Oden, 1771. cared little for the passive sentimentality of Klopstock, and demanded instead the fierce action and plastic figures of the theatre; Shakespeare, not Milton, was the master to whom they looked up. Thus the wild enthusiasm that greeted Klopstock's epic at the middle of the century had, in less than twenty years, completely cooled. The public that remained faithful to the old poet consisted, for the most part, of sentimental readers who feared lest he should be too hardhearted to pardon his contrite devil, Abbadona, at the Last Judgment. To realise the epoch-making nature of the Messias, it must be remembered that it was, for its time, the first German epic; in 1748 Germany knew nothing of her older epic literature-the Heliand and the Nibelungenlied, Parzival and Tristan. We must look into the tedious poetry that preceded the Messias, into C. H. Postel's Grosser Wittekind (1724) and the Alexandrine epics already referred to, by Besser, König, Pietsch, and Triller, to understand how great an innovator Klopstock really was. But the Messias came too late, or rather German literature advanced too rapidly to allow of it creating a school; the imitations of the epic were of little value. Bodmer was the most industrious of Klopstock's followers, and his Noah (1750-52) the first of a long series of epics of this class, each of which was inferior to its predecessor. Both Lavater and Wieland, to mention two other writers, whom we shall meet with later on, wrote Biblical epics in their youth. Although the Messias has now virtually passed into the limbo of unread books, Klopstock's lyric poetry still retains its hold upon our interest. Klopstock wrote lyrics all his life long, and for the most part in the rhymeless and antique measures which Pyra and Lange, it will be remembered, introduced into modern German poetry. Klopstock first collected and published his lyrics under the generic title of Oden in 1771. These Odes, of which the complete collection embraces no less than 229 poems,1 show essentially the same general development that is to be observed in the Messias; the early ones, those to his Leipzig friends and to Fanny," are filled with the same spirit as the first three cantos of the epic. An intense religious fervour permeates them all, and 1 Ed. F. Muncker and J. Pawel, Stuttgart, 1889; in Hamel's edition, vol. 3 (D.N.L., 47). even overflows into the love poetry. Later comes the calmer verse dedicated to Meta ("Cidli"), which in turn gives place to poetry inspired by the Germanic past, and, later still, to odes expressing the poet's disappointed hopes in the French Revolution. In 1758, and again in 1769, Klopstock, it may be noted, published two volumes of Geistliche Lieder, but they are much inferior to the Odes. His supreme import- Klopstock ance for the development of German poetry is to be sought as lyric in his lyric poetry; notwithstanding his un-German metres, it was he who freed the lyric from the false classicism of the Prussian poets, and led it back to the true national form which was to reach perfection in Goethe. In poems of which Die frühen Gräber (1764) may be taken as a specimen, Klopstock discovered again the spring of German lyric feeling : "Willkommen, o silberner Mond, Du entfliehst? Eile nicht, bleib, Gedankenfreund! Des Mayes Erwachen ist nur Schöner noch, wie die Sommernacht, Wenn ihm Thau, hell wie Licht, aus der Locke träuft, Ihr Edleren, ach es bewächst Eure Maale schon ernstes Moos! O wie war glücklich ich, als ich noch mit euch Comparing Klopstock with Milton, Herder once remarked poet. Passing over the dream of a literary commonwealth embodied in Klopstock's Deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774), one of the best of the many quixoteries of eighteenth-century literature, we have still to consider a side of his activity which appealed as strongly to his contemporaries as did the Messias. Klopstock wrote six dramas of which three were on KlopBiblical themes: Der Tod Adams (1757), which was translated stock's into the chief European tongues, Salomo (1764) and David 1 Hamel's edition, 3, 110. dramas. Gerstenberg, 1737 1823. (1772); the others were what their author called “Bardiete" -a word suggested by the barditus of Tacitus - and form a trilogy on the national hero Hermann or Arminius. Hermanns Schlacht appeared in 1769, Hermann und die Fürsten in 1784, and Hermanns Tod in 1787. These dramas, which are written in prose interspersed with "bardic" songs and choruses, possess much lyric beauty, but are in no sense dramatic. They came upon the crest of a literary movement which found its way to Germany from England, where Macpherson's Ossian had revealed the charm that lay in primitive literature. The first German translation of Ossian appeared in 1764, and kindled an enthusiasm which was even more abiding in its influence than was the Ossian-fever in England, for it awakened the German people to a serious interest in their own past. In this "bardic" movement three other poets are associated with Klopstock: Michael Denis (1729-1800), K. F. KretschH. W. von mann (1738-1809), and H. W. von Gerstenberg (17371823). The first and, at the same time, the last of these "bards" was Gerstenberg: the first because with the Gedicht eines Skalden (1766), a poem inspired by Ossian, he introduced bardic poetry to German literature; the last, because he represents the transition from Klopstock to the "Sturm und Drang." Gerstenberg was a more gifted poet than either Denis or Kretschmann, but he is now chiefly remembered by his gruesome tragedy, Ugolino (1768), in which the passivity of Klopstock had already given place to the drastic theatrical effects of the younger writers. To this tragedy, as well as to Gerstenberg's critical activity, we shall return. Kretschmann, the noisiest and most tasteless of the group, was but 1738-1809. meagrely gifted. His Gesang Rhingulfs des Barden, Als Varus geschlagen war (1768), which was enthusiastically received on its appearance, might serve as a typical specimen of this whole class of poetry. Denis, the chief Austrian representative of the "bards," made his reputation as a translator of Ossian (1768-69), and in 1772 published a collection of his own poems under the title Lieder Sineds des Barden (the anagram in "Sined" being obvious). His K. F. mann, M. Denis, 1729-1800. 1 Klopstocks Hermanns Schlacht und das Bardenwesen des 18. Jahrh., ed. by R. Hamel (Klopstocks Werke, 4, D.N.L., 48 [1884]). On Denis, cp. P. von Hofmann-Wellenhof, M. Denis, Innsbruck, 1881. services in popularising North German literature in Austria were, however, more lasting and important than his own. contributions to German poetry. On the whole, the "bardic" movement was a well-meaning revolt against the artificial classicism of the Prussian school of lyric poets, but, as even contemporaries recognised, it was on too narrow a basis to become genuinely national. Within a very few years it had either been identified with the "Sturm und Drang," or its ideas had been appropriated by the members of the Göttingen > "Dichterbund." A writer who stands somewhat apart from the feverish development of German literature in the eighteenth century was Salomon Gessner (1730-88). He was one of those S. Gessner, gentle, retiring writers who, while harking back to the literary 1730-88. ideals of the Renaissance, shared at the same time the love for nature of his age: Gessner's Idyllen was the most popular German book in Europe before the appearance of Werther. Born in Zurich in 1730, he came to Berlin at the age of nineteen to learn the trade of a bookseller, but art and literature were more to his taste. He began by writing verses in the style of the Anacreontic school, but, following Ramler's suggestion, tried prose and found in it a congenial mode of expression. The famous Idyllen (1756 and 1772), the pastoral romance, Daphnis (1754), and even his epic on the Tod Abels (1758), are written, not, as might be expected, in verse, but in a delicately balanced prose. Artificial in the extreme is the rococco world of sighing shepherds and coy shepherdesses, but the power which the "Swiss Theocritus" possessed of conveying to his readers his own warm love for nature was, at least, genuine; the tentative descriptive poetry of Brockes and Haller was here raised to a higher plane. 1 Ed. A. Frey in D.N.L., 41 [1884]. Cp. H. Wölfflin, Salomon Gessner, Frauenfeld, 1889. 268 CHAPTER IV. LESSING. G. E. Lessing, 1729-81. Early dramas. IN the autumn of 1746, after a promising school career at the Fürstenschule of St Afra in Meissen, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing1 became a student of the University of Leipzig. He was in his eighteenth year, having been born at Kamenz, in the Oberlausitz in Saxony, on the 22nd of January 1729. Leipzig, as he found it, was essentially the Leipzig of the "Bremer Beiträger." Gottsched, it is true, was no longer the unquestioned dictator of German literature, but the first cantos of the Messias had not yet appeared. Although Lessing did not belong to the coterie which contributed to the Beiträge-his chief friends were Kästner the epigrammatist, and a journalist, C. Mylius-his early literary work was exclusively influenced by the Saxon school. The centre of his interests was not the university, but, to the consternation of his family-his father was a pastor-the theatre. He was on friendly terms with the actors of Frau Neuberin's company, and in the beginning of 1748 his first play, Der junge Gelehrte, which throws an interesting light on his own personality at this time, was publicly produced by them. The best drama of his student years is the comedy Der Misogyn (1748), originally in one act, but at a later date revised and extended to three; it is, however, wholly in the style and tone of the comedy of the time. Meanwhile, in his studies, Lessing turned from theology to medicine, but in 1748 his university career came to an 1 E. Schmidt, Lessing; Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, 2 vols., 2nd ed., Berlin, 1899; Sämtliche Schriften, edited by K. Lachmann, 3rd ed. by F. Muncker, 15 vols., Stuttgart, 1886-1900. In D.N.L., edited by R. Boxberger and H. Blümner, vols. 58-71 [1883-90]. |