UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 FROM 
 
 A STUDY OF PSEUDO-CLASSICISM 
 IN LITERATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY." 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 
 1885. 
 
 112297
 
 Copyright, 1884, 
 Bv THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY. 
 
 All Rights Reserved. 
 
 STEREOTYPED BY 
 C. J. PETERS * SON, BOSTON.
 
 FT 
 
 \ 
 
 IV. D. HOWELLS.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE aim of this book is to give some 
 few of the many available proofs that the 
 different nations of modern Europe have 
 passed through very nearly the same ex- 
 perience in literature since the Renaissance. 
 The course of each separate nation has been 
 described by hosts of writers : in France 
 the early glow of the Pleiad, the chastening 
 
 OJ 
 
 H correctness of Malherbe and Boileau, the 
 +> gradual romantic revival; in England, the 
 ts fading out of the Elizabethan fervour, 
 
 Q 1 
 
 the precision of Dryden and Pope, and the 
 modifications that led to the revival of 
 poetry; the similar course of events in 
 Germany, all these things have been set 
 forth in countless volumes. The facts once 
 established, it becomes possible to detect a 
 harmony which it would be rash to call co- 
 incidence. The next thing is obviously to
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 see how closely the various nations kept 
 step together. Until this is done, our 
 knowledge is fragmentary and incomplete; 
 the relation of different authors to one an- 
 other is often only intelligible when we see 
 it more brilliantly illustrated in another 
 country. After this work is finished, there 
 will remain the task of ascertaining ex- 
 actly to what extent each nation modified 
 the general course of literary movement; 
 what was the national equation, so to speak, 
 of each country. When this is ascertained, 
 the period treated will be really known; 
 until then it will not be fully comprehended. 
 This volume is offered to the public as a 
 slight essay to show how like were some of 
 the early movements in different countries. 
 
 T. s. P. 
 
 BOSTON, July 28, 1884.
 
 FROM OPITZTO LESSING: 
 
 A STUDY OF PSEUDO-CLASSICISM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHAT we include in the term w German 
 Literature " may be conveniently assumed to 
 have begun with Lessing ; but, in order to 
 understand what that eminent writer did in 
 the way of clearing the ground for his suc- 
 cessors and of laying the foundations on 
 which they were to work, it is important to 
 take a look backwards, and to see what had 
 been done and what left undone before his 
 day. Only in this way can we appreciate 
 him at his proper value, and an examination 
 of this sort may also be of service, by show- 
 ing us that the study of literature, which is, 
 after all, only the study of one part of his-
 
 25 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 tory, is fruitful even when it requires of us 
 that we give our attention to men of mod- 
 erate merit, to writers who are praised when 
 they are called second-rate. There is some- 
 thing fascinating in studying merely the 
 greatest men, and in passing over the rest 
 without thought ; but literature cannot be 
 understood in that way, any more than bot- 
 any can be learned by studying nothing but 
 Japanese lilies and Jacqueminot roses, or 
 modern history by giving all our attention 
 to Napoleon Bonaparte, Washington, and 
 Lincoln. In literature, the man who accom- 
 plishes anything great is the one man who 
 succeeds where countless others fail ; and 
 our study will be of little profit if it does 
 not teach us how much greater are the long 
 and silently prepared movements than any 
 brilliant performance, how the most striking 
 thing about any genius is its inevitableness, 
 and that it cannot be understood without 
 the comprehension of the whole spirit of the 
 time. It is to the Germans that we owe
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 6 
 
 the statement of this principle, and it is only 
 just to illustrate its truth by investigating 
 what their writers have contributed to the 
 world's delight. We shall see, then, that 
 literature is not something remote from 
 human interest, although the way in which 
 it is often studied and sometimes practised 
 may encourage this unsound view. Let us 
 begin with the principle that literature is 
 not a thing apart from life, but is humanity 
 recording its hopes, thoughts, fears, and 
 emotions, not humanity composing rhetori- 
 cal exercises, except, to be sure, at moments 
 when rhetorical exercises are the legitimate 
 expression of corrupt taste and artificial en- 
 thusiasms; and even these, when viewed in 
 this way, acquire new interest in our eyes. 
 
 Although the modern literature of Ger- 
 many begins only in the latter half of the 
 last century, there had been a time when 
 Germany was in the van. Even if the 
 minnesingers were second to the Prove^al 
 troubadours, they were second to them
 
 4 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 alone. Later, when England was without 
 commerce or manufactures, before the age 
 Of Elizabeth, Germany was a rich and pow- 
 erful country. At the beginning of the six- 
 teenth century the German artists were the 
 only rivals of the Italian. The Reformation, 
 which was the second great modern move- 
 ment, was the work of Germany alone. 
 Learning, art, progress, wealth, flourished 
 in that great country. How was it that 
 these things were lost? How did it happen 
 that this mighty country was shattered into 
 a host of petty and powerless provinces, 
 without distinctive trait or perceptible in- 
 fluence, for something like two hundred 
 years? "While England stepped forth in 
 the age of Elizabeth to the position of the 
 great Protestant country, with a literature 
 that has been rivalled only by Greece in its 
 brief flowering time ; and Spain won do- 
 minion over half of Europe; and France be- 
 came the lawgiver in literature, politics, 
 philosophy, and fashions, to all civilized
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 5 
 
 nations; and even Holland, the meagre little 
 country, defeated the Spaniards and founded 
 something like a world-empire, Germany 
 sank from its high place into a mere inco- 
 herent mass of principalities. Its work 
 seemed forever closed. So true is this, that 
 there seems a chasm between the Germany 
 of the Reformation and the Germany of the 
 last century, and a chasm which had swal- 
 lowed wealth, art, literature in a word, 
 every sign of prosperity. The history of 
 the decadence of Germany is most painful 
 reading. The briefest possible summary of 
 it will show the gradual steps of material 
 and intellectual decline. There is no need 
 of fearing that a description of it does not 
 belong to literary history. It is only by re- 
 freshing our knowledge of these facts that 
 we can understand why a blight fell upon 
 letters and arts for so long a time, and by 
 what measures the greater man who followed 
 attempted to undo its mischievous effects. 
 We know from our own experience that our
 
 6 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 own study or thought is affected by all sorts 
 of external incidents. If there is some one 
 ill in the next room, or if the town is full of 
 excitement, our work is interrupted, and 
 what is true of every person is obviously 
 true of all persons. It is only by knowing 
 these external conditions that we can be- 
 gin to comprehend what the German writers 
 said and did. 
 
 In the first place, the Reformation tore 
 the country into two bleeding factions. 
 The Church of Rome was far too powerful 
 to yield its supremacy without a bitter 
 struggle in which freedom of conscience 
 was met by another strong principle, the 
 sense of obedience, a feeling that had so 
 long been nurtured that it had acquired 
 enormous power. Moreover, the Reforma- 
 tion was, in a great measure, the result of 
 the new spirit of the Renaissance, a spirit 
 which had grown in Germany more than 
 elsewhere, because, before the discovery of 
 America, Germany had been one of the
 
 PROM OPITZ TO LESSLtfG. 7 
 
 main avenues by which the modern spirit 
 made its way from Italy to the rest of 
 Europe. But when America was discov- 
 ered, the Mediterranean lost its central 
 position, and the Atlantic Ocean at once 
 became the new and larger field for mari- 
 time enterprise. It was a change that 
 affected the great Hanseatic cities of Ger- 
 many in exactly the same way as the open- 
 ing of the vast wheat fields of the West 
 has affected the agriculture of ^ew Eng- 
 land. Communication with India, which 
 before this had been made through Alex- 
 andria and Yenice into Germany, now fol- 
 lowed the longer but more profitable voyage 
 around the Cape of Good Hope, thus rob- 
 bing Germany of its previous share of a 
 most profitable trade. We see at once the 
 centre of power abandoning Germany and 
 moving to the west of Europe. Holland, 
 England, Portugal, France, and Spain, 
 secured what Germany lost, and that un- 
 happy country was left to carry on a most
 
 8 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 momentous struggle with swiftly dwindling 
 forces. With the decay of the material im- 
 portance of the country came what we have 
 all seen, on an infinitely smaller scale, in 
 ]N"ew England towns and villages that once 
 were prosperous, and, in their prosperity, 
 full of energy, and now are lifeless accumu- 
 lations of empty houses and shiftless citizens. 
 Then in Germany came the Thirty Years' 
 War (1618-48). This was a terrible blow 
 to the country. We may well doubt whether 
 in the whole history of modern times there 
 is a chapter of such hopeless gloom and 
 terrible tragedy. Let us bear in mind, 
 however, that it must not receive all the 
 blame for the decay of Germany; it has 
 enough to endure without that. The de- 
 terioration had begun before hostilities 
 broke out. War is not always merely 
 destruction ; not always are the bravest 
 slain without good to the country and to 
 the world. We ourselves know that even 
 out of civil war there may rise a grander
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 9 
 
 comprehension of patriotism, fuller material 
 growth, a broader view of a nation's duties 
 and responsibilities; but the Thirty Years' 
 War was like a plague or an earthquake. 
 The prosperity of the country received a 
 blow from which it did not recover for over 
 two centuries. A few statistics will make 
 this clear. In Wurtemberg the population 
 was reduced from 400,000 to 48,000; in 
 Frankenthal, from 18,000 to 324. Else- 
 where more than half the houses, and more 
 than two thirds of the inhabitants, had 
 perished ; in yet another place but one tenth 
 of the population survived. In Berlin there 
 were left only three hundred citizens. And 
 these figures make no account of the horrors 
 of the conflict for the living. A flame of 
 anarchy had passed over the whole country, 
 and consumed all feeling of security and 
 mutual dependence. The country was left 
 in ruins, and moral confidence was almost 
 wholly gone. To be sure, the leaders made 
 what seemed to them their profit out of the
 
 10 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 
 
 general confusion; but the use they made 
 of it, as we shall soon see, was of a most 
 unfortunate kind. 
 
 Already, at the time of the Reformation, 
 the theologians had confounded the intel- 
 lectual zeal of the Renaissance with the 
 perils coming from the Roman church, and 
 denounced them both with bitterness. The 
 Humanists were looked upon as public 
 enemies. The universities had shut their 
 doors to new truths and clung obstinately 
 to the old scholasticism. The Renaissance 
 had been rather a theological movement 
 than one of literary and artistic fervor, as 
 it was in other countries, although Hans 
 Sachs, Diirer, and Cranach showed that 
 the tide was turning in this direction, in 
 spite of the more exclusively theologic bent 
 which Luther gave to it. But this advance 
 was of course lost in the Thirty Years' 
 "War. "When the country at last found 
 peace, a new generation had grown up that 
 had known nothing but turmoil, and the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSINQ. 11 
 
 work of civilization had almost to begin 
 anew at a remote point. The rulers and 
 the nobility had wholly lost touch with their 
 own country and begun to model them- 
 selves after the French, who then, under 
 Louis XIII. and XIV., were imposing their 
 standard of taste on all Europe, and this 
 change is one that requires our closest 
 attention. 
 
 We must remember that the Gallomania 
 which henceforth prevailed in Germany 
 cannot be explained simply as the result 
 of more intimate acquaintance w'ith the 
 French who had taken part in the war; 
 nor was it by any means peculiar to Ger- 
 many alone. To be sure, it struck deeper 
 there than elsewhere. Every princeling 
 maintained his court like a miniature Ver- 
 sailles; he generally constructed a little 
 fortress which was garrisoned by a hand- 
 ful of soldiers, who were drilled like the 
 mighty armies of France. Germany was 
 spotted over with these reduced copies of
 
 12 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 
 
 its great neighbor, when every vice and ex- 
 travagance that were destroying the foun- 
 dations of a mighty kingdom were keeping 
 the impoverished Germans in misery. Au- 
 gustus the Strong, of Saxony, spent, on a 
 single festival, an amount that is variously 
 estimated as from one to five millions of 
 thalers; on another, about four millions. 
 Karl Eugene, of Wurtemberg, maintained a 
 suite of two thousand persons. Augustus 
 the Strong had set five hundred peasants 
 and two hundred and fifty miners to work 
 destrovin: a forest in order to make a 
 
 / <j 
 
 pleasure-ground. Their more serious em- 
 ployments and interests may be gathered 
 from the mention of a struggle which agi- 
 tated the princely houses who envied the 
 privilege that the electoral (kurfurstlicJie) 
 ambassadors enjoyed of having their chairs 
 on the same carpet as the Imperial Chief 
 Commissioner. Finally, their princely 
 hearts glowed with manly pride when di- 
 plomacy decided that their ambassadors
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 13 
 
 might sit with the two front legs of their 
 chairs on the fringes of the carpet. 
 
 The whole country swarmed with officials. 
 Positions were bought; professorships were 
 sometimes the property of minors. The 
 two thousand principalities into which Ger- 
 many was divided, suffered, although not 
 equally, from these miseries. As Bieder- 
 mann has pointed out, the whole population 
 was divided into two classes the official 
 class and their victims. Everyone tried to 
 become an official, and if he could do that, 
 his interest led him to keep the others 
 down. The full particulars of this condition 
 of affairs cannot be given here, but it will 
 be readily seen that the country was in 
 a wretched state. "We shall come across 
 countless instances of the way in which this 
 spirit manifested itself in literature, and we 
 shall notice how great is its divergence 
 from that of the early humanism. Yet this 
 divergence is to be noticed in every country 
 of Europe. In England the first inspiriting
 
 14 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLNTG. 
 
 effect of the Renaissance flourished for 
 some time in the magnificence of the Eliza- 
 bethan drama. It finally succumbed before 
 the courtly, artificial style which was promi- 
 nent in the work of the early Italians, and 
 in France won a speedy victory over the 
 confused efforts of Hardy, and even over 
 Corneille's early attempts to withstand the 
 movement of the time in the direction of 
 classicism, and away from the union of 
 medievalism with classicism, that began so 
 well in England. In Germanv, as is well 
 
 C-7 *J v 
 
 known, the beginning had been very prom- 
 ising. Hans Sachs struck a note which 
 showed clearly that the new influence was 
 combining with the old one, and it would 
 have been natural to expect that literature 
 in Germany would have flourished, for a 
 time at least, with an original fervour as 
 characteristic as that of England and Spain 
 before they succumbed .to classicism. Yet, 
 while those two countries gained new 
 strength from their augmented material
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 15 
 
 prosperity, Germany lost hers; and after 
 the Thirty Years' "War the coherent life 
 of the country, already in decay, was 
 destroyed. The shattered relations of the 
 past could no more be resumed than a 
 Shakespearian play can be written to-day 
 in Boston, or than roses can bloom in 
 snow and ice. The new tendency of 
 civilization had begun the work of ruin, 
 and the war completed the task. 
 
 Let us see if we may not find out some 
 of the reasons for this momentous change, 
 and our task will be the more inter- 
 esting if we bear in mind that it was one 
 which affected English literature as well 
 as the German; though, for reasons to be 
 pointed out, not to the same extent. It 
 was a universal modification of enthusiasm 
 in the direction of formal correctness. The 
 sole model was Latin literature, and it is 
 only apparent on examination how much 
 the work of the old Roman writers has 
 become an inspiration to modern civiliza-
 
 16 FROM OPITZ TO LESSTOG. 
 
 tion. In spite of the most ardent efforts 
 to extirpate medievalism, its historic posi- 
 tion could not be destroyed, although it 
 was much modified. Yet the natural 
 consequence of copying the literature of 
 another race, written, too, in a language 
 that was swiftly becoming a dead one, 
 was this: that literature fell entirely into 
 the hands of the learned, and became an 
 aristocratic possession. And herein, too, it 
 followed one of the strongest movements 
 of the time; indeed, it is fairer to say they 
 were both expressions of one thing, the 
 predominance of aristocracy in every 
 department of thought, in government as 
 in odes, in the church as in education. 
 
 Let us bear in mind that, two centuries 
 ago, not only was the work of the ancients 
 the most admired model that the world 
 knew, but that there was then only begin- 
 ning the momentous change by no 
 means even now wholly accomplished 
 which has modified the intellectual pro-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLNXJ. 17 
 
 cesses of men as completely as steam has 
 modified their material condition. Just as 
 until within about half a century all travel- 
 ling was done by sail or with the aid of 
 horses, in the time of Solomon and of 
 the Romans, as during our Revolutionary 
 War, so, until the diffusion of the Coper- 
 nican system, men regarded their position 
 in the universe as the central one; the sun, 
 moon, and stars were thought to have 
 been created for their sole good; and it 
 also remained one of the accepted common- 
 places of belief that men were the degen- 
 erate descendants of a more glorious race 
 of the past. Modern science has shown 
 the inaccuracy of this notion, and by so 
 doing has weakened our dependence on 
 classical literature. Weakened, I say, not 
 destroyed, for we cannot understand the 
 work of our ancestors without understand- 
 ing what it was that they felt and en- 
 deavored to convey, and how it was 
 that they thought and wrote as they did.
 
 18 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 But this historical interest, important 
 though it be, is very different from 
 dependence on the classics as the sole 
 repository of profane learning, which was 
 one important result of the Renaissance. 
 The value of native literature is something 
 that has only recently been learned, and it 
 will be interesting to watch the steps by 
 which this was done in Germany. After 
 the Thirty Years' War, literature lan- 
 guished. The natural growth of the Re- 
 naissance had already begun to fail under 
 the theological controversies that preceded 
 that terrible tragedy. One of the most 
 important of the efforts to atone for ab- 
 sence of inspiration by zealous work was 
 the foundation of the Fruit-bearing Society 
 in 1617, which was established for the 
 purpose of encouraging literature. The 
 inspiring model of this, and the similar 
 societies that followed it, was the Italian 
 Academies. The French Academy, which 
 was founded in 1629, was another proof
 
 FtfOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 19 
 
 of the existence of similar needs in that 
 country. Both the Academy and its hum- 
 ble rival, the Fruit-bearing Society, were 
 intended as literary tribunals, which should 
 find a way out of the confusion that dark- 
 ened intellectual progress. The German 
 society was composed of seven hundred 
 and fifty members, among whom were au- 
 thors, grammarians, philologists, rhetori- 
 cians, and a host of non-producers who 
 were interested in literature. These were 
 almost entirely people of gentle birth. The 
 members were busily employed, according 
 to their light, in polishing the language 
 and introducing those graces of expression 
 and manners which we shall soon see out- 
 wardly prominent in most of the modern 
 nations. The war, however, interfered 
 with this society; yet more fatal to it was 
 the remoteness of its interests from the 
 national life. While with one hand it 
 turned towards the brilliant literatures of 
 Italy and France and began to translate
 
 20 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 the works that had won fame there, it 
 also kept on good terms with mediaeval- 
 ism, as was shown by Neumark's assertion 
 that Japhet's grandson had settled in As- 
 cania, i. ., the Duchy of Anhalt, and 
 that among his direct descendants were 
 Manus, the first King of Germany, a con- 
 temporary of Abraham, 1 and the founder 
 of Trier; Servus, King of the Suabians, 
 etc., a genealogy which was demanded 
 by the alleged descent of the French from 
 Francus, the son of Hector, and of the 
 Britains from Brutus, a grandson of 
 .ZEneas. 2 It will be observed that the 
 Germans made up for their late arrival in 
 this fabulous antiquity by going back to a 
 remoter origin than other nations. Mat- 
 
 1 Yet even in the new edition of the " Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica," we read that " the Chinese Shoo-King " (the 
 Dock of History) " takes us back to about the time of 
 Noah." Sue vol. v., p. 660. 
 
 2 For further mention of these genealogies see the very 
 interesting book of Arturo Graf, " Roma nella memoria 
 e nolle Immaginazione del Medio Evo." Turin, 1883; 
 i. 28, and note p. 53.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSINXJ. 21 
 
 ters of orthography and spelling were de- 
 bated with much fervour. In general, 
 however, literature derived but little profit 
 from these well-meant endeavors to adapt 
 the country to the new light that was 
 rising. The lamentable divisions of the 
 country stood in the way of the formation 
 of any general enthusiasm, and each petty 
 principality was an intrenched camp where 
 lurked prejudice and ignorance. 
 
 When we learn that among the questions 
 discussed by the members of the society 
 was whether the Germans had any share in 
 building the Tower of Babel, and whether 
 the German language was spoken at Greece 
 and Rome, we are reminded of the subjects 
 given out by the French Academy for dis- 
 cussion just before the Revolution: "How 
 often was the Temple of Janus closed ? " 
 * What were the attributes of Jupiter Am- 
 mon?" etc., and we begin to doubt the 
 efficiency of academies in conveying en- 
 lightenment. Certainly the German society
 
 2& FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 
 
 scarcely verified its name. Its rivals were 
 scarcely more fortunate. Some of them 
 represented a violent reaction against 
 French influence, but the subtler conse- 
 quences of the new spirit manifested itself 
 even in them. They sought to remove all 
 Gallicisms from their language, but they 
 could not keep from falling into line with 
 the more important part of the movement, 
 which represented to them, as to everyone, 
 the advance of modern thought. It is 
 sufficiently clear that they moved further 
 and further away from any connection with 
 popular literature, and herein they followed 
 in the same direction with what was done 
 in all the other countries of Europe. Yet 
 nowhere w r as the discord more marked than 
 in Germany. The explanation is in part 
 that remote and foreign ideals were chosen 
 from antiquity, but we must also remember 
 that the schism was not caused by this fact 
 alone. While the upper classes rose in edu- 
 cation and what was in many ways refine-
 
 FEOM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 23 
 
 ment, the lower classes sank from the level 
 of ease which they had enjoyed during the 
 middle ages. They lost power, which was 
 speedily grasped by the aristocracy. This 
 was true throughout Europe, but nowhere 
 was it truer than in Germany, where relig- 
 ious discussions and civil war had done 
 their worst, and where arrogance on one 
 side was met by servility on the other. 
 The political history explains the literary, 
 just as literature always illustrates the poli- 
 tical, history of a country. 
 
 What, then, the societies which I have 
 briefly mentioned actually accomplished, 
 was slight. Altogether they did less than 
 a single writer, Opitz, who was himself 
 a member of the Fruit-bearing Society. 
 They served to foster a general uniformity 
 of taste; but the law, so to speak, was first 
 laid down by Opitz. It was not a new law 
 by any manner of means. Few laws are, 
 for that matter. They are but the conden- 
 sation of a widespread feeling, the statement
 
 24 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 of a general desire. The modifications that 
 Opitz helped to introduce into Germany 
 were generally described as resulting from 
 French influence, and their sway in Ger- 
 many was doubtless much furthered by the 
 predominance of French taste in this coun- 
 try as elsewhere, though this was more 
 marked in Germany than anywhere. Yet, 
 although the same tendency manifested 
 itself first with great distinctness, and was 
 followed in England by Ben Jonson, with- 
 out knowledge of what was done in France, 
 the French acquired the completest mastery 
 of it, and gave it their name by right of 
 conquest, because they adapted and applied 
 it most successfully. It harmonized, too, 
 with the political system of which Louis 
 XIV. was the most eminent exponent, un- 
 der whose hands France became a grand 
 and powerful country, while the German 
 imitations were ludicrous miniatures of its 
 splendor, just as their so-called Gallic lit- 
 erature was a mere confused echo of the 
 great French classic literature.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 25 
 
 Opitz's Bucli von der deutsclien Poeterei 
 was written and published in 1624. There 
 is much in it that has a remote sound to our 
 ears, but it had at the time all the charm 
 of eternal truth. Here are some of its 
 precepts : 
 
 "Heroic verse excludes what is not suitable, and 
 brings in much that does belong there, but is new 
 and unexpected, introducing all sorts of fables, his- 
 tories, arts of war, slaughters, councils, storms of 
 wind, rain, and thunder, and whatever necessarily 
 awakens our awe ; and everything in such order as if 
 one thing followed the other and came unsought into 
 the book." 
 
 " Tragedy is suited for the majesty of heroic verse, 
 except that it seldom permits the introduction of 
 people of humble birth or common deeds, because it 
 concerns itself with one of royal lineage, murders, 
 despairs, slaughters of fathers and children, fires, incest, 
 wars and tumults, lamentations, outcries, sighs, and 
 such tilings." 
 
 " Comedy has to do with common matters and per- 
 sons: it treats of weddings, banquets, games, the 
 deceits and knaveries of servingmen, braggart foot- 
 Boldiers, love-matters, the frivolity of youth, the avarice 
 of the aged, low amours, and such things which are 
 daily occurrence among common people. Hence those 
 who have nowadays written comedies have greatly
 
 26 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING-. 
 
 erred, in that they have brought into them emperors 
 and potentates, thereby running full in the face of the 
 laws of comedy." 
 
 "Eclogues or pastoral songs have to do with sheep, 
 goats, seagoing, harvests, fruits, fishing, and other out- 
 door things; and whatever the subject, as love, 
 marriages, deaths, courtships, banqueting, etc., it is 
 treated in a rustic and simple manner." 
 
 "In elegies one finds first only sad things, but, 
 afterwards, love matters, complaints about one's mis- 
 tress, longing for death, letters, yearnings for the 
 absent, narrations of one's life," etc. 
 
 This congeries of definitions and precepts 
 was taken for the most part from the 
 "Poetices" of J.C. Scaliger (1561), a book 
 that first froze into solid shape the mass of 
 pedantry that had grown up from the read- 
 ing of the classics. In accordance with his 
 principles, Opitz at once set himself to the 
 work of translating abundantly the master- 
 pieces of modern and ancient literature into 
 German, a task which occupied all his con- 
 temporaries throughout Europe; and his 
 real intellectual cojtrtemporaries, it is to be 
 remembered, were the Pleiad among the 
 French, and the early !Elizabj3thans among
 
 PROM OPITZ TO LESSUTO. 27 
 
 the English. Thus he translated a play of 
 Seneca's and the "Antigone" of Sophocles, 
 a task which was part of the literary educa- 
 tion of every country of Europe, as truly 
 as it is part of the discipline of every well- 
 educated young man. Thus, Dolce and 
 others in Italy, the elder Baif in France, and 
 Gascoigne in England, to give but a few 
 names, all began in the same way. Like 
 Surrey, Opitz translated from the Italians, 
 like Spenser, from the work of the French 
 Pleiad; then he made use of the work of 
 the Dutch writers, and notably of Heinsius, 
 to say nothing of abundant versions of 
 Greek, Latin, French, and Spanish writers. 
 He put into German Barclay's " Argenis " 
 and Sir Philip Sidney's " Arcadia." It was 
 with these crutches that his best work 
 was done. As an original writer he accom- 
 plished but little, in this respect he may 
 be compared with Malherbe, but his 
 influence was enormous. Other writers, 
 and notably Paul Fleming, were endowed
 
 28 FROM OPITZ TO LESSINQ-. 
 
 with greater poetical genius; but none of 
 them said just what their contemporaries 
 wanted to hear so infallibly as did Opitz, 
 and hence his position was secure. 
 
 "While under Opitz's directions, Germany 
 took that step in her literary progress which 
 was made by every country in Europe, and 
 the new formal knowledge of the classics 
 became the main foundation, instead of 
 being one of many elements, of literature. 
 There were other modifications, here as else- 
 where, which it is proper for us to observe 
 distinctly. The new interest in the classics 
 was the main change, the others are dis- 
 tinctly secondary varieties of this one great 
 substitution of the history, mythology, 
 manner of thought of Rome, and of Greece 
 as seen by the Romans, in the place of the 
 natural past of each nation. In everything 
 done in art and literature for two centuries, 
 we perceive a new background. The old 
 ideals are wiped out and scraps of classical 
 antiquity are brought in to take their place.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 29 
 
 To be sure, throughout the middle ages, 
 Roman literature had served this purpose, 
 but now it was burnished anew and had its 
 missing limbs restored. Moreover, it held 
 alone the position that it had previously 
 shared as in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 
 with purely mediaeval legends. When 
 Opitz said that it was of the highest impor- 
 tance to make a proper selection of epithets, 
 of which previously there had been a great 
 lack, and that they were to be gathered 
 especially from Greek and Latin, he foretold 
 the course which writers were to follow for 
 a long time. When he illustrated his mean- 
 ing by examples taken from Latin writers, 
 he used the only models that were authori- 
 tative. When he advised the employment 
 of full and forcible phrases in speaking of 
 important subjects, as gods, heroes, princes, 
 cities, etc., and that these should not be 
 simply named but described with high and 
 splendid language, citing "Vergil's method 
 as an example ; when he did this, I say,
 
 30 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLNX3-. 
 
 he won the glory which falls to that rare 
 man who gives advice that is followed. 
 Possibly this is not always the best advice; 
 but, however this may be, we must remem- 
 ber that it is not Opitz who spoke ; he was 
 but the mouthpiece of the new spirit. The 
 authority of the classics, which was thus 
 asserting itself, was simply the authority of 
 the best that men had uttered on the 
 problems of life and, what is perhaps the 
 most important, of the best way of uttering 
 it; for it was a rhetorical change almost as 
 much as anything else.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 IN studying the pseudo- classicism we 
 notice three distinct steps that it took, 
 three currents of the movements of the 
 Renaissance. The first in time was that 
 which we have just seen in our brief ex- 
 amination of Opitz; and Opitz personifies 
 the whole movement in German literature, 
 for it is always convenient, in dealing with 
 the past, to condense a great deal into one 
 proper name. Thus, Leonidas stands for 
 the Greek resistance to Persia; Washing- 
 ton, for the whole course of our revolu- 
 tionary war; Pope, for the classical wave in 
 English literature. The second one, which 
 also took its rise in Italy, was a form of 
 writing of which elegance and conceits 
 were the most admired constituents. It 
 was a refinement of the rugged virtues of 
 
 31
 
 32 FROM OPITZ TO LESSEN'G. 
 
 the school of Trissino and Rucellai in Italy ; 
 of that of Ronsard, even Malherbe, and 
 the earlier Jodelle in France, and of Ben 
 Jonson in England. In England it formed 
 what we know as the metaphysical school 
 of poetry. The third was the French clas- 
 sicism which began in England with Dry- 
 den and flourished under Pope, and per- 
 vaded Germany under the hands of Canitz 
 and Gottsched. It is the second one that 
 we have now to examine; and while it is 
 part of the advantage to be got from 
 studying a foreign literature, that it throws 
 light upon our own, our own in its turn 
 also throws light upon that of its neigh- 
 bors. Hence it is quite possible for us 
 to follow the further vagaries of German 
 literature by studying the corresponding 
 excuses in the English poets. What we 
 shall notice will be a similar loosening of 
 the hold upon simplicity, and the search 
 for exaggerated refinement in both. This 
 is soon conspicuous in the works of Klaj
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 33 
 
 (1616-1656) and of Harsdorffer (1607- 
 1658), for the German side, who may be 
 compared with some of their English con- 
 temporaries; and, indeed, the simultaneous 
 study of what was done in the two coun- 
 tries will be of service in showing how 
 inevitable are what every writer takes to 
 be his best claims to originality. We hum- 
 bler people might as well be proud of the 
 fact that we shiver when we are cold, or 
 put on airs of superiority because we 
 strictly follow fashion in dress. 
 
 Let us, in the first place, notice that the 
 delicate observation of the beauty of flow- 
 ers, trees, and gardens is common to the 
 corresponding poets in the two languages. 
 In his " Blumenlied " Harsdorffer sings: 
 
 Die Bltiraelein sind ohne Zahl, 
 
 und gcben nns die freye Wahl, 
 
 die schonsten auszulesen. 
 
 Von Ost und Westen schaut man hier 
 
 die wunder seltne Blumen-zier, 
 
 so jemals sind gewesen. 
 
 Der Safft, hat Krafft
 
 34 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 und das Leben, eingegeben, 
 
 der sie mahlet, 
 
 ja mit Purpur-Blut bestralet. 
 
 Es bleibet bey der Blumen nicht, 
 
 die Baumen bringen ihr Gericht, 
 
 die Pfirsing und Marilen : 
 
 Die Weichsel, Feigen, und Granat 
 
 und was man in der Fremde, hat, 
 
 kan man hierum erzielen 
 
 Citron, Melon, etc. 
 
 Observe, too, " Das Vogelsang " : 
 
 Nachtigal ftlhre der Vogelein Reyen ! 
 Tone, wann andre freyen in Maien, 
 Lispele, wispel Router zum Pferd, 
 klage mit schlagen, mache dich wehrt ! 
 Lasse das zarte Stimmelein steigen 
 Orgel und Pfeiffen, Lauten und Geigen, 
 miissen verstummend gegen dir schweigen. 
 
 Read, too, Philipp von Zesen's "An seine 
 Gedanken bei herzunahendem Friihlinge," 
 as well as numberless other poems of the 
 time, and there is to be found, in colder 
 language, the same innocent delight in 
 nature that is conspicuous in Herrick 
 (1591-1674?), and Marvell (1620-1678), to 
 mention the most conspicuous. Indeed, the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 35 
 
 more we examine, the more striking be- 
 comes the likeness; we seem to be reading 
 duller Herricks, and Marvells, and Carews, 
 and Herberts. What shall we examine 
 first? The mere form of the poems? We 
 may recall, to take the most singular ex- 
 amples, Herbert's poems, "The Altar," in 
 which the lines, by being longer at the 
 beginning and at the end, with all the 
 intervening ones of uniformly smaller size, 
 give to the eye a crude representation of 
 an altar; his "Easter Wings," in which we 
 notice a similar process of imitation; and 
 Herrick's "Pillar of Fame." This ingenious 
 device, which was known in Greece, prac- 
 tised in the East, and was a favorite form 
 in the Middle Ages, found many admirers 
 in Germany at about the same time. Sim- 
 ilarly constructed poems still survive, it is 
 curious to notice, in valentines, a form of 
 composition in which one is safe in not 
 expecting originality. In these conven- 
 tional productions we find, as we should
 
 36 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 expect, relics of a distant past. Not every 
 one writes valentines every year, and those 
 who do, adopt a form that has, at the most, 
 one three hundred and sixty-fifth as much 
 wear as the more usual forms of correspon- 
 dence. Hence, methods are preserved that 
 attrition has rendered obsolete elsewhere. 
 Indeed, the very gew-gaws of the paper on 
 which valentines are printed have kept 
 alive old forms of decoration contemporary 
 with the lyric inspiration that endears them 
 to the receiver, just as the oldest fashions 
 are preserved in court and ecclesiastical 
 dresses, especially of higher dignitaries, 
 and in the unfrequent ceremony of 
 coronation. In time, perhaps, it may be 
 possible to make a chronological table of 
 these curious survivals, of cross-bows as 
 well as valentines, and to estimate the date 
 when they flourished by the age of those 
 who now make use of them. 
 
 Harsdorffer composed an "Abbildung 
 des Reichsapfels" and an w Abbildung des
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSrtfG. 37 
 
 zweispitzigen Parnassus." l Another cu- 
 rious form is exemplified in Herrick's 
 " Upon Love, by way of Question and 
 Answer : " 
 
 I bring ye love ? Quest. What will love do ? 
 
 Ans. Like, and dislike ye. 
 I bring ye love. Quest. What will love do ? 
 
 Ans. Stroke ye, to strike yc. 
 I bring ye love. Quest. What will love do ? 
 
 Ans. Love will befool ye, etc. 
 
 With this curious form, which is doubt- 
 less an inheritance from the Middle Ages, 
 we may compare Hellwig's "Wechselge- 
 sang : " 
 
 Helianthus Es klappern, und plappern, und pap- 
 pern, 
 
 Montana in Nesten die Storche. 
 Es tirililiret, tiliret, umschwtiret, 
 Ilel. in Ltlften die Lerche. 
 Es kittert, und flittert, sich wittert, 
 Mont. der Stiglitz bey Tag. 
 
 Es zwitzert, und witzert, und zizert 
 Hel. das Zeisslein in Haag. 
 
 1 The student will recall many further illustrations of 
 what is but mentioned here, e.g., the prefatory lines to 
 Sylvester's " Dn Bartas," and Schottelius's "Pocal von 
 Dactilischen und Anapestischen." 
 
 j. 
 
 1 *> 
 
 I H.'
 
 38 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 Herrick's "Aphorisms" and Logan's 
 " Sinngedichte " correspond equally. As 
 for the more intimate similarities of thought, 
 the resemblances are even more striking. 
 Scheffler's poem comparing Jesulein to a 
 Blumelein, 
 
 Ich weiss eki liebes Blttmelein 
 
 Mit Gottes Thau begossen, 
 
 In einem jungfraulichen Schrein 
 
 Zur Winters-zeit entsprossen : 
 
 Diss Bltimelein heisst Jesulein, 
 
 Ew'ger Jugend, grosser Tugend, 
 
 Schon und lieblich, reich und herrlich : 
 
 Menschen-kind, 
 
 Wic selig 1st, der dieses Bliimelein findt. 
 
 is a good example of what in England 
 expressed itself in poems like Herbert's 
 w Jesu," where we find the same quality of 
 conceit, although in another guise than 
 here. The spirit that animates the " Vani- 
 tas ! Yanitatum Yanitas ! " of Gryphius is 
 the same that we find in Herbert's " Home : " 
 
 Nothing but drought and dearth, but bush and brake, 
 Which way so e'er I look, I see ;
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 39 
 
 Some may dream merrily, but when they wake, 
 They dress themselves, and come to Thee. 
 
 We talk of harvests there are no such things 
 But when we leave our corn and hay ; 
 
 There is no fruitful yeare but that which brings 
 The last and lov'd, though dreadful day. 
 
 When we come to Hofman von Hof- 
 manswaldau (1618-1679) we reach a man 
 who gave extreme expression to those va- 
 garies that are conspicuous in what are 
 called the metaphysical poets of England, 
 from Donne to Cowley. But, before we 
 take up these grotesque excesses, we may 
 note how in the lines " An Doris " he uses 
 the same similes and preaches the same 
 lesson that we find in Ben Jonson, " Gather 
 ye rose-buds while ye may," in Herrick, 
 and in Waller's w Go, lovely rose " : 
 
 Was wilt du, Doris, maclien ? 
 Brich deinen stolzen geist ! 
 Diss, was du schonheit heist, 
 Sind blumen-gleiche sachen, 
 Die unbestandig sind, 
 Und fliehen wie der wind.
 
 40 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 Es wird auf deinen wangen 
 Nicht steter fi-iihling seyn ; 
 Es weicht der sternen schein, 
 Als wie der bluruen prangen. 
 Die Zeit, so alles bricht 
 Schont auch des leibes nicht. 
 
 Was 1st der schonheit glantzen, 
 Als ein gesch winder Blitz? 
 Sein zubereiter sitz 
 Besteht in engen grantzen. 
 Kein fluss verrauscht so bald, 
 Als schonhcit und gestalt. 
 
 Was heute purpur traget, 
 Und alabaster fuhrt, 
 Was sich mit rosen ziert, 
 Wird morgen hingeleget, 
 Und ruhet ungeacht 
 In seiner todes-nacht. 
 
 Nun, Doris, lerne kennen, 
 Was falscher hochmuth sey, 
 Bleib nicht alleine frey, 
 Lass deine jugend brennen, 
 Und lass der liebe glut, 
 Durchwandern hertz und blut. 
 
 Gebrauche deine schatze 
 Weil blut und blilte siegt ; 
 Wann dich die Zeit beti-flgt 
 So trennet auch das netze, 
 So vormahls um dich hieng 
 Und manche seele fieng.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 4:1 
 
 So du dich selbst kanst lieben, 
 So nimm die Warnung an, 
 Die ich dir itzt gethan : 
 Ich werde mich betrtiben, 
 So diese rose stirbt 
 Und ohne lust verdirbt." 
 
 Certainly it is easy to see, from the suc- 
 cessful poems of this period, what it was 
 that their writers tried to express, and this 
 is something that in English at least has 
 made the time memorable for graceful and 
 charming work. It is not surprising, when 
 we recall the political and social condition 
 of Germany, that the poets accomplished 
 less there, yet they did much that was cer- 
 tainly noteworthy, although they are best 
 known for some of the extravagances which 
 were inherent in their zeal for curious con- 
 ceits. For every literary method, however 
 excellent, carries within it the seeds of de- 
 cay. Absolute perfection cannot be found; 
 good taste means simply that there is such 
 a thing as bad taste; eloquence implies the 
 existence of bombast, just as we should
 
 42 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 call nothing tall if there were not shorter 
 things with which comparison is made. 
 The boldness of the Elizabethan drama 
 soon degenerated into a hollow imitation of 
 grandeur; the correctness of the school 
 of Pope into an arid, juiceless precision; 
 and perhaps in our own day we are occa- 
 sionally thrilled by ingenuities of rhetoric 
 which we mistake for poetical wonders. 
 The fault is, however, more obvious in the 
 past, after it has been definitely determined 
 by universal agreement; and it is nowhere 
 more conspicuous than in the inferior work 
 of this school of poets. In their hunt for 
 what was striking, they found much that 
 was trivial. Cowley and Donne, and in- 
 deed Herbert, furnish many examples of 
 this tendency. No one showed it more 
 
 / 
 
 markedly than did Hofman von Hofmans- 
 waldau. Here is a gem in proof: 
 
 ABRISS EINES FALSCHEtf FREUNDES. 
 Was 1st doch ingemein ein Freund in dieser welt ? 
 Ein Spiegel der vergrosst und falschlich schoner 
 machct,
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 43 
 
 Ein Pfennig der nicht Strich und nichfc Gewichte 
 
 halt; 
 
 Ein Wcsen, so aus Zorn und bittrer Galle lachet, 
 Ein Strauchstein, dessen Glantz uns Schand' und 
 
 Schaclen bringt ; 
 
 Ein Glas, an Tituln gut, und doch mit Gifft erfilllet, 
 Ein Dolch, der schreckend ist, und uns in Hertzen 
 
 dringt, 
 Ein Heilbrunn (wie er heisst), aus dera Verderben 
 
 quillet, 
 
 Ein goldgestiekter Strang, der uns die Gurgel bricht ; 
 Ein Freund, der ohngefehr das Hertze hat verlohren, 
 Ein Honigwurm, der stets mit sussem Stachel sticht ; 
 Ein weisscs Ilennenoy, das Drachen hat gebohren, 
 Ein falscher Crocodil, der wcinend uns zerreist ; 
 Ein recht Sirenen-Weib, das singend uns ertrancket, 
 Ein Safft, der lieblich reucht, und doch die Haut 
 
 durchbeist, 
 Ein Mann, der uns umhalst, wenn seine Hand uns 
 
 hencket, 
 
 Ein Giiftbaun voller Bluth, ein Moloch Musicant ; 
 Ein iibergoldte Perl, ein Lock-ass zu den Nothen, 
 
 Ein Apfel von Damasc, ein falscher Diamant ; 
 Ein tiberzuckcrt Gifft, ein Irrlicht, uns zu todten, 
 
 Ein Pfeiffer in das Zarn, ein Spotter unser Pein ; 
 Ein goldner Urtels-Tisch und cine faule Sttitze, 
 
 Ein Zeug, der bald verschleist, ein ungregiindtcr 
 
 Schcin, 
 Dem Tcuffel allzusehr, dem Menschen wenig ntitze. 
 
 Ein mehres lasst mir jetzt die TJngedult nicht zu ; 
 Mein Leser, fleuch den Krnhm von solchen falschen 
 Waaren,
 
 44 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 Was diesen Eifer-Reim erprest, das meide du ; 
 Ach, hatt' ich, was ich schrieb, nicht auch zugleich 
 erf ahren ! 
 
 Lohenstein (1635-1683), who wrote tra- 
 gedies that outdo in horrors what his 
 contemporary accomplished in conceits, is 
 another example of the same school. 
 Andreas Gryphius also wrote tragedies, but 
 under the soothing and chastening influence 
 of Vondel, the Dutch tragedian. 
 
 What we notice first, on thinking over 
 the work of such writers, is the inevitable- 
 ness of a change, and the change soon 
 came; it appeared about simultaneously in 
 England and Germany; and here it was 
 that what is properly called French influ- 
 ence first asserted itself. It also took 
 another and strictly national form in the 
 hands of Christian Weise and others, but 
 the main direction lay in obedience to 
 French taste. 
 
 Canitz (1654-1699) was among the first 
 to write in this new fashion. He began
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 45 
 
 with imitating the idols of his time, just as 
 Dryden did in his early poems ; but he soon, 
 like his greater English contemporary, gave 
 in his allegiance to the doctrine of Boileau. 
 His satirical poems are inspired by the 
 French writer, and his constant aim was to 
 use poetry as an expression of reason ap- 
 plied to life. Then, too, he wrote a number 
 of occasional poems, like Dryden's elegies, 
 which, in their day, won great admiration. 
 Besser and Konig carried this method to 
 ludicrous excess. Konig, for example, 
 in a poem called "Heldenlob Friedrich 
 August's," said: 
 
 Kaum hast du dich vermahlt, so heisst ein Zug nach 
 
 Ehren 
 
 Dich nach Italien zum zweiten Male kehren, 
 Die Welschen raussten da beschamt vor Dir gestehen, 
 Dass selbst ihr altes Reich dergleichen nie gesehen 
 Und glaubten, weil sie Dich so hochst vollkommen 
 
 fanden, 
 Dass alle Helden Roms in Dir, Held, auferstanden. 
 
 or, to borrow from Hettner again, in his 
 "August im Lager," Konig described the
 
 46 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 
 
 meeting between the kings of Poland and 
 Prussia : 
 
 Der Ritter edlc Schaar vom wcissen Adlerorden, 
 Die iiber dreissig stark damals gezahlct worden, 
 Sie Avurden hingefiihrt, die von der Kriegesart, 
 Von unserm Feldmarschall, dem tapfern Wacker- 
 
 barth, 
 
 Die aber ihren Dienst dern Hof und Staat erwiesen, 
 Vora Oberkaramerherrn, dem v/ohlgesinntcn Fricsen. 
 Der Ordensadler blitzt mit manchcm Demnnstein, 
 Ilir Brustband schliest das Wort mit giildnen Strahlen 
 
 ein : 
 
 Den Glauben, das Geseltz, den Konig zu verfechten. 
 Das blaue brcite Band hangt links ab zu der Rechten, 
 Der Aufschlag ihres Rocks ist weder lang noch bveit, 
 Der Degengurt gestickt als wie ihr Ordenkleid. 
 
 Canitz avoided these lapses of taste, but 
 the "Zeitgeist" revenged itself upon him 
 in the edition of his works which his ad- 
 mirer Ivonig brought out; in the prefatory 
 memoir the editor says that Prussia con- 
 tends with the Mark the honor of being 
 Canitz's birthplace, just as seven Grecian 
 cities contended that Homer was born in 
 them. "But," he goes on, "while the 
 birthplace of the Greek bard is still
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING-. 47 
 
 doubtful, the reader of this memoir will al- 
 ready have perceived that the Freiherr 
 von Canitz, although he sprang from the 
 noble race of Prussian Canitzes, yet was 
 not born in Prussia, or brought up there, 
 and, in the whole course of his life, went 
 there but once, in the campaign of the 
 Kurfurst Friedrich Wilhelm. Consequently 
 Bulen has the sole claim for this honor" 
 (p. 97 ff.). The same genial friend thus 
 describes Canitz's poetry: "His thoughts, 
 like his expressions, bear indubitable wit- 
 ness to his noble education, his knowledge 
 of the world, his associations (Zutritt) with 
 great people, his intimacy with the court, 
 his familiar intercourse with the highest 
 councillors of state, and his acquaintance 
 with the most learned and intelligent men 
 of his time." In short, he was a court poet, 
 and thus he could write, in some lines on 
 the death of the Kurfurstinn Hcnriette, the 
 wife of him who was later Friedrich I : 
 Es konnten Ihren Leib nicht stand noch Jugend retten.
 
 48 FROM OPITZ TO LKSSING. 
 
 Again we see another curious instance 
 of the all-pervadingness of etiquette in 
 Besser's Ehren-Mahl der Frau von Canitz, 
 in which the bereaved husband is told: 
 
 Sag'ich : du solltest dich besinnen, 
 
 Was nocli fiir Trost dein Leiden hat, 
 Das Beyleid dieser gantzen Stadt, 
 Ja zweyer grosscn Churftirstinnen, 
 
 Sprichst du : ein Trost von solcher Hoh 
 
 Rechtfeitige vielmehr dein Weh. 
 
 This was the poem in which the writer 
 found it impossible to express to his own 
 satisfaction the thought that the sneer about 
 women first bringing trouble into the world 
 was only true of their death. He wrote 
 to Canitz, who sent him two alternative 
 stanzas; but, meanwhile, Besser had hit on 
 something that pleased Canitz better than 
 either of them. 
 
 In his satire on poetry Canitz is very 
 severe on the extravagances of his contem- 
 poraries : 
 
 Geht wo ein Schul Regent in einem FJecken ab, 
 Mein Gott, wie rasen da die Dichter um soin Grab ;
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 49 
 
 Der Tod wird ausgefilzt, dass er dem thcueren Lebcn 
 Nicht cine langere Frist als aclitzig Jnhr gegeben ; 
 
 Die Erde wird bewegt, im Himmcl Lcrm gemacht. 
 
 Minerva, wenn sic gleich, in ihrcm Hertzon lacht, 
 Auch Phobus und sein Chor, die miisscn wider willen, 
 Sich traurig, ohne Trost, in Flor und Boy verhiillen 
 
 Mehr Gotter sieht man offt auf solccm Zettel stehn, 
 
 Als Burger in der That mit zu der Leiche gehen." 
 
 It is Boileau done over into smooth and 
 readable German. In the little lyrics of 
 this school we find the same ingenious 
 smirk that is to be found in the songs of 
 Sedley, Congreve, etc. A single example 
 will illustrate this ; it is from Besser : 
 
 Climene starb, und sprach in Scheiden : 
 
 " Nun Lisis, nun verlass, ich dich ! 
 Ish sttirbe willig und mit Freuden, 
 
 Liebt' eine dich, so schr als ich " 
 " Ach," sprach er, " mag dich das betrtiben ? 
 
 Climene, nur dein Tod ist schwer: 
 Kanst du mich selbst nicht langer lieben, 
 
 Bedarf ich keiner Liebe mchr." 
 
 There is no need of going through each 
 one of the men who speedily fell into line 
 and acquired the French drill, cutting their 
 verses after the new pattern, and expres-
 
 50 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 sing with considerate uniformity mono- 
 tonous sentiments. The most striking 
 exception is Johann Christian Gunther 
 (1695-1723), a real poet, who paid dearly 
 for living in a time of miserable artificial- 
 ity. His career was one of vice and suf- 
 fering. His hand was against every man, 
 and every man's hand was against him. 
 He uttered the severest denunciations of 
 his contemporaries, and not the conven- 
 tional literary abuse that was as artificial 
 as the love-songs of the time, but genuine 
 heart-felt wrath, like what we find in Burns. 
 One of the saddest things in the poor 
 fellow's career was this: that want com- 
 pelled him to offer his pen to patrons who 
 might want a poem turned off at a few 
 hours' notice. Let us remember, however, 
 that independence was then impossible; a 
 poet had to choose between patrons and 
 starvation. "While the other bards were 
 paying compliments to woman that were 
 as artificial as the paintings on fans, Gun-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 51 
 
 tlier wrote the story of his love in verses 
 that are full of real feeling : 
 
 In den Waldern will ich irren, 
 Vor den Menschen will ich fliehn, 
 Mit verwaysten Tauben girren, 
 Mit verscheuchten Wilde ziehn, 
 Bis der Gram mein Leben raube 
 Bis die Kraffte sich verschreyn : 
 Und da soil ein Grab von Laube 
 Milder als dein Hertze seyn ! 
 
 ISTotice, too, the simplicity of these lines 
 in a poem about his youth : 
 
 Die Nachbarskinder liessen mir 
 
 Die Ehre, sie zu lencken ; 
 
 Da spielt : und lacht : und sprungen wir 
 
 Auf Rasen, Berg : und Bancken. 
 
 Was dieser hort und jener sah, 
 
 Das in der grossen Welt geschah, 
 
 Das sucht auch ich mit vielen 
 
 Im kleinen nach zu spielen. 
 
 And the despair of this : 
 
 Nunj leiber Gott, du bleibst ja lange, 
 Ich weiss nicht, was ich denken soil. 
 Der Zweifel macht der Hoffnung bange, 
 Ich weine Bett und Bibel voll ; 
 Ach, soil denn ich nur ich allein 
 Ein Grauel meines Schopfers sein !
 
 52 FROM OPITZ TO LESSTNG. 
 
 Was helfen mich nun alle Gaben ! 
 
 Verstand und Kunst und Ehrlichkeit ! 
 
 O hatt' ich nur mein Pf und vergraben ! . 
 
 Es ware doch wohl eine Zeit, 
 
 Indem man aller Orten siehet 
 
 Wie hoch der Thoren Gliicke bluhet. 
 
 Die Strafe bessert sonst die Sunder : 
 Dies ist mehr Grausamheit als Zucht ! 
 Versuch' einmal und geh gelinder, 
 Vielleicht gewinnt es eher Frucht : 
 Ein scharfer Streich und langer Grimm 
 Macht oft die besten Herzen schlimm. 
 
 I have spoken of the striking resem- 
 blance that Gunther bears to Burns; and, 
 inasmuch as, too often, comparisons of this 
 sort are dangerous, because they save 
 thought instead of encouraging it, it may be 
 well to point out a few proofs of this sim- 
 ilarity. This first strikes us in the form 
 of the poems, and next in the unhappiness 
 of the lives of both. Gunther wrote his 
 lyrical pieces not after the artificial pat- 
 tern of his day, but to express his real 
 emotions, and the form he chose was that 
 of the " Yolkspoesie." He stands as one
 
 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 53 
 
 of the two men of this period who were 
 able to keep true to the traditions of an 
 earlier and less sophisticated method. The 
 other was Paul Fleming, a contemporary 
 of Opitz, who was rewarded with neglect 
 for his indifference to the new elegance 
 of modern verse. Gunther felt the intel- 
 lectual kinship, and wrote about himself: 
 
 Es dorffte rair ein Freund noch manch Gedachtniss 
 
 weihn, 
 
 Ich wurd' im Tode mehr, als jetzt im Leben, seyn : 
 Der stille Rosen-Thai ergetzte meinen Schatten, 
 Und lasst sich ilm vielleicht mit Flemmings Geiste 
 
 gatten. 
 
 Burns brought into modern literature all 
 the charm of the old songs and ballads. 
 He did not invent these, we must remember; 
 he had behind him many generations of 
 verse-loving Scotchmen; he was the final 
 flower, and the poet we are too apt to regard 
 as standing alone by the unaided force of 
 his genius, forgetting that no genius, how- 
 ever brilliant, can accomplish anything 
 without having behind it a vast mass of
 
 54 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 effort which too often lacks all recognition 
 by posterity. In the same way, Flemming 
 keeps touch with the popular poetry before 
 Opitz petrified verse by the pedantic rules 
 that ran over the whole of Europe. Gun- 
 ther, too, wrote verses with the same 
 charm; and, in explanation of this fact, it 
 may be possible to suggest that, inasmuch 
 as he wrote many songs to be sung by his 
 fellow-students, it was to the preservation, 
 among these upholders of tradition, of the 
 c Volkspoesie," that is due his adoption of 
 this method. 1 Even now, among student- 
 songs, there survive possibly the " Lauriger 
 Horatius," and certainly the "Gaudeamus 
 Igitur," 2 as indubitable reminiscences of the 
 carmina burana of the Middle Ages ; and 
 while the students composed verses after the 
 
 1 Something of the kind is hinted at by Erich Schmidt in 
 his " Komodien vom Studentenleben aus dem sechzehnten 
 und siebzehnten Jahrhnndert " (Leipzig, 1880), p. 21. 
 
 * Vide Creizenach " Die Aeneis, die vierte Ecloge, und 
 die Pharsalia im Mittelalter," Frankfurt-a-M., 1864, p. 16, 
 note 91, and Permverth von Barnstein, " Ubi sunt qui ante 
 nos in mnndo fuere? " Wiirzburg, 1881, pp. 104 and 133.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 55 
 
 prevailing taste, when they wished to give 
 proof of their accomplishments, they sang 
 for their own delight after the older mod- 
 els. A moment's reflection will make clear 
 the assertion that students are upholders 
 of tradition; the now obsolescent hazing, 
 the drinking customs of German societies, 
 carry the sociologist back to a remote past. 
 Gunther's lyrics have at least the charm of 
 vividness, and it is by no means impossible 
 to believe that there survived in private life 
 in Germany a spring of song which even 
 the abundant culture of pseudo-classicism 
 did not extirpate, though it hid it from 
 observation. This was what fed Gunther, 
 as, nearly a century later, it inspired Burns, 
 who sang songs to be sung, not merely 
 songs to be criticised and read. 
 
 And Gunther's life shows the misery that 
 surely awaits the man who is bold enough 
 to tell his generation the things that only 
 the next generation shall delight to hear. 
 Fleming, too, in spite of his superior
 
 56 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 poetic power, sang to deaf ears. Gunther's 
 career was one of wretched failure, partly, 
 to be sure, from his own fault; but these 
 faults were in some measure the result of 
 his perception of his unsuitability for the 
 artificial work that was demanded of him. 
 Wretched rhymesters like Konig and 
 Besser were at the top of the wave, and it 
 was almost a century before he received 
 anything like proper recognition, although 
 there was an undercurrent of admiration for 
 him among the people whose voice is never 
 heard in public. His life, like that of Blake, 
 Collins, Gray, even Burns, shows how 
 terrible is the fate of the poet who lives in 
 an unpoetic age. To win temporary suc- 
 cess he must bow to the literary taste of 
 the day, however artificial it may be, as, to 
 avoid being mobbed in the streets, he must 
 wear the dress of the period. 
 
 Gunther was far removed from the path 
 which poetry was then to follow, although 
 dim signs of a change soon began to show
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 57 
 
 themselves. We have seen hitherto the 
 indications of scarcely anything but the 
 French influence; that of England began 
 very gradually at about this time to make 
 itself felt. When reason was laying its 
 cold hand on poetry, in Germany as well as 
 in England little indications of revolt be- 
 gan to make their appearance. To speak 
 of Brockes as the maker of an epoch seems 
 like a misuse of language. He was the 
 most humdrum of mortals; his statement 
 of the influences that led him to the com- 
 position of verse might be a description of 
 the way in which he undertook to pick up 
 horseshoes. The poems themselves are ex- 
 cessively monotonous and often ludicrous, 
 but they conveyed a novelty to readers tired 
 of argument in verse, and had an influence 
 wholly disproportionate to ' their rhetorical 
 merit. Yet, if we remember that what is 
 said for the first time must be ill said, and 
 that only practice can give anything like 
 perfection, we shall cease to be surprised.
 
 58 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 The head waters of the mightiest river are 
 petty enough 5 we can step over the spring 
 from which it rises without an effort; and, 
 as it would be a hasty notion of physical 
 geography to suppose that the Mississippi 
 flows in its full, broad majesty from a 
 gorgeous grotto, so it is with intellectual 
 movements, which start from obscure cor- 
 ners : it would be a great blunder to expect 
 always to trace them back to grand and 
 dignified beginnings. Yet such is the mis- 
 taken notion of the demonic splendour of 
 genius, that half of us are amazed to find 
 that the splendour is only a later accompa- 
 niment, and has nothing to do with the 
 humble beginning. Indeed, it is a question 
 whether praise and blame, admiration and 
 contempt, have anything whatsoever to do 
 with literary history. Our sole aim should 
 be to know, and as invariably any ex- 
 pression of surprise is nothing more than a 
 confession of ignorance, our blame can 
 merely come from a lack of knowledge of
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSOR. 59 
 
 all the facts, and the same must be true of 
 our praise. The highest quality of human 
 nature is comprehension, which is a placid 
 quality. Comprehension of Brockes, at any 
 rate, confers placidity. The humble bard 
 devoted himself to singing the wonders of 
 nature and pointing out how they redounded 
 to the credit of their Creator. This task 
 he performed with cloying profusion, in his 
 w Irdisches Vergnugen in Gott." He seems 
 to have taken for his text the canticle, "O 
 all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord ; 
 praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." 
 He gazes into the " sapphire depth of the 
 firmament," w die weder Grund, noch Strom, 
 noch Ziel, noch End' umschrenckt," and 
 "mein gauzes Wesen ward ein Staub, ein 
 Punkt, ein Kichts. 
 
 Und ich verlor mich selbst. Diss schlug mich plotzlich 
 
 nieder ; 
 
 Verzweiflung drohete der ganz verwirrten Brust, 
 Allein, O heylsara Nichts ! gltickseliger Verlust ! 
 Allgegenwart'ger Gott, in dir f and ich mich wieder."
 
 60 FROM OPITZ TO LESSTNG. 
 
 He gazes at the cherry-blossom at night, 
 "beim Mondenschein," and this, be it said, 
 is about the first rising of that German 
 moon which is not yet set. " Ich glaubt es 
 konne nichts von grosser Weisse seyn. Es 
 sehien ob war ein Schnee gefallen." 
 
 Ein jeder, auch der kleinste Ast 
 
 Trug gleichsam eim schwere Last 
 
 Von zierlich weissen runden Ballen. 
 
 Es 1st kein Schwan so weiss, da nemlich jedes Blatt, 
 
 Indem daselbst des Mondes sanftes Licht 
 
 Selbst durch die zarten Blatter bricht, 
 
 Sogar den Schatten weiss and sender Schwarze hat, 
 
 Unmoglich, dacht' ich, kan auf Erden 
 
 Was weissers angetroffen werden. 
 
 The upshot of this genuine outburst of 
 admiration is that it occurred to him, 
 
 Wie sehr ich mich am Irdischen ergetze, 
 Dacht' ich, hat Gott dennoch weit grossre Schatze, 
 Die grosste Schonheit dieser Erden 
 Kann mit der Himmlisehen doch nicht verglichen 
 werden. 
 
 The same appreciative eye was turned to 
 the ant, to various flowers in his garden, to
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 61 
 
 the early bnds on his pear-tree, which in- 
 spire him with this pious assurance of 
 security : 
 
 Ach warnm soil denn ich mit kindlichem Vertrauen 
 Auf deiner Lieb' und Vater-Treu nicht bauen, 
 In fester Zuversicht, Du werdest bier, im Leben 
 Den'n meinigen und mir leicht Kost and Kleider geben. 
 
 In winter he assures his Creator that de- 
 votion is not frozen out of him : 
 
 Mein Gott ! das Feuer warmet mich 
 Und macht mich nur, dass ich nicht f riere ; 
 Dass ich im Frost auch Anmuth spure 
 Daftir erheb' und preis' ich dich ! 
 
 Ich ftihl' jetzt cinen Trieb in mir, 
 Ein Winter-Opfer dir zu bringen, 
 Und deim Wunder zu besingen 
 Die ich, auch selbst im Frost, verspiihr. 
 
 Even in the contemplation of the wolf 
 he finds material for spiritual edification: 
 
 Sind auch in Wolfen viele Dinge zu unseren 
 Nutzen noch zu linden ; Wir haben nicht nur ihrer 
 Balge im scharfen Frost uns zu erfreuen, Es dienen 
 ihrer Glieder viele zu grossem Nutz in Arzeneien. 
 
 Another instance may be taken from the 
 chamois, and it may well stand as prose :
 
 62 FROM OPITZ TO LESSItfG. 
 
 Fur die Schwindsucht ist ihr Unschlitt, ftlrs Gesicht 
 die Galle gut ; Gemsenfleisch ist gut zu esscn, und den 
 Schwindel heilt ihr Blut; Auch die Haut dicnt uns 
 nicht minder ; strahlet nicht aus diesem Thier nebst 
 der Weisheit und der Allmacht auch des Schopfers 
 Lieb hervor ? 
 
 Yet less valuable than these raptures 
 would be ridicule of them, and beneath the 
 moral lessons which were part of the tri- 
 bute he paid to the spirit of his day, as 
 ridicule would be our tribute to the spirit 
 of our day, we may see that his eye was 
 detecting a novel solemnity in what modern 
 science was making known to the world. 
 The telescope and microscope were widen- 
 ing the field of the emotions. While 
 Brockes was exhaling in verse the raptures 
 he felt over the " Punckten-formigen Ge- 
 stalt der Himmels-Lichter," which gave him 
 " sichere Schlusse," and he felt that " ich 
 selber etwas grosses bin," and while in the 
 blue firmament there was detected, 
 
 Ein ewiges, allgegenwartig's all, 
 
 Ein unermess'lichs Ganz, in dem, als wie ein Ball
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 63 
 
 Ira weiten Ocean, nicht nur die Erd'allein, 
 Nein, ein unzahlbar Herr von Sonnen, Sternen, Erden, 
 Dir bloss durch ihn umringt, erfallt, erhalten werden, 
 In stiller Majestat, in reger Ruhe schwimmt. 
 
 Addison, in the Spectator, was saying very 
 nearly the same thing in prose : 
 
 But when we survey the whole earth at once, and 
 the several planets that lie within its neighborhood, 
 we are filled with a pleasing astonishment to see so 
 many worlds hanging one above another, and sliding 
 round their axles in such an amazing pomp and solem- 
 nity. (No. 420.) 
 
 Again (No. 565) : 
 
 Were the sun, which enlightens the part of the 
 creation, with all the host of planetary worlds that 
 move about him, utterly extinguished and annihilated, 
 they would not be missed more than a grain of sand 
 upon the sea shore. ... In this consideration 
 of God Almighty's omnipresence and omniscience 
 every uncomfortable thought vanishes. He cannot 
 but regard everything that has being, especially such 
 of his creatures who fear they are not regarded by 
 him, etc. 
 
 It is easy to understand how these dis- 
 coveries rendered men discontented with
 
 64 FROM OPITZ TO LESSI^G. 
 
 the narrow limitations that had previously 
 impressed themselves on human thought 
 and feelings. The spirit of rationalism 
 appeared inevitably when the rigidity of 
 old superstitions was broken; man assumed 
 new importance by the side of which con- 
 ventions of royalty and aristocracy were 
 insignificant, and the new thought of the 
 eighteenth century may be dated from this 
 widening of men's knowledge. Yet there 
 are those who lament the depressing 
 effect that science has upon letters. Is 
 literature, then, a superstition that must 
 shun the light ? 
 
 In Brockes the new feeling was often 
 expressed in a way that now seems gro- 
 tesque. When he began to observe his 
 emotions of delight he confounded them 
 in a most unconventional way. We have 
 seen with what delight he gazed at the 
 white blossoms in the moonlight, and how 
 he expressed his pleasure as a Chinese or 
 Japanese poet might do until he brought
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 65 
 
 up with his moral, but in these lines we 
 find him without a rival: 
 
 Ach welche Sussigkcit ! 
 Welch ausserlich und innerlichs Ergetzen 
 Empfindet man bey stiller Abend-Zeit, 
 Wenn wir den mtlden Leib auf weichen Feder- 
 
 Decken, 
 Mit einigen Envegen strecken ! 
 
 Yet even here, as Brandl has well said 
 in his monograph on Brockes, 1 these Philis- 
 tine lines are a natural consequence of 
 his way of regarding humanity. Invari- 
 ably selection is something later than the 
 first feeling. Brockes also translated 
 Pope's "Essay on Man" in 1740, and 
 Thomson's " Seasons " in 1745. Some of 
 the extracts that are given above will show 
 his indebtedness to English models; and, 
 like them, he endeavored to teach how every 
 man might make better use of his senses, a 
 lesson that he will be credited with teach- 
 ing the Germans. 
 
 Haller (1708-1777) was a man of far 
 
 1 Page 65.
 
 66 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 more importance. He began, to be sure, 
 under the inspiration of Lohenstein and 
 what is called the second Silesian school, 
 following the unwritten law in accordance 
 with which almost every writer first pays 
 allegiance to fading authorities, and is even 
 more old-fashioned than his adult contem- 
 poraries; but the influence of the philoso- 
 phical English poetry, especially that of 
 Pope, soon led him to writing after their 
 own method. His long poem on the Origin 
 of Evil is one of this sort ; but his " Die 
 Alpcn " is the one on which his poetical 
 fame now rests, although the " Ode to Eter- 
 nity" possibty touches a higher chord. The 
 poem on the Alps describes the majesty 
 of mountain scenery with an eloquence 
 that had no precedent. To be sure, the 
 poet reminds us at times that 
 
 der Himmel has diess Land noch mehr geliebet, 
 
 Wo nichts, was nothig, fehlt, und nur was ntitzet, 
 
 bltiht, 
 
 Der Berge wachsend Eis, der Felse steile Wande 
 Sind selbst zum Niitzen da, und tranken das Gelande.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 67 
 
 and when 
 
 senkt ein kahler Berg die glatten Wande nieder 
 
 Nicht fern vora Eise streckt, voll futterreicher Weide, 
 Ein fruchtbares Gebtirg den breiten Rticken her, 
 Sein saufter Abhang glanzt von reifendem Getreide, 
 Und seine Hugel sind von Hundert Herden schwer. 
 
 Yet he has an eye at times for the scenery 
 alone, apart from the fertility of the soil : 
 
 Hier zeight ein steiler Berg die mauergleichen Spitzen, 
 Ein Waldstrom eilt hindurch, und sturzet Fall auf Fall, 
 Der dickbeschaumte Fluss dringt durch der Felsen 
 
 Ritzen, 
 TJnd schiesst mit gaher Kraft weit tiber ihren Wall. 
 
 And before this : 
 
 Wenn Titans erster Strahl der gipfel Schnee verguldet, 
 1 Und sein verklarter Blick die Nebel unterdriickt, 
 So wird, was die Natur am prachtigsten gebildet, 
 Mit iramer neuer Lust von einem Berg erblickt. 
 
 Still, after all, it is rather the pleasant 
 valleys than the steep mountains that catch 
 his eye. Yet it is to Haller's credit that 
 he was not, like most of his contemporaries, 
 simply repelled by the savage gloom of the
 
 68 FROM OPITZ TO LESSEtfG. 
 
 mountains. After all, while he belonged 
 to his generation, as these extracts show, 
 he was yet raised above them by his posi- 
 tion as a man of science to whom every- 
 thing appealed; and in this poem he indi- 
 cated though confusedly the direction 
 in which taste was about to move. We 
 notice this more especially in his picture 
 of the Arcadian simplicity of the Swiss. 
 He made the same comparison between 
 their innocence and the corruption of the 
 civilized world that, nearly half a century 
 later, Rousseau eloquently presented to his 
 fascinated readers. This fact gives the 
 poem a most important position in literary 
 history; for, while what he said about the 
 scenery is more truly an indication than 
 an expression of our later raptures, his 
 accounts of the idyllic life of the Swiss 
 clearly foreboded Gellert and Rousseau. In 
 England James Thomson, as Taine says, 1 
 
 ^'History of English Literature." New York: 1861, 
 i. 219.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 69 
 
 "thirty years before Rousseau, had ex- 
 pressed all Rousseau's sentiments, almost 
 in the same style." He, too, compared the 
 corruptions of modern times with the inno- 
 cent past, and the vicious city with the 
 idyllic country. He was among the first 
 to sing the beauty of nature, and it is 
 curious to observe that he was a contem- 
 porary of Haller, as well as a fellow- 
 worker. Thomson began his " Liberty " in 
 1731, and the first parts of it appeared in 
 1734. Haller's "Die Alpen" was written 
 in 1729 and published in 1732. The " Sea- 
 sons " was completed by 1730. Thus, we 
 see the simultaneous appearance in Swit- 
 zerland and England of the spirit that was 
 to destroy the current thought; and pos- 
 sibly, in time, the discovery of other alleged 
 coincidences of this sort will be of service 
 in dispelling the notion that the study of 
 literature has no scientific value. 
 
 Haller's longer philosophical poems have 
 often aroused discussion as to whether or
 
 70 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 not Haller should be regarded as a direct 
 imitator of Pope, with whom he became a 
 fellow-worker as he had been of Thomson. 
 The question need not detain us long. It 
 is only our duty to remember that the 
 whole matter of plagiarism is in a very 
 crude state. If we look at the subject 
 fairly, we shall see at once that any man 
 who is abreast with his generation, who has 
 been exposed to the same influences as his 
 contemporaries, will probably see the next 
 step that the processes of thought demand 
 to be taken in just the same way as some 
 one else will see it. Hence, when we find, 
 at similar stages of culture throughout 
 Europe, different races repeating one an- 
 other's experiences, we shall observe that 
 the instinct of imitation is far from being 
 the sole cause of the similarity of their 
 actions. Men in England and men in Ger- 
 many find similar solutions for the same 
 problems, because they have the same ma- 
 terials for devising an answer. Pope had
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 71 
 
 been moved by Shaftesbury and Leibnitz in 
 writing his " Essay on Man ; " and Haller, 
 another cultivated man, was inspired by 
 Shaftesbury and Leibnitz in writing his 
 philosophical poetry. That there was a 
 likeness between the work of the two men 
 is certainly less surprising than would be 
 its absence. We may expect to find the 
 men of an army near together and acting 
 with some uniformity when they are mak- 
 ing their way through woods or fording a 
 stream; and every generation is, as it were, 
 an army that is doing its best to conquer 
 the world. Some are skirmishers in ad- 
 vance, and some are laggards in the rear; 
 the majority are in a monotonous mass, 
 keeping touch with one another, and mov- 
 ing in one uniform direction, with the 
 skirmishers only a little in advance and 
 resting on the main body. 
 
 In Hagedorn (1708-1754) we have a poet 
 whose importance the literary historians of 
 Germany are never tired of pointing out.
 
 72 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 He it was who brought into repute some of 
 the forms of verse that were much admired 
 in France and England, and remained popu- 
 lar in Germany until it is scarcely too 
 much to say poets found that they had 
 really a message to deliver. Hagedorn in- 
 troduced in their modern form the lyric, the 
 fable, and the poetic tale. Primarily, all of 
 these modes of expression were French ; yet 
 in England they flourished in the hands of 
 Prior, Swift, and Gay; while in Germany 
 they all, but especially the fable, developed 
 in a slightly different way. It was doubt- 
 less this novel urbanity, familiar enough 
 elsewhere, but strange here, that gave 
 Hagedorn his fame.
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 
 WHILE the doors were thus opened to 
 English influence in poetry, English prose 
 was also entering into Germany, as we see 
 by the numberless imitations of " Robinson 
 Crusoe," that speedily appeared after the 
 translation of the unsurpassed original. 
 While all that has been hitherto described 
 belongs to the history of what was dis- 
 tinctly a literary class, the Robinsonaden, 
 as they were called, were a part of popular 
 literature. They amalgamated with the 
 stories that appeared after the Thirty Years' 
 War, which were reminiscences of imita- 
 tions of the Spanish picaresque tales; and, 
 although crude and slight, they yet showed, 
 as well as furthered, the general interest in 
 something adventurous and foreign. The 
 English "Robinson Crusoe" was a co- 
 
 73
 
 74 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 herent part of the busy, roaming, active 
 English life; the German imitations had, 
 too often, as vague a background of reality 
 as have Jules Yerne's stories. And, as 
 Karl Elze has pointed out, 1 it was in the 
 inland countries that most of them were 
 written, and not in the maritime towns. 
 The best of them all, " The Swiss Family 
 Robinson," had its birthplace far from salt- 
 water. 
 
 Much more important were the English 
 essays, the "Spectator," etc., which imme- 
 diately called forth a number of German 
 imitations. I have shown elsewhere the 
 steps by which the English originals ac- 
 quired the form by which they are still well 
 known to us, and which for a century was 
 a favorite method of conveying amusement 
 and instruction to the public. In Germany 
 they were equally popular, though, as was 
 to be expected, of far less literary merit. 
 
 1 "Die Englische Sprache und Literatur in Deutsch- 
 land." Dresden: 1864, p. 41.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 75 
 
 They at present concern us as the weapons 
 with which was fought out the contest 
 between French and English influence in 
 Germany. We have already seen the 
 modest beginnings of French authority in 
 the satiric and courtly poems of Canitz and 
 others ; but this asserted itself most strongly 
 in the work of Gottsched, who was the 
 most prominent figure in the literature of 
 the first half of the eighteenth century, and 
 the most ludicrous in the eyes of men since 
 that period. This subsequent contempt is 
 the price he has paid for the adoration he 
 received in his lifetime for giving the most 
 complete expression to the taste of his con- 
 temporaries. Yet of late he is receiving in 
 some measure fuller justice from those 
 writers of literary history who perceive 
 that he did but carry the Germans through 
 an inevitable stage of their progress. Rid- 
 icule of his lessons is certainly a barren 
 method: one might as well laugh at a tree 
 for shedding its leaves in autumn, as at the
 
 76 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 Germans for obeying an influence that 
 overwhelmed the whole of civilized Europe. 
 Gottsched was born in 1700, and, after 
 completing his studies in Konigsberg, he 
 made his way to Leipzig, which was then 
 distinctly a literary centre. Its book trade 
 put the town into direct communication 
 with the whole of Germany. Already a 
 society existed since 1697 which was de- 
 voted to the study of the German language, 
 and of this Gottsched was soon made a 
 member. In this society he at once became 
 prominent; he got its name changed from 
 the " Deutschiibende Gesellschaft " to the 
 "Deutsche Gesellschaft;" and it at once 
 became the model of a number of similar 
 varieties hi different parts of Germany. 
 The new non-resident members and the 
 related societies united in recognizing 
 Gottsched's importance, and he found him- 
 self in a position of great influence. He 
 maintained himself here by untiring labor, 
 and it is easy to see how much good work
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 77 
 
 lay beneath much that posterity has agreed 
 to condemn. His first efforts were in a 
 humble sphere. He wrote book after book 
 on rhetoric, grammar, eloquence, the art of 
 verse; he gave precision to the confused 
 unsettled usage of the German tongue, and 
 thus met the generally felt need of a com- 
 mon means of communication among other 
 classes than the learned; for in Germany, as 
 in England, after the revolution of 1688, 
 the bourgeoisie was beginning to interest 
 itself in literature. 1 It was gradually losing 
 interest in the impossible romances that had 
 given the intensest pleasure not many years 
 before, and which still lingered as the fa- 
 vorite reading of the ignorant and of chil- 
 dren. In both countries there existed a 
 strong yearning for moral and social in- 
 struction. The essayists soon undertook to 
 provide this, and Gottsched soon established 
 
 i Vide Julian Schmidt, " Geschichte dos geistigen Lebens 
 in Deutschlund von Leibnitz bis auf Lessing's Tod." Leip- 
 zig: 1862, v. i., 436 ff.
 
 78 FBOM OPITZ TO LESSISTG. 
 
 a paper, in imitation of the English " Spec- 
 tator." The subject that he had nearest at 
 heart was the elevation of German litera- 
 ture, which was certainly an honourable 
 ambition; and he made a discreet choice in 
 selecting the drama as the means best suited 
 for bringing literature into close relation 
 with the life of the people. To be sure, we 
 now can see the certain failure of the ar- 
 tificial alliance which he endeavoured to 
 establish ; but, in selecting the French stage 
 for his model, he did the only thing which 
 it was possible for him to do. It is idle to 
 condemn Gottsched for this choice, inas- 
 much as there was actually no alternative 
 before him. When even in England, with 
 Shakespeare and his fellow-workers to in- 
 spire opposition to the French influence, 
 the whole current ran for a time in this 
 direction, there is no need for wondering 
 that Gottsched accepted what was most 
 successful for his model. Moreover, the 
 attempt to revive the German drama, which
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSITS T G. 79 
 
 at the best had never flourished, and had 
 sunk to a wretched depth, would have been 
 hopeless; and, in adopting French models, 
 Gottsched, it is further to be noted, also 
 lent his encouragement to the general desire 
 for moral teaching. Dr. Johnson, in the 
 preface to his Shakespeare, lamented that 
 poet's indifference to right and wrong and 
 to "opportunities of instructing and de- 
 lighting," and that he wrote "without any 
 moral purpose," comparing him unfavorably 
 in this respect with the later writers of the 
 English tragedy; and in Racine's later 
 plays, piety had asserted itself with notice- 
 able earnestness. Consequently, in doing 
 his best to expel grossness and roughness 
 from the German stage, Gottsched had the 
 double consolation of encouraging good 
 morals as well as good letters. Addison 
 must have known the same feeling when he 
 wrote his "Cato" to fill the place of the 
 extravagant heroic plays. He at once 
 began to translate, with the aid of his wife
 
 80 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 and children, the most celebrated French 
 tragedies, and soon found encouragement in 
 the success of the actors, who were readily 
 induced to take an interest in this new 
 venture. His own play, " Der sterbende 
 Cato," modelled on Addison's Cato, and 
 one by Deschamps, was one of many ex- 
 amples of the readiness of the Germans. 
 The German opera was driven away, and 
 the equivalent of the English clown was 
 finally banished from the stage. It has 
 been given to few literary autocrats to attain 
 anything like his success. His ambition 
 did not stop here; he sought to extend his 
 domain over the whole realm of poetry; 
 but he very soon met with opposition. We 
 shall soon see how the carefully constructed 
 theory of the drama fell into ruins; but, 
 before that crash, Gottsched was engaged 
 in a bitter controversy regarding the true 
 meaning of poetry, his antagonists being 
 two Swiss writers, Bodmer (1698-1783) 
 and Breitinger (1701-1776) . It is worthy
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 81 
 
 of note that his opponents lived in Switzer- 
 land, a country that had been saved from 
 some of the movements of modern taste by, 
 one may fairly say, its physical geography. 
 For mountains do not merely protect those 
 who live near them from the winds of 
 heaven that sweep unbroken over the level 
 plain; they serve as a barrier in the path 
 of travellers; they destroy readiness of 
 communication; and, as we find old-fash- 
 ioned dresses in their seclusion, and the phil- 
 ologist lights on idioms forgotten elsewhere, 
 so the thoughts of the people were to some 
 extent preserved from the influence of prin- 
 ciples that have full sway elsewhere. In 
 Zurich, which belonged to the Protestant 
 part of Switzerland, there existed at the 
 beginning of the last century a general 
 interest in letters. Its exceptional political 
 and religious condition secured for it the 
 same freedom in forming intellectual alli- 
 ances that is given to us Americans at the 
 present day, and led it naturally to an
 
 82 FROM OPITZ TO LESSTNG. 
 
 interest in England, where there existed 
 similar political freedom and religious zeal. 
 Moreover, the prominence of England in 
 science attracted to it the attention of stu- 
 dents, just as all serious workers now 
 follow German methods. 
 
 Bodmer and Breitinger were moved by 
 admiration of the " Spectator " to establish 
 a similar publication in Zurich ; and Addi- 
 son's enthusiastic praise of Milton soon 
 found enthusiastic admirers in these two 
 men. Whereas they had begun their lit- 
 erary career by acknowledging Gottsched's 
 supremacy, they soon wandered from the 
 straight and narrow path which he had 
 traced for all lovers of literature; and, as 
 early as 1724, Bodmer had translated the 
 " Paradise Lost," although his version was 
 not published until 1732; and in 1737 he 
 translated Butler's " Hudibras." Although 
 at first Gottsched praised the German trans- 
 lation of Milton's poem, he afterwards 
 took the opposite view, and the contest
 
 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 83 
 
 between the Swiss and the Leipzig school 
 soon became bitter. It was in 1740 that the 
 Zurich leaders opened all their batteries, 
 and the fray fairly began. That Gottsched 
 should have opposed any assertion of the 
 authority of Milton is, when we consider his 
 literary principles, perfectly natural. It was 
 not a simple personal choice that decided 
 him, though possibly he may have thought 
 so, any more than it is true that a stream 
 flows to the sea by personal choice. If 
 its level lies through a sandy region, it 
 must flow over sand; and it is with equal 
 inevitableness that Gottsched's theories 
 hardened his heart against Milton. He 
 was by no means alone in his opposition. 
 It will be remembered that the great 
 English poet had been neglected by his 
 fellow-countrymen when Addison under- 
 took his resuscitation and proved his ex- 
 cellence by the use of the weapons of the 
 very men who condemned his sins against 
 the poetry of reason. Yet the whole school
 
 84: FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 of critics, from Rymer to Dr. Johnson, who 
 believed in the principles that animated 
 Gottsched, nourished open or secret oppo- 
 sition to Milton. They believed that rhyme 
 was essential to poetry, and, so believing, 
 they . detested blank verse. They liked 
 directness and exactness of speech; Mil- 
 ton's language, with its remote suggestions 
 and majestic harmonies, sinned against this 
 essential necessity. In a word, he was the 
 last of the poets of the inspiration of the 
 Renaissance; they were earnest adherents 
 of the school that aimed at the correction 
 of its predecessors and could in no way 
 admire him. In Germany, as in England, 
 the appreciation of Milton's merits became 
 the test of literary preferences; and, in the 
 discussion that went on, we may see, now 
 that the smoke of the battle is blown away, 
 a battle in which the amount of powder 
 burned was in no proportion to the size or 
 number of the bullets, we may see, I say, 
 in the subsequent discussion, how much the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 85 
 
 inconsistencies with which both sides have 
 been charged were inherent in the prin- 
 ciples from which they started. The Swiss 
 critics, in their zeal against Gottsched and 
 all that he represented, asserted that the 
 poet should have nothing to do with what 
 was natural and common, but should de- 
 scribe only what was supernatural and 
 wonderful; and, although they attacked 
 with intelligence the weak points of Gotts- 
 ched's theory, the best that they could do in 
 constructing a positive theory was to com- 
 mend fables like .^Esop's as a model. Yet 
 it is not merely what a critic positively 
 affirms that inspires those who listen to 
 him. They are moved by the implications 
 which the critic himself may not fully 
 develop; and, in opposing Bodmer and 
 Breitinger, Gottsched was moved by the 
 same detestation of their belief in enthusi- 
 asm as was Pope when he made Theobald 
 the main hero of his "Dunciad;" for 
 Theobald had ventured to say, in the pref-
 
 86 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 
 
 ace to his edition of the works of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, that he thought enthusiasm 
 was the very essence of poetry. 
 
 Gottsched, on the other hand, maintained 
 that nothing lay nearer men's interests than 
 human nature, and that experiments with 
 the supernatural must necessarily fail, and 
 were only very seldom allowable. N Bodmer's 
 w Noachide " (translated into English about 
 1764) must have seemed to him to have 
 been written to corroborate his views; and 
 even Klopstock's "Messiah" betrays all 
 the weakness of his antagonist; but Gott- 
 sched went much further: he had nothing 
 but faint praise for Homer; Milton he de- 
 tested; Ariosto's poems, he said, were 
 delirious visions, without order or resem- 
 blance to truth; Tasso had " such love for 
 devilishness that he jumbled together the 
 mass and litany with conspiracies and 
 magical formulas, heaven with hell, Chris- 
 tianity with paganism and Mohammedan 
 superstition, in the most offensive way,"
 
 FEOM OPITZ TO LESSITSTG. 87 
 
 etc. Yet it is well, before condemning, to 
 remember Voltaire's assertion of the su- 
 periority of Tasso to Homer, Johnson's 
 continual contempt for Milton, and the slow 
 growth in England, among the most culti- 
 vated, of Shakespeare's fame. If Gottsched 
 was more distinctly philistine in his views 
 than the men of other countries, it must 
 not be forgotten that the sort of mistake 
 which he made was but the natural expres- 
 sion of a widespread error. He paid dearly 
 for living in a rude, unpolished country, 
 just as his antagonists manifested their pro- 
 vincialism by occasional indiscreet admira- 
 tion. Gottsched, too, lived long enough to 
 find his name a byword; to see himself 
 deserted by every one; and Germany, in 
 whose behalf he had toiled so arduously, 
 wholly abandoned to the heresies that he had 
 fought with tireless zeal. He died in 1766, 
 the year in which Lessing's " Laocoon " 
 appeared, and just before the "Hamburger 
 Dramaturgic " and " Minna von Barnhelm "
 
 88 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 made the victory of the new generation 
 complete. 
 
 Long before his death, modest prepara- 
 tions were making for the coming change. 
 Some young men who started as Gotts- 
 ched's disciples gradually freed themselves 
 from his control, and, in the " Brcmer 
 Beitrage," devoted their attention to the 
 newer and less rigorous forms of literature. 
 Such were Gartner, Rabener, Elias Schlegel, 
 Cramer, and others ; but their work was of 
 but moderate importance. Gellert, who 
 used the fable as a means of conveying 
 instruction and temperate delight, moved 
 in the same direction; but the fable, the 
 Anacreontic song, the moral tale, and the 
 improving satire, which flourished simul- 
 taneously, seem to be more heavily freight- 
 ed with the past than with the future. 
 
 By what they did after these models, the 
 Germans seemed to themselves to be keep- 
 ing step with the rest of Europe, but it 
 was only in a half-hearted way; and Bod-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 89 
 
 mer eagerly yearned for some one who 
 should write the missing epic in the Mil- 
 tonic spirit, and thus justify his criticisms 
 as well as complete German literature. At 
 length he found what he had sought in 
 Klopstock (1724-1803), the first three 
 books of whose " Messias " were published 
 in the "Bremer Beitrage " in 1748. At 
 first the poem excited as little interest in 
 Germany as it can now in this country; 
 but Bodmer was fire and flame in admira- 
 tion, and the story of his relations with its 
 author is one of the more amusing bits of 
 the literary gossip of the last century. 
 That he should have been delighted with 
 the poem explains itself without difficulty; 
 for it at once justified the position he had 
 taken in criticism; it was another tribute to 
 the greatness of Milton, and a proof that 
 his own abstract theories bore the test of 
 practical experiment. In Gottsched's eyes 
 the poem was an abomination; for it tore 
 to pieces the tottering fabric that he had
 
 90 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 built with so much care. In his wrath he 
 picked up a stray heroic poem, von Schon- 
 aich's "Hermann," that was written by 
 one of his admirers, and did his best with 
 this new weapon to drive the pretender 
 from the field; but his efforts were vain, 
 and only made the poor man's failure as a 
 dictator more ridiculous. If this ill-fated 
 " Hermann " was always unreadable, the 
 once more fortunate " Messias " has now 
 certainly become so; but the poem holds a 
 position in the history of literature which 
 saves it from obscurity. We see in it many 
 signs of the new spirit; for, while it drew 
 much of its inspiration from Milton, this 
 influence was largely diluted with more 
 modern tears. As Coleridge said of him, 
 Klopstock was a very German Milton; and, 
 in place of a strong handling of a vast sub- 
 ject, we have the emotions that the subject 
 is capable of calling forth, but nothing else. 
 His enthusiasm evaporated in sighs. When 
 he comes to describing anything that calls
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 91 
 
 for a vivid statement of his own, he tells us 
 that the incident is ineffable, inexpressible, 
 and he declines to say more about it. These 
 are literary objections, and in no way touch 
 the importance of the poem as an expres- 
 sion of the diffused, if not deep, religious 
 sentiment of the time. We will readily 
 recall the existence of the same feeling 1 in 
 England; and Young's " Night Thoughts," 
 Blair's "Grave," and Hervey's "Medita- 
 tions " all bear witness to its importance. 
 Yet there is a great difference to be noticed 
 between the dominant emotions in the two 
 countries under similar religious excitement. 
 While the English mainly contemplated 
 the grave and its horrors, the Germans en- 
 joyed a tearful ecstacy. Young and Blair 
 are more truly degenerate descendants of 
 Milton, of a Milton trimmed to the cool 
 requirements of the eighteenth century. 
 Klopstock, on the other hand, is full of 
 many of the qualities which are at once ap- 
 parent in the full glory of German litera-
 
 92 FROM OPITZ TO LESS ING. 
 
 ture in its speedy development. He was 
 at least enthusiastic, even if we may not 
 share his enthusiasm; they were cold and 
 academic. They brought to an end the tra- 
 ditions of Milton, although his blank verse 
 survived in many didactic poems; but in 
 Germany, as Hettner has well said, the 
 w Messiah " brought salvation. The hex- 
 ameter, in which measure the poem was 
 written, became a common form in the later 
 and more skilful hands of Yoss and 
 Goethe ; yet this is the slightest of his ser- 
 vices, one, it may be added, that had its 
 origin in Bodmer's advice, which had also 
 been given by Gottsched a few years 
 earlier. This fervent use of language was a 
 complete change from the tepid correctness 
 that had been the aim of his predecessors, 
 and continued to be that of some of his 
 contemporaries. When, in his odes, he 
 broke loose from rhyme and tried to write 
 in the measures of the Greek and Roman 
 classics, he went further than the Germans
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 93 
 
 have agreed to follow him; but he at least 
 destroyed the omnipotence of the rigidity\\ 
 that had previously ruled. It is to be no- 
 ticed too, that, while Klopstock's earliest 
 unrhymed odes bear the date of 1747, that 
 in the same year Collins's " Odes " were 
 first published, containing the beautiful un- 
 rhymed "Ode to Evening." 1 But Collins 
 sang to deaf ears, while Klopstock was not 
 only followed by a swarm of short-lived 
 imitators, but also had considerable influ- 
 ence on many of the most illustrious of his 
 followers. Just as a lightly laden, easily 
 handled craft will go about sooner than a 
 huge ship, so did Germany precede England 
 in preparation for the coming change. 
 The bulk of English didactic poetry gave 
 the literature of that country more head- 
 way. But its new rival found in Klop- 
 
 1 Of course it is not meant that Klopstock was the first to 
 adopt this form ; he was preceded, for example, by Pyra 
 and Lange, just as there were nnrhymed Iloratian odes in 
 English between Milton and Collins, e. g , S. Say's Poems, 
 p. 79, where may be found one written in 1720.
 
 94 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 stock's verse an ally in its struggle to better 
 things. In the first place, the " Messias " 
 was a hopeful poem; while the English 
 religious poems sang solely the gloomy hor- 
 rors of the unfruitful grave. To be sure, 
 this was lit by the dim light of the moon; 
 but it was the waning, late-rising moon that, 
 after dimly illuminating the romantic novels 
 of Mrs. RadelifFe and her fellow-workers, 
 set in the wild extravagance of now 
 forgotten tragedies like " Bertram," which 
 is only given a taste of immortality by 
 Coleridge's denunciation of it. Klopstock 
 sang with unfamiliar fervour of love and 
 friendship; Bodmer even said of his ode, 
 " Die Braut," that it might have been writ- 
 ten by the Messiah himself, had he ever 
 been in love! But Bodmer often allowed 
 himself strange expressions. What Klop- 
 stock did was to introduce into German 
 literature the gracious way of writing about 
 women, which had for a long time been 
 absent. He sang of love as a sentiment,
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 95 
 
 and of friendship as a sentiment, and, it 
 may be added, of love of nature as a sen- 
 timent. Some of these qualities it is possible 
 to detect in a crude state, to be sure 
 in what we know of Bodmer, whose enthu- 
 siasms foreboded what Klopstock was 
 about to accomplish. Indeed, the Swiss 
 critic's life is full of the quality that Klop- 
 stock knew better as material for poetry 
 than as a rule of conduct. This is proved 
 by his enthusiasm, when a man of fifty, 
 over the young poet, who preferred flirt- 
 ing with the young women of Zurich, and 
 drinking with the young men, to study- 
 ing Switzerland, and serious devotion to 
 writing. When Bodmer wanted to show 
 Klopstock the distant beauties of the Alps 
 through a spy-glass, he lamented that the 
 younger poet preferred to turn the spy- 
 glass toward the windows of Zurich. Yet 
 this is not the first time or the last that 
 there has been discord between young men 
 and old men, and on this subject; or that a
 
 96 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 poet's life has not borne out all that his 
 verses seemed to indicate. The general 
 sentimentality of Klopstock's poems found 
 many ready to condemn it, but more who 
 were disposed to accept it; for, with the 
 decay of reasonableness as the inspiration 
 of poetry, human nature once more asserted 
 itself, and gave full expression to emotions 
 that had been temporarily ousted from liter- 
 ature, and, doubtless, to some extent, from 
 life; for our inclinations and habits are 
 modified by the ideals that we find in books, 
 which themselves describe what their 
 writers see about them. It is scarcely ac- 
 curate to speak of this sensibility as a new 
 thing, as is often done. It has been more 
 than half hidden by the civilization of the 
 period just disappearing; but, in the re- 
 moter past of the heroic novel, tears had 
 been as frequent a pleasure to the noble 
 lords and ladies who lived in that fairyland, 
 as they were destined to be in the age just 
 beginning. The merest glance at the heroic
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 97 
 
 novels will confirm this statement, and in 
 the heroic plays we find equal sensibility; 
 although in these, at least in the English 
 ones, there is often a hysteric roar which 
 hides the susceptibility to tears. 1 In the 
 letters of Klopstock and of his contempo- 
 raries we find abundant traces of this long- 
 suppressed, emotional sensitiveness. It 
 had, however, all the charm, and, besides 
 the charm, the crudity of novelty. The 
 religious epic, which was a remote outwork 
 from Milton's greater work, and the poetical 
 expression of the pietism that had long 
 existed in Germany, reached its culmination 
 here, and soon ceased to be a tempting 
 ideal for a generation that was learning to 
 disregard religion. In other ways Klop- 
 stock was pointing out the future course of 
 thought. He soon became enthusiastic for 
 
 1 This is well brought ont in Fournel's "La Literature 
 Indt'pendante et les iCcrivains oublies an XVII. 1 " siecle," 
 chaps. IV. and V. He makes it very clear that sensibility 
 cannot be derived from Mme. de Lafayette's " Princesse de 
 Cleves," as some have thought.
 
 yo FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 Teutonic subjects; and in his odes, in 
 which the early German deities took the 
 place of those of Greece and Rome, he was 
 breaking the bonds of pseudo-classicism, as 
 well as encouraging the patriotism which, 
 throughout Europe, was destined to take 
 the place of the cosmopolitanism that was 
 growing up under the influence of a monot- 
 onous literary culture. Indeed, the culti- 
 vation that was formed on Roman models 
 carried with it- the imperium Romanum in 
 literature. It rested on a widespread and 
 generally accepted basis of common knowl- 
 edge, with, one might almost say, a common 
 language at its command; for in Spain, as 
 in Russia, Cupid's shafts,Yulcan's lameness, 
 Minerva's wisdom, everywhere brought 
 the same images to those who were contin- 
 ually reading about them. Then the forms 
 of verse were alike throughout all the 
 countries of Europe. The satires rever- 
 berated from one end of it to the other. 
 The softer elegies, the didactic poems, the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 99 
 
 epigrams, sounded gentler but no less fre- 
 quent notes. It was as if one language 
 was spoken in many dialects. That the 
 French should have been the most stren- 
 uous supporters of this cosmopolitanism 
 will not surprise us. These new tendencies 
 in literature derived their main authority 
 from France, where the national life had the 
 least representation in literature, as in poli- 
 tics ; and where, too, the national character- 
 istics were those most prominent in this 
 literary method, such as concinnity and 
 directness. The French zeal for cosmo- 
 politanism, which implied taking France 
 for a model, was like Heine's definition 
 of the French nation of equality, every 
 man wanted his superiors brought down 
 to his level. Every rebellion against the 
 rigid laws of pseudo-classicism was a 
 serious matter, and, whenever it broke 
 out, it found its sole support in an ap- 
 peal to some of the national distinctions. 
 It may not be fanciful, however, to conjee-
 
 100 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 
 
 ture that the Protestant epics had been 
 attempts in the same direction. Du Bartas, 
 in France, with his "Semaine," may be 
 acquitted of overt rebellion, because the 
 jurisdiction of the classics had not been 
 firmly established in his time. But Milton, 
 with his blank verse and grand style, had 
 stood forth in opposition to the admired 
 couplet and colourless verse that were 
 fastening themselves on English poetry, as 
 Addison saw when he praised him, to the 
 discomfiture of the unreasonable lovers of 
 reasonable verse. 
 
 Yet Klopstock's patriotism was at first 
 simple enough, reminding us as it does of 
 the Americanism of these poets who for 
 castles write wigwams, and for nightin- 
 gales, mockingbirds. There was no Ger- 
 many to inspire the feeling of patriotism, 
 but merely a congeries of rival States 
 speaking the German tongue; yet the feel- 
 ing that was going to cast these separate 
 atoms into a coherent whole began to make
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSHSTG. 101 
 
 itself felt in this early patriotism. Let us 
 notice one thing about it, which may sim- 
 plify for us the study of literature, and of 
 much else; and that is, that the way in which 
 every new interest of the human mind first 
 makes its appearance is as the merest senti- 
 ment. This may seem an absolute plati- 
 tude ; but, if we examine a moment, it may 
 help to explain some difficulties. And by 
 sentiment I mean what we call sentimen- 
 tality, which may always be taken to sig- 
 nify a sentiment that in time arouses our 
 distaste. If we seek for a few examples or 
 tests, we shall find the rudimentary, crude 
 feeling in the dim hatred of oppression, 
 which, after lying inert in the hands of the 
 sentimentalists, crystallizes into action in 
 the hands of energetic men. The course of 
 the Abolitionists may prove this: after 
 years of agitation, declamation, and denun- 
 ciation, the feeling which was first the 
 exclusive property of sentimentalists and 
 the detestation of practical men became a
 
 102 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 part of law, and the property of men who 
 pride themselves on hatred of sentimen- 
 tality. In the matters more immediately 
 before us we see the crude feeling for 
 nature, and apparently idle opposition to 
 the classes of reasonable poetry, in Brockes, 
 which only later became a fixed principle, 
 just as in Poussin and Claude Lorraine we 
 see the mountains figuring as ornaments of 
 the background, awaiting the time when 
 they were to be regarded as themselves 
 objects of interest. In the works of these^ 
 early painters, as Lotheissen has well said, 1 
 we find represented the scenery of the fash- 
 ionable Arcadias and shepherd-romances 
 which supplied the raw material that was 
 afterwards to develop into the love of 
 nature. Another example is the horror of 
 the romances, beginning with the "Castle 
 of Otranto," that was to appear as a greater 
 indulgence in vague mental emotion, and to 
 
 1 Geschichte dor franzozischen Literatur im XVII." 1 
 Jahrhundcrt. III., 368 ff.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSINGk 103 
 
 become a prominent quality in subsequent 
 literature. In the same way we perceive in 
 Klopstock's zeal for the remote past of 
 Germany the early buddings of the ro- 
 mantic revival.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 IN Wieland, on the other hand, we see 
 another and very different part of the same 
 movement making its appearance; whereas 
 Klopstock, in his ''Messias," sang rather an 
 exalted, vague elevation of the soul, than 
 any definite cosmogony of heaven, and, in 
 his celebration of the early history of Ger- 
 many, he wrote with an unreality that seems 
 to us confusing. He nevertheless helped 
 to bring to notice what was then a wilder- 
 ness, but in time became a familiar region. 
 Wieland, who began by following in 
 Klopstock's footprints and composed re- 
 ligious poems, afterwards became famous 
 as the leader of some of the innovations of 
 French and English taste. Klopstock's 
 followers lived in cloudland, and imagined 
 themselves great geniuses on account of 
 
 104
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 105 
 
 the facility with which they imitated the 
 most obvious faults of the illustrious model. 
 Wieland, detesting their obscurity and ex- 
 travagance, devoted himself to glorifying 
 terrestial grace and charm. His early re- 
 ligiosity, when he had once recovered from 
 it, left behind nothing but the familiar 
 mortification for an exploded enthusiasm. 
 From singing Platonic love he turned to 
 singing emotions that were anything but 
 platonic. Germany appeared to be turning 
 into a land where the full moon lit lonely 
 graves, on which sat weeping figures, 
 mourning only that they were not yet real 
 spectres. He filled the stage with a band 
 of revellers,, whose sole delight in moon- 
 light was that it did not betray half of their 
 frivolities, and who made the most of the 
 life they had. He belonged, indeed, to 
 those men who, in France and England, 
 devoted themselves to singing the joys of 
 the present; who learned from the current 
 philosophy enough scepticism to doubt
 
 106 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 
 
 everything but their own perception of the 
 moment. The age was speeding towards 
 the great Revolution, while Wicland was 
 maintaining that men neglected their capa- 
 city for material enjoyment. Yet his work 
 was of service, because it tended to make 
 reality important, and to dispel the mists of 
 wild enthusiasm. He was much admired in 
 his day, although now he pays for his 
 ancient fame by persistent neglect. Pos- 
 sibly a good part of the fame that he got 
 came from a feeling of gratitude among the 
 Germans for his success in polishing the 
 language, in giving it an unwonted grace, 
 and for proving that the Germans were 
 not really what they had long been sup- 
 posed to be, a clumsy race. The fact 
 that he had done this gave him what to 
 foreigners may seem like undue promi- 
 nence. He becomes historically important; 
 but we are ready to leave untouched his 
 work, which is made up of inspirations 
 drawn from the French, the English, the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 107 
 
 Italians, and the later Greek writers. Yet, 
 besides the undoubted charm of much that 
 he wrote, we must remember that he stood 
 forth as the representative of one of the 
 great currents of thought that existed 
 throughout Europe before the Revolution. 
 So much at least is true, that, if we include 
 his whole life, he followed many currents; 
 but he is interesting, as an example of the 
 complete civilization which had no sooner 
 established itself than it was overthrown, 
 as absolutism always must be over- 
 thrown, so long as man is a growing crea- 
 ture. The crowning point of the civiliza- 
 tion of the last century was a being without 
 prejudices, who believed only what he saw, 
 and for whom what he did not see was a 
 chaos as dark as Central Africa was in the 
 old atlases. Grace, ease, civilization, 
 for that sense of the word survives, al- 
 though the fact is gone, and words, being 
 born later, live longer than the facts, 
 all combined to make the last half of the
 
 108 PROM OPITZ TO 
 
 eighteenth century one of those periods 
 when perfection shone in this dull, clumsy, 
 stupid world; and we turn back to it with 
 that feeling which we always have for per- 
 fection, whether it be shown in strength, 
 or pathos, or charm; whether in villainy 
 or virtue, so long as it is our neighbor 
 who suffers and not ourselves. It was then 
 that the cultivation of the Renaissance cul- 
 minated; the real etymological meaning 
 of the word, the new birth, foretold its 
 fate; Rome had been born again; it had 
 flourished with its dependence on remote 
 ideals; it had become the property of 
 scholars; it had made a schism between the 
 real life of people and their way of appear- 
 ing in literature, exactly the same differ- 
 ence as there is in English between the 
 Latin and what we are accustomed to call 
 the Anglo-Saxon words of our vocabulary ; 
 and, after it had tamed and civilized men 
 for two hundred and fifty years, we saw 
 the result at the end of the last century, in
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLNT}. 109 
 
 the aversion to confusion, enthusiasm, 
 and everything inexplicable. On one side 
 stood life, with all its charm; there was 
 no confusion, the understanding appeared 
 to have settled everything. To be sure, 
 there were suffering, ignorance, misery; but 
 for the lucky ones who had won the prizes 
 in the lottery there was no unpleasant 
 feeling of duty to disturb their enjoyment. 
 On the other side were fanatics, enthusiasts, 
 discontented with the current neat solu- 
 tion of the universe, who indulged in ob- 
 viously foolish longings and refused to 
 listen to the voice of reason; yet, after all, 
 the grumbler is the man of the future, 
 though odious in the present. 
 
 All of this polished materialism Wieland 
 expressed very neatly, as it was expressed by 
 Voltaire and by hosts of forgotten writers 
 in France and by a certain number in Eng- 
 land, whose ears were too deaf to hear the 
 premonitory mutterings of change. They 
 broke away from pedantry and, as it were,
 
 110 FROM OPITZ TO LESSHSTG. 
 
 walked on their own legs without the aid of 
 crutches; they abandoned all prejudices, and 
 took men as they found them ; they had the 
 art of saying things gracefully: it was only 
 the men who were full of the future who 
 stammered and bungled. Sterne, in Eng- 
 land, represents the unpedantic writers of 
 the new time, who had acquired a Gallic 
 grace, and, with the grace, some of the 
 Gallic frivolity. Wieland, too, showed how 
 even Germans could give lessons in worldly 
 wisdom, and his fame was at once made. 
 
 To understand just what that civilization 
 meant is not perfectly simple; but Wieland 
 throws a light upon it. Like most writ- 
 ers, he cannot be exactly defined by even 
 the most careful adjectives of praise or 
 blame. Censure or approbation are equally 
 far from expressing his importance and 
 from conveying a clear notion of the precise 
 place that he occupied. The mere shifting 
 of popular taste, with regard to his work, 
 will make this statement clear. In the last
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. Ill 
 
 century we should have heard nothing but 
 rapturous admiration; and it is not merely 
 a difference in presidents that makes it un- 
 likely that any one now holding that office 
 should again translate his " Oberon," as John 
 Quincy Adams did. The difference is in 
 ourselves, and in the progress of literature, 
 which has absorbed many influences besides 
 the one Wieland represented, and cannot 
 linger by his contribution to the total work. 
 Whether we like it or not, his work is 
 there, and it is deserving of consideration. 
 This will show us that a good part of 
 Wieland's service to letters lay in breaking 
 ground for freedom in art. We saw how 
 Brookes expressed the new found delight 
 in nature, with what keen joy he expressed 
 his rapture over the delicate whiteness of 
 the new cherry blossoms; and to many, 
 doubtless, his exultation appeared like most 
 complete triviality; yet he was uttering 
 a new truth, that the world was in itself 
 beautiful, and that the eye of man was
 
 112 JFKOM OPITZ TO LESSIISTG. 
 
 capable of other pleasures than reading 
 about the chess-play of various intellectual 
 interests. "When we remember, however, 
 that his enjoyment of this innocent specta- 
 cle only led him up to amazement at the 
 undoubted superiority of celestial joys, we 
 shall see that he was poisoned by the moral 
 bias, like all of us moderns, who are in- 
 capable of enjoying beauty without pond- 
 ering on the associations, chiefly of a 
 didactic kind, that it may call up within us. 
 Every new aspect had to be recommended 
 as a moral teacher. We still know the 
 necessity of this ; we are still aware that a 
 thing which is beautiful has to be excused 
 or apologized for, or palliated, shuffled 
 hi, after some fashion, as good for our 
 morals. Our insistance on this secondary 
 end is the reason why men who wish to be 
 honest so often take great pains to be im- 
 moral. They are disgusted with our insin- 
 cerity, and exaggerate the grim horror of 
 the truth.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 113 
 
 What Wieland did was to attempt part 
 of the general regeneration of man from the 
 burthen of authority. Brockes peeped at 
 the truth ; "Wieland expressed it ripened and 
 enlarged. Brockes, we remember, sang of 
 the comfort of stretching in bed; Wieland 
 tried to point out how man was not a 
 merely intellectual creature, but that every 
 emotion of which he was capable was re- 
 quired for the perfect man. He detested 
 the dreamy vagueness of his contempo- 
 raries, and had a clearly-defined intellectual 
 perception that beauty had been expelled 
 by teaching; and he found no delight in 
 seeking for it in the fantastic shapes of the 
 clouds; he called for concrete enjoyment. 
 It was the narrowness of his ideal that in- 
 jured him. The material philosophy of 
 " let us eat, drink, and be merry," overlooks 
 the remorse and regret of satiety which 
 goes to the debit account, and has to be 
 considered by one who is at all wise; yet 
 it has done good work by advancing the
 
 114 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 claims of one side of long-starved human 
 nature, a complex thing, and thus con- 
 tributing to the general discussion of how 
 man shall grow, the fact that it is not by the 
 intellect alone, or by the emotions alone; 
 while these two elements take good care to 
 prove that it is not by material pleasures 
 alone. A number of complicated influences 
 fed the romantic revival, which was really 
 an assertion of man's individuality; and it 
 is only gradually that we are learning that 
 they are found in every human being, and 
 not in imaginary heroes alone. 
 
 "Wieland had detractors and rivals. The 
 literary currents were growing complicated 
 as they were in England ; the old and new 
 were meeting and producing strange re- 
 sults. Two of these were important 
 enough to demand a few words. Gessner 
 (1730-87) was the first writer of German, 
 of modern times, who received the honours 
 of translation into all the European lan- 
 guages. He looked at nature as he had
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 115 
 
 been taught to do by Brockes and by 
 Thomson, and he drew little idyllic pictures, 
 in which we nowadays notice especially the 
 frame and the composition rather than the 
 vivid representations of nature. Yet, in 
 comparison with the avo\vedly ideal per- 
 sons in the old Arcadian romances, these 
 Greuze-like figures were genuine, and their 
 sentimentality only added to their likeness 
 to the life about them. The Arcadians 
 were a long-lived race; when the interest 
 of readers lay in the direction of lofty 
 virtues, the romances reflected this; now, 
 when arose the love of nature, though of 
 nature seen through streaming eyes, Gessner 
 catered to it, and gave in a complete and 
 finished form what was crude in the trans- 
 lation and imitation of Ossian, in whom the 
 more modern feeling of nature was soon 
 to find expression. 
 
 In Glcim's military songs we find an- 
 other division of the new spirit seeking 
 utterance. They were patriotic outbursts,
 
 116 FROM OPITZ TO LESSTNG. 
 
 inspired by the success of Frederick the 
 Great. It is more as an indication of the 
 
 v> 
 
 new change in men's hopes and interests, 
 than from any enormous poetic value, that 
 these poems are important. The country 
 was awakening from the political apathy 
 that kept literature a thing apart from life 
 and a matter of formal interest. Real feel- 
 ing of civil life was showing itself after a 
 long absence; and patriotism, which had 
 fed itself on the romantic antiquity of a 
 really unknown past, now had real life set 
 before it. 
 
 Another important contribution came 
 from the Vblkslieder, which may be best 
 studied in the simple record of the Gottin- 
 ger "Hainbund;" although, since every 
 chronological division is an incomplete one, 
 it carries us down almost further than we 
 have a right to be at this stage of our con- 
 sideration of the subject. Yet the outburst 
 which we are about to study occupies an 
 intermediate place between the raw an-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 117 
 
 tiquity which Klopstock furthered and the 
 later study of mediaeval history, which in 
 many forms became one of the most impor- 
 tant decisions of the Romantic revival. 
 Inasmuch as it was at this time crude, it 
 may fairly be examined now, when our at- 
 tention is turned to what was the budding 
 season of the enthusiasm that was soon to 
 burst out into full flower. Certainly it is 
 not hard to perceive qualities that are gene- 
 rally associated with the name of Germany, 
 in what we find in these letters of the year 
 1772. Voss, for example, writes thus to 
 Bruckner: 
 
 You ought to have been here on the 12th of Sep- 
 tember ! The two Millers, Hahn, Holty, Wehrs, and 
 I went in the evening to a neighbouring village. The 
 moon was full. We gave ourselves up to the unre- 
 strained enjoyment of the beauties of nature. We 
 drank milk in a peasant's hut, and then walked out 
 into the open fields. Here we found a little oak- 
 grove ; and it at once occurred to us all to swear 
 friendship beneath these sacred trees. We set wreaths 
 of oak-leaves around our hats, seized one another's 
 hands, danced about the narrow space, called to the 
 moon and stars to be witnesses of our union, and
 
 118 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 vowed eternal friendship. Then we bound ourselves 
 to the most complete uprightness in our judgments of 
 one another, and, for this object in view, to celebrate 
 our usual meetings with more exactness and greater 
 ceremony. Every one of us is to write a poem on 
 that evening, and we are to renew the ceremony every 
 year. 
 
 October 26, he writes : 
 
 A few days before his departure, Ewald invited the 
 whole of our Parnassus and Burger to a farewell ban- 
 quet. That was a real assemblage of poets, and we 
 all revelled like Anacreon and Horace; Boie, our 
 Werdomar, at the head in an arm-chair; on both 
 Bides of the table the younger bards adorned with 
 oak-leaves. Healths w r ere drunk. First Klopstock's ! 
 Boie took his glass, rose, and shouted, " Klopstock ! " 
 Every one did the same, uttered the great name, and, 
 after a solemn silence, drank. Then Ramler's! Not 
 quite so solemnly. Lessing's, Gleim's, Gessner's, Ger- 
 stenberg's, Uz's, Weisse's, etc., then my Bruckner, 
 with his Doi'is. A holy shudder must have seized 
 them when the whole choir, Hahn, and the Millers, 
 with manly German throats ; Boie and Burger, with 
 their silver voices, and the rest of us, shouted the 
 fiery " Lebe." Burger called " Wieland ! Down with 
 Voltaire," etc. Next you were solemnly chosen a 
 member. The oath to further religion, virtue, sensi- 
 bility, and pure, innocent wit, will not cost you much 
 trouble; and the object of our society to aid one 
 another by mutual criticism you can assist by letter ;
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 119 
 
 for we communicate with one another by letter, in 
 order to secure greater freedom. 
 
 One or two additional quotations will 
 dispel any lingering doubts with regard to 
 their abundant enthusiasm. Klopstock's 
 birthday was thus celebrated, July 2, 1773 : 
 
 Immediately after dinner we assembled in Hahn's 
 room. A long table was set and adorned with flowers. 
 At the head was an empty arm-chair covered with 
 roses and gilliflowers, and on it were Klopstock's com- 
 plete works. Under the chair lay Wieland's "Idris" 
 torn into fragments. First, Hahn read a few of Klop- 
 stock's odes that referred to Germany ; then we drank 
 coffee. Our pipe-lighters were made out of Wieland's 
 works. Boie, who does not smoke, had to light one, 
 and stamp on the fragments of the " Idris." Then 
 we drank in Rhine wine Klopstock's health, Luther's 
 memory, Hermann's, the health of the " Bund ;" then 
 Ebert's, Goethe's (don't you know him yet?), Herder's, 
 etc. Then the talk grew. We talked about freedom, 
 with our hats on our heads, about Germany, virtue, - 
 and you can imagine how we talked! Then we ate, 
 drank punch, and at last we burned Wieland's "Idris" 
 and his likeness. 
 
 This is the last: 
 
 September 12 will often cost me tears. It was the 
 day of parting from the Counts Stolberg and their 
 excellent chamberlain Clauswitz. The afternoon and 
 evening were tolerably cheerful, though at times a
 
 120 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 trifle quieter than usual. In some we detected secret 
 tears of the heart. These are the bitterest, Ernes- 
 tina, bitterer than those which bedew the cheek. 
 The young Count's face was terrible ; he strove to be 
 cheerful, and every expression was melancholy. . . . 
 (Evening, 10 o'clock). I was forced to play on the 
 piano. Perhaps the music gave the others some alle- 
 viation ; but in me, who had to experience every 
 melting effect in order to render it again, it inflicted 
 only deeper wounds. It was midnight before the 
 Stolbergs arrived. But who can describe the three 
 terrible hours we passed together in the night ! Every 
 one wanted to cheer up the others, and hence arose a 
 confusion of grief and simulated joy which was 
 like madness. We had punch made, for the night was 
 cold. We tried to dispel our gloom by singing, and 
 chose Miller's " Abschiedslied." Here all pretence 
 was vain. Our tears welled forth ; our voices grad- 
 ually failed us. We asked the same questions ten 
 times over; we swore eternal friendship; we em- 
 braced; we sent messages to Klopstock. Then it 
 struck three. We could no longer restrain our agony ; 
 we tried to make ourselves more wretched, and sang 
 the "Abschiedslied" once more, and sang it to the 
 end with difficulty. We were all weeping aloud. 
 After a fearful pause, Clauswitz arose, " Now, my chil- 
 dren, the time has come!" I flew to him, and I do 
 not know what I did. Miller drew the Count to the 
 window and showed him a star. I can't go on, dear 
 Eniestina; my tears are falling anew. When Claus- 
 witz let me go, the Counts were off. It was the most 
 terrible night I ever knew.
 
 CHAPTEK Y. 
 
 SURELY letters like these enable one to 
 understand the mood in which "Werther" 
 was written and read; but they take us 
 away from the consideration of some of the 
 earlier incidents. Lessing, whose health 
 was drunk by these zealous revellers, has 
 been left till now, in order that the total 
 impression of his fine character and mo- 
 mentous impulse might appear in one dis- 
 tinct whole. ~We shall see that he includes 
 much that lies dim in his contemporaries, 
 and also that he, like every one else, was a 
 man of his time. This must be distinctly 
 borne in mind, not to the discredit of Les- 
 sing, but as a simple historic fact. That 
 quality which we call genius it may at 
 present be out of our power to define. 
 
 Yet the direction in which this genius 
 
 121
 
 122 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLtfG. 
 
 shall find expression, the errors which it 
 shall sweep away, as well as those which it 
 may accept, the language which it shall 
 use, are as inevitable and as capable of 
 explanation as the linguistic or grammatical 
 peculiarities which shall mark a writers 
 style. Just as an author must use the 
 existing vocabulary, he must correct or 
 express existing errors ; and he is bound 
 by the limitations of humanity as to the 
 extent to which he may be able to advance 
 beyond the starting-place. What he does 
 is to say what his contemporaries feel, ris- 
 ing above them, but in the direction in 
 which they are moving. So much, at least, 
 we are justified in saying of Lessing ; and 
 it perhaps deserves saying about him, be- 
 cause sometimes his countrymen have 
 spoken of him as a man who accomplished 
 all that he did by sheer intellectual force, 
 without any relation to his contempora- 
 ries. 
 
 If we trace the course of Lessing's life
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 123 
 
 and action, we shall see that he started 
 with his generation, and that what is won- 
 derful in him is the way in which he an- 
 swered the questions that naturally arose 
 as literature was growing. This was the 
 difference between him and other men, that 
 he answered the questions that arose, in- 
 stead of contenting himself with the obso- 
 lete solutions that satisfied his contempora- 
 ries. He was born in 1729 ; and, after a busy 
 boyhood and youth, in which he equipped 
 himself very well for the discussion of 
 many subjects, he began his literary career 
 at a very early age. We have seen that 
 Gottsched, who was then at the height of 
 his influence, was working heartily in the 
 direction of improving the German stage; 
 and Lessing soon tried his hand at writing 
 plays. This was far from being the only 
 employment of his busy pen. He not only 
 composed poems, but he criticised the work 
 of most of his contemporaries; and there 
 was scarcely a single department of thought
 
 124 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 in which he did not interest himself. 1 
 What first strikes the eye in running over 
 his work is its fragmentary state. Lessing 
 and Herder, the two men who raised Ger- 
 man literature from provincialism to promi- 
 nence, and, one may almost say without 
 exaggeration, established the lines on which 
 it was to move, have this quality in com- 
 mon, that their work is in a fragmentary 
 condition. The impulse that Herder gave 
 to Germany, and through Germany to the 
 civilized world, for by his time that coun- 
 try filled its own boundaries, and every 
 
 1 In their interesting books on German literature, both 
 Hinriehs and Grncker lay a great deal of weight on the 
 fact that the literature of Germany is built up on critical 
 work. This is true; but yet it is well to remember that 
 the large amount of criticism in that country is merely a 
 sign of widespread interest in literature, and that elsewhere 
 copious discussion accompanies creative work. Dryden, 
 for example, was always writing about the proper way to 
 write. Wordsworth and Coleridge defended the position 
 they and their contemporaries took in their poems; and in 
 France, about 1830, the critical warfare was quite as im- 
 portant as the literature it illustrated and advocated. 
 Everywhere and at all times people will talk about subjects 
 that interest them. This condition is far from being pecu- 
 liar to Germany.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 125 
 
 impulse that it received affected its neigh- 
 bours, was due, not to formal books, with 
 a beginning 1 , a middle, and an end, but 
 to remarks dropped here and there, that 
 were not formal developments of definite 
 problems, but happy statements of novel 
 truths. These fell on rich ground, and in- 
 fluenced every man, just as Bible texts 
 console the pious, who do not weave them 
 into an intricate system of theology. The 
 fragmentariness of what he said and of 
 what Lessing said does not appear to stand 
 in their way. After all, stammering is not 
 a quality to be acquired with pains; but it 
 is better to stammer out the truth than to 
 litter glibly empty platitudes; and when we 
 are reminded, of this or that writer, that his 
 work represents no system, it may be fair 
 to pause a moment before being over- 
 whelmed, and to ask what in the past is 
 the relative value of the men with systems, 
 and of the men who were wise enough to 
 see that a system of the universe was but
 
 126 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 another attempt to square the circle. 
 Socrates is regarded as a man who helped 
 the intellectual growth of the world; but 
 the Socratic system is not yet known. 
 Montaigne has some reputation as a thinker. 
 Where was his system? Old temples arc 
 not the only things that time overthrows; 
 and of Plato of every man who aims at 
 the solution of every question we have 
 left much dust, and a greater or smaller col- 
 lection of fragments that alone move the 
 world. Let us, then, not mourn that Les- 
 sing's swift intelligence made the selection 
 of w r hat should be given to the world; and 
 if for Lessing we read Emerson, the re- 
 mark still holds good. 
 
 In Lessing's case the fragmentariness is 
 sufficiently explained by the number of his 
 interests and his delight in controversy. 
 
 The fables which his contemporaries wore 
 writing, with a complacent belief that they 
 were filling every requisition that could be 
 made, Lessing also wrote. His restless
 
 FEOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 127 
 
 energy inspired him to attempt a serious 
 discussion of the nature of the fable, in 
 which he set some of Breitinger's false 
 notions right, but did not fairly come to a 
 ripe conclusion. Then, too, he wrote odes, 
 epigrams, and indeed all the accustomed 
 little poems of the day, and with such suc- 
 cess that he acquired some reputation in 
 foreign parts; but no one knew better than 
 himself how far he was from being a real 
 poet. His own lack of poetic capacity he 
 was never tired of confessing. Although 
 he wrote three plays that were the first in 
 Germany to deserve a place in literature, 
 a place they still hold, he maintained that 
 he was no dramatist. He knew, what pos- 
 terity has agreed in acknowledging, that his 
 main merit was as a critic. It is of the utmost 
 importance to know Lessing's plays, but it 
 is a great mistake to rest contented with 
 that knowledge, and not to study his critical 
 writing. To be sure, much of this has be- 
 come old-fashioned; many of the points
 
 128 PEOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 which he took up are now permanently 
 settled; some have at this day only a his- 
 toric interest; but everything that Lessing 
 wrote impresses on our minds the vision of 
 an indefatigable lover of truth, who refused 
 to take commonplaces for granted, and was 
 the deadly foe of pedantry and convention. 
 These were always his animating principles, 
 and in the drama, in general literature, in 
 archeology and theology, he cleared the 
 ground as no other one man has ever done 
 in the history of any country. 
 
 Let us examine what he did with the 
 drama by way of precept and example. In 
 Gottsched's hands the stage was turned 
 wholly in the direction of the lifeless imita- 
 tion of French models. The same formal 
 exactness in England flourished in Addi- 
 son's " Cato," and lingered until Johnson's 
 "Irene." Its final expulsion from that 
 country we may place in 1756, the date of 
 his preface to Shakespeare. But before 
 Johnson wrote that famous preface, the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 129 
 
 unities, which had been exotics . at the 
 best, had withered and fallen after bearing 
 but a few fruits, as juiceless as hot-house 
 oranges. In France, too, the change was 
 taking place in the dramatic literature 
 under the leadership of Diderot. Lessing 
 in Germany fought the same fight. Since 
 it was the same question, the conflict 
 between what was reputed to be the classic 
 stage and what is commonly called the 
 romantic, that was agitating these three 
 countries simultaneously, it may perhaps be 
 worth our while to examine the way in 
 which independence was sought in each one 
 of them. In fact, not only is this the most 
 interesting way of regarding the subject, 
 but it is distinctly the most accurate, for 
 it is impossible to understand what Diderot 
 and Lessing did without knowing the Eng- 
 lish stage; and, more than this, inasmuch 
 as waves of thought know geographical 
 boundaries as little as the waves of the sea 
 know their geographical names, the contests
 
 130 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 that were waged in these separate countries 
 were all parts of one great battle, not yet 
 wholly finished, between the old and the 
 new between the Renaissance and roman- 
 ticism. Just as in a real battle, the soldier 
 in a cornfield does not know very clearly 
 what is going on behind a neighbouring 
 hill, although the victory of the line at that 
 point weakens the enemy in his front, so 
 this fight was fought with each contestant 
 seeing most clearty the enemy directly in 
 his face, ^ow, however, we can view the 
 whole battle as it raged for something like 
 a century, and its importance gives greater 
 glory to Leasing, who was the ablest gen- 
 eral officer in the field. 
 
 The classic drama first fixed itself in 
 France, deriving its principles from Italy, 
 and taking the place of the crude drama of 
 impossibilities which was represented by 
 Hardy. In France it found its natural 
 home, and from there it spread to England 
 arid Germany. In England the French
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 131 
 
 influence was slow in its conquest of 
 modern taste. The Puritans, by closing 
 the play-houses in 1642, had broken with 
 the past, but the early inspiration was 
 already fairly dead. With the Restoration 
 and the revival of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 as well as in the work of the new writers 
 who had not forgotten the old traditions, 
 we see the native aversion to rules holding 
 out for a long time against accepting many 
 shackles at once. Dryden's indecision 
 about the relative merits of blank verse 
 and poetry ; his comments as in the 
 famous " Essay of Dramatic Poesy " on 
 the Frencli stage; and, more than anything 
 else, the general crudity of the English 
 heroic drama, with its excesses and extrav- 
 agances, show how far the English play- 
 writers were from imitating the French. 
 The stream that started in the classic 
 French drama met another and a very 
 turbid stream, that refused to flow in 
 bounds until Addison, who had already
 
 132 PROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 
 
 laughed at the heroic plays, let his " Cato " 
 be acted, and gave the authority of his 
 name to the most rigid formality. Yet 
 even his adherence to these rules, at the 
 very time it is curious to notice when he 
 was defending Milton and beginning the 
 war against similar artificiality in epic 
 poetry, inspired but few imitators. Howe 
 had already, in a crude way, gone back to 
 Shakespeare, and a few years later Lillo, in 
 his " George Barnwell," had shown that a 
 tragedy did not demand social position in 
 its main characters. Richardson and Lillo 
 established the sway of the family novel and 
 the domestic tragedy, and their eifect was 
 even greater on the continent than in Eng- 
 land, where there has always existed 
 marked intolerance for the discussion of 
 general principles. Moreover, in England 
 the classic plays had too slight a hold to 
 need much exorcising. They vanished 
 almost before they had become firmly 
 established. In France, however, they were
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENTG. 133 
 
 part of the apparent constitution of the 
 universe, and the attack upon them required 
 a campaign of nearly a century before vic- 
 tory was won. La Motte, a writer of no 
 great merit, opened the battle with an attack 
 on the writers, pointing out that the unity 
 of place made it necessary to lug people 
 into strange places, whither they would not 
 have gone naturally, and asking whether 
 the spectators, who knew that they were in 
 the theatre, could not as easily imagine 
 themselves in Athens as in Rome in the 
 course of a single play, and showing that in 
 the opera the variety of place caused no 
 confusion. 1 He attacked the unity of time 
 
 1 To show how the unity of place did not destroy free- 
 dom, the Abbe d'Aubignac, in his "Pratique du Theatre" 
 (Amsterdam : 1725), i. 90, says : " On pourroit feindre 
 au palais sur le bord de la mer abandonne h de pauvres 
 gens de la compagne; un prince arrivant aux cotes par 
 uaufrage, qui le feroit orner de riches tapisseries, lustres, 
 bras (lore?;, tableaux, et autrcs meubles precieux. Apres 
 on y feroit mettre en feu par qnelque avanture, et le faisant 
 tomber dans rembrasement, la mer paroitroit derrieve sur 
 laquelle on ponrroit encore roprcsenter un combat de vais- 
 seaux.. Si bien quo dans cinq changements de Theatre 
 1'unite de lieu scroit ingenieuscment gardec."
 
 134 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 with the same useless weapon, good sense, 
 but with the result that sensible people will 
 expect, he became an object of ridicule. 
 Voltaire, especially, turned on him with vio- 
 lence, saying : w The spectator is but three 
 hours at the play, consequently the acting 
 must last only three hours. Cinna, Andro- 
 maque, Bajazet last no longer. If a few 
 other pieces demand more time, this is a 
 license which is only pardonable in view of 
 the beauty of the work; and the greater the 
 license, the greater the fault." Marmontel, 
 too, frequently advocated a change. La 
 Motte recommended tragedies in prose. 
 Lachaussee wrote plays in prose about peo- 
 ple in common life ; the seed took root, and 
 change was in the air. 
 
 Among the inspiring causes, besides 
 the influence of the English stage 1 and 
 natural distaste for the dwindling glories 
 
 1 The Theatre Anglais (8 vols.) appeared between 1745 
 and 1749. The first four volumes were almost entirely 
 devoted to Shakespeare.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSI^G. 135 
 
 of the classic drama, we may count the 
 new influence of the novel, which, by 
 accustoming the reader to frequent change 
 of scene, helped to destroy the rigidity 
 of the unity of place, and left on the 
 reader an impression of the advantage 
 of prose for the expression of thought. 
 It also showed the value of the unconven- 
 tional hero. The spectator became more 
 aware than formerly of the chains which 
 the dramatist had to assume. This was all 
 part of the general disintegration of author- 
 ity which had gone to the making of the 
 etiquette of literature that marked the es- 
 tablishment of pseudo-classicism. There 
 independence was opposed, as independence 
 in manners is always opposed; the author- 
 ities felt averse to anyone who had his own 
 views of literature, as one feels now about 
 those who do not comply with convention, 
 but have manners of their own. The same 
 liberality extended itself, also, to the toler- 
 ance of translations and imitations. At the
 
 136 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 
 
 time of which we are now speaking, inde- 
 pendence was beginning to assert itself, 
 and it began with asking for freedom of the 
 emotions. 
 
 The most important defender of the new 
 spirit was Diderot, who wrote much about 
 the stage, urging the player to watch 
 nature, and in his " Paradox " affirming that 
 extreme sensibility makes mediocre actors; 
 mediocre sensibility, bad actors; and that 
 an absolute lack of sensibility makes 
 actors really sublime. He condemned ex- 
 cessive gesture and emphasis, and praised 
 realistic scenery. The best plays, he said, 
 were those that combined tragedy and com- 
 edy, and he tried his hand at composing 
 plays for a model to his disciples. What 
 injured both his precepts and his practice 
 was his insistence on the need of moral 
 teaching. " It is always virtue and virtuous 
 people that a man should have in view when 
 writing. Oh, what a gain it would be for 
 mankind if all the imitative arts should pro-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 137 
 
 pose one common object, and were to com- 
 bine with the laws in making us love virtue 
 and hate vice ! " This was an old error that 
 was especially prominent in the last cen- 
 tury. We shall come across it in Lessing, 
 just as we find it in the earliest writers on 
 the subject. 1 
 
 What especially distinguishes Lessing's 
 work about the stage is this, that he fought 
 almost single-handed, while in England the 
 change of the drama towards simplicity was 
 but one part of a general effort to abandon 
 an artificial system; and in France the 
 movement was furthered by a number of 
 fellow - workers. The condition of the 
 theatre in Germany when Lessing began to 
 write was most lamentable, and those who 
 were supplying it with material were slav- 
 
 1 D'Aubignac, Op. cit. i. 5: "La principale regie du 
 poeme dramatique est qne les vertns y soient toujours 
 reeompensces ou pour lo moins y soient toujours ionees, 
 mulgre les outrages de la Fortune et quo les vices y soient 
 toujours punis ou pour le inoins toujours en horreur quand 
 meme ils y triomphent."
 
 138 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 ishly devoted to the utmost rigor of the 
 French rules. They had no admirable past 
 to which they could look back; for the 
 medisBval glory of Germany was remoter 
 than the civilization of Home. The popular 
 theatre was a mass of vulgarities, that rep- 
 resented only the degradation of the popu- 
 lace; and the absence of national life de- 
 prived the Germans of what has always 
 been the strongest inspiration of a real 
 drama. Yet, narrow as the field was, it 
 was one that held out the most temptations 
 to young writers. The more they tried, 
 however, the more evident it became that 
 the French taste, which was the natural 
 expression of that nation, was an exotic in 
 the less civilized Germany. The imported 
 elegance had no roots in the nation, and it 
 even failed to satisfy those who, like Fred- 
 erick the Great, preferred to get the French 
 flavour in the French tongue. We have 
 seen that Klopstock led his generation back 
 to a remote and romantic nationalism. It
 
 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING-. 139 
 
 was Lessing's glory that he brought the 
 drama into close and actual relations with 
 human life. This he accomplished in two 
 ways by criticism and by his own original 
 work. From the beginning, Lessing's crit- 
 icism of Gottsched was unsparing. What 
 was ridiculous in that would-be dictator he 
 lost no chance to ridicule; and this he did 
 without entering the camp of the Swiss 
 school. Yet he began with the intention, 
 not of overthrowing everything that the 
 example of the French taught, but of 
 widening its narrow limits. He wrote the 
 beginnings of many plays, but it was with 
 the "Miss Sara Sampson" (1755) that he 
 first appeared as a dramatic writer of any 
 importance. His earlier work is only lit up 
 by the brilliancy of what he now began to 
 do. Of itself it was of the nature of school 
 exercises. Already Lessing had studied 
 the discussion that was going on in France 
 and England about the stage, and in the 
 very title of this play we see its descent
 
 140 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 from the English domestic drama. This 
 fact, that it owed its origin to the literature 
 of another country, is but one of the many 
 instances of the futility of looking anywhere 
 for that form of originality which to the 
 student is as incomprehensible as a sixth 
 sense. There is a vague notion that the 
 mysterious thing called genius is capable 
 of evoking something out of nothing by 
 direct exercise of creative power. While 
 this idea has vanished from science, it still 
 survives in those departments of human 
 activity which have not yet come fully 
 under scientific treatment, and poets and 
 painters enjoy in the popular estimation a 
 privilege which has been denied to nature. 
 For one thing, the fact that the Greek and 
 Roman classics came down to us only in 
 fragments and these the best confirmed 
 those who studied only those two literatures 
 in the belief that the great works of the 
 Greeks were the result of a sort of lucky 
 chance, and that the Romans, when they
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 141 
 
 wanted a tragedy, or comedy, or epic, set a 
 safe fashion by sitting down and copying 
 their predecessors. They had no better 
 opportunity to observe the growth of liter- 
 ature than has the hasty traveller who stud- 
 ies the history of painting in the Tribune 
 of the Uffizi, in which the masterpieces are 
 crowded together, and the splendor of 
 human achievement strikes the dazed and 
 delighted spectator without the intrusion of 
 any reminder of the toil by which it was 
 attained, or of the forgotten failures that 
 make it clear that not for us alone is suc- 
 cess rare and difficult. In Greek literature, 
 especially, we have only the mountain- 
 peaks, and not the expanse of plain, so that 
 we cannot draw the man with all the ful- 
 ness that is possible when we have to do 
 with modern countries. And, too, just as 
 Darwin would never have hit upon his 
 theory of evolution if the fauna he had 
 seen had consisted of nothing but horses, 
 cows, elephants, and dogs, so it would have
 
 142 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 been with the students of the classics. It was 
 the blending lines of the pigeons that first 
 led him to observe the interchangeability of 
 species; and with all the evidence at our 
 command in modern literature, we detect 
 the wonderful connection between the writ- 
 ings of different countries. The growth of 
 the bourgeoisie in England was the inspiring 
 cause of the family novel and the domestic 
 drama. This advance in civilization spread 
 to other countries, and with the same results. 
 The English and German imitations of the 
 "Spectator" carried the new feeling, which 
 was furthered by the study of nature; and 
 to the eye of science there is no material 
 difference between a king and a peasant 
 or at least since all discoveries are gradual 
 between a king and a respectable citizen. 
 Love of the peasant was still a sentimental 
 weakness, and, we may say, yet awaits the 
 time when the peasant shall discover his 
 own importance. The exaggerated insist- 
 ence on purely national traits was not a
 
 PROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 143 
 
 fault of Lessing's, who was too truly a man 
 of the eighteenth century not to perceive 
 that civilization was a single task in which 
 all European nations were allies. They all 
 spoke one language, though in different 
 dialects. Later, the feeling of national dif- 
 ferences was intensified by abhorrence of the 
 superficiality of cosmopolitanism, and, dis- 
 tinctly, by the struggle for life against the 
 French - 7 but now we are learning once more 
 the great lesson that we arc all one family. 
 "When science has made this clear, we shall 
 see that the leaven has again been working 
 in literature, and meanwhile even a hasty 
 examination will show that there is free 
 trade in thought at least throughout 
 the civilized world. 
 
 The change from a drama that repre- 
 sented only kings and heroes of princely 
 birth to one that concerned itself with hu- 
 man beings, was as inevitable a thing as is 
 the change in government from despotism 
 to democracy, with the growth of the im-
 
 144 PROM OPITZ TO LESSTNG. 
 
 portance of the individual. There is a cer- 
 tain monotony in civilization which may be 
 exemplified in a thousand ways. The large 
 gas-pipes, for instance, that are laid in every 
 street, and have the smaller branches run- 
 ning into every house, which again feed the 
 ramifying tubes that supply the single lights, 
 may remind one of the advance from the 
 general to the particular which character- 
 izes every form of human thought. The 
 classical tragedies presented a few acknowl- 
 edged truths vividly and strongly. Their 
 simplicity and universality were of great 
 service in inculcating a few general princi- 
 ples, and no one can easily overestimate 
 the educational value of a code that repe- 
 tition made familiar to every student. The 
 mere mention of Caesar's name brought with 
 it a picture of ambition. Scipio stood for 
 self-control ; Medea for the stricken mother. 
 Lucretia became the incarnation of matronly 
 honour; Virginia, that of maidenly purity. 
 Europe was civilized by the experience of
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 145 
 
 other races, and the study of the classics 
 was a labor-saving* device which deserves 
 all the credit that is not a mere echo of 
 what people imagine that they ought to say 
 to show their cultivation. But in the last 
 century the time began to appear when au- 
 thority ceased to serve its long-lived pur- 
 pose as an educational means. What the 
 classics and especially the Latin classics 
 could teach had been thoroughly learned. 
 We know that now it would be difficult to 
 oppose a tyrant by calling him Tarquin, and 
 we have as dim a feeling for the Roman 
 proper names- as we have after a bountiful 
 dinner on the twenty-second of December 
 for the sufferings of the Pilgrim fathers. 
 What Rome could do for the world had 
 been assimilated, to eradicate it would 
 have been barbarous; but to go on repeat- 
 ing it as if it contained the whole truth that 
 man could attain to would have been intel- 
 lectual bondage. Consequently men simply 
 left it on one side and took another path.
 
 146 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 There were several inviting them. The 
 populace had already found pleasure in the 
 contemplation of itself and of very unclas- 
 sical heroes, and the habit spread. More- 
 over, with democracy in the air, what were 
 kings but convenient formulas? Not in vain, 
 as Boswell's father told Dr. Johnson, did 
 Cromwell " gar kings ken that they had a 
 lith in their necks;" and when kings could 
 be robbed of their influence, to say nothing 
 of their lives, by their people, it became 
 evident that those who held the power were 
 also objects of interest. The lessons they 
 had to learn were not the vague truths that 
 Rome could teach, but the application of 
 these truths to modern conditions. 
 
 Let us also notice, here, that the new les- 
 sons were taught with an outburst of sen- 
 timent. Just as the present new treatment 
 of the poor, by the rigid application of sci- 
 entific rules, was preceded by the gushing 
 period, when charity consisted in putting 
 one's hands into one's pockets and bringing
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 147 
 
 out gold pieces that not unnaturally 
 made the pauper happy, the development of 
 modern literature without classic crutches 
 began with copious floods of tears, as if 
 those authors foresaw the melancholy con- 
 sequences of the new responsibilities that 
 the world was assuming. 
 
 Then, too, it is not with impunity that 
 man is born when certain influences are at 
 work; these he cannot escape any more 
 than he can escape fashions in hats. Lillo's 
 " George Barnwell " was a king done small. 
 The tragedy was like an old tragedy, with 
 a clerk's stool instead of a throne, and a 
 quill-pen in the place of a sceptre. What 
 would have been regal was made civic. For 
 the overweening crimes of a king, Lillo put 
 a London apprentice succumbing to gross 
 temptations; this was the value of the 
 change, that it was made clear that a 
 change was possible; its development 
 awaited time. For the discovery that free- 
 dom is desirable is very remote from the
 
 148 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSTJSTG. 
 
 discovery of the best way in which to se- 
 cure and maintain freedom. 
 
 In writing this "Miss Sara Sampson," 
 Lessing took the only step that was possi- 
 ble for a man abreast with his time. The 
 significance of the school can hardly be 
 overestimated, although this bears but a re- 
 mote relation to its aesthetic value. What 
 was gained by the introduction of human 
 beings who, so to speak, wore no halo, ran 
 a great risk of being lost by the substitu- 
 tion of more conventional and social punish- 
 ments for the more serious, because eternal, 
 ethical punishments of the older tragedy. 
 The gallows that adorned the last scene of 
 " George Barn well " was a feeble substitute 
 for more genuine tragic horror, and by the 
 introduction of the horrid vengeance of the 
 ministers of law, by having fate personified 
 as a police officer, we see the door opened 
 for the melodrama, and the same unneces- 
 sary error that the modern French novelists 
 make, when, in their effort to write about
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 149 
 
 common people, they pick out uncommonly 
 bad ones. I call the error unnecessary, and 
 so it is when judged after the event, but, 
 historically, it is necessary or at least uni- 
 formly true that we find simplicity the last 
 thing 1 attained. The whole gradual lesson 
 of life is the reduction of emphasis. Les- 
 sing speedily learned this truth which was 
 enforced upon him by his eighteenth century 
 training, and in his "Minna von Barnhehn " 
 (1763) we find it controlling and directing 
 him, for it is never to be forgotten that Les- 
 sing belonged to the eighteenth century. 
 This is not merely a statement of historical 
 fact, but an explanation of his merits and 
 of his limitations. We shall find abun- 
 dant instances to prove the assertion in 
 his critical writings, as well as in his origi- 
 nal writings, which are always of the nature 
 of illustrations of the theoretical position 
 he attained by dint of intellectual work. 
 Thus "Miss Sara Sampson" is like a lec- 
 turers drawing on the black-board, wherein
 
 150 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 Lessing makes plain what he has to say 
 about the domestic drama ; and in " Minna 
 von Barnhelm " we find a play that throws 
 light upon his late theories about the stage. 
 What first strikes us is its literary perfec- 
 tion, and this is a quality that marks the 
 work of many writers of the latter part of 
 the last century, who were keenly sensitive 
 to the thoughts that inspired that interest- 
 ing period, but whose eyes were not dazzled, 
 and whose hands were not made uncertain, 
 by the contemplation of the whole mighty 
 upheaval of the romantic revival. They 
 preserved a concinnity which was lost with 
 the good manners that existed before the 
 French revolution. Voltaire's French, for 
 instance, has known no later followers, 
 though it was used more or less well by 
 many of his contemporaries, and in English 
 literature we see something similar in Gold- 
 smith's "Vicar of Wakefield," which was 
 the last book written in that language that 
 can be read and admired by both scholars
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 151 
 
 and ignorant people. Lessing and Gold- 
 smith both employed a tool that had become 
 flexible and easy by long practice. Even 
 Klopstock, although old errors clung to 
 him, as Dantzel well points out, in trying 
 to make a literal substitution of the Scan- 
 dinavian for the Grseco-Roman mythology, 
 and in forging new fetters after the old 
 fashion, 1 opened wide fields to the imagin- 
 ation, to do justice to which exceeded his 
 own powers. Lessing, on the other hand, 
 was controlled by the more rigid and nar- 
 rower limits of the vanishing generation; 
 although the two men were contemporaries, 
 Klopstock belonged to the younger race. 
 In the second place, we notice that in 
 " Minna von Barnhelm," Lessing succeeded 
 in producing a play that drew its strength 
 from the fact that it was a vivid picture 
 of German life. A chord was touched that 
 had been silent for centuries; the Germans 
 had imitated the French with heavy-handed 
 
 1 See his "Lessing," i, 493.
 
 152 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 levity, they had tried to sing as Horace 
 sang, and to praise the juice of the grape 
 as Anacreon was supposed to have done; 
 but now German life found its poet, and 
 that country at once was fitted to take its 
 proper place among the nations of Europe. 
 The play was one result of the Seven Years' 
 War, which had already called Gleim away 
 from the production of Anacreontic frivoli- 
 ties to singing patriotic songs. Frederick 
 the Great, to be sure, did not care for Ger- 
 man literature; a taste for poetry, as Kuno 
 Fischer has truly said, 1 is something that is 
 formed in youth, a remark that is especially 
 true of busy men, and in his youth Gotts- 
 ched was the prophet of French taste. The 
 German writers were never tired of making 
 allusions to Frederick's indifference to their 
 work. Not only was it impossible to recall 
 the golden age of Latin literature without 
 thinking of Augustus, but the position of 
 
 1 See his " Lessing als Reformator der deutschen 
 Sprache." l ten Theil, p. 83.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSOG. 153 
 
 Richelieu and of Louis XIV. in France to- 
 wards writers aroused envy in every Ger- 
 man who was interested in letters. When 
 Frederick, a few days before Rossbach 
 (1757), gave an audience to Gottsched, the 
 writer said Germany lacked an Augustus, 
 Frederick retorted that they had one. "'But 
 no Maecenas,' I answered." [ It is Gottsched 
 who describes the scene. ] ' There you are 
 right,' said the king. When I urged fur- 
 ther that German writers were discouraged 
 because the nobility and the courtiers were 
 too familiar with French and too ignorant 
 of German to understand and appreciate 
 their own language, he said, ? That is true, 
 for I have never read a German book since 
 I was a boy, and I speak the language like 
 a coachman ' [they were talking in French] 
 'but now I'm an old fellow of forty-six and 
 have no time to give to it.' " Three years 
 later, in talking with Gellert, Frederick 
 asked, w Why have we no more good au- 
 thors?" a tactful question, it will be
 
 154: FROM OPITZ TO LESSINGk 
 
 noticed. * Your majesty has formed a pre- 
 judice against the Germans." " !N"o, I can't 
 say that." " At least, against German writ- 
 ers." " That is true." w A good many rea- 
 sons might be assigned why the Germans 
 have not produced very much first-rate 
 work. While the arts and sciences flour- 
 ished among the Greeks, the Romans were 
 at war. Possibly the present is our war- 
 making age ; possibly the Germans have not 
 had an Augustus." "What! Do you want 
 an Augustus for all Germany? " " Not ex- 
 actly that ; I only wish that each monarch 
 should encourage the geniuses in his own 
 territory." Here the king changed the sub- 
 ject, for that is a privilege which kings 
 enjoy in conversation with private citizens. 
 When, a few years after Lessing's death, 
 Mirabeau brought forward the same accu- 
 sation against the king, Frederick replied, 
 'You don't know what you are talking 
 about. Just because I have left my subjects 
 free play and have seemed to take no inter-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSDJG. 155 
 
 est in their writings, I have done more for 
 them and for enlightenment than if I had 
 tried to drive them." But if it is possible 
 now to be grateful 'that Frederick did not 
 drill the Prussians in literature, it is easy to 
 see that by his genius and bravery he gave 
 the state that independence of outside con- 
 trol, and that feeling of self-existence, which 
 animated Lessing at least in writing " Min- 
 na von Barnhelm." The story of his life 
 brings out very clearly the increasing strug- 
 gle he had with fate, owing to the indiffer- 
 ence of patrons of literature, but Freder- 
 ick's great deeds made the play possible. 
 
 And how delightful the play is! Tell- 
 heim, the hero, is a wounded officer who has 
 been fighting bravely under Frederick, and 
 is now discharged; but before he can re- 
 ceive his papers he must make clear an 
 apparent discrepancy in his accounts. It 
 seems that, being obliged to levy a contri- 
 bution from a region in which he had 
 been quartered, out of commiseration for
 
 156 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 the general suffering which the war had 
 caused, he had contributed the sum of two 
 thousand pistoles out of his own pocket. 
 When the peace was signed, he charged the 
 amount as part of the war debt. The note 
 given by the district was recognized to be 
 genuine, but it was regarded as a bribe to 
 Tellheim for reducing the enforced contri- 
 bution to its minimum; and, until the matter 
 is examined, he is forbidden to leave the 
 town. Meanwhile he has spent all his own 
 money ; most of his servants have run away, 
 carrying with them his belongings; one, 
 Just, by name, is left him. His sergeant- 
 major, Werner, who twice saved his life in 
 the war, is living near by, on a little estate 
 that he owns. In these circumstances he 
 awaits his fate, poor, wounded, suspected 
 of dishonesty, and further saddened by the 
 necessity of breaking his engagement. He 
 had been betrothed to Minna von Barnhelm, 
 who was filled with admiration for his gen- 
 erosity to the people from whom he had
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 157 
 
 been ordered to extort a levy. But after a 
 while he had ceased to answer her letters, 
 and she had determined to seek him. In 
 the company of her maid, Franziska, and 
 of her uncle, Count Bruchsall, a Saxon 
 nobleman, who detested the Germans, and 
 had lived in Italy while the war was going 
 on, she reached Berlin while her uncle was 
 detained at the next station. By chance 
 she goes to the inn where Tellhcim was 
 staying, the " King of Spain." She is rich, 
 Tellheim is poor; so during his absence the 
 landlord, without ado, dispossesses him 
 of his comfortable quarters, thrusts his be- 
 longings into a wretched hole in the garret, 
 telling Minna that the officer had voluntarily 
 offered her his room. Tellheim, in his 
 wrath, determines to leave the inn at once, 
 and, having no ready money for the payment 
 of his bill, gives Just his engagement ring 
 to pawn. Just gives it to the landlord, who 
 shows it to Minna, and thus she learns that 
 Tellheim is here. She thus gets a view of
 
 158 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 the whole matter; but she knows the man, 
 and perceives that her difficulties have only 
 begun. He is as proud as Lucifer, and 
 his pride is the only thing he will not sacri- 
 fice for anyone. He can never bring him- 
 self to owe his relief to her, and all her 
 assurances that she would gladly share his 
 misery she knows would be idle. But she 
 sees her way; as a rich heiress she has no 
 chance; she knows that if she pretends to 
 reject him because she is too poor and mis- 
 erable, the obstinate creature will be melted; 
 and so it happens. The innocent deception 
 is finally exposed, and the curtain falls on 
 the best German comedy that perhaps wa8 
 ever written. 
 
 The ingenuity of the plot is really secon- 
 dary to the skill with which the characters 
 display themselves. The ingenuity with 
 which Tellheim is drawn is above all praise. 
 In the first place, the enthusiasm that Just 
 feels for him prepares us for making his 
 acquaintance with a prejudice in his favor.
 
 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 159 
 
 His sergeant-major has just brought him 
 five hundred thalers, but he refuses to touch 
 them, and yet he is so poor that he bids his 
 servant make out the amount due him. 
 Then comes in the widow of one of his old 
 fellow-soldiers, to whom Tellheim had lent 
 four hundred thalers, and who, on his 
 death-bed, had enjoined upon her that she 
 must pay them. She had sold everything 
 to raise the money, which she now brings. 
 
 "Let me count the money," she says. 
 " No, indeed ; Marl off in debt to me? That 
 can hardly be. Let me see " (he examines 
 his note -book); "I don't find anything 
 about it." 
 
 "You must have mislaid his note, but that 
 formality makes no difference. Allow me." 
 
 " No, madam, I never mislay anything of 
 the kind. If I have not it, that is a sign 
 that I have never had it, or that it was paid 
 and I gave it back to him." 
 
 Major!" 
 
 "Certainly, madam; Marloff owed me
 
 160 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 nothing. I can't remember that he was 
 ever in my debt. Indeed, it is more likely 
 that he was my creditor. I have never 
 managed to pay everything I owed to a 
 man who for six years shared good fortune 
 and bad, honour and danger, with me. I 
 shan't forget that he left a son. He shall 
 be my son, so soon as I can be a father to 
 him. I am so confused to-day " 
 
 "Generous man! But do not think so 
 meanly of me. At least accept the money, 
 and let me have an easy conscience." 
 
 ? What more do you need than my assur- 
 ance that the money does not belong to me? 
 Or do you want me to rob my friend's 
 fatherless son? for that is what it amounts 
 to. It belongs to him; lay it aside for 
 him." 
 
 One notices the lifelike confusion of 
 reasons. 
 
 "I understand you. Excuse me if I 
 don't understand exactly how to receive 
 favors. But how did you know that a
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 161 
 
 mother would do more for her son than she 
 would do for her own life? " 
 
 "No sooner is the door closed upon her 
 than Tcllheim says : " Poor, noble woman ! 
 I must not forget to destroy the note;" and 
 he takes it from his pocket-book and tears 
 it into fragments. :? Who knows," he goes 
 on, " that my misery might not some day 
 lead me to make use of it?" This touch 
 was, and is, most thrilling on the stage. 
 
 The next scene, in which Just brings in 
 his bill, showing that he owes his master 
 91 thalers, 16 groschen, 3 pfennigs, is ex- 
 cellent reading. " Fellow, you are crazy ! " 
 says Tellheim. ;<: What are you looking at 
 me for? You don't owe me anything, and 
 I will recommend you to some one of my 
 friends where you will be better off than 
 you can be with me." 
 
 " I don't owe you anything, and yet you 
 want to turn me away?" 
 
 "Because I am not willing to get into 
 debt to you."
 
 162 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 Then Just, who bears a close family 
 likeness to Trim, in Sterne's "Tristram 
 Shandy," recounts his experience with a 
 poodle : " Last winter I was walking by 
 the canal, when I heard a sort of whimper- 
 ing. I climbed down in the direction of 
 the voice ; I thought I was saving a child 
 from drowning, and drew a poodle out of 
 the water. 'All right,' thought I. The 
 poodle followed me ; but I 'm no great friend 
 of poodles. I tried to get rid of him, but 
 in vain. I whipped him off, but in vain. 
 I would not let him sleep in my room; 
 he lay just outside of the door. If he 
 came near me, I kicked him off; he would 
 howl, look at me, and wag his tail. I have 
 never given him a crumb of bread, and yet 
 I am the only person whose voice he will 
 hear. He leaps about me, and is always 
 showing off his little tricks. He is an ugly 
 cur, but a good dog after all. If he goes 
 on, I shall get fond of poodles." And when 
 Tellheim savs that he means to leave the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSESTG. 163 
 
 inn, he bids Just to pack up all his things, 
 the pistols that hang at the head of his bed, 
 and, "One thing more: bring the poodle 
 along; do you understand, Just? " 
 
 These selections, however, do the play 
 injustice, because they make it appear as if 
 Tellheim were always posing for the proud 
 man; but in fact these characterizations are 
 kept subordinate to the movement of the 
 play. When Minna is chatting with her 
 maid, for instance, we find equal skill. Thus 
 Franziska says: "People seldom speak of 
 the virtue they have, but so much the oft- 
 ener of the one they lack." 
 
 " Do you see, Franziska, you have made a 
 very wise remark?" 
 
 "Made? Does one make what just hap- 
 pens to occur to one ? " , 
 
 "And do you know why I like it so 
 much? It applies to my Tellheim." 
 
 " And what in the world would you not 
 apply to him?" 
 
 "Friends and foes agree that he is the
 
 164 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 bravest man in the world. But who ever 
 heard him talk about bravery? He has the 
 most upright heart in the world, but up- 
 rightness and generosity are words that 
 never crossed his lips." 
 
 * What sort of virtues does he talk about, 
 then?" 
 
 " About none, for he has them all." 
 
 " I wanted to hear that." 
 
 " But wait a minute, let me think. He 
 does talk a good deal about economy. I 
 will say in confidence that I think the man 
 is extravagant." 
 
 " Oh yes. I have often heard him men- 
 tion truth and constancy to you; how if he 
 should happen to be a flirt? " 
 
 Lessing could be light as well as pathetic. 
 One last extract shall show this rarer qual- 
 ity of feeling. Werner tries to force some 
 money on him, which Tellheim refuses. " It 
 is not proper that I should be your debtor." 
 
 "Not proper? When that hot day, which 
 the sun and the enemy both made hot, and
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 165 
 
 your groom had gone astray with the can- 
 teen, and you came to me and said ' Werner, 
 have you got anything to drink? ' and I held 
 out mine to you, did n't you take it and drink 
 from it? Was that proper? By my poor 
 soul, as if a drink of wretched water at 
 that moment was not more than all that 
 stuff ! (he holds out the purse.) Take it, 
 dear Major! Just imagine it's water. God 
 created it for us all." 
 
 f You agonize me ; don't you understand 
 that I don't want to be your debtor? " 
 
 "Oh! that's very different. You don't 
 want to be my debtor? But how if you hap- 
 pened to be already? Or don't you owe any- 
 thing to the man who caught the blow that 
 was aimed at your head, and another time 
 cut off the arm that was about to send a bul- 
 let into you? How could you owe this man 
 any more? Or is my neck less important 
 than my purse? If that is a proper thought, 
 by my poor soul, it 's in abominably poor 
 taste." And when Tellheim still refuses,
 
 166 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 
 
 Werner fires this parting shot: "I have 
 often thought: How will it be when you are 
 old and crippled; when you have nothing 
 left; when you must beg your way from 
 door to door? Then I thought: No, you 
 won't have to beg; there 's Major Tellheim? 
 you '11 go to him, he will share his last penny 
 with you, he will support you as long as 
 you live, and you '11 die an honest man. 
 I don't think so any longer. Whoever 
 won't take anything from me when he needs 
 it and I 've got it, won't give me anything 
 when he has it and I need it. Oh, very 
 well! " The reader will notice the forebod- 
 ing of the tactics which Minna employed. 
 Yet there is one thing to be noticed in 
 these scenes, and this is the way in which 
 Lessing addresses the sensibility of his 
 hearers. At a time when Klopstock, and 
 the translations from the English were 
 moistening every eye, he drew this reserved 
 officer and the intelligent heroine in a man- 
 ner that was as far as possible removed from
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 167 
 
 the effusive. In one place where they are 
 talking, she says: "Patience, you still 
 love me! that is enough for me. But what 
 a tone I Ve fallen into ! An odious, melan- 
 choly, contagious tone. I must resume a 
 natural one. Now, my poor dear fellow, 
 you still love me, you have your Minna, and 
 are unhappy? Just hear what a poor con- 
 ceited creature your Minna was is. She 
 fancied, she fancies that she is your only 
 happiness. Come, out with all your unhap- 
 piness! She wishes to see how much she 
 outweighs it. Well?" 
 
 "I am not used to complaining." 
 
 " That is right. Next to bragging, I 
 don't know what is more detestable in a 
 soldier than complaining. But there is a 
 certain cold, indifferent way of speaking of 
 one's bravery and misfortunes." 
 
 "Which is yet bragging and complaining 
 all the same," rejoins Tellheim. 
 
 Does not this scene fairly represent Les- 
 siiig's views of the new sensibility? While
 
 1G8 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 his contemporaries manufactured pathos, he 
 sang the beauty of reserve with the same 
 reasonable intelligence that he showed in 
 contrasting the Prussian and the Saxon, and 
 in pointing out the reconciliation between 
 them when German patriotism was revelling 
 in the celebration of Hermann and other 
 remote heroes. The new Romanticism did 
 not address him; he had the love of com- 
 pleteness, of perfect form, which distin- 
 guished the generation before the romantic 
 authors began to write; he was the last 
 of a long line; they were the crude 
 beginners of a new epoch. His main -task 
 was correcting and classifying the past. 
 Thereby he, to be sure, made the way 
 smoother for his successors because the 
 work of every generation is built up on 
 what went before it, but the confusion of 
 the new men only disturbed him. Like 
 Klopstock, he disliked Goethe's " "Wei'ther," 
 which was the declaration of war for a later 
 generation. Whereas they were turbid and
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSENS. 169 
 
 uncertain, he who had won for himself the 
 command of what seemed best in the world 
 could not endure the inevitable abandon- 
 ment of old models just as soon as these 
 had been cleared of the dust of centuries. 
 In his eyes the new men were going hope- 
 lessly astray. He had restored antiquity to 
 its proper place, he had helped to bring 
 Shakespeare into repute, he had overthrown 
 Gottsched and proved the unwisdom of the 
 vague Swiss critics, but in stating the laws 
 of tragedy as Aristotle meant them instead 
 of as the French imitators of Seneca had 
 perverted them, he had left it to Herder to 
 show how much beauty there was outside 
 of the classics. He was the greatest of the 
 aesthetic critics, while Herder established 
 historical criticism which is now trying to 
 get a foothold in English-speaking nations, 
 and has placed Germany at the head of the 
 world in most matters of study. The man- 
 ner in which Lessing turned his back on 
 the modern excessive sensibility is illustra-
 
 170 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 tive of his whole position with regard to the 
 new movement, and a most striking proof 
 of the comparative iinfruitfnlness of mere 
 aesthetic criticism. So far as aesthetic 
 beauty is concerned, no comparison is pos- 
 sible between Lessing's dignified, impres- 
 sive handling of the emotions and the wal- 
 lowing, gushing enthusiasm of which we 
 have seen traces in Klopstock and some of 
 his admirers; yet their very excesses held 
 latent the seeds of much that has enriched 
 the world as the eighteenth century at its 
 best could never have done. The future 
 lay in those absurdities, to which Lessing's 
 back was turned while he rediscovered the 
 golden past. We can see in the history of 
 English literature the same truth, that in 
 the blunders made by the fervours of inex- 
 perience, there is a new revelation seeking 
 expression, just as in the tiresome high 
 spirits and chronic bubbling disobedience of 
 a child there may lie a finer, more original 
 character than in the smug docility of the
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 171 
 
 precocious prig. Let us not forget that the 
 only consolation of the German generals 
 whom Napoleon was forever thrashing, was 
 that they had at any rate fought according 
 to the rules. 
 
 If, in comparing English with German 
 literature, we go back to Goldsmith, it is 
 easy to see how superior his smooth and 
 discreetly tender verse must have seemed to 
 those who were bidden to admire Words- 
 worth's occasionally hoarse and frequently 
 tedious descriptions of nature, but in 
 Wordsworth there was a new view of the 
 world laid open to readers and- thinkers. 
 Perfection of work is an indication of 
 approaching change, but it is rare for the 
 man who has been brought up on the com- 
 plete form to be able to admire the follow- 
 ing one. Yet every labourer at the task of 
 building up civilization even unconsciously 
 raises the edifice higher, although each one 
 carries his own hod and is apt to grumble 
 at his fellow-workers. The very qualities
 
 172 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 that enable a man to do one sort of work 
 tend to dull his appreciation and compre- 
 hension of another. 
 
 Moreover, there is in literature a quickly 
 vanishing moment of perfection, as there is 
 one of legality in the course of a revolution, 
 which is speedily lost sight of in the whirl 
 of change. The revolution may have every 
 right on its side, but it demands for its 
 accomplishment that all the previous laws 
 be broken before a healthier society can be 
 organized; yet there is an inevitable division 
 at this point between those who are bound 
 by feeling, habit, and education to uphold 
 existing laws, and those who look beyond 
 the laws to the grander final result. In our 
 own history, and notably in the scruples of 
 those who wondered whether the govern- 
 ment was justified in calling for troops at 
 the beginning of our war, we may see an 
 example of the latter class. In literature, 
 Lessing belonged to the other men, who 
 hold to legality ; whose work is far removed
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 173 
 
 from the anarchy of the revolutionists, and 
 who prefer perfecting the past to making 
 rash experiments with the future. Whereas 
 his contemporaries busied themselves with 
 the extravagant representation of the mid- 
 dle ages and the unrestrained emotions of 
 their own day, he at one time wrote imita- 
 tions of Greek plays and never followed 
 their laxer course. 
 
 The "Emilia Galotti," too, is full of the 
 eighteenth-century impulse, although that 
 quality is far from being the most noticeable 
 thing about the play. It is the fruit of long 
 study of the drama and its laws, for against 
 Lessing there cannot be brought the current 
 and very old accusation that a critic is one 
 who has failed in creative work; on the 
 contrary, he was a critic whose lessons were 
 full of profit, and who, after stirring up a 
 hornet's nest, brought out some original 
 work as a model for those whom his criti- 
 cism had oifended. His "Minna" was a 
 model comedy ; there yet remained the tra-
 
 174 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 gedy to be done. In the interval between 
 the two plays he had written his "Ham- 
 burger Dramaturgic," in which he had dis- 
 cussed the laws and the best conditions of the 
 drama with a vividness, an impressiveness, 
 and a fund of learning that one is not accus- 
 tomed to associate with a theatrical critic. 
 All this consideration of Aristotle, of Cor- 
 neille, of Voltaire, of Shakespeare, bore rich 
 fruit, although his appreciation of the great 
 English tragedian was very different from 
 the unbounded admiration that the younger 
 men felt for him. As early as 1759, in one 
 of his Literaturbriefe, while reproving Gott- 
 sched for copying the French stage, he 
 said that if the early critic had translated 
 some of Shakespeare's masterpieces with a 
 few slight alterations, 1 he would have done 
 
 1 Cholovius, "Geschichte dcr deutschen Poesie," thcil i., 
 p. 537, has some interesting remarks on this matter, point- 
 ing out how impossible it would have been for Gottsched to 
 do what Lessing wished that he had done. As we have seen, 
 the poor man had no choice, and Lessing's error may serve 
 as a warning against neglecting the historical conditions. 
 It is not unlike regretting that the Greeks did not use mod- 
 ern artillery in the siege of Troy.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 175 
 
 better than he did in making the Germans 
 acquainted with Corneille and Racine; that 
 Shakespeare would have inspired writers, 
 for a genius can be kindled only by a 
 genius, and most easily by one who owes 
 all his merit to nature, and does not repel 
 admirers by the tedious perfections of art. 
 But, while here Lessing mentions Shake- 
 speare's apparent lack of art, he goes on to 
 point out that, even with regard to art, 
 Shakespeare is a much greater tragic poet 
 than Corneille. 
 
 Nearly ten years later, when Wieland's 
 translation and Gerstenberg's commentary 
 had appeared, he spoke of Shakespeare 
 in the "Hamburger Dramaturgic;" but al- 
 though he was then writing his "Emilia 
 Galotti," he found no inspiration in Shake- 
 speare. But in a later period, between 1773 
 and 1787, we see the influence of Shake- 
 speare dominant in the work of the 3 r oungcr 
 men. Lessing's root lay in the classic liter- 
 ature. His thorough study of the earlier
 
 176 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 masters naturally turned him away from the 
 crude domestic tragedy which had inspired 
 "Miss Sara Sampson," while at the same 
 time it taught him to avoid the error of the 
 French classical drama in unnecessarily nar- 
 rowing the limits that were imposed by the 
 critics under the shadow of Aristotle's name. 
 On the one hand, it taught him the folly of 
 a colourless copy of the French plays, his 
 last words in the " Dramaturgic " had been 
 that, without being a poet, there was not 
 one of Corneille's plays which he could not 
 improve, and, on the other, he had learned 
 not to mistake a mere sentimental attack on 
 the feelings for real tragic action. In the 
 tragedy that was growing up since Lillo's 
 famous rather than great play, the new 
 notion of the importance of the individual, 
 which had been lost sight of in the promi- 
 nence given to cultivation and to social 
 position, was beginning to assert itself 
 anew by means of the sympathy that was 
 felt for a man who suffered, even if his suf-
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIKG. 177 
 
 ferings were, so to speak, the mere result of 
 accident, and not of serious tragic fault. 
 The main point was that the individual suf- 
 fered; the cause of his misery was unim- 
 portant. But in Lessing's eyes the immu- 
 table laws of art admitted no such limitation. 
 He determined to write a tragedy in which 
 the final issue should be the natural result 
 of the action of the characters, and not a 
 mere external, cruel accident. The result 
 was "Emilia Galotti." 
 
 It is interesting to notice that the under- 
 lying plot was taken from the old Roman 
 story of Virginia, wherein Lessing showed 
 his willingness to meet the classical drama- 
 tists on their own ground; but in adapting 
 the plot to modern times he showed them in 
 what way the ancients should be held as 
 models, while he was able to make clear to 
 his contemporaries how the present was to 
 be treated. That he deliberately chose that 
 story with this conscious purpose cannot be 
 directly affirmed, but his selection had at
 
 178 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 any rate this double advantage. Yet the 
 story of " Emilia Galotti " is not to be com- 
 pared, line for line, with the classic original. 
 He made no copy on tracing-paper; the 
 whole notion of peril for the state, that 
 counts for much in the Roman original, 
 disappears from his play; all that is left is 
 the tragic story of the young girl's honour 
 preserved by death. 
 
 Every one who knows anything about 
 German literature is familiar with this play 
 and will recall its incidents. Emilia is 
 about to be married to the Count Appiani, 
 and the young Prince who has already seen 
 her and fallen in love with her is beside 
 himself on hearing this fact. His minister 
 and intimate adviser, Marinelli, begs him to 
 entrust the matter to him. The Prince ac- 
 cedes, and Marinelli arranges the assassina- 
 tion of the Count, and the abduction of Emi- 
 lia with her mother. A mask of politeness 
 hides their real intentions. The pretext 
 that the murder of the Count demands a
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 179 
 
 judicial investigation is made the reason for 
 detaining the two women, but the father ia 
 admitted to see them. Emilia acknowledges 
 the peril of her position. This it is that 
 induces the father to kill her, a deed for 
 which she thanks him as she dies. 
 
 It is not new for this termination of the 
 play to call forth wonder. At the time of 
 its first appearance numerous critics pointed 
 out the unsatisfactory end. Goethe, indeed, 
 suggested that Emilia was conscious of 
 feeling an interest in the Prince, but there 
 is every reason to doubt whether Lessing 
 could have permitted himself to represent 
 this accidental emotion, and one, too, that is 
 nowhere stated or implied as the turning- 
 point of a tragedy in which clearness was 
 as essential as truth. The hypothesis is 
 one that could explain better the plays writ- 
 ten after Lessing, when sudden passions took 
 the place that had in earlier times been oc- 
 cupied by equally mysterious fate. That 
 Emilia Galotti, whose betrothed had just
 
 180 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 been slain, could contemplate for a moment 
 the probable fascinations of the vicious 
 society at the house of Marinelli, is some- 
 thing simply surprising, and it may be fair 
 to adopt for explanation the hypothesis that, 
 in Emilia, Lessing tried to draw a woman 
 who should represent an old-fashioned ideal 
 of domesticity and maidenly reserve. In a 
 letter to his brother he wrote: "Girlish 
 heroines and philosophers arc not at all to my 
 taste. I know in unmarried girls no higher 
 virtues than piety and obedience;" of inde- 
 pendence he has nothing to say, and by 
 thus depriving Emilia of those qualities 
 that assure safety in the circumstances 
 wherein she finds herself, he has no other 
 way of cutting the web that has formed 
 about her than by putting her to death. 
 Thus villainy is baffled, and an impossible, 
 or at least an antiquated, ideal is preserved. 
 Yet the new men, with one consent, criti- 
 cised this solution. Lessing here, as else- 
 where, clung to the past, and, with every
 
 FKOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 181 
 
 qualification in his possession, he left the 
 future of the German stage in the hands 
 of men who, however crudely, let women 
 count as characters, not as mere accumula- 
 tions of domestic virtues. 
 
 Yet it is impossible to speak too highly of 
 the mechanical execution of the play; this 
 quality alone sufficed to make it a model for 
 future workers, and its influence is easily 
 detected in Schiller's "Kabale and Liebe." 
 This latter play is a direct attact on the vi- 
 cionsness of German princelings, and it is 
 easy to suppose that the keen intelligence 
 of Lessing did not fail to understand the 
 truth which was very obvious to those who 
 saw the play, that the condemnation of 
 licentious rulers was capable of very vivid 
 application in Germany. Goethe, in one of 
 his talks with Eckermann (Feb. 7, 1827), 
 lamented the polemical tone in Lessing's 
 work, ascribing its existence to the wretch- 
 edness of the times in which he lived. He 
 said, "In the ' Emilia Galotti,' he gave vent
 
 182 PROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 to his grudge against the princes ; in ' Na- 
 than,' his grudge against the priests." Yet 
 if this was true and there seems no good 
 ground for doubting it, for Lessing had 
 never been spoiled by courts his spirit 
 was rather a correcting one than it was an 
 iconoclastic wrath, such as that which ani- 
 mated Schiller. He had as little of the 
 revolutionary spirit in political as in literary 
 matters; the solution of the difficulties that 
 beset that period was like the one that we 
 are all striving to find now: it was to set 
 right existing evils, not to rise and over- 
 throw them violently. This destructive 
 feeling belonged only to the younger men, 
 and was gradually lifting its head in letters 
 just as now the spirit of revolution that 
 manifests itself in fierce detestation of gov- 
 ernment appears in literature as a desire to 
 paint the ordinary man as he is, not as peo- 
 ple imagine that others think that he is. 
 
 In the " ISTathan the Wise," again, Les- 
 sing sought a similar solution; the whole
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 183 
 
 play is, as it were, an apologue illustrative 
 of the views he held about religious ques- 
 tions. One of the most widespread of the 
 movements that marked the period of en- 
 lightenment was the excitement in behalf 
 of free-thinking, that, like much else of the 
 best inspiration of the last centurj^, had its 
 origin in England. It was one chapter of 
 the great lesson of freedom that demanded 
 release from the shackles of authority in 
 politics, literature, and ecclesiasticism, and of 
 all these subjects the relation of man to the 
 church is not the least important. Yet, in- 
 asmuch as the tendency of the church mani- 
 fested itself mainly in a desire to subordinate 
 society to its control, wherein it should hold 
 a position of chief magistrate, the opposition 
 limited itself mainly to opposing the claims 
 of priestcraft. This must be continually 
 borne in mind, if we are anxious to form a 
 just conception of the controversy. It was 
 not a magnificent, inspiring religion that 
 was attacked, but a petrified, heartless social
 
 184 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 form, in which a feeling- of simple devotion 
 would have been as out of place as one of 
 Goethe's lyrics in a tragedy of Gottsched's. 
 It was universally agreed that it was not 
 religion in itself that was assaulted, any 
 more than literature was the object of those 
 who denounced the rules. Questions are 
 not answered until they are asked; and not 
 yet was the discussion begun as to whether 
 or not some form of religion was necessary. 
 The antagonists of a corrupt religion were 
 Deists; of the later religious excitement of 
 the Methodists, Atheists. In England the 
 fight was always on the outskirts; there 
 was no attack on the citadel. The Deists, 
 by their very name, showed that they ac- 
 knowledged a purer and simpler form of 
 belief, which they would fain establish. The 
 Infame, against which "Voltaire raged was 
 not the religious sense, but a corrupt reli- 
 gion; one marked in France by every vice 
 of persecution and intolerance that inspired 
 his hate. In England, religion is always a
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 185 
 
 very important part of the social structure. 
 Swedenborg noticed that in heaven the 
 English kept very much to themselves, and 
 free-thought has been doubly dangerous in 
 that country, because it has been unfashion- 
 able. The avowed non-believer has been a 
 social outcast. In France, however, non- 
 belief was a more serious matter, and threat- 
 ened its supporters with more serious trou- 
 bles than was the case across the channel ; 
 so that whatever one may think of Voltaire's 
 religious sentiments, it is impossible not to 
 admire his noble defence, in the face of real 
 danger, of the victims of religious persecu- 
 tion. In Germany the questions concerned 
 were much less important ; yet even here, in 
 the home of modern theology, they excited 
 an interest which they lacked in England. 
 There was no such contrast as in France be- 
 tween the lives and the duties of the eccles- 
 iastics; the higher officials of the church 
 were not leaders in debauchery, as was 
 sometimes the case in the neighbouring
 
 186 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIN T G. 
 
 country, and persecution did not go so far 
 as to burn its victims at the stake. Yet an 
 arid, hide-bound orthodoxy existed, against 
 which Lessing fought for some time, and it 
 was this contest that called forth the 
 " ]S"athan." This play, then, held the same 
 position in regard to his theological dis- 
 cussions that his "Emilia" did to his 
 w Dramaturgie ; " it was the creative equiv- 
 alent of his critical work. It inculcated the 
 same lesson of tolerance that was the aim 
 of the whole movement. Whereas in France 
 the strife was complicated by the way in 
 which Voltaire felt compelled to mine the 
 ground beneath his dangerous opponents, 
 by disproving the basis of revealed religion, 
 here the contest took place in a field where 
 intellectual controversy had more weight. 
 The question was one that excited general 
 interest, while in England the common feel- 
 ing had been one of indignation against the 
 men who insisted on brawling instead of 
 letting things run on in the old-fashioned
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 187 
 
 way. Having started the question, the 
 English did not care for an answer. It 
 lost practical importance for them, and, as 
 they often did with exciting theories, they, 
 as it were, transported the serious consider- 
 ation of it to other countries, as if it were a 
 convict. English literature resumed its glib 
 acceptance of all the social conditions of life 
 as if no harassing questions existed to tor- 
 ment the anxious, just as now it runs on 
 as if vice and black error did not exist in 
 the world. Nothing can better illustrate 
 the difference between England and Ger- 
 many at this period than the contemplation 
 of the impossibility that a play like Les- 
 sing's "Nathan" should have appeared in 
 London. The stage was devoted to such 
 new plays as Foote's farces, the comedies, 
 of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and Home's 
 tragedies, which had equally little to do 
 with serious thought. Germany, however, 
 was busy with the examination of the many 
 new notions that were in the air, and was
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 preparing for the prominent place it was 
 about to take in the romantic revival. As 
 in France, the men who were making over 
 literature were also making- over the thought 
 of many men on other subjects; and the 
 point that was reached by Lessing here 
 bore strong resemblance, in its wisdom and 
 reasonableness, to what Lessing had striven 
 to attain in his purely literary work. Tol- 
 eration is in no way a revolutionary step; 
 H implies, too, the same acceptance of the 
 past, but of a past shorn of its growth of 
 bigotry, that we have seen in Lessing's 
 elevation of the stage. Orthodoxy had be- 
 come a thing of hard and fast rule like the 
 pseudo-classical tragedy, and in his treat- 
 ment of both we may see Lessing's desire to 
 bring forward saner notions, but by way of 
 modification, not of revolution. 
 
 It is with truth that the "Nathan" is 
 called the one play which is full of the 
 eighteenth century spirit; 1 all that is best 
 
 1 See Mr. John Morley's " Diderot," p. 227.
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSIXG. 189 
 
 in that interesting period finds expression 
 there; the ideal was a high one: toleration, 
 reasonable endurance of others. "What can 
 be grander than such a lesson? But its 
 very perfection prophesied its brief exist- 
 ence. It was an ideal attained by a few, 
 but too remote from the popular compre- 
 hension to endure. It lacked a sufficient 
 historical basis. Tolerance is only really 
 learned otherwise than by reason, and this 
 elevated point was a quickly vanishing one, 
 which was soon lost sight of. It was, like 
 all the eighteenth century thought, an 
 essentially aristocratic position, the doc- 
 trine of the remnant, and as unable to save 
 the world as a few champions are to settle 
 a modern war by single combat. 
 
 No; at the very moment when tragedy 
 was made simple, direct, and clear, it slipped 
 into confusion and became the outlet for 
 hitherto unknown emotions in the hands of 
 Schiller and Goethe; and, as soon as reli- 
 gious toleration was acquired, the new virtue
 
 190 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING* 
 
 had to be kept in busy practice to keep the 
 peace now seriously threatened by the new 
 forms of evangelicalism, medieval Catholi- 
 cism, and absolute infidelity. The point that 
 Lessing had reached still remained to be 
 reached again by the larger multitude with- 
 out; and during all the subsequent confusion 
 and reaction the eighteenth century perfec- 
 tion of form and clear intelligence have had 
 their influence in showing what has to be 
 attained by the orderly arrangement of our 
 more motley knowledge. For with this last 
 century has come the deluge of new 
 thoughts, forgotten emotions, the reviving 
 memory of the past, and, supervising all, the 
 historical sense which demanded their intel- 
 ligent arrangement. And along with the 
 scientific enlargement of this century, of 
 which those who do not comprehend the 
 physiology of a common pump are forever 
 boasting, is . the emotional one, the im- 
 portance whereof can be hardly overesti- 
 mated. The two are blended, for example,
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 191 
 
 in our dissatisfaction with the vague his- 
 torical setting of the eighteenth century 
 tragedies. w Nathan the Wise," like all the 
 rest, has its scene laid in a dim region, one 
 that lies to the eastward, we may say, 
 rather than that it is in the East, and this 
 remoteness from historical or geographical 
 exactness well represents the abstract intel- 
 lectual unity of the whole play. It was the 
 geometry of intellectual discussion which 
 our grandfathers studied, some of our later 
 methods may remind us of the sports of the 
 kindergarten, and in the absence of local 
 colour we see the absence of many of the 
 conflicting difficulties that embarrass these 
 questions for us. This, at least, may be 
 said, that in the diagrams which expressed 
 their lucid thought there is conveyed an 
 eternal truth which humanity must learn in 
 its own way, by experience. The remnant 
 cannot save our souls, we must save them 
 ourselves, and their remote enunciation of 
 the truth is the statement of a proposition
 
 192 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLtfG. 
 
 which we must solve out of our own lives. 
 That our answer will rest on the same basis 
 as that of Lessing cannot be affirmed any 
 more than it can be certain that our best tra- 
 gedies will be based on Aristotle's rules ; but, 
 whatever the future may have in store for 
 us, the toleration which Lessing saw will 
 render us able to respect even an unfamiliar 
 way of regarding this momentous question. 
 " Nathan the Wise " is scarcely a play ; 
 Lessing himself called it rather a dramatic 
 poem, which exactly defines it, although it 
 is still acted in the German theatres with 
 commendable piety. The core of the play 
 or poem lies in the parable of the rings 
 which Nathan recounts to Saladin, who, it 
 may be fair to presume, is the ideal monarch 
 with a predisposition to consulting philoso- 
 phers on religion, as the crowned heads of 
 the last century, Frederick the Great and 
 Catharine of Russia, consulted them on 
 questions of literature and heard them on 
 government, besides following them in all
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 193 
 
 their many investigations. The story was 
 an old one, but it receives a new form in 
 Lessing's hands. The Sultan asks Nathan 
 what in his opinion is the true religion, and 
 Nathan answers with the parable of a man 
 in the East who owned a ring of inestimable 
 value, which possessed the secret power of 
 endearing to God and man the wearer who 
 believed in its magic quality. He be- 
 queathed it to the dearest of his sons, who 
 in turn should leave it to his dearest son, 
 and so on; the owner, it was said, by virtue 
 of this ring, should be the head of the fam- 
 ily. Finally, the ring came into the posses- 
 sion of the father of three sons, who, being 
 unable to decide among them, had two imi- 
 tations made so exactly alike that he him- 
 self could not distinguish them, and these 
 he gave to his sons on his death-bed. 
 Thereupon arose strife as to which was the 
 head of the family. Each one felt sure 
 that his father had not deceived him and 
 was ready to accuse his brother of dishon-
 
 194 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 esty. They appealed to a judge, whose 
 decision ran thus, that, inasmuch as the ring 
 possessed the magic quality of making its 
 wearer loved, he need only find which of 
 the brothers filled that condition. ;? What, 
 none? Then you are all deceived deceivers. 
 All the rings are false. Probably the true 
 ring was lost. But I advise each of you 
 to imagine his ring to be the true one, and 
 to go away; then let each one strive to 
 show this power in his own ring. 
 
 w Let him aid this power with humility, 
 with earnest tolerance and kindness, with 
 sincere devotion," and in time, after thou- 
 sands of thousands of years, a wiser judge 
 may give the exact answer. In other words, 
 righteousness and devotion may alone solve 
 the question. 
 
 If this play is read simultaneously with 
 Lessing's prose writings on religion, it will 
 be seen that according to our modern 
 notions, he would be classified among or 
 very near the orthodox, yet in his own day
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 195 
 
 he was detested by the class that in a hun- 
 dred years has learned to enlarge its boun- 
 daries. By some common people his death, 
 which soon followed, was supposed to be a 
 special act of the devil, who spirited him 
 away miraculously; others maintained that 
 the physicians, from a sense of high duty, 
 refused to cure him when he was ill ; but the 
 more intelligent naturally mourned his un- 
 timely loss. They recognized the value of 
 his lesson, and, to speak of the " Nathan " 
 alone, we may easily see that if toleration 
 is advisable among Christians, Jews, and 
 Mohammedans, it is no less desirable for 
 atheists and pagans as well. The seeds of 
 thought, fermenta cogitationis, which Les- 
 sing boasted that he planted, are true in 
 the larger field because they are true in the 
 narrower one which he knew. This stimu- 
 lation of thought was his greatest work; and 
 since that task is, from its nature, fragmen- 
 tary and never to be completed, there is a 
 certain roundness at least in the choice of
 
 196 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 subjects which he treated. It did not fall 
 to his lot to take part in the great enlarge- 
 ment of men's interests which was the work 
 of the romantic school. That was accom- 
 plished by a new generation which was 
 already growing up around him. 
 
 The distinction between the eighteenth 
 century and the present one is clearly man- 
 ifested in a remark of Leasing, which has 
 met with nothing but unqualified approval: 
 " Not the truth of which anyone is, or sup- 
 poses himself to be, possessed, but the up- 
 right endeavour he has made to aim at truth, 
 makes the worth of the man. For not by 
 the possession, but by the investigation, of 
 truth, are his powers expanded, wherein 
 alone his growing perfection consists. Pos- 
 session makes us easy, indolent, proud. If 
 God held all truth shut in his right hand, 
 and in his left nothing but the ever restless 
 instinct for truth, though with the condition 
 of for ever and ever erring, and should say 
 to me, f Choose ! ' I should humbly bow to
 
 FKOM OPITZ TO LES8ING. 197 
 
 his left hand, and say, ' Father, give ! pure 
 truth is for thee alone."' This eloquent 
 utterance, however, with its left-handed 
 compliment to truth, as if truth were an 
 answer to a puzzle, and not the only thing 
 that makes life valuable, is full of the 
 same eighteenth century wisdom that char- 
 acterizes the remarks of those men of the 
 present day who regard education as some- 
 thing that does good, not by itself, but by 
 "exercising the mind." Fontenelle had 
 already said: "Si j'avais la main remplie de 
 verites, je me garderais bien de 1'ouvrir," so 
 that Lessing is relieved of some of the 
 opprobrium that might be hastily accorded 
 him. But, idling aside, may we not see in 
 the latter half of this statement not only the 
 notion which Goethe inherited and in turn 
 bequeathed to some conservatives of the 
 present day, that this world is created for the 
 intellectual delight of a few educated people, 
 but also that feeling of dependence on the 
 past which began to crumble at the end of
 
 198 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 the eighteenth century? The destruction 
 of the Bastille was but an outward and vis- 
 ible sign of the breaking loose of modern 
 men from authority. The iron chains then 
 broken were not the only fetters snapped; 
 indeed, modern scholarship may be said to 
 date from Wolf's "Prolegomena" (1795), 
 and modern scholarship has destroyed many 
 bugbears. It may be affirmed of the "Pro- 
 legomena" that they marked the period 
 when modern men had matured sufficiently 
 to look the classics in the face. The book 
 appeared not long before Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge began to found the new poetry in 
 England, and at the very time when real lit- 
 erature began to exist in Germany. The past 
 had done its best work in educating men 
 who spoke, not merely to the present, but 
 to the future the only grateful audience. 
 The man who at this present day should 
 refuse to grasp the truth, in order that he 
 might exercise his mind in searching for it, 
 would not be loved. The opinion has arisen
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 199 
 
 that the truth is perhaps as valuable as 
 any one man's symmetrical development ; 
 for this, after all, might be attained by ex- 
 ercising in a wholly profitless way, and, 
 moreover, no man will work to bring out a 
 muscle as he will to save his life. 
 
 Yet, as nothing starts in a complete form 
 in this world, we may see in some of Les- 
 sing's last writings the forebodings of the 
 altered notions that were to inspire the 
 younger men. In his "Erziehung des 
 Menschengeschlechts " there are distinct 
 statements of the growth in the past, and 
 the probable growth in the future, of 
 humanity. "Why," he asks in the begin- 
 ning, "why should we not rather, in all 
 positive religions, regard nothing more 
 than the course in which the human under- 
 standing of every place alone can develop, 
 and must further develop itself, instead of 
 ridiculing or denouncing it? Nothing else 
 in the world deserves our scorn or wrath, 
 should religion alone deserve them? Is it
 
 200 FROM OPITZ TO LESSLNG. 
 
 possible that God should have his hand in 
 everything, but not in our errors?" Then 
 follow the detached thoughts that make up 
 the memorable treatise, wherein he traced 
 briefly the growth of humanity : 
 
 What education is to the single individual, revela- 
 tion is to the whole human race. 
 
 Education is revelation coming to the individual, 
 and revelation is education coming to the race. 
 
 Education gives the individual nothing that he had 
 not in himself, and so of revelation, it gives humanity 
 nothing to which reason could not attain by its own 
 unaided resources. 
 
 Then he goes on to say that time may 
 bring to the world a new revelation which 
 shall be to Christianity what Christianity 
 itself was to what went before it, when man 
 will do right because it is right, not because 
 it ensures certain rewards. 
 
 There is no need of pointing out Lessing's 
 fine moral enthusiasm; what concerns us 
 here is the declaration of a possible and 
 probable development of humanity in the 
 future. No longer did he look back with
 
 FEOM OPITZ TO LESSING. 201 
 
 regret to a golden past; the present was 
 full of promise, and there is here dimly 
 stated what was to be announced more 
 clearly by Herder, that the condition of 
 man is one of growth. Just before the 
 great dramatic revolution broke out, Les- 
 sing died. He had already expressed dis- 
 satisfaction with Goethe's "Gotz," which 
 indicated no respect for Aristotle, and for 
 the <: 'Werther," wherein was announced 
 the new truth that reason alone cannot 
 move the world; that for this is required 
 the combination of qualities that go to make 
 up every human being. 1 Reason alone is 
 as inefficient to make a thorough person as 
 is muscular strength alone to make a man 
 healthy. Everything that man undertakes 
 to produce, whether by action, word, or in 
 whatsoever way, ought to spring from the 
 union of all his faculties. "All that is iso- 
 
 1 In Lessing's comments on the novel, he said : " Do you 
 Imagine that a Roman or Greek youth would have taken his 
 life in this fashion and for this reason? " To Goethe this was 
 an argument as remote as the Greek oracles.
 
 202 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 
 
 lated is contemptible," is Goethe's statement 
 of Hamann's and Herder's teachings. It 
 was this widening of the influences that the 
 new time had to establish, and in parting 
 with Lessing we have behind us the man 
 who, in his dealings with reason alone, 
 showed how the new lesson had to be 
 taught, by theory and practice, by sin- 
 cerity and direct study, by patience and 
 toleration. The high mark that he had 
 reached with his principles had to be at- 
 tained anew with the new principles. 
 
 This may be a fitting place to close. We 
 have traced roughly the slow degrees by 
 which Germany passed through its period 
 of apprenticeship. Everywhere, in form at 
 least, it kept step with the movements of 
 thought that held sway over all of Europe, 
 from Portugal to Norway; for modern lit- 
 erature is essentially a .unit; what hap- 
 pened in one country repeated itself in the 
 main in every other, just as the vicissitudes 
 of growth are repeated in every human
 
 FROM OPITZ TO LESSING. 203 
 
 being between his birth and maturity, with 
 differences, to be sure, in each case, depend- 
 ing on the personal characteristics. Yet 
 these characteristics cannot be properly un- 
 derstood until it is discovered how much 
 the various phenomena that we observe in 
 the individual are part of the common 
 experience of the race. When this is done, 
 it becomes easier to study intelligently what 
 is left. And there is certainly enough 
 left to reward the student. Especially in 
 the history of romanticism in Germany does 
 the peculiar quality of the Germans assert 
 itself. As the pseudo-classicism made its 
 headquarters in France, where it found a 
 congenial home, so the romantic spirit was 
 more momentous in Germany than else- 
 where, and found in Goethe a fuller expres- 
 sion than in any other one man. Perhaps 
 at some future time we may study the form 
 that romanticism took in that land, when 
 we may see how the confusion of its 
 history shut it off from that return to its
 
 204 FROM OPITZ TO LES8ING. 
 
 own past which was an important part of 
 the romantic revival in England, and how 
 the development of the qualities that we 
 have so far seen only in their crudity gave 
 Germany its prominence in intellectual 
 matters.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Academies, 18; the French Aca- 
 demy, 18, 21. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 63, 79, 80, 128, 
 131, 142. 
 
 America, discovery of, its in- 
 fluence on modern civiliza- 
 tion, 7. 
 
 Beauty, how dreaded, 112. 
 Besser, J. Von, 45, 48, 49. 
 Bodmer, J. J., 80 ff. 
 Breitinger, 80 ff. 
 "Bremer Beitrsige," 88 ff. 
 Brockcs, B. H., 57, 59-65, 111, 
 
 113, 115. 
 Burns, Robert, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56. 
 
 Canitz, F. R. L., 44-49. 
 
 Carmina burana, 54. 
 
 Coincidences, alleged, in litera- 
 ture, 69, 93. 
 
 Collins, William, his nnrhymed 
 odes, 93. 
 
 Criticism, how connected with 
 creative work, 124 n. 
 
 Diderot, D., 127, 136. 
 
 Drama, the German, 78-80, 127 ff. 
 
 Eighteenth century, the, some 
 qualities of, 107-109, 189-191, 
 195-199. 
 
 " Emilia Galotti," 173, 177-182. 
 
 English influence, 57, 69, 73jf 
 91 ff, 134, 139-142, 183. 
 
 Fleming, P., 53, 54. 
 
 Fragmentariness, not necessarily 
 a fault, 125, 126. 
 
 Frederick the Great, 153-155. 
 
 Free thought at end of last cen- 
 tury, 183-189. 
 
 French influence, 11-13, 22, 32, 
 44, 49, 75, 78, 99, 130, 138, 151, 
 153. 
 
 Fruit-bearing Society, 18-23. 
 
 Genius, common errors concern- 
 ing, 58, 140. 
 
 " George Barnwell," 132, 148. 
 
 Gcssner, S., 114, 115. 
 
 Gleim, J. W. L., 115, 116, 152. 
 
 Goethe, J. W., on "Emilia Ga- 
 lotti," 179, 181; on Herder, 201. 
 
 Goldsmith, O., his literary skill, 
 150, 171. 
 
 Gottsched, J. C., 75-87, 123; his 
 conversation with Frederick 
 the Great, 153 ff. 
 205
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Greek literature, its influence, 
 
 MOJ". 
 
 Gryphius, A., 38, 44. 
 G anther, J. C., 50-56. 
 
 Hagcdorn, F. von, 71, 72. 
 Haiubund, the, 11G-120. 
 Elallcr, A. von, 65-70. 
 * Hamburger Dramaturgic," the, 
 
 174 Jf. 
 
 Harsdjrffer, G. P., 33, 34, 36. 
 Hcllwiy, 37. 
 Herbert, Geo., 35, 38. 
 Herder, J. G., 124, 1G9, 202. 
 Herrick, R., 34, 35, 37, 38, 39. 
 Hexameter, German use of, 92. 
 Hofmaim von Hofmamiswaldau, 
 
 39, 42, 43. 
 
 Klaj, 32. 
 
 Klopstock, 86, 89-97, 151, 166, 170. 
 
 Konig, 45. 
 
 La Motte, attacks the unities, 
 133; is himself denounced by 
 Voltaire, 134. 
 
 Latin literature, its influence, 
 15-17, 28, 29, 8, 140^, 152. 
 
 Lessing, G. E., 121-202; his "Min- 
 na von Barnhelm," 155-107; 
 his "Emilia Galotti," 173, 177- 
 182; his "Nathan the Wise,' 
 182 1!)5; his opinion of roman- 
 ticism, 1C8; of " "Wcrther," 201 
 his relation to the past, 172; his 
 " Hamburger Dramaturgic, ' 
 
 Wff- 
 
 Lillo, George, his " George Barn- 
 well," 132, 148. 
 
 Literature, how to be studied, 2 
 3, C8; gradual growth of, 141 
 
 the German, its early state, 3, 
 
 4, 10, 14; its decay, 5. 
 Logau, F. von, 38. 
 Lohenstein, D. C., 44. 
 
 Marvcll, A., 34, 35. 
 
 " Mcssias, " the, 89-92, 104-5. 
 
 Metaphysical poets, the, 39, 41, 42. 
 
 Milton, John, influence of, 83 .#'. 
 Minna von Barnhclm," 155-167. 
 
 Mountains, beginning admira- 
 tion of, GS, C8. 
 
 ; Nathan the Wise," 182-195. 
 
 Opitz, Martin, 23-30; his "Buch 
 von der Deutschen Poeterei, 25, 
 26; his translations, 27. 
 
 Picaresque novels, 73. 
 
 Plagiarism, 70, 71. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 65, 63, 70, 85. 
 
 Reformation, the, 6, 10. 
 Renaissance, the, 10, 14, 18, 31, 
 
 1C8. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, 23 ff. 
 Rousseau, J. J., 68, 69. 
 
 Scaliger, J. C., his "Poetices," 
 26. 
 
 Schemer, 38. 
 
 Science, influence of, 63, 64, 82, 
 110, 142. 
 
 Sensibility, 9G/, 117 .ft 16G, 168. 
 
 Sentimentality, its importance, 
 101.0; 143, 146 ff. 
 
 Spectator, the, its influence, 74 ff. 
 
 Sterne, L., 110, 162. 
 
 Switzerland, its assumed Arca- 
 dian simplicity, GS; its real lit- 
 erary simplicity, 81.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 207 
 
 Teutonic revival, 97, 151. 
 Thirty Years' War, 8-14. 
 Thomson, James, 65, 69. 
 
 Unities, the three, 130, 134. 
 
 Valentines, their tenacity of life, 
 35,36. 
 
 ' Volkspoesie," 52, 54, 116. 
 
 Voltaire, his preference of Tasso 
 to Homer, 87; his literary per- 
 fection, 109, 150; defending the 
 unities, 134. 
 
 Vondel, 44. 
 
 Voss, J. H., 117-120. 
 
 Weise, C., 44. 
 
 Wieland, C. M., 104-118; the dis- 
 like of, 114-118. 
 Wordsworth, W., 171, 198. 
 
 Young, E, 91. 
 
 Zesen, F. von, 34.