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Babylonica ecclesiae, and Von 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 workGerman 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 his Gemeindeutsch. 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 (14751537). 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 of Von 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, the Affentheuerlich 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 the Froschmeuseler (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 his Stylpho (1470) and by J. Reuchlin with his witty adaptation of Maitre Patelin in his Henno (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 moralizing Fastnachtsspiele in 1515-1516; Niklas Manuel of Bern (1484-1530)—who has just been mentionedemployed 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: the Parabell vam vorlorn Szohn by Burkard Waldis (1527), the many dramas on the subject of Susanna 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 from Spruch and Schwank to complicated Meistergesang and 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 rôle than his Swiss and Saxon contemporaries; for his tragedies and comedies are deficient in all dramatic qualities; they are only stories in dialogue. In the Fastnachtsspiele, 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 of Amadis 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, the Rollwagenbüchlein. 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 old Volksbücher as 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 crude Volksbücher, namely, the famous story of the magician Doctor 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 slavery

to 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 of guidauce and 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 famous Aurora, oder Morgenröle im Aufgang (1612); while Friedrich von Spec (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; his Oden 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 his Buch 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 the Accademia della Crusca in Florence. These societies, of which the chief were the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft or Palmenorden (founded 1617), the Elbschwanenorden in Hamburg

and the Gekrönter Blumenorden an der Pegnitz or Gesellschaft der Pegnitzschäfer in Nuremberg, were the centres of literary activity during the unsettled years of the war. Although they produced much that was trivial-such as the extraordinary Nürnberger Trichter (1647-1653) by G. P. Harsdörffer (16071658), 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 epochmaking grammatical works with the avowed purpose of furthering the objects of the Fruchtbringende 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 the Buch von der deutschen Poelerey did 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 fullblooded 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 (16441709), 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 (16041655). 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 his Horribilicribrifax and Herr Peter Squents-the latter an adaptation of the comic scenes of the Midsummer 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 metcy of foreign influence, that influence was more varied and manifold in its character. Don Quixote bad been partly

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 English Spectator, Taller and Guardian—the so-called moralische Wochenschriften-it helped to regenerate literary taste, and to implant healthy moral ideas in the German middle classes.

translated early in the 17th century, the picaresque romance | impressed by the appreciation of nature in English poetry, gave had found its way to Germany at a still earlier date; while H. M. Moscherosch (1601-1669) in his Gesichte Philanders von Sittewald (1642-1643) made the Sueños of 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 16251676), 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.

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The real successor of Simplicissimus in Germany was the English Robinson 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 by Der schweizerische Robinson of J. R. Wyss (1812 fl.). With the exception of J. G. Schnabel's Insel 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 famous Asiatische Banise (1688)— and D. C. von Lohenstein (1635-1683), whose Arminius (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.

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 his Kritische 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 the estilo culto, to the art poétique of 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 his Kritische 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 Zurich, 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's Paradise 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, the Bremer Beiträger as 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 provinci

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 Lohenstein 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 Benjaminality, the dramatist J. Elias Schlegel (1719–1749), who in more 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 (16611725) epigrams was an effective antidote, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747), a native of Hamburg, who had been deeply

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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 the Bremer Beiträge there 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's Messias, and in a still higher degree, his Odes, laid the foundations of modern German literature in the 18th century.

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His immediate followers, it is true, did not help to advance | himself with the best critical principles of the rationalistic movematters; Bodmer and J. K. Lavater (1741-1801), whose ment-principles which, in the later years of his life, he employed physiognomic" investigations interested Goethe at a later in a fierce onslaught on Lutheran orthodoxy and intolerance. date, wrote dreary and now long forgotten epics on religious To the widening and deepening of the German imagination themes. Klopstock's rhapsodic dramas, together with Macpher- C. M. Wieland (1733-1813) also contributed, but in a different son's Ossian, which in the 'sixties awakened a widespread way. Although no enemy of pseudo-classicism, he broke with enthusiasm throughout Germany, were responsible for the the stiff dogmatism of Gottsched and his friends, and tempered so-called "bardic " movement; but the noisy rhapsodies of the pietism of Klopstock by introducing the Germans to the the leaders of this movement, the "bards " H. W. von Gersten- lighter poetry of the south of Europe. With the exception of his berg (1737-1823), K. F. Kretschmann (1738–1809) and Michael fairy epic Oberon (1780), Wieland's work has fallen into neglect; Denis (1729-1800), had little of the poetic inspiration of Klop- he did, however, excellent service to the development of German stock's Odes. prose fiction with his psychological novel, Agathon (1766–1767), which may be regarded as a forerunner of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and with his humorous satire Die 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 Thummel (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 of Agathon, but the groundwork and form were borrowed from English models; Gellert had begun by imitating Richardson in his Schwedische 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. Musaus (1735-1787), the last mentioned being, however, best known as the author of a collection of Volksmärchen (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 the moralische Wochenschriften of the preceding epoch; and with this group of writers must also be associated the most brilliant of German

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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), wrote Freundschaftliche 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 lighter vers de société could 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 of Der 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 of Sturm 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-18th-century satirists, G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799). 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 pseudoclassicism, 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 a bürgerliche Tragödie on the lines of Lillo's Merchant of London, Minna von Barnhelm (1767), a comedy in the spirit of Farquhar; in Emilia Galolli (1772), again with English models in view, he remoulded the "tragedy of common life" in a form acceptable to the Sturm und Drang; and finally in Nathan 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 in Laokoon (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 famous Literaturbriefe. Here Lessing identified |

Such was the milieu from 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 the Aufklärung to 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 (17381766) 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 the Volkslieder of 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 as Sturm 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 the Göttinger 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 position

in the "Bund," the members of this coterie were drawn from | upon a new development. Although hardly less turbulent in the peasant class of the lower bourgeoisie; J. H. Voss (17511826), 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 the Volkslied. Closely associated with the Göttingen group were M. Claudius (1740-1815), the Wandsbecker Bole-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 the Göttinger Musenalmanach ballads, 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 of Sturm 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 pamphlet Von 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 the Sturm 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. His Gölz von Berlichingen (1771-1773), the first drama of the Sturm und Drang, was followed within a year by the first novel of the movement, Werthers Leiden (1774); he dashed off Clavigo and Stella in a few weeks in 1774 and 1775, and wrote a large number of Singspiele, dramatic satires and fragments-including Faust in its earliest form (the so-called Urfaust)—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 of Gölz von Berlichingen found enthusiastic imitators in J. M. R. Lenz (1751-1792), whose Anmerkungen 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 the Sturm und Drang was its most characteristic product-indeed, the very name of the movement was borrowed from a play by Klinger; it was inspired, as Götz von Berlichingen had 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 the Sturm und Drang, again, was in its earlier stages dominated by Werthers 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 of Ardinghello (1787), Klinger, K. Ph. Moritz (1757-1793), whose Anton Reiser (1785) clearly foreshadows Wilhelm Meister, it reflected not merely the sentimentalism, but also the philosophic and artistic ideas of the period.

With the production of Die Räuber (1781) by Johann Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), the drama of the Sturm und Drang entered

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spirit than the work of Klinger and Leisewitz, Schiller's tragedy was more skilfully adapted to the exigencies of the theatre; his succeeding dramas, Fiesco and Kabale und Licbe, were also admirable stage-plays, and in Don Carlos (1787) he abandoned prose for the iambic blank verse which Lessing had made acceptable in Nathan 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-called Ritterdramen of which Götz von Berlichingen was the model. Germany owes to the Sturm und Drang her 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 the Sturm 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 writing Don 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 the Sturm und Drang behind 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 pseudoclassic 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 gave Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) its final form, he completed Egmont (1788)-like the exactly contemporary Don Carlos of Schiller, a kind of bridge from Sturm und Drang to classicism-and all but finished Torquato Tasso (1790). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1.795–1796) 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 before Wilhelm Meister appeared, however, German thought and literature had arrived at that stability and selfconfidence 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 his Krilik der reinen Vernunft, and this, together with the two later treatises, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788) and Kritik 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 on Anmul und Würde, on the Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), and Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795) show, on the philosophic and the critical side, the movement of the century from the irresponsible subjectivity of Sturm und Drang to 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 (17521809), advanced from disconnected, unsystematic chronicling to a clearly thought-out philosophic and scientific method. J. G

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