et all that can be attained out of the limits of
the living form, and out of the sphere of individuality, in the region of
ideas. It would, no doubt, be doing him a great injustice to dispute
entirely in his case that individual truth and that feeling of life with
which the simple poet describes his pictures. Many of his odes, many
separate traits in his dramas, and in his "Messiah," represent the object
with a striking truth, and mark the outline admirably; especially, when
the object is his own heart, he has given evidence on many occasions of a
great natural disposition and of a charming simplicity. I mean only that
it is not in this that the proper force of Klopstock consists, and that
it would not perhaps be right to seek for this throughout his work.
Viewed as a production of musical poetry, the "Messiah" is a magnificent
work; but in the light of plastic poetry, where we look for determined
forms and forms determined for the intuition, the "Messiah" leaves much
to be desired. Perhaps in this poem the figures are sufficiently
determined, but they are not so with intuition in view. It is
abstraction alone that created them, and abstraction alone can discern
them. They are excellent types to express ideas, but they are not
individuals nor living figures. With regard to the imagination, which
the poet ought to address, and which he ought to command by putting
before it always perfectly determinate forms, it is left here much too
free to represent as it wishes these men and these angels, these
divinities and demons, this paradise and this hell. We see quite well
the vague outlines in which the understanding must be kept to conceive
these personages; but we do not find the limit clearly traced in which
the imagination must be enclosed to represent them. And what I say here
of characters must apply to all that in this poem is, or ought to be,
action and life, and not only in this epopoeia, but also in the dramatic
poetry of Klopstock. For the understanding all is perfectly determined
and bounded in them--I need only here recall his Judas, his Pilate, his
Philo, his Solomon in the tragedy that bears that name--but for the
imagination all this wants form too much, and I must readily confess I do
not find that our poet is at all in his sphere here. His sphere is
always the realm of ideas; and he knows how to raise all he touches to
the infinite. It might be said that he strips away their bodily
envelope, to spiritualize them