“Pleureur.” Some of Grimm’s letters, besides the official correspondence,
are included in the edition of M. Tourneux; others are
contained in the Erinnerungen einer Urgrossmutter of K. von Bechtolsheim,
edited (Berlin, 1902) by Count C. Oberndorff. See also Mme
d’Épinay’s Mémoires; Rousseau’s Confessions; the notices contained
in the editions quoted; E. Scherer, Melchior Grimm (1887);
Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. vii. For further works bearing
on the subject, see K. A. Georges, Friedrich Melchior Grimm (Hanover
and Leipzig, 1904).
GRIMM, JACOB LUDWIG CARL (1785–1863), German
philologist and mythologist, was born on the 4th of January
1785 at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. His father, who was a lawyer,
died while he was a child, and the mother was left with very
small means; but her sister, who was lady of the chamber to
the landgravine of Hesse, helped to support and educate her
numerous family. Jacob, with his younger brother Wilhelm
(born on the 24th of February 1786), was sent in 1798 to the
public school at Cassel. In 1802 he proceeded to the university
of Marburg, where he studied law, a profession for which he had
been destined by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg
a year later, having just recovered from a long and severe illness,
and likewise began the study of law. Up to this time Jacob
Grimm had been actuated only by a general thirst for knowledge
and his energies had not found any aim beyond the practical one
of making himself a position in life. The first definite impulse
came from the lectures of Savigny, the celebrated investigator
of Roman law, who, as Grimm himself says (in the preface to
the Deutsche Grammatik), first taught him to realize what it
meant to study any science. Savigny’s lectures also awakened
in him that love for historical and antiquarian investigation
which forms the basis of all his work. Then followed personal
acquaintance, and it was in Savigny’s well-provided library that
Grimm first turned over the leaves of Bodmer’s edition of the
Old German minnesingers and other early texts, and felt an eager
desire to penetrate further into the obscurities and half-revealed
mysteries of their language. In the beginning of 1805 he received
an invitation from Savigny, who had removed to Paris,
to help him in his literary work. Grimm passed a very happy
time in Paris, strengthening his taste for the literatures of the
middle ages by his studies in the Paris libraries. Towards the
close of the year he returned to Cassel, where his mother and
Wilhelm had settled, the latter having finished his studies.
The next year he obtained a situation in the war office with
the very small salary of 100 thalers. One of his grievances was
that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform
and pigtail. But he had full leisure for the prosecution of his
studies. In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was
appointed superintendent of the private library of Jerome
Buonaparte, king of Westphalia, into which Hesse-Cassel had
been incorporated by Napoleon. Jerome appointed him an
auditor to the state council, while he retained his other post.
His salary was increased in a short interval from 2000 to 4000
francs, and his official duties were hardly more than nominal.
After the expulsion of Jerome and the reinstalment of an elector,
Grimm was appointed in 1813 secretary of legation, to accompany
the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army.
In 1814 he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of the books
carried off by the French, and in 1814–1815 he attended the
congress of Vienna as secretary of legation. On his return he
was again sent to Paris on the same errand as before. Meanwhile
Wilhelm had received an appointment in the Cassel library, and
in 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Völkel. On the
death of Völkel in 1828 the brothers expected to be advanced
to the first and second librarianships respectively, and were
much dissatisfied when the first place was given to Rommel,
keeper of the archives. So they removed next year to Göttingen,
where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian,
Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on
legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and
diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on
the Germania of Tacitus. At this period he is described as small
and lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessian
dialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with the
manuscript which most German professors rely on, and he spoke
extempore, referring only occasionally to a few names and dates
written on a slip of paper. He himself regretted that he had begun
the work of teaching so late in life; and as a lecturer he was not
successful: he had no idea of digesting his facts and suiting
them to the comprehension of his hearers; and even the brilliant,
terse and eloquent passages which abound in his writings lost much
of their effect when jerked out in the midst of a long array of dry
facts. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed a
protest against the king of Hanover’s abrogation of the constitution
established some years before, he was dismissed from his
professorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover.
He returned to Cassel together with his brother, who had also
signed the protest, and remained there till, in 1840, they accepted
an invitation from the king of Prussia to remove to Berlin,
where they both received professorships, and were elected
members of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under any
obligation to lecture, Jacob seldom did so, but together with his
brother worked at the great dictionary. During their stay at
Cassel Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy,
where he read papers on the most varied subjects. The best
known of these are those on Lachmann, Schiller, and his brother
Wilhelm (who died in 1859), on old age, and on the origin of
language. He also described his impressions of Italian and
Scandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observations
with linguistic details, as is the case in all his works.
Grimm died in 1863, working up to the last. He was never ill, and worked on all day, without haste and without pause. He was not at all impatient of interruption, but seemed rather to be refreshed by it, returning to his work without effort. He wrote for the press with great rapidity, and hardly ever made corrections. He never revised what he had written, remarking with a certain wonder of his brother, “Wilhelm reads his manuscripts over again before sending them to press!” His temperament was uniformly cheerful, and he was easily amused. Outside his own special work he had a marked taste for botany. The spirit which animated his work is best described by himself at the end of his autobiography. “Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments.”
The purely scientific side of Grimm’s character developed slowly. He seems to have felt the want of definite principles of etymology without being able to discover them, and indeed even in the first edition of his grammar (1819) he seems to be often groping in the dark. As early as 1815 we find A. W. Schlegel reviewing the Altdeutsche Wälder (a periodical published by the two brothers) very severely, condemning the lawless etymological combinations it contained, and insisting on the necessity of strict philological method and a fundamental investigation of the laws of language, especially in the correspondence of sounds. This criticism is said to have had a considerable influence on the direction of Grimm’s studies.
The first work he published, Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811), was of a purely literary character. Yet even in this essay Grimm showed that Minnesang and Meistersang were really one form of poetry, of which they merely represented different stages of development, and also announced his important discovery of the invariable division of the Lied into three strophic parts.
His text-editions were mostly prepared in common with his brother. In 1812 they published the two ancient fragments of the Hildebrandslied and the Weissenbrunner Gebet, Jacob having discovered what till then had never been suspected—the alliteration in these poems. However, Jacob had little taste for text-editing, and, as he himself confessed, the evolving of a
