CHAPTER IV.

LATER GERMAN CRITICISM.

HEINE: DECEPTIVENESS OF HIS CRITICISM—IN THE ‘ROMANTISCHE SCHULE,’ AND ELSEWHERE—THE QUALITIES AND DELIGHTS OF IT—SCHOPENHAUER—VIVIDNESS AND ORIGINALITY OF HIS CRITICAL OBSERVATION—‘DIE WELT ALS WILLE,’ ETC.—GRILLPARZER—HIS MOTTO IN CRITICISM—HIS RESULTS IN APHORISM, AND IN INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT—A CRITIC OF LIMITATIONS: BUT A CRITIC— CARRIÈRE: HIS ‘ÆSTHETIK’—LATER GERMAN SHAKESPEARE-CRITICS—GERVINUS: HIS “GERMAN POETRY”—ON BÜRGER—THE SHAKESPEARE-HERETICS: RÜMELIN— FREYTAG—HILLEBRAND AND COSMOPOLITAN CRITICISM—NIETZSCHE— ‘ZARATHUSTRA,’ THE ‘BIRTH OF TRAGEDY,’ AND ‘DER FALL WAGNER’— ‘UNZEITGEMÄSSE BETRACHTUNGEN’—‘LA GAYA SCIENZA’—‘JENSEITS VON GUT UND BÖSE,’ ETC.—‘GÖTZEN-DÄMMERUNG’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL POSITION.

The volume of critical writing in Germany since Goethe’s death, and the deaths of those younger contemporaries of his, like Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, who were mentioned in our last chapter on the subject,[1007] has been, of course, very great. The unceasing literary and scientific industry of the nation (with, in particular, the habit of the doctoral thesis forming almost an obligatory part of the regular education of any man pretending to culture) has made books of more or less critical intent and content as the sands of the sea. Yet the determination of the national critical temperament towards abstract æsthetic, or towards the most rudimentary and literal duties of _Quellenforschung_, of tabulation of rhyme and word-form, and the like, together with the custom (most fatal of all those encouraged by the thesis habit) of constantly “shoddying-up” former inquiries into fresher form, has prevented much of the very best kind of work from being done. If it were not for Heine, Schopenhauer, and one other who may come more as a surprise, in the earlier part, and the singular, erratic, and mainly wasted genius of Nietzsche in the later, this chapter would cut a very rueful figure beside most others in the book. Nor was any one of these primarily a literary critic.[1008]

[Sidenote: _Heine: deceptiveness of his criticism._]

Heinrich Heine[1009] did many wonderful and many delightful things; but though he certainly did many things more delightful, I do not know that he ever did anything more wonderful than in making _Die Romantische Schule_ persuade divers folk that he, the author of the _Nord-See_ in his morning, the author of Bimini when the night had almost fallen, was anything but a Romantic himself. This curious achievement shows the dangers that wait upon those who peruse his criticism. If they cannot remember that a man very frequently blasphemes, in jest or temper, what he loves and adores, if they have not graven on their souls Lamb’s lines which culminate in

“Not that she is truly so”—

they had much better not read Heine at all. For he will lead them into many foolish and hurtful errors, and direct them, as by his own account he actually did certain poor people in his impish days, to the sign of the Stone Jug as the most comfortable and respectable hotel in Göttingen.[1010]

[Sidenote: _In the_ Romantische Schule, _and elsewhere_.]

To put at once out of controversy what ought never to have been in it, let any one compare the famous passage or passages in _The Romantic School_[1011] about the Schlegels, with all their fantastic and contemptuous satire, and the serious passage about them in the much less well-known article on Menzel.[1012] Nay, let any man accustomed to sift evidence compare the more serious part of the “Romantic School” passages themselves with the less serious ones, and he will not have much doubt left on the manner. Heine was not only one of those persons who “cannot get enough fighting,” but one of those who always prefer the most fantastic, the most unconventional, I fear one must in some cases say the most unsportsmanlike, tactics and methods. He would have liked the _savate_ better than the formal rules of the English ring, with their pruderies about hitting below the belt and using your feet: and I think his favourite weapon would have been that ingenious Irish implement the Gae-Bulg, with which the great Cuchullain slew somebody else nearly as great whose name abides not with me—a short, many-barbed harpoon which you kicked from between your toes upwards, into the under and unprotected part of the opponent’s stomach. The Middle Ages were actually the most representative times of Christian literature: and had been made even too much of as such by the school he was attacking. This offended his Judaism, that equally passionate and unpractical form of religion. He knew—it is one of his great critical deliverances—that if the Romantic is not always the mediæval, the mediæval is almost always the Romantic. And so at times there was no mercy for mediævalism and Romanticism. At other times he went and wrote, or had already written, _Don Ramiro_ and _Das Liedchen von der Reue_, and _Mein süsses Lieb, wenn du im Grab_, and _Die alten bösen Lieder_, and _Ich bin die Prinzessin Ilse_, and the best things in the _Nord-See_ itself, and the nineteenth chapter of _Atta Troll_, and nearly the whole of the _Romancero_, and _Bimini_!

[Sidenote: _The qualities and delights of it._]

With such a man the critical letter killeth, unless you crush the snake on the wound, and, as the scientific people say now (justifying, like all real new wisdom, the wisdom of old), set free the antidote which the snake’s own blood contains for its own safety against its venom. Never was any so liberal of this antidote, without even the trouble of crushing, so easy to charm, so _self-charming_, as Heine. As he says himself,[1013] “the laughter sticks in his throat,” too often and too evidently: and all but the dullest ears should hear the sob that chokes it. But, unfortunately, there are ears in this world that _are_ dull of hearing; there are even several of them. And for these, as a critic, Heine is not.[1014]

For others he is perhaps the chief, and certainly one of the earliest, of those who have discovered that the Goddess of Criticism is really all the different Muses in turn, and that she can be Thalia as well as Clio. There is still an idea that the critic ought to be very serious: and this Heine certainly was not—at least consecutively—while he was not even quite master of his own seriousness when he had it. There is, for an Englishman, no more agreeable spectacle of the kind than the delightful struggle of Shakespeareolatry and Anglophobia in _Shakespeare’s Mädchen und Frauen_.[1015] All the Victor Hugo passages[1016] should be carefully compared, remembering of course that the half of Hugo had not been told to Heine. So should all the Goethe pieces,[1017] remembering, again, the interview, when the younger poet could find nothing to say to the elder but that the wayside plums between Jena and Weimar were good. Read him on Hoffmann and Novalis,[1018] and remember that it is not exactly everybody—not even every Heine (if indeed there could be more Heines than one)—that can appreciate Novalis _and_ Hoffmann together. In fact read him everywhere: but whenever you begin to read him, remember two little sentences of his, and if you cannot understand and enjoy them, shut the book. The one is that[1019] about the orange-trees at Sans-Souci whereof “every one has its number, like a contributor to Brockhaus’s _Konversationsblatte_.” The other is the pronouncement that “without the Will of the Lord no sparrow falls from the housetop, and Government-Councillor Karl Streckfuss makes no verse.” These will serve as useful tuning-forks, and they are not difficult to carry about and use.

In fine, Heine is a dangerous model, no doubt; yet even as a model he gave something to Criticism which it had not possessed before, which even Voltaire was unable to give it, because _his_ laughter was too far removed from tears. Heine’s humour too often turned to the humoursome: but it was always present. And Humour is to the critic very nearly what Unction is to the preacher, in its virtue as well as in its danger. Moreover if he could certainly hate he could as certainly love—could not help loving. And when you find Love and Humour together, they and you are not far from the critical Kingdom of Heaven.[1020]

[Sidenote: _Schopenhauer._]

The critical work of Schopenhauer[1021] is partly to be found in his great book, but it there assumes forms which are not of those with which we chiefly busy ourselves, while the critical sections of the _Parerga und Paralipomena_[1022] are ours—“stock, lock, and barrel”—a familiar metaphor which ceases to be hackneyed in face of the peculiar combativeness of Schopenhauer’s thought and style. They have all the refreshing quality of audacious originality and crisp phrase,[1023] and they have perhaps less than is the case elsewhere the perverseness—in fact, the mere ill-temper—which was the result, partly of his dreary creed, partly of the injustice with which he considered himself to be treated by the _Verdammte Race_.

[Sidenote: _Vividness and originality of his critical observation._]

In these latter moods he is sometimes very amusing, as where he speaks of “a disgusting jargon like the French,”[1024] or whenever he mentions Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel; but in them few men are critical, and Schopenhauer is certainly not one of the few. One might make a not uninteresting critical postil or _annotatiuncula_ on the enthusiasm of this pessimist for Scott: but it would be a slight divagation. Read all that he has to say on Style;[1025] it is the best thing, I think, that has ever been written on that subject in German, and one of the best things ever written in any language. It is conspicuously free from the old jest (repeated after Diderot on Beccaria so often) that there is nothing of his subject in his treatment; and we may forgive him for denouncing Parenthesis, when we remember the misconduct of the Germans towards that delightfullest of Figures. Among his numerous judgments, of more wisdom than mercy, none is better suited for these times (in which the evil, bad in his own, has grown worse) than his condemnation of the idea that “the last work is always the best,” that “what is written later is always an improvement on what was written before.”[1026] Nor is Schopenhauer’s anathema on reading pure and simple too strong, if it be taken with the grain of salt always necessary as seasoning to his strong meat—which grain is in this place the addition, “what is not worth reading, and what is merely _new_.”[1027]

Nor (as though he could leave no literary fault of his and our time untransfixed) does he spare the labour lost on biography and inquiry into originals and the like—“the analysing,” as he calls it, “of clay and paint instead of admiring the shape and colour of the vase.”[1028] No critic, who is not very uncertain of himself, need be annoyed by the characteristic observation on the critical faculty, “there is _for the most part_ no such thing.”[1029] For each of us may flatter himself that he is the exception, and need have no doubt about the rule. And, as a matter of fact, Schopenhauer proceeds to show that there _is_ a critical faculty, and that he knows very well what it is, and that he has it. If he condemns comparison, it is only what we have so often called the wrong comparison; he lays the very strongest emphasis on the Golden Rule of Criticism—that a poet, or any writer, is to be judged by his best things. On the old subject of the value of immediate and popular recognition, he is perhaps too interested a judge: and there is also evident temper in his exhortation to critics to “scourge mercilessly,” his doctrine that “Politeness in criticism is injurious.” As the world goes, the critic who accepts it as his first duty to scourge mercilessly, to neglect politeness, is quite as likely to scourge the few good books as the many bad, and will certainly do _himself_ irreparable harm. So, also, while recognising the nobility of much that Schopenhauer has written on genius,[1030] we shall perhaps think that his encomia on arrogance and his disapproval of modesty are slightly unnecessary. Let us, at any rate, first light our largest lantern, and go out in the brightest day our climate allows, to find these modest men.

[Sidenote: Die Welt als Wille, &c.]

In the æsthetic section,[1031] main and appended, of his great book itself, Schopenhauer concerns us less. It may be quite true[1032] that the subjective part of æsthetic pleasure is delight in perceptive knowledge, independent of Will; and the bass may be “the lowest grade of the objectification” of the said Will. But according to the views, perhaps wrongly but constantly maintained in this book, positions of this kind have nothing to do with the discovery or the defence of any concrete critical judgment whatsoever. We find of course—as we must find in any man of Schopenhauer’s powerful intellect and wide knowledge— divers interesting _aperçus_, not always or often conditioned by a tame consistency. Thus[1033] he dislikes rhyme altogether, but sees, as not everybody since has seen, and as comparatively few had seen before him, the beauty of rhymed Mediæval Latin. The passage on the sublimity of silence and solitude is an extremely fine one: and if his general quarrel with the world puts him in an unnecessary temper with minor poets,[1034] it is interesting to compare his attack on them with Castelvetro’s.[1035] It would be very interesting, too, to compare and connect his views on Poetry with his very celebrated opinions on Love: but _non nostrum est_.[1036] And it is only when Schopenhauer touches ethics that he is disputable; on æsthetic questions in the applied sense he seldom goes wrong, and is always stimulating and original to the highest degree.

[Sidenote: _Grillparzer._]

Our “surprise” is the Austrian poet, Grillparzer.[1037] I am told by persons who know more about that matter than I do, that Grillparzer was a remarkable playwright; I am sure that he is a remarkable critic. Four volumes of his Works are devoted to this subject, and nearly the whole of one of them[1038] is occupied by critical _pensées_ and aphorisms of the kind in which Joubert is the great master. Grillparzer is not the equal of the Frenchman, nor has he the depth of his countryman Novalis: but his critical matter is more abundant than the latter’s, and it is of a rather more practical kind. He seems, at all times of his long life, to have practised, and he has explicitly, preached, what I myself believe to be certainly the most excellent if not the only excellent way of criticism. [Sidenote: _His motto in criticism._] The delivery unto Satan of all theory, which I have put in the forefront of this Book, is of course intentionally hyperbolical: yet what he puts in the forefront of his own is quite sober. “My plan in these annotations is, without any regard to system, to write down on each subject what seems to me to flow out of its own nature. The resultant contradictions will either finally clear themselves away, or, being irremovable, will show me that no system is possible.” I am by no means sure that this was not the practice of Aristotle; it pretty certainly was that of Longinus; I have endeavoured to show that, pursued as it was by Dryden all through his literary life, it made him a very great critic; and it was to no very small extent (though in his case it was hampered and broken into by his fatal inconsecutiveness) the method also of Coleridge. Grillparzer had not the genius of these men: but he seems to have pursued his own method faithfully for some fifty or sixty years, and the result is some mediate axioms of very considerable weight, and a large body of individual judgments which are at least of interest.

[Sidenote: _His results in aphorism,_]

The former are perhaps the better. He has even attempts at the definition of Beauty, which are as good as another’s, holding that the Beautiful not merely gives satisfaction and appeasement to the sensual part in us, but also lifts up the soul.[1039] This, at least, escapes the witty judgment of Burke quoted above, after Schlegel. He has the combined boldness and good sense[1040] to see and say that “Sense _is_ prose”—to cry woe on the poetry that can be fully explained by the understanding. He has dealt a swashing blow[1041] at a terribly large part of ancient and modern criticism in the words, “Pottering, [“Schlendrian,”] and Pedantry in Art always delight in judging by Kinds— approving this and denouncing that. But an open Art—sense knows no Kinds: only individuals.” He is interesting and distinctly original on Dilettanteism:[1042] stigmatises in women (I fear he might have added not a few men) the “inability to admire what you do not wholly approve,”[1043] and says plumply,[1044] _Klassisch ist fehlerfrei_, a proposition which begs the question as little as any on a question that is always begged.

Nearly all his aphorisms on poetry and prose blend neatness and adequacy well, as this:[1045] “Prose and Poetry are like a journey and a walk. The object of the journey lies at its end: of the walk, in the walking.” Nay, he is blunter still, and to some people perhaps quite shocking, in comparing the two to eating and drinking.[1046] A text for a weighty critical sermon might, I think, be found in an aphorism of his,[1047] which is not easy to translate into English without periphrasis: and though he does not often venture upon the complicatedly figurative, there is another[1048] about Islands which I wish Mr Arnold had known, that he might have given us a pendant to _Isolation_. In fact, in these meditations of his, Grillparzer, though never pretentiously Delphic, is always for thoughts.

[Sidenote: _and in individual judgment._]

The very large body[1049] of individual judgments on literature, ancient and modern, with which he supports these, and from which, in part no doubt, he drew them, is, on the whole though not wholly, a little inferior. But we can see the reason for this inferiority where it exists, and even then it does not make him worthless. He has somewhat imperfect sympathies. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets[1050] he is not much better than Hallam; his single judgment on Heine,[1051] though studiously moderate, might almost be called studiously inadequate: and in talking of Friedrich Schlegel he cannot forget the author of _Lucinde_, or that when they once met at Naples, the future mystic and Neo-Catholic ate too much, drank too much, and talked too greasily. This, considering that he himself can admire _The Custom of the Country_, seems a little hard.

[Sidenote: _A critic of limitations: but a critic._]

Grillparzer is, in fact, one of those critics in exploring whose region one gets to be familiar with certain danger-signals which are not always signals of danger only. As a practised playwright he speaks with special interest on Shakespeare, and he has given us judgments on other dramatists, which have not less. His appreciation, by no means indiscriminate, of Beaumont and Fletcher[1052] is specially noteworthy, and he has a whole volume on the Spanish Drama. I do not know whether any of our modern Byron-worshippers are acquainted with his estimate[1053] of their idol, whom he fully accepts as “the second greatest English poet,” but of whom he gives an idea quite different from the average Continental one. As a dramatist once more, and a man with dramatic ideas, he is extremely hard on Lessing;[1054] but I do not know an admiring critic of Goethe who is much better[1055] on that difficult person. We know that he will not appreciate Walther von der Vogelweide, though he has no strong anti-mediæval prejudice as such; and he does not.[1056] Finally, let me give, as remarkable, his coupling of Adam Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_ and A. W. Schlegel’s _Lectures on Drama_ as “two of the most mischievous books of modern times for an inexperienced understanding.” I am not satisfied with his calling Tieck a “chattering noodle” (“Fasler”), but at any rate he calls Gervinus “absurd.” He returns again and again to the charge against this latter egregious person, who is still quoted by the compilers of Shakespeare Hand-books and the writers of examination papers. If I had any need of pardoning (which I have not, since I understand them) his remarks on Walther, on the Sonnets, and on Heine, I would do it at once for the exclamation, “Du lieber Himmel!” which he, a German, makes on Gervinus’s most famous boast that “the English have left it to us Germans to do full justice to their Shakespeare,” and for his explosion at the methods by which “_bis aufs Blut_ wird alles erklärt.”[1057]

In short, I strongly recommend Grillparzer, about whom I have seen very little in English, to study at the hands of those Englishmen who take an interest in criticism. A very considerable man of letters himself, he seems to have never, in the course of his long life, lost interest in the work of others. He had some natural limitations, and they appear to have been further tightened by his playwrightship and by the influence of Joseph Schreyvogel, a sort of Austrian Nisard, of whom I do not know much.[1058] But the quotations and account which I have given will, I think, show that he had no small root of the critical matter in him, and that in more than one or two instances he enunciated _and observed_ critical truths which are not exactly the stereotyped headings of the critical copybook.

It is not necessary here, after what has been said repeatedly before, to enter into any apology for not discussing the abstract Æsthetic of the German nineteenth century. Even Hegel, though he is tempting, must be omitted; for, as an authority of unsuspected competence[1059] observes with some naïveté on this very point, “it is undoubtedly difficult to get a net result out of Hegel,” and it is with net results that we are concerned. But a disciple of his may be usefully discussed with reference to the more general sides of the matter.

[Sidenote: _Carrière: his_ Æsthetik.]

The _Æsthetik_[1060] of Moritz Carrière is a sort of object-lesson on its subject. The praises which have been bestowed on its style are quite justified: there is no German book of the kind known to me that is pleasanter to read. Its learning and its arrangement are all that can be desired. And yet, as one reads it, the old reflections on _The Elements of Criticism_ arise (with a difference of course) once more. The impressions produced are rather those of a long course of elegant sermons, with æsthetic substituted for theology, than of anything else. Here you may read that women are smaller than men; that “as the noses of children are small and stumpy, a _retroussé_ nose in the adult indicates want of development, though with elegant culture [of the feature or the person?] it may be naïve and roguish”; that dilettanti are always plagiarists. The conclusion of the second volume, to the extent of nearly two hundred pages, is devoted to Poetry, and is very good reading. Sometimes whole pages are neatly woven of agreeable poetical citations, or of dicta from more or less important persons,—“Schiller says,” “Goethe observes,” and so on. We learn further how Music “presents the idea as the principle and measure of the movement of life, and connects the beauty of that which is to come with that of what is”— like, say, a dinner-bell when one is talking to an agreeable person in a pretty drawing-room. Observe that Herr Carrière is neither quack nor twaddler; he does really feel the beauties about which he is talking. Such a passage as that at the foot of p. 457, vol. ii., and the top of the next, on Homer’s method of bringing scenes and figures before us, is real criticism of a valuable kind,—not more, it is true, than a corollary of Lessing’s propositions, but worth adding to them, for all that. I know hardly anything more shrewdly and amusingly adjusted, as a sort of æstheticised “Rhetoric” of the Hermogenean type, than the remarks and illustrations about Figures, from that of the orator who said, “Let us burn our ships and launch out boldly into the open sea,” onwards. The attempts to connect different metres with distinctive mental effects, or with separate classes of subject, are again most ingenious. His defence of the rhymes of the _Nibelungenlied_ against the characteristic criticism of Gervinus is admirable. In fact, the book is almost everywhere, as Mr Weller would say, “wery pretty.”

Only—as we have so often been constrained to add in dealing with critics, from the Greek Rhetoricians downwards—how much better employed would this erudition, this taste, this ingenious adjustment of exposition to example, have been upon individual and complete poems, books, writers! These pieces, these selected examples, are after all only branches torn from the living trunk, mutilated things, wanting their context almost always to give them full beauty and their own beauty. But this is not the worst: for at least on the doctrine of the Poetic Moment they will sometimes give that moment. But they are produced, not to give it but to exemplify a presumed classification and analysis of the manner of its giving. They have to yield a formula: and insensibly, inevitably, the heresy will grow upon the reader, that the formula will yield _them_. It is as if some diabolical physiologist took Helen from the arms of Paris or of Faustus, extracted her eyes, or tore off her hair, or drew ounces of the half-divine blood from her veins, dissected and analysed them, and said, “Gentlemen, this dissection reconstituted, this analysis ‘made up,’ will give you what is required to make you immortal.” But, alas! it will not. And the fact is, that _no_ explanation of the manner in which the literary delight is produced is ever general or true of any but the individual instance. That delight is never the same twice running: these stars always have some, it may be infinitesimal, but discernible and individualising, glory. Yet Herr Carrière is a craftsmanlike and entertaining demonstrator of the Undemonstrable.

[Sidenote: _Later German Shakespeare-critics._]

The performances of the later German Shakespeare-critics are so much better known in England than almost any other part of the literature of the subject that it seems unnecessary to devote much of our rapidly disappearing space to them. Gervinus, Delius, Ulrici, Elze, have all been translated, quoted, and so forth, with the curious deference to foreign opinion in matters of taste, which has so oddly accompanied English stiff-neckedness in general. [Sidenote: _Gervinus: his_ German Poetry.] I am bound to say that I think not much of any of these pundits;[1061] and least of all of their great Panjandrum Gervinus. His critical quality, however, may be for our purpose better gauged by taking his large work on German Poetry.[1062] It is an estimable book enough; the author often says what he ought to have said, and does not very often or very outrageously say what he should not. But the faults of his Shakespeare-criticism—platitude, verbiage, attention to the unnecessary, and avoidance of the heart and root of the matter, the quality of Shakespeare as an English poet, mark this also. Take persons most diverse in character, time, what you will—take Walther von der Vogelweide, Hans Sachs, Opitz, Novalis, for instance—and read his verdicts on them. You will find that in the first place he hardly ever quotes or appreciates a _phrase_—in itself a tell-tale, and damagingly tell-tale, abstinence. But you will also find, in compensation for this reticence, a flood of general remark, (false) comparison, see-saw antithesis, and the like. By no means his worst judgment, but a most characteristic one, is that on Bürger, which I may partly translate, partly summarise, from the original:[1063]—

[Sidenote: _On Bürger._]

“Bürger then appears to us as at once a pathological and a critical poet, a poet of Nature and of Art, a poet of the people and of Love. He belongs at once to the school of the North and to that of the South, relies at once on sensations and reflections. His nature-painting is apparently dashed on with a big brush, but it is careful in detail. There is in him a fight of the Universal and the Particular, of Art and Nature, of Endowment and Facility, of Poetry and Platitude.”

I do not know how many readers will sympathise with, or even understand, the kind of rage which, I confess it, such criticism as this excites in my mind. It is not exactly false criticism; on the contrary, it is rather true. But its truth has nothing vital, nothing germinal, nothing specially appropriate to the subject in it: and if there can be said to be anything specially appropriate to the writer, it is only matter for an unfavourable judgment of him. Any man, with a good deal of reading and a little practice, can string tic-tac antitheses of this kind, made up of critical commonplaces and terminology, together for pages. No man, from anything of the kind, could grasp the real _differentia_ of Bürger— the fact that he was one of the first to make, in poetry, an almost convulsive attempt to get out of the conventional by attempting the supernatural.

In all these German Shakespeare-critics, moreover, the fault (which we have noticed even in Goethe) reappears, that they are criticising, not Shakespeare, but the translation of Shakespeare; that while they have plenty to say about the plot, and the “points in Hamlet’s soul,” and even sometimes the text in its lower aspects, the other and over-soul, the essence, the poetry, of Shakespeare not merely escapes, but apparently fails to interest or occupy them at all. On the accidents, the unnecessary things, they are voluble. “The rest is silence”—to expand which text in its present bearing were an insult.

[Sidenote: _The Shakespeare-heretics: Rümelin._]

A word or two, however, may be given to the arch-heretic in this division—the interesting Herr Rümelin.[1064] I find, in relation to this subject, a MS. note, of no matter what author, which may deserve quotation, despite the impropriety of its phraseology: “_Asinus Rumelinus_. Asinity much invited by precedent asinity on the other side.” And really there is something in this. It is not merely that Herr Rümelin’s essay sets forth his thoughts as those _eines Realisten_, and thus declares its author a reactionary partisan against Idealism and Romanticism. By a quaint, but not uncommon, “suck of the current” he has adopted not a few of the fallacies of the school he combats. It is _their_ Shakespeare, not the Shakespeare of Shakespeare and eternity, that he is belittling. We have seen how a sensible German like Grillparzer treated Gervinus’s boast about Germany as Shakespeare’s prophet. Rümelin’s demonstration that Shakespeare was forgotten in England for 150 years is only this same boast altered a little. It is, as every child ought to know now, and as I shall not here waste time in proving, an absolute falsehood: but it could be of no importance to the true critic if it were true. Gold scarcely ceases to be gold during the time that it is, or because it is, _irrepertum_: and perhaps the only thing that retains the slightest interest in this part of Herr Rümelin’s examination is his use of the argument that Bacon does not mention Shakespeare—a fertile source since of the finest mare’s-nests. But the Essay is a really interesting one, and might have done—though I do not know that it has done—much good to the chatterers about Shakespeare. The Southampton chatter, the chatter about the greatness of the Elizabethan period in connection with politics, &c., the chatter of Gervinus, the chatter of the Romantics—against all these Rümelin directs an anti-criticism, easy enough and sometimes not ineffective. As a Realist he does not (we can easily see why) like the character-play. As a Preceptist, he holds that Tragedy must not individualise, and that scarcely one of Shakespeare’s dramas contains a _wohlgefügte pragmatische denkbare Handlung_. As a mid-nineteenth century Liberal he is pained to find that Shakespeare was a Royalist and an aristocrat of the purest water. Comparing Shakespeare and Goethe (for there is much mere Chauvinism in Rümelin), he finds that the one “flashes on things like a rocket or a blue light,” while the other “shows them in a clear mirror.” But after all he admits “the joy in the poet.” So perhaps this poor heretic was not quite so far from the Kingdom of Heaven as Gervinus and Ulrici, for in reading them you are seldom invited to consider “the joy in the poet”—the Poetic Moment—at all.

We may conclude this chapter with notices of three later German critics, who are, in different ways, interesting and characteristic—the novelist Freytag; the cosmopolitan polygrapher, Karl Hillebrand; and the greatest, if the maddest, man of letters of modern Germany—Nietzsche.

[Sidenote: _Freytag._]

For the first, Gustav Freytag’s _Technik des Dramas_[1065] could hardly lack mention here as the principal contribution to criticism of the chief novelist of Germany during the later nineteenth century, and as itself one of the main contributions to a division of our subject which comes direct from one of the main fountainheads, the _Poetics_ of Aristotle. Freytag, however,—and the explicitness of his title bars any complaint on the subject,—occupies himself almost wholly with the _theatrical_ side of the matter—such questions as that of verse or prose and the like being relegated to the close, and very briefly handled. Had he written three hundred years earlier we should have had more room for him. As it is, the chief thing noticeable, and that not favourably, is his adoption of that Goethean utilitarianism which we have stigmatised before. He says nothing, he tells us, about French classical drama or the drama of Spain, because “we have nothing more to learn and nothing to fear from them.” That, it need scarcely be said, is complete heresy according to the view of criticism maintained in this book. What you have to “fear” hardly in any case matters; and you have always something to learn.

[Sidenote: _Hillebrand and cosmopolitan Criticism._]

Karl, or, as he sometimes called himself, Carl, Hillebrand is an interesting figure, and withal a typical one. He invented, I think, a useful word—“xenomania” or _Fremdensucht_—which was very proper for the nineteenth century: he attracted the notice, in his own country, of such a formidable and considerable person as the young Nietzsche; he wrote in several languages and lived in more countries, especially England and Italy. There was a time, which I can remember very well, when he “seemed to be a pillar.” But I am not so sure that he was one. He prided himself on his cosmopolitanism: and one of his best-known pieces, addressed to the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_ and reprinted in the great collection of his miscellaneous works, entitled _Zeiten Völker und Menschen_,[1066] deals with the presence of _Fremdensucht_ and insularity combined in Englishmen. We were, thought Herr Hillebrand some twenty or five-and-twenty years since, interesting ourselves in Continental matters at last, but we were not doing it in the right way. Frenchmen thought we interested ourselves too promiscuously in their men and matters; so did Germans. We put [_did_ we?] Mérimée and Octave Feuillet on a level; Rachel and Madame Sarah Bernhardt. We distressed Herr Hillebrand’s cosmopolitanism and his particularism equally.

This is a sufficiently interesting and distinct point of view to have a few words here, especially as it has been often taken since. I venture to disagree with it _in toto_. It is very well, if your sight is weak, to have the best spectacles adjusted to it that art can adjust. But you will very seldom better your sight by taking somebody else’s spectacles; and if you borrow the spectacles of several other people and combine or frequently substitute them, you will very soon see “men as trees walking.” To the process of having spectacles made for yourself corresponds that of studying foreign literatures as widely as possible and as carefully as possible; the process of adopting French points of view of Frenchmen, German of Germans, and the like, answers, I think, to the other. There is a wrong interpretation of _Sportam nactus es_, but also a right. And I think Herr Hillebrand’s own results bear out what I have said. His critical work is very extensive; it had much, and still has some, interest. It is the work of a man of certainly more than average cleverness and of much more than average information; of a man with a really fair knowledge of literature and more than a fair knowledge of institutions, customs, national _mores_ generally. Herr Hillebrand would never have made some, or many, of the little slips at which we laugh so much in other people, and at which other people laugh in us. But his cosmopolitanism, I think, eviscerated and emasculated his genius. In re-reading essays of his which I have read before, I have found them faded, tame, “fushionless”; in reading others for the first time they produce the same effect without the contrast. The satirist was justified in making fun of the “temptations To belong to other nations”; but, in a sense of which Mr Gilbert was not thinking, and of which I doubt his making fun, it _is_ to credit and to advantage that an Englishman shall remain an Englishman, a German a German, and so forth. There is a moral in the story of Antæus.

Not that there is not in Hillebrand work still interesting (though it is usually rather too contemporary as well as too cosmopolitan) when he is dealing with Fielding and Sterne and Milton, and Machiavelli and Rabelais and Tasso, as well as when he is dealing with Doudan and Renan and Taine. He was for an age: but for rather a short one. And one of his papers is an awful example. It is entitled _Delirium Tremens_, and it characterises the work with which it deals as a “distressing aberration.” That work is analysed with considerable skill, and the article contains some shrewd remarks, notably one on the invariable tendency towards “charcoal-burner” faith of some kind even in the most free-thinking Frenchman. Hillebrand’s strength lay in things of this kind. But the instance shows where his strength did not lie, and that this was in the direction of literary criticism. For this “distressing aberration,” this effect of _delirium tremens_, is one of the capital imaginative works of the later nineteenth century—the _Tentation de Saint-Antoine_ of Gustave Flaubert.

[Sidenote: _Nietzsche._]

Nietzsche’s criticism[1067] is, on the one hand, very much what might be expected by any one who might have managed (it would be difficult) to read only that part of his work which does not contain it, and on the other throws a very useful amount of additional light on his general mental attitude. Himself a remarkable artist from the purely literary side—the best modern German prose-writer by far, with Heine and Schopenhauer—he cannot help paying literary art the same compliment which he pays to some other things, that, not exactly of believing and trembling, but of acknowledging as he blasphemes. He blasphemes, of course, pretty freely: take away blasphemy, parody, and that particular kind of borrowing which thinks to disguise itself by inserting or extracting “nots,” and there is not much of Nietzsche left but form. [Sidenote: Zarathustra, _the_ Birth of Tragedy, _and_ Der Fall Wagner.] The mere headings of _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ will guide the laziest to his ultimate opinions upon poetry and other things. At the beginning, the _Birth of Tragedy_ (1871) is, despite its title, hardly literary at all; its theory of an orgiastic hyperanthropic Dionysus-cult superseding the calm “Apollonian” Epic, and itself superseded by the corrupting philosophy of Socrates, being entirely philosophic (or philo_moric_). Later, the onslaught on Wagner is very literary, and consists, in fact, of a violent—of a frantic—protest against the tendencies of Romanticism, of which he quite correctly sees that Wagner is, with whatever differences, a musical exponent, and against “literary” music itself. Perhaps there never was a hostile contention which the other side could accept with such alacrity as Nietzsche’s approximation[1068]of Wagner and Victor Hugo. They _are_ extremely alike in merits as in faults, and the recognition of the twinship is a point in favour of Nietzsche’s critical power, whatever his dislike of it may be.

[Sidenote: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen.]

To attend more heedfully to chronological order—the four remarkable essays of the _Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_, which, early as they are (1873-76), are perhaps the last things in which Nietzsche displayed himself as entirely _compos mentis_, are close to our subject throughout,[1069] and not seldom openly deal with it. The tremendous castigation administered to the “Culture-Philistinism” of Strauss—a document very fit to be registered as an abiding corrective to the hymns of our German-praisers, from Mr. Arnold to Mr. Haldane, and all who shall follow—is sometimes directly, and always in spirit, literary-critical. The unfriendly attitude of the next paper to the Study of History may seem less so, for, as we have seen, literary criticism without literary history is almost hopeless. But here Nietzsche’s as yet unformulated, but certainly conceived, aspirations towards a future that was to be quite different from the past, probably come in, and he was entitled to regard with suspicion, and to meet with protest, the “dry-as-dust” character of German history-study. The enthusiastic encomia on Schopenhauer and Wagner are again as constantly literary in character as the subsequent denials of both.

[Sidenote: La Gaya Scienza.]

If the similarity of title in Nietzsche’s _La Gaya Scienza_ (“Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft”) and in Mr Dallas’s above-mentioned book should awake expectations of criticism in anybody, he will be at first grievously disappointed, for, except an anticipation of a later fling at Seneca,[1070] he will, for a long time, find nothing at all of the kind. But he will make a very great mistake if he throws the book aside. The aphoristic manner, or rather the manner of detached notes, like Ben Jonson’s in the _Discoveries_, which Nietzsche had now adopted, makes it unsafe to conclude from any one page, or even from a considerable sequence of pages, what will meet us when we turn the next. In the middle, and again towards the end, we come upon “pockets” of our ore. From § 82 onwards, on the opposition of _esprit_ to the Greek temper, on translation, on the origin of Poetry, we find many noteworthy things, leading up to a formal note on “Prose and Poetry,” wherein is the selection of Leopardi, Mérimée, Emerson, and Landor as the prose masters of the nineteenth century proper. Here Mérimée’s scorn and Landor’s pride may have had something to do with Nietzsche’s admiration: but they cannot be said to usurp their places. I am not Italian scholar enough to give an opinion on Leopardi’s claim. Emerson, some may think, while not denying his merits, “a little over-parted.” I should venture to substitute Schopenhauer, if not Nietzsche himself.[1071] And after this we at last come on the long missing passage on Shakespeare, only to find, as perhaps some may have been very well prepared to find, that Shakespeare is not treated as a poet at all, but as the author of _Hamlet_ and the creator of—Brutus! Nietzsche, as most people should know, had a great idea of the Romans, thought them _vornehm_, and the nearest approaches in history to the _Uebermensch_; but his special selection of Brutus is very curious, though fortunately out of our range. The other pocket of the book comes long afterwards, and quite toward the end, where we get interesting things on modern German philosophers, “learned books and literature,” and the all-important question, “Was ist Romantik?” Here, however, Nietzsche goes off on Apollo and Dionysus as of old.

[Sidenote: Jenseits von Gut und Böse, _&c._]

The late and already somewhat half-sane _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, with its still later and still more fatally symptomatic continuation the _Genealogie der Moral_ (1887), devotes itself mainly to non-literary exercises of Nietzsche’s general topsyturvyfication.[1072] But there are passages which at any rate come close to literature. Such are the curious remarks on Galiani, Aristophanes, Petronius, together with some on Plato and Lessing, in §§ 26-28 of _Jenseits_; those on certain Germans of the great age, from Goethe himself downwards, in § 247; very specially those on German style and speech, in § 250; and the quaint attack on English philosophy in § 255. It may be not improperly observed here, in connection with Nietzsche’s Anglophobia, that besides what was, as in the case of “der Alte Zauberer” (Wagner), a sufficient cause of hate, the fact that he had once been rather directed by and indebted to English thinkers,[1073] there were others. He paid us the compliment of believing England to be the European stronghold of Christianity and Morality, and seems to have known very little directly about us.

[Sidenote: Götzen-Dämmerung.]

The great critical “place” in Nietzsche, however, as far as I have read him (for I have not yet had time to explore the “rubbish-heaps raked together by abject adorers,” as a very competent authority once described them to me, of the _Nachgelassene Werke_) is the _Götzen-Dämmerung_ (1889), his last publication before the prison-house closed. Nowhere is the Ishmaelite character, which reveals itself pathetically in the _Zarathustra_, so petulantly present. The very first paragraph batches together as “Meine Unmöglichen,” with a scornful tag to each tail, Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Kant, Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, Mill, the Goncourts, and Zola—a somewhat heterogeneous company who receive some recruits in the amplifications of their judgments that follow. A hasty judge, who could not apply the system of ruthless toleration which has been applied in this book, might of course disable Nietzsche altogether on some of them. To say that Dante is “a hyena who makes poetry in graves” is, _mutatis mutandis_, no more and no less critical than to say that Nietzsche is a Bedlamite who sets his Bedlam on fire and sings and dances on the blazing walls. Here the source of uncritical blindness is obvious: and the explanation is renewed in the cases of Mill, George Sand, and one of the later additions, Renan. But the objection to Mill’s “_offensive_ clearness,”[1074] to George Sand as “the milch-cow of beautiful style,” to Renan’s “nerve-dissolvingness,”[1075] are really literary objections, and, as some may think, not unjust ones.

Very interesting is his intense hatred of Sainte-Beuve for his “femininity,” his Romanticism (which Nietzsche does not, like some people, mistake), and (as he lets us see, with his usual naïveté) his critical power. His wrath with George Eliot for trying to retain Christian morality, after giving up Christian faith, is less literary. But, on the whole, Nietzsche’s criticism, such as it is, hangs very well together and is characteristic enough, even where it may seem, inconsistent. It has the special bents of the lover of _Rausch_, of the anti-crusader to whom, not as in the case of his much-admired Beyle,[1076] the Christian Hell, but the Christian Heaven, is something that leaves him no peace or patience, with the general drift which we have seen in German criticism, to fix on extra-literary points. A whole study might be made of his attitude to Goethe, whom he welcomes, salutes, almost adores as a fellow anti-crusader, as an example of _vornehm_ selfishness and unsentiment, while he is never tired of bringing in some of Goethe’s greatest things, notably the ends of both parts of _Faust_, for his favourite end-of-the-nineteenth-century trick of parody-reversal.

[Sidenote: _His general critical position._]

On the whole, therefore, we may call Nietzsche a contributor of extraordinarily interesting things to our history, and in some ways a literary critic _in potentia_, such as Germany has hardly given us save in the case of Novalis. But here, as elsewhere, his gifts of potency were marred by the _impotency_, the reckless, uncontrolled, uncontrollable flux and reflux of mood and temper, which distinguished him ever more and more. We have not required—we have seen that it is ridiculous to require—a rigid consistency, a development only in one straight line, from the critic. He may, he must, learn, branch out, even sometimes retrace his steps in a moderate degree. But when we find, with but a few years between the judgments, of Schopenhauer, that he is “a great educator,” a sort of intellectual Joshua to the German Israel, and that he is a “common smasher or debaser of the currency”;[1077] of Wagner that he is a hierophant, a master of masters, the “Alexander Magnus” of music, and that he is an “old sorcerer,” a “modern Cagliostro,” a “seducer and poisoner of Art,” we can but shake our heads. No man can go through such revolutions as these and remain a critic, if he ever was one. That in some ways Criticism has seen no nobler mind, no stronger or keener faculty, overthrown and lost to her, is, I think, true enough: but of the overthrow and the loss I can entertain no doubt.