SECTION E GERMANIC LITERATURE 



(Hall 3, September 23, 10 a. m.) 



CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR KUNO FRANCKE, Harvard University. 

 SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR AUGUST SAUER, University of Prague. 



PROFESSOR J. MINOR, University of Vienna. 

 SECRETARY: PROFESSOR K. D. JESSEN, Bryn-Mawr College. 



THE INFLUENCE OF NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE 

 ON GERMAN LITERATURE 



BY AUGUST SAUER 

 (Translated from the German by Prof. Robert S. Woodworth, Columbia University) 



[August Sauer, Regular Professor of German Language and Literature, University 

 of Prague, since 1891. b. Vienna Newstadt, Austria, Oct. 12, 1855. Graduate, 

 University of Vienna, 1876; Ph.D. ibid. 1877; University of Berlin, 1877-78. 

 Substitute Professor, University of Lemberg, 1879-83; Special Professor, Uni- 

 versity of Graz, 1883-86; ibid. University of Prague, 1886-91. Member of the 

 Imperial Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Society for the Advancement of German 

 Science, Art, and Literature in Bohemia and Prague. Author of Concerning 

 the Iambic Pentameter of Lessing's Nathan; Studies in the Philology of Goethe 

 (with Minor); Portrait of Women from the Golden Age of German Literature; and 

 many other works and papers on Germanic literature.] 



METHODOLOGICAL questions are capable of two sorts of treatment. 

 One can make a survey of the whole complex of problems and 

 exhaust all the possibilities. Or one can point out the best manner 

 of treatment by means of an example specially fit for the purpose. 

 It is in no spirit of contradiction to the philosophical spirit which 

 conceived the idea of this World's Congress and called it into life that 

 I choose the latter of these two ways, arid seek to fulfill the task 

 assigned me that of showing the relations of German literature to 

 foreign literature by tracing this connection in the case of two 

 authors who have hitherto been considered as very far apart from 

 each other. I mean by this choice to give strong expression to my 

 conviction that the slow and toilsome work of detailed research can 

 never be avoided in the life of science. Everything depends, how- 

 ever, even in such work, on gaining the broadest possible outlook 

 and never losing one's feeling for the great whole. 



The longer the span of history we survey, in a national literature, 

 and the more different national literatures we follow in their origin 

 and development, the more the history of all literature appears to 

 us as a single organism, the separate organs of which stand in closest, 

 most indissoluble connection with each other, while even the smallest 



