Decline of taste in Germany. 23. In the beginning of the century, as has been shown in the former volume, the prospects of classical literature in Germany seemed most auspicious. Schools and universities, the encouragement of liberal princes, the instruction of distinguished professors, the formation of public libraries, had given an impulse, the progressive effects of which were manifest in every Protestant state of the empire. Nor was any diminution of this zeal and taste discernible for a few years. But after the death of Melanchthon in 1560, and of Camerarius in 1574, a literary decline commenced, slow but uniform and permanent, during which Germany had to lament a strange eclipse of that lustre which had distinguished the preceding age. This was first shown in an inferiority of style, and in a neglect of the best standards of good writing. The admiration of Melanchthon himself led in some measure to this; and to copy his manner (genus dicendi Philippicum, as it was called) was more the fashion than to have recourse to his masters, Cicero and Quintilian.[924] But this, which would have kept up a very tolerable style, gave way, not long afterwards, to a tasteless and barbarous turn of phrase, in which all feeling of propriety and elegance was lost. This has been called Apuleianismus, as if that indifferent writer of the third century had been set up for imitation, though probably it was the mere sympathy of bad taste and incorrect expression. The scholastic philosophy came back about the same time into the German universities, with all its technical jargon, and triumphed over the manes of Erasmus and Melanchthon. The disciples of Paracelsus spread their mystical rhapsodies far and wide, as much at the expense of classical taste as of sound reason. And when we add to these untoward circumstances the dogmatic and polemical theology, studious of a phraseology certainly not belonging to the Augustan age, and the necessity of writing on many other subjects almost equally incapable of being treated in good language, we cannot be much astonished that a barbarous and slovenly Latinity should become characteristic of Germany, which, even in later ages, very few of its learned men have been able to discard.[925]
[924] Eichhorn, iii. 268. The Germans usually said Philippus for Melanchthon.
[925] Melchior Adam, after highly praising Wolf’s translation of Demosthenes, proceeds to boast of the Greek learning of Germany, which, rather singularly, he seems to ascribe to this translation: Effecit ut ante ignotus plerisque Demosthenes, nunc familiariter nobiscum versetur in scholis et academiis. Est sanè quod gratulemur Germaniæ nostræ, quod per Wolfium tantorum fluminum eloquentiæ particeps facta est. Fatentur ipsi Græci, qui reliqui sunt hodie Constantinopoli, præ cæteris eruditi, et Christianæ religionis amantes, totum musarum chorum, relicto Helicone, in Germaniam transmigrâsse. (Vitæ Philosophurum.) Melchior Adam lived in the early part of the seventeenth century, when this high character was hardly applicable to Germany; but his panegyric must be taken as designed for the preceding age, in which the greater part of his eminent men flourished. Besides this, he is so much a compiler that this passage may not be his own.
German learning. 24. In philological erudition we have seen that Germany long maintained her rank, if not quite equal to France in this period, yet nearer to her than to any third nation. |Greek verses of Rhodomann.| We have mentioned several of the most distinguished; and to these we might add many names from Melchior Adam, the laborious biographer of his learned countrymen; such as Oporinus, George Fabricius, Frischlin, Crusius, who first taught the Romaic Greek in Germany. One, rather more known than these, was Laurence Rhodomann. He was the editor of several authors; but his chief claim to a niche in the temple seems to rest upon his Greek verses, which have generally been esteemed superior to any of his generation. The praise does not imply much positive excellence; for in Greek composition, and especially in verse, the best scholars of the sixteenth century make but an indifferent figure. Rhodomann’s life of Luther is written in Greek hexameters. It is also a curious specimen of the bigotry of his church. He boasts that Luther predicted the deaths of Zuingle, Carlostadt, and Œcolampadius, as the punishment of their sacramentarian hypothesis. The lines will be found in a note,[926] and may serve as a fair specimen of as good Greek as could perhaps be written in that age of celebrated erudition. But some other poems of Rhodomann, which I have not seen, are more praised by the critics.
[926] Και τα μεν ὡς τετελεστο μετα χρονον, ὡς μεμορητο
ὡς γαρ δωδεκαμηνος ἑλιξ τριτος ετρεχε Φαιβου,
δη τοτε μοιρα, θεου κρυφιην πρησσουσα μενοινην,
μαντοσυναις επεθηκε θεοφραδεεσσι τελευτην
ανδρος, ὁσ ουτιν' απρηκτον απο κραδιης βαλε μυθον.
αμφω γαρ στυγερον πλαγξηνορε δογματος αρχω
οικιολαμπαδιον και κιγκλιον εφθασεν ατη
ποτμου δακρυοεντος' ἱνα φριξειε και αλλος
ατρεκιης προς κεντρον αναιδεα ταρσον ιαψαι.
ουδε μεν οξυηορους καρολοσταδιος φυγε ποινας,
τον δε γαρ αντιβολών κρυερῳ μετα φασματι δαιμων
εξαπινης εταραξε, και ηρπασεν οὑ χρεος ηευ.
Learning declines; 25. But, at the expiration of the century, few were left besides Rhodomann of the celebrated philologers of Germany; nor had a new race arisen to supply their place. Æmilius Portus, who taught with reputation at Heidelberg, was a native of Ferrara, whose father, a Greek by origin, emigrated to Genoa on account of religion. The state of literature, in a general sense, had become sensibly deteriorated in the empire. This was most perceptible, or perhaps only perceptible, in its most learned provinces, those which had embraced the Reformation. In the opposite quarter there had been little to lose, and something was gained. |except in Catholic Germany.| In the first period of the Reformation, the Catholic universities, governed by men whose prejudices were insuperable even by appealing to their selfishness, had kept still in the same track, educating their students in the barbarous logic and literature of the Middle Ages, careless that every method was employed in Protestant education to develop and direct the talents of youth; and this had given the manifest intellectual superiority, which taught the disciples and contemporaries of the first reformers a scorn for the stupidity and ignorance of the popish party, somewhat exaggerated, of course, as such sentiments generally are, but dangerous above measure to its influence. It was therefore one of the first great services which the Jesuits performed to get possession of the universities, or to found other seminaries for education. In these they discarded the barbarous school-books then in use, put the rudimentary study of the languages on a better footing, devoted themselves, for the sake of religion, to those accomplishments which religion had hitherto disdained; and by giving a taste for elegant literature, with as much solid and scientific philosophy as the knowledge of the times and the prejudices of the church would allow, both wiped away the reproach of ignorance, and drew forth the native talents of their novices and scholars. They taught gratuitously, which threw, however unreasonably, a sort of discredit upon salaried professors:[927] it was found that boys learned more from them in six months than in two years under other masters; and, probably for both these reasons, even protestants sometimes withdrew their children from the ordinary gymnasia and placed them in Jesuit colleges. No one will deny that, in their classical knowledge, particularly of the Latin language, and in the elegance with which they wrote it, the order of Jesuits might stand in competition with any scholars of Europe. In this period of the sixteenth century, though not perhaps in Germany itself, they produced several of the best writers whom it could boast.[928]
[927] Mox, ubi paululum firmitatis accessit, pueros sine mercede docendos et erudiendos susceperunt; quo artificio non vulgarem vulgi favorem emeruere, criminandis præsertim aliis doctoribus, quorum doctrina venalis esset et scholæ nulli sine mercede paterent, et interdum etiam doctrina peregrina personarent. Incredibile dictu est, quantum hæc criminatio valuerit. Hospinian, Hist. Jesuitarum, l. ii. c. 1. fol. 84. See also l. i. fol. 59.
[928] Ranke, ii. 32. Eichhorn, iii. 266. The latter scarcely does justice to the Jesuits as promoters of learning in their way.
Philological works of Stephens. 26. It is seldom that an age of critical erudition is one also of fine writing; the two have not perhaps a natural incompatibility with each other, but the bond-woman too often usurps the place of the free-woman, and the auxiliary science of philology controls, instead of adorning and ministering to the taste and genius of original minds. As the study of the Latin language advanced, as better editions were published, as dictionaries and books of criticism were more carefully drawn up, we naturally expect to find it written with more correctness, but not with more force and truth. The expostulation of Henry Stephens de Latinitate Falso Suspecta, 1576, is a collection of classical authorities for words and idioms, which seem so like French, that the reader would not hesitate to condemn them. Some of these, however, are so familiar to us as good Latin, that we can hardly suspect the dictionaries not to have contained them. I have not examined any earlier edition than that of Calepin’s dictionary, as enlarged by Paulus Manutius, of the date of 1579, rather after this publication by Henry Stephens, and certainly it does not appear to want these words, or to fail in sufficient authority for them.
Style of Lipsius. 27. In another short production by Stephens, De Latinitate Lipsii Palæstra, he turns into ridicule the affected style of that author, who ransacked all his stores of learning to perplex the reader. A much later writer, Scioppius, in his Judicium de Stylo Historico, points out several of the affected and erroneous expressions of Lipsius. But he was the founder of a school of bad writers, which lasted for some time, especially in Germany. Seneca and Tacitus were the authors of antiquity whom Lipsius strove to emulate. “Lipsius,” says Scaliger, “is the cause that men have now little respect for Cicero, whose style he esteems about as much as I do his own. He once wrote well, but his third century of epistles is good for nothing.”[929] But a style of point and affected conciseness will always have its admirers, till the excess of vicious imitation disgusts the world.[930]