Note 401 — Chapter I

The principles of the genuine Romanticism (as distinguished from its later and degenerate form) are ably enunciated by Tieck, in a comic drama, entitled Prince Zerbino; or, Travels in Search of Good Taste. One Nestor, a prosaic pedant, who piques himself on understanding everything, and on his freedom from all enthusiasm and imaginative nonsense, is introduced into the wondrous garden of the Goddess of Poesy. There he sees, among others, Dante and Ariosto, Cervantes and Sophocles. He complains of not finding Hagedorn, Gellert, Gesner, Kleist, or Bodmer; and the Goddess then points him out—as a true German bard—stout old Hans Sachs. Dante appears to him a crusty old fogie; Tasso, a well-meaning man, but weak; and Sophocles, whom he was disposed to respect as a classic, when blamed for the obscurity of his choruses, turns upon him like a bear. The conceited impertinence, the knowing air, and the puzzle-headedness of the Philistine, are hit off to admiration. This Garden of Poesy seems to him a lair of savages, an asylum for lunatics, where all his smug conventionalisms are trampled on, and every canon of his criticism suffers flagrant violation. Genii take him away, and give him something substantial to eat—earth to earth. The tables and chairs begin to talk to him. They congratulate themselves on being delivered from their old free life in the woods, and cut out into useful articles of furniture, so fulfilling the purpose of their being. He gets on much better with them than with the poets, and thinks them (himself excepted) the most sensible creatures in the world.