W. A. Mozart, 1756-91.

consisted of little more than imitations of Minna von Barnhelm, and family tragedies in the manner of Iffland. The name of only one dramatist need be mentioned here, CorC. H. von nelius Hermann von Ayrenhoff (1733-1819), an Austrian Ayrenhoff, officer of high rank, who cultivated the French Alexandrine 1733-1819. tragedy in Austria, and may be regarded as a belated follower of Gottsched. One of his comedies, Der Postzug, oder die nobeln Passionen (1769), which was warmly admired by Frederick the Great, was long a favourite on the German stage. In the lyric drama, however, Austria, or, at least, Vienna, began, at an early date, to lead the way. Gluck's Alceste, as has been already remarked, had been produced in Vienna in 1767, and in 1782, Wolfgang Gottlieb (or Amade) Mozart (1756-91), a native of Salzburg, ushered in a new period in the history of the German "Singspiel" with Die Entführung aus dem Serail. But the Viennese dramatists were not able to satisfy Mozart's requirements, and for his two next operas, Die Hochzeit des Figaro (1786) and Don Juan (Don Giovanni, 1787), he turned to the Italian, Da Ponte, for his texts. The former of these is an adaptation of the famous comedy by Beaumarchais, La Folle Journée, while Don Juan is a more original version of the theme which Molière had dramatised in Le Festin de Pierre; but Mozart's last masterpiece, Die Zauberflöte (1791), was again a German "Singspiel." With an almost childlike naïveté, he poured his noblest music into a loosely constructed Viennese "Posse," whose chief merit in his eyes was that it mirrored his own enthusiasm for the ideals of the "Aufklärung."

J. J. Heinse, 1749-1803.

Before the appearance of Don Carlos in 1787, the "Sturm und Drang" had wellnigh spent itself. A strange, anomalous genius has still, however, to be mentioned, a genius in whom were mingled the light grace of Wieland and the stormy intoxication of the "Geniezeit"; this was the Thuringian, Johann Jakob Heinse (1749-1803),1 who, in 1787, after three years' residence in Rome, published his most popular novel, Ardinghello, oder die glückseligen Inseln. The hero of this romance is the typical heaven-stormer of the age; Ardinghello is an artist and a dreamer, who ultimately founds on Grecian 1 Heinse's Sämmtliche Werke, ed. H. Laube, 10 vols., Leipzig, 1838; a new edition by C. Schuddekopf has begun to appear, Berlin, 1991. Cp. F. Bobertag, Erzählende Prosa der klassischen Periode, 1 (D.N.L., 136, 1 [1886]), 52 ff.

isles a realm as free as the "Thelema" of Rabelais. The plot of Ardinghello is in its way as extravagant as the early dramas of the "Sturm und Drang," and the love-adventures are described in a tone of southern sensualism, but the book has a particular interest in so far as it throws its shadow on the succeeding literary period; Ardinghello is a forerunner, although not, of course, in the same degree as Wilhelm Meister, of the art-novels of the Romanticists. In Heinse's second novel, Hildegard von Hohenthal (1795), the only other of his books which had much success, music takes the place which painting occupied in Ardinghello. As musical criticism, especially in its fine estimate of Gluck, Hildegard von Hohenthal has a certain value; as literature, it is disfigured, even more than its predecessor, by lack of restraint.

second

The representative novelist of the close of the "Sturm und Drang" was Maximilian Klinger,1 who has already been dis- M. Klincussed as one of the leaders of the literary revolution. The ger's work of his second period, free as it is from the unbalanced period. turbulence of his early life, shows an almost classic dignity. Two dramas in prose, Medea in Korinth and Medea auf dem Kaukasos (1791), which belong to these years, deserve a place among the best modern plays on Greek subjects; but his most solid and lasting achievement is the cycle of nine novels which he sketched out in 1790. It was his intention to make these novels a receptacle for all he himself had ever thought or experienced, for his own philosophy of life. The cycle opens with Fausts Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt (1791), which was followed by the Geschichte Giafars des Barmeciden (1792) and the Geschichte Raphaels de Aquillas (1793). The struggle of the heroes of the "Sturm und Drang" against an untoward fate is here fought out anew, but the tragedy is no longer purely personal; it has, as it were, become typical of the history of the race and stands against a background of philosophical pessimism. Reisen vor der Sündfluth (1795) and Sahir (1798) are of the nature of political satires, while in Der Faust der Morgenländer (1797) the conflict between the ideal and the real, which is to be found in all Klinger's work, is treated in a more conciliatory spirit than in the opening novel. The last three

1 M. Rieger, Klinger in seiner Reife, Darmstadt, 1896. Cp. A. Sauer, Stürmer und Dränger, 1 (D.N.L., 79 [1883]), where Fausts Leben is reprinted.

K. P. Moritz, 1757-93.

Anton Reiser, 1785.

works of the series, the Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten Zeit (1798), Der Weltmann und der Dichter (1798), and the collection of aphorisms entitled Betrachtungen und Gedanken über verschiedene Gegenstände der Welt und der Litteratur (1803-1805), are also the ripest; they are on themes taken from Klinger's own time, and in them he approaches as near as any of the classical writers to a harmonious solution of the problems which the "Sturm und Drang" had awakened in the German mind.

Less ambitious than the "art-novels" of Heinse or Klinger's philosophical romances, Anton Reiser, ein psychologischer Roman (1785),1 by Karl Philipp Moritz (1757-93), demands special attention in a history of German fiction at the close of the "Sturm und Drang." This novel stands in the direct line between Agathon and Wilhelm Meister. It is an unpretentious story, mainly autobiographical, like Jung-Stilling's Jugend; yet before Wilhelm Meister, no book of the eighteenth century painted with such convincing truth a young man's initiation into the trials of life. The theory of the modern psychological novel is implied in the few words of preface with which the book opens:

"Wer den Lauf der menschlichen Dinge kennt, und weiss, wie dasjenige oft im Fortgange des Lebens sehr wichtig werden kann, was anfänglich klein und unbedeutend schien, der wird sich an die anscheinende Geringfügigkeit mancher Umstände, die hier erzählt werden, nicht stossen. Auch wird man in einem Buche, welches vorzüglich die innere Geschichte des Menschen schildern soll, keine grosse Mannigfaltigkeit der Charaktere erwarten: denn es soll die vorstellende Kraft nicht vertheilen, sondern sie zusammendrängen, und den Blick der Seele in sich selber schärfen."

Anton Reiser is born in extreme poverty, and, beginning life as a hatmaker's apprentice in Brunswick, has to fight his way through all manner of hardships; the dream of his life is to win a name for himself on the stage, but, once success is within sight, he is bitterly disappointed with what he had regarded as the ideal world of Shakespeare and Goethe. This is practically the thread of narrative on which the novel hangs, but the importance of the book lies, not in its story, but in its keen observation and fine

1 Ed. L. Geiger, Litteraturdenkm., 23, Heilbronn, 1886. Cp. F. Bobertag, l.c., 165 ff.

insight. The restless spirit of the "Sturm und Drang" is still present, but now and again we are reminded of that new world which Goethe's broad humanitarianism had revealed to his contemporaries. Moritz, who belonged to Goethe's circle of friends in Rome, wrote also on æsthetic subjects, and his Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 (1783) and Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788 (1792-93) are valuable documents of the time.

1754-94.

Johann Georg Forster (1754-94), another writer who stood J. G. on the confines of the " Geniezeit," lived an extraordinarily Forster, adventurous life. Brought up in England, he accompanied his father on Cook's second voyage round the world (177275), and on his return wrote an account of it in English (A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World, 1777). Returned to Germany, he was appointed to a professorship in Kassel, which in 1784 he exchanged for a similar chair in the University of Wilna in Poland; but life in Wilna soon became unendurable to him, and he was glad to return to Germany in 1787. A year later he obtained a librarianship in Mainz. A fiery enthusiast for freedom, a "Weltbürger" like Marquis Posa, Forster greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm; but the horrors of the actual rising as he saw them in Mainz convinced him that it was not the hoped-for panacea for all social ills. He died in Paris in 1794. His masterpiece is the Ansichten vom Niederrhein, Ansichte von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im vom April, Mai, Junius 1790 (1791),1 one of the most remarkable rhein, 1791. books of travel that has ever been written. Nature and people, politics and art, nothing escapes Forster's wide glance, and for everything that comes under his notice he has the same unflagging interest; the art of Iffland or a picture by Rubens is described with no less loving care than the geological structure of the Rhine valley; and, above all, the book is written in so vivid and picturesque a style that it has remained one of the masterpieces of German prose.

1 Ed. W. Buchner in the Bibl. der deutschen Nationallitt., 13, 14, Leipzig, 1868.

Nieder

348

CHAPTER X.

GOETHE'S FIRST TWENTY YEARS IN WEIMAR.

THE Goethe who has been hitherto considered, was simultaneously a child of his age and its leader; in Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfort, he had belonged wholly to the literary movement in the midst of which he was placed; and during his last years in Frankfort, he was the acknowledged head of the "Sturm und Drang." From his twenty-seventh year onwards, Goethe was by no means so intimately bound up with the epoch; for the first fifteen years at least of his life in Weimar, he held entirely aloof from literary schools and movements. His personal development had been so rapid as to outstrip his time, and, after his return from Italy, his attitude to literature was even antagonistic. We have now to turn to the history of Goethe's life and work between his arrival in Weimar in the end of 1775, and the beginning of his friendship with Schiller in 1794.

As far as poety was concerned, the first years which Goethe spent in Weimar present a marked contrast to the period which preceded them: his best energies were for a time directed to other channels. Duke Karl August, with a clearness of judgment remarkable in so young a man-it must not be forgotten that while Goethe was six-and-twenty the service when he went to Weimar, his sovereign was only a youth of

Goethe in

of the State.

eighteen-saw that the poet whom he had called to his Court was more than a man of letters; and in spite of the opposition of his elders, he gave him one responsible position after another in the government of the Duchy. And the first month or two of unsettled life over, Goethe showed that the Duke's confidence in him was not misplaced. He threw himself zealously into his new duties, and poetry was