LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 327 



by way of Schiller, but rather from Lessing and Winckelmann by 

 way of Herder. For though Goethe was profoundly influenced by 

 Schiller's interpretation of Kant's doctrine of the harmony of the 

 moral and the natural orders in the realm of the aesthetic, he was 

 rather confirmed in the course of his own development than con- 

 verted to any alien way of thinking. As to his utterances on poetics, 

 while his Deutsche Baukunst (1773), his contributions to Die Horen 

 (1795-96), and his Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1798), are in 

 general restricted to the plastic arts, the conclusions there reached 

 concerning the characteristic (typical or significant) and the individ- 

 ual apply as well to music as to poetry. It is in his Conversations, in 

 his Letters, his Wahrheit und Dichtung, his Spriiche, and occasional 

 poems, that the course of his theory and its relation to details are 

 especially to be sought. Schiller's service to poetics is performed in 

 his Brief e uber die JEsthetische Erziehung der Menschheit, Anmuth und 

 Wiirde, and Ueber naive und sentimentale Dichtung (1795-96). His 

 ordering of the aesthetic feelings, his theory of the play-impulse, his 

 contrast between the poetry of simplicity and that of reflection, 

 while they derive in one way or another from Lessing, Winckelmann, 

 and Kant, possess the color and vitality of their poetic exponent. 



The theories of Schiller and Goethe, enriched by reciprocal sug- 

 gestion and criticism, have a direct bearing not only upon the poetics 

 of the philosophers who succeeded them, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, 

 but upon the poetry of Germany, and indirectly (through Coleridge, 

 Wordsworth, Herbert Spencer, Arnold, and Ruskin) upon the poetics 

 and the poetry of England. Since the appearance of Schiller's Ueber 

 naive und sentimentale Dichtung and Goethe's Deutsche Baukunst, 

 the dogmatic strife between ancient and modern poetics has given 

 place to an inquiry into the development of the aesthetic conscious- 

 ness and its relation to the history of artistic creation. 



The part of Herder in this movement toward a broader correlation 

 of literature and art, especially in the way of developing the genetic or 

 historical idea, cannot be overestimated. His writings abound in 

 suggestions of laws of literary growth, as might be expected in the 

 case of one in whom the historical sense was so highly developed, 

 who was indeed the pioneer, though under the influence of Rousseau, 

 of the doctrine of evolution. He carried the idea into "the regions 

 of poetry, art, religion, and finally into human culture as a whole. 

 ... By his work on language, Ueber den Ur sprung der Sprache, he 

 may be said to have laid the first rude foundations of the science 

 of comparative philology and that deeper science of the ultimate 

 nature and origin of language." As for the field of poetics, in 1768 

 he called for a scientist who should do what Winckelmann had 

 done for classical art. And he himself helped in no insignificant 

 way to found the historical or comparative science of literature. 



