The shock--for it was nothing less--came at a singularly happy moment. The blow, given by Carlyle as critic, was closely followed up by the French _Romantiques_, as creative artists. Nothing could well have been more alien to English taste, as understood by the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_, than the early works, or indeed any works, of Hugo and those who owned him for chief--if it were not the works of Goethe and the countrymen of Goethe. Different as these were from each other, they held common ground in uniting the most opposite prejudices of Englishmen against them. The sarcasms of Thackeray on the French writers speak to this no less eloquently than the fluent flippancies of De Quincey upon the Germans. [Footnote: See Thackeray's _Paris Sketch Book_, especially the chapters on _Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse_ and _French Dramas and Melodramas_. See also De Quincey's Review of Carlyle's translation of _Wilhelm Meister_. Works, vol. xii.] Yet, in the one case as in the other--thanks, in no small measure, to Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne--genius, in the long run, carried the day. And the same history has been repeated, as the literatures of Russia and of Scandinavia have each in turn been brought within our ken. These discoveries have all fallen within little more than half a century since Carlyle, by the irony of fate, reviewed Richter and the _State of German Literature_ in the pages of the _Edinburgh_. And their result has been to modify the standards of taste and criticism in a thousand ways. They have opened our eyes to aspects of poetry that we should never otherwise have suspected, and unveiled to us fields of thought, as well as methods of artistic treatment which, save by our own fault, must both have widened and deepened our conception of poetry. That is the true meaning of the historical method. The more we broaden our vision, the less is our danger of confounding poetry, which is the divine genius of the whole world, with the imperfect, if not misshapen idols of the tribe, the market-place and the cave. Of this conquest Carlyle must in justice be reckoned as the pioneer. For many years he stood almost single-handed as the champion of German thought and German art against the scorn or neglect of his countrymen. But he knew that he was right, and was fully conscious whither the path he had chosen was to lead. Aware that much in the work of Goethe would seem "faulty" to many, he forestalls the objection at the outset.