This is not the place to inquire what remains for Protestantism in France, since the Revolution of February last, and the long train of calamities, the bloodshed and anarchy, which have followed in its train. But we cannot dismiss the subject without expressing a confident hope, that, when the revolutionary storm which now agitates that ill-fated country shall have passed away, an enlightened form of Christianity will become the leading religion of her people. Catholicism can never again have any real influence on the French nation. Her clergy may live in peace with the present rulers of France, and sing in their churches the Domine salvam fac rempublicam, as six months since they sang, Domine salvum fac regem; but between democratic France and Catholicism there can never be any serious, any sincere union. Protestantism, that is to say, a religion founded in liberty of thought, can alone harmonize with free institutions. The Revolution of 1848, notwithstanding the many evils which have resulted from it, will have one good effect. It will have practically demonstrated, that it is not by wild and chimerical schemes of reform, that society can be regenerated; and France, we believe, will understand that in the tranquil but certain progress of religious truth is to be found the only safeguard of a nation.

ART. VIII.- - Prose Writers of Germany. By FREDERIC H. HEDGE. Illustrated with Portraits. Philadelphia : Carey & Hart. 1848. 8vo. pp. 567.

WE are surprised that some ingenious mind has not carried out, with reference to the intellectual universe, the argument from design, which forms the basis of Paley's Natural Theology. We infer the blended wisdom and benevolence of the Creator from the distribution of land and water, coal, salt, and metals, in such proportions and relations as subserve the convenience and facilitate the industry of man. We might draw the same inference from the relations of demand and supply that can be traced in the native capacities and endowments of mankind. Non omnia possumus omnes.

Nascitur, non fit, is the law not of poetical genius alone, but of intellectual and artistical superiority in every department. The power of appreciating and enjoying the creations of others exists in thousands whom no possible training could have made creative or controlling minds. While few are unable to receive pleasure and profit from books, the number of those who are capable of becoming the makers of readable books is comparatively small, and the richest culture and the most refined taste are entirely compatible with an utter incapacity of authorship. The same proportion that exists between born writers and born readers may be traced between the minds capable of a legitimate political ascendency and influence, as jurists, legislators, or diplomatists, and those who, lacking native, can never possess acquired, ability for public life. This proportion is very little affected by varieties of outward condition. It furnishes as large a representation pro rata for the council-fire in the forest as for the parliament or the senate-chamber. When, under democratic institutions, offices that are beyond the needs of the people are created for party purposes, and sought for selfish ends, for lack of candidates who can be fitted for them, they must be filled by men who cannot grow into the capacity to fill them well. When, on the other hand, under arbitrary institutions of government, the places of trust and power that ought to intervene between the supreme authority and the common citizens are left vacant, there is crowded out of its legitimate sphere a large amount of talent which cannot find scope in the humbler walks of industry, and will, from the necessity of its nature, seek posts and modes of influence the nearest possible to those for which the Creator fitted it. These unsphered minds, these potential statesmen and lawmakers, are almost always drawn into the literary arena; and they are too highly endowed to remain unnoticed, yet too far from their true vocation to win success and fame commensurate with their wisdom and ability.

These remarks are verified in German literature, and may aid in the solution of some of the complex problems which it offers. In modern Germany, there has never been a time when administrative and executive talent had an open field for its exercise. Art and authorship have been the only departments of effort which have been free for competition; and, as the born artist alone can cross the threshold of art,

authorship has occupied, not only its appropriate quota of the German intellect, but very many minds which, under more liberal institutions of government, would have embodied their ideas in constitutions, laws, or treaties. To this fact we are to ascribe the hyper-symmetrical, redundant many-sidedness of German literature. Hence its many sublustrous luminaries of no contemptible magnitude, yet too nebulous to present a definite outline. There are not a few German writers whose eminence is acknowledged rather than recognized, whose fame rests on general belief rather than on individual consciousness, who were rather the lexicographers than the historiographers of their own minds. They had breadth of vision, depth of intuition, large and profound culture, originality of speculation and of fancy; the Promethean gift alone was wanting. Thus there is a great deal which we feel that we ought to admire, but cannot, barbless thoughts, unwinged words. For the discriminating criticism of such a literature, the first process ought to be the separation of those who would not have been authors, could they have been any thing else, from those who could have been nothing else. have no more right to regard the quartos and octavos of vast learning and unfathomable stupidity, which are transferred from the German press to the dustiest shelf in the library, as parts of German literature proper, than a foreigner would have to libel American literature on the score of the less ponderous abortions of our own press which pass into circulation chiefly through the hands of the grocer.

-

We

The political condition of Germany accounts, not only for the profuseness of its authorship, but for many of the prominent characteristics of its literature. Its writers have found a wide range of the most obvious subjects tabooed. Not only the institutions of government, but a large part of the distinctions and arrangements of social life, have been under interdict from time immemorial. The workings of autocratic jealousy defy calculation, and one never knows at what point he may come into collision with prejudices and absurdities which help to sustain the pillars of state. Even the novel, in its English and American form, presupposes unlimited freedom of the press; for in a work of art which has for its object the delineation of persons and things as they are, men must be viewed, incidentally at least, as citizens, no less than as lovers and friends; and it would be hardly possible for

the novelist to be true to life as it is or has been, with the penalties of constructive treason hanging over every unguarded allusion to government, law, or even natural right. For still stronger reasons, under arbitrary forms of government, must the discussion of all subjects appertaining to the philosophy or economy of social or national existence be precluded, or thrown into the most abstract forms, so that the whole science of practical life will never leave the matrix of metaphysics, in which all its fundamental ideas must have their birth, but in which they cannot have their development. Precisely this has been the case in Germany. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel have been permitted to promulgate their respective formulas of the state and of civic life; but there has never been a time when an Adam Smith, a Montesquieu, or a Say would have been suffered ground-room. The relations of the ME and the NOT ME have been set forth with the most critical minuteness; but the joint and mutual relations of any given aggregate of actually existing MES have been left in unfathomed obscurity. Thus German philosophy has been doubly transcendental, transcending, as it has done, the sphere, not only of sensual phenomena, but of ordinary human experience. For lack of a legal settlement on terrestrial soil, it has been driven into cloud-land, or compelled to "lay the beams of its chambers on the waters." Thus, with the utmost precision and exactness both of outline and of detail, it has necessarily seemed inaccessibly misty or profound to the Anglo-Saxon mind, accustomed as it is to a pedestrian philosophy, which steps from fact to fact, and leaves its footmarks where they may be seen of all men.

We referred to the necessary influence of arbitrary political institutions on the literature of fiction. This, in Germany, is as meagre in some aspects as it is inexhaustibly rich and indescribably grand in others. We know of no German. novel, in the more restricted sense of that term. True, there are intellectual autobiographies under the color of fictitious names and incidents, there are philosophical tales, such as might be made from Plato's or Cicero's Dialogues by passing a slender thread of narrative through them, there are stories which depict some possible, imaginable, or remotely future condition of things, to which the present offers no parallel. But if there be any instances of the artistical employment of such materials as the existing state of society affords

in the construction of an elaborate and finished fiction, the plot, incidents, and dénouement all within the range of conventional probabilities, they at least do not lie within the usual German reading of an American. The consciousness of a restricted range in the region of the actual has, no doubt, been one of the chief reasons why German writers of fiction have retained the use of the supernatural element, notwithstanding the slender hold which, even in its authentic and hallowed forms, it has on the faith of the nation. It must be outward circumstances, and not intellectual tendencies alone, which sustain a vernacular literature, bristling with the outgrown superstitions of all times and lands, among a people whose prevalent theology limits Omnipotence by the narrowest code of general laws, and hides it behind the wheels and within the springs of its own mechanism.

Its

In what we have said, we would not imply that the peculiar direction and tone of German literature have been the result of calculation and deliberate choice. The circumstances to which we refer have educated the national mind, modified its spontaneity, shaped its development. Germany lies within the latitude of the highest genius. Its climate is eminently congenial to the compact and vigorous constitution and healthy temperament of body, most propitious to mental clearness, strength, industry, and enterprise. mountains, forests, and rivers are full of the noblest inspiration, and fraught with the most suggestive traditions and remembrances. The nation has inherited from its earliest ancestry traits of the highest intellectual energy, to which, even in its ages of rudeness and barbarism, cultivated Rome was constrained to pay reluctant honor. The collective mind of such a nation could not, in the nature of things, be restrained, suppressed, or dwarfed. It must grow, and, if arrested in its lateral expansion, it must shoot up into regions where it can be free. If its lower branches find no room, the sap which should have nourished them will clothe the topmost boughs with the richer verdure and fruitage. The German intellect is at home in its domain of cloud-land, and unconscious of its banishment thither. With the prospect of the largest liberty, it would hesitate to return earthward, so much more of sky-room is there than of ground-room. Its abstractions are realities of its own experience, - phenomena of its own introverted existence. Its habitual action