They had now pretty well collected their poetical requisitions; but they had still to consider that the marvellous might also be empty, and without relation to man.  But this relation, demanded as necessary, must be a moral one, from which the improvement of mankind should manifestly follow; and thus a poem had reached its utmost aim when, with every thing else accomplished, it was useful besides.  They now wished to test the different kinds of poetry according to all these requisites:  those which imitated nature, besides being marvellous, and at the same time of a moral aim and use, were to rank as the first and highest.  And, after much deliberation, this great pre-eminence was at last ascribed, with the highest degree of conviction, to Aesop’s fables!

Strange as such a deduction may now appear, it had the most decided influence on the best minds.  That Gellert and subsequently Lichtwer devoted themselves to this department, that even Lessing attempted to labor in it, that so many others turned their talents towards it, speaks for the confidence which this species of poetry had gained.  Theory and practice always act upon each other:  one can see from their works what is the men’s opinion, and, from their opinions, predict what they will do.

Yet we must not dismiss our Swiss theory without doing it justice.  Bodmer, with all the pains he took, remained theoretically and practically a child all his life.  Breitinger was an able, learned, sagacious man, whom, when he looked rightly about him, the essentials of a poem did not all escape,—­nay, it can be shown that he may have dimly felt the deficiencies of his system.  Remarkable, for instance, is his query, “Whether a certain descriptive poem by Koenig, on the ’Review-camp of Augustus the Second,’ is properly a poem?” and the answer to it displays good sense.  But it may serve for his complete justification that he, starting from a false point, on a circle almost run out already, still struck upon the main principle, and at the end of his book finds himself compelled to recommend as additions, so to speak, the representation of manners, character, passions,—­in short, the whole inner man; to which, indeed, poetry pre-eminently belongs.

It may well be imagined into what perplexity young minds felt themselves thrown by such dislocated maxims, half-understood laws, and shivered-up dogmas.  We adhere to examples, and there, too, were no better off; foreigners as well as the ancients stood too far from us; and from the best native poets always peeped out a decided individuality, to the good points of which we could not lay claim, and into the faults of which we could not but be afraid of falling.  For him who felt any thing productive in himself it was a desperate condition.