to him. The novel which Lohenstein published in 1689-90 Arminius, under the title Grossmüthiger Feldherr Arminius, oder Herr1689-90. mann als ein tapferer Beschirmer der deutschen Freiheit nebst seiner durchläuchtigsten Thussnelda in einer sinnreichen Staats-, Liebes- und Helden-Geschichte . . . vorgestellet, is by no means so lacking in good taste as his dramas. It is long, tedious, and learned; it is didactic and persistently patriotic; but the narrative is written with skill and events are vividly described. The author is at his best when he is carried away by his interest in what he has to tell, and forgets the rules of his ars poetica. On the whole, Lohenstein's talents show to much more advantage in his novel than in his plays, and had he been born in a more auspicious age, he might have produced work of permanent worth.

The faint light of the German Renaissance had thus flickered out before the seventeenth century reached its close. Intellectually, it was certainly not a glorious century in Germany's development, yet there had been many elements of promise in it. What might have happened had the nation been spared the desolation of the Thirty Years' War, it would be difficult to say, but it is certain that the political conditions produced by the war retarded the growth of German literature by at least fifty years. The main fact is that the German people fell into a slavish imitation of the customs and ideas of the Romance nations. That this period of imitation lasted so long was, in general, due to the untoward political conditions; but there was also, perhaps, another reason: the Germans of the seventeenth century were more anxious to imitate than to learn; they overlooked the fact that they were only in a backward state of development compared with the other nations of Europe. The consequence was that until nearly the middle of the succeeding century, German thought and German literature suffered under the disadvantages of an inward pride and an excessive self-esteem.

PART IV.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I.

RATIONALISM AND ENGLISH INFLUENCE.

Ar the close of the seventeenth century none, even among the smaller nationalities of Europe, was intellectually so insignificant as that which spoke the German tongue. Renaissance and Reformation had brought glory to France and England; to Germany they had, as we have seen, brought only the veriest beginnings of a national literature, and these beginnings were soon swept away by the storms of the Thirty Years' War. The year 1700 found France still full of pride The in her grand siècle, and England looking forward rather eighteenth than back. Rationalism, the logical development of that century. empiricism first taught by Bacon, had found able champions in Locke and the English Deists, and was established before long as the philosophic faith of France. Again, the eighteenth century was still young when individualism, a movement of even more far-reaching consequences for the history of literature, originated in England; and on the individualism of English thinkers and writers, Rousseau set the stamp of cosmopolitanism. Compared with such vigorous intellectual activity in England and France, all that Germany had to show until past the middle of the eighteenth century was as nothing; her literature had hardly vigour enough to imitate with success-not to speak of rivalling-the productions of her neighbours.

And yet this nation, which, in 1700, lay thus prostrate, possessed undreamt of germs of spiritual vitality. With phenomenal rapidity, Germany passed through a period of rationalism, then assimilated the best ideas of English and French individualism, and, before the century had reached

Pietism.

P. J. Spener, 1635-1705.

its close, produced a philosophy and a literature not unworthy to be placed beside the best of modern Europe. The helpless Germany of 1700 had, in 1800, become a leading intellectual power. No nation was ever more in debt than was Germany to France and England for nearly three-quarters of the eighteenth century; none repaid a debt more generously than Germany hers in the last quarter of that century.

The first indication of a revival of intellectual life before the period under consideration began, was a breath of Cartesianism which, coming from Holland, agitated slightly the surface of the stagnant Lutheran theology. Then Spinoza's philosophy, which left, however, deeper traces behind it, passed over Germany, and, finally, as a kind of protest against the strictness of Protestant orthodoxy, a wave of that Pietism with which, a generation earlier, Jakob Böhme had infused new vigour into religious life. The chief representative of German Pietism at the close of the seventeenth century was an Alsatian, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705),1 whose Pia Desideria (1675) formed the basis for the revival. But German Pietism, unlike English Puritanism, with which it may, in many respects, be compared, was not a militant faith; its watchword was renunciation, its thoughts were fixed on the millennium; its meekness was little adapted to stir the nation to intellectual achievement. The hymns and religious poetry of Spener himself, of Joachim Neander (1650-80), of Gerhard Tersteegen (1697-1769), of the prolific Graf von Zinzendorf (1700-60), strike an intensely personal note: they have often the sweetness of love-poetry, but their spirit is essentially passive. The only work of real importance called forth by Pietism was the Unpartheyische Kirchenund Ketzerhistorie (1698-1700) by Gottfried Arnold (16661714), a book which, even in Goethe's youth, had not wholly lost its interest. In the universities, the chief representative of the movement was Spener's chief scholar, A. H. Francke (1663-1727), who, as professor in Halle from 1692 onwards, exerted a far-reaching influence on German educational methods.

The chief German pioneer of intellectual progress in the period under consideration was Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), 1 A. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, 3 vols., Bonn, 1880-86, 2, 95 ff.