IDEA OF LAW IN POETRY 709 



race. It proceeds to its climax by a succession of contrasts, glaring, 

 violent, theatrical, though not wanting in force and power, describing 

 the coffins of the princes rotting in the glimmering light of the vault, 

 with silver shields hanging over them, and grinning skulls, emblems 

 of vanity. There is no flesh now so the poet reflects on the 

 hands which once, by a stroke of the pen, consigned good and wise 

 men to prison ; the stars and orders shine like comets on the breasts of 

 skeletons. The ear can hear no more the voice of flattery or lasci- 

 vious music, or the cry of hounds and horses, with which they sought 

 to still the voice of conscience. Let the hoarse croak of the raven be 

 far from the vault, and every rural sound, as well as the voice of 

 mourning, lest they should awake those who in their day were deaf to 

 the prayers of the peasant whose fields they ravaged, and to the sobs 

 of children and the sighs of soldiers, made orphans and cripples in 

 their wars. 



In a poem like this we feel the characteristic imagination of the 

 German people endeavoring in an uncongenial subject for the 

 presence of death demands solemnity and humbleness to express its 

 sense of the infinite, the terrible, the grotesque, the spectral, without 

 ever arriving at the desired effect. A nearer approach to perfection is 

 made by Biirger, whose imitations of the old ballad style woke an 

 answering chord in the imagination of Walter Scott, and helped to 

 hasten the romantic revival in England. In his Leonora, Biirger ex- 

 pressed the wild unrest of the European imagination during the revo- 

 lutionary epoch in a highly characteristic manner, by associating it 

 with the images of demons and spectres still surviving among the 

 people of Germany. 



It was not, however, till Goethe produced Faust that the German 

 lyric poets discovered the form of art qualified to give expression to 

 the universal revolutionary emotion. In Faust everything is as it 

 should be in art. The varied characters of Faust himself, Mephisto- 

 pheles, and Gretchen, together form the full complement of spiritual 

 human feeling which manifested itself in an outward form during 

 the epoch of the French Revolution : the picturesque scenes of local life 

 which are scattered through the drama Auerbach's wine-cellar, the 

 Brocken, the town fountain, the cathedral are all necessary to the 

 general effect; the little touches of sentiment Gretchen's song of 

 the King of Tlmle. the flower divination, the peasants' holiday enjoy- 

 ment if one of these had boon away, the poem would have lacked 

 something of its complete perfection. 



And yet the form of Faust is not essentially dramatic but lyrical; 

 it could never be satisfactorily acted on the stage like a play of 

 Shakespeare ; in its theatrical aspect it is only suitable for opera. Why 

 then has it achieved its undisputed place as one of the great repre- 

 sentative poom? of the world ? The answer is because, while its form 



