[393] "Best of all things water." Compare Meredith's exquisite poem "Phoebus with Admetus," "Water, first of singers o'er rocky mount and mead," etc., stanza 3.
[394] The drama of Racine.
[395] What this word means I do not know—possibly quill-feathers.
[396] Eine grosse Genialität. "First-rate genius" is rather too strong, "talents of the highest rank" would be more literal. We have no word that expresses Genialität. As the passage is ironical I have allowed "genius" to pass.
[397] Wir haben schlecht gestanden. Literally, "there is some mistake between us." But the idiomatic sense I presume is, "You've made a bad shot this time."
[398] What would Hegel have said of the first scene in the "Merchant of Venice"? No doubt Shakespeare's play contains very much more than such scenes, and there is a profound significance in that opening scene, for it at once emphasizes the collision of families upon which the entire tragedy turns. But is such a defence needed? There appears to be indubitably a certain deficiency in the above criticism. There is no reason that a scene in which a couple of peasants and two troopers are the dramatis personae should not be infinitely amusing provided a Shakespeare, or even a Goethe, when he is not in one of his dull moods, performs the office of teaching them how to speak.
[399] This surely goes too far unless "interest" is taken strictly to mean artistic interest which would appear to be so from the context. Everything that has once interested or affected mankind, however remote, has at heart an historical and antiquarian interest, and I am not sure that we should not be right in adding a general human interest. At least such is almost a dogma with a poet of the type of Browning.
[400] I do not know the Teutonic poem here referred to. But what about Wagner's famous tetralogy? The above arguments, though containing much that is true, appear to overlook for one thing the symbolic significance of mythological history, and in a certain sense to be lacking in sympathy for everything that is not modern or Hellenic. How very differently Carlyle, for example, referred to this very mythology, and his learning was not profound in the German sense.
[401] The intention of Aeschylus went, of course, much farther than this, and the entire play is essentially one written by a staunch conservative against modern innovation.
[402] It is strange that Hegel should have ventured such a generalization in the face of his old friend Holderlein's poetry. In England some fine poems have been written such as Lady Margaret Sackville's hymn to Dionysus and Swinburne's to Proserpine. But for a good essay in support of the main contention I know none equal to Russell Lowell's Essay on Swinburne's "Atalanta." I think that both our author and the critic who supports him somewhat fail to recognize the permanent reality, whether symbolical or directly spiritual, that an increasing number of men find in these Hellenic personalities, as illustrated in the poetry of Meredith, to take the finest flavour of the type.