Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/16

 things German on the part of literary Englishmen. In his essay On the Present State of Polite Learning (1759), Goldsmith says that the Germans had, indeed, a "passion for polite learning," that is literature, but "instead of studying the German tongue they continue to write in Latin." Nor does he mention a single German work of which he had any knowledge. A little later when the young Gibbon was meditating an historical subject for his pen, he preferred "one to all others, the history of the liberty of the Swiss." From this, however, he was debarred, as he thought absolutely, by his ignorance of "an old barbarous German dialect," and his unwillingness to learn it even for so important a purpose. Although Gray was one of the first to study Icelandic literature, he knew nothing of German, or of the beginnings there of a romantic movement which would have delighted him. Horace Walpole lived until 1797, but there is no mention of a German work or of German literature in his voluminous correspondence. When Mackenzie, the author of the Man of Feeling, lectured in Edinburgh on the German Theatre, and as Scott tells us first interested his countrymen in German literature, he knew no German himself, and had obtained his whole knowledge of German plays from French translations.

Under these conditions the appearance of Bürger's Lenore in the England of 1796 is quite extraordinary. Especially is this so when we remember that not one version only, but seven renderings by five different translators were published in that single year. Such an unusual circumstance naturally calls for some special explanation. Unfortunately, hitherto some of the important relations of the several versions appearing within a twelve-month have been missed by those who have dealt with the subject. It is possible, therefore, to shed some light upon the individual Bürger translations, and especially to give a connected history of this remarkable year in the literary influence of eighteenth century Germany upon England. Incidentally, too, it is a question whether the immediate influence of these translations upon English literature has been fully appreciated.