presupposed in that case, art can continue to exist at all; and at any rate the time of this spirit-like domination is still far off, although literature has witnessed the production of many dramatic poems which seem to be designed for it. It was many years ago that Tieck, on the subject of some wretched stuff by Clauren, made the remark that we had at last reached the cellar and must begin to ascend again. He was right in his remark, but, unhappily, not in the hope with which he accompanied it. Very far from hastening to leave the cellar, we have found it very comfortable down there; we have made ourselves at home as well as we could, and are hideously satisfied! Instead of the heroic spirit of our past ages, Jack Pudding now staggers out of the wings in a torn jacket and shows us what kind of humor is engendered by stupidity and brandy, when they have a rendezvous in the head of a porter. If Schiller and Goethe dare once to come out of their exile, then Nestroy's plum-pudding jinnee steps in their path, and they of course modestly give way to him. The magic worlds of Shakespeare and Calderon are already suffocated in their birth by the head-shaking of the stage-manager who must keep his machinery together for Raimund's bedlam hocus-pocus. Let us be just, however, let us remember that our theatre, in spite of the great talents which have been dedicated to it, was not what it should have been, even in its most brilliant period, and this perhaps not quite through its own fault. We have never had a real comedy; farces and absurdities take its place, and the critics themselves, if we except Schlegel, never seemed to divine that tragedy and comedy sprout from one and the same root, and that the former absolutely cannot unfold in all its greatness if the latter remains behind it. Confining the conception of comedy to the narrow etymological meaning of its name, and inferring the intrinsic impossibility of the poem from the accidental lack of a poet, we have imagined that we could not have a comedy, when on the contrary we, precisely, should and ought to have the very best, for reasons which cannot be developed thus in passing. Our tragedy, on the other hand, wished to take the second step before the first; it was not satisfied to start out to conquer the world from our own territory; it preferred to wander about as a homeless vagabond among all the peoples of the earth; and only when it had fully persuaded itself that one cannot grow fat off begged bread did it return in shame to its mother's breast. But, in Germany, in the meantime, the enthusiasm which can seldom or never be re-awakened had evaporated, and when _Wallenstein_ and _William Tell_, when _Hermann's Battle_ and the _Prince of Homburg_ appeared, the fusion of the theatre with life, which might perhaps have still been possible at the time of _Iphigenia_, was no longer to be thought of. People had become used to looking upon the