[392]. Luther placed practical activity (the day’s demands, as Goethe said) at the very centre of morale, and that is one of the main reasons why it was to the deeper natures that Protestantism appealed most cogently. Works of piety devoid of directional energy (in the sense that we give the words here) fell at once from the high esteem in which they had been sustained (as the Renaissance was sustained) by a relic of Southern feeling. On ethical grounds monasticism thenceforth falls into ever-increasing disrepute. In the Gothic Age entry into the cloister, the renunciation of care, deed and will, had been an act of the loftiest ethical character—the highest sacrifice that it was possible to imagine, that of life. But in the Baroque even Roman Catholics no longer felt thus about it. And the institutions, no longer of renunciation but merely of inactive comfort, went down before the spirit of the Enlightenment.
[393]. προσῶπον meant in the older Greek “visage,” and later, in Athens, “mask.” As late as Aristotle the word is not yet in use for person. “Persona,” originally also a theatre-mask, came to have a juristic application, and in Roman Imperial times the pregnant Roman sense of this word affected the Greek προσῶπον also. See R. Hirzel, Die Person (1914), pp. 40 et seq.
[394]. See pp. 127 et seq.
[395]. W. Creizenach, Gesch. d. neueren Dramas (1918), II, 346 et seq.
[397]. We too have our anecdote, but it is of our own type and diametrically opposed to the Classical. It is the “short story” (Novelle)—the story of Cervantes, Kleist, Hoffmann and Storm—and we admire it in proportion as we are made to feel that its motive is possible only this once, at this time and with these people, whereas the mythic type of anecdote, the Fable, is judged by precisely opposite criteria.
[398]. See pp. 143 et seq.
[399]. The Fates of the Greeks are represented as spinning, measuring out and cutting the thread of a man’s destiny, but not as weaving it into the web of his life. It is a mere dimension.—Tr.
[401]. The evolution of meaning in the Classical words pathos and passico corresponds with this. The second was formed from the first only in the Imperial period, and carried its original sense in the “Passion” of Christ. It was in the early Gothic times, and particularly in the language of the Franciscan “Zealots” and the disciples of Joachim of Floris, that its meaning underwent the decisive reversal. Expressing thenceforward a condition of profound excitement which strained to discharge itself, it became finally a generic name for all spiritual dynamic; in this sense of strong will and directional energy it was brought into German as Leidenschaft by Zesen in 1647.