Popular Tales of the Germans/Volume 1/Introduction
A
DIALOGUE
CONSISTING CHIEFLY OF
SOLILOQUIES.
———Nudos incurris in enses.
REVIEWER.
WHERE, friend, in the name of nonsense, did you rake all this rubbish together?
PUBLISHER.
Alas, poor Semele! the Thunderer’s blaze was too much for thee!—Mercy, good Sir: have some consideration of these poor shattered nerves. Relax the dignified severity of that stern brow a few folds: and let those oracular lips forbear to pout such cutting contempt. I feel every bud of hope in my bosom nipped by the frost of disdain.—But, between friends, suppose you unmask for a moment, and descend from your monthly stilts, that we may have a little confidential chat. We booksellers and you critics are, you know, to one another alternately patrons and protégès. A good understanding may be serviceable on both sides. As to the author of these tales, I did indeed make a slight enquiry concerning him; and was told, if I recollect right, that his bones were mouldering in the churchyard at Weimar, or a place with some such barbarous name. His spirit, for ought I know or care, may be freezing in Saturn or frying in Mercury: or, perhaps, the German is basking in the Elysian fields along side the Grecian Musæus, encircled by a ring of baby ghosts, crowding to hear his Lilliputian tales. But, whether alive or dead, a foreigner is never likely to come under articles with me; so I pay little regard to his birth, either in this or the other world, these being matters quite out of my line. What is to our present purpose is simply this:—The Translator came and laid his bundle at my door; I was tempted to take the foundling in, and bestow upon it a decent dress—which was certainly not cut out for a shroud. As my gentleman went off, he said: ‘I shall lie for the present under a total eclipse. Should the Reviewing Pack give their tongues merrily, and the public heartily join in the cry, I shall emerge, like Madam Luna, at the hooping and hallooing of the cannibals, from the jaws of the great dragon: and I may possibly be visible with another bantling or two of the same breed in my arms!’
The risque, therefore, you see, of this adventure is all my own. When a writer prints on his own account, you may plume yourself in your impartiality, and execute rigorous justice. But the case is different now, and I only just entreat you to say a few civil things: hereafter you may find that one good turn deserves—
REVIEWER.
Hold, hold, I beseech you: your anxiety makes you forget yourself. If your imprudent discourse should get abroadtwo or three unfortunate anecdotes have lately circulated among our country readers. The well-known discovery on the subject of ‘those truly original and excellent discourses’ involved our corps. Poor Bk should have kept his secret better. And the learned Doctor, who translates Greek orations out of French, was near spoiling all by his eagerness. His critique had almost stepped into the world before his history. The management in this case was much too gross.
In fact, if it was known that an individual critic, and not a society, as it is given out, is opposed to an individual author—and that the former individual is sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy or a rival of the latter, our articles would often be read as mere advertisements—Take away our magic we, our ideal association, and our standing joke, we grey-beards, and we should be able to do as little execution upon the race of writers as Catherine without her standing army upon the nations of infidels—So not a word more on this subject, I beg.
We now resume our judicial capacity, and proceed to public sentence. Here we brook neither interruption nor dispute, witness our monthly correspondence, in which we so cavalierly garble, misrepresent, and confute the remonstrances of the damned, whenever we do not find it more convenient to suppress them.
We have not been able to discover whether this collection of puerilities is of our own, or, as it is pretended, of foreign growth. Wherever it was found, it would have been far more adviseable to leave it in its original obscurity, than to expose its absurdities thus naked to public scorn.
PUBLISHER.
I just recollect an anecdote which affords me some consolation for the abruptness of your first question, and the harshness of your present stricture. When the most popular relater of popular tales had presented to his princely patron his copious narrative, with its rich embroidery of knights and dames, squires and palfreys, Moors and Christians, witches and enchanters, saints and phantoms, the only compliment he received was, ‘Where the devil, Signor Ludovico, didst thou pick up all this trash?’ Princes are only omnipotent; omniscience they have relinquished to Reviewers: the case is therefore not perfectly in point. But the omen is not discouraging.
REVIEWER.
Content to pass slightly over absurdities that provoke no laughter, and improbabilities that occasion no surprize, we should have consigned these tales to a quiet corner of our monthly catalogue: but they are marked by one feature so prominent, that we cannot, as guardians of the public taste and morals, refrain from setting our note of reprobation upon it.—Every page teems with profane allusions. Whenever the author, whose range of information seems unusually narrow, is at a loss for a metaphor or an allusion, he has recourse to his Bible. Neither the sanctity of the patriarchs, nor the respect due to old age, as in the instance of the venerable Nahor; nor the tremendous strength of the giants, the sons of Anak, which could daunt the armies of Israel, and defeat, for a time, the gracious purpose of hewing to pieces the idolatrous nations, and extirpating them from the face of the promised land, can restrain the fallies of his riotous imagination. Although we ourselves have oftener than once entered our protest against this spurious species of wit, we are sorry to observe that it is still well received by a numerous class of readers. Ludere cum sacris is, alas! become a favourite game. The faculties of the human understanding no longer fall prostrate at the sound of miracles and mysteries. And the example of those who profess seriously to examine how far the conduct of the favourites of Heaven corresponds to the rules of morality, is even more alarming to genuine piety than the sneer of the scornful.
PUBLISHER.
A serious charge, I confess! I should be glad to hear how the author could extricate himself. I own I did not myself like his flippant familiarity with the good people of Israel; and having one day, by way of experiment, read Richilda, or the Progress from Vanity to Vice, to a very numerous mixed circle, an old lady, a constant frequenter of the neighbouring meeting-house in Black-friars, vehemently protested against setting Eve’s apple on a level with that of Atalanta, though the latter was of gold purified in the fire; and she declared herself more scandalized by the concluding allusion than she had at any time felt at the lewdest print that ever stared her in the face as she walked along the public streets.
May there not, however, be more thoughtlessness than deliberate impiety in this offence? Popular tales are addressed to all ages and conditions. If an illustration is wanted, where can it be so successfully sought as in a book familiar to us all? Though Sandford and Merton, in some few families, may have supplanted Lot’s daughters and Potiphar’s wife, Sampson and Dalilah, together with the royal Solomon, and all his proverbs and concubines, thanks to our good mothers and nurses, we have all these edifying stories well impressed upon our memories, ready to come forward at the shortest notice. I conceive, therefore, that these allusions may have been chosen as universally intelligible.
REVIEWER.
We are more disposed to censure the execution than the design of this performance. Tales handed down from generation to generation carry with them a strong intrinsic recommendation. The wayward fancy of man is always apt to make an excursion beyond the bounds of this working-day world, and take its sport in the millennium of possibilities. But this playful disposition is most indulged in the careless infancy of the race. At all ages, however, we are ready enough to quit sober history and dull truth for these frolics of imagination. Frequent repetition supplies the place of writing and record. No country perhaps has suffered these primitive fables to perish, and their preservation is alone a sufficient proof of their bewitching power. The Highland traditions themselves were probably capable of being worked up into agreeable romances, if they had aimed at any thing short of Epic honours. At that moment all their charm vanished. Instead of the turbulent temper, coarse appetites, low cunning, unrestrained ferociousness, and unrelenting vengeance, relieved by those magnanimous atchievements, sage reflections, and spirit-stirring sentiments, which, like transient gleams succeeded by sudden squalls, compose the unsettled weather of a savage mind, an endless procession of undistinguishable automatons is marched in the same slow solemn pace, across the unchanging scene. The kingly Fingal and his grenadiers decline from their state as little as the archangel Raphael: their gestures, actions, and thoughts, are as stiff and monstrous as the style in which they are described; their passions are too dignified for sympathy; national vanity itself has not been able to endure the tædium produced by such uniform solemnity; and however our indignation may be roused by the alarm of an imposture, to have disgraced a subject capable of affecting the fancy so agreeably may justly be considered as a much more heinous literary crime, by readers at once sensible of its power, and of the unpleasing effect of the necromancer Macpherson’s disenchanting wand.—
PUBLISHER.
Faith, there seems to be something new in this idea. I’ll e’en ask the best novelist in my pay, whether he cannot contrive to new-model Ossian, and adapt him to the most vulgar capacity. But I do not remember any such over-charged imagery and fatiguing pomp in my Tales. In the Legends of Number-Nip, the author’s muse sports like a child: she takes her pleasure in huts and cottages, rather than in halls and palaces. His Baron is shewn more distinctly in his indigent estate than in his affluence. The daughters enjoy but one day of luxury for fix of solitude and hardship. His hermit-knight and runaway ’squire are surely not characters elevated above
REVIEWER.
We could easily undertake to shew that our author has not seized the full advantage of his subject. He has not been careful to interest the reader in the fortunes of any of his personages: nor are his characters delineated with sufficient precision. They come, and no heart beats at their approach: they go, and leave behind them no solicitude for their fate. When a writer has before him all that observation has ascertained of the course of nature; when he adds to this all that superstition and ignorance have dreamed of powers supernatural; and when he assumes the liberty of mixing these heterogeneous materials without constraint, we may expect him to produce some striking situations. But in the work before us we can discover little that affects us with pity or laughter. The beginning of the second volume irresistibly reminds us of the Tempest, and Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, but Number-Nip has neither the airy lightness of Ariel, nor the entertaining half malicious archness of Puck. This Prince of the Gnomes partakes of the gloom of his own dreary subterraneous realms.
Our author seems to understand little of a painter’s artifice. He shews his figures without management or perspective. Ignorant, as it would appear, of the means of setting at work the reader’s fancy, he displays every thing in its native simplicity; and for want of a little seasonable concealment destroys the whole effect of his exhibition.—
PUBLISHER.
The style of your picturesque artists is very different. Yorick, for instance, by a few careless scratches, as they would seem, often goes beyond the most finished piece of another master. At the slightest of his pathetic touches the tender-hearted dissolve away in sorrow. The very slipper of his fille de chambre is enough to set an inflammable imagination all on fire. The foolish fat scullion meanwhile stares unconcerned, even at the sketch of Maria, and wonders what the by-standers can find in the scrawl.
Another favourite of the present hour works after a different fashion. He empties plenty of lamp-black into his pot of rancid oil, whisks it furiously about, soaks his brush thoroughly, dashes it dripping wet upon the canvas, scrubs away till he becomes faint—and at length, when he exhibits his portrait, the connoisseurs laugh in their sleeves, to find that the right honourable Edmund has varnished those whom he only designed to blacken.
Our artist, who had to draw as well for the multitude as their betters, is plainer than the one, and less dashing than the other. Of necessity his portraits may be more antiquated and uncouth than those of many other masters. But the features of our, ancestors, in spite of their ruffs and farthingales, are human features. The fashion of dress prevailing in different nations, ages, and occupations, makes but a very small variation in the play of the machinery within. And if this be faithfully represented, and that well delineated, we may be gratified at once by the display of historical and poetical truth.—I doubt if Cervantes, the first of masters, can shew me a more whimsical figure than our honest Swabian gaping for swans at the mouth of his hermit’s den, the morning after he became the confidant of his master’s amours.
REVIEWER.
In taking leave of the work before us, we cannot but acknowledge that there are dispersed here and there some glimmerings, which might have been easily improved into bright coruscations of wit. We suspect, however, that in this instance the author, if there be really more than one person concerned, has suffered from the negligence or unskilfulness of the translator, who appears sometimes to suppress local allusions, and sometimes to substitute ideas or terms more familiar to the English reader.
PUBLISHER.
And so much the better for the English reader, if he has taken these liberties judiciously! Is not an English crown as good as a German dollar, provided it be sterling coin? And how long has exchange been accounted robbery?
But the periodical court disdains to revise its decrees. The antiquated pretensions of his Holiness have centered in the judges who preside there. From their infallibility, however, there still lies an appeal to public candour.—Should an humanized generation find relief from a listless hour in the reveries of an iron age, the dust shall be brushed off two or three more volumes of old tales, and they shall be trimmed for open market. And for myself I engage, if I can once more lay hold of the translator, to extort from him a full account of their real origin.—Should they be rejected, as too plain and artless for the intellectual palate of these times, the recital would afford no gratification to curiosity.