[21] "You wicked Jacques! What? Die and leave your old comrade? No, no, Jacques--you must not do it." [22] "Thou art not of this earth! No mortal offers such a sacrifice! Bless me, thou daughter of Olympian gods!" XVI ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND POLITICS In its first period, Romanticism is distinctly non-political. It exalts the established order of things (_vide_ Novalis), it submissively acknowledges the authority of the king and of the Church, but in its purely literary productions it is, generally speaking, politically colourless. Take Tieck's satiric comedies. In their outward form there is something Aristophanic; but their satire is never directed against any political character or tendency. It is aimed at "enlightenment;" and from Tieck's biographer we learn exactly what the poet understood by this word. At that time, says Köpke, the most prominent and respected men in Berlin, those who were still the leaders of public opinion, were of the school of Frederick the Great. The prevailing opinions of the eighteenth century had become their second nature. They were moral, conscientious men, who, in all the different departments of administration, science, and literature, devoted themselves zealously, and often with extraordinary industry, to their duties. Whether government officials, theologians, teachers, critics, popular philosophers, or poets, they all aimed at making religion and science useful, and at educating mankind by external provisions and rules. Intelligibility and popularity being to them all-important, they naturally diluted and levelled everything to one general plane of mediocrity. A certain blameless philistinism became their moral ideal, an ideal which seemed poor and tame in comparison with the old fervour of faith. Lessing was their prophet, and they believed themselves to be perpetuating his tradition. We can readily understand that they fell foul of Goethe, which indeed Lessing himself had done, and that they had a narrow conception of the significance and value of imagination. To them it was only the handmaid of utility, and of no value except as an instrument in the service of morality. Everywhere throughout Tieck's writings we come upon mockery of this moral literary tendency. Take, for instance, _Der Gestiefelte Kater_ ("Puss in Boots").--Hinze, the cat, is taking an evening walk, absorbed in melancholy thought. He begins to sing a hunting song. A nightingale strikes up in a bush close at hand. "She sings magnificently, this songstress of the groves," says Hinze; "but think how delicious she must _taste_! Happy indeed are the great of the earth; they can eat as many nightingales and larks as they fancy. We poor common people have to be content with the song, with the beauty, with the indescribably sweet harmony.--It is terrible that I cannot hear anything sing without wanting to eat it."