Nur wer Hafis liebt und kenntand Fitzgerald, following this suggestion almost literally, translated Calderon first, and then Omar Khayyam. Surely, one might infer, the era of a world-literature must be approaching. Yet in looking over the schedules of our American universities, one finds as little reference
Weiss was Calderon gesungen,—
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is French in its forms and often in its frivolity; while the French critics have lately discovered Jane Austen, and are trying to find in that staid and exemplary lady the founder of the realistic school, and the precursor of Zola.
Among contemporary novelists, Mr. Howells places the Russian first, then the Spanish; ranking the English, and even the French, far lower.
He is also said, in a recent interview, to have attributed his own style largely to the influence of Heine.
But Heine himself, in the preface to his ‘Deutschland,’ names as his own especial models Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Moliere —a Greek, a Spaniard, and a Frenchman.
Goethe himself thinks that we cannot comprehend Calderon without Hafiz,—
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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