Part 30 (1/2)

A very sharp controversy is now being waged by the scholars of Denmark and Schleswig. The Danes resort to philology in order to prove the right of their country to extend its government over the Germans of that Duchy, and the other party meet their onslaught with weapons equally keen, drawn also from the a.r.s.enals of dictionaries and grammars. The best of the quarrel hitherto seems to be on the side of the Schleswigers, whose great champion is one Herr Clement, a man of as much learning as talent. In a recent essay, he establishes that the original inhabitants of Schleswig were not Danes but Angles, or Frieslanders, essentially the same race as the original Saxon stock of England. In ill.u.s.tration of this doctrine he adduces an immense list of names of places which are the same in Schleswig and England--as, for instance, Ripen and Ripon, Ellum and Elham, Rodding and Reading, Meldorp and Milthorp, Wilstrup and Wilthorpe, &c., &c. This essay will probably be expanded into a book.

The German critics are discussing with high encomiums a volume of poems by ANNETTE VON DROSTE, a deceased poetess of Westphalia. It is ent.i.tled _Das Religiose Jahr_ (The Religious Year), and is inspired with that absolute devotion which lends so great a charm to the poems of Montgomery, the Moravians, and the mystical writers generally.

BYRON'S _Manfred_, with musical accompaniments, by R. Schumann, is about to be produced at the Weimar theatre.

JAHN, the well-known Leipsic professor, is engaged in writing a life of Beethoven.

RICHARD WAGNER, the revolutionist, musical composer, and writer upon aesthetics, has published a new work, ent.i.tled _Oper und Drama_ (Opera and Drama), which the German critics fall upon with considerable ferocity. They complain that while he entirely rejects the old form of the opera, he does not indicate what is the new kind of musical drama to be subst.i.tuted for it. Wagner has also published _Three Opera Poems_, which the same critics cannot but praise for their originality, power, and inspiration. If the music of these operas is adequate to the _libretti_, say they, they are really new and grand productions. This would seem, also, to be proved by the fact that one of them has been brought out at Weimar, through the influence and under the direction of Liszt. The author is living in exile in Switzerland, and is engaged upon a dramatic trilogy with a prelude. He no longer professes to write operas, but musical dramas.

An attempt has been made in Germany to register the enormous number of books and pamphlets which the Germans themselves have published on their two great poets, Goethe and Schiller. A catalogue of the Goethean literature in Germany, from 1793 to 1851, has been published by Balde, at Ca.s.sel, and in London by Williams and Norgate. The Schiller literature, from 1781 to 1851, is likewise announced by the same firm.

A very excellent translation of sundry old Scottish and English ballads has just made its appearance at Munich, from the pen of W. DOENNIGER. It contains sixteen Scotch and seventeen English ballads, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, all rendered with great fidelity, and in the true spirit of the original. So successful is the book that a second edition of it is about to appear, with ill.u.s.trations by Kaulbach, Voltzen, and other eminent artists.

The _Augsburg Gazette_ states that the Congregation of the Index has just prohibited all the works of Eugene Sue and Proudhon; also a clerical Turin paper, called the _Buona Novella_; a work on animal magnetism, by Tomasi; a manual for schoolmasters, printed at Asti in 1850; and all the works of Gioberti.

A book to be read by the students of literature and by critics is HETTNER'S _Moderne Drama_, just published at Brunswick. We do not know of a profounder and keener discussion of the principles and laws of dramatic writing, or of more just and striking dramatic criticisms than it contains.

LAYARD'S popular account of his excavations and discoveries at Nineveh has been translated into German by one of the Meissners (not the poet, we believe), and is published at Leipsic.

FRAULEIN FRIEDERIKE FRIEDEMANN has published, at Leipsic, a metrical version of Lord BYRON'S _Corsair_, which is worthy of all commendation.

The gloomy hue and pa.s.sionate vehemence of the original are preserved in the translation with surprising fidelity, and the rhythm is hardly less perfect than in Byron's English itself.

The last number of the _Theologische Quartalschrift_ (Theological Quarterly), published at Tubingen, by Laupp, contains an interesting paper on the pretended objections to the historical truth of the Pentateuch, by WELTE; the critical historical examination of the x.x.xi.

x.x.xii. Jeremiah, by REINKE; and the Aloge, with their relations to the Montanists, by HEFELE.

MR. GEORGE STEPHENS, the translator of Tegner's _Frithiof's Saga_, and whose intimate acquaintance with the early literature of Sweden has been shown by the collection of legends of that country which he edited in conjunction with Hylten-Cavallius, and by various works superintended by him for the _Svenska Fornskrift-Salskapet_, (a sort of Stockholm Camden Society,) has removed to Copenhagen in consequence of his having been appointed Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University there. The subject of his first course of lectures was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. We have in our possession the MS.

translations of some very interesting ancient Swedish poems made by Mr.

Stephens some five years ago, and not yet published.

The London _Leader_, socialist and avowedly and industriously infidel, says of EUGENE SUE, not long ago the rage of half the world: