A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 29

[7] See _ante_, p. 237.

[8] Walter Scott quotes this pa.s.sage in his review of Southey and Cottle's edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh _Review_ for April, 1804, and comments as follows: "While Chatterton wrote plain narrative, he imitated with considerable success the dry, concise style of an antique annalist; but when anything required a more dignified or sentimental style, he mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal."

[9] Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was dated March 25 [1769].

[10] See _ante_, p. 346.

[11] "Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others in the fifteenth century. The greatest part now first published from the most authentic copies, with engraved specimens of one of the MSS. To which are added a preface, an introductory account of the several pieces, and a glossary. London: Printed for T. Payne & Son at the Mews Gate. MDCCLXXVII."

[12] "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley," 2 vols. 1781.

[13] Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the fifteenth century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, etc. With a commentary in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended.

[14] "Essay on the Rowley Poems:" Skeat's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Vol. II. p. xxvii.

[15] For a bibliography of the Rowley controversy, consult the article on Chatterton in the "Dictionary of National Biography."

[16] "Ah, gentle dames! It gars me greet."

--_Tam o'Shanter_

[17] _Ante_, p. 350.

[18] "Chatterton. A Story of the Year 1770," by David Ma.s.son London, 1874.

[19] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 334.

[20] A recent critic, the Hon. Roden Noel ("Essays on Poetry and Poets,"

London, 1886), thinks that "'Aella' is a drama worthy of the Elizabethans" (p. 44). "As to the Rowley series," as a whole, he does "not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our language" (p. 39). The Choric "Ode to Freedom" in "G.o.ddwyn" appears to Mr. Noel to be the original of a much admired pa.s.sage in "Childe Harold,"

in which war is personified, "and at any rate is finer"!

[21] See in Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets," Vol. I. pp. 264-307, the description of a drawing of this building in 1138, done by Chatterton and inserted in Barrett's "History."

[22] For some remarks on Chatterton's metrical originality, see "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III, pp. 400-403.

[23] Look at.

[24] Blake was an early adherent of the "Gothic artists who built the Cathedrals in the so-called Dark Ages . . . of whom the world was not worthy." Mr. Rossetti has pointed out his obligations to Ossian and possibly to "The Castle of Otranto." See Blake's poems "Fair Eleanor"

and "Gwin, King of Norway."

[25] Chatterton's sister testifies that he had the romantic habit of sitting up all night and writing by moonlight. Cambridge Ed. p. lxi.

[26] Other standard lives of Chatterton are those by Gregory, 1789, (reprinted and prefixed to the Southey and Cottle edition): Dix, 1837; and Wilson, 1869.

[27] Rowleian: there is no such instrument known unto men. The romantic love of _color_ is observable in this poem, and is strong everywhere in Chatterton.

[28] See also the sonnet: "O Chatterton, how very sad thy fate"--Given in Lord Houghton's memoir. "Life and Letters of John Keats": By R. Monckton Milnes, p. 20 (American Edition, New York, 1848).

[29] Chatterton, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Sh.e.l.ley. "The absolutely miraculous Chatterton," Rossetti elsewhere styles him.

[30] "Historie du Romantisme," pp. 153-54.

[31] "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 self-developed 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 att.i.tude of the German mind which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have been following. In Germany, French cla.s.sicism 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.[1]

But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the Zuricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of "Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles.

In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous,"

1740) he a.s.serted 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 fas.h.i.+on. "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 continued to be throughout his life an ardent admirer. Justus Moser took great interest in the Minnesingers.

About the time when 'Gotz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German poetry was at its strongest, and Burger, Voss, Miller, and Holtz 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 Burger, 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 s...o...b..rg 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 Muller, began to show the Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Muller 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 aesthetic 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."[2]

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 Burger's and Herder's renderings from Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Gottingen in 1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found--besides the Viennese Denis--another translator in Fritz s...o...b..rg, who carried his medievalism 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 Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire 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 amba.s.sador to London, had translated "Julius Caesar."

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 Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, through the detached pa.s.sages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere."[5]

He afterward got hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to Stra.s.sburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with his own enthusiasm for "Ossian," and the _Volkslieder_, and led him to study Shakspere in the original.

Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist with pa.s.sionate conviction. He became an object of wors.h.i.+p, an article of faith. The Shakspere _cultus_ dominated the whole _Sturm- und Drangperoide_. The stage domesticated him: the poets imitated him: the critics exalted him into the type and representative (_Urbild_) of Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a recognition of the essential kins.h.i.+ps between the two separated branches of the great Teutonic stock. The enthusiastic young patriots of the Gottinger _Hain_,--who hated everything French and called each other by the names of ancient bards,--accustomed themselves to the use of Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the police and spent the night in the lockup. In Goethe's circle at Stra.s.sburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L.

Wagner, this Shakspere mania was _de rigueur_. Lenz, particularly, who translated "Love's Labour's Lost," excelled in whimsical imitations of "such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his father's house (October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the "Will of all Wills," and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. "The first page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of this oration, "made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant's miracle. I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had been expanded a whole infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8]

Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Gotz von Berlichingen"

conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the scene was s.h.i.+fted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions--knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric pa.s.sages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his ma.n.u.script, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give it a more independent form.

Scherer[9] says that the p.r.o.nunciamento of the new national movement in German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" ent.i.tled "Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blatter" ("Some Loose Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained essays by Justus Moser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits of popular song, advocated a collection of the German _Volkslieder_, extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Stra.s.sburg Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "a.s.serted that art, to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and with a friendly att.i.tude toward England. . . This great movement was, in fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from _a priori_ notions[11] to history, from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's 'Gotz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the publication of 'Gotz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate talent but shallow genius, the representative of the _Aufklarung_ (_eclairciss.e.m.e.nt_, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride _ins alte romantische Land_. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count Tressan began publis.h.i.+ng in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales, chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin"

and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12]

From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the _Aufklarung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superst.i.tions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in G.o.d and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches.

In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break with French cla.s.sicism and with that part of the native literature which had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because Germany had nothing to compare with the s.h.i.+ning and solid achievements of the Queen Anne cla.s.sics in England. It was easy for the new school of German poets and critics to brush aside _perruques_ like Opitz, Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth cla.s.s. But Swift and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton, and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere for this.

In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouque, Von Arnim, Brentano, and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone, Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual nature of their partic.i.p.ation in the movement, diminish their relative importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism.

In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_, which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laoc.o.o.n," "Faust," and "Wilhelm Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents, too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be cla.s.sified with a school. The temper which engendered "Gotz" and "Die Rauber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they pa.s.sed on presently into other regions of thought and art.

In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische Reise_, a reversion to the cla.s.sic; not the exploded pseudo-cla.s.sic of the eighteenth-century brand, but the true h.e.l.lenic spirit which expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und Dorothea," and the "Schone Helena" and "Cla.s.sische Walpurgis-Nacht"

episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many.

Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in cla.s.sical antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe were flooded by the cla.s.sical fas.h.i.+on for which Winckelmann had given the first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the mechanical arts strove after cla.s.sical forms, and ladies affected the dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of cla.s.sical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this cla.s.sical prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads, like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and "Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer."