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carry our investigation deeper, we shall find that any such defect
violates our sense of artistic propriety, because it offends against our
healthy human instinct of the fundamental natural laws; and the artistic
merit, as well of a romance as of an epic, rises in proportion as the plot
is naturally developed, instead of being conducted to its solution by a
series of violent leaps and make-shifts, or even by a pretentious sham.
We shall take occasion hereafter to illustrate these views by suitable
examples.
That the work we are now considering fulfills, in a high degree, this
requirement of refined artistic feeling and artistic treatment, will be at
once apparent to all discriminating readers, though it can not be denied

that there are many of the higher and more delicate chords which Soll
und Haben never strikes. The characters to whom we are introduced
appear to breathe a certain prosaic atmosphere, and the humorous and
comic scenes occasionally interwoven with the narrative bear no
comparison, in poetic delicacy of touch, with the creations of Cervantes,
nor yet with the plastic power of those of Fielding.
The author has given most evidence of poetic power in the delineation
of those dark characters who intrude like ghosts and demons upon the
fair and healthy current of the book, and vanish anon into the caverns
and cellars whence they came.
The great importance of the work, and the key to the almost
unexampled favor it has won, must be sought in a quite different
direction--in the close relation to the real and actual in our present
social condition, maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is
manifested, in very various ways, in every novel of distinguished
excellence. The object of all alike is the same--to exhibit and establish,
by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and
enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a
period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don
Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry
as in the portraiture that lies beneath, of the insignificance and
profligacy of the life of the higher ranks, which had succeeded the more
decorous manners of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only
hero of the book, but also the shattered Spanish people, among whom
he moves with gipsies and smugglers for companions, treading with all
the freshness of imperishable youth upon the buried ruins of political
and spiritual life, rejoicing in the geniality of the climate and the
tranquillity of the country, reposing proudly on his ancestral dignity.
This conception--and not alone the pure and lofty nature of the crazy
besieger of wind-mills, who, in spite of all, stands forth as at once the
worthiest, and fundamentally the wisest character in the
book--constitutes the poetic background, and the twilight glimmer amid
the prevailing darkness in the life of the higher classes. We feel that
there is assuredly something deeply human and of living power in these
elements, and this reality will one day obtain the victory over all

opponents.
By what an entirely different atmosphere do we feel ourselves to be
surrounded in Gil Blas, where the highest poetry, the cunning dexterity
of the modern Spanish Figaro, is manifested in the midst of a depraved
nobility, and a priesthood alive only to their own material interests. It is
only the most perfect art that could have retained for this novel readers
in every quarter of the world. The dénouement is as perfect as with
such materials it can be; and we feel that, instead of Voltaire's
withering and satiric contempt of all humanity, an element of unfeigned
good-humor lies in the background of the picture. How far inferior is
Swift! and how utterly horrible is the abandoned humor of a despair
that leaves all in flames behind it, which breathes upon us from the
pages of the unhappy Rabelais!
Fielding's novels, Tom Jones in particular, bear the same resemblance
to the composition of Cervantes that the paintings of Murillo bear to
those of Rembrandt. The peculiarity of Wilhelm Meister as a novel is
more difficult of apprehension, if one does not seek the novel where in
truth it lies--in the story of Mignon and the Harper, and only sees in the
remainder the certainly somewhat diffuse but deeply-thought and
classically-delineated picture of the earnest striving after culture of a
German in the end of the eighteenth century. It would argue, however,
as it appears to me, much prejudice, and an utterly unreasonable temper,
not to recognize a perfect novel in the Wahlverwandschaften, however
absolutely one may deny the propriety of thus tampering with and
endangering the holiest family relationships, or thus making them the
subjects of a work of fiction. Goethe, however, has here placed