[Footnote 4: He was assisted in his dramatic writings by his wife, a woman of splendid talents.—Trans.]
CCXLV. Influence of the Belles-Lettres
The German, excluded from all participation in public affairs and confined to the narrow limits of his family circle and profession, followed his natural bent for speculative philosophy and poetical reverie; but while his thoughts became more elevated and the loss of his activity was, in a certain degree, compensated by the gentle dominion of the muses, the mitigation thus afforded merely aggravated the evil by rendering him content with his state of inaction. Ere long, as in the most degenerate age of ancient Rome, the citizen, amused by sophists and singers, actors and jugglers, lost the remembrance of his former power and rights and became insensible to his state of moral degradation, to which the foreign notions, the vain and frivolous character of most of the poets of the day, had not a little contributed.
After the thirty years' war, the Silesian poets became remarkable for Gallomania or the slavish imitation of those of France. Unbounded adulation of the sovereign, bombastical carmina on occasion of the birth, wedding, accession, victories, fêtes, treaties of peace, and burial of potentates, love-couplets equally strained, twisted compliments to female beauty, with pedantic, often indecent, citations from ancient mythology, chiefly characterized this school of poetry. Martin Opitz, A.D. 1639, the founder of the first Silesian school,[1] notwithstanding the insipidity of the taste of the day, preserved the harmony of the German ballad. His most distinguished followers were Logau, celebrated for his Epigrams;[2] Paul Gerhard, who, in his fine hymns, revived the force and simplicity of Luther; Flemming, a genial and thoroughly German poet, the companion of Olearius[3] during his visit to Persia; the gentle Simon Dach, whose sorrowing notes bewail the miseries of the age. He founded a society of melancholy poets at Königsberg, in Prussia, the members of which composed elegies for each other; Tscherning and Andrew Gryphius, the Corneille of Germany, a native of Glogau, whose dramas are worthy of a better age than the insipid century in which they were produced. The life of this dramatist was full of incident. His father was poisoned; his mother died of a broken heart. He wandered over Germany during the thirty years' war, pursued by fire, sword, and pestilence, to the latter of which the whole of his relations fell victims. He travelled over the whole of Europe, spoke eleven languages, and became a professor at Leyden, where he taught history, geography, mathematics, physics, and anatomy. These poets were, however, merely exceptions to the general rule. In the poetical societies, the "Order of the Palm" or "Fructiferous Society," founded A.D. 1617, at Weimar, by Caspar von Teutleben, the "Upright Pine Society," established by Rempler of Löwenthal at Strasburg, that of the "Roses," founded A.D. 1643, by Philip von Zesen, at Hamburg, the "Order of the Pegnitz-shepherds," founded A.D. 1644, by Harsdörfer, at Nuremberg, the spirit of the Italian and French operas and academies prevailed, and pastoral poetry, in which the god of Love was represented wearing an immense allonge peruke, and the coquettish immorality of the courts was glowingly described in Arcadian scenes of delight, was cultivated. The fantastical romances of Spain were also imitated, and the invention of novel terms was deemed the highest triumph of the poet. Every third word was either Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, or English. Francisci of Lübeck, who described all the discoveries of the New World in a colloquial romance contained in a thick folio volume, was the most extravagant of these scribblers. The romances of Antony Ulric, duke of Brunswick, who embraced Catholicism on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter with the emperor Charles VI., are equally bad. Lauremberg's satires, written A.D. 1564, are excellent. He said with great truth that the French had deprived the German muse of her nose and had patched on another quite unsuited to her German ears. Moscherosch (Philander von Sittewald) wrote an admirable and cutting satire upon the manners of the age, and Greifenson von Hirschfeld is worthy of mention as the author of the first historical romance that gives an accurate and graphic account of the state of Germany during the thirty years' war.
This first school was succeeded by a second of surpassing extravagance. Hoffman von Hoffmannswaldau, A.D. 1679, the founder of the second Silesian school, was a caricature of Opitz, Lohenstein of Gryphius, Besser of Flemming, Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even Francisci was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel. This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naïve pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by this school, whose immorality was carried to the highest pitch by Günther, the lyric poet, who, in the commencement of the eighteenth century, opposed marriage, attempted the emancipation of the female sex, and, with criminal geniality, recommended his follies and crimes, as highly interesting, to the world. To him the poet, Schnabel, the author of an admirable romance, the "Island of Felsenburg," the asylum, in another hemisphere, of virtue, exiled from Europe, offers a noble contrast.
Three Catholic poets of extreme originality appear at the close of the seventeenth century, Angelus Silesius (Scheffler of Breslau), who gave to the world his devotional thoughts in German Alexandrines; Father Abraham a Sancta Clara (Megerle of Swabia), a celebrated Viennese preacher, who, with comical severity, wrote satires abounding with wit and humorous observations; and Balde, who wrote some fine Latin poems on God and nature. Prätorius, A.D. 1680, the first collector of the popular legendary ballads concerning Rübezahl and other spirits, ghosts and witches, also deserves mention. The Silesian, Stranizki, who, A.D. 1708, founded the Leopoldstadt theatre at Vienna, which afterward became so celebrated, and gave to it the popular comic style for which it is famous at the present day, was also a poet of extreme originality. Gottsched appeared as the hero of Gallomania, which was at that time threatened with gradual extinction by the Spanish and Hamburg romance and by Viennese wit. Assisted by Neuber, the actress, he extirpated all that was not strictly French, solemnly burned Harlequin in effigy at Leipzig, A.D. 1737, and laid down a law for German poetry, which prescribed obedience to the rules of the stilted French court-poetry, under pain of the critic's lash. He and his learned wife guided the literature of Germany for several years.
In the midst of these literary aberrations, during the first part of the foregoing century, Thomson, the English poet, Brokes of Hamburg, and the Swiss, Albert von Haller, gave their descriptions of nature to the world. Brokes, in his "Earthly Pleasures in God," was faithful, often Homeric, in his descriptions, while Haller depictured his native Alps with unparalleled sublimity. The latter was succeeded by a Swiss school, which imitated the witty and liberal-minded criticisms of Addison and other English writers, and opposed French taste and Gottsched. At its head stood Bodmer and Breitinger, who recommended nature as a guide, and instead of the study of French literature, that of the ancient classics and of English authors. It was also owing to their exertions that Müller published an edition of Rudiger Maness's collection of Swabian Minnelieder, the connecting link between modern and ancient German poetry. Still, notwithstanding their merit as critics, they were no poets, and merely opened to others the road to improvement. Hagedorn, although frivolous in his ideas, was graceful and easy in his versification; but the most eminent poet of the age was Gellert of Leipzig, A.D. 1769, whose tales, fables, and essays brought him into such note as to attract the attention of Frederick the Great, who, notwithstanding the contempt in which he held the poets of Germany, honored him with a personal visit.
Poets and critics now rose in every quarter and pitilessly assailed Gottsched, the champion of Gallomania. They were themselves divided into two opposite parties, into Anglomanists and Græcomanists, according to their predilection for modern English literature or for that of ancient Greece and Rome. England, grounded, as upon a rock, on her self-gained constitution, produced men of the rarest genius in all the higher walks of science and literature, and her philosophers, naturalists, historians, and poets exercised the happiest influence over their Teutonic brethren, who sought to regain from them the vigor of which they had been deprived by France. The power and national learning of Germany break forth in Klopstock, whose genius vainly sought a natural garb and was compelled to assume a borrowed form. He consecrated his muse to the service of religion, but, in so doing, imitated the Homeric hexameters of Milton; he sought to arouse the national pride of his countrymen by recalling the deeds of Hermann (Armin) and termed himself a bard, but, in the Horatian metre of his songs, imitated Ossian, the old Scottish bard, and was consequently labored and affected in his style. Others took the lesser English poets for their model, as, for instance, Kleist, who fell at Kunersdorf, copied Thomson in his "Spring"; Zachariä, Pope, in his satirical pieces; Hermes, in "The Travels of Sophia," the humorous romances of Richardson; Müller von Itzehoe, in his "Siegfried von Lindenberg," the comic descriptions of Smollett. The influence of the celebrated English poets, Shakespeare, Swift, and Sterne, on the tone of German humor and satire, was still greater. Swift's first imitator, Liscow, displayed considerable talent, and Rabener, a great part of whose manuscripts was burned during the siege of Dresden in the seven years' war, wrote witty, and at the same time instructive, satires on the manners of his age. Both were surpassed by Lichtenberg, the little hump-backed philosopher of Göttingen, whose compositions are replete with grace. The witty and amiable Thümmmel was also formed on an English model, and Archenholz solely occupied himself with transporting the customs and literature of England into Germany. If Shakespeare has not been without influence upon Goethe and Schiller, Sterne, in his "Sentimental Journey," touched an echoing chord in the German's heart by blending pathos with his jests. Hippel was the first who, like him, united wit with pathos, mockery with tears.
In Klopstock, Anglo and Graecomania were combined. The latter had, however, also its particular school, in which each of the Greek and Roman poets found his imitator. Voss, for instance, took Homer for his model, Ramler, Horace, Gleim, Anacreon, Gessner, Theocritus, Cramer, Pindar, Lichtwer, Æsop, etc. The Germans, in the ridiculous attempt to set themselves up as Greeks, were, in truth, barbarians. But all was forced, unnatural, and perverted in this aping age. Wieland alone was deeply sensible of this want of nature, and hence arose his predilection for the best poets of Greece and France. The German muse, led by his genius, lost her ancient stiffness and acquired a pliant grace, to which the sternest critic of his too lax morality is not insensible. Some lyric poets, connected with the Graecomanists by the Göttingen Hainbund, preserved a noble simplicity, more particularly Salis and Hòlty, and also Count Stolberg, wherever he has not been led astray by Voss's stilted manner. Matthison is, on the other hand, most tediously affected.
The German, never more at home than when abroad, boasted of being the cosmopolite he had become, made a virtue of necessity, and termed his want of patriotism, justice to others, humanity, philanthropy. Fortunately for him, there were, besides the French, other nations on which he could model himself, the ancient Greeks and the English, from each of whom he gathered something until he had converted himself into a sort of universal abstract. The great poets, who shortly before and after the seven years' war, put an end to mere partial imitations, were not actuated by a reaction of nationality, but by a sentiment of universality. Their object was, not to oppose the German to the foreign, but simply the human to the single national element, and, although Germany gave them birth, they regarded the whole world equally as their country.