most delicate and most abnormal form of govern-
ment into their tiny bureaucratical States. Had
not the French constitution-mongers, with Ben-
jamin Constant at their head, adapted it to Con-
tinental use ?

There was, however, a party which went
further than the constitutionalists. ' Young
Germany' — so we call the group of youthful
writers, bom about 1810, who, towards 1830, trod



THE MODERN MINDS. 271

in the footsteps of Borne and Heine— Young Ger-
many did not stop at representative monarchy, as
it did not stop at Deism in philosophy, youno-
although Heine himself remained ever ^'''"•'^"J'-
faithful to the theory of a limited monarchy, and
came back at the end of his life to ' the simple
belief in the personal God of the common man,' as
he used to say. Laube and Gutzkow, Wienbarg
and Euge attacked Christianity and even Hegelian -
ism, in which they had been bred, with the violence
of the French revolutionists of 1 7 9 2 . They showed
a determined predilection for atheism and material-
ism in philosophy, for Jacobinism in politics ;
they even preached, with the Saint- Simonians, the
emancipation of woman and the abolition of indi-
vidual property. They called themselves proudly
' modern ' minds. They protested against all
forms of aristocracy, social as well as intellectual.
The State was to become the one all-resfulatins
power ; not the historical State, as it had grown
up in the course of centuries — but the modem
State built up according to the dictates of Eeason
— or of Jean-Jacques ; not even the State of 1 790,
but the democratical State of 1793. The place
held till now by the great — kings, aristocrats, ge-
niuses — was to be held henceforward by the people,



272 'young Germany' and 'little Germany.'

wliicli was to become the hero of history and public
life. At the same time they claimed, not only for
the people, but for themselves, the right to material
enjoyment, even to luxury ; not an equality in
misery, but an equality in v^ealth was their un-
attainable ideal. Their religion was the rehabilita-
tion of the flesh ; science and poetry were means
for preaching and propagating their new gospel.
Their last and most dangerous disciple, Ferdinand
Lassalle, died only fifteen years ago, not without
having left his fatal legacy to Germany.

Borne and Heine, who had given the first
siernal for this reaction in favour of rationalism
Borne and ^g^iiiist history, and of French ideas
Heme. against German, did not, as I said, go so
far. Heine was too much of an artist not to be
shocked by such excesses ; Borne too much of a
Stoic to go such lengths — his ideal was the in-
corruptible Robespierre, not the epicurean Danton.
For Heine, politics, as well as religion, history,
philosophy, never ceased to be themes for poetical
variations. In reality they were as indifferent to
him as the religious subjects of the great works of
the Italian Renaissance were indifferent to the
artists who produced them. It was Borne and
Heine, nevertheless, who set the example. Heine



BORNE AND HEINE. 273

himself had belonged, as I have said, to the
romantic school, and was the personal pupil of A.
W. Schlegel. He had begun with two romantic tra-
gedies which exhibit only too visibly the traces of
the master's influence ; and he was destined to give
in ' Atta Troll ' and the ' Romanzero ' what the
romanticists themselves had never been able to
give, the ideal romantic poem. There was not
even wanting in them the much recommended
irony of Fred. Schlegel. But Heine had always
been a somewhat unruly disciple. As early as at
the age of sixteen he had sung his song of the
Napoleonic grenadiers, which was in opposition to
the whole tendency of his masters ; and you know
how he developed the theme of the Napoleon-
worship in the incomparable prose-poem of
' Tambour Legrand.' Now, for a while Germany
neglected Heine the immortal poet for Heine
the ephemeral politician and philosopher —there
are many foreigners who do so still — and was led
to accept the most meagre of doctrines by the
irresistible fascination of a prose and a verse which
she had not heard since the great days of Goethe
and Schiller ; whilst Borne's incomparable wit
made her forget for a time that his political ideal
was still more shallow than that of Heine.

T



274 ' YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.'

We have seen that the liberating movement of
1813, the rising of the whole nation against the
foreign yoke, had taken place under the inspira-
tion of romanticism. It had taken the form of
a crusade, not only against Napoleon and the
French, but against the rationalism, the demo-
cracy, and the cosmopolitan pretences of the eigh-
teenth century and the great Revolution. It had
invoked the Christian and religious spirit, Teutonic
patriotism, feudal loyalty towards the hereditary
princes ; and these feelings were still very strong
when Heine and Borne, towards 1825, gave ex-
pression to the aspirations of the rising genera-
tion which had not felt the hardship of foreign
oppression and to which the political reality
which had followed the enthusiastic rise of 1813,
had proved a source of the bitterest disappoint-
ment. The shameless despotism of the fathers of
the fatherland, most of them of Napoleon's own
creation, or at least promotion, the petty tyranny
of their instruments, and the religious fanaticism
or hypocrisy which already began to spring up in
the official spheres of South Germany, were quite
sufficient to alienate the young from the romantic
cause. It was the time when Grabbe wrote his
tragedy of ' The Himdred Days,' when Zedlitz



LITTLE GERMANY. 275

composed his poem of the dead Caesar's ' JMidnight
Review,' when W. Miiller's ' Griechenlieder,' and
Mosen's Polish songs resounded in the streets of
every German town. The reaction in favour of
cosmopolitism and humanitarianism against pa-
triotic one-sidedness, and of French sympathies
against German national prejudices, was at the
same time a partial return to the ideas which had
predominated in Germany in the times of Schiller
and Goethe, and the exposition of which has been
the main object of these lectures. A partial
return, I say; for in opposing democracy to aris-
tocracy, the masses to individualism, the mechani-
cal making of states and laws to the ideas of
growth and evolution, it was in contradiction
with the creed of Herder and of Goethe. In its
cosmopolitism and in its paganism it was quite
under the sway of the great Humanitarian and the
great Heathen.

The Francophil, democratical, and rationalistic
current, initiated by Borne, Heine, and Young
Germany, prevailed for nearly a quarter ^ittie
of a century, from 1825 to 1850. Then G*^"^'^"^'-
again u^nder the influence of the disenchantment
which the failures of 1848 had caused, and still
more under the impressions produced by the

T 2



276 'young Germany' and ' little geemany.'

bankruptcy of the French democracy in 1849, a
contrary current arose in Germany.

Already towards 1840 this new current had
set in : the current of German national spirit
Its national ^gaiust foreign influence, and above
character, ^^l against France. From 1840 to 1848
the 'Germanistenversammlungen ' or meetings of
Teutonic philologists, jurisconsults and historians,
were for Germany what the scientific congresses
were for Italy, the pretext and opportunity for
asserting and preparing the unity of Germany.
For it was written that our political ideas should be
framed by professors, as professors had framed our
literary and artistic, our religious and philosophical
ideas. The two men, however, who gave us, the
one a national poetry, the other a national state,
were not professors : but could they have done
their work if the professors had not prepared the
ground for them ? Would they not have done it
in a still more satisfactory way if the professors
had not continued to interfere in it ?

The outbreak of French Chauvinism — the ugly
word seems to have established itself in all our
languages — and the thirst for conquest betrayed
in 1840, the cries for the Ehine which resounded
in Paris, as soon as Europe was threatened with



ITS NATIONAL CHARACTER. 277

a general war through the complication in the
East, contributed not a Kttle to strengthen this
current, particularly in the menaced provinces of
the left bank, which had been the special centre of
the romantic movement. This current is, neverthe-
less, very distinct from that of 1813, and it became
still more so after 1848, when the romantic dreams
of a resurrection of Frederick Barbarossa's Empire,
under the form of a Seventy- Millions Germany,
prevented the foundation of the national State.
It was, in the main, undoubtedly directed against
what was un-German in the political rationalism
of ' Young Germany ' — whose best men, from
Borne, Gans, and Heine, down to F. Lassalle, were,
curious to say, really not of German blood, being
Israelites by birth, if not by creed. The declara-
tion of war itself was a violent pamphlet against
Borne from the pen of Gervinus.

Nevertheless, the reaction of 1850 did not affect
a picturesque and poetical costume like that of
1813. The new patriots deemed it unnecessary
and childish to show the love of their country by
their white collars, bare necks, and long hair.
On the contrary, they affected rather a sort of
bourgeois common-place exterior. They dreaded
to be considered as unpractical dreamers j their



278 'young GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.'

higliest ambition was to be taken for ' positive '
people. Tbeir ideal in history was the honest,
stedfast, prosy Burger of the sixteenth century,
not the romantic knight of the Middle Ages, or
the Germanic chieftain of barbarous times. They
saw the strength of the nation in the middle-
class, and turned against the Jmiker nobility, as
well as against the democratic masses. They did
not dream of a traditional royalty, but of a
monarchy resting on contract like that of England
since 1688. They showed no sympathy for the
Church or for any religious mysticism, such as had
inspired the poets of 1813 ; on the contrary, they
wished to impress upon men's minds that they
were Protestants — sober, unpoetical Protestants —
and at the same time the heirs of Kant, whose
purely moral religion, without dogmas and forms
of worship, was to be the German religion far
excellence, i.e. the final form of Protestantism, as
for the English Deists of the past century Uni-
tarianism was the final form of English Pro-
testantism.

But if they were disciples of Kant the moralist,
they pointedly ignored Kant the metaphysician.
'Young Germany' had still been strongly imbued
with the speculative spirit ; it had grown up under



THE GERMAN METHOD. 279

Hpgel's, as yet, uncontested rule. The new school
deliberately turned their backs on all metaphysics :
duringr their reisrn over public opinion, if

° Oil. Its Positive

not over State and Church — i.e. from Character

in Science.

1850 to about 1866— a sort of indiffer-
entism, nay, of aversion, for philosophical specula-
tion seemed to have taken hold of the nation,
awakened, as she was, and sobered down from her
metaphysical excesses. Even in their way of treat-
ing science they went to the opposite extreme. The
great advantage of Kant's influence was, that
science during the first half of this century was
always handled in a philosophical spirit. There
was certainly an excess both in the so-called 'philo-
sophy of nature ' and in the ' philosophy of history,'
which interfered too often with the sober and exact
observation and verification of facts. The new
school assumed to be more positive. General
ideas had nothing to do with science ; and they
even went so far as to treat history as a sort of exact
science. The famous ' German method ' dates from
this time. Imagination, and even intuition, were
banished from historical studies, as well as from
natural science. Facts alone were to be sought
for, sifted, and assembled ; the only combination
of the facts which was allowed was connexion



280 ' YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.'

through cause and effect ; and the disciples were
so well drilled that they succeeded at last not
only in finding the facts they wanted, and in mak-
ing them take the appearance which they desired,
but in driving life itself out of history, which is
but the evolution of life. Even the present genera-
tion, which has come back to long neglected philo-
sophy, is animated in its researches by a spirit
entirely different from that which j)redominated in
the times of Hegel. It is, indeed, Kant's criticism
of reason with its strictly experimental character
and its opposition to all a priori speculation, which
our matter-of-fact juniors have taken up again.
In other words they have returned to the point
whence their fathers started on their strange
Odysse}^ and they are favoured in their new
vojsige by all the light which the progress of
natural science, accomplished in the interval,
throws on their road. And not the professional
philosophers alone, but the men of science them-
selves, the physiologists especially, tread now with
a surer foot in the steps of the great renovator of
modern thought.

If, however, the men of 1850 repudiated all
philosophical ideas, they did not reject political
ideas ; nay, history soon became in their hands a



GEEMAN LIBERALISM. 281

storehouse of arguments for political views. The
' men of Gotha ' — so they were called in consequence
of the Gotha Parliament of 1849, in which thej
formed the majorit}" — thought, if thej did not
say, that politics alone really deserved to

la Politics.

occupy a nation which had come of age.
They were staunch Liberals of the constitutional
school ; but their ideal was the old English Con-
stitution, not the French one of 1830. In general
their leaders, from Dahlmann and Gervinus, down
to Gneist and Waitz, Sybel and Hausser, were
decidedly English in their sympathies, until —
well, until a period which lies beyond the limits
of the subject which I have to treat here.

Like the English Liberals of the old school they
had arrived at a species of compromise between
political rationalism and ' historicism.' They still
adhered to the German idea of evolution — the
only great German idea to which they remained
faithful — but they corrected it consciously, as the
English had done and do almost unconsciously, by
adaptation of the past to the exigencies of the
present. They saw the historical spirit, not in a
return to the past, or in a stopping of history at
a given moment, but in continuous progress.
Moreover, as, although mostly professors, they



282 ' YOUNG GEEMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GEEMANY.'

claimed to be practical politicians, not dreamers
and theorists, tliey did not want to awaken Fre-
derick Barbarossa in bis Kjffbaiiser, and call to life
the ' Holy Eoman Empire of tbe German Nation,'
witb its seventy millions of souls and its sway over
Hungary and Italy, Poland and Burgundy. Tbey
wanted to have a national State strong enough to
defend itself against foreign aggression, not so
mighty as to arouse the fears or suspicion of the
neighbouring nations; a State similar to those
founded, or at least perfected, by Louis XI. of
France, Henry YII. of England, Ferdinand the
Catholic of Spain. In consequence they raised
a characteristic protest against the Othos and
Fredericks of the Middle Ages, who, instead of
following the sensible and moderate national policy
of Henry I., went to assume in Eome the crown
of the Csesars. And as Austria was still con-
sidered, and considered herself as the natural
heir of the Holy Empire, as her possessions lay to
a great extent outside the frontiers of the German
language and German interests ; as she was Catho-
lic throughout, the exclusion of Austria became
an article, and indeed the chief article of the new
political faith. Thence the name of the party,
' Little Germany,' as opposed to those successors



THE PRUSSIAN STATE. 283

of the romantic school still numerous in 1848, who
wanted to defend the German interests ' on the
Mincio,' and saw in Austria the champion of
German grandeur, and were usually called the
party of ' Great Germany.'

The ' Little Germans,' indeed, saw clearly from
the beginning, in Protestant Prussia, the power
which was to realise the longed-for national State,
powerful enough to defend its integrity, but with-
out any hankering after political hegemony in
Europe such as Charles Y. and Louis XIY. had
aspired to, and such as had always haunted the
patriots of 1813, when they dreamed of avenging
the death of young Conradin and restoring the
Empire of his grandfather. Their aim, I said,
was to be eminently matter-of-fact, and they
affected a contempt for high-flown or sentimental
ideas, which was often taken abroad for less of a
fanfaronnade de vice than it really was. They were
so anxious to show that they were no longer
modest, shy, dreamy sentimentalists that they
sometimes overdid it ; for they strove not only
against the looseness of moral principles, the
Bohemian life, the Jacobinism and the Frenchified
ways of ' Young Germany,' to whose Gallic
frivolity they opposed their Teutonic earnestness ;



284 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AND ' LITTLE GERMANY.'

not only against tlie mania for poetical fancy-
costumes, and the unpractical enthusiasm of the
patriots of 1813. They strove also against the
idealism of Goethe's and Schiller's time, against
its exaggerated individualism, against the eternal
seK-education, against the Avhole worship of
beautiful souls, against its humanitarian cosmo-
politism, and absence of prejudice ; but above all
against its alienation from public life, and its
exclusive admiration of art and thought as the
highest activity of man.

Gervinus, at the end of his history of German
poetry, which appeared from 1835 to 1842, and
was a species of patriotic pamphlet in five huge
volumes, breaks out into these words, which give
vent to the suppressed idea, that pervades his
whole book, as it was the undercurrent of the
feelings of his whole generation :

Is it not time to use the forces hidden in the nation 1
to ask the governments to appreciate those forces, and give
them free course 1 to wish that the nation, which forms
the centre and nucleus of Eiu-ope, should come out of the
despised position which it occupies ? that it should enter
at last on its majority 1 . . . But, by whatever means that
aim is to be attained, it is not by the ways which our
poetry has taken. . . . We want a man of Luther's stamp.
He himself was tempted to undertake the task ; but he



THE GERMAN STATE. 285

despaired for the ever alleged reason that he did not
believe in the political intelligence and capacity of his
nation. If it were in the nature of the people, he was
of opinion, it would show itself without laws. . . . But
we will not despair of this people. . . , We cannot
believe that a nation can have achieved so great results
in poetry, religion, art, and science, and yet should be
absolutely incapable of any political achievement. , , .
Our duty is to understand the signs of the times, to
give up scattering our strength as we do, to direct our
activity towards the point which is the object of the most
ardent desires of all. The fight on the field of art is
over ; now we ought to aim steadily at the other object,
which nobody as yet amongst us has attained. Perhaps
Apollo will there also grant us the prize, which he has
not refused us elsewhere !

The ' man of Luther's stamp ' came, and the
first to turn his back upon him was the man w^ho
had yearned for him ; and the man of Luther's
stamp saw what Luther had seen, that political
capacity was not in the nature of the nation,
and so, having vainly tried to build the national
State with the help of the nation, he at last did
it without the nation. As soon as he had done
his work, the ' Little Germans,' who had not
understood him, and had opposed him, loaded
him with praise, for they saw that it was their
dream which he had realised. So he called them



286 * YOUNG GEEMANT ' AND '^LITTLE GERMANY.'

again to work with him to fit up the new building,
and they put their hand to the work, and again
proved that political capacity was not in their
nature, and thus they separated again, perhaps for
ever.

Nevertheless, they have been, and are, trying
hard to become a political nation. To arrive at
Its infla- "^^i^ result, Germany, freed for the last
^g*fjjj°°Q fifty years from all social, religious, and
°^^ ' national prejudices, had to acquire them
again artificially, or at least to form a new ' cake
of custom,' or ensemble of such prejudices as
were necessary for the practical purposes of a
national and political life. A man who sees all
sides of a question, whom the passions of the patriot
and the party-man do not move, who thinks more
of being let alone than of acting upon others,
a man without prejudices — in a word, the ideal
man of Goethe's time — was scarcely fit for the
new task. For this work, good, solid, narrow, social
and other prejudices were a necessity. The con-
solidation then of prejudices, above all, of the
national prejudice, was the chief, though uncon-
scious aim of the German intellectual movement
since 1850 ; and as regards national prejudice, they
certainly succeeded. Whenever national interests



MODERN GERMAN PATRIOTISM. 287

are at stake, we all liold together, as our fathers
never did, and show a public spirit utterly un-
known to them. I cannot say the same as yet in
cases where the interests of liberty, of good admin-
istration, of free trade, and so forth, are concerned.
It is a great thing that at least in national ques-
tions, we should be united and unanimous even
to excess. As I said in my last lecture, the death
of individualism, which we have witnessed since
1850, seems a contradiction of tke German idea.
Still, it was necessary to a certain degree, because
excessive individualism unfits man for public life.
One of the first means of creating those pre-
judices, and one of its last consequences, was the
creation of national pride, a virtue or a vice,
utterly unknown to the great period of 1790.
This new patriotism had not the simplicity of
the French or Greek patriotism, which regards
all other nations as barbarians ; nor the humble
and sentimental tenderness of Italian patriotism,
which clings to the redeemed country as a mother
does to a child saved from death but still delicate
and ailing, and scarcely able to face the hard-
ships of life in a public school with hardy com-
rades. It had not the robust vigour of the Roman
and old-English patriotism, which simply ignored



288 ' YOUNG GERMANY ' AND * LITTLE GERMANY.'

the legal existence of all who were not Eoman
citizens or British subjects. The new German
patriotism, which is not to be confounded with
the old Prussian, was not, and is not na'if. It is
conscious ; it is intentional ; it has a tincture of
pedantry because it has been made by scholars
and literary men. It has sprung up from a feel-
ing of want of patriotism, such as had reigned
before, and against which reaction was necessary.
It resembles in that respect the religion of the
German romanticists, who had all been free-
thinkers, and resolved one fine day to become
believers because belief was a necessary basis of all
poetical excellence. Hence the exaggerations of
German patriotism. It was not bom naturally,
or spontaneously, it was the fruit of reflection.

It was not the less justified for all that ; for
it was really necessary for the creation of a na-
tional State. Now, next to a just and righteous
order, which is the very raison d'etre of the State,
national independence and national strength, which
guarantees this independence, are the most in-
dispensable conditions for the welfare of a nation.
When a nation does not possess these, it must
sacrifice everything to attain them, even liberty.
The Spaniards gave the example of it in the



STRUGGLE FOR INTERNAL LIBERTY. 289

beginning- of this century, because they had at
least this superiority over Germany, that they
possessed a national State — worse, certainly, than
the one which the French wanted to force upon
them — but still a national State. This goal once
attained, the struggle for internal liberty ought
to begin, with its various vicissitudes of victory
and defeat, as England carried it on from the
destruction of the Armada to the reisrn of
George IV. ; and it is only when this conquest