The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 01

In all the foregoing discussion of the prevailingly conservative forces in the development of literature we have seen that none of these forces has a completely restraining effect. Language always undergoes a certain change, even in the most benumbed periods, since it is obliged to suit itself to the new demands of trade, of society, even of literature itself. We also saw that form and material were not an inert mass, but were in continual, though often slow, movement. Finally, though the public itself always demands essentially the same thing, it has, nevertheless, new variations which are forced upon it by its avidity for new subjects; it also demands, when it has enjoyed a higher artistic education (as in the days of the Classical and Romantic writers), perfection of technique and increase in specifically artistic values. Between the abiding and the progressive, between the conservative and revolutionary tendencies, the typical development of the individual himself takes its place as a natural intermediary factor. No literary "generation" is composed of men actually of the same age. Beside the quite young who are merely panting to express themselves, stand the mature who exercise an esthetic discernment, even as regards their own peculiar experience; finally, there are also the older men who have already said their say. In the same way every public is made up of people of all ages. These make different demands of their poets; youth wishes to conquer, manhood to fortify, old age merely not to lose. It is self-evident that points of conformity are to be found between the most widely differing fields: as, for example, conservative tendencies are present in the camp of the destroyers, revolutionary tendencies in that of the conservatives. In other words, in every community of men, no matter of what description, who are united by any kind of higher interest, new ideals grow up out of this very community of interest. Men who happen to be thrown together mutually cause one another's demands to increase; those who work in common try to outdo one another. Out of their midst personalities arise, who, brought up with the loftiest ideals, or often spurred on by the supineness of the public, with passionate earnestness make what merely filled up the leisure hours of others the sole purpose of their lives. Thus, in Germany above all, the new ideal has been born again and again, constituting the strongest motive power which exists, besides the personality of genius itself.

Of the greatest importance, to begin with, is the ideal of a national literature itself. Gottsched was the first in Germany, if not to apprehend it, at least to ponder it and to advocate it with persistent zeal. The literature of antiquity and the literature of France offered types of fixed national units. The affinity between the two as national units had been pointed out in France and England by means of the celebrated "Combat of the ancients and moderns," which also first gave living writers sufficient courage to think of comparing modern art with ancient.

Gottsched presented a program which he systematically strove to carry out, and in which one of the most important places is given to the building up of an artistic theatre, after the model of the great civilized nations. He surely had as much right to show some intolerance toward the harlequin and the popular stage as Lessing (who supplanted him while continuing his work) had to indulge in a like prejudice against the classical theatre of the French. Lessing, however, as we have already seen, goes at the same time more deeply into the matter by proposing not only a systematic but also an organic construction of the separate genres, and Herder took the last step when he demanded an autochthonous growth—that is to say, a development of art out of the inner necessity of personalities on the one hand, and of nationalities on the other. To be sure, the great poets who now appeared were not included in the program, and Gottsched did not appreciate Haller, nor did Lessing form a correct estimate of Goethe, or Herder of Schiller. There is, however, a mysterious connection between the aspirations of the nation and the appearance of genius.

Klopstock probably felt most directly what was wanting in the literature of his people, as he was also the most burning patriot of all our classical writers; and at the same time, as is proved by the Republic of Letters, his strange treatise on the art of poetry, he was the one among them who bore the most resemblance to the literary pedant of the old days. He is, therefore, continually occupied with the comparison between German and foreign art, language, and literature, which endeavor was continued later on and with other methods by A.W. Schlegel. But Herder also, in his comparison of the native art of Germany with the art of antiquity, of the Orient and of England, produced effective results; no less did Lessing, although the latter seeks to learn from the faults of his neighbors rather than from their excellencies. Goethe's criticism is dominated to such a degree by his absorption in the antique, and also in French and English general literature, that he has no understanding of national peculiarities when they do not conform to typical literary phenomena, as Uhland's lyric and Kleist's drama—two literary phenomena which we, nowadays, consider eminently national. The Romantic school was the first to try to place the conception of national literature as a whole on an autochthonous basis, and the scientific speculation to which Romanticism gave rise, has, since the Brothers Grimm, also resulted in serviceable rules gained from the increasingly thorough knowledge of language, of national development, and of social conditions. This new point of view reaches its climax in the attempts of Karl Müllenhoff and Wilhelm Scherer to trace the native literary development directly back to the nature and destiny of the German nation. But even as that proved scientifically unsuccessful, so likewise it was not feasible practically to establish a poetry confined to native materials, forms, and opinions. In vain did Tieck try to play off the youthful Goethe, as the only national one, against the Goethe of the Weimar period, which attempt many after him have repeated; or again, it was proposed to strike Heine out of the history of our literature as un-German—the last two literary events of European significance in Germany, according to Nietzsche. On the contrary, a comparison of German literature with those of foreign nations was not only necessary but also fruitful, as a certain exhaustion had set in, which lent an aftermath character to the leaders of the German "intellectual poetry" (Bildungs-Poesie) of that time. It was necessary once again to compare our technique, our relationship between the poet and the people, our participation in all the various literary genres and problems, with the corresponding phenomena in the countries of Zola, Björnson, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Strindberg.

This, now, leads up to another question, to that concerning poetic ideals, and not only poetry in itself; the poet also becomes the object of interest and expectation. Every age embodies a different ideal, by which in all instances the already existing type and the loftier hopes of youth are welded into one—if we maybe allowed so to express it. Antiquity asked that the poet should fill the heart with gladness; the Middle Ages desired edification with a spiritual or a worldly coloring; the first centuries of modern times applied to him for instruction. This last ideal was still in vogue at the beginning of modern German literature. But gradually the conception of "instruction" altered. The poet of the Germanic nations had now to be one who could interpret the heart. He should no longer be the medium for conveying those matters which the didactic novel and the edifying lyric had treated—things valuable where knowledge of the world and human nature, intercourse and felicity are concerned—but he must become a seer again, an announcer of mysterious wisdom. "Whatever, unknown or unminded by others, wanders by night through the labyrinth of the heart"—that he must transmit to the hearer; he must allow the listener to share with him the gift of "being able to give expression to his suffering." Thus the chief task of the modern poet became "the reproduction of the objective world through the subjective," consequently "experience." Real events, objects, manifestations must pass through a human soul in order to gain poetic significance, and upon the significance of the receiving soul, not upon the "poetic" or "unpoetic" nature of the subject itself, depends the poetic significance.

With this new conception, however, new dangers are connected. Near at hand lies the fear of a too open declaration of the most intimate feelings. In many old-style poets of modern times, in Hölderlin, in Kleist, Grillparzer, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff this fear assumes the character of ethical aversion to baring their feelings in public. But near, too, lies the hunt after interesting experiences—the need to "experience something" at any price—which marred the life of a romantic poet of Brentano's talents, and also affected the conduct of the realist Grabbe. A new responsibility was placed upon the shoulders of the German poet, which rested heavily on men like Otto Ludwig, and on account of which writers like Hebbel or Richard Wagner thought themselves justified in claiming the royal privileges of the favorites of the gods.

An entirely new method of poetic study began, which perhaps originated with Heinrich von Kleist: a passionate endeavor to place the whole of life at the service of observation or to spend it in the study of technique. The consequence was not seldom a nervous derangement of the whole apparatus of the soul, just at the moment when it should have been ready for its greatest performances, as in the case of Nikolaus Lenau; however, it also frequently resulted in an endlessly increased receptivity for every experience, as in the case of Bettina von Arnim, Heine, or Annette von Droste, and the most recent writers.

The infinitely difficult task of the modern poet is made still harder by the fact that, in spite of all his efforts, he, happily, seldom succeeds in transforming himself into, one would like to say, an artistically working apparatus, such as Ibsen very nearly became; not, however, without deploring the fact at the close of his life. The German poet in particular has too strong a lyrical inheritance not to reëcho the impressions directly received by his heart. The struggle between the demands of a purely artistic presentation of reality, i. e., one governed exclusively by esthetic rules, and its sympathetic rendering, constitutes the poetic tragedy of most of our "naturalistic writers," and especially of the most important one among them, Gerhart Hauptmann. But from this general ideal of the poet, who only through his own experience will give to reality a true existence and the possibility of permanence, there follows a straining after technical requirements such as was formerly almost unknown. This results in an effort in Germany all the more strenuous in proportion to the former slackness regarding questions of artistic form. The peculiarities of the different literary genres are heeded with a severity such as has been practised before only in antiquity or perhaps by the French. Poets like Detlev von Liliencron, who formerly had appeared as advocates of poetical frivolity, now chafed over banal aids for rhyming, as once Alfred de Musset had done. Friedrich Spielhagen, the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Jacob Wassermann are seen to busy themselves with the technical questions pertaining to the prose-epic, no longer in a merely esthetical and easy-going fashion, but as though they were working out questions vital to existence; and truly it is bitter earnest with them where their art is concerned. Often, as in painting, technique becomes the principal object, and the young naturalism of Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf has in all seriousness raised technique to a dogma, without, however, in the long run being able to get the upper hand of the German need of establishing intimate relations with the subject of the art.

We must, however, at this point again remind ourselves that the question is not one of abstract "poets" but one of a large number of living men who, happily, differ widely from one another. Above all, when considering them we must think of the typical development of the generations. Those for whom patriotic interests, at least in a direct sense, seemed to have little meaning, were always followed by generations patriotically inspired. The Germany of to-day hides, under the self-deluding appearance of a confinement to purely esthetic problems, a predominating and lively joy in the growth of the Fatherland, and naturally also in its mental broadening. To have given the strongest expression to this joy constitutes the historical significance of Gustav Frenssen, just as solicitude for its future inspired the muse of Wilhelm von Polenz.

The preference shown to individual literary genres changes in an almost regular order of sequence—the Swiss Bovet has even tried recently to lay down a regular law of alternation. Especially is the theatre from time to time abused for being a destructive negation of art, in just as lively a fashion as it is declared at other times to be the sole realization of the artistic ideal. As to prevailing temperaments, a preferably pathetic tone—as, for example, in the epoch of Freytag, Geibel, Treitschke—alternates with a sceptically satiric one—as in Fontane who (like so many writers, in Germany especially) did not belong to his own generation nor even to the immediately succeeding one, but to the next after that! With these are associated preferences for verse or prose; for idealism or realism and naturalism; a falling away from philosophy or an inclination to introduce it into poetry; and numerous other disguises for those antagonistic principles, to which Kuno Francke in a general survey of our literature has sought to trace back its different phases.

We have now said about all that, in our opinion, seems necessary for a general introduction to modern German literature. For the rest, it is of course quite obvious that it is German—and that it is a literature. That it is German, is precisely why it is not exclusively German: for in every epoch has it not been proclaimed in accents of praise or of blame, until we are almost tired of hearing it, that the inclination to take up and appropriate foreign possessions is peculiar to the German nation—and to the Germanic spirit in general? Thus we possess special presentations of German literature considered from the standpoint of its antique elements, and also from that of its Christian elements, and we could in the same way present theses which would show its development from the standpoint of the Romance or of the English influence. And yet latterly an exactly contrary attempt has been made—in a spirited, if somewhat arbitrary book by Nadler, which consists in trying to build up the history of German literature entirely upon the peculiarities of the different tribes and provinces. For the essence of the German, nay, even of the Swabian, or Bavarian, or North German, or Austrian individuality, is in the long run nourished rather than extinguished by all foreign influences. In spite of this, it is of course important in the consideration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to observe how the French pattern that is at first followed almost with the unquestioned obedience accorded to a fixed ethical model, is confronted by the English, which brings about the celebrated—and probably overrated—struggle between Gottsched and the Swiss School. We should also notice precisely how the tendency of British literature toward originality—in which the insular peculiarities were strongly emphasized—served to increase the self-reliance of German literature; how a new movement in the style of the antique was cultivated by the classical writers; and how the Romantic School favored medieval-Christian tendencies—much to Goethe's annoyance. It is of importance likewise to note the way in which Young Germany learned how to gain political-literary effects from the new French models; and finally, how the Northern realism of presentation, amalgamated with Tolstoy's, Björnson's, Strindberg's and also Ibsen's ethical subjectivity, educated the naturalism of the Germans. It is precisely those poets that are especially characterized by German peculiarities who have also trained themselves in the use of foreign subjects and forms: thus did Uhland, Mörike, Hebbel, and all the Romanticists. We have already had occasion many times to call attention in detail to the educational effect of foreign countries.

German literature is, in short, one that possesses the typical moments of development which mark all literatures, and which Wilhelm Scherer was the first to call to our notice: that is to say, it is a complicated organism in which the most varied tendencies cross one another, the most dissimilar generations of writers meet together, and the most remarkable events occur in the most unforeseen manner.

If we should now try to get a closer view of the last and by far the most important factor of literature, namely, the individual writers themselves, this difficulty in obtaining a general view of the whole, this working of the different parts against one another, this pulling away from one another, presents itself more clearly to us here than anywhere else. The attempt to classify the development of our literature into distinct groups according to the personalities which compose them has been frequently made, since I, in spite of all the difficulties and dangers of such a hazardous enterprise, first undertook, in my German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, to give an historical and complete presentation of a literature which had as yet scarcely become historic. I can here merely refer in passing to my own efforts and to those of Bartels, Biese, Riemann, and Soergel—to name only these; for in compliance with the purpose of this introduction we must confine ourselves to giving a general comprehensive outline—although it would be easy to improve upon it if one went more into detail.

It seems to me under these conditions that the groundlines of the development of our literature from 1700-1900 would be best impressed upon us by comparing the order of its evolution with that of the most "normal" poetic genius who ever lived—namely, with that of Goethe; and thereby we should prove its development to be an essentially normal one.

Like all "natural geniuses" Goethe begins as an imitator, dependent upon others; for the poet also must first learn to speak and to walk. The earliest literary effort of his which we possess is the poem On Christ's Descent into Hell, which naturally seemed strange enough to Goethe when this long forgotten first printed specimen of his literary productiveness was laid before him again after he had grown old. In this poem traditional phrases are repeated without the addition of anything new and original; conventional feelings are expressed, usual methods are employed; all this, however, not without a certain moderation of expression constituting a first sign of the otherwise still completely concealed poetic individuality.

Such is the character that the world of virtuosos also bears about the year 1700. The poems of Rudolf von Canitz and Johann von Besser are, though in entirely different spheres, just the same kind of first attempts of an imperfect art anxiously following foreign models as Goethe's first Christian poem—though truly with the tremendous difference that they represented the utmost that Frenchified courtly art could ever attain to; while Goethe's poem, on the contrary, was the immature sprig cut away before its time from the stem of a tree soon to stand in the full glory of its bloom.

When now in the Leipzig period the young student discovers the poet within him, he first does so in the customary way: he recognizes the ability on his part to handle the language of the contemporary poets, and also perhaps to imbue it with his own personal feelings. His poems inserted in letters, which make a show of the elegant pretence of improvisation, but in reality already display a great dexterity in rhyming and in the use of imagery, may be compared to Hagedorn's poetry; but at the same time Goethe is trying to attain the serious tone of the "Pindarian" odes, just as Haller's stilted scholarly poetry conquered a place beside Hagedorn's Epicurean philosophy of life. The Book of Annette (1767) as a whole, however, presents the first attempt on the part of Goethe to reach a certain completeness in his treatment of the poetic theme. In all his subsequent collections of poems the same attempt is made, it is true with increasingly rigid interpretation of the idea of "completeness," and in so far one is reminded in this connection of the theoretic intentions and performances of Gottsched.

The "New Songs" (Neue Lieder) of 1770 give a lop-sided exhibition of the style which Leipzig and the times acts. Two great acts follow: in 1773 comes Götz; in 1774, Werther. And with Götz the great "subjects of humanity" seize possession of Goethe's poetry, as they had taken possession of the poetry of Germany with Lessing—as shown by his whole work up to Nathan: for Lessing, the strongest adversary of mere "estheticism," really accomplished what those Anacreontic poets had merely wished to do—or seemed to wish—and brought literature into close touch with life. The Sorrows of Werther lays hold of the subjective problems of the age just as the drama of liberty lays hold of the objective; in them a typical character of the times is analyzed not without zealously making use of models—both innovations of Wieland! But now indeed comes the most important of all, that which in its greatness represents something completely new, although in detail Goethe had here all his teachers to teach him—Lessing who had written Faust-scenes, and Wieland who was so fond of placing the two souls of man side by side, and Herder who had an absolutely Faust-like nature; so that people have tried, with the exaggeration of the theorist, to hold up before us the whole Faust as a kind of dramatized portrayal of Herder! And with Faust Goethe in German literature has reached his own time—"For his century bears his name!"

But in the period which followed the predominating position of the classical writers we once more find the same parallelism of development. Again with Goethe's dilettante beginnings we compare a school of weak imitators, which unhappily was protected by Goethe himself (and also by Schiller in his literary organs); again with the Strassburg period and its Storm and Stress we compare Romanticism, which is characterized by its German nationalism and its antique tendencies, which is sentimental and philosophical, critical and programmatical like the time of Götz, which latter surely must have had a strong effect on men like Tieck and Arnim. And out of the sentiment for his country, which, in Goethe's whole literary career, is peculiar only to the poetry of the Strassburg period, tendencies develop like those which manifest themselves in the literature of the Wars of Liberation, of the Swabian School, in the older poetry of political conflict—in short, like all those tendencies which we connect with Ludwig Uhland's name.

Goethe's literary satires and poems for special occasions are a prelude to the purely literary existence and the belligerent spirit of men like Platen and Immermann, who both, as it were by accident, found their way into the open of national poesy. The self-absorption in Werther, the delving after new poetical experiences and mediums of expression; the method of expression hovering between form and illusory improvisation—all this we find again in the strongest individualists, in Heine, in Annette von Droste, in Lenau. The Weimar period, however, when the poet by means of a great and severe self-discipline trains himself to the point of rigidity in order to become the instrument of his art—that period is, with Tasso, paving the way for the school of Grillparzer, while that infinite deepening of the poetic calling is a preparation for Otto Ludwig, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Hebbel. The contemporary novel in the style of Wilhelm Meister is revived by the Young Germans, above all by Gutzkow, in the same way that tendencies found in Nathan and in Götz are brought out again in Gutzkow's and in Heinrich Laube's dramas, so rich in allusions. The national spirit of which Egmont is full also fills the novels of Willibald Alexis and Berthold Auerbach. Finally those works, besides Tasso, which we are wont to consider the crowning achievements of the Weimar period, above all, Iphigenia, have permanently served as models of the new, and in their way classical, "antiques"—for the Munich School, for the Geibels and the Heyses. But we must also remember Mörike and Stifter, and their absorption in the fullness of the inner life, which none of them could attain to without somewhat stunting the growth of life's realities—Hebbel perceived this clearly enough not only in Stifter but in Goethe himself. Above all, however, this whole epoch of the "intellectual poets" may, in a certain sense, be called the Italian Journey of German literature. Like Goethe in the years 1787-1788, the German muse in this period only feels entirely at home in Italy, or at least in the South; in her own country she feels misnamed.