There is no country where so much interest is taken in the literature of
Germany as in England, and there is no country where the literature of
England is so much appreciated as in Germany. Some of our modern classics,
whether poets or philosophers, are read by Englishmen with the same
attention as their own; and the historians, the novel-writers, and the
poets of England have exercised, and continue to exercise, a most powerful
and beneficial influence on the people of Germany. In recent times, the
literature of the two countries has almost grown into one. Lord Macaulay’s
History has not only been translated into German, but reprinted at Leipzig
in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than
the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address
their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels
of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipzig
and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and
Goethe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes;
and several works of German scholarship have met with more attentive and
thoughtful readers in the colleges of England than in the universities of
Germany. Goethe’s idea of a world-literature has, to a certain extent,
been realized; and the strong feeling of sympathy between the best classes
in both countries holds out a hope that, for many years to come, the
supremacy of the Teutonic race, not only in Europe, but over all the
world, will be maintained in common by the two champions of political
freedom and of the liberty of thought,—Protestant England and Protestant
Germany.
The interest, however, which Englishmen take in German literature has
hitherto been confined almost exclusively to the literature of the last
fifty years, and very little is known of those fourteen centuries during
which the German language had been growing up and gathering strength for
the great triumphs which were achieved by Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe.
Nor is this to be wondered at. The number of people in England, who take
any interest in the early history of their own literature, is extremely
small, and there is as yet no history of English literature worthy of that
name. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in England many people will
care to read in the original the ancient epic poems of the “Nibelunge” or
“Gudrun,” or acquire a grammatical knowledge of the Gothic of Ulfilas and
the Old High-German of Otfried. Gothic, Old High-German, and Middle
High-German are three distinct languages, each possessing its own grammar,
each differing from the others and from Modern German more materially than
the Greek of Homer differs from the Greek of Demosthenes. Even in Germany
these languages are studied only by professional antiquarians and
scholars, and they do not form part of the general system of instruction
in public schools and universities. The study of Gothic grammar alone
(where we still find a dual in addition to the singular and plural, and
where some tenses of the passive are still formed, as in Greek and Latin,
without auxiliary verbs), would require as much time as the study of Greek
grammar, though it would not offer the key to a literature like that of
Greece. Old High-German, again, is as difficult a language to a German as
Anglo-Saxon is to an Englishman; and the Middle High-German of the
“Nibelunge,” of Wolfram, and Walther, nay even of Eckhart and Tauler, is
more remote from the language of Goethe than Chaucer is from Tennyson.
But, without acquiring a grammatical knowledge of these ancient languages,
there are, I believe, not a few people who wish to know something of the
history of German literature. Nor is this, if properly taught, a subject
of narrow or merely antiquarian interest. The history of literature
reflects and helps us to interpret the political history of a country. It
contains, as it were, the confession which every generation, before it
passed away, has made to posterity. “Without Literary History,” as Lord
Bacon says, “the History of the World seemeth to be as the Statue of
Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew
the spirit and life of the person.” From this point of view the historian
of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and
tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where
they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect
the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius,
separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in the annals of
every country.
Although there exists no literature to reward the student of Gothic, yet
every one who cares for the history of Germany and of German thought
should know something of Ulfilas, the great Bishop of the Goths, who
anticipated the work of Luther by more than a thousand years, and who, at
a time when Greek and Latin were the only two respectable and orthodox
languages of Europe, dared for the first time to translate the Bible into
the vulgar tongue of Barbarians, as if foreseeing with a prophetic eye the
destiny of these Teutonic tribes, whose language, after Greek and Latin
had died away, was to become the life-spring of the Gospel over the whole
civilized world. He ought to know something of those early missionaries
and martyrs, most of them sent from Ireland and England to preach the
Gospel in the dark forests of Germany,—men like St. Gall (died 638), St.
Kilian (died 689), and St. Boniface (died 755), who were not content with
felling the sacred oak-trees and baptizing unconverted multitudes, but
founded missionary stations, and schools, and monasteries; working hard
themselves in order to acquire a knowledge of the language and the
character of the people, and drawing up those curious lists of barbarous
words, with their no less barbarous equivalents in Latin, which we still
possess, though copied by a later hand. He ought to know the gradual
progress of Christianity and civilization in Germany, previous to the time
of Charlemagne; for we see from the German translations of the Rules of
the Benedictine monks, of ancient Latin hymns, the Creeds, the Lord’s
Prayer, and portions of the New Testament, that the good sense of the
national clergy had led them to do what Charlemagne had afterwards to
enjoin by repeated Capitularia.(2) It is in the history of German
literature that we learn what Charlemagne really was. Though claimed as a
saint by the Church of Rome, and styled _Empereur Français_ by modern
French historians, Karl was really and truly a German king, proud, no
doubt, of his Roman subjects, and of his title of Emperor, and anxious to
give to his uncouth Germans the benefit of Italian and English teachers,
but fondly attached in his heart to his own mother tongue, to the lays and
laws of his fatherland: feelings displayed in his own attempt to compose a
German grammar, and in his collection of old national songs, fragments of
which may have been preserved to us in the ballads of Hildebrand and
Hadubrand.
After the death of Charlemagne, and under the reign of the good but weak
King Ludwig, the prospects of a national literature in Germany became
darkened. In one instance, indeed, the king was the patron of a German
poet; for he encouraged the author of the “Heliand” to write that poem for
the benefit of his newly converted countrymen. But he would hardly have
approved of the thoroughly German and almost heathen spirit which pervades
that Saxon epic of the New Testament, and he expressed his disgust at the
old German poems which his great father had taught him in his youth. The
seed, however, which Charlemagne had sown had fallen on healthy soil, and
grew up even without the sunshine of royal favor. The monastery of Fulda,
under Hrabanus Maurus, the pupil of Alcuin, became the seminary of a truly
national clergy. Here it was that Otfried, the author of the rhymed
“Gospel-book” was brought up. In the mean time, the heterogeneous elements
of the Carlovingian Empire broke asunder. Germany, by losing its French
and Italian provinces, became Germany once more. Ludwig the German was
King of Germany, Hrabanus Maurus Archbishop of Mayence; and the spirit of
Charlemagne, Alcuin, and Eginhard was revived at Aachen, Fulda, and many
other places, such as St. Gall, Weissenburg, and Corvey, where schools
were founded on the model of that of Tours. The translation of the
“Harmony of the Gospels,” gives us a specimen of the quiet studies of
those monasteries, whereas the lay on the victory of Louis III. over the
Normans, in 881, reminds us of the dangers that threatened Germany from
the West at the same time that the Hungarians began their inroads from the
East. The Saxon Emperors had hard battles to fight against these invaders,
and there were few places in Germany where the peaceful pursuits of the
monasteries and schools could be carried on without interruption. St. Gall
is the one bright star in the approaching gloom of the next centuries. Not
only was the Bible read, and translated, and commented upon in German at
St. Gall, as formerly at Fulda, but Greek and Roman classics were copied
and studied for educational purposes. Notker Teutonicus is the great
representative of that school, which continued to maintain its reputation
for theological and classical learning, and for a careful cultivation of
the national language, nearly to the close of the eleventh century. At the
court of the Saxon Emperors, though their policy was thoroughly German,
there was little taste for German poetry. The Queen of Otto I. was a
Lombard, the Queen of Otto II. a Greek lady; and their influence was not
favorable to the rude poetry of national bards. If some traces of their
work have been preserved to us, we owe it again to the more national taste
of the monks of St. Gall and Passau. They translate some of the German
epics into Latin verse, such as the poem of the “Nibelunge,” of “Walther
of Aquitain,” and of “Ruodlieb.” The first is lost; but the other two have
been preserved and published.(3) The stories of the Fox and the Bear, and
the other animals,—a branch of poetry so peculiar to Germany, and epic
rather than didactic in its origin,—attracted the attention of the monks;
and it is owing again to their Latin translations that the existence of
this curious style of poetry can be traced back so far as the tenth
century.(4) As these poems are written in Latin, they could not find a
place in a German reading-book; but they, as well as the unduly suspected
Latin plays of the nun Hrosvitha, throw much light on the state of German
civilization during the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The eleventh century presents almost an entire blank in the history of
literature. Under the Frankish or Salic dynasty, Germany had either to
defend herself against the inroads of Hungarian and Slavonic armies, or it
was the battle-field of violent feuds between the Emperors and their
vassals. The second half of that century was filled with the struggles
between Henry IV. and Pope Gregory VII. The clergy, hitherto the chief
support of German literature, became estranged from the German people; and
the insecurity of the times was unfavorable to literary pursuits.
Williram’s German had lost the classical correctness of Notker’s language,
and the “Merigarto,” and similar works, are written in a hybrid style,
which is neither prose nor poetry. The Old High-German had become a
literary language chiefly through the efforts of the clergy, and the
character of the whole Old High-German literature is preëminently
clerical. The Crusades put an end to the preponderance of the clerical
element in the literature of Germany. They were, no doubt, the work of the
clergy. By using to the utmost the influence which they had gradually
gained and carefully fomented, the priests were able to rouse a whole
nation to a pitch of religious enthusiasm never known before or after. But
the Crusades were the last triumph of the clergy; and with their failure
the predominant influence of the clerical element in German society is
checked and extinguished.
From the first beginning of the Crusades the interest of the people was
with the knight,—no longer with the priest. The chivalrous Emperors of the
Hohenstaufen dynasty formed a new rallying point for all national
sympathies. Their courts, and the castles of their vassals, offered a new
and more genial home to the poets of Germany than the monasteries of Fulda
and St. Gall. Poetry changed hands. The poets took their inspirations from
real life, though they borrowed their models from the romantic cycles of
Brittany and Provence. Middle High-German, the language of the Swabian
court, became the language of poetry. The earliest compositions in that
language continue for a while to bear the stamp of the clerical poetry of
a former age. The first Middle High-German poems are written by a nun; and
the poetical translation of the Books of Moses, the poem on Anno, Bishop
of Cologne, and the “Chronicle of the Roman Emperors,” all continue to
breathe the spirit of cloisters and cathedral towns. And when a new taste
for chivalrous romances was awakened in Germany; when the stories of
Arthur and his knights, of Charlemagne and his champions, of Achilles,
Æneas, and Alexander, in their modern dress, were imported by French and
Provençal knights, who, on their way to Jerusalem, came to stay at the
castles of their German allies, the first poets who ventured to imitate
these motley compositions were priests, not laymen. A few short extracts
from Konrad’s “Roland” and Lamprecht’s “Alexander” are sufficient to mark
this period of transition. Like Charlemagne, who had been changed into a
legendary hero by French poets before he became again the subject of
German poetry, another German worthy returned at the same time to his
native home, though but slightly changed by his foreign travels, “Reinhard
the Fox.” The influence of Provence and of Flanders is seen in every
branch of German poetry at that time; and yet nothing can be more
different than the same subject, as treated by French and German poets.
The German Minnesänger in particular were far from being imitators of the
Trouvères or Troubadours. There are a few solitary instances of lyric
poems translated from Provençal into German;(5) as there is, on the other
hand, one poem translated from German into Italian,(6) early in the
thirteenth century. But the great mass of German lyrics are of purely
German growth. Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the
Romans, the Italians, the Provençals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry
as their own. It is Teutonic, purely Teutonic in its heart and soul,
though its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, have
been touched by the more genial rays of the brilliant sun of a more
southern sky. The same applies to the great romantic poems of that period.
The first impulse came from abroad. The subjects were borrowed from a
foreign source, and the earlier poems, such as Heinrich von Veldecke’s
“Æneid,” might occasionally paraphrase the sentiments of French poets. But
in the works of Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried
von Strassburg, we breathe again the pure German air; and we cannot but
regret that these men should have taken the subjects of their poems, with
their unpronounceable names, extravagant conceits, and licentious manners,
from foreign sources, while they had at home their grand mythology, their
heroic traditions, their kings and saints, which would have been more
worthy subjects than Tristan and Isold, Schionatulander and Sigune. There
were new thoughts stirring in the hearts and minds of those men of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A hundred years before Dante, the German
poets had gazed with their eyes wide open into that infinite reality which
underlies our short existence on earth. To Wolfram, and to many a poet of
his time, the human tragedy of this world presented the same unreal,
transitory, and transparent aspect which we find again in Dante’s “Divine
Comedy.” Everything points to another world. Beauty, love, virtue,
happiness,—everything, in fact, that moves the heart of the poet,—has a
hidden reference to something higher than this life; and the highest
object of the highest poetry seems to be to transfer the mind to those
regions where men feel the presence of a Divine power and a Divine love,
and are lost in blissful adoration. The beginning of the thirteenth
century is as great an era in the history of German literature as the
beginning of the nineteenth. The German mind was completely regenerated.
Old words, old thoughts, old metres, old fashions, were swept away, and a
new spring dawned over Germany. The various branches of the Teutonic race
which, after their inroads into the seats of Roman civilization, had for a
time become separated, were beginning to assume a national
independence,—when suddenly a new age of migration threatened to set in.
The knights of France and Flanders, of England, Lombardy, and Sicily, left
their brilliant castles. They marched to the East, carrying along with
them the less polished, but equally enthusiastic, nobility of Germany.
From the very first the spirit of the Roman towns in Italy and Gaul had
exercised a more civilizing influence on the Barbarians who had crossed
the Alps and the Rhine, whereas the Germans of Germany proper had been
left to their own resources, assisted only by the lessons of the Roman
clergy. Now, at the beginning of the Crusades, the various divisions of
the German race met again, but they met as strangers; no longer with the
impetuosity of Franks and Goths, but with the polished reserve of a
Godefroy of Bouillon and the chivalrous bearing of a Frederick Barbarossa.
The German Emperors and nobles opened their courts to receive their guests
with brilliant hospitality. Their festivals, the splendor and beauty of
their tournaments, attracted crowds from great distances, and foremost
among them poets and singers. It was at such festivals as Heinrich von
Veldecke describes at Mayence, in 1184, under Frederick I., that French
and German poetry were brought face to face. It was here that high-born
German poets learnt from French poets the subjects of their own romantic
compositions. German ladies became the patrons of German poets; and the
etiquette of French chivalry was imitated at the castles of German
knights. Poets made bold for the first time to express their own feelings,
their joys and sufferings, and epic poetry had to share its honors with
lyric songs. Not only France and Germany, but England and Northern Italy
were drawn into this gay society. Henry II. married Eleanor of Poitou, and
her grace and beauty found eloquent admirers in the army of the Crusaders.
Their daughter Mathilde was married to Henry the Lion, of Saxony, and one
of the Provençal poets has celebrated her loveliness. Frenchmen became the
tutors of the sons of the German nobility. French manners, dresses,
dishes, and dances were the fashion everywhere. The poetry which
flourished at the castles was soon adopted by the lower ranks. Travelling
poets and jesters are frequently mentioned, and the poems of the
“Nibelunge” and “Gudrun,” such as we now possess them, were composed at
that time by poets who took their subjects, their best thoughts and
expressions, from the people, but imitated the language, the metre, and
the manners of the court poets. The most famous courts to which the German
poets resorted, and where they were entertained with generous hospitality,
were the court of Leopold, Duke of Austria (1198-1230), and of his son
Frederick II.; of Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia, who resided at the
Wartburg, near Eisenach (1190-1215); of Berthold, Duke of Zähringen
(1186-1218); and of the Swabian Emperors in general. At the present day,
when not only the language, but even the thoughts of these poets have
become to most of us unintelligible and strange, we cannot claim for their
poetry more than an historical interest. But if we wish to know the men
who took a leading part in the Crusades, who fought with the Emperors
against the Pope, or with the Pope against the Emperors, who lived in
magnificent castles like that of the Wartburg, and founded cathedrals like
that of Cologne (1248), we must read the poetry which they admired, which
they composed or patronized. The subjects of their Romances cannot gain
our sympathy. They are artificial, unreal, with little of humanity, and
still less of nationality in them. But the mind of a poet like Wolfram von
Eschenbach rises above all these difficulties. He has thoughts of his own,
truly human, deeply religious, and thoroughly national; and there are
expressions and comparisons in his poetry which had never been used
before. His style, however, is lengthy, his descriptions tiresome, and his
characters somewhat vague and unearthly. As critics, we should have to
bestow on Wolfram von Eschenbach, on Gottfried von Strassburg, even on
Hartman von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide, as much of blame as of
praise. But as historians, we cannot value them too highly. If we measure
them with the poets that preceded and those that followed them, they tower
above all like giants. From the deep marks which they left behind, we
discover that they were men of creative genius, men who had looked at life
with their own eyes, and were able to express what they had seen and
thought and felt in a language which fascinated their contemporaries, and
which even now holds its charm over all who can bring themselves to study
their works in the same spirit in which they read the tragedies of
Æschylus, or the “Divina Commedia” of Dante.
But the heyday of German chivalry and chivalrous poetry was of short
duration. Toward the end of the thirteenth century we begin to feel that
the age is no longer aspiring, and hoping, and growing. The world assumes
a different aspect. Its youth and vigor seem spent; and the children of a
new generation begin to be wiser and sadder than their fathers. The
Crusades languish. Their object, like the object of many a youthful hope,
has proved unattainable. The Knights no longer take the Cross “because God
wills it;” but because the Pope commands a Crusade, bargains for
subsidies, and the Emperor cannot decline his commands. Walther von der
Vogelweide already is most bitter in his attacks on Rome. Walther was the
friend of Frederick II. (1215-50), an Emperor who reminds us, in several
respects, of his namesake of Prussia. He was a sovereign of literary
tastes,—himself a poet and a philosopher. Harassed by the Pope, he
retaliated most fiercely, and was at last accused of a design to extirpate
the Christian religion. The ban was published against him, and his own son
rose in rebellion. Germany remained faithful to her Emperor, and the
Emperor was successful against his son. But he soon died in disappointment
and despair. With him the star of the Swabian dynasty had set, and the
sweet sounds of the Swabian lyre died away with the last breath of
Corradino, the last of the Hohenstaufen, on the scaffold at Naples, in
1268. Germany was breaking down under heavy burdens. It was visited by the
papal interdict, by famine, by pestilence. Sometimes there was no Emperor,
sometimes there were two or three. Rebellion could not be kept under, nor
could crime be punished. The only law was the “Law of the Fist.” The
Church was deeply demoralized. Who was to listen to romantic poetry? There
was no lack of poets or of poetry. Rudolf von Ems, a poet called Der
Stricker, and Konrad von Würzburg, all of them living in the middle of the
thirteenth century, were more fertile than Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried
von Strassburg. They complain, however, that no one took notice of them,
and they are evidently conscious themselves of their inferiority. Lyric
poetry continued to flourish for a time, but it degenerated into an
unworthy idolatry of ladies, and affected sentimentality. There is but one
branch of poetry in which we find a certain originality, the didactic and
satiric. The first beginnings of this new kind of poetry carry us back to
the age of Walther von der Vogelweide. Many of his verses are satirical,
political, and didactic; and it is supposed, on very good authority, that
Walther was the author of an anonymous didactic poem, “Freidank’s
Bescheidenheit.” By Thomasin von Zerclar, or Tommasino di Circlaria, we
have a metrical composition on manners, the “Italian Guest,” which
likewise belongs to the beginning of the thirteenth century.(7) Somewhat
later we meet, in the works of the Stricker, with the broader satire of
the middle classes; and toward the close of the century, Hugo von
Trimberg, in his “Renner,” addresses himself to the lower ranks of German
society, and no longer to princes, knights, and ladies.
How is this to be accounted for? Poetry was evidently changing hands
again. The Crusades had made the princes and knights the representatives
and leaders of the whole nation; and during the contest between the
imperial and the papal powers, the destinies of Germany were chiefly in
the hands of the hereditary nobility. The literature, which before that
time was entirely clerical, had then become worldly and chivalrous. But
now, when the power of the emperors began to decline, when the clergy was
driven into taking a decidedly anti-national position, when the unity of
the empire was well-nigh destroyed, and princes and prelates were
asserting their independence by plunder and by warfare, a new element of
society rose to the surface,—the middle classes,—the burghers of the free
towns of Germany. They were forced to hold together, in order to protect
themselves against their former protectors. They fortified their cities,
formed corporations, watched over law and morality, and founded those
powerful leagues, the first of which, the Hansa, dates from 1241. Poetry
also took refuge behind the walls of free towns; and at the fireside of
the worthy citizen had to exchange her gay, chivalrous, and romantic
strains, for themes more subdued, practical, and homely. This accounts for
such works as Hugo von Trimberg’s “Renner,” as well as for the general
character of the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Poetry
became a trade like any other. Guilds were formed, consisting of
master-singers and their apprentices. Heinrich Frauenlob is called the
first Meistersänger; and during the fourteenth, the fifteenth, and even
the sixteenth centuries, new guilds or schools sprang up in all the
principal towns of Germany. After order had been restored by the first
Hapsburg dynasty, the intellectual and literary activity of Germany
retained its centre of gravitation in the middle classes. Rudolf von
Hapsburg was not gifted with a poetical nature, and contemporaneous poets
complain of his want of liberality. Attempts were made to revive the
chivalrous poetry of the Crusades by Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von
Wolkenstein in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and again at the
end of the same century by the “Last of the German Knights,” the Emperor
Maximilian. But these attempts could not but fail. The age of chivalry was
gone, and there was nothing great or inspiring in the wars which the
Emperors had to wage during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries against
their vassals, against the Pope, against the precursors of the
Reformation, the Hussites, and against the Turks. In Fritsche Closener’s
“Chronicle” there is a description of the citizens of Strassburg defending
themselves against their bishop in 1312; in Twinger’s “Chronicle” a
picture of the processions of the Flagellants and the religious enthusiasm
of that time (1349). The poems of Suchenwirt and Halbsuter represent the
wars of Austria against Switzerland (1386), and Niclas von Weyl’s
translation gives us a glimpse into the Council of Constance (1414) and
the Hussite wars, which were soon to follow. The poetry of those two
centuries, which was written by and for the people, is interesting
historically, but, with few exceptions, without any further worth. The
poets wish to amuse or to instruct their humble patrons, and they do this,
either by giving them the dry bones of the romantic poetry of former ages,
or by telling them fables and the quaint stories of the “Seven Wise
Masters.” What beauty there was in a Meistergesang may be fairly seen from
the poem of Michael Beheim; and the Easter play by no means shows the
lowest ebb of good taste in the popular literature of that time.
It might seem, indeed, as if all the high and noble aspirations of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been lost and forgotten during the
fourteenth and fifteenth. And yet it was not quite so. There was one class
of men on whom the spirit of true nobility had descended, and whose works
form a connecting chain between the great era of the Crusades and the
still greater era of the Reformation. These are the so-called
Mystics,—true Crusaders, true knights of the Spirit, many of whom
sacrificed their lives for the cause of truth, and who at last conquered
from the hands of the infidels that Holy Sepulchre in which the true
Christian faith had been lying buried for centuries. The name of Mystics,
which has been given to these men, is apt to mislead. Their writings are
not dark or unintelligible, and those who call them so must find
Christianity itself unintelligible and dark. There is more broad daylight
in Eckhart and Tauler than in the works of all the Thomists and Scotists.
Eckhart was not a dreamer. He had been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, and his
own style is sometimes painfully scholastic. But there is a fresh breeze
of thought in his works, and in the works of his disciples. They knew that
whenever the problems of man’s relation to God, the creation of the world,
the origin of evil, and the hope of salvation come to be discussed, the
sharpest edge of logical reasoning will turn, and the best defined terms
of metaphysics die away into mere music. They knew that the hard and
narrow categories of the schoolmen do greater violence to the highest
truths of religion than the soft, and vague, and vanishing tones with
which they tried to shadow forth in the vulgar language of the people the
distant objects which transcend the horizon of human understanding. They
did not handle the truths of Christianity as if they should or could be
proved by the syllogisms of our human reasoning. Nevertheless these
Mystics were hard and honest thinkers, and never played with words and
phrases. Their faith is to them as clear and as real as sunshine; and
instead of throwing scholastic dust into the eyes of the people, they
boldly told them to open their eyes and to look at the mysteries all
around them, and to feel the presence of God within and without, which the
priests had veiled by the very revelation which they had preached. For a
true appreciation of the times in which they lived, the works of these
Reformers of the Faith are invaluable. Without them we should try in vain
to explain how a nation which, to judge from its literature, seemed to
have lost all vigor and virtue, could suddenly rise and dare the work of a
reformation of the Church. With them we learn how that same nation, after
groaning for centuries under the yoke of superstition and hypocrisy, found
in its very prostration the source of an irresistible strength. The higher
clergy contributed hardly anything to the literature of these two
centuries; and what they wrote would better have remained unwritten. At
St. Gall, toward the end of the thirteenth century, the monks, the
successors of Notker, were unable to sign their names. The Abbot was a
nobleman who composed love-songs, a branch of poetry at all events out of
place in the monastery founded by St. Gall. It is only among the lower
clergy that we find the traces of genuine Christian piety and intellectual
activity, though frequently branded by obese prelates and obtuse
magistrates with the names of mysticism and heresy. The orders of the
Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in 1208 and 1215, and intended to act
as clerical spies and confessors, began to fraternize in many parts of
Germany with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry
and thirsty after religious teaching. They had been systematically
starved, or fed with stones. Part of the Bible had been translated for the
people, but what Ulfilas was free to do in the fourth century, was
condemned by the prelates assembled at the Synod of Trier in 1231. Nor
were the sermons of the itinerant friars in towns and villages always to
the taste of bishops and abbots. We possess collections of these
discourses, preached by Franciscans and Dominicans under the trees of
cemeteries, and from the church-towers of the villages. Brother Berthold,
who died in 1272, was a Franciscan. He travelled about the country, and
was revered by the poor like a saint and prophet. The doctrine he
preached, though it was the old teaching of the Apostles, was as new to
the peasants who came to hear him, as it had been to the citizens of
Athens who came to hear St. Paul. The saying of St Chrysostom that
Christianity had turned many a peasant into a philosopher, came true again
in the time of Eckhart and Tauler. Men who called themselves Christians
had been taught, and had brought themselves to believe, that to read the
writings of the Apostles was a deadly sin. Yet in secret they were
yearning after that forbidden Bible. They knew that there were
translations, and though these translations had been condemned by popes
and synods, the people could not resist the temptation of reading them. In
1373, we find the first complete version of the Bible into German, by
Matthias of Beheim. Several are mentioned after this. The new religious
fervor that had been kindled among the inferior clergy, and among the
lower and middle classes of the laity, became stronger; and, though it
sometimes degenerated into wild fanaticism, the sacred spark was kept in
safe hands by such men as Eckhart (died 1329), Tauler (died 1361), and the
author of the German Theology. Men like these are sure to conquer; they
are persecuted justly or unjustly; they suffer and die, and all they
thought and said and did seems for a time to have been in vain. But
suddenly their work, long marked as dangerous in the smooth current of
society, rises above the surface like the coral reefs in the Pacific, and
it remains for centuries the firm foundation of a new world of thought and
faith. Without the labors of these Reformers of the Faith, the Reformers
of the Church would never have found a whole nation waiting to receive,
and ready to support them.
There are two other events which prepared the way of the German Reformers
of the sixteenth century: the foundation of universities, and the
invention of printing. Their importance is the same in the literary and in
the political history of Germany. The intellectual and moral character of
a nation is formed in schools and universities; and those who educate a
people have always been its real masters, though they may go by a more
modest name. Under the Roman Empire public schools had been supported by
the government, both at Rome and in the chief towns of the Provinces. We
know of their existence in Gaul and parts of Germany. With the decline of
the central authority, the salaries of the grammarians and rhetors in the
Provinces ceased to be paid, and the pagan gymnasia were succeeded by
Christian schools, attached to episcopal sees and monasteries. Whilst the
clergy retained their vigor and efficiency, their schools were powerful
engines for spreading a half clerical and half classical culture in
Germany. During the Crusades, when ecclesiastical activity and learning
declined very rapidly, we hear of French tutors at the castles of the
nobility, and classical learning gave way to the superficial polish of a
chivalrous age. And when the nobility likewise relapsed into a state of
savage barbarism, new schools were wanted, and they were founded by the
towns, the only places where, during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, we see any evidence of a healthy political life. The first town
schools are mentioned in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and they
were soon followed by the high schools and universities. The University of
Prague was founded in 1348; Vienna, 1366; Heidelberg, 1386; Erfurt, 1392;
Leipzig, 1408; Basle, 1460; Tübingen, 1477; Mainz, 1482. These
universities are a novel feature in the history of German and of European
civilization. They are not ecclesiastical seminaries, not restricted to
any particular class of society; they are national institutions, open to
the rich and the poor, to the knight, the clerk, the citizen. They are
real universities of learning: they profess to teach all branches of
knowledge,—theology and law, medicine and philosophy. They contain the
first practical acknowledgment of the right of every subject to the
highest education, and through it to the highest offices in Church and
State. Neither Greece nor Rome had known such institutions: neither the
Church nor the nobility, during the days of their political supremacy,
were sufficiently impressed with the duty which they owed to the nation at
large to provide such places of liberal education. It was the nation
itself, when forsaken by its clergy and harassed by its nobility, which
called these schools into life; and it is in these schools and
universities that the great men who inaugurate the next period of
literature—the champions of political liberty and religious freedom—were
fostered and formed.
The invention of printing was in itself a reformation, and its benefits
were chiefly felt by the great masses of the people. The clergy possessed
their libraries, where they might read and study if they chose; the
castles contained collections of MSS., sacred and profane, illuminated
with the most exquisite taste; while the citizen, the poor layman, though
he might be able to read and to write, was debarred from the use of books,
and had to satisfy his literary tastes with the sermons of travelling
Franciscans, or the songs of blind beggars and peddlers. The art of
printing admitted that large class to the same privileges which had
hitherto been enjoyed almost exclusively by clergy and nobility: it placed
in the hands of the third estate arms more powerful than the swords of the
knights, and the thunderbolts of the priests: it was a revolution in the
history of literature more eventful than any in the history of mankind.
Poets and philosophers addressed themselves no longer to emperors and
noblemen, to knights and ladies, but to the people at large, and
especially to the middle classes, in which henceforth the chief strength
of the nation resides.
The years from 1450 to 1500 form a period of preparation for the great
struggle that was to inaugurate the beginning of the sixteenth century. It
was an age “rich in scholars, copious in pedants, but poor in genius, and
barren of strong thinkers.” One of the few interesting men in whose life
and writings the history of that preliminary age may be studied, is
Sebastian Brant, the famous author of the famous “Ship of Fools.”
With the sixteenth century, we enter upon the modern history and the
modern literature of Germany. We shall here pass on more rapidly, dwelling
only on the men in whose writings the political and social changes of
Germany can best be studied.
With Luther, the literary language of Germany became New High-German. A
change of language invariably betokens a change in the social constitution
of a country. In Germany, at the time of the Reformation, the change of
language marks the rise of a new aristocracy, which is henceforth to
reside in the universities. Literature leaves its former homes. It speaks
no longer the language of the towns. It addresses itself no longer to a
few citizens, nor to imperial patrons, such as Maximilian I. It indulges
no longer in moral saws, didactic verses, and prose novels, nor is it
content with mystic philosophy and the secret outpourings of religious
fervor. For a time, though but for a short time, German literature becomes
national. Poets and writers wish to be heard beyond the walls of their
monasteries and cities. They speak to the whole nation; nay, they desire
to be heard beyond the frontiers of their country. Luther and the
Reformers belonged to no class,—they belonged to the people. The voice of
the people, which during the preceding periods of literature could only be
heard like the rolling of distant thunder, had now become articulate and
distinct, and for a time one thought seemed to unite all
classes,—emperors, kings, nobles, and citizens, clergy and laity, high and
low, old and young. This is a novel sight in the history of Germany. We
have seen in the first period the gradual growth of the clergy, from the
time when the first missionaries were massacred in the marshes of
Friesland to the time when the Emperor stood penitent before the gates of
Canossa. We have seen the rise of the nobility, from the time when the
barbarian chiefs preferred living outside the walls of cities to the time
when they rivaled the French cavaliers in courtly bearing and chivalrous
bravery. Nor were the representatives of these two orders, the Pope and
the Emperor, less powerful at the beginning of the sixteenth century than
they had been before. Charles V. was the most powerful sovereign whom
Europe had seen since the days of Charlemagne, and the papal see had
recovered by diplomatic intrigue much of the influence which it had lost
by moral depravity. Let us think, then, of these two ancient powers: the
Emperor with his armies, recruited in Austria, Spain, Naples, Sicily, and
Burgundy, and with his treasures brought from Mexico and Peru; and the
Pope with his armies of priests and monks, recruited from all parts of the
Christian world, and armed with the weapons of the Inquisition and the
thunderbolts of excommunication: let us think of their former victories,
their confidence in their own strength, their belief in their divine
right: and let us then turn our eyes to the small University of
Wittenberg, and into the bleak study of a poor Augustine monk, and see
that monk step out of his study with no weapon in his hand but the
Bible,—with no armies and no treasures,—and yet defying with his clear and
manly voice both Pope and Emperor, both clergy and nobility: there is no
grander sight in history; and the longer we allow our eyes to dwell on it,
the more we feel that history is not without God, and that at every
decisive battle the divine right of truth asserts its supremacy over the
divine right of Popes and Emperors, and overthrows with one breath both
empires and hierarchies. We call the Reformation the work of Luther; but
Luther stood not alone, and no really great man ever stood alone. The
secret of their greatness lies in their understanding the spirit of the
age in which they live, and in giving expression with the full power of
faith and conviction to the secret thoughts of millions. Luther was but
lending words to the silent soul of suffering Germany, and no one should
call himself a Protestant who is not a Lutheran with Luther at the Diet of
Worms, and able to say with him in the face of princes and prelates, “Here
I stand; I can not do otherwise; God help me: Amen.”
As the Emperor was the representative of the nobility, as the Pope was the
representative of the clergy, Luther was the head and leader of the
people, which through him and through his fellow-workers claimed now, for
the first time, an equality with the two old estates of the realm. If this
national struggle took at first an aspect chiefly religious, it was
because the German nation had freedom of thought and of belief more at
heart than political freedom. But political rights also were soon
demanded, and demanded with such violence, that during his own life-time
Luther had to repress the excesses of enthusiastic theorists and of a
violent peasantry. Luther’s great influence on the literature of Germany,
and the gradual adoption of his dialect as the literary language, were
owing in a great measure to this, that whatever there was of literature
during the sixteenth century, was chiefly in the hands of one class of
men. After the Reformation, nearly all eminent men in Germany—poets,
philosophers, and historians—belonged to the Protestant party, and resided
chiefly in the universities.
The universities were what the monasteries had been under Charlemagne, the
castles under Frederick Barbarossa,—the centres of gravitation for the
intellectual and political life of the country. The true nobility of
Germany was no longer to be found among the priests,—Alcuin, Hrabanus
Maurus, Notker Teutonicus; nor among the knights,—Walther von der
Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and their patrons, Frederick II.,
Hermann von Thüringen, and Leopold of Austria. The intellectual sceptre of
Germany was wielded by a new nobility,—a nobility that had risen from the
ranks, like the priests and the knights, but which, for a time at least,
kept itself from becoming a caste, and from cutting away those roots
through which it imbibed its vigor and sustained its strength. It had its
castles in the universities, its tournaments in the diets of Worms and
Augsburg, and it counted among its members, dukes and peasants, divines
and soldiers, lawyers and artists. This was not, indeed, an hereditary
nobility, but on that very ground it is a nobility which can never become
extinct. The danger, however, which threatens all aristocracies, whether
martial, clerical, or municipal, was not averted from the intellectual
aristocracy of Germany. The rising spirit of caste deprived the second
generation of that power which men like Luther had gained at the beginning
of the Reformation. The moral influence of the universities in Germany was
great, and it is great at the present day. But it would have been greater
and more beneficial if the conceit of caste had not separated the leaders
of the nation from the ranks whence they themselves had arisen, and to
which alone they owed their position and their influence. It was the same
with the priests, who would rather form a hierarchy than be merged in the
laity. It was the same with the knights, who would rather form a select
society than live among the gentry. Both cut away the ground under their
feet; and the Reformers of the sixteenth century fell into the same snare
before they were aware of it. We wonder at the eccentricities of the
priesthood, at the conceit of the hereditary nobility, at the affectation
of majestic stateliness inherent in royalty. But the pedantic display of
learning, the disregard of the real wants of the people, the contempt of
all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible,
the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the
sixteenth century to the present day, have occupied the most prominent
rank in the society of Germany. Professorial knight-errantry still waits
for its Cervantes. Nowhere have the objects of learning been so completely
sacrificed to the means of learning, nowhere has that Dulcinea,—knowledge
for its own sake,—with her dark veil and her barren heart, numbered so
many admirers; nowhere have so many windmills been fought, and so many
real enemies been left unhurt, as in Germany, particularly during the last
two centuries. New universities have been founded: Marburg, in 1527;
Königsberg, in 1547; Jena, in 1558; Helmstädt, in 1575; Giessen, in 1607.
And the more the number and the power of the professors increased, the
more they forgot that they and their learning, their universities and
their libraries, were for the benefit of the people; that a professor
might be very learned, and very accurate, and very laborious, yet worse
than useless as a member of our toiling society. It was considered more
learned and respectable to teach in Latin, and all lectures at the
universities were given in that language. Luther was sneered at because of
his little German tracts which “any village clerk might have written.”
Some of the best poets in the sixteenth century were men such as Eoban
Hessius (1540), who composed their poetry in Latin. National poems, for
instance, Brant’s “Ship of Fools,” were translated into Latin in order to
induce the German professors to read them. The learned doctors were
ashamed of their honest native names. Schwarzerd must needs call himself
Melancthon; Meissel Celtes, Schnitter Agricola; Hausschein, Œcolampadius!
All this might look very learned, and professorial, and imposing; but it
separated the professors from the people at large; it retarded the
progress of national education, and blighted the prospects of a national
policy in Germany. Everything promised well at the time of the
Reformation; and a new Germany might have risen before a new France, if,
like Luther, the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling.
But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German,
when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to
digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the
professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the
knights, Luther’s work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent
in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, and
political prostration, before a new national spirit could rise again in
men like Lessing, and Schiller, and Fichte, and Stein. Ambitious princes
and quarrelsome divines continued the rulers of Germany, and, towards the
end of the sixteenth century, everything seemed drifting back into the
Middle Ages. Then came the Thirty Years’ War, a most disastrous war for
Germany, which is felt in its results to the present day. If, as a civil
and religious contest, it had been fought out between the two parties,—the
Protestants and Roman Catholics of Germany,—it would have left, as in
England, one side victorious; it would have been brought to an end before
both were utterly exhausted. But the Protestants, weakened by their own
dissensions, had to call in foreign aid. First Denmark, then Sweden,
poured their armies into Germany, and even France—Roman Catholic
France—gave her support to Gustavus Adolphus and the Protestant cause.
England, the true ally of Germany, was too weak at home to make her
influence felt abroad. At the close of the war, the Protestants received
indeed the same rights as the Roman Catholics; but the nation was so
completely demoralized that it hardly cared for the liberties guaranteed
by the treaty of Westphalia. The physical and moral vigor of the nation
was broken. The population of Germany is said to have been reduced by one
half. Thousands of villages and towns had been burnt to the ground. The
schools, the churches, the universities, were deserted. A whole generation
had grown up during the war, particularly among the lower classes, with no
education at all. The merchants of Germany, who formerly, as Æneas Sylvius
said, lived more handsomely than the Kings of Scotland, were reduced to
small traders. The Hansa was broken up. Holland, England, and Sweden had
taken the wind out of her sails. In the Eastern provinces, commerce was
suspended by the inroads of the Turks; whilst the discovery of America,
and of the new passage to the East Indies, had reduced the importance of
the mercantile navy of Germany and Italy in the Mediterranean. Where there
was any national feeling left, it was a feeling of shame and despair, and
the Emperor and the small princes of Germany might have governed even more
selfishly than they did, without rousing opposition among the people.
What can we expect of the literature of such times? Popular poetry
preserved some of its indestructible charms. The Meistersänger went on
composing according to the rules of their guilds, but we look in vain for
the raciness and honest simplicity of Hans Sachs. Some of the professors
wrote plays in the style of Terence, or after English models, and fables
became fashionable in the style of Phædrus. But there was no trace
anywhere of originality, truth, taste, or feeling, except in that branch
which, like the palm-tree, thrives best in the desert,—sacred poetry. Paul
Gerhard is still without an equal as a poet of sacred songs; and many of
the best hymns which are heard in the Protestant churches of Germany date
from the seventeenth century. Soon, however, this class of poetry also
degenerated on one side into dry theological phraseology, on the other
into sentimental and almost erotic affectation.
There was no hope of a regeneration in German literature, unless either
great political and social events should rouse the national mind from its
languor, or the classical models of pure taste and true art should be
studied again in a different spirit from that of professorial pedantry.
Now, after the Thirty Years’ War, there was no war in Germany in which the
nation took any warm interest. The policy pursued in France during the
long reign of Louis XIV. (1643-1708) had its chief aim in weakening the
house of Hapsburg. When the Protestants would no longer fight his battles,
Louis roused the Turks. Vienna was nearly taken, and Austria owed its
delivery to Johann Sobiesky. By the treaty of Ryswick (1697), all the
country on the left side of the Rhine was ceded to France, and German
soldiers fought under the banners of the Great Monarch. The only German
prince who dared to uphold the honor of the empire, and to withstand the
encroachments of Louis, was Frederick William, the great Elector of
Prussia (1670-88). He checked the arrogance of the Swedish court, opened
his towns to French Protestant refugees, and raised the house of
Brandenburg to a European importance. In the same year in which his
successor, Frederick III., assumed the royal title as Frederick I., the
King of Spain, Charles I., died; and Louis XIV., whilst trying to add the
Spanish crown to his monarchy, was at last checked in his grasping policy
by an alliance between England and Germany. Prince Eugene and Marlborough
restored the peace and the political equilibrium of Europe. In England,
the different parties in Parliament, the frequenters of the clubs and
coffee-houses, were then watching every move on the political chess-board
of Europe, and criticising the victories of their generals and the
treaties of their ambassadors. In Germany, the nation took but a passive
part. It was excluded from all real share in the great questions of the
day; and, if it showed any sympathies, they were confined to the simple
admiration of a great general, such as Prince Eugene.
While the policy of Louis XIV. was undermining the political independence
of Germany, the literature of his court exercised an influence hardly less
detrimental on the literature of Germany. No doubt, the literature of
France stood far higher at that time than that of Germany. “Poet” was
amongst us a term of abuse, while in France the Great Monarch himself did
homage to his great poets. But the professorial poets who had failed to
learn the lessons of good taste from the Greek and Roman classics, were
not likely to profit by an imitation of the spurious classicality of
French literature. They heard the great stars of the court of Louis XIV.
praised by their royal and princely patrons, as they returned from their
travels in France and Italy, full of admiration for everything that was
not German. They were delighted to hear that in France, in Holland, and in
Italy, it was respectable to write poetry in the modern vernacular, and
set to work in good earnest. After the model of the literary academies in
Italy, academies were founded at the small courts of Germany. Men like
Opitz would hardly have thought it dignified to write verses in their
native tongue had it not been for the moral support which they received
from these academies and their princely patrons. His first poems were
written in Latin, but he afterwards devoted himself completely to German
poetry. He became a member of the “Order of the Palm-tree,” and the
founder of what is called the _First Silesian School_. Opitz is the true
representative of the classical poetry of the seventeenth century. He was
a scholar and a gentleman; most correct in his language and versification;
never venturing on ground that had not been trodden before by some
classical poet, whether of Greece, Rome, France, Holland, or Italy. In him
we also see the first traces of that baneful alliance between princes and
poets which has deprived the German nation of so many of her best sons.
But the charge of mean motives has been unjustly brought against Opitz by
many historians. Poets require an audience, and at his time there was no
class of people willing to listen to poetry, except the inmates of the
small German courts. After the Thirty Years’ War the power of these
princes was greater than ever. They divided the spoil, and there was
neither a nobility, nor a clergy, nor a national party to control or
resist them. In England, the royal power had, at that time, been brought
back to its proper limits, and it has thus been able to hold ever since,
with but short interruptions, its dignified position, supported by the
self-respect of a free and powerful nation. In France it assumed the most
enormous proportions during the long reign of Louis XIV., but its
appalling rise was followed, after a century, by a fall equally appalling,
and it has not yet regained its proper position in the political system of
that country. In Germany the royal power was less imposing, its
prerogatives being divided between the Emperor and a number of small but
almost independent vassals, remnants of that feudal system of the Middle
Ages which in France and England had been absorbed by the rise of national
monarchies. These small principalities explain the weakness of Germany in
her relation with foreign powers, and the instability of her political
constitution. Continental wars gave an excuse for keeping up large
standing armies, and these standing armies stood between the nation and
her sovereigns, and made any moral pressure of the one upon the other
impossible. The third estate could never gain that share in the government
which it had obtained, by its united action, in other countries; and no
form of government can be stable which is deprived of the support and the
active coöperation of the middle classes. Constitutions have been granted
by enlightened sovereigns, such as Joseph II. and Frederick William IV.,
and barricades have been raised by the people at Vienna and at Berlin; but
both have failed to restore the political health of the country. There is
no longer a German nobility in the usual sense of the word. Its vigor was
exhausted when the powerful vassals of the empire became powerless
sovereigns with the titles of king or duke, while what remained of the
landed nobility became more reduced with every generation, owing to the
absence of the system of primogeniture. There is no longer a clergy as a
powerful body in the state. This was broken up at the time of the
Reformation; and it hardly had time to recover and to constitute itself on
a new basis, when the Thirty Years’ War deprived it of all social
influence, and left it no alternative but to become a salaried class of
servants of the crown. No third estate exists powerful enough to defend
the interests of the commonwealth against the encroachments of the
sovereign; and public opinion, though it may pronounce itself within
certain limits, has no means of legal opposition, and must choose, at
every critical moment, between submission to the royal will and rebellion.
Thus, during the whole modern history of Germany, the political and
intellectual supremacy is divided. The former is monopolized by the
sovereigns, the latter belongs to a small class of learned men. These two
soon begin to attract each other. The kings seek the society, the advice,
and support of literary men; whilst literary men court the patronage of
kings, and acquire powerful influence by governing those who govern the
people. From the time of Opitz there have been few men of eminence in
literature or science who have not been drawn toward one of the larger or
smaller courts of Germany; and the whole of our modern literature bears
the marks of this union between princes and poets. It has been said that
the existence of these numerous centres of civilization has proved
beneficial to the growth of literature; and it has been pointed out that
some of the smallest courts, such as Weimar, have raised the greatest men
in poetry and science. Goethe himself gives expression to this opinion.
“What has made Germany great,” he says, “but the culture which is spread
through the whole country in such a marvelous manner, and pervades equally
all parts of the realm? And this culture, does it not emanate from the
numerous courts which grant it support and patronage? Suppose we had had
in Germany for centuries but two capitals, Vienna and Berlin, or but one;
I should like to know how it would have fared with German civilization, or
even with that general well-being which goes hand in hand with true
civilization.” In these words we hear Goethe, the minister of the petty
court of Weimar, not the great poet of a great nation. Has France had more
than one capital? Has England had more than one court? Great men have
risen to eminence in great monarchies like France, and they have risen to
eminence in a great commonwealth such as England, without the patronage of
courts, by the support, the sympathy, the love of a great nation. Truly
national poetry exists only where there is a truly national life; and the
poet who, in creating his works, thinks of a whole nation which will
listen to him and be proud of him, is inspired by a nobler passion than he
who looks to his royal master, or the applause even of the most refined
audience of the _dames de la cour_. In a free country, the sovereign is
the highest and most honored representative of the national will, and he
honors himself by honoring those who have well deserved of his country.
There a poet laureate may hold an independent and dignified position,
conscious of his own worth, and of the support of the nation. But in
despotic countries, the favor even of the most enlightened sovereign is
dangerous. Germany never had a more enlightened king than Frederick the
Great; and yet, when he speaks of the Queen receiving Leibnitz at court,
he says, “She believed that it was not unworthy of a queen to show honor
to a philosopher; and as those who have received from heaven a privileged
soul rise to the level of sovereigns, she admitted Leibnitz into her
familiar society.”
The seventeenth century saw the rise and fall of the first and the second
Silesian schools. The first is represented by men like Opitz and
Weckherlin, and it exercised an influence in the North of Germany on Simon
Dach, Paul Flemming, and a number of less gifted poets, who are generally
known by the name of the _Königsberg School_. Its character is
pseudo-classical. All these poets endeavored to write correctly, sedately,
and eloquently. Some of them aimed at a certain simplicity and sincerity,
which we admire particularly in Flemming. But it would be difficult to
find in all their writings one single thought, one single expression, that
had not been used before. The second Silesian school is more ambitious;
but its poetic flights are more disappointing even than the honest prose
of Opitz. The “Shepherds of the Pegnitz” had tried to imitate the
brilliant diction of the Italian poets; but the modern Meistersänger of
the old town of Nürnberg had produced nothing but wordy jingle.
Hoffmannswaldau and Lohenstein, the chief heroes of the second Silesian
school, followed in their track, and did not succeed better. Their
compositions are bombastic and full of metaphors. It is a poetry of
adjectives, without substance, truth, or taste. Yet their poetry was
admired, praised not less than Goethe and Schiller were praised by their
contemporaries, and it lived beyond the seventeenth century. There were
but few men during that time who kept aloof from the spirit of these two
Silesian schools, and were not influenced by either Opitz or
Hoffmannswaldau. Among these independent poets we have to mention
Friedrich von Logau, Andreas Gryphius, and Moscherosch. Beside these,
there were some prose writers whose works are not exactly works of art,
but works of original thought, and of great importance to us in tracing
the progress of science and literature during the dreariest period of
German history. We can only mention the “Simplicissimus,” a novel full of
clever miniature drawing, and giving a truthful picture of German life
during the Thirty Years’ War; the patriotic writings of Professor Schupp;
the historical works of Professor Pufendorf (1631-94); the pietistic
sermons of Spener, and of Professor Franke (1663-1727), the founder of the
Orphan School at Halle; Professor Arnold’s (1666-1714) Ecclesiastical
History; the first political pamphlets by Professor Thomasius (1655-1728);
and among philosophers, Jacob Böhme at the beginning, and Leibnitz at the
end of the seventeenth century.
The second Silesian school was defeated by Gottsched, professor at
Leipzig. He exercised, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the
same dictatorship as a poet and a critic which Opitz had exercised at the
beginning of the seventeenth. Gottsched was the advocate of French models
in art and poetry, and he used his wide-spread influence in recommending
the correct and so-called classical style of the poets of the time. After
having rendered good service in putting down the senseless extravagance of
the school of Lohenstein, he became himself a pedantic and arrogant
critic; and it was through the opposition which he roused by his
“Gallomania” that German poetry was delivered at last from the trammels of
that foreign school. Then followed a long literary warfare; Gottsched and
his followers at Leipzig defended the French, Bodmer and his friends in
Switzerland the English style of literature. The former insisted on
classical form and traditional rules; the latter on natural sentiment and
spontaneous expression. The question was, whether poets should imitate the
works of the classics, or imitate the classics who had become classics by
imitating nobody. A German professor wields an immense power by means of
his journals. He is the editor; he writes in them himself, and allows
others to write; he praises his friends, who are to laud him in turn; he
patronizes his pupils, who are to call him master; he abuses his
adversaries, and asks his allies to do the same. It was in this that
Professor Gottsched triumphed for a long time over Bodmer and his party,
till at last public opinion became too strong, and the dictator died the
laughing-stock of Germany. It was in the very thick of this literary
struggle that the great heroes of German poetry grew up,—Klopstock,
Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. Goethe, who knew both
Gottsched and Bodmer, has described that period of fermentation and
transition in which his own mind was formed, and his extracts may be read
as a commentary on the poetical productions of the first half of the
eighteenth century. He does justice to Günther, and more than justice to
Liscow. He shows the influence which men like Brockes, Hagedorn, and
Haller exercised in making poetry respectable. He points out the new
national life which, like an electric spark, flew through the whole
country when Frederick the Great said, “_J’ai jeté le bonnet pardessus les
moulins_;” and defied, like a man, the political popery of Austria. The
estimate which Goethe forms of the poets of the time, of Gleim and Uz, of
Gessner and Rabener, and more especially of Klopstock, Lessing, and
Wieland, should be read in the original, as likewise Herder’s “Rhapsody on
Shakspeare.” The latter contains the key to many of the secrets of that
new period of literature, which was inaugurated by Goethe himself and by
those who like him could dare to be classical by being true to nature and
to themselves.
My object in taking this rapid survey of German literature has been to
show that the extracts which I have collected in my “German Classics” have
not been chosen at random, and that, if properly used, they can be read as
a running commentary on the political and social history of Germany. The
history of literature is but an applied history of civilization. As in the
history of civilization we watch the play of the three constituent classes
of society,—clergy, nobility, and commoners,—we can see, in the history of
literature, how that class which is supreme politically shows for the time
being its supremacy in the literary productions of the age, and impresses
its mark on the works of poets and philosophers.
Speaking very generally, we might say that, during the first period of
German history, the really moving, civilizing, and ruling class was the
clergy; and in the whole of German literature, nearly to the time of the
Crusades, the clerical element predominates. The second period is marked
by the Crusades, and the triumph of Teutonic and Romantic chivalry, and
the literature of that period is of a strictly correspondent tone. After
the Crusades, and during the political anarchy that followed, the sole
principle of order and progress is found in the towns, and in the towns
the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries finds its new home.
At last, at the time of the Reformation, when the political life of the
country assumed for a time a national character, German literature also is
for a short time national. The hopes, however, which had been raised of a
national policy and of a national literature were soon blighted, and, from
the Thirty Years’ War to the present day, the inheritance of the nation
has been divided between princes and professors. There have been moments
when the princes had to appeal to the nation at large, and to forget for a
while their royal pretensions; and these times of national enthusiasm, as
during the wars of Frederick the Great, and during the wars against
Napoleon, have not failed to tell on the literature of Germany. They
produced a national spirit, free from professorial narrowness, such as we
find in the writings of Lessing and Fichte. But with the exception of
these short lucid intervals, Germany has always been under the absolute
despotism of a number of small sovereigns and great professors, and her
literature has been throughout in the hands of court poets and academic
critics. Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller are most free from either
influence, and most impressed with the duties which a poet owes, before
all, to the nation to which he belongs. Klopstock’s national enthusiasm
borders sometimes on the fantastic; for, as his own times could not
inspire him, he borrowed the themes of his national panegyrics from the
distant past of Arminius and the German bards. Lessing looked more to his
own age, but he looked in vain for national heroes. “Pity the
extraordinary man,” says Goethe, “who had to live in such miserable times,
which offered him no better subjects than those which he takes for his
works. Pity him, that in his ‘Minna von Barnhelm,’ he had to take part in
the quarrel between the Saxons and the Prussians, because he found nothing
better. It was owing to the rottenness of his time that he always took,
and was forced to take, a polemical position. In his ‘Emilia Galotti,’ he
shows his _pique_ against the princes; in ‘Nathan,’ against the priests.”
But, although the subjects of these works of Lessing were small, his
object in writing was always great and national. He never condescended to
amuse a provincial court by masquerades and comedies, nor did he degrade
his genius by pandering, like Wieland, to the taste of a profligate
nobility. Schiller, again, was a poet truly national and truly liberal;
and although a man of aspirations rather than of actions, he has left a
deeper impress on the kernel of the nation than either Wieland or Goethe.
These considerations, however, must not interfere with our appreciation of
the greatness of Goethe. On the contrary, when we see the small sphere in
which he moved at Weimar, we admire the more the height to which he grew,
and the freedom of his genius. And it is, perhaps, owing to this very
absence of a strongly marked national feeling, that in Germany the first
idea of a world-literature was conceived. “National literature,” Goethe
says, “is of little importance: the age of a world-literature is at hand,
and every one ought to work in order to accelerate this new era.” Perhaps
Goethe felt that the true poet belonged to the whole of mankind, and that
he must be intelligible beyond the frontiers of his own country. And, from
this point of view, his idea of a world-literature has been realized, and
his own works have gained their place side by side with the works of
Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. But, so long as there are different
languages and different nations, let each poet think and work and write
for his own people, without caring for the applause of other countries.
Science and philosophy are cosmopolitan; poetry and art are national: and
those who would deprive the Muses of their home-sprung character, would
deprive them of much of their native charms.