Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in German letters was the “small, badly printed anonymous book” entitled “Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blaetter” ("Some Loose Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained essays by Justus Moeser, who “upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as a vanished ideal”; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who “celebrated the merits of popular song, advocated a collection of the German Volkslieder, extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a German Shakspere”; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and “asserted that art, to be true, must be characteristic.  The reform, or revolution, which this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and with a friendly attitude toward England. . .  This great movement was, in fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from a priori notions[11] to history, from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius.  Goethe’s ‘Goetz’ was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much attention, but the ‘Fly-sheets on German Style and Art’ preceded the publication of ‘Goetz,’ as a kind of programme or manifesto.”  Even Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate talent but shallow genius, the representative of the Aufklaerung (Eclaircissement, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride ins alte romantische Land.  He availed himself of the new “Library of Romance” which Count Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his vocabulary from Old German sources.  He poetized popular fairy tales, chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as “Gandalin” and “Geron der Adeliche” ("Gyron le Courteois").  But his best and best-known work in this temper was “Oberon” (1780) a rich composite of materials from Chaucer, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and the French romance of “Huon of Bordeaux."[12]

From this outline—­necessarily very imperfect and largely at second hand—­of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English most of the way.  In both countries the reaction was against the Aufklaerung, i.e., against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire.  In opposition to this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superstitions; to believe, at all hazards, not only in God and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches.