The living
writer who has done most to make England acquainted with German authors,
a man of genius, but to whom precisely this one quality of justness of
spirit is perhaps wanting,--I mean Mr. Carlyle,--seems to me in the
result of his labors on German literature to afford a proof how very
necessary to the critic this quality is. Mr. Carlyle has spoken
admirably of Goethe; but then Goethe stands before all men's eyes, the
manifest centre of German literature; and from this central source many
rivers flow. Which of these rivers is the main stream? which of the
courses of spirit which we see active in Goethe is the course which will
most influence the future, and attract and be continued by the most
powerful of Goethe's successors?--that is the question. Mr. Carlyle
attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance to the romantic school
of Germany,--Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter,[137]--and gives to these
writers, really gifted as two, at any rate, of them are, an undue
prominence. These writers, and others with aims and a general tendency
the same as theirs, are not the real inheritors and continuators of
Goethe's power; the current of their activity is not the main current of
German literature after Goethe.
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