Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3 Essays on Literature, Biography, and Antiquities

There is no country where so much interest is taken in the literature of Germany as in England, and there is no country where the literature of England is so much appreciated as in Germany. Some of our modern classics, whether poets or philosophers, are read by Englishmen with the same attention as their own; and the historians, the novel-writers, and the poets of England have exercised, and continue to exercise, a most powerful and beneficial influence on the people of Germany. In recent times, the literature of the two countries has almost grown into one. Lord Macaulay’s History has not only been translated into German, but reprinted at Leipzig in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipzig and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and Goethe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes; and several works of German scholarship have met with more attentive and thoughtful readers in the colleges of England than in the universities of Germany. Goethe’s idea of a world-literature has, to a certain extent, been realized; and the strong feeling of sympathy between the best classes in both countries holds out a hope that, for many years to come, the supremacy of the Teutonic race, not only in Europe, but over all the world, will be maintained in common by the two champions of political freedom and of the liberty of thought,—Protestant England and Protestant Germany.

The interest, however, which Englishmen take in German literature has hitherto been confined almost exclusively to the literature of the last fifty years, and very little is known of those fourteen centuries during which the German language had been growing up and gathering strength for the great triumphs which were achieved by Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Nor is this to be wondered at. The number of people in England, who take any interest in the early history of their own literature, is extremely small, and there is as yet no history of English literature worthy of that name. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in England many people will care to read in the original the ancient epic poems of the “Nibelunge” or “Gudrun,” or acquire a grammatical knowledge of the Gothic of Ulfilas and the Old High-German of Otfried. Gothic, Old High-German, and Middle High-German are three distinct languages, each possessing its own grammar, each differing from the others and from Modern German more materially than the Greek of Homer differs from the Greek of Demosthenes. Even in Germany these languages are studied only by professional antiquarians and scholars, and they do not form part of the general system of instruction in public schools and universities. The study of Gothic grammar alone (where we still find a dual in addition to the singular and plural, and where some tenses of the passive are still formed, as in Greek and Latin, without auxiliary verbs), would require as much time as the study of Greek grammar, though it would not offer the key to a literature like that of Greece. Old High-German, again, is as difficult a language to a German as Anglo-Saxon is to an Englishman; and the Middle High-German of the “Nibelunge,” of Wolfram, and Walther, nay even of Eckhart and Tauler, is more remote from the language of Goethe than Chaucer is from Tennyson.

But, without acquiring a grammatical knowledge of these ancient languages, there are, I believe, not a few people who wish to know something of the history of German literature. Nor is this, if properly taught, a subject of narrow or merely antiquarian interest. The history of literature reflects and helps us to interpret the political history of a country. It contains, as it were, the confession which every generation, before it passed away, has made to posterity. “Without Literary History,” as Lord Bacon says, “the History of the World seemeth to be as the Statue of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person.” From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in the annals of every country.

Although there exists no literature to reward the student of Gothic, yet every one who cares for the history of Germany and of German thought should know something of Ulfilas, the great Bishop of the Goths, who anticipated the work of Luther by more than a thousand years, and who, at a time when Greek and Latin were the only two respectable and orthodox languages of Europe, dared for the first time to translate the Bible into the vulgar tongue of Barbarians, as if foreseeing with a prophetic eye the destiny of these Teutonic tribes, whose language, after Greek and Latin had died away, was to become the life-spring of the Gospel over the whole civilized world. He ought to know something of those early missionaries and martyrs, most of them sent from Ireland and England to preach the Gospel in the dark forests of Germany,—men like St. Gall (died 638), St. Kilian (died 689), and St. Boniface (died 755), who were not content with felling the sacred oak-trees and baptizing unconverted multitudes, but founded missionary stations, and schools, and monasteries; working hard themselves in order to acquire a knowledge of the language and the character of the people, and drawing up those curious lists of barbarous words, with their no less barbarous equivalents in Latin, which we still possess, though copied by a later hand. He ought to know the gradual progress of Christianity and civilization in Germany, previous to the time of Charlemagne; for we see from the German translations of the Rules of the Benedictine monks, of ancient Latin hymns, the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, and portions of the New Testament, that the good sense of the national clergy had led them to do what Charlemagne had afterwards to enjoin by repeated Capitularia.(2) It is in the history of German literature that we learn what Charlemagne really was. Though claimed as a saint by the Church of Rome, and styled Empereur Français by modern French historians, Karl was really and truly a German king, proud, no doubt, of his Roman subjects, and of his title of Emperor, and anxious to give to his uncouth Germans the benefit of Italian and English teachers, but fondly attached in his heart to his own mother tongue, to the lays and laws of his fatherland: feelings displayed in his own attempt to compose a German grammar, and in his collection of old national songs, fragments of which may have been preserved to us in the ballads of Hildebrand and Hadubrand.

After the death of Charlemagne, and under the reign of the good but weak King Ludwig, the prospects of a national literature in Germany became darkened. In one instance, indeed, the king was the patron of a German poet; for he encouraged the author of the “Heliand” to write that poem for the benefit of his newly converted countrymen. But he would hardly have approved of the thoroughly German and almost heathen spirit which pervades that Saxon epic of the New Testament, and he expressed his disgust at the old German poems which his great father had taught him in his youth. The seed, however, which Charlemagne had sown had fallen on healthy soil, and grew up even without the sunshine of royal favor. The monastery of Fulda, under Hrabanus Maurus, the pupil of Alcuin, became the seminary of a truly national clergy. Here it was that Otfried, the author of the rhymed “Gospel-book” was brought up. In the mean time, the heterogeneous elements of the Carlovingian Empire broke asunder. Germany, by losing its French and Italian provinces, became Germany once more. Ludwig the German was King of Germany, Hrabanus Maurus Archbishop of Mayence; and the spirit of Charlemagne, Alcuin, and Eginhard was revived at Aachen, Fulda, and many other places, such as St. Gall, Weissenburg, and Corvey, where schools were founded on the model of that of Tours. The translation of the “Harmony of the Gospels,” gives us a specimen of the quiet studies of those monasteries, whereas the lay on the victory of Louis III. over the Normans, in 881, reminds us of the dangers that threatened Germany from the West at the same time that the Hungarians began their inroads from the East. The Saxon Emperors had hard battles to fight against these invaders, and there were few places in Germany where the peaceful pursuits of the monasteries and schools could be carried on without interruption. St. Gall is the one bright star in the approaching gloom of the next centuries. Not only was the Bible read, and translated, and commented upon in German at St. Gall, as formerly at Fulda, but Greek and Roman classics were copied and studied for educational purposes. Notker Teutonicus is the great representative of that school, which continued to maintain its reputation for theological and classical learning, and for a careful cultivation of the national language, nearly to the close of the eleventh century. At the court of the Saxon Emperors, though their policy was thoroughly German, there was little taste for German poetry. The Queen of Otto I. was a Lombard, the Queen of Otto II. a Greek lady; and their influence was not favorable to the rude poetry of national bards. If some traces of their work have been preserved to us, we owe it again to the more national taste of the monks of St. Gall and Passau. They translate some of the German epics into Latin verse, such as the poem of the “Nibelunge,” of “Walther of Aquitain,” and of “Ruodlieb.” The first is lost; but the other two have been preserved and published.(3) The stories of the Fox and the Bear, and the other animals,—a branch of poetry so peculiar to Germany, and epic rather than didactic in its origin,—attracted the attention of the monks; and it is owing again to their Latin translations that the existence of this curious style of poetry can be traced back so far as the tenth century.(4) As these poems are written in Latin, they could not find a place in a German reading-book; but they, as well as the unduly suspected Latin plays of the nun Hrosvitha, throw much light on the state of German civilization during the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The eleventh century presents almost an entire blank in the history of literature. Under the Frankish or Salic dynasty, Germany had either to defend herself against the inroads of Hungarian and Slavonic armies, or it was the battle-field of violent feuds between the Emperors and their vassals. The second half of that century was filled with the struggles between Henry IV. and Pope Gregory VII. The clergy, hitherto the chief support of German literature, became estranged from the German people; and the insecurity of the times was unfavorable to literary pursuits. Williram’s German had lost the classical correctness of Notker’s language, and the “Merigarto,” and similar works, are written in a hybrid style, which is neither prose nor poetry. The Old High-German had become a literary language chiefly through the efforts of the clergy, and the character of the whole Old High-German literature is preëminently clerical. The Crusades put an end to the preponderance of the clerical element in the literature of Germany. They were, no doubt, the work of the clergy. By using to the utmost the influence which they had gradually gained and carefully fomented, the priests were able to rouse a whole nation to a pitch of religious enthusiasm never known before or after. But the Crusades were the last triumph of the clergy; and with their failure the predominant influence of the clerical element in German society is checked and extinguished.