On the mid-century period:—the articles on Schopenhauer (Vol. 24, p. 372, by Prof. Wallace),—the philosopher of the new age; the natural scientists Vogt (Vol. 28, p. 172), and Büchner (Vol. 4, p. 719); the fiction writers Spielhagen (Vol. 25, p. 667), Gustav Freytag (Vol. 11, p. 212), Ebers (Vol. 8, p. 841), Dahn (Vol. 7, p. 734), “Charles Sealsfield” (Vol. 24, p. 543), Gerstäcker (Vol. 11, p. 906), Storm (Vol. 25, p. 968), Gottfried Keller (Vol. 15, p. 718); and, among those who portrayed peasant and provincial life, Bitzius, “Jeremias Gotthelf” (Vol. 4, p. 15), Auerbach (Vol. 2, p. 899), Stifter (Vol. 25, p. 915), Fritz Reuter (Vol. 23, p. 210); the dramatists Hebbel (Vol. 13, p. 165) and Otto Ludwig (Vol. 17, p. 114); in the Munich School, Bodenstedt (Vol. 4, p. 109), Scheffel (Vol. 24, p. 315), Baumbach (Vol. 3, p. 539), Hamerling (Vol. 12, p. 876), Heyse (Vol. 13, p. 438); and the Platt-Deutsch poet Klaus Groth (Vol. 12, p. 621).
Since 1870
On the period since 1870, see the articles Lassalle (Vol. 16, p. 235, by Thomas Kirkup, author of An Inquiry into Socialism) and Marx (Vol. 17, p. 807, by Eduard Bernstein, Socialist deputy on the Reichstag) for new economic views; and Lotze (Vol. 17, p. 23), by J. T. Merz, author of European Thought in the XIXth Century, and Henry Sturt, author of Personal Idealism, and Eduard von Hartmann (Vol. 13, p. 36) for philosophical compromises between science and metaphysics and between pessimism and idealism; the dramatists Anzengruber (Vol. 2, p. 158), Paul Lindau (Vol. 16, p. 717), and, composer and dramatist, Richard Wagner (Vol. 28, p. 236), by W. S. Rockstro, author of A Great History of Music, and D. F. Tovey, author of Essays in Musical Analysis; the historians Sybel (Vol. 26, p. 275), Treitschke (Vol. 27, p. 238), Ranke (Vol. 22, p. 893), Mommsen (Vol. 18, p. 683) and Burckhardt (Vol. 4, p. 809); and Burckhardt’s friend, the early friend of Wagner and the type of a new spirit in German letters, Nietzsche (Vol. 19, p. 672), by F. C. S. Schiller, Oxford, author of Studies in Humanism.
The most important names of the last few years are Sudermann (Vol. 26, p. 20) and Hauptmann (Vol. 13, p. 68). See, besides, the articles on Wilhelm Jensen (Vol. 15, p. 321), Wilhelm Raabe (Vol. 22, p. 765), W. Busch (Vol. 4, p. 869), Peter Rosegger (Vol. 23, p. 734), Fontane (Vol. 10, p. 608), Ebner-Eschenbach (Vol. 8, p. 843), Franzos (Vol. 11, p. 38), K. F. Meyer (Vol. 18, p. 349), Richard Voss (Vol. 28, p. 215), Ernst von Wildenbruch (Vol. 28, p. 633), and for modern German drama, in the article Drama (Vol. 8, especially pp. 535–536).
CHAPTER XL
GREEK LITERATURE
In the article Literature in the Britannica, by Professor James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, himself a specialist in Spanish literature, are these sentences:
The evolution of literature is completed in Greece, and there its subdivisions may best be studied. Epic poetry is represented by the Homeric cycle, lyric poetry by Tyrtaeus, dramatic poetry by Aeschylus, history by Herodotus, oratory by Pericles, philosophy by Plato, and criticism by Zoilus, the earliest of slashing reviewers; and in each department there is a long succession of illustrative names. Roughly speaking, all subsequent literature is imitative.
The Main Article
This testimony to the importance of Greek literature is all the more weighty as coming from one whose own field of criticism is in Romantic literature. The authority with which such an important subject as Greek literature is treated in the Britannica will be apparent to any classical student who notes the names of the contributors of the articles mentioned in the following course of reading. The key article Greek Literature (Vol. 12, p. 507; equivalent to 65 pages of this Guide) is divided into three sections: Ancient (p. 507), Byzantine (p. 516) and Modern (p. 524). The second section, by Prof. Karl Krumbacher of Munich, author of Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, and the third, by J. D. Bourchier, correspondent of The Times (London) in South-Eastern Europe, need not be dwelt upon here. To the ordinary student, in spite of the increasing interest shown in Byzantine and modern Hellenic literature, “Greek literature” must mean the literature of ancient Greece, and for him the first part of the article will be the foundation of his study of the subject. This section of the article is by the late Sir Richard C. Jebb, professor of Greek at Glasgow and then at Cambridge, known as the biographer of Bentley, as the author of an excellent brief history of Greek literature, and as an authority on subdivisions of that subject so diverse as rhetoric and oratory on the one side and lyric and dramatic poetry on the other.
Jebb’s article divides ancient Greek literature into three periods: Early, including epic, elegiac, iambic and lyric poetry and coming down to 475 B.C.; Attic, 475–300 B.C., including tragic and comic drama and historical, oratorical and philosophical prose; and Decadence—Alexandrian, 300–146 B.C., and Greco-Roman, 146 B.C.–529 A.D.