e
pleases! I detect this seriousness also in our own Wieland: even the
wanton sportiveness of his humor is elevated and impeded by the goodness
of his heart; it has an influence even on his rhythm; nor does he ever
lack elastic power, when it is his wish, to raise us up to the most
elevated planes of beauty and of thought.

The same judgment cannot be pronounced on the satire of Voltaire. No
doubt, also, in his case, it is the truth and simplicity of nature which
here and there makes us experience poetic emotions, whether he really
encounters nature and depicts it in a simple character, as many times in
his "Ingenu;" or whether he seeks it and avenges it as in his "Candide"
and elsewhere. But when neither one nor the other takes place, he can
doubtless amuse us with his fine wit, but he assuredly never touches us
as a poet. There is always rather too little of the serious under his
raillery, and this is what makes his vocation as poet justly suspicious.
You always meet his intelligence only; never his feelings. No ideal can
be detected under this light gauze envelope; scarcely can anything
absolutely fixed be found under this perpetual movement. His prodigious
diversity of externals and forms, far from proving anything in favor of
the inner fulness of his inspiration, rather testifies to the contrary;
for he has exhausted all forms without finding a single one on which he
has succeeded in impressing his heart. We are almost driven to fear that
in the case of his rich talent the poverty of heart alone determined his
choice of satire. And how could we otherwise explain the fact that he
could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut?
Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the
inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and
in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself
the circle of humanity, that circle which we see joyfully traversed
throughout by the satirists previously named.

ELEGIAC POETRY.

When the poet opposes nature to art, and the ideal to the real, so that
nature and the ideal form the principal object of his pictures, and that
the pleasure we take in them is the dominant impression, I call him an
elegiac poet. In this kind, as well as in satire, I distinguish two
classes. Either nature and the ideal are objects of sadness, when one is
represented as lost to man and the other as unattained; or both ar