704 POETEY 



tion of things in the middle of the eighteenth century : " Because in 

 peace patriotism really consists only in this, that every one sweeps his 

 own doorstep, minds his own business, learns his own lesson, that it 

 may go well with his house, so did the feeling for Fatherland excited 

 by Klop stock find no object on which it could exercise itself." Ger- 

 many was full of men of imagination; they were all anxious to write 

 great epics and great dramas; unfortunately they had to make their 

 poetical bricks without straw, having neither characteristic ideas of 

 political unity, nor any continuous tradition of rude art out of which 

 they might consciously develop more perfect forms. Hence each poet 

 was forced to think out the first principles of composition for himself ; 

 and one of the characteristics of German poetry, that, in the higher 

 walks of the Art, Criticism precedes Creation. 



Now if we apply the twofold law of Fine Art to Klopstock's 

 Messiah, the most celebrated epic that Germany has produced, we 

 shall see how its form was affected by the imaginative conditions I 

 have just described. The matter may be best illustrated by the method 

 of comparison, and Klopstock's idea of poetical law be inferred by 

 contrasting the mode of composition followed in the Messiah with that 

 of Paradise Lost. Both Milton and Klopstock agree in the selection 

 of a subject of universal interest; in both of them the matter which 

 is the foundation of their conception is derived from the Bible. But 

 Milton has obtained for himself perfect freedom of poetical creation 

 by laying his action in the prehistoric period described in the first 

 chapters of Genesis, whereby he is enabled to treat the story of the 

 Fall in the epic form consecrated by the usage of such great poets as 

 Homer and Virgil. He has shown equal judgment in limiting the 

 action of Paradise Regained to the single episode of the Temptation, 

 which he can treat in epic style without any departure from Scripture 

 authority. Klopstock, on the other hand, has . formed no central 

 conception of the action which he proposes to relate. He begins 

 his epic with the. events immediately preceding the Crucifixion, but 

 he transports his action, as he pleases, from the sphere of the real to 

 the supernatural, embellishing it with episodes of angels and demons 

 which have no basis in the Scripture narrative. This attempt to 

 fuse what is historical with what is purely poetical betrays a fatal 

 want of judgment in view of the nature of the subject, and would 

 never have been made if Klopstock, before beginning to write, had 

 realized the truth of what Aristotle says as to the difference between 

 Poetry and History. 



Observe again the remarkable contrast in the vehicles of language 

 which Milton and Klopstock respectively employ for the expression 

 of their ideas. The English of Milton is a fusion of the Saxon and 

 Latin elements in our tongue, the one stream bearing on its face all 

 the spiritual character derived from its Teutonic source, the other 



