Biographia Literaria
given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief
in Nelson’s victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and
triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement
Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired
in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German
poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little
on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their
elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.
Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of
this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.
He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover’s blank verse
superior to Milton’s. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and
my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that
it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt
arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
“with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover’s
superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in
a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock’s French as I had already
construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our
poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose
translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very
bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages
not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the
translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his
odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, “I
wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,
and revenge me of your countryman!”. It was the liveliest thing which he
produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was
fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I
considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;
as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;
yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt
as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing
there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his
physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the
bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large
snow-white wig and the colour of an old man’s skin is disgusting, and
wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is
an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of
nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as
when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author
of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and
periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.
Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always
sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I
answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line
in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that
this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than
one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who
wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did
not.
We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he
sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of
their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough
an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation
of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to
forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;
and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their
iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock’s house we walked
to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,
till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the
sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the
distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)
lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of
the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist
floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro
between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and
brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been
divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions
could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a
fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving
objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a
beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English
child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other
accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before
I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two
longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the
feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see
the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.
There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two
or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and
his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of
entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,
there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the
women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the
other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more
singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal
church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
and silver.
I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which
my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the
interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but
one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,
that Klopstock’s remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my
own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,
that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of
Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or
a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and
presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as
to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral
system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. “Klopstock having wished
to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in
England, I went to Remnant’s (the English bookseller) where I procured
the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland’s
CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the
plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
versification in the German language before this time. The first three
cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though
done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He
had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and
there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of
versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--One day he was
struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his
room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the
evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of
what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his
efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he
had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an
author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction
of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one
till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had
finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in
a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.
The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The
reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was
nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty
years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only
composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He
values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical
writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation
against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion.
He called Rousseau’s ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.
I spoke of Dryden’s ST. CECILIA; but he did not seem familiar with our
writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and
epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read
either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or
other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of
Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done
violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the
Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its
particular spirit and genius. He said Lessing was the first of their
dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was
not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of
their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS
OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred
the first written to the rest of Goethe’s dramas. Schiller’s ROBBERS he
found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of
the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live.
He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot
was inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller’s works:
indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be