Klopstock probably felt most directly what was wanting in the literature of his people, as he was also the most burning patriot of all our classical writers; and at the same time, as is proved by the Republic of Letters, his strange treatise on the art of poetry, he was the one among them who bore the most resemblance to the literary pedant of the old days.  He is, therefore, continually occupied with the comparison between German and foreign art, language, and literature, which endeavor was continued later on and with other methods by A.W.  Schlegel.  But Herder also, in his comparison of the native art of Germany with the art of antiquity, of the Orient and of England, produced effective results; no less did Lessing, although the latter seeks to learn from the faults of his neighbors rather than from their excellencies.  Goethe’s criticism is dominated to such a degree by his absorption in the antique, and also in French and English general literature, that he has no understanding of national peculiarities when they do not conform to typical literary phenomena, as Uhland’s lyric and Kleist’s drama—­two literary phenomena which we, nowadays, consider eminently national.  The Romantic school was the first to try to place the conception of national literature as a whole on an autochthonous basis, and the scientific speculation to which Romanticism gave rise, has, since the Brothers Grimm, also resulted in serviceable rules gained from the increasingly thorough knowledge of language, of national development, and of social conditions.  This new point of view reaches its climax in the attempts of Karl Muellenhoff and Wilhelm Scherer to trace the native literary development directly back to the nature and destiny of the German nation.  But even as that proved scientifically unsuccessful, so likewise it was not feasible practically to establish a poetry confined to native materials, forms, and opinions.  In vain did Tieck try to play off the youthful Goethe, as the only national one, against the Goethe of the Weimar period, which attempt many after him have repeated; or again, it was proposed to strike Heine out of the history of our literature as un-German—­the last two literary events of European significance in Germany, according to Nietzsche.  On the contrary, a comparison of German literature with those of foreign nations was not only necessary but also fruitful, as a certain exhaustion had set in, which lent an aftermath character to the leaders of the German “intellectual poetry” (Bildungs-Poesie) of that time.  It was necessary once again to compare our technique, our relationship between the poet and the people, our participation in all the various literary genres and problems, with the corresponding phenomena in the countries of Zola, Bjoernson, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Strindberg.