Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations/Volume 1/Preface
PREFACE.
The English reader of these volumes must not expect to find in them the style of romance, which is now so popular, and justly popular, in his own country. These tales do not pretend to be a picture of human nature or human manners; they are either imitations of early traditions, or the traditions themselves, amplified by some modern writer, and must be judged of in reference to such origin. Stories of this kind form an important feature in the literature of the Germans, who seem to be the authenticated historians of Satan in all his varieties of name and attribute. Of such tales, no small portion has been derived from the Harz Mountains; nor is this to be wondered at; the belief in supernatural agents has its native home among mountains and deserts, and snows, and in short wherever society is broken into small masses and detached from the frequent intercourse of the general world; scepticism is the inhabitants of cities as credulity is of solitude, and the man, who was an unbeliever of all things amidst crowds, will become a believer of all things in loneliness.
The legends of these volumes have been gathered from various sources, and, of course, will be found to have characters as various; the elegant and playful Musäus has nothing at all in common with the dark, wild fancy of La Motte Fouqué; just as little similarity is there between Veit Weber and the author of the Freischutz; and though supernatural agency forms the basis of all, the superstructures vary with the varying characters of the authors. It may be said, that reason has nothing to do with any of them, either with sylphs or gnomes, spectres or sorcerers, and this no doubt is true; but reason is not always the most agreeable companion, nor is her constant presence any way condusive to the expansion of the kinder feelings; fiction is the natural point of rest for the mind, when worn out by the stern realities of life: those realities present little that is agreeable, and it is no wonder, therefore, if we seek to escape from them in the dreams of falsehood. There is something too, in such tales, that touches a spring common to all hearts; the connexion between the visible and invisible world is a thing which all reason denies, but all feeling allows, and which it always must allow, or fancy will be so completely subdued to truth that even poetry will have lost its value. Philosophy, or what is called philosophy, is, indeed, very busy in its vocation; fiction is banished from the nursery; Jack the Giant Killer is superseded by moral essays, and the reign of reason is speedily about to commence, when we shall believe nothing but what can be proved to be, and shall attain a happy exemption from those vulgar prejudices, which have hitherto held society together. But the dawn of that glory has not yet appeared; the dreams of Homer, Shakspear, and Milton are still tolerated; they still shine on in the night of our darkness—long may they do so! the daylight, that would extinguish them, would be worse than darkness.
It must however be allowed that, with the Germans, fancy has had too much sway, for it has seldom been under the guidance of sound taste, and the consequence is, that the multitude of their original fictions is disgraced by the most babarous absurdities. The same may, in some measure, be said of their modern romance, but at the same time the reader can not fail to be delighted with the variety and richness of its inventions, diablerie with the Germans being as inexhaustible as the fairyism of the Eastern world. Sometimes it is presented to us under its most terrific forms; at others it appears, as in Musäus under a light veil of irony, in a tone half jest, half earnest and that is, indeed, its most beautiful form. Few tales are more pleasing than the Spectre Barber, one of the happiest illustrations of this class of writing, where a playful fancy sports with a fiction, that was at no distant time the delight and terror of the peasant’s fireside. La Motte Fouqué, on the contrary, is altogether a magician of darkness, who loves to treat the wild and impossible as serious matters, but who always endeavours to draw from them some moral conclusions. Veit Weber, another great name of romance, builds his tales on the dark times of chivalry, when the kinghts plundered the people with the sword and the monks plundered the knights with the bible. Ottmar and Büsching are the antiquarians of romance, who have collected the scattered traditions of the peasantry, and retailed them to the world with little deviation from their originals. Madame Naubert is more akin in her genius to Musäus, though a spirit of an inferior order; her materials are generally of the light and playful kind; or, if not, she makes them so by the manner in which she works them up. Laun is the historian of ghost-stories, which have really occurred but which have subsequently been found capable of rational explanation; a translation of three or four of his tales has lately been published by Ackermann; the work is well executed and affords much wholesome food for the over-credulous. Grimm is the collector of Nursery Tales, and as such is well known to the English reader. Lothar has a volume on the plan of Ottmar’s the most essential difference being its inferiority. On the same principle are two volumes of Popular Tales, published at Eisenach, without the author’s name, but many of them are exceedingly entertaining. Lebrecht and Tieck are the authors of many beautiful legends, but they have generally trusted to their own fancy instead of building themselves on antient traditions. Backzo’s legends are something in the manner of La Motte Fouqué, though neither so fanciful nor so original. But to detail all the volumes of German legend and romance would be to give a bookseller’s catalogue; for, not only has Moravia, Silesia, Thuringia, and Austria, each its distinct legends, but every quarter of the Harz Mountains, east, west, north, and south, has its own exclusive terrors; and when to these are added the fictions of later writers, the catalogue swells beyond all reasonable limit.
It may perhaps be objected to the present collection that, in two instances, it goes over ground that has already been trodden; the Spectre-Barber has appeared in the Tales of the Dead, and Kibitz, in the Ladies Magazine, but the first of these translations was given in a mutilated form, nearly one half the tale having been omitted, and Kibitz seems to have been nearly re-written, so that neither interferes with the plan of the present work, where the alterations, with very few exceptions, are purely verbal. But this objection, if it be an objection, is confined to the two legends already mentioned; the remaining tales, to the best of our knowledge, have not hitherto been translated, so that, whatever may be their faults in other respects, they will at least have the merit of novelty with the English reader, and that, though not the highest, is certainly not the least, of commendations.