Biographia Literaria
their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that
no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last
scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will
make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity,
that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them
so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the
final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made
to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY
WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!
P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty,
those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially
if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit
and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence
credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral
and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those
common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your
playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion.
For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the
confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes
and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the
qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour,
(those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in
classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and
in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those
criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our
esteem!
And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without
having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own
fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and
then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have
made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you
will expect that part of my “Travels” will consist of excursions in my
own mind.
LETTER III
RATZEBURG.
No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
from a child’s hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this
clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,
and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits
certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the
noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it
on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet
Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with
kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board
and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,
in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English
stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude
resemblance, that an elephant’s ear does to the human. Its top was
composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been
parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern
curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered
the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I
could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which
we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like
a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts
through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor
of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes
one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are
commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,
women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an
appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I
measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken
off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small
interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two
where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight
feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;
indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing
each other’s faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,
a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely
to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different
feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left
unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and
green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within
three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,
the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by
woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to
Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred
and twenty-six miles.
The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a
mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very
unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a
narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense
length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island
the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor’s house or vicarage, together
with the Amtmann’s Amtsschreiber’s, and the church, stands near the
summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little
bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into
the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by
ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to
the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little
Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the
shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper
effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their
circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the
shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort
of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake,
and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the
distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they
were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built
entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the
eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening,
Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful,
and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a
term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a
pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy
clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in
undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the
yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with
single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light,
which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into
harmony.
I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but
the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which
you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and
trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and
piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within
the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of
man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the
houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:
for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,
money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not
have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by
imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect,
though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke
of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with
unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the
busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and
catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge
green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the
interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have
nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which
answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are
uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a
chef d’auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!--a savage
might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.
Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye
bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the
horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.
Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to
the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and
literature of Germany.
Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as
W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,
the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.
It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with
several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet’s
eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We
waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the
figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were
from Klopstock’s odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his
countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was
no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no
expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no
massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below
the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,
so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor
myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his
physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his
kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with
difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was
not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The
conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the
surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.
Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they
had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have