The Press.
London, England, 1858-06-05 00:00:00

THE PRESS, JUNE 5, 1858.

Mme. de Pontes has shrunk from giving in
these volumes any new biography of Goethe or
Schiller. She finds that Mr. Lewes has almost
exhausted the one subject, and the reputation of
Carlyle and Bulwer has deterred her from at-
tempting the other. She still hopes, however,
to light on a few new details by gleanine,,,, after
Mr. Lewes, and she assures us that much new
light has been thrown upon Schiller's character
since it was delineated by such distinguished pens.
Accordingly, she announces " that, if these vo-
" lumes meet with any degree of favour, they
" will be followed by another, which, together with
" sketches from the lives of Germany's greatest
" poets, will comprehend those of the modern
" school, Uhland, Ruckert, Freiligrath, Lenau,
" &c." If this design should ever be put into
execution, Mme. de l'onti!s will have to show,
not only how literature is spoiled by literary
cliques, but also how men of strong and large
hearts can resist injurious influences, and, burst-
ing through unnatural restraints, bring them-
selves into contact with the common life of corn-'
mon men.

Poetry, like religion, does not well consist with
sectarianism ; as a general rule, poetical sects or
schools do not spring up until the flame of in-
spiration begins to burn low. And the poetical
church, like the religious one, is divided by two
contrary heresies, infallible authority marshalling
its slaves on the one side and antinomian licence
attracting its enthusiasts on the other. Where
cliques are heresies will generally be : the cliques
of Paris took the side of superstition ; those of
Germany, under the influence of Leming, have
more generally taken the side of progress. But
it mattered nothing whether poets stood still or
advanced, so long as nature was hidden from
them ; while those who in all simplicity held the
mirror up to nature were generally found to re-
semble the ancients, though they had no design of
imitating them. The simplicity of the classicist
was inanity, and his calmness coldness, because
neither was true; the originality of the romantic
poet was madness, his passion idle fury, his elo-
quence a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal,
because all alike were unnatural. Into this
Scylla or this Charybdis the German poetry of
the last hundred years, with several illustrious
exceptions, appears to have fallen, because it has
been too much the poetry of a class.
If after a thousand years the German nation
is still without unity, we must expect to find its
literature during the Middle Ages, the age of
the formation of nations, bearing still more dis-
tinctly the stamp of a class. The fact is most
strikingly so. The poetry of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries is the poetry of trades-
men ; that of the twelfth and thirteenth is the
poetry of knights. Neither kind, certainly,
could give much pleasure to any class except that
which produced it ; knights would not care to
listen to prudential maxims, the saws of the
shop and the farm. Tradesmen could hardly
take a vivid interest in legends of Palestine, in
conflicts between errant knights and all mon-
strous things of the forest and the moor, in the
beauty of princesses, for which the poet, though
he had a wife of his own and the lady a husband,
was willing to fight all the peers of Charlemagne
at once. Yet for two centuries the knights
monopolised poetry, and then became mute,
while for two centuries more the shopkeepers
supported a thin and monotonous performance.
Nothing, surely, can show more clearly the dis-
united condition of society, nor anything more
conclusively demonstrate the decisiveness of that
revolution which after the final failure of the
Crusades began to abase the arts of war and
exalt those of peace.
Mme. de Pontes is much more successful in
her first volume than in her second. Her bio-
graphies of the poets of the last hundred years
are not very satisfactory. The biography of a
poet, when, as most of those commemorated here
did, he passes his life in the study, should be the
history of the formation of his mind. Perhaps
a lady was not equal to such a task. Instead of
this, we have generally a very minute account of
the poet's courtship and marriage, and, as one
love-story is generally very like another—and
this second volume contains about thirty biogra-
phies—the topic is really quite exhausted.
Moreover, in the second volume dates occur
more frequently, and dates are decidedly Mme.
de Ponte's weak point. We are unwilling to
attribute all the chronological mistakes we have

met with in this book to its authoress. When
we read in one place that the French Revolution
broke out in 1779, in another that it broke out in
1796, that the Peace of Westphalia was con-
cluded in 1748, that Klopstock was made a
French citizen by the National Assembly in
1772, that in 1802 he was sixty-seven years of
age, that Lessing left school in 1796, that Stol-
berg went to the University of Gottingen in the
same year, that Hoelty was born in 1785 and
died in 1775, that Biirger was born in 1748 and
was entered at the University of Halle in 1754,
and a multitude of similar assertions, we may
be disposed to conclude that Mnie. de Pontes
writes figures indistinctly, and—what on other
grounds we can easily believe—that the proofs
have not undergone a very careful revision.
But we have observed some blunders of at least
equal magnitude which cannot be thus accounted
for. For example—we are informed that Paul
Fleming, a pupil of Opitz, went in 1634 to
Russia. " A journey to Moscow," it is added,
"in those days was attended with great excite-
ment and sonic little peril, and Russia, just
"emerging from barbarism under the tutelary
"genius of its extraordinary sovereign Peter the
" Great, was an object of mingled curiosity and
"amazement to all the civilized nations of
" Europe." The same surprising ignorance of com-
mon things appears in the following sentence:—
"We render the passage in blank verse ; for,
" despite the merits of Cowper's translation:of
" Homer, and of Longfellow s ' Evangeline, we
" cannot but regard the introduction of the
" hexameter into English poetry as a bold and
" not very successful experiment.' In the follow-
ing sentence the word "fraternal" is droll:—" She
" knew, if Biirger did not, how intense was that
" sister's suffering, and she sinned alike against
" maiden-virtue and fraternal affection, against
" the laws of God and man." Errors like these,
however, surprising as they are in a writer of
wide information in some departments at least,
and of no contemptible skill in composition, as
some of the translations contained in these
volumes prove, do not prevent the account of
the mediaeval literature of Germany here given
from being the most complete and interesting
which has vet been given, so far as we know, in
English. We extract the following as a speci-
men at once of Ulrick Von Lichtenstein's skill
in lyric poetry, and of Mine. de Pontes skill in
translat ion :
Know ye the lady whom I seek—
Have you seen her in dell or bower?
She is dainty, soft, and meek;
Blue her pen and red her cheek,
And in her hand she holds a flower.

That flower is the lily white,
The emblem of her soul so pure;
Her hair is not with gems beilight,
Her giolle is not drawn t 0 tight; wit
She newer seeketh to allure.

I know her well;
As bees draw forth all hid len sweets,
E'er so she draws with marvellous spell
The closest secrets that do dwell
Within the hearts of those she meets.

She is sole mistress of my hesrt;
She rules it, as the in"on the tide,
She can bid all my griefs depart,
She can soothe my bosom's smart,
And much more beside.
This "much more beside," with which the en-
thusiastic minstrel confesses that the subject
transcends his best power, is very pretty and
ingenuous. Our friend Ulrich was the very
model of a minnesinger. He was page to a
Princess who afterwards married Frederick the
Warlike, Duke of Austria. lie sang for her,
tilted for her ; that she might have something of
his ever before her, he chopped off one of his
fingers, had it placed in a splendid casket with a
golden key, and presented it to her. lie wan-
dered over the country in female attire singing
her praises. After the marriage of the lady of
his love she admitted him to an interview, which
she intended to be a final one. On this occasion
he misbehaved himself so flagrantly that the
Duchess had hint pushed out of the window, and
he made a terrible noise in rolling down the
castle wall. This rough treatment not succeed-
ing, the lady proceeded to yet more violent
measures. t'lrich was cured at last, and took to
pouring out invectives upon his former mistress.
Meanwhile, it must be understood that he was
a married man with two or three children.