Biographia Literaria

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Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the
poet, who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and
lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort
to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge
ear-trumpet. From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I
hope, the German literati in general may resemble this first
specimen), I heard a tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting
anecdote. When Buonaparte was in Italy, having been irritated by some
instance of perfidy, he said in a loud and vehement tone, in a public
company--"'tis a true proverb, gli Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is,
the Italians all plunderers.) A lady had the courage to reply, "Non
tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a good part, or Buonaparte.)
This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things
that might have been said. The anecdote is more valuable; for it
instances the ways and means of French insinuation. Hoche had received
much information concerning the face of the country from a map of
unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he heard, resided at
Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the French army, Hoche
previously ordered, that the house and property of this man should be
preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order to an officer on
whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the man had
escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had no
reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French
nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." You
remember Milton's sonnet--

"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
Went to the ground"------

Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to
the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on
the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the
tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin
of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as
the madman of Macedon.

From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me to
his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a
solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to
my preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a
very fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief
object of my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if
anything, rather larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his
face and his nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and
sensibility!--There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in
the forehead.--The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of
quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute;
yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the
arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and
in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these very words in my
memorandum-book with the portrait before my eyes, and when I knew
nothing of Lessing but his name, and that he was a German writer of
eminence.

We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote.
"Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time." The Germans are the
worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle
of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of
the opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the
servants hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's
they came in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--
Pacchiaretti--Old Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and
lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the
ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are
brought in, cut up, and first handed round and then set on the table,)
with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese
and butter, with plates of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76],
and Shakespeare put it in my head to go to the French comedy.

Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act
informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who
had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers
plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads
with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and
faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act
sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and
hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could
not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic
indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually
dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes: and
in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
frantic, only with joy; that was all!

O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators
to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is
not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight
the imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward
to the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and
Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions:
for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness
of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of
the Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more
distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real
existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential
properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence,
and, (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle
has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in
the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry it is the
universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in
poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed. With the
ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and
France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry.
They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to
make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the
day, or the clothing of commonplace morals in metaphors drawn from the
shops or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they
condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators,
by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in
all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies
by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of
drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but
within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of
our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind
to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that
greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "thing, we
are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be;
suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid
the music of nobler thoughts.

Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)

DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
best Christian morality?

PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters
you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled
to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's
face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and
gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no
Antony, no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!

D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and
what curiosity can we feel----

P. What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language of
the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
passions?

D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story:
and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be
surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out?

P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties
of the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings
to the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and
the Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You
know all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with
the subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the
historic or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your
preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of former times,
those at least who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so
little to gratify this kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have
regarded the story in a not much higher light, than the painter
regards his canvass: as that on, not by, which they were to display
their appropriate excellence. No work, resembling a tale or romance,
can well show less variety of invention in the incidents, or less
anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON QUIXOTE of Cervantes.
Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and re-peruse some
preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they find any
eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts which
they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom we
love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale
of his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to
the readers of "old romance." I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who
thought it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its
substance should be previously known. That there had been at least
fifty tragedies with the same title, would be one of the motives which
determined Sophocles and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a
subject. But Milton--

D. Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men
tell us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?

P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But
why then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if
not all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main
incidents are concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at
least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles,
ballads, or translations of contemporary or preceding English writers.
Why, I repeat, do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps,
that you only pretend to admire him? However, as once for all, you
have dismissed the well-known events and personages of history, or the
epic muse, what have you taken in their stead? Whom has your tragic
muse armed with her bowl and dagger? the sentimental muse I should
have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy? What heroes
has she reared on her buskins?

D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-
catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-
hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our
misanthropes very tender-hearted.)

P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
such men be engaged?

D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling
down precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies;
and some of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such
perfection, that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in
their eye, seldom fail to make their favourite male character as
strong as Samson. And then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what
is done on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. I once
remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of
the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being
set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the
naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing!

P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians?
How can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the
power of destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to
elevate the characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?

D. O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own
wants and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.

P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to
have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and
vigour? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and
sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses and parishes.

D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet
has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is
capricious. He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it.
He gratifies us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom
we hate and wish to despise.

P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your
superiors.

D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and
their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and,
(that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the
last scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they
will make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a
pity, that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had
made them so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once;
and in the final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born
themselves are made to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY,
AND THAT A LOVELY WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!

P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of
loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which,
especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so
often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give
your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole system of your
drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous
kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than
hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross
self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists
with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of
things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise,
by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a
nice sense of honour, (those things rather which pass among you for
such), in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us
least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that
are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion
have excommunicated from our esteem!

And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet
without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by
your own fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to
forget now and then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other
good friends have made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever
place I write you will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist
of excursions in my own mind.

LETTER III

RATZEBURG.
No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I
this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town,
groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing.
My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink
under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I
left it on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the
poet Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me
with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to
board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The
vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an
English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and
rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top
was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have
been parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were
leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly
answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the
cold. I could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at
which we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room,
like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in
tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the
floor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street,
sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end.
These are commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs,
poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community; yet
there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of
these houses I measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The
apartments were taken off from one corner. Between these and the
stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-
eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the
stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows,
etc. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that
they had at least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. Stall-
feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning
which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite
opinions--or at least, to have very different feelings. The woodwork
of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old
houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and
tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles of
Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country,
as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by woods. At
Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg
to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one
hundred and twenty-six miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About
a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course
very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge
and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of
immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this
island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage,
together with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands
near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and
the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you
step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little
hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long
bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town
is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties
of the whole the shores being just often enough green and bare to give
the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater
part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and
indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and
the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the
north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church
towers of Luebec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as
distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view is,
that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses
roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of
brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five,
I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into
complete keeping, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky
over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over
the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red
light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the
red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts
of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them,
floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in
harmony with all, but brought all into harmony.

I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised;
but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses,
which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with
arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in
cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green
seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or
the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better,
than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a
nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The
busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have
adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind
begins to love nature by imitating human conveniences in nature; but
this is a step in intellect, though a low one--and were it not so, yet
all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and
I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts
even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this
charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city.
These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees
growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my
return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra
post, which answers to posting in England. These north German post
chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of
finery, a chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the
horses!--a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a
numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle
with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting
together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion
no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more
interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I left you:
namely, the literati and literature of Germany.

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