386 Herder [1767-1803

the Renaissance to their utmost limits, Herder entirely renounced the classic dogma; in his writings the ideas, which had germinated in Bodmer and had been put into practice by Klopstock, first took definite form as the literary creed of the future. To say " definite form " is perhaps incorrect, for Herder was one of the most inconsequent and nebulous thinkers of the eighteenth century ; he was a pioneer without being himself aware of it. And yet none of his contemporaries had so many ideas of vital importance for the coming time as he. All that is best in the next hundred years of German intellectual history — and much that has made for progress in that of Europe as a whole — may be traced back to Herder's stimulating initiative. He, for instance, first clearly understood the principles of the organic evolution of national life; and, with the help of this conception, he revolutionised the methods of historical science, and defined the principles of modern aesthetics and literary criticism. In a higher degree than Lessing, Herder made clear the real nature of Shakespeare's genius and greatness ; and in Strassburg he inspired the youthful Goethe with his own enthusiasm for the English poet, until Goethe felt — to use his own words — "like a blind man upon whom the power of sight had suddenly been conferred." Herder defined the conception of Volk as it had never been defined before, rediscovered and named the Volkslied, and formulated the idea of German nationalism, which he found reflected in the fabric of the Strassburg Minster. He was the pioneer of the Sturm und Drang, and a guide and teacher to whom even the Romanticists at the beginning of the nineteenth century looked up with respect.

Sturm und Drang is the name that a later generation gave to that wonderful ebullition of the German spirit which, foreshadowed by daring thinkers like Hamann and Gerstenberg — like Herder himself in his Fragmente (1767) —burst forth in the year 1773 with Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen. It seemed as if the German intellect which for thirty years had been struggling ineffectually to free itself from the rules of Latin classicism, had here at last attained its object. The literary ideals of this period of fermenting genius allowed the poet, and especially the dramatic poet, an opportunity for less shackled expression than he had known in Germany since the century of the Reformation. Goethe was the acknowledged leader of the group, the exemplar of unfettered genius; but hardly less original, and certainly more immersed in the current, were his followers and contemporaries, the dramatists Lenz, Klinger, Heinrich Leopold Wagner, and Leisewitz. What this age meant for the history of the drama may be learned from a comparison of Gotz von Berlichingen with Schiller's Rauber, which, appearing in 1781, influenced no less powerfully the later development of the movement. Die Rauber is inferior to Goethe's motley Ritterdrama in the broad outlook on human life; Schiller shows himself infinitely less conversant with the world, his judgment is more juvenile and less ripe;

1773-87] Sturm imd Drang 387

but progress is to be discerned in the better-welded scenes and in the more dramatic grasp of character. The evolution of a national type of tragedy — and it may be added, of a national theatre — from the unreasoning Shakespeare-worship of the first members of the group, is one of the chief services Germany owes to her Sturm und Drang.

But this period also produced notable work in other fields. The Sesenheimer Lieder proved not only Goethe, but also Lenz, to be a lyric poet of a high order ; and at this time there was in Gottingen a little band of singers who adopted the spirit of Klopstock to the needs of the new age; they, no less than Herder and Goethe in Strassburg, had discovered the secret of lyric power in the simple songs of the people. Goethe and his friends did not neglect or despise the Voile; they were too loyal disciples of Herder for that; but they were also too intent on giving voice to Titanic ideas, too enamoured of the Raritdtenkasten view of life, to efface themselves in the essentially contemplative world of the present. In this respect the Gottingen Dichterbund (or Sain, a designation suggested by a poem of Klopstock's) supplemented them ; many of the members of that circle, and notably its leader, Johann Heinrich Voss (1751-1826), had themselves sprung from the peasant class; they had, with few exceptions, lived the narrow life of the northGerman countryman of the eighteenth century, and their poetry never lost touch with the soil. Thus their folksongs are less influenced by bookish traditions than Herder's, less even than Goethe's lyrics, in which at this time something of the Anacreontic artificiality of the earlier decade was still noticeable. It is to the Gottingen poets, and, above all, to that strange wayward genius, Gottfried August Burger (1747-94), rather than to Goethe, that we owe the finest ballads of the epoch. Burger's Lenore (1773), the best known and, on the whole, the finest example of this popular poetry, which arose in imitation of the English Percy ballads, drew, together with Goethe's Werther, the attention of Europe to the new movement.

In fiction the Sturm und Drang produced one great book, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) ; but this stands somewhat apart from the general literary movement in Germany. Compared with the lengthy family-novels, or with Wieland's Agathon, which preceded it, it obviously belongs to a different type of fiction, a type as far removed from what was then called a novel as the modern German Novelle is from the Roman. Werther profoundly influenced the development of the German national novel, but it is not, strictly speaking, itself a link in that development. In point of fact, the Sturm und Drang failed conspicuously in its search for a type of novel that was suited to its needs. It was no solution to the difficulty to deluge the didactic family romance with sentimentality, as did Johann Martin Miller in his Siegwart (1776); still less was anything attained by imbuing the older fiction with philosophy, as did Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi — the

388 Barrenness of the movement [1773-87

Jacobi who had made of Goethe a life-long Spinozist — or Klinger in his later period; and the most vital novel of these years, Karl Philipp Moritz' Anton Reiser (1785), in which, adopting the methods of the Gottingen school, the author turned his own life into a novel of sentimental education, hardly crossed the boundary that separates autobiography from romance. The novelist who in this age wrote the most distinctive form of fiction was the Thuringian, Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse (1749-1803) ; he alone set about his task in what now seems the right way; that is to say, he took as his model not the formless imitations of the English family-novel, but the romances of Wieland, and infused into them the enthusiasm and sentimentalism of the new period. Heinse's best novel, Ardinghello oder Die gliickseligen Inseln (1787), forms the connecting link between Wieland on the one hand and Jean Paul on the other; it is the forerunner of Wilhelm Meister and of the " artist novels " of the Romanticists.

In passing thus summarily in review the literature of this revolutionary movement, we cannot but feel disappointed that so brilliant and promising a decade should have left behmd it so little of permanent value. For even Gotz von Berlichingen and Werther, Die Rauber and Kabale und Liebe—monuments of genius though they be — remain the expression of a very definite epoch ; they are not permanent and satisfying achievements such as appeal to the national mind in all its phases and in all its periods. They are read to-day less as masterpieces of German national literature than as the youthful creations of two great poets and as symptomatic phenomena of their time. The movement of Sturm und Drang, which Goethe had hailed in its first stage as an epoch of "Deutschland emergierend," failed to lay the foundation for a new and vigorous national literature ; its strong dramatic beginnings dwindled away in shallow sentimental plays like island's, or in blustering medieval dramas; its fiction degenerated rapidly into worthless sensational stories of sentiment and chivalry, of ruins and moonlight. The Geniezeit had but a small share in that movement towards classic achievement which is associated with the work of Goethe and Schiller in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The question thus forces itself upon us: Why did this movement, which for a time seemed the development towards which Germany's best national life was striving, prove so barren, and why was it so short-lived?

The question is one which the historian of German literature has not often faced, and yet it is too important for the understanding of the classical period and the subsequent Romantic movement to be ignored. A possible explanation is that the Sturm und Drang was too exclusively destructive and negative in its tendencies; its plan of attack, the instruments of demolition which it brought to bear on the Avfkldrung, were in the highest degree effective; and the earlier classicism of the eighteenth century found it difficult to resist the assault. Frederick

1775-88] Goethe's early years in Weimar 389

the Great's tract De la litterature allemande (1780) was easily laughed to scorn, and Lessing himself was summarily refuted when he attempted to protest. But not one of these young poets, not even Goethe and Schiller in their early years, stopped to consider how this outburst of national feeling in poetry might be turned to practical, constructive account. The Sturm und Drang in its youthful, irresponsible spontaneity, was content to be merely iconoclastic ; it knew not and cared little whither it was driving. And it is after all very doubtful whether the movement, even if it had been planned and carried out with deliberation, could have achieved more lasting results as the expression of the German national spirit in poetry. The German revolutionists were as little able as was Rousseau in France to stem the triumphant progress of the Aufkldrung towards the ideal of perfected humanism which finds its noblest expression in the classical poetry of Goethe and Schiller. The time was not yet ripe for a reversion to unrestrained individualism of thought and feeling.

The last outstanding work which still bears on it something of the stamp of the Sturm und Drang epoch is Schiller's drama Don Carlos (1787) ; in the same way, it might be said that the epoch of German classicism was opened by Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, which appeared in the same year, althought it had been conceived and written in prose at least ten years earlier. The transition in Goethe's life from Sturm und Drang to classicism is a chapter which still awaits exhaustive and conclusive treatment at the hands of the poet's biographers. Goethe's decisive break with the literary ideals of his youth was, in the first instance, occasioned by the change in his life: at the close of 1775 the Duke of Saxe-Weimar invited him to his Court, where before very long the poet became not only the intimate friend, but also the adviser and minister of his patron. The new conditions brought with them more varied responsibilities; they meant a less self-centred life than Goethe had led in Frankfort; he learned to look upon his own poetic production in a more objective and critical spirit. Works like Die Geschivister, Iphigenie, Tasso, are still " confessions," but in a less personal sense than Gotz von Berlichingen, Clavigo, Werther, and Stella had been; the poet has succeeded in dissociating to a greater extent than before his personality from his poetry.

Goethe's journey to Italy in the years 1786-8 was the central event of his life; it formed the culmination of his first classical period, which must be clearly discriminated from the second period of classicism—that of Hermann und Dorothea and Die natiirliche Tochter. In Italy, far removed from the atmosphere in which he had grown up, Goethe acquired for the first time that wonderful power of self-judgment which henceforward distinguishes him among the great poets of the world. It was not merely that he had left behind him the Sturm und Drang of his youth; but so objective did his standpoint become towards his early

390 Goethe in Italy. — Schiller [1788-96

masterpieces that he was able to revise them without bias, to complete Egmont (1788) and to add scenes to Faust (first published as a fragment in 1790). To Goethe Italy was a revelation of sunshine and colour; the months he spent there were given up to calm reflexion and unperturbed optimism. In looking back, the contrast that presented itself to him was not one of differing literary or artistic principle, but of the serene outlook upon life as opposed to the unsatisfied cravings and melancholy brooding of the German poetry of the time. The serene greatness of the antique as interpreted by Winckelmann and its reflexion in the Italian art of the Renaissance, became in Goethe's mind not merely the art-canon of a definite age, but an intellectual dogma of universal application. He arrived at no conscious decision—as in his later classical period—in favour of a classical as opposed to a Romantic or German art; he was only firmly convinced that a truly great art should express, above all things, tranquillity of soul. In Torquato Tasso (1790) we find the quintessence of Goethe's reflexions on his own life and mission as a poet; in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6), which had been begun in the early years at Weimar, his ripe conclusions on the great problems of life and art. This novel — and it is not often regarded under this aspect — is the immediate product, the fullest summary, of Goethe's Italian expreiences; neither in form nor in substance is it a " classic" work, but it has in common with classic literature that calm optimism which henceforth Goethe prized above all else.

Schiller's poetic development in these years epitomised, no less clearly than Goethe's, the movement of the time. Born in 1759, he was ten years younger than Goethe, and his early dramas stood in a relation to the second half of the Geniezeit comparable to that in which Goethe's Gotz von Berliohingen and Werther had stood to the first. He, too, soon felt the need of more satisfying ideals than those which had inspired Die Rauber and Kabale und Liebe ; and, like Goethe, he in his turn was irresistibly attracted by the serenity of classicism. But it is significant for the mental character of the two poets that, whereas Goethe, in his first excursion into the classic field, Iphigenie auf Tauris, adapted to the needs of German poetry classic ideas drawn more or less directly from Greek poetry itself, Schiller solved the problem in a way more in keeping with the traditions of his century; in Don Carlos he turned his back on the restless drama of his youth and became a disciple of the French theatre. Goethe's reversion to classic form had been the natural result of his choosing a classic subject; Schiller allowed himself, on the other hand, to be influenced by the neoclassicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The national characteristics of Greek literature, which appealed so strongly to Goethe and stimulated him to imitation, were acceptable to Schiller only in a generalised Latin form; and the fervour of Schiller's Hellenism, as it