art.

In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische
Reise_, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of
the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which
expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und
Dorothea," and the "Schoene Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht"
episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a
love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many.
Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids
and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for
the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In
Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical
antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe
were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the
first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the
mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the
dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe
and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of
classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age
was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical
prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the
century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads,
like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and
"Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf
mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer."

On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in
Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the
original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement
had greater momentum. The _Gruendlichkeit_, the depth and thoroughness of
the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in
politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its
practice a theoria, an _aesthetik_. In the later history of German
romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with
a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made
accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and
Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the
eighteenth century