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Is it really good psychology when Vauvenargues writes: “All men are born sincere and die impostors,” or, when Brillat-Savarin insists: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you who you are”? Or can we really trust Mirabeau: “Kill your conscience, as it is the most savage enemy of every one who wants success”; or Klopstock: “Happiness is only in the mind of one who neither fears nor hopes”; or Gellert: “He who loves one vice, loves all the vices”? Can we believe Chamfort: “Ambition more easily takes hold of small souls than great ones, just as a fire catches the straw roof of the huts more easily than the palaces”; or Pascal: “In a great soul, everything is great”; or the poet Bodenstedt when he sings: “A gray eye is a sly eye, a brown eye is roguish and capricious, but a blue eye shows loyalty”? And too often we must be satisfied with opposites.
During my residence in Paris, German metaphysics and literature had been my favourite study; I read Kant and Klopstock, Herder and Schiller, much more frequently than Condillac and Voltaire.
As Gleim lay on his death-bed he addressed the great bard of Germany "I am dying, dear Klopstock; and, as a dying man will I say, in this world we have not lived long enough together and for each other; but in vain would we now recal the past!" What tenderness in the reproach! What self-accusation in its modesty! The literary and the personal character.
Austria called Lessing and Klopstock HER poets; like the rest of Germany, she enthusiastically admired Schiller's 'Robbers, and wept over 'Werther's Sorrows; she was delighted with the poetry of Wieland; she learned to love the clear and noble mind of Herder, and the writings of Jean Paul admonished her to learn and to reflect.
Each of these poets had numerous followers, of whom Rambler is known as the German Horace. Frederick the Great preferred French works, and no one seems to have thought of starting a German school except Klopstock, who stands almost alone in the literature of his time and country.
In the sentimental kind, and especially in that part of the sentimental kind which we name elegiac, there are but few modern poets, and still fewer ancient ones, who can be compared to our Klopstock. Musical poetry has produced in this poet all that can be attained out of the limits of the living form, and out of the sphere of individuality, in the region of ideas.
Then, again, I have seen the Devil in the opera, as Göthe and Gounod's creation of Mephistopheles in Faust, and there he wore a goat's-beard and red-feathered cap, was a little lame in one leg, and had a baritone voice. He was not in the least beautiful." "You ought to read Klopstock, then, and Milton," said Countess Diodora.
Barbauld in her Life of Richardson 'under the name of Miss M., afterwards Lady G." Klopstock himself is rather remembered for what he was than what he is, an immortality of unreadableness; and we much doubt if many Germans put the "Oberon" in their trunks when they start on a journey.
The power and national learning of Germany break forth in Klopstock, whose genius vainly sought a natural garb and was compelled to assume a borrowed form.
For Karl, who knows his Klopstock as well as his Plutarch, love is a transcendental dream foretelling a spiritual union in a world without end; for Franz it is carnal appetite. Karl wears his heart upon his sleeve; Franz is wily and hypocritical. The one is handsome and chivalrous, the other ill-favored and cruel.
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