In the foregoing remarks little has been said about the literature of the century except among English-speaking peoples. Not being a Mezzofanti, I am not personally acquainted with the literature of all languages, and it is a vain thing to speak of books at second hand. It was not the nineteenth but the eighteenth century that saw Germany re-enter the field of pure literature, as distinguished from that of scholarship and science. Since the end of the Middle Ages, with their poets, German writers had mainly been devoted to theology and classical criticism. Latin was the language of the learned. Many ascertainable causes, in the middle and end of the eighteenth century, and doubtless many causes which cannot be ascertained, awoke again the Teutonic genius. The victories of Frederick the Great gave Germans patriotism and confidence in their own tongue.
The philosophic and social works which preluded to the French Revolution stirred the German mind and required popular expression. Thus Kant wrote in his own native speech in reaction against the sceptical philosophy of David Hume, and Kant became the father of the long array of German metaphysicians from Hegel and Fichte to Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Their philosophy “cannot be briefly stated, especially in French,” as one of them said, but its general effect has been rather to counteract materialism by making it pretty plain that human nature is not so simple and easily to be explained as the Scottish philosophers were apt to suppose. In England, Coleridge gave an Anglican heart to the new German philosophy, which also influenced Hamilton, and still affects the philosophical teaching of Oxford. “It is nonsense, but is it the right sort of nonsense?” asked the late Professor Sidgwick (a Cambridge man) when struggling with the examination papers of a Hegelian undergraduate.
More important as literature were the double influences of return on the mediæval past and of inspiration by the new political and social ideas which gave the impulse to the genius of Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, and others. Goethe began as the child of Rousseau, but as a child who had read Kant, and drunk deep of the romance of the Middle Ages. Doubtless his is the greatest name of modern Germany, both as a student of life, of nature, of history, and of thought. He was the spiritual parent of Scott, with his Götz von Berlichingen, and, with Richter, of Carlyle. Through himself and his English or Scottish disciples, Goethe has been the most fertile source of change in the literature of the nineteenth century. In extreme old age, curious to say, he gave the first impulse to the study of early religion as displayed in the obscure rites and beliefs of the Australian natives: a theme remote enough from his effect on the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Probably the two parts of his Faust and his Roman Lyrics are the most popular, and, as literature, the most permanent parts of his work, with Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Elective Affinities, in prose. Schiller, beginning with the boyish romanticism of The Robbers, became a kind of classic in his later dramas. Lessing and Winckelmann were the most sound and fertile influences in criticism. The Laocoon remains indispensable. The patriotic lyrists resurrected the national spirit of the Teutonic race, and Heine, Hebrew by race and half French in character, combined the characteristics of Lucian, Burns, and Voltaire.
Wolf, writing in Latin (and I believe that his work on Homer has never attained a third edition, and has never been translated into English), became the parent, for good or evil, of what is called the Higher Criticism, Lachmann introducing the painfully conjectural tendencies of that intellectual exercise. Its application to scriptural texts is notorious, but not precisely as part of literature. Like other European countries, the Germany of the close of the century is not remarkable for resplendent genius in poetry or fiction, though novels abound. The scientific, historical, and scholarly literature is of vast profusion. In thoroughness and tireless patience, Germany is the teacher of the world, while in curious contrast to her practical genius is the love of some of her scholars for baseless conjecture. The “insularity” with which the English are charged is a matter of reproach by French scholars against Germany. Some sets of ideas, long familiar in America, England, and the Latin nations, are only now beginning to reach German classical scholars.
To write an account of the changes in French literature during the century is impossible within moderate space. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were unfavorable to the literary art, and the head of so great a poet as André Chénier fell under the guillotine. Till about 1825–1830 the Restoration was accompanied by literature in the old classic style of Boileau and of the Augustan age, only enlivened by the romantic if somewhat affected style of that great rhetorician, Châteaubriand. The year 1830 is the sacred year of French romanticism, drawing its ideals partly from the German romantic movement, partly from Scott and Shakespeare, read, of course, only in translations. Everything was now to be mediæval, Spanish, and passionate: the drama was to be emancipated from Aristotle, also read in translations. As far as classicism went the young adventurers had no more Greek than Shakespeare or Scott. But they had the colossal and Titanic genius of Hugo, exquisitely sweet, rapid, strange, and versatile in lyric: potent, if inflated, in the drama and the novel. They had the charming humor and exquisite taste of Théophile Gautier; the feverish passion and mastery in verse of Alfred de Musset; the delicate, dreamy, and wandering spirit of Gérard de Nerval; and the manly, courageous, humorous, and unwearied vigor, in drama and in fiction, of Alexandre Dumas.
This was, indeed, an extraordinary generation, by far the greatest since that of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Many others might be named: the reserved force and incisive irony of Mérimée; the learned and genial criticism of Sainte-Beuve; the inexhaustible talent of George Sand, and the mighty Balzac, the maker and founder of the modern work of introspection. Probably, of all these writers, Dumas and Balzac have exercised most influence on later fiction in England and America. Flaubert continued, with painful elaboration, the traditions of Balzac; from Flaubert, and round him, grew up Daudet and M. Zola, and the Goncourts. Poetry, after Lamartine, dwindled into the prettinesses of the Parnasse and the eccentricities, too obviously intentional, of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and the Symbolistes. Literary art, at the end of the century, became too self-conscious, too fond of argument about ideals and methods, the tattle of the studio. Great men have not thus dissipated their energy; they have done what they could do; they have not talked about how they did it. What English literature was borrowed from France, at this time, is more in the nature of words than work. Criticism has been a chimaera bombinans in vacuo, chattering about realism, naturalism, symbolism, the use of documents, and so forth. The defects, rather than the merits, of France have been imitated; a squalid pessimism is easily affected.
The closing century has seen Russia awake, as the close of the eighteenth century beheld the literary revival of Germany. Russian poetry has only reached the learned among us: the novels of Turguenieff, Dustoiefsky, and Tolstoï are read in translation, with curiosity, antipathy, enthusiasm, and an absence of that emotion. It is very long since Terentianus Maurus remarked that the fortunes of a book depended on the taste of the reader. Often he is favorably impressed, not by the actual merit of the story as a story or as a work of literary art, but by its appeal to his private sentiments, as of socialism, pessimism, toryism, or whatever they may be. Possibly the vehement admirers of some Russian writers have been thus misguided. In any case, no qualified critic thinks that his opinion of works which he cannot read in the original language is of any value. For this reason I need not offend or please the reader by offering any uninstructed sentiments about the great Scandinavian dramatist, Dr. Ibsen; or concerning the work of Signor d’Annunzio, or the plays of M. Maeterlinck. To pronounce each of these gentlemen a Shakespeare or Æschylus is not unusual in cultivated circles; it remains for the new century to ratify or quash the verdict. In the mean time, have the approving critics taken the precaution of reading Æschylus and Shakespeare?
Andrew Lang.