The most conspicuous changes which came over the narrative poetry of the 13th century were, on the one hand, a steady encroachment of realism on the matter and treatment of the epic, and, on the other, a leaning to didacticism. The substitution of the “history” of the chronicle for the confessedly imaginative stories of the earlier poets is to be seen in the work of Rudolf von Ems, and of a number of minor chroniclers like Ulrich von Eschenbach, Berthold von Holle and Jans Enikel; while for the growth of realism we may look to thePfaffe Amis, a collection of comic anecdotes by “Der Stricker,” the admirable peasant romanceMeier Helmbrecht, written between 1236 and 1250 by Wernher der Gartenaere in Bavaria, and to the adventures of Ulrich von Lichtenstein, as described in hisFrauendienst(1255) andFrauenbuch(1257).
More than any single poet of the Court epic, more even than the poet of theNibelungenlied, Walther von der Vogelweide summed up in himself all that was best in the group of poetic literature with which he was associated—the Minnesang. The early Austrian singers already mentioned, poets like Heinrich von Veldeke, who in his lyrics, as in his epic, introduced the French conception ofMinne, or like the manly Friedrich von Hausen, and the Swiss imitator of Provençal measures, Rudolf von Fenis appear only in the light of forerunners. Even moreoriginal poets, like Heinrich von Morungen and Walther’s own master, Reinmar von Hagenau, the author of harmonious but monotonously elegiac verses, or among immediate contemporaries, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose few lyric strophes are as deeply stamped with his individuality as his epics—seem only tributary to the full rich stream of Walther’s genius. There was not a form of the German Minnesang which Walther did not amplify and deepen; songs of courtly love and lowly love, of religious faith and delight in nature, patriotic songs and politicalSprüche—in all he was a master. Of Walther’s life we are somewhat better informed than in the case of his contemporaries: he was born about 1170 and died about 1230; his art he learned in Austria, whereupon he wandered through South Germany, a welcome guest wherever he went, although his vigorous championship of what he regarded as the national cause in the political struggles of the day won him foes as well as friends. For centuries he remained the accepted exemplar of German lyric poetry; not merely the Minnesänger who followed him, but also the Meistersinger of the 15th and 16th centuries looked up to him as one of the founders and lawgivers of their art. He was the most influential of all Germany’s lyric poets, and in the breadth, originality and purity of his inspiration one of her greatest (seeWalther von der Vogelweide).
The development of the German Minnesang after Walther’s death and under his influence is easily summed up. Contemporaries had been impressed by the dual character of Walther’s lyric; they distinguished a higher courtly lyric, and a lower more outspoken form of song, free from the constraint of social or literary conventions. The later Minnesang emphasized this dualism. Amongst Walther’s immediate contemporaries, high-born poets, whose lives were passed at courts, naturally cultivated the higher lyric; but the more gifted and original singers of the time rejoiced in the freedom of Walther’s poetry ofniedere Minne. It was, in fact, in accordance with the spirit of the age that the latter should have been Walther’s most valuable legacy to his successors; and the greatest of these, Neidhart von Reuental (c.1180-c.1250), certainly did not allow himself to be hampered by aristocratic prejudices. Neidhart sought the themes of hishöfische Dorfpoesiein the village, and, as the mood happened to dictate, depicted the peasant with humorous banter or biting satire. The lyric poets of the later 13th century were either, like Burkart von Hohenfels, Ulrich von Winterstetten and Gottfried von Neifen, echoes of Walther von der Vogelweide and of Neidhart, or their originality was confined to some particular form of lyric poetry in which they excelled. Thus the singer known as “Der Tannhäuser” distinguished himself as an imitator of the Frenchpastourelle; Reinmar von Zweter was purely aSpruchdichter. More or less common to all is the consciousness that their own ideas and surroundings were no longer in harmony with the aristocratic world of chivalry, which the poets of the previous generation had glorified. The solid advantages, material prosperity and increasing comfort of life in the German towns appealed to poets like Steinmar von Klingenau more than the unworldly ideals of self-effacing knighthood which Ulrich von Lichtenstein and Johann Hadlaub of Zürich clung to so tenaciously and extolled so warmly. On the whole, the Spruchdichter came best out of this ordeal of changing fashions; and the increasing interest in the moral and didactic applications of literature favoured the development of this form of verse. The confusion of didactic purpose with the lyric is common to all the later poetry, to that of the learned Marner, of Boppe, Rumezland and Heinrich von Meissen, who was known to later generations as “Frauenlob.” TheSpruchdichtung, in fact, was one of the connecting links between the Minnesang of the 13th and the lyric and satiric poetry of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The disturbing and disintegrating element in the literature of the 13th century was thus the substitution of a utilitarian didacticism for the idealism of chivalry. In the early decades of that century, poems likeDer Winsbeke, by a Bavarian, andDer welsche Gast, written in 1215-1216 by Thomasin von Zirclaere (Zirclaria), a native of Friuli, still teach with uncompromising idealism the duties and virtues of the knightly life. But in theBescheidenheit(c.1215-1230) of a wandering singer, who called himself Freidank, we find for the first time an active antagonism to the unworldly code of chivalry and an unmistakable reflection of the changing social order, brought about by the rise of what we should now call the middle class. Freidank is the spokesman of theBürger, and in his terse, witty verses may be traced the germs of German intellectual and literary development in the coming centuries—even of the Reformation itself. From the advent of Freidank onwards, the satiric and didactic poetry went the way of the epic; what it gained in quantity it lost in quality and concentration. The satires associated with the name of Seifried Helbling, an Austrian who wrote in the last fifteen years of the 13th century, andDer Rennerby Hugo von Trimberg, written at the very end of the century, may be taken as characteristic of the later period, where terseness and incisive wit have given place to diffuse moralizing and allegory.
There is practically no Middle High German literature in prose; such prose as has come down to us—the tracts of David of Augsburg, the powerful sermons of Berthold von Regensburg (d. 1272), Germany’s greatest medieval preacher, and several legal codes, as theSachsenspiegelandSchwabenspiegel—only prove that the Germans of the 13th century had not yet realized the possibilities of prose as a medium of literary expression.
III. The Transition Period (1350-1600)
(a)The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.—As is the case with all transitional periods of literary history, this epoch of German literature may be considered under two aspects: on the one hand, we may follow in it the decadence and disintegration of the literature of the Middle High German period; on the other, we may study the beginnings of modern forms of poetry and the preparation of that spiritual revolution, which meant hardly less to the Germanic peoples than the Renaissance to the Latin races—the Protestant Reformation.
By the middle of the 14th century, knighthood with its chivalric ideals was rapidly declining, and the conditions under which medieval poetry had flourished were passing away. The social change rendered the courtly epic of Arthur’s Round Table in great measure incomprehensible to the younger generation, and made it difficult for them to understand the spirit that actuated the heroes of the national epic; the tastes to which the lyrics of the great Minnesingers had appealed were vitiated by the more practical demands of the rising middle classes. But the stories of chivalry still appealed as stories to the people, although the old way of telling them was no longer appreciated. The feeling for beauty of form and expression was lost; the craving for a moral purpose and didactic aim had to be satisfied at the cost of artistic beauty; and sensational incident was valued more highly than fine character-drawing or inspired poetic thought. Signs of the decadence are to be seen in theKarlmeinetof this period, stories from the youth of Charlemagne, in a continuation ofParzivalby two Alsatians, Claus Wisse and Philipp Colin (c.1335), in anApollonius von Tyrusby Heinrich von Neuenstadt (c.1315), and aKönigstochter von Frankreichby Hans von Bühel (c.1400). The story of Siegfried was retold in a rough ballad,Das Lied von hürnen Seyfried, theHeldenbuchwas recast inKnittelversor doggerel (1472), and even the Arthurian epic was parodied. A no less marked symptom of decadence is to be seen in a large body of allegorical poetry analogous to theRoman de la rosein France; Heinzelein of Constance, at the end of the 13th, and Hadamar von Laber and Hermann von Sachsenheim, about the middle of the 15th century, were representatives of this movement. As time went on, prose versions of the old stories became more general, and out of these developed theVolksbücher, such asLoher und Maller,Die Haimonskinder,Die schöne Magelone,Melusine, which formed the favourite reading of the German people for centuries. As the last monuments of the decadent narrative literature of the middle ages, we may regard theBuch der Abenteuerof Ulrich Füetrer, written at the end of the 15th century, andDer WeisskönigandTeuerdankby the emperor Maximilian I. (1459-1519)printed in the early years of the 16th. At the beginning of the new epoch the Minnesang could still point to two masters able to maintain the great traditions of the 13th century, Hugo von Montfort (1357-1423) and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1367-1445); but as the lyric passed into the hands of the middle-class poets of the German towns, it was rapidly shorn of its essentially lyric qualities;die Minnegave place to moral and religious dogmatism, emphasis was laid on strict adherence to the rules of composition, and the simple forms of the older lyric were superseded by ingenious metrical distortions. Under the influence of writers like Heinrich von Meissen (“Frauenlob,”c.1250-1318) and Heinrich von Mügeln in the 14th century, like Muskatblut and Michael Beheim (1416-c.1480) in the 15th, the Minnesang thus passed over into the Meistergesang. In the later 15th and in the 16th centuries all the south German towns possessed flourishing Meistersinger schools in which the art of writing verse was taught and practised according to complicated rules, and it was the ambition of every gifted citizen to rise through the various grades fromSchülertoMeisterand to distinguish himself in the “singing contests” instituted by the schools.
Such are the decadent aspects of the once rich literature of the Middle High German period in the 14th and 15th centuries. Turning now to the more positive side of the literary movement, we have to note a revival of a popular lyric poetry—the Volkslied—which made the futility and artificiality of the Meistergesang more apparent. Never before or since has Germany been able to point to such a rich harvest of popular poetry as is to be seen in the Volkslieder of these two centuries. Every form of popular poetry is to be found here—songs of love and war, hymns and drinking-songs, songs of spring and winter, historical ballads, as well as lyrics in which the old motives of the Minnesang reappear stripped of all artificiality. More obvious ties with the literature of the preceding age are to be seen in the development of theSchwankor comic anecdote. Collections of such stories, which range from the practical jokes ofTill Eulenspiegel(1515), and the coarse witticisms of thePfaffe vom Kalenberg(end of 14th century) andPeter Leu(1550), to the religious and didactic anecdotes of J. Pauli’sSchimpf und Ernst(1522) or the more literaryRollwagenbüchlein(1555) of Jörg Wickram and theWendunmut(1563 ff.) of H.W. Kirchhoff—these dominate in large measure the literature of the 15th and 16th centuries; they are the literary descendants of the medievalPfaffe Amis,MarkolfandReinhart Fuchs. An important development of this type of popular literature is to be seen in theNarrenschiffof Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), where the humorous anecdote became a vehicle of the bitterest satire; Brant’s own contempt for the vulgarity of the ignorant, and the deep, unsatisfied craving of all strata of society for a wider intellectual horizon and a more humane and dignified life, to which Brant gave voice, make theNarrenschiff, which appeared in 1494, a landmark on the way that led to the Reformation. Another form—the Beast fable and Beast epic—which is but sparingly represented in earlier times, appealed with peculiar force to the new generation. At the very close of the Middle High German period, Ulrich Boner had revived the Aesopic fable in hisEdelstein(1349), translations of Aesop in the following century added to the popularity of the fable (q.v.), and in the century of the Reformation it became, in the hands of Burkard Waldis (Esopus, 1548) and Erasmus Alberus (Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit, 1550), a favourite instrument of satire and polemic. A still more attractive form of the Beast fable was the epic ofReinke de Vos, which had been cultivated by Flemish poets in the 13th and 14th centuries and has come down to us in a Low Saxon translation, published at Lübeck in 1498. This, too, like Brant’s poem, is a powerful satire on human folly, and is also, like theNarrenschiff, a harbinger of the coming Reformation.
A complete innovation was the drama (q.v.), which, as we have seen, had practically no existence in Middle High German times. As in all European literatures, it emerged slowly and with difficulty from its original subservience to the church liturgy. As time went on, the vernacular was substituted for the original Latin, and with increasing demands for pageantry, the scene of the play was removed to the churchyard or the market-place; thus the opportunity arose in the 14th and 15th centuries for developing theWeihnachtsspiel,OsterspielandPassionsspielon secular lines. The enlargement of the scope of the religious play to include legends of the saints implied a further step in the direction of a complete separation of the drama from ecclesiastical ceremony. The most interesting example of this encroachment of the secular spirit is theSpiel von Frau Jutten—Jutta being the notorious Pope Joan—by an Alsatian, Dietrich Schernberg, in 1480. Meanwhile, in the 15th century, a beginning had been made of a drama entirely independent of the church. The mimic representations—originally allegorical in character—with which the people amused themselves at the great festivals of the year, and more especially in spring, were interspersed with dialogue, and performed on an improvised stage. This was the beginning of theFastnachtsspielor Shrovetide-play, the subject of which was a comic anecdote similar to those of the many collections ofSchwänke. Amongst the earliest cultivators of theFastnachtsspielwere Hans Rosenplüt (fl.c.1460) and Hans Folz (fl.c.1510), both of whom were associated with Nuremberg.
(b)The Age of the Reformation.—Promising as were these literary beginnings of the 15th century, the real significance of the period in Germany’s intellectual history is to be sought outside literature, namely, in two forces which immediately prepared the way for the Reformation—mysticism and humanism. The former of these had been a more or less constant factor in German religious thought throughout the middle ages, but with Meister Eckhart (? 1260-1327), the most powerful and original of all the German mystics, with Heinrich Seuse or Suso (c.1300-1366), and Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361), it became a clearly defined mental attitude towards religion; it was an essentially personal interpretation of Christianity, and, as such, was naturally conducive to the individual freedom which Protestantism ultimately realized. It is thus not to be wondered at that we should owe the early translations of the Bible into German—one was printed at Strassburg in 1466—to the mystics. Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445-1510), a pupil of the humanists and a friend of Sebastian Brant, may be regarded as a link between Eckhart and the earlier mysticists and Luther. Humanism was transplanted to German soil with the foundation of the university of Prague in 1348, and it made even greater strides than mysticism. Its immediate influence, however, was restricted to the educated classes; the pre-Reformation humanists despised the vernacular and wrote and thought only in Latin. Thus although neither Johann Reuchlin of Pforzheim (1455-1522), nor even the patriotic Alsatian, Jakob Wimpfeling (or Wimpheling) (1450-1528)—not to mention the great Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536)—has a place in the history of German literature, their battle for liberalism in thought and scholarship against the narrow orthodoxy of the Church cleared the way for a healthy national literature among the German-speaking peoples. The incisive wit and irony of humanistic satire—we need only instance theEpistolae obscurorum virorum(1515-1517)—prevented the German satirists of the Reformation age from sinking entirely into that coarse brutality to which they were only too prone. To the influence of the humanists we also owe many translations from the Latin and Italian dating from the 15th century. Prominent among the writers who contributed to the group of literature were Niklas von Wyl, chancellor of Württemberg, and his immediate contemporary Albrecht von Eyb (1420-1475).
Martin Luther (1483-1546), Germany’s greatest man in this age of intellectual new-birth, demands a larger share of attention in a survey of literature than his religious and ecclesiastical activity would in itself justify, if only because the literary activity of the age cannot be regarded apart from him. From the Volkslied and the popularSchwankto satire and drama, literature turned exclusively round the Reformation which had been inaugurated on the 31st of October 1517 by Luther’s publication of theTheses against Indulgencesin Wittenberg. In his three tracts,An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation,De captivitateBabylonica ecclesiae, andVon der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen(1520), Luther laid down his principles of reform, and in the following year resolutely refused to recant his heresies in a dramatic scene before the Council of Worms. Luther’s Bible (1522-1534) had unique importance not merely for the religious and intellectual welfare of the German people, but also for their literature. It is in itself a literary monument, a German classic, and the culmination and justification of that movement which had supplanted the medieval knight by the burgher and swept away Middle High German poetry. Luther, well aware that his translation of the Bible must be the keystone to his work, gave himself endless pains to produce a thoroughly German work—German both in language and in spirit. It was important that the dialect into which the Bible was translated should be comprehensible over as wide an area as possible of the German-speaking world, and for this reason he took all possible care in choosing the vocabulary and forms of hisGemeindeutsch. The language of the Saxon chancery thus became, thanks to Luther’s initiative, the basis of the modern High German literary language. As a hymn-writer (Geistliche Lieder, 1564), Luther was equally mindful of the importance of adapting himself to the popular tradition; and his hymns form the starting-point for a vast development of German religious poetry which did not reach its highest point until the following century.
The most powerful and virile literature of this age was the satire with which the losing side retaliated on the Protestant leaders. Amongst Luther’s henchmen, Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), the “praeceptor Germaniae,” and Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) were powerful allies in the cause, but their intellectual sympathies were with the Latin humanists; and with the exception of some vigorous German prose and still more vigorous German verse by Hutten, both wrote in Latin. The satirical dramas of Niklas Manuel, a Swiss writer and the polemical fables of Erasmus Alberus (c.1500-1553), on the other hand, were insignificant compared with the fierce assault on Protestantism by the Alsatian monk, Thomas Murner (1475-1537). The most unscrupulous of all German satirists, Murner shrank from no extremes of scurrility, his attacks on Luther reaching their culmination in the gross personalities ofVon dem lutherischen Narren(1522). It was not until the following generation that the Protestant party could point to a satirist who in genius and power was at all comparable to Murner, namely, to Johann Fischart (c.1550-c.1591); but when Fischart’s Rabelaisian humour is placed by the side of his predecessor’s work, we see that, in spite of counter-reformations, the Protestant cause stood in a very different position in Fischart’s day from that which it had occupied fifty years before. Fischart took his stand on the now firm union between humanism and Protestantism. His chief work, theAffentheuerlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung(1575), a Germanization of the first book of Rabelais’ satire, is a witty and ingenious monstrosity, a satirical comment on the life of the 16th century, not the virulent expression of party strife. The day of a personal and brutal type of satire was clearly over, and the writers of the later 16th century reverted more and more to the finer methods of the humanists. The satire of Bartholomaeus Ringwaldt (1530-1599) and of Georg Rollenhagen (1542-1609), author of theFroschmeuseler(1595), was more “literary” and less actual than even Fischart’s.
On the whole, the form of literature which succeeded best in emancipating itself from the trammels of religious controversy in the 16th century was the drama. Protestantism proved favourable to its intellectual and literary development, and the humanists, who had always prided themselves on their imitations of Latin comedy, introduced into it a sense for form and proportion. The Latin school comedy in Germany was founded by J. Wimpfeling with hisStylpho(1470) and by J. Reuchlin with his witty adaptation ofMaître Patelinin hisHenno(1498). In the 16th century the chief writers of Latin dramas were Thomas Kirchmair or Naogeorgus (1511-1563), Caspar Brülow (1585-1627), and Nikodemus Frischlin (1547-1590), who also wrote dramas in the vernacular. The work of these men bears testimony in its form and its choice of subjects to the close relationship between Latin and German drama in the 16th century. One of the earliest focusses for a German drama inspired by the Reformation was Switzerland. In Basel, Pamphilus Gengenbach produced moralizingFastnachtsspielein 1515-1516; Niklas Manuel of Bern (1484-1530)—who has just been mentioned—employed the same type of play as a vehicle of pungent satire against the Mass and the sale of indulgences. But it was not long before the German drama benefited by the humanistic example: theParabell vam vorlorn Szohnby Burkard Waldis (1527), the many dramas on the subject ofSusanna—notably those of Sixt Birck (1532) and Paul Rebhun(1535)—and Frischlin’s German plays are attempts to treat Biblical themes according to classic methods. In another of the important literary centres of the 16th century, however, in Nuremberg, the drama developed on indigenous lines. Hans Sachs (1494-1576), the Nuremberg cobbler and Meistersinger, the most productive writer of the age, went his own way; a voracious reader and an unwearied storyteller, he left behind him a vast literary legacy, embracing every form of popular literature fromSpruchandSchwankto complicatedMeistergesangand lengthy drama. He laid under contribution the rich Renaissance literature with which the humanistic translators had flooded Germany, and he became himself an ardent champion of the “Wittembergisch Nachtigall” Luther. But in the progressive movement of the German drama he played an even smaller role than his Swiss and Saxon contemporaries; for his tragedies and comedies are deficient in all dramatic qualities; they are only stories in dialogue. In theFastnachtsspiele, where dramatic form is less essential than anecdotal point and brevity, he is to be seen at his best. Rich as the 16th century was in promise, the conditions for the development of a national drama were unfavourable. At the close of the century the influence of the English drama—brought to Germany by English actors—introduced the deficient dramatic and theatrical force into the humanistic and “narrative” drama which has just been considered. This is to be seen in the work of Jakob Ayrer (d. 1605) and Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick (1564-1613). But unfortunately these beginnings had hardly made themselves felt when the full current of the Renaissance was diverted across Germany, bringing in its train the Senecan tragedy. Then came the Thirty Years’ War, which completely destroyed the social conditions indispensable for the establishment of a theatre at once popular and national.
The novel was less successful than the drama in extricating itself from satire and religious controversy. Fischart was too dependent on foreign models and too erratic—at one time adapting Rabelais, at another translating the old heroic romance ofAmadis de Gaula—to create a national form of German fiction in the 16th century; the most important novelist was a much less talented writer, the Alsatian Meistersinger and dramatist Jörg Wickram (d. c. 1560), who has been already mentioned as the author of a popular collection of anecdotes, theRollwagenbüchlein. His longer novels,Der Knabenspiegel(1554) and Der Goldfaden (1557), are in form, and especially in the importance they attach to psychological developments, the forerunners of the movement to which we owe the best works of German fiction in the 18th century. But Wickram stands alone. So inconsiderable, in fact, is the fiction of the Reformation age in Germany that we have to regard the oldVolksbücheras its equivalent; and it is significant that of all the prose writings of this age, the book which affords the best insight into the temper and spirit of the Reformation was just one of these crudeVolksbücher, namely, the famous story of the magicianDoctor Johann Faust, published at Frankfort in 1587.
IV. The Renaissance (1600-1740)
The 17th century in Germany presents a complete contrast to its predecessor; the fact that it was the century of the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the country, crippled the prosperity of the towns, and threw back by many generations the social development of the people, explains much, but it can hardly be held entirely responsible for the intellectual apathy, the slaveryto foreign customs and foreign ideas, which stunted the growth of the nation. The freedom of Lutheranism degenerated into a paralyzing Lutheran orthodoxy which was as hostile to the “Freiheit eines Christenmenschen” as that Catholicism it had superseded; the idealism of the humanists degenerated in the same way into a dry, pedantic scholasticism which held the German mind in fetters until, at the very close of the century, Leibnitz set it free. Most disheartening of all, literature which in the 16th century had been so full of promise and had conformed with such aptitude to the new ideas, was in all its higher manifestations blighted by the dead hand of pseudo-classicism. The unkempt literature of the Reformation age admittedly stood in need ofguidanceand discipline, but the 17th century made the fatal mistake of trying to impose the laws and rules of Romance literatures on a people of a purely Germanic stock.
There were, however, some branches of German poetry which escaped this foreign influence. The church hymn, continuing the great Lutheran traditions, rose in the 17th century to extraordinary richness both in quality and quantity. Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), the greatest German hymn-writer, was only one of many Lutheran pastors who in this age contributed to the German hymnal. On the Catholic side, Angelus Silesius, or Johann Scheffler (1624-1677) showed what a wealth of poetry lay in the mystic speculations of Jakob Boehme, the gifted shoemaker of Görlitz (1575-1624), and author of the famousAurora, oder Morgenröte im Aufgang(1612); while Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635), another leading Catholic poet of the century, cultivated the pastoral allegory of the Renaissance. The revival of mysticism associated with Boehme gradually spread through the whole religious life of the 17th century, Protestant as well as Catholic, and in the more specifically Protestant form of pietism, it became, at the close of the period, a force of moment in the literary revival. Besides the hymn, the Volkslied, which amidst the struggles and confusion of the great war bore witness to a steadily growing sense of patriotism, lay outside the domain of the literary theorists and dictators, and developed in its own way. But all else—if we except certain forms of fiction, which towards the end of the 17th century rose into prominence—stood completely under the sway of the Latin Renaissance.
The first focus of the movement was Heidelberg, which had been a centre of humanistic learning in the sixteenth century. Here, under the leadership of J.W. Zincgref (1591-1635), a number of scholarly writers carried into practice that interest in the vernacular which had been shown a little earlier by the German translator of Marot, Paul Schede or Melissus, librarian in Heidelberg. The most important forerunner of Opitz was G.R. Weckherlin (1584-1653), a native of Württemberg who had spent the best part of his life in England; hisOden und Gesänge(1618-1619) ushered in the era of Renaissance poetry in Germany with a promise that was but indifferently fulfilled by his successors. Of these the greatest, or at least the most influential, was Martin Opitz (1597-1639). He was a native of Silesia and, as a student in Heidelberg, came into touch with Zincgref’s circle; subsequently, in the course of a visit to Holland, a more definite trend was given to his ideas by the example of the Dutch poet and scholar, Daniel Heinsius. As a poet, Opitz experimented with every form of recognized Renaissance poetry from ode and epic to pastoral romance and Senecan drama; but his poetry is for the most part devoid of inspiration; and his extraordinary fame among his contemporaries would be hard to understand, were it not that in hisBuch von der deutschen Poeterey(1624) he gave the German Renaissance its theoretical textbook. In this tract, in which Opitz virtually reproduced in German the accepted dogmas of Renaissance theorists like Scaliger and Ronsard, he not merely justified his own mechanical verse-making, but also gave Germany a law-book which regulated her literature for a hundred years.
The work of Opitz as a reformer was furthered by another institution of Latin origin, namely, literary societies modelled on theAccademia della Cruscain Florence. These societies, of which the chief were theFruchtbringende GesellschaftorPalmenorden(founded 1617), theElbschwanenordenin Hamburg and theGekrönter Blumenorden an der Pegnitz or Gesellschaft der Pegnitzschäferin Nuremberg, were the centres of literary activity during the unsettled years of the war. Although they produced much that was trivial—such as the extraordinaryNürnberger Trichter(1647-1653) by G.P. Harsdörffer (1607-1658), a treatise which professed to turn out a fully equipped German poet in the space of six hours—these societies also did German letters an invaluable service by their attention to the language, one of their chief objects having been to purify the German language from foreign and un-German ingredients. J.G. Schottelius (1612-1676), for instance, wrote his epoch-making grammatical works with the avowed purpose of furthering the objects of theFruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Meanwhile the poetic centre of gravity in Germany had shifted from Heidelberg to the extreme north-east, to Königsberg, where a group of academic poets gave practical expression to the Opitzian theory. Chief among them was Simon Dach (1605-1659), a gentle, elegiac writer on whom the laws of theBuch von der deutschen Poetereydid not lie too heavily. He, like his more manly and vigorous contemporary Paul Fleming (1609-1640), showed, one might say, that it was possible to write good and sincere poetry notwithstanding Opitz’s mechanical rules.
In the previous century the most advanced form of literature had been satire, and under the new conditions the satiric vein still proved most productive; but it was no longer the full-blooded satire of the Reformation, or even the rich and luxuriant satiric fancy of Fischart, which found expression in the 17th century. Satire pure and simple was virtually only cultivated by two Low German poets, J. Lauremberg (1590-1658) and J. Rachel (1618-1669), of whom at least the latter was accepted by the Opitzian school; but the satiric spirit rose to higher things in the powerful and scathing sermons of J.B. Schupp (1610-1661), an outspoken Hamburg preacher, and in the scurrilous wit of the Viennese monk Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644-1709), who had inherited some of his predecessor Murner’s intellectual gifts. Best of all are the epigrams of the most gifted of all the Silesian group of writers, Friedrich von Logau (1604-1655). Logau’s three thousand epigrams (Deutsche Sinngedichte, 1654) afford a key to the intellectual temper of the 17th century; they are the epitome of their age. Here are to be seen reflected the vices of the time, its aping of French customs and its contempt for what was national and German; Logau held up to ridicule the vain bloodshed of the war in the interest of Christianity, and, although he praised Opitz, he was far from prostrating himself at the dictator’s feet. Logau is an epigrammatist of the first rank, and perhaps the most remarkable product of the Renaissance movement in Germany.
Opitz found difficulty in providing Germany with a drama according to the classic canon. He had not himself ventured beyond translations of Sophocles and Seneca, and Johann Rist (1607-1667) in Hamburg, one of the few contemporary dramatists, had written plays more in the manner of Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick than of Opitz. It was not until after the latter’s death that the chief dramatist of the Renaissance movement came forward in the person of Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664). Like Opitz, Gryphius also was a Silesian, and a poet of no mean ability, as is to be seen from his lyric poetry; but his tragedies, modelled on the stiff Senecan pattern, suffered from the lack of a theatre, and from his ignorance of the existence of a more highly developed drama in France, not to speak of England. As it was, he was content with Dutch models. In the field of comedy, where he was less hampered by theories of dramatic propriety, he allowed himself to benefit by the freedom of the Dutch farce and the comic effects of the English actors in Germany; in hisHorribilicribrifaxandHerr Peter Squentz—the latter an adaptation of the comic scenes of theMidsummer Night’s Dream—Gryphius has produced the best German plays of the 17th century.
The German novel of the 17th century was, as has been already indicated, less hampered by Renaissance laws than other forms of literature, and although it was none the less at the mercy of foreign influence, that influence was more varied and manifold in its character.Don Quixotehad been partlytranslated early in the 17th century, the picaresque romance had found its way to Germany at a still earlier date; while H.M. Moscherosch (1601-1669) in hisGesichte Philanders von Sittewald(1642-1643) made theSueñosof Quevedo the basis for vivid pictures of the life of the time, interspersed with satire. The best German novel of the 17th century,Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus(1669) by H.J. Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c.1625-1676), is a picaresque novel, but one that owed little more than its form to the Spaniards. It is in great measure the autobiography of its author, and describes with uncompromising realism the social disintegration and the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. But this remarkable book stands alone; Grimmelshausen’s other writings are but further contributions to the same theme, and he left no disciples worthy of carrying on the tradition he had created. Christian Weise (1642-1708), rector of the Zittau gymnasium, wrote a few satirical novels, but his realism and satire are too obviously didactic. He is seen to better advantage in his dramas, of which he wrote more than fifty for performance by his scholars.
The real successor ofSimplicissimusin Germany was the EnglishRobinson Crusoe, a novel which, on its appearance, was immediately translated into German (1721); it called forth an extraordinary flood of imitations, the so-called “Robinsonaden,” the vogue of which is even still kept alive byDer schweizerische Robinsonof J.R. Wyss (1812 ff.). With the exception of J.G. Schnabel’sInsel Felsenburg(1731-1743), the literary value of these imitations is slight. They represented, however, a healthier and more natural development of fiction than the “galant” romances which were introduced in the train of the Renaissance movement, and cultivated by writers like Philipp von Zesen (1619-1689), Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick (1633-1714), A.H. Buchholtz (1607-1671), H.A. von Ziegler (1653-1697)—author of the famousAsiatische Banise(1688)—and D.C. von Lohenstein (1635-1683), whoseArminius(1689-1690) is on the whole the most promising novel of this group. The last mentioned writer and Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1617-1679) are sometimes regarded as the leaders of a “second Silesian school,” as opposed to the first school of Opitz. As the cultivators of the bombastic and Euphuistic style of the Italians Guarini and Marini, and of the Spanish writer Gongora, Lohenstein and Hofmannswaldau touched the lowest point to which German poetry ever sank.
But this aberration of taste was happily of short duration. Although socially the recovery of the German people from the desolation of the war was slow and laborious, the intellectual life of Germany was rapidly recuperating under the influence of foreign thinkers. Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694), Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), Christian von Wolff (1679-1754) and, above all, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), the first of the great German philosophers, laid the foundations of that system of rationalism which dominated Germany for the better part of the 18th century; while German religious life was strengthened and enriched by a revival of pietism, under mystic thinkers like Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), a revival which also left its traces on religious poetry. Such hopeful signs of convalescence could not but be accompanied by an improvement in literary taste, and this is seen in the first instance in a substitution for the bombast and conceits of Lohehstein and Hofmannswaldau, of poetry on the stricter and soberer lines laid down by Boileau. The so-called “court poets” who opposed the second Silesian school, men like Rudolf von Canitz (1654-1699), Johann von Besser (1654-1729) and Benjamin Neukirch (1665-1729), were not inspired, but they had at least a certain “correctness” of taste; and from their midst sprang one gifted lyric genius, Johann Christian Günther (1695-1723), who wrote love-songs such as had not been heard in Germany since the days of the Minnesang. The methods of Hofmannswaldau had obtained considerable vogue in Hamburg, where the Italian opera kept the decadent Renaissance poetry alive. Here, however, the incisive wit of Christian Wernigke’s (1661-1725) epigrams was an effective antidote, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747), a native of Hamburg, who had been deeply impressed by the appreciation of nature in English poetry, gave the artificialities of the Silesians their death-blow. But the influence of English literature was not merely destructive in these years; in the translations and imitations of the EnglishSpectator,TatlerandGuardian—the so-calledmoralische Wochenschriften—it helped to regenerate literary taste, and to implant healthy moral ideas in the German middle classes.
The chief representative of the literary movement inaugurated by the Silesian “court poets” was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766), who between 1724 and 1740 succeeded in establishing in Leipzig, the metropolis of German taste, literary reforms modelled on the principles of French 17th-century classicism. He reformed and purified the stage according to French ideas, and provided it with a repertory of French origin; in hisKritische Dichtkunst(1730) he laid down the principles according to which good literature was to be produced and judged. As Opitz had reformed German letters with the help of Ronsard, so now Gottsched took his standpoint on the principles of Boileau as interpreted by contemporary French critics and theorists. With Gottsched, whose services in purifying the German language have stood the test of time better than his literary or dramatic reforms, the period of German Renaissance literature reaches its culmination and at the same time its close. The movement of the age advanced too rapidly for the Leipzig dictator; in 1740 a new epoch opened in German poetry and he was soon left hopelessly behind.
V. The Classical Period of Modern German Literature (1740-1832)
(a)From the Swiss Controversy to the“Sturm und Drang.”—Between Opitz and Gottsched German literature passed successively through the various stages characteristic of all Renaissance literatures—from that represented by Trissino and the French Pléiade, by way of the aberrations of Marini and theestilo culto, to theart poétiqueof Boileau. And precisely as in France, the next advance was achieved in a battle between the “ancients” and the “moderns,” the German “ancients” being represented by Gottsched, the “moderns” by the Swiss literary reformers, J.J. Bodmer (1698-1783) and J.J. Breitinger (1701-1776). The latter in hisKritische Dichtkunst(1739) maintained doctrines which were in opposition to Gottsched’s standpoint in his treatise of the same name, and Bodmer supported his friend’s initiative; a pamphlet war ensued between Leipzig and Zürich, with which in 1740-1741 the classical period of modern German literature may be said to open. The Swiss, men of little originality, found their theories in the writings of Italian and English critics; and from these they learned how literature might be freed from the fetters of pseudo-classicism. Basing their arguments on Milton’sParadise Lost, which Bodmer had translated into prose (1732), they demanded room for the play of genius and inspiration; they insisted that the imagination should not be hindered in its attempts to rise above the world of reason and common sense. Their victory was due, not to the skill with which they presented their arguments, but to the fact that literature itself was in need of greater freedom. It was in fact a triumph, not of personalities or of leaders, but of ideas. The effects of the controversy are to be seen in a group of Leipzig writers of Gottsched’s own school, theBremer Beiträgeras they were called after their literary organ. These men—C.F. Gellert (1715-1769), the author of graceful fables and tales in verse, G.W. Rabener (1714-1771), the mild satirist of Saxon provinciality, the dramatist J. Elias Schlegel (1719-1749), who in more ways than one was Lessing’s forerunner, and a number of minor writers—did not set themselves up in active opposition to their master, but they tacitly adopted many of the principles which the Swiss had advocated. And in theBremer Beiträgethere appeared in 1748 the first instalment of an epic by F.G. Klopstock (1724-1803),Der Messias, which was the best illustration of that lawlessness against which Gottsched had protested. More effectively than Bodmer’s dry and uninspired theorizing, Klopstock’sMessias, and in a still higher degree, hisOdes, laid the foundations of modern German literature in the 18th century.His immediate followers, it is true, did not help to advance matters; Bodmer and J.K. Lavater (1741-1801), whose “physiognomic” investigations interested Goethe at a later date, wrote dreary and now long forgotten epics on religious themes. Klopstock’s rhapsodic dramas, together with Macpherson’sOssian, which in the ’sixties awakened a widespread enthusiasm throughout Germany, were responsible for the so-called “bardic” movement; but the noisy rhapsodies of the leaders of this movement, the “bards” H.W. von Gerstenberg (1737-1823), K.F. Kretschmann (1738-1809) and Michael Denis (1729-1800), had little of the poetic inspiration of Klopstock’sOdes.
The indirect influence of Klopstock as the first inspired poet of modern Germany and as the realization of Bodmer’s theories can, however, hardly be over-estimated. Under Frederick the Great, who, as the docile pupil of French culture, had little sympathy for unregulated displays of feeling, neither Klopstock nor his imitators were in favour in Berlin, but at the university of Halle considerable interest was taken in the movement inaugurated by Bodmer. Here, before Klopstock’s name was known at all, two young poets, J.I. Pyra (1715-1744) and S.G. Lange (1711-1781), wroteFreundschaftliche Lieder(1737), which were direct forerunners of Klopstock’s rhymeless lyric poetry; and although the later Prussian poets, J.W.L. Gleim (1719-1803), J.P. Uz (1720-1796) and J.N. Götz (1721-1781), who were associated with Halle, and K.W. Ramler (1725-1798) in Berlin, cultivated mainly the Anacreontic and the Horatian ode—artificial forms, which kept strictly within the classic canon—yet Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708-1754) in Hamburg showed to what perfection even the Anacreontic and the lightervers de sociétécould be brought. The Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) was the first German poet to give expression to the beauty and sublimity of Alpine scenery (Die Alpen, 1734), and a Prussian officer, Ewald Christian von Kleist (1715-1759), author ofDer Frühling(1749), wrote the most inspired nature-poetry of this period. Klopstock’s supreme importance lay, however, in the fact that he was a forerunner of the movement ofSturm und Drang. But before turning to that movement we must consider two writers who, strictly speaking, also belong to the age under consideration—Lessing and Wieland.
As Klopstock had been the first of modern Germany’s inspired poets, so Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was the first critic who brought credit to the German name throughout Europe. He was the most liberal-minded exponent of 18th-century rationalism. Like his predecessor Gottsched, whom he vanquished more effectually than Bodmer had done, he had unwavering faith in the classic canon, but “classic” meant for him, as for his contemporary, J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768), Greek art and literature, and not the products of French pseudo-classicism, which it had been Gottsched’s object to foist on Germany. He went, indeed, still further, and asserted that Shakespeare, with all his irregularities, was a more faithful observer of the spirit of Aristotle’s laws, and consequently a greater poet, than were the French classic writers. He looked to England and not to France for the regeneration of the German theatre, and his own dramas were pioneer-work in this direction.Miss Sara Sampson(1755) is abürgerliche Tragödieon the lines of Lillo’sMerchant of London, Minna von Barnhelm(1767), a comedy in the spirit of Farquhar; inEmilia Galotti(1772), again with English models in view, he remoulded the “tragedy of common life” in a form acceptable to theSturm und Drang; and finally inNathan der Weise(1779) he won acceptance for iambic blank verse as the medium of the higher drama. His two most promising disciples—J.F. von Cronegk (1731-1758), and J.W. von Brawe (1738-1758)—unfortunately died young, and C.F. Weisse (1726-1804) was not gifted enough to advance the drama in its literary aspects. Lessing’s name is associated with Winckelmann’s inLaokoon(1766), a treatise in which he set about defining the boundaries between painting, sculpture and poetry, and with those of the Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) and the Berlin bookseller C.F. Nicolai (1733-1811) in the famousLiteraturbriefe. Here Lessing identified himself with the best critical principles of the rationalistic movement—principles which, in the later years of his life, he employed in a fierce onslaught on Lutheran orthodoxy and intolerance.
To the widening and deepening of the German imagination C.M. Wieland (1733-1813) also contributed, but in a different way. Although no enemy of pseudo-classicism, he broke with the stiff dogmatism of Gottsched and his friends, and tempered the pietism of Klopstock by introducing the Germans to the lighter poetry of the south of Europe. With the exception of his fairy epicOberon(1780), Wieland’s work has fallen into neglect; he did, however, excellent service to the development of German prose fiction with his psychological novel,Agathon(1766-1767), which may be regarded as a forerunner of Goethe’sWilhelm Meister, and with his humorous satireDie Abderiten(1774). Wieland had a considerable following, both among poets and prose writers; he was particularly looked up to in Austria, towards the end of the 18th century, where the literary movement advanced more slowly than in the north. Here Aloys Blumauer (1755-1789) and J.B. von Alxinger (1755-1797) wrote their travesties and epics under his influence. In Saxony, M.A. von Thümmel (1738-1817) showed his adherence to Wieland’s school in his comic epic in prose,Wilhelmine(1764), and in the general tone of his prose writings; on the other hand, K.A. Kortum (1745-1824), author of the most popular comic epic of the time,Die Jobsiade(1784), was but little influenced by Wieland. The German novel owed much to the example ofAgathon, but the groundwork and form were borrowed from English models; Gellert had begun by imitating Richardson in hisSchwedische Gräfin(1747-1748), and he was followed by J.T. Hermes (1738-1821), by Wieland’s friend Sophie von Laroche (1730-1807), by A. von Knigge (1752-1796) and J.K.A. Musäus (1735-1787), the last mentioned being, however, best known as the author of a collection ofVolksmärchen(1782-1786). Meanwhile a rationalism, less materialistic and strict than that of Wolff, was spreading rapidly through educated middle-class society in Germany. Men like Knigge, Moses Mendelssohn, J.G. Zimmermann (1728-1795), T.G. von Hippel (1741-1796), Christian Garve (1742-1798), J.J. Engel (1741-1802), as well as the educational theorists J.B. Basedow (1723-1790) and J.H. Pestalozzi (1746-1827), wrote books and essays on “popular philosophy” which were as eagerly read as themoralische Wochenschriftenof the preceding epoch; and with this group of writers must also be associated the most brilliant of German 18th-century satirists, G.C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799).
Such was themilieufrom which sprang the most advanced pioneer of the classical epoch of modern German literature, J.G. Herder (1744-1803). The transition from the popular philosophers of theAufklärungto Herder was due in the first instance to the influence of Rousseau; and in Germany itself that transition is represented by men like Thomas Abbt (1738-1766) and J.G. Hamann (1730-1788). The revolutionary nature of Herder’s thought lay in that writer’s antipathy to hard and fast systems, to laws imposed upon genius; he grasped, as no thinker before him, the idea of historical evolution. By regarding the human race as the product of a slow evolution from primitive conditions, he revolutionized the methods and standpoint of historical science and awakened an interest—for which, of course, Rousseau had prepared the way—in the early history of mankind. He himself collected and published theVolksliederof all nations (1778-1779), and drew attention to those elements in German life and art which were, in the best and most precious sense, national—elements which his predecessors had despised as inconsistent with classic formulae and systems. Herder is thus not merely the forerunner, but the actual founder of the literary movement known asSturm und Drang. New ground was broken in a similar way by a group of poets, who show the results of Klopstock’s influence on the new literary movement: the Göttingen “Bund” or “Hain,” a number of young students who met together in 1772, and for several years published their poetry in theGöttinger Musenalmanach. With the exception of the two brothers, Ch. zu Stolberg (1748-1821) and F.L. zu Stolberg (1750-1819), who occupied a somewhat peculiar positionin the “Bund,” the members of this coterie were drawn from the peasant class of the lowerbourgeoisie; J.H. Voss (1751-1826), the leader of the “Bund,” was a typical North German peasant, and his idyll,Luise(1784), gives a realistic picture of German provincial life. L.H.C. Hölty (1748-1776) and J.M. Miller (1750-1814), again, excelled in simple lyrics in the tone of theVolkslied. Closely associated with the Göttingen group were M. Claudius (1740-1815), theWandsbecker Bote—as he was called after the journal he edited—an even more unassuming and homely representative of the German peasant in literature than Voss, and G.A. Bürger (1748-1794) who contributed to theGöttinger Musenalmanachballads, such as the famous Lenore (1774), of the very first rank. These ballads were the best products of the Göttingen school, and, together with Goethe’s Strassburg and Frankfort songs, represent the highest point touched by the lyric and ballad poetry of the period.
But the Göttingen “Bund” stood somewhat aside from the main movement of literary development in Germany; it was only a phase ofSturm und Drang, and quieter, less turbulent than that on which Goethe had set the stamp of his personality. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) had, as a student in Leipzig (1765-1768), written lyrics in the Anacreontic vein and dramas in alexandrines. But in Strassburg, where he went to continue his studies in 1770-1771, he made the personal acquaintance of Herder, who won his interest for the new literary movement. Herder imbued him with his own ideas of the importance of primitive history and Gothic architecture and inspired him with a pride in German nationality; Herder convinced him that there was more genuine poetry in a simple Volkslied than in all the ingenuity of the German imitators of Horace or Anacreon; above all, he awakened his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. The pamphletVon deutscher Art und Kunst(1773), to which, besides Goethe and Herder, the historian Justus Möser (1720-1794) also contributed, may be regarded as the manifesto of theSturm und Drang. The effect on Goethe of the new ideas was instantaneous; they seemed at once to set his genius free, and from 1771 to 1775 he was extraordinarily fertile in poetic ideas and creations. HisGötz von Berlichingen(1771-1773), the first drama of theSturm und Drang, was followed within a year by the first novel of the movement,Werthers Leiden(1774); he dashed offClavigoandStellain a few weeks in 1774 and 1775, and wrote a large number ofSingspiele, dramatic satires and fragments—includingFaustin its earliest form (the so-calledUrfaust)—not to mention love-songs which at last fulfilled the promise of Klopstock. Goethe’s lyrics were no less epoch-making than his first drama and novel, for they put an end to the artificiality which for centuries had fettered German lyric expression. In all forms of literature he set the fashion to his time; the Shakespearian restlessness ofGötz von Berlichingenfound enthusiastic imitators in J.M.R. Lenz (1751-1792), whoseAnmerkungen übers Theater(1774) formulated theoretically the laws, or defiance of laws, of the new drama, in F.M. von Klinger (1752-1831), J.A. Leisewitz (1752-1806), H.L. Wagner (1747-1779) and Friedrich Müller, better known as Maler Müller (1749-1825): The dramatic literature of theSturm und Drangwas its most characteristic product—indeed, the very name of the movement was borrowed from a play by Klinger; it was inspired, asGötz von Berlichingenhad been, by the desire to present upon the stage figures of Shakespearian grandeur impelled and tortured by gigantic passions, all considerations of plot, construction and form being regarded as subordinate to the development of character. The fiction of theSturm und Drang, again, was in its earlier stages dominated byWerthers Leiden, as may be seen in the novels of F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819) and J.M. Miller, who has been already mentioned. Later, in the hands of J.J.W. Heinse (1749-1803), author ofArdinghello(1787), Klinger, K. Ph. Moritz (1757-1793), whoseAnton Reiser(1785) clearly foreshadowsWilhelm Meister, it reflected not merely the sentimentalism, but also the philosophic and artistic ideas of the period.
With the production ofDie Räuber(1781) by Johann Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), the drama of theSturm und Drangentered upon a new development. Although hardly less turbulent in spirit than the work of Klinger and Leisewitz, Schiller’s tragedy was more skilfully adapted to the exigencies of the theatre; his succeeding dramas,FiescoandKabale und Liebe, were also admirable stage-plays, and inDon Carlos(1787) he abandoned prose for the iambic blank verse which Lessing had made acceptable inNathan der Weise. The “practical” character of the new drama is also to be seen in the work of Schiller’s contemporary, O. von Gemmingen (1755-1836), the imitator of Diderot, in the excellent domestic dramas of the actors F.L. Schröder (1744-1816) and A.W. Iffland (1759-1814), and even in the popular medieval plays, the so-calledRitterdramenof whichGötz von Berlichingenwas the model. Germany owes to theSturm und Drangher national theatre; permanent theatres were established in these years at Hamburg, Mannheim, Gotha, and even at Vienna, which, as may be seen from the dramas of C.H. von Ayrenhoff (1733-1819), had hardly then advanced beyond Gottsched’s ideal of a national literature. The Hofburgtheater of Vienna, the greatest of all the German stages, was virtually founded in 1776.
(b)German Classical Literature.—The energy of theSturm und Drang, which was essentially iconoclastic in its methods, soon exhausted itself. For Goethe this phase in his development came to an end with his departure for Weimar in 1775, while, after writingDon Carlos(1787), Schiller turned from poetry to the study of history and philosophy. These subjects occupied his attention almost exclusively for several years, and not until the very close of the century did he, under the stimulus of Goethe’s friendship, return to the drama. The first ten years of Goethe’s life in Weimar were comparatively unproductive; he had left theSturm und Drangbehind him; its developments, for which he himself had been primarily responsible, were distasteful to him; and he had not yet formed a new creed. Under the influence of the Weimar court, where classic or even pseudo-classic tastes prevailed, he was gradually finding his way to a form of literary art which should reconcile the humanistic ideals of the 18th century with the poetic models of ancient Greece. But he did not arrive at clearness in his ideas until after his sojourn in Italy (1786-1788), an episode of the first importance for his mental development. Italy was, in the first instance, a revelation to Goethe of the antique; he had gone to Italy to find realized what Winckelmann had taught, and here he conceived that ideal of a classic literature, which for the next twenty years dominated German literature and made Weimar its metropolis. In Italy he gaveIphigenie auf Tauris(1787) its final form, he completedEgmont(1788)—like the exactly contemporaryDon Carlosof Schiller, a kind of bridge fromSturm und Drangto classicism—and all but finishedTorquato Tasso(1790).Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre(1795-1796) bears testimony to the clear and decisive views which he had acquired on all questions of art and of the practical conduct of life.
Long beforeWilhelm Meisterappeared, however, German thought and literature had arrived at that stability and self-confidence which are the most essential elements in a great literary period. In the year of Lessing’s death, 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the great philosopher, had published hisKritik der reinen Vernunft, and this, together with the two later treatises,Kritik der praktischen Vernunft(1788) andKritik der Urteilskraft(1790), placed the Germans in the front rank of thinking nations. Under the influence of Kant, Schiller turned from the study of history to that of philosophy and more especially aesthetics. His philosophic lyrics, his treatises onAnmut und Würde, on theÄsthetische Erziehung des Menschen(1795), andÜber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung(1795) show, on the philosophic and the critical side, the movement of the century from the irresponsible subjectivity ofSturm und Drangto the calm idealism of classic attainment. In the same way, German historical writing had in these years, under the leadership of men like Justus Möser, Thomas Abbt, I. Iselin, F.C. Schlosser, Schiller himself and, greatest of all, Johannes von Müller (1752-1809), advanced from disconnected, unsystematic chronicling to a clearly thought-out philosophic and scientific method. J.G.A.Forster (1754-1794), who had accompanied Cook round the world, and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), gave Germany models of clear and lucid descriptive writing. In practical politics and economics, when once the unbalanced vagaries of undiluted Rousseauism had fallen into discredit, Germany produced much wise and temperate thinking which prevented the spread of the French Revolution to Germany, and provided a practical basis on which the social and political fabric could be built up anew, after the Revolution had made the old régime impossible in Europe. Men like Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and the philosopher J.G. Fichte (1762-1814) were, in two widely different spheres, representative of this type of intellectual eminence.
Meanwhile, in 1794, that friendship between Goethe and Schiller had begun, which lasted, unbroken, until the younger poet’s death in 1805. These years mark the summit of Goethe and Schiller’s classicism, and the great epoch of Weimar’s history as a literary focus. Schiller’s treatises had provided a theoretical basis; his new journal,Die Horen, might be called the literary organ of the movement—although in this respect the subsequentMusenalmanach, in which the two poets published their magnificent ballad poetry, had more value. Goethe, as director of the ducal theatre, could to a great extent control dramatic production in Germany. Under his encouragement, Schiller turned from philosophy to poetry and wrote the splendid series of classic dramas beginning with the trilogy ofWallensteinand closing withWilhelm Telland the fragment ofDemetrius; while to Goethe we owe, above all, the epic ofHermann und Dorothea. Less important were the latter’s severely classical playsDie natürliche TochterandPandora; but it must not be forgotten that it was chiefly owing to Schiller’s stimulus that in those years Goethe brought the first part ofFaust(1808) to a conclusion.
Although acknowledged leaders of German letters, Goethe and Schiller had considerable opposition to contend with. TheSturm und Dranghad by no means exhausted itself, and the representatives of the once dominant rationalistic movement were particularly arrogant and overbearing. The literature associated with bothSturm und Drangand rationalism was at this period palpably decadent; no comparison could be made between the magnificent achievements of Goethe and Schiller, or even of Herder and Wieland with the “family” dramas of Iffland, still less with the extraordinarily popular plays of A. von Kotzebue (1761-1819), or with those bustling medievalRitterdramen, which were especially cultivated in south Germany. There is a wide gap between Moritz’sAnton Reiseror the philosophic novels which Klinger wrote in his later years, and Goethe’sMeister; nor can the once so fervently admired novels of Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) take a very high place. Neither the fantastic humour nor the penetrating thoughts with which Richter’s books are strewn make up for their lack of artistic form and interest; they are essentially products ofSturm und Drang. Lastly, in the province of lyric and epic poetry, it is impossible to regard poets like the gentle F. von Matthisson (1761-1831), or the less inspired G.L. Kosegarten (1758-1818) and C.A. Tiedge (1752-1841), as worthily seconding the masterpieces of Goethe and Schiller. Thus when we speak of the greatness of Germany’s classical period, we think mainly of the work of her two chief poets; the distance that separated them from their immediate contemporaries was enormous. Moreover, at the very close of the 18th century a new literary movement arose in admitted opposition to the classicism of Weimar, and to this movement, which first took definite form in the Romantic school, the sympathies of the younger generation turned. Just as in the previous generation theSturm und Dranghad been obliged to make way for a return to classic and impersonal principles of literary composition, so now the classicism of Goethe and Schiller, which had produced masterpieces likeWallensteinandHermann und Dorothea, had to yield to a revival of individualism and subjectivity, which, in the form of Romanticism, profoundly influenced the literature of the whole 19th century.
(c)The Romantic Movement.—The first Romantic school, however, was founded, not as a protest against the classicism of Weimar, with which its leaders were in essential sympathy, but against the shallow, utilitarian rationalism of Berlin. Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), a leading member of the school, was in reality a belatedStürmer und Dränger, who in his early years had chafed under the unimaginative tastes of the Prussian capital, and sought for a positive faith to put in their place. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), one of the most gifted poets of this age, demonstrates no less clearly than Tieck the essential affinity betweenSturm und Drangand Romanticism; he, too, forms a bridge from the one individualistic movement to the other. The theoretic basis of Romanticism was, however, established by the two brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel (1767-1845 and 1772-1829), who, accepting, in great measure, Schiller’s aesthetic conclusions, adapted them to the needs of their own more subjective attitude towards literature. While Schiller, like Lessing before him, insisted on the critic’s right to sit in judgment according to a definite code of principles, these Romantic critics maintained that the first duty of criticism was to understand and appreciate; the right of genius to follow its natural bent was sacred. TheHerzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbrudersby Tieck’s school-friend W.H. Wackenroder (1773-1798) contained the Romantic art-theory, while the hymns and fragmentary novels of Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Novalis, 1772-1801), and the dramas and fairy tales of Tieck, were the characteristic products of Romantic literature. The universal sympathies of the movement were exemplified by the many admirable translations—greatest of all, Schlegel’sShakespeare(1797-1810)—which were produced under its auspices. Romanticism was essentially conciliatory in its tendencies, that is to say, it aimed at a reconciliation of poetry with other provinces of social and intellectual life; the hard and fast boundaries which the older critics had set up as to what poetry might and might not do, were put aside, and the domain of literature was regarded as co-extensive with life itself; painting and music, philosophy and ethics, were all accepted as constituent elements of or aids to Romantic poetry. Fichte, and to a much greater extent, F.W.J. von Schelling (1775-1854) were the exponents of the Romantic doctrine in philosophy, while the theologian F.E.D. Schleiermacher (1768-1834) demonstrated how vital the revival of individualism was for religious thought.
The Romantic school, whose chief members were the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Wackenroder and Novalis, was virtually founded in 1798, when the Schlegels began to publish their journal theAthenaeum; but the actual existence of the school was of very short duration. Wackenroder and Novalis died young, and by the year 1804 the other members were widely separated. Two years later, however, another phase of Romanticism became associated with the town of Heidelberg. The leaders of this second or younger Romantic school were K. Brentano (1778-1842), L.A. von Arnim (1781-1831) and J.J. von Görres (1776-1848), their organ, corresponding to theAthenaeum, was theZeitung für Einsiedler, orTröst-Einsamkeit, and their most characteristic production the collection ofVolkslieder, published under the titleDes Knaben Wunderhorn(1805-1808). Compared with the earlier school the Heidelberg writers were more practical and realistic, more faithful to nature and the commonplace life of everyday. They, too, were interested in the German past and in the middle ages, but they put aside the idealizing glasses of their predecessors and kept to historic truth; they wrote historical novels, not stories of an imaginary medieval world as Novalis had done, and when they collectedVolksliederandVolksbücher, they refrained from decking out the simple tradition with musical effects, or from heightening the poetic situation by “Romantic irony.” Their immediate influence on German intellectual life was consequently greater; they stimulated and deepened the interest of the German people in their own past; and we owe to them the foundations of the study of German philology and medieval literature, both the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863 and 1786-1859) having been in touch with this circle in their early days. Again, the Heidelberg poets strengthened the national and patriotic spiritof their people; they prepared the way for the rising against Napoleon, which culminated in the year 1813, and produced that outburst of patriotic song, associated with E.M. Arndt (1769-1860), K. Th. Körner (1791-1813) and M. von Schenkendorf (1783-1817).
The subsequent history of Romanticism stands in close relation to the Heidelberg school, and when, about 1809, the latter broke up, and Arnim and Brentano settled in Berlin, the Romantic movement followed two clearly marked lines of development, one north German, the other associated with Württemberg. The Prussian capital, hotbed of rationalism as it was, had, from the first, been intimately associated with Romanticism; the first school had virtually been founded there, and north Germans, like Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) and Zacharias Werner (1768-1823)had done more for the development of the Romantic drama than had the members of either Romantic school. These men, and more especially Kleist, Prussia’s greatest dramatic poet, showed how the capricious Romantic ideas could be brought into harmony with the classic tradition established by Schiller, how they could be rendered serviceable to the national theatre. At the same time, Berlin was not a favourable soil for the development of Romantic ideas, and the circle of poets which gathered round Arnim and Brentano there, either themselves demonstrated the decadence of these ideas, or their work contained elements which in subsequent years hastened the downfall of the movement. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843), for instance, shows how easy it was for the medieval tastes of the Romanticists to degenerate into mediocre novels and plays, hardly richer in genuine poetry than were the productions of the laterSturm und Drang; and E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), powerful genius though he was, cultivated with preference in his stories, a morbid super-naturalism, which was only a decadent form of the early Romantic delight in the world of fairies and spirits. The lyric was less sensitive to baleful influences, but even here the north German Romantic circle could only point to one lyric poet of the first rank, J. von Eichendorff (1788-1857); while in the poetry of A. von Chamisso (1781-1838) the volatile Romantic spirituality is too often wanting. Others again, like Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), sought the inspiration which Romanticism was no longer able to give, in the East; still another group, of which Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827) is the chief representative, followed Byron’s example and awakened German sympathy for the oppressed Greeks and Poles.
Apart from Eichendorff, the vital lyric poetry of the third and last phase of Romanticism must be looked for in the Swabian school, which gathered round Uhland. Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) was himself a disciple of the Heidelberg poets, and, in his lyrics and especially in his ballads, he succeeded in grafting the lyricism of the Romantic school on to the traditions of German ballad poetry which had been handed down from Bürger, Schiller and Goethe. But, as was the case with so many other disciples of the Heidelberg Romanticists, Uhland’s interest in the German past was the serious interest of the scholar rather than the purely poetic interest of the earlier Romantic poets. The merit of the Swabian circle, the chief members of which were J. Kerner (1786-1862), G. Schwab (1792-1850), W. Waiblinger (1804-1830), W. Hauff (1802-1827) and, most gifted of all, E. Mörike (1804-1875) was that these writers preserved the Romantic traditions from the disintegrating influences to which their north German contemporaries were exposed. They introduced few new notes into lyric poetry, but they maintained the best traditions intact, and when, a generation later, the anti-Romantic movement of “Young Germany” had run its course, it was to Württemberg Germany looked for a revival of the old Romantic ideas.
Meanwhile, in the background of all these phases of Romantic evolution, through which Germany passed between 1798 and 1832, stands the majestic and imposing figure of Goethe. Personally he had in the early stages of the movement been opposed to that reversion to subjectivity and lawlessness which the first Romantic school seemed to him to represent; to the end of his life he regarded himself as a “classic,” not a “romantic” poet. But, on the other hand, he was too liberal-minded a thinker and critic to be oblivious to the fruitful influence of the new movement. Almost without exception he judged the young poets of the new century fairly, and treated them sympathetically and kindly; he was keenly alive to the new—and for the most part “unclassical”—development of literature in England, France and Italy; and his own published work, above all, the first part ofFaust(1808),Die Wahlverwandtschaften(1809),Dichtung und Wahrheit(1811-1814, a final volume in 1833),Westöstlicher Divan(1819),Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre(1821-1829) and the second part ofFaust(published in 1832 after the poet’s death), stood in no antagonism to the Romantic ideas of their time. One might rather say that Goethe was the bond between the two fundamental literary movements of the German classical age; that his work achieved that reconciliation of “classic” and “romantic” which, rightly regarded, was the supreme aim of the Romantic school itself.