er, "to render into our tongue,
which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties
of this ultra-romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe,
Uhland, Buerger and L. Tieck, Gerard retained in his turn of mind a
certain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem like
translations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies and
the studies of Gerard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, which
he often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of the
old Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidential
murmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; on
the margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hem
bedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the
mountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rock
clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grand
Walpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for a
Jena student. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's horn,[23]
the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if he
stops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the _Schoppen_
becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule." Among the French
romanticists of Hugo's circle there was a great enthusiasm for wild
German ballads like Buerger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erl-King." The
translation of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen ueber Dramatische Kunst und
Litteratur," by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless the
first fruits of Madame de Stael's "Allemagne," published the year before.
Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet)
collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's "Parisina." "Walter Scott was
then in the full flower of his success. People were being initiated into
the mysteries of Goethe's 'Faust,' . . . and discovering Shakspere under
the translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems of
Lord Byron, 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Giaour,' 'Manfred,' 'Beppo,' 'Don
Juan,' were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet grown
commonplace." Gautier said that in _le petit cenacle_--the inner circle
of the initiated--if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon,
it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself.
"Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes." As for himself, who had set
out as a painter