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tV SKETCH OF 
 
 HERDER AND HIS TIMES 
 
XJNIVEESIT^ 
 
HERDER, 
 
A SKETCH OF 
 
 HERDER AND HIS TIMES, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENEY NEVINSOiSr. 
 
 "The history of Literature is the great Morgue, where every man seeks 
 his dead, those whom he loves or to whom he is related. When amongst 
 the rows that lie there unnoticed and unmeaning I chance upon a Lessing or 
 a Herder, with faces so human, so sublime — then my heart throbs within me. 
 How can I go past without hurriedly kissing those pale lips ? " — Heine. 
 
 " If Herder was not a poet, he was a poem." — JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ^ or THE r 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LONDON ; CHAPMAN and HALL, Limited. 
 
 1884. 
 
 [All Rights Reserved.) 
 

 y^A^SS y^ 
 

 DEDICATED 
 
 IN GEATErUL EEVEEENCE TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 THOMAS OARLYLE. 
 
 " I praise the loyalty o' the scholar — stung by taunt 
 Of fools, * Does this evince thy Master, they so vaunt ? 
 Did he then perpetrate the plain abortion here ? ' — 
 Who cries, ' His work am I ! full fraught by him, I clear 
 His fame from each result of accident and time, 
 And thus restore his work to its fresh morning-prime : 
 Not daring touch the mass of marble, fools' deride, 
 But putting my idea in plaster by its side, 
 His, since mine ; I, he made, vindicate who made me !' " 
 
 FiFINE AT THE FAIR. 
 
 \^ 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 I have written this hook as a supplementary note 
 to Carlyle's Essays on German Literature, in the hope 
 that it may he helpful to some readers of those 
 Essays, as I think it would have heen helpful to me 
 when I first read them many years ago. 
 
 I have depended chiefly on the following autho- 
 rities : — 
 
 (1.) Keminiscences of Herder's life collected by 
 his widow, Maria Carolina von Herder (Br inner ung en 
 au8 dem Lehen Joh. Gottfrieds von Herder. Tiibingen, 
 1820). These Reminiscences were edited hy Johann 
 Miiller, the historian, and his brother George. Though 
 they are necessarily imperfect and fragmentary, they 
 give the most vivid picture of Herder's life that has 
 yet been made. They are in two small volumes. 
 
 (2.) Herders Lehenshild, This is a collection by 
 one of Herder's sons of the original authorities for the 
 earlier part of the Reminiscences ; also of Herder's 
 early unpublished works and correspondence. It is 
 invaluable as far as it goes, but stops abruptly with 
 the return from Strassburg (1771). 
 
ii PREFACE. 
 
 (3.) Aus Herders Nachlass (three volumes, edited 
 by Diintzer and Perdinand Gottfried von Herder, 
 1857) : a collection of Herder's correspondence with 
 several of his friends, such as Jean Paul, Lavater, 
 and the rest, also the letters from Goethe. A short 
 and useful account of each friendship's history is pre- 
 fixed to the several collections. The third volume 
 contains Herder's correspondence with Karoline 
 Elachsland before their marriage. 
 
 (4.) Von und an Herder (by the same editors, 
 3 vols. 1861) : a similar collection to the last, con- 
 taining the correspondence with Gleim, Heyne, 
 Nicolai, &c., and the letters from Einsiedel and 
 Knebel. 
 
 (5.) Eeise nach Italien (edited by Diintzer, 1859) : 
 the correspondence between Herder and his wife 
 during his visit to Italy. 
 
 (6.) Aus dem Herderschen Hause (published 
 1881) : an account, by Georg Miiller, of his visits to 
 the Herders in Weimar. 
 
 (7.) Knehels Nachlass (2 vols. 1840) : containing 
 the letters from the Herders to Knebel. 
 
 (8.) Hamanns Schriften tmd Brief e (4 parts, 
 1872-4) : containing some of Herder's correspondence 
 with Hamann. 
 
 (9.) Goethe. Brief e an Frau von Stein (1848): 
 useful for the history of Herder's first eight years in 
 Weimar. 
 
 (10.) Goethe. Briefwechsel mit F. H, Jacohi 
 (184G) : especially for the dispute on Spinoza. 
 
PREFACE. in 
 
 (11.) Goethe. BicUung tmd Wahrheit aus meinem 
 Lehen and the Annalen. 
 
 (12.) In the last chapters I have drawn occasion- 
 ally from Goethe's Briefwechsel mit Schiller, 
 
 (13.) Herder nach seiner Lehen (hy Eobert Haym, 
 Leipzig, 1877-80). Only the two first parts of this 
 great work, taking us to the departure from Biicke- 
 burg for Weimar, had yet appeared when I finished 
 this book. Por the history of this earlier period I am 
 greatly indebted to Haym's wonderful thoroughness 
 and unwearied research. 
 
 (14.) I have read the so-called Biographies of 
 Doering, Neumann, and Hing, but found them to be 
 little more than new arrangements of the Bemi- 
 niscences, with the vitality left out. Eing's is the best 
 of the three. 
 
 (15.) In considering Herder's works I have used 
 the edition prepared by his widow, Heyne, and the 
 MiiUers (Tubingen, 1805-20), as being on the whole 
 the best, in spite of all faults, and the only edition 
 with much pretence to completeness. Diintzer has 
 been slowly bringing out a very excellent edition, 
 with historical prefaces to the various works, and 
 notes on the text ; but it is still far from complete. 
 
 The references to Carlyle are from the ordinary 
 small edition, except those from Frederick, which are 
 from the large edition in six volumes (1859-65). 
 
 Hettner's account of Herder {Liter aturgeschichte 
 des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts) appears to me both 
 brilliant and sympathetic. 
 
IT PREFACE. 
 
 I owe much to my sister's help and counsel. 
 
 The portrait is from a crayon-drawing by Bury, now 
 in the possession of Herder's grandson, Geheimerath 
 von Stichling, of Weimar, by whose kind permission 
 I obtained this photograph. 
 
 Maj 8, 18S8. 
 
EREATA. 
 
 On page 7, last line of the verse, for come read comes. 
 Page 10, line 14, for Emmerien read Emmerich. 
 Page 24, line 20, for Kanter read Kant. 
 Page 53, line 26, for Indus read Ltidus. 
 Page 100, for Moser read Moser. 
 Page 113, line 23, for Philocrates read FMloctetes. 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 HERDER AND HIS TIMES 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " Old-world pairs." — James Lee 's Wife, 
 
 Early in the last centuiy the Protestant inhabitants of Silesia, 
 long a foremost stronghold of the Hussite band, found their 
 treatment at the hands of their neighbours, who were actively 
 encouraged, no doubt, by the Catholic house of Austria, so 
 grievous to be borne, that many of them considered it better to 
 leave their native home, and wander out into other lands, where 
 they could live more conveniently in accordance with their 
 steadfast views of the Gospel and its truth. Amongst these was 
 a man of the name of Herder, of whose origin and previous 
 dwelling-place nothing further can be discovered. He had 
 probably been a small farmer in Silesia ; for, after proceeding 
 far up to the north-east from his native place, and raising his 
 Ebenezer, as he would have said, at Mohrungen, a little town 
 in East Prussia, he bought a house and field, and devoted him- 
 self henceforth to farming and the Gospel. 
 
 In 1701 the son of the Great Elector had been crowned, 
 under the title of Frederick I., at Konigsberg,^ which lies 
 some fifty or sixty miles to the north of Mohrungen and had 
 
 ' Carlyle's Frederick, vol. i. p. 60. 
 B 
 
2 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 been famous since the Reformation days of Markgraf Albrecht 
 for its university, and as the capital of East Prussia; a province 
 that was safely delivered from the rule of Poland by the Elector 
 John Sigismund of Brandenburgh in 1618,^ though several of 
 the inhabitants of that slowly-changing country still continued 
 to speak in the Polish tongue. It must have been during the 
 reign of this Frederick I., who died in 1713, that the Herder 
 from Silesia settled in Mohrungen, and married one of the 
 daughters of the land, who bore him a son, and they called his 
 name Gottfried. The little town, w^ith its cattle, farms, market- 
 gardens, and yarn- and linen- looms, supporting at that time 
 nearly two thousand souls in all, lies in a flat and sandy region, 
 with a lake of some extent to the south, and to the north a pool, 
 also dignified by the name of lake, but in reality little better 
 than a marshy mill-pond. Beyond a circle of some miles of 
 open ground the sight is bounded by the borders of a fon;st, 
 that stretches away again to other lakes and swampy flats. 
 
 Like most of the towns in this district, Mohrungen owes its 
 existence to the Order of German or Teutonic Knights, who 
 deemed the strip of land between the two lakes a suitable 
 position for one of their outposts against the heathen of eastern 
 Prussia. Accordingly, in 1280, a castle was built and fortified 
 with eight towers, but the hamlet that nestled confidingly at its 
 foot was not altogether happy in its protector ; for the order 
 waxed fat, and together with the allied King of Poland was 
 utterly defeated at Tannenberg in 1410,^ so that Molu'ungen for 
 the time fell into the hands of the enemy. Again, I'athcr more 
 than a century later, all the place, except the castle and the 
 Gothic church, with its ^' horned pinnacles," was burnt to the 
 ground by Sigismund of Poland in his rage against that 
 obstinate Markgraf Albrecht of Brandenburg.^ In 1697 tlio 
 town was for the second time burnt through some accident, so 
 that when Herder arrived from Silesia the natives would hardly 
 have recovered from their disasters, land would be at a dis- 
 
 ' Carlyle'a Frederick, vol. i. p. 323. " Ibid. vol. i. p. 184. 
 
 =» Ibid. vol. i. pp. 244-254. 
 
" WHENCE." 3 
 
 countj and such houses as had been rebuilt would be looking 
 their newest and brightest — though indeed a traveller tells us 
 that buildings in Mohrungen soon begin to look dim and mossy, 
 for the damp of the land is great. 
 
 The son Gottfried grew up under the eye of this resolute 
 exile, and at first intended to devote his life to the handicraft 
 of cloth-weaving, but, finding it none too profitable, he obtained 
 a post as bellringer or sexton in the Lutheran church, and clerk 
 in the services that were conducted for the benefit of those 
 amongst the townsfolk who could only speak the Polish tongue. 
 He was also appointed master over the girls in the elementary 
 school, a position for, which nature had suited him; for, in spite 
 of a certain sternness and inflexible regularity, he was fond of 
 children, and readily won the confidence and friendship of the 
 little maidens of Mohrungen. One of them indeed, when she 
 was a grey old woman, used to tell how Gottfried Herder in 
 the days that are gone would bring her cherries from his patch 
 of garden outside the town walls, and even carry her to school 
 in his arms. He seems to have held the school in his own 
 house, for we read that the chatter of the girls was disturbing 
 to any of the family who wished for quiet. In course of time, 
 Gottfried, having now established for himself a certain position 
 in life, cast his eyes upon Anna Elizabeth, daughter of Pels or 
 Pelz, blacksmith and armourer in the town, a cheerful, diligent, 
 and quiet girl, with manners and intellect above her station in 
 life, and therefore well able to assist him in the management of 
 his school. Their marriage rites were duly performed, and their 
 first child was born in September, 1739. She probably died in 
 infancy, for we hear no more of her. The second, Anna Luisse, 
 was born in 1741, and at the age of twenty married a butcher, 
 Neumann, but died after two years' unhappiness. Next came 
 the subject of this story, and after him Caroline Dorothea, born 
 in 1748, and at the age of eighteen married to a baker, Giilden- 
 horn, a man of little worth, who vexed her righteous soul with 
 his cruelties and immorahties, as will hereafter be seen. The 
 fifth and last child, Carl Gottfried, was born in 1752, and died 
 
 b2 
 
4 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 when he was three years old. This little register is apparently 
 still to be seen; written down by Gottfried Herder's own hand 
 on the blank leaves of his Arndt's " True Christianity," which 
 served as his family memorandum-book, a little prayer accom- 
 panying each entry after the pious fashion of those times. The 
 entry that especially concerns us narrates how that a son was 
 born to them on the 2oth of August, 1744, and was duly 
 christened two days after his birth under the name of Johann 
 Gottfried; so early did Herder's connection with the Church 
 begin. By the side of the entry his father, Gottfried, has 
 written the following prayer : " God, keep this child in thy 
 baptismal covenant, and lead and direct his path through thy 
 Holy Spirit, that we may find him with us all at some future 
 day before the throne of the Lamb, and go in together to the 
 feast of everlasting joy. God, help." 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 MOHRUNGEN, 1744 — 1762. 
 
 " One day I will 
 " Accomplish it ! Are they not older still 
 " — Not grown up men and women ? 'Tis beside 
 " Only a dream, and, though I must abide 
 " With dreams now, I may find a thorough vent 
 "For all myself." 
 
 SOEDELLO. 
 
 Seeing that a child is the result from the combined characters 
 of his parents, and that the first few years of his life are little else 
 than the reflection of their influence, it will be worth while here 
 to try and form some clear picture of Herder's father and 
 mother, and see what manner of people they were. The warm 
 and imaginative spirit of the Silesian grandfather seems, as so 
 often happens, to have left out one generation, and to have 
 descended rather on the grandson than the son. Herder's father 
 was a pattern of strict regularity and unflinching industry, 
 doing his daily work in the house, the church, and amongst 
 the little girls in the schoolroom, with earnest cheerfulness, 
 and, for the most part, in silence. His son, in years long after, 
 used to tell of his strictness, and his little delight in words. 
 
 ^^ If my father was pleased with me, his countenance bright- 
 ened, he laid his hand gently on my head, and called me his 
 Gottes Friede (the peace of God); that was my greatest and 
 sweetest reward. Strict and upright in the highest degree he 
 always was, but also good-tempered. I shall never forget his 
 earnest, silent face, and his bald crown." 
 
 His insight, probity, and unwavering love of truth seem to 
 have raised him almost to the position of an oracle among the 
 simple people of Mohrungen, who consulted him in any diffi- 
 culty or perplexed crisis of their ordinarily quiet lives, never 
 
6 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1744— 
 
 failing to receive the comfort of the best counsel so pure a soul 
 could give, either by word of mouth or even in a little treatise 
 on their case. Method may be said to have been the watchword 
 of his life ; however healthy his children might be, yet, at 
 certain times of the year, they were obliged to take a powder 
 against a disease that was supposed to afflict the young ; in 
 spring, too, they were dosed with blackthorn tea, and in autumn 
 with elder syrup. Of his kindliness we have already seen 
 examples. Here, then, was again the stuff which nature ordains 
 shall father a " man of genius," who is not to lose himself in 
 transient flashes of aimless insanity, but is to continue with set 
 purpose on his way, slowly mastering the most difficult task of 
 all, the recognition of the reality of life. 
 
 In outward appearance Herder was very much like his 
 father; but, as might be supposed, he derived his inmost 
 characteristics from his mother, who was a small, thin woman, 
 loving quiet, and inclined to reserve and thoughtful piety, 
 having a touch of true poetry and imagination besides, though 
 hardly enough to be the mother of a ()oet that should be great 
 for all time. She devoted herself with contented piety to the 
 unambitious duties of her station, the careful management of 
 her little household, the furtherance of her daughter s welfare 
 (devotion too little repaid), assistance when possible in the girls' 
 school, and the relief and comfort of the husband of her youth, 
 whom she survived nine years ; for she lived long enough to see 
 her son Gottfried already of mark in the eyes of the German 
 world. The rest of her life was not without its trials, and those 
 grievous: we read that she was seldom free from ]min, and 
 for several years almost entirely lost her hearing. This was a 
 sore trouble, for it was ever her greatest pleasure to go to the 
 church, and hear good counsel aud listen to the old hymns she 
 loved. Two years before she died, in 1770, a year full of 
 momentous issues for her son, she wrote to him as follows : — 
 
 ^' My dearest Child, — Thou givest me many a wakeful hour; 
 if I wake up and think of thee, sleep takes to itself wings — and 
 yet I can do nothing but entrust thee to the great God. May 
 he give his angels charge over thee, that in their hands they 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. 7 
 
 may bear thee up ! and I have strong trust in Him ; He will not 
 let my petition be in vain ; me and mine hath he promised never 
 to leave nor neglect. As for me, trouble not thyself. The God 
 of ages is and abides my defence. If the Lord only grant me 
 grace that I may go into his house, then I have all ; joy in God 
 remains my greatest happiness. I always sigh when it comes 
 near Sunday, and I pray God that he may grant me the grace 
 to hear his word. Though I can work but little, yet I thank 
 God I can do what I myself require. I entrust all to Him ; my 
 cup of suffering will yet be one day full : 
 
 ' He never hath forsaken one 
 
 In all his government; 
 No, what he doth and lets be done 
 That come to a good end.' 
 
 Let the words of Isaiah xliii., 1, 2, 4, be with thee on thy 
 journeying^ ('Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have 
 called thee by thy name ; thou art mine. When thou passest 
 through the waters I will be with thee ; and through the rivers, 
 they shall not overflow thee,' &c.). May the Lord write these 
 words deep in thy heart." 
 
 The day before her death she solemnly entrusted her Gott- 
 fried to the care of God. 
 
 We are thus enabled to gain a tolerably clear insight into 
 this modest little household out in marshy Mohrungen a hundred 
 and fifty years ago, and can see that simple, undoubting piety 
 would be the prevailing atmosphere. The house was close to 
 the church, and, when the regular work and vexations of each 
 day were over and done with, the whole family met together 
 and sang an hymn in the hush of the evening ; so that at an 
 early age Gottfried knew by heart not only the words of all the 
 hymns in the old German hymnbook, but all the tunes as well, 
 and a love of Church music, especially of the German choral^ 
 remained with him all his life. This was a fit training for the 
 man who was to enter so deeply into the spirit of Hebrew 
 poetry. 
 
 ' Herder had then been to France and was travelling in the Rhineland. 
 
8 HEliDER AND HIS TIMES. [1744— 
 
 From the first he was not as other children are. One who 
 knew him when he was four years old described the future 
 author of the Ideen as a fat, rosy-faced boy, creeping about the 
 threshold, always grave and always alone, though other children 
 might be not far off. The writer adds : ^^ I never saw him run, 
 jump, or shout : " which seems a pity, and proved the mis- 
 fortune of his life. When he was five years old, he was for the 
 first time afflicted with a weakness or fault in the fistula of his 
 eye, that continued to trouble him to the end, though it was in- 
 directly the cause of his life's turning-point — his meeting with 
 Goethe, who, in the very same year, when Herder first felt the 
 pains of his calamity (1749), had struggled into the world a 
 black and hardly breathing infant, far away to the south-west 
 in Frankfurt. 
 
 But in spite of the pain of his eye, his gravity and reserve, 
 Gottfried was not to continue creeping about the threshold by 
 himself any longer. His father no doubt supplied the elements 
 of learning, but was unable to proceed further perhaps for want 
 of power, more likely for want of leisure from those girls of his. 
 Gottfried accordingly must be sent to the town school, where 
 those of the Mohrungen boys, about thirty in number, who 
 were to learn something more than reading and writing, were 
 entrusted to the power of a Rector Grimm, an austere man, with 
 a nature like his name, as German biographers are fond of 
 noticing. In order to form some idea of the condition of 
 average education in Germany at that time, and the extent of 
 the school-reforms for which Herder had to fight so bitterly 
 in later years, we may stop to examine more closely the nature 
 of this man, who laid so many burdens, grievous to be borne, 
 on the hearts of the children in that East-Russian village ; and 
 even yet, for good or for evil, this species of schoolmaster is not 
 quite extinct, but recurs at intervals, like the reversions to the 
 zebra-stripes in the horse and its kindred. 
 
 Let us picture to ourselves then a man of between sixty and 
 seventy, with a face of deadly pallor, all the more startling in 
 contrast with his large black wig ; tall and broad-shouldered, 
 but lame, owing to a disease of the foot, which caused him 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. 9 
 
 much pain, and was in the end his death (in 1767) ; unmarried, 
 and with a liatred of women so bitter, that the sight of earthen- 
 ware plates adorned with bright little pictures of ladies in bits 
 of frilling and ribbons drove him into an uncontrollable passion ; 
 living a life of utter loneliness, avoiding intercourse with all 
 men as far as possible, though on occasion, it was said, he could 
 display considerable knowledge of the world. Such was the 
 outward character of the man who, having resigned his post in 
 the neighbouring village of Saalfeld on account of frequent 
 complaints against his excessive rigour, appeared before the 
 youth of Mohrungen, in 1752, as the chief apostle to them of 
 Apollo and the Muses. The store of culture which he opened 
 before their eyes consisted in a thorough knowledge of the 
 Latin grammar and of a few inferior Latin authors, a little 
 history and physical geography, a little Grreek and less Hebrew, 
 the two last subjects being reserved for the favoured few at the 
 top of the school. His method of imparting this knowledge to 
 the trembling thirty was simple and sufficient. The cane and 
 ruler were always close at hand, for without them he considered 
 school r^iscipline to be beyond the power of mortal man. What- 
 ever had to be learnt was driven into the youthful brain by 
 frequent repetition and bodily distress, nor was the smallest 
 point in the Latin grammar left to itself, till it had become, as it 
 were, part of the boy, to be thenceforth indelible. This process 
 of pressure began at seven o'clock each morning, and lasted till 
 five in the afternoon; and, if Grimm had had his own way, 
 would have continued all night, so great was his zeal. All the 
 while that lessons were being said the boys had to stand ; and 
 Herder himself tells us that, in order to increase this feeling of 
 respect, they were obliged to take off their hats whenever they 
 saw Grimm or even his house in the distance, and proceed 
 bare-headed for the rest of the way. 
 
 '' On the other hand," continues Herder, " he was glad 
 enough to show his pleasure in the industrious, and distin- 
 guished some few of us, of whom I was one, by taking us for 
 walks with him, and then we had to look for speedwell and 
 cowslips to make his tea, which he drank every day. I have 
 
10 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1744— 
 
 therefore always had a particular regard for these flowers, for 
 they remind me of those walks, the honour and reward of my 
 ever-memorable rector. At times, too, to one or other of the 
 boys, of whom he wished especially to mark his approbation, he 
 would give a cup of this tea in his own study, with one little 
 tiny lump of sugar ; this was a most honourable distinction." 
 In return for which distinction w^e hear that the boy had to kiss 
 the master's hand in the depths of his gratitude. 
 
 His severity became a by-word in the village. Even Gott- 
 fried, who was one of the poor man's favourite pupils and a 
 pattern-boy to the rest, seems not to have escaped from the 
 terror of the place, for he used to call the grammar of Donatus 
 '^ the Book of Martyrs," and old Cornelius Nepos ^^ the author 
 of Torment." A boy named Emmerien, who continued Her- 
 der's faithful friend, was at that time head of the school. Herder 
 apparently coming second to him, so that these two had full 
 opportunities of winnowing what little grain might lie in the 
 chaff-heaps of Latin grammar, inferior Latin authors, rudi- 
 mentary attempts on the New Testament and Homer, together 
 with Baumeister's Handbook to Logic and ^' the complete Dog- 
 matic"; certainly as barren a chaff or rubbish-heap as could 
 well be imagined. And yet in this old rector Grimm some- 
 thing may be discerned which calls for pity, something of the 
 sorrow of baffled strength, if it were worth while to read be- 
 tween the lines. This, at all events, is certain and sufficient, 
 nanaely, that he, too, had been young once ; that his mother 
 probably thought him a genius, and that he still had an ambition 
 which was to prepare youths for the university, oven in dingy 
 little Mohrungen, if it were possible, though he had lost his 
 fairer opportunity at Saalfcld. 
 
 The impression of such a man on a child like Gottfried, so 
 gentle and sensitive, was strong and lasting, both ior good and 
 evil, as will abundantly appear in his future history. Under 
 this rule Gottfried, as his sister tells us, IxHMuno even more 
 quiet and retiring, and developed sucli a passion for reading 
 that his father had to forbid him to bring his books to meals, 
 and driven by his 1miiii;rv mind, little satisfied by the scanty 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. U 
 
 fare his own house supplied, he would go up and down through 
 the streets of Mohruns-en seekino^ what he mip-ht devour, and 
 whenever he saw a book in a window he would knock at the 
 door and politely ask the owner to be kind enough to lend it to 
 him ; then, hugging his treasure, he would hie him away to his 
 father's garden outside the village wall, and climbing a cherry- 
 tree, if it were spring-tide, would sit under the blossom Ariel- 
 wise ; an Ariel limited by the laws of gravitation, for one day 
 the bough broke, so that Gottfried might have done himself no 
 small injury ; and to prevent this occurring for the future he 
 used to bind himself tight round the body to the central stem 
 of the tree with his leathern book-thongs, and go on with his 
 book, free from the dangers of forgetfulness and rotten timber. 
 He delighted, too, to walk in the free air by the Mohrungen 
 lake and through the Wood of Paradise, as it was called by the 
 people in the pride of their hearts ; and in one of his letters he 
 relates how one autumn day when he was quite a boy he burst 
 into tears on finding Homer's comparison between the vanish- 
 ing generations of man and the leaves before the wind. 
 
 There are many such signs of his early separation from the 
 crowd. His sister says, that one day he pointed out Italy to 
 her on the map with indescribable joy, and cried, " my 
 Italy ! One day I must see thee, too." Here then, as at 
 Frankfort, was a heart longing for the sun and south and the 
 life of the ancient gods. Meanwhile, for the beautiful, he had 
 to content himself with cherry-blossom and lessons on a wretched 
 old harpsichord that was wheeled from room to room to suit the 
 convenience of the several pupils. But, in spite of all hin- 
 drances, he gained a complete knowledge of thorough bass and 
 harmony, and his joy in music, especially in the sublime sim- 
 plicity of church-music, never failed him throughout life. It 
 will be remembered that Herder was six years old when Bach 
 died, andtwelve when Mozart was born, and that he was 
 twenty- six, with his views on music and most other things 
 tolerably settled, before the baby that was to be Beethoven 
 uttered his first cry at Bonn. 
 
 But the boy's greatest delight was still to wander through 
 
12 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1744— 
 
 the woods with a translation of a Sj)anish ballad, or a book of 
 old German fairy stories, and gaze up at the trees with a solemn 
 awe, as at the oaks of Dodona, wondering what the palms might 
 look like in the desert, or the cedars that shade the slopes of 
 Lebanon; for already the spirit of Eastern poetry was upon 
 him, and as he read of Job and Solomon the Mohrungen wilder- 
 ness blossomed as the rose of Sharon. He never spoke to his 
 companions about his plans and ambitions for the future, but 
 there can be little doubt that all his thoughts were turned to the 
 Church as the field in which he might realise his ideal of life. 
 The Church was at his door ; her services, her music, her words 
 of wisdom and folly had sounded in his ears since he had ears 
 to hear ; in the church his father held office, though only the 
 small office of summoning the living and burying the dead ; the 
 very air that he breathed was ecclesiastic ; the words he spoke 
 were cast in Bible phrase ; and above all he now received re- 
 ligious instruction and was confirmed by the worthy old pastor 
 Willamovius, generally known as " the pious," whose family 
 were on terms of intimate friendship with the Herders; a 
 humble, peaceful little circle living in contented frugality, the 
 white-haired old pastor distributing alms to the poor of the 
 parish every Sunday after church, and silencing the expostula- 
 tions of his thrifty wife by his sure and certain hope that the 
 Lord would provide for his own. One of his two sons was 
 eight years older than Herder, and went to Konigsberg inii- 
 versity when he was quite young ; afterwards to St. Petersburg, 
 attaining a certain amount of fame, as a poet of dithyrambs, 
 chiefly on classical subjects, and as a rhymer of fables. The 
 pastor's wife is described as an angel in woman's disguise, and 
 the man himself was so much beloved that his portrait was hung 
 up in the town church, and there seems no doubt that he supplied 
 several features for Herder's ideal of a parson in his early 
 treatise on " God's preacher," though his mildness of temper, 
 that almost became weakness, and his simple but narrow-minded 
 piety, would not have satisfied Herder in later days, whilst his 
 unimaginative dogmatism could have had little attraction for 
 him at any time after childhood. But his memory was always 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. 13 
 
 regarded with tenderness and gratitude, none the less sincere, 
 though pervaded by a gentle humour. In after-years Herder 
 describes how during some lecture or lesson on religion the 
 pious and eloquent old man would always stop when he came to 
 the journey to Calvary, and, hanging (in his own phrase) 
 ^* mother-naked on the cross,^' would stand still, lost in a reverie 
 of tranquil enchantment — whilst his audience yawned. 
 
 Under such influences as these, therefore, the boy naturally 
 looked to the Church as his future profession in spite of the 
 poverty of his home and his weakness in one eye. But in 1760, 
 when Grottfried was now sixteen, a great and not altogether 
 favourable change was wrought in his young life by the arrival 
 of Sebastian Friedrich Trescho as new deacon or curate in the 
 town church. 
 
 Trescho belonged to a class of men whom it is hard to 
 admire, however much they are held up to us as models of 
 morality and godly life, a class that is always common enough 
 amongst northern nations, and commoner in the middle of the 
 last century even than now ; poor, melancholy creatures, con- 
 tinually wrapt up in contemplation of their latter end, and 
 analysis of their own righteousness and their enemies' chances 
 of salvation. Trescho was born at Liebstadt, a few miles to the 
 north of Mohrungen, and was eleven years older than Herder, 
 whom he seems in the end to have survived about a year. He 
 had been educated at the house of the Pastor Willamovius, and 
 whilst little Gottfried was still creeping over the door-steps, a 
 boy of four years old, he had proceeded to Konigsberg, where 
 he acquired a strange mixture of the barren pietistic theology 
 with a taste for higher literature, so that, though he used to write 
 verses of a certain order of worthlessness, and would talk a good 
 deal about the Beautiful and other high subjects, yet he gra- 
 dually came to the opinion that " the graces of poetry were but 
 a kind of sauce to give religion a relish to the palates of certain 
 people." His object therefore was to promote what was then 
 called edification, by means of the ornaments of culture ; and, as 
 his power of production both in the pamphlet and book form was 
 extreme — Hamann used to call him an animal scribax — he 
 
14 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1741— 
 
 seemed in a fair way to carry out liis purpose as far as the nature 
 of the case permitted. When at the age of seven-and-twenty he 
 returned to Mohrungen, his first appointment in the Church, he 
 had in hand some so-called ascetic treatises "on Religion, 
 Understanding, and Morals," " the History of my Heart." and 
 especially a notable work called the " Bible of Death," which 
 gradually grew into three volumes of mingled prose and verse, 
 all for the purpose of teaching suffering mankind " the art how 
 to die cheerful and happy." He remained at Mohvungen for 
 the rest of his long life, tolerably contented with his lot, though 
 he had been extremely weakly from a child, suffering from some 
 lung complaint, and, as might be guessed through the titles of 
 his works, from horrible fits of bodily and mental depression. 
 He lived unmarried and alone, with such ascetic thrift and fru- 
 gality that he always had plenty to give to the poor, and left a 
 considerable sum behind him for their benefit. In later life he 
 became more polemical, and in his " Letters on the newest 
 Theological Literature " ran many a tilt against the new doc- 
 trines, which he used to call " the latest thing in Socinianism." 
 Such was the man under whose influence the boy Herder was 
 now to fall. We must forgive him much, for to him we are 
 indebted for considerable information as to Herder's boyhood ;^ 
 but, at the same time, there is no doubt that the next few years 
 were among the most miserable of Herder's life, entirely owing 
 to this "martyr's cross" Trescho. Coming fresh from learned 
 Konigsberg, in all the pride of his new office, his culture, his 
 " graces of poetry," and abundant fertility in book-writing, the 
 poor man, with thoughts bent upon the history of his o-vvn pre- 
 cious heart and the art of dying with cheerfulness, took very 
 srpall account of the simple people in Mohrungen. He even 
 seems to have thought that out of Mohrungen could come no 
 learned thing except himself, and on hearing that this young 
 Gottfried Herder had thoughts of the university and a learned pro- 
 fession, which were even encouraged by old Pastor Willamovius 
 and by Hector Grimm, old-fashioned and rusty too, he hastened 
 
 ' In the i^r?;im/.<f6Y/iC6'.v, from uliich mul the Letters this account of Trescho 
 as well as of Grimm is chiefly derived, much too is due to Ilaym. 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. 15 
 
 to advise the honest sexton and his wife to allow nothing so 
 hazardous, but to get their son safely apprenticed to some un- 
 ambitious handicraft. Their poverty and the boy's weak sight 
 naturally pointed the same way, and the thing seemed as good 
 as settled. Meantime, till Gottfried should be old and strong 
 enough to learn his craft, he was to continue his lessons under 
 Rector Grimm, but was to sleep and for the most part live in 
 Trescho's bouse, where he would be free from the noise of those 
 girls in the paternal schoolroom, and would act as Famulus^ or 
 general servant and amanuensis, to Trescho ; thus enjoying, as 
 Haym puts it, the additional advantage of being the first to read 
 the curate's invaluable works. Trescho's object in making this 
 proposal is plain enough ; for Herder had already acquired a 
 thorough knowledge of Latin, could run errands almost as well 
 as most boys, and, above all, wrote a clear and beautiful hand, 
 under which guise that work On the History of my Heart 
 would be very presentable to the publisher Kanter over in 
 Konigsberg. 
 
 Accordingly Gottfried left his loving home-circle, with their 
 evening hymns and regular courses of medicine, for ever, as it 
 turned out, and took up his abode in Trescho's little house, 
 which seems to have been near at hand, and was presided over 
 by Trescho's elderly sister, who showed Herder no little unkind- 
 ness, regarding him in the light of a mere boot-boy, who could 
 help in the house and fetch the meat from market. He con- 
 tinued to have meals in his own home, though perhaps he had a 
 small allowance given him to buy some sort of breakfast, for we 
 read that out of this he saved enough to supply himself with oil 
 to light his nightly researches in Trescho's library. His out- 
 ward condition was very wretched; his apparel so woefully 
 mean that even the poor neighbours of Mohrungen were moved 
 to pity ; and his tender mother, always rather inclined to 
 despondency, was now quite in despair that her son, of whom 
 she had hoped so much, should come to such a plight. His daily 
 lessons under Grimm still continued, and no doubt had now 
 become rather a relief in comparison, for Grimm, though stern, 
 was at least honest, and was not engaged on a history of his own 
 
10 HERDER AND UlS TIMES. [174i— 
 
 heart. Treseho refused to give any aid in his education for fear 
 lest he should offend Grimm by his interference, as he himself 
 puts it, in an elaborate apology for his neglect written after 
 Herder's death, more probably because his own self-conceit 
 blinded him to the boy's merit, and utterly precluded any true 
 sympathy with a fellow-creature, of whatever position. 
 
 However, in spite of all appearances. Herder's parents, 
 especially the father, continued to have the greatest confidence 
 in Treseho and his advice — should not a curate of souls, a priest 
 of God, do right? — and it seems possible that at first, even Gott* 
 fried himself, through his reverence for his master's office, tried 
 hard to establish a friendly relation to him. Treseho at all 
 events tells us, that one Saturday evening in his confessional-box 
 he found a letter in an unknown hand, setting forth how much 
 moved the writer had been by last Sunday's sermon, how he 
 desired further instruction from the same source, being resolved 
 of the truth of religion, and steadfastly purposing to lead a new 
 life ; the writer concluded by asking that an answer might be 
 laid in the same place, whicli accordingly was done by Treseho, 
 who says that a few days afterwards he traced a strong resem- 
 blance between the writing in the mysterious letter and Herder's 
 hand, when he wrote fast, but could never draw from him a 
 single syllable of explanation or gratitude. The story is dis- 
 credited by the editors of the Reminiscences, and is likely 
 enough to have been a myth springing from that brain of 
 morbid, self-conscious vanity ; still it is not altogether impro- 
 bable in itself, and is just the sort of thing a thoughtful youth 
 like Herder, reserved but anxious to be heai'd, might do in a 
 moment of religious fervour, coloured by sentimental inti'ospec- 
 tion. Certain it is that if he was really the writer he soon found 
 out his mistake, discovering with much bitterness of soul that 
 no amount of ordination and apostolic succession can turn a 
 pedant into a man, and that it is quite possible for a parson to 
 draw on a garb of godliness with the surplice, and also leave it 
 comfortably hanging up in the vestry when service is over. 
 
 Under these circumstances it is with no wonder that we read 
 in Trescho's account of this period that to him the youth was 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEK 17 
 
 always sliy, reservedj and completely shut up in himself, hardly 
 speaking above a whisper, and then only a word or two at a 
 time. Certainly this was not a cheerful sphere of life for a boy 
 of high ideals and ambitions, partly conscious too of his own 
 difference from the rest, though hardly daring to encourage 
 what all around endeavoured to suppress. But in spite of every- 
 thing he went on his own way step by step as best he could, 
 though with a hope too like despair. By acting as copyist for 
 Trescho he learnt the art of making books, of whatever value 
 that may be, and acquired some degree of Trescho's dangerous 
 facility in speeding off sentence after sentence in prose or verse 
 indifferently, so that, especially in his earliest and latest works, 
 something of Trescho's manner is said to be recognisable.-^ 
 
 But above all other influences in importance at the time was 
 Trescho's collection of books, "printed and unprinted," as 
 Trescho modestly says, "unprinted" of course being understood 
 of his own productions. In this little library he discovered the 
 authors which continued his favourites foj' life, for, though he 
 lived to see a greater generation of poets and thinkers arise in 
 Germany than any she had yet produced, their glories could 
 never dull his love for the favourites of his youth, who had first 
 opened his eyes to the beauties of the world and the mysteries 
 of a poet's soul ; so that, when in far distant years Trescho 
 wrote oflPering him the choice of his posessions, he answered, 
 '^ Send me your old copy of Kleist, the first I ever read." 
 After Kleist, he seems most to have been attracted by Simon 
 Dach, a poet who had been the light of Konigsberg and all 
 this East Prussian country rather more than a century before 
 (1605 — 1659). At this time too he met with Gellert, Uz, 
 Gleim, the Odes of Klopstock, the first cantos of the Messias, 
 the earliest writings of Lessing, and other signs of the dawn 
 in German literature to be noticed in a following chapter. 
 Trescho's story, that one night he found the boy fast asleep in 
 his little bed with copies of the classics and modern German 
 
 ' So Haym : Trescho's works arc unknown to me. 
 C 
 
18 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1744— 
 
 poets heaped up round lilm, and to his horror a light burning 
 brightly in the midst, is more likely to be true than tlie myth of 
 the sentimental letter. 
 
 After he had been with Trescho rather more than a year, 
 and was now between seventeen and eighteen years old, the 
 redoubtable work on The History of my Heart was at last well 
 finished, and had to be sent off to the publisher Kanter at 
 Konigsberg. Herder, of course, as the boy of all work, had to 
 see that the treasure was properly directed, sealed up, and 
 despatched, A few days after came a letter from Kanter, no 
 doubt expressing his admiration of the inestimable history of 
 Trescho's heart, and adding that in the same packet he had found 
 an ode purporting to be addressed by an ancient Jew to Cyrus, 
 grandson of Astyages, altogether so full of spirit and emotion 
 that it had been printed at once, and was received with applause 
 by all competent critics. When Trescho charged Herder with 
 having interpolated this poem amongst the pages of My 
 Heart's History^ the boy did not deny it, but blushed and 
 smiled. This was Herder's first printed work. The ode is 
 really in honour of Peter III., grandson of Peter the Great, and 
 Czar of all the Russias, the husband of the '^ Wild Cat," 
 Catherine II. At the time this ode was written he had just 
 entered upon his tragic six months of power, for in this very 
 month of January the Empress EHzabeth had died, and Peter III., 
 filled with unbounded enthusiasm for the man who had held the 
 world at bay, now concluded peace, and even active alliance 
 with Prussia, at the same time evacuating East Prussia, which 
 had been occupied by Russian troops for some two or three 
 years past, and had served as the starting-point for that short- 
 lived triumph of the advance on Berlin itself, fifteen months 
 before.^ Herder's ode was therefore probably intended to cele- 
 brate the relief of his own little land from foreign annoyance at 
 the hands of these obstinate fighting-men with their unspeakable 
 tongue, though the editors of the lleminisctnces are inclined 
 
 ' Oct. 3rd-12tli, 17G0. Carlyle's Ft-edtriok, vol. vi. p. 87 ff. 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. IS 
 
 to put its praises in the mouth of some Russian notables released 
 by the new Czar from the dreariness of Siberia. 
 
 After such signs as these, it might have been thought even 
 Trescho would have perceived that he was hardly guiding this 
 boy, committed to his charge, towards the paths wherein nature 
 had willed that he should walk. Yet the man was so blinded by 
 a mixture of religious hypochondria and the vanity of self- 
 examination, that he was still absolute for some handicraft, and 
 this though Herder never showed the smallest ability for any 
 practical performance of the sort, in spite of a certain neatness of 
 hand and readiness of body. With no prospect before him but 
 the life of a village butcher or carpenter in remote Mohrungen, 
 and oppressed as he w^as daily by the savage harshness of the 
 unfruitful Grimm, and the petty tyranny of pious Trescho, the 
 boy, who was to be a name in Germany, might well despair ; 
 he longed for death, the " lovely sleep," as he calls it, that 
 would put an end to his miseries ; his reserve became deeper, 
 and he acquired that shyness of demeanour and nervous appre- 
 hension, which in after-life, in spite of all efforts, he hardly suc- 
 ceeded in conquering. He seems never to have completely 
 forgiven Trescho for his treatment of him during this period, 
 and always speaks of him, especially during the next few years, 
 with a peculiar bitterness of hatred and contempt. His letters 
 to him are in a style of mock civility, and contain no word of 
 thanks ; in one of his early pieces of verse he calls him a 
 " pious tiger," and in some later reviews he talks of " the 
 shrieking Trescho," " the great Apostle of Death," '^ the raven 
 croaking out funereal melodies," '^ the man who sprinkles the 
 cheeks of youth and the flowering rose with drops of lamb's 
 blood, and builds his dweUing on earth of the cross-bones of 
 Golgotha." ^ In a letter of later date he says, that in Trescho 
 he had learnt to know what a hypocrite meant. Whether a 
 still graver charge may not lie hidden under his comparison 
 between Trescho and Tartuffe may be left to the decision of 
 
 " Quoted by Haym. 
 C2 
 
20 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1744— 
 
 those Vho have suffered from personal contact with melancholy- 
 zealots of this kind. 
 
 In addition to all his other trials, the boy lived in perpetual 
 dread lest his last faint hope should be suddenly and for ever 
 cut short by a summons to the war. His name had been entered 
 on the military list of his district, and at any moment he was 
 liable to be called to the barracks, for, though he was weak in 
 sight and small of stature, six years of slaughter had considerably 
 thinned the Prussian muster-roll, the war was not yet over, and 
 if Silesia, and even the existence of Prussia herself, was to be 
 maintained, Father Fritz could not aflPord to be very particular 
 about the size of the children who died for him. 
 
 The remembrance of the sword that at that time hung over 
 his head remained with Herder throughout life, and— if any 
 special reasons are required in the case of an intellectual man — 
 this is sufficient to account for the peculiar horror with which 
 he always regarded things military. He used to maintain that 
 the military constitution as established in several German pro- 
 vinces was barbarous and inhuman, threatening to extirpate 
 morality and planting ignorance and idleness in its place. 
 '^ Look," he used to say, " how many honest men have been 
 ruined by it ; look how those poor people in Prussia are pressed 
 down in indescribable fear and slavery, so that they dare take 
 no thought for themselves." The sight of a " red collar " (his 
 name for the Prussian uniform) always filled him with grief 
 and indignation, and he never quite recovered from this early 
 hostility towards the Prussian Government. 
 
 But during this winter (1761-2) there was more grey than 
 red to be seen in Mohrungen, for a Prussian regiment on its 
 way back from the campaigns of the Seven Years' War (perhaps 
 from the triumphant field of Kunersdorf itself, where they had 
 shot to death the poet Kleist something more than two years 
 before this), being overtaken by the cold weather in East 
 Prussia, thought it best to find quarters for a time in Moh- 
 rungen. The army-surgeon of this regiment was intimate both 
 with Trescho and Herder's parents. It is possible that the 
 
1762.] MOHRUNGEN. 21 
 
 heavily-laden mother raised to this new comer the voice of her 
 complaint. At all events, one day the surgeon — whose name 
 seems to have been Schwarzerloh — though Herder himself was 
 doubtful on this point, only remembering that he was a Swede 
 — asked for a glass of water whilst in Trescho's house, and 
 when Herder had brought it, and duly retired, the surgeon 
 informed Trescho that he intended to take the boy into his 
 service; finding further how thorough w^as his knowledge of 
 Latin, he promised to take him to Konigsberg, and teach him 
 surgery, to have the weakness of his eye cured, and even to 
 give him a good start in the medical profession at St. Peters- 
 burg if he wished it, on condition that he should at once 
 translate a medical treatise of his own into Latin, so that it 
 might be read with ease by the whole civilised world from 
 Moscow to Paris. 
 
 This oiFer came to Herder, as he says, like the " day-spring 
 from on high." As soon as winter was gone, he set to work on 
 botany with the enthusiasm of a new life. It mattered not to 
 him that he had no natural taste whatever for medicine ; all he 
 thought of was deliverance from the meanness and slavery of 
 his present position. The gloom of Trescho was blighting his 
 young heart as the darkness of a cave blights a fern ; the whole 
 world was turning the colour of lead under the influence of this 
 morbid hypocrite with his " Histories of his Heart " and his 
 '' Bibles of Death " ; and now there was once more a chance of 
 seeing the fair golden sunshine and breathing the free air. 
 His friends and relations in Mohrungeij rejoiced with him, 
 though he was going as a bird from the nest, and gave him all 
 the aid that lay in their simple power. Accordingly in the first 
 beginnings of summer, whilst his favourite blossoms were still 
 on his father's cherry-trees, he set out towards northerly 
 Konigsberg with his angel of deliverance (the kindly surgeon 
 seemed no less), and left quiet Mohrungen, its castle, its gothic 
 church, damp little houses, lake, mill-pond, wood of Paradise, 
 his boyhood, his parents, and all who loved him, behind for 
 ever, for he was to see them no more at all again. 
 
22 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 KONIGSBERG, 1762—1764. 
 
 Konigsberg, Prussia Improper (so styled because there's a sort of bleak, 
 hungry sun there). — Pippa Passes. 
 
 " Shall I still sit beside 
 Their dry wells, with a white lip and filnr.ed eye, 
 While in the distance heaven is blue above 
 Mountains where sleep the unsunned tarns ? " 
 
 Paracelsus. 
 
 The journey from Mohrungen to Konigsberg seems to have 
 taken some four days for the post-waggon; we may suppose, 
 therefore, that for a regiment on march it would take rather 
 more ; and it is probable that Herder and his surgeon went with 
 the whole regiment, for Konigsberg was still in Russian posses- 
 sion for the next few months. Indeed, it seems to have been a 
 matter of indifference to the inhabitants in those days whether 
 they owed allegiance to Brandenburg, St. Petersburg, or War- 
 saw. For, though the '' expensive Herr," with his diamond 
 buttons, had been crowned here some sixty years before, as 
 Friedrich, the first King of Prussia,^ and though Konigsberg 
 owed her famous unitersity to that great Markgraf Albrecht, of 
 whom we have spoken above ; yet, through her trade, she was 
 inspired with that beautiful spirit of independence and cosmo- 
 politan toleration which welcomes all men as brothers, provided 
 they pay. 
 
 The town has taken her seat on the Pregel, partly on a large 
 island formed by the river, partly on piles actually driven into 
 its bed. About four miles further to the west the river enters 
 
 ' Carlyle's Frederick^ vol. i. p. GO, already referred to. 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 23 
 
 the broad lagoon of the Frische Haff, and the real port of the 
 town stands on a spit of land running into the open sea, about 
 twenty-five miles away. The town owed her prosperity to 
 ready communication with the interior of East Prussia and 
 Poland, by means of the Pregel and a system of canals, down 
 which various merchandise, especially of corn and oil-cake, 
 could glide quietly into the Baltic, and so across the bridge of 
 the sea to England in the west or northwards to Sweden. At 
 that time Konigsberg supported about 50,000 inhabitants, be- 
 sides the garrison and foreigners ; and it is no wonder that to 
 Herder, coming from peaceful Mohrungen, the streets of this 
 'kittle world," as he called it, with its churches, colleges, ware- 
 houses, harbour, squares, and gardens, seemed nothing short of 
 marvellous, and remained fresh in his memory, as on that first 
 day. The trade of the town gave both variety and reality to 
 the life of its citizens, whilst its remoteness, which was much 
 deplored by the university, really only served to foster its 
 independence and save it from the crackle and glitter of thought 
 in Berlin, and from the learned follies of Leipsig. 
 
 On arrival, the surgeon lost no time in introducing Herder 
 to his new profession ; he took him to see a dissection at one of 
 the hospitals, and no doubt this hero of the Seven Years' War was 
 surprised and annoyed when his young charge, instead of being 
 absorbed in interest at the performance, fainted away. This of 
 course is no uncommon thing in the early stages of the medical 
 profession ; and it is possible that the biographers have made 
 too much of the point as a proof of Herder's extraordinarily 
 delicate and sensitive nature — one of them even exclaiming, in 
 grandiloquent style, " Herder and Schiller both wished to be- 
 come doctors ; but God spake : mankind had deeper wounds 
 to be healed, and both became — poets." ^ Yet it must be 
 remembered that all his life long Herder could never even hear 
 of a surgical operation without the same feeling of faintness. 
 But what was to be done now ? Return to Mohrungen — where 
 
 ' Neumann's Biographie. 
 
24 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1762— 
 
 Trescho would be waiting with his "' I told you so" ; and no 
 second deliverance was to be hoped for — this was impossible* 
 To offend the kindly surgeon, who for the cure of his eye had 
 introduced him to Hamann, a clever doctor and father of a more 
 noteworthy son — this was hard ; but, as the case was urgent, 
 it had to be risked. Yet Herder seems to have hesitated for 
 some time, though it is probable that he attended no more dis- 
 sections. 
 
 The history of the next few months of his life is obscure, for 
 the letters from which it is derived were written more than 
 forty years after this, by persons who naturally took no interest 
 in the youth at this time, and in most cases were not aware of 
 his existence. Accordingly, even when they tell us anything, 
 they are generally full of contradictions. It at least seems 
 certain, however, that through the Hamanns he was introduced 
 to the bookseller Kanter, who would remember that poem to 
 Cyrus, so much admired in literary circles some months ago. 
 Kanter' s shop was a kind of centre or meeting-place for the 
 learned of Konigsberg, answering in some respects to coffee- 
 houses in London at the same time. Kanter himself actually 
 lived in this house at one period, though, perhaps, not till after 
 Herder had left Konigsberg. It is possible that Herder for a 
 short time had some thoughts of apprenticing himself to Kanter, 
 ,and following bookselling as a trade preferable to surgery or 
 oblivion in Mohrungen. 
 
 With such thoughts as these in his head, and something 
 under ten shillings of ready money left in his pocket, he was 
 wandering disconsolate through the streets one August day, 
 when he met with his old friend and school rival Emmerich, at 
 that time a candidate for ordination, afterwards organist or 
 clerk at Tragheim. Herder's situation was soon explained, and 
 Emmerich's advice to enter himself on the books of the univer- 
 sity, though this would only leave him a few pence to live 
 upon, was so unhesitating, and fitted so well with Herder's own 
 wish, that the two set off together at once to the proper autho- 
 rities. We read that the dean of the faculty of philosophy, 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 25 
 
 wlio was an ill-tempered man, and happened to be starting for 
 a walk, too, at the time, was far from polite in his reception of 
 this queer -looking figure, with his provincial apparel, and even 
 remarked that, judging from appearances, the examination 
 would not be much good. However, the dean of theology was 
 more considerate, and was surprised at the youth's learning, so 
 that, on August 10, Herder, as a prcestantissimus juvenis, was 
 *^ initiated to the sacred rites of the muses," as is set forth in 
 his matriculation paper with all the superlatives of a university 
 document. 
 
 Herder at once announced this important step to the surgeon, 
 who was of course vexed that his pains should be wasted, and 
 compared the miserable condition of a Prussian parson with the 
 glorious career that was open to a physician in St. Petersburg. 
 But the treatise on medicine had been already duly translated 
 into Herder's best Latin, and further representations were vain. 
 The surgeon disappears northwards now, and Herder saw him 
 no more, though he always spoke of him with gratitude. When 
 the news was received in Mohrungen, Trescho, as might have 
 been expected, was very indignant and wise on the subject, 
 shaking his head in the gravity of his apprehension, and mut- 
 tering that the boy had deceived them ; that he had only used 
 the surgeon's proposals as a pretence to get safe off to Konigs- 
 berg and enter himself at the university. It is characteristic of 
 the man, that he could never free himself from this idea, but 
 continued to charge the boy with deliberate deceit to his life's 
 end, in spite of Herder's fame and reputation. But the heart 
 of the mother rejoiced with pious joy, and the father contented 
 himself with noting the date in Arndt's True Christianity, 
 adding a prayer to " the God who bringeth to light the things 
 of darkness." 
 
 In Herder's letter home he had told his parents that he 
 would not ask them for a shilling towards the expenses of his 
 academical life, and he continued for the future to be quite 
 independent of them. A small sum was collected for him 
 amongst friends in Mohrungen, even Trescho contributing his 
 
20 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1702 — 
 
 share ; for the rest he had to depend on his own exertions in 
 Konigsberg; and during the next six months at least his 
 struggle was no doubt severe. But we know nothing certain 
 of this period, except that at a later time Herder used to tell 
 his children how in those days he could often get nothing to eat 
 but a roll or two of bread. Yet he felt himself to be at length 
 on the right road, and his heart was full of an inward peace 
 that could defy even hunger. 
 
 Kanter the bookseller was very kind in allowing him free 
 use of all his books, bound or unbound, and of his shop, where 
 Herder would sit all day long, the world forgetting in the new 
 world that was open to him. To his trade of bookselling Kanter 
 had joined the management of the town lottery, and the editing 
 of the Konigsherg Journal^ to which during the whole of his life 
 in Konigsberg Herder seems to have contributed occasional 
 verses and short reviews. Through Kanter, too, he probably 
 first made personal acquaintance with Kant, who in spite of his 
 own poverty at this time invited him to attend all his lectures 
 free of charge. According to one authority Herder was allowed 
 to supplement his education under Kector Grimm by a course of 
 free instruction at the great Friedrich's-College, where Kant 
 himself had been educated, but, as he had already passed his 
 examination for the university, this seems improbable. It is 
 also said that he was for a time appointed to teach arithmetic 
 in one of the elementary schools attached to the college, which 
 is in itself likely enough, for we have seen him helping his father 
 in the girls' school over in Mohrungen. One thing at least is 
 certain, that by this means or that he contrived to keep his 
 body alive from August 1762 till the following Easter, when he 
 gained a firm footing as master in the Friedrich's-College, 
 too-ether with some small exhibition or allowance expressly 
 founded for the benefit of Mohrungen youths studying theology. 
 At the same time, or perhaps rather earlier, through Hamann's 
 influence, he was a])pointed an overseer or guardian in the 
 boarding-house attached to the college, which was so notable 
 throughout the land for its piety and learning, that many rich 
 
1704.] KONIGSBERG. 27 
 
 Poles and Russians, with the dwellers in Courland and Lithu- 
 ania, sent their sons thither to live in the boarding-house two by 
 two, each pair watched over by a special official, who in return 
 for lodging, fire, and candles was required to see that their out- 
 of-school work was not at random, and to pray with them morn- 
 ing and evening. The overseers had further opportunities of 
 increasing their income by giving private lessons. Thus at the 
 age of nineteen we find Herder free from the hardest pinch of 
 poverty, and, though he was never rich, he never had much to 
 suffer from poverty again. Yet it may be doubted whether he 
 surrendered without a pang those days of complete liberty, when 
 he could say in verse : "A gymnosoph, how little do I need ! 
 Pomp, winter, rain, see now ! my coat defies you all, and 
 earthly glory too ; and I am rich as any poet, and academically 
 free. Only my belly do I serve ; for it I think, for it I am — 
 else free as air." In the shifts of hopeful poverty there is always 
 this fascination, unknowable in the limited routine of wealth. 
 
 Friedrich's-CoUege or the Collegium Fridericianum^ as it was 
 always called, owed its origin to the great Pietistic movement at 
 the beginning of the last century, and had received special privi- 
 leges as a royal school from Friedrich Wilhelm I. who favoured 
 the Pietists on account of their morality and their opposition to 
 the supposed fatalist doctrines of Wolff. When Herder was 
 appointed as one of the teachers, the college was still under the 
 direction of the famous Franz Albrecht Schultz, Kant's friend, 
 who, coming from Halle, tried to unite the zeal of Pietism with 
 the wisdom of the Wolfian school. Within the next two or three 
 months he was succeeded by Prof. Arnoldt as director, whilst 
 the real management of the college fell into the hands of two 
 inspectors, Schiffert and Domsien, apparently old-fashioned 
 Pietists of the narrowest type of pedantry. Herder, who already 
 felt within him the beginning of a new period in German life, 
 education, and religion, no doubt found some difficulty in keep- 
 ing on good terms with these worthy gentlemen, but, except for 
 various vague murmur ings of the Pious against this new teach- 
 ing, and apprehensive suggestions from the pedants that this 
 
28 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1762— 
 
 man's faith in the Latin grammar was not above suspicion, we 
 hear of no actual rupture ; only one day Inspector Domsien 
 observed that the dignity of a teaclier in the great Collegium 
 Friderioianum required the use of a wig, at least during school- 
 hours, and was met by Herder's simple remark, that for his part 
 he found his own hair cheaper. 
 
 During the first year he taught the third class in Greek, 
 French, Hebrew, and mathematics, and in 1764 he was en- 
 trusted with the Latin and poetry of the second class, and the 
 history and philosophy of the first. Such a high position for 
 so young a man was unexampled, and no doubt there were 
 envious tongues ever ready t«) carp ; but by his ready sympathy 
 with his pupils, by the life that he breathed into the dry bones 
 of learning and religion, and above all by his unflinching 
 industry, he abundantly proved that this confidence had not been 
 misplaced. His lectures on the Bucolics of Virgil are described 
 as full of charm, no doubt owing to his knowledge of the 
 country, and, when it was his turn to catechise in the college- 
 chapel on Sunday, the place would be full of listeners actually 
 eager to hear. He himself felt too that he was gaining much at 
 the same time, especially in clearness of conception and freedom 
 from misty generalities. In after-life, when he >vas at work on 
 the philosophy of history, he often regretted that he could not 
 give lectures on the subject to a class of university students ; and 
 this inherited desire to impart knowledge remained strong in 
 him to the end, for better and worse. We must remember that 
 he was inspired and cheered by the sweet joy of rebellion against 
 a barren and pernicious system. There still remains a short 
 address, probably belonging to this period, in which he exposes 
 and ridicules the stupidity of becoming learned in the dead 
 languages to the neglect of one's own, the folly of training up 
 mere cringing imitators of Horace and Virgil and crowning 
 Latin as the queen of languages. With such sentiments as these, 
 which were little short of blasphemous then, though common- 
 place now, it is no wonder that he was more poj)ular with his 
 pupils than with his colleagues and the worthy inspectors, nor 
 
176J:.] KONIGSBEUG. 29 
 
 that, being young and having plenty to fight against, lie enjoyed 
 his experience as schoolmaster in Konigsberg to the full. 
 
 IMeantime he was diligently attending the university lectures. 
 He went to Lilienthal for ^' dogmatic," to Kant for logic, meta- 
 physics, moral philosophy, mathematics, and physical geo- 
 graphy, and to others for philology, ecclesiastical history, and 
 physics. Here was a wide enough door into knowledge of 
 all sorts open to him, and he was not slow to enter ; one of his 
 friends tells us that even in those days he was a ^' walking dic- 
 tionary," and his carefully compiled and tabulated note-books 
 are sufficient evidence of his industry. Even before he had left 
 Mohrungen he had begun to draw up abstracts of important 
 books and sketches for future treatises, many of which came to 
 be fully elaborated in after-years, and through all his life he 
 continued the same practice. 
 
 In September 1763 he heard that his father had died at his 
 post in Mohrungen, and the family was left in extreme poverty. 
 For the present he could do no more than give up to his mother 
 the bit of heritage that had fallen to him. Next year Trescho 
 paid him a visit, and was surprised at the change that had come 
 over the young man once so shy and reserved. The awkward 
 boy had become refined and even courtly in manner. In 
 Trescho's own words '^ He who once was frightened at the 
 sight of a man with a collar on, could now look without flinch- 
 ing on an order with a star, or on a diadem, just as in the 
 golden age a lamb would play with a lion." He was sur- 
 rounded, too, by admirers and flatterers, which to Trescho, at 
 least, seemed a very dangerous position. We may think of 
 Herder, therefore, as very popular in the society, especially the 
 learned society, of democratic Konigsberg. In the spring of 
 1764 the bookseller Kanter's youngest sister, a girl of nineteen, 
 having died, Herder was requested to pronounce the funeral 
 oration, which was printed and admired, remaining a strange 
 mixture of old-fashioned rhetoric, eastern imagery, and common- 
 l)lace sentiment, yet on the whole a promising production for a 
 
30 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1762 -. 
 
 man of twenty.* We read that in all his speech and writing at 
 this time there was something of Schwdrmerei or sentimental 
 enthusiasm tending to fall into the sickly, but it must not be 
 forgotten how great a part this selfsame Scliwdiinerei had to 
 play in the new birth of life and literature throughout Europe, 
 here in England as elsewhere. In the middle of the last cen- 
 tury a true prophet might hav^e said of the times what Kant in 
 these Konigsberg days said of Herder himself: " When once 
 this frothy genius has got over the period of fermentation ho 
 will become a valuable man with those great talents of his." 
 
 In Herder's case the fermentation was restricted to the 
 region of thought, for in life, in spite of his popularity, he still 
 continued to be what is commonly called a " quiet man." 
 With his learning and teaching, his studies in Kanter's shop, 
 and the morning and evening prayer with the two boarders 
 under his charge, he was too busy to take part in the joys and 
 sorrows of the ordinary German student, even if his desire had 
 set that way. But he turned with a shudder of loathing from 
 the least approach to coarseness, thereby losing much of the 
 humour of life, and owing to his exclusive attention to things of 
 the intellect he never fully acquired that large tolerance in prac- 
 tical life which enables a man to live in the midst of startling con- 
 tradictions with patience and even quiet amusement. Yet he was 
 far from being a recluse ; his heart was warm with desire for love 
 and friendship, and though he seems to have been inclined to 
 play the superior amongst his equals in age, probably owing 
 to his position as schoolmaster, yet he gathered round him a 
 small circle of tolerably clever young men, who regarded him 
 with admiration that seemed to be sincere. In most instances 
 these friendships came to an end as soon as the university days 
 were over, as such friendships do, either from change of 
 thought, change of life, or mere absence ; but the remembrance 
 of tliem remained with lilm as a pleasant thought all his life, 
 
 ' Printed in the McminUcenccs. 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 31 
 
 and it is to the survivors of this circle, who had long ceased all 
 intercourse with the central figure, that we owe our knowledge 
 of Herder during this period. 
 
 The man elected by him out of the many to be the friend 
 on whom to sharpen his face, the daily companion to whom all 
 dreams of the future, all growths of thought, all poetic endea- 
 vours might be entrusted with safety in full assurance of per- 
 fect sympathy, was Kurella, afterwards councillor of war in 
 Konigsberg. He seems to have been an honest and affectionate 
 man, sincerely grieved that this sunny friendship could not be 
 eternal but had to end after two short years, because their paths 
 of life diverged, perhaps, too, because he was more limited in 
 brain than in affection, and Herder had already sucked what 
 advantage he could from him. His account, written in 1805, 
 is so vivid that it is worth while even to quote parts of it as 
 they stand. 
 
 The immortal Herder was in every way my most heartily-loved bosom 
 friend. All the time that he taught 'in the Collegium Fridericianum we 
 were together nearly every day, and our society became quite a necessity. 
 A man of his uitellect, nourished and matured by intercourse with the 
 old classics and the best German writers — a man of the clearest head, the 
 happiest temperament, and a beautiful sympathetic heart — full of glowing 
 imagination which did not degenerate into Schwarmerei — full of the noblest 
 ideas and as it were made for friendship, such a man could not fail to 
 enchain a youth who fully harmonized with his mode of thought and hung 
 on him con corde and con amore. The hours we spent together were 
 the happiest in my life. We generally conversed on literature and the 
 critical journals then in circulation, which I borrowed from a friend of 
 my family, the late lottery-director, the bookseller Kanter. Over a cup 
 of tea, which was kindly given me by a few well-to-do friends, merchants' 
 sons studying with us, and which I always saved for my Herder, we were 
 merrier than many an empty-head over his bottle of Tokay. His society 
 contributed much to my education, for he was even then a walking 
 dictionary. The world was not with us ; we were all in all to each other, 
 and happy when the hour struck that brought us together ; in autumn 
 and winter this was generally five o'clock in the afternoon. Also we were 
 always alone together, for I would not let any one listen to my Herder 
 but myself ; his sweet voice quite carried one away and his great soul 
 embraced the universe. This happy intercourse, as though we dwelt in 
 
32 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1762— 
 
 higher spheres, lasted nearly two years, after which we separated. I 
 found Herder always equable, always cheerful, and ready with his 
 sympathy, and always strictly moral. If at times my good spirits became 
 wanton, he joined in my laughter it is true, but at the same time he was 
 able by the most delicate tact to bring them within limits again. 
 
 Here, truly, was a friendship "as in the higher spheres," 
 bright as a rainbow, and as soon to fade. The picture is com- 
 plete : the scantily furnished room, the tea carefully hoarded, 
 the youthful enthusiasm, the eager conversation, soul pouring 
 into soul, and Kurella listening devoutly to this growing Titan ; 
 the woe of parting as if the heart-strings would crack, the speedy 
 recovery, the gradual oblivion ; certainly man's nature changes 
 but little from century to century. . 
 
 Another friend, though not so intimate, was Bock, who after- 
 wards also became a councillor of war in Konisberg, and wrote 
 a translation of Virgil's Georgics, at one time much admired. 
 He made Herder's acquaintance at Kant's lectures, where they 
 sat at the same table, together with another, named Wilpert, who 
 in his turn has supplied us with some little information. Herder 
 would, as far as possible, take down every word of the great 
 teacher, and, when he had carefully put his notes into correct 
 form at home, the friends would retire to an arbour in an unfre- 
 quented public garden, known as the Old Horse-paddock, and 
 seriously discuss the subject of the lecture. Bock was older than 
 Herder, or at least more advanced in the knowledge of contem- 
 porary literature, for he seems to have first introduced to his 
 notice the great critical journals that were beginning to move 
 over the face of the (jrerman chaos. Herder always remembered 
 him with gratitude, and more than twenty years after this he 
 writes to him, " I can see you still in the flesh, sitting at the 
 same table before me. Where are the old days? " 
 
 Fischer, too, was gone, " the chameleon," as he used to call 
 himself, the life of the party as Me may imagine, with his rever- 
 ential love and that delicate though full-flowing humour, from 
 which Herder himself might well have borrowed somethinir. 
 He became chaplain to a hospital and died comparatively young ; 
 
1764.] K0NIG8BERG. 83 
 
 all that is left of him being three letters to his friend, two 
 belonging to this time, the third sent to Riga the next year after 
 Herder's little flock had been left desolate, with nothing but the 
 relics of old memories to feed upon. When Herder left Konigs- 
 berg Fischer's grief knew^ no bounds, and he could only console 
 himself by reading Rousseau and talking over the old times with 
 Haberkant, another of this friendly circle of whom we know 
 nothing further. Hartknoch, who had come to Konigsberg to 
 study theology, but had changed his mind and was learning the 
 art of bookselling and publishing under Kanter, continued of 
 importance in Herder's life for a long time to come. 
 
 But far above all other influences, both for this period and 
 for his whole future, stands Herder's connection with the two 
 greatest minds that Konigsberg has produced — Hamann and 
 Kant; we must therefore try to estimate the effect of inter- 
 course with them during these years. 
 
 In Hamann we are brought face to face with one of the 
 strangest and least comprehensible figures in German, or indeed 
 European, literature : a man who has been alternately wor- 
 shipped as a prophet of God and derided as a hysterical maniac ; 
 a St. John with a broad sense of humour ; a woodland satyr 
 prostrate before the cross. His first pamphlet was received with 
 great comfort by the Pietists, because it w^as a bitter attack on 
 the Aufkldrerei, or Illumination, of the Berlin and French school. 
 The second part rather shook their faith ; and when a collection of 
 treatises came out under the title of " Crusades of a Philologist," 
 with a frightful head of a horned Pan in front and a picture of a 
 large cock solemnly beating time to some church-music for the 
 benefit of two chickens, who lift up beaks of praise in front, 
 whilst a worthy citizen and his wife look on w^ith some astonish- 
 ment from a pew in the background, it is no wonder that, as 
 Goethe tells us, the hearts of the pious were alienated from him.^ 
 Still he continued to have a select following of what might be 
 called mystic Christians, such as was Moser, who, living in 
 
 • Aus tueineni Lehen, book xii. 
 D 
 
34 HERDER AND HLS TIMElS. [1762— 
 
 southerly Darmstadt, gave him the title of the Magus, or Wise 
 Man from the North, by which he was afterwards known. Even 
 within these last few years there has been a strong effort in 
 Germany to re-establish his doctrines as a revelation of no 
 merely temporary value.^ An Englishman might gain some 
 idea of his influence on German thought by comparing him 
 with Coleridge, whom he sufficiently resembled in life and 
 method. Leaving out of sight the poetry of Coleridge's earlier 
 years, we see in both men the same startling contradictions 
 between teaching and practice, the same unaccountable whims, 
 at times the same weakness of will, though in old age at all 
 events Hamann was far the more stable of the two ; the thirst 
 after knowledge, the power of dissertation, the irresistible attrac- 
 tion for the young, the far-seeing criticism, the mystic Platonism 
 (Hamann used to boast that he could have written more than 
 half Plato though he had never read it), the " theosophic moon- 
 shine," — all this is much the same. But in Hamann we are 
 perplexed at long intervals by coming, as it were, upon a distant 
 savour of Swift in the rare atmosphere of Coleridge." lie 
 boasted himself a Socrates in his generation, and a Socrates is 
 never really far removed from Aristophanes in spirit. Endued 
 with all the apostolic fervour of St. Paul, he made a concubine 
 of his father's nurse. He was a bundle of contradictions, full of 
 the unexpected. Loving leisure and even idleness with a passion, 
 he worked for years at mean and irksome cmplojuionts to 
 support a sick father and a melancholy brother almost brutal 
 with hypochondria. 
 
 Educated in Konigsberg, he had proceeded to Courland and 
 Livonia as hofmeister in two noblemen's houses. Finding the 
 position insupportable, he tried to learn a merchant's business at 
 Riga with a friend named Berens. In his service ho had under- 
 taken a mission to London, but, falling into bad company of 
 both sexes, he grievously failed in the business, found hini-ill' in 
 debt, and from the depths of his despair turned to the Bible ot' 
 
 ' JCspecially iu DisselholFs Wcywciacr zu Hamann, a virv Christian book. 
 '^ And yot even Coleridp:e was not quite free oi" il Sec Ai'iu lulix I. 
 
176J:.] KONIGSBEKG. 35 
 
 his childlioocl. Tliis was in 1756, and it would have been inter- 
 esting if he had met Swedenborg, who must have been in London 
 at the time, bringing out his works on Heaven and Ilellj 
 The Neio Jerusalem^ and so on, " the result of thirteen years' 
 familiar intercourse with the angeJs." At all events, he un- 
 doubtedly read Swedenborg — what in fact did he not read ? — 
 and after his visit to London his whole tone of mind changed. 
 For though he himself confessed his thoughts were passing 
 whims, and though Thomas Abbt compared his brain to the 
 archipelago, where one must take ship to cross from land to 
 land, yet the islands were a continent once, and we can still 
 trace connecting links that prove their common origin, the chief 
 being faith in the Bible as something beyond a mere under- 
 standing ; a second, the inner meaning and imity of nature; and 
 perhaps a third, the importance of popular poetry and language. 
 Vi\ his return to Riga the change was soon apparent. 
 Berens could forgive his mistakes in business and his extrava- 
 gance, but could by no means forgive this new religious enthu- 
 siasm that threatened to perplex the comfortable and enlightened 
 Deism suitable for a prosperous merchant, who enthroned God 
 in heaven, and was ready to honour Him there, provided He 
 let business alone. Still less could Hamann be forgiven when 
 he ventured to look upon the sister, Katharina Berens, as his 
 ideal of all that is divine in woman, or, as he himself says, 
 " a lady with the charm of a Sevigne and the worth of a Main- 
 tenon."i As things became more and more uncomfortable, he 
 suddenly started for home in Konigsberg, where his father was 
 sick. Berens followed in all haste, and, finding his friend spend- 
 ing all his time in what seemed to him profitless religious and 
 philosophic speculations, combined with the activity which the 
 Germans call *^ book-swallowing," he induced Kant to help him 
 in urging a return to practical life. Poor Hamann, who had 
 just discovered the delights of leisure, replied by a pamphlet, 
 
 ' His Little essay on church music, formiug one of the Crusades, and con- 
 taining: the picture of the musical French cock, was addressed to her under this 
 title. 
 
 D 2 
 
3ij HERDER AND HT8 TIMES. [17G2— 
 
 called Memorabilia of Socrates for the Tedium of the Public, 
 compiled by a Lover of Tedium; loith a double dedication to the 
 renowned Nobody and to Two, meaning by the Two, of course, 
 Berens and Kant. The " renowned Nobody " is the unknown 
 mass of the public. Socrates, with his reverential love for the 
 popular religion and his firm faith in his attendant genius or 
 conscience, stands for Hamann himself, contrasted with the 
 enlightened of Berlin, who correspond to the subtle sophists of 
 Athens. 
 
 Having thus freed himself of Berens, he devoted his whole 
 time to the study especially of Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, 
 and the Koran in their original tongues. In 1763 the burden 
 of his brother fell upon him, and he was obliged to undertake 
 the duties of copyist and translator in a civil service depart- 
 ment. About this time, too, he went to Frankfort on the invitation 
 of Karl V. Moser, and narrowly missed seeing the boy Goethe ; 
 but, finding that Moser had been obliged to go to Holland, he 
 returned with characteristic impetuosity to Konigsberg, where, 
 in 1764, Kanter offered him a place on the staflP, or even the 
 management, of the Konigsberg Journal, a post for which he 
 was about as unfitted as nature and art could have made him ; 
 and he was afterwards appointed to the excise department. He 
 seems not to have become intimate with Herder till the ^larch 
 of this year, though there is no reason to doubt the story that 
 his father had been entrusted with the cure of Herder's eye, 
 and had failed two years before. He was fourteen years older 
 than Herder, and was probably not attracted at first by the 
 quiet country boy. But now, at all events, the friendship 
 became firm and fast, lasting, with but few interruptions, till 
 the end of his life, and of inestimable advantage to Herder, 
 whom Hamann regarded as the flower of his life-work. " This 
 Socrates," says Herder in one of his earliest writings,' "should 
 have an Aspasia and Alcibiades, and then an Aristotle to gather 
 up his teaching into a system." Ainia Hegina, the aboveinen- 
 
 ' The Fragments. 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 37 
 
 tioned nurse, with whom Haraann lived for about twenty years 
 in semi-connubial bliss, could not become an Aspasia, being 
 occupied with household cares of four children, but Herder did 
 his best to act as his Alcibiades ; and, if we must follow out the 
 parallel, Goethe must be content for this occasion to play the 
 Aristotle. After long oppression and grievous straits of fortune 
 Hamann was relieved by death of his two burdens, and at 
 length received from an admirer a considerable present or 
 pension, which enabled him to spend his last year or two in 
 comparative calm. In spite of his passionate nature, his life 
 was singulajrly pure; though to the end, in his most ethereal 
 speculations, he never lost sight of that side of man's nature 
 which is the broadest bond of kinship and humour throughout 
 all humanity. 
 
 It would be impossible to give a complete picture of such a 
 man except in a separate biography, nor has- this been satis- 
 factorily done yet. Under the figure of Pan, the great riddle 
 of the universe, he signified himself ; and he evidently had no 
 ambition to become a popular writer, for his style is always of 
 the roughest, often incomprehensible, interspersed too with 
 quotations from every literature from Hebrew to French, 
 generally in the original. On the titles of his pamphlets, of 
 which we have seen some instances, he laid great stress. 
 Probably the most suggestive of them all is ^sthetica in Nuce, 
 a Rhapsody in Kahalistic Prose, followed by a Hebrew 
 quotation from the Book of Judgment. Indeed neither Mon- 
 taigne nor the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy can rival 
 Hamann in powers of quotation, for to the wildest imagination 
 he joined the memory of a recording angel, a sufficiently rare 
 admixture. When he is at his best, it is hard to decide whether 
 to compare him to Isaiah, Jean Paul, or the author of the 
 Sartor. Exclamations and epigrams succeed each other in 
 bewildering confusion. In his own words, he takes his fan in 
 his hand to winnow the threshing-floor of literature, and in the 
 consequent dust of disturbance it cannot at first be seen whether 
 there was enough grain to make it worth the threshing. Yet, 
 
tS HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1762— 
 
 if we watch, after a time the grain becomes clearer, the heap 
 larger — but the thresher has supplied most of it himself In 
 the middle of the eighteenth century it is strange and cheering 
 to coiTie upon such sentences as these : " Poetry is the mother- 
 tongue of man ; " "The senses and passions speak and^under- 
 stand nothing but pictures ; " " The first garment of man was 
 a rhapsody of fig-leaves ; " " Speech is translation from the 
 tongue of angels into the tongue of man, from thoughts to 
 words, from things to names, from pictures to signs ; " or again, 
 " Your philosophy of murderous lies hath cleared Nature out of 
 the way, and why do ye require of us that we imitate Nature ? 
 That ye may be able to renew your pleasure, becoming also the 
 murderers of Nature's nurslings." 
 
 All his tracts and rhapsodies were written, it is true, to 
 serve a particular occasion, generally to confute some doctrine 
 advanced in Berlin or Leipsig ; and this, as Goethe says, gives 
 them an additional interest, if one can but find the key. Yet 
 they are all cast in a universal form and based on would-be 
 universal principles, for it is his main doctrine that nothing 
 separate or ])artial is of any value, but that every production 
 should spring from the union of the producer's whole powers : 
 a principle, again to quote Goethe, that is noble but hard to 
 follow, especially where the object is not life or poetry, but 
 branches of literature that necessarily imply separation and dis- 
 tinction of parts.^ Hence it is that though Hamann is far from 
 void he is without form. We wander through his pages as 
 through a German forest, full of obscure caves and dim vista, 
 rough with surprising rocks and tangled branches; yet, after 
 the glaring plain of the encyclopgadists and the barren desert of 
 scholiast abstractions, the shade is pleasant and the mystery has 
 its charm. 
 
 Soon after his friendship with Herder was established, 
 Hamann began to instruct him in English, and cliaraeteristically 
 set him to work at once upon Hamlet, the consummation of the 
 
 ' Am mrincn Lebc^i, book xii. 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 89 
 
 English speech. Then followed Paradise Lost, and the other 
 great examples of our olden time, attended, as we may imagine, 
 by discourses from Hamann, Herder eagerly drinking in his 
 words as he told how real a thing poetry must be, how different 
 from learning ; springing from the heart of a people, based on 
 the universal passions of mankind, whose soul throughout the 
 world is much the same ; in religion, too, he would be told, 
 there are spheres where only faith can be the guide, for under- 
 standing cannot enter ; there are depths of thought which all 
 the enlightenment of Bayle, Diderot, Voltaire, Nicolai, and the 
 rest of the clear-as-daylight school, cannot illumine. Such seed 
 thrown on a brain like Herder's was likely to bear fruit, which 
 in the work of his lifetime was apparent to all men. The first 
 signs of it appeared in the shape of some poems chiefly on 
 religious subjects, and a review of the so-called Dithyvamhs of 
 Willamov, son of old pastor Willamov, in Mohrungen, written 
 for the Konigsherg Journal, over which Hamann presided. 
 
 The friendship between Hamann and Kant still held, though 
 the bonds were growing weaker, so completely opposed were 
 their modes of thought; for they stood like archers shooting at 
 the same high mark from opposite sides of a hill, hardly willing 
 to believe that the mark was the same. Yet the rapid development 
 of Herder's friendship with Hamann must have increased his 
 intimacy wuth Kant, for about this time Kant, in spite of his 
 forty years, is said, though it seems impossible, to have begun to 
 consult the youth of twenty on the subject of his lectures, and 
 even to have submitted the drafts of some treatises to his 
 approval or correction. From the first Kant had been well 
 inclined towards the friendless boy. He himself had been private 
 tutor in Arensdorf, only a few miles from Mohrungen, some 
 sixteen years before, and we have seen that he allowed Herder 
 to attend all his lectures free of charge; though during all this 
 period, indeed for the fifteen years 1755-70, Kant held no 
 official position in the university, but was merely a privat-docent 
 giving lectures in his own house to such as would come and 
 would pay the fee. His poverty was great, and, to a man with 
 
40 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1762— 
 
 Kant's horror of dependence and debt, particularly oj)pressive ; 
 but his generosity was rewarded by the delight and enthusiasm 
 of his young listener. Herder has left us a brilliant account of 
 the great philosopher's appearance and manner at this time ; and, 
 though it has been quoted again and again in German, and even 
 in English, it will bear repetition. 
 
 Once, he begins, I enjoyed the happiness of knowing a philosopher, 
 who was my teacher. In the prime of life he had the joyous cheer- 
 fulness of youth. His open forehead, built for the home of thought, 
 was the seat of unfailing merriment and joy ; speech of the richest 
 thought flowed from his lips ; irony, wit, and humour were ready at his 
 call, and his method of instruction was the most entertaining intercourse. 
 With just the same spirit in which he examined Leibnitz, Wolff, Baum- 
 garten, Crusius, and Hume, or followed out the physical laws of Kepler 
 and Newton, he would turn to the writings of Rousseau that were then 
 coming out, his Emih and Ileloise^ as well as every natural discovery 
 which came to his ears, would test their worth, and always return to the 
 unrestrained knowledge of Nature and the moral worth of Man. The 
 history of men and nations, natural philosophy, mathematics, and expe- 
 rience, were the sources by which he gave life to his lectures and con- 
 versation ; nothing that was worth knowing was indiflferent to him ; no 
 clique, no sect, no personal advantage nor ambition had the slightest 
 charm for him against the further extension and explanation of truth. 
 He cheered us on, and urged us pleasantly to think for ourselves ; des- 
 potism had no place in his thoughts. This man, whom I name with the 
 greatest gratitude and respect, was Immanuel Kant. ' 
 
 It must be remembered that this description was written 
 many years after, when the enthusiasm of youth had given place 
 to direct antagonism. We may imagine, therefore, how strong 
 the influence was at a time when Herder was ready to welcome 
 every word that fell from Kant as a ray of light and truth, when 
 he would write verse after verse in his honour, telling how once 
 he lay sighing in chains in the place where one nothing feels and 
 nothing thinks ; " but god Apollo came. The chains gave way ; 
 my look was high ; he gave me Kant." Or again, " Apollo 
 spake ; and, shining bright, I saw the Muses dance in Tcmpe's 
 vale, flung up my golden hat, heard Kant, and tried a new song 
 
 ' Letters f 01' the Furtlwranoe of Humanity, part vi, (probably 1796.) 
 
1764.J KONIGSBERG. 41 
 
 with faltering tongue, as 1 wandered sideways towards Bacon." 
 We even read that one morning, probably between seven and 
 nine o'clock, Kant's lecture on the subject of Time and Eternity 
 had been so inspiring, that, in the afternoon. Herder turned it 
 into verse in the style of Pope or Haller, Kant's favourite poets, 
 and next day the master himself read the poem before the 
 assembled audience with approval. 
 
 We have seen that Kant prophesied much from ^^ this turbid 
 genius, if once his fermentation worked off;" but Kant, with 
 his horror of the ^^ Romantic," Kant, who once at least was 
 balked of marriage because he took such a time calculating the 
 advantages and disadvantages of a wife and the cost of the same, 
 was probably more amused or even alarmed than edified by this 
 hot-headed young man who worshipped Hamann and talked like 
 the Song of Solomon. Yet, on Herder's side, the admiration 
 was beyond doubt very genuine, and the influence profound. 
 A hundred years ago it was prophesied that within a century 
 Kant would have attained the reputation of Jesus Christ ; and, 
 though the prophecy has hardly been justified by the result, it 
 will be universally admitted that it was impossible for so receptive 
 a nature as Herder's to come in contact with what Goethe calls 
 ^^ the most philosophic mind that has existed," without a life- 
 long impression. Nor must we lay too much stress on the 
 assertion of the editors of the Reminiscences, that Herder was 
 only attracted by Kant's lectures on astronomy, mathematics, 
 and physical geography, but took refuge from his metaphysics in 
 poetry or the last work of Rousseau. Such a statement is too 
 evidently suggested by after-events. 
 
 The fact is, neither Kant nor any one else at this time drew 
 a hard and fast line between his metaphysics and the rest of his 
 teaching. Kant in his lectures always worked upon Baumgarten 
 or Wolff, and never taught his own system as such ; indeed, at 
 this time he had no dogmatic systeni at all, but contented him- 
 self lor the most part with bringing the English scepticism to 
 bear upon the orthodox dogmatism of Wolff, with rather startling 
 results. Of course it is quite possible that Herder, with his 
 
42 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17C2— 
 
 craving for the beautiful in nature and poetry, was glad enough 
 to turn to something human and genuine after lectures on meta- 
 l)h3'sics ; few would deny such aids to frail humanity. But in 
 his early letters and writings there is not a trace of disagreement 
 with Kant on philosophy. Indeed, it is absurd to talk of dis- 
 agreement between a boy of twenty and a mature philosopher. 
 Besides, disagreement is impossible with a man who has no dog- 
 matic system ; pure scepticism alone is above or beneath attack, 
 and Kant at this time was full of the English philosophy, or 
 negation of philosophy, as we also hear it called. Hume, as he 
 says in a passage almost painfully familiar, had roused him from 
 his doo^matic slumber ;^ and this Eno^lish line of thouMit con- 
 tinued almost unchecked till 1766, when the Dreams of a 
 Visionary were written in answer to Swedenborg, after which 
 came a long silence whilst the Kritik was a-preparing. Accord- 
 ingly we find that, till about a year after Herder had left 
 Konigsberg, Kant's work chiefly consisted in mathematics 
 and physics. No one was aware how vast a power was 
 hidden in that quiet little man, by whom, as Heine says, the 
 good people of Konigsberg set their watches. Experience was 
 the watchword of the time ; Hume and Rousseau ruled the 
 advanced thought of Europe together or in turn, and many 
 years were yet to pass before Kant could take the sceptre up. 
 For the present, in spite of his independence, he was content to 
 study the commands of the other two kings. In the first lecture 
 which Herder attended he treated the question, " Are there any 
 spirits besides our own souls? " in a light and ironical manner 
 that seems to have been a mixture of Hume and Voltaire. In 
 1762 he had written a pamphlet on the false subtlety of the 
 syllogistic figures. The same year Rousseau's Emile appeared, 
 and for one day Kant gave up his regular walk, such was the 
 charm of this book. In 1763 he published his ^^ ovAy possible 
 (not even this certain) argument for God's existence," and next 
 year his treatise oji ^^ the Beautiful and Sublime," which Herder 
 
 ' Preface to the Prohtfomrtia, 178:?. 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 43 
 
 compared to Winckelman and Burke. In 1764, too, there came \ 
 to Konigsberg a famous wiki man of the woods with his boy, no , 
 less wikl, deh'ghting the experimental philosophers and the/ 
 readers of Rousseau, learned or gentle, by his free and fearless 
 ways and honest mien, Kant taking especial interest in the 
 apparition.^ 
 
 On the whole, therefore, we may say that even to the keenest 
 sighted of men the Kant of 1764 presented a very different 
 appearance to the Kant of 1781 and onwards up to to-day. In 
 1764 there was no text-book to Kant, no talk about rivalry 
 between Immanuel Christ and Immanuel Kant, no prophecies 
 that within five years Christianity would be extinct, no promise 
 to create God at next day's lecture, no learned discourse about 
 noumenon and phenomenon, reason and understanding, and the 
 rest. The star in the German drama of thought was still learn- 
 ing his part, and none were aware of his powers, himself perhaps 
 as little as any. His influence on Herder is best described in 
 Herder's own words quoted above. He taught him to look fear- 
 lessly and cheerfully in the face of nature. He showed him the 
 mystery of the firmament, the wonders of the earth and sea, the 
 wonders of the heart of man; showed him how beautiful is 
 freedom, how absurd is despotism in thought, how vast the range 
 which the mind of man may embrace, yet how pleasant a thing 
 it is to have the foot on fact. Kant set him free from the place 
 of dogmatism where '^one nothing feels and nothing thinks," 
 and bade him resist the shadows of an unreal metaphysic and they 
 would flee from him; " for, though there are limits beyond which 
 metaphysics cannot go, yet what is knowable is enough for man." 
 It is also very significant that Herder so often speaks of 
 Kant as the gift of Apollo, and sings of a vision of Muses 
 dancing in Tempo's vale whilst he was listening to a lecture in 
 the stuffy room of a German privat-docent.'^ Evidently he 
 derived more from Kant's teaching on the aesthetic than the 
 
 * Kant wrote a paper on the subject for the Konigs'berg Journal. 
 2 The temperature in Kant's room is said to have been kept at 75° 
 Fahrenheit: cf. Prof. Wallace's Kant, p. 41. 
 
i 
 
 44 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17G2— 
 
 more strictly philosophic side. His eyes were opened to the 
 glories of external nature, the vastness of the universe with 
 history for time and astronomy for space ; and thus, through 
 nature, beauty was revealed. After all, then, it was not needful 
 to mope and moan like a Trescho with eye always on navel in 
 self-righteous humility. In Kant he found a man that was 
 no pedant (the only one of all his teachers. Herder used after- 
 wards to say), a man full of enthusiasm, to whom no knowledge 
 was indifferent ; who knew the surface of the whole globe 
 almost as well as his native Konigsberg ; who did not regard 
 the beautiful as merely a useful exponent of religious dogma; 
 but was indeed free from dogma, and taught not philosophy but 
 how to philosophise, making the search for truth a part of life 
 itself, not to this or that learned professor but to everyone who 
 deserved the name of man ; each one then must think out his 
 own salvation, but lose sight of his morbid peculiarities in the 
 glories of the universal ; for what is the *^ history of our own 
 heart " compared to the history of one bright particular star — 
 compared to the history of the holy spirit of man? 
 
 It is at this point of universality that the cheerful clearness 
 of Kant most nearly coincided with the mystic utterances of 
 the oracle Hamann; and we naturally find, therefore, that this 
 universality in Herder, as the natural product of two such 
 parents in thought, continued throughout life the leading prin- 
 ciple of his work. Henceforward he would be universal or 
 nothing ; he would build on the broadest basis the deepest 
 truths of nature and humanity, or he would deny the possibility 
 of foundation at all. The grey ghosts of the schools, the whims 
 of the philosophers, the dogmatic theorising of all sects, orthodox 
 as well as pietistic, must submit themselves to scrutiny, and go 
 on their way as best they might, leaving room for what had 
 been found eternally beautiful and true for all men, from Miriam 
 with her timbrel to Rousseau with his Helo'ise. It is hard for us, 
 who have seen this reaction in its birth, its progress, and 
 perhaps its decline, to appreciate now the joy with which its 
 first movements were greeted by a young and ardent soul like 
 
1764.] KONIGSBERG. 45 
 
 Herder's a Imndrecl and twenty years ago. To us, therefore, his 
 praises of Kant and Hamann may seem to have a false tone of 
 exaggeration, yet from any who in his youth has tasted the first 
 joys of Hberty and the merry excitement of ghost-chasing he 
 will receive full sympathy, perhaps not unmixed with pity. 
 
 Yet in spite of all friendships, in spite of an intercourse with 
 two of the greatest thinkers in Germany and the advances he 
 had made in general society, Herder was not quite at his exie 
 in Konigsberg. We begin to see something of that nervous 
 restlessness wdiich never quite forsook him. It is so hard to 
 find circumstances that exactly fit in with one's ideal of life, so 
 hard to say, " here or nowhere is my North America.'^ In 
 Konigsberg he seems to have been oppressed by the mercantile 
 spirit of the place ; the air began to seem thick and Boeotian, 
 affording little nurture to the delicate plants of poesy and refined 
 enthusiasms. Even the Collegium, where his work was mainly 
 set, was becoming an annoyance ; perhaps the authorities had 
 never quite recovered from that rude shock about the wig; 
 certainly Herder found that a man of twenty could not make an 
 ideal school in a day. This honourable old-maidenish Frederica 
 with her sixty years, with her ^' scars of religion and wrinkles 
 of pedantry," passable enough in her youth, now began to wear 
 a very jaded and worn appearance, not to be improved by the 
 copious use of rouge.^ 
 
 Accordingly, when in the autumn of this year (1764) an 
 invitation came from Professor Lindner in Riga, asking if 
 Herder were willing ,to take the post of assistant or colleague 
 {collaborator) in the cathedral- school of that town, the proposal 
 was at once agreed to with very little regret. Lindner had 
 been rector of the school, but was about to leave for Konigsberg 
 as professor of poetry. He was an intimate friend of Hamann, 
 who, as will be remembered, had made his business venture 
 from Riga. Through Hamann and Hartknoch he had heard 
 tidings of this successful young Herder, — his knowledge, his 
 
 ' Letter from Herder to Lindner : LehenMld, vol. i. p. 31L 
 
4G llERDEU AND HIS TIMES. [17C4. 
 
 verse-makin<Ty and methods of instruction. As soon as the idea 
 was started Hamann was especially enthusiastic in commending 
 this " young man with the maidenly soul of a Virgil."^ Two 
 short addresses on school matters were all that were required as 
 further evidences of efficiency, and it was agreed that Herder 
 should start in November, though it was mid-term. 
 
 Before he went he was obliged to take an oath to return if 
 he were required as a soldier, so strict was Father Fritz with 
 his children. On the 11th of November a terrible fire broke 
 out in Konigsberg, which lasted five or six days, and destroyed 
 the greater part of the town. Herder looking mournfully on 
 whilst the flax-warehouses blazed up in flame, and the church 
 steeples came crashing to the ground. He celebrated the 
 occasion in an ode on the Ashes of Konigsberg in the style of 
 Jeremiah, but in rhymed stanzas and with an occasional hint at 
 Greek legend. On the whole it is the most successful of his 
 poems so far, and contains no allusion to the phoenix, though 
 the poet consoles himself with a comparison to the Resurrection. 
 About ten days afterwards he started for Riga, leaving the 
 dreary skeleton of the town still smoking behind him, and 
 quitted Prussian territory with its ruthless military laws and 
 stern ways, apparently far more in joy than sorrow ; " ready to 
 kiss the ground for joy," as he said in after-days. For he was 
 free ; and full of hope he went forward, the whole world still 
 lying in front. 
 
 * Hamann to Lindner : Lehcnshild, vol i. p. 317. 
 
47 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EiGA, 1764—1769. 
 
 " When he finishes refection, 
 Knife and fork he never lays 
 Cross-wise, to my recollection, 
 
 As do I in Jesu's praise. 
 T the Trinity illustrate 
 
 Drinking watered orange-pulp, 
 In three sips the Arian frustrate, 
 While he drains his at one gulp." 
 
 In a Spanish Cloistee. 
 
 Journeying to the north-east from Konigsberg for nearly two 
 hundred miles, after some days Herder emerged from the vast 
 pine-forests of Courland, now damj) and heavy with autumn, and 
 far away across a bare sandy plain he would see the great 
 tower of Riga rise (tallest tower in all the Eussias, no less than 
 440 feet, the guide-books tell us), under sight of which he was 
 to spend the next four and a-half years, painted by fond after- 
 memory as the happiest of his life. 
 
 The quaint old town, with its German streets, narrow, high- 
 piled, and twisted, all hemmed in by the high protecting walls 
 and fortress towers, unencumbered as yet by the bald regularity 
 of the modern Russian suburbs, would take the traveller's mind 
 back to the days, five hundred and sixty years before, when 
 Bishop Adalbert, aided by merchants from Bremen, founded 
 Riga as the headquarters of the redoubtable Order of the 
 Brethren of the Sword, whose aim it was to further free trade, 
 and the power of the Church, by teaching the heathen the 
 Gospel of the steel. ^ The Order, having might on their side, 
 
 * Just mentioned in Carlyle's Frederick, vol. i. p. 118. This Adalbert, bishop 
 of Livonia, founder of the " Sword-Brothers," must not be confused with Adal- 
 bert, bishop of Prag, who stamped his life on Prussia, in the form of a crucifix, 
 some two centuries earlier. — {Frederick, vol. i. p. 82.) 
 
48 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 prospered in their holy cause, and, uniting themselves to the 
 kindred body of Teutonic knights, continued to possess the land 
 for some three centuries, Riga also becoming a member of the 
 Hanseatic League. But when Luther and the Reformation 
 came, the hearts of the men of Liefland, or Livonia as we call 
 it, were estranged from the Holy Mother, and the knights 
 finding their strength gone from them, being hard-bested, too, 
 by Russia and Sweden, appealed to Sigismund of Poland, who 
 adopted Liefland amongst his children, and allowed her to 
 establish the reformed practice of religion. Things went quietly 
 enough till a stronger than Poland appeared, and in 1621 
 Gustavus Adolphus came swooping over sea from Stockholm, so 
 that Riga was Swedish possession for ninety years without a 
 change; till again, after a terrible siege, accompanied by famine 
 and pestilence, it surrendered half in ruins to Peter the Great, 
 during the pitiful business of the Northern war, just before 
 Charles XII. retired to his five years' sleep in Turkey.^ The 
 province was finally confirmed to Russia in the peace of 1721, 
 so that when Herder arrived it had almost recovered from its 
 disasters, and was full of joy at the energy of new life within it. 
 Like the vest of the Baltic states, Liefland seems at that time to 
 have been comparatively indifferent to what rulers she owed 
 allegiance provided they let her alone and allowed her to pursue 
 her trade in peace. She was beginning to feel the pleasure of 
 safety under the protection of a vast empire, and her enthusiasm 
 for Russia was great. The very summer before, Riga had been 
 visited by Catherine herself, and had blossomed out into all 
 festivity to do her honour. But the town was still German at 
 lieart; the German language was generally spoken ; Lutheranism 
 was nearly universal ; and Russians, Swedes, Poles, Jews, and 
 Livonians went together to make up a kind of ideal German 
 trading-republic, based on affectionate reminiscences of the 
 Hanseatic League, with a careful preservation of ancient patri- 
 otic customs. 
 
 ' Carlyle's FredeHok, vol. i. p. 428. 
 
1769.] laGA. 49 
 
 For the rest, Herder would find the general spirit of the 
 place to be much like Konigsberg, except that here there was 
 no university to restrain the mercantile tone, and social relations 
 were freer and more cheerful. Instead of the Pregel here was 
 the Diina, three-quarters of a mile across at its mouth, bearing 
 to and fro on its broad surface the countless masts of trading: 
 vessels with their cargoes of tobacco, sugar, leather, paper, and 
 starch as they came in ; corn, linseed, hemp, flax, and, above 
 all, timber, on their passage out. A lively enough impression 
 for the traveller, when he arrived and took up his abode in a 
 corner house belonging to the school, which looked on to an 
 open space, now known as the Herder-Platz, adorned in 1864 
 by a cast-iron bust of Herder himself, resting on a gothic 
 pedestal, also of cast-iron ; the whole is elevated on granite steps, 
 and was unveiled in the August of that year to the sound of 
 Luther's '^Mne feste Burg^'''' with drum accompaniment, sung 
 by the boys and masters of the old cathedral school, now 
 changed into a town gymnasium. The cathedral itself, the 
 school and the town library, were close at hand, as was the shop 
 where Hartknoch was to set up his publishing establishment, 
 and print most of Herder's works that appeared before the 
 world. 
 
 The cathedral school seems to have been the only place of 
 education that survived the distresses of the siege, and under 
 Rector Lindner, who did not remove to Konigsberg for a few 
 months yet, it had attained high reputation. The town council, 
 or the Thirty Fathers as they were called, kept the supreme 
 management, though the clergy belonging to the chapter appear 
 to have had a voice in the matter ; at all events, though Herder 
 \^'as introduced as teacher in the school early in December, he 
 had to submit to an examination in theology in the February 
 after — a specially rigorous examination, as the Reminiscences 
 tell us indignantly, owing to the spite and aivfj of these clerical 
 hearts. Probably some evil reports about free- thinking, deism, 
 Hume^ philosophy, hatred of wigs, and similar crimes, had 
 reached their orthodox ears. The examiners, however, applauded 
 
 E 
 
50 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 the youth with one voice, and he at once devoted himself 
 dih'gently to the duties of his office as collaborator. 
 
 What these duties exactly were it is hard to discover. The 
 post had been newly instituted in compliance, we may imagine, 
 with representations from the practical merchants of lliga that 
 the old-fashioned learning was useless for their sons in after-life. 
 The same complaint is made again and again, that the education 
 of the grammar schools and universities does not help a man to 
 make his living. But it was a new cry then, however vulgar 
 now ; and accordingly the new collaborator, besides giving 
 general aid to any of his seven colleagues, wherever he was 
 wanted, was especially to instruct the merchants of the future in 
 natural philosophy, history, geography, French, mathematics, 
 and a practice called " style," for which essay-writing is our 
 nearest equivalent. In all this we see the beginning of that 
 system of Realschule, or scientific schools, that have since become 
 so prominent in Germany, though it has by no means uprooted 
 the old-fashioned gymnasium so much as is wished by those who 
 regard the education of their sons as a certain amount of well- 
 invested capital, that will give them a good start in the world, 
 and enable them to invent steam-engines and comfortable arm- 
 chairs. No post could have been more welcome to Herder at 
 the time. Fresh from the scientific lectures of Kant and his 
 studies in Bacon, Newton, and Hume, he entered upon his work 
 with all the enthusiasm that a new departure in theory and 
 practice can give. Here at length was something both new and 
 real ; here he could rebel without being a traitor, for his fight 
 for pedantry was now on a fair and open field, and every stroke 
 ^ould be applauded by those w^hom he served ; he need no 
 longer soothe with pretence the ruffled hearts of Pietists, nor 
 feign a belief in the all-sufficiency of the Latin grammar. 
 
 But his own view of his position is best gathered from two 
 speeches he delivered, one in his first year at Riga, the other 
 probably in his second ; and, as his theory of education did not 
 greatly change in afterlife, it may be as well here to examine 
 their general drift. His public instalment in his office had been 
 
1769.] RIGA. 51 
 
 postponed ; for, since a new rector was expected shortly, the 
 thrifty minds of the Thirty deemed that one ceremony was suffi- 
 cient for both. In May 1765 old Rector Lindner went on his 
 way to profess poetry in Konigsberg, his departure being cele- 
 brated by Herder in an ode divided into choruses for the boys 
 and solos for the " priest " in strophe and antistrophe, some- 
 thing after the manner of a carmen seculare. In June the new 
 rector came in the person of Schlegel, a former colleague of 
 Herder's in the old Friedrich's- College ; he was no relation to 
 Johann Adolph Schlegel, famous father of more famous sons, 
 now quietly at work with his books and parish far away in 
 Hanover, his sons hardly yet born. This Schlegel of Konigs- 
 berg and Riga was six years older than Herder, and survived 
 him six years, dying in 1810 of old age and a broken heart at 
 the disasters that befell Sweden and her king, in whose favour 
 he stood high. On his arrival the Thirty, always with an eye to 
 thrift, decreed that the ceremony of installation should take 
 place on the 27th of June, also the third anniversary of the day 
 on which the " Wild Cat" of Russia commenced her happy 
 and scandalous reign. Herder's speech on this occasion has 
 been preserved to us, and printed in full by his son.^ 
 
 After briefly thanking his patrons for their confidence in him 
 and the favours he had received, having no wish, as he says, to 
 bring before practical men a mere skeleton of common-places, 
 '•' especially in a town where monkish learning no longer rules," 
 he proceeds at once to sketch the duties of his new position, and 
 then proposes, as the main theme of his discourse, the question 
 '' How far, even in a school, Grace must prevail." Shortly ex- 
 plaining what he means by Grace or the Graces, he proceeds 
 boldly, almost recklessly, thus : 
 
 No ; it is unfortunately not the first conception that rises in one's 
 mind when a schoolmaster is named, that over his cradle the Graces of 
 heaven were watching, that in his youth he devoted his learning to tl^m, 
 
 1 ZehensMld, vol. i. part ii. pp. 42-75. Here and throughout this book my 
 accounts of Herder's speeches and works are of course very much compressed. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 HEKDEU AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 that they accompanied hmi to school, and chose for their workshop as it 
 were a room full of dust. Too seldom, when we meet a schoolmaster, do 
 we find him suave in society and in school, politeness on his lips and in 
 his bearing. On the contrary, most often we find that his circle of know- 
 ledge begins with the Latin grammar of Donatus, ' ' our first book of 
 martyrs," and ends with some barren attempts at ontology ; his method is 
 relentless pedantry ; the so-called morality that he teaches is only the 
 result of slavish compulsion; and the " best behaviour" is only the stiff- 
 ness of leading-strings, that end in making the scholar politely rude. He 
 is a terror to the boys, and his home, instead of being the abode of the 
 muses, is a dry-as-dust hell. This is the idea of learning which we 
 generally give our children. Schools are the first prisons with which they 
 are threatened, and in them we force them to sit still, to learn by heart, 
 and to go through heaven knows what other chivalrous exercises. All 
 the knowledge that a boy learns at school, we think it only right and 
 proper that he should clear away like so much steam as soon as he reaches 
 man's estate, if he would not have his wits choked. The consequence is 
 that our brains are formed first by our nurses ; then re-cast by the school- 
 master ; and for the third time completely re-modelled by the world. 
 
 In this picture of the common schoolmaster old Rector Grimm 
 of Mohrungen is plainly in Herder's mind, though probably he 
 had not to go far for models. He goes on to say, that this un- 
 happy result is only natural, since only a man of depressed 
 station or " unfriendly Minerva " would choose to ply the 
 homely usher's slighted trade, and the finest spirit would lose 
 something of its European polish after forty years' exile in 
 Siberia ; thus the schoolmaster is limited to his rude little circle 
 and the petty economics of his own household. Then follows a 
 sketch of an ideal schoolmaster: 
 
 The jewels on his breast-plate must be called insight or sympathy 
 and trust or honesty, whilst, like another Aaron, he bears the name of 
 his children written on his heart. No amount of learning will make up 
 for the want of insight. On the contrary, a vast amount of knowledge 
 would be rather detrimental to him than advantageous as far as education 
 was concerned. With thoughts scattered to all four winds of heaven ho 
 would lose sight of the circle of boys, and, plunged in the contemplation 
 of his own learned schemes, he would hurry them hither and thither, or 
 forget their education altogether. If you tie an eagle to a child's go-cart 
 he will either tear himself loose, or, in a moment of inspiration, will 
 
1769.] RIGA. 53 
 
 carry the cart with him up to the stars of heaven, and the child will be 
 spilled. 
 
 For a schoolmaster extraordinary learning is not needful, but he must 
 have talent, that he may inspire his children with thorough knowledge as 
 by a pleasant charm : and this is that Grace without which no man can 
 become a perfect teacher. But the tyrant, how different it is with him ! 
 The boy longs to wander through the pleasant fields of Paradise, but the 
 tyrant comes, all covered with frost, and drags him over ice and snow. 
 In vain is the torture ; " school-implements " (rulers and canes) avail not; 
 ambition avails not; promises of future advantage — all are to no purpose; 
 without the charm of grace they are as nothing. See, stripling, he 
 continues with ecstasy, I will make the years of thy youth not doleful 
 years, but pleasant to thy heart. On flowers will we wander forth ; give 
 me thy hand that I may lead thee into happiness. Thou murmurest at 
 thy youth ; I, too, was once a boy ; I murmured as thou, but, believe me, 
 I could wish myself back again. It is still before thee to choose the good 
 and be a light to thy friends, or to choose the evil and become a grief to 
 thy father and heaviness to her that bare thee. Secondly, the ideal master 
 must inspire confidence : and for this, too, no learning, no severity, will 
 be of help. On his forehead must be read the simple and sublime truth 
 of a father, who says nothing that he does not think. Such an one will 
 his pupils follow on the difficult road : they hang on his lips. O, my 
 imagination is lost in contemplation of a spot so fair, where Grace such as 
 this rules between the master and the boys ! It is no longer a school, it 
 is a pleasant garden of flowers. The master goes his way with cheerful 
 brow among friends who have given their whole hearts into his charge. 
 No longer a school but an Indus, a place for games, a gymnasium where 
 the Graces rule supreme. "The golden age of simplicity lives again ; " 
 again does Alcibiades, pattern of youth's virtues and errors, hang on the 
 neck of his Socrates. 
 
 After some advice to parents to restrain the increasing luxury 
 of the age, and a few words on his more special duties, he 
 explains how, though a school ought not to be a dancing academy 
 nor a gymnasium of compliment, yet there should be no contra- 
 diction between the manners of school and the manners of the 
 world; the schoolmaster must therefore be a model of good 
 manners and polished behaviour. The orator then, feeling that 
 enough had been said, " for it is best to promise little and fulfil 
 much," addressed a few words to each section of his audience, 
 from his boys to the town council, and so reaches his exordium : 
 
64 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 '^ May our school, our children, and our parents, flourish ! 
 May Riga flourish ! the town where refinement is combined 
 witli industry and usefuhiess; prosperity is combined with 
 friendship and politeness, obedience with freedom, thought with 
 belief, grace with knowledge of the world ; Riga, that might be 
 called Geneva under the shadow of Russia ; prosperity to her 
 trade, her citizens, her fathers, and her queen." 
 
 After a few words in praise of the " Wild Cat," and her 
 visit to Riga the year before, he finished by ** singing" an ode 
 of his own composition in honour of her coronation, inviting all 
 true patriots to join him in the strain. 
 
 This panegyric of the Graces seems to have raised some 
 dubitations in the minds of the merchants of Riga, for, in the 
 published version of the speech. Herder inserted a long passage, 
 of which we only possess a fragment, to explain that he was far 
 from wishing to transform their sons into polished puppets of 
 the French school, against which Rousseau had uttered his 
 lamentations. His Grace was a far other lady than the be- 
 powdered and befrizzled dancing mistress of France. 
 
 "Nay!" he cries, " let the Graces themselves appear! I 
 see, I see them coming ; the three sisters of sweetness, Aglaia, 
 Thalia, and Euphrosyne, the daughters of Jupiter, born of 
 Harmony ; naked are they, like the truth, full of noble simpli- 
 city, that is of kin to the blessed peace of Olympus ; their hair 
 flies out to the wind from under garlands ever green ; garlands 
 are in their hands ; their arms are intertwined ; goddesses of 
 Harmony, I lay my picture at your feet ; crown it with your 
 wreaths ! " 
 
 This also must have been a very beautiful apparition, very 
 different from the artificial dancing-mistress ; only people need 
 eyes to see it. 
 
 The second public speech on school matters was probably 
 delivered about a year after this, and treats of the relation that 
 the study of foreign languages ought to bear to the study of the 
 mother tongue. Herder begins with a few words of charac- 
 teristic regret over the days when the world was young — 
 
1769.] RIGA. 55 
 
 When, according to the sublime simplicity of our revelation, there 
 was only one speech and language in all the world. But now each tongue 
 has its peculiar character, and the mother-tongue is always best suited to 
 a people's way of thought. Hence, it is almost impossible to get at the 
 kernel of a foreign language. With much labour I may, perhaps, 
 master the dead languages according to their words ; but their spirit has 
 eluded me : and it is a good thing that the people who spoke them are 
 extinct, else they would accuse me of who knows what ignorance, bar- 
 barity, and rudeness. And yet to these foreign languages I must sacrifice 
 my most flourishing years, my most lively memory, the brightest fire of 
 my youth, just as children used to be thrown into the arms of Moloch ; 
 though things instead of words, thoughts instead of signs, would give me 
 far more nourishment. These are the objections raised by many against 
 the study of languages; objections that have nature on their side, though 
 the present condition of art is against them. But if each nation confined 
 itself to its own language how slowly the world would advance ; a 
 Newton in Germany would be torturing himself with a discovery that the 
 English Newton had unsealed long before. Nor can we trust to trans- 
 lations, in which the charm of form, the delicate bloom of expression, is 
 necessarily lost. Let us read the works of the greatest men in their own 
 tongues. With my German industry I try to combine genuine English 
 humour, the wit of the French, the sparkle of Italy. I will take the 
 stream of the Thames as my great example: "Deep, yet clear; gentle, 
 yet not dull; strong, without rage; without o'er-flo wing full. " (In this 
 form Denham's * verse appears in German prose.) But where, then, can 
 we make an end? A boundless sea, a labyrinth of languages, stretches 
 before us. After all, the mother tongue is most important for a man ; it 
 is part of his national character ; through it he babbled his first words ; 
 above all, it is essential for every work of art in poetry and eloquence. 
 What great author has written a masterpiece in a foreign tongue ? Why 
 should we be crawling imitators of Horace and Virgil, or even of the modern 
 French? 
 
 In this strain he continues to the end, without definitely 
 deciding the question, though he hints that at all events it will 
 be safe to pay at least three times as much attention to modern 
 languages as to the ancient. 
 
 From these two discourses we can derive a sufficiently 
 accurate notion of Herder's views on education, its method and 
 its substance. In the air of Eiga in 1765 all this sounded 
 
 ^ Denham's Cooper's Hill. 
 
66 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 strange ; what now seems common-place, or merely unpractical, 
 was then revolutionary ; and we cannot but admire this un- 
 friended stranger, only twenty-one years old, who, with sweet 
 voice and flashing eye, steps on the rostrum, and causes the 
 traditional foes of boyhood to tremble like the gods in their 
 twilight ; nor can we much wonder if the wigs wagged omi- 
 nously, and boded no good for the upstart who dared to say that 
 schoolmasters had no grace ; who called them unmannerly, 
 rude, and mean ; vain in their futile knowledge of the BooJ^. 
 of Martyrs^ and in their cult of the fiery Moloch ; himself 
 promising to show them the right way, to lead his charge beside 
 the flowery meads, having cast away his wig, the symbol of so 
 much that would follow soon, unless the thing were checked. 
 But there was still hope, for they too had been young, and now 
 were old. 
 
 At all events, with his pupils there could be no doubt about Her- 
 der's popularity; amongst them he actually did manage to realize 
 something of his hopes. One, who afterwards rose to be arch- 
 deacon, or something of that kind, wrote many years hence : 
 " His method of teaching was so excellent, his intercourse with 
 his pupils so human, that they attended no lecture with greater 
 pleasure than his." On this point the evidence of all the wit- 
 nesses agree ; three old ladies adding their testimony, blooming 
 girls at that time, and '' of very distinguished families," too ; 
 they took private lessons from him ; and " long," we are told, 
 " did he live in their hearts." 
 
 During the first few months in this new town, it is true, the 
 young schoolmaster was inclined to despond, owing to his lone- 
 liness, though his external position was far more comfortable 
 than at Konigsberg ; his lodging was convenient and his salary 
 sufficient ; in fact, as he writes to Hamann, he had ^^ everything 
 that Luther wished for in the fourth prayer, except a wife and 
 the rest." But, unfortunately, man does not live by bread alone. 
 '' I have very light work," he continues ; " and as the land here 
 might be called a Solum paj>averifenim, somniferum, I am almost 
 asleep. I have no entrance into society, and have nothing to 
 
1769.] RIGA. 57 
 
 goad me to small undertakings. You must wake me up." The 
 letter then proceeds to literature, and Herder offers to send an 
 English copy of No. 45 of the North Briton^ an offer which 
 Hamann accepts, though he adds he would rather see the Essay 
 on Woman, which is a significant notice of the disturbances 
 then agitating England, and the interest they aroused in the 
 learned of Europe, though as yet the telegraph was not.^ In 
 another letter to Hamann, Herder complains that he was still 
 unripe for his post ; he was teaching when he ought to be learn- 
 ing ; he had no opportunity of seeing life, nor enough society to 
 acquire the manners of the world ; in fact, he felt very much 
 like " a seven months' embryo." Hamann's answer displays 
 unexpected insight. He remarks that it is better to begin by 
 groaning than by boasts; he urges his young friend to seek 
 consolation with the great men of old, but above all to think 
 less and live more ; to follow his genius for music, and, if he 
 were not too old or anxious about his eyes, to learn drawing 
 and even painting in company with his pupils ; also to go to 
 concerts, and see as many people as possible. 
 
 Following this advice ill every point, except perhaps as to 
 the painting. Herder soon found his opportunities increase. At 
 his private lessons he won the hearts not only of his pupils, but 
 of their parents too. The doors of Eiga society soon stood open 
 to him, Hamann probably sending a few letters of introduction 
 besides, for Hamann was still well remembered in Riga for good 
 or bad. The Berens family, in whose service Hamann had visited 
 London, seem to have been the first to be gracious, and the 
 three brothers continued his firm friends. One of them, 
 Christoph, rose to be a senator in Riga, a man very distinguished 
 for honest and patriotic virtues. According to the editors of the 
 Reminiscences, it was he who in 1782 drew up the scheme of the 
 armed neutrality of the Northern Powers to check the hectoring 
 
 ' January, 1765. No. 45 of the North Briton was published in April, 1763, 
 and Wilkes was prosecuted for this and the Essay on Womaii early in the next 
 year. 
 
58 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17G4- 
 
 ways of Great Britain, which even the loss of America could not 
 disillusionise. 
 
 In the early summer of 1765 Hamann himself, finding 
 Konigsberg narrow and oppressive, as he said, also trying to 
 shake from his mind the image of the too-fascinating Anna 
 Begina, came to Mitau, within a day's journey from Riga south- 
 ward, and once more essayed the duties of a hofmeister to the 
 establishment of a kindly gentleman, who owned large grounds 
 and — which seemed more important to Hamann, with his 
 powers of book-swallowing — a large library. He did his best 
 to make a good hofmeister ; in his letters to Herder we find 
 commissions for the purchase of hazel-hens (moor-hens, or 
 perhaps black-game) jostling strangely with dissertations on 
 Swedenborg or Shaftesbury; he went to Warsaw with his 
 patron for some months, but returned to Mitau for the winter, 
 and at length hastened back to Konigsberg and the arms of 
 Anna Regina. 
 
 To Herder the proximity of his master supplied the goad 
 which he desired; he was awakened from his drowsiness' and 
 stimulated to fresh endeavours. He visited Mitau at least twice ; 
 once in the summer of 1765, and again in spring of next year, 
 ^' as soon as the Diina was open," for during winter communi- 
 cation was difficult, if not impossible. On this occasion he was 
 accompanied by Hartknoch, who within the last few months 
 had definitely established himself, wife and all, in Riga, as book- 
 seller and publisher for the Russian Geneva. We have an account 
 of the return-journey in a letter written to Hamann the same 
 night in the form of a chapter of " My Shandyan Romance to my 
 Uncle Toby Shandy." They had parted at two o'clock on a day 
 of rain and wind, never to meet again in the flesh. Most of the 
 drive home was accomplished in silence, but it ended safely in 
 spite of the dangers of the Diina, swollen with the rains of 
 spring and the melting snow, perhaps still strewn with groaning 
 blocks of ice ; " two girls drowned that- very day," Herder 
 writes; an ominous journey, for all the would-be Shandyan 
 humour of the tale. 
 
1769.] RIGA. 59 
 
 But for the present the prospect seemed bright enough. 
 Herder wrote to Trescho that this summer of 1765 had been the 
 happiest of his life ; and hopes further that the precious heart 
 finds itself healthy enough to compose a Bible of Life as a 
 counterpart to that old Bible of Beath, implying that, after 
 all, Golgotha bones are perhaps not just the right thing of 
 which to build a rose-bower. Belonging to this period we find 
 several little poems to celebrate births or marriages amongst 
 his friends, as well as an occasional funeral oration over the 
 grave of one who had ceased to join their circle. Evidently he 
 was soon a man much sought after. " The mercantile tone 
 prevails," he tells us, " and a man of learning must accommodate 
 himself thereto.^' It may be imagined that no " man of learn- 
 ing" was more ready to accommodate himself than Herder. 
 His greatest delight was to visit the wealthy merchants in their 
 country-houses and pleasant little summer residences at some 
 distance from the town, generally near the seashore. He would 
 reward his hosts by short poems in praise of their dwelling, two 
 or three of which haA^e survived ; one, an ode in honour of a 
 country-house, Grafenheide, with its sea-views, avenues, and 
 woods, was set to music some thirty years afterwards, and is 
 perhaps still a pride to the place. 
 
 As though to complete his happiness, Hartknoch in the 
 autumn of this year finally determined to publish henceforth at 
 Riga, and not at Mitau. Being a man too bright and gay- 
 hearted, as Herder thought, distinctly to profess religion as a 
 means of livelihood, according to his first intention, he had been 
 won over in Konigsberg to follow the book-trade in preference, 
 and now, with his simple-hearted, cheery young wife, he and 
 his household make a pleasant picture. Of an evening Herder 
 was generally to be found there amongst a merry circle of other 
 friends, mostly interested in literature and things of the mind. 
 Their greatest pleasure was to listen whilst Herder read them 
 some fragment of the concluding cantos of Klopstock's Messias, 
 not yet appeared in print, or extracts from other good books, 
 above all from his own translation of Yorick's Sentimental 
 
60 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 Journey ; and then, to reward the reader, Hartknoch would 
 play any music that had lately reached Riga, and would sing 
 besides. With their recitation and music, converse, more or less 
 elevated, and refreshment, chiefl}^, it appears, in the form of 
 apples, the friends often remained together till far into the 
 night, sitting beside their nectar, "red wine with apples in it," 
 as at a feast of the gods. Many years afterwards Herder writes 
 to one of the circle : " The times to which your letter transplants 
 me are pleasant beyond most ; they are to me a beautiful dream, 
 and such they will remain. The remembrance of the friends of 
 my youth is like the enjoyment of a fair garden ; to me not one 
 of them has grown old, all live still in my memory as they lived 
 at that time." 
 
 For a year or two everything remained bright. Herder was 
 full of ambitious schemes of authorship, and was already getting 
 something accomplished. In his own phrase, " The meadows 
 of knowledge still lay fresh before him in all the radiance of 
 morning." His health was good and even improved. We are 
 told: 
 
 " The hard work of his youth with its necessary moderation 
 and his delicate maidenly chastity rewarded him with that gift 
 beyond price, bodily health. True, even in Riga he was still 
 delicate, slim and thin, rather spirit than body, but still strong, 
 elastic, and healthy to the core. Of this period, really the golden 
 age of his life, he always thought with love, tenderness, and 
 longing." ^ 
 
 He was evidently taking Hamann's advice, to live as well as 
 think, and now at last he had full opportunity, as far as society 
 in Riga went. He was enthusiastic for the revival of public 
 spirit in the place, and seems to have had hopes of calling to 
 life something of the old Hanseatic League, with Riga at its head, 
 as a republic under the protection of Russia. It is worthy oi 
 notice, that as yet we find no trace of hostility between Teuton 
 and Sclav as such. The town was a brotherhood, no longer of 
 
 ' Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 95. 
 
1769.] RIGA. 61 
 
 the sword but of the purse. In October 1765 the new town- 
 hall was finished, Early in the morning of the festal day the 
 people of Riga were aroused by three volleys of cannon from the 
 walls, and the clash of bells from the great steeple. The old folk 
 and the elders of all the guilds, great and small, proceeded two 
 by two towards the church, the chief magistrate in his coach 
 following behind. A solemn address was given in the church, 
 another in the judgment-hall, and, in the afternoon, every one 
 crowded to hear this young Herder in the school, before going 
 to tlie great vocal and instrumental concert in the new town- 
 hall. Herder treated of the theme, " Whether we still have a 
 nationality such as the Ancients had," and in after-life he 
 published the speech though in considerably altered form.-^ It 
 is chiefly devoted to praise of the German tongue and German 
 patriotism, with lamentations over the low estate of German art and 
 literature, and encouragements for the future. But he thought 
 it not inconsistent on the same occasion to write a lengthy ode 
 in praise of Russia and the Czarina. "Thine, Fatherland," 
 he cries, " thine is this house (the town-hall), under the shadow 
 of Catherine : she herself in full majesty has sanctified it to 
 thee ! As long as the eagle heads of Russia are joined in one, 
 so long will justice and equity flourish here." The fact seems 
 to be that for all his German patriotism he was far from being 
 exclusive ; he could never regard one race as necessarily better 
 than another. Under the teaching of Rousseau, his head was 
 full of bright ideas about universal brotherhood, peace, and the 
 fi'iendship of kindred souls all the world over. At intervals 
 throughout his life we find him advocating schemes for the 
 foundation of international leagues and societies, to further 
 co-operation amongst the learned and virtuous of the earth. 
 
 It was no doubt for this purpose that in 1766 he joined 
 himself to the ancient and august body of Freemasons. Here, 
 perhaps, was the instrument he desired ; through this the 
 brotherhood of man might become a realised and visible fact, 
 
 » In the Letters for the Furtluivance of Humanity, part v. (1795-6.) 
 
62 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17C4— 
 
 instead of continuing a dreamer's theory. At all events here 
 was a well-established order with claims to the universal, and 
 we cannot over-estimate the charm which anything universal 
 exercised on Herder's mind. Besides, the lodge in Riga had 
 been founded only sixteen years before by some of his greatest 
 friends, and contained all the most influential spirits of the 
 town, enlightened, as they boasted, according to the very best 
 enlightenment of France and Berlin. We read that they placed 
 unlimited confidence in Herder, and elected him secretary 
 before he had passed through the customary grades. There 
 seem to have been vague rumours at one time too that the 
 Freemasons paid for his journey to France, and gave him 100 
 friedrichsd'or for one of his earlier works ;^ all idle tales, in- 
 dignantly denied by his widow. " Why," she writes in the 
 Reminiscences, " I was already married to him when the book 
 came out; Hartknoch paid us the stipulated fee, one fried- 
 richsd'or the sheet ; and we never got another penny for it." 
 Attracted by the Oriental spirit of the concern, and its strange 
 signs and pictures. Herder devoted much time and trouble to 
 its history at first, hoping to inspire it with " a new spirit in 
 accordance with our times.^' But he soon found that this was 
 mere labour lost, for the august body had come to be regarded 
 by most of its members as a solemn plaything, and by others 
 only as a good social or even mercantile investment. Accord- 
 ingly, we find hardly any mention of it in his writings or letters, 
 and when he reached Weimar he ceased to be known as a free- 
 mason at all, though he still took a distant interest in their 
 proceedings. Once, indeed, a member of the brotherhood offered 
 to increase the circulation of his books by means of the order, 
 and was answered, that Herder would have his books circulate 
 on their own feet or not at all. The promises of these aprons and 
 trowels and mystic signs of universal brotherhood were evidently 
 soon found delusive in the eyes of this ardent young secretary ; 
 not by such means then was the Kingdom of Humanity, One 
 
 ' The Ifrkundc. 
 
1769.] RIGA. 63 
 
 and Indivisible, to be proclaimed from the Flood to the world's 
 end and the uttermost islands of the sea. 
 
 The disappointment was no doubt grievous, and, whether 
 mainly from this cause or from several distresses combined, the 
 winter of 1766-7 opened gloomily. Hamann was alarmed at 
 the despairing tone of his friend's letters, and offered to procure 
 him an appointment as tutor to a boy of thirteen, with the 
 advantages of perfect leisure, change, country air, and a chance 
 of travel. Herder refused emphatically, but with sadness. 
 
 I have had no sleep Friday and Saturday night, so anxious about a 
 sermon ; yet who goes not forward goes back, and I must retain the only 
 blessings I have, freedom and independence ; here at least I am under 
 the shade of a peaceful sycamore, though it's no fruit-tree. True I am 
 surrounded by envious persons, malignant miscreants, pitiful blockheads, 
 who all jump for joy when they see me brought to this pass ; here I have 
 the misfortune to be placed under a fellow like S. (Schlegel, always 
 rather a hide-bound and melancholy creature), but there I should re- 
 main unknown. Besides, one has not much taste for a country life, and 
 leisure is sometimes mere torture. ' ' Still I am deeply grateful, &c. to 
 you ; but you see that I am in a state of mind that no change of place 
 can alter ; a joy has taken its flight. Half last night I spent in a lament- 
 able depression of spirits, such as I would not wish to my worst enemy ; 
 I could have stamped and cried, only tears will not come. Let these 
 words remain between ourselves ; my head is ready to burst ; everything 
 is against me. Had I not to go on with my private lessons, because even 
 in this woeful time (which I do my best to conceal) I have found more 
 friends than I could have hoped, I would give up everything and live 
 like a lonely bird in the cathedral school. 
 
 He concludes by a wise resolution to put himself under a 
 doctor for a week or two at all events ; and indeed it was high 
 time; disappointment, slanderous tongues, the limitations of 
 Schlegel, "the annoyances of a man of learning amongst a pack 
 of money-grubbing merchants on the banks of the distant 
 Duna," all these had combined to overturn the just balance of 
 health in a frame naturally too frail, in spite of all moderation 
 and sobriety ; the cold of winter gave the final push, and till 
 February Herder lay sick unto death (life actually despaired of 
 for half a week), owing to pleurisy, inflamed lungs, paroxysms 
 
64 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 of fever, and all the accompanying distresses. As soon as he 
 was on a fair way to recovery he determined to let the surgeons 
 of Riga try what they could do with his troublesome eye-fistula. 
 He procured a dispensation or leave of absence from the school 
 for two months, and took leave of his friends by letter, for 
 during the whole eight weeks he was not to go out, nor read, 
 nor write ; to this active mind, just launching out into literature 
 and full of first ambition, no wonder such an existence seemed 
 but " the shadow of death," ^' the ante-room to the realm of the 
 forgotten." We must remember, too, his sick horror at all 
 surgery and operations of blood. But he endured in the hope 
 that when all was over he might see with at least " three-quarters 
 of his eyes," or even go on his way sound of sight for the future. 
 He was not yet twenty-three, and still almost expected to find a 
 heaven on earth dwelt in by angels instead of complex humanity 
 with very little angelic in its complexity ; but now, with all these 
 cares and misfortunes and hindrances crowding on his head, he 
 determined that in Riga at least was no heaven ; he would stay 
 there one year longer, according to his agreement, and then 
 *nhis sandbank in the Baltic" must be left; he would take the 
 first call that offered and make for Germany, for Berlin if pos- 
 sible, but anywhere out of Riga. 
 
 It might have been expected then that when in the middle 
 of this so-called '* eye-cure" an invitation, most flattering to his 
 repute as a schoolmaster, came fi.'om St. Petersburg itself, 
 urging him to accept the post of inspector in the Lutheran 
 school of St. Peter in that city. Herder would have caught 
 eagerly at such an opportunity of release. There seems to have 
 been no insurmountable hindrance in the terms of his agreement 
 at Riga, and in his new position he would at least have things 
 his own way, unshackled by Schlegel and jealous conservatism. 
 But he seems to have feared that after all it might be possible 
 for a man of his age to have things too much his own way ; he 
 dreaded not so much the responsibility as the economic worries 
 and loss of leisure involved in the management of so large an 
 institution, and, sitting as he was in "the shadow of death," 
 
1769.] RIGA. 65 
 
 witliout any great confidence in himself, he determined ''to 
 leave the question in God's hands"; in other words, not to 
 answer the invitation immediately, but to wait awhile and see 
 how things went. 
 
 Meantime the rumour that Herder was going to leave them 
 spread abroad amongst the men of Riga ; great was the lamen- 
 tation of young and old ; '^ friends came with tears in their 
 eyes," imploring him not to leave them comfortless. His popu- 
 larity reached its height, and was genuine beyond suspicion ; 
 even the " crawling backbiters," though they leapt for joy, had 
 to practise the performance in private, fearing the Rigan men 
 and Rigan women. Finally, within a week after the arrival of 
 the letter, the Counsellor Christoph Berens arose in the grave 
 assembly of the Thirty, and proposed, that whereas the town 
 was threatened with the loss of Johann Gottfried Herder, which 
 was much to be regretted, for not only was his reputation high 
 as schoolmaster in the said town, but also as a man of learning 
 and author his fame was likely to extend throughout Germany; 
 seeing that already by his Fragmente he had attracted the 
 attention of such men as the famous and learned Herr Gleim in 
 Halberstadt; it therefore became the Thirty to look around 
 them, how they might retain this ornament to their town, that 
 she be not robbed of her lustre at the hands of strangers ; he 
 proposed, further, that, for the express benefit of the aforesaid 
 Herder, a special post be created, the office of Pastor^ Adjunctus, 
 or additional curate, with sufficient revenues, for the joint sub- 
 urban churches of Jesus and St. Gertrude, at present annexed 
 to the pastorate of Bicker. 
 
 These proposals were at once adopted and the appointment 
 was duly confirmed in a few days. Herder — who had passed 
 his preliminary examination as preacher soon after his arrival 
 in Riga, and had already filled the pulpit in the cathedral and 
 other churches, when required — submitted in June to another 
 examination on the theme, *' The Holy Spirit as the author of 
 human salvation," was ordained priest in July, and solemnly 
 introduced by the archdeacon to the two churches under his 
 
 F 
 
ee HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764- 
 
 charge. He had left the question '' in God's hands," and this 
 was the emphatic answer. After all these proofs of affection 
 and esteem from friends, especially from Berens and the Thirty, 
 it was impossible for him to go with any grace ; and though for 
 a time his despondency still remained, and from his letters we 
 may suppose that he regarded his honours more as an additional 
 trouble than a blessing ; yet his ideal of life had always been 
 rather as a preacher than a schoolmaster, and his complaints 
 must be attributed to bad health and the disappointment inevit- 
 able to every man who reaches in reality what from a distance 
 had seemed sublime. He sent a polite refusal to his admirers 
 in St. Petersburg and at once began his new duties, preaching 
 one sermon every fortnight, besides saints' days and festivals, 
 his churches always crowded, though they stood in the suburbs 
 and he preached in the afternoon. 
 
 One other thing there was which may have contributed to 
 bind him to Riga for yet a little while, and may even have 
 proved a stronger tie than all the rest, however much he re- 
 fused to acknowledge it to himself. Just at this time he gained 
 the friendship of a Madame Busch, herself suffering from some 
 weakness of the eye, which established between them the 
 universal kinship of sorrow. But the story is best told, as far 
 as we need know it, in Herder's own words. Three years after 
 this he wrote for his betrothed a sketch of his past life, in 
 which he incautiously remarked, " to leave Riga I had to tear 
 myself from the arms of an unhappy lady." The indignation 
 of the girl may be imagined, for jealousy of the past is often 
 more bitter, because more hopeless, than jealousy of the present. 
 When at length she answered, it was something like this: 
 '' How shall I come to your arms, when another unhappy lady 
 has been there before me— is there now for all I know — that 
 woman you left in Riga ? " This drew from Herder the follow- 
 ing explanation : 
 
 You must forgive my smiling ; I will clear up the whole matter. Do 
 you know who this unhappy friend was and is ? An excellent but very 
 unhappily married lady, between thirty and forty, whose friendship and 
 
1769.] RIGA. 67 
 
 daily intercourse I enjoyed together with another honourable man (named 
 Begrow), from whom we kept nothing secret in our hearts. I spent two 
 full years in her house, morning, noon (for I dined there daily), after- 
 noon, and evening till night; and as I from day to day learnt to appreciate 
 better her lively intellect, her kindly heart, and great firmness of 
 character, we lived together as friends, such as the world had few, and 
 Riga none except ourselves. We were daily together ; we chatted and 
 read, we quarrelled' and comforted each other, we dallied and caressed, 
 and — nothing more. One thought further would have injured our friend- 
 ship. I have done some service for her and her children ; we had in 
 common all joys and cares in which I could take a share ; and in me she 
 thus lost a friend, a daily companion, and kindly spirit such as she will 
 certainly never find again in her lifetime. She accompanied me in a yawl 
 full of friends to my ship, though she was extremely afraid of the water ; 
 our last kiss — I standing above on the ship speeding to the open sea, she 
 below in the ferry-boat returning to her home, perhaps never to see each 
 other again — was really a kiss of friendship, such as is not often given on 
 the ocean. A terrible storm arose and separated us before we were well 
 out of sight, and I have had no letter from her since leaving France. The 
 whole town knew of our friendship, because for her sake I gave up all the 
 hosts of invitations to parties, and I hardly ever went to preach but she 
 was with me in the carriage. This is the story of my unhappy friend; 
 are you still jealous ? Well, I have a ribbon of hers that, on the day of 
 departure, 1 snatched from her beautiful foot as a remembrance, giving 
 her in return one of Abbt's works that he had given me himself. Should 
 I not send you this ribbon with the little basket I received from you 
 lately ? A bond of friendship at the foot of the altar of love is no profa- 
 nation. Her last words to me were : '' Dear Herder, my only wish for 
 you is that your future wife may show you half as much love as I have 
 shown you kindness. " Do not think any more of the matter ; I can have 
 no secrets from you, &c. , &c. 
 
 At the candour of this confession we cannot but wonder, . 
 and there is not the sHghtest reason to suppose that it does not 
 contain the whole truth. The age of sentimentahty was already 
 far advanced in Germany, though Werther had not loved and 
 died ; friendships in Rousseau's manner were the fashion, and 
 there was a great deal of theorising on relations commonly 
 called Platonic ; nor was everyone satisfied with theory. In 
 such an atmosphere no one can blame Herder if, overcome by 
 tlie spectacle most touching to the youthful and unmarried 
 
 f2 
 
68 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 heart, the sight of a distinguished and beautiful lady in un- 
 happy wedlock, he determined to devote himself entirely to her 
 service. Her husband seems to have raised no objection. To 
 the lady and especially to Herder himself the advantage was 
 great, and for the next two years we accordingly find his 
 activities redoubled. 
 
 The Fragmented which had been gradually coming out for 
 some months past, were collectively published in three parts in 
 1767. The Torso, in memory of Thomas Abbt, appeared in the 
 following year ; and the three published parts of the Kritische 
 Wdlder in 1768 and 1769. At the same time he was engaged 
 upon reviews and short treatises for the Konigsberg papers and 
 more popular essays in the Riga journal. He also turned his 
 attention more closely than ever to the study of Hebrew and 
 the critical examination of the Old Testament, and he thus laid 
 the foundation for all his future work in life. 
 
 But, before we try to form some idea of these beginnings in 
 literature, let us stop at the door of Jesus's or St. Gertrude's 
 church, and, following the young preacher accompanied by 
 Madame Busch from his carriage to the chancel, let us see 
 what the people of Riga (chiefly young men and earnest women, 
 we are told) came out into the suburbs for to hear on those 
 Sunday afternoons long ago. At this period Herder wrote his 
 sermons word for word, a practice which he afterwards modified 
 and even abandoned ; but in spite of many entreaties he refused 
 to have them printed, well knowing the difference between a 
 sermon and a pamphlet, for in his own words ** sermons must 
 be preached, they must be received from the life, and remain 
 impressed on the heart, not on paper." He never felt himself 
 bound by the letter of what he had written, and readers of his 
 few published sermons must use their imagination to form a 
 sufficient conception of their original force. At this period espe- 
 cially. Herder showed a natural delight in fulness of language. 
 Winckelmann on reading his first book exclaimed, " What new 
 Pindar is this that has arisen in the north ? " and in later life 
 Herder would laugh and say, '' Certainly my sermons at that 
 
1769.] RIGA. 69 
 
 time were tricked out with youthful imagination and eloquence ; 
 all such flowers and leaves fall off as time goes on." For- 
 tunately we are able to judge for ourselves owing to a shorf 
 treatise called The Speaker ^ or- Preacher of God, and his fare- 
 well sermon, which has been printed at full length as written, 
 though probably not as spoken. 
 
 The former was almost certainly written at the very begin- 
 ning of the Riga period, as the ideal of what a preacher should 
 be, just as in the school-speech was sketched the ideal of a 
 schoolmaster. Herder begins with a sneer at those witty 
 persons who listen and sleep, and then wake up and laugh ; he 
 then distinguishes the preacher from the poet, from the public 
 orator, from all the play-actors ^^from Roscius to Garrick," and 
 from the philosophers. 
 
 The preacher must be great but quiet, solemn without the poet's oma-^ 
 ment, eloquent without Ciceronian periods, powerful without dramatic 
 magic, wise without learned speculations, compliant without diplomatic 
 cunning. 
 
 He draws a picture of such a man, the main characteristics 
 taken, it has been supposed, from old pastor Willamov of Mohr- 
 ungen ; at all events. Herder says the portrait is from memory : 
 
 His words are not sermons, for there is none of that stiff sermon style; 
 nor are they speeches, for there is none of that oratorical thunder and 
 lightning; nor are they theological treatises, for there is no dogmatic 
 point, no academical explanation, no skeleton of systematic arrangement. 
 He will not begin with exclamations to God, nothing but O ! and Ah ! as 
 if he had just come from Heaven and wanted to storm up again; but he 
 says a few solemn words of preparation that sink into the soul. As his 
 main theme he takes some common experience that must have come to 
 the notice of all his audience, but as he goes on they will all say, ' ' Here 
 was the thing right under our eyes, and yet we never saw it before; we 
 must listen to this man, for he sees more than we." But then, like a good 
 schoolmaster, he will give his listeners the joy of making a discovery for 
 themselves. I do not wish to follow his thoughts; I will think with him; 
 he must speak what I was just on the point of thinking, and then T shall 
 never forget it. The teaching will be no dry system of morals, no second- 
 hand rules of life, but a picture; the Idea of the picture is morality; the 
 composition, a situation of humanity and life; the colour of the picture is 
 
70 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 religion: and thus the semion is a complete whole. Between such a 
 sermon and the commonplace moral teaching there is as much difference 
 as between a picture by Raphael and a Niimberg composition; no wonder 
 then that most sermons are found tedious, old-fashioned, and dry. 
 
 Turning now to his farewell sermon, which naturally gives 
 us a more complete idea of his actual work in Riga, we find 
 that after briefly stating the cause of this special service and his 
 sorrow at departure, adding discreetly, "We will, as far as 
 possible, repress and conceal all signs of regret at this separa- 
 tion," he gives out his text (James i. 21), and begins at once 
 with an examination of a parson's position : — • 
 
 The man of the world regards the parson as a useless institution, 
 merely to satisfy human prejudices; the man of wit considers him a mask 
 for the greatest hypocrisy on God's earth; the ordinary citizen thinks the 
 Church a fair way of making a Hying; the ambitious man thinks it a 
 sphere in which he can display himself; the idle man sees in the Church 
 a place of rest in which one comes off easily with a moderate amount of 
 work; and the ignorant man thinks that on the whole this is the best 
 cloak to hide his narrow views and limited brains. But none of these 
 considerations influenced me; my object was to plant a word that would 
 make the souls of men happy, to save them from the slough of this 
 degenerate age, that abounds in so much that is gross and paltry and vile. 
 This is a parson's one office. In this world nothing really moves us but*] 
 what is actually human, what is created out of the experiences of our i 
 hearts. Most of my own sermons, therefore, all my best, have beeni 
 human (meiiscMich). I have tried to show that our only happiness is to j 
 remain true to the foundations of our nature, and to follow no guide but 1 
 reason and conscience. Humanity, therefore, in its widest circle, with all ■ 
 its noble ideas of God, itself, and Nature, with all its feelings of brother- 
 hood and sympathy, with all its charming duties and high dispositions 
 and capabilities for happiness, — Humanity {mcicschlichkeit) in this wide 
 scope was always the main theme of my sermons, instruction, and exhort- 
 ation. / My manner, too, was human; not occupied in dark and subtle' 
 questions and inconceivable mysteries, but reaching as straight and deep 
 as might be to the heart of man. Those of my hearers who used to come 
 to me once or twice, and having, like Noah's dove, plucked off an olive- 
 branch here and there, would fly away again, may deny this; many, too, 
 have been kind enough to call me a philosopher in black cloth, more fitted 
 for the lecture-room than the pulpit; but they do me too much honour; 
 my sermons have bCen everything rather than learned. I have even 
 
17G9.] RIGA. 71 
 
 descended to the particulars of everyday life, especially as to the manage- 
 ment of children, advice that is more than ever necessary now that 
 education seems to have gone mad, and few know the value of one human 
 soul, for which Christ died. No, if I preached a philosophy, it was 
 always the philosophy of mankind: I spoke a word to make the souls of 
 men happy. 
 
 Such, too, was my manner; it has been said that my sermons were 
 like a tinkling cymbal of fine phrases to gain applause for eloquence, a 
 chain of comparisons, pictures, and metaphors, to serve as a half -hour's 
 diversion and win me the title of a tasteful preacher. But I do not con- 
 sider it high praise when one of my audience pushes his way yawning out 
 of the church-door, and exclaims " What a beautiful sermon!" This noisy 
 praise is nothing to me compared to the quiet sigh or tear of one soul who 
 cheerfully resolves to lead a better life. I have, therefore, never tried to 
 arouse passions, as I might have done, by raising my voice and squeezing 
 out a tear or two. For not much is to be hoped from all this emotion and 
 sentimental hysterics; all this ecstatic devotion, which is as contagious as 
 yawning or the electric spark, passes off as quickly as it came. Hence 
 people have said I was feeble, especially towards the end of a sermon; if 
 this was so, it was unconscious. At all events I have never made my 
 sermons a mere string of biblical words and phrases, without meaning or 
 connexion. We Christians have got into a way of repeating these words, 
 without thinking about their real meaning and context; and so we go on 
 learning and learning, and never come any nearer the knowledge of the 
 truth. But my word was not only the word of man but the word of God, 
 on whom depends our whole existence in time and eternity; I have tried 
 to extend sublime and more worthy ideas of Him; and who then will not 
 admit that a parson's position is above price? How happy if I were 
 assured that the Judge of all the earth would recognise my work for the 
 last few years as not altogether vain ! how gladly could I then say with 
 Peter, "silver and gold have I none!" Is there no human soul that would 
 own itself better for my teaching ? If not, I may as well lay aside my 
 office with a blush, and have done with it. 
 
 For certain good reasons I have refused to have my sermons printed, 
 but my greatest hope is that my words will not be without fruit even in 
 my absence. My only object in going is to learn the world of my God 
 from more sides and to become more useful in my calling, and my greatest 
 hope is at some future time to be able to return to this place with larger 
 powers of service. I do not wish to be remembered with bitterness even 
 by those who have blackened my name ; the mistakes and weaknesses 
 due to temperament and years I leave to the forgiveness of my friends. I 
 leave the future with its bitter and sweet in the hand of God, who has 
 
12 HEKDEK AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 never suffered a man to be utterly unhappy that was true to his Provi- 
 dence and Will. In this parish I have had the fortune to know persons 
 who had noble thoughts and loved religion. Pray for me, my friends, 
 that it go well with me, and that God do for me as it seemeth him best 
 according to his infinite wisdom. 
 
 Such is a bare outline of the sermon listened to by the 
 people of Riga in the church of St. Gertrude, crowded to over- 
 flowing one Sunday in May 1769. There is sufficient in it to 
 explain the " empty benches," of which the other clergy in the 
 town complained, whenever Herder was preaching, for out in 
 that suburban church was a man who had something to say that 
 the people wanted to hear, and after being drenched with the 
 barren foam of the moral commonplace, and choked with the 
 desert sand of theological conti'oversy, they eagerly caught at 
 this more human treatment, at the risk of offending the more 
 old-fashioned practitioners. That the offence was great and the 
 envy bitter, Herder himself has confessed again and again. 
 After he had left Hartknoch writes to him, "The clergy and 
 Schlegel are especially your enemies." To a soul sensitive 
 almost to womanish delicacy such a position could not long be 
 bearable. Yet ho did not finally determine to leave Riga with- 
 out many searchings of heart. Not much more than a year 
 after this he sent to his betrothed the following account of this 
 period : — 
 
 In Liefland within a short time I gained the complete love of the 
 town, the friendship of three of the most worthy people I have ever 
 known (probably Hartknoch, Berens, and Madame Busch or Begrow), the 
 respect of the most original thinkers I have met in my life, of whom and 
 their trust in me I could write whole volumes ; on the other side the 
 hatred of the whole body of clergy, though they did not dare to raise a 
 finger against me, and the squint-eyed envy of a few crawling creatures. 
 In spite of this in Liefland I was so free and independent in my life, my 
 actions, and my teachings, as perhaps I shall never be able to be again. 
 Does not this show some strength of character ? (people had been whis- 
 pering, as people will, that he had no character). Loved by the town 
 and my parish, worshipped by my friends and a number of young men 
 who looked upon me as their Christ ! (he goes so far in self-defence and 
 to his betrothed), the favourite of the government and the nobility, who 
 
1769.] RIGA. 73 
 
 marked me out for Heaven knows what positions — in spite of all I went 
 from tlie summit of this applause, from the arms of an unhappy lady, 
 deaf to all proposals of short-sighted kindliness, amidst the tears and 
 lamentations of every one — I went away, for my genius irresistibly called 
 to me, " Use thy years and look into the world !" 
 
 Yes, youth was going by and the world was still to be seen. 
 Little insight into universal life could be gained by a man 
 stranded on a sandbank in the Baltic. England, France, and 
 Holland must at least be visited. He would there learn how 
 other nations educate themselves, and manage to make their 
 truce with the world. May not even " beloved Italy " be reached 
 at last? But we must not suppose that this desire to see " God's 
 earth " was Herder's only motive in leaving Biga, though with 
 all a man's power of self-deception he induced himself to believe 
 it. His position had in fact become insupportably irksome, 
 partly through malicious tongues, partly from the want of intel- 
 lectual society ; for, in spite of all his horror of '' the man of 
 learning," the wits of merchants could satisfy him no more, and 
 he missed the libraries of the more learned towns. But beyond 
 and above all this there were secret annoyances and discontents 
 about his literary ambition, and unsettled questionings of spirit 
 in other directions, that will be further hinted at in the next 
 chapters. On the whole the one and only way of restoring his 
 freedom was to cut all ties and go. In vain did the government 
 offer him this post and the other, if he would but stay awhile ; 
 all they could get from him was a vague hope of return at some 
 future time, a hope which Herder himself kept by him for many 
 years. Hartknoch disinterestedly urged the change, and was 
 the first to supply money ; other contributions quickly came 
 in ; furniture and books were sold to pay off debts ; leave of 
 departure was granted, the farewell sermon preached; and 
 the Tuesday after, Herder and GustavBerens were accompanied 
 in a yawl (or shallop) to the ship by Hartknoch and his wife, 
 Begrow and Madame Busch, — all dread of water overcome in 
 this supreme moment. Hardly was the ship reached when a 
 terrible storm with rain and thunder set in. We may imagine 
 
74 HERDER xVND HIS TIMES. [17C4— 
 
 the woe of the parting, the ribbon snatched from the beautiful 
 foot, the '^ kiss of friendship on the ocean," the poor frightened 
 lady rocking up and down in the yawl meantime, the promise 
 to write soon, '^ unless the sea- nymphs love me more than the 
 Graces on land ; " the dreary return home through the wind and 
 rain, "all the party soaked to the skin," and to one at least the 
 light of her life as it were gone out. Thus, as he says, *^ among 
 signs and wonders and portents of Heaven," did Herder go 
 down to the sea in a ship, and was once more free of the past. 
 Was it not to wander over that the world was made so wide ? 
 
1769.] 75 
 
 CHAPTEB V. 
 
 DEUTSCHLAND, 1764 — 1769. 
 
 " Cold hater of his kind, 
 A sea-cave suits him, not the vulgar hearth ! 
 What need of tongue-talk, with a bookish store 
 Would stock ten cities." 
 
 Aeistophanes' Apology. 
 
 We should find it impossible to estimate the significance of 
 Herder's work, both in youth and in manhood, unless we first 
 formed for ourselves some idea of German thought at the time, 
 and — which is more important — of German life and character. 
 It is my object to illustrate in Herder certain tendencies of the 
 last century, or rather one tendency that worked its way along 
 several channels ; and a tendency is a meaningless term, unless 
 we understand from what it diverged, and from what sources it 
 gathered strength. 
 
 Tt is still through the individual that we must reach the uni- 
 versal ; the more particular we become the wider is the gene- 
 rality, till, if we could but see with perfect clearness the heart 
 and soul, the essential spirit, of the individual, we should find 
 it co-extensive with mankind. It is this which gives to all 
 personality that force and directness, that humour and ready 
 appeal, which is not to be replaced by the most carefully-deduced 
 abstractions. For this reason I have chosen in the present 
 chapter to indicate the main currents of German life at that time 
 by giving some account of the leading men with whom Herder 
 was connected in his life or works at this earlier period, rather 
 than by the easier method of ready-made summaries and results, 
 which to the reader too often remain unrealities hanging in 
 the air. 
 
76 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 The history of German literature up to this century is like 
 some long avenue of statues that stood on the plains of Elis in 
 honour of the conquerors in the games, and led the wondering 
 stranger on through marble limbs once hot with conflict to the 
 temple where the Zeus of Pheidias was enthroned in grandeur, 
 though, as Heine tells us, he dared not arise lest his sublime 
 head should burst through the temple roof. Only after the 
 human statues could the worshipper bow before the final touch 
 of genius that made the Zeus divine. Even so the Zeus who 
 understood German ^ sits at the end of the avenue of strange 
 and human statues, who in their day fought a good fight, whose 
 limbs were once hot with confiict, though now they serve but 
 as guideposts to the temple's place. Or this interruption in our 
 rhapsody may be compared to the Homeric catalogue of ships, 
 or to any other list of men who have given their strength, no 
 matter how small, to strike a blow in any great expedition of 
 the children of light against the strongholds of barbarism. 
 
 From his *' sand-bank in the Baltic " Herder was looking 
 out on a country where the only ray of light seemed to be shed 
 by the fires of war. Since the peace of Westphalia, Germany 
 had been as a kingdom divided against itself ; its Reich had 
 become the mere mockery of a name. Bereft, it is said, of a 
 quarter of its population in the Thirty Years' War, it had lain 
 passive, like a blind giant sorely wounded, with vultures tear- 
 ing its flesh in the shape of " three hundred sovereigns and 
 fifteen hundred princes." The whole people had become 
 ashamed of their German customs and their German tongue. 
 '•' One is still in France," writes Voltaire from Potsdam, in 
 1750; ^^ German is never used except to soldiers and horses." 
 But, though *' from Frederick's throne the German muse un- 
 honoured went her way," as Schiller sings, it was through 
 Frederick that the German muse became possible. All the 
 hree hundred courts might gabble their French, the rude 
 citizens ape the French manners, the learned men deluge the 
 
 ' Heine's Romantisohc Schule, end of book i. 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 77 
 
 tongue of Luther with French phrases, the king himself might 
 spend his leisure time in writing bad French verse ; but, for all 
 this, Rossbach remained a fact, and from Potsdam there went 
 forth no sweet greetings to the Pompadour. On the other side, 
 in spite of Emperors and Pragmatic Sanctions, the land was 
 slowly throwing off the incubus of Austria. The Empire was 
 already regarded as almost a foreign power, and the rest of the 
 nation, thrown in upon itself, began to feel its limbs throbbing 
 with a new strength. Frederick had stirred the hearts of all 
 Germans with a question of common interest ; and national life, 
 with all its young vigour and enthusiasm, seemed once more to 
 be awakening from sleep. 
 
 But, as became Germans of those days, not in politics chiefly, 
 but in the kingdom of the air, was the change to be accom- 
 plished. We must, therefore, visit the chief centres of thought 
 throughout Germany, and see what the intellects of those days 
 were trying to bring about or oppose during the four years that 
 Herder was in Riga, when first he began to blaze like an aurora 
 in the north, making the old men shake their heads at this 
 portent, whilst the heart of youth was set wildly fluttering. Our 
 task will be the easier, because German thought at that time 
 generally took a distinct colour from its place; and certain 
 '^ schools," with definite characters of their own, such as the 
 Berlin school, the Leipzig school, &c. had gathered round the 
 different centres, especially the universities. 
 
 At Leipzig, then, as the old Greek poet began with Zeus, so 
 we w411 begin with Goethe, though as yet he was but a '^ light- 
 ning fellow " {blitzender Kerl), unknown to the many and much 
 ridiculed for his provincial speech and raiment. He had come 
 to Leipzig in 1765, having lived through the woes of separation 
 from Gretchen. Annette was now the heroine of the hour, and 
 he was tormenting her into estrangement by his Lover^s 
 Whims. With her and his engraving on copper, — making 
 merry with his friends, writing pompous verses full of gods 
 and goddesses, and ^' metaphor-hunting " in the woods, after 
 the example of Herder's old favourite, Kleist,--his time was 
 
78 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 more occupied or wasted than pleased the learned professors. 
 Yet he did not fail to gain what he miglit from the notable 
 figures of the place, though, indeed, Leipzig had somewhat 
 fallen from its high estate in the last twenty years, owing 
 to the scandalous revolt of the Swiss in Zurich, and the assaults 
 of Lessing, with sentences flashing like Frederick's swords. 
 
 Everyone now knows ^ the account of the visit of this young 
 Zeus, still a nurseling as it were in Crete, to old father Saturn 
 Gottsched, once the undisputed king of the German universe, 
 but now meeting a son whom he could not by any means 
 swallow. Everyone must remember the huge bald head, the 
 vast wig swung on with one hand, the servant boxed out of the 
 room with the other, ^*as at a comedy,'' and the conversation 
 quietly begun and proceeded with to considerable length, as if 
 nothing had happened. Gottsched was to die within a year, as 
 lonely and with as desperate a cause as his own Dying Cato. 
 His Critical Art of Pottery still ruled the schools, but since 
 Bodmer turned on him, twenty years before, his fall had been 
 certain, though gradual. In vain had he cried, ** Things are as 
 they have ever been ; our only duty is to follow the faultless 
 models of the French, according to the rules of right reason and 
 Wolff''s philosophy ; above all things let us be clear. What do 
 these Swiss mean by their ^imagination?' I know not what 
 manner of a thing it is." In vain had he watered the language 
 till' it spread on all sides, like " a deluge of mediocrity," threaten- 
 ing to overwhelm the very elect. In vain had he crowned the 
 false poet; Schonaich as a rival to Klopstock. He was forsaken 
 by most of his followers ; they would not write for his paper, 
 but started a new thing at Bremen for themselves, even pure- 
 hearted Gellert joining them. He was parodied on the stage by 
 his favourite actress ; obliged to read a bitter satire against him- 
 self to Briihl at Dresden ; and, last of all, even the clever wife 
 of his bosom, to whom be owed so much, turned against him ; 
 
 * Aus mexnem Lchcn^ book vii. end of the first quarter. Carlyle's Mu' 
 cellanics, vol. iv. p. IGl. Goethe's Works. 
 
1769.] BEUTSCHLAND. 79 
 
 and it is with a start of surprise that we find him still alive, and 
 proceeding with the conversation to Goethe as if nothing had 
 happened. His large wig inspires us with some respect and 
 much pity, for he had done good work in his time, though he 
 could never make out what manner of thing was this " imagina- 
 tion," with its English Milton and other crude barharities. He 
 had fought hard as a follower of his master, Wolff, for the purity 
 of German speech and literature according to the lights of the 
 French against the inanities of the Silesian school ; but when 
 at length he became blind to the time of day we forget his ser- 
 vices with a laugh. 
 
 But in the moral philosophy lecture-room, crowded to over- 
 flowing, there is a thin little figure with trustful blue eyes and 
 thin hollow voice, discoursing of the influence of culture on 
 morality, and much beside, to an audience ever glad to hear and 
 applaud, though now and then a frivolous Frenchman fresh from 
 Yoltaire will say, '^ Let him alone; he's fooling us all."-^ This 
 is Christian Fiirchtegott Gellert, the pure of soul, the worshipped 
 one of Leipzig and indeed of Germany, as he sat correcting with 
 copious red ink the themes of his pupils, Goethe's among the 
 rest, or rode out solemnly on his horse, a present from the Kiir- 
 furst— Prince Henry's charger, the quadruped that "was asto- 
 nished at itself" — being now dead.^ He was praised by Friedrich 
 himself as " the most reasonable of all German wTiters," and 
 was the oracle of the Protestant party, consulted by anxious 
 fathers for their sons, by trustful maidens as to their marriage 
 arrangements ; a man that bore his faculties meekly, suffering 
 much from sleeplessness and the torment of soul that people in 
 despair for an explanation call hypochondria. It was he who 
 urged the young Goethe before all things to write a good hand, 
 in the hope that thus at least he might acquire something of a 
 style ; for the rest, he had been a follower of Gottsched up to a 
 certain point, a firm friend of the two Schlegels, father and 
 
 > A71S meinem Lehen, book vii. about three-quarters through. 
 
 '^ Carlylc's Frederick, vol. vi. p. 156, and for the whole passage pp. 149-157. 
 
80 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764- 
 
 uncle of two more famous brothers, and of Gartner, Cramer, 
 Rabener, and the other leaders of the Bremische Bdtrdge^ to 
 which he long contributed. His fables — no mere translations of 
 Lafontaine, as he asserted with all the indignation that in him 
 lay — were then on everyone's lips, as were his hymns and sacred 
 poems, six of which at least will outlast the world, being put to 
 music by Beethoven, who was born a year after Gellert's death. 
 For, after Herder had left Riga some six months, Leipzig was 
 lamenting over Gellert's decease, and all Germany joined in the 
 mourning, poems and elegies coming in from all the would-be 
 poets of the day, ' ' enough to fill a considerable volume " we are 
 told, so pure-minded and gentle had he been. Thus do the old 
 king and queen, Gottsched and Gellert, the Louis and Marie - 
 Antoinette of Germany, pass away, for their time had come. 
 
 In the same house with Gellert, and bound to him in closest 
 friendship, there was dwelling till 1767 a man named Garve, 
 hereafter to be known as a translator of many English works, 
 and especially of Cicero's De Officiis^ with notes, undertaken at 
 the command of Frederick. He had been at Frankfurt-on-Oder 
 enjoying the lectures of Baumgarten, the celebrated inventor of 
 the word ^Esthetics, and was now diligently contributing to his 
 friend Weisse's journal, the Library of Literature, But in 
 the year mentioned he left Leipzig to comfort his mother in his 
 native Breslau, returning on Gellert's death to occupy his room 
 as professor. In his absence he had acquired that fatal hypo- 
 chondria, that blighted so many of Germany's best lives at this 
 time. His works on philosophy were much read, being written 
 in a clear and popular style ; and, though he himself confesses he 
 was not at home in higher speculation, yet Kant called him a 
 philosopher in the true meaning of the word. He died at the 
 end of the century in the midst of a treatise on The InvaluVs 
 Solitude^ based on copious experience. 
 
 One of the central figures of the intermediate period between 
 Gottsched and Goethe was Christian Weisse, editor and drama- 
 tist, a radiant, many-sided man, not falling far short of genius. 
 He had come to the university in great poverty, and, purposing 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 81 
 
 devotion to theology, had sat at the feet of Ernesti, but was led 
 away into other pursuits by his friend Lessing and the bright 
 young circle who started the Bremische Beitrdge. He almo?t 
 quarrelled with Lessing about the trouble with the actors that 
 drove Lessing from Leipzig; but in 1759 Nicolai had resigned 
 to him the editing of the famous Library of Literature and 
 Liberal Arts. He stood high in Gellert's favour, partly owing 
 to his wife, whom Gellert used to edify of an evening by re- 
 delivering to her his lectures on moral philosophy ; but it was 
 he who had given the final blow to Gottsched's power by his 
 comedy of Tlie Devil let loose, written at Lessing's suggestion ; 
 on the other hand, he was exposed to the attacks of Bodmer 
 and his faithful Swiss for the French frivolity of his operettas. 
 At one time he seems to have been haunted by visions of 
 becoming a Shakspeare, or even an ^iEschylus, for he wrote a 
 Richard III., a Borneo and Juliet, and a Taking of Thebes ; but, 
 faiHng in this endeavour, he . tm-ned to domestic comedy and 
 songs of Amazons and of Tyrtasus, something after the manner 
 of Gleim. Probably it was in songs that his real strength lay, 
 for, whereas his plays disappeared from the stage after a certain 
 space, one still hears drunken echoes of his song, beginning — 
 
 " But for love and but for wine, 
 Where's the good of living ? " 
 
 To us he is chiefly interesting for the sake of his friends, such as 
 Uz, with whom he corresponded for forty years without personal 
 acquaintance. 
 
 Another follower of Gellert, far more devout than Weisse, 
 was young Clodius, over whom Goethe made so merry. He 
 took upon himself to fill up the holes in Gellert's instructions, 
 and, Hke his master, he was not sparing in red ink ; and, at all 
 events, he set Goethe free from the pedantic use of all the gods 
 and goddesses of Olympus and Parnassus, that jostled each other 
 in the fashionable verses of the time. But, finding that in place 
 of the gods and goddesses Clodius flooded the language with 
 pompous words of Latin and Greek after the manner of Ramler, 
 
82 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 the hUtzender Kerl revenged himself by writing a solemn ode to 
 cookery in Clodius's vein on the inn wall, and parodying 
 Clodius's most wearisome of comedies, Medon, or, the Fhilo- 
 sophers Revenge^ thereby creating no little scandal in Leipzig.^ 
 One bright point about Clodius is his friendship with Herder's 
 Kleist, the poet of The Spring^ in happier days among his 
 native mountains that lie towards Bohemia. 
 
 Another of the great men of Leipzig with whom the young 
 Goethe was far from satisfied was Ernesti, professor of theology, 
 and interpreter of the Scriptures by a method then new. We 
 need here only notice that since he habitually wrote and thought 
 in Latin, as became a man of learning, he had the greatest 
 difficulty in composing the few German sermons required of 
 his professorship ; also, that he carefully avoided all modern 
 literature, and had a contempt for the style of these latter days, 
 and that his daughter, left motherless at her birth, grew up to 
 speak Latin and read Greek. 
 
 Before leaving Leipzig we may mention a poor sick figure 
 in the worst straits of poverty and melancholy, who, encouraged 
 by Gottsched, had come to the university, and was supporting 
 himself by writing occasional poems, fables, and satires. Weisse 
 and Gleim took pity on him — sent him to Hamburg as news- 
 paper editor for one thing — but it was too late. His name was 
 Benjamin Michaelis ; had but the fates allowed, he too might 
 have been a poet, but black night fluttered round his head, and 
 before he was twenty-seven he went to " Father Gleim " in 
 Halberstadt to die. 
 
 In Zurich the founders of the Swiss school, Bodmer and the 
 inseparable Breitinger — Gottsched's first scientific opponents — 
 were still in life and vigour, though their fighting-days lay some 
 fifteen years behind them, and their glory was beginning to 
 pale before the steel-blue star of Lessing. Inseparable though 
 alternate, they were like the Castor and Pollux of old ; Bodmer 
 writes his book, and Breitinger makes a preface ; Breitinger 
 
 * Am meinem Lcbc/t, book vii. lust quarter. 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 83 
 
 writes his book, and Bodmer makes a preface. Both were 
 nati^^es of Zurich, or its close neighbourhood. Bodmer, as a 
 child, found Latin easier than German ; aftei'wards considered 
 theology, in Switzerland at all events, rather gloomy stuff; 
 travelled in France and Italy, and, meeting with a French 
 translation of Addison's Spectator^ determined to produce the 
 same kind of thing in Zurich. He produced Discourses of 
 Painters accordingly, with Breitinger's help, Gottsched as yet 
 applauding heartily ; he also translated Paradise Lost and 
 Hudibras, being much inclined to English thought and manner. 
 At length the two inseparables hit upon the extraordinary dis- 
 covery that it might be as well for a poet to have imagination. 
 Gottsched was furious ; had he not been a poet all his life, and 
 yet was he not perfectly innocent of imagination? Who were 
 these rebels? And for a season things went hard with the 
 Swiss. But in 1748 the first three cantos of Klopstock's 
 Messias appeared in the Journal of Bremen^ and were received 
 with applause by all Germany in spite of Gottsched's sneers. 
 The triumph of Zurich now began. Klopstock came to Switzer- 
 land, and lodged in Bodmer's house ; he was succeeded by young 
 Wieland, who had just written a heroic poem on Arminius, and 
 was engaged with Plato, and another "epic" on the Temptation 
 of Abraham. It had been well for the inseparables had they 
 died in the flush of victory, but it entered into Bodmer's head 
 that if Klopstock could write epics on Scripture he might do the 
 same. Accordingly, epic after epic was poured out, beginning 
 with the Flood, the "Noachid," till, about the middle of Herder's 
 period in Riga, nearly the whole of the book of Genesis had 
 appeared as a series of epics by Bodmer's hand — a singular 
 memorial of delusion. Thus, in spite of his wide sympathies 
 and republicanism, in spite of his tragedies (one of them on 
 William Tell), his defence of Milton against Voltaire, and his 
 partial discovery of the Nibelungen Lied, Bodmer, in Goethe's 
 words, remained a child to his life's end. 
 
 With Breitinger it did not fare much better, though Goethe 
 tells us he saw the faults of his theories at last, and at all events 
 
 g2 
 
84 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 lie was saved from flooding tlie world with verse. He wrote a 
 critical art of poetry in opposition to Gottsched's, and made an 
 elaborate comparison between poetry and painting, asserting 
 that their province was the same, and above all things we must 
 have " pictures " in poetry. But pictures are not enough ; we 
 must also have something new, and what is so new as the mar- 
 vellous? But further, all this must conduce to some moral 
 l^urpose. What kind of poetry then unites the pictorial, the 
 marvellous, and the moral? Surely iEsop's fables, and they 
 alone. ^Esop's fables are therefore the highest poetry. With 
 this conclusion Bodmer as usual heartily agreed, but in practice 
 he seems to have contented himself with his epics, fearing 
 perhaps that he had not sufficient loftiness of mind to attempt 
 the higher flights of fable. Strange as it may appear, Gellert, 
 and even the keen-eyed Lessing, were beguiled into fable -writing 
 for a time. 
 
 One of the most devoted disciples of the inseparables was 
 Gessner, also of Zurich. Probably nature had intended him 
 for an artist, for from his earhest days his delight was in making 
 waxen figures and landscape painting, but he took to verse- 
 writing, and went to Berlin to see Ramler, who persuaded him 
 to give up metre and produce those monstrosities known as 
 prose poems. Henceforth even his few rhymed songs were 
 printed as though they were prose, "so as not to break the 
 regularity of the page." Eeturning to Zurich, he wrote a good 
 deal for the journal of Bodmer and Breitinger, and, following 
 the fashion of the time, he produced a Death of AheL But 
 liis great triumph was his book of Idylls^ descriptions of scenery 
 and supposed country life in exclamatory prose, setting forth 
 the tender sufferings of Melida, a young lady brought up in 
 solitude on an island ; also the daring of " the first sailor," a 
 fond youth who came to her relief, and other kindred themes : 
 but, above all, accounts of nature as he supposed it was, or rather 
 ought to be. "A Tlicocritus beyond a doubt," cried the critics ; 
 his idylls were translated into English and Italian, and, in 
 France especially, were received with rapturous ciitlmsiasm, so 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 85 
 
 that for a space all the polite and elegant youth of Europe were 
 ravished with the delight of his gentle tales. 
 
 In Ziunch at this lime there was also another, who must be 
 noticed : a soothing, pious creature, engaged in founding (1768) 
 an Ascetic Company, and peering abdllt into people's faces, we 
 may imagine, to judge what kind of heart lay under them. For 
 this was the once great Lavater, not yet at the height of his 
 greatness, when he was received as a prodigy by the civilised 
 world, and " kept the consciences of half Europe." He had 
 studied much in theology, and had written a book of religious 
 poems ; had visited the great ones of Leipzig and Berlin ; had 
 put the Psalms into rhyme, and made a book on the Power of 
 Faith and Prayer^ and was now on his way to world-wide 
 greatness, as an impostor quite unconscious of his fraud, till he 
 died with his illusions thick upon him, having met the French- 
 man's bullet at the siege of Zurich many years hence. 
 
 Westward from Zurich, and a little to the north, lies the 
 village of Brugg, where Zimmermann was sitting apart from his 
 fellows in discontented melancholy, finding his native Brugg 
 far too small a sphere for such a mind as his. Twenty years 
 before, he had studied at Gottingen, and was the favourite of 
 the great Haller himself He had striven " to live the life of a 
 man whose only wish it was to survive after death," had 
 travelled, married from Gottingen, and settled at Brugg as 
 town doctor, having some real skill and much enthusiasm in 
 physic. But the demons of hypochondria and self-conceit 
 would not let him be, but drove him out into the wilderness, so 
 that he w^ould speak to no man. In 1756 he had begun his 
 famous book on Solitude^ though it was not to be finished 
 for thirty years. In 1768 he was invited to Hanover as court- 
 physician; but, rendered more miserable by losses in his family, 
 he at last found the airs of these court ladies, ^^ who had drunk 
 coffee with George II.," bearable no longer, and, having under- 
 gone a terrible operation at Berlin with the greatest fortitude, 
 he betook himself to travel. He visited the Goethes in Frank- 
 furt for one thing, and caused them to pity his daughter, who 
 
86 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 indeed died soon after of sheer despair at her father's moody 
 ways. The fate of her brother was even worse, for he gradually 
 lost his reason and dragged on through many years of hopeless 
 idiocy. Though he is not a pleasant man to contemplate for all 
 his fame and all the presents from Catherine of Russia, in 
 gratitude for the great book on Solitude, yet he has attained 
 his great wish. He does " survive after death," for he it was 
 who killed, or at least failed to cure, the dying Frederick.^ 
 
 In Berne, at this time, men could still see the venerable 
 figure of the great Haller, poet and natural-philosopher, who 
 preached sermons when he was four years old, and soon after 
 saved his poems from his burning home as his possessions of 
 highest value. He had known men and manners, had studied 
 at Leyden, and visited the learned in London and Oxford, had 
 botanised through the length and breadth of the Alps, and 
 returned to native Berne to write his great poem, Tlie Alps, 
 and botanise further, so that spiteful neighbours asserted he kept 
 a cow in his drawing-room. After Gottingen university was 
 founded, in 1736, he was the shining light of the place for 
 nearly twenty years. La Mettrie, the so-called Materialist, had 
 the impertinence to dedicate his U Homme Maclime to him, a 
 compliment indignantly repudiated. He '^grasped his lyre" 
 for the last time in 1 748 in honour of his Britannic Majesty, 
 probably at the close of the war, and in 1753 retired to a 
 peaceful life in Berne, producing his " 1004 letters in all 
 languages," mostly on scientific subjects, as afterwards pub- 
 lished. One more beautiful point we may notice about him, 
 that in writing his declared object was " to say much in few 
 words — like the English." 
 
 Maupertuis, the " flattener of the earth," '^^ had died in Basle 
 some ten years before this, and we can now turn to Berlin 
 itself, the true centre of thought in Germany, ever since the 
 Swiss had taught the men of Leipzig. 
 
 * Carlyle's Frederick, vol. vi. p. 690; for further account of Zimmermann 
 see Ibid. pp. 497-500. 
 
 2 Maupertuis died in July 1759; see Carlyle's account, Frederick, vol. v. 
 p. 587. 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 87 
 
 In the great city that Hes stretched out upon the sand, in all 
 hor dreariness and utility, type of her own thought in those 
 days, we find ourselves in the presence of four men, who are 
 fortunately too great to need much mention. • The two Kings of 
 Berlin, Frederick, or "• Materialism crowned," ^ and Nicolai, the 
 bookseller, are at the height of their power, and for the first two 
 years of this period (1765-67) we may see the clear eyes of 
 Lessing himself, as he walks under the Linden with Mendels- 
 sohn, the quasi-philosopher, generally known as Moses. The 
 Laocoon had appeared in 1766, after Lessing's sudden return 
 from his six years' retreat in Breslau, and was still the talk of 
 all, especially of the young. The next year he was invited to 
 undertake the management of the theatre in Hamburg, and in 
 1767 he left Berlin and began a new paper, the Dramaturgie, 
 in addition to his other work in Hamburgh, where, at the end 
 of these four years, he was still hesitating whether to accept the 
 Duke of Braunschweig's invitation for travel in Italy, &c., 
 being fast bound by a lady's spell ; a man always lonely at 
 heart, in spite of his radiance and his friend Moses, for he was 
 as one born before due time. 
 
 Nicolai may stand for the true type of the Berlin school in 
 all its thin purity. He is now chiefly known as an easy mark 
 for sneers, for as he could not move with the times he appeared 
 to go backwards, as the trees fly past the laughing locomotive. 
 It is bad enough to mistake windmills for giants, but Nicolai 
 ^^ mistook giants for windmills,"^ and flouted at them amidst 
 the laughter of a world. But his services had been great, and 
 he is saved from contempt by his abhorrence of exaggeration. 
 He was one of the first to oppose both Gottsched and the Swiss, 
 and founded a journal independent of either party. He most 
 concerns us as the editor of the famous Letters on Literature, 
 purporting to be accounts of contemporary literature sent by a 
 friend to a wounded officer during the Seven Years' War. They 
 were started in 1759, by Nicolai, Lessing, and Mendelssohn, 
 
 ' Heine's Brief e uber Dentschland, book ii., beginning of last third. 
 2 Heine's Brief e iiber Deutscldand, book ii. beginning of last third. 
 
88 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 and the idea of the wounded officer was suggested to Lessing 
 by the death of his friend Kleist, poet of The Spring, at fatal 
 Kunersdorf, as we have already seen.^ Within the year Lessing 
 departed for Breslau, and Nicolai and Moses continued the 
 work alone, but were afterwards assisted by a young man called 
 Thomas Abbt, whose name we must remember. The Lettei^s 
 ceased in 1765, and Nicolai next proceeded to conduct a 
 General German Library, which prospered up to a certain 
 point for fifty years. For the rest, Nicolai is only important to 
 us as the leader of the Illumined, who were even called the 
 ^icolaiten by such as found little comfort in the Deism and 
 rational utility of the school. 
 
 Moses Mendelssohn, the pure-hearted Jew, type of Nathan 
 the Wise, is more interesting as a man, and in some ways more 
 significant of the times. The motto of his life was his famous 
 saying, " Without God, Providence, and imrnortahty, the good 
 things of this world would be merely contemptible," and, acting 
 on this, he published in 1767 his Fhcedon, or, the Immortality 
 of the Soul, in memory of Thomas Abbt, recently deceased. 
 Though he was as rational a Deist as the rest of the school, he 
 maintained every jot and tittle of the Jewish law, naturally 
 regarding Judaism and Deism as one and the same thing at 
 root. Yet he released his people from the dogmatic tyranny of 
 the Talmud, and by his translations of the Scriptures endeavoured 
 to make them Germans as well as Jews, in spite of the bitter 
 hatred dwelling in all true Christian breasts against the people 
 of God. In his other works, Moses may be regarded as the 
 leader of what was called the popular philosophy, which followed 
 no definite system, though it was based on Locke, its main object 
 being clearness of style, so as to be readily understood by the 
 vulgar. In this clear German of his he had written a treatise 
 on the Sublime and Beautiful after the example of Burke, for 
 whom he had much admiration ; also a prize essay, in which he 
 defeated Kant, on the grounds of natural theology and morality. 
 On these grounds his position was so firm that Lavater in spite 
 ' Carlyle's Frede7nok, vol. v. p. 487, 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 89 
 
 of all eflforts was unable to convert him to Christianity, and one 
 of Mendelssohn's last deeds was to defend Lessinff from the accu- 
 sation of Spinozism, as we shall see hereafter. 
 
 In real though not pronounced opposition to this leading 
 Kationalist party, there was in Berlin a clique inclined to a sort 
 of enlightened Pietism. In this we may include Spalding, Sack, 
 Sussmilch, and perhaps Sulzer, a Swiss by birth, chiefly known 
 for his theory of fine arts.^ Of these, Spalding was the most 
 notable at the time owing to his sermons and his Thoughts on 
 the Value of the Feelings in Christianity ; he was much admired 
 by Lavater and souls of kindred piety. In 1770 he with 
 Sulzer and Sack formed a commission for the improvement of 
 schools. Sussmilch, who had been one of the party, and had 
 written The Divine Order ^ paying some attention also to political 
 as well as Divine economy, had died in 1767. As to him we 
 need only remember that he had maintained human speech was 
 the direct gift of God, which seemed to Herder too desperate a 
 hypothesis. 
 
 Much befriended by this party, there was living at a short 
 distance from Berlin the verse-maker Lange, friend of Pyra, 
 and son of the pietist Lange, who had caused Wolff to be driven 
 from Halle many years before.^ It was he who together with 
 Pyra first introduced unrhymed verse into German, following 
 up the singular theory which denied that the very language 
 which is richest in rhyme was capable of rhyming. Being 
 anxious to become another Horace, he changed his wife Dorothy 
 into Doris^ whilst he and Pyra became Thyrsis and Damon, 
 as is seen in Pyra's Songs of Friendship. But Damon Pyra 
 died, and Lange's edition of Horace with metrical translation 
 was hacked to pieces by Lessing's sword, so that the star of 
 Thyrsis and Doris was now on the wane, though he still devoutly 
 hoped himself a Horace. 
 
 • Carlyle's Fi'edericTi, vol. iv. p. 406. " Inclination (of men) rather to 
 good?" said Frederick, shaking his old head, with a sad smile; " Alas, dear 
 Sulzer, I see you don't know that damned race of creatures as I do !" 
 
 2 Carlyle's Fi-ederich, vol. i. p. 623. 
 
90 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 But unfortunately in Berlin itself there was a rival Horace, 
 Ramler, the intimate friend of the leaders of thought ; a man to 
 whose criticism even Lessing submitted his work. His mother, 
 being determined in her own mind that the world should have 
 a poet now or never, had induced her husband to go with her 
 into the country a certain period before Ramler's birth, under 
 pretence of better health from baths, but in reality that she 
 might be filled with the nightingale's song. The result was that 
 the boy took to Horace from his youth up, and, having been 
 appointed professor of logic at Berlin, proceeded to pour out 
 Horatian lays in the famous journal of Bremen. Unhappily, 
 the nightingale found considerable difficulty in singing at all, 
 and his lays were the result of endless labour, so that some of 
 his friends impertinently doubted if he were a poet, and Goethe, 
 though he praises him with all the magnanimity of genius, is 
 inclined to call him a critic rather. Yet he was generally 
 esteemed a Horace for certain, and his odes, especially those in 
 honour of Friedrich, were much spoken of, though the king 
 himself paid no attention to the praises of his nightingale. He 
 seems to have led an honest and blameless life, and was much 
 lamented when he vanished from the Berlin circle, thirty years 
 after this. His death was celebrated by a remarkable imitation 
 of Mignon's song, then new to the world. The parody begins, 
 Kennt ihr den Greis, and has as chorus, Um ihn, %im ihn Klagt 
 dieserKluh^undmit ihm Magt Berlin, — which proves that Ramler *s 
 panegyrist at least was no nightingale. 
 
 But at the time with which we have to do, Ramler was 
 busy with the artistic training of the poetess Karschin, a train- 
 ing of very doubtful advantage. Anna Louise Karsch, or '' the 
 Karschin," had come to Berlin in 1761 in sore distress, and had 
 been patronized by Gleim, Mendelssohn, and Sulzer, as a genuine 
 poetess of nature, fresh from the sheep and cattle in her native 
 Silesia. The learned world at once saluted her as the modem 
 Sappho, chiefly because she was a woman who wrote verses ; for 
 her experience of life and love had been as a cow-girl and as 
 wife of two husbands, both brutal. When she ai'rived in Berlin 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 91 
 
 she seems to have been possessed of some real talent, which fast 
 disappeared under Ramler's artistic training ; but her odes to 
 the king and poems on reh'gious subjects continued to be 
 admired. As a woman she displayed admirable self- sacrifice, 
 fortitude, and independence ; which indeed amounted to boldness 
 when a few years after this she indignantly sent back the two 
 thalers (about six shillings), " Frederick's gift to Germany's 
 poetess. Frederick's successor, being more considerate or less 
 critical, allowed her to build a house for herself free of charge ; 
 but, in her haste to pass to fruition, the modern Sappho met her 
 death from the dampness of the plaster. 
 
 Turning now from the Sappho and Horace of Berlin we 
 proceed to another school, which equally with the Horatians 
 had its origin in old Hagedorn, who had died at Hamburg 
 eleven years before our period opens. This is the famous 
 Anacreonic school of Halle university, though the three leaders 
 were now there no longer, Gleim being already established in 
 Halberstadt within reach of Halle, Uz in his native Ansbach 
 far to the south in the Niirnberg country, and Gotz in Baden. 
 These three some five-and-twenty years before, together with a 
 fourth, who died early, being then students at Halle, and 
 probabty much wearied with the Pietistic atmosphere of the 
 place, had put their heads together to produce that kind of 
 poetry which, in Lessing's words, sings " of girls and wine, of 
 wine and girls, of kisses and drinking, of drinking and kisses, 
 and again of wine and girls, and nothing but kisses and drink- 
 ing." Such being the theme, it occurred to Uz that it would 
 be better to forsake the old German rhymes, which Gottsched 
 had made almost as wearisome as theology, and introduce the 
 Greek measures ; thus he set the example of the barbarous 
 experiments which seem to me to have ruined so much of the 
 best work, not only of Klopstock and Schiller, but of Goethe 
 himself. Not content with Anacreon's songs, Gleim and his 
 friends hoped for a time to introduce something of Anacreon's 
 spirit into life itself; and we read with a smile of the cups 
 crowned with flowers, the bottles buried in roses, and the 
 
92 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 Bacchic revelries in German churchyards, the stolid villagers 
 looking on. Stranger than all, the poet of the Messias himself 
 took some part in the flowery debauchery. But the Anacreonic 
 revival was not a success : it takes more than roses, and wine in 
 a restaurant, and girls existing in phantasy to reproduce the 
 Greek spirit. The Anacreons were bitterly attacked by Lessing, 
 Kant, and Wieland, who was at that time under the religious 
 influence of the Swiss, not for immorality, of which there was 
 little or none, but for sheer inanity, a far more cruel charge to 
 a would-be poet. Uz returned to moral treatises in verse in 
 the style of Pope or Horace. Gleim went to Berlin, and for a 
 time served as private secretary to the old Dessauer during the 
 war, thus gaining inspiration for his grenadier songs, by far 
 his best work, and much admired at one period. " Not only an 
 Anacreon this Gleim, but a Tyrtaeus also," cried the astonished 
 critics. After this he had retired to Halberstadt as cathedral 
 secretary, which post he held for fifty peaceful years. He was 
 a man of much mark in Germany, not so much because he was 
 a poet himself, but as a cause that poetry was in others. For 
 the main object of his life was to aid young genius in its 
 struggles, and Halberstadt became a kind of hothouse, where 
 tender plants were carefully sheltered from the storms of life. 
 Almost all the poets of this period owed something to " Father 
 Gleim," and by his enthusiasm for every sign of genius he won 
 the friendship and respect of all the greatest men of Germany. 
 He continued to write verses and novels (the first novels in the 
 country), and produced a famous work called Halladat, or the 
 Red Book, a treatise on God and man, intended to be "a book 
 like the Biblo.^*^ But as Goethe says, " one can't make poetry 
 all day," and Gleim devoted too much of his leisure to that 
 vast and inane correspondence with his numerous friends, in 
 which neither ink, paper, nor mutual admiration was spared. 
 
 * " I mentioned to him (Heraud) once, that Novalis had said, * The highest 
 problem of authorship is the writing of a Bible.' * That is precisely what I 
 am doing,' answered the aspiring unaspirating." — Carlyle to Emersoji, vol. i. 
 p. 277. 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 93 
 
 During these years his favourite young poet was Georg Jacobi, 
 for whom his friendship was tender if not passionate. He had 
 been introduced to Gleim by Klotz, and followed faithfully in 
 his master's footsteps till his life's end. Another young client 
 of Klotz was then to be seen in Halle, a passionate unruly man 
 of the name of Biirger, much of a spendthrift, but with the true 
 genius looking out of his eyes, and a brain through which 
 Lenore will soon begin to gallop. 
 
 This Klotz, who afterwards brought trouble to Herder, was 
 much renowned for his knowledge of Latin, especially for the 
 elegance of his Latin verses. Gottingen had known him, but, 
 his fame having reached Berlin, Frederick had expressly in- 
 vited him to his Prussian Halle. He was now editing the 
 paper Acta Eruditorum, and publishing his own pamphlets and 
 verses as Opuscula ; also writing a treatise on coins, all in 
 faultless Latin, in which his pride was great. " Quite a 
 Horace," said everyone ; ^^ or perhaps even better than a 
 Horace." 
 
 But Halle has other memories beside the echoes of Anac- 
 reonic songs, for it was from Halle that the renowned Christian 
 WolflP, champion of the Orthodox, who translated Leibnitz into 
 German, and posed as interpreter of his master's philosophy, — 
 WolflP, famous alike in mathematics and metaphysic, had been 
 driven by the Pietists under order of the unscientific Friedrich 
 Wilhelm. The Pietists, followers of Spener with his work of 
 Pia Desideria^ had always been strong in Halle, which was 
 indeed founded by their philosopher friend Thomasius in 1694. 
 WolflP had returned with triumph^ on the accession of the 
 Friedrich, who was willing that " every man should go to 
 heaven his own way " ; and since that time the power of the 
 Pietists, "these mystics without imagination,"^ had somewhat 
 declined. Yet out of their ranks had arisen one light at least, 
 the great Semler, who now held the chair of theology in Halle. 
 
 ' Carlyle's Frederick, vol. iii. p. 14. 
 
 - Heine's Briefe uher DeutscUand, book ii. 
 
U HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [170^— 
 
 He had turned from Pietism to Locke and the English deists, 
 and the result is rather confusing, for he prays like a Pietist, 
 and overthrows dogma like a Gibbon. His main teaching was 
 that dogma is of no importance, for that each man has a private 
 religion, and the real object of Christianity is moral improve- 
 ment. During these years we find him engaged, like Ernesti 
 and David Michaelis, in a free criticism of the Bible and in- 
 vestigations into Church history. 
 
 As we have already been at Konigsberg, all the schools of 
 thought in Germany flourishing at that time have now been 
 noticed, for the Hainhund of Gottingen was still hidden in the 
 future. And indeed Konigsberg cannot be called a centre of 
 thought till after the appearance of the Kntik in 1781. 
 
 A few individual names scattered throughout Germany, 
 generally offshoots of one or other of these schools, must still be 
 mentioned. Such was Baumgarten, who died at Frankfurt-on- 
 Oder in 1762. In his youth in spite of all opposition he had 
 been a devoted disciple of Wolff", and on him he had based his 
 Logic, which Kant always continued to use at lecture. It was 
 he who introduced the word Esthetics through the title of his 
 work u^sthetica, or the science of beauty, in which he showed 
 himself very discontented with the current criticism. Friedrich 
 invited him to Frankfurt, where the poor man is said to have 
 died daily for nine years owing to ill health and the terrors of 
 war ; for Kunersdorf battle was likely to disturb any theories of 
 -Esthetics. His brother, a famous theologian of Halle, died four 
 years before him. 
 
 At Dresden Rabener was still living, the boasted Swift of 
 Germany, once the cheerfulest of men but now becoming more 
 and more paralytic. He had been at school with Gellert, and 
 afterwards in Leipsig had written for Gottsched's paper, and was 
 among the first contributors to the Bremische Beitrdge of his 
 friends Gartner, Cramer, the Schlegels, and Ihe rest. He had 
 begun by a poetical proof that rhyme was insuff'erable in 
 German, and thenceforward had devoted himself to prose satires, 
 once as widely read as Gellprt's fables, but now not so valuable 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. ' 95 
 
 as his account of the siege of Dresden in 1760/ sent to his 
 friend Weisse in Leipsig. For Rabener was living quietly at 
 Dresden when Frederick came storming down upon it with fire 
 and cannon, consuming churches and homes and all Rabener's 
 precious manuscript satires, ^' to the mighty comfort of the fools 
 of the future," as he says, together with his shirts and collection 
 of wigs, which in his cheerful way he pretends to regret much 
 more. 
 
 Rabener is a bright spot amid the pervading moodiness and 
 hypochondria, but in 1771 his cheerfulness and satires ceased in 
 death, and we must go on our way westward past Weimar, as 
 yet of no account among the nations, to Erfurt, where we find 
 Riedel, a young man full of perseverance and energy, now hard 
 at work to reform Erfurt university. He had been a pupil of 
 Klotz in Halle, had written various satires, and was evolving a 
 " theory of fine arts and sciences," in which he tries to show 
 that there is no unalterable rule of taste, but all things vary 
 according to age and climate and individual opinion. He was 
 full of lofty ideals of future greatness, would like to be a second 
 Winckelmann for one thing, and a few years after this he was 
 invited to Vienna with great honour ; but he scandalised polite 
 society and the learned by familiarity with his pupils and the 
 habit of smoking tobacco. From tobacco to atheism was but a 
 step; and, being accused of one or both crimes to the pious 
 Maria Theresa, he was dismissed from his office, and for a long 
 time I'educed to pitiful estate, till Gluck, the musician, took 
 compassion on his misery. But it was too late, and he died, as 
 so many died, a victim to hypochondria and the gloom of a life 
 that had failed. 
 
 North-west from Erfurt is Gottingen, where the university 
 was still young. It was then listening to Kastner, the man 
 of universal knowledge ; Michaelis, the interpreter of things 
 oriental ; and Virgil's Heyne, whose struggles for life were now 
 almost over; for in 1763 he had succeeded the famous Gessner 
 as professor of eloquence.*^ 
 
 * Carlyle's Frederick, vol. vi. pp. 22-33. 
 
 ^ Carlyle's Essay on Heyne, Miscellanies, vol. ii. p. 74. 
 
96 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764— 
 
 Kastner was an importation from Leipzig, where he had 
 followed Gottsched in his youth, contributed to the Bremische 
 Beitrdge, and was renownied chiefly as a mathematician, though 
 he prided himself that he was not a mere " man of learning," 
 but a wit and a worldling withal. Michaelis had been evolved 
 out of the Pietists of Halle, had come to Gottingen in 1745 as 
 professor of philosophy, and since the departure of his friend 
 Haller had been occupied chiefly with the exploring expeditions 
 that were unveiling the East. Another promising theologian, 
 Heilmann, also from Halle, had died at Gottingen in 1764, to the 
 grief of Germany and of Herder in particular ; a man of clear 
 and bold insight, w^ith a free and even poetic style ; he had 
 translated Thucydides, and his lectures on Plato and the Iliad 
 had made some stir. 
 
 Closely connected with Heilmann in Herder's mind w^as this 
 Thomas Abbt, whom I have already mentioned as a successor of 
 Lessing in the Letters on Literature. He died in November 
 1766, in the little court-town of Biickeburg, not far to the north 
 and west of Gottingen. He first studied at Halle under Baum- 
 garten, the theologian, elder brother of the ^Esthetic Baumgarten; 
 but, growing tired of theology owing to the dreary unreality of 
 the pursuit, and being much influenced by Boyle and the French 
 sceptics, and no less by the English school, he accepted an invita- 
 tion to Frankfurt-on-Oder, where, in the thick of the shrieking 
 horrors of the war, amidst echoes of the cannon thunder of 
 Kunersdorf, he produced his book on Death for Fatherland^ 
 a word spoken in season for Frederick and Fatherland. For a 
 few months he was at Berlin in close friendship with Nicolai 
 and with Mendelssohn, who had to bring together all the 
 metaphysics within his reach to fortify himself against this fear- 
 less and clear-headed inquirer. After some time spent in 
 travelling he was invited to Buckeburg by the Duke, a strange 
 man whom we shall meet again, but he had not been there a 
 year when he died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight, with 
 fame and powers daily increasing. His great work was a treatise 
 On Merit, in which he discusses the duties of the various 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 97 
 
 classes that go to make up a complex constitution. Speaking to 
 authors he urges them above all things to write for the common 
 people. 
 
 " Out of the twenty million souls in Germany," he says, 
 " only some eighty thousand read the very wittiest of our pro- 
 ductions. Literature has become a thing of caste, and the 
 mass of the nation can find no interest in it, but are forced to 
 limit themselves to their Bible and the edifying works on 
 Christianity of a hundred years ago, books that are by no means 
 to be laughed at, for in them the people have found comfort from 
 generation to generation for their miseries in this life, and thus 
 they generally form part of a wife's dowry, and are read in the 
 evenings by our working-men, who naturally refuse to expend a 
 farthing on the writings of the learned." 
 
 Abbt's contempt for the " mere man of learning," who re- 
 fuses to take part in the struggle of contemporary life, is very 
 marked ; and no doubt this was the point which most attracted 
 Herder, and, if for this alone, Abbt well deserved the memorials 
 that were raised to him in Herder's Torso and the Phcedon of 
 Mendelssohn, 
 
 Due west, past Minden from Buckeburg, we find in Osna- 
 briick the heroic figure of Moser, practically governing his 
 little state, as a state is seldom governed, till his Britannic 
 Majesty's second son should come to full age. In his youth his 
 father kept him hidden in the country, lest Friedrich Wilhelm 
 should draft him off into the regiment of giants. After that he 
 had visited Jena and Gottingen, and was of much service to 
 his state in the Seven Years' War, being even sent to London 
 for nearly a year to arrange terms of peace, &c. For he, like 
 Abbt, hated the man of learning, and devoted his life to the 
 management of his small charge, as greater was not given him. 
 Yet he was now at work upon his history of Osnabriick, which a 
 few years afterwards kindled such enthusiasm in Goethe and 
 the German world for its lofty patriotism, its freedom, and 
 depth of. thought. He remained through life a very complete 
 
98 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17GI— 
 
 and healthy man, quite free from all the common sentimentalities 
 and hypochondria. 
 
 To the south-west, in Duisberg, by the Rhine country, was 
 a physician named Witthof, who wrote didactic poems, and was 
 admired by Herder at intervals throughout life as the successor 
 ofHaller. 
 
 In Brunswick, at this time, we find four men of sotne dis- 
 tinction. In the Collegium Karolinum of that town there were 
 three professors — Gartner, Zacharia, and Konrad Schmid— who 
 had run through the course of life nearly side by side. Gartner 
 had been at school with Gellert and Eabener, and then, pro- 
 ceeding to Leipzig, he had served Gottsched for a time: but, after 
 gathering round him a circle of intelligent young men, amongst 
 whom were Zacharia and Schmid, he raised the standard 
 of rebellion in the famous journal which, as it was printed 
 at Bremen, was known as the Bremische Beitrdge. Schmid 
 afterwards took to writing hymns and songs on sacred subjects, 
 such as " the birth of the Saviour, with Latin paraphrases '' ; 
 and Zacharia, who was the greatest of the three, wrote satires, 
 especially on the students of Jena, and mock heroics in imita- 
 tion of Pope. Also at the head of this Collegium was stationed, 
 as curator, a peaceful old divine named Jerusalem, once famous 
 for his " enlightened " piety, his depth of thought and purity 
 of style, now immortal, because his much-loved son shot him- 
 self, and crystallised the ideas floating vaguely in Goethe's 
 mind into the form of Werther. 
 
 Next, passing through Mecklenburg to the north, where a 
 youth named Voss, afterwards the founder of the Gottingen 
 Hainbund, or League of Poets, and famous in many other ways, 
 was now a private tutor in a family, wo arrive at Copenhagen. 
 Hero were two poets of the old school, Cramer and Gerstenberg; 
 both had been in Leipzig, and had known Gellert and Weisse ; 
 both had taken part in the Bremische Beitrdge. Cramer was 
 now court preacher, and was much a favourite in society, 
 especially with women, being a man of great cheerfulness and 
 
1769.] . DEUTSCHLAND. 99 
 
 courtesy, with some knowledge of the world, though to the end 
 he remained true to the old forms of Lutheranism. Gerstenberg 
 was now editing a literary journal in imitation of the great 
 Literaturhriefe of Berlin. He had written dramas and sung of 
 love and war with some success, having, indeed, had some expe- 
 rience in war against the Kussians. 
 
 Both these two were on terms of close friendship with the 
 first poet of the new school, the pure-hearted Klopstock, who, 
 throughout this time, was hving quietly at the court of Copen- 
 hagen, where his beloved Margaretha, the " Meta" of the Odes^ 
 had died in 1763. The first cantos of hi^Messias^ which had 
 appeared in 1748 in the Bremische Beitrage, were received with 
 much enthusiasm by all but Gottsched; the Swiss were de- 
 lighted to point to a living example of their theories, and even 
 the common people read him gladly, for his subject exactly 
 coincided with the religious feeling of the times. Imitations arose 
 on all sides, especially in Zurich, as we have seen ; and Klop- 
 stock was himself his worst imitator in the later cantos of the 
 Messiasy which was not finished till 1773, and in his Biblical 
 tragedies. His Odes, generally written in Horatian metres, 
 turn for the most part on religious themes, and were as popular 
 as the Messias, Goethe and his sister storming at each other in 
 rivalry of alternate passages.^ Klopstock had next, under the 
 guidance of Young and Richardson, passed through a stage of 
 sentimental melancholy, till, in 1764, the first translation of 
 Ossian appeared in Hamburg, and Klopstock threw aside all 
 classic legends and much of his orientalism, and began to dis- 
 course on bards and heroes, and all the misty mythology of the 
 North. Hermann and the German forests were the idols of the 
 hour, and the mistletoe of the Druids took the place of the classic 
 laurel. Klopstock's enthusiasm for the burly personages of 
 northern story was increased by his admiration of strength of 
 body and athletic skill, and it might be doubted whether his 
 Odes and elaborate theories on skating have not done more for 
 
 ' Alls meniem Lchi-n, book ii. end. 
 H2 
 
100 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1764- 
 
 the benefit of his country than the Messias, the rest of the Odes, 
 and all '^ the Bards," put together. 
 
 But Klopstock, like Lessing, is too great to need further 
 mention, and in Stuttgart to the south was living a very different 
 man from the poet of the Messias, though he was really working 
 at the same task. Johann Jacob von Moser, remarkable even 
 amongst Germans for the vast amount of his writings, is one of 
 the noblest figures of the time. With a Quixotic enthusiasm he 
 devoted his life to the vindication of the rights of the people 
 against the oppression of the petty courts. For fifty years he 
 laboured at the history of the laws of Germany and the liberties 
 of subjects. Nor were his politics confined to theory; at 
 Tubingen, Frankfurt-on-Oder, Homburg, Vienna, and Stuttgart, 
 he had held positions of high authority in the universities of the 
 learned and the ministries of princes. But this man, in whose 
 eyes *^ right was right, and wrong wrong," was not long in 
 offending the authorities wherever he went ; his life was one 
 persecution ; his writings were altered or suppressed by the 
 censorship ; his counsels were rejected ; for five years he lay in 
 prison ; his son Friedrich Karl, who followed his father's steps, 
 met with the same fate ; nothing could daunt him ; he was a 
 Don Quixote that was never ruined by a cure, but went down to 
 his grave still maintaining that '^ right was right and wrong 
 was wrong," whatever all the crowns in Europe might say. 
 
 Closely connected with Moser in his government of Hom- 
 burg was a man called Creuz, poet and politician, still managing 
 the affairs of Homburg during these years, especially in its 
 disputes with neighbouring Darmstadt, where in 1770 the 
 younger Moser became prime minister. Creuz, too, had been in 
 prison, and had written several poems of no high merit, such 
 as Seneca, a tragedy, and The Graves, an imitation of Young's 
 Night Thoughts, containing dissertations on the Last Day, 
 immortality, the certainty of death, and the rest, and concluding 
 by " consolations " to man that not he alone but all the world 
 is appointed for destruction. 
 
 In this Wurtemburg country too, at Marbach, was a boy 
 
1769.] DEUTSCHLAND. 101 
 
 named Friedrich Schiller, now attending the village-school, and 
 climbing the trees in the storm " to see where the thunder came 
 from"; and in Biberach, further to the south, was Wieland, who 
 had returned from Zurich in 1760, had written his Agathon, 
 and translated Shakespeare, though too much in the French style, 
 and was now engaged on his Musarion, all of these very different 
 in tone from his " seraphic poems" and the Tempted Abraham, 
 composed under pious Bodmer's care in Switzerland so few years 
 before. After a glance at Baireuth, where in 1763 Jean Paul 
 had begun his bright journey through the world, we will turn, 
 as all Germany turned, with a thrill of horror to Trieste, where, 
 in the June of 1768, Winckelmann was lying murdered in his 
 chamber. Thus with a hero our catalogue ends. 
 
 In the Homeric battles the leaders come rushing on with 
 cries and prayers for the fight amid the rattle and gleam of 
 brazen arms, and behind them tramples the vast and nameless 
 host that die for their cause unwept and unremembered. And 
 far away in Greece the main body of the nation is gathering in 
 the corn and pruning the vines from year to year, knowing not 
 and caring little how their brethren may fare. So too in Ger- 
 many, the leaders went forth to their battle in the air with 
 clashing phrases and gleaming strokes, in front of a vast and 
 nameless host, who were content to follow at a distance, and 
 senerallv stood watching while the leaders laid on. But the 
 great mass of the people staying at home cared for none of these 
 things, but earned their living, in spite of oppression, from year 
 to year, reading their Luther's Bible and Arndt's Cfiristianity, 
 completely cut off from other delights of the intellect, and when 
 they had sung their hymns they all went out into the churchyard. 
 Poetry, which is a people's life, had become a thing of the 
 courts and the universities, and we have seen in what strange 
 fashion it flourished. Everyone, down to the very mothers of 
 children, was longing for the bread of poetry, and for bread 
 they were given the stones of the moralists and the scorpions of 
 the Horatians. The learned men had lost themselves in the 
 solitary deserts of selfishness, and, being blinded with the dust 
 
102 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17G4— 
 
 of conceit and burnt up with the glare of introspection, they 
 laid them down in hopeless melancholy, for they had forgotten 
 that knowledge is nothing unless it lead to life, and that a wise 
 man cut off from his own people is as futile as a gate in the 
 midst of a flood. But on this blind chaos of Germany the spirit 
 of criticism was beginning to move ; the tops of the parched 
 trees were rustling as with a sound of much rain, and for this 
 once out of criticism was to come some good thing. To what 
 shall we compare this nation ? It was like a band of children 
 that have lost their way in one of Germany's own forests : a 
 pleasant place by day, but now the night was coming, and 
 strange shapes began to arise on every hand, and dreary voices 
 to sigh among the pines. This way and that the children 
 searched for a path, and one cried, *^ Lo, here," and another 
 '' Lo, there." At length one named Herder called to the rest and 
 said : ^' If we cannot escape from this forest as other children 
 have escaped, let us at least keep together, that so, having 
 comfort one of another, we may abide in trust and hope, till 
 the day dawn and the horror of night is departed." 
 
1769.] 103 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FIRST FRUITS, 1766 — 1769. 
 
 " God has conceded two sights to a man; 
 One of men's whole work, Time's completed plan, 
 The other of the minute's work, man's first 
 Step to the plan's completeness." — Soedello. 
 
 Whilst still in Konigsberg, as we have seen, Herder had 
 gained a wide knowledge of all contemporary literature in Grer- 
 manj, and of the leading writers in England and France ; he 
 had also begun to draw up short essays or schemes for treatises 
 on his own account, and this practice was continued during the 
 first years in Riga. The titles of these essays are sufficient to 
 show that from the very first his mind turned naturally towards 
 the paths which he was to follow through life. They treat of 
 the Beauty of Man, the French and German stage, the Ode or 
 Lyric ("that first-born son of passion," as he calls it, "the 
 fountain-head of poetry, now extinct among us, for we only , 
 borrow the relics of the ancients "), of the History of Poetry ^ U 
 especially of the Song, and of Taste, especially^.,Qothic, then 
 called Barbarous, and the possibility of making Philosophy ser- 
 viceable to the common people. Ever since the Liter atiirhriefe 
 of Nicolai and Mendelssohn came to an end. Herder had 
 intended to publish a series of essays, partly to supplement, 
 partly to criticise, the judgments of this famous journal. At 
 length, stimulated to the sticking-point by Hamann, in the 
 autumn of 1766 he published two parts or collections, under the 
 name of Fragments on the new German Literature^ and a third 
 part appeared at Easter in the following year. His choice of the 
 
104 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1766— 
 
 title is a curious instance of what it is fashionable to call the 
 irony of fate ; for it is a feature in Herder, as sad as character- 
 istic, that to his life's end all his greatest undertakings remained 
 fragments. Even these first Fragments were never finished, but 
 want their fourth and completing part, remaining, as his enemies 
 said, " a fragment of a fragment." Closely connected with this 
 in origin from some mental deficiency, is another failing, very 
 noticeable in his first work. For, when a second edition was 
 called for, the first having been eagerly bought up in a few 
 months, Herder thought it necessary to re-write the first part 
 entirely on quite a different plan, and to make considerable 
 alterations in the second part. He was never satisfied with his 
 own work ; could never be sure that he had once for all thrown 
 it into the most artistic shape possible for him, and might now 
 stand at a distance, and watch it as a thing complete. Like an 
 uncertain painter, who too long loves his picture as his child, he 
 was continually driven to add a touch here and a touch there, 
 working about it and about, generally with some loss of vigour ; 
 for the goddess of wisdom was not born as a common child is 
 born, but quick and armed in panoply. 
 
 The final edition of the first collection of Fragments treats of 
 language in general, of German, and of the growth of various 
 languages through different periods. 
 
 Language is the instrument of knowledge, and, as thought is probably 
 impossible without language, it is also the limitation of knowledge. A 
 nation that speaks a poor and mean language cannot produce great poets 
 or philoso]3hers. It is impossible to translate Homer into Dutch, or 
 Aristotle into the tongue of savages. But language is not only the 
 instrument of thought, it is also the result ; for a language is the monu- 
 ment of the development in a nation's life from century to century ; it is 
 a garden full of flowers, planted by many a thoughtful mind. Language 
 and thought are therefore inseparably dependent, and every nation speaks 
 according to its thought and thinks according to its speech. The prize 
 essay of Michaelis on language, in spite of its learning and the interest 
 of its examples, cannot compare for depth of thought with the writings 
 of the author of the Crusades (Hamann), '* though the editors of the 
 Literaturhriefe may well jeer at him, for they play with the sliells and 
 miss the kernel." 
 
1769.] FIRST FRUITS. 105 
 
 Turning now to German in particular, what man amongst us, Herder 
 asks, will explain to us its history and show us its beauty ? Who will 
 take the cloud from our eyes 1 I cannot attempt so much, but I offer 
 my Fragments as a handful of flowers gathered as I went my way through 
 the varied fields of our tongue ; not sought out with spectacles on nose 
 and face red with stooping, but plucked as they smiled up at me from 
 their place. The German language is original and self- developed, and 
 might still be maintained in its purity were it not for our men of learn- 
 ing ; it is a Gothic palace for a Gothic people, and we must not be 
 ashamed when our neighbours call it barbarous, for it was never intended 
 to progress as a tumbler, but to stride with dignity like a German ; it is a 
 brave speech, like the people who speak it, and is only terrible to cowards. 
 Its double consonants give it strength, its vowels and diphthongs variety, 
 and its aspirates the softness and delicacy of a lover's sigh. Owing to the 
 natural measure of our syllables our verse is inclined to move with firm 
 and steady tread rather than to bounce and jump in dactyl and anapaest. 
 Klopstock has shown us what may be done with a free metre ; in Kleist 
 and Gleim we see how well the English or Miltonic measure suits the 
 music and harmony of the German tongue. Let us not fear to restore 
 the strong and sonorous words of the olden time banished by Gottsched 
 and his followers, who have done more harm than any other party to the 
 genius of our language, and were only just opposed in time by the 
 patriotic Bodmer. And we must not be annoyed when foreigners laugh 
 at our inversions, for they give much point and emphasis to expression ; 
 and, above all, let us abide by our idioms, which are the real beauties of 
 a language and the index of a nation's growth, so that without idioms 
 humour is impossible, and it is owing to our imitation of "classical" 
 models that we have no humourists, for even Rabener is far below Swift. 
 We have aped other nations till " imitator " has become a nickname in- 
 separably attached to a German writer, taking from us "the pith and 
 marrow of our attribute," and our style is so flat and wearisome that the 
 reading public has shrunk to a few journalists, who have no time to think, 
 but plenty to write reviews. 
 
 Next Herder mentions, with short criticisms, the writers 
 whom he considers the best in Germany, namely, Winckehnann, 
 Hagedorn, Moser, Abbt, Spalding, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and 
 Hamann. Not one of these will he insult by the name of 
 '^ classic/^ Every one, he cries, talks in praise of a "classic" 
 writer, but what does it really mean ? Be true, my children, 
 and let who will be " classic." 
 
 Turning now from German, Herder traces the growth of 
 
 \ 
 
106 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17GG— 
 
 language, going especially to Greek for his examples, as being 
 the finest of tongues and the most independent in development. 
 
 The history of a language is as the history of a man from the lisping 
 of childhood, through the passion and music of youth to the calm wisdom 
 of age.. How tempting it is, and yet how vain, to peer with the imagi- 
 nation into primaeval time and search for the origin of such a thing as 
 speech. The hypothesis of Siissmilch that speech was a direct gift of the 
 Deity is contrary to all analogy, and destroys the wonderful unity of 
 Nature ; for everything grows or developes, and nothing is made perfect 
 at once. Language has grown like a tree from some small seed, and man 
 is the author of his own speech. In the childliood of man, whilst men 
 were still half beasts {Thiermensche^i), soon after, according to the fables, 
 men and beasts ceased to understand each other, speech was a song or 
 poetry full of pictures and images. We see remains of this period in the 
 utterances of the oracles and the poems of Homer. The first authors in 
 every nation are poets, and these poets are inimitable. Our speech is no 
 longer a song, as Homer's was ; in vain do we imitate him, taking for 
 metre the hexameters of Klopstock. Homer is used as an example here, 
 because the songs of the Druids and Bards are mostly lost. With the 
 introduction of writing and the growth of political life prose became 
 possible, singing ceased, and poetry was made a thing of art ; instead of 
 Homer we have Tyrttieus and the great tragedians, closely followed by the 
 historians ; for prose was the livmg language, till finally it reached its 
 perfection in Plato. But, in strict philosophy, little or no ornament must 
 be allowed ; every thing must be short and straight to the point, as we 
 see in Baumgarten's metaphysics, and we have no right to complain if we 
 find the style of philosophy as dry and uniform as algebra, for Truth is 
 best naked, even though it do not please the eye of women. Yet, as wo 
 are men before we arc philosophers, it is essential that a philosopher write 
 in his mother tongue with all the wonderful associations which he has 
 sucked in with the milk of childhood. Philosophy should lead out from 
 common life without a break, and not transplant us on a sudden into a 
 region of strange speech and thought. Sulzer's i^lan for purifying the 
 language by excluding all synonyms and superfluities does not necessarily 
 help the philosopher, whilst it destroys poetry. Something may be gained 
 by translations of the best models, and even the introduction of good 
 words, but great care must bo taken lest in this way the virgin purity of 
 a language be lost. 
 
 With the questions of more pai'ticular detail with wliicli 
 Herder closes the first collection of the Fragments^ criticising 
 
1769.] FIRST FRUITS. 107 
 
 an article by Abbt in the Literaturhriefe, we English can have 
 no further interest. 
 
 The second part begins with a sigh for the golden age, when 
 as yet there was no criticism, but man was content to think for 
 himself without learning what other people had thought; and 
 then a picture of the true critic is introduced, the guide of the 
 reader, the friend and juJge^ of the author, the architect of 
 literature, contrasted with the false critic as he was to be found 
 in so many German journals, ' ' those fashionable maladies of 
 our time." 
 
 But why is it, Herder goes on, that in spite of all criticism the Ger- 
 mans have no originality, no true genius ? They stand looking at each 
 other and do nothing ; they pride themselves on their imitations ; but 
 Apollo is still angry with them, and declares them "neither third nor 
 fourth" in the race. Let us consider what they imitate and how it is 
 that in spite of all imitation they are so grievous a failure. Many of 
 our best poems are based on the oriental, but our poets forget that David 
 and Job did not sing under a sky or amid a landscape like ours, and the 
 consequence is that the lamb and the tiger, Jordan and the Rhine, get 
 mixed up in very quaint confusion ; our whole nationality, too, is dif- 
 ferent, and, though Voltaire goes too far in regretting that *' a stupid little 
 people in an obscure corner of the earth has been so high exalted," yet it 
 is ridiculous for Cramer and Zacharia to sing our national thanksgivings 
 in the style of Miriam by the Red Sea, and for our other poets to cram 
 their verses with oriental metaphors and mythology, which is indeed 
 contrary to the whole tone of Christian religion, so that even Klopstock's 
 Christian Psalms are often wearisome if not absurd. Our whole manner 
 of life is distinct, and it would be much more profitable to explain the 
 spirit of the oriental poems than to imitate them. Taking the Messias as 
 the best example of this oriental manner, it is much to be regretted that 
 Klopstock met with so much praise and blind imitation at first, for it has 
 weakened the rest of his work ; and the Messias itself is not out of reach 
 of criticism, as may be seen from an imaginary conversation here intro- 
 duced between a Rabbi and a Christian. 
 
 Turning now to the more glorious land of Hellas, how far can the 
 Germans be said really to know the Greeks whom they imitate? At least 
 they are better in this than the French, who deck Homer out in their 
 own fashions or laugh at him as a barbarian ; whereas the Germans, who 
 have no public, no fatherland, are content to see him as he is. Yet where 
 is another Winckelmann who will open to us the temple of Greek wisdom 
 
 nJ 
 
108 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17G6— 
 
 and poetry as well as art? At all events our imitations are merely 
 failures. It is absurd to mention Bodmer and Homer in the same breath, 
 though Noah is a worthy and moral old man. Klopstock, again, really is 
 more akin to Virgil, and the only German who can compare to Homer in 
 influence on daily life is Gellert with his Fables, though this comparison 
 is absurd enough. Still less can we hope to imitate the dithyrambic 
 poems, that had their origin in mad enthusiasm and religious drunkenness; 
 our dithyrambs are evolved without Bacchus, without the dance, without 
 inspiration, and those who make them — such as Uz, Weisse, Gerstenberg, 
 and Schmidt — are worthy boon companions, who have perversely given 
 themselves a wrong name. Our Anacreons do not succeed much better in 
 their imitation, though Gleim has something of the true grace, and by his 
 Grenadier songs, so full of true German strength and humour, has done 
 more for his country than ever Tyrtaeus did. On the other hand Gessner 
 with his Idylls falls far below Theocritus; he has improved Nature till it 
 has lost all interest; he has mixed sugar with the Pierian spring; he has 
 polished down his passions till they are no more passionate. What have 
 we to do with these innocent shepherds that have ceased to be men, and 
 trip about as meaningless gods in an age called of gold ? Far otherwise is 
 it with Theocritus; he has originality and passion, the two essentials of 
 poetry, that are completely wanting in Gessner. Still more absurd is the 
 comparison between the Karschin and Sappho. To her we might say, as 
 Sai^i^ho said to her maid, "Thou hast never gathered roses on Pierian 
 hills, where the Muses and Graces have their haunt." 
 
 The third collection of Fragments is chiefly occupied with 
 the pernicious influence of Latin on modern literature. 
 
 Latin was from the first the enemy of German, and we might have 
 resisted it had it not been for Charlemagne and the monks, who opened 
 upon us the barbarous deluge of Latin literature, Latin religion, and Latin 
 speculation. Had we but been an island like England ! Luther set free 
 our thought, and tried to restore the language, but it again fell into Latin 
 forms, and was flooded by French phrases in hopes to make it polite. 
 Gottsched did much to oppose this, but still treated it from a Latin point 
 of view. German has not yet become the sublime Gothic building that 
 Luther planned. Latin, being considered an end in itself, is ruining our 
 education also, for it sucks the brains of youth dry and turns our men of 
 genius into hopeless pedants, thwarting our knowledge and laying its 
 limits on science itself. 
 
 Since men left off" communicating their ideas by signs and pantomime 
 and inarticulate noises like other animals, speech and thought have 
 gradually become so closely connected that they are now as insepai*able as 
 
1769.] FIRST FRUITS. 109 
 
 the skin and the body. Common men and unlearned women find it 
 impossible to throw their thoughts into different words; hence the rai3idity, 
 the natural directness, the naive beauty of their conversation. Men of 
 learning have become slaves to outlandish phrases, which they must shake 
 off unless they would appear ridiculous. We are already beginning to 
 laugh at the courtly old dame who says, " My feet (by your good leave)," 
 or " The street is {salva venia) dirty "; and some day we shall laugh at the 
 absurdities of the learned. The common man reads little, for what little 
 is written for him is so full of bookish wit and learning that he cannot 
 comprehend it. Our children's books are evidently written for their tor- 
 ment. Our women, whose education is all-important, are bored to death 
 by learned follies. Our poets, instead of singing like the poets of old, in 
 the natural speech of mankind, go searching about for dead expressions 
 and quaint artifices; for they have forgotten that in poetry expression and 
 thought must be in closer unity than two lovers embraced, closer than 
 skin and flesh, being related as the body and soul in Plato. Then only 
 can we feel the joy in poetry that a Winckelmann feels in the Apollo. It 
 is impossible for a poet to attain this perfection in any language but his 
 own. Imagine Shakespeare writing in a dead language! What would the 
 real Horace say if he were set to read such poets as Klotz, or the work of 
 any of our Latin pedants ? We sacrifice everything to that accursed word 
 "classical." We must begin our reform by giving up Latin, not as a 
 learned tongue, but as a means of artistic expression and a test of 
 culture. 
 
 In philosophy, on the other hand, we must never lose sight of the 
 thought in the covering of words, otherwise we become entangled in that 
 labyrinth from which Bacon, Locke, and Leibnitz tried to set us free. We 
 may know everything that philosophers have said, and yet, unless we 
 have made the thought our own and part of our life, we are not philo- 
 sophers. For philosophy does not play with words as arithmetic with 
 signs; and a true philosopher is as rare as a true poet, though many know 
 all about philosophy and poetry. The ultimate elements or conditions of 
 knowledge are time, space, and force or cause; and it is the office of philo- 
 sophy to analyse all thought into terms of these, and to set it free from 
 the trammels of arbitrary expression, such as the Latin phrases which 
 from continual use have come to be regarded as more important than the 
 thought which they originally expressed. As to mythology in poetry, it 
 may be used sometimes in fables and even in certain odes, but with the 
 greatest circumspection, and never as an end in itself, nor as a display of 
 learning. The old gods are on the whole better than abstract qualities 
 with capital letters proposed by Klotz, — such as Shame, Fear, Envy, and 
 the rest. 
 
110 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17GG— 
 
 Herder next passes in review, with comments generally 
 rather favourable, the imitators of Horace and Lucretius, con- 
 cluding with an eloquent description of the real office of ajx)et, 
 "who begins where the philosopher leaves oflp"; who sweeps 
 / every chord of the human heart and shows us the soul of man 
 in all its beauty and terror ; " for the only thing that moves us 
 is a picture of ourselves.'^ Then follows a treatise on the Elegy 
 from the Literaturhriefe, with notes by Herder, one of which is 
 worth quoting as a sign of what was to come after. 
 
 I have never read Young's Elegies or Creuz's Graves in so suitable a 
 frame of mind as of summer nights under a starry sky in the silent 
 bowers of a garden that lay near a churchyard, where the ancient holy 
 lime-trees, inspired by the breath of night, whispered a solemn awe to 
 the soul, and from the far-off ruins of a crumbling feudal castle, or from 
 their dwelling in the old Gothic church tower, the owls of wisdom now 
 and again uttered their hollow note. 
 
 After a discussion of various other questions, such as pulpit 
 oratory, that do not now interest us, the Fragments come to 
 an end. 
 
 Soon after the first part of the Fragments was published 
 news of Abbt's death reached Herder, and filled him with 
 sorrow. " The loss of Abbt is irreparable," he writes to Nicolai; 
 and indeed at this period there was no German writer with 
 whom Herder could more completely sympathise. He deter- 
 mined to write a memorial in honour of Abbt, Baumgarten, and 
 Heilmann ; but, though he set to work upon Baumgarten, and 
 went some way with his original scheme, the memorial, in its 
 final form, as published early in 1768, under the title of The 
 TorsOy was in honour of Abbt alone, and even then was not 
 complete. Herder begins with the difficulty of biography in 
 general, the impossibility of knowing the depths of any human 
 soul, and the vast difference between the life of a writer and his 
 works ; between thought and action. 
 
 How hard it is to catch the exact moment when the soul unveils itself 
 in fullest beauty, when we may embrace the thought of a fellow man, 
 and, as it were, learn wisd(>m by a kiss. In the ordinary reviews and 
 
17GD.] FIRST FRUITS. Ill 
 
 journals we run through a few extracts ; we read criticisms, and learn to 
 find errors rather than beauties ; and thus we seem clever, but are far 
 enough from becoming sons of wisdom. An author depends on the world 
 around him and the world of the past ; he bears the chains of his age, and 
 must be judged accordingly. 
 
 Turning now to Abbt, Herder, as might be conjectured, 
 sings his praises above all because he was not a mere man of 
 learning, born and bred among books, but a man among common 
 men, whose great object was to spread wisdom among the 
 people according to ^^ plain good sense" (this in English); 
 '' the consequence was, that, in exchange for a single chapter by 
 Abbt, we would gladly give a hundred scholarly works, three 
 new Pindars, and a score or tw^o of new Anacreons." 
 
 After forming his style on Sallust and Tacitus, Voltaire and the 
 English, Abbt had acquired just that sharp and terse way, so rare in 
 German ; *' any one who blames this style may be condemned to read all 
 the weekly journals in order, as they are published in Halle." The 
 extracts in the Fragments were mostly taken from Abbt's contributions to 
 the Liter aturhriefe. As a patriot he would not suffer German to be 
 weakened by an admixture of French, or too close an imitation of the 
 English ; as a man he would not suffer himself to be ruined by a life of 
 learned leisure at a university. It is true that under the influence of the 
 French he forsook theology, but he constantly turns to religion for his 
 themes, and is a sur^mse to those who are ignorant how much of true 
 religion may exist quite apart from a pi?iesthood. 
 
 To any one who can read between the lines in the Torso it is 
 evident that Herder is drawing rather an ideal of himself than a 
 portrait of Abbt. He regards Abbt as a sort of happy warrior, 
 who was all that Herder wished to be, taking him, as most of us 
 take some one, for the embodiment of the better side of his own 
 nature, free from the slips and failings of his every-day per- 
 sonality. For we like to have some clear type for our example 
 and satisfaction, and few can be sure of themselves. 
 
 Even within the year we find Herder giving way to more 
 anger, not to say petulance, than beseems a happy warrior. For 
 we have now come to his sharp contest wath Klotz of Halle, 
 and the followers of Klotz, chief of whom was Riedel, the 
 
112 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [17G6— 
 
 tobacco smokor of Erfurt. The first edition of the Fragments 
 was received with enthusiasm by all the best minds in Germany. 
 They were anonymous, and Herder was particularly anxious 
 that all his writings should remain anonymous, till he had ])ro- 
 duced a book worthy of himself. But Kanter let the secret out 
 in Konigsberg, and Herder was soon overwhelmed by letters of 
 admiration from Nicolai, Gleim, SchefFner, Lavater, and, finally, 
 Kant and Lessing. Even Winckelmann, as we have seen, asked 
 what young Pindar had appeared in the north. Mendelssohn 
 wrote a review of the Fragments for his journal, but it was kept 
 back till the second edition should appear, and was never pub- 
 lished. Klotz reviewed the work in the most elegant Latin, and 
 even wrote to Herder with some praise ; for, in fact, Herder 
 had been so careful not to offenjd Klotz, that Hamann accused 
 him of writing against his conscience. The one thing at which 
 nearl}^ everyone took offence was the style, which seemed over- 
 loaded with metaphors and quaint with " Hamann's cant," as the 
 critics called it; for, under the influence chiefly of Sterne, 
 though no doubt of Hamann as well, Herder had set the old 
 rules of prosody at defiance, and overleaped the steady-going 
 periods of the learned. It was to this point that the school of 
 Klotz turned for their vengeance. The change from apparent 
 indifference to bitterest hostility was gradual, but when a review 
 by Herder appeared in Nicolai's Journal, refusing Klotz's Poems 
 any higher position than the third class, war was declared in a 
 new journal started at Halle by Klotz himself. The Fragments 
 were freely abused, and the wish of the author to remain anony- 
 mous was not respected, in spite of Herder's protests to Klotz 
 himself. Petty details of personality were oven added, and 
 Herder's vexation was extreme. He thought of replying to 
 *' this Latin Gottsched " by a poem in the style of the Dunciadj 
 but wisely gave up the idea, for he was almost too eai'nest to 
 succeed in witty satire. The Torso was next attacked, and the 
 final blow was a criticism by Riedel of Erfurt on the second 
 edition of the Fragments, before it was even published. 
 
 Herder, who was at work on the completion of the Fragments 
 
17(59.] FIRST FRUITS. 113 
 
 and the Torso, at once gave up everything, and determined to 
 avenge himself on his tormentors by a series of essays, in which 
 he imagines himself walking at random through groves of criti- 
 cism {Kritische Wdlder). There are four parts, or " Groves," in 
 this work : the two first were written in the autumn of 1768, 
 after the news of Winckelmann's murder, and were published 
 early in 1769 ; the third a few months later ; the fourth was 
 never published till after Herder's death, for he had become 
 tired of polemical controversy that profits not. 
 
 The first is devoted to a consideration of Lessing's Laocoon, 
 and no doubt contains much that was intended for the con- 
 tinuation of the Fragmefits. Herder's object in including this 
 among the " Groves " was probably to secure the powerful alliance 
 of Lessing, who had himself just declared war against Klotz. 
 Herder's admiration for Lessing was naturally profound. When 
 the Laocoon appeared he read it through three times in succes- 
 sion in one afternoon and evening ; and yet in this first Waldchen 
 he is inclined to agree with Winckelmann rather, w^hen there is 
 any difference between the two ; for Winckelmann had been 
 gathered up into the ideal, but Lessing was still a mortal, and 
 some of his conclusions are treated with a criticism far from 
 servile. Herder contradicts his theory as to the expression of 
 the emotions among the Greeks, maintaining that Philocrates 
 does not shriek without restraint ; also as to the cloud of invisi- 
 bility in Homer, which, according to Herder, was a real cloud 
 of miracle ; as to the ugliness of Thersites, and other points that 
 are of much interest to the scholar and of some to most people. 
 But the one criticism of real importance is Herder's expostula- 
 tion against Lessing's dogma that all poetry must represent 
 action, which practically limits poetry to epic and the drama. It 
 is a paradox that was useful in its day when poetry was flooded 
 with endless description, washy odes, and good advice. But must 
 we therefore, asks Herder, give up the lyric and the song, the 
 language of passion and emotion, the first utterance of nature 
 herself? No wonder this seemed a hard saying to the man 
 
 I 
 
114 HEBDER AND HIS TIMES. [1766— 
 
 who, even in Shakespeare, found most delight in the soliloquies 
 and the parts that approach the lyrical. 
 
 This first Wdldchen on the Laocoon was immediately followed 
 by the two against Klotz, " those useless, rude, and pitiful 
 treatises," as Herder himself soon came to call them ; for 
 indeed he was of too sensitive, perhaps too irritable, a nature 
 ever to attain that perfect mastery of the sword which was given 
 to Swift and Lessing. Assured of the justice of his cause he 
 lost self-restraint, forgetting that, unless the decision is left to 
 time, justice has very little to do with success. Klotz is extinct 
 now, and would have been extinct though Herder had never 
 wagged a finger against him. Lessing was ever a fighter, and 
 the joy of conflict recompensed him for the annoyance and 
 pettiness of the foe ; but with Herder every stroke of the enemy 
 was as a dagger in his flesh, and when victory came he was 
 weary and sick at heart. Yet it was the cause, and all personal 
 questions were kept at a distance, though it may be doubted 
 whether Herder would not have spent his time better in writing 
 a good book rather than abusing a bad one. 
 
 He begins with an examination of Klotz's Letters on Horner^ 
 and shows how completely beside the mark they were in their 
 praise and blame. For Klotz, according to the current criticism 
 of those times, had taken upon himself to say " this is good," 
 or " that is bad," as though Homer had made his poems to 
 please a pedant of modern Europe, and not to be the glory of 
 the singers of Greece. 
 
 But, says Herder, what is each man apart firom his time? 
 In order to praise or blame Homer, "I must l)e~ ready to 
 become an Arab with the Arabs, a Hebrew with the Hebrews, a 
 Scald with the Scalds, a Bard with the Bards ; I must enter 
 into the spirit of Moses, and Job, and Ossian, according to their 
 time and nature." 
 
 The rest of the -first part is occupied with various small 
 questions of scholarship and taste, such as the use of mythology 
 in modern poetry— in which Herder defends Milton, and the 
 
\/ 
 
 1769.] FIRST FRUITS. 115 
 
 propriety of representing " the Christian God" in a chariot of 
 thunder ; all of which has become of comparatively small interest 
 to us now. But the second section, in which Herder jeers at an 
 essay of Klotz on the Purity of Virgil, contains some truths of 
 criticism, which have only within the last few years finally 
 established themselves in England. 
 
 A poet like Virgil must be judged as a poet and not as a guardian- 
 angel of the seventh commandment. A critic must be a judge of art, not 
 a judge of morality ; it is not his part to publish a long and learned dis- 
 sertation whether a poet's muse is a maiden pure and undefiled or not ; 
 that should be left to her great-aunts and other pious old women, of whom 
 there cannot fail to be plenty to delight in such a business. Herder goes 
 on to show what diverse ideas of purity have been fashionable among the 
 nations, and how great a part of modesty is conventional, and becomes a x/ 
 nuisance, if we allow it to interfere with our a]3preciation of the beautiful. 
 
 After an onslaught against Klotz^s commentaries on Horace 
 and his imitations, w^e come to the third Wdldchen^ which 
 criticises Klotz' s work on coins. In this Herder shows the 
 folly of display of so-called " taste " in such things as coins, 
 apart from the great principles of the history of nations and the 
 growth of beauty; for coins, like other works of art, are merely 
 the outcome of the spirit of man, and lose half their significance 
 in isolation. He proves, too, that Klotz had borrowed most of 
 his book, and concludes the volume by several other instances of 
 his enemy's superficial and partial judgment. 
 
 It is a relief to turn from the criticisms on Klotz — that have 
 come to look so trivial and unnecessary — to the fourth Wdldchen^ 
 though the origin of this, too, is polemical. Riedel of Erfurt, a 
 warm adherent of Klotz, had written, as we saw in the last 
 chapter, a Theory of the Fine ArtSj which, in fact, was little 
 else than a series of extracts from other writers on the subject, 
 beginning with Leibnitz, Burke, Home, Webb, Hagedorn, 
 Baumgarten, and Lessing, down even to Herder's Fragments, 
 Not only, according to Herder, had Eiedel utterly failed to 
 comprehend his authorities, but he had given the final touch to 
 his other offences by his main conclusion, which was, that man 
 is convinced of the true, the good, and the beautiful, by "his 
 
 i2 
 
/ 
 V 
 
 116 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1766— 
 
 immediate feelings." In other words, Riedel had followed the 
 multitude, besides women and children, in supposing that the 
 common criterion, " I like this, you like that, and there's no 
 more about it," might be converted into a philosophic principle ; 
 whereas, together with pure scepticism, of which it is only 
 a form, it is not philosophy but the despair of philosophy. 
 Herder's exposure of this fallacy in the beginning of the fourth 
 / Wdldchen is the best of his early work for depth of thought and 
 extent of knowledge, though we miss something of the enthu- 
 siasm of the Fragments. 
 
 He begins by showing that the doctrine of '* immediate " conviction, 
 if it were established, would at once rediwecn^^^^^ for it 
 
 would be impossible to advance beyond the particular in each case. It is 
 hopeless to say, " What a man feels to be true is true," for in that case 
 might not Klotz say to himself, "Mr. Privy Councillor Klotz, your 
 writings are beautiful ; 0, so beautiful ! so original, so excellent, so deep, 
 so godlike — I feel it ! What a man feels to be beautiful is beautiful as far 
 as he is concerned, and nobody can contradict him?" It is useless to 
 extend this criterion to general agreement, for the rule, " What pleases 
 every one must be beautiful," affords no basis for philosophy, but merely 
 says that the philosophy of the beautiful has no rules — in other words, 
 that it cannot exist. Thus, if Riedel's theory is accepted, *' the judg- 
 ment-day of German philosophy is come." The truth is. Herder con- 
 tinues, that we know nothing by immediate conviction except the fact of 
 our own existeuce, and, in rather a different sense as it were, '* by a neces- 
 sary hypothesis," the actuality of the external world. Of the beasts we 
 know too little to dogmatise ; but, from the time when self-consciousness 
 first dawned on man, it has been the work of philosophy or reason to make 
 clear to him the conceptions that lay darkly in his soul, just as the con- 
 ceptions of the universe lie hidden in the embryo. Each least separation, 
 or analysis, the earliest perceptions, as of distance, or the fact of the 
 external world (''I am not what I touch"), imply judgment, that is to 
 say, a conclusion of reason. The human race, like the human chUd, thus 
 first perceived the true or actual, then the good, and last the beautiful ; \ 
 and it is absurd to talk of three distinct faculties of immediate perception, 
 " common sense," conscience, and taste, when in reality the three facul- 
 ties are the same. Memory and imagination, together with wit, perfect 
 the whole, and thus by continual practice the act of judgment becomes so 
 quick as to seem like an immediate perception. 
 
 As to the particular case of Esthetics, Riedel had mistaken the 
 
1769.] FIRST FRUITS. 117 
 
 meaning of the word, supposing it to be the art of thinking in accordance 
 with beauty, whereas it is the science of beauty. Riedel had asked, 
 " Does a man of genius think of these rules when producing his work? " 
 This is beside the point, for creation is thus confused with criticism. It 
 is quite true that the greater the genius the less does he think of rules, 
 for it is he that gives the rules. Neither was Riedel right in his assertion 
 that there is no standard of beauty, for taste changes according to age and 
 climate. The idea of beauty was certainly not the same to the Greek, to 
 the Christian, and the Arab ; beauty changes as a Proteus, but still remains 
 one under different forms. At the root of all forms there lies one ideal 
 of beauty, and it is possible to rise above all limitations of age, nation, 
 and personality, and recognise beauty to the full wherever it may occur ; 
 for the ideal of beauty is a form of reason, which, as it developes, is 
 reflected in the external world and history of man. 
 
 After a panegyric on Baumgarten, Herder proceeds to 
 examine tlie functions of the senses, especially as regards their 
 perception of the beautiful. Sight leads him into a long discus- 
 sion on optics, according to the principles of Berkeley's Theory 
 of Visio7i, and on the difference between painting and sculp- 
 ture ; which latter, he maintains, falls rather under the faculty 
 of touch than sight. Music, as a science, is next examined, 
 to discover the difference between sound and tone, and the 
 relative positions of melody and harmony. The other arts, 
 such as dancing, architecture, and even gardening, follow in 
 their turn. But the whole of this last part of the fourth 
 Wdldchen is careless and incomplete com];)ared with the first, 
 being written when Herder was tired of the business, and had 
 his thoughts distracted in many ways. One passage, in which 
 he returns to his old theme of education, may be quoted as still 
 worth consideration : — 
 
 How lamentable is the condition of the whole realm of modem educa- 
 tion ! We spend so much time in learning the thoughts of others that 
 we end by learning nothing else but how to learn. From youth up our 
 teachers give themselves endless pains to rock us, as in a cradle, into a 
 convenient lethargy of soul. Everything is made easy for us ; we are 
 allowed to find out nothing for ourselves, and the consequence is that all 
 our life long we are incapable of discovery. 
 
 But after the surprise of the first part of this Wdldchen the 
 
118 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1700— 
 
 remainder seems but tame. For it is a surprise that Herder, 
 in spite of his education, in spite of his abhorrence of barren 
 speculation, in spite of an almost irresistible attraction to the 
 sunny simplicity of the English school, should so clearly have 
 perceived the supposed error that lies at its root ; and, whilst 
 clinging to Bacon and Locke, should have had the courage to 
 stretch out his hand to Leibnitz, in order to gain some unity in 
 life, and some foundation for experience. It is hard to fix his 
 exact position on this question in later life ; but he certainly 
 shoviTs an inclination to turn against this earlier theory, and lay 
 his foundations on the quicksands of individual judgment. 
 
 After this near approach to metaphysics, we may now pass 
 to certain treatises written by Herder in Riga, that would in 
 those days, at all events, have been thought very closely con- 
 nected with religion. These treatises are really short sketches 
 or fragments designed for a book on the archaeology of the 
 Hebrews, which Herder had in mind when he turned from his 
 course to humble the pride of Klotz. Some are mere skeletons 
 of essays on such subjects as the origin of religion, and the 
 differences and history tliereof ; but others arc fully worked 
 out, the most important being on the Mosaic story of creation 
 and the institution of the Sabbath, and on the deluge and lives 
 of the patriarchs. Throughout this work Herder clearly an- 
 nounces himself a disciple of the new school of biblical criticism, 
 as represented by Ernesti, Semler, Spalding, and, above all, 
 Michaelis. He takes the book of Genesis, and, with his con- 
 siderable knowledge of oriental things, he begins to examine it 
 verse by verse, not in the spirit of blind orthodoxy, that will set 
 all right, no matter by what effort, still less in the spirit of 
 Voltaire. His conclusion is (and he boasts himself the first to 
 have reached this conclusion) that the first chapter, containing 
 the account of the Creation, is a poem, an oriental song, pro- 
 bably composed long before the invention of writing by some 
 true poet of that far-off time, who thought thus best to explain 
 to himself the mystery of the universe. It was intended for the 
 memory, being divided into regular verses or antistrophes, with 
 
1769.] FIRST FRUITS. 119 
 
 something like a chorus. Herder even goes further, and con- 
 jectures that the story of Creation was sung every morning 
 from temple roofs by Magi, and the story of the Fall every 
 evening. Dwelling on almost every word, he shows how 
 oriental is the whole idea, how sublime in its simplicity, and 
 beautiful as a witness of humanity in an age when poetry was 
 universal. The explanation is intrinsically complete, and, as 
 Herder says, it is strange that no one should have imagined it 
 before. 
 
 For, he continues, how vain are the attempts of physics to give us a 
 key by interpreting the " days " as periods, and bewildering us with 
 endless follies of that sort. Equally vain are the subtleties of dogmatic 
 Christianity, which breaks through the very first laws of literary criticism 
 by considering the story entirely apart from its connexion and history, 
 and reading into it modern ideas of the Trinity, oj)timism, and angels, at 
 the same time opposing science, '' so that things have come to such a pass 
 that, when a true natural philosopher is given to reveal to us the wonders 
 of God's creation, he is rewarded with chains and daggers, or at best with 
 red-hot calumny and persecution, if his system does not fit in with 
 Moses." Foolish, too, are the mystic metaphysicians who wrangle about 
 the possibility of creation out of nothing, and reduce God to a mere meta- 
 physical thought. But if any one find fault and jeer at this poem he 
 deserves the answer which Noah, according to the fable, gave to the ass, 
 that stood finding fault outside the ark, " Get in, you ass." 
 
 Herder discusses the story of the Deluge in the same spirit, n\ 
 and incidentally exposes the absurdity of the fashionable proof 
 of its extension from the distribution of fossils ; " for if we had 
 never heard of a deluge we should have had no difficulty in 
 accounting for them by the natural course of things when the 
 face of the world was very different." In another essay he 
 compares the Sabbath with Sunday, and laments the stiff and 
 monotonous solemnity which people in those days thought it 
 right to assume when they went to church. He even calls this 
 stereotyped respect for Sunday "the opium of the soul." But 
 we have already seen something of his views on this subject, 
 and the sketch of his work at Riga may here close, though 
 nothing has been said of his reviews for Nicolai's paper, nor of 
 his popular essays for the R'ga Journal. 
 
120 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1766— 
 
 We must regard these early writings of Herder as parts of 
 one book, which it was the work of his life to expound and 
 develope ; for in them lie the germs of all his future activities. 
 Various as are the paths of thought which he has here opened 
 to view, each leading like every other path to the end of the 
 world, yet they all start from one point ; and if we stand there 
 we find that they are not cross-roads but radii. Unless the 
 foregoing sketch — which is nothing more than an analysis of 
 Herder's first productions or even a statement of his more 
 important conclusions — has completely failed of its purpose 
 owing to brevity or obscurity, it will have been plain to every- 
 one that this main point is Herder's unwavering insistance on 
 the law of growth or the unity of nature in its development. 
 From this all his other conclusions naturally follow ; the ab- 
 surdity of imitation and attempts to revive dead languages, the 
 vital connection between thought and language, the importance 
 of the common people, of their speech and their songs, the beauty 
 of originality and nature contrasted with the weakness of the 
 artificial, the true criticism that takes everything in connection 
 with its surroundings and the past, and refuses to call in the 
 supernatural where any scientific explanation can be imagined ; 
 for all knowledge and all experience together with the arts and 
 poetry make one chain which is the development of man, and 
 we cannot take a link here and a link there and extol or con- 
 demn it at our pleasure. The effect of these writings, especially 
 of the Fragments, was quick and beyond expectation, though 
 most readers only followed one of the paths, and wandered even 
 from that. Yet what we may call the first German revolution had 
 thus begun ; do we not hear the hum of mighty workings ? ^ 
 Herder was to see a second revolution, and perhaps a third ; the 
 fourth was Heine's ; the fifth has passed out of the region of 
 the air, and for its issue we are still waiting. 
 
 Keats, Sonnet to Ilaydon. 
 
1769.] 121 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 FRANCE, 1769 — 1770. 
 
 " We struggle, fain to enlarge 
 Our bounded physical recipiency, 
 Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life, 
 Repair the waste of age and sickness: no, 
 It skills not ! life's inadequate to joy. 
 As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take." 
 
 Cleon. 
 
 We can now imagine how mixed were Herder's feelings as he 
 stood on the ship that evening in early June and watched his 
 friends disappear in the storm till their boat was like a black 
 speck ; and his heart, as he tells us in some almost inspired 
 lines, was full of foreboding of a time when all friends, all joy, 
 and life itself, should seem fading from his sight like a black 
 speck into the distance of the past. Now that Riga was behind 
 him, his eyes were open to all her possibilities, and he was 
 overwhelmed with regrets for the things which he had left 
 undone. So to all men the past and future are full of oppor- 
 tunities, and none dare cast the first stone, if too often the 
 present seemed to Herder a blank. 
 
 Yet on the whole he was cheerful, and the humour of life 
 once more threw its shield round him. At all events he was 
 quit of Klotz and a conflict that was becoming not only painful 
 but degrading, for, in his anxiety to remain anonymous in spite 
 of the personalities of Klotz, Herder had positively denied the 
 authorship of the Wdlder, adding that he was quite as much 
 displeased at their tone as Herr Klotz himself His strength 
 of conviction could not carry so sensitive a nature through the 
 pain of scorn. It is but another instance of the juvenile Pro- 
 
122 HERDEK AND HIS TIMES. [17G9 — 
 
 testant who chalks up '' No Popery " on the wall and runs 
 away ; his sentiments no doubt do him credit, but we cannot 
 compliment him on his bravery. The manoeuvre was as vain as 
 foolish, for Herder remained as visible as a child with face 
 hidden in its mother's skirt ; but nobody thought much the 
 worse of him, for it was in accordance with the literary morality 
 of the day. Yet, now that he was quite clear of the affair, ho 
 must have felt like a man drawn out of a pit. With the same 
 sense of freedom he took leave of his offices as preacher and 
 schoolmaster. He felt that his life was full of contradictions, 
 that he was confined by forms which to him had ceased to have 
 meaning ; he wanted a time to breathe and to clear his own 
 ground, and, first of all, to find out exactly where he was ; for 
 a man who is obliged to speak much will easily persuade himself 
 that he is where he is not, and, under the urgency of com- 
 promise, we have a tendency to become what we say we are. 
 How refreshing then was the contrast, — as Herder himself again 
 and again represents it in his letters and so called Diary of this 
 time, — the contrast between the study, the ink-pot, the pulpit, 
 the school room, the endless speaking of his old life, and the 
 ship with rustling sails, the republic in little, hovering in 
 freedom between the abyss of the sea and the abyss of the sky, 
 the sweet danger and strong contact with actual life, and over 
 all the silence. 
 
 Of the details of the voyage we know very little, for Herder's 
 Travel-hook^ or Diary ^ is as unlike the tourist's journal as pos- 
 sible. Perhaps owing to the storm, the ship was obliged to 
 lie off near the harbour for two days ; and Herder wrote to 
 Hartknoch that he felt like Jonah, only he hoped that his whale 
 would not keep him there the full three days before she began 
 at all events to move. The gale was succeeded by a long period 
 of calm, and the progress was accordingly very slow. Coasting 
 along past Courland, Prussia, and Sweden, with its cliffs of 
 Olaus famous in song, they reached the islands of Denmark in 
 about a fortnight. To Herder everything was a jioaccfiil dream, 
 and he was full of dreamy plans and spiHiilatlons. The shoals 
 
1770.] FRANCE. m 
 
 of herring as they rush under the ship suggest to him the vast 
 immigrations and struggles of mankind in the long-forgotten 
 ages of the past ; the porpoises sigh and gambol around ; and to 
 his mind is revealed the infinite life of the sea. He wonders 
 how far the fishes have senses like ours, whether they have love 
 or any notion of morality. He even imagines that the sea may 
 be only a kind of thicker air in which the fishes are the birds, 
 whilst on the very bottom there may be dwelling a race of 
 strange creatures who can no more swim than we can fly ; he 
 longs for a cunning arrangement of telescopes that he may see 
 to the very depths. 
 
 Yet after all his mind is not changed ; he is full of large 
 plans for the future, and he soon regrets that he has not brought 
 Klopstock and Michaelis on Job with him. Ossian seems to 
 have been his only book, though perhaps he had not even that 
 on his first voyage ; and, in common with most people of a 
 time when true criticism and knowledge of nature were but 
 beginning to return to life, he prized it highly. He was in the 
 midst of the scenes where the stories were imagined ; he hoped 
 even to go to Scotland and see Macpherson in the flesh and the 
 real hills, where the sons of the mountain, the mere, the mist, 
 and the rest of them, were wont to make their haunt. The air 
 seemed full of the songs of bards and the sagas of the sea-kings. 
 The superstitions and wild tales of the sailors added to the 
 charm. Like Heine, many years after in the same sea, he must 
 almost have imagined that every red sail was as full of mystery 
 as the Flying Dutchman. One beautiful night they passed by 
 Copenhagen, and the next day by the royal hunting-lodges and 
 the fleet, when they drank the king's health in the last of their 
 Rhenish. Did Herder think, one wonders, of *^the custom 
 more honour'd in the breach than the observance ? ^' For the 
 day after, the ship put in at Helsingor (Hamlet's Elsinore), where 
 they landed, sent letters back to Riga, and probably changed 
 vessels. It cost Herder a severe struggle to give up all hopes 
 of seeing Klopstock, Cramer, and Gerstenberg, now that he 
 was so close to Copenhagen, but his companion, Gustav Berens, 
 
124 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 was going on business to France, and Herder seems to have 
 promised to bear him company, though it was his original 
 desire to visit Scotland and England first. Accordingly, passing 
 out of the Sound they coasted round Jutland (apparently with 
 some sight of Scotland) and past the Netherlands, till they 
 reached the Channel and Lear's cliffs on the second of July, and 
 finally cast anchor off Painboeuf on the fifteenth, proceeding up 
 the river to Nantes next day. Towards the latter part of his 
 six weeks' journey Herder seems to have become tired of the 
 monotony of such a life, " but," he adds in one of his letters, 
 " one gets accustomed to everything, as the penitent girl said of 
 purgatory." 
 
 Like most people who for the first time land in France he 
 was much surprised to hear the children with their wooden 
 shoes, the fish-wives in white caps, and the rough pilots all 
 talking the polite language of the courts, and also like most 
 people he was annoyed to find that, in spite of the hardships of 
 his education, in spite of his wide knowledge of French litera- 
 ture, he could hardly understand a word. The first sight of 
 Nantes seemed to him monstrous and even grotesque, and, find- 
 ing afterwards that others had thought it only beautiful, he was 
 inclined to suppose that this was due to the peculiar character 
 of his vision, that naturally received everything at first sight 
 under forms of Gothic vastness and irregularity. 
 
 The tendency of my mind, he goes on, seems to be in all cases to 
 the sublime. How closely my love borders on the sublime — even on the 
 melancholy ! Separation and distance are more mighty to me than the 
 , X^resent moment to other men. How I am moved by any unhappiness of 
 \ j my friend (Freundin), by a tear in her eye ! Nothing fills me with such 
 emotion as absence. Hence my affection for the shadows of antiquity 
 and the far-off times of ages that are flown. 
 
 From which it is evident that the image of Madame Busch 
 had not yet departed from his mind. 
 
 The travellers on arriving in Nantes lodged with a M. Babut, 
 with whom Gustav Berens probably had business relations. His 
 wife was a cheerful and lively lady after the best type of French 
 
1770.] FRANCE. 125 
 
 provincial life. She showed Herder much kindness, helping 
 him over his first awkward endeavours with the language, an 
 awkwardness that was increased by his natural shyness. He 
 felt that he was like a great barbarian, mangling that pretty 
 speech ; but, as he hoped to remain unknown and free from the 
 responsibilities of reputation, he was more at his ease, for among 
 perfect strangers we grow indifferent to public opinion. Un- 
 fortunately even this hope was dispelled, for one day as he was 
 driving in the country with Madame Babut she turned to him 
 and said, '^ By the way, M. Erder, have not you written a 
 book on your literature ? " " No, Madame," replied Herder, 
 " I am not the same Erder; I have not the honour to be an 
 author." " Oh, that's all very well !" retorted the lady. " We 
 
 know all about you ; you are a minister. You are '^ and 
 
 so on. It appears that the secret had been let out by a young 
 Swede named Koch, who, living in Hamburg, though now on 
 business in Nantes, took much interest in German literature, 
 and may even have had some acquaintance with Lessing him- 
 self. To Herder he soon became attached, and in tbeir zeal for 
 knowledge the two might be seen at five o'clock in the morning 
 wandering through the woods round Nantes, Herder discours- 
 ing swiftly on all things human and divine, and Koch sucking 
 therefrom what advantage he could with his cold and rather 
 wooden intellect. These woods were much consolation to 
 Herder, and when Koch was not with him he would take a 
 book and dream there of old Mohrungen days. 
 
 And so week after week went by, till his friends in Riga 
 began to wonder what on earth kept the man so long in Nantes, 
 and Herder thought some of them were inclined to complain 
 that tlie money with which they supplied him was being 
 wasted. They did not know how essential was this season of 
 rest. Herder was in weak health and seems to have undergone 
 another eye -operation, though he only mentions this once. He 
 was anxious not to advance to Paris before he could use French 
 with convenience, and was well pleased to keep for a time out 
 of sight of his enemies in Germany. The French authors. 
 
12G HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 especially Montesquieu and the EncyclopaBdists, then at the 
 height of their power, occupied much of his attention, and he 
 was determined to learn the French character side by side with 
 their language. A great change, too, was passing over his 
 mind; he was heartily tired, as he says, of " wandering through 
 groves of criticism," and he yearned now to get some of the 
 reality of life. It is true he finished the fourth Wdldchen, after 
 a fashion, at Nantes, as we have seen, and promised again and 
 again to send it to Hartknoch ; but it is doubtful if it was ever 
 sent, and certainly it was not published. A new scheme was 
 now in his head ; he would write a book " not for the public, 
 but for himself," and it was this idea that really detained him 
 at Nantes. The outcome was the journal of his voyage men- 
 tioned above.^ Part of it was written on board, and at Nantes 
 it was brought to an end ; though, like Herder's other works, 
 not definitely finished, for we have a sketch of a continuation. 
 
 This journal reveals much that would otherwise be obscure 
 in Herder's position. It is written with much freedom, in 
 a pointed and almost witty style, probably caught from his 
 study of French, and abounds in far-reaching thoughts and 
 promise of future possibilities. Herder begins with the merely 
 personal — with regrets over time lost by his course of study 
 and his efforts as author and preacher, whereby he had become 
 a bundle of learned papers rather than a man. He longs for 
 external life, its business and pleasures, its society, women, and 
 polite ways. In his self-dissatisfaction he even doubts whether 
 the virtue to which he had attained, and all the conventional 
 virtues of the world, were anything more than the inanity of 
 negative qualities and convenient prohibitions. Under the force 
 of the contrast between the life of a schoolmaster and life on 
 board ship, he is ready to give up all his learning and books for 
 some knowledge of natural philoso})liy and strict science, that 
 he might give account of the sun and stars, the wind and rain, 
 and the *' electric sparks " that dance on the waves. Then 
 
 ' rrintt'd in llci'der's Lchcnsbild, Btiiul ii. pp. loo-334. 
 
1770.] FRANCE. 127 
 
 come his fond imaginings about the fishes, and their vast wan- 
 derings lead him to the idea of a great and philosophic history 
 of mankind and the spirit of man, embracing all times and 
 places, and all the peoples of the earth, with their religion, 
 politics, philosophy, and art. Keturning to the sea he laments 
 the inefficiency of Russia's navy, and then treats of sailors in 
 general, their mixture of superstition and fearlessness, their 
 beautiful stories, and the manner of their life and behaviour, 
 recalling the old heroic days. • 
 
 Next, remembering sweet Riga washed by this universal 
 sea, he ponders over its barbarous luxury, its ignorance and 
 bad taste, its freedom and slavery. Why should he not be the 
 great reformer, the Luther of this Livonia ? That should be 
 the object of his travels ; he would gather up in himself the 
 wisdom of Europe, and of all its best authors, from Sterne and 
 Richardson to Montesquieu and Moser; would study history 
 and novels, politics, philosophy, poetry, and the stage ; would 
 perhaps write a wonderful book on human and Christian 
 culture, suited for every station of life and treating of every 
 branch of knowledge and education ; would then return, win 
 the favour of the court (perhaps even of Katherine herself, he 
 hints in another place) ; would become a public man, and study 
 every phase of politics; would change the merchants and 
 strangers of Riga into patriots, and, by preaching " the virtue 
 that is suited to this age," would raise Livonia to the ideal 
 province, where every man should be " illumined, instructed, 
 refined, reasonable, cultured, virtuous, and capable of enjoy- 
 ment; " where every national school-child should be as pleasant 
 a thing as Rousseau's Emil. 
 
 Full of this idea, and believing that a perfect training of 
 youth is the first thing necessary to reform the world, he at 
 once set to work upon a scheme of ideal education, which he 
 carefully followed out into the smallest details, evidently in- 
 tending that it should become practical as soon as he returned 
 to Riga. The breadth of view, the freedom and reality of this 
 scheme, almost place Herder in the same rank with the greatest 
 
12« HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 leaders of educational doctrine. He shows himself so far in 
 / advance of the schoolmasters of his own century that we can 
 \J hardly believe he is not writing for us. He begins of course 
 by overthrowing the predominance of his old enemy the Latin 
 grammar, and insists that variety is absolutely essential in a 
 school. 
 
 If possible there must be a number of masters, and the whole school 
 should come under the influence of each in different hours, so as to avoid 
 the monotony and weariness of the iorm system, in which the same 
 master is obliged to face the same boys all the day long. Even more im- 
 portant is a variety of subjects, which will give the children a chance of 
 finding out in what direction their special talents naturally lead them. 
 The school may be roughly divided into three large groups — children, 
 boys, and youths, and the teaching must be adapted to the capabilities and 
 tastes of each group. The subjects in the lowest form will be entirely 
 what the Germans call real or natural ; the children will be taught the 
 main properties of things in daily use, such as tea and coffee, sugar and 
 wine ; also they will learn something of the external form of the world in 
 which they stand, and of the habits of " the animals which they love so 
 much," their distinctions and resemblances. The child will thus be no 
 stranger in his world ; his spirit will be awake, and will be always striving 
 to make discoveries for himself. He will then advance to the first out- 
 lines of the meanings of art, manufacture, and invention, together with 
 the first principles of practical mathematics, as illustrated by sounds, 
 water, air, and machines. Next will come stories from history connected 
 with the places where they fell out, including the human parts of the Old 
 Testament, the story of the life of Christ, and the simplest ideas of 
 religion. '' The Lord's Prayer is difl[icult to explain ; the sense and 
 words belong to the time of Christ ; its tone is Jewish-Hellenistic, and, as 
 we use it every day, it must be briefly and simply paraphrased into such 
 words as a Christ would now use for children." 
 
 Proceeding now to the next group, we advance to a class of practical 
 science ; the boys must be encouraged to work for themselves with the 
 tools and implements best suited for simple production. Their know- 
 ledge of natural history must also be increased by means of illustrations 
 and diagrams, and the mysteries of physical geography, the relation of 
 sea and land, of mountain and river, of day and night, must be expounded 
 in the same way. This will lead to an account of the habits of men in 
 different parts of the world, their dress and mannera and religions. 
 Mathematics will still only be taught as connected with physics. History 
 will be an examination of the vast changes and revolutions by which 
 

 1770.] FRANCE. 129 
 
 nations have come to be what they are. No term must be admitted that 
 has not a vivid meaning for the hearers. Nothing of our modern history 
 will be left ; we shall have no rows of kings, battles, wars, laws, and 
 pitiful characters. Particular attention must be paid to the history of 
 the art and poetry of Greece, and the religion of the Jews, which have 
 had so vast an influence on the world. The third and highest group will 
 deal with physics and mathematics in their most abstract and universal 
 forms, and will study geography and history in their extreme details, 
 including statistics of commerce and finance, and everything that goes to 
 form the history of a people, distinguished from the history of kings and 
 battles. For practical arts the youths should be allowed to visit the 
 workshops of watchmakers and the studios of artists, whom they will 
 imitate of themselves. Last of all, to crown the whole, comes the final 
 result of experience, — logic, philosophy, metaphysics, and theology. As 
 for languages. Herder would have the mother-tongue thoroughly studied 
 first, grammar and style being acquired from experience in that. Then 
 French must be taught in conversation, though when the boys can con- 
 verse easily they should read the best French models. Latin should be 
 learnt for the sake of its literature; but even this is best taught by con- 
 versation. Greek and Hebrew follow in their turn and the course is 
 complete. 
 
 Passing from this dream of education, Herder next dreams 
 of politics, reviewing in turn the nations along whose coasts he 
 had sailed. His patriotism for Russia is at its height ; to him it 
 is very evident that Russia has the future in her hands, and only 
 needs skilful training. Russia under her imperious Katherine 
 had to all appearance just entered upon a period of startling 
 brilliancy. At this very moment she was slaying the Turk by 
 the thousand together. Galitzin had just walked up to the 
 Turkish fort Chotzim without striking a blow (the second 
 attempt, "the Supreme Being having in the meantime put on 
 his boots" to aid his Russians^). Frederick might smile and 
 call it "a war between purblind and blind," but the purblind 
 were certainly having the best of it. Galitzin had been super- 
 seded by men of clearer vision, the redoubtable Tottleben 
 amongst the others. A Russian fleet had even sailed all round 
 Europe to Spartan seas bent on the liberation of Greece, and all 
 
 ' Carlyle's Fi'ederlcTi, vol. vi. p. 434 (book xxi. chap, iii.), and for the whole 
 story, pp. 459-462. 
 
 K 
 
130 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 Europe was convulsed with a fit of premature Bjronic enthu- 
 siasm. The Partition of Poland lay close in front, and there 
 seemed every chance that in a few years most of Asia would be 
 at Eussia's feet. The Czarina was bent on high schemes, and 
 had commanded that a great Book of Laws be forthwith drawn 
 up. Here was a chance for a young man, whose head was full 
 of Montesquieu, to say a word in season. Herder seems to have 
 intended elaborating a great scheme '^ for the culture of a 
 nation, especially the Kussian," and sketches for the work 
 remain to us. For the constitution he was inclined to turn to 
 the East, rather than to antiquity and the West. The powers 
 of Europe seemed to him effete. Frederick, he maintains, had 
 really done no positive service to his Prussia. 
 
 Silesia profits not, and his wise men have brought Germany no good. 
 The philosophy of Frederick and Voltaire has spread abroad to the hurt 
 of the world, and example has been even more harmful than doctrine. 
 The sight of Sweden fills him with regret for the noble constitution of 
 the Hanseatic League. Active little Holland, with its discoveries and 
 economy, is fast sinking into a dead magazine of wares and a place of 
 exchange. England may come to ruin through her trade, her national 
 debt, and her American colonies ; though, perhaps, she will be long pro- 
 tected by her position, her freedom, and her brains. In France, litera- 
 ture is extinct ; the age of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau is as past 
 as the age of Louis, and now people are living on the ruins, with their 
 encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Even in her best period she had little 
 originality ; and now she is afraid to laugh, afraid to love. She is cold, 
 and cares for nothing but "taste"; she is aged, and has lost power of 
 production. 
 
 After some criticisms on French authors. Herder turns again 
 to Russia, and shows that the chief banner in her way was that 
 the people had no conception of honour, owing to their inequality 
 in rank. From this point the Journal proceeds more at random, 
 being chiefly occupied with the French, their language and 
 manners ; but wandering out into speech in general, sculpture, 
 the Italians, and the advantages of doing much and reading 
 little. 
 
 Throughout the whole of this Journal^ especially in the per- 
 
1770.] FRANCE. 131 
 
 soiial parts, tliere is a tinge of discontent with himself and his 
 position, which it is annoying to find in a man of Herder's age. 
 He ought to have been too old for sighs, and we can have little 
 pity for those who pity themselves. But it is only too easy to 
 understand his complaint. He would so gladly take part in 
 ^^real life," produce something tangible, substitute action for 
 thought, lay his hand to the destiny of nations ; he would so 
 gladly be what he is not. His ideal of education turns out to 
 be the exact opposite of his own when a boy. He is ready to 
 say with Wagnei?^ *^ True, I know much, but then 1 would know 
 all ;"*' he is even ready to count his much as nothing, and sur- 
 render all in return for what might have been. He sees the 
 blemishes of the actual ; the possible is bright with golden haze. 
 No one is willing to lay limits on himself. We have seen 
 Goethe devoting his time to bad painting and doubtful treatises 
 on science; we have seen Carlyle imagining that his highest 
 happiness would be to build a wall. For, as Marlowe says, 
 " Where we are is hell," and we have strange dreams of where 
 we might be, till we learn to make our peace with destiny. 
 
 But Herder's discontent is not entirely selfish. He pities 
 himself, it is true ; but it is as a type of his time and country. 
 How great a thing it would be, he thinks, if all the great men 
 of Germany, instead of poetising, and talking, and making criti- 
 cisms, would take to doing something for a change. It would 
 be well even, if, instead of grubbing amongst scholarships and 
 dreaming metaphysics, they would set foot on the firm and 
 lovely ground of science, and teach others how to turn the world 
 to their service. Most men of modern time have thoughts like 
 these, and we are slow to perceive that speech is great, though 
 action may be greater. Sometimes, indeed, speech seems the 
 stronger thing, as steam is stronger than the driving-wheel ; at 
 other times, again, it is given us to see that both in the end are 
 one. But Herder was at present impatient with thought and 
 speech ; he had eyes only for the other side of the circle ; and 
 none of our generation will refuse him sympathy. 
 
 Herder had now been in Nantes nearly three months, and, 
 
 k2 
 
132 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 having seen the whole neighbourhood, even as far as Angers 
 with its cathedral, he felt that his friends in Riga might well 
 complain if he lingered any longer. Early in November he took a 
 post-chaise, and, passing probably through Orleans, or perhaps 
 by Chartres, he reached Paris in four days without misadven- 
 ture^ though Gustav Berens, who had parted with him for Bor- 
 deaux, was very anxious for his safety ; for the country was in 
 a sadly disturbed condition, the people by this time beginning 
 to get very hungry under such government as D'Aguillon and 
 Louis, once the " well-beloved," could give them. 
 
 In Paris he stayed with a German artist, or engraver, named 
 Wille, who had made Paris his home for some twenty years, as 
 was the fashion with German artists of those days. Unfortu- 
 nately, the information we can obtain from Herder's letters as to 
 what he saw in Paris is very slight. We might hope for a 
 glance into that strange society that was then dancing before his 
 eyes, so near the edge of the abyss. He went to Versailles and 
 its gardens, but we only hear that the statues convinced him 
 that sculpture was for the touch rather than the eye ; and yet, 
 close at hand, the Du Barri may have been looking at him ; for 
 it must have been in these very months that she fluttered from 
 the streets to the highest point of glory attainable by unfor- 
 tunate female. He may have seen preparations beginning for 
 the festivities that were to welcome Theresa's daughter to this 
 stage on her way to the scaffold. But we are told nothing of 
 this. In Paris he felt restless and unsatisfied ; he had clear 
 enough eyes to see that all this " taste " and trickery of art was 
 a very different thing from beauty. With the common people 
 he was better pleased. ^* It is a libel," he writes, *' to say that 
 Sterne has never been in France ; he has caught the character 
 of the people exactly.^' His artist friend (too divided in aims, 
 and fond of pleasantry, he complains) conducted him to all the 
 sights — the galleries, the museums, and above all, the theatres, 
 To these last and the great actors of the day Herder paid par- 
 ticular attention. With his head full of Shakespeare it is no 
 wonder that he thought the tragedies and opera stiff, frosty, and 
 
1770.] FRANCE. 133 
 
 devoid of all human interest ; but from the newly-invented 
 polite comedy he was inclined to hope much. He even looks 
 forward to a time when the theatre will take the place of the 
 pulpit and lecture-room. 
 
 Herder was not long in making the acquaintance of the 
 literary circle in Paris ; Diderot, D'Alembert, Duclos, Thomas, 
 and the other lights of the Encyclopcedia. Buffon unfortunately 
 was in the country. Of these he writes to Hartknoch that he 
 knows plenty of anecdotes, but will reserve them till they meet, 
 and to us they are therefore lost. He found them all ignorant 
 of German philosophy and literature, except that they admired 
 Gessner for his tender pastorals and jeered at Klopstock. With 
 Diderot, who had recently been saved from his distresses by the 
 bounty of Catherine, Herder had much in common, in spite of 
 the opposition of their characters, and he accounts him " the 
 best philosopher in France." But perhaps Herder did not get 
 all he might have done from Paris; throughout his sojourn 
 there his mind was distressed and divided by perplexities for 
 the future. 
 
 He had not been in Paris more than a week or two when 
 he received a letter from Pastor Resewitz, a famous Copenhagen 
 divine and friend of Klopstock, asking him if he were willing to 
 undertake the charge of the Prince-bishop {Filrstbischof) of 
 Lubeck's eldest son. They were to travel for three years, and 
 Herder was to receive 300 thalers and some position at Kiel 
 university afterwards. Resewitz added that the prince's hof- 
 meister, von Cappelmann, who was to accompany them on the 
 travel, was an upright and cultivated man, but reserved and 
 requiring delicate management. Herder's embarrassment was 
 great ; he was always better at making plans than at carrying 
 them out ; he saw so plainly the advantages of each bundle of 
 hay that he could not determine on either ; now this way, now 
 that, he divided his swift mind, and the conclusion was slow in 
 coming. On the one side there were his plans already laid ; 
 he meant to go to Holland, to England, and then perhaps to 
 Germany, or, better stiU, to take ship for Spain and so round to 
 
134 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 Italy at last, and then he would return to Higa, or even go on 
 to St. Petersburg and set on foot his grand reforms. All had 
 been clear and straight before him, and now this invitation 
 upset everything. For it certainly had its advantages and was 
 not to be rejected at once ; it would be something to be indepen- 
 dent and not have to be always writing for more money ; some- 
 thing, too, to travel with a prince, who was going far and was 
 sure of a good reception. 
 
 The hope of independence at last decided him^ and he 
 accepted the prince's terms though with a heavy heart. As 
 soon as the matter was settled he probably wished it undone ; 
 when his Riga friends wrote to congratulate him he was ready 
 to take offence and suppose they were glad to be rid of him. 
 Bnt nothing could be less true ; they were full of sorrow and 
 indignation that he should be taken from them, Georg Berens 
 and Hartknoch especially using every exertion to prevent it. 
 
 It was, however, too late to turn back now ; and, in spite of a 
 promise that the post should be no real hindrance to a return to 
 Riga, Herder left Paris in the latter half of December with 
 very gloomy thoughts at heart. His expressions at this time 
 remind one of Webster's grotesque saying, " We are the stars' 
 tennis balls, "^ and it is only too probable that, as he mounted 
 the coach and went lumbering away past St. Denis to the north, 
 he sighed, " Oh, I am fortune's fool." Yet as far as Franco 
 was concerned he could not have been very sorry to be out of 
 her. She had played the tyrant in Germany too long to bo 
 loved by a man with Herder's views of national life. The iron 
 of Lessing had entered into her flesh, but she still required a 
 good deal of killing ; and, in spite of all Herder's love of life and 
 action, there was at the bottom of his free and liberal mind an 
 uncompromising Germanity, a Kem-Deutschheit (to use Carlyle's 
 word), a spirit of Trusty-Eckartism that suffered him not to 
 take pleasure in the delicate revels of the Venusbcrg. 
 
 Travelling without delay to the north-east Herder was in 
 
 ' Duchcsn o/ Mai ft. 
 
1770.] FEANCE. 135 
 
 Brussels at Ghristmas, and proceeded almost immediately tc 
 Antwerp. We know nothing further of his doings in the 
 Netherlands except that he is said to have studied what things 
 of art were to be seen. From Antwerp he took ship for 
 Amsterdam, but not far from the Hague one stormy night they 
 ran on to a sandbank and were in peril of sinking. Years 
 after this Herder wrote : "T still recall the feelings of that night, 
 when, sitting on the wreck of my ship, now unmoved by storm 
 and wave, drenched with spray and exposed to the wind of 
 night, I read Fingal and hoped for the morning." One can 
 compare him with Turner lashed to his mast and gazing out 
 perhaps upon this very sea many years afterwards.^ In the 
 morning fishers put off in boats and rescued all the party, who 
 had the satisfaction of seeing the ship sink as soon as they 
 got to land. 
 
 Passing through the Hague on the twentieth of January, he 
 went on to Ley den and Amsterdam, and made some acquaintance 
 with the distinguished men of these cities, though his mind was 
 too much perplexed with his own future to have much profit of 
 them. In Leyden, however, we must mention rather a weak 
 young creature named Leuchsenring, to whom Herder was much 
 attracted for about three days. His redeeming point was an 
 admiration of Sterne, and he believed that he had discovered in 
 Herder an enthusiastic recruit for an " Order of Sentimentality," 
 which he had in mind to found ; we shall meet him again in 
 about a year, without joy. After leaving Amsterdam, Herder 
 drove due east across Friesland to Hamburg, where important 
 events awaited him. 
 
 For Lessing was still lingering there, unable to tear himself 
 away, though his departure was only a question of days. We 
 would gladly have heard something of the meeting and con- 
 versation of these two men, so alike and yet so different. Un- 
 fortunately a letter from Herder to Hartknoch, perhaps contain- 
 ing an account of this, is lost, and we only know that Lessing 
 
 ' Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol v. p. 3i6. 
 
 ■1/ 
 
130 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769— 
 
 expressed himself much pleased with Herder, and that the fort- 
 night's intercourse was friendly, even enthusiastic. Lessing was 
 not hurt at Herder's criticism of the Laocoon, and thanked him 
 for several suggestions, at the same time soothing by his con- 
 siderate attention Herder's sensitive spirit, too grievously ruffled 
 by the annoyance of the Klotz party. Their conversation 
 probably turned chiefly on the drama, Burke's essay on the 
 Sublime and Beautiful, and speculations on theology, to which 
 Lessing was now beginning to pay more attention than hereto- 
 fore. Under this influence Herder regained his calmness and 
 self-respect, and he parted from Lessing with all the admiration 
 for his life that before he had felt for his works, as was suffi- 
 ciently proved when his great comrade in arms died, his battle 
 being over and his sword buried with him. 
 
 Through Lessing he naturally became acquainted with the 
 other leading men of Hamburg, of whom, however, we need only 
 notice one, the poet Matthias Claudius. He was four years 
 older than Herder, had been engaged in editing newspapers or 
 writing for them, and was ah-eady beginning to intersperse 
 amongst his prose those simple lyrics which great musicians 
 have not disdained to make immortal. With such ideas of 
 poetry, and a devoted admiration for the " Mage of the North," 
 to visit whom he seems even to have thought of skating to 
 Konigsberg one winter, it is no wonder that he gained Herder's 
 friendship. As he was out of employment he could probably 
 devote much of his time to his service, though the love-chains 
 of his Rebecca, whom he safely married two years afterwards, 
 were just at this time beginning to close round him. "Aman whose 
 heart was like a red-hot coal," Herder calls him ; or, again, " A 
 youth full of innocence, full of moonbeams, and with the scent 
 of the lilies of immortality in his soul." For a long time it was 
 Herder's hope that they might be able to live near each other, 
 but this was impossible ; and though some years afterwards, 
 through Herder's influence, Claudius received an appointment 
 with sufficient income, he gave this up shortly, and returned to 
 his native Waldbeck, with its green meadows. But he never 
 
177U.] FRANCE. 137 
 
 ceased to think of his ^' grumbling Herder " with enthusiastic 
 admiration to the end, though perhaps not " with a love sur- 
 passing the love of women," as at the beginning. Unhappily, 
 under stress of the war, he was forced to burn all Herder's letters 
 to him, so that here again we are deprived of what would have 
 been one of the most useful means of making this history. 
 
 On the tenth of March Herder left this happy circle in 
 JIamburg, and proceeding northwards across Holstein he 
 reached the university town of Kiel, where he found the young 
 prince with his hofmeister, Cappelmann, who proved to be even 
 more difficult to deal with than expected. They quickly left 
 Kiel for the little court of Eutin, where Herder stayed some 
 months, busying himself with his new duties, the library, and 
 visits to a scientific friend in Kiel, and at least one visit to 
 Hamburg, where he must have found that Lessing had at length 
 departed. As to the young prince he had some trouble. The 
 boy was clever and good-hearted, and very soon became attached 
 to Herder ; but he was inclined to self-questioning, introspection, 
 and sad broodings, with a tendency to religious mania and all its 
 attendant horrors. His mother was morbidly anxious for his 
 welfare, and his former tutor had taken him through a course of 
 studies at the very list of which an English schoolboy's brain 
 would whirl as at a glimpse of the infinite. Herder, with his 
 keen sense of life and reality, made every effort to save him from 
 these torturing scruples and horrible despondency, the mother 
 now aiding as best she could ; but at each attempt he found his 
 hands were tied by the surly hofmeister. Yet things went well 
 enough as long as they remained at Eutin. Herder took much 
 pleasure in the country, with its " castle, lakes, cattle, horses, 
 and green meadows *' ; the sea too was not far off, and through 
 his liveliness and bright knowledge he was soon very popular 
 with the court, especially with the ladies. His sermons on 
 Sunday were much admired, for people had never heard a man 
 preach after this fashion ; and, though the parsons and learned 
 accused him of Socinianism, and so on, the unlearned were 
 content to let it be so, finding comfort in his words, Socinian or 
 
138 HEKDER AND HIS TIMES. [1769. 
 
 not. At last it was time for the party to start on their travels, 
 and Herder felt very apprehensive of a journey with the prince 
 and the difficult hofmeister, when there would be no one to take 
 his part, nothing to distract attention, and no society to enforce 
 that external politeness so healthful to melancholy. He there- 
 fore made it a condition that he should be allowed to be quit of 
 the party when he pleased ; and on these terms the three set out 
 in the middle of July 1770 for Hamburg, Herder knowing as 
 little as other mortals how great things lay close before him. 
 
131) 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 DAEMSTADT, 1770. 
 
 " Love's the soil 
 Plants find or fail of." — Inn Album. 
 
 " I have danced through day 
 On tiptoe at the music of a word, 
 Have wondered where was darkness gone, as night 
 Burst out in stars at brilliance of a smile." — Inn Album. 
 
 After staying two or three days in Hamburg, where Herder 
 again took sweet counsel with Claudius, who found him on this 
 occasion " a very sympathetic youth, full of life, but yet not 
 averse to subtleties," the little party of opposites proceeded, as 
 in courtesy bound, to visit the courts of Hanover and Cassel on 
 their way southward. We hear nothing of the court of his 
 Britannic Majesty, nor of the ladies whom Zimmermann found 
 so haughty by reason of their tea-drinking, nor of Gottingen, 
 through which the travellers passed on their way to Cassel, nor 
 of the Brocken, that rose like a phantom on their left. But 
 Herder, who had already begun to labour at his Plastih, 
 naturally took much interest in the collections and galleries 
 both in Hanover and especially at Cassel. For here he met, 
 as superintendent of the museum, the Professor Raspe, whose 
 knowledge and knavery were making some stir in the world a 
 hundred years ago. At this time he had not yet begun to steal, 
 at least, not in an open and scandalous manner ; he had not yet 
 set the hearts of the learned of England in a flutter by a threat 
 to publish a volume of our Royal Society's £/nphilosophic 
 Transactions, and he was far enough from his obscure death in 
 
/ 
 
 140 HERDER AhVf HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 Ireland. To Herder he was of interest, not only for his know- 
 ledge of art but as being one of the first to draw German 
 attention to Ossian and Percy's Reliques, then so new and 
 refreshing to any child of nature. After saying farewell to him 
 and Cassel, the party drove through Hanau, and quietly entered 
 Darmstadt in the middle of August. It was a month since they 
 had left Eutin, and they were to stay in Darmstadt a fortnight, 
 for the young prince's mother was of the house of Darmstadt 
 born. Thus, unconsciously, do we go to meet our fate, pushed 
 along our path by this accident and by that. 
 
 According to the barbarous etiquette of the time. Herder 
 was not thought worthy to dine at the same table with the 
 nobility of the court. He was set to take his meals with the 
 court governess. Mademoiselle Ravanell, whom, no doubt, he 
 found at least as entertaining as the average noble. She intro- 
 duced him to Merck — Mephistofeles Merck, as Goethe generally 
 calls him — and Merck in his turn to the family of the Privy- 
 Councillor Hesse, who had married a lady named Flachsland, 
 one of a large family from Elsass, left in a poor way at their 
 father's death. The Flachslands had come originally from 
 Bern in the Reformation times, had dropped their old title of 
 nobilitj^, and settled down to a quiet citizen life, like Herder's 
 grandfather, whom we saw fleeing north from the mountains of 
 Silesia. And now, on a visit with Merck to Councillor Hesse, 
 Herder met one of the orphan sisters of the lady of the house, 
 a girl of twenty, named Marie Karoline, who will remain of 
 interest to us. 
 
 We have a picture of her as she then was.^ The forehead is 
 rather low, and straight with the nose ; the light-brown hair 
 rolled loosely back and bound with a single fillet, escaping down 
 the neck on each side in Greek fashion ; the eyebrows are clearly 
 marked, and the blue eyes straight and fearless. If we must 
 find fault it would be with the mouth, which is hardly tight and 
 firm enough to escape the sentimental, at all events in these 
 
 ' There is a fair engraving of it in Herder's Lebcnsbild, vol. iii. 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. 141 
 
 earlier years. The neck is long after the manner of those clays, 
 and rises gently to the breast, reminding one of Winckelmann 
 and his Greeks, with their " clusters of grapes " ; the figure 
 slim, delicate, and very straight ; something noticeably Greek 
 about the whole, for better or worse, as Herder and others were 
 quick to see; even when she was far on in life, Richter used to 
 call her a Greek goddess. This classic appearance is further 
 heightened in the portrait by her raiment, a kind of loose toga, 
 open in front, and apparently all of one piece, defying analysis ; 
 heightened too, I suspect, by the false art of the time, which in 
 its effort after the so-called ideal, the classic and statuesque, did 
 its best to polish nature into inanity, and to wipe out truth by 
 rule ; for relief from which tyranny of death we owe first thanks 
 to Herder himself. 
 
 Karoline had been living for some time with her sister in 
 rather a depressed and unhappy condition, chiefly owing to the 
 impetuous temper of her brother-in-law and other family cares ; 
 so that cause for pity was not absent, and with Herder, as we 
 have seen, the power of pity was strong. For the rest, it seems 
 to have been a case of love at third sight ; for Herder boasts 
 , that on the first two visits he only felt some slight interest in 
 this girl, with her retiring ways and speech of Elsass : and it 
 was not till the third afternoon, on occasion of an expedition to 
 some pheasant-preserve in the neighbourhood, that the interest 
 became deeper. He had heard from Merck, and probably from 
 the court-governess, of her good kindness to her brothers and 
 sisters, her cheerful spirit and knowledge of the house, and now 
 he found that Klopstock and the Kleist of his boyhood were her 
 favourite poets too, and whilst, standing in the midst of the little 
 party in the woods, he recited choice passages from these and 
 tender strains from the Minnesanger of old, he saw '' a gentle 
 tear " steal over her eye of blue (these things were so a century 
 back), and his heart was filled with a light that changed the 
 world. 
 
 The next Sunday he was to preach in the " Pine- wood 
 church " ; it had been prophesied to him that one of these days 
 
142 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 he would preach away some girPs heart, " and now/' writes 
 Karoline years afterwards, " I heard his voice as it were tlie 
 voice of an angel, words of life such as I had never heard 
 
 before In the afternoon I saw him and stammered 
 
 my thanks : from that time forward our souls were one, and 
 one they remain."^ During the next week they saw each other 
 daily, for Merck and his friends were so much delighted with 
 Herder that they exerted themselves to the utmost to do him 
 pleasure, though they always found they received more than they 
 could give. The woods and pleasant places round Darmstadt 
 were all visited, Herder showing himself at his very best, full 
 of life and enthusiasm, and a quality called " feeling." We 
 can all imagine the rest ; the music in the quiet evenings, for 
 Karoline could play the harpsichord and sing as well, having 
 been always fond of music, " especially the plaintive, languishing 
 kind," and now finding a new speech in it ; we can imagine the 
 fears and restlessness of the poor girl, "no sleep night after 
 night," she writes ; the walks in the twilight woods, never quite 
 alone, it appears, for the court-governess and Merck's wife were 
 from polite France, and had ideas of propriety. It is all visible 
 to us ; that last evening especially, in " the Avenue," when the 
 terror of parting lay so close in front and speech became dis- 
 jointed or impossible ; and so on, as it has ever been since 
 summer first was leavy. 
 
 On Sunday, the twenty-fifth of August, to celebrate Herder's 
 birthday, he being now twenty-six, the little party assembled in 
 Mile. Ravanell's rooms in the castle. The next Tuesday Herder 
 was to leave Darmstadt with the prince, and the hearts of all 
 were heavy with the thought that they would see his face no 
 more. When the party broke up he slipped a letter into 
 Karoline's hand declaring his love in admirably calm and self- 
 restrained words, but holding out little hope for the future. 
 Her answer is dated " eleven o'clock at night, Aug. 26," but 
 either it took her till morning to compose, which is likely, or 
 
 ' B/'minuccnoeXy vol. i. p. 152. 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. U3 
 
 she confused the days, for it must have been written the same 
 night (the 2Dth), since she appoints a meeting-place for the 
 Monday. This interview was short and in public, and the next 
 evening in the midst of sounds of preparation for departure 
 Herder wrote another more impassioned letter of farewell and 
 sorrow. But in the morning, on going to take leave of Merck, 
 he found Karoline there, no doubt by Merck's friendly arrange- 
 ment, and, in spite of the scruples of the French wife, the lovers 
 were alone for one eternal quarter of an hour. And then, being 
 already late for the prince and the stern hofmeister. Herder 
 tore himself from the poor girl's passionate embrace, rushed 
 out of the house without saying good-bye to any one, and in 
 two or three minutes more rumbled past the windows in the 
 carriage, venturing to kiss his hand in that direction, and so out 
 through Darmstadt gates again, and away towards Heidelberg 
 southwards. 
 
 Concerning the whole of this period our information is 
 almost overwhelming. Not only does Karoline in the Remi- 
 niscences dwell on these bright days with fond remembrance, as 
 is natural, but since her death the correspondence of the lovers 
 has been published almost every word, and printed out for the 
 world to read. It begins with a short note from Herder offering 
 to lend Mademoiselle Flachsland some novels to read as she 
 cannot get Mendelssohn's Phcedo from the library. Then comes 
 his letter of declaration, and next her answer taking him as her 
 '^ guardian-angel,^' and promising to be to him what Meta was 
 to Klopstock (we are reminded of Werther and Lottchen at 
 every turn, which shows how universal Goethe's picture was) ; 
 the rest of the letters follow in order, and are of course invalu- 
 able for this story. For the most part Herder's letters are full 
 of honest eloquence, natural passion, and true sympathj^ The 
 woman's side of his nature was almost excessively developed : 
 he was always "his mother's child, ^' as he says; and he had 
 something of a feminine delicacy of intuition that peculiarly 
 fitted him for the difficult tasks of preaching and writing letters, 
 especially to women. His eloquence is generally greater than 
 
144 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 his argument, and his statements better than his reasons ; but if 
 his light is not always '^ dry," it is at least warm ; when his 
 heart speaks he is generally right, and one sometimes feels that 
 a truth ceases to be divine as soon as it looks round for support. 
 Yet, useful as these letters are, we will not be careful to rake 
 amongst the ashes of dead love, nor coldly to collate and compile 
 from manuscripts that once made two human hearts leap and 
 throb. And now after all this tenderness, this Gretchen episode, 
 let us turn for relief to Mephistofeles Merck. 
 
 There was much to attract Herder in this extraordinary 
 man, whose story is one of the saddest tragedies in German 
 literature. Above all, Merck had introduced him to his ^' dear 
 Psyche," had procured him that quarter of an hour of sweet 
 sorrow, though perhaps more for the fun of the thing than 
 in true kindness, and after the sadness of parting Merck con- 
 tinued to act as secret diplomatist for both sides, receiving the 
 letters, consoling the desolate Karoline in the lonely familiar 
 scenes, and forwarding to the traveller what news of cheer he 
 could. These services seemed to shed a glory of love over Merck, 
 which was slow to fade under all coldness and hints of distrust, 
 and never quite disappeared, even when the warmest friend- 
 ship had turned to bitterest hate. But, besides this. Herder was 
 charmed by Merck's wealth of knowledge, his interest in his- 
 tory, especially the history of peoples and of the olden times, his 
 unerring criticism and keen insight, supported by the acute 
 satire, which Goethe compares to Swift's.^ Here was a mind 
 shooting out this way and that, like Herder's own. He had some 
 acquaintance with science, had made large collections of natural 
 objects, and mechanics were his ruin. Also he studied art, and 
 spent much time in drawing and painting, from which Herder 
 might get hints for his Plastik. 
 
 Of Darmstadt by birth, Merck had spent his happiest years 
 in French Switzerland, whence he had brought back the wife 
 mentioned above. He now held office in his native town, but 
 
 > For Goethe's account of Merck sec Avu nwhirm Lcben, book xii. near the 
 beginning. 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. 145 
 
 he was too divided in aims to attend to his business, and the 
 rest of the tragedy is generally known. Driven by a demon of 
 production he wasted his means on diverse hobbies, chiefly by 
 experiments in machines and farming ; wasted his brains on 
 poetry and branches of literature in which he had no real 
 power ; it turned out that his wife had too much propriety to 
 be virtuous ; all his friends were estranged by his bitterness and 
 want of truth ; Wieland alone was left him by ironical fate, 
 and in 1791 he put an end to his lonely miseries by his own 
 hand. Herder in after years remitted something of his hatred 
 in sorrow for his calamities, but we seldom find it possible thus 
 to separate a man from his fortunes. There was something in 
 Merck's blue-grey eye, Goethe tells us, that reminded one of a 
 tiger ; and this is the true key to his character, which is other- 
 wise a riddle. For it must be remembered that, for the next few 
 years, he is one of the most significant figures in Germany ; and 
 the man of whom Goethe could say, ^^on me his influence was of 
 the highest importance," cannot readily be called a failure. Yet 
 he could move no mountains, for he wanted faith ; and, wanting 
 faith, he wanted love and hate, the twin children of faith. He 
 saw what was noble and right, but his heart did not believe in 
 its all-sufiiciency ; with all his knowledge he had no unity ; and 
 having no central fire of faith he was made as the sparks that 
 fly upward. Thus he remained a Mephistofeles among the 
 angels ; a creature that denied, that never loved one human soul ; 
 a beautiful Medusa with eyes that turn the heart to stone; a 
 tiger or any other feline thing by the side of Herder, the trusty 
 watch- dog, and Goethe, the winged courser, lightning-fed. 
 
 But we are peering too far into the clouds of the future, and 
 at present all was bright. Herder seemed to have found in 
 Darmstadt not only love but the true friendship of his life. 
 " Perhaps there are only three such men in anj^ country, and 
 three such women in Germany," he writes to Hartknoch. In a 
 few years we shall find him writing, *' Merck is the third man 
 I wish I had never met." But at this time he filled a want in 
 Herder's life. He was not a master, like Hamann and Lessing, 
 
 L 
 
146 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 whilst he had more scope and manly fixity than Claudius ; the 
 two seemed equal, yet each superior, so that the conditions of 
 friendship were fulfilled ; and it would be interesting to trace the 
 course of the change, were we considering Merck's story rather 
 than Herder's ; but in this case the praise and admiration we 
 instinctively pay to the deserter, owing to his stronger position, 
 belong entirely to Merck; and Herder, with whom the bier of 
 the friendship remained, is proved the frailer to demonstration. 
 Yet we must try to forgive him this, remembering that we are 
 but men. 
 
 It would Jbe interesting, too, had we time, to watch what 
 change arose in Herder under the stress of love, which, though 
 late for so restless and warm-hearted a man, had yet at length 
 visited him, now for the first time, we may say, as he himself 
 protests again and again ; for the affair of Madame Busch may 
 be overlooked as different in kind. Gervinus, always ruthless 
 against Herder, contends that the influence of *' this Greek 
 woman " contributed to the decline and ruin he observes in his 
 intellect. How far this is true must be gathered in general from 
 the rest of our story. For the present, at all events, we may 
 divine what kept him so " quiet and dumb, incapable of speech, 
 incapable of thought," as he rolled through the Rhine country 
 by the prince's side. 
 
 But, further than all this, there was another perplexity, 
 which, added to the happy confusion of friendship and love, 
 might well make his companions think him " melancholy and ill." 
 Just before he lefl Eutin a letter from Westfeld, minister of the 
 Graf of Schaumburg-Lippe in Biickeburg, had at length reached 
 him by way of Riga, offering him the position of head-preacher 
 in Biickeburg on advantageous terms. Readers will have for- 
 gotten this Graf of Biickeburg, but he was Thomas Abbt's patron 
 and friend ; and, having read Herder's memorial Torso on Abbt, 
 nothing would please him but to have the author in his service. 
 Herder, unable as usual to make up his mind, had put the letter 
 aside for *^ circumstances " to answer. And now, in Darmstadt, 
 he had received a second letter from Westfeld, who complains 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. Ii7 
 
 that since the first, in February, he had written at least twenty 
 times in vain. Herder's difficulty may be imagined ; he could 
 no longer leave the decision to Providence ; Italy, Kiga, his 
 Russian reforms, or life in green Holstein, must all be given up. 
 On the other hand, it was time he reached some firm footing in 
 the world, and might he not soon have another life besides his 
 own to look after ? Accordingly, the day before he gave his 
 first letter to Karoline, he had written to accept the Count's 
 proposals, on condition that he could obtain leave from the 
 court of Eutin, and might not be required to come to Biicke- 
 burg at once, but be allowed time to continue his travels per- 
 haps even as far as Italy. He seems hardly to have expected 
 that the Count would suffer these conditions, and his mind was 
 anxious, though he probably <;ould not decide what to hope. 
 Besides, the scheme put him in a false position with the prince 
 and the hofmeister ; and most people have felt how grievous a 
 thing it is to seem to act with others, and, at the same time, to 
 keep a secret reservation at heart. 
 
 Full of these reflections and bewilderment, broken only by a 
 man who played a " David's harp " during dinner. Herder went 
 on his way to Heidelberg, whence he wrote both to Merck and 
 Karoline. She was at a ball that night, where she '' thought 
 of him the whole time " of course, and Herder is with her in 
 the phantasy of moonbeams. For himself he shuns his kind 
 and wanders in the twilight alone. The party next proceeded 
 to Karlsruhe, where they stayed for a day or two, the Count 
 Karl Friedrich of Baden-Durlach, an upright and noteworthy 
 man, taking much interest in Herder, and treating him with 
 friendly politeness, though Herder was still too distraught to care 
 for anything but soHtude and the woods. Unfortunately, too, 
 the countess was fain to be esteemed a woman of learning, and 
 hoped that in Herder she had found a fair field for display. But 
 the man who " fought shy of no creature in the world so much 
 as a woman of learning " did not meet her hints and compli- 
 ments with the flattery to which she was accustomed '' from 
 
 l2 
 
148 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 fools, French and German."^ He had no sympathy with her 
 bits of knowledge, and spoke to her " as from another world." 
 For to him, who could hardly forgive special learning in a man 
 except under the plea of necessity, a learned woman seemed 
 monstrous and unnatural. We must remember, of course, that 
 the German ideas of learning at that time were rather different 
 to ours at present. For this reason, he supposed, a certain 
 coldness arose between them ; and it is likely, for the learned 
 lady of the court must have thought Herder wanting not only 
 in politeness but in penetration. He was very glad, therefore, 
 that those days were shortened. The party went round rapidly 
 by Mannheim, and at length reached Strassburg, apparently on 
 the fourth of September. 
 
 Herder's first letters from Strassburg are very gloomy, and 
 these days are dark. We must begin to see of him that he was 
 not a man to be happy in life, if that mattered. He is driven 
 up and down into extremes, being too acute and sensitive in 
 heart and brain to live the equable life of cattle regardless of 
 the future, and yet unable quite to attain the calm freedom of 
 self-centred blessedness, which is the supreme reward of a few 
 high natures in most ages. For the present he was dwelling in 
 utter loneKness, " cooped up as in a prison " at Strassburg, 
 *^ that dull and wretched place without woods or pleasant walks," 
 so near, too, to happy Darmstadt — so near and yet so far. The 
 fair picture of Karoline floats before him ; he cannot read, he 
 cannot think. His mind is rent in quarters *' like Damiens" 
 by the horses '^ (one remembers the court-ladies of Louis Well- 
 beloved and their '' pauvres z\eaux .' "). The letter was long in 
 coming from Blickeburg. Whither, then, was he doomed to go 
 next ? To Italy, to Riga, to Blickeburg, or back to Holstein ? 
 With what sword should he open this oyster of a world ? The 
 society of the self-enwrapt and melancholy prince was not cheer- 
 ing, and the hofmeister always so difficult was now becoming 
 
 ' Letter to Karoline, LebensMld, yoI. iii. pp. 76-76. 
 
 "^ All these quotations are from his letters to Karoline or to Merck at this 
 time, Lcbcnshildy vol. iii. 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. 149 
 
 impossible. Had he been alone with the prince, he thought, all 
 might hare been well; but now his position was indefinite, and 
 the overbearing hofmeister reduced him to a mere appendage of 
 the party. Herder, who always hated court ways and the 
 emptiness of etiquette, felt that if he stayed with these people 
 any longer he must " cease to be Herder"; and what shall it 
 profit a man if he gain a competency and lose his own soul ? 
 But when one day at dinner he had to "go begging below the 
 salt, without napkin or attendants, a thing of no account, nay, a 
 laughing-stock to the rest," his bitter cup was full, and he deter- 
 mined to demand his dismissal, even if nothing else offered. 
 Happily in the middle of September the letter from Biickeburg 
 arrived formally appointing him to the post and accepting all 
 his conditions, only urging speed ; "for both the Count and 
 Westfeld were impatient for the society of a man of such learn- 
 ing and renown." A few days afterwards he told the prince 
 that they must part, and to his astonishment the boy was over- 
 come with sorrow, the first emotion the poor creature had ever 
 shown, and they left each other with tears. The hofmeister was 
 probably not inconsolable, though he expressed the usual polite 
 regrets, as did afterwards the bishop and his duchess, with 
 more sincerity. "And so," writes Herder to Merck, " another 
 dream is at an end. Our life is as a watch in the night." 
 
 The one ray of light during all this dark and bewildering 
 time had been the letters from Darmstadt, but, when the dark- 
 ness was blackest, this too suffered eclipse. For in a curt, 
 angry, and even sarcastic letter Karoline, who had much 
 strength of soul in spite of her tender tears (Goethe always 
 called her " Electra "), suddenly wrote saying that their corre- 
 spondence must end, that she would cease to trouble him with 
 her letters, that there was no bond between them, and she did 
 not care to look forward to years of letter- writing ; for they 
 would probably never see each other again. Herder after open- 
 ing the letter with a lover's expectation was overwhelmed as by 
 an upheaval of the solid world ; hardly a month yet gone since 
 she entreated him " to write, not to forget her, to come again," 
 
]50 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 and now an end , and as it seemed without even a woman's 
 show of reason. To us indeed the explanation no longer seems 
 difficult. Her kindly friends in Darmstadt had been busy, 
 especially her brother-in-law ; had represented Herder as a 
 random "' man of genius," unstable as water, having no back- 
 bone, no " character," no competency ; true there was no open 
 engagement, nor solemn betrothal, but we can imagine the silly 
 whisperings, the becks and nods, the unanswerable pointed 
 remarks of gossips out of employment at Kaffee-Klatsch or card- 
 table assembled.^ Then, again, she herself was perhaps a little 
 disappointed that her footing was not more secure, for Herder 
 spoke very gloomily about the future, and was inclined, as she 
 complains, to use too many words of mere friendship ; perhaps 
 after all he was only amusing himself with her as a " platonic" 
 acquaintance, and would presently flit to another flower ; at all 
 events this letter would force him to become explicit, and, if all 
 were well, at least it would be nice to hear his protestations from 
 the beginning again. She was suspicious, too, because he asked 
 her to burn all his letters, a request with which it is needless to 
 say she never thought of complying. 
 
 Her indignant letter has not been preserved, and we must 
 guess at its contents from quotations in Herder's answer and 
 our general knowledge of nature. The conclusion must be that 
 Herder mainly had himself to thank for his punishment. Owing 
 partly to his life as a schoolmaster, partly to his inexperience in 
 lover's art, he had displayed a certain want of tact and sympathy 
 which contradicts his real character. He sinned throuo^h igno- 
 ranee ; but of ignorance, nature and women take no account. 
 Karoline was tired of being continually asked, " Have you read 
 this, have you read that ?" as if the important thing was what 
 she knew, not what she was. Herder had laughed at her girlish 
 admiration for tender Gessner with his ideal pastorals; had 
 even ventured to hint that pious Klopstock was not all her fancy 
 pictured. He asked her opinion of Lessing's Minna, and when 
 she ventured a few simple and innocent objections against it and 
 ' Like their English counterparts in one of Shelley's letters. 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. . 151 
 
 comedy in general, as vulgar and savouring of low life, Herder 
 devoted four pages to pulling her criticisms to pieces in the 
 style of the Fragments, or a letter to a learned friend ; four 
 pages wasted on criticism, that might have been filled with 
 words of love ; nay, one word would outweigh them all : no dis- 
 appointment could be more bitter. And was she to have no 
 opinion of her own ? "W as she to be merged in a pedant ? In 
 her indignation she tells "nasty, ill-tempered Herder," that 
 henceforth, profiting* by his rebukes, she will take delight in 
 comedy, and try not to be shocked by any coarseness. 
 
 In his next letter also Herder had defended himself against 
 the charges of her brother-in-law, as to " want of dharacter," 
 by that short account of his past life to which I have often 
 referred. In self-defence he is almost unavoidably conceited, 
 and through the want of irony the tone is unpleasant. Here, 
 too, comes that fatal admission about the arms of the " unhappy 
 lady." Karoline's mind was made up ; and, if the thing was to 
 be done, it had best be done thoroughly. In answer to his 
 ceaseless complaints, his laments for the past and gloomy hesi- 
 tations for the future, she observes that she " hopes things will 
 go well with him, and that he will cease to be tossed so much 
 hither and thither on the waves of restless fate " (for who can 
 forgive a self-miserable man ?); and she adds that she has " de- 
 ceived herself, and all constraint or bond must be at an end." 
 Her triumph was complete. For the first time in his life 
 Herder was fairly struck out of himself.- In the agony of his 
 grief and fear he forgets his learning, his reputation, his posi- 
 tion, the past and future, and all the other incumbrances of 
 personality, and becomes an infinite man ; he has Strength as of 
 a sun over planets ; every ray of his soul pours itself into one 
 bright focus till the heat is white ; he is almost a poet. His 
 next three letters, written in quick succession without waiting for 
 answers, are amongst the most real and eloquent of his works. 
 If, as is probable, Karoline only hoped for love's renewal, and 
 only purposed to read Herder a lesson in the art that is no art, 
 her object was more than gained. All doubt was scattered, and 
 
152 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770. 
 
 furtlier resistance impossible. The story of the *^ unhappy lady '* 
 had to be cleared up, as we saw, and then the storm melted 
 quietly away into a security of sunshine ; a sunshine often over- 
 cast, but never again with such terror of blackness. This lover's 
 quarrel must be allowed to take its place in history, for it 
 revealed to Herder something in nature he had missed before, 
 and helped to guide him to the porch of Germany's greatness. 
 
 Before entering upon the greatest event of Herder's life, we 
 must make some mention of the cause that kept him in Strass- 
 burg after he had quitted the prince in October till the April of 
 the next year. Strassburg was then a great medical school ; 
 indeed Herder was inclined to think that the medical students 
 were the only people who got any good from the place, and 
 Goethe was at this time devoting his enthusiasm to anatomy 
 instead of law. Induced by the fame of a Professor Lobstein of 
 Strassburg, Herder determined whilst he was in the way witli 
 it to have another operation on his eye. This was the seventh 
 he had suffered since the trouble first began twenty years before. 
 The professor promised a complete cure in three weeks, and 
 Herder was full of hope at the thought of appearing before 
 Karoline free of his infirmity. Alas, the blind minds of men! 
 After six months of torture and gloom the euro was declared 
 impossible. We have full details of the operation both in Herder's 
 letters and in Goethe's Aus rneinem Lehen} But to the layman 
 they are of small profit, for from sickness and people who are 
 merely sick we can get little. It is sufiicient to know that the 
 professor set to work manfully with leaden plugs and lancets 
 and awls. The object at the beginning was to bore through the 
 nose -bone, but this was found harder and thicker than human 
 nose-bones ought to be. Another more noteworthy surgeon was 
 called in after some months of this treatment, and did his best 
 with insertions of horsehair and countless cuttings and probings, 
 " as though he were operating on an anatomical corpse." But, 
 after lengthy consultations with learned books, it was thought 
 
 ' Book X. near the beginning. 
 
1770.] DARMSTADT. 153 
 
 best to leave bad alone lest worse come of it, and to let the 
 wound heal np. Herder always writes of his sufferings with a 
 defiant humour, that in so sensitive a man is worthy of admira- 
 tion. Goethe, who was present at most of the operations, was 
 full of wonder at his endurance ; "he seemed to suffer less than 
 any one in the room," he writes; and, when the sad truth was 
 out, '^ his melancholy, even grim, resignation at the thought that 
 he would have to bear in his body this defect to his dying day, 
 was truly sublime, and secured him the eternal honour of those 
 who saw and loved him." 
 
 But we must not therefore imagine him cheerful ; to him 
 Strassburg looked dreary enough. He calls it a " stupid hole," 
 and we can hardly believe that this is the same Strassburg as in 
 Goethe's book. He had now to live at his own expense, and 
 was falling into debt. Like a sick animal he avoided his kind, 
 and was guilty of some rudeness to be quit of society. Once 
 he writes that he had not spoken to any one for a week ; and 
 sometimes he would not leave his room for days together, except 
 for the operations. He could read little or not at all ; a bore of 
 a Russian gave him much trouble, though he was on intimate 
 terms with another Russian- German named Pegelow, a cousin 
 of his old friend Begrow in Riga, and now a student of medicine 
 under Lobstein ; but Pegelow cared for cards and punch more 
 than philosophy. Through all this dreary time his chief comforts 
 were the letters from Darmstadt and a young man of twenty-one 
 from Frankfurt, with brown eyes " like balls of light," Johann 
 Wolfgang Goethe his name. 
 
154 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 STRASSBURG, 1770 — 1771. 
 
 " Thou, spirit, come not near 
 Now — not this time desert thy cloudy place 
 To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face ! 
 I need not fear this audience, I make free 
 With them, but then this is no place for thee." — Sobdello. 
 
 " Just a spirt 
 0' the proper fiery acid o'er its face, 
 And forth the alloy unfastened flies in fume; 
 While, self-sufficient now, the shape remains. 
 The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness, 
 Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore : 
 Prime nature with an added artistry — 
 No carat lost, and you have gained a ring." 
 
 The Ring and the Book. 
 
 " I promise, you shall learn 
 By what grace came the goat, of all beasts else, to earn 
 Such favour with the god o' the grape : 'twas only he 
 Who, browsing on its tops, first stung fertility 
 Into the stock's heart, stayed much growth of tendril-twine, 
 Some f aintish flower, perhaps, but gained the indignant wine. 
 Wrath of the red press I " — FlFlNE AT THE Fair. 
 
 We are thus brought face to face with the gi'eat difficulty of 
 tliis story. I should be very unwilling to say with Lewes that 
 Goethe is like Rhenish, Herder like a pot of Bavarian beer. 
 The metaphor is false, partly because Herder is beyond the 
 reach of the loathsome insult, partly because the kingdom of 
 heaven is not meat and drink. But there is, of course, a certain 
 amount of truth at the bottom of it. As has already been said, 
 all the other figures of this period really serve only as the fore- 
 ground or surrounding of Goethe ; and when ho himself comes 
 into view it is difficult, almost impossible, to keep our eyes off 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. ' 155 
 
 him. We are drawn to him as by a law of spiritual gravitation, 
 and he gives us no rest. If for a time we are repulsed, we 
 return again with a tormenting curiosity. A few months after 
 this he wrote to Herder : ^^ I will not let thee go unless thou 
 bless me ; " and it is in the same spirit that we wrestle with 
 himself. We have an idea that somewhere he holds the secret of 
 the universe. He does not hold it, but is himself the open 
 secret. No one is so visible, but a secret he remains ; and it is 
 this sphinx-like secrecy itself, as much as his greatness, that 
 makes the fascination so hard to resist. This difficulty will meet 
 us again and again throughout this book, and ever increases 
 with time ; but for all this we must not suffer ourselves to be 
 beguiled altogether out of our course. 
 
 In this chapter, however, we cannot turn away from him, 
 for his growth under Herder's influence remains the greatest of 
 Herder's works. In Herder he met for the first time a man 
 who w^as then undoubtedly his superior, both in knowledge and 
 insight into life ; a man of high and self-determined spirit, not 
 afraid to contradict, nor doubtful of his ground. The effect of 
 the intercourse was deep and lasting, though for the time 
 grievous, like all chastening. Goethe was in danger of spreading 
 out on all sides like a lagoon, which yet seems shallow rather 
 than broad ; and in Herder he found a force that drove him into 
 the deep channel of poetry and life. By Herder, whom he him- 
 self describes as " the sworn foe of all sham and ostentation," ^ 
 he was saved from that many-sided prettiness, which is dilet- 
 tantism in its worst form. He was taught to look to the depth 
 of things, and to see the difference between the temporal and 
 eternal in every form of art, especially of poetry ; and thus he 
 learnt that literature and life are grave realities, not playthings 
 to amuse for a moment, and that the thought of the world is not 
 a, meaningless term. What Goethe would have been without 
 this influence it is of course impossible to say ; he might have 
 
 ' Alls meinem Lehen, book x. which is also the foundation of the rest of 
 this chapter. 
 
156 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 been a great painter or man of science, or only a law}^er or 
 curator at a museum ; it is at least certain that he could not 
 have been what he was, and the difference that this would have 
 implied in European thought cannot be calculated. It was 
 Herder with his deep insight into life and history, his efforts 
 after unity of aim and earnest concentration, who thus harshly 
 pruned the luxuriant reed, and made a poet out of a man. 
 
 It is a very strange thing that Herder, who from Nantes had 
 spoken with some praise of his rather wooden Swedish comrade, 
 makes no mention whatever of the " son of Maia," now seated 
 at his side, in his letters to Darmstadt, till after he had left 
 Strassburg, and Goethe had become acquainted with Karoline 
 in person. It was then that he wrote the sentence which has 
 caused critics so much perplexity : " Goethe is a good child, 
 only rather light and sparrow-like.'* For the story of the inter- 
 course we must therefore go to Goethe himself, as he has written 
 it in the second part of Aus meinem Lehen, the tenth book. The 
 passage is too well known and accessible to be quoted in full, 
 but the beginning is so graphic and true that it cannot be 
 omitted, especially as we have otherwise not much idea what 
 Herder looked like at this time, for there is no portrait of him at 
 so young an age. 
 
 Our society, so soon as his presence there was kno\vn, felt a strong 
 wish to get near him; which happiness, quite unexpectedly and by chance, 
 befell me first. I had gone to the hotel zum Geist, visiting I forget what 
 stranger of rank. Just at the bottom of the stairs I came upon a man, 
 like myself about to ascend, whom by his look I could take to be a clergy- 
 man. His powdered hair was fastened up into a round lock, the black 
 coat also distinguished him ; still more a long black silk mantle, the end 
 of which he had gathered together and stuck into his pocket. This in 
 some measure surprising, yet on the whole gallant and pleasing figure, of 
 whom I had already heard speak, left me no doubt that it was the famed 
 traveller (arrival, rather, as we say); and my address soon convinced him 
 that he was known to me. He asked my name, which could not be of any 
 significance to him; however, ijiy openness seemed to give pleasure, for he 
 replied to it in a friendly style, and as we stepped upstairs forthwith showed 
 himself ready for a lively communication. I have forgotten whom we 
 visited (Carlyle's translation is here wrong); anyhow, before separating I 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. . 157 
 
 begged permission to wait upon himself, which he kindly enough accorded 
 me. I delayed not to make repeated use of this preferment, and was more 
 and more attracted towards him. He had something softish in manner, 
 which was fit and dignified, without strictly being bred (adretty A round 
 face, a fine brow, a somewhat short blunt nose, a somewhat projected 
 (pouting), yet highly-characteristic, pleasant, amiable mouth. Under 
 black eyebrows a pair of coal-black eyes, which failed not of their efiect, 
 though one of them was wont to be red and inflamed. ^ By various 
 questions he tried to make himself acquainted with me and my circum- 
 stances, and his power of attraction influenced me more and more 
 strongly. 
 
 To this description we must in these days add that Herder 
 was always clean-shaven, as became a son of the Muses. 
 
 The intimacy quickly grew to be very close ; Goethe tells us 
 that he visited the sick-chamber every morning and evening 
 (except, we must suppose, when he was wandering through the 
 free country^or wooing Frederika in idyllic Sesenheim), that he 
 often stayed with Herder whole days, and was generally present 
 at the operations, in which he took much interest, for he had 
 characteristically hardened himself to surgery, and could be of 
 some service. A great change was passing over him during 
 these ^^ wonderful and happy days, so full of dim promise for 
 the future." " New vistas," he goes on, " opened to my sight 
 
 every day, nay, every hour The more I swallowed, the 
 
 more Herder had to give He imparted to me the germs 
 
 of all that he carried out in after-life." In his old age Goethe 
 said with the calm humility of genius and the truth of humility, 
 *' If I could tell all I owe to my great predecessors there would 
 be very little left ;" and the account in Aus meinem Leben, 
 written also in old age, leaves us no doubt that to Herder he 
 owed one of the very strongest impulses of his life. Herder 
 was to him at this time what Italy is generally said to have 
 been nearly twenty years later. With youthful openness Goethe 
 " trusted him in everything," and would not let himself be 
 shaken off by a repulse. " I accustomed myself to his fault- 
 
 > Adrett is " wide-awake " or " well-drilled " in mind, rather than well-bred. 
 ^ Carlyle's translation, Miscellaneous Essays, vol. iv. p. 166. 
 
158 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 finding," he says. For, indeed, the intercourse was not all 
 sunshine. Goethe soon observed that this man had a repellent 
 side to his nature, which got the upper hand sometimes, and took 
 the form of bitter sarcasms and banterings, descending occa- 
 sionally to downright rudeness. No doubt much of this is to be 
 attributed to the increasing pain and weariness of those dreary 
 months of winter, and Groethe is the first to admit this himself 
 
 This is often so in our life, and we are apt not sufficiently to consider 
 the moral effect of a morbid bodily condition; and hence we judge many 
 characters very unfairly, because we take all men for healthy, and require 
 of them that they behave in such wise.^ 
 
 But, beyond this, there was always a love of contradiction 
 in Herder, a tendency to find fault and criticise and set people 
 straight, that continued in spite of Karoline's sharp lesson, and 
 was, of course, more trying to men than to women. Aggra- 
 vated by self-distrust and a too-sensitive temperament, this 
 resulted in those biting phrases and unpleasing jeers which 
 come rather of shyness than ill-nature. For it is the shy man 
 that is rude. To Goethe this "repellent" side of Herder's 
 nature was more apparent than to others. For hitherto Goethe 
 had lived something the life of a spoilt child. Received with 
 applause by every one, from his father downwards, he was well 
 content with himself and the rest of the world, and was fast 
 slipping into the live-and-let-live style of easy complacency. 
 " But Herder did not spare me," and, indeed, it was well. Of 
 no period of Goethe's life was the line with which he begins his 
 story more true: 6 firj hape\<^ av6po)iro<i ov TratSeuerai (" He 
 never went to school who was not thrashed ;" or, more beau- 
 tifully, " Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth "). He came to 
 Herder with the faults of a wayward child, and Herder had, 
 unfortunately, never had time for childishness. We remember 
 how he used to creep about, silent and still, *' never shouting 
 and leaping," and now he was face to face with a radiant youth 
 who seemed to be hopping wantonly hitlicr and thither " like a 
 
 ' Aus meinem Lchcn, book x. 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. 150 
 
 sparrow "; who by his wild ways and unrestrained spirits in 
 these years startled certain sober personages, till they thought 
 " the fellow could only be half-witted." 
 
 No wonder there seemed to he some want of strength and 
 reality in Groethe's past ; his aims were divided ; his culture 
 threatened to lose itself in the vapourings of literary and artistic 
 pursuits. He seemed quite content to go on writing Occasional 
 Poems and imitations, Anacreontics , and hymns. The brain that 
 was to give us Faust had as yet only produced the Laune der 
 Verliebten (^Lovers' Humours) and the Mitschuldigen (Guilty, 
 One and All), besides a few other pieces not preserved, all 
 modelled on the French pattern with a touch of Lessing. In 
 Leipzig he had learnt to engrave on copper, in Frankfort he 
 had gone " far into dark regions with that mystic-religious- 
 chemical business," and now in Strassburg he was studying 
 anatomy rather than law. He seemed to like everything indif- 
 ferently ; he was quite pleased with Gellert and Weisse ; Wie- 
 land seemed truly Greek. Having no' basis for criticism he 
 was unsure of his own judgment. He collected seals, took 
 delight in the bindings of his books, and admired the painter 
 Domenico Feti. Triviality was the danger of Goethe's life. 
 From his father he had inherited a taste for hobbies, and had 
 he not been thrilled through with the imagination of his mother 
 he might easily have degenerated into an antiquary or col- 
 lector of specimens. Seeing no greatness in Germany, nor in 
 German life, he was turned in upon himself and his little 
 circles of acquaintances. And yet at times he was tormented 
 by the indescribable restlessness of genius that cannot find its 
 channel. 
 
 There was a further reason for Herder's sharpness. He 
 himself, too, had just been passing through a critical stage ; he 
 looked back upon his past life as a thing of mere humours, 
 whims, and random bits of work ; he determined now to steady 
 himself and brace his energies together. In his letters he 
 writes that he hopes he is becoming calmer, more stable — less 
 French and more British. And now in Goethe he saw in an 
 
IGO HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 exaggerated degree all the faults from which he was himself 
 trying to escape. In reproving Goethe, therefore, he was re- 
 proving himself, and this made him violent and intense. The 
 highly- valued seal-collection was laughed to scorn ; the beau- 
 tiful bindings and Domenico Feti were held up to ridicule in 
 verses that fell short of politeness. A blustering power had 
 been admitted into the sanctuary of Goethe's pet deities, and 
 many a Dagon fell flat on its face. '' Very few stars of import- 
 ance were left in my heaven." Herder showed him the petti- 
 ness of all German literature hitherto since the great days of 
 old ; even Klopstock and Wieland were not spared. Against 
 the French he was ruthless ; they were all stiff and elegant and 
 out of date ; even Voltaire was a thing of the past. When Goethe 
 spoke of his favourite Ovid, Herder forced him to see how false 
 and artificial he was — neither Greek nor Italian — how unworthy 
 of the name of poet. In the bewilderment of these reproofs 
 and the twilight of his boyhood's gods, Goethe lost something of 
 his frankness, and became more and more reserved ; and it was 
 this, perhaps, that blinded Herder to his true worth. He said 
 no word of Frederika and happy Sesenheim, no word of his 
 cabalistic gropings, nor, so he tells us, of the dim visions of 
 Faust and Gotz that were beginning to flit through his mind in 
 these months ; but this last point is very doubtful. 
 
 Yet Herder's teaching was not confined to negations; he 
 could do more than destroy. We see from his letters at this 
 time, and from his criticisms on his own verses, that he was 
 himself gaining a cleai'er insight into life, and especially into the 
 depths of poetry. He introduced Goethe to the true Greek life 
 as it actually was lived, as opposed to the false classicism of the 
 day ; he introduced him to his own master Hamann, to the 
 English, to Swift and Sterne and Goldsmith and Ossian, and, 
 above all, to Shakespeare, in his omnipotent completeness, before 
 this only known to Goethe through a book of extracts. For the 
 first two months of his stay in Strassburg Herder was busy with 
 theories about the book of Genesis and the early history of the 
 world, intending to complete that work on Hebrew ai'cha^ology, 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. 161 
 
 which we saw begun in Riga. All these theories, together with 
 his views on the importance and beauty of primitive poetiy and 
 a nation's ballads, were imparted to Goethe, and " made him 
 acquainted with poetry from a quite different side." " He 
 taught me," says Goethe, '^ that the poet's art was a world-gift, 
 a gift to the nations, not a private inheritance of a few polite and 
 cultivated men." 
 
 If we could put ourselves back to the middle of the last 
 century in Germany, we should see how vast was the revelation 
 contained in those words. -^ In another place Goethe says, " I 
 was as a blind man restored to sight " ; and again, " He tore 
 from my eyes the veil that hid the poverty of all our con- 
 temporary literature, and I looked out upon life as it were from 
 a higher place of knowledge." These are strong words, coming 
 as they do from Goethe in old age, at the height of European 
 fame, when there was no longer any comparison between the 
 intellectual position of the two, so completely had it been reversed; 
 when indeed Herder had gone to his rest, his life-work done. 
 Yet they probably fall short of the truth. If we would discover 
 the real meaning of Herder's influence we must go rather to 
 Goethe's letters and the letters of his friends during these and 
 the few next months, or even years. 
 
 Or, better still, we must turn in upon ourselves and imagine 
 how it must have been with Goethe. For to most of us, perhaps 
 in early manhood, before we are stupefied by self-seeking and 
 knowledge and experience, there comes a time when our eyes 
 are opened to the depth and beauty of life and art and poetry ; 
 it may be only by some man's printed thought — Wordsworth's, 
 or Emerson's, or Ruskin's ; it may be — and this is stronger — by 
 the looks and life and words of some other, by the hearth, 
 or with us in the fields. Just this small change and the whole 
 world is new. The man is as heaven-sent. We must all remain 
 ourselves, lonely, self-centred : but this much can another do 
 fcr us, and in this is all. Then it is with us as though we 
 
 ' And yet Pope said almost the same. 
 M 
 
162 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 had been lying on a mountain-side, en wrapt in sullen mist — 
 total eclipse, no light, no sun ; but of a sudden the veil is rent, 
 and far out in front, perfectly beautiful, endlessly wide, full of 
 dim promise, the hills and waters and pleasant valleys of the 
 world glimmer in hues unseen before, perhaps never to be seen 
 again. 
 
 The main theory of Herder's Plastik seems to have been 
 discussed between the two, for the next year Goethe writes, " I 
 understand it all now; I shut my eyes and grope." But Herder 
 found it impossible, in spite of Hartknoch's entreaties, to con- 
 tinue the work in a place like Strassburg, and, after soma weeks 
 of speculation on the book of Genesis, he suddenly determined 
 to compete for the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for the 
 fhQ^i essay on the theme, " Was mankind capable of inventing 
 language if left to his own resources, and by what means could 
 he have invented it of himself ? " The essays had to be given 
 in by the 1st of January, and it must have been well on in 
 December when Herder began. But the subject had long been 
 in his mind, and as he was not hampered by books the essay 
 was finished by Christmas. The theme was too distinct to allow 
 him to wander, and the time too short to allow him to re- write. 
 There is, therefore, a directness and ease about this treatise that 
 is too often wanting in his other works. There were three 
 solutions of the question generally prevalent at the time, sup- 
 ported by three different parties ; the orthodox, headed by Siiss- 
 milch, maintained that man had been taught to speak directly 
 by the Deity, thus making God, as Goethe says, a kind of 
 omnipotent school-master. The German Rationalists, on the 
 other hand, supposed that man had instituted speech himself 
 by a kind of agreement or dogmatic form. The French 
 and English "Naturalists," again, argued that articulate 
 speech must have grown out of the howls and cries of Avild 
 beasts.^ Herder inclines to the last view, showing how un- 
 scientific the other two are (for to account for tlie origin of 
 
 ' For the modern deTclopmeiit of this theory see Darwin's Uescent of Man, 
 vol. i. pp. 53-62 (1871). 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. 163 
 
 language they assume it already existing) ; but at the same time, 
 according to him, man has a further gift than any other animal, 
 for how is it that none other has developed articulate speech ? 
 
 The narrower the circle of a creature's action the greater is its 
 peculiar instinct or innate art ; but man, being born to the fullest free- 
 dom and most universal sphere of action, has very little instinct, but a 
 peculiar characteristic of consciousness of his aims and of himself, the 
 power of understanding, or, as Herder generally calls it, *' reflexion." By 
 this ** reflexion " speech is at once necessitated ; one cannot be said to 
 exist without the other. Herder even goes so far as to say, that, assuming 
 the power of " reflexion," a man would learn speech even though he were 
 quite alone, for thought itself is a form of conversation. This faculty of 
 speech immediately dependent on the power of reflexion is further aided 
 by the countless sounds of nature conveyed through the mediate sense of 
 hearing, which Herder discusses at some length. The consideration of 
 the origin of language leads him to the time when, as Hamann said, all 
 speech was poetry, and this to the endless varieties into which language 
 has developed amongst the nations, " till it has become a Proteus on the 
 round superficies of the world," and each separate tongue is " a treasure- 
 house of human thought, to which each has contributed according to his 
 nature. 
 
 Before sending the essay to Berlin, where in time it received 
 the prize, Herder gave it to Goethe to read. ^^ As he wrote a 
 very clear hand," says Goethe, " the manuscript, loosely stitched 
 together, was easily got through." This ^^ clear hand" recalls 
 Mohrungen and Herder's slavery as copyist to Trescho. Goethe 
 confesses that the subject was quite new to him, and the question 
 seemed rather superfluous. 
 
 For, if man was of divine origin, so was language ; and, if man must 
 be regarded in the circle of nature, language must also be natural. 
 Still, I read the treatise with great pleasure and to my especial edifica- 
 tion. The fat surgeon (Pegelow) had less patience ; he humorously 
 declined to have anything to do with the prize essay, asserting that he 
 could not manage to think on such abstract questions. L'homhre, which 
 we generally played together of an evening, appealed to him more. 
 
 From this essay we can form some idea of the subject of the 
 conversations that had sufficient attraction to keep a man like 
 Goethe imprisoned in a sick-room day after day. The dim 
 beginnings of human endeavour, the true significance of poetry 
 
 M 2 
 
4 
 
 164 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 and song, the strange mythology of the early East, the cold- 
 hearted ])cdantry of the eighteenth century and its makers of 
 verse, all this was revealed to him for the first time. But to 
 supplement this essay we must turn to another book, or rather 
 collection of " flying leaves," which was not written tiU some 
 months after this, and was at length published in 1773, under 
 the title On German Style and Art. It contains a " corre- 
 spondence " on Ossian and an essay on Shakespeare, both by 
 Herder, together with Goethe's treatise on Gothic architecture, 
 and a sketch of German history by Moser, and may be said to 
 be the first definite protest on behalf of that mediaeval revival 
 which has led us to Pusey and his company on the one side, and 
 to Burne-Jones and Morris on the other. There can be no 
 doubt, both from internal evidence and from what Goethe has 
 said, that the subjects of these essays were fully talked over 
 during those winter days in Strassburg, so that this mention of 
 them falls best here. 
 
 From Herder's letters to Darmstadt at this time we see that 
 under the influence of love he was more than ever attracted to 
 the one poetry that is universal — the simple outpourings of the 
 human heart in its joy and sorrow, the lovely lyrics which, as 
 Heine says, sing to us like the nightingales from spring to 
 spring. He perceived more clearly than hitherto, that, though a 
 man speak with the tongue of men and angels, and have not 
 passion or depth of feeling, he is but sounding brass. Feeling 
 his own lack of this creative power, the great miracle given 
 among men, and perhaps too sick and dispirited to make more 
 than an occasional attempt, he fills his letters more and more 
 with translations from the true poets of other lands, executed 
 with that skill which in this kind never failed him. He trans- 
 lated the ballads in Shakespeare's plays, and hints that after all 
 the rude Laplander, who sings to his reindeer speeding over the 
 snow to his loved one's dwelling, may be a truer poet than 
 Major Kleist. He even thought of making a collection of true 
 songs and lyrics from all tongues, including appai'ently passages 
 of lyrical or idyllic prose. For this purpose he urged Goethe to 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. 165 
 
 seek out any relics of national poetry that might still linger in 
 Elsass, and we see here the germ of the plan that was to be ful- 
 filled in the course of years. At the same time he was careful 
 to distinguish between a merely antiquarian interest in ballads 
 and a genuine enthusiasm for all natural poetry as being 
 universal ; for all true songs are the same. His hatred of all 
 coldness and convention was now at its height. If he went to 
 England, he writes, he would of course like to see " Garrik " 
 and Hume, but would rather hie him away to the hills of Scot- 
 land and Wales ; '' my Eden would be a Celtic hut on a rough 
 mountain in frost and snow and cloud." He was also smitten 
 by " a frenzy for Shakespeare," as he writes to Karoline, "each 
 of whose plays is a complete philosophy on some passion," and 
 the fire was kept hot by his indignation at Wieland's recent 
 Frenchified rendering. All these things he poured into Goethe's 
 willing ears, and at length gathered up in the little book On 
 German Style and Art. 
 
 The letters on Ossian begin with a criticism on Denis, who 
 had translated the production of " the impudent Scotchman," as 
 Wordsworth calls Macpherson, into German hexameters. After 
 showing how absurd it is to separate the sense of a poem from 
 its form. Herder proceeds to consider or rather extol the merits 
 of ballads and national poetry in general. He hopes that his 
 readers will not laugh at him for his enthusiasm for savages, as 
 Voltaire laughed at Rousseau, because the thought of going on 
 all fours pleased him so well. He himself is far from looking 
 on civilisation with suspicion, " for the human race is destined 
 to advance from scene to scene, and to progress in culture and 
 morals." Still there is a touch of beauty in the old songs which 
 is missing in the eighteenth century. As instances. Herder 
 quotes some of his own admirable renderings of Scandinavian, 
 Scotch, and English ballads in their original metres, together 
 with some old German popular songs, amongst others the well- 
 known Roslem auf der Heiden, in its first form, generally attri- 
 buted to Goethe. The conclusion of the whole matter is that we 
 must return to nature, for at present " we work according to 
 
166 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 1770— 
 
 rules that no genius will recognise as rules of nature ; we make 
 verses on subjects about which we cannot think, still less feel, 
 still less imagine ; we polish up passions which we have not got, 
 and imitate strength of soul which we never possessed, and in 
 the end all is falsehood, weakness, artifice. Poetry, which should 
 be the most stormy and yet most self-assured of the daughters 
 of the human soul, has become the most uncertain, the lamest, 
 the most hesitating ; poems have become polite, like the re- 
 peatedly corrected exercises of boys at schools." With this con- 
 clusion any one who has felt that '^ the Jolly Beggars," or ^' the 
 Lines written on the Wye," are worth all the epigrams and 
 moralities of Pope, Young, Shenstone, and the rest put together, 
 will readily agree. 
 
 " Whoever would have an idea of the estimation in which 
 Shakespeare was held by us young men during that time" 
 (during the Sturm und Drang period, that is), writes Goethe in 
 Alls meinem Leben, " should read Herder's treatise in the book 
 On German Style and Art "; and should also read the essay on 
 Shakespeare which Goethe himself delivered to the little circle 
 of friends about the same time. Lessing and Gerstenberg had 
 hitherto been the defenders of Shakespeare in Germany, whilst 
 Garrick was standing, as Herder says, '' like his guardian angel" 
 in England. The attacks from which "the great barbarian" 
 had to be defended, the servile worship of the Greeks and 
 Aristotle's rules and unities, the still more servile practice of the 
 French dramas and the plays built on the Greek model, all this 
 has become very strange to us now, though occasionally we hear 
 echoes of it lingering in some belated brain. But Herder was 
 the first to stand up and boldly declare that Shakespeare could 
 no longer be treated like a clever prisoner on his trial, but was 
 the great king of poetry, enthroned for ever on her highest seat, 
 and to him must all men do homage in reverence and thankful 
 humility. Herder follows his invariable rule of criticism in 
 showing that, though Shakespeare in a sense may be called the 
 brother of Sophocles, it is absurd to measm'e the one against the 
 other, seeing that the conditions of poetry, and especially of the 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. 167 
 
 drama, were entirely different in Grreece and in Northern 
 Europe. The grounds of his eulogy are chiefly derived from 
 Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet. If fault is to be found 
 with the treatise, it is that Herder does not take the actual stage 
 into consideration. There was very little of the true dramatic 
 spirit in him, as we have seen, and this want is perhaps one of 
 the reasons that his pupil Goethe did not give us a great acting 
 drama in Gotz, nor indeed throughout his life. "When I begin 
 to read," Herder says, " all thoughts of the stage and its 
 apparatus vanish." He seems to regard these plays rather as 
 stories or epics than dramas, and, when we remember that such 
 men as Charles Lamb and Emerson did not enjoy Shakespeare 
 on the stage, we begin to wonder whether Herder was not right, 
 till we go to the theatre again. ^ We need not here notice 
 Goethe's treatise on Gothic architecture which followed the 
 article on Shakespeare, and w^as the product of the influence of 
 Herder and Strassburg cathedral on his mind. He maintained 
 that the Gothic should rather be called German, and that it 
 was absurd to compare it with the classic, which was suited to a 
 different climate and different modes of thought; but it must be 
 observed how completely Goethe has imitated the style of 
 Herder or even of Hamann, an imitation which, together with 
 the substance of the essay, he regretted in his old age. 
 
 The only other remarkable man that Herder seems to have 
 met in Strassburg was Jung- Stilling, who was introduced to him 
 by Goethe. He had come to Strassburg the same winter, having 
 abandoned the professions of charcoal-burner and tailor in turn, 
 and was now studying the eye under Lobstein, being at last 
 sure of his true calling. Li spite of his quiet mysticism and the 
 power of seeing visions which ran in his family, he was at once 
 seized with profound admiration for Herder. In his own account 
 he says : — 
 
 ^ There was indeed the same want of the true dramatic faculty in all these 
 three, in spite of their critical acuteness. It seems to me significant that the 
 highest work of all of them, except perhaps the Ideen^ took the form of essays, 
 more or less lyrical and " subjective." 
 
168 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 I had never admired any one so much in my life as this man. Herder 
 has only one thought, and that is the whole world. He was to me, as it 
 were, an outline of all in one ; and, if ever a spirit has received an impulse 
 to perpetual motion, that did I from him, all the more because my 
 temper harmonised better with this sublime genius than with Goethe. * 
 
 Still Goethe continued to be Herder's chief companion ; for 
 in the next summer Herder vy^rites, " Goethe alone visited me 
 in my imprisonment, and he was the only person I was always 
 glad to see." But by the beginning of April his imprisonment 
 was to end. The doctors were afraid to do any more, and the 
 wound was allowed to heal. After all this expense and torture 
 he was no better, and the joyful return he had pictured was 
 never to come. Still he was free and could get clear of this 
 miserable Strassburg ; he borrowed some money of Goethe and 
 hastened northwards through Karlsruhe again to happy Darm- 
 stadt. 
 
 The greatest work of Herder's life was done. 
 
 By the time he left Strassburg the strange, and in its day 
 glorious, movement of Storm and Stress foreshadowed in the 
 Fragments had fairly set in. It is needless here to follow its 
 well-known course. For English readers part of the story is told 
 by Mr. Lewes with a certain flashing brilliancy, and the heart 
 of the matter has been laid bare by Carlyle in his early writings. 
 For us it is only important to observe how the whole course of 
 Herder's previous life seems as though it had been specially 
 ordained to lead to this consummation ; the working-force of 
 Nature (if we must personify), with whips and blandishments, had 
 urged him inevitably along this road, for she had need of him. 
 Looking back we remember Mohrungen, with its lakes and 
 forests and church with " horned pinnacles," and the earnest- 
 ness of life. Then we saw Konigsberg, and the glad freedom 
 and reality in the teachings of Hamann and Kant ; then the 
 oppressions of convention and a limited life in Riga, and the 
 joys that rebellion has for a fearless and sincere soul both in life 
 
 ' Stilling's Wandcracltaft, p. 119, quoted in the Lchcnshlld, vol. iii. p. 396. 
 
1771.] STRASSBURG. 169 
 
 and literature ; next the sharp contrast of the sea that makes all 
 common life of small account ; France with her hard glitter of 
 polite ways and artificial grace, her literature "elegant and 
 antiquated," her philosophy "sad, atheistic, unnatural"; and, 
 above all, those crowning days in Darmstadt, when he was 
 brought face to face with Nature in her most untrammelled 
 form, with the force that eternally gives the lie to convention, 
 the second universal, that stands alone between birth and death. 
 This was the inevitable training of the man who was to direct 
 the form taken in Germany by that great spirit of revolution 
 which renewed the face of Europe. 
 
 Even whilst Herder was still in Strassburg, Goethe had 
 
 become a German, or, as Herder calls it, "a Briton"; his 
 
 Emilia and Lucinda, the French dancing-master's daughters, 
 
 had been exchanged for German Frederika. Werther and 
 
 Gotz, and the beginnings of Faust, the highest, perhaps the 
 
 only artistic expressions of this period of Storm and Stress, were 
 
 quickly to follow in the place of the Mitschuldigen. Already the 
 
 Strassburg circle of friends looked with contempt on everything 
 
 that was French or elegant. Germany had begun to have a 
 
 right to exist ; she had entered on the path that in a century 
 
 was to lead her in very unexpected directions. The seed sown 
 
 in Strassburg spread rapidly through the length and breadth of 
 
 the Rhine-land northwards, and to Zurich in the south. The 
 
 ice of two centuries of winters since Luther's day was breaking 
 
 up, and the waters flowed warm though turbid for the time. 
 
 The watchwords of the party were nature, originality, youth, 
 
 the worship of Shakespeare, rebellion against convention, and 
 
 the right of genius to live its own life. It is given to everyone 
 
 to hope that on some one point he too may be a genius. The 
 
 youth of Germany at all events had little hesitation as to their 
 
 claim, and, supposing that to be original was to be eccentric, 
 
 and to be a poet was to be sentimental, they launched out into 
 
 long hair and nakedness, moonbeams and feudal castles, suicide 
 
 and glooms of blighted love, till of them, too, the earth was 
 
 at length weary. Genius finding itself considerably limited in 
 
170 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 the world, cramped by the petty sameness of the daily round, 
 finding that it can be nothing, or at best but one thing, where it 
 would fain be all, is apt to cry out and throw itself into the 
 strange postures — some beautiful, some grotesque — that fascinate 
 or alarm the unwary. 
 
 This protest of the infinite spirit seems to accompany or 
 precede any great advance in human thought almost as surely 
 as "a return to nature." Indeed it is part of a return to 
 nature, a rebellion against dead conventions. In one country 
 it takes the form of Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, and Reform ; 
 in another, of Rousseau, the guillotine, and Napoleon ; in a third, 
 of Herder, Goethe, and Kant's philosophy. For a time things 
 are distract, people seem to go mad, thought staggers like a 
 drunken man, or revolves like a whirlpool. But that is the 
 way of the progress of the human spirit. It speaks by contra- 
 dictions, it publishes itself in paradox, it advances by tacks like 
 a ship against the wind. This is the beauty of error ; this is the 
 truth of extremes ; and those who, by distance of time or loftiness 
 of soul, are raised above the gasps and madness of the hour, tell 
 us that from their height after all the course looks straight and 
 the progress sure. When the brains are out the man is dead, 
 in spite of all ghosts ; and when a form of convention is dead, 
 though we need not wax hot and stick daggers in the corpse, 
 yet we may join in the general rejoicings, and must not be 
 alarmed if some people grow too merry at the tragi-comedy of 
 the wake. 
 
1773.] 171 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 BUCKEBURG, 1771-— 1773. 
 
 " The madman saith, He said so : it is strange." 
 
 An Epistle of Kaeshish 
 
 " There is no last nor first. 
 Say not, ' a small event !' Why ' small '? 
 Costs it more pain that this, ye call 
 A * great event,' should come to pass 
 
 Than that ?" 
 
 PippA Passes. 
 
 With the arrival in Darmstadt Herder's Lebenshild — the collec- 
 tion of his early letters, unpublished writings, and general 
 information as to his life hitherto — unhappily breaks off; so that 
 henceforth we must depend almost entirely on the Reminiscences 
 and his published correspondence and works, all of which indeed 
 are sufficient as far as quantity goes. During the two years of 
 which this chapter will give some account, a significant change — 
 which some would call an advance, others a reaction — came over 
 his mind, and he published little to the world; but his cor- 
 respondence with Karoline continued unbroken, and the letters 
 between the two make a volume of decent growth. He also 
 began or renewed an intercourse with other noteworthy person- 
 alities of the time, whose influence on his mind must be noticed 
 as briefly as is fit. 
 
 We can imagine the joyful hopes with which Herder saw 
 once more the woods and streets of Darmstadt, full of the happy 
 memories of six months ago. But deliberate pleasures always 
 fall short, and the few days spent in the well-known circle were 
 days of uneasiness and disappointment. As the betrothal was 
 not generally known, and was kept a close secret from Karoline's 
 
172 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 brother-in-law, Herder had to stay in a hotel, and the whole 
 party felt themselves in a false position. Of Merck we hear 
 nothing, but he seems already to have become rather indifferent 
 to his friend ; at all events, a chill seems to have been thrown 
 over the circle, and harmony could not be restored, partly, no 
 doubt, because, when the first meeting has been enthusiastic and 
 open-hearted, the second is generally cold and restrained, for 
 people are on their guard, afraid lest they should have com- 
 mitted themselves too far, and no longer feeling the first thrill 
 of novelty and the excitement of discovery. But the chief agent 
 of the deaf and dumb devil in this case seems to have been 
 Leuchsenring, the founder and perhaps the only member of the 
 Order of Sentimentality, whom we once met for a few days at 
 Leyden, and meet now again without joy, though with some 
 amusement; for he is the original of Pater Brey in Goethe's 
 little carnival-play, and will serve us as a type of the sickness 
 with which so many were sick in those days. 
 
 Sentimentality was an element necessary for the growth of 
 the storm that was gathering. For good or evil it was in the 
 air ; and neither Herder, nor even Groethe, at this time could 
 entirely free themselves from its influence. We have seen how 
 Herder had been struggling against this, together with all other 
 unrealities, and now he was brought face to face with a great 
 apostle of the cult. Sentiment was to be religion, nothing less ; 
 and Leuchsenring, having no fixed business in the world to keep 
 him better employed, went wandering from place to place as 
 tutor, hofmeister, or nothing at all, preaching the gospel of the 
 Idealism of Tenderness, " pressing the hands of hundreds of 
 girls, and sweet boys, and other dear little people,"^ leading 
 captive silly men and silly women by his tender discourse on 
 Friendship and the Heart. He was the embodiment of the doc- 
 trine so rudely contradicted by the young Gfoethe, that the office 
 of nature is to reduce a man to perfect softness. Such people 
 had not strength to sigh like a furnace nor weep hke a water- 
 
 ' Avs JIc7'der*8 Naohlnsst, vol. iii. containing his correspondence with Karo- 
 linc during these years. It is the basis of this chapter. 
 
1773.] BiJCKEBURG. 173 
 
 spout ; their sighs were gentle and their tears tender. Leuch- 
 senring, Goethe tells us, had no reality in himself, he depended 
 on his acquaintance and friendships for importance ;^ and it is a 
 sign of this, that he always travelled about with hosts of letters 
 securely locked up in caskets, which dear letters, as well as cer- 
 tain sainted volumes that had been presented to him, he would 
 reverently read aloud to any circle or "brotherhood" that was 
 sufficiently select and religious ; the plague of sentimental letter- 
 writing being at that time sadly prevalent, as the historian 
 knows only too well. This sentiment, indeed, was the popular 
 panacea, the "Morrison's Pill'^^ of the day, and it served its 
 purpose as well as universal suffrage, education, culture, the 
 worship of the beautiful, the Church, socialism, or any other of 
 the kind. Thus we find that Groethe's Pater Brey has a nostrum 
 for all the woes of man, would be glad to govern the world him- 
 self, would chalk over the ugly places, would make Jews, 
 Turks, and infidels love each other as the little lambs in May : 
 
 " Curses because without asking his pleasure 
 The sun his daily course doth measare." 
 
 This "phantom of humanity," as Herder calls him, con- 
 tinued to haunt Darmstadt and the Rhine-land for a few years, 
 though mercilessly exposed by Merck and jeered at by Goethe, 
 whom nevertheless Leuchsenring did not cease to admire ; that 
 at least must be said in his honour. Afterwards lie flitted round 
 Schiller for a time, and made friends with Nicolai and the 
 Berlin circle, founding countless orders and brotherhoods, and 
 causing much annoyance to friends and enemies alike. Next it 
 entered his head that Rome and the Jesuits were the root of all 
 evil, and he began to snuff* a Popish plot in everything. His sus- 
 picions seemed verified when, years afterwards, at the beginning 
 of this century, the Holy Mother again raised her head for a 
 moment, to the astonishment of creation, and swallowed down 
 Friedrich Schlegel and so many other of the greatest souls in 
 
 ' Aus meinem Lehen, book xiii. 
 •^ Carlyle's Past and Present. 
 
174 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 Germany. But, at the beginning of the Revolution, Leuch- 
 senring had taken himself a wife C" a marriage made in hell," 
 F. Schlegel calls it), and gone to live in Paris, thus falling out 
 of German history. Of this apostle of tenderness we will only 
 say further, that, when he was visited in his old age by Schlegel, 
 he produced for his guest's perusal a '^ Diary of the Abomina- 
 tions of my Wife," and that, after tottering about the Bois de 
 Boulogne day after day for a long time, he died (in 1827) in 
 utter loneliness, three years before Heine reached Paris. ^ 
 
 Such was the critic before w^hom the two lovers had to com- 
 port themselves ; no wonder they found it a hard matter to come 
 up to his standard. He had made the study of the Heart the 
 business of his life, and his judgments were oracular, infallible. 
 When he met Herder in Ley den he had drawn, as Herder says, 
 a "milk-and-water portrait" of him, and now^ his sensibilities 
 were sorely shocked at the disappointment. He whispered into 
 the ears of silly women, perhaps even to Karoline herself, that 
 Herder's behaviour was not at all the right thing ; that he was 
 too cold and quiet, and talked too much about books ; that he did 
 not sigh and cry enough ; in fact, that he was not properly in 
 love, according to the love-laws of Leuchsenring and Jacobi, 
 Gleim's favourite, the pet poet of the sentimentalists. For the 
 rest, Leuchsenring slid among the party, silent and white, like 
 a tender ghost, filling the hearts of all with chill suspicion. 
 
 Even we must wonder that Herder did not either confute 
 this creature, or at all events boldly announce his betrothal, and 
 thus, taking his stand on his instincts, wait for the whole huge 
 world, including the impetuous Privy-Councillor, to come round 
 to him, as Emerson assures us it will. But he had not enouofh 
 determination for this ; he was in debt, especially to Hartknoch 
 and Goethe ; Karoline was poor ; the future seemed altogether 
 too uncertain. He had been so long accustomed to changes, 
 that he could hardly believe in permanency. It is possible, too, 
 
 ' Sco Varnhagcn v. Enso, DcnkivurdhjhcHcti unil virmJucJifc Schriftenf 
 Biuul iv. ITOfT. 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 175 
 
 that he foresaw something of the disadvantage of having a double 
 existence before his own individuality was firmly established. 
 As for Leuchsenring, he had made the mistake of most idle 
 persons in supposing that marrying and getting in marriage 
 was the main business of life, and he could not understand a 
 man who had no time to play at tenderness and weep the tears 
 of sentiment. The lovers were never alone, though Herder was 
 conducted to visit her chamber ; and after he is gone she can 
 still see him sitting on the chair by her bed, or turning over the 
 books on her little altar of a table, or looking through a telescope 
 at Mainz far across the Rhine. The days so fondly expected 
 passed in cold disappointment, and Herder once more mounted 
 the postchaise, and drove from Darmstadt, northwards this time, 
 leaving Karoline '^stretched on his bed in floods of tears"; 
 from which it seems probable that he had moved from the hotel 
 to Merck's house. 
 
 At Frankfurt Herder visited the Goethe family, but un- 
 happily we know nothing as to his opinion of the father and 
 mother, and only learn from a letter of Goethe's that he had 
 some conversation with the wonderful sister, and sang to her 
 the praises of Wolfgang. He passed through Cassel without 
 seeing any one ; and late in April he drove through the hills and 
 forests into Biiokeburg, where he was received by Westfeld. 
 For months he had been impatiently awaited by the Count and 
 Westfeld, who, indeed, had been the main instrument in bring- 
 ing him there at all. We may imagine, then, the poor prime- 
 minister's astonishment when the new consistorialratJi (consistory- 
 councillor) of a North- Germ an town with sober views of decency, 
 arrived in "a sky-blue coat embroidered with gold, a white 
 waistcoat, and a white hat." ^ His perplexity was further in- 
 creased because the count, whom he knew to be an austere man, 
 had ordered that Herder should be brought to him the moment 
 he arrived, an order with which Herder flatly refused to comply 
 
 ' This passage is omitted from Westfeld's account in my edition of the 
 Rrm'miscrnccit, and I give it on Haym's authority, vol. i. part ii. p. 459. 
 
176 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 till he had made his toilette with the aid of barber and hair- 
 dresser, who had left their shops in the afternoon, and gone to 
 their dim places of recreation. The consequence was that the 
 count was kept w^aiting till nine o'clock in the evening, and 
 received Herder with a marked coldness, that long affected the 
 relations between the two. To appreciate how grievous the 
 offence was in the eyes of the count, and also to understand 
 Herder's general position for the next few years, we must obtain 
 some idea of this man as he was. The account in the Reminis- 
 cences is very full,^ and there is much in him that is typical of 
 the times ; much, too, of human interest ; at all events, he will 
 be refreshing after the sucking-dove Leuchsenring. 
 
 This is Wilhelm, Count of Buckeburg, or of Lippe, or of both, 
 or of Schaumburg- Lippe, whom we have met in Carlyle's Fried- 
 rich, "stalking loftily through this puddle of a world on terms 
 of his own" ; this is he who gave a dinner in his tent, and, when 
 asked by his guests what was that strange whiffling over their 
 heads, replied that he had given his artillery orders to practise 
 against his tent-pole, but, alas ! there was no chance of their 
 hitting it.^ He was twenty years older than Herder, and was 
 the second son of a natural daughter of George I. of England, 
 who bare him in London to the fantastic and immoral spend- 
 thrift Count of Buckeburg, who introduced Frederick to free- 
 masonry. Brought up in England, the young Wilhelm had, 
 " like all rich Englishmen, lived only for the morrow." ^ There 
 were endless stories about his recklessness and mad wagers ; how 
 he had once journeyed through the land as a beggar, and again 
 had ridden from London to Edinburgh sitting backwards on his 
 horse, a mode of progression that even in mad England must 
 have attracted remark. We note with sorrow that till late in 
 life visits from parties of young Englishmen would cause these 
 fits of insanity to recur, to the scandal of reasonable Biickeburg. 
 
 * See also Varnliagen v. Euse, Biof/rajfhiscJic Denkmalcy Band i. p. 1, flf. 
 ' Carlyle's l&cdenck, vol. vi. pp. 164-165. 
 
 8 This is Wcstf eld's account of the youth of England, JReminisccnctJt, vol. i. 
 p. 276. 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 177 
 
 Still, we are told that lie acquired something of that " nobility 
 of tone which belongs to the upper classes in England." He 
 never mastered the German tongue perfectly, though he spoke 
 French, Italian, and Portuguese, and had travelled through- 
 out Europe from Turkey to Portugal. On the death of his 
 elder brother he was obliged to live for a time in Biickeburg, 
 an indignant witness of his father's extravagance and the bar- 
 barous ceremony of the old German courts ; a witness, too, of the 
 insatiate greed of his father's mistress, a " Countess Bentink, 
 from England," and of his poor stupid step-mother's sullen 
 despair. He served at Dettingen the year before Herder was 
 born ; and at twenty-four, on the death of his father, he did for 
 Biickeburg — in a still more rigorous style — what Friedrich 
 Wilhelm I. had done for Prussia, when " the expensive Herr " 
 died.^ The step-mother, for whom Herder had no favour, retired 
 to a castle of her own ; the light Countess Bentinck flitted home 
 over seas ; the councillors of the father were sent packing ; new 
 councillors were appointed — councillors in name only, for we 
 read that Wilhelm " never took advice of any one"; the lovely 
 pleasure-houses were torn down, the ruins being left as a memo- 
 rial or warning to all who passed by; the fine furniture was sold. 
 Wilhelm would rule by his own might, and make of little Biicke- 
 burg a great military power. After another interval of travel 
 to gain experience, he returned in 1753, and the work began 
 in earnest. A sixteenth part of the whole population became 
 soldiers, and, by infinite exertion in the way of drilling and 
 military schools, he was ready w^hen the Seven Years' War came 
 on. " Hanover was obliged to ally herself to me," he proudly 
 said ; and as commander of the Allied artillery he did notable 
 service under Ferdinand of Brunswick; would have been in 
 Ferdinand's place, say some, if he had not insisted on taking the 
 world on his own terms. ^ 
 
 Perhaps sick of the ineptitude he found in a camp where 
 
 ' Carlyle's Frederich, vol. i. book iv. chap. iii. 
 2 Ibid. vol. vi. p. 164. 
 
 N 
 
178 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771 — 
 
 guests may have objected to artillery practice at their tent-pole, 
 he had retired to Biickeburg, when France, to drive a thorn 
 into Pitt's side, prevailed on Spain to declare war against help- 
 less Portugal. England, in spite of the disaster of Pitt's resig- 
 nation, had sense enough to send for the Count to command the 
 English and the Portuguese forces, or rather, to create the army. 
 Never v^as man in more difficult position ; victory was impos- 
 sible ; but what indomitable energy and silent strength could do 
 against hopeless confusion, unreadiness (except for Pitt's share), 
 and miserable national jealousies, was done.^ At the peace he 
 came home, and characteristically offered marriage to a woman 
 he had never seen, on the strength of a letter from her to her 
 brother. She became his Countess, and we shall meet her in 
 time. Soon after this he invited Thomas Abbt to his court, but, 
 after a year and a quarter of pleasant intercourse on philosophy 
 and schemes for practical government, this "friend of his heart" 
 died, leaving the Count very desolate. How, on reading the 
 Torso on Abbt, he had desired Herder to come to Biickeburg — 
 at first with no definite appointment, then as preacher in the 
 Lutheran church and member of the consistory — has been already 
 told. His main object in life was still to make Biickeburg a 
 great military power. In a large piece of water toward the 
 north, called the Steinhuder Lake, he had built a model fortress, 
 which he named the Wilhelmstein ; this looked towards Hanover, 
 and he maintained that every prince in poor divided Germany 
 ought to build the like. It was nothing to him that the expense 
 almost ruined his little state, already in a low way through his 
 father's whims. He had given up finance as hopeless, and never 
 much believed in salutary measures for the people, but believed 
 very firmly in iron ramrods and a stout fortress. Accordingly, 
 a foundation of solid masonry had to be laid in the bottom of 
 the lake, the country around drained, the fortress when finished 
 had constantly to be repaired, as the water rotted the stone, and 
 provisions must be supplied to the garrison ; for the place was 
 
 ' 1761-2. Carlyle's Frcdrrick, vol. vi. pp. 240-242. 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 179 
 
 kept always on a war footing. There were military schools and 
 barracks, too, by the lake, very immoral and ill-behaved places 
 we hear, though the Count on getting wind of this shipped the 
 worst offenders off to Portugal straight to mend their ways. 
 
 Yet this man was not a mere military despot ; was not so 
 much like Friedrich Wilhelm with his giants as like the greater 
 Frederick with his flute and Voltaire. He was a philosopher 
 after his kind ; and one of his main theories was that war to be 
 justified must always be defensive. He had considerable know- 
 ledge of physics and mathematics, and yet could say whole 
 pages of Shakespeare by heart. In Italy he had learnt music 
 and art, and now he kept up a little Kapelle for music at his own 
 expense, with Christian Bach, son of the great Sebastian, as 
 head musician ; also he had a fine collection of pictures, " in- 
 cluding a Raphael " ; and himself could draw with some skill. 
 He read the earlier works of Kant, and took pleasure in the 
 wit of Voltaire, but his greatest delight was in hearing of deeds 
 of bravery ; and, when he was told of the Portuguese priest who 
 went down in a ship rather than desert his post, he was so much 
 pleased that he " drew a picture of the scene," a picture one 
 would like to see if it is preserved. He also enjoyed talking 
 philosophy— eighteenth-century philosophy — with learned men ; 
 it was chiefly this that had drawn him to Abbt, and this he 
 required of Herder. For parsons and their works he had very 
 little respect ; as we have said before, he did not believe much 
 in " amelioration of the masses," except indeed, perhaps, like 
 Frederick, by the way of drainage. Another point of resem- 
 blance to Frederick was that the Count, when he was ill, always 
 managed to cure himself by the simple prescription of "silence, 
 patience ; esperance, soumission ; that is to say, Spes,^^ which he 
 adopted as his motto in. life. In figure he was tall and very 
 strong, though lean, with a face full of intellect and earnest- 
 ness, and eyes clear and sparkling ; something romantic about 
 his whole bearing; " he was like a Spanish knight, in fact a 
 Don Quixote," we are told in the Reminiscences ;^ and in after- 
 
 » Vol. i. p. 177. 
 
 n2 
 
180 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 years Herder said of him that he was altogether " a hero of 
 antiquity." 
 
 We can see now that such a man would think very much of 
 punctuality as of the istars of heaven, very much of obedience 
 strict as Nature's own, and very little of neatly-powdered hair or 
 dainty silken mantles. The meeting so long expected was un- 
 deniably cold, and the constraint lasted long ; it was increased, 
 too, according to the Reminiscences^ by the hostile representations 
 of a mysterious N., who happened to be on bad terms with the 
 Count, and indeed with all the other inhabitants of the place, 
 his wife and himself evidently considering Biickeburg far too 
 small a sphere for such as they. By N. Westfeld himself must 
 be signified. He was alive when the Reminiscences were written, 
 and we know that Herder stayed in his house for the first few 
 weeks, till his own place should be ready. We read, too, that 
 N. was the only man of culture in Biickeburg except the Count ; 
 and Westfeld certainly had a fair acquaintance with literature 
 and history, and especially of economics, for shortly after this he 
 gained a prize for a history of some social question. 
 
 Further, to estimate fully the difficulty of friendly intercourse 
 between Herder and the Count, we must remember Herder's old 
 horror of " the red collar " and all things military ; we must 
 remember his nervously sensitive, almost irritable, disposition, his 
 difficulty of decision, his slight and pliable frame. Accustomed 
 to be honoured rather than to do homage ; half dreamer, half 
 rebel, and yet resolved in his office of teacher to work some 
 good for the souls of men, he was now brought face to face with 
 a nature of granite, a man who never doubted, never took 
 advice, who demanded homage as his due, who was military- 
 mad, who made his artillery practise at his tent-pole, who 
 believed in no teaching but of bayonet-drill, whose knowledge 
 was mathematical and his speculations abstract. Abbt had dis- 
 played wonderful tact in managing the Count by seeming to 
 encourage his fixed ideas and submitting completely to his will ; 
 and yet it is^ hinted that even he could not have endured the 
 position much longer when death came. To Herder all intimacy 
 
1773.] • BUCKEBURG. 181 
 
 long seemed impossible. He was glad he did not live in the castle 
 like Abbt, and, though he occasionally dined there and was in- 
 vited to the concerts in the court Kapelle, he considered even the 
 pleasure of music dearly bought by enforced attention to the 
 Count's endless disquisitions on philosophy. Sometimes he would 
 be asked to preach at the summer residence of Baum, though 
 the Count was of the Keformed Church and had his private 
 chaplain, whilst Herder cured souls after the Lutheran fashion. 
 But after service he was compelled to walk in the garden with 
 the Count, and again obsequiously listen to his dogmatism on 
 " mere speculation and metaphysics," satisfying to no human 
 soul. During Herder's first year at Biickeburg, too, the Count's 
 temper was sorely tried by disappointment, for he had confi- 
 dently expected a son and heir, " certain of an uncertainty," as 
 the Reminiscences say ; and when a daughter came he shut himself 
 up in his room for a whole day, and was slow to take comfort. 
 For six months after this the Countess was away for her health's 
 sake, and yet in the end it was the Countess who was mediator. 
 Still the two men were not blind to each other. The Count told his 
 wife that '' Herder was a far greater man than ever Abbt had 
 been," and he often wondered that people left him in Biickeburg 
 so long. At the same time Herder writes to Karoline that no 
 one in the place could understand a reasonable word but the 
 Count and Westfeld, that the Count indeed was too great for 
 the land, and the only pity was he was too much of a prince, 
 and had been spoilt by servility ; a reservation that shows us 
 which way the European wind was blowing. 
 
 We shall now be able to understand the tone of despondency 
 that pervades Herder's early letters to Karoline from Biickeburg. 
 He was always easily downcast, and before he had been three 
 days in the place he had made up his mind for nothing but 
 misery ; rather too hasty a conclusion, as Karoline gently 
 suggests. For many months he feels like " a stork's nest on an 
 altar," like St. John at Patmos, like Prometheus chained to his 
 rock. Biickeburg is little better than a Bastille ; for the first 
 time in his life we see him completely cut off from sympathetic 
 
182 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 converse, the Count being such as we have heard, and but little 
 profit to be had of Westfeld with his political economics. The 
 rest of the population consisted entirely of tradespeople and the 
 military, both classes blind to all else but their craft. Herder 
 also complains of a wandering tribe of rogues and adventurers, 
 probably mostly disbanded soldiers, drawn to BUckeburg by the 
 Count's repute. " Not a person here that I should care to speak 
 to twice," he writes ; " heads like stones from which not even 
 steel could strike a spark ; " and again, ^* not a woman who 
 knows much more than her alphabet." The Count maintained 
 a kind of staff of thirty warriors, who had seen hard service and 
 something of the world in the Seven Years' War and elsewhere, 
 but were limited in ideas to the art of killing. In fact Biicke- 
 burg was a North-Grerman town, and the atmosphere was un- 
 avoidably what the Germans call kleinstddtisch, and what a few 
 years ago we might have called " provincial," without fear of 
 talking cant. 
 
 Worse still, the common people were in a very dreary and 
 oppressed condition, ground down with taxation, and groan* 
 ing under the most rigorous of military despotisms, with its 
 Wilhelmstein fortress and the sixteenth part of the population, 
 including women and children, turned into soldiers. The whole 
 land was overwhelmed in debt, which the Count let lie as hope- 
 less. Abbt, with his military tendencies and theories of " Death 
 for Fatherland," had not lightened the burden ; and now the 
 people looked forward with apprehension to Herder, as one who 
 would torment them with scorpions instead of the whips of 
 Abbt. A week before Herder came, this apprehension had been 
 increased by the arrival of an adventurer, von Zanthier by 
 name, a reckless soldier who was seeking from the Count what 
 he might devour. Doubtless then this was that Herder, the 
 Count's new favourite ; they had heard he was an eccentric 
 person ; that scar on his face was no doubt from the operation 
 in Strassburg. The prejudice took firm root in the minds of the 
 good people, and like so many prejudices it was not shaken by 
 the discovery of mistake, for that would have been a confession 
 
1773.J BUCKEBURG. 183 
 
 of weakness. It must be owned there was much in the real 
 Herder's appearance to astonish them. It seems that the head 
 preacher in a Lutheran church of a North- German town did not 
 generally wear a sky-blue coat embroidered with gold, a white 
 waistcoat, and a white hat. '' Whenever I go out into the 
 street," writes Herder, ^^ people come and stare at me as if I 
 were an elephant," and we cannot wonder, though he was 
 far enough from being a thick-skinned elephant, human or 
 quadruped.^ 
 
 On the first Sunday he had to preach, and curiosity reached 
 its height. Like Karoline we can see him in our mind's eye, 
 as he enters the church, built in 1615 with the hand of faith 
 rather than the hand of beauty — ^'exemplum religionis non strue- 
 turce,^^ as it modestly says of itself; we can see him as he walks 
 up the aisle by the side of his worthy though formal colleague, 
 in '^ his little mantle with the ends stuck in his pocket," whilst all 
 the villagers, now so long forgotten, were craning out their necks 
 to catch a glimpse. The slim little figure with colourless face and 
 powdered hair (almost like a corpse, Westfeld says), mounted 
 the pulpit, and in a very quiet voice began to preach. He had 
 chosen his favourite old subject, the soul-destroying power of 
 dead forms, and as he went on to discourse of the lethargy of 
 custom, the desert level of barren devoutness, and the frigid 
 follies of dogma, we can imagine how the coal-black eyes blazed 
 from out that pallid face. But it was in vain. For the first 
 time in his life he had failed. " The congregation went out as 
 cold as they had come in." Some thought he had said what he 
 ought to have said ; more thought he had said what he ought 
 not to have said; all agreed that he was a strange, even a 
 remarkable, young man, but otherwise they remained simply 
 indifferent. He seemed hopelessly out of their sphere, and it 
 was the same in his visits to their homes. For the first time he 
 found himself unable to influence any one around him for good. 
 He was even an object of ridicule, a laughing-stock, a mere 
 
 * Except indeed to the eye of genius : see Richter's saying, chap. xvii. 
 
184 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 eccentricity. The other parsons as usual hated him in all 
 Christian charity; ''he preaches," said they, ^'not Christ but 
 Bolial." Very few of the inhabitants chose him as their con- 
 fessor ; he said that he had only twenty people in his parish, 
 which seems to mean that only twenty entrusted themselves to his 
 guidance — became his Beicht-hinder, or children for confession. 
 ^^I am a parson without parish," he writes, "a patron of schools 
 without schools, a consistory-councillor without consistory." 
 
 For indeed the gymnasium and other schools were gone to 
 wrack, nor were new buildings to be thought of, lest funds 
 be subtracted from the darling fortress. The consistory, a 
 board for the furtherance of ecclesiastical discipline and fit 
 management, had sunk to a merely mechanical affair, pulled 
 through its stately antics by two hide-bound jurists. It was 
 long before Herder by stubborn persistence and calm sympathy, 
 especially through his lectures for confirmation, contrived to get 
 some hold on these vacuous minds, and he then found, as people 
 always find, that they were not so hopeless after all. But in the 
 meantime what was to become of his ideal of life ? Where were 
 those bright dreams of reality and practical activity, those visions 
 of himself as a reformer of nations, as a councillor of kings ? 
 How should one be a Luther in this ditch of Biickeburg, how 
 turn these stony heads into Emils of Rousseau, and that without 
 so much as a school-house ? It was a weary time. The pain of 
 the man of old was Herder's now ; " no strength, but many 
 thoughts at heart." Unlike the little book in the Revelation, this 
 book was bitter in the mouth. The fire was hot ; but the sword 
 of Siegfried was not forged at the parlour-grate ; it was at 
 Patmos that St. John saw the heavens open, and only when 
 Prometheus was chained to his rock could he become wortliy of 
 a poet. 
 
 In his loneliness the face of Nature was revealed to him as 
 he had never seen it before. We remember him among the 
 forests and lakes of marshy Mohrungen, in the countiy-houses 
 by Riga, on the great sea, and in the woods of Nantes ; but now 
 there was a new tone in his voice, new not only to him but to 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 185 
 
 the whole of Europe at that time, and a truer than we are now 
 wont to hear, because newer. The house that was made ready 
 for him was a large building with twelve rooms standing on the 
 outskirts of the town, where now the street runs that bears his 
 name. With his disordered finances he had some difficulty in 
 furnishing the place ; after many months he writes that his very 
 coffee-cups were borrowed ; but he took great pleasure in the 
 little garden that lay in front and was bounded by the town 
 rampart. Here he planted a few shrubs and fruit-trees, some- 
 times finding '^ his only consolation in roses and strawberries." 
 Just across the rampart the Wald or forest began, and stretched 
 far away to the Biickeburg hills and the ranges that guide the 
 Weser northward to the sea. On this rampart he would lie 
 sometimes from dawn to sunset and far into the night, listening 
 to the nightingales, and filling the moonlight with visions of 
 his Karoline. With the freedom of possession he would go 
 out to look at his garden at all hours of night. " The towns- 
 people," he writes, '^ regard me as a great philosopher because 
 I go walking about in the forests at four o'clock in the morning, 
 as a great courtier because I can do pretty much what I like, 
 and as the most celebrated of men because I have now gained 
 the prize " (the prize from the Berlin Academy for the treatise 
 on language). With Klopstock, Ossian, or Percy's Reliques in 
 his pocket he would wander far out into the forests : " I live 
 the life of a hermit, philosopher, or shepherd ;" the whole land is 
 like the forest of Arden, but where — he asks — is Rosalind ? He 
 learnt the joys of riding, and, as he galloped wildly through the 
 glades or down the country-roads to Lemgo some thirty miles to 
 the south west, the cares of life took flight ; with his good horse 
 under him and the peaceful woods around, loneliness was gone 
 and ambition had no meaning. Or, to make an end, for fear of 
 what Emerson calls euphuism, let us take this little picture from 
 a letter to Karoline : — 
 
 Yesterday I was not quite well, owing to the use of a cold bath. In 
 the afternoon I was tempted by a beautiful autumn day [he writes in 
 September]; I throw on an overcoat and boots, and wander out. Picture 
 
 ?W^ Of THE ^ \ 
 
 XJNlVEBSlTYl 
 
186 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 to yourself on one side a chain of little hills covered with wood (called 
 the Harl), over nearly all of which I have roamed; they are now all 
 a-shimmer in the silky mist of autumn and the evening sun. In front, 
 meadows and gardens ; on the other side the feudal castle of the Counts, 
 reflected in the clear and peaceful water; before me, the evening sun. I 
 had the English ballads with me, but could not read ; and, not far from 
 some groups of black and romantic trees, I flung myself upon a wild 
 height hard by a waterfall, that fell with two-fold stream — now fast, now 
 slow, now dark, now clear. Around it much wild forest-growth, and at 
 my side all the wild flowers that come in Shakespeare's songs of love and 
 faery. Mountain, sun, and evening all encircling me round! 
 
 Truly Werther is not far distant. 
 
 Karoline meantime had a fairly happy summer of it in spite 
 of her brother-in-law's trying temper. After Herder's depar- 
 ture she seems to have been rather seriously ill, which naturally 
 added to his depression, but she recovered in time to receive 
 Gleim and Wieland on their visit to Darmstadt. Here is her 
 tender little account, from a letter dated 4th June, 1771. 
 
 " I am still in a sweet dream of friendship. Gleim and Wieland have 
 been here ; they stayed with us all one afternoon till midnight. Would 
 that I could describe to you some scenes that moved my whole soul! 
 Merck, Leuchsenring, and I, curled ourselves up in a comer of the window 
 round the good, gentle, cheerful, noble, old Father Gleim, and abandoned 
 ourselves to the uncontrolled sentiment of tenderest friendship. Would 
 that you had seen the gentle and cheerful face of the good old- man ! He 
 wept a tear of joy, and I — I lay with my head in Merck's bosom ; he was 
 exceedingly moved, and wept too" (yes; tears from those tiger eyes), *' and 
 — I don't know all that we did. O sweet tears of my life, wept in the arms 
 of friends! sweet tears of friendship, how godlike are ye!" and so on. 
 And again, ** Gleim called me a good girl. Psyche, and loves me, and will 
 make me a song. . . . Wieland stayed with Merck, but unhappily he 
 was ill in bed <ill day with the colic, and yet kept his temper. He is made 
 for friendship, and what he says is honest, but at first sight he is not 
 attractive ; he is cold when he comes into society, talks a good deal, 
 especially when he has humour. You must see him some time before you 
 get to know him ; only an hour before he went away did I perceive that 
 he can show warmth and sentiment; and I love him since I have learnt to 
 know him as a friend. Yet I could wish some of his author's pride and 
 vanity away." 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 187 
 
 That is Wieland to the life, and gentle old Father Gleim, 
 tooj the long-suffering turkey-hen, as '' Goethe, or the devil," 
 told him to his face, that would sit brooding over other fowls' 
 eggs, and, if she found she had been wasting time over a pot- 
 egg, still took all kindly. The rest of the summer Karoline 
 spent in pleasant walks and excursions round Darmstadt, a visit 
 to the Frankfort fair (where she saw an opera from the French, 
 and thought very poorly of the artificial business), and in 
 doughty struggles with the French tongue, for she was smitten 
 with enthusiasm for Rousseau. On the anniversary of their 
 betrothal Herder sent her his picture on ivory. "Not a bit 
 like," she declares, and probably about this time she sent him 
 the portrait of herself which has been described. She was full 
 of schemes for his future ; she would sacrifice herself a thousand 
 times rather than stand in his way ; but her plans came to 
 nothing, and the winter was gloomy for her, the violence of 
 the brother-in-law — " a man," as she says, " who never knew 
 what love was " — becoming now almost unbearable, and other 
 family troubles succeeding the first ; for her own brother was 
 sunk in hopeless gloom because the one lady of his heart had 
 married without telling him a word about it, and her eldest 
 sister was now on the point of a final rupture with her husband. 
 There were ugly whisperings, also, in the Merck family on both 
 sides, and altogether marriage must have seemed to her a very 
 dubious adventure. For a long time she had thoughts of quit- 
 ting her brother-in-law's home and retiring from the world with 
 her divorced eldest sister and the disappointed brother. Haym 
 lays great stress on the cool and " platonic " tone which he 
 finds in the letters on both sides during this year; but, for 
 myself, I cannot see sufficient grounds to make this significant. 
 Hints at an ethereal love as between two fleshless and distant 
 spirits I believe to be entirely due to the phantasy of the age, 
 as are such terms of endearment as " noble youth," " sweetest 
 brother," " most virtuous young man." I think it certain that 
 never for one moment did they really doubt or draw back ; and 
 yet she, at all events, might have pleaded some cause, owing to 
 
188 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 her irresolute lover's continual hesitations and delays. The 
 more we read Karoline's letters the more we are convinced of 
 her uncomplaining bravery and her endless powers of endurance, 
 self sacrifice, and delicate sympathy, till at last we are obliged 
 to confess that, in spite of her inevitable sentiment, there have 
 been few such women in that or any age. 
 
 Returning to Herder, we find him doing little in the way of 
 production this year (1771) except continuing his translations 
 of old songs and ballads, chiefly from the English, and arrang- 
 ing those treatises on Ossian and Shakespeare which we already 
 know. He also proposed to himself a new translation of Job, 
 and throughout the winter his thoughts still ran on schemes to 
 further his work on Plastik. In July, under the influence 
 of Shakespeare's Julius Ccssar, he had begun a kind of lyrical 
 drama for music, to be called Brutus, a Cantata. It was not 
 finally done with till 1774, when it was set to music by 
 Christian or Christoph Bach, and was received with much 
 applause, especially by the Count, to whom it was dedicated. 
 Whilst we are in the way with it, we may mention that in 1773 
 Herder received a letter from his old enemy Riedel, once of 
 Erfurt, whom some readers may remember. He was now at 
 Vienna, and had already sunk into trouble through his Pro- 
 testantism and tobacco-smoking, but was sheltered by Gluck 
 the musician, whose household he managed whilst Gluck was 
 away in Paris this October, producing the Iphigenie. In order 
 to conciliate Herder, Riedel now wrote to tell him that Gluck 
 had put to music much of Klopstock's poetry, particularly the 
 Hermannschlacht, with much feeling. Perhaps encouraged by 
 this, Herder in the next year sent his Brutus to Gluck for 
 perusal, accompanied by a remarkable letter which, unfortu- 
 nately, is out of my reach.^ Since this first year in Biickeburg 
 he had the idea of the possibility of a new poetry and a new 
 music, and an " ideal union of the two arts," a kind of poetry 
 '^ which would stand truly in the middle, between painting and 
 
 • Sentences quoted by Haym, vol. i. part ii. p. 476. 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 189 
 
 music," and " a kind of music which would not dominate the 
 poetry." The Brutus^ therefore, was not to stand on its own 
 feet, but was only to attain unity in conjunction with music. 
 In the letter to Gluck Herder, probably out of compliment to the 
 composer, modifies his theory a little by emphasizing the part 
 of music. "A poem must be what the inscription is to a picture 
 or a statue — an explanation, a guide to lead the stream of music 
 by means of words interspersed in its current. It must be 
 heard, not read ; the words must only breathe life into the 
 emotional frame of music, and this must speak and act, work 
 on the emotions, and utter the thought, only following the 
 spirit and general idea of the poet." It almost seems as though 
 .Herder had already some vague presentiment of the theories of 
 Schopenhauer and Wagner, as though he dimly foresaw the 
 time when, to use the metaphor of Professor Shairp— a metaphor 
 that may appear bold, even for a professor of poetry — " the 
 two sisters, poetry and music, should be wedded all along the 
 line."^ 
 
 At all events we may say that music was to Herder very 
 much more than it was to Lessing or Schiller, more even than 
 to Goethe himself. We have seen from his boyhood that he 
 always inclined to the grave Church music, especially of the old 
 classical and Italian schools, and now in Biickeburg his favourite 
 is Pergolesi with his Stahat Mater. It sometimes seems as 
 though Herder wanted very little to make him a musician ; it 
 is idle to speculate whether fit training would not have done it ; 
 but, remembering that old harpsichord wheeled from room to 
 room in the Mohrungen school, we must allow that his training 
 was pitifully insufficient. To say nothing of creation, he never 
 even acquired any great skill in playing the piano, though he 
 would perform simple things for his own pleasure and to amuse 
 intimate friends, and it is pretty to think of him seated in the 
 twilight at Darmstadt with Karoline at his side playing over 
 old chorales and passages from the early oratorios. Yet here, 
 
 • Oxford Lecture on Shelley. 
 
190 * HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 too, was infinite passion and the pain of a finite heart ; here, too, 
 he could find no utterance, but was tied and bound, having 
 " no strength, but many thoughts at heart." 
 
 In the summer of this first year at BUckeburg a post was 
 again offered him in Riga, if he cared to return, for his old 
 enemy Schlegel had departed. But at the same time he heard 
 that the husband of Madame Busch was dead, and he prudently 
 resolved not to go ; he seems even to have intended to give up 
 all correspondence with Riga, for he answered no letters or only 
 in the coldest way, especially when he was informed that the 
 lady felt herself ill-used. But in the winter, on the news that 
 Hartknoch had lost his bright young wife, all such intentions 
 broke down, and the intercourse with the faithful bookseller was 
 renewed with more friendliness than ever. In his letter of con- 
 dolence Herder inclosed a small sum of money for his poor old 
 mother in Mohrungen, who was in rather distressed conditions, 
 and died in the following autumn with many longings for her 
 son. 
 
 Towards the end of 1771 Herder began once more to write 
 reviews for Nicolai's journal in Berlin ; and it is a strange thing 
 that he continued these contributions for a man, with whom he 
 had so little in common, for nearly two years. He also sent 
 reviews and pieces of verse to Claudius for his little paper in 
 Wandsbeck. But the paper was not a success, and Herder had 
 to use every means to find work for his friend, in Buckeburg if 
 possible, or in Darmstadt, especially when Claudius in the 
 following March, with less prudence or more resolution than 
 Herder, married his Rebecca, ^* his simple, artless, peasant-girl," 
 out of hand, and seemed quite pleased with himself and all the 
 world. Herder for his part continued his sad and lonely life 
 unbroken by a glimpse of pleasure till the new year 1772. It 
 seems to have been proposed that he should renew his travels 
 with the Prince of Eutin, the mother being particularly anxious 
 for this, and the former hofmeister having been dismissed. But 
 he firmly refused ; he probably knew tliat no good was to be 
 looked for from such a connection for either of the two, and 
 
1773.] BUCKEBUBG. 191 
 
 indeed soon afterwards the boy was declared hopelessly insane 
 and unfit for government, so far had he gone into the gloomy 
 regions of religious questionings and introspection. In De- 
 cember Herder imagined that a coldness had arisen between 
 him and Karoline ; the fancy was unfounded, but we have seen 
 that at this time she was exposed to much annoyance and 
 distress in her home, and her melancholy was to a certain 
 extent reflected in her letters ; she also began to write very 
 highly of Leuchsenring, who had been sending her letters, 
 calling her his Psyche, and otherwise behaving as such men 
 will. Herder in his Biickeburg solitude was quickly jealous, 
 but the storm blew over, and with January things brightened, 
 till on the 24th we find him writing, " For the last fortnight I 
 have begun to live in Biickeburg, and all seems to be altered 
 through the alteration of one soul." This one soul was no other 
 than the Count's wife. 
 
 The Countess Maria was of the same age as Herder, and 
 was born in Westphalia, where she and her much beloved twin- 
 brother Jonathan, being left orphans at their birth, were brought 
 up through childhood at the hand of relations. When she was 
 sixteen, she went to live with an elder widowed sister, who on 
 her second marriage took her to Silesia, where she fell into the 
 power of the Pietists, and spent many years of her life in self- 
 torments about her own salvation, having no one in that district 
 to say to her, in the words of Carlyle*s Scotch physician, " My 
 dear madam, it is not of the slightest consequence." At twenty- 
 two the Count of Lippe married her in the abrupt fashion we 
 have seen. As might be supposed, the union was not altogether 
 happy at first, and the estrangement grew wider when Abbt 
 arrived and took the Count captive with philosophic discussions, 
 in which the retiring and religious woman felt herself out of 
 place. But on Abbt's death the Count was drawn to her by her 
 genuine sympathy, and continued to regard her with the same 
 kind of tenderness that Friedrich Wilhelm showed to his "pretty 
 Feekin "; in fact people used to say that '' they loved each other 
 
192 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1777— 
 
 too much to be quite comfortable." She is described as very 
 beautiful, " with a face like a Raphael Madonna." ^' A picture 
 of charity, gentleness, love, and humility," Herder calls her ; 
 ^^ since her confinement a slight pallor lies on her face like a 
 heavenly veil. " In Biickeburg she was more popular, we may 
 imagine, than her husband ; the people called her " the mother 
 of the land," for her kind benevolence to the widow and orphan. 
 She made yearly visits to the wives of the military and courtiers, 
 but till Herder's arrival she remained alone in spirit. In her we 
 see another of those beautiful souls not uncommon at the time, 
 like Goethe's Fraiilein von Klettenberg and the schone Seele in 
 Meister. Herder was her formal confessor, and now with the 
 customary new year's gifts she sent him a letter with various 
 spiritual questions, assurances of friendship and admiration, 
 and an invitation to nearer intercourse. 
 
 In Herder's answer he honestly explained the trials of his 
 position, and at the concert next evening he was more than 
 ever charmed with her modesty and kindness ; the Count's 
 manner, too, seemed warmer, though he treated him to a long 
 sermon on moral philosophy. Herder had now gained a new 
 interest in life ; to have one sympathetic listener is enough — is 
 more than any reasonable man has a right to expect. The 
 Countess became his parish, his congregation ; for her he made 
 his sermons and studied religious questions. He lent her the 
 works of Spalding and Jerusalem, Klopstock and Lavater. 
 When in April to her great sorrow her twin-brother died, 
 Herder preached one of his great sermons on the certainty of 
 immortality, sent her a copy in his own writing (as he did with 
 many other sermons), and wrote for her two cantatas, the 
 Raising of Lazarus and the Childhood of Christ, which were set 
 to music by Christian Bach. The intercourse continued without 
 a break till the Countess died some years hence ; in the mean- 
 time she wrote him a hundred and five letters, large extracts 
 from which are given in the Reminiscences ; they are chiefly 
 concerning her soul and kindred subjects ; all Herder's answers 
 
1773.] BUCKEBUEG. 193 
 
 but one were destroyed by herself. She ascribes his advent in 
 Biickeburg to a decree of the Providence that watched over her, 
 and no doubt Herder could do much for the poor anxious lady ; 
 but at the same time the influence was not all on one side. She 
 was far more distinctly religious in the ordinary sense of the 
 word than Herder had ever been or perhaps was ever to be, and 
 the contact with such a spirit did not fail to bring forth fruits in 
 him after their kind. 
 
 In February Herder made a journey on horseback to 
 Gottingen, partly for the sake of the change and congenial 
 society, partly to collect materials from the great library for 
 furtherance of his knowledge of the early history of the human 
 race. For the first time he found himself engaged on a work 
 that required really hard study and careful investigation, and 
 could not be written off under the inspiration of the moment. 
 But the week he now spent in Gottingen was after all valuable, 
 not so much for the treasures of the library as for the beginning 
 of his friendship with two very remarkable persons — Heyne and 
 his wife Therese. 
 
 To us in these cooler days it is strange to watch how quickly 
 this friendship flowered. In spite of much that was nauseous 
 the pervading spirit of that time had its advantages. Men were 
 not so solitary in a crowd, they knew each other sooner, and did 
 not for ever speak as it were in the passage of the house with 
 the door open ; they did not choke down their real feelings till 
 they had no more to choke, and when they met there was a 
 chance that their society would become something more than a 
 spectacle or a narration of the latest news. Heyne, whom 
 Herder calls " a most noble, polite, and melodious soul, such as 
 one could hardly expect in a Latin man, nor perhaps find in the 
 course of centuries," will often cross our path again, for this 
 friendship continued with hardly an interruption till Herder's 
 death, after which Heyne, together with Georg Miiller (brother of 
 Johann, the historian of Switzerland), acted as one of the editors of 
 Herder's collected works. We will, therefore, pay more atten- 
 tion now to Therese, the wife of this studious and vastly-learned 
 
 o 
 
19i HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [nil- 
 
 little man, who chiefly by his power of sympathy and dramatic 
 feeling was throwing a new light on ancient literature.^ 
 
 Therese was a woman of high passions and great powers of 
 soul, inclined to melancholy, and always terribly in earnest ; 
 there is something heroic in her, though it is apt to approach 
 the stage-heroic too nearly. "Not beautiful," writes Herder 
 in his description to Karelin e, " but her whole face expresses 
 feehng ; sometimes as silent as though in a far-off dream .... 
 She is always with her children — very extraordinary children," 
 as indeed they were likely to be with such parents. Her love for 
 these children, too, is almost terrible; "my every nerve, every 
 drop of blood thrills hot when I see my children," she writes in 
 a letter to Herder ; yet four of these she saw die, till at length 
 she could bear up no longer, but slowly faded away, and three 
 years and a half after Herder's first visit she left her husband 
 " as desolate as a hunted deer," for his happiness in life was 
 bounded by the walls of his home. Her letters to Herder are 
 the wild outpourings of a passionate friendship, that would seem 
 exaggerated did we not know how true a woman she was. 
 
 On the last evening together Heyne had given his new 
 friend an account of his own early struggles, how at one time 
 he had owed his means of study, his very existence, to a house- 
 maid, and the rest of the story that is now tolerably familiar to 
 most of us, and has encouraged many, from Carlyle downwards, 
 as it then encouraged Herder. On the other evenings the 
 friends would talk or Herder would read aloud, chiefly from 
 Klopstock, Therese of course meantime shedding copious tears. 
 
 '' O that I could hear you again," she writes ; " how long is it since I 
 have had half hours like that 1 For my Heyne is too busy with his work, 
 dear man, to read with me now." [Alas! how strait the limits of a 
 woman's joy;'^ even this woman's, in spite of children and husband dearly 
 loved.] 
 
 Or again : '* Yes, this soul feels I O, my friend, it is all feeling for 
 
 ' See Carlyle's Essay on Heyne, MisciilanicSf vol. ii. and his speech at 
 lldinburgh. 
 
 ' See Goethe's Iphigeniey first lines. 
 
1773.] BIJCKEBURG. 105 
 
 the tenderest thoughts that ever mortal felt. Judge whether you are not 
 dear to my soul. You wake my spirit up again, my spirit long cloaked in 
 a veil of sadness and pain. May I speak thus ? Do I weary you 1 " 
 
 " My letter came straight from my heart " [this in answer to suspected 
 coldness in one of Herder's answers] ; ''and I am always proud of this 
 sensitive and suffering heart. How shall I in any way more solemnly 
 oflFer to you my open heart ? Only never doubt about its worth, wit, and 
 understanding ! Ah, I know not what you are ; I am feeling through- 
 out, and who would find in me anything else — I am not for him." "I 
 had met several other men of distinction ; my heart went out to them full 
 of feeling, full of enthusiasm, but — " [in short, they did not understand 
 the poor woman] — " but then my Herder appeared to me, and it was as 
 though part of heaven opened, and a spirit of a higher kind, enwoven in a 
 fair and pliant body, penetrated my whole being." 
 
 Let us take one more passage, with some truth in it, and 
 then make an end : 
 
 " O, my Herder ! spirit blest by heaven with understanding and 
 beautiful qualities, do dear friends, children, loved ones, make us happy? 
 Does not each band which twines itself round our heart and soul make us 
 unhappy when it is torn away? and is not the fear of this already a poison 
 which gnaws at our peace?" 
 
 These few extracts are fair examples of the pages which 
 Herder received from time to time during the next year ; to us 
 they are chiefly useful as symptoms of the prevailing malady, 
 and also as further proofs of the strange power which Herder 
 exercised over women of a thoughtful and imaginative mind. 
 To complete the picture, a passage in one of Herder's letters to 
 Karoline will serve : — 
 
 "In the sweetest hour, and the sweetest moment of the hour, my friend 
 Therese Heyne asked me whether, with such a heart as mine, as she called 
 it, I had not some loved-one, some maiden. I said, ' Yes 1 ' and raised 
 my hands to heaven. ^Der ich aher kein Glied werfh hin, und iverth zu sein 
 scheineT^ My eyes overflowed, but the excellent woman took it other- 
 wise, and began to comfort me." 
 
 We have seen that Herder's Essay on the Origin of Language 
 had gained the prize in the Berlin Academy. All his friends 
 hastened to congratulate him ; Karoline rejoiced that her lover 
 should be so famous, his name on every one's lips ; and the Count 
 
 ^ The translation is left to the reader's judgment. 
 02 
 
196 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 was delighted, because the great Frederick would hear how dis- 
 tinguished a man little Biickeburg had in her service ; to Herder 
 alone his success brought no joy. He already dimly felt that a 
 great crisis in his thought was at hand, and that it would be best 
 to be absolutely free of the past ; he wished he had not written a 
 single word till he should be thirty ; and, now that this little 
 w^ork was published in his own name and was sure of a wide 
 circulation, he felt that it would only bind him to old lines of 
 thought from which he had hoped to escape, and involve him in 
 endless controversy into which he must enter without the zeal 
 and assurance of conviction. Thus does a man leave his own pro- 
 ductions, of w^hatever sort, behind him directly they are finished, 
 and is startled to find that inevitably he remains their slave. 
 
 At Easter, 1772, the blow that Herder expected came; came 
 in the unkindest form of all — as a cold and hostile review by his 
 old master, Hamann, in the Konigsherg Journal. Herder had 
 had no correspondence with the Mage of the North since he left 
 Riga, and when the prize essay was published Hamann could no 
 longer regard ^' his Alcibiades " as a disciple, but as a traitor 
 to the cause, a deserter to Sparta, one who had forsaken the 
 armies of the faithful for the ranks of the Enlightened Philistines 
 of Berlin. It was true that the main ideas of the essay were 
 derived from Hamann himself, but in his zeal for the dry light of 
 science Herder had omitted — nay, distinctly denied — the direct 
 agency of the Deity. Hamann, whose trustful mysticism strove 
 to pierce the gloom where the light of science cannot reach, 
 could by no means forgive this heresy in his favourite pupil- 
 God might act through nature and the voices of beasts, but 
 from God language, as all else, must come, for in God we live 
 and move and have our being. In a letter to Nicolai, Herder 
 shows tliat this position is really the same as the main theory of 
 the essay, only in difi^erent words ; but, in spite of understand- 
 ing and clear-as-daylight science, the personal influence of his 
 old " Socrates, Pan, and Satyr," was too strong to be resisted. 
 His mind was gradually more and more esti*anged from Berlin 
 and drawn back to Kunio-sberij. The intercourse with the 
 
1773.] BCCKEBURG. 197 
 
 Countess, the fire of loneliness, and the mysterious voices of 
 Nature, were beginning to do their work. Might there not be 
 more things in heaven and earth ? He hastened to with- 
 draw the heresies of the essay and throw himself at his master's 
 feet, Hartknoch acting as mediator. Hamann ran l»alf-way to meet 
 him, for this his son had been dead and was alive again. With- 
 out withdrawing from his position he wrote a second more kindly 
 review of the essay, followed by a little treatise, The Last 
 Words of the Red-Cross Knight on the Divine or Human Origin 
 of Language, in which all real hostility vanishes. In a long 
 letter Herder strove to explain how slight was the difference 
 between them, especially as in writing for " an enlightened 
 Royal Prussian Academy " he had been compelled to adopt 
 " the Leibnitzian-sesthetic form," if only as a mask. The recon- 
 ciliation was complete ; and soon afterwards, in a French epistle 
 Au Solomon de Prusse^ in which Hamann entreated Frederick 
 to extend his glorious patronage to German literature, this sig- 
 nificant sentence is to be found, ^^ Herder sera Platon et le Pre- 
 sident de votre Academie des Sciences,''^ ^ Perhaps fortunately 
 for all concerned, the letter never reached the King. 
 
 In April of this year, at the very time of his return to 
 Hamann, Herder began to contribute to the Frankfurt Athe- 
 nceum (Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen), and continued to send 
 reviews and essays till the following October. This paper was 
 edited by Schlosser, the friend and afterwards brother-in-law of 
 Goethe, but the real power was in the hands of Merck, who, 
 through Herder's recommendation, had become acquainted witli 
 Goethe the winter before. With such contributors as Goethe, 
 Merck, and Herder, the journal soon became the recognised 
 organ of the new movement, and it is noticeable that it took its 
 whole tone from Herder, Goethe's work especially being hardly 
 distinguishable from his. In November^ after Herder had ceased 
 to contribute, Claudius writes to him : " You have a hand in 
 the Frankfurt paper, haven't you ? At all events it seems as 
 
 » Hamann's Scjiriften, vol. vii. pp. 191-199, quoted by Haym. 
 
198 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 though you were the conductor, and the whole choir sang to your 
 beat. The comparison is not mine, but has my approval." And 
 a writer in Jena maintained that Herder had called himself one 
 of the greatest heads in Germany. But, in spite of his powerful 
 influence, the connection had to be broken off in October, for 
 reasons which will be hinted at when we have first glanced at 
 the position of affairs in Darmstadt this summer. 
 
 Early in the year Karoline's prospects began to brighten, 
 for she was reconciled to Merck after some difference (she seems 
 to have suspected him, in fact, of reading her letters); and in 
 February she writes that she had with tears concluded a cove- 
 nant of fairest friendship with the most feeling and noble of 
 girls, who had been staying a fortnight in Darmstadt. This was 
 no other than Luise von Ziegler, now immortal as the Lila (not 
 Lili) of Goethe's poems. 
 
 ** On my birthday," KaroUne goes on, " she sent me a Httle blue 
 heart on a white ribbon of innocence, as a bond of friendship. I should 
 so like to have made a song on it — the little blue heart of innocence — if I 
 only could." At the parting, " she was choked with emotion, whilst I, 
 meantime, could weep, and her eyes seemed to yearn towards heaven, 
 like the eyes of a dying woman. 0, the beautiful soul ! Merck says 
 that as he led her downstairs she trembled extremely. She is a sweet, 
 enthusiastic girl ; has made her grave in her garden, and a throne in her 
 garden ; and there she has bowers and roses, and her lambkin that eats 
 and drinks with her." [The lambkin died-ninder the treatment, and was 
 succeeded by *' a faithful dog."] 
 
 In March Goethe and Georg Schlosser came to stay with 
 Merck. Goethe seemed to Karoline a good-hearted, cheerful 
 man, without any display of learning: 
 
 " He occupied himself a great deal with Merck's children, and has a 
 certain resemblance to you in tone or speech, or something, that quite 
 won my heart. In the beautiful sunset Goethe, my sister, and I sat 
 together for a moment and spoke of you. Next day we went for a walk, 
 and in the evening had no sentiment, but were very cheerful, Goethe and 
 I dancing minuets to the piano, and he recited your ballad, * Edward, 
 Edward.' " [Herder's famous translation from the Scotch.] 
 
 Spring came. Karoline was again at variance with Merck, 
 
1773.] BtJCKEBUKG. 199 
 
 but consoled herself with Don Quixote and Tom Jones. In 
 April Goethe walked over from Frankfurt, and, as they sat 
 together under a tree in the pouring rain, he sang them Herder's 
 rendering of Under the Greenwood Tree^ and in the evening 
 read aloud some scenes from his Gotz von Berlichingen. Next 
 day there was a water- party, " but it w^as very rough. Goethe 
 
 is cram-full of songs Merck told him of our Lila, and he 
 
 told me " such a sad story of .his heart, — in fact his desertion 
 by Aennchen of Leipzig, not a word of Frederika. Next came 
 Madame de la Koche, Goethe's friend in Coblentz,^ astonishing 
 them all by her fine manners and coquetry. By the end of 
 April Goethe was with them again, and Lila at the same time. 
 " We went yesterday with Goethe to my rock and hill. He has 
 appropriated a beautiful great rock to himself, and has gone 
 to-day to cut his name on it; no one can climb it but he alone." 
 Karoline thought she already noticed Goethe's inclination to 
 Lila and did her best to further the matter, only regretting that 
 he was not of noble birth. She was very much attracted to him 
 herself, " parted from him with a kiss and tears of heart," when 
 he went his way to Wetzlar. Herder could hardly help some 
 jealousy, and indeed he had cause for fear, for what woman 
 could resist this man ? And when Goethe sent her, besides some 
 other poems, one in w^hich he imagines himself looking from his 
 rock with pity on the forlorn maiden, Herder, being very in- 
 dignant that his Psyche was made to cut so sad a figure, hastened 
 to write another version of the story. Whereupon Goethe, 
 hearing that there was some offence, wrote to tell him that as 
 far as he was concerned he might give his maiden as many 
 melancholy hours as he chose without reproach. This does not 
 sound soothing, but nevertheless Herder continues to write of 
 Goethe in terms of the highest praise ; he admires his verses; 
 and of Gotz he writes, " It contains rare German strength, 
 depth, and truth, though now and again the intention is 
 better than the execution." (And yet in Aus meinem Lehen 
 
 ^ 4us meinem Lehen, book xiii. beginning. 
 
200 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 he is said to have received Gotz very badly.) Herder, however, 
 a few months afterwards, took his revenge in the Picture Fable 
 for Goethe J a satirical ballad in which Goethe is represented as 
 the bright and merry sparrow from Frankfurt-on-tlie-Main. 
 
 And in Westphalia's forests wild, 
 
 Where Hermann once did fight, 
 There sat a poor young falcon-hawk 
 
 Too early lamed in flight. 
 Broken his wing. — Alas ! too soon ! 
 
 The wild woods cried in sooth. 
 Chor. O falcon sad ! O falcon sad ! 
 
 Too early lamed in youth. 
 
 But what if the falcon should recover and swoop through 
 the free air with the strength of a young eagle ? One feels it 
 might be the worse for the merry sparrow. 
 
 Tlie reference to Hermann is due to Herder's first visit to 
 Pyrmont, which lies not far to the south-east from BUckeburg. 
 When Goethe's letter came this July, he was spending some 
 days there, not so much for the sake of the wells, the gaming- 
 tables, and ''the promenade dolls" (Alleenpuppen) , as for the 
 beautiful nature of the district — the '^ fairest, bravest, most 
 German and romantic scenery in the world ; not vine-clad hills 
 and groves of cedar, but bold forest, oaks and beeches, and 
 upheavals of the globe ; " and in the evening the calm moonlight 
 glancing through the defiles where Varus lost his legions. 
 
 These first promises of the dawning love for nature as she is, 
 alone ofier solace to the historian as he toils, sick and panting, 
 through the soft and tearful utterances which flood the average 
 letters of this period. In pity he should give the reader as little 
 as is sufficient, but it is impossible to obtain a true idea of the 
 greatness of such men as Herder and Goethe unless we have 
 realised how universal was this peculiar infection. It was not 
 confined to Germany, for in England the plague was at least 
 as strong, and from England the germs of the disease chiefly 
 came. '' I have seen an English engraving," Karoline writes 
 this summer, ^'Angelica and Medoro; they are sitting together 
 imder a tree, on which they have cut their names ; she is leaning 
 
1773.] BtJCKEBURG. 201 
 
 against his shoulder, and both are weeping. you can feel 
 how it went to my soul." We may see the like in any old print- 
 shop still, but they go to the soul no more. 
 
 In the end of August, two years after the lovers had met, 
 we come upon a finer scene. Karoline had often entreated 
 Herder to take her to himself; whatever his hardships she 
 " could go and do likewise "; but he had advised her to remain 
 where she was till his position was more settled either in 
 Gottingen or elsewhere. At length the tyranny of her privy- 
 councillor brother-in-law became unbearable. Not a meal passed 
 without some violent outbreak of temper; it was spoiling her 
 digestion. One day she rose from table, and was going to her 
 own room, when the privy-councillor in his rage ordered her to 
 stop. She replied she would not sacrifice her health to his 
 pleasure any longer. 
 
 '^Thereupon a fierce dispute; till at length I said, ' There's 
 an end of it ! My eldest sister (the divorced one) reaches such 
 and such a village in a week, and I'll go to her ; and for your 
 further information I may tell you that I am betrothed to 
 Herder.' " 
 
 The privy-councillor was struck dumb with astonishment at 
 the sight of this quiet and rather tearful girl thus rising in 
 defiance like a very Electra, as she always was at heart. He 
 could not sleep that night, and next morning he hastened to 
 make terms of truce, which he obtained after much difficulty. As 
 secrecy was at an end, she hoped Herder would come for her in 
 the winter; ''by Christmas she would have her clothes ready, 
 and could promise to be a good wife and mother." 
 
 But Herder in his present state of affairs, above all in his 
 present state of mind, could not hope to come before the spring. 
 This October his mother died. Karoline, too, was occupied with 
 her eldest sister, who had come to Darmstadt apparently half 
 insane, " her head full of magic and witchcraft and fears of 
 poisoning." Then she went for a visit to Mannheim, where she 
 was again disgusted with the opera, but took much delight in 
 the great collection of casts from the antique, the same that first 
 
202 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 revealed the Greeks to Goethe. She was beginning to make 
 arrangements for her household, and in November Goethe him- 
 self came to Darmstadt again from Wetzlar. 
 
 '* Our good Goethe is here," she writes, *' lives and draws, and in the 
 winter evenings we sit round him, and see and listen. At Merck's house 
 there is an academy; they draw and engrave on copper. He (Goethe) has 
 drawn me a little landscape with a castle on a hill and a village below. 
 ... He is teaching Merck to draw. He seems to me rather quieter 
 and more refined. He says you are not kind to him, and yet he is very 
 fond of you. He is still thinking of becoming a painter, and we urge him 
 strongly to do so. ' As I am deficient in all virtues,' he said, ' I will 
 devote myself to my talents. ' Out of such a head something might come. 
 To us girls and women he is better than he was and is heartily kind, but 
 as for loving — he has too much of the ashes of his first love in his heart, 
 and that is natural enough. We are all very fond of him here." 
 
 As to " the ashes of first love," and consequent reserve, wc, 
 with reminiscences of Lotte in Wetzlar and with Wei'tJier before 
 us, could say more. But we are only concerned now with the 
 causes of this estrangement from Herder which Goethe regretted. 
 Readers o£ Aus meinem Lehen will remember that at this period 
 Merck and Goethe, who was then under Merck's guidance, used 
 to call Herder Dechant or Swift, from the bitter sarcasms and 
 humours of his correspondence with them. Goethe is inclined 
 to attribute these to his inborn irritability ; and of course this is 
 partly true, for sarcasm is the defence of the sensitive. But 
 there was another and stronger motive at work on Herder's 
 mind, of which Goethe even in old age could not know so much 
 as we know now with our plentiful materials. 
 
 Early in this Biickeburg period the keen eyes of Merck had 
 noticed signs of the approaching change. One day he looked 
 significantly at Karoline and said, *' Herder is quite altered; 
 once he was like a bird on the bough." Karoline feared the 
 change was due to her, but she was not entirely the cause. In 
 his answer Herder writes, " I must leave all the lightness and 
 fire of youth behind, and get another nature, — stable, firm and 
 upright" Such expressions become frequent and increase in 
 strength with time ; 
 
1773.] BUCKEBURG. 203 
 
 " I live now with more feeling of hope, aim, and firm trust in creation; 
 with more self-determination and virtue." "I am much altered, but I see 
 it is for the best ; in my former wild state I was not worthy of you. " 
 " The time of vanity and inanity is gone; I long for nothing so much as to 
 live in Nature, Reality, and Truth — to strengthen a heart and spirit (Muth) 
 that is weakened by the head. Immortality of fame is a barren prickly 
 shell, and virtue and humanity alone are the kernel; day and night my 
 thoughts are directed towards casting oflf all rags and patches, and becoming 
 a simple man with an aim in the world." " To become the best country 
 parson in Germany would be sufficient object in life, and then I could 
 wish all learning and worldly success in the Archipelago with the Russian 
 fleet." And to Hartknoch he writes, " I am dreaming of a second part to 
 my life, that shall be great and good and silent." And to Merck, " I am 
 trying to burn out every trace of vanity and self-seeking." 
 
 In all this we see the first beginnings of morality in Herder, 
 It is not to be supposed that he had ever done anything dis- 
 tinctly immoral, if we except his acts of shyness ; but his 
 morality hitherto had been negative — that is to say, he had 
 had no morality. He had been as free both from sin and virtue 
 as those who have not the law. In spite of all his Teutonism 
 his life had been Greek — of the intellect mainly. Not having 
 felt what self-renunciation meant, he had no conception of 
 modern virtue ; and, having no virtue, but still being incapable 
 of sinking to the common level, he had remained ambitious. 
 But now, alone with Nature, he seemed to himself to see the 
 vanity of things intellectual and the meanness of self-seeking. 
 With Nature calmly working around him " without haste, with- 
 out rest," from the stars to the moss on the wall, the fame of 
 a man seemed of little account ; and, after all, what difference 
 did it make whether there were a few good books, a few fine 
 poems, more or less ? But, renouncing himself, to have done 
 the small thing that was nearest with all the thoroughness that 
 in him lay, to have stubbed but one yard of his Thurnaby 
 Waste, that were something ; nay, the loftiest genius could do 
 no more. I have attributed this growth of morality chiefly to 
 the influence of Nature, in spite of the words of one of our own 
 poets, who tells us there is no effort on her brow ; for in Her- 
 
204 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 der's younger days, at all events, the life of nature did not seem 
 a life of self-seeking and ambition. 
 
 But hand-in-hand with this influence was another, which led 
 him on the same road. Ever since his reconciliation to Hamann 
 he had more and more inclined to the mystic Pietism pro- 
 claimed by his old master. We have seen something of his 
 intimacy with the pious Countess and with Frau Heync, and in 
 October he writes to Merck, heartily deploring the coldness 
 that seemed to have arisen between them, but at the same time 
 adding : 
 
 '* You may have perceived that I am no longer the theological libertine 
 that I was, but you will hardly have conjectured that I have changed into 
 an inspired mystic. But the less the soul finds in the present world, the 
 fonder does she become of building or dreaming for herself worlds at a 
 distance. Heaven and hermits' cells are always close together. " And to 
 Karoline he writes, ' ' I have now so much warm enthusiasm (Schwannerei) 
 that I believe the most foolish ideas, which I could not have believed 
 before." And again, "Where love is, there is faith; and faith is a 
 peculiar thing that does not depend on reason and explanation, but 
 believes what is and does not doubt, for it sees that it is there, though it 
 could not explain it if asked a thousand times." 
 
 The words are the words of Herder, but it is evident the 
 doctrine is the doctrine of Lavater, the man whose watchword 
 was Faith, who '^ could not conceive how a man could live and 
 breathe without being a Christian "; who confronted the young 
 Goethe with the hard dilemma : either Christian or Atheist ! 
 ^' Whereupon," adds Goethe, " I explained to him that, if he 
 would not leave me my Christianity as I had hitherto enter- 
 tained it, I could just as well embrace Atheism, especially as I 
 saw no one rightly knew what cither exactly meant." ^ Lavater 
 had written to Herder in Riga, but the letter remained unan- 
 swered till this autumii (1772), when Herder was for the first 
 time studying the Vistas into Eternity {Aiifsichteti in die Etcig^ 
 keit)j a scries of letters written by Lavater to Zimmermann, 
 containing a complete account of the future life. These Vistas 
 
 ^ Avs mdnem Lebc7i, book xiv. near the beginning. 
 
1773.] BtCKEBURG. 205 
 
 were intended as the groundwork of a great poem on heaven 
 in the style of the Messias ; and to obtain a clear knowledge of 
 the subject Lavater had not only used the eye of faith but had 
 collected opinions from the theological specialists of the day, 
 much in the same way as he afterwards collected types for his 
 Physiognomik. Coming when it did, the book had a great effect 
 on Herder, partly, no doubt, owing to his mother's death, and 
 also to its really powerful use of analogy, to which he had him- 
 self been always strongly inclined. He writes to Karoline, 
 "" Lavater is, after Klopstock, perhaps the greatest genius in 
 Germany;" and at the end of October he began the corre- 
 spondence with Lavater himself which lasted for four or five 
 years. Herder's first letter is of very great length, and is chiefly 
 taken up with objections to the definite and childish realism 
 of the Vistas. At the same time the tone is warm and sym- 
 pathetic. There is none of the bitterness and Swift's humour 
 which distressed Goethe at this time, and Herder is at one with 
 Lavater in condemning "those philosophers of ours who will 
 reduce everything in Barbara'''' (the first syllogistic figure). 
 The enthusiasm of Lavater 's answer is almost frantic : "To 
 know Herder had been the dream of his life — without Herder 
 he could not live and die," and so on ; in fact, there was con- 
 cluded a warm and eternal friendship, which lasted, as has been 
 said, about four years. Now, therefore, we can better under- 
 stand Herder's difficulty in continuing to correspond with 
 Goethe and Merck and to write for their paper. Himself the 
 originator of the Sturm U7id Drang in literature, he had for- 
 saken the intellect for morality, and was now listening to the 
 apostle of a kind of Sturm und Drang in religion, whilst his 
 own disciples were following the intellectual road he had marked 
 out. • Not till after another year or so had passed did Goethe 
 come to know and value Lavater ; to Mephistofeles Merck he 
 was never anything but foolishness and a mockery. 
 
 And now the sprmg was come. Herder had borrowed 
 another considerable sum of money from the ever-faitliful Hart- 
 knoch ; and it was arranged that as soon as his Easter duty was 
 
206 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1771— 
 
 over he should bring home the bride, Biickeburg and the 
 Countess being all expectation. Leuchsenring was again in 
 Darmstadt, and had completely won the friendship of Karoline 
 by his soft ways, much to the indignation of Goethe, who 
 admired Karoline much himself. *' Even the cold woman-hater 
 Goethe calls you an angel," writes Herder. He could not 
 refrain from a few lampoons on the subject, of which Pater 
 Brey alone remains to us. In this Merck figures as the honest 
 greengrocer, Karoline is Lenore^ into whose favour the smooth 
 Father insinuates himself: when on a sudden enter Herder as 
 Balandrino, captain of dragoons, who has been away more than 
 two years and now comes to claim his Lenore. Knowing that 
 the silly Father can do no real harm, the captain contents him- 
 self with persuading him to try his patent methods of universal 
 reform on a wild, uncultivated race, which turns out to be — 
 the pigs ; and all ends happily in the marriage of the faithful 
 pair. 
 
 '' The 2nd of May, 1773," I quote from Karoline's own 
 account, " was our marriage-day in Darmstadt (Herder having 
 arrived on the 26th of April). A worthy old clergyman joined 
 us together in the circle of my relations during a beautiful 
 sunset. The love of my brothers and sisters and the brightest 
 May weather cast a glamour over our feast of joy. We began 
 our married life with a certain amount of debts and trusted 
 cheerfully in God. We hastened away from Darmstadt."^ 
 Goethe was present at the wedding. 
 
 ' Abridged from Meminiscetices, vol. i. p. 234. 
 
1773.] 207 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 BUCKEBURG STILL, 1773 — 1776. 
 
 " Why, to be Luther — that's a life to lead." 
 * * * * ♦ * 
 
 " He comes, reclaims God's earth for God, he says. 
 Sets up God's rule again by simple means, 
 Re-opens a shut book; and all is done ! " 
 
 Bishop Blougeam's Apology. 
 
 As Herder's correspondence with Karollne of necessity ceases 
 here, his personal and inner history again becomes more difficult. 
 Yet his marriage was by no means the end of his life nor of his 
 development. What if we should even prove Gervinus himself, 
 with his hints at decline of powers and the pernicious influence 
 of " the Greek woman," to be in the wrong? At all events this 
 chapter will show us only too plainly that his sneer against 
 Karoline was for the present quite uncalled for ; for it is certain 
 that during the first three and a half years of marriage, with 
 Karoline constantly by his side, Herder showed himself more 
 wanting in Greek self-restraint and clearness of vision than ever 
 before or after, so that through all the period sketched in this 
 chapter his Teuton Hebraism was and continues a rock of 
 offence unto many. 
 
 On the way from Darmstadt Herder and his wife seem to 
 have called at the Goethes' house in Frankfurt, and to have 
 stayed for a time at Gottingen with the Heynes. Then " we 
 hastened," as Karoline says in the Reminiscences, " into our 
 quiet, happy cot in Biickeburg" (a cot with twelve rooms and a 
 fairly large garden, it will be remembered). " The years which 
 we spent together there were the Paradise period of our house- 
 hold happiness, the golden age of our marriage." At the same 
 
208 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 time Herder wrote to his friends in tlie same cheerful and con- 
 tented strain ; of course he soon found plenty to complain of, 
 but he always couldfall back en his wife. "" My wife," he writes, 
 '^ is my comforter and angel that I sink not in the storm ; " and 
 again, " I work for my position and office : my wife is all in all 
 to me, and I hope for quite new life and progress." 
 
 The Countess was more sympathetic than ever ; her brother's 
 widow had just left Biickeburg, and in Karoline she found a 
 new friend ; as a mark of special favour the Count invited the 
 pair to dinner in the country-residence of Baum, " where," 
 writes Karoline, ^' the first meeting with the Countess silently 
 bound our souls together for ever. It was a holy relationship. 
 Words cannot express it." Another lady too, Frau von Be- 
 scheffer by name, who in miserj^'s school had learnt to give 
 succour, for a long time back had felt a secret sympathy with 
 Herder, and now came forward as the friend and adviser, " the 
 mother" of the young wife. By degrees the feeling of the whole 
 of Biickeburg towards Herder became changed ; he had already 
 won many by his lectures for confirmation ; and now the common 
 people, finding him little inclined to torment them with scorpions, 
 and seeing that he was a man of like human affections with 
 themselves, ceased to regard him as an elephant, a philosopher, 
 or any other freak of nature, and opened their hearts to him 
 with enthusiasm ; all the more when Westfeld, whose political 
 economy had failed to excite any ardent affection, quitted Biicke- 
 burg for service in Hanover early in 1774. Some honest 
 person even said to Herder once, ^^ If you had not married and 
 been withdrawn from Westfeld's society, we people of Biickeburg 
 should never have known you, nor you us." About New Year 
 1774 he began a long series of sermons on the life of Jesus, 
 which made a great impression on the whole parish, especially 
 on the peasants of a neighbouring village, who would trudge to 
 church Sunday after Sunday to hear what Parson Herder had 
 to say, bringing their Bibles with them for the sake of reference 
 to unusual texts. 
 
 Another point of interest was the visit of Zimmermann, who 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL 209 
 
 came over from Hanover to attend the Countess in August, 
 after Herder's marriage ; and in December came Pegelow, the 
 kindly physician of Strassburg days, who objected to abstract 
 questions, now on his way back to Russia after travels in Eng- 
 land and France for health's sake. As he was to pass through 
 Konigsberg the Herders sent greetings and some real West- 
 phalian rye-bread (Pumper nickel) by him for the Mage of the 
 North. Meanwhile, the correspondence with Lavater continued 
 with great warmth of friendship. Herder's letters, as a rule, 
 are fairly calm and connected, but Lavater always wrote in the 
 extreme Sturm und Drang style, full of dashes, parentheses, and 
 exclamations that become a weariness after a time. Occasionally 
 we get an interesting glimpse of the world as it looked then ; as 
 when Herder speaks of the enthusiasm with which they had all 
 been reading Biirger's Lenore^ just appeared upon the scenes, 
 inspired, as Biirger said, by Herder's own writings. For English 
 readers there will also be interest in this notice of a young artist- 
 friend, a son of a Zurich painter of some note, whom Lavater 
 calls Fiissli, better known to us as Henry Fuseli, of our Eoyal 
 Academy : 
 
 '*A man of the greatest imagination," Lavater says, "always in 
 extremes, always original; Shakespeare's painter — English and Swiss — 
 poet and painter. His letters — hurricane and storm. Reynolds [our Sir 
 Joshua] prophesies he will be the greatest painter of his time. His wit is 
 boundless. Does little except by pencil and brush, but when he acts he 
 must have a hundred yards clear room, or he's the ruin of everything. 
 Has swallowed all Greek, Latin, English, and Italian poets. His look is 
 lightning, his word a storm, his jest death, and his vengeance hell. At 
 close quarters he is hard to put up with." 
 
 Though this last statement seems probable, yet this was just 
 the man to pose as painter for the Sturm und Drang, As to Sir 
 Joshua's prophecy we may be allowed to be more dubious, for 
 from our point of view we can see a boy of sixteen, named 
 William Blake, creeping about round Westminster Abbey, and 
 we know that the shopkeeper Turner, who cuts hair in Maiden 
 Lane, shall shortly have a son. 
 
 But, after all, the best point about these letters is that they 
 
 P 
 
210 HERDER XND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 enable us to watch how by degrees tlie image of Goethe was 
 impressing itself on the minds of men. In November, 1773, 
 Lavater writes, *^ Goethe has sent me his Gotz von Berlichingen, 
 It seems that we shall come nearer each other." (It was the 
 next summer in fact that the world-child made that strange pro- 
 gress through the Rhineland, with '^ Prophet to right of him, 
 Prophet to left of him," in the shape of Lavater and Basedow.) 
 *' I rejoice with trembling," he goes on; '' amongst all writers I 
 know no greater genius — and perhaps he is also the keenest and 
 most open-hearted sentimentalist, but" — of this Lavater has 
 shrewd doubts. "At all events, the man can be of endless 
 service to me, can elevate me, warm, inspire, polish, humble, 
 purify." To which Herder replies without intentional deprecia- 
 tion that in many respects Fiissli seems to him to be what 
 Goethe is. " Pay attention to Goethe," he adds, *' he is a great 
 painter." Lavater thinks the comparison good, but is not alto- 
 gether satisfied, " for Goethe is more man and Fiissli more 
 poet," which in a certain sense is a true judgment, surprising as 
 it seems. 
 
 But to return to the quiet cot in Biickeburg. Throughout 
 the autumn, from August onwards, we find Herder hard at work 
 again, " working like a horse" as he says, under the stress of 
 an elevated mental excitement, partly due no doubt to the calm 
 content of his married life after the perplexities of the last few 
 years, partly to his newly-awakened zeal for Hebraic religion. 
 He was also anxious to clear himself of debt. His pamphlet 
 entitled Another Philosophy of History ^ now included in the 
 Propylden or Introductions to the History of Mankind, was 
 finished in August ; the first three parts of the Earliest Records 
 of the Human Race {Aelteste Urkunde) were written in August 
 and September. In October a volume of German ballads witii 
 some translations from the English, especially of Shakespeare, 
 was ready for the press; in November he wrote the twelve 
 District Letters for Preachers (Provimialbldtter) ; and in Decem- 
 ber he began his Commentaries on tlie New Testament; to say 
 nothing of some reviews for Nieolai, the last he ever sent, the 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 211 
 
 last indeed that Nicolai was likely to accept from a man who 
 could write such works as the above. A new impulse of pro- 
 duction had taken possession of him, and through the beautiful 
 days of autumn, as Karoline tells us, these works were poured 
 out as from a single flood of feeling ; " he would often be up 
 and at work by four o'clock in the morning. His mind was 
 perfectly attune — cheerful, earnest, quiet, and sublime. He 
 toiled without ceasing. I well remember that the first part (of 
 the Aelteste Urkunde) was finished in six weeks. Those days 
 were unique, happy, never to be forgotten";^ and Herder writes 
 to Lavater, " These are the first things I am glad to have 
 written ; and my Swiss girl is the cause of it all." Yet in this 
 very happiness lies the sadness. Most people have felt how sad 
 it is to look back on the time when, under the excitement and 
 eager joy of conviction, a piece of work was done which after- 
 wards the outside world took ill. And, even if the world be 
 right and we are disillusionised, yet like the man who applauded 
 in the empty theatre we regret the time before our eyes were 
 opened, and find it hard to thank our friends. 
 
 In fact Herder's writings during this period entangled him 
 in greater difficulties than any before, and, in the estimate of 
 some people, who pack a man's works all together without 
 respect to date and development, have gone far to diminish his 
 reputation. And yet it sometimes seems as though a large part 
 of a great man's work were of importance, not for its own sake 
 but for its effect on himself; and if we regard the works of this 
 period as forming one whole, for the aim in all is one, we shall 
 find that Herder was now fighting for a great idea, which 
 absorbed his own individuality and personal aims ; that he was 
 acting as the champion of religion, nothing less, and no one 
 could do more — whether by religion we mean science, art, or 
 religion.'^ We shall find too, that, when the joy of production 
 
 • Reminiscences ^ vol. i. p. 239. 
 
 2 " He who has science and art has religion too ; he who has not both of these 
 had best have religion": Goethe. The difficulty is that such uses of words too 
 often lead to jargon. 
 
 f2 
 
i 
 
 212 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 gave place to the vexations of criticism, he was learning some- 
 thing of a lesson which he never perfectly mastered. For to 
 gain some idea of Herder's position in his approaching contests 
 with Michaelis, and Schlozer of Gottingen, and even with Spald- 
 ing and his followers of Berlin, we may try to imagine how 
 some English canon or bishop would fare if, with more fervour 
 than research, he took up arms against certain ruthless German 
 expositors of modern times. When we feel strongly that we are 
 in the right on any point, it seems so easy just to go in and win ; 
 and Herder had yet to learn that there are only two ways of 
 reducing a fortress of the enemy, either to take it by storm with 
 its own weapons, on fair ground and by sheer hard work, or to 
 go calmly past on the way to victory, leaving it behind as a 
 thing of no importance, to be starved out by others at their 
 leisure. 
 
 As the volume of Ballads and Translations was withdrawn 
 before it was printed, and did not take its final shape till five or 
 six years after this, the most important for us of this series of 
 works is the treatise on the Philosophy of History ^ which forms 
 the link between what we might call Herder's first period of 
 Literature and his period of Dogma. In calling it '^ Another^* 
 (Anch eine) Philosophy of Hist or y. Herder seems to have been 
 sneering at one of the fashionable pursuits of the day ; for under 
 the influence of Rousseau and Montesquieu every little philosoph 
 was busy spinning cobweb theories on the progress of man, his 
 , destiny and possible perfection. Such writers habitually regarded 
 every period of history from what they were pleased to consider 
 the high and enlightened ground of the eighteenth century; all 
 other ages seemed to them *'dark" in comparison with the 
 favoured century that was illuminated by the blessed radiance of 
 their clear-as-daylight philosophy ; and the darkest of all were 
 the ages when religion was a real thing; for they did not know 
 that a historian without sympathy is like a photographer who 
 thinks he can produce a portrait. Want of sympathy we need 
 certainly never fear to find in Herder ; like a poet he could 
 place himself at will in any age and in any nation. This indeed, 
 
1776.] BtJCKEBURG STILL. 213 
 
 as will be seen, was his chief claim to be counted among the 
 poets ; yet it is with some surprise that we find how completely 
 in this treatise he has departed from the customary point of view 
 of the eighteenth century. Hitherto his writings for the most 
 part have been in harmony with the spirit of the time, though 
 sometimes they seemed discordant from the raising of the pitch ; 
 but now he puts himself completely out of concord with his age. 
 " This book," he writes to Lavater, '* is fire and hot coals on the 
 skull of our century." The illuminated of the time thought he 
 was crying back ; we of to-day can see that he was uttering 
 prophecy. For he was a forerunner of the band of modern 
 Protestants for things spiritual against the ethics of material 
 limitation ; a band whose champions bear such names as Schiller 
 and the Transcendentalists, Novalis and the Romantic school; 
 Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley ; Maurice and his reformers ; 
 Newman and the Oxford movement ; Ruskin and Carlyle ; 
 Emerson ; Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites ; a band that is at 
 unity with itself in spite of the diversity of its members ; whose 
 watchword is Failure, and their failure victory. Every shore is 
 strewn with their wrecks, every heart burns at the sound of their 
 names. 
 
 But, leaving this ground to the sufficient protection of its 
 heroes, we will return to Herder's protest, which begins calmly 
 enough with a sketch of man's progress from the sweet childhood 
 of the East, through the boyhood of Egypt and Phoenicia and 
 the youth of Greece, till in Rome he reached man's estate. Even 
 in this first part there are hints that the writer is going a way of 
 his own ; he lays much emphasis on the influence of locality 
 in the development of a race, its manners and arts ; he cannot 
 forbear a sneer at Voltaire, who could see nothing but priest- 
 craft in the beautiful story of patriarchal life, so calm and pure 
 in its reverence for authority compared to the anarchic freedom 
 and *^ cold philosophy " of these later days ; he accuses Winckel- 
 mann of neglecting the arts of other nations under the powerful 
 attraction of Greece; and he is inclined to think that it was 
 Phoenicia, with her trade and shipping, rather than Greece, 
 
214 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 whose hands took freedom first into them, a weanling child.^ 
 Dropping the metaphor from the growth of the individual, he 
 proceeds to trace the ethical and political influence of Christianity 
 on the chaos that succeeded the division of the Roman Empire ; 
 but he first stops to admit the folly of an attempt to characterise 
 any large nation or period under some general term, for no 
 single qualification can be universally applicable, seeing that no 
 two moments of history are the same, and that, by a kind of law 
 of compensation, we constantly find the most opposite extremes 
 existing side by side in the same race.*'^ Coming to the Middle 
 Ages, he takes up the sword in defence of the great ideals — 
 Chivalry, Knighthood, the Crusades, and a Universal Church — in 
 opposition to the blind sneers of Hume, Voltaire, and Robertson. 
 In this he may have been partly influenced by Goethe's picture 
 of feudalism in Gotz ; but, at all events, this is one of the earliest 
 waves of that flood of medisevalism which has since swept over 
 Europe; and it agrees with a saying of Herder's, reported by 
 Jean Paul many years afterwards, that " he wished he had been 
 born in the Middle Ages," a wish which many people during 
 these last hundred years have not ceased pathetically to echo, till 
 at length some seem to have thought they actually were in the 
 Middle Ages — with results both interesting and laughable. 
 
 After this it might be thought that Herder would agree with 
 those who opine that all would have been well if Erasmus instead 
 of Luther had held the management of the Reformation. But he 
 is far from agreeing. 
 
 «< « Why,' cries the soft philosopher, * why, oh why, is not every such 
 Reformation rather carried on without a Revolution ? The human spirit 
 (Oeut) might have been left to go its own quiet way, whereas now passions 
 in the storm of action have only created new prejudices, and we have 
 exchanged evil for evil.' " 
 
 The plaint has been repeated in almost the same words by 
 plenty of ** soft philosophers " in our time, who seem to think 
 
 ' Swinburne's " Songs before Sunrise,*' The Litany of Nations, 
 ' For a development of a similar theory of compensation, cf. Emerson's 
 Esmyii, vol. i. *• Compensation." 
 
""*%%, 
 
 >. 
 
 1776.] BtJCKEBURG STILL. 215 
 
 they have made a great discovery ; but Herder would have none 
 of them. " This calm advancement of the human spirit for the 
 amelioration of the world," he exclaims, " is only a phantom of 
 our own brains, not God's way in nature." Reform implies dis- 
 turbance ; the reformer must have passion ; it is his " patent of 
 office." 
 
 The rest of the treatise is a bitter and railing accusation 
 against the mechanical spirit of modern times, mechanical in 
 philosophy, education, and life as well as in appliances and 
 inventions ; free thought which was preached as a panacea was 
 no end in itself; culture, with its dictionaries and bits of inane 
 trickery, after all seemed only a vanity. Herder takes his stand 
 where Ruskin and Carlyle join hands ; we are irresistibly re- 
 minded of the Latter-day Pamphlets, and that in style as well 
 as in subject ; we are shown the pessimist side of an optimist's 
 thought. And yet Herder did not fail to see the true position of 
 his century, for, boldly taking Frederick ^ and Voltaire as his 
 types, he distinctly sets forth the virtues and failings of his time 
 as exhibited in its two most distinguished men, and concludes 
 that, in spite of all philosophs and illuminated despots, it may be 
 an instrument in the hands of fate for good to some far-off 
 future. For, he maintains, the whole history of man follows 
 the rule of some inexorable power, which we must call Fate if we 
 may not call it Providence ; and to the black riddle of fate there 
 is no key, unless, as Herder almost hints, it be the key of faith in 
 the Christian revelation. 
 
 In the theological works that immediately succeeded this 
 philosophy of history the key is not only hinted at. The first of 
 these was the first volume of the Aelteste Urkunde, in three 
 parts ; the second volume, also in three parts, was not published 
 till two years later ; but all the published works of this Biicke* 
 burg period really fall under the same category, being in fact 
 parts of one book. It will be simpler, therefore, to consider them 
 in close succession, and so obtain some idea of the whole. And 
 
 • His account of Frederick is quoted at length by Lavater in his Physiogno- 
 mische Frat/m elite. 
 
21C HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 this can be done briefly, for the works have little value in them- 
 selves, and for the most part have become a weariness to the 
 flesh. It may be that all theological treatises acquire this 
 character as they grow old, if they have it not to start with, and 
 that I am inclined to be impatient with Herder from want of 
 experience in this kind ; at all events, in toiling carefully through 
 the Aelteste Urkunde and the rest, I have found little to relieve 
 the dreary oppression of the whole. In the first place, the style 
 is annoying and often almost incomprehensible ; it is Sturm 
 vnd Drang prose tranferred to theology, full of exclamations, 
 questions, parentheses, and unusual words. Haym has given a 
 long list of the words and phrases which Herder seems to have 
 coined for the occasion ; and Georg Muller, the editor of 
 Herder's works, tells us, in his preface to the Urkunde, that 
 several writers had sent him copies of this work translated into 
 ordinary German. Even Hamann, who himself wrote like an 
 oracle gone mad, called this thing a monstrum horrendum, and 
 Merck was scandalised past endurance. But, further than this. 
 Herder was as yet deficient in special knowledge for the work, 
 and want of knowledge at times seems even worse than a bad 
 style. People used to say that he was " too much a poet to be 
 good at exegesis," and in a certain sense it was true, though it 
 is hard to deplore it ; for the worth of one poet is not to be 
 expressed in terms of exegesis ; but yet, if the poet will inter- 
 pret, he must have something more to go upon than phantasy 
 and smatterings of learning. Compared to the vast knowledge 
 of Michaelis, who had devoted his life to the study of the East, 
 Herder's learning was very thin (Kant called the Urkunde " a 
 triumph without victory ") ; and, compared to the flood of light 
 which has now been thrown on early history by oriental scholars, 
 who have deciphered the cuneiform character and the hiero- 
 glyphics, and have revealed the cities of old, Herder's light would 
 be great darkness. In his time, too, comparative mythology, to 
 which he trusts for support for the leading principle of the 
 Urkunde, was still young and unsure ; it had not really advanced 
 much beyond the point reached by Cud worth, to whom Herder 
 
1776.1 BtJCKEBURG STILL. 217 
 
 refers with a certain amount of approval. Indeed, if the English 
 reader would form some idea of the Urkunde, let him imagine the 
 second and third volumes of Cudworth's Eternal and Immutable 
 Morality translated into the German of Jean Paul, bereft of his 
 humour. 
 
 We feel, too, that in this case Herder has set himself dis- 
 tinctly in opposition to the stream of the world's thought, and 
 as long as he continued thus there could be no doubt how he 
 would fare. Yet these works were by no means worthless. 
 They aroused much enthusiasm as well as enmity at the time. 
 Many people read them gladly, especially the Swiss circle, 
 hitherto inclined to regard Herder with suspicion. Their in- 
 fluence on true science may have been good, if only through the 
 strength that opposition gives. But, as I have tried to show 
 above, their real advantage was to the writer himself, and to us 
 they are chiefly interesting as a psychological study, for they 
 present us with one more instance how strange things a man of 
 real wisdom may see, if he can shut his eyes tight enough. 
 
 The Earliest Records of the Human Race (Die Aelteste 
 Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts) is a sort of running com- 
 mentary on the book of Genesis as far as the Flood. It was in- 
 tended to be the fulfilment of the work on Hebrew archaeology 
 of which we saw the first outlines in Kiga. The position of the 
 author, however, is, as might be expected, very diflPerent. The 
 first volume treats of the story of Creation. Herder says he 
 wrote it with his face to the east, and gazing out at the sunrise 
 morning after morning ; he was therefore led to imagine that 
 he found in the story some mystical allegory of the dawn. But 
 .this is not all, for he maintains that the seven days were 
 arranged into a mystical hieroglyphic, a divided hexagon, with 
 one point as it were at the waist ; and this he traces elaborately 
 through the nations of antiquity — Egypt, Chaldaea, Saba, Phoe- 
 nicia, and the philosophers of Asia Minor. This hieroglyphic 
 formed a traditional song, which was of course not composed by 
 Moses, but, coming from a far higher source, was restored by 
 him in its original purity. He then proceeds to examine the 
 
218 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 rest of the story in ordinary sermonic fashion, interspersing 
 rather commonplace remarks and moral reflections on marriage, 
 modesty, parentage, and the like. Far the best part of the 
 work is his scornful satire against the persiflage and unsym- 
 pathetic scepticism of Voltaire and other so-called advanced 
 thinkers of the time. He shows some real humour in his con- 
 temptuous description of those who could not make up their 
 minds to reject either science or revelation, but, in order to 
 reconcile the two, imagined that man once went on all fours, 
 till, as it fell upon a day, seeing an apple on a tree, he reached 
 up towards it, and, finding the advantage of standing on his 
 hind legs, straightway called the tree the Tree of Knowledge. 
 With this kind of timorous folly Herder had no patience, 
 though it may appear hard to decide whether his own theories 
 at this period were much more scientific. 
 
 In the Letters to Preachers we are in rather clearer air, 
 though the spirit is still the same ; and they mark the change 
 that had befallen even more distinctly. In early Riga daj^s 
 Herder had been an enthusiastic disciple of Spalding of Berlin 
 and his doctrines of Christian and clerical duties ; even within 
 the last year or two he had recommended his works to the 
 Countess, together with the writings of Jerusalem, who was 
 treading the same path. But now to Lavater, who himself had 
 sat at Spalding's feet, he writes, " Your Spalding vexes me 
 more and more daily. His second edition of The Preacher ^ — 
 not a word what a preacher should be before God and man, 
 only what he is allowed to be, and would like to be, if he can be 
 anything at all, under privilege in the states of his most glorious 
 majesty the King of Prussia.*' Jerusalem pleases him no 
 better ; he accuses both of time-serving and even deceit, though, 
 when Lavater protested against such abuse of his old master, he 
 hastened to withdraw the charge, but nevertheless repeated that, 
 though he would not compare himself with such men for a 
 moment, yet as teachers, preachers, and Christians they did not 
 
 ' Spalding'8 book On the Uac of the Pi'cachn-^s Office. 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 219 
 
 satisfy him any longer. Finally, in protest against Spalding's 
 book, he published his Provinzialbldtter, of which there were 
 originally fifteen letters, though in Miiller s edition these are 
 reduced to twelve. 
 
 Spalding, seeing his fellow-parsons sore bestead in a Prussia 
 whose king suffered every man to go to heaven his own way, 
 especially if he were a good soldier, had ventured to raise his 
 voice, tuned to the '' common- sense " pitch, in defence of his 
 office; had pleaded, something in Wordsworth's style, that it 
 was a good thing for a country to have men of decent culture 
 scattered abroad amongst the ignorant, to expound the scriptures 
 and above all enforce the first principles of general morality. 
 The worthy man had done great service in his time by setting at 
 nought the barren disputes on dogma, into which the Lutheran 
 and Reformed theories of religion had fallen ; but he unfortu- 
 nately failed to perceive this great flood of deeper feeling, which 
 under one form or another was beginning to surge through 
 Europe. In these District Letters he seems first to have felt 
 the force of the tide. For to Herder his office needed no 
 defence ; he will hear of no temporising with powers and 
 dominions ; the preachers of God were sent out conquering and 
 to conquer ; and he is ruthless against the polite parson, the 
 dilettante priest of culture, that stickles for " good form," and 
 stands in awe before conventions. This was not Luther's way ; 
 and throughout these Letters Herder quotes largely from Luther, 
 and regards him more and more as the type of active priest- 
 hood, though he does not deny the benefits of Melancthon's 
 sweet counsel. After tracing the history of the priest from the 
 earliest times, when he was all in all, and exposing the shallow- 
 ness of Hume's sneering comparison between the soldier and 
 priest, he passes on to criticise a former work of Spalding's, 
 On the Value of the Feelings in Christianity ; and the rest of the 
 Letters are chiefly occupied with contradictions of the doctrine, 
 that the clergy's main duty is to inculcate correct morality. 
 He shows how different a thing is demonstration from belief; 
 he protests against the commonplace morality of sermons and 
 
220 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 the frigid disquisitions on the advantages of virtue, '^ for God 
 does not reveal himself in a moral discourse." Throughout all 
 these Letters Herder's aim is clear enough ; he is trying to 
 offer a solution to the difficulty that has perplexed Europe for 
 four hundred years, the difficulty that has been at the root of all 
 the great movements and revivals, as well Catholic as Puritan, 
 the Methodists and Trvingites, Positivism, and the Salvation 
 Army ; the difficulty of reaching out to something beyond the 
 morality of the best policy, so that morality may become a thing 
 of life, and the truths of the understanding be transformed into 
 religion. 
 
 The same high purpose dictated all Herder's important work 
 during this period. Hardly were the Letters finished when he 
 began the Commentaries on the New Testarnentj which, together 
 with The Epistles of the two Brothers of Jesus, occupied him 
 during 1774, and appeared about Easter in the following year. 
 The Commentaries are supposed to be derived from " a newly- 
 discovered oriental source," the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster, 
 recently translated into French ; and Herder, after sketching 
 the history of the interval between the Old and New Testaments, 
 tries to show that it was through a mixture of the Chaldasan 
 doctrines of Zoroaster, acquired during the Captivity, with the 
 Platonism of Philo and the Alexandrines, that Judaism reached 
 the sublime mysticism of St. John's Gospel. The book is indeed 
 a commentary illustrating this gospel by kindred passages from 
 the Zend- A vesta J together with a running explanation by the 
 author. People who are judges of the subject consider this 
 Herder's most orthodox work. For us it is chiefly significant 
 as containing some traces of the influence which, probably in 
 the summer and autumn of 1774, Spinoza was beginning to 
 exercise on his mind. Before this he does not seem to have 
 studied Spinoza's Ethics for himself; but in the following 
 February, writing to Gleim concerning Gleim's wonderful 
 Halladat, or Red Booky he says : 
 
 " You have well expressed the oriental thought, that heaven is 
 universal, that before God space and time vanish, but that he can only 
 
1776 ] BUCKEBURG STILL. 221 
 
 exist where thought is and where is active love, which is the purest 
 thought ; that this is God, God in every point or rather in no point ; it 
 (sie, i.e. wirkende Liebe) is, as it acts, in eternity, raised above space and 
 time, embracing all things, flowing in unity with all things that so think 
 and love, and thus performs all the works that are done in the world, and 
 is God ! These ideas sound merely enthusiastic (schwdrmerisch), but are 
 the coldest, most precise metaphysic. Read Spinoza's Morality, especially 
 the second and fourth books." 
 
 No less marked is Spinoza's influence in the otherwise Leib- 
 nitzian treatise on Apprehension and Sensation [Erkennen und 
 EmpJinduTig)^ which Herder wrote during this same year for 
 the Berlin Academy. No prize was awarded, but Herder pub- 
 lished his essay in a slightly different form, together with his 
 Plastik^ in 1778. A work which he called Mar an AtJia, on 
 the Apocalypse, the first sketch for which was also written at 
 this time, was not finally published till 1779. These writings, 
 together with the twelve published sermons on the Life of 
 Jesus, which display the same tendencies as the others, in a 
 simpler and more practical style, may be classed together as 
 the main result of the BUckebiirg period. Even from this 
 slight sketch there can be no doubt in the reader s' mind in 
 which direction the tide of Herder's thought was for the present 
 bearing him. If, after reading these works, there could be any 
 question about the matter, it would be at once set at rest by the 
 correspondence with Lavater, who, as has been already said, 
 was even offended and startled when Herder's zeal for religion 
 drove him to speak slightingly of the old leaders, Spalding and 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 After having read both the works as published and the 
 correspondence, I have not the slightest doubt that Herder was 
 perfectly honest throughout the whole of this business. I have 
 not the slightest doubt that the great hope of his heart was that 
 to him, too, in these latter days, it might be granted to strike a 
 great blow for religion's sake, such as Luther struck in stronger 
 times. I am the more anxious to insist upon this because a recent 
 writer has made the works of this period the ground for bring- 
 ing against Herder the foulest charge that can be brought 
 
222 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 against any man — the charge of selling the spirit of truth for 
 money.^ 
 
 It must be clear, from the sketch of Herder's works during 
 this period, how little there would be in his honest opinions that 
 could offend the most orthodox. If any offence was to be given, 
 it would be, as we saw in the case of Lavater, from an excess 
 of religious zeal rather than a defect. People who have grown 
 old in orthodoxy do not like to have the calm of their opinions 
 ruffled by the Sturm und Drang of a further religious develop- 
 ment; and if these things were, done in Lavater, himself the 
 leader of the religious Sturm und Drang^ what would be done 
 amongst the placid orthodox of the old school? I should 
 imagine that few in such a case would say that the support of 
 the orthodox was " catered for." On the internal or spiritual 
 side the charge falls to pieces ; and we will now take up the 
 thread of Herder's external history and judge how far it could 
 be substantiated there. 
 
 It is true that ever since his first meeting with Heyne 
 Herder had cast a wistful e^'e upon Gottingen, and was inclined 
 to think that, after all, a university life might be better than 
 exile in Biickeburg ; true, also, that even at the time of Herder's 
 greatest orthodoxy Heyne, who took very small interest in 
 modern religion, had sighed, "• Would you were more orthodox; 
 
 • Or, to use the writer's own words: " There seems little doubt that Herder 
 was tempted to cater for the support of the orthodox in view of this appointment 
 (in Gottingen) in publishing his Provinzialhldttcr an Prediger, Not only so, 
 it must be admitted that in his negotiations with the Gottingen authorities he 
 betrayed a pitiful watit of manliness and dignity." ' I take the words * tempted 
 to cater for the support of the orthodox ' to mean that Herder said what he did 
 not really believe in order to gain some material advantage therefrom ; that he 
 being unorthodox was willing to sacrifice what he thought true to please the 
 orthodox ; not merely that he stated his honest views in order to show those in 
 power what sort of man they had to deal with. For, if this last had been the 
 writer's meaning, he would have used other words than * tempted ' and 'cater,' of 
 which the one implies sin and the other meanness ; and I suppose there is neither 
 sin nor meanness in what must necessarily be done by every candidate for office and 
 trust either in published works or in examination or in speeches to constituents. 
 
 • The Fortnightly Review for October 1882. Herder ^ by James Sully. 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 223 
 
 people only know you as a man of letters, and one has no 
 theological work of yours to point to " ; and had added, with 
 an ironical smile, " some people want an orthodox preacher, 
 others a man of worldly wisdom and tact — a clever knave in 
 short." Whereupon Herder had answered in the same tone 
 that, so far as orthodoxy went, no one would have cause to 
 complain of him ; that he trusted, after all his experience, he 
 was not deficient in worldly wisdom ; and that, if a clever knave 
 was wanted to conceal the weak points of the office, he was 
 ready in a certain sense to undertake the post.* For he knew 
 theoretically, as well as most people, that all professions con- 
 tain something of compromise ; but he also knew that the only 
 way in the end to defend a position from attack is to raise it 
 from the common-place to a higher ideal. Herder's only mis- 
 take throughout was in supposing he excelled in worldly wisdom, 
 in which he was almost as strikingly deficient as Don Quixote. 
 It is truly sad to see a man with such views of the realities of 
 life, and the beauty of activity as his, continually boasting his 
 keeu practical sense, and continually failing to use the right 
 means to an end. In this case it is quite possible that, under the 
 advice of Heyne and Brandos the Hanoverian minister, it was 
 partly to explain his new theological position to the orthodox of 
 Gottingen that Herder wrote this series of works. But the 
 smallest amount of ^' worldly wisdom " would have told him 
 that nothing could have been wider of the mark, and indeed he 
 himself, speaking of the Aelteste Urhunde^ insists that they 
 were written not for Gottingen but for Germany. 
 
 The right of the appointment in Gottingen seems to have 
 lain between the Hanoverian ministers, Brandos and Bremer, 
 and the Gottingen consistory, chiefly university authorities who 
 on this occasion displayed all the petty rancour characteristic of 
 the hide-bound pedantry in which Gottingen university-men 
 even excelled their fellows, as we learn from Heine's mocking 
 laughter fifty years afterwards.^ Towards the end of January 
 
 * Herder's Correspondence with Heyne, letter 23. ( Von und an Herder.) 
 2 See most of Heine's earlier work, especially the Harzreise. 
 
224 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 1774 Herder was invited to preach before the ministers in 
 Hanover, but tlie visit was a complete failure. It does not 
 appear that he even preached, and the silly etiquette of the court 
 troubled him as much as it had troubled Zimmermann ; more, 
 indeed, for he seems to have found Zimmermann quite the 
 courtier and favourite of society there, in spite of ill-health and 
 melancholy humours. The polite seem to have objected to 
 Herder's apparel as only fit for the company of peasants, which 
 must have been a sore blow, and, under the pain of such insults, 
 he scandalised propriety still more by unexpectedly disappear- 
 ing, and betaking himself back to Buckeburg, a day or two 
 after he had come, determined never to think of Gottingen 
 again. In the spring, however, Brandos wrote demanding 
 theological books from which to discover his real opinions. 
 Herder at once sent the Urkunde and the Provinzlalbldtter ; but 
 Brandos, so far from supposing they were meant to " cater *' 
 for the support of the orthodox, was inclined to think such 
 works could not have been more ill-timed ; he deplored their 
 warmth, and feared they would further confound the confusion 
 of Gottingen, besides increasing tho author's unpopularity. And 
 he was right. Herder had not only failed to win the orthodox, 
 but he had succeeded in offending three distinct parties, all 
 largely represented in Gottingen ; one of them almost identical 
 with the orthodox themselves. 
 
 Whilst Herder was still writing for the Frankfurt paper of 
 Schlosser and Merck he had reviewed in a hostile and rather 
 flippant tone a dull and learned work, An Introduction to Uni- 
 versal History^ by Schlozer, historian and professor in Gottingen. 
 In this case, as in others, he had allowed his imagination to lead 
 him beyond the safe ground of exact knowledge ; and Schlozer, 
 who, for good reasons, had never known the sweet dangers of 
 imagination, devoted a whole volume to the exposure of Her- 
 der's ignorance of facts. The object of the book was printed on 
 the title-page, and once more matter triumphed over spirit ; for 
 Schlozer's victory was of course complete, as fai* as it went. 
 The review had been chiefly written to please Heyne, who was 
 
1776.] BtrCKEBURG STILL. 225 
 
 not on the best terms with his colleagues, and, though both 
 Hamann and Claudius rushed eagerly to the defence. Herder 
 wisely let the matter drop as best it could. 
 
 Worse still was the offence given by the Urkunde to the 
 great Michaelis and his party, who w^ere naturally very strong 
 in Gottingen, though Michaelis himself, being a true artist 
 after his kind, and conscious of right, seems to have paid little 
 attention to the matter. But the worst blow of all was due to 
 those very Provinzialhldtter themselves. We are told in the 
 Reminiscences that whilst he was writing these, and, indeed, 
 most of his works, Herder was so carried away by the enthu- 
 siasm of his convictions that he could pay regard neither to 
 personalities nor anything else that came in his path. But, when 
 he saw these letters printed, in alarm lest they should hurt 
 Spalding's feelings, he hastened to write and assure him of his 
 great regard for him and his works, in spite of minor differ- 
 ences ; at the same time, being anxious to act perfectly fairly, 
 he inclosed a copy of the book. Spalding, who was a benign 
 and reverend gentleman, though sore let and hindered in such 
 a dominion as Prussia, answered in calm and friendly tone, 
 quietly defending himself on one or two points. But his 
 followers, chief of whom was a man named Teller, were not 
 going to let the matter rest so. They obtained Herder^s letter 
 and sent it the round of Berlin, Brunswick, and Gottingen, not 
 under orders of secrecy. It appears to have been accompanied 
 by a guide or explanation from Teller's hand pointing out the 
 various atrocities of the writer, and was everywhere received 
 by exclamations of " What double-dealing!" "What hypo- 
 crisy ! " Even Hamann's faith was shaken for a time, though 
 he had just written some " Prolegomena " in defence of the 
 Urkunde, 
 
 Spalding's party might be described as the liberally com- 
 pliant, or the orthodox of sufficient reason, forming a link be- 
 tween the Pietists and the dogmatic orthodox. They had wide 
 influence, even such a man as the extreme Pietist Lavater, as 
 we have seen, counting himself one of Spalding's disciples be- 
 
 Q 
 
226 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 fore he began to keep consciences on his own account. And 
 now that this whole party was set against Herder, nominally 
 because his letter had proved him double-faced, really because 
 his ideal of religion was higher than theirs, to whom should he 
 turn for support ? In these writings he had boldly declared his 
 position, and was proved too intellectual for a Pietist, too imagin- 
 ative for the dogmatic followers of Wolff, and a downright 
 opponent of the liberalism of Spalding. Least of all, since his 
 onslaught upon his future colleagues, Michaelis and Schlozer, 
 could he appeal to his former allies, the apostles of untram- 
 melled in^^estigation and scientific enlightenment. To such a 
 pass had his enthusiasm for what he considered the truth 
 brought the man who expressed himself willing to play the 
 '' clever knave," to conciliate all parties, and had boasted of 
 his '^ worldly wisdom." 
 
 The storm broke in July 1774, whilst Herder was in his 
 favourite Pyrmont with Karoline on a short holiday. Here he 
 enjoyed the society of Zimmermann ; and here, for the first time, 
 he met Mendelssohn, with whom he had occasionally corre- 
 sponded before. One letter, at all events, he had written to 
 him from Riga, questioning the main conclusion of his Phcedo 
 on the immortality of the soul. But his pleasure was laid waste 
 by the news of Teller's libel. 
 
 "Pyrmont," he writes to Lavater, "ought to be a valley of the 
 celestials to me ; and lo ! around it has gathered a storm which has 
 plunged me into the depths. All the excellent people there, in whom I 
 take so much pleasure, Zimmermann not excepted, are seen through a 
 thick, dull cloud .... My birthday is near (his thirtieth birthday). 
 I wanted to make the occasion a kind of initiation, and such it has become, 
 though otherwise than 1 thought. 
 
 He returned to his quiet home, and the sympathetic comfort 
 of his wife and the Countess. On the 28th of August- - Goethe's 
 birthday — " Lucina knocked at the door," and his first child 
 was born ; ^ the Countess still taking a pathetic interest, for her 
 only daughter had died a month or two before. But, in spite of 
 
 • Wilhelm Christian Gottfried Herder, died 1806. 
 
1776.] BtCKEBURG STILL. 227 
 
 all, the world long seemed to him a "vale of woe," as he wrote 
 to Hamann, whose confidence in his disciple had been completely 
 restored. During this autumn Herder had some hopes of an 
 appointment in a new university that was to be founded at 
 Mitau, which would take his memory back with vague longings 
 to Riga, at this distance looking so free and happy ; but the 
 schemes came to nothing. 
 
 Late in the autumn he was again induced to visit Hanover 
 — much against his will — by the representations of Brandos, 
 Bremer, and Westfeld, who were all really anxious " not to lose 
 such a pearl for their university." Herder stayed with them 
 from Friday to Monday, and writes to Heyne that he went 
 through some comical scenes. The question seems to have 
 resolved itself into whether the appointment was to be 
 given to Herder, or to his bitterest enemy — Teller himself. 
 Here is, at all events, an excellent basis for comedy ; and we 
 can imagine the ludicrous manoeuvres of those ministerial and 
 consistorial persons who, having Herder in the flesh before 
 them, but a fear for the peace of Gottingen in their hearts, 
 were painfully anxious to say " yes and no " at the same 
 moment, and found the trick so difficult. The crisis of the 
 comedy must have been when, as Herder writes, " as they were 
 under the delusion that I had come to preach, I thought it best 
 to refuse with the utmost courtesy." Whereupon, one of the 
 ministers thought Herder would like to hold a conference with 
 the consistory, — " but I thought good not to accept the proposal ; 
 but with all courtesy, grace, and friendliness to let the matter 
 lose itself in the far-off azure of heaven. And so the two things 
 — Herder and Hanover — separated from one another."^ If 
 any one after this thinks that Herder was capable of selling the 
 spirit of truth for money, I suppose he may go on his way with 
 something of the self-content of the man who, having seen his 
 own wit, saw more than all the world beside. 
 
 About this same time Herder sent to Zimmermann, for a 
 
 * To Heyne, letter 38. ( Von imd an Herder.) 
 q2 
 
228 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 Hanover journal, a short treatise on the question already dis- 
 cussed by Lessing, How the Ancients represented Death ; but, like 
 so many of Herder's writings, this did not take its final form 
 till some years afterwards (in 1786). He was also engaged on 
 an essay concerning The Causes of the Decline of Taste, which 
 was crowned by the Berlin Academy in June 1775. Though 
 written in a calmer style than the other works of this period, 
 the spirit is thoroughly Teutonic, and quite in accordance with 
 Herder's former theories of art ; for, in a sketch of the history 
 of the periods when the arts have been most highly developed, 
 he proves that imitation is always worthless ; that the taste of 
 Louis XIV.'s age was inane, for true art must be founded on 
 the people, and declines with the loss of liberty and reality; 
 also that art has no necessary connexion with virtue, but is a 
 kind of force of nature running through time, now appearing, 
 now unseen, but never lost, '' for force is indestructible." 
 
 The rest of the winter was spent at Biickeburg in compai'a- 
 tive peace. Herder continuing his theological works and instruct- 
 ing a favourite page of the Countess. In February the Superin- 
 tendent of the district died, and Herder succeeded in his room. 
 A Superintendent is an ecclesiastical officer to whom I imagine 
 the English archdeacon — or, in some respects, the bishojD — corre- 
 sponds ; for he examines, performs the ordinations, introduces 
 the young clergy to their office, and generally makes himself 
 useful in matters of discipline and Church government. Hardly 
 had Herder been appointed when the Count, whose darling 
 fortress was probably in want of repair, informed him that he 
 intended to divert the income of the office " ad pios usus,^^ as he 
 expressed it, with notable irony. Herder protested in the name 
 of himself and his successors, and, under the influence of the 
 Countess Maria, the Count gave way, contenting himself with 
 subtracting the same amount from Herder's previous income. 
 This arrangement was not likely to make things smooth ; and, 
 when soon afterwards Zachariii left Gottingen, Herder naturally 
 tiu'ned his eyes again to the university. 
 
 At Easter, Hartknoch came and brought thorn a son of 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 229 
 
 Herder's dead ister Neumann, whom he had long intended to 
 adopt ; and early in June, Kanter, the bookseller of Konigsberg 
 — Herder's earliest patron — paid them a visit. In Biickeburg 
 itself, too, the family had become very intimate with the cavalry- 
 officer von Zanthier, who, we remember, was taken for Herder 
 when he first arrived, owing to his dashing mien and the scar 
 on his face. Towards the end of June, a letter was received 
 from the court of Eutin, entreating Herder to go and look after 
 the young prince, who had caused them all so much trouble, 
 and was now engaged to be married, but instead of attending 
 to his betrothed was moping in Darmstadt, bent on ending his 
 gloomy questionings by a plunge into the Roman Catholic Church. 
 Under pretext of a visit to relations, Herder at once set off with 
 his wife and son, and they spent three or four happy weeks in 
 the old familiar scenes. As to his real mission Herder was 
 partially successful, for, though the young prince was obstinate 
 against his betrothal, he retired to Eutin and gave up thoughts 
 of the Holy Church. Herder preached once more in the place 
 where he had "preached away his maiden's heart" five years 
 before ; Merck was coldly polite, but more amiable than might 
 have been expected ; and the visit was made doubly interesting 
 by an introduction to Friedrich Karl von Moser, then prime 
 minister in Darmstadt, and a warm admirer of Herder's recent 
 works. Zimmermann, too, was there on his way to Switzer- 
 land ; and, before the Herders left, Goethe himself arrived, 
 fresh from that wonderful Swiss tour with the Stolbergs, in 
 which he tried to tear himself from Lili. A day was spent in a 
 visit to Homburg, where Karoline's true friend Lila was now 
 living as Frau von Stockhausen ; her garden-graves and tame 
 animals given up, we must suppose, under the stern realities of 
 motherhood and a matter-of-fact husband. 
 
 Towards the end of July the party journeyed with Goethe 
 and Merck to Frankfurt, and so to Biickeburg by way of Pyr- 
 mont. Here, for the first time, Herder met Anacreon-rTyrtasus 
 Gleim, than whom assuredly a kinder-hearted, more forbearing 
 man never trod this earth. We can imagine Karoline's joy in 
 
230 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773- 
 
 introducing her husband to her " dear old father Gleim " (he 
 was now fifty-six), the man who had shown her kindness, called 
 her Psyche, and written verses to her in less happy days. He 
 accompanied them to Biickeburg, and the friendship lasted un- 
 broken till Gleim's death. It was at the end of this July, too, 
 that Herder received his first letter from the poet Lenz, then 
 staying in Strassburg, courting Goethe's Frederika, and causing 
 his honest landlady trouble enough because he would not keep 
 his room tidy, and had neglected to teach his pupil — Baron 
 Kleist — ^' the difference between the religions— Catholic and 
 Lutheran."^ Lenz writes to Herder in terms of almost extra- 
 vagant admiration as the leader of the Sturm und Drang move- 
 ment, of which he himself was an exaggerated — though in 
 some respects a beautiful — type. He sent the manuscripts of 
 his Soldaten and Pandcemonium Germanicum, to Herder's great 
 delight, and we shall meet him again before he sank into com- 
 plete madness. 
 
 With Gleim's departure the short interval of happiness 
 came to an end, and Herder found himself involved in new 
 troubles. The Count considered himself unfairly treated be- 
 cause he imagined Herder was in secret communication with 
 the court of Eutin, and it is probable he had not forgiven 
 Herder's reluctance to devote his income as Superintendent 
 ^^ad pios usus.''^ From the beginning the office had brought 
 Herder nothing but anxiety and annoyance, and now, during 
 his absence in Darmstadt, a worse thing had befallen. A young 
 man named Stock, a person of ill repute and dubious antece- 
 dents, had appeared upon the scene. Some time before the 
 consistory of another province had rejected him with disgrace 
 in what we should call the bishop's examination. Shortly afler- 
 wards, having gained the first prize in the Hanover lottery, he 
 had laid out 200 thaler (say 30/.) in buying a wretched livino- 
 from an impecunious nobleman. He applied again for ordina- 
 
 ' See an excellent letter by Lavator, quoted in A us JFcrdrrs Kaclihisst, Band i. 
 p. 217. 
 
1776.] BtJCKEBURG STILL. 231 
 
 tion, but having been again rejected he grew warm, and indig- 
 nantly demanded by what right he was kept out of his property — 
 had he not bought the living for money? The consistory 
 answered by prosecuting him for simony, and after betraying 
 his friends into ruin he retreated to Biickeburg, and oifered to 
 advance 4,000 thaler (say between 500Z. and 600/.) to the 
 exchequer under promise of a living. It seems sad that the 
 Count suffered such a transaction ; but funds were so short, and 
 the fortress so fair, and priests so unimportant. In September 
 Herder held his examinations as Superintendent of the consis- 
 tory, and Stock was summoned to appear. He sent a rude 
 refusal, "ill -written and ill-spelt." He was summoned again, 
 and, as he deigned no answer at all, one of the ministers in- 
 formed Herder that, by the Count's command, this candidate 
 was to be ordained without examination. Herder protested, 
 firmly but with some tact in dealing with the Count's weak 
 point. He was answered, that the matter should be inquired 
 into by a " special commission." Becoming more indignant, he 
 informed the Count that the matter did not fall under the juris- 
 diction of a special commission, and that he would resign and 
 leave Biickeburg rather than act against his conscience. The 
 Count coolly replied that he would find some other means. 
 Whereupon Herder retired into seclusion for a few days,^ and 
 reappeared with a full treatise on the subject, written with all 
 his warm eloquence, and more than his usual strength and 
 indignation ; for he was sure of the right, and had not studied 
 Luther in vain. The conclusion was, that he refused ever to 
 bring " a smoking brand of hell to the pulpit and altar," and, 
 for the rest, he would have no more to do with the odious busi- 
 ness {mit dieser stinkenden Sache). The pamphlet was sent to 
 the Count, who, being incapable of dishonour himself, was 
 obliged to admit he had been in the wrong, and to recognise 
 that a man who stood erect and caught at God's skirts^ was 
 
 ' It was on this occasion that he stamped up and down his room till his feet 
 were sore, and ground a piece of sealing-wax to powder between his hands. 
 ■-' Browning's Instans Tyrannus. 
 
232 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 more tlian a match for all the fortresses and train-bands in the 
 world. Stock was commanded to get him out of Buckeburg 
 territory within twenty-four hours, or to expect worse things. 
 Yet relations must have been rather strained in the Buckeburg 
 circle ; and for the first time the Countess took real offence at 
 Herder's warmth. 
 
 From the midst of these troubles Herder again turned his 
 eyes to his friends in Hanover and Gottingen. In August he 
 had been offered the fourth professorship of theology with an 
 annual income of 600 thaler (about 90/.),^ but had been inclined 
 to refuse on the ground that anything under 1 1 0/. was hardly 
 sufficient for a married man in his position. This October, 
 however, hearing that the offer was raised to nearly 100/., he 
 declared himself ready to accept, though just at the same time he 
 learnt with extreme sorrow that his chief attraction to Gottingen 
 was gone ; for Therese Heyne had at length died of consump- 
 tion, brought on from mourning for her children. On hearing 
 of his acceptance the orthodox were up in arms, with more hos- 
 tility than ever ; and, as we are told that '* it must be admitted 
 that in his negociations with the Gottingen authorities Herder 
 betrayed a pitiful want of manliness and dignity," we must be 
 on the alert, ready to admit whatever must be admitted. The 
 facts are briefly these : the Hanoverian ministry having written 
 to ask the views of the Gottingen theological faculty as to 
 Herder's orthodox}^, the faculty characteristically replied that 
 they could not answer plainly ; there was much in Herder's 
 writings they did not understand, but they were inclined to 
 think he had interpreted the history of the Creation in an alle- 
 gorical sense, &c. &c.''^ The Ministry laid this document before 
 the King, Herder's enemies apparently suggesting to him what 
 he should decree, for the respectable George himself was at that 
 
 ' Mr. Lewes, however, divides thalers by six instead of seven to reduce to our 
 pounds, so that the income would be rather more. One good authority, also, 
 divides by five at this period. But all such comparisons are misleading and 
 unimportant. 
 
 2 ActenstUck, quoted by Ilaym, vol. i. part ii. p. 731. 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 233 
 
 time only too much occupied by those upstart colonists across 
 the Atlantic and the troublesome eloquence of Burke at home. 
 He decided that, as Herder was not a doctor of theology, he 
 must submit to a colloquy with the consistory on the subject of 
 his belief. Herder indignantly refused, believing such a col- 
 loquy would be below the dignity of himself and his office. 
 
 '* It is a matter of indifference to me," he writes, " what people think 
 of my works. It is possible that I am more orthodox and am more truly 
 acquainted with Luther than they all. At all events the times are gone 
 by when people went to Rome with their heads in their hands to prove 
 their orthodoxy, and, besides, Gottingen is hardly Rome." 
 
 But he was willing to hold a discussion by letter, or to write 
 a treatise, for this was more dignified, and would not be so 
 much like fighting in the dark. The Ministers, however, assured 
 him that it was not to be thought of, and continued to urge the 
 colloquy as the only means, " for they have prejudiced the 
 King against you, and the King always abides by his first reso- 
 lutions " ; (alas, yes ; to England's sorrow !) Both Brandes * 
 and Bremer represented to him that there was not the slightest 
 degradation, that a colloquy was a mere matter of form and of 
 no importance whatever, except to satisfy the King's scruples. 
 Bremer writes to Zimmerman that the colloquium was a regular 
 and long-established custom in Hanover, implying no disparage- 
 ment nor even distrust. Zimmerman added his entreaties ; but 
 for months Herder remained firm. It was not till the end of 
 January 1776 that he was induced by the Ministry to talk the 
 matter over with his old friend Westfeld. They met at Olden- 
 dorf, on the borders of Hanover ; and Westfeld managed his 
 case so cleverly that, before they parted, Herder had agreed, 
 under certain conditions and protective clauses, to present him- 
 self at Gottinxjen for the deo^ree of doctor, which was to be con- 
 ferred without expense if he satisfied the authorities, and to 
 preach at Hanover on his way there or back. On the last day 
 
 ' This was the Brandes whose daughter Heyne married soon after Therese's 
 death, " with less difficulty than most men have in choosing a pair of boots." — 
 ^ Carlyle's essay on Ileyne, Miscellanies, vol. ii. p. 78. 
 
234 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 of January he writes to Zimmermann, " I am ready to tread 
 the bitter road to Gottingen." Under the stress of sore diffi- 
 culties in Biickeburg and the earnest remonstrances and repre- 
 sentations of friends, he had yielded against his will, perhaps 
 against his higher knowledge ; but I think few could afford to 
 call this '^ a pitiful want of manliness and dignity." 
 
 Whether Herder would finally have prevailed on himself to 
 go or not, we who know something of his ways must remain in 
 doubt. He himself had no doubt. " I would not go to the 
 colloquium even if Weimar failed me," he writes to Heyne 
 some weeks afterwards. '^ Since I said * Yes,' under compulsion, 
 my guiding genius has kicked up his heels {sich gebaiimt), and 
 a thousand times cried * No.' " Fortunately, the very day 
 after he had seen Westfeld he was saved from the pains of 
 hesitation by an official letter offering him the post of General 
 Superintendent in Weimar. Probably with a view to this, 
 he had inserted a clause in his agreement with the Hanoverian 
 ministry leaving himself free for any other appointment, for in 
 December Goethe had hinted that such a thing was possible. 
 
 Ever since Herder's marriage Goethe and he had been on 
 excellent terms, having forgotten the slight differences of the 
 year before, as may be seen from Goethe's short but most 
 friendly letters. Herder's answers are lost, but he always 
 writes of Goethe with the greatest enthusiasm to Hamann, Zim- 
 mermann, and Lavater. Since Werther appeared in 1774 the 
 name of Goethe had become a household word throughout 
 Germany. Herder avoided open criticism of the book, perhaps 
 purposely not to annoy the Countess, who was displeased at 
 its want of religion, but this did not prevent him from writing 
 to Hamann, '^Goethe is a fellow full of wits (Geist) and life. 
 He will be nothing that he cainiot be with heart and soul 
 {von Ilerzen und mit der Faust) ^^ ; and again, to Zimmermann, 
 March 1770, '^ Goethe is swimming down to eternity on the 
 golden waves of this century." On the other hand, Goethe had 
 been delighted with the depth and phant^isy of the Urkunde; 
 and, though he had not much sympathy with the main theme 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 235 
 
 of Herder's theological works (" for," he writes, *^ the whole 
 doctrine about Christ is so shadowy {so ein Scheinding) as to 
 drive a man — a poor, limited, needy creature — to distraction ^'), 
 yet he still continued to regard Herder as the centre and leader 
 of the new school, of which himself and Lenz were at present the 
 chief poets. There is no necessity for us, therefore, to join the 
 majority in quoting the invitation of Herder to Weimar as one of 
 the most striking instances of Goethe's disinterested generosity. 
 Kindliness was once for all as natural to him as singing ; ^ but 
 in this case there was no need to strain. Besides, the idea was 
 originally Wieland's, though it needed all Goethe's marvellous 
 practical energy to carry it out. He had himself arrived in 
 Weimar in November, and, as has been said, had written 
 within a month to ask Herder if he could accept such a post. 
 Herder joyfully promised, but all through the winter the ortho- 
 dox of Weimar and blind -eyed magistrates gave trouble enough, 
 in spite of the hearty good-will of the Grand Duke ; who, in- 
 deed, Goethe writes, was " absolutely determined to have no 
 priestly quibbling {Pfaffentracasserien) on orthodoxy and the 
 devil." 
 
 At last Karl August imperiously set aside all objections ; 
 the post of General Superintendent and rector of the town 
 church was offered in February, jo^^fully accepted at once, and, 
 after some more disputes with the magistrates, the appointment 
 was finally ratified in June. Herder was to arrive at Michael- 
 mas. In the meantime, though in the midst of the gaieties and 
 distractions of those early Weimar days, Goethe watched over 
 his friend's interests with his keen and practical eye. He writes 
 that he had turned some usurpers out of the parsonage-house, 
 and incloses an account and ground-plan of the building, at the 
 same time regretting that hedgehogs will build in the garden. 
 In July he even went to church for the first time, to see what 
 
 ' And yet Wordsworth has tohl us, and Mr. Matthew Arnold apparently 
 agrees, that Goethe's poems are not " inevitable enough." Is it possible that 
 they remembered the beginning of the fourth volume, book xvi. of Aus meinem 
 Leben ? 
 
236 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1773— 
 
 sort of a place Herder would have to preach in, and gives a 
 quaint account of the old tombs and Cranach's pictures. He 
 advises Herder to be as simple as possible in his first sermon, 
 for people were much alarmed at the idea — had heard that he 
 could not preach at all, and were afraid they would not be able 
 to understand a word. 
 
 Meanwhile, at Biickeburg, regrets from Gottingen and Han- 
 over had been pouring in, but to no purpose. Frequent letters 
 were passing between Herder and Lavater, chiefly on the sub- 
 ject of the Physiognomik, which was now far advanced. Herder 
 contributed portraits of himself,^ Karoline, the Countess, and 
 other friends, and sent ideal descriptions of Christ and Luther, 
 as was the custom of the time. At Easter Claudius came with 
 his " peasant girl " and child, and stayed a week ; he was on 
 his way to Darmstadt, where he had gained some appointment 
 through Herder's influence with Friedrich Karl von Moser. 
 Again the two friends determined to live together in the future, 
 if by any means it could be brought about ; but it never could. 
 The only real tie to Biickeburg was severed in June by the 
 death of the Countess. Every one but the Count had long 
 known that the end was at hand, and she herself desired death 
 with the yearning of a delicate and hapless soul. It was pro- 
 bably hastened by a superstitious theory, for she had noticed 
 that all the important events in her life had happened in June. 
 She died on her thirty-third birthday, and was buried at her 
 summer residence of Baum amongst the peaceful trees. 
 
 In August Herder's second son was born ; ho lived to be a 
 great favourite with his father, Goethe, and many others, and 
 attained some real repute as a miner and geologist. He was a 
 child rather remarkable for his god-parents, for, whereas three 
 only are in England generally necessary to salvation, Herder, like 
 most Germans, seems to have thought the more the better : '^ they 
 
 ' Lavater's Phystiognomisch^ Fragmentc^ vol. ii. p. 102. The portraits were 
 supposed to be fairly good. 
 
 ' The eldest son of Frau von Stein had no less than fifty god-parents to 
 superintend his spiritual welfare. 
 
1776.] BUCKEBURG STILL. 237 
 
 were Goethe, Hamann, Claudius, Karolhie's brother Sigmund, 
 and Frau von BeschefFer; and the boy was called Sigmund 
 August Wolfgang. 
 
 In his farewell sermon Herder reviewed his life in Bucke- 
 burg, touching on his early despair at the prospect of useless > 
 ness, and suggesting some rather sharp reforms. On the 7th of 
 September he preached by the monument to the Countess at 
 Baum ; and on the 10th, with his wife and two little sons,^ he 
 drove away from Buckeburg, its sad and happy memories, its 
 loneliness and pleasant places. The Count was with him next 
 summer at Pyrmont, and they talked only of her who was gone. 
 In spite of all his strength, he never recovered from her loss, and 
 died exactly a year after Herder's departure. 
 
 * Probably the nephew had returned to Mohrungen, for we hear nothing of 
 him. 
 
238 [1776— 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 WEIMAR, 1776-1788. 
 
 " Therefore I summon age 
 To grant youth's heritage, 
 Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 
 Thence shall I pass, approved 
 A man, for aye removed 
 From the developed brute; a God, though in the germ." 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezka. 
 
 I PROPOSE in this chapter to trace the general course of Herder's 
 external life during the twelve years that passed between his 
 arrival in Weimar and his departure for Italy. This may be 
 done with safety, for the period is sufficiently definite, and the 
 inner life corresponds with the external so closely as to remind 
 us of the metaphor of the Pre-established Harmony ; each being 
 indeed with Herder, as with all but the favoured few, only a 
 different aspect of the other. But, in spite of this, the historian's 
 task is rendered difficult for two opposite reasons ; for, tliough 
 so much has been written about this Weimar period, that it is 
 hard for him to decide what to select and what he may assume 
 as known, yet original authorities from 1775 to 1786 are com- 
 paratively scanty. Goethe has left us no detailed account of 
 these years, and the story must therefore be founded almost 
 entirely on letters, which are too often but broken reeds to lean 
 upon. Much must be read into letters before we can get at the 
 heart of a matter, and, as the very best generally chronicle mere 
 passing whims and aspects distorted by emotion, it is perplexing 
 to assign to each event its due significance, and to say which 
 course the stream is taking when the currents seem to run this 
 vy^ay and that. Too oflen the historian is like a man who, having 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 239 
 
 heard in the night a cry as of grievous pain, straightway 
 assumes that the agony is continuous ; whereas it may well be 
 that it thus afflicts the unknown man only once a year. Of aid 
 from letters however, such as it is, we have certainly abundance. 
 Out of Goethe's notes to Charlotte von Stein alone a tolerably 
 correct story might be built, though Herder is hardly ever men- 
 tioned till after 1780. Herder's correspondence with Lavater 
 continued up to that date, and he wrote frequently to Hamann, 
 Hartknoch, and Gleim, and after 1780 to Kncbel, Einsiedel, 
 and others beside. But, ever since his unfortunate epistle to 
 Spalding, Karoline tells us he grew more and more shy of letter- 
 writing, and we find that she gradually took the burden of his 
 correspondence upon herself. In her Reminiscences the story of 
 these twelve years is very incompletely sketched in some twenty 
 short pages. 
 
 Such then are our materials. And yet, monotonous and 
 uneventful as this period was for the most part, I am inclined to 
 regard it as on the whole the brightest and happiest of Herder's 
 life, for it was the time of his greatest and highest activity ; and 
 during these years, especially towards the end, his mind is seen 
 in its fullest development, though the results of his works were 
 not so rapid and startling as in his earlier days. Happiness, in 
 the ordinary sense of basking contentment, we must never 
 expect to see in such a man, for it is hard to imagine a state of 
 things under which he would not have winced now and again, 
 like the galled jade ; but for the most part there was light, and, 
 best of all, it was a light that steadily increased ; and it is not in 
 blackest darkness that a man can rightly be called miserable, but 
 only when light is on the wane. 
 
 The travellers probably drove straight through the Harz from 
 Biickeburg to Halberstadt, where they visited Father Gleim, 
 who, perhaps at Biickeburg the year before (though the date is 
 doubtful), had been so much affected by Herder's preaching that 
 he embraced ^ him as he descended the pulpit, and saluted him 
 
 ' Gleim was much given to embraces. In one of his letters, probably to 
 Uz, he narrates that as he was walking in his garden one morning he fell to 
 
240 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 as an apostle. At Halberstadt Herder would again be in 
 Prussian dominions after many long years of absence. Thence 
 the party made their way southward with some difficulty, the 
 roads being bad and perplexing, and on the 2nd of October, 
 1776, after the sun had set, their coach struggled over the 
 Ettersberg, and at nine o'clock rolled into the little town on the 
 Ilm. 
 
 As they passed through the walls the watchman, " who was 
 gifted with an extremely loud voice," sang as welcome the old 
 watchman hymn : 
 
 One thing is needful, and must be so; 
 Grant me, O Lord, this one to know. 
 
 They would then proceed up the hill, and along the narrow 
 streets to the open square by the church, then known as the 
 corn-market or the Topfenmarkt (potters' -market), now as the 
 Herder-platz,^ and so they would reach the large, but rather 
 ugly, house that stands huddled out of sight behind the church 
 with its high-pitched roof. Here Karoline's brother was waiting 
 to receive them, having made all necessary preparations. As 
 travelling companion, or, according to Karoline, as " attendant 
 angel " to him, there was also present a person of remarkable 
 history, called Kaufmann, strongly recommended to Herder by 
 Lavater as a steadfast apostle of the faith, and now'posing in 
 different towns of Germany as a martyr to the truth and the 
 highest interests of man. Hamann, on the first acquaintance, 
 had called him a monstrum pidcherrimumy and Herder and even 
 
 embracing an apple-tree with tears, fondly imagining that it was his beloved Uz. 
 No wonder Goethe could see little to admire in such correspondence. This pretty 
 picture — the rose-tipped snow of the apple-blossoms falling on the tearful old 
 Teuton, appareled probably in a venerable dressing-gown — I owe to Sophie 
 Weisse. 
 
 • A bronze statue to Herder was finally erected in this square, just in front of 
 his church, in 1850, having been begun two years before but interrupted by the 
 political commotions of that time. His Prometlu-itSy set to music by Liszt, was 
 performed on the occasion. I suppose it to be as good a likeness as such statues 
 generally are, though it is far too massive. It is significant that he was the first 
 of Weimar's heroes to be thus honoured. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 241 
 
 Lavaier saw through his imposture before long, and found him 
 to be a false apostle and a martyr to a lie ; but, for the present, 
 he deceived even the shrewd and sceptical Wieland, and Karoline 
 Y^^as especially enthusiastic in his behalf, for, judging all by her 
 own simplicity of heart, she surrendered at once to appearances. 
 
 The first few days were naturally spent in unpacking the 
 chattels, arranging the house, and paying the necessary calls. 
 Herder was very well received by the Grand Duke, his mother 
 Amalia, and his young wife Luise, who was living for the most 
 part alone out in the summer residence of Belvedere. The old 
 castle of Weimar had been burnt down only two years before, 
 and she herself felt rather sore at heart over the wild ways along 
 which this new favourite Goethe was leading her husband. As 
 might have been expected, Herder took more interest in her 
 than in the young Duke and his easy-going mother ; and, as he 
 seems to have been almost the only man of the circle with a 
 pretence to ordinary morality, as she was almost the only woman, 
 he long remained an especial favourite with her. Wieland was 
 glad at his arrival, and received him with enthusiasm, though, 
 in a letter, he regrets that '' there is no one in Weimar worthy 
 of Herder except Goethe, and he is much engaged with the 
 Duke and business." Before a year had passed, however, 
 Wieland modified this opinion considerably, for he found Goethe 
 " cold as frost," and Herder " like an electric cloud." But the 
 families continued very intimate, in spite of a certain vanity 
 which Wieland's daughters seem to have inherited. Goethe 
 himself was out in the country hunting (" shooting larks," if 
 that be possible) when the party arrived, but on his return he 
 visited them at once, and was " very joyful and friendly." 
 
 Herder's reception among the clergy and authorities of the 
 district seems to have been better than was to be expected from 
 their opposition to his appointment. Giinther and Weber, who 
 worked under him in the town, remained his true friends, and 
 would often spend the evening with him. But in Weimar, as 
 elsewhere, he found that he could not secure his position with- 
 out a battle. It seemed as though he were doomed to be always 
 
 u 
 
242 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 a fighter, and yet to such a man conflict brings little exhilara- 
 tion, especially if, as in this case, the cause is merely personal. 
 A fortnight after his arrival he was introduced to the consistory 
 and took the oath ; whereupon up rose the president, a hide- 
 bound old man, who long continued a vexation to Herder's soul, 
 and read an ordinance whereby ^^ all the first class " — ('probably 
 the nobility, courtiers, &c., for in those days both at church and 
 theatre there was a very stern line between these and the towns- 
 folk in the sight of God and man) — " all the first class, who 
 properly made up Herder's parish, were allowed to choose their 
 spiritual adviser or father-confessor, according to their own 
 pleasure." The post which Herder now held had been vacant 
 for many years, for the Duchess Amalia was not a devout lady ; 
 and, no doubt, these clerical gentlemen of the consistory hoped 
 to do a smart stroke of worldly business by taking advantage 
 of his modesty and inexperience ; and, besides, would it be safe 
 to entrust the souls of the nobility to the keeping of a reputed 
 heretic ? And again, had not they borne the heat and burden 
 of the day, and is not the labourer worthy of his hire ? Only 
 they were mistaken in their man. Herder indignantly protested 
 on the spot, before the whole assembly, and refused to be put 
 off by the president's quibble — worthy of Dogberry himself — 
 that the clause in the vocation, ^* he shall also hear confession 
 from those of the first class," signified " in so far, namely, as 
 they wished to confess to him " ; for Heaven forbid that the 
 nobility should confess to any one under compulsion. Herder 
 immediately wrote to the Grand Duke and Goethe, who were, un- 
 fortunately, away in the country, probably dancing with tho 
 peasant- girls at Ilmenau. The decisive answer in his favour 
 did not come till the Saturday afternoon, and on tlie Sunday ho 
 was to preach his first sermon. 
 
 His anxiety was further increased by some absurd reports 
 of his behaviour which had reached Weimar, as such reports 
 will ; how he preached in top-boots and spurs, and had his 
 clothes trimmed with lace and ruffles, and the like. I am in- 
 clined to trace these rumours to the early mistake of the people 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 243 
 
 of Biickeburg, when they assumed that the dashing cavalier 
 von Zanthier was their new minister in religion ; at all events, 
 all Weimar had heard that this Herder was a friend of the 
 strange and not altogether respectable young man Goethe, the 
 Duke's new favourite. Some, perhaps, knew him as the leader 
 of the Sturm und Drang^ and probably most would have been 
 more scandalised than astonished if he had mounted the pulpit 
 in the beauty of nakedness. Georg Miiller, who was certainly 
 little inclined to unorthodoxy or any other kind of outrage, 
 sweepingly describes the natives of Upper Saxony as " very 
 stupid, and in ecclesiastical customs absurd and pharisaical." 
 We can imagine, then, their relief (or shall we trust to the laws of 
 human nature and say disappointment ?) when Herder conducted 
 the service in the ordinary Lutheran gown and surplice. And 
 yet, in spite of his studied moderation, the story of the boots and 
 spurs continued to go the round through Germany, even reach- 
 ing Hartknoch in Riga ; and in Berlin the report was circulated, 
 probably by Nicolai in his spite against the new " men of 
 genius," that after every sermon Herder mounted his charger, 
 galloped round the inside of the church three times (which 
 would require some skill in horsemanship), and dashed out at 
 the porch. All idle tales, without even the ordinary phantom- 
 body of truth, as it is to be hoped the reader does not require 
 to be told. 
 
 On the appointed morning, then, the quaint old church was 
 crowded by an expectant throng. There would be no need to 
 stretch the customary chains across the four streets that open 
 into the church-square, for all Weimar was there already. 
 Lucas Cranach's great altar-piece, in which Luther — limned to 
 the life— stands and receives on his head the blood from the 
 crucifix, would be polished up to look its best; so, too, the 
 monstrous tombs of Saxon nobles and other armorial non- 
 entities. Karl August himself and Goethe were probably still 
 in the country ; but in the grand-ducal box (for the Grand 
 Dukes of Weimar have a private loge to worship in, just as 
 our Queen at Windsor) we may imagine the pleasure-loving 
 
 r2 
 
244 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 dowager Amalia, and the young bride Luise, " an angel," but 
 heroic ; and Friedrich von Einsiedel, Amalia's merry chamber- 
 Iain, and Count Gorz, head hofmeister to Luise, always a true 
 friend to Herder and a great admirer of his sermons. And pro- 
 bably Prince Constantino, the Duke's younger brother, a true 
 musician, would have come over from Tiefurt, three miles down 
 the Ilm, accompanied by his tutor Knebel, whom for the pre- 
 sent we will call the Trelawney of Weimar. Perhaps amongst 
 the ducal party Herder would see the exquisitely delicate and 
 intellectual face of Charlotte von Stein, who for nearly a year 
 already had held her Goethe in welcome chains ; and Karl von 
 Dalberg may have come from his government in Erfurt ; and 
 Wieland would be there ; and Musaus, the gentle gardiner and 
 schoolmaster, ever ready to tilt against wrong-headedness, either 
 of sentiment or science, but loving the simple legends and fairy- 
 tales of old. In the background loomed the dim multitude of 
 the unknown. 
 
 According to Karoline (who, it must always be remembered, 
 would have flayed herself alive rather than have said a bad word 
 of her husband), the effect of this sermon was instantaneous and 
 complete, both with the Court and amongst the townspeople ; 
 there was but one voice of heartfelt admiration ; truth conquered 
 at a blow. And to the last, the influence of Herder's sermons 
 was very wide, and his success as a preacher undoubted. Such 
 opposite natures as Schiller, Wieland, the Frau von Stein, Georg 
 Miiller, and Goethe, have all left us their tribute of admiration ; 
 and, what was more important, the common people seem to have 
 liked to listen. 
 
 In the other branches of Herder's office success was more 
 difficult ; for, coming down from the independence of the pulpit, 
 he was brought into contact with several external forces, each 
 alive, each with a distinct personality, each with a separate con- 
 ceit, fancying himself of no small account in the management of 
 the universe. For many months he devoted himself entirely to 
 the duties of his station ; the months became years, and still 
 every effort at usefulness seemed to fall baffled. A year after he 
 
1788.] WEIMAE. 245 
 
 had come, he writes to Gleim that he could read but little, and 
 did nothing but preach and write official documents ; and as late 
 as 1784 he complains, also to Gleim, that he is thwarted by 
 stupid old- Saxon forms on every side, and not one of his schemes 
 for improvement has been realised. He was required by his 
 position to preach, to hear confession, to confirm all the children 
 of Weimar, to baptize, marry, and bury all the "first class"; 
 to introduce and examine the candidates for ordination, and, 
 worst of all, to supervise all the ecclesiastical accounts of the 
 diocese. From this last duty arose a continual stream of com- 
 plaints and begging-letters from all the parsons and school- 
 masters round about; and Herder, who could do little or nothing 
 to lighten their lot, and, besides, was not cast in the correct 
 accountant's mould, found the task inexpressibly irksome. But, 
 for the most part, he went through it with a heroic mind; 
 though it is no wonder that he Jooked with admiring envy on 
 Goethe, who, as Herder himself said, " lived in complete calm 
 through the most petty and even hateful bits of business, as 
 though they were just the right thing for him " ; and throughout 
 he was inclined to admire Goethe's power in guiding the little 
 world around him, even more than his genius of production. 
 
 But the ordinary difficulties of a parson's position were aggra- 
 vated in Herder's case by his own views of his duties, and by 
 the consequent hostility of those with whom he had to deal. Of 
 these views we already know something, and can see, at all 
 events, that he was not a man to be content to tread the daily 
 round, doing only so much as decency required of him. In 
 spirit, at least, he was a born reformer, and a reformer is 
 generally crowned with thorns for a season. The consistory, or 
 governing body of the Weimar diocese (answering, I suppose, 
 nearly enough to an English " chapter "), seems to have been 
 composed of seven members ; and it struck the other six that 
 it would be a very excellent thing for themselves and their 
 mouldering institutions if they made a solemn league and 
 covenant to oppose every scheme of reform that Herder laid 
 before them. The idea, though not specially brilliant, was to 
 
246 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 tho purpose ; and we can imagine with what feelings Herder 
 would go down to the chapter-house every week — sometimes 
 twice, or more — and dash his fervid head against that immove- 
 able blockade of sandbags. Often the contest lasted from early 
 morning till late in the afternoon ; and it is not to be expected 
 that such a course of discipline would improve his temper, or 
 brighten his outlook on life. As though not even a chance of 
 contentment was to be allowed him, he was smitten at Christmas 
 by a bilious fever (Gallenfieber), which was unskilfully treated, 
 and was followed in the spring by jaundice and all the horrors 
 of liver complaint, from which he could never entirely free him- 
 self till his life's end, in spite of frequent visits to the waters at 
 Karlsbad, Pyrmont, and Aix. We must take account of this 
 affliction when we come to mention the increased gloom and 
 despondency of his later years ; for, however difficult it may be 
 to forgive a man for being sick, it seems at present too harsh 
 and paradoxical to place sickness on the same level as moral and 
 intellectual failings. 
 
 Here, then, was enough to make life look sombre ; but there 
 was worse behind. It seemed as though it was to be always his 
 fate to be ground to powder between the upper millstone of what 
 was then called Freedom and the nether millstone of pedantic 
 orthodoxy. The widow Karoline is undoubtedly right when she 
 tells us that at this time all the learned professions — especially 
 tho clerical — had fallen into great disrepute ; comparisons were 
 constantly made between the wretched country parsons and the 
 soldiers or hunters, who enjoyed life in all the strength and free- 
 dom of nature, " and thereby the peaceful and studious parson 
 was displayed in a very pitiful light. People with these views," 
 she goes on, " who otherwise valued Herder highly, were ex- 
 tremely anxious to convert him to their way of thinking, and 
 often exerted themselves to this end by representations some- 
 times polite, sometimes rude." ^ There can be no doubt that in 
 saying this Karoline was especially thinking of Goethe during 
 
 ' Jitminuoences, vol ii. p. 13. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 247 
 
 his first years in Weimar ; though, under Goethe's leadership, 
 the Duchess Amalia, Frau von Stein, the Grand Duke, Knebel, 
 the two Einsiedels — in fact, all to whom Herder would naturally 
 have looked for friendship and society — followed in the same 
 band. But Karoline has overlooked the real sadness of the 
 situation. For, so far from needing '^ conversion to this way 
 of thinking," Herder himself had been — in Germany, at all 
 events — its first apostle. He had preached the worthlessness of 
 imitation and the inanity of barren learning, and in consequence 
 he was now told that it was a disgraceful thing for a ^^ man of 
 genius " to be seen reading a book ; he had proclaimed the full 
 freshness of life according to Nature, and the folly of conven- 
 tions, and now he was told that Nature favoured the sportsman, 
 the play-actor, and the good skater, but was comparatively in- 
 different to respectable behaviour and the marriage-laws, which, 
 together with other morality, a ** man of genius" might regard 
 as foolish conventions. Here, again, we see how true it is that 
 a man is the slave of his own productions. But, worse than all. 
 Herder, having lagged behind the current of the stream of 
 thought to which he himself had given the first impulse — 
 having, indeed, followed of late a completely different channel — 
 was as one who has lost caste in the eyes of his fellows, or, at 
 best, is contemptuously pitied where once he w^as leader and 
 king. As a parallel, we may think of Wordsworth, when the 
 young Titans went on their way to the conquest of the future 
 with but a fjassing regret, " thus having been that he should 
 cease to be," ^ and that — 
 
 He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, 
 He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves.^ 
 
 But it must not be thought that Herder, therefore, shut 
 himself from his kind. When he was not occupied with the 
 cares of office he was glad to take part, though apparently only 
 as spectator, in the concerts and plays and open-air festivities 
 
 ' Shelley's Lines to Wordsworth. 
 ■■' The Lost Leader, by Browning. 
 
248 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 which, under Goethe's guidance, quickly succeeded each other 
 in honour of the young Duke and Duchess. Goethe now and 
 again mentions him in his letters to Charlotte von Stein as 
 forming one of the company in some expedition to Domburg, 
 Jena, or lovely little Tiefurt, where the woodland stage was 
 built. But his greatest delight was to attend the little gather- 
 ings, which in her more intellectual moods the Duchess Amalia 
 would collect, either in her house at Weimar or more generally 
 in the Ettersburg on the thickly- wooded hill. Here the after • 
 noons or evenings would be spent in music, or discussions on art, 
 literature, and politics ; or some one would recite passages from 
 Shakespeare, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland, and Herder himself. 
 During these earlier years in Weimar, too, he used to ride a 
 great deal ; and one hard gallop from distant Gotha seems to 
 have become a fable of prowess. The month after he arrived 
 he visited Kochberg, the country estate of the Frau von Stein ; 
 and there, for the first time, he met the poet Lenz, who returned 
 for a space to Weimar, but had to take his departure soon 
 afterwards on account of some lampoon or other piece of folly 
 (always spoken of by Goethe as an Eselei) which he aimed at 
 Goethe and perhaps higher personages. 
 
 Of Goethe himself, as has been said. Herder saw com- 
 paratively little for the first four or five years. Their lives 
 seemed to be running on different lines, though we can now see 
 that the lines were gradually converging. The practical duties 
 of each lay in quite distinct spheres, and the rest "of Goethe's 
 time was occupied by Charlotte von Stein, Karl August, and 
 the management of the plays and other social entertainments, 
 generally wild enough. Besides he was very often awa}^ from 
 Weimar, at Ilmenau, Jena, Erfurt, or in the retirement of the 
 Wartburg. The year after Herder's arrival he accomplished the 
 celebrated journey through the Harz in winter ; next year he 
 was in Berlin; and in the autumn of 1779 he started for 
 Switzerland with the Grand Duke, and was away the whole 
 winter. As to Wieland, I have not been able to discover that 
 there was any particular cause for his comparison of Herder to 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 249 
 
 an electric cloud, though it is graphic enough, as Wieland's 
 comparisons always are ; but it is certain that there could not 
 have been any real sympathy between the two ; and in 1781 the 
 potential electricity blazed out into actual lightning on the 
 occasion of some dispute at an evening party. 
 
 Even in Weimar, then, it was found that a crowed was not 
 company, and that such faces as Goethe's and Wieland's were 
 but a gallery of pictures where there was no love. In his letters 
 Herder continually complains of worry and loneHness of spirit ; 
 to Hamann he even writes that he had never in his life been so 
 much alone as during the winter of 1777-8, and on the whole he 
 is inclined to think himself worse off in this respect than at 
 Blickeburg. Being thrown back upon himself he turned once 
 more to the joy of his life-work and the calm pleasures of his 
 home. In January 1778 Karoline gave birth to what Herder 
 called " the third volume of her works " ; the other five volumes 
 appeared in tolerably regular succession, and all seem to have 
 been very excellent works after their kind, though one had 
 only a short circulation.^ But before we proceed to consider 
 Herder's own works, and to give some details of his ordinary 
 life, we must take account of a strange person who now first 
 appears, and was to exercise considerable influence on his future 
 aspect of the world. 
 
 August von Einsiedel was one of a large family of brothers, 
 
 * Here is the full catalogue : 
 
 1774. Aug. 28. Wilhelm Christian Gottfried, a doctor, died in Weimar, 
 
 1806. 
 1776. Aug. 18. Sigmund August Wolfgang, inspector of mines, died in 
 Dresden, 1838. 
 Ludwig Wilhelm Ernst, said by Georg Miiller to be the 
 least intellectual of all the children and most unlike 
 Herder, He became a merchant. 
 Karl Aemil Adelbert, became a farmer. 
 Luise Theodore Emilie, married Herr von Stichling of 
 
 Weimar. 
 Emil Ernst Gottfried, became a forester or ranger; edited 
 
 his father's Nachlass; died 1855. 
 Karl Ferdinand Alfred, died April 1788. 
 Rinaldo, became a forester. 
 
 1778. 
 
 Jan. ... 
 
 1779. 
 
 Aug. .. 
 
 1781. 
 
 April. .. 
 
 1783. 
 
 June. .. 
 
 1787. 
 
 Dec. ., 
 
 1790. 
 
 Aug. 21 
 
250 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 none of whom were content to go through life by the ordinary 
 plodding route. The wild hedonism of his brother Friedrich 
 Hildebrand is tolerably familiar to students of Goethe's life, but 
 he had by no means so interesting and complex a character as 
 August. After leaving his native Lumpsig August had entered 
 the army, but, finding that course of life altogether too oppressive 
 and unintelligent for a freeborn man, he quitted it in disgust, 
 and came to see his brother in Weimar, where he seems to have 
 stayed through the winter of 1777-8. He met Herder at Tiefurt, 
 and the two were at once attracted to each other. He often 
 came to see the Herders in the evenings ; and Karoline tells us 
 they would then sit up half the night holding converse and smoking 
 their pipes. From his letters, which begin in the June following, 
 it is evident that Einsiedel was already a man of wide and peculiar 
 knowledge. For the present his attention was chiefly directed 
 to the misty dynasties of antiquity, especially the Chaldaean and 
 Egyptian, though he was an enthusiastic inquirer into the 
 history and customs of all unsophisticated and primitive races — 
 modern as well as ancient. In these days he would probably 
 have devoted himself to the study of sociolog}', according to the 
 scientific method ; and he might have done some good work in 
 that line, for his mind was eminently scientific. And indeed 
 chemistry, as far as it then existed, and geology, became more 
 and more his favourite pursuits, and he was anxious to make 
 himself acquainted with all the important conclusions of anatomy 
 and physiology. 
 
 " He had not a trace of imagination," Karoline continues ; 
 " and his only aim was to obtain what he called ' definite and 
 true ideas.' " ^ Still she thought him on the whole " the kindest 
 and most good-tempered man in the world." He hated quackery 
 above all things, especially quackery in science ; but he could 
 never be induced to publish a word of his own patient investiga- 
 tions, partly because " he found it too tedious to write a book," 
 partly because he would not expose himself to the criticism of 
 
 * lU'viinhccncis, vol. ii. pp. 8, !». 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 251 
 
 "a pack of wretched reviewers"; though he tells Herder that he 
 had given the paper-makers plenty of employment by his copious 
 notes. The life of the world, politics, literature — he regarded 
 all with equal suspicion and contempt. An idealist fallen on 
 heavy times, he knew not the meaning of compromise; and 
 found to his sorrow, as time went on, that the universe was not 
 created for the individual, and that his hand did not keep the 
 stars in their courses. Then cried he in his wrath, " All men 
 are liars. Vanity of vanities. There is nothing new and nothing 
 true, and it doesn't matter."^ In vain did Herder in 1780 
 urge him to make peace with the universal destiny, to submit 
 himself to the yoke, and not for ever to kick against the pricks, 
 since in the end of such policy the loss and pain were all on one 
 side ; whereupon Einsiedel pleasantly but firmly replied, that it 
 was all very well for respectable citizens with assured position — 
 like Herder for example — to submit to the yoke, but to a free- 
 born, unlimited Einsiedel it was a very diiferent matter. " Of 
 all foolish things in the world," he goes on, " the most foolish is 
 that one man does a thing because another wants him to." 
 How much better to enjoy the glorious independence of 
 Einsiedel, whose greatest happiness is to do nothing, " for all 
 motives of action are in my opinion ridiculous." " For all our 
 activities come to the same thing in the end ; we only change 
 the appearance of things, without making them better or worse. 
 We are all served like the priest John, who lost behind what he 
 gained in front ; for he cut off a bit of cloth for himself at the 
 Emperor's election, and then found that some one else had cut a 
 bit out of his own cloak. Goethe's Pater Brey is by far my 
 favourite of all theories of morality and cosmopolitan schemes 
 since Enoch's prophecy. You get no real pleasure from activity ; 
 the Godhead does nothing at all, and it's my opinion the reason 
 
 is because he is very well off already Your eremites, 
 
 the theosophs of Asia, who have far more penetration than our 
 
 ' So, too, Emerson's " languid young Oxford friend," a very inferior being 
 to Einsiedel. 
 
252 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 philosophers, who consider activity the function of man, they 
 all say tliat absorption into inactivity is union w^ith the Godhead, 
 the heritage of good men, their being's end and aim." And 
 again he w^rites : " What would you have me do with myself? 
 I have no interest in life at all. The view of the Preacher is the 
 best view of life, and it is the view I take as mine ; " and so on 
 in language long painfully familiar to us all.^ 
 
 For the sake of clearness we may as well here sketch the 
 course of his life as far as it concerned Herder, though we shall 
 have to anticipate a little. After waiting for his discharge from 
 the army at Lumpsig, where the ignorance of his parents seems 
 to have driven him to despair, he returned to Weimar on his 
 way to Gottingen, and perhaps spent the whole of the winter 
 there. On reaching Gottingen he soon found that it was not 
 the place for a free-born man with ideas of his own. " Nothing 
 here," he writes, '' but cold philosophy scraped together out of 
 library catalogues. A few months ago I saw Schlozer " (Herder's 
 old opponent), '^ whom every one worships here. Never in my 
 life have 1 come across so odious {fatal) a countenance, though 
 I have travelled a good deal and mixed with the crowd at the 
 
 Frankfurt fair I am sick of these men and this old 
 
 story, and indeed of all the pushing and pulling along the path 
 of this world, and I have determined to take up my pilgrim's 
 staff and go wandering over the world till I find a nation and 
 climate to suit me; and that certainly will not be in our wretched 
 civilised countries, but where mankind still lives free from pre- 
 judice and system, willing neither to rule nor to be slaves.'* 
 He seems to have intended to make his way through Egypt 
 and settle in ^Ethiopia, which he imagined was just the place 
 for a free and peaceful life. '' The one and only difficulty would 
 be the language " ; and as soon as that was mastered he could sit 
 under the palm-trees and dream his life away, the best and 
 wisest amongst his ebon brothers. But for the present the 
 scheme was out of his reach, and in 1780 he passed through 
 
 ' Einsiedel's letters to Herder are printed in Herder's Correspondence ( Von 
 1171(1 an llcrder), at the end of vol. ii. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 253 
 
 Weimar again on his way to Freiberg, not far to tlie south-west 
 of Dresden, to superintend some mines in company with the 
 famous geologist Werner. But even this proved a sphere far 
 too limited for the high-souled man ; all the methods were 
 antiquated, and all the teachers shams ; the use and wont of the 
 place was petty and conventional. If each of us could but have 
 given a word or two of advice on the creation of the universe, 
 how much better it would all have been. But on the whole he 
 contrived to keep his temper by avoiding his irritating fellows. 
 *^I take no notice of any one," he writes ; '^ and indeed there is 
 not a soul worth associating with." 
 
 From Freiberg he generally came to Weimar in the summer 
 as well as at Christmas, and spent much of his time with the 
 Herders. It is significant that Herder, who was too often 
 accused of bitterness and sarcasm, was never known to say a 
 harsh or bitter thing to Einsiedel, the man who was more 
 opposed to many of his dearest opinions than any of his other 
 friends. It was during this period that Herder tried to persuade 
 him to accommodate his neck to the yoke of life ; but the old 
 love of Freedom was not dead; and in 1785, apparently in the 
 pay of the French Government, he started with two of his 
 brothers to explore North Africa. He passed through Weimar 
 on his way, and proceeded through Marseilles to Tunis, where 
 the party stayed six or eight months, feasting in charming free- 
 dom with the Bey, visiting the ruins of Old Carthage, and 
 witnessing the bombardment of Tunis by the Venetian fleet. But 
 beyond Tunis they were unable to advance, partly because the 
 plague was raging in the country between them and Senegal, partly 
 because a party less suited for exploration never started to explore ; 
 partly also because their numbers were unexpectedly increased 
 either soon after they arrived or before they had left France. 
 For during these years there had been dwelling in Weimar 
 a lady of high position, the wedded wife of the Chamberlain, 
 von Werther-Beichlingen, Lord of Frohndorf. In the Weimar 
 circle she seems to have been generally known as one of the 
 chief of court beauties. Fair she was for certain, but not so fair 
 
254 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 as fickle ; for, in spite of many experiments, she had found more 
 difficulty than most women in discovering her ideal of manly 
 excellence. Time after time she had been disappointed by man's 
 short-comings, for the individual man is but a limited creature ; 
 and time after time her fancy fell a-turning. She was veiy 
 intimate with the Herders and a special friend of Karoline, if 
 we may judge from a letter in after-years, in which she describes 
 how she used to come and play with the children ; and it may 
 have been in Herder's house that she lighted upon Einsiedel, 
 and hastened to conclude that here at length was the consumma- 
 tion she had sought with tears and laughter. But he was going 
 to Africa, and what were life in Weimar then ? In the region 
 of the romantic Africa was the absolute : how sweet to dream 
 away the sunny days stretched side by side beneath the slender 
 palms — a Paul and Virginie till life's last breath.^ Determined 
 to follow at whatever risk, during her husband's absence she 
 caused the rumour to be spread that she had died suddenly ; 
 and, after she had escaped unnoticed from Weimar, an image 
 or doll made in her likeness was solemnly buried in her stead. 
 The idea was undeniably quaint, and we cannot refuse admiration 
 to the lady's skill ; but she was detected by a friend at Strass- 
 burg ; and when we watch the husband standing by the newly- 
 made grave, whilst the coffin was dug out and the image disclosed, 
 it is hard to balance the tragedy and comedy of the situation. 
 
 Here then was reason enough why the exploring party could 
 not be as successful as had been hoped ; for a court beauty is 
 not the companion one would choose in an attempt to penetrate 
 into the wilds of Africa. The lovers came slowly back to 
 Germany through Italy and the South of France ; and, after 
 some negociation with her brothers and husband, the lady was 
 divorced, and two years afterwards married to Einsiedel in a 
 very commonplace and disappointing style. Goethe in a letter 
 to Charlotte von Stein says, as commentary on the business : 
 " But for our runaways, what a horrible end ! To die, to go to 
 
 ' It was only three or four years after the lady's flight that Beraardin St. 
 Pierre moved all the tender hearts of Europe with his gentle tale. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 255 
 
 Africa, to begin the strangest romance, and then to get a divorce, 
 and be married in the commonest fashion ! I have been very 
 merry over it. In this workaday world nothing out of the 
 ordinary course is allowed to be brought about." After this the 
 Herders appear to have had no great intercourse with Einsiedel 
 for some years, though he wrote to Herder about some appoint- 
 ment which he hoped in his lordly way to obtain in the Berlin 
 Academy ; but Herder was forced to reply that he had not the 
 slightest claim to show. About the same time Forster, Heyne's 
 son-in-law, was setting out to explore part of Eussia by com- 
 mand of Katherine II. ; and Herder, at Karoline's suggestion, 
 hinted that Einsiedel would be a useful man for his knowledge 
 of chemistry and geology. But Forster replied that this was not 
 the knowledge required, and Herder, who had some reasonable 
 doubts as to the wisdom of his proposal, let the matter drop. 
 After living some years in Lumpsig the Einsiedels removed to 
 Ilmenau, where they were probably occupied with the mines in 
 which Goethe took such interest ; and Knebel, who was then 
 living at Ilmenau, mentions them in his letters with pleasure, 
 though he was much annoyed by " that enthusiastic fool of a 
 woman." She, poor lady, had found that her romance did not 
 long survive her wedding, and that the man for whom she had 
 died and been buried by proxy was beginning to regard her 
 beautiful flightiness as an annoyance to a calm and scientific 
 mind. At length he seems to have handed her over together 
 with her son to the keeping of his younger brother. He met 
 Herder at Jena in 1794, and perhaps once or twice again; and 
 his letters continue up to 1801, latterly for the most part on the 
 great doings in France, in which he was so much interested that 
 he appears even to have undertaken a journey to Paris, though 
 he was always proudly conscious that he could have managed 
 the affair far better than all these Mirabeaus, and Dantons, and 
 Napoleons. 
 
 On the whole we must regard this Einsiedel as one of those 
 men whose powers are lost to the world for want of a great 
 leading principle in life. He had no all-absorbing passion to 
 
^ 
 
 256 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 which he might have sacrificed his pride, his comfort, reputa- 
 tion, all he loved, even life itself, and thought the world well 
 lost ; he was never lifted out of himself, but always kept an eye 
 on the opinion of other men and took account of reviewers. 
 Therefore, clear-sighted and intellectual as he was, he remained 
 a dilettante to whom the pains and blessedness of artist were 
 unknown. For the complete sceptic is, in practice, identical 
 with the vulgar fatalist, and both are as dead as mummies as 
 far as production goes. 
 
 And yet I am inclined to lay great stress on this man's influ- 
 ence over Herder during 1777 and the next three or four years; 
 for, though the direct evidence is slight, I believe it was through 
 the scientific mind of Einsiedel that Herder passed from Lavater 
 to Goetbe. Even in the publications up to 1780 we begin to 
 see a change, partly due, no doubt, to increased knowledge of 
 Spinoza — partly to the healthier tone of Weimar and the sharp 
 contact with practical life — but chiefly, 1 imagine, to the long 
 conversations with Einsiedel. 
 
 In 1778 Herder published the first part of the Popular Songs 
 and Ballads, and a translation and commentary on the Songs 
 of Solomon, adding examples of the use to which these poems 
 were put by the early German Minnesinger, He also rewrote 
 his essay on Apprehension and Sensation ^ for his German spirit 
 would not let him rest till he had attacked the eternal question 
 of the J^go, and he published it together with the treatise on 
 Plastik Art, that had been so long forming in his mind. In the 
 same year he obtained the prize from the Munich Academy for 
 an essay on the Influence of Poetry on the People. In 1779 he 
 published the second part of the Ballads^ and his Commentary 
 on the Revelation of St. John. It is evident at first sight that 
 in these works he was only fulfilling schemes that had long been 
 on his mind ; but it is significant that, amongst these six, only 
 one is strictly theological, and this one seems to have been the 
 cause of his final rupture with Lavater. And yet so little change 
 of position did Herder himself see in his Maran Atha, or the 
 Coming of the Lord, that he dated his published version 1775. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 257 
 
 The interpretation of this curious poem of the Revelation 
 evidently caused Herder much perplexity. Guided by his infal- 
 lible canon of criticism, that we must take our stand by the 
 poet's side, and see what the world looked like to his eyes, he 
 could not escape the conclusion that the author of the Revelation 
 wrote for those around him, and expected the coming of Christ 
 very soon after the destruction of Jerusalem. But in that case 
 not only had the prophecy been false, but the book had ceased 
 to have any living interest for the present time. Herder men 
 tioned his difficulty to Lavater, who adroitly replied, that " the 
 telescope of prophecy brings all things near " ; in other words, 
 that to the inspired eye time vanishes. But this solution failed 
 to solve, and Herder's book remains a curious instance of almost 
 wilful inconsistency and self-contradiction. Georg Miiller tells 
 us that its appearing caused much scandal to the pious, though 
 Herder had attempted to guard himself against misconstruction, 
 and even wrote one of his Letters on the Study of Theology on 
 purpose to allay their fears. In December 1780 Lavater wrote 
 that he was " oppressed and wounded " by the tone of the work, 
 and with this letter his correspondence with Herder comes to an 
 end, and we must suppose that his influence on Herder's thought 
 ended likewise. 
 
 Lavater's admiration for Herder was undoubtedly sincere. 
 In his Physiognomy he describes him, after his wild fashion, as 
 ^'a genius striving, high-flying, wide-glancing, embracing, con- 
 stant, almighty, full of creative and destructive strength; like 
 his works, a pyramid at which mice gnaw in vain and insects 
 break their heads." This figure of a pyramid, with the mice 
 and the insects complete, stands on the title-page of the third 
 volume. The motto for the whole work is a quotation from Her- 
 der's Urkunde, and the description of Frederick the Great is 
 taken from Another Philosophy of History. In October 1800, 
 when he was slowly dying of his wound, Lavater wrote the fol- 
 fowing " Memorial, to be sent to Herder in Weimar after my 
 death":— 
 
 Nothing in mortal man is more immortal than love. Though it sleep 
 
258 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 for years together it awakes to truest life if it is touched by the finger of 
 the man who first implanted it in our heart. 
 
 He died on the 2nd of January, in the following year. We 
 shall see him once in Weimar, but he has ceased to be of 
 importance to us. 
 
 In October 1779 Herder writes to Hartknoch that this 
 Mar an Atha was his masterpiece, and probably the end of his 
 life as author ; but it was far from being either. In the year 
 after he gained another prize from the Berlin Academy, and 
 the next year from the Academy of Munich. During this period 
 he was also engaged on a series of letters on the Study of Theo- 
 logy, for he had found of late years that the candidates for ordi- 
 nation had been much perturbed in mind — for good reasons. 
 It was owing to this almost universal perturbation that Herder's 
 path was crossed by a young man whose friendship was of much 
 value and comfort both to himself and Karoline during the 
 years that were coming. The Herders had spent the June of 
 1780 amid the forest-hills of Ilmenau ; and on the return home, 
 the first part of the Theological Letters being finished, Herder's 
 whole time was given up to his practical duties in Weimar. 
 
 But early in October travellers between Thuringia and Got- 
 tingen must have stared with some surprise at a melancholic 
 youth of twenty, dressed in " a round' black hat, white * Charles- 
 doux"* {Schahl-tuch ? scarf or muffler), a good cloth coat, black 
 breeches, white stockings, and new half-shoes,'^ tramping through 
 rain and mire along the heavy autumn roads, sorely perplexed 
 by the devious way and the speech that was strange to hid 
 southern ears ; tormented, too, by dreams within and omens 
 without, but cheering his heart by the songs of David or Klop- 
 stock, and the bright hope of what lay before him ; for the 
 desire of years was being fulfilled, and at last, having shaken 
 off the dust of Gottingen, he was on his way to Herder, the 
 well-spring of life. This is that Georg Muller whom I have 
 occasionally mentioned before. 
 
 He was born near Schaff'hausen, and from birth had been 
 endowed with that sombre melancholy and inclination to the 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 259 
 
 terrific and supernatural which is characteristic of the merry 
 Swiss boy. When about eighteen he had gone to Zurich and 
 was received into the enthusiastic circle which centred round 
 Lavater and Pfenniger. They about now must have been 
 spending much of their time seated at a mountain's foot trying 
 to remove it by an act of faith ; but, as their faith could never 
 attain to the purity of a grain of mustard-seed, the mountain 
 still remains. Miiller's chief patron seems to have been Hiifely, 
 a preacher in the town and a disciple of Lavater. After being 
 in Zurich about a year he was sent to Gottingen, probably by 
 the advice of his elder brother, Johann, the great historian of 
 Switzerland, who was already a professor at Cassel. But the 
 change from Lavater to Michaelis, who was removing other 
 mountains, and not by faith alone, was too sharp for the earnest 
 young mind ; he was chilled to the heart, and wandered about 
 disconsolate and plaintive as a lost dog. Li vain did he stand 
 for a whole hour, sunk in wonder, before a cast of Apollo ; 
 beauty could do little for him. But long ago, in Switzerland, he 
 had read Herder's Urkunde, and had fancied he found therein 
 the final explanation. He had then determined to see Herder, if 
 it were possible, and now he packed his little bundle and trudged 
 boldly forth from dreary Gottingen, for the opportunity was 
 come. 
 
 Li a series of letters to Hafely he sent an account of the 
 course of each day as it fell out, entering into the last detail 
 of domesticity, to the scandal of all stern historians. Some years 
 after, in an autobiography which he made for the benefit of his 
 betrothed, he again sketched the story of his intercourse with 
 the Herder family in more general terms, chiefly relating to 
 his second visit, when he lived in Herder's house from September 
 1781 till March 1782. His first visit to Weimar only lasted a 
 week, and two nights of this were spent at the Elephant inn, 
 which he compares to the interior of Jonah's whale for dis- 
 comfort, for he was of a rather irritable and exacting tempera- 
 ment. The accounts of these two visits form by far the most 
 vivid picture of Herder in his daily life, and for our sketch 
 
 s2 
 
260 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 it will be sufficient to take them both together and select the 
 details that seem characteristic, supplementing them occasionally 
 from Karoline's Remitiiscences, 
 
 Miiller gives an exact account of the house ; the front door 
 painted bright blue, where his heart trembled with fear and 
 expectancy ; the reception room, hung with engravings, where 
 Herder himself came to greet him, with face " smiling like the 
 dawn in spring," proving at a glance the futility of all por- 
 traiture ; the libraries and pleasant rooms with their sofas and 
 writing-tables; portraits, too, of Winckelmann, Swift, Hartknoch, 
 Fuseli, and old Hamann in the place of honour ; and then the 
 bust of Minerva in black marble, a gift from the young Duchess, 
 envied of Goethe himself ; and the study painted blue, like the 
 front door, but very dark from the shadow of the church; and, 
 guiding all, the figure of the wife — *^ a noble, warm-hearted 
 angel, gliding about, so light and soft, so gentle, so kind and 
 lovely, so tender and true and trustful." Karoline, on her side, 
 was equally charmed by the retiring but enthusiastic youth; "he 
 is pure as a flower and stedfast as a man," she writes to Gleim ; 
 and, finding how much his presence cheered her husband, she 
 was always regretting in darker years that MUller could not 
 return to live with them, for then her husband would surely 
 recover. ^ 
 
 The day was divided in the ordinary German fashion, and 
 each day of the week had its special routine. The family rose 
 early, and there was a slight breakfast with milk or coffee before 
 Herder set about the duties of his office, received the complaints 
 and petitions from the clergy of the diocese, arranged the 
 accounts, and wrote his official letters. Tuesday morning was 
 always spent with the consistory, and too often he returned 
 from the conflict depressed and gloomy. Thursday and Friday 
 were his easiest days, and then he would work at his books or 
 read Milton with Miiller, and sometimes walk with him in the 
 country. But even these free mornings were generally inter- 
 rupted by business, and Karoline tells us he never had a day 
 entirely to himself; and yet his works number forty-three 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 261 
 
 volumes of considerable size, which proves his activity, even if 
 we judge by quantity alone. Provided that business allowed, 
 dinner followed at twelve o'clock, consisting of the ordinary 
 German courses,^ for Herder was absolutely indifferent to all 
 delicacies and the details of cookery, '^ which," Karoline adds, 
 " was a great comfort to me," for in her hands the management 
 of the whole household lay. After dinner Herder would play 
 for a time with the children, whose great object was to induce 
 him to descend to their level, and creep about with them on the 
 floor as bear, or other monster of delight and terror ; whereupon 
 " such a shouting would arise " as was very trying to the nerves 
 of the pensive young man, who, whenever the children wailed, 
 which was perhaps inevitable, "wished himself a thousand miles 
 away, and was like to have jumped out of his skin or to have 
 dashed everything in pieces." '^ From this he was fortunately 
 restrained by politeness, and, on the whole, he bore his trial 
 well, being even delighted by a species of miracle play very 
 popular with the children, who were endowed with a dramatic 
 instinct certainly not inherited from their father. " Once they 
 played the Resurrection of Christ. Herr Christus (probably 
 Gottfried) lay under a bench, and the Angel (August) pulled 
 him out by one foot ; or they enacted Adam and Eve and the 
 story of the Temptation, and a thousand other excellent scenes," 
 in none of which the religious Mtiller found anything to shock 
 his piety. 
 
 Herder was very careful in the education of these children, 
 and even wrote a book of instructions for private tutors and 
 governesses ; but he sent his children to the gymnasium or 
 public school as soon as possible, for he was strongly opposed to 
 all seclusion and priv^ate instruction, well knowing that a child's 
 best education is derived from its fellows, and the only real 
 knowledge is that which cometh out of a man ; for, as Goethe 
 
 * For instance : " Egg-soup, turnips, roast meat, cold meat, carp, wine, grapes 
 and nuts," says the minute observer Miiller on the first day of his visit. 
 
 2 Miiller's accounts of his visits to Herder were published in 1881 in a little 
 book called Atis dem Herderschen Hause. 
 
262 HERDEK AND HIS TIMES. [1770— 
 
 has somewhere said, we learn a thing soon, but are slow to dis- 
 cover its truth.^ Herder also laid great stress on bodily culture, 
 and encouraged his children to climb the highest trees, and 
 enjoy all the other forms of exercise that are within the reach of 
 the German youth. The children having retired, coffee was 
 brought, and Herder smoked half a pipe,^ a practice which he 
 had adopted, since his arrival in Weimar, for the relief of head- 
 aches, probably by advice of Knebel, who w^as supposed never 
 to let his pipe gro"\v cold. He would then sometimes play the 
 harpsichord or piano, to please his guest, and sing perhaps 
 besides ; and Miiller writes that he had never heard music to 
 compare to this for pathos and simple grandeur. 
 
 Herder's love for music never declined ; a beautiful song or 
 a fine chorus never failed to banish his cares, and gladly would 
 he hear and gladly join in a part. Handel, Mozart, and Gluck 
 became his chief favourites, especially in their Church music,^ 
 though one of his chief delights was to hear his sons — Gottfried- 
 and Emil — play the Sf,ven Words of Haydn. He had hoped to do 
 much for religion by introducing true music into the services 
 in his church ; but here, as in so many of his reforms, he was 
 hampered by his colleagues, and also by the rising importance 
 of the theatre, which drew away all the best voices for the per- 
 formance of operas. Still, seated in his study, which was close 
 to the church, he would listen to the practising, and could never 
 continue his reading or work till the music was ended. He was 
 never absent at the production of a good opera, and generally 
 attended the concerts given by the Grand Duke on Sunday 
 evenings. The Sunday before MUller left Weimar, in March 
 1782, HandePs Messiah wsls performed at one of these concerts,^ 
 and Herder himself had written a translation of the words to fit 
 
 ' In the Italian Journey. 
 
 '^ "And made face enough over it" {ein schr auffisantcs JIundcIien), s&ys 
 Miiller; or does svffiaantcs mean " complacent " here ? 
 
 3 According to Fran von Stein's son it was " often " performed in Weimar 
 as early as 1780. This is an instance of the enterprise of the Weimar Conrt, 
 for the Mnaiah was not performed in Berlin till 1786 — nor in Leipzig for some 
 months later — and then against the advice of all the so-called musicians. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 263 
 
 the music. I have found no mention of Beethoven in Herder's 
 works, and, indeed, his music was probably hardly known so 
 far as Weimar at the time of Herder's death. 
 
 The rest of the afternoon was divided between work and 
 exercise. When he was alone Herder's favourite walk was to a 
 thickly-wooded hill, probably just across the Ilm, on the upper 
 road to Tiefurt. With Miiller, or in later years with Jean Paul, 
 he would drive up the long slope to the beech -woods of the 
 Ettersberg, and on to the retired castle, scene of so many revels ; 
 or they would follow the Elm on its way to Tiefurt, where 
 Knebel had designed the park, not of such beauty, Miiller 
 thought, as Goethe's park in Weimar. Of Goethe himself 
 Miiller makes little mention ; he was evidently rather frightened, 
 and, being cursed with self-consciousness, was inclined to wonder 
 what this man of strange renown might think of him, which 
 after all was completely unimportant. Once, it is true, on his 
 first visit, he passed the black ruins of the old castle, and, cross- 
 ing the bridge, walked down the new avenue, now called the 
 Stern, and through the broad and sunny meadow to the little 
 white house with pointed roof that stands at the foot of the low 
 hill to the left ; and Goethe, in his famous blue coat trimmed 
 with gold, came to greet him, and talked of Switzerland and 
 Lavater, and his old friend Passivant. But he was summoned 
 away almost immediately, and the two never became intimate ; 
 intimacy was, indeed, impossible. With Wieland Miiller fared 
 still worse ; he seems to have been prejudiced, probably con- 
 sidering his works immoral and flippant ; he thought the man 
 himself, at all events, frightfully ugly and contemptibly vain, and 
 saw as little of him and his family as possible. After his first 
 visit Miiller said to Herder (for one must say something), 
 *^ Wieland seems to be a very good man." Whereupon " the 
 electric cloud " gave reply, " There is none good but God " ; and 
 the conversation ended. 
 
 After his walk Herder generally set to work again till 
 supper-time. After supper sometimes one of the party would 
 
2G4 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 read aloud from some poet/ or any recent work of interest. 
 Karollne says that she used to read all his manuscripts aloud to 
 him, that he might judge of the sound; but more often the 
 hours up to twelve or one o'clock were spent in conversation. 
 Once, whilst Miiller was there, the criticism turned on Lessing's 
 Nathan, which had lately appeared, partly under stress of 
 poverty;^ at another time Herder was indignant against " the 
 un-Christian and devilish trafficking with truth, out of which 
 so many authors made profit." Of his own deahngs with the pub- 
 lishers he never spoke ; but he seems often to have said that as 
 soon as one of his own books was printed, and had lost the 
 confidential look of manuscript, he hated the sight of it. Gene- 
 rally, Weber, the preacher to the Stift, or foundation school, 
 would look in during the evening, and Herder would smoke 
 another "half-pipe" with him. He took no stimulants except 
 a little wine in the middle of the day, and coffee ; tea was too 
 exciting; "and," adds his widow, "he did not require cham- 
 pagne and that sort of thing to stimulate his intellect," which is 
 possibly a sneer at poor Schiller, whom our Electra found it 
 hard to forgive, even in his grave. Sometimes high ladies from 
 the court, probably the Duchess Luise and Charlotte von Stein 
 among others, would visit the quiet parsonage, and would even 
 discuss metaphysics^ with Herder, with an acuteness that fairly 
 astounded young Miiller, who, for his part — being, as I say, 
 cursed with self-consciousness — considered himself " too shy for 
 society, and was sure to say something stupid if he said any 
 thing at all." 
 
 » "Karoline read (from Gotz), and Herder sitting near her on the sofa 
 gradually began to snore slightly," says the careful Miiller,— for the flesh is 
 weak, and Gotz, too probably, dull. 
 
 2 Late in this year (1780), or early in the next, Gleim writes that Lessing 
 had visited him with Friedrich Jacobi, but had seemed dull and had fallen asleep 
 at dinner. That clearest of minds was growing dim, and early in February 
 1781 he fell into a deeper sleep. The gods were beginning to go. 
 
 ' " Sir," said Johnson, " a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his 
 hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised it should be done at all." 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 265 
 
 But the main subjects of conversation, especially at night, 
 seem to have been stories of ghosts and dreams and forebodings, 
 of all things in the world — stories, to judge from the ^* well- 
 authenticated " examples quoted by Miiller, that would hardly 
 impose on a child in these days, but were enough to send the 
 young man quaking off to bed with hair on end, like quills 
 upon the fretful porcupine ; and they were firmly believed, by 
 Karoline at least, as almost religious tenets of faith. It is not 
 worth while to reveal the folly of these supposed omens and 
 prophetic dreams ; indeed, we must respect the hope of Miiller 
 that his work will not fall into the hands of the scoffer. But it 
 gives us an interesting glance down the dim aisles of history to 
 think that a hundred years ago a man like Herder was still 
 haunted by a half-belief in the absurdities of second sight, fore- 
 bodings, and spiritual visitants to the glimpses of the moon ; for 
 the light of science as yet had hardly risen, and in the twilight 
 many uncouth monsters, such as Cagliostro (born the year 
 before Herder), Gall, Mesmer, and Lavater himself, were 
 fluttering abroad and perplexing the hearts of men, leading the 
 very elect astray by their abominable superstitions, that have 
 now become a sport for servant-girls and hysterical people of 
 idleness. In after-years Herder astonished Jean Paul by telling 
 him he wished he could see a ghost (and, indeed, this would be 
 a great comfort to most of us, even now) ; and to Miiller he 
 said, that of all spirits he should like to see Christ or St. John, 
 and Moses and Brutus. " Of Christ he would ask only one 
 question, but of that he would tell no man.'^ If we put our- 
 selves back a hundred years, and become Herder for a moment, 
 we shall have no difficulty in imagining a question which might 
 lead to the solution of much that seemed perplexing ; we shall 
 also cease to wonder that the young Swiss found enough that 
 was impressive, and even terrific, in the converse of that small 
 circle, drawn close round the stove in the nights of winter. 
 
 On Sunday, probably after morning service. Herder held a 
 class for candidates for ordination, with whom he discussed 
 " the sciences, and other branches of knowledge which might 
 
266 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. - [1776— 
 
 conduce to higher views of theology." One of his assistant 
 preachers in the church was Schroter, who had some knowledge 
 of geology, and had written a good deal on minerals, but, 
 according to Miiller, '' preached common-place orthodoxy, like 
 every one else in Weimar." On Sunday evenings there was 
 tea in the Herders' house for any one who chose to come ; but in 
 later years this was discontinued, "because," says Karoline, 
 ^' some one always chose to come whom Herder did not choose 
 to see." It appears that after his death a satirical and wound- 
 ing account of these social gatherings was printed in a Weimar 
 paper, much to the indignation of the widow. As to Herder's 
 manner in conversation, Miiller tells us that he contradicted people 
 with so pleasant a smile it was impossible to take offence ; and, 
 according to Karoline, his usual tone in society was an easy 
 irony, which he found it necessary to discontinue as he grew 
 older, because it was incomprehensible to " the heavy Ger- 
 manity of the Germans," and led to continual mistakes and 
 annoyances ; indeed, we too often find that his friends were not 
 so modest as young Miiller, but objected to contradiction, even 
 with so pleasant a smile. 
 
 During the winter which Georg Miiller spent with the 
 Herders his famous brother Johann came over from Cassel to 
 stay with them for a few days. But in March Georg himself 
 had to go, and took leave of his friends amid copious tears : " I 
 wept at every word that was said " for the whole day before. 
 Under his master's influence life had again become possible to 
 him. As his brother Johann said : ** Herder brouorht Georg to 
 the mean between the heat of Zurich and the cold of Gottingen." 
 To Gottingen he would not return, but went home to his native 
 Schaffhausen, where in 1794 he became Professor of Greek and 
 Hebrew, and in 1804 *^ Professor of the Encyclopaedia and 
 Methodology of all the Sciences," which I suppose to be the 
 nearest actual approach to the *' professor of things in general." 
 In the troubles of the time he also found himself translated into 
 a statesman. He never saw the Herders again in spite of 
 repeated wishes, but the letters between them must have been 
 
1788.] . WEIMAR. 207 
 
 very numerous, though these unhappily for us still lie unpub- 
 lished in the limbo of the Schaffhausen library. On Herder's 
 death Georg Miiller, together with his brother and Heyne, assisted 
 too by Karoline and her eldest son Gottfried, issued a complete 
 edition of his works, adding two volumes of Reminiscences^ col- 
 lected and i)ut together by Karoline with the help of the others. 
 Johann von Miiller himself wished to be Herder's biographer, 
 but was interrupted by the European upheavals of 1805, and 
 by death in 1 809. Karoline died a few months afterwards, and 
 Georg was left to superintend the edition. His task was finished 
 in 1819; in October he wrote the preface to the Reminiscences^ 
 and four weeks afterwards he died "with the imae:e of Herder 
 before his eyes as in a trance." 
 
 We must now turn from these domestic scenes to the wider 
 interests of the world which — for Herder, as for every one — began 
 across the threshold. In 1780 he had entered into a correspond- 
 ence with Eichhorn, Oriental professor in Jena, a young man 
 of wide learning, inspired by the idea of human development, 
 which drove him to write a continuous history of the arts and 
 sciences of Europe. Beyond the region of learning Herder's 
 letters generally serve as introductions or recommendations on 
 behalf of needy and deserving young men who had appealed to 
 him for aid. For it seems that every one that was in distress, 
 and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discon- 
 tented, gathered themselves unto Herder till he became a kind 
 of refuge for Adullamites. As far as his power went he spared 
 no pains in hope to cheer them on their way. For one young 
 poet, Mnioch, who had fled from Frederick's soldiery in Konigs- 
 berg, he collected money and maintained him at Jena, till he 
 came under the fatherly protection of benevolent old Gleim. 
 Herder's practical sympathy with the young never flagged, 
 even when the current of young thought had swept past him out 
 of sight and left him wondering and ill at ease. 
 
 Already he felt himself growing old, and a severe illness in 
 the spring of 1781 made him partially bald. "The brook of 
 my life," he writes next year, " is often dull and mournful." 
 
268 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776. 
 
 His health gradually grew worse, and he began to be tormented 
 with physiciil hypochondria. "I am becoming an elderly God," 
 he plaintively writes at the age of forty ; and every one who has 
 grown old in mind or even in body will know from what a depth 
 of suffering and regret those words must have come. And yet 
 I should choose the four or five years from 1783 onwards 
 as by far the best and greatest, and therefore in a sense the 
 happiest, of his life. In 1782 he published the first part of his 
 treatise on The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry^ and the second part in 
 the next year. In the spring of this year he at length found 
 time for a long promised visit to Gleim in Halberstadt. He 
 took his eldest son Gottfried with him ; and after a few days 
 with Gleim he went on to Brunswick, where he was welcomed 
 by Jerusalem with such kindness that he "■ felt quite ashamed of 
 himself/' no doubt on account of his impatience with the poor 
 old man some years before. The travellers next proceeded 
 northwards to Hamburg, with its reminiscences of Lessing and 
 youthful days thirteen years before. Here he at last met the 
 poet of the Messias, and was received with joy, though real 
 friendship with the worthy old man was probably out of the 
 question ; and the real cause of the visit to Hamburg was that 
 Claudius had returned to his beloved Wandsbeck, which lies 
 only three miles to the north, and was now superintendent of 
 accounts for a bank in Altona. By June Herder had returned 
 to Weimar and to Goethe. 
 
 For ever since 1780 the paths of Herder and Goethe had 
 been gradually converging, though too often they seemed to 
 swerve aside for a time through some harsh criticism or bitter 
 word, sometimes from Karoline, sometimes from Herder, for the 
 difficulties of whose position Goethe perhaps did not make 
 sufficient allowance. It was evident that Herder could no 
 longer be master, for Goethe was now over thirty, and at that 
 age a few years more gives a man no necessary advantage ; and, 
 with the journey through Switzerland in 1779, Goethe had 
 entered upon a period of self-contained and steadfast manhood. 
 His short notes to Herder begin again in tlie next year, and 
 
1788.] WEIMAK. 269 
 
 steadily increase in number. In 1782 he introduced several of 
 Herder's ballads in the woodland drama called the Fisher's 
 Daughter^ which begins with the JSrlkonig, and was acted on 
 the banks of the Ilm at Tiefurt. A few months after Herder's 
 return from Hamburg, Groethe wrote to Friedrich Jacobi that 
 one of the greatest joys of his life was that the painful clouds 
 which had so long separated him from Herder had at length 
 rolled away, and, as he was convinced, for ever. Throughout 
 these years Goethe was living for the most part a retired and 
 even life — occupied with bones, and stones, and plants, and 
 schemes for the new park and palace ; he was also working at 
 Egmonty the prose Iphigenie^ and, above all, Wilhelm Meister, 
 parts of which he sent from time to time to Herder, "to be 
 read by the fire with tea, that it may be more homely." In a 
 letter, also to Jacobi, he sums up his life in this sentence : " I 
 am still devoted to my old fate, and suffer where others enjoy, 
 and enjoy where others suffer." During the autumn and winter 
 of 1783 Herder began to write his Ideen, and read it aloud to 
 Goethe, who received it with enthusiastic pleasure, and in a 
 letter from Rome some years afterwards called it ''his dearest 
 Evangel." The two were together almost every evening, read- 
 ing or discussing science, or working at the microscope. 
 " Goethe visits me diligently, and is as refreshing as balm," 
 Herder writes. It was to Herder that Goethe first announced 
 his joyful discovery of the os intermaxillare in man, March 1784 ; 
 and he could hardly be induced to leave Weimar at all, '^ so 
 good and kind had Herder become." He considered him " the 
 only capital that paid interest except Charlotte von Stein," who 
 was generally present when the Herders came to tea in the 
 Gartenhaus ; and during this same year he writes to her, '^ except 
 you, Knebel, and Herder, I have no public." 
 
 Yet there was only too much fear that he would be deprived 
 of his new-found friend just at the height of intimacy. For 
 Gottingen, anxious to retrieve her mistake of eight years before, 
 was urgent with invitations to Herder; and, though to Karoline 
 the word Gottingen " sounded like Sodom and Gomorrha," a 
 
270 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 struggle of eight years against a barrier of sandbags tries a 
 man's temper, and her husband was really anxious to leave 
 Weimar. At the same time Gleim was scheming to obtain him 
 an appointment at Klosterberg, on the banks of the Elbe, but 
 these proposals came to nothing for one cause or another ; and 
 two years later an offer from Hamburg and high expectations of 
 office in Berlin — when the great Frederick, to use Gleim's phrase, 
 ^^had ceased to be mortal" — were equally futile, and Herder 
 remained in Weimar. Whereat Goethe was glad for his own 
 sake. " I should lose much if he went," he says in another 
 letter to Charlotte, ^' for, but for you and him, I am alone here." 
 The fruits of this renewal of friendship were soon evident ; the 
 first part of the Ideen appeared in 1784, and by 1787 three 
 parts were published as well as three volumes of miscellaneous 
 writings. 
 
 The September of this notable year, 1784, was marked by a 
 visit of Claudius to the Herders, and of Friedrich Jacobi to 
 Goethe ; and we must here glance for a moment at this remark- 
 able man Friedrich, or more commonly Fritz Jacobi, though for 
 the most part he belongs rather to the history of Goethe than of 
 Herder. 
 
 He was a year and a half older than Herder, and was the 
 younger brother of Georg Jacobi, the darling poet of Gleim and 
 the tender-hearted, by Nicolai called " the suckling." Fritz 
 had become an enthusiastic friend of Goethe in 1774 at Cologne, 
 where, with the moon glittering on the Rhine, he imparted to 
 Goethe his greater knowledge of Spinoza.^ But after four or 
 five years the friendship was interrupted. The Jacobis had 
 joined Wieland in starting his journal, The Mercury, for which 
 Herder wrote at intervals after his arrival in Weimar. For this 
 Merciiry Fritz wrote his once famous novel of Woldemar ; but 
 Goethe turned on his former self, held up the whole sentimental 
 
 • Ans meinem Lehen, book xiv. end. Others say the meeting was at Pempel- 
 fort. It was at the same time, or a month or two later, that Herder began to 
 study Spinoza, whilst Goethe was already acquainted with some of his works in 
 his father's library. And yet we are told by the writer in the Fortnightly 
 Jlecic'w mentioned above that Herder introduced Goethe to Spinoza. 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 271 
 
 school to pitiless ridicule in the Triumph of Sentimentality^ and 
 finished by nailing a copy of Woldemar to the top of a tree on 
 the Ettersberg, to flutter out its tender leaves for the birds of 
 the air. Jacobi was naturally indignant, but after two or three 
 years a reconciliation was brought about, and now — as Jacobi 
 had just lost one of his children and his wife Betty, a woman of 
 much interest and a friend of Groethe's ^— he was invited with 
 his sister to Weimar in hopes of comfort. Herder he had long 
 desired to know, and had entreated Claudius, who was tutor to 
 two of his sons, to effect a meeting ; but this had been im- 
 possible, and only a few letters had passed between the two. 
 Herder seems to have been rather frightened at him, alarmed 
 perhaps by reports of his dignified and haughty mien ; perhaps 
 because he knew that, as Goethe puts it, " God had punished 
 him with metaphysics." The story of his published account of 
 a conversation Lessing held with him on Spinoza and Goethe's 
 Prometheus shortly before death, and how Jacobi and Mendels- 
 sohn contended over Lessing's dead body, is sufficiently familiar. 
 " Spinozist, therefore Atheist ! " cried Jacobi, gripping hold of a 
 part of the deceased hero. ^* Deist, by the soul of Abraham !" 
 shrieked poor old Mendelssohn, gripping hold of another part ; 
 whilst the astonished world looked on. But in the midst of the 
 struggle, in January 1786, Mendelssohn's hands were loosened; 
 he was going, according to his Phcedon^ to join his friend, and 
 under the earthly Linden he walked no more. Yet Lessing was 
 not left defenceless, for cleaving through the air with oarage of 
 poesy came Herder with his discourse on God ; and, crying 
 " Neither Atheist, nor Deist, but Theist," he bore him off to 
 some dim region between the secret top of Oreb and the Dutch 
 Jew's workshop in the Hague ; and Goethe smiled for joy, 
 though for his own part he was " always so glad to hold his 
 peace when people began to talk about the Supreme Being." ^ 
 We can now form for ourselves some picture of the little 
 
 ' See Alls melnem Leben, book xiv. and Goethe's letters to her. 
 2 From one of Goethe's letters to Jacobi on the subject. Jacobi's corre- 
 spondence with Herder is in Herder's Nachlass, vol. ii. 
 
272 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [177G— 
 
 party that was driving southward to Jena on September 27, 
 1784, along the road where Heine's plums were growing forty 
 years after. They were Herder and Karoline, Claudius, Goethe 
 with his favourite Fritz von Stein, Charlotte's son, and Friedrich 
 Jacobi with his sister ; and they were going to visit Knebel, of 
 whom I have already vaguely spoken as the Trelawney of 
 Weimar. 
 
 Karl von Knebel was one of the most beautiftil, and at the 
 same time pathetic, figures in the Weimar circle. He was of the 
 same age as Herder, and he outlived all his fellow Olympians, 
 for he did not die till 1834, two years after " all warmth seemed 
 to have departed from the world" at Goethe's death. ^ He 
 watched the stream of time for ninety years, the ninety years 
 that produced Napoleon, and Goethe, and Beethoven ; an age 
 that, I suppose, has only been three times matched in the history 
 of the world — by the centuries that saw Shakespeare and Raphael, 
 Caesar and Christ, Plato and Pheidias. When Knebel was boni, 
 Pope had been dead only a few months, and bonny Prince 
 Charlie's hopes were high. When he died the Reform Bill was 
 safely behind us, Shelley's heart had long ceased to beat, Byron 
 was gone, Tennyson was a rising young poet, and Carlyle had 
 written the Sartor. For ten years (1763-1773) Knebel served 
 at Potsdam under Frederick the Great, of whom he has left 
 some interesting little accounts. Here he became acquainted 
 with Ramler, the Karschin, and the other lights of Berlin, who 
 in many respects remained his guides through life in spite of 
 Goethe's influence. Tired of the army, he travelled with the 
 young Grand Duke of Weimar till Goethe superseded him, when 
 he was appointed tutor to Prince Constantino at Tiefiirt. Here 
 he spent five years ; but with Herder he was not at all intimate, 
 though they met occasionally. He is said to be the figure that 
 in Goethe's Ilmenau (1783) is seen stooping over the fire with 
 shoulders broad and strong like a hero of old : — 
 
 Dry and good-humoured, ever with the skill 
 To set the circle iu a roar at will. 
 
 ' This account of Knebel is derived from his Nachlass (2 vols. Leipzig, 1840.) 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 273 
 
 On leaving Tiefurt he had retired to his home at Ansbach for 
 three years, but returning to Weimar in 1784 he liad found the 
 friendship between Goethe and Herder at its height. He im- 
 mediately became very intimate with the Herders, and in later 
 years we shall find that he was their firmest friend, though our 
 Electra at one time very nearly caused a rupture by her indig- 
 nant suspicions. Close upon two hundred^ of his letters to 
 Herder and Karoline have been published in Herder's Nachlass, 
 and a considerable number from the Herders in Knebel's 
 Nachlass^ thus divided and unarranged in real old-fashioned 
 German confusion. In time he came to regard himself as 
 almost a part of Herder's family, and yet he never remained 
 long in Weimar. We find him complaining that it was dull ; 
 " we are all asleep here," he writes ; " Goethe alone shines like 
 a star in the night," which seems to have been a favourite com- 
 parison with the gentle and scientific old man. Indeed, he 
 could never make up his mind where it was best for him to be ; 
 we find him now in Weimar, now in Ansbach, now in Ilmenau, 
 and most often perhaps in the beautiful old castle of Jena. 
 ^^ He is a tender bird," says Karoline, " who knows not where 
 to lay his head." 
 
 And this restlessness runs through all his character. Like 
 Einsiedel he, too, was lacking in one great purpose in life, which 
 would have made a unity as of art where now there is only patch- 
 work. A curious comparison might be worked out between 
 these two men — the result was so similar, but their natures so 
 unlike. Knebel was almost morbidly sensitive, retiring, and 
 diffident ; and, though he had not Einsiedel's brilliant wit and 
 large brain, yet he must have been a more loveable man, 
 especially in old age, for, if Einsiedel was retiring, it was 
 because he considered his average fellow-mortals hardly worthy 
 of notice. They were alike in their devotion to natural science, 
 so far as devotion is possible for such men. Knebel was enthu- 
 siastic over the first part of the Ideeuy and, after reading the 
 
 ' One hundred and ninety-nine, to be accurate, and there are more in his own 
 
 Naclilass, 
 
274 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776— 
 
 ^' Discourse on God," he wrote, '' From the knowledge of nature 
 everything is to be looked for " ; and Schiller, on his first visit 
 to Weimar, said of him, " Knebel, like every one else in Goethe's 
 company, pays too much attention to stocks and stones, and 
 depends on his five senses." He might even be called a 
 materialist with more justice than most people who bear the 
 name, for he saw no difficulty in explaining thought in terms of 
 matter ; and in philosophy he contented himself with Lucretius 
 and the enlightenment of the Berlin school. But whereas 
 Einsiedel, as we are told, had not a ray of imagination, Knebel 
 to the last fancied himself born a poet — which proves that his 
 imagination, though strong, was not always an advantage ; for 
 though he wrote a considerable number of verses, and under 
 great pressure from Herder and Goethe even translated Lucretius 
 in metre, I suppose no one would now dare to call him a poet. 
 In politics he was, for a time at least, enthusiastic for freedom, 
 the French Revolution, and the Bights of Man. '^ Germany is a 
 terra obedientice/' he cried with all the wrath that was in him ; 
 and during the troubles of the next ten years he was generally 
 placed side by side with Herder as one of the leaders of the 
 revolutionary party in Weimar. But a man more unlike the 
 ideal democrat of timorous fancy it is impossible to conceive. 
 His portraits, taken in old age, show us such a face of delicate 
 sensibility, gentle humour, benignity, and lofty intellect, as has 
 been given to few men, and over all lies the sorrow of a conscious 
 failure, meekly borne. He knew that, unstable as water, he 
 had not excelled ; but his chief sadness was for the friends who 
 had stood by him in his manhood, and one by one had dropped 
 at his side. 
 
 This was the man whom that little party went out to Jena 
 to see. They would find him by his window looking out over 
 the Jena woods, as was his custom, for he was one of the truest 
 lovers of nature's world ; and they would talk through the 
 twilight till night came, for it was his whim to have no lamp 
 brought till it was quite dark ; and then they set off for the 
 drive home " through the fairest moonlight," says Herder, ^* all 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 275 
 
 of us half-asleep and half- awake ; " and Karoline adds in a 
 postscript, " Befreshed by your beautiful soul, which raised 
 me above the common round of every day, I drove contented 
 through the moonlight, whilst Goethe spoke to us of the state of 
 the soul after death. Only he was hardly warm-hearted and 
 enthusiastic (scJiwdrmeriscK) enough for the heavenly light 
 through which we glided." 
 
 The next few years went peacefully by. Herder was wrapt 
 up in his work. * Each year saw a new volume of the Ideen and 
 Miscellanies^ and he was beginning to take an active part in 
 the dispute over Lessing and Spinoza. '^ The amount of work 
 Herder gets through is incredible," Goethe writes to Jacobi in 
 1785. And yet all through the winter both he and Karoline 
 had been far from well, and, for their health's sake, they spent 
 July in Karlsbad with Goethe and the Frau von Stein. In 
 September Weimar was visited by the Dutch philosopher Hem- 
 sterhuis, called '' the Plato of Holland," a strangely-peaceful 
 and quiet man, but in some respects not unlike Herder himself. 
 One of Herder's treatises, on Love and Egoism, has, indeed, 
 been published in the edition of Hemsterhuis's works as a sup- 
 plement. He was attended on his journey by his patroness the 
 Princess Gallitzin, who also extended her protection to Hamann. 
 In the same month Forster, then professor of natural history at 
 Wilna, in Poland, came through Weimar on his way back from 
 Gottingen, where he had married Heyne's daughter, who, after 
 the death of a second husband, became an authoress of some 
 repute as Therese Huber. 
 
 Forster himself had lived a great deal in England, especially 
 in Lancashire, and accompanied his father as naturalist on one 
 of Captain Cook's expeditions round the world (1772-5). He 
 had gained a very wide practical knowledge of botany, zoology, 
 and physical science in general, also of the history and customs 
 of primitive races, so that he could not fail to be very sen^iceable 
 to Herder and Goethe at this time, and the correspondence con- 
 tinued for some years. He passed through Weimar again in 
 1787 on his way back to Gottingen, where he was to prepare 
 
 t2 
 
276 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1776- 
 
 for a voyage of discovery in Russia. But the scheme came to 
 nothing through the outbreak of a Turkish war. Forster then 
 lived for a time at Mainz, where he was visited by the young 
 Humboldt, whose predecessor in science he has been called. As 
 his wife preferred to seek the society of her second husband a 
 few years before the death of her first, Forster devoted himself 
 to the service of the revolutionists in France, and, having been 
 entirely cosmopolitan in his life and teaching, he did his best to 
 betray Germany to the French. He held office under the 
 Jacobin Government throughout the night of fear, and died in 
 1794, in his fortieth year, after a life of abundant variety. He 
 was amongst the first to attempt to place the theory of heredity, 
 instead of " innate ideas," on a scientific basis. 
 
 In the beginning of the next year Goethe was busy revising 
 his works for a new edition, and saw hardly any one but Char- 
 lotte von Stein and the Herders. In Werther there was a good 
 deal which Herder wanted changed. " We had a good scene 
 over it," Goethe writes to Charlotte. " His wife would not let 
 a single word in the book be altered, and defended it excellently 
 well." It is probable that of such a book Karoline was now 
 the best judge of the three, but some alterations towards the 
 end were made at Herder's suggestion. It is supposed, too, 
 that Herder considered it a fault in the story that Werther's 
 motive for suicide was double — disappointment in love and dis- 
 appointment in ambition : and, as is well known, this was the 
 point on which Napoleon fixed in after-years. In July the 
 calm of the friends was interrupted by the advent of Lavater 
 on one of his apostolic progresses through Germany. Both 
 would gladly have avoided him, but he stayed with Goethe one 
 day, and Herder, for the first time, saw him face to face. Lavater 
 found him "polite, friendly, and open-hearted"; but Herder, 
 like Goethe, remained calmly indifferent to this apparition, who 
 was so far from his present line of thought; "for," to use 
 Goethe's words, " when a great man has a dark corner in his 
 soul, it is very dark indeed." 
 
 About a month after this Goethe stole away to Italy and left 
 
1788.] WEIMAR. 277 
 
 the Herders in great loneliness for nearly two years. " Goethe 
 is a man in every respect, and, but for him, we should be quite 
 alone in "Weimar," Karoline writes in her iiidignant way to 
 Gleim, who had been hinting suspicions. In the July of the 
 following year (1787) a young man, lean of figure and with 
 head thrown forward, was peering about Weimar with clear 
 and earnest eyes, forcing every hero he met to stop and give 
 account of himself at his peril. Unto Herder he came, and 
 read him the manuscript of Don Carlos, to Herder's great delight, 
 though before he had been inclined to despise the author of The 
 Robbers^ Fiesco, and Cabal and Love, having known him only 
 by hearsay, and not foreseeing what joy for the world and what 
 sorrow for himself was lying folded up in the soul of Schiller. 
 
 About this time the Herders seem to have been considerably 
 hampered by the expenses of their large family. Herder's 
 income was between 250^. and 300Z. a-year, and by the end of 
 1787 he had seven children to keep alive, besides himself and 
 wife and servant. We may imagine, therefore, how welcome 
 was a gift of about 200Z. from an unknown hand in Eisenach ; 
 and a few days afterwards the Grand Duke promised to increase 
 his income by about 70/. a-year. In April, however, his infant 
 son died. Herder was ailing, lonely, and depressed, and could 
 not even be cheered by a short visit from Father Gleim in May. 
 The " Discourse on God " was finished and published, and he had 
 drawn up an elaborate scheme for a universal society of all 
 German men of learning at the request of Karl Friedrich of 
 Baden, whose learned wife some readers may remember long 
 ago on the way to Strassburg. In June Herder received the 
 news that his beloved master the Mage of the North had died 
 in peace, after his life of storm, and was buried in the garden 
 of the Princess Gallitzin, not far from Miinster ;^ and in the same 
 month Goethe came back " one moonlight night" full of tales of 
 Italy and the land where the sun is warm. He was with the 
 Herders almost every day, and the longing for travel awoke in 
 
 ' He died at Wellberg and was buried at Angelmodde. 
 
278 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788 
 
 Herder again. We remember the cry of his boyhood, " my 
 Italy, thee must I one day see "; and now Friedrich von Dal- 
 berg, Canon of Worms and Speyer, antiquary, musician, and 
 brother of Herder's acquaintance — the Governor of Erfurt, had 
 invited him to be his companion on a journey to Italy itself. The 
 plan was of good hope, and all was arranged with speed ; leave 
 of absence was obtained from the Grand Duke ; and on the 6th 
 of August Herder drove westward from Weimar to Erfurt, only 
 regretting that Goethe found it impossible to bear him company 
 into the land of Mignon. 
 
279 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE GOOD. 
 
 " Why, Where's the need of Temple, when the walls 
 O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls 
 From Levites' choir, priests' cries, and trumpet-calls? 
 That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 Or decomposes hut to recompose, 
 Become my universe that feels and knows." — Epilogue. 
 
 We have now gained the topmost point of the rugged upland 
 through which our way leads. Here we may pause awhile and 
 look around us, for the sun is still high and the place is pleasant. 
 It is no crystal battlement of heaven that we are standing on, 
 no shuddering pinnacle of eternal snow, abrupt, sky-cleaving. 
 There is the less fear of wandering from our track through mist 
 and cloud, till the world seems to vanish from under our feet in 
 the depths of some gulf of gloom, or we are left shivering at the 
 foot of a sheer wall of ice, and dare not turn to look behind. 
 Yet we are raised far above the wanton marsh-lights and stifling 
 fogs of the common plain — on the highest point of a region such 
 as most of us can picture and some have known ; a region of 
 broad sweeps of barren heath broken by quiet valleys for the 
 homes of men ; of gently-rising slopes crossed by the flying 
 clouds, and of sun-lit hills from which the view is wide. Here, 
 as we rest and watch the world, our eyes are now and again 
 irresistibly drawn to a place far off in the blue of the distance, 
 a place of struggle and crying, of life and movement, of doubt 
 and death and despair, of endless hope ; a place where, as of old, 
 every one strives to go every way at once, and knows not whither 
 he would ; a place which is the present time. 
 
 In the following brief account of what appear to me to be 
 
280 HERDEK AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 the most important and far-reaching of Herder's works, I choose 
 to begin with those that bear most directly on morality — partly 
 because morality, like medicine, is universally interesting, being, 
 in fact, the medicine of life, and no one can go through life 
 without having to face the question of conduct, whereas many 
 actually live without beauty and without philosophy — partly also 
 because Herder would have put morality first himself. For 
 though he does not often condescend to waste time, as so many 
 have wasted it, in giving good advice, yet the great effort of his 
 life, both in deed and word, was to maintain a pure and lofty 
 standard of right conduct, and to oppose to the last all doctrines 
 and systems which seemed to him likely to undermine the 
 motives for morality which had hitherto sufficed. And, in thus 
 standing out as the champion of morality, he was tempted, 
 though not without reason, to consider that he stood alone of all 
 the leaders of men. For though we can now see that morahty 
 was as little in danger as religion, — that Goethe on the .one side, 
 and Kant and Schiller on the other, were proclaiming a code of 
 conduct at least as lofty as Herder's own, and that the Revolution, 
 whose terrors estranged even Herder's sympathy, was, as far as 
 it was evil, only a proof by experience that complete immorality 
 cannot stand, but is ridiculous or, more properly, non-existent, — 
 yet it is easy to allow that the Terror and the Goddess of Reason 
 were not reassuring to an earnest thinker who had the future 
 welfare of mankind close at heart; and it is one of those strange 
 paradoxes of history, that the proclamation of one of the sternest 
 and most exacting systems of ethics ever produced was accom- 
 panied by an outburst of the wildest immorality and rebellion, 
 especially amongst the young, who naturally preferred flying in 
 a mist to plodding on the dry and solid old ground. During the 
 last ten or twelve years of Herder's life these Kantian rebels 
 took the place of the rebels of " life according to nature," senti- 
 ment, gloomy despair, and moon-lit melancholy ; but it was 
 really the same spirit working under a different form, and Kant 
 would have disowned his supposed followers as indignantly as 
 Goethe and Herder disowned the sentimentalists. 
 
THE GOOD. 281 
 
 Herder's method of treatment was much the same for both 
 the forms of the disease ; for, as St. Peter brought down Simon 
 Magus by prayer, so Herder hoped to bring down these won- 
 drous high-flyers by education in its truest and widest sense. 
 " We must look to education and a knowledge of science," he 
 writes, and both in education and science his first object was 
 morality ; for, indeed, if all wrong-headed and misguided people 
 could be made to realise the truth of IMe as it is and the eternal 
 laws of the universe, and had their wills trained in accordance 
 with these, it seems as though morality would be a very simple 
 affair. But we are still met with the difficulty that nobody can 
 decide what the truth of life exactly is, that very little is known 
 about the eternal laws of the universe, which to the common 
 mind will seem, at least for a long time yet, to have no meaning 
 beyond the laws of health and manufacture, and that, finally, 
 every system of education, even when it is not merely a formless 
 growth of time, is, after all, in common with so much else, but 
 an approach to an ideal that for ever recedes. 
 
 ]n Herder's time the great and scientific system of education 
 now prevailing in Germany was hardly so much as conceived ; 
 but it was an age of revolution in education — as in art, politics, 
 and religion. Three years after Herder's birth Hecker had 
 established in Berlin the first Realschule, or Modern School, as 
 we should' say, opposed to the old Gymnasia, or grammar- 
 schools. We have seen that, as a master at Konigsberg and 
 Riga, Herder had devoted himself for the most part to real 
 instruction, and had supported it with enthusiasm as a means of 
 scattering the barren chaff-heaps of the grammarians. Since 
 those days Basedow, the other prophet who with Lavater had 
 attended the world-child on his Rhine journey, had attracted 
 the eyes of mankind by the strange intellectual antics of which 
 children were rendered capable in his forcing- house. " I would 
 not give him a calf to educate, let alone a man," Herder wrote 
 indignantly to Hamann. But he was better pleased with the 
 Swiss Pestalozzi, who was only two years younger than himself, 
 and had already begun his experiments in the rational training 
 
282 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 of growing minds.^ In 1783 Friedrich August Wolf, the 
 Homeric critic, went to Halle ; and this may be called the first 
 step in the great practical reform in German education as a 
 whole, though since the middle of the century — in Prussia at all 
 events — there had been some sort of State control over schools ; 
 and education was never left so entirely as with us to the caprice 
 of irresponsible masters and the pleasure of parents, indifferent 
 or endlessly gullible. In 1788 the " leaving examination," now 
 so important a feature in the German system, was first established 
 as a test for admission to the Prussian universities.^ So that, in 
 reading Herder's theories and proposals with regard to education, 
 we must remember that he was dealing with a state of things 
 very different from that now existing in Germany; in most 
 cases, indeed, his proposals, whether right or wrong, would be 
 more applicable to modern England. 
 
 Of Herder's theories of education in his more youthful years 
 we already know something, so that we can afford to be brief, 
 though a very sufficient account of his mature views on the sub- 
 ject has come down to us. As head of the church and schools in 
 Weimar, it was his duty to deliver an address on education at 
 least once a year, an address for which Latin was the tongue 
 ordained ; but Herder, who was always anxious to be intelligible 
 rather than learned, preferred to use German ; and after his 
 death these addresses were found carefully written oilt word for 
 word as they were delivered. Twenty-four of them, together 
 with two memorial speeches on his colleagues, Musaus (died 
 1787) and Heinze (died 1790), and a few short notices bearing 
 on the subject, were collected by Georg Miiller, and published 
 under the title of Sophron^ which title proves that in Midler's 
 opinion, at all events. Herder's first object in education was to 
 produce men of complete moral self-control. It must be remem- 
 bered that, when he speaks of education. Herder is not beating 
 
 ' For an account of Pestalozzi's method see Mr. Herbert Spencer's treatise 
 on Educatioii. 
 
 * For these facts in the history of German education I am indebted to Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's book on Tlte Higher Schools and Univcrftities of Oenimny, 
 
THE GOOD. 283 
 
 the air, nor vaguely sprinkling rose-water to charm the ignorant, 
 like so many pleasant theorists who have never fronted chaos 
 under the semblance of a class of boys. He had served a stern 
 apprenticeship for years, and was no amateur, but knew of what 
 he was speaking. Even in Weimar he would sometimes find 
 opportunities to teach in the Gymnasium, and on Heinze's death 
 Herder took his place till his successor was appointed ; for he had 
 inherited the instinct of teaching from his father, and it is note- 
 worthy that even Gervinus has nothing but praise for him here. 
 There was plenty of room for reforms in education near at 
 hand. Some forty years before Herder arrived in Weimar, it 
 had become evident to the advanced spirits of the place that a 
 knowledge of Latin syntax was not sufficient armour wherewith 
 to go out into life. " If the Gymnasium," they reasoned, 
 " cannot train our sons for the battle of life, let it at least train 
 them for the battles of war. Look at this army of giants old 
 Friedrich Wilhelm has got together ; and may not he or his 
 unruly young Frederick turn them to a purpose against which 
 our Latin syntax would avail little?" Herder accordingly 
 found that the Gymnasium, instead of being the peaceful home 
 of the Muses, had become a kennel for the dogs of war. The 
 youths that were to be the fathers of the future were taught riding, 
 fencing, and the politics of diplomacy; dancing, deportment, 
 and instrumental music had been added, in accordance with 
 another tendency of the time, which, in Herder's words, was 
 ready to forgive everything in a young man who was graceful 
 in society. Partly, as has been said, owing to Herder's own 
 rebellion against the inhuman dulness of the grammarians, it 
 had become the fashion to regard the perusal of novels and 
 verses as a sufficient education ; and if a boy could act a little 
 or sketch the outline of a play he at once claimed all the privi- 
 leges of genius. Under the banners of Nature and Genius 
 plentiful societies were founded to cultivate the arts of smoking, 
 beer-drinking, and cards ; and though, when we remember how 
 poor and barren a thing education too often becomes in the 
 hands of pedants, it is impossible not to sympathise with these 
 
284 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 youthful efforts at improvement, we must also agree with 
 Herder, that the arts of beer, smoking and cards, of play-acting, 
 and even verse-writing, are not in themselves a sufficient equip- 
 ment for life, which is not all youth, but reaches in many cases 
 to old age. But the reaction from pedantry had been so strong 
 that, after Herder and Heinze had worked together for the 
 Weimar schools for fourteen years, the evils of it were not 
 entirely obliterated ; and, as soon as there seemed some hope in 
 this direction, the first waves of the Kantian philosophy swept 
 over Germany, and all the youth began talking in an unknown 
 tongue, as Herder bitterly complained, of Ich + Nichulch — 
 Ich + mit-Ich, or to paraphrase, of Subject + Object — Sub- 
 ject + Ob-Subject ;^ a formula which, to Herder, seemed sad . 
 nonsense, and no doubt was equally incomprehensible to most 
 who used it ; whereas the aberrations of conduct by which it 
 was generally accompanied were evident and intelligible to all 
 men. 
 
 In his efforts for the cause of education, therefore. Herder 
 found himself struggling against three strong forces : the be- 
 numbing poison of pedantry, the follies of the '^ Nature-and- 
 Genius" school, to which the prevailing military mania may 
 be added, and, lastly, the vagaries of misguided Kantians. It 
 would not be difficult to find parallels to these three in modern 
 England ; only, as we boast endless powers of dissent, further 
 subdivision would be necessary. Our school of Nature anrl 
 Genius, for instance, seems to have very little connection with 
 things military ; and, conversely, our army-men seem to have 
 very little connection with Nature and Genius. 
 
 In dealing with such opponents Herder was always fearless 
 and unhesitating. Having a lofty conception of the reality and 
 earnestness of life, he stated his ideal of what education ought 
 to be in forcible terms, that must have made many of his 
 listeners start. " Schools," he said, ^^ according to the sayings 
 of our forefathers, are workshops of the spirit of God ;" and by 
 
 ' See Mr. Raskin's exquisite parody in Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 159. 
 
THE GOOD. 285 
 
 the spirit of God they and he meant, as he goes on to explain, 
 " the mighty impulse of nature, the living strength which 
 imparts life, the tendency in man ever to become more perfect, 
 clearer in understanding, purer in heart, stronger in will, nearer 
 to the Godhead, and fashioned more according to His image. 
 At once we are raised far above the pedantic old conceptions of 
 schools as temples of Apollo and the Muses, who for the most 
 part took the form of Latin grammars and vocabularies, or, at 
 the best, of Anacreontic verse and imitations called faultless." 
 
 But the time for such things, says Herder, is gone. " We must edu- 
 cate for life, not for the schools. " The whole man must be developed by- 
 study and exercise in everything that is humane, everything that makes 
 a man. Above all, the moral character and judgment must be established 
 and strengthened, and, so this be done, it is of small importance how. 
 The understanding is like an instrument which is serviceable for any use 
 when once it is sharp and polished. Whether, therefore, the means be 
 Greece or Rome, theology or mathematics, is unimportant, provided the 
 instrument has been perfected for the uses of life. ' And by life is meant 
 the life of humanity in its widest sense, not merely the life of exchange 
 and mart. With those who wish to turn our schools into apprentice 
 shops for different trades, Herder had little sympathy. " Public schools," 
 he says, " are institutions of the State for the production, not of future 
 townsfolk only, but in the first instance of men. We are men before 
 we are professional men, and woe unto us if in our future profession 
 we cease to be men." Now the understanding and judgment of all men 
 that are to be worthy of the name must both be clear and solid. It seems, 
 indeed, impossible to be clear without being also solid ; for the ignorant 
 man is not lucid, neither is the obtuse man profound. And, to render 
 the mind clear and solid, two things seemed above all necessary to Herder 
 — discipline and hard work. 
 
 We can imagine what a shock his sayings must have given 
 to the sensibilities of the darlings of nature and genius ; for, as 
 has been said. Herder was no rose-water theorist. Without 
 discipline, a school is no training, according to him, for it is 
 discipline that makes character, and it is absurd to talk of 
 royal roads to wisdom. Once for all, there are no royal roads, 
 
 * That this theory is not altogether true, or at least admits of much abuse, 
 has been shown by Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. iv. Appendix III. 
 
286 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 and " the gods sell us nothing without trouble." " Quickly 
 come, quickly go," is a universal law, and the beautiful will 
 never cease to be hard, nor the path of knowledge steep. The 
 self-educated man, for want of discipline, too often fails of 
 depth and accuracy ; and Herder has nothing but scorn for the 
 dilettanti " men of genius, who have learnt, by Grod's grace, to 
 discourse eloquently on any subject in heaven and earth," like 
 the sophists of old or the journalists of more recent times.^ 
 Knowledge that is poured into the mind as through a funnel, by 
 lectures and such easy methods, which involve no effort to the 
 mind itself, is therefore worse than useless ; for this is the 
 knowledge that puffs up and tends to conceit, and it gives no 
 training to the understanding, even if it be retained by the 
 exercise of mere memory, which, taken alone, is a dangerous 
 rather than enviable gift. Herder would therefore have the 
 teacher always follow the method of Socrates, and draw out 
 what was in the mind, rather than load it with a mass of hete- 
 rogeneous information, which is the common English method 
 justly called " cram," and strictly practised in nearly all schools, 
 public and private, and at the universities. 'In our advanced 
 girls' schools, where they work for examinations, the system 
 appears to have become especially rampant ; chiefly, I suppose, 
 because most boys, being endowed with a salutary spirit of 
 rebellion, will not allow themselves to be imposed upon after a 
 certain point. Of this so-called education, in which the learner 
 is merely passive ; of this imposed dogmatism, which is the 
 choke-weed of wisdom ; of these eternal second-hand criticisms, 
 which, as far as intellectual advancement is concerned, might 
 just as well be rolled into paper-pills and forced down the 
 throats of reluctant youth ;'^ — of all such things Herder would 
 
 > In almost the same words, too, we have heard a " woman of learning " 
 exclaim with fervour, " I thank my God, I am quite as much at home [^ebeti so 
 gilt zu Haiiae] in Hearen as on earth" ; meaning that she knew something of 
 astronomy. 
 
 2 For instance, in a large and important school I have known the caiulidntes 
 for an examination obliged to learn by heart a criticism which knocked off 
 
THE GOOD. 287 
 
 have nothing ; indeed, he could not have conceived that the 
 system against which he protested would ever reach such 
 lengths. To check the evil, he insists that once for all we 
 must abandon all thought of forcing. The tree of the forest 
 grows, and is not put together by the shifts of a stage-carpenter ; 
 and, if we continue our patent process of " cram," we must 
 expect the characters and intellects of children to be as unlovely 
 and inorganic as daubs cf painted canvas. " There they stand, 
 these centenarian children!" Herder exclaims, " and we look 
 and shudder." 
 
 As to examinations. Herder has not much to tell us ; for as 
 yet it had not been discovered that examination is the panacea 
 for suffering mankind. It seems to have been the custom in the 
 schools in Weimar for the master of each form to hold a viva 
 voce examination once or perhaps twice a year. Herder com- 
 mends the practice as an encouragement to industry, wakeful- 
 ness, and attention ; but he warns the masters to ask only what 
 they can fairly expect to be answered, not to seek to display 
 themselves, nor to suppose that examination can ever be an 
 exact test, but to remember it is only a subordinate means in 
 education. There is nothing to show that Herder would have 
 disapproved of the modern system in Germany, where the great 
 ^' leaving examination," that admits to the universities and the 
 learned professions, is not so much a test of knowledge as of 
 industry and sound training ; but as to the general idea of the 
 English, who rush into examinations of all kinds as the final aim 
 and complete test of education, it is only too probable that he 
 would have regarded this as a curse of heaven, a terrific night- 
 mare, which in our sleep we take for solid life. 
 
 To secure a sound training for the youth of Weimar, one of 
 Herder's favourite schemes was to establish a training-college 
 for schoolmasters, as Heyne did in Gottingen and Wolf in Halle 
 and Berlin ; but here, as in other reforms, his way was for a 
 
 Lessing in a line and a half, though of Lessing they knew absolutely nothing. 
 Any one connected with modern education is fortunate if he cannot remember 
 similar cases. 
 
288 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 long time blocked by the consistory. After repeated failures, 
 however, of which he complains bitterly to Gleim, he founded 
 something of the sort in 1787. This was only one of many 
 efforts to improve the condition of the masters in the public 
 schools. The master's position, he maintained, must be high 
 and secure ; he must be raised above all private anxieties, as 
 far as his office goes ; and must be out of reach of the tempta- 
 tions of self-advertisement, which beset the owners of private 
 or proprietary schools. In practice Herder allowed his masters 
 to follow their own methods as far as possible, finding they 
 could not work so well on any other ; but at the same time he 
 says, ^' we trust our children to the State, not to the whims of 
 an imaginative teacher." Therefore, for the sake both of masters 
 and learners, he considered that the State must be held respon- 
 sible for the management of schools; and he enthusiastically- 
 defended the public schools, with their high spirit and grand 
 tradition — " their genius or guiding angel," as he calls it — 
 against those who were beginning to cry up the system of 
 private schools, claiming for these a higher moral tone. 
 
 Coming down to the lower details of practice, Herder com- 
 plains that in the public schools the forms were too large, and 
 the work not interesting enough. As to subjects, he would 
 have the lower forms taught elementary science and mathe- 
 matics on Pestalozzi's method. The necessity of natural science, 
 he foresees, will become more and more evident, " for, through 
 the study of science, many old fables have vanished, and things, 
 with their methods, are becoming clearer." Geography, history, 
 and natural history must be taught in close connexion, and will 
 thus cease to be mere strings of meaningless words. But man 
 has a natural need of beauty, especially in youth— and though 
 there is no real opposition between beauty and science, and 
 though to the specialist his art is always beautiful ^ — yet natural 
 science is not in itself sufficient for the average man. Herder 
 
 » Sophron, p. 37. I give the reference lest it should be thought I am follow- 
 ing Mr. Matthew Arnold rather than Herder. On the subject of education the 
 resemblance is often very striking. 
 
THE GOOD. 289 
 
 quotes with approval the saying of Frederick the Great, that 
 good translation from the ancients is the first means of culture 
 for a people and language. Grammar and the correct use of 
 the mother-tongue must be taught for the sake of accuracy ; but 
 the object in the study of languages should not be the grammar 
 but the literature. And here the custom which sets boys to 
 work on such books as Caesar's ^ is mistaken, for these are too 
 dull and devoid of beauty ; and, if the best means of education 
 is the knowledge of all that goes to make up man in the highest 
 sense, we must devote ourselves to the study of all the best and 
 most beautiful fruits of the human spirit in literature, in philo- 
 sophy, and inquiries into the outside world. Neither must the 
 body be neglected ; the whole man is to be cultivated in equal 
 balance ; but it is to be remembered, according to Herder, that 
 neither knowledge nor athletics are ends in themselves ; he 
 would not have a Gymnasium become a training-place for petty 
 ambition and conceit, such as we have been told English schools 
 have become, or are likely to become, " barrel-organs playing 
 serious or secular tunes, according to the neighbourhood;"^ but 
 he maintains that the final aim of education is nothing else than 
 conduct or life, which, as we have also been told, can only be 
 said to begin with self-annihilation ; and the final aim of life, 
 says Goethe, is life itself. As to the best means of education, 
 it will have been seen that Herder was looking forward, as we 
 are still looking forward, to the happy time when the wolf of 
 science shall dwell with the lamb of letters, when the lion shall 
 eat straw like the ox, and the child of nature shall put his hand 
 on the philosopher's den. 
 
 Before passing on to Herder's second means of proclaiming 
 the Good, we may notice a passage in one of these school 
 addresses, which does not properly belong to education, but 
 stands midway between the training of youth and the conduct of 
 manhood. In his address on schools as " Workshops of the 
 
 » Sojphron, p. 238. 
 
 2 See Lecturei on the Electra and Macheth, by A. H. Gilkes, Preface. 
 
 U 
 
290 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 Spirit of God," after urging his hearers to follow knowledge 
 and truth and beanty as long as they are at school, he goes on 
 to warn them — half in earnest, half in irony — against the tempta- 
 tion of becoming men of letters in after-life. " 0, become men 
 of business," he cries ; " men of letters are the unhappiest of 
 all, and from the condition of our times they must become more 
 and more unhappy from year to year." He even foresees a time 
 when, partly through their numbers, partly through the un worthi- 
 ness of many, partly because *^ the world is sick of knowledge, 
 and of the word of God, and only craves amusement," — for these 
 reasons a man of letters may run the risk of hunger, nay of 
 starvation {verhungern). I believe that every great writer of 
 modern times, except perhaps Emerson, has at some time in his 
 life given us similar advice. But there seems as yet no sign 
 that the race of men of letters is dying out, and the good advice 
 is likely to be as unavailing as a law against madness. 
 
 What Herder was able to realise for the cause of education 
 in Weimar itself fell far short of his hopes, chiefly through the 
 solemn league of opposition in the consistory. Yet as Ephorus 
 of schools or minister of education he succeeded in re-establishing 
 what is called the Ernst Foundation School, which offered small 
 exhibitions and board to the twelve most deserving or poorest 
 scholars. Finding, further, that the chaplain to the garrison was 
 wasting his honeyed words on empty benches, he induced the 
 Grand Duke to divert the funds and increase the pay of the 
 schoolmasters, especially in the country districts, where education 
 had fallen into the hands of ignorant old soldiers, who were 
 glad to teach nothing for four or five pounds a year. In the 
 same year (1787) Herder at last set on foot a kind of ti'aining 
 college for some thirty or forty young masters, tliough again the 
 reality was a poor thing compared to his conception. His pro- 
 posals for a reform in the elementary schools were carried out 
 by Gunther after his death. Remembering what he himself had 
 suffered in boyhood from want of books, he established, and 
 partially supplied out of his own small income, a fund to pur- 
 chase books for very poor scholars, and he endeavoured to found 
 
THE GOOD. 291 
 
 a general library for the Gymnasium. In 1786, during his very 
 busiest period, he found time to write an alphabet (ABC BucJi) 
 for the lower forms, and in 1798 he published an explanation of 
 the Cathechism by Luther, which every German Protestant boy 
 is obliged to learn. He also long intended to write a simple 
 book on the natural history of plants and animals for the use of 
 the lower forms, but unfortunately the idea was never carried 
 out. Here, then, are plenty of proofs that Herder was not a man 
 of dainty whims, vaguely hovering in the air ; but having his 
 foot firmly on the ground he was full of practical endeavour as 
 far as his position allowed. That more was not allowed him, 
 that for want of action he was driven into regions of atmosphere 
 too rare for a spirit which craved for the positive and actual, I 
 suppose to have been one of the main causes of what he himself 
 used to call '^ the failure of his Hfe." 
 
 But Herder was not only Ephorus or supreme director of the 
 Weimar schools, he was also supreme in affairs ecclesiastical, 
 though here, too, his supremacy was too often reduced to the 
 shadow of a name by the combined efforts of his consistory. 
 Without entering into a detailed account of the German eccle- 
 siastical system of those times, it is sufficient to remember that 
 by reason of his appointment Herder ranked first among the 
 clergy of the town, and had a voice in the small upper consistory, 
 and that he was created vice-president of the consistory in 1789, . 
 and president twelve years afterwards, on the death of the old pre- 
 sident, his most wearisome opponent, aged and blind in body, 
 and aged and blind in soul. But in spite of the consistory, he 
 occupied throughout, actually if not legally, the most important 
 position in the Weimar church, always of course under the 
 Grand Duke himself. Or, to translate into English ways, we 
 may figure Herder as the Archbishop of Saxe- Weimar, except 
 that his income was hardly a fortieth part of the income which 
 beseems our English head representative of the gospel of renun- 
 ciation. Such being his position we are bound to take some 
 account of his labours in this sphere too, though it is tempting 
 to overlook them and pass on to themes of greater interest. But 
 
 u2 
 
292 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 we must remember that religion was, after all, Herder's professed 
 aim in life ; and since, as years went on, he came more and more 
 to regard his office as an instrument for the furtherance of the 
 morally good, the account of it naturally falls in tin's place. And 
 here we will begin with the practical, as being the easier ; for 
 religion is a wider thing than education ; and it is one of the 
 fortunate inconsistencies of life that people are generally agreed 
 as to the means that conduce to the morally good, however much 
 they may think to dispute about the end. 
 
 Herder's first object was to root out the tangled abuses that 
 were choking the powers of the Church for good. To this end 
 he introduced his new systems for the registration of births and 
 marriages, and for the better ordering of ecclesiastical accounts. 
 He also ordained that the management of public charities and 
 foundations should come under the supervision of the consistory, 
 and he reformed — or, at all events, attempted to reform — several 
 scandals that had grown roi^nd the practice of confession. It 
 seems to have been possible, for instance, to buy dispensations of 
 certain sins by paying money into the Government treasury, 
 whereupon the sinner was absolved by the consistory " in the 
 Prince's name "; for it was the ruin of the average German courts 
 that they were barbarous in luxury and limited in funds. This 
 kind of dispensation differed very little from the Indulgences of 
 Tetzel, as Herder himself protested, and it seemed an oiFence to 
 him. Again, members of certain walks and positions of life, 
 such as soldiers, the well-to-do, and people of the court, 4iad long 
 been accustomed to consider that such as they had no need of 
 spiritual physician or dispensation, or at least were not required 
 to be so careful of their souls' health as the ordinary creeping 
 mortals around them. " But," said Herder, " in the Church all 
 its members are Christians and nothing more," which must have 
 seemed a hard saying to many a high-stepping child of nature, 
 and many a smug type of comfortable circumstances, who had 
 imagined, as all are inclined to imagine, that " the Almighty 
 would think twice before damning a person of his quality." 
 Herder's schemes for a theological college were not so sue- 
 
THE GOOD. 293 
 
 cessful as in the case of the training-college for masters, for, 
 though he drew up several detailed plans, and was very earnest 
 in the matter, he was continually thwarted either by the con- 
 sistory or want of funds. Towards the end of his life he used to 
 tell Karoline that on the whole he was glad of this ill-success, for 
 on several practical points in the scheme his views had changed. 
 His object was to train candidates for ordination that they might 
 recognise their true position amongst the increasing difficulties 
 of the time, and to give them an opportunity for practical work, 
 that so the responsible positions in the Church might no longer 
 be filled by unripe boys, without any special fitness for their 
 duty (" for the strictest examination," he says, " is useless "), 
 and that the parishes might no longer be led hither and thither, 
 like senseless sheep, by the first charlatan {Marhtschreier) who 
 lifted up his voice. 
 
 It was chiefly to meet the want which he had hoped to 
 supply by a theological college that Herder wrote his series 
 of Letters on the Study of Theology (1780-1). In these, as 
 in the Letters to Theophron (1782), and a careful sketch of a 
 three years' course for a theological student (1782), practical 
 suggestions are very frequent; for, as Herder himself says, 
 without actual examples and instances his good advice is too 
 likely to become painted mist.^ Above all, he urges the young 
 clergy to practise teaching in schools before they attempt any- 
 thing further, and to preach as little as possible ; but, if preaching 
 is unavoidable, to be on their guard against " those common- 
 place sketches of virtues and vices, the darling themes of witty 
 Frenchmen and humdrum journalists." 
 
 They should also not be careful to read much (Herder was 
 writing for Germans), but should look out upon life as it is, and 
 observe the course of it, so acquiring a firm foothold for the 
 future ; "for in age a man stands still, and thinks that therefore 
 no one ought to go further, but that the colours which were 
 
 ^ Zur Beligion und TJieologie, Band x. s. 47. It seems rather cruel that 
 Coleridge should have borrowed the expression and turned it against Herder 
 himself. See Appendix I. 
 
294 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 fashionable in his youth should abide for ever ; a man clings to 
 the ways of his youth, and advance is impossible after certain 
 years." ^ Herder was inclined to think this an advantage on 
 the whole, supposing that the man thereby gained in steadfast- 
 ness. Of the last part of his own life, his saying is only too 
 true ; but, if it were universally true, how happy would those 
 be who die before thirty ! For the truth of the old proverb is, 
 not that because the gods love them some die young, but that 
 because they have died young, therefore the gods love them. 
 
 Of Herder's own preaching, almost as much as is possible 
 has been already said. Of the few sermons that were printed 
 in his lifetime nearly all celebrate some external event : a birth, 
 a death, a churching, or a confirmation in the grand-ducal 
 family ; and it is not often that sermons on these occasions are 
 the most interesting a man can preach, any more than the per- 
 functory ode on a royal marriage is to be ranked with the rest of 
 a poet's work. Yet the sermon on the birth of the Hereditary 
 Prince of Weimar (1783) was received with unbounded admira- 
 tion, and became widely popular ; it was translated, I believe, 
 once or twice into English. It was on this occasion that Wieland 
 said, in his ecstatic way, " Herder preached like a God " ; and 
 to Merck he wrote, " I know nothing so pure, so sublime and 
 simple, so appealing to the heart, So beautiful in thought and 
 beautiful in word, in German or any other tongue." Goethe 
 devoted a long letter to more sober criticism of the copy foi* 
 printing ; he characteristically complains that Herder had left 
 too marked a gulf between the present and the future ; and that 
 in the sketch of an ideal education for a prince — which, accord- 
 ing to Herder, was to aim at health and strength, insight and 
 wisdom, justice and goodness, and love to God and religion — room 
 enough had not been left for the fine arts. " True," says Goethe, 
 *^ a prince must devote himself to works of benevolence and 
 utility, and it is a mistake to allow too much place for the 
 passion for the beautiful; still, other passions are worse and 
 commoner." 
 
 ' Zvr Religion vnd Theologie, Band x. s. 159. 
 
THE GOOD. 295 
 
 In general tone, to judge from the accounts of others, and 
 the few short sketches that have come down to us. Herder's 
 sermons seem to have been the reverse of doctrinal, as, indeed, 
 might have been expected, except, perhaps, during the Biicke- 
 burg period. One of his ecclesiastical reforms was to break 
 through the old custom, or perhaps law, according to which the 
 text for the sermon was always chosen from the Gospel for the 
 Sunday ; whence it had come about, that the common people 
 remained ignorant of the rest of the Bible, and the sermons of 
 the average parson had become a barren series of monotonous 
 phrases, a kind of doctrinal merry-go-round — devoid alike of 
 intellect and merriment. Herder's method rather, was either to 
 expound some passage of the Bible in a simple and human 
 manner, or to enforce some high principle of life that might 
 stick in the hearts of his hearers. For the object of all true 
 teachers is, by one means or another, to inspire others with love 
 for an ideal higher than themselves. Man does not live by 
 bread alone ; and though it be true that a people, as well as an 
 army, " goes upon its belly," yet, just as mere progress in that 
 position is not the final aim of an army, so neither should this 
 be the final aim of a people. It is not, therefore, difficult to 
 accept the account of Herder's preaching given by Schiller, 
 though it is possible that a covert sneer is lurking in the last 
 part: ^^ It is all straightforward, popular, and natural ; a pro- 
 position of practical philosophy applied to certain details of life ; 
 a moral lesson which might be delivered in a mosque just as 
 well as in a church " ; and, we may add, this would be an 
 advantage rather than a fault — if a Mohammedan happened to 
 be present. Of action Herder was very sparing ; he preached 
 in quiet tones, but with endless variety, as became a musician. 
 Wilhelm von Humboldt was struck by his extreme simplicity, 
 but described him as a true orator, who could hold the attention 
 of his audience by the mere charm of his voice. 
 
 Wo can now venture a step further, and examine Herder's 
 attitude toward some of the vexed religious questions of his 
 time ; and we shall be met in the first place by his interpreta- 
 
296 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 tion of the Hebrew Scriptures. For, though the so-called " God- 
 intoxicated " Spinoza — ^the result of countless generations of 
 pure monotheism — could rightly say, " Men of high speculation 
 have, I think, nothing to do with the Scriptures ; for my part, 
 I have learnt none of God^s eternal attributes from the Scriptures, 
 nor have been able to learn any; "^ yet Herder had not to deal 
 with men of high speculation, for of such there are few, and 
 most Europeans were still content to seek their highest religion 
 in these self-same Hebrew Scriptures as of old. But we will 
 keep Spinoza's saying in our minds, lest we should be tempted 
 to exaggerate the importance of Herder's exegesis, or of any 
 theological controversy whatever by confusing it with religion. 
 
 Some such mistake appears to me to have arisen in the mind 
 of no less a man than Coleridge, most magnificent of theosophists, 
 though on such a point I speak with the bated breath of hesita- 
 tion, knowing little of theological subtleties and disputations 
 except their superficial wearisomeness. Coleridge, however, at 
 all events at the beginning of this century, was far too great a 
 man to be wearisome, and no one can fail to be charmed with 
 the supreme eloquence and wit with which he has hurredly 
 annotated three of Herder's works — two theological and one 
 quasi-philosophic.^ Besides their wit and penetration, these 
 notes abound throughout in the thorough-going abuse of eighty 
 years ago, and the frequency of such phrases as '' drunken self- 
 conceit," "whip-syllabub," "vile trash," "impudent sophistry," 
 "lullaby lie," " demi - semi - quavering philosoph," and worse 
 things, must be historically interesting, and perhaps refreshing 
 to our more gentle and dubious age, when no one seems certain 
 of anything except of his own uncertainty. But the dispute 
 
 ' Epistle 34. Translated in Mr. Pollock's Spinoza^ p. 52. 
 
 2 On the Resurrection^ the Letters on the Study of Theology^ and the 
 Kalligone, Herder's second attack on Kant. Coleridge's copies of these works 
 are preserved in the British Museum. His notes are generally in pencil, and 
 several words have become illegible to me or have been cut away by binders. 
 But I have copied them out as carefully as I could, and purpose to publish them 
 in an appendix for the benefit of those who take at least as much interest in 
 Coleridge as I myself, but are unable to refer to the originals. 
 
THE GOOD. 297 
 
 itself, like all disputes between men who really belong to the 
 same party, and are fighting on the same side (and there are 
 only two parties in the world, if so many as two), the dispute itself 
 has with time ceased to be of great interest. It is true that 
 Coleridge's conception of religion was entirely different from 
 Herder's ; and in matters of theosophy it would be impossible 
 to place Herder on the level of Coleridge for a single moment. 
 For he had little or nothing of that gorgeous imagination on the 
 wings of which Coleridge could mount to the seventh heaven at 
 will, and pass out of reach of criticism, if not of vision. Yet 
 Herder's work for religion, from this side too, was not without 
 result and significance ; perhaps it was even more truly modern 
 than the theosophism of the intervening period. Keeping, there- 
 fore, to our ground, we will let Coleridge " fly away " for the 
 present, and examine what was the meaning of the task Herder 
 set before himself, and how far he succeeded therein, judging 
 him — as every man must be judged — by the best, not by the 
 worst, that is in him. 
 
 To begin with Herder's interpretation of the Scripture, the 
 keynote of his method is struck on the first page of his Letters 
 on the Study of Theology^ where he says, "" We must read the 
 Bible in a human way" {menschlich, translated by Coleridge 
 "human-natural"); that is to say, we must read the series of 
 Hebrew poets and historians included in the Bible in the same 
 spirit as we read Hesiod, Thucydides, and iEschylus ; we must 
 interpret their history and their thought in close connection with 
 their times, and not set up their maxims of morality or tradition 
 as universal imperatives. Thus only can we hope to recognise 
 the full beauty of Judaism and of Christianity, and the immortal 
 literature which they have produced, and at the same time to 
 silence all scoffing and childish persiflage by ourselves adopting 
 the basis of free criticism, and proving that the beauty of the 
 Bible is thereby enhanced rather than diminished. 
 
 In these Letters and in two volumes of Christian Writings, 
 in which are included the treatises on the Kesurrection, the 
 Saviour, and the Gift of Tongues, Herder endeavours, for the 
 
298 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 sake of theological students, to read certain passages of the Bible 
 by the light of this " human " method ; and though, like most 
 great men who have written much but have had no definite 
 system of philosophy, he abounds in inconsistencies, and though, 
 after the great advances criticism has made since his day, few 
 of his interpretations can be considered final, yet, as long as he 
 holds his ground and is true to his method, he is safe. His 
 object w^as to induce others to see the Bible as it was and is in 
 itself, not as it has become under the dusty coating of centuries 
 of dogmatism. No one will call the effort vain who has felt how 
 the charm of the Bible continually vanishes or is dulled under 
 the drowsy routine of use and wont. So long have people been 
 accustomed to regard the Bible as a decent matter of course, or 
 as a book to which it is improper to look for satisfaction to 
 human interest and human sense of beauty, that we now read 
 it or listen to it with the same expression of gentle contentment 
 or resignation that is considered seemly in church. Its very 
 words have become so familiar that it requires an effort to pre- 
 vent them slipping through the mind as glibly and with as little 
 meaning as the alphabet. We might compare Herder's method 
 to the great Pre-Raphaelite movement in painting.^ To those 
 who would joyfully welcome the most destructive criticism, the 
 most vapid persiflage, to arouse them from senseless apathy 
 (for then at least they would be awake, whereas death and 
 sleep were brothers of old), men who have attempted what 
 Herder attempted will always be venerable, no matter what 
 their failings. 
 
 Herder's great opponents were the scoffers on one side and 
 dogmatism on the other ; both were stronger in his day than in 
 ours, and he, trying to take his stand between the two and 
 reveal the follies of each, was naturally heartily abused by both. 
 But, on the whole, he probably regarded dogmatism as the more 
 dangerous foe. It is difficult for us to imagine the weary sand- 
 
 ' " We find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring, 
 but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael." — Modern 
 Pa'interSy vol. iii. p. 57, " On the False Ideal — Religious." 
 
THE GOOD. 299 
 
 heaps of barren scholasticism under which the German mind — 
 Lutheran, Reformed, or Pietistic — had striven to smother and 
 bury the pure spirit of Christianity. How long, said Herder, 
 are we to lie in the prison of dogma, squabbling over scholia 
 and harping on diminutive points of doctrine, till we cannot see 
 the wood for the number of the trees? ^^ People have treated 
 Christianity as the old scholiasts treated Aristotle." ^ In his 
 later writings he speaks with praise of his old opponents 
 Michaelis and Spalding for their effort to break through the 
 yoke of German scholasticism. He even acknowledges Nicolai's 
 services in the same attempt.^ For " now is the time of ex- 
 purgation {des Heraustfiuns), the time for restoring will come ; "^ 
 and the ground must be cleared of the dead jungle before the 
 colonist can plant his vineyard and sit under the fig-tree. One 
 is almost inclined to envy these sappers and miners of the last 
 century ; the work before them was so quick, so simple and 
 straightforward, whereas the great organic growths hardly move 
 from year to year. 
 
 On the more positive side. Herder's view of Christianity 
 may be conjectured from the criticism of Jean Paul on Herder's 
 treatise called The Saviour : — 
 
 You have reconciled philosophy and theology, and the man Jesus is 
 now a man for the second time. Let no one again give him the rouge of 
 divinity (gottliche SchminJce) which hides all his noble features. 
 
 It might be replied that philosophy has properly nothing to 
 do with such a question, but I am inclined to think (though 
 indeed this is too wide a subject for generalisation, except after 
 very wide experience, which has not been mine) that the German 
 mind tends to regard religion as intellectual rather than emo- 
 tional ; as doctrinal or philosophic rather than personal and 
 "heart-felt"; as a matter for reason rather than faith ; at all 
 events, I believe the confusion of these two conceptions to have 
 been the cause of that inconsistency and wavering demeanour in 
 
 ' Zur Theologie und Religion, Band x. s. 7. 
 
 2 Ibid. s. 275. 3 Ibid. s. 11. 
 
300 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 Herder when dealing with a question like this, whereat Coleridge 
 took such offence ; and justly, from his point of view, though he 
 is unjust in the motives he attributes. It is quite true that 
 Herder did try to occupy a middle position, and those who, like 
 Coleridge, denounce him as a " spy " and " assassin," or blame 
 him for trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, 
 are welcome to get what good they can from their abuse. But 
 all who stand as passionless spectators to the scene, with sym- 
 pathies about equally divided between the piteous terror of the 
 hare and the mad exultation of the hounds, will understand that 
 Herder's attempt, and even his inconsistency, were not only 
 inevitable, taken in connection with his time, but also praise- 
 worthy. 
 
 They w^ere inevitable because, having come under the 
 influence of such men as Hamann, Klopstock, and Lavater, 
 who, as far as Christianity went, proclaimed pure love and 
 unquestioning faith, and came nearer to the ordinary English 
 conception of religion than I believe to be common in Germany 
 — having once come under this influence Herder was never 
 able to free himself entirely from it ; whilst, on the other hand, 
 he was continually driven by his German mind to probe and 
 speculate and philosophise into the grounds of this faith, and was 
 thus led, half-unconsciously to himself, by his keen sense of 
 history and criticism, back to premises from which his original 
 conclusions do not readily follow. I myself am inclined to think 
 that Herder's temporary alliance with Lavater and his life-long 
 admiration of Klopstock's religious poems were not really of 
 advantage to him. I believe that whenever he approached 
 theology the influence of such men unconsciously blinded his 
 eyes ; he continually put himself back on their ground without 
 perceiving that the position was for him a false position. All 
 men with sympathies as wide as Herder's are tempted to do the 
 same ; and I suppose this to be the cause of much of the ser- 
 monizing and exclamatory religion with which some of his 
 theological works are overloaded. But it may be replied that 
 such things are in the nature of theological works, and edify 
 
THE GOOD. 301 
 
 those for whom they are written ; also, that such men as Lavater 
 prevented Herder from drifting into the commonplace religion of 
 sleepy routine. And that is true too. 
 
 Again, Herder's attempt, if not his inconsistency, was also 
 praiseworthy. He saw that the religious system, which for 
 more than a thousand years had dictated the code of morality for 
 Europe, was now assaulted on all sides. His wide view of history 
 enabled him to see how essential the Christian religion had been 
 if only as an instrument for the furtherance of humanity. He 
 looked around and saw nothing that could take its place. The 
 sanctions of Christianity once broken through, he supposed another 
 period of chaos would succeed. At the same time no one was 
 more keenly alive to the beauty of Christianity in itself. He saw 
 that, however much people might fight round the edges, the heart 
 of the religion had become indispensable for mankind. "It is 
 impossible for man to go back now that he has once reached 
 Christianity," the worship of self-denial, the sanctity of sorrow, 
 the reverence for what is low, says Goethe, in the well-known 
 passage in Meisters Wanderjahre; and Herder's position was 
 exactly the same. He is inclined to think that the doctrines 
 about Christ were not at all essential to Christianity ; that the 
 idea was everything, and that the central idea was the complete 
 morality of self-abnegation. For the truth of the idea he looked 
 to its omnipotent success rather than to miracles and signs of 
 divine origin,^ and thinking thus he also believed that the inter- 
 preter must be modern. He thought that to the mass of man- 
 kind it was useless to cry back ; the modern spirit must be taken 
 into account, and those who strive to defend Christianity by an 
 appeal from the critical to-day to the organic age of fathers and 
 popes, only widen the gulf and draw a harder line between 
 themselves and the thought of the world. For it is no good to 
 forget the time of day, and all such attempts as these would 
 have seemed to Herder as absurd as to command the Nile, as it 
 bums past the Pyramids, to turn back and seek its fountains of 
 
 * Here again it seems rather cruel of Coleridge to use one of Herder's leading 
 principles against him. 
 
802 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 undiscovered snow. Yet he himself " wished he had been born 
 in the Middle Ages" ; but, clearly perceiving that he was not, he 
 accepted the sad fact and did what yet he could to battle against 
 chaos. That his efforts were not vain is proved by the testimony 
 of such people as the Frau von Stein, Georg Miiller, and Jean 
 Paul. Some of us will always need such men as Herder to 
 interpret and mediate between the past and future, and no one 
 except reactionists or revolutionists will feel bound to criticise 
 them harshly as '' spies" or '' arch- Jesuits," or anything of the 
 sort, but will- keep an open eye for their services and forgive 
 them much, recognising the purity of their purpose and the 
 difficulties of their lot. Nay, they need no forgiveness ; they 
 are the very salt of the earth. 
 
 Into Herder's personal religion I do not intend to examine 
 more closely. A man's religion is to others the life he has led, 
 and all definition and dogmatism on such a subject is vain. 
 " The highest cannot be spoken in words," says Goethe ; and 
 again, " there are concerns of thought and sentiment which 
 properly should not be spoken of except between God and the 
 individual." If we still want to be more precise we may follow 
 out the line of thought suggested by such sentences as the follow- 
 ing, in Herder's own words : 
 
 Religion is that which binds our conscience ; it is an inner certainty, 
 incapable of mathematical demonstration ; religion is the consciousness 
 what we are as parts of the world, what we ought to be as men and have 
 to do.' We strive over opinions, but opinions are not religion, for there 
 is but one religion, though it appears under many forms.'* 
 
 Some have said that Herder set humanity above religion, 
 that in fact his religion was humanity, and he only regarded 
 what is generally called religion as an instrument of morality ; 
 and it is quite true that Herder speaks more about humanity 
 than most of us would find edifying now that the word seems 
 likely to become a formula and fetter as warping and restricted 
 as anything which it was supposed to supersede ; it is also true 
 
 ' ^ir Religion und Theologies Band xii. pp. 236, 236. 
 « Ibid. p. 254. 
 
THE GOOD. 303 
 
 that he laid greater stress on the morally good than on any other 
 phase of human life, though he was not careful to define the 
 morally good, being always a practical teacher rather than an 
 ethical philosopher. But, when we are asked to accept neat and 
 piquant summaries of the inmost recesses of a man's soul (such, 
 I mean, as "humanitarian" of Herder, "great heathen ^^ of 
 Goethe, " Calvinist who has lost his creed," of Carlyle), we shall 
 generally find it safest to say with Job, *^ Lo, these are parts of 
 his ways, but how little a portion is heard of him." For Wisdom 
 saith, " I alone compassed the circuit of heaven, and walked in 
 the bottom of the deep. In the waves of the sea, and in all the 
 earth, and in every people and nation, I got a possession. I am 
 the mother of fair love, and fear, a,nd knowledge, and holy hope : 
 I therefore, being eternal, am given to all my children which 
 are named of him. They that eat me shall yet be hungry, and 
 they that drink me shall yet be thirsty." For the first m^an knew 
 her not perfectly ; no more shall the last find her out. For her 
 thoughts are more than the sea, and her counsels profounder 
 than the great deep.^ 
 
 * Ucclesiasticus, xxiv. 5, 6, 18, 21, 28, 29. 
 
304 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE BEAUTIFUL. 
 
 " We get so near, so very, very near; 
 'Tis an old tale."— Paracelsus. 
 
 DuKiNG the last hundred and fifty years so much that might 
 have been spared has been said about the beautiful, that we are 
 at length coming to the conclusion that very few people indeed 
 should be allowed to say anything more ; that even those few 
 must be brief, lest we turn and rend them ; and that the more 
 beauty that is produced and the less that is said about it the 
 better ; for criticism which consists, as is the common way, of 
 mere exclamations of praise or blame, soon palls and becomes 
 nauseous, whether we agree with it or whether we disagree ; and 
 criticism which pretends to science and analyses emotions, 
 reasoning of this and that, is only too likely to rub off that first 
 and irretrievable bloom of joy, which by the contemplation of 
 the beautiful is shed over minds whose sense of beauty is innate 
 and springs from their own corresponding beauty, and not from 
 any refinements of knowledge and dogmatic principles. As a 
 rule, therefore, it seems best to be silent and leave the beautiful 
 to the safe keeping of the producers, the poets and artists — that 
 is to say, the men of genius — who are always few but supreme, 
 being raised far above the strictures of criticism, not following 
 rules but unconsciously revealing them. For " men may devine 
 and glosen up and down," ^ but the laws of beauty are eternal, 
 though only a man of genius can give us a glimpse of them ; 
 and the man of genius in criticism is at least as rare as the man 
 of genius in poetry and art. 
 
 ' The Wif of Bathes Prologue. 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL ' 305 
 
 But then we are brought face to face with the question which 
 was perplexing every one in Herder's time, and continues to 
 perplex many still — the question whether the laws of beauty are 
 eternal ; or, in other words, what is beauty ? Have we any 
 standard beyond the judgment of the individual, or, at the best, 
 the judgment of the majority ? If not, we cannot gainsay the 
 tendency of our youth to prefer a comic song to the tragedy of 
 Lear, nor contradict the opinion of the sportsman, who thinks 
 a picture of a man in red jumping over a gate more beautiful 
 than the Virgin of the Rocks, nor the opinion of the English- 
 man who finds more in a glib waltz than in a Beethoven 
 sonata. As the question takes us at once down to the very 
 depths of metaphysics, and involves theories on the immortality 
 of the soul and other abstruse subjects, it would be out of place 
 to consider it further here. It is enough to remember that 
 some of our wisest men have thought, and still do think, that 
 Lear and the Virgin of the Rocks and the Beethoven sonata 
 w^ould eternally remain the more beautiful, though the whole 
 world was populated by the youth of the music hall, by sports- 
 men, or Englishmen, as the case might be.^ 
 
 Herder saw this difficulty clearly enough, and constantly 
 refers to it in the Kalligone as an objection to Kant's theory of 
 aesthetics, which, denying the possibility of persuasion by abstract 
 argument on the question of beauty, postulated a certain agree- 
 ment that might be looked for in all noble minds that were not 
 warped by convention and evil ways.'^ But Herder himself did 
 not escape ; he has even less basis for criticism, for he does not 
 take into account the character of the subject, but lays his 
 foundation on the sand of the hedonistic theory, which gives 
 no hold whatever. For our typical Englishman might say, 
 
 * Happily this ghastly supposition is impossible, and, for the same reason 
 that makes it impossible, beauty is safe. We are learning more and more clearly 
 that everything, however common and unclean, has a right to survive as long as 
 it can ; but we ai'e also learning that what is common and unclean has no chance 
 in the end against the higher forms of beauty, which are thus by the very nature 
 of man inevitable and eternal. 
 
 '^ See Professor Wallace's short account of the Krltlk of Judgment. Kant, p. 1 95 
 
 X 
 
306 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 " Pleasure, according to Herder and Spinoza, is that which 
 extends my existence ; pain is that which limits my existence. 
 Now I feel that my existence is extended by the tune ^ My 
 Queen,' but sadly limited by a Beethoven sonata, for involun- 
 tary sleep and boredom are both limitations ; therefore, to me 
 the one is more beautiful than the other ; it may not be so to 
 every one, but that is no concern of mine ; if all the world were 
 like me, or if all the world were like my German friend who 
 prefers the other thing, we might begin to talk about the 
 absolutely beautiful ; but at present there is no such thing, and 
 it is absurd to talk of one thing being more beautiful than 
 another, except in so far as it pleases us, or what we suppose to 
 be the majority of mankind." This negation of all possible basis 
 for criticism follows immediately from the hedonistic principle 
 which Herder really adopted, though his sense of beauty pre- 
 vented him from working entirely upon it. The same position 
 is, I believe, maintained by most of our modern men of scienccj 
 so that I suppose it to be impregnable from the physiological 
 side ; and if we were not obliged to contradict it, or at least to 
 imagine something further, every time we try to rise above the 
 likes and dislikes of everyday life it would recommend itself for 
 its simplicity and for delivering us from an amount of high- 
 sounding cant that is generally its alternative. 
 
 But fortunately here again, when we come to more particular 
 and tangible questions, it seems to make very little difference 
 whether a man believes in ideal laws of absolute beauty or 
 denies the possibility of philosophy and the existence of beauty 
 altogether, provided his sense of the beautiful be innate and ti*ue. 
 In a man like Herder we must not expect rigid consistency and 
 deductive reasoning. He seems often to work from principles 
 which would lead to the denial of all absolute laws of beauty, 
 as indeed was but natural in an age which, after pursuing 
 beauty through a course of years, ended by doubting its exist- 
 ence ; just as the age which has pursued happiness as our being's 
 end and aim for a course of years now supposes that it has dis- 
 covered pessimism to be the only wear. And yet at the same 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 307 
 
 time Herder's sense of the beautiful was often singularly true ; 
 or, if we are forbidden to say that such a thing can be true 
 because it does not represent some actual fact, we will say that 
 it was often singularly modern and opposed to the pseudo- 
 classicism with which he was surrounded. Of his youthful 
 rebellion against the dull and commonplace theories of eighteenth- 
 century poetry and art, I have already spoken briefly ; it re- 
 mains to observe his efforts in manhood to carry forward the 
 work he had begun. And I will begin with art, for his services 
 to art have been generally overlooked. 
 
 Scattered throughout most of Herder's critical and historical 
 works may be found very suggestive hints on art, especially 
 on the history of art. As an example of such we might take 
 a piece of verse called Pygmalion (Adrastea, 1801-3), which 
 describes the annoyance of the old gods on returning to their 
 temples and sweet haunts in Rome and Hellas and finding them 
 all transformed to museums.^ This might be called the pre- 
 cursor of that spirit of despairing regret which is always 
 lamenting that we were not born two thousand years ago ; the 
 spirit which has found deathless expression in choruses from 
 Hellas, and in the perfect words of Keats, in Last Oracles, and 
 Heine's lovely dreams of Gods in Exile.'^ But when he is at 
 his best no one is more aware of the time of day than Herder. 
 Fully recognising the beauty of the past, as seen through the 
 halo of death, and the present's ungainliness and dull oppres- 
 sion, he perceived at once the sorrow and the vanity of all this 
 mourning for the golden years. Except in moments of depres- 
 
 ^ Something like Chaucer's gods when the woods were felled to make 
 Arcite's pyre : 
 
 " Ne how the goddes rannen up and doun 
 Disherited of hir habitatioun, 
 In which they woneden in rest and pees, 
 Nimphes, Faunes, and Amadriades." 
 
 The Knightes Tale. 
 2 Strange as the assertion may appear, there is often a very close connection 
 between Heine and Herder, especially in the history of thought and art. Again 
 and again Heine seems to have taken Herder's idea and transfused it, till it 
 glows and vibrates, with the soul of a poet and the wit of a Heine. 
 
 X 2 
 
308 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 sion and melancholy fear— that is to say, except when he was 
 not at his best — Herder had clear eyes to see that the world was 
 still new. " A man of genius/' he exclaims, " will make new 
 pictures even when the objects have been seen and sung a thou- 
 sand times, for he sees them with his own eyes, and, the truer 
 he remains to himself, with the greater originality will he put 
 them together." And again : " We must live and work in 
 our own time or posterity will stand astonished at the pitiful 
 insanity of men who tried to change their climate, their time, 
 and their race." It may be said that we have needed the warn- 
 ing in the last few years at least as much as it was needed a 
 century back ; but it might be more profitable, instead of utter- 
 ing good advice, to consider what this regretful yearning for 
 the old classic life so sharply contrasted with our surroundings 
 really means, as being itself a part of our history. It may be 
 that in our present state it is impossible for the arts of sculpture, 
 painting, and poetry to tell us anything else. It may be that 
 our highest ground for noble emotions — in painting, for instance 
 — must be to know the kind of sponge with which Pompeian 
 mothers used to wash their babies, and the kind of flute into 
 which the dancing -girls of the Empire breathed the gaiety of 
 despair. If this is so, we must boldl}^ confess it for the sake of 
 posterity ; for even we shall be interesting historically, and it 
 will also be of interest to ourselves to see whither such things 
 wnll lead us. 
 
 But a man like Herder is not always inclined to look at the 
 matter in this calm and historical way, and his great service to 
 art was due to the fervour with which he joined in the effort — 
 it miffht almost be said led the effort — to free her from the 
 trammels of a frigid classicism, which had not even the merit 
 of the realism that has now been infused into the classic history 
 by the example of the Pre-Raphaelites and the general tone of 
 modern thought. 
 
 Greek art, lie said, must not be taken as an eternal model; it is perfect 
 in itself, but for that very reason all modern imitations must be false; for 
 the architecture and sculpture (»f men must spring from their way of 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 309 
 
 thought and life. In this sense there is no fixed ideal of art ; and * ' to 
 the man who limits himself to one period of art, be it France or Greece, 
 the ideal that extends over all peoples and times must remain for ever 
 unknown and strange." 
 
 Following out these principles Herder was one of the very 
 first to draw attention to the beauty and sincerity of the me- 
 diaeval painters and the mediaeval architecture, as well Flemish 
 and German as Italian. In the next chapter but one we shall 
 see his admiration of Diirer on his first visit to Nuremburg ; 
 and DUrer, who must be classed with the mediaeval artists, had 
 hitherto been almost ignored by the learned and the " men of 
 taste " in Germany. In all this it may be seen how much 
 more modern Herder's aspect of art was than was Goethe's in 
 the latter part of his life ; and by the modern aspect I mean 
 the general tendency of the last thirty or forty years as repre- 
 sented chiefly by Mr. Ruskin and the so-called Pre-Raphaelites. 
 In this sense we may include the most recent form of classical 
 revival on account of the generally strict naturalism of the school. 
 In some of his later writings it is true (for instance, in ihQ Letters 
 for the Furtherance of Humanity) , Herder is inclined to insist too 
 strongly on the life-giving power infused into art by that revival 
 of classical knowledge at the end of the fifteenth century, which, 
 together with countless other causes, went to make up the 
 movement of the Renaissance. He forgets that this bright 
 age of some fifty years of glorious life was followed by three 
 centuries of almost unbroken sickness and death ; and that one 
 of the chief germs of the sickness, though there were many 
 others, was this self- same revival of classical knowledge. But 
 in his best works, and generally throughout. Herder does not 
 suffer himself to be led away by any excessive admiration for 
 one particular development of art from the contemplation and 
 recognition of true art as a whole, under whatever form and in 
 whatever place it may appear. 
 
 Of Herder's writings especially devoted to art the two best 
 are the work on plastic art (Plastik, 1778) and the treatise first 
 published in the Miscellanies of 1786, called by the same name 
 
310 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 as Lessing's IIoio the Ancients represented Death. Both are 
 criticisims on Lessing, and in both Herder has caught some- 
 thing of Lessing's style ; for he is clear and to the point, and free 
 from those digressions and intervals of dullness which in Herder's 
 work too often tempt the unwary reader to skip. Of the two 
 the Plastik is the more suggestive ; and, indeed, it opened a 
 new vista in art-criticism and went far to establish a new law of 
 art. In reading the Laocoon Herder had noticed with surprise, 
 as every modem reader must notice, that Lessing had not 
 thought it worth while to make any real distinction between 
 sculpture and painting, but had been content to class them 
 under one common term as opposed to poetry. In his Plastik 
 Herder tries to establish the laws of this distinction. He is 
 feeling after the law of limitation in sculpture resulting from 
 its completeness, and he perceives, though he does not adequately 
 explain, the different degree of emotion and imagination with 
 which painting must be contemplated. The distinction has 
 become singularly prominent and important of late years ;^ 
 some, indeed, have been pleased to discourse upon it in subdued 
 tones of almost religious mysticism ; but in Herder's time it 
 was completely unknown or overlooked. 
 
 The difference in purpose and result which separates the 
 sculptor's and the painter's arts seems to be mainly, if not 
 entirely, due to the difference of the material through which 
 each has to express his thoughts ; marble being suited for definite 
 forms of completeness — the smooth, gleaming limbs of gods and 
 heroes, the broad and flowing lines of antique drapery, the solid 
 masses of hair, which scorn exactness of imitation ; in a word, 
 as Heine says, the forms with which the idea is co-extensive. 
 Whereas colour and the flat canvas, without caring for exact 
 imitation either, admit of the subtle lines of portraiture, vague 
 hints and suggestions of delicate colour, lurking places of dark- 
 ness, far-off tracts of vanishing distance, and spaces of acknow- 
 ledged incompleteness, where the imagination may work its will ; 
 
 ' See Mr. Browning's poem on Old Masters at Florence^ and Mr. Ruskiii 
 passim, especially the Edinburgh Lccfiwrs .- ulso Mr. Pater's Renaissance. 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 311 
 
 for here, too, the weak wins, bj reason of what is aspired to be 
 and is not. But this explanation was a great deal too simple, 
 and looked too unphilosophic for the German mind of the young 
 Herder, joyfully beginning to feel his way along the lines of 
 the philosophy of sensation then in vogue. He saw clearly 
 enough that the provinces of the two arts were distinct, that we 
 cannot expect the same results, nor treat the same subject in 
 sculpture as in painting. What then was the cause that lay at 
 the root of the difference ? We have seen that he answered the 
 question to his own satisfaction one day as he was wandering in 
 the gardens of Versailles. Poetry and music are for the ear, 
 painting for the eye ; sculpture is a distinct art, therefore it 
 must be judged by a separate sense ; it obviously does not appeal 
 to the taste nor smell —therefore it is left that it appeals to the 
 touch. The argument looks straightforward enough, and yet 
 the conclusion is false, or at all events so much exaggerated as 
 to give an entirely false impression to the incautious. If we 
 follow his arguments a little further, we shall see that the false 
 step in the process was the supposition that sculpture, being a 
 distinct art, must appeal to a separate sense. 
 
 At the time when the idea first struck him Herder was 
 much interested in Diderot's experiments on the blind; and, 
 during the eight years in which he was collecting materials for 
 the work, he was also under the influence of Berkeley's Neia 
 Theory of Vision. The two together had conclusively proved 
 that the eye presents us merely with a flat, coloured surface, and 
 that we only acquire a conception of distance or space by touch, 
 and then by imperceptible inferences from repeated experience 
 of certain angles and lines and shades of colour. Thus Diderot's 
 blind man, who suddenly gained his sight, thought that what he 
 saw was a flat surface w^hich struck his eye — and supposed, 
 therefore, that sight was a kind of touch ; and in this time has 
 shown that he was perfectly right, if, as we are told, all the 
 senses are but forms of motion, that is, of impact or touch. 
 Now, thought Herder, a picture is a flat, coloured surface, 
 precisely similar to the flat, coloured surface which is all that is 
 presented to us by the eye, independently of touch ; therefore a 
 
312 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 picture appeals to the eye alone ; but sculpture, wliich deals 
 with solids and implies intervals of space, can only be recog- 
 nised as solid by the touch, and therefore appeals to the touch 
 alone. He is obviously wrong in both conclusions; but it is 
 worth while to see where the fallacy lies, because the former of 
 the two mistakes has been recently dished up for our amuse- 
 ment by the school, if school it can be called, which opines that 
 a painting should only be a flat, coloured surface without form, 
 and therefore necessarily void ; for colour without form, if it 
 were possible, would be chaos. But it is impossible, for chaos 
 cannot exist before the eyes of man ; it is only possible where 
 there is no intelligence to give it form. 
 
 The fact is, the senses of sight and touch have become by 
 long experience so closely connected that it is almost impossible 
 for any one who has both to use one without calling in the other; 
 least of all is it possible to use sight without touch, or the infer- 
 ences we have unconsciously drawn from touch, that is, our 
 perception of distance. Every one necessarily acquires the con- 
 ception of limitation ; in other words, space is a necessary form 
 of thought— -for space and form are the same thing, or, at all 
 events, they are inseparable. And we talk of '' infinite space " 
 either by a mistake or a convenient metaphor; for, though we 
 cannot conceive a limit to space, neither can we conceive space 
 without limit. When, therefore, we look at a picture in which 
 something is represented (and if nothing is represented, as in a 
 Turkey carpet and some few kinds of illumination, it is an abuse 
 of terms to call it a picture, though even in these we do not get 
 rid of form) — when we look at a picture we unconsciously draw 
 all those inferences concerning space and solidity from our sense 
 of touch which we draw in ordinary life when we are dealing 
 with what is really solid and distant. Only, as no great painter 
 will try to beguile us with a semblance of reality, we accept the 
 convention, and, if need be, summon our imagination to suggest 
 the inferences of distance which, if we were really contem- 
 plating solids, would suggest themselves. Indeed, the whole art 
 of painting presupposes acquiescence in a convention and this 
 effort of the imagination, which is generally unconscious or very 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 313 
 
 slightly felt ; for it does not destroy the pleasure of our contem- 
 plation if we touch the picture and prove that it is really flat. 
 But Herder is right in this — that in sculpture this call on the 
 imagination is not so strong ; the thing is solid, and we know 
 that if we touched it we should find it occupying the amount 
 of space it appears to occupy. But even thus, I doubt if the 
 professed anatomist or the professed sculptor would gain a 
 clear perception of the beauty of a statue if he were blind- 
 folded and allowed to pass his hands over it ; the ordinary lay- 
 man would certainly not perceive its beauty with anything like 
 the clearness that is given by a single glance. As has been 
 already said, when we look at solids, or even flat representations 
 of solids, we inevitably draw inferences of distance and space 
 which originally are due to the sense of touch ; but by touch 
 alone we cannot call up an adequate image of a thing, partly 
 for want of experience, partly because touch cannot suggest the 
 play of light and colour. And, indeed, it would be a sufficient 
 answer to Herder's theory to say that it is now generally agreed 
 that the Greek statues were wholly or partially painted, or at 
 least covered with an encaustic varnish which gave even the 
 flesh a certain amount of colour, that would be imperceptible by 
 touch alone. And when Herder says that we are restless whilst 
 we are looking at a statue, because we wish to perceive its full 
 beauty by touch, I think the statement is imaginary, and the 
 reason little short of absurd — for it ought to apply to all beau- 
 tiful things that are solid, and to all beautiful persons ; whereas, 
 after very early childhood, we are satisfied to contemplate such 
 things by the sight alone ; inferring their solidity, distance, and 
 general form in the usual unconscious way, without any desire 
 to touch them ; or, if such desire exist, it is affectionate and 
 emotional rather than purely aesthetic.-^ 
 
 We must conclude, therefore, that Herder's first principle 
 is false as a whole, though it contains a certain glimmering of 
 truth. But, because his law is false, we must not, therefore, 
 undervalue his services to art. His doctrines on the difference 
 
 ' For a practical illustration of Herder's theory, see the fifth of Goethe's 
 Roman Elegies, 
 
314 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 in choice of subject and style of treatment, which is to be 
 expected in sculpture and painting, are just, and would now be 
 generally admitted. On the one hand they would save us from 
 those nauseous pieces of trickery in marble, the veiled faces, 
 the Parisian ladies in fashionable costumes, and the ladies, also 
 distinctly Parisian, without costumes at all, that are the admira- 
 tion of all who delight in trickery ; for Herder established the 
 law, that marble was only suited for the eternal form of man 
 apart from all fleeting fashions and peculiarities. On the other 
 hand, he did much to deliver the world from the frigid pseudo- 
 classical kind of painting falsely called " ideal"; ^' that excessive 
 tenderness,*' as he calls it, "that quality-like horror of the 
 common, which in the end makes our earth as narrow as our 
 parlour ; and dries up the freshest, deepest springs of truth, of 
 movement, and of power, till they become a dreary slough." 
 
 But his greatest service, after all, was that he endeavoured 
 to advance landscape painting to the position which it has since 
 occupied. In this attempt he was of course acting in direct 
 opposition to Lessing, who thought that landscape was unsuited 
 for representation, because it did not admit of an " ideal." But, 
 says Herder, though darkness and sunrise, lightning and storm, 
 brook and flame, are impossible in sculpture, because they could 
 not be touched (in other words, because marble does not admit 
 of such forms), yet they are suited to painting, which is like a 
 fair dream compared to the definite truth of sculpture. " Some 
 people think it ignoble," he goes on, " to represent the face of 
 creation ; just as if the heavens and earth were not better and 
 more significant than the cripple who creeps between them, 
 whose representation is considered the one and only subject 
 worthy of painting." 
 
 These are the leading principles of this treatise ; the remain- 
 der deals with the separate limits and features of a statue in 
 succession, and with certain strictures and rules for sculpture 
 derived from these principles, more directly interesting to the 
 professed antiquary and sculptor than to us. This is true, 
 also, of his shorter works on Nemes's and the JRepreseniation of 
 Death by the Ancients^ both published in the Miscellanies of 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 815 
 
 1786. As to the latter, Lessiiig, in his essay of the same name, 
 had maintained that the Greeks figured death on their tombs as 
 a blooming boy holding an inverted torch ; but, said Herder, 
 this figure cannot be death, for the Greeks regarded death as 
 something horrible, and they were unwilling to represent the 
 horrible at all ; the boy is rather sleep, the brother of death. 
 The distinction is not very important, for we may say that the 
 sleep of death was intended, and that on a tomb the Greeks 
 naturally liked to represent the death of their friends as a gentle 
 sleep ; or, it may be, that the boy is the Genius of the departed 
 and has just sunk the torch of life. At all events, Heyne is no 
 doubt right when he says that the little treatise is beautiful and 
 sugfi^estive, but whether Lessing would have been convinced is 
 another matter; "for when Lessing once formed an opinion it 
 was not his way to allow himself to be won over."^ After 
 stating his main position, Herder passes in review the other 
 forms under which death and the soul were represented ; Psyche 
 with her butterfly wings, ZephjT visiting the dead, Charon in 
 his boat, the dolphins and ships, the scenes from Hades, and 
 the cheerful figures of swans, or storks, and flowers, and the 
 Bacchic processions sweeping merrily along. But we may have 
 to recur at times to Herder's views on art in later years, and 
 we will now turn to another phase of the beautiful. 
 
 Of Herder's inestimable services to the poetry of his country 
 so much has already been said that little more is needed here. 
 We have seen that here he can only be compared with Words- 
 worth in England, or, to be more exact, he was the chief instru- 
 ment in Germany of that glorious work which was wrought out 
 in England by Cowper and Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
 Byron. He smote the stony rock and the waters flowed. Sel- 
 dom, I suppose, in the course of history has the fruit of wisdom 
 and labour ripened so quickly. Within ten years, one might 
 almost say within five years, after Herder had first spoken, the 
 whole aspect of German literature had changed, and the whole 
 
 ' Heyne's Preface in Miiller's edition of Herder's works. 
 
816 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 land was ringing with immortal songs. Herder saw of the 
 labour of his soul, but he was not satisfied. And this was 
 natural, for it is one of the hardest things to reverence co-equals 
 in age or the generation that is arising to supplant us, as the 
 buds push oiF the old leaves and make them wither. But those 
 who were great and revered when we were young hang there 
 like stars, gleaming on us from their vague and holy distance. 
 We can hardly imagine that such men were limited in a body 
 and had a back to their heads and a back to their lives any 
 more than we can imagine the face on the other side of the 
 moon. And this was the reason that even towards the very end 
 of the century — twenty years and more after the revolution had 
 begun — Herder stirred the wrath of Schiller by continuing to 
 discourse on Kleist, Witthof, Uz, and others, now only memo- 
 rable as the predecessors of the great German poets. In truth, 
 it was much as though a contemporary of Shelley and Keats 
 had continually harped on the merits and demerits of Young 
 and Shenstone. 
 
 But, taking this natural prejudice into account, it must not, 
 therefore, be thought that Herder was blind to the reviving 
 beauty of his time, though he did not fully perceive the vastness 
 of the difference that separated the new from the old. He 
 recognised and encouraged every first trace of genius, especially 
 of genius in poetry, which came under his notice ; and we see 
 this in the case not only of Goethe, but of Burger, Voss, 
 Schiller, and, in later days, of* Jean Paul. His firm belief in the 
 great truths of poetry never really changed or failed him, even 
 though at times there seems to live a contradiction on the tongue ; 
 and, whenever he turned his eyes abroad or to distant times, 
 where there was no prejudice to obscure his vision, his penetra- 
 tion is always singularly profound and his judgment discrimi- 
 nating. He had a very wide knowledge of European literature — 
 Italian, French, and perhaps Spanish. But it was to England 
 that he always looked with the greatest interest and affection, 
 partly because she was the land of Shakespeare and Milton, 
 partly because through England's help he had breathed the 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 317 
 
 spirit of life into the dry bones of Germany. He was intimately 
 acquainted with all English literature of importance from 
 Chaucer to Thomson ; and whatever he says of it, especially 
 when he speaks of its lyrical side and historical development, is 
 always remarkably clear and suggestive. He is never tired of 
 tracing its course from the age of fairy-tale and heroic narrative 
 through the bright intermediate space of Spenser and Shake- 
 speare to the age of speculation, of thought and learning and the 
 period of sober prose. And here it is indeed sad to think how 
 much Herder lost by dying. In the very year in which he pub- 
 lished his most continuous account of English literature, Burns 
 ceased to sing ; ^ Cowper was four years from death ; Byron was 
 eight years old, and Shelley four ; and two years later the 
 Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge appeared at 
 Bristol ; but to Herder all these were never to be so much as 
 the shadows of names. 
 
 But in spite of his keen appreciation of the truly beautiful 
 in poetry, of whatever nation and whatever time. Herder was 
 always most at home in the East, both on account of his early 
 training and the natural bent of his mind. No beauty came so 
 near his heart as the poetry of the Hebrews. Here was the 
 pure utterance of the soul — '^ a sigh of the soul," he calls it 
 himself — here were no frigid conventions, no restrictions of 
 thought by form. Amongst the Hebrews the true lyric — the 
 reflection of the inmost soul, the purely subjective poetry, as 
 some would call it — had reached its sublimest height; and 
 Herder, as he himself used to say", was born at midnight, and 
 therefore had a natural tendency to the sublime. We must 
 remember that for all his classical learning, and even classical 
 enthusiasm, and for all his love of the people's ballads and 
 simple ways, he remained a Hebrew in heart. 
 
 When, therefore, he was at work on the Spirit of Hebrew 
 Poetry^ he was justified in writing to Hamann that " from 
 childhood he had nourished this book in his heart," and any one 
 
 • In the Letters for the Furtherance of Humanity (1793-97). The eighth 
 series, which contains the account, was almost certainly written in 1796. 
 
818 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 who has taken the trouble to look through this account of his 
 life will have noticed how frequently this strong undercurrent 
 of Hebraic sympathy appears on the surface. The first volume of 
 this work on Hebrew poetry is written in the form of dialogue, 
 which is happily dropped in the second volume. For, though 
 Herder begins by stating that he uses this form for brevity and 
 to avoid dogmatism, and with no intention of vying with Plato, 
 yet Plato is inevitably suggested by a dialogue form, and it is 
 impossible for any writer ever to gain by the comparison. The 
 treatise on Solomon's love-songs, which I am inclined to think 
 the best on the whole of all Herder's attempts at pure criticism 
 on a particular poem, or rather series of poems — this, too, really 
 forms part of the same work, and the three volumes taken 
 together are a very beautiful and suggestive account of the 
 Hebrew poets, from Lamech almost up to the time of the 
 Prophets. Herder always intended to continue the work through 
 the series of poets known as the Prophets to the Revelation ; but, 
 like so many of his schemes, this was thwarted by other cares 
 and vexations, and the work remains a fragment. As usual, 
 his main object throughout is to reveal the full beauty of the 
 Hebrew poems, their depth of earnest thought, and at the same 
 time their sweet simplicity, by stripping off the coverings of 
 custom and the shrouds of dogma. For we know how sad a 
 thing it is to hear modern men and women repeating the Songs 
 of David, and talking about them, as if they were written by the 
 pew-opener for the benefit of the congregation, and had some 
 connection with the church-rates. 
 
 The commentary on the poem of the Creation is not so good 
 in this latter form as in the earlier form when Herder was in 
 lliga. The best parts of the work, as might bo expected, are 
 the accounts of the Book of Job, " that voice that speaks to us 
 still over the space of four thousand years," the Love-songs of 
 Solomon, and the Psalms, which Herder divides into periods, 
 David's Psalms marking the culminating point of the best lyrical 
 period of Hebrew poetry. The commentary or criticism is in- 
 terspersed throughout with Herder's singulai'ly beautiful trans- 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 319 
 
 lations from the Hebrew in a kind of free rhythm to imitate the 
 original cadences. But we will here cease to criticise criticism, 
 and pass to the more creative side of his work in the world. 
 
 Halfway between criticism and creation we come upon the 
 collection of Ballads and Songs of the People {Volkslieder, 
 pubhshed in two parts, 1778-9, afterwards gathered into one 
 volume by Johann Miiller under the title of Voices of all 
 Nations). In this work Herder had in view exactly the same 
 object as in his criticisms and translations of the early Hebrew 
 poets. The idea was no doubt suggested by the publication of 
 Percy's Religues in 1765, and it may be noticed as curious that 
 Percy wrote his commentary on the Song of Solomon the year 
 before he published the Reliques, and that Herder's account of 
 the same poem appeared at the same time as the first part of the 
 Volkslieder. Looked at from the present time such coincidences 
 show plainly enough which way the stream was running. Here 
 and there a man appears who is sick to death of frigid elegance 
 and faultless couplet, and has the courage to turn for healing to 
 the untrammelled songs and unadorned ballads of a time when 
 people lived and did not seem to live, and were poets without 
 much talk of poetry. Such men often seem half afraid of their 
 boldness. Percy introduced his Reliques with many an apology 
 for their rudeness, and interspersed his priceless treasures with 
 many specimens of worthless elegance, to make the volume 
 palatable to readers of taste. During the very years which 
 passed between the recall of Herder's first collection of Volks- 
 lieder, whilst at Buckeburg, and the final edition in 1779, the 
 sweetest singer of the century, " whyles daez't wi' love, whyles 
 daez't wi' drink/' was just beginning to "rhyme for fun";^ 
 
 ' " Some rhyme a neibor's name to lash ; 
 
 Some rhyme (vain thought I) for needfu' cash ; 
 Some rhyme to court the countra clash, 
 
 An' raise a din : 
 For me, an aim I never fash ; 
 
 I rhyme for fun." 
 
 Epistle to James Smith. 
 See also the third stanza below. It is hard to say whether Herder knew any- 
 thing of Burns. In the collection of Herder's own poems there are three verses 
 
 X 
 
320 HERDER AND H18 TIMES. 
 
 and yet he ^*was not so presumptive as to imagine that he could 
 make verses like printed ones composed by men who had Greek 
 and Latin"; and it is pitiable to see his undoubtedly honest 
 reverence and admiration for men who were not worthy to clean 
 his plough. In the same way we have already seen that in his 
 criticism Herder could not entirely free himself from the 
 eighteenth-century canons of his youth, and we shall see that 
 this is even more true of his own poetry ; for, when we have 
 been told all our life that this thins; or the other is beautiful and 
 true, we are only too likely to believe it, even in contradiction 
 to our real insight into beauty and truth. It seems rather harsh 
 and impertinent to give such things up altogether, and there 
 may be some permanent beauty in them after all, which only a 
 fool would seek to destroy. And this is one of the reasons why 
 /we so often find apparent contradictions in men like Herder. 
 I They recognise relics and traces of beauty with a more delicate 
 I eye than the rest of us, and they also know how vast is the 
 j power of a fool for a season. But, as far as the Volkslieder go, 
 there is no^qne_pf apology in Herder as there is in Percy, 
 though in the preface he puts on the cloak of fro^hyTrTrespect 
 for " correct " critics. There is nothing but praise and ex- 
 ultation in the Correspondence on Ossian and ancient poets, and 
 in the treatise on the connection between the early poetry of 
 Germany and England, which, together with the treatise on 
 Shakespeare, serve as introduction to the book. I cannot but 
 think that Herder would have done this piece of work, even if 
 he had never heard of Percy, though undoubtedly, as it was, 
 the idea was taken from him, as well as a large part of the 
 material. But Herder expressly says that he had no inter«tion 
 of rivalling Percy. It was not his purpose to make a complete 
 collection of German ballads, as was done some thirty years 
 later by Arnim and Brentano in the Wunderhorn ; he would 
 
 " from the Scotch," the first two of which are undoubtedly a reminiscence of 
 John Anderson, and of Burns's version of the song. But, if he had reall)' been 
 acquainted with a poet so truly after his own heart, he would certainly have 
 
 jnadc more mention of him. 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 321 
 
 give specimens from the popular poetry of as many nations as 
 he could, and display from this side the great unity of the 
 human race in the midst of all difference. Gervinus laughs at 
 his ambition, and no doubt is justified of his critical sneer ; but 
 simple people, who merely try to find the facts and general 
 tendencies of things, will perceive that this attempt of Herder's 
 was a new and important step towards that comparative method 
 of investigating human history as a whole which is gradually 
 becoming universal. It was impossible for Herder to limit 
 himself to one country or one time ; to him mankind was a vast 
 brotherhood, almost a great individual ; at all events, the 
 divisions and differences were for the most part accidental, and 
 to him time was as a continuous stream, in which we can cut no 
 sharp Hues for stages and periods. But while insisting on the 
 historical or scientific interest of this book we must not forget 
 its influence on poetry. It is really to the impulse which Herder 
 gave to this form of poetry that we owe the immortal ballads of 
 Burger, Goethe, and Schiller — and in later years of Uhland and 
 the Komantic School, which brings us to Heine himself. There- 
 fore, if we merely take account of the ballads, without regarding 
 the beautiful lyrics of natural and unconscious poetry which are 
 included in the book, we must consider the Volkslieder translated 
 and collected by Herder to have been the chief cause in Ger- 
 many of the movement which was beginning in England at the 
 same time, and was to produce its noblest fruits in the ballads of 
 Coleridge and Rossetti. 
 
 We have seen that the idea of such a collection lay slowly 
 developing in Herder's mind for many years before it was 
 realised. During his travels after he had left Riga, and 
 especially in the weary months at Strassburg, he had translated 
 several ballads chiefly from the English and Scotch, and, above 
 all, the songs of Shakespeare. In his preface he says that he did 
 this merely for his own amusement with no intention of publi- 
 cation ; but from a letter to Hamann, and from his request to 
 Goethe to collect for him any ballads he might find still lingering 
 in Elsass, it is evident that he did not intend to hide his light 
 
322 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 under a bushel. When he was at Biickeburg, at all events, 
 finding that his collection was now sufficient for a volume, he 
 sent the ballads to the press, though, as we have seen, he recalled 
 them in a fit of disgust. 
 
 The final edition, which was published after almost ten years' 
 preparation, begins with some songs from the far north, a piteous 
 dirge from Greenland, and the Laplander's songs to his reindeer 
 as he flies over the frozen snow to his beloved's home. Then 
 follow a considerable number, chiefly marriage-songs, from the 
 Baltic provinces, one from Tartary, and some tales from the 
 Morlack tribes, one of which was translated by Goethe. The 
 songs and ballads of uncultured nations such as these, who 
 chatter like swallows in an unknown tongue. Herder derived 
 for the most part from books of travel, such as Scheffer's Lap- 
 ponia, and they are therefore sometimes translations of trans- 
 lations, and have probably lost something by the way. Now no 
 one was better aware of the difficulties and danger, or more 
 properly the impossibility, of translating poetry than Herder 
 himself; we have seen that in his earlier writings, such as the 
 Fragments^ one of his main principles was that in true poetry 
 the thought and the form are inseparable, being strictly one and 
 the same, and hence that the fashionable imitations and trans- 
 lations were vain.^ It is curious, therefore, and rather sad, to 
 observe that Herder himself was one of the best translators of 
 poetry that the world has seen. Judging him, as I only have a 
 right to judge him, from his versions of the English and Scotch 
 ballads, and of Shakespeare's songs, I believe for his skill in this 
 art he may be placed by the side of Shelley, and, I suppose, the 
 translator of Omar. This skill is no doubt partly due to his 
 knowledge of the essential weakness of this art, but it chiefly 
 arises from that power of universal sympathy by which he was 
 enabled to become for the time a member of any nation in any 
 period of the world's history. 
 
 After the cries of the uncouth nations of the North, the second 
 
 ' And yet modern Germans have indignantly assured me that Shakespeare is 
 much better in German than in English. 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 823 
 
 book, containing songs from the South, begins with a few trans- ^ 
 lations of Greek lyrics, introduced— as Herder, partly in irony, 
 has written — ^* to comfort tender Greek souls for the barbarism 
 of the rest." Then comes one of the marriage-songs of Catullus, 
 and a few songs of Sicily and Italy, followed by several ballads 
 of Spain and France. The third book is devoted to England 
 and Scotland, and begins, alas ! with Ossian. Most of the ballads, 
 such as Sw Patrick Spens^ The Nuthrown Maid^ Edward^ and 
 Chevy Chase, are taken from the Eeliques, but some also from 
 Ramsay's Evergreen, and other collections. The' ballads are 
 followed by several of Shakespeare's songs and parts of the 
 dialogue, and there are a few more modern poems of Lovelace 
 and Wither, and even Shenstone. In the fourth book come the 
 ballads and shrill war-songs of old Norsemen, of Sweden and 
 the Danes, full of strange stories of Odin and the Yalkyriur, 
 Balder and the other weird shadows of northern myth. The 
 iifth book is entirely German, and begins with the story of King 
 Ludwig, the great-uncle of Charlemagne, who by the aid of 
 God smote the heathen Normannen. Johann MUller dates the 
 ballad 882, and it is said to be the oldest German song. After 
 this come a few old war-songs and several ballads well known 
 in the Wunderhorn, together with some of the most beautiful 
 lyrics in any language, such as the earliest form of Roslein auf 
 der Heiden and Wenn ich ein Voglein war. Several of Simon 
 Dach's poems are also included, perhaps with a touch of patriotic 
 prejudice for the old Mohrungen country, and there is one of 
 Claudius's poems and Goethe's Fisher, just to show what the 
 moderns could do — for the spirit- world is never barred ; our 
 sense is shut, our hearts are dead.^ The sixth and last book 
 contains the " songs of savages," chiefly from the Madagascan v^ 
 through the French of the traveller Parny. These are laments 
 for the dead, descriptions of natural pleasures, or the rage and 
 jealousy of savages, and, above all, hatred and fear of the white 
 man and slavery. Then follow two songs from the Peruvian, 
 
 ' " Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen : 
 
 Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt !"— FAUST. 
 
 y2 
 
324 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 one of which may appear in translation probably three times 
 removed, thus : 
 
 Sleep, O sleep, my maiden, 
 
 Softly to my strain ; 
 In the midnight, maiden. 
 
 Wake and list again. 
 
 and with this simplest of serenades the book ends. 
 
 On the whole I am inclined to consider it the most perfect, 
 though by that I do not mean the most important, of all 
 Herder's pieces of work, and 1 imagine that when he came to 
 die it would be on this that he would look back with most 
 unmixed satisfaction. 
 
 A great many of Herder's later works may be really regarded 
 as continuations or supplements of the Volkslieder, though with 
 a few exceptions they are wanting in the . true swing and 
 simplicity of the ballad and national lyric. In 1785 he published 
 a long series of translations from the Greek anthology, and he 
 has also left several versions of the Roman poems. In these he 
 has tried to preserve the original metres, and it may be said that 
 in the case of translations the experiment is more allowable ; 
 though, had not both Goethe and Schiller as well as Herder used 
 these classical metres constantly, for what they supposed to be 
 their most important original poems, I should have said that 
 any one who had ears to hear would have fled from the sound of 
 them. As it is, I could not be so '' presumptive" as to say that 
 three such men were wrong ; and yet, if I had to state what I 
 personally most regretted in the writings of them all, this 
 employment of classical metres in a modern tongue would be 
 the flrst point I should choose. 
 
 But, leaving this question to men of critical knowledge, we 
 may observe that in later life Herder inclined more and more to 
 oriental literature ; and, indeed, we have seen throughout that 
 orientalism had a strange fascination on his mind, in spite, and 
 partly because, of his strength of Teutonic enthusiasm. In his 
 Miscellanies of 1787 he published a series of oriental stories, 
 derived chiefly from tlie Hebrew history, which ho afterwards 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 825 
 
 called Pages of the Days of Old. A few years later he translated 
 parts of the Valley of Roses, probably through the French from 
 the Persian of Sadi ; and, in after-life, several stories from the 
 Chinese, also through the French, together with some sayings 
 and verses of Brahmin philosophy and poetry. In a series of 
 letters he joined Goethe in his admiration for the Indian drama, 
 Sdkoontald, or the Lost Ring, by Kalidas, which had been 
 recently translated into Latin and English by Sir William Jones, 
 and from his English into German by Herder's friend Forster, 
 who had added notes, especially on the natural history, from his 
 own wide knowledge of the earth's face and the ways of men. 
 In all this we see signs of the beginnings of that interest in 
 Eastern traditions, and poetry, and life, which in time became a 
 great movement, and found expression in Goethe's Divan, in 
 RUckert, in Byron and Moore, in sweet hints and dream-like 
 echoes of Heine, and in countless pantomimes, till at last the 
 whole thing is almost more nauseous than the knights in armour 
 and the moon-lit castles of dying romance ; for these at least 
 are flesh of our flesh. Herder's translations from the Latin of 
 Balde, the German seventeenth-century poet, and his version of 
 the Cid legends, will be best mentioned in their chronological 
 place, for they are not so important as they were once con- 
 sidered. 
 
 And now we must turn to the saddest part of the whole 
 story, and, as it is the saddest, it shall be but for a moment ; 
 indeed, that we consider it at all seems to need some apology to 
 Herder's memory, for he repeatedly confessed that he was not a 
 poet, and comparatively few of his original verses were published 
 by himself. And yet this man, who revolutionised the literature 
 of his country, who found it a dreary wilderness of shallow 
 phrase and frigid imitation, and left it as one of the six or seven 
 greatest literatures the world has ever known, — surely we might 
 have expected that such an one could himself produce something. 
 And, if we find that he could not thus create, I beheve I have 
 a right to say that this is the saddest thing in his history. If he 
 could have produced one supreme poem, even one perfect song 
 
326 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 that would have echoed down the ages, ill-heaUh, the loss of 
 friends, the rancour of enemies, death itself, all these would have 
 been as nothing to him. The earnest desire of all such men — I 
 had almost said of all men — is to express their inmost soul under 
 some immortal form of art ; they must create, and, failing this, 
 what shall it profit them if they gain the whole world ? To take 
 an instance from a parallel art to poetry : there have been great 
 musical performers, who, with all their fame, and wealth, and 
 wondrous skill to interpret the works of the masters, have yefc 
 retained so gloomy and melancholic a temper as to give rise 
 to stories about blighted affections, compacts with the devil, 
 domestic afflictions, and what not beside. Yet I can imagine 
 that in truth, even if these things were so, they were as nothing 
 to the one sorrow, that they had been unable to compose so much 
 as a single line of music which would be known fifty years after 
 their death, except by the curious. Or, as an instance still more 
 nearly parallel, we have seen that Carlyle tried to write poems, 
 and I have heard that amongst his papers were found a very 
 great number of verses. And yet Carlyle's spirit was always 
 creative ; at least two of his works are amongst the rarest kind 
 of creations — creations in prose. But still he could not be 
 content with prose, but was irresistibly driven to find his soul's 
 expression under a truer and more distinctive form of art. In 
 Emerson we see the same sad endeavour. For between the best 
 prose and even the lowest kind of true poetry there is a great 
 gulf fixed, and we may almost say that of those who travail with 
 their speech the poets only are immortal (or must we add Plato 
 and a few other humourists ?). To quote or misquote the Roman 
 writer — who, strangely enough, has hitherto been kept alive 
 mostly by schoolmasters — " the Muse forbids to die," and Herder 
 knew as well as any one that it is the Muse alone. 
 
 For a man who knows this there are two things possible : 
 either himself to create, to produce under some eternal form of 
 art, and thus to make his life one triumphant p^ean, in spit« of 
 all misery or misfortune ; or, recognising his impotence, to go 
 sternly on his way, doing what yet he can, joining in the 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 327 
 
 triumphs of others, and boldly accepting the complete unimport- 
 ance of his own individual success or failure, happiness or misery, 
 immortality or non-existence. I can imagine no third course 
 that would not both ruin the man and make his life unbearable 
 to himself and an annoyance to others. Now there can be no 
 doubt that Herder was firmly purposed to follow the second of 
 these two lines, knowing that the other was impossible for him ; 
 he would not allow himself to be blinded to the merits of others 
 by his own failure, as so many are blinded. It is true that he 
 sometimes seems rather harsh and bitter in criticism of his 
 friends, especially of Goethe ; but in this, after long study of his 
 character, I cannot believe that he was influenced by envy, as 
 some have said, but by a desire to give his true opinion, and, 
 after all, sincerity is the first necessity of criticism. Besides, it 
 requires rare skill to praise honestly without an appearance of 
 flattery, and to avoid flattery a man like Herder will always err 
 on the other side. It is wiser, therefore, not to join in the sneer 
 that in his letters he generally uses quotations from other poets 
 to express his feelings, rather than writing poems for himself, as 
 Goethe would have done ; knowing how much he could do, and 
 at the same time how little, we should rather admire his courage 
 and self-restraint. And yet at times the old sigh could not but 
 come back : what if, after all, he were a poet ? Therefore, he 
 never entirely abandoned the effort. 
 
 And, besides, there is another slightly different aspect of 
 poetry which should make one all the more loath to say anything 
 harsh against the poems of Herder, or indeed of any other man 
 who does not flaunt himself. Karoline tells us that, in the midst 
 of troubles, these poems were often his best or only consolation, 
 and that they never failed to deliver him from depression and 
 send him out to face the world once more with cheerful look. 
 This strange power of man to free the spirit by casting its 
 sorrows and passions into an external form of art has become 
 generally known through Goethe's works ; for he stated it, and 
 was peculiarly successful in its application, though indeed the 
 first of poets or artists was its inventor. As far as I can gather, 
 
328 HERDER AND HIS TIMES, 
 
 if the effort be strong, it is generally attended with, at all events, 
 partial success ; and, though it may be objected that it makes 
 the man callous, hard-hearted, and indifferent to sorrow, yet, 
 after all, hard-hearted towards himself and indifferent to his own 
 sorrow is just what a man ought to be, and a little hardening 
 will do no harm to any who are likely to try the method ; for 
 they too have to live in this world of limitation. If we remember 
 then that Herder's chief object in writing these poems was to 
 attain this freedom of spirit, and that he himself published very 
 little of his poetry to the world, criticism is obviously disarmed. 
 After this needful preface we may glance at the poems or 
 verses themselves, and we shall find that Herder attempted 
 nearly every kind of poetry — every kind, I suppose, except the 
 epic. In the ordinary edition of his works (the Miillers' edition) 
 the poems are collected and arranged with singular want of 
 judgment; several of the poems occur twice, and some that 
 really belong to Goethe, Schiller, or Knebel, are included. In 
 his youth we have seen that Herder was naturally led to imitate 
 the too-often common-place moralities of Pope, Haller, and 
 Witthof, as well as the odes and dithyrambs of Klopstock, 
 Gleim, Uz, and Weisse ; and throughout life he never quite 
 overcame this tendency to the didactic in poetry. At first- sight 
 this seems strange, for the whole force of his criticism was 
 against it ; but we have so often seen a poet overthrow his own 
 poetry by his own criticism that we should no longer be surprised, 
 remembering the subtle saying of Emerson : " Tell me what a 
 man praises, and I will tell you what he has not got.^' The same 
 may bo said of the continual allegory of Herder's poems ; the 
 frigid personification, the wearisome mythology, the abstractions 
 of virtues and vices with capital letters to their unreal names. The 
 man who was one of the first to proclaim humanity, and nature, 
 and truth in poetry, is himself hardly ever human, or natural, 
 or true. His poems are often shrewd ; one or two, especially 
 those on God, and nature, and personality, may even be called 
 philosophically profound, and there is no lack of sensible good 
 advice ; but they never move the soul to tears or laughter, they 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 829 
 
 never give us a glimpse of that poet's world of love, and beauty, 
 and delight, of which there is no death nor change. When he 
 writes for women, for instance, he bids them be natural in 
 youth and afterwards become good housewives, and the picture 
 suggested throughout is of the woman mending her husband's 
 socks, seeing that his dinner is decent, and looking after the 
 nursery; a very high, and difficult, and necessary ideal, no 
 doubt, but somehow falling short of the true revelation of 
 poetry when thus barely set down, unless, indeed, the poets 
 have beguiled us all along. And yet, from the example of all 
 true poets, we may infer that if a man is capable of poetry at 
 all he is capable of poetry on woman. 
 
 Another mark of the true poet, with very few though brilliant 
 exceptions, such as Chaucer,^ is that he should be able to write a 
 real song or lyric, with music in itself, which is the highest 
 kind, or, at all events, admitting of music. Of Herder's lyrics 
 at least four — sometimes, though accidentally, printed together, 
 namely. The Heart of Man [Das menscJiliche Herz), The Moment 
 {Der Augenblick), Lament in Loneliness {Des einsamen Klage), 
 and Expectation [Erwartung) — come so near, so very near, 
 the true thing, that I believe most people would call them poems ; 
 and if I asserted that Herder was a poet I should base the 
 assertion on these. For the benefit of the English reader I have 
 ventured to translate the first of the four, not that it is the best, 
 for the two last are better, but that it is the least spoilt by my 
 translation. And yet I have been unable to preserve the beauti- 
 ful two-syllable rhymes of the original, in which German is so 
 rich and English so poor or ungainly in comparison, even in 
 the hands of a master ; and, at the best, all translation of poetry 
 
 is a sorry thing. 
 
 Once at a loom were working 
 
 The gods of joy and grief, 
 Ceaseless the shuttle plying 
 
 The heart of man to weave ; 
 
 ' It may be said that sometimes even Chaucer is truly lyrical, as when he 
 turns round as it were, and addresses us or his characters in his own person ; but 
 there is a difference between this and the true lyric or passionate song. 
 
330 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 O poor sad heart enwoven 
 
 Of joy and sorrowing, 
 Ah dost thou know what life is ? 
 
 A glad or woeful thing ? 
 
 And there stood Love's own goddess, 
 
 And sorrowed for its sake : 
 " O doubtful was the labour, 
 
 That this poor heart did make. 
 Its bliss shall be in yearning, 
 
 And longing all its gain, 
 And even tears of pleasure 
 
 Be harbingers of pain." 
 
 Her child, the boy of beauty, 
 
 Came quickly with his dart ; 
 " See now my best of blessings 
 
 I here to thee impart. 
 An ever-onward striving 
 
 Shall love to thee remain, 
 And love shall be thy living. 
 
 And joy be all thy pain." 
 
 In which, if we must criticise, it will be plain that the last 
 verse does not ring quite true ; for it may happen that even 
 the pain of love is not joy, and Goethe would not have stepped 
 aside from the truth in order to finish with an epigrammatic 
 piece of consolation. The " dart," too, will justly have made 
 the modern reader shudder ; but, alas ! around Herder's heart 
 the chill shroud of the eighteenth century still hung heavily, and 
 could not be shaken off. 
 
 I will dare to give a version of yet one more of Herder's 
 lyrics, because it has received the glory of being set to music 
 by Beethoven himself The idea is from the Arabian, but to 
 me the beauty of the thought is spoilt by being cast in the 
 elegiac metre, which I do not care to reproduce. 
 
 O turtle-dove, that monrnest ceaselessly, 
 And from my weary eyes hast driven sleep, 
 
 O turtle-dove, sleepless I mourn with thee, 
 But in my heart must I my sorrow keep. 
 
 Ah 1 cruel is the lot love gave to me, 
 While thou canst mourn, my woe is dumb as deep. 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 331 
 
 Herder's ballads or imitations of ballads are not so successful 
 as his lyrics. Traces of Herder himself and of eighteenth- 
 century thought constantly appear and ruin all ; this is the more 
 strange because, as has been said, when he was dealing with history 
 or the productions of others he could enter at will into complete 
 sympathy with any time and any people — so different a thing is 
 creation from understanding. Thus, with all his admiration for 
 Shakespeare and his love of the drama, Herder was peculiarly 
 deficient in dramatic power. His six or seven attempts at 
 drama, such as his Prometheus^ his Brutus, and his Ariadne, are 
 revivals of Grreek or Eoman legends and history according to 
 the Greek model ; and in consequence, as he himself pointed out 
 time after time in the case of others, they are neither Greek nor 
 German, but have gone to share the fate of nearly all such 
 imitations ; though sometimes this fate is warded off", at least for 
 a time, by the genius of a true poet.^ 
 
 Of Herder's purely didactic poems I am unqualified to speak ; 
 for, after long effort, the phrase didactic poem — by which I mean 
 a poem inculcating morality, not a poem revealing new truths 
 of life — remains to me simply a contradiction of terms ; nor can I 
 imagine any frame of mind in which a strictly didactic poem, in 
 the ordinary sense of the words, could suggest to me by the 
 imagination any ^ noble grounds for noble emotions. '^ Such 
 verses may interest me scientifically, but there is no emotion, no 
 suggestion, no imagination. But, allowing that this is due to a 
 want of moral enthusiasm, we may at all events say that a didactic 
 poem cannot be immortal merely because it is didactic ; for the 
 fashion of such things changes, and knowledge in every form 
 is progressive. Thus, no one now goes to Pope's Essay for his 
 philosophy, nor to Young's Night Thoughts for his morality, 
 though such theories and maxims will always be interesting to 
 the historian and scientific inquirer. 
 
 Closely connected with didactic verse, though even less 
 
 ' As in Goethe's Iphigenie and Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta, the latter of 
 which at least will surely live for some years yet. 
 
 2 See Mr. Buskin's definition of poetry, Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 11. 
 
332 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 deserving the hi^h name of poetry, comes the kind of com- 
 position which deals in fables, allegories, parables, modem 
 instances of old proverbs, and, finally, epigrams. Herder was 
 much attracted by this form, and it was perhaps here that his 
 real strength in verse lay. To this class belong his verses on 
 politics, his satires against contemporary philosophy and pedantic 
 theologians, his adaptations of Greek mythology, and the new 
 turns he gives to old stories and fables. As an instance of the 
 transition from the true lyric to this lower form of verse the 
 following will serve ; and here translation becomes bearable, for 
 the nearer we approach the grotesque the less important does 
 perfection of form appear : 
 
 O wise men with the wondrous skill 
 To set the spheres in motion, 
 
 Give to a wearied heart one thrill, 
 One spark of new emotion ; 
 
 Ah, hut one drop of life-blood still 
 From youth-restoring potion — 
 
 I'd gladly leave you all your skill 
 To set the spheres in motion. 
 
 In certain moods the verse is true ; it at once suggests the 
 beginning of Faust, and will be seen to be significant of much 
 when we reach the later years of Herder's life. But if any one, 
 therefore, thinks that Herder would have considered the pro- 
 longation of the hebetated existence of Liverpool merchants by 
 ^^ nervous excitement" a worthy aim for the cultivation of 
 wisdom, I believe he would be wrong. ^ 
 
 As a more exact example of this kind, here is a stroke of satire 
 against philosophic opponents, probably of the Kantian school : 
 
 Who, when the midday sun is high, 
 
 Will join thereto his candle's light, 
 Must thank himself accordingly 
 
 If candle fails him in the night. 
 philosoph, that dost to other worlds aspire. 
 But in thine own art sunk in depths of dreary mire, 
 Methinks behind thy forehead glows most wondrous fire. 
 
 • Emerson tells us that on certain subjects we cannot allow a doctor to speak. 
 But when a man who was a poet speaks thus (in irony, one can hope), what 
 shall we say ? 
 
THE BEAUTIFUL. 333 
 
 This seems good enough for its purpose, though the parable and 
 its application are not exactly parallel ; and, for my part, sym- 
 pathy is very strongly on the side of the poor celestial philosopher 
 sunk so deep in this terrestrial quagmire. But this kind of 
 satire was a favourite device with the great men of the time, 
 and reaches its highest development in Schiller's contributions 
 to the Xenien. Another favourite form of wit was the short 
 epigram and the rhymed proverb with a pregnant meaning, 
 such as Herder's couplet — 
 
 Think not the smallest bush, because 'tis small, is bare. 
 How if a tiger should be lurking there ? 
 
 The idea is borrowed from an oriental proverb, but the sudden flash 
 of the second line is very vivid, and true besides, as the hectoring 
 traveller often finds when he ventures too near some demure-look- 
 ing man or woman, and by one swift blow of irony, that needs 
 no second, is stretched amongst the dead. But it will be said that 
 I am wandering from the beautiful, and that is true. To make 
 an end, therefore : it seems imj)ossible that any one who loved 
 poetry, and had read Herder's attempts at poetry, should be 
 anxious to claim for him a place amongst the poets. The title 
 of poet is far too great a thing to be given lightly. Esteeming, 
 as I do, every true poem to be above praise, above price, above 
 all measure or idea of value, I cannot help looking with suspicion 
 on criticisms which contrast one true poem with another, and 
 say this is better than that; for every true poem is in its 
 kind invaluable, and is, therefore, raised beyond the reach of 
 comparison or contrast. Or, to take familiar instances, we 
 cannot say that Shakespeare's " Where the bee sucks " is better 
 or worse than Keats's " Shed no tear, oh ! shed no tear," or 
 than Goethe/s " Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh," or than Heine's 
 ** Du bist wie eine Blume," for all of these are perfect. But 
 below these comes the great mass of compositions in verse and 
 metre of every order of worthlessness, and also of merit except 
 the higliest, which cannot be expressed. The only office of 
 comparative criticism, therefore, is to say which belong to this 
 highest class, and are worthy to be called poems. Into this 
 
334 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 supreme rank of poets Herder could not enter, nor did he claim 
 entrance. 
 
 If any further explanation of this is necessary, than merely 
 that he was not a poet, I refer back to Mr. Ruskin's definition 
 of poetry, which is sufficient here, though it is intentionally 
 made to include all true art, whereby it appears to me that some 
 unnecessary confusion is caused ; for, after all, we write English, 
 or at least try to write English, and not Greek (and even the 
 Greeks would have used music, not poetry, as the comprehensive 
 term). Poetry, says Mr. Ruskin, is " the suggestion by the 
 imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions," and by 
 the noble emotions he means *' the four principal sacred passions 
 — Love, Veneration, Admiration, Joy; and their opposites — 
 Hatred, Indignation (or Scorn), Horror, and Grief" ^ Applying 
 this definition to Herder's verses, and knowing that Mr. Euskin 
 is the man to mean what he says and to use no word in vain, I 
 should insist most strongly on the words " suggestion " and 
 '^suggestion by the imagination." The noble emotions are 
 sometimes there, the noble grounds are sometimes there, but 
 Herder has not the poet's truly magic and inexplicable art to 
 cause them to be suggested by the imagination. The general 
 tone of his attempts at poetry may also serve as an instance of 
 ** the failure of the ideal that leaves out the shadows." Attempts 
 after such an ideal, says Mr. Ruskin again, ^'are always soothing 
 and pathetic ; never sublime nor perfectly beautiful." '^ Herder 
 himself revealed the same error in Klopstock, in Gessner, and 
 many another gentle writer. He saved others, himself he could 
 not save. And yet he gets so near, so very, very near ; and 
 there is the sorrow of it. 
 
 » Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 11. ' Ibid. vol. iii. p. 77. 
 
335 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE COMPLETE. 
 
 " Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear. 
 Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe." 
 
 Abt Vogler. 
 " That low man goes on adding one to one, 
 His hundred's soon hit; 
 This high man aiming at a million, 
 Misses a unit." — A Grammarian's Funeral. 
 
 In an attempt to give an account of Herder's work in this 
 world, or of his position in the history of thought, the great 
 difficulty is to draw sharp lines, to make any distinctions that 
 will allow the reader a breathing space, to avoid repeating the 
 same truth without end, though in different words and with 
 different lights. As I have said before. Herder's separate works 
 are but parts of one greater work, which may be called a 
 Criticism of History, or a Study of Time, according to pleasure ; 
 and the key to this Criticism may in like manner be called the 
 Unity of Nature in her infinite development, the Continuity of 
 Phenomena, or the necessary self-existence of God, not so much 
 revealed in his works as indwelling under the form of the 
 universe. It is this key or central idea which I wish to make 
 the subject of the present chapter ; but, because the idea is 
 central, it of necessity follows that much which might be said 
 concerning it has been anticipated by what has gone before ; 
 indeed, unless I have insisted throughout that each part of 
 Herder's manifold work in life owed its main significance to his 
 extaordinary insight into this truth, I have missed the meaning 
 of his life. Herder approached it and endeavoured to proclaim 
 it from the side of poetry and from the side of art, by investiga- 
 
 - \^' 
 
336 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 tion into external nature and into the heart of man, by theo- 
 logical criticism and by historical criticism ; it would even be 
 simpler to say at once by historical criticism, for in its highest 
 sense this embraces and is made up of all the others. 
 
 In all the subjects of his study, to whatever phase of thought 
 or life he turned, through all his wanderings, his inconsistencies, 
 his countless contradictions, his dreamy unrealities, his inexact- 
 ness and impatient conclusions, this was the guiding principle 
 to which Herder trusted, and it led him safe in spite of error. 
 But it is from his universal application of this principle that the 
 difficulty of this chapter arises, for as it occurs everywhere it is 
 hard to isolate the thought, and at the same time to avoid 
 endless repetition. And besides, Herder does not anywhere 
 strictly examine his guide, just as the mariner does not write 
 treatises on the pole-star ; so that it is only after some hesitation 
 that I have concluded this central idea is more fully and singly 
 illustrated or announced in two of Herder's works than in the 
 rest, and have therefore determined to confine myself in this 
 chapter to the consideration of these. Also the two are in a 
 special sense one, or serve as the complements of each other 
 even more than is usual with Herder's books ; for the Conversa- 
 tions^ or Dialogues on God, and the Ideas for the Philosophy of 
 the History of Mankind, which I shall continue to speak of as 
 the Ideen, were really produced side by side during the same 
 few years (1783-1787). And, although the former was not 
 written till after the three most important parts of the Ideen 
 were finished, the conception of it, as far as we can date con- 
 ception, was at least as early ; indeed, as has been shown, the 
 germs of both were in Herder's mind from his youngest 
 thoughts. It will not, therefore, be that commonest and most 
 annoying of sins, a sin against time, if this chapter begins with 
 an account of the Dialogues on God, and by thus starting from the 
 depths of the ultimate principles gains some foundation for con- 
 sidering the work, or rather the suggestion of innumerable 
 works, by which Herder's name is most widely known. 
 
 The history of this Dialogue, for it is only one though 
 
THE COMPLETE. 337 
 
 divided into parts, has been already hinted at. As to the title, 
 Herder was certainly right in calling it startling ; nor has time 
 tended to make it seem less. I doubt indeed whether any mind 
 of high order, except a German mind, would ever have ventured 
 on it. Now, at all events, we instinctively shrink more and 
 more from everything of the sort, not as being irreverent, still 
 less as being profane, but as implying a certain self-sufficient 
 dogmatism, which inevitably drives the hearer through irritation 
 into the blind alley of flat contradiction, whether it meets us 
 under the form of the blatant " secularist's " tawdry illumina- 
 tion, or as the equally confident familiarity of the self-constituted 
 counsel for the defence of the Most High. So nauseous has this 
 all become, through the howls of insensate bores on the one side 
 and the sighings of sentimentalists on the other, that even in the 
 present case, when we are speaking of a book which appeared a 
 century ago, it will be better to treat it rather as a criticism on 
 Spinoza than as an account of Herder's positive theory of the 
 [universe; for though it is undoubtedly both, and is, perhaps, more 
 satisfactory merely as the latter, it seems less offensive to leave 
 this to be deduced from the other, so insurmountable is the 
 loathing for all that class whom Sadi, as quoted by Herder, has 
 called " those praters and gossipers about God " ; so vivid is 
 the fear lest for a moment one should fall into their company. 
 
 We will, therefore— to begin with at all events — simply con- 
 sider this treatise as being the first book, as far as I can gather, 
 which was definitely written, not merely in defence but in 
 enthusiastic admiration of Spinoza. For a hundred years ago 
 modern philosophy had hardly begun ; German philosophy could 
 only boast the one great name of Leibnitz, since, though the 
 Kritik had appeared in 1781, its enormous significance was 
 not generally recognised for some years. A contented and 
 mechanical Deism was still triumphant amongst the enlightened, 
 whether they followed Voltaire or Gibbon, Nicolai, Rousseau, 
 or Wolff ; and unless we remember this it is hard to understand 
 the shock which ran through Germany when three of the fore- 
 most men in the land on a sudden began to proclaim the gospel 
 
338 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 according to Spinoza. That this Benedict or Baruch Spinoza, 
 this glass-grinding Jew, who was supposed to wear the mark of 
 damnation in his face, whom every cultured nation and tongue 
 had agreed to brand as Atheist, who for a hundred years had 
 been spoken of as a dead dog only to be kicked, who by a very 
 merry jest was known as Maledictus rather than Benedictus ; 
 that this man —who indeed " scarce for his stupidity and ti'ifling 
 way of arguing merited to obtain a place amongst the lowest 
 forms of inferior animals " ^ — should now be put forward as an 
 Israelite indeed, a prophet and more than a prophet, as a theist 
 of theists, a Christian of Christians (theissimum et Christian- 
 issimum), in Goethe's words : to the wise this seemed foolishness, 
 a doctrine to be held by no sane man. So completely has the 
 estimation of Spinoza been reversed that it is hard to realise 
 that this is an under- statement rather than exaggeration of 
 the almost universal horror, or rather contempt, with which 
 he was then regarded. To most who deigned to notice him 
 either in easy confutation or easier abuse he was only known 
 through the famous article in Bayle's Dictionary ; and indeed 
 it is one of Herder's chief services that he put an end to this 
 method of estimation by showing that Bayle was hopelessly 
 lost in the error of prejudice, and that a man who " took equal 
 interest in a wrong date and the question of the existence of a 
 deity " could hardly be expected to fathom a profound philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 It is surely significant, therefore, when we see the three 
 greatest minds in Germany — always excepting Kant, whose 
 knowledge of Spinoza is doubtful, and Schiller, who was yet too 
 young, — these three, Lessing, Goethe, and Herder, simulta- 
 neously and independently engaged in studying Spinoza for 
 themselves, and coming more and more to the conclusion that in 
 this book, if in any, they had found their creed, though none 
 of them was anxious to be called a Spinozist, well knowing the 
 
 ' Matthias Earbery's answer to the Tractatiut Theologioo-Politicv^, quoted 
 by Mr. Pollock, Sjflnoza, p. .383. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 339 
 
 unimportance and, what is worse, the restriction of all these 
 names and systems. Whilst Herder was in Riga he spoke of 
 Spinoza in the then customary tone of depreciation, probably 
 through ignorance, the root of all abuse. We have seen that 
 he did not really begin to study Spinoza till he was more than 
 half-way through the Biickeburg period. Goethe certainly began 
 earlier, for he seems to have been already fairly acquainted with 
 the Ethics when he conversed with Jacobi on Spinoza at Cologne 
 during his Rhine journey. Lessing, as is well known, was 
 acquainted with Spinoza at least twenty years before this, but 
 was far from adopting his philosophy at that time, or indeed at 
 any time as a complete system. But it appears to me just 
 possible that his interest in Spinoza may have been revived by 
 the sight of the celebrated portrait of him at Wolfenbiittel,^ 
 where Lessing was appointed librarian in 1770; so that if a 
 date has to be fixed for the resurrection of Spinoza, which has 
 exercised such incalculable influence on the whole course of 
 modern thought, I should be inclined to name 1770 and the 
 four or five following years ; for, when once these three had 
 pledged themselves to establish not only the innocence but the 
 supremacy of Spinoza, there could be no doubt as to the final 
 issue. 
 
 Of Spinoza's indirect influence on Herder's work something 
 has been already said. I think it probable, too, that Lessing's 
 increased tendency during his later years to theological or anti- 
 theological polemic, as well as the extreme breadth of view in 
 Nathan^ in spite of its Deism, and in The Education of the 
 Human Race^ are at least partially due to the same cause. But 
 it was Goethe who first gave expression to Spinozism as an idea, 
 and we have seen that it was through a conversation between 
 Jacobi and Lessing on Goethe's Prometheus , in July of 1780, 
 that the crisis in the history of Spinozism at length came. 
 Jacobi had been undoubtedly acquainted with Spinoza for some 
 
 ' There is a photograph from the original in Dr. Martineau's Study on 
 Spinoza, 
 
 z2 
 
340 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 ten years, and boasted himself no mean interpreter ; indeed his 
 main theory or objection, though cast in an antiquated form, 
 seems to have been not so far from the truth as has usually l^een 
 supposed, if we must judge Spinoza from his two latest inter- 
 preters — Dr. Martineau and Mr. Pollock. But this interpretation 
 diflPers in important respects from the interpretation which was 
 proclaimed by Herder and Goethe, and was the soul of philo- 
 sophy — especially of German philosophy— for a space of years 
 whose limits are not yet quite clear. 
 
 At all events it is hard to avoid laughing at Jacobi whether 
 he was right or wrong ; he is so exceeding solemn, so uncon- 
 scious of laughter himself. Old woman Jacobi, marhetenderin 
 to the army of faith, as Heine has called him in the exquisite 
 passage translated below,^ a man of grave and dignified mien, 
 as Herder had learnt with some apprehension, never for a 
 moment suspected that the quick-witted Lessing could venture 
 to laugh at a person of his pretensions in philosophy. The calm 
 unconsciousness with which Jacobi wrote out for Mendelssohn 
 some three years later an account of his conversation with 
 Lessing on Goethe's Prometheus and Spinoza is one of the most 
 extraordinary instances of blindness in history. Truly if this is 
 the result of being '^punished with metaphysics," as Goethe 
 said Jacobi was punished, let us have no more of them. But 
 this almost incredible lack of wit really increases our pleasure in 
 the scene, for it makes us sure that Jacobi's account is nearly 
 word for word true, and we can join Lessing in his chuckle over 
 his opponent's solemnity. The conversation is too familiar to 
 
 * " It is worthy of notice how the most diverse parties in the w^jrld joined in 
 the war against Spinoza. They make up an army whose variegated arrange- 
 ment presents the most ludicrous aspect. Side by side with a mob of black 
 Capuchins and of whit^, with their crosses and smoking censers, marches the 
 phalanx of the Encyclopeedists^ who were quite as zealous against this pcnscur 
 temeraire. Side by side with the Rabbi of the Amsterdam synagogue, who 
 sounds to the combat with the ram's horn of faith, steps Arouet de Voltaire, 
 making sweet music for the behoof of deism on the piccolo of persiflage. In the 
 midst, the old woman Jacobi, the marketenderin of this army of faith." — Briife 
 uhcr Dcu^schlnnd, 2nd book. 
 
THE COMPLETE, 841 
 
 need repetition here.^ It is sufficient to mention the main 
 results, namely, that Lessing boldly — though probably by way of 
 paradox — declared Leibnitz himself to be a Spinozist at heart, and 
 for his own part confessed that, though his creed was written in 
 no book, he would take Spinoza for his master if he must take 
 any one. Whereupon Jacobi, admitting that Spinozism was safe 
 from refutation by logic, maintained that it was identical with 
 atheism, and that from atheism we must take refuge by a mortal, 
 or as we might say an immortal, leap of faith, a salto mortale as 
 he called it to Lessing, and in his correspondence with Goethe 
 and Herder ; but Lessing refused to jump, being unqualified by 
 age and weight for any such athletic performances. Six months 
 afterwards he took the last and easiest leap of all, to the irre- 
 parable loss of mankind ; and, though the direction in which his 
 thoughts were tending is obvious enough, I suppose that Heine 
 was undoubtedly justified in saying : ^^ Rest quiet in thy grave, 
 old Moses ! thy Lessing was truly on the way to this horrible 
 error, this piteous misery, I mean Spinozism ; but the Almighty, 
 the Father in heaven, saved him by death whilst there was yet 
 time. Rest in peace ! thy Lessing was no Spinozist, as the tongue 
 of calumny asserted ; he died a good Deist, just as thou and 
 Nicolai and Teller and the Universal German Library ! "''^ 
 
 Herder like the rest of the world was considerably surprised 
 by Jacobi's account of the conversation, which first appeared in 
 the form of a letter to Mendelssohn, w^ho was collecting materials 
 for Lessing's biography. Jacobi sent a copy of this letter to 
 Herder towards the end of 1783, and we may gather with what 
 feelings it was read from a sentence in a letter to Gleim some 
 two or three years later (1786). '^ I am a Spinozist," Herder 
 writes, " quite independently of Lessing, and was as pleased as 
 a child to find my brother in the spirit there so unexpectedly." 
 
 ' English readers will find a brief but sufiicient account of it in Mr. Pollock's 
 Spinoza, p. 392. The story of the conversation and the whole conflict with 
 Mendelssohn is best given by Jacobi himself, Uebei' die Lehre des Spinoza, 
 the second edition of which attempts some answer to Herder. 
 
 *■' Brief e uher Deutschland, 2nd book, towards the end. 
 
 . . ' Of THE 
 
 T]K1VEBS1T^ 
 
342 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 But though he had been meditating a treatise on Spinoza, 
 Shaftesbury, and Leibnitz for seven or eight years past (since 
 1775-6), he was extremely unwilling to be dragged into a strife 
 that became more and more useless, acrimonious, and personal ; 
 more especially as he had no real foothold in either camp, 
 believing that both had missed the true position, and had gone 
 out into the wilderness after a very small matter. For a long 
 time, therefore, he contented himself with the office of mediator, 
 and repeatedly urged Jacobi in his letters to mitigate the harsh- 
 ness of his language with regard to the sorrowing old Moses, 
 and to lay aside the polemical tone as far as possible. Much of 
 his advice was followed, especially in the first edition of the 
 treatise on Spinoza ; but unfortunately Jacobi's zeal had been 
 further fired by the death of his wife, and, though this almost 
 silences criticism, its influence on his mind allows him no place 
 amongst philosophers, whose hearts, as far as philosophy goes, 
 must not be touched by mortal things. 
 
 The correspondence on Spinoza, therefore- — between Jacobi 
 on one side and Herder and Goethe on the other — dragged on 
 through three or four years without the possibility of a conclusion. 
 Goethe is generally content to leave the statement of his own 
 views to Herder, who, as he repeatedly says, was quite at one 
 with him on this point ; for his own part, as is well known, he 
 wrote that he preferred to get his physics clear before he advanced 
 to metaphysics, and was always so glad to hold his peace when 
 people began to talk about the Divine Being. There is some 
 irony in Goethe's tone throughout, and indeed in Herder's too ; 
 perhaps irony was unavoidable in dealing with so dignified a 
 person. At all events it is worth remembering that Jacobi was 
 one of the few people with whom Goethe almost lost his temper, 
 both before this and some twenty years afterwards. Herder's 
 letters are interesting as containing in a brief form the substance 
 of his later treatise. His contention witli Jacobi in fact turned 
 on the point whether Pantheism was really identical with atheism, 
 as it had hitherto been practically considered. Certainly identical, 
 said Jacobi, or at all events Spinoza proclaims atheism, for " he 
 
THE COMPLETE, 343 
 
 upsets all belief in a Providence, a plan of the world, a God who 
 has being in himself, who is conscious in himself and not merely 
 in his creatures." " You, yourself," Herder replies, ^^ are 
 throughout a truly orthodox Christian ; for you have an extra- 
 mundane God, comme il faut^ and have saved your soul;" but 
 he had not hesitated to send a full and eloquent account of his 
 own position, which he supposed to be the same as Spinoza's, or 
 at all events a legitimate deduction therefrom (in two letters 
 especially, February and December 1784).^ He starts with 
 Lessing's saying, that is so often referred to throughout the con- 
 troversy : '^ One and all {"Yiv koX irdv), 1 know no more " ; and 
 his conclusion in the whole matter may be gathered from a 
 rendering of some sentences in a long and enthusiastic passage, 
 in which he identifies Spinozism with the teaching of Christ and 
 Moses, of all the apostles, philosophers, and prophets : 
 
 God is of a truth outside you, and works in and through all creation 
 (the extramundane God I do not know) ; but what is the meaning of God V/ 
 to you if he is not in you and you are conscious of his existence in the 
 depths of your inmost being, and he fulfils his existence (sich geniesset) in 
 you as one of his thousand million instruments ? You want a God in 
 human form as a friend to take thought for you. But reflect, he must 
 then be human and limited too. He speaks to you and works on you from 
 all noble human forms, who were his instruments, and especially from the 
 instrument of instruments, the heart of the spiritual creation. ... If 
 you turn this most spiritual and highest and widest conception into an 
 empty name, you are an atheist and not Spinoza. According to him, God 
 is the being of beings, Jehovah. 
 
 This may serve as the heart of all that Herder wrote on the 
 subject. Jacobi was not convinced, but went on his way us 
 before. By 1787 he had ready for publication a treatise on 
 David Hume, in which he maintained that knowledge was 
 impossible without faith in direct revelation. It may be remem- 
 bered that, many years afterwards, he drove Goethe again to 
 take refuge in the calm sanctuary of Spinoza, by declaring that 
 the purpose of Nature was to conceal God rather than to reveal. 
 
 The correspondence with Jacobi is printed in Herder's Nachlass, vol. ii. 
 
844 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 And now Herder, having finished the third part of the Ideen, 
 felt that it was time to speak. He was convinced that no one 
 had yet done justice to Spinoza ; he was irresistibly attracted by 
 the holiness and beauty of his life, by the almost superhuman 
 magnificence of many of his sayings, which I suppose to be 
 unsurpassed for truth and paradox except by the sayings of 
 Christ. The sole purpose which he set before himself was to 
 free Spinoza's memory from the charge of atheism, and in those 
 days this purpose had still the fascination of novelty and the 
 charm of chivalrous adventure. He may have been wrong, or 
 at least imcomplete, in his interpretation ; he may have read his 
 own spirit into Spinoza, or, as Jacobi insisted, have unconsciously 
 followed the Kabbala rather than the philosopher ; in other 
 words, he may have fallen into what I am inclined to call 
 Spinoza's trap. But, if this is so, he is not alone in this ; for the 
 profound influence which Spinoza has exercised on the thought 
 of the last hundred years has been mainly due to a similar mis- 
 take, if mistake it be, either acknowledged or overlooked. And, 
 indeed, after a careful consideration of the Ethics and Epistles, 
 even by the light of the two latest, clearest, and — as far as 
 Spinoza goes — most anti-theistic commentaries already referred 
 to, I confess myself at present unable to decide whether there is 
 a trap at all; or, if there is, whether Spinoza fell into it himself, 
 by reason of his descent and the suppressed poetic fervour of his 
 nature. For he was not a man to compromise, nor was he a 
 man to fail of his purpose ; so that he can neither have cloaked 
 his doctrines in theological garb as a disguise, nor have equipped 
 them in theological arqis out of irony, as for a sham fight or 
 review when the battle was over ; for in this case he certainly 
 failed to cheat his opponents through at least a hundred years, 
 since no one hesitated to call him Atheist. 
 
 Having determined that it was time for some one to speak, 
 and speak plainly, on this matter. Herder struck boldly at the 
 root by undertaking not merely the defence of Lessing but the 
 defence of Spinoza himself, which of course included the other. 
 He gave up his old scheme of writing on Spinoza, Shaftesbury, 
 
THE COMPLETE. 845 
 
 and Leibnitz in conjunction, and devoted himself entirely to 
 overthrowing the charge of Atheism against Spinoza ; and, 
 unless this purpose is kept clearly in mind, together v^ith the 
 previous history of Spinozism, and the horror and contempt with 
 w^hich the doctrine was almost universally mentioned, the book 
 is likely enough to prove disappointing. It is written in the 
 form of a dialogue, and was originally published under the title 
 of God : some Conversations on Spinoza's Si/stem, but has come 
 to be more generally spoken of as Some Conversations on God, 
 The first four books are dialogues between two friends, Theo- 
 phron and Philolaus, of whom Theophron is supposed to be the 
 true Spinozist, or, rather, defender of Spinoza ; for Herder would 
 not have consented to accept Spinoza's system in its complete- 
 ness but only after his own interpretation and development ; and 
 Philolaus is a shrewd and cultivated thinker, who hitherto has 
 followed the multitude in condemning Spinoza without the trouble 
 of reading him. But, as Herder was incapable of drama, the 
 characters are not strictly kept, and these four books may really 
 be read straight through with hardly a thought of them. In the 
 fifth book a ** lady friend," Theano, who in some unaccountable 
 way had been an invisible listener hitherto, enters bodily, with 
 her embroidery, in the hope by her feminine presence to restrain 
 the philosophers from overweening flights into the dim regions 
 of the inane. But she certainly does not increase the scientific 
 tone and thoroughness of the dialogue, and indeed contributes 
 very little in her dramatic character except some illustrations 
 and outcries, both equally feminine. There is some half conscious 
 irony in her observation, towards the beginning of the book, 
 how sweet and comforting a thing is Spinoza's doctrine of 
 necessity, especially to the heart of women, who, by the ordi- 
 nance of ^Nature and the decree of man, are allowed so little of 
 the freedom of will for which they are naturally most eager. 
 
 But, for the rest, we may set aside the form of dialogue as 
 entirely unimportant and, indeed, unfortunate. We shall then 
 see that Herder deals suggestively enough with several points in 
 the history of Spinoza's system, as it arose in his mind, and in 
 
346 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 the history of its reception by the world. He begins by showing 
 the inadequacy of Bayle's account, hitherto generally accepted, 
 and gives a few rules for the study of Spinoza, and a translation 
 of the passage in which he describes his choice of life. He also 
 criticises Descartes, to whose identification of extension and 
 matter he attributes much of the obscurity or error of Spinozism. 
 It is noticeable that Herder continually regrets that Spinoza was 
 born at a time so completely under the influence of Descartes, 
 and so far removed from the discoveries of modern physical 
 science, such as magnetism and electricity, which, in Herder's 
 opinion, have gone far to prove that matter is not dead, but 
 instinct throughout with life. " Without physical science," he 
 goes on, " metaphysic builds castles in the air "; and, again, in 
 the beginning of the third book, " science banishes the arbitrary 
 and wilful, and therefore banishes fear." He prophesies that the 
 day will soon come when all that seems arbitrary will have been 
 explained from the world ; and, after an embittered onslaught 
 against the vulgar teleology that was received as orthodox, he 
 adds, " I wish others would go bravely forward on the way 
 Spinoza has opened, and would unravel the simple laws of 
 Nature without troubling themselves about God's particular 
 purposes." There is also a full discussion of Lessing's con- 
 versation and of his position, as well as of Jacobi's. As to the 
 latter, Herder is inclined to think that it is best, if possible, to 
 do without any " mortal leap," for " we are on Creation's level 
 ground." It may be mentioned that in this treatise, for the first 
 time, we find a distinctly polemical tone against Kant appearing 
 at intervals throughout. Theano, for instance, is in sore distress 
 because her brother has lately begun to talk a strange and 
 mysterious tongue, as though he were possessed of a devil ; and 
 there is a good deal of misplaced satire on the impossibility of 
 proof or disproof of God's existence. Some few of the minor 
 points in Spinoza's system are also touched upon and partially 
 explained, such as the non-existence of evil, the freedom of 
 determinism, the theory of individuality (added in the second 
 edition), and the supposed necessity of the geometric form. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 347 
 
 together with Spinoza's anticipation of modern criticism and 
 religious tolerance. But several of the greatest difficulties appear 
 to have been overlooked, or at least set aside/ as not pertinent 
 to the present question, which, as has been said, turned on the 
 Atheism of Spinoza. 
 
 And here we come to the heart of the whole matter, and can 
 see now that it is simple enough. The treatise is an unflinching 
 blow at eighteenth-century Deism ; a Deism that said " a hand 
 unseen directs and guides this weak machine," ^ and tried to 
 rouse a gentle enthusiasm for a God who sat apart from the 
 world and "watched it go," having wound it up to work for a 
 time, like an eight-day clock,^ and contenting himself with now 
 and again jerking at the pendulum and pullies — a religion fit for 
 Geneva watchmakers, as Heine said. It was an interpretation 
 of wits and pedants, talking a jargon about plans and purposes, 
 excellent mechanism and divine contrivance. As long as it was 
 allowed to dogmatise, it could make all as clear as day by its 
 assertions; but, having assumed an all- wise and all-powerful 
 God, it could at any moment have been forced also to confess 
 that he must either be indifferent or spiteful. Alas ! more people 
 
 ' Such difficulties I mean as the following, which necessarily puzzle all 
 readers, or at least beginners, in Spinoza: Hovr can dualism be fused in monism ? 
 What is the connexion between body and mind ? What does he exactly mean 
 by the Attributes of Substance, and why are they infinite ? Assuming the inde- 
 pendence of thought and extension, is not thought the only thing necessary ? 
 How, then, can thought take rank with the other Attributes ? Does Spinoza's 
 system account for self-consciousness? What can we take as a test of truth, for 
 clearness of idea is no test, nor does Spinoza claim it to be such ? What is the 
 meaning or the two meanings of the word Idea ? What did Spinoza understand 
 by a causa sui ? It is very strange, too, that Herder should have taken so little 
 notice of the fifth part of the Ethics and its almost mystic language on immor- 
 tality. 
 
 "^ Libretto to Judas Maecabaus, the whole of which, with its " pious orgies, 
 decent prayers," its semi-paganism, vulgar presumption, and frigid blasphemies, 
 may serve as a fair type of average eighteenth-century Deism, though it is but a 
 paltry straw in the stream. 
 
 ^ See Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 25. It is possible that Carlyle adapted 
 the metaphor from Heine. 
 
348 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 than the outspoken Frenchwoman were beginning to find the 
 Eire Supreme a bore. 
 
 Herder's onslaught on such a conception of God is almost 
 incredibly bold and defiant, considering his position in a Church 
 whose thinking members took their views of orthodoxy from 
 Leibnitz according to Wolff; when we remember how real a 
 thing Deism still was to many, it is almost profane. He can see 
 no beauty in a God who " sat like a scrupulous artist, beating 
 his brains and making plans, comparisons, rejections, and selec- 
 tions ; who played with worlds, as children play with soap- 
 bubbles, till he gave preference to the one that pleased him 
 most." Or, again : 
 
 " The world," says Leibnitz, ''existed in God from eternity as an 
 idea," that is as a soap-bubble with which he played in imagination ; he 
 was delighted with it, and brooded through ages of eternity over thia 
 unborn egg. At length the time came [imagine the weary, weary time 
 through the eternity of this inactive God], and now he resolved to create. 
 On a sudden the world issued from God, the world that had been so long 
 in him, and now it is outside him for ever, and he outside the world. In 
 the great Inane of primeval, inactive eternity he has his comer (Raiimchen) 
 where he contemplates himself, and probably ponders on the project of 
 another world. I confess that in my opinion the gods of Epicurus are 
 more sufferable than this inactive, melancholy being, through whom 
 people have believed Spinoza could be overthrown off-hand. ' 
 
 The Deist might of course reply, that all this comes very 
 near to persiflage, and that such an interpretation of their funda- 
 mental idea is unfairly anthropomorphic ; indeed, as we are 
 human, it does not seem likely that we shall escape from human 
 conceptions, so that the charge of anthropomorphism becomes 
 merely a question of degree. I suppose, for instance, that many 
 modern thinkers would maintain that Herder himself erred both 
 in his interpretation of Spinoza and in his theory of the universe 
 from this selfsame cause, this inevitable tendency to personify, 
 to seek for ends and divine purposes, to crave for a reality other 
 and greater than phenomena, to imagine a, principle of life and 
 
 ' Gott, Drittct Gesprach, about the middle. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 349 
 
 thought distinct from and independent of a cunning self-adjust- 
 ment of what we call matter, however living and unknowable 
 matter may appear ; the tendency to speak, as Emerson spoke, of 
 an '^over-soul." And this is what I mean by saying, that, if 
 there is a trap for the unwary in Spinoza, Herder has fallen into 
 it. If Spinoza had throughout called his Substance merely Sub- 
 stance, or Nature, instead of God, I think it is doubtful whether 
 Herder's treatise would ever have been written.^ 
 
 If the pit-fall exists, it is on this word that Herder trips ; he 
 cannot escape personification ; the idea of God carries him away ; 
 and, when he supposes himself merely to be stating Spinozism in 
 fresh terms, he is really reading his own ideas into it. He 
 maintains the divinity and necessary existence of the universe, 
 but all the time we cannot help feeling that he regards the 
 universe not as God but as " the garment of God." The golden 
 chain of nature, the ceaseless rush of energy along the course of 
 time, of which he speaks, is really the visible expression of the 
 primeval soul, of the eternal and original power of thought and 
 power of action, the Urkraft not outside creation but for ever 
 immanent in creation, and this is what he means by God. He 
 sets his insistence on the side of thought ; he practically deifies 
 thought. As he vigorously says in one place, to him the word 
 'Ms," even the algebraical sign of equality, is proof enough of 
 the existence of God. He supposes, though with some obscurity, 
 that the introduction of " organic forces " would improve Spi- 
 noza's system, and by organic forces he means the spiritual force 
 or thought, and the bodily force or movement, which he would 
 probably have identified with life. That he should have insisted 
 on these two of all the infinite ways in which, as he says, God 
 infinitely reveals himself, proves the essential idealism of his 
 position; for the introduction of "organic forces " was not in 
 itself necessary — since, if they exist, they are by the definition 
 included in Spinoza's conception of Substance or God : indeed, 
 
 ^ " As far as logic goes, Spinoza's God is identical with nature, but I think 
 in other ways he meant something very different," said the teacher who first told 
 me anything definite about Spinoza; but this was probably a pious fraud. 
 
350 HERDER AND HIB TIMES. 
 
 thought is one of the two knowable Attributes of Substance ; and, 
 in a certain sense, life or existence may be identified with. Sub- 
 stance itself. And yet there is a certain mystery about thought 
 and organic life which sometimes does not seem to be shared by 
 the other Attribute and Modes of Substance, but drives us inevita- 
 bly into the region of myth and personification. Herder, there- 
 fore, being conscious of these two eternal mysteries —the mystery 
 of thought and the mystery of life — took his stand upon their 
 unspeakable significance, and for the rest was content to watch 
 the face of the universe in the time of history, the space of 
 physics, and in the heart of man as part of nature, with the sure 
 and certain hope that here at least it might be possible to find 
 some revelation of the soul in whom we live and move ; of the 
 power which, as he himself says, " was unto Moses Jehovah, 
 I am that I am, and shall be that 1 shall be." 
 
 " It is very possible that in all this Herder is constructing a 
 kind of Theism, or even mythology, out of one of the most 
 remarkably anti-theistic systems the world has seen. My object 
 is not to defend his interpretation but to show its historical 
 significance. Unless others, especially in Germany -^though in 
 England as well, through Germany— had adopted a closely- 
 similar interpretation, it is very certain that Spinozism would 
 not have exercised anything like the influence which it has exer- 
 cised during the last hundred years. When Herder first spoke, 
 Spinoza was a by-word in Europe, and now his fame is gone 
 out into all lands. As might be expected. Herder's book was 
 received with very opposite feelings and much excitement. 
 Jacobi complained bitterly that this God was no helper to 
 humanity, and for some years all intercourse between him and 
 Herder ceased. Hamann, being then near death, called the 
 book a Schuhu, a great horned owl, that had better creep away 
 and hide itself in the dark. On the other hand, Goethe, who 
 received it on his birthday in Rome, writes : 
 
 It was so comforting and refreshing to me in this Babel, the mother 
 of so much deceit and error, to read a book so pure and beautiful, and to 
 think that after all this is the time when such opinions and ways of 
 
THE COMPLETE. 351 
 
 thought can be published abroad without fear. It has encouraged me to 
 advance still further into nature, where, especially in botany, I have come 
 upon a "Ev Kai irav (the original plant), which fills me with astonishment. 
 
 The book sold quickly, for men's hearts were astir. In the 
 preface to the second edition (1800) Herder mentions that this 
 might have been published long before, only Spinoza had needed 
 no further defence of late. The air was full of him. Under 
 the influence of Kant and Spinoza the old Deism was as good 
 as dead, and what has been called Pantheism was being boril. 
 Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all impregnated with Spinoza, 
 though starting from Kant, were beginning to pile their systems. 
 The idea w^as alive, and it grew and multiplied. In 1797 
 Schelling published his Philosophy of Nature^ and the next year 
 his book on the Soul of the World ( Weltseele) . Schelling, it is 
 true, complained that Spinozism was cold and lifeless ; but Heine 
 tells us that as long as Schelling was a philosopher he was a 
 Spinozist. On the other hand. Herder disowned the conception 
 of the Weltseele as anthropomorphic and partial : but in all 
 essentials it seems to have been identical with his own inter- 
 pretation. And it is this interpretation that has lived hitherto ; 
 w^e find it in line after line of Groethe's poems, in the systems of 
 those three philosophers, in Shelley, in Heine at his best, in the 
 Sartor^ and in Emerson. Under one form of development or 
 another it may be called the central idea of a century of thought. 
 It has for years been the one possible road for those who refused 
 to turn aside into the convenient refuge-city of Agnosticism, 
 and were unsatisfied with the beautiful and accommodating 
 versatility of the Chinese, of old the best of conjurors, who can 
 swallow three distinct systems of religion side by side, and be 
 ready for any number more. 
 
 There is, of course, a noble eclecticism too, both fearless and 
 reverent, which, by a power of universal sympathy, strives to 
 take to itself the heart and life of every system, of every form of 
 religion which has had strength to be a guide unto men and to 
 survive its own weaknesses. But this kind, if it differs at all 
 from Herder's interpretation of life, as I have here attempted 
 
352 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 to set it forth, comes so very near — especially in its aspect of 
 history, with which we have now most concern — as to render 
 exact distinction unnecessary. 
 
 As to the name of this idea, which, since Herder's treatise 
 was published, has been the secret mainspring of all advance in 
 thought, and correlatively on the concrete side of all advance in 
 science— if we must still bind ourselves to names, it seems to be 
 of little importance whether we call it theism or pantheism, or 
 pot- theism either, " if the thing is true." ^ The tendency to 
 believe in names, either for abuse or for worship, is growing 
 fainter. We are more and more unwilling to enslave ourselves 
 in the limits of any ism or iti/, however recent and plausible. 
 We no longer dream of the near approach of a blessed and 
 lethargic time, when the universe will be explained with the 
 conciseness of an algebraical formula. Many run to and fro, 
 and knowledge is increased ; but we are beginning to see that 
 the thing is not to stand obstinately rooted in a system, still less 
 to construct a system for the limitation of others, but to be 
 awake to the influence of pregnant ideas, and, if it may be, to 
 increase the sum of them. We are beginning to realise the 
 profound truth of the saying — the letter killeth, but the spirit 
 maketh alive. 
 
 In the weird borderland of history a maiden was standing 
 at an emperor's seat of judgment, in sore peril of death by 
 reason of the craft of her enemies. But it had been shown 
 to her in a vision that if she was steadfast in supplication a 
 deliverer would come unto her ; therefore she cried for three 
 days, and ceased not. And at the end of the third day a knight 
 was seen approaching up the sti'eam of the Rhine, drawn by a 
 magic bird ; and he overthrew her enemies, and himself wedded 
 the maiden. Yet was their hatred not appeased, nor did their 
 guile fail them ; for in the evening they said to her, " Tliis 
 champion of thine is no true knight, but a false. Canst thou 
 even tell his name?" Therefore, in the bridal chamber she asked 
 
 ' Carlyle's Li/c of John Stcrlintj , p. 109. 
 
THE COMPLETE. - 353 
 
 him, saying, "Tell me thy name," and he told her, and his name 
 was Lohengrin, son of Parsifal, the guardian of the Holy Grail. 
 But she had no pleasure in the name ; for, as soon as he had told 
 her, he got him thence by the way by which he had come, and 
 left her sorrowing, and was seen no more. In one form or other 
 the story seems almost as old as history, and it may still be found 
 significant. 
 
 Turning now to the concrete or historical side of Herder's 
 aspect of the universe, we come at last to the Ideen, the ideas or 
 hints for the philosophy of . the history of mankind. The first 
 part was written in Herder's fortieth year ; the fourth and last 
 part was ready before he went to Italy, and was left in Goethe's 
 keeping, but was not published till 1791, for reasons which will 
 appear. The work was never finished, though some later writings 
 may be regarded as continuations of the same under a different 
 title. I have endeavoured to trace the history of the conception 
 as it grew in his mind ; indeed, it may be said the story of his 
 life hitherto has been nothing but the history of this, and for 
 anticipations of the basis of the Ideen we can point to much 
 of his work in Riga, his Diary at Nantes, the prize-essay on 
 Language, the pamphlet called Another Contribution to the Philo- 
 sophy of History, and to separate passages in nearly all his works. 
 From childhood up we have seen his passion for history in its 
 widest sense, and his enthusiasm for the study of man. It would 
 be strange, therefore, if the Ideen, a book bearing directly on his 
 favourite theme, and written during his best years, were not also 
 the best of his works. And such I believe it to be, and such — 
 which is more important — a century of time has declared it. 
 iFor I find that people and writers who just know Herder by 
 name always first think of him as the author of the Ideen ; if 
 they know a little more they add the Volkslieder, and so on 
 to the Fragments and his opposition to Kant ; and, I suppose, 
 sufficient time has now passed to make this verdict final. 
 
 Yet it is noticeable that the Ideen had not so pronounced and 
 immediate an effect as much of Herder's earlier work. This is no 
 doubt partly due to the nature of the subject, for we are not all 
 
 2 A 
 
354 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 men of science nor historians, whereas we are all bom poets, or 
 at least capable of poetry. It was perhaps for this, as well as 
 other and subtler reasons, that Goethe, after praising the third 
 part, added, " The book will effect its chiefest good only after a 
 length of time, and perhaps in foreign nations " ; a prophecy 
 which has come true, though he himself seems to coninte it in 
 two different ways ; for when the French translation of the Ideen 
 appeared Goethe said, " The influence of the book on the culture 
 of our nation has been incredible " ; and later in life, when 
 Herder seemed almost forgotten, he was inclined to disparage 
 the Ideen as having been long superseded. But the fact is, 
 since 1859-60 England has been the centre of modern thought, 
 and the Ideen comes much nearer the modern English aspect of 
 history than the intermediate German period. And again it is 
 almost absurd (I speak with reverence) to say that such a book 
 is superseded. It is as though we said Philip was superseded 
 by Alexander, Plato by Kant. No man, no book, no system 
 that has given a true idea to the world, can ever be superseded, 
 for we are all its children. 
 
 The great difficulty in giving a sufficiently short account of 
 the Ideen, for those who are unacquainted with the original, is 
 its excellence. It is one of the few of Herder's books that still 
 may be read through from beginning to end with pleasure, and 
 something more than pleasure, in spite of occasional contra- 
 dictions, inaccuracies, and mistakes arising from knowledge 
 inevitably insufficient. The style is simple and straightforward, 
 and the tone for the most part calmly philosophic, free from 
 common prejudice and blind enthusiasm ; the whole is so nearly 
 scientific that any page will prove how completely Herder had 
 delivered himself from all that was hot and cloudy and obscure 
 in the season of Storm and Stress, when such books as the 
 Urkunde were written. Something is lost, of com'se, but it 
 is something which is only too likely to become wearisome, and 
 in a book of this kind is out of place ; indeed this something 
 was not properly Herder's to start with, but Hamann's rather ; 
 it was therefore doomed to disappear. Needs must that a man 
 
THE COMPLETE. 355 
 
 borrow, for he grows with the world ; but only the borrowings 
 of genius are bearable, for they are always new. In the Ideen^ 
 accordingly, we find that Herder has a style of his own, a beau- 
 tiful and simple style, as refreshing as running water compared 
 to the gasping tension of a modern German scientific treatise. 
 
 The substance falls naturally into two main divisions : first, 
 the science of nature or man's place in the universe, then the 
 science of history or man's development in time. It may be 
 said that these two are really one ; but the distinction is con- 
 venient, and has hitherto been generally recognised. The 
 difficulty is to explain the bearings of these two parts without 
 being lengthy and without wearying the reader with constant 
 references and extracts that would be out of place in an attempt 
 of this kind. 
 
 But, before we proceed to glance at these two main divisions, 
 an apparent contradiction may be mentioned between the tone of 
 parts of the Ideen and the treatise called God. When the 
 supernatural is introduced at all in the Ideen^ though this is not 
 often. Herder's language is for the most part the language of a 
 Deist. And indeed Baerenbach, in his comments on a series 
 of quotations from the Ideen, by which he expounds Herder's 
 theory of natural development, speaks throughout of " Herder 
 the Deist. "^ Many reasons might be assigned for this contradic- 
 tion. It may be said that Herder was unwilling to raise an issue 
 on a point which he regarded as subordinate to his main object ; 
 or that he adopted the generally accepted aspect of the super- 
 natural, when he was obliged to introduce it at all into a work 
 which only sought after the natural in physics and history ; just 
 as Darwin speaks of " the Creator " with reference to his own 
 law of nature. Such explanations will hold ; but, as usual, I 
 should be inclined to turn to time, the universal explanation— -to 
 which may here be added the confusion of thought inseparable 
 from such a period of change and overthrow. No great revolu- 
 tion is accomplished at a blow ; relics of the old customs, the . 
 
 ' Herder ah Vorgiinger Danvin's (1877). 
 
 2 a2 
 
356 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 old loyalty, will remain, certainly for a time, perhaps for ages, 
 will possibly outlast a score of succeeding revolutions, and come 
 to be perplexing to the antiquary and social inquirer. And, to 
 take a narrower basis, it must be remembered that, though the 
 Ideen and the Discourse on God grew side by side, the Discourse 
 was written later ; and any increase in boldness and precision 
 will not be surprising to any one who has seen how incalculably 
 a man will develope within a year, even within a few months. 
 After this warning we may here finally quit the supernatural 
 for what is known as the natural, though indeed it might well 
 be said that the distinction is rather conventional than intrinsic. 
 The great difficulty of the first or physical part of the Ideen 
 arises from much the same source of confusion as was mentioned 
 above. Herder was standing close to the point of a new de- 
 parture in scientific investigation, but he did not recognise the 
 full significance of his position — he did not see whither this sharp 
 turning would lead him — it is doubtful if he saw there was a 
 turning at all ; at all events, he remained standing with one 
 foot on the old road and one on the new. It sometimes seems 
 in reading the Ideen that only a slight push, a small impulse of 
 knowledge, was needed, and we should have talked of Herderism 
 and not of Darwinism. But this is not true, for the time was 
 not ripe, and nature is in no hurry. The discovery of the laws 
 of evolution and natural selection was gradual, and has a long 
 history ; but it was almost as impossible that it should be con- 
 summated by Herder as by Jacob. In the same way the sub- 
 ordinate law of sexual selection has been practically recognised 
 through countless generations, but we cannot say that it was 
 scientifically formulated even by Shakespeare in the first four 
 lines of the Sonnets. Apparent anticipations such as these may 
 be found scattered up and down the whole course of literature. 
 We come upon something very like Darwinism in Cudworth, 
 enemy as he is to the whole school called English. But all such 
 things are to be regarded at best as merely glorious guesses, 
 significant and interesting to us as parts of history, but to be 
 treated with the greatest care, lest we exaggerate their import- 
 
THE COMPLETE. 357 
 
 ance by separating them from their times and reading them 
 only by the light of our present knowledge. In the Ideen, 
 therefore, the thing is rather to remember how far Herder was 
 removed from Darwin, than to watch for resemblances. The 
 resemblances indeed are obvious to the least watchful eye, but to 
 appreciate the gulf of difference some self-control and historical 
 imagination is needed. From the Ideeri I have collected several 
 passages, between thirty and forty in all, wliich come so close in 
 tone, sometimes even in words, to the Origin of Species, that 
 after all precautions I cannot help regarding the work as a 
 brilliant attempt to bridge the chasm between Spinoza and 
 Darwin, though Herder, starting as he did from Spinoza, and 
 using as his materials merely the sciences of physics and history, 
 yet did not see clearly whither the other end of his bridge 
 would reach. It is, therefore, his purely inductive and scientific 
 method of building, rather than the edifice, which remains of 
 importance. 
 
 The Ideen, as though to prove the insignificance as well as 
 the sublimity of the subject, begins with the position of the 
 earth in the universe of stars. This is followed by some chap- 
 ters on the earth's crust, its formation, the influence of the 
 atmosphere, and the vast revolutions through which it must 
 have passed before man could appear. Tracing the various 
 forms of life in the order in which he supposed they were pro- 
 duced, from the lichen up to man, Herder enunciates what may 
 serve as the text of his work : " Thus has Nature produced the 
 greatest variety out of a simphcity in endless progression." The 
 rest of the first part, especially the third book, and most of the 
 second part, may be regarded as proof or commentary of this 
 text. He illustrates this unity of creation from almost every 
 branch of natural organic science, from geology, from plants,^ 
 from comparative anatomy, from the universal mystery of gene- 
 
 • For account of fertilization of plants and uniformity of generation, see 
 Part I. book ii. chap. 2 ; for hint at possibility of a sensitive system in plants, 
 book iii. chap. 4. (The Ideen was admirably translated at the beginning of this 
 century^by F. Churchill.) 
 
A. 
 
 358 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 ration, from embryology, and that strange uniformity or typical 
 form (Ilauptform) which prevails through vast numbers of 
 distinct species and is the foundation of the great generic dis- 
 tinctions ; " This truly wonderful fact," as Darwin says, " the 
 wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity." 
 And again, " If species had* been independently created no 
 explanation would have been possible of this kind of classifica- 
 tion." ' 
 
 But, granting the uniformity of nature, it is more important 
 to find out how Herder traces and accounts for the endless 
 variety that has arisen out of uniformity, in fact for the origin of 
 species ; and we shall see that it is here he breaks down, though 
 it is often astonishing how near the more modern views he 
 comes, considering the state of scientific knowledge at the time 
 and his own small opportunities for scientific observation. One 
 of the most remarkable points is, that in those days the difficulty 
 of the origin of species should have occurred to him at all, even 
 in such a form or with such an answer as this : 
 
 Why did the creative Mother produce separate species at all ? For no 
 other object than that they might thereby more perfectly produce and 
 uphold the type of their conformation. We do not know how many of 
 our present species may have approached more nearly to each other in an 
 earlier period of the world's history ; but we see that their limits are now 
 fixed by generation, or in other words (as he goes on to explain) they 
 breed true, or the hybrids are wholly or partially sterile. '' 
 
 This difficulty, and probably his ignorance of the enormous 
 length of the periods in which Nature works out her changes, 
 led him to suppose that the final numbers and forms of species 
 were now fixed and unalterable since the time when, as he puts 
 it, " the gates of creation were shut." ^ This supposition, which 
 draws a hard and fast line in the course of history, would, of 
 course, destroy half the value of his theories ; but, fortunately, 
 
 ' Book ii. chap. 4 ; of. Origin of Species (sixth edition), p. 104. 
 2 Book vii. chap. 4, end; cf. Origin of Sj^fcirSj chap. 9, which shows that 
 the argument from such sterility has been exaggerated. 
 ' Book V. chap. .S. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 359 
 
 he is not quite consistent in maintaining it ; and in tracing the 
 course of development through the earliest periods he seeks to 
 establish laws which are quite as active now as at the time when 
 life first appeared. In common with most naturalists up to a 
 very recent time, Herder is inclined to lay the greatest stress 
 on the influence of climate in determining the variations and 
 laws of life amongst the lower animals, and especially amongst 
 the tribes of men. ^ As part ofthe same theory we may regard what 
 he calls the chains with which Nature binds us from our child- 
 hood to our possessions, our land, our manners, and language.'"^ 
 From such hints as these, which occur frequently throughout 
 the Ideen, it would be possible enough to construct the law of 
 adaptation to environment. Let us take some sentences from a 
 significant passage at the end of the second book : 
 
 *' The bird flies in the air ; every departure of its shape from the for- 
 mation of land-animals can be explained from the requirements of its 
 element. The fish swims in the water ; as yet its feet and hands can 
 only take the form of fins and tail ; as yet it has very little articulation of 
 limbs. But as soon as it comes in contact with the land, like the Manatee, 
 it developes at least separate fore-feet, and the female acquires breasts." 
 Similar instances follow : — '' And so there is a gradual advance from the 
 dust of the worms, from the lime-dwellings of molluscs, from the cocoons 
 of insects, up to the more articulate and higher organizations. ... It is 
 thus proved by anatomy and physiology, that, throughout the whole living 
 creation of our earth, the analogy of one organization is everywhere pre- 
 valent." ^ 
 
 The same method is followed in explaining the gradual 
 development of the brain from the end of the spinal marrow, of 
 the senses in general, and of the special organs of sense that 
 characterise certain species.^ If Herder had here been able 
 to explain the ultimate law of this gradual development, how 
 
 ' Book ii. chap. 3, and constantly in the second half of the work; contrast 
 with Origin of Species, pp. 43-112, &c. 
 
 * Book i. chap. 4. 
 ' Book ii. chap. 4. 
 
 * Book iv. chap. 1, middle; cf. Origin of Species, pp. 159-164, "Utilitarian 
 Doctrine "; and pp. 108-112, and 897, for growth of organs by use. 
 
V 
 
 360 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 that, before the advantageous change could come about, there 
 must be some variety, some exaggeration — by use or otherwise 
 — of an organ, which, being serviceable to its possessor, was 
 grasped and developed by natural selection, it looks as though 
 the theory might have been complete. He leaves out the active 
 cause of development, and yet in some passages he gets so near 
 that I have found it almost impossible to avoid misreading him 
 by supplying it. This difficulty is perhaps felt most of all in 
 the parts where Herder speaks of the law of persistence and 
 the struggle of each species and individual to continue ; for it is 
 this struggle for life which has changed the law of persistence 
 into a law^ of development, only Herder did not clearly grasp 
 the means by which the change is accomplished. 
 
 *' Self-preservation is the first object for which a being exists : from 
 the grain of dust to the sun everything strives to remain what it is." ' 
 Where there is no struggle or competition this law of persistence is 
 sufficient and does not lead to development, and consequently we see that 
 *' the less a nation is pressed upon, and the more truly it is obliged to 
 abide by its simple and savage way of life, the more exactly does it also 
 maintain its original conformation or type."^ But such cases are at least 
 extremely rare : " Nothing in nature stands still ; everything strives and 
 struggles onward. Could we only see into the first periods cf creation — 
 how one realm of nature was built up on another — what a procession of 
 forces ever struggling onward would be displayed in each development."^ 
 In this struggle, long before the earth assumed its present form, ''millions 
 of creatures were of necessity overwhelmed ; what could maintain itself 
 remained, and has been standing now for thousands of years in the great 
 harmonious order. "^ And again, " In proportion to the skill and clever- 
 ness, the courage and strength, of each species, to that extent was it able 
 to take possession of the earth. . . . All things are in strife against each 
 other, because everything is oppressed or limited ; it must look out for 
 itself and take thought for its own life. Why did nature do this ? Why 
 did she thus jostle her creatures together ? Because she wished in the 
 smallest space to create the greatest number of the most various living 
 
 ' Book viii. chap. 4, 
 
 2 Book vi. chap. 1, end. This important law is hinted at several times 
 throQghout the Idetn^ and readers may compare Origin of Sj)eoies, pp. 82, 8.3, 
 for the account of the persistence of anomalous forms such as the Omitho- 
 rhynchus. 
 
 ' Book V. chap. 3. ■• Book xv. chap. 2. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 361 
 
 beings, and therefore in creation one overcomes the other, and only by an 
 equilibrium of forces is peace possible. Each species cares for itself as if 
 it were the only species in the world, but at its side stands another to 
 limit it, and only in this relation of opposed forms did the creative 
 
 Mother find means for the maintenance of the whole It does not 
 
 trouble me, therefore, that vast species of animals are extinct. If the 
 mammoth is extinct, so too are the giants ; there was then another relation 
 between the races" ( Geschlechtern, perhaps meaning ''between the de- 
 scendants of the two races ").' 
 
 It is clear, then, that Herder regarded each special organ 
 or the conformation as a whole, as having been given to each 
 species or developed solely for the sake of that species, that it 
 might have more chance of preserving itself in the struggle for 
 existence, and not for the sake of any other species nor for man, 
 who is but " a fraction of the whole," as he says in a passage 
 directly bearing on this point.''^ For the first causes of variety 
 he relies, as has been said, more on climate than is now thought 
 admissible ; though he admits that " climate is a chaos of causes, 
 which work very unequally, and therefore slowly and in various 
 ways, till they at length penetrate into the inmost constitution, 
 and even alter this by habit and generation or heredity" ; ^ but in 
 this place he supposes that one species cannot develope into 
 another, though he admits very wide variability within its own 
 limits. He does not overlook the power of inheritance, the 
 importance for his theories of the laws of reproduction and 
 generation —that eternal wonder of wonders;'* and it is very 
 noticeable that in one passage whilst he is dwelling on this sub- 
 ject he endeavours to set at rest the old contention of innate 
 ideas by attributing them to inheritance^ — an explanation which 
 now finds general favour.^ 
 
 ' Book ii. chap. 3. ^ Book iii. chap. 5. 
 
 ^ Book vii. chap. 5. 
 
 * See especially book vii. chap. 4, end. ^ Book viii. chapter ii. 5 §. 
 
 ^ From Herder's observation that it is remarkable how amongst the count- 
 less different types of the human figure certain forms and relation not only recur 
 but also seem to belong expressly to each other (book vii. chap. 4), it would be 
 possible to deduce something like Darwin's law of Correlated Variations {Origin 
 of Species, pp. 114-115); but this would be forced, and is unimportant to Herder's 
 theory. 
 
362 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 These are the leading principles of the theory, and the rest 
 need not concern us so much. But Herder has made one 
 deduction from his principles which cannot be overlooked — it is 
 so singularly in accordance with the more recent decrees of 
 science. Again and again he states his belief that advance in 
 organisation means differentiation of the parts in the organic 
 being. What first distinguishes the animal from the plant is 
 the differentiation of the mouth ; and so he proceeds to trace 
 various points of differentiation in polyps, worms, and birds. 
 *' The higher we go the more various and distinct do the parts 
 become."^ And so with the differentiation of sex, " the more 
 complicated the organisation of a creature the more distinct is 
 the separation of the sexes." This principle he traces in the 
 same way from the plants that are wholly or partially her- 
 maphrodite, through those with distinct sexes, the fish, birds, 
 &c., up to the higher animals.*'^ As an instance of the same 
 law he also brings forward the delicate divisions and complica- 
 tions of the nervous system in the animals that approach nearest 
 to reason,^ and the instincts of such creatures as spiders and 
 bees, which he supposes grow more complex and harder to 
 acquire as the scale of organisation rises.* The same principle, 
 which is now known as the physiological division of labour, is 
 also applied by Herder to the history of society, and is most 
 definitely stated towards the middle of the work after a descrip- 
 tion of the growth of the human embryo: *^ Man is the most 
 perfect of earthly creatures only because the finest organic 
 powers we know act in him through the most elaborate instru- 
 ments of organisation." ^ 
 
 I have now mentioned, though in the barest outline, the 
 points in the physical parts of the Ideen which I believe to be 
 most important; and I suppose that their significance can be 
 
 » Book iii. chap. 1 ; cf. OHgin of Species, pp. 89, 97-100. 
 ' Book iii. chap. 1, end ; cf. Origin of Species, pp. 76-78. 
 8 Book iii. chap. 2, end. 
 
 * Book iii. chap. 4 ; cf . Origin of Species, pp. 205-7. 
 » Book vii. chap. 3. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 863 
 
 overlooked by no one who can realise tlie general condition of 
 natural science a century ago, its theories of creation and prin- 
 ciples of classification, and at the same time bear in mind the 
 general tendency of recent discovery in every department of 
 scientific investigation. The omissions in Herder's account of 
 nature are obvious enough, and were inevitable under the con^ 
 ditions of the time, and also because Herder had neither the power 
 nor the opportunity to collect that vast mass of evidence from 
 careful research, and especially from personal observation, which, 
 in Professor TyndalFs phrase, has made the strength of Darwin 
 as calm and irresistible as the movement of a glacier. As my 
 knowledge of the subject is limited to a few modern works, and 
 those chiefly psychological, I cannot attempt to decide how much 
 Herder was indebted for his physical theories to his contem- 
 poraries. Buffbn and Linnaeus he had certainly studied with care ; 
 his friend Forster contributed much, and Goethe's influence is 
 manifest throughout. In the very year in which the first and most 
 physiological part of the Ideen was published, Goethe was driven 
 by his belief in the unity of nature to his discovery of the inter- 
 maxillary bone in man. It is almost impossible to fix the exact 
 date or even the actual discoverer of any of the great theories or 
 inventions. The mind of man goes vaguely groping about after 
 something, it knows not what, till at length some one with clearer 
 vision and firmer hand grasps the heart of it, and then to all the 
 world it is plain and we laugh at our blindness ; then too we 
 see how many have touched it before, but knew not what they 
 did. For this reason, though I think it is a mistake to call 
 Herder an anticipator of Darwin, at the same time I believe he 
 deserves mention in the history of the law of evolution, as the 
 phrase is usually understood. 
 
 Those who are unacquainted with the Ideen must not think 
 that I have here exhausted the physical side of the book ; there 
 is much else that is valuable, and very much that is suggestive. 
 The first part, which may be regarded as a continuous story of 
 the development of creation up to man, abounds in interesting 
 
364 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 passages on contemporary discoveries in science, electricity — 
 which Herder seems incHned to identify with what he calls 
 '' organic force " — the wonders of geology, the origin of thought 
 and the inexplicable connection between mind and its instru- 
 ment, the peculiar points of organisation by which man is sepa • 
 rated from the other animals, the impossibility that he should be 
 descended from any ape with which we are now acquainted, the 
 beginnings of human society, which, in common with most 
 modern sociologists. Herder traces to the mother rather than the 
 father, the basis for man's hope in a future state and a kind of 
 vision of immortality ; all this I have omitted, chiefly because 
 such things are to be found in Herder's other works or in con- 
 temporary authors, especially of the English school, and J have 
 only sought out what I supposed to be most distinctive and 
 significant in the Ideen itself. 
 
 So far all is simple and straightforward enough, but it is 
 necessary to add in warning, that Herder is frequently led astray 
 unconsciously from his own theory by inevitable preconceptions, 
 which serve as another proof that he was really blind to its full 
 significance. Thus the work contains contradictions that need 
 careful sifting. After all he had said about development, it still 
 might be argued from certain passages that he supposed the 
 various degrees of organization were not developed from each 
 other by a gradual process, but appeared suddenly and apparently 
 spontaneously when the time was ripe.^ By a similar mis- 
 conception he frequently stoops to what is awkwardly called 
 teleology ; for instance, he describes the elephant, the lion, and 
 man, as specially endowed with certain organs for definite pur- 
 poses ; ''^ which is now seen to be a fallacy of beginning at the 
 wrong end.^ Again, in his unwilHngness to seem to make nature 
 cruel and inhuman, he is often led to underrate the universal 
 
 ' Book X. chap. 2. But it would be possible to interpret the passage other- 
 wise. 
 
 ^ Book iii. chap. 3. 
 
 ' Herder's mistake uced not, however, surprise us when we remember that 
 even the Origin of Species was at first greeted as a proof of teleology. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 365 
 
 struggle for existence,-^ though at other times he sees clearly 
 enough that this struggle is essential for his theory, for without 
 it development is impossible. Such contradictions are likely to 
 confuse the modern reader and lead him to depreciate Herder's 
 services to science, but if we can simply regard them as inevit- 
 able relics of a previous stage of thought they will not seem to 
 diminish much from the value of the work. 
 
 The historical side, to which we may now turn, is much 
 simpler, and the general tendency of it may be more briefly 
 explained, for in one form or other it has appeared in many of 
 Herder's earlier works, though for clearness and breadth of view 
 the Ideen surpasses them all. Having once brought the history 
 of the world down through the course of long ages to the 
 appearance of man, he begins the Second Part with an account 
 of several of the most primitive tribes of which he had any 
 knowledge — Esquimaux, Laps, Tartars, Hindoos, Negroes, " the 
 happy, peaceful nations that dwelt by the Mountains of the 
 Moon," Peruvians, and Red Indians. Then, as though he had 
 made a false start, he goes back to trace the growth of mind and 
 human customs, " not as a metaphysician with an abstract, pre- 
 conceived notion, but throughout as a natural and historical 
 philosopher." This leads him to episodes on comparative myth- 
 ology and law, on government and war, and the origin of skill 
 and art, on the fluctuating standard of happiness, the gradual 
 education of the human race in all that tends to humanity, and 
 on the importance of the individual ;''^ there is even a long pas- 
 sage on geology and the development of organisation again, 
 which leads him naturally to the ancient Asiatic myths of Creation 
 in China, Persia, and Judaea. 
 
 After this episode, which was perhaps inserted to point out 
 
 * Book viii. chap. 4, for instance. 
 
 2 Book viii. chap. 5. Two sentences deserve special mention: 1st. "Let us 
 thank Heaven that it did not make the earth a lecture-room for learned sciences." 
 2nd. " The State can supply us with artificial instruments for the good of the 
 individual, but unfortunately it can deprive us of something far more essential, 
 it can deprive us of ourselves." 
 
366 HERDER AND HIS TIME??. 
 
 the incalculable gulf between man and beast in spite of all 
 resemblance, the great procession of mankind— tribe after tribe, 
 nation after nation, empire after empire, line upon line of 
 vanished men and vanished women —begins to move before our 
 eyes and rolls on with hardly a break from its dim source in the 
 valleys of the central ridge of Asia, through fleeting light and 
 dreary lengths of shadow, down to the dawn of the Renaissance, 
 where the book abruptly breaks off. 
 
 The Mongol races, China, Thibet with its Lama pope, 
 Japan, the Hindoos with their Vedas, Assyria, Persia and 
 Zoroaster, the Hebrews, Phoenicia, Carthage, Egypt — all have 
 their peculiar character, their influence and place in the ever- 
 flowing stream, the unbroken chain of the spirit of man. The 
 religion and manners of each are briefly described, very much 
 as Hegel has described them in his best known book ; most 
 space is of course given to the Egyptians, with whom Herder had 
 peculiar sympathy, and to the Hebrews, who are on the whole 
 regarded in an unfavourable light, chiefly because he considers 
 that their ancient sacred books have been a hindrance to know- 
 ledge, for their laws and sayings have been universally applied, 
 without regard to time or place. " With Greece the morning 
 breaks," and the account of Greek life and history is evidently 
 written with the keenest enthusiasm. Goethe liked this chapter 
 the best in the book, though he was ready to say, ** Yea and 
 Amen " to the whole ; even the scholar Heyne expressed his 
 admiration. Rome, of course, follows, and the account seems 
 at least as excellent, though it is unavoidably wanting in that 
 loving delight, that inexpressible yearning with which all ages 
 will for ever turn to the short, bright life of Hellas. No one 
 could better express the mixture of horror and admiring awe 
 with which we approach Rome. No one has better grasped in a 
 few pages the spirit and meaning of it all, the terrible throes 
 and pangs that went to produce the flower of Rome, her law 
 and her empire. It may be noticed, too, that, like the modem 
 historian, Herder sti'ongly insists on the influence of early 
 
THE COMPLETE. 367 
 
 Etruria, its art, religion, and constitution, and is most enthu- 
 siastic in his praises of Csesar, by whom he beh'eves Rome 
 might have been saved when the senate fell before the mob, and 
 the empire did not yet lie dying of the sword, '^on the death-bed 
 where she rolled in agony for centuries." 
 
 The contemplation of this prolonged death-struggle naturally 
 leads to a digression on historical pessimism. " Is there, after 
 all, any advance ? '' sighs the despairing historian ; " I can see 
 God in nature, but is it possible to see God in man ? " Whereto 
 Herder triumphantly replies that man is part of nature ; man is 
 continually trying to make what best he can out of his sur- 
 roundings, and thus he has built systems out of chaos, freedom 
 out of tyranny. The chain of civilization is secured by the 
 wonderful symmetry of human reason, the symmetry whereby 
 all noble minds tend to think the same. And again, sa^'s 
 Herder, we walk by falls ; nothing can exist without some 
 principle of good, as Plato and Spinoza had taught us before. 
 And yet man must be content to be a child of his time ; we 
 cannot make a period to please ourselves, and even the Middle 
 Ages cannot be brought back: "for what can happen, does 
 happen ; and what can operate, does operate"^ The whole of 
 the fifteenth book is occupied with the discussion of these 
 questions, and various proofs of man's necessary advance in 
 reason and all that is distinctive of humanity. 
 
 The fourth and last part begins with an account of the 
 teeming hordes of Northern and Central Europe during the first 
 centuries of the Empire — the Gaels or Celts of Britain, the 
 Basques of Spain, the Gauls, the Cimbri of Wales and Cornwall 
 with their legends of Arthur, the Prussians and Fins and cold 
 dwellers in the North, the Magyars, the Sclavs, and the great 
 German nations ; finally the Arabs and Turks. (" What business 
 in Europe," he exclaims, " have these foreigners, who, after a 
 thousand years, are still determined to remain Asiatic bar- 
 
 ' Book XV. chap. 3. But the language in this book is often " teleological." 
 
368 HEKDEU AND lllS TIMES. 
 
 barians ? " To which we might reply, " The business that they 
 are still there.") But the influence of Arabs and Mahoin- 
 medans is not traced as yet, for Herder was obliged to stoj) to 
 take account of the event of history, the appearance of an 
 obscure Jew, proclaiming that national worship was over, that 
 the kingdom of God was at hand, a kingdom of spirit and of 
 truth.^ 
 
 Herder's sketch of early Christianity, the causes of its irre- 
 sistible power, and its influence on every phase of European 
 thought, is extremely brilliant and very curious. On the whole 
 it is unfavourable : it is sometimes harsh and bitter. Nor need 
 this surprise us ; to many artistic and poetic minds there is 
 something inexpressibly repulsive in " the Early Church." It 
 is to be feared that such people would at any moment readily 
 exchange all the edification of the blessed Fathers for one glimpse 
 of the bright limbs of Aphrodite, one joyful line from the eternal 
 poets. It is hard for them not to feel oppressed by the dreary 
 unloveliness of centuries of Christianity. Herder, at all events, 
 was overcome with dismay, as at a ghastly spectacle. He dilates 
 with bitterness on the childish submission, the intellectual 
 depravity of the Early Church, the " pious frauds," the dis- 
 appearance of true history, the growth of tiresome and absurd 
 ceremonies, the asceticism and loneliness, the hermitages, the 
 inhuman worship of virginity, the system of charity,'-^ the impos- 
 sible speculations, the depreciation of life, the frantic fanaticism 
 of martyrs. In the Eastern Church, after the remark that *' the 
 name of heretic was unknown to the philosophy of history, for 
 all was of equal interest," he traces the growth of the various 
 sects, according to their mixture with Buddhism, Zoroaster, or 
 the Platonism of Alexandria. He is merciless on the grim and 
 
 • The account of Christianity is given in Book xvii. 
 
 ^ Book xvii. chap 1. "If human society bo considered one hu'gc hospital, 
 and Christianity its common alms-box, a depraved condition of morals and 
 politics must necessarily ensue." 
 
THE COMPLETE. 369 
 
 barren disputes of the schools, and the weary duUness into which 
 Asiatic Christianity sank, dragging with it all arts and science, 
 literature and morals, till the whole thing was swept from the 
 earth by the living power of Mahomet. 
 
 Turning to the West, he pursues the history of Rome as a 
 centre of a Church and a new Christian mythology; and — after 
 some chapters on Alaric and his Goths, the Arab invasion of 
 Spain, the Vandals and Genseric, the sack of Rome, Attila and 
 the Huns, the Lombards, Pepin and Charlemagne and the con- 
 quest of Germany, the Saxons, English, and Normans, the 
 customs of the German nations and the growth of feudalism — he 
 returns to sketch the constitution of the Roman Church, the 
 sources of its power, and its influence on government, art, and 
 trade. After another digression into the East, to witness the 
 foundation of the Arab power, the burning of the libraries, the 
 glory of Bagdad and Fez and Tunis, and the irruption of the 
 Turks, he returns to the growth of Venice, Genoa, and the 
 Italian States, the origin of chivalry among the Arabs in Spain, 
 the Proven9al poetry and the romances of France, and so he 
 reaches the Crusades, of which he can hardly be sufficiently 
 contemptuous. Finally, he touches upon the beginnings of the 
 age of enlightenment, the appearance of Manichseism in Bul- 
 garia, the Waldenses, Huss and Wickliffe, the school of Paris 
 and the translation of Aristotle, the search for secret science, 
 the growth of jurisprudence and architecture, the discovery of 
 the compass and printing and gunpowder and the musical notes ; 
 and there, at one of the most thrilling points of the world's 
 history, the book ends, and of the next and concluding part only 
 the very barest outline was drawn out. 
 
 The Ideen was received with every sort of criticism, but a 
 few typical instances may stand for the rest. Goethe, as we 
 have seen, was enthusiastic in his praise, and indeed his influence 
 on the whole book cannot be overrated. Hamann admired 
 heartily, but with some caution, fearing that hardly room enough 
 was left for the supernatural ; and in a letter he warned Herder 
 
 2 B 
 
370 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 that ** our philosophy must begin from Heaven and not from an 
 anatomical locture-room and the dissection of a corpse." Men- 
 delssohn, on the other hand, was much alarmed lest this should 
 mean another outburst of Christian enthusiasm {Schwdrmerei) , a 
 fear that turned out to be entirely groundless. Forster com- 
 mended Herder for being on the right physical path, and 
 noticed the beauty of his principle of uniformity of structure 
 throughout nature, but opined that he had been led astray at 
 times by ignorant naturalists and had represented nature as too 
 human. Unfortunately, the most unfavourable of critics was 
 no less a man than Kant himself, and we must trace to this the 
 beginning of many troubles. Kant even went so far as to 
 publish a sketch of a philosophy of history himself in opposition 
 to Herder's, in which he maintained that the forms of organism 
 were fixed and that the aim of man was civil society. In the 
 Ideen he felt the want of logical accuracy and the customary 
 divisions of principles ; he calls the book a collectioji of hints 
 rather than cool judgments, and hopes that for the future the 
 author will restrain his imagination ; he objected to "the unity of 
 organic force " as confusing, and beyond scientific observation ; 
 he mocked at the whole of the second part, observing that from the 
 descriptions of travellers one might prove anything one chose .^ 
 Finally he asked : " Herder is not content with other systems of 
 philosophy ; is this then to be a pattern of philosophy ? " After 
 Kant Gleim cannot be called a critic, and it is hardly worth 
 while to chronicle his ready ecstasy, how " he was content to 
 prolong his life that he might see the revelation of Plato-Herder " ; 
 how he exclaimed, " Herder, Herder is my hero; I am his first 
 reader." The kindly old lamb. 
 
 To the modern reader it is plain that the book is far from 
 perfect ; indeed the scheme is too bold and vast to admit of 
 
 * And indeed Herder's capacity of reception is sometimes startling, e.g. book 
 vi. chap. 4: "A negro child is born white." " A hundred children are nothing 
 to a negro: an old man lamented with tears because he had only seventy." Such 
 facts seem hardly strong enough to support theories; though, for the paler colour 
 of negroes at birth, see Darwiu's Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 318 (1871). 
 
THE COMPLETE. 371 
 
 perfection; even now such an attempt after a lifetime's labour 
 can be no more than approximate. Some of the faults were 
 inevitable, some are surprising. As the most notable instance 
 of these latter, I should take his brilliant account of Christianity, 
 in which we miss something of that historic sympathy wherein 
 Herder seldom fails. In his natural horror at the first ten cen- 
 turies of Christianity he does not really go to the heart of the 
 thing. He attempts to sketch the causes of its power, but he 
 makes weakness of them rather than strength ; and yet Chris- 
 tianity has proved itself strong. In his yearning for the vanished 
 joys of art and song he forgets the huge sickness of the nations; 
 he forgets how welcome the free joys of the infinite spirit, how- 
 ever exaggerated, must always be after the maddening tedium 
 of temporal aims and material enjoyment. The mistake was 
 very common at the end of the last century, and has been 
 common since, though we have seen many reactions. Herder 
 evidently wrote whilst he was fresh from the influence of 
 Gibbon's inimitable irony, and indeed he speaks in defence of 
 Gibbon in terms of warm eulogy. This phase is best illustrated 
 by the corresponding period of Goethe's life. Writing in admi- 
 ration of this passage, Goethe went still further to abuse Chris- 
 tianity, and regret the Pagan past. It was indeed a period of 
 much dreary talk about art, especially Greek art ; but we have 
 seen that Herder could free himself from these trammels ; and 
 we should have expected him to remember that, but for those 
 long centuries of torpor, art could never have risen, as she did 
 rise, with a new and ethereal splendour on her radiant wings. 
 Therefore, even from the point of view of art, he was wrong ; and 
 the point of view of art is not the only possible. 
 
 But in spite of all defects the book remains a great work. 
 His method is purely inductive and works by experience : as he 
 says, " We will lay all metaphysics aside and stick to experience 
 and physiology." His aspect of history may therefore be called 
 singularly modern ; he does not start with a preconceived theory 
 that he is bound to prove. His history has really no central 
 
 2 b2 
 
372 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 idea like Lessing's ^ before him, and Hegel's after, much as he 
 resembles both in many respects. He does not venture to assign 
 any definite aim for human history, or, if such there be, it is 
 merely the development of all that is most characteristic of 
 humanity. He is content to show things as they were, and must 
 necessarily have been ; to watch the slow growth of nations and 
 manners and religions, asking only the reasons why each was 
 strong and not the objects of their strength. ^' Why did the 
 enlightened Greeks exist in the world " ? he asks ; *^ because 
 they did exist, and under such circumstances could be nothing 
 else but enlightened Greeks.'"^ By such a method we of course 
 lose something of the enthusiam with which we follow out a 
 theory like Hegel's ; but it is the scientific method. In the 
 Ideen we see pass before us as in a glass all the sorts and condi- 
 tions of men, all the nations of the world and the glory of them ; 
 they have passed over the world as a summer's cloud, and as a 
 summer's cloud they are gone ; and yet are not gone, for we 
 are they. Can such things be without our special wonder ? 
 
 It may be said that I have written these three chapters on 
 purpose to prove that Herder was neither a priest, nor a poet, 
 nor a philosopher. If that is proved, I shall be neither surprised 
 nor dismayed, for in the ordinary sense of the terms I should 
 call him none of these. But in fact I did not wish to prove 
 anything, but merely to unfold and reveal. I shall be quite 
 satisfied, therefore, if it has been shown that Herder had some 
 skill in choosing out the leading threads in the tangled skein 
 of life. To myself, this skill of his appears more and more 
 wonderful the more I consider the history of the last hundred 
 years. When we remember how complex the present always 
 is, how vague the forecast of the future, how much that promises 
 well will be fruitless and much that is weak will put on strength, 
 
 ' In The Education of tlie Hitman Race. The book is often referred to, 
 but, after watching the course of Herder's life, I am inclined to think its influence 
 on his mind has been exaggerated. 
 
 ■'' Book xiii. chap. 7; see also book xiv. chap. 6. 
 
THE COMPLETE. 373 
 
 it seems a great thing to say of a man that he grasped the lines 
 of thought which the future would follow; lines of thought, too, 
 that ill many cases were to be obscured and remote for full fifty 
 years after his death. For this cause I should liken Herder to 
 a diligent sapper and miner, whom the hosts of wisdom will 
 follow, and, as they follow, forget. 
 
 And now we may hasten down the hill, for the day is far 
 spent and the sun is dying in the heavens. 
 
374 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 ITALY, 1788—1789. 
 
 " ' Dust and ashes I ' So you creak it, and 1 want the heart to scold. 
 Dear dead women, with such hair, too — what's become of all the gold 
 Used to hang and brush their bosoms ? I feel chilly and grown old." 
 
 A Toccata of Galuppi's. 
 
 It is again the sixth of August, 1788, and the lumbering car- 
 riage — with Herder inside and his servant Werner probably- 
 perched up at the back — is making its way out of Weimar along 
 the high road for Erfurt westward ; whilst Karoline sits weeping 
 in the unchanging rooms at home, the children round her in the 
 hush and self-satisfied importance of childish sorrow : it was 
 the worst day of her life ; " worse than when her mother died ;" 
 how could she bear to look at his coat and hat hanging there, all 
 loose and empty ? 
 
 For a full account of this journey we must again thank the 
 ever-faithful Diintzer, who obtained from Herder's grandson in 
 St. Petersburg all the original letters between Herder and his 
 wife during these eleven months of separation, and published 
 them with only a few slight omissions in 1859.' Some insufficient 
 extracts had been thrown in, as well as Herder's letters to his 
 children, amongst the rough material that is huddled together in 
 the second volume of the Reminiscences. But the picture is now 
 tolerably complete, and the only trouble is that it falls into two 
 parts — one of Weimar and one of Herder in his wanderings ; 
 and any one who has read a novel will know how annoying this 
 division is. Yet we cannot get rid of it, for we are bound to 
 follow Herder himself; indeed, the spirit in which a man 
 
 * Herder's Reise nach Italien (Giessen, 1859). 
 
1788.] ITALY. 375 
 
 approaches Italy is a tolerably fair test of his whole nature. And 
 on the other hand, whilst it is pleasant to read letters from 
 Karoline once more, and to see what time has done for her, the 
 greatest interest of all is the accomit she has given of Goethe, by 
 occasional hints and quotations, during a period that is otherwise 
 very little known, a period which fixed the second great turning- 
 point of his life. For whereas the first season of growth began 
 from Herder, was marked by the Frau von Stein, and had Life 
 as its watchword, this second began from Italy, was marked by 
 Christiane Vulpius and Schiller, and its watchword was Art. 
 
 In reading Herder's letters during his travels it is impossible 
 not to compare them with the accounts given by Goethe of a 
 journey over much of the same ground two years before, and by 
 Heine some forty years later. When, however, it is remembered 
 that Goethe built his story himself out of the letters he had 
 written, re-arranging it all and ruthlessly suppressing much, till 
 the whole became that strange mixture of cheerful freedom and 
 barren pedantry, depths of wisdom and stretches of inhuman 
 dulness, — when we remember, too, that Heine deliberately wrote 
 his account for publication, whereas Herder merely wrote private 
 letters and never had a chance of revision, — we shall be careful 
 how we venture into the slippery regions of praise and blame. 
 Accordingly, though the comparison would be interesting enough, 
 I content myself with two remarks of Goethe himself. After 
 Karoline had read him a few of Herder's earlier letters he was 
 struck by the clearness and especially the variety of his observa- 
 tion, whereas " he himself had only seen one thing." Again, in 
 a letter to the Frau von Stein, he notices how much more human 
 Herder's letters were than his own. A*s to Heine, I think it 
 may be said that though Herder has little of that young-eyed 
 enthusiam and irresistible humour, he has nothing of the rather 
 startling freedom, the occasional coarseness even, with which, in 
 his account of Italy, Heine approaches natural details about 
 which ordinary people are agreed to hold silence. 
 
 From Erfurt Herder's way was still due west to Gotha, 
 where he was entertained by von Frankenberg, whose wife we 
 
876 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788- 
 
 may recognise as another of those tender, sad, and sickly ladies 
 of whom we have seen so many. Like all of this kind she felt 
 an instinctive attraction to Herder, and is mentioned again and 
 again in his. letters as a kind of blessed moonbeam; it seems 
 indeed that from her side at all events there was something 
 deeper than the ordinary interest of friendship, but in the pre- 
 vailing atmosphere of those days it is impossible to follow these 
 subtle distinctions exactly, and we can only say that she wrote 
 kindly, though " with some reserve," to Karoline, and sent 
 munificent presents at Christmas for the children, whilst Karoline 
 for her part was inclined to be a little jealous at first, but after- 
 wards, reproaching herself for her suspicions, was of course all 
 the more enthusiastic in her praises. 
 
 At Gotha the road turns at right angles to the southward ; 
 and, crossing the loveliest hill region of the Thiiringen Wald, 
 amidst pleasant scenes of pastoral life and mountain simplicity, 
 Herder proceeded through Meiningen and Coburg, and emerged 
 on the broad fertile country of Bamberg. Here he was in a 
 Roman Catholic town, and the college for priests caused him 
 much amusement ; for they maintained the Faith as sturdily as 
 the ignorant, but at the same time boasted their enlightenment 
 and culture. As proofs of this and also from natural politeness 
 they were very anxious to display to Herder their knowledge of 
 his own works, and a candidate for the doctor's degree produced 
 a thesis in which he had remarked that " he differed from 
 Herder on this point " ; but as only one succeeded in getting so 
 much as the title of one of his books right, and the rest talked 
 about Human Ideas, instead of Ideas for the Philosophy of the 
 History of the Human Race, it became only too evident to 
 Herder that these, like the rest of mankind, got their knowledge 
 of books from scraps of reviews, and that this was fame. 
 
 At Nuremberg he stayed about a week with much content, 
 being well received by the notables of the place, invited to con- 
 certs and garden parties, and altogether treated as a man of 
 letters who might reflect credit on his exhibitors. Any annoyance 
 ^hese interruptions caused him was compensated by the old town 
 
1789.J ITALY. 377 
 
 itself, its walls and roofs and churches, and glimpses into a far- 
 off German age. Here he learnt Albrecht Diirer, and only here 
 was that possible : "He is the painter I should like to have 
 been," he writes, so that even on the edge of Italy we see how 
 German he remained in heart. Whilst he was here, too, he met 
 young Vulpius, the brother of Goethe's Christiane, and saw 
 Goethe's letter of recommendation, that was the first cause of 
 so much. Before going on to Augsburg Herder turned aside 
 for one or two pleasant days of patriarchal simplicity with 
 Knebel's family at Ansbach. He was charmed with the sister, 
 " as gentle as a dove," but not so fair,^ but was especially 
 delighted with Knebel's younger brother Max, so fresh and 
 merry he seemed. Within two years this cheerful Max had 
 shot himself in a wood, almost at his brother's side, and there 
 was an end to his merriment. It may be remembered that at 
 Ansbach too dwelt good old Uz, once hailed the Anacreon of 
 girls and wine and roses, but now long departed from all such 
 wild and reprehensible ways. It would have been interesting 
 to watch the meeting of the two ; but we only know that, though 
 he regarded Herder as an " incorrect writer," he parted from 
 him with tears — the first tears the Knebols had ever seen him 
 shed, for indeed he was " as cheery as a boy, in spite of his 
 age." 
 
 Hurrying away from Ansbach, Herder was accompanied by 
 Knebel's brother, the good-humoured and suicidal Max, as far 
 as Augsburg, where his journey, hitherto so fresh and pleasant, 
 took a sad change for the worse, that almost ruined all. It had 
 been agreed that at Augsburg he was to meet his travelling 
 companion, the Canon von Dalberg, and accordingly he found 
 a letter announcing that Dalberg would arrive in a day or two, 
 and was bringing an '^ agreeable and unexpected present." The 
 same evening a clergyman called and informed him — we can 
 imagine with what becks and shrugs — that the reverend Canon 
 of Trier, Speier, and Worms, was to be accompanied on his 
 
 1 She afterwards came to Weimar, chiefly through Herder's influence, and 
 was governess to the Princess Constantine. 
 
378 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 journey through Italy by a thing of a widow, a Frau von 
 Seckendorf, whose husband had died two or three years before, 
 overwhelmed in debt through her extravagance. Here then was 
 a pretty present from a priest to a parson ; unexpected at all 
 events it was, for, though Karoline seems to have had her 
 woman's suspicions, Herder had supposed the lady safely banished 
 to some baths or other. She had passed through Weimar in 
 the early summer with Dalberg, and had been kindly received 
 by the Herders as his friend; for she, like Dalberg, had a 
 capacity for music in the midst of all her frippery, and seems to 
 have set to music some of Herder's own verses. And now as 
 she was definitely coming Herder determined to make the best 
 of it; he even fancied for a moment that she might be an 
 advantage ; and at all events ** he would take offence at nothing 
 that crossed his path on a journey." 
 
 This is all very brave, but the actual too often blunts the 
 bravest point ; and with the arrival of the friendly pair the first 
 glow of freedom and joy faded from Herder's journey. The 
 very beginning did not promise well. A friend of Dalberg's had 
 come to meet them at Augsburg, and Herder was led to infer 
 from their conduct that the lady had greater powers of affection 
 than discrimination. Dalberg, being a good easy man of twenty- 
 eight, accepted everything as it came with the most enviable 
 indifference. The friend, however, having departed, all went 
 smoothly enough as far as Innsbruck, though the lady was 
 ^^ rather shy" at first, as one might suppose, and Herder already 
 began to sigh for his freedom. But before Botzen the state of 
 things was fast becoming unbearable. It rained steadily all 
 through the Tyrol ; the party were uncomfortably crammed 
 together in the carriage. Herder facing the other two, and thus 
 dragged backwards into the land of hope. " The lady," Herder 
 writes, " had even the impertinence to consider us a nuisance, 
 though it was she who has ruined our journey." In spite of 
 her extravagance she was incessantly haggling over trifles to the 
 discomfort of every one ; what was worse, she could talk of 
 nothing else, being sadly short of wits, the poor thing, and going 
 
1789.] ITALY. 379 
 
 into Italy " more devoid of everything than ever human creature 
 went before." Dalberg followed her like a child ; to Herder 
 she tried to be polite and condescending enough (" for which the 
 devil give her thanks," he growls), and he flattered himself that 
 he showed no outward sign of impatience ; but he was thoroughly 
 wretched, and determined to pay for his own coffee and other 
 necessaries in future, to leave the others as soon as possible, to 
 stay in Rome as long as his own money would last, and then to 
 hasten back. 
 
 The lady, however, was not the only thing to blame ; to be 
 forced into the company of a foolish woman was bad, but the 
 real misfortune for Herder was that he had to go in company 
 of acquaintances at all. The beauty of travelling is that, for the 
 time, the traveller can escape his limitations and become a 
 universal man. He is free of the dead. The desire in entering 
 a strange new land, a land like Italy, is to become something 
 as strange and new, to throw off the tag-rag of the old self; 
 but this is impossible if on every side we are called by our dull 
 old names, and reminded of our dead old passions and our 
 buried associations. Before people hold Herder up to blame and 
 pity for ill-humour and discontent they must take account of 
 this. For this is unconsciously at the root of that wise careful- 
 ness with which travellers seek to avoid each other. When we 
 touch Italy what do we want with the door-plates of our native 
 street ? 
 
 After Herder began to pay his own expenses the party felt 
 more at ease, and reached Verona in comparative calm. Here 
 they found the Grand Duke's mother, the dowager Amalia, who 
 was travelling in Italy with her chamberlain, Friedrich von 
 Einsiedel, and a few other courtiers, and had been only a few 
 hours ahead since Innsbruck ; but the two parties did not meet 
 till they reached Rome. Herder's servant, Werner, was incon- 
 solable at coming amongst all these chattering foreigners, and 
 losing the use of his tongue ; his master was almost as mute ; 
 and, as the party could make up but little Italian amongst them, 
 the lady's difficulties in haggling must have been much increased, 
 
380 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 till at length an interpreter was procured. At Verona, and at all 
 the other places at which he stopped, Herder studied all the usual 
 sights, the works of art and antiquities, that people gave them- 
 selves time to see then, and many see now. Sometimes he gives 
 short descriptions of the most notable things, but he does not allow 
 much space for description and art-criticism, and we will allow 
 none. He also saw^ the people, a sight which the enthusiastic 
 traveller generally omits. 
 
 From Yerona they proceeded rather hurriedly to Ancona by 
 way of Mantua, Bologna, Faenza, and Rimini, where one morn- 
 ing at sunrise Herder came once more upon the sea with its 
 memories of youthful days in Riga and its mystic legends, no 
 longer now of Flying Dutchmen and North Kings, but of the 
 living ships that steered themselves, and of the much-enduring 
 man. The party was for the time on fairly good terms, and 
 each politely took a turn at the front seat. Werner had 
 recovered his spirits in spite of the unchristian language of the 
 natives : '^ 0, if the children were but here !" cried the faithful 
 retainer, as he watched the fishing-boats skim by, glancing in 
 the sun of Venice. 
 
 In Ancona they stayed a few days, and on the first after- 
 noon Herder went to hear a famous missionary, sent from 
 Rome by the Pope " to convert heretics." He discoursed to a 
 vast crowd in one of the squares, and a very disgusting dis- 
 course Herder thought it — nothing but stories of women in the 
 confessional, each greeted by a loud laugh from the audience. 
 " This is their way of spending their time when there is no 
 opera or play." From Ancona the road lay through Loretto to 
 Spoleto, with its memories of Hannibal and the " gate of flight"; 
 for the lady refused to turn aside to Perugia, probably ignorant 
 that any one ever lived there. At Rene, near Spoleto, Herder 
 entered the temple of Diana, that is still nearly complete. 
 ** The inner shrine," he says, " has been consecrated as a 
 church by orders of a Pope, that it might be spared. I mounted 
 the altar, as though I were mad, to the niche where the holy 
 goddess had stood ; but she was not there ; a wretched daub of 
 
1789.] ITALY. 381 
 
 the Crucifixion stood on the altar." And thus they came to 
 Terni, and, having stopped one day to see the waterfalls, went on 
 their way to Rome. 
 
 They entered the city that has been called holy on the even- 
 ing of September the nineteenth, and lodged for the first day or 
 two close to the Rotunda. Herder was much disappointed to 
 find no letters, owing to some accident to the mails, which took 
 about sixteen days to reach Rome from Weimar ; for which 
 reason the correspondence is often rather puzzling, for a fort- 
 night will make a large change of feeling. His search for letters 
 led him to Angelica Kaufmann, whom he found tender and 
 gentle and ideal, living her quiet artist life, pure and peaceful 
 "as a Madonna or pigeon " — or as one of her own pictures. 
 She was now nearly fifty, and her acquaintance with Herder 
 soon deepened into the strongest friendship. The first few days 
 in Rome were spent in seeking for a dwelling-place, a very 
 difficult matter, owing to the whims and sensibilities of the Frau 
 von Seckendorf. At last an abode of sufficient magnificence 
 was found, a suite for herself of five spacious apartments, all of 
 which she used to throw wide open when she received visitors 
 of station ; two little rooms for the easy-going Dalberg ; but 
 what was to be done with this elderly parson Herder ? Much 
 to his relief it was agreed he must go elsewhere, and at last he 
 found a home for himself and Werner in the Strada Condotti, a 
 quarter much frequented by Grermans, at the sound of whose 
 homely speech Werner was as one new-born. 
 
 The next thing to be surmounted was the question that dogs 
 every civilised man through life to his grave, the question of 
 clothes. He had started with " a summer suit," that Karoline 
 had ordered for him in Weimar, and, after some necessary 
 alterations at Nuremberg, he had hitherto worn this and grey 
 stockings. But now the winter was at hand, and, as the natives 
 of Rome insisted upon taking him for a priest because he wore 
 a good deal of black and had a bald crown, he found himself 
 politely debarred from the galleries because he ventured in pro- 
 vincial garb within the holy city of the Popes. " I purpose to 
 
382 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 think seriously about getting a black coat," he writes, "and will 
 consult Angelica on the question." But he put it off sadly, for 
 he had been so long looked after and managed in these domestic 
 points that he confessed himself as helpless as a child. Karoline 
 meantime was impatiently urging him to spare no expense for the 
 sake of what was decent and due to his position : " I advise you to 
 get one coat of violet silk, which is the colour of distinguished 
 clergy, and another of black. Werner must not let you be 
 without good silk stockings and good shoes." And again, " I 
 entreat you to wear elegant clothes, according to the custom of 
 the country, and not to forget pretty shoe-buckles ; to feel one- 
 self at ease with others depends a great deal on the clothes ; I 
 see this more and more." Indeed, this practical generalisation 
 will remain true till the adult man acquires the discernment of 
 very young children and the lower animals, before whom it is 
 useless to stand upon dignity and the favour of raiment. 
 Accordingly, by the end of October, Herder made his visits in 
 the correct uniform of fashionable Rome. 
 
 During the first few weeks he was introduced into the circle 
 of artistic friends — Moritz, Bury, Hirt, Rehberg, and the rest — 
 with whom Goethe had lived in Rome. Hirt, a pedantic, dry 
 little man, with a great barren knowledge of art and archaeology, 
 was engaged to conduct the party through all the sights of the 
 city ; but, as Frau von Seckendorf was always tired out in an 
 hour or two, and then required several days' rest before the next 
 venture. Herder calculated it would take them more than two 
 years to see anything at all. Besides, she was utterly ignorant 
 of the whole thing, and maintained an exasperating indifference, 
 unredeemed even by wit, when brought face to face with the 
 most worshipful relics of history and art. What were the glories 
 of Caesars and the wonders of artists to her ? Artists and 
 emperors were all dead as sure as she was alive; they had hardly 
 left a wrack behmd ; but her suite of rooms was tangible and 
 present, and to diminish a real duchess by her rivalry was worth 
 the pains. For in October the Duchess Amalia arrived with 
 her court, and was much sought afler, especially by Frau von 
 
1789.] ITALY. 383 
 
 Seckendorf herself, who was anxious to appear one of her 
 greatest" friends, that the joy of eclipsing her might be the 
 sweeter. She even attempted to make a clique for the exclusion 
 of Herder ; but here she failed, for the Duchess always acted 
 towards him with her usual good nature and respect, and was 
 herself full of interest in all that might be seen and learnt. 
 
 But, in spite of her kindness, in spite of the courtesy of one 
 of the cardinals, Monsignor Borgia, who introduced him to 
 friends as " the bishop of his land," it was evident to Herder 
 that his stay in Kome was hkely to be a complete failure. 
 Werner had been brought to death's door by sickness, and 
 recovered but slowly. Herder himself suffered much from 
 rheumatism and neuralgia whenever the sirocco blew, and the- 
 weather was for the most part rainy and miserably cold. But 
 the worst of all was, that, when now at the age of forty-four he 
 had at length reached Rome, he had to dance to the whims of a 
 silly young woman, with her ailments and vanities, her miser- 
 able spite and dubious reputation. As he was supposed to be 
 travelling at Dalberg's expense, he had to dine with them every 
 day, and she treated him as a hired servant. He had to find out 
 what they purposed doing each day, and was generally told that 
 Dalberg was busy composing, or that the lady was unwell ; and 
 it was a curious case of '^ elective- affinity " that when the lady 
 was unwell Dalberg was always unwell too. Add to this, that, 
 what with Werner's illness, the purchase of provisions for 
 morning and evening, and the inevitable incidental expenses of 
 a stranger in Home, Herder's own funds were falling very low, 
 and Dalberg, who had promised to pay for everything, quite 
 forgot all these grovelling details in the charms of his lady and 
 the raptures of musical composition. 
 
 It seems to be the stock thing to find fault with Herder for 
 discontent, self-made torment, and a carping spirit whilst he 
 was in Italy, and he is held up as a contrast to Goethe, with his 
 glorious serenity. It would be interesting to know how these 
 critics, who so carefully fit the man to their theory of the man, 
 would themselves have behaved under these circumstances. 1 
 
884 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 myself, at all events, find very much to admire in Herder at this 
 time for his unwavering good nature and forbearance. In his 
 letters to Karoline he constantly entreats her to say no word of 
 all this to any one, not even to Goethe, and when she disobeyed he 
 was really annoyed. Even to her he never said anything against 
 Dalberg, but maintained throughout that he meant well, and 
 was merely too easy-going and childish. For a long time he 
 refused to ask anything of Dalberg for fear of giving him pain, 
 and he never once reproached him for having brought the 
 capricious Frau to spoil their journey, partly for the same 
 reason, partly out of sympathy with the woman ; once for all, 
 she was there, and, as she could not be left, they must make the 
 best of it. It is true that Herder felt his humiliating position 
 very keenly, that he wished he had never started in such com- 
 pany, that Rome seemed to him little better tlian a grave, and 
 real enjoyment impossible on such terms, — but this seems only to 
 prove that he was neither a fool nor an inhuman angel. At last, 
 under great pressure from home, he wrote politely to Dalberg, 
 laying the true state of things before him, and informing him 
 that, if he was to stay any longer in Italy, he must have a 
 certain sum for his expenses and for the journey home. Dalberg 
 promised this, and sent a small instalment ; but things did not 
 really go much more smoothly till one day, at the very end of 
 October — Herder having been more silent than usual at dinner — 
 Dalberg had the good sense to see for himself that the position 
 was becoming absurd. He wrote kindly enough to Herder, 
 repeating his promise of the money, though he had found his 
 lady companion rather an expensive luxury, and advising com- 
 plete separation for the rest of the journey. Herder accepted 
 the terms with joy, and climbed to the top of St. Peter's with a 
 sense of freedom to which he had long been a stranger. 
 
 Meantime letters had been coming in from Weimar. The 
 few first from Karoline were full of dubitations : she feared she 
 had been no true wife, she had not done all that she might have 
 done, she had allowed the cares of this life to make her love 
 commonplace ; and, indeed, after fifleen or sixteen years, mar- 
 
1789.] ITALY. 385 
 
 riage is likely enough to seem a matter-of-course relationship ; 
 but worse than all else was the thought, "and now he is happier 
 without me." All vain and foolish fears, as Herder constantly 
 assured her, but it was long before they were quite set at rest, 
 even with the help of a peculiar kind of divination, from which 
 she often received courage. She possessed some book or other, 
 called a "treasury " or "casket," or, more exactly, a "treasure- 
 casket," apparently composed of quotations from the Bible ; this 
 she would open at random for consolation, and, as she never 
 failed to find comfort, some praise is due to the careful compiler, 
 who had selected only consoling passages. Indeed, she went 
 through life with an eye for omens : now it was a group of stars 
 over a black cloud, now a chair that jumped up and down whilst 
 she was combing her hair at night, or a great spider ran across 
 her writing-paper, or a wind — "no common wind" — stirred the 
 autumn leaves in the garden all day long. In such manifestations 
 she must needs put some degree of faith, and, as she found it a 
 refuge, no one can grudge it her. With dreams it was worse, 
 for they generally made her sad and perplexed, and seldom 
 boded any good. Goethe tried hard to deliver both her and 
 Frau von Stein from " these accursed dreams," as he calls them, 
 and with Karoline he nearly, if not quite, succeeded ; at all 
 events, she could laugh at them, even if in her heart she still 
 cherished a lingering respect for their potency. 
 
 For the rest we see from her letters that she and Weimar 
 society generally were absorbed in two topics, the change that 
 had come over Goethe and indignation against Dalberg for his 
 behaviour to Herder. There were also rumours of war in the 
 air, of Prussia beginning to move uneasily again, troops march- 
 ing towards Denmark, and southwards none knew whither; 
 perhaps the emperor in danger again. But the war was not to 
 come from that side next time, and the gossip of Weimar was 
 not yet to be disturbed. 
 
 Before going further it may be well once for all to say in 
 warning that Karoline's method of judging a man, though 
 simple, was hardly scientific. It may be briefly stated thus: 
 
 2c 
 
386 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 " If a man shows kindness to my husband, if he admires him, if 
 he speaks well of him, no praise is high enough for his moral 
 and intellectual worth ; on the other hand, if he is indiiferent to 
 my husband, if he does not further his interests, if he so much 
 as hint a word against him, better were it for that man if he had 
 never been born." This formula she applied with remorseless 
 consistency and all the impetuous fervour of her Electra's soul. 
 The consequence was that few of her friends escaped entirely, 
 for no one could act up to such a standard at all hours ; but 
 fortunately at the least sign of repentance she was ready to 
 receive the wanderer back into the fold. Unless this is remem- 
 bered, people might call her changeable and flighty in her judg- 
 ments, whereas in truth no judge of Hades could have been 
 more unwavering. During Herder's absence Knebel, who was 
 afterwards her firmest friend, suffered most from this beautiful, 
 woman-creature ; ^ but even Goethe did not escape unscathed. 
 
 At first he came to see her every other day or offcener, and 
 he seems to have found much comfort in his " Psyche " of 
 years gone by. He missed Herder more than any one else, and 
 complained there was no one to speak to in Weimar now he 
 was gone. But Karoline's clear eyes were not long in seeing 
 that all was not with him as it had been. She writes that he 
 had taken as his motto the words, " If you hold your peace, 
 help will come to you," and she complains that he was hiding 
 his real self, and for this purpose was constantly changing the 
 conversation. Goethe had begun to put on what Kai'oline in a 
 later letter calls " his coat of mail." When he spoke of himself 
 at all it was generally with sadness as of one '^ driven by 
 despair." In answer to a remark of Karoline's he said, " Yes, 
 I received God (Herder's treatise), last year, tliat I might 
 believe in none this"; and later on, in November, Karoline 
 writes, "He is a riddle to me ; he said, ' For his own part he 
 
 ' " And still the exquisite 
 
 Sea-thing stems on, saves still, palpitatingly thus, 
 Lands safe at length its load of love at Tsenarus, 
 True woman-crcuturc !"'— FiFiNE AT THE Fair, p. 95. 
 
1789.] ITALY. 387 
 
 had plenty of happiness — it streamed in upon him from every 
 side; but for others he had no happiness' " ; which is the saddest 
 saying of all, and seems to me no riddle. The only strange 
 thing about it is that most people can say the same. Karoline's 
 difficulty really was that it is impossible to be perfectly at ease 
 with a man who keeps an important part of his life carefully 
 hidden, and from July till about February Goethe did thus hide 
 his intimacy with Christiane Vulpius. Karoline therefore had 
 a vague and restless sense of groping after something she knew 
 not what, and this uneasiness was increased by the marked cold- 
 ness between Groethe and the Frau von Stein. This is not the 
 place to enter upon this vexed question ; the motives appear to 
 me obvious enough ; as to the right and wrong, the decision is 
 more difficult, perhaps impossible, perhaps unimportant. We 
 will only notice as curious that for a time the Frau von Stein's 
 suspicions fell upon Karoline of all women in the world, which 
 only shows to what desperate explanations jealousy will drive 
 such a nature. If Goethe spoke two words to Karoline in the 
 theatre, there were those hungry eyes glaring at them both ; at 
 last he thought it more prudent to visit the house behind the 
 church only once or twice a week. Yet in all her difficulties 
 Karoline turned to him, and his kindness never failed ; he 
 followed Herder's journey with the greatest interest, and gave 
 what advice he could, urging him above all things not to be in a 
 hurry, ^^ for a man should travel not to arrive, but to travel." 
 
 But unfortunately Herder had not much choice in the matter, 
 and on this point there was boundless indignation in Weimar, 
 especially against the poor Frau von Seckendorf, *^for spoiling 
 Herder's journey, and bringing dishonour on the race of woman." 
 They said she was merely imitating the beautiful Frau von 
 Werther, who went off to Africa after Einsiedel by a merry 
 stratagem, as has been described. " Under what title does she 
 travel?" asked one indignant wit, and the other ladies of Weimar 
 had no hesitation in answering the question by a word that was 
 rather explanatory than polite. But when Karoline heard that 
 her husband had been deceived and was obliged to pay a large 
 
 2c 2 
 
388 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 part of his own expenses, her anger ran over. With their six 
 children, their position in the town, their frequent illnesses, and 
 so on, she had always some difficulty to make the accounts 
 balance ; they had already even contracted a considerable debt. 
 And besides she had to send money "under Trescho's address" 
 to Herder's sister in Mohrungen, who was to be brought by 
 Hartknoch to live with them in the spring, her husband, the 
 baker Giildenhorn, being fortunately dead ; and after all this 
 she had now to scrape together at least lOOZ. to pay for her 
 husband's journey back. No wonder she writes with emphasis. 
 She insists that Herder should tell Dal berg exactly how things 
 stood ; she even dictates the very words he is to use, lest he 
 should shirk from fear of giving pain ; she tells him the eyes of 
 Germany are upon him, and it is not a time for them to play 
 benevolent simpletons. In spite of Herder's injunctions she 
 called Goethe to her assistance, and he was even more plain- 
 spoken in his indignation. He wrote himself urging Herder 
 amidst plentiful abuse of Dalberg not to give way to his good 
 nature : " It is no joke to entice a man into a place from which 
 he can see no way out." And to Karoline, after observing how 
 most men were ruined by following out, or too strongly insisting 
 upon their peculiarities, he added, " In this way Herder is now 
 injured by his peculiarity {Eigenheit) . No one will believe it, 
 but his peculiarity is delicacy and complaisance, and now he is 
 suffering from it. From the same reason it often comes about 
 that afterwards in the wrong place he turns the rough side of 
 his nature outwards." [f we wanted Herder's character in four 
 lines, there it is. 
 
 This excellent advice was not received very kindly at first ; 
 Herder was much annoyed that Karoline had told his difficulties 
 to any one, even to Goethe. Nobody cares to be summed up in 
 four lines; and, in answer to this, he wrote, *^ Spare your philo- 
 sophy, my dear people "; for, as Karoline complained, he had a 
 way of taking her praise for blame; and for the rest, like 
 Theophrastus Such and every one else, he preferred to keep the 
 lash in his own discriminating hands. Henceforth he often 
 
1789.] ITALY. 389 
 
 speaks of Goethe with some bitterness, and with reproaches that 
 might have been called entirely undeserved had not Goethe 
 adopted a slightly patronising tone, that perfect tact or sympathy 
 would have avoided. But that the advice took effect, and at last 
 overcame Herder's natural delicacy, has been seen. He had 
 now about two months of comparative freedom and delight in 
 Rome. He soon moved to new lodgings, looking out on the 
 Piazza Magnanelli, and he began to have conversation lessons in 
 Italian ; hitherto he had been able to speak but little, though 
 with the cardinals he could of course converse in Latin. He 
 saw much of the Duchess Amalia, with whom he had not been 
 very intimate before; and he could now visit Angelica more 
 often. But, beyond and above all this, there was his study of 
 Rome and Roman life itself And here it is probable that, if Frau 
 von Seckendorf knew too little. Herder knew too much. He 
 was overwhelmed by it; as he says, it is like a bottomless 
 deep in which one gets no further, the more one struggles hand 
 and foot. For, indeed, if it is true that all roads lead to Rome, 
 it is conversely true that in Rome every road leads to the ends 
 of the earth. 
 
 The best account of all that he saw in Rome could be made 
 from four letters he wrote to his sons : to Gottfried, about his 
 journey to Tivoli, the Anio, and places that Horace loved ; to 
 August, Goethe's favourite, on the statues in the Vatican ; to 
 Wilhelm, who was to have been an artist, on the great buildings ; 
 and, last, to little Adelbert, about the animals, both the living 
 beasts in the fields and the unchanging shapes in stone and bronze. 
 But to himself the whole place seemed little better than a great 
 tomb. He was oppressed by the vastness of the reminiscences, 
 he despised the modern solemnities of the Holy Mother as a 
 theatrical mockery, and he regarded all these titles, the Mon- 
 signori, the Princes, and Princesses, as a bore. Unfortunately 
 he was not introduced to the Pope himself, who might have 
 impressed his stubborn mind. Even the Catholic Canon Dalberg 
 failed in this duty, for the cardinal who was to have introduced 
 him could not come ; without the support of a cardinal he would 
 
390 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 have had to kneel, and it was below the dignity of a cultured 
 Canon to kneel in the presence of the Vicar of Christ. He there- 
 fore postponed the business, and proceeded soon afterwards to 
 Naples with his unintelligent lady. 
 
 It must not be thought that Herder was altogether gloomy 
 and ill-content. He could not escape the sweet spell of Italy, 
 the delight of external life ; he felt himself wrapt in pleasurable 
 indifference ; he knew, perhaps for the first time in life, the 
 joys of complete idleness, the lazy contempt of all thought and 
 struggle, to which he attributes the ruin of all the artists in 
 Rome. '^ Italy," he writes, '^ and, above all, Rome have been to 
 me a high school, not so much of art as of life." But this 
 was only true in certain moods, and on the whole the effect of 
 Rome was depressing, not only this time, but on his second 
 visit as well. 
 
 It was with the greatest joy therefore that, early in January, 
 he started for Naples with the Duchess and her retinue. The 
 cold was intense, the orange-blossoms all covered with ice and 
 snow ; but that did not chill his enthusiasm. Naples was to him 
 the place of all the world ; here he could " imagine how it was 
 possible to be a Greek "; it was like a new life after the gigantic 
 grave of Rome. He lodged with Einsiedel, Amalia's Chamber- 
 lain, the brother of his friend. Here he met Meyer and Tisch- 
 bein, the painter, who had accompanied Goethe to Sicily. He 
 became very intimate, too, with the Archbishop of Tarento, who 
 was afterwards kind enough to send a copy of Latin verses, that 
 say more for his benevolence than his scholarship, to Karoline 
 on Herder's death. As usual. Herder visited all the sights — 
 Pompeii, Vesuvius, Avernus, BaiaB, and the rest — except perhaps 
 Pfcstum. But the sight one is inclined to envy him most was 
 at a dinner given by the English ambassador. Sir William 
 Hamilton, renowned antiquary and man of science ; renowned 
 in these days chiefly because, two years after this, he married 
 Miss Emma Harte, who was then living with *' the old cox- 
 comb," as Herder calls him, and was very visible to Herder that 
 evening, dressed in Greek costume, and posing in bacchanal 
 
1789.] ITALY. 391 
 
 attitudes, after her manner. As Herder scoffed at her, she of 
 course selected him out of the whole company as the object of all 
 her most winning arts ; but they were of none avail against that 
 solid German soul. He opined that she was " at bottom a very 
 commonplace person, without any true feeling for what was 
 subhme, or great, or eternally beautiful; but such a she-ape 
 [probably he merely means imitator] as never was." Herder 
 was perhaps incapable of that flood of joy, that unspeakable 
 benefit of mere beauty, from which we ask nothing more ; but 
 it must be remembered, in his defence, that even Goethe, on his 
 second visit to Naples, thought the woman a poor witless thing, 
 charmed though he had been at first. Nelson and his coming 
 were still ten years ahead. On Herder the only result of her 
 blandishments was that he came away with a profound indiffer- 
 ence to the whole "art of apery" {Affenkunst)^ which afterwards 
 cost him dear; and one of his greatest delights, even in his 
 favourite Naples, was the discovery that " where everything is 
 sensuous one becomes spiritual — a man seeks after something 
 with his soul which he cannot reach with his senses." 
 
 After about six wrecks in Naples Herder was obliged to 
 return to Bome, chiefly because Dalberg with his lady had 
 quietly stolen away, and, being very short of funds, was on the 
 point of leaving Italy without paying his debt to Herder. Eome 
 again seemed to him very dead and dreary, especially as he fell 
 seriously ill. But, (hough the Duchess and others in Naples 
 entreated him to return, he steadily refused, " being tired of 
 travelling as an appendix." He accordingly remained in Bome' 
 many weeks, chiefly detained by Trippel,^ whom the Grand 
 Duke had commissioned to execute his bust in marble. Angelica 
 Kaufmann, too, was anxious to paint his portrait, which was 
 successfully accomplished. The rest ot his letters from Bome 
 
 ' This is the same Trippel who made the hust of Goethe (" idealised like an 
 Apollo," Herder complains) which is now in the Weimar library. " Ah, how 
 the ladies kiss it ! If it was not so heavy they would carry it away," cries the 
 old attendant, posing beside it, because his own resemblance to Goethe is so 
 remarkable. (Note of 1880). Herder's bust is in the same library. 
 
892 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788- 
 
 are chiefly occupied with the praises of the gentle Angelica, his 
 difficulties to get the money from Dalberg, whom he again 
 positively refused to force for fear of hurting his feelings, and 
 with reproaches against Goethe, who he thought had acted very 
 inconsiderately in refusing some money, which the Grand Duke, 
 with his usual generosity, had offered to contribute towards 
 Herder's expenses. 
 
 A greater source of annoyance was that, in the new edition 
 of his works which Goethe was just bringing out, the old skit of 
 Pater Brey was still included. Karoline, also, felt this very 
 keenly, and, in her usual impetuous way, she declared that 
 Goethe was "fataV to her, and she would see him no more. 
 But, in a few weeks, she writes that she is quite at one again 
 with Goethe ; that she understands him better, how he feels his 
 greatness, and is yet the best and most unchangeable of all. 
 And then again, in another fortnight, she thinks that Herder is 
 right after all; she is tired of Goethe's " despotism and hundred 
 little vanities," and she is far enough from making a god of 
 him ; the contrast only heightens her love for Herder, with his 
 ^^ reality, his true and pure spirit, his sympathy with all that is 
 suffering and good." And in May she has this significant 
 sentence : " Goethe has fallen out of my hands for some time 
 back, because he receives good men and ill with equal friend- 
 liness "; which is also a characteristic of the sun and the rain. 
 But hardly a week had passed again when Goethe came to talk 
 with her alone over his Tasso, at which he was then at work, and 
 over her own difiiculties. "0, how I blame myself," she writes, 
 *' that I doubted him for a single moment ; his soul is true and 
 manly throughout, and I am glad that you recognise this again 
 in your last letter." And so she turns this way and that, accord- 
 ing as Goethe succeeded in approaching her standard. Herder's 
 tone sounds more consistent, but is hardly so true. In one 
 passage he says, "The whole of Goethe's philosophy is repugnant 
 to me ; it is selfish, ungodly, unsympathetic, and a desolation to 
 the heart." And again, after expressing his admiration of very 
 much in the new edition of Goethe's poems, he adds : " I shrink 
 
1789.] ITALY. 393 
 
 from a great artist who regards his friends and all that comes 
 before him as mere paper to write on or colours to paint with." 
 And yet this very thing may be called the true artist's token : 
 " Into paint will I grind thee, my bride," ^ not " my friends " 
 merely " and all that comes before me," but my very heart of 
 hearts. Here, however, we need only remark that these two 
 sentences of Herder's might stand as text to all the volumes of 
 adverse criticism and abuse against Goethe that have hitherto 
 appeared, or are likely to appear. Herder was much displeased, 
 too, on hearing of Goethe's connexion with Christiane Yulpius. 
 Sometimes, however, his reproaches are too evidently the result 
 of personal feeling, which it is hard to forgive in a man. 
 
 But before the half of Herder's second sojourn in Rome was 
 well over he was met by a practical difficulty that makes a 
 certain amount of irritation and perplexity pardonable in such a 
 nature. This was nothing less than a proposal from Heyne 
 that he should change his whole course of life, and come to 
 Gottingen as professor of theology. It was now fourteen years 
 since the dispute with the authorities of Gottingen, and probably 
 most of Herder's orthodox opponents were dead or departed ; 
 for he himself had certainly not become more orthodox, though 
 he was quieter, owing to a certain indifference to the whole 
 thing. Coming to him in the midst of Italy, the proposal of a 
 professor's life, and dreary theological lectures in a pedantic 
 university town, did not at first sight seem attractive. On the 
 other hand, the offer had its advantages. In the first place, the 
 income was higher, though it was true that he could not ask 
 his Britannic Majesty to pay off his debts, as the Grand Duke 
 afterwards offered to do. Then again, his children could receive 
 a better and cheaper education at a university town. If they 
 had been all girls, the thing would have been impossible, he 
 says ; but now there was only little Luischen, and she was 
 beginning to take kindly to spinning and the ways of virtue. 
 Above all, he was becoming discontented with Weimar ; he was 
 
 * See Emerson {No7ninalist and Realist), who uses the line in a slightly- 
 different application. 
 
394 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 ^Hired of princes that remain unreasonable children to the 
 end " ; he hated to think of his difficulties with the consistory ; 
 he imagined that his family was growing more and more lonely 
 and forsaken in the town, and that no friend would really miss 
 them. At Grottingen, also, there might be a wider sphere of 
 work. He fancied he would have more time to himself, and 
 more opportunity for study ; at all events, ^' he had wandered 
 long enough like a poor lonely hermit by the banks of the Jim." 
 He now " merely wanted a workshop for the rest of his life, 
 and that was not to be found in Weimar." On the whole, 
 therefore, he was inclined to accept, but he refused to decide 
 anything, or even to think much about it, till he had reached 
 home and talked it over with Karoline face to face. 
 
 She, for her part, was even more divided in mind. She 
 wrote two or three times to Heyne, holding out no definite hopes 
 of acceptance, but making sundry suggestions as to increase of 
 income, and so on ; for she knew well enough that her husband 
 was not a man to push, as she says, and that, therefore, she 
 must do the pushing herself, having six children already to look 
 after, to say nothing of Herder himself. Yet she found it hard 
 to tear herself from Weimar ; she was probably more at home 
 there than her husband, and saw more of their friends — at all 
 events, every one was urging her not to go ; the Duchess Louise 
 was full of sorrow at the thought ; the Grand Duke was ready 
 to make almost any oflPer in order to retain Herder for his court- 
 town and his university in Jena. Goethe was most emphatic in 
 his protest that Herder was far too good for a university life, 
 and had no idea of the mean little passions of professors ; for 
 this reason he would not even have him go to Jena ; and at 
 Gottingen he would find at least as many envious tongues and 
 hypocrites as in the rest of the world. Frau von Stein told her 
 that Herder was now the life and soul of Weimar ; and her 
 most intimate friend Frau von Kalb was disconsolate at the 
 thought of parting. The very sexton came and implored her 
 not to leave her child's grave, on which the only roses of that 
 year would soon be growing. All were eager in their entreaties 
 
1789.] ITALY. 895 
 
 except one, her friend Knebel ; and he seemed indifferent, or 
 even anxious to be rid of them. Quivering with indignation 
 Karelin e clutched at the conclusion that he hoped to suck 
 advantage from their departure. She thinks him a timorous, 
 hesitating, untrusty creature, a false friend, a broken reed. 
 " He stands on a slough," she writes, " and the motto I inscribe 
 on him for the rest of his life is this, ' In doubtful case the 
 doughty friend is seen : Amicus certus in re incerta cemitur ' '* ; 
 a quotation which she hurls at poor Knebel in three several 
 letters to Herder, and once face to face, with a pardonable 
 pride. " On the whole matter he has not spoken a word to me 
 nor asked a single question ; so he may wait for an answer " 
 (er soil auch warten). One would hardly think that this self- 
 same Knebel was to be her greatest friend for the rest of her 
 life, and that she would soon turn with far more vehement 
 reproaches against Goethe himself, for whom throughout this 
 difficulty no praises seemed to her too high. Herder, on the 
 other hand, strongly took Knebel's part, supposing there was 
 some mistake, whilst his bitterness towards Goethe increases. 
 
 Thus does this unrelenting Electra stand at bay for the gods 
 of her home ; for the simple law that she followed was not of 
 to-day nor of yesterday. In her later letters she feared to say 
 all that was in her heart, for she had a suspicion that they were 
 opened. At one time she saw much of Moritz, the art critic, 
 who had been with her husband in Rome, and was now staying 
 in Weimar for some months, engaged in the worship of Goethe. 
 As the time for Herder's return drew near she became more 
 and more apprehensive, and continually reminds him that he 
 will find her no better than he had left her, a poor foolish 
 woman at best, whom he had taken upon him as his cross in 
 life ; perhaps she had been nothing but a drag on him from the 
 beginning ; how much better if he had taken himself a woman 
 of greater understanding. She was still tormented, also, by 
 dreams, though she began to see that " dreams were not always 
 prophetic." As a relief she wished to go as far as Karlsbad or 
 Ilmenau, or at least to Erfurt, to meet her husband, instead of 
 
396 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1788— 
 
 waiting in changeless anxiety at Weimar. But this was not to 
 be, and she remained in her place. 8he, too, put off all thought 
 of decision about Gottingen till her husband should arrive, and 
 for the rest kept as quiet as her nature would allow, Goethe 
 continually urging her to do nothing in her " Electra style.'* 
 
 Meantime the letters from Rome were rather happier. 
 Herder was now living there in such quiet contentment as was 
 possible for him. He spent most of his time with Angelica, and 
 his letters are full of her praises : " She is devoted to art as a 
 lamb to the sacrifice,'' he writes with a metaphor that at first 
 seems strange. The memory of her friendship was far the best 
 thing he brought with him from Italy. For two or three 
 wonderful days they were all at Tivoli together ; but within a 
 week or so, on the fourteenth of May, Herder left Rome behind 
 and drove northwards to Florence, where he describes his 
 delight at finding once more '^ the footsteps of men." After 
 Florence he stayed at Bologna, and then was carried by water 
 through Ferrara to Venice. He sent an admiring description of 
 the town, with its palaces and gondolas, to his children ; but he 
 could not stay more than a week ; and, hastening on through 
 Milan, Innsbruck, and Munich, he reached Nuremberg early in 
 J uly, after a terrible passage over the Alps in storm and snow. 
 From Nuremberg he writes, " I am coming now, but not in 
 triumph ; so do not think of meeting me. Wait quietly till I 
 come. I cannot go by way of Gotha : you must see that your- 
 self. It is impossible for me," — on account of that Frau von 
 Frankenberg. Finally, he seems to have come by Saalfeld and 
 Jena ; and he reached home on the ninth of July. 
 
 On the way he had heard from Karoline that his oldest 
 friend — the light-hearted, heavily-tried bookseller Hartknoch — 
 had died suddenly on the very day when he was setting out to 
 escort Herder's sister to Weimar : probably Herder's first thought 
 was that there would be no one now to publish the fourth part 
 of the Ideen. Herder had left his sister a happy maiden twenty- 
 seven years before in far-off Mohrungen, and now he found her 
 weak and sick, slowly dying of dropsy, as it turned out, but 
 
1789.] ITALY. 397 
 
 carefully tended by his wife, who was only anxious to make 
 their home a glimpse of heaven to the poor woman, " after she 
 had been twenty-three years in hell." How great a change in 
 this! For himself, too, what a change since that summer's day 
 when he rode away from Mohrungen with the kindly army- 
 doctor, whose very name was hardly remembered now ! And 
 there before him were his wife and six children ; he had seen 
 his beloved Italy, and had found that one always gets exactly 
 what one takes, and not a pennyworth more. He was now nearly 
 forty-five, and was sought after and reverenced throughout his 
 land ; he had become a name. But what profit should he get 
 of the labour he had done under the sun? What profit he 
 might get was of little or no consequence, so only that profit 
 was somewhere ; nor, to do him justice, did he ever account it 
 of much. 
 
398 [1789— 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 WEIMAR AGAIN, 1789 — 1802. 
 
 *• But don't suppose the new was able to efface 
 The old without a struggle, a pang ! The commonplace 
 Still clung about his heart, long after all the rest 
 O' the natural man, at eye and ear, was caught, confessed 
 The charm of change '' 
 
 FlFINE AT THE FAIB. 
 
 •'Over the ball of it 
 Peering and prying, 
 How I see all of it 
 Life there out lying." 
 
 PisGAH Sights, 1. 
 
 We need not dwell on Herder's divisions of mind over the 
 Gottingen question, having already seen enough of his difficulties 
 in practical decision. In his own heart he was probably inclined 
 to accept the offer, but then '' those proud sirs of Gottingen," 
 as he says in a letter to Karoline, were so provokingly certain 
 that he would come, that Herder's spirit of self-assertion was 
 roused ; for most people dislike doing what is expected of them, 
 lest they should seem to fail in individuality. Besides, the 
 inducements to remain in Weimar were very strong; all his 
 friends came forward in a body and implored him not to leave 
 them ; the Duchess Louise was especially urgent ; the Grand 
 Duke was ready to agree to almost any terms, and at once 
 appointed him vice-president of the consistory ; he was informed 
 that his work in Weimar was " a path of roses " compared to 
 Gottingen ; Goethe represented that he was too old for so com- 
 plete and sudden a change ; Karoline was certainly not anxious 
 to leave her old home and little cluster of friends; and accordingly, 
 after keeping Heyno, who had proposed the appointment to the 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 399 
 
 Gottingen authorities, in' a state of irritation and suspense till 
 far into September, Herder sent in his refusal, and tried to 
 reconcile himself to life in Weimar, " the unhappy mean," as he 
 calls it, " between court-town and village."^ 
 
 I am inclined to think that this decision was a mistake, 
 though it is easy to say this now. Herder had been in Weimar 
 long enough, and a complete change of centre might have 
 wakened him to new life and thought; for with such men change 
 is often the same as progress, and they need the sharp strokes of 
 fresh contact to bring the fire out of them. Weimar has been 
 so sanctified by a soft halo of memories that we forget that 
 even in Weimar life crept on from day to day much the same as 
 anywhere else ; people dosed themselves with coffee and gossip, 
 and knew each other, and grew old, and read books, and died 
 much the same as in any modern district that prides itself on its 
 culture. And it does not follow that because people five in a 
 cultured little town they are all on the narrow road to wisdom. 
 The chances indeed are against them, for there is always the 
 danger that they have mistaken their goal, and are running hard 
 down the broad road to intellectual dilettantism. How much of 
 the occasional dulness and pedantry in Goethe himself is due to 
 this pervading atmosphere in Weimar appears to me a very 
 large and serious question. For these reasons it seems a pity 
 that Herder did not boldly decide to go to Gottingen that the 
 fire of life might be kindled anew, even though a university town 
 is the last place we should naturally choose for this purpose. At 
 all events he would not then have been haunted by laments for 
 what might have been. For some minds it is easy to give up 
 what are called pleasures, it is not very difficult to give up what 
 is called happiness; but to have given up the chance which 
 might have turned life into something fuller and nobler than it 
 can ever be now-^ that is hard and is not soon forgotten. 
 
 Not many weeks had passed before he began to repent of his 
 choice. All through the winter he was very ill ; in the spring 
 
 • Knebel's Nachlass, vol. ii. p. 250. 
 
400 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 melancholy seemed to be settling down on him, and then began 
 that fatal cry, " what a failure of a life " {Ach, mein verfehltes 
 Lehen)^ which neA^er quite left his mind again. Absurd and con- 
 temptible though the lament would be from most men, few would 
 have the heart to laugh when it comes from Herder, remember- 
 ing how much he had done. Gleim had prophesied to Karoline 
 that her husband would never come back from Italy, and now 
 (May 1790) she writes in despair that the prophecy had come 
 true, for only half of the old Herder, if that, seemed to have 
 returned ; and the next year he himself writes to Knebel that 
 his life had become entirely common-place, and it seemed as 
 though his spirit had vanished. Almost every winter he was 
 afflicted with liver complaint or rheumatism, that year after year 
 drove him to the wells during the summer months, either at 
 Eger, Karlsbad, or Aix. On these visits Karoline went with 
 him, but even when he returned in better health and spirits a 
 few weeks of the consistory in the midst of his fellow-labourers 
 for the gospel of loving-kindness were enough to bring back the 
 old depression. 
 
 As vice-president it is true he was no longer obliged to 
 preach every week nor to conduct the burials, but his work was 
 not really lightened, for he had still to cope with the president, 
 who, purblind before, and quite blind in 1792, was still in no 
 haste to die, but for many long years continued to keep his blind 
 watch over the consistory, till at length, in 1801, he ceased to 
 cumber the ground, and Herder ruled in his stead. Worse than 
 the president was a new regulation of 1789, whereby the con- 
 sistory was deprived of its official lawyer, and left to stray in the 
 legal maze like sheep without a dog. Nothing daunted. Herder 
 at once set to work to study jurisprudence and case-law, but, 
 however fascinating the subject may be, it is not surprising that 
 it failed to soothe a man who approached it for the first time 
 when he was nearly fifty, and was only eager to use every hour 
 of the rest of his life to carry on his work in almost every other 
 branch of literature or science but that. Besides, Herder had a 
 strange theory about the administration of justice which must 
 
1802.] WEIMxVR x^GAIN. 401 
 
 have increased his difficulties tenfold. He considered that brevity 
 was an advantage in legal proceedings, and was dismayed to 
 find that cases of divorce and so on, which came before the con- 
 sistory, often dragged their length through three or even five 
 years, which would allow time for considerable matrimonial 
 shufiling. Supposing that these things were not as they should 
 be. Herder had a troublesome habit of bringing the trial to a 
 decision during the first term, and it is not hard to imagine the 
 baffled indignation of bench and bar and maundering clergy, 
 who liked their bits of hair-splitting, to say nothing of their fees, 
 and never saw things after this fashion. 
 
 Besides these legal and consistorial duties, which generally 
 occupied two or three days a week. Herder's difficulties with 
 the candidates for ordination steadily increased, as the Kantian 
 fever extended. He was often examining from nine o'clock till 
 six in the heat of summer with hardly a break. When we 
 remember too that during these years Heinze, the most trusted 
 of his schoolmasters, died^ and Herder for a time took the duties 
 on himself, we cannot wonder that in 1791 he writes to Forster, 
 ^' I am so overwhelmed with business and work that I can hardly 
 put on literature once a week as a Sunday coat." But in spite 
 of all he worked incessantly at the art of his life whenever 
 opportunity offered. By 1795 he had published two more 
 volumes of his Miscellanies, his treatise on the Resurrection^ and 
 the fourth part of the Ideen^ which was at last printed by Hart- 
 knoch's son in 1794. He had also written about half of his 
 series of Letters for the Furtherance of Humanity, some of which 
 may be regarded as a continuation of the Ideen^ for they treat 
 for the most part on European history since the Renaissance, 
 but chiefly deal with the literary and artistic side, and are too 
 often diffuse and common-place. The series came to an end in 
 1797. Under this stress of work and vexation his health of 
 course grew steadily worse. He was cramped by melancholy 
 and enervated by sleeplessness. He was powerless beneath the 
 clutch of old age and its limitations. Before he was fifty he 
 wrote to Jacobi, ^' I am very old now and grow older hour by 
 
 2 D 
 
402 HERDEK AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 hour." We must remember this when we come to mention the 
 enmities and polemics which have hitherto thrown a cloud over 
 his high reputation. A new life was moving in Europe ; the 
 second revolution in Germany had begun; but Herder had 
 allowed himself to grow old ; and all who have grown old, even 
 in years, will know how hard it is not to be afraid. 
 
 During all this time he was becoming more and more lonely 
 in Weimar, partly through his own fault, partly of necessity. 
 Karoline, it is true, still stood at bay over him, and never 
 flinched ; but even her strength was failing ; she seems never 
 quite to have recovered from the birth of her youngest child, 
 Einaldo, born in August 1790 ; and in her letters she too often 
 speaks of ceaseless headaches and lassitude. It was well for her 
 that, as she herself writes to Jacobi, — 
 
 Women can naturally suffer and endure more than men, and in reality 
 we are not so particular to a shade. Mother Nature has wisely conferred 
 on us this little cheerfulness as one of our wedding presents. . . . Still 
 you ought not to judge too much from the kindly faces of women, for 
 there is often beneath the surface something very different from mere 
 cheerfulness (Leichtsinn). 
 
 She kept up a frequent correspondence with old Father 
 Gleim and with Knebel, especially in later years, when Herder 
 hardly wrote at all, or contented himself with adding a few 
 words to her letters. Tn 1792, during their sojourn at Aix for 
 the sake of the baths, they renewed their intercourse with 
 Friedrich Jacobi, which had been broken off after the publica- 
 tion of Herder's God, and on their way home they stayed for 
 some days with the Jacobis at Pempelfort ; for those surprising 
 French rebels had not yet driven the metaphysical sage to 
 wander with his olive-branch of faith far up to the north (in 
 1794). After leaving Pempelfort the Herders also visited 
 Johann, the illustrious brother of their old friend Georg Miiller, 
 at Aschaffenburg ; and Herder returned home light of heart, 
 only to fall into deeper despondency. He continued to exchange 
 letters occasionally with Einsiedel and Forster, and frequently 
 with Heync, either to borrow books or to commend to his notice 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 403 
 
 some promising young student in the university. Gleim was 
 ever constant and admiring : liis kindly old commonplaces never 
 failed ; and we hear his benign voice at the beginning of this 
 century like an echo from an age long dead. Knebel, too, fi'om 
 Ansbach, at the time of his brother's suicide, or from Jena, and 
 latterly almost entirely from Ilmenau, was gradually writing his 
 two hundred and more letters to the Herders ; but he did not 
 often come to Weimar, and letters are poor things unless life is 
 breathed into them from time to time by living intercourse. 
 
 In Weimar itself the Herders began to see more of Wieland 
 than heretofore ; but, though Karoline speaks of him with the 
 warmest praise, the intimacy was never great ; and towards the 
 end of the nineties he retired to his country-house a few miles 
 from Weimar. Schiller was already established as professor of 
 history in Jena when Herder returned from Italy ; but they saw 
 little of each other, though Herder wrote occasional papers for 
 the Horen^ Schiller's journal ; and the animosity was not active 
 and embittered till about 1796, when the Xenien began to 
 appear in Schiller's new MusenaJmanac. Voss, the poet, the 
 founder of the Hainbund at Gottingen, came over once in 1794 
 from Halberstadt, where he had been staying with Gleim, and 
 was received with enthusiasm by the Herders. They always 
 watched for his works with the greatest interest, especially for 
 his famous translation of Homer ; for Herder was sadly coming 
 to the conclusion that " we must warm ourselves at the fire of 
 the ancients till better times come round." ^ Immediately after 
 this visit from Voss the Herders themselves and some of the 
 children went to visit old Gleim once more in his hospitable 
 hermitage. They met again two years after at Eisleben ; and 
 throughout the old man's kindness was unbounded. At the 
 time of the Herders' greatest difficulties as to the education of 
 their six sons, Gleim, by some delicate manoeuvre, caused them 
 to possess an additional fund, sufficient, apparently, for the 
 education of two. He seems almost to have adopted his god- 
 
 ' To Gleim, 1793. The correspondence with Gleim is printed in Von unci 
 an Herder, vol. i. 
 
 2d2 
 
404 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 child Aclelbert, and to have found a post for him, for a time at 
 least, in Halberstadt. Such pure-hearted kindliness would cover 
 a multitude of mediocre verses. 
 
 But all such gleams of brightness, the friendships with the 
 Duchesses and the Kalbs, and the Frau von Stein, now alone in 
 her indignant sorrow, were but reflections of a dying glory, 
 when the sun had set. After Herder's return from Italy the 
 hardly-perceptible rift between him and Goethe slowly but 
 inexorably widened, till within seven years the gulf was impass- 
 able. At first there seemed to be no change. In the autumn 
 of 1789 Goethe was travelling in Eisenach and the neighbour- 
 hood of Weimar with his godchild August Herder, whom he 
 continued to treat almost as his own son, looking after his 
 education and encouraging his geology. Early in the next 
 spring he stole quietly away, after his manner, to Jena, and 
 then slowly southward to meet the Duchess Amalia at Venice, 
 leaving to Herder the charge of his Christiane and infant son. 
 From Venice he sent Herder the Venetian epigrams, and wrote 
 in the old friendly way both to him and Karoline. But, as 
 some man of old has told us, want of communication corrupts 
 good friendships, and though this was not the only cause of 
 the division it certainly contributed. For hardly had Goethe 
 returned from this second journey to Italy when he set off 
 again to Dresden, and so into the heart of Silesia, to join the 
 Grand Duke in the camp at Breslau, where he stayed many 
 months awaiting the issue of the uneasiness of the nations. 
 
 The air was full of rumours of war, insignificant as they all 
 appear to us now ; Prussia's new king was jealously watching 
 the still newer emperor hardly yet seated on his throne ; tlie 
 grief of Poland was still shrieking out her impotent agony ; the 
 unknown factor of Russia was keeping all the rest in suspense 
 for her next move, though Sweden had not patience to wait, but 
 had dashed in upon her old enemy and was by this time silent, 
 whilst Russia had leisure to turn her full attention on the Turks, 
 and could slaughter them oif by thirty thousand at the time (storm- 
 ing of Ismail, December 1 790). And high over all men heard the 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 405 
 
 cries of a maddened people going up from Paris ; and hearing 
 this the Prussian king and Leopold of Austria thought best to 
 come to terms at Pillnitz, and to postpone their differences till 
 they had marched together into France to the succour of un- 
 fortunate royalty : was not the queen Theresa's daughter, and 
 monarchy itself perhaps at stake ? They did not know that in a 
 few years it would seem a small thing who was king of the 
 Romans, and whether Leopold or another was hailed emperor of 
 the German Realm amid the blare of chivalrous trumpets in the 
 old coronation town on the Main ; neither did they know that 
 this projected progress into France to reinstate suffering royalty 
 was as when one begins to let out blood. Accordingly, the 
 kings having determined to fight, Herder's best chance of life 
 was gone, for, before Goethe could fall completely under the 
 spell of Schiller, the renewal of the old friendship with Herder 
 might have been possible. But now, during most of 1792 and 
 the next year, Goethe was away with the Grand Duke besieging 
 Main^; and camping at Marienborn and elsewhere, watching 
 the progress of that surprising and instructive ^^ campaign in 
 France." During and after these years the letters to Herder 
 have become very short indeed and few. By the end of 1794 
 the friendship with Schiller had left little room for the ghosts of 
 the motionless past. 
 
 As we have come so near to France, we may take this 
 opportunity to ask with what thoughts Herder listened to the 
 thunders of those few quick years, which, to us, have come to 
 seem the very aim and crisis of a century — the sharp birth- 
 throes of a coming age. There are few things so astonishing to 
 the modern reader as the blindness of Europe to the real signifi- 
 cance of the Revolution. In North Germany especially the indif- 
 ference seems almost grotesque ; bat for the history of the last 
 hundred years we should call it sublime. Goethe himself tells us 
 that people thought him mad for his excitement over the affair of 
 the Diamond Necklace and the other faint beginnings of troubles : 
 and yet critics are never tired of reminding us of Goethe's 
 indifference to all political history. " We in the North," he 
 
406 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 says again, "continued to live in a kind of dreamy security;"^ 
 and the truth of this is evident from every letter of the time. 
 People went on with their bits of artistic criticism, their borrow- 
 ings of books, their panegyrics of common-place verses, their 
 tea-parties, and classical emendations, much the same as if all 
 things were as usual just across the Rhine ; as if no guillotine 
 was palpitating with quick rise and fall in the squares of Paris. 
 Five days after Herder returned from Italy the Bastille went 
 up in smoke ; whilst he was simmering in the steam-baths of 
 Aix, or enjoying the serenity of Pempelfort with Jacobi, the 
 prison-doors of Paris were red with the September massacres. 
 Within a few months after this Danton had hurled down his 
 gage of battle at the feet of the kings who stood up and took 
 council together ; and yet it is almost startling when in any of 
 these letters there comes to us some short outcry of horror or 
 some little sigh for the queen. No doubt the whole of Europe, 
 including France herself, underrated not only the significance 
 but the power of the Revolution. " The King of Prussia and 
 the Duke of Brunswick are determined to be in Paris by the- 
 25th of this month," Herder writes whilst the troops were 
 beginning to assemble on the Rhine (August 1792). But this 
 was not all ; the German mind was benumbed by that inevitable 
 indifference to what seems to lie outside our immediate sphere, 
 indifference which is almost as clever an invention as sleep and 
 forgetfulness, for without any of the three life would not be 
 
 This being so, it is hard to follow Herder's view of the 
 Revolution with any exactness, for he did not live long enough 
 to estimate its true proportions from the height of distance. 
 Like Wordsworth, and most liberal-minded men at the time, he 
 seems to have hailed it at first with hope and delight, and then 
 to have been gradually sickened by its brutality and madness, 
 till in the end he classed it with Kant's philosophy as having 
 delayed the development of humanity for at least a hundred 
 years. He was clear-sighted enough to see throughout that no 
 ' See Goethe's AiinaU, 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 407 
 
 good could come of the coalition of kings. After the siege of 
 Mainz, in 1793, he wrote to Jacobi, " I wish all these hosts 
 and powers would creep away into their holes ; they are not 
 the people to improve the anarchy in France"; and to old 
 Gleim, who tried to work up some kind of patriotic enthusiasm 
 and was meditating a new series of Grenadier Songs, he writes, 
 '^ With the pride of Austria on one side and the brutality of 
 France on the other, mankind can only sit and sigh. There are 
 no laurels to be won in a war like this." Owing to disloyal 
 sentiments such as these, and his well-known freedom in all 
 kinds of speculation, he appears to have been branded with the 
 then heinous charge of sympathy with the rebels ; a charge 
 which was only partially deserved, but caused him and his 
 family some trouble. It seemed to be established by his close 
 intimacy with Knebel, who sent him the Moniteur from time to 
 time and was one of the few who dared to display some enthu- 
 siasm for the cause. But, in fact. Herder's one wish was for a 
 renewal of peace, and during the last years of the Revolution 
 he could think of the present only with sorrow and of the future 
 with anxiety. Like so many others, he had thought that all 
 might have gone on so quietly to the millennium, and now all 
 the ideals for which he had staked his life seemed blighted by a 
 blast of hell from France and a cloud of mad verbiage from 
 Konigsberg. For he had allowed himself to grow old and now 
 could not save his soul from fear. 
 
 As an instance of his discernment it may be mentioned that 
 he foretold Napoleon's dominion in Germany, and regarded it 
 as the one means of arousing the Germans from their political 
 indifference ; " but he hardly believed this was quite so near," 
 adds Knebel in his last published letter to Karoline (April 
 1806). Karoline herself greeted the Revolution at first with all 
 the enthusiasm of her high nature. As late as November 1792 
 she writes to Jacobi : 
 
 The Sun of Freedom is rising, that is certain, and that this is not the 
 business of the French merely, but of the whole age, you can see yourself 
 in the letter to the Pope in the Moniteur. In Germany we shall still sit 
 
408 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789- 
 
 awhile in darkness, but the morning wind is here and there rising into 
 voice. 
 
 This comes so near the true ring of the cat-call Liberty and 
 the Rights of Man, that Herder thought it necessary to add a 
 postscript warning Jacobi that his wife was not really suffering 
 from the delirium of Freedom, but remained a good German 
 lady in this '^ terra ohedientice.''^ Three years later, when Frank- 
 furt fell and her own land lay open to the enemy, her enthu- 
 siasm was much shaken by her fears ; for love of country is 
 strong, in spite of theories and the Rights of Man ; and in 1798 
 she sums up the matter thus, in a letter to Gleim, with simple 
 philosophy and diplomatic suggestion : 
 
 Abuse of might leads to abuse of might by whomsoever it is practised. 
 It was thus that at the outbreak of the Revolution my feeling was for the 
 French, and now, after their deeds of violence and pillage, it is firmly 
 fixed against them. Beyond this I lament nothing, except that the Ger- 
 mans (I mean Austria and Prussia) have not the sense to appease the 
 excited and raging lion by imse negociations [all underlined in her im- 
 petuous way] ; but instead of this are always stirring him up more, so as 
 to bring misery on our heads. But now it is all confused and mingled, 
 the higher and the lower together ; the world is out of joint. When will 
 the great war of the abuse of might have an end ? 
 
 This may, no doubt, stand as the summary of the opinion, 
 not only of Herder as well but of most thoughtful and true- 
 hearted people during those years ; onl}-, unfortunately, when 
 the lion has become rampant it is so hard to approach him with 
 wise negociations that are likely to have a soothing effect. 
 
 Returning to Herder's more immediate sphere in Weimar 
 we find the breach between him and Goethe still further widened 
 in 1794 by the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 
 Chiefly under Schiller's advice it was now much altered from 
 its first form of many years before, and Herder, who had 
 hitherto chiefly regretted the " low company " with which it 
 dealt, now found little to admire. His criticism in a letter to 
 the Countess Baudisson of Holstein might almost be a page out 
 of De Quincey's famous essay. He deplores especially the want 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 409 
 
 of what he calls '^ delicate moral feehng," and thinks this is the 
 ruin of most of Goethe's writings. 
 
 '' These Mariannes and Philines and the rest of the company, how I 
 hate them all," he exclaims ; and, he adds very significantly " Perhaps in 
 no place in Germany do people depart so far from delicate moral con- 
 ceptions — I might say the very graces of our soul — as here in Weimar, and 
 thereby suffering mankind is deprived of the greatest charm of his life, 
 and discords sadly false strike on the ear. But enough of this. In 
 the book, as a whole, the old harper pleases me most. He's the man for 
 me. There are besides very striking and acute remarks, but I cannot 
 admire the web on which the whole is worked." ^ 
 
 When we remember the unbounded enthusiasm with which 
 Schiller welcomed the same book, declaring he could be friends 
 with no one who did not admire it, we cannot wonder that Goethe 
 felt himself all the more drawn away from Herder towards this 
 new and ardent nature, so full of encouragement and counsel. 
 The estrangement was further increased by Herder's bitter — 
 almost petulant — opposition to Kant and all his works ; for, 
 though Goethe was no Kantist, and remained calm through all 
 the excitement, he could not be blind to the enormous power of 
 a system which such men as Schiller and Fichte hailed as a 
 revelation. It was this premature old age in Herder, this 
 mournful loss of sympathy with the present, which at last made 
 further friendship impossible. This is best shown in a letter 
 from Goethe to Meyer after the publication of Herder's review 
 of German literature in the Letters for the Furtherance of 
 Humanity in 1796. He says: 
 
 Friend Humanus has just given us another sad instance to what woeful 
 issues arbitrary criticism necessarily leads, if once a man stoops to it, in 
 spite of the highest understanding. In this account there is such an 
 incredible sufferance towards mediocrity, such a rhetorical confusion of 
 the good and the insignificant, such a reverence for the dead and buried, 
 and indifference to the living and striving, that we must lament the con- 
 dition of the author from whom so mournful a composition could spring ; 
 and besides, throughout the whole there is again the drone of that old half- 
 true piece of Philistinism, '^that the arts must recognise the law of morality 
 
 • Quoted in the Preface to Herder's Nachlass, vol. i. p. 20. 
 
410 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 and subordinate themselves to that." The former of these things they 
 have always done, and must do, because their laws spring from reason, just 
 in the same way as the moral law ; but if they did the second they would 
 be lost, and it were better that we hung a millstone round their necks at 
 once and drowned them, than let them die away by degrees into the dead 
 level of utility. ' 
 
 It may be remembered that in younger days Herder had 
 been one of the first to say all this himself, but now old age and 
 fear and sickness had frozen his blood, and next year he bitterly 
 complained to Knebel of the immorality in the Bride of Corinth, 
 and other of Goethe's recent ballads. Neither would he take 
 any part in the enthusiasm for the new theatre, for which Groethe 
 had long laboured; it was opened in November 1798, but Herder 
 alone was not there, and refused interest in the whole under- 
 taking, having renounced all such pomps and vanities in his 
 baptism, as he said with a flash of his old humour. 
 
 If we must fix a date for the final separation, it would be the 
 appearance of the Xenien in Schiller's Musenalmanac of 1796. 
 Herder himself was treated gently enough in these fierce protests 
 against all dull mediocrity and commonplace, but some of his old 
 friends — such as Gleim especially — were not spared. 
 
 Poor old Gleim was pitied as the worn-out Peleus, who had 
 lost all the strength and speed of younger days ; ^ and, though 
 he himself bowed his head to the rebuke more in sorrow than in 
 anger, and meekly answered in a little series, apparently in 
 verse, called The Strength and Speed of the old Peleus, Herder 
 took the whole matter very much to heart, and Karoline glowed 
 with a fever of indignation. It was indeed natural that to the 
 celebrities of the time the tone of the Xenien should seem hector- 
 ing and presumptuous; for who, they asked, were these two 
 more than others that they should stand up and gird at " estab- 
 lished reputations?" And to many it seemed a grievous thing. 
 From this year onward Goethe and Herder hardly met at all, 
 and apparently only on three occasions with any feeling ot 
 
 > Quoted in Herder's Nac?tlas,<t, vol. i. p. 23. 
 2 See Xenien, No. 343, 344. 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 411 
 
 friendship, and these three were spoilt by accident and Herder's 
 want of compromise. In 1797 Goethe writes to Schiller, " I 
 heartily regret that the old man on Potter's Hill [now the Herder 
 Platz] is condemned to stand in the way of himself and others 
 on his own field " ; and two years later Herder writes, that to 
 his sorrow he has heard nothing of Knebel's translation of 
 Lucretius, " because he has no connexion whatever with the two 
 great columns, Jachin and Boas." i Do we get tired of hearing 
 Schiller called great and Goethe greater? If so, the joke is 
 bearable ; and with this we may quit this sad subject for the 
 present. 
 
 •I have been obliged to anticipate a little for the sake of 
 clearness, and now we can return to two points of light that 
 served to relieve the general gloom in 1796 ; these were the 
 completion of Herder's Terpsichore, or translation of Balde, and 
 the meeting with Jean Paul Richter, the one supreme humourist 
 Germany has given the world — unless we may account Heine a 
 German and a humourist. 
 
 This Jacob Balde, poet or half-poet, was born in Elsass at 
 the very beginning of the seventeenth century; and, leaving 
 Elsass when it fell into French hands, he betook himself to 
 Bavaria, and was trained by the Jesuits, then in the first out- 
 burst of their brilliant activity. He joined their order, and 
 became ascetic and warlike ; but devoted himself chiefly to the 
 composition of verses in almost every style, but for the most 
 part in Latin. As he published a book of Odes and Epodes, he 
 was, of course, lauded as the German Horace ; but had been 
 almost entirely forgotten, as perhaps he deserved, until Herder 
 discovered a copy of his works, and determined to bring him 
 again to light in good German speech and the original classic 
 metres. He began the translation in 1794, and Karoline tells 
 us that he never worked at anything with such enthusiasm 
 except the Urkunde and Ideen. He would begin on an ode after 
 supper, and read it to her at ten or eleven at night, to the con- 
 
 ■ ' Knebel's Nachlass^ vol. ii. p. 279. 
 
412 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 solation and encouragement of both. The Terpsichore, which 
 included some account of Jacob Balde, was received with admi- 
 ration — not only by Goethe and Schiller, but by the nation at 
 large ; for, as Balde had written during the Thirty Years* War, 
 he was now welcomed by the rising military spirit of the time ; 
 and even the modern reader, who can endure to be jolted in Teu- 
 tonic speech over the metres of Horace, may find a certain interest 
 in these odes, a historical interest mainly, but also a glimpse of 
 almost a poet's heart struggling to blossom in the midst of a flat 
 wilderness of sand. 
 
 Hardly was the Terpsichore published when Jean Paul came 
 to Weimar. The sight of him is like the profound smile of a 
 granite mountain bathed in sunshine. For here again w^as 
 Nature's most gracious gift, the man who having looked the 
 world to the heart can still laugh with love in spite of sorrow, 
 partly even because of sorrow. " With bright eyes, not with 
 wet," he says himself, '' we must go on our way through life," 
 and he will help us here to avoid dwelling too much on the 
 gloom of Herder's closing years. Richter was now thirty-three, 
 and his reputation already stood high. The Greenland Law- 
 suits, The Invisible Lodge, Hesperus^ Siebenkds, and, quite recently, 
 Quintus Fijclein, had been eagerly welcomed by an astonished 
 people, by none more eagerly than the Herders. Karoline, 
 writing to Gleim early in 1796, says that Quintus had been only 
 a few hours in the house, but she had sat up reading it till far 
 into the night, in spite of her weak eyes. Indeed, Richter had 
 a strange and not always enviable power of making women love 
 the author merely through his writing.^ And it was through 
 this cause that he now came to Wejmar in June 1796, at the 
 urgent entreaty of Karoline's great friend Charlotte von Kalb, 
 who, after reading Richter's books, had come to the conclusion 
 that he was much more worthy of such a soul as hers than was 
 her own husband. This was probably true ; but in our cooler 
 
 * The sad story of Maria Forster will occur to every one. She drowned 
 herself for hopeless love of Richter, whom she had never seen ; he was then fifty 
 and the father of a family. 
 
18020 WEIMAR AGAIN. 413 
 
 days there seems a certain want of delicacy in her courtship, 
 and, when she insists in her letters that nature should suffer no 
 restraint and love needs no laws, we can now see that the precept 
 will not bear universal application. And yet she claimed Herder 
 as her master, which only shows that perhaps after all he was 
 not so far wrong in insisting so strongly on the moral laws, even 
 at the risk of all else. 
 
 On the day of Jean Paul's arrival this lady took him to see 
 Knebel, and, whilst they were in the garden, Herder and Karo- 
 line with two children entered. " I went to meet him, and under 
 the free heaven I threw myself into his arms. I am now as 
 familiar with him as with you," says Eichter in a letter to Otto 
 the day after. ^ It was chiefly in hopes of knowing Herder that 
 he had come to Weimar. He had long regarded him as one of 
 the three great watch-towers of German thought, and no one 
 had so strongly influenced his own genius. He had already 
 addressed Herder two or three times with petitions for recom- 
 mendations to publishers and the like, but the correspondence 
 had hitherto miscarried. And now after this meeting Herder's 
 influence was to be more than doubled, and it continued through 
 life. It would be impossible in a sketch like this to quote all 
 the beautiful things that Jean Paul has said of his friend and 
 master. They are the more significant when we remember that 
 the friendship only began when Herder was long past his best 
 days. Jean Paul might be called the last and in many ways 
 the noblest of Herder's great works. They were both descend- 
 ants of Hamann, but Jean Paul was the grandson. The points 
 of resemblance between the two are striking, but the difi^erence 
 is even more significant. Each saw in the other something 
 which he himself was striving after but could never reach ; as, 
 many years afterwards, Jean Paul said, " I could have become 
 a great author with Herder's powers and my own application of 
 the same.^' Through all their long and familiar intercourse his 
 
 * Quoted in the L\fe of Jean Paul, comjjiled from various sources^ p. 212, 
 in many ways an excellent work, obviously by a woman. (By a Mrs. Lee of 
 Brooklyn, in fact ; see Carlyle and Emerson, vol. ii. p. 20.) 
 
414 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 admiration never flagged, and the year after Herder's death he 
 introduced a long passage in his praise into the Introduction 
 to u^sthetics, written with all his enthusiasm and penetration in 
 that gorgeous style which Herder easily learnt to parody.^ It is 
 quoted in the BeminiscenceSj but the following brief extracts 
 must here suffice : 
 
 This noble spirit was misjudged by the most opposite times and parties, 
 and that not entirely without his own fault ; for he had. the failing that he 
 was no star of the first or any other order of magnitude, but a cluster of 
 stars, out of which every one spelt out a favourite star-form for himself. 
 Men with several kinds of power are at once misjudged, men with one kind 
 seldom .... I went on my way in the fair garden, until I gained a free 
 view towards the sun that was sinking down soft and rosy red. The nightin- 
 gales were chanting amid the flowers, high over them the larks in the 
 clouds of even ; through all the round bosky woods the spring had taken 
 her way, and left the mark of her footsteps on them in flower and per- 
 fume. I thought of that spirit, whom (seldom as the freely-lavished title 
 can rightly be given) I can yet call nothing but a great man. How happy 
 and full of joy he always was in the country among trees and flowers ! 
 Dowered from his birth with an ardent draught of love towards all nature, 
 like a Brahmin with the lofty Spinozism of his soul, he loved each little 
 beast, each flower, and kept them close to his heart ; the carriage, as it 
 passed through verdant scenes of life, was his chariot of the sun, and only 
 under the free heaven, or under the spell of music, did his heart expand 
 wide open and cheerful as a flower. If he was not a poet, he was some- 
 thing better, namely, a poem, an Indian Greek Epos, composed by some 
 purest God. (And again) : Few spirits have been learned on so grand a 
 scale as he. Most people only pursue what is most remarkable and un- 
 known in a single science ; he, on the other hand, gathered up only the 
 great streams, but of every department of knowledge, into his heaven- 
 reflecting sea, that dissolved them into itself and drove its ceaseless 
 current from the evening to the Eastern sun. 
 
 It is in this same passage that Jean Paul tells how one day 
 Herder wished he had been born in the Middle Ages, and 
 at another time thought it would be a comfort to see a ghost. 
 But I will only mention one more of Richter's sayings on 
 Herder, and it is to me the best of all. Long years after, when 
 he was old and blind, the people with him were talking of the 
 
 ' See a letter of July, 1801. The corresponcleiice between the Herders and 
 Uichter is printed in Herder's Nnvhla.s's, vol. i. 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. ' 415 
 
 sense of smell, and Jean Paul maintained it was a test of imagi- 
 nation and refined temperament. " A gentle and refined Indian," 
 he added, "" would think us all offensive animals. Herder had 
 the most delicate sense of smell, but then in everything he was 
 an elephant."^ Think of the start in that circle of friends as 
 this glorious paradox broke upon them ; and then how subtly 
 Richter was led up to it; through the delicate nose and the 
 Asiatic form of thought, which he always attributed to Herder 
 in spite of his Hellenism, and thus to the dreamlike Indian 
 beast, the type of sensitive intellect. We remember, and perhaps 
 Richter remembered, how the natives of Biickeburg used to stare 
 at Herder as though he were an elephant ; common sense then 
 showed us how widely they were wrong, and now a flash of 
 genius shows us how nearly they were right.^ 
 
 After a few happy weeks in Weimar, Richter thought it 
 prudent for several reasons to return to his mother in Hof. But 
 two years afterwards (1798), coming from Leipzig, he passed 
 through Weimar again, and, finding the temptation irresistible, 
 he returned in October to establish himself by the side of the 
 Herders, and stayed there for exactly two years, to the joy of 
 the whole family. To Karoline he was a very dear friend, 
 though they had frequent battles over his style, and she always 
 protested that his women were too weak and whimpering.^ Her 
 
 * Quoted in the Life of Jean Paid, p. 421. 
 
 2 I am the less anxious here to insist on the importance of Herder's friend- 
 ship to Jean Paul because Herder was too old to be influenced much himself, 
 and for the rest I am half -pledged to return to the subject in some future year, 
 should wits and opportunity serve. 
 
 3 Her views on this point were so excellent, and at that time so rare, that a 
 passage may be quoted from a letter to Knebel, October 1803: " He makes his 
 women too weak, too whimpering — they are all poured out in tears and senti- 
 ment, instead of going to meet their pain and misfortune by action. Woman's 
 peculiar nature is rather passive than active ; and, if you bring so good and 
 tender a soul into a still more passive state by exaggerated emotions, the poor 
 creature must be overwhelmed in complete ruin. If I had not proofs of this, it 
 would not give me so much pain. Richter must yet bring it about that he does 
 not increase the soul's sorrow by sentiment, but causes it to be overcome by 
 action." — Knebel's Nachlass, vol. ii. p. 348. Truly this woman had been found 
 worthy to learn her life's lesson. 
 
416 HEltDEU AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 great regret was that after all his adventures he had not yet 
 gained a wife ; and, in spite of Gleim's warnings that Richter 
 was too much an idealist to be happy with any one real woman, 
 she of course worked her hardest to fill the deficiency. She 
 acknowledged that the task was not easy, but even she had under- 
 rated the difficulties ; for when all had at last been smoothed 
 between Richter and Karoline von Feuchtersleben, and the 
 whole party under the superintendence of the Herders had 
 assembled at Ilmenau for the betrothal in May 1800, the man of 
 genius, suddenly discovering that the lady suited him better 
 through the post than in daily presence, honestly declared that 
 the thing would not do, and dashed off to Berlin, where he met 
 Karoline Meyer, whom he married within the year. In spite of 
 their affection for Richter the Herders were naturally a little 
 perplexed and annoyed,^ though on the whole they defended 
 him, and, being quite reconciled when he returned in the summer, 
 deeply regretted his departure from Weimar that autumn. Their 
 last real friend in Weimar was thus removed ; he had been with 
 them almost every evening for two years, and the isolation from 
 the rest of the town had been of no consequence, for he preferred 
 to have Herder to himself. Indeed, as time went on th*ese two 
 had become completely cut off from the outside currents of men. 
 Jean Paul had been coldly received by Goethe at first, and felt 
 himself repulsed from his nature in spite of all admiration, in 
 spite of the eye " a ball of light," and his reading "like deep- 
 toned thunder, blended with soft whispering rain-drops." Of 
 " the stony Schiller, from whom as from a precipice all strangers 
 spring back,"^ he saw little, and indeed his avowed friendship to 
 Herder, to say nothing of the magnificent lawlessness of his own 
 genius, was enough to separate him from the whole of that party. 
 
 • Herder wrote what consolation he could to the unhappy girl, reminding her 
 especially that Richter had no substance to offer her but his wits, and we 
 remember Herder's saying that the authors of the future were likely enough to 
 die of starvation. But the lady refused to be comforted, and both Herder and 
 his wife were rather unreasonably indignant. " Nothing is more terrible than 
 the perversity of women," writes our impetuous heroine. 
 
 » Letter to Otto (1796), quoted in L^fc of Jean Paul, p. 216. 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIK. 417 
 
 But the one thing which more than any other caused this isola- 
 tion was that not only in his Clavis Fichtiana but with all the 
 power of his applause, criticism, and suggestion, Jean Paul aided 
 and abetted Herder in his onslaught upon the sons of Kant. 
 
 A critical examination into this controversy on its own merits 
 as a duel between the two rival methods of philosophy would be 
 here quite impossible, partly because it must include an account 
 of most of Kant's system and much of Fichte's, and would thus 
 extend this chapter to the size of another volume or two ; partly 
 also because, if, as I believe. Herder was singularly incapable of 
 what is called high metaphysical speculation, it is very certain 
 that I am still less capable, and in the present state of the 
 Kantian controversy in England it would seem a presumptuous 
 and surely unheard-of thing for any one, who confessedly does 
 not yet understand one side of the question, to give an opinion 
 on it, especially in scorn. I must, therefore, content myself 
 merely with the historical origin and importance of Herder's 
 polemic, and pass judgment on it, if that is necessary, also by 
 the light of history ; for even those who are not metaphysicians 
 can see what ideas have been of power in the world. 
 
 After Herder had ceased to correspond with Kant from 
 Riga, the separation had slowly developed into hostility, probably 
 beginning from the side of Kant, who must for a time have 
 regarded his old pupil as a mere hot-headed enthusiast. Herder 
 certainly took no pleasure in the Kritih from its first appearance, 
 but it is hardly possible to believe the words put into the mouth 
 of Hartknoch in the Reminiscences — that Kant attributed the slow 
 diffusion of his philosophy to Herder, of all people. At first 
 sight it seems in the last degree improbable that a man like 
 Kant should have thought for one moment of Herder as con- 
 nected with the matter at all ; and yet his behaviour with regard 
 to the Ideen, a year or two later, seems to point to a peculiar 
 spite against Herder, which it is not easy to explain, unless it 
 can be attributed to the necessary opposition between Herder's 
 Spinozism and Kant's Freedom. This, at all events, was the 
 beginning of avowed strife, and we have seen how Herder 
 
 2 E 
 
418 HEKDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 attempted to answer the challenge by sneers in his Dialogms on 
 God. But for many years he was restrained from saying more, 
 partly, one may hope, from hesitation as to his grounds, partly 
 from reverence to his old master. Not more than two years 
 before the crisis came he wrote that famous description, by 
 which Kant is perhaps better known than by any other, for it is 
 quoted by most biographers.^ But in the original manuscript 
 he had added three or four short pages that were afterwards 
 omitted from the Letters for Humanity^ but are fortunately printed 
 in the Remmiscences. I believe these to be of more value than 
 the Metakritik and Kalligone put together, for they show that, at 
 this time. Herder had some insight into the significance and 
 permanent effect of Kant's system. 
 
 But in the next few years the aspect changed. In 1794 
 Fichte had begun his professorship at Jena ; and there he was, 
 just across the forest, in the midst of Herder's candidates for 
 ordination, lecturing on Sunday, " creating God," foretelling 
 the speedy overthrow of Christianity, and abolishing all the other 
 sturdy old customs and traditions — for which he had all his 
 windows broken ; a most unpleasant way, as Goethe remarks, of 
 being convinced of the Non-Ego.'"^ It was in 1795 that the 
 Moniteurj speaking of Germany as a geography-book speaks of 
 a South Sea island, described it as a country which was chiefly 
 famous for its philosophy, in which a Mons. Kant and his pupil, 
 a Mons. Fichte, were the great lights.^ Even Goethe, in spite 
 of his admiration for the man, regarded Fichte's boldness as 
 something worse than imprudent ; and it would be easy to accuse 
 him of time-serving when, at the request of Saxony, the Duke 
 of Weimar was obliged to take notice of his professor's doctrine, 
 and caused his departure to Berlin (1799). In the meantime, 
 Herder's difficulties had increased year by year. The youth of 
 Germany were carried away by one of those recurrent fits of 
 delirium, which give them such a charm when compared to the 
 profit-and-loss young gentlemen of more sober counti'ies. Some 
 
 ' See above, p. 40. « See Goethe's Annals. 
 
 « Letter of Goethe to Schiller, May 16, 1796. 
 
1802.J WEIMAR AGAIN. 419 
 
 shot themselves, some wrote agamst marriage, some talked 
 strange tongues, others wore strange garments, some railed 
 against Christianity, others against their parents, most against 
 everyday morality ; but all agreed in believing the more in 
 Kant and Fichte the less they understood them. ^^ A new age 
 is dawning!" cried they all; in fact, it was a real German 
 Revolution, a period of philosophic Sturm und Drang, and the 
 youth of Jena were as drunk with thought as the mob of Paris 
 with blood. 
 
 To Herder, by reason of his position in the Church and his 
 scheme of hope for humanity, all this came very close. The 
 great century, for which he had done so much, seemed to be 
 dying out in shrieks of anarchy and the incoherent ravings of 
 madness. Even his son, his August, every one's favourite, had 
 caught the fever, and was beginning to babble of Identity and 
 the Absolute Ego. Therefore he determined that the time had 
 come when he must utter his voice, though, as he says, he was 
 now alone, without an echo ; or, as Karoline more emphatically 
 writes, " My husband has to play the parts of John the Baptist 
 in the wilderness and of Christ at the same time." His great 
 hope was that he might drive Kant to explain himself. It was 
 well known that Kant repudiated much that was being developed 
 out of his system by so-called followers, and Herder had hopes 
 that a word from the master might divide the true from the 
 false. His quarrel, as he often maintained, was with the 
 Kantists rather than with Kant, but it cannot be said that his 
 respect for the old philosopher increased with years. His general 
 purpose is clearly seen in a passage from a letter to Knebel, in 
 May 1799, when he had just finished the Metakritik: — 
 
 My object is now definite enough, namely, to exj^ose in the shortest, 
 clearest, and most pregnant way, the confusions and absurdities which 
 these fellows have introduced into the criticism of all that is true and 
 good and beautiful in art and knowledge ; yes, into practical doctrines too, 
 ethics and equity, even into philology, history, mathematics, and theology. 
 In every journal these bull-dogs and hounds are barking and yelping out 
 their critical canons without canon, without feeling, law, or regulation. 
 God help me ! But my motto is: Jada est alea — make a clean sweep, root 
 
 2e2 
 
420 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 and branch ! I have stopped up my ears with wool and white virgin-wax ; 
 I will look neither to the left nor right till the work is done. ' 
 
 The production of the two books on Kant's philosophy exactly 
 coincided with Richter's residence in Weimar. The MetaJcritik, 
 which is intended as a detailed criticism on Kant's Kritik of 
 Pare Reason j was begun in the autumn of 1798, and published 
 next year. Herder borrowed the title and some of the contents 
 from an unpublished work by Hamann, and, as Richter gave all 
 the advice he could, and was the only one except Karoline w^ho 
 knew the subject of the book, the Metakritik may be regarded as 
 the joint w^ork of Hamann and his two nearest descendants. As 
 this is so, we can only regret that it was written so late in 
 Herder's life, and deals with a subject for which all the three were 
 peculiarly unfitted. The Kalligone, which was published in 1800, 
 is a criticism on Kant's Kritik of Judgment j and, being concerned 
 with the Beautiful and kindred matters, is more attractive than 
 the other to the simple reader, but, as far as I can understand, 
 wanders still further from the point. Both of them abound in 
 the cheerful and energetic abuse of those confident times. 
 Kantism is generally known as the " Influenza from the North- 
 East "; Fichte is a resurrection of Swift's Brother Peter, and 
 his system is a '' St. Vitus's dance," a " Bedlam of Errors," and 
 the rest. Much was hoped from the Metakritik; the book sold 
 quickly, and, as Goethe writes to Schiller, its friends expected 
 that it would certainly reduce the oracle of Konigsberg to 
 silence. Some few applauded, but it is sad to see they are 
 always the second-rate names, the Grleims and the Knebels. 
 Goethe exclaimed that, if he had known what Herder was 
 writing, he would have implored him on his knees to suppress 
 it. And to Herder himself, as was inevitable, this, like every 
 other polemic, only brought soreness and vexation. He was 
 exposed to a perfect storm of ridicule and abuse in all the 
 Kantian organs of Germany, and we may judge of the tone 
 of these criticisms from the remarks that the scraph-tongued 
 
 ' Knebel's NacMaas., vol. ii. p. 278. 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 421 
 
 Coleridge has not thought it beneath him to inscribe in his 
 own copy of the Kalligone,^ There was to have been a third 
 volume to complete the work of the other two, but it was never 
 written. 
 
 And indeed it was as well, for quite enough had been said. 
 Herder had set himself in opposition lo the strongest movement 
 of his time, and such barriers only make the current wilder. His 
 enemies, and they were many, maintained, on the whole justly, 
 that his criticisms were chiefly verbal, dealing in etymology and 
 the use of terms, but never going to the heart of the matter ; 
 further, that he was a mere empiric in philosophy and had no real 
 position at all. The truth seems to be that, as I have said. 
 Herder, for a man of such intellect, was singularly incapable of 
 high metaphysical speculation ; he did not only refuse to accept 
 the conclusions of the Kantists, but he did not even understand 
 what they meant ; or, which is much the same thing, he could 
 not see where the real difficulties lay.^ But whether his warfare 
 was in itself holy or unholy must be left for time and others to 
 settle, all that concerns us here is that historically it was unholy 
 and hopeless, one of the gravest errors of Herder's life. The jnain 
 principles of Kant's philosophy have exercised such influence on 
 the world's mind that we can hardly imagine how things looked 
 before it. Whatever may be our views on the possibility of 
 philosophy, no one can doubt that Kantism was one of the 
 strongest forces of the century which produced our own, that 
 its strength extended far into our fathers' times at least, and is 
 therefore part of ourselves. When w^e consider that the words 
 of Kant and his sons have given an unknown depth and subtlety 
 to our greatest poets and thinkers, a radiant glow as of divine 
 behest to the morality of our greatest teachers, a fulness and 
 fervour to the life of hundreds of us who can pretend to neither 
 thought nor doctrine, we must be very ignorant or very enlightened 
 if we can afford to sneer. 
 
 But Herder with all his insight into history was blind to the 
 
 ' See Appendix I. 
 
 2 His criticism on Kant's theory of Time is a good instance of this. 
 
422 HERDER AND HIS, TIMES. [1789— 
 
 strength of this new thought. He did not see that Kant was 
 doing for philosophy very much what himself and Goethe had 
 done for poetry and literature in earlier years; that Kantism 
 was another protest against the common-place, against the smug 
 philosophising of shop and parlour, against the incoherence of 
 self-satisfied empiricism, that could not see its own difficulties, 
 but abode in chaos and called it plain. And yet in our day it does 
 not seem very hard to sympathise with Herder, even admitting 
 his blindness. It has even been maintained that the Metakritik 
 is an admirable example of the scientific method, and that the 
 only objection to it is that it cannot be understood without a 
 study of Kant, which no rational being would now-a-days under- 
 take.^ From Herder's position we can see how dense must have 
 seemed the clouds of confusion that were gathering on the fair 
 face of wisdom, threatening to stifle knowledge and impede the 
 advancement of man. It seemed as though the ideals for which 
 he had laboured, all that had given hope and value to life, were 
 to be swept away by a deluge of obscure waters. And the worst 
 of it was he had no longer the daring, which is the first thing 
 needful for all new knowledge, all growth of mind ; the loss of 
 which is old age. Especially was he afraid that the growth of 
 natural science would be checked or perhaps cease, most need- 
 lessly afraid, as time has shown. But the longer Herder lived 
 the more did he limit his hopes for the coming age to the 
 development of natural science. 
 
 It sometimes seems as though he only just missed being a 
 man of science himself. " If I were my own master," he would 
 often say, " I would shut myself up somewhere and for a time 
 would study natural science and nothing else;" and when in the 
 last years of his life he used to long to be forced to spend the 
 rest of his days in solitary prison confinement with a few books — 
 to this depth had the Herder of the Sturm nnd Drang descended 
 — it is very certain that science would have been his chief pur- 
 suit. He took the keenest interest in all the scientific discoveries 
 
 ' F. von Baereiibach, Herder als Vorgdnger Darrvin^s. 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 423 
 
 of the age, listening eagerly to the wisdom of his son August, 
 who had dwelt in many seats of learning, and above all in 
 Freiberg, where he had heard the great Werner lecture on 
 minerals and the formation of the earth. He met Werner him- 
 self at Aix in 1802, and was favoured with a private exposition 
 of his theory. The son August also wrote a book on Galvanism, 
 quite ruined, his father thought, by the under-current of Fichte ; 
 but of galvanism Herder could learn from Wilhelm Eitter, the 
 electrician, himself. Under such influence he looked to electricity 
 as the great secret of the future. And for another division of 
 science there was Gall, the phrenologist, who began his lectures 
 on the brain at Vienna in 1796, and was eagerly watched by 
 many of the wise and foolish of Europe, by none more eagerly 
 than Herder, who always regretted that he could not go to 
 Vienna to meet this man. Indeed the interest was personal as 
 well as scientific, for Gall always spoke of Herder with the highest 
 praise and acknowledged his debt to the Ideen^ but Herder had 
 been dead two or three years before Gall came to Weimar and 
 told Goethe he was a born stump- orator. 
 
 It was chiefly this keen interest in natural science which 
 made Herder wish his birth instead of his death had fallen at 
 the beginning of this century ; he would so gladly have seen to 
 what all this would lead. And that is the worst of being obliged 
 to live at some particular time ; every one would choose to live 
 a few hundred years earlier, or, better still, a few thousand years 
 later. If we must blame Herder for blindness to the significance 
 of Kant, here at all events he is safe. He foresaw what has 
 come to pass ; he foresaw that natural science would be the key 
 of the modern position ; that after a period of struggle, more or 
 less noisy, natural science would enjoy a period of complete 
 triumph, gradually less and less noisy, till it was universally 
 acknowledged and the work of science became blended with the 
 rest. Had Herder been born when he died he might have lived 
 to see a time when natural science is the one thing of universal 
 intere&t and pursuit, the one form of knowledge that seems worth 
 the pains; a time when the other branches of wisdom — all history, 
 
424 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789- 
 
 pliilosophy, criticism, and theology, all except perhaps the highest 
 poetry and the perfect forms of art — must be content to take the 
 lower room, as seeming dull, unreal, shadowy, trifling in com- 
 parison, unable indeed to exist till they shall have re-established 
 their foundations on the basis of natural science. This is the 
 time that Herder foresaw, a time when it seems a nobler and 
 more profitable thing to have analysed the laws of the impact of 
 a drop of water than to have writ the style of gods, or compelled 
 the nations by a single will. 
 
 Meanwhile the century was hastening to its end, and though, 
 as Einsiedel characteristically warned Herder, there is no hard- 
 and-fast line between century and century, yet the ordinary man 
 finds such distinctions useful as halting-places to reflect and 
 gather up the past. Herder was still full of schemes for future 
 work ; he was particularly anxious to finish the Hebrew poetry 
 and the Urkunde, to translate the Bible, Horace, Pindar, and 
 Ossian ; as to this last, we are told in the Reminiscences that he 
 had frequent conversations with James Macdonald, who stayed 
 for a time in Weimar. If by Macdonald is meant Macpherson 
 (who died in 1796), it would be interesting to know what were 
 the feelings of the " impudent Scotchman " as he solemnly dis- 
 cussed the translation of his astonishing production with the man 
 through whom chiefly it had worked on Germany. But all these 
 plans of Herder's gave way before the battle with the Kantists, 
 and a scheme which was first suggested by the younger Hart- 
 knoch. He proposed that Herder should edit a journal, perhaps 
 in rivalry to Schiller's; it was to be called the Aurora, and 
 Einsiedel, Knebel, and several other friends promised to assist. 
 But whether, as Karoline tells us. Herder was overloaded by 
 offers of contribution from both sexes, or whether he was too 
 much occupied with Kant, after various efforts he allowed the 
 plan to rest for two years, and only in 1801 began a series of 
 papers under the name of Adrastea, written entirely by himself, 
 and treating for the most part on episodes and detached periods 
 of the history of the last century, such as the age of Louis XIV. 
 and of Queen Anne, or the influence of Locke, Berkeley, and 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 425 
 
 Franklin. There is throughout a deep undertone of hostility 
 against the two great pillars of the temple, but the series was 
 chiefly important because it contained the first twenty-two 
 Romances of Herder's version of the Cid. 
 
 He always regarded Spanish literature as an unknown garden, 
 full of fair flowers only waiting to be gathered. Some years 
 before we find him inquiring whether Heyne had a copy of the 
 Cid in Spanish, but it seems doubtful whether Herder's acquaint- 
 ance with the Spanish tongue was at all extensive. At all events, 
 it is certain that his version of the Cid is almost entirely based 
 on a French prose translation. Being twice removed from 
 originality therefore, it cannot pretend to greatness ; but the 
 story moves pleasantly along in smooth German verse, after the 
 same metre which Heine generally adopts in his Spanish ballads, 
 the metre best known to English readers through Longfellow's 
 Hiawatha. The Germans say it is a model of German style, 
 nor was Herder likely to fail in this respect, especially in trans- 
 lation. But the fault of the whole thing is that it is too German. 
 Herder has failed to catch the spirit of the middle ages of Spain. 
 His Cid is a very worthy and excellent puppet for moral edifica- 
 tion. But he has not much more reality and human interest 
 than the allegories on a Georgian ceiling ; an epic hero must 
 spit out the salt-water and light his own fires before we can 
 believe in him, and we feel that Herder's Cid would have been 
 insulted if we had asked him to make a pun or to cut pork 
 chops.^ His Ximene, too, is a virtuous and affectionate German 
 Frau, with all that makes her a woman and loveable left out. 
 In a word, the presence of Herder and the eighteenth century 
 is felt from beginning to end, and quite destroys the charm of 
 the old story, that could never survive these bits of reflection 
 and moralising which are as tiresome there as in Eden. But for 
 all that, this version of the Cid has ranked as a great work in 
 
 ' '"'If the next painter who desires to illustrate the character of Homer's 
 Achilles would represent him cutting pork chops for Ulysses, he would enable 
 the public to understand the Homeric ideal better than they have done for several 
 centuries." — Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 83. 
 
426 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 Germany ; chiefly, 1 suppose, for Herder's skilful management 
 of the verse and style, and it is still interesting to read, if only 
 as a contrast to Heine. It was not published in its full form till 
 after Herder's death. 
 
 In 1801 Herder was raised to the rank of nobleman, though 
 through no fault of his own. His son Adelbert, who had learnt 
 to farm land, had bought a small estate in Bavaria, not only by 
 way of business but to be a resting-place for his father in old 
 age. The purchase was opposed by a nobleman and large land- 
 owner, to whose service Adelbert appears still to have been 
 bound, and as there was some law — some survival of feudalism 
 — still in force, that a commoner during the first year of pur- 
 chase was obliged to sell his land at the will of a nobleman for 
 the price he had given for it, the future looked black for the 
 little estate. For the nobleman, whom Karoline can describe 
 by no more fitting name than " Satan " or " a juristic hyaena," 
 insisted on his legal rights to the uttermost jot. In his perplexity 
 Herder wrote to a friend, a Count Gortz of Eatisbon, to ask if 
 Adelbert could be ennobled, or what else might be done. The 
 Herders themselves undertook a journey into Bavaria to make 
 inquiries, and in October they were saved from the annoyance 
 by receiving a free diploma from the Elector of Bavaria, con- 
 ferring nobility not on Adelbert but on Herder himself, and 
 thereby on his whole family. He had, of course, no envy for 
 such decorations ; he and Karoline determined not to use the 
 von themselves, but it was probably forced on them ; and thus, 
 though their darling was saved from the power of the hyaena, 
 they were themselves exposed to much petty annoyance. The 
 aboriginal nonentities of nobility probably viewed them with 
 disdain as upstarts, but far worse was the contempt and aversion 
 of the enlightened friends of liberty and equality. For people 
 had not then learnt that titles and the like cannot rationally be 
 either praised or blamed, being properly non-existent. 
 
 It would be of little profit to enter minutely into Herder's 
 life during these last years, for the gloom is broken by few rays 
 of light. His real life had indeed already ceased; a great 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 427 
 
 intellect was falling into the final dissolution ; as Jacobi said, 
 '' Herder had become like the Rhine, where it loses itself in 
 Netherland sands." A sorely-tried and sorely-striving nature 
 had no longer strength to trust in itself, nor courage to believe 
 in others. " I am so dead, and all around me is so dead," he 
 writes to Jacobi, '^ that the world and I myself often seem to me 
 but a shadow and a dream." To eyes like these Weimar and 
 Jena were weary as a pond, an un weeded garden. His pitifully 
 sensitive mind was worn out by fruitless controversy ; Wolff, 
 the Homeric critic, had conquered ;^ Kant was supreme, or only 
 superseded by worse. The ideals of his life seemed to him dead 
 or left destitute without a champion. He was wrong, for noble 
 ideals do not die ; it was himself that was dead. 
 
 His health, too, forsook him year by year ; the fifty years' 
 trouble with his eye was aggravated, and he could hardly see to 
 read. The Adrastea had to be printed in larger type, that he 
 might correct the proofs. Almost every summer he was driven 
 to this bath or that, though sometimes the family would visit 
 the Knebels or Einsiedels in Ilmenau. In June 1801 Richter 
 came with his young wife from Berlin, on their way to the quiet 
 home in Meiningen, and we may take the following pleasant 
 picture, as the last we shall get, from one of the bride's letters 
 to her father ; it does not show much penetration, but at least 
 says what she saw : 
 
 As soon as we arrived on Wednesday evening we went to Herder's. It 
 was already dark. With a beating heart I stepped into the sacred house. 
 The aged mother [Karoline, aged fifty- one, but perhaps looking more in 
 spite of bravery] sat in the parlour alone, knitting. Richter opened the 
 door quietly, and we stood before her. Her surprise is not to be described. 
 She looked at me with astonishment, ran to call all the house together, 
 turned back, and knew not what to do for joy. Now, while we debated 
 whether Richter alone, or whether we should both go up to Herder at 
 once, the venerable man stood in the door. I discovered him first. 
 "There he is!" I said, with emotion. He stepped calmly near and 
 
 ' Herder attacked Wolff's theory of Homer in ^cYaWQx^^ Musenalmanac ; 
 chiefly at Heyne's suggestion, it seems. 
 
428 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1789— 
 
 turned me with penetrating eyes towards the light, and as he looked 
 fixedly at me, " God be praised," he said, " I am now satisfied." ... I 
 cannot describe Herder to you ; through Richter you know enough of 
 him. He goes quietly in and out, so reflective, so serious, so harmonious, 
 so gentle and musical his voice, his dress so patriarchal. . . . His wife 
 has far exceeded my expectations. She has not the masculine form, but 
 only the manly soul, that I anticipated. She has risen with her husband, 
 but she stands firm by herself. She is equally acquainted with ancient 
 and modem literature, speaks decidedly upon the sciences, but inclines 
 herself in a loving, motherly manner to me. In her house she is active 
 and busy, but without littleness. A certain well-to-do-ness rules, without 
 luxury. The rooms are simply but cheerfully furnished. At the table 
 everything goes on quietly, without anxiety in the hostess ; the old ser- 
 vants are well trained, moving reverently about, observing attentively the 
 master's wishes. ' 
 
 Truly, even to see the surface, and record that faithfully, is 
 something. Jean Paul returned to Weimar for a time during 
 the year after. 
 
 As Herder slowly dies, the glory of his wife's character is 
 revealed in full magnificence. Each of her letters (and nearly 
 all are from her now) thrills with beauty and passion like a 
 complete poem, abounding in tenderest sorrow and great swift 
 blows of indignation, unsparing and always true, the blows of a 
 lioness at bay over her dying whelp, accounting all adversaries 
 the same. Through ill-health and trial, and the wearing daily 
 gloom of a despondent husband, she never loses hope, nor ceases 
 to live. And yet, sometimes, she cannot hold back a sigh for 
 the quiet happy days at BUckeburg, and for the friends that are 
 friends no more. Of Goethe she always speaks with a passionate 
 sorrow and an indignation that comes of regret. " 0, he might 
 have given us back to nature," she writes, " by a noble and 
 straightforward way, if he had been willing. But he preferred 
 his own apotheosis to truth." She has ceased to believe in him, 
 she cries, he for ever plays the coquet, and has proved himself 
 untrue to demonstration. But in June 1802 Herder super- 
 intended the confirmation of Goethe's son, and in Goetlie's 
 
 * Quoted and translated in the L\fe of Jean Paul, p. 291. 
 
1802.] WEIMAR AGAIN. 429 
 
 words/ the ceremony brought touching remembrances of past 
 relations and hopes for a renewal of intercourse in the future. 
 Early next year, too, Goethe's play of the Natural Daughter 
 was produced in the theatre, and Karoline writes : — 
 
 It filled me with a pure joy, long unknown. His good genius has 
 awakened. It is a light of art beside which Schiller's will-o'-the-wisp 
 vanishes. But the public and Jena students are spoilt by Schiller's cling- 
 clang and bombast. Schiller even said that he regretted there was too 
 much nature in the piece ! 
 
 This ray of hope soon faded, and in a few months she thus 
 indignantly retracts her praise in two flashing sentences : " My 
 criticism on Goethe appears to me exactly as though the lamb 
 there by the brook were to hold a eulogy on the wolf who was 
 just going to eat it up. 0, he has a wolfs nature! " '^ But this 
 is anticipating, and for the cause of the outburst we must look 
 to the next chapter. Only it seems sad that this word — almost 
 the last of this woman's words which come into this book- 
 should be aimed at the head, from which she had been one of 
 the first to foretell how much was to be hoped. 
 
 ' Annals, 1802. 
 
 2 KneheVs Nachlass, vol. ii. p. 350. October 19, 1803. 
 
430 [1802— 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 " O HEAVEN, WHITHER?" 1802—1803. 
 
 " Honey, yet gall of it ! 
 There's the life lying, 
 And 1 see all of it. 
 
 Only, I'm dying !"— PiSGAH SIGHTS, I. 
 
 " Body hides — wliere ? 
 Ferns of all feather, 
 Mosses and heather, 
 Yours he the care !" — Pisgah Sights, 3. 
 
 After rather a prolonged journey to the baths in Aix and 
 round through Northern Bavaria to visit his son Adelbert, 
 Herder had returned to Weimar in the autumn of 1802 with 
 revived health and spirits. Through the winter he continued 
 to work steadily at the Adrastea and his version of the Cid; but, 
 in the annoyances and loneliness of Weimar, the old hag of 
 depression soon had him in her toils. The whole world seemed 
 dead ; all the idols and guides of his youth were gone : Rous- 
 seau, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Hamann, all these had long fallen 
 silent; and now, early in this spring of 1803, old Father Gleim 
 went gently to sleep, and within a month was followed by the 
 pure-souled Klopstock, towards whom Herder had lately been 
 more closely drawn by the cord of common enmity.^ In the 
 spring, too, his health broke down again, for, as he and Karo- 
 line were driving back from a cultured tea-party, the coachman 
 by trying to display his skill in rounding a corner upset them 
 both into the road ; and, though they seemed little hurt at the 
 
 • Klopstock wrote four letters to Herder in 1799 after the appearance of the 
 ^Mahritlk. See Herder's Nachlasit, vol. i. 
 
1803.] **0 HEAVEN, WHITHER?" 431 
 
 time, it appears that Herder never quite recovered the sudden 
 surprise of the change. Very soon afterwards, in May, he had 
 to go to Jena on business, and it is there that we see Goethe for 
 the last time. The story is best told in Goethe's own words : ^ 
 
 For three years before this I had altogether withdrawn from Herder's 
 society, for, with his illness, his unkindly spirit of contradiction had also 
 increased, and cast a shadow over his x^recious and singular powers of 
 friendship and amiability. It was impossible to go to him without en- 
 joying his gentleness, and impossible to come away without being offended. 
 . . . Strangely enough, a short time before his end, I was to experience 
 an example in little of our joys and sorrows through so many years, of 
 our hearty agreement, as well as the incompatibility that spoilt all. After 
 the representation of Eugenie (the Natural Daughter) Herder, as I heard 
 from others, had expressed himself very favourably on the piece, and he 
 was indeed the man to discriminate intention and accomplishment with 
 the most subtle analysis. Several of my friends repeated to me the very 
 words he had used ; they were pregnant, sufficient, and to me very en- 
 couraging ; I even dared to hope for a renewal of intercourse, through 
 which the play would have found double favour in my eyes. An oppor- 
 tunity was very soon offered. Whilst I was in Jena he came there too on 
 business ; we lived in the castle under one roof and interchanged polite 
 visits. One evening he happened to be in my room, and began calmly 
 and clearly to say all that was good about the piece aforesaid. Whilst he 
 unfolded it as a critic, he displayed hearty sympathy as a friend, and, 
 just as a picture often charms us more when seen in a mirror than on 
 direct inspection, so now for the first time I seemed to know this pro- 
 duction aright and to enjoy it with true insight. This unmixed and 
 beautiful joy, however, was not to be long granted me, for he ended by a 
 trump-card, good-humouredly played it is true, but singularly inoppor- 
 tune ; and by this the effect of all the rest, at all events for the moment, 
 was undone. A man of insight will understand the possibility of this, 
 but will also sympathise with the painful feeling that seized me ; I looked 
 at him, answered nothing, and in this symbol the many years of our 
 intercourse came up before me in a startling and terrible guise. Thus we 
 parted, and I never saw him again. 
 
 When we think of that meeting on the steps of the Strass- 
 burg inn more than thirty years before, and the results for 
 Goethe to which that meeting had led — when we remember 
 
 [ Annals 1803, end. 
 
432 HEllUEU AND HIH TIMES. [1802- 
 
 what these two men had been to each other — it seems a Httle 
 paltry that a harsh and perhaps thoughtless criticism on a rather 
 inferior bit of work should have checked the last chance of 
 reconcilement before the final peace. But that is the sadly 
 human way. 
 
 On returning to Weimar Herder was seized by his old 
 maladies of bilious fever and nervous affection, but was now 
 carefully tended by his eldest son Gottfried, the doctor. Karo- 
 line in vain urged him to go quite away and rest for at least a 
 year ; he always replied that he was too busy. In July, how- 
 ever, he started for the wells at Eger, handing to Karoline, from 
 the carriage as he went, his version of the Cidj completely 
 written out. On his way to Eger he stayed with his son August, 
 the geologist, for a fortnight near the Schneeberg, which 1 
 suppose to be the same as the lofty hill of that name seen by the 
 enthusiastic tourist from the cliffs of Saxon Switzerland far 
 away to the south and west — just in the Bohemian country. 
 Here, amidst the silence of the woods, and all the soothing 
 sights and delicate scents of the country, life seemed to be quite 
 restored. He finished the little dramatic poem called the House 
 oj AdmetuSf based on the eternal story of Alcestis and her love ; 
 and " Herder's rest," the place where he used to sit and think 
 or converse with August through the sunny afternoons, is, 
 perhaps, still shown to the traveller who has ventured so far 
 from a railway. At Eger he lived in quiet and contented 
 loneliness, and we can imagine his trim little figure in the 
 " patriarchal " garb serenely wandering up and down to the 
 tap -room and the parade, probably giving quite as much food 
 for mirth and gentle satire to the Polish notabilities and other 
 lavish frequenters of the wells as they gave to him. For the 
 consolation of all who are cursed with this world's goods, one 
 of his remarks in a letter home must be quoted : " What a 
 difference there is between the manner of life of the rich and — 
 I might almost say — the reasonable of men ; yet, even amongst 
 the rich, some are reasonable — that is, after their own fashion." 
 
 On his way home he visited Dresden for the first time in 
 
1803.] "0 HEAVEN, WHITHER?" 433 
 
 his life. He was received by all the people, from the men of 
 genius and learning down to the Elector himself, with much 
 enthusiasm and friendly courtesy. All the treasures of art, the 
 pictures, and jewels, and libraries, were laid open before him, 
 the keepers vying with each other to do him honour and to 
 write him complimentary verses. Dresden seemed like a new 
 life ; it was, in fact, the last beam of the sunset flashing across 
 the world. 
 
 He returned to Weimar in the middle of September, and 
 found his sons Gottfried, Emil, and Wilhelm, besides the only 
 daughter Luise, all at home. He was full of plans for the 
 coming winter, especially practical schemes for the improve- 
 ment of the Weimar schools ; he also intended to finish the 
 Hebrew Poetry^ the Adrastea, and much else. Especially since 
 the inspiration of Dresden his cry had been for "more time, 
 more time " ; but no more time was to be given him. For 
 exactly a month after his return he continued his ordinary 
 duties, and he was in the midst of a chapter of the Adrastea 
 when he was taken ill for the last time. The page which he had 
 been writing remained open on his desk to the end. 
 
 He is said to have been attacked by a complication of all 
 his former disorders. At first he remained cheerful, and his 
 time was spent in reading, or listening to the reading of others, 
 or to music; but, as his nervousness increased, he could not 
 bear sounds. For a time he did not think that he should die, and 
 he certainly had no wish for death. " 0, my friend, my dear 
 friend," he would cry to Gottfried, " save me if you can." 
 And again, '' Only my body is ill; if I could get up I would 
 do a lot of work." Yes, and there was so much to be done yet, 
 so much that he thought could be left to no one else. He was 
 only fiftj^-nine, and how differently we should have thought of 
 Goethe if he had died in 1808. 
 
 But there is another saying of Herder's which partly con- 
 tradicts these and seems to come nearer the truth ; for he would 
 repeat, " Ah, if only one new and great spiritual idea came to 
 me, to penetrate and quicken my soul, I should recover at 
 
 2f 
 
434 HEliDER AND H18 TIME8. [1802— 
 
 once." And I believe this would have been so ; I believe he 
 w^as really killed by disappointment, loneliness, and sheer intel- 
 lectual exhaustion. His work was done ; he had striven hard 
 all his life to live in the good, the beautiful, and the complete, 
 without flinching ; but, even if death had not come now, it seems 
 that he could have accomplished little more for the world. 
 
 On Sunday morning, the eighteenth of December, 1803, he 
 fell asleep, and had not strength to wake again. 
 
 " A man of free intellect thinks of nothing so little as of 
 death, and his wisdom is not a meditation of death but is a 
 meditation of life."-^ 
 
 On the third day Herder was buried in his own church, a 
 vast concourse looking silently on. His tombstone is marked 
 by the device of his favourite signet-ring, or seal — the serpent of 
 eternity, and the words " Life, Love, and Light." 
 
 And Karoline had to live through all this, and to live through 
 the far worse trial — the burial in the press and the critical 
 journals, a ceremony which has gradually become so grim that 
 our apprehension of it almost overpowers sorrow for the death 
 of a great man. Most of their friends found solace for their 
 grief by composing elegies on the deceased, but, to tell truth, 
 Weimar was a good deal fluttered that month by the whirlwind 
 of Madame de Stael's arrival. The critics, we may imagine, 
 summed Herder up and polished him off in the usual style ; 
 some were kindly, others so spiteful that the indignant widow 
 could only compare their hearts to cavities of stone, the chosen 
 haunt of toads. For the rest nothing remained to her now but 
 to devote the years that were to come to her husband's memory. 
 She received a pension and certain other favours from the Grand 
 Duke ; the sale of Herder's books almost covered the debt of the 
 household (about five or six hundred pounds) ; and she seems to 
 have divided her time between Jena, Schncobcrg, Freiberg, and 
 Weimar. She diligently collected materials for Herder's Life, 
 and gave advice to the joint editors of his works. In 1807 she 
 
 ' Spinoza, Ethics, part iv. prop. 67. 
 
1803.] ''0 HEAVEN, WHITHER?" 435 
 
 finished the Reminiscences^ which with all its shortcomings must 
 always be the basis of an account of his life ; but, owing partly 
 to her self-restraint, and partly to the careful editing of Georg 
 Miiller, the Reminiscences by themselves would give us a very 
 inadequate idea of this woman's truly beautiful nature, with all 
 her enthusiasms and superstitions and bursts of indignant zeal. 
 
 She died on the 15th of September, 1809. 
 
 When Herder died a thousand new and stirring notes were 
 beginning to chant the promise of another age. Of the Schlegels 
 he heard a good deal, but without sympathy ; Brentano is men- 
 tioned in the letters as a hysterical boy ; with Tieck he perhaps 
 conversed. But this next great movement was not yet a distinct 
 and separate force. W^ordsworth and Coleridge though at their 
 height were unnoticed or despised, for most people are asleep 
 when old night is rent by the first dubious warble of a bird. 
 Ruckert was only fourteen ; Wilhelm Midler not yet ten. To 
 Byron and Shelley Herder's ears were for ever stopped by death. 
 The Heroic Symphony was hardly begun ; Carlyle was in his 
 boyhood ; Heine could just walk with tolerable security ; Emer- 
 son was still learning space at the caprice of a nursemaid ; the 
 fathers of Darwin and Wagner, of Schumann and Browning, 
 had as yet no imagining of their purpose in life. Herder cannot 
 be called one with any of these, but he helped to make them 
 possible ; he was one of their fathers in thought, and their sons 
 and grandsons are still with us. Thus we are knit together in 
 the woof of time, and no single thread however colourless can 
 be spared, still less one of the subtle motives in the pattern. 
 
 But there is a closer bond even than the bond of time. If 
 we have been able to catch a glimpse of the phantoms that have 
 flitted across this book — if we have laughed with their follies, and 
 seen that their weakness is also ours — it is very certain that the 
 own true self of each, though it appear but once in a lifetime, is 
 one with us in a far higher sense. We cannot mistake it, and 
 we dare not reject it. Every true word or action which springs 
 straight from a man's highest nature, that is, his real nature, will 
 be infallibly and universally true for all of us ; it becomes part 
 
 2 f2 
 
436 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. [1802. 
 
 of the mental autobiography of each ; it is one with ourselves, 
 but, like ourselves, it is also a creation, and a whole lifetime will 
 not exhaust its significance. Therefore it is impossible for any 
 one who will open his eyes to be alone at any time. Close at 
 his door, and far out through time and distance, he will find that 
 he is compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses, full of his 
 joys, his hopes, his questionings, and full of his sorrows. For 
 the heart knoweth another's bitterness, and herein consists the 
 whole beauty of man. 
 
APPENDIX I, 
 
 In copying out the following notes which Coleridge has written 
 on the margin of three of his own books, I have given his 
 exact words— so far as they are legible, and merely added short 
 explajiations from the context, where such appeared to me 
 necessary. 
 
 I begin with his remarks on the Letters dealing with the 
 Study of Theology (2nd edition, 1790). 
 
 At the very beginning Herder insists on his old point that 
 the interpretation of the Bible must be human, by which he 
 meant what we should call critical, as opposed to the blind 
 dogmatism of priests. Whereupon, Coleridge exclaims on the 
 fly-leaf:— 
 
 A famous word, a serviceable (?) and accommodating word, is that 
 menschlich (human, or rather human-natural). It is the cousin-german 
 of Charity, and employed by Herder to cover as many follies (according 
 to himself, not to me) as the latter does sins. See the first page of the 
 first letter — Menschlich, ad infinitum. How can man reason otherwise ? 
 Can he reason gottlich ? If he can, ought he not ? If he cannot. Herder 
 can only mean that there are zwei mogliche Weisen der Menschlich-denken 
 (two possible ways of human thought). How can we [illeg.] determine 
 the better of these two, till they are contradistinguished? Kindisch 
 (childish) is what Herder should have said, and this is the true dispute, 
 whether the Bible is capable of being interpreted as we would interpret 
 Plato, Kant, Leibnitz, or only as Esop's Fables for children ? 
 
 As note for page 1 7 we find : — 
 
 How can Herder have had the effrontery to assert that there is no 
 tone of allegory in the Tree of Life^ and the Tree of the Knowledge of 
 
438 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 Good and Evil — and a talking serpent, &c.? If these do not possess all the 
 marks of Eastern allegory, of allegory indeed in getiere, what does ? and 
 why should not Moses introduce historical persons in an allegory as well 
 as the author of the Book of Job ? History was for instruction — no such 
 cold divisions then existed as matter of fact chronicles and genial glean- 
 ings of the Past, such as those of Herodotus. 
 
 For pages 21, 22, where Herder has described the Temptation 
 and Fall, we read — still on the fly-leaf: — 
 
 I scarcely know whether I am reading intentional blasphemies or mere 
 follies. Is this Herder's Lord God Eternal and Infinite ? What was the 
 fruit-caused Lust? Wherein could it have difi"ered from what Adam 
 (according to Herder) had seen and envied in the brutes ? Why were 
 they ashamed of this more than hunger ? 
 
 On page 1 Herder had said the Bible is a book written by 
 men for men, and so on. Coleridge has as note : — 
 
 In other words the Bible or Word of God is not the word of God. 
 Truth is Truth, Falsehood is Falsehood. The only medium is Fable, but 
 this is Mndisch not menschlich. — S.T.C. 
 
 On page 15 Herder says the poetry of the Bible is the 
 natural outpouring of the spirit, free from all art and rule, and 
 therefore not to be compared with regular poetry. Note : — 
 
 This the Psalms themselves contradict. Doubtless the Hebrews had 
 poetry, intentional poetry; for such art is the first step of progressive 
 nature. 
 
 On page 19 : — 
 
 And thus, according to this demi-semi- quavering Philosoph-Christian, 
 Adam, in a state of perfection, acquired his first notion of Love from he- 
 goats and ram-cats in their orgasms. 
 
 On the fly-leaf at the beginning of the second series Cole- 
 ridge has these remarks : — 
 
 o 
 
 N.B. — To observe in any great work on the painfulness of being 
 oblige(d) to speak contemptuously of truths when taken as subordinated 
 parts of a whole, but absurdities when assumed as forming the whole — 
 Socinianism, &c. — yet what offence and scandal to the feelings of weak 
 
APPENDIX. 439 
 
 minds if King of England, Scotland, and Berwick upon Tweed — what if 
 a man should declare George the III*^. to be king only of Berwick upon 
 Tweed ? If I show the absurdities of this taken as a whole, do I deny- 
 that he is King of Berwick, together with England, Scotland, Ireland, 
 and — [word illegible — perhaps Wales — or is it France ?] 
 
 In part ii. letter B. p. 214 : — 
 
 All this runs glib as cream, but, most noble Herder ! was not this 
 Gospel writ by Matthew, and was not Matthew an Eye-witness ? And is 
 it natural for a plain man who had seen three miracles at three different 
 times under different circumstances to confound them into one ? And 
 this too when after-events had unspeakably elevated the importance of 
 the Wirken (?) (power or result) of these miracles ? Surely far more 
 natural were it for such a man to multiply miracles. — S. T. C. 
 
 On page 216:— 
 
 Cream ! or at least charcoal so exquisitely levigated that it tastes to 
 the palate smooth as cream ! But alas ! what story by what fanatic might 
 not be so supported ? Heaven forbid that the Gospels should need such 
 defence. Alas ! might not some sturdy infidel reply— The four Evan- 
 gelists do indeed agree in the main, just as in common life we find a 
 number of men all agreeing and disagreeing in a story which all had 
 heard cursorily, but no one had seen ? 
 
 On page 218 Herder had been arguing, in rather a wild 
 way, that we must receive all of the Gospels as true, or none : — 
 
 Now apply this to Wesley's Journal, or twenty other books of the 
 same kind, especially The Lives of Roman Catholic Saints. What ! are 
 there no rules of discrimination ? Am I to disbelieve all that Quintus 
 Curtius relates of Alexander because some parts contradict themselves, 
 and other parts contradict common sense? The tract alluded to [The 
 Lives of the Saints, apparently] might be easily rendered as ridiculous to a 
 sound understanding as it is hateful to a good heart without this under- 
 mining of all wholesome criticism. 
 
 On page 220 Herder had been arguing that probability and 
 improbability are hardly ever a test of truth, and that the miracles 
 should be deduced from the very nature of Christ, rather than 
 the nature of Christ from the miracles. It certainly seems 
 unfortunate, that in the following note Coleridge should have so 
 far mistaken his meaning as triumphantly to answer him by the 
 very same argument : — 
 
440 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 ! Kant has answered this in a way that no Metakritk of no Herder 
 will effectually rejoin to ! After sixteen years' meditation I dare affirm 
 that no miracle is susceptible of full proof unless it derive the greater 
 part of its evidence a priori, i. e. unless the religion prove it even more 
 than it proves the religion. On this ground I believe that Christ wrought 
 miracles. 
 
 On page 225 : — 
 
 Yet still this treachery of Judas. It was the first scruple that my oivii 
 thought elaborated in my earliest manhood. And the only answer to it 
 (viz.), that miracles were not to the Jews all that they are to us — that they 
 perpetually confounded not only the marvellous with the miraculous but 
 the unusual with the marvellous — what a thick-set hedge of difficulties 
 for the Paleys and — [name too illegible for my ignorance to guess at]. 
 
 On page 227 :— 
 
 Who could fancy that this same Herder had written Ueber die Auferste- 
 hung [On the Resurrection], the result of which is evidently to explain 
 away all the miracle of this little, simple, honest History ! 
 
 On page 230 : — 
 
 Merciful Heavens ! And is a tale how a man that was thought dead on 
 Friday night and appeared alive again on Sunday morning [word cut off], 
 that certainty ( — ) the immutability (?) ( — ) all ( — ) men ( — ) which the 
 Iiuman soulj thirsts after? And is it fact that the history of Christ was 
 the chief means of establishing Christianity! Do not the Scriptures 
 themselves attribute it to the Holy Ghost, to a Supematual Influence, to 
 a gift of faith, to the hearts that sincerely yearned after it? I believe (?) 
 Lord help my unbelief ! [rest illegible]. 
 
 On page 231 Herder insists on the importance of fact rather 
 than doctrine. Note : — 
 
 In my experience at least this too is false. The best and warmest 
 Christians of the lower and middle classes dwell almost exclusively on the 
 dogmatic Jides — namely Grace and Redemption. 
 
 On page 232 Herder was saying that the references to facts 
 of sacred liistory in hymns and the like were of more edification 
 than direct doctrines. Note: — 
 
^ 
 
 APPENDIX. 441 
 
 I doubt it not ; but then these references to facts were only mementoes 
 of the sublime mysteries of which they were the symbols rather than the 
 evidences, though doubtless both. 
 
 Coleridge does not appear to have read the rest of the book, 
 and it is not hard to understand why. 
 
 In Herder's treatise On the Resurrection as Faith, History, 
 and Doctrine, Coleridge has the following remarks : — 
 
 On page 1 Herder says many nations are still content to 
 believe they are dust, and to dust shall return. Note : — 
 
 False. At least Herder should have stated some three or four of these 
 wie viele Nationen! The contrary is notoriously the fact. 
 
 On page 7 Coleridge finds a contradiction in Herder's account 
 of the ascent of Enoch and Elijah, but the important words are 
 to me illegible, and the note therefore is not worth insertion. 
 
 Same page. Herder maintains that the Hebrews did not 
 believe in a Kesurrection, because they said they were ^^ gathered 
 to their fathers." Note : — 
 
 Does not this very phrase, "gathered to the dwelling of their fathers," 
 prove their belief in some form or other of future Being? Undoubtedly 
 it does ; and their great anxiety about the place of their sepulchre is in- 
 explicable on any other grounds. 
 
 On page 9 : — 
 
 How could Herder explain the singular fact of a death-realm without 
 an Elysium among the Jews, if not from some revelation concerning the 
 spiritual death till the coming of the Redeemer ? 
 
 On page 24 Herder had been saying that belief in the Resur- 
 rection was most likely to arise in times of national calamity and 
 distress, as in the time of the Maccabees. Note : — 
 
 What vile trash ! That such a faith as that portrayed in the Maccabees 
 should have been the sudden growth of a day ! Is there a word implying 
 that it was a new faith? Is it not, on the contrary, declared in the Book 
 of Wisdom that none but the most hardened and cruel sensualists dis- 
 
442 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 believed a future state? And even in the Prophets, how much more 
 natural to suppose that what they took for granted concerning each 
 Individual they should apply metaphorically to the State and its fortunes 
 than that what was only metaphorical as to the State should be applied 
 in solemn and literal reality to the Individual? Besides, had this been 
 the case, the Jews would have appropriated the Resurrection to them- 
 selves, and not have extended it at once to the whole human race. 
 
 On page 26, at the end of the chapter on the history of the 
 growth of the belief in Resurrection : — 
 
 So God sent his own Son from Heaven in order that the fictions 
 of hypocrites and the phantasies of dreamers might be fulfilled — O, 
 blasphemy ! 
 
 On page 39 Herder had maintained that the account of 
 the Resurrection was by the same hand as the account of the 
 Crucifixion, was as simple and circumstantial, and must be 
 accepted in the same manner. Whereupon he is thus com- 
 pletely answered by Coleridge : — 
 
 Curious hope ! So if a biographer of Wesley, after a minute account of 
 his death, should add a story of his apparition as seen by several of his 
 followers, the latter is to be as trustworthy as the former, as being 
 wiitten by the same man ! 
 
 On page 40 Herder maintains that it was not the Divine 
 Purpose of Christ to deliver Himself again mto the power of 
 man, or to expose Himself to danger when once the Crucifixion 
 was over. Note : — 
 
 And he could have commanded ten legions (60,000) of angels, and 
 could pass through closed doors ! 
 
 On page 41: — 
 
 An infidel would ask where Jesus procured the gardener's dress, or 
 whatever it was, in which Mary saw him. It is plain, he would say, that 
 Jesus must have had friends and confederates unknown to or unnoticed 
 (?) by the Aposties. 
 
 On page 44. I can see nothing in Herder's words to account 
 for Coleridge's indignation. He says that before the Crucifixion 
 the disciples had looked for an earthly kingdom, but after the 
 
APPENDIX. 443 
 
 Resurrection they understood the meaning of the spiritual 
 kingdom ; this, I believe, is still the generally accepted view. 
 Note :— 
 
 Are we to understand from this arcli-Jesuit that Christ's former 
 declarations were all delusions? Verily, broad, strait-forward (sic) dis- 
 belief is religion and Christianity compared with this assassin-like stab at 
 the character of our Lord. 
 
 At the end of the fifth part Coleridge has written : — 
 
 A strange inconsistency does this appear to me. We are to found our 
 trust in a future state on a history: and yet, according to Herder, a history 
 so disguised in symbols, allusions, and short and long allegories, that of 
 the two main facts which give their value to all the others. Herder 
 believes in the literal sense neither the one nor the other, and does not 
 supply even a hint what we are to believe, i.e. historically, instead of it. 
 If we are to understand anything, Christ nor really died on the cross nor 
 really ascended to heaven. What then became of him? Or if it be replied 
 we neither know nor care biographically, then how can your faith be 
 founded on a history ? 
 
 At the end of the sixth part Coleridge has written as 
 follows : — 
 
 Well ! this is indeed a lullaby lie ! Eia Puleia, Kindchen, geschweige.^ 
 1. First, it is utterly false that the resurrection of Christ as a mere proof 
 of a future state and of retribution ever did produce the effects of 
 Christianity, either of belief or of persecution. Cood Heavens! who, 
 except perhaps Jews, would ever have persecuted innocent men for 
 helping out their belief in rewards and punishments after this life by an 
 account of an apparition distinguished from the common sort by being 
 tangible.? 2. Still more false is it that the Apostles teach different 
 dogmata. 3. And falser still that they distinguished their dogmata from 
 their Krjpvyfia (preaching or message). But falsest of all that they sub- 
 ordinated articles of faith to acquiescence in historic facts. St. Paul 
 would no longer know Christ himself after the flesh, i.e. in mere reference 
 to historic phenomena. In short, the one great continuous fact of 1800 
 years has demonstrated that such opinions as these of Herder's were never 
 held, and never could hold together any promiscuous congregation. 
 
 On ])age 109 Herder had been saying that the conclusions 
 
 * " Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree-top," as our English mothers say. Popcia 
 is, I believe, commoner than Puleia. 
 
444 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 of the human understanding were the important things, but 
 these were confirmed by such events as the taking up of Enoch 
 and Elijah, and the return of Christ to life. Note : — 
 
 And why not of all the others collected in [name illegible to me], 
 Zwinglii, Theat. Hum. Vit, and the Humane Society? And is this the 
 religion, this the name to which heaven and earth is to bow and hell to 
 tremble ? A relgion founded on as gross a calumny of the human soul, 
 which nowhere but in monstrous exceptions has doubted its own amena- 
 bility and perpetuity, as it is an affected vornehm ['* quality-like," to use 
 Coleridge's own translation], perversion of God's Holy Word. 
 
 On page 113 Herder maintains that there has been in man- 
 kind an invincible belief that the right or wrong which escapes 
 reward or punishment in this life will be required hereafter. 
 Note:— 
 
 Most true ! a complete confutation of nine-tenths of this semi-demi- 
 quavering book. 
 
 On page 117 : — 
 
 Merciful Saviour ! and this is to pass for a defence of, no, an apology, 
 a mendicant, canting excuse for, this everlasting Gospel ! We must read 
 Peter and John as we read a novel and compare it with the fable of 
 Admetus ! 
 
 On the same page Herder speaks of the disciples' trust in 
 the word " of their departed friend." The German Freund has 
 rather a different and deeper shade of meaning than our word : 
 a woman will use it to her lover. Note : — 
 
 What one of the New Testament writers ever presumed to use this 
 familiar language, or any answering to it, in any other sense than they 
 used it of Almighty God — Lord and Saviour — God blessed over all — God 
 incarnate — the substantial and adequate Idea of the Father? 
 
 On page 119 there is an unimportant note on the command 
 implied in the sixth chapter of St. John. 
 
 On page 122 Herder had been insisting, like Professor 
 Westcott, on the all-importance of the Resurrection and Ascen- 
 sion of Christ for the religion of Christianity, as commonly 
 understood at the time. Note : — 
 
APPENDIX. 445 
 
 Not in the least would it explain the writings of Paul and John ! Did 
 they or any of the Jews ever pray to Enoch or Elijah, or declare them 
 the creator of the world? Did they join their names industriously with 
 God the Father? What should we think of God and Enoch and God 
 acting? For so the Herderists interpret the Holy Ghost. 
 
 On page 124 : — 
 
 Besides, turn back to p. 39, lines 12-17 (as the story of the death of 
 the Crucified is worthy of belief, so too under such circumstances must 
 the story of the Resurrection be; for it rests on the faith of the same 
 historian), and then ask : Are the Resurrection and Ascension the only 
 wonders related by these historians in the character of eye-witnesses? Or 
 only the conclusion of a long series? Does not the same John solemnly 
 attest the resurrection of the already putrid Lazarus, and the twice feeding 
 of three or four thousand men with a few loaves and small fishes? 
 
 On page 125 Coleridge's indignation seems again unfounded. 
 Herder maintains that Christ actually died and awoke from 
 death, and that the disputings of the early sects as to the nature 
 of his death were mere dissertations, and unimportant provided 
 the facts are admitted. Note: — 
 
 This is too, too bad ! What? Is it of no consequence whether Christ's 
 resurrection were a miracle or an accident? If the latter, must not all his 
 predictions have been forgeries ? 
 
 On page 126:— 
 
 All this trash might have been silenced by one question. Whatever 
 Christ's state was when taken from the cross, real death is only suspended 
 animation; was it brought back again by such means as he foreknew, 
 could and did foretell? 
 
 On the last page (132) Herder says that the truth of the 
 Eesurrection and the doctrine of Christianity could not be built 
 on the mere fact of the visible Ascension. Note : — 
 
 Impudent sophistry ! When it is clear that in Herder's system the 
 whole burthen of the proof that Christ really died and rose again from 
 death to life rests in the visible ascension. 
 
 On the fly-leaf at the end are the following general remarks : — 
 
 It is hard under one name to designate Herder's Faith, "if Faith it 
 can be called, which Faith is none." It is or seems to be composed of 
 
446 HEKDEJi xVND HlfS TIMES. 
 
 contrary elements in the act of balancing each other, but not yet balanced 
 and thus substantial, but still glowing in restless vibrations. A sensi- 
 bility, a certain refined epicurism of moral sense, a desire to possess the 
 sympathies of the mass of Christians, and to govern them thereby, and 
 yet an equal desire to be respected by the Philosophers, the Intellectuality. 
 He will linger in and about the court of the religious, but then he will 
 have, or will forge for himself, a ticket, a certificate from the philoso- 
 phists, authorising him so to do. Alas ! but is not this very like a sjyy ? 
 The most amusing thing in all Herder's theological tracts is the cool, 
 {vonuhm) "quality-like " looking down upon all the founders of Chris- 
 tianity. Poor simple creatures ! excuse them, gentlemen, they had very 
 good hearts, and though they were somewhat silly, yet, really put our- 
 selves in their place, suppose that instead of our rank, education, and 
 various immeasurable superiority, we had been vulgar, ignorant Jew- 
 blackguards like Peter, John, &c. we should have thought and acted 
 much the same ! And this is a defence of Christianity ! ! ! 
 
 And finally, best of all, on the next fly-leaf: — 
 
 What is the great nostrum of Unitarianism ? To persuade (an easy 
 task) wealthy, half-educated tradesmen and youths in the first processes 
 of thinking that their ignorance is sound sense. Consequently, those 
 natural doubts, which meeting with the presumptuousness incident to 
 youth and prosperity, which can only be counteracted by docility and 
 reverence of the great men departed, are ripened at once into insolent 
 positiveness.^ To such men infidelity is a comparative blessing — even as 
 much as the giving up a quack medium to a sick man, even though he 
 should not yet have called in a regular physician — he is more likely to 
 4o so. 
 
 On two blank leaves in the middle of his copy of the Kalligone 
 (first edition, 1800) Coleridge has written as follows : — 
 
 Dec. 19, 1804. Malta. And thus the book impressed me, to wit, as 
 being rank abuse, drunken self-conceit, that kicking and sprawling in the 
 six-inch deep gutter of muddy philosophism from the drainings of a 
 hundred sculleries dreams that he is swimming in an ocean of the trans- 
 lucent and profound; for I never read a more disgusting work, scarcely so 
 disgusting an one, except the Metakritik of the same author. I always, 
 even in the perusal of his better works, the Venn. Blatter [Miscellanies], 
 the Briefe das i^tudium des Theol. hetreffend [Letters on the Study of Tlie- 
 ology], and the Idecn zur Ocschicht des Meiisch. [Ideas for the History of 
 
 ' Coleridge has forgotten his construction, but the sense is clear. 
 
APPENDIX. 447 
 
 the Human Race], thought him a painted mist with no sharp outline, but 
 this is a mere steam . . . ' 
 
 On the next paoje he contlniieSj also with a Swiftian 
 metaphor : — 
 
 If ever there was a = first syllable of the Latin for Thrush in a band- 
 box, or meanness in millanery musky [word illegible], it is realised 
 in this diatribe of Herder's ! ! It disturbs my patience to see a man 
 transform the thoughts of a profound philosopher into poetic whip- 
 syllabub; and then by affixing a different meaning to the same words 
 give himself the air of confutation and insult. Vide p. 14 [in part II. ] et 
 passim. So important is Kant's distinction that one of the surest charac- 
 teristics of Genius as compared with Talent rests upon it. Ex. gr. Alston 
 (?) and Jack Dawe are both employed, each on a picture. The latter 
 constantly meditates on the arbitrary consequence of his Hcmdlung or 
 business — the SOOl. promised. The former cannot work at all, except as 
 far as he removes this from his mind, and finds the end in the means, and 
 true delight in the very labour. 
 
 ' The rest is legible but too Swiftian for our day, and it is a pity Coleridge 
 should have spoilt the magnificence of the beginning by stooping to such an end. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 The following Dream by Jean Paul was found amongst 
 Herder's papers ; ^ it was much altered by the author, and 
 published in Siehenkds under the name of ' ' The Address of the 
 Dead Christ."® Readers of Carlyle's earlier Essays will here 
 recognise some of his quotations from Richter in their earliest 
 form. This dream must have been written in 1789 or 1790, 
 according to Duntzer. 
 
 Lament of the dead Shakespeare among the dead congregation 
 in church because there is no God. 
 
 I often heard in my childhood that at eleven o'clock at night, wliilst 
 we were all sunk in deep sleep, the dead rise from their sleep and go 
 through a mock performance of the divine worship of the Living in the 
 church ; for this reason I did not care to look late at night at the long 
 church windows and the moonlight playing over them. I will now relate 
 my dream : I give much heed to dreams : it seems as though from dreams 
 we look out to far-off cloud-covered shores — as though they bore us away 
 from the crash and roar at the foot of a waterfall to a calm still height, 
 where we can look into the stream of life that flows silently through the 
 plain, and into the heaven that is over it and is reflected on its surface. 
 
 I dreamt I awoke in God's acre. I heard the wheels of the church- 
 clock unrolling as they struck eleven, and I looked for the sun into the 
 empty heaven of night, and thought it was merely veiled from me by an 
 eclipse. The graves stood open and the iron doors of the chamel ; over 
 the walls flitted shadows which no one made, and other shadows walked 
 upright in mere air. At times a flickering glimmer danced up the church- 
 windows from within, and two tremulous unceasing discords struggled 
 
 ' Printed at the end of Herder's correspondence with Jean Paul. NachlasSf 
 vol. i. p. 349. 
 
 "^ SiebenkdSf end of vol. ii. 
 
APPENDIX. 449 
 
 with one another m the church, and vamly strove to pats away mto a 
 single concord. I found I had passed unconsciously into the church, in 
 which, up at the back of the altar, a solitary hollow voice was tremulously 
 sounding. I saw unknown forms, marked by the stamp of centuries 
 long gone by, quaking and trembling: those further off trembled more 
 violently and faded into colourless shades ; and behind the altar was a 
 quivering darkness, into which the shadows melted away — the crowd of 
 the dead was continually drawn towards the darkness, and the darkness 
 ate them up. In the uncovered coffins lay sleeping dead with faces full 
 of living dreams, and now and again they smiled ; but those who had 
 awaked smiled not. Many who were awake turned towards me and 
 heavily opened their eyes ; but inside there was no eye, and in the left 
 breast instead of a heart was a hole. These also, with tortured and 
 weary gestures, kept clutching at something in the air, and their arms 
 grew longer, broke off, and dropped asunder. On the ceiling of the church 
 was the dial of eternity, on which there was no number and no hand, but 
 it whirled around itself ; and yet a black finger was pointing to it, and 
 the dead tried to make out the time on its face. I was drawn nearer to 
 the awful voice by the altar, which issued from a noble form, almost like 
 Shakespeare's ; but no movement told me that it spoke. It spoke thus : 
 
 " Resound for ever, ye two discords! God is not, neither is Time. 
 Eternity is chewing the cud of itself and is gnawhig at Chaos. The 
 many-coloured rainbow of existence stands like an arch, with no help of 
 sun, over the abyss, and is dropping down into it — we stand to witness 
 the dumb midnight burial of suicide nature, and we shall ourselves be 
 buried in her grave. Who now looks up to a divine eye of nature ? With 
 an empty black immeasurable eye-socket she stares you in the face. Ah ! 
 in this eternal storm, which no power sways, all beings, each and all, 
 stand there like crippled orphans, and as far as existence throws its 
 shadow there is no father. Whither art thou whirling, O sun, with thy 
 earths ? On thy long way thou shalt find no God, and perhaps on one 
 earth a God of fond imagining. . . . O, we unhappy dead ! when we 
 lay down in the coffins our galled and jaded backs, burdened with the 
 weight of life, and in life's evening creep into our earth, sleepy and 
 stooping, with the sure and certain hope that on the morrow we shall 
 see God and his heaven; then at midnight we are forced, with wrenchings 
 and shocks, out of the sleep of death and the ashes of the dead, by the 
 storm and combat and glare of the chaos of nature ; and the morrow 
 never comes. . . . O, thou who yet livest ! when a man is dead close 
 his eyes no more, for the eyelids rot away and then he sees ; and sees 
 no God any more. . . . O, ye blessed living ones ! perhaps to-day, 
 amidst the purple of evening and the breath of flowers, you fall down and 
 gaze into the open heavens far above the fixed stars, and go like children, 
 
 2g 
 
450 HERDER AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 with every treasure, eveiy pain, to your father and stand speechless in 
 prayer. O, give us your God ! I, too, was as happy as you in the days 
 that have flitted past, when I could still rest my aching bosom on thee, 
 O thou impossible God ! when I still believed that I lived in thy arms, 
 under thine eyes, and on thy world, and at last fell prostrate in tears of 
 thankfulness, thou departed father, who hast melted away sooner than 
 my tears ! Therefore do the sleeping dead still smile, their dreams reflect 
 the world of the past, and their heart still prays once more as it falls into 
 dust. O, pray to him — to this beloved God, and cease not, before, with 
 your dream and your form, he vanish like a shade ! 
 
 *' I hear only myself, and behind me is annihilation. In this broad 
 sepulchre of nature everything is alone as nothingness ; and by this 
 primeval hurricane, which seethes and yawns over chaos, is every being 
 borne along in loneliness or in loneliness engulfed. But to what end are 
 we yet borne ? To what end does anything endure ? What, except 
 chance, in its turn keeps chance in check that it does not tread out the 
 spark of the sun and stride through the snow-drift of stars and blow out 
 sun after sun, just as before the hastening traveller dewdrop after 
 dewdrop vanishes with a flash ? And thou, poor juggling man — whose 
 life is the sigh of nature or the echo of that sigh — whose ashes are the 
 visible scrapings off" a mirror that feigned a living man and made him — 
 whose existence is a concave mirror, that cast a tottering cloudy image in 
 the air ; gaze now into the abyss over which the ash-clouds of the over- 
 whelmed are drifting, and think still, as thou art crumbling into dust, 
 * I am ! ' And still dream of thy heart as it falls asunder, ' It loved.' Do 
 you not see then, ye dead, the little heap of ashes that rest so still on the 
 altar — I mean the mouldering dust of Jesus Christ. . . ." 
 
 With a terrible blow the bell-hammer, that spread over us into all 
 space, seemed to strike twelve, and crushed the church and the dead : 
 and I awoke and was glad that I could pray to God. But his sun looked 
 redder through the flowers, and the moon rose over the eastern evening 
 glow, and all nature resounded with a note of peace, like a far-ofl' evening 
 bell. — By the author of Selections from tlie DeviVs Pajyers. 
 
 FINIS. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 AbM, Thomas, 35, 88 ; his history, 96, 
 97; the Torso, 110, 111 ; connection 
 with Biickeburg, 178. 
 
 AdrasUa, the, 424, 433. 
 
 Amalia, the Dowager, 241, 248, 379, 
 .382, 389, 390. 
 
 Arndt, True Christianitt/y 4, 25, 101. 
 
 Baden- Durlach, the Count of, 147, 
 277. 
 
 Balde, Jacob, inA\2. 
 
 Basedon; 210,281. 
 ' Baumgarten, 94. 
 
 Berens, the family in Riga, 34, 57. 
 
 Berens, Christoph, 57, (55. 
 
 Berens, Guitar, 73, 123. 
 
 Berlin, 87-90. 
 
 Bescheffer, Fran von, 208. 
 
 Bock,'^2. 
 
 Bodmer, 82, 105, 108. 
 
 Brandes, 223, 227, 233. 
 
 Breitinger, 82-84. 
 
 Bremlsche Beitrage, 80, 94, 98, 99. 
 
 Brutus, a cantata, 188. 
 
 Biickeburg, Count of SchaumJmrg- 
 Lippe, patron of Abbt, 96 ; sends 
 for Herder, 146 ; reception, 175 ; 
 past history, 176-180 ; character, 
 180-181 ; his countess, 191 ; pious 
 uses, 228 ; Stock's bribe, 2.30-232 ; 
 death of the countess, 236 ; of the 
 count, 237. 
 
 Burger, 93, 209, 316. 
 
 Burns, 319. 
 
 Busch, Madame, 66, 67, 73, 190. 
 
 Cantatas, 188, 192. 
 
 Cappelumnn, 133, 137, 149. 
 
 C^d, the, 425. 
 h^ Claudius, meeting with Herder, 136, 
 139 ; the Wandsbeck paper, 190 ; 
 criticism on the Frankfurt paper, 
 197 ; appointment in Darmstadt, 
 236 ; Herder's visit to Wandsbeck, 
 268. 
 
 Clodius, 80. 
 
 Coleridge, 296 ; Appendix I. 
 
 Commentaries on New Testament, 210, 
 
 220. 
 Cramer, 98, 107. 
 Creuz, 100, 110. 
 
 Dalberg, Karl von, 244. 
 
 Dalberq, Friedrich von, 278 ; his jour- 
 ney with Herder, 377-384 ; his dig- 
 nity, 389. 
 
 Death, how the Ancients represented, 
 228, 315. 
 
 Diderot, 133, 311. 
 
 EduGitlon, speeches at Riga, 51-56 ; 
 sketch in the Journal, 127-129 ; 
 schools in Biickeburg, 184 ; German 
 education at the time, 281, 282 ; in 
 Weimar, 283-284 ; Herder on edu- 
 cation, 284-291. 
 
 Eichhorn, 267. 
 
 Einsiedel, Friedrich von, 244, 249, 
 379, 390. 
 
 Einsiedel, August von, history, 249- 
 256; compared with Knebel, 273. 
 
 Ernesti, 82. 
 
 Flchte, 417.418. 
 
 Fischer, 32, 33. 
 
 Flachsland, the family of, 140 ; for 
 
 KaroUne F. see Herder, M. K. F. 
 Forster, 255 ; his history, 275-276, 
 
 325 ; influence on the Ideen, 363, 
 
 370. 
 Fragments, the, 68, 104-110. 
 Franhenberg, Frau von, 375, 396. 
 Franhfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, 197. 
 Freemasons, 61, 62. 
 Frledrieh's College at Konigsberg, 27. 
 Fusell, 209. 
 
 Gall, 265, 423. 
 
 Gallitzin, the Princess, 275, 277. 
 
 Gartner, 98. 
 
452 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Garvc, 80. 
 
 Gdlerty 17, 79, 108, 159. 
 
 George III., 232. 
 
 Gerstenherg^ 98. 
 
 Gervinus, 146, 283, 321. 
 
 Gcssner, 84, 108, 133, 150. 
 
 Gleiruy Herder reads his poems, 17 ; 
 Anacreon and Tyrteeus, 91, 92, 105, 
 108; in Darmstadt, 18G; letter from 
 Herder on Spinoza, 220; meeting 
 with Herder, 229 ; at Halberstadt, 
 239; visit from Herder, 208; visit 
 to Weimar, 277; on the Idecn, 370; 
 kindliness to the Herders, 403 ; 
 death, 430. 
 
 GliicJt, 95, 188. 
 
 Goethe, hhih.,^', at Leipzig, 77; present 
 at the eye operations, 153; the in- 
 fluence of Herder, 155-162; imitates 
 Herder's style, 167, 197; in Darm- 
 stadt, 1 98-199, 202; Pater Brcg, 206 ; 
 Lavater on Goethe, 210; meeting at 
 Darmstadt, 229; invites Herder to 
 Weimar, 234-235 ; reception of 
 Herder, 241 ; powers of business, 
 245 ; his life during these years, 
 248 ; Miiller's visit, 263 ; renewed 
 friendship with Herder, 268-270; 
 goes to Italy, 276 ; Goethe and 
 Spinoza, 339,342; on Herder's God, 
 3.50 ; on the hlecn, 354, 363, 366, 
 369; change in Goethe's life, 375; 
 his relations to Karoline, 386-388, 
 392, 395 ; separation from Herder, 
 404; the Revolution, 405; hostility 
 to Herder, 409-411; Eichter, 416; 
 Fichte, 418 ; Karoline on Goethe, 
 428-429; last interview with Herder, 
 431. 
 
 Gottingen, 96 ; Herder's visit to Heyne, 
 193; the troubles of Gottingen, 222- 
 234 : second invitation to Herder, 
 269; third invitation, 393. 
 
 Gotz,tJic poet, d\,2Gi. 
 
 Gott.whed, 78, 105. 
 
 GrhniHy Herder's schoolmaster, 8, 9, 
 10. 
 
 ILvinhnnd, tlie, 94, 403. 
 
 Halle, ^\-^\,\\\. 
 
 nailer, 86. 
 
 Jfamann, 33; hia past history, 34-37; 
 his works, 37, 38 ; influence on 
 Herder, 39; corresponds with Herder 
 in Riga, 57 ; goes to Mitau, 58 ; 
 ** Hamann's cant," 112; influence 
 on Goethe, 167; review on Herder's 
 essay, 19G-197; reconciliation, 197- 
 
 204 ; greetings from Biickeburg, 
 209 ; death, 277 ; displeasure at 
 Herder's Spinozism, 350 ; on the 
 Ideen, 369. 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William, and Emma 
 Harte, 390. 
 
 Hartknoch, in Konigsberg, 33; settles 
 in Riga, 59 ; correspondence with 
 Herder, 190; was to bring Herder's 
 sister to Weimar, 388 ; his death, 
 398. 
 
 Hebrew poetry, 268, 317-318. 
 
 Heilmann, 96. 
 
 Hemsterhuis, 275. 
 
 Herder, the grandfather, from Silesia, 
 1,2. 
 
 Herder, GottfrUd, birth, 2 ; office, 
 marriage, children, 3; character, 5; 
 death, 29. 
 
 Herder, Anna Elizahath, 3 ; character, 
 6; death, 190. 
 
 Herder, Joliann Gottfried: birth, 4 ; 
 boyhood, 8, 10; with Trescho, 13-20; 
 Ode to Cyrus, 18; the Swedish 
 surgeon, 21 ; goes to Konigsberg, 22; 
 fails as medical student, 23 ; enters 
 the university, 25; master in Fried- 
 rich's College, 27; his friends, 31-33; 
 influence of Hamann, 38; of Kant,^ 
 41-44; invitation to Riga, 45; his 
 duties in the school, 49, 50 ; first 
 speech on education, 51-54; second 
 sjwech, 55; last visit to Hamann, 58; 
 patriotic speech, 61; the freemasons, 
 61; illness, 63; invitation to St. Peters- 
 burg, 64 ; church appointment in 
 Riga, 65 ; literary beginnings, 68 ; 
 sermons, 69-72; leaves Riga, 73; the 
 tVagments, 104-110; the Torso, 110- 
 111; Kritlsche Wdlder, 113-118; 
 Hebrew archajology, 118; Journey 
 by sea, 121-124; Nantes, 124; his V 
 journal, 126-131 ; Paris, 1.32-133; 
 the Netherlands, 134, 135; Hamburg, 
 135; Kiel and Kutin, 137; Darm- 
 stadt, 140; meeting with Karoline 
 Flachsland, 14J-146; journey to 
 Strassburg, 147; invitation to Biicke- 
 burg, 146; the eye-operation, 152; 
 Goethe, 155-160 ; prize essay on 
 Language, 1()2 ; essays on German 
 Style and Art, 161-167; return to 
 Darmstadt, 171 ; arrival at Biicke- 
 burg, 175; relations with the Count, 
 180-181; Biickeburg, 181-186; influ- 
 ence of the place, 184-185; the 
 Countess, 191 ; visit to the Hcyne3, 
 193; renewed influence of Hamann, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 453 
 
 197; quarrel with Goethe, 199, 202; 
 change of thought, 203-205 ; mar- 
 riage, 206; change in Biickehurg, 
 208 ; fresh works, 210 ; Anotlier 
 Philosophy of History, 212 ; the 
 Urkunde, 215 ; Prov ijizialbldtter, 
 218 ; Commentaries, 220 ; the Gott- 
 ingen question, 222-234; superinten- 
 dent, 228 ; visit to Darmstadt, 229 ; 
 quan-el with the Count, 230-232 ; in- 
 vitation to Weimar, 234 ; departure 
 from Biickeburg, 237; Weimar, 240; 
 the consistory, 242; duties, 244-248, 
 291; friendship with Einsiedel, 249- 
 256 ; works at this time, 256 ; end 
 of Lavater's influence, 257 ; home 
 life, 200-266 ; illness and age, 267 ; 
 Hamburg, 268 ; renewed friendship 
 with Goethe, 268-270; invitation to 
 Gottingen, 269; the Tdecn, 270; de- 
 fence of Lessing, 271 ; work, 275 ; 
 finance, 277 ; departure for Italy, 
 278 ; his views on education, 284- 
 291; on theologv and religion, 295- 
 303; basis of criticism, 305-307; art, 
 807-315 ; criticism on poetry, 315- 
 319: translations and collections, 
 319-325; his own verses, 325-334; his 
 book on Spinoza. 337-350; the Idem, 
 353-372 ; journey to Italy, 374-379 ; 
 Rome, 381-390 ; Naples, 390-391 ; 
 Homo again, 391, 396; beginning of 
 estrangement from Goethe, 392-393; 
 return home, 396 ; his sister, 397 ; 
 offer from Gottingen and refusal, 
 393, 398 ; illness and new duties, 
 400-401 ; separation from Goethe, 404 ; 
 the Kevolution, 405-8; hostility to 
 Goethe and Schiller, 409-411 ; TerjJ- 
 sichore. 411 ; friendshi])with Ilichter, 
 412-417; contest with Kant, 417-422; 
 science, 422-424; Adrastea, 424; the 
 Cid, 425 ; title of Ton, 426 ; failing 
 health, 427-428 ; last interview witli 
 Goethe, 431 : visit to August, 432 ; 
 Dresden, 433; death. 434. 
 Herder, Marie Karoline Flachsland, 
 account of her, 140 ; she meets Her- 
 der, l4l ; engagement, 142; quarrel, 
 149 ; Herder's second visit, 171-175 ; 
 life in Darmstadt, 186-188, 198-201 ; 
 marriage, 206 ; her children, 249 ; 
 home life, 260-261 ; Herder's de- 
 parture for Italy, 374; her cares for 
 him, 381 ; her sorrows, 384-385 ; her 
 standard of judgment, 386 ; on 
 " Goethe, 386-388,392; hesitation on 
 Gottingen, 394; quarrel with Knebel, 
 
 395; illness and travels, 402-404 ; 
 on the Revolution, 407-408 ; friend- 
 ship with Richter, 412; criticism, 
 415; title of von, 426; her letters and 
 final criticisms, 428-429 ; her hus- 
 band's death and her widowhood, 
 434; death, 435. 
 Heyne, 95 ; Herder's first visit, 193; 
 Therese, 194-195; invitation of Her- 
 der to Gottingen, 222-234 ; death of 
 Therese, 232 ; his daughter, 275- 
 276; on the Ideen, 366; third invita- 
 tion to Herder, 393, 398; correspond- 
 ence, 402. 
 
 Ideen, the, first part written, 269; ge- 
 neral principles, 335-336 ; general 
 history of, 353-356; the physical side, 
 356-365; the historical side, 365-369; 
 general estimate, 369-372 ; continu- 
 ation of, 401. 
 
 Jacohi, Georg, 174. 
 
 Jacohi,^ Fnedrich, 269, 270-271; on 
 Lessing and Spinoza, 339-341; corre- 
 spondence with Goethe and Herder, 
 342-343; Herder's visit, 402. 
 
 Jerusalem, 98, 192, 218, 268. 
 
 Jvng-StilUng, 167. 
 
 Kalligone, the, 418-420, 446. 
 
 Kant: allows Herder to attend his lec- 
 tures, 26-29; account of Kant at this 
 time, 39-44; the Kantians, 280-284 ; 
 basis of criticism, 305; beginning of 
 Herder's antagonism, 346 ; on the 
 Ideen, 370 ; ** Kant and the Revolu- 
 tion," 407; Herder's attack on Kant, 
 417-422. 
 
 Kanter, the bookseller, 18, 24, 29, 229. 
 
 Karschin, the, 90, lOS. 
 
 Kdstner, 95, 96. 
 
 Kavfmann, the martyr, 240. 
 
 Kanfmann, Angelica, 381, 389, 396. 
 
 Kleist, poet of The Spring, 17, 88, 105, 
 141, 164. 
 
 Klopstoch, youth, 92; general account, 
 99; Herder's criticisms, 105-108; 
 despised in Paris, 1 33 ; a favourite 
 in Germany, 141-143; Herder's later 
 criticism, 160; visit from Herder, 
 268; death, 430. 
 
 Klotz, 93, 109; contest with Herder, 
 111-115. 116, 121 
 
 Knehel, 244, 255; his history, 272-274; 
 his family, 377 ; quarrel with Karo- 
 line, 395; correspondence, 403; the 
 Revolution, 407. 
 
454 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Koch, 125. 
 
 Kritisclie Wdlder, 68, 113-118, 126. 
 
 Kurd la, 31. 
 
 Lavater, at Zurich, 85; works, 192 ; 
 beginning of his influence on Herder, 
 204-205; correspondence, 209 ; Fhy- 
 sloffnnmik, 236 ; end of intercourse 
 with Herder, 257; in Weimar, 276. 
 
 Lang<;, 89 
 
 Language, prize essay on, 162, 163, 
 185, 195. 
 
 Lenz, 230, 248. 
 
 Lesdng, 8.7, 113; meeting with Herder, 
 135, 150; Lessing and Shakespeare, 
 166 ; The Ancients and Death, 228; 
 Nathan and death, 264; contest after 
 his death, 27 1 ; Herder on the Laocoon 
 and Death, 310-315; Lessing on 
 Spinoza, 339-341. 
 
 Letichscnring, 135, further account 
 172-174; in Darmstadt, 186, 191, 206. 
 
 Liln (Lnise von Zieglcr), 198. 
 
 Lindner, 45, 49, 51. 
 
 Lohjttein, 152. 
 
 Lubech, Prince-bishop of, 133; the 
 young prince, 137, 149, 190, 229. 
 
 Luise, the DvcJwss, 241. 
 
 Luther, 108, 207, 214, 219, 221, 291. 
 
 Macpherson, 424. 
 
 Maran Atha, 221, 256-257. 
 
 Mavprrtuis, 86. 
 
 MendcUaohn, 87, 88, 143, 226; contest 
 
 with Jacobi over Lessing, 271, 341- 
 
 342; on the ldn'n,^10. 
 Merck, 140 ; his history, 144, 145, 
 
 friendship with Herder, 146; with 
 
 Karoline, 186; influence on Goethe, 
 
 197, 202; Herder's fourth visit, 229. 
 Metakintik, 418-420, 446. 
 M'whaelis, Benjamin, 82. 
 M'u'hael'iK, Johann David, 95, 96, 104, 
 
 212, 225, 259, 299. 
 Mnloch, 267. 
 
 Moscr, of Osnabriick, 97, 164. 
 Moser, iViedrich Karl, 33, 36, 100, 
 
 229, 236. 
 Moaer, JoJiann Jacob, 100. 
 Midler, Georg, 243; his history, 258- 
 
 259, 266. 
 Mailer, Johann von, 259, 266-267, 402. 
 Mnaauit, 244. 
 Music, 11, 181-188, 189, 192, 262. 
 
 Nlcolai, 87, 190, 210, 243, 299. 
 
 Ossian, 123, 140, 160, 165, 185, 421. 
 
 Pegelow, 153, 209. 
 
 Percy's lieliqueg, 185, 319-320. 
 
 Pestalozzi, 281-282, 288. 
 
 P/enniger, 259. 
 
 Philosojyhy of Histoi'y, Anot Jeer, 210, 
 
 212-215. 
 Pietists 93. 
 Plastih, the, 117, 132, 162, 188, 256, 
 
 309-314. 
 Politics, the state of the nations, 129, 
 
 130. 
 Prize Essays, 162, 221, 228, 256, 258. 
 Provinziaibldtter, 210, 218-220, 225. 
 Pygmalion, 307. 
 Pyra, 89. 
 Pyrmont, 200, 226, 229. 
 
 Rabener, 94, 105. 
 
 Ramler, 90. 
 
 Raspe, 139. 
 
 Reisebnch, Herder's Journal, 126-131. 
 
 Revolution, the French, 255, 274, 276, 
 280, 404-408. 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul, 101, 299; friend- 
 ship with the Herders, 412-417; cri- 
 ticism onHerder, 414-415; on Goethe 
 and Schiller, 416; visit of Kichter 
 with his wife, 427-428; his dream, 
 Appendix II. 
 
 Riedel, 95, 111, 112, 115, 188. 
 
 Ritter, 423. 
 
 Rousseau, 33, 61, 127, 187, 212. 
 
 Sack, 89. 
 
 SvhelUng: the Weltsccle and Spinoza, 
 351. 
 
 Schiller: childhood, 101 ; first visit to 
 Weimar, 277; on Herder's preach- 
 ing, 295; accuses Herder's criticism, 
 316; at Jena, 403; friendship with 
 Goethe, 408, 411. 
 
 Schlegel, Johann Adolph, 51, 79. 
 
 Schlcgel, of Konigsberg and Riga, 51, 
 190. 
 
 Schlegel, IVwdrich and August, 435; 
 Friedrieh, 173-174. 
 
 Schlozer, 212, 224, 252. 
 
 Schmid, Konrad, 98. 
 
 Schultz, 27. 
 
 Scchendorf, Fran von, 378-383, 387. 
 
 Sender, 93. 
 
 Sentinuntal, tJie, 135, 141, 172-174, 
 186, 191,198,200,254,270. 
 
 Seniums: at Riga, 69-72; at Eutin, 
 137; at Darmstadt, 141; at Biicke- 
 burg, 183; first sermon in Weimar, 
 243-244; Herder's sermons in general, 
 294-295. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 455 
 
 Shakesjjeare, 160, 166, 186, 1S8, 323. 
 
 Sophrvri, the, 282-290. 
 
 Spalding, 89, 192, 218-219, 225, 299. 
 
 Spinoza, Herder reads the Ethics, 220; 
 Jacobi and Spinoza, 270-271; Her- 
 der's Dialogue on God, 336-360; the 
 general horror of Spinoza, 338; effect 
 on Lessing, 339-341; on later philo- 
 sophers, 351; Kant, 417. 
 
 Stein, Charlotte von, 244, 387. 
 
 Stock, 230-232. 
 
 Sturm und Drang, 168-170, 205, 222, 
 230, 243, 246-247. 
 
 Susamilch, 89. 
 
 Sulzer, 89, 106. 
 
 Swedenborg, 35. 
 
 Teller, 225, 227. 
 
 TAeflZo/7y, Herder's relation to, 118-119, 
 
 203-205, 211-221, 295-303. 
 Torso, the, &^, 110, 111. 
 TrescJio, Sebastian Friedrich, 13-16, 
 
 19, 25, 29, 59, 388. 
 
 Urhunde, die Aelteste, 
 225 
 
 210, 215-218, 
 
 Uz, 17, 91, 108, 377. 
 
 Volkslv'der, 165, 212, 256, 319 324. 
 
 Voss, 98, 316, 403. 
 
 Vulpius, Christiane, 377, 387, 404. 
 
 Weisse, 80, 159. 
 
 Werner, 253, 423. 
 
 Werther, 98, 143, 186, 234, 276. 
 
 WertJwr-Bt'ichlingeit, 253-255. 
 
 Westfeld, 146, 175, 180,208, 227, 233. 
 
 Wieland, 83, 101, 145, 159; in Darm- 
 stadt, 186; in Weimar, 241, 249; 
 Miiller's visit, 263; intercourse with 
 Herder, 403. 
 
 Willauwvius, Pastor, 12, 69. 
 
 Wilpert, 32. 
 
 Winckdmann, 101,112,113. 
 
 Witthof, 98. 
 
 Wolf, Christian, 93. 
 
 Wolff, Friedrich August, 282, 287,427. 
 
 Zacharid, 98, 107, 228. 
 Zanthier, 182, 229. 
 Zend-Avesta, 220. 
 ^!nmu;rmann,85, 208, 224, 226. 
 
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