useful for spiritual pleasure, or even for moral culture, but because it is Art, and the highest in man, and the soul of all Beauty. To inquire after its utility, would be like inquiring after the utility of a God, or what to the Germans would sound stranger than it does to us, the utility of Virtue and Religion.On these particulars, the authenticity of which we might verify, not so much by citation of individual passages, as by reference to the scope and spirit of whole treatises, we must for the present leave our readers to their own reflections. Might we advise them, it would be to inquire farther, and, if possible, to see the matter with their own eyes.

Meanwhile, that all this must tend, among the Germans, to raise the general standard of Art, and of what an Artist ought to be in his own esteem and that of others, will be readily inferred. The character of a Poet does, accordingly, stand higher with the Germans than with most nations. That he is a man of integrity as a man; of zeal and honest diligence in his art, and of true manly feeling towards all men, is of course presupposed. Of persons that are not so, but employ their gift, in rhyme or otherwise, for brutish or malignant purposes, it is understood that such lie without the limits of Criticism, being subjects not for the judge of Art, but for the judge of Police. But even with regard to the fair tradesman, who offers his talent in open market, to do work of a harmless and acceptable sort for hire,—with regard to this person also, their opinion is very low. The 'Bread-artist,' as they call him, can gain no reverence for himself from these men. Unhappy mortal!' says the mild but lofty-minded Schiller, Unhappy mortal! that, with Science and Art, the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attempt'est nothing more than the day-drudge with the meanest; that in the domain of perfect Freedom, bearest about in thee the 'spirit of a Slave! Nay, to the genuine Poet, they deny even the privilege of regarding what so many cherish, under the title of their fame,' as the best and highest of all. Hear Schiller again :

The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favourite! Let some beneficent divinity snatch him, when a suckling, from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time, that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence, but dreadful, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present, but their form he will derive from a nobler time; nay, from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his own nature. Here, from the pure æther of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations.

which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it. His matter Caprice can dishonour, as she has ennobled it; but the chaste form is withdrawn from her mutations. The Roman of the first century had long bent the knee before his Cæsars, when the statues of Rome were still standing erect; the temples continued holy to the eye, when their gods had long been a laughing-stock; and the abominations of a Nero and a Commodus were silently rebuked by the style of the edifice, which lent them its concealment. Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored.

But how is the Artist to guard himself from the corruptions of his time, which on every side assail him? By despising its decisions. Let him look upwards to his dignity and the law, not downwards to his happiness and his wants. Free alike from the vain activity that longs to impress its traces on the fleeting instant, and from the querulous spirit of enthusiasm that measures by the scale of perfection the meagre product of reality, let him leave to mere Understanding, which is here at home, the province of the actual; while he strives, by uniting the possible with the necessary, to produce the ideal. This let him imprint and express in fiction and truth; imprint it in the sport of his imagination and the earnest of his actions; imprint it in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it silently into everlasting time.'*

Still higher are Fichte's notions on this subject; or rather expressed in higher terms, for the central principle is the same both in the philosopher and the poet. According to Fichte, there is a 'Divine Idea' pervading the visible Universe; which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence independent of it. To the mass of men this Divine Idea of the world lies hidden: yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the end therefore of all spiritual effort in every age. Literary Men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it and embody it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in. For each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of this Divine Idea, the essence of which is the same in all; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation and re-interpretation applicable to the wants of another. But in every century, every man who labours, be it

* Ueber die Esthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Esthetic Education of Man).

in what province he may, to teach others, must first have possessed himself of this Divine Idea, or, at least, be with his whole heart and his whole soul striving after it. If without possessing it or striving after it, he abide diligently by some material practical department of knowledge, he may indeed. still be (says Fichte, in his usual rugged way) a useful hod'man ;' but should he attempt to deal with the Whole, and to become an architect, he is in strictness of language,

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thing; he is an ambiguous mongrel between the possessor ' of the Idea, and the man who feels himself solidly supported ' and carried on by the common Reality of things; in his fruit'less endeavour after the Idea, he has neglected to acquire the 'craft of taking part in this Reality; and so hovers between two worlds, without pertaining to either." Elsewhere he

adds:

There is still, from another point of view, another division in our notion of the Literary Man, and one to us of immediate application. Namely, either the Literary Man has already laid hold of the whole Divine Idea, in so far as it can be comprehended by man, or perhaps of a special portion of this its comprehensible part,-which truly is not possible without at least a clear oversight of the whole,-he has already laid hold of it, penetrated, and made it entirely clear to himself, so that it has become a possession recallable at all times in the same shape to his view, and a component part of his personality: in that case he is a completed and equipt Literary Man, a man who has studied. Or else, he is still struggling and striving to make the Idea in general, or that particular portion and point of it, from which onwards he for his part means to penetrate the whole,-entirely clear to himself; detached sparkles of light already spring forth on him from all sides, and disclose a higher world before him; but they do not yet unite themselves into an indivisible whole; they vanish from his view as capriciously as they came, he cannot yet bring them under obedience to his freedom: in that case he is a progressing and self-unfolding literary man, a Student. That it be actually the Idea, which is possessed or striven after, is common to both. Should the striving aim merely at the outward form, and the letter of learned culture, there is then produced, when the circle is gone round, the completed, when it is not gone round, the progressing, Bungler (Stümper). The latter is more tolerable than the former; for there is still room to hope that in continuing his travel, he may at some future point be seized by the Idea ; but of the first all hope is over.'

From this bold and lofty principle the duties of the Literary Man are deduced with scientific precision; and stated, in all

* Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten (On the Nature of the Literary Man); a Course of Lectures delivered at Jena, in 1805.

their sacredness and grandeur, with an austere brevity more impressive than any rhetoric. Fichte's metaphysical theory may be called in question, and readily enough misapprehended; but the sublime stoicism of his sentiments will find some response in many a heart. We must add the conclusion of his first Discourse, as a farther illustration of his manner:

In disquisitions of the sort like ours of to-day, which all the rest, too, must resemble, the generality are wont to censure: First, their severity; very often on the good-natured supposition that the speaker is not aware how much his rigour must displease us; that we have but frankly to let him know this, and then doubtless he will reconsider himself, and soften his statements. Thus, we said above, that a man who after literary culture had not arrived at knowledge of the Divine Idea, or did not strive towards it, was in strict speech Nothing; and farther down, we said that he was a Bungler. This is in the style of those unmerciful expressions, by which philosophers give such offence.-Now looking away from the present case, that we may front the maxim in its general shape, I remind you that this species of character, without decisive force to renounce all respect for Truth, seeks merely to bargain and cheapen something out of her, whereby itself on easier terms may attain to some consideration. But Truth, which once for all is as she is, and cannot alter aught of her nature, goes on her way; and there remains for her, in regard to those who desire her not simply because she is true, nothing else, but to leave them standing as if they had never addressed her.

Then farther, discourses of this sort are wont to be censured as unintelligible. Thus I figure to myself,-nowise you, Gentlemen, but some completed Literary Man of the second species, whose eye the disquisition here entered upon chanced to meet, as coming forward, doubting this way and that, and at last reflectively exclaiming : The Idea, the Divine Idea, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance: what pray may this mean?' Of such a questioner I would inquire in turn: What pray may this question mean?'-Investigate it strictly, it means in most cases nothing more than this, Under what other names, and in what other formulas do I already know this same thing, which thou expressest by so strange and to me so unknown a symbol?' And to this again in most cases the only suitable reply were, Thou knowest this thing not at all, neither under this, nor under any other name; and wouldst thou arrive at the knowledge of it, thou must even now begin at the beginning to make study thereof ;--and then, most fitly, under that name by which it is first presented to thee!''

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With such a notion of the Artist, it were a strange inconsistency did Criticism show itself unscientific or lax in estimating the products of his Art. For light on this point, we might refer to the writings of almost any individual among the German critics: take, for instance, the Charakteristiken of the two Schlegels, a work too of their younger years; and say whether

in depth, clearness, minute and patient fidelity, these Characters have often been surpassed, or the import and poetic worth of so many poets and poems more vividly and accurately brought to view. As an instance of a much higher kind, we might refer to Goethe's criticism of Hamlet in his Wilhelm Meister. This truly is what may be called the poetry of criticism; for it is in some sort also a creative art; aiming, at least, to reproduce under a different shape the existing product of the poet; painting to the intellect what already lay painted to the heart and the imagination. Nor is it over Poetry alone that criticism watches with such loving strictness: the mimic, the pictorial, the musical arts, all modes of representing or addressing the highest nature of man, are acknowledged as younger sisters of Poetry, and fostered with like care. Winkelmann's History of Plastic Art is known by repute to all readers: and of those who know it by inspection, many may have wondered why such a work has not been added to our own literature, to instruct our own statuaries and painters. On this subject of the plastic arts, we cannot withhold the following little sketch of Goethe's, as a specimen of pictorial criticism in what we consider a superior style. It is of an imaginary landscape-painter, and his views of Swiss scenery; it will bear to be studied minutely, for there is no word without its meaning:

He succeeds in representing the cheerful repose of lake prospects, where houses in friendly approximation, imaging themselves in the clear wave, seem as if bathing in its depths; shores encircled with green hills, behind which rise forest mountains, and icy peaks of glaciers. The tone of colouring in such scenes is gay, mirthfully clear; the distances as if overflowed with softening vapour, which from watered hollows and river valleys mounts up grayer and mistier, and indicates their windings. No less is the master's art to be praised in views from valleys lying nearer the high Alpine ranges, where declivities slope down, luxuriantly overgrown, and fresh streams roll hastily along by the foot of rocks.

With exquisite skill, in the deep shady trees of the foreground, he gives the distinctive character of the several species; satisfying us in the form of the whole, as in the structure of the branches, and the details of the leaves; no less so, in the fresh green with its manifold shadings, where soft airs appear as if fanning us with benignant breath, and the lights as if thereby put in motion.

In the middle-ground, his lively green tone grows fainter by degrees; and at last, on the more distant mountain-tops, passing into weak violet, weds itself with the blue of the sky. But our artist is above all happy in his paintings of high Alpine regions; in seizing the simple greatness and stillness of their character; the wide pastures on the slopes, where dark solitary firs stand forth from the grassy carpet; and from high cliffs, foaming brooks rush down. Whether he relieve his