perplexities, accordingly, has been to decide what to omit. If there
shall be those who look for what they do not find, or find what they did
not expect, I can only say that the question of perspective, of the
relative importance of things, has all along received my careful
attention. Thoroughness is very alluring, but life is short and some
things must be taken for granted or treated as negligible. Otherwise one
runs a risk, as German experience proves, of beginning and never
finishing.

My great concern has been with the works of Schiller--to interpret them
as the expression of an interesting individuality and an interesting
epoch. It is now some twenty years since I first came under the
Weimarian spell, and during that time my feeling for Schiller has
undergone vicissitudes not unlike those described by Brahm in a passage
quoted at the very end of this volume. At no time, indeed, could I
truthfully have called myself a "Schiller-hater", but there was a time,
certainly, when it seemed to me that he was very much overestimated by
his countrymen; when my mind was very hospitable to demonstrations of
his artistic shortcoming. Time has brought a different temper, and this
book is the child of what I deem the wiser disposition.

For the poet who wins the heart of a great people and holds it for a
century is right; there is nothing more to be said, so far as concerns
his title to renown. The creative achievement is far more precious and
important than any possible criticism of it. This does not mean that in
dealing with such a poet the critic is in duty bound to abdicate his
lower function and to let his scruples melt away in the warm water of a
friendly partisanship; it means only that he will be best occupied,
speaking generally, in a conscientious attempt to see the man as he was,
to "experience the savor of him", and to understand the national