■ w// m UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY BOOK CLASS VOLUME Mwm sp m ajlLr w :: si m m m Wip * M* -*JilL'J; , oOcOy/ i; // c^- • • , | f 7 ^%fci iBi wmmm # - '"Oic 7 - 1' fpp ®Ryil # «■ Ml M' A\i'Z/ /^Tv - O. T> v//IV Will// '// \ Sw ////, l\ af :^j^j'; ,7- . O^ipOi1 / — 1 i ‘ ■ ' *b\ 0F ^\N O 'SmC'jii Ov i VO Jr, 'TFTv'''' ■ 7/0^’^''' ]/, jJjt O /y/^' jfn'K '•O' If/' ,vn\s ^1 # m *S~ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/historyofgermanl02sche_0 A HISTORY OF ;erman literature W. SCHERER TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD GERMAN EDITION BY MRS. F. C. CONYBEARE ♦ EDITED BY F. MAX MULLER $ \ VOLUME II. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1890 [ AU rights reserved ] CONTENTS OF VOL. II. CHAPTER XI, he Age'of Frederick the Great. Frederick and the national life, i. The Seven Years’ War, i. The Saxon Poets, i. Leipzig 2 Relations of Frederick with Gottsched and Gellert, 2. Gottsched, 3. Gellert, 8. The ‘ Bremer Beitrage,’ 12. Rabener, 13. Zacharia, 14. Elias Schlegel, 15. Younger dramatists, Cronegk and Bra we, 16. Christian Felix Weisse, and the Operetta, 16. Revival of German popular song, 18. Zurich and Berlin.19 Bodmer and Breitinger, 22. Frederick the Great, 24. Poets in Halle, 28. Poets in Berlin, 29. Klopstock, 30. Ewald von Kleist, 38. Salomon Gessner, 39. Wieland, 40. Lessing.47 First period (to 1755), 47. Connection with Voltaire, 49. ‘Miss Sara Samson,’ 52. — Second peiiod (to 1772), 53. Seven Years’ War, 54. Gleim’s War Songs, 54. Foreign popular poetry and ballads, 55. ‘The Litteraturbriefe,’ 58. ‘Minna von Barnhelm,’ 69. German Novels, 61. Revival of Classical influence, 62. Winckel- mann 67. Lessing’s Laokoon, 65. ‘The Hamburgische Dramaturgic,’ 67. The Antiquarian letters, 69. ‘Emilia Galotti,’ 71. —Third period (to 1781), 72. Theological controversy, 75. * Nathan der Weise,’ 77. Herder and Goethe .82 Essays on ‘German style and art,* and the literary revolution, 82. Justus Moser, 83. J. G. Hamann, 85. Herder, 86. Goethe’s youth (to 1775), 91. Herder’s influence on Goethe, 94. ‘Gotz,’ 96. Other poems, 99. Religious and moral development, 102. Werther, * 107. German letter-writing, no. VI Contents PAGE The Literary Revolution and the Illuminati . . . .114 Dramatists of the Storm and Stress Period, Lenz, Klinger, Wagner, Maler Muller, Torring, 115 : Schiller, 116. Gottingen brotherhood, 119 : Boie, Miller, Holty. The Stolbergs, 120. Voss, 121. Burger, 122. Revival of early German poetry, 123. Herder’s Storm and Stress period, 124. Lavater, Jung Stilling, Claudius, 126. Fritz Jacobi, 127. Heinse, 128. Wieland at Weimar, 129. ‘ Oberon,’ 131. Lessing, Lichtenberg and Nicolai, 132. Frederick the Great’s ‘ De la litterature Allemande,’ 132. Berlin, 133. Moses Mendelssohn, 135. Kant, 136. Herder’s ‘ Ideen,’ 139. CHAPTER XII. Weimar..142 Goethe at the Wartburg, 142. Anna Amalia and Karl August, 143. Goethe’s Masque for Dec. 18, 1818, 144. Goethe.145 Official work, and court life in Weimar, 145. Frau von Stein, 146. Scientific studies, 148. Edition of his early works, 150. ‘Egmont,’ 151. ‘ Iphigenie,’ 152. ‘Tasso,’ 156. Poems written at Weimar, 15S. Travels, 161. Goethe’s Italian journey, 162. Studies in physics, 163. Views on Art, 164. Christiane Vulpius, 166. Roman Elegies, 167. Schiller and Goethe.170 The ‘ Horen,’ 172. ‘ Xenien,’ 173. Goethe as director of the Court Theatre, 174. His dramatic writings, 179. ‘Natural Daughter,’ 179. ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ 181. Tales, 186. ‘AlexisundDora,’ 187. ‘Hermann und Dorothea,’ 187. ‘Achilleis,’ 194. Ballads, 195. Social Songs, 196. Allegorical Dramas, 197. Schiller. 199 Youthful poems, 200. ‘Don Carlos,’ 201. Political opinions, 203. Philosophy and History, 204. Poems, 206. Dramas, 208. ‘ Wallen¬ stein,’ 208. ‘Maria Stuart,’ 215. ‘ Maid of Orleans,’ 218. ‘Bride of Messina,’ 220. ‘ Wilhelm Tell,’ 224. ‘ Demetrius,’ 228. CHAPTER XIII. Romanticism ........... 229 Poet-families, 229. Storm and Stress, 230. Classical taste, 230. Romanticism, 230. Science.231 German prose, 231. Literary women, 232. Philosophy, 233. Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, 235. Cosmology and Alex- of Volume II. ander von Humboldt, 236. Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Science of Man. 238. Theology, 241. Philology and History, 243. (Critical spirit, comparative method, 244. Historical method, 245. History, 24;. Philology, 247.) The older Romantic school, 248. Tieck, 249. A. W. Schlegel. 250. Fr. Schlegel, 231. Later Romantic School, 252. Arnim and Brentano, 252. Gorres, 252. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 253. Uhland, 255. Goethe, 256. Lyric Poetry. School of Hagedom, 259. School of Haller, 259. Matthisson, 260. Holderlin, 261. Poetry in local dialects, 262. Hebei, 262. Usteri, 263. Older romantic school, 263. Novalis, 263. Tieck, 264. The Schlegels, 264. Patriotic poetry, 265. Arnim; Collin ; H. v. Kleist; Fouque; Schenkendorf; Stagemann; Riickert; Komer, 265. E. M. Arndt, 266. The Swabian school, 2f>8. Justinus Kerner. 269. Uhland, 269. North Germans, Chamisso, Eichen- dorff, Wilhelm Muller, 271. Goethe, 272. (‘ Westostlicher Divan,’ 273. ‘ Trilogie der Leidenschaft,’275.) Riickert, 275. Platen, 277. Heinrich Heine, 278. ‘ Reisebilder’ 280. Songs set to music, Franz Schubert, 281. Narrative writing. Epics, 282. Novels, 283. Semi-Historical, 284. Classical and chivalrous Novels, 285. Ghost Stories, 287. Didactic Novels, 287. Novels of domestic life, 288. Satirical and humorous romances, 289. Hippel, 289. Jean Paul, 290. Tales, 293. H. v. Kleist, 295. Arnim, Fouque, Chamisso, 295. Hoffmann, 296. Eichendorff, 297. Goethe, 297. ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ 297. ‘ Wahlverwandschaften,’ 298. The Drama. Goethe, 301. ‘Pandora,’ 302. Korner, Ohlenschlager, Zacharias Werner, 303. The 1 Fate-tragedies,’ 304. Historical plays, 305. Platen, 306. Kleist, 306. Drama in Vienna, 310. Grillparzer, 312. Ferdinand Raimund, 314.—‘ Faust, ’316. History of the legend, 316. Popular Drama of Faust, 317. Treatment of the Faust Legend by Lessing and others, 318. First part of Goethe’s Faust, 319. Analysis of Faust, 320. Second part, 323. Metre and style, 326. Gretchen, 327. Helena, 330. Male characters, 331. Mephisto, 332. Faust, 332. Appendix .... Chronological Table Bibliographical Appendix Index . • • Vll PAGE 259 282 301 337 337 353 405 - - I * CHAPTER XI. THE AGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT. Frederick the Great reigned from 1740 to 1786. When he began to reign Gottsched was the leading German writer; when he died Goethe was preparing for his Italian journey, and was just completing his ‘ Iphigenie.’ This interval of forty-six years is a period of unparalleled literary and aesthetic progress, ^ and though personally the king rather held aloof from progr ess in the movement, yet his home and foreign policy contri- Frederick’s buted powerfully to its advancement. Everywhere we reign, , , * r /. . 1 , 1740 - 1780 . find traces 01 his influence; everywhere men s eyes were fixed upon one, who could so stir their minds and stimulate their zeal, who could incite other rulers to follow his example, and awaken even the admiration of his enemies. The rise of modern German literature is connected with the Seven Years’ War, just as the rise of Middle High-German chivalrous poetry was connected with the first Italian campaigns of Frederick Barbarossa. Poets were to be found among the officers of the Prussian king just as among the knightly followers of the old emperor. And though Frederick the Great gathered French writers around him, and had no great confidence in Frederick's the literary powers of his own people, yet the very French annoyance which this caused them was but a new tastes, incitement to exert their powers to the utmost, and prove to the King that he was mistaken in his judgment. A small group of Saxon poets alone remained unaffected either directly or indirectly by Frederick’s influence; but these very poets -were in point of taste most akin to him, for their culture, like his, was chiefly derived from the French; it owed its characteristic features to that phase of German taste which had been inaugurated VOL. 11. B The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. <1 under Frederick’s grandfather, and which had subsequently diffused .pkg itself more and more. It was in Prussia that French Leipzig Classicism first found a sympathetic reception,, and poets. Prussians like Wernicke and Gottsched were its most devoted apostles; but it was in Leipzig that it established its head-quarters. Leipzig. During the Seven Years’ War Frederick the Great paid repeated Relations of visits to Leipzig, and did not neglect the opportunity Frederick 0 f acquainting himself a little with the state of contem- Gottsched P oraneous German poetry. He sent for the two Pro- and fessors, Gottsched and Gellert; the former he received Gellert. on October 15, 1757, the latter on December 18,1760. Gottsched he frequently saw after this; Gellert too received a friendly invitation to come again, but never availed himself of it. Gottsched read him his translation of Racine’s ‘ Iphig^nie,’ but the king was not much impressed by it. Gellert was made to recite one of his fables, and this gained the Royal favour. ‘ That is beautiful,’ he said to Gellert, ‘ very beautiful; there is such a lilt about it (‘ so was Coulantes ’), I can understand all that; but there was Gottsched now, who read me his translation of “ Iphigenie,” and though I had the French in my hand at the same time, I could not understand a word. They also brought another poet to me, one Pietsch, but I dismissed him.’ 1 Your majesty,’ answered Gellert, ‘ him I also dismiss.’ We remember that Gottsched de¬ clared this very Pietsch, his teacher, to be the greatest poet of the eighteenth century. When Gellert was gone, Frederick remarked, ‘ That is quite a different man from Gottsched.’ And the next day at table he called him the most sensible among all the German scholars. Three years before this, the king had written a French poem to Gottsched, in which he eulogized him as the Saxon swan, and assigned to him the task of founding the literary reputation of Germany. Gottsched hastened to have these verses published and translated into several European languages. But when they appeared among the king’s collected works, they bore the inscrip- Leipzig. (/h. xi.] I^eipzig. 3 tion : ‘ Au Sieur Gellei't ! The author had meanwhile altered the address. The German public agreed with their great king in thinking Gellert quite a different man from Gottsched. Even Q Q ii erfc before the end of his life Gottsched was looked upon preferred as a fallen hero, while Gellert is esteemed even in our to days. Gottsched aimed at making an impression in Gottsched - high circles, but he only succeeded in making his way into a few small German courts; Gellert sought his readers in the middle- classes, and found them in all ranks of society. Gottsched was only acquainted with the outward tricks of poetry; Gellert was a true poet, though in a narrow sphere. Gottsched wished to make Leipzig the centre of German literature, and the place could not have been better Advantages chosen. Leipzig united the features of a large town c f Leipzig with those of a flourishing University. It was the as a literary most important commercial emporium of the Saxon- centre - Polish Empire, and the centre of the trade between the Romanic West and the Slavic East. In the eighteenth century it became, the centre of the book-trade, ousting Frankfort from the leading position which it had hitherto occupied. Its fairs were the scene of most varied life, collecting, as they did, men of all nationalities, and bringing long caravans of merchants from a great distance. The best troops of actors in Germany always went to the ‘ Leipziger Messed Everyone liked going to 1 gallant ’ Leipzig, as it was called, to Little Paris on the Pleisse, where the whole world was to be found in miniature. As early as the fifteenth century Leipzig was famed for its politeness, and even its students acquired some¬ thing of its refinement. The rude manners of the smaller Uni¬ versity towns were tabooed there, and young aristocrats studied by preference in Leipzig. The town had no court, no local aris¬ tocracy, no garrison ; but its burghers strove after moral and intellectual culture, and Leipzig was considered the most educated town in Germany. The University, with its hereditary oligarchy of Professors, orthodox and conservative, proud of their vast knowledge, which they were perhaps more intent on transmitting than on increasing, was yet alive to the general interests of culture. B 2 4 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. The book-trade drew into its service scholars, both old and young, and was of great advantage to authors on the spot. Nowhere did literary journalism flourish as in Leipzig, and nowhere else was it so easy to become an author as there. Gottsched knew how to make the best of such a favourable Gottsched’s situation, and put forth all his great personal energy literary and his wonderful power of organization, in order to aspirations. carr y out his own a j ms> He noticed that French literature was centralised, subjected to fixed rules, and protected, as it were, by an Academy ; this Academy kept guard over the purity of the language, and saw that the rules were followed; it pro¬ duced a grammar and a dictionary, it taught the right use of synonymous terms, it distributed honours, and decided what was beautiful. Gottsched wished to make Leipzig, in a literary aspect, the German Paris, and to raise the Leipzig ‘ German Society’ to the His rank of an Academie Allemande ; he himself, its senior German member, wished to have been the president of the Academy. Academy, and to have stood at the head of the German world of letters. Ambition and patriotism pointed to the same goal, and he taxed his energies to the utmost to gain for German literature what the French already possessed. He was, as we know, a disciple of Wolff. His ‘ World-Wisdom ’ (1734) is a text-book of the Wolffian philosophy. Clearness and intelligibility, the ideals of the Wolffian philosophy and the special attributes of the French mind, were by Gottsched transferred to German lan¬ guage and style. He wrote a German grammar, or ‘ Art of language,’ a book which had the widest influence, and which ir many points fixed the rules of language as they have remained to our day. He furnished some teaching on the use of synonyms, and planned a dictionary such as Adelung afterwards carried out; the latter was a scholar of great versatility, but of limited aesthetic culture, like Gottsched himself, and succeeded him as legislator in language. But good taste and correct style were regarded as even more important than a fixed grammar. Gottsched wrote an ‘Art of Rhe¬ toric’ and a ‘ Critical Art of Poetry,’ based on classical and French His ‘ Welt- weisheit,’ and his Grammar. Leipzig. Ch. XL] models. Horace and Boileau were to him what Scaliger and Ron- sard had been to Opitz. He compiled a small die- tionary of belles-lettres and liberal arts, a book full of < Redekurmt ’ useful information. He wrote many papers and essays and ‘Kri- on literary history; he tried to survey the whole field tlsctie Dicht- of German literature, and till the present century, till Jacob Grimm and his associates, no one showed such an ex¬ tensive knowledge of early German literature as Gott- A , ° J His study sched. He gave his attention both to Old High- G f early German and Middle High-German poetry and prose, German wrote papers on Veldecke’s JEneid and on Old-German llterature - morals, and translated ‘ Reinecke Fuchs’ into modern German prose. He devoted some of the articles in his small dictionary to Walther von der Vogelweide and other Minnesingers; he in¬ tended to write a history of the German drama, and he gathered together the materials for it and arranged them chronologically. In all these endeavours he was actuated by the same motives of national pride and patriotic emulation which had animated the scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; he held up all the treasures of a past literature before the eyes of those who despised the Germans, to show them what his country could achieve. Gottsched exercised a practical influence by his example and by his teaching; the more so as he was not too proud to take a warm, indeed a supreme interest in contemporary literature. He thought it no dishonour to his professorial chair to try his hand at writing German poems, or for the advancement of German poetry to associate with actors and give them his advice. He succeeded in persuading the Leipzig actors to adopt an improved 1 Hig form of stage, after the French model, and by his own dramatic activity, by inciting others to help him, and by reforms, numerous translations, he enriched their re'pertoire of plays. He made tragedy his speciality, and only wrote one somewhat clumsy pastoral-play; comedy he left to the lighter talent of his wife, the.^ much-extolled ‘ clever friend,’ Luise Adelgunde Victoria, ne'e Kulmus. Other original German writers were net altogether want¬ ing at this time, but their works were almost all indifferent or bad. 6 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire now became the presiding geniuses of German tragedy; Moliere, Dufresny, and Destouches supplied the audience with merriment, and even the coarser farces of the Danish writer, Holberg, were welcomed on the German stage, since they were the productions of a celebrated scholar. Gottsched was also an assiduous journalist, and this enabled him His to bring all his various literary interests before the journalism, world. During thirty-four years of his life he pub¬ lished newspapers, which he skilfully edited, and for the most part wrote himself. His position at the University enabled him to gather young men around him, or to employ them as collaborators. He had numerous translations made, and in so doing he rendered a service not only to literature, but to the cause of general en¬ lightenment. The most important English weekly papers, Bayle’s Dictionary, Leibniz’s ‘ Theodicee,’ the works of Fontenelle, were through his labours, and through those of his wife and other fellow- workers, rendered accessible to German readers. If we pass in review his work in this direction, his contributions to the history of literature, his strong interest in the Drama, his union of theory and history, of poetical and journalistic activity, and of original work and translation, and if we ask who was his successor in all these respects, as Adelung was in his linguistic labours, the answer cannot be doubtful. Lessing was Gottsched’s heir, Lessing, the greatest literary and art critic, the greatest translator, dramatist and dramaturgist in Germany in the period following Gottsched. But Lessing was not only Gottsched’s heir, but Gottsched’s de¬ stroyer. He felt that Gottsched’s influence fettered and hindered him, and in order to free himself from it, no means seemed to him too strong, no words too bitter, no judgment too harsh. Down to the last years of his life Gottsched continued to render , real services to the German language and to the history (jrOttSCH8& S decline of German literature. But step by step the nation begins about had deserted him, and the authors who would have nothing to do with him became more and more numerous. As a creative poet he had never accomplished any¬ thing worthy of notice; his poems are absurd; his dramas are either not original or else quite useless, a miserable patchwork of Ch. XI.] Leipzig. 7 borrowed ideas badly cobbled together, and far removed from that correctness which he was always advocating as all-important. His labours as a literary and art critic lost more and more in importance as German literature grew strong enough to dispense with the French leading-strings, and passed from imitation to original production. His stand-point was the same as that which had been adopted by Canitz, Besser, Neukirch, and Pietsch, and he wished to impose this stand-point permanently on the whole nation. Pie attacked the Lo- hensteinian taste as Wernicke had done, and he scented Lohenstein wherever he met with a loftier flight of fancy, a more exalted style of diction, or an unusual figure of speech. His influence was at its height between the years 1730 and 1740, but after that it gradually declined; he still sought to play the dictator, but no one obeyed him except a few insignificant people, who, along with himself, excited general contempt. In the year 1739 he quar¬ relled with his Academy, the German Society in Leipzig. In the year 1740 his celebrated dispute began with the Zurich scholars, Bodmer and Breitin- ger, and their adherents. In 1741 the Neuber £ troupe’ caricatured him on the Leipzig stage under the name of ‘ Fault-finder ’.(‘ Tadler ’). This action was much applauded from Dresden, where Gottsched had never gained any firm footing, and Rost, a former pupil of the dictator’s, celebrated the event in a .satirical epic. In the year 1744 the most talented Leipzig poets, Gellert, Rabener, and Zacharia, ceased to contribute as hitherto to the ‘ Belustigungen des Ver- standes und Witzes,’ a paper conducted by Magister Schwabe, a disciple of Gottsched’s, agreeably to his master’s views and in the interest of his party, and started on their own account a paper entitled the ‘Bremen Contributions.’ In 1748 appeared Klop- stock’s ‘ Messias/ and the violent attack which Gottsched made on him only proved detrimental to his own reputation. G . ottsched > 3 In the year 1752 Koch, a theatre-manager at Leipzig, quarrel with produced on his stage an operetta of English origin, Klopstock ‘ Der Teufel ist los.’ Gottsched could not tolerate and others ‘ this apparent revival of the German opera, which he hated, and Gottsched’s dispute with Bodmer and Breitinger. The * Bremer Beitrage * started in opposition to Gottsched, 1744 . 8 The Age of Frederick the Great. [ch. xr. accordingly he attacked it himself and persuaded others to attack it in pamphlets. Koch answered, speaking from his own stage, and had the laughers on his side. A long literary war now began ; Rost was at once ready with his pen, and wrote in doggrel verses a witty Epistle from the -Devil to Gottsched; this he caused to be dis¬ tributed gratuitously, and also arranged that Gottsched himself, who was just then on a journey to the Palatinate, should have a sealed packet, containing several copies, handed to him at every post¬ station on his route. Gottsched made a personal complaint to the Minister Briihl, whose secretary Rost was, but the minister had the cruelty .to pretend he knew nothing about it; Gottsched had him¬ self to read out the lampoon in Rost’s presence, and was then only told, by way of good advice, that it was surely better simply to ignore such practical jokes altogether. After that he took no further active interest in the German stage, and in 1769 Lessing denied that the stage owed anything to his efforts. Six years later, at the time when young Goethe was studying in Leipzig, he could thus report of the quondam dictator, who had just given new offence by a second marriage with a very young girl: ‘ All Leipzig despises him; no one associates with him.’ Goethe himself, how¬ ever, paid him a visit, of which, in later years, he gave a most amusing description. The former and the future leader of German literature, whose lives together embrace the years from 1700 to 1832, did thus once meet and converse together. At the time when Goethe was in Leipzig, Gellert set the literary Gellert’s tone in the University, where he was professor extra- influence. ordinarius. Though he was of sickly appearance and lectured in a hollow and whining tone, still he gathered a large circle of listeners around him, whom he exhorted alike to purity of morals and purity of style. His authority was great both in Pro¬ testant and in Catholic Germany, and he had correspondents, male and female, both among the aristocracy and the middle-classes. The soldiers of Frederick the Great, as well as their Austrian opponents, did him homage. As Melanchthon maybe said to have founded the German school-system, so Gellert may be said to have fashioned German taste. Men came to him for literary as for moral advice; he was consulted about tutors and governesses, and Ch. XI.] Leipzig . 9 his advice was sought in the choice of wives or husbands. ‘ To believe in Gellert,’ said a later critic, ‘ is among our people almost the same thing as believing in virtue and religion.’ But the general confidence which he enjoyed as a man and a teacher was due really to his extraordinary popularity as a writer. Gellert tried his hand in many branches of literature. He wrote pastoral plays, well meant but crude in style, comedies, awkwardly composed, yet giving a faithful reflection of German His playa middle-class life, and a novel which rambles through and distant lands, and piles up extraordinary phenomena lectures, of the moral world in a somewhat repulsive manner. All these works had a certain success; his manual of epistolary style too was well received by the public, and his ‘ Moral Lectures,’ published after his death, seem to have found readers to appreciate them, in spite of what we should consider their commonplaces. But his fame really rested on his poetic fables and tales, which appeared in a collected edition in the years 1746 and 1748, almost at the same time as the first cantos of Klopstock’s ‘ Messias,’ and his re¬ ligious odes and hymns, which were published in 1757. Gellert’s poetic fables and tales belong to the same school as the writings of Hagedorn and his models. They set out Q e ii er t’s with the purpose of ‘ telling the truth in a figure to Fables, those who have not much understanding.’ They were 1746 and J 1748 meant accordingly to be popular and didactic, simple and useful. ‘ Where hast thou learnt to write thus ? ’ said Frederick the Great to Gellert. ‘In the school of Nature,’ answered the poet. ‘Thou hast imitated Lafontaine?’ ‘No, your Majesty, I am an original writer.’ Still, we cannot speak of Gellert without being reminded of Lafontaine, though at the same time we cannot give to the German poet the unqualified praise lavished by French critics on their great fable-writer. The bourgeois-literature of the sixteenth century was continued in Gellert, and he formed a just and appreci¬ ative judgment of the older German fable-poetry. He himself wrote more tales than genuine fables; his heroes are more often men than animals, and the types of character which he brings before us have no symbolical and general value, but are only true in their particular context. They are not types of humanity as it io The Age of Frederick the Great . [Ch. XI. exists in all ages, but are the men of that particular age, described by a poet who formed his style on Lafontaine, and who tells, in a natural and artistic manner, stories full of the charm of innocence and cheerfulness. His versification is free and flowing, and his rhymes so unaffected that they seem almost to come in by chance. His easy and flexible style seems to be but an idealised form of the conversational language of every-day life; sometimes, His style. . . , . , , however, he is almost too simple and transparent, and draws in coarse outlines as though for childish minds, while in genuine descriptive power he falls far short of Lafontaine. As it happened, Gellert’s readers were really as childish as he reckoned on their being: they delighted in having everything clearly brought before them, they expected to find in poetry a better world than that in which they lived, and were well pleased to see the good rewarded, the bad punished, and the hypocrite unmasked and disgraced. One thing Gellert learnt from the French and introduced once more into German art, namely grace, the most subtle secret of poetic charm. Gellert, like Hagedorn, devoted himself mainly to satirical pictures of contemporary manners, and derived much of his material from the English weekly papers. In his lectures he would sketch out moral characters in the style of Labruyere and Theo¬ phrastus, in whose sketches all the leading characteristics of the same type are accumulated in a single individual. He does not always borrow his materials from real life, but often from literary tradition. Thus he described women in the true spirit of the older satire, as fond of dress, quarrelsome, prudish and yet voluptuous, inconstant, gossipy, and somewhat selfish, fond of feigning to swoon and of all kinds of artifices. But what were formerly called vices are now only weaknesses. Gellert does not despise women, he only teases them; and with him, these fiail, worldly, and imperfect creatures are almost always pretty and charming ; they have grace and that subtle wit for which the Saxon women were specially famed, and they know how to converse with roguish abandon and charming freedom on all the tender experiences of the heart. Gellert’s paternal home was a Saxon parsonage, and he had begun by studying theology. He remained all his life a strictly religious and scrupulously conscientious man. Still this self- Ch. XI.] Leipzig. ii examining bachelor did his best to be a liberal man of the world, and to entertain tolerant views of life ; and pious moralist Gellert s as he was, was still a disciple of the ‘ enlightenment * character, movement. With all his humility, gentleness, and love of peace, he was yet ready to do battle for the cause of reason and humanity. It was part of his creed to make men happy, and not to interfere with their harmless pleasures. He declared the flatterer of great people to be more dangerous than the free-thinker. He fought against hypocrisy and intolerance, against religious and class prejudices; but he only fought with the weapons of temperate warning, and in his hands men grew up docile and amenable to reason. It was not his way to rail at vice directly, but to enlist men’s sympathies and admiration on the side of virtue; and this he did by depicting the good as beautiful, expedient, and conducive to happiness, thus winning to the side of a not too rigorous morality the aesthetic as well as the egoistic impulses of men. As utterances in song of the spirit of liberal Gellert’s religion, Gellert’s hymns rank as classics. Human hymns, and general interests preponderate in them. Their most sacred aim is to glorify virtue and to inculcate the duties of practical Christianity. They are divided by the author himself into didactic odes, and odes for the heart. The former are intended to furnish instruction and food for the understanding, while the latter are meant to bring home to our feelings all that is sublime and touching in religion. But predominance is given throughout to teaching and reflection, and the heart is appealed to through the intellect. Gellert had the warmest admiration*for the old church-hymns, and he speaks with reverence of the inimitable language of the Bible, its divine sublimity and ravishing simplicity. But he himself had not the language of the Bible at his command, nor did he profess that strength of conviction and emotion which alone lends power to the word. He took extreme pains to elaborate the form of his sacred songs, availing himself even of the help of his friends in the work, but he permitted things notorious for their bad taste to re¬ main in them. Still, his hymns must not be rejected as a whole on account of a fault here and there. No one can listen without the deepest emotion to those six hymns of his which have 12 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. xi. been set to powerful music by Beethoven; and it was Gellert’s words which inspired that music. Gellert died in 1769, at the age of 54 ; he did not live to see the great literary awakening which took place during the next ten Gellert’s years. Round him clustered a circle of able lite- disciples. rar y men, some of whom were really distinguished: Gartner, Rabener, Konrad Arnold Schmid of Liineburg, the three Schlegels, Cramer, Ebert, Giseke, and Zacharia. Klop- stock too, though less in sympathy with Gellert, belonged to the same group, and in 1747 he celebrated these poets in an ode, entitled ‘An meine Freunde/ which he later on changed to ‘ Wingolf/ The members of this circle were mostly natives of Upper Saxony, or of some part of central Germany, and had received a thorough classical training at the Saxon princely schools; they all studied in Leipzig, and mostly devoted them¬ selves to the clerical or the teaching profession. Their literary organ for four years (1744-48) was the ‘ ffeue Beitrage zum The ‘Bremer Vergniigen des Verstandes und Witzes/ the so-called Beitrage.’ < Bremer Beitrage/ The contributors to this paper mostly followed in Hagedorn’s steps; they polished their writings industriously, and attained to great smoothness and correctness in form. They declared from the first that they meant to be cheerful, and to try to afford both pleasing and profitable reading for the boudoir. Thus, besides serious and moral subjects, they sang and told of love and friendship, drinking and dancing, roses and zephyrs. They published religious odes, and Klopstock’s ‘ Messias ’ first saw the light in their columns; but they also imitated Horace and Anacreon. They tried to draw tender pictures of the feelings, and asserted that ‘ to enjoy life was the command of Nature.’ They hoped that an Athens or at least a Paris would arise in Germany, where good taste in literature would purify the tone of society, and where men would learn to speak and jest more elegantly, and con¬ verse in a livelier way upon serious topics. Meanwhile their imagination peopled Leipzig with shepherds and shepherdesses full of coquettish naivete and grace; these masques of the Renaissance had not even yet lost their charm, and were adopted as a matter of course in love-poems and love-dramas. The small china figures of Ch. XI.] Leipzig. 1 3 people in pastoral costume, well-dressed and powdered, richly be- laced and be-ribboned, and advancing in stately minuet steps, bring before our eyes, even at this distance of time, the ‘ painted doll- ideals/ as Goethe called them, of this class of poetry. None of the writers in the ‘ Bremen Contributions ’ can be com¬ pared in fame and influence to Gellert and Klopstock, and but few of them have any striking individuality. The learned Cramer and Cramer wrote numerous hymns, and sermons full of Ebert, solemn rhetoric. Ebert composed cheerful songs of love and wine, and translated much from English. Rabener distinguished himself in satire, Zacharia in the burlesque epic, Elias Schlegel in the drama, and these three men exerted a marked influence, although the style and kind of writing to which they adhered has been superseded in the maturer poetry of a later epoch. Rabener was a revenue officer in Leipzig and Dresden. He died in 1771. at the age of fifty-seven. In choosing the sub- Rabener, jects of his satire he found himself limited on every 1714-1771. side; public affairs were forbidden by the strict Saxon Hls satires - censorship, and derision of private characters excited the resent¬ ment of those who felt themselves hit. Rabener made a virtue of necessity. He declared that a true satirist shrank from the very thought of offending religion or princes, and protested that the characters of his fools had no personal application, but only a general one, for there was not one amongst them which did not apply indifferently to a dozen actual fools. Rabener’s private letters contain many remarks on the state of affairs in Saxony, full of patriotic wrath and asperity. But there is nothing of this in his satires; there he seeks out harmless fools, and arranges a whole gallery of them, as Sebastian Brand and Thomas Murner, and later on Johann Lauremberg and Christian Weise had done before him. Gellert brought the fable of the sixteenth century to a classic per¬ fection, and Rabener, although he always uses prose, seems to continue the work of the older masters of satire, and is the last representative of that line of writers. He surpasses the older satirists in elegance and variety, but he does not come up to them in force. He was indebted to the English weekly papers and to the writings of Swift, and is a kindred spirit to Lucian, Cervantes, and the Danish 14 The Age of Frederick the Great . [Ch. XI. Holberg. He is inexhaustible in new forms of writing; now he gives us ironical eulogies, such as the Humanists loved, now he relates a fairy-story or a dream, now he communicates to us a bit of a chronicle, a death-list, or a will. Sometimes he chooses the form of a treatise, sometimes that of a dictionary. Sometimes he uses parody as his instrument, sometimes he clothes his satire in the epistolary form, as had been done by the authors of the ‘ Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum/ The modern reader would soon be weary of him ; his writings, with their mild jokes, were specially calcu¬ lated for the domestic German middle-classes of his day, and between them and us a wide chasm intervenes. The art of delineating individual character does not reach a high level in his writings, if we measure them by the great models, but it is there, nevertheless, and Rabener’s poems helped beyond a doubt to render the psychological and moral insight of his contemporaries more subtle and acute. In close connection with the satire stands the mock-heroic The mock- poem, which first appeared under the form of the heroic poem, animal-epic, then in the fifteenth century chose peasants as its characters, and finally in the seventeenth century received its modern form at the hands of Italian writers, who found imitators in Boileau, Pope, and the German Zacharia. Un¬ important events were treated of in the style of the Iliad; dreams, oracles, and omens were introduced, and the diffuse narrative was adorned by long drawn-out similes; human beings were surrounded by a legion of imaginary gods, protecting spirits and demons, who fight their battles for them, guide their resolutions, and decide their fortunes. The contrast between the insignificance of the object and the grandeur of the apparatus for bringing it about affords great amusement, while the requisite epic breadth of treatment leads to detailed descriptions of the interests and manners of daily Zacharia’s life under all circumstances. Zacharia wrote a series 1 Renom- of these poems, among which his earliest, ‘ Der mist ‘ Renommist/ is most worthy of notice, for in this case the youthful poet was intimately acquainted with the sphere of life which he described, and followed in a path which had been successfully trodden by various writers since the sixteenth Ch. XI.] Leipzig. 15 century. His hero is an old Jena student, Raufbold by name, who comes to Leipzig, where he revels and brawls with old Jena comrades, and even gives the constables a flogging; but he falls so deeply in love with a Leipzig beauty, that for her sake he puts on a more civilised appearance, and has his head treated by a French hairdresser; but he only earns thereby his lady’s ridicule, and after a duel with her favourite, a gallant student of Leipzig, in which he is himself worsted, he retires abashed to Halle. The contrast which actually existed, between the roughness of the Jena and Halle men and the refined manners of the Leipzig students, has been very happily turned to account. Gallantry, Fashion, and similar allegorical figures people the necessary Olympus. A few scenes are quite excellent, but the author too often falls back upon mere description. He holds the scale impartially between the gallant and the boor, giving the preference to neither; in fact he contemns and ridicules both, and is as hostile to the French fashion as any satirist of the seventeenth century. We are reminded of Moscherosch as we read of the people ‘ who are never to be relied on, who forget their promises in treaties as in marriage, and look down with pity on German faithfulness.’ In a similar strain, Gottsched’s wife, in one of her comedies, wrote against French governesses and the demoralisation which they introduced into German homes. The Gottschedians and the writers for the * Bremer Beitrage ’ rivalled each other in patriotic feeling, and, like the novel - writers Lohenstein and Bucholtz before them, they sought for congenial subjects in early German times. Arminius, the liberator from the Romans, and Henry the Fowler, the subduer of the Hungarians, became favourite heroes. They have been celebrated by Elias Schlegel, Cramer, Klopstock, the Gottschedian von Schonaich and others, in epics, dramas, and Pindaric odes. Among all the Leipzig poets, Elias Schlegel was perhaps the one who excited the greatest expectations, and in Elias many respects he may be considered the forerunner of Schlegel, Lessing. He wrote tragedies and comedies, and passed died 1749 * from imitation of the French to imitation of the Greeks; he com¬ pared Shakspeare with Gryphius, and came to the conclusion that the rules of Aristotle were sometimes better observed in English The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. 16 than in French tragedy. He aimed more and more at establishing a national literature, and abandoned classical myths for subjects chosen from German and Northern history. But he died in Denmark at an early age, in 1749. The advances which he made in theory did not exercise any direct influence on German literature, and his literary achievements hardly rose above the level of the productions of the strict Gottschedians. His comedies are only French comedies in the German language; in his tragedies the French technique is always apparent, and both his tragedies and his comedies hardly come up to the second-rate His dramas. . works of French writers. They are utterly de¬ ficient in life and in hold upon reality. Their author has never realised in his own inner experience the characters he seeks to pourtray. The contrast which he draws in his play entitled . ‘ Hermann,’ between Germany as the home of virtue, ‘ Hermann.’ J . . and Rome as the home of vice, is frigid in the extreme, as is also his division of the characters into good and bad, patriotic and unpatriotic. Elias Schlegel’s first dramas were published under Gottsched’s patronage. A few years after their appearance, in January, 1748, Caroline Neuber, manageress of a Leipzig theatre, Gottsched's former ally, but now his enemy, produced on her stage a small comedy, entitled £ Der Junge Gelehrte: ’ it was the work of a student, called Lessing, who was then in his third term at Leipzig. The piece received the applause which it merited, but its author was destined to surpass by far all the hopes which this youthful effort excited. He soon left Leipzig, and never returned thither, except for passing visits. Leipzig still remained for a long time a favourable soil for the development of dramatic talent. In Leipzig a certain Herr von Cronegk, an enthusiastic disciple of Gellert’s, wrote tragedies, Christian inculcating the lesson of self-sacrifice, while another Felix young nobleman, von Brawe, came at the same time Weisse, under the influence both of Gellert and of Lessing. 1726-1804 " Both unfortunately died young. In Leipzig, too, Christian Felix Weisse laboured with great perseverance, and in Lessing’s ‘Junger Gelehrte,’ first acted in 1748. Ch. XI.] Leipzig . 17 various ways, for the benefit of the stage. He lived from 1726-1804, and was a revenue-officer, like Rabener. He was a friend of Lessing’s, and received a powerful impetus from Lessing’s early writings, but afterwards he remained far be¬ hind the great critic, and represents the later Leipzig, when it had considerably sunk in literary importance. He was a volumin¬ ous writer, but destitute of taste and originality, and he never succeeded in forming a characteristic style of his own. Still he enjoyed a kind of reputation as a lyric and dramatic poet, a writer of children’s books, and a journalist. From 1759 His he was editor of the ‘ Bibliothek der schonen Wissen- journalism, schaften und freien Kiinste,’ and of its successor, the ‘Neue Biblio- theke,’ two very highly esteemed German periodicals. From 1775 to 1782 he published his ‘Kinderfreund,’ a weekly paper for children, more didactic than imaginative, but outwardly more successful than any other of the current publications for the young. His dramatic activity belongs to an earlier period of his life. In tragedy he had passed through various fashions, while in comedy he had never got beyond the tastes of about the year 1740. He had His achieved his best in operetta; Weisse was the author dramas of the text of the operetta, ‘ The Devil is loose,’ which and caused Gottsched so much grief (see vol. ii. p. 7). operettas. The operetta (Singspief) came over to Germany together with Shakspeare. In 1741, Herr von Borck, Prussian Am- Tlie bassador in London, afterwards a Minister and one Operetta in of the curators. of the Berlin Academy, translated Germany. . Shakspeare’s ‘Julius Caesar,’ and in 1743, the English operetta ‘ The Devil to Pay,’ by Coffey. The latter was first performed in Germany with the English music, under the title ‘ Der Teufel ist los;’ then, in 1752, it was produced in Weisse’s version, with partly new music by Staudfuss; and finally, in 1766, it was altered, im¬ proved and set to new music by Johann Adam Hiller. For about ten years after this, the Operetta dominated the German stage, and the most celebrated German operettas of this operettas period, such as ‘ Lottchen am Hofe,’ ‘ Die Liebe auf by Weisse dem Lande,’ ‘Die Jagd,’ and ‘Der Dorfbalbier,’ were and Hlller * the joint work of Weisse and Hiller. Once again Leipzig asserted VOL. II. C i8 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. her position as a centre of dramatic activity in Germany. Many young Leipzig poets followed Weisse’s example, and others in other places vied in copying him. Directors were everywhere eager to get these light pieces, and the public were not tired of paying for them. Weisse mostly turned French operettas into German, freely altering them to suit a German public, and rendering them, on the whole, somewhat coarser. From the French he borrowed his chief theme, namely, rural innocence and simplicity putting to shame the corruption of the upper classes. But the best intentions and the best models were of no good if the music was a failure; the chief thing in the operetta was the blending of both arts. Weisse was not worth much as a poet, nor Hiller as a musician, but the two together mark an important advance in poetry and music. The German opera had perished, and German popular song had taken refuge with the lowest classes of the people; the Italian opera and the Italian aria reigned supreme. With Hagedorn’s light poetry, however, and the numerous imitations which it called forth, the German song in stanzas rose again into importance as a form of music, and the old connection between poetry and song asserted itself once more. But it was Hiller and Weisse who really founded popular song anew in Germany; they started those ‘ songs in the popular tone,’ a few of which became real ‘ people’s songs.’ Weisse’s operettas were Weisse and P rose comedies with songs inserted in them, and these songs soon gained a wide-spread popularity. Weisse was able to hit on the simple and natural style suitable for ballads and slight poems of sentiment and reflec¬ tion, and these, when set to flowing melodies, found ready acceptance in all classes of society. The cheerful style of poetry, started by Hagedorn, achieved its greatest triumphs in these simple popular songs of Weisse’s. The popular tendency, which Opitz had adopted from the old social songs, and which, since the middle of the seventeenth century, had gained so much ground among the scholar-poets, now, thanks to Weisse and the composers who aided him, found its way into secular lyric song, and recom- mended itself to the people in poetry of deeper import and greater artistic value. The Leipzig drama, which had begun with classical Hiller of German popular song. Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 19 Advance of Lessing upon Christian Weise’s School. tragedies in Alexandrine metre, thus ended by assuming an entirely popular form; and long after the operetta had lost the great in¬ fluence which it possessed about 1770, Weisse’s harmless songs, often taken from his operettas, continued to be sung in wide circles. Gellert’s fables, comedies, and pastoral plays, Rabener’s satires, Zacharia's mock-heroic poems, and Weisse’s operettas all belong to the same family, which we may consider to have been founded in the seventeenth century by Christian Weise, Rector of the Gymnasium at Zittau. All these Saxon poets have a leaning towards satire, and excel most in innocent and somewhat tame humour. Middle-class life with its humorous figures on the one hand, and ideal shepherds or ideal rustics on the other, form the staple of their poetry. They treat their subjects with an easy diffuseness, and in a thoroughly natural and commonplace manner. Goethe speaks of the great water-floods which had gathered round the German Parnassus, and in the history of German literature Christian Weise and his school are remembered under the name of ‘ Water-poets.’ In spite of a certain want of historical fairness about it, this nickname, it must be admitted, is very appropriate to the general state of literature at the time of Lessing’s appearance. Les¬ sing was almost the only writer who emerged from the flood, and set up in himself a new ideal for his fellow-countrymen to pursue. Like Pufendorf and Thomasius he left his native Saxon land, and found in Prussia a more favourable sphere for his efforts, a more promising basis to build upon. Even there he quickly superseded his teachers, and found that in the literary traditions there prevalent there was much to fight against and overthrow, many inveterate and time-honoured prejudices to root up, in order to pave the way for the final triumph of a self-dependent German literature. Zurich and Berlin. We have already noticed the opposed characteristics of Haller’s and Hagedorn’s poetry (see vol. i. pp. 376 seq.). There schools of was no personal opposition between them, and Haller and their differences did not exclude mutual appreciation. Hagedorn. Haller himself has drawn a just comparison between himself and 20 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. Hagedorn, and Hagedorn was undoubtedly influenced by Hallers poetry. In the same way an author might be, as a rule, subject to Gottsched’s or Hagedorn’s influence, without being therefore neces¬ sarily blind to Haller’s merits. The Saxon, Kastner, who had been educated under Gottsched’s influence, tried his skill in didactic poetry after Haller’s style, and bore eloquent witness to Haller’s greatness. This Kastner was a Professor in Leipzig, and afterwards in Gottin¬ gen. a mathematician and an astronomer, known to German litera¬ ture chiefly as a writer of epigrams. Gellert too used frequently to adorn his moral lectures with quotations from Haller, and even Frau Gottsched cited him in private letters as her favourite poet. Nevertheless, Haller and Hagedorn did represent two important and naturally opposed tendencies in poetry and philosophy, views which, not only in the time of these writers, but subsequently, separated whole groups of German poets. Hamburg and Switzer¬ land were the centres of two different circles of culture, which were gradually extended, now meeting, now intersecting, now hostile to each other, now mingling together, till at last they were both obliterated by new disturbing forces. Hagedorn’s school of poetry had spread to Leipzig, and it was he Hagedorn’s w h° mou Ided the literature of Lower and Upper Saxony, or the Haller’s literary canons on the other hand were adopted Leipzig py tp e Zurich scholars, who developed them theoreti- school. cally, and through their Prussian colleagues trans¬ planted them to Prussia, to Halle, and to Berlin, while in the South Haller’s, they held sway over the whole Allemannic district, that is to say, over Switzerland, Alsace, Swabia, and the Upper Rhine. The Allemannic Upper Rhine, the cradle of the Hohenstaufen, had in the twelfth century led German progress, while the Saxons had remained conserva¬ tive. Now, in the eighteenth century, we find the Saxons inclined to progress, and the people of the Al¬ lemannic districts conservative. At that earlier period the centre of German intellectual life lay in the Switzerland. South-West; now it had been transferred to the North. But when those Southern provinces, with their traditions of an- or the Swiss and Berlin school. Character¬ istics of the literature of South Germany and Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin . 21 cient culture, began once more to take an active interest in literature, they presented, in contrast with the international polish of the North, a stronger originality, a greater power of language and a surer instinct for developing the distinctively Germanic ten¬ dencies of the modern spirit. The literature of Hamburg and Leipzig was based on a mingling of English, French, and popular elements; it was thoroughly modern, progressive and open to the latest between influences. The Swiss, too, were thoroughly imbued the Leipzig with French culture, and their upper classes were at and the one time more at home in French than in literary High spools German ; but when they threw off the fetters of French influence, and in their search for freedom turned their glance on England, their attention first fell, as though by elective affinity, on Shakspeare and Milton, who embodied in a supreme degree Germanic power and art. Gottsched had a thorough acquaintance with the older German literature, but his chief interest was the modern drama in the French style. The South-Germans and Swiss concerned themselves little about an artistic form of drama; but in Strassburg Schilter, Scherz, and Oberlin rendered great services to the study of the old German literature and language, while, thanks to Swiss scholars, the Minnesang, the Nibelungenlied, and the chivalrous epics were recommended anew to the attention of the public. In Hamburg and Leipzig the religious life and the aesthetic were carefully separated. Gellert purged his comedies of all allusion to divine things, and biblical phrases, such Llberal as the young Goethe brought with him from Frankfort, Leipzig, and were tabooed in polite conversation. But with the Puritanism Leipzig poets, as with Hagedorn, a vein of blithe love- of i^^ Zer " poetry and drinking-songs ran peacefully side by side with religious hymns and prayers in verse. A cheerful view of the world was quite compatible with sincere religion, if each was strictly confined to its own sphere. No doubt Gellert did give offence to some pious souls by his comedy, ‘ Die Betschwester’ (The female devotee), but on the whole, religion and the Church had now lost their undivided sway over men’s minds. In the Allemannic 22 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. provinces, on the contrary, this dominion was as powerful as in the time of the Reformation. The University of Strassburg was a stronghold of Prussian orthodoxy; in Wiirtemberg, pietism had struck deep root; the magistrates of Swiss towns exercised a rigid censorship in religious matters, and imposed, whenever they could, the yoke of theology upon science. No doubt, superstition was often mistaken for faith, and honoured as such; still, great stress was laid on upright living, austere morals, and Puritanic bearing. Wieland declared that the idea of a ball was enough to alarm all the patriots of Zurich, and to call forth, even from the mouths of babes and sucklings, prophecies of the destruction of such a second Nineveh. This spirit of seriousness and often of gloom in matters of Bodmer re Hgi° n and morality pervades Haller’s poetry, and and offers a striking contrast to the cheerfulness of the Leip- Breitinger z ig school. The same spirit animated the literary cham- of Zurich.. pj ons Q f Zurich, Bodmer, and Breitinger, and led them to consider the religious epic as the highest possible form of poetry. Bodmer and Breitinger were much of the same age as Gottsched; Bodmer was born in 1698, Breitinger in 1701. The former was a busy, ambitious, and contentious literary propagandist; the latter was a modest, thorough, and original thinker. The former was a historian, a translator, a poet of little talent, but a very voluminous writer, inclined to satire, and continually finding fault with other writers; the latter was a theologian and a philologist, a scholar of great learning, who exercised important local influence. These two writers were accustomed to have their work and interests in common, and combined to publish a weekly paper; they also worked together at the development of a scientific theory of art. They both defended the merits of Haller and Milton, and fought against Gottsched’s dictatorship in literary taste; and, like Haller, they both advocated comparative freedom in religion, in opposition to the narrow ecclesiasticism of the Swiss. In the same year in which Gottsched’s ‘ Cato ’ and Haller’s poems were published, in 1732, there appeared a German prose version by Bodmer of Milton’s ‘ Paradise Lost.’ In the preface the translator refers to Addison, to whom was due the credit of having revived the appreciation of Milton in Bodmer translates Milton’s * Paradise Lost,’ 1732. Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 23 the eighteenth century. He also speaks with reverence of Shak- speare, calling him the English Sophocles, who introduced the metre of Milton, namely, blank verse, into England, and was Milton’s model in point of language. Bodmer had from the first the greatest distaste for rhyme, which he considered as a remnant of ‘ the barbarous poetry of our forefathers.’ In this point, as in all others, he thinks Milton’s poem a masterpiece of poetic genius, the leading work of modern times, as the Bible was the leading work of ancient times. All his criticisms and aesthetic writings, as also those of his colleague, Breitinger, are inspired by a study of Milton. The most important of these aesthetic papers Bodmer appeared in 1740: Bodmer’s Treatise on the Marvel- and lous in Poetry, and Breitinger’s Treatise on Similes, Breitinger’s and Critical Art of Poetry. Two editions of Gott- critl cal works. sched’s ‘ Kritische Dichtkunst ’ had been published by that time, in 1730 and 1737, and in this work Gottsched often referred with approval to Bodmer’s labours. Nor, indeed, were the stand-points of the two writers so essentially different as one might suppose. Neither attached much value to rhyme, and both attached a very great deal to imaginative power in p oints of poetry. But Gottsched studied to attain great clear- agreement ness, and also, as far as his means would allow him, and a certain elegance in writing; he made poetry an art between tho to be acquired by systematic instruction, and appealed Leipzig and to the rules of the Greeks as authoritative canons in Zurich matters of taste. The Zurich writers, on the con- scllools - trary, were more clumsy in form, but showed greater depth of thought ; their theory was less systematic, and their aim was not to make a receipt-book for the various classes of poetry, but to discover the fountain-heads of poetic beauty. They did not succeed in their object, and their thoughts may be found also in Gottsched’s writings, only more incidentally introduced and not so thoroughly worked out. Both parties were agreed in this: that poetry was an ‘imitation,’ or, as we should rather say, ‘representa¬ tion,’ of nature; that what was new and above the ordinary was alone beautiful and worthy of representation, and that the highest function of poetry was to depict the marvellous. In depicting 24 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. Feud between Gottsched and the Zurich writers. the marvellous, however, the poet must not transcend the bounds of probability, and accordingly we find the adherents of the two rival schools divided upon the question of how far the marvellous may be allowed to be probable, and therefore permissible in poetry; whether, for instance, Homer’s walking tripods and Milton’s devils were admissible or not. Gottsched was inclined to narrow the scope of the imagination; he brought up again the threadbare objections to Homer; he impugned, with Boileau and Voltaire, the aesthetic propriety of the devil, and protested in the name of enlightenment against the supernatural creations of Milton. On such points the Zurich school sharply set him to rights, and hence the feud between them. The quarrel turned chiefly on the merits of Homer and Milton, though many other questions were in¬ volved in it; and since in this matter the Swiss scholars represented the more universal taste, since they defended the cause of beauty against narrow dogmatism and pedantry, the victory remained theirs. They found their best allies in Halle and Berlin, and in Klopstock Prussia furnished them with the German Milton whose advent they so ardently desired. While the spirit of Enlightenment was reigning supreme, there arose a pure poetic soul, moulded by the senti¬ ments of pietism, who carried away with him the noblest of the nation, and roused the highest religious and poetic enthusiasm for that very Messiah whom Frederick the Great had termed only a Jewish carpenter’s son. Frederick the Great granted liberty of conscience and freedom of the press within certain limits. In his reign, church influence lost its power, and philosophy was left comparatively free to carry out its speculations to their logical conclusion. The king was thoroughly in sympathy with the scien¬ tific and religious movements of the age. Wolff, the leader of German rationalism, had the greatest influence on his mental development. The disciples of the Wolffian philosophy had already in the last years of Frederick William I begun to gain new ground in Prussia. The Provost Reinbeck in Berlin was a Wolffian. Halle counted among its teachers the two brothers Baumgarten; Halle and Berlin under Frederick the Great. Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 25 Revival of Wolffian influence. The brothers Baumgarten. Liberal tendencies of thought in Frederick’s reign. of these the elder, Siegmund, was a liberal theologian, who had started with Wolffian views, but was now in complete sympathy with English science, while the younger, Alexander, later on Professor at Frankfort-on-the- Oder, first developed more fully the theory of sensu¬ ous perception, and of beauty as perfect sensuous per¬ ception, within the system of the Wolffian philosophy, and gave to this theory the name of j.E sthetic . Under Frederick the Great the philosopher Wolff himself was recalled to his old chair, from which he had been so shamefully banished. Wolff left Marburg and returned to Halle, and his philosophy now promised to domi¬ nate the Universities even more than before ; but it had to divide its influence with other forces. Among the spirits to whom Frederick rendered enthusiastic homage were Locke, whose views Leibniz had attacked; Newton, Leibniz’s rival; the English free-thinkers and deists, who left of Christianity hardly anything but bare generalities; the moral philosopher Shaftesbury, who, as a disciple of the Greeks, taught the identity of the good and the beautiful, of virtue and happiness; the sceptic Bayle, who, in his celebrated Dictionnaire, led the revolt of reason against revealed faith; and, above all, the arch-sceptic, Voltaire, who carried on the work of Bayle, with redoubled force, with inimitable freshness and precision of language, with all the weapons of relentless mockery, and all the cheerful assurance of an imperturbable conviction—Voltaire, who popularised the ideas of Newton, Locke, and Shaftesbury, who taught that God is only known through Nature, and who founded morality on belief in God, at the same time that he assailed all positive religion. It was these spirits who threw the Prussian Wolff, Frederick’s early teacher, into the shade, and who for a long time exercised a potent influence on the best minds of the nation. Berlin clergymen of high position, such as Sack and Spalding, sought to modernise Christianity, to explain away the dogmas, to remove, as far as possible, all that could give i^e offence to reason, and to lay chief stress on virtuous Berlin conduct. These liberal tendencies were focussed in Academ y- the Berlin Academy, which had been re-organized by Frederick, 2 6 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. and which gathered together distinguished French and German scholars and men of the world. This Academy counted, among its members natural historians like Maupertuis, mathematicians like Euler and Lagrange, statisticians like Siissmilch, philosophers like Merian, Sulzer, Wegelin, Lambert, Premontval. But the liberal tendencies which it represented were not pushed so far as to become subversive of religion; for, in truth, mere scoffing has always been alien to the German intellect, and has never been more than a passing fashion, even the bitterest enemies of faith assailing it seriously and with reverence. Though many Germans were members of the Berlin Academy, yet it contributed nothing directly to German literature. Its trans¬ actions appeared in French, the language which the king wrote in, and which was still for the German nobility and for the German courts the language of the highest culture. ‘From my youth up, I have not read a German book/ said Frederick to Gottsched, ‘ and je parle comme un cocher ; but now I am an old fellow of forty-six, Frederick an( l have n0 longer time for such things.’ Frederick the Great must be reckoned among the most original and bril- as a writer * Hant writers of the Germany of his day. His poems and letters are a living picture of a remarkable individuality ; in his ‘ Anti-Machiavelli ’ he set up a new ideal of His ‘ Anti- . . Machiavelli * a prince, full of moral elevation; his historical works and take a high rank in the historical writings of all historical na ti 0 ns in all ages. Seldom has such a compre¬ hensive knowledge of facts in all departments of politics and government been united with such unflinching love of truth, with such philosophic grasp, and with a style equally fascinating, whether he is unfolding the condition of affairs, appraising men’s characters, or relating measures taken in peace or war. No king ever judged his ancestors so impartially; no states¬ man ever revealed his motives of action so openly, or acknowledged his faults so freely. As a poet, he most resembles Horace, and among the Germans, Hagedorn might be compared with him; but the king is more profound in his re¬ flections than Hagedorn, as we should expect of one who had wrestled seriously with the great problems of existence, and had led His poetry. Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 27 a life full of responsibilities, successes, and dangers. When he is encompassed with perils, as at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, he imagines himself succumbing to misfortune, and utters the gloomiest forebodings. His poems and letters bear witness that he felt and underwent much that no other man of that His age did. He liked calling himself a disciple of Epi- character, curus, but in reality, it was the Stoic view of life which moulded his character. ‘ The shield of Zeno/ he would say, ‘ is for misfortunes; the wreaths from the garden of Epicurus are for happiness.’ It was from the doctrines of the Stoa that he derived his high sense of duty and his firm resolution not to survive the misery of his Father- land. It was Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor of Rome, whom he revered and made his example, and, like him, he was pene¬ trated by the enthusiasm of humanity. The elevated sentiments of a genial ruler, of a faithful friend, of a distinguished man who devoted his best powers to the common weal, the anger and scorn of the satirist who looked down with contempt from his own pinnacle of wisdom and lofty resolution on the weaker creatures below him, who attacked stupidity and egoism, and was least of all indulgent to his princely colleagues—all these found expression in Frederick’s writings, and caused the nation which produced him to be held in honour throughout the whole civilised world. The Germans had a classic in their great King, but unfortunately, a classic in the French language. He did not address himself to his people, but to the nobility and the courts 1118 writinga of Europe; he strove to gain the approval of French French writers, and especially of that Volta : re, whom he wished to retain at his Court, and who really did remain for a time, till his vices made it impossible to keep him there any longer. But though Frederick’s writings cannot be Literary reckoned as belonging to German literature, except influence through translations, yet the spirit which they breathed of Frederick had a favourable effect on German literature. As Frederick introduced greater latitude in religious matters, so in the poetry of his reign the secular spirit became more and more pre¬ dominant ; cheerfulness, unquestioning enjoyment of life, worship of friendship, and the Horatian delight in rustic life became more 28 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. The Pietistie school. Pyra and Lange. and more strongly marked features in the Prussian poetry of this period. The pride of belonging to such a State and such an army also found poetic expression, and the great warlike achievements of the king soon furnished poetry with a most worthy theme. Two groups of poets which sprang up among the students of Schools of Halle show us most clearly the change in the spirit of poetry the times. Both were opposed to Gottsched and on in Halle, g ^ e Q f t h e tw0 Zurich friends; but while the elder group, formed about 1735, and consisting mainly of Jacob Immanuel Pyra and Samuel Gotthold Lange, was still subject to the influence of Pietism, the younger poets, Gleim, Uz, and Goiz, who joined together in Halle about 1740, clearly evidence the liberal tendencies of a new period. Pyra, who died young, was a worshipper of Milton, and planned a Biblical epic and Biblical tragedies; he also trans¬ lated the first book of the JEneid, wished to retain the ancient chorus in the drama, and was a strenuous advocate of rhymeless verse. Lange, whose father was a Halle Professor, and the chief opponent of Wolff, was a lyric poet, and chose Horace as his model; still his poems breathe religious fervour, and were meant to imitate the style of the Psalms. Pyra and Lange were the first representatives of that school of poetry in which Klopstock gained such renown ; they v/ished to give a classical setting to Biblical subjects. Gleim and his friends also adopted a classical form, but for the most part only the easy, four-footed trochaic verse of Anacreontic Anacreon; and in this metre they, like their Greek school, prototype, wrote songs of love and wine. The reli- Gleim, Uz, gi ous seriousness disappeared in their verse, and the spirit of Epicurus triumphed. Whereas Pyra and Lange approach in the tone of their poetry to Haller, these fol¬ lowers of Anacreon must be classed with Hagedorn and the most cheerful of the Leipzig poets. Their poetry was not burdened with many thoughts ; love, wine, and roses are their only themes, and rather narrow ones; still their increasing reiteration led the imagina¬ tion of these poets to be fertile in small details, and what had originally been simple outpourings of student merriment became Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin . 29 most elegant poetical creations, full of a tender regard for the taste of the ladies, and emulating the most graceful productions of the Alexandrian age. The members of this brotherhood of Anacreontic poets in Halle were in later life scattered somewhat far apart from each other. Gleim became a canon in Halberstadt, and for many years devoted his energies to helping on young poets ; Uz > s Uz attained to the rank of privy councillor in the ling,’ 1742 ; principality of Ansbach, and Gotz ended his days as Gleim s a ‘ Superintendent ’ in the Palatinate. Uz’s ‘ Spring ’ SC herzhaften appeared in 1742; Gleim’s ‘Essays in Humorous Liedern,’ Poetry' in 1744, and the translation of Anacreon by 1744 . TT J . Translation Uz and Gotz in 1746 . These works first brought this c f Anacreon group of poets before the general public. Gleim was by Uz and then in Berlin and Potsdam, and was rejoicing to see G6tz > 174 : 6 . that the Prussian capital was gradually becoming a rendezvous for German poets and authors. Pyra came there as a schoolmaster; one of the King’s officers, Christian Ewald Kleist, was Poets in destined to be the classic poet of spring; Karl Wilhelm Berlin. Ramler, a teacher at the Cadet-School, evinced a rare sense of out¬ ward form in poetry; Professor Sulzer, a true apostle of Bodmer, defended the aesthetic views of the Zurich scholars; Swiss youths like Solomon Gessner and Kaspar Hirzel the physician stayed for a time in the Prussian capital, and the Court preacher, Sack, took all aspiiing poets under his wing. Serious endeavours were made to interest the king in German literature. Canitz, it is true, had pleased his taste, and „ _ . _, he had called him the German Pope; it seemed as contempt though it might be possible to convince him that im- for German portant advances had been made since Canitz, and that the literary glory, which he too desired for his country, was really beginning. Sulzer lost no opportunity in this respect, and sent conscientious reports on the result of his efforts to Zurich. But in 1747 he could not say more than that at least the ladies at court were beginning to read German works. It was in vain that Pastor Lange sang the battles of the second Silesian war, and laid himself out to gain applause at court; it was in vain that the king’s atten¬ tion was called to Haller’s poems; he refused to read them, though 3 ° The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. he thought very highly of Haller as a scholar, and repeatedly tried to win him, first for Berlin and then for Halle. It was useless even for Sulzer to pay homage to the omnipotent French, in order through them to influence the king. The Swiss longed to bring under Frederick’s notice the gifted young poet Klopstock, author of the ‘ Messias.’ the creator of Biblical epic poetry, who was a true disciple of their own, and at the same time a subject of the great king. But it was folly to turn to Maupertuis and Voltaire in hopes of achieving this object. A French translation of the ‘ Messias ’ only brought Sulzer into thorough contempt with Mau¬ pertuis, and Voltaire roundly declared that a new ‘ Messias ’ was quite unnecessary, since no one even read the old one. Friedrich Gotj^ieb Klopstock was twenty-four years old, when in 17|8 he published the three first cantos of the ‘Messias’ in the fourth volume of the ‘Bremer Beitrage.’ It was not till 1773 that he brought the great work to an end with the twentieth canto. Klopstock was born in 1724, and died in,i8o3 ; though he thus lived nearly eighty years, yet by his twenty-fourth year he had reached, if not the height of his fame, yet the height of his poetic achievement. Subsequently he wrote many odes and religious poems, Biblical and national tragedies, pro¬ pounded an extraordinary system of poetics, and absorbed himself in metrical, grammatical, and orthographical speculations, but in all these later efforts he rarely or never transcended the first three cantos of his ‘ Messias.’ Klopstock came from Quedlinburg, the scene of Christian Klopstock’s Scriver’s (see vol. i. p. 345) last years of labour, the life and place where Gottfried Arnold (vol. i. p. 347) had com- character. p] e t e d his Church history, and where Pietists and Separatists had found a home. Religious fervour was traditional in his family, as in his birth-place. His father, a man of strong and courageous character, finding himself once in a company of religious scoffers, is said to have struck his hand on his sword, and exclaimed: ‘ Gentlemen, if anyone says anything against the good God, I take it as an insult to myself, and challenge him.’ The son inherited the strong self-reliant spirit of his father, and if we com- Klopstock, 1724 - 1803 . First three cantos of his ‘ Messias ’ published, 1748 . ‘ Messias ’ finished, 1773 . Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 3i pare this spirit with the hesitating and timorous manner of Gellert, we see at once the difference between the Prussian and the Saxon character. Young Klopstock grew up in the country, where he was able to take the hard bodily exercise which his athletic nature de¬ manded. The liberty which he enjoyed in his early youth had great influence in forming his character. He had no special inclination to develop his mind on all sides ; his emotions were very strong, and the most striking feature in his life is the energetic concentration of his powers on one narrow sphere, on one purpose which he con¬ ceived in early years, and afterwards unwaveringly adhered to. He remained for ever young, and could never quite get rid of a certain unripeness in his judgments of the world. He was at school for six years at Pforta, one of the princely institutions in Saxony; thence he went to study at Jena, and afterwards at Leipzig, but could not bring himself to choose any special branch of study. Neither theology nor philosophy had sufficient attractions for him; he wished merely to be a poet, and Providence happily granted his wish. The King of Denmark, and later on the Margrave of Baden, provided for his outward needs, so that poetry gained him not only the glory he had desired, but also such patrons as he had wished for. While he was still at school, Breitinger’s 4 Critical Art of Poetry ’ formed his canons of taste, and he became a poet after the notions of the Swiss critics. Bodmer had written a kind of German literary history in Alexandrines, in which he foretold the advent of the future epic poet of Germany. Klopstock made up his mind to fulfil the prophecy in himself. When he left school in 1745, he had already conceived the plan of the ‘ Messias,’ and in his farewell speech on the nature and office of ‘Messias’ the epic poet, he distinctly alludes to the great work planned as which he contemplated. The most sublime theme, and early as 1745. the dearest to a religious mind, the centre of the Christian faith, the sufferings and death, the resurrection and ascension of the Saviour—this was to be the subject of his poem. The epic attempts of the early Christian and of the humanistic poets, the Messiads of the ninth century, the religious plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the epic, lyric, and prose treatises of the seventeenth, and the oratorios of the eighteenth 32 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. xi. century, had prepared the way for him; it was the most popular subject that he could choose, and as yet no poet had exhausted it or brought it once and for all into definite shape, as Milton had the history of the Fall, to the exclusion of all possible rivals on the , ,, same ground. It was the vision of Milton that floated * Messias,’ before the poet’s eyes, and indeed he could not have suggested had a better model, for Milton had achieved the by Milton, highest t p at p e done for the Biblical tradition. Milton’s ‘ Paradise Lost ’ stood unrivalled in grandeur of conception and effective development of the theme. Amid Klopstock’s many debts to Milton, the following may be mentioned : the detailed description of hell, the council of the devils, the differences of opinion amongst them, their punishment by metamorphosis, the paths through the universe along which devils and angels wander and fly, and the vision of the Last Judgment at the close of the poem. But Klopstock did not profit half enough by Milton’s Klopstock’s example. While Milton leads us from hell into inferiority paradise, and thus relieves a gloomy scene by a to Milton, bright one, Klopstock, on the contrary, begins with the glories of heaven, and then keeps us in his irksome limbo of disembodied spirits till we long for a change out of very weariness. Milton exerts himself to the utmost not to let the interest flag, and pays particular attention to unity of composition, steady unfold¬ ing of the plot, and graphic narration ; Klopstock, on the other hand, lets the thread of his narrative decidedly drag, and accom¬ panies each step of the gradual denouement with the sentiments of all the spectators. His chief interest lies in the spiritual life of the Messiah, and in the sentiments which that life awakens in the souls of the spectators in heaven, earth, and hell; and since these sentiments would necessarily range over a somewhat narrow scale, Klopstock had to resort to endless repetition of the same few ideas. The emotional speeches are drawn out to a tedious length, and, instead of letting the characters reveal themselves in action, the author naively sets himself to tell us about them in a way altogether out of keeping with the best traditions of epic poetry. He relates incidents in such a confused manner that we often do not know what has happened. The constant resort Ch XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 33 to supernatural regions causes a constant change of scene, and angels are constantly appearing to disturb the natural course of events. Such an incident as the scourging is not made nearly so impressive as it might be, because the poet himself is too much overpowered, and can only sing ‘ with a weeping tone ’ just where he ought to pourtray with a firm hand; in the critical moment he declares that he is unable to sing all the sufferings of the Eternal Son. When he tries to rise to the sublime, Klopstock Defects becomes stilted and unnatural; his poetry is full of of ths the very faults which Milton condemned, and, however poem, much Milton may have been his model, yet his 1 Messias ’ is more closely related to the religious oratorios than to ‘ Paradise Lost.’ The life of Jesus had touched the hearts and stimulated the reflec¬ tion of earlier poets than Klopstock, of Otfried and Father Cochem for example. But these earlier poets took care in their works on the subject to keep pure narrative distinct from such alien elements as their own prayers or moral teaching. Even in the Passion- oratorios the epic element was duly kept apart from sentiment and reflection; in Klopstock, on the contrary, narrative and reflection are hopelessly mixed up together to the great prejudice of the former. Klopstock is really a lyric poet, masquerading as a writer of epic. It is a pity that he did not remain a lyric poet, and, like Angelus Silesius, for example, confine himself to a sym¬ pathetic commentary upon the sufferings of Christ. As it is, even Father Cochem stands, as a narrator, above Klopstock, for he has done what Klopstock neglected ; he has filled in the details of the Saviour’s life where the traditional records leave a blank, and has really tried to give his readers a clear idea of places, and a graphic picture of events. Klopstock ought to have tried to realise the state of Palestine as it was in the time of Christ; he ought at least to have read the descriptions of modern travellers; he ought to have studied the people around him in order to pick up some traits wherewith to characterize the Jewish populace of old. But he did not think of anything of the kind. He painted without making any preliminary studies either from life or from books, and evolved everything out of his own unassisted consciousness. For this very reason, however, his poem has certain redeeming VOL. II. D 34 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. qualities, for he invests his characters with his own nobility of soul, and dignity of language and action; he sends a ray of sympathy even into hell itself, and thus, like the sacred poets of the twelfth century, divests the religious sentiment of its gloomy severity. He lingers over the tender and poetic scenes, and his work in many parts has rather the tone of lyric than of epic poetry. Klopstock’s rhymeless religious odes and also his rhymed hymns Klopstock’s are s P°^ t by the same excess of sentiment which mars hymns and his ‘ Messias.’ His hymns, although set to old and religious well-known melodies, were written in a style utterly od.6S different from that of the old and approved Protestant hymns. Klopstock was bold enough to lay his hands on these, and try to re-write them to suit his own one-sided taste, thus setting an example which was generally followed, of improving these sterling old religious songs. This so-called improvement consisted in banishing terse, picturesque, and popular phrases, and in substituting empty and conventional ones. Klopstock rendered great services to the development of the , German language and prosody. His own verses Klopstock’s 00 v J improve- be balanced, polished, and elaborated w r ith unweary- ments in ing care. He was the first to gain a clear idea of the metre and diff erence j n accent between the various syllables in poetic style. ' German words, on which difference all imitation of classical metres is based. Following in the steps of Haller, he im¬ mensely enriched the poetic vocabulary, but his style was far from popular. The hexameters even of the ‘ Messias,’ the elegiac metre, Defects of the Horatian or original stanzas, and free rhythms his style. G f hi s 0 des repelled a public accustomed to Gellert or to Christian Felix Weisse; moreover, in the odes as well as in the ‘ Messias,’ there is a want of solid subject-matter, and everything is vague and impalpable. Klopstock was seldom able to discern the poetry latent in real life; he was under the necessity of first transferring reality to an unreal region, of imagining living men as dead, and those before him as being far away, of transforming the present into a visionary future, before he could begin poetic creation. In his odes, which are imitations of Horace, he sought to carry out the rules of the theorists, who insisted in this class of poetry Ch. XI.] 35 Zurich and Berlin. upon a headlong style, a wild beauty, intense feeling, striking metaphors, and startling turns and digressions. But this artificial passion and irregularity led to all kinds of obscurity and confusion, and it was quite impossible that such a style should attract the simple reader, who did not bring to it a mind imbued with classical culture. Complete control could not be at once acquired over the unwonted form and the novel diction, so that many stiff and awk¬ ward phrases naturally crept in, and few of Klopstock’s odes can be enjoyed throughout as pure, finished works of art. Yet they are full of beautiful details, many of which were now introduced into German poetry for the first time, and moreover they con¬ summate that revival of the serious form of lyric poetry which had been begun by Haller and carried on by Pyra and Lange, in marked contrast to the light and popular lyrics produced by Hage- dorn and the Anacreontic School (see p. 28). Klopstock’s poetry gave the first impulse to that remarkable out¬ break of sentimentality to which modern German _ J Emotional literature owes all its fire and inspiration. Klop- character stock’s particular art lies in his power of calling forth of his emotion. He seeks to express the unutterable feelings poeiry ‘ which shake the very foundations of our being, and he succeeds to a certain extent. He not unfrequently introduces physical desig¬ nations of emotion such as £ shaking/ ‘ trembling; ’ he says that his heart beats loud, and that a soft shudder runs through his whole frame. Spiritual conceptions are brought together in wonderfully affecting combinations, and a descriptive rhythm heightens the effect of the whole, which is almost like that produced by music. Still more affecting are often the very words which Klopstock uses; he knew that the mere word by the very charm of its sound will often throw all arts of paraphrase into the shade. Yet he is far from despising paraphrase, and is very happy in his choice of descriptive epithets. The opening lines of some of his odes move us deeply, though the sequel is often disappointing. He can with a few strokes draw the most impressive natural scenes. In these descriptions of nature some particular scene floats before his eyes, and keeps him from wandering into vague and indefinite regions. Among his love-odes too, those are most successful in d 2 3 6 The Age of Frederick the Great . [Ch. XI. which he not only wishes to express feeling, but also to describe a situation, an action. Two or three of them are addressed to his lady sleeping, a very favourite motive in the poetry of that time. He is fond of introducing the conventional roses of lyric poetry; at one time he throws dewy rose-buds into his lady’s curls to awaken her, at another he binds her brow with a wreath of roses; in the latter case he writes in a simple style and produces a very charming poem. We cannot help regretting that Klopstock so seldom touched the Want of eart h i n Ids poetry, and thus threw away his best chances reality in of success. There was one form of writing by which his poetry, jj e m jght have appealed to wider and more popular circles, namely, patriotic songs. In his youth he had been animated by a strong patriotism which, like his religious spirit, he derived from his father, who was enthusiastically devoted to Frederick the Great. The patriotism of young Klopstock found expression in an Klopstock’s excellent ‘War Song’ written in 1749, in honour of ‘Kriegslied,’ Frederick the Great. This song is full of real life 1749- and fire, and is written in the bold metre of the ballad of Chevy Chase, which Klopstock knew through Addison’s two essays in the ‘Spectator.’ It speaks of the Prussian king in terms of enthusiastic admiration. But this enthusiasm was not to last. The His want ar ^ our an d ambition of the poet in Klopstock sup- of sympathy pressed the patriotism of the citizen. Because Frederick with his disappointed the hopes which were set on him, because own age. ^ failed to patronise German poets, and favoured French free-thinkers instead, Klopstock felt himself called upon His to avenge German poetry of her king, and religion of devotion her scorner. He accordingly set himself to draw his G° °^an patriotic inspiration not from the living present, but history and from the dead past. The ‘War-Song’ was dedicated mythology, afresh, this time to Henry the Fowler, and Arminius, chief of the Cheruski, was celebrated in odes and dramas. By such methods the German Muse was to be schooled to indepen¬ dence. Nor was this all. Imitation of the ancient writers was to cease; the Northern gods, whom no one knew, whose names Klopstock himself was only just learning to pronounce, and Ch. XI.] Ztirich and Berlin. 37 which he had to explain to his reader in notes, were to take the place of the well-known figures of ancient mythology. The battle-cry of the old Teutons, the barditus mentioned by Tacitus, was supposed by Klopstock to refer to battle-songs sung by bards; he knew of such bards from Celtic poetry, and supposed that they were also to be found among the early Germans. Accord¬ ingly, he gave to his dramas, founded on early German history, the sounding title of ‘Bardiete.’ The Ode ‘Her- Klopstock’s mann und Thusnelda,’ written in 1752, is one of ‘Bardiete.’ his happiest inspirations, showing, as it does, powerful situ¬ ations and action revealed in the speeches; the whole is a kind of ballad in dialogue-form, full of incident and character-drawing. But his three Bardiete , ‘Hermann’s Schlacht,’ ‘Hermann und die Prinzen/ and ‘Hermann’s Tod/ completed in 1769, 1784, and 1787 respectively, were quite useless as plays for acting, and the first of them alone contained a few really poetic incidents. Though many of Klopstock’s literary experiments may seem to us very strange, yet they all give expression to some Klopstock J S wide-spread tendency of the age, and in most of them influence he found imitators. In his worship of Hermann he on other was the connecting link between the friends of his youth at Leipzig, and the poets of the war of Liberation. His classical Odes found imitators in Giseke, Ramler, Gotz, and many of his younger contemporaries. Goethe learnt from him the use of free unrhymed rhythms. His biblical epic found successors chiefly in Zurich, where the idea had really originated. The Swiss critics and their partisans greeted Klopstock with enthusiasm, and quickly made him famous. Bodmer Klopstock had some time before published the outline for an and Bodmer, epic on ‘Noah,’ and he now set to work to develop it; he also turned several other Bible stories in rapid succession into bad hexameters. In the summer of 1750, Klopstock, at Bodmer’s in¬ vitation, came to Zurich. A short time before he had made the acquaintance of the Anacreontic poet Gleim, who had rejoiced to find in him not a Homer with a prophet’s mien, but a man ‘like one of us/ Bodmer, on the contrary, expected at least a divine youth, who would think of nothing but his great work, and who 3« The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. in intercourse with worthy men would strive to become more and more worthy of his task. But Klopstock kept with the young people, went much into society, drank and smoked, kissed girls and women whom he saw for the first time, worked very little at the ‘ Messias,’ and took no interest in ‘ Noah.’ Klopstock was just fresh from the gallantry of Leipzig and the pleasures of student-life; he was no stranger to the Anacreontic mood; he sang the praises of wine, and declared in one of his Odes that a single glance, a sigh, an inspiring kiss was worth more than a hundred cantos with all their long immortality. Such a frank determination to enjoy life was all very well in North Germany and among poets of the Hagedorn school, but it shocked the Swiss puritans, even when exhibited by the poet of the ‘ Messias.’ Bodmer was soon awakened from his illusion, and a rupture be¬ tween him and Klopstock was only just avoided. Klopstock went to Kopenhagen, and other poets took up their abode by the Lake of Zurich, about which he had written so manv beautiful lines. ' * In the summer of 1752 Ewald von Kleist, the poet of spring, Other poets came to Zurich as Prussian recruiting-officer; Solo- at Zurich. m0 n Gessner published there his first literary efforts : Kleist, 1 : ’ Gessner, and Bodmer soon thought he had found in young Wieland. Wieland all that he had missed in Klopstock. Kleist’s ‘ Spring ’ had appeared in 1749, a year after the first Kleist’s cantos of the ‘Messias;’ it describes, through the ‘ Fruhling/ medium of a country walk, field, wood, lake, island, i749. cultivated shores, rain, and sun, and the labour and homes of the peasants. It extends over four hundred and sixty hexameters, each hexameter having an extra syllable at the begin¬ ning. The description is rather too detailed; still it is not dull, but written throughout in an exalted style, and combined with much praise of the Deity. Kleist’s ‘ Friihling ’ was one of the poems which this period of the dawn of modern literary glory was most proud of. It was a new variation of that old yearning of the townsman for simpler conditions of life, to which Horace, and, following in his steps, Fischart and Opitz had given expression. It was a new essay in the way of a poetic description of Nature, less in the diffuse style of Brockes than in the more concise manner of Haller. It was cer- Ch. XT.] Zurich and Berlin. 39 Influence of Swiss scenery on Kleist and others. tainly influenced by Thomson’s celebrated poem on the * Seasons,’ which was then being translated by Brockes, and which still lives on in Germany in the selection of it set to music by Haydn. Kleist's descriptive poetry was entirely after the heart of the Zurich critics, and the idyllic elements of his poem could nowhere reckon on a warmer welcome than in Switzerland. Haller had found pure, uncorrupted nature in the shepherds of the Alps. Bodmer, charmed by the idyllic beauty of Milton’s ‘ Paradise,’ had sought the same in the patriarchs of the Old Testament, and some of the characters in his biblical epics were esteemed very highly by his friends for their unaffected simplicity. Solomon Gessner, of Zurich, a bookseller, poet, and landscape-painter, acquired the art of poetic landscape-painting in part from his friend Kleist, and gained Euro¬ pean renown as an elegant imitator of Theocritus by G-essner’s his prose-idylls, published in 1756. Gessner’s shep- idylls, 1750 . herds are honest rustics with Greek names, such as appeared in the pastoral-plays performed at Leipzig; in small carefully finished pic¬ tures he described a golden age of generosity, virtue, and innocence, and his primitive sons of Nature are remarkable for their tender sentiment and elegance of speech. It is true that we find in these idylls few touches of true unadulterated Swiss scenery; still we may suppose that love of it, and feeling for its striking contrasts, helped to mould the taste of both Haller and Gessner. For was not Rousseau also a Swiss, and did not he also call upon men to abandon the fictions of civilisation, of arts and sciences, and to re¬ turn to Nature ? In his ‘ Devin de Village,’ a dramatised village- story, Rousseau gave an idyllic turn to the French operetta, and in his ‘ Nouvelle Heloise ’ he described the grandeur of the Alps in impressive language, that reminds us strongly of Haller. In Franc 1 , as in Germany, the Swiss nature showed itself to be emotional and enthusiastic, and was in conse- Opposition quence opposed to the cold logic of modern ration- between the rr, 1 • , ,, , ... , . , rationalistic aiism. 1 he intellectual opposition which was so and marked between Voltaire and Rousseau, was antici- sentimental pated in Germany, where it afterwards exercised school. such a strong influence. Haller, Bodmer, and Klopstock, took up 4 o The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. a hostile attitude towards Voltaire, while Gottsched translated him, flattered him, and sought to make use of him for his own purposes. And though it did not at first follow that the enemies of Voltaire were necessarily friends of Rousseau, though an orthodox Bernese aristocrat like Haller could only see in the Theist democrat of Geneva a madman or a criminal, yet the sentimental school both in Switzerland and in Germany soon attracted to itself younger men, who did not recoil from Rousseau’s levelling conclusions. Pietism and rationalism, enthusiasm and frivolity, the straitlaced and the pleasure-seeking life, Haller and Hagedorn, Klopstock and Voltaire, strove together for mastery over the soul of a young Christoph Swabian in this period—Christoph Martin Wieland. Martin Wieland learnt to write in a brilliant and imaginative Wieland, way in the school of dreamy enthusiasm, but he 1733-1813 J finally threw himself into the arms of enlightenment and became one of the greatest German epic poets. He was nine years younger than Klopstock, and was the son of a clergyman in the Swabian village of Oberholzheim, four hours from the town of Biberach. His father, a Pietist of the Halle school, was his instructor from his third year, and sent him in 1747 to Kloster- bergen, a college near Magdeburg, in which rigid Pietism was the rule. There his emotional nature was subjected to the prescribed course of contemplation, repentance, and ecstacy, not, however, Pietistic and w ^^ out experiencing an early and vehement attack of sentimental doubt. As early as his fifteenth year he was tossed phase in about between the opposing views of the age. In his his youth. £e venteenth year his newly-awakened religious en¬ thusiasm found an earthly object to concentrate itself upon, in Sophie Gutermann, a young relative, whom he translated to the region of the Klopstockian angels, and glorified in prose and verse. While he was still at the University, his marvellous ease in writing began to show itself, as well as his extraordinary capacity for absorbing knowledge and his facility in reproducing it under a new form. Wieland was both a didactic and an epic poet; precept and narrative, philosophizing and story-telling, were what his literary talent was inclined to throughout his life. Like Haller or Hage¬ dorn, he sang of a perfect world; he joined with Kleist and Ch. XI.] Zurich and Berlin. 4i Thomson in the praise of Spring, and Hermann and Thusnelda were destined to be his heroes as well as Klopstock’s. A hymn of praise to Love, moralizing letters, and an ‘Anti-Ovid’ were com¬ mitted in rapid succession to paper by young Wieland, His early and he also produced short tales in blank verse, such writings, as Bodmer copied from Thomson. The subjects for some of these tales were borrowed from the English weekly papers, such as the ‘ Spectator’ and the ‘Guardian;’ their style reminds us of Gellert, while their great sentimentality, their psychological analysis and sympathetic description betray the influence of Thomson and Klopstock. Wieland delighted in the idyllic form of poetry, and considered innocence the subject most worthy of poetic treatment. The lofty idealism of his poems reminds us of Klopstock, but Wieland’s writing is free from the harshness, obscurities, and exaggerations which disfigure Klopstock’s poetry. In August, 1751, Wieland sent his heroic poem ‘Hermann’ anonymously to Bodmer, to receive his judgment on wieland at it; this gave rise to a correspondence which led to an Zurich, invitation to Zurich. There he at first lived with Bodmer, and wrote at the same table with him; he satisfied Bodmer’s passion for biblical epics by the production of a poem on the trial of Abraham; he openly attacked the Anacreontic poets, denouncing them as cor- ruptors of morals; he found great delight in holding intercourse with Breitinger and other old gentlemen, he drank water and did not smoke like Klopstock, and, in short, lived for a time thoroughly after Bodmer’s own heart. Then he accepted an appointment as private tutor, and, being removed from the direct influence of his Mentor, he became gradually more and more estranged from him, so that the honest Bodmer had at last to lament a new and much more bitter disillusioning than he had suffered a short time before in the case of Klopstock. Nor was our young poet without his sorrows; his Sophie, who had inspired his earliest poetic efforts, whom he had sung of as Doris and pourtrayed as Thusnelda, jilted him and gave her hand to a certain Herr von La Roche. But Wieland’s im¬ pressionable mind soon recovered its equanimity; he declared that his love for her had always been a Platonic love, that her marriage need not make the slightest difference in his affection, and thus the 42 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. thread of old acquaintance was not snapt. But his poetry now assumed more and more the tone of extravagant Christian enthusi- . asm. His letters from the dead to friends left behind, Religious ’ enthusiasm the idea of which he borrowed from an English writer, in his show clearly to what an extent Heaven must draw writings. U p 0n the delights of earth in order to become beautiful and attractive. Simple, spiritual religion is as much lacking here as in Klopstock’s religious poems; but Wielana could describe in a more graphic and picturesque manner than Klopstock, and in his wealth and colour of diction he is hardly surpassed by any other German poet. We seem to hear the voice of Goethe in some of his verses—for instance, in the following: ‘ Thou weavest deftly a halo of truth around thy cherished error/ Wieland could not dispense with the society of women, and even in puritanical Zurich there were a few fair souls in whom his religious enthusiasm awakened an answering chord, and whom he transfigured in several of his religious writings. But by the year 1754 he had begun to run his thoughts and Influence of ^ anc ' es into Greek moulds. Shaftesbury directed him Greek on to Plato and Xenophon ; this gave rise to a Socratic Wieland’s dialogue, and he also commenced discourses on writings. b eaut y an d } ove< Greek influence combined with the great historical events of the age and with the entanglements of his susceptible heart to bring him back to earth. One of his Platonic friendships carried him too far; the tender-hearted enthusiast sud¬ denly felt himself a human lover, and had to be checked and rebuffed. ‘Araspes and Panthea,’ an episode taken from Xenophon’s Hig Cyrus-Romance, is the poetic memorial of this affair, ‘Arapses and the idea which here appears for the first time tmd runs through the whole of Wieland’s subsequent lite- Panthea. rar y ac q v ity : the transition from spiritual enthusiasm to earthly passion. Xenophon’s hero was also to become his own. When at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War all eyes were directed towards the King of Prussia, Wieland began an epic , entitled ‘Cyrus;’ Cyrus was only Frederick the Great in Persian disguise, and the epic was undertaken in the hopes that it would bring him some appointment in Prussia, His ‘ Cyrus.’ Zurich and Berlin. 43 either a place in the Academy or the Directorship of some school. Bodmer corresponded with Sulzer on the subject, but Wieland’s hope in this direction was destined to be disappointed, like many others. In June, 1759, Wieland went to Berne, where he was fortunate enough to fall into varied and stimulating society, and wieland where he gained the undeserved love of a noble and goes to highly intellectual girl, Julia Bondeli by name. At Berne > 1759 * the end of May, 1760, he returned to his native Biberach, where he was given a small legal appointment, and hastened to break his faith with the excellent Bernese girl, and to fall into the meshes of a common coquette. He compromised his honour in one more love-affair after that, and then brought the history of his loves to a close by marrying the daughter of an Augsburg tradesman, a worthy but insignificant girl. The weak, fantastic, susceptible, and fickle youth became henceforth a model husband and father. Meanwhile, as a writer, he had entirely freed himself from the old fit of extravagant enthusiasm, and passed into the wieland opposite extreme, into frivolity. ‘Don Sylvio von gives up Rosalva ’ (1764) and the ‘Humorous Tales’ (1766) bear eloquent witness to this change. The castle of Sylvio von Warthausen, distant an hour from Biberach, had since Rosalva,’ 1764 • 1761 been the residence of Count Stadion, an old man «Komische of much culture, and with a thorough knowledge of Erzah- the world; he was the patron of Herr von La Roche iungen/1766. and his wife, Wieland’s youthful love, who both lived with him. Nothing was more natural than that Wieland should have frequent intercourse with them, and that the tone of the cultivated world, which, under French influence, and especially since the Regency, had taken a perceptibly frivolous turn, should affect him too, and according to his usual tendency incite him at once to literary pro¬ duction. Wieland, who in his youth had so vehemently attacked the Anacreontic school, now became himself an Epicurean; he, who had been a disciple of Bodmer, began to follow in the footsteps of Voltaire and the younger Crebillon, and gave himself up to the poetry of humour and innuendo. But in so doing he won over to the cause of national literature the German aristocracy, who found His translation of Shak- speare, 1762 - 1766 . a further attraction in his flexible, eloquent, and finished style of writing, which had much to offer beyond the jests and mockery of the French style. This transition from extravagant enthusiasm to nature, also turned his attention to Shakspeare, the master of naturalness and truth of delineation. Between the years 1762 and 1766 he translated either the whole or parts of twenty-two of the plays. The golden age of Athens, the epoch of Socrates, Pericles, Xenophon, and Plato, became henceforth the ideal region which took the place in his imagination of those paradisaic fields of the blessed, where his muse had wandered in his earlier years. Now he sought, instead of an imaginary innocence, plain, unvarnished human nature, men such as he himself was, full of kindness, and with susceptible hearts. Around these he wove the history of his Wieland’s own ex P eiaences * n l° ve an d life, an d 4 Story of novels. Agathon’ (1766-67) is really the story of himself. In ‘Agathon,’ this book he conducts us to Delphi, Athens, Smyrna, 1766—67 1 J * Syracuse, and Tarentum; the ‘ Ion’ of Euripides sup¬ plied a few incidents for the history of the hero’s youth; we follow his inward development from childhood to mature manhood, and trace in his love-experiences and in his public career a gradual reaction from the extravagant enthusiasm and Quixotism of his early youth. While he was in Zurich Wieland had been a rapturous admirer of Richardson’s novels; he joined with Gellert and many others in admiring the faultless heroes set before the world by this novelist, Pamela and Clarissa and Grandison, and he even took the materials for a drama from one of these stories. But in England Fielding had headed a reaction against heroic untruth, while in Germany Musaus had written a parody on Grandison; and Wieland now became a follower of Fielding and fell in with the principles of Shaftesbury, who declared perfect characters in the epic and the drama to be simply monstrous./' Still Wieland's cha¬ racters are not of the solid motley texture that belongs to real men, but are thin impersonations of the opposed stages of morality through which Wieland had himself passed. These one-sided ideals are set forth by his heroes in long dialogues, so that his novels became at the same time philosophical disquisitions. Even in the Zurich and Berlin. Ch. XI.] 45 charming poetic narrative ‘ Musarion/ where a misanthropic Athe¬ nian philosopher is converted to pleasure and unre- , . , . fl . f . , v ‘Musarion. strained enjoyment ol life, we notice a didactic arnere- penste , and the very title of the book recommends it as a philosophy of the graces. In another book, half novel, half history, he chose the cynic Diogenes as his hero, and most inappropriately grafted an Anacreontic element on the stern old philosopher. ‘Die The ‘ Abderites,’ on the contrary, begun in 1774, -A-bderiten.’ must be reckoned among the best things that he ever wrote; it is a satirical romance, in which contemporary German events and in¬ cidents from Wieland’s own life are pourtrayed and ridiculed, under a Greek mask. In the light and playful ‘Die ‘ Graces/ in which, as in the old pastoral romance and G-razien.’ in many modern French epistles, verse alternates with prose, Wieland directed his steps back to the Arcadian regions which he had forsaken, but it was only because the happy mood of the idyll, the rosy dream of innocence and simplicity seemed the proper medium in which to set delicate mythological beings such as the Graces. Wieland, we see, rose from Greek men to the eternally fair ideals of Greek art, to the gods and heroes. And though in his youth he had made a miserable failure in Christian tragedies, such as ‘ Lady Jane Grey * and ‘ Clementine von Poretta/ yet he now determined to try his hand once more at dramatic writing. This time he resolved to choose some pre-Christian legend and to employ the fashionable form of the operetta. Accordingly in 1773 he entered the lists against 0perettasof Euripides with another ‘Alcestis/ and in ‘The ‘Alcestis’ Choice of Hercules ’ gave a rhythmical version in a and few scenes of Xenophon’s well-known story. Though Hercules - these pieces had no lasting success, and though the former of them excited the angry scorn of young Goethe, yet they were not without effect on the further development of German poetry, and on Goethe in particular, for the ‘ Alcestis ’ suggested his ‘ Iphigenie/ while his ‘ Faust ’ seems to echo some of the tones struck in the ‘ Hercules.’ Wieland's versatility is apparent in every epoch of his life, till age began to lay its fetters on him. Parallel with his Greek current [Ch. XI. 46 The Age of Frederick the Great. ‘Idris’ ( 1768 ), and ‘ Der neue Amadis ’ ( 1771 ). there runs a strong romantic one in ‘Idris’ (1768), and ‘The New Amadis’ (1771),for which Ariosto and Hamilton sup¬ plied him with models. His remarkable epic talent was not content with prose or with' the easy versifica¬ tion of Gellert, or with original metres; he wished to try his skill in all forms, and therefore adopted the Italian stanza in order to add the charm of its inter¬ laced rhymes to his highly coloured and sensuous style of description. And again, with his popular philosophic propensities Wieland could not resist the temptation of turning his attention to political questions; already in ‘ Agathon ’ he had introduced his hero into the field of political activity, and he himself had a share in the administration of a small state, extremely small it is true, with its little intrigues and rivalries, and its storms in a tea-cup. No sooner had Haller in his novel ‘ Usong ’ made use of an oriental garb in which to clothe political thoughts, than Wieland followed his example in ‘The Golden Mirror’ (1772) (1772), and and its sequel ‘The Danishmend’ (1775). In these } works the idea which had inspired his ‘ Cyrus ’ revived again; as in the earlier work Frederick the Great was to be his hero, so now the enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century floated before his eyes as the best possible constitution, and Frederick’s imitator, Joseph II, as its most happy representative. But this time his high conception of the princely calling really brought him into contact with a princely house; after Wieland having been made in 1769 Professor of philosophy and called literature at Erfurt, he was called in 1772 to Weimar to Weimar. as Hofrath and tutor to the young prince Karl August. There he was soon allowed to devote h : mself again exclusively to literary activity, and he lived in comfortable circumstances till his death in 1813. At the very commencement of this Weimar period he started a quarterly magazine, which for many years secured him great influence; this was the ‘Teutsche Merkur,’ in which he used his powers to promote the cause of enlightenment and pure taste, and gave expression to that moderate optimism which had gradually become his view of life. If he did not always find ‘ Der Danishmend ( 1775 ). The ‘ Teutsche Merkur,’ started by Wieland. Cb. XI.] Lessing. 47 favour with the younger generation, which in the last quarter of the century began to strike out powerfully in all directions, yet the best of these hot-headed youths soon rallied round him, and he on his part was always ready to welcome true genius with enthusiasm. But his ripest works were still to come (see p. 131 ); they were not produced until new impulses had awakened in France and Germany a new love for the Middle Ages, so that Wieland could rely on public sympathy and appreciation for his own romantic tendencies. Wieland had gradually freed himself from the bonds of literary partisanship which had trammeled him as a youth at Zurich. He had entirely outgrown the opposition between Gottsched and Bodmer, between the Leipzig and the Swiss school, and though he was now good friends with the Anacreontic writers, the tender and delicate ladies’ poets, yet, as an epic writer, his horizon necessarily extended further than this, while, as an editor, his interests forbade his becoming one-sided in his tendencies. He at- ■wieland tained somewhat later to that independent standpoint and which Lessing took up from the first. Lessing began Lessing, as an enemy of Gottsched’s, but was not therefore a partisan of Bodmer’s; on the contrary, he proved himself from the first to be an independent critic. He carefully watched Wieland's develop¬ ment, ridiculed his dreamy extravagance, refuted his polemics, annihilated his dramatic efforts, praised his * Agathon,’ and shared his enthusiasm for the Periclean age; and in German literature he did for the drama what Wieland had done for the epic, he raised it from mere good intentions to real merit. Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was five years younger than Klop- stock, and four years older than Wieland; he was Lessing born on the 22 nd of January, 1729 , at Kamenz, in 1729-1781. Upper-Lusatia. He, too, came of a clergyman’s His early life family, and was brought up in the Lutheran faith; but he never had anything in common with pietism, and in his poetic language we miss the magic solemnity, the sensuous charm, 4 8 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XT. the imaginative fire which Klopstock and Wieland acquired in the school of emotional religion. Lessing received his public-school training at the princely college of Meissen, matriculated at Leipzig in the autumn of 1746, at the age of seventeen, and as early as 1747 first came before the public with some short poems and a comedy. In January, 1748, another comedy of his, the ‘Young Scholar,’ was, as we already know, brought out on the His Comedy . . . . ‘Derjunge Leipzig stage, where it met with great approval. Gelehrte,’ Unlike the ‘ eternal youth ’ Klopstock, Lessing quickly performed g rew t 0 r ip e manhood; while Klopstock hardly de¬ veloped at all, but obstinately adhered to his first standpoint, Lessing’s life was one of steady progress, and his Lessing’s labours, which were many-sided without being diffuse, progressive- continually revealed ever fresh capabilities of his rich ness. nature. He has few points of contact with the writers for the ‘ Bremer Beitrage,’ of whom Klopstock was one. These Saxon poets were, as we have seen, thoroughly moralised writers, good-natured, self-satisfied, and as correct in their style as in their religious and political opinions; they lived as peaceable citizens, without struggles, without conflicts, happy in their mediocrity, and like quiet settlers cultivated their small field with industry and understanding. Lessing, on the contrary, was full of the spirit of enterprise and, far from being a peaceable nature, was inclined to assail mediocrity and give no quarter. It is, therefore, all the more to his honour that he was never revolutionary in his proceed¬ ings ; he always started from the existing state of things, took account of present facts, and with the genuine zeal of reform aimed only at introducing gradual improvements. Neither in poetry nor in science was he a radical innovator; he never lost his inner balance, nor that rare tact for distinguishing the possible and the useful, in which a fiery poet’s nature is so often deficient. The impulse to go forward, however, drove him from place to place, and he was not comfortably settled till late in life; though adverse cir¬ cumstances may have had much to do with this, yet it was mainly the result of his temperament. He did not like to bind himself, he easily entered into relations and quickly broke them off, and was fond of seeking new surroundings and new interests. . He passed Ch. XI.] Lessing. 49 through many varied experiences, many illusions and disappoint¬ ments, and was like a roaming seafarer, gathering treasures from all countries, but finding no fixed habitation anywhere. Lessing’s rapid development began early; even the ‘ Young Scholar ’ is a step in his emancipation, for the very Lessing’s pedantry which he ridicules therein was his own. As early a boy he had loved books, quickly ransacking their emancipa- contents, and school-life at first strengthened his pro¬ pensity towards unprofitable learning. But nature had endowed him with a cheerful and lively disposition, and with a fund of healthy mother-wit, which made him turn his pedantic teachers to ridicule, and soon revealed to him his own pedantic tendencies. With him too the spirit of modern enlightenment breathed life into the dry bones of scholarship, while mathematics, natural science and Anacreontic poetry all helped to emancipate him. The great city, whose University he entered, widened his horizon an$ gave him the wish to become above all a true man, and to learn how to live his life best. He aimed at attaining bodily and mental proficiency, followed his poetic leanings, and sought to develop himself into a German Moliere. He associated with actors, which gave great offence to his parents, and finally he left Leipzig to try his fortunes in Berlin. The opposition between pedantry and human feeling plays the same part in his character as the oppo¬ sition between extravagant sentiment and nature did in Wieland’s; but while Wieland never got beyond this one problem of his life, in Lessing it was a youthful episode and he soon triumphed over it. He went to Berlin against the will of his parents, and while they were fearing the worst for his religion and morals, he Lessing was earning a scanty but honourable livelihood by his goes to pen, writing reviews, making translations and publish- Berlin, ing original works, poems and dramas. But the apprehensions of his parents were, it must be confessed, not without foundation; his orthodoxy was put to the test and succumbed. In Becomes November, 1748, he had come to Berlin, and in 1750, acquainted shortly after Voltaire’s arrival, he made acquaintance with the great philosopher. Voltaire employed him in making translations, and for a time is said to have invited him with Voltaire. VOL. II. E The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. 5 ° daily to dinner. It was, of course, an enormous advantage for a young beginner like Lessing to be the guest of the greatest writer in Europe, and of the King of Prussia’s friend. It opened out to him prospects of instruction, advancement, and patronage, and of course, in the opinion of his parents, of spiritual harm. If Lessing had summed up his views and plans at that time, they would probably have borne a great resemblance to Voltaire’s. He wished to become a free author, not to influence literature from the professorial chair, but to be independent of the academic tradition, and, like Voltaire, to rely on the intrinsic power of his pen. Voltaire had written some counsels for a journalist, in which he recommended impartiality in all things; in philosophy he advised respect for greater thinkers, in history he called men’s attention to the various grades of civilisation, and laid special stress on the modern periods ; in dramatic criticism he required faithful analysis, moderation in judgment, and a comparison with other extant pieces on the same subject. In aesthetic criticism in general he insisted on the method of comparison, a method as valuable, he declared, in such departments of knowledge as in anatomy. , Lessing conducted his journalism in accordance with Lessings method of ^ ese counsels; he did not adhere to any particular criticism party; in philosophy he attached himself, like Voltaire, derived from t0 or rea t er of his predecessors, and he scrupulously Voltaire. . „ ° , f . . , , / followed the inductive and comparative method in esthetic criticism. The interest which he then took in history in general was not continued later, but literary history proved a sub¬ ject of permanent attraction to him. Lessing did not remain faithful to the physical sciences which Voltaire popularised, and neither tried his skill in the epic nor in the novel; but he shared Voltaire’s pre-eminent delight in the drama, and, like Voltaire, pro¬ ceeded cautiously in the reform of the stage. In their disinclination to positive religion and in their demand for religious toleration they were both of one mind ; and Lessing’s clear unadorned prose, which fits and follows every nuance of thought, might have been acquired from Voltaire, had it not been natural to himself. For good or evil, Lessing’s relation to Voltaire was an important element in his life. Personally he afterwards broke with him Lessing . Ch. XI.] 5i altogether. Lessing received a copy of Voltaire’s ‘ Siecle de Louis XIV’ before publication, and did not keep it Lessing’s carefully enough from strange eyes; Voltaire suspected quarrel with him of dishonourable motives in this, and a breach Voltaire, ensued, which was productive of much harm to Lessing in later years. But even without this breach, it was not in Lessing’s nature to resign himself to a foreign influence ; mere scoffing at religion exer¬ cised no power over his soul, and the weak points in Voltaire were too apparent to escape such a clever observer as he was. Voltaire was to him only a lever by which to raise himself to independence. If Voltaire had learnt from the ancients, Lessing might read them also; if Voltaire had learnt from the English, Lessing could follow suit there, and draw from the same source as Haller, Hagedorn, and Klopstock had done. In Berlin Lessing became not dependent but free; and, what is more important, he brought about the literary emancipation of Berlin from Swiss influence. Lessing’s He struck out a new line of criticism, and gathered influence round him young writers such as the Jewish merchant in Berlin - Moses Mendelssohn, and the bookseller Nicolai, who were his literary disciples and, like himself, adhered neither to the Swiss school nor to the Gottschedians, neither raved for Klopstock nor for Schonaich, and always reserved their own right of judgment. When, in 1755, he published a collected edition of his works, he was already a celebrated man, a dreaded critic and an admired poet. His little Anacreontic poems found great favour as songs, and the powerful drinking-song where Death appears before him and he succeeds in deceiving Death, has lived on among German students to this day. In his poetic fables he imitated the easy, conversational tone of Gellert. His epigrams borrowed much from foreign sources, but were seldom without the true epi¬ grammatic ring. In certain fragments of didactic poems he has the conciseness of Haller without his obscurity. His ‘ Briefe ’ and ‘ Rettungen ’ are works of a scholar, in which he uses his multifarious knowledge to correct old-established errors, to censure contemporary mediocrity, and defend calumniated wor¬ thies of the past, all in a clear and flexible style. But it was above all as a dramatist that Lessing took the first rank among E 2 52 The Age of Frederick the Great. [ch. xi. his colleagues even early in life. His litile comedies were more Lessing’s French than those of Gellert; but by his closer ad- Dramas. herence to a foreign technique, he became a master of technique in general. His plays are written with a sure and correct hand; the purpose in view is always attained, and the plot is clearly developed and never drags; his scenes are well contrived, his jokes are good, and his characters, in spite of a lingering con¬ ventionality, well drawn. But he did not remain content with light pieces for the amusement of the public; his idea was to use the stage as a moral influence, and to prove to his father that he was not giving up his life to empty aims. In ‘Der Freigeist’ Freigeist’ ^e P^ aces a n °ble theologian and an honourable free- ‘Die thinker side by side, and shows how the latter was Juden,’ and cured of his prejudice against the clergy. In‘Die Schatz ’ Juden ’ he attacks the Christian prejudice against these unhappy people, who were just beginning to breathe freely under the blessing of Frederick’s tolerance, and whose noblest representatives in Berlin Lessing had learnt to honour and love. His extensive historical knowledge of the drama among other nations was of benefit to his own productions; in ‘ Der Schatz * (The Treasure) we have a modernised version of a comedy of ‘ Miss Plautus, and his endeavour to modernise the Greek Sara legend of Medea resulted in the production of his Samson.’ t ra gedy r , ‘ Miss Sara Samson.’ This piece brings before us a fickle lover, who has become unfaithful to his first lady, and elopes with a second, but does not mean to marry her; his former mistress pursues him, upbraids him, threatens to kill her child, and really does kill her rival. These contemptible and horrible characters are put into English masks, and the play is written after the model of English plays like Lillo’s ‘ Merchant of London; ’ the dialogue is in prose, full of gushing sentiment which often becomes offensive. This play was the beginning of middle-class tragedy in Germany, of that trage'die bourgeoise against which' Voltaire had raised a warning voice. Under Lessing’s influence it now at once came into fashion, supplanted the Alexan¬ drine tragedy, and began to drive out every other kind of play. Various causes co-operated to call this new style of drama into life, Ch. XI.] Lessing. 53 such as the wish felt by authors to be true to nature, their con¬ viction that characters drawn from modern middle-class or aristo¬ cratic society would appeal more strongly to the hearts of play¬ goers than the fates of ancient kings and princes, or the desire to break with the remote idealism of French classical tragedy, a desire which in France had already led to the introduction of a ‘ comedie larmoyanlei i. e. a tragedy with characters drawn from private life and with a happy ending. But unfortunately these middle-class plays often degenerate into sensationalism on the one hand, or into the depths of commonplace on the other. ‘ Miss Sara Samson ’ closed an epoch in Lessing’s life and in his poetic activity; while the plaudits of the public still rang in his ears he was already filled with higher aspirations. In order to put himself en rapport with a higher style of drama, Lessing Lessing returned to Leipzig in the autumn of 1755. returns to There an opportunity offered itself of making a tour Leipzig, 1755 through North Germany to Holland and England in company with a young man of property, Winkler by name. But this tour was soon interrupted by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War; Lessing returned in October, 1756, to Leipzig, and at once became a centre of literary interests there. His old friend Christian Felix Weisse sought to benefit by his teaching as before; the young Von Brawe chose him as his model; Ewald von Kleist, now Major, and ordered to Leipzig with his regiment, became his intimate friend. By Lessing’s advice Kleist gave up descriptive poetry and took to epic or dramatic poetry, as containing more life and action; his tragedy ‘ Seneca,’ idylls like Kleist’s his excellent ‘ Irin,’ full of feeling and rich in thought, ‘Seneca, and a heroic poem from the Greek world entitled * cissides ‘ Cissides and Paches,’ bear witness to this change, and Paches.’ The war now fired all hearts ; men felt that a national interest was at stake, and the conflict with the French and the victory of Rossbach excited an indescribable enthusiasm. Poets all of a sudden found great subjects close at hand, and no longer needed to seek their heroes in a remote past; and though it was hard on Bodmer, Sulzer, Lessing, and others, that the hard-pressed king should at this very time have given a man like Gottsched an 54 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. opportunity of publicly glorying in the praise formerly bestowed „ on him by Frederick, yet this did not hinder them Effect of . . . the Seven from doing their part in that rise of German litera- Yaars’ War ture for which Frederick’s deeds were the signal, on literature. L ess j n g^ though a Saxon by birth, was in his heart on Frederick’s side. Another Saxon, Kastner (see p. 20), then Kastner Professor at Gottingen, glorified the Battle of Ross- Kleist, and bach in German and Latin epigrams. Many were Bamler. 0 f opinion that Frederick was greater than Csesar. Kleist sang the praises of his king and of the Prussian army, and the patriotic death which he had desired for himself fell to his lot at the battle of Kunersdorf (1759). Ramler produced solemn and artistic odes in honour of the glorious war, and deserved the name of the ‘ Prussian Horace.’ Johann Gottlieb Willamow attempted to glorify in heavy dithyrambs ‘ Frederick, Willamow hero, the prince, the sage,’ and aspired to be and Anna the Prussian Pindar. A Prussian Sappho, too, Karschin. according to the exaggerated praises of that time, appeared in the person of Anna Louisa Karschin, who, owing to meagre culture and too great indulgence on the part of her admirers, never got beyond mere rhyming. Many other writers besides these, cultured and uncultured, a few r with a vocation for poetry, many with none, made their voices loudly heard. Amongst these Gleim made a decidedly happy hit in his ‘ Prussian War- songs by a Grenadier,’ which first appeared in 1757 and 1758 in flying sheets, and w r ere published in a collected form in 1758, with a preface by Lessing; these poems really mark a new departure in popular lyric verse. Lighter poetry had never quite lost touch with the popular song Gleim’s fr° m which it had sprung. In Hagedorn we see the ‘ Grenadier relation clearly, and Gleim, who belongs to Hagedorn’s Songs.’ school, had in his earlier years written humorous romances in ballad-form; the Spanish Gongora and the French Moncrif were his models in these poems, which he really wished to be disseminated through ballad-singers. Klopstock, in his song on Frederick the Great, had struck a powerful and popular tone, and had made use of a celebrated English ballad-metre. It was this Ch. XI.] Lessing. 55 very metre, with lines only rhyming alternately, that Gleim now chose for the descriptions of battle which he put into the mouth of a grenadier, and these War-songs of his were quite as spirited, manly, and rich in action as Klopstock’s poem. The artificial obscurity of the classical ode was laid aside, and all digressions and sudden transitions were done away with; the grenadier-poet renounced all pomp, tinsel, and even decorative epithets, and simply called things by their real names. Though he sometimes becomes too diffuse, and though we meet with harsh and awkward forms of expression in his songs, yet on the whole he gives us happy ideas and striking scenes. Gleim is most successful in his fusion of epic and lyric elements ; he introduces God or the king, or Frederick’s generals as speaking; his tone is now grand, now naive, now comic, and he never forgets that he must speak as being himself a fighter in the battles which he relates. Lessing might well assign a high special literary place to the grenadier-poet, and expressly reckon him as one of the ‘ people’ who were always at least half a century behind modern refinements of language, and therefore opposed to French canons of criticism. The grenadier, Lessing says, reminds us rather of the German ‘ bards,’ the character of whose poems we can divine from those of the old Northern Skalds; nor does Lessing forget to mention the younger bards of the age of Hohenstaufen, and to cite their style as a parallel to Gleim’s. He thus shows his appreciation not only of the value of national and popular poetry, but also of the great epochs of German literature. With these and such-like reflections, Lessing introduced the Grenadier-Songs to the public, and the impulse thus given was partly beneficial, partly injurious; we soon seem to trace its influence when we see the old Northern poetry and the Minnesingers coming into favour again, and the longing after the Germanic bards feeding itself on the Celtic Ossian. The general applause called forth by Gleim’s war-lyrics led to many imitations, expressive rather of local patriotism than of national feeling. The Saxon Anacreontic 'Amazonen- r lieder * poet, Christian Felix Weisse; who had no glorious deeds to celebrate, wrote in 1760 his ‘ Amazon-songs,’ without reference to particular battles or to any particular war; by Imitations of Gleim. Weisse’s 5« The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. ‘Amazon’ he means a girl who has a soldier-lover, and he thus showed that such popularity as lay within his reach could only be at¬ tained by poetry which appealed not to national but merely to private sentiment, a fact which he later on still further attested by the songs Gersten- °f operettas. The Schleswig-Holstein Anacreontic berg’s poet, Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg, published in ‘Knegs- 1^62 ‘War-songs of a Royal Danish Grenadier/ The lieder/ and . Lavater s Zurich theologian Lavater, a disciple of .Bodmer and ‘ Sehweizer- Breitinger, produced a great but not a lasting effect by his ‘ Swiss-songs/ And in 1770 an Austrian lieder.’ German interest in foreign popular poetry. Cuirassier, in 1778 a Saxon Dragoon followed with limping gait in the steps of the Prussian Grenadier. But these Grenadier-songs also produced another and much wider result. This new form of popular poetry inspired the Germans with a higher esteem for popular poetry in general; Hagedorn and Hoffmanswaldau had al¬ ready taken an interest, half scholarly, half poetical, in the lyric poetry of foreign nations, and especially in the poetry of uncivilised nations. This interest was kept up in Lessing’s circle, as is attested by Kleist’s ‘ Song of a Laplander.’ Lessing himself published a couple of beautiful Lithuanian ‘ Dainos ’; he was averse to the very word barbarian, and was glad to prove that there are poets born under every sky, and that strong emotion is not a privilege only of civilized nations. Addison had already directed attention to the English ballad-poetry, and Klopstock, Gleim and others had profited English ky his example. Bishop Percy’s collection of Eng- ballads and lish ballads was, therefore, received with general Macpher- rapture in Germany, and the sentimental heroic son s Ossian. p Qetr y Q f Celtic origin, which Macpherson sent forth under the name of Ossian, was greeted with enthusiastic applause by a race of poets full of sentiment and warlike sym- Scandina- pathies. About the same time part of the Edda was vian poetry, rendered easily accessible in Mallet’s ‘History of Den¬ mark’and its German translation; and in 1766 Gerstenberg, by his ‘ Gedicht eines Skalden,’ introduced the Northern mythology into German poetry. Klopstock, who had long designated him- Ch. XI.] Lessing . 57 self and his friends as ‘Bards/ followed Gerstenberg’s lead, and began to produce his ‘ Bardiete.’ The Viennese Jesuit Denis, an admirer of Klopstock, translated Ossian into hexameters, and wrote some poetry in imitation of him; he and Klopstock were imitated in their turn, and thus there arose—long after the Seven Years’ War was over, and when there was, in fact, no war goingon anywhere—that vague kind of battle-poetry of which Weisse had set the example, and which has become so notorious under the name of the ‘ Roaring of the Bards ’ ( Bardengebriill ). Lessing looked somewhat coldly on this whole warlike fit which he himself had helped to induce: at the same time T . , 1 ’ Lessing s he had long paid much attention to popular poetry, projected and had asked himself whether it would not be pos- play of Lj I q i -| r. sible to atone for Gottsched’s sins, and restore the connection, which Gottsched in his conceit had so wantonly destroyed, between the regular stage and the old forms of drama represented by the wandering comedians. He was acquainted with the popular play of Dr. Faustus, and proposed to make the magical Doctor a character for the regular stage. He meant to endow him with a passionate love of truth, but finally to save him from hell; an angel was to declare at the end of the play: ‘ God has not given to man the noblest of impulses in order to make him eternally unhappy.’ Lessing began to work out this plan in his mind about the same time as that of ‘ Miss Sara Samson,’ and it occupied his attention for a long time; he even thought of two ways of treating the subject, one of which was to retain the traditional devil, while the other was to manage with¬ out him. In neither direction did he get beyond the mere sketch; for the time being, the present, the Seven Years’ War, laid hold on his imagination, as it also gave new impulses to his life. His odes in prose, addressed to Gleim and Kleist, were disguised eulogies of the Prussian king, with here and there a sarcasm upon the condition of Saxony. A Spartan war-song, laconic and pruned of all superfluous ideas, marks a new departure in . , Lessing’s taste. In the little drama ‘ Philotas ’ he draws in the same laconic way the character of a king’s son, who kills himself for the weal of his fatherland rather than fall as a valuable The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XT. 58 hostage into the hands of the enemy. The same laconic style is Lessing’s noticeable in the prose-fables which he now published. Fables. Gellert and Gleim had written fables of epic length; the Prussian Lichtwer had made the fable the vehicle of his peculiar humour, and the Swiss Meyer von Knonau had embodied in it close observation of nature. Lessing’s fables displayed none of these characteristics; they have just the epigrammatic brevity which pro¬ perly belongs to so trifling a branch of didactic poetry. In Lessing’s hands the fable was curtailed of the exaggerated importance which it had acquired in an age of literary sterility. But Lessing was able to convey very profound matter in his fables in spite of their concise style and meagre form ; we catch in them quiet echoes of the strong emotions of a fiery soul. In these contrasts of true with false greatness, of real with fictitious merit, in the onslaught made on pretence, hypocrisy, and fanaticism, we have a reflection of the views of life, and probably of the life-experiences, of their proud and self-reliant author; and this is what raises these poems to the rank of classical masterpieces in their modest sphere. These fables, and still more an essay attacking the established view of the fable, are sufficient evidence that Lessing was dissatisfied with current literary ideals, and filled with the presentiment of a new age and a new art. But the future of poetry seemed to him to be menaced by the stirring political events and interests of the time, which nearly monopolised men’s minds and incapacitated them for steady literary work. Accordingly, in various literary essays, he set him¬ self to divert men’s attention to the cause of letters by discouraging bunglers, by setting those who had talent to work on worthy sub¬ jects, and by rendering men’s artistic perceptions more acute. But such an undertaking could at that time be worked from Berlin alone. Lessing had returned to Berlin in 1758, Beilin 58 an d there his ‘ Literary Letters ’ began to appear in His 1759 - Lessing adopted in them the tone of conversa- * Littsratur- tj 0 nal and witty letter-writing; he wrote with reckless candour and veracity, calling a bad thing bad without circumlocution. At an earlier period he had, perhaps with unneces¬ sary vehemence, held up to ridicule an unsuccessful translation of Horace, and ruined for ever in public opinion the unhappy author, Ch. XI.] Lessing. 59 Pastor Lange of the older Halle school (see vol. i. p. 429), a protege of the Swiss school, and a fore-runner of Klopstock. He now set himself to chastise, though with less severity, the bad taste of a wider circle of scribblers. He delivered his most cruel His judgment on Gottsched, and had a sharp word for literary French tragedy; he made short work with the bad criticisms - translators and the prolific literary hacks; he found fault with Klopstock’s odes for being so full of feeling that in reading them one is not touched at all; he attacked the ‘ Nordischer Aufseher ’ (Northern Observer), a periodical which was issued by the Klop- stockian circle in Kopenhagen, and which had asserted that no one could be an upright man without religion; he sharply rebuked Wieland for his fanciful extravagance. Yet we must not suppose that his criticisms were wholly negative; there was no want of positive suggestions in them. After the first flush of his reforming ardour had passed off, Lessing, satisfied with the success which had rewarded his efforts, retired from the field and handed over the publication to his friends, Mendelssohn and Nicolai, who were soon joined by Thomas Abbt, a young Swabian by birth, but enthusi¬ astically Prussian in his sentiments; Abbt had received his education in Halle and at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and, fired with rapturous admiration for Frederick and his generals, had written an essay on ‘ Death for the Fatherland/ The * Literary Letters’ continued to be published till 1765; meanwhile Lessing had been since 1760 in Breslau, as secretary of General Tauentzien, whose acquaintance he had made through Kleist. In Breslau, Lessing gave himself up to various diversions, and even to the passion of gambling; at the same time he was carrying on important studies, and was pre¬ paring himself for two of his greatest achievements, ‘ Laokoon' and ‘ Minna von Barnhelm,'* which he published in 1766 and 1767, during a third sojourn in Berlin. The one reveals his Hellenic tendencies, while the other gives expression to his national senti¬ ments. The former is connected with general European culture, while the latter is founded on the special interests of the German nation, and marks the culminating point of the influence of the Seven Years’ War upon German letters. ‘ Minna von Barnhelm ’ was the first really national drama 6 o The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. dealing with contemporary events, and in it the Prussian soldier Lessing’s w ^ om Gleim had introduced into lyric poetry, made a Minna von glorious debut upon the comic stage. The scene is laid Barnhelm, j n Berlin, immediately after the war: the characters 1767 are no longer burdened with Greek or English names, and are not typical masks, but living people with individual traits drawn from the author’s own experience, and in sympathy with his own character. There is, first of all, the Prussian Major Tellheim, a retired and impoverished officer, generous, noble, and sensitive even to excess; the military element is further represented by the sergeant, Paul Werner, and the Major’s servant, Just, whom his master has imbued with his own noble nature. The female cha¬ racters are : the widow of one of Tellheim’s fellow-officers, who finds a friend and benefactor in the Major; his fiance'e, Minna, of whom he no longer thinks himself worthy, and who, therefore, has to woo and wed him in despite of himself; lastly, Minna’s maid Francisca, an improved edition of those Lisetles whom the poet had introduced as intrigantes in his earlier comedies, written after French models. All these characters are excellent, loveable and thoroughly German people. The play is a homage to German women, and a glorification of the Prussian army, in whose midst Lessing had lived for four years; it is, furthermore, a eulogy of the great king who looms in the background as the administrator of that justice which restores to the Major his lost pride, vindicates his injured honour, and brings everything to a happy conclusion. By way of contrast and as a salve to wounded national feeling, Lessing places by the side of the honest German, a French ad¬ venturer, a contemptible character, who excites the laughter of the audience by his broken German. All this is very happily embodied in scenes, partly mirthful, partly affecting. ‘Minna von Barnhelm’ was the first of a whole succession of soldier-plays, in which this hobby was driven to death, and finally, in time of peace, became as wearisome as the ‘ Roaring of the Bards.’ Lessing, inspired by the great war, and as a voluntary partisan of Prussia, had thus nationalised the German drama, and had made it really popular without the least sacrifice of artistic form. Before long, much the same thing was attempted for the novel, Ch. XI.] Lessing. 6 1 ‘ Miss Fanny Wilkes,’ and ‘ Sophien’s Heise.’ though by an extremely inferior writer, namely, the theologian Johann Timotheus Hermes. This author, who was a The German Prussian by birth, rescued the novel from those remote Novel, regions which had been alone thought appropriate to it, and made it a story of current events in Germany, as Grimmelshausen had done before him. As Lessing had laid the scene of his play ‘Miss Sara Samson’ in England, and thus acknowledged his in¬ debtedness to the English, so Hermes, who was an imitator partly of Richardson and partly of Fielding, first came before Hermes’s the public in 1766 with a novel entitled ‘ Miss Fanny Wilkes;’ subsequently, however, he took to trivial and common-place representation of German life in ‘ So- phien'sReise von Memel nach Sachsen’(1769-1773), a many-volumed and disconnected medley of adven¬ ture, moralisings, and sentiment. Hermes soon found a successor in Lessing’s friend Nicolai, whose novel ‘ Sebaldus Nothanker’ ( x 773) was a continuation of another novel written some time before, Moriz August von Thtimmel’s ‘ Wilhelmine,’ a burlesque epic in prose, which gained the esteem of Lessing. Lessing had \ given a prose form to tragedy, the fable, and the ode, and now, too, the mock-heroic poem was transformed into prose ; it was thus assimilated to the novel and the romance, and helped to bring these two forms of literature down to the interests of__ Thummel s every-day life. Thiimmel’s ‘ Wilhelmine,’ which ap- < wilhel- peared in 1764, was an attack on the depravity of the German courts. The heroine is a chambermaid in a reigning prince’s household, and marries the good village-clergy¬ man, Sebaldus. After the appearance of Oliver Gold- Nicolai’s smith’s ‘Vicar of Wakefield ’ in 1766, Nicolai endowed « Sebaldus this same Sebaldus with some qualities derived from Nothanker,’ 1773 the English country-clergyman, and related his further fortunes after his marriage. Sebaldus comes in contact with orthodox people, pietists and free-thinkers, with noblemen and Prussian sol¬ diers ; he suffers much on account of his opinions, is persecuted and driven from place to place, but is finally more or less consoled by winning a prize in a lottery. In this book Nicolai supplied the public with a patriotic work, dealing with middle-class life, and mine, 1764. 6 2 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch.XI. setting forth enlightened views ; and in spite of its incessant theolo¬ gical discussions, in spite of the traditional apparatus of robbers, shipwrecks, and slave-merchants, and of many other defects, the book proved not unpalatable reading to those who were not over-critical, for it was full of interesting information about religious conditions in Berlin, it contained a couple of happily- conceived characters, and teemed with protests against aristocratic arrogance, Gallomania, intolerance, and hypocrisy. But at the same time that German poetry was establishing itself Kevival of more and more firmly on German soil, the love of classical classical antiquity was also increasing. The humanis- infiuence. q c e j emen t G f modern culture gained redoubled force from the general spirit of creative activity which animated the age, and from the increased energy of aesthetic and scientific aspirations. While the war lasted the German nation had shown a Spartan endurance and valour, and had rivalled the ancients in its deeds; now that peace was restored the greatness of Athens seemed a worthy object of emulation. In January, 1771, shortly after the German comedy and the German novel had tendered a solution of the problems of national life, Frederick the Great entrusted the superintendence of Prussian instruction to Baron Zedlitz, who first made the Prussian gymnasium what it is, or what it was in its best times. Zedlitz doubled and trebled the number of hours to be devoted to Greek instruction, substituted for the New Testament the great writers of antiquity, and thus transformed the Gymnasium of the Reformation period into the modern classical school. As a parallel to this we find Lessing, before he completed his £ Minna von Barnhelm/ publishing his ‘ Laokoon,’ a work in which he ranged himself by the side of Winckelmann, and of those writers who not only gave an intellectual justification of the prevalent ten¬ dency to return to the pure Greek forms, but also educated and developed the taste for classical antiquity. The course of Winckelmann's life was exactly the reverse of Winckel- Lessing’s. Lessing was drawn from Saxony to Prussia, mann's there to have his genius moulded by Prussian influ- Ciassicism. ences . t p e p russ i an Winckelmann, on the contrary, left his native province to go to Dresden ; and there, in the classic Lessing. Ch. XT.] 6 3 His 1 Gedanken uber die Nachah- mung der His Geschicbte dfer Kunst des Alter- tbums,’ 1764 . abode of German Rococo , found satisfaction for his aesthetic nature in the treasures of modern and ancient art. There, in intercourse with the Austrian Oeser, a many-sided artist and stimulating character, he learnt to worship that ideal of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur which he revealed to the world in 1755 Griechischen in his ‘ Thoughts on the imitation of the Greeks Wer ke in d.6X* 01*61 in painting and sculpture/ But his stay at Dresden urd Bild _ was only preparatory to his life at Rome, whither hauerkunst/ his conversion to the Catholic Church naturally led 1755 . him. There, in the midst of the grand ruins of the ancient world, he enjoyed unparalleled personal liberty, and in 1764 gave to the world his ‘ History of Ancient Art/ the first historical work of art in the German language; in it he adopted that philosophic and generalising treatment of history which had been initiated by Montesquieu, and combined with it a vast experience and know¬ ledge of facts at first hand, along with a marvellous divination of the characteristics of the purest Hellenic style, although no monu¬ ments of that style had at that time been recovered. Nor should we omit to notice the remarkable sharpness of perception and en¬ thusiasm in observation which the book attests, nor the graphic language peculiar to Winckelmann, rich and sensuous in its de¬ scription of works of art, and often rising to poetic sublimity, nor lastly the glorious principle with which the work culminates, that art flourishes where liberty reigns. Winckelmann gave an, aesthetic turn to classical studies by re¬ cognising as he did the importance of a knowledge of Greek art and by advocating the study of monuments in connection with ancient literature. But Winckel¬ mann was only the most important representative of a wide-spread tendency of the age. Three years be¬ fore the appearance of the ‘ Thoughts on the imitation of the Greeks/ a certain Abbd Laugier had made a pitiless attack on the highly ornate style of architecture then in vogue, and had condemned all styles except the three orders of Greek architecture. Practical architecture had entered on the same path, and simplicity, Revived study of Greek Art and Literature. *4 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. self-restraint, and close imitation of the ancients had become its watchwords. German Professors like Ernesti in Leipzig, and Gesner in Leipzig and Gottingen, had begun to pay greater regard to the Greeks. Christ, also a Leipzig man, and Lessing’s chief teacher, had bidden his pupils study ancient art, and Gesner’s Greek ‘ Chrestomathie’ had established itself in the schools by the side of the New Testament. In Halle Professor Schulze was wont in his lectures expressly to compare the Greeks and Romans, and to adjudge pre-eminence to the former; Berlin pos¬ sessed such a school-master as Rector Damm, of whom Winckel- mann learned Greek; the Saxon princely schools were beginning to put the Greek classics in the hands of their scholars. German poetry reaped decided advantage from this Hellenising tendency; though the serious Greek lyric poetry was still chiefly represented to the Germans by Horace, the disciple of the Greeks, yet Anacreon had already exercised a strong influence on German poets. Thanks to Breitinger’s efforts the name of Homer began to be mentioned with more and more reverence, and Wieland and others derived from Plato and Xenophon an ideal picture of Socrates, with which they mingled their own moral ideals. The same Wieland, by the magic of his imagination, transported his readers to the Greek shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and made them quite at home among the contemporaries of Pericles; his Greeks may some¬ times have rather resembled Frenchmen of the eighteenth century a. d. than Hellenes of the fifth century b.c., but this resemblance really only bears witness to a sympathetic conception of ancient times, and the neo-Greeks of Wieland’s creation made it all the easier for the Germans to become acquainted with the genuine old Hel¬ lenes. The need of discarding French models in favour of original Greek ones began to be more and more strongly felt. Elias Schlegel returned to Sophocles, though without discarding the French Alex¬ andrine tragedy. Pyra, as we know, wished to revive the ancient chorus. Klopstock introduced Greek metres into German poetry. Lessing early learnt from the characters of Theophrastus much that was of use to him in his comedies; in the fable he returned to Aesop; he meant to write a life of Sophocles, to treat the sub¬ ject of Philoctetes, and to attempt a Nemesis-tragedy based on Ch. XI.] Lessing. 65 classical models. Winckelmann’s first work incited Lessing to devote his attention to the study of ancient art, and the feeling that a review of aesthetic criticism up to that time was much needed led him to make the important researches embodied in ‘ Laocoon.’ The work was intended to fill three volumes, of which, however, only one appeared. Lessing could as little compete Lessing’s with Winckelmann in the advancement of the history ‘ Laocoon.’ of ancient art, as he could in his acquaintance with the monuments. Neither from the ‘ Laocoon,’ nor from the controversial literature which it called forth, did archaeology directly reap any great advan¬ tage ; only the beautiful little treatise—‘ How the ancients depicted death/ first established a fact now well known to all, and restored the genius with the reversed torch on many of our graves. In de¬ fending ‘beauty’ as the supreme law of ancient art, and of sculpture and painting in general, in esteeming beauty of form higher than that of colour, in desiring that expression should be toned down and subordinated to beauty—in all this Lessing stood in essential agreement with Winckelmann, and he and Winckelmann together established grandeur and repose as the ideal of Hellenic sculpture and painting, and as the principle which should govern modern artists. But when Winckelmann went further and derived the dis¬ tinctive character of the Greek masterpieces from a certain Stoical composure of soul, and tried to discover the same spirit in the Greek poets, Lessing could not agree with him. Heroic stoicism, which only excites cold admiration, was not at all to his mind ; and it was easy to show that it was also contrary to the spirit of the Greeks. In the development of this controversy with „ . , r f J Lessing s Winckelmann, Lessing has given us signal proof of his controversy- ability to think out a thing in the abstract, and at the with same time to accurately observe and appreciate facts. Wmckel " 11 mann. He pointed out how differently the death of Laocoon had been treated by Virgil on the one hand, and by the Greek sculptor on the other, and how in this they had only followed the different laws regulating poetry and plastic art; he sought to re¬ move the confusion between the two, and above all to abolish that kind of word-painting in poetry, which had come into vogue in Germany, particularly through Breitinger’s influence. He sought VOL. 11. F 66 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XT. to deduce the limits of the two arts from the nature of the means with which each must work, and argued that good writing only describes things and persons indirectly through their actions, and that Homer in particular only depicts by narrating. He thus fur¬ nished most valuable contributions to the theory of the epic, put an end to mere word-painting, and fixed the method of Wieland and of his successors in this branch of poetry. He set forth his views in a kind of impromptu style, without attempting systematic de¬ duction of them ; his work has all the liveliness of oral exposition, and yet it really rests throughout on the basis of a consistent system. It seems that for Lessing an important personal hope was bound up with this work; he hoped by it to attract the King’s attention, and to obtain the appointment of Director of the Royal Library in Beilin, a post for which both his name and Winckelmann’s had been mentioned favourably to the King. But both Winckelmann and Lessing were destined to be disappointed in their hopes. The Lessing and King’s impression of Lessing had been formed by the Frederick description which the enraged Voltaire had given him the Great. Q f t p e y 0un g author who had offended him ; Frederick, therefore, utterly refused to appoint Lessing to the post. Winckel¬ mann’s appointment also fell through owing to a dispute about the salary, Frederick declaring that the proposed two thousand Thalers (£300) was too much for a German, and that he would only give him half that amount. In the end an utterly incom¬ petent Frenchman was appointed over the heads of Lessing and Winckelmann. If Frederick could only have recognised it, no German author was really so akin to his inmost character as Les¬ sing. Both had the same vivacity and ambition, the same youthful thirst for glory which led them recklessly to humiliate their ene¬ mies, the same severity towards what was bad; both felt strongly the need of friendship, while both were but slightly susceptible to the love of women; in both enjoyment of life was combined with a strong sense of duty; both had the same liberal views, and tolerance, the same clear, ready, and rational style. Lessing demanded of a historian that he should relate contemporary events, a demand which Frederick fulfilled. Lessing introduced strict rule in literature, as Frederick did in the field and in home-government. Lessing, like Ch. XI.] Lessing. 67 the great king, defended the national cause against the foreigner. There were never two men more created for each other than Lessing and Frederick the Great, and Frederick could not have found any¬ where a subject who would have served him with greater faithfulness and a more worthy aim, or a writer who would have so fully compen¬ sated him for the loss of what attracted him in his beloved French. But the unproved and unjust accusation made years before by a Frenchman, whom the king despised much as he admired him, was sufficient reason for striking out the name of this German poet and scholar for ever from the list of those who might serve him. Lessing shook the dust of Brandenburg from his feet, and went in April 1767 to Hamburg, where a new disappoint- Lessing and ment awaited him. A permanent German national the Hamburg Theatre was about to be founded in the town which theatre, 1767 had been the home of the early German opera, the birth-place of Brockes and Hagedorn, and which was then the place of residence of so many old and young scholars and poets. The art of acting had been raised to a much higher level since the first start had been given it by the efforts of Caroline Neuber, already men¬ tioned in connection with Gottsched. The Schonemann, Koch, and Ackermann companies had become quite celebrated, and their best actors were beginning to give up imitating the French, and to aim at a less affected style of acting. Many excellent actors and actresses in Hamburg were ready to support Lessing in his new dramatic schemes. Lessing was to be the reporter, was to train the actors by his free criticisms, and to educate the public taste. From the first of May 1767 his ‘ Hamburgische Dramaturgic ’ appeared twice a week; it was a paper written entirely by himself, and exclusively devoted to the. interests of the National Theatre. But the actors, as usual, did not care to be found fault with, but only to be praised; the public did not show any very great sympathy with the undertaking, and the means soon began to fail. The scheme was abandoned after two years, and the ‘ Dramaturgic/ which had for some time given up criticising the representations regularly, and had introduced general discussions of the drama instead, did not get further than two volumes. But these two volumes are of The ‘ Hamburg¬ ische Drama¬ turgic.' F 2 68 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. inexhaustible value ; they are rich in information about the plays of the time, rich in penetrating criticism of dramatic art and dra¬ matic poetry in general. They form a continuation to the theatrical periodicals which Lessing had published in his youth, a continuation to his earlier polemical writings on the weaknesses of the French school, and a sequel to his ‘ Laocoon.’ In subsequent volumes the * Laocoon ’ was to have culmi- Lessing’s nate d in a glorification of the drama as the highest theory of form of poetry. All art, Lessing declared, must aim the drama. at q ie direct representation of nature ; and poetry, which can only describe and represent indirectly and by means of words, rises in the drama to the full level of a first-hand represen¬ tation, a real imitation of life. We can judge from this how deeply interested Lessing must have been in coming into direct contact with an excellent theatre. He had already discussed the theory of the fable, and in ‘ Laocoon ’ had furnished contributions to the theory of the epic, and it must have seemed to him of far greater importance to lay a theoretical basis for his favourite branch of poetry, the drama. As in the fable he had held up iEsop, and in the epic Homer, as infallible models, so now in the drama the Greeks of the best period were his guiding-stars, Aristotle for theory and Sophocles for practice. As in ‘ Laocoon ’ he had sought after true poetry and true painting, so now he sought out the way, which he had already indicated in his ‘ Literary Letters,’ towards the true drama. In common with the French school he laid the greatest weight on the authority of Aristotle; in common with Aristotle, the Wolffian philosophy, in which he too had been Sophocles, e d uca ted, he attached the greatest, nay, too great im- Shakspeare P ortance to correct definition as the basis of all theory. his In Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, or at least in his authorities. own interpretation of it, Lessing thought he laid his finger on the true essence of the drama, and with this defini¬ tion he found the dramas of Sophocles to be in full agree¬ ment ; but, strange as it may seem, the dramas of Shakspeare seemed to him to be also in full agreement with the demands of Aristotle, and this judgment of his shows how strong was the hold upon him of the literature of a kindred nation, and how surely he Ch. XI.] Lessing. 69 penetrated through the semblance to the substance, and was able to discern true genius under different forms. Such tragic elements as were common to Sophocles and to Shakspeare seemed to him to constitute the essence of tragedy, which, as he thought, should excite not amazement but sympathy, by representing overpowering events as inevitable consequences flowing from the character of the agents. From this standpoint he criticised the achievements of German tragedy up to his own time, and the tragedies of his old friend Weisse did not come off much better under his treatment than the comedies of Frau Gottsched. Then he attacked the false tragedy of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, the false interpretation and arbi¬ trary perversion of the Aristotelian doctrines by the French, and pointed out how entirely Voltaire had failed in his attempts to rival Shakspeare in depicting passion or in introducing supernatural elements into the drama. It was at Voltaire that Lessing’s hardest blows were levelled, for in him he was attacking a living man, a personal enemy who had done him grave injury; and besides, was he not indirectly avenging the cause of German literature against Frederick the Great, by lowering the reputation of a poet whom the king esteemed as the highest genius? Still, Lessing was no indiscriminate hater of the French. In earlier life it was Diderot who had nerved him to attack the French stage, and who had directed his attention to the special limitations of the various arts ; they both agreed in preferring the tragedy of middle- class life. Lessing had translated Diderot’s plays, and always gratefully acknowledged the influence which this worthy philosopher had exercised upon him. Lessing broke off his * Dramaturgic * in a fit of Lessing’s indignation, and resuming those archaeological studies controversy- which he had dropped in displeasure some years ^he^nti' before, proceeded to fling his * Antiquarian Letters ’ quarische at the head of Professor Klotz of Halle. Klotz was Briefed an elegant Latin scholar, who had come into a good appoint¬ ment early in life, and had skilfully organized a clique of his own with its own periodicals. He now set his clique and his papers to bait Lessing. Lessing struck all such opponents to the ground in the person of their chief, and gibbeted once and for all the 7o The Age of Frederick the Great. [ch. xi. mean intrigues of this miserable pedant. Lessing dropped this controversy also in disgust; he longed to get away from Hamburg, away from Germany, and to go straight to Rome. On the 8th of June, 1768, Winckelmann had been assassinated in Trieste. His place in Rome was vacant, and Lessing thought he might fill it; but not in the literal sense, as his German enemies supposed, who were only too anxious that he should incur the odium of changing his religion 1 . What Lessing wanted was to succeed to the position in which Winckelmann had done so much for the archaeological interests of Europe, and to live with the monuments of ancient art close at hand in the city where the best of them were preserved. For he felt, like Winckelmann, that to make these monuments known, to interpret them, to classify them historically, and to subject them to aesthetic criticism was a task demanding a man’s full powers, and worthy of his undivided attention. But the journey was deferred, evidently because Lessing could not find the necessary money, and it was finally given at Wolfen- that of Librarian at Wolfenbiittel. The post was biittel, small, it is true, but it was worthy of his acceptance, 177 °‘ and suited to his tastes. In Brunswick the Abbot Jerusalem, a clergyman of enlightened views, endeavoured to the utmost of his power to help on German poets, in the same way as we have noticed the court chaplain Sack did in Berlin. Jerusalem’s advice was of great influence in the appointment of the teachers at the Brunswick £ Carolinum,’ an in¬ stitution founded by Duke Charles on the model of the English public schools. Some of the writers in the ‘ Bremen Contributions/ Gartner, Ebert, Zacharia, and Schmid, had received masterships there, and Klopstock was just about to join them when the call to Kopenhagen opened more agreeable prospects to him. In this circle and from these teachers the hereditary prince of Brunswick derived his culture; and it was at his demand, reinforced by Ebert's strong approval, that the librarianship at Wolfenbiittel was offered to Lessing. He accepted the offer, and entered on the duties of his office in the spring of 1770. 1 Winckelmann had turned Roman Catholic. Ch. XI.] Lessing. 7 i Lessing's writings now assumed for the most part a bibliogra¬ phical character. He made many a happy find in Lessing ’ s the treasures of the library confided to his care ; and bibliogra- whenever he lighted on a valuable and unknown work, pbical pub- he always furnished the learned public with a full re- llcat:ons - port of his discoveries. Yet the impressions wrought on him by the Hamburg stage were still active in his mind. His important advances in the recognition of the principles on which the drama rested were yet to bear some tangible fruit. He wished to put his theory to a practical proof, and did so in his ‘ Emilia Galotti,' which appeared in 1772. The piece had 'Emilia been planned long ago ; it was meant at first to have Galotti,’ been founded on the story of Virginia, and, like 1772 ' other tragedies which Lessing sketched in the fire of youth, was to have extolled an uprising in the cause of liberty; later on, however, he gave up the idea of dramatising public affairs, and transferred the scene to a small modern Italian principality. The play gives us a terrible picture of a princely egoist, who, in the satisfaction of his riotous desires, sets the life of his subjects at nought; he hurries from one amour to another, drives one woman almost mad by de¬ serting her, then murders a bridegroom in order to possess his bride ; the girl herself longs for death, and at her request her father plunges a dagger into her heart and thus saves her from dishonour. The characters are all excellently drawn; Emilia's worthy old father, rough and recklessly impetuous, yet at the same time afraid of his own impetuosity; the weak, imprudent, somewhat down¬ trodden mother; the honest, straightforward, manly bridegroom; the girl herself, charming, modest, the most timid yet the most resolute of her sex; the refined, princely profligate, who can con¬ verse cleverly with a painter about art, and whose mind is open to all higher interests, but who knows no restraint to his wishes, be¬ cause he thinks himself above all laws; his first victim, the half¬ crazy Orsina; his pliant courtier Marinelli, the servant of his lusts, in whom every feeling of morality and honour has been destroyed by associating with the despot—all these characters, and even the bandits hired by Marinelli are graphically presented to us, and the course of action springs, as the ‘ Dramaturgic’ demanded, from the 72 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. nature of the characters. Though the plot may have been settled beforehand, and the characters only drawn out afterwards to fit in with it, though the father may be blamed, and has been, for stab¬ bing his daughter and not the despot—yet all must own that the plot is developed without any awkward halts or gaps, and the diffi¬ culties involved in its presentation on the stage got over with won¬ derful ease. Lessing proved himself in this piece a master of tragedy as in his ‘ Minna ’ he had shown himself a master^ of comedy. As the author of ‘Emilia Galotti’ he became the real teacher of a younger generation of dramatists. But Lessing’s dramatic activity was not to end with this play. ‘Nathan He h a d ^ to r ^ se to a y et higher level. The der Weise/ form of the prose drama, which he had introduced by 1779 . p- g < § ara> » an( j w hich he had, notwithstanding ear¬ lier intentions to the contrary, remained faithful in his ‘ Emilia/ was yet to be abandoned for the drama in verse, in order that he might clothe a most ideal subject in a worthy form, and add the grace and charm of rhythm to a noble hymn of all-embracing human love. ‘ Emilia Galotti ’ was followed unexpectedly, after seven years, by ‘ Nathan the Wise/ Theological controversies induced him to write this, just as contact with a real stage had induced him to write ‘ Emilia.’ He seemed to be absorbed in his duties as librarian, and actively engaged in various departments of harmless science, when in 1773 he began his ‘ Contributions to history and literature drawn from the treasures of the Wolfenbiittel library.’ But in the next year the question of toleration came up incidentally in ‘Fragmente connection with some point of literary history, and eines Wolf- there appeared, without exciting much notice, the first enbutteler j ns t a i men t 0 f a publication purporting to be extracts Ungenann- r r r o ten,’ edited from the papers of an * anonymous Wolfenbiitteler/ by Lessing, which was followed by further instalments in 1777 and 1774 1778. These papers contained the sharpest attacks on Christianity ; the writer denounced the ‘ crying-down of reason from the pulpits/ questioned the possibility of a Revelation, and de¬ nied the character of a Revelation to the Old Testament on special grounds; in the New Testament the story of the Resurrection Lessing. Ch XI.] 73 in particular was sharply criticised, and highly irreverent views were put forth as to the aims of Christ and his disciples. In truth, this new work, which Lessing disguised as a humble bibliographical publication, precipitated a crisis in the history of Protestant theology and of the Protestant Church. The whole theological world was soon in uproar, though it had seemed fully prepared for the strongest criticism. The general development of the Church and of religious doctrine had been in a decidedly liberal direction ; orthodoxy was retreating, and most of the influential Church appointments were filled by the Liberals. Liberal The influence of the English Freethinkers was mak- theological ing itself more and more felt, and their views were criticism in secretly accepted by many, and openly avowed by Crerman y- a few. The society of Freemasons, which had spread from Eng¬ land about the time of the accession of Frederick the Great, under¬ mined the esteem hitherto cherished for positive religion, and Voltaire’s malicious criticisms on Christianity were eagerly read in Germany, as in the whole of Europe. An increasing indifference to dogma was everywhere apparent, and theological writings were becoming more elegant in style, more secular in tone. As in the time of the Humanists, so now, the general advances in history and philology were, after German fashion, at once turned to the account of theology in particular, and this could only result in an increasing independence of thought and criticism, Ernesti, and a corresponding diminution of faith. The cele- Michaelis, brated scholar, Ernesti of Leipzig, was the first to and Semler - begin an unbiassed and strictly learned interpretation of the Bible, in opposition to dogmatic prepossessions. He was followed in this by Michaelis and Semler, both of whom studied at Halle. Semler became the father of modern historical criticism from original sources; he was the first to distinguish between contem¬ porary and second-hand evidence, original and indirect authorities, and treated the writings of the New Testament as monuments of literary history, trying to discover the purpose with which they were written, and the occasions which called them forth. Lie wished to separate what was of permanent value in them from what was merely local and temporary. But the boldness of Semler and [Ch. XI. 74 The Age of Frederick the Great. of every other scholar was far surpassed by the one-sided and Re imams’ swee P’ n o criticism put forth by the Hamburg philo- views pub¬ lished by- Lessing in his ‘ Frag- sopher and professor, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, in a work vhich was submitted to Lessing in manu¬ script form, and by him published, as we have seen, a mente eines few years after the author’s death, under the title of the Tinge- ^ ‘ Papers of an Anonymous Wolfenbutteler/ Reimarus could perceive in the origin of Christianity nothing but the worldly aims of its Founder, and the false pretensions of his disciples. This was too much, not only for the orthodox, but for the Liberal party. Among the former the disputatious Melchior Goeze of Hamburg, and among the latter Semler and many others rose up and challenged these views. All of them made Lessing responsible for the opinions set forth, and he had to answer all attacks. He had been prepared for this, and knew what a storm he was conjuring up. But the frame of mind in which he had published those first cutting fragments was very different from that in which he now set about undertaking the defence of the anonymous Wolfenbutteler. Then, peace and happi¬ ness had just begun to dawn for him. Alone, and often in struggle with want and debts, he had lived on till his forty-eighth year; at length fortune seemed to smile upon him, for his outward circum¬ stances had improved, and a clear-headed and energetic woman, Eva Konig, the widow of a Hamburg friend, had become his wife in October, 1776. She had the best influence upon him, and made him quieter, steadier, and less hasty. But on Christmas Eve, 1777, Death of she gave birth to a son, who died in twenty-four hours, Lessing’s and on the 10th of January, 17 78, she died herself. wife- Lessing wrote heart-rending letters, letters breathing the bitter misanthropic mockery of his Tellheim or his Orsina, letters full of unfathomable misery, and such as no one had ever before written, except Frederick the Great in his most desponding moments. ‘ My wife is dead,’ he writes, ‘ so this experience, too, I have now made. I am tha.nkful there cannot be still reserved to me many such experiences, and am quite easy.’ It was in this frame of mind that Lessing had to begin to answer the polemics against the anonymous author and his publisher. Ch. XI.] Lessing. 75 He wrote his ‘Testament of John/ his ‘Duplik/ his ‘Parables/ his ‘Axiomata/ and that whole series of scathing Lessing’s polemics to which he gave the title of ‘Anti-Goeze/ theological He applied all his marvellous powers of language controversy, and keen argument to the task before him ; meta¬ phors and similes suggested themselves in abundance at his call, and yet he appeals less to the imagination than to the His ‘ Anti¬ understanding. His quick transitions of thought keep G-oeze.’ us continually on the alert; we seem to be listening to a dis¬ cussion carried on in flying haste, and where the objections of the opponent are left to our conjecture. The dramatic vivacity of the Lutheran pamphlets is revived here in the hands of a true dramatist. Now Lessing adopts the form of the dialogue, now of the epistle. At one time he propounds a parable, at another he brings forward a chain of theses; here we have calm evidence and statements, there a storm of query and invective. He has a special style for every separate opponent. Goeze gets the hardest blows, being stamped as a disloyal persecutor and bigot, an intolerant hypo¬ crite and slanderer. Every weak point which he betrays Lessing at once spies out with eagle eye, and mercilessly assails. But his object is rather defence than attack, and he triumphantly answers the onslaught made upon him for publishing the ‘ Fragments/ Free enquiry, he says, is the right of all Protestants. Luther’s spirit demands that no man should be hindered in seeking after truth according to his lights, for the final purpose of Christianity is not that we should be saved in any manner, but that we should be saved through the truth illumining our souls. And the letter is not the spirit, the Bible is not religion; consequently attacks on the Bible are not necessarily attacks on religion. As a matter of fact Lessing by no means agreed with all the opinions set forth in the ‘Fragments/ He wished to distinguish the religion of existing Christian Churches from the religion of Jesus, the ‘ divine friend of man/ the religion which Lessing’s his beloved disciple summed up in the words—‘ Little real children, love one another.’ He was prepared to follow religious views. Semler’s example, and vigorously promote the study of the Gospels as monuments of literary history, and, by a 76 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. more intimate acquaintance with primitive Christianity, to bring about that emancipation from a slavish adherence to the letter, which he saw to be so necessary. He would have treated Chris¬ tianity as Winckelmann had treated Greek art, and would have shown how different climates produced different wants and satis¬ factions, different manners and customs, different ethics and dif¬ ferent religions. He considered religions as the products of a necessary but purely human development, and said that their chief importance lay in the moral effect they produced. This was why he regarded as proof against any refutation the pious feeling which is happy in its faith, and why he so earnestly longed for a new and permanent Gospel, which should recommend virtue for its own sake, and not for the sake of a future happiness. The noblest flower of virtue seemed to him to be that love which unites men and lifts them above the earthly limits of nationalities, states, and religions. Lessing did not find time to set forth all his thoughts on religious subjects. His controversy with Goeze was only a preliminary skirmish; the real battle was to come. He was not a man who would build up a system in too great haste. His strength lay in discriminating, examining, refuting; in one word, in criticism. But above the particulars which he subjected to a strict in- Lessing’s vestigation, his mind rose in anticipation to a view * Ernst und of the whole. He had formed for himself concep¬ tions of God, the world, and the human soul, in accordance with those of Leibniz and not altogether unlike the views held by Spinoza. He gave the frankest utterance to what he deemed essentials in his ‘Freemason dialogues' of 1778 (he had joined the order in Hamburg), and he set forth the same convictions schlechts,’ more covertly, not in his own name, but as an interpre¬ tation of Christian dogmas, in his ‘ Education of the Human Race,’ published in 1780. These convictions form a quiet background to the stormy activity of his controversial writings. Lessing’s most violent controversy took place in 1778. Then silence was suddenly imposed on him by a command from Bruns¬ wick, and the right of free publication was withdrawn from him. He had to lay down the weapons of theological warfare, and Falk, Gesprache fur Frei- maurer,’ 1778, and ‘ Erziehung des Mens- chenge- Ch. XI.] Lessing. 77 resorted instead to his old poetical weapons, which were still untar¬ nished and had never been wielded in a nobler cause, for the question was not the triumph of one opinion over another, but the victory of tolerance over intolerance. In this very year, 1778, Voltaire had died, and Lessing had written this epitaph on him : ‘ Here lielh one, who, if ye truly prate, Ye pious folk, here lieth all too late. Forgive his Henriade, O God of mercies, Forgive his tragedies and little verses; I will not ask forgiveness for the rest Of what he wrote, for that was much the best.’ In the year 1762 Voltaire had published extracts from the Anti- Christian Testament of Pastor Meslier, and in 1763 had written his ‘ Traite de la Tolerance/ Lessing published the ‘Fragments by an Anonymous Wolfenbiitteler ’ from 1774 to 1777, ‘Nathan and in 1779 wrote ‘ Nathan the Wise/ In this drama der Weise/ he returned to a subject which had suggested itself to 1779 . him at the time of his intercourse with Voltaire, and for which Voltaire had even furnished a few ideas. In his comedy of ‘ The Jews/ Lessing himself had taken a few features from the same story, which in its main outlines was derived from Boccaccio, the great story¬ teller of the middle ages. The following is a short outline of the story. Sultan Saladin is in need of money. He sends for a rich Jew, and, in order to entrap him, puts the question to The story him, which of the three religions he holds to be of the Three the true one—the Jewish, the Mohammedan, or the Kings. Christian. The Jew, who is prudent as well as rich, asks leave to relate a story, and tells of a ring which was in the possession of a noble family, and was handed down from father to son, always exalting the son who had it above the other sons; this ring came at last into the hands of a father who had three sons, all of whom he loved equally well, so that he did not wish one to be better off than the other two. He therefore had two other rings made, which he himself could hardly distinguish from the original one, and gave a ring to each of his sons. After his death they all raised the same claims, which no one could settle, since no one could find out the true ring. The Jew applies the story to the case of the three 7« The Age of Frederick the Great . [Ch XI. different religions; Saladin recognises the truth of the parable, acknowledges his need, receives what he wants, and treats the Jew henceforth as his friend. This is a short outline of Boccaccio’s story, and a similar story was told of a Spanish king of the eleventh century. In Spain all three religions were represented, and flourished peacefully side by side. The Greek culture which had been revived there by the Arabs had dissipated many of the religious prejudices which sepa¬ rate men. The story of the three rings became in Spain a customary parabolic expression of tolerant views. The story spread over Europe, and the bigots gave it a different termina¬ tion, according to which the true heir is found out by reason of the true ring working miracles. Sometimes the rings are omitted, and we have only a story of three brothers. In the seventeenth cen¬ tury the brothers went among Lutherans by the names of Peter, Martin, and John, and Martin was of course the true heir. In the eighteenth century Swift availed himself of the story in his ‘Tale of a Tub’ in order to mock at all three sects. The poet Gellert followed the same idea in his story of the hat, which was always assuming new shapes, and yet always turned out to be the same old hat; he was not scoffing at religion, however, but at philosophy with its varying systems. From this allegory of the three rings, Lessing now, in the eighteenth century, set himself to draw the same moral of toleration as had already been drawn in the eleventh. But he availed himself of the old tale not merely as a weapon against intolerance, but also in order to inculcate the gospel of love. He attributes a miraculous power to' the ring, and makes the father declare that that power lies in the gift which the ring has of bringing favour with God and man to him who wears it in this assurance; and the judge gives the fol¬ lowing counsel to the three brothers who crave justice at his hands: ‘Test the power of your rival rings by emulating one another in gentleness, concord, benevolence, and zeal in the service of God.' The plot But Boccaccio only furnished Lessing with a few of ‘ Nathan scenes, whereas he required a plot of five acts, and, if der Weise. p 0SS ibi e> a cr i s is in which the character of the Jew should be put to the test and come out triumphant. Lessing’s Jew Ch. XI.] Lessing. 79 was to be a wise and good Jew, like Moses Mendelssohn. By way of making Nathan yet more interesting, Lessing represents him as a much persecuted man of sorrows, whose wife and seven sons have been all slain in one day by the Christians. Nevertheless, Nathan conforms to the hardest of Christian precepts : he loves his enemies and adopts a Christian child as his own, and Recha, this adopted daughter, turns out to be the Sultan's niece and the sister of a Knight-Templar. Christians and Mohammedans are thus united by a family tie, as had already been described by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his ‘ParzivaL and ‘ Willehalm,’ and a Jew is received into their circle, not by a dispensation of nature, but owing to the power of his noble character. In this play, as in ‘ Emilia,’ the action issues naturally from the characters, which are life-like, individual figures, such as Lessing knew well how to draw from his faithful observation of human nature in himself and in those around him. Nathan is character a merchant and philosopher like Moses Mendelssohn ; of he is a man who has been sanctified by sorrow and Nathan, self-denial, an ideal character, who calls forth the highest admira¬ tion, and yet is never idealised into vagueness, but, on the contrary, leaves on the mind the impression of a portrait. Widely-travelled and wise, rich and unselfish, he is invaluable as a guide, philosopher, and friend. In his attitude towards the great ones of this world he is fearless though cautious, and in dealing with noble natures, he has learnt that it is the best policy to appeal to the noblest moral feelings. He extends his tolerance to all except the vicious. He oth^r has educated his adopted daughter Recha to be simple characters and sincere, and has fortified with his enlightened of the P la y* teaching the natural purity of her heart. Child-like in her innocence, she knows nothing of love, and the appeals of a lover awake no echo in her heart; all the affection of her enthusiastic nature is centred on Nathan, whom she believes to be her real father. Then while Nathan is away there comes a moment of peril, and she is saved by the Templar. She is so infatuated that she regards her deliverer as an angel, until Nathan returns and undeceives her. The Templar is an upright man, and fair-minded, except for a certain arrogance towards the Jew, which, however, vanishes as 8o The Age of Frederick the Great . [Ch. XI. soon as he comes to know him. He is carried away by his youth¬ ful passion to take a thoughtless step, which imperils Nathan and plunges himself in the bitterest remorse. Saladin is a hearty, impulsive man, as soldiers and men of action often are; he is easily roused and as easily forgets. He is enthusiastic in his devotion to his brother and sister, and in practical affairs, for which he has no talent, he lets himself be guided by his clear-minded and prudent sister, as Lessing probably was guided by his wife. But her influence is not always for good, and the line of conduct which she suggests should be adopted towards the Jew, turns out to her own and to Saladin’s discredit. Nathan’s friend the Dervish, ‘ the wild, good, noble man/ the beggar whom Nathan declares to be the true king, has put himself as the Sultan’s treasurer into a very false position, from which he finally escapes by simply running away ; this creation of Lessing’s humour owed its origin to a Jewish mathematician of Mendelssohn’s circle. The groom, who had long ago brought the little Christian child to Nathan, finds himself in a similar false position; he has afterwards to prove his simple piety in the service of an unscrupulous, but happily also stupid Church dignitary. He, like the rest, becomes Nathan’s friend, and exclaims, in ad¬ miration of him : ‘By God, you are a Christian; there never was a better Christian than you.’ All these characters share more or less consciously in the views which Nathan, as the wisest among them, is the best able to put into words. These views, Lessing tells us, had been his own from his earliest years, or, to speak more accurately, since Theological t ^ ie ^ me ^ rst so journ in Berlin. The lead- views in ing characters of the play are all opposed to the ‘Nathan, pretensions of positive religion ; they are all of one mind in seeking beyond the differences of creed and nation¬ ality the common basis of humanity, and in considering good action to be man’s aim in life; but they also all hold fast to Theism, to a general belief in God, and in His government of the world, though not by means of supernatural interference. This faith is their guiding principle. They all, with the exception of the one hero, fall away once, either from noble or ignoble motives, from the way which they consider right, and the chief complica- f Ch. xi.] Lessing. 81 tions in the play arise from these aberrations. As a contrast to these characters, we have the Patriarch of Jerusalem and Recha’s nurse Daja; these pretend to know the only true way to God, and the Patriarch, a caricature of Melchior Goeze, is quite prepared to drive the whole world by fire and sword into conformity with his own views. In ‘Nathan/ differing nationalities and creeds are united by bonds of harmony and peace, a dream which had floated before Lessing’s eyes as a Free-mason. But the spirit of peace which breathes throughout this play is also a cheerful spirit. Cheerful characters and incidents alternate, as in ‘ Minna von Barnhelm,’ with serious and affecting ones, and this mingling of light and shade brings the play down to the level of real life, instead of keeping it in a purely ideal region of noble sentiment and generous deeds. In one of his pamphlets against Goeze, Lessing casts a retro¬ spective glance on his stormy period of impetuous ardour, and says he feels himself now driven by softer winds towards the harbour where he hopes to land as happily as his opponent. Three years after he had written this, two years after he had pub¬ lished ‘Nathan/ and in the sentiments of the wise Jew had given a reflection of*his own convictions, Lessing died, on the Lessing 15th of February, 1781. His step-daughter, Malchen dies > 1781 - Konig (the original, as we may suppose, of Nathan’s Recha), attended him faithfully on his death-bed. Lessing was a true and resolute man in an effeminate age. He was capable of tender feelings himself, and of love and His sympathy for others, but he had no desire to let the character, world look into his heart. Not sentiment, nor subtle reasoning, but action seemed to him to be the true end of man ; virtuous action was to him the only touchstone of true religion, and the mature man, who does his duty without regard to reward or dis¬ tinction, was his moral ideal. He considered action to be the highest theme of poetry, and the drama, which represents action most graphically, the highest form of poetry. When we reflect on his impetuous activity, his restlessness, his delight in animated conversation, his readiness to engage in con- VOL. 11 . G 82 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. troversy, his Protestant zeal for truth, and then remember that he was also a classical scholar, a patriot, an enemy of tyrants, who refused patronage and worked on in the present, careless of the future,—it seems to us as though Ulrich von Idutten had appeared again in him, only under a more gentle and agreeable aspect. Herder and Goethe. In May, 1773, six years after the publication of ‘Minna von Barnhelm,’ a small, badly printed, anonymous book ‘Vondeut- a pp earec j entitled ‘ On German style and art, a few undEunst’ fly-sheets.’ It contained -essays by three different 1773 . writers; Justus Moser, counsel to the governing body Moser, Q f t p e ca thedral foundation of Osnabriick, contributed Herder and .... . , Goethe a highly original sketch of German history, m which he upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as a vanished ideal; Johann Gottfried Herder, counsel of the Consistory of Biickeburg, celebrated the merits of popular song, advocated a collection of the German ‘ Volkslieder,’ extolled the greatness of Shakspeare and prophesied the advent of a German Shakspeare; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a lawyer at Frankfort-on-the-Main, who was destined to be the long-expected German Shakspeare, and whose name was then in everyone’s mouth as the author of ‘ Gotz von Berlichingen,’ gave utterance in the same volume to his delight with the Strassburg Cathedral, and attacked the Abbe Laugier, who would recognise nothing but ancient columns as good architecture. Goethe ] raised the Gothic style as the national German style of architecture, and assi rted that art, to be true, must be characteristic. Moser was at this time fifty-three years old, Herder twenty-nine, and Goethe twenty-four. Herder and Goethe had made each other’s acquaint¬ ance in the autumn of 1770, at Strassburg. Moser’s essay was taken «r from the preface to his ‘ History of Osnabriick,’ and was probably incorporated at Herder’s instigation in these ‘ Fly-Sheets.’ Moser was a man of the older generation, a lawyer and an official, who had long before evinced a sympathy with the patriotic tendencies of German liteiature. The two younger authors, who took part with him in this publication, were not fanatical partisans of the movement in favour of restoring the old German style of Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. 83 writing, and of keeping up the popular art of by-gone times; nevertheless they did for a while lend it their strong support, and by doing so conclusively showed that the strong current of national feeling, which had set in after the Seven Years’ War, still retained its force. These patriotic tendencies had continued to go hand in hand with hostility to France and with a friendly attitude towards England. They now waxed stronger Literary and more impetuous, till they acquired the character pre iuded not of a mere reforming but of a revolutionary force, by the intensifying and exaggerating the spirit which had characterised Klopstock and Lessing, and carrying ‘Gotz’ - along with it all young and enthusiastic minds. National and popular in its tendencies, this great movement was in fact a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from a priori notions to history, from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's ‘ Gotz ' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much attention, but the ‘ Fly-sheets on German style and art' preceded the publication of ‘ Gotz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto. Moser was born in 1720, at Osnabriick, in the very heart of old Saxony; he lived there till 1794 and was much Moser’s esteemed. He had no interest in questions of inter- life and national politics, for in the district of North Germany character, where his home lay, there were no large cities where such questions would be discussed. But the neighbourhood offered him great facilities for making himself acquainted with the every-day life of the peasants, with its narrow interests and trivial details. Consequently it was the social and economic differences, the traditional laws and customs that were brought within the range of his observation and occupied his attention, much more than the natural equality and rights of man. He devoted himself entirely to the study of his immediate surroundings, and adopted as his literary model the essays on manners in the moralizing weekly papers. He apparently wished to write only for his countrymen, to report their experience, and to teach them; but he did this in such a thorough and in- G 2 The Age of Frederick the Great . [Ch. XI. 84 teresting manner, and with so much humour and irony, and, following in the steps of Montesquieu and Voltaire, he adopted such a high historical standard, that his small essays, collected in His ‘Patrio- 1 774 under the title of ‘Patriotic Fantasies,’ furnish tische Phan- a perfect treasure of observation, wit, and reflection, tasien, 1774. practical, historical, and theoretical wisdom. In these essays he succeeded in generalizing and, as it were, idealizing His ‘ o«na *he ^ oca ^ interests in his immediate neighbourhood; briickische and in the same manner his ‘ History of Osnabriick,’ Geschichte,’ which began to appear in 1768, opened out by its 1768 bold conjectures a wide outlook into early German times, and originated views of German constitutional history, whose influence lasted on far into our own century. Moser’s name is mentioned with equal respect by German lawyers, historians, and His Con- political economists. But his conservative attitude, his servatism. re spect for existing institutions, and his strong vener¬ ation of the past put him in opposition to the general tendencies of the eighteenth century. He was an enemy of centralising and levelling tendencies, of enlightened despotism with its meddlesome bureaucracy. He was also incidentally an opponent of philanthropic sentiment, and delighted to utter paradoxical praises of club-law and serfdom. On the other hand he demanded the institution of trial by jury, and foretold the advent of national armaments. England, which he knew from direct experience, seemed to him in many respects a model worthy to be copied. He looked up to the English aristocracy with the same admiration with which Lessing and Herder looked up to Shakspeare, and he sang the praises of early German times with as much enthusiasm as Klopstock. Herder, too, was in opposition to the spirit of his age. He was Herder, inclined to look at things historically, and the sum and b. 1744 . substance of all his speculation and writing was, in a word, the history of the human spirit. He was the son of a schoolmaster, and was born on August 25, 1744 at Mohrungen in East Prussia, in the dominions of Frederick the Great. Taught during his earlier years by a pedant, then mentally enslaved by a priest, it was not till he went to the University that he won intellectual freedom. Of a very excitable temperament, he early nursed Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. 85 ambitious dreams ; as a member of the clerical profession, he looked forward to influencing the great and raising the common people. As a student in Konigsberg, he soon showed a talent for teaching and a decided tendency to intellectual independence. Th^ philosopher Kant opened to him the wealth of his own knowledge, and led him to suspect the soundness of the fashionable ‘ enlight- Hamann’s ened ’ philosophy. But more than any other, Hamann influence attracted him into his strange sphere of thought. on Johann Georg Hamann, the ‘ Magus of the North/ as he was called, was a fantastically original man, and a writer of mystical works ; he was a great reader, had a thorough knowledge of the Greek writers and of Shakspeare, and introduced Herder to the study of the latter. He was born in 1730, and after many wanderings at length found rest in his native town of Konigsberg. From 1759, he published a succession of fragmentary writings, full of allusions and with strange titles, ‘ Sibylline leaves ’ people called them. They were dis¬ connected papers, now oracular, now humorous, never fully worked out or deductively proving anything, but in their merely aphoristic and ardent style rather suggestive than convincing. An enemy of mere analysis and abstraction, he sought to understand man and his faculties as a whole. Nature, he said, works upon us through the senses and the passions, which in turn can neither appreciate nor utter themselves in anything but images ; therefore poetry is the original language of the human race. The passions are the driving force of human nature and the life of all thought and imagination. Hamann adopted a hostile attitude towards the theology and philosophy of the so-called ‘Illuminati’ or rationalists. . Hamann s During a sojourn in London, in a time of great hostility to inward and outward difficulty, he began to read the the Bible, and this made a turning-point in his life ; orthodoxy gained a new prophet, who everywhere defended faith against reason, and asserted the insufficiency of the latter for the recognition of the deepest truths. And as on the one hand he mistrusted logical argument, so on the other he attacked aesthetic rules; as he championed revelation, so he also did homage to unfettered genius in poet and artist. Whereas the Illuminati strove to attain an ordered system of 86 The Age of Frederick the Great. [ch. XI. knowledge, he revelled in disconnected assertions. Whereas they tried to shut up everything in sweeping general formulae, he laid stress on the radical unlikeness of everything to everything else. While they sought to be clear and reasonable in their literary style, Hamann scorned to be merely logical in what he wrote, and preferred exceptions to rules, imagination to understanding, poetry to prose, the particular to the general. Though any systematic progress in knowledge would be impossible on these lines, yet Hamann’s teaching might render it easier for a true poet of original talent and liberal culture to break from the fetters of finite thought, might strengthen his faith in his own powers, and quicken in him the impulse to poetic creation. The seeds of Hamann’s teaching germinated in Herder, and through him bore fruit for Goethe. Warmly recommended by Hamann, Herder, in November, Herder at T 7^4> Konigsberg for Riga, where he soon en- Higa, chanted everyone as a teacher and preacher; but 1764 - 68 . this did not suit him as a permanence, and after four years of work he suddenly gave up his office. He was not yet twenty-five, and he wished to see the world. A journey to France confirmed him in his aversion to the French. He was next to go with a German prince to Italy; but on his way thither he engaged himself to a lady in Darmstadt, and during his stay in Strassburg he received a call to Btickeburg, which he accepted. For five years, from 1771 to 1776, he remained chained to this little Westphalian town, where in 1773 he made a home for himself and his bride. Thomas Abbt, author of the writings entitled, ‘ Of death for one’s Herder at country,’ and ‘ Of Merit/ had been Privy Councillor Btickeburg, and friend of Count Wilhelm of Lippe-Schaumburg, 1771-76. an q h ac [ died j n Btickeburg at an early age, in 1766. Herder, who had a great respect for him, had praised his popular philosophy and his historical gifts in one of his works. This directed Count Wilhelm’s attention to him, and he hoped to find in him one who would make up to him for the loss of Thomas Abbt. But the two did not agree well together and the relation between them remained a cool one. The Countess, whose beautiful character Harder and Goethe. Ch. xi ] 87 strongly attracted her clerical friend, died in the summer of 1776, and Herder, who had long felt himself an exile at Herder at Bfickeburg, was called in the autumn of the same year Weimar, to Weimar, as Court chaplain and ‘ Superintendent ’ of 1 776 - 1803 . the Church district of Weimar. There amid varying circumstances he worked till 1803. In his sensitive nature there lay a tendency to discontent; he did not develop freely, boldly, victoriously, but found hindrances everywhere, which were in part due to his own character. He kept silence from sensitiveness where he ought to have spoken, and then he suffered greatly from awkward situations, which he might have avoided by timely frankness. He attacked his enemies violently, and was surprised when they answered in like manner. His literary production began with great ardour, but easily flagged, and not one of his original great works was carried to completion. His first important works, which he published in Riga, were the ‘ Fragmente fiber die neuere deutsche Literatur ’ (1767), and the ‘Kritische Walder’ (1769). The former were meant to be a continuation of Lessing’s ‘Literaturbriefe,’ while the latter stood in close con¬ nection with his ‘ Laokoon.’ In the former Herder wrote like Hamann, in the latter he sometimes reminds us of Lessing. He showed himself throughout to be a careful, enthusiastic, but at the same time critical reader of Lessing, for whom he cherished all through life the greatest reverence. He con- Herder and tinued to follow in Lessing’s steps when he praised Lsssmg. Shakspeare, Homer, and the popular songs. He showed Lessing’s spirit too in the tolerance and wide human sympathies which prompted him to rescue barbarian nationalities, so-called dark ages, despised branches of poetry and forgotten poets from oblivion, and to give them their due honour. He sought to determine the boundaries of poetry and plastic art in a different manner from Lessing, and he went beyond Lessing in his endeavours to define the difference between plastic art and painting. He most suc¬ cessfully corrected and amended Lessing’s theory of fables and epigrams, but he required, quite in Lessing’s spirit, that lyric poetry as well as other kinds should above all be full of movement, pro¬ gress, and action. But whereas Lessing was in the first place- an Herder’s ‘ Fragmente’ and ‘ Kri¬ tische Walder.’ 88 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. art-critic, and only secondarily a historian of literature, of Herder the reverse was true : he was first and foremost a historian of literature, and only incidentally an art-critic. Lessing had recourse to his rich literary knowledge in order to find rules of composition and bases „ , . of criticism, but Herder studied the literature of all sympathy nations and periods for its own sake, and with en- with foreign thusiastic appreciation. He tried to transport himself literatures. j n j Q i oca ] an( j temporary conditions under which literary works had been produced, and to adopt the point of view then prevalent; he sought to be a Hebrew with the Hebrews, an Arab with the Arabs, a Skald with the Skalds, a Bard with the Bards; and in these endeavours, which were strengthened by kindred efforts among English writers of the same time, he proved himself a true pupil of Montesquieu and Winckelmann; their power of appreciating the past lived on in him, and bore new fruit in literature. Herder showed his sympathetic appreciation *of foreign poetry not only as a historian of literature, but also as a translator. His His powers original poems, which evince a characteristic tendency as a trans- towards didactic narrative, towards allegory, parable, lator. an d sacrec i legend, do not rise to any great merit, but his translations must be reckoned among the classical achievements of German literature. From Opitz down to Klopstock and Lessing, foreign influence exerted its sway over German literature ; Herder founded the universal culture of modern Germany on the remains of this foreign dominion, and taught his successors that lesson of open-hearted surrender to the influences of foreign races or of the remote past, which, far from enslaving the learner, really con¬ firms his independence, while it enriches and strengthens his mind. Herder’s art, as a translator, was based on his deep insight into His theory language and poetry in general, their origin, their of poetry, development, and their relation to each other. In this especially he showed himself to be a disciple of Hamann. * Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race,’ Hamann had said; a whole world of truth is indeed locked up in the pregnant word, and Herder was the man to make it yield up its secret. Poetry is older than prose; poetry lives in language, lives in myth, and greets Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. 89 us at the threshold of history. Primitive poetry, the poetry of Nature, in which all Nature acts and speaks, being personified by man, who is all feeling and passion, poetry such as 'breathes in the songs of barbaric peoples—this, said Plerder, is true poetry. The paradise of the Scriptures and Rousseau’s ideal natural man meet us purifLd and transfigured in Herder’s thought. He too is con¬ vinced that a return to Nature alone will regain us our original and ideal perfection. In his ‘ Literary Fragments/ Herder sang the praises of his mother-tongue, its freedom and native force, and it was then already clear to him that the history of the human soul can only be deciphered from its language. His treatise on the ‘ Origin of Languag e ’ cast the deepest glances into primitive times. His ‘ Spirit of Hebraic Poetry ’ contained his ripest His < Geist thoughts on the connection between language and der Hebrai- poetry. His general views as a historian of litera- scllen:E>oesie - ture were revealed in his prize essay on ‘ The causes of the lowering of taste amongst various nations once distinguished for it.’ His fame as a man of universal sympathies, and as a versatile translator, was established by his collection of * Popular Songs/ published in the years 1778 and 1779. Later publishers gave to H . t stim _ the work the affected title of ‘Voices of the Nations mender in Song/ It comprised not only popular songs Volker in by unknown authors, but characteristic poems drawn Liedern - from the literature of all nations alike. All forms of lyric poetry were here represented, and the only principle of classifica¬ tion which Herder allowed of in this collection was an aesthetic one, namely, community of subject and sentiment. It is marvellous how Herder was able to appreciate the spirit of these songs, to strike the right note in his translations and retain it throughout, to reproduce exactly not only the feelings, but even the peculiar metre and style of each poem. The whole collection is a series of gems of poetry, all written in exquisite German, and free from the barrenness which meets us in most anthologies. Herder’s scientific work is marked by the same breadth of view and catholic sympathy as his poetry. Many of his thoughts had been uttered before, and few of them are thoroughly worked out; he furnished more suggestions than results, more questions than 90 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. answers, bold hypotheses, but little argument. But we can well excuse Herder as a science the imperfection which is confined to details, philosopher and which is but the condition of rising to a wide of History. v j ew G f th e w hole. It may be true that Herder looked at things only from a distance, where the eye deceives and forms melt into one another. Yet his point of view was so well chosen, that he could direct many people to their goals, and indicate the paths which are followed, even in the present day. He took in at a glance the limits and interrelation of the various sciences; and whoever advances to the highest problems in any of the sciences of the human mind, whoever studies history, or the science of language, mythology, or ethnology, whoever collects popular traditions or explores German or Hebrew antiquity, or would trace the develop¬ ment of national peculiarities in all spheres of life, and understand the formative influence of nature upon man—each one of these must reverence Herder as a seer of extraordinary powers. His work teaches on all sides the value which the union of separate depart¬ ments of science has for the progress of knowledge. And more than this ; if the example of Lessing proves how much criticism and poetic activity may advance each other, when combined in one man, the influence of Herder on Goethe shows how much benefit a clear¬ sighted young poet, thirsting for knowledge, may derive from an equally clear-sighted critic, who has all the resources of history and theory at his command. Herder’s mind seems to have developed with wonderful consis- „ , , tency. His earliest works contain all the later ones o mental in germ. Nevertheless/ne did pass through momen- develop- tous changes in mental attitude. In his early youth he m8nt ‘ was an orthodox PietisT; in Riga his religion took a freethinking direction; in Biickeburg he became a Biblical Christian," and in Weimar he returned to liberal views. When at the zenith of his influence in Riga, as we have already said, he suddenly gave up his office there; after this, the new impressions gained from a long sea-journey, and also from life in France, among a foreign people and in new circumstances, had a powerful effect on the development of his mind, and set all his ideas in ferment. In a diary which he kept at this period, we find plan after plan proposed. He dreams Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe . 9i alternately of distinction as a teacher or as a statesman, of becoming the Calvin of Riga or the Lycurgus of Russia, but, in spite of him¬ self, the instinct to be a man of learning triumphs, and all his schemes revert in the end to the books he would like to write. Energy enough to divert the world from its course, ambition, thirst for action, vagueness about details, but certainty about the whole— such ‘ stor m and stre ss ’ (Sturm und Drang ) of wit and intelli¬ gence as we notice still seething at this period in Herder’s mind, characterized the German literary Revolution. Herder’s ardent im¬ pulse towards literary creation had as yet found no satisfaction, when in Strassburg he made the acquaintance of Goethe, and won him as a pupil. Goethe came from Frankfort, from the Rhine and Main district, where the popular poetry of the fourteenth century had , blossomed. The Franconian race to which Hutten birthplace, and Hans Sachs belonged, and the republican city Frankfort which had formerly been the centre of the German on tlie Mam ' book-trade, had the honour of producing Germany’s greatest poet, and some of Goethe’s leading characteristics may have been in part called forth by the scenes of his early life. The con¬ servative city in which the German emperors were crowned, was quite free from that artificial aesthetic and social culture which reigned, for instance, in Leipzig; it looked not to the future but to the past, in which its greatness lay. Goethe’s family on the paternal side was one which had risen rapidly in the social scale; his great-grandfather was a farrier, His his grandfather a sailor, his father a lawyer and a parentage, man of independent means, who lived for self-culture ; the great event of his life was a journey to Italy, which he wrote an account of, and was always referring to; he was a collector and kind of Maecenas, a man of many-sided interests, literary, scientific, and artistic, with a love of order and regularity amounting almost to pedantry, stern, serious, true to his convictions, a good patriot, an enemy of the French and a worshipper of Frederick the Great. The mother, on the other hand, came of one of the leading families of the town; she was twenty-one years younger than her husband, and had a singularly easy and cheerful nature, 92 The Age of Frederick the Great. [ch. XL pliant and averse to all care; she bore with c heerful resignati on a marriage which had little of happiness, and consoled herself by adorning her life with the charms of imagination, and lavishing the rich treasures of her heart and mind on her children and especially on the eldest, Wolfgang. Restraint and freedom, serious¬ ness and cheerfulness, fear and love all helped to educate the boy; they complemented each other, and so gave him breadth of mind and character, great desires, yet also the necessary discipline to keep his passions in check and direct his extraordinary gifts to a worthy object. From his father he inherited method and the scientific spirit, and it was also his father who turned his thoughts to Italy, and inspired him with zeal for learning and dilettante interests. His poetic talent, his gift of figurative speech, his fiery nature, and his sweeping fancy descended to him from his mother. She herself was gifted with a straightforward, cheerful eloquence; every unimportant note that she wrote breathes the charm of naturalness and originality; she was an incomparable teller of fairy-tales, and by telling the boy but half a story and letting him guess the rest, she early trained him to poetic in¬ vention. His education was somewhat irregularly pursued, but was such as would promote rapid development towards intellectual freedom, and the most important productions of contemporary literature were at an early age put in the boy’s hands. Goethe Goethe was ^ orn on 2 8th August, 1749, when Geflert, b. 1749. Gleim, Klopstock, and Lessing had already begun to His early wr it e . His father favoured the rhyming poets, and a education. p.- enc j f am jiy introduced the ‘ Messias.’ The beauty of the Old Testament called forth a willing admiration in the boy, and laid the foundation of those naive, idyllic elements which he soon handled in such a masterly manner. A pantomime to which he was taken gave him the first impulse to dramatic writing, and a translation of Tasso’s ‘ Gerusalemme Liberata ’ seems to have furnished him with the first chivalric-heroic subject. Precocious and ambitious as a boy, he had, by the time he was sixteen, tried his hand in all branches of poetic composition, and had learned everything there was to be learned in the Imperial city; he had witnessed an Imperial coronation, had mixed with all sorts and Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. 93 conditions of men, had looked more than was good for him into social evils, and had loved often and known the disap¬ pointments of love. At sixteen, following his father’s wish and suppressing his own leaning towards philology, he went to the University of Leipzig, with the avowed purpose of studying law; but in fact he dabbled in all Leipzig sciences, and received a really deep and lasting University, ■J impression only from his intercourse with an artist, 1 that same Oeser who at an earlier period had influenced Winckel- mann in Dresden. He returned after three years, out of health and depressed in spirits, to his paternal home ; but during his time in Leipzig he had made great advances in taste and in poetic power. A couple of unrhymed odes written at this period are full of happy imagery, and in a number of rhymed poems he combined the half-jocose, half-didactic, operetta-like tone of the Leipzig school with a keen appreciation of nature, and thus brought the graceful, frivolous, Anacreontic poetry to its highest perfection. In a pastoral play entitled ‘The Humour of the Lover, he succeeded in giving quite a new rendering to «pi e Laune an old theme, well known in Leipzig; the interest of des Yer- the old plot is enhanced by the life-like way in which he liebten.’ draws the characters, and the whole play is a true and unique work of art, written in the charming but usually somewhat trivial style of the dramatic idyll. Older Frankfort associations of Goethe’s are reflected in the disagreeable, but powerful comedy of ‘ The Accomplices/ In all these productions it is evident ‘DieMit- that Goethe had not only imbibed the Leipzig literary schuldigen.’ spirit from Gellert and Weisse, but that Lessing’s newly published ‘ Minna ’ had greatly benefited his dramatic technique. It is clear also that Klopstock and Wieland had enriched his poetic language and ideas, and that Oeser’s teaching had not been thrown away upon him. We may further notice that in all these poems he does what, as a writer of lyrics, he continued to do for many decades,—he treats almost exclusively of matters drawn from hr, own personal experience, and seeks to alleviate his inwa rd distress by uttering it in vnrs e. His ideal at this time was innocence, and he preferred the 94 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. cheerful and naive to the exaggerated heroism and stupendous virtue which Wieland had already attacked. But beyond this, Lessing’s ‘ Minna ’ had directed him to great national subjects; he was also familiar with Shakspeare, and at Strassburg, whither Goethe and went s P r i n o of I 77 ° to complete his legal Herder in studies, he made the acquaintance of Herder, with Strassburg, whom he spent the winter of 1770-71. He oc- 1770 casionally felt himself somewhat roughly treated and cruelly mocked at by his master, but this stern discipline was whole¬ some for him. Herder’s gods became his gods ; the pupil of Wieland was taken into the school of nature, and his lyric poetry at once underwent a thorough transformation. To see the difference, one need only compare the Leipzig poem: ‘ Nun verlass ’ ich diese Htitte ’ in which he describes himself coming out from the cottage of his beloved into the lonely wood and the moon-light, with the celebrated Strassburg poem: * Es schlug mein Herz, geschwind zu Pferde.’ The former does indeed contain one beautiful metaphor:— 1 Und die Birken streun mit Neigen Ihr den siissten Weihrauch auf’— the first instance of Goethe’s incomparable art of finding a poetical meaning in the appearance of plants. In other re¬ spects, however, this poem is full of affectation, such as the pastoral fancy and the introduction of ancient mythology; description takes the place of action and the poem winds up with a very ordinary lover’s jest. Very different is the poem written at Strassburg, describing how the lover sets out to see his beloved, his welcome and his farewell. Here, four stanzas give us a succession of dramatic scenes in the fewest words, and the whole is penetrated by the glowing breath of passion. All fits in exactly with Herder’s theory of the song, a theory which he founded on the primitive nature of language, and which may be summed up in the sequence: ‘ verb, life, action, passion.’ There is no dragging in of dead mythology here, but actual creating of it anew, as if it had never existed before. While in Strassburg Herder had thus described the genesis of mythology : 1 the savage saw the lofty tree towering in its majesty, and he marvelled thereat; Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe . 95 the tree-top rustled, and he heard the godhead weaving; the savage fell on his knees and prayed. There you have the history of man as a sensuous being.’ Goethe had learnt to lo ok on nature as a savage. He had listened to Herder’s advice and thereby made immeasurable progress. He had as it were drunk from the original source whence poetry first sprang, and now he was fortified for every task. But in this Strassburg song Goethe had not created accord¬ ing to abstract rules alone ; he had also drawn from Q oethe and real life. The beloved one really existed of whom Friederike he sang. In Alsace, in the country parsonage of Brion. Sesenheim, he had met F riederike Brion . She was a quiet, bright, naive, faithful girl, and was soon devoted with her whole heart to the merry student; in her Goethe found his long-sought ideal. The pastor’s family at Sesenheim seemed to him the Vicar of Wakefield and his family in real life ; here was an idyll without affectation, without any false halo; here was pure, beautiful family-life, with all its kindliness and gentle charm, the simple country occupations, the happy atmosphere which good people diffuse around them. Reality, imagination, and love combined to make Friederike the real embodiment of his ideal; thus Herder’s pupil learnt to base his poetical creations upon reality. It was at S esen heim that he made his preliminary studies for Gretchen and Clarchen, for ‘ Werther ’ and for his ‘ Hermann and Dorothea.’ But Alsace gave Goethe more than Herder and Friederike. The Strassburg Minster made him an admirer of i n f tueuces 0 f Gothic architecture. The national enmities apparent Go3the’s in his immediate vicinity, the general tendency of Strassburg German feeling after the Seven Years’ War, the religious P eriod - phase he was then passing through, and in this case too, Herder’s example, excited in him an aversion to France and French litera¬ ture. He and several young and turbulent companions vied with each other in passionate patriotic sentiments, and in doing homage to the spirit of Shakspeare. Leipzig gallantry began to be supplanted by free-and-easy, student-like manners, joined with plain speech and coarse jokes, and this spirit even penetrated into 9 6 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch, XI. poetry. Julius Caesar and other great historical characters capti¬ vated the fancy of the youthful Goethe, whose self-confidence soon soared beyond all limits; Mahomet and Socrates floated before his mind, while Lessing and the marionette-plays had already directed his attention to the figure of Faust. But chance threw another hero in his way, who for the time being attracted him more than these, and who could more easily be made the centre of a drama— Gotz von Berlichingen. The historical Gotz, a robber-knight and a leader in the ‘Gotz von peasant-wars of the sixteenth century, had employed Berlich- the enforced leisure of his later days in writing an ingen, 1771. autobiography in defence of his life and conduct. He represented himself as an honest but much misunderstood and slandered person, a man who had always followed right and justice, and had never fought but in defence of the weak. His record of him- self was printed, and falling into Goethe’s hands,, was completely believed by him. He took the old knight just as he had described himself, and determined to rescue him from oblivion, just as Lessing was so fond of doing to forgotten worthies. It was the more natural that Goethe should choose such a subject because at that time chivalry was being revived in literature, especially in France. G oethe ’s early acquaintance with Tasso and with popular romances such as the ‘ Haimonskinder’ had laid a good foundation in this direction, and the subject of Gotz attracted his glance to the most important period of the Reformation, as well as to those old imperial relations and conditions which had from old time been fraught with special interest for the imperial town of Frankfort. Protestant sympathies are reflected in the piece, and the poet draws a by no means flattering picture of a clerical court, and gives a lamentable description of the condition of the Empire at that period; no one can find justice, each must shift for himself, and the blame of this disorder lies with the independent princes, against whom even the Emperor can do nothing. Gotz is a good Imperialist, but he hates bad sovereigns, Goethe’s and though he should succumb in the struggle, still Liberalism, h; s dying breath he will invoke success for the cause of Liberty. In this play Goethe championed the cause Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. 97 of freedom against the tyrants of Germany, and contrasted the honest, patriotic, chivalrous life of his hero, with the corrupt life of the courts. Haller’s newly published novel ‘ Usong * and the criticism of the courts in Thummel’s and Weisse’s works were not without influence on Goethe in writing this piece; but at the same time he was also under the power of a local and family tradition, which urged upon him a certain liberalism in politics. His father was in the habit of warning him against becoming a mere courtier. Herr von Loen, a relative of the Goethe family, had described in a didactic novel the difficulties which an honest man has to overcome at court; and Frederick Karl von Moser, one of the most eminent German statesmen of the last century, had published at Frankfort in 1759 a book, called ‘ Der Herr und der Diener/ which in bold and passionate language ruthlessly criticised the sovereigns of the smaller German states. Goethe was back in Frankfort, when about the end of 1771 he wrote down the first sketch of his ‘Gotz/ On the 28th of August in that year he had been called to the bar. His old interests and connections were taken up again, and new ones were added to them; yet he was not happy, for he was oppressed by a sense of having injured an innocent person; Friederike Brion had given him her heart, and though perhaps no formal vows had been ex¬ changed, they seemed to belong to each other, and Goethe’s she might well have expected a declaration from him desertion of after his return home; instead, there came a letter Friederike - taking leave of her altogether. The young lawyer did not dare to introduce the Alsatian clergyman’s daughter into the Frankfort patrician family. He reproached himself for his conduct, and could not forgive himself for it, but he did not repent and return to his deserted love. He did not see her again till eight years afterwards, when he was Minister at Weimar; the meeting between them was calm and affectionate, and set him at rest with himself. His poems written during the intervening years testified that he anyhow deeply felt his guilt in the matter; we find him characters in creating, as a foil to his honest Gotz, the character ‘Gotz.’ of Weislingen, the unfaithful lover of Gotz’s gentle sister. Weis- lingen is a portrait of Goethe himself, and a portrait more honest than VOL. 11. H 9« The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. flattering. He is an elegant and seductive young gallant, of weak character, and spoilt by court-life ; he wavers between two very different women, but is finally drawn away from the gentle and good one by a lovely but fiendish rival. Lessing’s ‘ Sara ’ was the only important German tragedy which ‘ Gotz ’ offered itself to the young poet as a model in written in writing this play, and it was no wonder that so imitation of imperfect a work compared unfavourably with Shak- Shakspeare. ou i > ,, t , j speare. Shakspeare s name was the standard under which Goethe resolved to win. Addison and Bodmer, Lessing and Herder, Wieland and Gerstenberg. had proclaimed the great dramatist’s merits. Christian Felix Weisse’s £ Richard III,’ though meritorious, could not hold its own by the side of Shakspeare’s, and his ‘ Romeo and Juliet’ only awakened a longing for the Shakspearian original. Gerstenberg sought to approach nearer to the real Shak¬ speare in his ‘Ugolino,’ but it was impossible to feel any enthu¬ siasm for a play in which hunger reigned through all five acts. The Strassburg brethren would hear no more of dilutions of Shakspeare; they wanted to transplant the real Shakspeare into German literature, and with this object Goethe v treated his ‘ Gotz ’ in the manner of a Shakspearian historical drama. In this first version of the play unity of time and place is utterly disregarded, and change of scene occurs for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six. The unity of action is spoilt by the introduction of Weislingen, who thrusts himself in as a second hero. Men of all ranks, citizens, soldiers, ser¬ vants, and peasants are dragged in; the variety of character and sentiment is carried to excess, tragedy and comedy being inter¬ mingled, and a Shakspearian clown and jester set down in the midst of a society of courtiers. Small songs are introduced, and there is much strong language and coarseness, along with far-fetched similes and exaggeration, reminding one of Lohenstein and the old ‘ chief- actions and State-actions’ (cf. vol. i. p. 398), while at the same time many Shakspearian reminiscences occur throughout the play. Over¬ joyed with this work, which he had accomplished so quickly and easily Goethe sent it to Herder. But Herder, who was an inexorable opponent of all imitation, summed up his judgment in the following words: ‘Shakspeare has quite spoilt you.’ Lessing’s ‘ Emilia Galotti/ Ch. XL] Herder and Goethe . 99 which made its appearance about the same time, showed how dif¬ ferent a conception the master of German drama had formed of the manner in which Shakspeare should be followed. Goethe at once felt that ‘Emilia’ was an original work, while his ‘ Gotz’ was only an imitation. Without being discouraged he set to work afresh. He could not now alter the essential features of the piece, but he could weld it into greater unity, and could remove as far as possible all forms of expression which he was conscious of having borrowed from Shak¬ speare. He could at the same time aim higher than Lessing, for he despised all artificial restraints, all affectation, and high-sounding language in the dialogue generally, while he retained the ornate language and formal expressions proper to the conversation of couriiers. He often used words merely to indicate actions, and altogether succeeded in imparting to his dialogue the tone of natural conversation. ‘ Gdtz von Berlichingen ’ ap- i mpr0 ved peared before the public in this new and improved version of form in the summer of 1773. It presented a picture ‘ G ° tz > 1773 - drawn from the past history of the nation ; the characters were purely German, such as had never hitherto been seen in German tragedy, and of which Lessing’s ‘ Minna ’ offered the only exam¬ ples in the sphere of comedy. The play is full of life, action, and truth. The noble character of its hero, powerless to stem the wickedness of the world, is most pathetic, and the interest of the play is enhanced by all the display of a romantic chivalry, and by the quick succession of exciting incidents. Goethe’s ‘ Gotz ’ was the signal for a perfect Shakspeare-mania in Germany, though it marked the end of this same mania in its author. By writing c Gotz * Goethe freed himself from the ser¬ vile imitation of Shakspeare, and learnt from him original and independent dramatic art. Only two of his other plays, ‘Faust’ and ‘Egmont,’ both planned simultaneously with or shortly after ‘ Gotz,’ show the same rapid change of scene / which is so incompatible with our theatrical arrangements. Goethe sought henceforth to put himself in sympathy with the living stage, and Lessing’s technique, which differed little from Smaller that of the French, was adopted by him as authori- dramas, tative. By operettas such as ‘ Erwin und Elmire ’ and ‘ Claudine H 2 lOO The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. von Villabella/ he sought to win the favour of the average theatre¬ goer by cultivating the fashionable dramatic form of the day. In his ‘ Clavigo/ a tragedy dealing with middle-class life, and in his ‘ Stella/ he countenanced change of scene but once at the utmost within an act, and maintained unity of time also to a certain degree. But he did not yield himself up entirely to modem subjects and modern treatment. The historical mood in which he had begun this literary Revolution had by no means passed off with the appearance of * Gotz/ and though ‘ Faust’ and ‘ Egmont’ took shape more slowly, yet their author’s whole heart was in them. The sixteenth century with its free and active spirit of enquiry and its valiant struggle against intellectual slavery, seemed to him the ideal epoch of history. There he found characters such as he wanted, thoughts and deeds, the study of which might elevate and brace up a more effeminate age, and in addition to these a style of art full of characteristic truth and simple nature. The fame of Hans Sachs began to be revived about this time. In 1765 he was made the subject of a monograph; then Kastner put in a good word for him, and the local patriotism of Ntirnberg, thus encouraged, burst forth into warm eulogies. Goethe himself influence of considered the poetic shoemaker of Ntirnberg of suffi- Hans Sachs cient importance to make his style worth reviving, on Goethe. Goethe’s study of Shakspeare enabled him to take up the threads of literature at the point where the Thirty Years’ War had suddenly stopped the development of the German drama. Flans Sachs gave him the clue to what Opitz and his school had missed in the seventeenth century; and while his own refined sense of form and beauty purified the old shoemaker’s easy doggrel verse and realistic style, the influence which Hans Sachs exercised over Goethe is traceable in his satirical dramas,, such as ‘ Das Jahr- marktsfest zu Plundersweilen/ or ‘ Satyros,’ or the Carnival play, ‘Pater Brey;’ in little didactic plays, such as ‘ Kimstler’s Erden- wallen ’ (The artist’s earthly wanderings), and ‘Ktinstler’s Vergot- terung ’ (The artist’s apotheosis), in his poem written in praise of the old master himself, and above all in 4 Faust.’ But while Goethe was following these national aspirations he was at the same time absorbed in the study of classical antiquity, Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. IOI just as Lessing had produced almost simultaneously his ‘ Minna' and his * Laokoon/ and Goethe himself, when in classical Leipzig, had been equally influenced by the Dutch tendencies genre-painters and by Oeser’s classic grace. At in Goetlie ' Strassburg, in Herder’s company, he began to read Homer, and after he had, under the strong influence of Shakspeare, written down the first sketch for ‘ Gotz,’ he devoted himself to Theo¬ critus and Pindar. ‘ Gotz’ had hardly appeared when he ventured to rival Aeschylus with a ‘ Prometheus.’ Teutonic and Hellenic elements of culture, with their two opposite styles, gained power over him simultaneously, and each benefited the other. Beside the doggrel verses he employed rhymeless, free rhythms, with beautiful, sonorous epithets. He produced odes, scenes, and fables modelled upon the Greek type, and at the same time rhyming proverbs and sarcasms about correct style directed against the critics of the day. He united Hans Sachs’ method of description with Homer’s epic breadth, and was able, as we have seen in the Strassburg song men¬ tioned above, to clothe pathetic descriptions of travel and wandering, set in the midst of nature’s ever-shifting scenes, in the powerful and exalted style of the Pindaric odes. His poem called * Der Wan- ‘ Der Wanderer,’ in part suggested by Oliver Gold- derer.’ smith’s ‘ Traveller,’ deals with motives and incidents of rustic life, full of human interest; here he followed Theocritus’ example, and employed the form of a dialogue in order to suggest a walk pre¬ senting change of scene and varying objects of nature and art, and to give the reader a glimpse of the conditions of domestic life in the country. In this poem too we can everywhere trace Herder’s literary and historical many-sidedness bearing fruit in Goethe, and develop¬ ing dormant powers in the mind of the young poet. He had now got far beyond the rhymed prettinesses of Wieland’s Hellenism, which he had so admired in Leipzig, and he strongly attacked them in his plain-spoken prose farce, entitled ‘ Gotter, • Gotter, Ilelden und Wieland,’ in which the Greeks are made to Helden Ulld , i • , . , Wieland,’ behave m a rude, bragging, and student-like manner. and < p rome . But his ‘Prometheus,’ which he beggn in 1773 theus.’ as a drama in blank verse, and which he afterwards cut down to a single monologue, remained free from such extravagances. 102 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. and is throughout grand and elevated. Prometheus is a creative artist, who loves his creatures and breathes life into them. He looks to Heaven for nothing, but relies entirely upon his own power; in this respect he expresses one side of Goethe's own religious convictions. The inner life of the poet had already passed through various Goethe’s phases. Though from early years, as we have seen, the religious Bible enriched the store of his poetic imagination, yet a develop- superficial religious teaching and unedifying sermons loosened even in school-years the ties binding him to the Church. At the University of Leipzig biblical and dogmatic criticism gave to his mind a thoroughly liberal ten¬ dency. But an illness and a pious friend were the means of bringing him again nearer to the Gospel; and on his return home, a friend of his mother’s, Fraulein von Klettenberg, won him as a convert to the Pietism of the Moravians. Mystical ideas struck root in him, and he began to give vent to passionate yearn¬ ings after deliverance from earthly fetters, and union with God. But this pious mood, which at the beginning of his Strassburg career was still strong upon him, did not last long. We learn that in the summer of 1772 Goethe no longer went to church or to the Sacrament and seldom prayed. He was loth to disturb others in their views, being thoroughly tolerant in religion and morals ; sym¬ pathy for human weakness appeared to him the true theology. But in the very next year this toleration forsook him, and we find him attacking those with whom he had so recently been in close sym¬ pathy. He not only ridiculed the vulgar rationalism represented by Doctor Bahrdt, who gave much offence by extreme teaching and frivolous living, but he also scoffed at sentimental religiosity and the pietistic worship of the Lamb, at separatism and missionary zeal. He conceived the plan of devoting a religious satirical epic in doggrel to the character of the Wandering Jew. The shoemaker of Jerusalem, who, according to the mediaeval legend, jeered at Christ bearing the cross, and was in consequence condemned to wander until Christ’s second coming, was transformed by Goethe into a Moravian and Separatist; but Goethe makes Christ return, not as the judge of all mankind, but as the ruler of the millennium. Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. ic 3 The moment when deeply moved he beholds the earth once more is one of the grandest things that Goethe's imagination ever pro¬ duced. With the naivete of a Hans Sachs, and with an unconcerned humanising of divine things, he succeeds in revealing to us wonder¬ ful depths of the soul, so that our hearts are touched to the very core. Unfortunately the work never got further than a few fragmentary beginnings, which were not made public till after Goethe’s death. When he wrote these fragments Goethe had quite broken with the belief in a Providence arbitrarily interfering with human fate, and retained nothing but the universal Deity of Goethe’s Spinoza. His experience seemed to have taught him Spinozism. that in the moments of our life when help is most needed w r e are throwm upon our own resources. He had discovered, he thought, like Frederick the Great in the exigencies of the Seven Years’War, that God is deaf to our entreaties. His creative talent seemed to him the only thing on which he could now rely. Faith in his artistic power alone did not deceive him, and Beauty w r as his Goddess. His Prometheus rejects the demands of the Gods like the Prometheus of ^Eschylus, and like the Cyclops of Euripides is devoted to earthly possessions. He knows that nothing is his but the sphere of his activity and influence, ‘nothing below that and nothing above.’ He says with Spinoza: ‘ Thus I am eternal, for I exist,’ and he deems himself on a level with the Gods. But the defiant w^ords which he launches against them w^ere probably not meant to be his last; if Goethe had finished the drama, he would probably have shown that men do stand in need of the Gods; the arrogance of the artist would have been humbled, and the result w'ould have been the joy of which his brother suggests the prospect, the bliss when the Gods, Prometheus, his creatures, and the w^orld and heaven shall all feel themselves to be parts of a harmonious whole. Although Goethe no longer looked to Heaven for help, yet he had not wholly lost his reverence for the Deity. That mystic union with God which he had learned from the Moravians, he found echoed in Spinoza’s teaching. Goethe too felt himself to be a part of the all-embracing, all-sustaining spirit of the universe, and in in¬ effable emotion he celebrated his recognition of the Deity. The 104 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. monologue of Prometheus was completed bv a monologue of Ganymede, in which L ove of Nature becomes love of God. Our salvation, our happiness, our liberty, consist, according to Spinoza, in constant and eternal love of God, which is nothing else than a part of that infinite love with which God loves him¬ self. But though Goethe grasped this idea, and recognised in Spinoza himself the free man, who rises above the sea of passion and in happy serenity bids the storms be still, yet he him- His restless se ^ was all the time tossing on the wild sea of tur- and turbu- bulent emotions; he could only long for, not win the lent life. ca lm of the wise man, and he was on the way to become what he himself designated later on ‘ a problematic nature,’ a man whom no sphere of life would satisfy, and who was not good enough for any sphere of life. His barrister’s work made no great claims upon him; he had but few bnefs and even in those his father helped him. There were frequent intermissions in his work; he was often in Darmstadt where he had a valued friend in Merck, a member of the War Ministry, with whom he shared* literary, artistic, and personal interests. During the year 1772 Merck had the editing of the Frankfort ‘ Geiehrte Anzeigen,’ a cridcal review to which Herder and Goethe contributed, and in which were heard the first distant notes of the German literary revolution. In the summer of 1772 Goethe passed four months in Wetzlar in order to become acquainted with the procedure of the Imperial Chancery (Reichskammergericht). In the summer of 1774 he travelled down the Rhine to Diisseldorf, and in the summer of 1775 he went to Switzerland. It became more and more manifest that Frankfort was not the right sphere for him. The many distinguished strangers who came to see him there could not compensate him for what he missed at home. He felt himself confined and fettered on every side. The legal profession did not satisfy him, and he could not devote himself exclusively to a poetical career. In addition to this, His love-entanglements of various kinds had brought him love-affairs. j n t 0 equivocal and difficult pos.tions. In Wetzlar he -———— ■"f fell violently in love with Lotte Buff, the affianced bride of his good friend Kestner; but in this case the firm character of the girl, Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe . 105 Goethe’s friendship for her betrothed, and finally separation and departure all worked together to quell the passion. In Frankfort, how¬ ever, he fascinated girls and women, awakened feelings which he could not share, and excited wishes which he might not satisfy. Now it was an excellent, simple girl to whom he seemed so much attached that his parents fully expected an engagement, which how¬ ever never came to pass; at another time it was the brilliant vision of L ili Schonemann which irresistibly attracted him, and in spite of many objections an engagement took place, but neither did that end in marriage. Then again, side by side with Lili, another figure appears, a girl whom, according to the expression of his diary, he wore like a spring flower upon his heart. In short, the lovingness and loveableness of his nature were constantly carrying him away and almost turning him into a Don Juan; but all this disturbed his daily life, darkened his pleasures, troubled his conscience, and filled him with the most painful emotions. He was right when, in the October of 1775, he called the months which had just passed the most distracted and confused, the fullest and most empty, the strongest and most foolish epoch of his life. This life of inward and outward unrest Goethe goes was happily cut short in November 1775 by his to Weimar, accepting an invitation to the court at Weimar, where 1775, he was henceforth to make his home. But however prejudicial these four stormy years of barrister-life at Frankfort may have been to Goethe’s moral de- Goethe’s velopment, they have left indelible traces in his poetry, lyrics, up to In Strassburg his lyric poetry was only just begin- 1775 * ning to free itself from the fetters of the Leipzig style; simul¬ taneously with the passionate poem, ‘ Es schlug mein Herz,’ he wrote the charming song, ‘ Mit einem gemalten Bande,’ the flower of German Anacreontic poetry. The poems to Friederike are true lyrics and breathe the pure and peaceful happiness which he found in loving her. But the poems to Lili are more dramatic in their effect (‘ Neue Liebe, neues Leben,’ ‘ An Belinden,’ ‘ Lili’s Park’); we detect in them discord and struggle; now he wishes to tear himself away, now he gives up resistance, but the feelings which she excites are always of a mixed nature. We see what enthrals him here—the youthful freshness, [Ch. XT. 106 The Age of Frederick the Great. the lovely form, the look full of faithfulness and kindness, the voice, the song. We also discover what vexes him: the frivolous, social life, the unbearable people who surround her, the whole menagerie of her worshippers, the childish coquettries indiscriminately showered- around, and which he is to share with the rest. And whether he sets before us the whole painful situation in an elaborate allegory, or whether a single despairing sigh escapes from his breast, still it is always a moment of inner conflict, intense and irreconcileable, which his song reveals. In his poems to Lili Goethe characterizes the object of his passion, but not himself; for the latter purpose he employed other forms, epic and dramatic, in which he continued the personal confession which he had begun in the character of Weislingen. In his next play this character becomes the hero himself, under the title of Clavigo, a man ot modern times, an author, tossed hither and thither by ambition and love, till he is finally stabbed at the bier of his beloved one, by her brother. Crugantino, the scapegrace in ‘ Claudine von His Villabella/ a Don Juan and a restless wanderer, ‘Clavigo,’ fairly reflects Goethe’s own character at the time, von Villa- Fernando too, in ‘Stella/ has traits taken from Goethe bella." and himself. Fernando has left his wife Cecilia and has ‘ Stella.’ then seduced Stella; now he would like to return to his duty, yet at the same time shrinks from making Stella -unhappy; in the depths of despair he is saved by the proposal of Cecilia, that they should all three remain together. Goethe has never carried his indulgence towards human weakness, and his sympathy with a loving, suffering heart to such lengths as in this piece, to which however he subsequently g ive a tragic termination by the death of Fernando and Stella. It is worth noticing how disinclined he seems to make use of German surroundings in the modern drama. In both ‘ Clavigo ’ and ‘ Claudine ’ the scene is laid in Spain. Even the farce of ‘ Pater Brey ’ contains a captain Balandrino ; and even in ‘ Stella/ which is otherwise German, the vacillating, aris¬ tocratic lover must needs have the sounding name of Fernando. But we are altogether transported to native soil and to the present, namely, to the time of Goethe’s youth, in the fullest and most faithful confession which he made at that time, his ‘ Werther/ Herder and Goethe . Ch. XI.] 107 ‘ The Sorrows of young Werthe r’ appeared in 1774, and though thoroughly German in character, the book was known . Leiden in a short time over the whole civilised world. It was des jungen translated into all civilised languages, and found imi- Werther,’ 1774 tators in many literatures. Unlike ‘Gotz’ it did not presuppose in the reader an interest in the past history of the German nation, but appealed to every warm-hearted man of whatever race. Goethe ventured in this novel to reproduce in an artistic form his experiences at Wetzlar. He introduced Lotte Buff into it with her Christian name unaltered, he placed beside her as bridegroom and husband, under the name of Albert, a person who might suggest Kestner, and he drew the character of the hero half from himself, half from a youth called Jerusalem, the son of the Brunswick clergy¬ man (see p. 70), who shot himself in Wetzlar on the 29th of October, 1772. Jerusalem, like himself, had been in love with the wife of another man, and his death decided Goethe to write the book. By drawing on his own experience, by representing a similar situation in which he had found himself in the same town, Goethe sought to discover what could be the cause of a man’s committing suicide. He wished to make the catastrophe result from the character, as Lessing had taught him to do in his ‘ Dramaturgies His purpose was to combine consistent and exact development of character with the breadth of treatment which the novel allows of more than the drama. He therefore accentuated to his utmost the character of the hero. Werther is a conscientious, good man, who even as a child loved to indulge in dreams and fancies. School and re- werther’s straints of every kind were hateful to him. He lost character, his father young, and we are led to suppose that his mother neither educated him with a strong hand, nor understood him enough to gain his love and confidence. He is not obliged to work for his living, but he has been educated for the bar; his understanding and talents have been much praised, but he does not care to use them for the public benefit by entering the public service, and still less does he wish to lead a scholar’s life. His one idea is to revel in the most refined spiritual pleasures, reading sympathetic poets, listening to good music, drawing, enjoying nature, holding inter- io8 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch. XI. course with simple, good people, and revealing his inmost soul, and all his joys and sorrows to a single friend. He writes an ardent and passionate style, reflects on what he observes, and in talking about it easily grows excited. He respects religion, but derives no support therefrom. He thinks of God as a loving, piti¬ ful Father, and he is full of love for his fellow-men, provided they do not repel him. He has a deep sense of the evil in the world, and he wishes that men would not arbitrarily poison the pleasures which are granted them. His over-sensitive nature is easily wounded, and feeling himself to be misunderstood by those around him, he seeks solitude, or associates with children and people of the lower classes. He follows every dictate of his heart, has no self-control and no energy, lives a life not of action but of feeling, and like a true child of his age, prides himself on his wealth of sentiment. With all these qualities he has a peculiar attraction for people, and has excited the love of women without returning it; now it is his fate to be in love himself, but without any prospect of possession, for he loves a woman who is first bride then wife of another. This is the rock on which he is wrecked; his passion consumes him, and as it is the strongest force in his nature, and he is impotent to fight against his feelings, he chooses to commit suicide rather than endure a life of enforced renunciation. Goethe has introduced a conversation between Werther and Werther’s Albert on the subject of suicide. Werther considers suicide. it as merely the result of an incurable disease, and in this he expresses Goethe’s own view of the matter. In this book Goethe gives us the whole pathology of the disease ; we are meant to observe the inner disposition, the causes and the symptoms, and Gradual de to ^°^ ow their course to the end. The change which velopment takes place in Werther’s mind, the slow development of the cata- 0 f his madness is carefully traced by Goethe, and the stronliG catastrophe is prepared for with great skill, the excite¬ ment being gradually worked up and the tension increased. Throughout the book Goethe not only traces the natural growth of the disease, but notes the outward circumstances which contri¬ buted to its development. He tells us that Werther’s attempt to employ himself in an official capacity failed, owing to an unplea- Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. 109 sant superior, and to the offensive and slighting treatment which he experienced at the hands of the aristocracy. He supposes that Albert and Lotte have been married in Werther’s absence ; Lotte is unhappy in her marriage, and feels herself more strongly drawn to Werther than before. Werther perceives her unhappiness, and is inclined to break through the reserve he has hitherto maintained towards her. By reading aloud to her long passages of the mystical poetry of Ossian he raises himself and her to an unnatural pitch of excitement; this clouds his reason and goads his feelings, till he loses that delicate reserve which has hitherto characterised all his relations with Lotte; he embraces her, and she tears herself away and refuses to see him again; the next day he shoots him¬ self. Goethe assumes that Werther remains to the end the same moral man, that he reproaches himself bitterly for having disturbed a marriage, and hopes by his death to reconcile husband and wife to each other again. The description of Werther’s end, as well as the experiences of his short period of active life, is exactly borrowed Realism of from the fate of young Jerusalem. This close ad- ‘ Werther.’ herence to reality was a guarantee of high poetical truth and probability. But this is not the only respect in which Goethe does his utmost to strengthen the impression that we are here dealing with a story taken from fact. Till near the end he does not speak himself, but lets Werther speak. He makes a pretence of publishing Werther’s long journal, written by way of letters to an intimate friend; occasionally he adds a remark, or pretends that he is suppressing something, and only takes up the narrative himself where we must suppose that Werther’s letters to his friend cease. But even then he apparently has access to Werther’s last memor¬ anda, and the remainder he pretends to have learnt from the mouth of Lotte, Albert, and others. Goethe treats the somewhat exag¬ gerated and over-strained sentiment with the firm and skilful hand of an artist, and by his clear arrangement of the story helps us to take it in at a glance. It is not very long in itself, and falls natur¬ ally into two periods, the one prior, the other subsequent to Werther's abortive career as a public official. In each of the two divisions into which the story thus falls we may easily distinguish no The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch« XI. three stages : first we meet Werther alone, then Lotte comes upon the scene, and then Albert; in the second part Werther is absent at the beginning, then he returns, and finally, when the story is approaching its end, narrative takes the place of the letters. Every letter bears its date, and the story lasts exactly from the 4th of May 1771 to Christmas 1772. Novels in epistolary form had been written before Goethe’s time, Novels in particular by Richardson and Rousseau. But epistolary whereas till then authors had preferred to make a form. number of people correspond, Goethe on the con¬ trary only lets the hero speak. By this means our attention is en¬ gaged more strongly, and focussed on the hero, and in one respect the task was thus rendered easier, since the letters could all be written in the same style, whereas the older form required as many styles as there were writers; but in another respect the difficulty was increased, inasmuch as the out-pourings of one mind are much more liable to become monotonous than the utterances of many. Goethe surmounted this difficulty with the greatest ease, and by his ‘Werther’ introduced a new style of letter-writing into German literature. We possess German letters dating as early as the thirteenth cen- German tury. Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s memoirs contain a note Letter- addressed to him by the lady of his heart, a mere dry writing. report of events. In the fourteenth century we may find the correspondence between a pious nun and her father-confessor, who interchange presents and spiritual experiences, marked occasionally by sentimental outbursts. At a later epoch we find sterility of imagination helping itself out by external assistance ; for instance, in a love-letter, if a tender phrase was not at command, a drawing of a heart pierced by an arrow might serve as a sub¬ stitute. Model letter-writers in the early years of printing suggest forms of address such as : ‘ Sweet, subtle, benevolent, well- conducted, most dear lady.’ We find Luther writing to his ‘ dear Luther’s Sonikin, Hansichen,’ or to his wife as his ‘kind, Letters. dear master, Frau Katherine von Bora.’ In his letters to his boy he describes Heaven in childish fashion as a beautiful fairy garden, and he greets his wife with all kinds Ch. XI.] Herder and Goethe. in of chaff, and gives her a very amusing account of his travelling adventures, expressing everything in quaint and original language, but without a trace of artificiality. In fact, Luther fills his letters with his own heartiness, vigour and cheery humour, and this popular and original epistolary style started by him was never quite lost; the tradition was reserved down to the Duchess Elisabeth Charlotte of Orleans (see vol. i, p. 374) and to Goethe’s mother, though side by side with it the intolerable bombast and foreign affectations of the seventeenth century were fostered by polite letter-writers, and through their influence ultimately became the ruling fashion. In the eighteenth century, on the contrary, efforts were made to attain a natural and yet cultivated style. Madame de Sevignd was considered the great model in letter-writing. Frau Gottsched’s letters show a roguish grace which her comedies would not have led one to expect from her. Gellert reduced the new ideal of letter-writing to a theory, and instructed his fellow-countrymen most thoroughly as to how they were to set about it in order to appear as natural as possible; they were to follow their own disposition, to strive after variety of style, to seek their matter near at hand, to make reference to the small circumstances under which they were writing, and so on. He found in young Goethe a Goethe’s willing pupil, who at once grasped the matter with a Letters, boldness which far exceeded the good Gellert’s intentions. His first student’s letter from Leipzig rises to a dramatic level in its lively and graphic representation of what is passing at the moment he writes. This dramatic enhancement of reality, these true re¬ flections of his passing moods characterize all his style of youthful letters, and form the basis on which he ‘Werther.' worked with conscious art in ‘Werther,’ arranging and leading up to definite effects. But he took care not to entertain his readers solely with the feelings of his hero. A number of people appear in the book, who are all briefly characterized. Pictures of nature and of human life are faithfully executed, and everything is made to bear upon the hero, and reveal to us his views, tastes, and character. Goethe informs us what Werther read; the Old Testament, Homer, Goldsmith, Klopstock, Ossian, are his favourite reading, as they were also Goethe’s. Shakspeare does not seem to have 11 2 The Age of Frederick the Great. [Ch XT. attracted him, for Shakspeare would break in too rudely upon the world of such a sentimentalist. But these other writers with their idyllic and emotional elements determine Werther’s own views and interests, such as we find them reflected in his letters. He would like to establish patriarchal and Homeric conditions of life around him; nature and natural characters he describes in terms of deep affection, finding in them inexhaustible variety. But he does not show us idylls only ; his embittered heart can spur him on to satire, and he can also recognise the poetic side of the prose of everyday life. He describes Lotte knitting a stocking, or cutting bread for her younger brothers and sisters, and himself playing with the children or helping Lotte to gather fruit. He gives us a picture of a rustic ball and its break-up by a storm. He works in ordinary, un¬ interesting conversations, and introduces us into various households ; and all his experience is drawn from the sphere of middle-class life, the sphere in which Gellert’s comedies generally move, and which, one would ihink, could not possibly offer any elements of romance. By his ‘ Werther’ Goethe introduced a new phase into German _ _ . sentiment; this kind of sentiment had been fostered by Werther on pietism and by the pastoral poetry of the seventeenth German century, and already in Philipp von Zesen we find an Sentiment. a tt em pt to impart a sentimental colouring to middle- class life; but Goethe was the first to succeed in an endeavour which a hundred and thirty years before seemed a half comic, half pathetic enterprise. He had first to divest Klopstock’s characters of their saintly halo, and Gessner’s shepherds and Weisse’s rustics of their unreality. He succeeded in making his descriptions of nature more animated and varied than those of Haller, Kleist, and Klopstock, and his bourgeois characters and bourgeois sentiments more interesting than those of Gellert or Rabener, by exhibiting them as they ap¬ peared in the mind of an ardent youth, who had acquired the power of faithful delineation in the school of plastic art. Werther’s exalted sentiment and ever-ready reflections are combined with genre- pictures and landscapes in the style of the Dutch school. The whole gives the impression of a realistic sentimentality, whose ideal is to be found in the housewifely Lotte, cheerful and active in her homely life, and yet capable of elevated thoughts and feelings. Herder and Goethe. Ch. XI ] 1J 3 Revolution¬ ary tenden¬ cies and arbitrary style in ‘Werther.’ Though Rousseau is not mentioned among Werther’s favourite authors, perhaps owing to Goethe’s hostility to French , Werther’ literature at that time, or to deeper causes, yet and Rousseau’s influence really exercised great power Rouss eau. over the production of * Werther.’ No book then published was so akin to ‘ Werther ’ as Rousseau’s ‘ Nouvelle Hdoise ;’ the French romance presents a similar hero, similar ideas and incidents, similar language, and only far inferior art. In ‘ Werther,’ too, as in all Rousseau’s writings, there breathes a truly revolutionary spirit. Goethe’s novel is a protest against a state of society which cannot make worthy use of the brilliant talents of an ardent youth, against inequality of classes and the haughtiness of the nobility, as contrasted with Werther’s sympathy with the people, against the ruling code of morals, which looked on suicide far otherwise than with mere pity; it is a protest against conventional pedantry of style and strict aesthetic rules, though Goethe himself does not break any established rule in the work, and, finally, it is a protest against the dominant mode of expression, for the author expresses himself not only with freedom but with arbitrary licence. By his drama of ‘ Gotz ’ Goethe had already questioned the existing stage arrangements, but now even the established grammar was not safe. The unity of the literary language, won by toilsome effort, was imperilled; the grace and perfection of form, which had been attained thirty years before in the ‘Bremer Beitrage/ now gave place to personal caprice, provincialisms, phrases forcible but colloquial, an elliptical style, and a novel mode of spelling. Once more a revolution disturbed the quiet and steady develop¬ ment of German aesthetic culture, in the same way as Influence of the Reformation had interfered with the Renaissance