More than one,

As to money, no one thought of it. as in that assembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood 'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not passed through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in such an environment by M. Alfred Vigny's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere." *

*"Chatterton," a drama by Jones and Herman, was played at the Princess' Theater, London, May 22, 1884.

CHAPTER XI.

The German Tributary.

Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in Great Britain had been selfdeveloped and independent of foreign influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great (1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he had not read a German book.*

But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of the publication of Thomson's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, under the leadership of the Züricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought under Milton's banner,

*Scherer's "History of German Literature," Conybeare's Translation, Vol. II. p. 26.

434

and in the preface to his prose translation of "Pard dise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles. In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous," 1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. Deutscheit, Volkspoesie, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the Kaiserzeit and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in 1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing, in his preface to Gleim's War-songs,' called attention to the Middle High-German poets, of whom he con tinued to be throughout his life an ardent admirer. Justus Möser took great interest in the Minnesingers. About the time when 'Götz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German poetry was at its strongest, and Bürger, Voss, Miller, and Höltz wrote Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773 Gleim published Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Bürger, who vied hard with the rest, but without

much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character. Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, Mein Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the song of the old Swabian knight-'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Müller, began to show the Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Müller was only following in Herder's steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages the realization of his æsthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and strong patriotic feeling."*

When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister. Mention has already been made of Bürger's and Herder's renderings from Percy's "Reliques," an edition of which + See ante, pp. 300-301.

*Scherer, Vol. II. pp. 123-24.

was published at Göttingen in 1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by MacPherson's "Ossian." * This last found-besides the Viennese Denis-another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his mediævalism so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's "Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's Spectator papers. Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in England; and Gersternberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the first-fruits of the German translation of the "Histoire de Dannemarc," preceded by two years the publication-though not the composition-of Gray's poems from the Norse.

But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated "Julius Cæsar." This was followed, a few years later, by a version of "Romeo and Juliet." In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two of Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long superseded by the TieckSchlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, through the detached passages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere." He afterward got

*See ante, pp. 337-38.

"The Beauties of Shakspere. Regularly selected from each Play. With a general index. Digesting them under proper heads." By the Rev. Wm. Dodd, 1752.

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