Hagedorn, with the elegant frivolity of the man of the world, continued the necessary sifting of antiquated material; Albrecht von Haller, with the deep seriousness of the great student of nature, once more squarely faced the eternal problems.  But the entire wealth of inner experience, in its most exclusively individual sense, was first revealed, not only to the literature of Germany but to modern literature in general, by Klopstock.  Along this path Goethe pressed forward gloriously, his whole poetic work presenting, according to his own testimony, a single great confession.  From Haller, on the contrary, proceeds the effort to develop a poetical style that would enable individuals to share in the great thoughts of the age.  Lessing strides onward from Minna von Barnhelm—­the first drama of contemporary history since the Persians of AEschylus—­to Nathan the Wise, herein following the lead of the “literature with a distinct purpose” (Tendenz-Dichtung) of France, and especially of Voltaire, otherwise antipathetic to Lessing.  Lessing’s great dramatic heir is Schiller, whose tradition is in turn carried on by Kleist, the latter allowing his personality to penetrate the subject matter far more even than either of his predecessors.

But the utmost was done by Goethe, when in Werther and Goetz, in Prometheus or Satyros, but above all eventually in Faust, he lived through in advance—­or, as he himself said, he “anticipated” (vorfuehlte)—­the peculiar experience of the age with such intensity that, in the work which resulted, the individual experience became the direct experience of the whole generation.

Out of the “reverence for nature” (Naturfroemmigkeit) with which he contemplated all created things—­from “the Cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which grows on the wall,” from the mighty movement of the stream in Mahomet to the bit of cheese that is weighed by the old woman in Die Geschwister—­out of all comes a widening of the poetic horizon, the like of which had never before been seen in any age.  The Romanticists in reality only made a watchword out of this practice of Goethe’s when they demanded “progressive universal poetry,” by which they meant that the poet should live through the whole experience of creation in his own person.  In demanding this, they—­as the aging Goethe had himself done—­formed too narrow a conception of the personal, and rejected too absolutely the problems of politics and of science, so that once more a narrowing process ensued.  But even in their own ranks this tendency was offset by the exigency of the times; after the wars of liberation, political and in general, poetry written with a purpose was actually in the ascendency.  The poetry of the mood, like that of a Moerike, remained for a long time almost unknown on account of its strictly intimate character.  In the success of Ernst von Wildenbruch we see provisionally the last victory of this sort of literature—­which directly proclaims what is worth striving for—­at least in its loftier form.  For the contemporary novel constantly takes for its subject the emancipation of woman, or the fight for culture, the protection of the Ostmark, or the fight against alcohol.