The most popular of the German romanticists was Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouque, the descendant of a family exiled from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussian army in the war of liberation.  Fouque’s numerous romances, in all of which he upholds the ideal of Christian knighthood, have been, many of them, translated into English.  “Aslauga’s Knight” appeared in Carlyle’s “Specimens of German Romance” (1827); “Sintram,” “Undine,” and “Der Zauberring” had been translated even earlier.  “Thiodolf the Icelander” and others have also been current in English circulating libraries.  Carlyle acknowledges that Fouque’s notes are few, and that he is possessed by a single idea.  “The chapel and the tilt yard stand in the background or the foreground in all the scenes of his universe.  He gives us knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they stand before us in their mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire and dame. . . .  Change of scene and person brings little change of subject; even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence of its unseen presence.  Nor can it be said that in this solitary department his success is of the very highest sort.  To body forth the spirit of Christian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old sentiment to modern thoughts, was a task which he could not attempt.  He has turned rather to the fictions and machinery of former days.”  Heine says that Fouque’s Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of a hundred lions and the sense of two asses.  But Fouque’s “Undine” (1811) is in its way a masterpiece and a classic.  This story of the lovely water-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight, and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance to the conception of Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun.”  Coleridge was greatly fascinated by it.  He read the original several times, and once the American translation, printed at Philadelphia.  He said that it was beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere’s Caliban in being a literal creation.

But in general Fouque’s chivalry romances, when compared with Scott’s, have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higher spirituality and a softer sentiment.  The Waverley novels are solid with a right materialistic treatment.  It was Scott’s endeavour to make the Middle Ages real.  The people are there, as well as chevaliers and their ladies.  The history of the times is there.  But in Fouque the Middle Ages become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in our imaginations.  There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, and enchantment.  Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the Lion Heart in “Der Zauberring” with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in “Ivanhoe” and “The Talisman.”