With Herder himself a different form of difficulty besets the historian. Here there is no question of scattered literary obiter dicta occurring in a range of obstinately miscellaneous thinking. Twenty volumes[[658]] of ostensibly and really literary work, of which something like a full half is actual criticism, present themselves to the inquirer; he knows, and everybody knows, that his author counts, as hardly anybody else, save Lessing and Goethe, has counted, in the literary development of one of the great “completely equipped”[[659]] literary nations of Europe; he can see, if he has any eyes at all, that Herder is, with Lessing, Diderot, and the shy and mainly apocryphal Gray, one of the very few leaders in the conversion of Europe at large to a catholic study of literature. And yet the arguments against any very full treatment of him in such a book as this are twenty-legion strong.His drawbacks of tediousness, In the first place, there is what I can only call a certain fearful woolliness about Herder’s literary work. It scarcely ever compresses and crystallises itself into a solid and fiery thunderbolt of literary expression. He himself, in the very forefront of it,[[660]] speaks of “Die liebe Göttin Langeweile,” “the dear Goddess Ennui,” as having “hunted many, if not most people, into the arms of the Muses.” I am afraid it must be said that in his own case the dear Goddess did not understand where her mission as matchmaker ended, and is too frequently present at the interviews of man and Muse.

pedagogy,

In the second place, that pedagogic instinct which has been noted, which is so excusable and so praiseworthy in him and in his contemporaries, when we consider their circumstances and milieu, interferes somewhat disastrously with the freedom and the lasting interest of his writing. The Latin nations, by their inheritance of real or supposed prerogative from Latin itself, we English by our alleged national self-sufficiency, escape this in greater or less degree. All the four, Italians, French, Spaniards, English, take themselves in their different degrees and manners for granted; they are “men,” if only in the University sense. The Germans of the mid-eighteenth century are, and take themselves for, schoolboys: it is greatly to their credit, but it does not precisely make them good reading without a great deal of good will. and meteorosophia, Lastly Herder, as it seems to me (though, no doubt, not to others), in consequence of this sense of dissatisfaction with his own literature, climbs too rapidly to generalisations about the relation of literature itself to national character, and to the connection of literature generally with the whole idea of humanity. All this is noble; but we are in a bad position for doing it. It will be a capital occupation for persons of a critical temperament when humanity has come to an end—which it has not even yet, and which it certainly had still less in Herder’s time.[[661]]

but great merits.

These general disadvantages are indeed compensated by general merits of a very eminent kind. Stimulated by Hamann, by Lessing, and by his own soul, Herder betook himself, as nobody had done before him, to the comparative study of literature, to the appreciation of folksong (perhaps his best desert), to the examination of Ancient, Eastern, Foreign literature in comparison with German. This is his great claim to consideration in the history of literature and of criticism: and it is so great a one that in general one is loath to cavil even at the most extravagant expressions of admiration that have been lavished upon him.

The Fragmente.

But individual examination of his works revives the objections taken above. For instance, the early Fragmente zur Deutschen Litteratur[[662]] has an almost unique relative interest. I do not know where to look for anything like it as a survey (or rather a collection of studies) of a literature at a given period of its development. On the language; on the prosody;[[663]] on the “rhetoric” in the narrow-wide sense, of German after the close of the Seven Years’ War; on the chief authors and kinds of its literature; on a vast number of minor points, positive and comparative, in relation to it, Herder lavishes an amount of filial devotion, of learning, of ability, which is quite admirable. Taken absolutely, the value and the interest, and therefore the admiration, shrink a little.