Modern German literature

Preface

The botanist, as he wanders through our woods, is attracted alike by the fungus and the flower, and the seed-vessel is more to him than the blossom. So, with studious eyes intent, the philologists search through the German poets' grove, " Der Deutsche Dichterwald," and grub the specimens for their herbaria. Even the cryptogamous forms of literature, the glosses and the interlinear versions, have here their charm and place, while the triumphs of culture may be to them less valuable materials than the growths of untutored nature. So, too, there is a point of view from which it is as interesting, perhaps more interesting, to dissect a savage than a philanthropist, the Ormulum than the Adonais. There is a sense in which Shakspere and Goethe are products, as much as M. Tai ne's virtue and vice, sugar and vitriol, as much as the religious weekly or the American magazine. A scientific analysis or synthesis is profitable and useful in literature ; but when it is exhaustive it is apt to be exhausting, and when it affects to vi

PKEFACE.

despise the study of literature for aesthetic enjoyment it becomes injurious to the development of popular culture. Surely it is right and helpful to pluck the flowers of literature without grubbing for their roots. Tor while no doubt the study of these roots and of the soil from which they draw their nourishment may lead a chosen few to a deeper knowledge than others will attain, experience tells us that the majority of those who have set out, like Hylas, to find the stream that runs by philology's shrine have tripped over so many of these roots that they have had no time to waste " with the flowers on the margin," while their " light urns " have been left quite as empty as his.

This book, then, is not for the learned specialist, nor for him who aspires to become one, but rather for those to whom, as to the great majority of our college students, German literature is a pleasant avocation, a secondary means of culture.

What does such a well-educated foreigner care to know about German literature ? That is what most of our university men have to ask themselves, and this book is an attempt at an answer whose correctness others must determine. Evidently most cultured foreigners will never be German ists. They will want to know, not about the "Muspilli" or the "Wessobrunn Prayer," but, first of all, about what men are writing and reading now, and then about what they continue to read of the works of older generations.

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vii

Now, except perhaps the Nibelungenlied, there is little if anything printed before Lessing's " Literary Letters" (1759) that educated Germans read for literary enjoyment to-day, and there is very little before that time of which a cultured foreigner, not a specialist, needs or cares to know. And yet in the current literary histories rather more than half the space is usually given to the earlier periods, and in great part to men who live chiefly in the memory of those whose profession it is to explore musty catacombs and fill antiquarian journals.

There are, indeed, aspects of this earlier literature that fall naturally within the scope of a more general culture. The interdependence of literature and politics in Germany is very curious and suggestive. Luther is still a name to conjure with, and Wagner has reawakened a wide interest in the Mbelungen saga and in Parzival and Tristan. Still, even here I have labored to be brief in my introductory chapter, and have preferred to be incomplete rather than obscure.

Then I have tried to show how Klopstock, Wielancl, and Herder herald the new era, while the great reformer, Lessing, prepares the way for the universal literature of Goethe and Schiller, the German classic authors of whom we read and hear most to-day, and shall for some time to come. Nearly half the volume is given to these, and, as is fitting, more to Goethe than to Schiller. If Richter and the Romanviii

PREFACE.

tic School then claim a chapter, it is less because these men, now lapped in their own lead, have an intrinsic interest, than because unless we know what they were it is hard to understand what Heine became. And Heine has peculiar claims on our intelligent study, because this last great German poet was the first who was in touch with the distinctive moving forces of our modern life. It is only when we come to see the relations of our thought to his that we can comprehend how he is separated from Goethe more widely than Goethe from us. Finally, I have devoted a chapter to modern novels and dramas because these are almost the only forms of contemporary imaginative literature that continue to be generally read, whether at home or abroad, and I have not wished to dwell on any writer who to a cultured foreigner would probably be only a shadowy name.

In a book whose sole purpose is to further literary appreciation and enjoyment, a learned and critical apparatus would be superfluous and impertinent. I have spoken of no book that I do not know at first hand, but my judgment has often been influenced, sometimes directed, by the great German critics, especially by my " Collegienhefte " of Professor Scherer's lectures in Berlin, between 1877 and 1880, and by his admirable " Litteraturgeschichte." I have consulted also Gervinus and Schmidt, seldom without profit, and the standard biographies, as will be seen

PREFACE.

ix from occasional foot-notes. I have quoted and paraphrased from them and from others wherever it seemed desirable ; for my modest ambition has been less to be original than to be helpfully suggestive to the lovers of pure literature.

BENJAMIN W. WELLS.

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Contents

Page

I. The Origins 1

II. The First Fruits: Klopstock, Wieland,

Chapter I. The Origins

Every literature has its periods of flourishing and of decay. Like the political life of a nation, and often in connection with it, the literary life ebbs and flows, rises and falls. And in none of the great literatures of Europe is this so clearly marked as in the German. At the beginning of the seventh century, as the Teutonic tribes, upborne by the triumphs of the great migration, looked down on conquered Rome and rested for a time on their laurels, the forces that had been engaged in that struggle of arms turned to the literary glorification of its experiences. A distinctively national epic literature appeared in Germany, almost at the same time that similar conditions were uniting to form the early Anglo-Saxon epic in England. The year six hundred, then, may mark the first blossoming of German literature.

But in the spiritual struggle that followed the political conquest, the Teutonic races were less fortunate. They could conquer the Roman legions,

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they yielded to the Eoraan church ; and their intellectual forces were diverted to its service in ever increasing measure. The old national poetry was forgotten, perhaps even despised, by the monks of the cloister, and the wandering singer w T as no longer " high,, placed in hall, a welcome guest," as he had been before monasteries and monastic records gave a title to posthumous fame that promised to be more enduring than the memorial of his songs.

So the literature that had been national in the seventh century was from the beginning of the tenth thoroughly catholic, general. The epic lives of Christ, the Saxon "Heliand," or the High-German " Krist " of Otfrid, are sometimes spirited and poetic, but they are not distinctively German. Indeed it was not until, beneath the energetic sceptre of the Ottos, the Germans began to feel once more the dignity of their national individuality thaj they reached back again instinctively to their own earlier traditions, to their peculiar independent sources of inspiration. Then, six hundred years after the first outburst of national song, the popular epic wells up again in the splendid beauty of "Gudrun" and the " Nibelungenlied." This is the century of the " Volks-epos ; " the whole nation is aglow with high political aspirations, full of overflowing strength.

But for the second time we see these lofty hopes deceived. For as the Roman church had moulded to its ends the spiritual forces that made the first national epic possible, so now the Roman law, trans-

THE OBIGINS.

formed and petrified into the feudal system, was to blight the intellectual fruitage of the German nation. The upper classes, the nobles, under its influence, separated themselves more and more from their followers and from the peasants, and, while the latter became coarser and more material, the former grew more refined, but less broadly human. Literature remained with the nobles, it tended to become their peculiar possession, but it was in a new form. The court epic and its subjects no longer had their roots in the national glories of a legendary past ; they were rather the graceful figments of a foreign fancy. Now it will be the court of Arthur of which they sing, some Welsh fable, or a legend from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "little book," or perhaps it will be the mystic story of the Grail with its Celtic ideals' of spiritual knighthood, or it may be the siege of Troy and the campaigns of Alexander that claim their attention. And if by chance the subject should be their own German emperor, Charlemagne, they will treat him in the same spirit that they did the Macedonian, and send him travelling to Constantinople on a fool's errand.

More beautiful in form, more philosophical in conception, this courtly epic had no root in the popular consciousness, and therefore in the next century it died gradually away of over-refinement and exhaustion, so that the year 1500 found literature at an ebb perhaps even lower than the tenth century could show. Naturally this manifested itself most clearly in poetry. That highest form of imaginative litera-

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ture now " ceases to belong to the order of the day, it is of no general interest to the people; it has become a means of agitation, a tool of political schemers, or a purveyor of coarsest entertainment. It is indeed not without productive power in matter of invention. It uses up a vast amount of material, and creates a few moral types, mostly results of hate or jest, and often of a grandiose conception. But it lacks the charm of form, it is too ephemeral, too indifferent to external beauty. ... It transfers to a more fortunate generation the best that it has, as mere formless material." 1

Here, again, literary decay coincides with, and seems to depend on, the decay of national power. The Reformation cost Germany her political pre-eminence for well-nigh three centuries and a half. The conditions that produced and succeeded it could not but be fatal to the development of literary art. But the tide rose again when the German heart was enlarged by the glorious struggles and victories of Frederic II. German literature responded to the national spirit and celebrated its third and greatest triumph in the age of Goethe, while to-day the tide seems to have ebbed again as quickly as it rose.

Few phenomena in the literary history of the world are so remarkable as the outburst of that splendid

1 Scherer, " Litteraturgeschichte." To this book and to " Collegienhefte" of Scherer's Berlin lectures in the years 1877-1880 this chapter is indebted, directly or indirectly, on almost every page. While independence of critical judgment has been sought in every case, the author is probably more indebted to his first and chief instructor in this field than even he himself is aware.

THE ORIGTNS.

galaxy of literary genius, after the wars of the great Frederic had given breath once more to the stifled giant of German nationality. It was as if the pentup energies of three centuries of repression had broken loose to flood the world with light. The peculiarity of these conditions invites a treatment of German literature to which the French or our own would ill submit. The English has a consistent, steady development from Chaucer to Tennyson, seldom without a poet of the first rank, or without masters of prose. The French, too, has had a succession of reputable names that link in unbroken chain the days of Villehardouin in the thirteenth century to the masters of our own. It is true we speak of a classical period both in French and in English literature, but there is no such contrast between the age of Louis XIV., or of Elizabeth, and the times that went before or followed, as there is in Germany between the age of Goethe and the five centuries that preceded it. In no great literature save the German do we see such abandonment of past achievements and such laborious regaining of former conquests. For this reason it is possible to appreciate and understand German literature since the days of Frederic II., independently of what went before, to a degree that would be impossible in French literature were one to begin his study with Voltaire, or in English should one begin with Fielding. Hence it is not without justification in the nature of the case that those to whom the study of German is an avocation and a subsidiary means of culture should be content with

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a brief review of the earlier time, that they may concentrate their critical attention and aesthetic appreciation upon the century that begins with Lessing and ends with Heine. Such a brief review of the origins of that culminating century is the purpose of this chapter.

Of the first epic period, its songs of heroes and their deeds, and of the mythology of their warrior gods, such scanty remnants are preserved that one might say it has practically perished past recovery. Yet from a fragment of a song of Hildebrand and his single combat with Hadubrand, his own son, and still more from English and Norse poems of similar character and from the later German poetry, it is clear that the first blossoming of German literature was of great force and rugged beauty. No contemporaneous effort was made to commit this poetry to writing. That permanence was for the present reserved for the service of religion. The first Teutonic book wasthe translation of the Bible made by Bishop Wulfila (Ulfilas) for the West Goths on the Danube. Books have their fates, and a very beautiful manuscript of this work, which, though now incomplete, is thought by some to be contemporary with the good bishop himself, is after many vicissitudes preserved to-day in the library of the University of Upsala, in the opposite corner of Europe.

It was after the first outburst of German song that the dispersion of the Teutonic tribes, fostering diversity of dialects, led to the segregation of the High Germans, whose literary development immedi-

THE ORIGINS.

ately concerns us here. But among them in this early period literary activity, at least so far as it found record in writing, was almost exclusively monastic in origin and religious in purpose. Gospel harmonies in verse and prose, versions of portions of the choir offices, engaged the chief attention of the monastic literati, who exercised their imaginations on "Visions of Judgment," or more frequently on the fanciful legends of their patron saints, and allowed themselves at rare intervals to be diverted by the worldly interests of their cloister to such political subjects as the patriotic " Ludwigslied," or " Song of King Louis."

A really intelligent interest in national poetry was, however, one of the titles to greatness of the magnanimous Charles and his cultured counsellor the English Alcuin. It is a fair and worthy witness to the catholic mind of the noblest mediaeval emperor that while he was bending every effort to the conversion of the still heathen Saxons, and fostering translations into the vernacular of sermons and catechetical instructions and of the Gospel narrative, he was at the same time collecting with zealous care the relics of the old heathen poetry. But a narrower and more bigoted age suffered this priceless treasure of antiquity to perish, though it preserved a vast amount of that proselytizing literature for an age to which it seems indeed outworn, while the recovery of, the epic songs of Charlemagne, like that of the lost books of Tacitus and Livy, remains the unfulfilled dream of the scholar.

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From the eighth century until the crusades, the German literature that has been preserved to us can hardly be regarded as equal in value to that produced in England or in France during the same period. There was perhaps nothing then written there that would be read for its own intrinsic interest and literary worth to-day, as we still read the " Chanson de Ptoland " or the Anglo-Saxon " Cross." Not until the German people felt again the pulses of a reawakened national life did their literature strike its roots once more deep in the popular heart. The immediate political cause of this reawakening of national pride was the broad policy of Otto and Barbarossa, who revived in German minds a consciousness of their great mission that had slumbered since the death of Charlemagne. But more than this, the far-reaching plans of these rulers had brought their subjects into intimate contact with the more advanced culture of the South and West, and by this the German nobility had become again as in the days of Theodoric the centre of German literary life. Under their refining influence grew up the delicately modulated Middle-High- German dialect, a language pre-eminently fitted for poetic expression. And the instrument that lay so temptingly ready to the hand of genius was soon put to use in lyrics of love and epic ballads of heroism. Soon the standard of the courts reacted on the people. Already in the eleventh century there is evidence of growing refinement in popular literary taste ; for, though the best secular literature was still probably in Latin, there were German religious epics

THE ORIGINS.

that showed a very considerable development. These deal with subjects from the Scriptures, with the. crucifixion and death of Christ, with the legends of the various Marys, and with the exodus of Israel ; or the monastic author will dwell, with reminiscences of chivalrous clays, on the adventurous expedition of Judith, and, in still freer fancy, will contrast the joys of this fleeting life with the horrors of eternal death.

German literature had reached this stage in its development when the crusades came to open new avenues to adventure and new horizons to imagination. The renewed struggle with the heathen recalled the days of Charlemagne and Eoland ; contact with the East revived the memories of Alexander's adventures. The result was immediate. In 1130 the French epics of Eoland and of the great Macedonian were already done into German. And the native poets were quick to catch the new spirit in tales of travel and warlike adventure, in the main clearly the direct result of the crusades. Such a pseudo-historical epic is "'Eother," whom the poet makes a grandfather of Charlemagne, though he is in fact a study from the Norman Eoger of Sicily. A second and perhaps more famous epic tale is " Herzog Ernst," who is historically a combination of the rebellious Ludolf, son of the Emperor Otto, with Ernst, Duke of Bavaria, who was also a rebel. But in the poet's hands Ernst has become a crusader and wandering- Ulysses, rivalling Sindbad the Sailor in his fabulous adventures among pygmies, giants, cyclops, and mag-

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netic mountains. Another German Ulysses is King Orendel, and similar traits can be found in the German version of the legend of an Irish saint, Brendan. Even the English martyr, King Oswald, becomes in the hands of the Bavarian poet an amorous, halfcomic crusader.

This free treatment of the legends of the saints is noteworthy, for it implies a less serious view of life and its issues. And that was the natural result of the crusades, which could not but make the crusaders more tolerant. Beligion during this period is coming to be looked at less as an alterative than as an anodyne. One of the crusading poets remarks in a jest that hides a truth, which he sees, but perhaps would still hesitate to think, at least aloud, that at Acre he could not distinguish Jews, Christians, or heathen. This is the age when Frederic II. and Saladin contend for the palm of magnanimity, while the great poets of the century, Walther and Wolfram, anticipate Lessing's " Nathan der Weise " in their philosophic conception and bold teaching of universal toleration. Arabians, Jews, and Germans join at the Emperor's Sicilian court to open the treasures of Aristotle to the Western world. It was indeed a wonderful age, a time of broad horizons and distant prospects, which were veiled too soon and for centuries by the cold and selfish policy of the Boman curia, that saw in Frederic II. its most dangerous enemy, struck from his hand the lamp of culture, brought to naught his far-reaching plans, and pressed back the swelling tide of the German spirit

THE ORIGINS.

till it should break for itself new paths at the Reformation.

This inspiring thirteenth century, that found its political incarnation in Frederic, has left its literary monuments also. Growing ever more self-conscious, more national, through the closing years of the twelfth century, German poetry greets us on the threshold of the thirteenth with the " Nibelungenliecl," its Iliad, an epic second only to that masterpiece, and soon to be followed by " Gudrun," a veritable German Odyssey. But the first quarter of this century is to give us also the philosophical epics of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the less thoughtful but more popular epic tales of Hartmann von Aue, and the exquisite songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, surrounded by the melodious chorus of the " Minnesangsfruhling," the " Springtime of the songs of love," as this period has been poetically named. The whole makes up one of the most remarkable phenomena of the intellectual life, to be compared to "the spacious times of great Elizabeth," and, like this, finding its cause and explanation in the political life and aspirations of the people, as indeed the last great literary epoch of Germany would have been impossible but for the inspiration of that greater Frederic, king of Prussia and truly king of men.

The masterpieces of this wonderful generation fall almost holly between 1190 and 1220. They may be divided broadly into popular and courtly epics, while the lyrics take a middle ground. The great epic representatives of popular tradition are the

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" Nibelungenlied " and " Gudrnn." The former tells of the love, marriage, and widowed vengeance of Kriemhild, a Burgundian princess from the court of Worms, whose tragic story associates her with Sigfried, a mythical hero of the race of the Nibelungs from the lower Bhine, and after his death with Attila and Theodoric of Yerona. But while there is thus an historical background, it is plain that chronology is thrown to the w:inds, and that heroes dear to the popular heart are joined together from various centuries of German history. Sigfried, who is the chief figure in the former half of the epic, has been identified by some with that Arminius who defeated Varro and the Boman legions of Augustus in the first century ; and Theodoric carries us beyond the age of Attila to the sixth century.

That the legend, or rather the legends, had been long fluxed in the popular mind of the Teutonic race is clear from the form in which they meet us in Iceland, and from the allusions to them in Anglo-Saxon verse. Their main outlines are made familiar, at least in part, in our day by the operatic cycle of Wagner, though in many particulars the four operas, "Kheingold,"" Sigfried," "Die Walkure," and "Die Gotterdammerung " follow the Norse rather than the distinctively German form of the story.

The latter half of the " Nibelungenlied " transfers the epic scene to the court of Attila, who has become the husband of Sigfried's widow. Its grim hero is Hagen, the counsellor of the Burgundian kings and the slayer of Sigfried, on whom his widow here takes

THE ORIGINS.

fearful vengeance. She beguiles her relatives and their retainers to a festival at Attila's court, and with them Hagen comes, though not beguiled, to their common destruction. In fearful struggle all are massacred at last, but the best of Attila's retainers are also slain, his son is killed, and Kriemhild, too, has perished at the hands of the outraged Theodoric.

The idea that lies at the base of this poem is noteworthy and characteristic of the people whence it sprang. Heine remarked with some bitterness that the strongest characteristic of the German nation in his day was their loyalty, their " Treue," and it is precisely the conflicting claims of double allegiance that form the springs of tragic action in the " Nibelungenlied " six hundred years before. In Kriemhild's case there is the conflict between her duty as wife and as sister. In Sigfried's it is between his duty as husband and as vassal. Biidiger is divided between the claims of his Burgundian guests and those of Attila, his over-lord. And so throughout, faith, allegiance, " Treue " is the central thought of nearly every phase of the " Nibelungenlied."

As will have become clear, the " Nibelungenlied " naturally falls into two parts, culminating, the former in Sigfried's death, the latter in the massacre at Attila's court, but there is no unity of inner structure in either portion. Passages of the deepest feeling and pathos alternate not only with those of rugged strength, but also with what is trivial, grotesque, or even silly. Then, too, the connection of the episodes is not always clear. This is true here in a much

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greater degree than in the Homeric poems, and whatever may be the final judgment in regard to these, it is hard to conceive that the " Nibelungenlied " can have been the product of a single mind. Rather does it seem a result of the editing and combining, with a freedom characteristic of the time, of epic songs that had long been current among the people, changing from generation to generation, and taking different forms in the various Germanic dialects, but caught for us, like some petrifaction of a bygone age, in the shape that it had taken in Austria, perhaps at Vienna, between the years 1190 and 1210.

Though the " Nibelungenlied " is the greatest, it is by no means the only epic formed from songs in High Germany. There is one that tells of the death of the great Gothic king, Ermenrich, of the race of the Amalungs, to which Theodoric also belonged, though many generations later. Here, however, the legends are fused, and the culmination of the " Dietrichsage " is Theodoric's conquest of- Italy. Others tell of Sigfried's youthful adventures. But soon the popular epic begins to take on a local color. The High Germans grow jealous of the epic glories of the Nibeluug hero from the lower Rhine, and in " Biterolf " and the " Rosengarten " they make Theodoric and Sigfried contend for the mastery, and venture at length to award the palm to the Southern champion. Gradually Sigfried becomes the sport of fancy, and the type of youthful heroism sinks at last to the Saufritz of the farm-yard and the nursery.

THE ORIGINS.

Another group of High German legends gathers ahout the Vandal brothers, Ortnit and Wolfdietrich. Here, too, the " editing " is more extensive than in the " Nibelungen," and by a series of strange geographical misunderstandings of names that possibly were already distorted in the original songs, the " editors " have taken the brothers, now to Eussia, now to Eome. There is a striking similarity in the tale to the classic story of Castor and Pollux, but the special students of this literature regard conscious imitation as extremely improbable.

These stories belong wholly to High Germany and to Austria. A third group shows as clearly its Low German origin. For here the hero's home is the sea, and viking raids are his glory ; but yet, by the ocean as among the hills, loyalty, faithfulness, " Treue," is the burden of the song. In this group the place of the " Nibelungen " is taken by the story of " Gudrun." The legend has a peculiar interest to Englishmen, for the time and the local color is that of the raids of Danes and Northmen on the coasts of England and Ireland. The ocean and the shore are the scene of action, and the subject is as old, and as ever new, as the story of Europa or of Helena. The suitor, noble, beloved, but rejected by jealous parents, flies with his stolen bride. Then follows the pursuit, the battle, and, in the mediaeval tales, as universally, the reconciliation and the marriage ; a solution which offers suggestive points of contrast to the classical conception.

The " Gudrunsaga " tells us how King Hagen of

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Ireland had a daughter Hilde, passing fair, whose suitors that genial monarch was accustomed to kill or hang. But King Hettel of Denmark is not easily discouraged, and his messengers persuade the willing daughter to escape to him with them over-sea. He meets his bride on the shore, but the enraged father is in hot pursuit, and the lover has to maintain his right in a fight on the beach, that is described with great verve. Here Hettel magnanimously saves Hagen's life, and all ends in happy reconciliation.