William Lovell goes to Paris (which Tieck at that time had not seen), and is, of course, disgusted with everything there. "The town is a hideous, irregular pile of stones. One has the feeling of being in a great prison.... People chatter and talk all day long without so much as once saying what they think.... I occasionally went to the theatre, simply because time hung so heavily on my hands. The tragedies consist of epigrams, without action or passion, and tirades which produce much the same effect as the words issuing from the mouths of the figures in old drawings.... The less natural an actor is, the more highly is he esteemed. In the great, world-renowned Paris Opera--I fell asleep." Such are the impressions made upon Lovell (an Englishman) by Paris at the time of the Revolution. It is nothing but an expression of the prevalent German contempt for the French character and French art, doubly unreasonable in this case because it has simply been learned by rote out of books. In the Théâtre Français, however, Lovell ejaculates: "O Sophocles! O divine Shakespeare!" and he characteristically observes: "I hate the men who, with their little imitation sun (namely, reason), light up all the pleasant twilight corners and chase away the fascinating shadow phantoms which dwelt so securely under the leafy canopies. There is, undoubtedly, a kind of daylight in our times, but the night and morning light of romance were more beautiful than this grey light from a cloudy sky." [Illustration: LUDWIG TIECK] With the exception of a few such touches, this work seems at the first glance to be distinguished by none of the peculiarities one is accustomed to associate with a Romantic production; but, as a matter of fact, there is no book which reveals to us more distinctly the foundations on which the Romantic movement rests. The main idea and the form of _William Lovell_ (it is written in letters) were both borrowed from a French novel, _Le Paysan Perverti_, by the materialistic writer, Rétif de la Bretonne. The fact that we are able to trace the origin of a Romantic work directly to French materialism is not without significance; it is in reality from this materialism that the Romanticists derive their gloomy fatalism. _Lovell_ is an extremely tedious book to read nowadays; the style is tiresomely diffuse, the characters are as if lost in mist. Some of the subordinate figures, the devoted old man-servant, for instance, are weak imitations of Richardson--there is not a trenchant trait nor a dramatic situation in the whole book. Its merit, which is as German as are its defects, lies in its psychology. The hero is a youth who is led, slowly and surely, to do away, as far as he himself is concerned, with all authority, to disregard every one of the traditional, accepted rules of life, until at last he is leading the life, not only of a confirmed egotist, but of a criminal.