GERMANY CONTD many of them stated it in violent terms, and openly aimed at the equal division of property, if possible by peaceful agitation, if necessary by revolution. At the time of the formation of the party Herr von Bismarck was engaged in his struggle with the liberals in the Prussian parliament, and he did not scruple to damage his opponents by encouraging Lassalle, who detested them more vehemently than did the premier himself. Soon after the war with France the condition of the country was in the highest degree favourable to the progress of the movement. . Intoxicated by the national triumphs, and having a vague impression that the French indemnity must be an inexhaustible source of wealth, many of the German middle class indulged in wild speculation, and contracted habits of reckless expenditure. At the same time the resources of the nation were drained by the most costly military system the world has ever seen. The inevitable result was that in a short time trade was depressed beyond all recent experience; wages fell, and large numbers of workmen were deprived of employment. Socialism found its opportunity; multitudes of the sufferers eagerly listened to instructors who depicted for them a brilliant future that might be easily attained. In England no considerable body of men has ever been deeply impressed by socialist schemes; but in Germany the conditions of political life are altogether different. There the Government is the greatest of all powers. At every stage of a man’s life it makes itself felt; it creates around the community a sort of political atmosphere from which there is no escape, in which every one moves and breathes. Thus to an uninstructed German there seems to be hardly any limit to the feats of which the state is capable. It professes to be so nearly omnipotent that he appears to himself to be within his right in asking it to make all poor men suddenly rich.
At each successive general election the numbers of socialist deputies to the imperial parliament increased; and in 1877 it was calculated that, although only twelve members of the party were returned, about a tenth of the entire body of voters were socialists. Some alarm was excited by these facts, but no one thought of putting down the movement by force until one day in May 1878 a shot was fired at the aged emperor in Berlin, as he drove along the Unter den Linden with his daughter, the grand-duchess of Baden, by his side. The criminal, a youth named Hödel, boasted of his socialist opinions and aims. A wave of anger swept over the nation; and the reactionary party, fancying it had an opportunity of laying a rough hand on far more than socialism, succeeded in inducing the imperial Government to draw up without delay a severe measure, directed nominally against the socialists, but in reality against all politicians obnoxious to the conservatives. The bill was hurried through the federal council and submitted to the diet. By that time the majority of the liberals had recovered their self-control; and with the aid of the centre party they threw out the proposed scheme by an immense majority. Parliament was prorogued, and it was uncertain whether there would be any further attempt at repression.
Suddenly the announcement came that the emperor had again been shot at, and that this time he had been wounded. For some days Germany was convulsed with rage and horror, and on all sides the cry was raised that now at last socialism must be sternly dealt with. Taking courage, the Government dissolved parliament, and pressure of every kind was put upon the electors to secure a thoroughly reactionary diet. The country, however, reflected that, although it was necessary to protect society, it might not be necessary to sacrifice the liberties which it had with so much difficulty conquered. Accordingly, when the new parliament assembled in August 1878, it was found that the liberals had not sustained very serious losses. The progressists bitterly opposed the measure introduced by the Government; but by some means Prince Bismarck managed, as he had often done before, to overcome the objections of the national liberals. By their support a law was passed which gave the police of the empire, for two years and a half, enormous special powers. These powers were at once rigidly enforced; and socialism appeared to vanish from the land. Whether, however, it may not spring up in some great national crisis, all the stronger for the sufferings of its adherents, is a point that can be determined only when some great national crisis occurs.
The socialists and the ultramontanes, without having anything else in common, have joined in opposition to measures for promoting the national unity. They have been aided by the Polish deputies, by the members for Alsace and Lorraine, and by the so-called particularists, conservative politicians ardently attached to the ancient customs and rights of the individual states. Notwithstanding this formidable band of allies, considerable progress has been made in the task of transforming a loose confederation of countries into a true nation. Between 1872 and 1875 utter anarchy in important departments of life was brought to an end by laws relating to imperial coinage, imperial paper money, and the system of banking. And in 1877 thorough investigation resulted in the appointment of a supreme imperial tribunal (Reichsgericht). It was proposed that this tribunal should sit in Berlin; but many liberals having no desire that that city should assume in Germany the place which belongs in France to Paris, a large majority decided for Leipsic. This was taken as a hint that, while Germany wishes to be united, she will not voluntarily see herself transformed into a magnified Prussia.
In spite of their military strength, their victories, and the establishment of their empire, the Germans are not, politically, a contented people; and the reason is that they have outgrown their institutions. While a statesman of extraordinary genius and authority stands in the way, a progressive system maybe impossible; but the more intelligent classes have never lost the desire to add to the hardly-earned national unity the crowning triumph of unfettered representative government.
Bibliography.—Luden, Die Geschichte des deutschen Volks.·, Leo, Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte des deutschen Volks und Reichs ·, Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit·, Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte·, Mayer, Deutsche Geschichte·, Souchay, Geschichte der deutschen Monarchie·. Sugenheim, Geschichte des deutschen Volks und seiner Cultur. (J∙ SI.)
PART HL—LANGUAGE.
In its ordinary sense the name German Language or Deutsche Sprache is now generally used to denote, in all their stages from the earliest time to the present day, the different languages and dialects of Teutonic origin spoken in the German and Austrian empires and in Switzerland, not including, however, the Frisian language, which once was spoken, and still in a few remnants survives, on the shores and islands of the German Ocean, nor the dialects of the Danish population of nortnern Schleswig. Flemish and Dutch, although very closely connected with German, are likewise excluded. But the word Deutsch has also been, and still continues to be, used in a wider sense. Jacob Grimm introduced it, in his famous Deutsche Grammatik, as a comprehensive name for that family of the so-called Indo-European or Aryan languages, for which English writers generally use the name of “Teutonic,” and of which the principal branches are represented by Gothic, the Scandinavian languages, English, Frisian, and German. In this Grimm has had many followers, but scarcely anywhere out of Germany; and even there the fact that the name, in this application, besides being incorrect from an historical point of view (as the word has never been used thus by any one of the people to whom it has been applied by Grimm), is also liable to be misunderstood, has caused a growing tendency towards confining it again to its original meaning described above, and using Germanisch, or Germanic, in the collective sense of the English “Teutonic.” But even in the stricter sense the designation Deutsch is not of very long standing, nor has the word always been a real proper name for a distinct people or tribe. In Bishop Ulfilas’s Gothic version of the Bible we find the adverb thiudisko (eθvικω<s), Gal. ii. 14, which is clearly a derivative from thiuda (fθvο<i), meaning primarily “after the manner of the people.” German writers of tbe earlier centuries were therefore as fully justified in calling their own language diutisc, or, in a Latinized form, theudiscus, theοtiscus, that is, their popular or vernacular language, as were those mediaeval Latin writers of all nations who distinguished their national languages by the name of lingua vulgaris irom. Latin, the only literary language fully acknowledged in their time. It was not until the I Oth century that another Latinized form frequently used in later times, viz., teutonicus, began to be used instead of the older theοtiscus, of which the only rivals in former times had been such local names as frαnciscus (frenkisc} or saxoηi-cus, which were no doubt derived from the names of single tribes, but were often also used in the same comprehensive sense as theotiscus, without necessarily implying any allusion to dialectal differences between the languages of the tribes they properly belonged to. The last name we have to mention here is the Latin Germanus, with its different derivatives in the modern languages, including the English form German. Many attempts have been made to elucidate the origin of this word, but as yet nothing can be taken for certain beyond the fact that it is neither of Latin nor of German origin. Most probably it was a Celtic word, and, according to what Tacitus says in his Germania (ch. ii.), it was originally the name of a Celtic tribe, from which, by some strange error of the Roman and Greek historians, it has been transferred to the non-Celtic inhabitants of Germany. Accordingly the name has never been used by the Germans themselves except in imitation of its use in the works of Latin writers.
As to its geographical extension the German language has undergone very great changes in the course of the last two thousand years. At the dawn of history no Germans were to be found to the left of the Rhine, and even to the right of it Celtic tribes occur in the earliest times. There were Celts also in the south of the present Germany as far north at least as the Danube and the Main; Bohemia, too, derives its name from an early Celtic population, the Boii. Only the midland and north were inhabited by Germanic nations or tribes, stretching as far east as Poland, and perhaps covering even parts of the adjoining territories of Russia, where Slavonic and. Finnish tribes were their neighbours. But of these Germanic tribes and their languages some have left no equivalents in our modern German tribes and dialects. We have mentioned the Frisian language as not belonging to German in its proper sense, although the Frisians have kept their original residence up to the present day, and have always been in constant connexion and frequent intercourse with their “German” neighbours. Many other tribes have wandered from their seats and colonized other countries. It was as late as the middle of the 5th century that the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons began their voyages of conquest to England, where they founded a new people and a new language, leaving their native soil open to Danish invasions. Much earlier the midland tribes had already been slowly pushing on to the west and south, and expelling or subduing and assimilating the Celtic owners of the territories they invaded. But what was gained in these parts was counterbalanced by great losses in the north and east. The territories about the lower and middle Elbe, Oder, and Vistula, abandoned by the Lombards, the Burgundians, the Goths, and some other Germanic tribes, as well as Bohemia, which for some short time had been in the possession of the German Marcomans, were soon filled up by the immigration of numerous tribes of the great Slavonic family. Without going into details of the facts which are well known to the student of history, we may simply state that, since about 500 a.d., when the great migration of the nations had come to an end so far as Germany was concerned, no further change of any great importance has taken place in the western and southern parts. In the east the German population at this time did not go beyond a line that may be drawn from about Kiel to the Böhmerwald, passing near Hamburg, Magdeburg, ^Naumburg, Coburg, and Baireuth. As is well known, it is in later centuries that almost all the eastern districts have been recovered for the German language.
In the 6th century the remains of the numerous smaller Germanic tribes, mentioned before and during the migration of the nations, had consolidated into seven larger bodies or aggregations of tribes. The Frisians still held the extreme north of Holland and Germany. Their midland and eastern neighbours were then called by the new name of Saxons, borrowed from the Saxons who had left the Continent for England. In the main parts of the Netherlands and Belgium, along both sides of the Rhine, and across Germany to the Thuringian and Bohemian Forests, the powerful Frankish confederation had established itself, and it soon incorporated the smaller and less vigorous tribes of the Hessians and Thuringians, which were surrounded by the midland or eastern Franks, the Saxons, and the Slavs. Alsatia, Switzerland, and South Germany eastward to the river Lech were occupied by the Alemannians, while the inhabitants of the remaining districts of the present Bavaria and Austria bore the collective name of Bavarians.
The history of the German language cannot be severed from the history of these tribes, for Frisian, Saxon, Frankish (Hessian, Thuringian), Alemannian, and Bavarian are the leading dialects of the Continental branch of the Teutonic family. What Dr J. A. H. Murray has pointed out about the origin of the principal English dialects may equally well be said of these Continental idioms. Having no specimens of the languages of the Continental tribes for nearly three centuries after their final settlement, we cannot tell to what extent they originally agreed with or differed from each other, although there must have been some dialectal differences to begin with, which were afterwards increased and multiplied, partly by phonetic changes (most probably resulting from scarcely discernible phonetic peculiarities, which, even in the earliest times, must have prevailed in those idioms), and partly by such alterations of the inflexional systems as are known to occur frequently in all languages whose character is not merely literary. But, however scanty our means of illustrating the earliest history of these idioms may be, there is no doubt that they were not all of them related to each other in the same degree. Three main groups are easily distinguishable :—
(1) Frisian and Saxon, whose nearest relation is English;
(2) Frankish, Hessian, and Thuringian; and (3) Alemaunian and Bavarian. Frisian is generally considered as a separate language. From Saxon the later Low German dialects {Niederdeutsche Mundarten) have sprung. The members of the third group (generally designated as Oberdeutsch, or Upper German), combined with Mitteldeutsch, or the midland dialects, viz., Thuringian, Hessian, and part of the Frankish dialects, are the sources of the later Hochdeutsch or High German. The greatest difference prevails between the first and third groups; the second may be characterized as containing various transition dialects. The southern Frankish dialects are very closely akin to the adjacent Upper German idioms, while Dutch, the utmost offshoot of the Frankish language to the north, does not very materially differ from Saxon or Frisian in the earliest period. The most striking phonetic feature of the languages of the first group is their regular dropping of the nasal sounds before the spirants f, th, s, accompanied by subsequent lengthening of the preceding vowels. Thus we have in Anglo-Saxon or Old English fiif, after, cuft, gas (Mod. English five, other, {uni) couth, goose), in Old Frisian fif, othar, cuth, gos, in Old Saxon fif, othar, cuth,gοs, corresponding to such Gothic forms as fimf, anthar, kunths, or the ordinary High German fünf, ander, kund, gans. Since, however, Dutch partakes of this peculiarity to some extent, we cannot easily form a decisive opinion as to the value of this fact as a distinctive mark; but more stress may be laid on a very remarkable difference in the inflexional system of the verb. Here the languages of the first group have melted together the forms of the three persons of the plural number, thus we, ge, his findaft, or fundon, we, you, they find, or found, in Old English ∙,wi,gι, hia findaft, or fundon in Old Frisian; wi, gi, sia findaft, or fundon in Old Saxon. The corresponding Old High German forms are wir findam, ir findat, sie findant for the present, wir funium, ir funtut, sie funtun for the perfect tense. Old Dutch joins, in this case, the German branch; from werthaη, to become, for instance, are derived wι werthun, gι werthift, sia τverthunt, &c. The declension of the substantives shows another remarkable difference. While the languages of the first group have retained the original s in the nominative plural of such words as Old English dagas, days, Old Saxon dagos, or changed it to r, as Old Frisian dagar, Dutch and German have dropped it altogether, the corresponding forms being daga and taga. These facts must be taken for decisive, as it seems to be certain that they existed before any distinction of Low and High German in their modern sense (a distinction chiefly dependent on subsequent changes in their mute system) could be thought of. From a purely grammatical point of view, Dutch, although generally considered a separate language (which no doubt it is, with regard to its literary and political position), is entitled to claim a closer relation to High German than even Low German, whose non· literary character, taken along with the political union of northern and southern Germany, has led to the current opinion that it is only a dialect of “German” in its narrower sense. We do not mean to deny that there is, at present, a more conspicuous conformity between Dutch and Low German than between Low German and High German; but this is only due to the fact that High German, after the final settlement of the German tribes, has deviated much more from its original features than either Dutch or Low German. The most striking peculiarities of High German, as opposed to all other Teutonic idioms, have mainly been caused by the second or High German “Lautverschiebung,” or change of mute consonants, which forme part of a long series of sound-changes generally comprehended under the name of Germanische Lautverschiebung or Grimm’s Law. This Lautverschiebung began, perhaps as early as the 7th century, in the south, and thence slowly spread northward, but with decreasing vigour and consistency, Dutch and Low German not being touched at all. It was only thus that the idiom of the Netherlands Franks of the later centuries was separated from the dialects of their “German” relations. Before, however, the first literary documents are met with, this separation is complete; and we may therefore restrict ourselves here to a short history of High and Low German alone.
The German language presents, as do most of the cognate tongues, three maiu stages of development,—Old, Middle, and Modern,—distinguished by their inflexional and literary character. In accordance with Mr Henry Sweet’s description of the stages of the English language, Old German may be defined as the period of full inflections (Old Low German, dages, dage, dagu∙, dagos, dago, dagun ; Old High German, tages, tage, tagu; tagä, tago, tagum), while the Middle period is that of levelled inflections (Middle Low German, dages, dage, dagen∙, Middle High German, tages, tage, tagen)·, but it is chiefly the literary character that distinguishes Modern High German from Low German and its own earlier stages. A special form of High German is established in this period for all literary purposes, supplanting the dialects both of Low and of High German that formerly were freely used in literary intercourse. Assuming two periods of transition besides, we have the following divisions, with the approximate dates: [table]
The same divisions have to be made for Low German, but the scheme cannot be so fully carried through, as the time between 1000 and 1200 is almost destitute of literary monuments.
Old German.— The inflexional characteristics of Old German are almost identical with those of Old English. Nouns had the same five cases,—nominative, accusative (only in a few instances kept distinct), genitive, dative, and instrumental. Strong and weak declensions of nouns and their subdivisions are likewise the same. The dual of the first and second personal pronouns is almost extinct in Old High German, but is quite common in Low German. In the verb we find the same distinction of the subjunctive from the indicative mood, and the same two inflected tenses, present and past,—the former also used for the future, the latter for all shades of past time. The order of the sentence corresponds generally to the modern use, but is not kept so strictly as now, especially in the oldest prose texts, which are often materially influenced by the Latin sources from which they have been derived or translated.
The earliest extant specimen of Low German belongs to the beginning of the 9th century. It is a short formula of renunciation of the devil to be used before the ceremony of baptism. It begins thus:—“Forsachistu dioboleî et respondeat: ec forsacho diabole. End allum diobolgelde 1 respondeat: end ec forsacho allum diobolgelde. End allum dioboles uuercum! respondeat: end ec forsacho allum dioboles uuercum and uuordtιm, Thuner ende Uuoden ende Saxnote ende allum them unholdum the hira genotas sint.” “Forsakest thou (the) devil? I forsake (the) devil. And all devil-sacrifice Ί And I forsake all devil-sacrifice. And all (the) devil’s works? And I forsake all the devil’s works and words, Thuner and Woden and Saxnot and all the uncouth (beings) that their companions are.”
We cannot, unfortunately, tell what special dialect of Low German this piece belonged to, nor even whether it was originally written in German, as several forms occurring in it have rather an Old English look. No more certain are the place of origin and the dialect of the most important relic of the Old Saxon language, the great poem of the Heliand, or the History of our Saviour, composed in the old alliterative verse by a Saxon cleric or monk, about the year 830. We quote as a specimen the following lines from the Munich MS.:—
“Quamun managa
Iudeon an thene gastseli; uuard im thar gladmod hugi, blidi an iro breostun: gisahun iro baggebon uuesen an uunneon. Drog man uuin an flet skiri mid scalun, scenkeon huurbun, gengun mid goldfatun; gaman uuas thar inne, lιlud an thero hallu, helidos drunkun.”
“ (There) came many Jews to the guest-hall; became to them there glad (their) mind, blithe in their breasts: (they) saw their ring-giver be in joy. Wine was borne into (the) hall bright in cups; cup-bearers walked about, went with golden vessels, joy was therein loud in the hall, the knights drank.”
Much more numerous and various in age and dialect are the documents of Old High German, some of which date as far back as the 8th century. Welcome as they may be to the student of grammar, not much can be said for their intrinsic value. Almost all the prose pieces are mere translations (many of them could not be worse) from the Latin; and even such poetical works as Otfrid’s Life of Christ are no more than prose thoughts forced into bad verse. Only a very few relics of true poetry have reached us, among which the Hildebrandslied (in a mixed dialect), the fragments of the Mùspüli (a poem about the Last Judgment, in the Bavarian dialect, belonging, like the Hildebrandslied, to the beginning of the 9th century, and also written in alliterative verse), and the Ludιvigslied (881 or 882, in one of the Frankish dialects) may be mentioned here.
High German, as already hinted, is chiefly distinguished from the other Teutonic languages by a certain transformation of its mute system. The ordinary changes,—that is to say, those received in the modern High German literary language,—are the following:—d is changed to t in all positions; t to z (either pronounced ts or ss); p to pf, ff, or/according to its position in the word; k initial and following a consonant is kept, but after a vowel k passes into ch (pronounced as Scotch or Modern German ch). Thus we get the following comparisons :— [table]
This is the state of things in the High Frankish or Eastern Frankish dialect, spoken in the south-east of the Frankish territory. In the earliest period, as may be seen from the above list, it still preserved the th sound in many cases; in the later stages d is found to have been substituted, as in Modern High German. The Upper German dialects show the same change at a much earlier time, and, in addition to this, they have also changed k initial and following a consonant into ch, and b and g initial into ρ and k (representing most likely voiceless soft stops, as still pronounced in South Germany and Switzerland); Bavarian admits p for b even in the middle of words. Thus we have, for instance, denchen for Frankish i/wnføn, to think; pitten for Frankish bitten, to bid; keban, or Bavarian kepan, for Frankish geban, to give. In illustration of these distinctions and some other variations of spelling we may quote three contemporaneous versions of the Lord’s Prayer which have fortunately been preserved:— [table]
It is impossible to give here a sufficient idea of the variability of Old High German, as, indeed, out of several hundred pieces that have come to our knowledge, there are not two representing exactly the same dialect to all its shades or at least in exactly the same spelling. We shall therefore restrict ourselves to a short notice of the more important documents. South-western Frankish is best represented by a very old translation of a treatise by Isidorus Hispalensis, De Fide Catholica, b and Otfrid’s Life of Christ, mentioned above. The chief source of Eastern Frankish ia a translation of the Harmony of the Gospels erroneously ascribed to the Syrian father Tatianus. For Bavarian we may quote some old glossaries, for Alemannian the interlineary versions of the Benedictine Rule and some Latin church hymns, besides several glossaries. For later Old High German, the works of Notker Labeo, or Teutonicus, a monk of St Gall who died in 1022, are the fundamental sources. What 0rmin did for English phonetics, Notker may be said to have done, even more completely, for those of Germany. He not only carefully marks the quantities of vowels, but also points out the phonetic difference between such diphthongs as ei, ou, iu, and ie, no by his way of accentuating them (ei, ou, iu, and îe, ûo) ; even such phonetic minutiae as the change of initial voiced stop consonants into voiceless stops after a pause or a voiceless consonant are duly registered, as may be seen from the following specimen.
“Sanctus paulus kehîez tien die in sînên zîten uuândon des sûonetagen, taz er êr nechâme êr romanum imperium zegîenge ünde antichristus rîchesôn begéndi. Uuér zuîuelôt romanos iu uuésen àllero rîcho hêrren ünde iro geuuAlt kân ze énde dero uuérlte î” “St Paul assured those who in his time expected the day of judgment that it would not come before the Roman Empire was dissolved, and Antichrist began to reign. Who doubts that the Romans are the masters of all kingdoms, and that their power reaches to the end of the world?”
It will be clear from what has been said above that the main feature of the Old High German period is the total absence of a common literary language. No voluntary modifications of the form of speech are to be found, but such as are naturally involved in any attempt to adapt a spoken idiom to literary use. Nevertheless it has been suggested by K. Müllenhoff and others that idioms of a more refined character than the ordinary popular dialects were spoken at the principal courts of the empire, and especially at the imperial court itself, and that the authority of these Hofsprachen was great enough to exercise a modifying influence on the literary productions throughout the empire, or in those parts at least where High German was the vernacular speech. But how these suppositions can be proved does not appear, or how they can be reconciled with the fact that all literary documents of the period are dialectal.
Middle German.— The transition to Middle High and Low German is conspicuously marked by a decided improvement in the poetic faculties of the nation. While the 10th century has left only a very few specimens of poetry, and these of poor quality, the number of poems (mainly of a theological bearing) dating from the 11th century is not inconsiderable, and the 12th century shows a rapidity of literary development almost unparalleled. At first indeed religious and legendary poetry is still prevalent, but soon literature begins to take a more historical or epic turn. This tendency is clearly visible in the Kaiserchronik, or Emperor’s Chronicle, in which the first attempt is made to give a survey of universal and German history in a poetical form. The romantic tales of Alexander the Great and of the battle of Roncesvalles weretranslated from the French,— the Alexanderlied by the Pfaffe Lamprecht, the Rolandslied by the Pfaffe Konrad; while old national traditions contributed fitting subjects for such epic poems as that concerning the adventures of the Lombard King Rother. Lyric poetry, hitherto altogether neglected, sprang suddenly into vigour in the remote east of Austria about the middle of the century, and soon found its way to other countries. But the most decided advance was not made till about 1180, when the new forms of social life that had crept in among the more cultivated classes, in imitation of the laws and customs of French chivalry, began to exercise a powerful reforming influence on all branches of poetry. The example set by the Netherlands poet, Heinrich von Veldeke (who for some time lived, and partly wrote, in Germany), in his JEηeit, or Aeneid, was soon followed by the three great epic masters of the period, Hartmann von Λue, Gottfried von Strasburg, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. About the same time the Nibelungenlied and other compositions of a more national character were composed, while lyric poetry was raised to a height of excellence never attained at any other period of the Middle Ages, and best represented in the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide. It is true enough that this new chivalrous poetry was not always very original in thought; indeed, most epic poems of this class, and many lyric stanzas, have been directly copied from French models; but its influence on the culture of the language was immense. It was then for the first time that Germany possessed a real literary language, undoubtedly homogeneous as far as style and metre are concerned. Whether a similar unity of the outer form of speech had already been reached at that period is a point very difficult to decide. The question was raised for the first time as early as 1820, by Karl Lachmann, in his Ausιvahl aus den hochdeutschen Dichtern des XIII. Jahrh. Lachmann’s opinion was that the poets of the 13th century spoke a definite, unchangeable sort of High German, a few minor dialectal peculiarities being excepted, and that uneducated scribes had been guilty of introducing older or corrupt forms of the common speech into our manuscripts. These views were at the time unanimously accepted, and are still held (though in a somewhat modified form, admitting two literary idioms, one in the south, the other in the midland) by a majority of the German philologists of the present day. As a consequence of this, most of the “critical” editions of Middle High German poetry that have appeared since Lachmann’s time do not reproduce the original readings of the manuscripts, but give the texts in a “corrected” form, commonly called “correct Middle High German,” which is assumed to appear in its purest form in the works of Hartmann von Aue. It is chiefly Alemannian, or Swabian, with some Frankish peculiarities of spelling in the use of the consonants, in order to produce a greater resemblance to ordinary Modern High German orthography. No manuscript, however, is known to be written in exactly the same language or orthography; nor are there any poets, except those of Swabia, who do not clearly show by their rhymes the existence of dialectal forms in their speech, All incongruities in the rhymes disappear when they are transferred to the forms peculiar to the local dialects of their authors. It was therefore but natural that a reaction against Lachmann’s views should ultimately have set in; and this reaction appears to have been right in denying that dialectal forms were purposely and studiously avoided, even by the classic authors of the period, with a view to the approximation of their language to a certain universal idiom never existing anywhere but in the fancy of certain modern writers. How injurious to the study of Middle High German dialects the views of Lachmann, had they prevailed, must have been, it is easy to see; but on the other hand it must not be forgotten that the only method of investigating the dialects of the single authors was that followed by Lachmann, viz., to reconstruct them by a careful study of the rhymes, for the dialects of the manuscripts are often, nay in most cases, clearly different from those of the writers themselves, as shown by the rhymes. It is therefore not so much the principle of reconstruction that has been resisted by Lachmann’s opponents as the way in which this reconstruction has been practically carried out. For prose writings of course no such reconstruction is possible; still, prose documents, especially such as were destined for local use only (charters, <fcc.), and therefore less liable to adulterations of the original, are often the main sources for German dialectology.
The prominent feature of German (Low German included) in this period is the levelling of the unaccented vowels of the inflexional and some of the derivative syl-tables already mentioned. As to the former there is only one exception, viz., the retaining of the termination iu (pronounced as Modern German u qt French long w) for the nom. sing. fem. and the nom. and acc. plur. neutr. of the adjectives (flindiu, while all other cases have the levelled e) ; and even this seems to be a speciality of Upper German, the corresponding Midland form being blinde as in Modern German. The unaccented e is frequently dropped in all dialects, especially in the south, where the dropping is almost regular after an r or l closing a short syllable, as in bern, steln, for bereu, stelen, to bear, to steal; Old High German, beraη, stelaη. In the Midland dialects i is often written for this e, thus berin, steliη. The accented vowels of the root syllables are greatly changed in this period by the “Umlaut,” or mutation of sounds, being an assimilation of these vowels to an i or y originally following. Thus a, a, o, o, u, ü, uo are changed to e, ce, Ü or ö, ce, w, iu (long ü), üe, as may be seen in the following instances :— hant, hand, pl. hende; rat, council, pl. rcete; golt, gold, güldîn, golden, or mohte, I might, subj. mohte; groz, great, groeze, size; kus, a kiss, küssen, to kiss; müs, mouse, pl. miuse∙, guot, good, güete, goodness. The Umlaut, however, is not always expressed in the spelling of the manuscripts, though it must have existed in the living language. Of the diphthongs, iu has been changed into long ü, but the old spelling is often retained in the MSS. (liute, modern Leute, Old High German liuti, people). As to the consonants, the th sound had nearly disappeared at the beginning of the period, and was lost entirely in its course; sk has passed into the sh sound, written sch as in Modern German. Spelling in general is simpler, and in some points more rigidly phonetic than in Old German. Final voiced consonants, as b, d, g, are generally changed into the corresponding voiceless sounds, as p, t, c (in High German grap, grave, gen. <7rαδes, ρfat, path, gen. pfades, tac, day, gen. dages; in Low German graf graves, pat pades, dach dages). Double consonants are simplified in the same position, as in Old German {fal, ball, gen. banes'). The use of the letter v has greatly increased; in High German it means simply f, and is therefore quite superfluous; in Low German its pronunciation is f at the beginning of words, while in the middle of words it lias the same sound as English v.
The leading dialects of the period are those of Old German, the most noteworthy difference being the accession of the dialects of the kingdom of Saxony {Obersächsisch, or Upper Saxon) and Silesia to the midland dialects, and those of some eastern provinces of Prussia {Niedersächsisch, or Low Saxon) to Low German, in consequence of the German colonization of these countries. Low German, to begin with, has retained the phonetic structure of its consonantal system unaltered, except by the loss of the th sound. The spelling of the vowel system is very imperfect. Umlaut is not expressed in the older manuscripts, except in the case of a and e. A long e corresponds to both High German ei and ie, a long o to High German ou, ou, and uo, üe, the only diphthong generally admitted being ou before a w, as in hrnιwen, to hew. The pronunciation of ë and o must, however, in these cases have been different according to their etymological values, for all the High German sounds mentioned above are distinctly kept asunder in the modern Low German dialects, and ei and u or u are often written for ë and o where they stand for High German ei and uo or üe, but never otherwise. It is most likely, judging from the present state of things, that open e, o were the equivalents for High German ei, ou, ou, while close e, o corresponded to High German ie, uo, üe. The préfixais dropped, as in English and in the Scandinavian languages (thus bort, birth, High German geburt). But the most remarkable fact in the history of Low German sounds is the restoration of nd or ηn for th after a dropped nasal sound (see above, p. 516), as in ander or anner, other, for Old Saxon 6thar, or in muηt, mouth, for Old Saxon muth. This transition cannot be explained by any phonetic laws, but must necessarily be ascribed to High German influence. As to the inflexional system, a similar influence seems to have introduced the High German terminations of the plural of verbs {wi geven, gi gevet, se geven we, you, they give). The Old Saxon ∙* in the nominative plural has been dropped, as in High German. The following lines quoted from the municipal laws of the town of Hamburg (written 1270) maybe taken as a fair specimen of 13th-century Low German :—“Dat nement syn erue verkopen schal, he ne bede id erst synen negesten. So we syn erue vorkopen wil, dat bynnen desser stad vnde bynnen dessem wicbelde belegen is, de schal id beden twen synen negesten vrunden, dar syn erue vp vallen mach, vnde wil it erer nen kopen, so mot he syn erue wol vorkopen deme de erne dar vmme allermest geuen wil.” “That nobody shall sell his inheritance, unless he offer it first to his nearest (relations). Whosoever is willing to sell his inheritance, that is situated within this town and within these precincts, shall offer it to two his nearest friends (relations), to whom his inheritance may fall, and if neither of them is willing to buy it, he must (may) well sell his inheritance to him who is willing to give him most for it.”
The differences of the main dialects of High German are not very striking during the first stage of this period. Alemannian is best characterized by its rigidly keeping its original vowel qualities, some of the modern Swiss dialects showing exactly the same system as about 1200. Swabian is easily discovered by its frequent use of au for a, as in gaun, to go, for gaη. A very important change of vowel qualities is found to have taken place, at a very early time, in the Bavarian dialect. While ie, uo, He were preserved as in Alemannian, ei, ou, ou were changed into oei (or ai), au, eu (or au), and three new diphthongs, ei, ou, eu, sprang up from the long vowels ï, Û, iu (u). In the Midland dialects again, ei, mi, and ï, ü, ü were kept, as in Alemannian (although ü is generally not distinguished from u in writing, as in most Midland manuscripts no special signs for the Umlaut vowels are u≡ed, except e), but ie, uo, üe were contracted to simple ï, ü (u), differing from the old ï, ü, iu only in their open quality. The system of these changes may be illustrated by the following list :— [table]
As to the consonants, Alemannian and Bavarian still clung to the use of ch or kch for ordinary k, as chomen, for komen, to come. P initial for b is especially Bavarian, and was rather more frequent in the 14th and 15th centuries than before; w initial is often expressed by b in Bavarian manuscripts since the 13th century; thus we find paideu, both, for beidiu or peidiu in Alemannian, or beide in the Midland dialects, and beip, wife, or even zbai, two, for ordinary wïp, zwei - k initial for ordinary g went altogether out of use. In Midland orthography the two sounds of Old High German z, viz. ts and ss, were expressed by cz or zc, and z or zz respectively. The following specimens of the language of this period are taken from the Schwabenspiegel, or Swabian Law, for Alemannian (13th century); the Spiegel deutscher Leute, or Mirror of German People, for Bavarian (14th century); and a Midland version of the Sachsenspiegel, or Saxon Law:—
[table]
“To the pope it is set (ordained) that he shall judge at a certain time,(sitting) on a white horse, and the emperor shall hold the stirrup to the pope, that the saddle may not slide off. This means that whatsoever resists the pope, so that he cannot overcome it with spiritual censure, the emperor and other secular judges shall overcome with the proscription, (and the spiritual [court] shall exercise discipline with the ban).”
In the 14th and 15th centuries the development of the dialects rapidly advanced. The greatest changes were those occurring in the vowel system. The new diphthongs ei, ou, eu, for older z, w, iu, which had originated in the southeastern parts of the Bavarian district gradually spread to the north and west; even some of the South Midland dialects, as Bohemian and Silesian, began to partake of this change, while the north Midland dialects and Alemannian remained unaltered. Short root syllables ending in a single consonant began to be lengthened in almost all dialects, as geben, riemeη, for geben, nemen, to give, to take. Unaccented e was dropped in the southern dialects, especially in Bavarian, to the utmost extent possible. Such forms as pschoech, gtorst, hcert, for beschoehe, happened (subj.), getorste, I durst, gehoeret, heard (part.), began to be quite familiar. Even before a final l or nasal sound e was now and then dropped in Bavarian, as in<7eδm for geben, to give, gegnt for g eg ende country, which are exactly the forms still used in our time. Midland and Low German dialects continued to be much more conservative in all these respects. In the consonantal system we have to mention the loss of the 2 sound in all dialects, where it was a simple spirant (notis); although the letter z was still often preserved in spelling, it was frequently confounded with s in the rhymes, a thing which never occurred in the earlier centuries. Alemannian is chiefly distinguished by its constant change of sm, sn, sl, sw, sp, st into schm, schn, seid, schιv, schp, seht, as in schmit, smith, sehne, snow, schlahen, to slay, schwimmen, to swim, geschproehen i spoken, geischtlich, “ghostly,” spiritual. Late Bavarian favours such spellings as chrankch, pekch, for krank, becke. Spelling in general was much neglected, although it was not quite so bad as often in the 1Gth century, when there was a strong tendency towards crowding as many letters into a word as possible.
While the 15th century was thus marked by great divergencies of the spoken dialects, important steps towards gaining a greater uniformity of literary speech were made in the same period by the invention of the art of printing, and by the development of certain Kanzleisprachen, or literary idioms of the imperial and other chanceries. There is no need to explain how the habit of reading books printed in dialects not familiar to the reader must have obliged the learned public of the time to acquire a certain amount of knowledge of dialects in general, and must have made them better aware of the peculiarities of their own idioms than was either necessary or possible at the time when manuscripts written expressly in the local dialects of the readers were the only means of conveying literary information. Besides, writers as well as printers must soon have found it profitable to publish their works in a language readily understood by readers in all parts of the country. The principal work, however, was doue in Germany by the chanceries. Among these the imperial chancery naturally held the most prominent position; and, inasmuch as its public acts were addressed to readers of all dialects existing throughout the empire, it obviously had also the greatest interest in calling into existence a general idiom. In the 14th century no difference between the language of the imperial chancery and the local idioms of the particular emperors was yet visible. The public Acts of Louis of Bavaria (1314-1347) were written in the Bavarian dialect. The succession of Charles IV. (1347-1378) was accompanied by the introduction of the Bohemian dialect into the imperial charters. This dialect, as was natural from its local position, was neither purely Southern nor purely Midland. Ei, ou, eu for ï, ü, iu were frequently adopted from the Southern dialects, but ch for k and p for b were generally rejected; unaccented vowels were preserved to about the same extent as in Midland German. In the reign of Wenceslaus of Bohemia (1378-1400) the same state of things was maintained; but in the charters of Rupert, the elector palatine (1400-1410), we find the Midland dialect of the Palatinate. Sigismund (1410-1437) reintroduced the Bohemian dialect, which by this time had, with the exception of a very short period, prevailed for nearly a hundred years in the imperial chancery. It was therefore but natural that Duke Frederick of Austria should exchange the Austrian dialect of his ducal chancery (which abounded with kch, kh, kg [oxk, and p for δ) for the Bohemian chancery dialect of his predecessors, when he succeeded to the imperial throne (1470-1493). His example was followed by Maximilian (1493-1519), but only so far as public Acts were concerned. In charters destined for local Austrian use as well as in his private correspondence he always kept his vernacular Austrian dialect, showing thus that no change of the spoken idioms had been caused as yet by the introduction of the new artificial language. In the same manner and at the same time the Midland dialect of the electoral chancery of Saxony came to be better adapted for general use by the adoption of the Southern ei, ou, eu for ï, ü, iu, and the abolition of several prominent Midland peculiarities.
Modern High German.— In the preceding paragraph we have tried to give a short sketch of the origin of literary Modern High German; and it is this very idiom of the imperial and Saxon chanceries that Luther made afterwards popular by his translation of the Bible and his numerous other writings. We may quote his own words in confirmation :— .
“Ich habe keine gewisse, sonderliche, eigne spräche im deutschen, sondern brauche der gemeinen deutschen spräche, das mich beide Ober-und Niederländer verstehen mögen. Ich rede nach der sechsischen cantzlei, welcher nachfolgen alle fürsten vnd könige in Deutschland; Alle reichsstedte, fürstenliöfe schreiben nach der sechsischen vnd vnsers fürsten cantzeley. Darumb ists auch die gemeinste deutsche spräche. Kaiser Maximilian vnd churfürst Friderich, hertzog von Sachsen, haben im römischen reiche die deutschen sprachen also in eine gewisse sprach zusammengezogen.” Luther’s language, again, was soon acknowledged by German grammarians, as Sebastian Franck (1531) and Johannes Clajus (1578), and was accordingly imitated, as the best pattern of High German. It is true that in the 1Cth century many writers, especially in Switzerland and Lower Germany, still clung with great pertinacity to their native dialects. But about 1600 Luther’s language was fully established as the only idiom of literary intercourse throughout Germany. The changes the language has undergone since Luther’s time mostly concern the inflexional system. In the strong verbs the differences between the singular and plural and the indicative and subjunctive of the past have been levelled in the course of time: thus, ich fand, zvir fanden, I, we found, subj. ich fände, or ich schnitt, wir schnitten, I, we cut, for ich fand·, wir fanden, ich fände, or ich schneit, ivir schnitten. At present the verb werden, to become, is the only specimen left of the old regular inflexion :— ich ward, wir ιvurden, ich würde’, but even here a new irregular form, ich wurde, has come into use and almost superseded the more archaic ich ward, which is now chiefly confined to poetry. Many other vowel changes have taken place besides, as in ιvebe, wob, gewoben, weave, wove, woven, for Middle High German wibe, reap, geweben, so that the old system of “Ablaut,” or vowel change in the root syllables of the strong verbs has often become quite indistinct. A great number of verbs have passed from the strong inflexion to the weak, and vice versa. The declension of substantives has also been greatly altered. Umlaut is now regularly used as a plural sign with most monosyllabic and many dissyllabic masculine words, as in baum, bäume, or nagel, nagel, for Middle High German bourn, bourne, and nagel, nagele-, originally it was confined to a much smaller number of words (7-stems, as gast, gäste, Middle High German gast, geste). Other masculine words have adopted the plural-er, together with Umlaut of the root syllables, from the neuter declension, as mann, männer, geist, geister, besides frequent exchanges between the strong and weak declensions, which cannot be specified here. The strong and the weak declension of feminine words originally ending in e have been melted together, one form (ending in e or a consonant) being used for all singular, and one (ending in en or η after a consonant) for all plural cases, as <∕cιδe, gaben, zahl, zahlen, zuηge, Zungen, for Middle High German gäbe, gäbe, gen. and dat. gäben-, zαl, zal, gen. and dat. ζα/π; zunge, gen. dat. and acc. Zungen, pl. Zungen throughout. As to phonology, no change of vowel quality is noticeable in literary German. Modern High German still has the Midland sounds 7 (often spelt ie), ü, ü, for Southern ie, uo, üe, as well as the Bavarian diphthongs ei, au, eu (αw), for the older sounds 7, u, iu, the latter not being distinguished either in spelling or in educated pronunciation from the older diphthongs ei, ou, on. We have thus zwei, drei, baum, haus, frende, hauser, lente for Middle High German zwei, dm, boum, hüs, vronde, hiuser, liute. Change of vowel quantity is the most prominent phonetic feature of Modern High German when compared with the earlier stages of the language. All root-syllables ending formerly in a short vowel followed by a simple consonant have now become long, either by lengthening the vowel or by doubling the consonant, thus täg, täge, säl, bote, or gott, gottes, blatt, blätter, for AIiddle High German tag (or täc), täge, sal, bote, got, gδtes, blat, bleter. The rules for dropping unaccented vowels have often been changed accordingly. It must not be forgotten, however, that all these rules are only applicable to the literary idiom; the dialects, and even those of the educated people, often differ very materially from the rules laid down above. There is, indeed, no such thing as a generally recognized standard pronunciation of German, except perhaps on the stage, which no doubt has exercised and still exercises a certain influence on the cur rent opinions as to how one ought to pronounce, but has not been powerful enough to abolish all dialectal peculiarities in the case of even the highest classes. Only a very few general rules can be given. Englishmen will do well to pronounce the vowels as in Italian: ü and 'o are rounded or labialized i and e sounds, formed by pouting the lips while trying to pronounce i or e. Long vowels are always pronounced simple, never as diphthongs (which is frequently the case in English, especially with a and o). Unaccented e is invariably dropped in the terminations el, en, the real pronunciation of such words as handel, bitten, lippen, haben, nehmen being handl, bittn, lippn or liρprn,, häbn or häbm, nem (with a lengthened m). Among the peculiarities of the consonantal system we may mention the sound of ch (in two distinct varieties as in αch and ich), the z, which is a combination of t and s, and the r, which ought to be trilled with the tip of the tongue, but is often pronounced as a uvular or guttural sound. S initial is generally sounded like the English 2, in stage pronunciation, but not usually elsewhere; st and sp initial are never pronounced on the stage like English st or sp, but are always sht, slip, as in stein, spiel, pronounced (to use English spelling) as shtine, shpeel. The English 10 ought to be avoided. The German w sound is more like English v, but somewhat softer; in Midland pronunciation a sound intermediate between English w and v takes its place. German v is simply ∕.
The varieties of the German dialects of the present are too numerous to be described here. It may suffice to state that the old divisions of Low German, Midland, and Upper German dialects are still applicable. Among the first, the Western or Westphalian dialects are distinctly marked by the pronunciation of g initial as a gh, or voiced ch (sometimes even voiceless), and the use of numerous diphthongs, both long and short, instead of simple vowels. The principal subdivisions of Midland German are the Lower Rhenish or Middle Frankish dialect (including the German dialects of Transylvania), South-Western and Eastern or High Frankish, Hessian, Thuringian, Saxon, and Silesian. Alemannian is divided into the three main groupsof Swabian, Alsatian, and Swiss, while Bavarian is constituted by several subdialects spoken in Bavaria and Austria. The study of these dialects has been carried on in Germany for a considerable time, but not always very successfully, especially so far as phonology is concerned; for many observers, while well-trained in all the disciplines of the older school of philology, have been totally ignorant of the simplest laws of phonetics. It is only within the last few years that the value of phonetic studies (although they began in German researches) has been duly recognized in the country of their origin, and dialectology has not hitherto gained much by the more theoretical study of general phonetics. Some excellent beginnings indeed have been made, among which Dr Winteler’s book on his native Swiss dialect holds by far the foremost rank; but it is probable that a long time must yet elapse before Germany can possess so well trained and independent a school of phonetists as that which already exists in England headed by Mr A. Melville Bell and Mr Alexander J. Ellis. Not till then, however, can a real history of the German language be written. (e. si.) PART IV.—LITERATURE.
There is a deep vein of poetry in the Teutonic nature, and it appears to have revealed itself in the earliest ages. According to Tacitus, the Germans of his time had ancient songs relating to the god Tuisco, his son Mannus, and the three forefathers of the Teutonic race. They had also poems in honour of Arminius, the original subject of which was probably the god Irmin, whose pillar Charles the Great overthrew long afterwards in his first campaign against the Saxons. A song called “barditus,” celebrating the greatness of the war-god whom Tacitus calls Hercules, was sung or chanted by the freemen as they advanced to battle. The name “barditus” led some ingenious writers of the 18th century to speculate respecting an order of bards among the ancient Germans; but there is no evidence that any such order existed. “Barditus” meant in the first instance a shield, and was transferred to the song because, while the singing went on, the shield was held to the mouth to make the sound more terrible. It is the opinion of many critics that the stories of “Reynard the Fox” and “Isengrim the Wolf” may be traced back to these remote times. If so, the probability is that they were brought by the Teutons from Asia, and were originally common to the Aryan family. There is every reason to believe that some elements of the Nibelungenlied belong to the prehistoric age. The legend of Siegfried has all the marks of extreme antiquity, and it seems to have had at first a purely mythological character. Of the rhythm in which these primitive conceptions were embodied we have no certain knowledge; but as the most ancient poems which have been preserved are in alliterative verse, it is reasonable to assume that this had grown up long before writing came into use.
I. The Early Middle Age.— When the German tribes began to accept Christianity the clergy every where opposed the native poetry, and strove to replace its rude conceptions by the milder imagée of the gospel. Among the Goths of the 4th century Bishop Ulfilas took the most effectual means of achieving his purpose by preparing a clear, faithful, and simple rendering of the Scriptures,—a translation which has been of inestimable value in the scientific study of the Teutonic languages. No clergyman of like genius arose in Germany itself; but there, too, pagan compositions were steadily discouraged. Charles the Great was the first to check this hostile movement. He showed his love of his native speech, not only by beginning to put together a German grammar, but by issuing orders for a collection of old German poetry. Louis the Pious had little sympathy with the taste of his father, but he could not efface the impression produced by the great emperor. Many of the clergy ceased to dislike that which so mighty a friend of the church had approved, and in some monasteries there were ardent collectors of ancient epic fragments and ballads.
These treasures of Old High and Low German literature are nearly all lost, but from the small portions which have come down to us, and from hints in Latin chronicles, we can at least make out the themes with which many of them dealt. Ermanrick, or Ermanaricus, the famous Gothic king of the 4th century, was the subject of a large number of poetical legends. Siegfried continued to be a great epic hero, and from about the 7th century he appears to have been no longer treated as superhuman. The legend of the overthrow of the Burgundian king, Gundicarius or Günther, by Attila assumed many forms, and was at a later time connected with the story of Siegfried. Around the name of Theodoric the East Goth, as Dieterich, several legends soon grouped themselves; and from about the 9th century he was associated with Attila, with whom in history he had nothing to do. Unfortunately, the fragments which have been preserved—all of which are alliterative—do not treat of these supreme heroes; their subjects are of subordinate importance and interest. The Hildebrandsl·ied, which was written from traditional narratives early in the 9th century, and is in a mixed dialect, introduces us to a follower of Dieterich. Hildebrand, returning from the wars carried on by his lord, is compelled to fight his own son; but we are left in uncertainty whether father or son is conqueror. The Ludwigslied is a ballad of the latter part of the 9th century, written in honour of a victory gained over the Northmen by Louis III., the West-Frankish king. The author was probably a monk who had been a favourite at the court of Charles the Bald. There is also an Old High German ballad celebrating the reconciliation of Otto I. with his brother Henry; and similar ballads are known to have kept up the fame of Duke Ernest of Swabia, who rebelled against Conrad II., and of many other popular heroes. Walter of Aquitania, who flies with his bride fpm the court of Attila, and at Worms fights King Günther and his warriors, is the hero of a Latin poem of the 10th century, written by a mouk of St Gall, whose materials were evidently taken from a more vigorous German original. The Merseburger Gediçhte, two songs of enchantment, were written in the 10th century, but must have come down from a much more remote period. They are chiefly interesting for the light they throw upon the religious beliefs and customs of ancient Germany.
The old ballads, which were intended to be sung as well as recited, were handed down from generation to generation, and necessarily underwent many changes. They were preserved from an early period in the memory of the people by professional minstrels, who were held in considerable honour in the time of Charles the Great, but were afterwards rather tolerated than encouraged by the higher classes. Many of them were blind men, and in their solitary wanderings the ancient stories must often have assumed in their minds new shapes. They usually accompanied their singing with the zither or the harp.
Of the works with which the church sought to counteract pagan influences very few remain. The most important is Heliand, a Low German poem in alliterative verse said to have been written by a Saxon at the request of Louis the Pious. It is a narrative of the life of Christ, and follows closely the Four Gospels, whose separate accounts it attempts to harmonize. The author has considerable force and freedom of expression, and seems to have been so absorbed in the grandeur of his theme as to have deliberately rejected rhetorical ornament. The so-called Krist of Otfrid, a High German poet, who dedicated his work to Louis the German, has the same subject, but is not nearly so effective. It is the first rhymed German poem, and the necessities of rhyme often compel Otfrid to fill out his line with words and phrases which obscure his meaning. His lyrical passages are too didactic to rank as genuine poetry. The fragment of Muspilli, a Bavarian poem of the 9th century on the Last Judgment, indicates power of a much higher order. Its form is alliterative; and reminiscences of paganism are strangely mingled with its Christian ideas.
Duriug the reigns of Charles the Great and Louis the Pious secular learning was zealously cultivated in the monasteries of Germany as well as in those of other portions of the Frankish empire. The school established by Hrabanus Maurus in the famous abbey of Fulda vied with that of Tours, where Hrabanus had been a pupil of Alcuin, in the excellence of its teaching. In the wars with the Northmen, with the Magyars, and with the Slavs under the later Carolingian kings, many of the ecclesiastical institutions were destroyed; but they sprang up again under the protection of Henry I. From the time of his son Otto I. the Germans stood in direct relation with Italy; the marriage of Otto II. with the princess Theophano brought them into connexion with the learning and refinement of the Byzantine court and Gerbert, the friend of Otto III., afterwards Pope Silvester II., introduced them to some of the achievements of Arabian science. These influences quickened the energies of enlightened churchmen, and originated an intellectual movement which to some extent continued during the vigorous reigns of the first two Franconian sovereigns, Conrad II. and Henry III. The chief subject of study was the scholastic philosophy, to which, however, in its earlier stages, Germany made no supremely important contribution. The Neo-Platonic tendencies of Scotus Erigena were opposed by Hrabanus Maurus, who remained loyal to Aristotle and Boetius; and his example was generally followed, not only by his successors in Fulda, but by the members of all other German schools. The school of St Gall was exceptionally active, and one of the monks, Notker Labeo, who died in 1022, wrote some original philosophical books, and translated into German the De Consolatione of Boetius and two of Aristotle’s works. In pure literature very little was done; but there are several well-written Latin histories belonging to the 11th century. The best thought of the age was manifested in its Romanesque architecture, and in the then subordinate arts of painting, sculpture, and music.
II. The Age of Chivalry.— The reign of Henry IV., during which the struggle between the empire and the papacy began, had a disastrous effect on the national culture; and the evil was not remedied under the disturbed rule of his two immediate successors. But under the Hohenstaufen dynasty, during the period of Middle High German, the country passed through one of the greatest epochs of its literature. The more learned of the clergy interested themselves deeply in the development of scholasticism through the nominalists and the realists; and in the 13th century Albertus Magnus, a native of Swabia, produced the first systematic exposition of Aristotle, in the full light of Arabian research. It was, however, in poetry that Germany achieved the highest distinction; and her most important poets were members of the knightly class, which at this time rose to its utmost power and fame. There were many reasons why the members of this class became sensitive to the higher influences of the imagination. In the first place, they had the elevating consciousness of a life shared with a vast community which set before itself the loftiest aims. Historians sometimes take a malicious pleasure in contrasting the mean performance of many knights with their high vows; but these vows at any rate introduced into the life of rough nobles an ideal element, and inclined them to take interest in the gentler and nobler aspects of existence. In the Italian wars of Frederick Barbarossa the German knights saw more than they had ever before done of Southern civilization, and their minds were continually stimulated by the varying fortunes of their adventurous emperor. Of still greater importance was the influence of the crusades, in which the Germans first took an active part under Frederick’s predecessor, Conrad III. The crusaders had a remote and unselfish aim, connected with all that was most sacred and most tender in their religious ideas; and this alone would have created a sentiment favourable to poetic aspiration. But, besides this, the far-off Eastern lands, with their strange peoples and mystical associations, awoke dreams which could not have other than harmonious utterance, and on the return of the warriors they stirred the fancy of their friends with reports of a new and greater world. While the crusades lasted,the knights were forced into intimate acquaintance with the clergy, whose refined culture inevitably to some extent softened their rudeness; they also formed friendships with representatives of French chivalry. In France the works of the troubadours and the trouvères formed one of the most prominent elements of the national life, and the French nobles did not forget in Palestine the songs and romances of their home. The better minds in the German armies caught the inspiration, and longed to distinguish themselves by like achievements. And their desire was deepened when, by the acquisition of the Free County of Burgundy, Frederick Barbarossa opened a new pathway by which intellectual influences might pass from the western to the eastern bank of the Rhine.
The poetic impulse which thus entered Germany affected a wide circle; the highest princes as well as the humblest knights felt its power. Even the emperor Henry VI. himself is said to have been moved by the prevailing feeling, and to have composed verses. At the imperial and princely courts poets were encouraged to give expression to their genius; and the ladies whose beauty and virtues they delighted to praise stimulated their endeavours by marked appreciation. Thus the national imagination found in the whole temper of the age an atmosphere well adapted to the blooming of its first spring-time.
The most characteristic outcome of this active era is the series of poetical romances produced in the 12th and 13th centuries. The German poets might have found magnificent material in their old, native legends; but for the most part they preferred subjects which had already been artistically wrought by the trouvères, whose methods and style they also closely imitated. Among the themes they selected may be mentioned the legends of Alexander the Great, of Charles the Great and his paladins, of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, with the allied legend of the Holy Grail. The fortunes of Tristram and Iseult also exercised a powerful charm over many minds. These and all other chosen subjects were treated wholly in the spirit of chivalry. The poets of the Middle Age had no idea of being true to the characteristics of a particular epoch; their own time was the only one they attempted to understand. Ancient heroes became in their hands mediaeval knights; men who had died long before the rise of Christianity were transformed into devoted servants of the Church. And in every romance the supreme aim was to present an idealized picture of the virtues of knighthood.
One of those who prepared the way for the chief romancewriters was Conrad, a priest in the service of Henry the Proud, who, before 1139, composed the Rolaηdslied, setting forth, in imitation of the French Chanson de Poland, the overthrow of Roland, the favourite paladin of Charles the Great, in the pass of Roncesvalles. He was followed by another priest, Lamprecht, who, also working upon a French original, relates in t ∖∖ Q Alexaηderlied the deeds of the Macedonian hero. Greater than either of these was Heinrich von Veldeke, the first of the poets who may claim to rank as German trouvères. His great work was i ∖ iQHneit, written beween 1175 and 1190. It is not only in armour and in dress that Virgil’s characters are here changed; in thought and feeling they are recreated. The language of the poem is so carefully chosen, and the incidents are narrated with so much spirit, that it is still possible to understand the immense popularity it once enjoyed. Hartmann von Aue, in Der Arme Heinrich and other poems, selected themes that are extremely repulsive to modern feeling; but he was endowed with genuinely plastic force, and interests us by touching certain mystical -aspects of mediaeval sentiment. The master in whom these aspects were most fully represented was Wolfram von Eschenbach, a member of a noble family of Franconia, who wa3 born during the reign of Frederick Barbarossa and died during that of his grandson, Frederick II. He was one of a group of poets who established themselves at the Wartburg, the court of the brilliant landgrave Hermann of Thuringia; and his chief poem, Parzival, was composed there towards the end of the 12th century. Germany did not produce during the Middle Ages a more truly poetic mind, and it is curious to observe how exactly he anticipated some of the qualities for which she long afterwards became famous. He has all the dreaminess, the sentiment, the passion for the ideal, which are, or rather at one time were, her most attractive characteristics. The hero, trained by his mother amid circumstances of idyllic simplicity, suddenly passes into a world of movement and adventure, and he is brought by accident to the gorgeous palace of the Holy Grail, of whose kingdom he ultimately becomes lord. The object of the poem is evidently to depict the strivings of a restless but noble spirit, dissatisfied with passing pleasure, having always before it a high and spotless aim. It is difficult for modern readers to detect the spiritual significance of many of the scenes; the poet seems to escape from us into a far-off region, whence his words reach us rather as dim echoes than as clear, ringing sounds. And some of the descriptions are in themselves tedious and superfluous, while advance from one stage of the tale to another apparently proceeds according to the arbitrary whim of the moment. Nevertheless, the character of Parzival is a true conception of genius, and enables us to understand, better than any other imaginative creation of mediaeval Germany, that discontent with life as it is, that sense of being haunted by visions of spiritual loveliness, which, throughout the Middle Ages, existed side by side with unrestrained delight in the outward world.
A complete, almost a dramatic, contrast to Wolfram von Eschenbach is found in Gottfried of Strasburg, the greatest of his literary contemporaries. These two men are representatives of a distinction which incessantly recurs,—that between the poet who fashions spirits of a finer mould than those we actually know, and the poet who contents himself with penetrating into the innermost recesses of existing character. Gottfried’s theme is Tristram and Iseult; and the charming tale, which unfortunately he did not live to carry to the end, was perhaps never more beautifully told. There are no mystic longings in the men and women he presents tous: they love the earth and the sky, with their gorgeous colours, graceful forms, and happy sounds; they care not to inquire what may lie behind these, or whether in the scheme of things there is a place for moral law. Few poets have set forth so powerfully the×fascination of youthful passion. In his glowing pictures we find no shadowy figures like those of Wolfram, with step so light that they appear to be the figures of a dream; his images are clear, sharply cut, like those of the world from which they are taken. And although psychological analysis was unknown to him, the actions of his characters display keen insight into the secrets of human hearts when entangled in the most confused meshes.
Mediaeval romance bore its richest fruit in the works of these two great poets; and most of their successors imitated one or other of them. Those who followed in Gottfried’s steps came nearest to a happy result, for Wolfram was one of those lonely and daring spirits in whose remote path it is given to few to tread without stumbling. The best known of Gottfried’s imitators was Conrad von Würzburg, who wrote on the Trojan war and many other subjects, and 13 considered one of the most artistic of mediaeval writers. Towards the end of the 13th century the movement showed signs of exhaustion, and romances began to make way for rough popular tales and rhymed chronicles.
Fortunately the poets of the age of chivalry did not all occupy themselves with the subjects of French romances. A few, whose names we do not know, turned towards the rich material in the metrical legends of their native land. Of these poets the most important was he who collected and put into shape the ancient ballads which make up the Nibelungenlied. How far he modified them we cannot tell. In the form in which we possess them, they probably owe something of their force to his genius; but he needed rather to arrange and to curtail than to invent, and, although a genuine poet, he was not at all times competent for his task. The work includes the legends of Siegfried, of Gundicarius, or Günther, king of Burgundy, of Dieterich, and of Attila; and the motives which bind them into a whole are the love and revenge of Kriemhild, the sister of Günther and Siegfried’s wife. She excites the envy of Brunhild, the Burgundian queen, whose friend, Hagen, one of Günther’s followers, discovers the vulnerable point in Siegfried’s enchanted body, treacherously slays him, and buries in the Rhine the treasure he has long before conquered from the race of the Nibelungen. There is then a pause of thirteen years, after which Kriemhild, the better to effect her fatal purpose, marries Attila, king of the Huns. Thirteen years having again passed, her thirst for vengeance is satiated by the slaying of the whole Burgundian court. The Germans justly regard this great epic as one of the most precious gems of their literature. It has little of the grace of courtly poetry; its characters are without subtlety or refinement; we are throughout in the presence of vast elemental forces. But these forces are rendered with extraordinary vividness of imagination, and with a profound feeling for what is sublime and awful in human destiny. The narrative begins with epic calmness, but swells into a torrent, and dashes vehemently forward, when the injured queen makes a fearful return for her wrongs, and is herself swept away by the tragic powers she has called to her service. In the management of the story there are occasional traces of mediaevalism; but its spirit is that of a more primitive time, when the German tribes were breaking into the Roman empire, when passions were untamed by Christian influence, and when the necessities of a wandering and aggressive life knit closely the bonds that united the chief to his followers. Deliberate villany hardly appears in the poem; the most savage actions spring either from the unrestricted play of natural feeling, or from unquestioning fidelity to an acknowledged superior. Here and there we come upon touches which indicate that the poet who preserved the ancient legends was not incapable of appreciating finer effects than those at which he generally aims. The sketch of the hospitable and chivalrous Rüdiger, who receives the Burgundians on their way to the court of Attila, and afterwards dies while unwillingly fighting them in obedience to his queen’s command, is not surpassed in the most artistic of the mediaeval romances.
Gudrun is another epic in which a poet of this period gave form to several old legends. They had for centuries been current along the coasts of Friesland and Scandinavia, and the society they represent is essentially the same as that of the Nibelungenlied, — a society in which the men are rude, warlike, and loyal, the women independent and faithful. Although full of serious episodes, Gudrun is as happy in its ending as the greater poem is tragic; and we feel throughout that the beautiful Princess Gudrun of Seeland, whom the Northmen have carried from her home, and on whom the cruel Queen Gerlind heaps indignities, will at last be restored to King Herwig, her brave and passionate lover. The characters stand out clearly in their rough vigour; and several happy strokes call up a vision of the bleak coasts and changeful northern sea which are the scenes of their adventures.
In the 15th century a German writer brought together in a single volume which he called the Heldenbuch — the “Book of Heroes”—a number of old legendary tales that must have been frequently on the lips of the people and of the wandering minstrels, while the knightly poets were singing of Tristram or of Arthur. This work, which was partly written by Kaspar von der Rhön, will not compare in imaginative force with its more famous rivals. The most powerful of the stories is probably the “Grosser Rosengarten,” in which a monk, Ilsan, displays a very unclerical, but truly Teutonic, passion for war.
The age of chivalry was remarkable not only for its romances and epics but for its lyrics. All the leading writers of the time exercised themselves in lyrical poetry, and it was laboriously cultivated by multitudes who did not feel equal to the task of a prolonged effort. Among those who gained more or less distinction may be named Heinrich von Morungen, Reinmar der Alte, and Gottfried von Neifen. The poets of this class were known as Minnesänger, because their favourite theme was Minne or love. They began by imitating the troubadours, whose metres they often reproduced when not penetrated by the emotion which originally found in these forms a genuine expression. At a later stage it was considered a point of honour for each poet to invent a stanza of his own, whether or not those already existing were appropriate to his feeling. Thus many of the minne songs produce an impression of unreality and coldness, seeming at best to be but clever pieces of handiwork. But when the utmost deduction has been made, it is surprising how much of what wa3 achieved by these ardent writers still appeals to us. The best among them strike notes which respond in every age to a master’s touch; and they do it with a fine sense of beauty, a trained instinct for the appropriateness of words, and an evident delight both in simple and in subtle melody.
Perhaps no group of writers has ever had a deeper undertone of sadness than is to be detected in the greatest of the minnesänger. They had a vivid consciousness of the evanescence of human pleasure, an abiding feeling that corruption lurks behind the gayest forms and brightest colours. But they caught with proportional eagerness the passing rapture, letting no drop escape from the cup that would soon fall from their grasp. This intensity of feeling is reproduced in their lays, yet it was purified and generalized as it passed from the fleeting reality to the permanent realm of art. Their treatment of love, although sometimes, according to modern ideas, extravagant and fantastic, often displays genuine elevation of sentiment. They sing also in impassioned strains the loyalty of the vassal to his lord, the devotion of the Christian to his church. If they do not exhibit the soaring spiritual ambition of Wolfram’s Parzival, they have a kind of pathetic memory of a lost paradise, a vague longing, by some distant difficult service, in battle with the infidel, to attain to a world in which the discords of the present life may be forgotten or harmonized. And behind all their images is the background of nature, whose loveliness they do not the less appreciate because they refrain from elaborately describing it. To the dwellers in dreary towers winter had often a cheerless and melancholy aspect; but this made all the more enchanting the new life of spring. It is in hailing the returning warmth and colour of the young season that the minnesänger attain their happiest triumphs.
Of all the minnesänger the first place belongs without question to Walther von der Vogelweide, probably of Tyrol, whom Gottfried of Strasburg praises as heartily as he slyly depreciates Wolfram von Eschenbach. Walther lived some time at the Wartburg, and wa3 the friend of King Philip and Frederick II; he died on a little estate which the latter gave him in fief. Other Minnesänger lavished praise on generous princes; Walther was of a more manly character, and seems always to have maintained an independent bearing. Besides the usual themes of the lyrical poetry of his time, he wrote with enthusiasm of his native land; he also frequently alludes to the strife between the spiritual and secular powers, and sternly rebukes the ambition of the papacy. Beyond all his rivals he gives us the impression of writing with ease and delight. The structure of his stanzas does not hamper the movement of his feeling; it appears to provide the conditions of perfect freedom. Such a lyric as his Unter der Linden an der Heide, with its musical refrain Tandaradei, although a masterpiece of art, is exquisite in its childlike simplicity; it has the unaffected grace of a flower, the spontaneity of a bird’s song.
As the expression of all that was fantastic and ridiculous in the age of chivalry, must be mentioned the Frauendienst of Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a work which was written about the middle of the 13th century, and had a certain popularity in its time. It is an autobiography, with a number of lyrics interwoven to give variety and animation to the narrative. The solemn gravity with which the author relates the amazing tasks imposed upou him by his mistress shows how easily the worship of womanhood degenerated into almost incredible childishness. Ulrich is sometimes compared to Don Quixote, but this is to do extreme injustice to Cervantes’s hero. Amid all his illusions the fictitious knight maintains a certain pathetic dignity; the knight of reality passes from absurdity to absurdity without a touch of idealism to redeem his folly. And his lyrics are the tasteless manufacture of a thoroughly prosaic spirit.
Several of the minnesänger, Walther von der Vogelweide especially, display at times a strongly didactic tendency. From the beginning of the period this tendency was developed by writers who took little interest in poetry for its own sake, and it became more and more prominent as the purely lyrical impulse passed away. The didactic poet, however significant his labours may be to his contemporaries, has necessarily the stamp of commonplace for posterity; and the gnomic writers of the 13th century form no exception to this rule. But several of them have at least the interest that attaches to sincerity and earnestness. There is genuine enthusiasm for pure morality in the Welsche Gast of Thomasin Zerklar; and the Bescheidenheit of Freidank expresses so high a conception of duty, and expresses it so well, that the work was ascribed to Walther himself. Reinmar von Zweter and Heinrich Frauenlob came a little later, and they were followed by Hugo von Trimberg, whose Renner sets forth unimpeachable lessons in homely and satirical verses. A higher tone is perceptible in Der Winsbecke, a collection of sayings in which we find an echo of the reverence for noble women that marked the epoch at its dawn. Among didactic writings must be classed the well known Der Krieg auf der Wartburg (“The Contest at the Wartburg”). It includes the verses supposed to have been sung at a tournament of poets attended by Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Walther von der Vogelweide, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
As Latin continued to be the speech of scholars, and the passion for metrical expression pervaded the higher classes, there was not much scope for the growth of prose. Nevertheless, it is in this age that we find the first serious attempts to secure for German prose a place in the national literature. The Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel, two great collections of local laws, although of , a scientific character, and mainly interesting because of their social importance, had considerable influence in encouraging the respect of the Germans for their own language. The preachers, however, were the principal founders of prose style. Preaching became about the middle of the 13th century an agency of great power in the life of Germany. A number of the clergy, dissatisfied with the technicalities of scholasticism, and with the mere forms under which spiritual aspiration was often crushed, strove to attain to a fresh vision of religious truth, and to kindle their own enthusiasm in the minds of others. Of this generous band the most popular was Brother Berthold, a Franciscan monk, a man of a noble and commanding temper, and an orator of the highest rank. Love for the poor was his dominant motive, and he sometimes expressed it in language a modern socialist might envy. Having something of the imaginative glow of the minnesänger, he gave such colour to his abstract teaching as made it at once intelligible and attractive. Of a less poetical nature than Berthold, Master Eckhart, the next early master of religious prose, was more deeply philosophical. Although familiar with the scholastic systems, he broke away from their method, and became the founder of the mystical school which was one of the most potent factors in preparing the way for the Reformation. Eckhart’s reasonings are sometimes hard to follow, but he is not a confused thinker; his obscurity arises rather from the nature of his themes than from his mode of handling them. He occasionally touches profound depths in the spiritual nature of man, and it is refreshing to pass from the formal hairsplitting of the scholastic philosophers to the large conceptions of a mind which obeys its own laws and is evidently in direct contact with the problems it seeks to solve.
III. The Later Middle Age.— After the fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty the age of chivalry in Germany virtually came to an end. The breaking up of the old duchies set free a large number of petty nobles from their allegiance to mediate lords; and as there was no longer a strong central authority, either to hold them in check or to provide them with such outlets for their energy as they had found in the crusades and in the imperial expeditions into Italy, nearly the whole class sank from the high level to which it had temporarily risen. Many knights became mere robbers, and thought themselves honourably employed in taking part in the innumerable little wars which shattered the prosperity of the nation. Men of this kind were not very likely to inherit the free and poetic spirit of Walther von der Vogelweide. In the course of the 14th and loth centuries attempts were still made by Wolkensteiu, Muskatblüt, and other writers to imitate his style; but in their hands the lyre of the minnesänger gave forth only feeble or discordant notes. For a long time the princes were no more inclined to literature than the npbles; they were too much occupied with mutual jealousies, and with incessant attempts to shake themselves free of the crown, to give heed to anything so removed from practical interests as poetry.
It so happened that during this period the cities rose to a position of higher importance than they had ever before occupied. There was a while when it even seemed possible that by their leagues, and by alliance with those emperors who had insight enough to recognize their strength, they might become the preponderating element in the state. Driven from the castles of the princes and the towers of the nobles, literature took refuge in these young and growing centres of a vigorous life. Not one or two here and there, but multitudes of honest citizens, became possessed by the desire to distinguish themselves in the arts in which they had been so much surpassed by the nobles of a previous generation. Unfortunately, they had no literary training; they were not familiar with any great models; few of them had leisure for the cultivation of style; and the character of their daily employments was not such as to kindle thoughts that demand poetic utterance. At that time every trade had its guild; and they now formed guilds of poetry, the task of whose members was in intervals of leisure to produce songs according to a body of strict rules, as in hours of business they produced shoes or loaves. The rules were called the “Tabulatur,” and the rauk of each member was determined by his skill in applying them. The lowest stage was that of a man who had simply been received into the guild; the highest, that of a master, who had invented a new melody. Between these were the scholar, the friend of the school, the singer, and the poet. Literature produced under such conditions could not have much vitality. It amused the versifiers, and developed a certain keenness in the detection of outward faults; but the spirit of poetry was wanting, and there is hardly a “meistersänger” whose name is worthy of being remembered.
Much more important than these tedious manufacturers of verse were the unknown authors of the earliest attempts at dramatic composition. In the 10th century Hroswitha, the abbess of Gandersheim, wrote Latin imitations of Terence; but they were without influence on the progress of culture. The real beginnings of the modern drama were the crude representations of scriptural subjects with which the clergy strove to replace certain pagan festivals. These representations gradually passed into the “Mysteries” or “Miracle Plays,” in which there was a rough endeavour to dramatize the events celebrated at Easter and other sacred seasons. They were acted at first in churches, but afterwards in open courts and market places; and for many hours, sometimes day after day, they were listened to by enormous audiences. The fragment of a Swiss “Mystery” of the 13th century has survived; but the earliest that has come down to us in a complete form is a play of the first half of the 14th century, treating of the parable of the ten virgins. Like those of France and England, these mediaeval German dramas display little imagination; and they are often astonishingly grotesque in their handling of the most awful themes. Along with them grew up what w ere known as “Shrove Tuesday Plays,” dialogues setting forth some scene of noisy fun, such as a quarrel between a husband and wife, with a few wise saws interspersed. They were declaimed without much ceremony in the public room of an inn, or before the door of a prominent citizen, and gave ample occasion for impromptu wit. Nuremberg seems to have been particularly fond of “Shrove Tuesday Plays,” for one of its poets, Hans Rosenblüt, who flourished about the middle of the 15th century, was the most prolific author of them. A little later he was extensively imitated by Hans Folz, a Nuremberg barber and meistersänger.
By far the most interesting writers of the 14th century were the mystics, who continued the movement started by Eckhart. Johannes Tauler of Strasburg (1300-61) had not the originality and force of his predecessor, but the ultimate mysteries of the world had an intense fascination for him, and his tender and sensitive spirit opened itself to lights which find no way of entrance into more robust and logical intellects. He did not in the main pass beyond the speculations of Eckhart, but he added grace and finish to their expression, and made them a greater popular power than they could have become through the master’s writings. Heinrich Suso, of Constance (1300-65), who has been called “the minnesangei ’ of the love of God,” made the doctrines of Eckhart an occasion for the outpourings of a full and sometimes extravagant fancy. Eckhart’s teaching was also put into shape by an unknown author, whose work was afterwards published by Luther under the title Eyn deutsch Theologia. To all these writers the phenomenal world is in its nature evil, but it is also unreal; the only reality they recognize is a world outside the limits of space and time, in union with which man rises to his true life. They are chiefly of importance in the history of speculative thought, but even from the point of view of literature they were of high service in the development of a rich and vigorous prose.
A plain narrative prose style was cultivated in the chronicles which began at this time to be written in different parts of Germany. The Limburg Chronicle written between 1336 and 1398, the Alsace Chronicle about 1386, and the Thuringian Chronicle, by Rothe, a monk of Eisenach, about 1430, have all considerable historical value; and the fact that they are in German, not like previous chronicles in Latin, proves the rising respect among the people for their native speech.
During the latter part of the 15th century there was in Germany, as in the other leading European nations, a great revival of intellectual life. And it was due to the same causes as prevailed elsewhere,—especially the rediscovery of Greek literature and the invention of printing. The movement was naturally most powerfully felt in the universities. The first of these institutions had been founded early in the 14th century by Charles IV. in Prague. Soon afterwards others were established in Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, and Erfurt; and in the 15th century universities were set up also in Rostock, Greifswald, Tübingen, Leipsic, and elsewhere. For a long time lav; and divinity were almost the only subjects studied; but when the Renaissance passed from Italy into Germany, university teaching became the instrument of a freer and larger culture. Scholastic philosophy fell into disrepute; the most active minds occupied themselves only with the intellectual treasures of the ancient world. The men devoted to the new studies were called “Humanists,” and they carried on continual warfare with the more ignorant and intolerant of the clergy. Unfortunately they knew nothing of the value of their own language; they wrote, as the scholastic philosophers had done, solely in Latin, and they gave but slight and contemptuous attention to the movements of popular literature.
Yet the popular literature of their time was quite worthy of study, for the stir of new life had affected not only scholars but all classes of society, citizens and even peasants included. It is surprising how many books found their way to the public between 1450 and the outbreak of the Reformation; every one seemed anxious that the newly discovered process by which writers could appeal to so wide an audience should be turned to the utmost possible advantage. Of this great mass of literature a comparatively small proportion was created in obedience to the free impulses of the intellect. The problems of the time were mainly social and practical; men were less moved by ideal interests than by questions as to the tyranny of the princes, the greed and sensuality of the clergy, the worldliness of the papacy, the powerlessness of the crown to enforce peace and order. Multitudes of little tales in prose and verse appeared, in which the princes, the nobles, the clergy, and sometimes rich citizens, were held up to ridicule. The “Shrove Tuesday Plays,” which now became extremely popular, also expressed the general discontent; and there were even “Miracle Plays” whose object was to reveal the wrongs of the people. In one of them, the leading character of which was Joanna, the mythical female pope, a clerical author did not hesitate to pour contempt on the Roman see itself.
By far the greatest of these satirical writings was the epic narrative, Revneke Fios. It has beeu already stated that the stories of “Reynard the Fox” and “Isengrim the Wolf” probably belong to prehistoric ages. They became current, through the Franks, in Lorraine and France; and from the 11th to the 15th century they formed the subject of many works in Latin, French, and German. The epic to which allusion is now made appeared in 1498, and was probably by Hermann Barkhusen, a printer of Rostock. It is in Low German, and its materials were obtained from a prose version of the tale which had appeared some years before in Holland, and of which Caxton printed an English translation. Originally, the story had no satirical significance; it was a simple expression of interest in what may be called the social life of wild animals. In the hands of the author of this Low German poem it becomes an instrument of satire on some enduring tendencies of human nature. He does not lash himself into fury at the vices he chastises; he laughs at while he exposes them. His humour is broad and frank, and he did more than any one else to make Reynard the type of the resource and cunning which overmaster not only brute force but even truth and justice. There are several renderings of the poem into High German, the most important being the well-known work of Goethe in hexameters.
Another popular satirical work was the Narrenschif (“Ship of Fools”) of Sebastian Brandt, published in Basel in 1494. It is an allegorical poem of more than a hundred sections, in which the vices are satirized as fools. This work passed through many editions, and was rendered into more than one Low German dialect, and into Latin, French, and English; it was even made the subject of a series of sermons by Geiler, of Kaisersberg, a well-known preacher of the day, who had himself some satirical talent. Brandt was personally of a mild and unassuming character, and the fact that he became a satirist in spite of himself is a striking proof of the confusion which had fallen upon both church and state. Now that the occasion of his book has passed away, it is difficult to realize that it once enjoyed almost unprecedented popularity. We cannot but feel that the writer was an honest man; but his allegories are without force or charm, and his moral lessons have been the commonplaces of every civilized society. A satirist of a bolder type was Thomas Murner, who, although he lived far into the age of the Reformation, belongs in spirit altogether to the preceding period. He was a preacher, and both in sermons and in secular writings attacked without mercy the classes who were the butts of his fellow-satirists. After the beginning of the Reformation he included Luther among the objects of his comprehensive dislikes. His laughter was loud and harsh, and can hardly have been favourable to any small buddings of charity that may have revealed themselves among the antagonisms of his generation.
One of the favourite books of this time was Tyll Eulenspiegel. It was published in 1519, and the author (probably Murner) seems to have included in it many anecdotes already well known. According to the preface, Tyll was a Brunswick peasant of the 14th century, who went about the country perpetrating practical jokes. The force of his humour mainly consists in taking every word addressed to him in its most literal sense, and in giving it applications altogether different from those intended by the speaker. There are readers who still find amusement in his rough pleasantries.
During the better part of this stirring period Maximilian I. was emperor, and he interested himself a good deal in the current literature. As in politics, however, so in poetry, his sympathies were altogether with an earlier age; and he attempted to revive the taste for mediaeval romance. From a sketch said to have been prepared by him, Melchior Pfinzig celebrated iu Theuerdanh the emperor’s marriage with Princess Mary of Burgundy. The work was splendidly printed, and attracted much notice; but romantic poetry, once so fascinating, produces in its pages the effect of an elderly coquette who, refusing to believe in the ravages of years, tricks herself out in the gay adornments of youth. An earlier book, the Weiss Kunig, an autobiography of Maximilian, written by his direction in prose by his secretary Treizsauerwein, has the excellence neither of a chrouicle nor of a romance; it is for the most part the fantastic work of a mind which misunderstood its epoch and its own powers.
Behind the strife aud noise of contending sections there was slowly growing up an admirable intellectual product of Germany,—its popular poetry. One of the earliest writers who struck the note of the popular poets was Veit Weber, a Swiss who fought with his countrymen against Charles the Bold, and who celebrated in vigorous verses the battles of Granson, Murten, and Nancy. From this time the German people had always a living poetry of their own, created by unknown authors, but caught up by the masses, passed on from village to village till it was everywhere known, and handed down by each generation to its successors. This popular poetry ultimately reflected every aspect of daily life among the humbler classes; each section among them had its appropriate lyrics, and there were songs of youth, of age, and of middle life. There is no elaboration in these offshoots of the popular fancy, but many of them have an artless beauty which touches the fountains of smiles and tears, and which had an irresistible fascination for the poets of the greatest period of German literature.
IV. The Century of the Reformation.— It is possible that if there had been no Reformation the Renaissance would have revealed itself in Germany in a great literary movement, as in France and England, or in a great artistic movement, as in Italy. The conditions of both movements were present in the labours of the humanists on the one hand, and of' the Holbeins, Albert Dürer, and Lucas Cranach on the other. But the questions of the Reformation were too profound and agitating for the mind of the nation to turn seriously to any task save that which they imposed. Thus it happened that the young shoots of the Renaissance withered almost before they were in leaf. It was settled that Germany must wait until a much later time for the full exercise of her highest energies.
In literature not less than in religion Luther (1483-1546) was the commanding spirit of the age; but he was so rather by accident than by choice. For form for its own sake he cared little; he studied it solely that he might the better produce the moral effect at which he aimed. It is hardly possible for any one to sympathize now with the violence and the dogmatism of his tracts, addresses, and sermons; but they had the high merit of addressing the nation in a language it could understand. They are always clear, simple, warm with the glow of a passionate nature; and amid their noise and fury an attentive ear will sometimes catch the still small voice of a spirit touched to finer issues than mere party warfare. “My husk may be hard,” he him3elf said, “but the kernel is soft and sweet.” We do extreme injustice to Luther if we do not recognize in him a strongly poetic element,—an element which had free play only in the best of his private letters, and in his still popular hymns. By the highest of his literary achievements, his translation of the Bible, he made a truly splendid contribution to the spiritual life of his people. No body of literature has been so fortunate in its translators as the Scriptures; and Luther’s rendering ranks with the best. Its absolute simplicity brings it to the level of a child’s understanding; its strength and grace give it an enduring place as a work of art. Germany instantly felt its charm; and for three centuries it has been to innumerable millions the supreme consoler and sanctifier, the power associated with their tenderest, most pathetic memories, the one link which has connected sordid lives with noble and sublime ideas. And for the first time it gave the nation a literary language. Up to this stage every author had written in the dialect with which he was himself familiar; henceforth for the men of Swabia, of Bavaria, of Saxony, and of all other districts there was a common speech, which the writers of each state could use without any sense of inferiority to those of another. It is thus to Luther that the Germans owe the most essential of all the conditions of a truly national life and literature.
The writer who deserves to stand next to Luther is Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523). An accomplished humanist, he effectively attacked the enemies of the new culture in the Epistoloe Obscurorum Virorum t of which he was one of the chief writers. This was before the special work of Luther began; and at a still earlier period he had assailed in a series of fine Latin orations the tyranny of Duke Ulrich of Würtemberg, who was accused of murdering a member of Hutten’s family. He had little real sympathy with Luther’s religious aims; but he threw himself heartily into a movement by which it seemed possible to purge the state of the spiritual and secular ills which were in deadly antagonism to the progressive energy of humanism. His German writings are mainly short satirical poems and prose dialogues and addresses. Their style is direct, bold, and trenchant; but they are now in teresting mainly because of the spirit of freedom which breathes through them, the lofty political ideals of the writer, and his generous ardour for the popular welfare.
A far more voluminous author than Hutten or Luther was Hans Sachs, meistersänger of Nuremberg (1494- 1576). He was, indeed, one of the most prolific of German writers, having composed, according to his own calculation, more than 6000 poems. Although extremely popular in his own time, Sachs was almost forgotten after his death. His memory was revived by Wieland and Goethe, and he is now universally admitted to have been the chief German poet of the 16th century. Every species of verse then known he freely cultivated, and there is no important element of his age which is not touched in one or other of his works. He had little of the culture of the schools, and many of his verses are excessively rude. But Hans had considerable force of imagination, sly humour, and, in his happiest moments, a true feeling for melody. His best works are his “Shrove Tuesday Plays.” It is true he makes hardly more attempt than Rosenblüt to develop a dramatic action, but his characters have life, and in many individual scenes are artistically grouped. His didactic dialogues and satirical tales present a remarkably vivid picture of the ideas, controversies, and moral sentiments of his generation; and some of his lyrics still live in the memory of the nation. The song in which he hailed the “Wittenberg Nightingale” gave fine utterance to the reverence of the Lutherans for their chief, and in his hymn, Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz? he so happily met the spiritual need of the day that it was soon translated into eight languages, including English, French, and Greek.
If Ilans Sachs was the most industrious poet of the century, Johann Fischart was beyond all comparison its greatest satirist. There was a distinctly Rabelaisian touch in this restless, bizarre, and effusive spirit,—a man of upright and manly character, keenly alive to the evils of his time, and continually opening fire at new points on his enemies. He was an enthusiast for the Reformation, and did it more lasting service among the middle class than half the theologians. His chief work was an adaptation of Rabelais’s Gargantua, which he rendered with an insight into its purpose, and a fulness of sympathy with its methods, unsurpassed even by Urquhart. In the poem, Das Glückhaft Schiff, he gives evidence of a faculty for stirring narrative verse, but his prose is richer, fuller, and more free. Considering how imperfectly prose style was then developed, he had an astonishing command over the resources of the language. He delighted in new and complicated word-formations, and by means of them often succeeded, while dealing with his main theme, in casting side lights on its subordinate branches. Even he, penetrating and enlightened as he was, could not rise so far above his age as to condemn the burning of witches; but hardly another popular folly escaped his glance. From the evil practices of hypocritical priests to the impudence of astrologers and weather prophets every abuse found in him a watchful critic; and nothing of the kind could be more admirable than the skill with which he excites contempt while professing to write in a spirit of respect and credulity. The secret of his poweι , lay also partly in his profound humanity, for this scathing satirist was at heart thoroughly genial; his mockery had its root in an abiding faith injustice.
Several other cultivators of prose style deserve mention. Albert Durer, whose paintings, drawings, and engravings gave to the age of transition between mediaevalism and the modern world its most perfect artistic expression, wrote several scientific treatises, one of which, on the proportions of the human body, is a masterpiece of calm, clear, and systematic exposition. Johann Thurnmeier, called Aventinus (1466-1534), Sebastian Franck (1500-45), and Aegidius Tschudi, of Glarus (1505-72), wrote histories which,' as ordered narratives, rank considerably above mere chronicles. The autobiography of Götz von Berlichingen, if its style is without merit, has an enduring interest as a sketch of the rude lives of the petty nobles at the time when the old social order was breaking up under the influence of new ideas. Huldrich Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer (1484- 1531), could state an argument with logical precision, but his style is thin and weak in comparison with the nervous force of Luther. Johann Agricola (1492-1566) wrote some theological work3 on the Catholic side; he is chiefly important, however, for a collection of German proverbs, which afford important evidence as to the currents of popular thought. Of a far higher class as a religious writer was Johann Arndt (1555-1621), who wrote the most widely read work of the 16th century, Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christenthum (“Four Books on True Christianity ”). Soon after Luther’s death the doctrines of the Reformation lost nearly all vitality; becoming the subjects of vehement controversy among contending theologians, they ceased to interest the m ιsses, who turned to simpler and more congenial themes. Arndt, like Eckhart, Tauler, and Luther himself, being a man of religious genius, saw the futility of these noisy disputes, and brushing them aside went to the heart of Christianity as a power fitted to nourish spiritual feeling and to govern conduct. His work appeared in Magdeburg in 1610, passed through edition after edition, and was translated into eleven languages. It still has a place of its own, for beneath the forms of a past age there burns the fire of a true enthusiasm. Sebastian Franck, already mentioned as a historian, wrote some religious works in a spirit akin to that of Arndt; but he lacked the intensity, the power of touching the popular mind, which was possessed by the later writer. Less practical in tendency, but incomparably deeper in philosophic thought, were the writings of the Görlitz theosophist, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). Boehme is in many respects one of the most striking figures in the history of German speculation. A man of mild and humble temper, working in patient obscurity as a shoemaker, he spent his life in grappling with the vastest problems which perplex humanity. Starting from the dogmas of Christianity, he sought to ground them in the deepest reason; and although he often appears to darken counsel by words, yet his writings contain many bold suggestions, which have profoundly influenced later philosophical systems. There are times when one feels that his struggling thought is imperfectly uttered only because it is not expressed in poetic forms. For Boehme was one of those thinkers who occupy the borderland between philosophy and poetry, a fact often perceptible in the concrete shape which the most abstract ideas assume in his hands. There is a touch of poetry in the very title of his first and best known, although not perhaps his best, book, Aurora.
The secular poetry of this period, if we except the works of Hans Sachs and Fischart, is without value. An ambitious didactic poem by Rollenhagen, Der Frosch- mäusler, gained a certain reputation; but it stands far beneath Reineke Vos, of which it is partly an imitation. The religious lyrics of the age are, however, of high excellence; they, indeed, are the sole works in which a perfect marriage was effected between idea and form in the epoch of the Reformation. In his grand battle-hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, in his pathetic verses Aus tieffer Not schrey ich zu dir, and in other lyrics, Luther led the way; and he was, as we have seen, followed by Hans Sachs. Nicolaus Herrmann in his Erschienen ist der herrlich Tag, Paul Eber in his Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein, Philip Nicolai in his Wie schön leucht uns der Morgenstern, and several other writers not less distinguished, created, in moments of genuine inspiration, lyrics which must move men while religious instincts survive. The adherents of the Reformation everywhere opened their hearts to these beautiful poems, for in them alone, not in creeds or sermons or controversial treatises, were the deepest emotions of the time freely poured forth. Next to the translation of the Bible, nothing did so much as the popular hymns to unite the Protestants, to stimulate their faith, and to intensify their courage.
During this century the drama made considerable progress. Besides the “Mysteries” and “Shrove Tuesday Plays,” “School Comedies,” in imitation of Terence and Plautus, were written and acted in the universities and public schools. Luther, with the large humanity characteristic of him when dogmatic disputes were not in question, encouraged these comedies, and was, indeed, friendly to dramatic effort of all kinds. To persons who complained that modesty was often offended by the actors he replied that if they carried out their principle they would have to refrain from reading the Bible. When the Jesuits began to agitate in opposition to Protestantism they detected at once, with their usual tact, the importance of this element in popular life; and through their influence more attention was paid not only to the plays but to the manner in which they were represented. Towards the end of the 16th century Germany was visited by a band of English comedians, who went about acting in their own language. They appear to have produced a deep impression; and at least one of their importations, the clown, the “Pickelhäring” of the Dutch, survived in Hanswurst or Jack Pudding, who was formore than a century an indispensable character in every play designed to gratify the prevailing taste. In imitation of the English comedians, wandering companies, consisting largely of idle students, now began to be formed, and thrilled both rustic and city audiences with blood-and-thunder tragedies, and with comedies too coarse to deserve even the name of farces. About the middle of the century a theatre was built in Nuremberg, and Augsburg and other cities soon followed the example. Duke Julius of Brunswick (1564-1613) not only built a theatre in his capital but maintained a permanent company; and he amused himself by writing for it comedies and tragedies in the approved style of the day.
It is significant of the stage of literary culture reached by Germany that she enjoyed the barbarous productions of this scribbling prince while English audiences were appreciating “Hamlet” and “Othello.”
V. The Period of Decay.— The period at which we have now arrived is in many respects the most dismal in German history. From 1618 to 1648 the country was desolated by the Thirty Years’ War, a struggle which—as Gustavus Adolphus, its greatest hero, declared—absorbed into itself all the other wars of Europe. It completed the disintegration of Germany, blurred every great national memory, fastened upon the people hundreds of petty despotisms, reduced the population by more than half, paused a whole generation to grow up in ignorance, accustomed all classes to an almost incredible brutality of manners, and put an end to the material prosperity which had been steadily growing during the 16th century. It is not surprising that pure literature drooped and nearly died out during the time which followed this tremendous war, for the conditions of pure literature were almost wholly wanting. Had a man of high genius arisen, the buds of his fancy must have faded for lack of light and air.
The only species of literature for which the conditions were favourable was the religious lyric. Under the pressure of grinding care, with no hope that a better day would dawn for them in this world, meditative and gentle spirits devoted their thoughts to another life; and many of them linked themselves to the truest poets of the previous century by giving musical voice to their spiritual fears and joys. Their prevailing tone in regard to “things seen” is one of profound melancholy; but all the brighter are the strange lights from the invisible which break through the gloom. The greatest of these writers is Paul Gerhardt (1606-75), many of whose hymns—such as 0 Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, 0 Welt sieh hier dein Leben— penetrate to the essence of Christianity as the religion of humility, of sacrifice, and of sorrow. He had worthy associates among the Protestants in Johann Rist (1607-67), Joachim Neander (1610-88), and Louise Henriette of Brandenburg, wife of the Great Elector (1627—67). Some of the wiser Jesuits also attempted the lyrical expression of religious feeling; and one of them, Friedrich von Spee (1592-1635), fell little short of the best among his Lutheran rivals. Spee was a man of admirable moral as well as literary qualities. Asked by the elector of Mainz how it happened that at the age of forty his hair was white, he answered, “It is because I have accompanied to the stake so many women accused of witchcraft, not one of whom was guilty.”
The standard of pure speech set up by Luther in his translation of the Bible had not been maintained by later writers. The innumerable dialects of Germany are an almost inexhaustible fountain for the renewal of the youth of her literary language; but when the literary language was less fixed than it is now, they were also a temptation to barbarism. In addition to the evils of excessive provinciality, the written speech had suffered from a too generous importation of Latin, Spanish, and French words. In the early years of the 17th century the prevailing laxity suggested to an enlightened prince, Louis of Anhalt-Köthen, that it would be desirable to introduce into Germany institutions resembling the Italian academies. Accordingly, in 1617, the “Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft” (“The Fruit-bearing Society”) was established,—a union which took the form of an order, with a palm tree for its emblem, and the words “Alles zu Nutzen” (“Everything for use”) for its motto. It immediately became fashionable for members of the highest classes of central Germany to belong to this society; and at a somewhat later time other societies were started in imitation of it. Of these the most famous was the “Order of the Pegnitzschäfer” (“Shepherds of the River Pegnitz”) in Nuremberg, which to some extent took the place of the school of meistersanger on which honour had been reflected by Hans Sachs.
These societies were associated with much pedantic folly, and from none of them proceeded any great work of genius; but they did good service by at least protesting against unlawful forms of speech. One of the earliest writers who worked in their spirit was Weckherlin (1584—1651), who, being associated with the German embassy in London, became intimately acquainted with some of the many forms in which the English genius then revealed itself. He wrote a number of odes, idylls, and sonnets, with an evident desire to give them a careful artistic finish. To him belongs the doubtful honour of having introduced alexandrines into German poetry,—a measure totally unsuited to the national spirit, but which for more than a century was in general use. The fame of Weckherlin was soon overshadowed by that of Martin Opitz (1597-1639). The beginnings of modern German poetry are often dated from the publication of his critical book, Die deutsche Poeterei, which appeared in 1624, and enjoyed an astonishing popularity. It became a sort of secular Bible to the “Fruit-bearing Society,” of which Opitz was a member, and was regarded by several generations of verse-makers as an almost infallible guide. In regard to merely outward forms, it deserved its reputation, for Opitz was the first German writer who attempted sharply to distinguish the different species of poetry, to bring together some of the external laws which govern them, and to insist with emphasis that purity of style is essential to high literary effect. He altogether missed the fact, however, that poetry must be the expression of an emotional life; it became in his exposition a mere handicraft, for excellence in which industry and familiarity with good models are alone necessary. The result is seen in his own lyrical and didactic poems, which are laudably correct in language and in metre, but are hardly once lighted up by the fire of intense feeling.
Opitz was born in Silesia; and from this circumstance the writers who shared his tendency or came under his influence are known as the first Silesian school. By far the most distinguished member of this so-called school was Paul Fleming (1609-40), the only secular German poet of the 17th century of whom it can be confidently said that he was endowed with true genius. He did not live long enough to reveal his full capacity; he confined himself to short rapid flights, and all his lyrics are contained in a moderately sized volume, Geistliche und Weltliche Poemata. This single volume, however, comprises enough to secure for him an enduring place in literature. He moves freely over the whole range of lyrical poetry, but his charm is at once strongest and most delicate in his love verses, which sometimes recall the gaiety of Herrick, although a touch of sentimentalism distinguishes the German writer from the more worldly Englishman. A fine spirit of manliness is the note of Fleming’s sonnets; and in several hymns he almost equals the religious depth of Gerhardt. Even in its artistic qualities his best work is higher than anything achieved by Opitz; in its power of awakening permanent human sympathies it stands alone in its era.
Another writer of the first Silesian school was Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), who sought to create a drama in accordance with the laws laid down by Opitz. He was the first German dramatist who divided his tragedies—of which he wrote five—into five acts; but his characters are roughly conceived, and he produces his effects rather by violence and bombast than by the gradual evolution of a definite plan.
His comedies, although also rude, have more life than his tragedies. In one of them, Peter Squenz, there are traces of Shake3peare , s Midsummer Night’s Dream, of which Gryphius appears to have had some knowledge through a third writer. Friedrich von Logau (1604-55) applied the principles of Opitz in epigram. He had a decided talent for terse, emphatic expression, and a considerable number of the vast collection of his epigrams have a keenness of edge which must have made him a dreaded enemy. His prevailing tone is satirical, and the chief object of his satire is the moral corruption of his time. Joachim Rachel (1618-69) was another satirist who strove by means of polished verses to castigate popular vices; but he lacked force and invention. There was much more vigour in the Scherzgedichte of Hans Wilmsen Lauremberg (1591-1659), who wrote in Platt Deutsch; he, however, can hardly be claimed as a member of the first Silesian school. Philip von Zesen (1619-89), a writer of some versatility, wrought in the spirit of Opitz by warring against foreign words which had intruded into German,—a warfare in which his zeal was not always as wise as it was patriotic. He founded in Hamburg, in imitation of the “Fruit-bearing Society,” an association (the “Deutschgesinnte Gesellschaft ”) inspired by his enthusiasm for Teutonic purity of speech.
While the admirers of Opitz were striving, with the best intentions, to introduce a correct poetic style, a movement of a very different kind originated among the “Pegnitzschäfer” of Nuremberg. The members of this society, conscious of the barrenness of existing poetry, and not feeling in themselves the sources of a higher activity, turned for help to Italian literature. Instead of studying the great Italian poets they attached themselves to Marino and his extravagant school; and the chief result was a number of fantastic pastorals, the writers of which seemed to have no other aim than to show how much silly affectation the German language may be made to express. Their tendency was carried to its utmost development by the second Silesian school, whose leading representatives were Hoffmanns waldau (1618-79) and Lohenstein (1635-83). Hoffmannswaldau wrote odes, pastorals, and heroic epistles, which are marked by a childish foppery of manner, and whose tone affords startling evidence of the moral laxity of the society to which they were addressed. Lohenstein chiefly cultivated the drama, and he has the distinction of having written perhaps the worst plays ever accepted as literature by a modern community. They are so wild and bombastic that, even if presented as burlesques, they would now be condemned as ridiculously extravagant. The lyrics of this pretentious writer are not less crude and unnatural than his plays.
As the century advanced, the German courts passed more and more under the influence of France. Pocket editions of Louis XIV. were to be found in all the little capitals, courtiers talked more French than German, and it was unfashionable not to know, or not to affect to know, contemporary French literature. It was, therefore, inevitable that some writers should turn away from the path of the second Silesian school, and compete for court favour by imitating the French style. This was done by Canitz (1654-99), Besser (1654-1729), König (1688-1744), and many other authors of the same class. These “court poets” took Boileau for their guide, and had, therefore, the negative merit of avoiding the absurdities of Lohenstein and Hoffmannswaldau. But they were, as a rule, tame, cold, and dull. In Canitz alone, who was a Prussian statesman and wrote for his pleasure, is there any evidence of original energy; the others were professional versifiers who produced appropriate odes and sonnets at the bidding of their employers.
During the greater part of the 17th century Germany produced few prose works that can now be tolerated. Notwithstanding the efforts of the purists, the language became more and more corrupt, and mo3t writers were either artificial, or pedantic, or coarse. One of the small number whose power we can still feel was Grimmelshausen, whose Simplicissimus (1659) has qualities bordering upon genius. The hero is a peasant’s son, who tells his own tale. Torn from his parents during the Thirty Years’ War, he is brought up by a hermit; afterwards in the service of a commandant, he makes himself notorious for tricks like those of Tyll Eulenspiegel; he then becomes a soldier, rises to wealth and rank, but ultimately loses both, passes through many wild adventures, and retires from the world to a desert island, in which he devotes himself to religion. The value of the book consists in its graphic pictures of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War,—pictures relieved by touches of rough, sometimes of the coarsest, humour. Another writer of great but insufficiently cultivated talent was Moscherosch, author of Gesichte Philanders von Sittewalt (1650), which is partly an imitation of the Suenos of Quevedo. It is made up of a number of visions or dreams, some of which, like passages of Simplicissimus, convey a vivid idea of the sufferings of Germany during her great struggle; in others the writer strikes with effect at popular follies, including the extravagances of the second Silesian school. Sigmund von Birken wrote a history of the house of Austria, which, although one-sided, is not without merit as a plain narrative; and an ecclesiastical history by Gottfried Arndt has some interest as an attempt to do justice to heretics condemned by the church. A very good book of travels was written by Adam Olearius, describing the adventures of a mission to Persia, of which the author and Paul Fleming were subordinate officials. A Protestant pastor, Balthasar Schupp (1610-61), was the author of several didactic prose works, which, although rough in form, display native wit, and pour wholesome ridicule on the follies and barbarisms of contemporary writers. Against these more or less valuable prose writings we must set piles of enormous romances in the style of D’Urfé and Mademoiselle Scudéry. The favourite authors of these astonishing productions were Buchholtz, who wrote Hercules und Valisca, and Herculiscus und Herculadisla; Anton Ulrich, duke of Brunswick, whose Octavia was loudly applauded by aristocratic readers; and Von Ziegler, the writer of The Asiatic Banise, an incredibly foolish book which, published in 1688, took Germany by storm, and maintained its popularity for more than a generation. Lohenstein was also the author of a romance, dealing with the fortunes of Arminius and Thusnelda. It is hard to understand the interest which works of this class once excited; they are barren of every imaginative quality, with no kind of relation to life, and grotesque in style. They were ultimately driven from the field by imitations of Robinson Crusoe, which, notwithstanding the charm of their model, display no more talent than the romances. Various writers imitated Simplicissimus, but they succeeded only in reproducing in an exaggerated form its occasional brutalities. Abraham a Sancta Clara (1642-1709), a Vienna priest, whose real name was Megerlin, revealed considerable power of satire in his Judas der Erzschelm (“Judas the Arch-Rogue”), and in pamphlets and sermons; but his naturally rich fancy was wholly uncontrolled, and his humorous passages are marred by a far larger number in which he is pedantic or vulgar.
No progress was made during the 17th century towards the formation of a national drama. At the courts the Italian opera was the favourite entertainment, and the wandering companies of actors represented for the most part barbarous plays of their own devising, in which Hanswurst was generally the popular character. Occasionally a man of some talent found his way into these companies; and one such actor, Velthen, showed so much insight as to include in his repertory some of the works of Molière. But the general tendency of what passed for the drama was from bad to worse, and the usual character of the plays to a considerable extent justified the hatred with which they were denounced by the clergy.
For a time it almost seemed as if Germany could never hope to emerge from the intellectual degradation into which she had sunk; but in reality the higher forces of the nation were rallyiug in preparation for a new era. One of the first symptoms of revival was presented by the remarkable pietistic movement, which, although it ultimately led to the formation of the pettiest of petty sects, was in its origin noble both in aim and in method. Its originators were the ardent, generous, and eloquent Jacob Spener (1633— 1705), and August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). The labours of these writers and preachers, who had close affinity to the mystics, not only gave more sincerity to religious forms, but did service to literature by quickening the popular intellect, and awakening emotions which could find no satisfaction in the tedious writings of the day. Of still greater importance were the beginnings of modern German philosophy. It was in this dreary period that Germany gave birth to one of the most brilliant of her thinkers, Leibnitz (1646-1716). The prevailing style of the day-— “Mischmasch,” he called it—seems to have disgusted him with his own language, for nearly all his writings are in French or Latin. Nevertheless, he exercised a profound influence on the best minds of his generation. His monadology, his doctrine of the pre-established harmony, his theory of the best of possible worlds, while carrying on the central current of European thought, offered Germauy new problems for solution, and helped to replace a rigid orthodoxy by a spirit of disinterested curiosity. The task of giving shape to his ideas was undertaken by Wolf (1679— 1754), who had none of Leibnitz’s genius, and often crushed his fruitful suggestions under a burden of logical proofs. The disciple, however, so far taught in his master’s spirit as to exalt the claims of reason over mere authority; he aLso encouraged habits of systematic thinking, and proved by his practice that serious writers had no excuse for clothing their doctrines in any other language than their own. Less philosophical than Leibnitz, and even than Wolf, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) was an impressive popular thinker. He edited the first German periodical, a sort of monthly magazine, in which he vigorously attacked pedants and bigots. His style, although not pure or graceful, received glow and warmth from his moral earnestness. Through him literature became a great practical power, for it was mainly he who put an end to the burning of witches and to punishment by torture.
Even in poetry, before the close of this period, there were a few glimmerings of dawn. Wernicke, a man of cultivated and severe taste, published a volume of epigrams (1697) in which he thrust home at the follies of Lohenstein and his followers; and that his mockery had effect was plain from the outcry of two noisy members of the school, Postel and Hunold. Günther (1695-1723), who died too soon for his genius, wrote lyrics in which the voice of nature was once more heard. “A poet in the full sense of the word,” Goethe calls him; and no one can realize how great was his achievement without making some acquaintance with his truly dismιl predecessors. Brockes (1680-1747) had not Günther’s fine spontaneity, but he had the merit of giving simple expression to unaffected pleasures,—a virtue for which historians of literature, remembering the formality of the court poets and the insincere posturing of the second Silesian school, readily forgive his occasional flatness and garrulity. He was the first German poet who displayed some knowledge of English literature. Although unacquainted with Shakespeare, he directed his countrymen to Milton, Young, and Pope; and he appended to his chief work, Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, a fair translation of Thomson’s Seasons.
VI. The Period of Revival.— For five centuries there had been no great literary period in Germany which deserves to be named with the famous periods in the history of England, France, Italy, and Spain. The Reformation was a spiritual achievement of splendid originality, but in literature Germany had for the most part followed timidly in the footsteps of her neighbours. She was soon to make up amply for this tardy progress; and we have now reached the age in which she fairly awoke to a consciousness of her strength,—an age mainly of preparation, but one which has also an independent interest, since it includes names that rank high in the history of European as well as of German culture. We have seen that in the midst of the period of decay there were already symptoms of revival. These became more and more numerous, and while they increased, Germany was suddenly startled by the appearance in her midst of a great warrior and statesman. It is impossible to estimate with any approach to exactness the impression produced by Frederick II.; but it is beyond doubt that he profoundly affected the intellectual life not only of Prussia but of Germany. After the Thirty Years’ War the people had lost confidence in themselves. They forgot that they had a magnificent history; they only saw that the structure of society had been rudely battered, and that nearly every enterprise of the nation as a whole ended in failure. Frederick the Great restored to them faith in their own vigour; he convinced them that it depended on themselves whether or not they should rise to their ancient place in Europe; and by the prompt, faithful, and energetic discharge of his personal duties he set before them an example which was widely felt. Literature shared the impulse which penetrated the national life. It became stronger, more independent, and moved forward with the assured step of a power conscious of high destinies.
Several causes of a purely literary character contributed to promote this advance. One of these was the revival of classical study in the best sense. Classical study had been pursued with ardour by the humanists; but after them it became dry, pedantic, and tedious, and was subordinated to theological controversy. In the 18th century a number of scholars arose, who, ceasing to interest themselves in merely verbal criticism, sought to pierce to the meaning of classical writers, to understand and enjoy their imagi native effects, their ideas, and their style. They also strove to construct what the Germans call “Alterthumswissenschaft,” the science of antiquity—that is, to comprehend the life of the Greeks and Romans, their religion, art, and philosophy, and to interpret their literature in the light of this knowledge. The movement passed from one university to another and soon made itself felt in the public, schools. Thus the best class of minds were familiarized with higher ideals than they had yet known, and received, almost without being aware of it, the germs of new activity. Another cause, which co-operated with the more intelligent study of the classics, was acquaintance with English literature. Hitherto the foreign influences which had affected the Germans had come from Italy, Spain, and, above all, France; but now they began to know something of contemporary English writers, and gradually worked their way back to Shakespeare. The English genius was instinctively recognized as more in harmony with that of Germany than any other, and its products stimulated the free exercise of the imagination and the reason, while the ancient classics led to the perception of the greatest laws of form.
Among the poets who helped to effect the revival of a truly national literature a place of honour belongs to Haller (1708-77), who, although chiefly famous as a man of science, revealed imagination and poetic sympathies in his descriptive and didactic poem Die Alpen (“The Alps”). Hagedorn (1708-54) was for a time the most popular poet of his day in virtue of his songs, odes, fables, and narratives in verse. He was of a genial and happy temper; and no author who preceded him was master of so clear, bright, and animated a style. One of the chief characteristics of the time was the tendency of writers to group themselves in schools. If two or three writers who lived in the same place happened to become friends, they forthwith called themselves a school; and the result was that they usually developed some marked common characteristics. These coteries inevitably became more or less narrow and exclusive; but they also stimulated each other to fresh effort, and the clash of their ideals sometimes helped the outside world to new points of view. The Saxon school, whose headquarters were in Leipsic, was for some years more prominent than any of its rivals. It was founded by Gottsched (1700-66), who, although he made himself ridiculous by pedantry and vanity, became the ruling literary man of Germany. He was appointed a professor in Leipsic in 1724, and founded there “The German Society,” which soon became the centre of a number of similar bodies for the cultivation of literature. Gottsched aimed at nothing short of the complete reformation of German poetry. He had the sense to see that if he wished to reach the people he must begin with the drama, and he was fortunate enough to find in Frau Neuber, who had formed a company in Leipsic, an intelligent actress capable of giving effect to his ideas. With her help he banished Hanswurst from the stage; and she was forthwith supplied with plays by himself, by his clever wife Louisa Victoria, and by several disciples. He gave his attention chiefly to tragedy, and unfortunately he had but one idea in regard to it—that it had reached the utmost possible excellence in the classic drama of France. The English drama, he admitted, had some merit, but only in so far as it had modelled itself on the work of Corneille and Racine. Hence, in his chief tragedy Der Sterbende Cato (“The Dying Cato”) he availed himself freely of Addison’s Cato; the Elizabethan dramatists, of whom his direct knowledge was slight, he believed to be mere barbarians. His taste gave the law in nearly every theatre in which German plays were acted; and it was certainly a good consequence that Lohenstein fell into permanent disrepute, while even the groundlings began to feel that the uncouth works which actors themselves had hitherto produced were, to say the least, far from perfection. On the other hand, the German genius was forced to submit to arbitrary laws antagonistic to its true nature; and so long as its submission lasted, a genuinely native drama was impossible. It was not only in regard to drama that Gottsched insisted on absolute subservience to France. In regard to all species of verse his sympathies were with the court poets, and both by example and by critical precept he insisted that in poetry as in everything else the understanding must be supreme, and that clearness of statement, correctness in the management of figures, and logical arrangement are the highest literary virtues. Regarding the function of imagination and feeling in poetry he had no suggestion to offer.
There were writers who instinctively felt that this could not be a complete theory; and of these the chief were Bodmer and Breitinger, the leaders of the Swiss school, which was formed in Zürich. These writers, although destitute of creative genius, had nourished their imagination on English poetry, especially on Paradise Lost, and it was incredible to them that a critical doctrine could be correct which left out of account or condemned their favourite writers. At first they were on friendly terms with Gottsched, but when the latter harshly criticized a translation of Milton’s epic issued by Bodmer, his Swiss rivals prepared to defend themselves; and thus broke out a literary controversy which made much noise at the time, and in which the angry critics, to the edification of onlookers, pelted each other unmercifully with abusive epithets. Neither party was fully conscious of the significance of its attack, and sometimes the warriors seemed almost to change sides. But the general tendency of the dispute was that the Swiss school, amid much exaggeration, defended the claims of free poetic impulse, while the Saxon school, in a narrow and pedantic spirit, maintained those of conscious art. It is hard werk now to follow their arguments, but at the time they interested a considerable public in literature, and opened fresh lines of investigation. One of the results was that Baumgarten, a disciple of Wolf, published a book which Germans regard as the beginning of modern aesthetics,—a branch of mental science to which their philosophers have ever since devoted thought and labour.
While this warfare of critics was going on, there were in Leipsic a number of young writers who more or less attached themselves to Gottsched, but who gradually shook off his authority. They founded a periodical, the Bremer Beiträge (the “Bremen Contributions ”), which had considerable influence in forming their own style, and in keeping alive the popular interest excited by the central controversy. After a while many of them were scattered over different parts of Germany, but they retained their original impulse, and continued to be known as members of the Saxon school. Gellert (1715- 69) was by far the most famous of the circle. It is impossible to mention without respect this amiable writer. His plays are unimportant, but his fables and tales reveal so gentle and pure a spirit that we cannot wonder at his great popularity. He was a favourite among all classes, even Frederick the Great himself, who rarely condescended to notice a German author, declaring after a long interview that he was “the most reasonable of German scholars.” His supreme defect was a tendency to weak sentimentalism and pious commonplace. Rabener (1714-71) acquired fame as a good-humoured satirist. His prose is fresh and clear, but he has not sufficient grasp of any important principle to entitle him to very high rank among moralists. Christian Felix Weisse (1726-1804), the friend of Lessing’s youth, failed as a writer of tragedy, but was a favourite author of comic operettas. He was also the first successful German writer for children, and edited for many years a periodical (the Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften) which had a favourable influence on popular culture. Johann Elias Schlegel (1718-49), uncle of the two Schlegels who became long afterwards leaders of the Romantic school, gave evidence of high dramatic talent, but died when he was beginning to be conscious of his power. Arnold Ebert distinguished himself by good translations from English; and Zachariä wrote with some success mock heroics in the style of The Pape of the Lock. Kästner, whose disputations at the Leipsic university were diligently attended by young Lessing, made himself feared as a biting epigrammatist. Cramer became one of the most eloquent preachers of the day, wrote popular religious odes, and edited The Northern Guardian, a well-meaning but rather commonplace imitation of the Guardian of Steele. These writers, who from being Gottsched’s friends all became more or less hostile to him, have a clearness and grace of style which were unknown in the previous century. Another author who was from the beginning Gottsched’s enemy, but who had no relation with this particular school, may be here mentioned,-—Liscow (1701-60).
His prose has nerve and animation, and few satirists have dealt severer blows at literary pretence.
The Halle school of poets was in some respects different both from the Saxon and the Swiss schools. Its original members were Gleim (1719-1803), Uz (1720-96), and Götz (1721-81). These three writers formed a friendship in their student days at Halle, where they came under the influence of the poets, Pastor Lange, and the tutor of his children, Immanuel Pyra, ardent disciples of Bodmer and Breitinger. The young students, while feeling sincere respect for the Swiss critics, did not attempt any very serious flight; they preferred to amuse themselves with lively little anacreontic verses, which they soon brought into high repute. Afterwards Gleim settled in Halberstadt, where he lived to an extreme age. His didactic poem Halladat, which he wrote, he himself modestly explained, in order to gratify a wish of his youth to produce a book like the Bible, has no vitality; but during the Seven Years’ War he composed TΓαr Songs of a Grenadier, which were everywhere read, and have not yet lost their popularity. They were edited by Gleim’s friend Lessing, who, however, protested against their patriotic vehemence. Gleim was one of the most kindly of men, and became the patron of young poets, several of whom he always had in his pleasant bachelor’s home. He also kept up an extensive correspondence with other writers·, which is now an important source of information respecting the movements of contemporary literature. One of his most intimate friends, who resembled him only in geniality of disposition, was the noble-hearted Ewald Christian von Kleist (1715-59), who was fatally wounded on the battle-field of Kunersdorf. He would still deserve to be remembered as the man whom, of all others, the equally noble Lessing most loved. His descriptive poem Frühling (“ Spring ”) is partly an imitation of Thomson; but it is also the work of an independent lover of nature, who knew how to give beautiful utterance to true and simple feeling. Ramler (1725-98), another friend of Gleim, and the friend, too, of Kleist and Lessing, wrote spirited odes in Horatian metres, which, like the War Songs of a Grenadier, gave pleasure because of their strongly patriotic tone,—the direct result in both cases of Frederick’s influence. Anna Louisa Karsch (1722-91), a poetess who owed much to Gleim’s goodness, was a favourite among the literary men of the day, butj her verses are ruder than they ought to have been at so late a date. Idyllic poetry, which Kleist and Götz to some extent cultivated, was taken up in earnest by Solomon Gessner (1730-87), whose prose idylls, The Death of Abel, The First Sailor, and others, were translated into French and English, and were better received in their foreign dress than in their original form. They are written in an easy style, and express much harmless although somewhat tedious sentiment. He was imitated by Xaver Bronner, a Catholic priest, whose idylls have not half the merit of his autobiography, which affords remarkable insight into the religious life of Catholic Germany about the middle of the 18th century.
The religious lyric, which had shared the general decay during the latter half of the 17th century, displayed more vitality during part of this period. It owed its fresh life mainly to the pietists, who reopened fountains of spiritual feeling that had been apparently dried up by theologians. Among the best of this younger generation of hymn writers were Freylinghausen, Neumeister, and Tersteegen. Their fame was, however, less extensive than that of Count von Zinzendorf (1700-60), the founder of the sect of Herrnhiiter or Moravian Brethren. Besides hymns he wrote religious works in prose, and made himself one of the most prominent figures of his time by ardent missionary zeal. His followers, like all deeply religious sects in Germany, delighted in hymns; and many of those they produced are remarkable for the sensuous, sometimes almost sensual, forms in which their emotions are expressed.
Fables were at this time an extremely popular class of writings, and nearly every imaginative writer sought to distinguish himself as a fabulist. The Swiss school, indeed, in their zeal for a combination of the wonderful and the useful in literature, maintained that the fable was the highest type of literature. As a rule, Lafontaine was taken as the model in works of this kind, but we look in vain among his German imitators for his exquisite grace and naïveté Gellert stands at the head of the more sentimental fabulists; after him may be named Willanow and Lichtwer. The latter (1719-83) has humour as well as sentiment, and some of his fables have an artistic finish that indicates a faculty by which he might have won distinction in more important labours.
From about the middle of the 18th century onwards a number of prose writers, who may be classed together as popular philosophers, worked effectively for the enlightenment of ordinary readers. They attached themselves to some extent to Wolf; they also came under the influence, although not in any great degree, of the French Encyclopedists; and they were admiring students of the English deists, and of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. They are often condemned for the shallowness of their thought; and if we compare them with the great thinkers who followed them, the condemnation is just. They did not grasp the significance of the problems which had been handed down by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, with which Hume was now grappling, and which were soon to enter upon a new phase in the critical philosophy of Kant. In regard to religion they had a very imperfect appreciation of every'element that could not be expressed in clear logical statements; feeling and imagination were rigidly subordinated to the understanding. And they had not even a remote suspicion of what is now familiar as the historical spirit, so that they displayed amazing narrowness of vision in their treatment of past spiritual developments, and of contemporary creeds with which they did not happen to agree. But if we are to do justice to these popular philosophers, they must be compared rather with their predecessors than with their successors. An important place belongs to them in the movement by which vital human interests have been raised above theological disputes, by which morality has received a basis independent of dogmatic religion, and by which toleration has been secured for men of every faith. They were penetrated by a truly humane sentiment; and it must be counted a high merit that in a country which had been more or less dominated by pedants, and whose great writers of a later age have not always attempted to be both profound and clear, they sought to express themselves in unpretending and straightforward German. The chief of the popular philosophers was Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), not a deep or massive thinker, but a man of fine moral sympathies, an enthusiast for freedom—from the lack of which he himself, as a Jew, keenly suffered—and an incisive psychological analyst. His friend, Frederick Nicolai (1733-1811), the Berlin bookseller, had the misfortune to outlive his epoch. He had only words of contempt for Goethe and Schiller; and Kant, whom he did not profess to understand, seemed to him a sort of cross between a bungler and an impostor. These terrible mistakes have made poor Nicolai, notwithstanding his lifelong warfare against bigotry, the type of a narrow-minded bigot. Yet in his earlier days he was recognized by such a judge as Lessing, with whose friendship he was honoured, as a writer of talent. And his Bibliothek (“Library ”), the most important literary periodical of his day, did excellent service by providing the popular philosophers with a medium for the expression of their opinions on all the great questions which then agitated Germany. Other popular philosophers were George Sulzer (1720-79), who devoted himself to aesthetics in the spirit of the Swiss school, but with the advantage of later lights; Thomas Abbt (1738-66), whose style was one of uncommon vigour; Christian Garve (1742-98), who did not attempt any great original work, but in letters and articles examined many individual philosophic questions from new points of view; and Johann Jacob Engel (1741-1802), whose Philosoph für die Welt (“Philosopher for the World”) interested a class of readers who would have been unable to follow a more adventurous guide. Zimmermann (1728— 95) hardly deserves to be mentioned in such good company; but his Betrachtungen über die Einsamkeit (“Observations on Solitude ”) by its sentimentalism and rhetoric carried his name far beyond the bounds of Germany. Some theologians, without exactly sharing the beliefs of the popular philosophers, were profoundly affected by them. Among these were Mosheim, the ecclesiastical historian; Spalding, the translator of Shaftesbury; and Jerusalem, the father of the young writer whose suicide suggested some elements in Goethe’s Werther. These liberal theologians did not hold a very intelligible logical position, but they were of some importance by their attempts to introduce a freer and more polished style of eloquence than had hitherto marked the German pulpit. In regard to the permanent movements of thought, their influence was greatly inferior to that of Michaelis and Semler, whose labours heralded the approach of modern Biblical criticism.
In history Germany produced at this time at least one writer of high eminence, Justus Möser (1720-94), author of the Osnabrückische Geschichte (“History of Osnabrück ”) and Patriotische Phantasien (f Patriotic Fancies ’’). Möser was the first German historian who wrote a good style and attempted to penetrate to the meaning of events and to present them in the light of great principles. He also produced a strong impression by his enlightened patriotism and by his burning scorn of wrong. Schröck and Schlözer were prominent historians, and the latter made himself known as a clear writer on contemporary politics. Karl von Moser, of Stuttgart, applied to political subjects a faculty for wit and satire that was estimated highly in his own day. *
It has been already stated that the revival of classical study was one of the chief causes by which the mind of Germany was awakened to new effort. Professors Christ and Ernesti, of Leipsic, who were the favourite teachers of many young students, including Lessing, were two of the chief writers to whom this revival was due. Incomparably greater than either, however, was Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), whose History of Ancient Art (1764) opened a new era in the appreciation of ancient life. Later investigation has corrected Winckelmann on many points, but no critic has displayed a keener feeling for the beauty and the significance of such works as came within his knowledge, or a truer imagination in bridging over the gulfs at which direct knowledge failed him. And his style, warm with the glow of sustained enthusiasm, yet calm, dignified, and harmonious, was worthy of his splendid theme. What he did for ancient art was to some extent done for ancient literature by the untiring editorial labours of Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812).
Important as were many of these writers, Winckelmann above all, they exercised slight influence on the national mind compared with the three men whom the Germans justly regard as the founders of their classical literature— Klopstock (1724-1803), Wieland (1733-1813), and Lessing (1729-1781).
Klopstock stood in direct relation to the Swiss writers. When a pupil at Schulpforta, one of the great Saxon schools which sent forth many of the best authors of the day, he was a diligent student of Bodmer, by whose critical principles he guided himself in reading Homer, Virgil, and Milton. The Messiah, on which his fame mainly rests, is now little read, and it is impossible even to glance through it without becoming conscious of glaring faults. Klopstock’s genius was essentially lyrical; he lacked the plastic force of imagination necessary for a great epic. His central figure is nowhere presented in clear sharp outlines; it wavers between two distinct conceptions, that of a divine and that of a human character. And the facts to which he turns our gaze in the crisis of his narrative are not such as kindle the deepest sympathies; he exhausts the powers of language to convey an impression of the Messiah’s sufferings, but we hear nothing of the qualities of soul which these sufferings rouse into action. The subordinate characters are innumerable, and except Abaddona, a repentant fallen angel, between whose character and whose fate there is an effective contrast, none of them can be said to live; they exist only as an excuse for the utterance of Klopstock’s feelings. They talk incessantly, weep, embrace, and kiss, but they never do anything that exhibits more than a vast quantity of obtrusive sentiment. Notwithstanding its obvious defects, however, the Messiah has qualities which must still command admiration; it reveals a nature full of lofty aspiration and deep humanity, and it contains individual images of striking force and beauty.
It would be difficult to imagine anything more dreary than Klopstock’s plays, the subject of three of which is Arminius, while the others deal with scriptural themes. He knew enough neither of life nor of the stage to be a true dramatist; his characters are mere names, and the incidents are grouped according to no principle of art. His odes, which he continued to write from the beginning to the end of his long career, are of far higher excellence. Those which derive their inspiration from Northern mythology are too remote from general sympathy and too obscure in construction to awaken interest; but the stamp of genius is upon several of the lyrics in which he expresses his passionate feeling for the grander phenomena of nature, his ardent patriotism, his enthusiasm for freedom, and his elevated sense of human worth and destiny. Both as an epic poet and as a writer of odes he had many imitators, who, like most others of their class, exaggerated the defects of their model and left his virtues alone. His influence upon the intellectual life of Germany was deep, and, on the whole, beneficent. He encouraged the self-respect of his countrymen, intensified their desire for an independent literature, and by handling high themes, sometimes powerfully, alwayβ seriously, suggested that the national imagination would reveal its full capacity only by undertaking greater enterprises than any it had yet attempted.
Although Klopstock was one of the central literary figures during two generations, he was not a prolific writer; Wieland, on the other hand, was one of the most prolific of German authors. He was continually at his desk, and in the course of his career produced a considerable library. Of his many works the romantic poem Oberon is by far the most famous, and the only one that really pleases modern readers. Agathon is perhaps the best of the prose romances in which he endeavoured to depict ancient Greek life. He was not endowed with great vividness of imagination, and his prevailing tendency is to extreme diffuseness; but some of his descriptive passages, especially those in Oberon, have a touch of ideal grace which enables us to return to them with fresh relish. He had a fine appreciation of style, and by the study of Greek and French masterpieces persistently strove to acquire lightness, clearness, and ease. Even yet few German writers will compare with him in these qualities. In all his works he had a strongly didactic tendency, but his teaching was the opposite of that inculcated by most modern writers who deliberately aim at ethical effect. Above all, he differed from his great contemporary, Klopstock. Writing at first as a strict pietist, he ultimately became a pronounced Epicurean in the popular sense, and made it his object to proclaim an Epicurean theory of life, discouraging enthusiasm, laughing at such aspirations as those of his own youth, exalting the claims of the senses, and placing the highest virtue, in kindliness and good humour. This tendency often conducts him to more slippery ground than any on which a German writer of his standing would now venture; but it also gives him innumerable occasions for the play of a gentle and refined irony.
Whatever may be the excellences of Wieland and Klopstock, both are essentially writers of the past. This cannot be said of Lessing, the third great German of this period; he is still a living influence. He is, indeed, the only writer before Goethe whom Germans can now read without feeling themselves in a world foreign to their sympathies. Throughout his career he strove to renew and fructify the intellectual life of his nation, and he achieved his aim by important creative activity, and by the clearest, freest, and most drastic criticism of the 18th century.
As an imaginative writer he was chiefly distinguished in the drama, and his most important dramatic work is Minna von Barnhelm. If it cannot be said that this is, in the highest sense, a comedy of genius, it is at any rate a comedy which contains elements of permanent interest. The characters are vividly presented; the plot is systematically, yet naturally, unfolded; the dialogue is clear, fresh, and animated. And the work has the high merit of giving artistic shape to elements taken by the dramatist from the living world around him. Emilia Galotti is marred by a deep flaw in the conception of the central figure; but every other character in the tragedy is conceived with bold imaginative force, and it is possible for a competent actress to sotten, if not to harmonize, even the clashing elements in Emilia herself. No drama making even a distant approach to the excellence of these two plays had been produced in Germany; they thus gave literature in its highest department a fresh start.
But valuable as were Lessing’s imaginative creations, they were inferior to his labours as a thinker. Here he was absolutely supreme among his contemporaries; and in some respects he has not since been surpassed. His method is invariably critical, but he aims at rising to the highest, most universal aspects of every subject with which he deals. As a master of style he ranks with the greatest European writers. The structure of his sentences is clear, precise, and compact; and he keeps the mind awake by vivid images drawn from nature and from human life, by interesting, sometimes remote, allusions, by rapid strokes of wit, and by unexpected turns of thought, as if he were abandoning his main theme, while he is in reality indirectly advancing it. He has often been called the most critical of poets; it would be equally just to call him the most poetical of critics.
The greatest of Lessing’s purely critical writings is Laocoon, a fragment, but a fragment containing the germs of much of the best thought of his own and the immediately succeeding generations. It has an enduring value as the first serious and great attempt to distinguish sharply the realms of art and poetry, and to foster both by subjecting each to its own laws. Next in importance stands his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, a series of criticisms on plays represented at the Hamburg National Theatre. By these splendid criticisms, which are based in the main on Aristotle’s Poetics, with many side-references to Diderot’s theories, he put an end to the abject submission of dramatic writers to French traditions. In his later years he issued the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, portions of a theological work by Reimarus, a deistical writer of admirable force and clearness. He thus became involved in a hot controversy with indignant professors and pastors, the noisiest of whom was Pastor Goeze of Hamburg. The tracts issued by Lessing in the course of this controversy are in form among the most perfect of his writings; they are at once learned, keen, and witty. And in the history of Western thought they are of deep significance. His immediate object was to secure for criticism absolute freedom of movement; but he did very much more. He foreshadowed, as a vital element of the coming time, inquiry as to the origin and growth of the Scriptures, the rise of Christianity, and the fundamental character of religion. And he indicated a far higher standpoint than that of the popular philosophers by vindicating the claims of feeling in spiritual life as opposed to those of the bare understanding. In his Education of the Human Race he gave systematic shape to the fruitful principle that a religion which is not true absolutely or for all time may be of vast importance by meeting the needs of a portion of the race in special epochs, and that there is in history, notwithstanding apparent reactions, a progressive movement towards higher intellectual and moral ideals. The suggestions thrown out in controversy he developed artistically in one of the greatest of his writings, the fine dramatic poem, Nathan the Wise, a work which enshrines all that was noblest in the struggles and the aspirations of his age, and connects the thought of the 18th with that of the 19th century. As a drama, it has serious faults; but it powerfully effects its purpose by revealing, in the enlightened Jew, its hero, the grandeur of a nature which, instead of binding itself in dogmatic fetters, cultivates a spirit of free and disinterested humanity.
Thus in all directions this great writer laboured for the intellectual regeneration of his people. If Goethe, Schiller, and Kant found a nation prepared to receive their work, they owed the fact to many causes; but among these the chief were the political activity of Frederick II. and the literary activity of Lessing.
VII. The Classical Period.— At the close of the Seven Years’ War the conditions of public life were very unfavourable to literature. The country was impoverished, and Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa were almost the only sovereigns who showed the least regard for the welfare of their subjects. But the mind of the nation had been thoroughly aroused from its long slumber. It had been startled into patriotism by Frederick’s unsurpassed energy, while the labours of the chief writers had imbued the better part of the middle class with a desire for a more varied and interesting life. As political freedom was still a dream of the future, they turned more and more to books for refreshment and stimulus. Multitudes of young men who in other circumstances would have occupied themselves solely with practical duty became authors, and they urged each other to an activity without parallel in any previous period.
Most of these young writers were deeply influenced by the men of the older generation—Lessing, Wieland, and Klopstock. They were also ardent students of Shakespeare, Ossian, and Dr Young, poets who were oddly supposed to be on the same level and to share the same tendencies. Rousseau excited almost as much enthusiasm in Germany as in France, and the criticism of Diderot found many warm admirers. Under these diverse influences a curious movement began which is known as that of “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Pressure”). It lasted, from about 1770, for ten or twelve years, and included nearly all the writers who still had fame to win. Their most prominent quality was discontent with the existing world. They detested not only tyranny and superstition but everything which prevented, or seemed to prevent, the free exercise of any powerful impulse. To break down conventionalities appeared to the “Sturm und Drang” poets their true function; but even this did not satisfy them. They longed for some knowledge deeper and more intimate than that attained by science, philosophy, or history, for some emotion intenser than can arise from any known human relation. All these conflicting feelings they expressed in their writings. From slavish submission to French critical laws they were of course completely emancipated. Most of them despised laws of every kind in literature as well as in life, and continually proclaimed that the duty of a man of genius was towrite precisely as nature dictated. By “genius” they meant vehement sensations, by “nature” a free use of vigorous epithets.
The writer who formed the connecting link between Lessing on the one hand and Goethe and Schiller on the other, and whom the best writers of the “Sturm und Drang” movement regarded as their critical guide, was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder is sometimes compared with Lessing, but while Lessing has a cosmopolitan touch which makes him intelligible and attractive to all the world, Herder is in the strictest sense a German, and is only slightly studied beyond his own nation. He was less boldly original than his older contemporary, and never attained the clearness, force, and classic beauty of Lessing’s style. Nevertheless he is justly ranked among the most distinguished spirits Germany has produced. His mind was receptive in many different directions, and what he absorbed he made his own by independent thought, giving it out in new and suggestive forms. As an original poet, Herder does not rank high; yet genuine poetic impulses are visible in the poem in which he gave shape to the Spanish legends of the Cid. The literature in which he looked for the highest manifestation of thought and feeling was that which appeals to popular sentiment and has its root in popular life. Lessing had already called attention to the songs and ballads of the people; but Herder was the first German who decisively followed the impulse which led in England to the publication of Percy’s Reliques. In his Stimmen der Völker (“Voices of the Peoples”) he brought together an admirable collection of the lyrical utterances of many races; and it would be difficult to overrate the service he thus rendered, for he conducted his countrymen to a source of imaginative pleasure and revival in which their literature is exceptionally rich. By far his most important prose work was his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (“Ideas towards the Philosophy of the History of Humanity”), in which, working to some extent on the lines laid down in the brief paragraphs of Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, he develops the conception of progress, and indicates that we can fully understand any single element of history only by seeing it in the light of human evolution as a whole. This excellent book elevated the aims and enlarged the scope of historic inquiry in Germany; and it still produces a powerful moral effect by its noble spirit of humanity. To the end of his days Herder was animated by a fine enthusiasm for human happiness, and it lights up his pages even when his subject does not lead to its direct expression.
To Herder belonged the high honour of stimulating and directing, at a critical stage, the young genius of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832). In naming Goethe we mention the writer who holds in German literature the place held by Shakespeare in the literature of England, and by Dante in that of Italy. He towers high above even the greatest of his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors,—Schiller himself, who is most worthily associated with him, being far inferior in breadth of sympathy and splendour of creative impulse. Goethe, indeed, is one of the few writers who, while marked by strongly national characteristics, belong to the world rather than to a particular country. The special phases of his age have begun to pass away, but his best work has lost none of its freshness: it cannot become old, since it is rooted in elements of human life that eternally endure.
All things co-operated to render worthy of his destiny this favoured child of fortune. During his long life he enjoyed almost uninterrupted physical vigour; he was born into a family of prosperous circumstances, although not so highly placed as to satisfy his ambition; he received the best intellectual training his epoch could afford; in Weimar he was free to adapt the plan of his life to his inclinations; and he appeared at the very time when, by an era of sincere poetic endeavour and unparalleled critical labour, the mind of the nation had been prepared for the boldest efforts of genius. Nature has seldom lavished so many advantages on the greatest of her great men.
The quality in Goethe which immediately arrests attention is the extraordinary range of his activity. Hardly any aspect of human existence was strange to him. He possessed in an unsurpassed degree the faculty of dramatically thinking himself into phases of life to which his personal impulses would not have led him; and he deliberately enlarged his experience by exercising this power at every stage of his career. It was his prevailing conviction that all ideals which fascinate or have fascinated humanity must have a touch of vitality; and none was so remote from him but he sought to penetrate to its meaning. He could be just to Hellenic culture without doing wrong to mediaevalism; he appreciated the spirit of Christianity without being indifferent to the faith of the Parsees or the Buddhists; he presented the ascetic aspirations of a “beautiful soul,” while setting forth the gaiety of the brightest and. most careless tempers; he felt the charm of art at the same time that he carried on profound researches in science; he loved his country, and yet, even when it was overrun by Napoleon’s troops, he would not join the patriots in saying a harsh word of France. This absolute universality destroyed enthusiasm for special practical movements; but it gave astonishing variety to his literary achievements. Goethe’s was in every respect a thoroughly poetic nature. He could not pass through a profound experience, an image of beauty could not cross his vision, without an accompanying impulse to find for his emotion an adequate sensuous representation. So vast a body of writings as bis inevitably includes much that is tedious, but in his happiest moments his genius moved with the ease, the certainty, the calmness of the great forces of nature; he could be as perfect in the lightest stroke of delicate feeling as in the grandest flight of soaring imagination. The world he reflects is the world we actually know; but he is not, therefore, in any narrow sense, a realist. The facts he images are shaped and coloured by his thought and feeling; he breathes into them a life by which they are made of universal significance. This combination of realism and idealism is one of the chief secrets of his power. His art aims at producing the most general effects, yet it is kept fresh, vivid, and true by incessant contact with the concrete life of men.
Heine relates that he felt inclined to address Goethe in Greek, so like was the calm dignified old man to an earthly Zeus; and this is probably the image suggested to most minds by his name. But in youth he was full of eager life, restless, and passionate, and his early works bear the impress of turbulent feeling. Of these the first published was Götz von Berlichiηgeη, which instantly established his fame as one of the chief writers of the “Sturm und Drang” school. It is almost as formless as their inartistic writings. The language is sometimes excessively rude, and there is no attempt to combine the different scenes into an harmonious picture. Yet it is sharply separated off from the tasteless plays with which it was compared, for everywhere we find traces of immature power. The characters are alive; they act and react upon each other as we should expect men and women to do in a stormy and troubled epoch; and by a few touches of apparently unconscious art we are made to realize the vital change through which the society of the age of the Reformation was passing. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sufferings of Young Werther”) gave Goethe a European reputation. Much of its sentimentalism now excites smiles instead of tears; but with all its faults it has an enduring fascination. It breathes a warm love of nature, of which it presents vivid pictures; it conveys a powerful impression of the mingled force, sweetness, and unreasonableness of early passion; and it expresses with deep pathos that weariness of life which forms one of the moods of poetic youth, and the manifestation of which was a favourite pastime of the less sincere “Sturm und Drang” versifiers. The promise of Glitz and Werther was not sustained by all the works produced in the first part of his career. Clavigo is only a fairly good acting play; and Stella has even more than the extravagant sentimentalism of Werther. with only an occasional touch of its poetry. On the other hand, it was now that Goethe began Faust; and the fragment, Prometheus, expresses a grand defiance that is the more impressive because of the deep philosophic thought which may be .traced in the background. It was, however, in his lyrics that the richly varied life of Goethe’s youth most perfectly revealed itself. There are no German lyrics, if we except Heine’s, which deserve to be compared with Goethe’s; perhaps none in any literature have a more subtle charm. Profiting by the teaching of Herder, he studied the artless beauty of the best songs of the people, to some of which he gave new form, while retaining their primitive simplicity. His own lyrics are at once popular and artistic; he takes as his themes the joys, the longings, the regrets which all men understand, and weds them to melodies of delightful ease and grace. Almost every poem was suggested by some passing emotion of his own; yet his feeling is so purified that his words become the voice rather of humanity than of an individual man. His ballads are not, as a rule, so powerful as his songe, but both have one quality in common—without elaborate descriptions they continually call up by an apparently accidental word or phrase a clear vision of some natural object or scene. He is equally master of himself in rendering nature as a mirror in which we see the reflection of our own experience, or as a power moving on in calm indifference to our hopes and fears.
In 1775 Goethe settled in Weimar, where Wieland already was, and whither he was ultimately followed by Herder and Schiller, so that the little town became the centre of the intellectual life of Germany. After an interval of ten years, during which he published nothing, he paid his famous visit to Italy. Here his genius was kindled anew, and a close study of sculpture and painting suggested to him the necessity of submitting more fully than he had yet done to the permanent laws of art. The fruits of this experience were Iphigenia, Tasso, and Egmont, all of which he took with him to Italy in an unfinished form. The first two of these dramas were accepted as imitations of the antique; but they are so only in the sense that in each the parts are rigidly subordinated to the intention of the whole, that there is an orderly sequence in the development of the action, and that they are marked by elevation and simplicity of style. While incomparably more finished as works of art than any of the greater works he had before produced, they indicated no falling off in energy of imagination. Iphigenia, although its subject is Greek, is in tone and motive altogether Christian; and it would be difficult to name a more attractive picture of a modern lady than the pure and high-minded heroine. In Tasso Goethe draws in strong and sure outlines the sorrows of a poetic nature which will not sharply discriminate the real from its own ideal world. This dramatic poem is hardly more remarkable for the truth and vividness of its conceptions than for the charm of its versification and the wealth and beauty of its language. Egmont, however, has more movement, and touches human experience at deeper points. Most readers agree with Schiller’s criticism, that there is too much melodrama in the closing scene, in which Clärchen appears to the hero as the spirit of freedom, and that, notwithstanding the liberties taken with history, Goethe has hardly succeeded in making Egmont the type of an enemy of despotism. But Clärchen is a beautiful study of a mind stirred by love to great resolves; and there is splendid portraiture in the characters of Alva, William of Orange, and the Princess of Parma.
Meanwhile, a new literary force had revealed itself in the life of Germany: Schiller (1759-1805), Goethe’s great rival, had begun to divide with him the public attention and interest. The names of these two poets, in virtue of whose labours their period deserves to be called classical, are indissolubly connected, yet they were marked off from each other by profound distinctions. Goethe is often called the poet of culture, and it is true that he never ceased to subject his powers to systematic discipline. He was also one of the keenest critics of modern times. But the charm of his best writings is not dependent on criticism or culture; it springs from the spontaneous movement of a great imaginative faculty. Schiller, on the other hand, while also endowed with imagination, possessed it in a much less degree. His poetry would probably have lived even if he had not had the advantage of a thorough grasp of aesthetic laws; but it would certainly have had no claim to the distinguished place it now holds in European literature. He did not attempt so wide a range as Goethe, and within his scope he was not, like Goethe, a disinterested observer; he flung himself into the midst of the struggles of his time, and fought valiantly as the champion of a side. Fortunately for Germany, his side was always that of a truly chivalrous mind; for Schiller was one of the most unselfish of men, with lofty aspirations for the race, and a generous confidence in its essential goodness. These qualities determined the character of his conceptions. Goethe presents us with idealized pictures of the world; Schiller’s creations are not so much pictures of the world as the figures of a realm distinct from actual life. His supreme aim was to express great sentiments and ideas, and as the medium for their utterance he conceived characters which are to be found only in a poet’s dreams.
Schiller began his literary career as a youth of two-and-twenty, inspired by revolutionary ardour, detesting every conventionality of society, dreaming of a world in which will and passion should have absolute licence. He relieved himself of his vehement emotions in his first three plays, Die Bäuber (“ The Robbers ”), Fiesco, and Cabale und Liebe (“Intrigue and Love”). Genius never beat with more Titanic energy against an unsympathetic world than in these dramas; the impulse of the “Sturm und Drang” period, as it was about to die away, spoke in them its wildest, most passionate word. Don Carlos, his next drama, still manifested inability to form an organic whole; it contains scenes which have no bearing on the central action, and there is hardly an attempt to explain deeds by natural and intelligible motives. But we are no longer in the presence of one who merely raises an outcry against the existing world; furious resistance to despotism has become enlightened enthusiasm for freedom, humanity, and progress. Although the part of Marquis Posa is imperfectly worked into the scheme of the play, he is a nobly ideal creation; through him Schiller pours forth his own aspirations for the welfare of mankind. There is admirable art in the momentary elevation caused by his greatness of soul even in the dark and selfish Philip and the restless and wayward Don Carlos.
After he settled in Jena in 1789 as professor of history, Schiller was often in Weimar; but for a time he and Goethe held apart. By and by they began to approach each other, and from about 1794 their acquaintance ripened into fast friendship. The friendship of Goethe and Schiller is one of the most beautiful in the history of literature. It made no essential change in Goethe’s modes of thought or expression, but it spurred him to the highest activity of which his genius was capable. His friend, he himself declared, “created for him a second youth, and again made him a poet, which he had almost ceased to be.” On the other hand, in contact with Goethe’s larger intellectual life, Schiller was raised to new points of view, and he acquired for the first time that mastery of artistic methods which secured for him his highest triumphs. He now became as remarkable for the perfection of his form as for the depth and warmth of his feeling.
The two friends worked harmoniously in connexion with Schiller’s journal Die Horen, and wrote in common the Xenien, a number of epigrammatic verses meant to wound their literary enemies. On the whole, it is surprising that comparatively so few of the arrows in this rather large quiver are delicately pointed and feathered. A very different stage of excellence is reached by Schiller’s well-known ballads, which were written during the period of his intimacy with Goethe. Nearly all of them are marked by force of conception and by purity and dignity of style. In lyrical poetry he had acquired some distinction before he knew Goethe, but it was in competition with his friend that he achieved his masterpiece, Das Lied von der Cloche (“The Song of the Bell”), in which within a small compass he presents an impressive picture of the course of human life, varying his melody with subtle art to suit the changing aspects of his theme. Less artistically perfect than the Cloche, other lyrics, such as Der Genius, Die Ideale, Der Spaziergang, have the power which belongs to deeper personal emotion. In ease and spontaneity none of Schiller’s lyrics equal Goethe’s, in which, as Heine says, “the word embraces you while the thought kisses you.” But they express in clear and noble language some of the highest feelings excited in a poetic mind by contemplation of human life and destiny,
In his dramatic writings Schiller was influenced by Goethe even more than in his lyrics and ballads. The whole series of tragedies which he now wrote have historic or legendary themes, and he displays remarkable skill in unfolding through the past his greatest ideas respecting the future. At the same time he evokes from it a company of finely ideal figures, whose qualities are revealed by the systematic development of large and carefully conceived schemes. Wallenstein, the earliest of the series, consists of two plays, The Piccolomini and Wallenstein’s Death, the former of which is preceded by a number of scenes presenting a vivid picture of Wallenstein’s camp. The tragic motive of this great work is somewhat obscure. We are made conscious by many artful touches of the ultimate issue; but Schiller does not render fully intelligible the play of the influences which result in disaster. There is, however, high imaginative faculty in his conception of Wallenstein’s powerful, dark, and wavering character; and every reader feels the charm of the love passages between Max Piccolomini and Thekla. In Maria Stuart Schiller triumphs over an obvious difficulty by admitting the heroine’s guilt, while he stirs our pity for her sufferings and our admiration for the spirit of endurance with which they are met. In the Jungfrau von Orleans, “The Maid” would have given purer pleasure if she had not been represented as loving one of the English commanders; but this only slightly mars the splendid picture of her patriotic devotion. As a •work of art, the Traut von Messina is the least successful of the later dramas, for it attempts to combine romantic and classic elements which are irreconcilable; it contains, however, some of the most brilliantly rhetorical passages in the German language. The last of his completed works, and in some respects the best, was Wilhelm Tell. Here his love of freedom shaped for itself forms of immortal beauty. At a time when the French emperor threatened the independence of all Europe, men felt the power of the play more keenly than can be done in a calmer period; but it has permanently enriched the life of humanity by its conception of a character dominated by high, ideal passions. Schiller never saw Switzerland, yet in this powerful drama he renders with astonishing vividness the grander effects of Alpine scenery.
During his friendship with Schiller Goethe wrote in competition with him many lyrics and ballads. In works of the latter class, as Goethe himself thought, he was surpassed by his friend. He is incomparably more subtle and suggestive than Schiller; but for this very reason he is less effective. A ballad does not deserve its name if it is not popular; and we hear the voice of the people themselves in Schiller’s free, bold, and simply harmonious verses. One of the longer works published by Goethe during this period was Hermann und Dorothea. His delicately chosen language and dignified hexameters are not always in keeping with the somewhat prosaic life they are here used to portray; but the poem is the nearest approach that has been made to the successful epic treatment of an ordinary theme. And it rises to a high level of imaginative power in the contrast it suggests between the still life of the humble village, with its little idyll of satisfied love, and the far-off desolation of the revolutionary wars, of which we are reminded by the band of emigrants. The genius of Goethe moves more freely in Wilhelm Meister, of which the first part was now published. This work has perhaps given rise to more contradictory criticism than any other book in modern literature. We may safely disregard the opinion of those who find in it all the excellences that can be combined in a prose romance, for it is without plan, and its style is singularly unequal. When Goethe himself admitted that he did not possess the key to its full significance, his warmest admirers may allow that perhaps there is no key to possess. Yet few of his writings present more striking evidence of the fertility of his power. He interests us equally— to recall only a few of the characters—in the gay and worldly Phillina, in the romantic Mariana, and in that most mysterious, lovely, and fascinating of creations, Mignon, whose Kennst du das Land is perhaps the noblest of those pathetic poems in which a soul in an uncongenial world calls up a momentary vision of its true home. It is not only in its dramatic conceptions that Wilhelm Meister is great; it contains some of Goethe’s deepest thoughts on life and literature.
After the death of Schiller Goethe turned his attention more and more to science, his achievements in which have been fully appreciated only since the growth of the doctrine of evolution. Still, it was in hi⅛ latest period that he completed the most famous and the greatest of his works, Faust, a poem which he began in youth and did not finish until nearly his last birthday. The Faust of legend was a vulgar magician; Goethe so conceives the character that it indicates the deepest mysteries of human existence. The second part, in which the problem of the poem is solved, can hardly be regarded as a work of art; it is, or seems to be, confused and dark. And the individual elements of the first part are not completely welded; they form rather a series of poems than a single creation. In these individual elements, however, we find the grandest sweep of imaginative thought yet achieved by the German genius. The episode of Gretchen reflects with perfect art the most alluring and the most sorrowful facts of life; and philosophy and religion in their highest aspects meet in Faust’s aspirations and struggles.
It might have been supposed that at the age of seventy Goethe had no new imaginative worlds to conquer; yet he then published his Westöstlicher Divan, representing, with dramatic sympathy and lyric force almost unabated, the combined mysticism and sensuousness of Oriental life. Ten years before, he had issued Wahlverwandtschaften (“Elective Affinities”), a powerful picture of impulses which law cannot control, and in which are concealed the germs of tragic issues. It has, however, less charm than another prose work, Dicldung und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”), in which he draws a slightly idealized sketch of his early life. This fascinating book has made the figure of young Goethe as familiar as his chief dramatic characters; and no creations of the fancy are better known than the Frederikas and the Lilis, who had long before occasioned his sweetest lyrics, and the memory of whom in old age gave delicacy and music to his style. ·
While Goethe and Schiller were in thé midst of their career, Europe was startled by the French Revolution. At first it stirred as much interest in Germany as in England. The aged Klopstock greeted it with odes full of the fiery energy of youth, and for a time Schiller almost fancied that his loftiest hopes were about to be realized. Sympathy, however, was transformed into bitter opposition by the Reign of Terror; and when Germany was trodden under foot by Napoleon, she turned more and more from every kind of French influence. Thus it happened that, although the ideas of the Revolution have indirectly affected the literature of Germany as deeply as that of the. rest of Europe, their immediate effect was slight and transitory.
An event of the highest importance in the intellectual growth of Germany was the publication, in 1781, of Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. It is hard for men of a later time, accustomed to metaphysical speculation, to realize the impression produced by this great book. Its effect in philosophy was not unlike that caused in our own day in science by Mr Darwin’s Origin of Species. Everywhere among thoughtful men, at the universities especially, philosophy became the absorbing subject of study; and it was taken up at a point from which its whole past development was for the first time intelligible. Goethe, without neglecting the movement, was perhaps less stirred by it than any other prominent writer; Schiller became one of Kant’s most enthusiastic students, and traces of the new system are to be found in many of his later lyrics and dramas. He also applied its principles to aestlietics in several admirable critical writings. By and by, dissatisfied with the gulf left by Kant between mind and matter as “things in themselves,” philosophers started in search of some principle which should harmonize all the elements of existence; and thus grew up, one after the other, the systems of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For more than a generation these thinkers excited deeper interest than imaginative writers; the most serious minds were fascinated by speculations which placed in new lights all the greatest questions relating to human thought and action.
Of the poets or versifiers who began their career with Goethe, the one who for some time attracted most notice was Klinger (1753-1831), whose play, Sturm und Drang, is at least memorable through its title. Other plays of his were Conradin and Medea·, and he also wrote romances, of which the best known were Paust , s Leben, Thaten, und Höllenfahrt and Der Weltmann und der Dichter. His writings are violent and noisy, without a touch of true art; what he mistook for imagination was a power of crude and unmeasured declamation. His later works express the bitterness of a deeply disappointed man. Lenz (1750-92), whose name is usually connected with that of Klinger, did not make even so distant an approach to imagination as his rival; his plays are the wild outgrowths of a mind which has made no sincere observation of life, and has submitted neither to intellectual nor to moral discipline. A man of much greater talent than either was Daniel Schubart (1739-91), the restless, licentious, and unfortunate poet who, for publishing a piece of false news, was confined for ten years in a fortress, where he suffered incredible hardships. In his attempts to portray the horrible he is sometimes extremely grotesque, but his best verses have both music and pathos, and they had the good fortune to exercise some influence on Schiller. He was one of the earliest publicists of Germany, and his hatred of despotism was the real cause of the infamous act which deprived him of freedom. Writers who shared the spirit of “Sturm und Drang,” and applied it in new directions, were Lavater and Basedow. Lavater enjoyed the friendship of nearly every distinguished man of his day, yet he was vain and fanatical. His Physiognomische Fragmente (“Fragments on Physiognomy ”) were supposed by thousands of readers to find in the relations of mind and body the materials of a new and mysterious science; but the pretended science was in reality a mixture of commonplace and extravagance. Basedow, although with too passionate a faith in the power of education to effect an immediate transformation of the race, did excellent service by advocating, after Rousseau, a more humane and natural system of mental training than had before prevailed. The same cause was more temperately promoted by Campe, who wrote some admirable books for the young; and the Swiss educational reformer, Pestalozzi, set forth methods of instruction in earnest didactic works which had some effect in nearly every country in Europe.
The excitement of the “Sturm und Drang” writers was shared by a band of young poets who in other respects displayed a wholly different temper. Most of them were students at Göttingen, where they gathered round Boie, editor of the Musenalmanach, a journal he had started in imitation of Le Mercure de France, and to which Goethe and many of the best of the younger men of the day contributed. They called themselves the “Hainbund” (“Grove Confederation ”), because of their dancing one night by moonlight round an oak tree, swearing eternal friendship, and vowing to devote themselves to their native land. The god of their idolatry was Klopstock, whose somewhat fantastic enthusiasm for primitive Germany they fully shared, and whose labours on behalf of virtue they never ceased to celebrate, while they loathed and despised Wieland. Several members of the “Hainbund” afterwards acquired distinction, and all of them were more or less remarkable for the genuinely popular tone of their writings. By far the greatest of them was Bürger (1748-94), who, although he never did full justice to himself, gave evidence of an original and adventurous geniu3. His Lenore, a translation of which was Scott’s first published work, is full of weird power, and his sonnets are among the most perfect in German literature. His faculty of meeting the popular taste was possessed by Holty (1748-76), who, however, delighted in mild and calm expression, while the best of Bürger’s poems are full of stir and action. Johann Martin Miller (1750-1814) became known chiefly as the author of the romance Siegwart, a rather weak imitation of Werther. Some irreverent spirits ventured to laugh at its tedious pathos, but it was welcomed by the majority of the middle class, who took especial delight in the songs it includes. Christian, Count Stolberg, and his brother, Frederick Leopold, were also members of the Göttingen school. Besides imitations of Greek plays, they issued odes, ballads, and songs. Of the two the most powerful was Frederick Leopold (1750-1819), in some of whose briefer pieces there is true feeling for nature. He continually verges, however, on extravagance, and often takes the fatal step from the sublime. A stronger writer was Johann Heinrich Voss (1751-1826), author of a famous idyll, Louise, which was received by Schiller as a poem of first-rate importance, and suggested to Goethe the idea of his Hermann und Dorothea. Its homeliness of style is perhaps more in keeping with its simple and commonplace theme than the classic grace of Goethe’s verses. Voss acquired a better title to fame by an admirable translation of Homer, which did for the Iliad in Germany what Pope’s translation did in England. Voss’s rendering is less polished than Pope’s, but incomparably more faithful. Matthias Claudius (1740-1815), although not a member of the “Hainbund,” is usually associated with it because of his general sympathy with its tone. The Waηdsl)ecker Bote (“Wandsbeck Messenger ”), in which he brought together all his writings, contains much simple poetic feeling, and some of his songs are still popular favourites.
While these writers attached themselves to Klopstock, others showed traces of Wieland’s influence. The most important of this class was Wilhelm Hei∏3e (1749-1803), whose chief work was Ardinghello, a prose romance. He shares Wieland’s general theory of life, but, instead of expressing it in the calm, ironical style of his master, he is vehement, tumultuous, and enthusiastic. Amid his wild exaggerations he sometimes displays a remarkable power of describing physical beauty. He was an ardent student of art, and was the first German writer who succeeded in reproducing in glowing language the impression produced upon him by pictures and music. Other imitators of Wieland were Aloys Blumauer, who mistook vulgar burlesque for satire; Alxinger, whose Doolin von Mainz may be taken to represent a large class of tiresome poems of chivalry; and Von Thümmel, who, with considerably more ability than these writers, spoiled his good qualities by cynical grossness. An indefinite number of mediaeval plays were written in imitation of Goethe’s C'otz, and robber romances in imitation of Schiller’s Räuber. Of the latter the earliest and most famous was the Rinaldo Rinaldini of Vulpius. Jung Stilling (1740-1817) continued the sentimental tone of Werther in a number of curious autobiographic tales, which acquired extraordinary popularity, and threw much light on the inner tendencies of the later pietists. Among imitators of Schiller’s lyrical poetry the best were Matthison and Salis-Seewis; but they were more successful in reproducing his moral feeling than in rivalling his high art. For many years the stage was in the possession of Iffland (1759-1814) and Kotzebue (1761-1819). The former, who was a distinguished actor, wrote dramas chiefly of domestic interest. They are without genius, but had the merit of almost displacing the foolish mediaeval plays of Goethe’s imitators. Kotzebue was a most prolific writer; and although he had no imagination, and wrote merely to catch the applause of the moment, his comedies still deserve to be named among the few works of this class which have hitherto been produced in Germany.
A writer who exercised some influence over the youth of Goethe was Frederick Jacobi (1743-1B19). He was the author of two romances, Alwill and Woldemar, in both of which there is a little of Werther’s sentimentalism, although their main purpose is didactic. He also wrote a number of philosophical works. His main principle is that the sources of religion and morality are to be found in intuition; and by a constant reiteration of this doctrine he worked in opposition to Spinoza, to Kant, and to Schelling. There are occasional gleams of philosophical genius in Jacobi, and he is of some interest to English readers because of the attention Sir William Hamilton appears to have devoted to his writings. An author of a very different type, and of far greater eminence, was Jean Paul Richter, usually called Jean Paul (1763-1825). It is difficult to do justice to Jean Paul, for he commits almost every fault of which a writer of romance can be guilty; he is at different times pedantic, extravagant, sentimental, and tedious. He prescribed for himself no limits; everything that occurred to him at the moment of his writing went down exactly as it suggested itself. Yet it is impossible even to look into any of his innumerable books without recognizing his genius. The work which has maintained the strongest hold over the nation is perhaps his charming prose idyll, Die Flegeljahre (“The Years of Wild Oats”); but his great romance, Titan, and the less ambitious Siebenkäs, or “Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces,” have also kept their place as works of permanent excellence. The most admirable quality of Richter is his humour. No German writer plays with his subject more delightfully, and he produces his most striking effects in dealing with the simplest, most unpretending relations of life. He is usually very near the sources of pathos when he smiles, and Jean Paul’s pathos, at its best, is full of power, awakening the deepest feeling by its obvious sincerity. Sometimes it is associated with lofty imagination, as in the famous dream in which he describes a universe without religion. His feeling for the periodic changes of season in nature is that of a poet in the highest sense, his descriptions of spring being perhaps unsurpassed for their glowing yet tender beauty. To his other excellences we must add the manly spirit which led him to scoff, occasionally without due measure, at every kind of vulgarity and pretence, and at the same time preserved in its original freshness bis sympathy with his fellow-men and his passion for their enlightenment and progress.
The most important literary movement which originated duringthe lifetime of Goethe was that of the Romantic school, whose leading members at first attached themselves to him, but gradually diverged more and more from his spirit. The rise of the school was in some measure due to the philosophy of Fichte, whose theory of the ego as the principle which freely creates its own world gave new importance to the individual as opposed to law and convention. ’ Schelling still more effectually prepared the way for the Romanticists by his poetic treatment of the relations between the mind and nature; and several of his disciples, especially Steffens, worked in the same direction by dwelling on the possibilities of mystery in human life and in the external world. The aim of the Romantic school was to assert for modern feeling the right of a freer, more varied utterance than can be provided for it by the forms of classic literature. They were not in sympathy with their own time; they found it tame, prosaic, colourless; and to enrich it with new elements they went back to mediaevalism, in which, as they conceived it, daily life had not been divorced from poetry. They drew enthusiastic pictures of the Middle Ages, of the charms of chivalry, of the loyalty of each class to the class above it and to society as a whole, of the devout piety which was supposed to regulate the conduct of prince and peasant alike, and which revealed itself in splendid architecture aud a gorgeous ritual. With a like purpose the Romanticists pointed to Oriental life, and began the serious study of Sanskrit and Persian poetry. The chief writers whom they opposed to the classical poets both of antiquity and of modern times were Shakespeare and Calderon; but they also brought to light many mediaeval authors who had previously been neglected, and. stimulated the Germans to a systematic study of the whole of their past literature.
The Romanticists did not strike out a wholly original path, for there were in the writings of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller—especially of Goethe—elements in full harmony with all that was best in the new tendency. They were guilty of grotesque exaggeration in their descriptions of the superior happiness of mediaeval nations and Oriental peoples, aud they did much harm by checking the rising appreciation of measure and order iu literary form which had been encouraged by the great classical writers, In practical life, too, their labours led to results opposed to the progressive tendencies of the age; for in the case of many adherents of the Romantic school, enthusiasm for the Middle Ages soon ceased to be a mere literary fancy,—they strove to reproduce obsolete mediaeval ideas. Large numbers of them joined the Catholic Church, and became the most vehement opponents of spiritual and political freedom. Still the Romanticists gave prominence to certain vital principles. That we now feel the charm of what was great and beautiful in the Middle Ages, is in part the result of their teaching; and to some extent we owe to them the recognition of deeper elements in the world than reason can formulate, and the conviction that the thought of each age must create for itself a medium of expression adapted to its special nature.
The writer known as the prophet of the Romantic school was Frederick von Hardenberg, generally called Novalis (1772-1801). In his unfinished romance, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, he revealed a mystical and sensitive spirit, penetrated by religious aspiration, and feeling itself ill at ease in the hard rough world. These qualities are still more pathetically expressed in his poems, the best perhaps being those in which he directly utters spiritual emotions. The critical leaders of the school were the brothers August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) and Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829). It is to be feared that many English readers have derived their impression of the former mainly from Heine’s malicious caricature. In reality, although destitute of creative power, he was a man of great intellectual distinction. His translations from Shakespeare are masterly, and his rendering of Calderon has also genuine merit. He did much to promote the scientific study of Sanskrit, and his lectures on dramatic art and literature, and on the theory and history of plastic art, contain many fruitful suggestions. Friedrich von Schlegel, who - was a writer of greater depth and versatility than his brother, caused much scandal by his romance, Lucνnde, in which the school appeared for the moment as a powerfully dissolving force in regard to the most sacred of human relations. His most important work, however, is his History of Ancient and Modern Literature. Throughout his exposition he is a propagandist of his special ideas; but the book is of lasting importance as the earliest attempt to present a systematic view of literary development as a whole. The period in which the brothers worked most effectually for their school was between 1796 and 1800, when they lived in Jena, and formed the centre of a brilliant circle which included Fichte, Schelling, Tieck, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Here they edited the Athenoeum, in which they chastised feeble and pretentious writers, and awoke general interest in mediaeval art and literature, and in the systems of philosophy that harmonized with their special tendency.
The most productive, and for a time the most famous, writer of the Romantic school was Ludwig Tieck (1773— 1853). Many of the smaller tales in his Phantasus have not yet lost their interest. They are, indeed, as far as possible from representing the real life of mediaevalism, but they have a mystic and fairy-like charm which is not the less powerful because it is purely imaginative. In his later novels he took his themes from modern life, and they display a remarkable talent for keen and searching satire. Most of them, however, are already practically forgotten, for Tieck was unable to give form to his ideas, and his imagination was wayward and eccentric. In his lyrical poetry he seldom touches a true note, and his dramas have no high qualities to make up for their utter and deliberate lack of plan. Yet his dramatic criticism, of which he wrote a great deal in Dresden,—where he lived for many years, the centre of an adoring body of disciples,— is often happy and suggestive; and his completion of Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare is poetic in feeling, and indicates a rare mastery of language aud versification. A writer of less importance, but who exercised considerable influence over Tieck at an early period of his career, was W. H. Wackenroder (1772-98), whose Phantasien über die Kunst (“Fancies concerning Art ”) was published by Tieck after the writer’s early death. Both in this book and in his Overflowings from the Heart of an Art-loving Friar he expresses a deep feeling for Christian, especially allegoric, art. He was here in full sympathy with the whole Romantic school, which derived intense delight from the spiritual art of the early mediaeval painters, but cared little for the noble beauty of Greek art or of the art of the Renaissance.
Among the authors who wrote in the spirit of the Romantic school, and who were for a long time extremely popular, one of the chief was E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776- 1822). His treatment of ghostly and horrible themes is often very grotesque; but he has flashes of vivid narrative which indicate a deep appreciation of some of the more mysterious aspects of human nature. Clemens Brentano (1777-1842) was one of the most ambitious of the Romanticists, and he had originality both of thought and fancy; but he was too confused, too indifferent to form, to produce more than a passing impression. Of far more enduring excellence than anything he himself wrote was Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a book of popular lyrics which he collected with his brother-in-law, Achim von Arnim. Arnim (1781-1831) revealed imagination and feeling in his Kronenwächter (“' Guardians of the Crown ”); and his Countess Dolores gives evidence of great natural power. His works, however, suffer the penalty which attaches to the total neglect of art. De La Motte Fouqué (1777-1843) does not, in the majority of his writings, rise above the level of his fellows; like them, he usually lacks clearness, precision, and genuinely human interest. But in one little book, Undine, he achieved a masterpiece. This charming tale, with its sweetness, pathos, and dream-like beauty, is now above criticism; it has taken its place as one of the select clas≡ of creations which appeal to all the world, and do not depend for their popularity on the tendencies of a particular time. Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857) is an adherent of the Romantic school only in some of his tales; his lyrics combine its depth of emotion with clear and musical expression, and his best stories are written in a frank and attractive style. Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), although usually classed as to some extent a Romanticist, has none of the dreaminess and mysticism of the school. He became a German both in thought and feeling; but his ordered and vigorous style preseuts many traces of his French origin. He is now chiefly remembered by Peter Schlemihl, a tale of quaint and suggestive humour. The most distinguished dramatist of the Romantic school was Heinrich von Kleist (1776-1811), whose dramas were not represented till after his death, but have since then attracted much attention. Some of his characters are conceived with great vigour, but in his tragic motives he lacks invention, and all his works are more or less marred by morbid sentimentalism. Allied to the Romantic school, although not directly connected with it, were the writers of the so-called fate-tragedies. The originator of this curious class of works was Werner (1768-1823). It would be difficult to imagine a more trivial conception of fate than that which he develops in his Twenty-Fourth of February, which represents a series of disasters as occurring at intervals on a particular day in consequence of a father’s curse. The notion, however, struck the popular fancy, and for ten years even Kotzebue could not contest the supremacy of the fate-tragedians. The chief followers of Werner were Miillner and Houwald. Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) began his career with a play— Die Ahnfrau (“ The Ancestress”)—in the style of these popular writers, but in his later tragedies he strove to attain classic force and dignity; and by at least one play, Sappho, he achieved a place among the most distinguished German dramatists.
The whole life of Germany was to some extent influenced by the Romantic school. In politics it was represented, among others, by Joseph Gorres, who agitated with constantly growing enthusiasm for the revival of mediaevalism both in church and state. In philosophy Franz Xaver von Baader followed a like tendency by entering deeply into the spirit of Jacob Boehme’s mystical philosophy, and interpreting its principles in accordance with Catholic doctrine. Frederick Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was a thorough Protestant, and his services to serious literature were incomparably higher than those of Baader. He was an admirable dialectician, and did more than any other writer to promote in Germany a sympathetic study of Plato. Yet there is a touch of Romanticism in the vague, shadowy, and mystic language in which he presents the elements of Christian thought and life. The love of the Romantic writers for previous epochs of German history and literature led to the great researches of the brothers Grimm, who founded the scientific study of the German language and of German antiquities. They were followed by many devoted scholars, among whom may be named Beneke, Lachmann, Moritz Haupt, and Franz Pfeiffer. The Oriental studies of the Romanticists also promoted comparative philology, which acquired something of the character it now bears through the labours of the illustrious scholars, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Franz Bopp.
During the calamitous period when Germany was beaten and humbled by Napoleon the Romantic school, by continually recalling the past glories of the nation, contributed largely to the revival of patriotic feeling. A like result was achieved by Fichte, whose addresses to the German people, delivered in Berlin while it was occupied by French soldiers, are models of fervid yet thoughtful and dignified eloquence. In the war of liberation the popular excitement was expressed with great spirit by Theodor Körner (1791-1813) and Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860). Of these two writers Arndt is the most poetic, but few even of his lyrics have much literary value. To judge them fairly we must think ourselves back into the epoch in which the nation spontaneously arose to avenge its wrongs and assert its independence. It was as a writer of patriotic war-songs that Frederick Rückert (1789-1866) opened his career. Afterwards he moved over a wide range, distinguishing himself especially as a translator of Oriental poetry. He was master of almost every form of lyrical expression, and had hardly less facility in narrative and didactic verse. As regards the substance of his poetry, he is perhaps chiefly remarkable for the tone of calm resignation which he learned from his Eastern masters. In his preference for Oriental modes of thought he has been followed in recent times by Daumer, Bodenstedt, and other poets, who, however, chiefly aim at contrasting the ascetic ideals of Christianity with a gayer, brighter scheme of life. The whole movement had its origin, and was virtually exhausted, in Goethe’s Westostlicher Divan.
Had the hopes of German patriots been realized after the war of liberation, literature might have profited by the growth of an intelligent national spirit. But the reward of the German people for their immense sacrifices was bitter opposition on the part of their Governments to every aspiration for freedom and unity. Arndt himself, who had done so much to kindle patriotic ardour, was dismissed in disgrace from his professorship at Bonn, which he did not regain till 1840, when Frederick William IV. mounted the Prussian throne. And the brothers Grimm with other scholars were ignominiously turned out of Gottingen. The mass of the people lost interest in high thought and endeavour, and nourished itself on weak poetry like the Urania of Tiedge, and detestable novels like those of Clauren. Yet even in poetry the period was not destitute of important names. Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), whose first volume of poems appeared in 1815, ranks with the greatest of modern lyrical writers. He is truly popular and patriotic in tone, yet his songs and ballads have an ease and grace of style which raise him far above any of the Romantic schotjl. Uhland was the founder of the so-called Swabian school of poets, of whom the most cultivated was Gustav Schwab. Other Swabian poets were Justinus Kerner, who attempted, not unsuccessfully, to combine pathos and humour, and Eduard Mörike, whose poetry is generally of a melancholy tone, relieved, however, by touches which indicate a fine sympathy with nature. The theatre was dominated by Raupach (1784- 1852) and Freiherr von Auffenberg (1798-1857), the former reigning in Berlin, the latter in Carlsruhe. Both had talent and knowledge of the stage, but there is neither genius nor art in their plays. Immermann (1796-1840), although not without poetic power, lacked the faculty of controlling his dramatic conceptions. He was more successful in romance—his Epigonen, and still more his Münchhausen, displaying vivid fancy and a quaintly original humour. Sir Walter Scott, who was deeply influenced by German literature, repaid his obligations by influencing it in turn. One of the best of his imitators was Wilhelm Hauff (1802-1827), who had the merit of nearly putting an end to Clauren’s popularity by satirizing his style. Hauff ’ s chief work was Lichtenstein, which excited hopes that were too soon extinguished by death. Wilhelm Häring, known as Wilibald Alexis (1798-1876), also began as an imitator of Scott, but he afterwards wrote more original historical romances, the scenes of which he laid in Brandenburg. Johanna Schopenhauer, mother of the philosopher, was considered in her day an attractive writer of romance, but she is now remembered only for the sake of her son. She was surpassed in vigour of thought and style by Caroline Pichler (1769-1843), who wrote several well-known historical novels.
Throughout the whole of this period Germany maintained her eminence in classical study, contributions of the highest importance to the knowledge of ancient life being made by Wolf, Hermann, Boeckh, and Otfried Müller. In history she produced several writers of distinction. Spittier (1752- 1810) was a worthy successor of Justus Möser in the free and artistic treatment of historical subjects; in youth he was kindly treated by Lessing, whose clear style he appears to have taken as his model. Johannes von Müller (1752-1809), the historian of Switzerland, used to be considered by the Germans an eloquent writer, almost a prose poet, but he is now generally regarded as an affected rhetorician. Raumer, in his chief work, History of the Hohenstaufen, gave forth the results of deep research in an animated and vigorous narrative. Schlosser, author of a History of the Eighteenth Century, was also an historian who combined purity and strength of style with learning. Niebuhr, in his Homan History, pushed his scepticism too far, but he profoundly modified opinion in regard to the tests of historic credibility.
VIII. The Latest Period.— With the death of Goethe in 1832 began a new era in German literature, an era not yet closed. The period has been one of intense political excitement. In 1848 the national aspiration for freedom and unity found decisive expression in action; since that time Germany has achieved unity by the sword, while she still slowly feels her way towards freedom. It was inevitable that in such an epoch much of the best energy of the nation should be devoted to politics, but there has also been great literary activity—activity deeply influenced by the practical struggles, hopes, and fears of the time.
Philosophical speculation has been continued without interruption, and in many respects it has been, and still is, the deepest current in the intellectual life of Germany. From 1818 till his death in 1831, when he was a professor in Berlin, Hegel dominated the highest thought. His vast system, in which he attempted to explain the ultimate facts of the world and to bind by a chain of deductive reasoning the elements of all knowledge, found enthusiastic adherents among the more ambitious of the younger literary men, and for many years after his death it determined the character of their work. Gradually, however, the school broke up into three distinct divisions, the right, the centre, and the left. Of these the most active were the members of the latter party, who interpreted Hegel’s doctrine in a revolutionary sense. Arnold Ruge, one of the most brilliant writers of the school, applied Hegelianism to politics, in which he associated himself with the extreme radicals. David Friedrich Strauss, who also started as a follower of Hegel, in his memorable Leben Jesu resolved the narratives of the Gospels into a series of myths, and found the vital element of Christianity in its spiritual teaching. Feuerbach, going still further, warred against all religion, urging that it should be replaced by a sentiment of humanity. While the different sections of Hegelians opposed each other, Schelling developed the later phases of his system; and thought was turned into a new channel by Herbart, whose psychological work has been carried on at a later time by Lotze. Krause also attracted attention by philosophical ideas through which he aimed at solving the practical difficulties of modern life. Ulrici and the younger Fichte have exercised considerable influence as the advocates of a pantheistic doctrine by which they endeavour to reconcile religion and science. None of these names, however, have the importance which attaches to that of Arthur Schopenhauer, who, although his chief book was written in the lifetime of Goethe, did not secure a hearing until long afterwards. At the present time he stirs deeper interest than any other thinker. German philosophers have, as a rule,been utterly indifferent to style, but Schopenhauer’s prose is clear, firm, and graceful, and to this fact he owes much of his popularity. He expressed bitter contempt for his philosophical contemporaries, and, going back to Kant, claimed to have corrected and completed his system. His main doctrine is that will is the fundamental principle of existence; but his importance arises less from his abstract teaching than from his descriptions of the misery of human life. History seemed to him but a record of turmoil and wretchedness; and there is high literary genius as well as moral earnestness in his graphic and scornful pictures of the darker aspects of the world. Eduard von Hartmann, the latest original philosopher of Germany, works on essentially the same lines, but seeks to reconcile Schopenhauer not only with Hegel and Schelling but with Leibnitz.
The growth of science has been one of the most powerful factors in the recent intellectual development of Germany, and some of the best books of the period have been works presenting in a popular form the results of scientific labour. Among these the first place still belongs to the Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt. Its fundamental conceptions are no longer in full accordance with the best thought; but it is made enduringly impressive by the writer’s power of handling vast masses of facts, by his poetic feeling for the beauty and the order of nature, and by the purity and nobility of his style. Some of the greatest men of science, such as Liebig, Virchow, and Helmholtz, have also made admirable attempts to render their subjects intelligible and interesting to ordinary readers. Büchner and Vogt have considerable merit as popular scientific authors, but their writings are marred by a polemical tendency, which induces them to dogmatize on metaphysical questions beyond their proper range.
In historical literature Germany has recently produced many eminent writers. The historian who enjoys the widest popularity is Leopold Ranke, who has instructed two generations by communicating in an agreeable style the results of extensive research in many different fields of inquiry. Gervinus acquired a permanent place as an historian by his excellent History of the Nineteenth Century. Works of high value have also proceeded from Giesebrecht, who has written on the Holy Roman Empire with enthusiastic appreciation of the great emperors; from Droysen, the diligent historian of Prussia; from Dahlmann, whose labours included German, English, French, and Danish history; from Häusser, whose masterpiece is an elaborate history of Germany since the death of Frederick the Great; from Waitz, the chief authority on the growth of the German constitution; from Sybel, by whose researches much new light has been thrown on the French Revolution; from Mommsen, the vigorous historian of ancient Rome; and from Curtius, whose history of Greece is not more remarkable for its learning than for the clear and attractive arrangement of its materials. Of late years much attention has been devoted to “Culturgeschichte,” which describes the life of a people in all its phases, either through the whole past or during a particular epoch. A favourable example of works of this class is Karl Biedermann’s Germany in the Eighteenth Century.
Recent German literature is extraordinarily rich in histories of the individual elements of intellectual development. In its histories of philosophy it is absolutely supreme. Hegel still ranks as one of the greatest historians of philosophy, although the value of his expositions is lowered by a tendency to find his own doctrine in preceding thinkers. Erdmann, Schwegler, and Ueberweg were among the most important workers in the same department; and with them may be named Kuno Fischer, who writes the history of philosophy with a striking power of sympathetic appreciation and in a fascinating literary style. Less attractive in manner than Fischer, Lange, in his History of Materialism, did full justice for the first time to the different phases of materialistic philosophy, and is especially happy in the skill with which he traces the growth of a recognition of law in the phenomena of nature. Since Lessing, aesthetics have always formed a prominent branch of philosophy among the Germans; and they have hardly been less successful as historians of art than as historians of metaphysics. High distinction has been achieved, among other art historians, by Kugler, Vischer, Carrière, and Lübke. Of historians of literature, especially German literature, there is almost a small army. One of the earliest of these was Gervinus, who, although his critical canons are not now in favour, had an unusual faculty for grouping his materials and sharply defining what seemed to him the essential qualities of particular writers and movements. The history of German literature by Vilmar, although written in an eloquent style, is too partial in its judgments to have permanent value. Koberstein is remarkable rather for industry than for insight; but the literary histories of Julian Schmidt and Gυttschall are both marked by decisive, often penetrating, critical judgment. One of the best works of this kind for style, thought, and research is Hettner’s elaborate History of Literature in the Eighteenth Century.
The Germans possess a vast mass of biographical literature, a large proportion of which is rendered almost worthless by inartistic treatment. Luther alone forms the subject of more than one hundred and fifty biographies; yet a satisfactory study of the Reformer has still to be written. In recenttimes, however, there has been amarked improvement, several biographers having conscientiously striven not only to be thorough in research but to write simply, clearly, and vividly. The first to set a good example was Varnhagen von Ense, whose numerous biographies are masterpieces of well ordered and dignified prose. Germany owes an admirable biography of Ulrich von Hutten to Strauss, who also wrote interesting sketches of several prominent modern authors. Other biographies which deserve mention are Karl Grün’s philosophical study of Feuerbach, Rosenkranz’s scholar-like life of Diderot, and Justi’s life of Winckelmann. The popularity of Mr Lewes’s life of Goethe for a long time deterred German writers from touching a subject he had handled with so much talent; but of late there has been a remarkable revival of interest in Goethe, and Hermann Grimm has ventured to present a fresh study of his intellectual and moral character.
In imaginative literature the greatest writer of the latest period is Heinrich Heine. No German writer since Goethe and Schiller has excited so much interest throughout Europe, and among the Germans themselves his fame is steadily rising. He professed to care little for what men said of his poetry, yet it is mainly as a lyrical poet that his name lives. His Buch der Lieder is one of the most fascinating collections of lyrics in European literature. Although a deadly enemy of the Romantic school, he had moods, especially in youth, in which he shared its dreaminess and mysticism; and these qualities he expressed in some of his best songs, but with perfect grace of style and melody. He struck with equally finished art chords of passion and aspiration beyond the range of even the chief Romanticists, for Heine was in every respect a modern man, penetrated by a love of freedom, and by a high enthusiasm for beauty. Except Goethe, no other German poet achieves his effects by such simple means; with the language of a village maiden he gives shape to feelings and ideas of exquisite refinement and subtlety. His satirical poems are sometimes gross and cynical; but none of them are without touches of humour. In his pro≡e, which deals with a wide range of subjects, he is rather French than German in his love of sparkling epigram and biting wit Almost every theme, however sacred, gives Heine occasion for mockery, but in the midst of cruel laughter he is often restrained by a pathetic memory, which he expresses with unsurpassed delicacy. This combination of pathos, wit, and humour giveshim a unique place in the literature of his country.
Platen, who belongs rather to the previous period, was one of the many writers whom Heine bitterly attacked, but he was a poet of considerable power. Like Heine himself, he failed in the drama; and even in his successful writings he is not remarkable for wealth of thought or depth of feeling. His odes and sonnets, however, are in language and metre so artistically finished as to rank among the best classical poems of modern times. Börne was another writer whose fame, although the two men were at one time warm friends, suffered from Heine’s satire. He was a manly literary critic, and as a political writer dealt at the despotic Governments of Germany blows which they keenly felt.
A school of writers known as Young Germany was deeply influenced by Heine, and had the good fortune to be singled out for persecution by the confederate diet. Their object was to effect a complete revolution in the political and social institutions of Germany, and at the same time they became the propagandists of ideas intended to undermine the church. The most important member of the school was Karl Gutzkow, who wrote a number of dramas which maintain their hold of the stage. He was also the author of many romances, of which the chief were Die Ritter vom Geiste (“The Knights of the Mind”) and Der Zauberer von Roni (“The Magician of Rome”). These works are of enormous length, and their polemical tendency has already begun to weaken their interest. But the leading characters are genuine creations, and the incidents are interwoven with great artistic skill. Heinrich Laube, another member of the group, is the author of an historical romance, The German War, which represents, in a clear, fresh, and vivid style, the condition of Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. He has also enriched the stage with several excellent plays. Less important authors associated with these writers were Gustav Kühne, Theodor Mundt, and Ludolf Wienbarg—the latter universally recognized as a keen and vigorous critic.
The novel has acquired the same important place in Germany as in France and England, and it need scarcely be said that the vast majority of works of this class are forgotten almost as soon as they are issued. One of the most distinguished of recent novelists is Gustav Frey tag, whose chief work, Soll und Haben (“Debit and Credit”), is a study of commercial life intensely realistic in tendency. Lately he has undertaken a series of romances, Die Ahnen (“The Forefathers”), intended to represent in a highly poetic form the different epochs of German history. Important historical romances have been written by Levin Schücking, who is remarkable for his power of vividly conceiving character. The Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn is the writer of a number of novels in an artificial style, affecting to represent good society. Her manner has been cleverly satirized by Fanny Lewaid, who is one of the best German novelists, keen and true in observation of life, and artistic in method. Paul Heyse’s short tales have firmness of outline, and are at the same time full of delicate grace; as a writer of elaborate romance, he has also achieved success. The humour of Hackländer is generally considered to surpass that of any other recent writer; and among the novelists of simple village life Auerbach easily takes the first place. Frederick Spielhagen has penetrated deeply into the spirit of the age, and in Problematische Haturen (“Problematic Natures”) and other works reveals its tendencies with cultivated imaginative force. The novels of Fritz Reuter, although written in Platt Deutsch, take high rank; they are fresh in style, and combine keen observation of life with a fine appreciation of comic effect.
Contemporary literature has not, as in England, been divorced from the stage; the best imaginative writers find scope for their energies in work for the theatre. Besides Gutzkow and Laube, Gottschall has been a fertile writer both of tragedy and comedy; Freytag also, and Prutz, are original dramatic authors. The dramas of Christian Grabbe, full of eccentricity, but with a certain wild power, originated a movement resembling to some extent that of the “Sturm und Drang” poets. Its chief representative was Hebbel, a writer endowed with imaginative gifts, but who marred every play by affectation and extravagance. Freiherr von Münch-Bellinghausen, known as Friedrich Halm, author of Der Fechter von Pavenna (“The Gladiator of Ravenna”), and Mosenthal, author of Deborah, achieved distinction by aiming at something higher than mere stage effect. Paul Lindau is the author of some refined comedies, and Adolf Wilbrandt has written both comedies and tragedies which meet the taste of Vienna. Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer and Roderich Benedix were prolific writers of plays with the sort of merit that belongs to an intimate knowledge of the technical necessities of the stage.
Many recent writers have attempted lyrical and narrative poetry, some of them with sufficient power to maintain worthily the traditions of German literature. From about 1830 onwards, a group of Austrian poets, more or less political in tendency, commanded the respect of all Germans. The chief was Count von Auersperg, who assumed the name of Anastasius Grün. His first important work was Walks of a Vienna Poet, published in 1831, but his fame rests chiefly on two volumes of lyrics issued some years later. He had enthusiastic faith in the future, and expresses his hopes in verses full of colour, sometimes brilliant and effective. Another Austrian writer, Nicholas Strehlenau, generally called Lenau, gives powerful utterance in several poems to the sorrows of a deeply melancholy nature. Meissner and Hartmann, Bohemian poets, have a considerable reputation, the latter as a writer of great artistic merit, the former as a poet of vivid imagination and free sympathies. Leopold Schefer was for a long time a popular poet, and the genial optimism of his chief book, the Laienbrevier, is interesting because of the contrast it presents to the pessimist tone of more recent writers. Before the revolutionary movements of 1848 a number of writers attempted to force poetry into the service of freedom. Of these one of the best known is Herwegh. He advocated liberty with a vehemence that won for him immense popularity, but the interest of his writings is rather historical than literary. Ferdinand Freiligrath was of a more truly poetic temperament. His poems, although without delicacy, have graphic force, and in his earlier writings he displayed a remarkable talent for reproducing the gorgeous colours of tropical landscape. Other poets who have made verse a means of awakening in the popular mind a passion for political justice are Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who has a considerable command of musical expression, and Franz Dingelstedt, a versatile writer who has done good work as a novelist and dramatist. Gottschall, already named as a dramatist and an historian of literature, began as a political poet, but afterwards gave evidence of disinterested imagination in two narrative poems, Göttin and Zeno. The lyrics of Emmanuel Geibel, some of which are also political, with a conservative tendency, have found favour with nearly all classes; they reveal a gentle and refined spirit, and are written with something of Uhland’s grace. Among the most distinguished contemporary writers iβ Robert Hamerling, whose poetry is remarkable for the boldness of its conceptions and its almost vehement passion.
Since the middle of the 18th century Germany has never been without writers of deep thought and vast research; and in her supreme writers — in Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Heine—these qualities have been associated with a feeling for artistic finish which has not been surpassed in England or even in France. But the tendency of German authors beneath the highest rank has been to neglect the laws of expression. Thus there is in Germany an extraordinary quantity of literature which, although the result of great labour, and full of ideas, makes intolerable demands on the patience of readers. The lack of measure and precision has in many cases deprived of nearly all value powers of imagination, reason, and industry, which would have made the literary fortune of a Frenchman. This deficiency of style is in some degree explained by the fact that an undue proportion of German literature has hitherto been addressed, not to the public, but to specialists, who naturally concern themselves more with substance than with form. During the present generation there have been symptoms of a remarkable change. Ever since the Germans began to feel that they are one people, arid to strive after political unity, an increasing number of scholars and thinkers have displayed an ambition to extend their influence, while several imaginative writers have consciously appealed to the nation as a whole. The inevitable result has been that they have aimed at more methodical arrangement than their predecessors, and have cultivated greater force, simplicity, and directness of speech. Nothing has fostered this wholesome tendency so much as the growing respect of the nation for the great masters of its language, a respect indicated by the new editions of their writings which appear year after year. The higher class of poets, dramatists, and novelists have also profited by the deepening conviction that the function of art is not to battle with practical evils, but to create a world of ideal beauty in which the mind may find refuge from the perplexities of real life.
Bibliography. —Koberstein, Grundriss der deutschen Nationalliteratur; Gervinus, Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen; Vilmar, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur; Goedeke, Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung; Kurz, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur; Hettner, Literaturgeschichte des 18 ea Jahrhunderts; Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland von Leibniz bis auf Lessing's Tod, and Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 19«» Jahrhundert; Gottschall, Geschichte der deutschen Natwnalliteratur in der ersten Hälfte des 19«» Jahrhunderts-, Gostwick and Harrison, Outlines of German Literature. (J· SI·)
Index.
Academies, 472. Adelaide, queen, 483. Administration, 463. Adolf of Nassau, 493. Agnes, empress, 487. Agriculture, 451.
Albert I. of Austria, 493. Albert II., 496.
Alemanni, 476.
Alcmannian language, 519.
Alsace taken by France, 502; restored to Germany, 513.
Animats, 451.
Anno, archbishop, 487. Area, 447.
Arminius, 475.
Army, statistics of, 467; ancient, 474.
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 543.
Amdt, Johann, 529. Arnim, Achim von, 542. Arnulf, 481.
Aschaffenburg, concordat of, 496.
Asphalt, 453.
Attila, 476.
Aue, Hartmann von, 523.
Augsburg confession, 498; peace of, 499.
Austria erected a duchy, 490; wars of, with the Turks, 496; under Maria Theresa, 503; shattered by Napoleon, 504; Prussia's jealousy of, 505, 508; revolution of 1848, 507; war with Prussia, 511.
Ballads, early, 524. Banking, 466. Barbarossa, 489.
Barditus, 522.
Basedow, 540.
Bavaria, 476; incorporated by Charlemagne, 479.
Bavarian language, 517. Bee culture, 452.
Beetroot sugar, 451.
Berengar of Lombardy, 483.
Berlin assembly, 507. Berthold the monk, 526. Bibliography, 472, 514, 546.
Biography, writers on, 545.
Bismarck, 510, 514.
Boehme, Jacob, 529. Boniface, St, 478.
Book trade, 472. Bouvines, battle of, 491. Brandenburg granted to Frederick of Hohenzollern, 495.
Brandt, Sebastian, 527.
Breitenfeld, battle of, 500.
Bremer Beiträge, 533.
Bremen, trade of, 463.
Breteslaus of Bohemia, 487.
Breweries, 451.
Brockes, poet, 532. Bund, the, 509.
Bürger, 540. Burgundians, 475. Burgundy bequeathed to
Conrad II., 487.
Caesar, Julius, 474.
Canals, 460.
Canossa, Henry IV.’s penance at, 488.
Carlsbad decrees, 505. Catholic league, 500. Census statistics, 455.
Chamisso, 542.
Charlemagne, 478.
Charles Martel, 477.
Charles the Great, 478. Charles the Bald, 480.
Charles the Fat, 481.
Charles IV., 495.
Charles V., 497.
Charles VI., 502.
Charles VΠ., 503. Chiefs, ancient, 474.
Childeric, 476.
Chivalry, age of, 492; literature of, 523.
Chloride of potash, 455.
Christianity, introduction of, 478,
Chronicles, prose, 527.
Church statistics, 468.
Church and state, 'relations of (1872), 513.
Cities, statistics of population of, 457; imperial, 492-4; power of, 495; influence of, on literature, 526.
Civilis, 475.
Classical period of literature, 536
Classics, revival of study of, 532.
Claudius, Matthias, 541.
Clergy under Charlemagne, 479.
Climate, 450.
Clovis, 476.
Coal, 453.
Coast-line, 447. Commerce, 462.
Confederation of tιibes, 475.
Confederation, German, 505; North German, 512
Conrad T.. 482.
Conrad II, 486.
Conrad III., 489.
Conrad IV. ,492.
Conrad von wiirzhurg,
524.
Copper, 454.
Cotton manufacture, 458 Council, first German, 478.
Court poets, 531.
Crimean war, 509.
Crops, 451.
Crusade, flrst and second, 4S9.
Crusade period, literature of, 523.
Currency, 466.
Customs parliament, 512. Customs revenue, 465.
Customs union, 505.
Danes, subjection of, 483.
Danish war of 1848, 507; of 1864, 511.
Debt, imperial, 466.
Dialects, 516.
Didactic poets, 525
Diet rendered permanent, 501; decay of, 505; restored, 508; imperial (1871), 513
Diets, local, 496.
Drama, rise of, 526; growth of, 529, 533.
Dukes, 477, 479.
Dürer, Albert, 529. Dutch language, 516.
Eckart, 526.
Edict of restitution, 500. Education statistics, 470. Eichendorff, 542.
Electors, 492.
Emigration statistics, 456. Emperor, title of, 479.
Empire, connexion of
Germany with the, 484. Empire of 1871, 513. English literature, influence of, 533.
Erfurt parliament, 508. Excise, 465.
Excommunication of Henry IV., 488; of Louis IV.,494.
Exports, 462.
Fables, writers of, 534. Fate-tragedies, 543. Federal council statistics, 464.
Fehmgerichte, 495.
Ferdinand I., 499.
Ferdinand II., 500.
Ferdinand III., 502.
Feudalism, 479; growth of, 481.
Fichte’s philosophy, 541.
Finance statistics, 464. Fine arts, 472. Fischart, Johann, 528. Fishes, 452.
Fleming, Paul, 530. Foreign residents, 457. ' Forests, 451.
Fortresses, 467.
Fouqué, De la Motte, 542. France, Otto’s invasion of, 483; war with Austria (1859), 510; with Germany (1870), 512.
Francis I., 503. Franconian dynasty, 486. Frankfort assembly, 506; peace of, 513. Frankish kingdom, 476. Frederick Barbarossa, 489.
Frederick II., 491. Frederick III., 494. Frederick IV., 496. Frederick II. of Prussia
(the Great), 503, his Influence on literature,
532.
Frederick william If.
(Prussia), 504. Frederick William III.
(Prussia), 504. Frederick William IV.
(Prussia), 505. Freemen, 473. French Revolution of
1789, 504; its effect on literature, 540; of 1830, 505; of 1848, 506. Frisian language, 515. Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, 530.
Funds of the empire, 465. Game, 452.
Gastein convention, 511. Gaus, 476.
Gellert, dramatist, 533 Geography, 447. Geology, 447.
Gerhardt, Paul, 530.
German kingdom, commencement of, 480; confederation, 505; empire of 1871, 513.
Germanicus, 475. Gero, margrave, 483. Gervinus, historian, 544. Gleim, poet, 534.
Gods, ancient, 474. Goethe, 537; imitators of, 541.
Gold, 454.
Golden Bull, 495. Goths, 475.
Gottfried of Strasburg, 524.
Göttingen school of poets,
540.
Gottsched, dramatist, 533. Götz von Berlichingen,
529.
Government, 463 Graphite, 453.
Gregory VII., pope, 488. Grillparzer, 543. Grimmelshausen, 531. Gryphius, 530.
Gudrun, 524. Günther, poet, 532 Gustavus Adolphus, 500. Haffs, 447.
Hagedorn, poet, 533. Hainbund poets, 540. Halle school of poets, 534.
Hamburg, trade of, 463. Hanseatic league, 493, 495.
Hapsburg, rise of house of, 493; accession of, 496.
Hardenberg, 542. Hartmann von Aue, 523. Hegel, 544.
Heine, Heinrich, 545. Heinse, Wilhelm, 541. Heldenbuch, 525.
Hemp manufacture, 459.
Henry I., 482.
Henry II., 4S6.
Henry III., 487.
Henry IV., 487.
Henry V., 489.
Henry VI., 490.
Henry VII., 493.
Henry the Lion, 499.
Henry the Proud, 489. Herder, 537.
Hesse-Cassel disturbances, 508.
High German language,
517.
Hildebrandslied, 522.
History, 473.
History, writers of, 535, 543, 544.
Hoffmannswaldau, 531.
Hohenstaufen dynasty, 489; literature of the period, 523.
Holy Roman empire, 484; end of, 504.
Hops, 451.
Houses, statistics of, 458. Humanists, 527.
Humboldt, Alexander von, 544.
Hussite war, 495.
Hutten, Ulrich von, 498, 528.
Hymns, 529, 534. ∏lland, dramatist, 541. Illegitimacy, 456.
Imperial cities, 492 Imperial diet (1871), 513 Imperial title, 479, 484.
Imports, 462.
Industries, 458. Investitures, war of, 488. Iron, 453.
Islands, 447.
Italy, invasion of, by Otto !.. 483; by Otto II.. 485; by Barbarossa, 490; war in (1859), 510.
Jacobi, Friedrich, 541. Jesuit influence, 500. Joseph II., 504.
Jute manufacture, 459. Kant, Immanuel, 540. Kanzleisprachen, 520. Kleist, E. C. von, 534. Kleist, Heinrich von, 543. Klopstock, 535.
Kotzebue, 541.
Krieg auf der Wartburg,
525.
Lakes, 450.
Language, 514.
Languages, statistics of, 470.
Lavater, 540.
Lead, 454.
Learning, monastic, 522. Lechfeld, battle of, 484. Leibnitz, 532.
Leipsic, battle of, 5C4. Leopold I., 502.
Leopold II., 504.
Lessing, 536.
Letters, statistics of, 460 Liberalism in Prussia, 510
Libraries, 472.
Lichtenstein, 525. Lignite, 453.
Linen manufacture, 459.
Literary societies, establishment of, 530, 533.
Literature, 522.
Live stock, 451.
Logau, 531.
Lohenstein, poet, 531. Lorraine passes to France, 502.
Lothair, 480.
Lothair the Saxon, 489. Louis the Pious, 479. Louis the German, 480. Louis the Child, 481. Louis d’Outremer, 483. Louis IV., 494.
Louis XIV. of France, 502.
Low German language, 516.
Ludwigslied, 522.
Luther, 497: language of, 520; literary work of, 528.
Lützen, battle of, 501.
Luxembourg dynasty, 491.
Lyrics in age of chivalry, 525, 529; religious,
534.
Magyars, 481; defeat of, at Lechfeld, 484.
Maria Theresa, 503.
Maroboduus, 475. Matthias, emperor, 499.
Maurice of Saxony, 499.
Maximilian I., 496; en-couragesliterature, 527.
Maximilian II., 499.
Meistersänger, 226. Mendelssohn, Moses, 534.
Merovingian kings, 477.
Metals, 453.
Middle German language,
518.
Migrations of tribes, 475.
Minerals, 452.
Mines, 452.
Minnesänger, 525.
Minstrels, 522.
Miracle plays, 526.
Modern High German language, 520.
Monastic learning, 522.
Money, 466.
Moscherosch, 531.
Möser, Justus, 535.
Mosheim, 535.
Mountains, 448.
Mumer, Thomas, 527.
Mysteries, 526.
Mystics, 526.
Mythology, ancient, 474.
Napoleon Bonaparte, 504. Napoleon III., 512.
Narrenschiff, 527.
National Liberals, 512.
National literature, 535, 543.
Navy, statistics of, 468. Neuchâtel affair, 510.
Newspapers, 472.
Nibelungenlied, 524.
Nicolai. 534.
Nimeguen, peace of, 502.
Nobles, increase of. 484; mediate, 486; discontent of, 498.
North German Confederation, 512.
Northmen, 481.
Novalis, 542.
Novelists, modern, 545.
Observatories, 472.
Occupations, statistics of, 458.
Old German language, 516.
Opitz, Martin, 530.
Otto I., 483.
Otto II., 485.
Otto III., 485.
Otto IV., 491.
Papacy,degraded state of, temp. Henry III., 487.
Parzival, 524.
Patriotic writers. 535, 543.
Peasants’ war, 498.
Pegnitzschäfer, 531.
Petroleum, 453
Pfahlbürger, 493
Philip of Hohenstaufen, 491.
Philological writers. 543.
Philosophy, development of, 532; popular, 534; modern, 544.
Physical features, 447. Pietistic movement, 532.
Pippin, 477.
Pippin of Aquitania, 480.
Plains, 448, 449
Plateaus, 448.
Poetry, ancient, 522; court, 531; didactic, 525; recent, 546.
Poland, partition of, 503.
Poles, early allegiance of, 486.
Population, statistics of, 455; density of, 457.
Ports, principal, 463.
Post-office, 460.
Pragmatic sanctions, 492, 502.
Prague, peace of, 511.
Preaching, influence of (13th century), 526.
Principalities, division of,
492.
Prose, rise of, in literature, 525.
Prose writers, 529.
Protestant Union and
Catholic League, 500.
Prussia, early conquest of, 491; growth of, 503; reform in 1848, 507; war with Austria, 511.
Railways, 459.
Rainfall, 450.
Ranke, Leopold, 544.
Raspe, Henry, 491.
Rastislaus, 480.
Reformation, period of, 497; influence of, on literature, 528.
Reichsgericht, 514.
Reichstag statistics, 464.
Reineke Vos, 527.
Religion, statistics of, 468; ancient. 474.
Renaissance, influence of. on the people. 497; on literature. 527.
Representation statistics, 464.
Restitution, edict of, 500. Revolution, French, of 1789, 504; of 1830,505.
Revolutions of 1848, 506.
Reynard the Fox, 527.
Rhenish confederation,
493, 504.
Richter, Jean Paul, 541.
Rivers, 449.
Roads, 459.
Roman emperor, title of. 479, 484.
Roman invasion and conquest, 474.
Romances, poetical, 527; of 17th century, 531.
Romantic school of poets, modern. 541.
Rückert, 543.
Rudolf I., 493,
Rudolf II.,499.
Rupert, elector, 495.
Sachs, Hans, 528. Sachsenspiegel, 525.
Salic code, 476.
Salt, 455.
Sancta Clara, satirist, 531.
Saxon dynasty, 482.
Saxon school of literature,
533.
Saxons, 477.
Saxony, conquest of, 478; hostility of, to Henry IV., 488.
Schiller, 538; imitators of,
541.
Schlegel, A. W. von, 542.
Schlegel, F. von, 542.
Schleiermacher, 543.
Schleswig-Holstein question, 507, 510.
Schools, statistics of, 471.
Schopenhauer, 544. Schubart, 540,
Schupp, 531. Schwdbenspiegd, 525.
Science, recent, 544. Scientific societies, 472.
Sedan, battle of, 513,
Seven Weeks' War, 511.
Seven Years’ War, 503; its effect on literature, 536.
Sexes, proportion of, 456.
Shipping, 461.
Sigismund, 495.
Silesian school of poets, first, 530; second, 531.
Silesian war, 503.
Silk, 459.
Silver, 454.
Slavs, 476, 480, 483.
Smalkald league, 498.
Socialism, 513.
Societies, scientific, 472; literary, establishment of, 530, 533.
Spanish succession, war of, 502.
States of the empire, 455.
Statistics, 447.
Stilling, Jung, 541.
Strauss, 544.
Stuπn und Drang movement, 536, 540.
Suso, 526.
Swabian league. 495.
Swabian school of poets» 543.
Swiss league, 494.
Swiss school of poets, 533.
Switzerland threatened by Prussia, 510.
Tauler, 526.
Taxation statistics, 465.
Telegraphs, 461.
Tell, william, 494.
Temperature, 450.
Theatres, early, 529, 530. Tħeodoric, 477.
Theologians, liberal, 535.
Thirty Years' War, 500; its effect on literature,
530.
Thomasius, 532.
Tieck, 542.
Tilly, 500.
Tobacco, 451.
Towns, statistics of population of, 457; Roman origin of, 475; fortification of, 482.
Trade, statistics of, 462.
Trades, industrial, 458.
Tribes, ancient, 473; confederations of, 475.
Tyll Eulenspiegel, 527.
Uhland. 543.
Union, German, 508.
Universities, 471.
Vandals, 476.
Vegetation, 450.
Verdun, treaty of, 480.
Vienna, congress of, 504.
Village constitution, 473. Vine culture, 451.
Vital statistics, 456.
Voss, 541.
Wackenroder, 542.
Wallenstein, 500.
Walther von der Vogelweide, 525.
Weckherlin, poet, 530.
Wenceslaπs of Bohemia, 495.
Wernicke, 532.
Westphalia, peace of, 501.
Wieland, 535; imitators of, 541.
William I. (of Prussia),
510; crowned emperor, 513.
lVinckelmann, 535.
Wine, 451.
Wolf, 532.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, 524.
Woollen manufacture,459.
Worms, concordat of,
489; diet of (1495), 497.
Zinc, 454.
Zollverein, states of, 455 ,∙ formation of, 505.
