The direct and avowed influence of Spain upon English literature has hardly been comparable to that of France or Italy; nevertheless, in its totality, it has been sufficient to demand some concise review. Meanwhile that review necessitates, if less inevitably than in the case of Italy and France, an outline survey of the history of Spanish literature down to the middle of the seventeenth century. After that date the Peninsula, apart from its own lack of progress, cannot be said to count in our literary development.
In the summary of such literary forces as existed in the Dark Ages, we have already spoken of the Moslem learning of Cordova, and of the agency of Moors, Arabs, and Jews in spreading science and philosophy. We must not forget also the influence of Arab lyrics accompanying Arab music, which not only operated in Spain, but also in Provence after the Counts of Barcelona had established their court in that region. The interpenetration of Christian and Moorish thought was, as a matter of course, continued for many generations during the Christian re-conquest, but from the eighth to the twelfth century both learning and literary art lay with the Moslem. When in the thirteenth century the dialect of Castile had become the most important, though by no means the only Spanish speech, it embodied but little contribution from the north. Such as it reveals is an imitation of the Carlovingian chansons de geste of France, in the shape of romantic poems of which the hero is Ruy Diaz de Bivar, commonly called the “Cid” (a corruption of the Arabic Seyd, “lord”). Side by side with these went the troubadour poetry common to the Provençal of Southern France and its closely related Catalonian of Eastern Spain. In the next and following centuries there were destined to spring from the Cid poems, combined with the Celtic tales of Arthur, brought through France from Wales, those romances of chivalry—libros de caballerias—of which something will be said in due course.
Meanwhile some noticeable elements in the character of the rising Spanish literature were being cultivated under Oriental influence. Chief among these were the love of aphorism and the love of story. The Spanish mind has at all times been peculiarly sententious, and the proverbial philosophy of Spain extraordinarily rich. The Spanish taste has also set strongly in the direction of fiction of no very probable kind, whether embodying more or less supernatural marvel, impossible sentiment, chivalric and pastoral, or crowd of incident. These predilections already showed themselves during the nascent period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Spanish taste worked with the Oriental in respect both of proverb and story. The people of the Arabian Nights naturally passed on their répertoire more readily to their Spanish neighbours than elsewhere. The Arabic version of the Fables (or Tales) of Pilpay was translated under the same title of Kalila and Dimna, and the Arabic version of the Seven Sages (or Book of Sindabad) into the Stratagems of Women. With these and other materials there went a native inventiveness, in which Spanish writers have seldom been deficient. When they proceed to issue stories in their own names, though still derived from eastern sources (as in the forty-nine tales of the Count Lucanor of Don Juan Manuel early in the fourteenth century), the sententious character common to Moors and Spaniards is in strong evidence. The same people which was gathering proverbial wisdom into such collections as Blooms of Philosophy and Mouthfuls of Gold, affected tales with a moral. Count Lucanor consists of stories, told by a minister to a prince according to the Oriental machinery, which are meant to do more than amuse. They have the credit of being the first collection of novels, if we may call them such, in modern Europe. Scattered fabliaux existed in France, and various tales were current in Italy, but there was as yet no Decameron. The extent to which portions of this early fiction filtered into England cannot very well be estimated, but in the neo-Latin countries, with their comparative nearness of language and traditions, their racial affinities and their common church, the tales enjoyed a large vogue, which brought them into the hands of the French composers of fabliaux, of Boccaccio’s Italian predecessors, of Boccaccio himself, and thence of Chaucer. The plot of one of Don Manuel’s stories is familiar to us through the Taming of the Shrew, and on the Continent some of them reappear in the dramas of Calderon, or the novels of Lesage. Nor was the circulation of the proverbs confined to Spain. In Caxton’s Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, translated from the French, there appear aphorisms which correspond to those in the Spanish Florilegia.
The next step in Spanish literature consists of the prose “Chivalric Romances,” or libros de caballerias, of which the existence is best known to the ordinary reader through the derision showered upon them by Cervantes in Don Quixote. The only exception which he makes is in the case of their parent, the original Amadis of Gaul (or Wales), as being the best book in this kind, and deserving of preservation as an example of a type. This Amadis, derived from Welsh sources, appeared early in the fourteenth century, but enjoyed its greatest popularity during the fifteenth. Elsewhere in western Europe the age of chivalry had already passed, but in Spain the spirit lingered. The Amadis romances, with their peculiar blend of Celtic knightly self-devotion and the semi-Oriental fondness for magical and other marvels, were entirely to the Spanish taste. About the original Amadis and some of its imitations, despite their extravagant conception of knightly honour and knightly prowess, and their lack of all reality of time, place, and circumstance, there is a certain tone or temper of nobility which redeems them from entire contempt. Beyond this the sequels to Amadis of Gaul, such as Palmerin, Palmerin of England, and Amadis of Greece, possess no literary virtues. They are simply more or less ingenious variations of one another, employing much the same figures and much the same situations. Their knights-errant are totally unreal, and move with much prolixity in an unreal world, of which the chief elements appear to be love and sorcery. Nevertheless, when reinforced by a new development, of which we are to speak next, their chivalric virtues gave them life under a new shape in France of the seventeenth century.
This new development was the pastoral romance. Our knights and their loves are now placed in the Arcady of shepherds and shepherdesses. It is the same world of chivalric impossibility of sentiment, heroism, and enchantment; but, during the vogue of the Amadises, Italy had developed the pastoral, and the increasing contact of Spain with Italy—since the acquisition of Naples—speedily brought before the Spanish writers the example of Sannazaro. From the Arcadia of the Italian on the one hand, and from the libros de caballerias on the other, the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor created his famous Diana. This work, like Sidney’s Arcadia, is partly in prose and partly in verse, and, in such English development as arose from the pastoral, the influence of the Spaniard must be reckoned with that of the Neapolitan. It appears in Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender, and incidentally it may be observed that, before writing his Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare would seem at least to have been told of the substance of Montemayor. Not only did this influence come directly from the Spanish work, and from its translation into English at the end of the sixteenth century; it came also by way of France in the latter part of the seventeenth. For in France, early in that century, had appeared the Astrée of D’Urfé, based upon the Spaniard, and this in turn was the parent of those tedious creations of sentimental affectation, the heroic romances of La Calprenède and Scudéry, which have already been mentioned in dealing with the effect of French literature upon our post-Restoration writers of drama and fiction.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that, during this period of romance and pastoral, literature made no approach towards real existence. When war has come to play a smaller part in the national interest, and when reading is becoming general, a country which loves stories and “situations” will begin to find material for them in the facts, or at least the possibilities, of real life. It was so with Spain. In the latter part of the fifteenth century appears the first instalment of non-romantic or non-chivalric literature in the shape of Calisto and Meliboea, better known as Celestina, a work of uncertain authorship. A prose “comedy,” though impracticable for the stage, and written in twenty-one so-called acts, it sets forth—ostensibly with a dissuasive moral purpose—a tale of intrigue and vice which might conceivably belong to the realities of contemporary Spain. “Realistic,” indeed, it cannot be called, since realism describes things strictly as they are. The work was translated in all western Europe, including England. The fact that in the early sixteenth century the productions of Spain found ready access to our own country will be considered later. Meanwhile it is most convenient to note the subsequent history of the Spanish novel of common life. That history was peculiar, but intelligible. Spain was growing weary of the monotonous pretences of the Amadises, and it was by the treatment of the most opposite type of humanity that the liveliest interest could be evoked. From the knight-errant to the rogue-errant was a grateful change. The country possessed a plenty of picaros or rogues, who lived by the exercise of their wits, and whose adventures might be embellished into stories at least as interesting as those of a Palmerin. The appearance of The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, his Fortunes and Adventures (1554)—a work of unknown authorship, though commonly attributed to Mendoza—marks the date at which such stories first take shape as a distinct branch of the novel, to be known as the “picaroon” or “picaresque.” From that time, for nearly a century, the “Novelas de Picaros” are a chief product of Spanish writing. In them the vagabond of low life is carried by his cunning and his luck through a multitude of such adventures as the Spanish mind considered humorous, even though they might not be particularly edifying. Unfortunately the hero and his history tend to become as stereotyped as those of the chivalric romance; and unhappily also many of the situations at which contemporary Spain could evidently laugh, are, to us, rather productive of pity or disgust. Chief among the progeny of Lazarillo are Guzman de Alfarache (1599), a sequel to Lazarillo itself by Luna (1620), and The Life of Buscon (otherwise entitled The Great Knave) by Quevedo (1626). All these were quickly translated into English. Upon England the effect of the picaresque novel first appears in the Jack Wilton of Nash, who was well acquainted with Spanish, and whose choice of a picaroon higher in the social scale than Lazarillo is merely a concession to contemporary English tastes and interests. In France the type passed through the hands of Scarron and reached those of Lesage, whose Diable Boiteux and Gil Blas were destined to eclipse the fame of the Spanish originals. From the example of France this species broke out in England with the Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack of Defoe, the Joseph Andrews of Fielding, the Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle of Smollett. In the nineteenth century it finds its congeners in the Three Musketeers of Dumas and in the works of several minor English novelists. Mr. Jingle does not essentially differ from the type.
It is commonly said that it was the ridicule of Miguel Cervantes which destroyed the vogue of the chivalric romances. In reality he is rather the embodiment of his epoch, dealing the coup de grâce to that which was already dying. His immortal Don Quixote appeared first in 1605, when Amadis and Palmerin had already been losing their hold for a generation. Cervantes himself began with a pastoral Galatea, but it is not to be wondered at that his characteristic satirical sense of reality diverted him from this vein to the writing of original novels. Some twelve of these “Novelas Exemplares,” or moral and instructive tales, were published in 1613, and, though of uneven quality, they are the nearest approach which Spain could show to a novel of actuality. Some of these were soon converted into plots for dramas by the later Elizabethan playwrights. La Gitanilla becomes the Spanish Gipsy of Middleton, and Fletcher’s The Fair Maid of the Inn is from the Illustrious Housemaid. But the abiding fame of Cervantes rests upon work of an entirely novel kind, and one which has remained unique, despite all efforts at imitation. Though full of contemporary Spain, Don Quixote is one of those immortal books which become the property of the world rather than of any particular country. Its happy conception and execution, its humour, its fine suggestion of the true gentleman, and its admirable style, combine to make Cervantes the one significant name in Spanish literature. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman of La Mancha, a true type of the Castilian with all his native dignity and ready acceptance of lofty views of honour and loyalty, has bemused himself—as so many others had done—with the reading of the libros de caballerias. Accepting the world of the chivalric romances as a real world, where wrongs and oppressions clamour for heroic knights to redress them, he saddles his gaunt mare, Rosinante, clothes himself in old armour, with a barber’s dish for helmet, and sallies forth to seek adventures. To him Cervantes attaches the necessary squire in the shape of Sancho Panza, a good-natured, ignorant peasant, endowed with a simple readiness to believe his betters, but also with a fund of vulgar shrewdness which forms an excellent contrast to the idealizing monomania of his master. The story consists of the adventures of this worthy pair. The inns which the knight takes for castles, and the windmills which he takes for giants, are now a commonplace, and had become proverbial in England within a few years of the appearance of the book. The word “Quixotic” itself tells the story of the vogue which the work secured. But thousands have been entertained by the book as a novel without realizing its deeper perfections. Don Quixote is something far greater than a satire upon the chivalric romances. It is a work of creative art, a perfect mirroring of two types of character, all the more true to nature for the apparent contradictions which each embraces. And Cervantes possesses the supreme gift of creation, in that, like Swift or Defoe, he makes his persons live. We are apt to feel, not that the Don is an imaginary character in a book, but that he once actually lived and entertained his noble delusions in La Mancha. The skill which not only saves him from contempt, but invests him with pathetic admiration, is in itself the skill of genius. It should be observed that Cervantes adapts his Spanish to the situations with the delicate tact of a master, and that more than usual is therefore inevitably lost in translation. The difficulty of imitating such a work is manifest. Among the best known must be reckoned the Hudibras of Samuel Butler (1663), but beyond adopting the notion of an errant knight and squire, in the persons of Sir Hudibras and Ralpho, he achieves little that is comparable to his original. Sir Hudibras is a cowardly and contemptible person of narrow mind, but, even as such, his treatment is inconsistent, and the verse which Butler employs in place of Cervantes’ prose is but facile doggerel. It would be better indeed to speak of Hudibras as a vulgar, if often amusing, travesty of Don Quixote than as an imitation.
Meanwhile the Spanish lyric verse of the cancioneros, cultivated with much assiduity but with little genius, hardly concerns us, whether in its native form or when reshaped into sonnets and other varieties under Italian influence by “learned” poets like Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega. Of most importance is the fact that poetry of the latter kind was disfigured by Gongora, a writer of the end of the sixteenth century, into one of those styles of exaggerated preciosity which always seem to secure a temporary success by their very absurdity. The estilo culto, otherwise known as Gongorism, was a deliberate invention, of which the main features were the consistent avoidance of the natural word and, as far as possible, of the natural order. Such tricks were congenial to the Spanish taste, which has always been too much inclined, whether in verse or prose, to verbose and ornate expression. Gongorism is but a new species of Spanish artificiality in this respect—a national characteristic recognized and ridiculed by Shakespeare in his Don Armado. How much of the peculiar style of Lyly’s Euphues may be due to Spanish as well as Italian influences cannot be determined with any preciseness. But it should always be borne in mind that, after the marriage of Henry VIII with Catharine of Aragon, the English Court was frequented by Spaniards, and that, thanks to this fact, and the general prominence of Spain in the eyes of contemporary Europe, Spanish manners, whether of person or expression, were regarded as a proper subject of emulation by gallants and beaux esprits. This imitation extended far into the reign of Elizabeth. Before Gongora had introduced his new varieties of expression, this circle of Englishmen had been more or less familiar with the sententious antitheses and fantastic prolixities of the prose of Guevara (of the early sixteenth century), whose Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius and Golden Letters combined the characteristic proverbial philosophizing, often tediously platitudinarian, of his nation with its almost equally characteristic straining after uncommonness of phrase. Indeed it would seem that Elizabethan England caught from the Spaniards a taste for apophthegmatic wisdom which reached some among even the best of its writers, including no less a person than Bacon.
It only remains to remark briefly upon that form of literature which, apart from Cervantes, is the chief boast of Spain. This was the drama, established by Lope de Vega (1562-1635), and polished by Calderon a generation later. Spanish plays had begun in the usual manner with the performance of “Mysteries” and “Miracles,” of which the latter, when connected with the sacrament, were called autos. But from these Spain, like England, and unlike Italy or France, developed an entirely native species of drama. As in England, the attempts to impose the Senecan form, with its unities of place and time and its entire distinction of the tragic from the comic, entirely failed. But, unlike the drama of England, that of Lope de Vega and Calderon does not undertake to mirror human nature and action with all its various sides and complex motives. Its characters are but types, and, even as such, they are narrowly conceived. In the “cloak and sword” pieces a lady, a lover, a sober old man, and a clown, are the stock figures, who are brought into existence chiefly for the purpose of enacting their parts in certain ingenious and complicated intrigues with abundance of exciting or amusing situations. If Calderon shows a more finished style and a finer observation than Lope, his scope is otherwise the same. The Spanish stage does, indeed, like the French or Italian, affect frequent displays of rhetoric, but there the resemblance ends. Of special note among the comedias were those above mentioned as “cloak and sword” (de capa y espada). The title refers to the usual equipment of a typical Spaniard of the higher middle class, who was the most natural hero of adventures and intrigues. It is not difficult to find in Ben Jonson and Fletcher resemblances to these plays of Spain. In France, where Spanish influence was at its highest in the time of Lope, comedy was inevitably affected by much that was congenial in the tastes and lives of the two peoples, and with the Restoration the same influence reached England in an attenuated form. Perhaps the most amazing thing in all Spanish literature is the miraculous fecundity of Lope, to whom are credited nearly two thousand plays, dashed off with a rapidity which remains a unique phenomenon. In finish they are, of course, to seek; but the passableness of the verse thus composed, and the ingenuity of the plots conceived, are beyond denial. To the Spaniards Lope was “the prodigy of nature,” and “the Spanish phoenix.”
It is needless for our purpose to follow further the story of Spanish literature, which, since the seventeenth century, has been singularly barren, and, in any case, has exerted no appreciable effect whatever upon our own. On the whole it has been justly said that the writing of Spain has not been quite worthy of the nation. Perhaps its best work, leaving Cervantes aside, has been in history, from which, however, we have derived no definite influence which can be classed as literary. Apart from these its merits are those of inventiveness in plot and of a certain high conception of dignity—a most consistent trait of the Spaniard. But it is a literature wordy in expression, lacking in insight, and seldom concerning itself with the deeper interests of human life.
| DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE. | CHIEF REPRESENTATIVE OR WORK. | DATE. | SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fiction: | |||
| (a) Moral Tales | Don Juan MANUEL (Count Lucanor) | Early fourteenth century | Passed into stock of fabliaux and novelle, and thence occasionally reappear, e.g., in Taming of the Shrew. |
| CERVANTES (Novelas Exemplares) | 1613 | Utilized by later Elizabethan playwrights, e.g., Middleton’s Spanish Gipsy, Fletcher’s Fair Maid of the Inn. | |
| (b) Chivalric Romances (Libros de Caballerias) | Amadis of Gaul | Fourteenth century | The chivalric romances, combined with the pastoral, led (through D’Urfé) to the French “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Scudéry. For their effect on English work, see French Literature. The Arcadia of Sidney and Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender owe some influence to Montemayor. Diana was Englished at the end of the sixteenth century. |
| Palmerin, Palmerin of England, etc. | Fifteenth century | ||
| (c) Pastoral Romance (part prose, part verse) | MONTEMAYOR (Diana) | 1520-1562 | |
| CERVANTES (Galatea) | 1585 | ||
| (d) Romance of Common Life | Celestina (Calisto and Meliboea) | Fifteenth century | |
| Picaroon Novels (Novelas de Picaros) | Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman de Alfarache | 1554, 1599 | The original source of the picaroon (or picaresque) novel, first seen in England in, e.g., Nash’s Jack Wilton. In France passed through Scarron to Lesage. Taken up by Defoe (Moll Flanders, etc.), Fielding (Joseph Andrews), Smollett (Roderick Random, etc.). Revived by Dumas and his followers. |
| QUEVEDO (Life of Buscon) | 1626 | ||
| (e) Satirical | CERVANTES (Don Quixote) | 1547-1616 (D.Q. 1605) | Greatly read and quoted in England at all times. Imitated in Butler’s Hudibras. |
| Poetry: | |||
| (a) Early Romance | Poem of the Cid | Twelfth and thirteenth centuries | |
| (b) Learned Poetry (lyric) | GARCILASO DE LA VEGA | 1530-1568 | |
| GONGORA | 1561-1627 | The estilo culto joins with Italian influence to create artificiality of style. | |
| Ethical Writing | Early Collection of Proverbs | Utilized in Caxton’s Dictes and Sayings, etc. | |
| GUEVARA (Golden Book and Golden Letters) | 1474-1546 | Much effect on Tudor England in encouraging apophthegmatic and sententious style. | |
| Drama | LOPE DE VEGA | 1562-1635 | The “cloak and sword” dramas of situation and intrigue influence plays of Jonson and Fletcher. French comedy sought material in Lope, and England was thence indirectly affected after the Restoration. |
| CALDERON | 1601-1681 |
For our purpose, which is that of surveying the influence exerted by other literatures upon both the form and contents of our own, the writings of Germany are of less prominence than those of the countries with which we have hitherto dealt. To Latin our debt has been great and continuous; to Greek it has been less continuous, but essentially much more important; to Italian it was a debt of considerable dimensions for some three centuries; to French it has been an extensive obligation at two different and well marked epochs of some duration and potency. But to German we owed but an inconsiderable debt until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth, and, even since that time, the influence has been rather philosophical and scientific than literary—one affecting general currents of thought and methods of thinking rather than one affecting range of literary subject or manner of literary expression.
German “literature” at its best covers some half-century. The years from about 1770 to about 1820 were its golden period, the age of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Since the latter date Heine alone stands forth as one of those names in pure literature which have a cosmopolitan, and not merely a German, significance. In speaking thus we are not forgetting minor poets like Uhland, or philosophers like Schopenhauer, or historians like Mommsen. But, in a literary inquiry of the present scope, we must not, on the one hand, confound science, even the science of philosophy, with literature; and, on the other, we must not lose our truth of perspective by magnifying the relatively small.
It is at first sight one of the most amazing facts in literary history that Germany should have been so late in arriving at a stage of creative genius which was reached five centuries earlier in Italy, a hundred and fifty years earlier in France, and nearly two hundred years earlier in England; for by so much time does the flourishing of Dante, of Corneille, and of Shakespeare, respectively precede the flourishing of Goethe. When we recognize what a capacity the German mind possesses for deep and sustained reflection, for tender sentiment, for rhythmic expression, we are struck with wonder that, before the days of Lessing in the latter half of the eighteenth century, German literature appears like a huge sand-waste, with here and there a poor oasis yielding for the most part but stony fruits and almost destitute of verdant beauty, except—and the exception is considerable—those simple and earnest Volkslieder in which the Teutonic feeling finds such touching outlet.
The Lay of the Nibelungen is properly an antique. The Minnesänger are to us little more than a tradition. Of the Meistersänger perhaps Hans Sachs is the only name which readily recalls itself. Luther we know full well, but, except for his hymn, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, he is remembered as a figure of theological controversy and a translator of the Bible rather than as a man of letters in the proper sense. We are familiar with the almost omniscient Leibnitz in the realms of science and philosophy; but it is not till towards the end of the eighteenth century, just before our own Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, that we meet with a fully matured and artistic literature, graced with numerous rememberable names—with Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and, in a minor rank, Klopstock, Wieland, Bürger, Jean Paul Richter.
For this long sterility and slow development of German literature various reasons are assigned. We need not here pretend to estimate how far they are severally true. We cannot refer all literary outbursts to causes independent of genius. Nor is it necessary always to demand an extensive national life as a condition of literary fertility. Looking at the golden-age literatures of Athens and Florence, we should rather hold that it is a free-spirited and cultured life pervading a community, small or great, which stimulates to literary productiveness and excellence. It is, in fact, the prevailing ideals in a community which determine whether it shall create a splendid literature or not. In Germany there were for centuries no communities pervaded with this spirited and cultured life; the prevailing ideals were not in the direction of any consummate artistic production. Till 1802 there existed, in name at least, as many as two hundred and fifty petty princedoms and paltry republics in Germany, for the most part little better than narrow feudal domains, struggling, ignoble, and selfish, as such disintegrated political atoms are wont to be. So long as these were really separate there was no grandeur of spirit, no high level of culture, in Germany. Nevertheless, for a generation before the end of the eighteenth century there had been growing up a wider and more national German sentiment and a considerable measure of union, political and social. It was not till this generation that Goethe and Schiller appeared. The wars which devastated Germany after the Reformation were of most hideous ferocity and unparalleled continuance, and had necessarily caused a dearth of literature as of other arts. What literature is to be found in Germany for two hundred years, from the time of our own Henry VIII down to the time of our George III—all those generations which include our Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray—is almost entirely a literature of controversy, religion, hymns, criticism, and learning. Then at length, with the growing feeling of a general Germanic nationality and a general Germanic spirit and culture, with religious freedom established and controversy worn out, with the ideals of learning homogeneously spread, the time has come when literary genius finds its apt environment, and the thought and feeling of Germany take shape in dramas, ballads, lyrics, novels, and all other wonted forms. And then, for a generation, German literature is the dominant literature of Europe.
With the literary work—if we may call it such—of the monastic period, and with the religious poems of the learned German monks, we have nothing to do. German literature at all worthy of the name begins with the various Lieder, or romantic lays and lyrics of the twelfth century. The impulse to the Romances of Alexander and of the Table Round came from the trouvères of Northern France; the impulse to the lyrics of chivalrous minstrelsy came from the troubadours of Languedoc. During the Crusades the German barons were prominent, and that great motley pilgrimage of Frenchmen, Germans, Provençals, and Italians to the Holy Land was the means of spreading the legends and literary manners of the one to the knowledge and imitation of the rest. It was probably in this way, it was certainly at this time, that arose the Minne-Gesang and the army of Minnesänger, who were its poets. Minne means “love,” and love is the special theme of those who copied the troubadours. The lyrics of the Minnesänger are primarily love-ditties of the kind which have been already described as current in Provence. Not that all their Lieder were lyric songs. There were also legends and romances, satires and fables.
Most famous among all the creations of mediaeval Germany stands forth the Nibelungen Lied, the “Lay of the Nibelungen.” Properly speaking the title is The Calamity of the Nibelungen—Der Nibelungen Noth. The work is an epic, the one epic of Germany. It records how Siegfried, a hero of the fifth century, was done to treacherous death through the jealousy of the Amazon Queen Brünhild, and how his murder was ruthlessly avenged by his wife Kriemhild. The Nibelungen are properly fabulous giants of the Land of Fog, but when a vast treasure, which Siegfried has taken from them, comes into the hands of the Burgundians at Worms, these Burgundians become in turn the Nibelungen. And since it is upon the lords of these hapless Burgundian Nibelungen that Kriemhild’s vengeance falls, the poem is rightly styled Der Nibelungen Noth. Such is the plot of this “Iliad of Germany,” of which the collecting or formulation dates from about the year 1200, and which is full of great exploits and great passions, of witchcraft and murder and grimness. From a literary point of view the composition is one of great vigour but of no less great uncouthness.
One other product of the time deserves some mention. It is the beast story, or satirical fable, of Reineke Fuchs—“Reynard the Fox”—wherein the cunning of the fox is contrasted with the qualities of the other animals, who each bear a special sobriquet, and wherein human practices are all the time playfully satirized. That the French borrowed this beast-epic in their Roman de Renart from the Germans, and not the Germans from the French, is clear from the names borne by the various animals, such as the French renard, the fox, and baudet, the donkey, which are but the old German nicknames, Reynhart and Baldwin, in slight disguise.
Following the Minnesänger came the Meister-Gesang and the Meistersänger. This was the age of trade guilds, when artisans met as in a club, and when each guild contained its poet or its poetaster. The shoemaker or weaver had often a fancy to be rhymester for his mates; thereupon were formed special guilds of poets of this sort, poetic artisans or artisan poets, and these were called the Schools of Meistersänger. Naturally enough the verse of men like these concerned itself, not with chivalry and troubadour lyrics, but with themes of common life, with wedding and christening songs, with songs of drink, of labour, and of domesticity.
In this age begin those special German Volkslieder, or “people’s songs,” of which some touchingly sweet and musical specimens are still read and heard to-day. The most prolific and best known of the Meistersänger is Hans Sachs, “the cobbler bard,” who flourished about the year 1550.
Of more importance to ourselves, perhaps, at this time was Sebastian Brandt. He is scarcely one of the Meistersänger, since he was no artisan, but a lawyer. Though of the same time and style he stands quite apart. Us he concerns because his work, the Narrenschiff, or “Ship of Fools,” was imitated in the sixteenth century by our English Barclay, and was the parent of a considerable satirical progeny during that century. It suggested, for instance, both the conception and the title of such productions as the Ship of Drunkards. The “Ship” was chosen by Brandt to convey the fools he satirizes—fops, misers, drunkards, and the like—because no other conveyance was large enough. The captain was a book-fool, and his name was Sebastian Brandt. About 1550 there was also translated by Copland, under the name of the Owl-glass, the famous Eulenspiegel, a series of amusing trickeries which are reflected in the English Robin Goodfellow.
The age of the Meistersänger is followed by the age of Luther, the Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War. It is an era of the founding of universities, of the spread of learning, of religious dispute carried on in pedantic language, an era when the popular speech was disregarded in favour of Latin or French. To speak broadly, there is no literature worth the name from the time of Luther, who died in 1546, down to Lessing, who wrote in 1760. Nor is Luther himself a figure of literature proper. As a translator of the Bible into the Upper-Saxon dialect, and as having thus fixed the modern German language, he is of the greatest importance to Germany itself. To us his value is that of a thinker or moral force.
Yet there is one product of this long period which must count for something in virtue of its subject. It is the legend of Dr. Faustus, which was first printed in 1587, was utilized by Marlowe for his most celebrated play, gave the hint for Green’s Friar Bacon, and was revived by Goethe in his most famous and most influential work, the drama of Faust. It is reported that there actually was a person named Faust in Swabia in 1560, who rejoiced in a reputation for sorcery, and in the companionship of the devil.
With a long leap over an irrelevant and wearisome interspace we arrive at the “Classic Period” of German literature. It seems better to call this the “classic” than the “classical” period, since the former word signifies the best and golden age, the age of the classic works, not the age in which literature followed the rules and canons of classicism after the manner of the French in the “classical” period of Louis XIV, or of the English in the “classical” period after the days of Dryden. It is a superlative merit of the great German writers that they, like our Elizabethans, and like our poets of the early nineteenth century, for the most part refused to be fettered by artificial rules.
Now was the time of a splendid crop of genius, a time when Frederick the Great had made North Germany more compact and peaceful, a time when princely patronage deigned to take note of literature. It was the time of a revolt against pedantry, of a reaction in favour of the national language, and of romantic and spontaneous literary creation.
The period of creation had been preceded in the early eighteenth century by a period of criticism, in which the German Swiss school of Bodmer, affecting the literary freedom of England, came into collision with the Leipzig school of Gottsched, which favoured the regulated literature of France. The latter faction, however, soon passed away, and Klopstock’s Messias, inspired by Milton, though a work poor in action and character, showed how Germany was minded to abandon the mundane tone and interests which had satisfied the school of Voltaire and his Teutonic followers, and to adopt the cult of feeling and the ideal. For a time, it is true, the rising poet Wieland set himself in deliberate opposition to this cult, and proclaimed himself a pupil of the French; but, when settled at Weimar in 1772, his French predilections did not prevent him from at least devoting his abilities to the reconstruction of old romance.
The attack on the old formalism and its rules, in favour of free and untrammelled genius, was deliberate and organized. It consisted on the one hand of the fresh and searching criticism of Lessing and Herder, and, on the other, of the efforts of German poetic youth. The name given to the young spirits of the literary revolt and regeneration, the clamourers for free play of spontaneity and imagination, was that of Stürmer und Dränger. They were so called from the words Sturm und Drang, often translated “Storm and Stress,” but in reality meaning “Vigorous Assault,” which formed the title of a drama published by a certain Klinger in 1774, although their appropriateness is not now easy to discern. This particular drama supplied, however, in its wild and extravagant structure, imagery and figures, a kind of manifesto of the new school. Those who sided with the movement were therefore called the “Storm-and-Stress men,” just as the “Impressionists” in painting have been so named from the picture called Impressions, in which Monet first publicly exemplified their methods. Most of the poets who were afterwards to become famous belonged in their youth to this new school, went through its extravagances, and came out all the better for it in their maturity. Goethe with his juvenile drama of Götz, Schiller with his of The Robbers, had their “Sturm und Drang” stage, the stage when they allowed their imaginations and their language to run riot in wild extravagance.
The first great writer of the classic period in point of date is Lessing. He had nothing to do with the violent ardours of “Sturm und Drang.” None the less he is a regenerator, a more powerful regenerator, and, in a sense, the founder of German literature. His dramas, with their central idea of depicting a hero whose character and conduct point a general moral, fixed the manner of German drama for Goethe and Schiller, and therefore for all German literature. His Minna von Barnhelm, and his Nathan the Wise, are moral lessons in military duty, or in religious toleration. They are the precursors and direct progenitors of Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Wallenstein. But, perhaps, of all Lessing’s works that which is best known abroad, and which has been most powerful and far-reaching in its influence, is his Laocoon. Despite its errors and shortcomings, this famous treatise on the “Boundaries of Poetry and Painting,” a work of criticism in the philosophy of the beautiful, has perhaps influenced more minds than any other work on aesthetics ever written except those of Aristotle and Longinus. To countless others besides Macaulay it has been their first illumination of the everlasting principles of beauty.
Side by side with Lessing, younger than he, but more ardent, went the Dichterbund, the “Poets’ League,” of Göttingen, whose object it was to make the poetry of Germans truly German, by composing natural lyrics and ballads of that sort in which modern German poetry perhaps abounds more richly, more musically, than any poetry of any other land. They, too, greatly influenced Goethe and Schiller, and from them Heine derives the impulse to his exquisite music and simplicity. Chief among them was Bürger, the ballad-writer and author of Lenore, who, perhaps, deserves additional mention as the reputed author of the famous adventures of Baron Münchhausen, perhaps the most perfectly ridiculous set of impossible lies ever invented.
To speak of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, would require volumes. Perhaps nothing more perfect in their kind can be found than the lyrics of these three superlative artists, superlative in their simplicity of language, in their music, and in their clear-cut thought. Schiller’s Song of the Bell is thought converted into, identified with, melody. Goethe’s Heath Rose, his Serenade, his songs in Egmont; the gems scattered through Heine’s Buch der Lieder; these show every possible virtue of poems in their kind. For what is the supreme merit of such a poem, unless that it should give expression to a worthy thought or emotion in exquisite language, which shall communicate it wholly, clearly, and movingly, by means of sounds and cadences acting like music on the emotions, and tuning the mind to a state of perfect receptiveness? This is precisely what the great German triad did, and, if German were only more closely regarded on its literary, as opposed to its utilitarian side, a study of German lyrics, odes, ballads, and songs might serve as the best of trainings for any who would learn to write them as poets should. Herein, perhaps, the literary influence of Germany has yet to work with ample scope and unmixed benefit.
But, though their lyrics alone are more than enough to make Goethe, Schiller, and Heine immortal, it is not by these that Goethe and Schiller are best known to the world outside of Germany. It is by dramas like Wallenstein and Wilhelm Tell that Schiller holds his place, while Goethe’s fame is mostly identified with Faust, with Iphigenie, and with Egmont.
For German literature Goethe is the consummate name. He is the apex of the pyramid, and that in virtue of one sublime quality—originality, a word which perhaps means, after all, independence of observation combined with a keen capacity for its exercise. After passing through his Sturm-und-Drangship, his morbid stage of The Sorrows of Werther, and his intermediate stage of classical proportion, Goethe wrote as one who saw, and saw clearly. He saw facts, he dissected passions and motives. He could analyse the complex, and build up the elements again into a sound complexity. He has no narrowness. He displays a broad Hellenic tolerance, and a clear Hellenic way of seeing things in their reality. The influence of such a man must be vast. Byron and Shelley owned it and showed it. Carlyle, as stern a critic as ever played the pedagogue, is unmixed in his admiration for the man Goethe, who is to him divine. In his own country his Werther, despite its frequent morbidness and its longueurs, determined the feeling of every sentimentalist. Outside that country his Faust has become almost a textbook in poetical philosophy. He is translated, commented on, consulted like an oracle. In the reality and width of sway which he exercises, he stands next to Shakespeare among the poets.
“The genius of Germany,” says Lamartine, “is deep and austere.” The characteristics of German literature bear the impress of that national genius. The German mind is one which inquires and ponders. The German is, above all things, a deep and earnest thinker. Philosophy and learning, investigation in history, language, physical science, these belong to the Germans more than to any other people. We shall expect, therefore, to find German literature full of reflection and original thought, more concerned with the pursuit of the truth of that thought and reflection than with the form of expression. Heine, indeed, cannot be classed with the other great writers in this respect. Humour, wit, grace, music, all these he has in abundance. But he is apt to be reckless in his brilliancy; he is the incarnation of cleverness, but scarcely of sober and sincere thought. But Heine, though a German, was not a Teuton. He was a Jew. He wrote in German words in a German atmosphere, but hardly from a Teutonic mind.
Truth and earnestness are essentials of German writing. And therefore it is difficult to find in German literature mere writing for writing’s sake. Its prose is the prose of discussion, argument, reflection, criticism, philosophy, analysis: its poetry is poetry of earnest meditation, real pathos, and real sentiment. Above all things German poetry is lyrical, and its lyric note rings true.
For German “literary” influence on ourselves we cannot point to much that is very definite. The influence of German philosophy in Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schopenhauer, is one of thought in the scientific, not in the literary, aspect. We cannot say how great that philosophic influence has been. Nor are we under any obligation here to attempt the task. Neither are we concerned with the immense theological influence—which is also one of philosophy—that came to us from Luther. We are only concerned with the literary subject matter, the forms, and the principles which we may owe to Germany. Our conception of how history should be written owes much to Niebuhr, Ranke, and Mommsen; our aesthetic criticism to Lessing and Winckelmann; and our literary criticism to the brothers Schlegel. So long as there is intercommunication between countries by reading and by travel we necessarily expect ideas to pass in some shape and measure from one to the other. But it is only when great writers look abroad for formative influences that we can perceive and demonstrate a positive literary debt. English literature, and especially Shakespeare, has, in this respect, exercised much more influence on Germany than German literature upon ours.
In the sixteenth century we may find German legends like those concerning Bishop Hatto or the Piper of Hamelin transferred to England; we may find the story of Dr. Faustus producing Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Greene’s Friar Bacon; we may see Brandt’s Narrenschiff translated as Barclay’s Ship of Fools, and producing other satirical “Ships” of a similar kind. We may trace the thoughts of Pope’s Essay on Man back through Bolingbroke’s prose to the philosophic writings of Leibnitz. Yet instances like these are but scattered, and are intrinsically not of the first importance. A really large and steady influence begins for us with the end of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth century, with Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and thence with Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley in England. Coleridge and De Quincey were much read in German literature and philosophy; Byron and Goethe were mutual admirers; Shelley read Goethe along with the ancient classics; Scott practically commenced writing by translating Goethe’s Götz into Goetz of the Iron Hand. Carlyle admired Goethe with an entirety which he refuses to any but the greatest; English thinkers and essayists are constantly quoting him. In our own day, when the knowledge of German is increasing, we all absorb more or less of the thought of Germany. Yet the influence is one of thought. It has not yet developed into an influence which can be seen to determine the form and tone of poetry or prose, as was the case with French and with Italian. The fact seems to be that German literature is naturally too much like our own to exert such clear and palpable effect.