Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/143



twelve months before the birth of Goethe, a Leipzig professor of logic spurred on his countrymen to the cultivation of their native tongue, in preference to Latin and French, by publishing a German grammar of a comprehensive kind. This professor was the once-admired, now only celebrated, Gottsched. Pedant as he seems to have been, his service to German literature, in the instance of the grammar, deserves to be had in remembrance. To write in the dialect of Vaterland became the order of the day. But Germany's hour was not yet come. Authors, indeed, sprang up and multiplied, till it seemed as though heaven, pitying the indigence of earth, out of the very stones was making bread: certainly, if you asked for bread in those days, you were likely to get a stone, and one without much price or polish. Pigmies aped the mien and gesture of Titans. A feeble folk affectedAborigines of Lilliput mimicked the strut and swagger of Brobdignag. All was imitation; and when a spruce writer succeeded in reminding his readers of the ancient master whom he copied, he was forthwith honoured with his master's title, and worshipped, if not with the latria due to the original, at least with a doulia of almost equivalent intensity. Father Gleim scribbled songs and poemetti. which incontinently secured for him all homage as the German Anacreon. Gessner penned languid idyls, and became the German Theocritus. Ramler struck a Berlin lyre, with old-world graces, and muses, and deities, for his theme; and hence the German Horace. Chancellor Kramer, again, was lyrical to the extent of three volumes octavo;and, lo! the German Pindar. Klopstock bears the bell—sonorous and monotonous in its music—in the shape of an epic, still known to all, still quoted by some, still read (or dipped into) by a few; and to him was ceded the glory of the German Homer—a glory since merged in that of being a very German Milton. These were the days in which was cast the lot of Lessing, who became a light shining in a dark place—an earnest of good things to come. He stands out from among his contemporaries—always excepting Kant, Klopstock, and one or two others—like a man among a crowd of tailors: assuming, that is, the fractional theory of a tailor's manhood to be correct.

As it was an age of imitation, the ranks of authorship naturally looked in various and opposing directions for standards of composition. Hence