Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ATTITUDE OF GOETHE AND SCHILLER TOWARD THE FRENCH CLASSIC DRAMA Introduction The eighteenth century in Germany witnessed the slow break-up of a literary despotism and the establishment of the principles of a literary democracy which stood for the right to expression of individual?as opposed to collective?experience in suitably flexible forms. Seventeenth century France had bequeathed to Germany, along with social and political ideals, the mistaken notion that there was a set of rules?nearly rigid?by which all literary production was to be regulated. The brilliant literature of the French classic period had impressed the Germans, prostrate as they were from the aftereffects of the Thirty Years' War, and it was only natural that they should turn to the sister nation for guidance. For more than a century, Germany's literary men sought to assimilate the rules of French composition vainly hoping to bring forth a literature comparable to that of the French. With the opening of the eighteenth century, however, a rival entered the field, which was destined to put French ideals to flight: this was the literature of England. While the French type represented, in general, the formal intellectual elements of literary composition, the English ideal emphasized thought and feeling. These two ideals fought for supremacy long and bitterly, first in the strife between Gottsched on the one hand, and Bodmer and Breitinger on the other, later between Gottsched and Lessing. With the publication in 1767 of Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgic, the battle came to be waged most hotly in and about the drama. It was a question of who best represented the spirit of the ancient theater and the theories of Aristotle; Corneille, Boileau, Racine, and Voltaire, or Shakespeare? Lessing laid about him so...