[MA-WS-125]
ARE THERE “GERMAN CLASSICS”?—Sainte-Beuve observes...
ARE THERE “GERMAN CLASSICS”?—Sainte-Beuve observes somewhere that the word “classic” does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For instance, nobody could talk seriously of “German classics.”—What do our German publishers, who are about to add fifty more to the fifty German classics we are told to accept, say to that? Does it not almost seem as if one need only have been dead for the last thirty years, and lie a lawful prey to the public, in order to hear suddenly and unexpectedly the trumpet of resurrection as a “Classic”? And this in an age and a nation where at least five out of the six great fathers of its literature are undoubtedly antiquated or becoming antiquated—without there being any need for the age or the nation to be ashamed of this. For those writers have given way before the strength of our time—let that be considered in all fairness!—Goethe, as I have indicated, I do not include. He belongs to a higher species than “national literatures”: hence life, revival, and decay do not enter into the reckoning in his relations with his countrymen. He lived and now lives but for the few; for the majority he is nothing but a flourish of vanity which is trumpeted from time to time across the border into foreign ears. Goethe, not merely a great and good man, but a culture, is in German history an interlude without a sequel. Who, for instance, would be able to point to any trace of Goethe’s influence in German politics of the last seventy years (whereas the influence, certainly of Schiller, and perhaps of Lessing, can be traced in the political world)? But what of those five others? Klopstock, in a most honourable way, became out of date even in his own lifetime, and so completely that the meditative book of his later years, The Republic of Learning, has never been taken seriously from that day to this. Herder’s misfortune was that his writings were always either new or antiquated. Thus for stronger and more subtle minds (like Lichtenberg) even Herder’s masterpiece, his Ideas for the History of Mankind, was in a way antiquated at the very moment of its appearance. Wieland, who lived to the full and made others live likewise, was clever enough to anticipate by death the waning of his influence. Lessing, perhaps, still lives to-day—but among a young and ever younger band of scholars. Schiller has fallen from the hands of young men into those of boys, of all German boys. It is a well-known sign of obsolescence when a book descends to people of less and less mature age.—Well, what is it that has thrust these five into the background, so that well-educated men of affairs no longer read them? A better taste, a riper knowledge, a higher reverence for the real and the true: in other words, the very virtues which these five (and ten or twenty others of lesser repute) first re-planted in Germany, and which now, like a mighty forest, cast over their graves not only the shadow of awe, but something of the shadow of oblivion.—But classical writers are not planters of intellectual and literary virtues. They bring those virtues to perfection and are their highest luminous peaks, and being brighter, freer, and purer than all that surrounds them, they remain shining above the nations when the nations themselves perish. There may come an elevated stage of humanity, in which the Europe of the peoples is a dark, forgotten thing, but Europe lives on in thirty books, very old but never antiquated—in the classics.