[Illustration:  Johann Jakob Bodmer]

Klopstock, Wieland, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller—­those were the great names that were soon to shine like stars in the literary firmament.  But the lesser men who broke the ground and opened paths for their brilliant followers are almost forgotten.

Toward the middle of the century, there lived in Zuerich a modest professor of history, Johann Jakob Bodmer by name (born July 19th, 1698), who spoke the first word for a national literature, and who was the first writer to attempt a scientific criticism of contemporary authors.  His efforts were rude beginnings of a style that culminated in the polished essays of Lessing.  It was Bodmer whose independence of thought and feeling first revolted from the slavish imitation of French culture that enchained the German mind.  In his youth he had been sent to Italy to study commerce.  This visit aroused his poetic and artistic nature.  He forgot his business in listening to street singers, in imitation of whom he wrote Italian lyrics.  He read French works on art, and wrote artificial French verses according to French models.  With equal versatility he composed German poetry, copying Opitz, whom he esteemed a great poet.  Nor did he hesitate to try his skill at Latin hexameters.

By chance a copy of Addison’s Spectator fell into his hands.  He turned at once from French and Italian culture to admire English classics.  The first German to appreciate Milton and Shakespeare (the latter he called the English Sophocles), he never wavered in his devotion to the English school.  With his faithful friend, Johann Jakob Breitinger, a conscientious scholar, he started in Zuerich a critical weekly paper on the plan of the Spectator.  It was called Discoursen der Mahlern (Discourses of the Painters), and its essays embody the first literary effort of the Swiss as a nation.  A little weekly coterie soon gathered about Bodmer to discuss the conduct of the paper; but much of the spirit and enthusiasm of these councils evaporated in print, the journal being subjected to a rigid censorship.  Not alone art and literature came under discussion, but social subjects.  All contributions were signed with the names of famous painters, and dealt with mistakes in education, the evils of card-playing, the duties of friendship, love and matrimony, logic, morality, pedantry, imagination, self-consciousness, and the fear of death.  These discourses were chiefly written by Bodmer and his colleague Breitinger.  The earlier papers, awkwardly expressed, often in Swiss dialect, masqueraded as the work of Holbein, Duerer, Raphael, or Michael Angelo.  Although intended at first for Swiss readers only, the little weekly soon captured a German public.  Its purpose was to kindle the imagination, and to suggest a parallel between the art of painting and the art of literature.  Bodmer only dimly outlined what an infinitely greater mind defined with unerring precision some twenty years later in the ‘Laocoon.’  But the service of the older man to literature is not therefore to be undervalued.  Bodmer created the function of analytic and psychological criticism in Germany.  Hitherto no writer had been called to account for any literary offense whatever.  Bodmer maintained that the man who demanded a hearing from the public must show good cause for this demand.