“Merimee,” continued Goethe, “is indeed a thorough fellow!  Indeed, generally, more power and genius are required for the objective treatment of a subject than is supposed.  Thus, too, Lord Byron, notwithstanding his predominant personality, has sometimes had the power of renouncing himself altogether, as may be seen in some of his dramatic pieces, particularly in his Marino Faliero.  In this piece one quite forgets that Lord Byron, or even an Englishman, wrote it.  We live entirely in Venice, and entirely in the time in which the action takes place.  The personages speak quite from themselves and from their own condition, without having any of the subjective feelings, thoughts, and opinions of the poet.  That is as it should be.  Of our young French romantic writers of the exaggerating sort, one cannot say as much.  What I have read of them—­poems, novels, dramatic works—­have all borne the personal coloring of the author, and none of them ever makes me forget that a Parisian—­that a Frenchman—­wrote them.  Even in the treatment of foreign subjects one still remains in France and Paris, quite absorbed in all the wishes, necessities, conflicts, and fermentations of the present day.”

“Beranger also,” I threw in experimentally, “has only expressed the situation of the great metropolis, and his own interior.”

“That is a man,” said Goethe, “whose power of representation and whose interior are worth something.  In him is all the substance of an important personality.  Beranger is a nature most happily endowed, firmly grounded in himself, purely developed from himself, and quite in harmony with himself.  He has never asked—­what would suit the times? what produces an effect? what pleases? what are others doing?—­in order that he might do the like.  He has always worked only from the core of his own nature, without troubling himself as to what the public, or what this or that party, expects.  He has certainly, at different critical epochs, been influenced by the mood, wishes, and necessities of the people; but that has only confirmed him in himself, by proving to him that his own nature is in harmony with that of the people; and has never seduced him into expressing anything but what already lay in his heart.

“You know that I am, upon the whole, no friend to what is called political poems, but such as Beranger has composed I can tolerate.  With him there is nothing snatched out of the air, nothing of merely imagined or imaginary interest; he never shoots at random; but, on the contrary, has always the most decided, the most important subjects.  His affectionate admiration of Napoleon, and his reminiscences of the great warlike deeds which were performed under him, and that at a time when these recollections were a consolation to the somewhat oppressed French; then his hatred of the domination of priests, and of the darkness which threatened to return with the Jesuits—­these are things to which one cannot refuse hearty sympathy.