Ritteroman, Raeuberstuck, Raeuberroman, Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied) both in Germany and England, satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom, adventure, strong action, and emotion.  As Lowell said of the transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to get at the fresh air.  Laughable as many of them seem today, with their improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement, and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description.  They appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of the Naturton, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic emotions, pity and terror.  This spirit infected not merely the department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction in general.  It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like Beckford’s “Vathek,” Godwin’s “St. Leon” and “Caleb Williams,” Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Shelley’s “Zastrozzi” and “St. Irvine the Rosicrucian,” and the American Charles Brockden Brown’s “Ormond” and “Wieland,” forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the elixir vitae, or who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in their hands.

Lockhart, however, denies that “Goetz von Berlichingen” had anything in common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the Anti-Jacobin.  He says that it was a “broad, bold, free, and most picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events.”  He thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with “their forays upon each other’s domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord,” Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy’s “Reliques” prompted the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” so “Goetz” prompted the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion.”  He quotes the passage from “Goetz” where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further progress of the battle; and he asks “who does not recognize in Goethe’s drama the true original of the death scene in ‘Marmion’ and the storm in ’Ivanhoe’?”