OF LITERATURE. 



Ixiii 



fire of his descriptions : and the name of Jean 

 Jacques Rousseau sounds like another term for 

 the mingled eloquence of sentiment and passion. 

 How loftily do these writers soar above French 

 dogmatism in the theory of the fine arts, even as 

 it existed in their day, and was partly counte- 

 nanced by Voltaire himself! But how deadly, 

 in everything except style, were the antichristian 

 sophistries of the first, the sceptical opinions of 

 the second, and the self-willed reveries of the 

 third ! In co-operation with the degrading 

 materialism of HELVETIUS,* their tendency was 

 to blot God's word out of the memory of man, 

 and God's image out of his soul. Then came 

 the devilish enginery of the ENCYCLOPEDIA, con- 

 ducted by DIDEROT f and D'ALEMBKRT, whose 

 principle was atheism. The people, with whom a 

 work like this could find acceptance, was already 

 ripe for the great Revolution ; $ an event still 

 too fruitful of ominous forebodings, as well as 

 recollections, to be touched on here, were it not 

 for the congenial character which it has impressed 

 upon the workings of the French mind. Its 

 commencement was accompanied by some bursts 

 of grandeur, such as broke from the lips of 

 MIRABEAU. But soon was everything noble and 

 refined borne down by a rage for destruction, 

 which, at the moment when these lines are being 

 traced, seems again to infuriate the base, the 

 gross, and the ignorant in the community around 

 us. And from that anarchy of all the social 

 elements, which the Revolution brought on 

 France, what literary monsters have emerged ! 

 If much of the rankness of that period clings 

 even to the rhetoric of DE STAEL and the 

 fancy of CHATEAUBRIAND, what shall we say to 

 the hideous spawn of such a brain as VICTOR 

 HUGO'S, or to the systematic profligacy of such a 

 dramatist as DUMAS ? Some of this class, in 

 their plays and romances, dream that they 

 are treading in the footsteps of Shakspeare 

 and Walter Scott. They had better resort, 

 as Schlegel counsels, to models which they 

 would have some chance of comprehending ; 

 namely, the old spirit and poetry of their own 

 nation. The French historians of the present 

 day have done this ; and no one will deny that 

 THIERRY, THIERS, and a few others, have done it 

 with eminent success. 



We must take up the GERMANS where we left 

 them, under the encroaching influence of their 

 French neighbours. By them they were inocu- 

 lated with that poison of infidel prejudices 



A. D. 17151771 



t Diderot died A. D. 1784 ; D'Alembert A. D. 1783. 

 t A. D. 1789. Died A. D. 1791. 



which, notwithstanding the opposition of some 

 great minds, has since circulated together with 

 the life-blood of German philosophy and litera- 

 ture. The effects of scepticism in Germany have 

 differed from those observable in France, only 

 because it did not encounter, in the former 

 country, either the tiger -element or the monkey- 

 element, so conspicuous in the French character. 

 But they have been sufficiently apparent in criti- 

 cism, in metaphysics, and in all things liable to 

 be worked upon by those modes of intellectual 

 exertion. Under a wiser limitation of this scep- 

 tical tendency, German criticism might have 

 been the parent of unmingled good ; especially 

 by the learning and genius it has brought to bear 

 on classical subjects ; greatly improving, we 

 must confess, on the English critics of the last 

 generation, and acting very favourably on those 

 of the present, who, like Mitchell, Milman, 

 Nelson Coleridge, and other ripe and eloquent 

 scholars, have made such subjects popular. 

 Under the same limitation, it would not have 

 been so often necessary to say of the German 

 metaphysicians, that in straining after new ideas 

 they have lighted only on new words ; a fault 

 which in their English worshippers degenerates 

 into the most nauseous coxcombry : or that they 

 have been lured, by specious phantoms, far away 

 from the regions of faith and truth, into abysses 

 of error, 



" Where in the lowest deep, a lower deep, 

 Still threatening to devour them, opens wide." 



In France, literature takes much of its com- 

 plexion from polite society ; in England, from 

 active life and politics ; in Germany, where there 

 is no political life, from mere speculation. 

 Whatever the Germans borrow from other races, 

 they are sure, in the end, to dye with the hues of 

 their own philosophy. For example, the famous 

 parties of GOTTSCHED * and BoDMER,f who 

 divided the literary world of Germany during the 

 first portion of the eighteenth century, while the 

 one inclined to French theories, and the other to 

 classical principles, as interpreted by the British 

 school, had enough of native industry, earnest- 

 ness, and quaintness about them, to show the 

 peculiar bent of the German mind, and to facili- 

 tate its further development. 



Bodmer and his partisans had espoused critical 

 tenets really most akin to the disposition of their 

 countrymen. The erudite and thoughtful poet 

 HALLER J sided with them : so did the pure, 

 simple, virtuous GELLERT, penitently declaring, 



* A. D. 1700 17G6. 

 I A. D. 17081777. 



t A. D. 16981783. 

 A. D. 17151759. 



