He may have sought
German literature more for its matter than for its artistic
beauty--here, too, he brought a new, if in some ways a dangerous,
element into criticism--but neither he nor his readers could study it,
least of all could they study the work of Goethe, without awakening
to a whole world of imagination and beauty, to which England had
hitherto been dead. With all its shortcomings, the discovery of German
literature was a greater revelation than any made to Europe since the
classical Renaissance.
The shock--for it was nothing less--came at a singularly happy moment.
The blow, given by Carlyle as critic, was closely followed up by the
French _Romantiques_, as creative artists. Nothing could well have
been more alien to English taste, as understood by the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, than the early works, or indeed any works, of Hugo and
those who owned him for chief--if it were not the works of Goethe and
the countrymen of Goethe. Different as these were from each other,
they held common ground in uniting the most opposite prejudices of
Englishmen against them.
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