ROSENTHAL'S GERMAN DRAMAS FOR THE YOUNG. * IN a Chinese the
notions of European life conveyed in these dramas would not be astonishing ; m an European they provoke a wonder where the worthy author can have spent his days. The scene of the first is laid in Switzerland ; and the favourite amuse- ments of one of the heroines are to run after her cow to the top of the Alps of a morning, and go to a fancy ball at " Lady Pimlico's" in the evening. But this is a trifle. The scene of the second is laid in England : among the more prominent characters are an ex- nurse who descants upon Correggio and his pictures with intense gusto ; a gipsy who goes about telling fortunes, and is looked upon as the most exemplary character and universal bene- factress of the neighbourhood.; a hermit who spends his life in fasting and prayer; and a student involved in a democratic conspiracy at the university, and sentenced to ten years' im- prisonment. In the third act, a lady sends her carriage to carry the hermit to a fete champetre. The probabilities of time are as little regarded as those of manners : in the first drama we have a young lady, who lost her parents in the first French Revolution, sitting down, after a lapse of eleven years, to read Humboldt's " Cosmos." The characters, in short, belong to a world which has as little in common with our own as that of the " Contes de Commere Oie "; and they resemble the heroes and heroines of that venerable lady, too, in being for the most part of portentously high birth. These things may have the appearance of defects in works composed for the in- struction of the young; but to make amends, all the characters are immensely learned and sententiously moral. A young lady of sixteen will talk you as learnedly about Schiller, Goethe's " Far- ben-Lehre," and the Italian and Dutch schools of painting, as a German professor. Their learning, indeed, appears sometimes to overpower their natural feelings. One loving sister thus an- nounces to another that their brother has just escaped drowning- " William let his watch fall into the pond where he was feeding the gold fish. The water was so clear that he saw it at the bottom ; and, forgetting —you know how courageous he is—the law of optics in consequence of which water always appears one-fourth shallower than it really is, he jumped in."
In their defiance of probability, we have, as already observed, been struck with a similarity between these dramas and Mother Goose's Fairy Tales : there all resemblance ceases. They are in fact as dull as if they were indeed exact copies of well-regulated society. The author justly claims credit for not having used one naughty word ; but it strikes us that some of his phrases are of a kind we in England have not been accustomed to hear used by men, much less by ladies, in really good society. It is very im- probable that the pattern "Lady Stewart" would have spoken of "Der Tolpel von einem Bedienten."
Theater fllr die Jugend. By J. Rosenthal. Williams and Norgate.
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