T. G. von Hippel, 1741-96.

as his interests. In the course of two visits to England in 1769 and 1774 (Briefe aus England, 1776 and 1778), he came into touch with the English scientific and literary world, and was particularly attracted by the English theatre, where Garrick's star was then in the ascendancy. As a humourist

and satirist, his genius was of a high order; indeed, no writer has a better claim than he to be called the greatest satirist of modern German literature. Had he chosen, Lichtenberg might have been a German Swift, but instead, his powers were frittered away in trivial and ephemeral work, and almost the only book by which he is now remembered is a masterly commentary on Hogarth, the Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche (1794-99).

Hardly another minor writer of this age can boast of so lasting a popularity as T. G. von Hippel (1741-96). Personally, Hippel was one of those problematic natures in which the nineteenth century takes a more sympathetic interest than his own contemporaries could possibly have taken, and something of the contrasts and contradictions of his life and personality have passed over into his writings. Über die Ehe (1774), his best-known book, is a strange apologia for marriage by one who was himself unmarried; even his novels, of which Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie (1778) is mainly autobiographical, are still readable at the present day.1

The strong pedagogic interests of the age that produced Rousseau's Emile (1762) were represented in Germany by J. B. Basedow (1723-90) and J. H. Pestalozzi (1746-1827)

-the latter, a native of Zurich. Pestalozzi's Lienhard und Gertrud (1781) remains one of the classics of educational science. Popular philosophers in the stricter sense of the word were Christian Garve (1742-98), whose teaching smacks of the homely ethics of Gellert, and J. J. Engel (1741-1802), who was also the author of a popular novel, Herr Lorenz Stark, ein Charaktergemälde (1795).2

1 Cp. D.N.L., 141, 195 ff. A modernised version of the Lebensläufe, by A. von Öttingen, has reached a third edition, Leipzig, 1892. Über die Ehe, edited by E. Brenning, in the Bibl. der deutschen Nationallitt., 36, Leipzig, 1872.

Cp. F. Bobertag, Erzählende Prosa der klassischen Periode, I (D.N.L., 136), 317 ff.; also in Reclam's Univ. Bibl., No. 216.

293

CHAPTER VI.

HERDER; THE GÖTTINGEN BUND.

and

THE line that separates the age of Rationalism from the new movement which began in Germany as "Sturm und Drang," might be said to pass between Lessing's Litteraturbriefe and the Fragmente of Herder. Lessing, as we Lessing have already seen, is the representative writer of the "Auf- Herder. klärung." With Herder, on the other hand, the new epoch opens; he is the gatekeeper of the nineteenth century. As a maker of literature, a poet, he does not, it is true, take rank beside the masters of German poetry; but as a spiritual force and intellectual innovator, he is second to none. The whole fabric of German thought and literature at the close of the eighteenth century would have been lacking in stability without the broad and solid basis afforded by his work.

1744-1803.

Johann Friedrich Herder, an East Prussian, was born J. F. in the village of Morungen on August 25, 1744. His Herder, childhood was embittered by privations, his school-life was one long tyranny. He was able, however, to attend the university, where he began by studying medicine, but soon found theology more to his taste. It is significant that the first influence under which he fell was that of Immanuel Kant, who laid in the young student's mind the foundation of the method, by means of which he revolutionised at a later date the science of history. In Königsberg he also came into J. G. immediate personal relations with J. G. Hamann (1730-88), Hamann,

1 R. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben uni seinen Werken, 2 vols., Berlin, 1877-85; E. Kühnemann, Herders Leben, Munich, 1895. The standard edition of Herder's Sämmtliche Werke is that edited by B. Suphan, 32 vols., Berlin, 1877 ff. A selection (10 vols.) in D.N.L., 74-78 [1885-94], ed. by H. Meyer, H. Lambel, and E. Kühnemann,

1730-88.

Herder's

1767.

T. Abbt, 1738-66.

the "

Magus im Norden." 1

Hamann was a strange way

ward genius, who, after an aimless, penurious youth, became suddenly aware of the true meaning of the Bible, while on a visit to London in 1758. Returning to Königsberg, his native town, he began to read and study with untiring zeal. His writings-the chief of which are Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (1759), and Kreuzzüge des Philologen (1762)—are all fragmentary and full of strange, often startling, ideas in aphoristic form. His fervid enthusiasm, his championship of genius, his insistence on a man facing life and its tasks with his whole collective energy, and not acting by halves, made his sybilline utterances popular with the new generation of "Stürmer und Dränger." To Hamann, Herder owed his acquaintance with English literature, especially Ossian and Shakespeare, and with Hamann's aid he succeeded in obtaining a position in the "Domschule" in Riga. Here he spent five years (1764-69) of unremitting work.

In 1767, the third year of his residence in Riga, the Fragmente, Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur were published anonymously as "Beilagen" or supplements to the Litteraturbriefe. Lessing's share in this latter publication had come to an end as early as 1760, but the journal continued to appear until the middle of 1765, owing mainly to the co-operation of a new writer, Thomas Abbt (1738-66), who is now only remembered as the author of two books, Vom Tode fürs Vaterland (1761) and Vom Verdienste (1765). Abbt may be regarded as the connectinglink between Lessing and Herder; it was his warm enthusiasm, rather than Lessing's cold, critical genius, that attracted Herder in the Litteraturbriefe. Abbt was a pioneer in the study of history on principles of organic development, a study which Herder and Justus Möser first illustrated practically. The standpoint of the Fragmente is not essentially different from that of the Litteraturbriefe, except perhaps with regard to Klopstock, whom Herder champions more warmly; but the two publications follow opposite methods. The Litteraturbriefe were in the first place critical; they had little to say of general theories or ideas. Herder's Frag

1 Cp. J. Claassen, Hamanns Leben und Werke, Gütersloh, 1885, and J. Minor, J. G. Hamann in seiner Bedeutung für die Sturm- und Drangperiode, Frankfort, 1881.

mente, on the other hand, begin with the exposition of ideas, and only criticise by the way; they are leavened with a spirit of enthusiasm, and betray in every line the personality of their author. The germs of many of Herder's chief opinions are to be found in the Fragmente-his ideas on language, for instance, on the relation of his own to other literatures, on the "Volkslied." His next work, Kritische Wälder (1769)- the title Kritische being an imitation of Quintilian's "sylvæ❞—is of a more Walder, polemical nature. In the first "Wäldchen," which discusses Lessing's Laokoon, Herder's instinctive antagonism to his predecessor is more marked than in the Fragmente, while the second and third volumes are occupied with the antiquarian Klotz, who raised Lessing's ire.

1769.

France,

In the summer of 1769, Herder was able to leave Riga, Herder's the provincialism of which had begun to weigh heavily journey to upon him; he proceeded by sea to Nantes and spent nearly 1769. five months in France. The most interesting work of this period, and, in some respects, the most interesting of all that Herder wrote, is his Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769. It is a record of the most magnificent literary, æsthetic, and political dreams that ever haunted the brain of man, and through them all runs the fundamental idea of Herder's intellectual life, the conception of the human race and human culture as a product of historical evolution. Herder's writings can be described as at best only a collection of fragments, but a certain plan is behind them all; they are fragments of one great work on the evolution of mankind; to make this evolution of human history clear was the aim of Herder's life. At the end of his visit to France, he was appointed travelling-tutor to the son of the Princebishop of Lübeck; but this appointment came to an end hardly a year later in Strassburg, where Herder arrived In Strasswith his pupil in September, 1770. Relieved of his duties, burg, he took the opportunity of placing himself under the hands of an eye-specialist in Strassburg he suffered from a growth in one of the lachrymal glands - before settling down as pastor in the little town of Bückeburg. The winter which he spent in Strassburg (1770-71) was of importance, for from it may be said to date the origin of the movement known as the "Sturm und Drang." During these months in Strassburg, Goethe sat at Herder's feet and learned the new

1770-71.

Von

deutscher Art und Kunst, 1773.

J. Möser, 1720-94.

Volkslie

der, 1778

79.

faith from his lips. Herder opened the young poet's eyes to the greatness of Shakespeare, revealed to him the treasures of national poetry in the songs of the people, and endowed the traceries of the Gothic cathedral above their heads with a new meaning and a new gospel. In this momentous period and the few years that immediately followed, Herder was a force of the first magnitude in German literature, a force that it is impossible to overestimate. Of his writings at this time the most important were a prize essay, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and his contributions to Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773).1 The latter work, in which Goethe and Möser also had a share, may be regarded as the manifesto of the German "Sturm und Drang.” Justus Möser (1720-94), a native of Westphalia, who spent a considerable part of his life in London, was another pioneer of the coming time; his Osnabrückische Geschichte, which began to appear in 1765, was the earliest historical work written from the modern standpoint of organic development. He stimulated even in a higher degree than Klopstock the interest of the German people in their own past; he realised what Abbt had not lived to complete. Möser's Patriotische Phantasien (1774)2 were richer in ideas for the political wellbeing and progress of the nation than any other book of this eventful time.

In 1778 and 1779, Herder published a collection of popular songs and ballads of many nations, entitled Volkslieder. This work opened the eyes of the German people to the poetic worth of the Volkslied; and it was, at the same time, characteristic of the new standpoint which Herder held with regard to criticism. While a critic of the older generation, like Lessing, set, for instance, less value on a popular ballad than on an epigram, Herder gave the Volkslied its true place in literary history. In the songs which he took over from foreign literatures, he proved himself an admirable translator, but he lacked the creative faculty of the poet; his original poems, his lyric dramas, of which Brutus (1774) was written. in these years, are reminiscent of Klopstock. Of the prose

1 Werke, 5. A convenient reprint of Von deutscher Art und Kunst, ed. H. Lambel, in the Litteraturdenkmale, 40, 41, Stuttgart, 1892.

2 Ed. R. Zöllner, in the Bibl. der deutschen Nationallitt., 32, 33, Leipzig, 1871. 3 Werke, 25; the title Stimmen der Völker was given to the collection by J. von Müller, the first editor of Herder's works.