In the midst of this plastic and musical people, who are so good-natured, so childlike, so careless of their dignity, and, according to English ideas, so immoral, Oswald, who is accustomed to regard it as the aim and end of existence to live up to certain insular conceptions of duty and dignity, feels himself very ill at ease. Devoid of all artistic feeling, he judges art now by a literary, now by a moral, now by a religious standard; his prejudices are constantly offended; he understands nothing. He notices some reliefs on the doors of St. Peter's, and great is his amazement to find that they represent scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Leda with the swan, and the like! What is this but pure paganism! Corinne takes him to the Colosseum, and (in this resembling his contemporary Oehlenschläger) his one thought is that he is standing in a gigantic place of execution, his one feeling, moral indignation at the crimes here perpetrated against the early Christians. He enters the Sistine Chapel and, ignorant of the history of art, is greatly outraged that Michael Angelo has ventured to portray God the Father in ordinary human form, as though he were a Jupiter or a Zeus. He is equally scandalised on finding in Michael Angelo's prophets and sibyls none of that humble Christian spirit which he had looked for in a Christian chapel. All this the authoress has drawn from life. Italy presupposes in her visitors a certain amount of artistic, or æsthetic, taste. There are three ways of looking at everything--the practical, the theoretical, and the æsthetic. The forest is seen from the practical point of view by the man who inquires if it conduces to the healthiness of the district, or the owner who calculates its value as firewood; from the theoretical, by the botanist who makes a scientific study of its plant life; from the æsthetic or artistic, by the man who has no thought but for its appearance, its effect as part of the landscape. It is this last, the artistic, æsthetic view, that Oswald is unable to take. He has no eyes; his reasoning power and his morality have deprived his senses of their freshness. Therefore he cannot lose sight of the substance in the form, therefore the Colosseum awakens in him only the remembrance of all the blood so wickedly spilled there. In Corinne's vindication of the æsthetic view we feel the influence of Germany, more particularly of A. W. Schlegel, the first exponent of the awakening romantic spirit in that country. For, however differently Romanticism may develop in different countries, one thing which it invariably maintains is, that the beautiful is its own aim and end, or Selbstzweck, as it was called in Germany; an idea borrowed from Kant's _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_; the vindication of beauty as the standard and true aim of art. In France this theory was expressed by the formula _l'art pour l'art_, and it makes its appearance for the first time in Denmark in certain of Oehlenschläger's poems.