There is a difficulty in writing about German criticism, especially in the great period of Goethe’s productiveness, which hardly occurs in any other department of our subject. Not only is there much positive critical writing from all the writers, great and small, of the time, but almost all the writings of the great ones are criticism of an indirect and applied kind. The whole of German Literature from 1750 to 1830 is a sort of Seminar—a kind of enormous and multifarious Higher Education movement, pursued, with much more than half consciousness, by persons often of great talent and sometimes of great genius. To give an account of all this is impossible: if it were possible it would be really improper, because much of what the Germans found out with infinite labour was only what nations more fortunately situated in regard to literary position had inherited, if they sometimes neglected their inheritance. But they also found out certain things which other nations had not: nor is it easy to combine an indication of these with an account, full, but not too full, of the entire movement; and hardly any two persons are likely to agree on the point where fulness is reached but running over has not begun.

Hamann.

An early and remarkable instance of this critical permeation is Hamann,[[645]] the “Magus of the North.” If Hamann had been anything but a German, superficial readers might take him for a quack; indeed, as it is, they have done so, and possibly may still do so. After an early visit to England—which was anything but fortunate, save that it imbued him with English literature—and after trying various occupations, he passed the greater part of his life in a very poor public employment. He wrote large numbers of letters to Lindner, Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and other persons, and published many short treatises, of the most miscellaneous in kind, and the most eccentric and occasionally apocalyptic in style and title. But he was in reality as deadly a foe of affectation and sham as Carlyle himself, who, no doubt, took not a little from him. His polemic with his friend, and townsman, and “high-honoured Herr-magister” Kant (whom, however, one shudders to find elsewhere described as “ein guter homunculus”) does not concern us. But it is almost impossible to read a few pages in his works without coming across some literary reference, more or less remarkable when its date is considered. As early as 1759 he writes[[646]] to Kant himself, “Wir schreiben für ein Volk das Maler und Dichter fordert”; three years later[[647]] he entitles two of his quaint little pieces “Author and Critic,” “Reader and Critic,” and fills them with ironic wisdom. Earlier than these last, in May 1761,[[648]] he has read Diderot, and, like Lessing,[[649]] has discovered in and with him that rules are all very well, but that there is something “more immediate, more intimate, obscurer, but more certain” than the Rule.

He is harsh, but by no means wholly unjust (as indeed we have seen), when he finds, in The Elements of Criticism, “Mehr Worte und Wendungen als Sachen”; he knows Burke; and he leaves his “Magus”-tower to discuss Baretti and Goldoni. Mystic as he is, he detects the emptiness of the new Æsthetic:[[650]] and consistently champions direct perception of literary and other beauty in individual cases. It is admitted that his Shakespeare study[[651]] transmitted itself to Herder, upon whom he had great influence: and, generally speaking, he may be said to have exercised at least as much power in the germinal and stimulating way upon the younger writers, who were to form the great generation, as Lessing did in the way of dogma and method. Against the mere Aufklärung and against Sturm und Drang, Hamann was alike a conservative and preservative agency: and he is one of the authors, now getting terribly numerous, on whom I should like to spend much more time and space than can be afforded here.

Lichtenberg.

There are rather strong points of resemblance between Hamann and the somewhat younger Lichtenberg. Both were very much influenced by visits to England, and both show the inspiration or English humourists—especially Swift—in their not exactly forced, but very decidedly purposed, eccentricity. Lichtenberg, however, was more a man of this world than the “Magus”: and he shows very much more of the passion of the time for physics. Never did any one’s writings better deserve the title of Vermischte Schriften[[652]] than his, consisting as they do, for the most part, of a bewildering assemblage of mote-articles, ranging from the question “Why Germany has no seaside watering-place,”[[653]] and from an account of a “Sausage-Procession”[[654]] (which gives a foretaste not merely of Jean Paul but of Sartor Resartus itself) to serious mathematical and physical discussions. Lichtenberg is perhaps best known to English readers by his dealings with Garrick and other English theatrical persons: but there is not a little pure literature in him, outside as well as inside his two sets of titularly literary Bemerkungen.[[655]] He has actual animadversions on Pope, on Swift, on the early German drama even: but his most noteworthy critical achievements are to be found in more general maxims and judgments, many of them showing that creditable anxiety for the literary improvement of his country which the best men of his generation all felt, and which was rewarded in and by the next. He stigmatises that excessive imitation which even here we have had to notice: he says plumply,[[656]] Die Deutschen lesen zu viel; he is prophetically, as well as actually, notable on the process of commenting and translating Shakespeare.[[657]] But perhaps his best judgment-epigram is on that critical vice which is the other extreme from general denigration. “Men call,” says he, “others by the name of genius, as wood-lice [Kelleresel] are called Millepedes. Not that they have a thousand legs, but that people won’t take the trouble to count!”

Herder.