jstor-დან მოძიებული მასალა

VOLUME XXXTI JANUARY, 1937 VONDEL'S INFLUENCE ON GERMAN LITERATURE EVER since the attention of scholars has been directed to the study of the so-called German Baroque the conviction has been growing that this movement entered North and Central Germany mainly from Holland- 'das Zentrum aller nordlichen Barockkultur'.1 It is therefore necessary to determine exactly the share which Vondel, the greatest of Dutch seventeenth-century poets, had in the making of this movement. His relation to the German Baroque is a somewhat complex one. Current German opinion regards him as the Baroque poet par excellence, but of late some Dutch scholars, notably Albert Verwey,2 have opposed this view, by stressing the fact that Vondel is a late Renaissance author with certain Baroque characteristics, rather than the Rubens of literature, which some art historians have called him. With regard to Vondel's influence in Germany, however, the issue is complicated by the fact that it was the Baroque qualities of his poetry that were admired and imitated by the German poets, as Paul Stachel3 and Willi Flemming4 have pointed out. The influence of Holland on German literature starts with Opitz. It is well known that in his treatises Das Buch von der deutschen Poeterey and Vorrede zu Seneca's Trojanerinnen this poet followed Julius Scaliger's and still more Daniel Heinsius's interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics. Now Vondel's theory of the drama as it appears in the prefaces to his tragedies is likewise based on Aristotle as Heinsius and his successor Vossius understood him, though when it came to bringing the theory into prac- tice, his poetic instinct often carried him beyond their teaching. As Opitz's treatises became the basis of all later theories of art in seven- teenth-century Germany, one may say that his successors ultimately derived their ideas on the subject from the same source as Vondel, namely the Dutch scholars. Besides these literary connexions there was the element of personal contact. Opitz had visited Holland in 1620, when he made the ac- quaintance of Heinsius. Such a journey to Holland, the so-called 'Kavalierstour', soon came to be regarded in Germany as an indispens- 1 H. Cysarz, Deutsche Barockdichtung, p. 61. 2 Lately in De Nieuwe Taalgids, xxx (1936), pp. 31-4. 3 In 'Seneca und das Deutsche Renaissancedrama' (Palaestra, XLVI, Berlin, 1907). 4 In A. Gryphius und die Buhne (Halle, 1921). M. L. R. XXXII 1 N გაგრძელება?