[20] That is, of the isle of Melos, Sappho's birthplace.
[21] Readers of the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller will recall the unsparing attacks which were directed against this formalist and pedant.
[22] Even Frederick II "did not see that the art of German poesy was raising itself swift on high from the enduring stock of a stable root, and spread the shade of its branches far abroad."
[23] He greets this new "reawakened sun, no mere dream at least of mine. Verily I bless thee, who sweepest over my head, my grey hairs, the strength of me that still endures after its sixty years. Ay, for was it not this strength which has carried me so far to see this very vision!"
[24] "Forgive me, brother of France, and brotherhood is the noblest tie after all, that I once cried to my Germans to flee from that, which I now implore them to follow—imitation of you." The reference is of course to the French Revolution.
[25] Hegel may mean that Klopstock was unable to see the real benefits which would result from the French Revolution despite its apparent failure. The sentence which follows would, however, suggest an alternative interpretation that the poet was unable to see the higher demand which the facts of Revolution made upon the French people, and which from the first, that is, even when Klopstock admired them, they did not either frankly face or successfully respond to. I think, indeed, this latter is most probable.
[C. DRAMATIC POETRY]
The reason that dramatic poetry must be regarded as the highest phase of the art of poetry, and, indeed, of every kind of art, is due to the fact that it is elaborated, both in form and substance, in a whole—that is the most complete. For in contrast to every other sort of sensuous materia, whether it be stone, wood, colour, or tone, that of human speech is the only medium fully adequate to the presentation of spiritual life; and further, among the particular types of the art of articulate speech, dramatic poetry is the one, in which we find the objective character of the Epos essentially united to the subjective principle of the Lyric. In other words it presents directly before our vision an essentially independent action as a definite fact, which does not merely originate from the personal life of character under the process of self-realization, but receives its determinate form as the result of the substantive interaction in concrete life of ideal intention, many individuals and collisions. This mediated form of epic art by means of the intimate personal life of an individual viewed in the very presence of his activity does not, however, permit the drama to describe the external aspects of local condition and environment, nor yet the action and event itself in the way that they are so described in the epic. Consequently, in order that the entire art-product may receive the full animation of life, we require its complete scenic representation. And, finally, the action itself, regarded in the full complexus of its ideal and external reality, is adapted to two distinct types of composition of the most opposite character, the predominant principles of which, regarded severally as the tragic and comic type, create in their turn also a further fundamental and specific point of view in our attitude to the dramatic art.