The traditional material of literary compositions is, however, also a conservative power, just as are language and form.  The stock of dominating motives naturally undergoes just as many transformations as language or metrics; but, in both cases, what already exists has a determining influence on everything new, often going so far as to suppress the latter entirely.  Customary themes preferably claim the interest of the reader; as, for example, in the age of religious pictures it would have been exceedingly hard to procure an order for a purely worldly painting.  The artists themselves unconsciously glide into the usual path, and what was intended to be a world-poem flows off into the convenient worn channel of the love-story.  But the vivifying and deepening power of the Germanic spirit has here, more than in any other domain, destroyed the opposing force of inertia.

The oldest poetry is confined to such subjects as are of universal interest—­one could also say of universal importance.  War and the harvest, the festivals of the gods and the destinies of the tribe, are the subjects of song.  These things retain their traditional interest even where a healthy communal life no longer exists.  Epochs which are absolutely wanting in political understanding still cultivate the glory of Brutus in an epic or dramatic form; or those ages which can scarcely lay claim to a living religious interest still join in choruses in honor of Apollo or in honor of the Christian religion.  Every literature carries with it a large and respectable ballast of sensations that are no longer felt, of objects that are no longer seen, culminating in the spring-songs of poets confined to their room, and the wine-songs of the water-drinkers.  A stagnating literature, as that of the seventeenth century was essentially, always has an especially large amount of such rubbish.  Poems composed for certain occasions, in the worst sense—­that is to say, poems of congratulation and condolence written for money, trivial reflections and mechanical devotion, occupy an alarmingly large space in the lyric of this period.  Drama is entirely confined, and the novel for the greater part, to the dressing up in adopted forms of didactic subject matter of the most general type.  Men of individuality are, however, not altogether lacking:  such were lyric poets like Andreas Gryphius and Paul Fleming, gnomologists like Johann Scheffler, and narrators like J.J.  Christoffel von Grimmelshausen; but even with them the personal note does not dare to sound openly.  The first to give free expression again to intimate sensations is Christian Guenther, and he arouses thereby contradiction, together with admiration.  The court poets about the year 1700 work more in a negative way, i. e., by that which they did not express in their verses.  The great merit of the pre-classical writers is to have created space, on the one hand, for personal sensations, and, on the other, for the great new thoughts of the age.