XII. Heinrich Zschokke's ausgewählte Dichtungen, Erzählun- XIII. La Morte di Carlo I. e l' Ettore. Tragedie improvvisate THE FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-Adam Oehlenschläger's Schriften. Zum erstermale gesammelt als Ausgabe letzter hand. (The works of Adam Oehlenschläger. Collected for the First Time.) Bde. I.— XVIII. 8vo. Leipsic. 1829, 1830. MANY of our readers are probably old enough to recollect the time when any adventurous person who had spoken gravely in company of Danish literature or Danish poetry, would have been looked upon as a literary Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, who was endeavouring, on the strength of having been beyond seas, to pass off the usual wonders of a traveller upon the public. Nay, it is not many years ago since a Frenchman, talking to a friend who had ventured to explore the savage regions of Germany, and naturally wishing to acquire some knowledge of the habits of the natives, asked him, "Les Allemands, est-ce qu'ils ont une langue?" "Non," replied the other, "ils parlent seulement un patois; mais ils se comprennent entre eux!" Now certain it is, that the Danes too, as well as the Germans, contrive to understand each other pretty well; and what, perhaps, is more to our purpose, they are now beginning to be understood by Europe also: the names of their poets, their novelists and historians, are becoming less strange, if not absolutely familiar to our ears; and Danish literature is fast assuming a respectable, if not an elevated position on the field of European culture. We have already, in a general article on the subject of Danish poetry, alluded to the works of some of its most distinguished ornaments; we now propose to consider a little more in detail the literary life of its greatest dramatic poet-Adam Oehlenschläger. OEHLENSCHLÄGER was born in a suburb of Copenhagen on the 14th of November, 1779. His father held the situation of organist and steward at Friedricksberg, a royal country-seat in the neighbourhood. This residence, which had been built by Frederick IV. after his return from Italy, animated and gay with the pomp and bustle of the court in summer, was left in winter VOL. VIII. NO. XV. B almost deserted, under the charge of the poet's father. The poet was left to wander at will through the lofty, magnificent and solitary apartments, to gaze on the portraits of kings and princes; and surrounded by these splendors, not his own, to pore over romances and fairy tales obtained from some circulating library in town, to which he made frequent pilgrimages for this purpose through storm and snow; or to listen to his father, who, as the autumnal evenings closed in, used to assemble his family about him, and read aloud to them accounts of voyages and travels. At the age of twelve he exchanged the freedom of the country, and the stately rooms of the royal residence, for a narrow lodging in the town, to prosecute, or rather to commence his studies, under the care of Edward Storm, a Norwegian, a poet and a man of talent. Though Oehlenschläger's reading had been of the most desultory and least profitable kind, Storm saw in his activity of mind, and the energy with which he pursued those studies which interested him, the promise of future improvement. Even before this time he had been overheard in the chapel at Friedricksberg, when he thought himself alone, delivering extempore discourses from the pulpit, much to the satisfaction of the clergyman, who happened on one occasion to overhear his effusion from the sacristy, and forthwith advised his father to make him a preacher. Whatever he learned himself he instantly set about communicating to others. Having promised to give one of his young friends instructions in anatomy, he prevailed on him to accompany him to Friedricksberg, where he had procured the skeleton of a child for the purpose of demonstration. The friends were to sleep together in the same room; the skeleton, after the conclusion of the lecture, was left on the table; and the lecturer and his pupil had dropt asleep. Suddenly they were awakened by a knocking at the door, and lay motionless with terror, thinking that the owner of the skeleton had come in person from the tomb to reclaim his bones. Great was their relief, however, when they found that it was only the old maid servant, who came to bring the anatomist his night-shirt, which he had forgotten below! The same activity displayed itself at school, though, unfortunately, instead of being devoted to Latin and history, it took the direction of stage-playing, dramatic composition, and pugilistic exhibitions. The latter were, indeed, in some measure forced upon him. His father, who was not very well able to defray the expenses of his education, had, as a good speculation, purchased from the keeper of the king's wardrobe a number of faded suits, out of which the young poet had been equipped for school. "There I walked about," says he, "for a long time in coats which had once figured on the backs of crown-princes, and stiff boots which had been worn by kings, while my pantaloons were made out of the cloth which had covered some old billiard-table, now out of commission." This strange raiment, his long dark hair straggling in the Roderick-Random style over his shoulders, and his tall thin figure towering above the rest, "like the minster over the houses in Strasburg," rendered him at first the butt of the school; and it was only after bestowing a sound drubbing on some of the ring-leaders that he was allowed to wear these memorials of ancient grandeur in quiet. Once fairly naturalized, however, his liveliness and ingenuity soon rendered him a favourite. He headed their sports, and organized a regular system of stage-plays, the young poet himself being generally both the composer and the principal performer. "My dear child," Storm used sometimes to say to him," you are a greater poet than Molière; he used to think it quite a feat to write a piece in eight days; you manage the matter with ease in one." Occasionally, some blundering comrade ruined the effect of Oehlenschläger's most impassioned scenes by some unlucky contre-temps. He and his comrades were one day performing a very touching piece, in which the heroine was to faint on being informed by a truculent father that she was not to wed her lover. The despairing father, who could not remember a word of his part, but who with a strange perversity had bestowed his chief attention on the stage directions, looking at the fainting lady, repeated with much gravity, "During this time the other characters support her;" and after uttering this affecting apostrophe, immediately disappeared. A well-administered blow from the prompter, however, sent him back upon the stage, and, like an application of animal magnetism, restored at the same time the memory of the performer. So passed the period from his twelfth to his sixteenth year. During the latter part of the time he had been more diligent; praise and rewards had occasionally been bestowed upon him; he had acquired a passable knowledge of history, geography, and his mother tongue; understood German well, French indifferently, and had a superficial acquaintance with the sciences. Like Shakspeare, however, he had little Latin and less Greek. His father's first intention had been that he should devote himself to merchandize; but ignorant as he was of English, a bad arithmetician, and without the smallest inclination to commerce, it was plain that "his madness did not that way tend." To his great relief, the merchant into whose counting-house his father had hoped to introduce him, could not receive him, and so the obnoxious proposal was dropped. Thus agreeably disappointed, he prevailed on his father to allow him to resume his studies, with the view of passing his examination in arts, and again plunged into belles-lettres and poetry. It is rather singular that most of his early efforts should have been in the comic and satirical vein. The gaiety of youth is instinctive, not reflective, while comedy, with its exhibitions of the weaknesses and absurdities of life, is the result of an enlarged experience of society, reflection on its follies, and of those feelings of vanity and vexation of spirit which that experience and reflection give rise to. In such a mind as Oehlenschläger's, we should have imagined that the tragic or epic would have preoccupied the ground which might have been assigned to the comic or idyllic; but, probably, his choice was influenced by no deeper principle than imitation, and the chance which had thrown Holberg's Comedies, Wessel's Liebe ohne Strumpfe (Love without Stockings), and such parodies on the sentimental school into his hands before the grave pieces of Schiller and Goëthe. Less singular, considering the constitution of his mind, in which vague and enthusiastic feelings were but too predominant, was the strong delight which he experienced in romance reading, particularly those in which spectres and chimeras dire formed the machinery of the story. Hoffman had not at that time astonished the world by his ghastly phantasmagoria, in which the devil and his angels seem perpetually on the broad grin, and the reader wandering among doubles of himself, and passing inexplicably from the regions of this lower world into a land of shadows, and from fairy-land back again to reality, feels himself throughout, as it were, in a hazy, troubled, oppressive, and night-mare dream. Weber's romantic legends of the olden time (a field from which more than one of our own novelists have borrowed without acknowledgment), he read with approbation; but for the genuine ghost story, which makes the knotted and combined locks to part, and the reader to feel as if he were undergoing the operation of scalping, Spiess was the man! Over his horrors Oehlenschläger loved to pore, till the fantastic began to overpower the satirical tendency in his mind, and the common events of life to be overshadowed by an atmosphere of terror. On the road, for instance, between Copenhagen and Friedricksberg, stood the public place of execution, in a waste field looking towards the sea, the wheel and gallows reading a moral lesson to the traveller, and the gentleman of the shade, as they past. During the dynasty of Spiess and his brethren, a criminal had been executed at this spot. Oehlenschläger had gone one afternoon with his sister and the servant to the Suderfeld, to gather some walnuts, which the gardener had still left on the topmost branches of the trees. His sister had been rather silent and gloomy during their walk;—the |