DP CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBBABY, 3 1924 091 302 426 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924091302426 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 2001 GERMAN THOUGHT GERMAN THOUGHT FROM THE SEVEN TEARS' WAR TO GOETHE'S DEATH SIX LKCTUnES DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN May and June 1879 BY KARL IIILLEBRAND NEW YORK HENllY HOLT AND COMPANY ISSO lUNIVERSITYf LIBRARY^ PEEFACE. Readers acquainted witli German, who may wish, to follow up the necessarily brief indications of the present lectures, will find further information in the numerous histories of German civilisation, literature, and philosophy, more especially in. the works of Biedermann and G. Freytag on the first subject, of Jos. Hillebrand and H. Hettner on the second, of E. Zeller on the thu-d. In the following pages the lecturer has kept almost exclusively to the woi-ks of the great German writers themselves and to the follow- ing, amongst many hundred, special works : Dietei-ich on Kant, Haym on Herder, Helmholtz on Goethe as a naturalist, Dilthey on Schleiermacher, H. Hettner and Haym on the romantic school. No fault, the author hopes, will be found with him for having reproduced here and there the conclusions of his own earlier essays on Winckelmann, Wieland, Lessing, Herder, W. von Humboldt, Caroline Schlegel, H. Heine, Gervinus, L. Hoensser, the Berlin Society from 1789 to 1815, the German Unity Question from 1815 to 1866, the history of classical philology in Germany, &c. &c. (published between 1865 and 1872 in the 'Eevue moderne,' the Tl PREFACE. 'E.evue des Deux Mondes,' the 'Journal des D^bats; the ' Ntiova Antologia ; ' the ' Preussische Jahrbiicher ; ' the ' Fortnightly Heview,' and the ' North American Review.') They were so many preparatory studies for a general work on the subject, which has never been more than a project, the author having since abandoned this, for an entirely different field of research. K. H. CONTENTS. -LECTURE I. PAOB Introduction. — On tiie Pakt of iiie Five Great European Nations in the "Work op Modern CuLTCiiE (1450-1850) 1 LECTURE IL The STAETING-rOlNT AND FiBST SlAGES OF MODBSN Germany (1648-17G0) 37 LECTURE IIL The Seeds of German Thought (1760-1770) , . 70 LECTURE IV. The Keiqn of IIbkder (1770-1786) . . . .117 LECTURE V. The Triumvirate of Goethe, Kant, and Schiller (1787-1800) 173 CONTENTS. LECTUEE VL PAGE The Eomaniic School (1800-1825) . . . .228 EPILOGUE. ' Young Germany ' and ' Lhtle Germany (1825- 1860) 264 LECTUEES ON GEBMAN THOUGHT. LECTUEE I. INTRODUCTION — ON THE PAET OF THE FIVE EUEO- PBAN NATIONS IN THE "WOEK OF MODEEN CULTUEE. 1450-1850. Ladies and Gentlemen, — You will readily believe me, when I say that I begin these lectures with great apprehension. It is the first time that I am called upon to address an English public ; and I am to address it in its own language, the most precise and at the same time the supplest of instruments in the skilful hands of those who are used to it from their infancy, and have a complete mastery of it ; but a dangerous one for a foreigner, ever liable to miss the just measure and the right expression, weighing too much, here, gliding too B Z INTBODUCTIOlir. lightly there, and becoming to a certain degree the slave of the engine of which he ought to be the absolute ruler. I know that the audience I have the honour to address is, if not a parterre de rois, at least a parterre of gentlemen, and that consequently it will be as lenient to a guest as it would have a right to be severcy if it were to assume the functions of an impartial judge. Nevertheless, I have thought it my duty not to rely too exclusively on your hospitable indulgence, or to overrate my strength in launching into these new waters without the swimming-apparatus of pen and ink. However alive I may be to the advantage of speaking over reading, I must forego that advan- tage and bring you my thoughts already made, as it were, and congealed, instead of letting them flow and expand naturally from the running spring of the spoken word. What renders the honour bestowed upon me of addressing so select a public more perilous still, is the consciousness that I have but an imperfect control, not only of the language of words, but also of the language of thought, pre- doniinant in this country and in our days — an idiom, I am afraid, which I have still to learn. Every country and every time indeed has its own INTEODUCTION. 3 intellectual atmosphere ; and a Spaniard who in the sixteenth century might have spoken French as well as a Parisian, would have failed to un- derstand Voltaire or Diderot, if he had come to Paris a hundred years ago, as they in turn would have failed to understand him. Wow, I am per- fectly aware that the intellectual atmosphere of the England of to-day — which is fast becom- ing the intellectual atmosphere of all Europe — is not the one in which my generation has been bred and reared. If I, for instance, have lived long and intimately with the English of the past, I know little of the English of to-day, or, to speak more precisely, I rather know about them than know them. In the whole tendency of my mind, in my entire way of looking at things — religious and moral, historical and scientific — I liave remained a thorough Continental, nay, a thorough German, whereas the younger generation of Europe is entering more and more every day into the intellectual current which sprang up in this island towards 1860, and has since spread over the greater part of the Continent. But this will require an explanation which will lead us at once into the subject of these lectures. 11 2 4 inteodhction. We may consider medieval Europe as one vast family, whicli, for a time, thought that it might Uni.'v of ^6main for ever under the same roof, and Europe. ^Qj-k in common at the great vrorlr of civilisation. One language, Latin — one Faith, the Catholic — one Law, the Eoman — one Sover- eign, the Emperor — were to rule supreme, and shelter all the members of the family. In reality this ideal was never completely attained. Yet it governed men's minds during the whole Middle Ages, and even in after-times haunted certain intellects, which were thirsting for unity and order, but were unable to find them in variety and liberty. The law of nature nevertheless was stronger than the laws of men : Europe outgrew the parental house, however spaciously it seemed constructed. 'No sooner had every hearth its own familiar language, than those who were assembled around it wished to give vent in that language to the thoughts and feelings of both their every day and their ideal life. From the day when a philosophical thought was expressed in a national language, that division of Europe had begun, which, during the fifteenth century, resulted in the national monarchies of England, France, and Spain, in UNITY OF EUROPE. 5 the' Italian renaissance, and the reformation in Germany. The division, not the disimion. The work which Europe had done collectively and simulta- neously till then was henci forward to be done separately and successively, 50 that, as Algarotti said of his own nation, ' the one who had got up early before the others, and drudged a good deal, might rest somewhat in the day-time.' Neverthe- less the work done by modern Europe is truly one work, although the workmen have several times relieved each other, handing on to their successors the torch of intellectual life : Vitai lampada tradunt. It is one stock, one capital — the capital of humanitj' — which they have accumulated, each in turn contributing the fruit of his labour. I need scarcely warn you, gentlemen, that these and similar expressions must not be taken too strictly. Humanity is a living body, in Avhich every part is intimately connected with the other, where every separation is felt like a sword-cut, painful at once and endangering life. Still, as the pliilosopher has a right to separate memoiy and imagination, will and sensation, understanding b INTRODUCTION. and reason, which in reality form the living individual, so the historian must claim permis- sion to divide mentally what in reality is closely united. When England exercised for the first time the intellectual hegemony over Europe, when Gilbert and Harvey, Bacon and Hobbes, ISTewton and Locke were writing and thinking, Italy had her Galileo, France her Pascal, Germany her Leibnitz. Still, for any impartial observer of the history of thought, the focus of the movement was in this island. Italy was the first of the European nations to come of age and grow impatient of the paternal jjj,] authority. As early as the beginning of 1450-1525. ^Y^e fifteenth century she boasted of a poem in the national dialect, which summed up the whole intellectual life of the middle ages ; and, a century and a half later^ she began to eman- cipate herself from this very system of thought to which Dante had given the most beautiful, as well as the most adequate, expression. The day- work of Italy may be reckoned from 1460 to 1525 ; but I must once more beg that such limits may be taken cum grano salis. Nobody can fix the exact line where one's arm ceases and one's shoulder begins ; still the anatomist must needs THIS ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 7 make the division somewhere. Everybody has present to his mind the events which, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, awoke Italy, as well as those more melancholy events which, seventy-five years later, laid her in the grave, or at least in a long and dull lethargy. You are all aware how Italy discovered, as it were, the treasures of Greek art and literature, how she cleansed, mended, and made them accessible, and rendered this purely lay and human civilisation the basis of all modern culture. The important point for us is to characterise in one word the nature of the intellectua.l work accomplished by her in those years of incessant and almost feverish labour. The Italian Renaissance was the re-habilitation of human nature ; and the instinct of history has not been mistaken when, up to this day, it calls the representative men of that age the Humanists, their culture the humanistic. The Middle Ages and Catholicism had subordinated the present to the future, liberty to authority, the human to the divine. They had declared flesh, i.e, the natural instincts of man, sinful, and preached the sup- pression or taming of them. The Italian Renais- sance reversed things. For the naive scepticism of a Lorenzo and a Filelfo, an Angelo Poliziano 8 IHTKODTJCTION". and a Marsilio Ficino, the present alone had reality, and as such it was to be understood, de- scribed, enjoyed, as the Greeks of Pericles' time had tried to understand, describe, and enjoy it. All that was in nature was good and beautiful, in- stinct was the surest guide, natural forceand beaut}' were the truest signs of and titles to superiority. Let not the fact of their formal adherence to the Church mislead you any more than their enthu- siasm for Plato's lofty idealism. The Church was for them nothing more than an indifferent garment which a man would not needlessly ex- change for another, or lay down altogether. Platonism was a form of poetical dreaming, not a philosophical conviction. What they pursued was the knowledge of human nature, mental and physical, and of human society, not as they might be or ought to be, but as they were. Whether Machiavelli is describing political life as in his Prince, his Decades, his History of Florence, or is depicting the social life of his times as in his Comedies, he never enters into the question of good or bad; he is satisfied to understand things. So do the philo- sophers, the poets, the artists of the time. For them art is what Goethe proclaims it to be, what THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 9 our century seems to have so utterly lost sight of — ' the interpreter of nature,' nothing more, nothing less. This might have been harmless, as it was right, if it had been limited to Art and Thought ; but it was the pretension of the Renaissance to make of it the rule of life and action. Our temperament and our mental character frame our opinions, mostly without our knowing it ourselves. It was the sen- suousness of their temperament and mind which especially fitted the Italians for their historical mission ; but it also led them to such lengths that they incurred the penalties attached to excessive indulgence in one's own thoughts and inclinations. They saw everything in the light of art, gave to everything an artistic form, regarded everything, public worship, the -State, even private life, as within the province of art ; and the thought that they were living as the Greeks had done justified everything in their eyes. They forgot that in Greece ' the Muse accompanied life, and did not direct it.' What it came to, the names of the Sforza and the Borgia tell us foi'cibly enough. A strong reaction set in — a double reaction ; the one popular, appealing to the inward authority of conscience ; the other coining from above and 10 INTEODUOTTON. endeavouring to restore the outward autliorihy of tradition and collective force : the ReformatiiDn of Luther and the Society of Jesus. The former, although prior in time, had its full influence' upon the strain of higher thought in Europe, only a century later in England, only two centuries later in Germany. The latter acted at once, and it Spain ^^^ Spain which gave rise to this move- 152O-1600. JJ^g].,^_ When, ten years after the founda- tion of the Jesuit order by the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola, the famous Council was opened at Trent, it was Loyola's successor, the Spaniard Lainez, who became at once the directing genius of that great Assembly which renovated Catho- licism by giving it the form in which it has lived and prospered during the last three centuries. I find our time somewhat inclined to underrate the importance of the part played by Spain in the history of European thought. Of course hers was above all a negative action ; but she acted also in a positive v/a,y. Not only was the reorganisation of the Church entirely her work ; the absolute Monarchy of Divine Eight, as it flourished during the seventeenth century, was equally of Spanish origin. Think of the difference between the medieval conception of sovereignty, and tlie one INFLUENCE OP SPAIN. 11 wliich was the soul of Louis XIV., nay, even of the Protestant James I. of England, and down to the smallest German and Italian princelings of that time ; between the variety of the feudal royalty of the Middle Ages with its almost inde- pendent vassals, and the uniformity of the modern monarchy with its passive obedience and its VEtat c'est moi. Now one might say, the mon- archy of Louis XIV. was simply the despotism of Philip II., tempered by the innate sense of the French for measure and taste, enlivened by their natural serenity and elegance. This, however, is only one side of the question, and, for our object, not the most impoi'tant. At the same time that the principle of authority, both religious and political, received a new impulse from Spain, and conquered after an obstinate struggle the greater half of Europe, extirpating Protestantism in Italy and in France, in Belgium and in South Germanj', in Bohemia and Austria, literature and philosophy underwent the same influence. At the very moment when Italy lost the monopoly of Fine Arts, and high schools of painting rose in Madrid, Seville, and the Spanish Netherlands, a new poetry and a new poetical style began to spread from Spain all over 1 2 INTEODTJCTION. Europe. Not only Italian and German Marinists ■were imitators of the Spanish Gongorists, even your English Euphuism of Shakspeare's times had its origin in the cuUeranismo of Spain ; and not the form and style alone, but the spirit also, and the subjects of literature during the first half of the seventeenth century, were in the main Spanish. Only think of Corneille's ' Cid,' written in 1636, of his ' Polyeucte,' which might figure among Calderon's Autos sagramentales. Even in the second half of the century, Moliere takes the subjects of his ' Festin de Pierre,' his ' Princesse d'Elide,' his ' Ecole de Maris,' from Moreto and Tirso. Grimmelshausen introduces into Germany, Scarron into France, the Roman picaresco of the Spaniards, of which Lesage and Smollett became the recognised masters in the following century. Much greater still is the influence exercised by Spain on the jjhilosophical thought of Europe during the seventeenth century. The death of individuality which accompanied or followed the Spanish rule in State, Church and School, wherever it reached, threatened even speculative activity. Not that the philosophy of Molina and Suarez — if one may call philosophy what after all was only tbeoldgy — ever i-eally penetrated into the higher INFLUENCE OP SPAIN. 13 strata of intellectual life, even the elite of the clergy protesting against it, as they did in our days against the dogma of infallibility ; but the principle of authority which Spain had restored all over the world was a powerful check on conti- nental thought, a check sometimes beneficial, more often most pernicious. There can be no doubt that no society could live in the long run with the principles, or rather the absence of principles, of the Italian Renaissance. The restoration of authority was the imposition of a salutary i*ein en daring minds for whom the licet quia lihet had become a species of dogma. However, if you think how Malebranche, and even Descartes, were fettered in the movement of their thought by the reigning dogmatism of their time, you may well ask yourselves whether the benefit was not bought too dear. Je trouve hon qu'on n'ajiprofondisse pas Vopinion de Gopernic, says the great enemy of the Jesuits himself. It was because Catholic Europe • did not dare to grapple with this opinion that the leadership of modern thought passed from it to the Protestant countries of England and Holland, where there was no Holy Inquisition to interrupt the researches of a Galileo, no unbending orthodoxy to stop the mighty thought of a Pascal. i 4 INTKODUCTION. The Reformation had been a popular move- ment, nob an aristocratical one, as scientific I'rotestaut- activity must be everywhere and al- "'*'"■ ways. The great Protestant men of science of the preceding century, the Reuchlin and Erasmus, the Henry Estienne and Justus Scaliger, were sons of the Italian Renaissance, not of the German Reformation. Their inspiration was a thoroughly worldly one, they acted upon the aristocracy of culture, not on the masses. The Reformation sprung more from a moral feeling of revolt, than from an intellectual want of liberty. This is the reason why I scarcely mention it here, where I look only for the formation of European thought, as it manifests itself in the higher sphere of select intelligence. For, whatever may be the character of moral; life, in intellectual life the paucis vivit genus humanum will always remain a truth. If, however, the Reformation was not a philosophical movement in its origin, it had the most momentous influence on the philosophical movement by its consequences. Modern Catholicism, indeed, such as it was shaped by the Jesuits during the sixteenth century, if it did not combat openly the classical civilisation and literature which the Renaissance had un- PfiOTESTANTISM. 15 covered, as it were, and given back to humanity, yet knew how to paralyse its action in the most effective way. Nowhere was the Greek and Latin literature more industriously studied than in tlie Jesuit schools ; but it was previously rendered innocuous. The poison of free thought which it contains was taken out of it, before it was sorved to the youthful mind. The freest and most living of all literatures became a collection of dead rhet- orical formulse to be learnt by heart and to be used as occasion demanded. The matter was repre- sented as of no value whatever; the form only as a charming and clever play of the mind. Just so three centuries later, when it was no longer pos- sible to ignore the development of natural sciences, the Jesuits reduced all the results of long and universal research into manuals to be used and mechanically applied in practical life, or to be confided to memory for examination's sake, where it answers so well, indeed, that the rue des Pastes drills ten times more successful scholars for the ecole polyiechnique than any lay establishment, although history does not say that it has produced one man of science. For they are prudent enough to teach the scientific data without awakening and stimu- lating that spirit of research which is the idetil 16 INTRODUCTION. value of natural science, as freedom of thought is the true ideal value of ancient literature. Not so Protestantism. That also had restored authority in place of the theory of unlimited liberty ■which in the times of Italian Renaissance made caprice the supreme arbiter of life. But its authority was not an outward one ; it was the authority of individual conscience. Its main principle was free inquiry, first applied to the Bible ; but once allowed to exercise itself, there was no telling where it would stop, arid in fact, it did not stop at the Bible. It was not the cradle of Protestantism, how- ever, which first saw these fruits of the new faith. German Protestantism was temporarily quenched, when the reaction against Spanish dogmatism set in in Europe ; and poor Kepler was almost stifled in his attempts to develope the system of Copernicus. Germany was engaged in the most disastrous and barbarous war that the history of manljind mentions in its annals, when the noble scientific movement of the seventeenth century Enffinnd ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ vigour. It was reserved 1600-1700, ^ England whose great Queen had saved for her the treasure of religious independence, to give the signal of the new march onward ; while ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 17 Holland, which had come out victorious from the long and manly struggle against Catholic E'pain, associated herself with England in the glorious task. This self-given t.ask was the knowledge of nature and its laws. The fifteenth century had, as it were, restored the broken links of time ; the seven- teenth unveiled space. The former had shown to man his place in history, the latter was to assign him his place in nature. The world was weary of rhetoric and words, as well as of abstract, bottom- less speculation. It thirsted for facts. It had long enough accepted tond fide the ready-made solutions of all questions offered to it by authority ; it was resolved to inquire for itself into the causes of things. The conclusions of an d priori philosophy would no longer satisfy it. Secretly and almost unconsciously it longed for a knowledge based on observation, which should also be a methodical knowledge. It was Bacon who gave words to the innermost desire of his generation, when he in- troduced and recommended the method of induc- tion. No doubt, Copernicus had observed before him and better than he did. Kepler was just then practising ' induction,' from observations with 18 INTRODUCTION. positive results, of which Bacon could not boast, whilst Galileo was at the same moment employing the experimental method which Bacon still used very awkwardly. Nevertheless it is Bacon, not Kepler or Galileo, who is rightly considered the father of modern thought. Kepler and Galileo indeed used the inductive and experimental method somewhat as M. Jourdain made prose — saws le savoir. Assuredly the progress of science was not the less furthered because Galileo's grand and simple nature, and Kepler's noble and unbend- ing mind, were occupied with the search for truth without being aware of the intellectual revolution they helped to bring about. Nevertheless, for the history of thought, the man who first spoke out and formulated the new method with the full consciousness of the momentous principle he expressed, remains the representative man of the age. It is the fashion nowadays, on the continent at least, to look down upon Bacon, because he was an indifferent observer and a sometimes puerile experimentalist ; a little also because he was a fine Writer, and our time happens to be in a somewhat suspicious disposition of mind towards fine lan- guage. It is only just, however, to remember that Bacon's whole education still belonged to the ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH OENTUET. 19 rhetorical period ; that his very nature was of an artistic turn ; and, above all, that, if he did not do much to further science by his discoveries, he advanced it immensely by the impulse which he gave to it by establishing the new method. One might say that from that time only, the ground was won on which methodical empiricism could move freely. Not only did Hobbes take his start from Bacon ; but all that England dis- covered in natural philosophy from Harvey to Newton, all that - it produced in psychological philosophy from Locke to Hume, would have been impossible, if the Novum Organon had not laid down the laws of the exact method. It would have been equally impossible if the Protestant faith had not been maintained in l^ngland during that time. The melancholy lot of Kepler, G. Bruno, and Galileo, would have been, reserved for these daring hunters for truth, if they had not lived on Protestant ground. The thi-ee greatest continental thinkers of the mathematical age — Descartes, Spinosa, Leibnitz — could perform their work only because they passed the greater part of their lives in Protestant countries. One of them carried even there the invisible fetters imposed upon him by his first education. Nay, c 2 20 INTEODTJCTIOK. Bayle himself, who forms the link between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between English and French thought, was obliged to in- voke the protection of the Protestant governments of the Hague and London. If English Empiricism ' was a reaction against Spanish Dogmatism ; if Spanish Dogmatism had been a reaction against Italian Humanism, France French Rationalism, which ruled su- 1//0-1775. pfgnjg during the following century, was a continuation of, not an opposition to, the intellectual current in England. It was a soi't of contagion, indeed, which affected France, whose most distinguished geniuses, from Saint-Evremond to Montesquieu, from Voltaire to Buffon, and even down to Rousseau, came in turn to England, and even before crossing the Channel had put them- selves to the school of Newton and Locke. No sooner had France taken the lead than she gave to the movement that particular logical character of her own, which goes straight to the mark and never shrinks from the last conclusions. The great English thinkers of the preceding age con- • By Empiricism I mean the spirit of the seventeenth cen- tury, i.e. the meclianical and mathematical explanation of Nature, as it was undertaken and to a great extent carried out. FRENCH EATIONALISM. 21 tented themselves witli studying things and facts without trying to draw from them inferences which might be too dangerous, or applying them to religion and politics. Locke himself paused in deep reverence before revelation and the throne. Not so the French. Their rationalistic turn of mind and impatient temperament carried them at once to tlie extreme of submitting church and state to the same method of inquiry which had been so successfully applied to nature and mind. But logic and passion soon drove them further than they first intended, and made them often forget that patient observation and careful comparison of facts, which had yielded such extraordinary results in England. Already Des- cartes — a true Frenchman in that respect — had at once committed himself to the mechanical ex- planation of things, hy making the animal a machine, and as he remained a spiritualist at heart, never could quite manage to reconcile the two worlds of matter and mind. The French of Bayle's school — I do not say Bayle himself — knew of no such impediments. They recognised no authority whatever. Their aim was simply abso- lute emancipation from all conventionality and authority. Without being aware of it, they fell 22 INTRODUCTION. again into the authoritative spirit, against which the English reaction was directed. Only it was no longer revelation, nor tradition which was the authority, but the senses and human reason, — human reason independent, if not of natural, at least of historical facts. They dreamed either of political constitutions (which were to be the result not of history, i.e. of conflicting interests, but of a general, abstract, preconceived idea of state and society) ; or of a natural law, which was to replace the codes of traditional laws and customs, just as they dreamed of a natural, or rather a rational, religion, which began with being a timid deism, very similar to that of Toland and Clarke, and ended with the enthronement of the goddess of reason, or with the complete denial of that spiritual world, from which Descartes had been unable to throw a bridge to the world of matter. Whatever may have been the fatal conse- quences of this method for France herself, though they are largely balanced by its salutary results, the method itself effected the liberation of Europe, nay of mankind. There existed an accumula- tion of traditional forms, prejudices, impediments of all sorts which disturbed the development of FRENCH EATIONALISM. 23 humanity. It seems to have been the historical mission of France, it certainly was her merit, a merit which never can be sufificiently acknowledged, to have laid the axe unsparingly to this thicket of intellectual conventionalities, and levelled the road for us. Of course she could not remove all — it was not desirable that she should remove all ; and much of the brushwood which she re- moved, has grown up again. Still it was the. first time in history that men dared to look at things and to order them by the light of reason alone. Many national qualities had singled France out for this task, many circumstances helped her to fulfil her mission with immediate success. The clearness of the French mind, as it reveals itself in the French language ; the geo- graphical position.of the country between England, Spain, and Germany ; the political hegemony over Europe which she had won under Louis XTV. ; the vast influence gained .already by her poetical litera- ture ; last, not least, the simplicity of the new creed, based upon the most general characteristics of humanity and common-sense, and carried out by the most seductive of instruments, logic — all contributed to facilitate her task. This explains also the instantaneousness with 24 INTEODtrCTlON. ■which the French idea made its way in Europe. Generally, the intellectual influence of a nation only begins to spread abroad when its work is nearly completed. Italy had already done her best, when towards the beginning of the sixteenth century her thoughts and works began to act upon the rest of Europe. Eor more than a century Europe still continued to go to Rome, Bologna, and Naples, .although Velasquez and Murillo, Poussin and Claude, Eubens and Van Dyck, were capable of teaching their teachers. It was the same with Spain and Englaiid. It is the same with Ger- many, whose original and creative work was done and well-nigh finished as early as 1860, although the world is looking upon her still as the great laboratory of thought for Europe. France is, perhaps, the only country whiclj began to export her intellectual wares at once, even before the whole store was gathered and ready. The time of Voltaire and the EncyclopEedists was also the time of Hume and Gibbon. It was reserved for Germany to react against the too absolute thought of France, and to begin Germany ^^^ work of restoration on a sounder lay two centuries before. It would ,be interesting INFLUENCE OF GERMANY. 25 to stow, at some length, how she prepared herself for her task, how she fulfilled it, and what were the results obtained from it. To do this properly, however, it would be necessary to prove how she owed part, at least, of her intellectual freedom to England and France, how from them she certainly received the impulse to her own work, how she renovated philosophy as well as history, how she created several new sciences which have since taken their place amongst the greatest achievements of the human mind. Suffice it to state that she in^ troduced once for all the idea of Organism into European thought, just as French Rationalism, English Empiricism, Spanish Dogmatism, and Italian Humanism, have long become integral parts of the mental constitution of Europe. Is it not in fact as impossible now for us to read Homer in the same spirit in which our grand- fathers read him before Wolf had written his. ' Prolegomena,' as it is for us to look at Nature as we might have done before Newton had published his ' Principia,' or at the State as we might have done before Montesquieu wrote his ' Esprit des Lois ' ? There is, indeed, a common stock of ideas on which we all live, in which we all move, often 26 INTRODUCTION. without being quite conscious of it. Let even the most convinced of Roman Catholics ask him- self whether he could still look on the history of mankind as St. Thomas or St. Dominic looked on it before the Italian Renaissance had restored, as it were, the continuity of history, and filled up the abyss which cut humanity in two. Could any man consider public and private life with the unprincipled naivete with which the contemporaries of Machiavelli considered them, before the prin- ciple of authority had been restored by Spain ? Again, who of us could ever forget, for a moment only, the physical discoveries of the seventeenth century, and think of the earth, like Dante, as the centre of. creation? And is it not the same with our political and philosopliical views ? Has not the application of the French rationalistic method of the past century moulded our mind anew ? Could we still, if we wished, look on the divine right of monarchy or on revelation as Bossuet and Fenelon did ? Now something analogous has taken place since the death of Vol- taire and Rousseau. Another new thought has become an integral part of the European mind. It would be as impossible for Hume to write his essay on 'National Character' to-day as INFLUENCE OF GEEMANY. 27 it would have been for Augustin Thierry to ■write his ' Conquete d'Angleterre ' in the past century, or for anyone to compose Voltairo's ' Pucelle ' in ours. Why so ? Because not only have there been discoveries in philology and eth- nography which render it materially impossible to explain historical facts as a Hume or Gibbon explained them, but also because a new idea has been thrown into the world, which has profoundly modified our whole course of thought. Now this idea has been elaborated in Germany, and it is the history of this elaboration which is still to be written, and of which I venture to offer something like a general programme, the outlines of a plan, which it would require volumes to fill in. In speaking of the intellectual movement of Germany, from the second half of the past century to the middle of the present, it will be in- Definition dispensable also to touch upon her poeti- pf the sub- cal literature and her philosophy proper. This seems to be a sort of truism. Yet it is not so in my mind. What I am investigating now is neither the literary spirit, nor the meta- physical speculations, nor the scientific work of the nation, but the whole Weltanschauung, that is 28 JNTBODUOTION. to say, the general course of tliouglit (or rather the general standing-point), which the German nation made fur itself, and opened or added to European cultui-e during those seventy or eighty years ; and such a general standing- point is but indirectly influenced by poetry and science proj)er. Poetry is an art, and as such it is not subject to the law of progress ; consequently it is, properly speaking, outside histoi-y, a thing absolute and eternal. The ' Iliad ' is as true to-day as it was three thousand years ago, the main object of poetry being the unchangeable part of man's nature. It is not so with science, with thought, with politics. These are subject to the law of development. When we read in Dante's poem of Francesca's love and Pia's death we are moved as Dante's contem- poraries may have been moved ; when he explains his cosmography to us, we smile, and perhaps shut il suo volume. Here, then, we speak of two different activities of the human mind, which sometimes are at work in a different, sometimes in the same, generation and country. Eng- land's philosophical labour began only after Shakespeare, that of France only after Racine and Moliere ; whereas in Spain Calderon and Cer- vantes were the contemporaries of Suarez and DEriNITION OF THE STTSJEOT. 29 Molina, while in Germany Goethe and Schiller lived at the same time with Kant and Wolf, Hum- boldt and Niebuhr. This apparently accidental fact has an important consequence. Poetry and philosophy penetrate each other, when they are simultaneous, to their mutual advantage in some respects, to their great disadvantage in others. The spirit of Calderon's poetry is also the spirit of Ignatius Loyola ; in Schiller you hear the echo of Kant's moral philosophy. The great literature of the French, on the contrary — the eloquence of a Bossuet and the enthusiasm, of a Corneille — expresses a state of thought in some points directly opposed to that spirit of the eighteenth centui-y which the world calls properly the French spirit. I might speak of Shakespeare, for whose clear, deep eye there is no yesterday nor to-morrow, no here nor there, without even mentioning that he was a contemporary of Bacon ; I could not speak of Goethe without reminding you that he was a friend of Herder, and a reader of W. von Humboldt. There is another fact of great importance which I could not pass over in silence if I had space to enter fully into the subject ; and this is the political state of Germany during the elabora- 80 INTRODUCTION. fcion of her Thouglit (Weltanschauung), and tlie effect which, this thought has had on the ulterior transformation of the German State. This great period during which the intellectual culture of Germany was built up or at least accomplished, was the time when her old society was dissolved, and her political life was in complete decay. Is it possible to be at the same time great and fertile in public life, and in scientific and speculative activity ? When we think of Plato and Aristotle laying the foundation of all true and high philo- sophy in the period of decay which had followed the epoch of what might be called the civil war of Greece; when we contemplate the political dis- union and misery of Italy at the time of the Renaissance ; when we see England contribute most actively to the intellectual wealth of Europe during the not very glorious reigns of James I. and Charles II. ; when we observe France ruling the world by the pen of Voltaire and Eousseau, sending the missionaries of her thought to St. Petersburg and Naples, to Copenhagen and Lisbon, and at the same time defeated at Rossbach, obliged to sign the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and that of Versailles, and driven out from India and her colonies ; when we think of Germany producing her Kant and Herder, DEPINITION OP THE SUBJECT. SI while the Fatherland was utterly impotent and helpless, or even tind'iv foreign domination, we maybe tempted to think that pei'haps-the two activities are incompatible, or at least only excep- tionally compatibio. And why should it be otherwise ? Must Bot the different faculties of the human mind have their rest from, time to time* and relieve each other, if the sources are not to be exhausted before the time ? There have been religious ages, like the first centuries of our era and the sixteenth century, entirely bent upon the creation and definition of religious dogmas, passionate only for religious questions and interests ; and these have been followed by periods of comparative silence, when humanity, weary of theological dis- cussions, uninterested in religious subjects, quietly accepted the existing forms of religion and rested in them. There had been a great artistic age four centuries before Christ, slowly prepared during hundreds of years, slowly dying out during hundreds of years, after a short and brilliant blossom. Then the capacity of artistic intu- ition lay dormant for a long, long time, till it slowly awakened towards the end of the Middle Ages, and came to a short but splendid 3.2 INTRODUCTION. efflorescence in. the fifteenth century only again to die along death, whicir, T am afraid, is now well nigh consummated. But here again I most warn my hearers against taking my words too literally. There have been eminent statesmen like Richelieu in scientific ages, religious apostles like Savonarola in artistic centuries ; so there may be eminent artists in our time' — bnt they act as isolated indi- viduals. The main effort of the human mind is bent in another direction, and there are but few eyes open to take in what is still left of artistic creation. * Why should not the capacity for political and scientific life sometimes lie fallow, when the reli- •gions and artistic faculties require such temporary repose? Why should they not have their rest in turn? Why, above all, should we discuss which grandeur is the better, that of Voltaire or that of Napoleon, that of Newton or that of Oromwell ? Men will never agree on that question, because it is not a difference of opinion, but a difference of temperament and character. Let us only admit this one point. When a nation, in- stinctively or consciously, feels that one day's work is done and sets herself to do the work of the next, leave her alone ; do not let us try to be wiser than DEFINITION OP THE SUBJECT. 33 history and nature. If for a time a nation gives herself up to building, laboriously and awkwardly perhaps, a new house in which she may live un- molested and in conformity with her own history and nature, let her do so, and do not ask of man- hood the down of youth, nor of summer the mellow tints and ripe fruits of autumn. All these are at the bottom idle questions, which are much like reproaching the apple-tree for not bearing oranges. If the nation which has yielded the in- tellectual leadership of Europe to another nation, because it had more pressing work on hand — per- haps also because it was tired and wanted change — excludes itself from the intellectual life of Europe, as Spain did during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it will pay a penalty heavy enough. If, on the contrary, it continues to participate in the spiritual movement of Europe, as this country has done during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, then it may be sure that one day or another the leadership will come back to it, and that sooner or later, it will reoccupy, even if it bo onlj' for a time, the first place in the intellectual laboratory of Europe. However this may be, the assigned limits of time force me to resist the temptation of giving 34 INTKODUOTION. even a sketch of German literature and philosophy proper, still more of relating the history of state and religion in Germany, and I must content myself with simply tracing the outlines and the general character of German cultures, such as it was shaped in the period I have mentioned. Even thus 1 shall be obliged to have recourse to somewhat superficial generalities in explaining the growth and the nature of the German standing- point in religion, literature, politics, and science. I need scarcely add that my remarks have not the slightest pretension to originality. I give you the results neither of special investigation, nor of personal thought ; but only what is the common property of every cultivated German, although I give it in the particular form which it has taken by passing through my individual mind. I speak only as an interpreter, not even as a commentator, still less as a critic, and least of all as a discoverer of new truth. One word more and I have finished. A sub- ject like the one which we propose to study, the contribution of one European nation to the common capital of European thought, can only be successfully treated if we endeavour to divest ourselves of all party spirit, national, political. NEED OP FEBEDOM FEOM PKEJUDIOE. 35 and religious. Party spirit has its right place in practical life. When it is a question of defending one's faith, or one's country, of obtaining certain positive ends only to be obtained bj' collective and disciplined forces, let us be of a party and stand by it usque ad mortem. But when we try to understand the history of mankind and to pene- trate its mysterious ways, nay, whenever we meet on a ground where those practical interests are not endangered or threatened, where there is no war and strife, where we are simply to live with each other, to know each other, at the utniost to judge each other — let us forget such unpleasant distinctions, and treat each other as if we were all of one nation, one party, one faith. Let us 'not approach peoples, or facts, or ideas with a precon- ceived judgment, nor ask them suspiciously for their passport, instead of trying to Ascertain their intrinsic value. Let us not condemn or canonize people, facts or ideas, because they may be of Russian or Italian origin, bear a Catholic or Pro- testant label, come from the Conservative or Liberal camp. This would be true barbarism, — bar- barism, I am afraid, which will invade humanity more and more, in proportion as political democracy advances v,'ith superficial enlightenment 1) 2 36 INTKODUCTIOW. and scientific half-culture. As the number of those who take part in public life increases, the more will passion — political, religious, national — overrule justice and equity and goodwill. For the man^who puts himself under the thraldom of party bonds mu^t needs sacrifice part of the truth which he knows, part of his moral and intellectual freedom, part of himself. On the other side, in proportion to the scantiness of their numbers will be the intensity of the love of truth in those who emancipate themselves from sxich passions in order to look at things and judge them by themselves. Let us all strive at least to be of those few ; for they are not only the lovers of truth, they are not only the sole free minds, they alone are also the really just. And whatever our effeminate age may say to the contrary, justice is still and will always be what Plato and Aristotle proclaimed it to be, the highest and manliest of virtues. LECTUEE 11. THE STAETING-POINT AND PIBST STAGES OF MODERN GERMANY. 1648-1760. NoBODT can form a trna estimate of the present state of Germany, social and political, religious and intellectual, who does not realise what was her starting-point. All European nations can boast of a continuous development from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Even the great catastrophe whiclT delivered Italy up to foreign rule towards the middle of the sixteenth century, even the Great Rebellion and the Glorioiis Revolution which gave birth to new England, nay, even the revolution of 1789 which destroyed the ancien regime in France, had not the power entii'ely to break the thread of national history in these three great civilised nations. From Dante and Giotto to 38 THE STAETING-POINT. Filijacaaiid Dominichino there is one uninterrupted line of growth and decay. The memory of Queen Bess was still living in the time of William III., and a Lamartine and a Victor Hugo have been lulled with the verse of Lafontaine and Racine, and reared on the ideas of Bossuet and Voltaire. Not so in Germany. The Thirty Years' War which raged from 1618 to 1648 made a gap in her national development, such as we find nowhere else in history. It threw her back full two hundred years, materially and intellectually, and extinguished all remembrance of the past. If you walk through the cities of Augsburg a.nd Niiremberg, Liibeck and Ratisbon, you meet at Germany ^very step vestiges of a high civilisation, teen'th^'^' Tliose churches, those town-halls, those century. palaces— Only think of the Heidelberg- Schloss — were mostly built at the end of the six- teenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century ; and a hundred and fifty years before, ^Slneaa Sylvius (Pope Pius II.) had been so struck with the comfort of the German cities, that he declared the kings of Scotland might rejoice to be as well- housed as an ordinary burgher of Niiremberg. True, the relative poverty of the soil always ren- dered the accumulation of wealth difiBcult and GERMANY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 39 slower than elsewhere in two-thirds of Germany ; true also, the discovery of America and the consequent change of the seat of commerce had in some measure checked the tide of German middle-class prosperity. Nevertheless the material and social civilisation of Germany was still in the sixteenth centurj^ on the whole rather superior than inferior to that of England and France. If we think of the high culture of city patricians like Pirckheimer and Peutinger, of hankers like Fugger and Welser, of lords and gentlemen like Philip of Hesse and Ulrich von Hutten ; if we think of their intimacy with artists such as Vischer and Diirer, with scholars such as Reuchlin and Erasmus, with theologians such as Luther and Melanchthon, we at once feel that there exists an intellectual culture common to the whole nation, that wealth is not yet separated from learning, that Art is not yet the metier of a guild. Not only English and French courtiers, but also the highly refined Italians, who crossed the Alps, found in Germany a society quite on a par with that of Florence and Ferrara. True it is that politically, and even intellectually, the country made little progress after the religious peace of 1555. Ever since a foreig^ner, Charles V., had ascended the 40 THE STAETING-POINT. imperial throne in 1519, the German national state seemed doomed to death, and all patriotic minds felt it deeply. All towards the end of the century looked with eyes of melancholy envy on the national kingdoms of Queen Elizabeth and Henry IV. But this is not the place to relate the history, of the sixteenth history. Suffice it to say that the political unity of Germany had declined more and more, that the Jesuits had won consider- able ground, not only over the Lutherans, but also over the National Catholics, as we might call all the representatives of the old religion, who in Germany as in France resisted the new cosmo- politan current of the Church. The whole of the second half of the century was employed in that double work of reaction, political and religious, and the work was successful. Still there remained the tradition of a German state, there remained some public life, there re- (;eiman3- ™ained above all a good deal of the •seventeenth German religion. All this Ferdinand II. century. undertook to destroy, and, although he was conquered in the long run, he succeeded only too well. Germany came out of the Thirty Years' War almost expiring. It was as if a deadly illness had wiped out the memory of the nation in its GERMANY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUET. 41 cruel delirium. All the national forces, material as well as intellectual and moral, were destroyed when peace was concluded in 1648. There are fertile wars and sterile wars ; civil and religious wars belong mostly to the latter class. Still the religious wars in France, and the Great Rebellion in England, were light spring storms compared with that terrible Thirty Years' War which left Germany a desert. And what it destroyed in this way was nob a barbarous country ; it was an old civilisation. Hundreds of Material flourishing cities were reduced to ashes ; *''""'■ there were towns of 18,000 inhabitants which counted but 324 a.t the peace ; ground which had been tilled and ploughed for ten centuries had become a wilderness ; thousands of villages had disappeared. Trees grew in the abandoned houses. At Wiesbaden the market had grown into a brush- wood full of deer. The whole Palatinate had but 200 freeholders; Wiirtemberg had but 48,000 inhabitants at the end of the war instead of the 400,000 which it had mustered at the beginning. We are told that a messenger going from Dresden to Berlin through a once floui-ishing country walked thirty miles without finding a house to rest in. The war had devoured, on an average, three quarters of 42 THE STAETING-POINT. the population, two thirds of the houses, nine tenths of the cattle of all soris; nearly three quarters of the soil had been turned into heath. Commerce and industry were as utterly destroyed as iigriculture ; the mighty Hanseatic League was dissolved ; the savings of the nation were entirely spent. I am therefore certainly not far from the truth when I say that Germany was thrown hack two hundred years as compared with Holland, France, and England. Even in so prolific a nation, a century did not suffice to fill up the gaps in the population, nor could two centuries restore the lost capital. It is a proved fact, indeed, that Germany recovered only towards 1 850 the actual amount of capital and the material well-being with which she had entered the great war in 1618. Thus, so far as the number of homesteads, the heads of cattle, the returns of crops can be statistically ascertained, the amount in 1850 was, not relatively but absolutely, the same as in 1618 j in some respects even inferior. The social and moral state corresponded with the materiah Many schools and churches Moral and stood abandoned, for public instruction and public worship had nearly perished. The highly cultivated language of Luther was MOEAL STATE OP GERMANY. 43 utterly forgotten, together with the whole litera- ture of his time. The most vulgar vices had talren root in people who had been reared from their infancy in the horrors of war. Every higher aim and interest had been lost sight of; not a vestige of a national tradition remained. There was no middle class nor gentry left; the higher noblemen had become petty despotic princes, with no hand over them, since the Emperor vras but a name ; the lower went to their court to do lackey's service. A whole generation had grown up during the war, and considered its savage barbarism as a normal state of society. Only those who have read the ' Simplicissimus,' an admirable novel in Smollett's style, but anterior by more than a century, can have an idea of the state of things. Suicides became so frequent after the war, that an Imperial law ordered self-murderers to be buried under the gallows. From hoiises and churches the old artistic furniture had disappeared, and was replaced by coarse and cheap utensils. The peasants' dwellings differed little from those of their animals. De- preciation of their products and taxation weighed heavily upon them ; the innumerable differences of weight and money, and the bad roads rendered 44 THE STAETING-POINT. the sale of goods more difficult still. The adminis- tration of justice was detestable, slow, expensive, and corrupt. For all habits of self-government, even in the cities, had gone ; the gentlemen had become courtiers instead of magistrates. An unprecedented coarseness of manners had invaded not only courts and cities, but also the universities and the clergy. There was servility everywhere. The theologians became in theory and practice the supporters of despotism ; a Leibnitz himself ah times set a somewhat unworthy example of humility. Cowardice had become the common vice of the lower people and of what remained of the middle class, in a time when the free citizens were weaned from the use of arms through the numerous mercenary troops, which had become gangs of highwaymen. The prodigality, vanity, and luxury of the higher classes infected the lower ; the con- tagion was general. Everybody wanted a title — for it was then that the great title-mania set iu, of which Germany is not yet entirely cured. Theo- logy in its most rigid form, superstition of the rudest character, had replaced religion ; pedantry had talcen the place of erudition. The study of the Greek language had almost disappeared from the universities and colleges, where the professors SOCIAL STATE OF GEBMANT. 45 vied with tlie students in vulgar vices. Drink- ing became a profession ; there were travelHng drinkers; at the highest Court of the Empire at Wetzlar, an examination in drinking was exacted from the newly-appointed assessors by their col- leagues. Every baron had his mistresses, as well as an Augustus of Saxony, or a George of Hanover. ' At the Court of Dresden,' says a con- temporary, ' there are numbers of people who, not being able to live from their own resourcv-d, sacri- fice their wives to maintain themselves in favour.' Gambling had become a general habit, and as nobody had money to gamble with, it was the public income which, through the channel of the princes, ran into the pockets of the courtiers and became the means of satisfying that passion. Venality and nepotism prevailed among the nume- rous officials ; pauperism and mendicity among the lower people; ignorance and immorality every- where. The nobility and bourgeoisie, once so united, were henceforth sej)arated, it seemed, for ever. Foreign manners and foreign language were adopted everywhere. Read the letters of the Duchess of Orleans, read Lady M. Montn.gue's reports of the beginning of the following century, or Pollnitz's and Casanova's memoirs, in order to 46 THE STARTING-POINT. form for yourselves an idea of the prevalent customs and language. The restoration of the Stuarts, and the splendour of the French court, acted as dangerous examples; every princeling wanted to imitate them. ' There is not a younger son of a side line,' said Frederick II., even a century later, ' who does not imagine himself to be something like Louis XIV. He builds his Yersailles, has his mistresses, and maintains his armies.' Now this splendour, without glory and taste, without refine- ment and art, without literature, without any redeeming point, in short, became general at the hundreds of German courts, and did not allow the exhausted country to rally. Never, perhaps, were things worse than towards 1700, when the coiu'tpoet of Dresden, Besser, sang his well-known ode : Der Konig ist vergniigt ; Das Land erfreuet sich.' The political state was not better than the social. Ferdinand II. had not succeeded in his Political plans ; he was conquered. The States °'"'*' became free ; religion also was free ; bub one-third of Germany was virtually separated and ' The king amuses himself : the country is delighted. 'political state of GERMANY. 47 estranged from the intellectual life of the nation. Austria and Bavaria have only in this century begun again to take a part in it. All the wealthy, the learned, the industrious, who would not give up their faith, were exiled like Kepler ; those who remained were broken in spirit. National ■unity scarcely existed even in words and forms. The Empire was organised anarchy : confusio divinitus conservata, said Oxenstierna. Germany had really and truly become a geographical ex- pression. France and Austria governed her in turn ; the Germans themselves saw in Louis XIV. the successor of Charlemagne, called to protect them against Spaniards and Turks. The small states, which the court-theologians called com- placently 'true gardens of God, cultivated by princely hands,' had in reality become hot-beds of debauch and tyranny. Never had despotism reigned so supreme and unchecked. And what despotism ! Not that of a Philip II. or a Louis XIV., which at least pursued high, if unjust, aims, and exercised itself in grand proportions; but despotism of the meanest as well as the pettiest kind. In the interest of their faith men had stood by the Princes against the Emperor ; now the clergy had become instruments 4» THE STAKTING-POINT. of the former against the people, preaching every- where the doctrine of passive obedience to the ' monarchs,' as they styled themselves. The ' monarchs ' in turn isolated themselves more and more from the nation, which they governed through the thousands of their servile and corrupt officials, whose business it was to find the m.oney for their princely entertainments. Justice was as venal as administration was rapacious. The old parlia- ments had disappeared long ago, together with the jury, the Landesgemeinde, and all that recalled the old Te\itonic uses and customs which, fortu- nately for yon, survived in this island. Eeligion itself, which had been the pretext of the war, had well-nigh vanished. True, the nation, in the misery of her political life, had thrown herself entii-ely into Church life, but a Church life of the narrowest kind, in which theology triumphed over religious feeling, as it had triumphed over science ; for science and theology again stood apart, as in the days of scholasticism. And as religion had united the classes, so theology separated them. Mean- while Catholic proselytism pursued its work, and princely conversions became of every-day occur- rence. It is easy from this to infer the intellectual IHTELLECTUAL STATE. 49 state of the nation. Here also a gulf had opened between the learned and the people, as in jnteiiectuai religion between the clergy and the lay- ^''"^" men. The German literature of the sixteenth century, the poetry and prose of a Hans Sachs, a Fischart, a Sebastian Brant, had been essentially popular. A hundred years later there was as com- plete a separation between literature and the people as there was complete oblivion of what had existed before. There was» no theati-e, and no art ; for art did not survive the war. What remained of it was of the worst taste, more bric-a-hrar. than art. It was at this time that the taste for collecting curiosities arose : the grune Gewolbe in Dresden dates from this period. In poetry there is the same utter want of originality. The whole litera- ture of the time is a servile imitation of the Neo- Latin literatures. Opitz imitates Tasso, Ronsart, Ben Jonson ; the Silesian school imitates Mariiii, Mile. Scudery, Dryden ; Gottsched and Canitz imitate Boileau, Eacine, Pope. There was no- thing national either in the form, the language, the subjects, or the inspiration. Besides, the writers were without a public. The bourgeoisie lived iu the narrowest social and intelhictual circle. The gentry were too much given up to ' gambling B 50 THE STAETING-POINT. and drinlring,' according to Leibnitz, 'to be lovers of science like the English, or of wit and witty conversation like the French.' The princes, who might be compared to your lords, 'thought it beneath their dignity to cultivate their mind.' So wrote Count Mannteufel to WolfF as late as 1738. Leibnitz himself ascribed to his countrymen one merit only, tha,t of industry. The language fell into utter decay ; everybody in the higher classes spoke French as the Eussians did twenty years ago. ' Since the treaty of Miinster and the Pyrenees,' said Lf^ibnitz, ' it is not only the French govern- ment, but also the French language which has got the best of us. Our princes have rendered Ger- many subject, if not to the French king — although there is little wanting for that either — at least to French fashion and language.' The official idiom was composed of Latin, French, and German words mixed together, and so awkwardly constructed, that even an English legal document would be easy reading compared with it. At the univer- sities teaching went on in Latin. If there was still some verse — whatever its worth might be — there was no prose left in the country of Luther. Nevertheless a quelque chose malheur est hon, and ogni male non viene per nuocere. However THE MISSION OF PEUSSIA. 51 great may have been the misery, the humiliation and the dismemberment of Germany, however radical her material, intellectual and moral ruin ; there yet remained for the nation at The work- least the possibility of a moral and politi- ins «p, . 1648-1763. cal restoration. But she would have lost this if she had fallen under the Habsburg yoke, and if Jesuitism had invaded -North and Central Germany as it invaded Austria and Bavaria, which were secluded from the intellectual and moral life of Germany for more than a century after. The two springs around which the new life ; gathered and grew up were the Prussian State and the Protestant Religion. Ever since Esau of Saxony had sold his primo- geniture for the lentil dish of the Polish crown, the task of reuniting Protestant Germany Politii.al, had fallen to Prussia, and she did not shrink from her glorious mission. Scarcely was the Peace of Westphalia signed when the Great- Elector set about the task, as a disinterested servant of the people, and one conscious of his daty. Nor was it easj' to do for Germany, in the broad daylight of modern history, what Egbert had done for England in the dim times of the early Middle Ages, what Louis XI, and Ferdinand the E 2 62 THE RTAETING-POINT. Catholic had accomplished for Spain and France in the fifteenth century, when means were still allowed which were no longer tolerated in the times of Cromwell and William III. This task was the unification of a great nation through the union and assimilation, or the submission, of all the minor states. Nor were the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries times in which public men could speak freely. The Continent was every- where under the sway of absolute monarchy. Absolute monarchy then guided the state with the instruments at its disposal. These were the army, the bureaucracy, the clergy, and the schools. Wlien ' enlightened despotism ' set to work, the first thing was to improve and furbish up these instru- ments, to enforce discipline, industry, honesty, and to awaken the sense of duty. They were rude masters, those kings of Prussia, who rose early, worked hard, went about themselves, stick in hand, to see that the schoolmasters held their classes, that the tax-gatherers kept their accounts rightly, that the conti-actors made no undue profits, that every judge had clean hands, and that every ofiicial was up to his task. When they began to set the example of economy at their courts in a time when extravagance and prodigalitj' ENLIGHTENED DESPOTS. 63 seemed to be the necessary virtues of monarchy, they were sneered at of course as undignified misers. When Frederick TI. received coldly pd- venturers like Pollnitz and Casanova, -who v/ere the delight of all the German courts, he was looked on as a sovereign who did not know what hon ton was. The nation, however, was not to be deceived, nor were the thinkers of the time. The friends of enlightenment, from Voltaire down to Diderot, and from Hume to Gibbon, had strong absolutist predilections. You all remember Vol- taire's delightful tale about Truth and Reason wandering about Europe after their long banish- ment, and finding everywhere, except in Poland, signs of a hopeful spring brought about by despotic refoi-mers : it is Pombal in Lisbon, Aranda in Madrid, Taniicci in Naples, Ganganelli in Rome, Peter Leopold in Tuscany, Joseph 11. in Vienna, the great Catherine in St. Petersburg, Struensee in Copenhagen, and Gustavus III. in Stockholm. Even in the little capitals of Stuttgart and Darmstadt, Lippe-Detmold and Dessau,' they find ' enlightened despots ' on a small footing. The one. however, who was the type and model of them all was Erederick. Not unjustly. Not only was he the only ruler. 64 THE STAETING-POINT. who was in full possession of the culture of his Frederick time, the One who had penetrated most ti.e Great, ^^gpjy ^^^^^ ^he philosophy of the age, the one who proved the most completely disinterested personally; he was also the one who, from the outset, had the clearest conception of the duty which made him the first servant, ' le premier doviestique,' of the nation. He was twenty-eight years old when he ascended the throne (1740), and wrote to his officials : ' Our intention is that you should not he allowed to enrich yourselves, and to oppress our poor subjects. You must watch over the welfare of the country as much as over our own ; for we will not recognise any distinction between our personal advantage and that of the country ; you must always have this in view as much as that — and even more. The advantage of the country should always have the preference over Our personal advantage, when both do not concur.' And he not only preached in words, he acted up to his precepts. When seven- teen years later he thought himself lost against the coalition of Europe, he wrote on the eve of Eossbach to Count Fiuck : ' If it happen that I should be killed, affairs must take their course without the slightest alteration, and without any FREDERICK THE GREAT. 65 body perceiving that they are in other hands. . . If I have the ill luck to be taken prisoner by the enemy, I forbid my subjects to show the slightest regard for iny person, or to attach ths least im- portance to what I may write from my captivity. If such a thing should happen, I wish to be sacrificed to the State ; and everybody shall obey my brother, who, as well as my ministers and generals, will answer on their heads that neither province nor ransom shall be offered for me, but the war shall be continued jnst as if I had never existed.' And what he had proclaimed on his accession and during his glorious reign, he still recommended on his death-bed and in his will to his successor ; i.e. ' if necessary, the sacrifice of his personal advantage to the well-being of the country and the good of the State.' It is this absence" of per- sonal ambition, or avarice, or thirst of pleasure, this complete identification of himself with the State, — i.e. with an impersonal but living ideal, which forms the moral grandeur of Frede- rick, whatever may be the means which he and all his contemporaries, without exception, used for the attainment of their ends. It is needless to speak of his intellectual grandeur: his deeds are too striking to allow of its being contested. 66 THE STAllTING-POINT. Frederick's attitude towards relijfious opinion ■was one of absolute indifference, and the con- sequence thereof was absolute toleration. He made no attempt to unite the churches as William III. had done, or as liis own grandson tried to do. His policy was to let them alone. ' All religions shall be tolerated in my Staies,' ho wrote, ' and the ministers have only one thing to look to, and that ip, that none should do any harm to others; for here every one shall be free to seek his salvation after his own mind' {a sa fagon). He really was the first to emancipate Europe religiously, to create the purely secular State. ' A prince,' said Kaut himself, 'who avows it to be his duty not to prescribe anything to men about their religion, but to leave them complete liberty in that respect, who consequently declines even the proud merit of toleration — such a prince is enlightened and deserves to be praised by his con- temporaries, and by a grateful posterity, as the' one who first emancipated mankind, and left every man free to use his own reason in matters of con- science.' Similarly, as a civil legislator, ho real- ised the dream of his age by putting natural law in the place of traditional law and custom. His Code (the Landrecht), in many of its articles^ PEEDERIOK THE GEEAT. 57 roads like the 'Eights of Man' of the French Revolution and the American Constitution. Well might Mirabeau say, that he was in advance of his age by a hundred years. ■Frederick has often been reproached, with having shown no interest in German literature, nay, with having- expressed something very like contempt for German intellectual life. This seems to me very unjust and unintelligent. When Frederick came of age towards 1730, and again when, an ardent youth still, and thirsting for intel- lectual life, he became king, his country offered him little, and what it offered — Wolff's philosophy — he certainly embraced with ardour. But naturally enough he sought his intellectual food chiefly in the country which produced most of it, and where literary activity was just then most intense — in France. Besides, if ' he was a Frenchman by education, he was a German by nature,' says Madame de Stael with great shrewdness ; and if he thought as a Frenchman, I might add, he acted as a German. There was nothing in the public life of Germany to inspire a poet or a writer, until by his deeds he gave a national subject to poetry, and above all 9. national inspiration. It is only after the Seven Years' War — a fertile war, because a necessary one 58 THE STABTINGf-POINT. — ^that the Germans began to feel themselves a nation again. Goethe in his own life has vividly' de- scribed the effect of the war on the general marasmus of the time, and Gleim's poems, and Lessing's ' Minna,' remain as witnesses of the direct inspira- tion which the nation drew from Frederick's ex- ploits. Nay, his indifference to the literary life of liis country was perhaps, I might say certainly, a good thing after all. He allowed it to grow natur- ally, spontaneously, without giving it a direction in an academical or other sense, contenting himself with levelling the ground for it, with making for it a wholesome atmosphere. If Frederick had not ensured absolute liberty of thought to Germany, her literature never would have been what it became, one of the freest of all literatures since the Greek. Well might Schiller sing : Kein Augustisch Alter blulite, Keines Mediciiers Giite Liichelte dev deutschen Kunst : * * ■* » Von dem grbssten deutschen Sohne, Von des gTosson Friedrichs Throne Ging sie schtitzlos, imgeehrt.' ' No Augustan age flourished, the kindness of no Medicis smiled on German Art. From Germany's greatest son, from the throne of the great Frederick, she went improtected, unhonoured. PROTESTANTISM. 59 But instead of complaining of this indifference, Germans ought to thank Frederick for it, in grateful remembrance of Kant's words : 'The age of enlightenment was the century of Frederick the Great.' More than that, the time of the resurrection of the German nation was the time of Frederick ; for it was he who inspired all that made the nation capable of self-assertion — hero- ism, national spirit, religious liberty, modern law ; it was he who gave life and strength to the nucleus which was to become, and deservedly to become, the German State. I said, that next to the Prussian State, it was Protestantism which allowed Germany to raise herself out of the state of intellectual protestant- and moral misery in which the Thirty '^"'" Years' War had left her. Undoubtedly it was a petrified sort of Protestantism which had sur- vived ; but it was Protestantism, that is to say, relative liberty of religious thought. A revival which assumed the proportions of a new reforma- tion was slowly preparing as early as the second half of the seventeenth century. This reformation was not the work of Government, as that Pietism. of the sixteenth century had been in England and partly even in Germany. It was 60 THE STAETIiSTG-POINT. worked out and spread by individuals. So was its influence an influence on the soul, on the inner life, not on the constitution of the Church, still less on govei'nment and public life. In both respects, in its origin and in its eff^ects, it bears a close re- semblance to the Evangelical and Wesleyan move- ment which took place a century later in this island. It sprang from a want of more intense religious feeling, and so renovated first religion and afterwards society. The old theology had for- gotten the struggle against sin in the struggle about dogma ; pietism left dogma alone, and appealed to the inner.voice of revelation. Pietism, indeed, which we are so accustomed to look upon as a narrow or narrowing view of religion, was at first the exact contrary. It was a reaction against the dryness and stiffness of orthodox religion, where theology reigned supreme and dogmas and forms obstructed the direct and spon- taneous communication of the faithful with the Deity. ' As Socrates, the new apostles said, had di'awn down philosophy from heaven to earth, so they wished that theology should be turned from vain speculations ar.d subtleties in order to show the way of the spirit and of saintliness in the pre- cepts necessary to salvation.' It was thus that PIETISM. 61 pietism brought warmth, and feeling, and life into religion, and, although mixed up with mysticism, acted as a liberating word. This is not the place to dwell on Spcner's and Francke's doings, on the expulsion of the latter from Leipzig and his transfer to Halle, which afterwards became the seat of pietism ; nor can I enumerate the schools, the charitable institutions, the secularisa- tion of worship, the collective working establish- ments which owed their existence to Count Zin- zondorf and his Herrnhuter (Moravian b]"ethren). Suffice it to say that the mild charity, the demo- cratic simplicity of these men, won over hundreds and thousands of souls, and that the movement which spread from Halle became a general one in the first half of the past century. Goethe tells us indeed, that ' at this time a certain religious disposition of mind was rife in Germany. In many princely houses there was a genuine religious life ; noblemen were not rare who aimed at true holiness, and in the lower classes this feeling was widely spread.' So it came about that pietism grew into a real power in a very short time. Even the ' monarchs ' began to dread it. The Margrave of Bayreuth was admonished and rebuked for his vices by a pietist preacher in presence of the 62 THE STAETING-POINT. whole congregation, and publicly promised better conduct, and all that was required before he could obtain absolution. When Frederic William I., the king-corporal, was dying, his chaplain, a pietist also, reproached him severely with his ' accesses of wrath, his armies, the corvees he had inflicted on the peasants, and with his failure to do what he might have done for his poor subjects. However wholesome and fertile pietism might be, it was unable to make good the losses which Scientific *'^® reformation of the sixteenth century revival. -j^^^ sustained by not bringing about a political and national reorganisation. This work was reserved for others. Besides, pietism degene- rated but too soon and became iu its turn inanimate and incapable of free action. The inner life, however, had been awakened, and it was not to fall asleep again, because those who stopped at the starting-point claimed the name and inherit- ance of the initiators. On the other hand the reigning philosophy was not without influence on religion ; but the reigning philosophy was not yet that of Locke and Shaftesbury; it was the theistic philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Wolfi'. The difference is great. The French and English amis des lumieres vrere Deists, that SCIENTIFIC REVIVAL. 68 is to say, tliey arrived by the application of the law of causality in the outward world [i.e. by reasoning and mechanical explanation) at the First Cause or Deity. The German Theists started from Conscience and tried to prove the Deity by the inward revelation of the moral law as it speaks in the bosom of men : and they invoked the authority of Cartesianism as developed by Leibnitz, and set forth and commented upon by Wolff, which appealed to the innate idea of a Deity as the strongest proof of its existence ; whereas Goethe rightly said of the Trench of the eighteenth century what he might also have said of the English Deists, — ' They do not undertitand that there can be anything in man which has not come into him from without.' The philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Wolff inflvienced science and moral life before it influenced religion. It was the sight of a superior foreign literature which first awoke the desire of a richer intellectual life in Germany. So the ad- miration of foreign culture became the impulse to the creation of a national one. For this, however, it was necessary to emancipate science from theology, as religion had been emancipated from it already. 64 THE STAETING-POINT. The liberation of man from the yoke of authority, which was properly the idea of the eighteenth century had been aimed at everywhere as early as the end of the preceding century, even in Germany. Whilst Wolff's moral philosophy, which was only that of Leibnitz in a popularised form, emancipated morality from theology, it im- parted also a freer view of legislation. Puffendorf followedinthe footsteps of HugoGrotius. He drove the theologians out of political science and founded a purely lay theory of the state ; and although individually the German Lichtfreunde of that time were certainly inferior to a Locke and a Bayle, their immediate practical influence was perhaps greater. Thomasius not only revolutionised law by his teaching, putting it on a natural and rational basis ; he revolutionised teaching itself by the in- troduction of the German language into the uni- veraities ; he founded the German Press by his weekly papers ; he put a stop by his agitation to that shame of the age, the trials for sorcery and witchcraft ; he introduced a better tone amongst professors and students; he dared to say to Frederick the Great's grandfather that the one thing wanting for an intellectual and moral revival in his states was liberty. ' If 1 must say it SCIENTIFIC REVIVAL. 65 in one word,' he wound up his address to King Frederick, prompting him already to take the lead of Germany by restoring liberty, ' if I must say it in one word it is liberty which gives to all spirit the right life ; and without it human understand- ing, whatever may belts advantages, is, as it were, dead and inanimate. . . . This is the one thing virhich has given to the Dutch and English so many learned men, whereas the want of this liberty has oppressed the inborn sagacity of the Italians, and the high-flowing mind of the Spaniards. Such liberty would justify the hope that in our Germany also noble minds might apply themselves to wash away that shameful spot — the belief in her own incapacity to invent and do anything good and great.' These words were spoken in 1705. The University of Halle had been founded under the protection of the first king of Prussia, Sophia Charlotte's husband, by the regenerators of religion, the pietists,who had been persecuted in Saxon3% These, however, had soon fallen them- selves into the intolerance from which they had suffered so much, and waged a terrible war against Thomasius, to whom the king hud offered an asylum in Halle when he in turn had been driven F 66 THE STAETING-POINT. out of Leipzig. Did he not dare together with Wolff to preach rationalism in those halls which the unworthy followers of Spener and Francke con- sidered as their own realm ? Thomasius died opportunely; Wolff was obliged to leave, when the persecutors got the better of Fredei-ick I.'s successor. Then ib was that Miinchhausen founded the University of Gottingon, which henceforward became the stronghold of rationalistic science. It beca.me also the hearth of that new philology which paved the wa,y for a freer assimilation of profane antiquity. Gresner was the first to call the attention of his pupils to the beauty of ancient literature, which, till then, had been nothing more than a drilling instrument; Christ insisted upon the substance of it, the political, religious, above all the artistical life of the ancients, and thus became the creator of modern arehseology ; whilst Michaelis through his more methodical study of the eastern languages, and Heine by his testhetical commen- taries, widened the . ground and enlivened the spirit of classical philology. Meanwhile the material and social life of the nation began to improve. The process, however, was very slow, for many of the old hindrances still re- mained. There was no national centre, no industry. THE LITEEAKT EEVIVAIi. 67 no commerce. The middle classes might be said to vegetate rather than to live, excluded from all participation in the State, shut up in the petty- existence of their small towns, contented in their poverty, and unacquainted with the great currents of life which were flowing elsewhere. Out of their prose of every-day life they fled into the ideal world until they thought that this inner world alone had reality. As soon as the xheiiteiair wounds began to heal, the interest in ''<=^'^"'- moral and intellectual things was at once re- awakened. First it was religion, soon science and poetry, which became the great affair of the nation, not a pastime for leisure-hours but the one serious thing, not an ornament of life but the national life itself. There were no courts to protect literature, as we have seen, or to guide it. The new literature sprang from the spontaneous activity of the nation. It freed the courts themselves from foreign manners and foreign culture, and forced the national tongue upon them. Ruhmend darf's der Deiitsclie sagen, Hoher darf das Herz ihm schlagon, Selbst erschuf er sich den Werth.' ' The German has a right to boast of it, his heart may beat higher : for he gave to himself his riches. F 2 PS THE STARTING-POINT. There was no retxirn, however, to the popular movement of the sixteenth century, the bridg-e which might have served for this jpurpose being irreparably broken. It was a new spirit which rose, individual, not national, btit awakening at least, though late, the national spirit, instead of being awakened by it, as was the case elsewhere. Other nations indeed have had a national history and tradition, a centre and a societj-, wealth and comfort, before they possessed a literature ; in Germany it was the reverse. Literature came first, and gave its character to the slowly forming society instead of receiving it from a societj' already formed. The impulse came from a concourse of isolated and individual forces and efforts which ran into the same bed. There was no political life, or, if there was any, it was beyond the reach of the middle classes ; but there arose a literary life, in which there was no division into states and provinces, governed and governing, upper and middle classes. Therein, at Irast, the nation was one ; therein everybody felt himself a German. What a man of talent wrote became at once the property of the nation, whether it was published in Strasburg or in Konigsberg, in Fmnkfort or in Dresden. All the THE LITERARY REVIVAL. 69 eminent writers of the age travelled from one end of the country to the other, and settled where they pleased. Nobody thought of asking whether Lessing was a Saxon, Herder a Prussian, Schiller a Wiirtemberger. They all formed one nation. Thus national unity existed in literature long before its political existence was felt as a necessity; but it prepared and brought about political unity in the end. Moreover, and this specially concerns us here, this literature worked out an ensemble of views which became the lay creed of every cultivated German, whether Catholic or Protestant, a creed which is still held by many, I might say^ by the whole elite, of the nation, if not outspokenly, at least as the tacitly accepted foundation ground of all their ideas. My object here is to explain what this creed was. At the beginning of the eighteenth century serious attempts had been made to endow Germany with a national literature ; but every- thing was wanting for original production, form as well as substance. The language was still, or rather had become, an unwieldy', awkward engine, composed of fragments of French, Italian, Latin, and legal phraseology. There was nothing 70 THE STAETING-POINT. in the common life of the nation to famish the subject or the matter of a literature ; no original thought, no great action. The con- sequence was that the new literature continued to be what the literature of the preceding age had been — a stammering imitation of French, Italian, and English models; for Germany had gone through all the phases through which the western literatures had passed in the preceding centuries, following them closely, but without being able to give any life to its servile copies. Yet the writers had an instinctive feeling of the task which they had to fulfil, viz., the creation of a literature at once popular and refined, national and up to the mark of westei-n culture. At the same time they differed as to the way by which this aim was to be obtained, one side thinking Boileau's ' Art Poetique ' the last word of literary legis- lation, the others invoking the authority of English examples. Their appeal, however, was not made so much to Addison and Pope, rational- ists fed with Locke and Shaftesbury, as to Milton, the poet of enthusiasm, and Richard- son the sentimentalist. No doubt they also were liberal Protestants, but they were not ration- alists in the English and French sense of the THE NE"W LITERATURE. 71 word; they were believers, not in the letter but in the spirit, and even the letter they com- bated with respect. And this was still the spirit even of the great literary generation which followed them, and began to enter the lists during and shortly after the Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763). In the first third of the eighteenth century, French models still ruled uncontested, and their advocate, Professor Gottsched, in Leipzig, was still the absolute sovereign of the of the new -^ ^ literature. German Parnassus. It was against his pedantic and despotic sway that the so-called English school arose in Zurich. A whole library might be filled, not only with the weekly papers, which for the last twenty years had been trying awkwardly enough, to fill the place of German 'Tat- lers ' and ' Spectators,' but with the heavy volumes in which . the conflicting schools expressed their theories and attacked those of their adversaries. Even when an original literature had begun to spring up, these literary and £esthetical discussions still continued ; in fact, they continued almost to our day. Modern German literature, you see, was not born in a simple, spontaneous, unconscious age, but in an age of criticism ; the war of theories 72 THE STAETING-POINT. raged over its cradle, and with, theories it was reared. No V)fonder that, even when it had readied manhood, it still retained something of these early habits of self-conscious, self-critical production, and appeared somewhat — Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ; which does not mean that the German poet, boi-n in a library, was not to become capable of the fresh- est and most thrilling utterances as often as he fled from the dust of his book-shelves into the forests and the fields of Franconia and Swabia. Yet you must not forget that this literature was the work of the learned middle-classes, not of idle and wealthy gentlemen, but of needy and hard-work- ing schoolmasters and clergymen. As there was no great national Court, so there was no rich no- bility and gentry to cultivate letters. Nor was there a noblesse de robe, as in France, or a class of well-to-do merchants, as in England, who might have tilled up their leisure hours with literary pursuits. Germany boasts of no Montaigne or Montesquieu, no Shaftesbury or Bolingbroke. Men of the social position of Addison and Fielding, of Hume and Gibbon, did not exist, and, when they existed, did not think of literature. This, and the seclusion from political THE NE"W LITEEATTJEE. 73 life, and tlie absence of publicity, ga,ve German literature its particular character, its wonderful freedom from all general fashion, form, style, con- ventionality, its unique individualism, its daring- thought and imagination ; and also its somewhat abstract nature. It sometimes strikes one as a soul ■without a body. We at once feel that its writers have never known great life, whether social or po- litical, lb betrays at the same time a general aver- sion to action and practical aims, as if the inner life alone had any worth and reality. It was only after the terrible blows which in the begin- ning of this century awoke them from their dreamy or ideal life, that the Germans began to compre- hend that their new intellectual liberty could live and last only in an independent and respected State. To revert, however, to the literary strifes of the first half of the past century, it was the English tendency wliich got the better fheEnn-- of the contest ; and Richardson was, per- '''*'' sciiooi. haps, next to Thomson, the writer who contri- buted most to this result. Clumsy translations of Young's ' Night Thoughts,' followed the heavy metrical versions of ' Paradise Lost,' and the ' Seasons.' Their inspiration was, after all, more 74 THE STARTING-POINT. congenial to the German nature, and more adapted to tlie social and moral state of the German middle-class than Racine and Corneille, or even Moli^rc and Lesage. Under this influence — for it is a strange fact that the foundation of a national culture was still sought through imitation — and under the tutorship of theoretical criticism, arose a tame and modest, half-sentimental, half- moralising sort of literature, which reflected the petty, prosy, every-day life of the small cities of Germany, and which pleased because it reflected it. This humble, timid collection of satires, fables, and idyls, had, however, the one merit, till now wanting in all the literary productions of the country, the merit of depicting German life and giving expression to German feelings, instead of describing French and Italian manners, ideas, and characters. This literature was certainly as poor I dare not say poetically, but at least in rhyme and style as the life it depicted — the petty customs, defects, weaknesses, and interests of the poor tutored German middle-class. A host of Dr. Primroses came forward even before the English Dr. Primrose came to life ; but they were Primroses without the delightful irony, if not without the benevolence, of Olivia's father j and THE SEVEN TEAES' WAR. 75 ■who had never come into contact with geiitlemen like Sir William Thornhill. Yew people read Gellert's novels, Rabener's satires, Zacharia's comic poems nowadays ; still the historian will find nowhere a truer image of the modest conditions of the time than in these pale pictures, which resemble the bleached old photographs of 1850, to which we still grant a place in our sitting- room. The Seven Years' War soon roused the national spirit to new life after centuries of slumber. For the first time Germans might once more r^he Seven feel proud of their deeds, and boast of a ^^'>"'^^■"■• national hero ; and Gleim's ' Grenadiersongs ' (1758) gave vent to this feeling. The German ' Tyrtseus,' as he was ambitiously called, was a very mild Tyrtseus, if you like ; still his inspiration was a more vigorous one than that of the timid and sentimental friends of his youth. Togetlier with him, however, appeared on the field the somewhat younger generation of the great in- tellectual warriors who definitively freed the German mind from the foreign yoke and the bondage of narrow tradition, and who cleared the ground upon which those who followed were to build. 76 THE STARTING-POINT. Our new literature only began properly to- wards 1760. The hundred preceding years were iiecapituia- entirely filled with the slow and weari- '""'■ some process of recovery from the material misery and the intellectual, as well as moral decay in which the Thirty Years' War had left us. It required these hundred years before people could attain even that modest degree of well-being which, allowed them to give a thought to something else than the care for material existence. It required these hundred years to free German Eeligion, as well as German Science, from the thraldom of orthodox theology. It required these hundred years to create the beginnings only of a national State, and to reform some, at least, of the abuses of the Empire. It required yet a hundred 3-ears more of incessant toil, and four generations of men of genius and of talent, to bring about a really national literature and a really national State, looked up to and respected by the world. No doubt, as this our new State still bears the stamp of its origin — the bui-eaucratical and military monarchy of Frederick the Great, — so our new literature, very different in this respect from our literature of the Middle Ages, as v^eR as from that of the sixteenth century, is a literature EKCAPITULATION. 77 of scholars and officials. It reflects the intellectual and moral life of that class. It does not depict a large social and public life, which did not exist ■when it sprang- up, and which has scarcely come even now, when all has been done that was neces- sar}' to clear the ground for it — perhaps because our history, our intellectual and moral aptitudes, make us less fit than other nations for such a life, and assign to us other and by no means lower fields of activity. Be this as it may, you will never under- stand our political and literary conditions if you forget the starting-point of modern Germany ; if you do not remember that, whereas the German of the sixteenth century was fully on a par with the Englishman, Frenchman, and Italian, in material and intellectual, as well as in moral and social, respects, the German of the seventeenth century was thrown back into utter barbarism by the Thirty Years' War. When our country, at the end of that cruel time, towards 1650, set out on a new career, she had everything to rebuild anew; state and religion, wealth and society, science and literature, language, even, and mo- rality. The start of two hundred years, which v/estern Europe thus had over Germany, is still apparent in our society and manners, iu our ?8 THE STASTIXG -POINT. wealth and comfort. We have the presumption to believe that intellectually and morally — politi- cally, also, since 1866, if we do not cling to the prejudice that parliamentary government is the only one worthy of a civilised nation — we have again come up with our western neighhours in the great race of civilisation, in which men are not rivals but fellow-workers. LECTUEE III. THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. (1760J770.) It was during, and shortly after, the Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763) that the first generation of the great founders of our national culture made their appearance. There are three generations, indeed, -which followed each other at twenty years' distance, and which almost entirely did the great work The three of German culture, of which I have genera- tions. undertaken to trace the outlines in these short lectures. Tlie first, born between 1715 and 1735, the generation of Klopstock, Wieland, Winc- kelmann, Kant, Mendelssohn, above all, Lessing, whose principal works were published between 1750 and 1770, when these men were from thirty to fifty years old. The second generation, born in the middle of the century, included Herder and Voss, Klinger and Burger, Goethe and Schiller, 80 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. whose greatest and most fei-tile activity displayed itself equally during tlieirfnll manliood, from 1770 to 1800. Finally, iu the third generation, born be- tween 1760 and 1780, the most conspicuous names were those of the two Schlegels, the two Humboldts, Tieck, Eahel, Schleiermacher, Niebuhr, Savigny and Schelling, whose followers acted more parti- cularly in the first quarter of the present century. The two schools which, from 1825, to 1850, influenced the German mind most powerfully, the school of Hegel and that of Gervinias, only con- tinued, developed, summed up, applied, or contra- dicted the main ideas of the three preceding great generations ; they did not properly put forth and circulate new ideas. It was a manly and robust generation, the generation of Klopstock, Wieland, Lessiug, which was also that of Frederick, Winckelmann, and Kant. They almost all were born in the humblest stations of life, and fought their way through direst privation ; but the struggle for life was not capable of stifling iu them the sense of the ideal. You all know how Klopstock was formed by Klopstock, English, Wieland by French models, born 1/24. rjij^gy were, however, no servile imitators ; and they are thus distinguished from the Brookes KLOPSTOOK. 81 and Gottscheds of the preceding age. They filled their works with a spirit of their own, and modified even the forms which thoy borrowed, so as to accommodate them to the genius of their own language. The tendency of their age was still that of the beginning of the century : a deeply religious spirit, but one which believed more in the continuous revelation of God through con- science than in the historical revelation of the Orthodox, or the ai-gumentation of the Deists, representing God as the great architect of this material machine. It was partly because Klopstock gave a poetical expression to this feeling that his poem acted so powerfully ; and partly also because its form seemed an entirely German one, although the verse was the classical hexameter of the ancients, now for the first time quite assimilated and mastered, as that generation believed. Ger- many imagined that she too possessed a ' Paradise Lost,' and welcomed in the bard of the ' Messiah' the interpreter of its innermost thought. Then at last Germany had a German poem, both in sub- stance and form ; and neither substance nor form was of the mediocre, prosy, and humble kind to which German genius seemed till then condemned. Thought and language soared high — too high, G 82 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. perhaps, for us to follow it still with otir clipped wings — yet it proved to the nation that she might attempt what other nations had successfully at- tempted before her. Whilst Klopstock's inspiration was Christian and Teutonic, that of Wieland was more ration- Wiciand ^listic and cosmopolitan. If Klopstock born 1733. ^g^^gj^^; ^j^g German language strength and flight, Wieland gave it fluency and elegance. He became, indeed, the very creator of a simple, easy, and natural prose, the most necessary instru- ment of culture. German prose before Wieland was pedantic, stiif, intricate : with some writers it is so still. Wieland gave it the tone of polite society ; taught it how to handle irony, how to be witty with grace and decorum. He him- self had belonged entirely to the school of the Trench, particularly to that of Voltaire, and among the English, Shaftesbury, the virtuoso, had been the chief object of his study and predilection. When he wrote his philosojjhical novels and minor poems in Voltaire's manner, Germany seemed at first astonished to see that her heavy language could be capable of such charming, prattling talk. Wieland won over to it the higher classes, then exclusively bred in French ; he made German Ian- ■WIELAND. 83 guage and literature hoffdJdg (admissible at Court). At the same time lie popularised the English and ^French philosophy of the time. The ' popular philosophers of Berlin, such as Mendelssohn and Nicolai, the friends of Lessing, would have been impossible without Wieland ; and their influence was great. As Klopstock and his followers had given a poetical expression to the religious feeling of the nation, independent of, and superior to, dogma and outward worship, so Wieland directed the war of the century against sacerdotalism and theology with the somewhat blunted, but not less effective, arms, which German free-thought has ever since used against Church and dogma ; for Germany seemed to have found at least the proper vehicle to enable her to join ili the movement of Western culture, instead of following it at a dis- tance. Now, onlj', she seemed to have made that culture completely her own. This was necessary ; but it was not suffi. cient. She wanted also to be able to go on alone and without anybody's help. She was no longer the province of a foreign civilisation, but she was still a tributary. And she had to be freed from this allegiance also, and to be received on an equal foot- ing in the intellectual society of Europe, before she B 2 84 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. could work on her own account. More than this : after having obtained an entire command over foreign culture, after having not only accepted but digested and assimilated it, it became neces- sary that she should react against it : for all life- bringing movement is a.ction and reaction. Lessing undertook the task. It was he who founded the literary independence of Germany Lessinir ^^ rebelling against the foreign laws, born 1729. ^ijjgjj ]^.^^ remained even after the foreign rulers had yielded the place to horae-born leaders ; and he freed, not Germany alone, but the vvLole world, when he gave the deadly blow to the con- ventional classicism of the French. For it is bard to believe that Byron, Manzoni, Victor Hugo himself could have written what they wrote, without Lessing's ' Dramaturgie ' ? When Lessing attacked the French poetical laws and rules, they were still universally acknowledged. Addison had wiitten his ' Cato ' in conformity with them, and Pope recognised no higher authority ; and, long after them, Moratin preferred Racine to his own Cal- deron, as they had placed Corneille over Shake- speaxe. Nay, even after Lessing, but before liis influence could be felt on the other side of the Alps, Alfieri, the Misogallo, cast his impetuous LESSING. 85 thought in the French mould. Lessing was the first revolt against that law, and to show that it was entirely conventional and arbitrary, adhering to outward and nccidental forms, instead of to the essence of ancient poetry. From Boileau's theories he appealed to Aristotle, from Corneille's practice to that of Shakespeare, whom he proved to he a truer, although ■unconscious, follower of Sophocles than Corneille. But Aristotle himself and Shake- speare he treated as a true Protestant treats the Bible : with the spirit of free inquiry. He did not submit to Aristotle because he was Aristotle, but because he discovered in him ' truth as sure as that of Euclid.' At the same time, adding example to theory, he gave to Germany litei'ary works of his own at once popular and refined, such as she had yeai'ned for so long. He united Wieland's realism with EHopstoek's idealism in works which have survived, whilst those of Klopstock and Wieland can scarcelj' be said to be still living. He gave a model of the free dramatic form, which he wanted to substitute for the French pattern, in his ' Emilia Galotti.' He gave words to the first national enthusiasm felt by modern Germany at Frederick's deeds in his ' Minna von Barnhelm.' Nay, the whole re- 86 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT, ligious and philosophical creed of his generation he expressed in his ' Nathan,' for which his friend Mendelssohn sat as model, and which he left as a legacy to the nation, to the world. The spirit of toleration,, together with a firm belief in a good and just Deity, breathes in every page of that wonderful work, in which the best ideas of the age are summed up. For what he had done for litera- ture he did for religion ; what he had done for Aristotle he did for Luther. ' The true Lu- theran,' he exclaimed, ' does not want to be protected by Luther's writings, hut by Luther's spirit, and Luther's spirit exacts absolutely that no man should be prevented from communicating his progress in knowledge to others.' He would not allow the Protestant clergy to assume an authority which the spirit of Protestantism for- bids them to claim, and declared loudly that he would be ' the first to take back the Pope for the popelings' if they should put a stop to free inquiry. And as his * JSTathan ' showed religious feeling to be independent of, and superior to, established forms of religion, so in his 'Education of Mankind ' he showed that morality is indepen- dent even of religious belief; and that the good done for the satisfaction of one's own conscience is ■WINCKELMANN. 87 superior to that which is done with a hope of re- compense in a future life, the preoccupation of such a life being rather an impediment than a furtherance towards making the best use of this existence. ' Why not quietly wait for a future life, as one waits for the morrow ? ' without wish- ing to investigate what cannot be investigated, the things which it will bring? Who knows whether thei-e will not come ' a new eternal gospel,' promised in the New Testament, and which will be to Christianity what Christianity was to Juda- ism, a third stage in the long education of man- kind by God, for whom ' the shortest line is not always a straight line ' ? In such ideas, however, Lessing was far in advance of his generation, for he not only gave the last expj'ession to the past, but he also opened the door for the coming age. He, as well as Kant and Winckelmann, stood with his feet in the eighteenth century ; with his head he already reached the nineteenth. Winckelmann had published his ' History of Art' in 1764; so had Kant his 'Observations on the Sublime.' In 1766, just a hundred years before the auspicious birthday of the German State, appeared his ' Dreams of a Visionary,' Winckelmann's ' Allegory,' Lessing's ' Laoeoon.' 88 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. and the most suggestive book perhaps ever written, Herder's ' Fragments.' They announced to the ■world that the years of apprenticeship were ovor for Germany, and that she had begun to work on her own account. The medium through which the modern classical writers of the Italian and French type View of lool*:ed at antiquity was Eoman civilisa- antiquity. ^j^j^^ jj^gj^ since the Jesuits had become masters of public education in theneo-Latin coun- tries, they had seen how easy it would be in nations, whose Church, whose language, and whose legal traditions were Eoman, to put the Latin literature in the foreground. They felt at the same time how important for their aim it would be to mould men's minds by Roman antiquity, the spirit of which is discipline, instead of feeding them with Greek antiquity, the essence of which is freedom. While the contemporaries of Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino still lived under the charm of the Hellenic civilisation, those of Bembo and Alamanni were already under the spell of Latin Alexandrinism. Lessing had been as attentive a reader of Sophocles as of Shakespeare ; and when he jiro- posed the latter instead of Corneille as a model to the future dramatic poets of Germany, it was ■WINCEBLMANn'S ' HISTOEY OP AET.' ' 89 because lie saw in him, in spite of his irregular form, a more faithful, if not a more systematic fol- lower of the ancients, than in Eacine and Corneille. Here also it was not the letter which he preached, but the spirit. He protested against the whole way of looking at the ancients, which had reigned ever since Trissino and Tasso, as against a sort of third Alexandrinism. For, according to him, they saw the importance of ancient literature where it was not, in accidental outward forms ; and sacri- ficed to these that which had really inspired the ancients — natural beauty. He wished his age and his nation to do what the great artists of the Renaissance had done, before academical classicism had set in, viz., to look on Nature and Man directly with clear, sound, unprejudiced eyes, such as the Greeks had brought to the contemplation of things ; and to create, if necessary, new foi'ms for new thoughts and feelings. It is highly important to notice that a new view of antiquity, entirely opposed to the academical one, was the basis of the literary edifice which Germany was about to build. Hence also the importance of Winckel- mann's ' History of A.rt,' which, as I have said, appeared in 1764, and, of his 'Allegory ' which was published in 1766. « 90 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUaHT. Winckelmann's ' History of Art ' is at once a system of aesthetics and a history. There may he, and there are, many points on which we Winckel- , , _ niann, born are at variance with W inclcelmann, and 1717. the fundamental idea even of his great hook — that the aim of art is the creation of ideal forms — is no longer, I hope, admitted by sesthetic criticism. Nevertheless, his book acted as if it was a revelation of the Hellenic world. Winckel- mann had himself something of the spirit of the Greeks, and so became naturally their most elo- quent interpreter. It was as if he had brushed away the dust from the ancients, and revealed to view the purity of their outlines, buried as they were under a dense layer of rubbish. He en- deavoured to show in language hitherto unparal- leled — a prose lofty and noble, nay, majestic, with- out affectation, and correct without purism — in a language worthy of the ancients, that the Greek art of the time of Pericles rested on the same basis as the Platonic philosophy ; the basis of idealism, contemplating the real world as a reflection of the world of ideas, and trying to reconstruct for the senses, as Plato tried to do for the intellect, those ideas which were like the lost types of the created world. Against the unquiet, overladen style of his own time, he invoked the calm and simplicity INFLUENCE OF 'WINCKELMANN. 91 of Greek art, even introducing into painting the rules of sculpture. Although this reaction against rococo degenerated soon — as all reactions will do — and degenerated into the cold and dry school of a new Academy, almost worse than the Berninesque school which it superseded, yet it was a necessary reaction, and one which, if it has done no good in the domain of the fine arts, has had most fertile re- sults for poetry. Goethe's ' Iphigenia,' and ' Alexis and Dora,' would never have been written, if Winckelmann had not first unveiled the ideal beauty of Greek antiquity. The poAvdered and patched Greek heroines of Voltaire's tragedy be- came henceforward as impossible as the senti- mental or raging heroes of Crebillon. For they ■were totally devoid of that ' noble simplicity and calm grandeur' which Winckelmann had-estab- lished as the first principle of Greek art. If men like David and Ingres, Canova and Thorwaldsen, who were directly or indirectly disciples of Winckelmann, proved themselves unable to create an Iphigenia, at once Greek and modern, ideal and real, full of life and full of measure, it was because the generation to which they belonged entirely lacked the natural disposition which makes great artists, that spontaneous, direct intuition, which is unbiassed by abstract thought 92 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. and abstract systems. It was also — I will not deny it — because the new theory could not be ac- cepted throughout. Sculpture had tried to produce the effects of painting. Winckelmann went into the other extreme by introducing into painting the rules of sculpture. But, we have not to ask ourselves here whether the action of Winckel- mann was beneficial or not; only what it was, and how far it reached. But Winckelmann did even more in his History than reveal the principle of Greek Art. He gave the first example of modern historical method. All histories of Art, like those of literature, had been till then collections of biogra- phies, lists of titles, and analyses or descriptions of different works, with an account of their vicissi- tudes. Winckelmann was not only the first to dis- tinguish the different periods of Art as coinciding with the different styles; he also described its growth and decay as if it were a natural vegetation, showed the causes of this growth and decay — climate, national character and national manners, political history, religion, race — and thus restored the unity of History. Thus Winckelmann first introduced, not in theory, but in practice, the idea of organic and historical development, which is pro- FRENCH CULTURE. 93 p3rly the German idea. In his hands the history of the infancy, adolescence, youth, maturity, and old age of Art became a system of the different styles, and vice versa. He expelled the concep- tion of arbitrary creation by intellects independent of circumstances from the domain of Art-history ; and it was only after Winckelmann had shown Fine Arts to be the result of the general condition of a given civilisation, that otlier writers began to apply the same idea to Poetry, Philosophy, Religion and the State. The first seed of the German idea was thrown into the world. But although Winckeliaanu had awakened the sense for the ' noble simplicity and calm grandeur ' of ancient Art, he had not been able to j cssin^v divest himself of certain intellectual '^'«><="«".' habits of his time. As he had proposed ideal forms as the highest aim of Art, i.e. forms which do not exist in nature, but are the product of the idealising mind, and had combined the fruits of his various observations into one patchwork called ideal beauty, so he had raised no objection against abstract thought becoming the object of Art, in other words, against allegory. This was the legacy of the French rationalistic culture of the first half of the century against which Leasing 94 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOOGHT. ■\vas to lead the reaction. The French of that time approaohed Poetry as they approached Ee- ligion, as they approached the State, with the conviction that the organ of understanding was able to produce intentionally and consciously what in reality has always been the product of other human facilities acting almost unconsciously ; they believed in inventors of religion as in inventors of constitutions. Hence a confusion of all the activities of the human inind. People believed that the Fine Arts could serve to explain abstract thought, which is allegory, and again that words might paint objects, which produced descriptive poetry. The simple exjjlanation that words, sounds, forms, and colours ai-e different languages for diiferent orders of mental activity had been entirely lost sight of. Experience taught that none of these mental faculties could work when isolated, without the aid of the others ; the inference was drawn that each might do the work of the other. People wanted to express in forms and colours, that is, in the language of the Fine Arts, what can only be expressed in words ; and they wanted to express in words what can only be expressed in sounds, i.e. music. The great historical importance of Les- sing's ' Laocoon ' lies in the fact that it put a stop FUNCTIONS OP THE ARTS. 95 once for all to that confusion — once for all, if every- body had known how to read it, or had consented to read it as it was written. We should not have musicians who are content to interpret words, or painters who condescend to illustrate, novels and poems, if the necessary consequences had been drawn from Lessing's premises. For in his com- parison between Virgil's description of Laocoon's death and the famous group in the Vatican, he traced the impassable boundary which sepa- rates Fine Arts and Poetry. The Fine Arts have to show things in space and to the eyes. Poetry in time and through the ears to the in- tellect : the inference is that the subjects of the Fine Arts must be circumscribed objects, or, at least, lasting situations as extended in space and capable of being embraced in one glance, whereas the subjects of poetry must be actions accomplished in time, and conveyed to the intellect in their successive stages. When, con- sequently, the poet wants to treat the same subject as the artist, he must first transform it into action, as Homer did with Achilles' shield and Helen's beauty (her appearance before and impression on the old men of Troy) ; or Goethe, when he describes the gardens of Hermann's father, by following 1)6 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT. the steps of his mother from, one part to the other. If, on the contrary, the artist wishes to treat a poetical subject, he must first transform the action into a situation of some duration. As a rule it would be better still to avoid such a subject altogether ; but if he does take it he must first modify it, choosing' in the action that moment which is most lasting and at the same time most pregnant, i.e. in which there is contained most of the past and of the coming moment. There is much to object to in this theory which would condemn altogether such masterpieces as Rubens' Lionhunt or Gericanlt's Hussars, and is not only, as it seems to me, a most insufficient defi- nition of the artistic object, but also leaves un- touched the far more important side of the question, viz., the subjective origin of a work of art. On the whole wo should be justified in saying that Lessing's artistic education was very incomplete, his artistic organisation, if he had any, hardly at all developed. This, in fact, is somewhat the fault of all the German sesthetic theories which have been brought forward during the last hundred years ; nay, Lessing, who saw the point in poetry so ad- mirably, still hai'boured the false and hollow con- ception of the ideal which was the principal mis- liESSINa ON POETBY. Q*! take of "Winclcelmann. Be this, liowever, as it may, I am not here to criticise, but to explain, and I turn again to Lessing's proper field, litera- ture, where his thought was to bear fruit a hun- dredfold. The essence of poetry, Leasing taught, is action ; but action which reveals the complete- ness of human nature, and which must therefore show man in the free movement of passion. The aim of poetry, then, is to reproduce human passions, and to inspire sympathy with them, but a sympathy purely human, free from all personal interest ; and, as poetry is not to produce in us real, material fear and hope, so it does not pursue either moral or religious or political aims : it has its aim in itself. ' True Art" (Darstellwig) , says Goethe, ' has no aim ; it neither approves nor disapproves ; it develops the feelings and actions as they follow each other and out of each other, and by this, and this alone, it enlightens and teaches.' With this the didactic poem was banished from literature, as the descrip- tive had been banished from it by the former theory. And this was the second seed sown be- tween 1760 and 1770. If Winckelmann and Lessing reacted against the sesthetic views of the Fi-ench, Kant and H rS THE SEEDS OP GEEMAlir THOUG.^T. Herder received their first impulse from them ; Kant born ^^^ from Voltaire, it is true, nor from the ^'^*" Encyclopaedists (with the exception of Diderot, who differed from them in many respects, and had immense influence on German thought), but principally from Buflfon and Rousseau. In his metaphysical thought Kant rests entirely on Newton. He started from Locke and Hume in his psychology, which overthrew all metaphysics as they had been taught till then. In his views of history and humanity, with which we are more especially concerned here, he owed as much to Erousseau, although he reacted partly against him, as he did against Hume's psychology. This he only developed twenty years later, thereby producing in philosophical science a revolution only to be compared with that effected by Newton in the natural sciences; but they belong to the periods which we shall have to consider in our fifth lecture. To-day we must fix our attention on the Kant of 1766, not the Kant of 1787. Till then, as lie shows in his "Natural History of the Heavens,' which was inspired by Newton, Kant considered the history of manlcind, somewhat like that of nature, in the light of a deadly struggle for life. Just aa our planet through terrible cata- ROtrSSEAU's ETHICS. 99 strophes and cataclysms liad shaped itself into a dwelling for reasonable beings, so humanity ad- vances through wars and revolutions towards per- fection ; and just as nature emerges more and more out of chaos into organisation, so the human miud frees itself more and more from the tumult of blind passions, and through perfecting of the intellect forms a pure image of the eternal har- mony of the universe. Few individuals, however, attain this lofty aim ; the great majority vege- tate like plants ; millions of germs perish ; the progress of humanity takes place only in the high spheres of a privileged few. This aristocratic belief was deeply shaken by the reading of Eousseau's works towards 1760. Kousseau, as you all remember, saw in the progress of art and science the cause of immorality as well as of inequality among men. He represented the natural state of man as good, and contended that his superiority over animals was not in his iatelli- gence, but in his heart. Now, as feeling is not, like intelligence, the privilege of a few, as it is the common possession of men, the whole demo- cratic view of Rousseau results from this deceptive paradox. Kant adopted this theory, though in a modified form, in his ' Considerations on the Senti- H 2 100 THE SEEDS OF GEKMAN THOUGHT. xnent of the Beautiful and the Sublime,' which appeared in 1764, eight years after Burke's -work on the same subject, with which, however, it has much less in common than with Lessing's 'Laocoon.' According to Kant's correction of Rousseau's views, it is no longer the intellectual culture of privileged classes or individuals which is the aim of history, but the culture of the masses through the education of their feelings. In this respect he allows that a retrograde move- ment has taken place, which is also a progres- sive one — retrograde compared with Greek anti- quity ; progressive compared with the savage state of primitive tribes. For he holds that the per- fection of human nature was realised in the sim.ple civilisation of the ancients, and by no means shares Rousseau's enthusiasm for savages. He preaches a return to nature, but finds nature, not in the primitive times which knew no art and no thought, but, like Winckelmann, in the Hellenic civilisation which had remained faithful to nature. There, indeed, was a union of true nature and true culture, and Kant hoped that humanity might come again to such a state through a simpler education ; nay, he believed that it will be the final resiilt of all the warfare and movement KANt'S idea of OIVILISATIOlSr. 101 of history. No doubt, man only acts within the given limits of nationality, epoch, and climate ; but he must strive, and will strive with success, to de- velop more and more the purely human in him- self. National distinctions will not, therefore, disappear; onlj"^ they will be no longer contrasts,, but merely varieties and gradations of character — a view which was entirely accepted by Lessing and Herder, Goethe and Schiller, and has re- mained the German view of cosmopolitanism and nationality. Kant goes a step farther on the way to which Rousseau had directed him. The motive power in Nature is pleasure and pain, the sensation of what furthers and what im- pedes the development of life. But in man a whole series of more delicate sensations is added to those of pleasure and pain : the sensations of ideal worth, sensations which are less strong but more durable than the material ones. Such is the feeling of honour — an inferior feeling still, because it depends upon the judgment of others and implies a selfish personal interest. Such is sympathy, which is above all selfish personal interest — nay, is the contradiction of it — but lacks duration and con- sistency. Such is above all the feeling of duty, •which makes us sacrifice our personal interest, not 102 THE SEEDS OF GEEMAN THOXTGHT. according to momentary impulse, but to a fixed and durable rule of conduct. It has its origin in the feeling of one's own dignity, which dignity we grant to every other human being, and which we respect in him ; for man, who lives in conformity with nature, both esteems himself and considers every human being as a fellow-creature deserving esteem. This feeling once awakened, the beauty of the soul becomes the highest aesthetic and moral ideal. Among the moderns, the Italians through fine art, the French through elegance and taste, the English through earnestness and depth, have come nearest to this ideal. 'By their feeling of duty, by their unbending fidelity to principles, by their enthusiasm for the rights and dignity of man, the English set an example to all nations.' The Germans follow slowly in the cultivation of aesthetic and moral feeling. Once freed and cured of their present vices, leading a free and national life, they will perhaps unite the virtues of the French and English, delicacy of taste and a strong- sense of duty ; and a new Hellenic life will blossom once more. This hope, this ideal, animated the whole of this and the next generation. Ger- many was to become a new Greece ; humanism in the highest sense, intellectual, moral, and herdee's pibst appeaeancb. 103 social, was to be realised by her. But none at that time, except Kant and Herder, saw clearly what ■was the preliminary condition for such a second Renaissance. 'What is wanting to our country,' said Herder, almost at the same moment as Kant, ' is public feeling, a noble pride, which is not to be organised according to foreign patterns, but will organise itself according to its own nature, as other nations have always done : to be Germans on our own well-defended soil.' So spoke the fourth of the German prophets. Herder. He was the first to draw out the con- sequences involved in the teaching of his master, Kant, that the purely human was the aim of history and culture, a teaching which we ought to consider as the seed which, next to Winckelmann's and Lessing's, worked most powerfully on the German mind. True, Kant's earlier writings (although composed in a style of such eloquence that the reader sometimes wonders how the same hand could have written in the dry and abstract style of the ' Critic of Judgment ') did not waken so loud an echo as the contemporary works of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder. Still they fell on good ground, and proved in the long run as fertile as, perhaps more fertile than, the seeds sown by his contemt)oraries. 104 THE SEEDS OP GEBMAST THOUGHT. I have pronounced the name of Hsrder, and I have called him a prophet. Such a name he indeed Herder deserves more, perhaps, than any man of born 1744: ^^^ j^^g^ century. He had the soul and he had the language of a seer, and it was as a seer that he worked upon his contemporaries. In reality he belongs to the next generation, although his hrst work appeared at the same moment as the writ- ings, which I have noticed, of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Kant. He was only twenty-two, and an obscure teacher in the distant Baltic provinces under Russian rule, when his 'Fragmente' ap- peared in 1766, and ran through Germany with the quickness of a train of gunpowder. With him, then, the new generation made its entrance. Older than Goethe, Biirger, Jacobi, Voss, by four or five years on]j, he became their master at once, the preacher of the new literary gospel, to whom they listened as if ho had been inspired. It is perliaiDS^ — nay, it is certainly— a great dis- advantage that I should have chosen a subject and adopted a plan of treating it, which obliges me to pass by the men and their lives, their moral character, their living persons, and to present to you only their ideas, detached from life like fruits from the tree : their ideas, moreover, in an INFLUENCE OF HEEDEE. 105 abstract form and condensed in a few words. Still the subject is so vast, and our time so short, that I must needs thus confine myself, however dry and unattractive my subject must consequently become. I regret it often, however, and never can I regret it more than Avhen I speak of Herder, who was neither a great writer, nor a great in- vestigator and discoverer, nor an accomplished poet, but who was a mighty personality and whose doctrine itself was, so to speak, the doctrine of personality, Wo one, Kant perhaps alone excepted, has con- tributed more to the stock of German thought, or has ever exercised gi'eater or more lasting influence over an age, a nation, or the world at large than Herder. Like the genuine rebel he was, he -began by turning upside down the science and literature which then reigned, as Kant was to do with the philosophical speculation of his time. He was a revolutionist indeed, liessing would fain have paused after having freed the laws of composition from the hoary over- growth of time, false interpretation, and erroneous application. He never had the slightest intention of attacking the laws themselves. But, however great a man's genius may be, lie cannot stem at 106 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT. his will the current which carries away a whole generation with it — particularly when lie has himself cleared the road for it by removing the obstacles which stood in its way. Every Mirabeau finds a Danton to outstep him. Lessing had claimed the right of individual genius to modify rule, and five years had hardly elapsed after the publication of his ' Dramaturgic ' when the literary montagne already urged a radical abo- lition of all literary legislation and proclaimed the right of genius to absolute self-government. Reform had drifted into revolution; and Herder was marching at the head of the insurgents. Before showing the influence exercised by Herder over his contemporaries, let us see what was the nature of the new principle applied by him to theology, history, and poetry. It was the superiority of nature over civilisation, and of in- tuition over reason. The essence of Herder's ideas lay in continually opposing synthesis to analysis, the individual to rule, spontaneous im- pulse to conscious action, organism to mechan- ism, development and growth to legislation and creation — in a word, in placing the fieri above the facere. This was the basis of the creed professed by that school of ' original geniuses ' IDEAS OP NATURE. 107 ■which he was leading to battle against the religious, literai-y, and scientific rationalism of the age. No man finds his starting-point within himself. The starting-point ■ of German thought was in France, as that of French thought had been in England. It was more particularly from Rousseau that Herder received his first impulse. Ko„g.,eau'3 The reaction against the exclusive wor- ^"''"^"'=^- ship of reason had begun precisely in those countries which had been foremost in establishing it. It was the land of Pope and Hume which gave birth to Burns and Burke ; and the writings of Lowth and Wood, of Young and Macpherson had struck out in literature and criticism that path on which Rousseau was to lead the latter half of the century in political and social matters. Mankind was to return to nature, to that good parent whose works had become disfigured by the manners and customs of a polished, refined society. It is difficult for us in our days to form any ade- quate conception of the effect produced by Rous- seau's ' Discourse on Inequality ' at the time when it appeared. ' It is impossible to speak otherwise than with secret veneration of these lofty ideas and sublime thoughts,' exclaimed Lessing, then 108 THE SFEDS OP GEEMAN THOUGHT. a yonng man, but already very little disposed to be sentimental. Kant actually forgot his daily walk while he perused ' Emile.' Even ten years later, Schiller comj)ared Eousseau to Socrates — ' Eousseau, who perished by the hands of Chris- tians; Eoussean, who would fain make human beings out of Christians.' Herder, while yet a student, addressed enthusiastic verses to Roussea.u, in which he chose him for ' his guide through life.' One must read the description which Goethe has left of the impression made on the youth of Ger- many by Rousseau's works. What it was in France is well known. We smile at those diminutive English parks which replaced Le Notre's stately avenues, at the farmyards established in royal de- mesnes, and at the queens who turned themselves into dairymaids. When we read of the great ladies of the eighteenth century suckling their infants amidst a group of elegants, we are often tempted to see more affectation in it than thei-e really was. Everything in that powdered and hooped company had become so artificial that any symptom of naturalism appeared as a deliverance, passed for a protest against unnatural refinement, and really was a thoroughly justified reaction against the opposite extreme. Nothing, indeed. POETRY AND OOMLMON SENSE. 109 could be more justifiable than Rousseau's oppo- sition to Voltaire and the Bncyclopa3dists ; for what was it but the rebellion of feeling against reason which till then had restrained and en- thralled it — of feeling which burst the tight ligatures by which rtw.n had sought to confine their hearts, in the effort to shake off reason's yoke and obtain brea.thing room for itself? In Germany too, the spirit of the 'Eneyclo- pa3dia ' was then reigning, or at least threaten- ing to reign. The great Frederick, Nicolai and his followers in Berlin, Wieland himself, were con- fii'med rationalists at heart, although the rational- ism of the latter was draped in Shaftesbury's sesthetical epicurism. We find common sense, not sentiment, ruling all things. Even in Mendelssohn and Lessing, although their in- spiration is so different from that of the French and English rationalists, light is the characteristic quality. How should such minds, in which everything was clearness, precision, and accuracy, have any room left for vague twi- light ? Now, that same precise, matter of fact, uncompromising thing which we denominate common sense never did engender poetry, and cMaroscuri will exist in the depths of man's 110 THE SEEDS OF GEBMAN THOUGHT. nature. Such things as dim apprehensions, pre- sentiments, reverie, lie dormant within the in- nermost recesses of the ,hunian soul — nay, form, mayhap, the most precious of its treasures. If we seek to light up these dark corners, not by the mild and unfailing light of inward revelation or intuition, but by the dazzling and often mis- leading lantern of reason, we may chase from their haiints the spirits which have taken up their abode there. Then, as often happens, we may only suc- ceed in driving them to seek refuge in mystery elsewhere, and to assume the form of a grosser superstition, while, if wholly cast out, thej' leave behind them a blank void together with a painful longing to fill it up again. An Aene- sidemus provokes an Apollonius of Tyana ; and the d'Holbachs and Helvetiuses are followed by the Cagliostros and Mesmers. Herein lay Herder's right of protest against the prose of common sense, as against the moralising didacti- cism of German poetry, from which even Lessing was unable entirely to free his contemporaries, and against the petrified forms of citizen life, religion and science in Germany ; for Herder's protest against one-sided rationalism never de- generated into a defence of superstition or mys- tidism. HKRDER AND ROUSSEAU. Ill Whereas Eousseau had chiefly sought to re- establish nature's rights in social matters, Herder wished to establish them in things of the Herder's intellect. In that lies his originality. It 1'"°<=>p'«^- was by this he developed and continued what Eous- sea.u had begun, and it was by this that he was finally induced to turn round upon Rousseau and react against him. While searching for nature's unconscious proceeding in her intellectual creation of what we call language, religion, and poetry, he ended by discovering the secret of her process in creating society and th^ state, and found this pro- cess to be the antipodes of the Contrat Social. You will find in Herder's earliest writings the ideas developed twenty-five years later in Burke's ' Ee- flections.' ' But it was not Rousseau alone who acted upon Herder and his master Hamann, ' the Magi- cian of the North,' as they used to call him. Herder's mind was stirred by the English works on Homer, by the poetry of the Bible, by Shake- speare, by Percy's ballads ; as he was also im- ' Mr. Leslie Stephen and Mr. John Morley have abundantly proved that Burke expressed this fundamental belief of his life as early as 1756 in his Vindication of IfiUural Society; but he expressed it en passant without developing it, and without finding an echo, as he did thirty-iive years lalpr, and as Herder did from the outset. 112 THE SEEDS OP GEEMAN THOUGHT. pressed by Buffon's profound views of nature and the cohesion of intellectual and physical life. Still it was Rousseau's idea, that the condition of human development lay in the enlightenment and perfecting, not of our reasoning faculty, but of our feelings, which led him to investigate the elementary operations of the soul. These operations soon assumed in his eyes the character of infallible powers. Instinctive, intuitive man, with all the energies of body and mind unimpnired, became the ideal man. Everybody and every- thing was to be looked at, not dissolved, as abstract philosophy had dissolved it, into its parts by analysis, nor detached from the natural cir- cumstances, but in the combination of the parts in an indivisible whole. So everybody was to act. Coherence, cohesioii became the watch- word. Not isolated faculties, but only all the faculties combined, could grasp the outward as well as the inner world. Intuition is all. Ms- thetic rules as well as moral laws ought to be put aside. Even in science sight is to replace analj'sis. Here we have the germ of that contrast between Herder and Kant which was to break out so much la.ter. Indeed, both Kant and Herder gave definitive and systematic shape to their ideas only BERBER AND KANT. 113 twenty j'ears later, and, althcugli starting from the same point, reached very different conclusions. So did Goethe and Schiller, whose poetical pro- duction began under the powerful influence of Herder's views, but was afterwards deeply modi- fied through Kant and a more methodical study of nature. To-day we only contemplate their spring, which was the spring also of German in- tellectual life — a spring full, of course, like all springs, of promises which were not kept ; full of terrible storms also, which, however, proved to be salutary in the end; full, above all, of a charming freshness which the literature of summer did not find again. Herder himself, the mighty representative of this age — he in whose work all the new ideas which have animated the intellectual world during fifty years are in germ — Herder himself remained always a youth, ever unable to give a definite and artistically measured form to his thought. Her- der's very universality was injurious to him. His range was too vast to allow of his grasping any- thing firmly : il emhrassa trap pour bien etreindre. His ever-wandering eye never could restrict itself to one narrow spot, and his enthusiasm reminds U3 more of a burning steppe than the concen- I 114 THE SESDS OF GEEMAK' THOUGHT. trated, persistent glow of a furnace. He canglxt glimpses — 1 might almost say lie had the visions of a genius, upon all subjects, mastering none completely; and thus, while able to give the architect the most valuable suggestions, he was himself utterly at a loss to construct the smallest edifice. No man ever scattered abroad a greater quantity of fruitful seeds than he; yet at the close of his career he found that he had not tilled a single corner of his own field according to rule. It is undeniable that his works are more remarkable for the variety than for the profundity of the learning they contain, as he himself was endowed with more imagination than good sense, with more ardour than thoroughness. It was precisely these defects, nevertheless, which determined his immense and immediate Herder's influence. He was certainly one of the action, greatest incentive powers the world has ever known. ' Who is this modern Pindar who has just made his appearance amongst you ? ' wrote Winclcolmann from Rome in 1767, when Herder's ' Fragments ' had just appeared. ' This, to be sure, is a madman or a genius,' exclaimed Wieland. ' Wlioever may be the author,' Lessing said to Mcolai, ' he is at any rate the only one for HERDER S rUNDAMBNTAL IDEA. 115 whom it is worth my while to publish my ideas.' If the mature generation spoke thus, what must have been the efiect of the youthful prophet upon the unripe one ? Nor is the fact astonishing. By dint of analysing human nature, and introducing into history the division of labour, people had come to such a point that, as Mephistoplieles has it, 'they held the parts in their hands, the intel- lectual link alone being wanting.' It was Herder's unmethodical visionary imaginabion which dis- covered the failing link, and reunited what analysis had severed. ' Everything that man undertakes to produce, whether by action, word, or in whatsoever way, ought to spring from the union of all his faculties. All that is isolated is condemnable.' These are the words in which Goethe sums up the fundamental idea which inspired Herder's master Hamann and Herder himself. Nothing, he would say, is in reality isolated, and just as each individual sense is assisted by the four others in the perception of any object which absorbs our attention, so do memory and imagination likewise co-operate with judgment and perception in enabling us to acquire our knowledge of things. This union of all the faculties, this primitive entireness of the individual, 1 2 110 THE SEEDS OP GEKMAlf THOUGHT. is what we must endeavour to recover, such as it was in the early ages, ere abstract rules had been thought of — times when each individual acted, thought, and spoke according to inspiration and direct view. And what is true of individuals is true of nations. What they produce — laws, con- stitutions, religions, poetry — always is^ in a way, a collective work, the result of a union of all faculties and forces. This was the fourth great mother-idea, if I may so call it, that gave birth to the German view of mind and nature, man and historj', which we have proposed to examine. We have now to see what became of the seeds of thought sown in Germany between 17(50 and 1770 by the hands of the four great geniuses who are to be con- sidered as the real architects of our culture. We shall try to form to ourselves an idea of Herder's own view on mankind and history in his maturer age, of Goethe's view on mankind and nature, Kant's view on mankind and morality, Schiller's view on mankind and art. LECTUEE IV. THE REIGN OP HERDBK. 1770-1786. We have seen that the principal ideas which Germany had to develop and illustrate in her national literature and in her scientific work were almost all thrown on the intellectual market of Europe shortly after the conclusion of the Seven Years' War. Winckelmann gave new life to an- ticjuity by applying to it a new historical method. Lessing traced the limits between the fine arts and poetry, assigning to each of them a domain not to be overstepped. Kant, correcting Rousseau's view of the history of mankind, contended that the ideal aim of mankind was not the natural state of the savage as Rousseau held, but a state of nature combined with intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and political development, such as was realised in Greece. Herder, finally, starting likewise from 118 THE REIGN OP HEEDEE. Rousseau, believed all great creations of humanity to 1)6 the work of spontaneous action, either indi- vidual or collective and national, not tlie inten- tional result of self-conscious activity. The three first of these, four great men still belong to the generation of 1760, as we should call the men born in the second and third decade of the century ; the last, Herder, born in 1744, already belongs to the following generation, that of Goethe. His marvellous precocity alone permitted him to fight at the side of Lessing, his elder by fifteen years. It seems natural that the youngest of the prophets should also be the one. most eagerly listened to by the youth of his country; it becomes more natural when we take into account the inspired and inspiring personality of the man who at twenty- two stirred the German world by his apparent paradoxes, who at twenty-six was the Mentor, the initiator, the guiding genius of Goethe, his junior only by five years. And not of Goethe alone, although his personal relations with him were more intimate than with others, but of the whole generation of 1775. It is not too much to say that he inspired all the writers of this period of literary history — and Germany had then scarcely any but literary history — the Sturm- und Drang- .hbbdee's mature works. 119 periods, -which lasted from about 1770 till about 1786. Herder, it is true, gave to Lis thoughts their lasting and determined form only in 1784, when he published his principal work, the ' Ideas on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.' This great book, however, only develops the con- ceptions which were in the germ in the ' Frag- ments,' the 'Critical Rylva3,' and the 'Origin of Language,' just as in the ' Letters on the Study of Theology ' and the ' Spirit of Hebrew Poetry ' (1781-1782) we find the very thoughts which he had laid before the public ten years earlier in his ' Most Ancient Document of Humanity ' — thoughts which opened quite a new insight into the secret laboratory of language, poetry, and religion. Even the memorable book, which has been father to all the histories of poetiy, religion, language and law of our century — even the ' Ideas ' — are unfinished, diffusely written in a loose disconnected style, the style of a seer rather than of a thinker, and still less that of an historian ; very in- sufficient if we look upon them as a collec- tion of researches, nay, totally a)itiquated as far as form and materials are concerned. But as for the thoughts contained in it, the book seems written but yesterday ; it might easily J 20 THE EEIGN OF IIBKDEK. be taken for a sketch from the pen of M. Taine. The one chief conception, we have seen, which Herder sought to impress on his age, was that of Herder's evolution, growth, fieri, which he had views. borrowed from the vegetable kingdom in order to apply it to political, religious, and literary history ; na.y, to the natural history of man and to that of his language. He, and Hamann before him, had been struck by the little help obtained from isolated observation towards arriving at the truth. They saw that almost all our knowledge is acquired by synthetic and unconscious observation, or, to use a more accu- rate term, reception; while intuition — i.e. the spark which suddenly shows the link and coherence of such synthetic knowledge, and which is after all only the result of long unconscious reception and unconscious maturation of what has been received — seemed to them infinitely superior to consciously generalising and arguing reason, which had been so exclusively used in their century. Hence their two leading ideas, which gradually acquired depth, width, and strength, became the two leading ideas of German culture : the first being that of the totality of individual or collective forces as opposed herder's views. 121 to the division of labour ; tlie second, that of the unintentional origin of all great individual and collective creations. Now the unconscious creative power, working in man and nature, manifests itself nowhere so strikingly as in genius — the genius not only of the great legislator, captain, philosopher, poet, but also the genius of naivete, i.e. of any single human being, or collection of human beings, not yet affected by our abstract and analytical habits. Our minds to day are differently framed from those of primitive men, owing to the education of our youth for so many past generations. We are accustomed to reflect and analyse so much that we hardly see or feel any more. "We no longer poetise in or on the living world; our poetry is not the result of the contact of objects with our soul; we manufacture artificially both the subjects and the modes of treating them ; and we have practised this so long and so frequently, and we begin to do so at so early an age, that a free education would have small chance of sviccess with us ; for how should the lame learn to walk upright 1 The starting-point, then, of Herder's whole philosophy is the conception of genius as the one acting force of the intellectual world. ' What is it in Homer that compensates for his ignorance of the rules, deduced from the study of his works by 122 THE KEIGN OF HERDER. Aristotle ? What in Shakespeare that makes up for his direct violation even of these laws of criti- cism ? The unanimous answer to the question will be : Genius.' These vyorda of Ham.ann may be considered as the theme of all Herder's varia- tions. Now, the nature of genius consists in the elementary operations of the mind before habits of analysis and abstraction have severed the differ- ent mental faculties and have accustomed man to form general conceptions and to influence his will by them. Its essence is direct sensation and in- tuition, unconscious production. It lives prin- cipally in popular poetry, legislation, and religion, not yet influenced by rationalistic culture. Even nowadays it cannot survive unless it keeps itself free from all rationalistic rules, and obeys only its inspiration. We shall see by and by to what errors this principle led as soon as it was applied to science, which rests entirely on the combination of observation and reasoning ; and to morals, the very essence of which is connected in our own minds with the idea of duty. Let us confine our- selves for the moment to poetry and history in the widest sense, comprising theology, philology, &c., where this point of view was exceedingly fertile and salutary. heedbe's views on poetet. 123 Indeed, the much vaunted originality not being of frequent occurrence in the eminently artificial society of the eighteenth century, it be- q^ came necessary, in order to find it in all °^ '^'' its purity, either to ascend to epochs which preceded civilisation — in other words, to primitive nations, — or to descend to those popular strata of the existing age which had as yet escaped the contagion of corrupt culture. Herder, you see, was a kind of literary Eousseau. He may be said to have renovated and regenerated the poetry of his time by immersing it in the true sources of all great poetry : nature and popular life. He it was who first established the fact, subsequently confirmed by historical discovery, that poetry always pre- ceded prose in the annals of mankind ; he it was who first proclaimed the poetical superiority of ages in which the entireness of individuality was not yet broken. In the flourishing psriodsi of elegant prose, he would say, nothing but art can prosper in poetry. Later on we find even mere versified philosophy and half-way poetry. On the other hand, the language of those times, when words had not yet been divided into nobles, middle-class, and plebeians, nor had prose b3en sifted, was the richest for poetical purposes. Our tongue compared with the idiom of the savage seems adapted rather for reflection 124 THE EEIGIT OF HEKDEE. than for the senses or imagination. The rhythm of popular verse is so delicate, so rapid, so precise, that it is no easy- matter for us bookworms to detect it with our eyes ; but do not imagine it to have been equally difficult for those living populations who listened to, instead of reading it ; who were accustomed to the sound of it from their infancy ; who themselves sang it, and whose ear had been formed by its cadence. And here Herder enters into one of the topics which he has made so wonderfully his own — that of the organ of the ear — but it would lead me too far if I were to quote in extenso. Suffice it to say that his essentially musical nature made him par- ticularly apt to listen to that innermost life of the soul, which can be expressed only by tone and rhythm. If he so continually and persistently contemplates primitive ages, and incessantly op- poses them to his own conventional age, it is chiefly because that innermost life was more intense then, because thoughts, facts, images even of primitive man had not yet been severed from this innermost life, and consequently still wanted the help of music, as the only adequate language of it, in order to give them expression. Poetry in those happy days lived in the ears of the people, on the lips and in the harps of living bards ; it HERDEE S THEOKY ON POETKY. 125 sang of history, of the events of the clay, of mysteries, miracles, and signs. It was the flower of a nation's cha- racter, language, and country; of its occupations, its prejudices, its passions, its aspirations, and its soul. The whole modern theory concerning epic poetry is contained in embryo in these words. Yet Herder goes still further, and formulates it so distinctly that F. A. Wolf had scarcely anything to do but to develop and establish it more firmly by means of that detailed and solid system of argumentation, which made him the true father of the Homeric idea, as comprehended by our age. The greatest among Greek bards was also the greatest among popular poets. His sublime work is no epopceia ; it is the epos, the story, the legend, the living history of the people. He did not sit down on velvet cushions to compose a poem in twice twenty-four cantos according to the rules of Aristotle. Words like these naturally fell like thunder- bolts on that eighteenth century, so self-satisfied, so vain of the great progress it had achieved and of the high culture it had attained. Versification as an art had been brought to such perfection, the criterion by which the merits and demerits of poetry were to be measured had been so accurately defined, poetry itself was so -easily learnt and 12G THE REIGN OF HEEDEK. taught, that the world was completely dumb- foundered at this strange enthusiasm for miserable, despised savages. Moreover, Herder added pi-actice to theory. During his stay at Strassburg, he had already begun with Goethe to search for popular songs, and great was his delight when he was able to send one to his affianced bride, which lie had gathered from the motith of the people. No book, since the appearance of Percy's ' Relics,' had met with such success in Germany as the 'Voices of Nations,' a series of volumes containing popular poems in masterly translations, and pub- lished by Herder in 1778. It became indeed the model for all the numerous collections of the kind which have come out during the nineteenth century. But Herder not only discovered true living poetry in the distant ages of Homer and the cloudy isles of Ossian ; he found it out in modern times, in his own nation, lending a ready ear to the simple ditties of the woodcutter and the peasant, of the journeyman and the soldier, of the hunter and the shepherd. Germany owes the revival of the lied or song entirely to Herddr and to his ' Stinimen der Volker.' When we read the verses which Goethe wrote at Leipzig, before THE BALLAD AND THE LIED. 127 meeting with Herder, we may well be permitted to doubb whether Germany would have ever possessed those unrivalled pearls, his little songs of love, ad- dressed to Friederike and Lili, if he had not known him. It is, at any rate, very doubtful whether it would have had the ' Erlkonig ' or the ' fisherman.' Of these, however, England possesses beautiful examples in her own ballads; not so of the lied, with which even Burns's poems have little in common, and of vfhich we find only the pendant in Shakespeare's little songs, such as — Blow, blow, thou winter wind I and others. It is difficult indeed to define the lied. What is the tied ? Herder asked. It is neither a sonnet nor a madrigal, poems for the study and the salon ; it is no composition for painting with hannonioiis colour- ing ; light and brilliancy are not its merits. . . . The essence of the lied is song, not painting. Its perfection resides in the melodious course of a passion or a sentiment. ... If this melody be wanting in a lied, if it have not the poetical modulation, the right tone, it may contain ever so many images, it may be graceful, it may have colouring ; it never can be a lied. And as with the epic poem, the ballad, and the so with the fable. Lafontaine had made 128 THE REIGN OF HERBER. delicious talleaux de genre of the fable of the ancients ; Lessing concise, epigrammatic satires. Naj, Lessing had still defined the fable in the spirit of the eighteenth century as an intentional form of moral teaching : ' If we reduce a general proposition to a particular case, lending it reality and making a story out of it, in which the general proposition may be recognised by means of in- tuition, we call this a fable.' How much deeper is Herder's view. In his eyes fables originally were, and would again become, were we to live less artificially, the ' poetical illustration of a lesson of experience by means of a characteristic trait, drawn from animal life and developed by analogy.' In ancient tahles (he says) animals act, because what- ever in nature pi'oduces efiects appeai-s to primitive humanity to act, ... It is analogy which is the parent of poeti-y in fables, not abstraction, still less a dry deduc- tion fi cm the general to the particular. . . . The fable rests ou Nature's eternal consistency and constancy. . . . Its characters are types. . . . The more natural the state in which a nation lived, the more it liked fables. Now, Herder made this refutation of the mechanical theories, then reigning throughout Europe, from his point of view, i.e. that of spon- VIEW OF THE ANCIENT -WORLD. 129 taneous creation without special conscious aim, not only in the domain of the fable, but in that of every kind of poetry. He carefully studied the nature of the epigram in its earliest form, and of q^ f^^^^_ the national drama, as he had studied ''"''•^'' that of the lied and the epic poem, chiefly illus- trating his theories from Greek examples. The ■whole of the ancient world has been looked upon with different eyes since Herder. Viewing the ancients as an historian alone could view them, he opposed his own less refined conceptionof antiquity, not only to the Alexandrian, rather than the Athe- nian, conventional antiquity which found favour with the French and Wieland, but also indirectly and half-unconsciousiy to Winckelmann's some- what cothurnic idealism. For him the first, Achilles and Ajax became chiefs of clans, instead of princes of the blood, or lords of a royal court a la Versailles, as Apollo and Diana became living mythical figures instead of cold allegories. It was Herder who taught young Goethe to laugh at Wieland's powdered and patched Alcestis in his charming satire, ' Gods, heroes, and Wieland' (1774), as it was Herder who made him understand the beauty of the Strassburg Cathedral, then considered as a work of barbarism, and express in his Essay on 130 THE EEIGN OP HEEDEE. ' German Architecture ' those simple and profound thouglits on arb, which ought to have put a stop to all our systematic imitations of past and foreign styles which correspond to nothing in our life. Herder's views, however, failed unfortunately to prevail within the province of plastic art, On His- owing to the powerful and yet too recent *°''-^" influence and authority exercised by Winckelmann. But they penetrated rapidly into all other branches of intellectual activity in Germany; into historical studies particularly, for Herder himself applied his main conception of poetry to the history of states, civil law, and religions. It is true he placed the history of civilisation far above political history. Still he included political history in that of civilisation, and thereby he made a real revolution in historical science, or I had perhaps better say in the art of history. Up to his time the most mechanical teleology had reigned in the philosophy of history. Providence was represented to have created ' cork- trees that men should have wherewithal to stop their bottles ; ' as also, of course, to have prevented Cromwell from setting out for America in order that an instrument might not be wanting to ac- heeder's views on history. 131 complish the Revolution in England. Bossuet's ' Discours sur I'histoire universelle ' is still entirely based upon the programme-idea ; and Montesquieu, in his 'Grandeur et decadence,' if he does not bring in the Divine regisseur, lends to the mortal actors of history plans and intentions, and ascribes to laws and institutions an iniluence which they never had. Herder was tiie first who ventured to leave the alleged aims of Providence as well as those of theo- retical legislation in historical events out of the question, and opposing himself alike to the idea of a preconceived plan, and that of mere chance, refused to see anything in history bej'ond the development of given germs. This has undoubtedly proved the most fertile of modern ideas. ' Each nation contains its centre within itself, as a bullet its centre of gravity. There is nothing within the whole kingdom of God which is a mere means ; everything is at once means and end.' He was the fii'st also to banish the conscious legislators out of primitive history. For him Lycurgus was already what Otfried Miiller proved him to be fifty years later, the legendary judge who, according to tra- dition, codified the secular uses and customs of his tribe, not the inventor of a brand new constitution planned ad hoc like that of the Abbe Sieyes. The K 2 132 THE EEIGN OF HEEDEE. pervading spirit of his great book is a sort of warfare against mechanical causes or abstract ideas, intro- duced as realities into history, and above all a.gainst teleology, which looks for an end or purpose in every event. The historian, he says, ' will never attempt to explain a thing which is by a thing which is not. And with this severe principle all ideals, all phantasmas of a dream-world disappear.' Consequently we must beware of referring the phenomena of history to a design or plan which is unknown to us. To the question, 'Why did Alexander go to India ? ' there is only one answer, ' Because he was Alexander, Philip's son.' In giving up this investigation into a plan of history we are recompensed by getting an insight into the high and beautiful laws of nature. Indeed, ' ... if there is a God in nature, he is also in. history ; for man is also part of the creation, and must, even in his •wildest excesses and passions, obey laws, which are no less bcaiitifiil and excellent than those according to which all the celestial bodies move.' . . . ' The God I look for in history must be the same as the God of nature ; for man is but a tiny particle of the whole, and the history of mankind resemhles that of the worm, closely connected with the tissue it inhabits ; therefore the natural laws by which the Deity reveals itself must reign in man likewise.' And elsewhere : ' . . . The whole history of humanity is heedee's views on the law op history. 133 pure natural history of human forces, actions, and instincts, according to place and time.' This is tlie view of human history which we shall afterwards see Goethe applying to nature, nor can the resemblance surprise any one who knows how intimately the two men lived together. Herder has not only a wonderful insight into the early periods of history — one must read his diary during his journey from Riga to Nantes to see how the mystery of the formation of States, and of the migration and settlements of nations, revealed itself to him — he has even profound views on the prehistoric state of mankind which belongs still, up to a certain point, to natural history. And a great naturalist of our dtij'S (Baer) could say of him that he ' had drawn with the divination of a seer the outlines of comparative anatomy of which the works of Cuvier and our time give only the commentary.' Now, Herder's principle as ap- plied to historic as well as prehistoric times, is that everywhere on earth all beings become what they can become according to the situation and necessities of place, according to the circumstances and opportunities of time, and according to the inborn or acquired physical and intellectual character of the race ; in other words, M. Taine'a 134 TUB REIGN OP HEEDEE. I ' milieu, moment, et race.' No doubt, Montes- quieu in his famous seventeenth and eighteenth books had already given great importance to the influence of climate and soil on the destinies of nations ; but he, wisely enough, made of them only contributing elements, and although his views on this matter taken in themselves may be sounder than those of Herder, it is certain that they have not acted on the general current of thought as Herder's did, perhaps also because he exposed them less persistently and less enthusiasti- cally. The plan which Herder proposed to the future historian was to take his start from the Universum, marking the position of the earth in it, and to show the condition of life on earth, resulting from this position; then to describe the typical forms of plants and animals ' until the physiognomy of the earth as a whole should be entirely grasped with all the conditions it offers for human historj'.' The great geographical work of K. Eitter, who wrote these words, as well as those of A. von Hum- boldt, are the fruit of this method recommended by Herder. All this, however, was for him only the basis of a History of Man. Man is the last and highest link in the develop- VIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT OP MAN. 135 ment of the creating power, which lives in the earth. He shows how the progress of nature pro- duced a more and more refined brain until it arrived at man. The same organic evolution which gave him the most developed brain gave him also language. Indeed, whilst one-half of the cul- tivated world still saw in language a gift or reve- lation of God, the other an intentional, human invention, Herder already saw in it, what we all nowadays see in it, a potential instrument for the development of reason, a natural product of the soul's vital forces, an ever self-creating process. For it is through language that we must under- stand the birth of abstract reason, i.e. the faculty of forming general conceptions, which is not a primi- tive faculty, common to all men from the begin- ning, but one acquired by the co-operation of language and intelligence. According to Herder's conception of organic development, therefore, the human alone can be the ideal aim of mankind. A morality, which affects anything higher, would be a delusion. If we examine mankind — if we look on mankind, as we know it to be, i.e. according to tlie laws which are within it — we know nothing higher than humanity in man. Even When we imagine angels and gods, we imagine them as ideal, higher men. 136 THE KEIGN OF HERDEE. The Deity has limited man's possibilities only by time, place, and innate faculties. The one active force is the creative power of man's nature, which the environment hinders or furthers more or less. Now, the law of this progress and develop- ment is, that all destructive forces must, in the long run, not only succumb to the conservative forces, but also serve to the development of the whole. This the history of the animal kingdom shows as well as the history of mankind.' Though Herder is continually appealing to God, all this sounds singularly like pantheism. On Reii- ^^^ ^^^ words which I have quoted are ^°"' not such as he would have penned at Biickeburg at the time he made the first rough sketch of his philosophy of history. But, since then, he, like Lessing, Goethe, and nearly all the eminent minds of the age, had tasted of Spinoza and relished him extremely. In spite of the scandal produced among believers by this change. Herder never renounced his new faith, even after having attained the highest ecclesiastical dignities. He sought to conceal it, more certainly from him- self than from others, and in order to do this he ' See the ' Ideas ' pas-nm, and particularly Book xv. 1 and 2 Cf. Book xiii. 7, on Greek history in general. herdee's views on religion. 137 was obliged to put much into Christianity which does not really belong to it, as many othei's before and since have done. The pearl is found (he says) ; no one can bviild upon any other foundation than that of Christ. As this Gospel needs no external signs, heing its own proof, neither can it be overthrown by theological or other doubts. ... In all the things which occur in the world, it is its kingdoD[i which is coming ; for this is the business of Piovidence, and it is the aim and character, the very essence of the human race to accomplish the work of Providence. Put no trust in phantoms. The kingdom of God is within you. This religion, you see, was a very wide one, and this species of Christianity very closely re- sembled the doctrines of Spinoza. But it was precisely in virtue of the peculiar wideness of his Christianity that Herder exercised so great an influence over his country. If the German people has been — till lately, at least — the only one which has remained deeplj"^ religious without paying any great attention to external worship, religious observance and dogmas, ib has merely followed the example which Herder gave it. The question has been raised whether a man can be moral independently of religion — independently of re- ligious dogma is undoubtedly what is meant, for other- 138 THE KEIGN OF HBRDEK. t wise this question would lie resolved by itself. True religion cannot exist without morality, and true morality is religion under whatsvei' form it may show itself. This, translated into Luther's language, means that faith, goes before works : the man who lives in the ideal cannot be immoral, the modern German would say, in accordance therein with the unconscious belief of all his forefathers. As far from orthodoxy as from rationalism. Herder constantly appeals from dogma and reasoning to religious feeling: 'Flee religious controversy as you would the plague,' he used to say, ' for it is impossible to dispute about what religion is. It is as impossible either to denj^ or affirm it by dis- cussion as to paint the mind or hear light.' It is precisely because Christianity is an especially human religion that Herder feels himself a Chris- tian ; for the development of the human was the ideal of his life. The natural nobility of man was great enough in his eyes without claiming a supra- natural one for him. Herder's religious development is very charac- teristic of Germany in the past century. The Bible was for him the earliest source of intellectual culture, as it was for Klopstoclr, Lessing, and above all Goethe. At an early age, however, he rebels heedee's 'most akcient document.' J 39 against the idea of its being a revealed book. Genesis became in his eyes only a kind of theo- gony, like that of Hesiod, nor could he see anything beyond a collection of national chronicles, poems and proverbs, in the rest of the Old Testament. What he discovers in it above all is poetry ; and we iind him defending the Song of Solomon as energetically against mystics as against moralising rationalists. It is necessary to read his eloquent pages on the Mosaic epopocia in order to under- stand the effect which thej' produced in their apparently profane treatment of the subject. Tor Herder, of course, and his countrymen it was only another form of admiration. ' Burn all rational- istic metaphysics ! ' he exclaims. ' The living commentary on the Mosaic monument blows with the morning air.' Herder it was who first taught the world to understand the Oriental way of thinking, who first showed it what Oriental poetry was, and opposed the primitive simplicity of the Bible to the dogmatic interpretation of theologians. And he finds beautiful words to praise the beauty of this Oriental poetry of the Bible. These ideas Herder brought forward for the first time in his ' Most Ancient Document,' which 140 THE EEiaN OP HEEDEE. lie ' had cherished in his heart from his tenderest infancy.' They were taken np again and de- veloped still further eight and ten years later in his ' Letters on the Study of Theology,' and in the ' Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.' He never tires of telling the world that the Bible is not only the basis of our own religion, but also contains that which is the most elevated and ancient in the woi'ld. (At that time the Vedas had not yet been discovered.) It was he above all who opened the world's eyes anew to tiiat poetry which had been hidden from its sight by the mass of allegory, morals, dogmas, philosophical ideas, and law texts with which it had been stifled. For he had the boldness to treat the Bible like any other human document; and by doing so, he rendered possible the history of religion which belongs essentially and exclusively to our age. For nothing less than the example of Herder's deep and sincere religious feeling would have sufficed to enable men of those times to study religion itself without placing them- selves at the point of view of any given religion. The various forms under which mankind have successively or simultaneously tried to satisfy their craving for the infinite and the supernatural, had to be duly respected and loved ; but it was herder's influence on later schools. 1'41 needful also to reach the point at which the believer no longer requires that the infinite and supernatural should have a definite and conven- tional form, in order to adore and dread it. An enthusiastic nature was needed, like that of Her- der, capable of understanding a mystical glow, and yet free-thinking enough not to attribute to himself and his sect alone the privilege of such mystical glow and the immediate conception of the Deity. The Tubingen school would have been an impossibility without Herder, and we may say exactly the same thing with regard to its adver- saries. Ewald would never have written his ' History of the People of Israel ; ' Eunsen would never have composed his great ' Bible-work,' nor his ' God in History,' if Herder had not opened out fresh horizons to theology and historj-. Even E. Renan finds himself still upon ground which Herder has conquered for religious history. Re- spect and sympathy for religion are here allied to an independence of view which regards all religions as issuing from the same religious want, and which substitutes internal for external revelation. Herder no longer explains the origin of posi- tive religion, as it was customary to do in the philosophical camp, by the imposture of priests. 142 THE EEIGN OF HEKDEK. but liistoricallj. Mrst he sees fear and super- stition ; then curiosity, creating cosmogonies, and, ■with the aid of poetical imagination, mythology. He shows that reUgious ideas become simplified, generalised, and purified only by degrees. In the beginning they could only be instinctive, intuitive, sensuous, and consequently local and definite. It was natural that these traditions should be more national than anything else in the world. Everyone spoke through the mouth of his forefathers, saw by the standard of the world which surrounded him ; gave him- self solutions concerning the problems which interested him most, such as were best adapted to his climate, nationality, and traditions. . . . Scandinavia built a world of giants ; the Iroquois made the turtle the machine which explained to him the existence of the earth. The whole of modern religious criticism, its fertility as well as its perils, is contained in these words. For how should a grosser mind, or simply a less poetical, less respectful soul than Herder's, translate all this otherwise than by the well-known words of the arch-scoffer : ' God created man after his own image and man gave it him back ? ' Nor are gross minds, cold and irreverent souls less common among the defenders than among the VIEW OP THE PUTUEE OP MANKIND. 143 detractors of positive religion. Warburtoia would not liave understood Herder better than he waa undei'stood by Paine. Hence the great unpopu- larity of Herder and his disciples in both camps. It is usual to call Herder the apostle of humanitarian ideas, and not without reason, pro- vided a contempt for nationalities be not q^ implied. Herder, like Leasing, who de- humanity, clared patriotism to be a virtue of doubtful worth, like Goethe, like Schiller above all, placed human- ity higher than nationality. In his eyes the title ' man ' was the noblest which could be imagined, and he still belongs entirely to his essentially optimistic century by this very exalted idea of man. Ill his eyes national prejudices were as contempt- ible as were religious and caste prejudices. He thought that a day would come when a single bond would unite all peoples, when a single, un- written religion, a single civilisation, a single morality would bring men together in a common brotherhood. He protested vehemently against national exclusiveness, as he protested against every other species of exclusiveness. He did not wish that any people, not even his own, should be trumpeted forth as the elect ; but he was not the less full of love and reverence for his country on 144 THE EEIGN OP HEEDEK. that aecotint, and I may anticipate what I shall have to say later, by stating that this spirit of temperate patriotism, which desires for our native country an equal, but never a predominant, place among nations, has given the main impulse to the national rerival of Germany in this century, and still moves and sways the mass as well as the elite of the nation. National pride (said Herder) is absurd, ridiculous, and dangerous ; but it is everybody's duty to love his country, and it cannot be loved if it is not honoured, or if it is allowed to be disparaged. It must be defended, and each of us must contribute the utmost in his power to its honour and welfare. Far from being a despiser of his own country. Herder was perhaps the most patriotic German writer of the last century, although he had not continuously ' Hermann, the Cherusk,' and the ' Roman tyrants ' in his mouth like Klopstock and the Stolbergs. He was undoubtedly the one who best understood the degradation and who most deplored the fragmentary condition, the slavery and political decadence of the Emi)ire. He laments that Germany was but ' a thing of the imagination,' that she had no ' common Toice,' that there was no Frederick II. seated upon the worm-eaten herder's views on humanity. 145 throne of the German Csesars. And as, in oppo- sition to Schiller, he desired that poetry should seek her inspiration in real life and not in the ideal world, he likewise wished, in opposition to Goethe, that this reality should be that of public, not for ever that of private, life. In particular his ' Letters on Humanity,' especially the first, are full of these patriotic and political ideas. But it would convey a false impression if I did not add that in his eyes the nation was but ' a member of humankind.' His demand was that nations should exercise a mutual influence over each other by means of their moral and intellectual qualities only, and he saw in a ' free competition of activity among the different nationalities the fundamental condition of the civilisation of mankind.' Certainly it seems to have been his miission to preach the Human, but also to show it in all its manifold forms. For he contended even against Lessing that h.uman development is conditioned by nationality and natural surroundings, that in the vicissitudes of history the ideal of the Human never appears nor ever will appear in one universal form. This man it is who, thanks to some ill- comprehended sentence of a speech made in his youth, has become the ' apostle of cosmopolitism ' 146 THE EEIGN OF HEEDEE. in the eyes of posterity. One ought far rather to say that, after having been the standard-bearer in the revolt of the Teutonic against the Latin spirit by his literary criticism, he was at once the first and the most eloquent defender of that principle of nationalities which has agitated our own century so deeply. By restoring national poetry to its place of honour he contributed indirectly to the revival of patriotic sentiments ; by formulating the German idea he became the foi-erunner of those who, long after, created the German State. As for himself. Herder was a citizen of all coun- tries and ages, as he was a reader of all literatures. He deemed it necessary to know and appreciate the poetry of other countries as well as of his own ; and to be able to do this properly it was in- dispensable that he should place himself amongst the surroundings which had produced it. Now, nature had endowed him for this purpose with a pliability of intelligence, an acuteness of percep- tion, a keenness of sight and hearing, a refined delicacy of taste totally unrivalled. This faculty of appreciating and entering into the spirit of the most divers countries and periods constitutes his chief and true grandeur, and he bequeathed a good part of it to the culture of Germany. This was in reality his cosmopolitism, which has been so often heedek's views on humanity. 147 misrepresented, and about which a legion of his- torians have been content to repeat stereotj'ped judgments, without attempting to subject them to the slightest criticism. This cosmopolitism never for a moment prevented him from being the most German of aH German writers in the general tone of his inspiration, still less from heralding the German idea to the world with that exaggeration which is always to be found in reactions, and which it is the task of our time to moderate. In fact, as we have seen. Herder not only put an end to the remnants of reasoning, didactics, and moralising which even Lessing had still admitted into the. domain of poetry; he combated them also in the field of religion, politics, and historical science, as he also rose up against the idea of rule which Lessing defended, for the essen- tially German conception of individual right. He restored originality, if T may say so, to German poetry and thought by setting limits for a while to the imitation of the ancients ; and the form and spirit of his teaching were eminently' German. For, although Germany has had more than one matter-of-fact and sober genius since Luther, still Herder's rather musical than plastic genius, his high-flown, enthusiastic nature, his want of measure L 2 148. THE EEIGK OP HEEDEE. and of definiteness, his wonderful intuitive power, his rather unmethodical reasoning, and his faculty of assimilation are, after all, more characteristic of the German nature than the practical sense and the energy of a Frederick and a Bismarck, the dialectical prowess of a Lessing, or the plastic power of a Goethe. There was one quality besides, almost lost, it seemed, since the days of Leibnitz, which Herder restored to his nation and bequeathed to its civili- sation and thought : universality and breadth of horizon. Understanding nationality as few per- sons of his time understood it, he subordinated it to humanity, Brought up in reverence for Hellenism, and the first to point out its true character, he discovered the East by intuition. In heart a Christian, he knew how to assimilate all the ' pagan ' humanism of the Renaissance. Pull of admiration for the classical authors, he found the secret of primitive and religious poetry. Liberal in his political sympathies,he demonstrated the laws and consistency of history. No mani- festation of mankind, whatever its form, had a secret for the apostle of humanity. GENERALITY OP THE MOVEMENT. 149 The movement inibiated by Herder was a general one, and it extended from Konigsberg to Ziirich, from Strassburg to Dresden, Sturm- und every town of Germany taking part in it, U'wig- periode. more or less. Not only universities and republics, like Gottingen and Frankfort, but small capitals also, such as Darmstadt, Weimar, Stutt- gart, saw the ' geniuses ' hurl their clamorous challenge and defy the heaven in their desire to renew and regenerate the world by a return to Nature ; for the young disciples, as disciples will do, began forthwith to out-Herder Herder. The preceding generation had been concentrating its powers for action, and Berlin had been Lessing's headquarters. Young Germany of 1775 overflowed the entire country, finding voluntary agents and apostles in all quarters. The same ideas which Hamann had instilled into Herder, when on the shores of the Baltic, were to strike his ear as soon as he approached Switzerland, where Lavater was preaching them with still greater zeal and in more whimsical language than the ' Magician of the North.' When a student atKonigsberg, indeed, Herder had undergone not only Kaiit's influence, Ky,,;™. but also, and still more, Hamann's. He "°' 150 THE EBIGN OP HEKDEE. owed to Kant — not yet the man who wrote the Critic of Pure Reason, and opened new horizons to man's intelligence — the awakening of his philo- sophical thought. I once had the happiness of knowing a philosopher ; he was my teacher. He had the joyous cheerfulness of youth at that happy time ; his open forehead, created ex- pressly for thought, was the seat of imperturbable serenity ; his speech, redundant with ideas, flowed from his lips ; he always had some humorous trait, some witty sally at his disposal. . . . He would constantly bring us back to the simple, unaffected study of nature. . . . He gave me self- confidence, and obliged me to think for myself, for tyranny was foreign to his soul. And Kant himself, on reading some verses of the enthusiastic boy, said: 'When this boiling genius has done fermenting, he will be a very useful man.' Who could then have predicted the desperate warfare which was to break out between these two great men thirty years later? Even then, however, it was .Hamann's more than Kant's merit to have shown Herder the road he was to follow. Hamann is not to be counted among the German classical writers, although he left several volumes ; for all he produced was of a fragmen- tary nature. He abounded in new and original ideas, but there were as many ' nebulous spots as GOTTINGEN. 151 stars on that firmament ' (Jean Panl), and the dis- order of his brain was as clearly reflected in his ' grasshopper-style ' as it was in his odd person. This singularly active power — Goethe called him ' the indispensable, but indigestible leaven ' of the time — must in a great measure, of course, escape the scrutiny of history ; nor is it easy to explain it otherwise than by the persistency with which Hamann harped upon that fundamental theme then about to become the leading principle of the generation : the theme of absolute individual liberty. He excited Herder against the dead letter of poetical rule, as well as against the narrow- minded morality of the middle classes. He was as rebellious against the ' modern State ' of the Philosopher King, as against ' enlightenment ' and rationalism in religion ; but it was reserved to the disciple to set the ' unstrung pearls ' of the Konigsberg ' Magus.' The University of Gottingen was a still more agitated centre of movement than that of Konigs- berg. There Biirger had just written his Gottingen. 'Lenore,' and those other early ballads which at once took Germany by storm ; there some young students had formed among themselves a poetical league, which assembled around the secu- 152 THE KEIGN OF HEKDEE. lar oaks of the neighbouring forest, invoking the memory of Hermann, the liberator, and the Teu- tonic bards, worshipping Klopstoek, and burning Wieland's works. The famous 'Hainbund' num- bered among its associates many celebrated names. There were the two impetuous Counts Stolberg, the ' enemies of tyrants ' — dead tyrants, of course — VosR, the peasant-boy and future poet of ' Louise,' he who gave Germany what Heine called the Vul- gate of Homer, and who, forty years later, declared v/ar upon Fritz Stolberg, when this friend of his youth fled into the arms of Rome ; his brother-in- law, Boie, who published the first poetical alma- nack, the ' Moniteur ' of the League ; melancholy Holty, doomed to early death, and many other poets who afterwards got a high reputation, but the eldest of whom at that time was hardly twenty-two years of age ; sincere and pure and high-minded youths all of them, but somewhat in- tentional in their enthusiasm, not without uncon- scious affectation beneath the surface of their mag- niloquent vehemence; more bent upon looking for the poetical in abstract thought and vague feelings than in sensuous reality and its definite forms. In the South, especially in Wiirtemberg, a soil which has always been productive of revolutionary WUETEMBEEG. 153 radicalism, it was no longer rebellion against literary authority alone which armed the yyurtem- poets. They did not limit themselves '^"'''' to ridiculing, like Biirger, 'Mam'zell la R^gle, nursery-governess and duenna, half French, half Greek, ever ready to watch over the children of the German Muse, preventing them from straying on to the flower-beds and admonishing them to hold up their heads, turn out their toes, and stretch their arms.' Here it was not only against the yoke of scholastic pedantry in science and thought that protest was made, as in the North ; here was not only a platoaic hatred vowed against religious and political oppression, as in the plains of Gottingen ; here there was rebellion against the established authorities as well. Despotism had put such a strain upon the springs in the little counti'y of Suabia that at last they threatened to snap asunder. The worship of Rousseau nowhere found more numerous and more fervent ad- herents than in the native land of Schiller. The young writer of the ' Brigands ' had himself much to bear from the intolerable yoke of ' Denys turned into a schoolmaster.' It is well known how he escaped from the Duke's College by flight, and what eloquent, clamorous protest he hurled 154 THE EEIffN OP HEKDEE. from that tirae against despotism in ' Fiesco,' in ' Cabal and Love,' in ' Don Carlos.' His gipsy- like countryman Weckherlin, who protested in his newspapers, divided his life between prison and exile. Before him Schubart, the journalist, scholar, musician and poet, the model and ideal of Schiller's early days, had raised his voice in impetuous stanzas, and expiated the temerity of his ' Piirsten- gruft ' by ten years of solitary captivity in the famous castle of Hohenasperg, which received within its walls many other high-minded men, determined to resist absolute rule. More to the South still, in the old Swiss re- publics, ' preserved in spirits of wine,' as Goethe used to say, the new ideas also worked Zurich. . •' against the antiquated and petrified forms of state, society, religion. There it was that Postalozzi, inflamed by Rousseau's ' Emile,' at- tempted to elevate the lower classes by a more natural education, without falling into the ex- tremes of the other great school reformer of the day, Basedow, who had also waged war against all the traditional systems. Basedow, however, who was one of Goethe's odd travelling companions on the Rhine,' preached and worked mostly in the ' Propbete rechts, Prophete links, Das Weltkind in der Mitten. ZUKICH. 155 northi of Germany. The other ' prophet,' Lavater (born 1741), the famous physiognomist, taught the new religion in Ziirich, which ever since the beginning of the century had been an active focus of literary life. Reviving pietism in a way by giving it a sort of poetical colour and combining with it a high culture, little familiar to the humble brethren, he pretended to regenerate Christianity by the inner light, by. the revelation every day re- peated. With the tone of an inspired seer he boasted of having found again the Divine word, which had been lost. In his heart he felt Christ born anew. This tone and these ideas he brought also into the poetical domain where he would re- cognise genius alone. Young Goethe was content to proclaim the autocracy of Genius, which ' school could but fetter,' and to which ' principles were more noxious even than examples ; ' Lavater went the length of actual worship : Geniiises (he would exclaim), lights of the t. oi-ld, salt of the earth, nouns in the gi-ammar of humanity, images of Deity, human Gods, creators, destroyers, revealers of the secrets of God and man, drogmans of nature, prophetsi, priests, kings of the world — it is of you I si)eak, it is you I ask. How did the Deity call you ? There you have something of the reigning 166 THE REIGN OP HEE.DEE. hero- worship in its ahstnisest form ; and, of course, among the worshipped heroes was the prophet himself and even his disciples. Nothing could give a better idea of the ways and spirit of this strange young generation than these bizarre effu- sions. However tedious may be the tortui-ed style of the enthusiast, one must endure it if we would understand the time. The character of genius is apparition, which, like that of an angel, does not come, but is there, which, like that, strikes the innermost marrow . . . and disappears and continues acting after having disappeared, and loaves behind itself sweet shudders and tears of terror and paleness of joy which are the work and effect of genius. Call it as thou likest — call it fecundity of mind, inexhansti- hility, unequalled strength, primitive force, elasticity of soitl, call it central spirit, central fire, or simply inven- tion, instinct, the not-learned, the not-borrowed, the un- learnable, the nnborrowable, etc , etc. And thus it goes on fbr pages ; but in spite of the absurd form the idea appears clearly. Nothing but spontaneousness is worth anything ; and the form itself is contempt for all that is orderly, correct, and systematic. The manners also which shocked not a little the pedantic and economical inhabitants of the Alps corresponded to these forms of style, when the young enthusiasts of STRASSBUEG. 157 the ITorth. came as on a pilgrimage to the Ziiricli apostle, foremost among them the two Stolbergs, displaying their long fair locks in the midst of those carefully powdered heads, and dividing ' the green waves of the lake ' in full daylight. Who does not think of old Horace ? Ingenium misera quia fortunatius arte Credit et exclucUt sanos Helicone poetas Democritus, bona pars non ungues ponere curat, etc. Still the true field of battle, that of literary principles, which at that time had alone the powor of exciting a passionate interest in Ger- Strassburg, many, after Frederick's heroic period had heen succeeded by his more prosaic administrative activity, the true battle-field was the valley of the Rhine, where historical ideas and interests at all times were wont to meet and join in conflict. It was in Strassburg that Goethe met with unfortunate Lenz, the most gifted perhaps of his friends, a morbid and misunderstood genius, who, like many of his generation, was to sink, while still young, into the night of ic sanity; wibh honest Lerse, whom he immortalised in his ' Gotz ; ' with that strange and kind-hearted dreamer, Jung-Stilling, the tailor-doctor, a sweet and touching physiog- nomy, an ardent and mystical soul, whom Goethe lob THE KEIGN OP HBEDEE. revealed to the world by publisliing the manuscript of his diary ; with Herder above all, who was then suffering from an operation on his eyes, and with whom he kept company in the long winter evenings of 1770-71. Here took place those conversations, and that interchange of thought, awakened by their reading which made that year a memorable date, and the city of Strassburg, still entirely German in spite of ninety years of French government, a hallowed spot to the German people. Here it was that young Goethe — then twenty-one years old — who had recently arrived from Leipzig with some- what academical or rather arcadian views and habits of mind, was initiated into the beauties of Shakespeare by Herder. Here it was that they read and re-read the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' ' Tristram Shandy,' Percy's ' Eeliques,' and of course Ossian ; and here, also, that Goethe, while under the cha.rm of the most poetical romance of his life, composed his finest lyric poems, sketched his ' Gotz,' and conceived the idea of ' Faust.' The account he has left in his memoirs of the time he spent in Alsace, the portraits he has traced of the companions of his generous freaks there, the de- scription we owe to him of the movement of ideas which animated this sparkling, stirring young FRANKFURT. 159 generation, is simply a masterpiece of literary- history in the modest frame of a personal memoir. Trom Strassburg Goethe returned to his native town, Frankfurt, where he at first settled under the paternal roof — the casa santa, as the Frankfurt. poet's friends used to call it — and after- wards took up his residence at Wetzlar as a clerk to the Imperial Court of Justice. There, assisted by his friend Merck — a shrewd and deep mind of severe literarj"- taste, with whom he was always to be seen, ' like Faust and Mephistopheles ' — he edited the chief paper of the party, the * Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen,' and published stroke upon stroke ' Gotz,' ' Werther,' ' Clavigo.' Here ' Socrates-Addison,' as they called Merck, replaced the ' Irish dean witb his whip ' — so they styled Herder — in the tutorship of Goethe, the ' yoang lord with scraping cock-spurs.' Literary congresses were soon organised everywhere in the valleys of the Lahn, Mein, and Rhine. Jacobi, the philosopher of sentiment, opened his hospitable villa of Pempelfort to his numerous friends ; Sophie de la Roche — the authoress of ' Fraulein von Sternheim,' the first love of Wieland's youth, the mother of MaximilianeBrentano, who furnished more than one feature to Goethe's 'Lotte,' the 160 THE EEION OF HERDEE. grandmotlier of Clemens Bi-entano, the roman- ticist, and Bettina, 'the child' — Sophie de la Roche received them often in her seat near Co- blentz. The little University of Giessen, where proud Klinger, the dramatist, who has given the name to the whole period, was then studying, and already shaping out that wonderful career which he began as a poor workman's apprentice and ended as a Russian lieutenant-general ; the old imperial city of Wetzlar, where the scene of Goethe's 'Werther' is laid, as it was the real scene of the poet's and Lotto's love; the small residence of Darmstadt, where Merck received the visits of all the literary celebrities of the day — saw in turn the meetings where the new creed was enthusiastically preached. It was under Merck's guidance that. Goethe, together with his brother-in-law, Schlosser, and Herder, set to work so vigorously and mercilessly to attack the old literary routine in his periodical, upon which Goze, Lessing's old theological enemy, invoked the rigour of the secular arm ; and when we see Merck ' knock the powder out of the wigs ' in his young friend's journal, it is not difficult to understand how Wieland could say of him : ' Merck is among critics what Klopstock is among WEIMAR. 16] poets, Herder among the learned, Lavater among Christians, and Goethe among all human beings.' But with all his impatience for conventional literature, and in spite of his appreciation of that simple, unaffected popular poetry which Herder had brought into fashion, Merck never suffered himself to be deceived by counterfeit nature a la Macpherson. True, he ridiculed the tight-laced poetry of the times, and had no mercy for classical buskin; but he was quite as severe upon the two impetuous Stolbergs' strained enthusiasm, upon whimsical Lenz's intentional eccentricity, and tender-hearted Jacobi's mystic languor. In the midst of all these young folks giving themselves the airs of tribunes or seers — more than one of them had indeed a deceptive likeness to genius — he did not hesibate a moment in distinguishing the only real genius, Wolfgang Apollo. It was Merck also who made him known to the young Duke of Saxe-Weiinar, henceforth his protector and friend for life. Goethe was twenty-six years old when he ac- cepted (1775) the invitation of Charles Weimar. Augustus, and transported to Weimar the tone and the allures of the literary Bohemia of Strassburg. There, to the terror of the good M 162 THE KEIGN OF HEEDEE. burghers of that small residence, to the still grea.ter terror of the microscopic courtiers, began that ' genial ' and wild life, which he and his august companion led during several years. Hunting, riding on horseback, masquerades, private theatricals, satirical verse, improvisation of all sorts, flirtation particularly, filled up day and night, to the scandal of all worthy folks, who were utterly at a loss to account for His Serene Highness saying ' Du ' to this Frankfurt roturier. The gay Dowager Duchess, Wieland's firm friend, looked upon these juvenile freaks with a more lenient eye ; for she well knew that the fermen- tation once over, a noble, generous wine would remain. ' We are playing the devil here,' writes Goethe to Merck ; ' we hold together, the Dukft and I, and go our own way. Of course, in doing so we knock against the wicked, and also against the good ; but we shall succeed ; for the gods are evidently on our side.' Soon Herder was to join them there, unfortunately not always satisfied with the results of his teaching about absolute liberty of genius. The whole generation bore with impatience, as we have seen, the yoke of the established order, of authority under whatever form, whether GENERAL ATTITUDE OP THE GBNEEATION. 163 tte fetters were those of literary convention or social prejudice, of the State or the Church. The ego affirmed its absolute, inalienable right; .j.^^ it strove to manifest itself according to [f ^^f "g^ its caprices, and refused to acknow- "'='^""°°- ledge any check. Individual inspiration was a sacred thing, which, reality with its rules and prejudices could only spoil and deflower. Now, according to the temperament of each, they rose violently against society and its laws, or resigned themselves silently to a dire necessity. The one in Titanic effort climbed Olympiis, heaving Pelion on Ossa; the other wiped a furtive tear out of his eye, and, aspiring to deliverance, dreamed of an ideal happiness. Sometimes in the same poet the two dispositions succeed eacli other. Cover thy sky with vapour and clouds, O Zeus, ex- claims Goethe's Prometheus, and practise thy strength on tops of oaks and summits of movintains like the child who beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless, leave me my earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my hearth, whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, burning with a sacred ardour, which alone has accom- plished all ? And should I thank thee, who wast sleeping whilst I worked 1 The same young man, who had put in o the mouth M 2 164 THE REIGN OP HBEDEE. of the rebellious Titan this haughty and defiant OTitburst, at other moments, when he was dis- couraged and weary of the struggle, took refnge within himself . Like Werther, 'finding his world within himself, he spoils and caresses his tender heart, like a sickly child, all whose caprices we in- dulge.' One or the other of those attitudes towards reality, the active and the passive, were soon taken by the whole youth of the time ; and just as Schiller's ' Brigands ' gave birth to a whole series of wild dramas, ' Werther ' left in the novels of the time a long line of tears. More than that, even in reality Karl Moor found imitators who engaged in an open struggle against society, and one met at every corner languishing Siegwarts, whose delicate soul was hurt by the cruel contact of the world. What strikes us most in this moi'bid sen- timentality, is the eternal melancholy sighing after nature. Ossian's cloudy sadness and Young's dark Nights veil every brow. They fly into the solitudes of the forests in order to dream freely of a less brutal world. They must, indeed, have been very far from nature to seek for it with such avidity. Many, in fact, of these ardent, feverish young men became in the end a prey, GENERAL ATTITUDE OP THE GENERATION. 165 some to madness, others to suicide. A species of moral epidemic, like that which followed upon the apparent failure of the Eevolution in 1799, had broken out. The germ of Byronism may be clearly detected already in the Wertherism of those times. Exaggerated and overstrained imaginations found insuflScient breathing-room in the world, and met on all sides with boundaries to their unlimited demands. Hearts, accustomed to follow the dictates of their own inspiration alone, bruised themselves against the sharp angles of reality. The thirst for action, vyhich consumed their ardent youth could not be quenched, in fact, in the narrow limits of domestic life ; and public life did not exist. Frederick had done great things, but only, like the three hundred other German governments, to exclude the youth of the middle classes from active life. Thence the general uneasiness. ' Werther ' was as much an effect as a cause of this endemic disease ; above all, it was the expression of a general state of mind. It is this which constitutes its historical importance, while the secret of its lasting value is to be found in its artistic form. Besides, if I may say so without paradox, the disease was but an excess of health, a juvenile 166 THE REIGN OP HEEDEU. crisis through which Herder, young Goethe, Schil- ler, and indeed the. whole generation, had to pass. Oh (exclaimed old Goethe fifty years later in a conver- sation, with, young Felix Mendelssohn) — oh, if I could but ■write a fourth volume of my life. ... It should be a history of the year 1775, which no one knows or can write better than I. How the nobility, feeling itself outrun by the middle classes, began to do all it could not to be left behind in the race; how liberalism, jacobinism, and all that devilry awoke : how a new life began • how we studied, and poetised, made love and wasted our time ; how we young folks, full of life and activity, but awk- ward as we could be, scoffed at the aristocratic propensities of Messrs. Nicolai and Co. in Berlin, who at that time reigned supreme. . . . Ah, yes, that was a spring, when everything was budding and shooting, when more than one tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. All that in the year 1775 ! Old pedantic Nicola'i, at whom he scoffed thus, foresaw, with his prosy common- sense, what would happen ' with all those confounded striplings,' as Wieland called them, ' who gave themselves airs as if they were accustomed to play at blind -man's buff with Shakespeare.' ' In four or five years,' said he in 1776, 'this fine enthusiasm will have passed away like smoke ; a few drops of sjjirit will be found in the empty helmet, and a big caput LATER PHILOSOPHY OF HIS BISICIPLES. 167 mortuum in the crucible.' This proved true cer- tainly for the great majority, but not so as regards the two coursers which then broke loose, and for him who had cut their traces and released them. Of the latter I have spoken to-day ; of the former two I shall say something the next time we meet. Not of their youth, however, but of their maturer age ; not of their views when Ihey were twenty, but of the philosophy which they had come to twenty years later. Goethe, indeed, modified, or at least cleared up, his early views under the influence of a deeper study of nature and the sight of ancient and Eenaissance Art in Italy (1786-1788) ; Schil- ler put himself to school under Kant (1790), and went out of it with a completely altered philosophy ; Kant himself became another after, if not in consequence of, the gi-eat King's death (1786) ; Herder alone remained faithful throughout to the creed he had himself preach?d. I have dwelt so long on Herder not only because, till lately, his influence has not been sufficiently acknowledged, but also because the way Conclusion. opened by him, although partly and temporarily abandoned during the classical period of which I shall have to speak to you the next time, was followed again by the third generation 168 THE KEIGN OP HEEDEE. of the founders of German culture, the so-called Romanticists, and by all the great scholars, who, in the first half of this century, revived the his- torical sciences in Germany. Herder's ideas have, indeed, penetrated our whole thought to such a degree, vyhilst his works are so unfinished and disconnected, that it is hardly possible for us to account for the extraordinary effect these ideas and works produced in their da}'', except by marking the contrast which they present with the then reigning methods and habits, as well as the surprising in- flience exercised by Herder personally. From his twenty-fifth year, indeed, he was a sovereign. His actual and uncontested sway was not, it is true, prolonged beyond a period of about sixteen years, albeit his name figured to a much later time on the list of living potentates. It is also true, that when the seeds throivn by him had gi-own luxuri- antly, and were bearing fruit, the sower was almost entirely forgotten or wilfully ignored. The gene- ration, however, of the ' Stilrmer und Drdngar,' or, as they were pleased to denominate themselves, the 'original geniuses,' looked up to Herder as their leader and prophet. Some of them turned from liim later on and went back to the exclusive worship of classical antiquity ; but their very HIS INDIEECT INFLUENCE. 169 manner of doing homage to it' bore witness to Herder's influence. The following generation threw itself no less exclusively into the middle ages ; but what, after all, was it doing if not fol- lowing Herder's example, when it raked up Dantes and Calderons out of the dust in order to confront them with and oppose them to Virgils and Racines ? However they might repudiate, nay even forget, their teacher, his doctrines already pervaded the whole intellectiial atmosphere of Germany, and men's minds breathed them in with the very air they inhaled. To-day they belong to Europe. Herder, I repeat, is certainly neither a classical nor a finished writer. He has no doubt gone out of fashion, because his style is pompous and diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary ; because his reasoning lacks firmness and his erudi- tion solidity. Still, no other German writer of note exercised the important indirect influence which was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude to Schelling and his philosophy, which received more than one impulse from Herder's ideas ; nor to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical system and defended them with his wonderful dialectics. But F. A. Wolf, when he points out to us in Homer the process of epic poetry ; Niebuhr, 170 THE REIGN OF HERDEK. in revealing to us the growth of Rome, the birth of her religions and national legends, the slow, gradual formation of her mai-vellous constitution; Savigny, when he proves that the Roman Civil Law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, was not the work of a wise legislator, but rather the wisdom of generations and of centuries ; Eichhorn, when he wrote the history of German law and created thereby a new branch of historical science which has proved one of the most fertile; A. W. Schlegel and his school, when they trans- planted all the poetry of other nations to Germany by means of imitations which are real wonders of assimilation ; Frederick Schlegel, when, in the ' Wisdom of the Hindoos,' he opened out that vast field of comparative linguistic science, which Bopp and so many others have since cultivated with such success ; Alexander von Huinboldt and Karl Ritter, when they gave a new life to geo- graphy by showing the earth in its growth and development and coherence ; W. von Humboldt, when he established the laws of language as well as those of self-government ; Jacob Grimm, when he brought German philology into existence, while his brother Wilhelm made a science of Northern myth- ology; still later on, D. F. Strauss, when, in the days FEKTILITT OP HIS IDEAS. 171 of our own youth, lie placed the myth and thelegend, with their unconscious origin and growth, not alone in opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud ; Otfr. Miiller, when he proved that Greek mythology, far from con- taining moral abstractions or historical facts, is the involuntary personification of surrounding nature, subsequently developed by imagination ; Max Miiller even, when he creates the new science of comparative mythology — what else are they doing but applying and working out Herder's ideas ? And if we turn our eyes to other nations, what else were Burke and Coleridge, B. Constant and A. Thierry, Guizot and A. de Tocqueville — what are Eenan and Taine, Carlyle and Darwin doing, each in his own branch, but applying and developing Herder's two fundamental principles, that of or- ganic evolution and that of the entireness of the individual? For it was Herder who discovered the true spirit of history, and in this sense it is that Goethe was justified in saying of him : A noble mind, desirous of fathoming man's soul in whatever direction it may shoot forth, searcheth through- out the universe for sound and word which flow through the lands in a thousand sources and brooks ; wanders 172 THE EEIGN OF HBEDEE. through the oldest as the newest regions and listens in every zone. . . . He knew how to find this soul wher- ever it lay hid, whether robed in grave disguise, or lightly clothed ia the garb of play, in order to found for the future this lofty rule : Humanity be our eternal aim 1 LECTURE V. THE TEIUMVIEATE OP GOETHE, KANT, ABTD SOHILLEE, 1787-1800. Among the young literary rebels who, tinder Herder's guidance, attempted, towards and after 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all autho- rity, even all law and rule, in order to put in their stead the absolute self-government of genius, freed from all tutorship — the foremost were the two greatest German poets, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe's ' Gotz ' and ' Werther,' Schiller's ' Bri- gands,' and ' Cabal and Love,' were greeted as the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their subjects were German and modern, not French or classic ; in their plan they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once familiar, strong, and original; in 174 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEB. their inspiration they were protests against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement outbursis of individuality against con- vention. Not twenty years had passed away, when both the revolutionists had become calm and resigned liberal conservatives, who understood and taught that liberty is possible only under the empire of law ; that the real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world, which knows no frontiers ; that to be completely free man must fly into the ideal sphere of Art, Science, or formless Religion. Not that they abjured ' the dreams of their youth.' The nucleus of their new creed was contained in their first belief; but it had been developed into a system of social views more in harmony with society and its exigencies, of EEsthe- tic opinions more independent of reality and its accidents, of philosophical ideas more speculative and methodical. In other words, Goethe and Schiller never ceased to believe as they had done at twenty, that all vital creations in nature as in society are the result of growth and organic development, not of intentional, self-conscious planning, and that individuals on their part act powerfully only through their nature in .its en- GENERAL VIEW ON NATURE AND MAN. 175 tirety, not ttrough one faculty alone, such as reason or will, separated from instinct, imagina- tion, temperament, passion, etc. Only they came to the conviction that there existed general laws which presided over organic development, and that there was a means of furthering in the individual the harmony between temperament, character, understanding, and imagination, with- out sacrificing one to the others. Hence they shaped for themselves a general view of Nature and Mankind, Society and History, which may not have become the permanent view of the whole nation ; but which for a time was predominant, which even now is still held by many, and which in some respects will always be the ideal oi the best men in Germany, even when circumstances have wrought a change in tlie intellectual and social conditions of their country, so as to necessi- tate a total trats formation and accommodation of those views. We cannot regard it merely as the natural effect of advancing years, if Goethe and Schiller modified and cleared their views ; if Kant, whose great emancipating act, the 'Critic of Pure Reason,' falls chronologically in the preceding period (1781), corrected what seemed to him too absolute in his 176 GOETHE, KANT, AND SaHILLER. system, and reconstructed from tlie basis of the conscience that metaphysical world which he had destroyed by his analysis of the intellect. The world just then was undergoing profound changes. The great ' Philosopher King ' had descended to the tomb (1786), and with him the absolute liberty of thought, which had reigned for forty- six years. The French Eevolution, after having exalted all generous souls, and seemingly con- firmed the triumph of liberty and justice which the generation had witnessed in America, took a direction and drifted into excesses which unde- ceived, sobered, and saddened even the most hopeful believers. As regnrds personal circum- stances, the Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788) and his scientific investigations into nature, the study of Kant's new philosophy to which Schiller submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791), were the high-schools out of which their genius came strengthened and purified, although their aesthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite unimpaired by them. I shall endeavour to give an idea of this double process and its results at the risk of being still more abstract and dry than before.^ ' For the following pages on Goethe, see his 'Wilhelm Meister,' especially the sixth book, and ' Bildung and Umbildung AET AND NATTJKE. 177 Man is the last and highest link in Nature ; his task is to understand what she aims Qocthe's at in him and then to fulfil her inten- morll*'*^ tions. This view of Herder's was Goethe's !>"""?'«=• starting-point in the formation of his Weltan- schauung or general view of things. All the world (says one of the characters in ' Wilhelm Meister') lies before tis, like a vast quarry before the architect. He does not deserve the name, if he does not compose with these accidental natural materials an image whose source is in his mind, and if he does not do it with the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All that we find outside of lis, nay, within us, is object-matter; but deep within us lives also a power capable of giving an ideal form to this matter. This creative power allows us no rest till we have produced that ideal form in one or the other way, either without us in finished works, or in our own life. Here we already have in germ Schiller's idea that life ought to be a work of art. But how do we achieve this task, continually impeded as we are by circumstances and by our fellow-creatures, who will not always leave us in peace to develop our individiial characters in perfect conformity with organischer Naturen,' particularly 'Geschichte meines Botan- ischen Stadiums ' (vol. xxxvi. of the ' Works '). N 178 GOETHE, KANT, AND SOHILLEK. nature? In our relations with our neighbour, Goethe (like Lessing and Wieland, Kant and Herder, and all the great men of his and the pre- ceding age, in England and France as well as in Germany) recommended absolute toleration not only of opinions, but also of individualities, pai-- ticularly those in which Nature manifests herself ' undefiled.' As to circumstances, which is only another name for Tate, he preached and practised resignation. At every turn of our life, in fact, we meet with limits ; our intelligence has its frontiers which bar its way ; our senses are limited, and can only embrace an infinitely small part of nature ; few of our wishes can be fulfilled ; pri- vation and sufferings await us at every moment. ' Privation is thy lot, privation ! That is the eternal song which resounds at every moment, which, our whole life through, each hour sings hoarsely to our ears ! ' laments Faust. What remains then for man ? ' Everything cries to us that we must resign ourselves.' ' There are few men, however, who, conscious of the privations and sufferings in store for them in life, and desirous to avoid the necessity of resigning themselves anew in each particular case, have the courage to perform the act of resignation once for all ; ' who Goethe's moral principles. 179 say to themselves that there are eternal and neces- sary laws to -which we must submit, and that we had better do it without grumbling ; who ' en- deavour to form principles which are not liable to be destroyed, but are rather confirmed by contact with reality.' ' In other words, when man has discovered the laws of nature, both moral and physical, he must accept them as the limits of his actions and desires ; he must not wish for eternity of life or inexhaustible capacities of enjoyment, understanding, and acting, any more than he wishes for the moon. Tor rebellion against these laws must needs be an act of impotency as well as of deceptive folly. By resignation, on the contrary, serene resignation, the human soul is purified ; for thereby it becomes free of selfish passions and arrives at that intellectual superiority in which the contemplation and understanding of things give sufficient contentment, without making it needful for man to stretch out his hands to take possession of them :' a thought which Goethe's friend, Schiller, has magnificently developed in his grand philosophical poems. Optimism and pessimism disappear at once as well as fatalism ; I the highest and most refined intellect again accepts the world, as children and ignorant toilers do, as 180 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. a given necessity. He does not even think the world could be otherwise, and within its limits he not only enjoys and suffers, but also worts gaily, trying, like Horace, to subject things to himself, but resigned to submit to them, when they are invincible. Thus the simple Hellenic existence which, contrary to Christianity, but according to nature, accepted the present without ceaselessly thinking of death and another world, and acted in that present and in the circumstances allotted to each by fate, without wanting to overstep the boundaries of nature, would revive again in our modern world and free us for ever from the torment of unaccomplished wishes and of vaiu terrors. The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe lived outside the struggle for life, outside the competition and contact of practical Goethe's view of activity, m the contemplation of nature Nature. and art, developed this view — the spec- tator's view, which will always be that of the artist and of the thinker, strongl}' opposed to that of the actor on the stage of human life. ' Iphi- genia,' ' Torquato Tasso,' ' Wilhelm Meister ' are the fruits and the interpreters of this conception of the moral world. What ripened and perfected it, so as to raise it into a general view, not only of Goethe's method. 181 morality, but also of the great philosophical questions which man is called upon to answei", was his study of nature, greatly furthered during his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the bottom of all the vague longing of his generation for nature he was to solve. It became his inces- sant endeavour to understand the coherence and unity of nature. You. are for ever searching for what is necessary in nature (Schiller wrote to him once), but you search, for it by the most difficult way. Yovi take the whole of nature in order to obtain light on the particular case ; you look into the totality for the explanation of the individual existence. From the simplest organism (in nature), you ascend step by step to the more complicated, and finally construct the most complicated of all, man, out of the materials of the whole of nature. In thus creating man anew under the guidance of nature, you penetrate into his mysterious organism. And, indeed, as there is a wonderful harmony with nature in Goethe, the poet and the man, so there is the same harmony in Goethe, the savant and the thinker ; nay, even science he practised as a poet. As one of the greatest physicists of our days, Helmholtz, hn,s said of him : ' He did not try to translate nature into abstract concep- tions, but takes it as a complete work of art, which 182 GOETHEj KANT, AND SCHILLER. must reveal its contents spontaneously to an intelligent observer.' Goethe never became a thorough experimentalist ; he did not want ' to extort the secret from nature by pumps and re- torts.' He waited patiently for a voluntary revela- tion, i.e. until he could surprise that secret by an intuitive glance; for it was his conviction that if you live intimately with Nature, she will sooner or later disclose her mysteries to you. If you read his ' Songs,' his ' Werther,' his ' Wahlverwandt- schaften,' you feel that extraordinary intimacy — I had almost said identification — with nature, pre- sent everywhere. Werther's love springs up with the blossom of all nature ; he begins to sink and nears his self-made tomb, while autumn, the death of nature, is in the fields and woods. So does the moon spread her mellow light over his garden, as ' the Uiild eye of a true friend over his destiny.' Never was there a poet who humanised nature or naturalised human feeling, if I might say so, to the same degree as Goethe. Now, this same love of nature he brought into his scientific researches. He began his studies of nature early, and he began them as he was to finish them, with geology. Buffon's great views on the revolutions of the earth had made a deep impression upon hiai, although Goethe's view of nature. 183 he was to end as the declared adversary of that vulcanisni which we can trace already at the bottom of Buffon's theory — naturally enough, when we think how uncongenial all violence in society and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theo- retical study he had early turned to direct obser- vation ; and when Ids administrative functions obliged him to survey the mines of the little Dukedom, ample opportunity was offered for positive studies. As early as 1778, in a paper on Granite, he wrote : ' I do not fear the reproach that a spirit of contradiction draws me from the contemplation of the human heart — this most mobile, most mutable and fickle part of the creation — to the observation of (granite) the oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son of Nature. For all natural things are in connexion with each other.' It was his life's task to search for the links of this coherence in order to find that unity, which he knew to be in the moral as well as material uni- verse. From those ' first and most solid beginnings of our existence,' he turned to the history of plants and to the anatomy of the animals which cover this crust of the earth. The study of Spinoza, 184 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. confirmed him in the direction thus taken. ' There I am on and under the mountains, seeking the divine in herbis et lapidibus,' says he, in Spinoza's own words ; and again : ' Pardon me, if I like to remain silent, when people speak of a divine being which I can know only in rebus singularibus.' This pantheistic view grew stronger and stronger Avith years; but it became a pantheism yery different from that of Parmenides, for whom being and thinking are one, or from that of Giordano Bruno, which rests on the analogy of a iiniversal soul with the human soul, or even from that of Spinoza himself, which takes its start from the relations of the physical Avorld with the conceptive world, and of both with the divine one. Goethe's pantheism always tends to discover the cohesion of the members of nature, of which man is one: if once he has discovered this universal unity, where there are no gaps in space, nor leaps in time, he need not search further for the divine. Nature ! We live in it and remain strangers to it. It continually talks to us and does not betray its secret. It seems to have planned everything with a view to indi- viduality, and does not care for individuals. It lives only by continual birth, and the mother is indiscernible. Niiture has thought, and does not cease to think ; but it Goethe's view of natuee. 135 thinks, not as man does, but as Natiire. It lovas itself and is ever centred.on itself with innumerable eyes and hearts. It has multiplied itself in order to enjoy itself a hundredfold. It is ever creating new enjoyers, never tired of communicating itself. Life is its most beautiful invention, and death its artifice for having much life. This idea it was which was afterwards meta- physically developed by Schelling and Hegel ; but metaphysics are not what we are now studying. Even when I shall have to speak by and by of Kant, who entirely changed the basis of all specu- lative thought, I shall leave aside his philosophy proper as much as possible, and try only to speak of his way of looking at life and history. Goethe's view of life, which he won through the study of nature, and which consists in trying to seize the unity of nature iu the constant climax of its phenomena up to the highest, the intellectual phenomenon, man, — differs from all former similar views in this, that it considers the coherence of the universe as a process in time, a history in which or through which nature becomes conscious of itself, not as a connection by links in space only. This is the point where Herder's influence is most perceptible, and which was to be brought into a system by the methodical and dialectical specula- 186 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEK. tions of Hegel, whom we may consider as the great summariser of all the intellectual work done by- Germany during the sixty or seventy years with which we are occupied. By what means was this process, this history, which Goethe discerned in the coherence of nature, to be discovered and understood ? By the means of the very same organ of intuition which the whole generation of Herder and Goethe had recog- nised in their youth as the highest of poetical faculties, and which Kant himself had admitted to be the distinctive quality of the poet. Others, we have seen and shall further see, applied this faculty to history. Goethe applied it to nature. His poet's eye revealed to him the mysteiy of nature's laws ; but he ■yvas not content with such divination. He became a patient and conscien- tious observer, and did not rest until he had, as it were, proved his sum. Now, this method has re- mained the dominant one in Germany, and has misled thinkers more than once, when they applied it without controlling it by the inductive method. The aberrations and excrescences of Schelling's philosophy of Nature are in everybody's memory ; and the best things done in natural science, even in Germany, have been done by adversaries of goethe's view of natuke. 187 Sctelling's school and adherenta of the mechanical principle of explanation. Nevertheless the in- tuitive method has been wonderfully fertile even for natural science, and I remember how often Liebig himself told me that all his discoveries had been the result of lightning-like intuition and divination, ascertained afterwards by observation and experiment. As for historical sciences, the conquests made by the intuitive method are uncontested. It has taught the world that the knowledge of laws — that is to say, the most ab- stract and unreal kind of knowledge — is by no means alone valuable ; that causality, to which the savants of our day would again limit all science, is not its sole object; that the intuitive knowledge of typical forms — in other words, of platonic ideas — which we acquire by the careful observation of individualaiidparticular phenomena, has equally its value; for it allows us to form ideas of things, which always remain the same through all the changes of the phenomena, and neverthe- less do not exist in reality. It is analogy which helps us to form these intuitive or platonic ideas. It was through analogy that Goethe arrived at his great dis- coveries in natural science, and I only repeat 188 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. what such men as Johannes Miiller, Baer, and Helmholtz have been willing to acknowledge, when I say that the poet's eye has been as keen as that of any naturalist. Kant had contended that there might be a superior Intelligence, which, contrary to human intelligence, goes from the general to the particular ; and Goethe thought — he proved, I might say — that in man too some of this divine intelligence can operate and shine, if only in isolated sparks. Tt was a spark of this kind which, first at Padua on the sight of a fan- palm tree, then again, on the eve of his departure from Palermo, during a walk in the public garden amidst the southern vegetation, revealed to him the law of the metamorphosis of plants. He found an analogy between the different parts of the same plant which seemed to repeat themselves : unity and evolution were revealed to hira at once. Three years later the sight of a half-broken sheep-skull, which he found by chance on the sand of the Venetian Lido, taught him that the same law, as he had suspected, applied also to vertebrate animals, and that the skull might be considered as a series of strongly modified ver- tebrae. He had, in fact, already hinted at the principle, shortly after put forward by Lamarck, Goethe's view op nature. 189 and long afterwards developed andfirmly established by Darwin. He considered the difference in the anatomical structure of animal species as modi- fications of a type or planned structure, modi- fications brought about by the difference of life, food, and dwellings. He had discovered as early as 1 786 the intermaxillary bone in man, i.e. the remnant of a part which had had to be adapted to the exigencies of the changed structure ; and proved thereby that there had been a primitive similarity of structure, which had been trans- formed by development of some parts, and atrophy of others. Goethe's sketch of an ' In- troduction into Comparative An atom}',' which he wrote in 1795, urged by A. von Humboldt, has remained, if I may believe those competent to judge, a fundamental stone of modern science. And, I may be allowed, as I am unversed in such matters, to invoke the authority of one of the most eminent living physiologists, Helmholtz, who says of Goethe's anatomical essay, that in it the poet .... teaches, with the greatest clearness and decision, that all differences in the structure of animal species are to be oonsidei-ed as changes of one fundamental type, which have been brought about by fusion, transformation, ag- grandisement, diminution, or total annihilation of sevei al 190 GOETHE, KANT, ANT) SCHILLEE. parts. This has, indeed, become, in the present state of comparative anatomy, the leading idea of this science. It has never since been expressed better or more clearly than by Goethe : and after-times have made few essential modifications.' Now, the same may be said, I am told, in spite of some differences as to details, of his metamor- phosis of plants. I do not mean by this to say that Goethe is the real author of the theory of evolution. There is between him and Mr. Darwin the difference which there is between Vico and Niebuhr, Herder and F. A. Wolf. In the one case we have a fertile hint, in the other a well- established system, worked out by proofs and convincing arguments. Nevertheless, when a man like Johannes Miiller sees in Goethe's views ' the presentiment of a distant ideal of natural history,' we may be allowed to see in Goethe one of the fathers of the doctrine of evolution, which, after all, is only an application of Herder's prin- ciple oi fieri to the material world. After having thus gone through the whole series of organisms, from the simplest to the most complicated, Goethe finds that he has laid, as it were, the last crowning stone of the universal ' Written in 1863, five years before the appearance of Mr. Darwin's great work. Goethe's philosophic views, 191 pyramid, raised, from the materials of the whole quarry of nature ; that he has reconstructed mail. And here begins a new domain ; for after all for mankind the highest study must be philosophic views man himself. The social problems of property, education, marriage, occupied Goethe's mind all his life through, although more parti- cularly in the last thirty years. The relations of man with nature, the question how far he is free from the laws of necessity, how far subject to them, are always haunting him. If you read the ' Wahl- verwandtschaften,' the 'Wanderjahre,' the second 'Faust,' you will find those grave questions ap- proached from all sides. I shall not, however, enter here into an exposition of Goethe's political, social, and educational views, not only because they mostly belong to a later period, but especially because they have never found a wide echo, nor determined the opinions of an important portion of the nation, nor entered as integrating principles into its lay creed. Xot so with the metaphysical conclusion which he reached by this path, and which is somewhat different from the pantheism of his youth, inasmuch as he combines with it some- what of the fundamental ideas of Leibnitz, which were also Lessing's, and which, after all, form a 192 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. sort of return to Christianity, as understood in its widest sense, in the sense in which it harmonises with Plato's idealism. ' Thinking is not to he severed from what is thought, nor will from move- ment.' Nature consequently is God, and God is nature, but in this God-Nature man lives as an imperishable monad, capable of going through thousands of metamorphoses, but destined to rest on each stage of this unlimited existence, in full possession of the present, in which he has to ex- pand his whole being by action or enjoyment. This conception of life was not, as you will see, the Creation of an imagination longing to pass beyond the conditions of human existence — which is the idealism of the ' general '— but the highest result of the poet's insight into the order of nature. Here we mark the great contrast with the later Kant, the contrast between a view which sees in man one link in the chain of nature, and the view which takes man out of the order of nature and makes him a member of a higher invisible order. This contrast has filled up the intellectual history of Germany ever since Herder opened hostilities against the master of his youth. In vain Fichte, Schelling, Hegel gave themselves out to be the disciples of Kant ; in reality they Goethe's philosophic views. 193 ■were only the sophists, who, witli the weapons of Kant's dialecticism, carried ad abmirdum the main idea of Herder and Goethe, the German idea, Kar' s^o')(riv, according to which nature is immanent in the human mind, and develops itself by the de- veloping of the conceptions of this mind. For mind is nothing else but nature come to the con- sciousness of itself : its essence being the essence of nature, its contents the contents of nature. The task of the student is to discover this identity, and the most powerful vehicle for its discovery is intuition. Now, as long as in these matters in- tuition let itself be controlled by observation and induction, it had wonderful results, particularly in the historical sciences and even in the natural sciences, although, as I just said, the best part of Germany's work in the latter was done by ad- versaries of this method. StiU, A. von Humboldt, when he declared his aim to be 'the consideration of physical things as a whole, moved and animated by inner forces,' and K. Eitter, when he defined 'the earth as a cosmic individual with a particular organisation, an ens sui generis, with progressive development,' both stood on common ground with Goethe and Herder; on common ground even with Schelling, whose influence has been so de- 194 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. plorable on natural science in Germany, leading to the most dangerous consequences throngli the desire to understand and grasp the parts, their distribution and ordination, by starting from the whole — a sort of deductive system of intuition as the old deductive system was one of abstract conceptions. "What, on the contrary, the intui- tive method, supported by severe and sagacious criticism of detail, has produced in the historical sciences, which can only be grasped by intuition, I need not say. The names of F. A. Wolf and Niebuhr, W. von Humboldt and Bopp, the Grimms and Boeckh, Savigny and Bichhorn, tell us clearly enough. Philology and archseology, theology and mythology, jurisprudence and history proper, have been entirely renewed by it ; whilst linguistic and literary histoiy may be said to have been created by it. (I am here only explaining the views of the creators of German culture : 1 do not defend them, where I share them, as I did not criticise them when I found myself at variance with them. Else, I should certainly pause here, and in all courtesy break a lance with those men of the younger generation and of this island, who would treat the historical sciences by tlie pame method as the natural or mathematical.) THE TWO CURRENTS. 195 I hare said tliat there was an antagonism between Kant's views and tliose of Herder and Goethe, and that this antagonism has .p|,g j,y„ been ever since sensibly felt in the Intel- ^""™'^- lectual history of Germany. Some efforts were made to reconcile them, as for instance by Schiller. Sometimes a sort of alliance took place, as in 1818, when the romanticists, who were quite under the spell of the Herder-Goethe ideas, invoked the aid of the moral energy, which was a special characteristic of Kant's disciples ; but the antagonism lives on not the less even now in the German nation, as the antagonism between Hume and Burke, Locke and Berkeley, Fielding and Richardson, Shakespeare and Milton, nay, between Renaissance and Puritan- ism in spite of their apparent death, is still living in the English nation. This difterence is, as will happen in this world, much more the difference between two dispositions of mind, character, and temperament, than between two opposite theories ; or at least the conflicting opinions are much more the result of our moral and intellectual dispositions than of objective observation and abstract argu- mentation. Germany owes much to the stern unflinching moral principles of Kant ; she owes still more, however, to the serene and large views o 2 196 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. of Goethe. The misfortuue of both ideals is that they cannot and will never be accessible save to a small elite, that of Kant to a moral, that of Goethe to an intellectual elite. But are not all ideals of an essentially aristocratic nature ? The German ideals, however, are so more than others, and the consequence has been a wide gap between the mass of the nation and the minority which has been true to those ideals. The numerical majority, indeed, of the German nation has either remained faithful to the Church, though without* fanatic- ism, or has become materialistic and rationalistic. It is a great misfortune for a nation when its greatest writer in his greatest works is only understood by the happy few, and when its greatest moralist preaches a moral which is above the common force of human nature. The only means of union between the nation and the in- tellectual and moral aristocracy, which has kept and guarded that treasure, as well as the only link between these two aristocratic views of life themselves, would be furnished by religion, a religion such as Lessing, Mendelssohn, and above all Schleiermacher, propounded, such as reigned all OTer Germany forty or fifty years ago, before party spirit had set to work, and the flattest of THE TWO CTJEEENTS. 197 rationalisms had again invaded the nation— a religion, corresponding, for the mass, to what Goethe's and Kant's philosophy, which is neither materialism nor spiritualism, is for the few — a religion based on feeling and intuition, on con- science and reverence, but a religion ivithont dogmas, without ritual, without forms, above all without exclusiveness,- and without intolerance. I doubt whether this mild and noble spirit, which is by no means indifferentism, will soon revive, as I doubt whether Germany will quickly get over the conflict between the traditional and the rationalistic spirit, which mars her public life, whether too she will soon reach that political ideal which England realised most fully in the first half of this century and which consists in a perfect equilibrium between the spirit of tradi- tion and that of rationalism. However, although Kant's lofty and Goethe's deep philosophy of life is now the treasure of a small minority only, it has none the less pervaded all the great scientific and literary work done up to the middle of this century. It has presided over the birth of our new State; and the day will certainly come when public opinion in Germany will turn away from the tendency of her present literature, science, and 198 GOETHE, KANT, AND SOHILLEK. politics — a somewhat narrow patriotism, a rather sha,llow materialism, and a thoroughly false parlia- mentary rSgime — and come back to the spirit of the generations to whom, after all, she owes her intellectual, though not perhaps her political and material, civilisation. But I have wandered away from our immediate subject, and it is time that I should come back to it, and especially to Kant, who, at the period we speak of, wielded, with Groethe and Schiller, the sceptre of intellectual life. Whoever has studied the history of German philosophy, knows that there are two Kants ; nay, gj,„f I might even say, three Kants. The first b. 1724. j[;ant^ the young Kant of thirty, started, as we have seen, from Newton and Rousseau, and came to a view of the world and of mankind very much akin to that of Lessing. He was little noticed then, however, and acted little upon his contemporaries at large, in spite of the animated, sometimes even elegant and ornamented, style of his youthful essays. The second Kant, if I might be allowed to say so, wrote when he was fifty and published in 1781. the ' Critic of Pure Eeason,' the most wonderful efibrt of abstract thought which the world has seen. By this extraordinary per- formance Kant effected for the intellectual world. KANT. 199 as lie said himself, wliat Copernicus had effected for the physical world : an entire change of the basis of all philosophical study. Before him the only paths tried in metaphysics were dogmatism and scepticism. He had himself followed first the one with Leibnitz-Wolff; then the other with Hume ; but coming to no satisfactory conclusion with either, he at last chose a third way, the critical, and made this ' footpath a highroad ' to the knowledge of speculative truth. Till now it was taken for granted that our under- standing must accommodate itself to the objects; but all attempts to learn anything which might widen our know- ledge by a priori conceptions were without result in consequence of that supposition. Let us try, therefore, whether we do not come nearer to the solution of meta- physical problems, by supposing that objects must accom- modate themselves to our understanding. ... It is with this as with the first thought of Copernicua. Not suc- ceeding with the explanation of the celestial movements as long as he supposed that all the host of stars turned round the observer, he tried whether he would not succeed better if he left the stars quiet, and made the observer turn round. There can be no doubt that the hypothesis proved true in both cases. Kant's philosophy is to the metaphysics before him what astronomy 200 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. is to astrology, what ckemistry is to alchymy. As he proclaimed, he achieved the momentous revolution by submitting to examination the in- strument itself of philosophising, i.e. human reason, for, according to him, philosoj)hy is a science which treats ' of the limits of reason,' and he showed why it is incapable of grasping the infi- nite in space and time, as well as the idea of a first cause. Space, indeed, as well as time, and in- directly causality, are not qualities of the outer world, but laws of our mind, or rather ' forms of our representation,' which have nothing to do with the things themselves. In fact, objects of the senses can never be known, but as they appear to us (through the subjective medium of space and time) not as they are in themselves ; and objects which our senses do not perceive are no objects for our theoretical knowledge. (Remark the theo- retical, because on it the later evolution of Kant hinges.) Kant never denied the existence of the sensual world, as Berkeley did ; he only con- tended that we see it not as it is, but as the forms of our intellect make it appear. Teleology is therefore a ' regulative ' principle of our under- standing, which supplies a motive for the world of phenomena, not a ' constitutive ' principle of this objective world. It is true that Kant added in the KANT. 231 first edition of his book a passage which he left out in the second, and in which he said, quite in pass- ing, that the ' thing in itself ' and the perceiving ego might be one and the same thinking substance, and it is on this passing hypothesis that ' the three great impostors,' as Schopenhauer most unjustly calls richte, Schelliirg, and Hegel, constructed their whole idealism. Kant himself says plainly enough : — The proposition of all the true idealists, from the Eleatic school down to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in the formula : all knowledge through the senses and ex- perience is mere appearance; truth is only in the ideas of pure intelligence and pure reason. The principle which governs and pervades all my idealism is, on the contrary : all knowledge of things through pure intelli- gence and pui-e reason is nothing hut appearance ; truth is only in experience. All psychology, cosmology, and theology based on pure reason fall with that principle ; for they are attempts to apply the forms or categories of the understanding to the 'thing in itself,' which those very categories prevent it from perceiving, consequently they nivst mislead. Psychology, which treats the soul as a thinking substance, must lead to paralogisms, such as liberty without motives ; theology, with its famous three proofs 202 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. of tlie Deity, deals with, empty conceptions ; cos- mology, which, considers the world as it appears to US, to be the world as it really is, can only end in contradiction or antinomies {e.g. the world has a beginning and is limited in space, and the antithesis, the world is eternal and infinite). The ' Critic of Pure Reason ' made a great stir ; but the salutaiy influence which it Kant's . , . moral phi- might haTB exercised at once on the phi- losophy. losopliical movement of the country, as it begins to do just now only, was marred to a cer- tain extent by the second great book of Kant, the ' Critic of Practical Reason,' which virtually was a retractation of the first book. Indeed, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, the so-called continuators of Kant, meant to be true Kantians, when with one foot they stood on the ' Pure Reason,' with the other on the 'Practical Reason.' We all know what was the result of their acrobatic efforts at equilibrium. Schopenhauer, the only thinker who held fast by Kant's great discovery, and took his starting- point from it, combining it at the same time with the Herder-Goethe idea of the ever-working creative power in nature, . remained ignored for forty years. Since then there has been a revival of Kant's philosophy, which will, I trust, kant's moeal philosopht. 203 prove permanent ; and it is particularly remark- able that, as Kant started from the natural sciences to arrive at tlie criticism of tlie mind, so his critical method has in our days penetrated into, and pervades, all the natural sciences. Almost all the really great men of science in Germany are neither materialists nor spiritualists, nor sceptics, but critics, if I may say so, of the Kantian school. This, however, is not the place to enter further into an exposition of Kant's ' Pure Reason ; ' for here, I repeat, we are not studying the history of philosophy any more than that of literature and the State, but the history of the general thought of the German nation. Now a book like Kant's ' Pure Reason ' cannot exercise any direct in- fluence on the general thought of a nation ; it is too special for that, too difficult, too abstract ; it remains the esoteric property of the philo- sophers. Even the indirect influence which it must exercise, the exoteric doctrine, which belongs to the domain of these lectures, begins only to be felt in our days, as I said just now, and we are speaking here of the end of the past century. Not so with what I venture to call the third Kant. Kant published his 'Critic of Practical Reason' in 1 788, his ' Critic of Judgment' in 1790, 204 GOETHE, KANT, AND SOHILLEK. and these two books had a deep and im mediate effect on general thought. Schiller modified his aesthetic views under the influence of the. latter, and the best of a whole generation lived and acted in the lofty — for us too lofty — moral ideas of the former. Kant's ' Critic of Pure Eeason ' had been the scientific analysis of the human intellect. His ' Critic of Practical Eeason ' may be regarded as the scientific analysis of human will (or, more exactly, desire), together with a reconstruction of the metaphysical world through moral feeling. Kant, indeed, contended that there were only three psychological faculties : understanding, volition, and feeling. Understanding contains its own principles and those of the other two. Considered with regard to its own principles, it is ' Pure Reason ; ' considered with regard to volition, it is 'Practical Reason;' considered with regard to the feeling of pleasure and pain, it is ' Judgment.' Now, Kant contends that there is a sentiment of morahty inborn in us, and he calls it, in opposition to all conditional morality, the ' categoric impera- tive,' which orders us to act so or so. We have it, he contends, without and before experience, and it tells us what is right and wrong independently of kant's moral philosophy. 205 all the dictates of a given social law in a giveii period or nation. Liberty consists in our obeying this inner law. He had himself stated that this is an idea which cannot be proved, that for reason liberty does not and cannot exist ; but it exists, he now iirges, for feeling ; and as he had shown in his ' Pure Reason ' that behind this experimental and phenomenal world there might be a different world superior to, or rather exterior to, the laws of our understanding and senses, so this undoubted feeling of a moral law within us proves that this possible higher world really exists. This is the rnonstrum, to use Schopenhauer's words, to which Kant found his way : ' a theoretical doctrine ' which is theoretically indefensible, and which has only practical value! From this postulate, then, Kant reconstructs the immortality of the soul, as the necessary con- dition for realising our inborn ideal of virtue, and the personal Deity as being a consequence of our inborn desire of happiness ; in other words, the very things which in his ' Pure Reason ' he had proved to be unprovable. ' We can imagine,' he then said of the Deity plausibly enough, ' an intelligence which, not being discursive like ours, but intuitive, niight go from the general to the 206 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. particular • • . ; ' but for us, men, there is no knowledge except through, the combination of sensation with the forms and categories of the intelligence. There is no faculty within us to create anything without materials furnished by the senses. Consequently the particulars furnished by the senses on one side, and the unity which we impart to them by our combining intellect on the other side, would remain independent of each other. If they correspond, it might be mere chance ; it is only by supposing a divine mind really intuitive that this casual, accidental cor- respondence would become a necessary identity. But this, he surmises (and with him all thinkers who wish to remain within the limits assigned by Kant himself to human intelligence), would always remain an hypothesis. Now, in his ' Practical Reason,' this hypothesis suddenly becomes a reality, through the inner, sense of the moral law. Once more, in his third great work, to which we shall revevt by and by, in the ' Critic of Judgment,' Kant destroys the old onto- logical, cosmological, and physico-theological proofs of the existence of a personal God, only to admit the moral proof — not before the tribunal of Reason, of course, but on the kant's moeal philosophy. 207 ground of sentiment, and before tliat of practical necessity. Kant's -whole religion, however, is always founded upon the moral law alone, not upon reason and argument like that of the rationalists and Deists; still less upon individual revelation, like that of the mystics and pietists ; least of aU on the Bible or tradition, like that of the orthodox and theologians. Men will not understand (he says) that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's com- mandments ; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise. And again : As everybody likes to be honoured, so people imagine that God also wants to be honoured. They forget that the fulfilment of duty towards men is the only honour adequ.ate to him. Thus is formed the conception of a re- ligion of worship, instead of a merely moral religion. . . . Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly. If once a man has come to the idea of a service which is not purely moral, but is supposed to be agreeable to God himself, or capable of propitiating him, there is little difierence between the several ways of seiwing him. For all these ways are of 208 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLFE. equal value. . . . Whether the devotee accomplishes his statutoiy walk to the church, or whether he undertakes a pilgrimage to the sanctuaries of Loretto and Palestine, whether he repeats his prayer-formulas with his lips, or like the Tibetan, uses a prayer-wheel . . . ia quite indifferent. As the illusion of thinking that a man can justify himself before God in any way by acts of worship is religious superstition, so the illusion that he can obtain this justification by the so-called intercourse with God is religious mysticism (Schwdrmerei). Such super- stition leads inevitably to sacerdotalism (PJaffenthum) which will always be found where the essence is sought not in principles of morality, but in statutory command- ments, rules of faith and observances. The last consequence of Kant's principle is that religion should be .... successivelyfreed from all statutes based on history, and one purely moral religion rule over all, in order that God might be all in all. The veil must fall. The leading- string of sacred tradition with all its appendices . . . becomes by degrees viseless, and at last a fetter . . . The humiliating difference between laymen and clergymen must disappear, and equality spring from true liberty. All this, however, must not be expected from an exterior revolution, which acts violently, and depends upon fortune. In the principle of pure moral religion, which is a sort of divine revelation constantly taking place in the soul of man, must be sought the ground for a passage to the new order of things, which will bo accomplished by slow and successive reforms. kant's political views. 209 And as ia religion so in the State ; with the dif- ference that h.e not only wanted to break with all tradition, but wished also to see the new Kant's Sbate founded on purely rational prin- political views. ciples. Hence his enthusiasm for the North-American Republic and for the French Revolution, in spite of his previous conviction that ' a revolution might bring about the downfall of personal despotism and avaricious oppression, but never a true reform . . . for new prejudices would serve as well as the old for leading-strings for the thoughtless mass' (1785). When, in 1792, the Republic was proclaimed, he said with tears in his eyes : ' Now, I can say like Simeon, Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.' He was somewhat shaken by the death of Louis XVL, some months later, and wrote once more (1798) against the right of rebellion ; but soon after the reign of terror was over, and even during the Directory, when everybody turned away in disgust, he remained faithful to his belief, that the French Revolution was the dawn of a new day for mankind, the first great attempt to found a State on reason alone. We must not allow ourselves to be misled* by his polemic against Rousseau's ' Contrat social.' p 210 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEB. Here, as in his metaphysics, te drew the distinc- tion between theoretical and practical truth, contending that in fact there was nothing like a contract, either between all the members of a nation, or between the citizens and the king. His political views remained nevertheless in their essence those of the constitution-mongers of the century, from Montesquieu to Hamilton. In this he remained isolated in Germany. The incredible and universal enthusiasm which, the Revolution had excited there gave way to very different feel- ings after the execution of the King; and even the principle of a rational constitution was soon abandoned for the more congenial idea of pro- gress through a reform of the traditional institu- tions. It was Burke, the English Herder, who became the prophet of the rising generation in Germany. Not so with Kant's religious and moral ideas. The former found a most eloquent iiaterpreter in Schleiermacher, and it was, I might say, the national religion during almost half a century. The moral principle, on which Kant based his religion, Eant'a mf'de, indeed, an immediate impression in influence, gpite of its almost superhuman severity. When Kant proclaimed this stern idea of inexor- kant's influence. 211 able duty, the German world was practically and theoretically worshipping selfishness, be it under the form of indulgence to caprice, or under that of meek sentimentalihy, while Courts vied with literary circles in ' genial ' license. Kant's was a morality not of paasion or disposition, but of firm principles and severe commandments. Love and affection are in his eyes no more moral motives than utility and ambition. The one motive is : ' thou shalt ' ; fulfilment of duty for duty's sake, respect for the unbending moral law. When he preached absolute political liberty, equality, and self-government, the German nation still lived under the most arbitrary despotism of three hun- dred absolute rulers ; it was divided into narrow castes, and no public life existed. When he called for a peaceful federation of all civilised nations, (1795) a war which seemed destined never to end was still raging almost throughout Europe. It was, perhaps, this contrast of his ideas with the surrounding world which gave them such power over men's minds. There can be no doubt that the generation of Stein and'Scharnhorst, of Fichte and Arndt, was fed and inspired with Kant's moral views, that they obeyed his ' categoric imperative,' when they withstood violence and injustice, when p 2 212 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. tKey chose exile and privation rather than wrong their conscience, when they rose at last against the foreign oppressor, but only after having given to their own countrymen liberty, equality and, as far as the times would allow, self-government. You all know that Stein abolished the last remnants of serfdom, made the soil free, and gave the cities their autonomy, whilst Scharnhorst introduced that palladium of our revived nation, equal military service for every citizen whether rich or poor, nobleman or peasant, and created that army, ■which, even should it ever become superfluous for the defence of national independence, should it ever cost us twice as much as it does, will be maintained as that national high school of unselfishness, reverence, manliness, and true idealism which it has been for the last seventy years, in the silent times of universal peace, still more than in the stirring moments of gloriou? warfare.' ' In general, there is a good deal of exaggeration in tie way the English Press speaks of the financial burdens our army imposes upon xis. The sum total of the German taxation, direct a/tid indirect, amounts to 15s. Id. per head, whereas that of England is not less than 21. Os. 3d. Germany spends ITj millions annually for military purposes on a total budget of 84 millions, i.e. about one fifth ; Great Britain spends 32J millionR on a total budget of 128 millions, i.e. about one fourth. kant's influence. 213 Still, I must be allowed to say that Kant's moral creed was no more the German one tlian his political credo. Even the men of whom I jnst spoke were obliged practically to bend its rigid rules and to adapt them to the exigencies of circumstance and of character. No, the idea of free will is no more a German idea than radicalism or rationalism. The pretension of basing morality on the conception of duty alone, and without taking into account either the inborn noBility or meanness of character or pity and emotion is no more German than is the attempt to create religion and State, without and in contra- diction to the given historical circumstances and traditions, according to reason and by means of a conscious will. These are no German ideas, and, as I am addressing an English audience, I may say they are not Teutonic ideas. Our culture — yours still more than ours — has been strongly, and on the whole healthily, influenced by Pelagianism. and rationalism; still, at the root it has remained faithful to Augustinianism as to the belief in the unconsciously working powers of history and nature, and in the rights of these powers. A true Teutonic mind will certainly never admit that his- tory is only a long series of unmeaning accidents ; but still less will it admit that the traditional 214 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. state wHcli we have inlierited from our fore- fatliers is only a heap of abuses and absurdities wil- fully introduced, and to be done away with entirely in order to make room for constitutions, framed by abstract reason and for abstract men. It will never admit that religion is only an imposture of priests and a tissue of superstitions, to be replaced by an enlightened system of morality, and that the poor in spirit should be denied the right to satisfy his craving for an ideal by giving to this, his ideal, a palpable, or at least a sentimental form. It will never admit that morality ie to be sought only in obedience to the commandment of duty, that such a thing as life for high dis- interested pursuits, like science and art, such a thing as generous and even unwise impulse, such a thing as pity, above all, and instinctive self-sacrifice, should not constitute morality as well as the obedience to duty. It will never admit that men are free and equal morally. When, at the great revolt of the Teutonic spirib against the Latin, which we call the Eeformation, Luther placed faith above works and claimed the privilege of salvation for the elect, was he not ex- pressing in his language the same thought which, two centuries later, was put into words by the SCHILLER. 215 second great Teutonic rebel against the Latin spirit, Herder, wlien he said that the man living in the ideal could not be immoral ; or by his disciple malgre lui, Fr. Schlegel, when he spoke of the moral aristocracy of ' noble natures ' {Edel- gebornen) ; or by Schleiermacher, when he gave a new form to the doctrine of St. Augustin ? Did he not give the form of his time, i.e. the theo- logical, to the fundamental conception of a Shake- speare, a Fielding, and a Goethe, when they showed us their Prince Hal, their Tom Jones, their Egmont, as noble, sympathetic, and elect natures, in spite of their freaks, their follies, and their sins ? Besides, it was not Herder alone who remon- strated against Kantis ideas of morality, gciijuer b. politics, and religion, as against his whole ^^°^' way of analysing what in nature is united . Schiller himself, Kant's greatest disciple, has lent to his 'Wallenstein ' the finest words in which ever the true Teutonic idea, from Luther down to Schopen- hauer, the negation of absolute free will, was formulated : Hab' ich des Menschen Kern erst untersucht, So kenn' ich auch sein Wollen und sein Handeln, &c. Schiller, it is true, does not speak these words in 216 GOETHE, KANT, AND SOHILLEK. Ms own name ; he puts tliem into the mouth of Ms fatalistic hero. Nay, he always insists upon freedom as the distinctive quality of man in oppo- sition to necessity, which is the law of nature; but he always means hy it the co-op&ration of intellectual and moral motives in the formation of our actions, not the absolute rule of those motives. In this, as in all the rest, he extenuated the rigidity of Kant's doctrines, and largely modified at last what he had taken from Kant. Was it not Schiller himself who wrote the famous epigram against Kant's categoric imperative ? "Willingly I serve my friends ; unfortunately I do it with pleasui-e, and so I am often angry with myself for not being virtuous. There is only one remedy : try to despise your friends, and then do with horror what duty commands. Already before studying Kant's great works, Schiller had arrived at the same conclusions as Kant with regard to history. Starting from Rousseau, as Herder, and Kant himself in his earlier works, had done, he had contended that the state of nature, so much vaunted by Jean Jacques, was reconcilable with civilisation, pro- vided this civilisation was a simple one like that of the Greeks, which, far from stifling natural SCHILLEE. 217 spontaneousness as ours does, develops it. The aim of Humanity was to be Nature purified by- culture. The prototype of this renovated and ennobled nature vras the Hellenic world. Here you have almost literally Kant's earlier ideas of 1764. Nevertheless, Schiller already goes his own way even here, when he sees in Art the first civilising power which prepares moral and scientific culture, as well as the crowning of all civilisation, the highest development of man. The ideal of mankind, in his eyes, will be attained only when moral and scientific culture is placed again under the principle of beauty, in other words, when life itself becomes again a work of art, as it was in Greece. When, after having, put forth this view in 1789, in his great poem, 'The Artists,' he made the acquaintance of Kant's works, Schiller was exceedingly struck and even conquered by them ; but soon a reaction took place, and he tried to com- plete and modify Kant's moral doctrine, in order to bring it into harmony with his own ai'tistic pro- pensities and predilections. Kant's condemnation of the senses, his rigid conception of duty, hurt the artistic nature of Schiller, who endeavoured to show that moral beauty, not moral actions, ought 218 GOETHE, KANT, AND SOHII.LBE. to be the ideal aim of man, because perfection could only be attained when duty had become a second nature to man. Already, in his sesthetic treatises, Schiller had contended against Kant that beauty was not only a subjective sensation, but that it existed objectively in things. As often as an object is, what it is, by itself and for itself, it is beautiful, according to him — an idea already con- tained, however, in Kant's ' teleologic ' or objec- tive judgment, as opposed to the ' aesthetic ' or subjective judgment, although Schiller corrected Kant's conception of a higher teleology by that of autonomy. This objective beauty — a most doubtful conception — Schiller called architectural beauty, and he opposed to it the moveable beauty or grace, which belongs only to free beings, and which is the expression of the beautiful soul regu- lating all the movements of the body. Archi- tectural beauty, he says, does honour to the Author of nature, moveable beauty to the possessor, who is at the same time its creator. Now, what is the state of the soul which pro- duces this moveable beauty or grace ? It cannot be the absolute empire of reason over the senses, because the liberty of nature is impaired thereby ; it cannot be the absolute rule of the senses, which SCHILLEE. 219 are always tinder the yoke of necessity. Hence, beauty of soul exists, wlien both come to a kind of mixed constitution and compromise, in which reason and sense, duty and inclination, coincide. Man is designed not for the performance of par- ' ticular moral actions, but to be a moral being. ' His perfection lies not in virtues, but virtue ; and virtue is only inclination for duby. ' We call a soul beautiful, when the moral feeling has become so thoroughly master of all the sensations of man that he can without fear abandon to impulse the direction of the will.' Thence, in a beautiful soul, it is not the particular actions which are moral ; the whole character is moral. This, you see, is a reconciliation of the Herderian and Kantian ideas by the evocation of the Hellenic ideal ; it is the serene KaloTcagathia of the Greeks, not Kant's rigid law of the categoric imperative, which treats the senses like slaves. This ideal of the beautiful soul, however, is practically almost unattainable. There are mo- ments when the assaults of the senses must be conquered; and these moments will be the test whether the moral beauty is really an acquired possession which will resist, or only an inborn dis- position to kindness and a goodness of tempera- 220 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. ment which will give way. If it is the former, the victory will be dignity, which is not the opposition, but the completion of grace ; for ' grace lies in the freedom of our voluntary movements, dignity in the rule over involuntary movements.' I need scarcely say that I am here simply stating the ideas of the great German thinkers and poets. I do not discuss them. I also adopt their terminology, even when it seems to me objectionable, as that of Schiller when he uses the words dignity, grace, beauty. The means, according to Schiller, to acquire beauty of soul, are art and science, because they are the only things in which our personal interest does not come into question, and in which con- sequently we are, philosophically speaking, really free. The contemplation of nature and its forms, and the study thereof, without a wish to possess, utilise, or enjoy the objects of such contemplation or study for our personal advantage, constitute art and science. The ideal of a human society would in con- sequence be a sort of EBsthetic community, which Schiller, however, was quite resigned not to see ever realised, except in some select sphere. Nevertheless, he thinks that the example of Greece shows that the thing is possible. Whilst with us SCHILLER'. 221 ttere is nothing but barbarism on one side, cor- ruption on tbe otlier, and a division of labour everywbere, "witli the Greeks tbere was nature and culture ; tbeir work was not divided, nor were their souls. Tbucydides was, at the same time, a philosopher, a physician, an admiral, a statesman, and an historian ; and Xenophon, the naturalist, showed himself a great general when circumstances required it. Something analogous must be done for the modem world. All political amendment, however, must proceed from an amendment of character. For this we want an instrument inde- pendent of the State, an instrument which the general corruption will not touch ; and this instru- ment is art. Each of us must, somewhat in the spirit of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, try to educate himself, to make of himself a beautiful soul, to develop all the germs of his individuality to an harmonious unity. Thus SchiUer, by the philo- sophical way, reaches the same goal which Herder had reached by the study of history, and Goethe by the study of nature — I mean, the ideal of human- ism. The completion of Schiller's ideas his friend, W. von Humboldt, gave in his strange book on the ' Limits of the Action of the State,' which reads like a chapter of J. S. Mill's 'Essay on 222 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE. Liberty ' from an idealistic,, instead oi from an utilitarian, point of view : for W. von Humboldt wants to see tlie power and interference of the State limited to tlie utmost, only in order that the freest and most harmonious development of individuality ma,y not be impeded. Thus the emancipative tendencies of the cen- tury, which elsewhere had led to the democratic conclusion of the superior rights of individual reason over collective wisdom as represented by tradition, of common sense over genius, and thence to affirming the equal value of all individuals, led in Germany to the aristocratic view of the recognition of superior individualities and their rights, and thence to considering the education of these individualities (not the satisfaction of the interests, passions, and wishes of the greater number) as the means and aim of civilisation. It is but natural that the former view should favour the development of utilitarianism and of positive science, and that the latter should generate the artistic and the historical treatment of things. There is no doubt that Schiller definitively determined the province of art, when he said that it consisted not in dreaming of an unreal, fantastic world, but in discerning the ideal in the real world. SCHILLER. 223 in seeing in tlie accidental the manifestation of tlie eternal. Tlie question is wlietlier lie and his time were riglit in seeing tlie dignity of man preserved in art alone, because in art alone man was free and active, his own master, and yet working upon the outer world. A second and secondary question is whether they did not en- tirely misunderstand Greece, where State and City formed the basis of the whole national existence and by no means only a disagreeable necessity. Finally, there is always the Mephistophelian objection : what, if you had seen Greece near ? would you not have found things somewhat differ- ent from what they seem to you in the haze of distance? One thing, however, is certain: the standpoint of Schiller remained that of the whole age in its greatest representatives. The weak side of it is obvious ; and cruel reality stirred up Germany, proving to her harshly enough that the much despised State was the necessary ground upon which alone man could devote himself with dignity and security to his aesthetic perfection. Things have been reversed since then in Germany. The idea of the State, so utterly obliterated in Schiller's time, has become exceed- ingly active and powerful ; and the nation is eager 224 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. to sacrifice everything to it. Schiller's idea is not extinct for all that. As long. as the national State, the lack of which had been so painfully Presei't vicw3 on felt in the moment of need, is being con- State. structed, it is natural that the nation should show a certain ouesidedness and exclusive- ness in this direction. For the time being, indi- vidualism, as [)rea",hed by the great pathfinders of German culture, seems almost vanished. The nation in which Madame de Stael did not find tvro minds thinking alike on any subject, has become singularly gregarious, nay, uniform ; the great producer and consumer of original ideas is content nowadays to feed on some few watchwords mechanically repeated. Individualism indeed, humanism,, absence of prejudice and of social con- ventionality, when pushed so far as they were by the generation of Schiller and Goethe, are absolute hindrances to public life, which subsists only by the sacrifice of individual interests and convic- tions to party principles or national interests. A nation, or a class, or a party in a nation, is irre- sistible only when it has a whole set of common thoughts, interests, feelings, and forms. As long as each unit goes its own way, nation, class, party exist only in words, and cannot resist the slightest PKESENT VIEWS ON STATE. 225 shock. Modem German history proves it on every page. And not only has individualism made room for Tiniformity, humanism for patriotism, but Schiller's conception itself that art was the highest form of human activity, that accidental pi'actical life must be subordinated to a higher ideal life, has, as it were, disappeared, for the time being at least. For I feel confident that, as soon as the long- yeamed-for national State is complete and insured against inner and outer enemies, Germany will come back to the creed of the real founders of her civilisation. But she will only accept it with quali- fications. She will never again profess that un- spoken contempt for the State, which lay at the root of all the thought of Schiller's generation; but neither will she any longer see in the State an end, as she does now, instead of a means, a necessary means, a noble means even, but a means, nevertheless, not an end. It seems im- possible, indeed, that the nation of Lessing and Herder, Goethe and Kant, should not weary of polities as she wearied, long ago, of theology, and, leaving politics to the politicians as she left theo- logy to the theologians, should not set to work Q 226 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER. again at tlie ideal content of life, instead of at the containing forms. There is no contradiction in this, as might at first sight appear. If there are domains of human activity, where absolute individualism is an evil, and a sign of selfishness, there are others where it is as fertile as it is noble. And so it is with collectivism, if I may use that term. A blessing in one department of life, it is a curse in the other. But is it really impossible to confine each of them within limits which will render it salutaij- ? The Germany of 1800 Imew only indi- vidualism ; the Germany of 1879 seems to know only collectivism. The Germany of the futm-e, let us hope, will submit to collectivism, and will be ready to sacrifice individual thought and feeling where it is necessary to do so, i.e. in State and society. She will claim full liberty of personal thought and feeling, where individualism alone can bear fruit, i.e. in art and science; and in doing so she wiU feel that she has chosen the better part: for he, who tries to penetrate the world — ^humanity and nature — and to interpret it faithfully and lovingly, be it by the artist's intui- tion and second creation, be it by the intellect and learning of the scholar, has chosen a higher PRESENT VIEWS ON STATE. 227 activity than tlie man who lives only in and for the State and its passing interests. "We shall see, however, in the next and last of these lectures, how the contrary conviction was brought about in Germany, and what is its justifi- cation. LECTURE VI. THE BOMANTIO SCHOOL. 1800-1825. We have seen that the great task of giving to Germany the foundations of a new and national culture fell to three generations, that of Winckel- mann, Kant, and Lessing ; that of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller ; that of the two Schlegels and the two Humholdts, which was also that of Hardenherg and Tieek, of Rahel and Gentz, of Schelling and Hegel, of Arndt and Kleist, of Schleiermacher and Holderlin, not to speak of many other less cele- brated writers and thinkers who were all born towards the year 1770. It is of this generation, whose principal works were published from 1800 to 1815, that I have to speak to you to-day. My remarks must be, if possible, of a character still more summary and, I am afraid, more superficial than those I have presented to you thus far, as THE STARTING-POINT. 229 this is our last meeting, and I wisli also to notice rapidly, as in an epilogue, the different currents of thought which have agitated Germany during the quarter of a century succeeding the palmy days of the romantic school, which forms the main subject of the present lecture. The romanticists were by no means from the first'-' day such aS they appear to us now, and such as they will figure for ever in the history of rpi,^ g^^^^_ thought. They also, like the two preced- '°s-point. ing generations, fought their battle on the literary field, the only one then open to Germany ; and they began only later to act upon the public life of their country. When they first began to attract attention, they gave themselves out as staunch admirers of Goethe, and adhered strictly to Schiller's principles. It was only in their second phase of development that they turned round against the reigning classicism. Two things are necessary for the poet and artist (says Schiller) ; he must rise above reality, and he must i-emain within the sensuo^is. Where both those exigencies are fulfilled equally, there is eesthetic art. But in an un- favourable and shapeless nature (and society), he too easily abandons the sensuous along with the real, and be- comes idealistic, and, if his understanding be feeble, even 230 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. fantastic ; or when he wishes, and is obliged by his nature, to remain in the sensuous, he obstinately clings to the real, and becomes realistic in the narrow sense of the word, and even servile and vnlgar if he wholly lacks imagination. In both cases he is not aesthetic. These golden words, which the artist and poet can never meditate upon sufficiently, or keep too steadily before his mind, found a notable commen- tary in the German literature of the time. Whilst Goethe and Schiller were on the limit, and often even overstepped the limit, which separates artistic truth — or what they called aesthetic beauty — from abstract idealism, there were many writers who were pleased to dwell within the most vulgar, everyday reality, because they were either afraid or unable to rise into ideal regions. And these writers had a far more numerous public than our classics. The Ifflands, Schroders, Kotzebues, Aug. Lafontaines, and others were in possession of the stage, and made the fortune of the circulating libraries. The prosiest philistine-life became the object of literature, and the inartistic forms of this life were reproduced in poetry, if not yet by plastic art. Schiller and Goethe declared pitiless war against this vulgarity ; and it was no wonder if they exaggerated on their side, not only by the BATTLE -WITH THE REALISTS. 231 occasional misuse of the weapon of satire, but also by the example of their works. In the beginning of their classical period, which is that of their maturity, they had still taken their subjects and their inspiration from real life and national history. 'Hermann and Dorothea' and ' Wallenstein ' are in the highest degree what Schiller required works of art to be, 'within the limits of the sensuous, but raised above accidental reality.' So in spite of the foreign costume were ' Tasso ' and 'Iphigenia,' 'Egmont' and the 'Eoman Elegies.' They showed reality, i.e. concrete feelings and passions, personages and situations, reduced to their eternal, artistic element, and thereby interpreted reality by art. More than this, ' Wilhelm Meister ' had shown that the task of life, the task of the time particularly in, which Goethe lived, was to recognise the rights of reality, and to reconcile idealism with this reality. When once the battle had begun against the vulgar realists, who thought a button-hole an object as worthy of art as a human face, and a wart on -that face as important as the lines of the forehead, Goethe and Schiller were led to the same extreme to which the Tine Arts had already been drifting. In their horror of prosy reality they fled into the 232 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. classic world of antiquity and even into abstract idealism ; and just as Carstens and David looked for ideal types, and thought to find them in the art of the ancients alone, so they hegan to give classic names and forms to mental abstractions, turned the old gods which Herder had shown to be living mythical individualities once more into lifeless symbols of general conceptions, and fell again into full allegorj-. If they were not entirely lost in it, it was because the ideas they allegorised were of real depth, and because their artistic genius was so powerful that even allegory lost something of its inanimate coldness under their hands. ' Pandora ' and ' Palcophron and Euterpe ' are still read, in spite, not because, of. the aesthetic theory which was godmother to them. The pi'C- text for thus abandoning the ' sensuous ' was not even plausible. The German life of their time, they said, offered no fit objects for poetry. ' Her- mann and Dorothea ' is the most eloquent refuta- tion of that paradox, if it wanted refutation. Men's costume may sometimes be inartistic ; their body and soul is never entirely devoid of interest for the artist, although it may offer to him a more or less fertile object. The young romanticists went a step further VIEWS OF SCHILLER AND GOETHE. 233 still than Schiller and Goethe, who had become — for the time being, at least — one-sided idealists ; ' they became dreamers because their understand- ing was feeble.' Goethe and Schiller, indeed, even when they went so far as to seek their subjects beyond the bounds of reality, in abstract thought or a so-called ideal world, at least treated them with the wisdom of artistic understanding and in an objective way. Their young disciples and allies deemed their caprice and inspiration suflBcient guides, and treated their imaginary themes in a quite subjective manner. So, strangely enough, it came to pass that they took from Goethe and Schiller just the shortcomings of their youthful as well as of their mature age, and disdained the superior qualirties which distinguished thom in both periods. In their youth the two great poets had sought in reality and personal experience the materials of their poetry, treating them, however, with a ' subjectivity ' which did not recognise the authority of artistic understanding as the regulat- ing power. Fifteen years later they came to the conviction that no great work of art can be pro- duced without that regulating power, but, disgusted with the realistic literature of the time, they sought their objects outside reality. In this the young 2;^4 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL- romanticists followed them, but remained in tlie other respect at the point where their masters had been in the 'Sturm- und Drangperiode ' ; they recognised no right of control by the under- standing. The only controlling power they ad- mitted was irony, i.e. reason, hovering over and smiling at the work done by unfettered fancy. The consequence was that they, without the guidance of artistic understanding, soon went still farther astray than their models, and not only fled from the surrounding reality, like Goethe and Schiller, but from all reality, into the world of mere imagination. ; Even to such creations, how- ever, they did not know how to give plastic, sen- suous, palpable form ; all remains musical, lyrical, vague, subjective, like their inspiration. They pride themselves on this personal character of both object and form in their poetry. They transferred to art the philosophic system of Fichte, for whom the whole universe was only the production of the ilgo ; and the one activity of this Ugo, which they recognised as the supreme, was Imagination, fantasy. They soon felt the complete contra- diction between themselves and the classical Hellenic world, evoked by Schiller and Goethe, and opposed to it the world of the middle ages, whose THE MEDIEVALISTS. 235 chiaroscuro is infinitely more favoiirable to their dreamy, fantastic art ; and they ended with trying practically to restore the middle ages in order to get a poetical reality. The apostles of unlimited personal liberty in ai't and life became the mis- sionaries of a religious and political conservatism, which would erase from history three centuries of progressive enlightenment, because the preachers of such conservatism feel more comfortable in the dark than in daylight. German romanticism, you see, is totally differ- ent from that which the French have since called by this nam.e, and which bears infinitely Definition moi'e resemblance to the principles of of roman- ticism. the German ' Sturm- und Drangperiode,' viz., the emancipation from all aesthetic rules. Eor the French, for instance, Shakespeare's ' Corio- lanus ' would be a romantic drama, Corneille's ' Cid ' a classical one. It is just the reverse with the Germans. The form of the ' Cid,' of ' Poly- eucte,'maybe classical, the inspiration is modern, i.e. subjective, and the process of creation is modern, i.e. conscious. The form of ' Julius Caesar ' ' may be ever so different from Sophocles,' the inspiration is objective, the process of creation naif, as with the ancients. Now German roman- 236 THE EOMANTIO SCHOOL. ticiam was, above all, a reaction in favour of imagination and faith against the enlightenment and rationalism of the preceding age, but also a reaction in favour of Christianity and the middle ages against the Hellenic heathendom of the end of the century. The theorist of the school, the younger Schlegel, defined it in these words : Komanticism rests solely on Christianity and the feel- ing of charity and love which, thanks to this religion, reigns also in poetry. In this feeling, suffering itself appears as a means of glorification and tiansfiguration. The traditions of the Greek, Germanic, and Scandinavian mythology become in it graceful and serene plays of the imagination. Even among the external forms of style and language, the romantic poet chooses those which answer best to this intimate feeling of love, and those plays of the imagination. Love then, sentimental love, fancy, faith, chivalry, honour, were to be the inspiration of romantic poetry. And as unity reigned in the middle ages, so it was to reign again, unity between head and heart, between poetry, life, philosophy and religion. 'Romanticism,' said Fred. Schlegel, 'is the aspiration after an in- finite poem, which includes the germs of all other poems.' And young Novalis : ' Should the funda- DEPINITIOIT OP ROMANTICISM. 237 mental laws of imagination really be in opposi- tion to those of logic?' And out-Herdering Herder : ' Poetical sentiment has something akin to the sense of divination, to religious sense, even to madness.' Again, poetry was to he philosophy without ceasing to he religion for these mystical minds. Philosophy is the hero of poetry (said Novalis). It elevates poetry, and shows that it is all in all. . . . Tha separation of poet and philosopher is only apparent and injures both; it is the symptom of an illness or of a sickly constitution. All ought to centre in the philo- sopher who is always omniscieiit, who is the real world in nuce. But not philosophy alone, all existence was to be poetry. Life was to become again poetical, as - they imagined it to have been in the dark ages, and poetry was to be lived : both poetry and life under the guidance of religion — not of stern, prosaic, Protestant, but of warm, coloured, sen- suous, Catholic religion. Thus they overthrew all limits, not only those which the strong artistic sense of the ancients had drawn between epic, dramatic, and lyrical poetry, those which Lessing had laboriously erected between plastic art and poetry, those which Kant 238 THK ROMANTIC SCHOOL. had sagaciously traced between theoretical and practical knowledge, but also the limits between prose and verse, art and life, morality and intellect, science and religion, imagination and understand- ing. It was the exaggeration, or rather the caricature, of Herder's profound principle of unity — unity and simultaneousness of individual forces in individual action, of national forces in national action, of human forces in the pursuit cf human aims. Herder had remonstrated against division of labour, but only in the sense that a general basis was required for every special wort, that individual, nation, humanity must be entirely absorbed in the special work in which they are engaged. For the romanticists there was no longer any special work ; State, Religion, Science, Poetry were all one in their eyes. This came in fact to a denial of all civilisation, whose very action is specialisation, not indeed of the subjec- tive forces acting, but of the objective mass which it is its task to master. No wonder if they saw their ideal in the dark ages. Where indeed coxdd they find such unity, poetical life and ' lived ' poetry, political religion and religious politics, as in the middle ages ? Novalis went so far as to declare it a misfortune DEFINITION OP ROMANTICISM. *239 that tlie Papacy should no longer have the power to stop such dangerous theories as those of Coper- nicus, which made mankind believe itself no longer the centre and aim of creation. ' The spirit of all art and sciences,' said Fred. Schlegel, ' must again be united in one centre, similar to that which humanity has lost since the middle ages and to the restoration of which it must aspire.' In the words of his more sober brother, A. William : Europe was one in those gi-eat times. One chivalry made friends of all warriors. All vied in fighting for one faith. Hearts were open to one love. Then also poetry arose, one in feeling, although different in lan- guage. Now the power of the olden times is gone, and we dare to speak of them as barbarous ! People have invented for themselves a narrow wisdom, and what, in their impotence, they do not understand, they call dreams ; but nothing which is of a divine nature can thrive any longer in a time when work is done by unholy hands. Alas ! This age has neither Faith nor Charity ; how should it have retained Hope 1 Hence also their antipathy for the Hellenic ■world where all is clearness, light and health. They had begun with masterly studies ou Greek poeti-y, in F. A. Wolfs sense; had shown great admiration for Goethe ; had developed Schiller's 240 THE EOMAXTIO SCHOOL. theories on sentimental poetry ; but in proportion as they formulated their own principles more distinctly, they turned against Greek classicism, as Goethe and Schiller understood it. In their yearning for twilight, they turned away from a period when that longed-for unity of life and poetry was realised in full sunshine, and under the control of healthy reason. How much more congenial to them were the dark ages in which they saw the reign of uncontrolled fantasy, the outward realisation of their own inner life ! If only they could restore that time, would they not become the Dantes and Wolframs of their time, as Goethe and Schiller were the Homers and Sophocles of theirs ? Now, it was particularly the religion of the Middle Ages which they con- sidered the one higher region, in which all classes, all cultures and all nations might meet again. 'Art and religion were synonymous ' in Z. Werner's eyes, as poetry and science in Hardenberg's. 'They made piety,' Goethe says, ' the one foundation of art, because some monks had been artists, and consequently all artists ought to be monks ; ' and elsewhere he compares them to 'children, who, to imitate a bell, fasten a rope to a tree and sing ding-dong, whilst they are moving it.' A NE-W MTTHOLOGT. 241 To give new life, then, to this bleak, rational- istic age, the spark of imagination was to be rekindled. Fancy was to become once ^ j^^^ more the queen of the world, as they Mythology. imagined she had been in the Middle Ages ; and this sullen, bleak atmosphere was to shine once more in rich colours and in varied forms. What was wanting in modern religion as in modern poetry was a mythology. A mythology then was to be created anew out of all the fragments of pagan and German myths, Indian and Christian legends blent together ; the elves and nixes, who dwelt in the forests and on the rivers, the dwarfs and kobolds who peopled the medisoval world, were evoked anew. The fairy tale was to become the highest form of poetical production, as it was at once the most simple, and the most composite — the most simple because it was created by childlike minds for children ; the most composite, as in it lay united as in a germ, religion and imagination, poetry and thought, wisdom and folly, legend and history, in that unity in which they presented themselves to primitive minds. Even so with the great geniuses of the Christian era. ' Shake- speare's and Calderon's artistic confusion, the delightful harmony of contradictions, the wonder- 242 THE EOMANTIO SCHOOL. ful alternations of enttusiasm and irony, which show themselves in the smallest fragment, seem a new peculiar kind of mythology ; for the beginning of all poetry is to suspend the processes and laws of speculative reason, and to take us back into the beautiful confusion of imagination, iuto the primi- tive chaos of nature.' Heine, a romanticist himself in his earlier days, to whom it was given to realise in his poems, if not in his life, the poetical ideal which lay at the root of all the aspirations and vague definitions of the romanticists, has wonderfully satirised this mixed mythology and poetical chaos of irony and enthusiasm, of fancy and wit, in his ' Atta Troll,' and in what I cannot help considering his finest work, 'the Exiled Gods.' You will not wonder when I say that this apotheosis of imagination, 'Jupiter's spoiled child,' as the highest intellectual power, degenerated naturally into a species of mysticism. They were for ever seeking after the 'blue flower,' like Seinrich von Ofterdingen, the hero of Hardenberg's novel, the ' Wilhelm Meister ' of the school. 'What there is highest in the world,' Fred. Schlegel would say, ' can be told only in sym- bols, precisely because it is unspeakable.' And OHAEAOTEa OF THE ROMANTICISTS. 243 Novalis (Hardenberg), alluding to Ms beloved Middle Ages as the golden age of mankind, says: It had then become quite a natural thing to consider the most ordinary and the nearest things as miraculous, and what was strange and supernatural as ordinary. In this way daily life itself surrounded man like a wonderful fairy tale, and that region which most men do but guess at — or question — as a distant incomprehensible thing, became his home. It seemed unnatural that the poets should form a separate class of men. To be a poet was in their eyes the proper activity of the human mind . Nor otherwise Gorres, the tribune of the party, when he speaks of the dark ages : ' Taith, love, heroism, were then mingled in one large stream. Then it was that the new garden o"f poetry blos- somed, the Eden of romanticism.' Unfortunately there was no genuine simplicity in all this, no spontaneousness, nor that sort of second sight which illuminated for Character Herder all the darkness of early ages, of the Ro- manticists. It was the studied simplicity of pedants and bookworms, who tried laboriously by the effort of understanding and will to arrive at the simple, but rich, direct and concrete conceptions which intuition revealed spontaneously and easily to the B 2 244 THE EOMANTIO SCHOOL. original and liealthj minds of primitive nations, or to robust and undefiled genius in modem times. Their ^** ^* ^^ even with their religion. Eeiigion. Hardenberg excepted, they had all been Bceptics in their first youth. It is possible that in England the Evangelical movement may have avyakened, at least indirectly, what might, in one sense, be called the English romanticism of this century, in other words, the Tractarian movement and what followed. In Grermany it was from the beginning rather in opposition to pietism, than in accordance with it. Schleiermacher himself, who had been brought up in a school of Moravian Brethren, was intellectually emancipated even be- fore he left it. No, Catholicism was to them all only a question of sesthetics, as A. W. Schlegel himself confessed, and as it was in fact also to Chateaubriand. Most of them remained Protest- ants, even after they had denounced Protestantism as the sin against the Holy Ghost. Hardenberg himself, the St. John of the mission, a sickly over- strained nature — Hardenberg who had declared that ' Christianity was finished with the Eeform- a.tion,' who had called Protestantism ' a sacrilegious revolt against Christianity, which exists only in the unity of the visible and universal Church ' — Hard- THEIE KELIGION AND ETHICS. 245 enberg-Novalis himself, never left, perhaps had not the time to leave, the Lutheran Church in which he was born. True, there were manj among them, who, following Fred. Schlegel's and Zacharias Werner's example, actually embraced Catholicism ; but their new religion did not prevent them from enjoying life and its most worldly pleasures just as before. They took from Catholicism only what suited their tastes, its outward plastic forms, its deep historical value, some dogmas which might be interpreted as the symbolical expression of their philosophic convictions, the uncontested authority which it representel ; but they submitted in no wise to what was in the least severe, or even only inconvenient to them in the old faith ; for they ex- hibited a marvellous ingenuity in choosing and appropriating to themselves in every theory, political, religious, philosophical or sesthetic, just what was congenial to their tastes and wants, and in ignoring the rest as if it did not exist. As their religious, so was their poetical and moral attitude. In whatever they do and say there is something voulu and tendu as rp,^^;^ the French would say, and there is no ^"'"^^• affectation more insupportable than the affectation of simplicity. There was an utter want of healtby 246 THE BOMANTIC SCHOOL. and vigorous sensuousness as well as of natural genius in most of those men who made such a pretence of having strong impulses where there was only a perverted imagination, or, at least, a self-indiilgence, which was' content to consider every caprice as an unconquerable passion. The doctrines of ' Luciade,' Fred, Schlegel's youthful novel, a rehabilitation of the flesh and its rights, were commented upon by his friend Schleiermacher, a clergyman, not with Eabelais' or Sterne's jovial sensuousness, which makes us almost forget their ecclesiastical robes, but with a sort of unctuous devotion, as if he spoke of a new religion ; and these doctrines were put into practice during their whole lifetime by such men as Fr. Schlegel, Gentz, and Zacharias Werner, who carried epicurism to a kind of maestria. Divorce was no longer that respectable institution which allows a fetter to fall off, when it has become intolerable, and brings to an end the long expiation of a youth- ful mistake. Divorce in their circle had become an every-day occurrence. There is an actual chassez-croisez among them. Tieck's sister is divorced from her brother's best friend Bernhardi ; Ifendelssohn's daughter is divorced from Veit and marries Fred. Schlegel; A. W. Schlegel's THEIR ETHICS. 247 wife — the most remarkable among tlie women of tlie generation after Raliel — Caroline ScHegel, is divorced and marries Sclielliiig, who is ten years younger than she. There is something unhealthy even in those who do not break deliberately through the bai-riers of society : Holderlin be- comes an early prey to insanity, through his hopeless passion for the mother of his pupils ; Hardenberg cherishes a sentimental love for a girl of twelve j'ears, and dies an early death, at the age of twenty-nine, when this child is taken from him ; Schleiermacher has a romantic re- lation with another clergyman's wife, and ends by marrying a third friend's widow, for whom he had entertained an apparently hopeless love ; Kleist commits suicide, together with a not less morbidly excited lady friend ; Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and Hoffmrain made Mzarrerie a system, and lived according to that system. Their moral indifference itself varied widely from that of a Diderot and his friends. There was a consciousness about it, which deprived it of the only excuse to be pleaded for it. When they contended that ' to have understood a thing was to have justified it;' when they pleaded that 'noble creatures pay with what they are, not 248 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. with what they do ' ; when they thus brought the doctrines of election and grace into a worldly system which had no other aim than to justify their own loose morals ; when these refined Epicureans of Culture, these impotent dilettanti, who have not produced a single lasting poem, were for ever talking of spontaneousness and imagination and popular simplicity — they were certainly theoreti- cally in the right. But it was plain to everyone that the thing most wanting in them was the one they most recommended and praised, whilst, on the contrary, they m.ost depreciated the faculty they possessed in the highest degree, that of criticism. It was by this faculty nevertheless that they acted principally on their time and on the follow- Their ing generation. For they acted power- action in , Germany, fully upon it, not Only m the domain of poetry and art, but also in that of science and politics. It was the romanticists, indeed, who created modern literary history, of which Herder had only Their in- sketched the outlines. They collected Ltoary" *^® popular sougs and fairy tales of Old IS oiy. Grermany ; they republished, and com- mented upon, the poems of Wolfram and Gott- ITS INFLUENCE ON LITEEART HISTORY. 219 fried, the ' Nibelungen ' and the ' Gudrun ; ' and they did it with a delicacy, and a poetical tact, which have been completely lost, since the literary history of the Middle Ages has been treated only from a grammatical point of view. Nor was it only the literary history of the German Middle-Age which the romanticists created; they brought Dante again to honour and with him all the minor medieval poets of the Sonth as well as of their own country. Their translations of the Renaissance poets, of Shakespeare particularly, of Bojardo, Ariosto, Calderon, Camoens, Cervantes, have, it may be said, made the master-works of the world the property of the German nation. It is their merit if, after such a total change of atmosphere, and when the worship of foreign things, which characterised the old Germany, has long subsided, these masterworks still keep their place on the German stage and in German libraries beside those of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. Germany owes to them not only the naturalisation of the poets of all latitudes and times ; but also that of the poetical forms of all nations and periods. It was they who introduced and acclimatised the Italian terzina and canzona, the Spanish redondilla, th3 Persian gasela, as their predecessors had introduced 260 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. and acclimatised in German poetry the hexameter and the alcaic strophe of the Greeks. It was Fr. Schlegel, who first sought and found in India the highest expression of romanticism, i.e. 'the deepest and most intimate life of the imagination. When once we are able to draw from the original sources, perhaps the appearance of sovithern glow, which now attracts us so much in Spanish poetry, will appear to us but pale and occidental.' Then, again, their reaction against the exclu- sive Hellenism of Goethe and Schiller gave impulse to the new poetry of the national and Christian type, of which TJhland has remained and will remain the most charming representative ; to the great national dramas of a Kleist, which after all are the most effective that Germany has produced for the stage, if we except those of Lessing and Schiller; to the patriotic songs of 1813 (the Schenkendorffs and Arndts, Korners and Eiic- kerts, all belonged, more or less, to the romantic school) to the new fantastic novel-literature of the Arnims, Brentanos, Hoffmanns, Chamissos, Fouques ; above all, to what there is best and most imperishable in Heine's wonderful productions. I am not giving you here a literary history of G ermany ; otherwise I should have to show you the AliT. 251 different ramifications of the romantic scliool; the group of the fatalists, that of the patriots, that of the pure fantasts, that of the sentimentalists, •who have all retained in German poetry a place which the preachers of the new Gospel themselves never succeeded in attaining. A similar impulse was given by the romanticists to architecture and painting. That mediaeval tendency, which still prevailed in these On Art. arts in the days of our youth, was their work. France, England, Italy themselves received that impulse from the German romanticists, although they were not quite conscious by what channels it reached them. Bonald had lived in Germany ; B. Constant was as intimate with A. W. Schlegel as Coleridge was with Tieck ; and as the whole atmosphere was pregnant with similar tendencies, as the ground seemed only to wait for the seed in the country of Chateaubriand and in that of Walter Scott, it is natural enough that the slightest germs should bear fruit. The roman- ticists had the merit of freeing the world from Winckelmann's new academical theories, in which Goethe was still entirely wrapt up, of having drawn attention to the beauty of Gothic cathedrals, so de- spised in those days as barbarous monstra, of having 252 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. shown the vaUie of a Giotto and a Fra Angelico, of having made the first collections of Van Eycks and Memlings, as they were also the first to revive the old Catholic church music. Whatever may have been the shortcomings of that school in Art, it was a necessary reaction against the academical classicism of the school of David and Canova.. However false and perilous may have been their view,^ about Art as an instrument for conveying religious or other impressions, the very fact that people began again to appreciate works of art, which were fruits of a simple and genuine study of nature, furthered the intei'ests of modem Art. The revival and exaggeration even of Herder's ideas of unconscious growth in history and their On History application to language, poetry, and law, proper. acted most powerfully and beneficially on the historical, if not on the natural, sciences. The romanticists themselves self-complacently dated a new age from their apostolic mission. ' Several of my friends and I,' said A. W. Schlegel, candidly, ' have proclaimed in all forms, in poetry and prose, seriously and playfully, the beginning of a new era.' And it would be unjust not to confess that there is some truth in this pretension. It was only now and under their care that the HISTORT PKOPEB. 253 seeds sown by Herder, tMrty years before, bore all tbeir fruits. The whole history of medieval literature and language dates from them. The troubadours and the trouveres, the Minnesingers and the Meistersangers, the minstrels and jongleurs, were revived ; more than that, German philology was created by their disciples, the two Grimms. Soon neo- Latin philology was to follow; nay, even Oriental philology owes its first impulse to Fr. Schlegel's important work on the ' Wisdom of the Hindoos,' as the comparative science of languages was created by one of their generation, if not of their school, W. von Humboldt. But we must go a step further. If their prin- ciple, applied to politics, to philosophy and natural science, has done little more than mischief; if it has led to the monstrous hypotheses of a Schelling and to his arbitrary a priori constructions, uncon- trolled by observation of facts ; if it produced a mysticism which considered Nature as the dark mystery which the senses and understanding could never unveil, and has thus led to Oken's, Schubert's, and Steffens's scientific aberrations — it yet exer- cised an important influence for good in the history of philosophy, religion, legislation, the State, and even in that of science. Not only the Grimms, but 254 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. Eiehliorn, Savigny, Mebuhr, Creuzer were personal friends of the romanticists, in the main adherents to their principles, and fed with their ideas. You know the revolution effected by Creuzer's ' Sym- bolik,' and how, in spite of all its extravagances, it created indirectly the science of comparative mythology. You also know the importance of the so-called historical school of Niebuhr and Eichhom, Otfried Miiller and Bockh, which re- novated history. Even on religion their inflxience has been, partially at least, a salutary. If they favoured and furthered the Catholic reaction which took place after 1830 in Germany as well as in France, they have also propagated in a whole generation (from 1800 to 1830) the conviction that religion can exist without dogmas, that all inner life, all higher feeling is religion, as Schleiermacher had argued in his ' Discourses ; ' and in propa- gating this wide i-eligion they also pleaded and furthered the cause of real, inner toleration. But their influence was most perceptible and most favourable, after all, in the awakening of national sentiment, of patriotism. In fact, the principle according to which Art and Poetry have their roots in national life, the study of old German historyj poetry, and Ian- NATIONAL FEELING. 255 guage at the moment when the deepest humilia- tion was inflicted upon the nation, the lofty humanitarianism and idealism of a Herder, q^ National a Goethe, a Schiller, which seemed to have ^^^''"S- led to the ruin of the German State on the battle- field of Jena, indirectly awakened the national feel- ing, while the persistency with which the roman- ticists dwelt upon the importance of nationality, contributed not a little to the great patriotic effort of the nation in 1813 to free itself from foreign yoke. Nay, that peculiar national pride of a lite- rary and scientific character, which ever since has been proper to Germany, and which ultimately has kindled also the national pride in things political, can be traced to the influence of the Eomanticists. With them also began, alas, that sort of methodical reaction in favour of feudal and ecclesiastical institutions, which was caused by their hatred for the radicalism and Jacobinism of the French Revolution, its spirit of levelling uniformity, its rationalistic spirit. It is remarkable that the German Burke, young Gentz, made, as early as 1796, the first German translation of Burke's * Eeflections.' Unfortunately they did not stop where the great interpreter of the British Constitution stopped. They wanted to go back 256 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. not only beyond 1688, but beyond 1520; nay, further back still, to the glorious time when the holy Roman crown rested on the anointed head of the German Emperor, and his half princely, half sacerdotal sway extended over the whole of middle Europe, when the State was still entirely imbued with an ecclesiastical spirit. The whole movement was, in fact, like that of Herder's times, a reaction against the rationalistic tendency of the eighteenth century, and The Toiiticai the romanticists might be called the real Keactlon. executors of Herder s bequest, were it not that Herder contented himself with emanci- pating the mind from rationalistic conventionalism, whereas the romanticists, after having most effec- tually worked in the same direction, wanted to enthral it in the fetters of a worse conventionalism — that of a dead tradition, galvanised by artificial means. Herder strove to awaken the mind by appealing to all its active forces ; the romanticists tried to lull it into a dreamy sleep by mesmerising as it were all those forces. Herder was of opinion that the historical principle consisted in progress ; the romanticists held that it meant retrogression. Herder wished his own time to make history ; the romanticists thought that they could show respect THE POLITICAL EEACTION. 257 for history only by stopping its course. This they believed might be done most effectually by preaching the cause of ' throne and altar,' of authority, both secular and spiritual, in writings worthy of J. de Maistre. Almost all of them became instruments of the despotic governments of the Restoration after 1815; many of them, we have seen, were even consistent enough to throw themselves into the arms of Rome, the securest citadel, they thought, against the spirit of ex- amination which had bred revolt and i-esulted in the overthrow of all the creations of history. 'The spirit of enlightenment,' said A. W. Schlegel, ' which has no respect whatever for darkness, is the most decided and most dangerous adversary of poetry.' Now, as poetry was supposed to penetrate the whole life, public and private, the consequence was that enlightenment in the eyes of the romanticists was an enemy to be combated also in the domains of Religion and the State. Hence their strong antipathy for the French Revolution,, which Klopstock, Kant, Schiller, and even Herder had saluted as the beginning of a new era. They saw in it nothing but Voltaireanism and the worship of the goddess Reason ; the presumptuous attempt to create mechanically a' s 258 THE KOMANTIO SCHOOL. social order according to rationalistic principles ; the negation, in a word, of History. Unfortu- nately their medieval tastes were not so inno- cent as the children's play with the bells spoken of by Goethe. The literary and philosophical ten- dencies of earlier times soon developed into poli- tical and ecclesiastical tendencies. Alexander of Russia was deeply imbued with their ideas when he formed the ' Holy Alliance,' more even against the spirit of the past century than against revolu- tionary France. In Austria and in Italy the governments made themselves the champions of the Eoman Church ; in France ' throne and altar ' formed an alliance against scepticism and liberal- ism ; the petty nobility of Germany already dreamed of a restoration of its feudal rights ; Prussian professors and statesmen began to vie with each other in theorising on the ' Christo- Teutonic ' State. It was reserved for the most exalted disciple of the romanticists to realise their ideal — so far as the good old Protestant State of Prussia allowed him to realise it — when he at last ascended the throne in 1840 : for Germany's favourable star had granted a long life to his wise and good father. Eouianticism, indeed, was long dead, when Fre- derick William lY., the ' Romanticist on the EEOENT GERMAN WORK. 259 throne,' as Strauss called Him by innuendo in a celebrated pamphlet, delivered up to the Catholic Church the rights of the State, so strenuously defended by his father, catholicised Protestant- ism as much as it lay in his power, and tried to create artificially a medieval constitution. He did not succeed ; but Germany still pays the penalty of these dangerous poetical experiments. We have arrived at the end of our task. Germany has not since been idle. She has pro- duced one poet of genius and many of talent since 1825. She has given to the world some Conclusion. great scientific and historical works, which are unequalled even in the period we have been studying together. Some great discoveries have been made in natural science ; but no new and fruitful ideas, such as had come forth from Germany during the sixty or seventy years we have been contemplating, have been produced. No new science has been created. The German intellect has been busy, ever since Goethe's death, in developing or contradicting, in modifying or applying the ideas propounded and insisted on by the three generations to which Germany owes her intellectual Renaissance, the generation of 1760, that of 1780, and that of 1800. We have 260 THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. examined together these ideas, and I need not dwell upon them longer — or if I were to do so, I should be obliged to ask you for fifty meetings more — but I must beg you to bear in mind (what is indeed the purport of all these lectures), that the point of view, which was the general one in Europe during the last fifty years, was really opened by Germany. Let us not be misled by the universality of certain currents of thought as to their origin. When all Europe seemed bent on the mechanical explanation of nature, when Galileo, Kepler, Des- cartes, devoted their lives to this task, it was England which, through Harvey, Gilbert, Bacon, gave the impulse, which, through Hobbes, Newton, Locke, kept the lead in the movement which had sprung up in this island. It was the same with the French thought of the past century, 'No sooner had the Montes- quieus and Voltaires, the Eousseaus and Diderots, expressed their ideas, than these ideas passed into European currency and were changed into foreign coin. The same phenomenon may be seen in the successive phases of the period dur- ing which Germany was acquiring the intellectual hegemony, i.e. from about 1763 to about 1830. ITS INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND AND EUEOPE. 261 Scarcely had Winckelmann declared war against the reigning rococo, than all over Europe sculpture, painting, and architecture took the new classical turn. When, fifty years later, a reaction set in against the style empire, which had ' but' been; an exaggeration of Winckelmann's theories, when Chateaubriand in France, and Walter Scott in England, brought the Middle Ages into fashion, they only followed — unconsciously o£ course — the impulse given by the German romanticists. It was the same with the more important movement which took place a.ll over Europe in historical and natural science. Not only would Augustin Thierry and Thomas Carlyle have been impossible without the German revolution of thought ; but the way in which our century looks upon antiquity, so widely different from that in which Pope or Voltaire looked upon it, was opened by Winckelmann and Lessing. The point of view, if not the method, which is generally accepted now in natural science, was first held by Goethe. The historical sciences — under which name we comprise not only political and literary history, but also theology, philology, archseology, and jurisprudence — have been, during the whole century, and harve scarcely even now ceased to be. 262 THE EOMATJTIO SCHOOL. under the empire of Herder's ideas of evolution. Comparative philology, whether we consider it a branch of natural or of historical science, has not yet abandoned the roads opened by W. von Humboldt and Bopp, nor have the neo-Latin studies repudiated the paternity of Diez, or the Ger- manistic that of Grimm. A new basis for philo- sophy has been laid by Eant. Schiller's concep- tion of art has been more and more generally adopted. The science of religion, and the inde- pendent spirit in which our time treats the history of Christianity, so different from the aggressive tone of the last century, are mainly due to Herder's German disciples. Above all, the con- sciousness with which individualism — a conserva- tive principle, when understood in the German sense — still resists here and there the overwhelm- ing tide of the levelling tendencies of our days, is of German origin. So also is the conscious- . ness with which the right of intuitive genius — an aristocratic principle — is as yet maintained against the all-invading method of analysis and rationalism, a method which, in its ultimate re- sults, must always further the democratic interest, as it applies to the most general of human faculties. The fact of this struggle would suflSce to prove CONCLUSION. 263 that the main principles of German thought have not triumphed without contest in Europe. They can hardly be said to have triumphed even in Germany, where they have been deeply modified and corrected by new currents, just as they had themselves deeply modified and corrected the English French currents of the past. EPILOGUE. * TOUNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GEEMANT.' 1825-1860. The romanticists were men ' who, with, the weapons forged by the age of enlightenment, combated enlightenment itself, in the domains of science, art, morality, and politics.' With these words one of the most gifted Young Hegelians, who rose against romanticism towards 1830, Arnold Euge, characterised his opponents. The exaggera- tion, in fact, of the romantic movement produced, as will always be the case, a strong reaction. This reaction took place in every department of intellectual life, just as the romantic movement had pervaded every branch of activity. The his- torical idea had been carried so far that it had led to the justification of every abuse and of every crime of the good old time, nay, to plans and efforts for bringing the world back to that good old time. HEGEIi. 265 Hegel himself did not go to such, lengths. He remained throughout faithful to the ideal of the modern State and the Protestant jj^^^j religion. Feudality and Catholicism re- ^''''^^^^^• mained always for him things of the past, which no eflfort could recall to life ; but he saw in the bureaueratical State of Frederick William III. the crowning result of all the historical evolutions, the end to which all the political history of Germany had tended. He regarded the ' Evan- gelical Alliance' of Frederick William III. as destined to bring together Calvinists and Luthe- rans, as the ultimate expression of the religious development of his country. Now this evolution was, according to the philosophy of identity, which he had modified, but not abandoned, nothing but the evolution of universal reason itself, as developed in time and space ; and he gave to this view its philosophical formula, when he declared that 'whatever is, is reasonable, and whatever is reasonable, is ' — a proposition quite defensible if only Hegel's premiss were accepted, that his dialectic method was a thinking process identical with the process of things which in its turn was but the process of eternal thought thinking itself. For Hegel had given to the fieri idea of Herder 266 ' YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GBEMANT.' dialectic and metapliysical form : the ' immanent negativity ' of things — everything is always chang- ing, consequently denies itself unceasingly — ^is the form of a thought, which is identical with the process oi fieri in the world of phenomena. In the same way he had undertaken to prove that Christianity had given expression to the con- sciousness of the absolute in its purest form — as far as imagination and feeling were concerned — that it was consequently the absolute religion, as his philosophy was of course the absolute philo- sophy. At last he had gone so far as to interpret all the difiFerent dogmas of Christianity so as to make of them symbols of his own philosophy. This provoked the rebellion of his most eminent disciples. Strauss and Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Euge, separated from him, and formed the left wing of Hegelianism, or, as they called themselves, the Young-Hegelians. Strauss attacked super- naturalism as well as theological rationalism with the weapons of historical investigation in his ' Life of Jesus,' which appeared in 1835. Faith- ful to Hegel's earlier ideas he presented in this memorable book the origin of Christianity as growing naturally out of the thoughts, feelings, and circumstances of the time, not as created by YOUNG HEGELIANS, 267 one stroke of a magic wand. He sliO"wed how far legend, myth, and the popular imagination had aided in the hirth of Christianity, combating the supernatural as well as the rationalistic ex- planation of the miracles ; hut combating quite as warmly the irreverent theories of the eighteenth century, which saw only wonder-workers and im- postors in all founders of religions. He thus be- came, together with F. 0. Baur, who had begun before him and who continued his work, the father of the new 'theological school, known as the Tubin- gen school, whilst Feuerbach subjected more fully the theoretical side of Hegel's doctrine to the dialectical process which he had learned from his master, investigating the essence of religion in general; and soon a numerous school of young thinkers followed in his steps. A return to common- sense in philosophy, to criticism in theology, was the consequence of these attacks against the high- priest of ' official ' philosophy. Even in the field of pagan mythology the spirit of enlightenment rose once more against the spirit of dusky divination ; and Voss and Lobeck threw down the gauntlet to Creuzer in the name of common-sense and reason. Something similar took place in jurisprudence and history proper. Savigny as well as Eichhom 268 ' TOUNG GKRMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GEEMANT.' had taught that our time had neither vocation nor aptitude for law-giving ; that all fertile legislation There- "^^^ ^^^ work of generations; that the orratloial Roman law, which still lived in all the ''"'■ countries of the Continent, the German law, which still prevailed in England, were only the expression of national spirit, custom, tradi- tion, and local necessities. Already in Hegel's life- time his most eloquent disciple, Gans, had defended against the historical school the rights of the living, and with these the rights also of reason. At the same time the wonderful development of the Frederician and Napoleonic legislation seemed the living refutation of the historic theory, pushed as far as it was pushed by the romanticists. Not a generation had passed away since the great work of Bonaparte ; and the Code Napoleon seemed already ineradicably rooted in France., Nay, with an eye of envy non-Prussian Germany regarded this simple rational legislation as contrasted with her own various complicated and antiquated laws. Napoleon, after all, had made his Code civil as well as his Code pSnal and his Code de procidure — as Frederick II. had, thirty years before, constructed his less comprehensive Landrecht — out of the frag- ments of former historical legislation, just as his HISTOBT, 269 new administration was only that of the old mon- archy in disguise. This, howeyer, was not yet well recognised by the generation of 1830, which was still persuaded that all this new organisation had sprung out of the Emperor's head, like Minerva from that of Jupiter, and that he had shaped it exclusively according to abstract principles of justice and utility. In all German universities 'natural law,' i.e. the rationahstic theory of law, as the eighteenth century had preached it ever since Thomasius, again mounted the pro- fessors' chairs and revindicated the rights of reason against the absolutism of the historic school, which Goethe had so wittily parodied by anticipation. Like an inveterate disease, law and rights descend trailing from generation to generation, and gently move from place to place. Eeason becomes non-sense ; what was a blessing is a curse. Woe to thee that thou art a grandson ! Of those rights, alas ! with which we are born, there is ne'er a question. A large body of historians followed the road of the new rationalistic school of jurisprudence. Germany was inundated with histories History. which treated all the past with reference to the present, which were not content to tell the facts, but commented upon them from the point 270 ' TouiTG gbemant' and 'little geemany.' of view of the French liberals or the French re- publicans of the day. Eotteck's and Welcber'g great ' Dictionary of Political Science,' entirely written under the influence of formal French constitutionalism, was the Bible of the new liberal doctrinaires, who sprang up everywhere in Germany and repeated in the small Chambers of Carlsruhe and Darmstadt the great oratorical tournaments of Paris under the Eestoration and Louis Philippe. If the most practical of English statesmen, Lord Palmerston, naively believed that the recipe of a parliamentary constitution, neatly written on white paper, would work in Spain and Greece, as that growth of centuries, the British constitution, worked ia England, the German professors of 1830 were certainly excus- able in thinking that they might introduce that most delicate and most abnormal form of govern- ment into their tiny bureaucratical States. Had not the French constitution-mongers, with Ben- jamin Constant at their head, adapted it to Con- tinental use ? There was, however, a party which went further than the constitutionalists. ' Young Germany' — so we call the group of youthful writers, bom about 1810, who, towards 1830, trod THE MODEEN MINDS. 271 in the footsteps of Borne and Heine — Young Ger- many did not stop at representative monarcliy, as it did not stop at Deism in philosophy, yamg although Heine himself remained ever ^®''™''"J'' faithful to the theory of a limited monarchy, and came back at the end of his life to 'the simple belief in the personal God of the common man,' as he used to say. Lanbe and Gntzkow, Wienbarg and Euge attacked Christianity and even Hegelian- ism, in which they had been bred, with the violence of the French revolutionists of 1792. They showed a determined predilection for atheism and material- ism in philosophy, for Jacobinism in politics ; they even preached, with the Saint-Simonians, the emancipation of woman and the abolition of indi- vidual property. They called themselves proudly ' modem ' minds. They protested against all forms of aristocracy, social as well as intellectual. The State was to become the one all-regulating power ; not the historical State, as it had grown up in the course of centuries — but the modern State -built up according to the dictates of Eeason — or of Jean-Jacques ; not even the State of 1790, but the democratical State of 1793. The place held till now by the great — kings, aristocrats, ge- niuses — was to be held henceforward by the people, 272 ' yOUNG- &ERMANT ' AHD 'LITTLE GEEMANT.' whicli was to become tlie hero of history and public life. At the same time they claimed, not only for the people, but for themselves, the right to material enjoymejit, even to luxury ; not an equality in misery, but an equality in wealth was their un- attainable ideal. Their religion was the rehabilita- tion of the flesh ; science and poetry were means for preaching and propagating their new gospel. Their last and most dangerous disciple, Ferdinand Lassalle, died only fifteen years ago, not without having left his fatal legacy to Germany. Borne and Heine, who had given the first signal for this reaction in favour of rationalism Home and against history, and of French ideas ijeine. against German, did not, as I said, go so far. Heine was too much of an artist not to be shocked by such excesses ; Borne too much of a Stoic to go such lengths-^his ideal was the in- corruptible Robespierre, not the epicurean Danton. For Heine, politics, as well as religion, history, philosophy, never ceased to be themes for poetical vai-iations. In reality they were as indifferent to him as the religions subjects of the great works of the Italian Renaissance were indifferent to the artists who produced them. It was Borne and Heine, nevertheless, who set the example. Heine BOENE AND HEINE. 273 himself liad belonged, as I have said, to the romantic school, and was the personal pupil of A. W. Schlegel. He had begun with two romantic tra- gedies which exhibit only too visibly the traces of the master's influence ; and he was destined to give in 'Atta Troll' and the 'Romanzero' what the romanticists themselves had never been able to give, the ideal romantic poem. There was not even wanting in them the much recommended irony of Fred. Schlegel. But Heine had always been a somewhat unruly disciple. As early as at the age of sixteen he had sung his song of the Napoleonic grenadiers, which was in opposition to the whole tendency of his masters ; and you Isnow how he developed the theme of the Napoleon- worship in the incomparable prose-poem of ' Tambour Legrand.' Now, for a while Germany neglected Heine the immortal poet for Heine the ephemeral politician and philosopher — there are many foreigners who do so still — and was led to accept the most meagre of doctrines by the irresistible fascination of a prose and a verse which she had not heard since the great days of Goethe and Schiller; whilst Bome's incomparable wit made her forget for a time that his political ideal was still more shallow than that of Heine. T 274 'young geemant' and 'little germ ant.' We have seen that the liberating movement of 1813, the rising of the whole nation against the foreign yoke, had taken place under the inspira- tion of romanticism. It had taken the form of a emsade, not only against Napoleon and the French, hut against the rationalism, the demo- cracy, and the cosmopolitan pretences of the eigh- teenth century and the great Revolution. It had invoked the Christian and religious spirit, Teutonic patriotism, feudal loyalty towards the hereditary princes ; and these feelings were still very strong when Heine and Borne, towards 1825, gave ex- pression to the aspirations of the rising genera- tion which had not felt the hardship of foreign oppression and to which the political reality which had followed the enthusiastic rise of 1813, had proved a source of the bitterest disappoint- ment. The shameless despotism of the fathers of the fatherland, most of them of Napoleon's own creation, or at least promotion, the petty tyranny of their instruments, and the religious fanaticism or hypocrisy which already began to spring up in the official spheres of South Germany, were quite sufficient to alienate the young from the romantic cause. It was the time when Grabbe wrote his tragedy of ' The Hxmdred Days,' when ZedlilK LITTLE GEEMANY. 275 composed liis poem of the dead Caesar's ' Midniglit Review,' when W. Miiller's ' Griechenlieder,' and Mosen's Polish songs resounded in the streets of every German town. The reaction in favour of cosmopolitism and humanitarianism against pa- triotic one-sidedness, and of French sympathies against German national prejudices, was at the same time a partial return to the ideas which had predominated in Germany in the times of Schiller and Goethe, and the exposition of which has been the main object of these lectures. A partial return, I say ; for in opposing democracy to aris- tocracy, the masses to individualism, the mechani- cal making of states and laws to the ideas of growth and evolution, it was in contradiction with the creed of Herder and of Goethe. In its cosmopolitism and in its paganism.it was quite under the sway of the great Humanitarian and the great Heathen. The Francophil, democratical, and rationalistic current, initiated hy Borne, Heine, and Young Germany, prevailed for nearly a quarter ^^^^-^^ of a century, from 1825 to 1850. Then ««'"«".^-- again under the influence of the disenchantment which the failures of 1848 had caused, and still more under the impressions produced by the T 2 276 'yotjng gebmany' and 'little geemant.' bankruptcy of the Frencli democracy in 1849, a contrary cuixent arose in Germany. Already towards 1840 this new current had set in: the ctirrent of German national spirit Its national ^'gainst foreign influence, and above charaoer. ^^ against France. From 1840 to 1848 the 'Germanistenversamralungen' or meetings of Teutonic philologists, jurisconsults and historians, were for Germany what the scientifi.c congresses were for Italy, the pretext and opportunity for asserting and preparing the unity of Germany, For it was written that our political ideas should be framed by professors, as professors had framed our literary and artistic, our religious and philosophical ideas. The two men, however, who gave us, the one a national poetry, the other a national state, were not pr.ofessors : but could they have done their work if the professors had not prepared the ground for them ? Would they not have done it in a still more satisfactory way if the professors had not continued to interfere in it ? The outbreak of French Chauvinism — the ugly word seems to have established itself in all our languages — and the thirst for conquest betrayed in 1840, the cries for the Rhine which resounded in Paris, as soon as Europe was threatened with ITS NATIONAL CHARACTER. 277 a general war through the compKcation in the East, contributed not a little to strengthen this current, particularly in the menaced provinces of the left bank, which had been the special centre of the romantic movement. This current is, neverthe- less, very distinct from that of 1813, audit became still more so after 1848, when the romantic dreams pf a resurrection of Frederick Barbarossa's Empire, under the form of a Seventy- Millions Germany, prevented the foundation of the national State. It was, in the main, tindoubtedly directed against what was un-German in the political rationalism of ' Yoxmg Germany ' — whose best men, from Borne, Gans, and Heine, down to E. Lassalle, were, curious to say, really not of German blood, being Israelites by birth, if not by creed. The declara- tion of war itself was a violent pamphlet against Borne from the pen of Gervinus. Nevertheless, the reaction of 1850 did Tiot affect a picturesque and poetical costume like that of 1813. The new patriots deemed it unnecessary and childish to show the love of their country by their white collars, bare necks, and long hair. On the contrary, they affected rather a sort of bourgeois common-place exterior. They dreaded to be considered as unpractical dreamers; their 278 ' YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND * LITTLE GERMANY.' highest ambition was to be taken for ' positive ' people. Their ideal in history was the honest, stedfast, prosy Bwrger of the sixteenth century, not the romantic knight of the Middle Ages, or the Germanic chieftain of barbarous times. They saw the strength of the nation in the middle- class, and turned against the Junker nobility, as well as against the democratic masses. They did not dreatn of a traditional royalty, but of a monarchy resting on contract like that of England since 1688. They showed no sympathy for the Church or for any religious mysticism, such as had- inspired the poets of 1813 ; on the contrary, they wished to impress upon men's minds that thej' were Protestants — sober, unpoetical Protestants — and at the same time the heirs of Kant, whose purely moral religion, without dogmas and forms of worship, was to be the German religion jpour excellence, i.e. the final form of Protestantism, as for the English Deists of the past century TJni- tarianism was the final form of English Pro- testantism. But if they were disciples of Kant the moralist, they pointedly ignored Kant the metaphysician. 'Young Germany' had still been strongly imbued with the speculative spirit; it had grown up under THE GERMAN METHOD. 279 Hegel's, as yet, uncontested rule. The new school deliberately turned their backs on all metaphysics : duiing their reign over public opinion, if lis Positive not over State and Church — i.e. from cimractcr in Science. 1850 to about 1866 -a sort of indiffer- entism, nay, of aversion, for philosophical specula- tion seemed to have taken hold of the nation, awakened, as she was, and sobered down from her metaphysical excesses. Even in their way of treat- ing science they went to the opposite extreme. The great advantage of Kant's influence was, that science during the first half of this century was always handled in a philosophical spirit. There was certainly an excess both in the so-called ' philo- sophy of nature ' and in the 'philosophy of history,' which interfered too often with the sober and exact observation and verification of facts. The new school assumed to be more positive. General ideas had nothing to do with science ; and they even went so far as to treat history as a sort of exact science. The famous ' German method ' dates from this time. Imagination, and even intuition, were banished from historical studies, as well as from natural science. Facts alone were to be sought for, sifted, and assembled ; the only combination of the facts which was allowed was connexion 280 ' TOCNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GEEMANT.' through, cause and effect ; and the disciples were so well drilled that they succeeded at last not only in finding the facts they wanted, and in mak- ing them take the appearance which they desired, but in driving life itself out of history, which is but the evolution of life. Even the present generEu- tion, which has come back to long neglected philo- sophy, is animated in its researches by a spirit entirely different from that which predominated in the times of Hegel. It is, indeed, Kant's criticism of reason with its strictly experimental character and its opposition to all a priori speculation, which our matter-of-fact juniors have taken up again. In other words they have returned to the point whence their fathers started on their strange Odyssey, and they are favoured in their new voyage by all the light which the progress of natural science, accomplished in the interval, throws on their road. And not the professional philosophers alone, but the men of science them- selves, the physiologists especially, tread now with a surer foot in the steps of the great renovator of modern thought. If, however, the men of 1850 repudiated all philosophical ideas, they did not reject political ideas ; nay, history soon became in their hands a GERMAN LIBEEALISM. 281 storehouse of arguments for political views. The ' men of Gotha ' — so they were called in consequence of the Gotha Parliament of 1849, in -which they formed the majority — thought, if they did not say, that politics alone really deserved to 1 • 1 -1 -1 » ^° Politics. occupy a nation which had come of age. They were staunch Liberals of the constitutional school ; but their ideal was the old English Con- stitution, not the French one of 1830. In general their leaders, from Dahlmann and Gervinus, down to Gneist and Waitz, Sybel and Hausser, were decidedly English in their sympathies, until — well, until a period which lies beyond the limits of the subject which I have to treat here. Like the English Liberals of the old school they had arrived at a species of compromise between political rationalism and ' historicism.' They still adhered to the German idea of evolution — the only great German idea to which they remained faithful — but they corrected it consciously, as the English had done and do almost unconsciously, by adaptation of the past to the exigencies of the present. They saw the historical spirit, not in a return to the' past, or in a stopping of history at a given moment, but in continuous progress. Moreover, as, although mostly professors, they 282 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AHD ' LITTLE GERMANY.' claimed to be practical politicians, not dreamers and theorists, tliey did not want to awaken Fre- derick Barbarossa in bis Ky£fbaiiser, and call to life tbe 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,' witb its seventy millions of souls and its sway over Hungary and Italy, Poland and Burgundy. Tbey wanted to bave a national State strong enougb to defend itseK against foreign aggression, not so migbty as to arouse tbe fears or suspicion of tbe neigbbouring nations; a State similar to tbose founded, or at least perfected, by Louis XI. of France, Henry VII. of England, Ferdinand tbe Catbolic of Spain. In consequence tbey raised a cbaracteristie protest against tbe Otbos and Fredericks of tbe Middle -Ages, wbo, instead of following tbe sensible and moderate national policy of Henry I., went to assume in Rome tbe crown of tbe Caesars. And as Austria was still con- sidered, and considered berself as tbe natural beir of tbe Holy Empire, as ber possessions lay to a great extent outside tbe frontiers of tbe German language and German interests ; as sbe was Catbo- lic tbrougbout, tbe exclusion of Austria became an article, and indeed tbe chief article of the new political faith. Thence tbe name of tbe party, 'Little Germany,' as opposed to tbose siTCcessors THE PRUSSIAN STATE. 283 of the romantic school still numerous in 1848, who wanted to defend the German interests ' on the Mineio,' and saw in Austria the champion of German grandeur, and were usually called the party of ' Great Germany.' The " Little Germans,' indeed, saw clearly from the beginning, in Protestant Prussia, the power which was to realise the longed-for national State, powerful enough to defend its integrity, but with- out any hankering after political hegemony in Europe such as Charles V. and Louis XIV. had aspired to, and such as had always haunted the patriots of 1813, when they dreamed of avenging the death of young Conradin and restoring the Empire of his grandfather. Their aim, I said, was to be eminently matter-of-fact, and they affected a contempt for high-flown or sentimental ideas, which was often taken abroad for less of a fanfaronnade de vice than it reaUy was. They were so anxious to show that they were no longer modest, shy, dreamy sentimentalists that they sometimes overdid it ; for they strove not only against the looseness of moral principles, the Bohemian life, the Jacobinism and the Frenchified ways of ' Young Germany,' to whose Gallic frivolity they opposed their Teutonic earnestness ; 284 ' TOUNG GERMANY ' AND * LITTLE GEEMANT.' not only against the mania for poetical fancy- costumes, and the unpractical enthusiasm of the patriots of 1813. They strove also against the idealism of Goethe's and Schiller's time, against its exaggerated individualism, against the eternal self-education, against the whole worship of beautiful souls, against its humanitarian cosmo- politism, and absence of prejudice ; but above all against its alienation from public life, and its exclusive admiration of art and thought as the highest activity of man. Gervinus, at the end of his history of German poetry, which appeared from 1835 to 1842, and was a species of patriotic pamphlet in five huge volumes, breaks out into these words, which give vent to the suppressed idea, that pervades his whole book, as it was the undercurrent of the feelings of his whole generation : Is it not time to use the forces hidden in the nation 1 to ask the governments to appreciate those forces, 9,nd give them free course 1 to wish that the nation, which forms the centre and nucleus of Europe, should come out of the despised position which it occupies 1 that it should enter at last on its majority ] . . . But, by whatever means that aim is to be attained, it is not by the ways which our poetry has taken. . . . We want a man of Luther's stamp. He himself was tempted to undertake the task ; but he THE QEEMAN STATE. 285 despaired for the ever alleged reason that he did not believe in the political intelligence and capacity of his nation. If it wej e in the nature of the people, he was of opinion, it would show itself without laws. . . . But we will not despair of this people. . . . We cannot believe that a nation can have achieved so great results in poetry, religion, art, and science, and yet should be absolutely incapable of any political achievement. , . . Our duty is to understand the signs of the times, to give up scattering our strength as we do, to dirftjt our activity towards the point which is the object of the most ardent desires of all. The fight on the field of art is over ; now we ought to aim steadily at the other object, which nobody as yet amongst us has attained. Pei-haps Apollo will there also grant us the prize, which he has not refused us elsewhere ! The ' man of Luther's stamp ' came, and the first to turn his back upon him was the man who had yearned for him ; and the man of Luther's stamp saw what Luther had seen, that political capacity was not in the nature of the nation, and so, having vainly tried to build the national State with the help of the nation, he at last did it without the nation. As soon as he had done his work, the 'Little Germans,' who had not understood him, and had opposed him, loaded him with praise, for they saw that it was their dream which he had realised. So he called them 286 ' TOXJNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GEEMANT.' again to work with Hm to fit up the new building, and they put their hand to the work, and again proved that political capacity was not in their nature, and thus they separated again, perhaps for ever. Nevertheless, they have been, and are, trying hard to become a political nation. To arrive at Its influ- *^^^ result, Germany, freed for the last GeTmaii ^^ ^7 y^ars from all social, religious, and t ">"S 1 • national prejudices, had to acquire them again artificially, or at least to form a new ' cake of custom,' or ensenible of such prejudices as were necessary for the practical purposes of a national and political life. A man who sees all sides of a question, whom the passions of the patriot and the party-man do not move, who thinks more of being let alone than of acting upon others, a man without prejudices — in a word, the ideal man of Goethe's time — was scarcely fit for the new task. Tor this work, good, solid, narrow, social and other prejudices were a necessity. The con- solidation then of prejudices, above all, of the national prejudice, was the chief, though uncon- scious aim of the German intellectual movement since 1850 ; and as regards national prejudice, they certainly succeeded. Whenever national .interests MODERN GEBMAN PATRIOTISM. 287 are at stake, we all told together, as our fathers never did, and show a public spirit utterly un- known to them. I cannot say the same as yet in cases where the interests of liberty, of good admin- is bration, of free trade, and so forth, are concerned. It is a great thing that at least in national ques- tions, we should be united and unanimous even to excess. As I said in my last lecture, the death of individualism, which we have witnessed since 1850, seems a contradiction of the German idea. Still, it was necessary to a certain degree, because excessive individualism unfits man for public life. One of the first means of creating those pre- judices, and one of its last consequences, was the creation of national pride, a virtue or a vice, utterly unknown to the great period of 1790. This new patriotism had not the simplicity of the French or Greek patriotism, which regards all other nations as barbarians ; nor the humble and sentimental tenderness of Italian patriotism, whifh clings to the redeemed country as a mother does to a child saved from death but still delicate and ailing, and scarcely able to face the hard- ships of life in a public school with hardy com- rades. It had not the robust vigour of the Eoman and old-English patriotism, which simply ignored 288 'toung geemant ' and ' little geemant,' the legal existence of all who were not Eoman citizens or British subjects. The new German patriotism, which is not to be confounded with the old Prussian, was not, and is not naiif. It is conscious ; it is intentional ; it has a tincture of pedantry because it has been made by scholars and literary men. It has sprung up from a feel- ing of want of patriotism, such as had reigned before, and against which reaction was necessary. It resembles in that respect the religion of the German romanticists, who had all been free- thinkers, and resolved one fine day to become believers because belief was a necessary basis of all poetical excellence. Hence the exaggerations of German patriotism. It was not bom naturally, or spontaneously, it was the fruit of reflection. It was not the less justified for all that ; for it was really necessary for the creation of a na- tional State. Now, next to a just and righteous order, which is the very raison d'etre of the State, national independence and national strength, which guarantees this independence, are the most in- dispensable conditions for the welfare of a nation. When a nation does not possess these, it must sacrifice everything to attain them, even liberty. The Spaniards gave the example of it in the STRUGGLE FOB INTERNAL LIBERTY. 289 begiiming of this century, because tbey bad at least this superiority over Germany, tbat tbey possessed a national State — worse, certainly, tban tbe one wbicb the French wanted to force upon them — but still a national State. This goal once attained, the struggle for internal liberty ought to begin, with its various vicissitudes of victory and defeat, as England carried it on from the destruction of the Armada to the reign of George IV. ; and it is only when this conquest has been achieved, that the nation can allow herself again the luxury of such liberal ideas and feelings as those which animated the great founders of German culture. Meanwhile those ideas bear fruit a thousand- fold throughout the world, and spring up even in distant fields, whither the seed has been ConcUision. carried by the winds of history. But at home there still remains, and will ever remain a quiet, unobserved community of the faithful, who guard devotedly the treasure bequeathed to their country by the great heroes of thought and art. They live outside the strife of public life, looking on it sometimes with regret, sometimes with anger — but always with hope. They will not allow that Germany, which has given to the world the u 290 ' TOUITG GEEMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GESMANT.' ideas of Lessing and Herder, of Groetlie and Schiller, should for ever exclude them from their national creed. They will take care that, when the day- is come, Germany shall restore those wide ideas to their place of honour at the hearth from which they went forth over the world. When that moment is come, Germany, which now seems chiefly occupied with the selfish, though necessary, task of strengthening her house against the storms which might threaten it, and of rendering it more habitable than it has been before, will, I for one am. confident, resume with undivided heart her share in that common work of Europe which, under whatever national form it may be produced, is the civilisation of mankind. INDEX. Addtsok, 70, 72, 84 iEueas Sylvius (Pope Plus II.), Alfiei-i, 84 Algarotti, 5 America, effect of the discovery of, 89 Anatomy, Goethe's confribu- tions to, 189 Antiquity, different ways of viewing, 88 Aranda, 53 Ariosto, 249 Aristotle, SH, 83, 121 Arudt, 211, 228, 250 Arnim, 2.^0 Art and Life, 9 Art, Winckelmann's History of, 89, 90; Schiller's ideas of, 215, 217, 223, 225, 229 Authority, the principle of, 11, 13, 20, 04 Baco:^, Francis, 0, 17, 13, 23, 200 Baer, 133, 188 Basedow, 154 Bauer, B., 200 Baur, F. C. , 237 Bayle, 20, 21, 04 Bayreuth, Margrave of, 01 Beauty, Schiller's conception of, 318 Berkeley, 195, 200, 201 Besser, 40 Bettina, 100 Bismarck, 118 Boeokh, 193, 254 Boie, 153 Boileau, 49, 70, 85 Bojardo, 319 Bolingbroke, 73 Bonald, 351 Bopp, 193, 3G3 Borne, 371, 372, 277 Bossuet, 20, 29, 38, 131 Brant, Sebastian, 49 Brentano, Clemens, 100, 247, 250 Bruno, Giordano. 19, 184 Buffon, 20, 98, 113, 132 Bunsen, 141 Burger, 79, 104, ir-l , 153. 278 Burke. Edmund, 100, 107, 111, 171, 195, 210, 255 Burns, Robert, 107, 127 Byron, 84 Caldeuon, 12, 38, 84, 109, 241, 249 Camoens, 349 Canitz, 49 Ganova, 91, 353 Carlyle, Thomas, 171, 301 Carstons, 232 Casanova's Memoirs, 45, 53 Catherine II., 53 Catholicism, 7, 14, 344 Cervantes, 28, 349 Chamisso, 350 292 INDEX. Charles v., 39, 383 Charles Augustus, Duke of Saxe- Weimar, 161 Chateaubriand, 344, 351, 361 Code Napoleon, the, 368 Coleridge, 171, 351 Constant, Benjamin, 171, 251 Copernicus, 16, 17, 199, 339 Comeille, 13, 39, 74, 84, 88, 235 Orebillon, 91 Creuzer, 354, 267 Cromwell, 33, 53, 130 Guvier, 133 ■Daiilmann, 281 Dante, 6, 26, 37, 169, 240, 349 Danton, 57, 273 Darwin,' Charles, 171, 189, 190 David, 91, 232, 352 Democracy, dangers of, 35 Descartes, 13, 19, 21, 63, 260 Diderot, 3, 53, 98, 247, 260 Diez, 262 Division of Europe into national monarchies, 4 .Dominichino, 38 " Dramaturgie," Lessing's, 84, 106 Dryden, 49 Durer, 39 Egbbrt of England, 51 Eichhom, 170, 194, 254, 267 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 40 Encyclopajdists, the, 98, 109 England in the seventeenth oeutuiy, 16, 30 English language as an instru- ment of expression, 1 Epic poetry, 125, 109 Erasmus, 14, 39 Estienne, Henry, 14 Evolution, Goethe's prevision of, 188, 190 Ewald, 141 Fables, Lessing's and Herder's definition of, 138 "Faust," Goethe's, 158, 178, 191 Fenelon, 26 Ferdinand II., 40, 46 Ferdinand the Catholic, 51, 282 Feuerbach, 2fi6 Fichte, 193, 201, 202, 311, 334 Ficino, Marsilio, 7, 88 Fielding, Henry, 73, 195, 215 Filelfo, 7 Filijaca, 38 Finck, Count, 54 Fine Arts, f auction of, 95 FLsohart, 49 Fouque, 250 Fra Angelico, 353 Francke, 01, 66 Frederick the Great, 53, 80, 109, 148 Frederic William I., 63 Frederick William III., 365 Frederick William IV., 358 French literature, 29 French rationalism, 30, 93 French revolution, 176, 309, 255, 357 Gai.ii.eo, 6, 13, 18, 19, 260 Gambling, 45, 50 Ganganelli, 53 Gans, 268, 277 Gellert's novels, 75 Genius, Herder's view of the nature of, 122 ; Lavater's en- thusiasm for, 155 Gentz, 228, 240, 255 George IV., 289 German literature, distinctive character of, 73 Germany, intliienoo of upon the thought of Europe, 24; gen- eral course of thought in, 37 ; political condition of du- ring the elaboration of her thought, 29 ; general charao- INDEX. 293 ter of the culture in, 04; Btarting-point of modern, S7 ; effects of the Thirty Years' War upon, SS, 40, 77 ; in tho sixteenth century, 38 ; in the seventeenth century, 40 ; social and moral state of, 43 ; political state of, 4G ; intel- lectual state of, 49 ; tho working up of (1048-1700), G1-; influence of Frederick the Great, 50, 58 ; influence of Protestantism upon the growth of, 59 ; scientific re- vival in, 03 ; tho literary re- vival in, 07 ; character of the new literature in, 71 ; impulse given by the Seven Years' "War in, 75, 79 ; tho seeds of thought in, 79 ; t!io services of Klopstock to, 80 ; of Wic- land, 83 ; of Lcssing, 84. 93 ; of Winckelmaun,S9 ; of Kant, I or; of Herder, 103, 130; I "Wertherism" in, 104; po- 1 riod of Goethe, Kant, and ■ Schillor, 173 ; the character- . istio ideas that prevail in, 310,' 263, 379; the idea of the State in, 230 ; use of tho l;o- mantic school in, 33,1 ; the national feeling of, 355 ; i)o- litical reaction, 250 ; recent work in, 359 ; "Young Ger- many " and ' ' Little Ger- many," 264 ; the liberation movement of 1813, 374 ; the movement of 1848, 375 ; mod- ern German patriotism, 387 Gerviuus, 80, 377, 381, 384 Gesner, GO Gibbon, Edward, 24, 53, 73 Gilbert, 0, 260 Giotto, 37, 253 Gleim's poems, 58, 75 Gnoist, 281 Goethe, 8, 29, 58, 61, GO, 79, 95, 101, 115, 116, 118, 138, 148, 151, 154, 157, 166, 171, 173, 315, 331, 335, 339, 301, 3;i», 240, 249, 351, 255, 359, 261, 209, 273, 286, 290: his debt to Winokelmann, 91 ; his de- finition of Art, 97 ; . his in- debtedness to Herder, 104, 113, 118, 126, 120, 133, 140, 158, 177, 185, 195 ; influence upon, of Kant, 110; his " Gotz," l.-;8, 159, 173 ; his "Faust," 153, 178, 101; bis "Werther," 159, 100, 104, 173, 182; goes to Weimar, 101 ; his maturer views, 107, 174 ; character of his early work, 173, 203 ; effect of hia Italian journey, 17", 180 ; his moral principles, 177, 196 ; his view of Nature, 180, 192 ; hU "Wilhelm Meister," 177, 180, 221, 231, 343; Ilelm- holtz's tribute to, 189 ; his philosopliic views, 191, 197 Gcirros, 343 Gottfr:od, 240 Giittingen, university of, 66, 149. 151 Gottsched, Professor, 49, 71, 81 Goze, 160 Orabbe, 274 Greek art and literature, 7, 9, 15, 91 Greek classicism, 240 Grimm, Jacob, 170, 194, 353 Grimmelshauson, 13 Grotius, Hugo, 04 Gnizot, 171 GustavusIII., 53 Gutzkow, 371 ■ " Hainbund," the, 153 Il.alle, university of, 65 Hamann, 111, 115, 130, 123, 149, 150 294: INDEX. Hanseatic League, the, 43 Hans Sachs, 49 Hardenberg, 328, 240, 343, 344, 247 Harvey, WilUam, 6, 19, 360 Hansser, 381 Hegel, 80, 169, 185, 186, 193, .301, 303, 338, 365, 379 Hegelians, Young, 364, 366 Heidelberg-Schloss, the, B8 Heine, 66, 152, 243, 250, 271, 373 377 Helmiioltz, 181, 188, 189 Heniy IV. of France, 40 Henry VII. of England, 383 Herder, 29, 30,09, 79, 101, 103, 158, 161, 163, 166, 167, 177, 190, 193, 193, 195, 199 ; his "Fragments," 88, 104; the character and influence of his work, 104, 110 ; his ideas of nature and life, 106 ; his ad- miration for Kousseau, 108; his reaction against Rousseau, 111 ; his ideas, 112, 238 ; his limitations, 118; his funda- mental idea, 115, 130 ; his mature works, 119 ; his views, 120; on poetry, 133; on the ancient world, 139. 832 ; on history, 130, 171, 252, 256; his views on the law of his- tory, 183 ; on. the develop- ment of man, 135 ; on reli- gion, 136 ; of the Bible, 139 ; of the future of mankind, 143 ; his ■' Cosmopolitanism," 145 ; extent of his influence, 149, 167; his quality as a writer, 169 ; Goethe's tribute to, 171 Hermann, 153 Hesiod. 139 History, continuity of, 37 Hobbes, 6, 19, 260 Hoffmann, 247, 350 H(31derlin, 328, 347 Holtz, 153 Holy .Mliance, the, 258 Homer, 25, 95, 111, 131, 125, 169, 340 Horace, 180 Hugo, Victor, 38, 84 Humanists, the, 7 Human mind, different facul- ties of the, 31 ; nature of the, 193 Humboldt, Alexander von, 29, 80, 134, 170, 189, 193, 328 Humboldt, WUliam von, 29, 80, 170, 194, 221, 338, 353, 263 Hume, David, 19, 34, 36, 53, 73, 98, 107, 195, 199 IFPI/AND, 330 " Iliad," the, 28 Induction, the method of, 17 Ingres, 91 Intuition, 120, 187, 193, 194, 343 Italy, Eenaissance in, 6, 34, 26, 30, 107, 372 Jacobi, 104, 159, 161 Jesuits, 10, 15, 40, 88 Jonson, Ben, 49 Joseph II. , 53 Jung- Stilling, 157 Kant, 29, 30, 56, 59, 79, 87, 113, 110, 117, 149, 167, 175, 178, 185, 188, 103, 195, 197, 215, 319, 325, 228, 337, 257, 363, 378, 280 ; his services to German literature, 98, 105 ; his idea of civilization, 101 ; his admiration for Rous- seau, 108, 216; the three pe- riods of his philosophy, 198; his " Critic of Pure Reason," 175, 198, 202 ; his idealism, 301 ; his views of psychology, cosmology, and theology, INDEX. 295 201 ; his " Critic of Practical Reason," 203, 304; his '• Critic of Judgment," 20y, 206 ; his moral philosophy, 204,313; his religion, 207; his political views, 209, 211 ; his influence, 210 Kf^pler, 10, 17, 19,47, 260 Kleist, 228, 347, 350 Klinger, 79, 100 Klopstock, 79, 80, 85, 138, 144, 153, 160, 257 ; his " Messiah," 81 Koruer, 250 Kotzebue, 230 La Fontaine, 38, 137 Lamarck, 188 Laraartiue, 38 Language, 135 " Laocoou," Lessing's, 87, 93, 100 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 272, 277 Laube, 371 Lavater, 149, 155, 161 Leibnitz, 6, 19, 44, 50, 62, 64, 14S, 191, 199 Lenz, 157, 161 Le Sage, 13, 74 Leasing, 58, 69, 79, 80, 83, 101, 103, 109, 117, 138, 138, 148, 147, 148, 178, 191, 197, 198, 235, 228, 237, 249, 361, 290 ; his services to literature, 84; his " Nathan the Wise," 86 ; his " Laocoon," 93, 100 ; his admiration for Rousseau, 107 Liberty, influence of, upon in- telleofcual growth, 65 Liebig, 187 " Lied," the, 137 Lob<5ck, 367 Locke, John, 6, 19, 20, 21, 62, 64, 70, 98, 195 Lorenzo de Medicis, 7 Louis XI., 51,283 Louis XIV., 11, 23, 40, 47, 383 Louis XVI, 209 Loyola, Ignatius, 10, 39 Luther, 39, 42, 50, 188, 147, 214, 215, 284 Lycurgus, 131 Maciiiavellt, 8, 26 Maistre, Joseph de, 257 Malebranche, 13 Mannteufel, Count, 50 Manzoni, 84 Marini, 49 Melanchthon, 39 Memling, 253 Mendelssohn, Felix, 160 Mendelssohn, Moses, 79, 83, 86, 109, 196 Merck, 159, 160 " Messiah," IClopstock's, 81 Michaelis, 66 Middle Ages, the, 7, 11, 31, 37, 338, 340, 243, 261 Mill, John Stuart, 221 Milton, 70, 195 Mirabeau, 57, 100 Molicre, 12. 38, 74 Molina, 13, 39 Montagu, Lady Mary, 45 Montaigne, 73 Montesquieu, 20, 35, 72, 131, 134, 310 Moratin, 84 Moravian brethren, the, 61 Moreto, 13 Mosen, 275 MuUer, Johannes, 188, 190 Miiller, Max, 170 Miiller, Ottfried, 131, 171, 354 MUUer. W., 375 Miinchhausen, 66 Mythology, the new, 341 Napoleon, 83, 368, 273 " Nathan, the Wise," Lessing's, 86 National preoccupations, 32 206 INDEX. Nature, Goethe's view of, 180, 102 Newton, Sir Isaac, 0, 10, 30, 35, 83, 08, 108 Nicolai, SiJ, 10!), IGC Niebuhr, 30, 80, 109, 100, 104, 2~)4 Novidis, 230, 338, 343, S45 Novum Orgnnum, Bacon's, 19 Nuremberg, ^3 Okick, 253 OpUz, 40 Orloiins, Duchess of, 45 Ossiiin, 158, 101, 104 rAixE, Thomas, ]; his ideal of human society. 220 Schlegel, A. \V., 80, 170, 238, 280, 244, 240, 251, 252, 257, 27;j Schlogel, Caroline, 247 Schlegel, Frederick, 80, 170, 228, 2;iG, 239, 342, 240, 2r>{}, 353, 273 Schleiermacher, 80, 198, 210, 228, 244, 247, 254 Sohlosser, 160 Schopenhauer, 201, 203, 205, 215 Schroder, 230 : Sohubart, 154 Schubert, 353 ; Science, rise of, 17, 02 , Scott, Sir Walter, 251, 301 Scudery, Mile. , 49 Seventeenth century in Ger- many, 40 Seven "Years' War, the, 57, 71, 75, 79, 117 Shaftesbury, 03, 70, 73, S3, 109 Shakcsi>eare, 1 3, 28, 84, 88, 11 1 , 137, 158, 166, 195, 215, 235, 241, 249 Sieyos, Abbe, 131 Silesian school of poetry, 49 " Simplioissiraus," the, 48 Smollett, Tobias, 13, 43 Space and time, Kant's view of, 30J Spain, the part played by, in the history of European thought, 10 Spener, 61,60 Spinoza, 19, 136, 183 StaiJl, Madame de, 57, 234 Steffens, 353 Stein, 211, 212 Sterne, 240 Stolberg, Count, 153, 157 Strauss, D. F., 170, 250, 200 Sturin-vncl-Drany period, 149, 168, 234 Suarez. 13, 28 Sybel, 381 Taine, HiProLTTE, 130, 133, 171 Tanucci, 53 Tnsso, 49, 89 Taxation in Germany and in England, 212 note Teutonic ideas, 313, 215 Tliierry, Augnstin, 27, 171, 201 Thirty Years' War, the, 38, 40, 70, 77 Thoraasius, 04, 05, 309 Thomson, 73 Thorwaldsen, 91 i Thucydides, 331 j 'J'ieck, 80. 228, 247, 251 i Tirso, 12 \ Tocqueville, Alexis de, 171 I Trent, CouucU of, 10 ' Tripsino, 89 Tubingen school, the, 3G7 UlII.ANT), 250 XJUich von Hutten, 39 Unity of Europe, 4 Uuiver.sity of Ilalle, 6) ; of G Zi- turgen, 60, 149, 151 Van Eyck, 253 Vico, 190 Vischer, 39 Voltaire. 3, 20, 20, 30. 32, 38, 53, 83, 91, 98, 100. 2S0, 201 VoHS, 19, 104, 152, 207 298 INDEX. Wattz, 381 " Wallenstein," Schiller's, 215, 331 Warbnrton, Bishop, 143 Wars, different kinds of, 41 Weokherlin, 154 Werner Z., 340, 345,346 " Werther," Goethe's, 159, 160, 164, 173, 183 Westphalia, Peace of, 51 Wieland, 79, 80, 85, 109, 139 153, 159, 100, 178 ; his ser- vices to German literature, 83 Wienbarg, 271 "Wflhelm Meister," Goethe's, 177, 180, 331, 331, 343 William III., 38, 53, 50 Winckelmann, 79, 80, 87, 100, 103, 117. 139, 339, 251, SCO ; his "History of Art," 89, 90 Wolf, F. A., 135, 169, 190, 194, 339 Wolff, 50, 57. 63, 63, 64, 60 Wolfram, 248 Xknopiion, 321 Zaciiahta's comic poems, 75 Zedlitz, 374 Zinzendorf , Count, 61 PUBLISHED BY IIENR Y HOLT &■ CO. TAINE'S (HIPPOLyXB ADOLPHE) WORKS. Uniform Library Edition. 14 vols., large lamo. $2.50 per vol. " 'J'he paper, print, and binding of this series leave nothing to be desired in point ste and .attractiveness." — Nniion. The French Revolution. Vol. I. Translated by John Durand. Large 121110. $2.50. The Ancient Begime. 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" It is a work of real value and usefulness on England as a people and a nation, and gives information about that country whtch it is impossible to find elsewhere in so convenient and interesting form." — N. Y. Tribune, " One of those sterling though impretcntious books whose value is permanent. . . . Rests on a philosophy so soun J, and moves within information so accurate, that many generations to come will have to learn from him how England lived and felt and acted in 1880. . . . To Americans it is nothing less than a revelation. . . . The most perfect and satisfactory study in practical sociology now in exist- ence." — Boston A dvertiset. WALLACE'S (D. MACKENZIE) RUSSIA. With two maps. 8vo, $4.00. "One of the stoutest and most honest pieces of work produced in our time, and the man who has produced it, . . * even if he never does anything more, will not have lived in vain." — Fortttigktly Review. "Excellent and interesting, . . . worthy of the highest praise. . . . We commend his book as a very valuable account of a very interesting people."— Nation, BAKER'S (JAMES) TURKEY. 8vo, with two maps. $4.00. *' His work, like Mr. Wallace's, is in many parts a revelation, as it has had no predecessor, which was so founded upon personal observation, and at the same time so full of that sort of detailed information about the habits, the customs, the character, and the life of the people who form its subject, which constitute its best possible explanation of history and of current events. . . . Invaluable to the student, profound or superficial, of Turkish affairs. " — N. V. Kveninff Post. McOOAN'S (J. O.) EGYPT AS IT IS. With a map taken from the most recent survey. 8vo. $3.75. "We can recommend Egypt as It Is to our readers as supplying a want which is most felt ; a detailed and .a truthful and able account of the country as it is in its moral material and economical aspect." — L.ondan At/ie?teEum. CREASY'S (SIR EDWARD S.) HISTORY OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS. From the Beginning of their Empire to the Present Time. Large ismo, $2.50. " It presents a vivid and well-connected account of the six centuries of Turkish growth, conquest, and decline, interwoven with summary views of institutions, na- tional characteristics, and causes of success and failure. It embodies also the results of the studies of a large number of earlier and later writers, and throughout evinces research, independence of judgment, and candor." — Nation. JONES' (C. H.) AFRICA : The History, of Exploration and Adventure as given in the leading authorities from Herodotus to Livingstone. With map and illustrations. 8vo. $5.00. "A cyclopaedia of African exploration, and a useful substitute in the library foi the whole list of costly original works on that subject."' — Boston Advertiser,