sfficiency, their schools were powerful engines for spreading a half-clerical and half-classical culture in Germany. During the Crusades, when ecclesiastical activity and learning declined very rapidly, we hear of French tutors at the castles of the nobility, and classical learning gave way to the superficiall polish of a chivalrous age. And when the nobility likewise relapsed into a state of savage barbarism, new schools were wanted, and they were founded by the towns, the only places where, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we see any evidence of a healthy political life. The first town-schools are mentioned in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and they were soon followed by the high schools and universities. The University of Prague was founded in 1348; Vienna, 1366; Heidelberg, 1386; Erfurt, 1392; Leipzig, 1408; Basil, 1460; Tiibingen, 1477; Mainz, 1482. These universities atre a novel feature in the history of German and of European civilization. They are not ecclesiastical seminaries, not restricted to any particular class of society: they are national institutions, open to the rich and the poor, to the knight, the clerk, the citizen. They ale real universities of learning: they profess to teach all branches of knowledge, —theology and law, medicine and philosophy. They contain the first practical acknowledgment of the right of every subject to the highest education, and through it to the highest offices in Church and State. Neither Greece nor Rome had known such institutions: neither the Church nor the nobility, during the days of their political supremacy, were sufficiently impressed with the duty which they owed to the nation at large to provide such places of liberal education. It was the nation itself, when forsaken by its clergy, and harassed by its nobility, which called these schools into life, and it is in those schools and universities that the great men who inaugurate the next period of literature - the champions of political liberty and religious fi'eedom - were fostered and formed. The invention of printing was in itself a reformation, and its benefits were chiefly felt by the great masses of the people. The clergy possessed their libraries, where they

394 APPENDIX A. might read and study if they chose; the castles contained collections of MSS., sacred and profane, illuminated with the most exquisite taste; while the citizen, the poor layman, though he might be able to read and to write, was debarred from the use of books, and had to satisfy ihis literary tastes with the sermons of travelling Franciscans, or the songs of blind men and pedlers. The art of printing admitted that large class to the same privileges which had hitherto been enjoyed almost exclusively by clergy and nobility; it placed in the hands of the third estate arms more powerful than the swords of the knights, and the thunderbolts of the priests: it was a revolution in the history of literature, more eventful than any in the history of mankind. Poets and philosophers addressed themselves no longer to emperors and noblemen, to knights and ladies, but to the people at large, and chiefly to the middle classes, in which, henceforth, the chief strength of the nation resides. The years from 1450 to 1500 fobrm a period of preparation for the great struggle that was to inaugurate the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was an age "rich in scholars, copious in pedants, but poor in genius, and barren of strong thinkers." One of the few interesting men, in whose life and writings the history of that preliminary age may be studied, is Sebastian Brant, the famous author of the famous "Ship of Fools." With the sixteenth century we enter upon the modern history and the modern literature of Germany. With Luther, the literary language of Germany became New HighGerman. A change of language invariably betokens a change in the social constitution of a country. In Germany, at the time of the Reformation, the change of language marks the rise of a new aristocracy, which is hence. forth to reside in the universities. Literature leaves its former homes. It speaks no longer the language of the towns. It addresses itself no longer to a few citizens, nor to imperial patrons, sueh as Maximilian I. It indulges no longer in moral saws, didactic verses, and prose novels, nor is it content with mystic philosophy, and the secret outpour.

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 395 ings of religious fervor. For a time, though but for a short time, German literature becomes national. Poets and writers wish to be heard beyond the walls of their monasteries and cities. They speak to the whole nation; nay, they desire to be heard beyond the frontiers of their country. Luther and the Reformers belonged to no class,they belonged to the people. The voice of the people, which, during the preceding periods of literature, could only be heard like the rollings of distant thunder, had now become articulate and distinct, and for a time one thought seemed to unite all classes, -emperors, kings, nobles and citizens, clergy and laity, high and low, old and young. This is a novel sight in the history of Germany. We have seen in the first period the gradual growth of the clergy, from the time when the first missionaries were massacred in the forests of Friesland, to the time when the Emperor stood penitent before the gates of Canossa. We have seen the rise of the nobility, from the time when the barbarian chiefs preferred living outside the walls of cities, to the time when they rivalled the Frenlch cavaliers in courtly bearing and chivalrous bravery. Nor were the representatives of these two orders, the Pope and the Emperor, less powerful at the beginrlling of the sixteenth century, than they had been befobre. Charles V was the most powerful sovereign whom Europe had seen since the days of Charlemagne, and the Pipal see had recovered by diplomatic intrigue much of the influence which it had lost by moral depravity. Let us think, then, of these two ancient powers: the Emperor with his armies, recruited in Austria, Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Burgundy, and with his treasures brought from Mexico and Peru; and the Pope with his armies of priests and monks, recruited from all parts of the Christian world, and armed with the weapons of the Inquisition, and the thunderbolts of Excommunication; -let us think of their former victories, their confidence in their own strength, their belief in their divine rights; and let us then turn our eyes to the small University of Wittenberg, and look into the bleak study of a poor Augustine monk, and see that monk step

396 APPENDIX A. out of his study with no weapon in his hand but the Bible - with no armies and no treasures, - and yet defying, with his clear and manly voice, both Pope and Emperor, both clergy and nobility; there is no grander sight in history; and the longer we allow our eyes to dwell on it, the more we feel that history is not without God, and that, at every decisive battle, the divine right of truth asserts its supremacy over the divine right of popes and emperors, and overthrows with one breath both empires and hierarchies. We call the Reformation the work of Luther; but Luther stood not alone, and no really great man ever stood alone. The secret of their greatness lies in their understanding the spirit of the age in which they live, and in giving expression, with the full power of faith and conviction, to the secret thoughts of millions. Luther was but lending words to the silent soul of Protestant Germany, and no one should call himself a Protestant who is not a Lutheran with Luther at the Diet of Worlns, and able to say with him, in the face of princes and prelates, " Here I stand, I can no otherwise, God help me, Amen." As the Emperor was the representative of the nobility, as the Pope was the representative of the clergy, Luther was the head and leader of the people, which, through him and through his fellow-workers, claimed now, for the first time, an equality with the two old estates of the realm. If this national struggle took at first an aspect chiefly religious, it was because the German nation had freedom of thought and of belief more at heart than polit-.ical freedom. But political rights also were soon demanded, and demanded with such violence, that during his own lifetime Luther had to repress the excesses of enthusiastic theorists, and of a violent peasantry. Luther's great influence on the literature of Germany, and the gradual adoption of his dialect as the literary language, were owing in a great measure to this, that whatever there was of literature during the sixteenth century, was chiefly in the hands of one class of men. After the Reformation, nearly all eminent men in Germany, poets, philosophers, and historians, belonged to the Protestant party, and resided chiefly in the universities,

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 397 The universities were what the monasteries had been undei Charlemagne, the castles under Frederick Barbarossa; the centres of gravitation for the intellectual and political life of the country. The true nobility of Germany was no longel to be found among the priests, - Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Notker Teutonicus; nor among the knights, — Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfriam von Eschenbach, and their patrons, Frederick II, Hermann von Thiirinen, and Leopold of Austria. The intellectual sceptre of Germany was wielded by a new nobility, a nobility that had risen from the ranks, like the priests and the knights. but which, for a time at least, kept itself from becoming a caste, and from cutting away those roots through which it imbibed its vigor, and sustained its strength. It had its castles in the universities, its tournaments in the diets of Worms and Augsburg, and it counted among its members dukes and peasants, divines and soldiers, lawyers and artists. This was not, indeed, an hereditary nobility, but on that very ground it is a nobility which can never become extinct. The danger, however, which threatens all aristocracies, whether martial, clerical, or municipal, was not averted from the intellectual aristocracy of Germany. The exclusive spirit of caste deprived the second generation of that power which men like Luther had gained at the beginning of the Reformation. The moral influence of the universities in Germany was great, and it is great at the present day. But it would have been greater and more beneficial if the conceit of caste had not separated the leaders of the nation from the ranks whence they themselves had risen, and to which alone they owed their position and their influence. It was the same with the priests, who would rather form a hierarchy than be merged in the laity. It was the same with the knights, who would rather form a select society than live among the gentry. Both cut away the ground under their feet; and the Reformers of the sixteenth century fell into the same snare before they were aware of it. We wonder at the eccentricities of the priesthood, at the conceit of the hereditary nobility, at the affectation of majestic

898 APPENDIX A. stateliness inherent in royalty. But the pedantic display of learning, the disregard of the real wants of the people, the contempt of all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible, the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the sixteenth century to the present day, have occupied the most prominent rank in the society of Germany. Professorial knight-errantry still waits for its Cervantes. Nowhere have the objects of learning been so completely sacrificed to the means of learning, nowhere has that Dulcinea — knowledge for its own sake - with her dark veil and her barren heart, numbered so many admirers; nowhere have so many windmills been fought, and so many real enemies been left unhurt, as in Germany, particularly during the last two centuries. New universities had been founded: Marburg, in 1527; Kdnigsberg, in 1547; Jenla, in 1558; Helmstidt, in 1575; Giessen, in 1607. And the more the number and the power of the professors increased, the more they forgot that they and their learning, their universities and their libraries, were for the benefit of the people; that a professor might be very learned, and very accurate, and very laborious, yet worse than useless as a member of our toiling society. It was considered more learned and respectable to teach in Latin, and all lectures at the universities were given in that language. Luther was sneered at because of his little Ger. man tracts, which " any village clerk might have written." Some of the best poets in the sixteenth century were men such as Eoban Hessius (1540), who composed their poetry in Latin. National poems, for instance, Brant's "Ship of Fools," were translated into Latin, in order to induce the German professors to read them. The learned doctors were ashamed of their honest native names. Schwarzerd must needs call himself Melancthon; Meissel Celtes, Schnitter Agt'icola; Hausschein, Oecolalnpadius! All this might look very learned, and professorial, and imposing; but it separated the professors from the people at large; it retarded the progress of national education, and blighted the prospects of a Rational policy in Germany. Every thing promised well a

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 399 the time of the Reformation; and a new Germany might have risen before a new France, if, like Luther, the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vague and vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, and political prostration, before a new national spirit could rise again in men like Lessing, and Schiller, and Fichte, and Stein. Ambitious princes and quarrelsome divines continued the rulers of Germany, and towards the end of the sixteenth century, every thing seemed drifting back into the middle ages. Then came the Thirty Years' War, a most disastrous war for Germany, which is felt in its results to the present day. If, as a civil and religious contest, it had been fought out between the two parties- the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Germany - it would have left, as in England, one side victorious; it would have been brought to an end before both were utterly exhausted. But the Protestants, weakened by their own dissensions, had to call in foreign aid. First Denmark, then Sweden, poured their armies into Germany, and even France — Roman Catholic France — gave her support to Gustavus Adolphus, and the Protestant cause. England, the true ally of Germany, was too weak at home to make her influence felt abroad. At the close of the war, the Protestants received, indeed, the same rights as the Roman Catholics; but the nation was so completely demoralized, that it hardly cared for the liberty sanctioned by the treaty of Westphalia. The physical and moral vigor of the nation was broken. The population of Germany is said No have been reduced by one half. Thousands of villages and towns had been burnt to the ground. The schools, the thurches, the universities were deserted. A whole genera-:on had grown up during the war, particularly among the

400 APPENDIX A. lower classes, with no education at all. The merchants of Germany, who formerly, as Aneas Sylvius said, lived more handsomely than the Kings of Scotland, were reduced to small traders. The Hansa was broken up. Holland, England, and Sweden had taken the wind out of her sails. In the Eastern provinces commerce was suspended by the inroads of the Turks; while the discovery of America, and of the new passage to the East Indies, had reduced the importance of the mercantile navy of Germany and Italy in the MIediterranean. Where there was any national feeling left, it was a feeling of shame and despair, and the Emperor and the small princes of Germany might have governed more selfishly than they did without rousing opposition among the people. What can we expect of the literature of such times? Popular poetry preserved some of its indestructible charms. The Meistersinger went on composing according to the rules of their guilds, but we look in vain for the raciness and honest simplicity of Hans Sachs. Some of the professors wrote plays in the style of Terence, or after English models, and fables became fashionable in the style of Phaedrus. But there was no trace anywhere of originality, truth, taste, or feeling, except in that branch which, like the palmtree, thrives best in the desert - sacred poetry. Paul Gerhard is yet without an equal in his songs; and many of the best hymns which are still heard in the Protestant churches of Germany, date from the seventeenth century. Soon, however, this class of poetry also degenerated on one side into dry theological phraseology, on the other into sentimental and almost erotic affectation. There was no hope of a regeneration in German literature, unless either great political and social events should rouse the national mind from its languor, or the classical models of pure taste and true art should be studied again in a different spirit fiom that of professorial pedantry. Now; after the Thirty Years' War, there was no war in Germany in which the nation took any warm interest. The policy pursued in France during the long reign of Louis XIV

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 401 (1643-1708), had its chief aim in weakening the house of Hapsburg. When the Protestants would no longer fight his battles, Louis roused the Turks. Vienna was nearly taken, and Austria owed its delivery to Johann Sobiesky. By the treaty of Ryswick (1-697), all the country on the left side of the Rhine was ceded to France. and German soldiers fought under the banners of the Great Monarch. The only German prince who dared to uphold the honor of the empire, and to withstand the encroachments of Louis, was Frederick William, the great Elector of Prussia (1670-88). He checked the arrogance of the Swedish court, opened his towns to French Protestant refugees, and raised the house of Brandenburg to a European importance. In the same year in which his successor, Frederick III, assumed the royal title as Frederick I, the King of Spain, Charles I, died; and Louis XIV, while trying to add the Spanish crown to his monarchy, was at last checked in his grasping policy by an alliance between England and Germany. Prince Eugene and Marlborough restored the peace and the political equilibrium of Europe. In England, the different parties in Parliament, the frequenters of the clubs and coffee-houses, were then watching every move on the political chess-board of Europe, and criticising the victories of their generals, and the treaties of their ambassadors. In Germany, the nation took but a passive part. It was excluded from all real share in the great questions of the day, and if it showed any sympathies, they were confined to the simple admiration of a great general, such as Prince Eugene. While the policy of Louis XIV was undermining the political independence of Germany, the literature of his court exercised an influence hardly less detrimental on the literature of Germany. No doubt, the.literature of France stood far higher at that time than the German. "Poet " was among us a term of abuse, while in France the Great Monarch did homage to his great poets. But the professorial poets who had failed to learn the lessons of good taste from the Greek and Roman classics, were not,ikely to profit by an imitation of h:e C-urious classicality

402 APPENDIX A. of French literature. They heard the great stars of the court of Louis XIV praised by their royal and princely patrons as they returned from their travels in France and Italy, full of admiration for every thing that was not German. They were delighted to hear that in France, in Holland, and in Italy, it was respectable to write poetry in the modern vernacular, and set to work in good earnest. After the model of the literary academies in Italy, academies werp founded at the small courts of Germany. Men like Opitz would hardly have thought it dignified to write verses in their native tongue, had it not been for the moral support which they received from these academies and their princely patrons. His first poems were written in Latin, but he afterwards devoted himself completely to German poetry. He became a member of the " Order of the Palm-tree," and the founder of what is called the First Silesian School. Opitz is the true representative of the classical poetry of the seventeenth century. He was a scholar and a gentleman; most correct in his language and versification; never venturing on ground that had not been trodden before by some classical poet, whether of Greece, Rome, France, Holland, or Italy. In him we also see the first traces of that baneful alliance between princes and poets which has deprived the German nation of so many of her best sons. But the charge of mean motives has been unjustly brought against Opitz by many historians. Poets require an audience, and at his time there was no class of people willing to listen to poetry, except the inmates of the small German courts. After the Thirty Years' War, the power of these princes was greater than ever. They divided the spoil, and there was neither a nobility, nor a clergy, nor a national party to control or resist them. In England, the royal power had, at that time, been brought back to its proper limits, and it has thus been able to hold ever since, with but short interruptions, its dignified position, supported by the self-respect of a free and powerful nation. In France it assumed the most enormous proportions during the long reign of Louis XIV, but its appalling rise was followed, after a century, by

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 403 a fall equally appalling, and it has not yet regained its proper position in the political system of that country. In Germany the royal power was less imposing, its prerogatives being divided between the Emperor and a number of small but almost independent vassals, remnants of that feudal system of the middle ages which in France and England had been absorbed by the rise of national monarchies. These small principalities explain the weakness of Germany in her relation with foreign powers, and the instability of her political constitution. Continental wars gave an excuse for keeping up large standing armies, and these standing armies stood between the nation and her sovereigns, and made any moral pressure of the one upon the other impossible. The third estate could never gain that share in the government which it had obtained, by its united action, in other countries; and no form of government can be stable which is deprived of the support and the active co-operation of the middle classes. Constitutions have been granted by enlightened sovereigns, such as Joseph II and Frederick William IV, and barricades have been raised at Vienna and at Berlin; but both have failed to restore healthy life to the political organization of the country. There is no longer a German nobility, in the usual sense of the word. Its vigor was exhausted when the powerful vassals of the empire became powerless sovereigns with the titles of king or duke, while what remained of the landed nobility, became more reduced with every generation, owing to the absence of the system of primogeniture. There is no longer a clergy as a powerful body in the state. This was broken up at the time of the Reformation, and it hardly had time to recover and to constitute itself on a new basis, when the Thirty Years' War deprived it of all social influence, and left it no alternative but to become a salaried class of servants of the crown. No third estate exists powerful enough to defend the interests of the commonwealth against the encroachments of the sovereign; and public opinion, Ihough it may pronounce itself within certain limits, has no means of legal opposition, and must choose, at every crit

404 APPENDIX A. ical moment, between submission to the royal will and rebellion. Thus, during the whole modern history of Germany, the political and intellectual supremacy is divided. The former is monopolized by the sovereigns, the latter belongs to a small class of learned men. These two soon begin to attract one another. The kings seek the society, the advice, and support of literary men; while literary men court the patronage of kings, and acquire powerful influence by governing those who govern the people. From the time of Opitz there have been few men of eminence in literature or science who have not been drawn towards one of the larger or smaller courts of Germany; and the whole of our modern literature bears the marks of this union between princes and poets. It has been said that the existence of these numerous centres of civilization has proved beneficial to the growth of literature; and it has been pointed out that some of the smallest courts, such as Weimar, have raised the greatest men in poetry and science. Goethe himself gives expression to this opinion. "What has made Germany great," he says, " but the culture which is spread through the whole country in such a marvellous manner, and pervades equally all parts of the realm? And this culture, does it not emanate from the numerous courts which grant it support and patronage? Suppose we had had in Germany fbr centuries but two capitals, Vienna and Berlin, or but one; I should like to know how it would have fared with German civilization, or even with that general well-being which goes hand in hand with true civilization." IIn these words we hear Goethe, the minister of the petty court of Weimar, not the great poet of a great nation. Has France had more than one capital? Has England had more than one court? Great men have risen to eminence in great monarchies like France, and they have risen to eminence in a great commmonwealth such as England, without the patronage of court%, by the support, the sympathy, the love of a great nation. Truly national poetry exists only where there is a truly national life; and the poet vhbo

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERnATURE. 405 in creating his words, thinks of a whole nation which will listen to him and be proud of him, is inspired by a nobler passion than he who looks to his royal master, or the applause even of the most refined audience of the dames de la cour. In a free country, the sovereign is the highest and most honored representative of the national will, and he honors himself by honoring those who have well deserved of his country. There a poet-laureate may hold an independent and dignified position, conscious of his own worth, and of the support of the nation. But in despotic countries, the favor even of the most enlightened sovereign is dangerous. Germany never had a more enlightened king than Frederick the Great; and yet, when he speaks of the queen receiving Leibnitz at court, he says, " She believed that it was not unworthy of a queen to show honor to a philosopher; and as those who have received from heaven a privileged soul rise to the level of sovereigns, she admitted Leibnitz into her familiar society." The seventeenth century saw the rise and fall of the first and the second Silesian schools. The first is represented by men like Opitz and Weckherlin, and it exercised an influence in the North of Germany on Simon Dach, Paul Flemming, and a number of less gifted poets, who are generally known by the name of the K'nigsberg School. Its character is pseudo-classical. All these poets endeavored to write correctly, sedately, and eloquently. Some of them aimed at a certain simplicity and sincerity, which we admire particularly in Flemming. But it would be difficult to find in all their writings one single thought, one single expression that had not been used before. The second Silesian school is more ambitious; but its poetic flights are more disappointing than the honest prose of Opitz. The " Shepherds of the Pegnitz " had tried to imitate the brilliant diction of the Italian poets; but the modern Meistersiinger of the old town of Niirnberg had produced nothing but wordy jingle. Hoffmannswaldau and Lohenstein, the chief heroes of the second Silesian school, followed in their track, and did not succeed better. Their compositions are born

106 APPENDIX A. bastic and full of metaphors. It is a poetry of adjectives, without substance, truth, or taste. Yet their poetry was admired, praised not less than Goethe and Schiller were praised by their contemporaries, and it lived beyond the seventeenth century. There were but few men during that time who kept aloof from the spirit of these two Silesian schools, and were not influenced by either Opitz or Hoffmannswaldau. Among these independent poets we have to mention Friedrich von Logau, Andreas Gryphius, and Moscherosch. Besides these, there were some prose writers whose works are not exactly works of art, but works of original thought, and of great importance to us in tracing the progress of science and literature during the dreariest period of German history. We can only mention the Simplicissimus, a novel full of clever miniature drawing, and giving a lively picture of German life during the Thirty Years' War; the patriotic writings of Professor Schupp; the historical works of Professor Pufendorf (1631-1694); the pietistic sermons of Spener, and of Professor Franke (1663-1727), the founder of the Orphan School at Halle; Professor Arnold's (1666-1714) Ecclesiastical History; the first political pamphlets by Professor Thomasius (16551728); and, among philosophers, Jacob Bohme at the be ginning, and Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth century. The second Silesian school was defeated by Gottsched, professor at Leipzig. He exercised, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the same dictatorship as a poet and a critic which Opitz had exercised at the beginning of the seventeenth. Gottsched was the advocate of French models in art and poetry, and he used his wide-spread influence in recommending the sedate, correct, and so-called classical style of the poets of the time. After having rendered good service in putting down the senseless extravagance of the school of Lohenstein, he became himself a pedantic and arrogant critic; and it was through the opposition which he roused by his Gallomania, that German poetry was delivered at last from the trammels of that foreign school. Then followed a long literary warfare; Gottsched and his follow

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 407 3rs at Leipzig defended the French, Bodmer and his friends in Switzerland the English style of literature. The former insisted on classical form and traditional rules; the latter on natural sentiment and spontaneous expression. The question was, whether poets should imitate the works of the classics, or imitate the classics who had become classics by imitating nobody. A German professor wields an immense power by means of his Journals. He is the editor; he writes in them himself, and allows others to write; he praises his friends, who are to laud him in turn; he patronizes his pupils, who are to call him master; he abuses his adversaries, and asks his allies to do the same. It was in this manner that Professor Gottsched triumphed for a long time over Bodmer and his party, till at last public opinion became too strong, and the dictator died the laughing-stock of Germany. It was in the very thick of this literary struggle that the great heroes of German poetry grew up,Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. Goethe, who knew both Gottsched and Bodmer, has described that period of fermentation and transition in which his own mind was formed. He does justice to GUnther, and more than justice to Liscow. He shows the influence which men like Brockes, Hagedorn, and Haller exercised in making poetry respectable. He points out the new national life which, like an electric spark, flew through the whole country when Frederick the Great said, "J'ai jete le bonnet par-dessus les moulins; " and defied, like a man, the political popery of Austria. The estimate which Goethe forms of the poets of the time, of Gleim and Uz, of Gessner and Rabener, and more especially of Klopstock, Lessing, and Wieland, should be read in the original, as likewise Herder's Rhapsody on Shakspeare. The latter contains the key to many of the secrets of that new period of literature, which was inaugurated by Goethe himself and by those who like him could dare to be classical, by being true to nature and to themselves. The history of literature is but an applied history of civilization. As in the history of civilization, we watch the

408 APPENDIX A. play of the three constituent classes of society, -clergy nobility, and commoners, we can see, in the history of literature, how that class which is supreme politically, shows for the time being its supremacy in the literary productions of the age, and impresses its mark on the works of poets and philosophers. Speaking very generally, we might say that, during the first period of German history, the really moving, civilizing, and ruling class was the clergy; and in the whole of German literature, nearly to the time of the Crusades, the clerical element predominates. The second period is marked by the Crusades, and the triumph of Teutonic and Romantic chivalry, and the literature of that period is of a strictly correspondent tone. After the Crusades, and during the political anarchy that followed, the sole principle of order and progress is found in the towns, and in the towns the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries finds its new home. At last, at the time of the Reformation, when the political life of the country assumed for a time a national character, German literature also is for a short time national. The hopes, however, which had been raised of a national policy and of a national literature, were soon1 blighted, and, from the Thirty Year's War to the present day, the inheritance of the nation has been divided between princes and professors. There have been moments when the princes had to appeal to the nation at large, and to forget for awhile their royal pretensions; and these times of national enthusiasm, as during the wars of Frederick the Great, and during the wars against Napoleon, have not failed to tell on the literature of Germany. They produced a national spirit, free from professorial narrowness, such as we find in the writings of Lessing and Fichte. But with the exception of these short lucid intervals, Germany has been, and is still, under the absolute despotism of a number of small sovereigns and great professors, and her literature has been throughout in the hands of court poets or academic critics. Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller are most free from either influence, and most impressed with the duties which a poet owes, before all, to the nation to which he be

SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. 409 longs. Klopstock's national enthusiasm borders sometimes on the fantastic, for, as his own times could not inspire him, he borrowed the themes of his national panegyrics from the distant past of Arminius and the German bards. Lessing looked more to his own age, but he looked in vain for national heroes. " Pity the extraordinary man," says Goethe, " who had to live in such miserable times, which offered him no better subjects than those which he takes for his works. Pity him, that ill his Minna von Barnhelm he had to take part in the quarrel between the Saxons and the Prussians, because he fbund nothing better. It was owing to the rottenness of his time that he always took, and was forced to take, a polemical position. In his Emilia Galotti he shows his pique against the princes; in Nathan, against the priests." But, although the subjects of these works of Lessing were small, his object in writing was always great and national. He never condescended to amuse a provincial court by masquerades and comedies, nor did he degrade his genius by pandering, like Wieland, to the taste of a profligate nobility. Schiller, again, was a poet, truly national and truly liberal; and although a man of aspirations rather than of actions, he has left a deeper impress on the kernel of the nation than either Wieland or Goethe. These considerations, however, must not interfere with our appreciation of the greatness of Goethe. On the contrary, when we see the small sphere in which he moved at Weimar, we admire the more the height to which he grew, and the fieedom of his genius. And it is, perhaps, owing to this very absence of a strongly marked national feeling, that in Germanly the first idea of a world-literature was conceived. " National literature," Goethe says, " is of little importance: the age of a world-literature is at hand, and every one ought to work in order to accelerate this new era." Perhaps Goethe felt that the true poet belonged to the whole of mankind, and that he must be intelligible beyond the frontiers of his own country. And, from this point of view, his idea of a world-literature has been realized, and his own works have gained their place side by side with the works VOL. II.L-18

410 APPENDIX A. Of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. But, so long as there are different languages and different nations, let each poet think, and work, and write for his own people, without caring for the applause of other countries. Science and philosophy are cosmopolitan; poetry and art are national: and those who would deprive the Muses of their homesprung character, would deprive them of much of their native charms.

APPENDIX B. HEGEL AND RECENT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY.1 Hegel. I. GEORGE WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL was born at Stuttgart, the 27th of August, 1770. In his eighteenth vear he entered the University of Ttibingen, in order to devote himself to the study of theology. During his course of study here, he attracted no marked attention; Schelling, who was his junior in years, shone far beyond all his contemporaries. After leaving Tiibingen, he took a situation as private tutor, first in Switzerland, and afterwards in Frankfort-on-the-Main till 1801, when he settled down at Jena. At first he was regarded as a disciple, and defender of Schelling's philosophy, and as such he wrote in 1801 his first minor treatise on the "Difference between Fichte and Schelling." Soon afterwards he became associated with Schelling in publishing the " Critical Journal of Philosophy," 1802-3, for which he furnished a number of important articles. His labors as an academical teacher met at first with but little encouragement; he gave his first lecture to only four hearers. Yet in 1806, he became professor in the university, though the political catastrophe in which the countr'y was soon afterwards involved, deprived him again 1 In order, in some manner, to complete Madame de Stail's survey of German Philosophy, we here add from Tennemann's Manual, an account of Hegel and his successors. - Ed.

412 APPENDIX B. of the place. Amid the cannon's thunder of the battle of Jena, he finished " The Phenomenology of the Mind," his first great and independent work, the crown of his Jena labors. He was subsequently in the habit of calling this book which appeared in 1807, his "voyage of discovery." From Jena, Hegel, for want of the means of subsistence, went to Banlberg, where for two years he was editor of a political journal published there. In the fall of 1808, he became rector of the gymnasium at Nuremberg. In this situation he wrote his Logic, 1812-16. All his works were produced slowly, and lie first properly began his literary activity as Schellinig finished his. In 1816, he received a call to a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, where in 1817 he published his " Encyclopcedia of the Philosophical Sciences," in which for the first time he showed the whole circuit of his system. But his peculiar fame, and his far-reaching activity, dates first from his call to Berlin in 1818. It was at Berlin that he surrounded himself with an extensive and very actively scientific school, and where, through his connection with the Prussian government, he gained a political influence and acquired a reputation for his philosophy, as the philosophy of the State, though this neither speaks favorably for its inner purity, nor its moral credit. Yet in his " Philosophy of Rights," which appeared in 1821 (a time, to be sure, when the Prussian State had not yet shown any decidedly anti-constitutional tendency), Hegel does not deny the political demands of the present age; lie declares in favor of popular representation, freedom of' the press, and publicity of judicial proceedings, trial by jury, and an administrative independence of corporations. In Berlin, Hegel gave lectures upon almost every branch of philosophy, and these have been published by his disciples and friends after his death. His manner as a lecturer was stammering, clumsy, and unadorned, but was still not without a peculiar attraction as the immediate expression of profound thoughtfulness. His social intercourse was more with the uncultivated than with the learned; he was not fond of shining as a genius in social circles. In 1829

HEGEL, 413 he became rector of the university, an office which he ad ministered in a more practical manner than Fichte had done. Hegel died with the cholera, November 14, 1831, the day also of Leibnitz's death. He rests in the same church-yard with Solger and Fichte, near by the latter, and not far from the former. His writings and lectures form seventeen volumes, which have appeared since 1832: Vol I. Minor Articles; II. Phenomenology; III-V; Logic; VI-VII. Encyclopaedia; VIII. Philosophy of Rights; IX. Philosophy of History; X..Esthetics; XI-XII. Philosophy of Religion; XIII-XV. History of Philosophy; XVI-XVII. Miscellaneous. His life has been written by Rosenkranz.1 Hegel rejected the Intellectual Intuition of the Philosophy of Nature, and studied to make philosophy an intelligible science and knowledge by means of dialectics. He called philosophy the Science of Reason, because it is the idea and consciousness of all Esse in its necessary development. It is his principle to include all particular principles in it. Now as the Idea is reason identical with itself, and as, in order to be cognizant of itself, or in other words, as, in order to be self-existing (fir sich seyn), it places itself in opposition to itself, so as to appear something else, without, however, ceasing to be one and the same thing; in this case Philosophy becomes divided: 1st. Into Logic considered as the science of the Idea in and for itself. 2d. Into the Philosophy of Nature considered as the science of the Idea,.'epresenting itself externally (Reason thrown out in Nature). 3d. Its third division is that of the Philosophy of Mind, expressing the return of the Idea within itself, after having thrown itself without externally. All Logic, according to Hegel, presents three momentums: 1. The abstract or intelligible momentum, which seizes the object in its most distinct and determinate features, and distinguishes it with precision. 2. The dialectic or negative rational momentum consists in the annihilation of the determinations of objects, and their transition to the opposite determinations. 3. The 1 This summary of Hegel's life is from Schwegler. - Ed.

414 APPENDIX B. speculative momentum perceives the unity of the determinations in their opposition. Such is the method which philosophy ought to follow, and which is frequently styled by Hegel the immanent movement, the spontaneous development of the conception. Logic is essentially Speculative Philosophy, because it considers the determinations of thought in and for itself, consequently of concrete and pure thoughts, or in other words, the conceptions, with the significations of the self'subsisting foundation of all. The primary element of Logic consists in the oneness of the subjective and objective; this oneness is the absolute science to which the mind rises as to its absolute truth, and is found in the truth, that pure Esse is pure conception in itself; and that pure conception alone is true Esse. Tile absolute idealism of Hegel has considerable affinity with Schelling's doctrine of Identity on this point, but it shows a complete departure from it in the method. With Hegel, Logic usurps the place of what had been previously styled Metaphysics and Critique of pure Reason. The first, and perhaps the most suggestive, of Hegel's works, his Phenomenology of the Mind, contains a history of the progressive development of the Consciousness. Instinctive or common knowledge only regards the object, without considering itself. But the Consciousness contains, besides the former, also a perception of itself, and embraces, according to Hegel, three stages in its progress — Consciousness, Self-consciousness, and Reason. The first represents the Object standing in opposition to the Ego, the second the Ego itself. and the third, accidents attaching to the Ego, i. e., Thoughts. This phenomenology constituted at first a sort of introduction to pure science, whereas later it came to form a part of his doctrine of the mind. Pure Science or Logic is divided, 1st, into the Logic of Esse or being (das Seyn); 2d, into the Logic of qualified nature (das Wesen); 3d, into Logic of the conception or of the idea. The two first constitute the objective logic; and the last division the subjective logic, containing the substance of vulgar logic. Hegel treated as fully of the philosophy

HEGEL. 415 of right and of art, as of the metaphysical part of his sys. tem. According to his view, the essential in man is Thought; but thought is not a general abstraction, opposed to the particular abstraction; on the contrary, it embraces the particular within itself (concrete generality). Thought does not remain merely internal and subjective, but it determines and renders itself objective through the medium of the will (practical mind). To will and to know are two inseparable things; and the free-will of man consists in the faculty of appropriating and of rendering the objective world his own, and also in obeying the innate laws of the universe, because he wills it. Hegel places the existence of right in the fact that every existence in general is the existence of a free-will. Right is usually confounded with morality, or with duty placed in opposition to inclination. There exists, however, a higher morality raised above this, which bids us act according to truly rational ends, and which ought to constitute the true nature of man. We find the objective development of this higher morality in the State and in History. As regards the connection existing between thought and reality, Hegel has laid down this memorable proposition: That which is rational is real, and that which is real is rational (there is no empty abstract vacuum beyond). It is important here to distinguish, in the temporary and transitory appearance, the substance that is immanent, and the eternity which is present. Hegel proceeds to make an application of this idea to political science, by attempting to grasp and represent the state as a rational whole, instead of constructing a new one. He develops his method with great sagacity, but the form in which he dresses it is so arid and dry, that it is extremely difficult to understand. Such are the leading features of Hegel's system, which exerted for a considerable time an almost sovereign sway over the philosophical public in Germany, and which, in a modified form, may still be regarded as the Orthodox metaphysics of modern Germany, notwithstanding the numerous and vigorpus attempts that have been made to supersede it. 1 For a much fuller account of Hegel's Philosophy, see Schwegler.-Ed

416 APPENDIX B. The Iegelian School. II. Soon after Hegel commenced the publication of The Journal for Seientific Criticism (1817), the Hegelian phi. losophy began to show its power. This magazine was at first exclusively devoted to the external propagation of Hegelianism, and it added daily to the number of prose. lytes. Subsequently to Hegel's death its spirit became more tolerant, and suffered departures from the strict letter of the master, until it sanlk gradually to an ordinary review, and died a natural death, in 1847, from want of sympathy in the public. Immediately after the death of Hegel, his orthodox school of followers effected the publication of all his works, an undertaking which he himself had desired. Among these may be enumerated his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, of Nature, and of History, and also his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. The editors of his various works were Mlarheineke, Johann Schulze, Gans, Von Henning, Hotho, Fdrster, and Michelet; to these must be added Rosenkranz, who appeared at a later date as the biographer of Hegel.1 Hegel had enounced the proposition: that a party can only maintain its supremacy by separating into two parties, for which reason the division that arises in a party, though apparently a misfortune, is in reality an advantage. This principle was exemplified in the Hegelian school, where disputes arose concerning the Person of' God, the Immortality Df the Soul, and the Person of Christ, which terminated in the division of the great school into two camps. Daumer, Weisse, G'schel, Rosenkranz, Schaller, and others, attempted to connect the theistic idea of God with the common notion of the Divinity contained in the Hegelian philosophy, and to prove the former from the latter; while Blasche, Michelet, Strauss, and others, maintained that the pantheistic idea of God was the only true result of the Hegelian principle, 1 G. W. F. Hegel's Werke, durch einer Verein von Freunden de# ~erewigten, etc.; 18 vols. 8vo: Berlin, 1834-45.

THE HEGELIAN SCHOOL. 417 and represented God as the universal substance or the Eternal Universe, which becomes first absolutely conscious of itself in humanity. G6schel, Heinrichs, Rosenkranz, Schaller, and others, attempted moreover to justift the ecclesiastical idea of Christ, as specifically the only God-Man, on philosophical grounds; whereas, Blasche, Conradi, Michelet, Strauss, and others, maintained that the unity of the Divinity and of Humanity was not realized in one individual, but in the whole of humanity, so that the latter in reality is the God-Man. Finally, G'schel, the younger Fichte, Weisse, and others, sought to demonstrate the idea of a personal immortality from the Hegelian philosophy, while Blasche, Conradi, Daumer, J'flichelet, and others, understand the idea of imnmortality as the eternally present quality of the spirit, and maintained that the eternity of the spirit as such, consisted in the extinction of the individual. For the rest, the influence of the Hegelian philosophy has extended to all the sciences, since they have all been reconstructed from the basis of that philosophy, and in some degree have been completely reformed and changed by it, notwithstanding the great resistance it encountered in a onesided Empiricism and the prejudices of custom. While the orthodox adherents of Hegel, the so-called Old Hegelians, or Hegelians of the right, flocked around the " Journal for Philosophy and speculative Theology," founded by the younger Fichte, in 1837, the review entitled the "'Halle Journal for German Science and Art," founded in 1838, by Ruge and Eschenmayer, became the organ of the Young Hegelian school. This journal was conducted by Ruge alone, since 1840, under the title of the " German Journal for Science and Art," and became the advocate of the religious and political reforms proposed by the New Hegelian party, developing latterly so radical a tendency that it became obnoxious to the government about 1843, and was suppressed by the interference of the police. The " Journal of the Present," edited at Tiibingen, by Schwegler, since 1843, Ps well as the "Journal of speculative Philosophy," edited by Noack, at Worms, since 1846, perished together wit]

418 APPENDIX B. Fichte's periodical in the political troubles of 1848, after the two former journals had defended the cause of free science against every dogmatically stationary system of German spiritual life, with virile power and enthusiasm. Strauss and Feuerbach. III. The influence of the Hegelian philosophy has been especially felt in theology; and among those who particularly labored in this province we may notice Daub, at Heidelberg; Marheineke, at Berlin; Rosenkranz, at Konigsberg; Conradi, at Derheim (in Rhenish Hesse); Erdmann, at Halle; Vatke, at Berlin; Zeller, at Tiibingen; and others who more or less contributed in giving this coloring to the contemporary theology of Protestant Germany. At length there appeared, in 1837, a pupil and countryman of Hegel, David Frederic Strauss,1 who sought to emancipate the genuine kernel of Hegel's religious doctrine from all foreign elements and orthodox additions. It was with this view that he published, first his " Critique of the Gospel History," and afterwards his " Dogmatik," in which he attempted to develop what he represented as the true spirit of the Hegelian philosophy, and to stand forth as a true and genuine Hegelian himself. It was Louis Feuerbach,2 however, who 1 D. F. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 4th edit. 8vo, Tabing. 1840. Leichtfassliche Bearbeitung desselben, 8vo, Winterthur, 184.3. Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift, iiber das Leben Jesu, 8vo, Tubingen, 1837. Die Christliche Glaubenslehre, in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung, und im Kampf mit der modernen Wis senschaft, 2 vols. 8vo, Taibingen, 1840. Charakteristiken und Kritiken, Svo, 1844. Zwei friedliche Bliitter. Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Caesars; oder, Julian der Abtriinnige, 8vo, Mannheim, 1848. Der politische und der theologische Liberalismus, 8vo, Halle, 1848. Sechs theolog. politische Volksreden, 8vo, 1848. 2 L. Feuerbach's Sammtliche Werke, vols. i.-vii. 8vo, 1846-49. Vol. i. Erliuterungen zum Wesen des Christenthums. Vol. ii. Philoso, phische Kritiken und Grundsitze. Vol. iii. Gedanken iiber Tod und Unsterblichkeit. Vol. iv. Geschichte der philosophie von Bacon bis Spinoza. Vol. v. Darstellung und Kritik der Leibnitzschen Philoso

STRAUSS AND FEUERBACH. 419 carried the consequences of Hegel's position to their ultimate results; but in doing so, he has exceeded the very position which he himself at first assumed, when he was led to make the statement that the being of man is the highest object of philosophy, and that all speculation is mere vanity, which attempts to transcend nature and humanity. He has introduced this view into the province of religion, in his " Nature of Christianity " (1841), and has represented religion as the relation of man to himself-to his own being. At the same time, he describes this relation to his own being as if it were to another being, inasmuch as man can reduplicate his personality, and represent himself as God. The only true and genuine province of religion, regarded from the ground of Feuerbach's theory, is the being of humanity: man has his highest being - his God in himself in his very nature, or rather in that of his race. The Atonement, which is the general tendency of religion, is in reality a natural atonement; another man is from his very position the meditator between my own individuality and the holy idea of the race. Whosoever rises to the love of the race, he is a Christ, -- nay, he is Christ himself; immediately that the consciousness of the race, as a race, arises in you, the ecclesiastical Christ disappears, without our losing his real being on that account. Thus, in Feuerbach's eyes, man and nature, which belong to the complete' and true being of man, are the real sum and substance of religion. We are indebted to Riige for having more accurately explained and more elaborately developed this religion of humanity: this writer has ably unveiled this phase of modern religion in his treatise entitled " The Religion of our Times." phie. Vol. vi. Pierre Bayle. Vol. vii. Das Wesen des Christenthums. Das Wesen der Religion, 2d edit. 8vo, Leipsic, 1849. Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luther's, 8vo, 1844. See also, J. P. Lange's Kritische Beleuchtung von L. Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums, t2mo, Heidelberg, 1850.

420 APPENDIX B. Schopenhauer, Reff and Planck. IV. The present tendencies of philosophy in Germany have struck out branches in two directions. They belong either partially to the school of Herbart 1 and Krause, or have outgrown the orthodox Hegelian principle, fiom which they have departed, either by following up this principle in 1 " John Frederic Herbart, born at Oldenburg, professor at K6nigs berg, and particularly excited by Fichte, has developed peculiar opin ions opposed to the greater part of the existing systems, and which he has succinctly consigned to posterity in several treatises under a polemical form. He wishes philosophy to abandon the psychological direction which has been erroneously praised in modern times. According to him, to attempt to measure the limits of the faculty of cognition, and to criticise metaphysics, is to have the strange illusion of thinking that the faculty of cognition is more easy to understand than the object itself with which metaphysics concerns itself: this illusion is so much the greater, since all the conceptions by means of which we represent to ourselves the faculty of cognition, proceed from a metaphysical source. The psychological premises on which the criticism is based are for the most part obtained surreptitiously. Philosophy is an elaboration of conceptions, called forth by the collection of observations relating to these same conceptions. Its method is the method of relations; that is to say, a method that consists in seeking for the ideas necessary to complete an order of thoughts: it starts from the supposition of contradictions in a given object-contradictions that push you on to a higher degree in thought. The elaboration of conceptions consists sometimes in their elucidation and explication; hence logic freed from all psychological mixture: at other times, it consists in cutting off, in connecting, and completing —hence metaphysics; when the author sometimes returns to the doctrine of the Eleatxe. Psychology, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Philosophy, are in his eyes parts of applied metaphysics. The science of ideas, united to a judgment competent to approve or condemn, is AEsthetics, which, applied to a given objcct is distributed in a series of doctrines, among which that which bears the character of necessity, has received the name of the doctrine of du. ties and of virtue (Practical Philosophy). In these different parties, the author develops views that are peculiar to him, and which evidence a great sagacity, but which often become obscure on account of their brev:ty, and require meditation; as for instance, his theory of the destruction

SCHOPENHAUER, REIFF, AND PLANCK. 421 all its theoretical and practical consequences and applying it as a critique to all objects presented to it, or by giving Hegelianism a leaning to Schelling's last position, and cramping Hegel's position into a union with historical Christianity, thus bringing about a Christianized Hegelianism. No really fruitful advance of philosophy to a higher platform can be traced in these groping efforts. The entire development of philosophy inl Germany, beginning with Kant and closing with Hegel, revolves and resides in the idea of the Consciousness. K;ant had said,' Our cognition is on the one hand limited by Sensuousness, i. e., by the perception of something objective and real without us, which presents us with the raw material for cognition to work upon. On the other hand, it is limited by the forms of Consciousness originally indwelling in our mind; while the very material of thought, presented to us through the Senses, is not a thing in itself, or reality as such, but only the same reflected in the mirror of our Consciousness." Fichte likewise pronounced this thing in itself as a subjective, though at the same time a necessary stage of our thinking; or, in his language, as the Not-I thrown out by the I (Ego) or thinlking process, previous to all Consciousness. Schelling led back the problem to the question, how the Objective without us could become a Subjective within us; or how the Real could become thle Ideal, that is, the thing known? He grasped the Absolute as the original union of Thought and Being (Denken und Seyn), of Consciousness and Existence, which absolute Identity he endeavored to place in a process of Self-development and Self-realization. Hegel completed this attempt of a real system of the Self%nd preservation of Natures, in his speculative psychology founded on nathematics, and his theory of representations considered as forces. It is proper to notice his criticism of the principles at present dominant'n psychology, his critique of Kant's doctrine of free-will, and his own determinative or necessarian doctrine (in the sense of Leibnitz) on the same subject." - (Tennemann, Manual of Philosophy, pp. 462, 463.) - Ed.

422 APPENDIX B. deve..opment of the Absolute in the dialectics of thinking, which should at the same time contain all Being (Seyn) in itself.. The principle of the Hegelian philosophy is Thought (das Denken), which thinks in the form of the Conception, or according to dialectics, and which thus, as a rational Thinking (Denken), generates the whole contents of knowledge from itself, and develops it in a systematic form as Science. This thinking of the philosopher is at the same time absolute Thinking, in so far as it has become raised in man, by the process of its phenomenological development, to its truth, i. e., to the consciousness of the identity of its Being with that of the Absolute. The philosopher's thought is moreover proved to be absolute Thought by reproducing this process in the Individual, and by rising to the Self-Consciousness of the Absolute. It was undoubtedly a merit in Hegel to have modelled perspicuously and distinctly, into a perfectly fashioned systemrn, this idea of philosophy, as a development of thought in the form of a necessity in thinking, and of systematic dependence. Yet we find in Hegel the want of a real demonstration that Being and Thinking, Existence and Consciousness, are really identical. Their identity was only maintained, but never proved, by Hegel. The Hegelian system, instead of really reconciling Being and Thinking, the real and the ideal, and developing this reconciliation as a system, is nothing more than the repetition of a one-sided idealism. According to it the real itself must be thought, and the development of the world must be represented as that of thought; that is to say, all Esse or Being, all Reality, is resolved into Consciousness. Thus the Consciousness;s grasped as the principle of philosophy, and the movement of the world is attached to the development of Consciousness from the shadowy dream of instinctive life up to the noon-day height of self-conscious Thought. Notwithstanding the sublime and imposing character of this spiritual Idealism, it shows itself to be one-sided, and incapable of completely and solidly penetrating the reality of the universe; and there are still shadowy and obscure

SCHOPENHAUER, REIFF, AND PLANCK. 423 remains and relics in the development of the Consciousness which do not appear in Hegel's idealism. An attempt has been lately made in opposition to it, of elevating the Will instead of Consciousness to be the principle of philosophy, and of regarding the development of Will instead of that of the Consciousness, as the Nature (Wesen) and Soul of the Universe. The adherents of the latter view have endeavored to introduce this principle into all the sciences, representing the Will as the filndamental substratum (Grundwesen) of the Universe, which develops itself on their different platforms of Nature, Spirit, and History. The thinker who first struck out into this new path, thereby pioneering the future road for philosophy, was Arthur Schopenhauer. He was born at Dantzic about 1790, and is the son of the banker named Schopenhauer, and of the celebrated authoress, Johanna Schopenhauer, whose maiden name was Trosina. This lady resided, after the death of her husband, in 1806, first at Weimar, and afterwards at Frankfort and Jena, where she died in 1838. The son, who was a countryman of Kant, and had attended Fichte's lectures, has published several works at Berlin, since 1813, among which a book entitled " The World regarded as Will and Conception " (1818) displayed the genius of an original thinker. Founding his system on the thought that the act of Will from which the world has arisen is our own, Schopenhauer sought to build up his philosophy, without having actually completed it as a system of real Idealism which should fulfil the object that he proposed, namely, that of concentrating the reality of all Existence and the root of universal Nature in the Will, and of showing the latter to be the heart and focus of the world. Starting from the critique of the Hegelian system, Re/if of Tiibingen has based upon Schopenhauer's foundation a new system, which converts the Nature (Wesen) of the Ego, or the pure aEgo, into the principle of philosophy; tnd elevates the System of the Will's tendencies or phases (Willensbestimmungen) to the rank of the fundamental Sci ence of Philosophy.

424 APPENDIX B. The System of the Will's phases, according to Reiff, contains the development of the world: those elements which are intimately associated with every one's Consciousness, and which constitute his inmost being, his strength and his weakness, his weal and his woe, are world-creating and worldmoving forces. These are not to be sought for above; we have only to look within in order to find them. A young countryman of Reiff's, named Planck, has become associated with him and his views, at Ttibingen, and has endeavored, in his work entitled - The Age "1 (2 vols. 1850-51), to erect the reconciliation of Idealism and Realism, begun by Reiff, into a complete of Real-Idealism. However, these new efforts of philosophy belong to the present, and have not yet passed into history. It is sufficient for us to have discovered from the preceding sketch that the present position of philosophy in Germany is that which converts the Will, instead of the Consciouslless, into the absolute productive principle of the world, and which regards all reality in nature, spirit, and history, as a manifestation of Will. It is the present object of the philosophical mind to pave the way to a new era by the introduction of this principle (whose first proposition is the following: I will; therefore I am): The oneness of thinking and being is the Will. The adherents of this new school anticipate that the future philosophy of Germany, by becoming the Metaphysics of the Will, will attain the crown and summit of human wisdom. Other Recent Systems. V. Besides the authors specified in the last section, we briefly signalize among the recent German systematic essays zontemporary and subsequent to Hegel, the "Architectonic" Df Fred. Christoph. Weise, professor at Heidelberg; the essays Pf William Kern, of John, Baron Sinclair, of Charles Louis 1 K. Ch. Planck, Die Weltalter. Vol. i. System des reinen Ideal. ismus, 1850. Vol. ii. Das Reich des Idealismus, 1851. Die Genesis les Judenthums, 8vo, 1843.

OTHER RECENT SYSTEMS. 425 Vorpahl, who maintains that Being is derived from Birth. We have also to notice the doctrine of Identity modified by Adalbert Kayssler, professor at Breslau, deceased in 1822; considerations on man, resembling in some degree the ideas of Jacobi and of Schelling, by David Theod. Aug. Suabedissen, professor at Marburg; the popular observations of C. F. G. Griivel and F. Linkmaier; the interesting sketches of Berger, which approach in some measure the ideas of Hegel; and the principles of a philosophy of nature, by Tieftrunck. One of the most remarkable of the later German metaphysicians is Fred. Edward Beneke, who approximates the Scotch school in many of his views, being a decided realist, and endeavoring to arrive at ontological results through the medium of psychological analysis. To the above writers we must add Herm. Wi'. Ern. de Keyserlingk, privat-docent at Berlin, who published a system of perceptive (Anschaitung's) philosophy; besides numerous other authors, who have contributed to the advancement of special branches of philosophy by different publications. Among these must be cla-sed Gotlob Will. Gerlach, professor at Halle; H. C. W; Sigwart, professor at TUbingen; Joseph i'lldebrand, professor at Giessen, and previously at Heidelbergr. The thleologictl discussions which have lately occurred, on the connection between Reason and Revelation, and between the Free-will of man and Divine Grace, have not been devoid of interest in a philosophical point of view; and some have imagined that they could solve these problems by means of mysticism. A tendency has quite recently appeared among the German philosophers towards a psychological and anthropological direction, in preference to pure speculation. Several writers of eminence have combined this psychological tendency with works on the history of philosophy, such as Brandis, Ritter, Reinhold, jun., etc.; while the diversity and conflict of speculative opinions naturally and necessarily led the mind to a more searching extmination of the different positions taken up during various epochs in the development of the science. Before closing our sketch of the modern German school of philosophy,

426 APPENDIX B. we have still to notice another of its phases, which has been quite recently developed, chiefly through the influence of Will. von Humboldt.1 We allude to the attempt to bring philology to bear upon philosophy, and to explain many of its problems from the structure of language. This view has met with considerable success and able advocates, and has combated with some advantage the Hegelian doctrine, which is naturally regarded by the adherents of the science of Languages as a play of words ( Wortenspiel). The last best work on the dispute between Hegelianism and this new school of philological philosophy, is a book of H. Steinthal, entitled " Die Sprachwissenchaft W. von Humboldt's und die Hegel'sche Philosophie," 8vo, Berlin, 1848. 1 Born at Berlin in 1767, died 1835

APPENDIX C. RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY.1 ALTHOUGH the keen interest which followed the course of German speculation down to Hegel in metaphysics, and Strauss and Baur in criticism, has partly abated, Germany is still the land most rich in erudition, and most fertile in speculation, — still the mother of all things new and strange in the domain of Theology. It is true that the creative period seems to have passed by; that - if we except the constructive criticism of the later Tiibingen school - self-confident energy, and the audacious hope of intellectual youth, are replaced by a microscopic criticism, an erudition painfully minute, a groping and searching in the plane of religious speculation, that turns in the same circle, and perpetually recoils upon itself. As political problems are given to England to work out painfully. and social ones to France, so to Germany it seems committed to exhaust every vein of abstract thinking and erudition, to run the round of every possible hypothesis, to test and eliminate the errors of all half-way systems, and by a reductio ad absurdum leave the right way to be taken at last by those not wearied with following the truth through all its doublings and windings. If a feeling like sadness comes upon us at seeing the weariness and chaos that appear to occupy the field of that earnest and high debate, - if we are amazed to behold a new-school metaphysics plunging rampant intc 1 We are indebted for this fine summary, to the Christian Examiner No. cciv, November 7th, 1857, p. 431, et sequens.- Ed.

428 APPENDIX C. Atheism, iand a hyper-Lutheranism toppling over into a mongrel Romanism, - if a host of obscure names and petty controversies occupy the ground where Lessing and Herder, Fichte and Se:hleiermacher, De Wette and Neander, have waged their high controversy with error or unbelief, - still a little attention will show that good service is rendered us by the present generation also. And we are indebted to any otie who will help to clear up the confusion, and arrange the new party men and names in their true bearings. The general results of the last thirty or forty years we cannot better describe than in the following paragraph, taken from a recent number of the Westminster Review: "The critical theology has become conscious of its own mission. From a blind instinct of aimless inquiry, from the eager ebullition of youthful curiosity which would question every thing, it has matured into a habit of careful research, governed by a conscientious spirit, and armed with all the resources of knowledge, direct and collateral. If, indeed, its early enthusiasm has abated, this is inevitable. All fertile periods of speculative agitation, such as that which Germany has just gone through, are only possible because they are stimulated by hopes too sanguine to be realized. After a time the human mind is brought to, in its most adventurous flights, by the bounds which it cannot pass. It recognizes, when'roused by the shock which drives it back, the wall of adamant which bounds inquiry.' It lowers its pretensions, but at the same time consolidates its efforts. In this stage is German theological endeavor. Never was speculation less wild or capricious. Its every movement has to be made under the surveillance of the most vigilant criticism. Its own inltense consciousness of the laws of logical method checks it at every turn. The enormous wealth of applicable learning which it has accumulated hampers its operations. It can no longer be ingenious or inventive, but is under the imperious necessity of being just. It may smile at the crude conjectures of its young rationalist days, but it must be with a mixture of regret for the freedom and elasticity with which it then sallied forth for the conquest of the world."

RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY. 429 In our survey we shall follow the method, and wherever we can, the language of Schwarz, whose volume 1 is the most recent on the subject, and for our purpose the best. It is a work generous and liberal in spirit, apparently free from party bias, sympathizing most nearly with the middle, or " reconciliation " school of theologians, of whom Bunsen is the noblest representative, rather than with either extreme section, yet with a clear exposition, and frank acknowledgment of the service rendered by the most unsparing critics. It covers, professedly, the period of twenty years, - from 1835, when the work of Strauss brought to a head the critical ferment of German erudition, - in fact, a little more. The "'Leben Jesu" was a true "epochmaking " book. The epoch which it led was " not creative, but revolutionary," - an anticipation, by some dozen years, of the political storm of 1848. Up to 1835, we find the two old-fashioned parties, Rationalist and Supernaturalist, about equally one-sided and superficial: now they are brushed aside by a current of deeper speculation, and a breeze of sharper historic criticism. Hitherto, all manner of hybrid and transitional theologies. Rationalism has grown sterile and effete, resting on barren erudition, blind to the mystic or poetic side of the Scripture it professes to expound, —" lacking in religious sense, speculative sense, and historical sense." The Idealism in vogue fifty years ago becomes abstract and fantastic - drifting vaguely through romantic dreams of the Middle Age, through mysticism and fable towards a spurious Catholicity, a high-church "positivity." The real religion of the time sprang from the inspirations of patriotism, and was born in the war of German independence. A self-sacrificing conviction, a faith unto death, whatever its source, is religion. The regeneration of Germany came with the shock that struck from the popular heart the spark of liberty. 1 Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie. (An Essay towards the ftistory of the Newest Theology.) Von Karl Schwarz. Leipzig: 1856. 12mo, pp. 437.

430 APPENDIX C. Hegel and Schleiermacher — two men whose influence on the development of thought has been, perhaps, exceeded by none in the present century —are the two eminent leaders in the period that now ensued. All the more recent German schools either date immediately from them, or at least have been most powerfully affected, whether as disciples or opponents, by the movement in which they bore the leading share. It was when the government was trying to extinguish all embers of the revolutionary spirit, that Hegel appeared at Berlin, in 1818. His system of abstract necessity set itself against all abstract ideality. His maxim of " the selfdevelopment from substance to subject," practically came to this: 1" Whatever is, is right." His disciples of one wing interpreted'his speculative theory into old-fashioned orthodoxy. His "'logical category they made an historic category;" his philosophical Absolute was realized to them in Jesus of Nazareth, -a translation which only hid the real drift of the original. A more dangerous tendency set in the direction towards mere nihilism and unbelief. The phrases of the master are taken out of their place in a comprehensive and fertile system, and made mere handles to an opponent, or catchwords of a sect. In Hegelism, so read, " events are brought to pass by ghastly Universals; it is a philosophy of history, in which history stains the purity of philosophy, and philosophy drains away the blood from history." The Christian ethics of freedom disappear. There is no germ of personality. " Persons are only masks; humanity is a mosaic, not an organism." "The absolute is not that which creates, but that which comes to pass." Idealism in this shape is but one step removed from French Positivism, - a step which the later disciples of Hegel were not slow to take. Feuerbach marks the easy transition from Pantheism to Anthropology, - from AllGod to No-God. Metaphysics takes the sudden plunge from Conservative Orthodoxy to Atheistic Nihilism. The great name of Schleiermacher represents, thirty years ago, the nobler phase of a sincere intellectual piety

RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY. 431 The waste waters of " Romanticism" he led to irrigate the dry soil of an abstract theology. Starting in his youtb with a sort of pantheistic mysticism, his nature ripened into an intellectual breadth and richness, and a "Moravial " fervor of piety, that make him the finest type of that " religion for the cultivated classes " which it was eminently his task to expound. His chief service was to define the " essence of Religion " in the life, and turn over, without fear, to history, cosmology, and metaphysics, whatever belongs not essentially to that. But his followers struck presently into opposite directions; on the onle hand, seeking reconciliation with the existing beliefs and tendencies, and so bridging the way to the present " Confessionalism,"little as they like it or are thanked for it; and on the other diverging as far as to Baur and Strauss, "wllom the schools of Hegel and Schleiermacher beat to and fro between them like a shuttlecock," each anxious to shun the questionable fame of the arch-heresy. Following the orthodox tendency a little way, we meet some of the more familiar and honored names of the later theology. Neander was " last of the Fathers, a Protestant monk andl saint." His mild, indeterminate method did much to call out the sharp and positive " Confessionalism." His Church History is rather a history of piety than of the church. His followers are fitly enough termel " pectoralists," or heart-Christians. His generous and tender spirit was the most formidable antagonist to the new Prussian olrthodoxy. Passing over names less important in this direction, we come presently to Hengstenberg. He seeks something more definite and clear than Schleiermacher, something after the elder type of Lutheranism. In him, pietism and orthodoxy "came not in penitential rags, but in fashionable apparel." Like the Jesuits, he teaches unpalatable doctrine in imodern phrases. He deifies the Canon; proscribes all historical criticism; offers the sharp alternative, "Give up all or nothing." Hengstenberg is at the head of the state theo!. ogy —the " Union" party in religion, which rested on the

432 APPENDIX C. secular arm as the defence against a too rationalistic clergy till 1848, since when it has equal dread of the laity. Till then a terror, it has since become a bore. It was an inquisition to put down heresy and neology, resting after all on a superficial knowledge of the two great masters, Schleiermacher and Hegel. Weakly dilettante in Stahl (" the foremost sophist of them all"), loosely eclectic in. G'schel, (who defines his position from the data of Goethe, Hegel, and the Bible), resisted by the more liberal temper of Neander and Steudel, this new papacy subsisted on the confutation of heresy; its golden time was when such names as Strauss and Feuerbach made the object of its assault. Looking now at the genuine movement which dates from 1835, we find that it has two sides, - Historical Criticism and Speculative Dogma,- which it will be convenient to consider separately. In Strauss we find summed up the net results of a century of criticism. His "perfection of form," his "placid objectivity," were the source of his imposing and terrifying effect. He " hates the affectation of a pious and doleful tone in criticism. For science, there is no holy but only the true." His task was mostly negative, - to expose the fallacy of the oldl-style rationalism (which attempted in good faith to interipret the Gospel as a narrative of mere natural events), and to carry to its length the mythical theory, already popular in explaining many portions of the Bible. Strauss was the "alarm-drum," which roused the forces to the great theological battle, -" a brave building without foundations;" he criticizes the history as a whole without a previous investigation of its parts, and draws no clear boundary between what is mythic and historical. The real strength of Strauss is shown both in the multitude and in the weakness and vacillation of his opponents. Tholuck belongs to all schools; he is pietistic, but not poor in spirit; anti-rationalist, but, like the English apologists, imbibes the poison of the heresy he confutes: annihilates the idea of miracle in defining it; and criticises Strauss to good purpose only on the weakest side, the question of gen

RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY. 4833 uineness. Neander's criticism is compromising and capri. cious,- a dissolving process, timidly and half-way followed, upon the miraculous narrative. Ullmann, the mildest and clearest opponent, admits the mythical and legendary along with the historical; plants himself on St. Paul's faith in the resurrection; puts the question, Did Christ make the Church, or the Church make Christ? (to which Strauss answers, "Both,") and asserts that as in art, so in the divine life, there must be a living human realization of the type. Among the right-wing Hegelians, Gdschel asserts that Christ was the ideal of humanity, actualized, - a "whimsical realism, as of the theorist who would taste only ideal fruit;" Dorner, backed by cabalistic studies and theories of the Adam-Kadmon, claims for him a "universal personality;" Schaller and Rosenkranz maintain that the historic Christ was the " complete" or all-sided man. Of those who have replied in detail to the critical theories of Strauss, Weisse maintains that Mark was the original Gospel; holds that the narrative portion of John is not genuine; lays stress on the works of healing (which he refers to something akin to a magnetic force, growing sensibly feebler towards the close), while admitting myth or allegory in other parts of the miraculous narrative. Schweizer excepts to various portions of the fourth Gospel, - whether as of Galilean origin, or "magical" in style. Ebrard fiames a capricious "' apology," admitting no difference of great or small in the miraculous, and conceding that the Gospels are no way " protocols, or consecutive narrations." Bruno Bauer is the most extraordinary of these champions. By one leap he passed from the extreme right to the extreme left of the school of Hegel. His fanaticism for "truth " amounts to bluster; the leaven of the time ferments in him until it fairly explodes. " A kind of Faust," through philosophic abstraction he loses all capacity of truth. His great service, tn his own eyes, is to refute the apology of Strauss for the Gospel narrative!- which he holds to be mere extravagance and contradiction. The fourth Gospel, he considers, VOL. II.-19

434 APPENDIX a. was written in Edessa, about A. D. 130, by some disciple of the school of Andrew. Such is a sample of the German replies to Strauss. For any results of positive scientific value, we must look ir. another quarter, to the "New TUibingen School." Of the life and services of Ferdinand Christian Baur, - by some called "unquestionably the first of living theologians," — we cannot speak as we would in our present narrow space, reserving it for full treatment in a future number. His characteristic method is to treat the history of dogma as a process of logical development, while he makes it the gauge and test of literary criticism. "' His doctrine of universals is a sort of logical etiquette." His weakness is, that he treats doctrine apart from life, though in a masterly way. The New Testament writings he investigates purely as an integral portion of the early Christian literature,- his original starting-place being the Epistles of Paul, as the earliest genuine documents of the faith. A school of remarkable ability has gathered about the master, - Schwegler, whose "Post-Apostolic Time " has the merits and faults of youthful arrogance; Zeller, whose "Acts" is the most finished work of the entire school; Hil.enfeld, "more analytic and less dogmatic than Baur," whose works cover both the synoptical Gospels and the apocryphal Clementines; Ritschl, whose " Old Catholic Church " is a " useful criticism on the extreme tendencies of the school;" and Volkmar, who calls in question the preference too often shown for the apocryphal over the canonical Gospels. The findamental principle of this school is, that Christianity was a growth from the soil of Judaism; that early Christianity was equivalent to Jewish Christianity; that the opposition to Paul did not cease with the fall of Jerusalem, and not until the Catholic reconciliation became necessary, to resist the persecutions of paganism and the assaults of Gnosticism. Its critical analysis has been called "a compound microscope applied to the history of the first two centuries." It may have the exaggerations and defects, as well as the excellencies, of an instrument of such high power; but this cannot be gainsayed,

RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY. 435 that it has brought the facts of that period into a totally new light, and compelled a revolution in the method of their handling. Opposition to this school has been shown chiefly in the form of juvenile essays, prize writings, etc. Of more important works are those of Thiersch, who by "psychological insight" attempts to distinguish a constructive period in the Church, the first century, from a conservative in the second; Dorner, who avoids the discussion of the fourth Gospel, and the late appearance of the Logos doctrine; Ewald, who is excessively violent and arbitrary, "mechanically and anatomically," dissects the narrative into eight fantastically assorted parts, dissolves miracles into mist, which he asks you to accept, then condenses it back to fact which is neither good history nor fable, and tempts one constantly to ask whether it is mysticism or sophistry that misleads him; Bleek, who argues the genuineness of John's Gospel from its use among the Gnostics and all parties in the Church; Reuss, who holds to the genuineness of the lesser Epistles, and makes John less the expression of a doctrinal than of a mystic tendency; and Base, who rather incoherently makes the Gospel an exposition of what is said in the Apocalypse from another point of view. So far the historico-critical process. Looking next at the speculative-dogmatic, we find its impulse also given by Strauss, who in his "'Dogmatik" speaks the "inexorable consciousness of the time." -le attacks the fallacy with which some have solaced themselves, that the form of doctrine only is changed, while its substance remains the same, - the self-deception of metaphysical theologists. In this new work (published in 1841) we find the same calm and cold " objectivity," tracing the secular process of destruction which history makes known, to which all individual criticism or heresy is but " as a little rill to a mighty torrent." The fatal flaw in Strauss's mind is painfully evident, his nihilistic tendency, his'hopeless-blas6 " temper, so contrasted with the courageous energy of Lessing. His leading dea is the irreconcilable opposition between the ancient and

438 APPENDIX a. modern view of the universe. Faith and science must tolerate each other, - but here he "recks not his own rede." Yet even Strauss is not thoroughly consistent. Theoretically a pantheist, an honest moral instinct keeps him oscillating between fatalism and free-will. The divine personality, he asserts, is not individual, but universal. In philosophic parlance, the "Absolute" is " substance becoming subject," -- not the primal principle, but the result. Whatever vacillation may be in Strauss, we find none of it in his followers. Feuerbach shows the passionate reaction against all metaphysics. He admits only the two spheres of concrete existence, - physical phenomena, and acts or states of the human mind. The Absolute has to him no objective reality at all. Whatever any being aspires to, is contained within itself. The divine attributes are but emotions of the mind, or attributes of humanity. The conception of race - humanity - takes the place of all religious or ideal contemplation. Yet even here is an approach to some sort of higher than mere materialistic belief, which draws on him the scorn of a hooting mob, —"gamins of philosophy," -who pelt him with epithets, and call him theologist and hypocrite! A just retribution on him who "thought to fight a good fight with supernaturalism," and assailed Christianity with the ribaldry of old-school infidelity. One point of truth we find in him, —that human aature must have its rights fully recognized in religion; a "religion of humanity " only, but still in some sort a religion. Then we find the new radical school of metaphysics, "Young Hegelism," which parades in the Hallische Jahrbicher its assault on all institutions and beliefs, and its empty phrases of "truth, freedom, equality, humanity, popular sovereignty," to the general terror of' all parties. In Ruge, we observe the transition from quietism to rationalism, from old to young Hegelism. He is not a leader of the movement, but is drawn on by it. Always an idealist, he still clings to his "religion of freedom and humanity," though mixed with " slurs at nonsense and pedantry, and blase sneers

RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY. 437 at all fine sentiment." This movement burlesques the Hegelian idealism; makes each step of progress "both necessary, and necessarily obliterated by the next;" and so sets itself in defiance to all that is before and after. Bruno Bauer displays the new and violent dogmatics of materialism; Herwegh its poetic, Marr and Grun its socialistic, and Voiit its scientific phase -- its dissatisfaction with all that is, its hollow phrases, and chaos of contradictions." We should do injustice to the soberer thought of Germany, did we omit all notice of the " Reconciliation-theology," which seeks to heal this deep disorder. The name of Ullmann stands first, — " centre of the centre," more essentially a reconciler even than Neander. In his very weakness, his pet phrases, it is touching to see how sincere is his reliance on his own prescription. In his smooth periods, his finished style, Schleiermacher's phrases come to us dissolved in mist: " Christianity not a doctrine, but a life;" " Christ developed in humanity;" " Christianity the religion of humanity, independent and original, yet strictly historical." " The person of Christ is alone a miracle,' yet " not schlechthin supernatural." " Christianity is divine in essence, human in form; divine in origin, human in realization." But why Christianity in especial? is it not equally true of all life? or, if the divine and human are essentially opposed, why is the growth different from the germ? We are sensible here of' a repugnance at bottom to the miraculous, which shrinks from denying it in terms. Liebner (Dogmatik, 1849) is of a nature at once mystic and sensu ous, inconsistent and weak, and void of originality,- combining a strange patchwork doctrine of the Trinity with Schleierrnacher's doctrine of Christ's human perfection. So in Dorner's doctrine of the " all-personality " of Christ as the primal man, of the Absolute as manifest in the totality of individuals, the "selt'-limitation" of' the second person of the Trinity, and the " pan-Christism " which identifies the Logos with the divine principle in all men, we have expositions of the Church doctrine, which are only its destruction. Far richer is Lange, — his restless vigor playing with the.

438 APPENDIX C. ories and half-thoughts, like a virtuoso who improvises on an instrument. Religion may be seen on the Divine or human side, as revelation or native sense. Creation is the Divine necessity, the self-manifestation of God, - the Godman, the centre of' all dogmatic systems. He opposes all arbitrary and formal theology. Miracle is the manifestation of the life-principle; it comes of a higher law of being; it is " the natural law of all natural laws." Revelation is a continued creation, etc. But this is but putting new wine in the old bottles of theology, -a toying with metaphysical sophistry, a reasoning firom spiritual to physical miracle, where there is no connecting term. Afartensen is a master of form, but has no inward unity or independence; is more dependent on church dogma, which he seeks only to temper by philosophy. His doctrine is, that Will is manifest in the form of Law; miracle is the higher world-order; the universal Logos has but a higher potency in Christ.' Abstract Satanology" is one feature of his creed; and according to him the bread of the Eucharist feeds the resurrection-body. A more fearless and logical consistency marks Rofte, whose " Ethik," in depth, originality, andt decision, is the finest since Schleiermacher. He believes in a Christian realism, a spirit-world, or objective realm of higher being; and looks for a new philosophy of nature, which shall subdue the grossness of materialism. He accepts the tendency of Protestantism, to merge the Church in the State; in the future the State and Church shall be one,- the "' kingdom if God;" the true meaning of the State is, " the totality of -moral ends;" but association shall be voluntary and free within it. His fundamental thought is the identity of religion and morality. He holds to a philosophic trinity; the necessity of creation; the correlation of God and the world, such that, without the one, the other could not be. Such are some of the more marked phases of German speculation in these latter years. We have next to note the three parties which seek church-union: 1. (Hengsten. berg, etc.) That which would establish an external rule of discipline by state authority, after the Cabinet order of

RECENT GERMAN THEOLOGY. 439 March, 1852, -- a confederacy of Lutheran and Reformed 2. (Nitzsch, Miller, Liicke, etc.) A doctrinal union, grounded on the acceptance of fundamental articles; 3. Antidogmatic, protesting against the authority of all dogmatic articles, represented by men of various schools (as Ewald, Knobel, Bunsen), who put fo the religious sense and conscience of the time the broad question: " Shall Christianity go over to Barbarism, and Science to Infidelity?" We can only indicate the position of this admirable body of men, with whom the best hope of Continental Europe seems at present to repose. We speak not of their special opinions, for it is not on these they rest their appeal to the mind of Christendom; but on the more comprehensive aim, expressed characteristically by Bunsen, as the translation of religion from Semitic to Japhetic forms —from mysticism and dogma into the conscience and life. One other party remains to be named - the Reactionists, the school of New-Lutheranism, the extreme opposite pole to Bruno Bauer and the radicals. With them, belief is the essential, piety the incidental. Hengstenberg is entirely outdone in his own domain, and regarded by these new apostles of orthodoxy as only a prophet of the past, one crying in the wilderness to a crooked and perverse generation. These New-Lutherans - Kahnis, Kliefoth, Vilmar, Petri, M1iinchmeyer, Euen -lead the way to a party of extremists, a high-church sect of Hyper-Lutherans (Lothe, Delitsch, Leo), who reproduce all the sacramentarian theories familiar to us through the " Oxford Tracts." It is a spurious and mongrel Romanism, — a caricature of mediaeval Catholicity, to which it shows a constant disposition to assimilate. Why Leo, the historian of the Middle Age, does not openly join the communion whose part he takes in all questions, - even in the Albigensian crusade, and the ferocities of Alba, —is not quite clear. Probably he knows that, once within its pale, he should lose that Teutonic privilege of freedom, which he clings to in his wayward fashion. At heart he is more materialist than sacerdotalist; and is, after all, of nearer kin to Feuerbach than to the ultramontane Romanism he coquets withal.