"Then were seen the Universities rising, and, their professors themselves leading their young pupils to these battles of giants. The battles of Lutzen and Bautzen have never yet been examined under the point of view which would give them a melancholy interest. These glorious generations meet in presence. The conscripts of the empire from eighteen to twentyone; the students of the Universities, who bore the funeral flag of Queen Louisa, and the oldest of whom was not, perhaps, twenty-two. In the midst of this noble young blood thundered 1500 pieces of cannon, tearing this rosy flesh, and maiming these limbs; and yet not one of these youths flinched, for they combated for their mother-country."

tion of what is or ought to be positive. He can seldom get beyond a hint or an assertion, unless with some special feeling to when he would accuse Canning of an act as gratify. No one is more positive or bold, unknown as assassination to the British character; or when, depreciating Wellington, he would exalt the clemency of Alexander as the star of a Russo-Gallic alliance.

We turn to the Comte de la Garde. Pleasant as diplomacy is, and gay and brilliant as must have been the aspect of Vienna in 1814, and the early part of 1815, we suspect that, beneath the endless succession of fetes prepared for the many crowned heads,

Terrible this may be, but after the cold-wearing, at length, their crowns with some blooded, tortuous, hollow hypocrisy with feeling of security, there lurked a dissatisfied which M. Capefigue commonly afflicts us, feeling; something like that which affects it at least healthily stirs the blood. Never ourselves in the perusal of the Comte de la had a country been so trampled upon, plun- Garde's gaudy book. While we are stundered, and degraded as was Prussia by ned with the music of monster concerts, and France, after the battle of Jena. The con- confounded with a tumult of military fêtes, tributions levied upon the peasantry threat- varied with grotesque revivals of the cusened to convert the fields into a waste. toms of the middle age,-while troubaThe wantonness of the conqueror was ex-dours, paladins and their dames, falconers hibited in outrages the most revolting. The indignity offered by Napoleon to the beautiful, clever, and heart-broken queen, was imitated in grossness of a worse de scription. It is a fact known to many living officers that, at the occupation of Paris, Blucher held an order issued by the military governor of Berlin, to provide the French officers with female companions under a menace that may be imagined.

Why do we dwell on this here? Because M. Capefigue endeavours to confound English with Russians, as urged by one common desire to oppress and humiliate France after the victory of Waterloo. He does so for the purpose of exalting the clemency of the Emperor Alexander. The truth of the matter is, that it was the Duke of Wellington who saved the monuments of the French capital from the destruction to which they were doomed by Blucher; the authority of Alexander was interposed with the same object, but at the instigation of the Duke. Capefigue is an avowed advocate for an alliance between France and Russia, and it is in accordance with this view, that, treating of this bitter period of the occupation of Paris, he endeavours to conciliate his countrymen towards Russia by representing Alexander and his Russians as mediators and saviours against the wrath and cupidity of English and Prussians.

and tableaux vivans, glitter past us,-while all is glare, noise, dancing, feeding, gambling, and enjoyment,- -we cannot but bear in mind, that the map of Europe is spread out itself like a banquet, for each royal guest to take his share according to his might. At this feast there is no harmony; each eyes the other with distrust and suspicion; and while Alexander is laying his heavy hand upon Poland, and the whisper of partition of France is going round, Talleyrand and the English minister are signing a secret treaty with Austria, with the object of raising a barrier against the dangerous rise of Russian power.

The Comte de la Garde saw only the banquet and the salons; he was not admitted behind the scenes, and accordingly has no secrets to reveal. He saw kings in dominoes, and empresses in masks, and was warned not to mistake a queen for a grisette. He heard some dissertations, but they were upon the fine arts and conversations at the dinner-table of Lord S—; they turned upon Shakspeare and Corneille, the gobelin tapestry, and Sévres porcelain; in which discussion the Frenchman, of course, came off with flying colours. We doubt not that in the circumstances there was a polite agreement to allow French vanity the consolation of calling Shakspeare rude and uncultivated, and of What credit is due to M. Capefigue as exalting Racine above Milton. Anything an historian may, therefore, be easily de- might be said, so that diplomacy was not termined. The vagueness which in diplo- called upon to make premature revelations. matic writing is with him the perfection of We are told that the sovereigns themselves skill, he himself carries into the apprecia-only talked politics one hour during the

twenty-four; and that the dullest, for it, quilly replied the diplomatist. And the rehearwas the hour before dinner; and even then sal took place. the subject was quickly despatched, for contemplation of the innocent slaughter of

task. Since the silence or death of Lessing, lamenting or with satirizing; he applied a Schiller, and Göthe-that is to say, for the last forty or fifty years-no branch of German literature and art has fallen into such undeniable decay. Most others have made admitted progress: the drama alone, the youngest and the most feeble shoot of German genius, has been stunted and discouraged. Perhaps some of the causes lie upon the surface.

remedy. When, by his vigorous criticism, he had demolished the slavish following of the French school, and fixed the attention of his countrymen on the great dramatic poet of England, he may be said to have created the German stage. Göthe's influence was less favourable His Goetz von Berlichingen' announced his early inclination to the theatre: but of the pieces he There is no central public in Germany: afterwards constructed in that form, Ega want which has been of evil influence to mont' and 'Clavigo' alone continue to be many of the national interests, but to none acted; while the greater works of Tasso," more decidedly than to the proper cultiva- Iphigenia,' and the incomparable Faust," tion and development of a national dramatic introduced that dangerous distinction begenius. The numerous German capitals-tween acted and unacted drama, which every one of them strongly indoctrinated was fated to mislead so many in their apwith peculiar and distinguishable tastes; proaches to the stage. The third is the each in some sort playing rival to the other; greatest name in the history of the German all existing by their own special laws, man- theatre. Schiller's influence, its character, ners, and customs; Vienna praising what and its enduring effects, are known to all; they are laughing at in Berlin, Weimar not we have lately enlarged upon them. knowing what they admire in Frankforthave offered little of that settled public guidance to the dramatic poet, without which the highest order of stage success can rarely be achieved. To this are to be added the operation of censorships, more especially fatal to the health of comedy, and the luckless influence of the German governments in every other point wherein they have meddled with the theatre. It was they who cumbered it with its absurdly restrictive laws; who disabled it of its few chances of control by popular influence; who effected that unhappy metamorphosis of the gay, lively, self-supporting actor, into the compelled servant of a manager, or the life-hired menial of a prince; and finally, when some daring dramatist had even braved these dangers, and with them the certainties of mutilation that awaited his work from public censor, from prince-fed actor, from ignorant critic, it was the wisdom of these governments which so ordered the system of his remuneration, as to starve him back, with as little delay as might be, into pursuits he had unwisely abandoned. Our pedantry is so great,' said Lessing, when he satirically deplored this condition of things, that we consider boys as the only proper fabricators of theatrical wares. Men have more serious and worthy employments in the State and in the Church. What men write should beseem the gravity of men: a compendium of law and philosophy; an erudite chronicle of this or that imperial city; an edifying sermon, and such like.' But Lessing did not content himself with

* Dramaturgie, 1st April, 1768.

Ouce established, and its native claims allowed, a schism broke out in the dramatic literature of Germany, and two schools' set themselves in marked opposition: the romantic,' and what we should call the domestic. The last-named had its founder in Lessing, who set it up in rivalry to the French classical manner; and whose 'Sara Samson,' 'Emilia Galotti,' and other plays of the same kind, turned Göthe and Schiller in that direction: the one in his 'Clavigo,' the other in his Cabal and Love' (Kabale und Liebe), and in such episodes of his greater works as the Max and Thekla of 'Wallenstein.' But while this example strengthened the more direct followers of Lessing in the domestic school (the Ifflands and the Kotzebues), the same writers, particularly Göthe, were responsible for influences that tended strongly to what we have called the romantic school, of which the leaders were Tieck, the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, and Arnim. There is no very exact meaning in the term romantic, but it was the word in vogue.

The effects of this style of writing, in criticism perhaps more than in dramatic production, were adverse to the progress of the German theatre. The dramas of Tieck and Arnim were impossibilities. The thin, fantastic, cloudy world of elves and fairies, of spectres and of dreams, which had found itself so effective in the tale, the novel, or the song, showed pale and utterly out of place in the compact form of the drama. Tieck's Genoveva' and 'Blue Beard" were poems of imagination and a sharp original fancy, but their dramatic form was accidental: not bestowed upon them by

qualities of their own, but by the voluntary! the Spanish of Aretino Mureto; Don Guafterthought of the poet. The same is to tierre,' after Calderon; and 'Life a Dream,' be said of Arnim's dramas, a new edition also after Calderon. of which has been lately published by Wilhelm Grimm. The only one of this school, indeed, who actually found his way to the stage, was Henrich von Kleist (not to be confounded with the elder poet of the same name, Christian Eweld von Kleist), whose dramas of Kate from Heilbronn,' adapted for representation by Holbein, and The Prince of Hesse-Homburg,' are acted now and then even to this day, attracting such as have a touch of their own mysticism, but in themselves as weak and sickly as the poor poet had been, who in 1811 took to drowning out of melancholy and despair. But the critics of the school were a more formidable party than the dramatic producers. Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Tieck himself, Franz Horn, and others in connection with them, brought all their talents to bear against the existing German theatre, and proved a formidable impediment to its growth. Young and feeble as it was, they proposed nothing but the very strongest drink for its nurture. Shakspeare and Calderon: these were the only models they would offer for imitation; nothing short of these could be the salvation of the drama. And straightway on this Procrustes bed of criticism, modest and quiet German poets stretched themselves out, to the terrible injury of what limbs they had, and to no earthly production of any they had not. All this wrought but one result: the unnatural excess of effort introduced into the drama a deplorable affectation, a phrenetic, convulsive style, a kind of intoxication of the pathetic, which have to this day depressed and retarded it. And it is worthy of remark that at this very time, in opposition to the violent demands of Tieck, the Schlegels, and their followers, it was reserved for a writer of a more moderate genius and less exaggerated claims to prove with what far more useful results the foreign model might have been brought in aid of the native effort, if a modest, practical spirit had only guided and controlled its introduction. Schreijvogel's pleasing translations from the Spanish drama are still acted. He was a man, we may add, of very great merit, though little known out of Germany. He was born in 1768, and was properly the creator of the first German theatre, the Burg-theater' at Vienna He died in 1832: one of the first victims to the cholera. His best and most successful translations are Donna Diana,' from

• He wrote under the name of West.

Meanwhile Iffland and Kotzebue had steadily and perseveringly cultivated what we have called the domestic school, the bourgeois drama (das bürgerliche Schauspiel). Both these writers are widely known; both are popular to this day with German audiences. Overflooding with his comédie larmoyante' every little theatre in the country, Kotzebue was too profuse and immoderate in production to care at any time for progress or elevation. Iffland, himself the best existing actor, and the head of a dramatic school, some members of which are yet living at Berlin, had a practical knowledge of the stage superior to any of his contemporaries: his motives were well marked and effective; his characters strongly individualized: but his plots were in every instance from commonplace life, and that in its most prosaic form. A bankruptcy, a gambling loss, a theft if possible : these were the catastrophes of the plays of Iffland. A generous husband, who forgives his femme perduc; an illegitimate son, who reconciles his mother to his father; an uncle, who arrives in the nick of time from the Indies, West or East: these were the favourite heroes of Kotzebue, whom our German friends have the most loudly applauded for upwards of thirty years. Not classical' tragedy this, it must be confessed; no need of the cothurnus here, to mount up the actor to the poet's requirements; here are heroes much within standard height of the Prussian soldier, and passions other than those whereat Germany might have wept with Shakspeare, or shuddered with Calderon. It may be further admitted that there is often in these writers more sterility than simplicity, less clearness than insipidity in their intentions, and of the humble much less than of the vulgar in their general scope and aim. But there was some reality to go upon; something that made appeal to the honest German playgoer on the score of what he had felt himself; and all the idealisms on abstractions in the world went for nothing against it. The romantic' school was worsted; and the highest order of genius then existing in Germany was withdrawn from the service of the stage, and unluckily devoted to the misdirection of other talents on their way to it. Success vitiated the bourgeois style, of course: but though its fortunes were not without vicissitude, and other modified styles, influenced by the critical sway which the 'romanticists' maintained, be

came grafted on it, we must admit that it has on the whole kept the victory it won. When we arrive at the most recent datein the detailed review to which we now proceed-it will be seen that the plays of the two most successful stage writers of the day, the Princess Amelia of Saxe, and the Baron Münch-Bellinghausen* are but the revival, with modern additions, of the principles of Lessing and Iffland.

in 1823. Impassioned and ill-regulated in his life and in his poetry; without a solid foundation in character or in knowledge; three times married, and three times divorced; now selecting for his dramatic hero the great author of the Reformation, and then announcing himself a zealous convert to the Roman Catholic religion; at Berlin the ruling dramatic author, and at Vienna a preaching, proselytising fantastic priest: Werner, wandering on this earth like a restless shadow, proved, by so many changeful contrasts and vicissitudes, that the wild, irregular spirit in his poetical. productions, was at least no affectation, but a truly-felt, remediless, sickness of his soul.

What the Germans call das Schicksalsdrama, the drama founded on the idea of fate (Shicksal), comes first in our review. It was a strange product of the conflicting theories and tendencies of the time: a sort of wild clashing together of the most inflated romantic pretensions, and the most ordina- His first dramatic work was The Sons ry domestic interests. Here was Calderon of the Valley,' and, notwithstanding its with a vengeance, his Christian inspiration, vague, impracticable, rhapsodical character, his wild catholicism, wedded to the old re- it contained more of the chaotic nature and morseless Fate of the Greeks: here was genius of the man than any of his later all-sufficient sympathy for the wonderful writings. It is in two parts: the first, and mysterious in nature and in man, to The Templars in Cyprus' (Die Templer please even the most exacting romanticists: auf Cypern); and the second, The Brethand could Shakspeare have been fairly rep-ren of the Cross' (Die Kreuzesbrüder.) Each resented by supernatural passions and un- of these parts is, itself, a play of six acts, earthly fancies, here was a laudable effort and the two fill two thick volumes. The to imitate Shakspeare. Superstition, mys- subject is the persecution and destruction ticism, or murder, had constant possession of the Order of the Templars: a rich and of the scene; fright and shudder were the tragic subject as it stands in history, and fashion; pity was dethroned by terror, and presenting a worthy hero in the person of this despot ruled alone. Conceptions so Jaques Molay. But mere history had no wild and irregular must have a special lan- charms for Werner. It was the history guage too: and the passionate rhythm of entirely within himself to which he had rethe trochaic verse, modelled on Calderon, solved to give utterance, and a mighty supplanted the steady flow of the iambic. strange business he made of it. He hapThe representatives of this extraordinary pened at this time to be a brother, and an dramatic style (which, after all, would never exalted one, of the order of Freemasons; have taken hold of the audiences as it did, and so, behind the full and warlike form of but for its points of human interest studied the Templars, to which in the first part of in the school of Lessing) were Werner, his poem (where their condition before their Müllner, and Houwald: three men of very fall is pictured) he now and then does different talents, and the first by far the most striking dramatic justice, he places the remarkable. But for him, indeed, there shadowy power and control of a mystic inhad been little interest for us in das Schick-stitution: anew, never heard-of rival Order, salsdrama. A gifted spirit,' as Mr. Carlyle has well described him,†' struggling earnestly amid the new, complex, tumultuous influences of his time and country, but without force to body himself forth from amongst them; a keen, adventurous swimmer, aiming towards high and distant landmarks, but too weakly in so rough a sea; for the currents drive him far astray, and he sinks at last in the waves, attaining little for himself, and leaving little, save the memory of his failure, to others.'

called The Sons of the Valley, half-spiritual, half-real, omnipotent, ubiquitous, and full

Das

*We subjoin a list of the whole. Die Söhne des Thales (The Sons of the Valley): 2 vols. Berlin, 1803. Der Vier-und-Zwanzigste Februar (The Twenty-fourth of February): Leipsic, 1815. 2 vols. Berlin, 1806, and Vienna, 1820. Martin Kreuz an der Ostsee (The Cross of the Baltic Sea): Luther; oder, die Weihe der Kraft (Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Strength). Berlin, 1817. Attila: Berlin, 1808. Wanda (Queen of Sarmatia): Tübingen, 1810. Kunigunde (St. Cunigunde; Leipsic, 1815. Die Mutter der Makkahder (The Mother of the Maccabees): Vienna, 1815. The complete edition of his works was published in 1840, by his friends Grimma, and contains in addition to the dramas, the lyric poems and the sermons preach+In Carlyle's Miscellanies a paper will be founded at Vienna. His friend and companion, Hitzig, on the Life of Werner.

Zacharias Werner was born at Konigsberg in Prussia, 1768, and died at Vienna,

Frederick Halm is his adopted name.

published his biography at Berlin, in 1823.