CHAPTER XII THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: GERMANY Luther, Zwingli, Albert Dürer, Leibnitz, Gottsched NO RENAISSANCE.--The great originality of Germany from the literary point of view--perhaps, too, from others--is that she _had no renaissance_, no contact, at all events close, with classic antiquity. Her temperament was no doubt hostile; the Reformation, that is, the impassioned adoption of a primitive unadulterated Christianity conservative and directly opposed to antiquity whether pagan or philosophical, added to the repugnance. However that may be, the fact remains: Germany enjoyed no renaissance. LUTHER.--Also in the sixteenth century in Germany, as in France in the fourteenth century, there was only popular poetry, and all the prose is German, all reformist, all moralising, and has little or practically no echo of antiquity. Luther, by his translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, by his _prefaces_ to each book of the Bible, in his polemical writings (_The Papacy and its Members_, _The Papacy Elevated at Rome by the Devil_, etc.), by his _Sermons and Letters_, gave to Teutonic thought a direction which long endured, and to Teutonic prose a solidity, purity, sobriety, and vigour which exercised an immense influence on human minds. THE REFORMERS.--Following Luther, Zwingli, Hutten, Eberling, Melanchthon (but in Latin), Erasmus (most frequently in Latin but sometimes in French) spread the new doctrine or doctrines in relation thereto. ERASMUS; ALBERT DÜRER; GOTTSCHED.--An exception must be made about Erasmus in what has just been observed. With a very unfettered mind, often as much in opposition to the side of Luther as to the side of Rome, and also prone to attack the pure humanists who styled themselves Ciceronians, Erasmus was a humanist, an impassioned student of ancient letters, so that he has one foot in the Renaissance and one in reform, and withal possessed a very original brain, and was, from every aspect, "ultra-modern." Albert Dürer must also be cited: mathematician, architect, painter, yet belonging to our subject by his _four books on the human proportion_ wherein he shows, in chastened and precise style, that he himself is nothing less than the earliest founder of Teutonic æstheticism. The seventeenth century--extending it, as is reasonable enough, up to the region of 1730--is almost exclusively the era of French influence and a little, if desired, of Italian influence. The critic Gottsched (_Poetic Art, Grammar, Eloquence_) maintained the excellence of French literature and the necessity of drawing inspiration from it with an energy of conviction which drew on him the hatred of the succeeding generation.