In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a more
republican form of the same authority. At that time a traveller reports
eight hundred authors in Zuerich alone! Young aspirant for lettered fame,
in imagination clear away the lichens from their forgotten headstones,
and read humbly the "As I am, so thou must be," on all! Everybody
remembers how Goethe, in the seventh book of his autobiography, tells the
story of his visit to Gottsched. He enters by mistake an inner room at
the moment when a frightened servant brings the discrowned potentate a
periwig large enough to reach to the elbows. That awful emblem of
pretentious sham seems to be the best type of the literature then
predominant. We always fancy it set upon a pole, like Gessler's hat, with
nothing in it that was not wooden, for all men to bow down before. The
periwig style had its natural place in the age of Louis XIV., and there
were certainly brains under it. But it had run out in France, as the
tie-wig style of Pope had in England. In Germany it was the mere
imitation of an imitation. Will it be believed that Gottsched recommends
his Art of Poetry to beginners, in preference to Breitinger's, because it
"_will enable them to produce every species of poem in a correct style_,
while out of that no one can learn to make an ode or a cantata"?
"Whoever," he says, "buys Breitinger's book _in order to learn how to
make poems_, will too late regret his money.
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