KARL HILLEBRAND
The latter half of the eighteenth century was, throughout Europe, a period of revolt against the old ideas, the outworn bonds of mediæval society. In art and literature the older system, with its elaborately planned rules and formulas, is technically called "classicism"; and the outburst against it established "romanticism," the spirit of desire, the longing for higher things, an impulse which ruled the intellectual world for generations, and which many critics still believe to be the chief hope for the future.
Romanticism found expression, more or less impassioned and defiant, in every land, but its earliest and strongest impulse is generally regarded as having sprung from Germany. The sceptical, half-cynical rule of Frederick the Great had left men's minds free, and imagination was everywhere aroused. The early culmination of its extravagance is found in the youth of Goethe and Schiller, Germany's two greatest poets; and Goethe's famous novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, became the text-book of the rising generation of romanticists. Werther kills himself for disappointed love, and the book has been seriously accused of creating an epidemic of suicide in Germany. Hillebrand, writer of the following analysis of the period and the movement, is among the foremost of present-day German authorities upon the subject.
Goethe was twenty-six years old when he accepted (1775) the invitation of Charles Augustus, and transported to Weimar the tone and the allures of the literary bohemia of Strasburg. There, to the terror of the good burghers of that small residence, to the still greater terror of the microscopic courtiers, began that "genial" and wild life which he and his august companion led during several years. Hunting, riding on horseback, masquerades, private theatricals, satirical verse, improvisation of all sorts, flirtation particularly, filled up day and night, to the scandal of all worthy folk, who were utterly at a loss to account for his serene highness saying "Du" to this Frankfort 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 fermentation once over, a noble, generous wine would remain. "We are playing the devil here," writes Goethe to Merck; "we hold together, the Duke and I, and go our own way. Of course, in doing so we knock against the wicked, and also against the good; but we shall succeed; for the gods are evidently on our side." Soon Herder was to join them there, unfortunately not always satisfied with the results of his teaching about absolute liberty of genius.
The whole generation bore with impatience the yoke of the established order, of authority under whatever form, whether the fetters were those of literary convention or social prejudice, of the state or the church. The ego affirmed its absolute, inalienable right; it strove to manifest itself according to its caprices, and refused to acknowledge 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 Olympus, heaving Pelion on Ossa; the other wiped a furtive tear out of his eye, and, aspiring to deliverance, dreamed of an ideal happiness. Sometimes in the same poet the two dispositions succeed each other.
"Cover thy sky with vapor and clouds, O Zeus," exclaims Goethe's Prometheus, "and practise thy strength on tops of oaks and summits of mountains like the child who beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless, leave me my earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my hearth, whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, burning with a sacred ardor, which alone has accomplished all? And should I thank thee, who wast sleeping whilst I worked?"
The same young man who had put into the mouth of the rebellious Titan this haughty and defiant outburst, at other moments, when he was discouraged and weary of the struggle, took refuge within himself. Like Werther, "finding his world within himself, he spoils and caresses his tender heart, like a sickly child, all whose caprices we indulge." One or the other of those attitudes toward 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 morbid sentimentality 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, some to madness, others to suicide. A species of moral epidemic, like that which followed upon the apparent failure of the Revolution in 1799, had broken out. The germ of Byronism may be clearly detected already in the Wertherism of those times. Exaggerated and overstrained imaginations found insufficient breathing-room in the world, and met on all sides with boundaries to their unlimited demands. Hearts, accustomed to follow the dictates of their own inspiration alone, bruised themselves against the sharp angles of reality. The thirst for action which consumed their ardent youth could not be quenched, in fact, in the narrow limits of domestic life; and public life did not exist. Frederick had done great things, but only, like the three hundred other German governments, to exclude the youth of the middle classes from active life. Thence the general uneasiness. Werther was as much an effect as a cause of this endemic disease; above all, it was the expression of a general state of mind. It is this which constitutes its historical importance, while the secret of its lasting value is to be found in its artistic form.
Besides, if I may say so without paradox, the disease was but an excess of health, a juvenile crisis through which Herder, young Goethe, Schiller, and indeed the whole generation had to pass.
"Oh," exclaimed old Goethe fifty years later in a conversation 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 poetized, made love and wasted our time; how we young folk, full of life and activity, but awkward 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 Nicholai, 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 spirit will be found in the empty helmet, and a big caput mortuum in the crucible." This proved true certainly 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. 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 Renaissance art in Italy (1786-1788); Schiller put himself to school under Kant (1790), and went out of it with a completely altered philosophy: Kant himself became another after, if not in consequence of, the great King's death (1786); Herder alone remained faithful throughout to the creed he had himself preached.
The way opened by Herder, although partly and temporarily abandoned during the classical period which intervened, was followed again by the third generation 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 historical sciences in Germany. Herder's ideas have, indeed, penetrated our whole thought to such a degree, while his works are so unfinished and disconnected, that it is hardly possible for us to account for the extraordinary effect these ideas and works produced in their day, except by marking the contrast which they present with the then reigning methods and habits as well as the surprising influence exercised by Herder personally. From his twenty-fifth year, indeed, he was a sovereign. His actual and uncontested sway was not, it is true, prolonged beyond a period of about sixteen years, albeit his name figured to a much later time on the list of living potentates. It is also true that when the seeds thrown by him had grown luxuriantly, and were bearing fruit, the sower was almost entirely forgotten or wilfully ignored. The generation, however, of the "Stuermer und Draenger,"[58] or, as they were pleased to denominate themselves, the "original geniuses," looked up to Herder as their leader and prophet. Some of them turned from him later on and went back to the exclusive worship of classical antiquity; but their very 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 following Herder's example, when it raked up Dantes and Calderons out of the dust in order to confront them with and oppose them to Vergils and Racines? However they might repudiate, nay, even forget, their teacher, his doctrines already pervaded the whole intellectual atmosphere of Germany, and men's minds breathed them in with the very air they inhaled. To-day they belong to Europe.
Herder, I repeat, is certainly neither a classical nor a finished writer. He has no doubt gone out of fashion, because his style is pompous and diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary; because his reasoning lacks firmness and his erudition 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, in revealing to us the growth of Rome, the birth of her religious and national legends, the slow, gradual formation of her marvellous constitution; Savigny, when he proves that the Roman civil law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, was not the work of a wise legislator, but rather the wisdom of generations and of centuries; Eichhorn, when he wrote the history of German law and created thereby a new branch of historical science which has proved one of the most fertile; A.W. Schlegel and his school, when they transplanted 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 Humboldt and Karl Ritter, when they gave a new life to geography 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 mythology; still later on, D.F. Strauss, when, in the days of our own youth, he placed the myth and the legend, with their unconscious origin and growth, not alone in opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud; Otfr. Mueller, when he proved that Greek mythology, far from containing moral abstractions or historical facts, is the involuntary personification of surrounding nature, subsequently developed by imagination; Max Mueller, 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 Renan and Taine, Carlyle and Darwin doing, each in his own branch, but applying and developing Herder's two fundamental principles, that of organic 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 throughout the universe for sound and word which flow through the lands in a thousand sources and brooks; wanders through the oldest as the newest regions and listens in every zone." "He knew how to find this soul wherever it lay hid, whether robed in grave disguise, or lightly clothed in the garb of play, in order to found for the future this lofty rule: Humanity be our eternal aim!"
Among the young literary rebels who, under Herder's guidance, attempted, toward and after 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all authority, 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 Goetz and Werther, Schiller's Brigands 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 their inspiration they were protests against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement outbursts of individuality against convention.
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 æsthetic 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 entirety, not through one faculty alone, such as reason or will, separated from instinct, imagination, temperament, passion, etc. Only they came to the conviction that here 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, without sacrificing one to the others. Hence they shaped for themselves a general view of nature and mankind, society and history, which may not have become the permanent view of the whole nation; but which for a time was predominant, which even now is still held by many, and which in some respects will always be the ideal of the best men in Germany, even when circumstances have wrought a change in the intellectual and social conditions of their country, so as to necessitate a total transformation and accommodation of those views.
We cannot regard it merely as the natural effect of advancing years if Goethe and Schiller modified and cleared their views; if Kant, whose great emancipating act, the Critique of Pure Reason, falls chronologically in the same period (1781), corrected what seemed to him too absolute in his system, and reconstructed from the basis of the conscience that metaphysical world which he had destroyed by his analysis of the intellect. The world just then was undergoing profound changes. The great "Philosopher-king" had descended to the tomb (1786), and with him the absolute liberty of thought which had reigned for forty-six years. The French Revolution, after having exalted all generous souls, and seemingly confirmed the triumph of liberty and justice which the generation had witnessed in America, took a direction and drifted into excesses which undeceived, sobered, and saddened even the most hopeful believers. As regards personal circumstances, 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 æsthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite unimpaired by them. I shall endeavor to give an idea of this double process and its results at the risk of being still more abstract and dry than before.
Man is the last and highest link in nature; his task is to understand what she aims at in him and then to fulfil her intentions. This view of Herder's was Goethe's starting-point in the formation of his Weltanschauung (or general view of things).
"All the world," says one of the characters in Wilhelm Meister, "lies before us, like a vast quarry before the architect. He does not deserve the name if he does not compose with these accidental natural materials an image whose 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 us, nay, within us, is object-matter; but deep within us lives also a power capable of giving an ideal form to this matter. This creative power allows 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 individual characters in perfect conformity with nature? In our relations with our neighbor, Goethe—like Lessing and Wieland, Kant and Herder, and all the great men of his and the preceding age, in England and France as well as in Germany—recommended absolute toleration, not only of opinions, but also of individualities, particularly those in which Nature manifests herself "undefiled." As to circumstances, which is only another name for fate, he preached and practised resignation. At every turn of our life, in fact, we meet with limits; our intelligence has its frontiers which bar its way; our senses are limited and can only embrace an infinitely small part of nature; few of our wishes can be fulfilled; privation 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 say to themselves that there are eternal and necessary laws to which we must submit, and that we had better do it without grumbling; who "endeavor to form principles which are not liable to be destroyed, but are rather confirmed by contact with reality." In other words, when man has discovered the laws of nature, both moral and physical, he must accept them as the limits of his actions and desires; he must not wish for eternity of life or inexhaustible capacities of enjoyment, understanding, and acting, any more than he wishes for the moon. For rebellion against these laws must needs be an act of impotency as well as of deceptive folly. By resignation, on the contrary, serene resignation, the human soul is purified; for thereby it becomes free of selfish passions and arrives at that intellectual superiority in which the contemplation and understanding of things give sufficient contentment, without making it needful for man to stretch out his hands to take possession of them; a thought which Goethe's friend, Schiller, has magnificently developed in his grand philosophical poems. Optimism and pessimism disappear at once, as well as fatalism; the highest and most refined intellect again accepts the world, as children and ignorant toilers do: as a given necessity. He does not even think the world could be otherwise, and within its limits he not only enjoys and suffers, but also works gayly, 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 forever from the torment of unaccomplished wishes and of vain terrors.
The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe lived outside the struggle for life, outside the competition and contact of practical activity, in the contemplation of nature and art, developed this view—the spectator's view—which will always be that of the artist and of the thinker, strongly opposed to that of the actor on the stage of human life. Iphigenie, 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 morality, but also of the great philosophical questions which man is called upon to answer, was his study of nature, greatly furthered during his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the bottom of all the vague longing of his generation for nature he was to solve. It became his incessant endeavor to understand the coherence and unity of nature.
"You are forever searching for what is necessary in nature," Schiller wrote to him once, "but you search for it by the most difficult way. You take the whole of 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, has said of him, "He did not try to translate nature into abstract conceptions, but takes it as a complete work of art, which 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 retorts." He waited patiently for a voluntary revelation, 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 Wahlverwandtschaften, you feel that extraordinary intimacy—I had almost said identification—with nature, present 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 mild eye of a true friend over his destiny." Never was there a poet who humanized nature or naturalized 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 him, although he was to end as the declared adversary of that vulcanism 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 theoretical study he had early turned to direct observation; and when his 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, 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 connection 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 universe.
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 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 with years; but it became a pantheism very different from that of Parmenides, for whom being and thinking are one, or from that of Giordano Bruno, which rests on the analogy of a universal soul with the human soul, or even from that of Spinoza himself, which takes its start from the relations of the physical world 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.
It is analogy which helps us to form these intuitive or platonic ideas. It was through analogy that Goethe arrived at his great discoveries in natural science, and I only repeat what such men as Johannes Mueller, 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. It was a spark of this kind which, first at Padua on the sight of a fanpalm-tree, then again, on the eve of his departure from Palermo, during a walk in the public garden amid 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 him at once.
Three years later the sight of a half-broken sheep-skull, which he found by chance on the sand of the Venetian Lido, taught him that the same law, as he had suspected, applied also to vertebrate animals, and that the skull might be considered as a series of strongly modified vertebræ. He had, in fact, already hinted at the principle, shortly after put forward by Lamarck, and long afterward developed and firmly established by Darwin. He considered the difference in the anatomical structure of animal species as modifications of a type or planned structure, modifications brought about by the difference of life, food, and dwellings. He had discovered as early as 1786 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 transformed by development of some parts and atrophy of others. Goethe's sketch of an Introduction into Comparative Anatomy, which he wrote in 1795, urged by A. von Humboldt, has remained, if I may believe those competent to judge, a fundamental stone of modern science. And I may be allowed, as I am unversed in such matters, to invoke the authority of one of the most eminent living physiologists, Helmholtz, who says of Goethe's anatomical essay, that in it the poet "teaches, with the greatest clearness and decision, that all differences in the structure of animal species are to be considered as changes of one fundamental type, which have been brought about by fusion, transformation, aggrandizement, diminution, or total annihilation of several 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."[59]
Now, the same may be said, I am told, in spite of some differences as to details, of his metamorphosis 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 Mueller 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 principle of 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 pyramid, raised from the materials of the whole quarry of nature; that he has reconstructed man. And here begins a new domain; for after all for mankind the highest study must be man himself. The social problems of property, education, marriage, occupied Goethe's mind all his life through, although more particularly 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 Wahlverwandtschaften, the Wanderjahre, the second Faust, you will find those grave questions approached from all sides. I shall not, however, enter here into an exposition of Goethe's political, social, and educational views, not only because they mostly belong to a later period, but especially because they have never found a wide echo, nor determined the opinions of an important portion of the nation, nor entered as integrating principles into its lay creed. Not so with the metaphysical conclusion which he reached by this path, and which is somewhat different from the pantheism of his youth, inasmuch as he combines with it somewhat of the fundamental ideas of Leibnitz, which were also Lessing's, and which, after all, form a sort of return to Christianity, as understood in its widest sense, in the sense in which it harmonizes with Plato's idealism. "Thinking is not to be severed from what is thought, nor will from movement." 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 expand 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.
I have said that there was an antagonism between Kant's views and those of Herder and Goethe, and that this antagonism has been ever since sensibly felt in the intellectual history of Germany. Some efforts were made to reconcile them, as for instance by Schiller. Sometimes a sort of alliance took place, as in 1813, when the Romanticists, who were quite under the spell of the Herder-Goethe ideas, invoked the aid of the moral energy, which was a special characteristic of Kant's disciples; but the antagonism lives on not the less even now in the German nation, as the antagonism between Hume and Burke, Locke and Berkeley, Fielding and Richardson, Shakespeare and Milton, nay, between Renaissance and Puritanism in spite of their apparent death, is still living in the English nation. This difference 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 argumentation. Germany owes much to the stern unflinching moral principles of Kant; she owes still more, however, to the serene and large views of Goethe. The misfortune of both ideals is that they cannot and will never be accessible save to a small élite, that of Kant to a moral, that of Goethe to an intellectual, élite. 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 fanaticism, 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 intellectual and moral aristocracy, which has kept and guarded that treasure, as well as the only link between these two aristocratic views of life themselves, would be furnished by religion, a religion such as Lessing, Mendelssohn, and above all Schleiermacher, propounded, such as reigned all over Germany forty or fifty years ago, before party spirit had set to work, and the flattest of 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 conscience and reverence, but a religion without 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 realized most fully in the first half of this century, and which consists in a perfect equilibrium between the spirit of tradition 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 politics—a somewhat narrow patriotism, a rather shallow materialism, and a thoroughly false parliamentary régime—and come back to the spirit of the generations to whom, after all, she owes her intellectual, though not perhaps her political and material, civilization.