Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 21 (US).djvu/15

 Rh Even the differences among themselves are marked, and their conjunction is not to be wholly accounted for on the score of a common vogue. Ludwig Tieck indeed reached the zenith of his fame and the height of his productive activity in the first quarter of the present century; and though the new romantic movement, of which he was one of the pioneers, had by that time exhausted itself, the versatility of his powers enabled him to retain his hold upon the public by his work in a totally different genre. Fouqué had captured the European world by his Undine in 1814, and Hoffmann's feverish activity had only closed with his life in 1823. But Musæus when the Translations appeared had been forty years in the grave, and it is difficult to believe that such reputation as he enjoyed in his lifetime had so long survived him. It is perhaps not fanciful to believe that remote as are both Tieck and he from the modern fashions of romance, one can detect an air of the archaic and out of date about the earlier as compared with the later writer. Carlyle's criticism of both of them—'journeywork' applies only to his task of translation—is as sympathetic as he knew how to make it. The truth is that he has evidently described the variety of Tieck's gifts and the versatility of his powers as a romancer from a more extensive study of his works than the specimens, which alone with his limited choice he was able to give, are at all well calculated to illustrate. They are all of what may be called the seriously romantic order, quite devoid either of the symbolic or of the satirical suggestion which might have interested Carlyle in them. As it is, his too obvious want of sympathy with them and with their whole genre betrays him into an almost comically apologetic tone. He tells the reader, plump and plain, that he cannot boast of having 'any very certain, still less any very flattering presentiment' respecting their reception; that their merits, 'such as they have, are not of a kind to force themselves on the reader,' who, on the other hand, is 'seldom inclined to search out merit for himself'; that 'the ordinary lovers of witch and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and