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 LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 GEEMAN THOUGHT
 
 LONDON : PBINTED BY 
 
 SP0TTI8W00DB AND CO., NEW-STRKET SQTIARH 
 
 AND PAEIilAMKNT STEEET
 
 ir-iio ^"^ '■'■• 
 
 SIX LECTUEES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 HISTORY OF GERMAN THOUGHT 
 
 From the SEVEN YEARS' WAR to GOETHE'S DEATH 
 
 DEUVERED AT THE 
 
 ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN 
 May & June 1879 
 
 BY 
 
 KARL HILLEBRAND 
 
 LONDON 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 1880 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 rJ 
 
 iLX
 
 ^"^ LIBRARY 
 
 ^ / UNIVERSITY OF CATJFORNW 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 ^r 
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 Readers acquainted with German, who may wish to follow 
 up the necessarily brief indications of the present lectures, 
 will find fm^ther information in the numerous histories of 
 German civilisation, literature, and philosophy, more 
 especially in the works of Biedermann and G. Frejrtag 
 on the first subject, of Jos. Hillebrand and H. Hettner 
 on the second, of E. Zeller on the third. In the following 
 pages the lecturer has kept almost exclusively to the works 
 of the great German writers themselves and to the follow- 
 ing, amongst many hundred, special works : Dieterich on 
 Kant, Haym on Herder, Helmholtz on Goethe as a 
 naturalist, Dilthey on Schleiermacher, H. Hettner and 
 Haym on the romantic school. No fault, the author 
 hopes, will be found with him for having reproduced 
 here and there the conclusions of his own earher essays 
 on Winckelmann, Wieland, Lessing, Herder, W. von 
 Humboldt, Caroline Schlegel, H. Heine, Gervinus, L. 
 Hoensser, the Berlin Society from 1789 to 1815, the 
 German Unity Question from 1815 to 1866, the history 
 of classical philology in Germany, &c. &c. (published 
 between 1865 and 1872 in the ' Revue moderne,' the
 
 VI PEEPACE. 
 
 ' Revue des Deux Mondes,' the ' Journal des Debats ; ' 
 the ' Nuova Antologia ; ' the ' Preussische Jahrblicher ; ' 
 the ' Fortnightly Review,' and the ' North American 
 Review.') They were so many preparatory studies for 
 a general work on the subject, which has never been more 
 than a project, the author having since abandoned this, 
 for an entirely diffei-ent field of research, 
 
 K. H.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Inteodttction. — On the Part op the Fiye Great 
 European Nations in the M^ork op Modern 
 CDLTrEE (1450-1850) 1 
 
 LECTURE IL 
 
 The Starting-point and First Stages of Modern 
 
 Germany (1648-1760) 37 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 The Seeds of German Thoitght (1760-1770) . . 79 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 The Reign of Herder (1770-1786) . . . .117 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 The Triumtirate op Goethe, Kant, and Schtller 
 
 (1787-1800) 173
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Romantic School (1800-1825) . . . .228 
 
 EPILOGUE. 
 
 ' Young Gekmany ' and ' Little Germany ' (1825- 
 
 1860) 264
 
 LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 GEEMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION — ON THE PART OF THE FIVE EURO- 
 PEAN NATIONS IN THE WORK OF MODERN 
 
 CULTURE. 
 
 1450-1850. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen, — You will readily believe 
 me, when I say that I begin these lectures with 
 great apprehension. It is the first time that I am 
 called upon to address an English public ; and I 
 am to address it in its own language, the most 
 precise and at the same time the supplest of 
 instruments in the skilful hands of those who are 
 used to it from their infancy, and have a complete 
 mastery of it ; but a dangerous one for a foreigner, 
 ever liable to miss the just measure and the right 
 expression, weighing too much here, gliding too
 
 Z INTEODUCTION. 
 
 lightly there, and becoming to a certain degree 
 the slave of the enmne of -which he oug-ht to be 
 the absolute ruler. I know that the audience I 
 have the honour to address is, if not a, parterre de 
 rois, at least a parterre of gentlemen, and that 
 consequently it will be as lenient to a guest as 
 it would have a right to be severe, if it were to 
 assume the functions of an impartial judge. 
 Nevertheless, I have thought it my duty not to 
 rely too exclusively on your hospitable indulgence, 
 or to overrate my strength in launching into these 
 new waters without the swimming-apparatus of pen 
 and ink. However alive I may be to the advantage 
 of speaking over reading, I must forego that advan- 
 tage and bring you my thoughts already made, 
 as it were, and congealed, instead of letting them 
 flow and expand naturally from the running spring 
 of the spoken word. 
 
 What renders the honour bestowed upon me 
 of addressing so select a public more perilous 
 still, is the consciousness that I have but an 
 imperfect control, not only of the language of 
 words, but also of the language of thought, pre- 
 dominant in this country and in our days — an 
 idiom, I am afraid, which I have still to learn. 
 Every country and every time indeed has its own
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 intellectual atmosphere ; and a Spaniard who in 
 the sixteenth century might have spoken French 
 as well as a Parisian, would have failed to un- 
 derstand Voltaire or Diderot, if he had come to 
 Paris a hundred years ago, as they in turn would 
 have failed to understand him. Now, I am per- 
 fectly aware that the intellectual atmosphere 
 of the England of to-day — which is fast becom- 
 ing the intellectual atmosphere of all Europe — 
 is not the one in which my generation has been 
 bred and reared. If I, for instance, have lived 
 long and intimately with the English of the past, 
 I know little of the English of to-day, or, to 
 speak more precisely, I rather know about them 
 than know them. In the whole tendency of my 
 mind, in my entire way of looking at things — 
 religious and moral, historical and scientific — I 
 have remained a thorough Continental, nay, a 
 thorough German, whereas the younger generation 
 of Europe is entering more and more every day 
 into the intellectual current which sprang up in 
 this island towards 1860, and has since spread 
 over the greater part of the Continent. 
 
 But this will require an explanation which 
 will lead us at once into the subject of these 
 lectures.
 
 4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 We may consider medieval Europe as one vast 
 family, which, for a time, thought that it might 
 Unity of remain for ever under the same roof, and 
 Europe. -^qj.]j {^1 common at the great work of 
 civilisation. One language, Latin — one Faith, 
 the Catholic — one Law, the Eoman — one Sover- 
 eign, the Emperor — were to rule supreme, and 
 shelter all the members of the family. In reality 
 this ideal was never completely attained. Yet it 
 governed men's minds during the whole Middle 
 Ages, and even in after-times haunted certain 
 intellects, which were thirsting for unity and 
 order, but were unable to find them in variety and 
 liberty. The law of nature nevertheless was 
 stronger than the laws of men : Europe outgrew 
 the parental house, however spaciously it seemed 
 constructed. 'No sooner had every hearth its 
 own familiar language, than those who were 
 assembled around it wished to give vent in 
 that language to the thoughts and feelings 
 of both their every day and their ideal life. 
 From the day when a philosophical thought 
 was expressed in a national language, that 
 division of Europe had begun, which, during 
 the fifteenth century, resulted in the national 
 monarchies of England, France, and Spain, in
 
 UNITY OF EUROPE. 5 
 
 the Italian renaissance, and tlie reformation in 
 Germany. 
 
 The division, not the disunion. The work 
 which Europe had done collectively and simulta- 
 neously till then was henceforward to be done 
 separately and successively, so that, as Algarotti 
 said of his own nation, ' the one who had got up 
 early before the others, and drudged a good deal, 
 might rest somewhat in the day-time.' Neverthe- 
 less the work done by modern Europe is truly one 
 work, although the workmen have several times 
 relieved each other, handing on to their successors 
 the torch of intellectual hfe : 
 
 Vitai lampada tradunt. 
 
 It is one stock, one capital — the capital of 
 humanity — which they have accumulated, each in 
 turn contributing the fruit of his labour. 
 
 I need scarcely warn you, gentlemen, that 
 these and similar expressions must not be taken 
 too strictly. Humanity is a living body, in which 
 every part is intimately connected with the other, 
 where every separation is felt like a sword-cut, 
 painful at once and endangering life. Still, as the 
 philosopher has a right to separate memory and 
 imagination, will and sensation, understanding
 
 5 INTEODUCTION. 
 
 and reason, wliicli in reality form the living; 
 individual, so the historian must claim permis- 
 sion to divide mentally what in reality is closely 
 united. When England exercised for the first 
 time the intellectual hegemony over Europe, when 
 Gilbert and Harvey, Bacon and Hobbes, Newton 
 and Locke were writing and thinking, Italy had 
 her Galileo, France her Pascal, Germany her 
 Leibnitz. Still, for any impartial observer of the 
 history of thought, the focus of the movement was 
 in this island. 
 
 Italy was the first of the European nations 
 to come of age and grow impatient of the paternal 
 jjjj]^, authority. As early as the beginning of 
 1450-1525. ^Yie fifteenth century she boasted of a 
 poem in the national dialect, which summed up 
 the whole intellectual life of the middle ages ; and, 
 a century and a half later, she began to eman- 
 cipate herself from this very system of thought to 
 which Dante had given the most beautiful, as 
 well as the most adequate, expression. The day- 
 work of Italy may be reckoned from 1450 to 1525 ; 
 but I must once more beg that such limits may 
 be taken cum grano salts. Nobody can fix the 
 exact line where one's arm ceases and one's 
 shoulder begins ; still the anatomist must needs
 
 THE ITALIAN EENAISSANCE. 7 
 
 make the division somewhere. Everybody has 
 present to his mind the events which, towards the 
 middle of the fifteenth century, awoke Italy, as 
 well as those more melancholy events which, 
 seventy-five years later, laid her in the grave, or at 
 least in a long and dull lethargy. You are all 
 aware how Italy discovered, as it were, the 
 treasures of Greek art and literature, how she 
 cleansed, mended, and made them accessible, and 
 rendered this purely lay and human civilisation the 
 basis of all modern culture. The important point 
 for us is to characterise in one word the nature of 
 the intellectual work accomplished by her In those 
 years of incessant and almost feverish labour. 
 The Italian Renaissance was the re-habilitation of 
 human nature ; and the instinct of history has 
 not been mistaken when, up to this day, it calls 
 the representative men of that age the Humanists, 
 their culture the humanistic. The Middle Ages 
 and Catholicism had subordinated the present to 
 the future, liberty to authority, the human to the 
 divine. They had declared flesh, i.e. the natural 
 instincts of man, sinful, and preached the sup- 
 pression or taming of them. The Italian Eenais- 
 sance reversed things. For the naive scepticism 
 of a Lorenzo and a Filelfo, an Angelo Poliziano
 
 8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 and a Marsilio Ficino, the present alone had 
 reality, and as such it was to be understood, de- 
 scribed, enjoyed, as the Greeks of Pericles' time 
 had tried to understand, describe, and enjoy it. 
 All that was in nature was good and beautiful, in- 
 stinct was the surest guide, natural forceand beauty 
 were the truest signs of and titles to superiority. 
 Let not the fact of their formal adherence to the 
 Church mislead you any more than their enthu- 
 siasm for Plato's lofty idealism. The Church 
 was for them nothing more than an indifferent 
 garment which a man would not needlessly ex- 
 change for another, or lay down altogether. 
 Platonism was a form of poetical dreaming, 
 not a philosophical conviction. What they 
 pursued was the knowledge of human nature, 
 mental and physical, and of human society, 
 not as they might be or ought to be, but as 
 they were. Whether Machiavelli is describing 
 political life as in his Prince, his Decades, his 
 History of Florence, or is depicting the social 
 life of his times as in his Comedies, he never 
 enters into the question of good or bad; he is 
 satisfied to understand things. So do the philo- 
 sophers, the poets, the artists of the time. For 
 them art is what Goethe proclaims it to be, what
 
 THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 9 
 
 our century seems to have so utterly lost sight 
 of — ' the interpreter of nature,' nothing more, 
 nothing less. 
 
 This might have been harmless, as it was right, 
 if it had been limited to Art and Thought ; but it 
 was the pretension of the Eenaissance to make of it 
 the rule of life and action. Our temperament and 
 our mental character frame our opinions, mostly 
 without our knowing it ourselves. It was the sen- 
 suousness of their temperament and mind which 
 especially fitted the Italians for their historical 
 mission; but it also led them to such lengths that 
 they incurred the penalties attached to excessive 
 indulgence in one's own thoughts and inclinations. 
 They saw everything in the light of art, gave to 
 everything an artistic form, regarded everything, 
 public worship, the State, even private life, as 
 within the province of art ; and the thought that 
 they were living as the Greeks had done justified 
 everything in their eyes. They forgot that in 
 Greece ' the Muse accompanied life, and did not 
 direct it.' What it came to, the names of the 
 Sforza and the Borgia tell us forcibly enough. 
 
 A strong reaction set in — a double reaction ; 
 
 '^he one popular, appealing to the inward authority 
 
 of conscience ; the other coming from above and
 
 10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 endeavouring to restore the outward authority of 
 tradition and collective force : the Reformation of 
 Luther and the Society of Jesus. The former, 
 although prior in time, had its full influence upon 
 the strain of higher thought in Europe, only a 
 century later in England, only two centuries later 
 in Germany. The latter acted at once, and it 
 Spain ^^^ Spain which gave rise to this move- 
 1525-1600. j^g^^^ When, ten years after the founda- 
 tion of the Jesuit order by the Spaniard Ignatius 
 Loyola, the famous Council was opened at 
 Trent, it was Loyola's successor, the Spaniard 
 Lainez, who became at once the directing genius 
 of that great Assembly which renovated Catho- 
 licism by giving it the form in which it has lived 
 and prospered during the last three centuries. I 
 find our time somewhat inclined to underrate the 
 importance of the part played by SjDain in the 
 history of Euroj^ean thought. Of course hers was 
 above all a negative action ; but she acted also in 
 a positive way. Not only was the reorganisation 
 of the Church entirely her work ; the absolute 
 Monarchy of Divine Eight, as it flourished during 
 the seventeenth century, was equally of Spanish 
 origin. Think of the difference between the 
 medieval conception of sovereignty, and the one
 
 INFLUENCE OF SPAIN. 11 
 
 which was the soul of Louis XIY., nay, even of 
 the Protestant James I. of England, and down to 
 the smallest German and Italian princelings of 
 that time ; between the variety of the feudal 
 royalty of the Middle Ages with its almost inde- 
 pendent vassals, and the uniformity of the modern 
 monarchy with its passive obedience and its 
 VEtat c'est moi. Now one might say, the mon- 
 archy of Louis XIY. was simply the despotism of 
 Philip II., tempered by the innate sense of the 
 French for measure and taste, enlivened by their 
 natural serenity and elegance. This, however, is 
 only one side of the question, and, for our object, 
 not the most important. 
 
 At the same time that the principle of 
 authority, both religious and political, received a 
 new impulse from Spain, and conquered after an 
 obstinate struggle the greater half of Europe, 
 extirpating Protestantism in Italy and in France, 
 in Belgium and in South Germany, in Bohemia 
 and Austria, literature and philosophy underwent 
 the same influence. At the very moment when 
 Italy lost the monopoly of Fine Arts, and high 
 schools of painting rose in Madrid, Seville, and the 
 Spanish Netherlands, a new poetry and a new 
 poetical style began to spread from Spain all over
 
 12 INTRODUCTIOIT. 
 
 Europe. Not only Italian and German Marinists 
 were imitators of the Spanish Gongorists, even 
 your English Euphuism of Shakspeare's times 
 had its origin in the culteranismo of Spain ; and 
 not the form and style alone, but the spirit also, 
 and the subjects of literature during the first half 
 of the seventeenth century, were in the main 
 Spanish. Only think of Corneille's ' Cid,' written in 
 1636, of his ' Polyeucte,' which might figure among 
 Calderon's Atitos sagramentales. Even in the 
 second half of the century, Moliere takes the 
 subjects of his ' Festin de Pierre,' his ' Princesse 
 d'Elide,' his * Ecole de Maris,' from Moreto and 
 Tirso. Grimmelshausen introduces into Germany, 
 Scarron into Prance, the Roman 'picaresco of the 
 Spaniards, of which Lesage and Smollett became 
 the recognised masters in the following century. 
 Much greater still is the influence exercised by 
 Spain on the philosophical thought of Europe 
 during the seventeenth century. The death of 
 individuality which accompanied or followed the 
 Spanish rule in State, Church and School, wherever 
 it reached, threatened even speculative activity. 
 Not that the philosophy of Molina and Suarez — if 
 one may call philosophy what after all was only 
 theology — ever really penetrated into the higher
 
 INFLUENCE OF SPAIN. 13 
 
 strata of intellectual life, even the elite of the 
 clergy protesting against it, as they did in our 
 days against the dogma of inftillibility ; but the 
 principle of authority which Spain had restored 
 all over the world was a powerful check on conti- 
 nental thought, a check sometimes beneficial, more 
 often most pernicious. There can be no doubt 
 that no society could live in the long run with the 
 principles, or rather the absence of principles, of 
 the Italian Renaissance. The restoration of 
 authority was the imposition of a salutary rein en 
 daring minds for whom the licet quia libet had 
 become a species of dogma. However, if you 
 think how Malebranche, and even Descartes, were 
 fettered in the movement of their thought by the 
 reigning dogmatism of their time, you may well 
 ask yourselves whether the benefit was not bought 
 too dear. Je trouve hon qu^on n'approfondisse pas 
 Fopinion de Copernic, says the great enemy of the 
 Jesuits himself. It was because Catholic Europe 
 did not dare to grapple with this opinion that the 
 leadership of modern thought passed from it to 
 the Protestant countries of England and Holland, 
 where there was no Holy Inquisition to interrupt 
 the researches of a Galileo, no unbending orthodoxy 
 to stop the mighty thought of a Pascal.
 
 14 INTEODUCTIOX. 
 
 The Eeformation had been a popular move- 
 ment, not an aristocratical one, as scientific 
 Protestant- ^-ctivity must be everywhere and al- 
 *^'"' ways. The great Protestant men of 
 
 science of the preceding century, the Reuchlin 
 and Erasmus, the Henry Estienne and Justus 
 Scaliger, were sons of the Itahan Renaissance, not 
 of the German Eeformation. Their inspiration 
 was a thoroughly worldly one, they acted upon the 
 aristocracy of culture, not on the masses. The 
 Eeformation sprung more from a moral feeling of 
 revolt, than from an intellectual want of liberty. 
 This is the reason why I scarcely mention it 
 here, where I look only for the formation of 
 European thought, as it manifests itself in 
 the higher sphere of select intelligence. For, 
 whatever may be the character of moral life, in 
 intellectual life the pa^tc^s vivit genus humanum 
 will always remain a truth. If, however, the 
 Eeformation was not a philosophical movement in 
 its origin, it had the most momentous influence on 
 the philosophical movement by its consequences. 
 Modern Catholicism, indeed, such as it was shaped 
 by the Jesuits during the sixteenth century, if it 
 did not combat openly the classical civilisation 
 and literature which the Eenaissance had un-
 
 PEOTESTANTISM. 15 
 
 covered, as it were, and given back to humanity, 
 jet knew how to paralyse its action in the most 
 effective way. Nowhere was the Greek and Latin 
 literature more industriously studied than in the 
 Jesuit schools ; but it was previously rendered 
 innocuous. The poison of free thought which it 
 contains was taken out of it, before it was served 
 to the youthful mind. The freest and most living 
 of all literatures became a collection of dead rhet- 
 orical formulae to be learnt by heart and to be used 
 as occasion demanded. The matter was repre- 
 sented as of no value whatever ; the form only as 
 a charming and clever play of the mind. Just so 
 three centuries later, when it was no longer pos- 
 sible to ignore the development of natural 
 sciences, the Jesuits reduced all the results of long 
 and universal research into manuals to be used 
 and mechanically applied in practical life, or to be 
 confided to memory for examination's sake, where 
 it answers so well, indeed, that the rue des Pastes 
 drills ten times more successful scholars for the ecole 
 polytechnique than any lay establishment, although 
 history does not say that it has produced one man 
 of science. For they are prudent enough to teach 
 the scientific data without awakening^ and stimu- 
 lating that spirit of research which is the ideal
 
 16 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 value of natural science, as freedom of thought is 
 the true ideal value of ancient literature. Not so 
 Protestantism. That also had restored authority 
 in place of the theory of unlimited liberty which 
 in the times of Italian Eenaissance made caprice 
 the supreme arbiter of life. But its authority 
 was not an outward one ; it was the authority 
 of individual conscience. Its main principle 
 was free inquiry, first applied to the Bible ; 
 but once allowed to exercise itself, there was no 
 telling where it would stop, and in fact, it did not 
 stop at the Bible. 
 
 It was not the cradle of Protestantism, how- 
 ever, which first saw these fruits of the new faith. 
 German Protestantism was temporarily quenched, 
 when the reaction against Spanish dogmatism set 
 in in Europe ; and poor Kepler was almost stifled 
 in his attempts to develope the system of 
 Copernicus. Germany was engaged in the most 
 disastrous and barbarous war that the history of 
 mankind mentions in its annals, when the noble 
 scientific movement of the seventeenth century 
 
 En"-iand ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ vigour. It was reserved 
 1600-1700. ^^ England whose great Queen had saved 
 
 for her the treasure of religious independence, to 
 give the signal of the new march onward ; while
 
 ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 17 
 
 Holland, which had come out victorious from 
 the long and manly struggle against Catholic 
 Spain, associated herself with England in the 
 glorious task. 
 
 This self-given task was the knowledge of nature 
 and its laws. The fifteenth century had, as it 
 were, restored the broken links of time ; the seven- 
 teenth unveiled space. The former had shown to 
 man his place in history, the latter was to assign 
 him his place in nature. The world was weary of 
 rhetoric and words, as well as of abstract, bottom- 
 less speculation. It thirsted for facts. It Lad 
 long enough accepted hond fide the ready-made 
 solutions of all questions oflPered to it by authority ; 
 it was resolved to inquire for itself into the causes of 
 things. The conclusions of an a priori philosophy 
 would no longer satisfy it. Secretly and almost 
 unconsciously it longed for a knowledge based 
 on observation, which should also be a methodical 
 knowledge. It was Bacon who gave words to the 
 innermost desire of his generation, when he in- 
 troduced and recommended the method of induc- 
 tion. No doubt, Copernicus had observed before 
 him and better than he did. Kepler was just then 
 practising ' induction,' from observations with 
 

 
 18 INTEODUCTION. 
 
 positive results, of which Bacon could not boast, 
 whilst Galileo was at the same moment employing 
 the experimental method which Bacon still used 
 very awkwardly. Nevertheless it is Bacon, not 
 Kepler or Galileo, who is rightly considered the 
 father of modern thought. Kepler and Galileo 
 indeed used the inductive and experimental 
 method somewhat as M. Jourdain made prose — 
 sans le savoir. Assuredly the progress of science 
 was not the less furthered because Galileo's grand 
 and simple nature, and Kepler's noble and unbend- 
 ing mind, were occupied with the search for truth 
 without being aware of the intellectual revolution 
 they helped to bring about. Nevertheless, for the 
 history of thought, the man who first spoke out 
 and formulated the new method with the full 
 consciousness of the momentous principle he 
 expressed, remains the representative man of the 
 age. It is the fashion nowadays, on the continent 
 at least, to look down upon Bacon, because he was 
 an indifferent observer and a sometimes puerile 
 experimentalist ; a little also because he was a fine 
 writer, and our time happens to be in a somewhat 
 suspicious disposition of mind towards fine lan- 
 guage. It is only just, however, to remember 
 that Bacon's whole education still belonged to the
 
 ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 10 
 
 rlietorical period ; that his very nature was of an 
 artistic turn ; and, above all, that, if he did not 
 do much to further science by his discoveries, 
 he advanced it immensely by the impulse which 
 he gave to it by establishing- the new method. 
 One might say that from that time only, the 
 ground was won on which methodical empiricism 
 could move freely. Not only did Hobbes take his 
 start from Bacon ; but all that England dis- 
 covered in natural philosophy from Harvey to 
 Newton, all that it produced in psychological 
 philosophy from Locke to Hume, would have been 
 impossible, if the Novum Org anon had not laid 
 down the laws of the exact method. 
 
 It would have been equally impossible if the 
 Protestant faith had not been maintained in 
 England during that time. The melancholy lot 
 of Kepler, G. Bruno, and G-alileo, would have been 
 reserved for these daring hunters for truth, if they 
 had not lived on Protestant ground. The three 
 o-reatest continental thinkers of the mathematical 
 age — Descartes, Spinosa, Leibnitz^ — could perform 
 their work only because they passed the greater 
 part of their lives in Protestant countries. One 
 of them carried even there the invisible fetters 
 imposed upon him by his first education. Nay, 
 
 c 2
 
 20 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Bayle himself, who forms the link between the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between 
 English and French thought, was obliged to in- 
 voke the protection of the Protestant governments 
 of the Hague and London. 
 
 If English Empiricism ^ was a reaction against 
 Spanish Dogmatism ; if Spanish Dogmatism had 
 been a reaction against Italian Humanism, 
 France, Erench Eationalism, which ruled su- 
 ' " ■ preme during the following century, 
 was a continuation of, not an opposition to, 
 the intellectual current in England. It was a sort 
 of contagion, indeed, which affected France, whose 
 most distinguished geniuses, from Saint-Evremond 
 to Montesquieu, from Yoltaire to Bufibn, and even 
 down to Rousseau, came in turn to England, and 
 even before crossing the Channel had put them- 
 selves to the school of Newton and Locke. No 
 sooner had France taken the lead than she gave 
 to the movement that particular logical character 
 of her own, which goes straight to the mark and 
 never shrinks from the last conclusions. The 
 great English thinkers of the preceding age con- 
 
 ' By Empiricism I mean the spirit of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, i.e. the mechanical and mathematical explanation of 
 Nature, as it was undertaken and to a great extent carried out.
 
 FEENCH RATIONALISM. 21 
 
 tented themselves with studying things and facts 
 without trying to draw from them inferences which 
 might be too dangerous, or applying them to 
 religion and politics. Locke himself paused in 
 deep reverence before revelation and the throne. 
 Not so the French. Their rationalistic turn of 
 mind and impatient temperament carried them 
 at once to the extreme of submitting church 
 and state to the same method of inquiry which 
 had been so successfully applied to nature and 
 mind. But logic and passion soon drove them 
 further than they first intended, and made them 
 often forget that patient observation and careful 
 comparison of facts, which had yielded such 
 extraordinary results in England. Already Des- 
 cartes — a true Frenchman in that respect — had at 
 once committed himself to the mechanical ex- 
 planation of things, by making the animal a 
 machine, and as he remained a spiritualist at 
 heart, never could quite manage to reconcile the 
 two worlds of matter and mind. The French of 
 Bayle's school — I do not say Bayle himself — knew 
 of no such impediments. They recognised no 
 authority whatever. Their aim was simply abso- 
 lute emancipation from all conventionality and 
 authority. Without being aware of it, they fell
 
 22 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 again into the authoritative spirit, against which 
 the English reaction was directed. Only it was 
 no longer revelation, nor tradition which was the 
 authority, but the senses and human reason, — 
 human reason independent, if not of natural, at 
 least of historical facts. They dreamed either of 
 political constitutions (which were to be the result 
 not of history, i.e. of conflicting interests, but 
 of a general, abstract, preconceived idea of state 
 and society) ; or of a natural law, which was to 
 replace the codes of traditional laws and customs, 
 just as they dreamed of a natural, or rather a 
 rational, religion, which began with being a timid 
 deism, very similar to that of Toland and Clarke, 
 and ended with the enthronement of the goddess 
 of reason, or with the complete denial of that 
 spiritual world, from which Descartes had 
 been unable to throw a bridge to the world 
 of matter. 
 
 Whatever may have been the fatal conse- 
 quences of this method for France herself, though 
 they are largely balanced by its salutary results, 
 the method itself effected the liberation of Europe, 
 nay of mankind. There existed an accumula- 
 tion of traditional forms, prejudices, impediments 
 of all sorts which disturbed the development of
 
 FRENCH RATION ALISM. 23 
 
 liumanity. It seems to have been the historical 
 mission of France, it certainly was her merit, a 
 merit which never can be sufficiently acknowledged, 
 to have laid the axe unsparingly to this thicket of 
 intellectual conventionalities, and levelled the road 
 for us. Of course she could not remove all — it 
 was not desirable that she should remove all ; 
 and much of the brushwood which she re- 
 moved, has grown up again. Still it was the 
 first time in history that men dared to look at 
 things and to order them by the light of reason 
 alone. Many national qualities had singled 
 France out for this task, many circumstances 
 helped her to fulfil her mission with immediate 
 success. The clearness of the French mind, as it 
 reveals itself in the French language ; the geo- 
 graphical position of the country between England, 
 Spain, and Germany ; the political hegemony over 
 Europe which she had won under Louis XTV. ; the 
 vast influence gained already by her poetical litera- 
 ture ; last, not least, the simplicity of the new 
 creed, based upon the most general characteristics 
 of humanity and common-sense, and carried out 
 by the most seductive of instruments, logic — all 
 contributed to facilitate her task. 
 
 This explains also the instantaneousness with
 
 24 INTRODUCTIO:^ 
 
 which the French idea made its way in Europe. 
 Generally, the- intellectual influence of a nation 
 only begins to spread abroad when its work is nearly 
 completed, Italy had already done her best, when 
 towards the beginning of the sixteenth century 
 her thoughts and works began to act upon the 
 rest of Europe. For more than a century Europe 
 still continued to go to Rome, Bologna, and Naples, 
 although Velasquez and Murillo, Poussin and 
 Claude, Rubens and Van Dyck, were capable of 
 teaching- their teachers. It was the same with 
 Spain and England. It is the same with Ger- 
 many, whose original and creative work was done 
 and well-nigh finished as early as 1850, although 
 the world is looking upon her still as the great 
 laboratory of thought for Europe. France is, 
 perhaps, the only country which began to export 
 her intellectual wares at once, even before the 
 whole store was gathered and ready. The time of 
 Voltaire and the Encyclopsedists was also the time 
 of Hume and Gibbon. 
 
 It was reserved for Germany to react against 
 
 the too absolute thought of France, and to begin 
 
 Germany, ^^^ work of restoration on a sounder 
 
 1.60-1825. ijg^gjg than that which Spain had tried to 
 
 lay two centuries before. It would be interesting
 
 INFLUENCE OF GERMANY. 25 
 
 to show, at some length, how she prepared herself 
 for her task, how she fulfilled it, and what were the 
 results obtained from it. To do this properly, 
 however, it would be necessary to prove how she 
 owed part, at least, of her intellectual freedom to 
 England and France, how from them she certainly 
 received the impulse to her own work, how she 
 renovated philosophy as well as history, how she 
 created several new sciences which have since taken 
 their place amongst the greatest achievements of 
 the human mind. Suffice it to state that she in- 
 troduced once for all the idea of Organism into 
 European thought, just as French Rationalism, 
 English Empiricism, Spanish Dogmatism, and 
 Italian Humanism, have long become integral 
 parts of the mental constitution of Europe. Is 
 it not in fact as impossible now for us to read 
 Homer in the same spirit in which our grand- 
 fathers read him before Wolf had written his 
 ' Prolegomena,' as it is for us to look at Nature 
 as we might have done before Newton had 
 published his ' Principia,' or at the State as we 
 might have done before Montesquieu wrote his 
 ' Esprit des Lois ' ? 
 
 There is, indeed, a common stock of ideas on 
 which we all live, in which we all move, often
 
 26 INTEODUCTION. 
 
 witliouL being quite conscious of it. Let even 
 the most convinced of Roman Catholics ask him- 
 self whether he could still look on the history of 
 mankind as St. Thomas or St. Dominic looked on 
 it before the Italian Renaissance had restored, as 
 it were, the continuity of history, and filled up the 
 abyss which cut humanity in two. Could any 
 man consider public and private life with the 
 unprincipledtiatue/e with which the contemporaries 
 of Machiavelli considered them, before the prin- 
 ciple of authority had been restored by Spain ? 
 Again, who of us could ever forget, for a moment 
 only, the physical discoveries of the seventeenth 
 century, and think of the earth, like Dante, as 
 the centre of creation ? And is it not the same 
 with our political and philosophical views ? Has 
 not the application of the French rationalistic 
 method of the past century moulded our mind 
 anew ? Could we still, if we wished, look on the 
 divine right of monarchy or on revelation as 
 Bossuet and Fenelon did ? Now something 
 analogous has taken place since the death of Vol- 
 taire and Rousseau. Another new thought has 
 become an integral part of the European mind. 
 It would be as impossible for Hume to write 
 his essay on ' National Character ' to-day as
 
 INFLUENCE OF GERMANY. 27 
 
 it would have been for Augustin Thierry to 
 write his 'Conquete d'Angleterre ' in the past 
 centurj, or for anyone to compose Voltaire's 
 ' Pucelle ' in ours. Why so ? Because not only 
 have there been discoveries in philology and eth- 
 nography which render it materially impossible 
 to explain historical facts as a Hume or Gibbon 
 explained them, but also because a new idea has 
 been thrown into the world, which has profoundly 
 modified our whole course of thought. Now this 
 idea has been elaborated in Germany, and it is 
 the history of this elaboration which is still to 
 be written, and of which I venture to ofier 
 something like a general programme, the outlines 
 of a plan, which it would require volumes to 
 fill in. 
 
 In speaking of the intellectual movement of 
 Germany, from the second half of the past century 
 to the middle of the present, it will be in- 
 
 Definition 
 
 dispensable also to touch upon her poeti- pf the Sub- 
 cal literature and her philosophy proj)er. 
 This seems to be a sort of truism. Yet it is not 
 so in my mind. What I am investigating now 
 is neither the literary spirit, nor the meta- 
 physical speculations, nor the scientific work of 
 the nation, but the whole Weltanschauung, that is
 
 28 JNTEODUCTION. 
 
 to say, tlie general course of thought (or rather 
 the general standing-point), which the German 
 nation made for itself, and opened or added to 
 European culture during those seventy or eighty 
 years ; and such a general standing-point is but 
 indirectly influenced by poetry and science proper. 
 Poetry is an art, and as such it is not subject to 
 the law of progress ; consequently it is, properly 
 speaking, outside history, a thing absolute and 
 eternal. The ' Iliad ' is as true to-day as it was 
 three thousand years ago, the main object of poetry 
 being the unchangeable part of man's nature. It 
 is not so with science, with thought, with politics. 
 These are subject to the law of development. 
 When we read in Dante's poem of Francesca's love 
 and Pia's death we are moved as Dante's contem- 
 poraries may have been moved ; when he explains 
 his cosmography to us, we smile, and perhaps 
 shut il suo volume. Here, then, we speak of two 
 different activities of the human mind, which 
 sometimes are at work in a different, sometimes 
 in the same, generation and country. Eng- 
 land's philosophical labour began only after 
 Shakespeare, that of France only after Pacine 
 and Moliere ; whereas in Spain Calderon and Cer- 
 vantes were the contemporaries of Suarez and
 
 DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT. 29 
 
 Molina, while in Germany Goethe and Schiller 
 lived at the same time with Kant and Wolf, Hum- 
 boldt and Niebuhr. This apparently accidental 
 fact has an important consequence. Poetry and 
 philosophy penetrate each other, when they are 
 simultaneous, to their mutual advantage in some 
 respects, to their great disadvantage in others. 
 The spirit of Calderon's poetry is also the spirit of 
 Ignatius Loyola ; in Schiller you hear the echo of 
 Kant's moral philosophy. The great literature of 
 the French, on the contrary — the eloquence of a 
 Bossuet and the enthusiasm of a Corneille — 
 expresses a state of thought in some points 
 directly opposed to that spirit of the eighteenth 
 century which the world calls properly the French 
 spirit. I might speak of Shakespeare, for whose 
 clear, deep eye there is no yesterday nor to-morrow, 
 no here nor there, without even mentioning that 
 he was a contemporary of Bacon ; I could not 
 speak of Goethe without reminding you that he 
 was a friend of Herder, and a reader of W. von 
 Humboldt. 
 
 There is another fact of great importance 
 which I could not pass over in silence if I had 
 space to enter fully into the subject ; and this is 
 the political state of Germany during the elabora-
 
 30 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 tion of her Thought {Weltanscliauung), and the 
 effect which this thought has had on the ulterior 
 transformation of the German State. This great 
 period during which the intellectual culture of 
 Germany was built up or at least accomplished, 
 was the time when her old society was dissolved, 
 and her political life was in complete decay. Is 
 it possible to be at the same time great and fertile 
 in public life, and in scientific and speculative 
 activity ? When we think of Plato and Aristotle 
 laying the foundation of all true and high philo- 
 sophy in the period of decay which had followed 
 the epoch of what might be called the civil war of 
 Greece; when we contemplate the political dis- 
 union and misery of Italy at the time of the 
 Renaissance ; when we see England contribute 
 most actively to the intellectual wealth of Europe 
 during the not very glorious reigns of James I. and 
 Charles II. ; when we observe France ruling the 
 world by the pen of Voltaire and Rousseau, sending 
 the missionaries of her thought to St. Petersburg 
 and Naples, to Copenhagen and Lisbon, and at the 
 same time defeated at Rossbach, obliged to sign the 
 peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and that of Versailles, and 
 driven out from India and her colonies ; when we 
 think of Germany producing her Kant and Herder,
 
 DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT. 31 
 
 ■while the Fatherland was utterly impotent and 
 helpless, or even under foreign domination, we 
 may be tempted to think that perhaps the two 
 activities are incompatible, or at least oidy excep- 
 tionally compatible. 
 
 And why should it be otherwise ? Must not 
 the different faculties of the human mind have 
 their rest from time to time and relieve each 
 other, if the sources are not to be exhausted before 
 the time ? There have been religious ages, like 
 the first centuries of our era and the sixteenth 
 century, entirely bent upon the creation and 
 definition of religious dogmas, passionate only 
 for religious questions and interests ; and these 
 have been followed by periods of comparative 
 silence, when humanity, weary of theological dis- 
 cussions, uninterested in religious subjects, 
 quietly accepted the existing forms of religion and 
 rested in them. There had been a great artistic 
 age four centuries before Christ, slowly prepared 
 during hundreds of years, slowly dying out during 
 hundreds of years, after a short and brilliant 
 blossom. Then the capacity of artistic intu- 
 ition lay dormant for a long, long time, till 
 it slowly awakened towards the end of the 
 Middle Ages, and came to a short but splendid
 
 32 INTEODUCTION. 
 
 efflorescence in the fifteenth century only again 
 to die a long death, which, I am afraid, is now well 
 nigh consummated. But here again I must warn 
 my hearers against taking my words too literally. 
 There have been eminent statesmen like Richelieu 
 in scientific ages, religious apostles like Savonarola 
 in artistic centuries ; so there may be eminent 
 artists in our time — but they act as isolated indi- 
 viduals. The main efibrt of the human mind is 
 bent in another direction, and there are but few 
 eyes open to take in what is still left of artistic 
 creation. 
 
 Why should not the capacity for political and 
 scientific life sometimes lie fallow, when the reli- 
 gious and artistic faculties require such temporary 
 repose? Why should they not have their rest 
 in turn? Why, above all, should we discuss 
 which grandeur is the better, that of Voltaire or 
 that of Napoleon, that of Newton or that of 
 Cromwell ? Men will never agree on that question, 
 because it is not a difference of opinion, but a 
 difference of temperament and character. Let us 
 only admit this one point. When a nation, in- 
 stinctively or consciously, feels that one day's work 
 is done and sets herself to do the work of the next, 
 leave her alone ; do not let us try to be wiser than
 
 DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT. , 38 
 
 history and nature. If for a time a nation gives 
 herself up to building, laboriously and awkwardly 
 perhaps, a new house in which she may live un- 
 molested and in conformity with her own history 
 and nature, let her do so, and do not ask of man- 
 hood the down of youth, nor of summer the 
 mellow tints and ripe fruits of autumn. All these 
 are at the bottom idle questions, which are much 
 like reproaching the apple-tree for not bearing 
 oranges. If the nation which has yielded the in- 
 tellectual leadership of Europe to another nation, 
 because it had more pressing work on hand — per- 
 haps also because it was tired and wanted change — 
 excludes itself from the intellectual life of Europe, 
 as Spain did during the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries, it will pay a penalty heavy enough. If, 
 on the contrary, it continues to participate in the 
 spiritual movement of Europe, as this countr}^ has 
 done during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
 turies, then it may be sure that one day or 
 another the leadership will come back to it, and 
 that sooner or later, it will reoccupy, even if it be 
 only for a time, the first place in the intellectual 
 laboratory of Europe. 
 
 However this may be, the assigned limits of 
 time force me to resist the temptation of giving 
 
 D
 
 34 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 even a sketch of German literature and philosophy 
 proper, still more of relating the history of state 
 and religion in Germany, and I must content 
 myself with simply tracing the outlines and the 
 general character of German culture, such as 
 it was shaped in the period I have mentioned. 
 Even thus I shall be obliged to have recourse to 
 somewhat superficial generalities in explaining the 
 growth and the nature of the German standing- 
 point in religion, literature, politics, and science. 
 I need scarcely add that my remarks have not 
 the slightest pretension to originality. I give 
 you the results neither of special investigation, 
 nor of j)ersonal thought ; but only what is the 
 common property of every cultivated German, 
 although I give it in the particular form which it 
 has taken by passing through my individual mind. 
 I speak only as an interpreter, not even as a 
 commentator, still less as a critic, and least of all 
 as a discoverer of new truth. 
 
 One word more and I have finished. A sub- 
 ject like the one which we propose to study, 
 the contribution of one European nation to the 
 common capital of European thought, can only 
 be successfully treated if we endeavour to divest 
 ourselves of all party spirit, national, political.
 
 NEED OF FKEEDOM FROM PREJUDICE. 35 
 
 and religious. Party spirit has its right place in 
 practical life. When it is a question of defending 
 one's faith, or one's country, of obtaining certain 
 positive ends only to be obtained by collective and 
 disciplined' forces, let us be of a party and stand 
 by it usque ad mortem. But when we try to 
 understand the history of mankind and to pene- 
 trate its mysterious ways, nay, whenever we meet 
 on a ground where those practical interests are 
 not endangered or threatened, where there is no 
 war and strife, where we are simply to live with 
 each other, to know each other, at the utmost to 
 judge each other — let us forget such unpleasant 
 distinctions, and treat each other as if we were 
 all of one nation, one party, one faith. Let us not 
 approach peoples, or facts, or ideas with a precon- 
 ceived judgment, nor ask them suspiciously for 
 their passport, instead of trying to ascertain their 
 intrinsic value. Let us not condemn or canonize 
 people, facts or ideas, because they may be of 
 Russian or Italian origin, bear a Catholic or Pro- 
 testant label, come from the Conservative or 
 Liberal camp. This would be true barbarism, — bar- 
 barism, I am afraid, which will invade humanity 
 more and more, in proportion as political 
 democracy advances with superficial enlightenment 
 
 I) 2
 
 36 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 and scientific lialf-culture. As tlie number of 
 those who take part in public life increases, the 
 more will passion — political, religious, national — 
 overrule justice and equity and goodwill. Tor 
 the man who puts himself under the thraldom of 
 party bonds must needs sacrifice part of the truth 
 which he knows, part of his moral and intellectual 
 freedom, part of himself. On the other side, in 
 proportion to the scantiness of their numbers will 
 be the intensity of the love of truth in those who 
 emancipate themselves from such passions in order 
 to look at things and judge them by themselves. 
 Let us all strive at least to be of those few ; for 
 they are not only the lovers of truth, they are not 
 only the sole free minds, they alone are also the 
 really just. And whatever our effeminate age 
 may say to the contrary, justice is still and will 
 always be what Plato and Aristotle proclaimed it 
 to be, the highest and manliest of virtues.
 
 37 
 
 LECTUEE II. 
 
 THE STARTING-POINT AND FIRST STAGES OP 
 MODERN GERMANY. 
 
 1648-1760. 
 
 Nobody can form a true estimate of the present 
 state of Germany, social and political, religious 
 and intellectual, who does not realise what was 
 her starting-point. All European nations can 
 boast of a continuous development from the Middle 
 Ages to the nineteenth century. Even the great 
 catastrophe which delivered Italy up to foreign rule 
 towards the middle of the sixteenth century, even 
 the Great Eebellion and the Glorious Revolution 
 which gave birth to new England, nay, even the 
 revolution of 1789 which destroyed the ancien 
 regime in France, had not the power entirely to 
 break the thread of national history in these three 
 great civilised nations. From Dante and Giotto to
 
 38 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 Filijacaand Dominichino there is one uninterrupted 
 line of growth and decay. The memory of Queen 
 Bess was still living in the time of William III., and 
 a Lamartine and a Victor Hugo have been lulled 
 with the verse of Lafontaine and Racine, and 
 reared on the ideas of Bossuet and Voltaire. Not 
 so in German}^ The Thirty Tears' War which 
 raged from 1618 to 1648 made a gap in her 
 national development, such as we find nowhere 
 else in history. It threw her back full two 
 hundred years, materially and intellectually, and 
 extinguished all remembrance of the past. 
 
 If you walk through the cities of Augsburg a.nd 
 Nuremberg, Liibeck and Eatisbon, you meet at 
 Germany ©Very step vestigcs of a high civilisation. 
 ^^Jith'^' Those churches, those town-halls, those 
 centurj'. palaccs— Only think of the Heidelberg- 
 Schloss — were mostlv built at the end of the six- 
 teenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century ; 
 and a hundred and fifty years before, ^neas 
 Sylvius (Pope Pius TI.) had been so struck with 
 the comfort of the German cities, that he declared 
 the kings of Scotland might rejoice to be as well- 
 housed as an ordinary burgher of Nuremberg. 
 True, the relative poverty of the soil always ren- 
 dered the accumulation of wealth difficult and
 
 GEEMANT IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 39 
 
 slower than elsewhere in two-thirds of Germany ; 
 true also, the discovery of America and the 
 consequent change of the seat of commerce 
 had in some measure checked the tide of German 
 middle-class prosperity. Nevertheless the material 
 and social civilisation of Germany was still in 
 the sixteenth century on the whole rather superior 
 than inferior to that of England and France. 
 If we think of the high culture of city patricians 
 like Pirckheimer and Peutinger, of bankers like 
 Fugger and Welser, of lords and gentlemen 
 like Philip of Hesse and TJlrich von Hutten ; if 
 we think of their intimacy with artists such as 
 Vischer and Diirer, with scholars such as Eeuchlin 
 and Erasmus, with theologians such as Luther 
 and Melanchthon, we at once feel that there exists 
 an intellectual culture common to the whole nation, 
 that wealth is not yet separated from learning, that 
 Art is not yet the metier of a guild. Not only 
 English and French courtiers, but also the highly 
 refined Italians, who crossed the Alps, found in 
 Germany a society quite on a par with that of 
 Florence and Ferrara. True it is that politically, 
 and even intellectually, the country made little 
 progress after the religious peace of 1555. Ever 
 since a foreigner, Charles V., had ascended the
 
 40 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 imperial throne in 1519, the German national 
 state seemed doomed to death, and all patriotic 
 minds felt it deeply. All towards the end of the 
 century looked with eyes of melancholy envy 
 on the national kingdoms of Queen Elizabeth 
 and Henry IV. But this is not the place to relate 
 the history of the sixteenth history. Suffice it to say 
 that the political unity of Germany had declined 
 more and more, that the Jesuits had won consider- 
 able ground, not only over the Lutherans, but also 
 over the National Catholics, as we might call all 
 the representatives of the old religion, who in 
 3rermany as in Prance resisted the new cosmo- 
 politan current of the Church. The whole of the 
 second half of the century was employed in that 
 double work of reaction, political and religious, 
 and the work was successful. 
 
 Still there remained the tradition of a German 
 state, there remained some public life, there re- 
 Germany rained abovc all a good deal of the 
 seventeenth German religion. All this Ferdinand II. 
 century. undertook to destroy, and, although he 
 was conquered in the long run, he succeeded only 
 too well. Germany came out of the Thirty Years' 
 War almost expiring. It was as if a deadly illness 
 had wiped out the memory of the nation in its
 
 
 / 
 
 GEEMANT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 41 
 
 cruel delirium. All the national forces, material 
 as well as intellectual and moral, were destroyed 
 when peace was concluded in 1648. There are 
 fertile wars and sterile wars ; civil and religious 
 wars belong mostly to the latter class. Still 
 the religious wars in France, and the Great 
 Eebellion in England, were light spring storms 
 compared with that terrible Thirty Years' War 
 which left Germany a desert. And what it 
 destroyed in this way was not a barbarous country ; 
 it was an old civilisation. Hundreds of Material 
 flourishing cities were reduced to ashes ; ^*^*^' 
 there were towns of 18,000 inhabitants which 
 counted but 324 at the peace ; ground which had 
 been tilled and ploughed for ten centuries had 
 become a wilderness ; thousands of villages had 
 disappeared. Trees grew in the abandoned houses. 
 At Wiesbaden the market had grown into a brush- 
 wood full of deer. The whole Palatinate had but- 
 200 freeholders; Wiirtemberg had but 48,000 
 inhabitants at the end of the war instead of the 
 400,000 which it had mustered at the beginning. 
 We are told that a messenger going from Dresden 
 to Berlin through a once flourishing country walked 
 thirty miles without finding a house to rest in. The 
 war had devoured, on an avera,ge, three quarters of
 
 42 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 the population, two thirds of the houses, nine 
 tenths of the cattle of all sorts; nearly three 
 quarters of the soil had been turned into heath. 
 Commerce and industry were as utterly destroyed 
 as agriculture ; the mighty Hanseatic League was 
 dissolved ; the savings of the nation were entirely 
 spent. I am therefore certainly not far from the 
 truth when I say that Germany was thrown back 
 two hundred years as compared with Holland, 
 France, and England, Even in so prolific a nation, 
 a century did not suffice to fill up the gaps in the 
 population, nor could two centuries restore the lost 
 capital. It is a proved fact, indeed, that Germany 
 recovered only towards 1 850 the actual amount of 
 capital and the material well-being with which she 
 had entered the great war in 1618. Thus, so 
 far as the number of homesteads, the heads 
 of cattle, the returns of crops can be statistically 
 ascertained, the amount in 1850 was, not relatively 
 but absolutely, the same as in 1618 ; in some 
 respects even inferior. 
 
 The social and moral state corresponded 
 with the material. Many schools and churches 
 Moral and stood abandoned, for public instruction 
 socia sta e. ^^^ public worship had nearly perished. 
 The highly cultivated language of Luther was
 
 MOEAL STATE OF GERMANY. 43 
 
 utterly forgotten, together with the whole litera- 
 ture of his time. The most vulgar vices had 
 taken root in people who had been reared from 
 their infancy in the horrors of war. Every higher 
 aim and interest had been lost sight of; not 
 a vestige of a national tradition remained. 
 There was no middle class nor gentry left; the 
 higher noblemen had become petty despotic 
 pi'inces, with no hand over them, since the 
 Emperor was but a name ; the lower went to their 
 court to do lackey's service. A whole generation 
 had grown up during the war, and considered its 
 savage barbarism as a normal state of society. 
 Only those who have read the '' Simplicissimus,' an 
 admirable novel in Smollett's style, but anterior 
 by more than a century, can have an idea of 
 the state of things. Suicides became so frequent 
 after the war, that an Imperial law ordered 
 seK-murderers to be buried under the gallows. 
 From houses and churches the old artistic furniture 
 had disappeared, and was replaced by coarse 
 and cheap utensils. The peasants' dwellings 
 differed little from those of their animals. De- 
 preciation of their products and taxation weighed 
 heavily upon them ; the innumerable differences 
 of weight and money, and the bad roads rendered
 
 44 THE STAHTING-POINT. 
 
 the sale of goods more difficult still. The adminis- 
 tration of justice was detestable, slow, expensive, 
 and corrupt. For all habits of self-government, 
 even in the cities, had gone; the gentlemen 
 had become courtiers instead of magistrates. An 
 unprecedented coarseness of manners had invaded 
 not only courts and cities, but also the universities 
 and the clergy. There was servility everywhere. 
 The theologians became in theory and practice 
 the supporters of despotism ; a Leibnitz himself 
 at times set a somewhat unworthy example of 
 humility. Cowardice had become the common vice 
 of the lower people and of what remained of the 
 middle class, in a time when the free citizens were 
 weaned from the use of arms through the numerous 
 mercenary troops, which had become gangs of 
 highwaymen. The prodigality, vanity, and luxury 
 of the higher classes infected the lower; the con- 
 tagion was general. Everybody wanted a title — 
 for it was then that the great title-mania set in, 
 of which Germany is not yet entirely cured. Theo- 
 logy in its most rigid form, superstition of the 
 rudest character, had replaced religion ; pedantry 
 had taken the place of erudition. The study of 
 the Greek language had almost disappeared from 
 the universities and colleges, where the professors
 
 SOCIAL STATE OF GERMANY. 45 
 
 vied witL. tlie students in vulgar vices. Drink- 
 ing- became a profession ; there were travelling 
 drinkers; at the highest Court of the Empire at 
 Wetzlar, an examination in drinking was exacted 
 from the newly-appointed assessors by their col- 
 leagues. Every baron had his mistresses, as 
 well as an Augustus of Saxony, or a George of 
 Hanover. ' At the Court of Dresden,' says a con- 
 temporary, * there are numbers of people who, not 
 being able to live from their own resources, sacri- 
 fice their wives to maintain themselves in favour.' 
 Gambling had become a general habit, and as 
 nobody had money to gamble with, it was the 
 public income which, through the channel of the 
 princes, ran into the pockets of the courtiers and 
 became the means of satisfying that passion. 
 Venality and nepotism prevailed among the nume- 
 rous ofiicials ; pauperism and mendicity among the 
 lower people; ignorance and immorality every- 
 where. The nobility and bourgeoisie, once so 
 united, were henceforth separated, it seemed, for 
 ever. Foreign manners and foreign language 
 were adopted everywhere. Eead the letters of the 
 Duchess of Orleans, read Lady M. Montague's 
 reports of the beginning of the following century, 
 or Pollnitz's and Casanova's memoirs, in order to
 
 46 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 form for yourselves an idea of the prevalent customs 
 and language. The restoration of the Stuarts, 
 and the splendour of the French court, acted as 
 dangerous examples; every princeling wanted to 
 imitate them. ' There is not a younger son of a 
 side line,' said Frederick 11., even a century later, 
 ' who does not imagine himself to be something 
 like Louis XIV. He builds his Versailles, has his 
 mistresses, and maintains his armies.' Now this 
 splendour, without glory and taste, without refine- 
 ment and art, without literature, without any 
 redeeming point, in short, became general at 
 the hundreds of German courts, and did not allow 
 the exhausted country to rally. Never, perhaps, 
 were things worse than towards 1700, when the 
 court poet of Dresden, Besser, sang his well-known 
 
 ode : 
 
 Der Konig ist vergniigt ; 
 Das Land erfreuet sich.' 
 
 The political state was not better than the 
 social. Ferdinand II. had not succeeded in his 
 p ,.^ J plans ; he was conquered. The States 
 state. became free ; religion also was free ; but 
 
 one-third of Germany was virtually separated and 
 
 * The king amuses himself : the country is delighted.
 
 POLITICAL STATE OP GERMANY. 47 
 
 estranged from tlie intellectual life of the nation. 
 Austria and Bavaria liave only in this century 
 begun again to take a part in it. All the wealthy, 
 the learned, the industrious, who would not give 
 up their faith, were exiled like Kepler ; those 
 who remained were broken in spirit. National 
 unity scarcely existed even in words and forms. 
 The Empire was organised anarchy : confusio 
 divinitus conservata, said Oxenstierna. Germany 
 had really and truly become a geographical ex- 
 pression. France and Austria governed her in 
 turn ; the Germans themselves saw in Louis XI Y. 
 the successor of Charlemagne, called to protect 
 them against Spaniards and Turks. The small 
 states, which the court-theologians called com- 
 placently 'true gardens of God, cultivated by 
 princely hands,' had in reality become hot-beds of 
 debauch and tyranny. Never had despotism 
 reigned so supreme and unchecked. And what 
 despotism ! Not that of a Philip II. or a Louis 
 XIV., which at least pursued high, if unjust, 
 aims, and exercised itself in grand proportions ; 
 but despotism of the meanest as well as the 
 pettiest kind. In the interest of their faith 
 men had stood by the Princes against the 
 Emperor ; now the clergy had become instruments
 
 48 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 of the former against tlie people, preacliing everj- 
 wliere the doctrine of passive obedience to the 
 ' monarchs,' as they styled themselves. The 
 ' monarchs ' in turn isolated themselves more and 
 more from the nation, which they governed through 
 the thousands of their servile and corrupt officials, 
 whose business it was to find the money for their 
 princely entertainments. Justice was as venal as 
 administration was rapacious. The old parlia- 
 ments had disappeared long ago, together with 
 the jury, the Landesgemeinde, and all that recalled 
 the old Teutonic uses and customs which, fortu- 
 nately for yon, survived in this island. Eeligion 
 itself, which had been the pretext of the war, had 
 well-nigh vanished. True, the nation, in the misery 
 of her political life, had thrown herself entirely 
 into Church life, but a Church life of the narrowest 
 kind, in which theology triumphed over religious 
 feeling, as it had triumphed over science ; for 
 science and theology again stood apart, as in the 
 days of scholasticism. And as religion had united 
 the classes, so theology separated them. Mean- 
 while Catholic proselytism pursued its work, and 
 princely conversions became of every-day occur- 
 rence. 
 
 It is easy from this to infer the intellectual
 
 INTELLECTUAL STATE. 49 
 
 state of the nation. Here also a gulf had opened 
 between the learned and the people, as in intellectual 
 religion between the clergy and the lay- " ^^'^' 
 men. The German literature of the sixteenth 
 century, the poetry and prose of a Hans Sachs, a 
 Fischart, a Sebastian Brant, had been, essentially 
 popular. A hundred years later there was as com- 
 plete a separation between literature and the people 
 as there was complete oblivion of what had existed 
 before. There was no theatre, and no art ; for 
 art did not survive the war. What remained of 
 it was of the worst taste, more hric-a-hrac than art. 
 It was at this time that the taste for collecting- 
 curiosities arose : the grilne Gewolhe in Dresden 
 dates from this period. In poetry there is the 
 same utter want of originality. The whole litera- 
 ture of the time is a servile imitation of the Neo- 
 Latin. literatures. Opitz imitates Tasso, Ronsart, 
 Ben Jonson ; the Silesian school imitates Marini, 
 Mile. Scudery, Dryden ; Gottsched and Canitz 
 imitate Boileau, Eacine, Pope. There was no- 
 thing national either in the form, the language, 
 the subjects, or the inspiration. Besides, the writers 
 were without a j)ublic. The bourgeoisie lived 
 in the narrowest social and intellectual circle. 
 The gentry were too much given up to ' gambling 
 
 E
 
 50 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 and drinking,' according to Leibnitz, * to be lovers 
 of science like the English, or of wit and witty 
 conversation like the' French.' The princes, who 
 might be compared to your lords, 'thought it 
 beneath their dignity to cultivate their mind.' So 
 wrote Count Mannteufel to Wolff as late as 1738. 
 Leibnitz himself ascribed to his countrymen one 
 merit only, that of industry. The language fell into 
 utter decay ; everybody in the higher classes spoke 
 French as the Eussians did twenty years ago. 
 ' Since the treaty of Miinster and the Pyrenees,' 
 said Leibnitz, ' it is not only the French govern- 
 ment, but also the French language which has got 
 the best of us. Our princes have rendered Ger- 
 many subject, if not to the French king— although 
 there is little wanting for that either— at least to 
 French fashion and language.' The official idiom 
 was composed of Latin, French, and German words 
 mixed together, and so awkwardly constructed, 
 that even an English legal document would be 
 easy reading compared with it. At the univer- 
 sities teaching went on in Latin. If there was 
 still some verse — whatever its worth might be — 
 there was no prose left in the country of Luther. 
 
 Nevertheless a quelque cJiose malheur est hon, 
 and ogni male non viene per nuocere. However
 
 THE MISSION OP PRUSSIA. 51 
 
 great may have been the misery, the humiliation 
 and the dismemberment of Germany, however 
 radical her material, intellectual and moral ruin ; 
 there yet remained for the nation at 
 
 ... . . The work- 
 
 least the possibility of a moral and politi- ins up, 
 
 , 1648-1763. 
 
 cal restoration. But she would have lost 
 this if she had fallen under the Habsburg yoke, 
 and if Jesuitism had invaded North and Central 
 Germany as it invaded Austria and Bavaria, 
 which were secluded from the intellectual and 
 moral life of Germany for more than a century 
 after. The two springs around which the new life 
 gathered and grew up were the Prussian State 
 and the Protestant Religion . 
 
 Ever since Esau of Saxony had sold his primo- 
 geniture for the lentil dish of the Polish crown, 
 the task of reuniting Protestant Germany 
 
 Political. 
 
 had fallen to Prussia, and she did not 
 shrink from her glorious mission. Scarcely was 
 the Peace of Westphalia signed when the Great- 
 Elector set about the task, as a disinterested 
 servant of the people, and one conscious of his 
 duty. Nor was it easy to do for Germany, in the 
 broad daylight of modern history, what Egbert 
 had done for England in the dim times of the early 
 Middle Ages, what Louis XI. and Ferdinand the
 
 52 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 Catholic had accomplished for Spain and France 
 in the fifteenth century, when means were still 
 allowed which were no longer tolerated in the 
 times of Cromwell and William III. This task 
 was the unification of a great nation through the 
 union and assimilation, or the submission, of all 
 the minor states. Nor were the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries times in which public men 
 could speak freely. The Continent was every- 
 where under the sway of absolute monarchy. 
 Absolute monarchy then guided the state with the 
 instruments at its disposal. These were the army, 
 the bureaucracy, the clergy, and the schools. When 
 'enlightened despotism' set to work, the first 
 thing was to improve and furbish up these instru- 
 ments, to enforce discipline, industry, honesty, and 
 to awaken the sense of duty. They were rude 
 masters, those kings of Prussia, who rose early, 
 worked hard, went about themselves, stick in 
 hand, to see that the schoolmasters held their 
 classes, that the tax-gatherers kept their accounts 
 rightly, that the contractors made no undue 
 profits, that every judge had clean hands, and 
 that every official was up to his task. When 
 they began to set the example of economy at their 
 courts in a time when extravagance and prodigality
 
 ENLIGHTENED DESPOTS. 53 
 
 seemed to be the necessary virtues of monarcliy, 
 they were sneered at of course as undignified 
 misers. When Frederick TI. received coldly ad- 
 venturers like Pollnitz and Casanova, who were 
 the delight of all the German courts, he was 
 looked on as a sovereign who did not know what 
 hon ton was. The nation, however, was not to 
 be deceived, nor were the thinkers of the time. 
 The friends of enlightenment, from Voltaire down 
 to Diderot, and from Hume to Gibbon, had strong 
 absolutist predilections. You all remember Vol- 
 taire's delightful tale about Truth and Reason 
 wandering about Europe after their long banish- 
 ment, and finding everywhere, except in Poland, 
 signs of a hopeful spring brought about by despotic 
 reformers : it is Pombal in Lisbon, Aranda in 
 Madrid, Tanucci in Naples, Ganganelli in Rome, 
 Peter Leopold in Tuscany, Joseph 11. in Vienna, 
 the great Catherine in St. Petersburg, Struensee 
 in Copenhagen, and Gustavus III. in Stockholm. 
 Even in the little capitals of Stuttgart and 
 Darmstadt, Lippe-Detmold and Dessau, they find 
 ' enlightened despots ' on a small footing. The one, 
 however, who was the type and model of them all 
 was Frederick. 
 
 Not unjustly. Not only was he the only ruler,
 
 54 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 who was in full possession of the culture of his 
 Frederick time, the One who had penetrated most 
 deeply into the philosophy of the age, the 
 one who proved the most completely disinterested 
 personally; he was also the one who, from the 
 outset, had the clearest conception of the duty 
 which made him the first servant, ' le premier 
 domestique,' of the nation. He was twenty-eight 
 years old when he ascended the throne (1740), 
 and wrote to his officials : ' Our intention is that 
 you should not be allowed to enrich yourselves, 
 and to oppress our poor subjects. You must 
 watch over the welfare of the country as much 
 as over our own ; for we will not recognise any 
 distinction between our personal advantage and 
 that of the country ; you must always have this 
 in view as much as that — and even more. The 
 advantage of the country should always have the 
 preference over Our personal advantage, when both 
 do not concur.' And he not only preached in 
 words, he acted up to his precepts. When seven- 
 teen years later he thought himself lost against 
 the coalition of Europe, he wrote on the eve of 
 Eossbach to Count Finck : ' If it happen that I 
 should be killed, affairs must take their course 
 without the slightest alteration, and without any
 
 FEEDERICK THE GKEAT. 55 
 
 body perceiving that they are in other hands. . , 
 If I have the ill luck to be taken prisoner by the 
 enemy, I forbid my subjects to show the slightest 
 regard for my person, or to attach the least im- 
 portance to vt^hat I may write from my captivity. 
 If such a thing should happen, I wish to be sacrificed 
 to the State ; and everybody shall obey my brother, 
 who, as well as my ministers and generals, will 
 answer on their heads that neither province nor 
 ransom shall be offered for me, but the war shall 
 be continued just as if I had never existed.' And 
 what he had proclaimed on his accession and 
 during his glorious reign, he still recommended 
 on his death-bed and in his will to his successor ; 
 i.e. 'if necessary, the sacrifice of his personal 
 advantage to the well-being of the country and 
 the good of the State.' It is this absence of per- 
 sonal ambition, or avarice, or thirst of pleasure, 
 this complete id© vilification of himself with the 
 State, — i.e. with an impersonal but living ideal, 
 which forms the moral grandeur of Frede- 
 rick, whatever may be the means which he and 
 all his contemporaries, without exception, used 
 for the attainment of their ends. It is needless 
 to speak of his intellectual grandeur: his deeds 
 are too striking to allow of its being contested.
 
 56 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 Frederick's attitude towards religious opinion 
 was one of absolute indifference, and ihe con- 
 sequence thereof was absolute toleration. He 
 made no attempt to unite the cburches as 
 William III. had done, or as his own grandson 
 tried to do. His policy was to let them alone. 
 * All religions shall be tolerated in my States,' he 
 wrote, ' and the ministers have only one thing to 
 look to, and that is, that none should do any harm 
 to others ; for here every one shall be free to seek 
 his salvation after his own mind' {a sa fagon). 
 He really was the first to emancipate Europe 
 religiously, to create the purely secular State. 
 ' A prince,' said Kant himself, *who avows it to be 
 his duty not to prescribe anything to men about 
 their religion, but to leave them complete liberty 
 in that res^Dect, who consequently declines even 
 the proud merit of toleration— such a prince is 
 enlightened and deserves to be praised by his con- 
 temporaries, and by a grateful posterity, as the 
 one who first emancipated mankind, and left every 
 man free to use his own reason in matters of con- 
 science.' Similarly, as a civil legislator, he real- 
 ised the dream of his age by putting natural law 
 in the place of traditional law and custom. His 
 Code (the Landrecht), in many of its articles.
 
 FREDEEICK THE GREAT. 57 
 
 reads like the 'Eights of Man' of the French 
 Eevolution and the American Constitution. Well 
 might Mirabeau say, tliat he was in advance of 
 his age by a hundred years. 
 
 Frederick has often been reproached with 
 having shown no interest in German literature, 
 nay, with having expressed something very like 
 contempt for German intellectual life. This 
 seems to me very unjust and unintelligent. When 
 Frederick came of age towards 17-30, and again 
 when, an ardent youth still, and thirsting for intel- 
 lectual life, he became king, his country offered him 
 little, and what it offered — Wolff's philosophy — 
 ■ he certainly embraced with ardour. But naturally 
 enough he sought his intellectual food chiefly in 
 the country which produced most of it, and where 
 literary activity was just then most intense — in 
 France. Besides, if ' he was a Frenchman by 
 education, he was a German by nature,' says 
 Madame de Stael with great shrewdness ; and if he 
 thought as a Frenchman, I might add, he acted as 
 a German. There was nothing in the public life of 
 Germany to inspire a poet or a writer, until by his 
 deeds he gave a national subject to poetry, and above 
 all a national inspiration. It is only after the Seven 
 Years' War — a fertile war, because a necessary one
 
 58 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 — that the Germans began to feel themselves a 
 nation again. Goethe in his own life has vividly de- 
 scribed the effect of the v^raron the general marasmus 
 of the time, and Gleim's poems, and Lessing's 
 ' Minna,' remain as witnesses of the direct inspira- 
 tion which the nation drew from Frederick's ex- 
 ploits. Nay, his indifference to the literary life 
 of his country was perhaps, I might say certainly, a 
 good thing after all. He allowed it to grow natur- 
 ally, spontaneously, without giving it a direction 
 in an academical or other sense, contenting himself 
 with levelling the ground for it, with making for 
 it a wholesome atmosphere. If Frederick had not 
 ensured absolute liberty of thought to Germany, 
 her literature never would l^ave been what it 
 became, one of the freest of all literatures since 
 the Greek. Well might Schiller sing : 
 
 Kein Augustisch Alter bliihte, 
 Keines Medicaers Giite 
 
 Lachelte der deutschen Kunst : 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Von dem grossten deutschen Sobne, 
 Von des grossen Friedrichs Throne 
 Ging sie schutzlos, ungeehrt.* 
 
 ' No Augustan age flourished, the kindness of no Medicis 
 smiled on German Art. From Germany's greatest son, from the 
 throne of the great Frederick, she went unprotected, unhonoured.
 
 PEOTESTANTISM. 59 
 
 But instead of complaining- of this indifference, 
 Germans ought to thank Frederick for it, in 
 grateful remembrance of Kant's words : ' The age 
 of enlightenment was the century of Frederick 
 the Great/ More than that, the time of the 
 resurrection of the German nation was the time 
 of Frederick ; for it was he who inspired all that 
 made the nation capable of self-assertion — hero- 
 ism, national spirit, religious liberty, modern 
 law ; it was he who gave life and strength to the 
 nucleus which was to become, and deservedly to 
 become, the German State. 
 
 I said, that next to the Prussian State, it was 
 Protestantism which allowed Germany to raise 
 herself out of the state of intellectual protestant- 
 and moral misery in which the Thirty ^^"^" 
 Years' War had left her. Undoubtedly it was a 
 petrified sort of Protestantism which had sur- 
 vived ; but it was Protestantism, that is to say, 
 relative liberty of religious thought. A revival 
 which assumed the proportions of a new reforma- 
 tion was slowly preparing as early as the second 
 half of the seventeenth century. This reformation 
 was not the work of Government, as that 
 
 Pietism. 
 
 of the -sixteenth century had been in 
 England and partly even in Germany. It was
 
 60 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 worked out and spread by individuals. So was its 
 influence an influence on tlie soul, on the inner 
 life, not on the constitution of the Church, still less 
 on government and public life. In both respects, 
 in its origin and in its effects, it bears a close re- 
 semblance to the Evangelical and Wesley an move- 
 ment which took place a century later in this 
 island. It sprang from a want of more intense 
 religious feeling, and so renovated first religion 
 and afterwards society. The old theology had for- 
 gotten the struggle against sin in the struggle 
 about dogma ; pietism left dogma alone, and 
 appealed to the inner voice of revelation. Pietism, 
 indeed, which we are so accustomed to look upon 
 as a narrow or narrowing view of religion, was 
 at first the exact contrary. It was a reaction 
 against the dryness and stiffness of orthodox 
 religion, where theology reigned supreme and 
 dogmas and forms obstructed the direct and spon- 
 taneous communication of the faithful with the 
 Deity. * As Socrates, the new apostles said, had 
 drawn down philosophy from heaven to earth, so 
 they wished that theology should be turned from 
 vain speculations and subtleties in order to show 
 the way of the spirit and of saintliness in the pre- 
 cepts necessary to salvation.' It was thus that
 
 PIETISM. 61 
 
 pietism brought warmth, and feeling, and life into 
 religion, and, although mixed up with mysticism, 
 acted as a liberating word. This is not the place 
 to dwell on Spener's and Francke's doings, on 
 the expulsion of the latter from Leipzig and his 
 transfer to Halle, which afterwards became the 
 seat of pietism ; nor can I enumerate the 
 schools, the charitable institutions, the secularisa- 
 tion of worship, the collective working establish- 
 ments which owed their existence to Count Zin- 
 zendorf and his Herrnhuter (Moravian bi'ethren). 
 Suffice it to say that the mild charity, the demo- 
 cratic simplicity of these men, won over hundreds 
 and thousands of souls, and that the movement 
 which spread from Halle became a general one in 
 the first half of the past century. Goethe tells 
 us indeed, that ' at this time a certain religious 
 disposition of mind was rife in Germany. In many 
 princely houses there was a genuine religious 
 life ; noblemen were not rare who aimed at true 
 holiness, and in the lower classes this feeling was 
 widely spread.' So it came about that pietism grew 
 into a real power in a very short time. Even the 
 ' monarchs ' began to dread it. The Margrave of 
 Bayreuth was admonished and rebuked for his 
 vices by a pietist preacher in presence of the
 
 62 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 whole congregation, and publicly promised better 
 conduct, and all that was required before he could 
 obtain absolution. When Frederic William I., 
 the king-corporal, was dying, his chaplain, a 
 pietist also, reproached him severely with his 
 accesses of wrath, his armies, the corvees he had 
 inflicted on the peasants, and with his failure to do 
 what he might have done for his poor subjects. 
 
 However wholesome and fertile pietism might 
 be, it was unable to make good the losses which 
 Scientific ^^^ reformation of the sixteenth century 
 revival. j^^^ sustained by not bringing about a 
 political and national reorganisation. This work 
 was reserved for others. Besides, pietism degene- 
 rated but too soon and became in its turn inanimate 
 and incapable of free action. The inner life, 
 however, had been awakened, and it was not to 
 fall asleep again, because those who stopped at 
 the starting-point claimed the name and inherit- 
 ance of the initiators. On the other hand the 
 reigning philosophy was not without influence 
 on religion ; but the reigning philosophy was 
 not yet that of Locke and Shaftesbury ; it was 
 the theistic philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, 
 and WolfiP. The difference is great. The French 
 and English amis des lumieres were Deists, that
 
 SCIENTIFIC REVIVAL. 63 
 
 is to saj, they arrived by the application of 
 the law of causality in the outward world {i.e. by 
 reasoning and mechanical explanation) at the First 
 Cause or Deity. The German Theists started from 
 Conscience and tried to prove the Deity by the 
 inward revelation of the moral law as it speaks in 
 the bosom of men ; and they invoked the authority 
 of Cartesianism as developed by Leibnitz, and 
 set forth and commented upon by Wolff, which 
 appealed to the innate idea of a Deity as the 
 strongest proof of its existence ; whereas Goethe 
 rightly said of the French of the eighteenth 
 century what he might also have said of the 
 English Deists, — ' They do not understand that 
 there can be anything in man which has not come 
 into him from without.' 
 
 The philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, and 
 Wolff influenced science and moral life before it 
 influenced religion. It was the sight of a superior 
 foreign literature which first awoke the desire of 
 a richer intellectual life in Germany. So the ad- 
 miration of foreign culture became the impulse to 
 the creation of a national one. For this, however, 
 it was necessary to emancipate science from 
 theology, as religion had been emancipated from 
 it already.
 
 64 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 Tlie liberation of man from the yoke of 
 authority, which was properly the idea of the 
 eighteenth century had been aimed at everywhere 
 as early as the end of the preceding century, even 
 in Germany. Whilst Wolff's moral philosophy, 
 which was only that of Leibnitz in a popularised 
 form, emancij^ated morality from theology, it im- 
 parted also a freer view of legislation. Puffendorf 
 followed in the footsteps of Hugo G rotius. He drove 
 the theologians out of political science and founded 
 a purely lay theory of the state ; and although 
 individually the German Lichtfreunde of that time 
 were certainly inferior to a Locke and a Bayle, their 
 immediate practical influence was perhaps greater. 
 Thomasius not only revolutionised law by his 
 teaching, putting it on a natural and rational 
 basis ; he revolutionised teaching itself by the in- 
 troduction of the German language into the uni- 
 versities ; he founded the German Press by his 
 weekly papers ; he j)ut a stop by his agitation to 
 that shame of the age, the trials for sorcery and 
 witchcraft ; he introduced a better tone amongst 
 professors and students ; he dared to say to 
 Frederick the Great's grandfather that the one 
 thing wanting for an intellectual and moral 
 revival in his states was liberty. ' If I must say it
 
 SCIENTIFIC REVIVAL. 65 
 
 in one word,' he wound up his address to King 
 Frederick, prompting him already to take the lead 
 of Germany by restoring liberty, ' if I must say it 
 in one word it is liberty which gives to all spirit 
 the right life ; and without it human understand- 
 ing, whatever may be its advantages, is, as it were, 
 dead and inanimate. . . . This is the one thing 
 which has given to the Dutch and English so 
 many learned men, whereas the want of this 
 liberty has oppressed the inborn sagacity of the 
 Italians, and the high-flowing mind of the 
 Spaniards. Such liberty would justify the hope 
 that in our Germany also noble minds might 
 apply themselves to wash away that shamefiil 
 spot — the belief in her own incapacity to invent 
 and do anything good and great.' These words 
 were spoken in 1705. 
 
 The University of Halle had been founded 
 under the protection of the first king of Prussia, 
 Sophia Charlotte's husband, by the regenerators 
 of religion, the pietists,who had been persecuted in 
 Saxony. These, however, had soon fallen them- 
 selves into the intolerance from which they had 
 suffered so much, and waged a terrible war against 
 Thomasius, to whom the king had offered an 
 asylum in Halle when he in turn had been driven 
 
 ¥
 
 66 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 out of Leipzig. Did lie not dare together witli 
 Wolff to preach rationalism in those halls which 
 the unworthy followers of Spener and Francke con- 
 sidered as their own realm ? Thomasius died 
 opportunely; Wolff was obliged to leave, when 
 the persecutors got the better of Frederick I.'s 
 successor. Then it was that Miinchhausen founded 
 the University of Gottingen, which henceforward 
 became the stronghold of rationalistic science. It 
 became also the hearth of that new philology 
 which paved the way for a freer assimilation of 
 profane antiquity. Gesner was the first to call the 
 attention of his pupils to the beauty of ancient 
 literature, which, till then, had been nothing more 
 than a drilling instrument; Christ insisted upon 
 the substance of it, the political, religious, above all 
 the artistical life of the ancients, and thus became 
 the creator of modern archseology ; whilst Michaelis 
 through his more methodical study of the eastern 
 languages, and Heine by his sesthetical commen- 
 taries, widened the ground and enlivened the 
 spirit of classical philology. 
 
 Meanwhile the material and social life of the 
 nation began to improve. The process, however, was 
 very slow, for many of the old hindrances still re- 
 mained. There was no national centre, no industry,
 
 THE LITERARY REVIVAL. 67 
 
 no commerce. The middle classes might be said 
 to vegetate rather than to live, excluded from all 
 participation in the State, shut up in the petty 
 existence of their small towns, contented in their 
 poverty, and unacquainted with the great currents 
 of life which were flowing elsewhere. Out of their 
 prose of every-day life they fled into the ideal 
 world until they thought that this inner world 
 alone had reality. As soon as the xheUterary 
 wounds began to heal, the interest in ^^'""^^^• 
 moral and intellectual things was at once re- 
 awakened. First it was religion, soon science and 
 poetry, which became the great aflPair of the nation, 
 not a pastime for leisure-hours but the one serious 
 thing, not an ornament of life but the national life 
 itself. There were no courts to protect literature, 
 as we have seen, or to guide it. The new literature 
 sprang from the spontaneous activity of the 
 nation. It freed the courts themselves from 
 foreign manners and foreign culture, and forced 
 the national tongue upon them. 
 
 Ruhmend darfs der Deutsche sagen, 
 Hoher darf das Herz ihm schlagen, 
 Selbst erschuf er sich den Werth.' 
 
 * The German has a right to boast of it, his heart may beat 
 higher : for he gave to himself his riches. 
 
 p 2
 
 68 THE STAETIXG-POINT. 
 
 There was no return, however, to the popular 
 movement of the sixteenth century, the bridge 
 which might have served for this purpose being 
 irreparably broken. It was a new spirit which 
 rose, individual, not national, but awakening at 
 least, though late, the national spirit, instead of 
 being awakened by it, as was the case elsewhere. 
 Other nations indeed have had a national history 
 and tradition, a centre and a society, wealth 
 and comfort, before they possessed a literature ; 
 in Germany it was the reverse. Literature came 
 first, and gave its character to the slowly 
 forming society instead of i^eceiving it from a 
 society already formed. The impulse came from 
 a concourse of isolated and individual forces and 
 efforts which ran into the same bed. There 
 was no political life, or, if there was any, it was 
 beyond the reach of the middle classes ; but there 
 arose a literary life, in which there was no 
 division into states and provinces, governed and 
 governing, upper and middle classes. Therein, 
 at least, the nation was one ; therein everybody 
 felt himself a German. What a man of talent 
 wrote became at once the property of the nation, 
 whether it was published in Strasburg or in 
 Konigsberg, in Frankfort or in Dresden. All the
 
 THE LITEEART REVIVAL. 69 
 
 eminent writers of the age travelled from one end 
 of the country to the other, and settled -where 
 they pleased. Nobody thought of asking whether 
 Lessing was a Saxon, Herder a Prussian, 
 Schiller a Wiirtemberger. They all formed one 
 nation. Thus national unity existed in literature 
 long before its political existence was felt as a 
 necessity; but it prepared and brought about 
 political unity in the end. Moreover, and this 
 specially concerns us here, this literature worked 
 out an ensemble of views which became the lay 
 creed of every cultivated German, whether Catholic 
 or Protestant, a creed which is still held by 
 many, I might say, by the whole elite, of 
 the nation, if not outspokenly, at least as the 
 tacitly accepted foundation ground of all their 
 ideas. My object here is to explain what this 
 creed was. 
 
 At the beginning of the eighteenth century 
 serious attempts had been made to endow 
 Germany with a national literature ; but every- 
 thing was wanting for original production, form 
 as well as substance. The language was still, 
 or rather had become, an unwieldy, awkward 
 engine, composed of fragments of French, Italian, 
 Latin, and legal phraseology. There was nothing
 
 70 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 in the common life of the nation to furnish 
 the subject or the matter of a literature ; no 
 original thought, no great action. The con- 
 sequence was that the new literature continued 
 to be what the literature of the preceding age 
 had been — a stammering imitation of French, 
 Italian, and English models; for Germany had gone 
 through all the phases through which the western 
 literatures had passed in the preceding centuries, 
 following them closely, but without being able to 
 give any life to its servile copies. Yet the writers 
 had an instinctive feeling of the task which they 
 had to fulfil, viz., the creation of a literature at 
 once popular and refined, national and up to the 
 mark of western culture. At the same time 
 they differed as to the way by which this aim 
 was -to be obtained, one side thinking Boileau's 
 * Art Poetique ' the last word of literary legis- 
 lation, the others invoking the authority of 
 English examples. Their appeal, however, was 
 not made so much to Addison and Pope, rational- 
 ists fed with Locke and Shaftesbury, as to 
 Milton, the poet of enthusiasm, and Richard- 
 son the sentimentalist. No doubt they also were 
 liberal Protestants, but they were not ration- 
 alists in the English and French sense of the
 
 THE NEW LITEEATURE. 71 
 
 word; they were believers, not in tlie letter 
 but in the spirit, and even the letter they com- 
 bated with respect. And this was still the spirit 
 even of the great literary generation which 
 followed them, and began to enter the lists 
 during and shortly after the Seven Years' War 
 (1756 to 1763). 
 
 In the first third of the eighteenth century, 
 French models still ruled uncontested, and their 
 advocate, Professor Gottsched, in Leipzig, 
 
 Character 
 
 was still the absolute sovereign of the of the new 
 
 literatura 
 
 German Parnassus. It was against his 
 pedantic and despotic sway that the so-called 
 English school arose in Zurich. A whole library 
 might be filled, not only with the weekly papers, 
 which for the last twenty years had been trying 
 awkwardly enough to fill the place of German ' Tat- 
 lers ' and ' Spectators,' but with the heavy volumes 
 in which the conflicting schools expressed their 
 theories and attacked those of their adversaries. 
 Even when an original literature had begun to 
 spring up, these literary and sesthetical discussions 
 still continued ; in fact, they continued almost to 
 our day. Modern German literature, you see, was 
 not born in a simple, spontaneous, unconscious age, 
 but in an age of criticism ; the war of theories
 
 72 THE STAETHSTG-POINT. 
 
 raged over its cradle, and with theories it was 
 reared. No wonder that, even when it had 
 reached manhood, it still retained something of 
 these early habits of self-conscious, self-critical 
 production, and appeared somewhat — 
 
 Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of tliovight ; 
 
 which does not mean that the German poet, bom 
 in a library, was not to become capable of the fresh- 
 est and most thrilling: utterances as often as he fled 
 from the dust of his book-shelves into the forests 
 and the fields of Franconia and Swabia. Yet you 
 must not forget that this literature was the work 
 of the learned middle-classes, not of idle and 
 wealthy gentlemen, but of needy and hard-work- 
 ing schoolmasters and clergymen. As there was 
 no great national Court, so there was no rich no- 
 bility and gentry to cultivate letters. Nor 
 was there a noblesse de robe, as in France, or 
 a class of well-to-do merchants, as in England, 
 who might have filled up their leisure hours 
 with literary pursuits. Germany boasts of no 
 Montaigne or Montesquieu, no Shaftesbury or 
 Bolingbroke. Men of the social position of 
 Addison and Fielding, of Hume and Gibbon, did 
 not exist, and, when they existed, did not think of 
 literature. This, and the seclusion from political
 
 THE NEW LITEKATUEE. 73 
 
 life, and tlie absence of publicity, gave German 
 literature its particular character, its wonderful 
 freedom from all general fashion, form, style, con- 
 ventionality, its unique individualism, its daring 
 thought and imagination ; and also its somewhat 
 abstract nature. It sometimes strikes one as a soul 
 without a body. We at once feel that its writers 
 have never known great life, whether social or po- 
 litical. It betrays at the same time a general aver- 
 sion to action and practical aims, as if the inner 
 life alone had any worth and reality. It was 
 only after the terrible blows which in the begin- 
 ning of this century awoke them from their drea,my 
 or ideal life, that the Germans began to compre- 
 hend that their new intellectual liberty could live 
 and last only in an independent and respected 
 State. 
 
 To revert, however, to the literary strifes of 
 the first half of the past century, it was the 
 English tendency which got the better TheEns- 
 of the contest ; and Richardson was, per- 
 haps, next to Thomson, the writer who contri- 
 buted most to this result. Clumsy translations of 
 Young's ' Night Thoughts,' followed the heavy 
 metrical versions of ' Paradise Lost,' and the 
 ' Seasons.' Their inspiration was, after all, more
 
 74 THE STAETIXG-POIN'T. 
 
 congenial to tlie G-emian nature, and more adapted 
 to the social and moral state of the German 
 middle-class than Eacine and Corneille, or even 
 Moliere and Lesage. Under this influence — for it 
 is a strange fact that the foundation of a national 
 culture was stOl sought through imitation — 
 and under the tutorship of theoretical criticism, 
 arose a tame and modest, half-sentimental, half- 
 moralising sort of literature, wliich reflected the 
 petty, prosy, every-day life of the small cities of 
 Germany, and which pleased because it reflected 
 it. This humble, timid collection of satires, fables, 
 and idyls, had, howerer, the one merit, till now 
 wanting in all the literary productions of the 
 country, the merit of depicting German life and 
 giving expression to German feelings, instead of 
 describing French and Italian manners, ideas, 
 and characters. This literature was certainly as 
 poor I dare not say poetically, but at least in 
 rhyme and style as the life it depicted — the 
 petty customs, defects, weaknesses, and interests 
 of the poor tutored German middle-class. A host 
 of Dr. Primroses came forward even before the 
 English Dr. Primrose came to life ; but they were 
 Primroses without the delightful irony, if not 
 without the benevolence, of Olivia's father; and
 
 THE SETE^' TEAES' WAR. 75 
 
 who had never come into contact witli gentlemen 
 like Sir William Thomliill. Few people read 
 GeUert's novels, Eabener's satires, Zacharia's 
 comic poems nowadays ; still the historian will find 
 nowhere a tmer image of the modest conditions 
 of the time than in these pale pictures, which 
 resemble the bleached old photographs of 18-50, 
 to which we still grant a place in onr sitting- 
 room. 
 
 The Seven Tears' "War soon roused the national 
 spirit to new life after centuries of slumber. For 
 the first time Germans might once more -j^g seyen 
 feel proud of their deeds, and boast of a y^=^"^^- 
 national hero ; and Gleim's ' Grenadiersongs ' 
 (1758) gave vent to this feeling. The German 
 'Tvrtseus,' as he was ambitiouslv called, was a 
 very mild Tyrtseus, if you like ; still his inspiration 
 was a more visrorous one than that of the timid 
 ^sdrsentimental friends of his vouth. Together 
 with him, however, appeared on the field the 
 somewhat younger generation of the great in- 
 tellectual warriors who definitively freed the 
 German mind from the foreign yoke and the 
 bondage of narrow tradition, and who cleared 
 the ground upon which those who followed were 
 to build.
 
 76 THE STARTING-POINT. 
 
 Our new literature only began properly to- 
 wards 1760. The hundred precedmg years were 
 Recapituia- entirely filled with the slow and weari- 
 some process of recovery from the material 
 misery and the intellectual, as well as moral decay 
 in which the Thirty Years' War had left us. It 
 required these hundred years before people could 
 attain even that modest degree of well-being which 
 allowed them to give a thought to something 
 else than the care for material existence. It 
 required these hundred years to free German 
 Religion, as well as German Science, from the 
 thraldom of orthodox theology. It required these 
 hundred years to create the beginnings only of a 
 national State, and to reform some, at least, of 
 the abuses of the Empire. It required yet a 
 hundred years more of incessant toil, and four 
 generations of men of genius and of talent, to bring 
 about a really national literature and a really 
 national State, looked up to and respected by the 
 world. No doubt, as this our new State still 
 bears the stamp of its origin — the bureaucratical 
 and military monarchy of Frederick the Great, — 
 so our new literature, very different in this respect 
 from our literature of the Middle Ages, as well as 
 from that of the sixteenth century, is a literature
 
 EECAPITULATION. 77 
 
 of scholars and officials. It reflects tlie intellectual 
 and moral life of that class. It does not depict a 
 large social and public life, which did not exist 
 when it sprang up, and which has scarcely come 
 even now, when all has been done that was neces- 
 sary to clear the ground for it — perhaps because our 
 history, our intellectual and moral aptitudes, make 
 us less fit than other nations for such a life, and 
 assign to us other and by no means lower fields of 
 activity. Be this as it may, you will never under- 
 stand our political and literary conditions if you 
 forget the starting-point of modern Germany ; if 
 you do not remember that, whereas the German 
 of the sixteenth century was fully on a par 
 with the Englishman, Frenchman, and Italian, in 
 material and intellectual, as well as in moral and 
 social, respects, the German of the seventeenth 
 century was thrown back into utter barbarism by 
 the Thirty Years' War. When our country, at 
 the end of that cruel time, towards 1650, set out 
 on a new career, she had everything to rebuild 
 anew; state and religion, wealth and society, 
 science and literature, language, even, and mo- 
 rality. The start of two hundred years, which 
 western Europe thus had over Germany, is still 
 apparent in our society and manners, in our
 
 78 THE STAETING-POINT. 
 
 wealth and comfort. We have the presumption 
 to believe that intellectually and morally — politi- 
 cally, also, since 1866, if we do not cling to the 
 prejudice that parliamentary government is the 
 only one worthy of a civilised nation — we have 
 again come up with our western neighbours in 
 the great race of civilisation, in which men are 
 not rivals but fellow-workers.
 
 79 
 
 LECTUEB III. 
 
 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 (1760-1770.) 
 
 It was during, and shortly after, the Seven Years' 
 War (1756 to 1763) that the first generation of 
 the great founders of our national culture made 
 
 their appearance. 
 
 There are three generations, indeed, which 
 followed each other at twenty years' distance, and 
 which almost entirely did the great work 
 of German culture, of which I have genera- 
 
 T • 1 tions. 
 
 undertaken to trace the outlines in these 
 short lectures. The first, born between 1715 and 
 1735, the generation of Klopstock, Wieland, Winc- 
 kelmann, Kant, Mendelssohn, above all, Lessing, 
 whose principal works were published between 
 1750 and 1770, when these men were from thirty 
 to fifty years old. The second generation, born in 
 the middle of the century, included Herder and 
 Voss, Klinger and Biirger, Goethe and Schiller,
 
 80 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 whose greatest and most fertile activity displayed 
 itself equally during tlieir'fuU manhood, from 1770 
 to 1800. Finally, in the third generation, born be- 
 tween ] 760 and 1780, the most conspicuous names 
 were those of the two Schlegels, the two Humboldts, 
 Tieck, Rahel, Schleiermacher, Niebuhr, Savigny 
 and Schelling, whose followers acted more parti- 
 cularly in the first quarter of the present century. 
 The two schools which, from 1825, to 1850, 
 influenced the German mind most powerfully, the 
 school of Hegel and that of Gervinus, only con- 
 tinued, developed, summed up, applied, or contra- 
 dicted the main ideas of the three preceding great 
 generations ; they did not properly put forth and 
 circulate new ideas. 
 
 It was a manly and robust generation, the 
 generation of Klopstock, Wieland, Lessing, which 
 was also that of Frederick, Winckelmann, and 
 Kant. They almost all were born in the humblest 
 stations of life, and fought their way through 
 direst privation ; but the struggle for life was not 
 capable of stifling in them the sense of the ideal. 
 
 You all know how Klopstock was formed by 
 Kio stock English, Wieland by French models. 
 bom 1724. "pjjgy -were, however, no servile imitators ; 
 and they are thus distinguished from the Brookes
 
 KLOPSTOCK. 81 
 
 and Gottsclieds of the preceding age. TLey 
 filled their works with a spirit of their own, and 
 modified even the forms which they borrowed, so 
 as to accommodate them to the genius of their 
 own language. The tendency of their age was 
 still that of the beginning of the century : a 
 deeply religious spirit, but one which believed more 
 in the continuous revelation of God throuorh con- 
 science than in the historical revelation of the 
 Orthodox, or the argumentation of the Deists, 
 rejDresenting God as the great architect of this 
 material machine. It was partly because Klopstock 
 gave a poetical expression to this feeling that his 
 poem acted so powerfully ; and partly also because 
 its form seemed an entirely German one, although 
 the verse was the classical hexameter of the 
 ancients, now for the first time quite assimilated 
 and mastered, as that generation believed. Ger- 
 many imagined that she too possessed a * Paradise 
 Lost,' and welcomed in the bard of the * Messiah ' 
 the interpreter of its innermost thought. Then at 
 last Germany had a German poem, both in sub- 
 stance and form ; and neither substance nor form 
 was of the mediocre, prosy, and humble kind to 
 which German genius seemed till then condemned. 
 Thought and language soai'ed high — too high, 
 
 G
 
 82 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 perhaps, for us to follow it still with our clipped 
 wings — yet it proved to the nation that she might 
 attempt what other nations had successfully at- 
 tempted before her. 
 
 Whilst Klopstock's inspiration was Christian 
 
 and Teutonic, that of Wieland was more ration- 
 
 Wieiand alistic and cosmopolitan. If Klopstock 
 
 born 1733. -j^g^^gi^^ ^j^g German language strength 
 
 and flight, Wieland gave it fluency and elegance. 
 He became, indeed, the very creator of a simple, 
 easy, and natural prose, the most necessary instru- 
 ment of culture. German prose before Wieland 
 was pedantic, stiff, intricate : with some writers 
 it is so still. Wieland gave it the tone of polite 
 society ; taught it how to handle iron}^ how 
 to be witty with grace and decorum. He him- 
 self had belonged entirely to the school of the 
 French, particularly to that of Yoltaire, and 
 among the English, Shaftesbury, the virtuoso, had 
 been the chief object of his study and predilection. 
 When he wrote his philosophical novels and minor 
 poems in Voltaire's manner, Germany seemed at 
 first astonished to see that her heavy language 
 could be capable of such charming, jDrattling talk. 
 Wieland won over to it the higher classes, then 
 exclusively bred in French ; he made German Ian-
 
 WIELAND. 83 
 
 guage and literature 7iq^d7% (admissible at Court). 
 At the same time lie popularised the English and 
 French philosophy of the time. The popular 
 philosophers of Berlin, such as Mendelssohn and 
 Nicolai, the friends of Lessing, would have been 
 impossible without Wieland ; and their influence 
 was great. As Klopstock and his followers had 
 given a poetical expression to the religious feeling 
 of the nation, independent of, and superior to, 
 dogma and outward w^orship, so Wieland directed 
 the war of the century against sacerdotalism and 
 theology with the somewhat blunted, but not less 
 effective, arms, which German free-thought has 
 ever since used against Church and dogma ; for 
 Germany seemed to have found at least the proper 
 vehicle to enable her to join in the movement of 
 Western culture, instead of following it at a dis- 
 tance. Now, only, she seemed to have made that 
 culture completely her own. 
 
 This was necessary ; but it was not suffi- 
 cient. She wanted also to be able to go on alone 
 and without anybody's help. She was no longer 
 the province of a foreign civilisation, but she was 
 still a tributary. And she had to be freed from this 
 allegiance also, and to be received on an equal foot- 
 ing in the intellectual society of Europe, before she 
 
 G 2
 
 84 THE REEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 could work on lier own account. More than this : 
 after having obtained an entire command over 
 foreign culture, after having not only accepted 
 but digested and assimilated it, it became neces- 
 sary that she should react against it : for all life- 
 brinoingf movement is action and reaction. 
 
 Lessing undertook the task. It was he who 
 
 founded the literary independence of Germany 
 
 Lessinff ^J rebelling against the foreign laws, 
 
 bora 1729. ^yj^j^^j^ j^g^^j remained even after the foreign 
 
 rulers had yielded the place to home-born leaders ; 
 and he freed, not Germany alone, but the whole 
 world, when he gave the deadly blow to the con- 
 ventional classicism of the French. For it is hard to 
 believe that Byron, Manzoni, Victor Hugo himself 
 could have written what they wrote, without 
 Lessing's ' Dramaturgic ' ? When Lessing attacked 
 the French poetical laws and rules, they were still 
 universally acknowledged. Addison had written 
 his ' Cato ' in conformity with them, and Pope 
 recognised no higher authority ; and, long after 
 them, Moratin preferred Racine to his own Cal- 
 deron, as they had placed Corneille over Shake- 
 speare. Nay, even after Lessing, but before his 
 influence could be felt on the other side of the 
 Alps, Alfieri, the Misogallo, cast his impetuous
 
 LESSING. 85 
 
 thought in the French mould. Lessing was the 
 first revolt against that law, and to show that it was 
 entirely conventional and arbitrai'j, adhering to 
 outward and accidental forms, instead of to the 
 essence of ancient poetry. From Boileau's theories 
 he appealed to Aristotle, from Corneille's practice 
 to that of Shakespeare, whom he proved to be a 
 truer, although unconscious, follower of Sophocles 
 than Corneille. But Aristotle himself and Shake- 
 speare he treated as a true Protestant treats the 
 Bible : with the spirit of free inquiry. He did 
 not submit to Aristotle because he was Aristotle, 
 but because he discovered in him ' truth as sure 
 as that of Euclid. ' 
 
 At the same time, adding example to theory, 
 he gave to Germany literary works of his own at 
 once popular and refined, such as she had yearned 
 for so long. He united Wieland's realism with 
 Klopstock's idealism in works which have survived, 
 whilst those of Klopstock and Wieland can scarcely 
 be said to be still living. He gave a model of the 
 free dramatic form, which he wanted to substitute 
 for the French pattern, in his ' Emilia Galotti.' 
 He gave words to the first national enthusiasm 
 felt by modern Germany at Frederick's deeds in 
 his ' Minna von Barnhelm.' Nay, the whole re-
 
 86 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 ligious and pliilosopliieal creed of his generation 
 he expressed in his ' Nathan,' for which his friend 
 Mendelssohn sat as model, and which he left as 
 a legacy to the nation, to the world. The spirit 
 of toleration, together with a firm belief in a good 
 and just Deity, breathes in every page of that 
 wonderful work, in which the best ideas of the age 
 are summed up. For what he had done for litera- 
 ture he did for religion ; what he had done for 
 Aristotle he did for Luther. ' The true Lu- 
 theran,' he exclaimed, ' does not want to be 
 protected by Luther's writings, but by Luther's 
 spirit, and Luther's spirit exacts absolutely that 
 no man should be prevented from communicating 
 his progress in knowledge to others.' He would 
 not allow the Protestant clergy to assume an 
 authority which the spirit of Protestantism for- 
 bids them to claim, and declared loudly that he 
 would be ' the first to take back the Pope for the 
 pox^elings ' if they should put a stop to free 
 inquiry. And as his * Nathan ' showed religious 
 feeling to be independent of, and superior to, 
 established forms of religion, so in his ' Education 
 of Mankind ' he showed that morality is indepen- 
 dent even of religious belief; and that the good done 
 for the satisfaction of one's own conscience is
 
 "WIXCKELMANN". 87 
 
 superior to that wliicli is done with a hope of re- 
 compense in a future life, the preoccupation of 
 such a life being rather an impediment than a 
 furtherance towards making the best use of this 
 existence. 'Why not quietly wait for a future 
 life, as one waits for the morrow ? ' without wish- 
 ing to investigate what cannot be investigated, 
 the things which it will bring? Who knows 
 whether there will not come ' a new eternal gospel,' 
 promised in the New Testament, and which will 
 be to Christianity what Christianity was to Juda- 
 ism, a third stage in the long education of man- 
 kind by God, for whom ' the shortest line is not 
 always a straight line ' ? In such ideas, however, 
 Lessing was far in advance of his generation, for 
 he not only gave the last expression to the past, 
 but he also opened the door for the coming age. 
 He, as well as Kant and Winckelmann, stood 
 with his feet in the eighteenth century ; with 
 his head he already reached the nineteenth. 
 
 Winckelmann had published his ' History of 
 Art ' in 1764 ; so had Kant his ' Observations on 
 the Sublime.' In 1766, just a hundred years 
 before the auspicious birthday of the German 
 State, appeared his ' Dreams of a Visionary,' 
 W^inckelmann's ' Allegory,' Lessing's ' Laocoon,'
 
 88 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 and the most suggestive book perhaps ever written, 
 Herder's ' Fragments,' They announced to the 
 world that the years of apprenticeship were over 
 for Germany, and that she had begun to work 
 on her own account. 
 
 The medium through which the modern 
 classicaj writers of the Italian and French type 
 View of looked at antiquity was Roman civilisa- 
 antiquity. ^j^j^^ Ever since the Jesuits had become 
 masters of public education in the neo-Latin coun- 
 tries, they had seen how easy it would be in nations, 
 whose Church, whose language, and whose legal 
 traditions were Roman, to put the Latin literature 
 in the foreground. They felt at the same time 
 how important for their aim it would be to mould 
 men's minds by Roman antiquity, the spirit of which 
 is discipline, instead of feeding them with Greek 
 antiquity, the essence of which is freedom. While 
 the contemporaries of Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio 
 Ficino still lived under the charm of the Hellenic 
 civilisation, those of Bembo and Alamanni were 
 already under the spell of Latin Alexandrinism. 
 
 Lessing had been as attentive a reader of 
 Sophocles as of Shakespeare ; and when he pro- 
 posed the latter instead of Corneille as a model 
 to the future dramatic poets of Germany, it was
 
 WINCEELMANN'S ' HISTORY OF ART.' 89 
 
 because he saw in him, in spite of his irregular 
 form, a more faithful, if not a more systematic fol- 
 lower of the ancients, than in Racine and Corneille. 
 Here also it was not the letter which he preached, 
 but the spirit. He protested against the whole 
 way of looking at the ancients, which had reigned 
 ever since Trissino and Tasso, as against a sort of 
 third Alexandrinism. For, according to him, they 
 saw the importance of ancient literature where it 
 was not, in accidental outward forms ; and sacri- 
 ficed to these that which had really inspired the 
 ancients — natural beauty. He wished his age 
 and his nation to do what the great artists of the 
 Renaissance had done, before academical classicism 
 had set in, viz., to look on Nature and Man 
 directly with clear, sound, unprejudiced eyes, such 
 as the Greeks had brought to the contemplation of 
 things ; and to create, if necessary, new forms for 
 new thoughts and feelings. It is highly important 
 to notice that a new view of antiquity, entirely 
 opposed to the academical one, was the basis of 
 the literary edifice which Germany was about to 
 build. Hence also the importance of Winckel- 
 niann's ' History of Art,' which, as I have said, 
 appeared in 1764, and of his ' Allegory ' which was 
 published in 1766,
 
 90 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 Winckelmann's ' History of Art ' is at once a 
 
 system of aesthetics and a history. There may be, 
 
 and there are, many points on which we 
 
 Winckel- 
 
 mann, born are at variance with Winckelmann, and 
 
 1717. 
 
 the fundamental idea even of his sreat 
 book — that the aim of art is the creation of ideal 
 forms — is no longer, I hope, admitted by SBsthetic 
 criticism. Nevertheless, his book acted as if it 
 was a revelation of the Hellenic world. Winckel- 
 mann had himself something of the s^^irit of the 
 Greeks, and so became naturally their most elo- 
 quent interpreter. It was as if he had brushed 
 away the dust from the ancients, and revealed 
 to view the purity of their outlines, buried as they 
 were under a dense layer of rubbish. He en- 
 deavoured to show in language hitherto unparal- 
 leled — a prose lofty and noble, nay, majestic, with- 
 out affectation, and correct without purism — in a 
 language worthy of the ancients, that the Greek 
 art of the time of Pericles rested on the same basis 
 as the Platonic philosophy ; the basis of idealism, 
 contemplating the real world as a reflection of the 
 world of ideas, and trying to reconstruct for the 
 senses, as Plato tried to do for the intellect, those 
 ideas which were like the lost types of the created 
 world. Against the unquiet, overladen style of 
 his own time, he invoked the calm and sim^^Hcity
 
 INFLUENCE OF WINCKELMANN". 91 
 
 of Greek art, even introducing into painting the 
 rules of sculpture. Although this reaction against 
 rococo degenerated soon — as all reactions will do — 
 and degenerated into the cold and dry school of a 
 new Academy, almost worse than the Berninesque 
 school which it superseded, yet it was a necessary 
 reaction, and one which, if it has done no good in 
 the domain of the fine arts, has had most fertile re- 
 sults for poetry. Goethe's ' Iphigenia,' and ' Alexis 
 and Dora,' would never have been written, if 
 Winckelmann had not first unveiled the ideal 
 beauty of Greek antiquity. The powdered and 
 patched Greek heroines of Voltaire's tragedy be- 
 came henceforward as impossible as the senti- 
 mental or raging heroes of Crebillon. For they 
 were totally devoid of that ' noble simplicity and 
 calm grandeur' which Winckelmann had estab- 
 lished as the first principle of Greek art. If men 
 like David and Ingres, Canova and Thorwaldsen, 
 who were directly or indirectly disciples of 
 Winckelmann, proved themselves unable to create 
 an Iphigenia, at once Greek and modern, ideal 
 and real, full of life and full of measure, it was 
 because the generation to which they belonged 
 entirely lacked the natural disposition which 
 makes great artists, that spontaneous, direct 
 intuition, which is unbiassed by abstract thought
 
 92 THE SEEDS OP GEHMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 and abstract systems. It was also — I will not 
 deny it — because the new theory could not be ac- 
 cepted throughout. Sculpture had tried to produce 
 the effects of painting. Winckelmann went into 
 the other extreme by introducing into painting 
 the rules of sculpture. But, we have not to 
 ask ourselves here whether the action of Winckel- 
 mann was beneficial or not ; only what it was, and 
 how far it reached. 
 
 But Winckelmann did even more in his History 
 than reveal the principle of Greek Art. He 
 gave the first example of modern historical 
 method. All histories of Art, like those of 
 literature, had been till then collections of biogra- 
 phies, lists of titles, and analyses or descriptions 
 of difi'erent works, with an account of their vicissi- 
 tudes. Winckelmann was not only the first to dis- 
 tinguish the difi'erent periods of Art as coinciding 
 with the different styles; he also described its 
 growth and decay as if it were a natural vegetation, 
 showed the causes of this growth and decay — 
 climate, national character and national manners, 
 political history, religion, race — and thus restored 
 the unity of History. Thus Winckelmann first 
 introduced, not in theory, but in practice, the idea 
 of organic and historical development, which is pro-
 
 FEENCH CULTURE. 93 
 
 perly the German idea. In his hands the history 
 of the infancy, adolescence, youth, maturity, and 
 old age of Art became a system of the different 
 styles, and vice versa. He expelled the concep- 
 tion of arbitrary creation by intellects independent 
 of circumstances from the domain of Art-history ; 
 and it was only after Winckelmann had shown Fine 
 Arts to be the result of the general condition of a 
 given civilisation, that other writers began to apply 
 the same idea to Poetry, Philosophy, Religion and 
 the State. The first seed of the German idea was 
 thrown into the world. 
 
 But althouo-h Winckelmann had awakened the 
 sense for the ' noble simplicity and calm grandeur * 
 of ancient Art, he had not been able to Lessin^-g 
 divest himself of certain intellectual '-^^ocoon.' 
 habits of his time. As he had proposed ideal 
 forms as the highest aim of Art, ix. forms which 
 do not exist in nature, but are the product of the 
 idealising mind, and had combined the fruits of his 
 various observations into one patchwork called 
 ideal beauty, so he had raised no objection against 
 abstract thought becoming the object of Art, in 
 other words, against allegory. This was the 
 legacy of the French rationalistic culture of the 
 first half of the century against which Lessing
 
 9.4 THE SEEDS OP GEEMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 Avas to lead the reaction. The French of that 
 time approached Poetry as they approached Re- 
 ligion, as they approached the State, with the 
 conviction that the organ of understanding was 
 able to produce intentionally and consciously what 
 in reality has always been the joroduct of other 
 human faculties acting almost unconsciously ; they 
 believed in inventors of religion as in inventors 
 of constitutions. Hence a confusion of all the 
 activities of the human mind. People believed 
 that the Fine Arts could serve to explain abstract 
 thought, which is allegory, and again that words 
 might paint objects, which produced descriptive 
 poetry. The simple explanation that words, sounds, 
 forms, and colours are different languages for 
 different orders of mental activity had been entirely 
 lost sight of. Experience taught that none of these 
 mental faculties could work when isolated, without 
 the aid of the others ; the inference was drawn that 
 each might do the work of the other. People 
 wanted to express in forms and colours, that is, in 
 the language of the Fine Arts, what can only be 
 expressed in words ; and they wanted to express 
 in words what can only be expressed in sounds, i.e. 
 music. The great historical importance of Les- 
 sing's ' Laocoon ' lies in the fact that it put a stop
 
 rUKCTIONS OF THE ARTS. 95 
 
 once for all to that confusion — once foi' all, if eveiy- 
 body had known how to read it, or had consented 
 to read it as it was written. We should not have 
 musicians who are content to interpret words, or 
 painters who condescend to illustrate novels and 
 poems, if the necessary consequences had been 
 drawn from Lessing's premises. For in his com- 
 parison between Virgil's description of Laocoon's 
 death and the famous group in the Vatican, 
 he traced the impassable boundary which sepa- 
 rates Fine Arts and Poetry. The Fine Arts 
 have to show things in space and to the eyes. 
 Poetry in time and through the ears to the in- 
 tellect : the inference is that the subjects of the 
 Fine Arts must be circumscribed objects, or, 
 at least, lasting situations as extended in space 
 and capable of being embraced in one glance, 
 whereas the subjects of poetry must be actions 
 accomplished in time, and conveyed to the 
 intellect in their successive stages. When, con- 
 sequently, the poet wants to treat the same subject 
 as the artist, he must first transform it into action, 
 as Homer did with Achilles' shield and Helen's 
 beauty (her appearance before and impression on 
 the old men of Troy) ; or Goethe, when he describes 
 the gardens of Hermann's father, by following
 
 96 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 the steps of his mother from one part to the 
 other. If, on the contrary, the artist wishes to 
 treat a poetical subject, he must first transform 
 the action into a situation of some duration. As a 
 rule it would be better still to avoid such a subject 
 altogether ; but if he does take it he must first 
 modify it, choosing in the action that moment 
 which is most lasting and at the same time most 
 pregnant, i.e. in which there is contained most of 
 the past and of the coming moment. 
 
 There is much to object to in this theory which 
 would condemn altogether such masterpieces as 
 Eubens' Lionhunt or Gericault's Hussars, and is 
 not only, as it seems to me, a most insufficient defi- 
 nition of the artistic object, but also leaves un- 
 touched the far more important side of the question, 
 viz., the subjective origin of a work of art. On 
 the whole we should be justified in saying that 
 Lessing's artistic education was very incomplete, 
 his artistic organisation, if he had any, hardly at 
 all developed. This, in fact, is somcAvhat the fault 
 of all the German aesthetic theories which have been 
 brought forward during the last hundred years ; 
 nay, Lessing, who saw the point in poetry so ad- 
 mirably, still harboured the false and hollow con- 
 ception of the ideal which was the principal mis-
 
 LESSING ON POETRY. 97 
 
 take of Winckelmann. Be this, however, as it 
 may, I am not here to criticise, but to explain, 
 and I turn again to Lessing's proper field, litera- 
 ture, where his thought was to bear fruit a hun- 
 dredfold. The essence of poetry, Lessing taught, 
 is action ; but action which reveals the complete- 
 ness of human nature, and which must therefore 
 show man in the free movement of passion. 
 The aim of poetry, then, is to reproduce human 
 passions, and to inspire sympathy with them, 
 but a sympathy purely human, free from all 
 personal interest ; and, as poetry is not to 
 produce in us real, material fear and hope, 
 so it does not pursue either moral or religious or 
 political aims : it has its aim in itself. ' True 
 Art' [Darstellung), says Goethe, 'has no aim; it 
 neither approves nor disapproves ; it develops the 
 feelings and actions as they follow each other and 
 out of each other, and by this, and this alone, it 
 enlightens and teaches.' With this the didactic 
 poem was banished from literature, as the descrip- 
 tive had been banished from it by the former 
 theory. And this was the second seed sown be- 
 tween 1760 and 1770. 
 
 If Winckelmann and Lessing reacted against 
 the sesthetic views of the French, Kant and 
 
 H
 
 98 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 Herder received their first impulse from them : 
 Kant born ^°^ from Voltaire, it is true, nor from the 
 ^''^'^' Encyclopaedists (with the exception of 
 Diderot, who diflfered from them in many- 
 respects, and had immense influence on German 
 thought), but principally from Buffon and 
 Rousseau. In his metaphysical thought Kant 
 rests entirely on Newton. He started from Locke 
 and Hume in his psychology, which overthrew all 
 metaphysics as they had been taught till then. In 
 his views of history and humanity, with which we 
 are more especially concerned here, he owed as 
 much to Rousseau, although he reacted partly 
 against him, as he did against Hume's psychology. 
 This he only developed twenty years later, thereby 
 producing in philosophical science a revolution 
 only to be compared with that effected by Newton in 
 the natural sciences ; but they belong to the periods 
 which we shall have to consider in our fifth 
 lecture. To-day we must fix our attention on the 
 Kant of 1766, not tlie Kant of 1787. Till then, 
 as he shows in his ' Natural History of the 
 Heavens,' which was inspired by Newton, Kant 
 considered the history of mankind, somewhat like 
 that of nature, in the light of a deadly struggle 
 for life. Just as our planet through terrible cata-
 
 Rousseau's ethics. 90 
 
 stroplies and cataclysms had shaped itself into a 
 dwelling for reasonable beings, so humanity ad- 
 vances through wars and revolutions towards per- 
 fection ; and just as nature emerges more and 
 more out of chaos into organisation, so the human 
 mind frees itself more and more from the tumult 
 of blind passions, and through perfecting of the 
 intellect forms a pure image of the eternal har- 
 mony of the universe. Few individuals, however, 
 attain this lofty aim ; the great majority vege- 
 tate like plants; millions of germs perish; the 
 progress of humanity takes place only in the high 
 spheres of a privileged few. 
 
 This aristocratic belief was deeply shaken by 
 the reading of Eousseau's works towards 1760. 
 Rousseau, as you all remember, saw in the progress 
 of art and science the cause of immorality as well 
 as of inequality among men. He represented the 
 natural state of man as good, and contended that 
 his superiority over animals was not in his intelli- 
 gence, but in his heart. Now, as feeling is not, 
 like intelligence, the privilege of a few, as it is 
 the common possession of men, the whole demo- 
 cratic view of Eousseau results from this deceptive 
 paradox. Kant adopted this theory, though in a 
 modified form, in his * Considerations on the Senti- 
 
 E 2
 
 100 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 ment of tlie Beautiful and the Sublime,' whicli 
 appeared in 1764, eight years after Burke's 
 ■work on the same subject, with which, however, it 
 has much less in common than with Lessino-'s 
 ^Laocoon.' According to Kant's correction of 
 Eousseau's views, it is no longer the intellectual 
 culture of privileged classes or individuals which 
 is the aim of history, but the culture of the 
 masses through the education of their feelings. 
 In this respect he allows that a retrograde move- 
 ment has taken place, which is also a progres- 
 sive one — retrograde compared with Greek anti- 
 quity ; progressive compared with the savage state 
 of primitive tribes. For he holds that the per- 
 fection of human nature was realised in the simple 
 civilisation of the ancients, and by no means 
 shares Eousseau's enthusiasm for savasres. 
 He preaches a return to nature, but finds nature, 
 not in the primitive times which knew no 
 art and no thought, but, like Winckelmann, 
 in the Hellenic civilisation which had remained 
 faithful to nature. There, indeed, was a union of 
 true nature and true culture, and Kant hoped that 
 humanity might come again to such a state through 
 a simpler education ; nay, he believed that it will 
 be the final result of all the warfare and movement
 
 kant's idea op civilisation. 101 
 
 of history. No doubt, man only acts witliin the 
 given limits of nationality, epoch, and climate ; but 
 he must strive, and will strive with success, to de- 
 velop more and more the purely human in him- 
 self. National distinctions will not, therefore, 
 disappear ; only they will be no longer contrasts, 
 but merely varieties and gradations of character — 
 a view which was entirely accepted by Lessing 
 and Herder, Goethe and SchiUer, and has re- 
 mained the German view of cosmopolitanism and 
 nationality. Kant goes a step farther on the 
 way to which Eousseau had directed him. 
 
 The motive power in Nature is pleasure and 
 pain, the sensation of what furthers and what im- 
 pedes the development of life. But in man a whole 
 series of more delicate sensations is added to those 
 of pleasure and pain : the sensations of ideal worth, 
 sensations which are less strong but more durable 
 than the material ones. Such is the feeling of 
 honour — an inferior feeling still, because it depends 
 upon the judgment of others and implies a selfish 
 personal interest. Such is sympathy, which is 
 above all selfish personal interest — nay, is the 
 contradiction of it — but lacks duration and con- 
 sistency. Such is above all the feeling of duty, 
 which makes us sacrifice our personal interest, not
 
 102 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 according to momentary impulse, but to a fixed 
 and durable rule of conduct. It has its origin in 
 the feeling of one's own dignity, which dignity we 
 grant to every other human being, and which we 
 respect in him ; for man, who lives in conformity 
 with nature, both esteems himself and considers 
 every human being as a fellow-creature deserving 
 esteem. This feeling once awakened, the beauty 
 of the soul becomes the highest eesthetic and 
 moral ideal. Among the moderns, the Italians 
 through fine art, the French through elegance and 
 taste, the English through earnestness and depth, 
 have come nearest to this ideal. 'By their feeling 
 of duty, by their unbending fidelity to principles, 
 by their enthusiasm for the rights and dignity of 
 man, the English set an example to all nations.' 
 The Germans follow slowly in the cultivation of 
 sesthetic and moral feeling. Once freed and cured 
 of their present vices, leading a free and national 
 life, they will perhaps unite the virtues of the 
 French and English, delicacy of taste and a strong 
 sense of duty ; and a new Hellenic life will blossom 
 once more. This hope, this ideal, animated 
 the whole of this and the next generation. Ger- 
 many was to become a new Greece ; humanism 
 in the highest sense, intellectual, moral, and
 
 herder's first appearance. 103 
 
 social, was to be realised by Ler. But none at that 
 time, except Kant and Herder, saw clearly what 
 was the preliminary condition for such a second 
 Renaissance. 'What is wanting to our country,' 
 said Herder, almost at the same moment as Kant, 
 ' is public feeling, a noble pride, which is not to be 
 organised according to foreign patter us, but will 
 organise itself according to its own nature, as 
 other nations have always done : to be Germans 
 on our own well-defended soil.' 
 
 So spoke the fourth of the German prophets, 
 Herder. He was the first to draw out the con- 
 sequences involved in the teaching of his master, 
 Kant, that the purely human was the aim of history 
 and culture, a teaching which we ought to consider 
 as the seed which, next to Winckelmann's and 
 Lessing's, worked most powerfully on the German 
 mind. True, Kant's earlier writings (although 
 composed in a style of such eloquence that the 
 reader sometimes wonders how the same hand 
 could have written in the dry and abstract style of 
 the ' Critic of Judgment ') did not waken so loud an 
 echo as the contemporary works of Winckelmann, 
 Lessing, and Herder. Still they fell on good 
 ground, and proved in the long run as fertile as, 
 perhaps more fertile than, the seeds sown by his 
 contemporaries.
 
 104 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 I have pronouncecl the name of Herder, and I 
 have called him a prophet. Such a name he indeed 
 Herder dcserves more, perhaps, than any man of 
 
 born 1744. ^^^ ^^^^ centnrj. He had the soul and he 
 had the language of a seer, and it was as a seer that 
 he worked upon his contemporaries. In reality he 
 belongs to the next generation, although his first 
 Avork appeared at the same moment as the writ- 
 ings, which I have noticed, of Winckelmann, 
 Lessing, and Kant. He was only twenty-two, and 
 an obscure teacher in the distant Baltic provinces 
 under Eussian rule, when his Tragmente' ap- 
 peared in 1766, and ran through Germany with 
 the quickness of a train of gunpowder. With 
 him, then, the new generation made its entrance. 
 Older than Goethe, Biirger, Jacobi, Yoss, by four 
 or five years only, he became their master at 
 once, the preacher of the new literary gospel, to 
 whom they listened as if he had been inspired. 
 
 It is perhaps — nay, it is certainly — a great dis- 
 advantage that I should have chosen a subject 
 and adopted a plan of treating it, which obliges 
 me to pass by the men and their lives, their moral 
 character, their living persons, and to present 
 to you only their ideas, detached from life like 
 fruits from the tree : their ideas, moreover, in an
 
 INFLUENCE OP HERDER. 105 
 
 abstract form and condensed in a few words. Still 
 the subject is so vast, and our time so sliort, that 
 I must needs thus confine myself, however dry 
 and unattractive my subject must consequently 
 become. I regret it often, however, and never 
 can I regret it more than when I speak of Herder, 
 who was neither a great writer, nor a great in- 
 vestigator and discoverer, nor an accomplished 
 poet, but who was a mighty personality and whose 
 doctrine itself was, so to speak, the doctrine of 
 personality. 
 
 No one, Kant perhaps alone excepted, has con- 
 tributed more to the stock of German thought, 
 or has ever exercised greater or more lasting 
 influence over an age, a nation, or the world 
 at large than Herder. Like the genuine rebel 
 he was, he began by turning upside down the 
 science and literature which then reigned, as 
 Kant was to do with the philosophical speculation 
 of his time. He was a revolutionist indeed. 
 Lessing would fain have paused after having freed 
 the laws of composition from the hoary over- 
 growth of time, false interpretation, and erroneous 
 application. He never had the slightest intention 
 of attacking the laws themselves. But, however 
 great a man's genius may be, he cannot stem at
 
 106 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN" THOUGHT. 
 
 Lis will the current whicli carries away a wliole 
 generation witli it — particularly when lie has 
 himself cleared the road for it by removing the 
 obstacles which stood in its way. Every Mirabeau 
 finds a Danton to outstep him. Lessing had 
 claimed the right of individual genius to modify 
 rule, and five years had hardly elapsed after the 
 publication of his * Dramaturgic ' when .the 
 literary montagne already urged a radical abo- 
 lition of all literary legislation and proclaimed the 
 right of genius to absolute self-government. 
 Reform had drifted into revolution ; and Herder 
 was marching at the head of the insurgents. 
 
 Before showing the influence exercised by 
 Herder over his contemporaries, let us see what 
 was the nature of the new principle applied by 
 him to theology, history, and poetry. It was the 
 superiority of nature over civilisation, and of in- 
 tuition over reason. The essence of Herder's 
 ideas lay in continually opposing synthesis to 
 analysis, the individual to rule, spontaneous im- 
 pulse to conscious action, organism to mechan- 
 ism, development and growth to legislation and 
 creation — in a word, in placing the Jieri above 
 the facere. This was the basis of the creed 
 professed by that school of ' original geniuses '
 
 IDEAS OF NATURE. 107 
 
 •which he was leading to battle against the 
 religious, literary, and scientific rationalism of the 
 age. 
 
 No man finds his starting-point within himself. 
 The starting-point of German thought was in 
 France, as that of French thought had been in 
 England. It was more particularly from Rousseau 
 that Herder received his first impulse. Rousseau's 
 The reaction against the exclusive wor- " ^*^"^^' 
 ship of reason had begun precisely in those 
 countries which had been foremost in establishing 
 it. It was the land of Pope and Hume which 
 gave birth to Burns and Burke; and the writings 
 of Lowth and Wood, of Young and Macpherson 
 had struck out in literature and criticism that 
 path on which Eousseau was to lead the latter 
 half of the century in political and social matters. 
 Mankind was to return to nature, to that good 
 parent whose works had become disfigured by the 
 manners and customs of a polished, refined society. 
 It is difficult for us in our days to form any ade- 
 quate conception of the effect produced by Eous- 
 seau's ' Discourse on Inequality ' at the time when 
 it appeared. ' It is impossible to speak otherwise 
 than v«^ith secret veneration of these lofty ideas 
 and sublime thoughts,' exclaimed Lessing, then
 
 108 THE SEEDS OP GEEMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 a young man, but already very little disposed to 
 be sentimental. Kant actually forgot bis daily 
 walk while be perused * Emile.' Even ten years 
 later, Scbiller compared Eousseau to Socrates — 
 * Rousseau, wbo perisbed by tbe bands of Cbris- 
 tians ; Eousseau, wbo would fain make buman 
 beings out of Cbristians.' Herder, wbile yet a 
 student, addressed entbusiastic verses to Rousseau, 
 in wbicb be cbose bim for * bis guide tbrougb life.' 
 One must read tbe description wbicb Goetbe bas 
 left of tbe impression made on tbe youth of Ger- 
 many by Rousseau's works. What it was in 
 France is well known. We smile at those diminutive 
 English parks which replaced Le Notre's stately 
 avenues, at tbe farmyards established in royal de- 
 mesnes, and at tbe queens wbo turned themselves 
 into dairymaids. When we read of tbe great 
 ladies of the eighteenth century suckling their 
 infants amidst a group of elegants, we are often 
 tempted to see more affectation in it than there 
 really was. Everything in that powdered and 
 hooped company bad become so artificial that any 
 symptom of naturalism appeared as a deliverance, 
 passed for a protest against unnatural refinement, 
 and really was a thoroughly justified reaction 
 against the opposite extreme. Nothing, indeed.
 
 POETRY AND COMMON SENSE. 109 
 
 could be more justifiable than Rousseau's oppo- 
 sition to Voltaire and tbe Encjclopeedists ; far 
 wliat was it but tlie rebellion of feeling against 
 reason which till then had restrained and en- 
 thralled it — of feeling which burst the tight 
 ligatures bj which men had sought to confine 
 their hearts, in the effort to shake off reason's 
 yoke and obtain breathing room for itself? 
 
 In Germany too, the spirit of the * Encyclo- 
 psedia' was then reigning, or at least threaten- 
 ing to reign. The great Frederick, Nicolai and his 
 followers in Berlin, Wieland himself, were con- 
 firmed rationalists at heart, although the rational- 
 ism of the latter was draped in Shaftesbury's 
 sesthetical epicurism. We find common sense, 
 not sentiment, ruling all things. Even in 
 Mendelssohn and Lessing, although their in- 
 spira,tion is so different from that of the 
 French and English rationalists, light is the 
 characteristic quality. How should such minds, 
 in which everything was clearness, precision, 
 and accuracy, have any room left for vague twi- 
 light ? Now, that same precise, matter of fact, 
 uncompromising thing which we denominate 
 common sense never did engender poetry, and 
 chiaroscuri will exist in the depths of man's
 
 110 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 nature. Such things as dim apprehensions, pre- 
 sentiments, reverie, lie dormant within the in- 
 nermost recesses of the human soul — nay, form, 
 mayhap, the most precious of its treasures. If 
 we seek to light up these dark corners, not by 
 the mild and unfailing light of inward revelation 
 or intuition, but by the dazzling and often mis- 
 leading lantern of reason, we may chase from their 
 haunts the spirits which have taken up their abode 
 there. Then, as often happens, we may only suc- 
 ceed in driving them to seek refuge in mystery 
 elsewhere, and to assume the form of a grosser 
 superstition, while, if wholly cast out, they leave 
 behind them a blank void together with a 
 painful longing to fill it up again. An Aene- 
 sidemus provokes an Apollonius of Tjana ; 
 and the d'Holbachs and Helvetiuses are followed 
 by the Cagliostros and Mesmers. Herein lay 
 Herder's right of protest against the prose of 
 common sense, as against the moralising didacti- 
 cism of German poetry, from which even Lessing 
 was unable entirely to free his contemporaries, 
 and against the petrified forms of citizen life, 
 religion and science in Germany ; for Herder's 
 protest against one-sided rationalism never de- 
 generated into a defence of superstition or mys- 
 ticism.
 
 HERDER AND ROUSSEAU. Ill 
 
 Whereas Eousseau had chiefly sought to re- 
 establish nature's rights in social matters, Herder 
 wished to establish them in things of the Herder's 
 intellect. In that lies his originality. It i^^^^ipies. 
 was by this he developed and continued what Kous- 
 seau had begun, and it was by this that he was 
 finally induced to turn round upon Rousseau and 
 react against him. While searching for nature's 
 unconscious proceeding in her intellectual creation 
 of what we call language, religion, and poetry, he 
 ended by discovering the secret of her process in 
 creating society and the state, and found this pro- 
 cess to be the antipodes of the Contrat Social. You 
 will find in Herder's earliest writings the ideas 
 developed twenty-five years later in Burke's ' Re- 
 flections.' ' 
 
 But it was not Rousseau alone who acted 
 upon Herder and his master Haraann, ' the Magi- 
 cian of the North,' as they used to call him. 
 Herder's mind was stirred by the English works 
 on Homer, by the poetry of the Bible, by Shake- 
 speare, by Percy's ballads ; as he was also im- 
 
 ' Mr. Leslie Stephen and Mr. John Morley have abundantly 
 proved that Burke expressed this fundamental belief of his 
 life as early as 1756 in his Vindication of Natural Socii'tij ; but 
 he expressed it en jMissant without developing it, and without 
 finding an echo, as he did thirty-live years later, and as Herder 
 did from the outset.
 
 112 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 pressed by Buffon's profound views of nature 
 and the cohesion of intellectual and physical life. 
 Still it was Eousseau's idea, that the condition 
 of human development lay in the enlightenment 
 and perfecting, not of our reasoning faculty, but 
 of our feelings, which led him to investigate 
 the elementary operations of the soul. These 
 operations soon assumed in his eyes the character 
 of infallible powers. Instinctive, intuitive man, 
 with all the energies of body and mind unimpaired, 
 became the ideal man. Everybody and every- 
 thing was to be looked at, not dissolved, as 
 abstract philosophy had dissolved it, into its parts 
 by analysis, nor detached from the natural cir- 
 cumstances, but in the combination of the parts 
 in an indivisible whole. So everybody was to 
 act. Coherence, cohesion became the watch- 
 word. Not isolated faculties, but only all the 
 faculties combined, could grasp the outward as 
 well as the inner world. Intuition is all. Es- 
 thetic rules as well as moral laws ought to be put 
 aside. Even in science sight is to replace analysis. 
 Here we have the germ of that contrast between 
 Herder and Kant which was to break out so much 
 later. Indeed, both Kant and Herder gave 
 definitive and systematic shape to their ideas only
 
 HERDER AND KANT. 113 
 
 twenty years later, and, although starting from 
 the same point, reached very different conclusions. 
 So did Goethe and Schiller, whose poetical pro- 
 duction began under the powerful influence of 
 Herder's views, but was afterwards deeply modi- 
 fied through Kant and a more methodical study 
 of nature. To-day we only contemplate their 
 spring, which was the sj)ring also of German in- 
 tellectual life — a spring full, of course, like all 
 springs, of promises which were not kept ; full of 
 terrible storms also, which, however, proved to be 
 salutary in the end ; full, above all, of a charming 
 freshness Avhich the literature of summer did not 
 find again. 
 
 Herder himself, the mighty representative of 
 this age — he in whose work all the new ideas which 
 have animated the intellectual world during fifty 
 years are in germ — Herder himself remained 
 always a youth, ever unable to give a definite and 
 artistically measured form to his thought. Her- 
 der's very universality was injurious to him. His 
 range was too vast to allow of his grasping any- 
 thing firmly : il embrassa trop pour hien etreindre. 
 His ever-wandering eye never could restrict itself 
 to one narrow spot, and his enthusiasm reminds 
 us more of a burning steppe than the concen- 
 
 I
 
 114 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 trated, persistent g-low of a furnace. He caught 
 glimpses — 1 might almost say he had the visions 
 of a genius, upon all subjects, mastering none 
 completely; and thus, while able to give the 
 architect the most valuable suggestions, he was 
 himself utterly at a loss to construct the smallest 
 edifice. !No man ever scattered abroad a greater 
 quantity of fruitful seeds than he ; yet at the 
 close of his career he found that he had not 
 tilled a single corner of his own field according to 
 rule. It is undeniable that his works are more 
 remarkable for the variety than for the profundity 
 of the learning they contain, as he himself was 
 endowed with more imagination than good sense, 
 with more ardour than thoroughness. 
 
 It was precisely these defects, nevertheless, 
 which determined his immense and immediate 
 Herder's influence. He was certainly one of the 
 action, greatest incentive powers the world has 
 ever known. * Who is this modern Pindar who 
 has just made his appearance amongst you ? ' 
 wrote Winckelmann from Eome in 1767, when 
 Herder's ' Fragments ' had just appeared. ' This, 
 to be sure, is a madman or a genius,' exclaimed 
 Wieland. * Whoever maybe the author,' Lessiug 
 said to Mcolai, ' he is at any rate the only one for
 
 herder's fundamental idea. 115 
 
 "wliom it is worth my while to publish mj ideas.' 
 If the mature generation spoke thus, what must 
 have been the effect of the youthful prophet upon 
 the unripe one ? Nor is the fact astonishing. Bj 
 dint of analysing- human nature, and introducing 
 into history the division of labour, people had 
 come to such a point that, as Mephistopheles has 
 it, ' they held the parts in their hands, the intel- 
 lectual link alone being wanting.' It was Herder's 
 unmethodical visionary imagination which dis- 
 covered the failing link, and reunited what analysis 
 had severed. 
 
 * Everything that man undertakes to produce, 
 whether by action, word, or in whatsoever way, 
 ought to spring from the union of all his faculties. 
 All that is isolated is condemnable.' These are the 
 words in which Goethe sums up the fundamental 
 idea which inspired Herder's master Hamann and 
 Herder himself. Nothing, he would say, is in 
 reality isolated, and just as each individual sense 
 is assisted by the four others in the perception of 
 any object which absorbs our attention, so do 
 memory and imagination likewise co-operate with 
 judgment and perception in enabling us to acquire 
 our knowledge of things. This union of all the 
 faculties, this primitive entireness of the individual, 
 
 I 2
 
 116 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. 
 
 is what we must endeavour to recover, sucli as it 
 was in the early ages, ere abstract rules had been 
 thoug-ht of — times when each individual acted, 
 thought, and spoke according to inspiration and 
 direct view. And what is true of individuals is 
 true of nations. What thej produce — laws, con- 
 stitutions, religions, poetry — always is, in a way, a 
 collective work, the result of a union of all faculties 
 and forces. 
 
 This was the fourth great mother-idea, if I 
 may so call it, that gave birth to the German 
 view of mind and nature, man and history, which 
 we have proposed to examine. We have now to 
 see what became of the seeds of thought sown 
 in Germany between 1760 and 1770 by the hands 
 of the four great geniuses who are to be con- 
 sidered as the real architects of our culture. We 
 shall try to form to ourselves an idea of Herder's 
 own view on mankind and history in his maturer 
 age, of Goethe's view on mankind and nature, 
 Kant's view on mankind and morality, Schiller's 
 view on mankind and art.
 
 117 
 
 LECTUEE IV. 
 
 THE EEIGN OF HERDER. 
 1770-1786. 
 
 We liave seen that the principal ideas which 
 Germany had to develop and illustrate in her 
 national literature and in her scientific work were 
 almost all thrown on the intellectual market of 
 Europe shortly after the conclusion of the Seven 
 Years' War. Winckelmann gave new life to an- 
 tiquity by applying to it a new historical method. 
 LessinsT traced the limits between the fine arts and 
 poetry, assigning to each of them a domain not 
 to be overstepped. Kant, correcting Eousseau'a 
 view of the history of mankind, contended that the 
 ideal aim of mankind was not the natural state of 
 the savage as Eousseau held, but a state of nature 
 combined with intellectual, moral, sesthetic, and 
 political development, such as was realised in 
 Greece. Herder, finally, starting likewise from
 
 118 THE REIGN OF HERDEE. 
 
 Rcusseau, believed all great creations of Immanitj 
 to be the work of spontaneous action, either indi- 
 vidual or collective and national, not the inten- 
 tional result of self-conscious activity. The three 
 first of these four great men still belong to the 
 generation of 1760, as we should call the men born 
 in the second and third decade of the century ; 
 the last, Herder, born in 1744, already belongs to 
 the foUoAving generation, that of Goethe. His 
 marvellous precocity alone permitted him to fight 
 at the side of Lessing, his elder by fifteen years. 
 
 It seems natural that the j^oungest of the 
 prophets should also be the one most eagerly 
 listened to by the youth of his country; it becomes 
 more natural when we take into account the inspired 
 and inspiring personality of the man who at twenty- 
 two stirred the German world by his apparent 
 paradoxes, who at twenty-six was the Mentor, the 
 initiator, the guiding genius of Goethe, his junior 
 only by five years. And not of Goethe alone, 
 although his personal relations with him were 
 more intimate than with others, but of tlie whole 
 generation of 1775. It is not too much to say 
 that he inspired all the writers of this period of 
 literary history — and Germany had then scarcely 
 any but literary history — the Sturm- und Drang-
 
 herder's mature works. 119 
 
 periode, which lasted from about 1770 till about 
 1786. Herder, it is true, gave to his thoughts 
 their lasting and determined form only in 1784, 
 when he published his principal work, the * Ideas 
 on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.' 
 This great book, however, only develops the con- 
 ceptions which were in the germ in the * Frag- 
 ments,' the 'Critical Sylvffi,' and the 'Origin of 
 Language,' just as in the ' Letters on the Study 
 of Theology ' and the ' Spirit of Hebrew Poetry ' 
 (1781-1782) we find the very thoughts which he 
 had laid before the public ten years earlier in his 
 ' Most Ancient Document of Humanity ' — thoughts 
 which opened quite a new insight into the secret 
 laboratory of language, poetry, and religion. 
 Even the memorable book, which has been father 
 to all the histories of poetry, religion, language 
 and law of our century — even the ' Ideas ' — are 
 unfinished, diffusely written in a loose disconnected 
 style, the style of a seer rather than of a thinker, 
 and still less that of an historian ; very in- 
 sufficient if we look upon them as a collec- 
 tion of researches, nay, totally antiquated as 
 far as form and materials are concerned. But 
 as for the thoughts contained in it, the book 
 seems written but yesterday ; it might easily
 
 120 THE EEIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 be taken for a sketch from the pen of M. 
 Taine. 
 
 The one chief conception, we have seen, which 
 Herder sought to impress on his age, was that of 
 Herder's evolution, growth, fieri, which he had 
 viewb. borrowed from the vegetable kingdom in 
 order to apply it to political, religious, and literary 
 history ; nay, to the natural history of man and to 
 that of his language. 
 
 He, and Hamann before him, had been struck 
 by the little help obtained from isolated observation 
 towards arriving at the truth. They saw that 
 almost all our knowledge is acquired by synthetic 
 and unconscious observation, or, to use a more accu- 
 rate term, reception; while intuition — i.e. the sj^ark 
 which suddenly shoAvs the link and coherence of 
 such synthetic knowledge, and which is after all 
 only the result of long unconscious reception and 
 unconscious maturation of what has been received 
 — seemed to them infinitely superior to consciously 
 generalising and arguing reason, which had been 
 so exclusively used in their century. Hence their 
 two leading ideas, which gradually acquired depth, 
 width, and strength, became the two leading ideas 
 of German culture: the first being that of the 
 totality of individual or collective forces as opposed
 
 herder's views. 121 
 
 to the division of labour ; tlie second, that of the 
 unintentional origin of all great individual and 
 collective creations. 
 
 Now the unconscious creative power, working 
 in man and nature, manifests itself nowhere so 
 strikingly as in genius — the genius not only of the 
 great legislator, captain, philosopher, poet, but also 
 the genius of naivete, i.e. of any single human 
 being, or collection of human beings, not yet 
 affected by our abstract and analytical habits. 
 
 Our minds to day are differently framed fi'om those of 
 primitive men, owing to the education of our youth for so 
 many past generations. We are accustomed to reflect 
 and analyse so much that we hardly see or feel any more. 
 We no longer poetise in or on the living world; our 
 poetry is not the result of the contact of objects with our 
 soul ; we manufacture artificially both the subjects and 
 the modes of ti-eating them ; and we have practised this so 
 long and so frequently, and we begin to do so at so early 
 an age, that a free education would have small chance of 
 success with us ; for how should the lame learn to walk 
 upright 1 
 
 The starting-point, then, of Herder's whole 
 philosophy is the conception of genius as the one 
 acting force of the intellectual world. ' What is 
 it in Homer that compensates for his ignorance of 
 the rules, deduced from the study of his works by
 
 122 THE REIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 Aristotle ? What in Shakespeare that makes up 
 for his direct violation even of these laws of criti- 
 cism ? The unanimous answer to the question 
 will be : Genius.' These words of Hamann may 
 be considered as the theme of all Herder's varia- 
 tions. Now, the nature of genius consists in the 
 elementary operations of the mind before habits 
 of analvsis and abstraction have severed the differ- 
 ent mental faculties and have accustomed man to 
 form general conceptions and to influence his will 
 by them. Its essence is direct sensation and in- 
 tuition, unconscious production. It lives prin- 
 cij^ally in popular poetry, legislation, and religion, 
 not yet influenced by rationalistic culture. Even 
 nowadays it cannot survive unless it keeps itself 
 free from all rationalistic rules, and obeys only 
 its inspiration. We shall see by and by to what 
 errors this principle led as soon as it was applied 
 to science, which rests entirely oii the combination 
 of observation and reasoning; and to morals, the 
 very essence of which is connected in our own 
 minds with the idea of duty. Let us confine our- 
 selves for the moment to poetry and history in the 
 widest sense, comprising theology, philology, &c., 
 where this point of view was exceedingly fertile 
 and salutary.
 
 herder's VIET7S OK" POETRY. 123 
 
 Indeed, the much vaunted originality not being 
 of frequent occurrence in the eminently artificial 
 society of the eighteenth century, it be- q^ 
 came necessary, in order to find it in all °® ^•- * 
 its purity, either to ascend to epochs which preceded 
 civilisation — in other words, to primitive nations, 
 — or to descend to those popular strata of the 
 existing age which had as yet escaped the contagion 
 of corrupt culture. Herder, you see, was a kind 
 of literary Eousseau. He may be said to have 
 renovated and regenerated the poetry of his time 
 by immersing it in the true sources of all great 
 poetry : nature and popular life. He it was who 
 first established the fact, subsequently confirmed 
 by historical discovery, that poetry always pre- 
 ceded prose in the annals of mankind ; he it was 
 who first proclaimed the poetical superiority of 
 ages in which the entireness of individuality was 
 not yet broken. 
 
 In the floiu'ishing periods of elegant prose, lie would 
 say, nothing but art can prosper in poetry. Later on we 
 find even mere versified philosophy and half-way poetry. 
 On the other hand, the language of those times, when 
 words had not yet been divided into nobles, middle-class, 
 and plebeians, nor had prose been sifted, was the richest 
 for poetical purposes. Our tongue compared with the 
 idiom of the savage seems adapted rather for reflection
 
 124 THE REIGN OF HERDEE. 
 
 than for the senses or imagination. The rhythm of popular 
 verse is so deHcate, so rapid, so precise, that it is no easy 
 matter for us hookworms to detect it with our eyes ; but 
 do not imagine it to have been equally difficult for those 
 living populations who listened to, instead of reading it ; 
 who were accustomed to the sound of it from their infancy ; 
 who themselves sang it, and whose ear had been formed 
 by its cadence. 
 
 And here Herder enters into one of tlie topics 
 wliicli he has made so wonderfully his own — that 
 of the organ of the ear — but it would lead me too 
 far if I were to quote in extefiso. Suffice it to say 
 that his essentially musical nature made him par- 
 ticularly apt to listen to that innermost life of the 
 soul, which can be expressed only by tone and 
 rhythm. If he so continually and persistently 
 contemplates primitive ages, and incessantly op- 
 poses them to his own conventional age, it is 
 chiefly because that innermost life was more 
 intense then, because thoughts, facts, images even 
 of primitive man had not yet been severed from 
 tliis innermost life, and consequently still wanted 
 the help of music, as the only adequate language 
 of it, in order to give them expression. 
 
 Poetry in those happy days lived in the ears of the 
 peoj)le, on the lips and in the harps of living hards ; it
 
 heedee's theoet on poetet. 125 
 
 sang of history, of the events of the day, of mysteries, 
 miracles, and signs. It was the flower of a nation's cha- 
 ractei', language, and country; of its occupations, its 
 prejudices, its passions, its aspirations, and its soul. 
 
 The whole modern theory concerning epic 
 poetry is contained in embryo in these words. 
 Yet Herder goes still further, and formulates it so 
 distinctly that F. A. Wolf had scarcely anything 
 to do but to develop and establish it more firmly 
 by means of that detailed and solid system of 
 argumentation, which made him the true father 
 of the Homeric idea, as comprehended by our age. 
 
 The greatest among Greek bards was also the gi'eatest 
 among popular poets. His sublime work is no epopoeia ; 
 it is the epos, the story, the legend, the living history of 
 the people. He did not sit down on velvet cushions 
 to compose a poem in twice twenty-four cantos according 
 to the rules of Aristotle. 
 
 Words like these naturally fell like thunder- 
 bolts on that eighteenth century, so self-satisfied, 
 so vain of the great progress it had achieved and 
 of the hiofh culture it had attained. Yersificaticn 
 as an art had been brought to such perfection, the 
 criterion by which the merits and demerits of 
 poetry were to be measured had been so accurately 
 defined, poetry itself was so easily learnt and
 
 126 THE REIGX OF HERDEE. 
 
 tauglit, that the world was completely dumb- 
 foundered at this strange enthusiasm for miserable, 
 despised savages. Moreover, Herder added practice 
 to theory. During his stay at Strassburg, he 
 had already begun with Goethe to search for 
 popular songs, and great was his delight when he 
 was able to send one to his affianced bride, which 
 he had gathered from the mouth of the people. 
 No book, since the appearance of Percy's ' Relics,* 
 had met with such success in Germany as the 
 ' Voices of Nations,' a series of volumes containinsr 
 popular poems in masterly translations, and pub- 
 lished by Herder in 1778. It became indeed the 
 model for all the numerous collections of the 
 kind which have come out during the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 But Herder not only discovered true living 
 poetry in the distant ages of Homer and the 
 cloudy isles of Ossian ; he found it out in modern 
 times, in his own nation, lending a ready ear to 
 the simple ditties of the woodcutter and the 
 peasant, of the journeyman and the soldier, of the 
 hunter and the shepherd. Germany owes the 
 revival of the lied or song entirely to Herder and 
 to his ' Stimmen der Volker.' When we read the 
 verses which Goethe wrote at Leipzig, before
 
 THE BALLAD AND THE LIED. 127 
 
 meeting with Herder, we may well be permitted to 
 doubt whether Germany would have ever possessed 
 those unrivalled pearls, his little songs of love, ad- 
 dressed to Friederike and Lili, if he had not known 
 him. It is, at any rate, very doubtful whether it 
 would have had the ' Erlkoiiig ' or the * Fisherman.' 
 Of these, however, England possesses beautiful 
 examples in her own ballads ; not so of the lied, 
 with which even Burns's poems have little in 
 common, and of which we find only the -pendant in 
 Shakespeare's little songs, such as — 
 
 Blow, blow, thou winter wind ! 
 and others. 
 
 It is difficult indeed to define the lied. 
 
 "What is the lied ? Herder asked. It is neither a 
 sonnet nor a madrigal, poems for the study and the salon ; 
 it is no composition for painting with harmonious colour- 
 ing ; light and brilliancy are not its merits. . . . The 
 essence of the lied is song, not painting. Its perfection 
 resides in the melodious course of a passion or a 
 sentiment, ... If this melody be wanting in a lied, if it 
 have not the poetical modulation, the right tone, it may 
 contain ever so many images, it may be graceful, it may 
 have colouring ; it never can be a lied. 
 
 And as with the epic poem, the ballad, and the 
 lied, so with the fable. Lafontaine had made
 
 128 THE REIGN OP HERDER. 
 
 delicious tableaux de genre of the fable of the 
 ancients ; Lessing concise, epigrammatic satires. 
 Nay, Lessing had still defined the fable in the 
 spirit of the eighteenth century as an intentional 
 form of moral teaching : ' If we reduce a general 
 proposition to a particular case, lending it reality 
 and making a story out of it, in which the general 
 proposition may be recognised by means of in- 
 tuition, we call this a fable.' How much deeper 
 is Herder's view. In his eyes fables originally 
 were, and would again become, were we to live 
 less artificially, the ' poetical illustration of a 
 lesson of experience by means of a characteristic 
 trait, drawn from animal life and developed by 
 analogy.' 
 
 In ancient fables (he says) animals act, because what- 
 ever in nature produces effects ap2)eai-s to primitive 
 humanity to act. ... It is analogy which is the parent 
 of poetry in fables, not abstraction, still less a dry deduc- 
 tion from the general to the particular. . , , The feble 
 rests on Nature's eternal consistency and constancy. . . . 
 Its characters are types. . . . The more natural the state 
 m which a nation hved, the more it hkcd fables. 
 
 Now, Herder made this refutation of the 
 mechanical theories, then reigning throughout 
 Europe, from his point of view, i.e. that of spon-
 
 VIEW OF THE ANCIENT WORLD. 129 
 
 taneous creation without special conscious aim, not 
 only in the domain of the fable, but in that of every 
 kind of poetry. He carefully studied the nature of 
 the epigram in its earliest form, and of q^^ ^^^^j 
 the national drama, as he had studied ^"^'^'^ 
 that of the lied and the epic poem, chiefly illus- 
 trating his theories from Greek examples. The 
 whole of the ancient world has been looked upon 
 with different eyes since Herder. Viewing the 
 ancients as an historian alone could view them, he 
 oi^posed his own less refined conception of antiquity, 
 not only to the Alexandrian, rather than the Athe- 
 nian, conventional antiquity which found favour 
 with the French and Wieland, but also indirectl}- 
 and half-unconsciously to Winckelmann's some- 
 what cothurnic idealism. For him the first, Achilles 
 and Ajax became chiefs of clans, instead of princes 
 of the blood, or lords of a royal court a la Versailles, 
 as Apollo and Diana became living mythical 
 figures instead of cold allegories. It was Herder 
 who taught young Goethe to laugh at Wieland's 
 jjowdered and patched Alcestis in his charming 
 satire, ' Gods, heroes, and Wieland' (1774), as it 
 was Herder who made him understand the beauty 
 of the Strassburg Cathedral, then considered as a 
 work of barbarism, and express in his Essay on 
 
 K
 
 130 THE EEIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 ' German Architecture ' those simple and profound 
 thoughts on art, which ought to have put a stop 
 to all our systematic imitations of past and 
 foreign styles which correspond to nothing in our 
 
 life. 
 
 Herder's views, however, failed unfortunately 
 to prevail within the province of plastic art. 
 On His owing to the powerful and yet too recent 
 ^°'"'^- influence and authority exercised by 
 Winckelmann. But they penetrated rapidly into 
 all other branches of intellectual activity in 
 Germany; into historical studies particularly, 
 for Herder himself applied his main conception 
 of poetry to the history of states, civil law, and 
 religions. It is true he placed the history of 
 civilisation far above political history. Still he 
 included political history in that of civilisation, 
 and thereby he made a real revolution in historical 
 science, or I had perhaps better say in the art of 
 history. Up to his time the most mechanical 
 teleology had reigned in the philosophy of history. 
 Providence was represented to have created ' cork- 
 trees that men should have wherewithal to stop 
 their bottles ; ' as also, of course, to have prevented 
 Cromwell from setting out for America in order 
 that an instrument might not be wanting to ac-
 
 herder's views on history. 131 
 
 complisli the Eevolution in England. Bossuet's 
 ' Discours sur Vhistoire universelle ' is still entirely 
 based upon the programme-idea ; and Montesquieu, 
 in his ' Grandeur et decadence,^ if he does not bring 
 in the Divine regisseur, lends to the mortal actors 
 of history plans and intentions, and ascribes to laws 
 and institutions an influence which they never had. 
 Herder was the first who ventured to leave the 
 alleged aims of Providence as well as those of theo- 
 retical legislation in historical events out of the 
 question, and opposing himself alike to the idea of 
 a preconceived plan, and that of mere chance, 
 refused to see p.nything in history beyond the 
 development of given germs. This has undoubtedly 
 proved the most fertile of modern ideas. ' Each 
 nation contains its centre within itself, as a bullet 
 its centre of gravity. There is nothing within the 
 whole kingdom of God which is a mere means ; 
 everything is at once means and end.' He was the 
 first also to banish the conscious legislators out of 
 primitive history. For him Lycurgus was already 
 what Otfried Miiller proved him to be fifty years 
 later, the legendary judge who, according to tra- 
 dition, codified the secular uses and customs of his 
 tribe, not the inventor of a brand new constitution 
 planned ad hoc like that of the Abbe Sieyes. The 
 
 •K 2
 
 132 THE ESIQN OF HEEDER. 
 
 pervading spirit of his great book is a sort of warfare 
 against mechanical causes or abstract ideas, intro- 
 duced as realities into history, and above all against 
 teleology, which looks for an end or purpose in 
 every event. The historian, he says, ' will never 
 attempt to explain a thing which is by a thing 
 which is not. And with this severe principle all 
 ideals, all phantasmas of a dream-world disappear.' 
 Consequently we must beware of referring the 
 phenomena of history to a design or plan which 
 is unknown to us. To the question, ' Why did 
 Alexander go to India ? ' there is only one answer, 
 ' Because he was Alexander, Philip's son.' In 
 giving up this investigation into a plan of history 
 we are recompensed by getting an insight into 
 the high and beautiful laws of nature. Indeed, 
 
 * ... if there is a God in nature, he is also in history ; 
 for man is also part of the creation, and must, even in his 
 "wildest excesses and passions, obey laws, which are no less 
 beautiful and excellent than those according to which all 
 the celestial bodies move.' ... * The God I look for in 
 history must be the same as the God of natiu'e ; for man 
 is but a tiny particle of the whole, and the history of 
 mankind resembles that of the worm, closely connected 
 loith the tissue it inhabits ; therefore the natural laws by 
 which the Deity reveals itself must reign in man Hkewise.' 
 And elsewhere : * . . . The whole history of humanity is
 
 herder's views oisr the law of history. 133 
 
 pure natural history of human forces, actions, and instincts, 
 according to place and time.' 
 
 This is the view of human history which we 
 shall afterwards see Goethe applying to nature, 
 nor can the resemblance surprise any one who 
 knows how intimately the two men lived together. 
 Herder has not only a wonderful insight into the 
 early periods of history — one must read his diary 
 during his journey from Riga to Nantes to see 
 how the mystery of the formation of States, and 
 of the migration and settlements of nations, 
 revealed itself to him — he has even profound views 
 on the prehistoric state of mankind which belongs 
 still, up to a certain point, to natural history. And 
 a great naturalist of our days (Baer) could say of 
 him that he * had drawn with the divination of a 
 seer the outlines of comparative anatomy of which 
 the works of Cuvier and our time give only the 
 commentary.' Now, Herder's principle as ap- 
 plied to historic as well as prehistoric times, is 
 that everywhere on earth all beings become what 
 they can become according to the situation and 
 necessities of place, according to the circumstances 
 and opportunities of time, and according to 
 the inborn or acquired physical and intellectual 
 character of the race ; in other words, M. Taine's
 
 134 THE EEIGN OP HEEDEE. 
 
 ' milieu, moment, et race.' No doubt, Montes- 
 quieu in his famous seventeenth and eighteenth 
 books had already given great importance to the 
 influence of climate and soil on the destinies 
 of nations ; but he, wisely enough, made of them 
 only contributing elements, and although his 
 views on this matter taken in themselves may be 
 sounder than those of Herder, it is certain that 
 they have not acted on the general current of 
 thought as Herder's did, perhaps also because he 
 exposed them less persistently and less enthusiasti- 
 cally. 
 
 The plan w^hich Herder proposed to the future 
 historian was to take his start from the Universum, 
 marking the position of the earth in it, and to 
 show the condition of life on earth, resulting from 
 this position ; then to describe the typical forms 
 of plants and animals ' until the physiognomy of 
 the earth as a whole should be entirely grasped 
 with all the conditions it offers for human history.' 
 The great geographical work of K. Ritter, who 
 wrote these words, as well as those of A. von Hum- 
 boldt, are the fruit of this method recommended 
 by Herder. All this, however, was for him only 
 the basis of a History of Man. 
 
 Man is the last and highest link in the develop-
 
 VIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN". 133 
 
 ment of tlie creating power, which lives in the 
 earth. He shows how the progress of nature pro- 
 duced a more and more refined brain until it 
 arrived at man. The same organic evolution which 
 gave him the most developed brain gave him 
 also language. Indeed, whilst one-half of the cul- 
 tivated world still saw in language a gift or reve- 
 lation of God, the other an intentional, human 
 invention. Herder already saw in it, what we all 
 nowadays see in it, a potential instrument for the 
 development of reason, a natural product of the 
 soul's vital forces, an ever self-creating process. 
 For it is through language that we must under- 
 stand the birth of abstract reason, i.e. the faculty of 
 forming general conceptions, which is not a primi- 
 tive faculty, common to all men from the begin- 
 ning, but one acquired by the co-operation of 
 language and intellig-ence. 
 
 According to Herder's conception of organic 
 development, therefore, the human alone can be 
 the ideal aim of mankind. A morality, which 
 affects anything higher, would be a delusion. 
 
 If we examine mankind — if we look on mankind, as 
 we know it to be, i.e. according to the laws which are 
 within it — we know nothing higher than humanity in 
 man. Even when we imagine angels and gods, we imagine 
 tJiem as ideal, higher men.
 
 136 THE REIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 The Deity has limited man's possibilities onlj 
 by time, place, and innate faculties. The one 
 active force is the creative power of man's nature, 
 which the environment hinders or furthers more 
 or less. Now, the law of this progress and develop- 
 ment is, that all destructive forces must, in the 
 long run, not only succumb to the conservative 
 forces, but also serve to the development of the 
 whole. This the history of the animal kingdom 
 shows as well as the history of mankind.' 
 
 Though Herder is continually appealing to 
 God, all this sounds singularly like pantheism, 
 On Reii- ^^^^ ^^® words which I have quoted are 
 ^'°"" not such as he would have penned at 
 Biickeburg at the time he made the first rough 
 sketch of his philosophy of history. But, since 
 then, he, like Lessing, Goethe, and nearly all the 
 eminent minds of the age, had tasted of Spinoza 
 and relished him extremely. In spite of the 
 scandal produced among believers by this change, 
 Herder never renounced his new faith, even after 
 having attained the highest ecclesiastical dignities. 
 He sought to conceal it, more certainly from him- 
 self than from others, and in order to do this he 
 
 ' See the ' Ideas ' pasnm-, and particularly Book xv. 1 and 2, 
 Cf. Book xiii. 7, on Greek history in general.
 
 heeder's views on religion. 137 
 
 was obliged to put mucla into Christianity wliich 
 does not really belong to it, as many others before 
 and since have done. 
 
 The pearl is found (he says) ; no one can build upon 
 any other foundation than that of Christ. As this Gospel 
 needs no extei'nal signs, being its own proof, neither can 
 it be overthrown by theological or other doubts. , , , In 
 all the things which occur in the world, it is its kingdom 
 which is coming ; for this is the business of Providence, 
 and it is the aim and character, the very essence of the 
 human race to accomplish the work of Providence, Pttt 
 no trust in phantoms. The kingdom of God is within you. 
 
 This religion, you see, was a very wide one, 
 and this species of Christianity very closely re- 
 sembled the doctrines of Spinoza. But it was 
 precisely in virtue of the peculiar wideness of his 
 Christianity that Herder exercised so great an 
 influence over his country. If the German people 
 has been — till lately, at least — the only one 
 which has remained deeply religious without 
 paying any great attention to external worship, 
 religious observance and dogmas, it has merely 
 followed the example which Herder gave it. 
 
 Tlie question has been raised whether a man can be 
 moral independently of religion — independently of re- 
 ligious dogma is undoubtedly what is meant, for other-
 
 138 THE EEIGN OF HERDEE. 
 
 "wise this question would be resolved by itself. True 
 religion cannot exist without morality, and true morality 
 is religion under whatever form it may show itself. 
 
 This, translated into Lutlier's language, means 
 that faith goes before works : the man who lives 
 in the ideal cannot be immoral, the modern 
 German would say, in accordance therein with 
 the unconscious belief of all his forefathers. As 
 far from orthodoxy as from rationalism, Herder 
 constantly appeals from dogma and reasoning to 
 religious feeling : ' Flee religious controversy as 
 you would the plague,' he used to say, ' for it is 
 impossible to dispute about what religion is. It 
 is as impossible either to deny or affirm it by dis- 
 cussion as to paint the mind or hear light.' It is 
 precisely because Christianity is an especially 
 human reli^fion that Herder feels himself a Chris- 
 tian ; for the development of the human was the 
 ideal of his life. The natural nobility of man was 
 great enough in his eyes without claiming a supra- 
 natural one for him. 
 
 Herder's religious development is very charac- 
 teristic of Germany in the past century. The 
 Bible was for him the earliest source of intellectual 
 culture, as it was for Klopstock, Lessing, and above 
 all Goethe. At an early age, however, he rebels
 
 HEEDER'S ' MOST ANCIENT DOCUMENT.' 139 
 
 against the idea of its being a revealed book. 
 Genesis became in his eyes only a kind of theo- 
 gony, like that of Hesiod, nor conld he see anything 
 beyond a collection of national chronicles, poems 
 and proverbs, in the rest of the Old Testament. 
 What he discovers in it above all is poetry ; and 
 we find him defending the Song of Solomon as 
 energetically against mystics as against moralising 
 rationalists. It is necessary to read his eloquent 
 pages on the Mosaic epopoeia in order to under- 
 stand the effect which they produced in their 
 apparently profane treatment of the subject. For 
 Herder, of course, and his countrymen it was only 
 another form of admiration, ' Burn all rational- 
 istic metaphysics ! ' he exclaims. ' The living 
 commentary on the Mosaic monument blows 
 with the morning air.' Herder it was who first 
 taught the world to understand the Oriental way 
 of thinking, who first showed it what Oriental 
 poetry was, and opposed the primitive simplicity 
 of the Bible to the dogmatic interpretation of 
 theologians. And he finds beautiful words to 
 praise the beauty of this Oriental poetry of the 
 Bible. 
 
 These ideas Herder brought forward for the 
 first time in his ' Most Ancient Document,' which
 
 140 THE REIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 lie ' had cherished in his heart from his tenderest 
 infancy.' They were taken up again and de- 
 veloped still further eight and ten years later in 
 his ' Letters on the Study of Theology,' and in the 
 ' Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.' He never tires of 
 telling the world that the Bible is not only the 
 basis of our own religion, but also contains that 
 which is the most elevated and ancient in the 
 world. (At that time the Yedas had not yet been 
 discovered.) It was he above all who opened the 
 world's eyes ancvv to tuat poetry which had been 
 hidden from its sight by the mass of allegory, 
 morals, dogmas, philosophical ideas, and law texts 
 with which it had been stifled. For he had the 
 boldness to treat the Bible like any other human 
 document ; and by doing so, he rendered possible 
 the history of religion which belongs essentially 
 and exclusively to our age. For nothing less than 
 the example of Herder's deep and sincere religious 
 feeling would have sufficed to enable men of those 
 times to study religion itself without placing them- 
 selves at the point of view of any given religion. 
 The various forms under which mankind have 
 successively or simultaneously tried to satisfy 
 their craving for the infinite and the supernatural, 
 had to be duly respected and loved ; but it was
 
 herder's, influence on later schools. 141 
 
 needful also to reach the jjoint at which the 
 believer no longer requires that the infinite and 
 superuatui'al should have a definite and conven- 
 tional form, in order to adore and dread it. An 
 enthusiastic nature was needed, like that of Her- 
 der, capable of understanding a mystical glow, 
 and yet free-thinking enough not to attribute to 
 himself and his sect alone the privilege of such 
 mystical glow and the immediate conception of 
 the Deity. The Tiibingen school would have been 
 an impossibility without Herder, and we may say 
 exactly the same thing with regard to its adver- 
 saries. Ewald would never have written his 
 * History of the People of Israel ; ' Bunsen would 
 never have composed his great * Bible- work,' nor 
 his * God in History,' if Herder had not opened 
 out fresh horizons to theology and history. Even 
 E. Eenan finds himself still upon ground which 
 Herder has conquered for religious history. Re- 
 spect and sympathy for religion are here allied to 
 an independence of view which regards all religions 
 as issuing from the same religious want, and which 
 substitutes internal for external revelation. 
 
 Herder no longer explains the origin of posi- 
 tive religion, as it was customary to do in the 
 philosophical camj), by the imposture of priests.
 
 142 THE REIGN OP HERDER. 
 
 but liistoricallj. First lie sees fear and super- 
 stition ; then curiosity, creating cosmogonies, and, 
 with the aid of poetical imagination, mythology. 
 He shows that reUgious ideas become simplified, 
 generalised, and purified only by degrees. In 
 the beginning they could only be instinctive, 
 intuitive, sensuous, and consequently local and 
 definite. 
 
 It was natural that these traditions should be more 
 national than anything else in the world. Everyone 
 spoke through the mouth of his forefathers, saw by the 
 standard of the world which surrounded him ; gave him- 
 self solutions concerning the problems which interested 
 him most, such as were best adapted to his climate, 
 nationality, and traditions. . . . Scandinavia built a world 
 of giants ; the Iroquois made the turtle the machine 
 which explained to him the existence of the earth. 
 
 The whole of modern religious criticism, its 
 fertility as well as its perils, is contained in these 
 words. For how should a grosser mind, or simply 
 a less poetical, less respectful soul than Herder's, 
 translate all this otherwise than by the well-known 
 words of the arch-scofi'er : ' God created man after 
 his own image and man gave it him back ? ' Nor 
 are gross minds, cold and irreverent souls less 
 common among the defenders than among the
 
 VIEW OF THE FUTUEE OF MANKIND. 143 
 
 detractors of positive religion. Warburton wonld 
 not have understood Herder better than he was 
 understood by Paine. Hence the great unpopu- 
 larity of Herder and his disciples in both camps. 
 
 It is usual to call Herder the apostle of 
 humanitarian ideas, and not without reason, pro- 
 vided a contempt for nationalities be not q^^ 
 implied. Herder, like Lessing, who de- humanity. 
 clared patriotism to be a virtue of doubtful worth, 
 like Goethe, like Schiller above all, placed human- 
 ity higher than nationality. In his eyes the title 
 ' man ' was the noblest which could be imairined, 
 and he still belongs entirelj^ to his essentially 
 optimistic century by this very exalted idea of man. 
 In his eyes national prejudices were as contempt- 
 ible as were religious and caste prejudices. He 
 thought that a day would come when a single 
 bond would unite all peoples, when a single, un- 
 written religion, a single civilisation, a single 
 morality would bring men together in a common 
 brotherhood. He protested vehemently against 
 national exclusiveness, as he protested against 
 every other species of exclusiveness. He did not 
 wish that any people, not even his own, should be 
 trumpeted forth as the elect ; but he was not the 
 less full of love and reverence for his countiy on
 
 144 THE REIGN OF HEEDEE. 
 
 that account, and I may anticipate what I shall 
 have to say later, by stating that this spirit of 
 temperate patriotism, which desires for our native 
 country an equal, but never a predominant, place 
 among nations, has given the main impulse to 
 the national revival of Germany in this century, 
 and still moves and sways the mass as well as 
 the elite of the nation. 
 
 National pride (said Herder) is absurd, ridiculous, 
 and dangerous ; but it is everybody's duty to love his 
 country, and it cannot be loved if it is not honoured, or if 
 it is allowed to be disparaged. It must be defended, and 
 each of \is must contribute the utmost in his power to its 
 honour and welfare. 
 
 Far from being a despiser of his own country. 
 Herder was perhaps the most patriotic German 
 writer of the last century, although he had not 
 continuously ' Hermann, the Cherusk,' and the 
 * Roman tyrants ' in his mouth like Klopstock and 
 the Stolbergs. He was undoubtedly the one who 
 best understood the degradation and who most 
 deplored the fragmentary condition, the slavery 
 and political decadence of the Empire. He laments 
 that Germany was but ' a thing of the imagination,' 
 that she had no ' common voice,' that there was 
 no Frederick II. seated upon the worm-eaten
 
 herder's views on humanity. 145 
 
 throne of the German Csesars. And as, in oj^po- 
 sition to Schiller, he desired that poetry should 
 seek her inspiration in real life and not in the 
 ideal world, he likewise wished, in opposition to 
 Goethe, that this reality should be that of public, 
 not for ever that of private, life. In particular 
 his * Letters on' Humanity,' especially the first, 
 are full of these patriotic and political ideas. But 
 it would convey a false impression if I did not add 
 that in his eyes the nation was but ' a member of 
 humankind.' His demand was that nations should 
 exercise a mutual influence over each other by 
 means of their moral and intellectual qualities 
 only, and he saw in a ' free competition of activity 
 among- the different nationalities the fundamental 
 condition of the civilisation of mankind.' Certainly 
 it seems to have been his mission to preach the 
 Human, but also to show it in all its manifold 
 forms. For he contended even ag-ainst Lessinsr that 
 human development is conditioned by nationality 
 and natural surrouu dings, that in the vicissitudes 
 of history the ideal of the Human never appears 
 nor ever will appear in one universal form. 
 
 This man it is who, thanks to some ill- 
 comprehended sentence of a speech made in his 
 youth, has become the ' apostle of cosmopolitism ' 
 
 L
 
 146 THE REIGN OF HEEDEE. 
 
 in tlie eyes of posterity. One ought far rather to 
 say that, after having been the standard-bearer in 
 the revolt of the Teutonic against the Latin spirit 
 by his literary criticism, he was at once the first 
 and the most eloquent defender of that principle 
 of nationalities which has agitated our own century 
 so deeply. By restoring national poetry to its 
 place of honour he contributed indirectly to the 
 revival of patriotic sentiments ; by formulating 
 the German idea he became the forerunner of 
 those who, long after, created the German State. 
 As for himself. Herder was a citizen of all coun- 
 tries and ages, as he was a reader of all literatures. 
 He deemed it necessary to know and appreciate 
 the poetry of other countries as well as of his own ; 
 and to be able to do this properly it was in- 
 dispensa,ble that he should place himself amongst 
 the surroundings which had produced it. Now, 
 nature had endowed him for this purpose with a 
 pliability of intelligence, an acuteness of percep- 
 tion, a keenness of sight and hearing, a refined 
 delicacy of taste totally unrivalled. This faculty 
 of appreciating and entering into the spirit of the 
 •most divers countries and periods constitutes his 
 chief and true grandeur, and he bequeathed a good 
 part of it to the culture of Germany. This was in 
 reality his cosmopolitism, which has been so often
 
 herder's views on humanity. 147 
 
 misrepresented, and about which, a legion of his- 
 torians have been content to repeat stereotyped 
 judgments, without attempting to subject them to 
 the slightest criticism. This cosmopolitism never 
 for a moment prevented him from being the most 
 German of all German writers in the general tone 
 of his inspiration, still less from heralding the 
 German idea to the world with that exaggeration 
 which is always to be found in reactions, and which 
 it is the task of our time to moderate. 
 
 In fact, as we have seen, Herder not only put 
 an end to the remnants of reasoning, didactics, 
 and moralising which even Lessing had still 
 admitted into the domain of poetry ; he combated 
 them also in the field of religion, politics, and 
 historical science, as he also rose up against the 
 idea of rule which Lessing defended, for the essen- 
 tially German conception of individual right. He 
 restored originality, if I may say so, to German 
 poetry and thought by setting limits for a while 
 to the imitation of the ancients ; and the form and 
 spirit of his teaching were eminently German. 
 For, although Germany has had more than one 
 matter-of-fact and sober genius since Luther, still 
 Herder's rather musical than plastic genius, his 
 high-flown, enthusiastic nature, his want of measure 
 
 L 2
 
 148 THE EEIGN OP HERDEE. 
 
 and of definiteness, his wonderful intuitive power, 
 his rather unmethodical reasoning, and his faculty 
 of assimilation are, after all, more characteristic 
 of the German nature than the practical sense and 
 the energy of a Frederick and a Bismarck, the 
 dialectical prowess of a Lessing, or the plastic 
 power of a Goethe. 
 
 There was one quality besides, almost lost, it 
 seemed, since the days of Leibnitz, which Herder 
 restored to his nation and bequeathed to its civili- 
 sation and thought : universality and breadth of 
 horizon. Understanding nationality as few per- 
 sons of his time understood it, he subordinated 
 it to humanity. Brought up in reverence for 
 Hellenism, and the first to point out its true 
 character, he discovered the East by intuition. 
 In heart a Christian, he knew how to assimilate 
 all the * pagan' humanism of the Renaissance. 
 Full of admiration for the classical authors, he 
 found the secret of primitive and religious j)oetry. 
 Liberal in his political sympathies, he demonstrated 
 the laws and consistency of history. No mani- 
 festation of mankind, whatever its form, had a 
 secret for the apostle of humanity.
 
 GENERALITY OF THE MOVEMENT. 149 
 
 Tlie movement initiated bj Herder was a 
 general one, and it extended from Konigsberg to 
 Zurich, from Strassburg to Dresden, 
 
 Sturm- un 
 
 every town of Germany taking part in it, J)ranff- 
 
 periode. 
 
 more or less. Not only universities and 
 republics, like Gottingen and Frankfort, but small 
 capitals also, such as Darmstadt, Weimar, Stutt- 
 gart, saw the ' geniuses ' hurl their clamorous 
 challenge and defy the heaven in their desire to 
 renew and regenerate the world by a return to 
 Nature ; for the young disciples, as disciples 
 will do, began forthwith to out-Herder Herder. 
 The preceding generation had been concentrating 
 its powers for action, and Berlin had been 
 Lessing's headquarters. Young Germany of 1775 
 overflowed the entire country, finding voluntary 
 agents and apostles in all quarters. The same 
 ideas which Hamann had instilled into Herder, 
 when on the shores of the Baltic, were to strike 
 his ear as soon as he approached Switzerland, 
 where Lavater was preaching them with still 
 greater zeal and in more whimsical language than 
 the ' Magician of the North.' 
 
 When a student at Konigsberg, indeed. Herder 
 had undergone not only Kant's influence, Kgnjo-g. 
 but also, and still more, Hamann's. He ^"^'
 
 150 THE EEIQN OF HEEDEE. 
 
 owed to Kant — not yet the man who wrote the 
 Critic of Pure Reason, and opened new horizons 
 to man's intelligence — the awakening of his philo- 
 sophical thought. 
 
 I once had the happiness of knowing a philosopher ; he 
 was my teacher. He had the joyous cheerfulness of 
 youth at that happy time ; his open forehead, created ex- 
 pressly for thought, was the seat of imperturbable serenity ; 
 his speech, redundant with ideas, flowed from his lips ; he 
 always had some humorous trait, some witty sally at his 
 disposal, . . . He would constantly bring us back to the 
 siniple, unaffected study of nature. . . . He gave me self- 
 confidence, and obhged me to think for myself, for tyranny 
 was foreign to his soul. 
 
 And Kant himself, on reading some verses of the 
 enthusiastic boy, said: 'When this boiling genius 
 has done fermenting, he will be a very useful man.' 
 Who could then have predicted the desperate 
 warfare which was to break out between these 
 two great men thirty years later? Even then, 
 however, it was Hamann's more than Kant's 
 merit to have shown Herder the road he was to 
 follow. Hamanu is not to be counted among the 
 German classical writers, although he left several 
 volumes ; for all he produced was of a fragmen- 
 tary nature. He abounded in new and original 
 ideas, but there were as many ' nebulous spots as
 
 GOTTINGEN. 151 
 
 stars on that firmament ' (Jean Paul), and the dis- 
 order of his brain was as clearly reflected in his 
 * grasshopper-style ' as it was in his odd person. 
 This singularly active power — Goethe called him 
 *the indispensable, but indigestible leaven' of 
 the time — must in a great measure, of course, 
 escape the scrutiny of history ; nor is it easy to 
 explain it otherwise than by the persistency with 
 which Hamann harped upon that fundamental 
 theme then about to become the leading principle 
 of the generation : the theme of absolute individual 
 liberty. He excited Herder against the dead letter 
 of poetical rule, as well as against the narrow- 
 minded morality of the middle classes. He was 
 as rebellious against the 'modern State' of the 
 Philosopher King, as against ' enlightenment ' 
 and rationalism in religion ; but it was reserved 
 to the disciple to set the ' unstrung pearls ' of 
 the Konigsberg ' Magus.' 
 
 The University of Gottingen was a still more 
 agitated centre of movement than that of Konigs- 
 berof. There Biiro^er had iust written his 
 
 ^ » J GSttingen. 
 
 ' Lenore,' and those other early ballads 
 which at once took Germany by storm ; there some 
 young students had formed among themselves a 
 poetical league, which assembled around the secu-
 
 152 THE EEIGN OP HERDEE. 
 
 ]ar oaks of the neisrlibonrinGf forest, invokincf the 
 memory of Hermann, the liberator, and the Teu- 
 tonic bards, worshipping Klopstock, and burning 
 Wieland's woi-ks. The famous 'Hainbund' num- 
 bered among its associates many celebrated names. 
 There were the two impetuous Counts Stolberg, the 
 ' enemies of tyrants ' — dead tyrants, of course — 
 Voss, the peasant-boy and future poet of ' Louise,' 
 he who gave Germany what Heine called the Vul- 
 gate of Homer, and who, forty years later, declared 
 war upon Fritz Stolberg, when this friend of his 
 youth fled into the arms of Rome ; his brother-in- 
 law, Boie, who published the first poetical alma- 
 nack, the ' Moniteur ' of the League ; melancholy 
 Holty, doomed to early death, and many other 
 poets who afterwards got a high reputation, but 
 the eldest of whom at that time was hardly 
 tAventy-two years of age ; sincere and pure and 
 high-minded youths all of them, but somewhat in- 
 tentional in their enthusiasm, not without uncon- 
 scious affectation beneath the surface of their mag- 
 niloquent vehemence; more bent upon looking for 
 the poetical in abstract thought and vague feelings 
 than in sensuous reality and its definite forms. 
 
 In the South, especially in Wlirtemberg, a soil 
 which has alwa^^s been productive of revolutionary
 
 wiJETEMBEEG. 153 
 
 radicalism, it was no loiisrer rebellion airainst 
 literary authority alone which armed the wurtem- 
 poets. lliey did not limit themselves '^*^'"^' 
 to ridiculing, like Blirger, ' Mam'zell la Regie, 
 nursery-governess and duenna, half French, half 
 Greek, ever ready to watch over the children of 
 the German Muse, preventing them from straying 
 on to the flower-beds and admonishing them to 
 hold up their heads, turn out their toes, and 
 stretch their arms.' Here it was not only against 
 the yoke of scholastic pedantry in science and 
 thought that protest was made, as in the North ; 
 here was not only a platonic hatred vowed against 
 religious and political 0]3pression, as in the plains 
 of Gottingen ; here there was rebellion ag'ainst 
 the established authorities as well. Despotism had 
 put such a strain upon the springs in the little 
 country of Suabia that at last they threatened to 
 snap asunder. The worship of Eousseau nowhere 
 found more numerous and more fervent ad- 
 herents than in the native land of Schiller. The 
 young writer of the ' Brigands ' had himself much 
 to bear from the intolerable yoke of ' Denys 
 turned into a schoolmaster.' It is well known 
 how he escaped from the Duke's College by flight, 
 and what eloquent, clamorous protest he hurled
 
 154 THE REIGN" OF HEEDEE. 
 
 from that time ao^ainst despotism in ' Fiesco,' in 
 * Cabal and Love,' in ' Don Carlos.' His gipsy- 
 like countryman Weckherlin, who protested in his 
 newspapers, divided his life between prison and 
 exile. Before him Schubart, the journalist, scholar, 
 musician and poet, the model and ideal of Schiller's 
 early days, had raised his voice in impetuous 
 stanzas, and expiated the temerity of his ' Fiirsten- 
 gruft ' by ten years of solitary captivity in the 
 famous castle of Hohenasperg, which received 
 within its walls many other high-minded men, 
 determined to resist absolute rule. 
 
 More to the South still, in the old Swiss re- 
 publics, ' preserved in spirits of wine,' as Goethe 
 used to say, the new ideas also worked 
 
 Zurich. 
 
 against the antiquated and petrified forms 
 of state, society, religion. There it was that 
 Pestalozzi, inflamed by Rousseau's * Emile,' at- 
 tempted to elevate the lower classes by a more 
 natural education, without falling into the ex- 
 tremes of the other great school reformer of the 
 day, Basedow, who had also waged war against 
 all the traditional systems. Basedow, however, 
 who was one of Goethe's odd travelling companions 
 on the Rhine, ^ preached and worked mostly in the 
 
 • Propliete rechts, Prophete links, 
 Das Weltkind in der Mitten.
 
 ZUEICH. loo 
 
 north of Germany. The other 'prophet,' Lavater 
 (born 1741), the famous physiognomist, taught 
 the new religion in Ziirich, which ever since the 
 beginning of the century had been an active focus 
 of literary life. Reviving pietism in a way by 
 giving it a sort of poetical colour and combining 
 with it a high culture, little familiar to the humble 
 brethren, he pretended to regenerate Christianity 
 by the inner light, by the revelation every day re- 
 peated. With the tone of an inspired seer he 
 boasted of having found again the Divine word, 
 which had been lost. In his heart he felt Christ 
 born anew. This tone and these ideas he brought 
 also into the poetical domain, where he would re- 
 cognise genius alone. Young Goethe was content 
 to proclaim the autocracy of Genius, which ' school 
 could but fetter,' and to which ' principles were 
 more noxious even than examples ; ' Lavater went 
 the length of actual worship : 
 
 Geniuses (he would exclaim), lights of the world, salt 
 of the earth, nouns in the grammar of humanity, images 
 of Deity, human Gods, creators, destroyers, revealers of 
 the secrets of God and man, drogmans of nature, prophets, 
 priests, kings of the world — it is of you I speak, it is you 
 1 ask, How did the Deity call you 1 
 
 There you have something of the reigning
 
 156 THE EEIGX OF HEEDEE. 
 
 liercH-svorsliip in its absti-usest form ; and, of course, 
 among the worsliipped heroes was the prophet 
 himself and even his disciples. Xothing could 
 give a better idea of the wars and spirit of this 
 strange young generation than these bizaiTe efPu- 
 sions. However tedious may be the tortured 
 style of the enthusiast, one must endure it if we 
 wotild understand the time. 
 
 The character of genius is apparition, which, Kke that 
 of an angel, does not come, but is there, which, like that, 
 strikes the innermost maiTow . . . and disappears and 
 continues acting after having disappeared, and leaves 
 behind itself sweet shudders and teai-s of tenx)r and 
 paleness of joy which are the work and effect of genius. 
 Call it as thou hkest — call it fecundity of mind, inexhausti- 
 bility, unequalled sti-ength, piimitive force, elasticity of 
 soul, call it central spirit, central fire, or simply inven- 
 tion, instinct, the not-learned, the not-borrowed, the un- 
 leamable, the unborrowable, etc., etc. 
 
 And thus it goes on for pages ; but in spite of 
 the absurd form the idea appears clearly. Nothing 
 but spontaneousness is worth anything ; and the 
 form itself is contempt for aU that is orderly, 
 correct, and svstematic. The manners also which 
 shocked not a little the pedantic and economical 
 inhabitants of the Alps corresponded to these 
 forms of style, when the young enthusiasts of
 
 STEAS5BUEG. 1-57 
 
 the Xorth came as on a pilgrimage to tlie Zurich 
 apostle, foremost among them the two Stolbergs, 
 displaying their long fair locks in the midst of 
 those carefallj powdered heads, and dividing *the 
 crreen waves of the lake ' in full davlight. Who 
 does not think of old Horace? 
 
 Ingenium mbera quia, fortunatius arte 
 Credit et excludit sanos HeUcone poetas 
 Demociitus, bona pars non ungues ponere curat, etc. 
 
 Still the true field of battle, that of literary 
 principles, which at that time had alone the power 
 of exciting a passionate interest in Ger- 
 
 Strassburg. 
 
 many, after Frederick's heroic period had 
 been succeeded by his more prosaic administrative 
 activit}', the true battle-field was the valley of the 
 Ehine, where historical ideas and interests at all 
 times were wont to meet and join in conflict. It was 
 in Strassburg that Goethe met with unfortunate 
 Lenz, the most gifted perhaps of his friends, a 
 morbid and misunderstood genius, "who, like many 
 of his generation, was to sink, while still voting, 
 into the night of insanity ; with honest Lerse, 
 whom he immortahsed in his ' Gotz ; ' with that 
 strange and kind-hearted dreamer, Jung- Stilling, 
 the tailor-doctor, a sweet and touching physiog- 
 nomy, an ardent and mystical soul, whom Goethe
 
 158 THE REIGN OP HEEDEE. 
 
 revealed to the Avorld by publisliini^ the manuscript 
 of his diary ; with Herder above all, who was then 
 suffering from an operation on his eyes, and with 
 whom he kept company in the long winter evenings 
 of 1770-71. Here took place those conversations, 
 and that interchange of thought, awakened by their 
 reading which made that year a memorable date, 
 and the city of Strassburg, still entirely German 
 in spite of ninety years of French government, a 
 hallowed spot to the German people. Here it was 
 that young Goethe — then twenty-one years old — 
 who had recently arrived from Leipzig with some- 
 what academical or rather arcadian views and 
 habits of mind, was initiated into the beauties of 
 Shakespeare by Herder. Here it was that they 
 read and re-read the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Tristram 
 Shandy,' Percy's ' Reliques,' and of course Ossian ; 
 and here, also, that Goethe, while under the 
 charm of the most poetical romance of his life, 
 composed his finest lyric poems, sketched his 
 ' Gotz,' and conceived the idea of ' Faust.' The 
 account he has left in his memoirs of the time he 
 spent in Alsace, the portraits he has traced of the 
 companions of his generous freaks there, the de- 
 scription we owe to him of the movement of ideas 
 which animated this sparkling, stirring young
 
 FRANKFURT. 159 
 
 generation, is simply a masterpiece of literary 
 history in the modest frame of a personal memoir. 
 From Strassburg Goethe returned to his native 
 town, Frankfurt, where he at first settled under 
 the paternal roof — the casa santa, as the 
 
 Frankfurt. 
 
 poet s friends used to call it— and after- 
 wards took up his residence at Wetzlar as a 
 clerk to the Imperial Court of Justice. There, 
 assisted by his friend Merck — a shrewd and deep 
 mind of severe literary taste, with whom he was 
 always to be seen, * like Faust and Mephistopheles ' 
 — he edited the chief paper of the party, the 
 ' Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen,' and published 
 stroke upon stroke ' Gotz,' ' Werther,' ' Clavigo.' 
 Here ' Socrates-Addison,' as they called Merck, 
 replaced the ' Irish dean with his whip ' — so they 
 styled Herder — in the tutorship of Goethe, the 
 ' young lord with scraping cock-spurs.' Literary 
 congresses were soon organised everywhere in the 
 valleys of the Lahn, Mein, and Ehine. Jacobi, 
 the philosopher of sentiment, opened his hospitable 
 villa of Pempelfort to his numerous friends ; 
 Sophie de la Eoche — the authoress of ' Fraulein 
 von Sternheim,' the first love of Wieland's youth, 
 the mother of Maximiliane Brentano, who furnished 
 more than one feature to Goethe's ' Lotte,' the
 
 160 THE EEIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 grandmother of Clemens Brentano, tlie roman- 
 ticist, and Bettina, ' the child ' — Sophie de la 
 Roche received them often in her seat near Co- 
 blentz. The little University of Giessen, where 
 proud Klinger, the dramatist, who has given the 
 name to the whole period, was then studying, and 
 already shaping out that wonderful career which 
 he began as a poor workman's apprentice and 
 ended as a Russian lieutenant-general ; the old 
 imperial city of Wetzlar, where the scene of 
 Goethe's ' Werther ' is laid, as it was the real 
 scene of the poet's and Lotte's love ; the small 
 residence of Darmstadt, where Merck received the 
 visits of all the literary celebrities of the day — saw 
 in turn the meetings where the new creed was 
 enthusiastically preached. 
 
 It was under Merck's guidance that Goethe, 
 together with his brother-in-law, Schlosser, and 
 Herder, set to work so vigorously and mercilessly 
 to attack the old literary routine in his periodical, 
 upon which Goze, Lessing's old theological enemy, 
 invoked the rigour of the secular arm ; and when we 
 see Merck ' knock the powder out of the wigs ' in 
 his young friend's journal, it is not difficult to 
 understand how Wieland conld say of him : 
 ' Merck is among critics what Klopstock is among
 
 WEIMAR. 16] 
 
 poets, Herder among tlie learned, Lavater among 
 Cliristians, and Goethe among all human beings.' 
 But with, all his impatience for conventional 
 literature, and in spite of his appreciation of that 
 simple, unaffected popular poetry which Herder 
 had brought into fashion, Merck never suffered 
 himself to be deceived bj counterfeit nature a la 
 Macpherson. True, he ridiculed the tight-laced 
 poetry of the times, and had no mercy for classical 
 buskin ; but he was quite as severe upon, the two 
 impetuous Stolbergs' strained enthusiasm, upon 
 whimsical Lenz's intentional eccentricity, and 
 tender-hearted Jacobi's mystic languor. In the 
 midst of all these young folks giving themselves 
 the airs of tribunes or seers — more than one of 
 them had indeed a deceptive likeness to genius — he 
 did not hesitate a moment in distinguishing the 
 only real genius, Wolfgang Apollo. It was Merck 
 also who made him known to the young Duke of 
 Saxe-Weimar, henceforth his protector and friend 
 for life. 
 
 Goethe was twenty-six years old when he ac- 
 cepted (1775) the invitation of Charles 
 
 Weimar. 
 
 Augustus, and transported to Weimar the 
 
 tone and the allures of the literary Bohemia of 
 
 Strassburg. There, to the terror of the good 
 
 M
 
 162 THE REIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 burghers of that small residence, to the still 
 greater terror of the microscopic courtiers, began 
 that ' genial ' and wild life, which he and his 
 august companion led during several years. 
 Hunting, riding on horseback, masquerades, 
 private theatricals, satirical verse, improvisation 
 of all sorts, flirtation particularly, filled up day 
 and night, to the scandal of all worthy folks, who 
 were utterly at a loss to account for His Serene 
 Highness saying ' Du ' to this Frankfurt roturier. 
 The gay Dowager Duchess, Wieland's firm friend, 
 looked upon these juvenile freaks with a more 
 lenient eye ; for she well knew that the fermen- 
 tation once over, a noble, generous wine would 
 remain. ' We are playing the devil here,' writes 
 Goethe to Merck ; ' we hold together, the Duke 
 and I, and go our own way. Of course, in doing 
 so we knock against the wicked, and also against 
 the good ; but we shall succeed ; for the gods are 
 evidently on our side.' Soon Herder was to join 
 them there, unfortunately not always satisfied 
 with the results of his teaching about absolute 
 liberty of genius. 
 
 The whole generation bore with impatience, 
 as we have seen, the yoke of the established 
 order, of authority under whatever form, whether
 
 GENERAL ATTITUDE OF THE GENERATION. 163 
 
 the fetters were tliose of litei^ary convention or 
 social prejudice, of the State or the Church. The 
 er/o affirmed its absolute, inalienable right; ^j^^ ^^^_ 
 it strove to manifest itself according to '^^ the^'S 
 its caprices, and refused to acknow- °'^^'^'^^'"^- 
 ledge any check. Individual inspiration vy;^as a 
 sacred thing, which reality with its rules and 
 prejudices could only spoil and deflower. Now, 
 according to the temperament of each, they rose 
 violently against society and its laws, or resigned 
 themselves silently to a dire necessity. The one 
 in Titanic eflPort climbed Olympus, heaving Pelion 
 on Ossa ; the other wiped a furtive tear out of his 
 eye, and, aspiring to deliverance, dreamed of an 
 ideal happiness. Sometimes in the same poet the 
 two dispositions succeed each other. 
 
 Cover thy sky with vapour and clouds, Zeus, ex- 
 claims Goethe's Promethevis, and practise thy strength on 
 tops of oaks and summits of mountains like the child who 
 beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless, leave me my 
 earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my 
 hearth, whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, 
 burning with a sacred ardour, which alone has accom- 
 plished all 1 And should I thank thee, who wast sleeping 
 whilst I worked ] 
 
 The samjg young man, who had put into the mouth 
 
 M 2
 
 164 THE EEIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 of the rebellious Titan this haugiity and defiant 
 outburst, at other moments, when he was dis- 
 couraged and weary of the struggle, toolr refuge 
 within himself. Like Werther, ' finding his world 
 within himself, he spoils and caresses his tender 
 heart, like a sickly child, all whose caprices we in- 
 dulo-e.' One or the other of those attitudes towards 
 reality, the active and the passive, were soon taken 
 by the whole youth of the time ; and just as 
 Schiller's ' Brigands ' gave birth to a whole series 
 of wild dramas, ' Werther ' left in the novels of the 
 time a long line of tears. More than that, even in 
 reality Karl Moor found imitators who engaged in 
 an open struggle against society, and one met 
 at every corner languishing 8iegwarts, whose 
 delicate soul was hurt by the cruel contact of the 
 world. 
 
 What strikes us most in this morbid sen- 
 timentality, is the eternal melancholy sighing 
 after nature. Ossian's cloudy sadness and 
 Young's dark Nights veil every brow. They fl}' 
 into the solitudes of the forests in order to dream 
 freely of a less brutal world. They must, indeed, 
 have been very far from nature to seek for it with 
 such avidity. Many, in fact, of these ardent, 
 feverish young men became in the end a prey.
 
 GENERAL ATTITUDE OF THE GENERATION. 105 
 
 some to madness, others to suicide. A species of 
 moral epidemic, like that whicli followed upon 
 the apparent failure of the Ee volution in 1799, 
 had broken out. The germ of Byronism may be 
 clearly detected already in the Wertherism of 
 those times. Exaggerated and overstrained 
 imaginations found insufficient breathing-room in 
 the world, and met on all sides with boundaries 
 to their unlimited demands. Hearts, accustomed 
 to follow the dictates of their own inspiration 
 alone, bruised themselves against the sharp angles 
 of reality. The thirst for action which consumed 
 their ardent youth could not be quenched, in fact, 
 in the narrow limits of domestic life ; and public 
 life did not exist. Frederick had done great 
 things, but only, like the three hundred other 
 German governments, to exclude the youth of 
 the middle classes from active life. Thence the 
 general uneasiness. ' Werther ' was as much an 
 effect as a cause of this endemic disease ; above 
 all, it was the expression of a general state of 
 mind. It is this which constitutes its historical 
 importance, while the secret of its lasting value 
 is to be found in its artistic form. 
 
 Besides, if I may say so without paradox, the 
 disease was but an excess of health, a juvenile
 
 166 THE REIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 crisis through which Herder, young Goethe, Schil- 
 ler, and indeed the whole generation, had to pass. 
 
 Oh (exclaimed old Goethe fifty years later in a conver- 
 sation with young Felix Mendelssohn) — oh, if I could but 
 write a fourth volume of my life. ... It should be a 
 history of the year 177.5, which no one knows or can write 
 better than I. How the nobility, feeling itself outrun by 
 the middle classes, began to do all it could not to be left 
 behind in the race ; how liberalism, jacobinism, and all 
 that devilry awoke : how a new life began ; how we 
 studied, and poetised, made love and wasted our time ; 
 how we young folks, full of life and acti^dty, but awk- 
 ward as we could be, scoffed at the aristocratic proijensities 
 of Messrs. Nicolai and Co. in Berlin, who at that time 
 reigned supreme. . . . Ah, yes, that was a spring, when 
 everything was budding and shooting, when more than one 
 tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. 
 All that in the year 1775 ! 
 
 Old pedantic Nicolai, at whom he scoffed thus, 
 foresaw, with his prosy common* sense, what would 
 happen ' with all those confounded striplings,' as 
 Wieland called them, ' who gave themselves airs 
 as if they were accustomed to play at blind -man's 
 buff with Shakespeare.' ' In four or five years,' 
 said he in 1776, *this fine enthusiasm will have 
 passed away like smoke ; a few drops of sj>irit will 
 be found in the empty helmet, and a big cajjut
 
 LATER PHILOSOPHY OF HIS DISCIPLES. 167 
 
 mortuum in the crucible.' This proved true cer- 
 tainly for the great majority, but not so as regards 
 the two coursers which then broke loose, and for 
 him who had cut their traces and released them. 
 Of the latter I have spoken to-day ; of tlie former 
 two I shall say something the next time we meet. 
 Not of their youth, however, but of their maturer 
 age ; not of their vie ws when they were twenty, but 
 of the philosophy which they had come to twenty 
 years later. Goethe, indeed, modified, or at least 
 cleared up, his early views under the influence of a 
 deeper study of nature and the sight of ancient 
 and Eenaissance Art in Italy (1786-1788) ; Schil- 
 ler put himself to school under Kant (1790), and 
 went out of it with a completely altered philosophy ; 
 Kant himself became another after, if not in 
 consequence of, the great King's death (1786); 
 Herder alone remained faithful throughout to the 
 creed he had himself preached. 
 
 I have dwelt so long on Herder not only because, 
 till lately, his influence has not been sufficiently 
 acknowledged, but also because the way 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
 opened by mm, although partly and 
 temporarily abandoned during the classical period 
 of which I shall have to speak to you the next 
 time, was followed again by the third generation
 
 168 THE EEIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 of the founders of German culture, the so-called 
 Eomanticists, and by all the great scholars, who, 
 in the first half of this century, revived the his- 
 torical sciences in Germany. Herder's ideas have, 
 indeed, penetrated our whole thought to such a 
 degree, whilst his works are so unfinished and 
 disconnected, that it is hardly possible for us to 
 account for the extraordinary effect these ideas and 
 works produced in their day, except by marking the 
 contrast which they present with the then reigning 
 methods and habits, as well as the surprising in- 
 flaeiice exercised by Herder personally. From his 
 twenty-fifth year, indeed, he was a sovereign. 
 His actual and uncontested sway was not, it is 
 true, prolonged beyond a period of about sixteen 
 years, albeit his name figured to a much later time 
 on the list of living potentates. It is also true, that 
 when the seeds thrown by him had grown luxuri- 
 antly, and were bearing fruit, the sower was almost 
 entirely forgotten or wilfully ignored. The gene- 
 ration, however, of the ' Stiirmer und Drang er,' or, 
 as they were pleased to denominate themselves, 
 the 'original geniuses,' looked up to Herder as 
 their leader and prophet. Some of them turned 
 from him later on and went back to the exclusive 
 worship of classical antiquity ; but their very
 
 HIS INDIRECT I-NTLUENCE. 169 
 
 manner of doing homage to it bore witness to 
 Herder's influence. The following generation 
 threw itself no less exclusively into the middle 
 ages ; but what, after all, was it doing if not fol- 
 lowing Herder's example, when it raked up Dantes 
 and Calderons out of the dust in order to confront 
 them with and oj)pose them to Virgils and Racines ? 
 HoAvever they might repudiate, nay even forget, 
 their teacher, his doctrines already pervaded the 
 whole intellectual atmosphere of Germany, and 
 men's minds breathed them in with the very air 
 they inhaled. To-day they belong to Europe. 
 
 Herder, I repeat, is certainly neither a classical 
 nor a finished writer. He has no doubt gone 
 out of fashion, because his style is pompous and 
 diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary ; 
 because his reasoning lacks firmness and his erudi- 
 tion solidity. Still, no other German writer of note 
 exercised the imjDortant indirect influence which 
 was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude 
 to Schelling and his philosophy, which received 
 more than one impulse from Herder's ideas ; nor 
 to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical 
 system and defended them with his wonderful 
 dialectics. But F. A. Wolf, when he points out to 
 us in Homer the process of epic poetry ; Niebuhr,
 
 170 THE REIGN OF HERDER. 
 
 in revealing to us the growth of Eome, the birth 
 of her religious and national legends, the slow, 
 gradual formation of her marvellous constitution; 
 Savigny, when he proves that the Roman Civil 
 Law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, was 
 not the work of a wise legislator, but rather the 
 wisdom of generations and of centuries ; Eichhorn, 
 when he wrote the history of German law and 
 created thereby a new branch of historical science 
 which has proved one of the most fertile ; A. 
 W. Schlegel and his school, when they trans- 
 planted all the poetry of other nations to Germany 
 by means of imitations which are real Avonders 
 of assimilation ; Frederick Schlegel, when, in the 
 * Wisdom of the Hindoos,' he opened out that 
 vast field of comparative linguistic science, which 
 Bopp and so many others have since cultivated 
 with such success ; Alexander von Humboldt and 
 Karl Eitter, when they gave a new life to geo- 
 graphy by showing the earth in its growth and 
 development and coherence ; W. von Humboldt, 
 when he established the laws of language as well as 
 those of self-government ; Jacob Grimm, when he 
 brought German philology into existence, while his 
 brother Wilhelm made a science of Northern myth- 
 ology; still later on, D. F. Strauss, when, in the days
 
 FERTILITY OF HIS IDEAS. 171 
 
 of our own youth, he placed the myth and the legend, 
 with their unconscious origin and growth, not 
 alone in opposition to the idea of Deity intervening 
 to interrupt established order, but also to that of 
 imposture and conscious fraud ; Otfr. Miiller, when 
 he j)roved that Greek mythology, far from con- 
 taining moral abstractions or historical facts, is 
 the involuntary personification of surrounding 
 nature, subsequently developed by imagination ; 
 Max Miiller even, when he creates the new science 
 of comparative mythology — what else are they doing 
 but applying and working out Herder's ideas ? And 
 if we turn our eyes to other nations, what else 
 were Burke and Coleridge, B. Constant and A. 
 Thierry, Guizot and A. de Tocqueville — what are 
 Eenan and Taine, Carlyle and Darwin doing, each 
 in his own branch, but applying and developing 
 Herder's two fundamental principles, that of or- 
 ganic evolution and that of the entireness of the 
 individual? For it was Herder who discovered 
 the true spirit of history, and in this sense it is 
 that Goethe was justified in saying of him : 
 
 A noble mind, desirous of fathoming man's soul in 
 whatever direction it may shoot forth, searcheth through- 
 out the universe for sovmd and word which flow through 
 the lands in a thousand sources and brooks ; wanders
 
 172 THE EEIGN OF HERDEE. 
 
 tbrough the oldest as the newest regions and listens in 
 every zone. . . . He knew how to find this soul wher- 
 ever it lay hid, whether robed in grave disguise, or lightly 
 clothed in the garb of play, in order to found for the 
 future this lofty rule : Humanity be our eternal aim !j
 
 173 
 
 LECTURE Y. 
 
 THE TRIUMVIRATE OF GOETHE, KANT, AND 
 SCHILLER. 
 
 1787- 1800. 
 
 Among the young literary rebels who, under 
 Herder's guidance, attempted, towards and after 
 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all autho- 
 rity, even all law and rule, in order to put in their 
 stead the absolute self-government of genius, 
 freed from all tutorship — the foremost were the 
 two greatest German poets, Goethe and Schiller. 
 Goethe's 'Gotz' and ' Werther,' Schiller's 'Bri- 
 gands,' and ' Cabal and Love,' were greeted as the 
 promising forerunners of the national literature to 
 come. Their subjects were German and modern, 
 not French or classic ; in their plan they affected 
 Shakespearean liberty ; in their language they 
 were at once familiar, strong, and original; in
 
 174 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 their inspiration they were protests against the 
 social prejudices and political abuses of the time, 
 vehement outbursts of individuality against con- 
 vention. 
 
 Not twenty years had passed away, when both 
 the revolutionists had become calm and resig^ned 
 liberal conservatives, who understood and taught 
 that liberty is possible only under the empire of 
 law ; that the real world with all its limits had a 
 rio-lit as well as the inner world, which knows no 
 frontiers ; that to be completely free man must fly 
 into the ideal sphere of Art, Science, or formless 
 Religion. Not that they abjured ' the dreams of 
 their youth.' The nucleus of their new creed was 
 contained in their first belief; but it had been 
 developed into a system of social views more in 
 harmony with society and its exigencies, of aesthe- 
 tic opinions more independent of reality and its 
 accidents, of philosophical ideas more speculative 
 and methodical. In other words, Goethe and 
 Schiller never ceased to believe as they had done 
 at twenty, that all vital creations in nature as in 
 society are the result of growth and organic 
 development, not of intentional, self-conscious 
 planning, and that individuals on their part act 
 powerfully only through their nature in its en-
 
 GENERAL VIEW ON NATURE AND MAN. 175 
 
 tiretj, not through one faculty alone, such as 
 reason or will, separated from instinct, imagina- 
 tion, temperament, passion, etc. Only they came 
 to the conviction that there existed general laws 
 which presided over organic development, and 
 that there was a means of furthering in the 
 individual the harmony between temperament, 
 character, understanding, and imagination, with- 
 out sacrificing one to the others. Hence they 
 shaped for themselves a general view of Nature 
 and Mankind, Society and History, which may 
 not have become the permanent view of the whole 
 nation ; but which for a time was predominant, 
 which even now is still held by many, and which 
 in some respects will always be the ideal of the 
 best men in Germany, even when circumstances 
 have wrought a change in the intellectual and 
 social conditions of their country, so as to necessi- 
 tate a total transformation and accommodation 
 of those views. 
 
 We cannot regard it merely as the natural 
 effect of advancing years, if Goethe and Schiller 
 modified and cleared their views ; if Kant, whose 
 great emancipating act, the ' Critic of Pure Reason,' 
 falls chronologically in the preceding period (1781), 
 corrected what seemed to him too absolute in his
 
 176 GOETHEj KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 system, and reconstructed from the basis of the 
 conscience that metaphysical world which he had 
 destroyed by his analysis of the intellect. The 
 world just then was undergoing profound changes. 
 The great ' Philosopher King ' had descended to 
 the tomb (178G), and with him the absolute 
 libertj"^ of thought, which had reigned for forty- 
 six years. The French Eevolution, after having 
 exalted all generous souls, and seemingly con- 
 firmed the triumph of liberty and justice which 
 the generation had witnessed in America, took a 
 direction and drifted into excesses which unde- 
 ceived, sobered, and saddened even the most 
 hopeful believers. As regards personal circum- 
 stances, the Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788) 
 and his scientific investigations into nature, the 
 study of Kant's new philosophy to which Schiller 
 submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791), 
 were the high-schools out of which their genius 
 came strengthened and purified, although their 
 aesthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite 
 unimpaired by them. I shall endeavour to give an 
 idea of this double process and its results at the risk 
 of being still more abstract and dry than before.' 
 
 ' For the following pages on Goethe, see his 'Wilhelm 
 Meister,' especially the sixth book, and ' Bildung und Umbildung
 
 ART AND NATURE. 177 
 
 Man is the last and liighest linlc in Nature ; 
 
 Lis task is to understand what she aims Q^gthe's 
 
 at in liim and then to fulfil her inten- moral ^ 
 
 tions. This view of Herder's was Goethe's '"""^'P ***• 
 
 starting-point in the formation of his Weltan- 
 schauung or general view of things. 
 
 All the woi-ld (says one of the characters in ' Wilhelm 
 Meister ' ) lies before us, like a vast quarry before the 
 architect. He does not deserve the name, if he does not 
 compose with these accidental natural materials an image 
 whose soux'ce is in his mind, and if he does not do it with 
 the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All 
 that we find outside of us, nay, within us, is object-matter ; 
 but deep within us lives also a power capable of giving an 
 ideal form to this matter. This creative power allows 
 U3 no rest till we have produced that ideal form in one 
 or the other way, either without us in finished woi-ks, or 
 in our own life. 
 
 Here we already have in germ Schiller's idea 
 that life ought to be a work of art. But how do 
 we achieve this task, continually impeded as we are 
 by circumstances and by our fellow-creatures, who 
 will not always leave us in peace to develop our 
 individual characters in perfect conformity with 
 
 organischer Naturen,' particularly 'Gescliichte meines Botan- 
 ischeu btudiams ' (vol. xxxvi. of the ' Works ').
 
 178 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 nature? In our relations with our neighbour, 
 Goethe (like Lessing and Wieland, Kant and 
 Herder, and all the great men of his and the pre- 
 ceding age, in England and France as well as in 
 Germany) recommended absolute toleration not 
 only of opinions, but also of individualities, par- 
 ticularly those in which Nature manifests herself 
 ' undefiled.' As to circumstances, which is only 
 another name for Fate, he preached and practised 
 resignation. At every turn of our life, in fact, 
 we meet with limits ; our intelligence has its 
 frontiers which bar its way ; our senses are limited, 
 and can only embrace an infinitely small part of 
 nature ; few of our wishes can be fulfilled ; pri- 
 vation and sufferings await us at every moment. 
 ' Privation is thy lot, privation ! That is the 
 eternal song which resounds at every moment, 
 which, our whole life through, each hour sings 
 hoarsely to our ears ! ' laments Faust. What 
 remains then for man ? ' Everything cries to us 
 that we must resign ourselves.' 'There are few 
 men, however, who, conscious of the privations 
 and sufferings in store for them in life, and desirous 
 to avoid the necessity of resigning themselves 
 anew in each particular case, have the courage to 
 perform the act of resignation once for all ; ' who
 
 Goethe's moral principles. 179 
 
 say to themselves that there are eternal and neces- 
 sary laws to which we must submit, and that we 
 had better do it without grumbling ; who ' en- 
 deavour to form principles which are not liable to 
 be destroyed, but are rather confirmed by contact 
 with reality.' In other words, when man has 
 discovered the laws of nature, both moral and 
 physical, he must accept them as the limits of his 
 actions and desires ; he must not wish for eternity 
 of life or inexhaustible capacities of enjoyment, 
 understanding, and acting, any more than he 
 wishes for the moon. For rebellion against these 
 laws must needs be an act of impotency as well as 
 of deceptive folly. By resignation, on the contrary, 
 serene resignation, the human soul is purified ; 
 for thereby it becomes free of selfish passions and 
 arrives at that intellectual superiority in which 
 the contemplation and understanding of things 
 give sufficient contentment, without making it 
 needful for man to stretch out his hands to take 
 possession of them : a thought which Goethe's 
 friend, Schiller, has magnificently developed in 
 his grand philosophical poems. Optimism and 
 pessimism disappear at once as well as fatalism ; 
 the highest and most refined intellect again accepts 
 the world, as children and ignorant toilers do, as 
 
 N 2
 
 180 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 a given necessity. He does not even think the 
 
 world could be otherwise, and within its limits he 
 
 not only enjoys and suffers, but also works gaily, 
 
 trying, like Horace, to subject things to himself, 
 
 but resiofned to submit to them, when thev are 
 
 invincible. Thus the simple Hellenic existence 
 
 which, contrary to Christianity, but according to 
 
 nature, accepted the present without ceaselessly 
 
 thinking of death and another world, and acted 
 
 in that precent and in the circumstances allotted 
 
 to each by fate, without wanting to overstep the 
 
 boundaries of nature, would revive again in our 
 
 modern world and free us for ever from the torment 
 
 of unaccomplished wishes and of vain terrors. 
 
 The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe 
 
 lived outside the struggle for life, outside the 
 
 competition and contact of practical 
 Goethe's . . . 
 
 view of activity, m the contemplation or nature 
 
 Nature. ^ , . . 
 
 and art, developed this view — the spec- 
 tator's view, which will always be that of the 
 artist and of the thinker, strongly opposed to that 
 of the actor on the stage of human life. ' Iphi- 
 genia,' ' Torquato Tasso,' * Wilhelm Meister ' are 
 the fruits and the interpreters of this conception of 
 the moral world. What ripened and perfected it, 
 30 as to raise it into a general view, not only of
 
 Goethe's method. 181 
 
 morality, but also of the great philosopliical 
 questions which man is called upon to answer, 
 was his study of nature, greatly furthered during 
 his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the 
 bottom of all the vague longing of his generation 
 for nature he was to solve. It became his inces- 
 sant endeavour to understand the coherence and 
 unity oi nature. 
 
 You are for ever searching for what is necessary in 
 nature (Schiller wrote to him once), but you search for 
 it by the most difficult way. You take the whole of 
 natui'e in oider to obtain light on the particular case ; you 
 look into the totality for the explanation of the individual 
 existence. From the simplest organism (in nature), you 
 ascend step by step to the more complicated, and finally 
 construct the most complicated of all, man, out of the 
 materials of the whole of nature. In thus creatmg man 
 anew under the guidance of nature, you penetrate into his 
 mysterious organism. 
 
 And, indeed, as there is a wonderful harmony 
 with nature in Goethe, the poet and the man, so 
 there is the same harmony in Goethe, the savant 
 and the thinker ; nay, even science he practised 
 as a poet. As one of the greatest physicists of 
 our days, Helmholtz, has said of him : * He did 
 not try to translate nature into abstract concep- 
 tions, but takes it as a complete work ot art, which
 
 182 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 must reveal its contents spontaneouslj to an 
 intelligent observer.' Goethe never became a 
 thorough experimentalist ; he did not want ' to 
 extort the secret from nature by pumps and re- 
 torts.' He waited patiently for a voluntary revela- 
 tion, i.e. until he could surprise that secret by an 
 intuitive glance ; for it Avas his conviction that 
 if you live intimatel}^ with Nature, she will sooner 
 or later disclose her mysteries to you. If you read 
 his ' Songs,' his ' Werther,' his ' Wahlverwandt- 
 schaften,' jo\i feel that extraordinary intimacy — 
 I had almost said identification — with nature, pre- 
 sent everywhere. Werther's love springs up with 
 the blossom of all nature ; he begins to sink and 
 iiears his self-made tomb, while autumn, the death 
 of nature, is in the fields and woods. So does 
 the moon spread her mellow light over his garden, 
 as 'the mild eye of a true friend over his destiny.' 
 Kever was there a poet who humanised nature or 
 naturalised hnman feeling, if I might say so, to 
 the same degree as Goethe. Now, this same love 
 of nature he brought into his scientific researches. 
 He began his studies of nature early, and he 
 began them as he was to fi.nisn them, with geology. 
 BufFon's great views on the revolutions of the earth 
 had made a deep impression upon him, although
 
 Goethe's view of a'ature. 183 
 
 lie was to end as tlie declared adversai-y of that 
 vulcanisni which we can trace already at the 
 bottom ofBuffon's theory — naturally enough, when 
 we thiuk how uncongenial all violence in society' 
 and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere 
 for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theo- 
 retical study he had early turned to direct obser- 
 vation ; and when his administrative functions 
 obliged him to survey the mines of the little 
 Dukedom, ample opportunit}- was offered for 
 positive studies. As early as 1778, in a paper on 
 Granite, he wrote : ' I do not fear the reproach 
 that a spirit of contradiction draws me from the 
 contemplation of the human heart — this most 
 mobile, most mutable and fickle part of the creation 
 — to the observation of (granite) the oldest, firmest, 
 deepest, most immovable son of Nature. For all 
 natural things are in connexion with each other.' 
 It was his life's task to search for the links of this 
 coherence in order to find that unity, which he 
 knew to be in the moral as well as material uni- 
 verse. 
 
 From those ' first and most solid beginnings of 
 our existence,' he turned to the history of plants 
 and to the anatomy of the animals which cover 
 this crust of the earth. The study of Spinoza
 
 184 GOETHE, KANT, AKD SCHILLEE. 
 
 confirmed liim in the direction thus taken. * There 
 I am on and under the mountains, seeking the 
 divine in herhis et laindibus,' says he, in Spinoza's 
 own words ; and again : ' Pardon me, if I like to 
 remain silent, when people speak of a divine being 
 which I can know only in rehus singularibvs.' This 
 pantheistic view grew stronger and stronger with 
 years ; but it became a pantheism very different 
 from that of Parmenides, for whom being and 
 thinking are one, or from that of Giordano Bruno, 
 which rests on the analog-y of a universal soul 
 with the human soul, or even from that of Spinoza 
 himself, which takes its start from the relations of 
 the physical world witli the conceptive world, and 
 of both with the divine one. Goethe's pantheism 
 always tends to discover the cohesion of the 
 members of nature, of which man is one : if once 
 he has discovered this universal unity, where there 
 are no gaps in space, nor leaps in time, lie need 
 not search further for the divine. 
 
 Nature ! We live in it and remain strangers to it. 
 It continvially talks to us and does not betray its secret. 
 It seems to have planned everything with a view to indi- 
 viduality, and does not care for individuals. It lives only 
 by continual birth, and the mother is indiscernible. 
 Nature has thought, and does not cease to think ; but it
 
 Goethe's view of nature. 1S5 
 
 thinks, not as man does, but as Nature. It loves itself 
 and is ever centred on itself with innumerable eyes and 
 hearts. It has multiplied itself in order to enjoy itself 
 a hundredfold. It is ever creating new enjoyers, never 
 tired of communicating itself. Life is its most beautiful 
 invention, and death its artifice for having much life. 
 
 This idea it was which was afterwards meta- 
 physically developed by Schelling and Hegel ; but 
 metaphysics are not what we are now studying-. 
 Even when I shall have to speak by and by of 
 Kant, who entirely changed the basis of all specu- 
 lative thought, I shall leave aside his philosophy 
 proper as much as possible, and try only to speak 
 of his way of looking at life and history. Goethe's 
 view of life, which he won through the study of 
 nature, and which consists in trying to seize the 
 unity of nature in the constant climax of its 
 phenomena up to the highest, the intellectual 
 phenomenon, man, — differs from all former similar 
 views in this, that it considers the coherence of the 
 universe as a process in time, a history in which 
 or through which nature becomes conscious of 
 itself, not as a connection by links in space only. 
 This is the point where Herder's influence is most 
 percej)tible, and which was to be brought into a 
 system by the methodical and dialectical specula-
 
 186 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. 
 
 tions of Hegel, whom we may consider as the great 
 summariser of all the intellectual work done by 
 Germany during the sixty or seventy years with 
 which we are occupied. 
 
 By what means was this process, this history, 
 which Goethe discerned in the coherence of nature, 
 to be discovered and understood ? By the means 
 of the very same organ of intuition which the 
 whole generation of Herder and Goethe had recog- 
 nised in their youth as the highest of poetical 
 faculties, and which Kant himself had admitted 
 to be the distinctive quality of the poet. Others, 
 we have seen and shall further see, applied this 
 faculty to history. Goethe applied it to nature. 
 His poet's eye revealed to him the mystery of 
 nature's laws ; but he was not content with such 
 divination. He became a patient and conscien- 
 tious observer, and did not rest until he had, as it 
 were, proved his sum. Now, this method has re- 
 mained the dominant one in Germany, and has 
 misled thinkers more than once, when they applied 
 it without controlling it by the inductive method. 
 The aberrations and excrescences of Schelling's 
 philosophy of Nature are in everybody's memory ; 
 and the best things done in natural science, even 
 in Germany, have been done by adversaries of
 
 Goethe's view of nature. 187 
 
 Scbelling's school and adherents of the mechanical 
 principle of explanation. Nevertheless the in- 
 tuitive method has been wonderfully fertile even 
 for natural science, and I remember how often 
 Liebig himself told mo that all his discoveries had 
 been the result of lightning-like intuition and 
 divination, ascertained afterwards by observation 
 and experiment. As for historical sciences, the 
 conquests made by the intuitive method are 
 nncontested. It has taught the world that the 
 knowledge of laws — that is to say, the most ab- 
 stract and unreal kind of knowledge — is by no 
 means alone valuable ; that causality, to which 
 the savants of our dav would again limit all 
 science, is not its sole object; that the intuitive 
 knowledge of typical forms — in other words, of 
 platonic ideas — which we acquire by the careful 
 observation of individual and particular phenomena, 
 has equally its value; for it allows us to form ideas 
 of things, which always remain the same through 
 all the changes of the phenomena, and neverthe- 
 less do not exist in reality. 
 
 It is analogy which helps us to form these 
 intuitive or platonic ideas. It was through 
 analogy that Goethe arrived at his great dis- 
 coveries in natural science, and I only repeat
 
 ]88 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 what swch men as Johannes Miiller, Baer, and 
 Hehnholtz have been willing to acknowledge, 
 when I say that the poet's eye has been as keen as 
 that of any naturalist. Kant had contended that 
 there might be a superior Intelligence, which, 
 contrary to human intelligence, goes from the 
 general to the particular ; and Goethe thought — 
 he proved, I might say — that in man too some of 
 this divine intelligence can operate and shine, if 
 only in isolated sparks. It was a spark of this 
 kind which, first at Padua on the sight of a fan- 
 palm tree, then again, on the eve of his departure 
 from Palermo, during a walk in the public garden 
 amidst the southern vegetation, revealed to him 
 the law of the metamorphosis of plants. He found 
 an analogy between the difierent parts of the same 
 plant which seemed to repeat themselves : unity 
 and evolution were revealed to him at once. 
 
 Three years later the sight of a half-broken 
 sheep-skull, which he found by chance on the 
 sand of the Venetian Lido, taught him that the 
 same law, as he had suspected, applied also to 
 vertebrate animals, and that the skull might be 
 considered as a series of strongly modified ver- 
 tebrae. He had, in fact, already hinted at the 
 principle, shortly after put forward by Lamarck,
 
 Goethe's view op nature. 189 
 
 and long afterwards developed and firmly established 
 by Darwin. He considered the difference in the 
 anatomical structure of animal species as modi- 
 fications of a type or planned structure, modi- 
 fications brought about by the difference of life, 
 food, and dwellings. He had discovered as early 
 as 1 786 the intermaxillary bone in man, i.e. the 
 remnant of a part which had had to be adapted 
 to the exigencies of the changed structure ; and 
 proved thereby that there had been a primitive 
 similarity of structure, which had been trans- 
 formed by development of some parts, and 
 atrophy of others. Goethe's sketch of an ' In- 
 troduction into Comparative Anatomy,' which 
 he wrote in 1795, urged by A. von Humboldt, 
 has remained, if I may believe those competent to 
 judge, a fundamental stone of modern science. 
 And, I may be allowed, as I am unversed in such 
 matters, to invoke the authority of one of the most 
 eminent living physiologists, Helmholtz, who says 
 of Goethe's anatomical essay, that in it the poet 
 
 .... teaclies, with the greatest clearness and decision, 
 that all differences in the structure of animal species are to 
 be considered as changes of one fundamental type, which 
 have been brought about by fusion, transformation, ag- 
 grandiiiement, diminution, or total annihilation of several
 
 190 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 parts. This has, indeed, become, in the present state of 
 comparative anatomy, the leading idea of this science. It 
 has never since been expressed better or more clearly than 
 by Goethe : and after-times have made few essential 
 modifications.' 
 
 Now, the same may be said, I am told, in spite 
 of some differences as to details, of Ms metamor- 
 phosis of plants. I do not mean by this to say 
 that Goethe is the real author of the theory of 
 evolution. There is between him and Mr. Darwin 
 the difference which there is between Vico and 
 Niebuhr, Herder and F. A. Wolf. In the one case 
 we have a fertile hint, in the other a well- 
 established system, worked out by proofs and 
 convincing arguments. Nevertheless, when a 
 man like Johannes Miiller sees in Goethe's views 
 ' the presentiment of a distant ideal of natural 
 history,' we may be allowed to see in Goethe one 
 of the fathers of the doctrine of evolution, which, 
 after all, is only an application of Herder's prin- 
 ciple oi fieri to the material world. 
 
 After having thus gone through the whole 
 series of organisms, from the simplest to the most 
 complicated, Goethe finds that he has laid, as it 
 were, the last crowning stone of the universal 
 
 1 Written in 1853, five years before the appearance of Mr, 
 Darwin's great work.
 
 Goethe's philosophic views. 191 
 
 pyramid, raised from the materials of the whole 
 quarry of nature ; that he has reconstructed man. 
 And here begins a new domain ; for after 
 
 Goethe's 
 
 all for mankind the highest study must be philosophic 
 
 views. 
 
 man himself. The social problems of 
 property, education, marriage, occupied Goethe's 
 mind all his life through, although more parti- 
 cularly in the last thirty years. The relations of 
 man with nature, the question how far he is free 
 from the laws of necessity, how far subject to them, 
 are always haunting him. If you read the ' Wahl- 
 verwandtschaften,' the ' Wanderjahre,' the second 
 ' Faust,' you will find those grave questions ap- 
 proached from all sides. I shall not, however, 
 enter here into an exposition of Goethe's political, 
 social, and educational views, not only because 
 they mostly belong to a later period, but especially 
 because they have never found a wide echo, nor 
 determined the opinions of an important portion 
 of the nation, nor entered as integrating principles 
 into its lay creed. Not so with the metaphysical 
 conclusion which he reached by this path, and 
 which is somewhat different from the pantheism of 
 his youth, inasmuch as he combines with it some- 
 what of the fundamental ideas of Leibnitz, which 
 were also Lessing's, and which, after all, form a
 
 » 
 192 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 sort of return to Christianity, as understood in its 
 widest sense, in the sense in which it harmonises 
 with Plato's idealism. ' Tliiuking is not to be 
 severed from what is thought, nor will from move- 
 ment.' Nature consequently is God, and God is 
 nature, but in this God-Nature man lives as an 
 imperishable monad, capable of going through 
 thousands of metamorphoses, but destined to rest 
 on each stage of this unlimited existence, in full 
 possession of the present, in which he has to ex- 
 pand his whole being by action or enjoyment. 
 This conception of life was not, as you will see, 
 the creation of an imagination longing to pass 
 beyond the conditions of human existence — which 
 is the idealism of the ' general '— but the highest 
 result of the poet's insight into the order of nature. 
 Here we mark the great contrast with the 
 later Kant, the contrast between a view which 
 sees in man one link in the chain of nature, and 
 the view which takes man out of the order of 
 nature and makes him a member of a higher 
 invisible order. This contrast has filled up the 
 intellectual history of Germany ever since Herder 
 opened hostilities against the master of his youth. 
 In vain Fichte, Scheiling, Hegel gave themselves 
 out to be the disciples of Kant ; in reality they
 
 Goethe's philosophic Views. 193 
 
 ■were only the sophists, who, with the weapons of 
 Kant's dialecticism, carried ad ahsurdum the main 
 idea of Herder and Goethe, the German idea, Kar^ 
 s^o-^rjv, according to which nature is immanent in 
 the human mind, and develops itself by the de- 
 veloping of the conceptions of this mind. For 
 mind is nothing* else hut nature come to the con- 
 sciousness of itself : its essence being the essence 
 of nature, its contents the contents of nature. 
 The task of the student is to discover this identity, 
 and the most powerful vehicle for its discovery is 
 intuition. Now, as long as in these matters in- 
 tuition let itself be controlled by observation and 
 induction, it had wonderful results, particularly 
 in the historical sciences and even in the natural 
 sciences, although, as I just said, the best part of 
 Germany's work in the latter was done by ad- 
 versaries of this method. Still, A. von Humboldt, 
 when he declared his aim to be 'the consideration 
 of physical things as a whole, moved and animated 
 by inner forces,' and K. Ritter, when he defined 
 'the earth as a cosmic individual with a particular 
 organisation, an ens sui generis, with progressive 
 development,' both stood on common ground with 
 Goethe and Herder ; on common ground even 
 with Schelling, whose influence has been so de- 
 
 o
 
 \ 
 
 10 J) GOET^ter :^ANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 plorable on natural science in Germany, leading- to 
 the most dangerous consequences through the 
 desire to understand and grasp the parts, their 
 distribution and ordination, by starting from the 
 whole — a sort of deductive system of intuition as 
 the old deductive system was one of abstract 
 conceptions. What, on the contrary, the intui- 
 tive method, supported by severe and sagacious 
 criticism of detail, has produced in the historical 
 sciences, which can only be grasped by intuition, 
 I need not say. The names of F. A. Wolf and 
 Niebuhr, W. von Humboldt and Bopp, the Grimms 
 and Boeckh, Savigny and Eichhorn, tell us clearly 
 enough. Philology and archaeology, theology and 
 mythology, jurisprudence and history j)roper, have 
 been entirely renewed by it ; whilst linguistic 
 and literary history may be said to have been 
 created by it. (I am here only explaining the 
 views of the creators of German culture : I do 
 not defend them, where I share them, as I did 
 not criticise them when I found myseK at variance 
 with them. Else, I should certainly pause here, 
 and in all courtesy break a lance with those men 
 of the younger generation and of this island, who 
 would treat the historical sciences by the same 
 method as the natm-al or mathematical.)
 
 THE TWO CURRENTS. 195 
 
 I have said that there was an antagonism 
 between Kant's views and those of Herder and 
 Goethe, and that this antagonism has rj,,^g ,p^^ 
 been ever since sensibly felt in the intel- ^^"®°^^- 
 lectual history of Germany. Some efforts were 
 made to reconcile them, as for instance by Schiller. 
 Sometimes a sort of alliance took place, as in 1813, 
 when the romanticists, who were quite under the 
 spell of the Herder-Goethe ideas, invoked the aid of 
 the moral energy, which was a special characteristic 
 of Kant's disciples ; but the antagonism lives on 
 not the less even now in the German nation, as the 
 antagonism between Hume and Burke, Locke and 
 Berkeley, Fielding and Richardson, Shakespeare 
 and Milton, nay, between Renaissance and Puritan- 
 ism in spite of their apparent death, is still living 
 in the English nation. This difference is, as will 
 happen in this world, much jnore the difference 
 between two dispositions of mind, character, and 
 temperament, than between two opposite theories ; 
 or at least the conflicting opinions are much more 
 the result of our moral and intellectual dispositions 
 than of objective observation and abstract argu- 
 mentation. Germany owes much to the stern 
 unflinching moral principles of Kant ; she owes 
 still more, however, to tlie serene and large views 
 
 o 2
 
 196 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 of Goethe. The misfortune of both ideals is that 
 they cannot and will never be accessible save to 
 a small elite, that of Kant to a moral, that of 
 Goethe to an intellectual elite. But are not all 
 ideals of an essentially aristocratic nature ? The 
 German ideals, however, are so more than others, 
 and the consequence has been a wide gap between 
 the mass of the nation and the minority which has 
 been true to those ideals. The numerical majority, 
 indeed, of the German nation has either remained 
 faithful to the Church, though without fanatic- 
 ism, or has become materialistic and rationalistic. 
 It is a great misfortune for a nation when its 
 greatest writer in his greatest works is only 
 understood by the happy few, and when its 
 greatest moralist preaches a moral which is above 
 the common force of human nature. The only 
 means of union between the nation and the in- 
 tellectual and moral aristocracy, which has kept 
 and guarded that treasure, as well as the only 
 link between these two aristocratic views of life 
 themselves, would be furnished by religion, a 
 religion such as Lessing, Mendelssohn, and above 
 all Schleiermacher, propounded, such as reigned 
 all over Germany forty or fifty years ago, before 
 party spirit had set to work, and the flattest of
 
 THE TWO CURRENTS. 197 
 
 rationalisms liad again invaded the nation — a 
 religion, corresponding, for the mass, to what 
 Goethe's and Kant's philosophy, which is neither 
 materialism nor spiritualism, is for the few — a 
 religion based on feeling and intuition, on con- 
 science and reverence, but a religion Avithout 
 dogmas, without ritual, without forms, above all 
 without exclusiveness, and without intolerance. 
 I doubt whether this mild and noble spirit, which 
 is bj no means indifferentism, will soon revive, as 
 I doubt whether Germany will quickly get over 
 the conflict between the traditional and the 
 rationalistic spirit, which mars her public life, 
 whether too she will soon reach that political 
 ideal which England realised most fully in the 
 first half of this century and which consists in a 
 perfect equilibrium between the spirit of tradi- 
 tion and that of rationalism. However, although 
 Kant's lofty and Goethe's deep philosophy of life 
 is now the treasure of a small minority only, it 
 has none the less pervaded all the great scientific 
 and literary work done up to the middle of this 
 century. It has presided over the birth of our new 
 State ; and the day will certainly come when 
 public opinion in Germany will turn away from 
 the tendency of her present literature, science, and
 
 198 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. 
 
 politics — a somewhat nan'ow patriotism, a rather 
 shallow materialism, and a thoroughly false parlia- 
 mentary regime — and come back to the spirit of 
 the generations to whom, after all, she owes her 
 intellectual, though not perhaps her political and 
 material, civilisation. But I have wandered away 
 from our immediate subject, and it is time that 
 I should come back to it, and especially to Kant, 
 who, at the period we speak of, wielded, with 
 Groethe and Schiller, the sceptre of intellectual life. 
 Whoever has studied the history of German 
 philosophy, knows that there are two Kants ; nay, 
 Kant ^ might even say, three Kants. The first 
 h. 1/24. j^^jj-t^ i]^Q young Kant of thirty, started, 
 as we have seen, from Newton and Rousseau, and 
 came to a view of the world and of mankind very 
 much akin to that of Lessing. He was little 
 noticed then, however, and acted little upon his 
 contemporaries at large, in spite of the animated, 
 sometimes even elegant and ornamented, style of 
 his youthful essays. The second Kant, if I might 
 be allowed to say so, wrote when he was fifty and 
 published in 1781 the ' Critic of Pure Eeason,' the 
 most wonderful effort of abstract thought which 
 the world has seen. By this extraordinaiy per- 
 formance Kant effected for the intellectual world,
 
 KANT. 199 
 
 as lie said himself, what Copernicus had effected 
 for the physical world : an entire change of the 
 basis of all philosophical study. Before him the 
 only paths tried in metaphysics were dogmatism 
 and scepticism. He had himself followed first the 
 one with L eibnitz- Wolff ; then the other with 
 Hume ; but coming to no satisfactory conclusion 
 with either, he at last chose a third way, the 
 critical, and made this ' footpath a highroad ' to 
 the knowledge of speculative truth. 
 
 Till now it was taken for gi'anted that onr under- 
 standing must accommodate itself to the objects ; but all 
 attempts to learn anything which might widen our know- 
 ledge by a priori conceptions were without result in 
 consequence of that supposition. Let us try, therefore, 
 whether we do not come nearer to the solution of meta- 
 physical problems, by supposing that objects must accom- 
 modate themselves to our understanding. ... It is with 
 this as with the fii'st thought of Copernicus. Not suc- 
 ceeding with the explanation of the celestial movements 
 as long as he supposed that all the host of stars turned 
 round the observer, he tried whether he would not 
 succeed better if he left the stars quiet, and made the 
 observer turn round. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the hypothesis 
 proved true in both cases. Kant's philosophy 
 is to the metaphysics before him what astronomy
 
 200 GOETHE, KANT, AND SGHILLEE. 
 
 is to astrology, "vvliat chemistry is to alcliymy. 
 As lie proclaimed, lie acliieved the momentous 
 revolution by submitting to examination the in- 
 stniment itself of philosophising, i.e. human 
 reason, for, according to him, philosophy is a 
 science which treats ' of the limits of reason,' and 
 he showed why it is incapable of grasping the infi- 
 nite in space and time, as well as the idea of a first 
 cause. Space, indeed, as well as time, and in- 
 directly causality, are not qualities of the outer 
 world, but laws of our mind, or rather ' forms of 
 our representation,' which have nothing to do with 
 the things themselves. In fact, objects of the 
 senses can never be known, but as they a^jpear to 
 us (through the subjective medium of space and 
 time) not as they are in themselves; and objects 
 which our senses do not perceive are no objects 
 for our theoretical knowledge. (Remark the theo- 
 retical, because on it the later evolution of Kant 
 hinges.) Kant never denied the existence of the 
 sensual world, as Berkeley did ; he only con- 
 tended that we see it not as it is, but as the 
 forms of our intellect make it appear. Teleology 
 is therefore a ' regulative ' principle of our under- 
 standing, which supplies a motive for the world of 
 phenomena, not a ' constitutive ' principle of this 
 objective world. It is true that Kant added in the
 
 KANT. 201 
 
 first edition of his book a passage which he left out 
 in the second, and in which he said, quite in pass- 
 ing, that the ' thing in itself ' and the perceiving ego 
 might be one and the same thinking substance, and 
 it is on this passing hypothesis that 'the three great 
 impostors,' as Schopenhauer most unjustly calls 
 Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, constructed their 
 whole idealism. Kant himself says plainly 
 enouo-h : — 
 
 "»' 
 
 The proposition of all the true idealists, from the 
 Eleatic school down to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in 
 the formula : all knowledge through the senses and ex- 
 perience is mere appearance ; truth is only in the ideas 
 of pure intelligence and pure reason. The principle 
 which governs and pervades all my idealism is, on the 
 contrary : all knowledge of things through pure intelli- 
 gence and pure reason is nothing but appearance ; truth 
 is only in experience. 
 
 All psychology, cosmology, and theology based 
 on pure reason fall with that principle ; for they 
 are attempts to apply the forms or categories of 
 the understanding to the 'thing in itself,' which 
 those very categories prevent it from perceiving, 
 consequently they must mislead. Psychology, 
 which treats the soul as a thinking substance, 
 must lead to paralogisms, such as liberty Avithout 
 motives ', theology, with its famous three proofs
 
 202 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 of the Deity, deals witli empty conceptions ; cos- 
 mology, wliich considers the world as it appears 
 to us, to be the world as it really is, can only 
 end in contradiction or antiDomies {e.g. the world 
 has a beginning and is limited in space, and the 
 antithesis, the world is eternal and infinite). 
 
 The ' Critic of Pure Reason ' made a great 
 stir : but the salutary influence which it 
 
 Kant's . . -, 1 . 
 
 moral phi- might have exercised at once on the phi- 
 losophy. 
 
 losophical movement of the country ,^ as 
 
 it begins to do just now only, was marred to a cer- 
 tain extent by the second great book of Kant, the 
 ' Critic of Practical Peason,' which virtually was 
 a retractation of the first book. Indeed, Fichte, 
 Schelling, Hegel, the so-called continuators of 
 Kant, meant to be true Kantians, when with one foot 
 they stood on the ' Pure Eeason,' with the other on 
 the ' Practical Eeason.' We all know what was 
 the result of their acrobatic efforts at equilibrium. 
 Scho]3enhauer, the only thinker who held fast by 
 Kant's great discovery, and took his starting- 
 point from it, combining it at the same time with 
 the Herder-Goethe idea of the ever-working 
 creative power in nature, remained ignored 
 for forty years. Since then there has been a 
 revival of Kant's philosophy, which will, I trust.
 
 kakt's mokal philosophy. 203 
 
 prove permanent; and it is particularly remark- 
 able that, as Kant started from tlie natural sciences 
 to arrive at the criticism of the mind, so his 
 critical method has in our days penetrated into, 
 and pervades, all the natural sciences. Almost 
 all the really great men of science in Germany are 
 neither materialists nor spiritualists, nor sceptics, 
 but critics, if I may say so, of the Kantian school. 
 This, however, is not the place to enter further 
 into an exposition of Kant's ' Pure Reason ; ' for 
 here, I repeat, we are not studying the history of 
 philosophy any more than that of literature and 
 the State, but the history of the general thought 
 of the German nation. Now a book like Kant's 
 ' Pure Eeason ' cannot exercise any direct in- 
 fluence on the general thought of a nation ; it is 
 too special for that, too difficult, too abstract; 
 it remains the esoteric property of the philo- 
 sophers. Even the indirect influence which it 
 must exercise, the exoteric doctrine, which belongs 
 to the domain of these lectures, begins only to 
 be felt in our days, as I said just now, and we 
 are speaking here of the end of the past century, 
 Not so with what I venture to call the third 
 Kant. Kant published his 'Critic of Practical 
 Eeason' in 1 788, his ' Critic of Judgment ' in 1790,
 
 204 GOETHE, KAXT, AND SCHILLEE. 
 
 and these two books liad a deep and immediate 
 effect on general thought. Schiller modified his 
 fiesthetic views under the influence of the latter, 
 and the best of a whole generation lived and 
 acted in the lofty — for us too loftj — moral ideas 
 of the former. 
 
 Kant's ' Critic of Pure Eeason ' had been the 
 scientific analysis of the human intellect. His 
 ' Critic of Practical Eeason ' may be regarded as 
 the scientific analysis of human will (or, more 
 exactly, desire), together vdth a reconstruction of 
 the metaphysical world through moral feeling. 
 Kant, indeed, contended that there were only 
 three psychological faculties : understanding, 
 volition, and feeling. Understanding contains 
 its own principles and those of the other two. 
 Considered with regard to its own principles, it is 
 ' Pure Eeason ; ' considered with regard to volition, 
 it is 'Practical Eeason;' considered with regard to 
 the feeling of pleasure and pain, it is ' Judgment.' 
 Now, Kant contends that there is a sentiment of 
 morahty inborn in us, and he calls it, in opposition 
 to all conditional morality, the ' categoric impera- 
 tive,' which orders us to act so or so. We have it, 
 he contends, without and before experience, and it 
 tells us what is right and wrong independently of
 
 kant's moral philosophy. 205 
 
 all tlie dictates of a given social law in a given 
 j)eriod or nation. Liberty consists in our obeying 
 this inner law. He had himself stated that this 
 is an idea which cannot be proved, that for 
 reason liberty does not and cannot exist ; but it 
 exists, he now urges, for feeling ; and as he had 
 shown in his ' Pure Reason ' that behind this 
 experimental and phenomenal world there might 
 be a different world superior to, or rather exterior 
 to, the laws of our understanding and senses, so 
 this undoubted feeling of a moral law within us 
 proves that this possible higher world really exists. 
 This is the raonstrum, to use Schopenhauer's words, 
 to which Kant found his way : ' a theoretical 
 doctrine ' which is theoretically indefensible, and 
 which has only practical value ! 
 
 From this postulate, then, Kant reconstructs 
 the immortality of the soul, as the necessary con- 
 dition for realising our inborn ideal of virtue, and 
 the personal Deity as being a consequence of our 
 inborn desire of happiness ; in other words, the 
 very things which in his ' Pure Eeason ' he had 
 proved to be unprovable. ' We can imagine,' he 
 then said of the Deity plausibly enough, ' an 
 intelligence which, not being discursive like ours, 
 but intuitive, might go from the general to the
 
 206 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 particular . . . ; ' but for its, men, there is no 
 knowledge except tlirougli the combination of 
 sensation with the forms and categories of the 
 intelligence. There is no faculty within us to 
 create anything without materials furnished by 
 the senses. Consequently the particiilars furnished 
 by the senses on one side, and the unity which 
 we impart to them by our combining intellect on 
 the other side, would remain independent of each 
 other. If they correspond, it might be mere 
 chance ; it is only by supposing a divine mind 
 really intuitive that this casual, accidental cor- 
 respondence would become a necessary identity. 
 But this, he surmises (and with him all thinkers 
 who wish to remain within the limits assigned by 
 Kant himself to human intelligence), would always 
 remain an hypothesis. Now, in his ' Practical 
 Eeason,' this hypothesis suddenly becomes a 
 reality, through the inner sense of the moral 
 law. Once more, in his third great work, to 
 which we shall revert by and by, in the ' Critic 
 of Judgment,' Kant destroys the old onto- 
 logical, cosmological, and physico-theological 
 proofs of the existence of a personal God, 
 only to admit the moral proof — not before 
 the tribunal of Reason, of course, but on the
 
 eant's moral philosophy. 207 
 
 ground of sentiment, and before that of practical 
 necessity. 
 
 Kant's whole religion, however, is always 
 founded upon the moral law alone, not upon 
 reason and argument like that of the rationalists 
 and Deists ; still less upon individual revelation, 
 like that of the mystics and pietists ; least of all 
 on the Bible or tradition, like that of the orthodox 
 and theologians. 
 
 Men xoill not understand (he says) that when they 
 fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's com- 
 mandments ; that they are consequently always in the 
 service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that 
 it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise. 
 
 And again : 
 
 As everybody likes to be honoured, so people imagine 
 that God also wants to be honoured. They forget that 
 the fulfilment of duty towards men is the only honour 
 adequate to him. Thus is formed the conception of a re- 
 ligion of worship, instead of a merely moral religion. . . . 
 Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself 
 able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere 
 superstition and religious folly. If once a man has come 
 to the idea of a service which is not purely moral, but 
 is supposed to be agreeable to God himself, or capable of 
 propitiating him, there is little difference between the 
 several ways of serving him. For all these ways are of
 
 208 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 equal value. . . . Whether the devotee accomplishes his 
 statutory walk to the church, or whether he undertakes 
 a pilgrimage to the sanctuaries of Loretto and Palestine, 
 whether he repeats his prayer-formulas with his lips, or 
 like the Tibetan, uses a prayer-wheel ... is quite 
 indifferent. As the illusion of thinking that a man can 
 justify himself before God in any way by acts of worship 
 is religious superstition, so the illusion that he can 
 obtain this justification by the so-called intercourse with 
 God is religious mysticism {Schwdrmerei). Such super- 
 stition leads inevitably to sacerdotahsm [Pfaffenthum) 
 which will always be found where the essence is sought 
 not in principles of morality, but in statutory command- 
 ments, rules of faith and observances. 
 
 The last consequence of Kant's principle is 
 
 that religion should be 
 
 .... successively freed from all statutes based on history, 
 and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that 
 God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading- 
 string of sacred tradition with all its appendices . . . 
 becomes by degrees useless, and at last a fetter . . . The 
 humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen 
 must disappear, and equality spring from true hberty. 
 All this, however, must not be expected fi'om an exterior 
 revolution, wloich acts violently, and depends upon 
 fortune. In the principle of pure moral religion, which 
 is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in 
 the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage 
 to the new order of things, which will be accomplished 
 by slow and successive reforms.
 
 eaxt's political views. 209 
 
 And as in religion so in the State ; with the dif- 
 ference that he not only wanted to break with all 
 tradition, but wished also to see the new 
 
 Kant's 
 
 State founded on purely rational prin- political 
 
 views. 
 
 ciples. Hence his enthusiasm for the 
 North-American Eepublic and for the French 
 Revolution, in spite of his previous conviction 
 that ' a revolution might bring about the downfall of 
 personal despotism and avaricious oppression, but 
 never a true reform . . . for new prejudices would 
 serve as well as the old for leading-strings for the 
 thoughtless mass' (1785). When, in 1792, the 
 Republic was proclaimed, he said with tears in 
 his eyes : ' Now, I can say like Simeon, Lord, now 
 lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
 eyes have seen Thy salvation.' He was somewhat 
 shaken by the death of Louis XVL, some months 
 later, and wrote once more (1798) against the 
 right of rebellion ; but soon after the reign of terror 
 was over, and even during the Directory, when 
 everybody turned away in disgust, he remained 
 faithful to his belief, that the French Revolution 
 was the dawn of a new day for mankind, the 
 first great attempt to found a State on reason 
 alone. We must not allow ourselves to be misled 
 by his polemic against Rousseau's ' Contrat social.' 
 
 p
 
 210 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. 
 
 Here, as in his metaphysics, he drew the distinc- 
 tion between theoretical and practical truth, 
 contending that in fact there was nothing like a 
 contract, either between all the members of a 
 nation, or between the citizens and the king. His 
 political views remained nevertheless in their 
 essence those of the constitution-mongers of the 
 century, from Montesquieu to Hamilton. In this 
 he remained isolated in Germany. The incredible 
 and universal enthusiasm which the Eevolution 
 had excited there gave way to very different feel- 
 ings after the execution of the King; and even 
 the principle of a rational constitution was soon 
 abandoned for the more congenial idea of pro- 
 gress through a reform of the traditional institu- 
 tions. It was Burke, the English Herder, who 
 became the prophet of the rising generation in 
 Germany. 
 
 Not so with Kant's religious and moral ideas. 
 The former found a most eloquent interpreter in 
 Schleiermacher, and it was, I might say, the 
 national religion during almost haK a century. The 
 moral principle, on which Kant based his religion, 
 j^g„(^,g made, indeed, an immediate impression in 
 lu uence. gpj^g ^f ^^g almost Superhuman severity. 
 When Kant proclaimed this stem idea of inexor-
 
 kant's influence. 211 
 
 able duty, tlie German world was practically and 
 tlieoretically worslLipping- selfishness, be it under 
 tlie form of indulgence to caprice, or under that 
 of meek sentimentality, while Courts vied with 
 literary circles in * genial ' license. Kant's was a 
 morality not of passion or disposition, but of firm 
 principles and severe commandments. Love and 
 affection are in his eyes no more moral motives 
 than utility and ambition. The one motive is : 
 ' thou shalt ' ; fulfilment of duty for duty's sake, 
 respect for the unbendiDg moral law. When he 
 preached absolute political liberty, equality, and 
 self-government, the German nation still lived 
 under the most arbitrary despotism of three hun- 
 dred absolute rulers ; it was divided into narrow 
 castes, and no public life existed. When he called 
 for a peaceful federation of all civilised nations, 
 (1795) a war which seemed destined never to end 
 was still raging almost throughout Europe. It 
 was, perhaps, this contrast of his ideas with the 
 suiTounding world which gave them such power 
 over men's minds. There can be no doubt that the 
 generation of Stein and Scharnhorst, of Fichte and 
 Arndt, was fed and inspired with Kant's moral 
 views, that they obeyed his ' categoric imperative,' 
 when they withstood violence and injustice, when 
 
 p 2
 
 212 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 they chose exile and privation rather than wrong 
 their conscience, when the j rose at last against the 
 foreign oppressor, but only after having given to 
 their own countrymen liberty, equality and, as far 
 as the times would allow, self-government. You 
 all know that Stein abolished the last remnants of 
 serfdom, made the soil free, and gave the cities 
 their autonomy, whilst Scharnhorst introduced 
 that palladium of our revived nation, equal military 
 service for every citizen whether rich or poor, 
 nobleman or peasant, and created that army, 
 which, even should it ever become superfluous for 
 the defence of national independence, should it 
 ever cost us twice as much as it does, will 
 be maintained as that national high school 
 of unselfishness, reverence, manliness, and true 
 idealism which it has been for the last seventy 
 years, in the silent times of universal peace, 
 still more than in the stirring moments of glorious 
 warfare. ' 
 
 » In general, there is a good deal of exaggeration in the 
 way the English Press speaks of the financial burdens onr army 
 imposes upon us. The sum total of the German taxation, direct 
 and indirect, amounts to 15«. 2d. per head, whereas that of 
 England is not less than 21. Os. Sd. Germany spends 17|-. 
 millions annually for mihtary purposes on a total budget of 84 
 millions, i.e. about one lifth ; Great Britain spends 32| millions 
 on a total budget of 128 millions, i.e. about one fourth.
 
 kant's influence. 213 
 
 Still, I must be allowed to say tliat Want's 
 moral creed was no more the German one tlian his 
 political credo. Even the men of whom I jnst spoke 
 were obliged practically to bend its rigid rules and 
 to adapt them to the exigencies of circumstance and 
 of character. No, the idea of free will is no more a 
 German idea than radicalism or rationalism. The 
 pretension of basing morality on the conception of 
 duty alone, and without taking into account either 
 the inborn nobility or meanness of character or pity 
 and emotion is no more German than is the attempt 
 to create religion and State, without and in contra- 
 diction to the given historical circumstances and 
 traditions, according to reason and by means of a 
 conscious will. These are no German ideas, and, as 
 I am addressing an English audience, I may say 
 they are not Teutonic ideas. Our culture — yours 
 still more than ours — has been strongly, and on 
 the whole healthily, influenced by Pelagianism and 
 rationalism; still, at the root it has remained 
 faithful to Augustinianism as to the belief in 
 the unconsciously working powers of history and 
 nature, and in the rights of these powers. A true 
 Teutonic mind will certainly never admit that his- 
 tory is only a long series of unmeaning accidents ; 
 but still less will it admit that the traditional
 
 214 GOETHE, KANT, AXD SCHILLEE. 
 
 state which we have inherited from our fore- 
 fathers is only a heap of abuses and absurdities wil- 
 fully introduced, and to be done away with entirely 
 in order to make room for constitutions, framed 
 by abstract reason and for abstract men. It will 
 never admit that religion is only an imposture of 
 priests and a tissue of superstitions, to be replaced 
 by an enlightened system of morality, and that 
 the poor in spirit should be denied the right to 
 satisfy his craving for an ideal by giving to this, 
 his ideal, a palpable, or at least a sentimental 
 form. It will never admit that morality is to be 
 sought only in obedience to the commandment 
 of duty, that such a thing as life for high dis- 
 interested pursuits, like science and art, such 
 a thing as generous and even unwise impulse, 
 such a thing as pity, above all, and instinctive 
 self-sacrifice, should not constitute morality as 
 well as the obedience to duty. It will never 
 admit that men are free and equal morally. 
 When, at the great revolt of the Teutonic spirit 
 against the Latin, which we call the Eeformation, 
 Luther placed faith above works and claimed the 
 privilege of salvation for the elect, was he not ex- 
 pressing in his language the same thought which, 
 two centuries later, was put into words by the
 
 SCHILLER. 215 
 
 second great Teutonic rebel against the Latin 
 spirit, Herder, when he said that the man living 
 in the ideal could not be immoral ; or by his 
 disciple malgre lui, Fr. Schlegel, when he spoke 
 of the moral aristocracy of ' noble natures ' {Edel- 
 gehornen) ; or by Schleiermacher, when he gave a 
 new form to the doctrine of St. Augustin ? Did 
 he not give the form of his time, i.e. the theo- 
 logical, to the fundamental conception of a Shake- 
 speare, a Fielding, and a Goethe, when they 
 showed us their Prince Hal, their Tom Jones, 
 their Egmont, as noble, sympathetic, and elect 
 natures, in spite of their freaks, their follies, and 
 their sins ? 
 
 Besides, it was not Herder alone who remon- 
 strated against Kant's ideas of morality, gehiiier, b. 
 politics, and religion, as against his whole ' 
 way of analysing what in nature is united. Schiller 
 himself, Kant's greatest disciple, has lent to his 
 ' Wallenstein ' the finest words in which ever the 
 true Teutonic idea, from Luther down to Schopen- 
 hauer, the negation of absolute free will, was 
 formulated : 
 
 Hab' ich des Menschen Kern erst untersucht, 
 
 So kenn' ich auch sein WoUen und sein Handeln, &c. 
 
 Schiller, it is true, does not speak these words in
 
 216 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 liis own name ; be puts tliem into tlie moutli of 
 Ms fatalistic hero. Nay, lie always insists upon 
 freedom as the distinctive quality of man in oppo- 
 sition to necessity, which is the law of nature ; 
 but he always means by it the co-operation of 
 intellectual and moral motives in the formation of 
 our actions, not the absolute rule of those motives. 
 In this, as in all the rest, he extenuated the 
 rigidity of Kant's doctrines, and largely modified 
 at last what he had taken from Kant. Was it 
 not Schiller himself who wrote the famous epigram 
 against Kant's categoric imperative ? 
 
 Willingly I serve my friends ; unfortunately I do it 
 with pleasure, and so I am often angry with myself for 
 not being virtuous. There is only one remedy : try to 
 despise your fi-iends, and then do with horror what duty 
 commands. 
 
 Already before studying Kant's great works, 
 Schiller had arrived at the same conclusions as 
 Kant with regard to history. Starting from 
 Eousseau, as Herder, and Kant himself in his 
 earlier works, had done, he had contended that 
 the state of nature, so much vaunted by Jean 
 Jacques, was reconcilable with civilisation, pro- 
 vided this civilisation was a simple one like that 
 of the Greeks, which, far from stifling natural
 
 SCHILLER. 217 
 
 spontaneousness as ours does, develops it. The 
 aim of Humanity was to be Nature purified by- 
 culture. Tbe prototype of this renovated and 
 ennobled nature was the Hellenic world. Here 
 you have almost literally Kant's earlier ideas 
 of 1764. Nevertheless, Schiller already goes his 
 own way even here, when he sees in Art the 
 first civilising power which prepares moral and 
 scientific culture, as well as the crowning of all 
 civilisation, the highest development of man. 
 The ideal of mankind, in his eyes, will be attained 
 only when moral and scientific culture is placed 
 again under the principle of beauty, in other 
 words, when life itself becomes again a work of 
 art, as it was in Greece. 
 
 When, after having put forth this view in 
 1789, in his great poem, ' The Artists,' he made 
 the acquaintance of Kant's works, Schiller was 
 exceedingly struck and even conquered by them; 
 but soon a reaction took place, and he tried to com- 
 plete and modify Kant's moral doctrine, in order to 
 bring it into harmony with his own artistic pro- 
 pensities and predilections. Kant's condemnation 
 of the senses, his rigid conception of duty, hurt 
 the artistic nature of Schiller, who endeavoured to 
 show that moral beauty, not moral actions, ought
 
 218 GOETHE, KAXT, AND SCHILLEK. 
 
 to be tlie ideal aim of man, because perfection 
 could oulj be attained wlien duty liad become a 
 second nature to mau. Already, in his restlietic 
 treatises, Schiller had contended against Kant that 
 beauty was not only a subjecti^ sensation, but 
 that it existed objectively in things. As often as 
 an object is, what it is, by itself and for itself, it is 
 beautiful, according to him — an idea already con- 
 tained, however, in Kant's ' teleologic ' or objec- 
 tive judgment, as opposed to the * aesthetic ' or 
 subjective judgment, although Schiller corrected 
 Kant's conception of a higher teleology by that 
 of autonomy. This objective beauty — a most 
 doubtful conception — Schiller called architectural 
 beauty, and he opposed to it the moveable beauty 
 or grace, which belongs only to free beings, and 
 which is the expression of the beautiful soul regu- 
 lating all the movements of the body. Archi- 
 tectural beauty, he says, does honour to the Author 
 of nature, moveable beauty to the possessor, who 
 is at the same time its creator. 
 
 Now, what is the state of the soul which pro- 
 duces this moveable beauty or grace '? It cannot 
 be the absolute empire of reason over the senses, 
 because the liberty of natm-e is impaired thereby ; 
 it cannot be the absolute rule of the senses, which
 
 SCHILLER. 219 
 
 are always tinder the yoke of necessity. Hence, 
 beauty of soul exists, wlien both come to a kind of 
 mixed constitution and compromise, in which 
 reason and sense, duty and inclination, coincide. 
 Man is designed not for the performance of par- 
 ticular moral actions, but to be a moral being. 
 His perfection lies not in virtues, but virtue; and 
 virtue is only inclination for duty. ' We call a 
 soul beautiful, when the moral feeling: has become 
 so thoroughly master of all the sensations of man 
 that he can without fear abandon to impulse the 
 direction of the will.' Thence, in a beautiful soul, 
 it is not the particular actions which are moral ; 
 the whole character is moral. This, you see, is a 
 reconciliation of the Herderian and Kantian ideas 
 by the evocation of the Hellenic ideal ; it is the 
 serene KaloTcagathia of the Greeks, not Kant's rigid 
 law of the categoric imperative, which treats the 
 senses like slaves. 
 
 This ideal of the beautiful soul, however, is 
 practically almost unattainable. There are mo- 
 ments when the assaults of the senses must be 
 conquered ; and these moments will be the test 
 whether the moral beauty is really an acquired 
 possession which will resist, or only an inborn dis- 
 position to kindness and a goodness of tempera-
 
 220 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. 
 
 ment wliicli will give way. If it is the former, tlie 
 victory will be dignity, wliicli is not the opposition, 
 but the completion of grace ; for ' grace lies in the 
 freedom of our voluntary movements, dignity in the 
 rule over involuntary movements.' I need scarcely 
 say that I am here simply stating the ideas of the 
 great German thinkers and poets. I do not discuss 
 them. I also adopt their terminology, even when 
 it seems to me objectionable, as that of Schiller 
 when he uses the words dignity, grace, beauty. 
 The means, according to Schiller, to acquire 
 beauty of soul, are art and science, because they 
 are the only things in which our personal interest 
 does not come into question, and in which con- 
 sequently we are, philosophically speaking, really 
 free. The contemplation of nature and its forms, 
 and the study thereof, without a wish to possess, 
 utilise, or enjoy the objects of such contemplation 
 or study for our personal advantage, constitute 
 art and science. 
 
 The ideal of a human society would in con- 
 sequence be a sort of aesthetic community, which 
 Schiller, however, was quite resigned not to see 
 ever realised, except in some select sphere. 
 Nevertheless, he thinks that the example of Greece 
 shows that the thing is possible. Whilst with us
 
 SCHILLEE. 221 
 
 there is nothing but barbarism on one side, cor- 
 ruption on the other, and a division of labour 
 everywhere, with the Greeks there was nature 
 and culture ; their work was not divided, nor were 
 their souls. Thucydides was, at the same time, a 
 philosopher, a physician, an admiral, a statesman, 
 and an historian ; and Xenophon, the naturalist, 
 showed himself a great general when circumstances 
 required it. Something analogous must be done 
 for the modem world. All political amendment, 
 however, must proceed from an amendment of 
 character. For this we want an instrument inde- 
 pendent of the State, an instrument which the 
 general corruption will not touch ; and this instru- 
 ment is art. Each of us must, somewhat in the 
 spirit of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, try to educate 
 himself, to make of himself a beautiful soul, to 
 develop all the germs of his individuality to an 
 harmonious unity. Thus Schiller, by the philo- 
 sophical way, reaches the same goal which Herder 
 had reached by the study of history, and Goethe by 
 the study of nature — I mean, the ideal of human- 
 ism. The completion of Schiller's ideas his friend, 
 W. von Humboldt, gave in his strange book on 
 the ' Limits of the Action of the State,' which 
 reads like a chapter of J. S. Mill's 'Essay on
 
 222 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 Liberty ' from an idealistic, instead of from an 
 utilitarian, point of view : for W. von Humboldt 
 vrants to see the power and interference of tlie 
 State limited to tlie utmost, only in order that 
 the freest and most harmonious development of 
 individuality ma-y not be impeded. 
 
 Thus the emancipative tendencies of the cen- 
 tury, which elsewhere had led to the democratic 
 conclusion of the superior rights of individual 
 reason over collective wisdom as represented by 
 tradition, of common sense over genius, and thence 
 to affirming the equal value of all individuals, 
 led in Germany to the aristocratic view of the 
 recognition of superior individualities and their 
 rights, and thence to considering the education of 
 these individualities (not the satisfaction of the 
 interests, passions, and wishes of the greater 
 number) as the means and aim of civilisation. It 
 is but natural that the former view should favour 
 the development of utilitarianism and of positive 
 science, and that the latter should generate the 
 artistic and the historical treatment of things. 
 
 There is no doubt that Schiller definitively 
 determined the province of art, when he said that 
 it consisted not in dreaming of an unreal, fantastic 
 world, but in discerning the ideal in the real world,
 
 SCHILLER. 223 
 
 in seeing in the accidental tlie manifestation of 
 the eternal. The question is whether he and his 
 time were right in seeing the dignity of man 
 preserved in art alone, because in art alone man 
 was free and active, his own master, and yet 
 working npon the outer world. A second and 
 secondary question is whether they did not en- 
 tirely misunderstand Greece, where State and City 
 formed the basis of the whole national existence 
 and by no means only a disagreeable necessity. 
 Finally, there is always the Mephistophelian 
 objection : what, if you had seen Greece near ? 
 would you not have found things somewhat differ- 
 ent from what they seem to you in the haze of 
 distance ? One thing, however, is certain : the 
 standpoint of Schiller remained that of the whole 
 age in its greatest representatives. The weak 
 side of it is obvious ; and cruel reality stirred up 
 Germany, proving to her harshly enough that the 
 much despised State was the necessary ground 
 upon which alone man could devote himself with 
 dignity and security to his sesthetic perfection. 
 
 Things have been reversed since then in 
 Germany. The idea of the State, so utterly 
 obliterated in Schiller's time, has become exceed- 
 ingly active and poweriul ; and the nation is eager
 
 224 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. 
 
 to sacrifice everytliing to it. Scliiller's idea is not 
 extinct for all that. As long as the national State, 
 
 the lack of which had been so painfully- 
 Present 
 
 views on felt in the moment of need, is being con- 
 State. , , * . 
 
 structed, it is natural that the nation 
 
 should show a certain onesidedness and exclusive- 
 ness in this direction. For the time being, indi- 
 vidualism, as preached by the great pathfinders of 
 German culture, seems almost vanished. The 
 nation in which Madame de Stael did not find 
 two minds thinking alike on any subject, has 
 become singularly gregarious, nay, uniform ; the 
 great producer and consumer of original ideas is 
 content nowadays to feed on some few watchwords 
 mechanically repeated. Individualism indeed, 
 humanism, absence of prejudice and of social con- 
 ventionality, when pushed so far as they were by 
 the generation of Schiller and Goethe, are absolute 
 hindrances to public life, which subsists only by 
 the sacrifice of individual interests and convic- 
 tions to party principles or national interests. A 
 nation, or a class, or a party in a nation, is irre- 
 sistible only when it has a whole set of common 
 thoughts, interests, feelings, and forms. As long 
 as each unit goes its own way, nation, class, party 
 exist only in words, and cannot resist the slightest
 
 PRESENT VIEWS ON STATE. 225 
 
 shock. Modern German history proves it on every 
 page. 
 
 And not only has individualism made room for 
 uniformity, humanism for patriotism, but Schiller's 
 conception itself that art was the highest form of 
 human activity, that accidental practical life 
 must be subordinated to a higher ideal life, has, 
 as it were, disappeared, for the time being at least. 
 For I feel confident that, as soon as the long- 
 yeamed-for national State is complete and insured 
 against inner and outer enemies, Germany will 
 come back to the creed of the real founders of her 
 civilisation. But she will only accept it with quali- 
 fications. She will never again profess that un- 
 spoken contempt for the State, which lay at the 
 root of all the thought of Schiller's generation ; 
 but neither will she any longer see in the State 
 an end, as she does now, instead of a means, 
 a necessary means, a noble means even, but a 
 means, nevertheless, not an end. It seems im- 
 possible, indeed, that the nation of Lessing and 
 Herder, Goethe and Kant, should not weary of 
 politics as she wearied, long ago, of theology, and, 
 leaving politics to the politicians as she left theo- 
 logy to the theologians, should not set to work 
 
 Q
 
 226 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. 
 
 again at the ideal content of life, instead of at 
 tlie containing forms. 
 
 There is no contradiction in this, as might 
 at first sight appear. If there are domains of 
 human activity, where absolute individualism is 
 an evil, and a sign of selfishness, there are others 
 where it is as fertile as it is noble. And so it is 
 with collectivism, if I may use that term. A 
 blessing in one department of life, it is a curse in 
 the other. But is it really impossible to confine 
 each of them within limits which will render it 
 salutary? The Germany of 1800 knew only indi- 
 vidualism ; the Germany of 1879 seems to know 
 only collectivism. The Germany of the future, let 
 us hope, will submit to collectivism, and will be 
 ready to sacrifice individual thought and feeling 
 where it is necessary to do so, i.e. in State and 
 society. She will claim full liberty of personal 
 thought and feeling, where individualism alone 
 i^an bear fruit, i.e. in art and science; and in 
 doino- so she will feel that she has chosen the 
 better part : for he, who tries to penetrate the 
 world — humanity and nature — and to interpret it 
 faithfully and lovingly, be it by the artist's intui- 
 tion and second creation, be it by the intellect and 
 learning of the scholar, has chosen a higher
 
 PEESENT VIEWS ON STATE. t227 
 
 activity than the man who lives only in and for 
 the State and its passing interests. 
 
 We shall see, however, in the next and last of 
 these lectures, how the contrary conviction was 
 brought about in Germany, and what is its justifi- 
 cation.
 
 228 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 1800-1825. 
 
 We have seen that the great task of giving to 
 Germany the foundations of a new and national 
 culture fell to three generations, that of Winckel- 
 mann, Kant, and Lessing ; that of Herder, Goethe, 
 and Schiller ; that of the two Schlegels and the two 
 Humboldts, which was also that of Hardenberg 
 and Tieck, of Eahel and Gentz, of Schelling and 
 Hegel, of Arndt and Kleist, of Schleiermacher and 
 Holderlin, not to speak of many other less cele- 
 brated writers and thinkers who were all bom 
 towards the year 1770. It is of this generation, 
 whose principal works were published from 1800 
 to 1815, that I have to speak to you to-day. My 
 remarks must be, if possible, of a character still 
 more summary and, I am afraid, more superficial 
 than those I have presented to you thus far, as
 
 THE STAETING-POINT. 229 
 
 this is our last meeting, and I wisli also to notice 
 rapidly, as in an epilogue, tlie different currents 
 of thought which have agitated Germany during 
 the quarter of a century succeeding the palmy 
 days of the romantic school, which forms the main 
 subject of the present lecture. 
 
 The romanticists were by no means from the first 
 day such as they appear to us now, and such as they 
 will figure for ever in the history of rpj^g g^^^^. 
 thought. They also, like the two preced- '""S-pomt. 
 ing generations, fought their battle on the literary 
 field, the only one then open to Germany ; and 
 they began only later to act upon the public 
 life of their country. When they first began to 
 attract attention, they gave themselves out as 
 staunch admirers of Goethe, and adhered strictly 
 to Schiller's principles. It was only in their 
 second phase of development that they turned 
 round against the reigning classicism. 
 
 Two things are necessary for the poet and artist (says 
 Schiller) ; he must rise above reality, and he must remain 
 within the sensuous. Where both those exigencies are 
 fulfilled equally, there is aesthetic art. But in an un- 
 favourable and shapeless nature (and society), he too 
 easily abandons the sensuous along with the real, and be- 
 comes idealistic, and, if his understanding be feeble, even
 
 230 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 fantastic ; or when he wishes, and is obliged by his nature, 
 to remain in the sensuous, he obstinately cHngs to the 
 real, and becomes realistic in the narrow sense of the 
 word, and even servile and vulgar if he wholly lacks 
 imagination. In both cases he is not aesthetic. 
 
 These golden words, whicli the artist and poet 
 can never meditate upon sufficiently, or keep too 
 steadily before his mind, found a notable commen- 
 tary in the German literature of the time. Whilst 
 Goethe and Schiller were on the limit, and often 
 even overstepped the limit, which separates artistic 
 truth — or what they called sesthetic beauty — from 
 abstract idealism, there were many writers who 
 were pleased to dwell within the most vulgar, 
 everyday reality, because they were either afraid 
 or unable to rise into ideal regions. And these 
 writers had a far more numerous public than our 
 classics. The Ifflands, Schroders, Kotzebues, 
 Aug. Lafontaines, and others were in possession of 
 the stage, and made the fortune of the circulating 
 libraries. The prosiest philistine-life became the 
 object of literature, and the inartistic forms of 
 this life were reproduced in poetry, if not yet by 
 plastic art. Schiller and Goethe declared pitiless 
 war against this vulgarity ; and it was no wonder 
 if they exaggerated on their side, not only by the
 
 BATTLE WITH THE REALISTS. 231 
 
 occasional misuse of tlie weapon of satire, but also 
 bj the example of their works. In tbe beginning 
 of their classical period, which is that of their 
 maturity, they had still taken their subjects and 
 their inspiration from real life and national history. 
 * Hermann and Dorothea ' and ' Wallenstein * 
 -are in the highest degree what Schiller required 
 works of art to be, 'within the limits of the 
 sensuous, but raised above accidental reality.' So 
 in spite of the foreign costume were ' Tasso ' and 
 *Iphigenia,' 'Egmont' and the ' Eoman Elegies.' 
 They showed reality, i.e. concrete feelings 
 and passions, personages and situations, reduced 
 to their eternal, artistic element, and thereby 
 interpreted reality by art. More than this, 
 ' Wilhelm Meister ' had shown that the task of 
 life, the task of the time particularly in which 
 Goethe lived, was to recognise the rights of reality, 
 and to reconcile idealism with this reality. When 
 once the battle had begun against the vulgar 
 realists, who thought a button-hole an object as 
 worthy of art as a human face, and a wart on 
 that face as important as the lines of the forehead, 
 Goethe and Schiller were led to the same extreme 
 to which the Fine Arts had already been drifting. 
 In their horror of prosy reality they fled into the
 
 232 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 classic world of antiquity and even into abstract 
 idealism ; and just as Carstens and David looked 
 for ideal types, and thought to find them in the 
 art of the ancients alone, so they began to give 
 classic names and forms to mental abstractions, 
 turned the old gods which Herder had shown to 
 be living mythical individualities once more into 
 lifeless symbols of general concejptions, and fell 
 again into full allegory. If they were not entirely 
 lost in it, it was because the ideas they allegorised 
 were of real depth, and because their artistic 
 genius was so powerful that even allegory lost 
 something of its inanimate coldness under their 
 hands. ' Pandora ' and ' Paleophron and Euterpe ' 
 are still read, in spite, not because, of the sesthetic 
 theory which was godmother to them. The pre- 
 text for thus abandoning the ' sensuous ' was not 
 even plausible. The German life of their time, 
 they said, offered no fit objects for poetry. ' Her- 
 mann and Dorothea ' is the most eloquent refuta- 
 tion of that paradox, if it wanted refutation. 
 Men's costume may sometimes be inartistic ; their 
 body and soul is never entirely devoid of interest 
 for the artist, although it may offer to him a 
 more or less fertile object. 
 
 The young romanticists went a step further
 
 VIEWS OF SCHILLER AND GOETHE. 233 
 
 still than Schiller and Goethe, who had become — 
 for the time being, at least — one-sided idealists; 
 ' they became dreamers because their understand- 
 ing was feeble.' Goethe and Schiller, indeed, even 
 when they went so far as to seek their subjects 
 beyond the bounds of reality, in abstract thought 
 or a so-called ideal world, at least treated them 
 with the wisdom of artistic understanding and in 
 an objective way. Their young disciples and allies 
 deemed their caprice and inspiration sufficient 
 guides, and treated their imaginary themes in a 
 quite subjective manner. So, strangely enough, it 
 came to pass that they took from Goethe and 
 Schiller just the shortcomings of their youthful as 
 well as of their mature age, and disdained the 
 superior qualities which distinguished them in 
 both periods. In their youth the two great poets 
 had sought in reality and personal experience the 
 materials of their poetry, treating them, however, 
 with a ' subjectivity ' which did not recognise the 
 authority of artistic understanding as the regulat- 
 ing power. Fifteen years later they came to the 
 conviction that no great work of art can be pro- 
 duced without that regulating power, but, disgusted 
 with the realistic literature of the time, they sought 
 their objects outside reality. In this the young
 
 234 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 romanticists followed them, but remained in the 
 other respect at the point where their masters 
 had been in the ' Sturm- und Drangperiode ' ; 
 they recognised no right of control by the under- 
 standing. The only controlling power they ad- 
 mitted was irony, i.e. reason, liovering over and 
 smiling at the work done by unfettered fancy. 
 The consequence was that they, without the 
 guidance of artistic understanding, soon went still 
 farther astray than their models, and not only fled 
 from the surrounding reality, like Goethe and 
 Schiller, but from all reality, into the world of 
 mere imasrination. Even to such creations, how- 
 ever, they did not know how to give plastic, sen- 
 suous, palpable form ; all remains musical, lyrical, 
 vague, subjective, like their inspiration. They 
 pride themselves on this personal character of both 
 object and form in their poetry. They transferred 
 to art the philosophic system of Fichte, for whom 
 the whole universe was only the production of the 
 Ego ; and the one activity of this Ego, which they 
 recognised as the supreme, was Imagination, 
 fantasy. They soon felt the complete contra- 
 diction between themselves and the classical 
 Hellenic world, evoked by Schiller and Goethe, and 
 opposed to it the world of the middle ages, whose
 
 THE MEDIEVALISTS. 235 
 
 chiaroscuro is infinitely more favourable to their 
 dreamy, fantastic art ; and they ended with trying 
 practically to restore the middle ages in order to 
 get a poetical reality. The apostles of unlimited 
 personal liberty in art and life became the mis- 
 sionaries of a religious and political conservatism, 
 which would erase from history three centuries of 
 progressive enlightenment, because the preachers 
 of such conservatism feel more comfortable in the 
 dark than in daylight. 
 
 German romanticism, you see, is totally differ- 
 ent from that which the French have since called 
 by this name, and which bears infinitely 
 
 Definition 
 
 more resemblance to the principles of of roman- 
 ticism. 
 
 the German ' Sturm- und Drangperiode,' 
 viz., the emancipation from all aesthetic rules. For 
 the French, for instance, Shakespeare's ' Corio- 
 lanus ' would be a romantic drama, Corneille's 
 ' Cid ' a classical one. It is just the reverse with 
 the Germans. The form of the ' Cid,' of ' Poly- 
 eucte,'maybe classical, the inspiration is modern, 
 i.e. subjective, and the process of creation is 
 modern, i.e. conscious. The form of ' Julius 
 Csesar ' ' may be ever so different from Sophocles,* 
 the inspiration is objective, the process of creation 
 navf, as with the ancients. Now German roman-
 
 236 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 ticisni was, above all, a reaction in favour of 
 imagination and faith against the enlightenment 
 and rationalism of the preceding age, but also a 
 reaction in favour of Christianity and the middle 
 ages against the Hellenic heathendom of the end 
 of the century. The theorist of the school, the 
 younger Schlegel, defined it in these words : 
 
 Romanticism rests solely on Christianity and the feel- 
 ing of charity and love which, thanks to this religion, 
 reigns also in poetry. In this feeling, suffering itself 
 appears as a means of glorification and transfiguration. 
 The traditions of the Greek, Germanic, and Scandmavian 
 mythology become in it graceful and serene plays of the 
 imagination. Even among the external forms of style and 
 language, the romantic poet chooses those which answer 
 best to this intimate feeUng of love, and those plays of 
 the imagination. 
 
 Love then, sentimental love, fancy, faith, 
 chivalry, honour, were to be the inspiration of 
 romantic poetry. And as unity reigned in the 
 middle ages, so it was to reign again, unity 
 between head and heart, between poetry, life, 
 philosophy and religion. 'Romanticism,' said 
 Fred. Schlegel, *is the aspiration after an in- 
 finite poem, which includes the germs of all other 
 poems.' And young Novalis : ' Should the funda-
 
 DEFINITION OF ROMANTICISM. 237 
 
 mental laws of imagination really be in opposi- 
 tion to those of logic ? ' And out-Herdering 
 Herder : * Poetical sentiment has something akin 
 to the sense of divination, to religious sense, even 
 to madness.' Again, poetry was to be philosophy 
 without ceasing to be religion for these mystical 
 minds. 
 
 Philosophy is the hero of poetry (said NovaHs). It 
 elevates poetry, and shows that it is all in all. . . . The 
 separation of poet and philosopher is only apparent and 
 injures both; it is the symptom of an illness or of a 
 sickly constitution. All ought to centre in the philo- 
 sopher who is always omniscient, who is the real world in 
 nuce. 
 
 But not philosophy alone, all existence was to 
 be poetry. Life was to become again poetical, as 
 they imagined it to have been in the dark ages, 
 and poetry was to be lived : both poetry and life 
 under the guidance of religion — not of stern, 
 prosaic, Protestant, but of warm, coloured, sen- 
 suous, Catholic religion. 
 
 Thus they overthrew all limits, not only those 
 which the strong artistic sense of the ancients 
 had drawn between epic, dramatic, and lyrica 
 poetry, those which Lessing had laboriously erected 
 between plastic art and poetry, those which Kan
 
 238 THE ItOMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 had sagaciously traced between theoretical and 
 practical knowledge, but also the limits between 
 prose and verse, art and life, morality and intellect, 
 science and religion, imagination and understand- 
 ing. It was the exaggeration, or rather the 
 caricature, of Herder's profound principle of unity 
 — unity and simultaneousness of individual forces 
 in individual action, of national forces in national 
 action, of human forces in the pursuit of human 
 aims. Herder had remonstrated against division 
 of labour, but only in the sense that a general 
 basis was required for every special work, that 
 individual, nation, humanity must be entirely 
 absorbed in the special work in which they are 
 enofa^ed. For the romanticists there was no 
 longer any special work : State, Religion, Science, 
 Poetry were all one in their eyes. This came in 
 fact to a denial of all civilisation, whose very 
 action is specialisation, not indeed of the subjec- 
 tive forces acting, but of the objective mass which 
 it is its task to master. 
 
 No wonder if they saw their ideal in the dark 
 ages. Where indeed could they find such unity, 
 poetical life and ' lived ' poetry, political religion 
 and religious politics, as in the middle ages ? 
 Novalis went so far as to declare it a misfortune
 
 DEFINITION OF ROMANTICISM. - 239 
 
 that the Papacy should no longer have the power 
 to stop such dangerous theories as those of Coper- 
 nicus, which made mankind believe itself no longer 
 the centre and aim of creation. ' The spirit of all 
 art and sciences,' said Fred. Schlegel, ' must again 
 be united in one centre, similar to that which 
 humanity has lost since the middle ages and to the 
 restoration of which it must aspire.' In the words 
 of his more sober brother, A. William : 
 
 Europe was one in those gi-eat times. One chivalry 
 made friends of all warriors. All vied in fighting for 
 one faith. Hearts were open to one love. Then also 
 poetry arose, one in feeling, although different in lan- 
 guage. Now the power of the olden times is gone, and 
 we dare to speak of them as barbarous ! People have 
 invented for themselves a narrow wisdom, and what, in 
 their impotence, they do not understand, they call di-eams ; 
 but nothing which is of a divine nature can thrive any 
 longer in a time when work is done by unholy hands. 
 Alas ! This age has neither Faith nor Charity ; how 
 should it have retained Hope 1 
 
 Hence also their antipathy for the Hellenic 
 world where all is clearness, light and health. 
 They had begun with masterly studies on Greek 
 poetry, in F. A. Wolfs sense ; had shown great 
 admiration for Goethe ; had developed Schiller's
 
 240 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 theories on sentimental poetry ; but in proportion 
 as they formulated their own principles more 
 distinctly, they turned against Greek classicism, 
 as Goethe and Schiller understood it. In their 
 yearning for twilight, they turned away from a 
 period when that longed-for unity of life and 
 poetry was realised in full sunshine, and under 
 the control of healthy reason. How much more 
 congenial to them were the dark ages in which 
 they saw the reign of uncontrolled fantasy, the 
 outward realisation of their own inner life ! If 
 only they could restore that time, would they not 
 become the Dantes and Wolframs of their time, 
 as Goethe and Schiller were the Homers and 
 Sophocles of theirs ? Now, it was particularly 
 the religion of the Middle Ages which they con- 
 sidered the one higher region, in which all classes, 
 all cultures and all nations might meet again. 
 'Art and religion were synonymous ' in Z. Werner's 
 eyes, as poetry and science in Hardenberg's. *They 
 made piety,* Goethe says, ' the one foundation of 
 art, because some monks had been artists, and 
 consequently all artists ought to be monks ; ' and 
 elsewhere he compares them to * children, who, 
 to imitate a bell, fasten a rope to a tree and sing 
 ding-dong, whilst they are moving it.'
 
 A NEW MYTHOLOGY. 241 
 
 To give new life, then, to this bleak, rational- 
 istic age, the spark of imagination was to be 
 rekindled. Fancy was to become once ^ j^^^ 
 more the queen of the world, as they Mythology, 
 imagined she had been in the Middle Ages ; and 
 this sullen, bleak atmosphere was to shine once 
 more in rich colours and in varied forms. What 
 was wanting in modern religion as in modern 
 poetry was a mythology. A mythology then was 
 to be created anew out of all the frasfments of 
 pagan and German myths, Indian and Christian 
 legends blent together ; the elves and nixes, who 
 dwelt in the forests and on the rivers, the dwarfs 
 and kobolds who peopled the mediaeval world, were 
 evoked anew. The fairy tale was to become the 
 highest form of poetical production, as it was at 
 once the most simple, and the most composite — the 
 most simple because it was created by childlike 
 minds for children ; the most composite, as in it 
 lay united as in a germ, religion and imagination, 
 poetry and thought, wisdom and folly, legend 
 and history, in that unity in which they presented 
 themselves to primitive minds. Even so with the 
 great geniuses of the Christian era. ' Shake- 
 speare's and Calderon's artistic confusion, the 
 delightful harmony of contradictions, the wonder- 
 
 B
 
 242 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 ful alternations of enthusiasm and irony, which 
 show themselves in the smallest fragment, seem a 
 new peculiar kind of mythology ; for the beginning 
 of all poetry is to suspend the processes and laws of 
 speculative reason, and to take us back into the 
 beautiful confusion of imagination, into the primi- 
 tive chaos of nature.' Heine, a romanticist himself 
 in his earlier days, to whom it was given to 
 realise in his poems, if not in his life, the poetical 
 ideal which lay at the root of all the aspirations 
 and vague definitions of the romanticists, has 
 wonderfully satirised this mixed mythology and 
 poetical chaos of irony and enthusiasm, of fancy 
 and wit, in his ' Atta Troll,' and in what I cannot 
 help considering his finest work, ' the Exiled 
 Gods.' 
 
 Yon will not wonder when I say that this 
 apotheosis of imagination, ' Jupiter's spoiled child,' 
 as the higliest intellectual power, degenerated 
 naturally into a species of mysticism. They were 
 for ever seeking after the ' blue flower,' like 
 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the hero of Hardenberg's 
 novel, the ' Wilhelm Meister ' of the school. 
 ' What there is highest in the world,' Fred. 
 Schlegel would say, ' can be told only in sym- 
 bols, precisely because it is unspeakable.' And
 
 CHARACTER OF THE ROMANTICISTS. 243 
 
 Novalis (Hardenberg), alluding to his beloved 
 Middle Ages as the golden age of mankind, 
 
 says : 
 
 It had then become quite a natural thing to consider 
 the most ordinary and the nearest things as miraculous, and 
 what was strange and supernatural as ordinary. In 
 this way daily life itself surrounded man like a wonderful 
 fairy tale, and that region which most men do but guess 
 at — or question — as a distant incomprehensible thing, 
 became his home. It seemed unnatiu-al that the poets 
 should form a separate class of men. To be a poet was 
 in their eyes the proper activity of the human mind. 
 
 Nor otherwise Gorres, the tribune of the party, 
 when he speaks of the dark ages : ' Faith, love, 
 heroism, were then mingled in one large stream. 
 Then it was that the new garden of poetry blos- 
 somed, the Eden of romanticism.' 
 
 Unfortunately there was no genuine simplicity 
 in all this, no spontaneousness, nor that sort of 
 second sight which illuminated for 
 
 Character 
 
 Herder all the darkness of early ages, of the Ro- 
 manticists. 
 It was the studied simplicity of pedants 
 
 and bookworms, who tried laboriously by the effort 
 
 of understanding and will to arrive at the simple, 
 
 but rich, direct and concrete conceptions which 
 
 intuition revealed spontaneously and easily to the 
 
 K 2
 
 244 'the eomantic school. 
 
 original and healthy minds of primitive nations, 
 or to robust and undefiled genius in modern times. 
 
 Their ^^ ^^ ^^ even with their religion. 
 
 EeUgion. jjardenberg excepted, they had all been 
 sceptics in their first youth. It is possible that in 
 England the Evangelical movement may have 
 awakened, at least indirectly, what might, in one 
 sense, be called the English romanticism of this 
 century, in other words, the Tractarian movement 
 and what followed. In Grermany it was from the 
 beginning rather in opposition to pietism, than in 
 accordance with it. Schleiermacher himself, who 
 had been brought up in a school of Moravian 
 Brethren, was intellectually emancipated even be- 
 fore he left it. No, Catholicism was to them all 
 only a question of aesthetics, as A. W. Schlegel 
 himself confessed, and as it was in fact also to 
 Chateaubriand. Most of them remained Protest- 
 ants, even after they had denounced Protestantism 
 as the sin against the Holy Ghost. Hardenberg 
 himself, the St. John of the mission, a sickly over- 
 strained nature — Hardenberg who had declared 
 that ' Christianity was finished with the Reform- 
 ation,' who had called Protestantism 'a sacrilegious 
 revolt against Christianity, which exists only in the 
 unity of the visible and universal Church ' — Hard-
 
 THEIR RELIGION AND ETHIOS. 245 
 
 enberg-Novalis himself, never left, perhaps had not 
 the time to leave, the Lutheran Church in which he 
 was born. True, there were many among them, 
 who, following Fred. Schlegel's and Zacharias 
 Werner's example, actually embraced Catholicism ; 
 but their new religion did not prevent them from 
 enjoying life and its most worldly pleasures just as 
 before. They took from Catholicism only what 
 suited their tastes, its outward plastic forms, its 
 deep historical value, some dogmas which might be 
 interpreted as the symbolical expression of their 
 philosophic convictions, the uncontested authority 
 which it represented ; but they submitted in no 
 wise to what was in the least severe, or even only 
 inconvenient to them in the old faith ; for they ex- 
 hibited a marvellous ingenuity in choosing and 
 appropriating to themselves in every theory, 
 political, religious, philosophical or aesthetic, just 
 what was congenial to their tastes and wants, and 
 in ignoring the rest as if it did not exist. 
 
 As their religious, so was their poetical and 
 moral attitude. In whatever they do and say 
 there is something voulu and tendu as -pj^gjj. 
 the French would say, and there is no 
 affectation more insupportable than the affectation 
 of simplicity. There was an utter want of healthy
 
 246 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 and vigorous sensuousness as well as of natural 
 genius in most of those men who made such a 
 pretence of having strong impulses where there 
 was only a perverted imagination, or, at least, a 
 self-indulgence, which was content to consider 
 every caprice as an unconquerable passion. The 
 doctrines of ' Lucinde,' Fred. Schlegel's youthful 
 novel, a rehabilitation of the flesh and its rights, 
 were commented upon by his friend Schleiermacher, 
 a clergyman, not with Rabelais' or Sterne's jovial 
 sensuousness, which makes us almost forget their 
 ecclesiastical robes, but with a sort of unctuous 
 devotion, as if he spoke of a new religion ; and 
 these doctrines were put into practice during their 
 whole lifetime by such men as Fr. Schlegel, Gentz, 
 and Zacharias Werner, who carried epicurism to 
 a kind of maestria. Divorce was no longer that 
 respectable institution which allows a fetter to 
 fall off, when it has become intolerable, and 
 brings to an end the long expiation of a youth- 
 ful mistake. Divorce in their circle had become 
 an every-day occurrence. There is an actual 
 chassez-croisez among them. Tieck's sister is 
 divorced from her brother's best friend Bernhardi ; 
 Mendelssohn's daughter is divorced from Yeit 
 and marries Fred. Schlegel ; A. W. Schlegel's
 
 THEIR ETHICS. 247 
 
 wife — tlie most remarkable among the women of 
 the generation after Rahel — Caroline Schlegel, is 
 divorced and marries Schelliug, who is ten years 
 younger than she. There is something unhealthy 
 even in those who do not break deliberately 
 through the barriers of society : Holderlin be- 
 comes an early prey to insanity, through his 
 hopeless passion for the mother of his pupils ; 
 Hardenberg cherishes a sentimiental love for a 
 girl of twelve years, and dies an early death, at 
 the age of twenty-nine, when this child is taken 
 from him ; Schleiermacher has a romantic re- 
 lation with another clergyman's wife, and ends 
 by marrying a third friend's widow, for whom 
 he had entertained an apparently hopeless love ; 
 Kleist commits suicide, together with a not less 
 morbidly excited lady friend ; Tieck, Clemens 
 Brentano, and Hoffmann made hizarrerie a system, 
 and lived according to that system. 
 
 Their moral indifference itself varied widely 
 from that of a Diderot and his friends. There 
 was a consciousness about it, which deprived it of 
 the only excuse to be pleaded for it. When they 
 contended that ' to have understood a thing was 
 to have justified it;' when they pleaded that 
 * noble creatures pay with what they are, not
 
 248 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 with what they do ' ; when they thus brought the 
 doctrines of election and grace into a worldly system 
 which had no other aim than to justify their own 
 loose morals ; when these refined Epicureans of 
 Culture, these impotent dilettanti, who have not 
 produced a single lasting poem, were for ever 
 talking of spontaneousness and imagination and 
 popular simplicity — they were certainly theoreti- 
 cally in the right. But it was plain to everyone 
 that the thing most wanting in them was the one 
 they most recommended and praised, whilst, on 
 the contrary, they most depreciated the faculty 
 they possessed in the highest degree, that of 
 criticism. 
 
 It was by this faculty nevertheless that they 
 acted principally on their time and on the follow- 
 
 Their ing generation. For they acted power- 
 action in 
 Germany, fully upou it, not Only in the domain of 
 
 poetry and art, but also in that of science and 
 politics. 
 
 It was the romanticists, indeed, who created 
 modern literary history, of which Herder had only 
 Their in- sketched the outlines. They collected 
 Literary" ^^^ popular songs and fairy tales of Old 
 18 ory. Q^eriiia,ny ; they republished, and com- 
 mented upon, the poems of Wolfram and Gott-
 
 ITS INFLUENCE ON LITEEART HISTOEY. 249 
 
 fried, the ' Nibelungen ' and the ' Gudrun ; ' and 
 they did it with a delicacy, and a poetical tact, 
 which have been completely lost, since the literary 
 history of the Middle Ages has been treated only 
 from a grammatical point of view. Nor was it only 
 the literary history of the German Middle-Age 
 which the romanticists created; they brought 
 Dante again to honour and with him all the minor 
 medieval poets of the South as well as of their own 
 country. Their translations of the Eenaissance 
 poets, of Shakespeare particularly, of Bojardo, 
 Ariosto, Calderon, Camoens, Cervantes, have, it 
 may be said, made the master- works of the world 
 the property of the German nation. It is their 
 merit if, after such a total change of atmosphere, 
 and when the worship of foreign things, which 
 characterised the old Germany, has long subsided, 
 these masterworks still keep their place on the 
 German stage and in German libraries beside those 
 of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. Germany owes 
 to them not only the naturalisation of the poets 
 of all latitudes and times ; but also that of the 
 poetical forms of all nations and periods. It was 
 they who introduced and acclimatised the Italian 
 terzina and canzona, the Spanish redondilla, the 
 Persian gasela, as their predecessors had introduced
 
 250 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 and acclimatised in German poetry the hexameter 
 and the alcaic strophe of the Greeks. It was 
 Fr. Schlegel, who first sought and found in India 
 the highest expression of romanticism, i.e. *the 
 deepest and most intimate life of the imagination. 
 When once we are able to draw from the original 
 sources, perhaps the appearance of southern glow, 
 which now attracts us so much in Spanish poetry, 
 will appear to us but pale and occidental.' 
 
 Then, again, their reaction against the exclu- 
 sive Hellenism of Goethe and Schiller gave impulse 
 to the new poetry of the national and Christian 
 type, of which Uhland has remained and will remain 
 the most charming representative ; to the great 
 national dramas of a Kleist, which after all are 
 the most effective that Germany has produced 
 for the stage, if we except those of Lessing and 
 Schiller; to the patriotic songs of 1813 (the 
 Schenkendorffs and Arndts, Korners and Riic- 
 kerts, all belonged, more or less, to the romantic 
 school) to the new fantastic novel-literature of 
 the Arnims, Brentanos, Hoffmanns, Chamissos, 
 Fouques ; above all, to what there is best and most 
 imperishable in Heine's wonderful productions. 
 I am not giving you here a literary history of 
 Germany ; otherwise I should have to show you the
 
 AET. 251 
 
 different ramifications of the romantic school; 
 the crroup of the fatalists, that of the patriots, that 
 of the pure fantasts, that of the sentimentalists, 
 who have all retained in German poetrj a place 
 which the preachers of the new Gospel themselves 
 never succeeded in attaining. 
 
 A similar impulse was given bj the romanticists 
 to architecture and painting. That mediaeval 
 tendency, which still prevailed in these 
 arts in the days of our youth, was their 
 work. France, England, Italy themselves received 
 that impulse from the German romanticists, 
 although they were not quite conscious by what 
 channels it reached them. Bonald had lived in 
 Germany ; B. Constant was as intimate with A. 
 W. Schlegel as Coleridge was with Tieck ; and as 
 the whole atmosphere was pregnant with similar 
 tendencies, as the ground seemed only to wait for 
 the seed in the country of Chateaubriand and in 
 that of Walter Scott, it is natural enough that the 
 slightest germs should bear fruit. The roman- 
 ticists had the merit of freeing the world from 
 Winckelmann's new academical theories, in which 
 Goethe was still entirely wrapt up, of having drawn 
 attention to the beauty of Gothic cathedrals, so de- 
 spised in those days as barbarous monstra, of having
 
 252 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 shown the vahie of a Giotto and a Fra Angelico, of 
 having made the first collections of Van Eycks and 
 Memlings, as they were also the first to revive the 
 old Catholic church music. Whatever may have 
 been the shortcomings of that school in Art, it 
 was a necessary reaction against the academical 
 classicism of the school of David and Canova. 
 However false and perilous may have been their 
 views about Art as an instrument for conveying 
 religious or other impressions, the very fact that 
 people began again to appreciate works of art, 
 which were fruits of a simple and genuine study of 
 nature, furthered the interests of modern Art. 
 
 The revival and exaggeration 6ven of Herder's 
 ideas of unconscious growth in history and their 
 On History application to language, poetry, and law, 
 proper. acted most powerfully and beneficially on 
 the historical, if not on the natural, sciences. 
 The romanticists themselves self-complacently 
 dated a new age from their apostolic mission. 
 ' Several of my friends and I,' said A. W. Schlegel, 
 candidly, ' have proclaimed in all forms, in poetry 
 and prose, seriously and playfully, the beginning 
 of a new era.' And it would be unjust not to 
 confess that there is some truth in this pretension. 
 It was only now and under their care that the
 
 HISTORY PEOPEE. 253 
 
 .seeds sown by Herder, thirty years before, bore 
 all their fruits. The whole history of medieval 
 literature and language dates from them. The 
 troubadours and the trouveres, the Minnesingers 
 and the Meistersangers, the minstrels and jongleurs, 
 were revived ; more than that, German j»hilology 
 was created by their disciples, the two Grimms. 
 Soon neo- Latin philology was to follow ; nay, 
 even Oriental philology owes its first impulse 
 to Fr. Schlegel's important work on the ' Wisdom 
 of the Hindoos,' as the comparative science of 
 languages was created by one of their generation, 
 if not of their school, W. von Humboldt. 
 
 But we must go a step further. If their prin- 
 ciple, applied to politics, to philosophy and natural 
 science, has done little more than mischief; if it 
 has led to the monstrous hypotheses of a Schelling 
 and to his arbitrary a priori constructions, uncon- 
 trolled by observation of facts ; if it produced a 
 mysticism which considered Nature as the dark 
 mystery which the senses and understanding could 
 never unveil, and has thus led to Oken's, Schubert's, 
 and Steffens's scientific aberrations — it yet exer- 
 cised an important influence for good in the history 
 of philosophy, religion, legislation, the State, and 
 even in that of science. Not only the Grimms, but
 
 254 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 Eicliliorii, Savign J, Niebuhr, Creuzer were personal 
 friends of the romanticists, in the main adherents 
 to their principles, and fed with their ideas. Ton 
 know the revolution effected by Creuzer's ' Sjm- 
 bolik,' and how, in spite of all its extravagances, 
 it created indirectly the science of comparative 
 mythology. You also know the importance of 
 the so-called historical school of Niebuhr and 
 Eichhorn, Otfried Miiller and Bockh, which re- 
 novated history. Even on religion their influence 
 has been, partially at least, a salutary. If they 
 favoured and furthered the Catholic reaction which 
 took place after 1830 in Germany as well as in 
 France, they have also propagated in a whole 
 generation (from 1800 to 1830) the conviction that 
 religion can exist without dogmas, that all inner 
 life, all higher feeling is religion, as Schleiermacher 
 had argued in his ' Discourses ; ' and in propa- 
 gating this wide religion they also pleaded and 
 furthered the cause of real, inner toleration. But 
 their influence was most perceptible and most 
 favourable, after all, in the awakening of national 
 sentiment, of patriotism. 
 
 In fact, the principle according to which Art 
 and Poetry have their roots in national life, 
 the study of old German history, poetry, and Ian-
 
 NATIONAL FEELING. 255 
 
 guage at the moment when the deepest humilia- 
 tion was inflicted upon the nation, the lofty 
 humanitarianisrn and idealism of a Herder, q^ National 
 a Goethe, a Schiller, which seemed to have ^^^^^^s- 
 led to the ruin of the German State on the battle- 
 field of Jena, indirectly awakened the national feel- 
 ing, while the persistency with which the roman- 
 ticists dwelt upon the importance of nationality, 
 contributed not a little to the great patriotic effort 
 of the nation in 1813 to free itself from foreign 
 yoke. Nay, that peculiar national pride of a lite- 
 rary and scientific character, which ever since has 
 been proper to Germany, and which ultimately 
 has kindled also the national pride in things 
 political, can be traced to the influence of the 
 Romanticists. With them also began, alas, that 
 sort of methodical reaction in favour of feudal 
 and ecclesiastical institutions, which was caused 
 by their hatred for the radicalism and Jacobinism 
 of the French Eevolution, its spirit of levelling 
 uniformity, its rationalistic spirit. It is remarkable 
 that the German Burke, young Gentz, made, as 
 early as 1796, the first German translation of 
 Burke's ' Eeflections.' Unfortunately they did 
 not stop where the great interpreter of the British 
 Constitution stopped. They wanted to go back
 
 256 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 not only beyond 1688, but beyond 1520; nay, 
 further back still, to the glorious time when the 
 holy Roman crown rested on the anointed head of 
 the German Emperor, and his half princely, half 
 sacerdotal sway extended over the whole of middle 
 Europe, when the State was still entirely imbued 
 with an ecclesiastical spirit. 
 
 The whole movement was, in fact, like that of 
 
 Herder's times, a reaction against the rationalistic 
 
 tendency of the eighteenth century, and 
 
 The 
 
 Political the romanticists might be called the real 
 executors of Herder's bequest, were it 
 not that Herder contented himself with emanci- 
 pating the mind from rationalistic conventionalism, 
 whereas the romanticists, after having most effec- 
 tually worked in the same direction, wanted to 
 enthral it in the fetters of a worse conventionalism 
 — that of a dead tradition, galvanised by artificial 
 means. Herder strove to awaken the mind by 
 appealing to all its active forces ; the romanticists 
 tried to lull it into a dreamy sleep by mesmerising 
 as it were all those forces. Herder was of opinion 
 that the historical principle consisted in progress ; 
 the romanticists held that it meant retrogression. 
 Herder wished his own time to make history ; the 
 romanticists thought that they could show respect
 
 THE POLITICAL REACTION. 257 
 
 for history only by stopping its course. This 
 they believed might be done most effectually by 
 preaching the cause of ' throne and altar,' of 
 authority, both secular and spiritual, in writings 
 worthy of J. de Maistre. Almost all of them 
 became instruments of the despotic governments 
 of the Restoration after 1815; many of them, we 
 have seen, were even consistent enough to throw 
 themselves into the arms of Rome, the securest 
 citadel, they thought, against the spirit of ex- 
 amination which had bred revolt and resulted in 
 the overthrow of all the creations of history. 
 
 'The spirit of enlightenment,' said A. W. 
 Schlegel, * which has no respect whatever for 
 darkness, is the most decided and most dangerous 
 adversary of poetry.' Now, as poetry was supposed 
 to penetrate the whole life, public and private, the 
 consequence was that enlightenment in the eyes 
 of the romanticists was an enemy to be combated 
 also in the domains of Religion and the State. 
 Hence their strong antipathy for the French 
 Revolution, which Klopstock, Kant, Schiller, and 
 even Herder had saluted as the beginning of a 
 new era. They saw in it nothing but Voltaireanism 
 and the worship of the goddess Reason ; the 
 presumptuous attempt to create mechanically a 
 
 s
 
 258 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 social order according to rationalistic principles ; 
 the negation, in a word, of History. Unfortu- 
 nately their medieval tastes were not so inno- 
 cent as the children's play with the bells spoken 
 of by Goethe. The literary and philosophical ten- 
 dencies of earlier times soon developed into poli- 
 tical and ecclesiastical tendencies. Alexander of 
 Russia was deeply imbued with their ideas when 
 he formed the ' Holy Alliance,' more even against 
 the spirit of the past century than against revolu- 
 tionary France. In Austria and in Italy the 
 governments made themselves the chamj^ions of 
 the Roman Church ; in France ' throne and altar ' 
 formed an alliance against scepticism and liberal- 
 ism ; the petty nobility of Germany already dreamed 
 of a restoration of its feudal rights ; Prussian 
 professors and statesmen began to vie with each 
 other in theorising on the ' Christo- Teutonic 
 State. It was reserved for the most exalted disciple 
 of the romanticists to realise their ideal — so far as 
 the good old Protestant State of Prussia allowed 
 him to realise it — when he at last ascended the 
 throne in 1840 : for Germany's favourable star had 
 granted a long life to his wise and good father. 
 Romanticism, indeed, was long dead, when Fre- 
 derick William IV., the ' Romanticist on the 
 
 J
 
 RECENT GERMAN WORK. 259 
 
 tlirone,' as Strauss called him by innuendo in a 
 celebrated pamphlet, delivered up to the Catholic 
 Church the rights of the State, so strenuously 
 defended by his father, catholicised Protestant- 
 ism as much as it lay in his power, and tried to 
 create artificially a medieval constitution. He did 
 not succeed ; but Germany still pays the penalty 
 of these dangerous poetical experiments. 
 
 We have arrived at the end of our task. 
 Germany has not since been idle. She has pro- 
 duced one poet of genius and many of talent since 
 1825. She has given to the world some 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
 great scientific and historical works, 
 which are unequalled even in the period we have 
 been studying together. Some great discoveries 
 have been made in natural science ; but no 
 new and fruitful ideas, such as had come forth 
 from Germany during the sixty or seventy years 
 we have been contemplating, have been produced. 
 No new science has been created. The German 
 intellect has been busy, ever since' Goethe's death, 
 in developing or contradicting, in modifying or 
 applying the ideas propounded and insisted on 
 by the three generations to which Germany owes 
 her intellectual Renaissance, the generation of 
 1760, that of 1780, and that of 1800. We have 
 
 s 2
 
 260 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 examined together these ideas, and I need not 
 dwell upon them longer — or if I were to do so, I 
 should be obliged to ask you for fifty meetings 
 more — but I must beg you to bear in mind (what 
 is indeed the purport of all these lectures), that 
 the point of view, which was the general one in 
 Europe during the last fifty years, was really 
 opened by Germany. 
 
 Let us not be misled by the universality of 
 certain currents of thought as to their origin. 
 When all Europe seemed bent on the mechanical 
 explanation of nature, when Galileo, Kepler, Des- 
 cartes, devoted their lives to this task, it was 
 England which, through Harvey, Gilbert, Bacon, 
 gave the impulse, which, through Hobbes, Newton, 
 Locke, kept the lead in the movement which had 
 sprung up in this island. 
 
 It was the same with the French thought of 
 the past century. No sooner had the Montes- 
 quieus and Yoltaires, the Rousseaus and Diderots, 
 expressed their ideas, than these ideas passed 
 into European currency and were changed into 
 foreign coin. The same phenomenon may be 
 seen in the successive phases of the period dur- 
 ing which Germany was acquiring the intellectual 
 hegemony, i.e. from about 1763 to about 1830.
 
 ITS INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND AND EUROPE. 261 
 
 Scarcely had Winckelmann declared war against 
 the reigning rococo, than all over Europe sculpture, 
 painting, and architecture took the new classical 
 turn. When, fifty years later, a reaction set in 
 against the style empire, which had but been an 
 exaggeration of Winckelmann's theories, when 
 Chateaubriand in France, and Walter Scott in 
 England, brought the Middle Ages into fashion, 
 they only followed — unconsciously of course — the 
 impulse given by the German romanticists. It was 
 the same with the more important movement 
 which took place all over Europe in historical and 
 natural science. 
 
 Not only would Augustin Thierry and Thomas 
 Carlyle have been impossible without the German 
 revolution of thought ; but the way in which our 
 century looks upon antiquity, so widely difierent 
 from that in which Pope or Voltaire looked upon 
 it, was opened by Winckelmann and Lessing. The 
 point of view, if not the method, which is generally 
 accepted now in natural science, was first held by 
 Goethe. The historical sciences — under which 
 name we comprise not only political and literary 
 history, but also theology, philology, archaeology, 
 and jurisprudence — have been, during the whole 
 century, and have scarcely even now ceased to be,
 
 262 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 under the empire of Herder's ideas of evolution. 
 Comparative philology, whether we consider it 
 a branch of natural or of historical science, has 
 not yet abandoned the roads opened by W. von 
 Humboldt and Bopp, nor have the neo- Latin 
 studies repudiated the paternity of Diez, or the Ger- 
 manistic that of Grrimm. A new basis for philo- 
 sophy has been laid by Kant. Schiller's concep- 
 tion of art has been more and more generally 
 adopted. The science of religion, and the inde- 
 pendent spirit in which our time treats the history 
 of Christianity, so different from the aggressive 
 tone of the last century, are mainly due to 
 Herder's German disciples. Above all, the con- 
 sciousness with which individualism — a conserva- 
 tive principle, when understood in the German 
 sense — still resists here and there the overwhelm- 
 ing tide of the levelling tendencies of our days, 
 is of German origin. So also is the conscious- 
 ness with which the right of intuitive genius — 
 an aristocratic principle — is as yet maintained 
 against the all- invading method of analysis and 
 rationalism, a method which, in its ultimate re- 
 sults, must always further the democratic interest, 
 as it applies to the most general of human faculties. 
 The fact of this struggle would suffice to prove
 
 CONCLUSION. 263 
 
 that the main principles of German thought have 
 not triumphed without contest in Europe. They 
 can hardly be said to have triumphed even in 
 Germany, where they have been deeply modified 
 and corrected by new currents, just as they had 
 themselves deeply modified and corrected the 
 English French currents of the past.
 
 264 
 
 EPILOGUE. 
 
 * TOUNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 1825-1860. 
 
 The romanticists were men ' who, with the 
 weapons forged by the age of enlightenment, 
 combated enlightenment itself, in the domains of 
 science, art, morality, and politics.' With these 
 words one of the most gifted Young Hegelians, 
 who rose against romanticism towards 1830, Arnold 
 Ruge, characterised his opponents. The exaggera- 
 tion, in fact, of the romantic movement produced, 
 as will always be the case, a strong reaction. 
 This reaction took place in every department of 
 intellectual life, just as the romantic movement 
 had pervaded every branch of activity. The his- 
 torical idea had been carried so far that it had 
 led to the justification of every abuse and of 
 every crime of the good old time, nay, to plans 
 and efforts for bringing the world back to that 
 good old time.
 
 HEGEL. 265 
 
 Hegel himself did not go to sucli lengths. He 
 remained throughout faithful to the ideal of 
 the modern State and the Protestant ^^^^^^ 
 religion. Feudality and Catholicism re- ^''^-^^^i- 
 mained always for him things of the past, which 
 no effort could recall to life ; but he saw in the 
 bureaucratical State of Frederick William III. the 
 crowning result of all the historical evolutions, 
 the end to which all the political history of 
 Germany had tended. He regarded the ' Evan- 
 gehcal Alliance' of Frederick William III. as 
 destined to bring together Calvinists and Luthe- 
 rans, as the ultimate expression of the religious 
 development of his country. Now this evolution 
 was, according to the philosophy of identity, which 
 he had modified, but not abandoned, nothing but 
 the evolution of universal reason itself, as developed 
 in time and space ; and he gave to this view its 
 philosophical formula, when he declared that 
 ' whatever is, is reasonable, and whatever is 
 reasonable, is ' — a proposition quite defensible if 
 only Hegel's premiss were accepted, that his 
 dialectic method was a thinking process identical 
 with the process of things which in its turn was 
 but the process of eternal thought thinking itself. 
 For Hegel had given to the fieri idea of Herder
 
 266 'young Germany' and 'little Germany.' 
 
 dialectic and metaphysical form : the ' immanent 
 negativity ' of things — everything is alv^^ays chang- 
 ing, consequently denies itself unceasingly — is the 
 form of a thought, w^hich is identical with the 
 process of fieri in the world of phenomena. In 
 the same way he had undertaken to prove that 
 Christianity had given expression to the con- 
 sciousness of the absolute in its purest form — as 
 far as imagination and feeling were concerned — 
 that it was consequently the absolute religion, 
 as his philosophy was of course the absolute philo- 
 sophy. At last he had gone so far as to interpret 
 all the diflPerent dogmas of Christianity so as to 
 make of them symbols of his own philosophy. 
 
 This provoked the rebellion of his most eminent 
 disciples. Strauss and Feuerbach, B. Bauer and 
 Ruge, separated from him, and formed the left 
 wing of Hegelianism, or, as they called themselves, 
 the Young-Hegelians. Strauss attacked super- 
 naturalism as well as theological rationalism with 
 the weapons of historical investigation in his 
 ' Life of Jesus,' which appeared in 1835. Faith- 
 ful to Hegel's earlier ideas he presented in this 
 memorable book the origin of Christianity as 
 growing naturally out of the thoughts, feelings, 
 and circumstances of the time, not as created by
 
 YOUNG HEGELIANS. 267 
 
 one stroke of a magic wand. He showed how far 
 legend, myth, and the popular imagination had 
 aided in the birth of Christianity, combating 
 the supernatural as well as the rationalistic ex- 
 planation of the miracles ; but combating quite as 
 warmly the irreverent theories of the eighteenth 
 century, which saw only wonder-workers and im- 
 postors in all founders of religions. He thus be- 
 came, together with F. 0. Baur, who had begun 
 before him and who continued his work, the father 
 of the new theological school, known as the Tiibin- 
 gen school, whilst Feuerbach subjected more fully 
 the theoretical side of Hegel's doctrine to the 
 dialectical process which he had learned from his 
 master, investigating the essence of religion in 
 general ; and soon a numerous school of young 
 thinkers followed in his steps. A return to common- 
 sense in philosophy, to criticism in theology, was 
 the consequence of these attacks against the high- 
 priest of ' official ' philosophy. Even in the field of 
 pagan mythology the spirit of enlightenment rose 
 once more against the spirit of dusky divination ; 
 and Voss and Lobeck threw down the gauntlet to 
 Creuzer in the name of common-sense and reason. 
 Something similar took place in jurisprudence 
 and history proper. Savigny as well as Eichhorn
 
 268 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 had taught that our time had neither vocation nor 
 aptitude for law-giving ; that all fertile legislation 
 There- ^^^ ^^^ work of generations; that the 
 orrationaf- Roman law, which still lived in all the 
 countries of the Continent, the German 
 law, which still j^revailed in England, were only 
 the expression of national spirit, custom, tradi- 
 tion, and local necessities. Already in Hegel's life- 
 time his most eloquent disciple, Gans, had defended 
 against the historical school the rights of the 
 living, and with these the rights also of reason. 
 At the same time the wonderful development of 
 the Frederician and Napoleonic legislation seemed 
 the living refutation of the historic theory, pushed 
 as far as it was pushed by the romanticists. Not 
 a generation had passed away since the great 
 work of Bonaparte ; and the Code Napoleon seemed 
 already ineradicably rooted in France. Nay, with 
 an eye of envy non- Prussian Germany regarded 
 this simple rational legislation as contrasted with 
 her own various complicated and antiquated laws. 
 Napoleon, after all, had made his Code civil as well 
 as his Code penal and his Code de procedure — as 
 Frederick II. had, thirty years before, constructed 
 his less comprehensive Landrecht — out of the frag- 
 ments of former historical legislation, just as his
 
 HISTORY. 269 
 
 new administration was only that of the old mon- 
 archy in disguise. This, however, was not yet 
 well recognised by the generation of 1830, which 
 was still persuaded that all this new organisation 
 had sprung out of the Emperor's head, like Minerva 
 from that of Jupiter, and that he had shaped it 
 exclusively according to abstract principles of 
 justice and utility. In all German universities 
 ' natural law,' i.e. the rationalistic theory of 
 law, as the eighteenth century had preached it 
 ever since Thorn asius, again mounted the pro- 
 fessors' chairs and revindicated the rights of reason 
 against the absolutism of the historic school, which 
 Goethe had so wittily parodied by anticipation. 
 
 Like an inveterate disease, law and rights descend 
 trailing from generation to generation, and gently move 
 from place to place. Reason becomes non-sense ; what 
 was a blessing is a curse. Woe to thee that thou art 
 a grandson ! Of those rights, alas ! with which we are 
 born, there is ne'er a question. 
 
 A large body of historians followed the road 
 of the new rationalistic school of jurisprudence. 
 Germany was inundated with histories 
 
 History. 
 
 which treated all the past with reference 
 
 to the present, which were not content to tell the 
 
 facts, but commented upon them from the point
 
 270 'young Germany' and 'little geemany.' 
 
 of view of the Frencli liberals or the French re- 
 publicans of the day. Eotteck's and Welcker's 
 great ' Dictionary of Political Science,' entirely 
 written under the influence of formal French 
 constitutionalism, was the Bible of the new 
 liberal doctrinaires, who sprang up everywhere in 
 Germany and repeated in the small Chambers of 
 Carlsruhe and Darmstadt the great oratorical 
 tournaments of Paris under the Restoration and 
 Louis Philippe. If the most practical of English 
 statesmen, Lord Palmerston, naively believed 
 that the recipe of a parliamentary constitution, 
 neatly written on white paper, would work in 
 Spain and Greece, as that growth of centuries, 
 the British constitution, worked in England, the 
 German professors of 1830 were certainly excus- 
 able in thinking that they might introduce that 
 most delicate and most abnormal form of govern- 
 ment into their tiny bureaucratical States. Had 
 not the French constitution-mongers, with Ben- 
 jamin Constant at their head, adapted it to Con- 
 tinental use ? 
 
 There was, however, a party which went 
 further than the constitutionalists. ' Young 
 Germany' — so we call the group of youthful 
 writers, bom about 1810, who, towards 1830, trod
 
 THE MODERN MINDS. 271 
 
 in the footsteps of Borne and Heine— Young Ger- 
 many did not stop at representative monarchy, as 
 it did not stop at Deism in philosophy, youno- 
 although Heine himself remained ever ^'''"•'^"J'- 
 faithful to the theory of a limited monarchy, and 
 came back at the end of his life to ' the simple 
 belief in the personal God of the common man,' as 
 he used to say. Laube and Gutzkow, Wienbarg 
 and Euge attacked Christianity and even Hegelian - 
 ism, in which they had been bred, with the violence 
 of the French revolutionists of 1 7 9 2 . They showed 
 a determined predilection for atheism and material- 
 ism in philosophy, for Jacobinism in politics ; 
 they even preached, with the Saint- Simonians, the 
 emancipation of woman and the abolition of indi- 
 vidual property. They called themselves proudly 
 ' modern ' minds. They protested against all 
 forms of aristocracy, social as well as intellectual. 
 The State was to become the one all-resfulatins 
 power ; not the historical State, as it had grown 
 up in the course of centuries — but the modem 
 State built up according to the dictates of Eeason 
 — or of Jean-Jacques ; not even the State of 1 790, 
 but the democratical State of 1793. The place 
 held till now by the great — kings, aristocrats, ge- 
 niuses — was to be held henceforward by the people,
 
 272 'young Germany' and 'little Germany.' 
 
 wliicli was to become the hero of history and public 
 life. At the same time they claimed, not only for 
 the people, but for themselves, the right to material 
 enjoyment, even to luxury ; not an equality in 
 misery, but an equality in v^ealth was their un- 
 attainable ideal. Their religion was the rehabilita- 
 tion of the flesh ; science and poetry were means 
 for preaching and propagating their new gospel. 
 Their last and most dangerous disciple, Ferdinand 
 Lassalle, died only fifteen years ago, not without 
 having left his fatal legacy to Germany. 
 
 Borne and Heine, who had given the first 
 siernal for this reaction in favour of rationalism 
 Borne and ^g^iiiist history, and of French ideas 
 Heme. against German, did not, as I said, go so 
 far. Heine was too much of an artist not to be 
 shocked by such excesses ; Borne too much of a 
 Stoic to go such lengths — his ideal was the in- 
 corruptible Robespierre, not the epicurean Danton. 
 For Heine, politics, as well as religion, history, 
 philosophy, never ceased to be themes for poetical 
 variations. In reality they were as indifferent to 
 him as the religious subjects of the great works of 
 the Italian Renaissance were indifferent to the 
 artists who produced them. It was Borne and 
 Heine, nevertheless, who set the example. Heine
 
 BORNE AND HEINE. 273 
 
 himself had belonged, as I have said, to the 
 romantic school, and was the personal pupil of A. 
 W. Schlegel. He had begun with two romantic tra- 
 gedies which exhibit only too visibly the traces of 
 the master's influence ; and he was destined to give 
 in ' Atta Troll ' and the ' Romanzero ' what the 
 romanticists themselves had never been able to 
 give, the ideal romantic poem. There was not 
 even wanting in them the much recommended 
 irony of Fred. Schlegel. But Heine had always 
 been a somewhat unruly disciple. As early as at 
 the age of sixteen he had sung his song of the 
 Napoleonic grenadiers, which was in opposition to 
 the whole tendency of his masters ; and you know 
 how he developed the theme of the Napoleon- 
 worship in the incomparable prose-poem of 
 ' Tambour Legrand.' Now, for a while Germany 
 neglected Heine the immortal poet for Heine 
 the ephemeral politician and philosopher —there 
 are many foreigners who do so still — and was led 
 to accept the most meagre of doctrines by the 
 irresistible fascination of a prose and a verse which 
 she had not heard since the great days of Goethe 
 and Schiller ; whilst Borne's incomparable wit 
 made her forget for a time that his political ideal 
 was still more shallow than that of Heine. 
 
 T
 
 274 ' YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 We have seen that the liberating movement of 
 1813, the rising of the whole nation against the 
 foreign yoke, had taken place under the inspira- 
 tion of romanticism. It had taken the form of 
 a crusade, not only against Napoleon and the 
 French, but against the rationalism, the demo- 
 cracy, and the cosmopolitan pretences of the eigh- 
 teenth century and the great Revolution. It had 
 invoked the Christian and religious spirit, Teutonic 
 patriotism, feudal loyalty towards the hereditary 
 princes ; and these feelings were still very strong 
 when Heine and Borne, towards 1825, gave ex- 
 pression to the aspirations of the rising genera- 
 tion which had not felt the hardship of foreign 
 oppression and to which the political reality 
 which had followed the enthusiastic rise of 1813, 
 had proved a source of the bitterest disappoint- 
 ment. The shameless despotism of the fathers of 
 the fatherland, most of them of Napoleon's own 
 creation, or at least promotion, the petty tyranny 
 of their instruments, and the religious fanaticism 
 or hypocrisy which already began to spring up in 
 the official spheres of South Germany, were quite 
 sufficient to alienate the young from the romantic 
 cause. It was the time when Grabbe wrote his 
 tragedy of ' The Himdred Days,' when Zedlitz
 
 LITTLE GERMANY. 275 
 
 composed his poem of the dead Caesar's ' JMidnight 
 Review,' when W. Miiller's ' Griechenlieder,' and 
 Mosen's Polish songs resounded in the streets of 
 every German town. The reaction in favour of 
 cosmopolitism and humanitarianism against pa- 
 triotic one-sidedness, and of French sympathies 
 against German national prejudices, was at the 
 same time a partial return to the ideas which had 
 predominated in Germany in the times of Schiller 
 and Goethe, and the exposition of which has been 
 the main object of these lectures. A partial 
 return, I say; for in opposing democracy to aris- 
 tocracy, the masses to individualism, the mechani- 
 cal making of states and laws to the ideas of 
 growth and evolution, it was in contradiction 
 with the creed of Herder and of Goethe. In its 
 cosmopolitism and in its paganism it was quite 
 under the sway of the great Humanitarian and the 
 great Heathen. 
 
 The Francophil, democratical, and rationalistic 
 current, initiated by Borne, Heine, and Young 
 Germany, prevailed for nearly a quarter ^ittie 
 of a century, from 1825 to 1850. Then G*^"^'^"^'- 
 again u^nder the influence of the disenchantment 
 which the failures of 1848 had caused, and still 
 more under the impressions produced by the 
 
 T 2
 
 276 'young Germany' and ' little geemany.' 
 
 bankruptcy of the French democracy in 1849, a 
 contrary current arose in Germany. 
 
 Already towards 1840 this new current had 
 set in : the current of German national spirit 
 Its national ^gaiust foreign influence, and above 
 character, ^^l against France. From 1840 to 1848 
 the 'Germanistenversammlungen ' or meetings of 
 Teutonic philologists, jurisconsults and historians, 
 were for Germany what the scientific congresses 
 were for Italy, the pretext and opportunity for 
 asserting and preparing the unity of Germany. 
 For it was written that our political ideas should be 
 framed by professors, as professors had framed our 
 literary and artistic, our religious and philosophical 
 ideas. The two men, however, who gave us, the 
 one a national poetry, the other a national state, 
 were not professors : but could they have done 
 their work if the professors had not prepared the 
 ground for them ? Would they not have done it 
 in a still more satisfactory way if the professors 
 had not continued to interfere in it ? 
 
 The outbreak of French Chauvinism — the ugly 
 word seems to have established itself in all our 
 languages — and the thirst for conquest betrayed 
 in 1840, the cries for the Ehine which resounded 
 in Paris, as soon as Europe was threatened with
 
 ITS NATIONAL CHARACTER. 277 
 
 a general war through the complication in the 
 East, contributed not a Kttle to strengthen this 
 current, particularly in the menaced provinces of 
 the left bank, which had been the special centre of 
 the romantic movement. This current is, neverthe- 
 less, very distinct from that of 1813, and it became 
 still more so after 1848, when the romantic dreams 
 of a resurrection of Frederick Barbarossa's Empire, 
 under the form of a Seventy- Millions Germany, 
 prevented the foundation of the national State. 
 It was, in the main, undoubtedly directed against 
 what was un-German in the political rationalism 
 of ' Young Germany ' — whose best men, from 
 Borne, Gans, and Heine, down to F. Lassalle, were, 
 curious to say, really not of German blood, being 
 Israelites by birth, if not by creed. The declara- 
 tion of war itself was a violent pamphlet against 
 Borne from the pen of Gervinus. 
 
 Nevertheless, the reaction of 1850 did not affect 
 a picturesque and poetical costume like that of 
 1813. The new patriots deemed it unnecessary 
 and childish to show the love of their country by 
 their white collars, bare necks, and long hair. 
 On the contrary, they affected rather a sort of 
 bourgeois common-place exterior. They dreaded 
 to be considered as unpractical dreamers j their
 
 278 'young GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 higliest ambition was to be taken for ' positive ' 
 people. Tbeir ideal in history was the honest, 
 stedfast, prosy Burger of the sixteenth century, 
 not the romantic knight of the Middle Ages, or 
 the Germanic chieftain of barbarous times. They 
 saw the strength of the nation in the middle- 
 class, and turned against the Jmiker nobility, as 
 well as against the democratic masses. They did 
 not dream of a traditional royalty, but of a 
 monarchy resting on contract like that of England 
 since 1688. They showed no sympathy for the 
 Church or for any religious mysticism, such as had 
 inspired the poets of 1813 ; on the contrary, they 
 wished to impress upon men's minds that they 
 were Protestants — sober, unpoetical Protestants — 
 and at the same time the heirs of Kant, whose 
 purely moral religion, without dogmas and forms 
 of worship, was to be the German religion far 
 excellence, i.e. the final form of Protestantism, as 
 for the English Deists of the past century Uni- 
 tarianism was the final form of English Pro- 
 testantism. 
 
 But if they were disciples of Kant the moralist, 
 they pointedly ignored Kant the metaphysician. 
 'Young Germany' had still been strongly imbued 
 with the speculative spirit ; it had grown up under
 
 THE GERMAN METHOD. 279 
 
 Hpgel's, as yet, uncontested rule. The new school 
 deliberately turned their backs on all metaphysics : 
 duringr their reisrn over public opinion, if 
 
 ° Oil. Its Positive 
 
 not over State and Church — i.e. from Character 
 
 in Science. 
 
 1850 to about 1866— a sort of indiffer- 
 entism, nay, of aversion, for philosophical specula- 
 tion seemed to have taken hold of the nation, 
 awakened, as she was, and sobered down from her 
 metaphysical excesses. Even in their way of treat- 
 ing science they went to the opposite extreme. The 
 great advantage of Kant's influence was, that 
 science during the first half of this century was 
 always handled in a philosophical spirit. There 
 was certainly an excess both in the so-called 'philo- 
 sophy of nature ' and in the ' philosophy of history,' 
 which interfered too often with the sober and exact 
 observation and verification of facts. The new 
 school assumed to be more positive. General 
 ideas had nothing to do with science ; and they 
 even went so far as to treat history as a sort of exact 
 science. The famous ' German method ' dates from 
 this time. Imagination, and even intuition, were 
 banished from historical studies, as well as from 
 natural science. Facts alone were to be sought 
 for, sifted, and assembled ; the only combination 
 of the facts which was allowed was connexion
 
 280 ' YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 through cause and effect ; and the disciples were 
 so well drilled that they succeeded at last not 
 only in finding the facts they wanted, and in mak- 
 ing them take the appearance which they desired, 
 but in driving life itself out of history, which is 
 but the evolution of life. Even the present genera- 
 tion, which has come back to long neglected philo- 
 sophy, is animated in its researches by a spirit 
 entirely different from that which j)redominated in 
 the times of Hegel. It is, indeed, Kant's criticism 
 of reason with its strictly experimental character 
 and its opposition to all a priori speculation, which 
 our matter-of-fact juniors have taken up again. 
 In other words they have returned to the point 
 whence their fathers started on their strange 
 Odysse}^ and they are favoured in their new 
 vojsige by all the light which the progress of 
 natural science, accomplished in the interval, 
 throws on their road. And not the professional 
 philosophers alone, but the men of science them- 
 selves, the physiologists especially, tread now with 
 a surer foot in the steps of the great renovator of 
 modern thought. 
 
 If, however, the men of 1850 repudiated all 
 philosophical ideas, they did not reject political 
 ideas ; nay, history soon became in their hands a
 
 GEEMAN LIBERALISM. 281 
 
 storehouse of arguments for political views. The 
 ' men of Gotha ' — so they were called in consequence 
 of the Gotha Parliament of 1849, in which thej 
 formed the majorit}" — thought, if thej did not 
 say, that politics alone really deserved to 
 
 la Politics. 
 
 occupy a nation which had come of age. 
 They were staunch Liberals of the constitutional 
 school ; but their ideal was the old English Con- 
 stitution, not the French one of 1830. In general 
 their leaders, from Dahlmann and Gervinus, down 
 to Gneist and Waitz, Sybel and Hausser, were 
 decidedly English in their sympathies, until — 
 well, until a period which lies beyond the limits 
 of the subject which I have to treat here. 
 
 Like the English Liberals of the old school they 
 had arrived at a species of compromise between 
 political rationalism and ' historicism.' They still 
 adhered to the German idea of evolution — the 
 only great German idea to which they remained 
 faithful — but they corrected it consciously, as the 
 English had done and do almost unconsciously, by 
 adaptation of the past to the exigencies of the 
 present. They saw the historical spirit, not in a 
 return to the past, or in a stopping of history at 
 a given moment, but in continuous progress. 
 Moreover, as, although mostly professors, they
 
 282 ' YOUNG GEEMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GEEMANY.' 
 
 claimed to be practical politicians, not dreamers 
 and theorists, tliey did not want to awaken Fre- 
 derick Barbarossa in bis Kjffbaiiser, and call to life 
 the ' Holy Eoman Empire of tbe German Nation,' 
 witb its seventy millions of souls and its sway over 
 Hungary and Italy, Poland and Burgundy. Tbey 
 wanted to have a national State strong enough to 
 defend itself against foreign aggression, not so 
 mighty as to arouse the fears or suspicion of the 
 neighbouring nations; a State similar to those 
 founded, or at least perfected, by Louis XI. of 
 France, Henry YII. of England, Ferdinand the 
 Catholic of Spain. In consequence they raised 
 a characteristic protest against the Othos and 
 Fredericks of the Middle Ages, who, instead of 
 following the sensible and moderate national policy 
 of Henry I., went to assume in Eome the crown 
 of the Csesars. And as Austria was still con- 
 sidered, and considered herself as the natural 
 heir of the Holy Empire, as her possessions lay to 
 a great extent outside the frontiers of the German 
 language and German interests ; as she was Catho- 
 lic throughout, the exclusion of Austria became 
 an article, and indeed the chief article of the new 
 political faith. Thence the name of the party, 
 ' Little Germany,' as opposed to those successors
 
 THE PRUSSIAN STATE. 283 
 
 of the romantic school still numerous in 1848, who 
 wanted to defend the German interests ' on the 
 Mincio,' and saw in Austria the champion of 
 German grandeur, and were usually called the 
 party of ' Great Germany.' 
 
 The ' Little Germans,' indeed, saw clearly from 
 the beginning, in Protestant Prussia, the power 
 which was to realise the longed-for national State, 
 powerful enough to defend its integrity, but with- 
 out any hankering after political hegemony in 
 Europe such as Charles Y. and Louis XIY. had 
 aspired to, and such as had always haunted the 
 patriots of 1813, when they dreamed of avenging 
 the death of young Conradin and restoring the 
 Empire of his grandfather. Their aim, I said, 
 was to be eminently matter-of-fact, and they 
 affected a contempt for high-flown or sentimental 
 ideas, which was often taken abroad for less of a 
 fanfaronnade de vice than it really was. They were 
 so anxious to show that they were no longer 
 modest, shy, dreamy sentimentalists that they 
 sometimes overdid it ; for they strove not only 
 against the looseness of moral principles, the 
 Bohemian life, the Jacobinism and the Frenchified 
 ways of ' Young Germany,' to whose Gallic 
 frivolity they opposed their Teutonic earnestness ;
 
 284 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 not only against tlie mania for poetical fancy- 
 costumes, and the unpractical enthusiasm of the 
 patriots of 1813. They strove also against the 
 idealism of Goethe's and Schiller's time, against 
 its exaggerated individualism, against the eternal 
 seK-education, against the Avhole worship of 
 beautiful souls, against its humanitarian cosmo- 
 politism, and absence of prejudice ; but above all 
 against its alienation from public life, and its 
 exclusive admiration of art and thought as the 
 highest activity of man. 
 
 Gervinus, at the end of his history of German 
 poetry, which appeared from 1835 to 1842, and 
 was a species of patriotic pamphlet in five huge 
 volumes, breaks out into these words, which give 
 vent to the suppressed idea, that pervades his 
 whole book, as it was the undercurrent of the 
 feelings of his whole generation : 
 
 Is it not time to use the forces hidden in the nation 1 
 to ask the governments to appreciate those forces, and give 
 them free course 1 to wish that the nation, which forms 
 the centre and nucleus of Eiu-ope, should come out of the 
 despised position which it occupies ? that it should enter 
 at last on its majority 1 . . . But, by whatever means that 
 aim is to be attained, it is not by the ways which our 
 poetry has taken. . . . We want a man of Luther's stamp. 
 He himself was tempted to undertake the task ; but he
 
 THE GERMAN STATE. 285 
 
 despaired for the ever alleged reason that he did not 
 believe in the political intelligence and capacity of his 
 nation. If it were in the nature of the people, he was 
 of opinion, it would show itself without laws. . . . But 
 we will not despair of this people. . . , We cannot 
 believe that a nation can have achieved so great results 
 in poetry, religion, art, and science, and yet should be 
 absolutely incapable of any political achievement. , , . 
 Our duty is to understand the signs of the times, to 
 give up scattering our strength as we do, to direct our 
 activity towards the point which is the object of the most 
 ardent desires of all. The fight on the field of art is 
 over ; now we ought to aim steadily at the other object, 
 which nobody as yet amongst us has attained. Perhaps 
 Apollo will there also grant us the prize, which he has 
 not refused us elsewhere ! 
 
 The ' man of Luther's stamp ' came, and the 
 first to turn his back upon him was the man w^ho 
 had yearned for him ; and the man of Luther's 
 stamp saw what Luther had seen, that political 
 capacity was not in the nature of the nation, 
 and so, having vainly tried to build the national 
 State with the help of the nation, he at last did 
 it without the nation. As soon as he had done 
 his work, the ' Little Germans,' who had not 
 understood him, and had opposed him, loaded 
 him with praise, for they saw that it was their 
 dream which he had realised. So he called them
 
 286 * YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND '^LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 again to work with him to fit up the new building, 
 and they put their hand to the work, and again 
 proved that political capacity was not in their 
 nature, and thus they separated again, perhaps for 
 ever. 
 
 Nevertheless, they have been, and are, trying 
 hard to become a political nation. To arrive at 
 Its infla- "^^i^ result, Germany, freed for the last 
 ^g*fjjj°°Q fifty years from all social, religious, and 
 °^^ ' national prejudices, had to acquire them 
 again artificially, or at least to form a new ' cake 
 of custom,' or ensemble of such prejudices as 
 were necessary for the practical purposes of a 
 national and political life. A man who sees all 
 sides of a question, whom the passions of the patriot 
 and the party-man do not move, who thinks more 
 of being let alone than of acting upon others, 
 a man without prejudices — in a word, the ideal 
 man of Goethe's time — was scarcely fit for the 
 new task. For this work, good, solid, narrow, social 
 and other prejudices were a necessity. The con- 
 solidation then of prejudices, above all, of the 
 national prejudice, was the chief, though uncon- 
 scious aim of the German intellectual movement 
 since 1850 ; and as regards national prejudice, they 
 certainly succeeded. Whenever national interests
 
 MODERN GERMAN PATRIOTISM. 287 
 
 are at stake, we all liold together, as our fathers 
 never did, and show a public spirit utterly un- 
 known to them. I cannot say the same as yet in 
 cases where the interests of liberty, of good admin- 
 istration, of free trade, and so forth, are concerned. 
 It is a great thing that at least in national ques- 
 tions, we should be united and unanimous even 
 to excess. As I said in my last lecture, the death 
 of individualism, which we have witnessed since 
 1850, seems a contradiction of tke German idea. 
 Still, it was necessary to a certain degree, because 
 excessive individualism unfits man for public life. 
 One of the first means of creating those pre- 
 judices, and one of its last consequences, was the 
 creation of national pride, a virtue or a vice, 
 utterly unknown to the great period of 1790. 
 This new patriotism had not the simplicity of 
 the French or Greek patriotism, which regards 
 all other nations as barbarians ; nor the humble 
 and sentimental tenderness of Italian patriotism, 
 which clings to the redeemed country as a mother 
 does to a child saved from death but still delicate 
 and ailing, and scarcely able to face the hard- 
 ships of life in a public school with hardy com- 
 rades. It had not the robust vigour of the Roman 
 and old-English patriotism, which simply ignored
 
 288 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AND * LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 the legal existence of all who were not Eoman 
 citizens or British subjects. The new German 
 patriotism, which is not to be confounded with 
 the old Prussian, was not, and is not na'if. It is 
 conscious ; it is intentional ; it has a tincture of 
 pedantry because it has been made by scholars 
 and literary men. It has sprung up from a feel- 
 ing of want of patriotism, such as had reigned 
 before, and against which reaction was necessary. 
 It resembles in that respect the religion of the 
 German romanticists, who had all been free- 
 thinkers, and resolved one fine day to become 
 believers because belief was a necessary basis of all 
 poetical excellence. Hence the exaggerations of 
 German patriotism. It was not bom naturally, 
 or spontaneously, it was the fruit of reflection. 
 
 It was not the less justified for all that ; for 
 it was really necessary for the creation of a na- 
 tional State. Now, next to a just and righteous 
 order, which is the very raison d'etre of the State, 
 national independence and national strength, which 
 guarantees this independence, are the most in- 
 dispensable conditions for the welfare of a nation. 
 When a nation does not possess these, it must 
 sacrifice everything to attain them, even liberty. 
 The Spaniards gave the example of it in the
 
 STRUGGLE FOR INTERNAL LIBERTY. 289 
 
 beginning- of this century, because they had at 
 least this superiority over Germany, that they 
 possessed a national State — worse, certainly, than 
 the one which the French wanted to force upon 
 them — but still a national State. This goal once 
 attained, the struggle for internal liberty ought 
 to begin, with its various vicissitudes of victory 
 and defeat, as England carried it on from the 
 destruction of the Armada to the reisrn of 
 George IV. ; and it is only when this conquest 
 has been achieved, that the nation can allow 
 herself again the luxury of such liberal ideas 
 and feelings as those which animated the great 
 founders of German culture. 
 
 Meanwhile those ideas bear fruit a thousand- 
 fold throughout the world, and spring up even in 
 distant fields, whither the seed has been 
 
 . T 1 T . ^ c T • Conclusion. 
 
 carried by the winds of history. But at 
 home there still remains, and will ever remain a 
 quiet, unobserved community of the faithful, who 
 guard devotedly the treasure bequeathed to their 
 country by the great heroes of thought and art. 
 They live outside the strife of public life, looking 
 on it sometimes with regret, sometimes with 
 anger — but always with hope. They will not allow 
 that Germany, which has given to the world the 
 
 u
 
 290 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.' 
 
 ideas of Lessing and Herder, of Goethe and Schiller, 
 should for ever exclude them from their national 
 creed. They will take care that, when the day 
 is come, Germany shall restore those wide ideas 
 to their place of honour at the hearth from which 
 they went forth over the world. When that 
 moment is come, Germany, which now seems chiefly 
 occupied with the selfish, though necessary, task 
 of strengthening her house against the storms 
 which might threaten it, and of rendering it more 
 habitable than it has been before, will, I for one 
 am confident, resume with undivided heart her 
 share in that common work of Europe which, 
 under whatever national form it may be produced, 
 is the civilisation of mankind. 
 
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