Seventeenth century philosophy made woman nothing. Eighteenth century philosophy, springing from the English utilitarians, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, made woman a mere adjunct, a tool of man. Above all things else, an Englishman loves his home. A good wife makes a man more comfortable in his home than a bad one. "Therefore," said eighteenth century philosophy, "'tis the part of worldly prudence to train women toward virtue." This thought is the substance of Locke's Treatise on Education, so far as it concerns women. "A husband of high social standing may be the reward of persistent virtue," added Samuel Richardson, the man through whom Locke's philosophy became potent over women of all ranks in all civilized countries.
For more than half a century Locke's philosophy, filtered through Richardson's novels, colored feminine ideals almost as deeply on the continent as in the author's own country. Rousseau was a third link in the chain a very strong, a mighty link.
Richardson's first novel was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison soon followed. Each of these books, translated into German, passed through many editions. French renderings of Richardson's novels also flooded German book stores. This author's books struck both new and old chords in the heart of German womanhood. They dealt with heroines who moved in the humbler walks of life. Before Richardson and Rousseau wrote, the memoirs of highborn dames may be searched in vain for a single expression of sisterly feeling toward women in a lower rank of society than their own. Compassion and almsgiving were not lacking, but the "put yourself in her place" feeling seems never previously to have been awakened. Richardson emphasized chastity a virtue which the early eighteenth century world most sadly lacked. He made the hearthstone once more an altar.
Out of the sentimentalism of the Locke-Richardson-Rousseau school was evolved a type of womanhood which, during the second half of the eighteenth century, made the world purer and better.
CHAPTER X
THROUGH STORM AND STRESS TO CLASSICISM AND HUMANISM
About the middle of the eighteenth century, after long and weary years of unfruitful struggle, disappointment and desolation, there begins faintly to glimmer, and then rapidly to shine in broad illumination, a stupendous cultural movement the impelling force of which was the humanizing thought which sprang from the fertile brains of great literary and philosophical thinkers; preeminent among whom were Lessing, the greatest critical genius of the German nation, and Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher. Enlightenment mental liberation from the shackles of tradition and orthodoxy became the watch-word of the time. Through the dominating personality of Frederick the Great (1740-1786), even despotism was made to feel this influence, the scope of which was still further extended, though less successfully, by the reforms of Joseph II. (1765-1790), Maria Theresa's son. The message sounded from beyond the seas in the American Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution spread through the hearts of the nations of Europe, proclaiming the gospel of human rights and equality before God and the law. The French Revolution was its most direct fruit. In Germany, the liberation of thought, of science and art, the emancipation of man and woman alike, had to precede political freedom which, in its full development, could be evolved only by blood and iron.
It is true, however, that, though the idea of humanism then became the ideal of the present, there remained enough of the social and political vices and errors of the past to make this epoch perhaps the most complex and complicated in German history. Divine thought and mystic-sentimental-pseudo-science, the grossest lust and the highest idealism, the most abject servility and the most liberal political views, cynical scepticism and childlike faith, true patriotism and nationalism on the one hand, national treason and anti-national cosmopolitanism on the other, meet and conflict at every step.
But whatever were the conditions of the time, woman was the causa movens, the underlying force of the cultural life of the nation and of all its leaders. Women contributed to the progress of the storm and stress evolution toward classicism and emancipation; women inspired the bloom of literature; women gave Germany a stage and adorned it with their genius as actresses; women fostered the arts; women on the throne ruled Germany; a German woman, withal the greatest and vilest, Katharine the Great, raised Russia to the rank of a world power; women dominated the nobility and the courts; women elevated the bourgeoisie to higher standards of living and thinking; women strove to emancipate themselves and their peasant husbands from servitude.