man--wrote them. Even in the treatment of
foreign subjects one still remains in France and Paris, quite absorbed
in all the wishes, necessities, conflicts, and fermentations of the
present day."

"Beranger also," I threw in experimentally, "has only expressed the
situation of the great metropolis, and his own interior."

"That is a man," said Goethe, "whose power of representation and whose
interior are worth something. In him is all the substance of an
important personality. Beranger is a nature most happily endowed, firmly
grounded in himself, purely developed from himself, and quite in harmony
with himself. He has never asked--what would suit the times? what
produces an effect? what pleases? what are others doing?--in order that
he might do the like. He has always worked only from the core of his own
nature, without troubling himself as to what the public, or what this or
that party, expects. He has certainly, at different critical epochs,
been influenced by the mood, wishes, and necessities of the people; but
that has only confirmed him in himself, by proving to him that his own
nature is in harmony with that of the people; and has never seduced him
into expressing anything but what already lay in his heart.

"You know that I am, upon the whole, no friend to what is called
political poems, but such as Beranger has composed I can tolerate. With
him there is nothing snatched out of the air, nothing of merely imagined
or imaginary interest; he never shoots at random; but, on the contrary,
has always the most decided, the most important subjects. His
affectionate admiration of Napoleon, and his reminiscences of the great
warlike deeds which were performed under him, and that at a time when
these recollections were a consolation to the somewhat oppressed French;
then his hatred of the domination of priests, and of the darkness which
threatened to return with the Jesuits--these are things to which one
cannot refuse hearty sympathy. And how masterly is his treatment on all
occasions! How he turns about and rounds off every subject in his own
mind before he expresses it! And then, when all is matured, what wit,
spirit, irony, and persiflage, and what heartiness, naivete, and grace,
are unfolded at every step! His songs have every year made millions of
joyous men; they always flow glibly from the tongue, even with the
working-classes, whilst they are so far elevated above the level of the
commonplace, that the populace, in