so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly incomprehensible; that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans, but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to produce the book, open it, and point to a passage, and beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do, by substituting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers, but they could hardly be called a sect; and luckily till the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever, but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a Master. Kant had appeared am a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing, to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere appetite. Well, but, said he, you see that such poems please everybody. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the Oberon. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages; but that I made allow-bitious to be the founder of a sect-that he had sucance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his Essay in the churchyard. He complained of the Fool in Lear. I observed, that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written rhyme poetry with more skill than any of our writers. I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the case, but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of lines as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and feminine (i. e. single or double) rhymes; at least, he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think that no language could ever be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerons practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by taking this ceeded, but that the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but, above all, the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with any admirers in England-did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer, who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting tears. I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience; that it was done every day by the meanest writers." I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes, &c. are not intended as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial prowess," to judge of which, by an accidental conversation, and this with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks, than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me whether I have read the Messiah, and what I think of it? I answer, as yet the first four books only; and as to my opinion, (the reasons of which hereafter,) you may guess it, from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning told me that Klopstock was the German Milton-" a very German Milton indeed!!!"-Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLERIDGE. CHAPTER XXIII. liberty too frequently. I recommended to him the Quid, quod præfatione præmunierim libellum, qua conor omnem orfendiculi ansam præcidere? Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam sibi satisfieri nolent, vel stupidiores sint quam ut satisfactionem intelligant? Nam quem ad modum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse quam ut possint a sc decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores quam ut placari queant. Adhæc, non mirum est, invenire quod calumnietur qui nihil aliud quærit nisi quod calumnietur. Erasmus, ad Dorpium Teologum. IN the rifacciamento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the Conciones ad Populum, printed, though scarcely published, in the year 1795, in the very heat and height of my antiministerial enthusiasm: these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no change. In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters from Germany, with particular reference to that which contains a disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of Bertram, written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste. The letter was written to a friend; and the apparent abruptness with which it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences. You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death, proposed to the assembly subscribers of Drury-Lane Theatre, that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual, under certain conditions and limitations; and that his proposal was rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the attainment of which, the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of philo-dramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now, this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage, not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste. Drury-Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown; Shakspeare, Johnson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanburgh, Congreve and Wycherly, were to be re-inaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to commence by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the lucri bonus ordo would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work masters. Rank, fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments or consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Mecænaship, these were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary subscribers of Drury-Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such auspices and had passed the ordeal of such judgments; and the Tragedy, on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great expectations, justified by so Inany causes, were doomed at length to settle. But before I enter on the examination of Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand, I shall interpose a few words on the phrase German Drama, which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the German Stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the works of Shakspeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not, perhaps, go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to all thinking men, even to Shakspeare's own countrymen, the true nature of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated were deviations only from the Accidents of the Greek Tragedy; and from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek Poets, and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the Heroic Opera. He proved, that in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of nature, the plays of Shakspeare were incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under these convictions, were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their deficiency is in depth and in imagination; their excellence is in the construction of the plot, the good sense of the sentiments, the sobriety of the morals, and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under the name of the German Drama. Of this latter, Schiller's Robbers was the earliest specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his boyhood) and, as such, the pledge and promise of no ordinary genius. Oply as such did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play. During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production, with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good taste than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation at the unwonted popularity of the Robbers, seduced him into contrary extremes, viz: a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity ;) a die¦tion elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of the chorus. But to understand the true character of the Robbers, and of the countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at least, call to your recollection, that about that time, and for some years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language, were. the translations of Young's Night Thoughts, Hervey's Meditations, and Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe. Now, we have only to combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only, I repeat, to combine those Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short, the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then, to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious villains-geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the author's words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and contrivances) to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the Castle of Otranto, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England)-and as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognise the so-called German Drama. The Olla Podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination, on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakspeare, in which the German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was still in vogue, and Shakspeare was quoted as authority for the most anti-Shakspearean Drama. We have, indeed, two poets who wrote as one, near the age of Shakspeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic of their writings) the Coryphæus of the present Drama may challenge the honor of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humor, the wit, the felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths of all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes a Kotzebue. The so-called German Drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or, rather, consider it as a lack grace returned from transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts usually come home with. I know nothing that contributes more to a clear insight into the true nature of any literary phenomenon, than the comparison of it with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent; while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is furnished us by the old Spanish play, entitled Antheisla Fulminato, formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of Spain, and which, under various names, (Don Juan, the Libertine, &c.) has had its day of favor in every country throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant, claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative. Nothing of it belongs to the real world but the names of the places and persons. The comic parts equally with the tragic; the living, equally with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability as the Satan of Paradise Lost, or the Caliban of the Tempest, and, therefore, to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood-all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but, likewise, of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses, and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue; the gratifications of the passions and appetites her only dictate; each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature utters her commands, and "Self-contradiction is the only wrong! For, by the laws of spirit, in the right That acts in strict consistence with itself." That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as that they can scarcely, in any instance, be systematically realized, on account of their unsuitableness to human nature, and to the institutions of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell; and a separate world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete devil. But, on the other hand, it is no less clear, nor, with the biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied, without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature, (i. e. materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of a present providence and of both a present and future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of communities to a degree that almost does away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible character, as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks only of the reader what as a poet he is privileged to ask, viz., that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being. which we willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition to the same state of feeling as that with which we contemplate the idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules. What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is to the mind in strength of character. Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. (Hence The ideal consists in the happy balance of the gene-basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, ric with the individual. The former makes the may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a character representative and symbolical, therefore wish wholly without a meaning. instructive; because, mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter gives its living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only recollect the specific state of his feel-power is necessarily an object of our desire and of ings, when in looking at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait; and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure is not ideal; and therefore, not ideal, because one of the two factors or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek forms and faces, i. e. outlines drawn according to a recipe. These again are not ideal, because in these the other element is in excess. Forma formans per forman formatam translucens," is the definition and perfection of ideal art. our admiration.) But of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of human ambition. We shall be as gods in knowledge, was and must have been the first temptation; and the co-existence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely superior being. This is the sacred charm of Shakspeare's male cha racters in general. They are all cast in the mould of Shakspeare's gigantic intellect; and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, &c. in particular. But again : of all intellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest interest, the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the whole of his cient for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and be This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in our pantomime of that name. We see, clearly, how the character is formed; and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful degree. (We do not believe it enough for this effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or acquiescence which I have described above.) Meantime the qualities of his cha-work be in harmony; a dramatic probability, suffiracter are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my becom-lieve; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a ing such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never dream; and this too with our eyes open, and with shall be an atheist! I shall never disallow all dis- our judgment perdue behind the curtain ready to tinction between right and wrong! I have not the awake us at the first motion of our will; and mean. least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in time, only not to disbelieve. And in such a state of my love affairs! But to possess such a power of cap-mind, who but must be impressed with the cool intivating and enchanting the affections of the other sex! to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me! that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious) even my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious) could not eradicate the passion! To be so loved for my own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me this, sir, takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the heroic disinterestedness to which love can transport a woman, cannot be contemplated without an honorable emotion of reverence towards womanhood; and on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and substantial trepidity of Don John on the appearance of his father's ghost: "Ghost.-Monster! behold these wounds!" "D. John.-I do! They were well meant, and well performed, I see." "Ghost. My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries, mist, sure." "D. Antonio.-(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions.) They are not! 'T was a ghost."' "D. Lopez-(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales before." "D. John.-Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be natural." "D. Ant.-And nature is unalterable in us too."' "D. John.-We are too much confirmed-curse on this "D. John.-T is true! The nature of a ghost cannot dry discourse. Come here's to your mistress; you had one change ours." when you were living: not forgetting your sweet sister." (Devils enter.) "D. John.-Are these some of your retinue? Devils say you? I'm sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with that's drink fit for devils," &c. Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second Prometheus? "Chorus of Devils." "Statue-Ghost.-Will you not relent and feel remorse?" "D. John.-Couldst thou bestow another heart on me, I might. But with this heart I have, I cannot." "D. Lopez.-These things are prodigious." "D. Anton.-I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds me back." "D. Lop.-If we could, 't is now too late. I will not." "D. Ant.--We defy thee!" "Ghost.-Perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid up in store for you!" (Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.) "Ghost to D. John.-Behold their dreadful fates and "D. John.-Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I'll break your marble body in picces, and pull down your horse." (Thunder and lightning-chorus of devils, &c. "D. John.--These things I see with wonder but no fear. Were all the elements to be confounded, And shuffled all into their former chaos; Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me, And all mankind roaring within those fires, know that thy last moment's come!" I could not fear, or feel the least remorse. (He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.) Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting in dramatic probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage, and scrupulous honor, (in all the recognized laws of honor) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their gloss and glow; but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone. Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate designation) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subIn fine, the character of Don John consists in the version of the natural order of things in their causes union of every thing desirable to human nature as and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by means, and which, therefore, by the well-known law representing the qualities of liberality, refined feelof association become at length desirable on their own ing, and a nice sense of honor (those things rather account, and in their own dignity they are here dis- which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in played, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that classes where experience teaches us least to expect in the effect they appear almost as means without an them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies end. The ingredients too are mixed in the happiest which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each other-law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety, and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far, at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the statue ghost of the governor whom he had murdered, to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the head, Don John has prepared a banquet. our esteem. This of itself would lead me back to Bertram or the Castle of St. Aldobrand; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into connexion with the Libertine, (Shadwell's adaptation of the Atheista Fulminato to the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second) by the fact, that our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from the first scene of the third act of the Libertine. But with what palpable superiority of judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men and spirits, are up in arms against Don John: the two former acts of the Play have not only "D. John-Some wine, sirrah! Here's to Don Pedro's prepared us for the supernatural, but accustomed us ghost-he should have been welcome." Here Governor, your health! Friends, put it about! Here's excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come I'll help you, come eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten." (The ghost threatens him with vengeance, to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate, when the captain exclaims, "In all the dangers I have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned;" and when the hermit says, "that he had beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance." And Don John's burst of startling impiety is equally intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect. But what is there to account for the prodigy of the |