Vr PT 91.H45 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Date Due ■^"^« i X ia|a ^ HOURS WITH German Classics BY ^. FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE FORMER PROFESSOR OF GERMAN IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY BOSTON ROBERTS BROTHERS 1886 (? Of; if I 1 1 . K2 tn^nnrRti ri Y ll.^k/'.U Y yf.^/^^^ 'VN- Copyright, 1886, By Frederic Henry Hedge. dnffieralis $tess: John Wilson and SoNj Cambridgb. TO l^is l^onoretJ JFn'enli, WILLIAM HENRY FURNESS, THE SUCCESSFUL TRANSLATOR OF GERMAN VERSE, THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED, WITH THE AUTHOR'S LOVE. EXPLANATORY NOTE. The following essays contain the substance of lec- tures delivered by the author in his official capacity as Professor of German Literature. Far from assuming to be a complete history of that literature, they aim to exhibit some of its characteristic phases as exemplified by writers who fairly represent the national genius. Want of space within the limits of the one volume to which it was judged expedient to restrict this presenta- tion, necessitated the exclusion of many writers of note in prose and in verse, — among others the great philoso- phers, Kant and his followers, who, though eminently classic, form a class by themselves. These the author has presented in former publica- tions. See " The Prose Writers of Germany," and "Atheism in Philosophy, and other Essays." F. H. H. Cambridge, May 17, 1886. Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026076491 CONTENTS. CHIPTEB PACE I. Introductory 1 II. Eldest Monuments 11 III. The Nibelungenlied 25 IV. Comparison of the Nibelungenlied with the Iliad 48 V. GuDRUN AND Other Medi^val Poems ... 56 VI. Martin Luther 65 VII. Hans Sachs and Ulrich von Hutten ... 83 Vni. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries . . 100 IX. Klopstock 121 X. Lessing 143 XI. Mendelssohn 171 XII. The Universal German Library. — Friedrich Nicolai 190 Xm. Wieland 207 XIV. Herder 228 XV. Goethe 254 XVI. Schiller 344 XVII. Jean Paul 396 XVin. The Romantic School 429 XIX. Hoffmann 474 XX. Heinbich Heine 502 INDEX 529 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTOBY. THE literature of modern Germany is a recent growth compared with the literatures of England, Italy, France, and Spain. I say modern Germany, not forgetting that mediaeval Germany led contemporary nations in epic and lyric song. The English were slow to recognize the merits of German writers when at last it was understood that Germany had writers in propria sermons and a literature of her own. The Germans were confounded with the people of Hol- land. The name " Dutch " was applied indiscriminately to the countrymen of Hermann, of the Minnesingers, of Luther, of Guttenberg, and to dwellers on the Waal and the Scheldt. The elder Disraeli, in his " Curiosities of Literature," has an essay entitled " Literary Dutch," in which he speaks of Germans and Hollanders as one and the same people, using the same language : he is not aware of any distinction between them. Vondel, a Dutchman of the sixteenth century, and Schubart, a German of the eighteenth, are adduced as illustrations of the same literature. He writes with a show of candor, but concludes that on the whole the question of Father 1 2 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. Bouhours, " Whether a German can have wit," had not been answered. And this was subsequent to the death of Lessing. It was after Wieland and Klopstock and Herder had nearly finished their labors ; after Goethe and Schiller had published things which in their own way have not been excelled. What German critic has ever betrayed such Cimmerian ignorance on any subject of which he undertook to discourse ? A writer in the " Edinburgh Review " for October, 1825, in a critical notice of Carlyle's translation of " Wilhelm Meister," after characterizing that work — which he professes to know only by translation — as " eminently absurd, puerile, incongruous, vulgar, af- fected, . . . from beginning to end one flagrant offence against every principle of taste and every just rule of composition," passes by an easy induction from the particular to the general, and pronounces the same conr demnation on the entire literature of Germany. It is all vulgar; and the reason assigned is that German writers are poor, and therefore debarred the privilege of good society, — that is, of the society of the rich. The fact being that a larger proportion of German writers than of English have been the friends of princes, and that literary genius in Germany has been better sus- tained on the whole than in England, where, if poverty makes authors vulgar. Burns should have been the most vulgar of poets; where Samuel Johnson was in the habit of subscribing himself impransus; where Spenser could testify from his own experience, — " What hell it is in suing long to bide." Three years had not elapsed after this tirade when Thomas Carlyle published in the same journal his tri- INTRODUCTORY. 3 umphant vindication of German literature, which marks an epoch in the history of English opinion on that sub- ject. The years succeeding have wrought a mighty change, not in the value of the literature whose best productions antedate that essay, but in the knowledge and appreciation of it by English and American schol- ars. A certain strangeness, which at first is always repulsive, had to be encountered and overcome before English intelligence could open itself freely to the com- munications of the German mind. Every nation that can properly be said to have a lit- erature of its own imparts to that literature something of its own character, — certain qualities due to language, race, historic development, distinguishing it from other literatures, and making it, more than any industrial activities, a true exponent of the national mind. In German literature, accordingly, we shall expect to find, and do find, along with much that is common to all modern. Western, Christian nations, some qualities pe- culiar to itself. I name as the first of these qualities a predominant idealism, a tendency to see all things in the light of ideas, to seek in all things the interior reason of their being. " When Candide," says Heine, " came to Eldo- rado, he saw some boys in the street playing with great nuggets of gold instead of stones. This extravagance led him to believe that these boys were young princes ; and he was not a little surprised when he learned that in Eldorado nuggets of gold were as plentiful as pebbles are with us, so that school-boys can play with them. Something similar happened to a friend of mine, a for- eigner, when he first began to read German books. He was amazed at the wealth of thought he found in them ; 4 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. but he soon discovered that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as nuggets of gold in Eldorado, and that the authors whom he had supposed to be the intellectual princes of the nation were mere ordinary school-boys." The familiar witticism which represents the German naturalist as undertaking to evolve the image of the camel from his interior consciousness, points to this peculiarity of the national mind, — that it works, so to speak, from within outward. Imagination predomi- nates. We are indebted to this peculiarity for that rich treasury of fairy myths and tales of the supernatural which have found such ready welcome in other lands. Motte-Pouqud's " Undine," his " Bottle-Imp," Cha- misso's " Peter Schlemihl," Tieck's " Elves," and above all Goethe's " Marchen," are flowers of fiction indigenous to German soil. Another distinguishing feature of German literature is philosophic criticism, — a province of intellectual activ- ity in which the writers of that country have taken the lead, and hold by universal consent the foremost place. Indeed, the higher criticism, as distinguished not only from verbal corrections and emendation of texts, but even from such judgments of literary merit as those of the English critics of the last century, — criticism that discerns and interprets the innermost principle of a work of art, that divines the spirit and reconstructs the life of the past,— may be said to be an original growth of the German mind. And what a change it has wrought in the intellectual life of our time ! What a dawn it has shed on theology, history, literature, art ! How differently the great masterpieces of ancient and modern time shine forth ! How different the lands and the ages show in its light! German criticism has unfolded the merit and INTRODUCTORY. 6 the meaning of Hellenic art; it has taught us to dis- tinguish between the mythic and the actual in historic records, Biblical and profane. It has enucleated the kernel from the hull, has elicited from ancient fable the secrets intrusted to its keeping, and given us in Japhetic equivalents and scientific form the eternal truths of religion divested of their Semitic envelopment. In this way Lessing, Herder, the Schlegels, Niebuhr, Bunsen, and a host of others have become the mediators of universal culture, the priests of a common humanity, which in various phases and costumes asserts its identity in every land and age. Cosmopolitan breadth of view, generous appreciation of foreign merit, I must also name as a special grace of the German mind. Conscientiously investigating and thoroughly acquainting itself with the literatures of other nations, it renders full justice to all. Nowhere have the great minds of England, Italy, France, and Spain re- ceived such thorough appreciation. And what other na^ tion boasting great wits of its own, among them some of the greatest, has so exalted as have the Germans a for- eign genius, and one of a contemporary people ? What other nation has enthroned in its Valhalla, supreme over all, a stranger god ? In Shakspeare the Germans have recognized — they first among the nations, earlier even than his own countrymen — the chief of poets. " Every literature of the world," says Carlyle, " has been culti- vated by them ; and to every literature they have studied to give due honor." While Homer and Shakspeare " occupy the loftiest station in their poetical Olympus, there is space in it for all true singers out of every age and clime. . . . Perdusi and the primeval mythologists of Hindustan live in brotherly union with the Troubadours 6 HOURS WITH GERMAN. CLASSICS. and ancient story-tellers of the West. The wayward, mystic gloom of Calderon, the lurid fire of Dante, the auroral light of Tasso, the clear icy glitter of Eacine, all are acknowledged and reverenced. . . . The Germans study foreign nations in a spirit which deserves to be imitated. ... It is their honest endeavor to understand each with its own pecuharities, and participate in what- ever worth or beauty it has brought into being. Of all literatures accordingly, the German has the best as well as the most numerous translations." This was written more than fifty years ago. Other nations since then, and notably the English, have made great strides in the same direction ; but the leadership here must be accorded to the Germans. The principal, or certainly a marked, defect in Ger- man literature is its want of rhetorical force, — of free, impressive communication in the way of direct ad- dress, whether primarily through the lips or through the pen. I speak of prose composition. Germany has produced no orators, no speeches of the pulpit or the forum, that have taken strong hold of the popular mind, — no names in this line that can be compared with those of English and French renown. It has been suggested that the absence of popular as- semblies, of an open court, and until lately of a national parliament, is the reason of this deficiency. But Ger- many has had a pulpit : why not a Savonarola, a Bossuet, a Masillon, a Taylor, a Hall ? Able preachers she has had, but — with the exception of Luther, whose rugged but clear, direct, and uninvolved sentences so strongly contrast the utterances of his later countrymen — no great pulpit orator. The ability of her preachers has con- INTRODUCTORY. 7 sisted rather in profundity of thouglit or piety of senti- ment than in forcible speech. Not German institutions, but the character of the Ger- man language, as it seems to me, is chargeable with the want of oratorical power. If it be urged on the contrary that great oratorical gifts would have moulded the lan- guage to suit the demands of effective popular address, I shall not dispute the point : I only maintain that tak- ing the language as it is, I find it ill suited to oratorical effect. For many purposes it is the best of modern dia- lects. Copious and flexible beyond any of the Latin family ; indefinitely capable of compounds hj simple ag- glutination ; expressive of nice shades of meaning and philosophical distinctions which have no exponent in English, — it forms an apt instrument of transcendental speculation. By the facility with which it yields itself to every variety of metrical form, it is equally adapted to poetic use. The charm of the female rhyme, so limited and often so dearly purchased in English, impossible in French, is the natural method of German verse. But in oratory, in direct address, where short sentences, simple construction, and sharp terminal accent are required to produce the desired effect, the German fails by reason of its polysyllabic character, its involved periods, its clumsy syntax. Here the English, with its prevalence of mono- syllables, has an immense advantage. The German sep- arates the parts of the verb, — the auxiliary from the participle ; and where a conjunction or relative pronoun comes in, it separates the nominative from the verb agreeing with it, throwing the latter to the end of the sentence, with more or less of secondary matter between. This often gives to the most emphatic word in the sen- tence a position unfavorable to the best effect. Take the 8 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. following sentence from Goethe's " Campaign in France." In English idiom it would read as follows : " During this time I often saw Marshal Broglie, and have since been glad to find the man whose figure had made so good and lasting an impression honorably mentioned in history." Literally rendered according to the order of the words in the original, it reads thus : " During this time have I the Marshal Broglie often seen, and it has me also afterward rejoiced the man whose figure a so good and lasting im- pression made had in history honorably mentioned to find." " Surely," says a writer in the Contemporary Review, " no people with a sense of the art of words would have adopted a mode of writing where sentences, a page in length, are ended by the verb." In poetry also, of the sort in which the aim is fervid utterance, English verse by its abundance of mono- syllables has capabilities which the German wants. In Byron's " Giaour " occur these lines : — " The cold in clime are cold in blood, Their love can scarce deserve the name ; But mine was like the lava flood That boils in Etna's breast of flame. 'T is true, I could not whine or sigh, — I knew but to obtain or die. I die: but first I have possessed; And come what may, I have been blest." Here, in eight consecutive lines, there are but five words which are not monosyllables, and three of the five have the accent on the last syllable. It would be im- possible to render these lines into German with the same effect of sound which they have in English. On the other hand, it would be impossible to render smoothly mto English verse, preserving the metre and rhyme of the original, some of the finest German lyrics. INTRODUCTORY. 9 The vocal properties and capabilities of the language have been underrated, I think, not only by nations whose speech is of Latin origin, but also by the English, whose language is compounded in nearly equal parts of Latin and German elements. Coleridge undertook to illustrate the phonetic inferiority of the German to the English by comparing the effect on the ear of two words, an English and a German, having the same signification, — death ; in German, Tod. This word, he argues, has a disagreeable sound on account of the loathsome animal (toad) which it suggests. A curious hibernicism ! Even if the word in question, t-o-d, were pronounced toad, as Coleridge supposes, it would not suggest a toad to those who use it, since their word for toad is quite different. But in fact the word is not pronounced toad, but toadt. Unquestionably the German is inferior to the English, as the English is to the Italian, in sonorousness. Who- ever has heard at a concert songs in the Italian and in the German, sung by the same singer, must have felt painfully the musical inferiority of the latter. The em- peror Julian declared that the singing of their popular songs by the Germans of the Rhine sounded like the crowing and cawing of birds of prey. 'T is not a so- norous language — the excess of consonants forbids ; but fine vocal effects are possible in it through the ease with which it forms compounds : e. g. Windesungestum. In Korner's " Prayer before Battle " we have the lines, — " Wie im herbstlichen Rauschen del- Blatter So im Schlachtendonnerwetter." If not orotund like languages of the Latin family, it has softer combinations of sound than any language with which I am acquainted. Take this from Goethe's poem, " Der gefangene Graf," — 10 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. " Doch -wird ein liebes Liebchen auch Der Lilie Zierde loben." Or this from Schiller's " Pilger," — " Ach kein Steg will dahin fiihren, Ach der Himmel iiber mir Will die Erde nie beriihren, Und das dort ist niemals hier." Native historians of German literature have adopted certain classifications which, so far as the purpose of these essays is concerned, are unimportant, and will not be noticed as characterizing the individual authors of whom I am to speak. The great divisions of ancient, mediaeval, or pre-Lutheran, modern and more modern ; the period of full maturity, including Goethe and Schiller and their successors, — these divisions are obvious, and justify themselves to the apprehension of other nations as well as to native Germans. But the subdivisions into what are called " schools," — the Old Silesian, and the New Silesian, the Swiss, the Saxon, the Prussian Poets' Union, the Leipziger Poets' Union, the Gottingen Circle, the Romantic School, and the Austrian School, — these, with the exception, perhaps, of the Romantic School, have little or no significance for the foreigner. They express local and accidental association rather than in- tellectual tendency or literary likeness. I shall pay no regard to these, but present in chronological or nearly chronological order, out of the mass of German writers and writings, such as have seemed to me for one or an- other reason worthy of special note. First, let us glance at some of the works which have come down to us in forms of speech now obsolete. ELDEST MONUMENTS. H CHAPTER II. ELDEST MONUMENTS. THE word " Teutoni(/" — derived from " Teutones," the name of a barbarous people who make their first appearance in his;tory in connection with the Eo- man General C. Marius, 102 B.C. — has, by a strange mischance, become a synonym for " German." It is not certain that the Teutones were a German tribe. Some authorities suppose them to have been Celts. And yet, proceeding on the former supposition, German writ- ers themselves at one time adopted the fashion of spell- ing their national designation with a t instead of d, — Teutsch instead of Deutsch. It was a mistaken ety- mology. " Deutsch " is not derived from " Teutones," but from the Gothic word " Thiuda," — a people. Hence, the adjective " Thiudisc ; " whence, in the old High-Ger- man, " Diutish (th changing into d); thence " Deutisch" contracted into " Deutsch." If certain ethnologists are right in their identification of the Goths, who figure in the third and fourth centuries of our era, with the Getae, who inhabited the western shore of the Euxine, we may reckon as the earliest known writer in German the Latin poet Ovid,i who was banished to Tomi on the Euxine in the year 8 a. d. In his letter to Carius in the Fourth Book of the " Epistolae 1 See Taylor's " Survey of German Poetry." 12 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. ex Ponto," he boasts of having written a poem in the Gothic language with Latin metre, — " Getico scripsi sermone libellum Structaque sint nobis barbara verba modis." Ovid's Gothic verses have not come down to us, but we have what is infinitely better, a work which German philologists unanimously claim as the oldest monument of German literature, — Ulfilas's Gothic version of the New Testament. Says Jacob Grimm, the most diligent investigator of the sources of German speech : — "There where, according to Thracian tradition, Haemus and Ehodope ^ were petrified into mountains, was heard the earliest German discourse preserved to us in writing. Had not Ulfilas felt in himself the impulse to express in Gothic the sacred words of the new faith, the very foundation of the his- tory of our language would have been wanting. But a small portion of his imperishable work has come down to us ; it is impossible to estimate the injury sustained by the loss of the rest. But a happy discovery in our day has enabled us to fill out a considerable gap, and from every line of the text thus preserved we derive fresh gains. No other living European language can boast a monument of equal antiquity and worth.'' Ulfilas, or Wulfilas, belonged to that portion of the Gothic race known in history as Visigoths or Westgoths. The word " Goth " is associated in common speech with all that is rude and barbarous. It is to the modern mind what " Scythian " was to the ancient. Indeed, a portion of the Goths have been supposed to be identical with the Scythians inhabiting European or old Scythia, the " Moesia Inferior " of ancient geography. We find 1 King and queen of Thrace, who, aspiring to divine honors, were turned to mountains. ELDEST MONUMENTS. 13 mention made by the ancients of a people inhabiting that country who bear the name of Getae. They are known to Herodotus, who speaks of them as a Thracian tribe, but distinguishes them as a better variety of that nation, — " &pr]iK(ov dvBpeioTaroi koI SiKaioTaroi," He speaks of " FeTai aOavaTi^ovTei," the Getae who deemed themselves immortal, — words of weight, says Grimm, " in the mouth of haughty Greeks who would look upon Thracians as barbarians." In Greek and Latin comedy, the names Getas and G-etae occur repeatedly as names of slaves. They are supposed to be names of nationali- ties applied to individuals, — in the same way that the term " Swiss " has been used to denote servants of that nation. . Greta has been affirmed to be synonymous with Goth. Grimm thinks the evidence irresistible for their identity. If his view is correct, it would follow that long antece- dent to the Christian era the Goths were known to the Greeks and Romans as a people inhabiting the countries called Moesia and Dacia, corresponding in modern geog- raphy with the province of Bulgaria. It would seem, furthermore, from the typical use of the name Getas (^Geta), in Greek and Latin comedy, that enslaved Goths in those ages, perhaps on account of their fidelity and trustworthiness, were favorite servants. On the other hand, history presents at the opening of the third century of our era an influx of Goths ^ into Central and Southern Europe from an opposite quarter, — from the Scandinavian peninsula. A portion of these invaders make incursions into Thrace, and finally estab- lish themselves in Dacia, a province ceded to them by the emperor Aurelian in the year 272. "Whether these 1 Called \>j Latin historians Gothones. 14 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. Gothones were the veritable Getae mentioned above, — moving southward and eastward again after a tempo- rary settlement in the north, and returning to the an- cient home of their race, — or a wholly distinct people, confounded with the Getae in consequence of the iden- tity of their location, is a question on which authorities differ. Certain it is that the Visigoths are found estab- lished in Dacia and Moesia toward the close of the third century. The more powerful kingdom of the Ostrogoths lay to the north and the east of them on the banks of the Borysthenes, now the Dnieper. That the Goths were Germans, a branch of the great Germanic stock, is univer- sally conceded. Their language proves it ; it is evidently one of the cognates of modern German speech. Ulfilas was a Visigoth, a native of Moesia ; hence called Moeso-Goth. Philostorgius claims for him a Cappado- cian ancestry. Himself a Cappadocian, the historian perhaps desired for his people the reflected glory of a writer so eminent in the annals of the Church. There is, however, nothing improbable in the assertion. The Goths, among other predatory excursions in Asia Minor, are quite likely to have invaded Cappadocia, and to have taken captive some of the natives. Philostorgius asserts that among these captives were ecclesiastics who con- verted some of their captors, and that one of these was an ancestor of Ulfilas. It is recorded that a Gothic bishop named Theophi- lus attended the Council of Nicaea, where he signed the Orthodox creed, nearly half a century before Ulfilas ap- pears upon the stage. The latter may have been the descendant of a Cappadocian captive, but was unques- tionably of Gothic birth. The family name Wolfel, of which Ulfilas is the latinization, is certainly German. ELDEST MONUMENTS. 15 It was not until near the middle of this century that the learned world had any authentic knowledge of the history of this remarkable man. The way in which that knowledge was obtained is very curious, — one of the instances so common in our time of the unexpected recovery of long-buried literary treasures. A German professor, by the name of Waitz, in 1840 found in the library of Paris a manuscript of the fourth century, con- taining the strictures of an Arian bishop, Maximinus, on the Council of Aquileja (381). In this manuscript is inserted a life of Ulfilas, by the bishop Auxentius of Dorostorius, who, when a child, had been committed by his parents to the care of Ulfilas for instruction in the sacred Scriptures. Before this discovery, all that was known of him was that he was a Gothic bishop who translated the Bible into his native tongue. From the manuscript of Maximinus we learn that he was born in 311, was consecrated bishop in 341, and died during a visit to Constantinople in 388, greatly honored and deeply lamented by his people. He translated into his native Gothic, it is said, the whole Bible, with the excep- tion of the books of Samuel and of Kings. These he omitted on account of the frequent fighting recorded in them. His Goths were already quite too fond of that sort of thing ; the encouragement of Biblical precedent might stimulate injuriously their native proclivities. He is also, but erroneously, said to have invented an alphabet for his work. It is an interesting circumstance that this Gothic ver- sion of the Scriptures was nearly contemporary with the preparation of that Latin one which, under the name of the " Vulgate," was for a thousand years the only au- thorized Bible of Western Christendom, and is still the 16 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. Bible par excellence of the Romish Church. Saint Jerome, at work upon this Latin version in his cell at Bethlehem in 403 A. D., was surprised by a letter from two Goths, requesting light on certain discrepancies which they had noticed between the Latin and the Alexandrian versions of the Psalms. " Who would believe," he said, " that the barbarous tongue of the Goths would be inquiring about the true sense of the Hebrew original ; and that while the Greeks were sleeping, or contemptuous, Germany would be investigating the words of the Holy Spirit ? " ^ The work of Ulfilas was held in high estimation for several centuries by descendants of the Goths in Italy and Spain. As late as the seventh century the language in which it is written was still understood if not spoken. Then it passed out of sight, and all that was known about it, or its author, was the assertion of Greek eccle- siastical historians, — that there was once a bishop of the Goths who had translated the Bible into their vernacular. Six hundred years went by before, toward the close of the sixteenth century, one Arnold Mercator, an offi- cer in the service of the Hessian Landgrave, William lY., reported the discovery in the Abbey of Werden of a German translation of the Gospels written on parchment. This precious manuscript afterward found its way to Prague, and when the Swedes took Prague in the Thirty Years' War, was seized and transferred to Stockholm. Thence, for reasons and by means un- known to me, it travelled to Holland. There it was pur- chased by the Swedish chancellor. Count de la Gardie, 1 Quis crederet ut barbara Getarum lingua Hebraicam quaereret veri- tatem, et dormitantibus, immo contemnentibus Graecis, ipsa Germania Spiritus Sancti eloquia scrutaretur 1 ELDEST MONUMENTS. \1 and presented to the University of TJpsala in 1669, where it remains to tlais day. It is inscribed, partly in silver and partly in gold letters, on a purple ground, and is bound in solid silver ; hence called codex argen- teus. It had originally three hundred and thirty leaves, of which only one hundred and seventy-seven remain. It gives the Gospels in a different order from that with which we ai'e familiar, — namely, Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark. This manuscript, dating from the close of the fifth century, when the Ostrogoths had possession of Italy, is the only original one known to be extant which contains any portion of Ulfilas's version. There are five or six others containing small fragments, but these are copies of a later date. The entire version is nowhere preserved ; of the Old Testament, only por- tions of Ezra and Nehemiah. In a scientific view the value of these fragments, mea- gre as they are, is immense. The enthusiasm of the philologer has not overrated their import. Without them the knowledge of the oldest branch of German speech would be wanting. The piety of the Visigoth (a name which stands as a synonym for barbarism) has fur- nished to the science of language — a science of wholly modern growth — a more important contribution than all the scholars of his time. Little did the good bishop, toiling for his wild flock to tame their savageness and to give them those milder manners with which Saint Chry- sostom credits them in a sermon still extant, and which he applauds as the fruit of Christian teaching, — little did he dream that a fragment of his work, enshrined in silver, at the distance of fourteen hundred years, would gladden the heart of a plodding Grelehrte and stimulate a new branch of human learning. 2 18 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. This is not the only instance in which religion has rendered such aid to science. To the sacred books of the Hindus we are indebted for the preservation of the earliest form of that widespread family of languages from which our own, and those of the greater portion of Eu- rope, are derived. To Christian missionaries we are in- debted for our best knowledge of China and the written wisdom of that alien race. And, to cite an example nearer home, an American apostle in the middle of the seventeenth century performed a task in character and purpose the same with that of Ulfilas, but incomparably more difficult. The Goth translated the Bible from a language the acquisition of which was facilitated by all the means and appliances which a civilized dialect with a literature of its own supplies to the learner, into his own familiar tongue. John Eliot turned the same scrip- tures into a foreign, unwritten, undeveloped language, of which he had known not a word until nearly his fiftieth year, — a language with words of such portentous length, that Cotton Mather said they must have been growing ever since the Tower of Babel; a language having no affinity with any dialect of civilized man. The world's libraries contain no work more brave in its conception, more wonderful in its execution, than Eliot's Indian Bible. The seventeenth century witnessed no feat more arduous than the making of that book. Curiously enough, it was the first Bible ever printed on this continent, the printing of English Bibles being then a monopoly of the British crown. The race who used the language in which it was written has long since passed from the earth. The language is extinct ; this Bible with its accompanying grammar is its only remain- ing monument. Probably there lives not the man who ELDEST MONUMENTS. 19 can read it without the aid of a translation. But there it is, an imperishable witness of holy zeal and indomita- ble patience. The end for which piety designed it, — the edification of future generations of Mohicans, — has failed through the failure, undreamed of by Eliot, of the race for whom he toiled ; but like the work of the Visigoth it subserves another end, which its author did not intend, and could hardly have foreseen. As an aid to compara- tive philology, as a guide to the knowledge of the lan- guages of the aborigines of North America, and through them, it may be, of other dialects of other savage tribes, it renders a service to the cause of science for which the learned in all generations should bless that good man's name. This, then, is our present interest in the work of Ulfilas, this the claim which these hardly-preserved fragments have on our regard ; they reveal to us, if not the fountain head, for which we must look beyond the Himalaya, yet one of the earliest tributaries of German speech. And now, to show how much of modern German there is in that old Gothic dialect, here is Ulfilas' rendering of the best-known portion of the New Testament, the Lord's Prayer : — Atta unsar pu in himinam, Veinai namo pein. Quimai pn- dinassus peins. Vairpai vilja peins, sve in himina jah ana airpai. Hlaif unserana pana sinteinam gif uns himma daga. Jah aflet uns patei skulans sijaima svasve jah veis afletam paim skulam unseraim. Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausei uns af pamma ubilin ; unte peina ist pudangardi jah mats, jah vulpus, in awans. Amen. Although the Gothic is the oldest form of German speech of which any monuments survive, it would be in- 20 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. correct to say that modern German is derived originally from the Gothic; both are descended from an earlier tongue, of which no monuments remain. The Scandi- navian dialects — the High German, the Low German with its branches, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Dutch and Platt- deutsch (German patois) and the Frisian — are offspring of the same stock. The more immediate antecedents of the German of to-day are Old High-German, Middle High-German, Low German, and Saxon, a branch of Low German. Of the Old High-German we have a trans- lation and exposition of the Lord's Prayer by an un- known author, near the beginning of the ninth century. The original is in the Royal Library at Munich. A comparison of this with the version of Ulfilas will show how truly the Gothic may claim to be German, and how little progress was made in the development of the lan- guage during the space of four hundred years. Here is the first clause : — Fater unser der ist In himilom, Kaeuaihit uuerde din namo. In Low German (one of the sources of modern Ger- man), or partly in that dialect, is an old heroic poem of the eighth century, of which a fragment has come down to us with the title " Hildebrand and Hadubrand." The story which furnished the material of the poem is as follows : — Hildebrand, an Ostrogoth, had fled with Dietrich of Bern (Theodoric) before the arms of Odoacer from Italy to the Huns, leaving behind him a wife and an infant son. After an interval of thirty years, during which his enemies, with Odoacer at their head, had been slain in battle, he returns to his native land. Meanwhile his son Hadubrand had grown to be a powerful warrior. ELDEST MONUMENTS. 21 And now, with an accompaniment of armed men, he marches to the border to oppose the entrance of Hilde- brand with his followers, whom he takes for enemies. Not knowing him to be his father, he challenges him to single combat. Hildebrand knows his son, and endea- vors to dissuade him from the duel. He tells his story, which Hadubrand discredits, insisting that his father is dead, — for so it had been reported by seafaring men who came over the Wendelsee (the Mediterranean). Hilde- brand takes from his arm the golden bracelet, the most esteemed ornament of a German warrior, and offers it to propitiate his son. The younger hero disdains the gift, which he boasts he will win with his sword. " Thou art a Hun ; " he says, " a cunning Hun ; thou wishest to mislead in order to slay me." " Woe ! " cries Hilde- brand, "now is the day of my calamity come; thirty winters and thirty summers I have roamed an exile, and now will my beloved child hew me with the sword or compel me to be his murderer ! Nevertheless, the most cowardly were he of the men of the eastland [the Ostro- goths] who would keep thee from the conflict since thy heart desires it." Then father and son first hurled at each other their lances of ash, and afterward closed with each other in hand-to-hand conflict, and smote with grim strokes each other's white shields, until the edges thereof were hacked in pieces by the blows of their swords. Here, provokingly, this ancient fragment — which, bound in vellum, is still preserved in the library of Cas- sel — ends. But fortunately, for the satisfaction of our curiosity, the sequel has come down to us by another way. After an interval of seven hundred years, during which this remarkable lay may be supposed to have lived an oral life in popular song, its substance, toward the 22 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. close of the fifteenth century, was embodied in a new poem, entitled " The Father with the Son," by one Kaspar von der Roen. There we learn that the sexa- genarian sire was victor in that unnatural combat. Hadubrand being vanquished, acknowledges Hildebrand for his father, and leads him home to his mother, who is greatly surprised to see the old man, supposed to be dead, led by the hand of her son, and placed at the head of the table. Then Hadubrand discloses to her that the stranger is her husband ; and Hildebrand drops, as a token, his golden ring into the cup of his beloved wife. It is interesting to know that for what remains of the elder poem we are indebted to the literary taste of two monks in the monastery of Pulda. These worthy friars, who found, no doubt, their monastic life hang heavy on their hands, for want of something better to do in the intervals of prayer, engrossed this lay which may have been familiar to them from their earlier secular experi- ence : the one by turns dictating, the other writing on the only material afforded them, — the blank spaces of a prayer-book, of whose devout breathings the author, it is likely, would not have approved as a fit accompani- ment, — these secular and partly heathenish heroics. The verses of this poem are without rhyme, and with- out even the alliteration which meets us somewhat later as a prominent characteristic of medieeval poetry. They lack, of course, the exact measure of the Greeks and Latins, differing in that so widely from modern verse. Still there is a rhythm, an appreciable rhythm, but no metre. The rhythmical effect is produced by an arm, or lift, which marks the beginning of a verse, and is once or twice repeated, thus distinguishing poetic diction from chance-accented, irregular prose. ELDEST MONUMENTS. 23 There survives in the Low-German dialect a confession of faith and a form of renunciation of the Devil ordered by a council of the Church called by Charles Martel in the eighth century, in which we discern a somewhat nearer approximation to the German, and also to the English of our day. To the same period belongs, moreover, a celebrated poem of which the original is lost, and only a Latin version dating from the earlier years of the tenth century survives. It relates the story of Walter of Aqui- taine, his encounter with Giinther, king of the Burgun- dians, and his twelve champions in a narrow pass of the Vosges. They seek to wrest from him the rich treasures which he brought from the Huns, and his betrothed Hildegard whom he had rescued from the hands of Attila. Walter fights these warriors, one after another, in. single combat, and, though he loses his right hand in the conflict, overcomes them all, secures his treasures and his bride, reaches his native land, where his nuptials are celebrated with royal festivity, succeeds his father on the throne, and reigns in Aquitania thirty years, a just and beneficent sovereign. If we may trust the enthusiasm of certain philo-German antiquaries, the description of those successive duels, each with differ- ent accompaniments and fresh characterization, exceeds everything of later interest in that line, and is not sur- passed by Homer himself. Enthusiasm is not always a trustworthy critic ; still, one can see that the stuff is good, and the situation well chosen. Of other writings in the rude German of those distant years, I will only mention the great Saxon epic of the ninth century, — the " Heliand," or " History of Christ," which Vilmar pronounces the most perfect and sublime work that the Christian muse in any age or nation has 24 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. produced ; the only real Christian epos, and, apart from its Christian contents, one of the most glorious of poetic creations. I confess a mistrust of the eulogy which throws Dante and Milton into the shade. No one as yet, so far as I know, has thought it worth the while to translate this vaunted masterpiece into modern German, or into any modern language ; and the specimen given by the critic whom I have named does not seem to me to justify his encomium. Within less than half a century after the composition of the " Heliand " by an unknown author or authors, — a work which waited six centuries for a publisher, — one Otfrid in Alsace, a Dominican friar, handled the same subject less impressively but more artistically in a poem which is chiefly remarkable as the earliest German poem in rhyme, and as furnishing a model for that kind of verse in later ages. Of these and other contemporary writings I care not to speak at length, but pass at once over an interval of more than three centuries to the period of the full efflorescence of ancient German classic poetry, — the period of the Nibelungen and the Minnesingers. THE NIBELUNGENLIED. 25 CHAPTER m. THE NIBELUNGENLIED, THE Nibelungenlied, like the Iliad, is an epic in the strictest sense of the term, — a people's epos as distinguished from the epopee, a word implying artistic creation. In a loose way we call Virgil's Aeneid an epic ; also Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and even Milton's Parar dise Lost. But criticism notes a difference in kind be- tween these masterpieces of poetic art and the Iliad. Virgil proposes to himself a narrative poem, of which Aeneas shall be the hero ; which shall consist of so many books, and in which such and such characters and inci- dents shall be embodied. The idea governs and moulds the stuff ; it is a work of art. Tasso plans a Christian poem, to glorify Christian manhood, and finds his ma- terials in the first crusade. Milton finds his material outside the actual world, and constructs a poem whose characters are ideas. Obviously the Iliad was gener- ated in no such way. Here was no forecasting, no cun- ning invention, no fabrication, but simply an arranging by some unknown hand of existing materials ; a telling of stories that were current, in such sequence as to form a connected whole. The poem throughout is pure narra- tive ; a presentation of persons and events with no ac- companying reflections or ulterior design ; the author's personality nowhere appears, and Homer is only a name 26 HOURS WITH GERMAN CLASSICS. for the unity of the compositions to which it is assigned, — a name which throws no light on their origin ; it is the name of an aoiho<;, not a iroiriTrj