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

 hundred and twenty-two pages. Klopstock, Herder, Lessing, in the eighteenth century, wrote no novels: the same might ahnost be said of Schiller; for his fragment of the Geisterseher (Ghost-seer), and his Magazine-story of the Verbrecher mis verlorener Ehre (Criminal from Loss of Honour), youthful attempts, and both I believe already in English, scarcely form an exception. The elder Jacobi's Woldemar and Allwill I was forced, not without consciousness of their merits, to pass over as too abstruse and didactic; for a like reason of didacticality, though in a far different sense, Wieland could afford me nothing which seemed worthy of himself and our present idea of him; and Klinger's Faust, the product evidently of a rugged, vehement, substantial mind, seemed much too harsh, infernal, and unpoetical for English readers. Of Novalis and his wonderful fragments, I could not hope that their depth and wizard beauty would be seen across their mysticism. Other meritorious names I may have omitted, from ignorance. Maler Müller's I was obliged to omit, because none of his fictions were, properly speaking, novels; and unwillingly obliged, for his plays and idyls bespeak a true artist; and the English reader would do well, by the earliest opportunity, to substitute the warm and vigorous Adam's Awakening of Müller, for Gessner's rather faint and washy Death of Abel, in forming a judgment of the German Idyl.

A graver objection than that of omissions, is that, in my selections, I have not always fixed upon the best performance of my author; and to this I have unhappily no contradiction to give, nor any answer to make, except that it lay not in the nature of my task to avoid it; and that often not the excellence of a work, but the humble considerations of its size, its subject, and its being untranslated, had to determine my choice. In justice to our strangers, the reader will be pleased