No More Learning

The Elbe continued
to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of
fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the
clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to
Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees,
over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon
the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their
bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic
harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,
and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of
paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen
and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the
whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,
and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is
uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and
republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that
might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste
which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work
are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards
of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and
yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the
human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of
nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and
country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments
for which men's habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays
and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women
and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a
nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and
passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to
choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the
Boom House, Hamburg.



LETTER II

To a lady.

RATZEBURG.

Meine liebe Freundinn,

See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
been six weeks in the country! --almost as fluently as English from my
neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as
we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,
never fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my
dearest Englander! vhee goes it! "--which is certainly a proof of great
generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,
ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as
actress, directress, etc. , or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and
the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in
every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is the Frau
Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or
Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the
Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know
it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,
when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a
female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection
will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than
abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their
perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a
sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be
loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.

Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--"This
is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has
blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn
where he is and what he has seen. " Well then! that I am settled at
Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,
will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has
edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the
Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was
amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once
or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all
people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes
in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight
and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,
wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver
bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of
the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But
I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible. --Therefore,
Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks
the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of
confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man
of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed
about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners
from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;
and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little
attentions, etc. , remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,
or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute
philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of
the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something
strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the
word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more
easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high
moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.
I have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand
scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;
and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea
of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed
with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,
I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,
whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial
not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners
and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to
others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings
an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to
himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling
of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of
Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning
the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect gentlemen these
old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the
same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero's
philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in
Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the
notion of a very fine gentleman. " You uttered the words as if you had
felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree
altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero
an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,
in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare
in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period
of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But
the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the
Anglo-American democrats.

I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by
the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him
for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression
of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both
make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to
find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in
the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to
deliver my letters of recommendation.

I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I
began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being
so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats
shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of
petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul
with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which
stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled
through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a
stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap
behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses
on the back:

"Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner
Spread in defiance of all enemies. "

The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too
glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the
laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their
clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped
along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from
the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always
considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I
had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my
English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight
the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the
foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,
some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;
but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese
grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,
so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt's window
tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young
toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the
appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not
in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding
that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to
associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I
fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural
beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and
crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of
water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,
and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all
that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have
been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and
stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which
my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade
planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and
cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a
square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving
among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by
their husbands or lovers. ------

(Some paragraphs have been here omitted. )------thus embarrassed by sad
and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like
the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant inquiring
after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel.
Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I
doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,
amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one
behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the
sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are
painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a
useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused
with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the
bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every
entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows,
as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing
cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I
might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe
of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his
mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who
was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his
pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside
his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both
of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there
wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same
Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty
which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as
the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures,
(such is the power of true genius! ) neither acts, nor is meant to act
as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group,
a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the
attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this
feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus
prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles
or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of
contempt or hatred.

Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the
landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that
was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing
to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for
it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest
class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the
market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas:
a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens
and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a
round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired.
Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo,
so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this
church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream,
occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead
of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild
Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance
was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle:
and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had
rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He
had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged
with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and
in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the
kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no
blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it
against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture,
and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with
all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force
out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and
exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had
rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet
all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish
for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare
warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of
the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the
Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description,
left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his
own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in
Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor
the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French
emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization
of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems
itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general
aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded
that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their
treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or
corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families
of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled
to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who
sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil
war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution!
In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the
latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war
between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the
latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy
shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.

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.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as
W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,
the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.
It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with
several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's
eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We
waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the
figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were
from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his
countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was
no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no
expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no
massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below
the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,
so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor
myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his
physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his
kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with
difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was
not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The
conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the
surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.
Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they
had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have
given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief
in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and
triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement
Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired
in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German
poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little
on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their
elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.
Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of
this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.
He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse
superior to Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and
my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that
it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt
arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,

"with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"

and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's
superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in
a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already
construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our
poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose
translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very
bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages
not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the
translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his
odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, "I
wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,
and revenge me of your countryman! ". It was the liveliest thing which he
produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was
fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I
considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;
as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;
yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt
as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing
there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his
physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the
bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large
snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and
wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is
an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of
nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as
when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks. --The author
of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair. --His powder and
periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.

Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always
sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I
answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line
in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that
this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than
one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who
wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did
not.

We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he
sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of
their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough
an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation
of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to
forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;
and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their
iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked
to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,
till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the
sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the
distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)
lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of
the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist
floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro
between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and
brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been
divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions
could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a
fairy scene! --and to increase its romantic character, among the moving
objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a
beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English
child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other
accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before
I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two
longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the
feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see
the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.
There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two
or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and
his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of
entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,
there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the
women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the
other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more
singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal
church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
and silver.

I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which
my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the
interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but
one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,
that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my
own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,
that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of
Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or
a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and
presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as
to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral
system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished
to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in
England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured
the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's
CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the
plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
versification in the German language before this time. The first three
cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though
done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He
had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and
there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of
versification. These were only of very moderate merit. --One day he was
struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his
room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the
evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of
what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his
efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he
had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an
author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction
of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one
till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had
finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in
a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.