Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/597

“Die Alpen” of Albrecht von Haller (d. 1777) and the graceful verse of Friedrich von Hagedorn (d. 1754). The most popular author of the day was Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715-69), whose fables were familiar to every German household. He also wrote stories, moralizing comedies, and hymns. But neither these writers nor those of the Halle circle, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Ewald Christian von Kleist, and Johann Peter Uz, were in any sense great writers.

VII. The Classic Period of German Literature (1748-1805).—Many causes contributed to the rise of a great national literature in the eighteenth century. The victories of the Prussian King Frederick the Great quickened national sentiment in all German lands. This quickening of patriotism is discernible in Klopstock's poems; it encouraged Lessing to begin his campaign against the rule of French classicism. Religious movements also exerted a powerful influence. Pietism came as a reaction against the narrow Lutheran orthodoxy then prevailing, and though it ultimately added but one more petty sect to those already existing, the deepening of religious sentiment that followed it was beneficial to poetry. With the appearance in 1748 of the three opening cantos of "Der Messias" a new era opened for German literature. The author, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803), was hailed at once as a poet born not made. Poetry again had a noble content: love, patriotism, and religion. The theme of the "Messias" is the Redemption. In spite of its high seriousness and lofty purpose, the poem is a failure as an epos. Klopstock's gift was lyric; he is at his best in his odes. Impatient of the pedantic rules of versification followed by poets since the days of Opitz, he discarded rhyme altogether and chose for his odes antique metres and free rhythms. This, as well as their involved diction, has stood in the way of their popularity. Another defect that mars all of Klopstock's work is its excessive sentimentalism, a defect that is disagreeably noticeable in most of the literature of that time. The poet's patriotism found vent in odes as well as in patriotic prose dramas, the so-called Bardiete, in which an attempt was made to revive Germanic antiquity and to excite enthusiasm for Arminius, the liberator of ancient Germany from Roman subjugation. As drama these productions are utter failures, though their lyric passages are often beautiful; their chief effect was to stimulate the "bardic" movement represented by von Gerstenberg, Kretschmann, and the Viennese Jesuit Denis. Klopstock's Biblical dramas like "Der Tod Adams" (1757) are now wholly forgotten.

Of far greater influence on literature than pietism was rationalism, whose watchword was "Enlightenment." Reason was to be the sole guide in all things; tradition and faith were to conform to it. For dogma of any kind there was no room in such a system, which frequently tended towards undisguised atheism, as with the English Deists and especially the French Encyclopedists. Frederick the Great was an adherent of their views and made them dominant in Church and State as far as Prussia was concerned. In Germany, however, rationalism did not go to the length of atheism; as a rule a compromise between reason and revealed religion was attempted. The broad humanitarianism of the great writers of this period, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, shows the influence of the Enlightenment. Certain it is that all these writers were out of sympathy with any of the orthodox forms of Christianity. Often, however, the Enlightenment degenerated into a shallow, prosy rationalism, destitute of all finer sentiment, as in the case of the notorious Nicolai (d. 1811). As a reaction against the one-sided sway of rationalism, came a passionate revolt against the existing order. This revolt was inaugurated by Rousseau and manifested itself in German literature in the Sturm-und-Drang-Periode (Storm and Stress Period). The final product of the whole rationalistic movement was the epoch-making "Critique of Pure Reason" of Immanuel Kant.

The representative of the Enlightenment in its best aspect is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), one of the greatest critics of the century. In the "Literaturbriefe," a series of essays on contemporary literature, his wonderful critical ability was first shown. Here Shakespeare is held up as a model and the supremacy of the French drama is challenged. In 1766 appeared the "Laokoon," in which the spheres of poetry and the plastic arts are clearly defined, and their fundamental differences pointed out. The attempt to establish a national theatre at Hamburg resulted in the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" (1767-69), wherein Lessing investigates the nature of the drama, and refutes the claim of the French that their classic drama is the true exponent of the practice of the ancients. The rules of Aristotle are accepted as final, but it is shown that the French have misunderstood them, and their German imitators are therefore doubly in error.

Sebastian Brant

With all its one-sidedness, the polemic was fruitful for it put an end to pseudoclassicism and made a national German drama possible. Lessing led the way. His "Miss Sara Sampson" (1755) is the first bourgeois tragedy of the German stage. It was followed by "Minna von Barnhelm" (1767), the first German national drama, on a subject of contemporaneous interest with the Seven Years War for a background, and by "Emilia Galotti," the first classic German tragedy (1772) as an adaptation to modern conditions of the story of Appius and Virginia. Lessing's last drama "Nathan der Weise" (1779) was the outcome of the theological controversy in which he had been involved, through the publication of the Wolfenbuettel fragments. These had been written by Reimarus and contained a bold attack on Christianity and the Bible. A bitter feud between Lessing and Göze, the champion of Lutheran orthodoxy, was the result in the course of which Lessing wrote a number of polemics in which he asserted that Christianity could exist without, and did exist before, the Bible. When a decree of the Duke of Brunswick forbade further discussion, he had recourse to the stage, and wrote his "Nathan." In this he uses Boccaccio's famous parable of the three rings to enforce the thesis that there is no absolutely true religion. Not faith, but virtuous action is the essence of religion, and all religious systems are equally good. For a dogmatic religion there is, of course, no room in this view, which is a frank expression of Lessing's deistic rationalism. His last prose works, notably "Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts" (1780), are philosophical in character and treat of ideas related to those expressed in "Nathan."

A contrast to Klopstock's "seraphic" sentimentalism is offered in the sensualism of Christopher Martin Wieland (1733-1813). He began as a fervid pietist and admirer of Klopstock, and under the influence of rationalism passed to the opposite extreme of sensualism tinged with frivolity before he found his level. His "Agathon" is the first German Bildungsroman, presenting a modern content in ancient garb, a method