LATIN MANUSCRIPTS IN AMERICAN LIBRARIES By B. L. ULLMAN It is perhaps somewhat humiliating to American scholars that a visitor to this country, M. Seymour de Ricci, has taken the initiative in remedying a defect that we should have corrected long ago. To be sure, many of us have no doubt had the thought, as I have myself, of making some such collection as M. de Ricci has started, but it remained for him to take the first step. Spurred on by his example, I intend to publish addenda from time to time to his list of manuscripts of the Latin classics (using the term in the widest sense to include such late writers as are discussed in the histories of Latin literature by Teuffel and Schanz), and perhaps later to list Latin manuscripts containing mediaeval and Renaissance works. I am well aware of the difficulties. Readers of this note are requested to inform me of any libraries or individuals who possess Latin manuscripts or who they believe might possess some. It goes without saying that any detailed information will be welcome. BODMER AS A LITERARY BORROWER By C. H. IBERSHOFF In a previous article I have dealt at some length with Bodmer's indebtedness to Milton as revealed by a somewhat critical examination of his Noah. Incidentally I there expressed the view that before undertaking his biblical epic, Bodmer probably provided himself with excerpts, not only from Milton, but also from the writings of others; this conclusion, which differs from that of Hirzel, Cholevius, Baechtold and others, I hope to justify in the course of the present discussion. In the famous literary feud between Gottsched's Saxon coterie and the Swiss group, Bodmer maintained a firm stand and proved himself a determined fighter. The controversy was by no means a mere skirmish, but an important, prolonged conflict of opinions and ideals, and was fought out to a decisive issue, which was nothing less than the complete discomfiture of the erstwhile literary leader Gottsched, who, because of his too prosaic nature, was prone to overemphasize reason in the matter of poetry at the expense of free, creative imagination. In this memorable war of authors in defence of their conceptions of the nature and principles of poetry, Bodmer's admiration for a work of the imaginative type and poetic distinction of Paradise Lost stood him in good stead and helped to school and fortify his judgment, for, as Schiller says, Ein groszes Muster weckt Nacheiferung Thoreau, as I recall, somewhere gives expression to a similar thought when he declares, " Anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. And, it may be added, there appears to be the working of a psychological law in the further fact, also referred to in Schiller's lines, that one naturally imitates what one sincerely and habitually admires; small wonder, then, that when Bodmer later launched forth upon his Noah, he should have imitated both the Paradise Lost of Milton and the Messias 1 Bodmer and Milton, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. XVII, (1918) pp. 589-601. of the Miltonizing Klopstock-epics for which he had a profound admiration. Bodmer's borrowings from Milton began long before he undertook or even conceived his Noah; in other words, the first influence of Milton upon him antedates by over twenty years the appearance of the first cantos of Klopstock's Messias. In the work Von dem Einflusz und Gebrauch der Einbildungskraft (1727) which he wrote in collaboration with Breitinger, we find, for example, a reference to a "Wald-Theater" which is none other than Milton's "woody theatre" as pictured in the following passage in Paradise Lost: So on he fares, and to the border comes Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. (IV 1. 131 ff.)2 Franz Servaes in his Die Poetik Bodmers und Breitingers refers to this "Wald-Theater" without, however, suspecting its origin; nor is he aware that the illustrative passage of some twenty lines which he cites in this same connection is nothing more or less than virtually Bodmer's translation of various borrowings from Paradise Lost. Other works of Bodmer, I may add, likewise show Miltonian reminiscences; this fact, taken in conjunction with evidence presented in my previous article and with a mass of further testimony to be referred to below, shows us to what a surprising extent he was under the spell of Milton, the author who was to him a veritable cult-a cult which had both a poetic and a religious basis. Though indispensable for a just estimate of Milton's influence on the Noah, a record of Milton-Bodmer parallels has hitherto been unavailable. To supply this want, it was necessary to under 2 These same lines, as I hope to show elsewhere, left their clear mark also upon a passage in the Noah. take a somewhat detailed study of Bodmer's epic with a view to determining the extent of his actual indebtedness to Paradise Lost. This I have done, and the results of my investigation have greatly exceeded my expectations. Indeed, it may prove somewhat disconcerting to those European scholars who have hitherto confidently regarded Klopstock's influence on the Bodmerian Noah as incomparably greater than Milton's,3 to learn that my examination of Bodmer's borrowings from Milton has yielded a mass of material comprising, together with my comment, some three hundred manuscript pages. For a general statement of the nature and variety of the parallels which I have gleaned, I refer the reader to my article, Bodmer and Milton. The unfailing influence of Milton, as I hope to show elsewhere, extends, without exception, through every one of Bodmer's twelve cantos; this fact alone, I am inclined to think, justifies one in pronouncing the Noah well-nigh, if not indeed altogether, unique in the annals of European literature. In this connection it may not be amiss to state that in addition to the great influence of Paradise Lost and the Messias, I have succeeded in tracing also minor influences of nineteen other literary works upon Bodmer's biblical epic.5 Though it is foreign to my present purpose to give a detailed presentation of my collected material, I feel that I ought, perhaps, to make one or two further summarizing statements for the purpose of giving at least a general idea of the true extent of Bodmer's indebtedness to Milton, his admired English master. Numerically this may be done by stating that his borrowings from Paradise Lost involve, not dozens or scores, but literally hundreds of Milton's lines, among them many of the most characteristic and significant. To state the case in another, perhaps more ef 3 Cf. supra p. 600, where I refer, e. g., to Muncker's Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. The author of the article on Bodmer in the Encyclopædia Britannica refers to the Noah as "a weak imitation of Klopstock's Messias." This, to say the least, is an inadequate and misleading characterization of the epic. 4 Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1918, pp. 589-601. 5 Cf. in this connection C. H. Ibershoff: Dryden's Tempest as a Source of Bodmer's Noah in Modern Philology, August 1917, pp. 54-61. The influence of Dryden's Tempest was by no means inconsiderable, nor was that of a number of other works. With regard to such sources, the expression "minor influences,'' as used above, is therefore to be taken in a relative, not in an absolute, sense. fective, way: if all the Miltonian passages which Bodmer utilized for his Noah were to be deleted from Paradise Lost, that poem would not only be most sadly disfigured, but would be so deplorably reduced as to leave but a mere torso of the epic which we know as Milton's masterpiece. 66 In my previous article, I expressed my dissent from Franz Muncker's unqualified statement that Bodmer rated Klopstock "hoch über alle andern Dichter," and in defence of my position I cited what I felt, and still feel, to be an altogether convincing passage from Bodmer's own writings, not to mention the extensive gleaning of parallels to which I have referred above. At another time I hope to deal with further pronouncements of Muncker regarding Bodmer and his Noah, such for example, as the following: "sein Werk (war) völlig nach dem Muster des Messias gebildet;" "der Einflusz, den Milton auf den Verfasser des Noah ausübte, blieb recht äusserlich;" "Klopstock verdrängte allmählich sogar Milton aus Bodmers Geiste;" ausser der Erzählung des Sündenfalls (war) nur wenig im einzelnen nach Miltons Muster gebildet;" and finally, as compared with Milton's influence upon the Noah, he discerns an "übermächtigen Einflusz Klopstocks." It is interesting to compare these dicta with the following strikingly similar conclusions of Baechtold, "Die Form (i.e. of the Noah) war zunächst der Messiade nachgebildet. Milton diente, auch nur äusserlich, in Einzelheiten, wie in der Erzählung des Sündenfalls und in der Gestaltung der Engel als Vorbild."" After what has already been set forth in this and my previous discussion, I shall at this time content myself with merely adding that in a letter to Zellweger, dated March 13, 1750, we have it on the authority of Bodmer's own words-a personal confession, if you please that it was his deliberate purpose to imitate in his epic "the spirit of Milton (and Homer)"; moreover, he expressly requests elsewhere that his Noah be not compared with the Messias, giving as his reason that his own epic is human whereas Klopstock's is divine. On still other points in the matter I take issue with Muncker and Baechtold, as I do also 6 Cf. the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1918, p. 600. 7 Cf. his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in der Schweiz, p. 603. |