German Romance: Specimens of Its Chief Authors (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from German Romance: Specimens of Its Chief AuthorsA more discouraging 'foreword' can seldom have been penned, and one cannot but admire the magnanimity of the publisher who could print it without remonstrance.Carlyle, however, goes on to point out other serious difficulties in the way of satisfactory selection. The field open to him was severely limited by causes for which neither be nor his authors could beheld responsible, so that, as he puts it, '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.' This fact, he adds, has especially to be borne in mind with regard to two of the authors, Fouque and Richter. The former's best-known work Undine had already found a translator, and both the Hesperus and the Titan of the latter were no doubt deemed inadmissible on the ground of length. But to us in these days the choice of authors seems much more curious than the selection from among their works - so unequal do they now ap pear in merit, and so vastly does one of them tower over the rest. Whether Jean Paul der einzige still enjoys the reputation among his countrymen which once was his, or whether, unlike his great English admirer, and in some sense imitator, he has failed to reconcile posterity by sheer force of genius to the eccentricities of his style, I hardly know, but, as compared with his companions in these volumes, there can be no doubt of his superior claims to posthumous life. Musaeus, Tieck, Hoff'mann, Fouque, are none of them lacking in merit of various kinds, but for humour and imagination, for power of thought and mastery of language, the strongest of them will not bear comparison with Richter.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.