The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No IIVarious
History
The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
A new contribution to an obscure but most interesting part of European
history is _Deutschland in der Revolutions periode von_ 1522-26, (Germany,
in the Revolutionary Period from 1522 to 26,) by JOSEPH EDMUND JÖRG. The
author has had access to a great mass of original and hitherto unused
materials, especially diplomatic correspondence and other documents in the
Bavarian archives. His view of the subject is very different from that
taken by ZIMMERMANN, in his _Peasants’ War_, or by any other writer. He
mocks at the idea that this revolution grew out of the evils and
oppressions suffered by the people, and finds its most powerful impulse in
the passion for innovation that sprung up along with the revival of
classical studies in the middle ages.
The antique fashion of presenting poetic works to the public, is revived
in Germany with great success. Professor GRIEPENKERL of Brunswick, whose
tragedy of Robespierre made a great sensation a year or more since, is now
reading his new play of the Girondists to large audiences in the principal
cities. He has already been heard at Brunswick, Leipzig, Dresden, and
Bremen, and proposes to visit other places on the same errand. The play,
which is a tragedy of course, is much admired, though it is not thought to
be adapted to the stage. The Girondists were not men of action, but
orators and thinkers. The final scene in the play is the famous banquet
before they were taken to execution. Charlotte Corday is among the
characters; the women are said not to be drawn as truly and powerfully as
the men.
CARLYLE’S Life of Stirling is criticised in the _Grenzboten_, which calls
Carlyle the strangest of all philosophers. This book is said, however, to
be, on the whole, clearer and more intelligible than most of his former
productions. Still, like most works of the new romantic school in England,
of which Carlyle is the chief, it aims rather to give expression to the
ideas and abilities of the author, than to do justice to its subject. But
it is in Warren’s _Lily and the Bee_, that the school appears in full
bloom. This is said to consist mostly of exclamation points, and is
written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without
object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the
kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation
these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its
predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and
finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily.
This is better treatment than _The Lily and the Bee_ gets at home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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