1830-7] Arrest of Prussian Archbishops 381

Resort was then had to Rome, and the conduct of the affair was left to Bunsen. The Pope in 1830 made some concessions, but the Brief in which they were embodied was so ambiguously worded that the Prussian Government declined to accept it as a solution of the controversy. At this juncture Pius VIII died, and with the election of Gregory XVI the Jesuits, who after their expulsion from Rome in 1820 had been admitted first to Austria and then to other parts of Germany, regained their influence in the Papal Curia. In 1832 Gregory, in a Brief to the Bavarian Bishops, prohibited what had hitherto been the Prussian practice ; and Prussia, seeing no prospect of success at Rome, revived the negotiations with the Bishops under her authority. At length in 1834 a compromise was accepted at Berlin by von Spiegel, Archbishop of Cologne; but in the following year he died, and with extraordinary folly the Crown Prince secured the appointment of Freiherr von DrosteVischering as his successor.

The new Archbishop had already signalised himself by waging war on Hermes' teaching, forbidding his theologians to attend the University of Bonn, and opposing the measures of the Prussian Government. He soon became the protagonist of the Ultramontane party; he refused consecration to all ecclesiastics who would not promise him unlimited obedience without appeal except to Rome, declared the laws of the State to be incompatible with the rights and privileges of the Church, and prohibited his clergy from countenancing mixed marriages without the promise that the children should be educated in the Roman Catholic faith. All efforts at accommodation failed ; relations between Berlin and Rome grew strained; while in the Rhine Province the agitation reached a dangerous pitch. Misled by Bunsen's declaration that vigorous measures would alone make any impression on the Curia, the Prussian Government suddenly arrested the Archbishop of Cologne on November 10, 1837, and conveyed him out of his diocese, never to return. Bunsen was thereupon refused audience at Rome and compelled to leave his post. In three successive allocutions the Pope denounced the conduct of the Berlin Government. The Archbishop of Posen, Uunin, followed Vischering's example, and was in turn imprisoned ; and, with the exception of the Bishop of Breslau, the Roman Catholic Bishops in the eastern provinces took the Roman side. The situation was more dangerous in the west, because the Rhinelands had never completely reconciled themselves to Prussian rule. The clericals received support from Paris and from Munich; and Catholic Belgium dreamed of making a material conquest of the discontented province. The most serious symptom of all was perhaps the sympathy which Prussia's anti-popular tendencies secured to the opponents of the government from thousands who had nothing else in common with the Ultramontane party.

Compared with this contest the difficulties which Prussia encountered in the Protestant Churches were slight. The union of the Reformed and

382 Death of Frederick William III [1835-40

Lutheran Churches was an object dear to Frederick William's heart; and in this project he was assisted by the Berlin theologian Schleiermacher, the Lutheran historian Marheineke, and by Bishops Sack and Eylert. The movement spread in Baden and in Hesse; and Bunsen busied himself with drawing up a sort of German Book of Common Prayer. But rigid Lutherans refused to compromise the doctrine of consubstantiation; and the Reformed Churches objected to the Royal supremacy. The opposition was strengthened by a revolt of orthodox Lutheranism against the mystic pantheism of Schelling and the philosophic efforts of Schleiermacher to harmonise reason and religion ; and, though the King professed to abhor any compulsion in the matter, the opponents of the union in Prussia were subjected to harsh treatment. The orthodox themselves invoked the secular arm against the rationalistic tendencies of Baur, of Strauss, whose Life of Jesus was published in 1835, and of the famous Tubingen school, and even against the milder heresies of the Halle professors, Gesenius and Wegscheider. But Altenstein confined himself to the promise that for the future only such men should be appointed to teach theology as acknowledged allegiance to the doctrines of the Church interpreted in the sense of the Augsburg Confession.

This was not a measure adequate to the growing divergences of religious faith in Germany. But the political importance of the questions was soon lost in the reviving insistence of the constitutional struggle. The outward signs were not yet numerous. Metternich and the Austrian system still seemed to be holding their own against the local discontents in Hungary and Transylvania; and in 1840 few would have prophesied a revolution in Vienna and the Chancellor's flight for safety to a constitutional country. But there was little faith in the stability of the thrones of Louis-Philippe and the Italian despots; and even in Germany itself the continuance of repression depended as much on Prussia as on Austria. Prussians felt for Frederick William something of the same respect that Englishmen felt for George III; and the personal desires of the former were as effective in delaying constitutional development as those of the latter in retarding Catholic Emancipation. When on June 7,1840, the long reign of the monarch, who had survived Auerstadt and Jena, came to a close, it was felt that the beginning of a new era was at hand. Germany had repaired the material ravages of a generation of war and prepared the soil for a new intellectual harvest. The political system, which had suited that age, had waxed old like a garment, and the last efforts to patch up its rents were ending in failure.

CHAPTER XII

LITERATURE IN GERMANY

There is no political or social explanation of the phenomenallyrapid development of German literature in the eighteenth century. In 1700 the German people, only slowly recovering from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, were still in general at a very low ebb of intellectual and political life ; and throughout the whole century they remained, as a corporate social organism, far behind France and England. Even the reigns of Frederick the Great in Prussia and of Joseph II in Austria, were, so far as the history of literature is concerned, stimulating episodes rather than epochs of pre-eminent achievement. In other words, the factors which were at work in raising German literature from insignificance to the leading position it occupied at the close of the century, were in great measure independent of political conditions.

The most obvious explanation of the phenomenon lies in the relative chronological position of German classical literature ; we have here the exceptional case of a new literature growing up under the shadow of two greater literatures, and in a cosmopolitan age which, in matters of taste, knew no national boundaries. Germany rose to greatness with extraordinary rapidity on borrowed ideas ; she sought out, first in French literature, then in English, what she was able to utilise for her own development, and built up her classical literature on the foundation thus acquired. In accordance with the needs of this process, the type of mind exemplified by Germany's intellectual leaders in the eighteenth century was of a peculiarly assimilative character; the eminence of men like Lessing and Herder, even of Goethe and Schiller, was not of that uncompromising original kind, which regards all that comes in its way either with sovereign indifference or as legitimate prey. These men became great partly by the conscientious study of models which they admired, and by the systematic absorption of ideas which had been handed down from their predecessors. It is this growth by imitation and assimilation which, in the first instance, explains how Germany arrived at so rich a poetic efflorescence amidst, on the whole, povertystricken intellectual conditions, how her high poetic achievement is to be reconciled with the uninspiring and even sordid provincialism of the nation.

384 Gottsched and the Swiss critics [1740

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, German literature had virtually reached the standpoint of Boileau ; the poets of the day, such as they were, were " court poets " according to the French ideas. Before long, however, the influence of English thought and literature found its way in—either directly by way of Hamburg, or indirectly through the agency of the Huguenot refugees, who were at this time opening up cosmopolitan paths across Holland and France. The first sign of returning vigour in German literature was the famous contention in 1740 between Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-66), who had established himself as literary dictator in the metropolis of German taste, Leipzig, and the two Swiss reformers Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701-76). The controversy was more or less repetition of the French querelle des anciens et des modernes; Gottsched representing the strictly classic principles of the French seventeenth century, Bodmer and Breitinger a more specialised and modern form of the doctrine championed by Perrault and his friends. But in one important particular the analogy breaks down : the German quarrel arose before there was any German literature to dispute about; it was a controversy about first principles, about the place of imagination in poetry, and the free exercise of genius. This precedence of theory to practice, which is characteristic of every step forward in the German literature of the eighteenth century, is often quoted as a peculiar trait of the German mind ; but it is incident to the assimilative growth of a literature. The quarrel of Leipzig and Zurich could not, however, have had more fruitful results, had it concerned German poets of the day, instead of a foreigner, Milton, whom Bodmer had a few years earlier introduced to the Germans in a clumsy prose translation. For from this quarrel dates the birth of modern German literature; the first practical issue of it is to be seen in the work of Lessing and Klopstock. Gottsched himself had not, it is true, the breadth of mind to benefit by his discomfiture, but the younger members of his party were willing, under the cogency of the Swiss arguments, to modify their opinions. Lessing owed to them his introduction to the literary life, and Klopstock was himself a contributor to their organ, the so-called Bremer Beitrdge.

The position of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) in the movement of his century may be summed up by saying that he carried the Aufklarung in literature and criticism to its fullest development. In this respect his place is with the German " ancients " rather than with the " moderns," with Gottsched rather than with the Swiss; but his standpoint, thanks in great measure to the decisive victory of Bodmer and Breitinger, is so far in advance of Gottsched's that he appears as the bitterest antagonist of the last-named. With his marvellously balanced mind, Lessing was admirably fitted to reduce the intellectual chaos and unassimilated foreign ideas of his time to order; he gave the movement of German rationalism a broader basis than either Wolff or Gottsched

1748-1813] Lessing, Klopstock, and Wieland 385

had dreamt of; he was a critical rationalist who hud room in his system for the mystic pantheism of Spinoza and for a religious faith, and he was a classical critic who could judge without undue bias unclassical poets like the Klopstock of the Messias; he introduced to the German stage the burgerliche Tragodie, and, first of his nation, showed genuine understanding for the greatness of Shakespeare. But in all this Lessing did not for a moment sacrifice the fundamental tenets of rationalism and classicism. He took his standpoint on the dogmas of eighteenth century humanism, which regarded the history of the human race as a gradual progress towards perfection, an Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes ; if he proclaimed Shakespeare a greater poet than Corneille or Racine, it was because he grasped the continuity between Shakespeare and Sophocles, and held Shakespeare to be a more faithful observer of the spirit of Aristotle than were the French poets; and the opinion, which he shared with Winckelmann, that Greek sculpture was the ne plus ultra of art, was something wholly different from the narrow classic prejudices of the French seventeenth century.

As Lessing is thus virtually Gottsched's successor, so Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) is Bodmer's. The Messsias (Cantos I-HI, 1748) is the religious epic on which Bodmer set his hopes; it was Klopstock who justified in a German way those pleas for the rights of the imagination which the Swiss critics had borrowed from Addison and Muratori. Even more important, however, is Klopstock's share in the reawakening of the German lyric ; the promise of the unhappy Giinther, who died in 1723, and the beginnings of nature poetry to be found in the amorphous outpourings of Brockes, lead up unmistakably to Klopstock's Odes, which became the fountainhead of all that is best in the German lyric poetry of the century. Less easy is it to define the position of the third of the great " liberators " of modern German letters, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813). He began as an imitator of Klopstock and a friend of Bodmer's, but all his riper work and influence belong to " classicism." He had, it must be admitted, little enough understanding for the true classic spirit, and,he was wholly deficient in the high seriousness of Lessing or Winckelmann ; but his light and often frivolous tone served as a wholesome antidote to the sentimental excesses of Klopstock and the later Sturm und Drang. Except in his early novels—Agathon (1766-7) is a landmark in the evolution of German fiction from the mediocre imitations of Richardson in the fifties and sixties to the typical classical novel, Wilhelm Meister — Wieland contributed little to the movement of his time and he left behind him few disciples.

A more important force than either Klopstock or Wieland in the development of German poetry was Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803). While Lessing brought the rationalistic and classic movement to its fullest perfection, and stretched the intellectual and poetic principles of

C. M. H. x. 25