Schubarth.

The work of Schubarth, Zur Beurtheilung Goethe’s,[[800]] may be worth a short notice as an early and by no means contemptible example of a kind of book which has been very largely written during the nineteenth century, but which we can only here take by sample. A contemporary cannot often have been handled earlier on so great a scale: for there are some nine hundred pages in the second edition, and the author makes the widest possible casts round his subject. He is not in the least satisfied with the consideration of particular works (which he gives mainly in two batches, on the earlier and the later respectively), or on his author’s general literary characteristics. He has long excursus on the personages, especially Mephistopheles. He can never refuse himself what he modestly calls a “glance” (Hinblick), but what is generally a very durable and substantial stare, at things that occur in passing,—some criticisms of A. W. Schlegel’s, the literary contrasts of Christianity and Heathenism, Lessing and the Education of the World, the great succession of German philosophers from Kant to Schelling, the Historical Method, Shakespeare, Poetry and Criticism in our day, the Nibelungen Lied, the Devil in the Middle Ages, the Moral and the Immoral in Art and Poetry. In short, the book is a sort of Quodlibeta—a treatise upon “Goethe and Things in General.” We have seen many like it since: let them appear here by it their foreman.

Solger.

Solger’s Vorlesungen[[801]] are an early and good example of the defect of Æsthetic from the standpoint of this book. He often says true things; but they are generally not the whole or final truth, and they are almost always too abstract. Thus, for instance: “Oft verwechselt man das Interessante mit dem Schönen.”[[802]] The truth of this is constantly exemplified both in life and in criticism; but, laid down too isolatedly, it blinks the question whether, in certain degree, matter, and circumstance, the Interesting is not the Beautiful: and it has an obvious and possibly dangerous connection with the very important critical question of the “Unity of Interest.” So, too, distinctions of Heavenly and Earthly Beauty are full of snares: and the danger of generalisation perhaps reaches its highest in the dictum, “In Epic and Lyric, matter is the important thing: in the Drama, form and the pure activity of fancy.” One might almost make out “twenty-nine distinct damnations” involved in this, with hardly more than a thirtieth and single way of salvation and escape!

Periodicals, Histories, &c.

To complete the notice of this remarkable division, which has, by authorities respectable and more than respectable, been pronounced to be the greatest of all, and which is certainly most important, something should be said of the critical publications which, in Germany as elsewhere, but almost earlier there than anywhere, played so important a part, and of the immense industry in literary history which came to supply perhaps the greatest of critical needs. Of the Translations, which some would rank with these, I shall say nothing more than that they seem to me to have been a great misfortune for Germany—encouraging the tendency of the nation to keep aloof from the pure literary integer of the book-as-it-is; assimilating the literature of other nations insensibly but unduly to German ideals; and so making even the general judgment of authors untrustworthy and unsound.

The Periodicals of this time are gradually shaking off the disguises and mannerisms which the Spectator had imposed upon those of our last period. The most important of them, after Lessing’s Dramaturgie, are the Frankfurter Gelehrten-Anzeigen of Merck, Herder, and Goethe (1772); the Teutsche Merkur of Wieland, next year; the Berlin Monatschrift (1783); the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-zeitung (1785); Schiller’s Horen (1795), and Musenalmanach, next year; the Schlegels’ Athenæum (1798). Of literary historians from Bouterwek to Menzel, Schlosser,[[803]] and others, the list is almost too long to attempt.