handled few national subjects or none at all;"[1] and yet Goethe is the admirer of world-literature.
National literatures, then, require a vigorous and continuous national life; and if we seek for perfect types of national literature, we shall find them only under such conditions. In Italy, neither a language delightfully musical nor an early development of individualism of character within her cities could make up for the loss of such a life; nationality was here paralysed by the overlordship of the German emperor, the presence of a world-religion visibly centred in that ancient capital which might have been the heart of an Italian nation, the strife of city commonwealths strangely like and unlike those of ancient Greece. In Germany the isolation of the feudal princes and of the towns aided the cosmopolitan ideas of the Holy Roman Empire in checking the progress of nationality. Russia, long the prey of Asiatic invaders, and exposed as a kind of rude barrier for the security of quiet culture in the West, was equally slow in manifesting signs of national life. In short, we may say that only in England, France, and Spain do we find truly national groups; and, when we remember how the burst of national life in Spain under Charles V. and Philip II. was succeeded by three centuries of comparative stagnation, we may add that, if continuous development be one grand mark of nationality, England and France, especially from a literary standpoint, are the only perfect types of nationhood yet known to history. But they are types to be contrasted as well as compared; and the contrast will enable us to distinguish two aspects curiously different under which national literature has revealed itself.
§ 88. A. W. Schlegel, discussing the progress of the
- ↑ Wahrheit und Dichtung, bk. vii.
