life, as it develops itself in time in the manifold tangled chains of causes and effects. It is, however, impossible that he can have all the data for this; he cannot have seen all and discovered all. He is forsaken at every moment by the original of his picture, or a false one substitutes itself for it, and this so constantly that I think I may assume that in all history the false outweighs the true. The poet, on the contrary, has comprehended the Idea of man from some definite side which is to be represented ; thus it is the nature of his own self that objectifies itself in it for him. His knowledge, as we explained above when speaking of sculpture, is half a priori; his ideal stands before his mind firm, distinct, brightly illuminated, and cannot forsake him; therefore he shows us, in the mirror of his mind, the Idea pure and distinct, and his delineation of it down to the minutest particular is true as life itself.[1] The great ancient historians are, therefore, in those particulars in which their data fail them, for example, in the speeches of their heroes — poets; indeed their whole manner of handling their material approaches
- ↑ It is scarcely necessary to say that wherever I speak of poets I refer exclusively to that rare phenomenon the great true poet. I mean no one else; least of all that dull insipid tribe, the mediocre poets, rhymsters, and inventors of fables, that flourishes so luxuriantly at the present day in Germany. They ought rather to have the words shouted in their ears unceasingly from all sides—
Mediocribus esse poëtis
Non homines, non Dî, non concessere columnæ.It is worthy of serious consideration what an amount of time—both their own and other people's—and paper is lost by this swarm of mediocre poets, and how injurious is their influence. For the public always seizes on what is new, and has naturally a greater proneness to what is perverse and dull as akin to itself. Therefore these works of the mediocre poets draw it away and hold it back from the true masterpieces and the education they afford, and thus working in direct antagonism to the benign influence of genius, they ruin taste more and more, and retard the progress of the age. Such poets should therefore be scourged with criticism and satire without indulgence or sympathy till they are induced, for their own good, to apply their muse rather to reading what is good rather than to writing what is bad. For if the bungling of the incompetent so raised the wrath of the gentle Apollo that he could flay Marsyas, I do not see on what the mediocre poets will base their claim to tolerance.
