VII. HYMNS OF RENEWED RELIGIOUS LIFE
As in the immediate pre-Reformation age, in spite of the decadence of religious life among the Roman Catholic leaders, there was a semi-submerged piety that forced the Reformation inside the church; so in this recrudescence of paganism in the German church, there was a great body of earnest, pious Christians who kept the spirit of true German devoutness alive.
These were represented by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803), who, although he set the disastrous fashion of re-writing the older hymns in order to improve their literary value by removing archaisms and harsh lines, was yet a devout man, writing the great German epic “Messias” and also some deeply religious hymns that were too poetic for the common people. Another devout writer was Johann Kasper Lavater (1741-1801), better known by his treatise on physiognomy, who wrote some hymns after the style of Klopstock, but with greater popular success, for his “O suessester der Namen all” (“O name than every name more dear”) has been translated and used in English hymnals.
When the first intoxication of the new freedom from churchly, and even moral, restraint passed away, the German church again found able representatives to give expression to its religious life. Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), also called “Novalis,” a mining engineer of fine literary ability, wrote some hymns of deep feeling and beautiful style. Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (1777-1843), chiefly known as the author of Undine, and as an outstanding representative of the Romantic school in literature, wrote some very beautiful hymns, including two missionary hymns of great excellence. There is a literary and imaginative charm in these hymns, as in his general German style, that betrays his Huguenot heredity. Both these writers had the literary emphasis that somewhat discounted the value of their hymns for the common people. They stand, however, as landmarks of the subsidence of the rationalistic period in German hymnody.