Thus, during the whole modern history of Germany, [pg 036] the political and intellectual supremacy is divided. The former is monopolized by the sovereigns, the latter belongs to a small class of learned men. These two soon begin to attract each other. The kings seek the society, the advice, and support of literary men; whilst literary men court the patronage of kings, and acquire powerful influence by governing those who govern the people. From the time of Opitz there have been few men of eminence in literature or science who have not been drawn toward one of the larger or smaller courts of Germany; and the whole of our modern literature bears the marks of this union between princes and poets. It has been said that the existence of these numerous centres of civilization has proved beneficial to the growth of literature; and it has been pointed out that some of the smallest courts, such as Weimar, have raised the greatest men in poetry and science. Goethe himself gives expression to this opinion. “What has made Germany great,” he says, “but the culture which is spread through the whole country in such a marvelous manner, and pervades equally all parts of the realm? And this culture, does it not emanate from the numerous courts which grant it support and patronage? Suppose we had had in Germany for centuries but two capitals, Vienna and Berlin, or but one; I should like to know how it would have fared with German civilization, or even with that general well-being which goes hand in hand with true civilization.” In these words we hear Goethe, the minister of the petty court of Weimar, not the great poet of a great nation. Has France had more than one capital? Has England had more than one court? Great men have risen to eminence in great monarchies like France, and [pg 037] they have risen to eminence in a great commonwealth such as England, without the patronage of courts, by the support, the sympathy, the love of a great nation. Truly national poetry exists only where there is a truly national life; and the poet who, in creating his works, thinks of a whole nation which will listen to him and be proud of him, is inspired by a nobler passion than he who looks to his royal master, or the applause even of the most refined audience of the dames de la cour. In a free country, the sovereign is the highest and most honored representative of the national will, and he honors himself by honoring those who have well deserved of his country. There a poet laureate may hold an independent and dignified position, conscious of his own worth, and of the support of the nation. But in despotic countries, the favor even of the most enlightened sovereign is dangerous. Germany never had a more enlightened king than Frederick the Great; and yet, when he speaks of the Queen receiving Leibnitz at court, he says, “She believed that it was not unworthy of a queen to show honor to a philosopher; and as those who have received from heaven a privileged soul rise to the level of sovereigns, she admitted Leibnitz into her familiar society.”
The seventeenth century saw the rise and fall of the first and the second Silesian schools. The first is represented by men like Opitz and Weckherlin, and it exercised an influence in the North of Germany on Simon Dach, Paul Flemming, and a number of less gifted poets, who are generally known by the name of the Königsberg School. Its character is pseudo-classical. All these poets endeavored to write correctly, sedately, and eloquently. Some of them aimed at a certain [pg 038] simplicity and sincerity, which we admire particularly in Flemming. But it would be difficult to find in all their writings one single thought, one single expression, that had not been used before. The second Silesian school is more ambitious; but its poetic flights are more disappointing even than the honest prose of Opitz. The “Shepherds of the Pegnitz” had tried to imitate the brilliant diction of the Italian poets; but the modern Meistersänger of the old town of Nürnberg had produced nothing but wordy jingle. Hoffmannswaldau and Lohenstein, the chief heroes of the second Silesian school, followed in their track, and did not succeed better. Their compositions are bombastic and full of metaphors. It is a poetry of adjectives, without substance, truth, or taste. Yet their poetry was admired, praised not less than Goethe and Schiller were praised by their contemporaries, and it lived beyond the seventeenth century. There were but few men during that time who kept aloof from the spirit of these two Silesian schools, and were not influenced by either Opitz or Hoffmannswaldau. Among these independent poets we have to mention Friedrich von Logau, Andreas Gryphius, and Moscherosch. Beside these, there were some prose writers whose works are not exactly works of art, but works of original thought, and of great importance to us in tracing the progress of science and literature during the dreariest period of German history. We can only mention the “Simplicissimus,” a novel full of clever miniature drawing, and giving a truthful picture of German life during the Thirty Years' War; the patriotic writings of Professor Schupp; the historical works of Professor Pufendorf (1631-94); the pietistic sermons of Spener, and of Professor Franke (1663-1727), the [pg 039] founder of the Orphan School at Halle; Professor Arnold's (1666-1714) Ecclesiastical History; the first political pamphlets by Professor Thomasius (1655-1728); and among philosophers, Jacob Böhme at the beginning, and Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth century.
The second Silesian school was defeated by Gottsched, professor at Leipzig. He exercised, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the same dictatorship as a poet and a critic which Opitz had exercised at the beginning of the seventeenth. Gottsched was the advocate of French models in art and poetry, and he used his wide-spread influence in recommending the correct and so-called classical style of the poets of the time. After having rendered good service in putting down the senseless extravagance of the school of Lohenstein, he became himself a pedantic and arrogant critic; and it was through the opposition which he roused by his “Gallomania” that German poetry was delivered at last from the trammels of that foreign school. Then followed a long literary warfare; Gottsched and his followers at Leipzig defended the French, Bodmer and his friends in Switzerland the English style of literature. The former insisted on classical form and traditional rules; the latter on natural sentiment and spontaneous expression. The question was, whether poets should imitate the works of the classics, or imitate the classics who had become classics by imitating nobody. A German professor wields an immense power by means of his journals. He is the editor; he writes in them himself, and allows others to write; he praises his friends, who are to laud him in turn; he patronizes his pupils, who are to call him master; he abuses his adversaries, and asks his [pg 040] allies to do the same. It was in this that Professor Gottsched triumphed for a long time over Bodmer and his party, till at last public opinion became too strong, and the dictator died the laughing-stock of Germany. It was in the very thick of this literary struggle that the great heroes of German poetry grew up,—Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. Goethe, who knew both Gottsched and Bodmer, has described that period of fermentation and transition in which his own mind was formed, and his extracts may be read as a commentary on the poetical productions of the first half of the eighteenth century. He does justice to Günther, and more than justice to Liscow. He shows the influence which men like Brockes, Hagedorn, and Haller exercised in making poetry respectable. He points out the new national life which, like an electric spark, flew through the whole country when Frederick the Great said, “J'ai jeté le bonnet pardessus les moulins;” and defied, like a man, the political popery of Austria. The estimate which Goethe forms of the poets of the time, of Gleim and Uz, of Gessner and Rabener, and more especially of Klopstock, Lessing, and Wieland, should be read in the original, as likewise Herder's “Rhapsody on Shakspeare.” The latter contains the key to many of the secrets of that new period of literature, which was inaugurated by Goethe himself and by those who like him could dare to be classical by being true to nature and to themselves.
My object in taking this rapid survey of German literature has been to show that the extracts which I have collected in my “German Classics” have not been chosen at random, and that, if properly used, they can be read as a running commentary on the political [pg 041] and social history of Germany. The history of literature is but an applied history of civilization. As in the history of civilization we watch the play of the three constituent classes of society,—clergy, nobility, and commoners,—we can see, in the history of literature, how that class which is supreme politically shows for the time being its supremacy in the literary productions of the age, and impresses its mark on the works of poets and philosophers.
Speaking very generally, we might say that, during the first period of German history, the really moving, civilizing, and ruling class was the clergy; and in the whole of German literature, nearly to the time of the Crusades, the clerical element predominates. The second period is marked by the Crusades, and the triumph of Teutonic and Romantic chivalry, and the literature of that period is of a strictly correspondent tone. After the Crusades, and during the political anarchy that followed, the sole principle of order and progress is found in the towns, and in the towns the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries finds its new home. At last, at the time of the Reformation, when the political life of the country assumed for a time a national character, German literature also is for a short time national. The hopes, however, which had been raised of a national policy and of a national literature were soon blighted, and, from the Thirty Years' War to the present day, the inheritance of the nation has been divided between princes and professors. There have been moments when the princes had to appeal to the nation at large, and to forget for a while their royal pretensions; and these times of national enthusiasm, as during the wars of Frederick the Great, and during the wars against Napoleon, have not [pg 042] failed to tell on the literature of Germany. They produced a national spirit, free from professorial narrowness, such as we find in the writings of Lessing and Fichte. But with the exception of these short lucid intervals, Germany has always been under the absolute despotism of a number of small sovereigns and great professors, and her literature has been throughout in the hands of court poets and academic critics. Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller are most free from either influence, and most impressed with the duties which a poet owes, before all, to the nation to which he belongs. Klopstock's national enthusiasm borders sometimes on the fantastic; for, as his own times could not inspire him, he borrowed the themes of his national panegyrics from the distant past of Arminius and the German bards. Lessing looked more to his own age, but he looked in vain for national heroes. “Pity the extraordinary man,” says Goethe, “who had to live in such miserable times, which offered him no better subjects than those which he takes for his works. Pity him, that in his ‘Minna von Barnhelm,’ he had to take part in the quarrel between the Saxons and the Prussians, because he found nothing better. It was owing to the rottenness of his time that he always took, and was forced to take, a polemical position. In his ‘Emilia Galotti,’ he shows his pique against the princes; in ‘Nathan,’ against the priests.” But, although the subjects of these works of Lessing were small, his object in writing was always great and national. He never condescended to amuse a provincial court by masquerades and comedies, nor did he degrade his genius by pandering, like Wieland, to the taste of a profligate nobility. Schiller, again, was a poet truly national and truly liberal; and although a [pg 043] man of aspirations rather than of actions, he has left a deeper impress on the kernel of the nation than either Wieland or Goethe. These considerations, however, must not interfere with our appreciation of the greatness of Goethe. On the contrary, when we see the small sphere in which he moved at Weimar, we admire the more the height to which he grew, and the freedom of his genius. And it is, perhaps, owing to this very absence of a strongly marked national feeling, that in Germany the first idea of a world-literature was conceived. “National literature,” Goethe says, “is of little importance: the age of a world-literature is at hand, and every one ought to work in order to accelerate this new era.” Perhaps Goethe felt that the true poet belonged to the whole of mankind, and that he must be intelligible beyond the frontiers of his own country. And, from this point of view, his idea of a world-literature has been realized, and his own works have gained their place side by side with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. But, so long as there are different languages and different nations, let each poet think and work and write for his own people, without caring for the applause of other countries. Science and philosophy are cosmopolitan; poetry and art are national: and those who would deprive the Muses of their home-sprung character, would deprive them of much of their native charms.
LIST OF EXTRACTS FOR ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE.
Fourth Century after Christ.
Gothic:—