worst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind it
was Gervinus, and in the middle Chimera. The tout-ensemble was
Lessing. This discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked,
and read no more. In sooth, Great Master, why have you written such
fusty little chapters?

We do, indeed, learn something new from them; for instance, that
Gervinus made it known to the world how and why Goethe was no dramatic
genius; that, in the second part of Faust, he had only produced a
world of phantoms and of symbols; that Wallenstein is a Macbeth as
well as a Hamlet; that the Straussian reader extracts the short
stories out of the Wanderjahre "much as naughty children pick the
raisins and almonds out of a tough plum-cake"; that no complete effect
can be produced on the stage without the forcible element, and that
Schiller emerged from Kant as from a cold-water cure. All this is
certainly new and striking; but, even so, it does not strike us with
wonder, and so sure as it is new, it will never grow old, for it never
was young; it was senile at birth. What extraordinary ideas seem to
occur to these Blessed Ones, after the New Style, in their aesthetic
heaven! And why can they not manage to forget a few of them, more
particularly when they are of that unaesthetic, earthly, and ephemeral
order to which the scholarly thoughts of Gervinus belong, and when
they so obviously bear the stamp of puerility? But it almost seems as
though the modest greatness of a Strauss and the vain insignificance
of a Gervinus were only too well able to harmonise: then long live all
those Blessed Ones! may we, the rejected, also live long, if this
unchallenged judge of art continues any longer to teach his borrowed
enthusiasm, and the gallop of that hired steed of which the honest
Grillparzer speaks with such delightful clearness, until the whole of
heaven rings beneath the hoof of that galumphing enthusiasm. Then, at