herefore, the struggle with the language was fought out
successfully by modern German literature only on the battleground of
the lyric (and even there, as we have seen, not without exceptions),
on the other hand a second conservative force was placed at the
service of the literary development with more uniform success, namely
_Metrics_. To be sure, here again this applies only to verse, for the
corresponding art of prose rhythm has been as good as lost to the
Germans, in contrast to the French, and almost more so to the English.
In prose also a conscious and systematic attempt to make an artistic
division into paragraphs, chapters, and books, has only been made in
recent times, above all in and since the writings of Nietzsche. For as
far as the treatment of language in itself is concerned, German
literature has hardly yet fully developed an artistic form; writers
still continue to treat it far too much as a mere tool. But verse is
felt to be an object for artistic molding, although here too the
naturalistic dogmas of the Storm and Stress writers, of the
Romanticists, Young Germans and Ultra-Moderns, have often shaken the
theories upon which the artistic perfection of our poetry is based.

In this regard, likewise, there was, in the seventeenth century, a
great difficulty to be overcome. Changes in language, the effect of
French and Italian style, the influence of music, had weakened the
foundations of the German art of verse, which were already partly
broken down by mechanical wear and tear. The comparatively simple
regulation contrived by an ordinary, though clever, poet, Martin
Opitz, proved capable of enduring for centuries; a connection was
established between the accent of verse and natural accent, which at
the same time, by means of more stringent rules, created barriers
against variable accent. It was merely a question of arranging the
words in such fashion that, without forming too great a contradiction
to the common-place order of words, the way in which the accents were
placed upon them should result in a regularly alternating rise and
fall. On the whole, this principle was found to be sufficient until
the enthusiasm of the new poetic generation demanded a closer
connection between the poetic form and the variable conditions of the
soul; they found a way out of the difficulty by carrying a rhythmical
mood through a variety of metrical divisions, and thus came upon the
"free rhythms." From whatever source these