As to Klopstock is due the praise of being the first to teach the Germans by great examples, that reliance upon native resources, and independence of the contracting sway of meager French conventional rules, were the only paths to the production of original, enduring literature; to Lessing belongs that of enforcing the wholesome lesson by precept. Lessing is the father of modern criticism. Born in Kaments, a small town of Lusatia, in 1729, five years later than Klopstock, he wrote at the age of twenty-two a criticism of the Messiah. Later, in his maturity, he produced his Dramaturgie, or, theatrical and dramatic criticism, and his Laocoon, or, the limits of poetry and the plastic arts. He sought always for first principles; and in the search he was guided by a rare philosophic acuteness, co-operating with strong common sense. His fancy—whereof a good endowment is indispensable to a critic—is ever subordinate to his reason; his fine sensibility to the beautiful, supplying materials for the deduction of principles of taste and composition by his subtle understanding. Though greater as a critic than as a poet or creator, he has nevertheless left three different works in the dramatic form, that are classics in German literature;—Minna von Barnkelm, a comedy; Amelia Galotti, a domestic tragedy; and Nathan the Wise, a didactic poem of unique excellence. He himself regarded as his best work his Fables, remarkable for sententiousness, simplicity of language, and pithy significance. His prose style, concise, transparent, forcible without dryness, is a model for the literary student. Not the least of his great services is, that he was the first to draw attention in Germany to Shakspeare, whose supremacy over all poets has since been no where more broadly acknowledged, and the causes of it no where more lucidly developed.
Cotemporary with Klopstock and Lessing, and, from his works and influence, deserving of being mentioned next to them, was Wieland, born in 1733 in Biborach, a town of Swabia. Wieland commenced writing at the age of seventeen, and finished at that of eighty, during which extended period he addicted himself to almost every department of authorship. He is the first German who translated Shakspeare. As the author of Oberon, his name is familiar to English readers. This is much the best work of Wieland, more remarkable for grace and sprightliness than force or originality. He drew largely from the Greeks, Italians, English and French, and though a poet and writer of high and various merit, but a small portion of the much he has written is now read.
Following chronological order in this fertile period, we come after Wieland to Herder, born at Mohrungen, a small town of Eastern Prussia, in 1744. Like Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller, Herder was drawn to Weimar by the munificient spirit of the Duchess Amalia, and her son, the grand Duke Augustus, illustrious and ever memorable, as enlightened fosterers of genius—shining examples to sovereigns, kingly or popular. Herder was appointed in his thirty-second year, court preacher at Weimar, and there passed the remainder of his life, in diversified usefulness, simultaneously inspecting schools and elaborating philosophical essays, learnedly elucidating the Old Testament, and at the same time reviving and awakening a taste for national songs. His greatest work, entitled Ideas for the Philosophy of History, is esteemed one of the noblest productions of modern times. Herder is called by Richter, a Christian Plato.
And here, next to Herder, and a congenial and profounder spirit, we will speak of Richter himself, born in 1763. Richter, better known by his Christian names, Jean Paul, is a fine sample of the German character. The truthfulness of the Germans, their deep religious feeling, their earnestness and their playfulness, (far removed from frivolity) their enthusiasm and their tendency to the mystical, their warm affections and aptness to sympathy, are all not only traceable in his works, but prominent in the broad vivid lines of his erratic pen. In the union of learning with genius, Richter surpasses Coleridge. His wonderful fictions are out of the reach of common readers, not more by their learned illustrations and their subtleties, than by their wild irregularity of form and arbitrary structure, whereby the world generally is deprived of the enjoyment of a fund of the most tender pathos, gorgeous description, bold, keen wit and satire, and the richest humor in modern literature. His two greatest works are on education, and on the philosophy of criticism. He was several years in writing each; and storehouses they are of deep and just thought, of searching analysis, and of great truths, evolved by the reason of one of the world's profoundest thinkers, and illuminated by flashes of genius of almost painful intensity. They are works, each of them, to be studied page by page. Nothing similar to or approaching them exists in English literature.
Of the writers who in this remarkable epoch belong to the first class in the highest department of letters, the poetical or creative, we have spoken—in the cursory manner necessary in a general sketch—of all, save the two greatest, Schiller and Goethe.
Frederick Schiller was born in 1759, at Marbach, a small town of Wurtemberg. In his mind seem to have been blended, and there strengthened, elevated, and refined, the qualities of his parents—the one, a man of clear upright mind; the other, a woman of more than common intelligence and taste, who both enjoyed the fortune of living to witness the greatness of their son. Schiller had the benefit of good early instruction. At the age of fourteen he was placed in a high school, just founded by the reigning Duke of Wurtemberg, and conducted with military discipline. Here, while his daily teachers were tasking him with irksome lessons, first of jurisprudence and afterwards of medicine, the chained genius, chafing like the lion in his cage, was brooding over the thoughts, and by stealth feeding with a translation of Shakspeare the cravings, which nature had implanted in him to produce one of her noblest works—a great poet. At eighteen he began, within the walls of the Duke's military school, The Robbers, often feigning sickness, that he might have a light in his room at night to transfer to paper his daring conception and burning thoughts. He postponed its publication until after he had finished his college course and had obtained the post of surgeon in the army, in his twenty-first year. The appearance of The Robbers, as a consequence of the formal drilling of the self-complacent pedagogues of the Duke of Wurtemberg, I have elsewhere1 likened to the explosion of a mass of gunpowder under the noses of ignorant boys drying it before a fire to be used as common sand. Schiller himself, in after life, described it as "a monster, for which by good fortune the world has no original, and which I would not wish to be immortal, except to perpetuate an example of the offspring which genius, in its unnatural union with thraldom, may give to the world." Never did a literary work produce a stronger impression. With enthusiastic admiration, the world hailed in it the advent of a mighty poet.
1 North American Review, for July 1834.
That which roused enthusiasm throughout Germany, roused anger in the sovereign of Wurtemberg; and while all eyes were turned towards the land whence this piercing voice had been heard, he from whose bosom it issued was fleeing from his home to avoid a dungeon. For having gone secretly to Manheim, in a neighboring state, to witness the performance of The Robbers, the Duke had the young poet put under arrest for a week, and Schiller, learning that for repeating the transgression a severer punishment awaited him, fled in disguise, choosing rather to face the appalling reality of sudden self-dependence than brook the tyranny of mind, which to the soaring poet was even more grievous than to the high-souled man. He quickly found friends. Baron Dalberg supplied him with money, while he lived, for a short time, under the name of Schmidt in a small town of Franconia, until Madam von Wollzogen invited him to her estate near Meinungen. Under this lady's roof he gave free scope to his genius, and produced two more dramas—Fiesco, and Kabal und Liebe (Court Intrigue and Love.) These, with the Robbers, constitute the first or untutored era of Schiller's literary life. With faults as glaring as their beauties are brilliant, they are now chiefly valued as the broad first evidence of that power, whose full exertion afterwards gave to the world Don Carlos, Wallenstein, and Tell, and to Schiller immortality. Their reputation obtained for him the post of poet to the Manheim theatre. Thence, after a brief period he went to Leipsic and to Dresden, developing his noble faculties by study and exercise. In 1789, at the age of thirty, he was appointed by the Grand Duke of Weimar, at the instigation of Goethe, professor of History in the university of Jena. Here and at Weimar he passed, in constant literary labor, the remainder of his too short life.
Schiller's great reputation rests, and will ever rest, unshaken, on his dramas. Regarding his first three, which we have named, as preparatory studies to his dramatic career, he has left six finished tragedies, viz.—Don Carlos, The Maid of Orleans, Wallenstein (in three parts,) Mary Stuart, The Bride of Messina, and William Tell—works, in whose conception and execution the highest principles of art control with plastic power the glowing materials of a rich, deep, fervent mind, ordering and disposing them with such commanding skill, as to produce dramas, which are not merely effective in theatrical representation, and soul-stirring to the reader as pictures of passion, but which, by the rare combination of refined art with mental fertility and poetic genius, exhibit, each one of them, that highest result of the exertion of the human faculties—a great poem. Possessing, in common with other gifted writers, the various endowments needed in a dramatist and poet of the highest order, the individual characteristic of Schiller is elevation. The predominant tendency of his mind is ever upwards. Open his volumes any where, and in a few moments the reader feels himself lifted up into an ideal region. The leading characters in his plays, though true to humanity, have an ideal loftiness. You figure them to yourself as of heroic stature, such grandeur and nobleness is there in their strain of sentiment and expression. The same characteristic pervades his prose and lyrical poetry. Had he never written a drama, his two volumes of lyrical poetry would suffice to enthrone him among the first class of poets, so beautiful is it and at the same time of such depth of meaning, so musical and so thought-pregnant. No where is the dignity of human nature more nobly asserted than in the works of Schiller; as pure, and simple, and noble, as a man, as he is powerful and beautiful as a poet. In the full vigor of his faculties, his mind matured by experience and severe culture, and teeming with poetic plans, he died in 1805, having reached only his forty-sixth year.
Of Schiller's great rival and friend, Goethe, as of Schiller himself, I can, in the limited space allowed in such a lecture as this, only give you a rapid sketch.