the terzine of the Basvilliana and the blank verse of the Iliad. I refer to that poem of 1826 dedicated to his wife, in which, anticipating his own early end and surprising the confirmation of this in the silent and preoccupied looks and the furtive tears of the woman he loved, he uttered the following words of consolation, little elegant, indeed, in comparison with those which he was formerly wont to employ in former days, but sincere :

“. . . datti pace, e il core

ad un pensier solleva

di me piú degno e della forte insieme
anima tua. La stella

dell viver mio s'appressa

al suo tramonto; ma sperar ti giovi

che tutto io non morrò: pensa che un nome
non oscuro ti lascio, e tal che un giorno

fra le italiche donne

ti fia bel vanto il dire :-Io fui l'amore

del cantor di Bassville,

del cantor che di care itale note

vesti l'ira d'Achille. . . ." 1

Those "dear Italian notes" had been his true ideal, the cult to which he had devoted his whole life.

1 "... be tranquil, and raise thy heart to a thought more worthy of me and also of thy strong soul. The star of my life draws near its setting, but may it comfort thee to hope that not all of me will die and think that it is no obscure name that I am leaving to thee, a name which one day you may be proud to utter among Italian women, saying: I was the beloved of the singer of Bassville, who clothed the wrath of Achilles in dear Italian notes."

III

SCHILLER

FREDERICK SCHILLER is a great name, which has filled a great place and will continue to fill a great place in the history of poetry. Yet how does he come by that name and that position unless it be due entirely to the hybrid method usual in the writing of poetical history? Indeed, his case can be quoted as a clear instance of the errors in perspective due to such hybrid treatment. For it is only owing to the confusion of history of poetry with that of culture that it has been possible to create the couple GoetheSchiller, par nobile fratrum, lucida sidera of poetry in general and of German poetry in particular. This equivalence or juxtaposition is due to motives really external to art, and to some extent dissimilar from those which led to the coupling of Dante and Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso, Corneille and Racine. It was suggested and imposed, from the fact that the two men had been friends and collaborators for some years, that both had received the applause and the confidence of their compatriots at the moment of their first appearance in the literary world, from their common lot of being selected as standard bearers in Germanic literary and political conflicts. And, on the other hand, it is only owing to the confusion of the history of poetry with that of literary classes and institutions that we hear Schiller exalted as the poet

who "created the German national theatre," the poet whose plays (as a recent historian of literature has declared), "whatever may be their deficiencies, and were they even greater than they are, belong always to the classical drama of Germany."

If we regard the matter, on the other hand, from the exclusive standpoint of poetry, and if we argue with the simplicity of heart which is not unsuitable to that form of history, we should come to the natural conclusion that Schiller belongs to it only as a poet of the second rank. In saying this, we go against the opinion of Horace, for whom poetry of the second rank is unacceptable to gods, men, and booksellers. From our point of view, poets of the second rank would be those ingenious and expert men of letters who avail themselves of artistic forms already discovered, employ them with judgment, and enrich them with psychological, social, and natural observations, in order to compose instructive, elevating or agreeable works. Such men are sensible and decorous writers, yet they are not poets: a fact which does not imply that their works are not sometimes most acceptable, and in their way more " useful," than those of the true poets. That Schiller was a poet of this secondary sort is a conviction which has now penetrated, although not always very clearly stated as having done so, not only the consciousness of other peoples, but also of the Germans themselves. The former, for a brief period, read, translated, and imitated Schiller, looking upon him as a sort of modernized Shakespeare, but now he is neglected, and with the change of political conditions, the recurrence of the first centenary since his death was celebrated in a very different fashion from that of

the famous centenary of his birth, in 1859. German artists and critics, on being asked for their opinions, have confirmed the fall of the poetical reputation of Schiller, though expressing themselves in pious euphemisms. A certain British writer, too, who must be set down as a crank, on being also invited to express a judgment on the matter, candidly confessed that he had never read a line of Schiller, but declared, at the same time, that since he had been endowed with the gift of deducing from the sound of an author's name the quality and value of his work, this gift enabled him to infer that "Schiller" was one of those authors highly recommended in schools, who extract vast yawns from the breast. The gentleman in question was not altogether wrong in his theory of the sound of the name, because the name of a celebrated man becomes impregnated with all the impressions aroused by his work, with the judgments of admiration or of disapproval which it has received, and with the greater or lesser degree of warmth of the said judgments. For this reason, it is very often possible that one who knows nothing but the sound of a name may yet be able to gather from that, whether it be a question of a great, a little or a mediocre writer, of a genius or a pedant, of an author mysterious and profound in thought and feeling, or easy and accessible to the delight of everyone. It is true that, in reducing the glory of Schiller to modest dimensions, an attempt has also been made to change the value of its various components and by belittling the merit of his mature plays, those which used to be considered perfect, to extol that of his early plays, which are imperfect and chaotic. But I have strong reasons for suspecting that this inversion of values has been brought about

by a criterion active in Germany (and also outside Germany properly so-called). This criterion came into fashion with the great value attached to the echtdeutsch, the ur-Germanisch, whereby a realism overexcited and convulsed has been taken as the mark of genuine, sublime poetry. This realism, save for its crudity, seems to me to be quite other than purely and primitively Germanic, derived from the forest of Arminius; indeed it is nothing but an indigestion of Shakespeare, blended with the generous vintage of Rousseau, which first appeared in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century and several times renewed itself, with other vinous admixtures, among which must not be forgotten powerful but perfidious draughts drawn from the Catholicsacrilegious-incestuous cantines of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand.

Shakespeare is a moment of the spirit's history, and he cannot be repeated at pleasure; so that when we see his Lears, his Edmunds, his Cordelias in the costumes of the old Moor, or of Franz Moor, or of Amalia in the Raüber, we seem to be passing from myth and fable to a brutal realism, which violates the lofty and delicate creations of great poetry. Giannettino Doria too, in the Fiesco, is an evil-minded, tyrannous bully compared with Richard III, and the Moorish assassin of the same play, instead of attending to his ignoble business, engages in fool's talk like certain of the Elizabethan clowns, thereby transporting something foreign into the society where it is introduced. The imitation is strident. I am quite well aware of the effect that must have been produced in those days by the furious tirades of Charles Moor against social laws and tyrannies :

D