THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY
Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland; Prose
Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Herder, Kant. Poets of the Nineteenth
Century: Goethe, Schiller, Körner.
THE AGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.--In the literature of Germany the
eighteenth century, sometimes designated under the title of the age of
Frederick the Great, forms a Renaissance or, if preferred, an awakening
after a fairly prolonged slumber. This awakening was assisted by a
quarrel, sufficiently unimportant in itself, but which proved fertile,
between Gottsched, the German Boileau, and Bodmer, the energetic
vindicator of the rights of the imagination. In the train of Bodmer came
Haller, like him a Swiss; then suddenly Klopstock appeared. _The
Messiah_ of Klopstock is an epic poem; it is the history of Jesus Christ
from Cana to the Resurrection, with a crowd of episodes dexterously
attached to the action. The profound religious sentiment, the grandeur of
the setting, the beauty of the scenes, the purity and nobility of the
sermon, the Biblical colour so skilfully spread over the whole
composition, cause this vast poem, which was perhaps unduly praised on
its first appearance, to be one of the finest products of the human mind,
even when all reservations are made. German literature revived. As for
Gottsched, he was vanquished.
THE POETS.--Then came Lavater, Bürger, Lessing, Wieland. Lavater, a Swiss
like Haller, is remembered for his scientific labours, but was also a
meritorious poet, and his naive and moving _Swiss Hymns_ have remained
national songs; Bürger was a great poet, lyrical, impassioned, personal,
original, vibrating; Wieland, the Voltaire of Germany, although he began
by being the friend of Klopstock, witty, facile, light, and graceful,
whose _Oberon_ and _Agathon_ preserve the gift of growing old
felicitously, is one of the most delightful minds that Germany produced.
Napoleon did him the honour of desiring to converse with him as with
Goethe.
LESSING.--Lessing, personally, was a great author, and owing to the
influence he exercised over his fellow-countrymen, he holds one of the
noblest positions in the history of German literature. He was a critic,
and in his _Dramaturgie of Hamburg_ and elsewhere, with all his strength,
and often unjustly, he combated French literature to arrest the
ascendency which, according to his indolent opinion, it exercised over
the Germans; and in his _Laocoön_, with admirable lucidity, he made a
kind of classification of the arts. As author, properly speaking, he
wrote _Fables_ which to our taste are dry and cold; he made several
dramatic efforts none of which were masterpieces, the best being _Minna
von Barnhelm_ and _Emilia Galotti_, and a philosophical poem in dialogue
(for it could hardly be termed drama), _Nathan the Sage_, which
possessed great moral and literary beauties.
HERDER.--Herder was the Vico of Germany. Here was the historical
philosopher, or rather the thoughtful philosopher on history. He did
everything: literary criticism, works of erudition, translations, even
personal poems, but his great work was _Ideas on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind_. This was the theory of progress in all its breadth
and majesty, supported by arguments that are at least spacious and
imposing. From Michelet to Quinet, on to Renan, every French author who
has at all regarded the unity of the destinies of the human race has
drawn inspiration from him. His broad, measured, and highly coloured
style is on the level of the subject and conforms to it. Even in an
exclusively literary history Kant must not be forgotten, because when he
set himself to compose a moral dissertation, as, for example, the one
upon lying, he took high rank as a writer.
THE GLORIOUS EPOCH.--Thus is reached the end of the eighteenth close on
the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this intermediary epoch shone
the most glorious hour of Teutonic literature. Simultaneously Iffland,
Kotzebue, Körner, Schiller, and Goethe were to the fore. This formed a
great constellation. Iffland, actor, manager, and author, friend and
protector of Schiller, wrote numerous dramas, the principal of which were
_The Criminal through Ambition_, _The Pupil_, _The Hunters_, _The
Lawyers_, _The Friends of the House_. He was realistic without being
gloomy. He resembled the French Sédaine. Kotzebue, who was the friend of
Catherine of Russia, subsequently disgraced by her, possessed a highly
irritable and quarrelsome disposition, and was finally killed in 1819
as a reactionary by a Liberal student, did not fall far short of genius.
He wrote a number of dramas and comedies. Those still read with pleasure
are _Misanthropy and Repentance_, _Hugo Grotius_, _The Calumniator_, and
_The Small German Town_, which has remained a classic.
KÖRNER.--Körner, the "Tyrtaeus of Germany," was simultaneously a brave
soldier and a great lyrical poet who was killed on the battlefield of
Gadebusch, wrote lyrical poems, dramas, comedies, farces, and, above all,
_The Lyre and Sword_, war-songs imbued with splendid spirit.
SCHILLER.--Schiller is a vast genius, historian, lyrical poet, dramatic
poet, critic, and in all these different fields he showed himself to be
profoundly original. He wrote _The Thirty Years' War_; odes, ballads,
dithyrambic poems, such as _The Clock_, so universally celebrated;
dissertations of philosophic criticism, such as _The God of Greece_ and
_The Artists_; finally, a whole repertory of drama (the only point on
which it is possible to show that he surpasses Goethe), in which may be
remarked his first audacious and anarchical work, _The Brigands_, then
the _Conjuration of Fieso_, _Intrigue and Love_, _Don Carlos_,
_Wallenstein_ (a trilogy composed of _The Camp of Wallenstein_, _The
Piccolomini_, _The Death of Wallenstein_), _Mary Stuart_, _The Betrothed
of Messina_, _The Maid of Orleans_, _William Tell_. By his example
primarily, and by his instruction subsequently (_Twelve Letters on Don
Carlos_, _Letters on Aesthetic Education_, _The Sublime_, etc.), he
exercised over literature and over German thought an influence at least
equal, and I believe superior, to that of Goethe. He was united to Goethe
by the ties of a profound and undeviating friendship. He died whilst
still young, in 1805, twenty-seven years before his illustrious friend.
GOETHE.--Goethe, whom posterity can only put in the same rank as Homer,
is even more universal genius, and has approached yet closer to absolute
beauty. Of Franco-German education, he subsequently studied at Strasburg,
commencing, whilst still almost a student, with the imperishable
_Werther_, to which it may be said that a whole literature is devoted
and, parenthetically, a literature diametrically opposed to what Goethe
subsequently became. Then a journey through Italy, which revealed Goethe
to himself, made him a man who never ceased to desire to combine classic
beauty and Teutonic ways of thinking, and who was often magnificently
successful. To put it in another way, Goethe in his own land is a
Renaissance in himself, and the Renaissance which Germany had not known
in either the sixteenth or seventeenth century came as the gift of
Goethe. Immediately after his return from Italy he wrote _Tasso_ (of
classic inspiration), _Wilhelm Meister_ (of Teutonic inspiration),
_Iphigenia_ (classical), _Egmont_ (Teutonic), etc. Then came _Hermann and
Dorothea_, which was absolutely classic in the simplicity of its plan and
purity of lyric verse, but essentially modern in its picture of German
customs; _The Roman Elegies_, _The Elective Affinities_, _Poetry and
Truth_ (autobiography mingled with romance), _The Western Eastern Divan_,
lyrical poems, and finally, the two parts of _Faust_. In the first part
of _Faust_, Goethe was, and desired to be, entirely German; in the
second, through many reveries more or less relative to the theme, he more
particularly desires to depict the union of the German spirit with that
of classical genius, which formed his own life, and led to _intelligent
action_, which also was a portion of his existence. And for beauty,
drama, pathos, ease, phantasy, and fertility in varied invention, nothing
has ever surpassed if anything has even equalled the two parts of _Faust_
regarded as a single poem.
Apart from his literary labours, Goethe occupied himself with the
administration of the little duchy of Weimar, and in scientific research,
notably on plants, animals, and the lines in which he displayed marked
originality. He died in 1832, having been born in 1749. His literary
career extends over, approximately, sixty years, equal to that of Victor
Hugo, and almost equal to that of Voltaire.
THE CONTEMPORANEOUS PERIOD.--After the death of Goethe, Germany could not
maintain the same height. Once more was she glorified in poetry by Henry
Heine, an extremely original witty traveller, in his _Pictures of
Travel_, elegiac and deeply lyrical, affecting and delightful at the same
time in _The Intermezzo_; by the Austrian school, Zedlitz, Grün, and the
melancholy and deep-thinking Lenau; in prose, above all, by the
philosophers, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and lastly
Nietzsche--at once philosopher, moralist (after his own manner), and
poet, with an astonishing imagination; by the historians Niebuhr (before
1830), Treitschke, Mommsen, etc. Germany seems to have drooped, so far as
literature is concerned, despite some happy exceptions (especially in the
drama: Hauptmann, Sudermann), since her military triumphs of 1870 and the
consequent industrial activity.