Therefore anything so beautiful and
attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, now-a-
days, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the
English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the
Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will
be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the
literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the
literatures where it is not native. Novalis or Ruckert, for
instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a
feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits
them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic
nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the
strokes in the German's picture of nature {136} have ever the
indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in
the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his
daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn,
Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the
Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural magic originally
lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this
question.
In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we
are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready
critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled
at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of
handling her.
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