merely wished to do—­or seemed to wish—­and brought literature into close touch with life. The Sorrows of Werther lays hold of the subjective problems of the age just as the drama of liberty lays hold of the objective; in them a typical character of the times is analyzed not without zealously making use of models—­both innovations of Wieland!  But now indeed comes the most important of all, that which in its greatness represents something completely new, although in detail Goethe had here all his teachers to teach him—­Lessing who had written Faust-scenes, and Wieland who was so fond of placing the two souls of man side by side, and Herder who had an absolutely Faust-like nature; so that people have tried, with the exaggeration of the theorist, to hold up before us the whole Faust as a kind of dramatized portrayal of Herder!  And with Faust Goethe in German literature has reached his own time—­“For his century bears his name!”

But in the period which followed the predominating position of the classical writers we once more find the same parallelism of development.  Again with Goethe’s dilettante beginnings we compare a school of weak imitators, which unhappily was protected by Goethe himself (and also by Schiller in his literary organs); again with the Strassburg period and its Storm and Stress we compare Romanticism, which is characterized by its German nationalism and its antique tendencies, which is sentimental and philosophical, critical and programmatical like the time of Goetz, which latter surely must have had a strong effect on men like Tieck and Arnim.  And out of the sentiment for his country, which, in Goethe’s whole literary career, is peculiar only to the poetry of the Strassburg period, tendencies develop like those which manifest themselves in the literature of the Wars of Liberation, of the Swabian School, in the older poetry of political conflict—­in short, like all those tendencies which we connect with Ludwig Uhland’s name.

Goethe’s literary satires and poems for special occasions are a prelude to the purely literary existence and the belligerent spirit of men like Platen and Immermann, who both, as it were by accident, found their way into the open of national poesy.  The self-absorption in Werther, the delving after new poetical experiences and mediums of expression; the method of expression hovering between form and illusory improvisation—­all this we find again in the strongest individualists, in Heine, in Annette von Droste, in Lenau.  The Weimar period, however, when the poet by means of a great and severe self-discipline trains himself to the point of rigidity in order to become the instrument of his art—­that period is, with Tasso, paving the way for the school of Grillparzer, while that infinite deepening of the poetic calling is a preparation for Otto Ludwig, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Hebbel.  The contemporary novel in the style of Wilhelm Meister is revived