Uhland as a poet
is not interested in his own psychology, but in the impinging world
and in the tender past. When Goethe said that Uhland was primarily
a balladist, he was right, for the ballad presupposes just
that permeation of the object by the emotion that satisfies the
unquestionable lyric gift possessed by Uhland, without in any way
destroying the essentially narrative objectivity of his style.
Uhland's greatest fame rests, then, on his ballads. The difference
between these and those of Goethe and Schiller is not merely in
the so-called "castle-Romanticism" of Uhland, not in a lingering
sentimentality in some of the poorer ones, but in Uhland's ability at
will to catch the folk-tone. Sometimes this folk-tone is a question
of certain technical tricks, such as the abrupt shift of scene,
repetition, varying series of scenes or words, archaized language; but
it is just as often in the mood which Uhland throws over the whole. He
thus can catch the inner form and essential mood of the popular ballad
in a way that not even Goethe does in his _Erlking_. Uhland's ballads
and romances vary greatly in quality; none, perhaps, has the grandiose
dramatic and ethical note of Schiller's _The Cranes of Ibycus_
and none the power of revealing the hidden forces of nature in
anthropomorphic and demoniac form as Goethe does in his _Erlking_ and
_The Fisher_. But Uhland's poems are more varied in treatment, even
though he cannot be said to have brought any new forms and themes into
German verse.
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