Germany from the Earliest Period, vol 4 | Page 3

and Italian schools. Haydn introduced the variety and melody of the opera into the oratorio, of which his "Creation" is a standing proof. In the latter half of the foregoing century, sacred music has gradually yielded to the opera. Mozart brought the operatic style to perfection in the wonderful compositions that eternalize his fame.
The German theatre was, owing to the Gallomania of the period, merely a bad imitation of the French stage. Gottsched,[4] who greatly contributed toward the reformation of German literature, still retained the stilted Alexandrine and the pseudo-Gallic imitation of the ancient dramatists to which Lessing put an end. Lessing wrote his "Dramaturgy" at Hamburg, recommended Shakespeare and other English authors as models, but more particularly nature. The celebrated Eckhof, the father of the German stage, who at first travelled about with a company of actors and finally settled at Gotha, was the first who followed this innovation. He was succeeded by Schroeder in Hamburg, who was equally industrious as a poet, an actor, and a Freemason. In Berlin, where Fleck had already paved the way, Iffland, who, like Schroeder, was both a poet and an actor, founded a school, which in every respect took nature as a guide, and which raised the German stage to its well-merited celebrity.
At the close of the eighteenth century, men of education were seized with an enthusiasm for art, which showed itself principally in a love for the stage and in visits for the promotion of art to Italy. The poet and the painter, alike dissatisfied with reality, sought to still their secret longings for the beautiful amid the unreal creations of fancy and the records of classical antiquity.
Fashion, that masker of nature, that creator of deformity, had, in truth, arrived at an unparalleled pitch of ugliness. The German costume, although sometimes extravagantly curious during the Middle Ages, had nevertheless always retained a certain degree of picturesque beauty, nor was it until the reign of Louis XIV. of France that dress assumed an unnatural, inconvenient, and monstrous form. Enormous allonge perukes and ruffles, the fontange (high headdress), hoops, and high heels, rendered the human race a caricature of itself. In the eighteenth century, powdered wigs of extraordinary shape, hairbags and queues, frocks and frills, came into fashion for the men; powdered headdresses an ell in height, diminutive waists, and patches for the women. The deformity, unhealthiness, and absurdity of this mode of attire were vainly pointed out by Salzmann, in a piece entitled, "Charles von Carlsberg, or Human Misery."
[Footnote 1: Also his brother John, who painted with equal talent in the same style.--Trans.]
[Footnote 2: Called also Gerardo dalle Notti from his subjects, principally night-scenes and pieces illuminated by torch or candle-light. His most celebrated picture is that of Jesus Christ before the Tribunal of Pilate.--Ibid.]
[Footnote 3: Gothic architecture has been likened to petrified music.]
[Footnote 4: He was assisted in his dramatic writings by his wife, a woman of splendid talents.--Trans.]

CCXLV. Influence of the Belles-Lettres
The German, excluded from all participation in public affairs and confined to the narrow limits of his family circle and profession, followed his natural bent for speculative philosophy and poetical reverie; but while his thoughts became more elevated and the loss of his activity was, in a certain degree, compensated by the gentle dominion of the muses, the mitigation thus afforded merely aggravated the evil by rendering him content with his state of inaction. Ere long, as in the most degenerate age of ancient Rome, the citizen, amused by sophists and singers, actors and jugglers, lost the remembrance of his former power and rights and became insensible to his state of moral degradation, to which the foreign notions, the vain and frivolous character of most of the poets of the day, had not a little contributed.
After the thirty years' war, the Silesian poets became remarkable for Gallomania or the slavish imitation of those of France. Unbounded adulation of the sovereign, bombastical carmina on occasion of the birth, wedding, accession, victories, f��tes, treaties of peace, and burial of potentates, love-couplets equally strained, twisted compliments to female beauty, with pedantic, often indecent, citations from ancient mythology, chiefly characterized this school of poetry. Martin Opitz, A.D. 1639, the founder of the first Silesian school,[1] notwithstanding the insipidity of the taste of the day, preserved the harmony of the German ballad. His most distinguished followers were Logau, celebrated for his Epigrams;[2] Paul Gerhard, who, in his fine hymns, revived the force and simplicity of Luther; Flemming, a genial and thoroughly German poet, the companion of Olearius[3] during his visit to Persia; the gentle Simon Dach, whose sorrowing notes bewail the miseries of the age. He founded a society of melancholy poets at K?nigsberg, in Prussia, the members of which composed elegies for each other; Tscherning and Andrew Gryphius, the Corneille of Germany, a