IDEA OF LAW IN POETRY 707 



Robbers is more or loss true of all his plays; seek for the element of 

 poetry in them, and you will find it to be rather lyrical than dramatic ; 

 the best passages in Don Carlos, Wallenstein, and even William Tell, 

 are those in which he pours out his OAvn emotions, not those in which 

 it is necessary for him to carry the audience out of themselves into the 

 action and passion of the imaginary situation. 



As for the plays of Goethe, with the exception of Faust, of which 

 I shall speak presently, they breathe the spirit of sculpture, the most 

 remote of all the arts from the genius of action. Heine describes 

 them with cruel justice; he likens them to the statues of the gods in 

 the Louvre, " with their white expressionless eyes, a mysterious mel- 

 ancholy in their stony smiles." " How strange," he continues, u that 

 these antique statues should remind me of the Goethian creations, 

 which are likewise so perfect, so beautiful, so motionless ! and which 

 also seem oppressed with a dumb grieving that their rigidity and 

 coldness separate them from our present warm, restless life, that 

 they cannot speak and rejoice with us, and that they are not human 

 beings, but unhappy mixtures of divinity and stone." ISTo more in the 

 drama than in the epic did the Germans find that ideal matter and 

 form which needed to blend congenially with their imaginations 

 before it could assume the character of Fine Art. 



How different is the case with German lyric poetry! The German 

 song-writers began to be celebrated in the last quarter of the eight- 

 eenth century, just at the period when the mind of Europe was 

 agitated with the apprehended approach of a great change in the 

 structure of societ}', the more mysteriously alarming that its nature 

 could not be divined. All felt it, but most of all the Germans. Cut 

 off from the outlets of expression in political life, the ardent minds of 

 Germany sought with the more vehemence to give utterance to this 

 universal feeling in the sphere of imagination and emotion. In the 

 German language they had an instrument admirably adapted to their 

 purpose. As Klopstock said of it. it had remained since the days of 

 Tacitus "solitary, unmixed, incomparable." With its ancient inflec- 

 tions, its homely words, its abstract torm=, its extraordinary powers 

 of compounding itself, this venerable parent language was capable of 

 touching primitive chords of emotion in all who possessed a strain of 

 Teutonic blood that is to say, in every nation north of the Alps. 

 But it was not possible to strike out at one boat the essential char- 

 acter of national art. and Gorman philosophers, as well as Gorman 

 poets, made many experiments before they hit upon the true form. 

 The failure of the Holy ]?oman Empire to produce any working 

 ideal of life and action had loft the German mind in a position of 

 contemplative isolation, and with a strong tendency to regard all 

 human affairs from a cosmopolitan point of view. Such an abstract 

 mode of conception was foreign to the genius of Fine Art, which 



