ad I been born an Englishman, and
had all those numerous masterpieces been brought before me in all their
power, at my first dawn of youthful consciousness, they would have
overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do. I could not have
gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had to
bethink myself, and look about for a long time, to find some new
outlet."

I turned the conversation back to Shakespeare. "When one, to some
degree, disengages him from English literature," said I, "and considers
him transformed into a German, one cannot fail to look upon his gigantic
greatness as a miracle. But if one seeks him in his home, transplants
oneself to the soil of his country, and to the atmosphere of the century
in which he lived; further, if one studies his contemporaries, and his
immediate successors, and inhales the force wafted to us from Ben
Jonson, Massinger, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare
still, indeed, appears a being of the most exalted magnitude; but still,
one arrives at the conviction that many of the wonders of his genius
are, in some measure, accessible, and that much is due to the powerfully
productive atmosphere of his age and time."

"You are perfectly right," returned Goethe. "It is with Shakespeare as
with the mountains of Switzerland. Transplant Mont Blanc at once into
the large plain of Lueneburg Heath, and we should find no words to
express our wonder at its magnitude. Seek it, however, in its gigantic
home, go to it over its immense neighbors, the Jungfrau, the
Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, St. Gotthard, and Monte Rosa;
Mont Blanc will, indeed, still remain a giant, but it will no longer
produce in us such amazement."

"Besides, let him who will not believe," continued Goethe, "that much of
Shakespeare's greatness appertains to his great vigorous time, only ask
himself the question, whether a phenomenon so astounding would be
possible in the present England of 1824, in these evil days of
criticising and hair-splitting journals?"

"That undisturbed, innocent, somnambulatory production, by which alone
anything great can thrive, is no longer possible. Our talents at present
lie before the public. The daily criticisms which appear in fifty
different places, and the gossip that is caused by them amongst the
public, prevent the appearance of any sound production. In the present
day, he who does not keep aloof from all this, and isolate himself by
mai