BAUMGARTNER, ALEXANDER. - Swiss Jesuit, literary critic and historian, b. at St. Gallen on 27 June 1841, d. at Luxembourg on 5 Sept. 1910. He was the son of the well-known historian and statesman Gallus Jakob B., whose Geschichte des schweiz. Freistaates und Kantons St. Gallen (III, St. Gallen 1890) he later completed and of whom he wrote a profile: Gallus Jakob B... und die neue Staatsentwicklung in der Schweiz (1769 to 1869) (Fribourg in Br. 1892).
A Jesuit from 1860, B. was assigned, after his studies (1873), to the editorial staff of the journal Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, where he attracted attention with penetrating articles of literary criticism on Lessing, Longfellow, Vondel, etc. (some works, such as the early studies on Goethe, and Das Ramayana und die Rama-Literatur der Inder (1892), appeared in the Ergänzungshefte, or supplements, of the Stimmen). His vigorous work: Goethe, sein Leben und seine Werke (3 vols., Fribourg in Br. 1885-86), fair, but at times harsh in its reaction to the prevailing idolatry of the neo-pagan poet, unleashed violent polemics (cf. N. Scheid, Verständigung im Streit um Goethe, in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, 86 [1941], pp. 420-28; the work was later recast in 2 vols. by A. Stockmann, Fribourg in Br. 1923-25). B.'s masterwork, however, unfortunately remained incomplete: Geschichte der Weltliteratur (6 vols., Fribourg in Br. 1897-1911), in which the ancient literatures, both Oriental and Greco-Roman, and the medieval Latin ones are treated; of the modern national literatures, only the French is treated and, in the last volume, posthumously, the Italian. Of most refined aesthetic sensibility, and also a poet, B. nevertheless adheres strictly, as a critic, to moral and religious principles and rejects the formula of art for art's sake, which earned him, toward the end of his life, no small amount of opposition (cf. his writing: Die Stellung der deutschen Katholiken zur neueren Literatur, Fribourg in Br. 1910). In another genre, his accounts of travels in the northern regions had met with wide favor: Island und die Förder (3rd ed., ibid. 1902); Durch Skandinavien nach S. Petersburg (3rd ed., ibid. 1901); Reisebilder aus Schottland (3rd ed., ibid. 1906).
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Edmondo Lamalle