man, his genius, his wit, his character, and his misfortunethan the following expression of his concerning himself :

The great author of the universe, the Aristophanes of heaven, has resolved that the little author on earth, the so-styled "Aristophanes of Germany," shall feel, to his inmost soul, what insignificant needle-pricks his most brilliant sarcasms have been, compared with the awful thunderbolts which his divine humor can hurl against weak mortals.

After the audacity and the pathos of words like those, one feels like being "dumb with silence." Indeed, what could possibly be said that would not rather harm than help the sentiment inspired of mingling admiration, horror, and pity?

XIII.
EPILOGUE.

THE author's preface is usually in effect the author's epilogue. But in the present case the preface going before seems not quite to make unnecessary something following after, to say a few things still left unsaid, such as the author, in retrospect of his labor accomplished, would naturally feel like saying to a kindly interested friend at his side.

We shall hardly, we presume, in the opinion of any, have made the mistake of admitting German literary names not worthy to be included in a book like this. We may further, with some confidence, assume that the proportion of space here allotted to one name and another will generally be allowed as approximately true to their comparative importance taken in connection with their adaptedness to interest a popular audience of readers. Yet again. We cannot have gone widely astray in choosing from among the various productions of each several author the one, or the ones, best deserving to be shown to our readers. Of course, in seeking to strike the right critical tone for appreciation of different authors and different masterpieces there is more chance of

failure. At this point we cannot suppose ourselves fortunate enough so to have hit the mark as to unite all qualified suffrages in our favor. What we do hope is that all judges will agree in clearing us of intentional unfairness. If we have anywhere through ignorance made false statements as of fact, we shall on conviction confess ourselves blameworthy; though no writer is bound to know every thing, every writer is at least bound to know what he undertakes to tell as of knowledge.

The present writer profoundly believes that for the interests of literature, quite apart from the interests of life, nothing is more fatal than to attempt the divorce, in thought and in judgment, of character from genius, of morality from literary production. He has criticised constantly in view of this principle. His ethical judgments may thus properly be regarded as pronounced less in the behoof of ethics than in the behoof of letters. Bad men have sometimes been good writers, and, alas, on the other hand, too, good men have sometimes been bad writers; there is no certain inference possible in either direction—from character to production or from production to character. Still, for ourselves, we freely confess, we consider it-and this purely as a matter of literary criticism—of the two courses, safer to infer from a man's known evil life and character that there must be flaw in his literary performance than, inversely, to infer from the apparent excellence of his literary work that his life and character, though apparently evil, must really be good. That which is in character will generally come out in production, whether the production be of art or of literature. Such correspondence— often latent, but seldom lacking, especially where the question is of poetry-between what an author is and what that author does, it is, in each case, within the just province of literary criticism to divine and discover. The danger to the critic of undue personal bias, adverse or favorable, existing on his own part, as to the man whom he criticises, is always great. One criticising must task one's self to be fair--alike to the author considered and to the cause of good literature.

There are many German writers absent even in name from the preceding pages, whom, if this were a history of German literature, it would be an unpardonable deficiency not at least to have mentioned and characterized. We should need, for instance, to have told how Kotzebue, the playwright-what with talent and what with impudence-pushed himself to the front, alongside of Goethe and of Schiller, in the public attention, and, with his century or more of successful plays, renewed on German soil that tradition of fecundity in production for dramatists which is among the wonders of Greek literary history. Kotzebue, to be sure-worked over and adapted in our own language by Sheridan-is known among us to spectators of the drama, by some plays of his remarkable for effective situation and eloquent dialogue; witness his Incas in Peru, more recognizable under its English alias of Pizarro. But Kotzebue was more nearly a charlatan than a classic in German literature. The same may be said of Werner, who may be described as a kind of exaggeration, a reduction to absurdity, of Schiller.

The philosophers, likewise, one would wish to have shown. something of; all the more from the fact that metaphysic speculation in Germany has so vitally affected German literary development-Kant, for instance, having imposed the mold of his system on Schiller's later production, and Fichte and Schelling having, through their idealism in philosophy, prepared the way for romanticism in literature. Jacobi, indeed, among German philosophers, unites a literary, with his philosophical, claim to attention, which well-nigh persuaded us to give him place in the company of our select German immortals. The same like thing might be said of Schleiermacher among theologians; for Schleiermacher translated Plato into German. Among preachers, Krummacher appealed to us for inclusion; and more strongly still, Theremin, a writer on sacred eloquence, who most felicitously joined a delightful lucidity in exposition, inherited, with his blood, from France, to a singular philosophical depth and suggestiveness, communicated, perhaps, by some commingling of German in his

nearer ancestry. The name of Krummacher as preacher recalls that preacher's father. The elder Krummacher was author of many "parables," over which the present writer long affectionately delayed before he could bring himself to give up showing them in specimen to the readers of this book.

Some glance at more recent German literature might appear to be natural here. But the truth is, interests other than literary have, since Goethe's death, for the most part absorbed the intellectual energies of Germany. Revolutionary upheaval, beginning about 1848, soon subsided, or was soon suppressed, into a stagnation and torpor unfriendly to literary achievement. Political, philosophical, and scientific activity, predominating later, left literature proper to languish. Materialism, too—a spirit naturally enough engendered under the incubus of heavy military establishments, which made peace itself seem like war-invaded the land of ideas. As a consequence of these things, and as a consequence too—so, at least, the present writer ventures to think—of a sterilizing influence exerted by Goethe, who in literature added nothing, unless it were the idea of self-culture as the great thing in life, to the stock of human ideas, and who set the example of endlessly elaborating the old, in place of fruitfully originating newat any rate, for some reason or reasons, within the last fifty years, no distinctively literary name, except Heine, stands out with a prominence at all comparable to his. Schopenhauer is not a distinctively literary name, though he did write his oppressive philosophy in almost a literary style; but Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic speculation has registered so deep a score in modern human thought, and whose fame and influence seem in origin only of to-day, in fact wrote his chief work before Goethe died. Germans have indeed continued to think, all the time that they have been with long patience schooling themselves to be the chief military power in Europe; but they have not meantime produced any recognized masterpieces of literature. In history, however-not only in political history, but in history of philosophy, of letters, of art, and of culture-they have achieved praiseworthy things.

German fiction, also, has of late been illustrated with some noteworthy names.

We could hardly hope to make even approximately apprehensible to our readers the self-denials which the necessary limits of space imposed upon us as to the authors to be here included. As to the things to be included from the authors finally chosen, the case was yet more trying. We can truthfully testify that merely to select and condense the translated extracts that appear in the foregoing pages has cost much more labor and thought than to write the original text that introduces or accompanies them.

The effort has constantly been to treat and to show the authors selected, not in such a manner that readers testing our results by the current criticism of the day would find us in accord with prevailing opinion; but in such a manner that readers subsequently pushing, however far, their study of any particular author himself should at no time have just occasion to say that we had seriously misled them.