Part 18

It is at first sight one of the most amazing facts in literary history that Germany should have been so late in arriving at a stage of creative genius which was reached five centuries earlier in Italy, a hundred and fifty years earlier in France, and nearly two hundred years earlier in England; for by so much time does the flourishing of Dante, of Corneille, and of Shakespeare, respectively precede the flourishing of Goethe. When we recognize what a capacity the German mind possesses for deep and sustained reflection, for tender sentiment, for rhythmic expression, we are struck with wonder that, before the days of Lessing in the latter half of the eighteenth century, German literature appears like a huge sand-waste, with here and there a poor oasis yielding for the most part but stony fruits and almost destitute of verdant beauty, except—and the exception is considerable—those simple and earnest _Volkslieder_ in which the Teutonic feeling finds such touching outlet.

The _Lay of the Nibelungen_ is properly an antique. The Minnesänger are to us little more than a tradition. Of the Meistersänger perhaps Hans Sachs is the only name which readily recalls itself. Luther we know full well, but, except for his hymn, _Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott_, he is remembered as a figure of theological controversy and a translator of the Bible rather than as a man of letters in the proper sense. We are familiar with the almost omniscient Leibnitz in the realms of science and philosophy; but it is not till towards the end of the eighteenth century, just before our own Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, that we meet with a fully matured and artistic literature, graced with numerous rememberable names—with Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and, in a minor rank, Klopstock, Wieland, Bürger, Jean Paul Richter.

For this long sterility and slow development of German literature various reasons are assigned. We need not here pretend to estimate how far they are severally true. We cannot refer all literary outbursts to causes independent of genius. Nor is it necessary always to demand an extensive national life as a condition of literary fertility. Looking at the golden-age literatures of Athens and Florence, we should rather hold that it is a free-spirited and cultured life pervading a community, small or great, which stimulates to literary productiveness and excellence. It is, in fact, the prevailing ideals in a community which determine whether it shall create a splendid literature or not. In Germany there were for centuries no communities pervaded with this spirited and cultured life; the prevailing ideals were not in the direction of any consummate artistic production. Till 1802 there existed, in name at least, as many as two hundred and fifty petty princedoms and paltry republics in Germany, for the most part little better than narrow feudal domains, struggling, ignoble, and selfish, as such disintegrated political atoms are wont to be. So long as these were really separate there was no grandeur of spirit, no high level of culture, in Germany. Nevertheless, for a generation before the end of the eighteenth century there had been growing up a wider and more national German sentiment and a considerable measure of union, political and social. It was not till this generation that Goethe and Schiller appeared. The wars which devastated Germany after the Reformation were of most hideous ferocity and unparalleled continuance, and had necessarily caused a dearth of literature as of other arts. What literature is to be found in Germany for two hundred years, from the time of our own Henry VIII down to the time of our George III—all those generations which include our Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray—is almost entirely a literature of controversy, religion, hymns, criticism, and learning. Then at length, with the growing feeling of a general Germanic nationality and a general Germanic spirit and culture, with religious freedom established and controversy worn out, with the ideals of learning homogeneously spread, the time has come when literary genius finds its apt environment, and the thought and feeling of Germany take shape in dramas, ballads, lyrics, novels, and all other wonted forms. And then, for a generation, German literature is the dominant literature of Europe.

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With the literary work—if we may call it such—of the monastic period, and with the religious poems of the learned German monks, we have nothing to do. German literature at all worthy of the name begins with the various _Lieder_, or romantic lays and lyrics of the twelfth century. The impulse to the Romances of Alexander and of the Table Round came from the trouvères of Northern France; the impulse to the lyrics of chivalrous minstrelsy came from the troubadours of Languedoc. During the Crusades the German barons were prominent, and that great motley pilgrimage of Frenchmen, Germans, Provençals, and Italians to the Holy Land was the means of spreading the legends and literary manners of the one to the knowledge and imitation of the rest. It was probably in this way, it was certainly at this time, that arose the Minne-Gesang and the army of Minnesänger, who were its poets. Minne means “love,” and love is the special theme of those who copied the troubadours. The lyrics of the Minnesänger are primarily love-ditties of the kind which have been already described as current in Provence. Not that all their _Lieder_ were lyric songs. There were also legends and romances, satires and fables.

Most famous among all the creations of mediaeval Germany stands forth the _Nibelungen Lied_, the “Lay of the Nibelungen.” Properly speaking the title is _The Calamity of the Nibelungen_—_Der Nibelungen Noth_. The work is an epic, the one epic of Germany. It records how Siegfried, a hero of the fifth century, was done to treacherous death through the jealousy of the Amazon Queen Brünhild, and how his murder was ruthlessly avenged by his wife Kriemhild. The Nibelungen are properly fabulous giants of the Land of Fog, but when a vast treasure, which Siegfried has taken from them, comes into the hands of the Burgundians at Worms, these Burgundians become in turn the Nibelungen. And since it is upon the lords of these hapless Burgundian Nibelungen that Kriemhild’s vengeance falls, the poem is rightly styled _Der Nibelungen Noth_. Such is the plot of this “Iliad of Germany,” of which the collecting or formulation dates from about the year 1200, and which is full of great exploits and great passions, of witchcraft and murder and grimness. From a literary point of view the composition is one of great vigour but of no less great uncouthness.

One other product of the time deserves some mention. It is the beast story, or satirical fable, of _Reineke Fuchs_—“Reynard the Fox”—wherein the cunning of the fox is contrasted with the qualities of the other animals, who each bear a special sobriquet, and wherein human practices are all the time playfully satirized. That the French borrowed this beast-epic in their _Roman de Renart_ from the Germans, and not the Germans from the French, is clear from the names borne by the various animals, such as the French _renard_, the fox, and _baudet_, the donkey, which are but the old German nicknames, Reynhart and Baldwin, in slight disguise.

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Following the Minnesänger came the Meister-Gesang and the Meistersänger. This was the age of trade guilds, when artisans met as in a club, and when each guild contained its poet or its poetaster. The shoemaker or weaver had often a fancy to be rhymester for his mates; thereupon were formed special guilds of poets of this sort, poetic artisans or artisan poets, and these were called the Schools of Meistersänger. Naturally enough the verse of men like these concerned itself, not with chivalry and troubadour lyrics, but with themes of common life, with wedding and christening songs, with songs of drink, of labour, and of domesticity.

In this age begin those special German _Volkslieder_, or “people’s songs,” of which some touchingly sweet and musical specimens are still read and heard to-day. The most prolific and best known of the Meistersänger is Hans Sachs, “the cobbler bard,” who flourished about the year 1550.

Of more importance to ourselves, perhaps, at this time was Sebastian Brandt. He is scarcely one of the Meistersänger, since he was no artisan, but a lawyer. Though of the same time and style he stands quite apart. Us he concerns because his work, the _Narrenschiff_, or “Ship of Fools,” was imitated in the sixteenth century by our English Barclay, and was the parent of a considerable satirical progeny during that century. It suggested, for instance, both the conception and the title of such productions as the _Ship of Drunkards_. The “Ship” was chosen by Brandt to convey the fools he satirizes—fops, misers, drunkards, and the like—because no other conveyance was large enough. The captain was a book-fool, and his name was Sebastian Brandt. About 1550 there was also translated by Copland, under the name of the _Owl-glass_, the famous _Eulenspiegel_, a series of amusing trickeries which are reflected in the English Robin Goodfellow.

The age of the Meistersänger is followed by the age of Luther, the Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War. It is an era of the founding of universities, of the spread of learning, of religious dispute carried on in pedantic language, an era when the popular speech was disregarded in favour of Latin or French. To speak broadly, there is no literature worth the name from the time of Luther, who died in 1546, down to Lessing, who wrote in 1760. Nor is Luther himself a figure of literature proper. As a translator of the Bible into the Upper-Saxon dialect, and as having thus fixed the modern German language, he is of the greatest importance to Germany itself. To us his value is that of a thinker or moral force.

Yet there is one product of this long period which must count for something in virtue of its subject. It is the legend of Dr. Faustus, which was first printed in 1587, was utilized by Marlowe for his most celebrated play, gave the hint for Green’s _Friar Bacon_, and was revived by Goethe in his most famous and most influential work, the drama of _Faust_. It is reported that there actually was a person named Faust in Swabia in 1560, who rejoiced in a reputation for sorcery, and in the companionship of the devil.

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With a long leap over an irrelevant and wearisome interspace we arrive at the “Classic Period” of German literature. It seems better to call this the “classic” than the “classical” period, since the former word signifies the best and golden age, the age of the classic works, not the age in which literature followed the rules and canons of classicism after the manner of the French in the “classical” period of Louis XIV, or of the English in the “classical” period after the days of Dryden. It is a superlative merit of the great German writers that they, like our Elizabethans, and like our poets of the early nineteenth century, for the most part refused to be fettered by artificial rules.

Now was the time of a splendid crop of genius, a time when Frederick the Great had made North Germany more compact and peaceful, a time when princely patronage deigned to take note of literature. It was the time of a revolt against pedantry, of a reaction in favour of the national language, and of romantic and spontaneous literary creation.

The period of creation had been preceded in the early eighteenth century by a period of criticism, in which the German Swiss school of Bodmer, affecting the literary freedom of England, came into collision with the Leipzig school of Gottsched, which favoured the regulated literature of France. The latter faction, however, soon passed away, and Klopstock’s _Messias_, inspired by Milton, though a work poor in action and character, showed how Germany was minded to abandon the mundane tone and interests which had satisfied the school of Voltaire and his Teutonic followers, and to adopt the cult of feeling and the ideal. For a time, it is true, the rising poet Wieland set himself in deliberate opposition to this cult, and proclaimed himself a pupil of the French; but, when settled at Weimar in 1772, his French predilections did not prevent him from at least devoting his abilities to the reconstruction of old romance.

The attack on the old formalism and its rules, in favour of free and untrammelled genius, was deliberate and organized. It consisted on the one hand of the fresh and searching criticism of Lessing and Herder, and, on the other, of the efforts of German poetic youth. The name given to the young spirits of the literary revolt and regeneration, the clamourers for free play of spontaneity and imagination, was that of _Stürmer und Dränger_. They were so called from the words _Sturm und Drang_, often translated “Storm and Stress,” but in reality meaning “Vigorous Assault,” which formed the title of a drama published by a certain Klinger in 1774, although their appropriateness is not now easy to discern. This particular drama supplied, however, in its wild and extravagant structure, imagery and figures, a kind of manifesto of the new school. Those who sided with the movement were therefore called the “Storm-and-Stress men,” just as the “Impressionists” in painting have been so named from the picture called _Impressions_, in which Monet first publicly exemplified their methods. Most of the poets who were afterwards to become famous belonged in their youth to this new school, went through its extravagances, and came out all the better for it in their maturity. Goethe with his juvenile drama of _Götz_, Schiller with his of _The Robbers_, had their “Sturm und Drang” stage, the stage when they allowed their imaginations and their language to run riot in wild extravagance.

The first great writer of the classic period in point of date is Lessing. He had nothing to do with the violent ardours of “Sturm und Drang.” None the less he is a regenerator, a more powerful regenerator, and, in a sense, the founder of German literature. His dramas, with their central idea of depicting a hero whose character and conduct point a general moral, fixed the manner of German drama for Goethe and Schiller, and therefore for all German literature. His _Minna von Barnhelm_, and his _Nathan the Wise_, are moral lessons in military duty, or in religious toleration. They are the precursors and direct progenitors of Goethe’s _Faust_ and Schiller’s _Wallenstein_. But, perhaps, of all Lessing’s works that which is best known abroad, and which has been most powerful and far-reaching in its influence, is his _Laocoon_. Despite its errors and shortcomings, this famous treatise on the “Boundaries of Poetry and Painting,” a work of criticism in the philosophy of the beautiful, has perhaps influenced more minds than any other work on aesthetics ever written except those of Aristotle and Longinus. To countless others besides Macaulay it has been their first illumination of the everlasting principles of beauty.

Side by side with Lessing, younger than he, but more ardent, went the _Dichterbund_, the “Poets’ League,” of Göttingen, whose object it was to make the poetry of Germans truly German, by composing natural lyrics and ballads of that sort in which modern German poetry perhaps abounds more richly, more musically, than any poetry of any other land. They, too, greatly influenced Goethe and Schiller, and from them Heine derives the impulse to his exquisite music and simplicity. Chief among them was Bürger, the ballad-writer and author of _Lenore_, who, perhaps, deserves additional mention as the reputed author of the famous adventures of Baron Münchhausen, perhaps the most perfectly ridiculous set of impossible lies ever invented.

To speak of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, would require volumes. Perhaps nothing more perfect in their kind can be found than the lyrics of these three superlative artists, superlative in their simplicity of language, in their music, and in their clear-cut thought. Schiller’s _Song of the Bell_ is thought converted into, identified with, melody. Goethe’s _Heath Rose_, his _Serenade_, his songs in _Egmont_; the gems scattered through Heine’s _Buch der Lieder_; these show every possible virtue of poems in their kind. For what is the supreme merit of such a poem, unless that it should give expression to a worthy thought or emotion in exquisite language, which shall communicate it wholly, clearly, and movingly, by means of sounds and cadences acting like music on the emotions, and tuning the mind to a state of perfect receptiveness? This is precisely what the great German triad did, and, if German were only more closely regarded on its literary, as opposed to its utilitarian side, a study of German lyrics, odes, ballads, and songs might serve as the best of trainings for any who would learn to write them as poets should. Herein, perhaps, the literary influence of Germany has yet to work with ample scope and unmixed benefit.

But, though their lyrics alone are more than enough to make Goethe, Schiller, and Heine immortal, it is not by these that Goethe and Schiller are best known to the world outside of Germany. It is by dramas like _Wallenstein_ and _Wilhelm Tell_ that Schiller holds his place, while Goethe’s fame is mostly identified with _Faust_, with _Iphigenie_, and with _Egmont_.

For German literature Goethe is the consummate name. He is the apex of the pyramid, and that in virtue of one sublime quality—originality, a word which perhaps means, after all, independence of observation combined with a keen capacity for its exercise. After passing through his Sturm-und-Drangship, his morbid stage of _The Sorrows of Werther_, and his intermediate stage of classical proportion, Goethe wrote as one who saw, and saw clearly. He saw facts, he dissected passions and motives. He could analyse the complex, and build up the elements again into a sound complexity. He has no narrowness. He displays a broad Hellenic tolerance, and a clear Hellenic way of seeing things in their reality. The influence of such a man must be vast. Byron and Shelley owned it and showed it. Carlyle, as stern a critic as ever played the pedagogue, is unmixed in his admiration for the man Goethe, who is to him divine. In his own country his _Werther_, despite its frequent morbidness and its _longueurs_, determined the feeling of every sentimentalist. Outside that country his _Faust_ has become almost a textbook in poetical philosophy. He is translated, commented on, consulted like an oracle. In the reality and width of sway which he exercises, he stands next to Shakespeare among the poets.

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“The genius of Germany,” says Lamartine, “is deep and austere.” The characteristics of German literature bear the impress of that national genius. The German mind is one which inquires and ponders. The German is, above all things, a deep and earnest thinker. Philosophy and learning, investigation in history, language, physical science, these belong to the Germans more than to any other people. We shall expect, therefore, to find German literature full of reflection and original thought, more concerned with the pursuit of the truth of that thought and reflection than with the form of expression. Heine, indeed, cannot be classed with the other great writers in this respect. Humour, wit, grace, music, all these he has in abundance. But he is apt to be reckless in his brilliancy; he is the incarnation of cleverness, but scarcely of sober and sincere thought. But Heine, though a German, was not a Teuton. He was a Jew. He wrote in German words in a German atmosphere, but hardly from a Teutonic mind.

Truth and earnestness are essentials of German writing. And therefore it is difficult to find in German literature mere writing for writing’s sake. Its prose is the prose of discussion, argument, reflection, criticism, philosophy, analysis: its poetry is poetry of earnest meditation, real pathos, and real sentiment. Above all things German poetry is lyrical, and its lyric note rings true.

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For German “literary” influence on ourselves we cannot point to much that is very definite. The influence of German philosophy in Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schopenhauer, is one of thought in the scientific, not in the literary, aspect. We cannot say how great that philosophic influence has been. Nor are we under any obligation here to attempt the task. Neither are we concerned with the immense theological influence—which is also one of philosophy—that came to us from Luther. We are only concerned with the literary subject matter, the forms, and the principles which we may owe to Germany. Our conception of how history should be written owes much to Niebuhr, Ranke, and Mommsen; our aesthetic criticism to Lessing and Winckelmann; and our literary criticism to the brothers Schlegel. So long as there is intercommunication between countries by reading and by travel we necessarily expect ideas to pass in some shape and measure from one to the other. But it is only when great writers look abroad for formative influences that we can perceive and demonstrate a positive literary debt. English literature, and especially Shakespeare, has, in this respect, exercised much more influence on Germany than German literature upon ours.

In the sixteenth century we may find German legends like those concerning Bishop Hatto or the Piper of Hamelin transferred to England; we may find the story of Dr. Faustus producing Marlowe’s _Dr. Faustus_ and Greene’s _Friar Bacon_; we may see Brandt’s _Narrenschiff_ translated as Barclay’s _Ship of Fools_, and producing other satirical “Ships” of a similar kind. We may trace the thoughts of Pope’s _Essay on Man_ back through Bolingbroke’s prose to the philosophic writings of Leibnitz. Yet instances like these are but scattered, and are intrinsically not of the first importance. A really large and steady influence begins for us with the end of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth century, with Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and thence with Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley in England. Coleridge and De Quincey were much read in German literature and philosophy; Byron and Goethe were mutual admirers; Shelley read Goethe along with the ancient classics; Scott practically commenced writing by translating Goethe’s _Götz_ into _Goetz of the Iron Hand_. Carlyle admired Goethe with an entirety which he refuses to any but the greatest; English thinkers and essayists are constantly quoting him. In our own day, when the knowledge of German is increasing, we all absorb more or less of the thought of Germany. Yet the influence is one of thought. It has not yet developed into an influence which can be seen to determine the form and tone of poetry or prose, as was the case with French and with Italian. The fact seems to be that German literature is naturally too much like our own to exert such clear and palpable effect.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF GERMAN LITERATURE.