Of the more awful person in this fearful story I will not speak; but for the outline of the fate of Christian, who can look round him into the most ordinary life, and not see innumerable instances of it? The burden of the other two stories is very similar: the way to understand them is to try and analyse the feelings left on our mind by the whole, and not distract ourselves by assuming a fancied meaning, and speculating with the particulars to make each fragment fit our theory. Do not let us perplex ourselves to find out what the little dog is, what is the meaning of the bird, and the old woman. They may have many meanings; but we shall never find them by beginning at that end. It is only by the light of the whole that the parts become intelligible.
"The Love-charm" is a work of a different nature; it is one of the most remarkable of all Tieck's writings, and, as far as we know, stands alone among the productions of modern art. With the help of a popular German superstition, he has woven a tragedy out of the ordinary events of every-day life, the spirit of which approaches as near as modern thought can be made to approach to the fatalism of the Greek drama. A destiny of some kind, either moral or external, is essential to tragedy. What we mean by "the terrible" as applied to human action, is, that the free will of man is laid under the influence of some external power, which he has little or no ability to resist, which hurries him on through a series of action and incident, from which, if in full possession of his self-control, he would shrink in horror. Thus, in common life the crimes men commit under the influence of any of the loftier passions, such as love or revenge, or when goaded on by famine or despair, or which men do in ignorance, when the ignorance may partially, but not entirely, be their own fault, are terrible, and therefore tragic. The individual seems to be sacrificed, not to deserve all that has fallen on him; his fate becomes one of the startling mysteries of life. The meaner or more selfish the passion under which the crime is committed, or the cooler and more deliberate the action, the more what he does loses the character of tragic, and becomes merely disgusting. Pity goes with terror, and in such cases there can be no pity. The destiny in Shakspere's tragedies is a moral one; not an external power constraining, but an internal power impelling; working not against, but in and through the will. Such was the influence of his father's spirit on Hamlet, Hecate and the Witches on Macbeth, Iago's intellect on Othello, and so on with the rest. The Greek destiny, though in our way of thinking less human, is more terrible even than that of Shakspere. The sins of the fathers visited on the children, curses continuing to work generation after generation, and the helpless struggle of the victim only precipitating him into a darker doom--there is a stern grandeur about this form of thought; it is a feature of a broader philosophy than ours to bear to see the individual sacrificed, and believe that in some mysterious way the well-being of the whole is furthered by it, "with calm self-surrender to hear the murderer's hand upon a brother's throat, yet stand with upturned unquailing eyes before the everlasting Providence." It is a scheme of thought so unlike ours that we can hardly realise it, it is so like a monster to us. Yet this Love-charm is an attempt to do it; and although the spell is but over a single person, and forms no portion of a broad scheme of Providence; although for the stately forms of kings and heroes stalking across the stage, we have but the ball-going ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century, and but an old witch for the Delphic oracle, or the gods appearing in visible form; few people can rise from reading it without having been made to feel that this life, after all, is a stranger thing than they have been in the habit of imagining.