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!"