33oofc6 bp &tmo JFrancfce GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1907 HANDBOOK OF THE GERMANIC MU- SEUM OF HARVARD UNI VERSITY. Pub- lished by the University. Cambridge, 1906 A HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE, AS DETERMINED BY SOCIAL FORCES. New York, Henry Holt & Co. London, George Bell & Sons. 1901 GLIMPSES OF MODERN GERMAN CUL- TURE. Dodd, Mead & Co. 1898 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERA- TURE. Henry Holt & Co. 1896 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY Boston and New York GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY FROM KLINGER'S STATUE OF BEETHOVEN GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY AND OTHER ESSAYS ON GERMAN CULTURE KUNO FRANCKE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY m>t fitoer£i&e pre?*, CambriDge 1907 COPYRIGHT 1907 BY KUNO FRANCKE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published April igoj Fl TO MY BROTHER HUGO WHOSE LOVE HAS PROTECTED ME FROM EARLY YOUTH AND TO FRIEDRICH PAULSEN WHOSE FRIENDSHIP HAS GUIDED AND INSPIRED THIRTY YEARS OF MY LIFE THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED HEIMATGEFUHL Die Heide bluht. Ein endlos Flimmern, Ein Summen, Briiten weit und breit; Am fernen Horizonte schimmern Die Diinen, still und traumbeschneit. Die Heide blunt. Wie Purpurquellen, Aus braunem Sande stromt's hervor ; Und tausendfache Farbenwellen Erzittern uberm dunklen Moor. Die Heide bliiht. Aus dunklen Tiefen Ziehn Sehnsuchtstimmen durchs Gemiit, Als ob sie meine Seele riefen Zur Ewigkeit. Die Heide bliiht. Ofc PREFACE The essays and sketches brought together in this book deal with what may be called the higher life of modern Germany. For even in so far as they are concerned with earlier epochs of literary or artistic development, they consider these earlier phases only in their relation to the life of the present. Taken as a whole, they form perhaps a slight contribu- tion to the psychology of the German national mind. The temper of these papers is frankly pro- pagandist. They wish to arouse sympathy with German views of public life, education, literature, and art ; and they try to set forth some German achievements in various fields of higher activity. The author hopes, how- ever, that love for his native land has not blinded him to shortcomings and defects in- herent in the German character. viii PREFACE All of the papers, except the last one, have been published previously, — four of them in the Atlantic Monthly, seven in the Nation, one in the International Monthly, one in the Inter- national Quarterly, one in the Outlook, and one in the Boston Transcript. The verses accom- panying the dedication were first printed in the Berlin Weekly, Die Woche. To all these peri- odicals the author is indebted for the privilege of republishing his contributions. The head of Klinger's Beethoven, which forms the frontispiece of the book, is taken from a photograph of the statue published by E. A. Seemann in Leipzig. It seems to ex- press with particular emphasis and power the concentrated striving of contemporary Ger- many for the vision of eternal things. A few remarks about this greatest creation of modern German sculpture will be found on pages 43 and 210. K. F. Harvard University, March, 1907. CONTENTS I. German Ideals of To-Day 3 II. Three Anniversary Addresses 1. Goethe's Message to America 53 2. Schiller's Message to Modern Life 74 3. Emerson and German Personality 93 III. The Evolutionary Trend of Ger- man Literary Criticism 129 IV. The Inner Life in German Sculp- ture 193 V. The Study of National Culture 215 VI. Sketches of Contemporary German Letters 1. Hauptmann's Fuhrmann Henschel 243 2. Sudermann's Die drei Reiherfedern 249 3. Paulsen's Philosophia Militans 257 4. Herman Grimm — An Obituary 268 5. Hauptmann's Michael Kramer 275 6. Hauptmann's Der Arme Heinrich 282 7. The Struggle for Individuality on the German Stage 293 8. Widmann's Der Heilige und die Tiere 304 VII. The Future of German Literature 329 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY One of the most interesting fragments that have been preserved to us from Schiller's literary workshop, is a Hymn to Germany which occupied the poet's mind during the last years of his life. This Hymn never passed the stage of sketches, partly in verse, partly in prose ; but even these sketches give us an idea of the noble conception of the whole. Apparently, Schiller wanted to proclaim the greatness of Germany in the midst of her na- tional disasters ; he wanted to tell his people, threatened in its very existence by the Napo- leonic invasion, that there was still a hope left for it ; he wanted to contrast the brute force of military prowess with the eternal achieve- ments of literature and art. " May Germany," — thus runs the beginning of this sketch, — "may Germany, at a moment when she issues without glory from a terrible war, when two arrogant nations have set their feet upon her neck, when the victor rules her fate, — may 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY she feel herself? May the German take pride in his name? May he lift his head, and with firm step appear in the company of nations ? Yes, he may. He has been unsuccessful in the fight ; but that which makes his worth he has not lost. German Empire and German people are two different things. Bereft of political power, the German has found his worth in another sphere, a sphere of his own ; and even if the Empire were to crumble to pieces, Ger- man greatness would remain unimpaired. Das ist nicht des Deutschen Grosse, Obzusiegen mit dem Schwert ; In das Geisterreich zu dringen, Vorurteile zu besiegen, Mannlich mit dem Wahn zu kriegen, Das ist seines Eifers wert. To him, the German, the highest destiny has been set. He has been chosen by the World- Spirit, in the midst of temporary struggles, to devote his work to the eternal structure of human culture, to give permanence to what the fleeting moment brings. Therefore he has as- similated and made his own what other na- tions have produced. Whatever came to life in other ages and countries, and disappeared again, he has stored up, — the treasures of GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 5 centuries are his. Every people has its day ; the day of the German is the harvest of all time." How strangely out of date do these words, born from a patriot's grief over the political humiliation of his people, appear at a time when " German nation " and " German Em- pire " are happily not any longer contradic- tory terms ; when through extraordinary mil- itary achievements, as well as through a wise and far-seeing statesmanship, the political power of Germany has been more firmly' estab- lished than ever before; when German com- merce and industry are competing for the front rank among nations in every quarter of the globe. The question which confronts us of to-day is precisely the opposite from the one which confronted Schiller and his contempo- raries. Then the question was: Will the high state of intellectual refinement, of literary and artistic culture, reached by the educated few react upon the masses and bring about a new era of popular energy? Will the striving of the German mind for universally human and eternal values, for enlightenment, for spiritu- ality, for cosmopolitanism, result in a height- ening of national power also, and in a revival 6 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY of public activity for material ends ? Now the question is : Will the new era of popular pros- perity and national self-assertion result in a reawakening of spiritual strivings also? Will it give a new impetus to the longing for eter- nal possessions? Will it lead to a nobler con- ception of humanity, to a deeper faith in the Infinite, to a more exalted view of the mean- ing of life and the mission of art? Will it, in short, bring about a new era of idealism ? The following observations, gathered dur- ing a recent visit in the land of my birth, may perhaps serve as an attempt to analyze the physiognomy of contemporary German life from this point of view. Even a first impression of the external con- ditions of the Germany of to-day must con- vince the unprejudiced that German progress of the last thirty years has not been confined to industrial and commercial development. Not since the days of the Renaissance and the Reformation has there been a time when the outward aspect of the country bespoke such ardent life, such intense activity in every domain of national aspirations, as now. Even the most casual observer cannot fail to be impressed with the picture of healthfulness, GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 7 power, orderliness, and enlightened citizen- ship, which meets the eye of the traveler on every hand, on every square mile of German soil, north and south, east and west. These flourishing, well-kept farms and estates, these thriving villages, these beautiful, carefully re- plenished forests, these bustling cities teeming with a well-fed and well-behaved population, these proud city halls, stately court houses, theatres, and museums rising everywhere, these admirable means of communication, these model arrangements for healthy recrea- tion and amusement, — how plainly all this testifies to a remarkably high state of public consciousness ! This magnificent army, with its manly discipline and its high standard of professional honor (occasional excesses of youthful Hotspurs notwithstanding), these universities and technical schools, with their joyousness of student life, and their earnest- ness and freedom of scientific investigation, this orderly management of political meetings and demonstrations, this sober determination and effective organization of the laboring classes in their fight for social betterment, this respectful and attentive attitude, even of the masses, toward all forms of art, — what 8 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY unmistakable proofs of a wonderfully organ- ized collective will, of an instinctive reaching out toward higher forms of national exis- tence ! It has been said, and not without some rea- son, that the distinguishing quality of Ameri- can patriotism, as compared with Old-World sentiment, consisted in this, that it was pre- eminently directed toward the future. The absence of a long historical tradition, as well as the gigantic tasks pressing in upon a people still in the making, undoubtedly accentuate this forward leaning of American patriotic sen- timent. But it would be a mistake to think that German patriotism of to-day was preemi- nently looking backward, that it was chiefly concerned with the maintenance of the tradi- tions of the past, that it lacked the outlook into an ideal future. Germany, too, is a young nation; here, too, a new order of things, new tasks, new ideals, are forcing themselves upon the national consciousness ; here, too, the sub- stance of patriotism, if not its form, is con- cerned with the working out of the problems of to-morrow. Let us consider some of the ideals which consciouslv or unconsciouslv dominate the in- GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 9 tellectual and moral world of the German of to-day, shaping his conception of what the Germany of the future is to be. The average American, if asked to define his political creed, would probably without much hesitancy sum up his answer in the one word, Liberty. The German would find it less easy to give a generally acceptable answer to this question. His answer would vary accord- ing to the variety of fundamental political demands contained in the programme of the party with which he might be affiliated. The Conservative would maintain that a strong monarchy was the only power to whose guid- ance the ship of state might safely be commit- ted ; and the principal safeguard of a strong monarchy he would see in the army. He would further declare a close alliance between throne and altar, between the State and the Church, to be absolutely necessary for the maintenance of public morals; and as to gov- ernmental maxims, he would have no hesita- tion in giving preference to the methods of paternalism and state regulation. The Liberal would probably point to the English Consti- io GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tution as his ideal of government; he would speak of the necessity of parliamentary gov- ernment, he would deplore the impotence of the present parties, he would deride militarism, clericalism, and protectionism, and he would declaim on the beauties of free thought and free trade. The Centrist would above all in- veigh against the principle of state omnipo- tence, he would speak of "a free Church in a free State," he would exalt the work done by the Catholic Church for the moral and econo- mic improvement of the working classes, and he would demand the admission of Catholic thought and scholarship on equal terms with Protestant science in the higher schools and universities. The Socialist, finally, — not to speak of a number of other, ephemeral par- ties and fractions of parties, such as the Pan- Germans, the Anti-Semites, and so on, — the Socialist would squarely come out for a repub- lic as the ideal form of government ; he would condemn the whole existing order of things as utterly corrupt and untenable ; he would wish to replace the standing army by a militia system, abolish the established Church, na- tionalize the great industries, and what not. In short, it would seem from such an inquirv GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY n as though there was a great chaos of political opinions furiously at war with each other, as though an agreement on some few funda- mental tenets, irrespective of disagreement in matters of practical expediency, was an impos- sibility in German politics. Closer questioning, however, would reveal the fact that the picture of the future hover- ing before these representatives of the various German parties was, after all, not so radically different as it first appeared. In the first place, the headlines in the va- rious party catechisms — in Germany as well as elsewhere — are for the most part not much more than hypnotic formulae designated to catch the eye and to delude the party-follower into a comfortable state of sleepy assurance that he believes these things. In reality, no sane Conservative would deny that, if the monarchy had no other justification for its ex- istence than that founded upon bayonets and guns, it would not be worth while for the people to maintain so costly an institution ; and as to the reestablishment of patriarchal methods of government without popular con- trol, that is a pious wish which may swell the breast of a few fanatics, such as the notorious 12 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Count Piickler, but the practical execution of such wishes would involve the perpetrator in serious conflicts with the courts, or land him in an asylum. On the other hand, the record of the Liberal party — which, by the way, for the moment has almost been effaced in na- tional as well as in state politics J — has been such that one may well doubt its ability to convert into constructive achievements its doctrinaire programme of self-government and civil rights. Its course has been, in the main, negative ; and on more than one occasion, especially during the days of the " Kultur- kampf," it has gone back on its own princi- ples by making itself a tool of coercive legis- lation. As to the Centrist party, its motto, " a free Church in a free State," is in reality only a euphemism for " the State controlled by the Church," and would disappear from its programme the moment the State showed the slightest intention of carrying it out, that is, of disestablishing the Church. And lastly, the Socialist talk about a German republic is 1 Since this was written, the new elections for the Reichs- tag have taken place. They seem to indicate a revival of Liberalism throughout Germany; let us hope that it will be Liberalism ot the practical, common-sense kind. GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 13 so manifestly a mere catchword, or at best so shadowy a dream of immature brains, that it need not be seriously considered. While, then, a good many of the apparent differences and contradictory principles of the various parties turn out to be, as a matter of fact, mere surface ebullition and froth, it will be found that all German parties have one es- sential thing in common, a strong confidence in government supervision. This confidence is well founded, historically. By whatever ill- sounding name one may call it, — bureaucracy, officialdom, governmental caste, or what not, — the fact remains that the government ser- vice, both civil and military, has during the last two hundred years been the chief task- master of the German people in its evolution to national greatness, the strongest force in the gradual working out of an enlightened public opinion. It may be doubted whether the gov- ernment service of any other country, except possibly that of modern Japan, has been so unremittingly and steadfastly committed to the principle of public welfare as the only law of conduct for a public servant, as that of Prussia and those German states which have taken the keynote of their administration from Prussia. i 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY The idea that a public office is a public trust, and that efficiency and trustworthiness are the only indispensable prerequisites for hold- ing office, has come to be something so self- evident to the German mind that it needs no place in any party platform. It is tacitly ad- mitted by all parties, and, although it would be too much to say that in point of fact the Ger- man administration of to-day is strictly non- partisan, it certainly must be said that this is the principle to which it tries to live up. The recent conflict of the Prussian Ministry of Education with a large part of the Prussian student body, as well as with not a few gov- erning bodies of the universities and techni- cal schools, is a good illustration of this fact. During the last decades, Catholic clubs have had a great ascendency in the German univer- sities. These clubs admit as members only young men who regularly perform their reli- gious duties, and are in every respect faith- ful sons of the Church. They are affiliated with the Centrist party, and make no secret of their desire to make propaganda for its policy. Naturally, they have brought upon themselves the hatred and contempt of the larger part of the student body, which is still dominated by GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 15 free thought and decidedly anti-clerical feel- ings. When, some time ago, the Catholic Club of the Polytechnic at Hannover demanded an official representation in the General Stu- dents' Committee, this demand was refused by the other student organizations, on the specious plea that the Catholic clubs were es- sentially opposed to the principle of academic freedom, and disdained fellowship with the rest of the student body. Strangely enough, the Faculty coincided with this view, and other polytechnics and universities followed suit. The Ministry of Education, however, applying the principle of non-partisan admin- istration, sided with the Catholic clubs, and refused to sanction their exclusion from the General Students' Committee. Thereupon a storm of indignation throughout the Prussian universities, a flood of high-sounding talk about freedom of science, about the defense of modern civilization against Romanism and mediaevalism, mass meeting after mass meet- ing filled with denunciations against the " re- actionary " government. But the outcome undoubtedly will be a triumph of the non- partisan view of the government ; and the only pity is that it does not seem at present 16 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY likely that the same view will be maintained by the government to guard the rights of other student bodies, less acceptable to the powers that be, — for instance, Socialist socie- ties. But to return to our main question, the question whether there is one political ideal uniting the great diversity of German parties in a common aim. The traditional non-par- tisan methods of German administration, we saw, have brought it about that all German parties rely much more readily than is the case in most other countries on government action. This widespread trust in government action, on its part, has brought it about that the government is looked upon, much more generally than in England or America, as the great harmonizer and arbitrator between con- flicting interests. And this view of the function of government, in its turn, has forced into the very centre of political life a demand which in other countries is more commonly based on moral and economic grounds, — the demand for social justice. I believe I am not mistaken if I designate the idea of social justice as the peculiarly German ideal of political life. That the Socialist party should have been GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 17 the first to proclaim this ideal is in the nature of things ; for it represents the cause of the masses to whom, all over the globe, social jus- tice is so largely denied, the disinherited and the downtrodden. But it is by no means an ideal of the downtrodden only, it is an ideal inspiring the best minds of every party and class ; it is part and parcel of the very make-up of the people. The Conservative is bound to it by the certainty that only in rallying the masses about the Imperial standard can the monarchy in the long run be saved. The Cen- trist cannot escape the conviction that social justice is one of the foremost tenets of Chris- tian teachings. The Liberal is forced to ac- knowledge that without this principle there is no really enlightened civilization. And the common man throughout the land feels in- stinctively that Germany, of all countries, is the one where this idea is destined to play the leading part in shaping the future of the nation. How threadbare and antiquated most of the other ideals have come to be that held their sway during the last one hundred years ! How few of those that swelled the breasts of Schiller and his contemporaries are a living 1 8 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY force to-day ! The brotherhood of nations ? Germany has had every reason during the last two or three generations to doubt the sin- cerity of those who make it a business to declaim about humanity and the peace of the world. Every step which she has made toward national unity and consolidation has been con- tested by her good friends and neighbors : the Empire had to be welded together in a bloody war brought about by Napoleonic intrigues; and now the beginnings of Ger- man sea power are grudgingly watched, de- nounced, and as much as possible, thwarted, by commercial rivals all over the world. No, the brotherhood of nations has no particular charms for the German of the twentieth cen- tury. Enlightenment? The time has long passed when this word thrilled the elite of the nation beyond any other. We have come to see that, priceless a possession as intellectual enlightenment is, it is after all not without its dangers, and easily leads the masses to mate- rialism and moral indifference. Freedom ? To be sure, the mission of freedom is endless, and there is plenty of work left for her in contemporary Germany, as everywhere, par- ticularly in religious matters; but it would be GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 19 absurd to deny that the German Constitution of to-day allows to the individual an amount of political freedom undreamed-of a hundred years ago, and larger than the great majority of individuals are capable of carrying. Even to the Socialist, freedom is not any longer the one magic formula to conjure with ; what he de- mands is not freedom, but justice. National- ity ? To the great mass of Germans this word would appeal more than either human bro- therhood or enlightenment or freedom. And yet even this word does not any longer ex- press a widespread, elemental longing : it ex- presses rather satisfaction at the fulfillment of national aspirations, pride at national achieve- ments; it has ceased to be an ideal. The question : " Was ist des Deutschen Vater- land?" does not any longer make the Ger- man heart beat faster. Industrial progress and supremacy ? Certainly, this is a thing for which thousands and thousands of heads and hands are ceaselessly at work, a goal of ambi- tion hovering before the keenest and best trained minds of the country. But how could one forget that this very progress is often enough a fetich to which thousands of living beings are sacrificed, a cancerous growth prey- 20 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ing upon the nation's health? How could in- dustrial progress ever acquire the dignity of a national ideal ? Place by the side of all these ideals and ob- jects of ambition the words " social justice," and you will see at once that this phrase ex- presses better than any other the ideal content of German patriotism of to-day. In no other country has the state the same obligation to control the exercise of social justice, or the same capacity for maintaining this control, as in Germany. A government which strains every nerve of the people for public purposes, which takes some of the best years- from the life of every citizen for military service, which at every important point of the individual's career impresses upon him his connection with the state and his responsibility to the state, such a government cannot possibly avoid the responsibility of acting as the great social peacemaker, as the mediator between capital and labor, as the advocate of the weak, as the support of the needy; and it is in the nature of things that in exercising this duty it will more and more be drawn into the management of the great industries on its own account, and will more and more come to be the great em- GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 21 ployer of labor. That the German govern- ment is fully aware of this solemn obligation, and is to an extraordinary degree capable of fulfilling it, is amply proven on the one hand by the gigantic undertaking of state insur- ance of workingmen against accidents, inval- idism, and old age, and on the other by the re- markable success which has attended the pass- ing of the German railways into government control. Now, it is perfectly clear that such an enormous social and industrial powervested in a partisan government would inevitably re- sult in the worst form of tyranny and oppres- sion ; only a non-partisan government is cap- able of wielding this power for the cause of social justice. The great question, then, the great desideratum of German political life, is, not the introduction of the English principle of parliamentary government, the triumph of majority rule, but the further development of the historic German principle of nonpartisan government, the building up of a government which, while recruited from all the various parties, will, in reality as well as in principle, be raised above all parties, and serve still more exclusively than it does now the one great cause of the common weal. Is it too much to 22 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY hope that the German government of the future will habitually unite in itself the best minds of the Conservative, the Liberal, the Centrist, and the Socialist parties, and thereby rob party life of its present bitterness and im- placability ? ' Does not the whole trend of Ger- man political history, with its traditional aver- sion to the rule of parliamentary majorities, and with its traditional insistence on a stable, public-spirited, and highly trained civil service, point in this direction ? Is not this a worthy aim of patriotic aspirations ? And will not this complete carrying out of non-partisan gov- ernment for the sake of social justice, the es- tablishment of perpetual party compromises within the executive itself, be an important and highly instructive addition to the history of political experiments, and enrich the forms of government by a new and peculiarly valuable type ? Indeed, here is a task before Germany, for the successful solution of which all nations will owe her a debt of gratitude; here is a new chance for the Hohenzollern dynasty of prov- 1 The necessary prerequisite for such a union of all par- ties within the ministry would, of course, be the acceptance by the Socialists of the monarchy as the corner-stone of the German Constitution. GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 23 ing to the world that its historic motto of " Suum cuique " is not an empty word, and of demonstrating anew its wonderful power of uniting faithfulness to inherited traditions with keenest grasp of the problems of the future. If social justice may be called the political ideal of contemporary Germany, social effi- ciency may be called the fundamental demand of the new German education. The times are long since passed when schol- arly culture could still be considered the chief or even the only aim of higher training. The demands of practical life have become so man- ifold and so pressing that it has become absolutely imperative for the school to adapt itself to these variegated needs. Hence the practical tendency of what is called the School Reform, a movement initiated in theory by such men as Paulsen, Rein, and other univer- sity professors, directed into legislative chan- nels, at the instigation of the Emperor, chiefly by the Prussian Ministry of Education under the skillful executive of Dr. Althoff. The abolition of the Latin essay in the final exami- nation of the Gymnasium, the increased atten- 24 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tion given to German history and literature, the introduction in certain gymnasia of French previous to Latin, the reduction of the time devoted to Greek, the admission of schools without Greek (the Realgymnasia), and even of schools without Latin (the Oberrealschuleri) to the same standing with the gymnasia, the tentative establishment of girls' gymnasia, the proposition to introduce a certain amount of election into the curriculum of the higher schools, the admission of women to the uni- versities, and even to the doctorate, the liberal endowment of laboratories and other scientific institutions at the universities, the foundation of new polytechnic schools, the official recog- nition of the polytechnic schools as being of equal rank with the universities and as being entitled to confer the highest academic degree, — all this has a decidedly practical and, as scoffers have said, American aspect. But while it is unquestionable that most of these reforms, or all of them, have been forced upon. the schools and universities by economic needs, and the increased struggle in all strata of society for making a livelihood, it is equally certain that the economic motive has not been the only one in bringing about these reforms. GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 25 A spiritual motive, as well as a material, is lying back of the School Reform, and those who oppose it — although they may imagine themselves to be the advocates of superior in- terests — are surely not the only supporters of ideal demands. The increased struggle of life, the quicker pulsation of blood, the greater tension of will and intellect, all of which are characteristic fea- tures of modern society, are bringing about, in Germany as much as anywhere else to-day, a new type of man and of woman. We do not care, — this is the instinctive feeling prevalent among the younger generation of parents, — we do not care to have the life knocked out of our children by the old learning. Let those who have a special bent in that direction devote themselves to the study of the ancient world. To make an appreciation of ancient literature and art the prime standard of cultivation, to demand of all of us a- thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin grammar, of Greek and Ro- man history, to confine the best part of school- ing to studies of direct import only to the phi- lologist or the historian, — this is intellectual tyranny. What is the colonization of Asia Mi- nor by the Greeks, compared with the gigantic 26 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY colonization of America by the Germanic and Romance nations ? What is the struggle of Rome and Carthage over the supremacy in the Mediterranean, compared with the struggle for world-dominion that has been going on during the last few centuries ? What is the conflict between the Roman plebs and patriciate, com- pared with the huge conflict between capital and labor that is now agitating the whole civ- ilized world? What is even Greek literature and art, compared with the wealth and variety of artistic ideals and types produced by Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England, not to speak of other nations that have enriched the artistic vision of our own age ? To set up the ancient languages as the one means of linguistic training, to magnify ancient civilization as the climax of all human development, is worshiping an idol of arbitrary fancy. Far from having a liberalizing effect upon the youthful mind, -this insistence by the schoolmen upon the superiority of the ancient world either tends to narrow the range of in- tellectual sympathy, or, by arousing the pro- test consequent upon all exaggeration, it leads to indifference and open hostility against the very thing which the pupil is bidden to ad- GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 27 mire. The true and essential demand of a liberal education is, that we should be made intellectually at home in our own country and people, that we should know the history of our mother tongue, that we should be familiar with the great epochs of our national develop- ment — whether political, literary, or artistic — that we should be intimately acquainted with the language and the literature of those nations that have had the greatest influence upon our own history, and with whom we have now the most intimate relations, — in the case of Germany, then, at least the English and French language and literature ; and only after all these requirements have been met with, the study of the ancient world should come in as an element in the education of the average man. Is it not an intolerable condition of things that the majority of our educated men should have struggled through the best part of their boyhood with Greek moods and tenses, and not be able to read our own Nibelungenlied or Walther von der Vogelweide in the origi- nal ? Is it not an absurdity and a shame that they should have been initiated into the de- tails of archaeological discussions concerning 28 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY excavations in Olympia or Pergamon, and at the same time have been left practically igno- rant of the treasures of plastic art stored in the cathedrals of Bamberg or Naumburg or Strass- burg ? Is it not preposterous that they should have been made to worry through Platonic dialogues and Ciceronian orations, without for the most part being led to grasp their true significance and beauty, and at the same time hardly know more than the names of such men as Milton or Voltaire or Rousseau, — men who, both on account of their language and because of the subjects treated by them, are very much nearer to the understanding of the youth of to-day ? If we demand a com- plete reversal of method in the study of the humanities, we make this demand not from mercenary motives, but in the name of liberal education. We are convinced that, if the em- phasis of the instruction in all schools were laid upon the modern world, — modern lan- guages, modern history, modern art and liter- ature and thought, — education would acquire a new meaning. It would cease to be a matter of the school alone, it would come to be a part of public life. It would be a kind of self-scru- tiny of the national mind as to the foundations GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 29 of its own strength. It would lose all the harshness and artificiality inseparable from the old system. It would stimulate the in- dependent activity of the pupil, and his de- sire to find his own bearings. It would in the best sense of the word be delivery, delivery from self-deception and self-conceit. It would be a most active power in preventing, or at least allaying, international misunderstandings and animosities. For how could a man who felt truly at home in the intellectual world, at least of France, Germany, and England, fail to recognize the close interdependence of the great modern nations ; how could he but be filled with the desire to contribute on his part toward their mutual understanding and friendly devotion to a common task ? If, then, the tendency toward modern sub- jects, so characteristic in contemporary Ger- man instruction in the humanities, is actuated to a very large extent by ideal motives, the same must be said of the two other most con- spicuous features of German education of to- day, — the emphasis laid upon natural science, and the constantly increasing interest in uni- versity studies taken by women. As to nat- ural science, the conviction is steadily gaining 3 o GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ground that, quite apart from its importance as an economic factor, it should form part of the liberal training of an educated man. As little as a man can be called truly educated who is not intellectually at home in the great problems and conflicts that have shaped the history of his own country, as little can he be called educated who is not intellectually at home in the physical world that surrounds us. And what age has brought this self-evident truth clearer into view than ours, which puts its best energy into the service of physical observation, and which year by year reveals new forces in the cosmic order hidden hereto- fore ? It is this truth to which Germany has risen with astonishing rapidity. As to the in- flux of women into the universities, there can be no question that the desire for economic independence or the necessity of self-support has not been the most cogent cause for this remarkable phenomenon. Most of the Ger- man women do not pursue bread and butter studies in the university ; what they crave is intellectual stimulus. The German woman has, late perhaps, 1 but on that very account 1 It should, however, be said that women played an important part in the German Romantic movement and that GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 31 with particular ardor, taken up the struggle for emancipation ; she has come to the full consciousness of her spiritual dignity. She does not want any longer to confine herself to the narrow sphere of the house, she does not want any longer to be a mere piece of decora- tion, she does not want any longer an edu- cation which fits her only for society babble. She is resolved to get on her own feet intel- lectually ; to grapple herself with the problems of modern life; to become a comrade, an equal of man ; to reach out into the wide realm of liberal study. The result has been that to-day there is hardly a German family of the higher classes in which some feminine member is not taking up some serious life work, and that the state of things of a gener- ation ago, when the lieutenant was the ordi- nary ideal of the typical German Backfisch, is fast getting to be obsolete. The remarkable activity which German women have of late displayed in literature, especially in lyrics and in the novel, is only one phase, although a highly significant one, of this widespread, ar- dent, and earnest striving of womanhood for the emancipation of woman was a demand most eagerly raised by the Schlegels and their compeers. 32 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY higher activity. The woman question is as much alive, and as momentous, and on as high a plane, in Germany as in any other country. It will perhaps be clear now in what sense I called social efficiency the fundamental de- mand of the new German education. Not in the sense as though only that had social value in education which is of immediate application to some specific public need ; but rather in the sense that only that knowledge is socially val- uable which has been self-acquired, which has become part and parcel of the individual's own make-up, which adds to the individual's origi- nality, which increases his or her power of adjustment to given conditions, which leads to a fuller insight into the great problems press- ing in upon us from all sides, which stimulates active participation in public work of any kind, which heightens the joy of life. It will also have become clear that the nickname "Amer- ican," which has been attached to the new edu- cation, is in reality not a term of derision, but a name of honor and of deep significance. For it brings out the fact that the two great na- tions which have perhaps more to give to each other than any other two nations of to-day GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 33 stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight for a rational, modern education. Indeed, there can hardly be any question that it is in Amer- ica and in Germany that this cause will first achieve its final and lasting triumph. In no other country, with the possible exception of Scandinavia, is public opinion so overwhelm- ingly on the side of the new ideal ; in no other country the work of reconstruction is taken up in so earnest, methodical, and comprehensive a manner ; in no other country the reform has found such sagacious, uncompromising, and fearless leaders. It is more than a mere coin- cidence that at the present moment the two most influential men in educational matters in America and Germany should be men so strik- ingly alike in intellectual temper as President Eliot and Dr. Althoff. Ill Thus far we have paid little or no attention to the spiritual ideals dominating contemporary German life. In considering this side of our subject, we are at once struck with a remark- able difference between conditions in Germany and the state of things in other countries, par- ticularly America and England. In America 34 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY and England questions of the higher life are still very largely bound up with the Church ; it is hardly conceivable that spiritual problems should arise in either of these countries with- out the Church trying to meet them. In Ger- many, the Church has ceased to be a moral leader ; it has sunk back to the position of a defender of creeds. The inner life has been secularized in Germany; the men who shape spiritual ideals are philosophers, poets, artists. In a large measure this state of affairs is due to the after-effect of that great epoch of German humanism signalized by the names of Goethe and Kant, Schiller and Fichte. The very substance of the life work of these men and their compeers consisted in this, that they replaced the ecclesiastical doctrine of atone- ment by the belief in the saving quality of restless striving. Never in the whole history of the world has there been held up to man an ideal of life more exalted, more inspiring, freer from unworthy or belittling motives, than in their teachings. They trusted in the essential goodness of all life; they conceived of the universe as a great spiritual being, engaged in constant self-revelation and in a constant strug- gle toward higher forms of existence. They GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 35 believed that man, as a part of this spiritual universe, was in immediate and instinctive communication with its innermost essence ; and they saw the great office of man in help- ing the spirit toward its fullest self-realization. They did not close their eyes to the fact that there is evil in the world. But they saw in evil merely abortive attempts toward the good, — failures, as it were, of the world-spirit in its reaching out for completeness of self-mani- festation; and the remedy for evil, the atone- ment for guilt, they found not in contrition or self-inflicted suffering, but in renewed effort, in heightened activity, in unremitting work. That the practical demands growing out of this new faith, the fullest development of all human faculties, the freest play of all human aspirations, and the redemption of man from sin by his own strength, are absolutely incom- patible with the traditional church doctrine of the radical perversity of human nature and the impossibility of salvation except through divine intercession, is undeniable. But it is equally clear that they are in full accord with the whole drift, with the strongest tendencies, of modern life. And there can be no question that litera- ture and art, in so far as they are expressions 36 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY of what is most distinctly modern in contem- porary life, cannot help drawing their best in- spiration from such views as these. During the decades following the death of Goethe, the problems of political reconstruc- tion and national unity so largely absorbed public attention that the higher demands of the human heart, the longing for spiritual per- fection, for oneness of the individual with the all, for the harmonious rounding out of per- sonal life, had, as it were, to be hushed. Hence the lameness, the half-heartedness, the prevail- ing mediocrity, of German literature and art about the middle of the nineteenth century. With the foundation of the new Empire in 1870, the most urgent national need was at last put out of the way ; a basis for a secure political development had been established. From now on, questions of the inner life pressed to the foreground once more, and in course of time there followed a revival of that moral enthusiasm, that intense striving for a free human personality, that fearless and com- prehensive view of the world as a great liv- ing organism, which had brought about the great epoch of German culture at the end of the eighteenth century. To-day we are in the GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 37 midst of a literary and artistic movement which is in every way a worthy counterpart to that great era of moral delivery ; to-day literature and art have again assumed the role of leader- ship in the national striving for spiritual pos- sessions. If we were to express in one word the key- note of this new German art, so as to indi- cate what it has added and is adding to the moral consciousness of the German people, we probably could not choose a better word than sympathy with life, — Lebensbejahung, as Nietzsche, its most impassioned, though by no means noblest, champion would say. Of course no art could be imagined which was entirely devoid of this sympathy with life ; the main difference between the various epochs of ar- tistic development consists in the greater or smaller degree, the larger or narrower range, of this sympathy. The distinguishing feature of contemporary German, as indeed of all modern, art is the intense ardor, the well-nigh universal comprehensiveness of this feeling. Humanity, — this is the general impression left by the most characteristic productions of this new art, — humanity is once more throb- bing with the desire to comprehend all, to 38 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY sympathize with all, to feel at one with all. Dumb nature and animal life, the lot of the common people, the drudgery of everyday ex- istence, the suffering of the downtrodden and the degraded, the whole gamut of human in- stincts, passions, ambitions, and aspirations, — it is all worthy of loving consideration and inter- est, all is part of one great living whole, in it all there is felt the breath of the infinite spirit, the restless striving of the universal life for completeness of existence. The two men who have given the most perfect artistic expression to this new panthe- ism, Richard Wagner and Arnold Bocklin, are not any longer among the living, but their works are as active a force in creating the ideal atmosphere of cultivated Germany as ever before. The thousands upon thousands who year after year listen to the soul-stirring strains of Wagner's music, who enter into the world of elemental longings, passions, and strivings contained in such heroic figures as Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried, or Parsifal, cannot help un- dergoing thereby a process of moral revolu- tion. They cannot help being made to feel, — blindly, perhaps, in most cases, but on that account no less forcibly, — that here there are GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 39 types of a life raised above the ordinary con- ceptions of good and evil, beings that have in them something of the primeval power of nature herself, superior both to happiness and to distress, finding their only law and their only joy in living out what is in them. Even where their names suggest ecclesiastical tradi- tion and lore, these heroic figures are them- selves as unecclesiastical as possible ; no mat- ter whether they succumb to a tragic fate or whether they press on to victory, they are sufficient unto themselves, they remain unbro- ken, they have no need of changing themselves into something which is contrary to their natu- ral instincts ; what inspires, moves, and main- tains them, is their indestructible faith in life, their instinctive assurance that they are inde- structible themselves, part of that great, mys- terious One and All which through countless transformations and cataclysms maintains itself in unimpaired splendor and strength. And similar is the effect of Bocklin's paintings. Here also there is a life, exultant, ecstatic al- most, with the feeling of the oneness of man with the powers that surround him. Here the line dividing man and nature has been effaced entirely. Whether we see the surf dashing 4 o GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY against the rocks, tossing about in its mighty whirl a fantastic host of half-human, half-ani- mal forms, or the fights of centaurs on lonely mountain heights, encompassed by rolling clouds ; whether the wonders of the forest open before us in the shy, half-crazed glance of the unicorn stepping noiselessly through its grue- some dusk ; whether the holy grove receives us in common with the solemn company gathered about the altar and bending in mute adoration before the sacred flame ; whether we lose ourselves in gentle meditation with the venerable old hermit playing the violin before the image of the Virgin, or whether we follow the daring fancy of the knight-errant riding with head erect and lordly mien over the sandy, desolate beach ; whether the sun sparkles in the brook and the meadows teem with flowers and sporting children, or whether the Island of the Dead, with its sombre cy- presses and its austere rocks, looms up from the glassy sea, — everywhere there seems to look at us that same magic, all-embracing, all- enfolding, inexhaustible being, of which man, beast, plant, and all the elements are partial, but closely kindred manifestations ; every- where our sense of life is heightened, our sym- GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 41 pathy is enlarged, our passions are stirred, our longing for a complete rounding out of all our faculties is intensified. Of Bocklin it may in truth be said that he has forced the present generation of Germans to see in a new way, more intensely, and at wider range ; that the sky seems bluer, the meadow greener, the light of the sun more dazzling, the shadow of the poplar and the cypress deeper, than before he opened our eyes to these sights ; that he, as no one before him, has revealed nature as one gigantic, irresistible striving for beauty, for color, for light, for variety of forms, for perfection of types. That a man of such astounding creative power, and of such an extraordinary wealth of ideas as he should during his lifetime have had to struggle against all sorts of prejudices and animosities, and that even now he should hardly have begun to exert an influence beyond the confines of German-speaking countries, 1 is a fresh proof of how hard it is for the truly great to dispos- sess fat mediocrity. 1 I believe, the short sketch of Bocklin's work contained in my Glimpses of Modern German Culture is the first and only attempt made by an American writer to characterize his art. 42 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Perhaps none of the sculptors, painters, musicians, and authors of the younger gener- ation can be compared in range and sweep of conception with the two masters whose works will probably stand to posterity as calmly re- splendent symbols of all the brooding, longing, striving, all the passion, exultation, and rest- less activity that vibrated in German hearts at the end of the nineteenth century and the be- ginning of the twentieth. That, however, even the most modern German art and literature is committed to these same ideals, that it is per- meated with this same zeal of grappling with the fundamental problems of existence, that it is impelled by the same desire to express the innermost cravings of life in all their wealth and variety, the mere enumeration of such names as Richard Strauss, Max Klinger, Ger- hart Hauptmann, Joseph Widmann, Wilhelm von Polenz, Gustav Frenssen, Ricarda Huch, Helene Bohlau, and Clara Viebig, is sufficient proof. And it should be added that recent years have given us not a few productions which for their artistic perfection as well as their spiritual significance, may well be ranked among the great. Think of such creations as Strauss's Tod GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 43 und Verklarung y Klinger's Beethoven, Haupt- mann's Der Arme Heinrich , Widmann's Mai- kafer-Komoedie, — has the contemporary art of other nations anything to offer deeper in feel- ing or more irresistible in expression ? Does not Strauss's ravishing composition lead us into the very centre of the elemental struggles and catastrophes of life ; does it not spread before us the vision of an infinite, all-em- bracing activity? Has not Klinger's chisel transformed the features of Beethoven into a symbol of the concentrated energy of modern intellectual striving ; has it not made the mar- ble proclaim the indomitable determination of modern man to conquer matter ? Is not Hauptmann's dramatization of the mediaeval legend of " Poor Henry " a wonderful em- bodiment of the modern longing for firmness of faith, for spiritual resurrection, a song of redemption by inner transformation ? And does not Widmann's fantastic poem of the joys, the desires, and the tragedy of insect life open up our heart to everything that lives and draws breath; does it not make us see our own life in a new light, increasing our capacity for enjoyment and strengthening our readiness to endure ? Indeed, here there are ideal creations 44 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY that have sprung from the very midst of the spiritual problems that surround us ; here there are hymns of modern belief ; here art appears in her noblest form, as priestess of humanity, as healer, uplifter, exhorter, and redeemer. But quite apart from such works as these, works appealing to aspirations universally hu- man and removed in subject-matter from the actual conditions of to-day, what a wealth of idealism and joyous vitality has come to light of late in the literature dealing directly with contemporary subjects and situations! The German novel, in particular, has during the last ten or fifteen years undergone a complete transformation. Not in vain has it gone to school with the masters of realism in Russia and France ; it has learned directness of ex- pression, precision of delineation, perspicuity of grouping, simplicity and truthfulness of characterization. As mere specimens of artis- tic composition, such novels as Polenz's Der Buttnerbauer, Ricarda Huch's Rudolf Ursteu, Clara Viebig's Das Tagliche Brot or Das Schlafende Heer, Helene Bohlau's Der Ran- gier bahnhof are equal to anything which the contemporary novel of Europe or America GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 45 has produced. What, however, gives their peculiar significance to these and similar German novels of to-day is the noble, gen- erous humanity pervading them, the sym- pathy with human suffering and struggling, the charitable view taken even of the degen- erate and the criminal, the openness and hos- pitality for any kind of strong and genuine feeling, the belief in the sacredness of life, the earnest desire to do justice to all of its types, the eagerness to approach all questions of pri- vate conduct or public morality without pre- judice or malice, the trust in the saving quality of honest endeavor and courageous grappling with circumstance. These novelists are moral leaders, even though they do not know it, and most effectively so when they do not intend to be. They are helping toward a wider and fuller conception of humanity, a more truthful foun- dation of morals, a freer development of per- sonality, a society based on justice and reason. They are enriching the moral consciousness of the German people ; they are adding to its storehouse of spiritual ideals. I have already alluded to the fact that the Church, the great organized power for the maintenance and propagation of spirituality, 46 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY has remained entirely foreign to this body of spiritual ideals which, sprung from the great epoch of German Classicism and Romanti- cism, have formed the German lay religion ever since, and have during the last few decades found renewed expression in literature and art. Unfortunately, this statement is not quite strong enough. The Church, both Protest- ant and Catholic, has not only maintained an attitude of indifference toward these ideals; it has over and over again declared its open hostility to them, it has condemned them as unchristian and atheistic, it has designated them as the root of all evil in modern society. Here there lies the fundamental antagonism, the cardinal paradox, of contemporary Ger- man life. Nowhere is there a greater chance, a wider opportunity, for the Church to become a spiritual leader, to receive into its own stream all the higher aspirations of the nation, than in Germany. No people is at heart more deeply religious than the German ; nowhere is there more individual reaching out after the Infinite. No view of life seems more clearly destined to become the common creed of modern humanity than the noble optimism, the joyous trust in the universe, the belief in GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 47 the affinity of all things, the sympathy with all existence, the faith in work, in continual endeavor as the royal road to redemption, which are the living legacy of our classic litera- ture and philosophy. There is nothing, abso- lutely nothing, in these convictions which the Church might not assimilate. By placing her- self on the same intellectual level with our thinkers, poets, and artists ; by relinquishing the unworthy notion of an extramundane deity residing somewhere in a corner of the uni- verse ; by abandoning the childish conception of a single revelation of this deity in times past through the mouths of a few men and to a few chosen people ; by resolutely casting aside the incongruous idea of the salvation of mankind through one vicarious sacrifice ; by squarely and openly adopting a religion which is in harmony with the modern view of the universe, which is broad enough to include the demands of every human instinct, and which listens without fear to every message of Na- ture and all her interpreters, — the Church would at once rally around herself all the long- ing, striving, aspiring minds of the nation, and a new era of popular religious life would be at hand. Germany, the home of free thought, 48 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY would become the home of a new, free reli- gion, also. Instead of that, what do we see? We see that the Church, of all the public forces in German life of to-day, is the only one which has remained absolutely stationary ; that she obstinately clings to a set of superstitious be- liefs which are in direct contradiction to the most primitive knowledge acquired in the common schools ; that she forces these beliefs upon the religious instruction in the schools, nay, even upon the theological faculties of the universities, the seats of the " higher criti- cism ; " that she applies her obsolete and un- enlightened views with such consistency and energy that she has, for instance, succeeded in having cremation forbidden by law in Prussia, on the ground of this process of interment being prejudicial to the resurrection of the body ; we see, in other words, that the Church is doing her best to make religious life to the great majority of the people appear as one prodigious lie or mockery. No wonder that, in the Protestant parts of Germany, at least, the religious instruction forced upon school children leads in most cases with growing ma- turity only to contempt for everything con- GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY 49 nected with church life ; that sermons as a rule are preached to empty benches ; that the materialistic vagaries of Haeckel and the un- measured anticlericalism of Nietzsche find a ready ear with the masses, and incite them to hatred of religion herself. Such a state of things cannot last. Either, the Church persists in her present defiance of everything that makes life interesting and precious to thinking men, — in that case the disaffection and the revolt against the Church will, of course, steadily grow, and ultimately reach such dimensions that the whole ecclesi- astical system goes to ruin ; or, the Church rises at last to her opportunity, fills herself with the modern faith in life, casts to the winds dogmatic squabbles, and preaches that God whom Christ and his disciples preached, the infinite spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. 1 In that case there will be a religious reawakening such as Germany has not seen since Luther. Let us hope that this is what the future has in store for us. A few words in conclusion. We have seen 1 Undoubtedly, the extraordinary success of such a book as Frenssen's Hilligenlei is largely due to the widespread longing for a religious revival of this kind. 50 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY that contemporary Germany is by no means lacking in ideal impulses. Social justice as the controlling force in the development of po- litical institutions, social efficiency as the goal of education, universal sympathy with life as the guiding principle of literature and art, — this is a triad of uplifting motives which can- not help stimulating every constructive en- ergy, every power for good, contained in the nation. All that Germany needs is an undis- turbed condition of public affairs, absence of foreign complications, and mutual forbearance and good will in domestic controversies. With this prospect assured, the new ideals briefly analyzed on the preceding pages will more and more completely dominate the na- tional consciousness, and the way will be free toward a golden age of German achievements in every domain of higher aspiration. II THREE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESSES I. GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 1 Anniversaries of great men of the past are valuable as incentives for stating anew the abid- ing elements of their fame, for reexamining their essential contributions to the higher life, for realizing afresh those traits in them which, in spite of changed surroundings and conditions, appeal to us with the force of immediate actu- ality. The Goethe anniversary, then, which is being celebrated this year in not a few Ameri- can cities as well as throughout Germany, may well induce us to ask, not what was Goethe for his time and his people, but what is he for our time and our people, — what insights, convic- tions, ideals, may we gain from his work and his personality that will help us in facing the manifold problems that beset our own life ; in short, what is Goethe's message to America ? T shall try to answer this question under the head of two ideas, the ideas of freedom and 1 An address delivered, in 1899, at the Goethe anniver- sary celebration in Cleveland. 54 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY culture ; for in these two conceptions, it seems to me, the sum total of Goethe's message to America is contained. I That Goethe, before everything else, is a spiritual emancipator must be clear to every one who has felt, however faintly, the breath of his genius. Yet nowhere can this eman- cipating force of Goethe's character be better understood or work more freely than here in America. Happily, the time is long since past when he was feared by respectable society as a libertine and destroyer of good morals, when he was hated by the church as an atheist and a subverter of faith. Even his adversaries, nowadays, have agreed to respect him as the great apostle of free humanity. Nevertheless, it may not be superfluous to show how closely Goethe's ideal of a free humanity is allied to the best in American life. Goethe is a classic of individualism. His moral conceptions are founded upon the un- wavering belief in the paramount value of personality ; and the full assertion, the com- plete development, of this personality is to him the fundamental and inviolable law of all GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 55 human activity. If his Wilhelm Meister had no other importance or interest for us, this novel would be sure of a lasting place in the history of American culture for this reason alone : that here an idea is anticipated which may be called the very corner stone of educa- tional thought in America, — the idea that the true task of education is, not to preserve from error, but to guide through error to fuller in- dividuality and richer experience. It is, how- ever, not only in this general principle of individualism that Goethe is at one with the strongest tendencies of American intellectual life ; in the application also of this principle to concrete reality he seems to address himself above all to a people which, like the Ameri- can, is engaged in the struggle of shaping its own national individuality. Outright American, one might say to begin with, is the extraordinary sense of reality which has prevented Goethe from becoming a prey to the fantastic speculations and romantic hallu- cinations of his time, and which perhaps more than anything else has helped him in the mani- fold conflicts of his life to assert incessantly his own self. To be sure, he too paid his trib- ute to the sentimentalism of the period in which 56 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY his youth fell ; he- too was affected by the exaggerated idealism of theWeimar epoch ; he too suffered from the overstraining of the aes- thetic sense which gives to most of the great German writers of the beginning of the nine- teenth century an almost feminine character. Yet how does his Werther stand out from the other sentimental novels of the Storm and Stress period through genuine feeling and plastic power ! In what clear and simple out- line does his Iphigenie stand forth against the shadowy productions of the other classicists ! How firm and resolute even so idealized figures as Hermann and Dorothea tread the ground of reality ! And with what inexorable truthful- ness does Goethe, in Tasso and in the Elective Affinities, expose the immorality of aspirations which do not rest upon the recognition of actual facts and existing laws! It was this incorruptible sense of reality which enabled Goethe, in the affairs of Church and State, always to find out the truly productive and significant, no matter to what party it might belong ; so that the admirer of Napoleon could also be an admirer of English parliamentary government, the follower of Spinoza also a glorifier of mediaeval popery. It was this same GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 57 sense of reality which preserved Goethe from subscribing to any of the metaphysical tenets which, during his long life, one after the other intoxicated the minds of his contemporaries. It was this same sense of reality which in sci- entific matters kept him in the narrow path of patient and unbiased observation ; which made him in biological research a forerunner of Darwin ; in the history of literature and art a master of that criticism which does not con- demn or canonize, but analyzes and compre- hends. It was this same sense of reality which made him speak the blunt but wholesome word: "The occupation with thoughts on immortal- ity is for aristocratic circles, and especially for ladies who have nothing to do; " which made him put into the mouth of the aged Faust this confession of faith : — The sphere of earth is known enough to me ; The view beyond is barred immutably. A fool, who there his blinking eyes directeth And o'er his clouds of peers a place expecteth! Firm let him stand, and look around him well! This world means something to the capable. Why needs he through eternity to wend ? He here acquires what he can apprehend. Thus let him wander down his earthly day; When spirits haunt, go quietly his way; 58 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY In marching onward bliss and torment find, Though, every moment, with unsated mind. Do we not recognize in all this a deep af- finity between Goethe and the genius of the American people ? Do we not see here symp- toms of the same state of mind which is the source of the traditional fairness and impar- tiality of the American commonwealth toward the manifold creeds and religious denomina- tions, of the preeminently experimental bent of American science, of the decidedly practical type of American life even in its religious and ethical aspects ? Do we not see here an antici- pation of the truly American conviction, — American in spite of demagogues and jingoes, — the conviction that freedom has no more dangerous enemy than blind enthusiasm for any theory or any party principle ? Intimately associated with this thoroughly masculine sense of reality, and again closely akin to American character, is the glorification of work and deed which shines forth with such beneficent and freeing splendor from all of Goethe's works, from Gbtz von Berlichingen down to the Second Part of Faust , and no less from his own life. The fundamental import- ance of this conception for Goethe's whole GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 59 view of the world is in the first place proved by a superabundance of individual utterances, which, made at widely separated times and on most different occasions, all agree in this, — that man acquires true freedom only by — action. " Ah, writing is but busy idleness," says Gotz ; " it wearies me. While I am writing what I have done, I lament the mis- spent time in which I might do more." Faust translates the first line of the Gospel accord- ing to John by, " In the beginning was the Deed ; " and at the end of his life he draws the balance of his earthly experience in the words, " Enjoyment makes debased," and, " The deed is everything, the glory naught ! " And more personally still Goethe expresses this same thought in his Maxims and Reflex- ions : " Endeavor to do your duty, and you know at once what you are. What is your duty? The demand of the day." Under the title " Five Things," he lays down in the Divan this succinct and intensely practical rule of life : — What makes time short to me ? Activity ! What makes it long and spiritless ? Idleness ! 60 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY What brings us to debt ? To delay and forget! What makes us succeed ? Decision with speed ! How to fame to ascend ? One's self to defend! And as a last sacred bequest he leaves to his friends the message : — Solemn duty's daily observation — More than this it needs no revelation. But not only in such isolated though sig- nificant utterances has Goethe expressed his conviction of the saving quality of work ; his whole moral attitude is determined by this one idea. Goethe shares with the Christian religion a strong sense of the sinfulness of human nature and of the necessity of redemption. With the Christian religion he sees the true aim of life in the delivery from hereditary weakness, in the victory of mind over matter. But of all church conceptions none was ever mOre foreign to him than the idea of repentance as a condition of the soul's salvation. Repent- ance seemed to him something entirely nega- tive and unproductive, a gratuitous and useless self-humiliation. Not through contrition and self-chastisement, but through discipline and GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 61 self-reliance, he thought, is the way to per- fection. Eor this reason, throughout his life he kept as much as possible aloof from all influences which seemed to endanger his self- possession, such as pain, care, grief, fear ; while he incessantly and systematically cultivated in himself and others whatever tends to heighten the feeling of self, as joy, cheerfulness, hope, courage. For this reason, Wilhelm Meister finds lasting satisfaction in calm renunciation of a happiness which lies outside the limits of his nature, and in the firm conviction that by this very renunciation he insures his true spir- itual freedom. For this reason, finally, Faust atones for his guilt, not by self-destruction, but by a life devoted to freedom and progress. And this leads us to the third manifestation of Goethe's individualism, which most preemi- nently points to the spirit of modern Ameri- can life, — his belief in the saving power of — unceasing progress. As in the development of the earth, of plant and animal life, he saw progress not in sudden and unexpected con- vulsions, but in gradual and steady transforma- tion, so in spiritual matters, also, he found the essence of personal life not in ecstatic emotions and violent upheavals, but in an unremitting 62 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY and even growth from one mental state to another, until at last a condition s,hould be reached in which the fetters of earthly person- ality would fall away, and the individual spirit be drawn into the restless movement of the universal spirit. Im Grenzenlosen sich zu finden Wird gem der Einzelne verschwinden, Da lost sich aller Ueberdruss ; Statt heissem Wiinschen, wildem Wollen, Statt last' gem Fordern, strengem Sollen, Sich aufzugeben ist Genuss. Weltseele, komm', uns zu durchdringen! Dann mit dem Weltgeist selbst zu ringen Wird unsrer Krafte Hochberuf. Teilnejimend fiihren gute Geister, Gelinde leitend, hochste Meister, Zu dem, der Alles schafFt und schuf. Und umzuschafFen das Geschaffhe, Damit sich's nicht zum Starren waffne, Wirkt euiges, lebendiges Tun. Und was nicht war, nun will es werden, Zu reinen Sonnen, farbigen Erden, In keinem Falle darf es ruhn. Es soil sich regen, schaffend handeln, Erst sich gestalten, dann verwandeln ; -heinbar steht's Momente still. GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 63 Das Ewige regt sich fort in Allen : Denn Alles muss in Nichts zerfallen, Wenn es im Sein beharren will. 1 Might one not say : Here there is a dream of the life beyond, here there is a prophetic delineation of the future world, such as might well have presented itself to Goethe's eye as a continuation and completion of modern Ameri- can life, with its endless movement, change, and restless striving? It is, at any rate, well worth noticing that not long after this poem was written Goethe expressed himself on ques- tions of the political and commercial life of the United States in a manner which betrays an extraordinary insight into the vital prob- lems and tasks of our national development. Through Alexander von Humboldt Goethe was informed, in 1827, of the project of a Panama canal, and the octogenarian listened to this project with a youthful eagerness and enthusiasm, as though it concerned an under- taking in his own immediate neighborhood. "All this," he said to Eckermann, "is left to the future and to wide-reaching enterprise. This much, however, is certain : if a canal is 1 So far as I know, this wonderful poem has never been translated into English ; and it seems indeed untranslatable. 64 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY constructed, through which vessels of every size and cargo may go from the Gulf of Mex- ico to the Pacific Ocean, there will result from it incalculable consequences for the whole civi- lized and uncivilized world. I should be sur- prised, therefore, if the United States would let the opportunity pass of getting such a work into its hands. It is to be foreseen that this youthful republic, with its decided ten- dency toward the west, will have annexed and populated, within thirty or forty years, even the wide areas beyond the Rocky Mountains. It is also to be foreseen that along the whole Pacific coast, where nature has formed the roomiest and safest harbors, there will arise, in course of time, very important cities, which will serve as points of commerce between the United States and China. In that case, how- ever, it will be not only desirable, but almost indispensable, for men-of-war as well as mer- chantmen to maintain a quicker connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific coast of North America than has been heretofore possi- ble. I repeat, then : it is absolutely necessary for the United States to construct and control a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, and I am sure thev will accom- GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 65 plish it. I shall not live to see it ; but it might well be worth the while on that account to stand it here for another fifty years." II Goethe is not only a representative of free- dom ; he is also, and in a still more peculiar sense, a representative of culture. What is culture? Does it consist in the refinement of the senses, in the increase of needs, in the perfection of talents, in the acqui- sition of knowledge, in the widening of the intellectual horizon ? All these elements con- tribute to produce culture, but they are not culture. Culture is not an accomplishment, but a state of mind. Culture he alone has who realizes the relation of his accomplish- ments, whatever they may be, to the larger life of which he forms a part ; whose aim in heightening his own personality is only to make it better fitted for service to the community. The striving for true culture, therefore, con- tains a democratic as well as an aristocratic tendency. It is aristocratic ; for it tends to give to the most refined, the best schooled, the most fully developed, the part in public life which is their due. It is democratic ; for 66 GERMAN : IDEALS OF TO-DAY it is bound to no class and no rank, and it increases the feeling of public responsibility in direct proportion to the increase of personal attainments. This, if I am not mistaken, is the conception of culture which is becoming more and more dominant among the best representatives of American civilization. To be sure, there are still not a few of our college professors and college alumni who think that culture is bound up with the possession of certain magic for- mulae, as the verbs in fu y or the ablative ab- solute, or the Thirty-Ninth Theorem. But it certainly seems as though the rule of such magic formulae were nearing its end, even in academic circles ; it certainly seems as though the time were not far distant when the conviction will have become universal that every kind of know- ledge and every kind of accomplishment may lead to genuine culture, provided that this knowledge and this accomplishment have been acquired in a thorough manner and are em- ployed in such a way as to benefit the commu- nity. As to Goethe, it is perfectly obvious that his conception of culture entirely agrees with the view just propounded. Some critics have GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 67 taken offense at the sudden turn from classic sublimity to practical reality which marks the end of Faust's career. To me this turn is the most beautiful proof of the noble large-mind- edness of Goethe's ideal of culture. Faust has gone through the world in all its length and breadth ; he has felt the highest happiness and the deepest woe ; he has seen the splen- dor of an imperial court and experienced the intrigues of political life ; he has passed in re- view the grotesquely fantastic figures of medi- aeval folk-lore and the heroic forms of classic legend ; his striving for complete humanity has thus acquired ever fuller and richer reality ; and how does this striving now culminate? Wherein does he gain final and lasting satis- faction ? Therein that he puts all his know- ledge and accomplishments, all his experience and intuition, at the service of the common need; therein that, standing "on a free soil with a free people," shoulder to shoulder with his brethren, in daily renewed toil he fights the cause of the common man. Is not this a striking glorification of the principle that the essential thing in culture is not the What, but the How ; that its measure is not a certain amount of knowledge and accomplishments, 68 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY but the state of mind in which these acqui- sitions are employed ? Is it not a shining symbol of the necessity of the submission of the individual, even the most refined indi- vidual, to the common weal ? Is it not a poetic anticipation of the ideal for which our whole age is struggling, and on whose realiz- ation depends the future of the American people, — the reconciliation and amalgamation of intellectual aristocracy with democratic or- ganization of society? Three practical consequences which may be drawn from this submission of the individual to the whole, which indeed have been drawn by Goethe himself, seem to me of especial significance for American life. First, the necessity of self-limitation, if the individual is really to accomplish something for the whole. On this point Goethe has ex- pressed himself in a manner which cannot help being a welcome message to those of us who expect from the specialization of studies not a narrowing, but a deepening of culture. "Many- sidedness," he says, " prepares only the ele- ment in which the one-sided can work. Now is the time for the one-sided ; well for him who comprehends it, and who works for him- GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 69 self and others in this spirit. Practice till you are an able violinist, and be assured that the director will have pleasure in assigning you a place in the orchestra. Make an instrument^ of yourself, and wait and see what sort of place i humanity will grant you in universal lifi^J Every one needs to serve from the lowest rank upward. To limit one's self to one craft is the best. To the narrow mind it will be, after all, a craft ; to the more intelligent, an art ; and /the most enlightened, when he does one thing, does everything, — or, to be less paradoxi- cal, in the one thing which he does rightly he beholds the semblance of everything that is rightly done." Secondly, the necessity of a reverent attitude toward the large whole of which the individual is only an insignificant part. " Freedom lies not in this," says Goethe, " that we are not willing to acknowledge anything above us, but that we revere what is above us. For by revering it we raise ourselves to its level, and evince by our recognition that we our- selves have the higher in us, and are worthy of being part of it." Words like these — words which are borne out by Goethe's habitual at- titude toward small things as well as great — 70 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY may well serve to rectify certain defects of American life brought about by exaggerated individualism. Finally, the assurance that this reverent at- titude toward the larger whole, of which each of us forms a part, is the best foundation for genuine enjoyment. The joylessness so widely spread in American life is caused, in part at least, by the absence of this feeling of rever- ence. We hasten and hurry after a distant, unknown happiness, and trample in the dust the flowers which blossom round about us. Titan-like we pile Pelion upon Ossa, forget- ting that divine joy is to be found only upon the calm heights of Mount Olympus. How different Goethe! To be sure, in a moment of discouragement he once said that his life, after all, had been nothing but toil and trou- ble, the continual rolling of a stone which had to be lifted ever anew, and that in the seventy-five years upon which he was looking back, he had had not four weeks of real com- fort. But these very words show the infinite capacity of his reverent soul for true enjoy- ment. For in spite of his unfulfilled desires, in spite of his consciousness of the fragmen- tariness and insufficiency of human life, he GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 71 retained to his last moment the power of de- riving joy from the apparently most insig- nificant source, of losing himself in worshipful feeling for the small wonders that surround us. A few weeks before his death he wrote* to Boisseree : " I have now come to my limit, in this sense : that I begin to believe where others despair, those, namely, who expect too much from knowledge, and thereby are led to deem the greatest treasures of mankind as naught. Thus we are driven from the whole to the part, and from the part to the whole, whether we will or not." Ill A little episode from the German War of Liberation may give us an idea of how the figure of Goethe stood before the minds of the noble youths who at that time flocked from the colleges and universities to the defense of their country. It is an incident which hap- pened to a company of Liitzow volunteers at the beginning of the campaign of 18 13, in the town of Meissen. A member of this company — Friedrich Foerster, the friend of Theodor Koerner — relates the occurrence as follows : "We had just finished our morning song in 72 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY front of the inn in which our captain was quar- tered, when I saw a man whose features seemed familiar to me entering a mail coach. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it was Goethe ! Having at once communicated the glorious discovery to my comrades, I ap- proached the coach with a military salute and said: ' I beg to report to your Excellency that a company of Royal Prussian Volunteers of the Black Rifle Corps, en route for Leipzig, have drawn up before your headquarters and desire to salute your Excellency.' The cap- tain gave the command { Present arms !' and I called, 'The poet of all poets, Goethe, hurrah ! ' The band played, and the whole company cheered. He touched his cap and nodded kindly. Now I once more stepped up to him and said : c It is no use for your Excellency to try to keep your incognito ; the Black Riflemen have sharp eyes, and to meet Goethe at the beginning of our march was too good an omen to pass unnoticed. We ask from you a blessing for our arms ! ' ' With all my heart,' he said. I held out my gun and sword ; he laid his hand on them and said : ( March for- ward with God ! And may all good things be granted to your joyous German courage ! ' GOETHE'S MESSAGE TO AMERICA 73 While we again cheered him, still saluting he drove past us." To us Americans this little scene from the " Holy War" of the Germans may well sym- bolize our own relation to Goethe. We too are engaged in a holy war ; we too are fight- ing for the highest ideals of life, the freedom and culture of our people ; we too ask the great man whose prophetic eye so clearly fore- saw our destiny to bless our arms. II. SCHILLER'S MESSAGE TO MODERN LIFE 1 However widely opinions may differ as to the greatness of Schiller the writer, the thinker, the historian, or even the poet, there can be no difference of opinion as to the greatness of Schiller the apostle of the perfect life. His own life was filled by one central idea. Every line written by him, every deed done by him, proclaim the fact that he felt himself to be the bearer of a sacred message to humanity, and that the consciousness of this high office in- spired, ennobled, hallowed his whole existence. It seems proper at the hundredth anniver- sary of the passing away of this great prophet briefly to define the message to the spreading of which he devoted his earthly career, and to ask ourselves what this message means to us of to-day. The central idea of Schiller's literary activity is bound up with his conception of the beauti- 1 An address delivered in 1905, at the Schiller centennial celebration at Harvard University. SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 75 ful. Beauty was to him something vastly more significant than the empirical conception of it as a quality exciting pleasurable emotions im- plies. It was to him a divine essence, inti- mately allied, if not synonymous, with absolute goodness and absolute truth. It was to him a principle of conduct, an ideal of action, the goal of highest aspiration, the mark of noblest citizenship, the foremost remedy of the evils besetting an age which seemed to him depraved and out of joint. Art was to him a great edu- cational force, a power making for progress, enlightenment, perfection ; and the mission of the artist he saw in the uplifting of society, in the endeavor to elevate public standards, in work for the strengthening, deepening, and — if need be — remodeling, of national character. What was Schiller's attitude toward the great national problems of his own age ? Schiller lived at a time when the very foun- dations of German political greatness appeared to be crumbling away. Of the ancient glory of the Holy Roman Empire — the pride of former generations — hardly a vestige was left. The civic independence and political power of the German city-republics of the Renaissance had come to be nothing but a shadowy tradi- 76 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tion. Public life was hemmed in by a thousand and one varieties of princely despotism and bu- reaucratic misgovernment, by class monopoly, by territorial jealousies, by local obstructions to trade and industry, by serfdom, by com- plete political apathy of the ruled as well as the rulers. No wonder that a nation which lacked the most fundamental prerequisites of national consciousness was powerless to withstand foreign aggression, and found itself dismem- bered, limb by limb, in the furious onslaught of Napoleonic imperialism. Out of this bondage to external conditions the German spirit freed itself by retreating — so to speak — into the souls of a few great men ; men faithful to the legacy of the German past ; faithful to the ideal of personality held up by Walther von der Vogelweide, by the Mystics, by Luther, by Leibniz ; faithful to the inerad- icable German striving for the deepening and intensifying of the inner life. The greatest of these men — builders from within, as one might call them, or renewers of the national body through reawakening of the national soul — were Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. Kant's ap- peal is an appeal to the conscience. In this fleeting world of appearances, where every- SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 77 thing is subject to doubt and misrepresenta- tion, there stands out one firm and incontro- vertible fact, the fact that we feel ourselves moral beings. The moral law, residing within ourselves, is felt by us instinctively as our in- nermost essence, and at the same time as the only direct and unmistakable revelation of the divine. In submission to this law, therefore, not in the gratification of our desires, does man's true freedom lie ; obedience to the dic- tates of duty is the only road to the perfect life. If Kant addresses himself to the moral sense, both Goethe and Schiller address them- selves to our artistic nature ; but while Goethe accentuates the receptive side of our artistic being, Schiller accentuates its creative side. To Goethe life appeared as an unending op- portunity for gathering in impressions, for widening our sympathies, for enriching our imagination, for heightening our sense of the grandeur of all existence; universality of cul- ture was to him the goal of endeavor. To Schiller, life appeared as an unending oppor- tunity for penetrating into the essence of things, for finding the unity lying back of the con- trasts of the universe, of matter and spirit, of instinct and reason, and for expressing this 78 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY unity in the language of art; striving for inner harmony, for oneness with self and the world was to him the supreme task of man. It is not surprising that in the actual world about him, in the society of his time, Schiller found little that seemed to him to make for this ideal of inner harmony. Indeed, he felt that this ideal could be attained only in direct opposition to the spirit of his age. The des- potic state of the eighteenth century, with its shallow opportunism, its bureaucratic narrow- ness, its lack of popular energy, seemed to him the sworn enemy of all higher strivings, and fatal to the development of a harmonious, well rounded inner life. " When the state," he says in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, " when the state makes the office the measure of the man ; when it honors in one of its subjects memory alone, in another clerical sagacity, in a third mechanical clever- ness ; when in one case, indifferent toward character, it insists only on knowledge, in an- other condones the most flagrant intellectual obtuseness if accompanied by outward disci- pline and loyalty, — is it a wonder that in order to cultivate the one talent which brings honor and reward all other gifts of the mind SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 79 are neglected ? To be sure, a genius will rise above the barriers of his profession ; but the mass of mediocre talents must of necessity consume their whole strength in their official existence. And thus individual, concrete life is gradually being annihilated in order that the abstract shadow of the whole may drag out its barren existence." In such an age, then, this is Schiller's reasoning, the man who wants to be himself, who strives for inner harmony, must live as a stranger to his surroundings, a stranger to his time, he must remove himself from the distracting and belittling influence of the ambitions of the multitude, he must scorn participation in the sordid quest for outward success, he must fill himself with the spirit of what the best and the finest of all ages have dreamed and accomplished, he must dwell in the idea of the Beautiful. The striving for the beautiful was to Schiller a call as sacred and solemn as the submission to duty was to Kant ; nay, it seemed to him to imply a higher conception of humanity than the moral law. Is it really so, as Kant would have us believe, that reason must be absolute sovereign of the will ? that instinct must unconditionally surrender ? that it be- 80 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY longs to the essence of the good that it is en- forced and brought about against the desires of the instinct ? No, says Schiller, this cannot be. For it is impossible to assume that only by suppression of a part of our nature we could achieve its perfection, that only by sti- fling our inclinations we could live up to our duty. The good consists not in the repression of our instincts, but in ennobling them ; not in the mutilation of our nature, but in develop- ing it ; not in stagnation, but in the free play of our powers; not in ascetic world-denial, but in manly world-enjoyment, — in a word, in the creation of the beautiful. Beauty is the perfect union of matter and spirit, of sense and reason ; it is the harmony of the real and the ideal, of the inner world and the outer. As spirit, we are active, determining, mascu- line ; as beings of the senses, we are receptive, determinable, feminine. Our task is to unite these two parts of our being, to reconcile matter and form, instinct and reason; to merge the finite and the infinite. In doing this, — nay, even in endeavoring to do this, — we create the beautiful, we become ourselves beautiful, we fulfill the worthiest mission of humanitv, we reveal the divine in man. SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 81 It is clear that from this point of view art comes to be the highest of all human activities. All other activities set only a part of our be- ing in motion ; they do not develop our full- est humanity. The pleasures of the senses we enjoy merely as individuals, without the species immanent in us being affected thereby. Nobody but I myself has the slightest part in the fact that I enjoy — let us say oysters on shell. The pleasures of the senses, therefore, we cannot lift into the sphere of the univer- sal. The functions of reason we fulfill chiefly as species, without our individual self being deeply stirred thereby. If I come to under- stand some mathematical law, for instance, the Thirty-Ninth Theorem, this is not so much an individual experience as a demonstration of my belonging to the species of homo sapiens. Our intellectual pleasures, therefore, cannot fully enter into the sphere of personality. The beautiful alone we enjoy both as individ- uals and as species, that is, as representatives of the species ; and the artist who creates, the public who sympathetically receive the beau- tiful, thereby lift themselves to the highest plane accessible to man. I shall not here dwell on the question 82 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY whether this apotheosis of art does not do injustice to other forms of human activity. What led Schiller to these, we should be in- clined to say, over-statements, was probably the absence in the Germany of his time of a healthy public life which could have taught him the value of any kind of strenuous pro- ductive work. It is, however, clear that this very exaggeration of the mission of art carries with it an inspiring force akin to the moun- tain-removing assurance of religious faith. And there can be no doubt that it was this conception of art as a great public agency, as the great atoner and harmonizer, as the inter- mediator between the spirit and the senses, as the fulfiller of the ideal of humanity, which has given to German literature of Schiller's time its unique, transcending, and enduring radiance. No better characterization of this literature could be given than that implied in the fol- lowing words from Schiller's essay, On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy : " True art has for her object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to excite to a momentary dream of liberty. Her aim is to make us intrinsically and absolutely free ; and this she accomplishes SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 83 by awakening, exercising, and perfecting in us a power to remove to an objective distance the world of the senses, which otherwise only bur- dens us as a dead weight, as a blind force, to transform it into the free working of our spirit, and thus to master matter by means of the idea." Schiller's own poetic activity, since the time when he had outgrown the turbulent Storm and Stress of his youth, was entirely given over to carrying out this ideal. All his ripest productions — the philosophical poems, the ballads, the five great dramas from Wallenstein to William Tell — bring out the conflict of man with himself and the world, the struggle be- tween his spiritual longings and his earthly desires, and they all point to a reconciliation of these contrasts, to atonement, purification, peace. They all are symbols of the perfect life. Whether we think of such a poem as The Ideal and Life, with its brilliant pictures of man's endless striving for mastery over matter; or of such ballads as The Diver, The Fight with the Dragon, The Ring of Poly crates, The Cranes of Ibycus, with their wonderful sugges- tions of the destiny of man and the workings of Fate ; or whether we review the central 84 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY themes of his principal dramas : in Wallenstein the conflict between selfish ambition and moral greatness, in Mary Stuart the conflict in a woman's soul between sensual passion and repentant abnegation, in The Maid of Orleans the conflict between the human heart and a superhuman task, in The Bride of Messina the conflict between human prowess and inexora- ble Fate, in William Tell the conflict between popular right and despotic usurpation, — ev- erywhere we see human nature issue forth from these struggles ennobled, exalted, glori- fied, even if outwardly defeated ; everywhere are we accorded foreboding glimpses, at least, of that higher realm where instinct and reason have become one, where doubts, misgivings, uncertainty, have fled, where beauty, scorning that which is corruptible, has put on her in- corruptible body, and shines in transcending, eternal, spiritual radiance. I have tried briefly to show how the central idea of Schiller's life, his conception of the beautiful, was connected with his view of the society of his time, how it formed part of the inner regeneration of German national life at the end of the eighteenth century. Let me add a few words about the significance which SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 85 this conception of art seems to have for our own age. Never before has there been a greater need or a greater opportunity for art to fulfill the mission set to it by Schiller than there is to- day. Again, as in Schiller's time, the strongest forces of social life tend to alienate man from his own self, to make him part of a huge ma- chine, to prevent a full rounding out of all his faculties. Politically, to be sure, great strides have been made during the last hundred years ; the despotic methods of government, in which Schiller saw the most pernicious bar to the full development of personality, have largely been superseded by popular participation in public affairs. But another, and perhaps graver dan- ger to the cultivation of the best and the finest in human personality confronts us to-day, the overweening, all-overpowering influence of in- dustrialism. The division of labor in every field of activity, brought about by modern methods of industrial production ; the fierce competition in every domain of life, made necessary by the industrial struggle for exist- ence ; the rapid ascendency of huge combi- nations both of capital and labor demanding complete and unconditional submission of the 86 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY individual, — in short, all the most character- istic and most fundamental phenomena of modern society, militate, every one of them, against the growth of a broad, generous, com- prehensive, thoroughly sound inner life. Again, as in Schiller's time, although for entirely dif- ferent reasons, men before whose minds there hovers the image of ideal mankind find them- selves inevitably in direct opposition to the ruling tendencies of the age ; again they feel strangers in a world whose din and confusion blurs and distracts the noblest powers of the mind ; again they grope about for something which will heal the wounds of humanity, which will pacify the fierce tumult of social strife, which will satisfy the deepest longings of the soul, which will give us at least a symbolic anticipation of man in his fullness and total- ity. Is there not, then, a great mission in the world of to-day for Schiller's conception of art to fulfill ? More than this, is not Schiller's con- ception of the beautiful the only artistic ideal capable of becoming a great uplifting public force, a power of redemption from the distract- ing, distorting, disfiguring influence of mod- ern commercialism, a tower of strength in the SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 87 struggle for an enlightened, unselfish, elevated national consciousness ? Let us imagine for a moment what the result would be, if Schiller's insistence on the social office of art had come to be generally ac- cepted : how different, for example, the Ameri- can stage would be, if the managers of all our theatres worked for the elevation of the public taste, instead of most of them being driven by the desire for private gain ; how different our literature would be, if every writer considered himself responsible to the public conscience, if the editors of all our newspapers and maga- zines considered themselves public educators ; how different our whole intellectual atmosphere would be, if the public would scorn books, plays, pictures, or any works of human craft which did not make for the union of our spir- itual and our sensuous strivings ; if, in other words, the cultivation of beauty had come to be acknowledged, as Schiller wanted it to be acknowledged, as a duty which we owe not only to ourselves, but also to the community and the country ; if it had come to be a regu- lative force of our whole social life. We should then be freed from the vain pomp and senseless luxury which hold their 88 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY baneful sway over so many of our rich, unfit- ting them for useful activity, poisoning their relation to other classes of society, ever widen- ing the gulf between them and the mass of the people, making their very existence a menace to the republic. We should be saved from the vulgar sensationalism and the vicious volup- tuousness which degrade most of our theatres and make them corrupters of morality instead of givers of delight. We should be spared the hideous excrescences of industrial competition which disfigure not only the manufacturing districts of our cities, but even deface our meadows and woods and waterfalls. We should be rid of the whims and fancies of literary fashion which merely please the idle and the thoughtless. We should be relieved from the morbid, pseudo-artistic reveling in the abnor- mal and the ugly, which appeals only to a super- ficial curiosity without stirring or strengthen- ing our deeper self. We should have an art which, while true to life, and by no means palliating its misery and its horrors, would hold before us the task of rising superior to life's woes, of fulfilling our destiny, of round- ing out our whole being, of overcoming the inevitable conflict between instinct and duty, SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 89 between passion and reason, in short, of striv- ing for the perfect life. Such an art would in- deed be a great public force for good; such an art, instead of being the servant of the rich, would come to be the spiritual leader of the people ; such an art would mature the finest and most precious fruits of democracy. It does not seem likely that views like these, fundamentally true and self-evident as they are, will ever be generally accepted. In their very nature they are views which appeal only to those to whom the conception of art as a mere opportunity for amusement or dis- play is something utterly repulsive and con- temptible. All the more sacred is the obliga- tion of these few, — and that our own time possesses such men, the names of Tolstoi, of Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Maeterlinck, of Haupt- mann, are a happy reminder, — all the more sacred is the obligation of such men as these steadfastly to adhere to the harmony between the senses and the spirit as the ultimate goal of artistic endeavor. Far be it from me to underrate what men like those just mentioned have accomplished or what they stand for. These men are un- doubtedly worthy followers of Schiller. They 9 o GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY once more have opened the eyes of mankind to the fundamental problems of art. They once more have freed art from the slavery of being a mere toy and pastime of the ruling classes ; they once more have made it a mouth- piece of suffering, struggling, and aspiring hu- manity. But has any one of these writers at- tained to that thoroughly free and thoroughly lawful view of life, that generous comprehen- sion of the rational as well as the emotional forces of man, that measured harmony of form and spirit, which make the very essence of Schiller's art ? Nothing could be more instructive than to compare Schiller's artistic ideal with that of the two greatest of these moderns, and their most characteristic representatives, Leo Tol- stoi and Henrik Ibsen. Both these men have as exalted an opinion of the mission of art as had Schiller. To them, as to Schiller, art is essentially a means for the regeneration of so- ciety ; to them, as to Schiller, its office is to show the way toward a perfect state of human existence. Both are unrivaled masters in lay- ing bare the perplexing problems, the besetting falsehoods, the secret sins, the tragic conflicts, the woes and horrors, of modern civilization. SCHILLER'S MESSAGE 91 Both are inspired with an invincible belief in the society of the future, in the coming broth- erhood of man, and in their own vocation to bring it about. But must it not be said that this society to come, as conceived by Tolstoi or Ibsen, is an utterly fantastic fata morgana, a purely subjective day-dream ? Can it be assumed that modern society, with its highly complex and variegated occupations, with its thousand and one gradations of national ac- tivity, will revert to the dead level of the stolid, long-suffering, uninitiative Russian peasant whom Tolstoi would have us consider as the type of the unselfish, loving, truly Christian life of the future ? Or, on the other hand, is it possible to imagine that the brotherhood of man can be brought about by the over-individ- ualized, tempestuous, Viking-like race of fight- ers and visionaries whom Ibsen makes the representatives of his own ideal of human de- velopment ? And even if either of these con- ditions were really to come to pass, is it not clear that neither of them could be brought about without a violent disruption of the ex- isting order of things, — that both Ibsen and Tolstoi, therefore, are fundamentally subver- sive, and only with regard to possible distant 9 2 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY effects of their thought may be called con- structive? What they lack is Schiller's conception of beauty as mediator between the sensuous and the spiritual ; what they lack is Schiller's ap- peal to the best, the most normal, the most human in man : his natural desire for equipoise, for oneness with himself, for totality of char- acter. Schiller's art does not point backward, as Tolstoi's glorification of primitiveness of existence does. It does not point into a dim, shadowy future, as Ibsen's fantastic Uebermen- schen do. It guides us with firm hand toward a well-defined and attainable ideal, the ideal of free, noble, progressive, self-restrained man- hood: — Der Menschheit Wurde ist in eure Hand gegeben ; Bewahret sie ! Sie sinkt mit euch ! Mit euch wird sie sich heben. Der freisten Mutter freiste Sohne, Schwingt euch mit festem Angesicht Zum Strahlensitz der hochsten Schdne ! Um andre Kronen buhlet nicht. Erhebet euch mit kiihnem Fliigel Hoch iiber euren Zeitenlauf ! Fern dammre schon in eurem Spiegel Das kommende Jahrhundert auf ! III. EMERSON AND GERMAN PERSONALITY ' Emerson was, above all, an American ; the love of his people was the controlling motive of his whole life ; and if we were to express the great variety of his interests and sympa- thies by one central ideal, we could probably find no better name for it than American culture. Next to his own country, England occupied the foremost place in his affections. The history of the English people was to him not only the history of the life of his fore- fathers, and as such surrounded by the halo of romance, but it stood to him also for a most impressive object lesson, demonstrating the truth of the practical side of his own mes- sage, the teachings of self-reliance, tenacity of purpose, and common sense. It was through his delicate sense of artistic form that Emer- son was drawn toward Italy and France; and no one who has read his estimates of Mon- 1 An address delivered in 1903, at the Emerson centen- nial celebration in Concord. 94 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY taigne or Michelangelo can fail to see that, Puritan as he was, he had a keen appreciation of the genius of the Latin race. Germany was the only large country of western Europe which he never visited; the only distinguished German with whom he entertained a friendly correspondence, Herman Grimm, crossed his path too late in life to add much to his range of vision. For the greatest German of his time, Goethe, Emerson, in spite of sincere ad- miration, had after all only a limited under- standing; whereas, against the manners of the ordinary Teuton he even seems to have had a natural aversion. Wherein, then, lies the jus- tification for emphasizing, nevertheless, Emer- son's relation to Germany? What side of his nature was akin to German ways of thought and feeling? What particular inspiration did he receive from the great masters of German literature and philosophy ? What part of his own life-work has a special significance for the Germany of to-day ? These are the questions which I shall attempt briefly to answer. I There is a widely spread notion that Ger- many is a land trodden down by militarism EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 95 and bureaucracy. Independence of character and personal initiative, are, we are told, ne- cessarily crushed out by governmental meth- ods which force the individual, from boyhood on, into a system of complicated routine and make him a part of a huge, soulless mechanism. It would be futile to deny that the pressure ex- erted upon the individual by official authority is greater in Germany than in America, Eng- land, France, or Italy. Indeed, there is good reason for thinking that this very subordina- tion of the individual to superior ordinances has had a large share in the extraordinary achievements of German statecraft, strategy, industry, and science of the last fifty years. What I maintain is this : In spite of the intense supervision of personal conduct, of the supre- macy of drill and regulation, of the overwhelm- ing sway of historical tradition and class rule, in spite of all this there is to be found in Ger- many a decidedly greater variety of individual views, convictions, principles, modes of life, ideals, in other words, of individual character, than in America. I do not wish here to ana- lyze the causes of this remarkable phenome- non, beyond stating that one of these causes seems to me to lie in the very existence of 96 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY those barriers which in Germany restrict and hem in individual activity. It seems as though the pressure from without tended to force to light the life within. Certain it is that the German, while submitting to external limi- tations which no American or Englishman would tolerate, is wont to guard his intellec- tual selfhood with a jealous eagerness com- pared with which the easy adaptation of the American to standards not his own comes near to being moral indifference. His inner life the German seeks to shape himself; here he tolerates no authority or ordinance; here he is his own master ; here he builds his own world. It is easy to see how closely allied was Emerson's whole being to this side of Ger- man character. The moderation and harmo- niousness of his temper preserved him from the angularity, the oddities and eccentricities which often go with the German insistence on pronounced intellectual personality. On this personality itself he insisted with truly German aggressiveness. Indeed, it may be said that his definition of the scholar as being not a thinker, but man thinking, — a defini- tion which is at the root of Emerson's whole EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 97 view of intellectual life, — is an essentially- German conception, and places Emerson in line with those splendid defenders of personal conviction which have embodied German thought with all its rugged pugnaciousness, from the days of Luther to Lessing and Fichte, and finally to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. A few of the most important manifesta- tions of this German love of spiritual indi- viduality which seem to me to have a special bearing upon Emerson it may be useful to con- sider. What else but implicit trust in the supreme value of the inner life is it, if the Germans much more than other nations are given to expressing their contempt for appearances, if they have a delight, sometimes a cynic delight, in exposing shams of any kind, if they take the business of life with a seriousness that often seems to rob it of lightness of move- ment and the gracefulness of fleeting forms'? Goethe's Faust is, in this respect also, a true index of national character. As a work of art it is unwieldy, uneven, volcanic, dis- connected, fragmentary, barbaric. Scenes of supreme lyric power, of elemental passion, of deepest tragedy, of ravishing poetry, go 98 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY side by side with cynic raillery, allegorical stammering, metaphysical lucubrations, book- ishness, and pedantry. The sensuous impres- sion of the whole upon an unbiased mind cannot but be bewildering and disquieting. And yet there stands out in it all a mighty personality, a mighty will ! The weaknesses, the falsehoods, the frivolities of the day are here unmasked! The real concern of life, ceaseless striving for higher forms of activity, endless endeavor in the rounding out of the inner world, is brought home to us! The very defects and shortcomings of the form re- veal the vastness of the spirit which refused to be contracted into limited dimensions ! That thoughts like these were familiar to Emerson, that his own habitual state of mind was akin to the temper here described, needs no docu- mentary demonstration. But it may not be out of place to quote a few passages which show how fully conscious he was himself of his affinity to this side of German character: — What distinguishes Goethe for French and English read- ers is a property which he shares with his nation, — an habitual reference to interior truth. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understand- ing of the English, and the American adventure ; hut it has EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 99 a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial perform- ance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought, but what is it for ? What does the man mean ? Whence, whence all these thoughts ? Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book ; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth. ... If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind, — the burden of truth to be declared, — more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world to see those facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stam- mers ; that his voice is harsh and hissing ; that his methods or his hopes are inadequate ? That message will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak. Closely allied with the German contempt for appearances, and, like it, rooted in the high valuation of personality, is the often praised delight of the Germans in small things. He who knows how to enter lovingly into what is outwardly inconspicuous and seemingly insig- nificant, he who is accustomed to look for full- ness of the inner life even in the humblest and most circumscribed spheres of society, to him new worlds will reveal themselves in re- gions where the hasty, dissatisfied glance dis- ioo GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY covers nothing but empty space. " Man upon this earth," says Jean Paul, "would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble, — were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling, this, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, this it is which makes him the immortal creature that he is." Here we have the root of that German love for still life, that German ca- pacity for discovering the great in the little, which has given to our literature such incom- parable characters as Jean Paul's own Quintus Fixlein, Wilhelm Raabe's Hungerpastor, or Heinrich Seidel's Leberecht Hiihnchen, which even to-day makes Germany the land of all lands where in the midst of the bewildering tumult of industrial and social competition there are to be found hundreds upon hun- dreds of men firmly determined to resist the mad desire for what is called success, perfectly satisfied to live in a corner, unobserved but observing, at home with themselves, wedded to some task, some ideal which, however little it may have to do with the pretentious and noisy world about them, fills their souls and sheds dignity upon every moment of their ex- EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 101 istence. Is it necessary to point out that there never lived an American who in this respect was more closely akin to the German temper than Emerson ? He was, indeed, the Jean Paul of New England. New England coun- try life, the farm, the murmuring pines, the gentle river, the cattle lowing upon the hills, the quiet study, the neighborly talk in the vil- lage store or on the common, — this was the world in which he felt at home, in which he discovered his own personality. Here he for- tified himself against the foolish fashions and silly prejudices of so-called society; here he imbibed his lifelong hatred of vulgar ambi- tion; here there came to him that insight into the value of the unpretentious which he has expressed so well, " I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ; I embrace the com- mon; I explore and sit at the feet of the fa- miliar, the low ; " here he acquired that deep- seated and thoroughly German conviction of the dignity of scholastic seclusion and sim- plicity, which has made his whole life a prac- tical application of his own precept : — He (the student) must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his glees and his glooms alone. His own estimate must be measure enough, his own praise reward enough for 102 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY him. . . . How mean to go blazing, a gaudy butterfly, ir. fashionable or political salons, the fool of society, the fool of notoriety, a topic for newspapers, a piece of the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat, the privacy, and the true and warm heart of the citizen ! The natural counterpart to this high appre- ciation of seemingly small and insignificant things, — which we found to be characteristic both of the German temper and of Emerson's mind, — is a strongly developed sense for the spiritual unity of all things, a strongly devel- oped consciousness of the supremacy of the infinite whole of which all individual beings are only parts, a divining perception of the spirituality, or collective personality, of the universe ; and here again is seen a point of con- tact between Emerson and Germany. How deeply German mysticism of the Middle Ages had drawn from this well of the Infinite, how strongly it had imbued even the popular mind with the idea of self-surrender and absorption in the divine spirit, may be illustrated by an anecdote of the fourteenth century attached to the name of the great preacher and mystic thinker, John Tauler. It is said that at the time when Tauler was at the height of his fame and popularity in Strassburg, one day a EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 103 simple layman came to him and frankly told him that in spite of all his sacred learning and his fine sermons he was further removed from the knowledge of God than many an unlet- tered man of the people. Upon the advice of the layman, — so the story runs, — Tauler now withdrew from the world, gave away his books, refrained from preaching, and devoted himself in solitude to prayerful contemplation. Not until two years later did he dare to ascend the pulpit again, but when he attempted to speak, his words failed him ; under the scorn and derision of the congregation he was forced to leave the church, and was now considered by everybody a perverted fool. But in this very crisis he discovered the Infinite within him- self, the very contempt of the world filled him with the assurance of his nearness to God, the spirit came over him, his tongue Toosened as of its own accord, and he suddenly found him- self possessed by a power of speech that stirred and swayed the whole city as no preacher ever had done before. This story of the fourteenth century x may be called a symbolic and instinctive anticipation 1 I am not unaware of the fact that Denifle has proved its unhistoric character. io 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY of the well-defined philosophic belief in the spiritual oneness of the universe, which was held by all the great German thinkers and poets of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Tieck, Jean Paul, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, however much they difFered in temper and specific aims, all agreed in this, that the whole visible manifold world was to them the expression of the same infi- nite personality, the multiform embodiment of one universal mind ; they all saw the crown- ing glory and divinity of man in his capacity to feel this unity of the world, to hear the voice of the world-spirit within him, to be as- sured of its eternity in spite of the constant change and decay of visible forms. Again, there is no need of commenting upon the close affinity of all this with Emerson's views of spiritual personality. But, by way of illustration, it may be fitting to place side by side with each other two utterances, one by Emerson, the other by Novalis, upon the es- sential unity underlying all life, — utterances which, but for the difference of style and ar- tistic quality, might have come from the same man. This is Novalis : — EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 105 Nature has all the changes of an infinite soul, and sur- prises us through her ingenious turns and fancies, movements and fluctuations, great ideas and oddities, more than the most intellectual and gifted man. She knows how to vivify and beautify everything, and, though there seems to reign in individual things an unconscious, meaningless mechanism, the eye that sees deeper recognizes nevertheless a wondrous sympathy with the human heart. . . . Does not the rock become an individual «« Thou " in the very moment that I address it ? And in what way do I differ from the brook when I look down into its waves with tender sadness and lose my thoughts in its movement as it glides on ? And here is Emerson's somewhat dilettan- teish, but after all unerring, speculation : — ■ The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it ; the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents ; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through space. Each creature is only a modification of the other ; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same. So intimate is this unity that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. ... It is the one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which ani- mates all men. 106 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY As the fourth, and last, evidence of tem- peramental affinity between German character and Emerson, — an affinity resting, I repeat, upon the common basis of insistence on per- sonality, — I mention courage of personal conviction and disdain of intellectual compro- mises. I mention this point last, because it seems to me the most important of all. It cannot be denied that in a country where every one is constantly affected, in one way or another, by that which the masses think, desire, or dislike, there is no greater danger for the individual than the lack of intellectual differentiation. Democracy is by no means the only, or necessarily the best, safeguard for intellectual independence. On the contrary, it may foster the desire in the individual to adapt himself to a generally accepted standard of opinion, to avoid frictions, to smooth down the sharp corners of personal conviction, to shun principles, to embrace opportunism. I cannot rid myself of the impression that American university and college life shows the effect of this natural tendencv. There is a decided monotony of type, a prevalence of mediocrity about it. There are few college professors who are more than good college EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 107 professors, few that stand for some great prin- ciple, few fighters, few leaders of public opin- ion, few of whom it might be said that they represent the national conscience. It is differ- ent in Germany. The German likes contrasts ; he likes friction ; he likes intellectual contro- versy ; he identifies himself with the cause which he represents, and since he loses him- self in his cause, he does not hesitate to use plain speech, even at the risk of being too plain for some ears. I do not close my eyes to the defects which are the concomitant trait of this national characteristic. It has undoubt- edly led in German political life to so bewil- dering a variety of inimical factions and party platforms as to make parliamentary govern- ment well-nigh impossible ; it gives to German scientific controversy often a tone of personal bitterness and acrimoniousness which to out- siders cannot but be repulsive or amusing. And yet, it is true that here are the very roots of German greatness. It is intellectual courage which has made Germany, in spite of state omnipotence and clerical supremacy, the home of free thought ; it is the disdain of compro- mises which lends to life in Germany, with all its drawbacks, its oddities, its quarrelsome- 108 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ness, its lack of urbanity, such an intense and absorbing interest; it is the insistence upon principle which makes the German univer- sities the chosen guardians of national ideals, which draws into their service the freest, most progressive, and boldest minds of the country, which endows them with the best of republi- canism. Emerson was not a university man in the German sense. But of all American writers of the century, none has expressed or lived out this fundamental tenet of German university life as completely as he. Indeed his whole life- work was one continuous defiance of the stand- ards of the multitude, whether fashionable or otherwise. In his resignation from the pastor- ate, in his resistance against official obligations which would have hemmed in his free activity, in his advocacy of manual training for children, of the elective system in college studies, in his championship of the workman against the encroachments of industrialism, in his speeches against Daniel Webster and the Fugitive Slave Law, — everywhere the same free, undaunted, self-reliant personality, " a reformer" (to quote his own description of the ideal American), — " a reformer not content to slip along through EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 109 the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go hon- orably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him to go in honor and with benefit." And so it has come to pass that he uncon- sciously characterized himself and his mission for the American people in that noble passage of the Lecture on the "Times : — Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more surrendered soul, more informed and led by- God, which is much in advance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but predicts what shall soon be the general fullness ; as when we stand by the seashore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher than any foregoing one, and recedes ; and for a long while none comes up to that mark ; but after some time the whole sea is there and beyond it. II Thus far we have been considering certain traits of character which reveal an inner affinity between Emerson and the German mind. But — as is well known — there is a more imme- diate and direct connection between the two. Emerson bears such a relation to the great no GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY German idealists of the eighteenth century as the Apostles were thought by the Church to have to the Prophets. He is inspired by their thought, transmitted to him for the most part by Coleridge and Carlyle ; he adds little to it that is original or new, but he applies it to the needs of his time and his people ; and since he speaks to a free people, a people entering with youthful energy upon a career of bound- less activity, he gives to this thought an even greater vitality, a more intensely human vigor than it had in the hands of his masters. What were the main features of the new humanism held up to the world by the great Germans of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, by Kant, Schelling, and Fichte, by Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis ? In the first place, an absolute free- dom from traditional authority. Probably never in the history of mankind has there been a period when men looked at things from as broad a point of view and with so little bias. Humanity in the largest sense was the chosen study of the age. Everywhere, — in language, in literature, in political institutions, in religion, — men tried to detect the human element and brought it to light with all the fearlessness EMERSON AND THE GERMANS in of scientific ardor. With this boldness of research there was allied, secondly, a supreme interest in the inner life. Man was considered bound up, to be sure, with the world of the senses, and confined to it as the scene of his activity, yet essentially a spiritual being, deter- mining the material world rather than deter- mined by it, responsible for his actions to the unerring tribunal of his own moral conscious- ness. In the sea of criticism and doubt which had swept away traditional conceptions and beliefs, this inner consciousness appeared as the one firm rock. Here, so it seemed, were the true foundations for a new religious belief, a belief which maintains that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise than by fulfilling one's duties to men, a belief which considers the divine rather as the final goal than as the preexisting cause of life. And lastly, there was a joyous optimism in the men of this age which could not help raising them into a higher sphere. They believed in the future. They believed in eternity. They believed that humanity was slowly advancing toward perfection, that a time must come when the thoughts of the few wise men, the dreams of the few poets and prophets would become ii2 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY transfused into the life-blood of the masses, when the good would be done because it is the good, when instinct and duty would be reconciled ; and they derived their highest inspirations from the feeling that they them- selves were workers in the service of this cause. 1 It is easy to see that here are found side by side all the essential elements of Emerson's spiritual world, — his freedom from tradition, his deep interest in man, his belief in moral freedom and in the moral order of the uni- verse, his pantheism, his optimism, his confid- ing trust in the perfectibility of the race. But it is worth noticing that in the application of these principles there is, — as I intimated be- fore, — a decided difference between Emerson and his masters. The great German idealists, while embracing the human race in their thought, while glorying in the idea of a strong and free popular life, addressed themselves in reality to a small circle of elect spirits ; these they hoped to influence ; to them they adapted their manner of presentation ; with the people 1 In the above passage, I have taken the liberty of quot- ing words used by myself in my Social Forces in German Literature. EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 113 at large they had little to do. They were, in other words, with all their democratic sym- pathies, at heart thoroughly aristocratic. The result is that German literature of that period, both poetry and prose, bears for the most part, the stamp of a certain over-refinement, of studied culture ; that it often lacks simplicity and the strong, direct appeal to the popular heart. It must further be borne in mind that the condition of the German people at that time was one of utter political disintegration, that the very foundations of national existence were crumbling away, one after another, before the onslaught of foreign invasion, and that the task of the future was nothing less than a com- plete reorganization of public life. Whatever there is, then, in German literature of that time of popular appeal is dictated by distress, by the bitter need of the hour, and has to do with the death agony of a social order sinking into ruins, and the birth throes of a new order not yet fully formed. Emerson, on the other hand, although his life was spent amid the most refined circles of New England culture, although his own utter- ances never fail to appeal to the finest and ii4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY most elevated aspirations of the human heart, yet always looked beyond his own cultivated surroundings into the wider spheres of com- mon, ordinary life. With all his aristocratic bearing and predilections, he was at heart thoroughly democratic. And the people to which he gave his life's work was not a nation threatened in its existence, crippled, defeated, but a nation that only recently had won its freedom, a healthy young giant, teeming with untried power and latent vitality, inexperienced but perfectly normal, untouched by disap- pointment, a vast future in his loins. Is it a wonder that Emerson's application of German idealism should, on the whole, have been more sane, more normal, more vigorous, more gen- uinely popular, more universally human than German idealism itself? Let me illustrate this side of Emerson's re- lation to Germany by a brief parallel between Emerson and that German thinker to whom he bears the most striking resemblance, al- though he was acquainted with his thought only through the medium of Carlyle's writ- ings, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. There is no greater or more inspiring figure in intellectual history than Fichte's. In originality and con- EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 115 structiveness of thought, he so far surpasses Emerson that the two can hardly be mentioned together. It is as men, as writers, as citizens, that they should be compared. Fichte's historic task was this : to con- centrate the German mind, dissipated by over- indulgence in aesthetic culture, upon the one topic of national reorganization. He felt clearly that Germany's future could be saved only through an entire change of heart. What had brought on the national catastrophe, what had made the ancient glory of Germany go down before the triumphant standard of Na- poleon, was, to his mind, the unchecked rule of egotism ; what was to insure national sal- vation, was, according to him, unconditional self-surrender. As he himself says, — The rational life consists in this, that the individual should forget himself in the species, sacrificing his existence to the existence of the whole ; while the irrational life con- sists in this, that the individual should not consider or love anything but himself and should devote his whole exist- ence to his own well-being. And if the rational is the good and the irrational the bad, then there is only one virtue, to forget one's self; and only one vice, to think of one's self. This, then, was the appeal which Fichte made to his over-cultivated, over-individualized, and n6 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY thereby disorganized nation. Whatever pro- gress mankind thus far has made, — for there is progress even in decay, — whatever bless- ings of civilization we possess, it has been made possible only through the privations, the suf- ferings, the self-sacrifice of men who, before our time, lived and died for the life of the race. Let us emulate these men. Let every one of us be a public character. Let our phi- losophers and poets be aware that it is not they but the universal spirit in them which speaks through their thought or their song, that it would be a sin against the spirit to de- grade their talents to the bondage of personal ambition and vanity. Let our political life be free from despotism and monopoly ; let our social institutions be regulated on the basis of a common obligation of each to all. Let the working classes be made to feel " that they serve, not the caprice of an individual, but the good of the whole, and this only so far as the whole is in need of them." Let the rich live in such a manner as to be able to say, " Not a farthing of our profits is spent without a bene- fit to higher culture ; our gain is the gain of the community." Let the ideal of a perfect society be the guiding motive of the age : — EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 117 Nothing can live by itself and for itself; everything lives in the whole, and the whole continually sacrifices it- self to itself in order to live anew. This is the law of life. Whatever has come to the consciousness of existence must fall a victim to the progress of all existence. Only there is a difference whether you are dragged to the shambles like a beast with bandaged eyes or whether, in full and joyous presentiment of the life which will spring forth from your sacrifice, you offer yourself freely on the altar of eternity. In times of distress, in any great national crisis, this splendid appeal of Fichte's for self- surrender of the individual will prove its in- spiring force, will ever anew demonstrate its imperishable worth. But it can hardly be denied that it bears the earmarks of the ex- traordinary and exceptional times which forced it from Fichte's mind. Its Spartan rigor, the demand of state omnipotence implied in it, and actually drawn as its consequence by Fichte himself, its tendency toward uniformity in education, its stoic contempt for the instinc- tive, do not make it a safe rule for all times and all nations, and therefore detract from its universally human value. Emerson's historic task was this : to expand the consciousness of the American people, preoccupied with material prosperity, to a full realization of its spiritual mission. He did not n8 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY lack penetration into the evils of the time and of the society surrounding him, nor did he spare the scourge of sarcasm and moral indig- nation in chastising these evils. What more drastic summing up of the degrading and be- littling influence of wealth has ever been given than in his contrasting of father and son — the father a self-made man, the son a creature of circumstance : — Instead of the masterly good humor and sense of power and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing heart which the father had, whom nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and fish, seemed all to know and to serve, — we have now a puny, protected person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches and men-servants and women-servants from the earth and the sky, and who, bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that endangers those possessions, and is forced to spend so much time in guarding them, that he has quite lost sight of their original use, namely, to help him to his ends, to the prosecution of his love, to the help- ing of his friend, to the worship of his God, to the enlarge- ment of his knowledge, to the serving of his country, to the indulgence of his sentiment ; and he is now what is called a rich man, — the menial and runner of his riches. And there are whole philippics against pluto- cracy contained in such sentences as, " The EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 119 whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor," or in the lines, — 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave and corn to grind ; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. But Emerson did not find himself, as Fichte did, in the midst of a national breakdown. The social evils against which he directed his criticism and invective were concomitant phe- nomena of a national development at bottom sound and full of promise. His message, therefore, while fully accepting Fichte's appeal for self-surrender of private interests to public purposes, culminated not in the demand of concentration, but in the demand of expansion of the individual. To him as to Fichte the common welfare was the highest goal ; to him as to Fichte every individual — the farmer, the mechanic, the business man, the scholar, the artist — was, above all, a public servant. But this service consisted to him primarily in the fullest development of all higher instincts, in keeping (as he expressed it) one's source higher than one's tap, and in the freest pos- sible blending together of individual activities. Nothing was further removed from his ideals than patriarchalism or state omnipotence ; iio GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY never would he have been willing to entrust the training of the rising generation to the exclusive control of the state, never would he have submitted to the limitations of a socialis- tic community. To the last he adhered to the principle formulated in the best years of his manhood, "A personal ascendency, — that is the only fact much worth considering ; " to the last he saw the hope of the future in keep- ing this spirit alive : — In the brain of a fanatic ; in the wild hope of a moun- tain boy, called by city boys very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised him shall be ; in the love glance of a girl ; in the hair-splitting consci- entiousness of some eccentric person who has found some new scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal, is to be found that which shall constitute the times to come. May we not, without disparaging the splen- did services of Fichte and the other German idealists, say that here there is a message con- taining more of universal truth, more wisdom applicable to the common, natural, and normal needs of humanity, than is to be found in their noble and extraordinary flights ? Ill Emerson belongs to the world. But it seems as though at the present moment there EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 121 was no country which had a greater claim upon his services and a more urgent need of them than Germany. It cannot be denied that the great political struggles and achievements, the remarkable industrial and commercial devel- opment of the last fifty years have, for the moment, stifled somewhat the German genius, or at least diverted it from its spiritual flight. Our age has accomplished gigantic tasks. It has brought about the welding together of some thirty mutually jealous and distrustful states and principalities into one united na- tion; it has carried through a war crowned with unparalleled victories and triumphs; it has changed Germany from a prevailingly ag- ricultural country to one of the great manu- facturing centres of the globe ; it has made her one of the foremost competitors in the policy of expansion now dominating the world. All this belongs to the realm of fact rather than to the realm of the spirit. It has led to an over-emphasis of the will; it has blunted the feeling ; it has crippled the moral sense ; it has clogged speculation ; it has brutalized person- ality. Religious life in modern Germany is almost wholly latent. I do not doubt that it exists, not 122 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY only among the thousands of devoted men and women who serve the church of their fathers in traditional manner and form, but, perhaps, even more among the millions who have turned away with hatred and contempt from rituals and creeds which to them have become empty phrases. But the fact remains that there is no form of religious life in Germany which could in any way be said to be a true expression of the national conscience. In ethical theories the average German of to-day, whether con- sciously or not, is a follower of Nietzsche. He believes in personality, but it is not the personality of the great German idealists of a century ago, the personality which is a part of the infinite spirit, a visible manifestation of the divine, — but the personality of the cynic author of Menscbliches-Allzumenschliches, a bundle of animal instincts, of the desire for self-preservation and self-gratification, the thirst for power, the impulse to create and to command. In the sciences, — both mental and physical, — the man of facts, the special- ist, is the man of the hour ; and whatever may be said in favor of specialization as the only sound basis of scientific research (there clearlv is no other equally sound), the exclusive rule EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 123 of specialization has undoubtedly given to our whole scholarly life something spiritless, nar- row, mechanical. Nobody has felt this more deeply and expressed it more clearly than Herman Grimm, the last great representative of the golden age of German literature who reached into our own time. He says : — We have the facts in our heads, we are ready at any time to pay out in cash any amount of knowledge up to the limit of our drafts. But the marriage of our thoughts with the spirit which shelters them is a cool marriage of con- vention without communion and without children. No- where do we dare to draw ultimate consequences. What goes beyond the sphere of fact, of that which can be proved by positive evidence, is looked upon as a dangerous conjec- ture. Only the unimpeachable is loudly expressed, and that opinion is passed by with frowning silence which has no other foundation than the deep conviction of him who ut- tered it. All the foregoing, it seems to me, must have made it apparent why Germany at the present moment in a peculiar and pregnant sense is ripe for Emerson. Emerson, as we have seen, is allied to the German mind by a deep and close affinity. He has the German love of in- dividuality, the German seriousness of pur- pose and contempt of sham, the German de- light in small things, the German sense of the i2 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY infinite, the German intellectual courage and disdain of compromise. In addition to this, he derived his highest and best thought to a large extent from the bountiful store of German idealism of a hundred years ago, and he en- riched this thought and gave it still wider sig- nificance by applying it to the needs of a free, youthful nation. Now the time has come for Germany to receive from Emerson. Now the time has come for Emerson to pay back to Germany what he owes to her. Now the time has come for him to restore to Germany the idealism of her own thinkers in a purified, saner, and more truly human form. This is not mere speculation. Emerson's career in Germany has already begun. No less a man than Herman Grimm first drew atten- tion to him as one of the truly great, as a spir- itual power, as a helper and comforter, as a deliverer from the cynicism, pessimism, and fact-worship of the present day. He said in one of his earliest essays : — Emerson is a perfect swimmer in the element of modern life. He does not fear the tempests of the future, because he divines the calm which will follow them. He does not hate, contradict, combat ; because his understanding of men and their defects is too great, his love for them too strong. EMERSON AND THE GERMANS 125 I cannot but follow his steps with deep reverence and look at him with wonder, as he divides the chaos of modern life gently and without passion into its several provinces. A long acquaintance has assured me of him ; and thinking of this man I feel that in times of old there really could be teachers with whom their disciples were ready to share any fate, because everything appeared to them doubtful and life- less without the spirit of the man whom they were follow- ing- Grimm's genuine admiration did not re- main without effect upon thinking men in Ger- many. Gradually but steadily the circle of Emerson's influence widened. Julian Schmidt, Friedrich Spielhagen were affected by him ; even Nietzsche could not resist his personal- ity. From the eighties on, two Austrian writ- ers helped to increase his following : Anton E. Schonbach, to whom we owe the first objec- tively critical account in German of Emerson's work, and Karl Federn, who first published a comprehensive translation of his essays. Just now a second, and more ambitious, edition of Emerson's works in German is being pub- lished in Leipzig. Meanwhile there has been gathering strength, independently from Emerson, a movement which is bound to draw still wider circles of German intellectual life toward Emerson, a 126 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY reaction against the pessimism of Scl open- hauer, the cynicism of Nietzsche, the soulless monotony of scientific specialization. Her- man Grimm's own life-work, his incessant in- sistence on artistic culture, on a free, noble, reverent personality, was perhaps the initial force in this spiritual reawakening. But other and younger men have followed in his steps. The signs of the time are full of promise. The extraordinary success of such a book as Harnack's Essence of Christianity ; the wide- spread influence of such a university teacher, such a wise, free, kindly man of ideals as Friedrich Paulsen ; the devoted efforts of Ru- dolf Eucken, Eugen Kiihnemann, Friedrich Naumann, Bruno Wille, Wilhelm Bolsche, and others, to win the masses back to spiritual hope and an enlightened faith; the new life kindled in poetry, the novel, and the drama, — all this is conclusive evidence that we are on the very verge of a new era of German ideal- ism. And if it comes, there will come with it the demand : less Nietzsche and more Emer- son ; and a new intellectual bond between America and Germany will have been estab- lished. Ill THE EVOLUTIONARY TREND OF GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM THE EVOLUTIONARY TREND OF GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM In following out the influence exerted upon German literary criticism by the doctrine of evolution, one is confronted at the out- set by the fact that the roots of the Dar- winian theory are to be found on German soil. Long before the theory of a continuous and uninterrupted development of the physi- cal world had been scientifically formulated, German poets and historians had accustomed themselves to conceive of the moral world as an organic whole living itself out according to its own immanent laws. Long before the strug- gle for bodily existence had been discovered as the prime cause of differentiation of racial types, the realization of the Idea through evo- lution from mere identity with itself to the most highly organized intellectual life had be- come a household word in German philosophy. It is clearly impossible, then, to trace Darwin- ian ideas in German literary criticism without 130 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY discovering that to a large extent these ideas are at bottom pre-Darwinian. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the great ascendency of the natural sciences, which set in with the middle of the nineteenth century, exerted a profound influence upon the mental sciences also. The idea of intellectual development, which thus far had borne a meta- physical appearance, now assumed scientific features, and literary criticism, no less than his- tory or philosophy, was affected by this change. Before 1850, literary criticism had been in the main speculative ; after 1850, it became either kulturhistorisch (there is no English equiva- lent for this word), or philological, or psycho- logical, — terms which, every one of them, emphasize the scientific aspect of evolution. Here, then, seem to be mapped out the natural divisions of my inquiry. I shall first speak of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas in German literary criticism from Herder to He- gel ; next, I shall consider the critical views of men, like Wilhelm Riehl and Jacob Burck- hardt, who looked upon literature primarily as an index of the advance or decay of civili- zation; thirdly, I shall examine the philological method of research, now dominating the aca- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 131 demic study of literature, a method which is primarily directed toward the elucidation of literary origins ; and finally, I shall discuss the psychological method just beginning to claim its place as an indispensable means for the proper understanding of the growth of poetic conceptions or impressions. Our review naturally opens with a man who not only gave the first strong impulse, in Ger- many, to the historical study of literature, but who also anticipated the scientific method of literary research by nearly one hundred years, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder was the first German critic to conceive of literature as a natural growth. The principles which Winck- elmann had derived from the study of Greek art he applied to the study of literature, and he surpassed Winckelmann in this, that he did not confine himself to any one literature, be it Greek or Roman or German, but endeavored to understand all literature as the necessary outcome of a given national culture. Whether studying Esquimaux funeral songs or Hebrew psalms or Spanish ballads, whether comparing English and German popular poetry, whether 132 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY analyzing great master-minds like Pindar or Sophocles or Shakspere, Herder never loses sight of the fact that all poetry is the product of a particular soil, — natural surroundings, national character, and social conditions, — and his critical endeavor mainly has in view the fuller understanding of the relation between the literary soil and its product. Nearly a cen- tury before Taine, in his History of English Literature, gave a specimen demonstration of the influence of the sea upon the intellectual make-up of a nation, the young Herder, in the diary of his voyage from Riga to Nantes, de- scribed how this life on shipboard made him understand the Homeric epics as the poetic outgrowth of a seafaring people. "It was sea- farers who brought the Greeks their earliest religion. All Greece was a colony by the sea. Consequently, their mythology was not, like that of the Egyptians and Arabs, a religion of the desert, but a religion of the sea and the forest. Orpheus, Homer, Pindar, to be fully understood, ought to be read at sea." And it is not too much to say that Herder's ripest works, such as the Ideas on the Philosophy of History, or the Letters Concerning the Advance- ment of Humanity, are simply steeped with the GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 133 conviction of the inseparableness of literature and social life. The ideal of Greek beauty is to him closely allied with the free humanity of Greek political institutions; Roman litera- ture appears to him as a concomitant pheno- menon of Roman imperialism ; in mediaeval epics and romances he analyzes the chivalric and the clerical element; in the Elizabethan drama he detects the spirit that moved Drake and Raleigh ; and his hope of a new golden age of modern literature is founded upon his belief in the progressive humanization of mod- ern society. While in all this we clearly see the begin- nings of an evolutionary method of studying literature, it must be admitted that Herder nowhere passes the stage of beginnings. Just how a certain national character and certain social conditions produce a certain type of literature ; just how within a given national culture certain literary stages correspond to certain stages in the general intellectual and moral development ; and above all how the literary conceptions of one people have af- fected and transformed the literary conceptions of another people, — these are questions to which Herder offers either no answer at all or 134 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY an answer couched in general and somewhat dubious terms. No one would have been bet- ter able to supplement Herder in this direc- tion than his greatest pupil, the author of the Metamorphosis of Plants, and Goethe has in- deed given us not a few literary sketches which demonstrate that he looked upon literature as a phenomenon essentially parallel to the phe- nomena of nature, to be studied with all the exactness and the attention to detail required in biological research. His Benvenuto Cellini, his Winckelmann and His Age, and above all his own autobiography are model achieve- ments of the evolutionary method ; they de- scribe, with truly scientific comprehensive- ness and precision, the growth of a great in- dividual, the development of a pronounced intellectual type under the modifying influences of inheritance, time, and environment. And his essay on Mere Imitation of Nature, Manner, and Style is, at least in outline, an inductive study of the stages through which the creative activity of a great literary or artistic individ- ual seems necessarily to pass, from the mere reproduction of outward impressions, through the inner amalgamation of these impressions with his own individualitv, to the final selec- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 135 tion of such impressions as reveal the funda- mental and abiding type ; in other words, from naturalism through subjectivism to objective mastery. It is to be regretted, therefore, that Goethe has not pursued this subject still further; espe- cially, that he has not formulated more fully his views as to the relation of one literary age to another, that he has not given us a study of the development of the world's literature. If he had, his sober, inductive observation would have saved us much of that subjective speculation, characteristic of the further course of evolutionary literary criticism in Germany, which, however stimulating and suggestive especially Schiller, the Schlegels, and Hegel have made this speculation, somewhat detracts from its scientific value. Schiller, as well as the brothers Schlegel, and even more so Hegel, derive their views of literary development from certain precon- ceived notions about the development of cul- ture in general ; Schiller from the contrast between what he calls the Naive and the Senti- mental, the Schlegels from the contrast between the Classic and the Romantic, Hegel from the self-realization of the Idea. 136 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY The essay on Naive and Sentimental Poetry ', in which Schiller reviews the whole history of civilization as reflected in the history of literature, clearly demonstrates both the af- finity of Schiller 's aesthetic conceptions with the moral views of Rousseau and his departure from these views. It is in this departure that we see an evolutionary tendency. In entire accord with Rousseau, Schiller proceeds from the dream of a primitive state of harmony be- tween the sensuous and the spiritual in man, a state of naive, unconscious equipoise between the contrasting forces of our nature. In chil- dren, in animals, in plants, we have types of this inner harmony before our eyes even now : instinct and reason are here not yet at variance with each other. In the history of mankind, Greek poetry and art have been the highest expressions of this naive, instinctive, natural oneness of man with himself. The progress of civilization has destroyed this state of natu- ral oneness, it has brought man into conflict with himself; modern poetry, therefore, as a rule does not express harmony, but lost har- mony, longing for harmony, — it is not naive but sentimental. To be sure, there have been a few great poets, even among the moderns, GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 137 who seem to have preserved that childlike oneness with self which we find in the Greeks ; but the great mass of modern poetry is a sym- bol of strife, of the strife between intellect and sentiment, duty and instinct, authority and freedom, and at the same time it is a symbol of the craving for the overcoming of this strife, of the longing for reconciliation, atonement, purification, peace. Here, then, the difference between Schiller and Rousseau clearly asserts itself. To Rousseau, the inharmoniousness, the grating discords of modern life are merely symptoms of corruption and decay. If we are to recover our humanity, we must return to the simplicity of primitive life. To Schiller, the very discords and the very morbidness of modern life are concomitant symptoms of a higher development. The return to primi- tive simplicity from our complex civilization is as impossible as the return of the mature man to the days of his childhood. Not back to nature, but forward to a still more com- prehensive culture is the watchword, and it is the principal office of literature and art to lead mankind in this upward movement. This, then, is Schiller's conception of literary evolution. It is a theory clearly founded not 138 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY upon the observation of facts, but upon a subjective demand of Schiller's own nature. Schiller felt in himself a most intense desire for spiritual oneness, for a welding together of the instinctive and the conscious into a higher unity, and he projected, as it were, this inner struggle of his own self into the history of the race, making it a law of all spiritual development. As a scientific contribution, therefore, this theory of a necessary progress from the naive to the sentimental and thence to a reconciliation of both, has its obvious defects and limitations. As a suggestive specu- lation, as a fermentum cognitionis, it has been of inestimable value. The discussion so eagerly carried on in the first half of the nineteenth century, about the objective and subjective elements of poetry, about the difference be- tween Volkspoesie and Kunstpoesie> about the natural sequence of the several poetic species from the naive stage represented by the epic, through the sentimental phase characterized by lyrics, to the final combination of both as shown in the drama, — this whole discussion could hardly have taken the form which it took without the influence of Schiller's fun- damental thought. ) GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 139 I have said that the brothers Schlegel based their theories of literary growth upon the con- trast between the Classic and the Romantic. This formula by no means does full justice to the service rendered by the Schlegels to the history of literature. Both Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm have done remarkable work in bringing out the intimate connection between literature and national cul- ture in general. Such studies as Friedrich's essay, On the Schools of Greek Poetry ', with its fine characterization of the Ionic, Doric, Attic, and Alexandrian culture, or August Wilhelm's Lectures on Dramatic Literature, with their subtle analysis of the artistic individualities and historic positions of the great dramatists from Sophocles to Calderon and Shakspere, are masterpieces of evolutionary criticism. Yet it can hardly be said that the underlying idea of these and similar works is original with the Schlegels ; it is an Herderian idea further devel- oped and more carefully applied. The concep- tion, however, of the contrast between Classic and Romantic is their own; this is their essen- tially new contribution to evolutionary thought. We are able to follow out the growth of this conception, from its first germ in Friedrich's 140 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY essay, On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795), to its fullest form in August Wilhelm's Berlin lec- tures, On Belles-Lettres and Art (1803-4). In the essay just mentioned, Friedrich Schle- gel reveals himself as a most ardent Classicist. The ancients are to him exponents of what he calls the "objective," /'. e. } the lawful, natural, typical, beautiful; the moderns appear to him as representatives of what is merely "interest- ing," i. e., the capricious, artificial, individual, accidental. Even the greatest of the moderns, even Dante and Shakspere, offer us no true harmony, no genuine beauty. This is Fried- rich Schlegel's starting-point. Gradually, how- ever, we see him drift away from this position to one exactly opposite; that is to say, while he maintains the contrast of the "objective" and the "interesting," he more and more in- clines to attach different values to these terms, until at last he comes to see in the objectivity of ancient art nothing but formal correctness, "the perfect letter of poetry," while the par- ticular interest of modern or romantic art he finds now in this, that it is a revelation of the soul, that it makes us divine " the growing spirit." This is the point where his brother takes GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 141 up the discussion. Deeply imbued, as he was, with the Schellingian idea of the inner unity of all life, August Wilhelm Schlegel conceived of the contrast between Classic and Roman- tic as a part of the polarity of the whole universe, the polarity between form and spirit, the real and the ideal, the finite and the infi- nite ; he therefore refrained from extolling one of these opposing principles at the expense of the other, he merely considered them as different but typical manifestations of the same all-embracing creative force, and he endeav- ored to trace the consequences of this differ- entiation of type throughout the whole range of art and literature. It is natural that from this point of view painting should have appeared to him as the typically romantic, sculpture and architecture as the typically classic arts. The latter two appeal above all to the sense of form, they are dominated by line and external proportion ; ancient art, therefore, finds in them its high- est expression. The fuller development of the inner life in Christian history has broken this supremacy of form; Christian sculpture and architecture have, therefore, not reached that completeness of perfection which we admire 142 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY in the Parthenon. Painting, on the other hand, has achieved its greatest triumphs in modern times, because painting is not so much concerned with harmony of outline as with the changing effects of light and shade, with the inner movement, as it were, of na- ture, and, therefore, has a closer affinity with the human soul. In like manner Schlegel de- rives the difference between classic and roman- tic poetry from this fundamental polarity of form and spirit. The metrical system of the ancients is quantitative, that of the moderns accentuating and rhyming. The reason for this difference is to be found in this, that a line measured by quantity is an isolated fact, complete in itself, appealing to our plastic sense, while the rhyme, by depriving the single line of its independence and making it a part of a fluctuating whole, appeals to our feeling for inner movement. "Classic verse always holds us in the present and brings be- fore us images of equal distinctness and dig- nity; romantic verse suggests both the past and the future, and gives us a foreboding sense of the infinite." And so, finally, the ultimate spiritual aims of art and literature are found to be differentiated according to these GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 143 two principles of the Classic and the Roman- tic, — the one proceeds from the real, lifts it into the sphere of the ideal and finds its noblest form in man deified ; the other pro- ceeds from the ideal, sinks it into the real, and finds its supreme expression in God become flesh. Undoubtedly in these generalizations there is a good deal that is more brilliant than truth- ful, that is the result of hasty deduction and flighty speculation. Yet here again, as in Schiller's case, we have every reason to be grateful for a method which considers the whole development of human culture from one syigle point of view and thus imparts to it an organic unity and a grandeur of outline that is both illuminating and inspiring. As the first comprehensive attempt to represent the history of the world's literature in the light of a continuous succession of opposed yet related types, of a gradual approximation toward a complete harmony between form and spirit, August Wilhelm Schlegel's work will retain its place among the great achievements of evolutionary criticism. In no aesthetic theory has the principle of evolution played a more important or more i 4 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY consistent part than in that of Hegel. As Hegel's whole philosophy is based upon the conception of a gradual self-unfolding of the Idea, i. e., a gradual transition from latent and unconscious to fully apparent and fully con- scious spiritual freedom, so his aesthetic doc- trine also is based upon the conception of a gradual self-unfolding of Beauty, from its lowest to its highest manifestations. As des- ignations for two of the stages in this process of artistic evolution, Hegel adopts the Schle- gelian terms of Classic and Romantic, but he gives these terms a new meaning, and he adds to them, or rather he prefixes to them, another, — the Symbolic. What does Hegel mean by this necessary passage of art through the three stages of the Symbolic, the Classic, and the Romantic? Briefly stated, and robbed, as far as possible, of the technicalities of Hegel's language, it is this: — In the lowest, or symbolic, stage "the Idea," as Hegel says, 1 " has not yet found the true form even within itself, and therefore continues to be merely the struggle and aspiration there- after." There is no congruity, no inner bond between the thought to be expressed and its 1 I quote from Bosanquet's translation of the JEstbtttk. GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 145 expression. Either the expression is entirely without form, shapeless, as in the case of a rude block standing for divinity; or it is of an exaggerated, huge, grotesque shape, as though the Idea, in order to come to itself, had to do violence to nature, — this is the impression produced, for instance, by Assyrian architec- ture. Although this stage is to be found in the artistic development of every race and nation, — as, indeed, in that of most individuals, — yet its typical representative is Oriental art, with its " reciprocal inadequacy of shape and idea, its aspiration, its disquiet, its mystery, and sublimity." In the second stage of art there is no such contrast between form and meaning. The Idea has found its adequate manifestation in the human body ; for the human body is, among finite things, the most complete revelation of mind, it is the spiritual made sensuous. The artist, then, by representing the human body in its typical outline, i. e. y freed from all the defi- ciencies of what is merely accidental and exter- nal, represents, indeed, the Idea in a direct and specific manner. This stage of art is again, more or less clearly, a part of the spiritual de- velopment of all nations and all individuals ; 146 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY it has, however, reached its perfection in Greek sculpture. But, perfect as Greek sculpture is, it proves very conclusively the limitations of this second stage of art. Mind is here "spe- cified as a particular case of mind, as human mind, and not as simply absolute and eter- nal." A new struggle, therefore, to express the Idea in all its fullness becomes necessary, and thus there arises the third stage of art, the ro- mantic. "The romantic form of art destroys the completed union of the Idea and its reality, and recurs, though in a higher phase, to that difference and antagonism of two aspects which was left unvanquished by symbolic art." In- deed it revives and modifies the symbolism of that early stage. Complete harmony of form and spirit becomes once more an unattainable ideal ; vague, deep, unutterable longings once more take the place of precise and definite characterization ; fantastic caprice rules instead of law and measure. But while in the first symbolic stage the Idea was as yet so unde- veloped that it fell short of adequate expres- sion, it is now so fully developed that it tran- scends all sensuous expression and seeks to reveal itself as free and infinite. Isolated sug- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 147 gestions, fragmentary anticipations of this last stage of art development are again to be found throughout the whole course of human history; but only in mediaeval and modern painting, music, and poetry has the romantic principle become the dominating motive of creative activity. What a marvelous construction it is, this Hegelian evolution of Beauty, this seeking of the spirit after adequate self-revelation, from the first struggling with crude, material form to its final transcendence of all sensuous form ! What light it seems to shed upon the whole course of civilization; how it seems to unlock the mysteries of all spiritual existence ! No wonder that it swayed European thought with sovereign exclusiveness for a whole generation, that its indirect influence is by no means superseded yet. Without it we should not only not have had such aesthetic systems as that of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, such literary critics as David Friedrich Strauss, such literary philosophers as Kuno Fischer or Rudolf Haym ; but it is doubtful whether the further course of evolutionary criticism in Germany, although to a large extent opposed to Hegel's deductive method, would have been as vigor- 148 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ous and aggressive as it has been, but for the propelling force of Hegel's thought. 1 Almost simultaneously with Darwin's Ori- gin of Species there appeared four books which form an epoch in German literary history, — Hermann Hettner's Literaturgeschichte des 1 8. Jahrhunderts (1855), Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrbunderten (1858), Gustav Frey tag's Bilder aus der deut- schen Vergangenheit (1859), and Jacob Burck- hardt's Kultur der Renaissance in It alien ( 1 860). These four books may be singled out as indicat- ing the turning of the tide in German evolution- ary criticism from a priori reasoning to inductive methods, especially to that inductive method which studies literature and art from the point of view of national civilization. That this method was at bottom an idea of the eigh- teenth century, that it had been proclaimed in Germany most vigorously by Winckelmann 1 Even so intensely modern a book as Edgar Steiger's Das Werden des neuen Dramas ■ ( I 898), a book which betrays an affinity with the spirit of Ibsen and Hauptmann as few others do, rests, in its philosophic presuppositions, largely on Hegelian views. GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 149 and Herder, I have stated before. Nor had it been entirely discarded in the period of pre- vailingly philosophic speculation. I need only mention, as proof of this, the names of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Gervinus, and Vilmar. But it certainly may be said that the full ap- plication of this method sets in only with the middle of the nineteenth century. Of the four men whose works I bracketed with each other as epoch-making in German literary history, Hettner's was perhaps the least original personality. His influence was broad rather than deep ; in detail his criticism is often disappointing; he lacks that delicate sense of form which enables a Sainte-Beuve or a Herman Grimm to reproduce a given work of literature or art before our very eyes. But Hettner rendered one extremely important ser- vice to the study of literature ; he gave us the first inductive literary history which represents on a large scale and at the same time with scientific minuteness the development of a cer- tain intellectual type and its variation accord- ing to different national surroundings. It may truly be said that the one theme of his His- tory of Eighteenth Century Literature is this : to show both the racial unity and the national 150 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY differentiation of European culture in the Age of Enlightenment, — or, to use a simile which Hettner himself is particularly fond of em- ploying, European literature of the last few centuries appears in this book as a grand fugue in which the voices of the various nations make themselves heard one after another, each tak- ing up the leading motive in its own way, each blending with the preceding and the following voice, and thus helping to produce a progres- sive whole of an extremely complex and varie- gated character. How England takes the lead with its empirical philosophy, its constitutional freedom, its deistic religion, its emotional and satirical literature; how France adopts the tone set by England, how Voltaire trains himself in the school of Newton and Locke, how Mon- tesquieu studies the English Constitution, how Rousseau is inspired by Richardson, how at last the English spirit, modified by French temper, leads to the downfall of the ancien regime; and finally, how the whole movement reaches its artistic climax in the classic productions of the German poets and composers of the Weimar epoch, — all this is brought out with a sound- ness of method, a soberness of judgment, and wealth of illustration far removed from the GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 151 fascinatingly dangerous generalities of Hegel- ian reasoning. The influence of the scientific method is here unmistakable. While Hettner's principal subject is the gradual rounding out and final consummation of that intellectual type which stands for the most essential and permanent in modern cul- ture, — the rationalistic, — Jacob Burckhardt goes still further back to origins. His subject is the evolution of the modern individualistic type of man from the collectivism of mediaeval society; and his particular aim is to analyze the form which this evolution took in Italy, to show in what sense " the Italian was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe." In the Middle Ages — this is the starting- point of Burckhardt's investigation — the hu- man mind was in a state of dreamy half-con- sciousness. It looked at the world, both the inner and the outer, "through a veil woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession. Man was conscious of himself only as a mem- ber of a race, people, party, family, or corpo- ration, — only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; the objective treatment and consideration of the things of this world became possible ; and at 152 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY the same time the subjective side of conscious- ness asserted itself with corresponding em- phasis, man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such." In every phase of life Burckhardt traces the effects of this momentous change. In the new utilitarian views of society ; in the development of state omnipotence on the one hand, of republican- ism on the other ; in Macchiavellian poli- tics; in the beginnings of economic science; in the beginnings of an exact study of zoology, botany, and astronomy; in the great wave of geographical exploration setting in with the fifteenth century ; in the discovery of natural beauty, signalized, for instance, by Petrarch's ascents of mountain peaks ; in the striving for universality of culture, as shown in such men as Leon Battista Alberti or Lionardo da Vinci ; in the revival of antiquity, — everywhere we are made to see manifestations of the same fundamental fact, the emancipation of the in- dividual from the fetters of tradition, the sub- stitution of individual reason and feeling for collective sentiment and thought. What a distinctively evolutionary character this point of view imparts to Burckhardt's treatment of poetry and how it is just this evolutionary GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 153 character which gives to his literary criticism its highest charm, may best be seen by a single quotation, a passage on Dante's Sonnets and Canzoni. " The prose of the Vita Nuova in which Dante gives an account of the origin of each poem, is as wonderful as the verses themselves, and forms with them a uniform whole, inspired with the deepest glow of pas- sion. With unflinching frankness and sincerity he lays bare every shade of his joy and his sor- row, and moulds it resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively these Son- nets and Canzoni, and the marvelous frag- ments of the diary of his youth which lie between them, we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages the poets had been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was the first to seek his own soul. Before his time we meet with many an artistic verse ; but he is the first artist in the full sense of the word, — the first who consciously cast immortal matter into an immortal form. Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness, and most of it is so set forth that all ages and peo- ples can make it their own." Both Hettner and Burckhardt, as we have seen, are primarily concerned with the devel- 154 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY opment of individuality ; the whole of a na- tional organism is to them in the main only the background from which there stand out a few great personalities. Quite different is the standpoint of the two other noteworthy lit- terateurs whom I mentioned as their fellow- workers in the history of civilization, Freytag and Riehl. These men also are far removed from the deductive methods of the Hegelian philosophy ; they also betray clearly the in- fluence of the exact sciences, they also studv primarily the development of individual types ; but in one important respect they are more closely related to Hegel than they themselves perhaps would have been willing to admit, — the individual type is to them much more strictly than to Hettner and Burckhardt a re- presentative of the species ; the real object of their study is the evolution of the national soul as seen in the evolution of the individual. Both men have expressed in unambiguous terms their views as to the relation of the individual to this national soul. Freytag de- clares: "Millions of individuals make the people, in millions of souls the life of the people is pulsating, but the conscious and un- conscious working together of the millions GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 155 produces a spiritual content in which, at times at least, the soul of the whole people appears as a living, self-creating unity." And similarly Riehl : " The age, /. e., the nation at a partic- ular stage of its development, creates the man and the man helps to create his age ; every epoch-making mind is at the same time child and father, disciple and master of his age, and the more fully he surrenders himself to it, the more fully will he control it." And with equal frankness and precision both men have stated which element in this incessant intermingling between the individual and the universal seemed to them the most important. Riehl, in justifying his collecting testimony from every sort of private and domestic usages, institutions, and implements, says: "These studies on isolated antiquarian matter, on cus- toms and habits often very puerile and irra- tional, on house and home, on garments and utensils, are indeed, if taken by themselves, nothing but idle rubbish ; they receive their scientific and poetic consecration only through their relation to the wonderful organism of a whole national personality. For of this national personality it can, indeed, be said with absolute truth, that man is man's worthiest study." 156 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY And Freytag introduces his Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit with a declaration of his intention to give in them " a picture of the growth of our national soul during the last two thousand years." "What is printed here from old documents, are largely reports of men of the past about their own experi- ences, not infrequently insignificant incidents in the life of the common crowd. But just as every gesture of a strange man whom we meet for the first time, his address, his first words, give us the image of a fixed personality, an imperfect and unfinished image, to be sure, but yet a whole ; so every document in which the life of an individual is revealed has, if we mistake not, the curious effect of bringing be- fore us with sudden clearness an image of the life of the people, a very incomplete and un- satisfactory image, yet likewise a whole, around which a large variety of ideas and facts, stored up in our mind, flash-like shoot together, as crystals around their centre." It is not surprising that such views as these should have led both Freytag and Riehl to a treatment of literature and art which is more closely related to sociology than to aesthet- ics. To Freytag a poem, a novel, a drama is, GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 157 indeed, primarily an historical document, a document in which a particular stage in the development of the national soul is recorded. And although the author of Soil und Haken, of Die Journalisten, and Die Tecbnik des Dramas hardly needs to be defended against the in- sinuation that he was insensible to the specifi- cally aesthetic charms of a work of art, it is nevertheless true that the innermost spring of his nature wells up only whenever he discovers a striking instance of the mysterious connection between individual feeling and national life. It is in this spirit that he views the martial tradi- tions of old Germanic herodom, the monastic culture of the tenth century, the Minnesong and the Volkslied, the spiritual struggles through which Luther became the leader of his people, the beginnings of journalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the private corre- spondence and literary activity of Frederick the Great. It is in this spirit that he traces, in the introduction to the fourth volume of the Bildery the development of German culture from the Thirty Years' War downward. In all other countries political ascendency and literary greatness have been simultaneous. iEschylus was a contemporary of the Persian 158 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY wars ; the golden age of Latin poetry was the age of imperialistic expansion of the Roman people; Shakspere was the poetic expression of English popular energy in the days of the Armada ; Corneille and Moliere reflect the brilliant Parisian society under Louis XIV. " Quite otherwise in Germany. While every- where else the state is like a body whose healthy vitality brings forth the works of the spirit, there arises in Germany since the Thirty Years' War, a new national culture out of the most decrepit and rotten political institutions; it arises from individuals entirely devoid of that discipline of mind and character which only the participation in public affairs can give ; it at first seeks support in the imitation of foreign models, gradually becomes more independent and free, and finally shines forth as an illustrious example to other nations, combining the highest beauty of poetry with the noblest freedom of science. German cul- ture of the eighteenth century was, indeed, the wonderful creation of a soul without a body. And what is still more remarkable, this new national culture was to help in a round- about way to bring back to Germany her lost political greatness. From it there were to de- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 159 velop political enthusiasm and passion, party life, parliamentary institutions, national unity. Never has a literature played such a part and solved such tasks, as German literature from 1750 to the present." Still more pronounced than in Freytag is the sociological aspect of literary and artistic study in Riehl ; indeed, there is in Riehl a de- cided tendency toward emphasizing the influ- ence of social and intellectual conditions at the expense of the creative individuality, so that he may justly be called the father of that his- torical school which at present has its chief exponent in Karl Lamprecht. 1 It can hardly be said that Riehl has advanced very far on the way toward the goal which he undoubtedly had in mind in this sociological study of intel- lectual life. His aim unquestionably was to represent the working of the social laws which regulate literary and artistic as well as economic 1 An extremely interesting account of Riehl' s whole activity from this point of view is given by Henry Simons- feld in his essay, W. H. Riehl ah Kulturhistoriker ; Fest- rede gebalten in der k. b. Akademie d. Wiss. zu Miinchen, Munich, 1898. Cf. also G. Steinhausen, Freytag, Burck- hardt, Riehl, und ihre Auffassung der Kulturgeschichte, in Neue Jahrbiicher fur das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und Deutsche Litteratur, 1898. 160 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY and political activity. What is meant by such laws may perhaps be made clear by some words of the present writer printed elsewhere, in which he has tried to formulate the regulating influence exerted upon literature by two ele- mental human tendencies, the tendency toward personal freedom and the tendency toward social organization. " The tendency toward personal freedom leads, in literature, to the observation and representation of whatever is striking, genuine, individual ; in short, to real- ism. The tendency toward social organiza- tion leads, in literature, to the observation and representation of whatever is beautiful, sig- nificant, universal ; in short, to idealism. The individualistic tendency, if unchecked, may lead either to a vulgar naturalism or to a fantastic mysticism. The collectivistic tendency, if un- checked, may lead to an empty conventional- ism. Those ages and those men in whom the individualistic and the collectivistic tendencies are evenly balanced produce the works of lit- erature which are truly great." It is perhaps safe to assume that Riehl when he speaks, — as he frequently does speak, — of the laws of literary and artistic taste, had some such regu- lative influence as that of these two funda- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 161 mental tendencies in mind. But he never ex- plicitly states exactly what is to be understood by his "laws"; he often seems to confound law and fashion ; instead of reducing the vari- ety of social and literary or artistic phenomena to a common first principle, he confines himself, for the most part, to bringing out the corre- spondence between certain phenomena in the social or political sphere, on the one hand, and certain phenomena in the literary or artistic sphere on the other. If this is a limitation of the service rendered by Riehl to literary and artistic criticism, — as it seems to be, — it should at once be added that within these limits set by himself, Riehl has done most signal service. In the charac- terization of the social elements of literary or artistic phenomena, in the treatment of such themes as, for instance, the relation of music to popular life, the development of the musical ear, the evolution of the sense for landscape in their correspondence with the various stages of national culture, 1 he is unsurpassed, and in this 1 It is interesting to note that Edgar Steiger, in his Das Werden des neuen Dramas, is directly or indirectly in- fluenced by Riehl's views on the development of taste, when he attempts to show that with the advance of culture the 162 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY respect even such men as Georg Brandes and Karl Lamprecht must recognize in him their master. This sketch of the principal representatives, in Germany, of what may be called the method of Kulturgeschichte as applied to the studv of literature and art, necessarily brief and incom- plete as it is, 1 would be entirely insufficient were it not to include the name of a man who during the last thirty years has stood per- haps more fully than any other writer for the highest ideals of our national culture, Her- man Grimm. Herman Grimm is not a literary sociologist like Wilhelm Riehl ; at times it seems as though he were opposed to all sci- entific criticism of literature ; he is an artist rather than a critic, an artist of reproductive limits of what is considered ugly steadily become narrower, or, as he expresses it, that " with every new century there are fewer ugly things " (II, 28 f.). ' It is clear, for instance, that in a fuller treatment of the subject such men as Karl Biedermann, the author of Dcutsch- land im 18. Jakrhundert ; Karl Hillebrand, the author of Zeiten, Vblher und Menscben ,• Karl Justi, the author of Velasquez and Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, would have to be considered individually, as characteristic types of the class of writers basing their criticism upon the study of civilization. GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 163 genius. Yet even Herman Grimm's artistic temper has been drawn into the service of scientific criticism. He has never attempted to formulate a general law of literary or artistic development. But in analyzing and interpreting the great works of the world's literature and art, he always makes us feel that they are necessary manifestations of a deep, mysterious force which regulates all human life. And if there is anything that stands out as the central motive of his whole literary activity, it is the desire to reproduce before the eyes of the present the elements out of which have grown the great spiritual lead- ers of mankind, a Homer, a Michel Angelo, a Raphael, a Goethe. Grimm, then, is not less an evolutionist than Riehl or Taine. But whereas for Riehl and Taine the general move- ment is of prime importance, Grimm, like Jacob Burckhardt, lays the chief emphasis upon the individual who represents the gen- eral movement. Taine is greater in analyzing men who seem to have been nothing but tools in the intellectual or moral development of mankind, whose strength seems to have been absorbed by living out a certain phase of the world's history ; Grimm is greater in depict- 1 64 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ing men who seem to stand by themselves, who seem to have taken refuge from the whirlpool of circumstances and fate into the serene regions of personal freedom. Ill Some twenty-five years ago there was coined, by Erich Schmidt I believe, a term which has attained considerable currency since, the term Goetbe-Philologie. It is an ugly term, and for the sake of good taste it would be better if it never had been created. But the fact of its having been received so widely, and into such good company as German professorial circles, is significant ; it is an official recognition of a process which has been going on for genera- tions, the process of a gradual reaching out of philology, or the evolutionary method of studying language, into the sphere of literature. Philology is essentially a science of origins. It studies the development of word-structure through the shifting of vowels and consonants, through the increase or loss of inflections ; it studies the development of word-meaning through analogy and differentiation of ideas ; it studies the development of the sentence through coordination and subordination. In GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 165 other words, philology studies linguistic growth with regard both to the changes of form and to the changes of content. The philological method of studying literature, also, is con- cerned with these two kinds of change ; it is concerned either with the variations of literary structure or with the variations of literary sub- ject-matter, or with both; in any case it is chiefly directed toward bringing out the origi- nal type. That this method of studying liter- ature is again, like the kulturhistorische method, essentially scientific and essentially evolution- ary, need not be emphasized. What have been the results of this method thus far? There can be no question that the largely mechanical way in which the philological method has been and is being pursued by the average scholar, especially by the authors of the stereotype ^uellenuntersuchungen^ or criti- cal investigations of a writer's material, which form so large a part of the yearly output of the German universities in doctor-dissertations, has done much to discredit this method in the eyes of liberally trained and cultivated men. It often would seem as if the whole scientific creed of these dissectors of literary achieve- ments consisted in the conviction that under no 166 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY circumstances must the writer who just happens to be the victim of their anatomical treatment be assumed to have had an idea of his own. Whatever he has of ideas he must have bor- rowed from some one else, and this some one else must again have borrowed from some one else, and so on, so that it may truly be said that the primal " some one else" plays in these philological investigations the same part which, according to Spinoza, the so-called primal cause plays or used to play in theological discussions, the part, namely, of an asylum ignorantiae. It would, however, be obviously unjust to gauge the merit of the philological method by these factory wares of the doctor-dissertation kind ; its true spirit we must seek with the masters, with the men who represent not its defects but its virtues, with philologists of the type of Friedrich August Wolf, Jacob Grimm, Karl Lachmann, or Wilhelm Scherer. Let us consider one or two cases in which the philo- logical method as applied by such men has been particularly successful in elucidating lit- erary origins. I suppose there is hardly a scholar living who would still cling, as Scherer did in his His- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 167 tory of German Literature, to Lachmann's theory of the composition of the Nibelungenlied. The twenty so-called lays which Lachmann cut out of the thirty-nine "adventures" of the Nibe- lungen text and which he held to have been the original form of the Middle High German version of the subject, belonging 'to about as many different authors, are clearly nothing but arbitrary constructions of his own ; they are no lays at all ; they have a meaning only as cantos or chapters of a larger whole. And no one who reads the Nibelungenlied without hypercritical bias can resist the impression that here we have, indeed, a whole which, in spite of occasional discrepancies and not infre- quent irrelevancies, possesses a grand unity of conception and has a noble heroic movement going through it all. The central theme of this epic is Kriemhild's love, grief, and revenge ; and everything throughout its thirty-nine "ad- ventures" is subordinated to this one theme, from Kriemhild's foreboding dream in the first canto to the fearful massacre of friend and foe in the last. Throughout the poem we feel something of the striding of Fate, of the over- whelming inevitableness with which guilt is followed by death, and joy is turned into sor- 168 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY row. But all these considerations cannot take away from the gratitude which we owe to Lach- mann for having by his philological method first shed light upon the stages through which the Nibelungen legend passed before it reached the form of the Middle High German epic. That originally the Nibelungen legend was treated not as a "whole, but in its various indi- vidual episodes ; that its original poetic form was not that of a large,- connected epic, but of short, independent, ballad-like lays ; and that these independent lays were still in existence J*. *at the time of the author of the Nibelungenlied and by him were welded together and made parts of a great epic organism, — this is the result of Lachmann's investigations which will stand. Or, to take another, more recent instance of the influence exerted upon literary criticism by the philological method, what a beneficial, truly enlightening effect has this method had upon the study of Goethe's Faust I Not as though the spiritual import of this poem had not been understood, as far as such works can be understood, even before Heinrich Diintzer, Wilhelm Scherer, Gustav von Lo*per, and Erich Schmidt began their researches upon GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 169 the growth of Goethe's Faust conception. No amount of philological knowledge will ever give real insight into the spirit of a work of genius, if the instinctive intuition of this spirit is absent. But one thing the researches of these men have undoubtedly accomplished. They have freed us for the time being — and let us hope for all time — from the metaphysical interpretations which, until the middle of the last century, so largely obstructed the clear view of Goethe's work ; they have led us directly into Goethe's own presence. And if the reader who is introduced by them to Goethe misses Goethe's spirit, it is not their fault ; for the principal office of these researches is to enable the reader to judge for himself, to make him see with his own eyes the original type from which the later work in all its fullness has developed. It was, indeed, a striking vindica- tion of the value of these studies, when some twenty years ago Erich Schmidt discovered the manuscript of Goethe's original Faust concep- tion, and here found revealed in strongest out- line exactly that type of poetical conception toward which these philological investigations had pointed as the probable germ of the whole poem, — the conception of the reckless Storm 170 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY and Stress individualist whose titanic self- assertion transgresses all law and transcends all happiness. Or, to take still another case, what would the study of comparative literature be but an amateurish collecting of similar phenomena in the literatures of different nations, — and it must be admitted that a good many so-called students of comparative literature are nothing more than amateur collectors, — if philology had not given to the best representatives at least of this youthful science a safe direction in the search for literary origins. This is de- cidedly the point of view from which the re- lation between Provencal, Old French, and Middle High German literature has been stud- ied by such masters as Diez, Bartsch, and Wackernagel ; it is the point of view from which Benfey, Max Muller, Reinhold Kohler, and others have traced the course of literary and intellectual connections between orient and Occident; and no one who has turned the pages of Max Koch's Zeitschrift fur vergleich- ende Literaturgeschichte can fail to see that more and more this point of view is coming to be universally and exclusively accepted. Comparative literature, then, is converting it- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 171 self into a science by adopting the evolution- ary principle. 1 It would be useless to attempt here an enu- meration of the works in which, during the last generation, the philological method has led not only to analytical investigations of literary origins but also to synthetic representations of literary development. But it should at least be said that the representative works of this kind belonging to the last few decades cover a remarkably wide area of scientific in- quiry ; indeed, taken together, well-nigh em- brace the history of the whole world's litera- ture. Oldenberg's and Deussen's studies in Hindu literature and Hindu philosophy; Noldeke's Studies in Ancient Arabian Poetry and History of the Koran ; Rohde's History of the Greek Novel; Mahrenholtz's Moliere; Korting's Petrarch and Boccaccio ; Muncker's Klopstock ; Erich Schmidt's Lessing ; Minor's Schiller ; R. M. Meyer's or Bielschowsky's Goethe ; Brahm's Heinrich von Kleist, — are only a few examples, selected at random, which prove that the philological method has practi- 1 Cf. W. Wetz, Shakespeare vom Standpunkte der verg. Liter aturgeschichte, 1890, and Veber Liter atur ge- schichte, 1801. 1 72 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY cally taken possession of the academic study of literature even in its synthetic form, and has, therefore, helped to establish the predomi- nance of evolutionary principles, in this respect also. IV It remains to cast a glance at a method of literary study which, though only just begin- ning strongly to assert its influence, seems des- tined to become of great, nay of paramount importance in the further development of lit- erary criticism, — the psychological method. Neither the metaphysical nor the historical nor the philological way of considering literature, although each of them gives us valuable insights into literary growth, goes quite to the root of the matter; neither of these methods quite touches the spot from which there spring forth either the work of art itself or the sensations resulting from its being received by the public. Only by studying the genesis of the emotions which produce a work of art in the mind of the artist, and by studying the emotional pro- cesses which a work of art calls forth in the minds of its hearers or spectators, can we ar- rive at the foundation for a full understanding GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 173 of literary or artistic evolution. This method has, of course, never been entirely neglected. We find traces of it even in such intensely speculative writers as Schelling and Hegel ; it plays a not unimportant part in Friedrich Theodor Vischer's aesthetic theory ; it is seen more or less distinctly in the literary investiga- tions of the historical and philological school. But only recently, only since Fechner and Wundt established a real science of psycho- logy, have attempts been made to apply the psychological method in a systematic manner to the study of literature. It would be tempting to show here on a larger scale the influence exerted by the psy- chological method in various directions ; to show, for instance, how it affected the literary criticism of such men as Kuno Fischer, Eugen Kuhnemann, or Anton Bettelheim ; how it colored Steinthal's view of the popular epic ; how it determined Friedrich Nietzsche's con- ception of " the birth of tragedy ; " how it induced R. M. Werner to undertake a syste- matic description of the growth of lyric poetry from the first " inner experience " to the whole variety of artistic forms ; ' how it led Ernst 1 Cf. Richard Maria Werner, Lyrik u. Lyriker, 1890. 174- GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Elster to the attempt of founding a " science of literature " upon a searching analysis of the normal processes of human imagination and emotion. 1 I shall, however, confine myself to a somewhat more detailed consideration of a work which seems to me by far the most original and suggestive contribution yet made by a German to the psychological study of literature, Johannes Volkelt's JEsthetik des Tragischen (Munich, 1897). This book is closely connected with the new life which has sprung up during the last decades in German literature, especially in the drama. For, if I mistake not, the personal motive of Volkelt's thought lies in his desire to justify before his scientific conscience the new forms of tragic art which are now coming to light in the pro- ductions of such men as Ibsen and Hauptmann. But the intellectual significance of this book is more than temporary. It is an achievement that opens up new paths. It is the first book to show in a comprehensive manner the great variety of tragic types, the many transitions which lead from the least developed to the most complete forms of tragic emotion ; it is 1 Cf. Ernst Elster, Prinzipien der Liter aturwissenschaft, 1897. GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 175 the first successful attempt to break away en- tirely from aesthetic canons which since the days of the Renaissance, chiefly by means of a too rigid application of Aristotelean prin- ciples, have held the theory of tragedy within narrow and artificial limits. In short, it is nothing more nor less than a revision of the theory of tragic sensations from the evolu- tionary point of view. I shall try to bring out this essentially evolutionary nature of Volkelt's investigation by considering his answers to the following questions: (1) Is sublimity of character a necessary element of the tragic hero ? (2) Is guilt a necessary element of tragedy ? (3) What is the essence of the tragic catastrophe ? (4) What is the effect of tragedy upon the human mind? 1. It is a matter of course that, in the dis- cussion of the elements that make the tragic hero, Volkelt should have nothing in com- mon with the absurd and obsolete view of pre-Lessingian times that an exalted station, princely or noble birth, were a necessary con- dition of tragic character. But Volkelt also rejects a view which in some circles is by no means considered obsolete, — the view that a 176 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tragic hero cannot be thought of without grandeur of soul. Is there any grandeur in such characters as Shakspere's Henry VI, Prince Arthur, or Hamlet ; in Lessing's Emilia ; in Goethe's Tasso, or Grillparzer's Rudolf II? And do not these characters, nevertheless, impress us as truly tragic figures ? No, grandeur of soul is not a necessary con- dition of the tragic type ; it is only one of the elements which may or may not enter into the constitution of the tragic type. In other words, the expression " tragic character " is not a fixed term ; there is a large scale of characters which may be called tragic ; there is a grada- tion of the tragic from lower to higher forms. There exists only one absolute prerequisite for a tragic character; he must not be hope- lessly and irretrievably vulgar or common- place. There must be something in him which appeals to our higher nature, something which calls out in us a decided human sympathy, something which gives us a strong sense of the contrast between the apparent claims of this man to happiness and his actual suffer- ing, of the contrast between what ought to be and what is, of the contrast between human aspirations and the mysterious ways of Fate. GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 177 Where this feeling of contrast is not aroused, there the suffering appears not as tragic, but merely as sad or pitiful. The lowest form of the tragic, then, is that which is largely still within the sphere of the merely sad, yet at the same time in some respects is raised above it; the lowest form of the tragic is a transition- form from the pitiful to the tragic. A striking example of this tragic type is Hauptmann's 'The Weavers. Every one of these disfran- chised, downtrodden, physically and mentally crippled proletarians, whose suffering Haupt- mann's drama brings before us, is, taken singly, too miserable to arouse anything but pity. Taken together, however, as a social group, as representatives of a class in whom the feeling of human dignity is for the first time dimly awakening, of a class which, if once fully aroused to its great social mission, would be able to change the face of the earth, these poor weavers are tragic heroes whose suffering has something in it of the martyrdom for a noble cause, and makes us feel the contrast of what is and what ought to be. A higher type of tragic character is that which shows us a man, not by any means ex- traordinary or great, yet raised in one particu- 178 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY lar respect above the common crowd and being driven into ruin by this very divergence from the ordinary. Such a tragic character is Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas. Kohlhaas is a plain man of the people, a shrewd, practical horse-dealer, a man apparently without any claim to greatness. But there is one trait that gives to this plain, practical man the stamp of the true idealist; he has a sense of justice, absolutely incorruptible and unbending. And it is just this sense of justice that forces him to take revenge for injustice with the sword in his hand ; that makes him a rebel against the law of his country ; that brings the deepest misery upon himself and through him upon his people; that finally drives him into death. Here still more clearly than in The Weav- ers we have a tragic character that reveals to us (to use Kohlhaas' own words) "the defec- tive order of this world" and makes us long for a better order. As to the highest form of tragic character, Volkelt finds himself in accord with the ac- cepted view in so far as he, too, considers the great personality, drawn into ruin or threat- ened by ruin, as the tragic character ko.t i£o- Xtjv ; for the suffering of the truly great man GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 179 most emphatically forces upon us the riddle of existence. But here again Volkelt admits a larger variety of type than his predeces- sors. In particular, he refutes the common notion that tragic greatness is confined to the strong, the aggressive, the indomitable; and excludes the gentle, the contemplative, the prevailingly receptive character. The tragic feeling, the feeling of contrast between the "is" and the "ought" is aroused, not only by witnessing the downfall of the hero of strenuous will and of action, but also by wit- nessing the ruin of the sensitive thinker, the passive dreamer, the reveler in sentiment. Hamlet is a tragic character of the highest type in spite of his inactivity. Werther's fate has the quality of highest tragedy; for this passive dreamer stands for the imperishable right of feeling, for the 'priceless worth of per- sonality, for a true aristocracy of the spirit, and he is crushed by the unthinking and un- feeling mediocrity that surrounds him. Even Byron's Sardanapalus belongs to this class; for his inertia and voluptuousness have their roots in a gentle, humane heart which would do harm to none, shed no blood, wage no war, and bring happiness and enjoyment to every- 180 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY body. The violent downfall of such a man impresses us as tragedy of the highest type. i. We have seen, then, that in the consid- eration of tragic greatness Volkelt is led by his evolutionary principles to a freer and more comprehensive view than was attained by his predecessors. The same is true of his con- sideration of tragic guilt. The Aristotelean theory that the ruin of the tragic hero must be brought about by some sort of aberration or mistake or crime of which he has made him- self guilty, has been considered unimpeachable throughout the centuries. It was strongly up- held by Lessing ; it was philosophically reen- forced and deepened by Hegel and Vischer ; it practically rules to-day ; the downfall of the hero, this is still the opinion of most critics, must be the consequence of his guilt and thus serve as an atonement for his guilt. Volkelt, in truly inductive manner, dis- cusses in the first place a number of cases in which this theory of atonement for guilt does not seem to work. Can it be said that Eg- mont's death is an atonement for guilt? Or is it not simply preposterous to think that Egmont's easy-going temper, his neglect of the warnings of his friends, his implicit trust in men GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 181 and in his own good luck, were moral aberra- tions which could be rectified only by his death ? What is it that causes Gotz von Berliching- en's ruin ? The slight moral aberration which induces him to accept the leadership of the rebellious peasants? Or is it not rather the world of meanness, treachery, trickery, and corruption which presses in upon this honest, faithful, and doughty knight, blighting his hopes and crushing his life ? Does not Sieg- fried, in the Nibelungenlied as well as in Heb- bel's drama, although the external cause of his death lies in his over-hasty confidingness, fall in reality as an innocent victim of evil pow- ers ? Or take Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Lear-, those critics who, like Gervinus and Ulrici, find in these dramas nothing but examples of just retribution following upon the heels of reck- less love and over-reaching egotism, are, indeed, to be compared to uncouth savages breaking into the flower-garden of poetry in order to steal some cabbage-heads. It is clear, then, there are not a few drama- tic masterpieces in which the ruin of the hero is not caused by his guilt. In other words the atonement for guilt is not the only legitimate form of the tragic denouement ; it is only one 1 82 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY type of tragic structure in a large scale of other types. But it should at once be added, that it is the highest, the most complex form of tragic structure. For guilt both intensifies and softens the tragic feeling, it both intensi- fies and softens the feeling of contrast between the actual and the ideal. It intensifies this feeling because guilt is the deepest of all woe. The guilt of a great man affects us still more painfully than his misfortune. The sight of greatness being drawn into guilt brings before us in particularly emphatic manner the para- doxicalness of a world in which just what is best, noblest, strongest is most easily perverted into evil, impurity, and crime. It makes us shudder at the awful possibilities of sin and agony that lurk in the recesses of the human heart. But, on the other hand, tragic guilt and suffering soften the feeling of contrast be- tween the actual and the ideal. For the suf- fering of the guilty is felt as a necessity, as a moral demand; and we derive even an aesthe- tic satisfaction from the sight of the moral equilibrium being restored through this suffer- ing. 3. Closely allied with the question of tragic guilt is the question, what is the essence of GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 183 the tragic catastrophe? The answer to this question given by dogmatic aesthetics is a very simple one : the tragic catastrophe, by show- ing the hero, though outwardly crushed, yet inwardly victorious or purified, is necessarily elevating and inspiring. Here again we ob- serve how, in contradistinction from the dog- matic way of looking at things, Volkelt's psychological method leads to evolutionary views. Is it really true, he asks, that the tragic catastrophe is necessarily elevating and inspiring ? Is there nothing legitimate in the tragic catastrophe of the depressing variety ? A review of the history of literature shows that the depressing type of the tragic catastro- phe is by no means uncommon. It is found not only in the most recent literature, not only in Tolstoi or Hauptmann. Some of the greatest masterpieces of the past are prevail- ingly depressing. The catastrophe of the Ni- belungenlied dismisses us with a sense of name- less woe ; the whole world seems here to be out of joint ; the noblest, the best, the brav- est go under in a universal wreck; the guilty and the guiltless are crushed by the same in- exorable fate. Othello, a man of colossal pas- sion but also of purest, unadultered feeling, a 1 84 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY man both hero and child, is robbed by a con- summate villain of happiness and peace ; is in- wardly deranged; becomes the brutal murderer of his loving wife ; and is finally driven to suicide — a career so shocking, so horrible, so bewildering to our moral sense that it seems preposterous to look here for elevating or inspiring elements. And is not the Elective Affinities, probably Goethe's artistic master- piece, in its moral effect essentially depressing? Must not the same be said of Hebbel's Judith and Mary Magdalen, the same of most of George Eliot's novels ? Are all these works to be condemned as illegitimate productions of art ? Or are they, after all, valuable as bringing out one side at least of human life? It seems clear that the latter is the case. It would be tantamount to depriving art of a most important part of its office, if we were to deny it the right of arous- ing a strong feeling of the nothingness, the confusion, the grimness, the perversity, the curse of all earthly existence. It would be a distortion of the meaning of life, it would be a mere palliation of facts, if art were to exclude from its sphere the great woe of our being, the triumph of the mean over the noble, the sink- GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 185 ing under of great souls in shame, hopeless- ness, and despair. Such a sight, though deeply depressing, is not by any means degrading. On the contrary, it enriches our inner experi- ence ; it widens our sympathies ; it puts the soul into a state from which there have sprung some of the finest spiritual truths, the state of a noble contempt of the world, of a lofty resignation to the eternal. And thus the de- pressing type of the tragic catastrophe, in a roundabout way, leads to the same goal as the inspiring type, the goal of strengthening, in- tensifying, and deepening the inner life. That the inspiring type is aesthetically higher, Vol- kelt does not deny. The highest type he sees in the combination of both, in a tragic cata- strophe which both depresses and inspires, which plunges us into the deepest abyss of human woe, yet even in this woe gives us a triumphant sense of human greatness and freedom. 4. This leads us, finally, to the considera- tion of the effect which tragedy as a whole has upon the mind of the reader or spectator. Here the contrast between Volkelt's evolu- tionary method and the dogmatic method of older aesthetics is particularly marked, because 1 86 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY here he entirely breaks away from a doctrine which for centuries has been considered as the very corner-stone of tragic theory : the Aris- totelean doctrine of pity and fear. With most ajsthetical writers this doctrine of pity and fear, as the fundamental emotions called out by tra- gedy, still enjoys undisputed sway. Volkelt shows that this is a formula far too narrow to do justice to the wealth and variety of tragic emotions. Pity, in particular, is a most unfortunate term, if it is to stand for the whole scale of sympathetic feelings aroused by tragic suffer- ing. Let us suppose : the suffering hero is in all his agony unshaken ; he does not give way to despair or lamentation ; his agony serves only to set off his greatness of soul all the more strikingly. In the face of such a suffer- ing we do not feel pity, or at least, pity is far outweighed by another kind of sympathy. Our sympathy in such a case has itself some- thing of the courageous, the powerful ; it is not so much sympathy with the sufferer, as admiration for the way in which he suffers. For the Prometheus of iEschylus or Byron's Lucifer we feel no pity. Or let us suppose : the tragic hero is drawn into vice and crime GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 187 and thus becomes a caricature of his better self. For such a man we certainly feel pity, but this pity is mixed with horror and repug- nance ; and frequently these latter feelings gain the ascendency over pity. When we see Macbeth hardening himself in bloody, atro- cious crimes, our pity with him is overshad- owed by feelings which keep us away from him. Pity tends to unite us with its object; it rests on the instinctive conception of an inner affinity. In Macbeth's case the opposite takes place ; we feel an ever-widening gulf stretching out between him and ourselves ; and in the end pity has well-nigh disappeared. These examples may suffice to suggest the way in which Volkelt demonstrates the inade- quacy of the Aristotelean, or rather Lessingian, formula of tragic emotions. What, then, is his own formula? He has no formula, he admits the whole range of human feelings, both pleas- urable and painful, depressing and inspiring, and he studies the scale of combinations into which these pleasurable and painful feelings may enter with each other. That there should be such a combination, a mixture between joy and pain, between hope and gloom, between light and dark, — this seems to him the sine 188 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY quanon of tragic effect; and the highest tragic effect seems to him reached when this mixture is most harmonious and evenly balanced. "In that case the tragic effect is of an inexpres- sible charm; willingly Pain opens his being to Joy, lets her take away his sting, and feels tremblingly her gentle touch; and Joy on her part enters into the union with Pain bashfully and hesitatingly, as if fearing to disturb his sacred calm." We have followed the course of German lit- erary criticism through a number of important stages: the metaphysical, the sociologico-his- torical, the philological, and the psychological. We have seen that in all these stages the con- ception of a continuous evolution from lower forms of literature to higher ones dominated the critical analysis. We have seen that in every one of these stages the evolutionary method led to some new aspect of literature, some new insight into the relation of literature to life. It is perhaps not unfitting, and cer- tainly harmless, to conclude this essay with a prophecy. It seems to me that the literary critic of the future, the Messiah toward whom GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM 189 the previous history of criticism is pointing as the coming fulfiller of its mission, will be the man who combines in himself all the pre- ceding stages of critical thought, who is meta- physician, sociological historian, philologist, and psychologist in one. But perhaps this man partakes too much of the character of the Nietzschean Uebermensch to have much of a prospect for being seen in the flesh. IV THE INNER LIFE IN GERMAN SCULPTURE THE INNER LIFE IN GERMAN SCULPTURE It is due, above all, to the munificence of the German Emperor, and to the ready response which his high-minded initiative has found with other friends of German culture both in Amer- ica and Europe, that the Germanic Museum of Harvard University possesses a collection of reproductions of monumental works of Ger- man sculpture such as exists nowhere else on this side of the Atlantic and, for that matter, in very few museums abroad. As this fact is, I believe, not very widely known, it may be not inopportune, by a brief review of at least a few representative specimens of this remark- able collection, to bring out its unusual signifi- cance, and at the same time to throw light upon some features of German art which seem to deserve particular attention. If we were to name one quality which more than any other distinguishes German plastic work from that of other nations, we probably 194 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY should not go astray in designating it as in- tensity and vigor of the inner life. In beauty of form, in symmetry of proportions, the art of other nations, particularly the French and the Italian, has equaled and not infrequently surpassed the German work. In spiritual en- ergy, in moral earnestness, in veracity of feeling, in depth of character, German sculpture has had few equals and no superiors. Particularly is this true of those epochs which in the Ger- manic Museum are most fully represented — the height of the Middle Ages and the Renais- sance. There can be no doubt that mediaeval Ger- man sculpture, quite as much as mediaeval German poetry, has received important sug- gestions and formative impulses from France. Just as Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, and Wal- ther von der Vogelweide's lyrics would have been impossible without the preceding activity of Chretien de Troyes, Thomas of Brittany, and the Provencal troubadours, so the sculptures of Freiberg, Naumburg, Bamberg, Strassburg, would not be what they are without the in- fluence of Chartres, Rheims, and Amiens. And vet one should be careful not to overestimate INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 195 the influence of French models upon mediaeval German sculpture. From the very beginning there is a decided note of individuality in the German work — an individuality which can hardly be accounted for except by taking re- course to fundamental traits of national tem- per. The Frenchman, as a rule, seems to have little difficulty in expressing himself; he seems to be borne along by a popular sentiment in entire accord with his own ideals and views of life ; he easily adapts himself to the general current; he is naturally graceful and communi- cative. The German is naturally self-centred and unresponsive ; he often finds himself in opposition to the life surrounding him ; and the more he has to say, the harder is it for him to say it. He struggles, he broods, he is bur- dened with his task, and only in supreme mo- ments of concentrated energy does he pour out his whole self. Is it surprising that, with such national characteristics as these to start from, German sculpture of the Middle Ages, although strongly influenced by the art of France, should have maintained a spirit essen- tially different from that of French sculpture? If the French artist appeals to us chiefly by 196 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY his mastery of form, by the universality of his imagination, by the refinement of his manner, the German makes his appeal chiefly through the energy of his personality, through the sturdiness of his purpose, through the home- liness of his speech, through his independence of conventional forms, through his identify- ing himself with his subject, through his de- voutness of soul. French sculpture of the Middle Ages, therefore, preserves an even level of formal excellence and measured grace. Ger- man sculpture moves in leaps and bounds; from broad naturalism it passes over to fantas- tic mysticism ; for the most part it is extreme and one-sided ; in rare moments, however, it reaches a perfection of form combining the deepest longings of the heart with fullest com- prehension of the visible world. We are fortunate in having at least one group of monuments, showing essential char- acteristics of German art, from a time when German sculpture had not yet been affected by French influence : the bronze reliefs of the so-called Bernward Column and the portal of Hildesheim Cathedral, belonging to the be- ginning of the eleventh century. In these remarkable sculptures the German genius for INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 197 homely truthfulness and directness of charac- terization manifests itself with a truly childlike simplicity. Crudeness is the most palpable quality of this art ; but it is a crudeness thoroughly wholesome and full of power, and therefore refusing to submit to conventional canons. There is nothing in the art of France of the eleventh century which in animation and fullness of life could at all be compared with these Hildesheim monuments ; and even the best French works of the beginning of the twelfth century, such as the impressive sculp- tures of Vezelay and Autun, show a far stricter adherence to conventional arrangement of dra- pery and grouping, a far closer affinity to the severe Byzantine manner. Nothing could ex- ceed the plainness of speech and the instinctive grasp of essentials with which the Hildesheim artist tells his tale. How God the Father, after the fall of man, appears in the Garden of Eden, calling Adam to account, Adam on his part putting the blame upon Eve ; how Cain deals the deadly blow to his brother ; how the Virgin receives reverently and devoutly the blessed message of the Angel of Annunciation ; how John the Baptist sermonizes to the bad king and the evil queen, the latter sitting in her 198 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY husband's lap; how the daughter of Herodias dances at the king's feast — all this is told with a popular homeliness and freedom from restraint which betray truly indigenous art. It is hardly fanciful to say that in these Hildes- heim monuments we have a worthy counter- part to the simple and direct manner of German religious poetry of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, previous to the introduction of courtly fashion from France. Most of the German plastic work from the height of the Middle Ages shows distinct traces of this courtly manner. In the pulpit and the crucifixion group of Wechselburg, in the Golden Gate of Freiberg, in the founders' statues and the rood-screen of Naumburg, in the sculptures of Bamberg and Strassburg, this influence is clearly discerned. In the drapery, in the arrangement of the hair, in facial ex- pression, in peculiarities of bearing and ges- ture, all these monuments show a decided affinity to the French type, a clear adaptation to a common standard of decorum and chiv- alric etiquette. Yet even here it would be a mistake to think of the German work merely as a copy of the French. Over and over again the German individuality asserts itself and INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 199 gives to these creations their own peculiar life. In the reliefs of the pulpit of Wechselburg ' — Christ as Judge of the World, the sacrifice of Isaac, and the healing of the Jews by the brazen serpent — it seems as though the Ger- man artist was grappling with the problem of form. In the majestic figure of Christ him- self, seated on his throne, surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists, he has indeed at- tained perfection of form, classic solemnity, exalted repose. In the more animated scenes of the sacrifice of Isaac and the healing of the Jews, there is a curious contrast between gran- deur and awkwardness, sweetness of feeling and naive naturalism. Apparently, here is an artist who looks at the life about him with a keen, penetrating, and receptive eye, but who at the same time is impelled to subject reality to certain canons of measure and proportion which he has not yet made fully his own; and perhaps the chief charm of these remarkable reliefs springs from this very conflict between inner life and outer form. Among the Bamberg sculptures of the thir- 1 A reproduction of this pulpit has been given to the Germanic Museum by the King of Saxony. 200 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY teenth century, I would single out, as illustrat- ing a distinctively German quality of mind, two statues widely differing from each other in attitude and temper: the serene, saintly Empress Kunigunde and the stern, portentous Sibyl (or Elizabeth, as she is perhaps more correctly to be called). That both these stat- ues had their prototypes in certain figures of Rheims Cathedral there can be no reasonable doubt; but it seems equally certain that what imparts the fullness of life to these figures is something not borrowed from any foreign model. French sculpture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has produced many a wo- man figure of greater freedom and gracefulness of movement than is seen in Kunigunde, the saintly patroness of Bamberg Cathedral ; but I doubt whether French art of that time offers any parallel to the homely, naive gesture of the hand with which this German woman seems to receive the blessing of heaven, the radiance of which is surrounding and transfiguring her. The very awkwardness of motion becomes here a sign of spiritual concentration and self- surrender. As to Elizabeth, we are justified in finding in her something of the spirit of Albrecht Diirer. The general outline of the INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 201 body, the majestic drapery with its regular and rhythmic folds are taken from French models; but all that gives to this figure its strange, un- canny fascination — the long, emaciated fin- gers, the sinewy neck, the almost masculine face, the thin lips, the protruding cheek-bones, the small, deep-cut, penetrating eyes — all this is the artist's own, and shows in him the same curious mixture of mystic brooding and natu- ralistic truthfulness which in Durer was to find its fullest artistic embodiment. Of the Strassburg monuments belonging to the thirteenth century, the Death of Mary is perhaps the finest example of French form and German feeling blended with each other. That the general arrangement of this scene, the grouping of the Apostles about the bed of the dying Virgin, as well as the treatment of individual figures, were suggested to the Ger- man artist by French representations of the same subject; that, therefore, the singular beauty of this wonderful tympanum is pre- eminently a tribute to the artistic imagination of the French mind, no one familiar with the sculptures of Senlis or Notre Dame de Paris will deny. And yet, I hardly believe that among all the French representations of the 202 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY death or burial of Mary there is one which be- trays the same depth of religious sentiment or the same variety of individual emotion as does this Strassburg relief. Indeed, the whole his- tory of sculpture knows of few creations in which the fundamental feelings of the human heart are more impressively brought out than in the hushed awe and grief of the Apostles grouped about this death scene and the truly majestic equanimity and heroic composure of this Virgin. The climax, however, of German plastic art of the Middle Ages is to be found in the sculptures of the choir and the rood-screen of Naumburg Cathedral, also belonging to the thirteenth century. In these figures, particu- larly the twelve portrait statues of patrons and benefactors of the Naumburg bishopric, the intensity of the inner life, of which I spoke before as the most striking characteristic of mediaeval German art, seems to have found its fullest and most adequate impersonation. Here there is no suggestion of labored sub- mission to a conventional standard; here there is no discrepancy between spirit and form ; here there is complete distinctness and vigor of individual life. Every one of these figures INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 203 is a type by itself, a fully rounded personality. The Canoness standing erect, but with slightly inclined head, thoughtfully gazing upon a book which she supports with one hand while the other turns over its leaves ; the two pairs of a princely husband and wife, one of the men full of power and determination, the other of a youthfully sanguine appearance, one of the women broadly smiling, the other with a gesture full of reserved dignity drawing her garment to her face ; the young ecclesiastic, holding the missal in front of him, with his carefully arranged hair flowing from his ton- sure ; the various knights, one looking out from behind his shield, another leaning upon his sword, others in still different postures and moods, — there is not a figure among them which did not represent a particular indi- vidual at a particular moment, and which did not, without losing itself in capricious imita- tion of accidental trifles, reproduce life as it is. It is impossible in the face of such works of sculpture as these not to feel that they pro- ceeded from artists deeply versed in the study of human character, fully alive to the prob- lems of human conduct, keenly sensitive to impressions of any sort; in other words fully 2o 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY developed, highly organized, complicated in- dividuals. And it is equally impossible not to recognize in these figures types of German character, a race sturdy and upright, of strong passions, thoroughgoing both in worldly joys and in spiritual cravings ; a race to whom life is a serious thing, a heavy task, a mysterious riddle, a portentous ideal. If we had nothing left of thirteenth-century art except these Naum- burg sculptures, they alone would suffice to refute an assumption which since Jacob Burck- hardt's Kultur der Renaissance in It alien has been repeated over and over again, — the as- sumption, namely, that modern individual- ism had its origin in the era of the rinascimento ; they show conclusively that Burckhardt's phrase of " the discovery of the individual " by the great Italians of the quatrocento is misleading, that, in other words, the Middle Ages themselves contain the germs of modern individualism. It is but natural that the Renaissance, which brought the decisive break with the ecclesias- tical formulas, which freed the individual from obsolete creeds, which substituted human aspi- rations for divine authority, should have given, in German sculpture, a new impetus to the INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 205 native German tendency for unrestrained and fearless representation of the inner life. Never has German sculpture been more frankly real- istic than in the days of Adam Kraft, Peter Vischer, Hans Briiggemann, and Tilman Rie- menschneider. Never has it brought forth, by the side of much that is cumbersome, heavy, and overcrowded with detail, such a wealth and variety of human types. Never has there been a more striking illustration of the fact that the realistic tendency in art is not so much the outcome of a desire to copy the outward forms of nature, as a symptom of intense inner activity discharging itself in forms imbued with the freedom, variety, and primitiveness of nature herself. Only two of the foremost productions of German realism belonging to the Renaissance may briefly be considered here : Adam Kraft's Entombment of the Sa- viour and Peter Vischer's Tomb of St. Sebald. If we compare Adam Kraft's Entombment of Christ with the Strassburg Death of Mary mentioned before, we find in it less refinement of outline, less harmony of composition. There is a certain grossness in it, an apparently will- ful emphasis laid on the ordinary and com- monplace. But, after all, this ordinary and 206 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY commonplace exterior serves only to make us understand all the more fully the eternal human emotions throbbing beneath its surface. As in Rembrandt's paintings, we seem to have the most direct, untrammeled access to the secrets of the heart. The speechless woe expressed by Mary's clutching her son's head and draw- ing it to her lips with frantic ecstasy calls up before us the deepest tragedy of a mother's life, and stirs in us feelings that cannot die. Peter Vischer's Tomb of St. Sebald is almost bewildering in the variety of its forms. It seems as though the artist had been driven to crowd into this monument his whole view of the universe. The dumb creation, the elemen- tal forces of nature and history, the playful and the serious moods of the human breast, the great heroic figures of the Christian legend, and the workaday scenes and types of common life, — all this is made to surround the resting- place of the saintly man whose earthly career has been run. And in it all, what an abundance of character, what a firm grasp of personality — most of all, perhaps, in the figure of the honest master himself, modestly standing in a niche at the back of the monument, his tools in his hands, the leather apron hung over his shoul- INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 207 ders, the very embodiment of sturdy, sincere, devoted workmanship. That, even amid the artificiality and pom- pousness of the baroque period and of pseudo- classicism, German sculpture, in a few of its representatives at least, preserved its native truthfulness and vigor of the inner life, is proven by a monument which, through the grandeur of its proportions as well as its his- torical significance, was clearly marked out for the place of honor which it holds in the Ger- manic Museum: Schliiter's equestrian statue of the Great Elector of Brandenburg. Frederick William, the founder of the Prus- sian monarchy, was a remarkable mixture of autocratic arbitrariness and single-minded de- votion to the common weal. Ruthlessly over- riding time-honored class privileges and local statutes, he established the sovereignty of the modern state in his widely scattered territories, and thus welded them together into a politi- cal whole. Obstinately adhering to a military absolutism even in matters of civil adminis- tration, he was also keenly alive to the de- mands of industrial progress and commercial expansion. A Prussian from foot to crown, zealously maintaining the prerogatives of his 208 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY principality against other States of the empire, he was also the only German prince of his time who deeply felt for the national honor, the only one willing to risk his own State in defense of Germany. Could the sturdy great- ness of this man, could the innermost secret of his personality, be more concretely and impressively brought before us than by this statue, erected in front of his castle at Berlin a few years after his death? Clad in the cos- tume of a Roman Imperator, the marshal's staff in his right hand, with the left tightly grasping the reins and holding his horse in check, his head slightly thrown back, so that the aquiline nose and the commanding eyes are in full sight, while the manelike hair flows in bold masses over neck and shoulders, he seems the very embodiment of seventeenth- century absolutism. But there is nothing vain- glorious in this man, nothing that savors of a Charles II or a Louis XV. His horse is not a showy thing of parade, but a doughty animal of tough sinews and heavy limbs ; he rides it free and without stirrups ; he knows what he is about ; he is carrying his destiny in himself; and a victorious future hovers before his eyes. I may perhaps be permitted to add to the INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 209 consideration of this monument a reminiscence of a personal nature. In March, 190a, at the time when Prince Henry of Prussia was the guest of the American nation, the German Emperor honored Harvard University by inviting me to an audience at the Royal Castle in Berlin. During this interview the Emperor showed his guest an album containing views of all the works of art which he intended to present to our museum, commenting upon every one of them with astonishing minuteness of knowledge and remarkable precision as well as breadth of judgment. When he came to the statue of the Great Elector, he was particu- larly emphatic in pointing out its artistic power and fullness of life, summing up his observa- tions in the words : " If that man stood on the Capitoline Hill at Rome, instead of the Lange Briicke at Berlin, the whole world would be at his feet." Modern German sculpture, after a brief reign of a refined neo-classicism during the first half of the nineteenth century, has pro- duced little in any sense worthy of its great masters of the past. Particularly the decades following the Franco-German war have been made hideous by a deluge of showy, turgid, 210 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY fantastic, and hollow glorifications, in marble and bronze, of national prowess. Fortunately, there are indications that another turn toward the inner life has set in. Even Rodin, the greatest plastic genius of our time, has created nothing which in weight of thought and con- centrated spiritual energy is superior to Kling- er's statue of Beethoven ; and one might per- haps say that with this work and with Rodin's " Thinker " the plastic art of Germany and that of France have once more entered the lists as rivals worthy of each other. To me, Klinger's statue has even more to say than Rodin's. The latter, so to speak, takes us off our feet through the colossal proportions and the grand attitude of the Titan weighted down and inclined forward by the tremendous burden of his brooding thought. In Klinger's Beet- hoven everything is concentrated in his head and hands. The contracted and protuberant forehead, the eyes gazing into infinitude, the lips pressed together, the fists clinched as if held by an invisible spell and at the same time moved by an inner rhythm, — all this leads us straight into the innermost recesses of this man's soul and draws us with him into the realm of the idea. Whatever we may INNER LIFE IN SCULPTURE 211 think of the by-play, so to call it, of this statue : the eagle cowering in front of it, the over-rich detail in the decorations of the chair on which Beethoven sits, the strange device of represent- ing him in the garment of an Olympian Zeus, — the criticism of these things is disarmed by that head and those hands ; and we feel instinctively that here a new type of art has been created. V THE STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE THE STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 1 Last spring the President and Fellows of Harvard College took a step which, like not a few steps taken under President Eliot's administration, was novel, experimental, and somewhat venturesome : they established a professorship of the History of German Cul- ture, the first professorship of this subject in an American or English university, and they intrusted this office to the then professor of German literature. Naturally this event has induced a renewed consideration of the fundamental question in- volved in this matter, the question : What is the place of the study of national culture within the whole of historical and philological studies; and it is perhaps fitting that some reflections on this subject should be presented to a wider audience of persons interested in higher learn- ing. 1 An address delivered in October, 1906, before the Graduate School of Harvard University. 216 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY The history of a nation may be studied un- der two main heads : civilization and culture. When we speak of national civilization, we mean thereby all that contributes to shape the outward conditions and conduct of life : the modes of gaining a livelihood, the organization of the family, the forms of domestic and pub- lic custom, social gradations, political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions, and the friendly or hostile contact with other nations. When we speak of national culture, we mean thereby all that contributes to shape the inner life, to enrich the world of feeling, imagination, and thought : religious and philosophical move- ments, tendencies in literature and art, ideal aspirations, intellectual and spiritual revolu- tions. Civilization makes the citizen, culture makes the man ; civilization has to do with spe- cific conditions, culture has to do with values of universal application ; civilization is the form, culture is the content of national con- sciousness. But neither of the two can develop without the other ; they constantly exert a re- ciprocal influence on each other ; and only he who has studied comprehensively both the civilization and the culture of a given nation, is in a position to estimate what this nation STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 217 has contributed to the whole of the world's history. I shall not, in the following remarks, trav- erse the whole ground indicated by these ob- servations. What I wish to do is to point out how the study of the spiritual life, the study of literature, and the study of art may be benefited by considering spiritual, liter- ary, and artistic movements as parts and as kindred manifestations of a given national culture. There is nothing revolutionary in this point of view. Since the days of Winckelmann, Wolf, and Boeckh, students of classical an- tiquity have been accustomed to look at Greek and Roman life in its totality. The critical study of the Homeric poems, the history of Greek vase-painting, the history of the Attic drama, of Attic sculpture, oratory, and phi- losophy, are generally recognized to be no- thing but chapters in a comprehensive history of Greek culture, supplementing and illustrat- ing each other ; and no classical philologist worthy of the name would think himself com- petent to write even a single paragraph of any one of these chapters without having, at least cursorily, gone over the ground of all the rest. 218 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY The result has been that every Greek poem from Homer to Theocritus, every Greek statue from the Mycenaean age to the schools of Rhodos and Pergamon, every conception of Greek philosophy from Anaxagoras to Ploti- nus, nay, every construction of a Greek sen- tence and every fragment of a Greek inscription stands to us as an epitome of a particular phase in the development of Greek culture, thus re- vealing to us the peculiar conditions of life from which it took its origin. Nor can it be said that this alignment of individual works of literature, art, and philosophy into the his- torical sequence of national development has, in this case, in the least taken away from the intrinsic interest of these works themselves. On the contrary, it has added to it a very important element. The epya koX rjfjiepaL of Hesiod means more to us since we have come to see in it the expression of a democratic reaction against the aristocratic society of the Homeric times. We have a fuller and more intimate knowledge of the peculiarity of the art of Euripides, since he has come to be understood as a dramatic counterpart to the disintegrating tendencies of the rationalistic philosophy of his time, and to the realistic STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 219 analysis of human passion in the plastic art of Skopas. And how much more has the Lao- coon group to tell to us, now that it does not any longer appear, as it did appear to the men of the eighteenth century, as a timeless production of absolute genius revealing the " noble simplicity and calm grandeur " (as Winckelmann expressed it) of Greek charac- ter per se, but has come to be recognized as a typical production of that period of Greek national development when the noble sim- plicity and calm grandeur of the iEschylean age had been superseded by the high-strung, nervously excited temper of Hellenistic ro- manticism. The point which I wish to make is that this conception of the totality of a given national culture has not as yet prevailed sufficiently to achieve for the history of modern nations what it has achieved for the history of Greece and Rome. Not as though there had not been distin- guished writers treating the literary, artistic, and intellectual history of modern nations from this point of view. Indeed, there are not a few illustrious examples of this sort of applied national psychology both with regard to gen- 220 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY eral movements and to individual representa- tive men. Among Frenchmen, the one name of Hippolyte Taine stands for a whole class of writers trying to detect national character- istics in literary and artistic achievements. In Germany, such men as Jacob Burckhardt, Hermann Hettner, and Karl Lamprecht have applied this method both to particular periods or phases of intellectual developments and to the whole history of a given people in all its manifold manifestations. In England, John Addington Symonds and William Lecky have created masterpieces of research in the history of morals and spiritual culture in mediaeval and modern Europe. And our own Barrett Wen- dell has attempted to build upon these same foundations a Literary History of America. As to biographies of epoch-making men, I point only to a few works of signal merit, works which give us as it were the spirit of a whole age, the temper of a whole nation con- densed in one central figure : Sabatier's Vie de St. Francois, Grimm's Michel Angelo, Villari's Girolamo Savonarola e suoi tempi , Morley's Rousseau, Justi's Velasquez und sein Jabrbun- dert, and a book by one whom we may also, although unfortunately only for a few months, STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 221 t call our own : Eugen Kuhnemann's Schiller. In all these works the great task, the single aim of the writers, is to arrive at a clear and just conception of what the culture of a given age, a given people, a given personality has stood for, what ideals of life, what aspirations, passions, imaginings, forms of expression, modes of thought it included, what its place is in the general trend of human development, what it means for our own life. While, then, much has been done by emi- nent writers to make that view of the totality of a nation's history which the great humanists of the early nineteenth century applied to the study of Greece and Rome, applicable to mod- ern nations also, it yet remains true that the university study of modern literature, art, and intellectual life is still, on the whole, domi- nated by views too exclusive to lead the student from the very start into the wider realm of national culture. I am certainly very far from decrying the value of specialization. I fully believe that a stu- dent should as soon as possible try his hand at investigating one subject thoroughly — whether it be certain aspects of the syntax of Berthold von Regensburg, or the representation of the 222 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Annunciation in mediaeval German sculpture, or the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux upon German mystic thought of the fourteenth cen- tury, or what not. But I do think that as uni- versity teachers we do not as a rule see suffi- ciently to it that such investigations be carried on in a broad spirit, that they be kept from degenerating into mere collections of gram- matical forms or catalogues of certain plastic types or the amassing of parallel passages of a number of writers. That this sort of thing is the average work done in doctor disserta- tions dealing with this class of subjects there can be little doubt. Nor can it be denied, it seems to me, that the monographs in our phil- ological, archaeological, and literary quarterlies very often betray a deplorable lack of histori- cal perspective, that there is something barren and unprofitable about this huge mill of ghiel- lenuntersuchungen, of tracings of literary affilia- tions and indebtednesses, and of the eternal quest for the first authenticated appearance of a certain literary or artistic conceit. The well- nigh exclusive rule of this method in our uni- versity seminaries has limited the view, stifled the imagination, and brought about a state of mind among many of our young Ph. D.'s and STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 223 candidates for the Ph. D. according to which literature and art seem entirely detached from life and appear as nothing but a huge system of automatic contrivances. And the principal business of the literary historian and art critic has come to be, according to this view, to analyze the mechanism of these contrivances and to establish the dates when their inven- tors — so to speak — had them officially pa- tented. I am convinced that one remedy against this soulless and lifeless method of studying literature and art is to hold constantly before one's mind the connection of literature, art, and thought with the general trend of national development, and never to lose sight of the fact that they make together one living whole where " Alles ist Frucht und Alles ist Samen." Let me give one or two illustrations of the way in which this conception of the interdepen- dence of the various manifestations of national consciousness may be made fruitful for the study of each of them. If these illustrations are taken exclusively from the field of German studies, there will be seen in this an effect upon myself of that very over-specialization, the narrowing influence of which upon others I 224 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY just now deplored ; and I would take this opportunity to say that throughout all my remarks I feel myself open to just this criti- cism, and shall have nothing to reply if I am to be confronted with a " Physician, heal thy- self!" My first illustration is concerned with a single phenomenon of intellectual life. No one could make even a perfunctory study of German Romanticism without being struck by the attention bestowed by the Romanticists upon the problem of insanity. Indeed, there is hardly a phase of mental derangement which did not in one form or another appear in Ro- mantic literature and art. There are the over- strained characters of Jean Paul, the melan- choly, brooding philosopher Schoppe, whom the irreconcilable contrasts of life, the unfath- omable abysses of existence, deprive of his reason: or the colossal man of will Roquairol, whose boundless ambition leads to nothing but inner ruin and mental wreck. There is the gallery of eccentric personalities which form so large a part of Tieck's literary house- hold : the youthful dreamer of the Lovel type who is unsettled by the contact with the world and the teachings of a Pseudo-Fichtean philo- STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 225 sophy ; the man of blind instincts, such as the Blonde Eckbert, who lives, as it were, in a world of chronic hallucinations, who is pursued by constant dread of monstrous happenings, to whom life is a terrible burden and a nightmare ; or, on the other hand, the ecstatic enthusiast, such as the old painter-hermit in Franz Stern- bald, whose gentle madness seems to have unsealed to him the beauty and harmony of the whole universe. There is the somnam- bulism of Kleist's Kathchen von Heilbronn ; the irresponsible libertinism and aimlessness of the vagrant folk in Brentano's, Eichen- dorff's, and Justinus Kerner's stories. There is the ghastly spook of Amadeus Hoffmann's grotesque imagination with its criminal mono- maniacs, its haunted houses, doubles, and enchanted beasts, and with its Bedlam of cari- catures and mentally or morally deformed human figures. That this Romantic interest in the abnormal and the deranged held its sway even to the middle of the nineteenth century, is proved by the popularity of the well-known drawing of Kaulbach's, represent- ing the club-room of an insane asylum with its inmates grouped about in excited conversa- tion or in silent brooding, each of them bring- 226 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ing before us a particular type of madness or aberration. Now, in studying these types of insanity in German Romanticism, the most obvious, least circuitous, and (let me add) a most unalluringly safe path to be followed is that of the familiar ghiellenuntersuchung. What types of insanity the different writers or artists treat by prefer- ence ; how these different writers influence each other in this matter ; how far, for example, the insane characters in Tieck served as models for those in Amadeus Hoffmann ; who was the first author to set this morbid fashion ; what foreign influences, if any, were at work in it; how far, for example, Tieck's occupation with Shakspere, Ben Jonson, or Cervantes' Don Quixote was responsible for his leaning toward the representation of eccentric charac- ters, — all these are perfectly pertinent ques- tions ; they are questions which it is well to have answered before one proceeds to further investigations. But let no one who has answered these questions satisfactorily, imagine that he has thereby contributed much toward the elucida- tion of the problem of insanity in German Romanticism. What he has done is in the STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 227 main of bibliographical interest. He has shown that it was A, and not B, who first introduced this subject into literature, that D owes much of his material to C, that E has a greater vari- ety of types than F, and so on. The question how this remarkable and widespread interest of the Romanticists in the phenomena of in- sanity is connected with German national life of that time, with the prevailing currents of thought and feeling, in a word what place it has in the history of German culture, — this question he has hardly touched. In order to answer this question intelli- gently, he will have to consider the Romantic movement in all its bearings upon the emo- tional and intellectual life of that age, and he will try to detect those phases of this move- ment which would naturally have had a par- ticular effect upon the way in which people would look upon cases of insanity. To indi- cate only a few lines of reasoning which such an inquiry would open, the following reflection would be likely to suggest itself. The Romantic movement is, in one aspect at least, a revolt against society and class rule, an outburst of individual thought and passion, a pronunciamento of the individual heart and 228 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY imagination against the canons of convention, a declaration of sympathy with everything that is something by itself, and that lives out its own laws of existence. To the Romanticist — and I include here under this name that whole galaxy of poets and thinkers who were under the direct or indirect influence of Rous- seauic ideals of life — to the Romanticist there is nothing uninteresting except the artificial. Everything, whether large or small, beautiful or ugly, ordinary or exceptional, strong or weak, healthy or diseased, beneficial or destruc- tive, as long as it is not artificially perverted and estranged from its own nature, is worthy of our human interest and sympathy; and even if it is perverted it has at least a claim upon our pity and compassion. The individual is sacred; life as such is something of abso- lute value ; and every one of its varieties has an equal right to try its wings. Is it not clear that here there lie the sources of those humanitarian views in criminology and psychiatry which from the latter part of the eighteenth century on to the present time, slowly and with a good many setbacks, have nevertheless steadily been pressing on toward wider recognition ? The criminal, according to STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 229 Beccaria, the great eighteenth-century reformer of criminal law, is not an enemy of the human race against whom society has to wage a relent- less war. Much truer it would be to say that he is a victim of the conditions of society itself; and that the prevention of crime by bettering these conditions is a matter of much greater importance than the punishment of the crimi- nal. And the insane man, according to Pinel, Tuke, and other eighteenth-century reformers of lunatic institutions, is not, as former ages considered him, a miscreant, possessed by evil spirits, to be chained and chastised, but rather a sufferer from disease, worthy of our most tender attention and care. And both the crim- inal and the insane are to the popular scientists of the end of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth, favorite subjects of psychological analysis and description. The individualistic and humanitarian ele- ment, then, of the Romantic movement tended to make the insane, alongside with other types of human states of mind, a topic of intense interest for the writers of fiction and poetry; and we need not go to Shakspere's Lear or Ophelia or to Cervantes' Don Quixote to ac- count for the frequency of deranged characters 230 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY in Tieck's novels and dramas. On the con- trary, it might be said that Tieck's interest in such characters as the Fool in King Lear or Don Quixote is, in part at least, accounted for by the Romantic sympathy with the unconven- tional and the wayward. And that whole class of eccentric personages so frequent in Romantic literature, who see life at a different angle from the normal, who follow their own whims or illusions, who meander through the world as through a labyrinth of charming surprises and aimless diversions, may be called a collec- tive protest against the humdrum and stupid matter-of-fact existence of the so-called good citizen, the substantial man of business, the respectable member of society. The illusion- ist is the Romantic character /car e^o^V, — to his sensitive nerves there are revealed de- lights of life which remain hidden to the ob- tuse brain of the muscular healthy ; he is the personality par excellence, unencumbered by the weight of the material world which burdens and drags down the anonymous majority ; he moulds freely and with sovereign playfulness his own world; in him the divine irony, of which Friedrich Schlegel rhapsodized, finds its fullest expression. The affinity between mad- STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 231 ness and genius is a discovery which we owe to Romanticism. This is one side of the subject. But Ro- manticism was not only an individualistic pro- test against society. It was also what at first sight may seem the very opposite of this in- dividualism, and yet is after all only a natural sequence of it : it was a proclamation of the universe as one organic living whole. And this side of the Romantic movement also is closely connected with the interest taken by Romantic poets and novelists in the problem of insanity. The infinite is the true home of the Roman- ticists. Novalis defines philosophy as home- sickness, — homesickness for the absolute. To Schelling beauty is the infinite represented in finite form. Tieck's whole life was an infinite longing for something beyond and above. All Romantic landscape paintings have that fasci- nating quality of the hazy blue distance which beckons on and on to endless space. Never, perhaps, has there been a time when the world, to the chosen few at least, seemed so literally alive with infinite power as it seemed to these men. To them there was no dividing line be- tween rock, plant, beast, and man. A mysteri- ous bond of magnetic attraction, they believed, 232 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY unites stars and human brains, the organic and the inorganic, the conscious and the uncon- scious. The world of the senses was to them only a symbol of a spiritual presence hovering within and above us. All nature they con- ceived as one indivisible being, incessantly striving to manifest itself, and to become fully conscious of its own spirit. Now it is clear that such views as these, very imperfectly stated by me, but of para- mount, fundamental importance to the Ro- manticists — it is clear, I say, that such views as these of the essential unity of all life, of the identity of matter and spirit, of the absorption of the individual in the great mysterious All, are not fully accessible to the sober intellect, that they require for their receptacle a vision- ary state of mind, an imagination pitched to its highest key, a soul that is itself in instinc- tive contact with the invisible powers. The Romantic individual, in his highest perfection, is the inspired mystic, the ecstatic seer, who is his own law, and who harbors within himself the riddle of the universe. Is it necessary to say that here again we have arrived in a sphere where it is hard to draw the line between in- spiration and madness? STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 233 Here, then, there is seen the connection between the intellectual drift of the age and the second important class of types of men- tally deranged in Romantic poetry and fiction : the seekers for the infinite. A great many dif- ferent varieties of extravagant fancy and mor- bid desires may be traced back to this common type. It appears as the craving for solitude and passive contemplation ; as the reveling in the mystery of night or in the wonders of a cavernous, subterranean existence ; as the glo- rification of the irrational and the incoherent. It assumes the form of a naive dreaming one's self back into a fantastic golden age, or of plunging into a state of trancelike transfigu- ration, or of a return to a serene, placid un- consciousness. Or again, we see it represented in characters wrestling with themselves, and seeking forgetfulness, intoxication, commu- nion with the universe either in mesmeristic and spiritualistic pseudo-science, or in sensual dissipation and revelry, or in suicide. It is hardly necessary to add that all these various types of mental derangement so fre- quent in Romantic literature find their coun- terpart in the lives of the Romantic writers themselves. The tragic fate of Holderlin, 234 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Heinrich von Kleist, Lenau, the erratic career of Brentano and Amadeus Hoffmann, are typ- ical illustrations of the correctness of Goethe's dictum, "The Classic is the healthy, the Ro- mantic is the diseased." In our own time, the fate of Poe, of Nietzsche, and of Oscar Wilde has furnished a new proof for this homely truth. Every broad-minded man, however, while fully recognizing this truth, will acknowledge that even these excesses of Romantic imagination have enlarged the vision, broadened sympathies, and heightened the in- terest of life, and have thus added priceless treasures to the store of spiritual possessions. So much for the way in which a single lit- erary phenomenon may (or is it not better to say, should) be studied as an expression of the whole culture of a given period in the national development. Let us now for a mo- ment turn to the question, how a number of different phenomena of literature, art, and thought may be studied under the common head of the development of national culture. Here again, I content myself, in place of the- oretical discussions, with giving one concrete illustration. Historians of German literature are wont to STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 235 draw a sharp contrast between the high refine- ment both of sentiment and form which is characteristic of the classic epoch of chivalric poetry at the turning-point of the twelfth cen- tury to the thirteenth, and the decay of good taste setting in toward the middle of the thir- teenth century. And it must be admitted that in imaginative literature the whole period from 1250 to 1500, that is, from the decline of chivalric poetry to the Humanistic movement, offers nothing that could at all be compared with the grandeur of the Nibelungenlied or the charm of Gottfried von Strassburg or Walther von der Vogelweide. From the ex- clusively literary point of view, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, with their cumbersome romances, their unwieldy didactic encyclopaedias, their gross satire, and their over-realistic and over-spectacular religious drama, appear indeed as an epoch of disinte- gration and decay. As soon, however, as we discard this exclu- sively literary point of view, as soon as we survey the whole ground of higher national activities and try to detect those achievements in which the creative power of the nation at a given time found its fullest expression, these 236 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY same centuries assume a very different as- pect. If, instead of following out in their weari- some and artificial detail the offshoots and outspurs of chivalric epics and lyrics in the thirteenth century, we visit the cathedrals of Naumburg, of Bamberg, of Strassburg, of Frei- burg, and look at the reliefs and statues adorn- ing their portals, choirs, and rood-screens, we become aware of the fact that the classic epoch of Middle High German poetry from the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thir- teenth century was followed in the greater part of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth by an equally classic epoch of German sculpture. And if we study these plastic monuments from the point of view of national culture, if we compare them with the great figures of chivalric poetry, we find that, although sculpture and poetry differed from each other in subject-matter, the spirit of these two epochs of classic German art was essen- tially the same. The same refinement and measure ; the same insistence on courteous decorum ; the same curious combination of scrupulous attention to certain conventional forms of dress, gesture, and expression, on the STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 237 one hand, and a free sweep in the delineation of character, on the other ; the same moral earnestness and the same fanciful vagueness ; in short, the same happy union of the univer- sally human with the distinctively mediaeval which is found in such characters as Parzival, Tristan, or Kudrun, comes to light in the Founders' Statues of Naumburg, the so-called Konrad of the Cathedral of Bamberg, or the Ecclesia and Synagogaof Strassburg Cathedral. Very far, then, from seeing in the thirteenth century a period of artistic decline, we simply observe in it a shifting of the forms through which the artistic energy of the nation revealed itself; we receive from it a new impression, from a different angle, of that rounding out of the personality, that heightening of human existence, which was one of the great effects of the supreme sway of chivalry and of the medi- aeval Church. As the art of Phidias and Prax- iteles is an indispensable supplement to the art of vEschylusand Sophocles for our under- standing of Attic culture in its prime, so these works of German sculpture of the thirteenth century, in their wonderful blending of the ideal human type with the characteristic fea- tures of the portrait, stand to us, by the side of 238 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY the great creations of the chivalric poets, as incontrovertible proofs of the free and noble conception of humanity reached by mediaeval culture at its height. Perhaps I may be per- mitted to say that it was considerations such as these which some years ago led to the es- tablishment of our Germanic Museum as a place where these impressive plastic types of national imagination and feeling might be brought before the student's eye in their his- torical sequence, and with as much of com- pleteness as possible. Similar observations might be made about the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The fourteenth century, so barren and uninspiring if we measure it by the standard of polite liter- ature, becomes of absorbing interest and deep- est significance, if we study it as the great epoch of German mysticism, if we enter into that marvelously intense inner life, the world of visions, dreams, hallucinations, and the pure regions of exalted self-abnegation and self-per- fection which mark the age of Eckart, Suso, and Tauler as the first irresistible outburst of modern individualism. And as to the fif- teenth century, can there be any doubt that it was neither literature nor sculpture nor mystic STUDY OF NATIONAL CULTURE 239 speculation, but religious painting which con- centrated upon itself the creative energy of that age ? So that he who would understand this century and its relation to the preceding epochs should first of all study the great re- presentatives of the pictorial art, from the Van Eycks and the Cologne masters to Memlinc and Albrecht Diirer. And in doing so, he will recognize Diirer and his compeers as the direct descendants of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide, the masters of the Bamberg or Strassburg sculptures, and Eckart and Suso and the other mystics of the fourteenth century ; in other words, by this very passing from one sphere of national activ- ities to another he will come to understand fully the continuity of the development of national culture as a whole. I am done. Only one word in conclusion. We are witnessing at present in a number of our universities, notably at Columbia and at Harvard, a remarkable strengthening and rounding out of the departments of Compar- ative Literature. The comparative study of national literatures cannot fail to be a most powerful help in determining what is original, what is of abiding and universal importance in 2 4 o GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY the artistic contributions of the various peo- ples to the common stock of spiritual life. And so, as a student of the history of national culture, I offer to these young and most pro- mising departments of international research a cordial and expectant welcome. VI SKETCHES OF CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LETTERS SKETCHES OF CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LETTERS 1 I. GERHART HAUPTMANn's FUHRMANN HEN- SCHEL (DECEMBER, I 898) After the appearance of Gerhart Haupt- mann's Die Versunkene Glocke, not a few of his admirers thought that this drama would mark a turning-point in the poet's develop- ment, that he had at last struggled through the gloom of his early imaginings, that from now on he would accentuate the joyous, the harmonious notes of human life. This hope has been cruelly disappointed by his latest production, Fuhrmann Henscbe/, a dialect tragedy which has been the doleful piece de resistance of the Deutsches Theater of Berlin during the last few weeks. Nothing could be 1 The following sketches, being impressions of the mo- ment and having been written, in part at least, as letters from abroad, are here reprinted in the chronological order in which they first appeared ; and no attempt has been made to efface discrepancies between them, due to the dif- ferent mood of different moments. 244 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY gloomier and more depressing than this mournful picture of Silesian peasant life. Even Tolstoi's The Power of Darkness, which undoubtedly suggested the outline of char- acters and the general trend of action in Hauptmann's drama, is, in its final effect, less oppressive and saddening ; for although it presents to us a succession of the most hor- rible atrocities, it leads in the end to a genuine delivery of soul, to a spiritual purification such as we experience in all truly great works of art. In Hauptmann's Fuhrmann Henschel, on the other hand, there is much less of outward offense against the laws of society, much less of violation of the accepted code of morality ; and yet we seem to sink resist- lessly and irretrievably into utter degradation and ruin. The plot as well as the characters of the drama are of the simplest. Henschel, a team- ster in a Silesian mountain village, has hitherto been leading a humdrum and uneventful married existence. Both he and his wife have passed middle life when the first child is born. As a consequence of childbed the mother falls into a lingering illness from which she does not recover. Shortly before her death, she CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 245 exacts from her husband a promise that he will not marry their servant-girl, whose ambi- tious schemes upon the unsuspecting man she has discerned with the mental clear-sightedness that comes from bodily weakness. This is the end of the first act. In the second act we see the helpless widower, struggling along in his loneliness and isolation, seeking comfort in idealizing the memories of the past, but at the same time unconsciously breaking away from them ; constantly holding before himself the promise that he made to his dying wife, yet by this constant ruminating over it weak- ening his sense of moral obligation to it, and thus gradually drifting into a second marriage. In the third act, Hanna, the servant-girl, has attained her purpose : she has become the mistress of the house ; and now she reveals her true character. She treats her husband with brutal scornfulness ; she lets the child of the first marriage die from sheer neglect ; she dismisses an old and trusted manservant ; she flirts with all sorts of doubtful characters ; she ill disguises her wrath and disgust when the good-natured husband, thinking to please her thereby, adopts the offspring of a former liaison of hers whom she had left to misery 246 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY and starvation. The fourth act brings the be- ginning of the catastrophe. Thus far Henschel has borne all the contumely and shame in- flicted upon him by his second wife with mute resignation. He seems to live on in a sort of dazed half-wakefulness, apparently unmind- ful of the scorn and disrepute into which he has fallen in the village community. But now a chance word rouses him to sudden con- sciousness of his condition. Being involved, one evening, in a quarrel at the tavern, he hears the insinuation that his second wife is leading him by the nose, nay, that she was not without responsibility for the death of his first wife and child. Now his long-repressed despair breaks forth with boundless fury. Like a maniac he rages about, he strikes down whoever comes in his way, he has his wife brought to the tavern to confront her with her accuser ; and, when she haughtily defies them all, he sinks down utterly prostrated. From here on, throughout the fifth act, he appears well-nigh out of his mind. Only one idea is ever present with him, one fact stands out before him with terrible distinctness : the violation of the promise given to his dying wife. This, he thinks, is the cause of all his CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 247 troubles, for it has prevented his wife from finding rest in the grave. Wherever he goes he sees her face. She looks at him, sad and pale, from out of the moon. She stands by his side when he is grooming the. horses. She walks about in the house, rearranging the fur- niture. When he is going to sleep at night, he finds her lying in his bed; and she presses her hand upon his breast and chokes him. At one time it seems as though he reveled in taking the whole responsibility of his mis- fortune upon himself: he finds no fault with his second wife ; he retracts whatever he said against her. But then, again, he gives way to fatalistic ravings, with genuine peasant super- stitiousness throwing the whole blame upon the baneful chain of circumstances. " Yes, yes ; I am at fault in it all, I know it, I am at fault; have done with it. But before that happened with my wife, I mean before I took Hanna, it had begun already, and slowly, slowly it went down-hill with me. First my whalebone whip broke in two. Next, I re- member it plainly, I drove a wagon over my dog ; it was the best Spitz I had. Then, three of my horses fell dead, one right after another; and one was a stallion, too, worth three hun- 248 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY dred thalers. Then, at last, my wife died. I knew well enough that I had been marked out for all this. But when my wife died, I first thought it had come to an end. Now he can't take much more from me, I thought. But now, you see, he has managed to do me still an- other turn." It is easy to imagine what the result of all these mad hallucinations is ; a man of such hopelessly hypochondriac temper cannot live, and we are glad for him when he has ended it all. Hauptmann's consummate skill in depict- ing diseased states of mind has perhaps never been as strikingly illustrated as in this pathetic figure of a man who goes to ruin from sheer mental disintegration. But never, too, has there been a more striking illustration of the inevitable failure of exclusively pathological poetry. The whole drama, to speak plainly, is as intolerable as it is perfect. There is not a glimpse of the higher life in it ; not a single figure which calls out our affection ; not even an appeal to our sense of indignation or our righteous wrath ; nothing but the cold analysis of a scientific observer. And that from the author of Die Weber ^ Einsame Menschen, and Die Versunkene Gloke ! Indeed, the extraordi- CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 249 nary wealth and versatility of Hauptmann's genius could not be more graphically brought to our minds than by placing Fuhrmann Henschel side by side with the three dramas just men- tioned. And herein lies the ground for the hope that his next drama will again be a sur- prise, and lead us into those regions of higher spirituality which in this latest production of his are so entirely hidden from view. 11. sudermann's die drei reiherfedern (APRIL, 1899) A curious illustration of the evasiveness of genius, and of the impossibility of predicting its course from the influence of surrounding circumstances, has lately been afforded in the unexpected turn taken by the two foremost of living German dramatists. Hauptmann, after having risen in The Sunken Bell to sublime visions of the infinite, has allowed himself once more to be drawn into the sphere of the hopelessly earthly. Sudermann, on the other hand, the racy satirist, the impassioned orator, the rough-and-ready delineator of blunt actu- ality, all of a sudden reveals himself as a lyric poet in whom reecho the most aerial sounds of mediaeval mysticism. 2 5 o GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Paradoxical and unrelated as these facts seem to be, they yet point to a common source. They are symptoms of the restless search of the modern world for a new faith, of its ine- radicable striving after a new answer to the rid- dle of life. They clearly show that we are still in the very midst of that spiritual fermentation which set in with the final decay of the feudal world in the eighteenth century. They are a new proof of the evident fact that the blue flower of the Romanticists has not yet been found, that the spirit of the Middle Ages is still walking about and is still in vain trying to reincarnate itself. Nor is the personal link of Sudermann's latest drama with his former production by any means entirely wanting. In his Johannes he portrayed a moral visionary who goes through the world with eyes riveted upon a fictitious ideal, and who, therefore, fails to see the needs of the life that is pressing upon him. In Die drei Reiherfedern he now brings before us an aesthetic visionary who chases after a magic form of womanly love and beauty that hovers before him on the distant horizon, without noticing that in his flight he tramples into the dust not only his own CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 251 happiness, but also the life of the woman who has given to him her all. To restate in com- monplace prose the details of the exceedingly- romantic happenings of this drama would be an injustice to both author and interpreter. A few words, however, about its essential features and its leading thought may be not unwelcome to readers who otherwise might be bewildered by the extraordinary variety — not to say, ap- parent incoherence — of the action. Young Witte, Prince of Gotland, is a mix- ture of Parzival, Hamlet, and Faust. Like Parzival, he is a knight-errant, roaming through the world in quest, if not of the Grail, at least of some supernatural goal of happi- ness. Like Hamlet, he is a dreamer of deeds rather than a doer of deeds, in constant con- flict between the impulse to follow the call of an heroic mission and the capricious prompt- ings of his little weaknesses and frailties. Like Faust, he is a man of infinite susceptibility, of boundless appetites, a consummate egoist, but at the same time a soaring idealist, yearning for completeness of life. He has left his home, impelled by a vague longing for the woman of his destiny, the woman that shall fill his soul, that shall inspire his highest thought. Fate 252 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY has revealed to him that to make himself worthy of her he must first win a magic treas- ure, the feathers of a wild, demoniac heron who is worshiped as a god on a desolate isl- and of the northern seas : — Es liegt eine Insel im Nordlandsmeer, Wo Tag und Nacht zur Dammerung wird; Noch niemand feierte Wiederkehr, Der sich im Sturme dorthin verirrt. Das ist dein Weg. Dort, wo das Heil noch nie gelehrt, Dort wird in einem krystallenen Haus Ein wilder Reiher als Gott verehrt. Dem Reiher reisse drei Federn aus Und bringe sie her ! If he burns the first feather, he will behold the image of the coveted woman in the far distance. By burning the second, he will be united with her in the secrecy of the midnight hour. The burning of the third will bring de- struction to her likewise. Both the greatness and the tragedy of Witte's career lie in this, that he allows himself to be drawn under the spell of these fatalistic concep- tions. He accomplishes the task demanded, — he struggles through the horrors of the en- chanted island and brings back his prize. He burns the first feather, and now there Moats CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 253 before him, between sea and sky, the gigantic shadow of a womanly form which incites his feelings to highest passion. He rushes upon it as Faust rushed upon the phantom of Helen ; but, like the phantom of Helen, it vanishes into air before his outstretched arms. From here on he seems almost bereft of reason. He has no thought of his country suf- fering under the tyranny of a savage usurper ; he has no eye for any sight of real life that presents itself to him ; he only raves in ecstatic desire for that fair image. Thus he comes, in the course of his wanderings, to the court of a young widowed queen who, in order to satisfy the clamorings of her people for a ruler, has proclaimed her willingness to accept the hand of him who in knightly combat should defeat the host of her wooers. Half against his will, unconsciously moved by the entreating glance of the lovely young queen, he takes up arms for her, and, although severely wounded in the tournament, is declared victor and accepted as the queen's husband. But even now, at the side of the fairest and sweetest of women, he finds no rest ; his only thought is of that magic vision in the clouds. The cares of state weigh upon him ; like the hero of "The Sunken Belly 254 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY he feels burdened with the commonplace con- cerns of every-day life ; his wife seems to draw him down into ordinary enjoyment: " Genies- sen macht gemein." Despondent of his fate, out of accord with himself, he once more takes refuge in the supernatural : in solitary mid- night hour he burns the second magic feather, which is to unite him with the beloved. The queen, who has spent a sleepless night, griev- ing over her husband's gloom, is attracted by the flame and thus appears before him. But the frenzied man, instead of seeing in her ap- pearance the fulfillment of the oracle, instead of recognizing in her the woman of his des- tiny, reproaches her for having watched and suspected him. His harsh words cause her long-repressed feelings for him to break forth without reserve; and in a supremely beauti- ful scene husband and wife are for a moment truly brought together. But only for a moment. For soon Witte's restless craving leads him again astray. He abandons himself to wild orgies and dissipa- tions, and although in a measure he atones for these by rising to spasmodic heroism in the political crisis brought upon the country through his eccentricities, he sinks back into CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 255 his former state as soon as the crisis is past ; and he ends by laying down his crown and resuming his old knight-errantship, he, " der Sehnsucht nimmermuder Sohn." In the last act we see him, a prematurely broken man, after many weary wanderings and many fruit- less undertakings, on his way homeward to the scenes of his youth. Passing by the castle of his wife, he is recognized by a peasant, and the news is brought to the queen. She who, during all these years of loneliness, has lived for him and in him only, at once hastens to greet him. And now at last the scales fall from his eyes. He sees that he has wasted his life, that he has been under the spell of an illusion, that he has willfully spurned heaven's best gifts. Feverishly he grasps for the last fatal feather; he will break the spell, will destroy the perni- cious image that has haunted him all his life. He casts the feather into the flame. But in- stead of the hoped-for magic effect, he sees his own wife sinking at his feet, uttering a last dying word of faith and love. Despairingly he throws himself upon her body, and is thus united to her at last : — Wer seiner Sehnsucht nachlauft, muss dran sterben ; Nur wer sie wegwirft, dem ergiebt sie sich. 256 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY That a drama like this should in general have found little favor with the critics is not surprising. Surprising — and highly gratify- ing — is the fact that the verdict of the reading public seems in this case to differ widely from that of the critics. Already, hardly three months after its first performance, the drama has reached a tenth edition. That it has its serious artistic blemishes it would be folly to deny. There is a certain forced grandeur in the heroic parts and an equally forced vulgar- ity in the subordinate figures. And reasonable exception might perhaps be taken to this whole genre of symbolical poetry. It certainly is true that the leading idea of this drama, embodied in characters of our own time and in actions belonging to the sphere of our own experience, would have touched the average reader of to- day more quickly and more surely. But may it not be that, on that very account, this work will speak more distinctly to future genera- tions, that its very timelessness and incon- creteness will give it permanence and universal value ? Even if this should not be the case, it will most assuredly live in history as a noble monument of German intellectual life at the end of the nineteenth century, as a magna pars CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 257 of the artistic revival which has placed the Ger- man drama once more in the very front rank of European literature. For, however strange and far away at first sight its characters and its actions may seem to be, it is, after all, most closely related to our own lives ; it brings be- fore us what may be called the problem of problems of our own time, — the reconciliation of intensest activity with simple enjoyment ; of restless striving with spiritual peace. in. Paulsen's philosophia militans (APRIL, I9OI) With the exception of Herman Grimm, there is no German scholar now living who may be said to maintain the traditions of the classic era of German idealism in as vigorous and broadly effective a manner as Friedrich Paulsen. In temper and training he is widely apart from his older colleague. Grimm seems to belong to the idyllic atmosphere of Weimar court life. One might characterize his habitual state of mind by the lines in which Goethe expressed one side at least of his own all-em- bracing nature : — Zierlich Denken und suss Erinnern 1st das Leben im tiefsten Innern. 258 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY One may imagine him roaming about with Goethe in "forest and cavern " of the Thurin- gian Highlands, reveling in the stillness of the woods, and musing about the destiny of man ; one may think of him as delightful com- panion and graceful raconteur at one of those simple and unpretentious entertainments at the Dornburg or the Belvedere which fascinated the worldly Mme. de Stael. Paulsen is made of harder stuff. The leading professor of ethics at the foremost German university is still at heart the farmer's boy of forty years ago. He has something in him of Fichte's uncompro- mising temper ; he is altogether a man of the people ; he does not care to shine in society ; he opens up only when in company with a few trusted and old-time friends ; he is most truly himself when called upon, either in the lec- ture-room or in the literary arena, to expound or defend a far-reaching moral principle. Both Grimm and Paulsen seem somewhat out of place in the stir and rush of the intensely modern and intensely practical German capital ; but it is a hopeful sign for the future of Ger- man culture that two such men should have risen to influence and leadership in the midst of these very surroundings. CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 259 Just now Paulsen has published a volume of essays, entitled Philosophia MHitans, which will perhaps still more clearly than his former, more systematic writings bring home to the popular mind his peculiar position as defender of idealism. As these essays address them- selves avowedly to the auditorium maximum of persons interested in the literary aspect of philosophy, it may be not unfitting for one of this class of readers to note down some of the impressions which he received from them, and to point out the place which they seem to him to have in the general movement of contemporary German thought. All of the essays here collected deal in one way or another with the great intellectual con- flict which, though it pervades the life of all modern nations, is being fought at present with particular bitterness in Germany : the conflict of the idealistic view of the world with the supernaturalistic dogma on the one hand, and with materialistic science on the other. As typical representatives of these two extremes of supernaturalism and materialism, Paulsen considers at length two books which, during the last two years, have aroused public opinion in Germany to a remarkable degree: a His- 26o GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tory of Idealism , by the Catholic philosopher, O. Willmann, and Haeckel's ultra- (or shall we say pseudo-) scientific Riddles of the Universe. These two books illustrate to Paulsen the con- dition in which Philosophy has found herself placed now for a good many years past. Her road, he says in effect, passes through two hostile camps, from both of which she is con- tinually being insulted and attacked. On the one side she is accused of leading to atheism and moral perversion ; on the other she is reviled as a traitor to science, as a mounte- bank cheating the credulous with such useless patent-medicine stuff as "God, Freedom, and Immortality." No doubt, the two extremes hate each other, but in their enmity against idealistic philosophy they are at one. And in a certain way they esteem each other and are indispensable to each other. There can be little question but that Haeckel's Riddles of the Universe will be greeted by the Clerical party with a certain joyous satisfaction as a complete incarnation of the evil principle of modern philosophy. And Haeckel, on his part, takes a certain aesthetic pleasure in Cath- olic theology and philosophy, since here he sees in its normal and fullv developed form CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 261 what appears only as a partial and stunted growth in the systems of Kant and Fichte. As might be expected, Paulsen has an easy game with the slander and calumnies heaped by his Catholic opponent upon nearly every great name in the history of philosophy since Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, it might almost seem a waste of energy to refute such state- ments as these : that Spinoza was a tricky Jew and unscrupulous demagogue, whose criminal ethics had no other aim than the extirpation of Christianity ; that Hume was a shallow soph- ist, "whose skepticism resembles the worms that form in a dead body ; " that Kant was a rebel against law and duty, an advocate of self- ishness and license, an underminer of society, a Robespierre in philosophic disguise. What gives to this whole discussion its significance is this, that a man like Paulsen should con- descend to take notice of such distortions of history, that he should think it necessary to uphold once more the fundamental thought of the last three hundred years against the vio- lent assaults made upon it by the resuscitated ghost of mediaeval scholasticism. No man could be further removed from sectarian pre- judices than is Paulsen ; no one could be 262 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY fairer toward all forms of religious or philo- sophic belief. No writer of recent years has done fuller justice to the greatness, univer- sality, large-mindedness, and beauty of the mediaeval Church. One might even say that there is a vein of mild contemplativeness, a fondness for mysticism in him that has at times made him, perhaps, too lenient toward religious creeds which, after all, do not stand the test of clear thinking. If such a man, then, sees himself forced to enter the arena for the defense of the most elementary principles of free thought, it is manifest that Hannibal is, indeed, ante portas, that the Catholic Church is once more preparing for an attack all along the line against every stronghold of the mod- ern view of life; and the authorities responsi- ble for public instruction in Germany will do well on their part not to omit anything that may help to prevent the substitution, in the minds of the growing generation, of the phi- losophy of Thomas Aquinas for the philoso- phy of Kant. That this is indeed the goal which the Cath- olic Church has in view, is made clear by a papal rescript of September 8, 1899, to the French clergy, quoted by Paulsen, in which CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 263 Pope Leo XIII warns the clerical authorities against an "insidious and dangerous philoso- phy of Protestant origin " which cannot but lead to utter moral ruin and destruction. It is defined as a doctrine "which under the se- ductive pretext of delivering human reason from all prejudices and deceptions, denies rea- son the right to any conclusions except about its own functions, and thus abandons to a boundless skepticism all those arguments which, by approved metaphysics, were made the indispensable and indestructible founda- tion for demonstrating the existence of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, and the objective reality of the outer world." While in this whole discussion Paulsen asserts the reasonableness of the Kantian view of life against the unreasonable absolutism of papal infallibility, he maintains it in his criticism of Haeckel's Weltrdtsel against the equally unreasonable infallibility of scientific materialism. Into the details of this contro- versy I cannot here enter. I can only urge the reader to follow himself the truly delight- ful path of Paulsen's critical analysis. Highly entertaining is the way in which he dissects Haeckel's fantastic and futile attempt to re- 264 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY place both speculative and experimental psy- chology by what he calls " evolutionary psy- chology," — a method which turns out to be based upon the fundamental error of an arbi- trary identification of locomotion and con- sciousness in the lowest organisms. Masterly is the proof how little Haeckel's doctrine of the relation between body and mind has to do with Spinoza's theory of the parallelism of physi- cal and psychical processes, although Haeckel plumes himself upon having given to this Spi- nozistic theory its final scientific application : in Spinoza (so Paulsen shows) a clear juxtaposi- tion of two different kinds of processes, ac- companying each other, corresponding to each other, but without the relation of cause and ef- fect ; in Haeckel, an utter confusion and chaos, arising from his promiscuous use of matter, motion, energy, thought, spirit as identical terms. Most amusing is the description of Haeckel's monistic religion of the future, in which the churches will be transformed into aquariums "illustrating by mollusks, crabs, and corals the wonderful art-forms of sea life," the high altar being replaced by an " Urania re- vealing in the revolutions of the celestial orbs the omnipotence of the law of substance," while CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 265 the whole cult, of course, is to be directed by Haeckel himself, the discoverer of the homo ala/us, of the cyto- and the histopsyche. All this I can only touch upon briefly. But in order to indicate the position which Paulsen himself occupies between these two extremes of a supernaturalistic theology on the one hand and a pseudo-philosophic science on the other, I cannot refrain from quoting in full a pas- sage in which, at the end of the whole book,, he seeks to define the positive and construc- tive element which, in spite of all its vagaries and absurdities, this essay of Haeckel's con- tains : — After all, one may perhaps see in the World Riddles a symptom that natural science is once more on the point of lifting itself beyond the merely physical aspect of things to a higher and more comprehensive, in other words, to a philo- sophical aspect of the world. Haeckel's final goal is marked by the names Bruno, Spinoza, Goethe ; he tends ultimately toward a view which conceives of psychic life, not as of something removed from reality and foreign to it, but as something most intimately allied to it, as the other, the inner side of its being. What Haeckel really means to say is this : to every relatively complete system of .bodily processes there corresponds a system of mental processes ; all things are of psycho-physical nature. The most manifest case of this universal state of things is found in the organic forms of life. To the physiological observation they appear 266 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY as units of bodily systems with most complex processes of locomotion, which are regulated by the universal law of the conservation of energy. But by the side of these processes of locomotion which the physiologist observes, and whose laws he tries to discover, there are going on other processes which are not accessible to the scrutiny of the physiologist. These mental processes are accessible to us directly only in one way, namely, through our own consciousness ; but they are inferred by everybody as existing for the whole realm of human and animal life. To the thoughtful observer of nature, however, it is impossible not to go beyond this. The inner affinity and unity of the universe, with its con- stant interchange of cause and effect and its constant trans- formation of the organic and the inorganic, is so great that even the physicist finds himself constrained to believe in a psycho-physical principle of all nature. And thus we come to the conclusion : To every uniform physical system, to the simplest, such as cells and molecules, as well as to the largest, such as celestial bodies and cosmic systems, there corresponds some sort and some form of mental life, com- parable in a way to the life which we experience in our- selves. Had Haeckel gone the whole length of his thoughts, he would have arrived at the view which Fechner has de- veloped with full precision and clearness. Are Fechner's thoughts, after having rested for a generation almost inactive in the womb of time, at last about to be called to new life ? Are they to accomplish in the new century what they clearly point to ? Are they to win back natural science to an ideal- istic view of the world from which it had been estranged by the failure of a priori speculation ? CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 267 In a highly suggestive and truly enlight- ening book on contemporary German life by William H. Dawson, which has just come to my notice, 1 there is a particularly well-balanced chapter on " Religious Life and Thought." The burden of this chapter is an expression of regret that the materialistic doctrines as preached by the Social Democracy should have taken away from a large part of the work- ing classes all respect for religion, all super- natural faith, all recognition of supreme and objective ethical laws. Although this statement seems to me to leave out of account the ethical and religious forces embodied in the Socialist movement itself, it is certainly true that these constructive forces have not yet produced a system of idealistic opinions, to which the mass of those who have fallen away from the old church creed would be willing to subscribe. It is to such men as Paulsen, Eucken, Kalt- hoff, and Naumann that we must look for helping on the day of this new secular religion of the masses. 1 German Life in Town and Country. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1 90 1. 268 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY IV. HERMAN GRIMM An Obituary (June, ipoi) During the last six years I have had the priv- ilege of friendly relations with the man whom in the preceding sketch I designated as one of the few living representatives of that subli- mated culture of heart and mind which we as- sociate with the great names of classic German literature. Now that death has come to him, I may perhaps be permitted to say a few words in homage to the spirit so suddenly, if not unexpectedly, departed. Three years ago, when his seventieth birth- day brought forth many public protestations of regard and appreciation, Herman Grimm wrote to me : "I am very much surprised to find that, in the eyes of others, my life has had consistency and inner unity. To myself, it has seemed all along a series of impulses from without ; and nearly everything I have done was the result of some chance suggestion of the moment." The two fundamental qualities of Herman Grimm's nature could not be better formulated than in these words of his own. What Goethe says of lyric art, that all CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 269 genuine poetry is poetry of the moment, may indeed be applied to all of Herman Grimm's writings. Whether he speaks of Michelangelo or Homer, of Goethe or Emerson, of Raphael or Diirer, we always feel that he expresses in the first place his own mood, a momentary phase of his own feeling, a state of his mind as determined by certain impressions from without. This it is, I take it, that gives to Herman Grimm's biographical and aesthetic estimates their supreme artistic charm. He had no sympathy with that soulless and spir- itless method of literary or artistic research, only too common in our universities to-day, according to which it is the sole office of the critic to dissolve a poet's or artist's work into the various elements of which it may be com- posed, to detect in it traces of the work of some other artist or author, to discuss its relation to its models, and so on. Such a method, if ap- plied exclusively or even prevailingly, seemed to Herman Grimm a perversion of the true mission of the critic, which is, to interpret the essential meaning of a work of genius. For this essential meaning, he thought, could be grasped only by letting the work as a whole exert its concentrated force upon the critic's 270 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY mind, by letting it, as it were, pass through his mind into a new, spiritualized form of ex- istence. This is the way in which he himself approached the works of the masters to the interpretation of which he devoted his life. As the lyric poet draws inspiration from the moment, and, by reproducing it in his song, gives permanence to it, so Herman Grimm imbued himself with the impressions from great lives and great works of art ; and, by giving shape to these impressions, himself produced works of art worthy to stand by the side of the originals from which he had drawn his inspiration. His lectures on Goethe, his biographies of Michelangelo and Raphael, his essays on Homer, Bettina von Arnim, or Bocklin, are, therefore, in a most pregnant sense, part of his own self; they are not so much contributions to knowledge (although they are this also) as creations of the imagina- tion ; they should be judged by artistic rather than by scientific standards. They undoubt- edly have the faults of the artistic temper ; they are not free from willfulness and mannerism ; they often reveal more clearly the personality of the writer than the subject-matter of which he writes. But they never fail to bring before CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 271 us some real and striking aspect of the topic under consideration ; they never fail to sur- prise us by some deep intuition; they never fail to give us some new insight into the mys- terious working of genius. And who would not prefer to see Diirer or Dante through the eyes of Herman Grimm than through those of an irreproachable and impersonal collector of facts ? We understand, then, why to Herman Grimm himself his life's work may have seemed, at times at least, to have been deter- mined by momentary impressions and im- pulses rather than by fixed and abiding max- ims. But it would be a great mistake to think that this life as a whole had not been guided by a very definite and permanent principle. It is, indeed, impossible to read a page of Herman Grimm without feeling that the un- derlying principle of his whole activity was the imperturbable conviction that in scholarly research, in literary and artistic production, in spiritual culture, is to be found the noblest, the most important, the most sacred concern of mankind. In this respect, more than in any other, he was a contemporary not so much of Bismarck and Bebel as of Schiller and the 272 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Humboldts. Only a few months before his death he wrote to me : — " The more we Germans grow in political and commercial influence, the more necessary it is to remember that we owe all that we are to our spiritual achievements. In some circles here the opinion seems prevalent that these spiritual achievements were of secondary im- portance, that they were a traditional possession which might be kept without particular effort. I do not say that the Government thinks so ; what I say is that a large part of the public is addicted to this belief. More than ever, then, it is to-day the duty of Germans, wherever they live upon this globe, to preserve the spir- itual unity of the German race, and to guard it as a priceless jewel." This was the spirit which impelled his whole literary production. He was a living protest against the common, the matter-of-fact, the unfeeling, the flippant, the sensual, the vul- gar; he was a living symbol of all that uplifts, expands, rejoices, purifies, and ennobles. To him, the scholar was not a mere hunter for facts, a maker of conjectures, a defender or destroyer of authorities, but the guardian of the human past, the seeker for eternal truths, CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 273 the interpreter of the universe. To him, the artist was not a mere merrymaker and pleas- ure-giver, but the creator of high ideals, the prophet of a coming golden age, the priest of a religion of humanity. He was himself a priest of this religion — the religion whose one and only tenet Goethe has expressed in the words : — Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen, AIs dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare, Wie sie das Feste lasst zu Geist zerrinnen, Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre. Personally, Herman Grimm was a man of commanding presence, and, in his later years, of patriarchal dignity and kindliness, in this respect also preserving the precious heritage of a noble ancestry. Being given over only to ideal pursuits, and keeping constant company with the best spirits of all the ages, he was entirely raised above the pettiness of personal intrigue and malice which has disfigured so many scholars' lives. I well remember a con- versation which 1 had with him some years ago on certain aspects of Berlin University life. When, during the course of the conversation, I could not repress my indignation at the fact that, through certain personal animosities, he 274 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY had been cut off from election to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and remarked that this seemed to me a national disgrace, he smiled and said almost gayly, " Oh, no, that is not a national disgrace ; it is simply funny (es ist ein- fach komiscb)." Germans, naturally, will feel the loss of Herman Grimm most keenly ; but Americans also have a special reason for mourning him. Seldom have American character and Ameri- can scenery more sympathetically and truth- fully been depicted than in his novel Unuber- windliche Mdchte. No foreign writer has understood Emerson as well as he. And even in his last days, when the South-African hor- rors had embittered him against the British, he retained his hopes and sympathies for the Anglo-Saxon beyond the sea. One of his last public acts was an attempt, happily successful, to arouse interest in German governmental circles for the Germanic Museum of Harvard University ; so that his name, together with that of the Emperor, will be remembered among the names of the first German friends and patrons of this American institution. CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 275 V. GERHART HAUPTMANN's MICHAEL KRAMER (FEBRUARY, I9O1) About a year ago, in speaking of Gerhart Hauptmann's Fuhrmann Henscbel, I expressed the hope that Hauptmann's return to the uncompromising naturalism of his earliest works, as manifested in that drama, would prove to be only a transient phase in his de- velopment ; that his next serious production would again lead us to the heights of existence reached in Die Versunkene Glocke ; would show the poet once more journeying towards the promised land of ideal art. In a way, this hope has been sadly disappointed. Michael Kramer, his latest drama, is altogether of a piece with his first revolutionary outbursts of indignation at social corruption. Like For Sonnenaufgang and Das Friedensfest, it reveals a world of atro- cious vulgarity, foulness, and vice ; and, like these earlier productions, it forces upon us the question : How is it possible that a poet of such refinement of moral feeling, such deli- cacy of imagination, and such exquisite light- ness of artistic touch, should, after all, seem by preference to wallow in the mire of social misery and moral degradation ? 276 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Is this, then, really the life led by the typi- cal German of to-day? These unhappy and unintelligent marriages, these capricious and masterful parents, these rebellious and disloyal children, these swaggering men and these grace- less women, this stupidly arrogant cavalierdom, this petty and self-seeking bureaucracy, this universal indecency, lust, and debauchery — that is Germany, that is what we were fond of calling the land of idealism, the land of intel- lectual aristocracy, the land of pure and loving family life ? If it is, we can only pray that the sins of the present generation may not be visited upon our children and our children's children ; for if they were, the future could bring nothing but national disintegration and degen- eracy. However this may be, we cannot but deplore the fact that a genius like Hauptmann's should have been condemned to live in sur- roundings which have imparted even to his noblest creations a fatal germ of morbidness and gloom ; which have forced him, too, like so many inferior men, into the class of writers of whom a contemporary epigrammatist truth- fully says, — Das heissen sie heute die Welt verstchn: Statt der Rose die Blattlaus schn — CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 277 and which have deceived him into thinking that the painful and the tragic are identical terms. What is the action in this latest drama of his, Michael Kramer ? One might say, there is no action at all ; there is only a situation, a calamitous family situation. The father, old Kramer himself, is a painter, a man of ardent convictions, but apparently mediocre talent. His convictions have been inherited by his daughter, who, however, is a singularly ungraceful person. His talents have been transmitted to his son, who, however, is a moral wretch. Add to this that Kramer has no inner relation whatever with his wife, a hopelessly humdrum and unintelligent person — and the necessary ingredients for family misery are at hand. The father, with stubborn tenacity, devotes himself to his art — so much so that he lives almost exclusively in his studio, apart from the family ; the son, with equal consistency, wastes his vitality by lounging about in doubtful resorts and by intercourse with waitresses and chorus girls. The mother limits her activity to taking the son's part whenever the father's indignation at his con- duct becomes particularly violent. The daugh- 278 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ter bears the burden of the whole family. The end, of course, is the son's suicide, borne by the father with the exaltation of a man brought face to face with eternity. No one would deny, I suppose, that a theme like this might form a proper subject for dra- matic art. A number of conflicts arising from it may be imagined which would be genuinely tragic. If we were made to see the struggle in the son's breast between his artistic striv- ing and his baser appetites ; if we were made to feel that a noble nature was here, in spite of brave resistance, dragged down by sin and lust, until at last suicide was found to be the only escape, the only way in which moral free- dom could assert itself, we should follow this struggle with that mixture of painful and pleasurable sensations which, according to Vol- kelt, constitutes the tragic emotion. And the same would be the case if the conflict between father and son were emphasized and carefully delineated ; if we saw two principles clashing with each other, — paternal authority on the one hand, self-assertion of the individual on the other, — each confident of its right, each subversive of the other. Or, finally, if the conflict were confined to the father's breast: CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 279 if we saw him at variance with himself, expe- riencing in his own soul the contrast between the old, autocratic view of life and the new demands of freer humanity, as represented by his son ; if we were made to understand how impossible it was for him to overcome this contrast, and how he was thus bound to plunge both himself and his son into ruin — this also would be a truly tragic sight. It would be preposterous to assume for a moment that a master like Hauptmann should not have thought of these various conflicts. Indeed, he has indicated traces of them him- self throughout his drama ; but he has only indicated them. With full deliberation, he pushes all these tragic conflicts into the back- ground, and concentrates our attention upon the unqualifiedly painful, the loathsome spec- tacle of the moral wretchedness into which the son has at length sunk. In reading these scenes we feel as though we were observing a case of progressive paralysis of the brain. Hardly a symptom of this most hideous of mental dis- eases are we spared. All the profane language, all the sexual excitement, all the vile halluci- nations characteristic of this wretched state, are brought before us ; and, in addition to this, 280 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY there is forced upon us with awful distinctness a sight of those unspeakably vulgar surround- ings, the bawling and carousing restaurant life of " respectable " society, in which this partic- ular victim of modern city profligacy has lost his soul. In all this there is no false touch, there is no exaggeration, there is nothing but truth to life ; there is consequently, technically speaking, perfect art. But I must confess, if this is art, I, for one, prefer a life in the desert, where there is no art, but plenty of air and plenty of sky. And yet this latest drama of Hauptmann's, like all his works, has something of that in- spiring quality which only true genius can give. Here, as in Fuhrmann Henschel, there stands out at least one figure which compensates us for all the surrounding vulgarity. In Fuhrmann Henschel it was the figure of the honest Silesian peasant-teamster, craving to shake off the feel- ing of guilt, craving to atone for the violation of a promise given to his dying wife, and thus standing unwittingly all by himself as the in- stinctive upholder of a moral principle. Here, it is the brooding, choleric old Michael Kramer. Like Henschel, he is encompassed by nothing but foulness and vice. In his own family he CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 281 has nothing but disappointment. His son, from whose artistic genius he had hoped for the con- summation denied to himself, he sees sink into utter moral disintegration. But all the more steadfastly does the old man cling to the ideals of his art; in his work he finds his religion; his studio becomes to him the holy of holies; here he consecrates himself; here he wrestles and strives through lonely hours, lonely days, lonely years ; here it becomes clear to him that the true artist is the true ascetic and the true anchorite. And thus he acquires the moral strength which enables him to bear the most cruel blow, the ig- nominious suicide of his son, not only without flinching, but with true elevation and grandeur of soul. Death now appears to him as the great fulfiller and sanctifier ; and, as he stands by the outstretched lifeless form of his son, he sees in his pale face a glow of triumph and attainment. " What did these fools know of him — these sticks and blocks in human form? What did they know of him and me and our struggles? They have hunted him to death; they have killed him like a dog. That is past now. 'T is well that he lies there ; 't is well ; 't is well. Let me tell you, Death has been slandered ; that is the greatest wrong in the 282 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY world. Death is the fairest form of Life ; 'tis the masterwork of Love, the Eternal." Hauptmann's art seems like a wondrous flower, blossoming in lonely beauty upon a hideous, pestilential pool. Would not this flower blossom all the more beautifully if it were transplanted to a healthy soil ? Would not, in other words, the poet Hauptmann ap- peal all the more strongly to our aesthetic instincts if, instead of the abnormal and the diseased, he offered us types of the univer- sally and harmoniously human ? VI. GERHART HAUPTMANN's DER ARME HEINRICH (DECEMBER, I Q02) The friends of Gerhart Hauptmann have had a rather arduous task during the last few years in trying to reconcile their admiration of his genius with the erratic and often far from agreeable paths which he latterly chose to follow. With every new production of his, it appeared less likely that he would succeed in attaining the high ideals of art held out in his Versunkene G/ocke, and more and more the fear seemed justified that his creative power would finally succumb under the laborious effort to copy the whimsical appearances and outward CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 283 paraphernalia rather than the essence of life. These doubts and misgivings have now happily- been silenced; for at last the poet has given us a work of art which appeals to the eternally human, which touches the deepest chords of the heart, and which seems destined to live, the dramatic poem, Der Arme Heinricb. The legend of Poor Henry, as every- body knows, was first treated by Hartman von Aue in an epic poem which is among the few real masterpieces of mediaeval literature. Hartman tells us of a rich and powerful lord, Heinrich von Aue, who, like Job, in the midst of worldly affluence and splendor, is visited by a terrible affliction, being infected with leprosy ; who, unlike Job, abandons himself — for a time at least — to grief and hatred and rebel- liousness against God; but is finally healed, both bodily and mentally, through the pure faith and self-surrender of a simple peasant girl. The various stages of this inner conflict and its reconciliation Hartman brings before us with a charming simplicity and artistic grace. We see the unfortunate man despairing of all help because he has been told that he can be saved only by the blood of a pure maiden who, of her own free will, shall die for him. We 284 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY see him retiring from the world, and seeking refuge in the lonely farmhouse of one of his tenants. We see him here attended and cared for by the farmer's little daughter, who, al- though a mere child, seems to divine the sick man's thoughts and wishes, and is so insepar- able from him that he playfully calls her "my little wife." We see the child lying awake at night — for she has heard of the fatal condition of his recovery — weeping and grieving for the poor sufferer, until she suddenly is overjoyed and transfigured by the thought that it is her mission to save him. And we see this salva- tion finally brought about through a change of heart in Heinrich himself. Through his un- willingness to accept her sacrificial offering, through his decision to submit henceforth trustfully to the mysterious ways of God, — in other words, through his inner transforma- tion and renewal, — his bodily recovery also is achieved. It is a poem, naive, childlike, and mediaeval in its tone, surrounded by an atmo- sphere of the miraculous and the wonderful ; at the same time, however, breathing a spirit of unconditional trust in the power of goodness and in the promptings of the inner voice, and in so far essentially modern. CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 285 Among the poets of our own time, Long- fellow, if I am not mistaken, is the only one who has attempted, previous to Hauptmann, to revive this mediaeval tale. But the sweet and graceful singer of Hiawatha was not at his best when he turned to this subject, and it can hardly be said that his Golden Legend reproduces anything but the outward show of mediaeval life. Of religious machinery and spectacular by-play there is plenty : Lucifer and his host, angelic chants, itinerant preach- ers, Minnesingers, reveling friars, devout pil- grims, pretty bits of romantic landscape after the manner of Tieck, even a whole Nativity Play, introducing the Wise Men of the East, the Angels of the Seven Planets, allegories of Virtues, Mary, Jesus, and God the Father himself. But there is no life in all these pic- turesque scenes and happenings, and the prin- cipal figures, Prince Henry and Elsie, are no human characters, and entirely fail to appeal to our deeper emotions. It is just here that the supreme merit of Hauptmann's drama lies. Hauptmann has gone to the root of the sub- ject. He has stripped the mediaeval tale of what is merely superficial and temporary ; he has made it a poetic vessel of universal human 286 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY suffering and sympathy ; he has made it a per- fect symbol of inner regeneration ; and thus he has produced a work of art which will stand by the side of Goethe's Iphigenie and tell future generations of the heartburnings, the bitter struggles, and the exultant joys of a man who, perhaps more ardently than any living poet, is striving to express what moves, in- spires, and presses upon our age. It would be a futile task to relate in detail by what means Hauptmann has accomplished this feat ; for the play is so much a drama of the inner life that it is well-nigh impossible to reproduce its movement by paraphrasing it — as impossible as it is to describe a symphony. A few remarks, however, about the leading motive of the whole may be helpful to the understanding. Heinrich himself is conceived by Haupt- mann as a strong, heroic nature, overflowing with life, burning for action. In years gone by, when a mere youth, he would often be a-hunting in the Black Forest, and then he would spend many a day on the farm of his old tenant Gottfried, whom he loved like a father, and with whose little daughter Otte- gebe, then hardly out of her leading-strings, CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 287 he would play and sport, taking her with him on his horse and caressing her as " his little wife." Since then nine years have passed. In these years he has seen and experienced much. He has taken part in the conflict between Pope Innocent and Emperor Frederick II; has, for his allegiance to the Emperor, been laid under the Papal ban ; has, under this ban, taken part in a crusade ; and, at the Em- peror's court in Palermo, as well as in the land of the Saracens, he has led a life of worldly joy, has reveled in the voluptuous beauty of the Orient and imbibed the teachings of the Koran. Now he returns to the scenes of his youth — the same and yet another. He is still impulsive ; he still harbors strong desires and aspirations ; but his hope of fulfillment is gone ; he carries the worm within him ; he has been marked by God ; he is unclean, a leper. Thus far, he imagines, he has guarded the terrible secret — perhaps he hopes to guard it forever ; for the present, he craves nothing but solitude, peace ; and for this he has turned to the house of his old tenant. That, in reality, his disease has already been whispered about, at least among the common folk, becomes clear in the very first scene of the drama, when one 288 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY of Heinrich's servants, terrorized by supersti- tious imaginings, takes precipitous flight. While Heinrich for the time seems to have forgotten the little playmate of his youth, Ot- tegebe, who now is on the threshold of woman- hood, has preserved his memory well. She is a sensitive, shy, visionary being. With the peasant lads and lasses she mingles little ; her favorite stay is with Father Benedict in his forest hermitage, and what effect the child pro- duces upon the old monk is seen from his words : — Kommt sie, wird meine dumpfe Klause helle, Mein enges Waldkapellchen weit und gross, Der Heiland atmet und Maria lacht, Und ich, von meiner Siinden Ueberlast Sonst fast erdriickt, kann mich vom Boden heben, Und Gott, entsiihnt, ins giitige Antlitz sehn. Through the friar, she has been filled with mystic forebodings of the approaching Judg- ment Day; she revels in depicting to herself the sinfulness of the world ; the Black Death and the scourge of leprosy are, to her, visible signs of God's wrath, and every leper's body a mirrored image of poisoned Christendom. But she also revels in the Christian mystery of atonement, in the saving power of innocent CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 289 blood voluntarily shed, and in its cleansing effect upon sin and disease. What wonder that, when she comes to know what frightful secret has brought Heinrich to her father's house, she should be possessed by the idea of redeeming him by her own death ? These, then, are the two characters between whom there arises a tragic conflict — a conflict of compassion and despair, of woman's de- sire for self-sacrifice and man's determination to struggle alone — until finally love, uncon- ditional, all-embracing, divine love, subdues both man and woman, and dissolves the con- flict into joyful harmony. That Ottegebe from the very first feels something more than com- passion for Heinrich — that, unknown to her- self, she loves him — we divine from the out- set. Why else should she tremble whenever he speaks to her? Why should she tear the ribbon which she had put on in his honor, from her hair as soon as attention is drawn to it ? But as yet her love is slumbering ; it is overshadowed by the Christian desire to atone, to rescue, and by the Christian longing for the crown of spiritual reward. Heinrich, on his part, has no other feeling for her except that of curious wonder at her devoted service : he 290 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY is too much absorbed with himself and his frightful fate to have thoughts of anything else. It is wonderful to see how it is just this fright- ful fate of his, the gradual unfolding of his terrible doom, which draws this man and this woman together, which opens their hearts to each other, and thus brings salvation and life to both. The climax of the drama is reached in the third and fourth acts, when Heinrich, after having made known the nature of his disease, has fled to the woods and is hiding there like a hunted beast, pursued by the execrations and curses of the populace. He now seems to have risen to colossal proportions. Misery has stripped him of everything that is weak and small. He has now penetrated to the bottom of things; he has become knowing; he has found out that life is a dungeon, that death is freedom ; he scorns as folly the report, brought to him by old Gottfried, that his daughter is determined to die for him at the hands of the physician of Salerno ; he chases herself away with cursing and stones when she ventures into his wilderness ; and in grim frenzy he di- verts himself by digging his own grave. These moments, however, are followed by others in CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 291 which the mere craving for existence gets the better of him. In such moments he will prowl about, like a beast of prey, in the vicinity of Gottfried's house, or wherever he imagines Ottegebe to be, crouch on the ground, creep through the thicket, only to get a glimpse of her and to feed on the thought of being saved by her. And at last, in one such moment of highest transport of despair, when exhausted and fainting he has sunk to the ground, Otte- gebe is at his side, and in rapturous delight presses a fervent kiss upon his forehead. Inexpressibly sweet is the contrast formed by the last act with these wild and frenzied hap- penings. Heinrich has returned with Ottegebe to his castle. Instinctively, even against his will, had he followed her to Salerno. Travel- ing by the side of his little saint, he had for the first time felt his heart secure from the pur- suit of the demons ; a new life had been born within him, joy and hope had returned ; and at last, at the height of the catastrophe, when the sacrificial act was about to be performed, Love had descended upon him and bidden him prevent the execution — and he was healed Da traf der dritte Strahl der Gnade mich : Das Wunder war vollbracht, ich war genesen ! 292 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY Hartmann, glcichwie ein Korper ohne Herz, Ein Golem, eines Zauberer's Gebilde, Doch keines Gottes — thonern oder auch Aus Stein, oder aus Erz — bist du, solange nicht Der reine, grade, ungebrochne Strom Der Gottheit eine Bahn sich hat gebrochen In die geheimnisvolle Kapsel, die Das echte Schopfungs-Wunder uns verschliesst : Dann erst durchdringt dich Leben. Schrankenlos Dehnt sich das Himmlische aus deiner Brust, Mit Glanz durchschlagend deines Kerkers Wande, Erlosend und auflosend — dich! die Welt! In das urewige Liebes-Element. While Heinrich from this moment on is in the full possession of his powers, joyful, daring, active as of old, Ottegebe has remained as in a stupor. She has not fulfilled her mission, she has not won the heavenly crown ! She, too, has through suffering become knowing. She knows now that she loves Heinrich, but it seems to her an unholy love, an earthly desire. She, the bride of Heaven, has fallen a victim to the powers of darkness. What is there left to her but death? So, as in Goethe's Ip hig en ie> there seems to arise a new conflict after the rounding out of the main theme. But, hap- pily, this conflict is only a transient clouding of the radiance that is spread over these clos- CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 293 ing scenes. For human love proves its divine- ness, in spite of these ecclesiastical scruples ; and when Heinrich, at the wedding ceremony, presses Ottegebe passionately to his breast, she whispers joyfully : — " Heinrich ! — Nun sterb' ich doch den siissen Tod !" There are few works in the world's litera- ture that aim higher than this sweet and noble poem. In depth of feeling, in simplicity of structure, in beauty of language, in strength of character-drawing, in spiritual import, it sur- passes to my mind everything that has come from the hand of living dramatists. Hail to the poet who, disdaining ephemeral effects or the applause of the crowd, has clung to that which is for the few of all ages, and has thus added a new treasure to the spiritual posses- sions of mankind. VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIVIDUALITY ON THE GERMAN STAGE (FEBRUARY, I9O2) The German society drama of the present day shows a curious mixture of high aspirations and imperfect fulfillment, of noble conceptions and brutal effects, of an ardent desire for truth, freedom, nature, and of a tame subser- 294 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY vience to conventional devices and artificial sentiment. In the early nineties, when the first powerful productions of Sudermann and Hauptmann filled the air with joyous echoes of the striving for a heightened existence both of the individual and of society, we dreamed of a new classic era of dramatic literature close at hand. We hoped that the young German writers who so boldly and with such earnest conviction had taken up the gospel of Ibsen, Bjornson, and Tolstoi, would soon rise to the full height of their masters, or perhaps even surpass them. For it seemed as though there were something in these young writers, a cer- tain sense of measure and tradition, a certain reverence for the human past, that in all their tumultuous strivings would keep them on the path of true art and preserve them from the merely volcanic, which, especially in the Scan- dinavian writers, not infrequently destroys the pure aesthetic enjoyment of modern poetry. These hopes, if I may be permitted to give to my own experience a somewhat wider ap- plication, have been sadly disappointed. In- stead of pressing on toward the goal of an art embodying in vigorous, free, and impressive types the ideals of modern humanity, and thus CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 295 holding up before the eyes of the present the life that is to come, the German dramatists, or most of them at least, have again fallen back to that position from which the whole move- ment of "Youngest Germany" started some fifteen years ago, — the position of an essen- tially negative and pessimistic analysis and arraignment of existing conditions. That in taking this stand they give expression to a large and important part of the intellectual life of modern Germany, can hardly be denied; for the natural counterpart of the reigning im- perialism and officialdom has been the growth of a public opinion so peevishly sensitive to even the slightest encroachments on personal rights, so eagerly insisting on free inquiry, so boldly — and often with such bitter sarcasm — exerting its function of a searching criticism of public affairs, as is scarcely to be found in countries where individual liberty is more firmly guarded. In no other country, for instance, would the artistic views of the chief of state have aroused such violent antagonism, or would his efforts at putting these views into practice have been received with such a flood of biting satire, as was the case with the Emperor's re- cent utterances on art addressed to the sculp- 296 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tors of his monumental gifts to the citv of Berlin. Nor is it likely that the appointment of a Catholic professor of history beside that of a Protestant — which recently took place at the University of Strassburg — would in any other country have led to such a storm of in- dignation, such protestations of principle, such abuse of government interference with profes- sorial standards of impartial inquiry, as shook German academic circles some weeks ago. As a reflex, then, of public affairs, the Ger- man drama of the last few seasons, disappoint- ing as it is when considered from the point of view of ideal art, is still an extremely in- structive phenomenon. The clash between the individual and society, which, in one form or another, may be said to underlie all tragic situations in real life as well as in art, has re- ceived in the German drama even of very recent years some new and interesting impersona- tions. What seems to me regrettable is, that in hardly any of these recent dramas is there a ray of hope, a suggestion of a possible de- livery from the social conflict except by self- destruction of the individual ; that, on the contrary, this self-destruction is constantly be- ing insisted upon in these dramas as the only CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 297 and as a truly heroic solution, even where there seems not the slightest necessity for it, since a little more common sense and large-minded- ness and a little less willfulness and sentimen- tality would have obviated all difficulties. A striking illustration of this drift towards the needlessly tragic and its painful results is a drama which is at present holding a promi- nent place in the repertory of almost every German theatre; which, moreover, through the award of the Grillparzer prize and a nearly unanimous approval of the leading critical re- views, has obtained the highest literary dis- tinction. I refer to Otto Erich Hartleben's Rosenmontag. The hero of this drama is a Prussian officer who falls a victim to the petty prejudices and hollow ambitions of caste. He is a dreamer, an idealist, a man to whom purity of heart is the highest demand of life. He has fallen in love with a simple burgher maiden, without realizing that, as long as he remains an officer, there can be no question of marriage with this girl. Two of his com- rades, cousins of his, in whom the sense of family pride and social standing seems to have absorbed every other intellectual or emotional faculty, take it upon themselves to save him 298 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY from embarrassing situations by acting the part of his Fate. First they separate him from the girl by bringing it about that he is for a time detached to another garrison. In leav- ing, he intrusts his love to their protection. This confidence they abuse by persuading the girl that he has become engaged to another, while at the same time representing to him that his love has broken her faith. The news of her alleged treachery prostrates him physi- cally as well as mentally, and when, after a year of illness and agony, he actually becomes engaged to a rich society girl, this is clearly a symptom of his shattered ideals. Thus he returns to his old regiment, only to find out what a shameful trick has been played upon him. Now he is beside himself with rage and indignation. He has a violent rupture with his comrades ; he defies the military code of honor ; he takes his old love back, and, after a few days' reveling in bliss, ends his life to- gether with hers. Hackneyed and crude as this plot is, I am far from denying that it is worked out with unusual cleverness and brilliancy of dramatic invention. The officers' life, with its racy, frivolous jargon, its well-mannered and well- CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 299 meaning inanity, with its jolly comradeship and its brutal conception of woman, is portrayed here with astonishing vividness and truthful- ness. Although during the whole play we do not get beyond the limits of the barracks or the officers' casino, the only woman character of the plot being the deserted girl, there is not a moment of dullness or monotony in it. As an historical document, as a comprehensive and cutting satire on military life in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, this drama is undoubtedly a notable achievement, and will stand in literary history by the side of such Storm-and-Stress productions as Wag- ner's Die Kinder mbrder in or Lenz's Die Sol- daten. All the more disappointing is it that the author, who knew so well how to casti- gate social foibles and depravities, should not have been happier in depicting genuine human feeling, — that he should not have been able to create a hero capable of something besides ranting and fuming against military conven- tionalities and then blowing his brains out. There is really not the slightest reason in the world why this man, after he has found out that his love always has been and still is faith- ful to him, should not with a light heart bid 300 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY good-by to all these glittering frivolities, and begin, together with the woman of his choice, a new, serious, and happy life. Is an officer's life, then, everything, even in Germany ? Is the only alternative left to this man really either to stifle the best instincts of his being or to follow the contemptuous advice of a comrade of his, " Then go to America and turn waiter " ? And even this latter choice, would it not have been manlier and more genuinely human than this absurd refuge in the Nothing? How differently has Ibsen, in his Enemy of the People, tackled a similar problem ! How radiant and triumphant does the personality, in the midst of defeat, here stand out at the end against the unreasoning and unfeeling herd of the " solid majority " ! In Hartleben's play, in spite of all the lofty talk and noble sentiment, there is at the end nothing left but moral numbness and submis- sion to the dictates of an artificial etiquette. I cannot bring myself to speak at length of a recent production of Sudermann's, which was first put on the boards of the Deutsches Theater last week, under the curious mis- nomer of Es lebe das Leben ! For nothing could be more devoid of the real feelings for CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 301 which life stands than this painfully thought- out parody of life ; and it is truly saddening that a man who began his literary career in accents that reminded one of the young Schil- ler, who, even in his Johannes and Die drei Reiherfedern^ seemed to strive after the heights of life, should now stoop to the pseudo- tragedy of social scandals not a whit more up- lifting or less mawkishly sentimental than the much-abused plays of Kotzebue or Paul Lin- dau. What leads me to mention this doleful production here is the fact that it is another flagrant instance of that lack of a bold and consistent personality, along with and in spite of a certain attitude of protest against social tyranny, which seems to me responsible for the ultimate artistic failure of Hartleben's Rosenmontag. In Sudermann's play also the hero, or rather the heroine, sacrifices herself without any sufficient reason, nay, even without any intelligible purpose. She sacrifices herself, she thinks, in order to save the life of her lover, with whom fifteen years ago she had trans- gressed her marriage vows, and who since then had lived unsuspected in ideal friendship with herself and in close comradeship with her 302 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY husband, until a sudden exposure brings the two men into irreconcilable conflict. But how is it possible to think that this man, after her self-destruction, should take up life in the sense she wishes him ; namely, as a champion of the Conservative cause against the destruc- tive tendencies of Social Democracy, since, as he himself expresses it epigrammatically, he " must live on because he is dead " ? She sacrifices herself also, she thinks, in order to rescue her husband from an impossible situa- tion, apparently without realizing how little this sacrifice can do to atone for the pro- tracted falsehood and lie of fifteen years. Finally, she sacrifices herself in order to keep the Conservative party from the scandal and confusion which would arise from an open conflict between the two men, both pillars of law and order; and again she seems to be en- tirely blind to the fact that nothing will more clearly reveal the " skeleton in the closet " of the Conservative party, and more directly and irretrievably hurt the cause of law and order, than her own suicide. In short, the motives which actuate the events in this play are artificial to the last degree; and while there runs a hidden protest CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 303 through it against the suppression of indi- viduality demanded by the complicated moral code of the modern state, there appears not a single character in it who dares to be truly himself, and most of the characters (to borrow one of the author's own phrases) seem to be living in a prison which they themselves guard. A sorry turn, indeed, to be taken by the author of Heimat. It would be superfluous to dwell on other dramas of recent date, such as Philippi's Das grosse Licht and Wohlthdter der Menschheit, which show this same curious mixture of in- dividualistic leanings on the one hand and submission to social convention on the other. It is, however, worthy of mention, since it is characteristic of the whole state of contem- porary German culture, that the only play of the last few years in which a powerful personality successfully asserts itself, is an edu- cational play, — Otto Ernst's comedy, Flachs- mann als Erzieher, a brave, timely, and amus- ing plea for individuality and common sense in the instruction of children. The way in which the ideas of Pestalozzi and Froebel are here given form in an inspired young teacher who fights to the end and maintains 3 o 4 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY his ideals in spite of endless intrigue, slander, and malicious machinations on the part of his colleagues and superiors, is truly delightful ; and the only pity is that the sphere of action in this piece is too narrow to give room for a really free and large artistic movement. When will the German society drama fulfill the prophetic message of fifteen years ago, free itself from the shackles of sentimentality and conventional formality, and rise to a really human representation of the great conflicts of modern life? Bjornson's Beyond Our Strength, which is being performed with such masterly skill in all the great German theatres, should point the way toward this goal. viii. widmann's der heilige und die tiere (may, 1906) The English-speaking world is not suffi- ciently aware, I think, of the fact that German literature is in the midst of a great revival. To be sure, a few names, such as Hauptmann and Sudermann, are accepted as newspaper celeb- rities, about whom it is well to have, or at least to express, opinions. For the rest, one does not expect much of mental stimulus or spiritual enlightenment from German novel- CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 305 ists, dramatists, or poets of to-day. Among the causes which account for this indifference of other nations toward modern German litera- ture, I am inclined to consider the negative tendency of contemporary German journalism as the most potent one. In France or Eng- land, criticism in the main is a help to pro- duction. By setting forth what is valuable or important in the literary activity of the day, French and English critics, as a class, enable the foreign public to arrive at a tolerably just view of the literary progress of their respective countries. The German press, with a few ex- ceptions, is dominated by a spirit of factional acrimoniousness and fault-finding. The con- sciousness that it is the main office of criticism to interpret, to reproduce the mood and feel- ings from which sprang the productions of creative fancy, seems almost entirely lost. Still less is there to be seen a widely spread desire or even willingness by fairness and justice of interpretation to uphold national dignity and to make propaganda for the cause of German literature abroad. Most of the journalistic re- viewers seem to consider authors as fair game for their own caprice. To protest, to belittle, to ignore, to ridicule, to startle by sensational 306 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY epigrams or grandiloquent phrases, has come to be the prevailing note of critical comment. So that, if one were to go by the conflicting and distorted testimony of German newspaper crit- icism, the condition of contemporary German literature would seem to be most disheartening and gloomy. As a matter of fact, German literary life of to-day is in a greater ferment than that of per- haps any other country. Indeed, it is almost impossible to take up a new German drama or a German book of verse or fiction, without being struck with symptoms of an ascending movement of emotional forces, a quickened pulsation of spiritual energy, a heightened sense of the dignity of existence, a wider sym- pathy with humanity in all its forms, a firmer grasp of the fundamental problems of morality, in short with incontestable indications that the same eagerness and restless activity which are playing such an important part in reconstruct- ing German politics, industry, and scientific investigation, are also at work in reshaping German literature. I wish to call attention to a writer who, living far removed from the great intellec- tual centres of modern Germany, and holding CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 307 himself aloof from the strife of critics and the noise of the literary mart, has nevertheless — or, perhaps, for that very reason — given us some of the finest artistic symbols of modern German thought that we possess : the Swiss poet, Joseph Victor Widmann. Widmann is not any longer a novice of the craft ; standing in his sixty-fourth year, he may look back upon a long list of achievements. He has written essays, sketches of travel, epics, nov- els, dramas, graceful in form and replete with ideas. Besides, as literary editor of the leading Swiss paper, the Bernese Bund, he has com- mented for now tens of years, week in and week out, with singular fairness and breadth of view, on all the important manifestations of the new life in German letters and art. And in all this he has revealed a very unusual per- sonality, keenness of observation, wealth of fancy, spiritual earnestness and insight, and above all, a most delightful sense of humor — the true humor which springs from a warm heart for all that is genuine and fine, in how- ever humble a form it may appear, and which detects the false and the hollow even under its most glittering guise. The two works by which, I believe, Wid- 308 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY mann will speak to posterity are the Maikd- ferkomoedie and Der Heilige und die Tiere. It is not easy to classify these works in ac- cordance with the accepted standards of lit- erary nomenclature. Indeed, they defy, both in form and in matter, the traditional concep- tions of art. They combine dramatic dialogue, epic narrative, and lyric effusions; they are satirical and rhapsodic, fantastic and realis- tic, far removed from our daily life and yet entirely up to date. They seem to be a capri- cious pot-pourri of tragedy and farce, of mysticism and rationalism, and yet they are held together by a wonderful artistic harmony. They contain elements on the one hand of the animal lore of primitive peoples, on the other of the mediaeval miracle plays ; and yet they are deeply poetic symbols of the mod- ern view of life. They are indeed sui generis, a new phenomenon on the literary horizon, a new kind of poetic creation ; and aesthetic theory will have to enlarge its classifications in order to find room for them. The Maikaferkomoedie, the earlier work of the two, is, in spite of its name, a tragedy, of insect life, and at the same time an allegory of human existence with its ephemeral joys, CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 309 its eternal longings, and its endless suffering. Astounding is the art by which the poet suc- ceeds in bringing this tiny world of insects within the range of our own feelings and as- pirations, so that we cannot help thinking of these beetles and worms as being endowed with human intellect and emotions, and are not in the least surprised to hear of them as striving, like ourselves, for higher forms of existence. This striving forms, indeed, the starting-point of the plot. It is early spring; below the surface of the earth as well as above a new life is throbbing ; it is stirring also among the larvae of the May-beetles that lie imbedded under the turf. A gospel has spread among them of a country of marvelous beauty, of regions of eternal light and joy stretching out above the darkness of the underground world that encompasses them; and they are thrilled by the hope that it is for them to win this land of promise. To be sure, there are skeptics in their midst who doubt this mes- sage, who claim to know of the dangers, the cruelty, and the horrors of this upper world, and who raise their voice of warning against the attempt to reach it. But these voices are drowned in the general enthusiasm, in the 3 io GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY wave of religious craze that has seized the masses as well as their leaders. The king, a romantic, mystically inclined idealist, calls upon his people to gather around him ; a uni- versal movement forward and upward is un- dertaken, the crust of the earth is broken, the surface is reached, and now the little army lifts its wings to fly toward the joys of light. It may be imagined what their fate is. How they are caught and tortured by boys who amuse themselves by inflicting pain upon helpless animals ; how they are chased and eaten by birds ; how they are persecuted by farmers who guard their orchards and gardens against them; how they enjoy swarming and buzzing during a few brief summer nights ; how they burn to death by flying into the fire; how they are crushed under wagon wheels and horses' hoofs, and how, at last, in the autumn their benumbed, half-lifeless little bodies lie scattered over the fields like the bodies of fallen heroes, until either the rain or the frost makes an end of them — all this is brought before us with a truly marvelous art, with a mixture of pathos and pity and humor which makes this story of insect life a true counter- part to the lot of human kind. CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 311 Deeply poetic and full of meaning as is the Maikdferkomoedie, it cannot be compared in sweep and significance of thought with Wid- mann's latest work, Christ in the Wilderness^ as its curious title, Der Heilige und die Tiere, may perhaps be paraphrased. The motto taken from the first chapter of Mark : " And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan, and was with the wild beasts ; and the angels ministered unto him," indicates that here again the animal world with its cruelty, its blind desires, and its dumb suf- fering forms the background of the action, but it also leads us to look forward to human grappling with the deepest problems of exis- tence, to a battle with evil and sin, and to a note of redemption and spiritual triumph. And this hope is by no means disappointed by the poem itself. It opens with a prelude of exquisite humor and poetic power, transporting us into the midst of the philosophical and theological con- troversies of to-day. Two theological students are tramping in the Black Forest. One of them quotes with much moral indignation a passage from Nietzsche : " God is dead ; but, such as human kind is (cf. sheep kind), there will per- 3 i2 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY haps for thousands of years continue to exist caverns in which his shade will be worshiped. And we, we must conquer even his shade." To his comrade this passage does not seem so very blasphemous ; he is inclined to think that a Godless, or rather a God-free Christianity may be destined to be the religion of the fu- ture ; sympathy with all forms of life, whether human or animal or vegetable, seems to him a much more essential part of religion than the traditional church belief. As an illustra- tion of his own views he tells of a minister in the Canton of Zurich who once on a Christ- mas Day, after the communion service, step- ping out of the church, saw a flock of hungry crows sitting on the cloister walls, and moved by pity for the starving creatures, fed them with the holy bread. Of course the commu- nity was scandalized and the kindly man lost his ministry. He found, however, a refuge in a little country parish in the Black Forest ; and as this village is near to where the two young men are wandering, they decide to make a de- scent upon him, chiefly in the hope of a good supper and a good glass of wine at his table. In the following scenes we come to know this heretical theologian himself, Lux by name. CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 313 He is a man to whom nothing human is for- eign, a passionate lover of nature, a friend of beast and plant, a delver in old books, steeped in Jewish and early Christian legend and in Gnostic thought, in spite of his advancing years of a fiery, explosive, thoroughly artistic temper — altogether a most lovable and unique personality. He is just coming back from an evening walk, very much wrought up over a sight which would perhaps have seemed trivial to most men, which to him, however, seems of tragic import. He had been reveling in the quiet and calm of the sunset, all nature seemed to him at harmony with itself, when he is sud- denly awakened from his dreams by a pitiful squeal at the wayside ; his own pet dog, Prince, has been chasing a field mouse and bitten her to death. The bleeding little thing lies on the ground dying; and dying gives birth to a lit- ter of young ones. This sight of purposeless cruelty, of guiltless suffering, of a life being sac- rificed while giving way to a new life, arouses in the old minister all his latent moral indignation. What kind of a world is it in which such things are commonplace events ? What kind of a God is it who permits such things ? In vain does his sister remind him that in saner and more 314 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY composed states of mind he himself is wont to think of God as being within, not above the world, as striving, struggling, suffering in common with it. In vain does she call to help the serene equanimity of Spinoza, the contemplative calmness of the Hindoos; he does not want to contemplate or to reason ; he wants to despise, to protest, to castigate. His clerical life seems to him now a mockery — away with the ministry, away with sermon- izing ! Doing, healing — that is the only true kind of worship ! Now the sister, in order to divert him, re- calls to his mind his favorite relaxation of former years whenever the cares of the parish or religious scruples were worrying him : the stage of shadow pantomimes which of many a winter evening his fancy used to people with heroes of sacred or profane legend. With youthful enthusiasm he enters upon her sug- gestion to perform such a play now ; and since the two theological students just then appear at the house, he decides on the spur of the moment to give to them his views on God and the world in this semi-dramatic form. After supper, while the gentlemen are smok- ing in the study and conversing with Fraulein CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 315 Esther, Prince lying at their feet with a face as innocent and devout as though he had never even heard of the killing of a field mouse, Lux retires to his little puppet stage, and soon he is heard from behind the curtain announc- ing to his audience the title of the play about to be performed, The Saint and the Beasts, a Biblical Mystery. Here the prelude ends. From the parsonage in the Black Forest we are now transported to the desert on the shores of the Dead Sea, and to the end of the book we remain in the sphere of a fantastic Orien- tal animal life and of ancient Jewish folk-lore. The first scene is on a rocky ledge over- looking the desert. A lioness, her cub, and a jackal are lying in wait for prey, and con- versing with each other. How they hate and fear and despise human kind ! The jackal tells with great relish of a ravine near by which in the time of his great-grandfather was heaped full with human carcasses — the aftermath of a batfle between the Maccabeans and the sons of Iambri. With a mixture of rage and ad- miration, the young lion repeats the tale of Samson, the lion-killer and tormenter of foxes. Then the conversation turns to the old lion, his father, who meanwhile is roaming through 316 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY the desert in quest of blood. In the midst of this, the low roar of the lion himself is heard. He is returning from his expedition, but not victoriously, in a frame of mind en- tirely different from his usual temper. He has met a man, but he has not dared to attack him! — a frail, ascetic-looking man with a face that seemed surrounded by the radiance of the sun ; and he looked at the lion fearlessly and kindly and passed by as if lost in thought! Who is he, and what is he, this strange, de- fenseless, and all-conquering being? What is his errand in the wilderness ? In the next scene we hear more about him, from the mouth of Azazel, the desert demon of ancient Jewish tradition. In the apocry- phal book of Enoch and similar works, Azazel is identified with Satan, he is the leader of the rebellious giants that rise against the Lord, and he is finally bound by the archangel Raphael to the rocks, to await in fetters the day of judg- ment. Widmann has evidently drawn from this apocryphal Jewish literature, but he has modified the conception of Azazel and adapted it to the central conflict of his whole poem, the struggle between the flesh and the spirit. Azazel is to him a gigantic, monstrous being, CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 317 the very incarnation of the horror and the awfulness of wild nature; but he also repre- sents the irresistible, untamed forces of prim- itive life, the rugged natural instinct not yet " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." He, too, is agitated by Jesus' appearance in the wilderness. He feels instinctively that Jesus has retired to it in order to gather strength in the solitude for his work among men, and this work Azazel fears. He fears that humanity is on the point of what he sarcastically calls "a great boost," a spiritual upheaval. Das rote Blut verdunnen und verwassern, Vertilgen unser flammend Element, Den starken Leib in kranken Geist verbessern, Kurz, alles dampfen was in Freude brennt, Das ist die Absicht, wenn ich's recht verstehe; Die schone, hitz'ge Dime, diese Welt, Wird, wenn ich zeitig nicht zum Rechten sehe, Zum Bleichsucht-siechen Nonnchen mir entstellt. To prevent this " watering of life's warm blood," this "improving of healthy bodies into feeble minds," this "changing of the gay Lady World, to an anaemic nun," he consid- ers his satanic duty ; and he sets about to block the way of the spiritual reformer. His first thought is of Lilith, the archtemp- 3 i8 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY tress of Jewish popular lore. He lifts his mighty voice to call her. It is a long time before she appears ; for she has spent the night in Jerusalem hovering about the sleeping Salome and whispering voluptuous thoughts into her ear. But at last she alights from a cloud before her master and asks for his com- mands. He bids her to tempt Jesus with her charms ; but to his great disgust he must hear that she has already tried to seduce him, that in the noonday glare of the desert she has un- veiled her beauty before him. But Jesus has looked at her with a dreamy, far-away, pitying glance ; and the words that fell from his lips, " Thou poor erring spirit," have not only dis- armed her entirely, but even planted a longing for sinlessness and purity in her heart. So Azazel must think of some other means of leading Jesus astray. Before we hear of this attempt, the poet in- troduces an irresistibly humorous intermezzo of animal life, drawn from the Jewish ritual and satirizing formalistic views of religion. A herd of wild goats are quietly grazing on the grassy slope of an oasis, when they are suddenly alarmed by the sight of an animal galloping at break-neck speed towards them through the CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 319 desert At first sight they think it to be some new strange beast of prey; they are therefore greatly relieved when at nearer view it turns out to be a goat like themselves. " Ah, chil- dren," calls out their leader, Queen Melka, " a false alarm ! The same old story again ; another scapegoat ! Apparently he does n't know what good luck his misery has brought him." Now the unfortunate fugitive has reached the herd, he rages in frenzy through their midst, warning them not to touch him, not to come near him : — " My breath brings pestilence ! A curse " — " What curse ? " " I am the scapegoat ! " "Is that all?" "Ah, but you don't know" — " Oh, yes, we do. The same stupid affair happens over again every year. But if it eases your mind, let 's have it." And now the poor, terrified beast blurts out the whole story of the Jewish day of atonement, — how he and his brother had been led to the altar, how the lot was cast over them, how the high priest drew his knife and sacrificed the brother, and how he then pronounced the curse upon himself, that terrible, frightful curse fraught with the 320 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY sins of all Israel and winding up with the com- mand, " Away with thee, away to the desert, to the demon Azazel ! " This whole tragic story produces no other effect upon the lis- teners except that of mild amusement over the gullibility of the poor, frenzied victim who takes the curse so seriously. They congratulate him for having escaped this murderous, savage race of men ; they assure him that scapegoats are particularly welcome in their midst — "We like goats with a past!" — they introduce him to a scapegoat of former years, who now leads a most jolly and enviable bachelor-exis- tence among them ; in fine, the tragedy ends as a satyr-play of exultant, effervescent gayety. From this truly Erasmian farce, a farce lift- ing weighty moral questions into the realm of sovereign playful fancy, we return to Azazel's attempts against Jesus. Azazel, as we saw be- fore, wishes to prevent Jesus from collecting himself in the wilderness, from gaining certi- tude of mind and firmness of purpose for his spiritual task. The attempt to seduce him by sensual charms has failed. Will it, perhaps, be possible to lead him astray by entangling him in the animal world ? If he is made to see the whole tragedy of animal life, its blind appe- CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 321 tites, its relentless cruelty, its horrible selfish- ness, and, alongside with this, its dumb suf- fering, its quiet steadfastness, its faithfulness to instinct, its defenselessness, its submission to Fate, will not this sight absorb his sym- pathy to such an extent as to make him forget his mission to mankind? Will he not fritter away his strength in a vain effort to help dumb creation ? Will he not be distracted and be- wildered by the nameless woe of all existence and despair to accomplish anything for the betterment of the world ? Will he not, in short, fail to find in the wilderness what he has come to seek, spiritual power and courage? Will he not return from it depressed and dis- pirited, not any longer a moral enthusiast, but a skeptic and a cynic ? Thus, perhaps, we may formulate the motives which induce Azazel to tempt Jesus by endowing him with the gift of understanding the language of the beasts. I frankly confess that the means by which this gift is bestowed upon Jesus — the magic ring of King Solomon, which Azazel forces Lilith to fetch from the bottom of Lake Siloah — seems to me the one point in Widmann's poem which it is hard to accept as a truly poetic symbol of spiritual truths. It seems too 322 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY artificial and too fantastic a device to satisfy our imagination. The change brought about thereby in Jesus' state of mind, in his under- standing of animal existence, is too sudden to be entirely convincing. But granting the poet's premises, accepting this device for open- ing Jesus' ear to the voices of the wilderness, we cannot help being impressed with the effect which it has upon the further psychological development. Jesus has been roaming through the desert without receiving an answer to his inner ques- tionings. The " Great Silence " is oppressive to him ; he longs for a word of enlightenment, for a message of sympathy from this vast mys- terious world about him. Now the magic gift unlocks to him the secrets of animal life ; he stands and listens, eagerly, breathlessly. And what does he hear ? A tale of endless, cease- less war and murder, of fear, of anguish, of oppression, of fierce passion and savage bru- tality. The scenes of wild humor and fantastic grotesqueness by which this side of animal existence is revealed to him, it would be a hopeless task to reproduce in ordinary prose. Perhaps the most grimly humorous among them is a quarrel of a flock of ravens over the CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 323 dead body of a rabbit, which finally leads to a compromise dinner, during which one of the guests, an old raven that has come from the North, delights his table companions with a gruesome account of the toothsome corpses of the Roman army scattered over the battle- field of the Teutoburg Forest. The impor- tant thing in all these scenes is that their effect upon Jesus is just the reverse from the one hoped for by Azazel. I nstead of being brought to a low level of moral energy, instead of be- ing dragged down spiritually and of measuring human life by the standard of animal instincts, Jesus is stimulated to a wider and freer hu- manity by this very sight of beastly appetite and avidity. He comes to recognize that ani- mal life is bound up by instinct, that herein lie both its doom and its redemption, its hor- ror and its beauty. He comes to see that sin has no part in it, that it is exempt from re- morse and mental agony, and that in so far it may stand to man as an image of the ideal life. But he also sees that its sufferings are beyond the pale of human interference ; that all we can bestow upon beasts is friendly sym- pathy and kindly forbearance. He learns the great lesson that acceptance of reality, of life 324 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY in all its infinite variations and degrees of con- sciousness, is the only sound basis for higher spiritual striving. Thus inwardly fortified, he is able, on the mount of temptation, to face the Evil One himself, to defy Azazel's final attempt to di- vert him from his human mission by illusive phantoms of his divinity. And at last — here the poet combines once more Biblical and Apo- cryphal tradition — he is surrounded by the heavenly host ; he receives from them joyous messages of a living, glorious, ever-struggling, ever-striving universe ; and he is led by the archangels toward a life of loving, self-sacri- ficing, sin-combating activity. It is self-evident that this brief and inade- quate account of a world-embracing poem can- not in any sense do justice either to its artistic worth or to its spiritual significance. But enough perhaps has been said to make clear that here there has come to light a work of genius, a work which will have a permanent place in the history of literature. Unique and incomparable as it is, it nevertheless suggests a number of other attempts to express in po- etic symbols the modern view of the universe. There are accents in it of Goethe's Faust, of CONTEMPORARY LETTERS 325 Ibsen's Brand and Peer Gynt, of Hauptmann's Versunkene Glocke. It is a most welcome and convincing proof of the fact that modern thought is not antagonistic to art, but, on the contrary, has enlarged her sphere by open- ing the eyes of mankind to the mystery and sacredness of all forms of life. VII THE FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE THE FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE Prophecy is a dangerous and on the whole an unprofitable occupation. If I nevertheless ven- ture to supplement these fragmentary sketches of German letters of to-day and of the past by casting a brief glance into the future of German literature, I do so because the present condition of literary production in Germany is such that the question of its probable out- come in permanent achievement forces itself upon us with more than ordinary emphasis and intensity. It is the principal features of the present situation and their promise for the future which I wish briefly to analyze. Among the symptoms betokening the ap- proach of a new era of true literary greatness, I would name in the first place the extraordi- nary receptivity of the German public for se- rious art. Foreign observers of contemporary Germany often make the mistake of assuming that our national vitality is absorbed by indus- trial enterprise and commercial expansion. As 330 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY a matter of fact, there is no country where literary and artistic questions are so eagerly discussed and evoke such serious consideration among the broad mass of average people as in the Germany of to-day. Wherever you go, you find the same proofs of this intense interest in higher things. In the lecture-rooms of the universities you see, week in, week out, hun- dreds of hearers, often comprising besides the regular students a large contingent of officers, artists, litterateurs, and men of affairs, listening with unflagging attention to learned discourses on the modern drama, on Wagner, on Nietz- sche, and similar subjects. In going over the weekly repertoire of the principal theatres in any of the larger German cities, you will find that the serious drama — Shakspere, Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, Hauptmann — altogether pre- dominates, and night after night you will find the playhouses crowded by the same thought- ful, discriminating, and responsive audiences. In the fine arts, a new work by Rodin, by Klinger, by Sinding is an event stirring the imagination and the critical faculty of large masses of Germans, to an extent quite unknown in America or England ; and such questions as the restoration of Heidelberg Castle or the FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 331 Hohkonigsburg lead to antagonisms and in- criminations in the newspapers and magazines hardly less heated than debates in the Reichs- tag brought on by an interpellation of Bebel or some other Socialist. Even the acrimoni- ousness and cliquishness of literary and artistic criticism, of which I spoke in a preceding paper, may in a sense be considered a concomi- tant phenomenon of a highly developed, quickly pulsating imaginative life. And whatever one may think of the artistic predilections and antipathies of the present Emperor, it is clear that he is in this respect also, as in so many others, a typical representative of the eager,- restless striving of modern Germany for high achievement and of its remarkable responsive- ness to ideal impulses. There is a comic element in the hypnotiza- tion of the masses by a man of genius. We cannot help realizing this when we think of some of the names which during the last thirty years have succeeded each other in forcing themselves upon the imagination of the average German. First, in the seventies, the educated Philistine had to swear by Wagner's Wotan and Rhine-maidens ; next, he had to discover a kinship between his own humdrum exist- 332 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY ence and the fantastic and reckless beings of Bocklin's art; then, in the eighties, he had to adapt himself to the rhapsodies of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and at the same time come to terms with the tantalizing, quizzical figures of Ibsen. Then, Hauptmann and Sudermann tossed him back and forth between the misery of every-day life and the ecstasy of a somewhat artificial fairy world. And at present, if we may trust the ponderous articles written by German critics on Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, he has the choice of discovering a new and exalted view of society in the former or a spiritualized conception of the universe in the latter. Truly, it is not an easy task for the educated Philistine to keep up with himself, particularly if he has a conscience and takes himself seriously. Fortunately, the influence of great men is not confined to this hypnotization of feebler minds ; its best part consists in this, that it awakens activity in others. There can be little doubt that this has been the prevailing effect of the rapid succession of eminent men who during the present generation have swayed the imagination of the German people. Wagner has created a Wagnerian state of FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 333 mind in thousands of people without mak- ing them a helpless prey to his bombast and pompousness. Nietzsche has opened the eyes of thousands to the delights of pure intellec- tuality without imparting to them his own irrational hatred of historical tradition. Each and all of the men who since the middle of the seventies have been leaders in literary and artistic matters in Germany, have helped to free the mind, to dispel phantoms, to loosen the spiritual soil, to sow the seeds of a stronger and nobler life. Surely, this is a state of things favor- able to the development of a great literature. Is there ground for the belief that we are in the midst of the beginnings of a great litera- ture at this very moment ? Statistics are of little value in literary study. Nevertheless, it is worth while to note that the numerical output — so to speak — of con- temporary German literature in works of high aim and more than temporary interest has been truly remarkable. This is particularly true of the drama, the form of literature which in every respect stands in the foreground of public attention and seems to express the sur- charged and explosive condition of the Ger- man mind most fittingly. For the last two 334 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY decades not a year has passed without the addition of some drama of serious import and spiritual significance to the German stage. If most of these dramas have superseded each other, if Wilbrandt's Meister von Palmyra or Fulda's 'Talisman or Wildenbruch's Heinrich und Heinrichs Geschlecht have practically dis- appeared from the footlights and seem to us now almost to belong to a different epoch from ours, if even each new work by Haupt- mann or Sudermann or Halbe or Schnitzler or Hofmannsthal crowds out for the time being most of its predecessors from the public eye, this is simply one more proof of the fever- ish, restless activity now going on in dramatic production. But it is not in the drama alone where this intensity and fervor of modern German life manifest themselves. Lyric poetry and the novel have come to be equally adequate mani- festations of the national striving for the ideal. Indeed, German lyric and reflective poetry, which in the seventies of the nineteenth cen- tury seemed to have dwindled down to a mere pastime of clever versifiers, is now swelling on again to a full-sounding chorus of genuine passion and power. The tempestuous Lilien- FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 335 cron, the contemplatively caustic Widmann, the weighty Richard Dehmel, the nobly sen- suous Isolde Kurz, the rich and luxuriant Stefan George, the dreamy, melodious Hugo von Hofmannsthal — to single out only a few voices from this strong-lunged and voluminous chorus, — how clearly there rings out in them the deep human feeling for the beauty, the fascination, the mysteriousness, the tragedy, and the grandeur of life ; how strongly there betrays itself in them the eternal longing of man for a wider horizon, a firmer faith, a truer knowledge, a heightened personality, a better social order. As to contemporary German novels, I think it is not too much to say that in most of them there is an extraordinary de- gree of vitality, of earnestness, of impetuous desire for going to the root of things, for re- vealing the essence of character. In the best of them — the works of Wilhelm von Polenz, Ricarda Huch, Helene Bohlau, Clara Viebig, Frieda von Biilow, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Wilhelm Hegeler — there is added to this an artistic finish altogether delightful. It is high time for the English-speaking world to awake to an appreciation of this remarkable outburst of creative power in German narrative 336 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY literature. The unprecedented external success of Gustav Frenssen's Jbrn Uhl and Hilligenlei — works which from the purely artistic point of view are by no means representative of the best German achievements in this genre — proves that the German reading public is equal to the German authors in willingness to cope with fundamental questions of life; and that the novel has taken its place by the side of the drama as a great national force. Contemporary German literature, then, in all its forms has come to be once more what it was a hundred years ago : a part of the in- nermost strivings of the German mind, of its ineradicable longing for completeness of exist- ence. Whether these aspirations are going to lead or, in part at least, have already led to a revival of that perfection of literary workman- ship which distinguished the great productions of German Classicism and Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century and the begin- ning of the nineteenth, it is probably too early to decide. So much seems certain, that the main trend of contemporary literature shows a stronger affinity with Romanticism than with Classicism. Obviously Romantic is the predilection of FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 337 modern German writers for the fantastic and the visionary, for the world of dreams and forebodings, for the legend and the fairy tale. In order to account for this tendency there is no need of taking recourse to the influence of French Symbolism. Hauptmann's Versun- kene Glocke and Widmann's Der Heilige und die 'Tiere are direct descendants of the period when the German mind was in search of the Blue Flower, when it longed for an exist- ence raised above the limits of actuality, when the whole world appeared as a magic garden of luxuriant wonders and infinite surprises. We of to-day feel, as strongly as did the con- temporaries of Novalis and Schelling, the desire to reach out into the sphere of the unknowable. As impatiently as they, do we beat against the bolts and bars of inert matter that hem in our vision ; as fervently as they, do we long for the freedom and wide sweep of the spirit. It is this feverish pressing on to- ward the spiritual, this abnormally heightened feeling of the inner oneness of all life, this clairvoyant anticipation of the true reality lying back of the apparent reality, which give to modern German poetry its most sublimated, and essentially Romantic, flavor. 338 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY No more distinctly Romantic a poem has ever been written than Hugo von Hofmanns- thal's Der Thor und der 'Tod, with its wonderful representation of death as the true life-giver, the great inspirer, the spirit of fulfillment whose sacred and mysterious power is felt in every solemn and portentous moment of existence. Wenn in der lauen Sommerabendfeier Durch goldne Luft ein Blatt herabgeschwebt, Hat dich mein Wehen angeschauert Das traumhaft um die reifen Dinge webt. Wenn Ueberschwellen der Gefuhle Mit warmer Flut die Seele zitternd fullte, Wenn sich im plotzlichen Durchzucken Das Ungeheure als verwandt enthiillte, Und du, hingebend dich im grossen Reigen, Die Welt empfingest als dein eigen, In jeder wahrhaft grossen Stunde, Die schauern deine Erdenform gemacht, Hab' ich dich angeriihrt im Seelengrunde Mit heiliger, geheimnisvoller Macht — Do not these words, spoken by Death in Hofmannsthal's symbolical drama, take us back to Hardenberg's Hymns to Night? Do they not bring before our minds the image of that delicate and inspired singer to whom the death of his beloved one opened the view into an endless panorama of life, and to whom FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 339 night disclosed the mystery of worlds hidden by the light of day ? No less Romantic, however, than this super- naturalistic reveling in the infinite, this con- ception of the whole world of the senses as a symbol of the spirit, is the intense, sometimes extreme, naturalism of contemporary Ger- man literature. Symbolism and naturalism are closely allied with each other ; they are both symptoms of an excessive subjectivism, of an unusually heightened, if not abnormally strained, inner life. It is a mistake to assume that the naturalistic artist is chiefly concerned in copying the external forms of reality. His desire to reproduce these forms in all their fullness and variety springs from the intense, though dim, feeling that there lives a hidden motive power in all these variegated shapes of the outer world ; that even the most incon- spicuous, the most fleeting, the most ordinary and ugly are parts of the grand central force which is constantly emitting new varieties of beings to the surface of life. He feels himself akin to this creative spirit residing in the depths of all existence, and he is impelled to emu- late its mysterious workings in the sphere of art. His art, therefore, although seemingly 340 GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY objective, rests, as a matter of fact, upon his own state of extreme sensitiveness and divina- tory perception of the inner life of things, and is an expression of a most subjective view of the world. And the same is obviously true of the symbolist. He finds the essence of things in his own self. Abandoning himself to the throng of images which arise from within be- fore him, he sees in them the true reality; the world of commonplace reality changes before his eyes into a world of sublimated substance, into a play of his dreams, a creation of his own being. It is not surprising, therefore, that in all epochs of highly strained nervous activity these two apparently conflicting tendencies of naturalism and symbolism should have been found side by side with each other. Conspic- uously was this the case during the decades when German Romanticism was at its height. Tieck's whole career may be called a constant oscillating between an airy, fantastic play of the imagination and an attempt to give flash- light views — as it were — of the involuntarily comic existence of the matter-of-fact Philistine. In Kleist's poetic temper there was a constant struggle between extravagant, ecstatic divina- FUTURE OF GERMAN LITERATURE 341 tion of a higher order of existence and an in- exorable sense for the minutest facts of actual life. And Amadeus Hoffmann, the master of grotesquely spookish effects, was at the same time a master in the impressionist manner of representing the "ewig Gestrige " and the mo- notonously trivial. The recrudescence, then, of naturalism in contemporary German literature is, fully as much as its symbolist tendency, an unmistak- able sign that we are in the midst of another Romantic movement, that we are agitated by the same throbbing desire to comprehend the world in its totality, to grasp and express the inner meaning of life, which pulsated in Novalis, the Schlegels, Kleist, Uhland, and Heine. Will the course of history be retraced a step further still ? Will Neo-Romanticism ultimately lead us back to Neo-Classicism ? Are another Goethe and another Schiller per- haps in our very midst even now ? These are questions which I am not bold enough to answer. CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S • A w& uU Y.C.. BERKELE Y LIBRARIES I CDS^flDS7bE