Forster (1754–1794), who had accompanied Cook round the world, and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), gave Germany models of clear and lucid descriptive writing. In practical politics and economics, when once the unbalanced vagaries of undiluted Rousseauism had fallen into discredit, Germany produced much wise and temperate thinking which prevented the spread of the French Revolution to Germany, and provided a practical basis on which the social and political fabric could be built up anew, after the Revolution had made the old régime impossible in Europe. Men like Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and the philosopher J. G. Fichte (1762–1814) were, in two widely different spheres, representative of this type of intellectual eminence.
Meanwhile, in 1794, that friendship between Goethe and Schiller had begun, which lasted, unbroken, until the younger poet’s death in 1805. These years mark the summit of Goethe and Schiller’s classicism, and the great epoch of Weimar’s history as a literary focus. Schiller’s treatises had provided a theoretical basis; his new journal, Die Horen, might be called the literary organ of the movement—although in this respect the subsequent Musenalmanach, in which the two poets published their magnificent ballad poetry, had more value. Goethe, as director of the ducal theatre, could to a great extent control dramatic production in Germany. Under his encouragement, Schiller turned from philosophy to poetry and wrote the splendid series of classic dramas beginning with the trilogy of Wallenstein and closing with Wilhelm Tell and the fragment of Demetrius; while to Goethe we owe, above all, the epic of Hermann und Dorothea. Less important were the latter’s severely classical plays Die natürliche Tochter and Pandora; but it must not be forgotten that it was chiefly owing to Schiller’s stimulus that in those years Goethe brought the first part of Faust (1808) to a conclusion.
Although acknowledged leaders of German letters, Goethe and Schiller had considerable opposition to contend with. The Sturm und Drang had by no means exhausted itself, and the representatives of the once dominant rationalistic movement were particularly arrogant and overbearing. The literature associated with both Sturm und Drang and rationalism was at this period palpably decadent; no comparison could be made between the magnificent achievements of Goethe and Schiller, or even of Herder and Wieland with the “family” dramas of Iffland, still less with the extraordinarily popular plays of A. von Kotzebue (1761–1819), or with those bustling medieval Ritterdramen, which were especially cultivated in south Germany. There is a wide gap between Moritz’s Anton Reiser or the philosophic novels which Klinger wrote in his later years, and Goethe’s Meister; nor can the once so fervently admired novels of Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) take a very high place. Neither the fantastic humour nor the penetrating thoughts with which Richter’s books are strewn make up for their lack of artistic form and interest; they are essentially products of Sturm und Drang. Lastly, in the province of lyric and epic poetry, it is impossible to regard poets like the gentle F. von Matthisson (1761–1831), or the less inspired G. L. Kosegarten (1758–1818) and C. A. Tiedge (1752–1841), as worthily seconding the masterpieces of Goethe and Schiller. Thus when we speak of the greatness of Germany’s classical period, we think mainly of the work of her two chief poets; the distance that separated them from their immediate contemporaries was enormous. Moreover, at the very close of the 18th century a new literary movement arose in admitted opposition to the classicism of Weimar, and to this movement, which first took definite form in the Romantic school, the sympathies of the younger generation turned. Just as in the previous generation the Sturm und Drang had been obliged to make way for a return to classic and impersonal principles of literary composition, so now the classicism of Goethe and Schiller, which had produced masterpieces like Wallenstein and Hermann und Dorothea, had to yield to a revival of individualism and subjectivity, which, in the form of Romanticism, profoundly influenced the literature of the whole 19th century.
(c) The Romantic Movement.—The first Romantic school, however, was founded, not as a protest against the classicism of Weimar, with which its leaders were in essential sympathy, but against the shallow, utilitarian rationalism of Berlin. Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), a leading member of the school, was in reality a belated Stürmer und Dränger, who in his early years had chafed under the unimaginative tastes of the Prussian capital, and sought for a positive faith to put in their place. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), one of the most gifted poets of this age, demonstrates no less clearly than Tieck the essential affinity between Sturm und Drang and Romanticism; he, too, forms a bridge from the one individualistic movement to the other. The theoretic basis of Romanticism was, however, established by the two brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel (1767–1845 and 1772–1829), who, accepting, in great measure, Schiller’s aesthetic conclusions, adapted them to the needs of their own more subjective attitude towards literature. While Schiller, like Lessing before him, insisted on the critic’s right to sit in judgment according to a definite code of principles, these Romantic critics maintained that the first duty of criticism was to understand and appreciate; the right of genius to follow its natural bent was sacred. The Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders by Tieck’s school-friend W. H. Wackenroder (1773–1798) contained the Romantic art-theory, while the hymns and fragmentary novels of Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Novalis, 1772–1801), and the dramas and fairy tales of Tieck, were the characteristic products of Romantic literature. The universal sympathies of the movement were exemplified by the many admirable translations—greatest of all, Schlegel’s Shakespeare (1797–1810)—which were produced under its auspices. Romanticism was essentially conciliatory in its tendencies, that is to say, it aimed at a reconciliation of poetry with other provinces of social and intellectual life; the hard and fast boundaries which the older critics had set up as to what poetry might and might not do, were put aside, and the domain of literature was regarded as co-extensive with life itself; painting and music, philosophy and ethics, were all accepted as constituent elements of or aids to Romantic poetry. Fichte, and to a much greater extent, F. W. J. von Schelling (1775–1854) were the exponents of the Romantic doctrine in philosophy, while the theologian F. E. D. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) demonstrated how vital the revival of individualism was for religious thought.
The Romantic school, whose chief members were the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Wackenroder and Novalis, was virtually founded in 1798, when the Schlegels began to publish their journal the Athenaeum; but the actual existence of the school was of very short duration. Wackenroder and Novalis died young, and by the year 1804 the other members were widely separated. Two years later, however, another phase of Romanticism became associated with the town of Heidelberg. The leaders of this second or younger Romantic school were K. Brentano (1778–1842), L. A. von Arnim (1781–1831) and J. J. von Görres (1776–1848), their organ, corresponding to the Athenaeum, was the Zeitung für Einsiedler, or Tröst-Einsamkeit, and their most characteristic production the collection of Volkslieder, published under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–1808). Compared with the earlier school the Heidelberg writers were more practical and realistic, more faithful to nature and the commonplace life of everyday. They, too, were interested in the German past and in the middle ages, but they put aside the idealizing glasses of their predecessors and kept to historic truth; they wrote historical novels, not stories of an imaginary medieval world as Novalis had done, and when they collected Volkslieder and Volksbücher, they refrained from decking out the simple tradition with musical effects, or from heightening the poetic situation by “Romantic irony.” Their immediate influence on German intellectual life was consequently greater; they stimulated and deepened the interest of the German people in their own past; and we owe to them the foundations of the study of German philology and medieval literature, both the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785–1863 and 1786–1859) having been in touch with this circle in their early days. Again, the Heidelberg poets strengthened the national and patriotic spirit
