the Greeks of the
aboriginal world--"_diese Griechen der Urwelt_"--and so much better and
more divine than the western Greeks, as the aboriginal world was better
and more divine than that which came after it. If imagination was the
prime, the creative faculty in man, here, in the holy Eddas, it had sat
throned for thousands of years as high as the Himalayas. If repose was
sought for, and rest to the soul from the toil and turmoil of religious
wars in Europe, here, in the secret meditations of pious Yooges, waiting
to be absorbed into the bosom of Brahma, surely peace was to be found.
Take another matter. Why did Frederick Schlegel make so much talk of the
middle ages? Why were the times, so dark to others, instinct to him with a
steady solar effluence, in comparison of which the boasted enlightenment
of these latter days was but as the busy exhibition of squibs by
impertinent boys, the uncertain trembling of fire-flies in a dusky
twilight? The middle ages were historically the glory of Germany; and
those who had lived to see and to feel the Confederation of the Rhine, and
the Protectorate of Napoleon, did not require the particular predilections
of a Schlegel to carry them back with eager reaction to the days of the
Henries, the Othos, and the Fredericks, when to be the German emperor was
to be the greatest man in Europe, after the Pope. But to Schlegel the
middle ages were something more. The glory of Germany to the patriot, they
were the glory of Europe to the thinker. Modern wits have laughed at the
enthusiasm of the Crusades. Did they weep over the perfidy of the
partition of Poland? Do they really trust themselves to persuade a
generous mind that the principle of mutual jealousy and mere selfishness,
the meagre inspiration of the so called balance of power in modern
politics, is, according to any norm of nobility in action, a more laudable
motive for a public war, than a holy zeal against those who were at once
the enemies of Christ, and (as future events but too clearly showed) the
enemies of Europe? Modern wits sneer at the scholastic drivelling or the
cloudy mistiness of the writers of the middle ages. Did they ever blush
for the impious baseness of Helvetius, for the portentous scaffolding of
notional skeletons in Hegel? But, alas! we talk of we know not what. What
spectacle does modern life present equal to that of St Bernard, the pious
monk of Clairvaux, the feeble, emaciated thinker, brooding, with his
dove-l