and esthetics at Jena in 1798; founded a critical journal to
represent the Romantic school; lectured in Berlin in
1803-04; traveled with Madame de Stael, a tutor to her
children afterward at Coppet; became secretary to the Crown
Prince Bernadotte and ennobled; professor at Bonn in 1818;
visited England in 1823; wrote romances, sonnets, odes and
criticisms, and translated Shakespeare.

SHAKESPEARE'S MACBETH[21]

Of "Macbeth" I have already spoken once in passing; and who could
exhaust the praises of this sublime work? Since the "Eumenides" of
AEschylus nothing so grand and terrible has ever been written. The
witches are not, it is true, divine Eumenides, and are not intended to
be; they are ignoble and vulgar instruments of hell. A German poet,
therefore, very ill understood their meaning when he transformed them
into mongrel beings, a mixture of fates, furies, and enchantresses,
and clothed them with tragic dignity. Let no man venture to lay hand
on Shakespeare's works thinking to improve anything essential: he will
be sure to punish himself. The bad is radically odious, and to
endeavor in any manner to ennoble it, is to violate the laws of
propriety. Hence, in my opinion, Dante, and even Tasso, have been much
more successful in their portraiture of demons than Milton.

[Footnote 21: From the "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature."
Translated by John Black, the translation being revised by A. J. W.
Morrison. Madame de Stael heard these lectures delivered in Vienna,
and in her work on Germany says she was "astonished to hear a critic
as eloquent as an orator."]

Whether the age of Shakespeare still believed in ghosts and witches is
a matter of perfect indifference for the justification of the use
which in "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" he has made of preexisting traditions.
No superstition can be widely diffused without having a foundation in
human nature: on this the poet builds; he calls up from their hidden
abysses that dread of the unknown, and presage of a dark side of
nature, and a world of spirits, which philosophy now imagines it has
altogether exploded. In this manner he is in some degree both the
portrayer and the philosopher of superstition; that is, not the
philosopher who denies and turns it into ridicule, but, what is still
more difficult, who distinctly exhibits its origin in apparently
irrational and yet natural opinions. But when he ventures to make
arbitrary c