Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VII.djvu/781

 Meistersänger), whom Herder calls the Meister of Meistersänger, and who excelled more than any poet before him in all styles of composition, from the most tragical touch of feeling to the most comic turn of thought. His song dedicated to Luther (Wittenbergische Nachtigall) was especially fine. Frauenlob and Michael Behaim were also poets, and Rosenblüt and Folz playwrights of some note, the former of whom was also one of the best tale writers of his time. Among the contributors to the drama who succeeded Hans Sachs, he was excelled in skilful arrangement of plots by Jakob Ayrer (died in 1605), and in grace and refinement of composition by Andreas Gryphius (1616-'64).—During the excitement occasioned by the reformation almost all branches of composition were cultivated, but in learned and scientific literature the 16th century was most prolific. Besides Melanchthon, whose influence secured the preponderance of the Aristotelian philosophy in the Protestant schools of Germany for more than a century, were Luther, Camerarius (classics and philology), Cornelius Agrippa, Theophrastus Paracelsus (mystical philosophy and natural history), Copernicus (astronomy), Leonhard Fuchs (botany and medicine), Conrad Gesner (botany, zoölogy, and classics), and Agricola (mineralogy). At the expiration of the 16th century few of the great scholars of Germany were left, and classical culture was declining in the early part of the 17th. The numerous universities and schools which had sprung up under the influence of the reformation were no longer animated by the zeal of the reformers, but engrossed by subtle polemical and scholastic strifes. The deliverance of the German intellect from the scholastic bonds of the middle ages, which was the cherished endeavor of Luther, was again retarded.—Poetry, in passing from the Meistersänger to scholars, lost in naturalness what it gained in elaboration. Most aspirants to poetical fame in the 17th century were graduates of universities, and learned societies were formed at its beginning, with a view of improving the German language and literature. These societies became as notorious for their imitations of the Italian academies as the corporations of the Meistersänger had been for attempting to mimic the minstrels. After their dissolution they were replaced by many literary and scientific associations in Leipsic, Berlin, Hamburg, Königsberg, Halle, and in others of those principal central and university towns of Protestant Germany which had become the leaders of German culture. A new school of poetry was established, of which the forerunners were Friedrich von Spee (died in 1635) and Georg Rudolf Weckherlin (1584-1651), the first author of sonnets in German. Martin Opitz (1597-1639) became the leader of this school, which after his native country was called the first Silesian school. He wrote the language with a purity of idiom in which he rivalled Luther.

He imparted more vigor to the versification, and wrote many lyrical, mixed, and didactic poems. Although more scholastic than poetical, he exerted a great influence on literature, at a time when the thirty years' war and the growing taste for bad Italian and French modes of composition threatened to annihilate all vestiges of pure German poetry, and when the reforms introduced by Luther into the language still required to be steadily urged and followed up in order to become established. Paul Flemming (1609-'40) was the principal lyrical, and Simon Dach (1605-'59) a gifted sentimental poet of this school. Von Zesen (1619-'89) was the greatest purist of them all, strenuously opposing the admixture of French words, which was becoming more and more common in Germany. Halsdörfer was one of the principal poets of the pastoral Nuremberg branch of the school. Among the other eminent poets were Christian Weise, who excelled in popular songs and the drama, and afterward opposed the Silesian schools, and Friedrich von Logau (1604-'55), a witty epigrammatist. Andreas Gryphius did much to improve the German drama, and his poetry was as excessively passionate as that of Opitz was conventional and cold. This conventionality gave rise to a formidable opposition, at the head of which stood Hofmannswaldau (1618-'79) and Lohenstein (1635-'83), who took the most inflated Italian and French writers as their models, and became proverbial for bombast and artificiality. They in their turn were opposed by Canitz, the Berlin statesman and poet (1654-'90), Besser (1654-1729), and König (1688-1744), most of whom were court poets, who endeavored to imitate the then fashionable verses of Boileau, but were unable to resist the success of Lohenstein's affected and extravagant effusions. Imitativeness was the bane of literature in Germany; only a few, as Brockes of Hamburg (1680-1747) and Günther (1695-1723), were free from it, while Neukirch (1665-1729), and especially Wernike of Hamburg (died about 1720), were almost the only poets who dared to protest against it.—The most successful authors of novels in this period were Buchholz, Von Zesen, Ziegler, Klipphausen, Lohenstein, and Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick. The most entertaining book of the century was a collection of tales of adventure (Simplicissimus) by Grimmelshausen, a style of composition in which he had been preceded by the satirist Moscherosch. The writings of the Roman Catholic preacher Abraham à Sancta Clara (1642-1709) are distinguished by a broad humor, especially his Judas. Among the prose writers of the 17th century were S. von Pufendorf in political philosophy, Kepler (who wrote in Latin) in astronomy, and Gottfried Arnold in ecclesiastical history. Among writers on theology and ethics, Spener, the founder of Protestant pietism, takes a prominent position. In philosophy and learning Latin continued to be the sole medium of literature; and Jakob