The Kritische Walder.
The Kritische Wälder[Wälder], which followed the Fragmente in a couple of years,[[664]] are occupied, first, with a sort of continuation of the work of Winckelmann and of Lessing in the Laocoön (a continuation which, like its forerunners, busied itself chiefly with the arts other than literature), and then with some work of Lessing’s enemy, Klotz,[[665]] somewhat more directly literary in kind. Klotz, however, had busied himself, and Herder necessarily busies himself in turn, with general questions of the moral-literary type, especially in reference to Homer and Virgil. The book is full of those curious Rettungen or “white-washings,” of which we have previously referred to an example in speaking of Lessing on Horace. But it has not very much for us.
The Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmack[Geschmack],
There is some more, though the quality may be differently appreciated by different persons, in the Prize Essay of 1773 on the Causes of the Decline of Taste in different Nations:[[666]] and a great deal more in the twenty years later Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und bildenden Künste.[[667]] In the first, Herder develops (not of course for the first time, for Montesquieu had given the line long before, if he had not applied it much to literature, and Du Bos had started it before him, and Vico had in a manner anticipated both; but for the first time in a wide, and at the same time not loose, application to literature itself) the idea of Age- and Race-criticism—the close conjunction of a general conception of the characteristics of a time and a country with the phenomena observed or supposed to be observed in groups of literary production. In theg second, at once generalising further, and descending to further particulars, we have an attempt to connect literature with general characteristics of humanity, and almost innumerable critical experiments of this process, on different authors and schools and kinds.
the Ideen, &c.
Anything that has to be said in general on these processes is for the Interchapters; but we may here repeat that no one can well exaggerate their historical importance or the influence that they have exercised since. Further, the merit of their combined precept and example, in directing study at once to those features which are common in all literature, and to the individual bodies by comparison of which the general features are discernible, is quite beyond question. The Prize Essay has perhaps the main defects of its kind, that of “figuring away” in plausible gyration, without bringing home any very solid sheaves, or even leaving any definite path. But the immense Miscellany of the Ideen more than makes up for this. Herder’s general scheme, here, in the Adrastea,[[668]] in that Aurora (suggested by the dawn of the nineteenth century) which he only planned, and which was but a small part of the huge adventures for which he died lamenting his lack of time, may be described as that of a mediæval collection of Quæstiones Quodlibetales, methodised by the presence throughout of his leading practical and theoretic ideas. Age-, Country-, and Race-, Criticism These were, as has been said, the necessity of enriching German literature with material, and furnishing it with patterns, “plant,” and processes, by the study of all literature, ancient and modern, as a practical and immediate aim; and the working out of the notions of literature, as connected with the country, and literature, as connected with the general race, for ultimate goal.