Lecture on Germanic Studies.

Professor Henry Wood of Johns Ropkins University delivered a lecture last evening on "The History of Civilization as an Element of Germanic Studies." He said in part:

The slow uplift in German literature from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century was explained by the indirect reception of humanism in Germany. Humanism came in, not as worship of the beautiful, but as a species of didacticism, which was monopolized by scholars. The people neither received the fruits of it, nor were they interested in the resulting literature. Luther's Bible and the "Volkslied" represent however a marvelous development, which show what might have been reached under more favorable conditions. The "language sodalities," for ameliorating the language itself, are a further example of movements which were too exclusive and too theoretical. The attempted reform in the German vocabulary, which for the moment failed, was contrasted with the gains to English in the hands of a controversial master of style like Thomas Nash. Nash wrote with the nation for his audience and his changes (e.g. the introduction of words in the size into controversial English) were dictated by more practical considerations than occurred to the German theorists. But the indirectness and slowness of development in German literature, as compared with German culture, ceased with the time of the reign of Frederick the Great. By the year 1800, German literature had not only caught up with German culture, but had even come to a position of domination. The balance between the two has on the whole been retained since that time, although the position of literature towards the culture of the nation is now on the whole less commanding than it was a century ago.

Professor Wood closed by expressing the hope that the new impulses recently evident in German commercial enterprise, and the return of the nation from philosophical materialism to its earlier ideals, would bring a new uplift in German literature.