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Celtic Literature: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt -

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt -

compared with the play and power of Shakspeare’s style or Dante’s, suggest at once the difference between Goethe’s task and theirs, and the fitness of the faithful laborious German spirit for its own task. Dante’s task was to set forth the lesson of the world from the point of view of mediaeval Catholicism; the basis of spiritual life was given, Dante had not to make this anew. Shakspeare’s task was to set forth the spectacle of the world when man’s spirit re-awoke to the possession of the world at the Renaissance. The spectacle of human life, left to bear its own significance and tell its own story, but shown in all its fulness, variety, and power, is at that moment the great matter; but, if we are to press deeper, the basis of spiritual life is still at that time the traditional religion, reformed or unreformed, of Christendom, and Shakspeare has not to supply a new basis. But when Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of spiritual life; she had to find it again; Goethe’s task was,—the inevitable task for the modern poet henceforth is,—as it was for the Greek poet in the days of Pericles, not to preach a sublime sermon on a given text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of human life and the glory of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human life afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it. This is not only a work for style, eloquence, charm, poetry; it is a work for science; and the scientific, serious German spirit, not carried away by this and that intoxication of ear, and eye, and self-will, has peculiar aptitudes for it.

We, on the other hand, do not necessarily gain by the commixture of elements in us; we have seen how the clashing of natures in us hampers and embarrasses our behaviour; we might very likely be more attractive, we might very likely be more successful, if we were all of a piece. Our want of sureness of taste, our eccentricity, come in great measure, no doubt, from our not being all of a piece, from our having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity. The Rue de Rivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is another, and Stonehenge is another; but we have a turn for all three, and lump them all up together. Mr. Tom Taylor’s translations from Breton poetry offer a good example of this mixing; he has a genuine feeling for these Celtic matters, and often, as in the Evil Tribute of Nomenoe, or in Lord Nann and the Fairy, he is, both in movement and expression, true and appropriate; but he has a sort of Teutonism and Latinism in him too, and so he cannot forbear mixing with his Celtic strain such disparates as:-