Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/15



The earliest English translations of Bürger's Lenore will always interest a student of the English poetic revival at the end of the eighteenth century. They represent almost the first real touch of the German romantic movement on England. It is true that certain German poems had appeared in English dress before this time. Yet these had but slight relation to the new romantic movement. This applies to Idylls and Death of Abel, both of which had been translated into English in 1762. It was equally true of Goethe's Iphigenia and Wieland's Dialogues of the Gods, which were made accessible to Englishmen by William Taylor of Norwich in 1793 and 1795. In Edinburgh, according to Scott's Imitations of the Ancient Ballad, Henry Mackenzie had lectured on German literature as early as 1788, but even this had produced little immediate effect.

This late influence of Germany on English literature of the eighteenth century is also the more remarkable, because the Germans had long recognized the inspiration of English masters. Shakespeare and Milton for the older periods had already been studied and imitated in Germany, as well as numerous writers of the eighteenth century, notably Thomson, Richardson and Goldsmith. Indeed, the translators of Bürger's most famous poem were merely returning to its native land an originally English ballad, which had inspired the most successful of the German ballad imitators.

Yet the slight acquaintance of Englishmen with Germany fully explains the lack of literary influence from that source. Throughout the eighteenth century the literary relations of England and the personal relations of Englishmen had been with France and Italy. In the early part of the century an Englishman would have been about as likely to visit Russia in travel, as any part of Germany. Even when Englishmen took to themselves the Hanoverian royal house, they still had as little interest in the Hanoverian principality as the first two Georges had in their English possessions. Later, when England gave her support to the great Frederick of Prussia, it was with pecuniary aid merely, unaccompanied in the case of most of the people with any but the barest knowledge of his kingdom, or of the learning and literature of his countrymen.

Take, for example, some significant instances of ignorance about