Heine's Criticisms. And costliest presents, the value of which Was enough to make a whole province quite rich. The palace, when some three days had pass'd, In front of the caravan he sped. At the end of a week to Thus came they- With shouts and noises enter'd straight. The trumpets sounded, the loud drums beat, But through the east gate, at the farther end The funeral train, so full of gloom, That the dead Ferdusi bore to his tomb." 413 In his prose writings, Heine has given many just criticisms, many striking sayings, many felicitous pictures of men and things. If to call Madame de Stael " a whirlwind in petticoats was mere impertinence, and to say, "Nature wanted to see how she looked, and created Goethe," was sheer enthusiasm, how happy is the mot about Talleyrand: "If an express should suddenly bring the news that T. had taken to a belief in accountability after death, the funds would at once go down ten per cent.!" How beautifully characteristic the description of a man insensible to artistic beauty! "He is like a child, which, insensible to the glowing significance of a great statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold." As striking, though in another style, is his description of Rubens: A "Flemish Titan, the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite of the hundredweight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs." Heine might have become a thoroughly national poet-the German Poet of the first half of the nineteenth century. He preferred becoming a sectional one. Poetry saturated with unbelief, never is long-lived. Where is the epigrammatic antiChristianism in verse of the age of the Encyclopedie? Even Voltaire is little read out of France, and not a great deal in it. That clever persifleur Arsene Houssaye will not succeed in writing up "Le Roi Voltaire" again. In an age of revived religious feeling and action, Heine was obtrusively irreligious, rudely anti-Christian. There are passages which, under a wrong view, as we think, of a translator's duty, Mr Bowring has given, for which the only fit place would be in the columns of the coarsest part of the newspaper press. We shall not, even once, quote any of these. "Would he had blotted a thousand lines!" is the alleged criticism of envy on Shakspeare. It is the just verdict of disappointment in those who would fain admire Heine, but feel themselves repelled by his mockery at all they hold most in veneration. A few months ago, the German people in the Fatherland, and out of it, celebrated the centenary of the birth of Schiller. We cordially indorse the approval of that festival, as a whole (however objectionable some details in various places may have been), which has been lately, in the " Allgemeine Kirchen Zeitung," pronounced by Professor Lechler of Leipzig, on the twofold ground, that "Schiller, as a poet and thinker, stands upon Christian ground; and Christianity neither can nor will dissociate itself from true beauty and art." But we can anticipate no such future recognition of Heine. A distinguished name in the second period of a country's literature never can stand on the same ground as a great name in the first. Schiller was one of a band, and one of the greatest of them, who gave to Germany, for the first time in modern history, a poetic literature. So Burns gave again to Scotland a national poetry, which, since the sixteenth century conflicts, that nation had not possessed. He was the immediate poetic heir of Dunbar and Lyndsay. Perhaps it may be added, he only of all poetic sons of Scotland may be placed with Shakspeare and Chaucer, Spenser and Milton, among the princes of the literary blood-royal of Britain. More fortunate than her sister land, England never lost her poetic tradition. She had not the Scottish two centuries break. She could not therefore owe to any one, what last year Scotland recognised as her deep obligation to Burns. So Heine was but one of many. He was distinctive, unique, in many respects original, in intellectual gifts. He wrote much, and fast. It was the age's fault as much as the man's. One he was among the stars, but far enough from being a sun. Among the best biographies of our time, are those of Schiller and Goethe-books not to be exhausted by one reading, but worthy of several-from which the young student of German, and the matured man of culture, to whom German is but one of many literatures, may alike derive intellectual profit. But we do not consider that any British man of letters could acquire or increase lasting renown, by seeking to make a third classic biography out of the chequered and saddening career of Heinrich Heine. We part from Mr Bowring with high respect for his talent Lechler adds, "Not indeed at the centre of Christianity, but still within its circumference." Overvaluing of German. 415 and industry. With proper regard for the public and for himself, we hope he may win a lasting reputation, not on the lower platform of translation merely, but on ground altogether his own. There is danger in these days of our forgetting that Southern Europe has had, and still possesses, a literature; and Mr Bowring will allow us to say, in conclusion, that he will translate none the worse from the German, and will none the less appreciate that one century old literature, if Spain and Italy should claim a share of his attention and regard. Neither of the southern literatures can be expected to influence our country as they did in the age of Elizabeth and James. The intellectual relation of the countries has changed too thoroughly for that. In the great historian, whose remains in the first week of this year were laid in our National Walhalla, we had, perhaps, the last eminent literary man by whom German was little known. The tendency now is, to study German to the disparagement of all the Romanic tongues. For this linguistic kindredness may be a motive, but is no justification. Proportion is the rule here, as elsewhere. The choicest parts of all accessible literatures,-such is the intellectual food which the true man of self-culture will choose. 1A eulogistic reviewer asked that week, "What had he not read?" Will any one tell us (now that the very natural enthusiasm is over) how many allusions to German can be found in Macaulay's writings? 2 D VOL. XXXII. NO. LXIV. ART. VI. Church and State; the Spiritual and the Civil Courts. 1. Fragment on the Church. By THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D. London. 2. The State in its Relation with the Church. By W. E. GLADSTONE, Esq. London. 3. The Cardross Case. Proceedings at the Commission of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. Edinburgh. THERE are three possible ways in which the Church and the State-the body ecclesiastical and the body political-might exist in reference to each other. First, the State might be regarded as possessing a rightful sovereignty over the Church, and hence the religious society be put under the rule of the civil magistrate. Or, secondly, the inferiority of the Church to the State might be asserted, and the temporal government subjected to the regulation, or at least the control, of the spiritual authorities. Or, thirdly, the two societies might be viewed as distinct and independent bodies, entering into alliance, or existing separately, but each complete in itself, and supreme within its own province and for the determination of its own affairs. It is seldom, or perhaps never, that the idea of Church and State, according to either of these theories, is purely or accurately realized in fact. Still it is to one or other of these types that all existing examples of the relation between the two bodies more or less closely approximate, and in reality belong. The controversy as to the preference due to one or other of these theories must very much turn upon the question,—Are the Church and the State originally and essentially two distinct and independent societies, with separate spheres and functions, or only one society under two names? Are they two bodies, different in their origin and nature-in the kind of authority belonging to each-in the character of the members that they include-in the class of matters with which they are conversant, so that they cannot be merged into one or confounded without altering their true character as Church or State; or are they in reality but one body, with no more than one province and function,dealing with things nominally but not essentially different,—and exercising the same identical jurisdiction with reference to all causes and persons, whether known as secular or known as spiritual? Assert that there is no valid or true foundation for the distinction commonly acknowledged between things secular and things sacred, or that there is no greater difference between matters belonging to the faith and worship of God, on the one Different Theories of the Relation between Them. 417 hand, and matters pertaining to civil life on the other, than between various classes of temporal rights among themselves, and it is plain that they may all be properly dealt with in the same way and controlled by one common governing body. If questions of truth and falsehood in religious doctrine, or right and wrong in religious worship, or what is lawful or unlawful in religious order, do not require a different treatment, and are not to be decided on different principles from questions relating to person and property, and if the authority which is competent to deal with the understanding and conscience of man in spiritual things be not essentially distinct from the authority that is conversant with his outward and civil obedience, then the ruling power in the State may also be the ruling power in the Church; and it will, to a large extent, depend on the comparative importance conceded to the religious or to the civil element in society at any particular time, whether we see an approximation to the Ultramontane doctrine of the subordination of the State to the Church, or witness an example of the Erastian theory of a civil jurisdiction in spiritual things. The notion of the identity of the spiritual and temporal powers, or at least the practical denial of their separate and essential independence, has been exemplified in various ways. In times before the introduction of Christianity, and in our own day among nations where Christianity is unknown, we very commonly see the King and the Priest to be one and the same person; and because usually he is much more of the King than the Priest, and because the civil element throughout the nation is more largely developed than the religious, the temporal power lords it over the spiritual. But a similar result may be brought about in a Christian nation by a process somewhat different. Among a professedly Christian people, where the subjects of the Commonwealth are, to a large extent, numerically identical with the members of the Church, and where the laws of the State are more or less borrowed from Christianity, there is a danger that the real difference between Church and State may be overlooked, from the idea that they are merged into each other, and that the two are become virtually one. Such substantially is the doctrine of Hooker in his "Ecclesiastical Polity," and also of Dr Arnold in his "Fragment on the Church," although they arrive at their conclusion by different roads. With Hooker, the fixed and predominant idea was the supremacy of the civil power, which he had to defend against the Puritans, who regarded it as unlawful in the ecclesiastical province; and, accordingly, while asserting that in every professedly Christian nation the Church and the Commonwealth become "one society," he does so by teaching. 1 Ecclesiastical Polity, Book viii., chap. 1. |