[Side-note: Bodmer--Breitinger--Guenther.]
Yet we must not dismiss our Swiss theory without doing it justice. BODMER, with all the pains he took, remained theoretically and practically a child all his life. BREITINGER was an able, learned, sagacious man, whom when he looked rightly about him, the essentials of a poem did not all escape; nay, it can be shown that he may have dimly felt the deficiencies of his system. Remarkable, for instance, is his query:--"Whether a certain descriptive poem by König, on the _Review-camp of Augustus the Second_, is properly a poem?" and the answer to it displays good sense. But it may serve for his complete justification that he, starting from a false point, on a circle almost run out already, still struck upon the main principle, and at the end of his book finds himself compelled to recommend as additions, so to speak, the representation of manners, character, passions, in short, the whole inner man; to which, indeed, poetry pre-eminently belongs.
It may well be imagined into what perplexity young minds felt themselves thrown by such dislocated maxims, half-understood laws, and shivered up dogmas. We adhered to examples, and there, too, were no better off; foreigners as well as the ancients stood too far from us, and from the best native poets always peeped out a decided individuality, to the good points of which we could not lay claim, and into the faults of which we could not but be afraid of falling. For him who felt anything productive in himself it was a desperate condition.
When one considers closely what was wanting in the German poetry, it was a material, and that, too, a national one; there was never a lack of talent. Here we make mention only of GUENTHER, who may be called a poet in the full sense of the word. A decided talent, endowed with sensuousness, imagination, memory, the gifts of conception and representation, productive in the highest degree, ready at rhythm, ingenious, witty, and of varied information besides;--he possessed, in short, all the requisites for creating, by means of poetry, a second life within life, even within common real life. We admire the great facility with which, in his occasional poems, he elevates all circumstances by the feelings, and embellishes them with suitable sentiments, images, and historical and fabulous traditions. Their roughness and wildness belong to his time, his mode of life, and especially to his character, or if one would have it so, his want of fixed character. He did not know how to curb himself, and so his life, like his poetry, melted away from him.