382 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



we are still living. Again, we are reminded of the close connection 

 between literature and the programmes of the schools. M. Faguet 

 plausibly attributes the failure of the brilliant Romantic movement 

 to create enduring drama, epic narrative, or serious philosophy, to 

 the fact that the generation of 1815 had not learned their human- 

 ities. He sees the effects of a sounder classical discipline manifesting 

 themselves between 1850 and 1870 in the more solid work of Flaubert, 

 Taine, Renan, Leconte de Lisle. With the generation of 1870 we 

 enter again upon a period of decline and decadence. But we need 

 not consider the matter so curiously in order to appreciate the signi- 

 ficance of the classics both for French literature and the scholarly 

 study of its history. 



This secular interaction of scholarship and literature cannot be 

 traced in Germany, for the simple reason that while German scholar- 

 ship dates from the Renaissance, or it may be from Charlemagne 

 or the Apostle Boniface, German literature, in the proper sense of 

 the word, begins with Lessing and may almost be said to end with 

 the deaths of Goethe and Heine. But this fact only makes more 

 prominent the coincidence and interdependence of this brief bloom 

 of German literature with the great revival of classical scholarship 

 which is one of Germany's chief gifts to the modern world. The 

 detailed history of this relation is yet to be written. The outline is 

 so familiar that I need not labor the point. Lessing, the founder, 

 occupies a place in the history of philology only second to that 

 which he holds -in literature. 1 Of Winckelmann, the creator of the 

 history of Greek art. Goethe says that he made his own career pos- 

 sible. The fruitful conceptions of historical method, national develop- 

 ment, and the genius of primitive poetry, of which Herder became 

 the herald, were derived from or illustrated by his study of the 

 Greeks. The mainly Latin scholarship which he brought away 

 from the University Goethe supplemented by long and ardent study 

 of the Greek poets. 2 Schiller's preoccupation with the classics is 

 manifest in his correspondence with Goethe and in his independent 

 fritical and aesthetic studies. All the great writers were the pupils, 

 friends, or colleagues of the great scholars, the Heynes, the Wolfs, 

 the Hermanns, arid lived and worked in an atmosphere not merely 

 of r-iassk-al culture, but of enthusiastic scholarship. 



As mi<rht be anticipated, the relation of English writers to the 

 classics is more individualistic. English literature does not illustrate 

 the periods of European thought so clearly as does the literature of 

 France, and it is at no time so intimately associated with productive 

 scholarship as the literature of Germany has been. But if \ve accept 

 Macaulay's definition of the scholar, as one who reads Plato with his 



1 Kont, .!., Lessing ft 1'A ntiquitt. Paris, 1899. 



2 Thalmeyr, Goethe und das klass. Alterthnm. Leipzig, 1897 



