328 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



which is even now reaping the fruition of the long labors of the 

 nineteenth century. 



To the dawning period of romantic poetry and poetics, Jean Paul 

 Richter also rendered service. His contribution proceeded from a 

 combination of idealism and naturalism, the latter an outgrowth of 

 his unaffected love of beauty, color, and radiance in the real world. 

 His Vorschule der dEsthetik appeared in 1804, the year after Herder's 

 death. 



The period of reconstruction reached its climax during the decade 

 1790-1800. The theory and history of art had advanced in content 

 from the formal to the significant; and in method from the pro- 

 vincial and traditional to the inductive. Poetics and literary criticism 

 had abandoned in theory the particular judgment for the universal; 

 and in practice the conventional for the natural and expedient. In 

 linguistic philology and literary history the comparative method 

 had at least found its prophet, Johann Gottfried von Herder. 



2. The Period of Romanticism and Allerleiwissenschaft. Exactly 

 in the middle of the decade 1790-1800 fell the publication of a work 

 that was to vivify philology with the spirit of science as well as of 

 romance. This was the famous Prolegomena to Homer. The author, 

 F. A. Wolf, had earlier still, in 1786, asserted the independence, 

 totality, and relativity of philology, as a study in its own right, cov- 

 ering not alone the languages of the Greeks and Latins, but their 

 literatures, and all else that might serve as the exponent of their 

 human nature, their life, philosophy, and law, their history, religion, 

 and art. But by proving, or trying to prove, in 1795, that Homer was 

 not a single poet, writing according to art and rule, but a name which 

 stood for a golden age of the true spontaneous poetry of genius and 

 nature, Wolf furthered even more vitally the interest of mankind 

 in popular poetry, in the beginnings of art and institutions. In his 

 Geschichte der romischen Literatur and his Prolegomena to Homer, 

 all histories of literature since his time have their roots of method, 

 cultur-geschichtlich, and generic, and interpretative. It is interesting 

 to note here that as the aesthetics of Lessing and Kant drew their 

 inspiration from English sources, so also the philological conception 

 and method of Wolf. They are anticipated and undoubtedly sug- 

 gested by Bentley's Dissertation upon the Letters of Phalaris, 1698. 

 And this, as Professor Jebb has said, is the earliest model of the new 

 criticism which by a scientific method was to bring accurate philo- 

 logical knowledge into relation with historical research. 



From 1795 to about 1850 the Alterthumsunssenschaft of Friedrich 

 August Wolf reigns in philology, and in the literature affected by 

 philology, I mean literary criticism, and literary history as well. In 

 1807 the Olympian Boeckh began to lecture at Heidelberg, in 1811 

 he was in Berlin; and from then on proceeded the Spiritual Recon- 



