The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume I | Page 7

this regard, likewise, there was, in the seventeenth century, a great
difficulty to be overcome. Changes in language, the effect of French
and Italian style, the influence of music, had weakened the foundations
of the German art of verse, which were already partly broken down by
mechanical wear and tear. The comparatively simple regulation
contrived by an ordinary, though clever, poet, Martin Opitz, proved
capable of enduring for centuries; a connection was established
between the accent of verse and natural accent, which at the same time,
by means of more stringent rules, created barriers against variable
accent. It was merely a question of arranging the words in such fashion
that, without forming too great a contradiction to the common-place
order of words, the way in which the accents were placed upon them
should result in a regularly alternating rise and fall. On the whole, this
principle was found to be sufficient until the enthusiasm of the new
poetic generation demanded a closer connection between the poetic
form and the variable conditions of the soul; they found a way out of
the difficulty by carrying a rhythmical mood through a variety of
metrical divisions, and thus came upon the "free rhythms." From
whatever source these were derived, either from the misunderstood
poems of Pindar, from the language of the Bible or of the enthusiastic
mystics, or from the poetic half-prose of the pastoral poet Salomon
Gessner, they were, in any case, something new and peculiar, and their
nature has not been grasped in the least degree by the French in their
"vers libres," or at any rate only since the half-Germanic Fleming
Verhaeren. They received an interesting development through Goethe
and Heinrich Heine, while most of the other poets who made use of
them, even the greatest one, Novalis, often deteriorated either into a
regular, if rhymeless, versification, or into a pathetic, formless prose.
Another method of procuring new metrical mediums of expression for
the new wealth of emotions was to borrow. Klopstock naturalized
antique metres, or rather made them familiar to the school and to

cultivated poets, while on the other hand Heine's derision of August
von Platen's set form of verse was welcomed in many circles, and even
the elevated poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which approached the
antique form, remained foreign to the people, like the experiments of
Leconte de Lisle in France; in Italy it fared otherwise with Carducci's
Odi barbare. Only one antique metre became German, in the same
sense that Shakespeare had become a German poet; this was the
hexameter, alone or in connection with the pentameter; for the ratio of
its parts to one another, on which everything depends in higher metrics,
corresponded, to some extent, to that of the German couplets. For the
same reason the sonnet--not, however, without a long and really bitter
fight--was able to win a secure place in German reflective lyric poetry;
indeed it had already been once temporarily in our possession during
the seventeenth century. Thus two important metres had been added to
German poetry's treasure house of forms: first, the hexameter for a
continuous narrative of a somewhat epic character, even though
without high solemnity--which Goethe alone once aspired to in his
_Achilleis_--and also for shorter epigrammatic or didactic observations
in the finished manner of the distich; second, the sonnet for short
mood-pictures and meditations. The era of the German hexameter
seems, however, to be over at present, while, on the contrary, the
sonnet, brought to still higher perfection by Platen, Moritz von
Strachwitz and Paul Heyse, still exercises its old power of attraction,
especially over poets with a tendency toward Romance art. However,
both hexameter or distich and sonnet have become, in Germany, pure
literary forms of composition. While in Italy the sonnet is still sung, we
are filled with astonishment that Brahms should have set to music a
distich--Anacreon. Numerous other forms, taken up principally by the
Romantic school and the closely related "Exotic School," have
remained mere literary playthings. For a certain length of time the
ghasel seemed likely to be adopted as a shell to contain scattered
thoughts, wittily arranged, or (almost exclusively by Platen) also for
mood-pictures; but without doubt the undeservedly great success of
Friedrich von Bodenstedt's Mirza Schaffy has cast permanent discredit
on this form. The favorite stanza of Schiller is only one of the
numerous strophe forms of our narrative or reflective lyric; it has never
attained an "ethos" peculiar to itself. Incidentally, the French

alexandrines were the fashion for a short time after Victor Hugo's
revival of them was revivified by Ferdinand Freiligrath, and were
recently used with variations by Carl Spitteler (which, however, he
denies) as a foundation for his epic poems. So, too, the "Old German
rhymed verse" after the manner of Hans Sachs, enjoyed a short
popularity; and