Scarcely any one of us ever judges our
hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two sides,--their side
for religion and their side for poetry. Everything which has helped
a man in his religious life, everything which associates itself in
his mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and venerable to
him; in this way, productions of little or no poetical value, like
the German hymns and ours, may come to be regarded as very precious.
Their worth in this sense, as means by which we have been edified, I
do not for a moment hold cheap; but there is an edification proper to
all our stages of development, the highest as well as the lowest, and
it is for man to press on towards the highest stages of his
development, with the certainty that for those stages, too, means of
edification will not be found wanting. Now certainly it is a higher
state of development when our fineness of perception is keen than
when it is blunt. And if,--whereas the Semitic genius placed its
highest spiritual life in the religious sentiment, and made that the
basis of its poetry,--the Indo-European genius places its highest
spiritual life in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis of
its poetry, we are none the better for wanting the perception to
discern a natural law, which is, after all, like every natural law,
irresistible; we are none the better for trying to make ourselves
Semitic, when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to shift the
basis of our poetry.
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