only the comic as a subject of treatment; for he
can never lay stress upon detached separate phenomena, if he cannot
prove the connection between them and the general whole, if they do not
constitute for him a window through which he looks down into Nature's
breast. It is easy to calculate, accordingly, how high Theodor Koerner's
services to the comedy should be rated, provided he has actually
succeeded with his smaller things, _The Nightwatchman, The Green
Domino_, etc., in furnishing amusing farces. To accomplish this, nothing
was required but natural gaiety combined with a talent for
representation, and many men who were anything but poets have been
equipped with both.

It still remains for us to estimate what Koerner and Kleist have achieved
in narrative. In this field Koerner has produced such mere trifles that
it would be unjust for one to infer from them the least thing touching
his characteristics, as it probably never occurred to him to consider
himself a story-writer. Heinrich von Kleist's novels and stories, on the
other hand, belong among the best that German literature possesses.
Almost all the narratives of our writers, with the exception of a few
productions by Hoffmann and Tieck, suffer, if I may say so, from the
monstrousness of the subjects chosen, if they do indeed rise at all
above mediocrity. There is, however, no very deep psychological insight
needed in order to know how the whole man will be affected by an event
which sweeps down upon him like a stormwind, and very ordinary talents
may safely attempt tasks of this kind; just as, for example, every
painter with some technical skill can represent despair, fear, terror,
all those emotions, in short, which only permit of one expression;
whereas a Rembrandt is required, if a gipsy encampment is to be
pictured. Kleist, therefore, set himself other tasks; he knew and had
perhaps experienced in his own person, that life's process of
destruction is not a deluge but a shower, and that man is superior to
every great fatality, but subject to every pettiness. He proceeded from
this theory of life, when he delineated his _Michael Kohlhaas_, and I
maintain that in no German novel have the hideous depths of life been
projected upon the surface in such vivid fashion as in this, when the
theft by a squire, of two miserable horses, forms the first link in a
chain, which extends upward from the horse-dealer Kohlhaas to the ruler
of the Holy Roman Empire, and crushe