nation again. Goethe in his own life has vividly de-
scribed the effect of the v^raron the general marasmus
of the time, and Gleim's poems, and Lessing's
' Minna,' remain as witnesses of the direct inspira-
tion which the nation drew from Frederick's ex-
ploits. Nay, his indifference to the literary life
of his country was perhaps, I might say certainly, a
good thing after all. He allowed it to grow natur-
ally, spontaneously, without giving it a direction
in an academical or other sense, contenting himself
with levelling the ground for it, with making for
it a wholesome atmosphere. If Frederick had not
ensured absolute liberty of thought to Germany,
her literature never would l^ave been what it
became, one of the freest of all literatures since
the Greek. Well might Schiller sing :
Kein Augustisch Alter bliihte,
Keines Medicaers Giite
Lachelte der deutschen Kunst :
* * * *
Von dem grossten deutschen Sobne,
Von des grossen Friedrichs Throne
Ging sie schutzlos, ungeehrt.*
' No Augustan age flourished, the kindness of no Medicis
smiled on German Art. From Germany's greatest son, from the
throne of the great Frederick, she went unprotected, unhonoured.
PEOTESTANTISM. 59
But instead of complaining- of this indifference,
Germans ought to thank Frederick for it, in
grateful remembrance of Kant's words : ' The age
of enlightenment was the century of Frederick
the Great/ More than that, the time of the
resurrection of the German nation was the time
of Frederick ; for it was he who inspired all that
made the nation capable of self-assertion — hero-
ism, national spirit, religious liberty, modern
law ; it was he who gave life and strength to the
nucleus which was to become, and deservedly to
become, the German State.
I said, that next to the Prussian State, it was
Protestantism which allowed Germany to raise
herself out of the state of intellectual protestant-
and moral misery in which the Thirty ^^"^"
Years' War had left her. Undoubtedly it was a
petrified sort of Protestantism which had sur-
vived ; but it was Protestantism, that is to say,
relative liberty of religious thought. A revival
which assumed the proportions of a new reforma-
tion was slowly preparing as early as the second
half of the seventeenth century. This reformation
was not the work of Government, as that
Pietism.
of the -sixteenth century had been in
England and partly even in Germany. It was
60 THE STARTING-POINT.
worked out and spread by individuals. So was its
influence an influence on tlie soul, on the inner
life, not on the constitution of the Church, still less
on government and public life. In both respects,
in its origin and in its effects, it bears a close re-
semblance to the Evangelical and Wesley an move-
ment which took place a century later in this
island. It sprang from a want of more intense
religious feeling, and so renovated first religion
and afterwards society. The old theology had for-
gotten the struggle against sin in the struggle
about dogma ; pietism left dogma alone, and
appealed to the inner voice of revelation. Pietism,
indeed, which we are so accustomed to look upon
as a narrow or narrowing view of religion, was
at first the exact contrary. It was a reaction
against the dryness and stiffness of orthodox
religion, where theology reigned supreme and
dogmas and forms obstructed the direct and spon-
taneous communication of the faithful with the
Deity. * As Socrates, the new apostles said, had
drawn down philosophy from heaven to earth, so
they wished that theology should be turned from
vain speculations and subtleties in order to show
the way of the spirit and of saintliness in the pre-
cepts necessary to salvation.' It was thus that
PIETISM. 61
pietism brought warmth, and feeling, and life into
religion, and, although mixed up with mysticism,
acted as a liberating word. This is not the place
to dwell on Spener's and Francke's doings, on
the expulsion of the latter from Leipzig and his
transfer to Halle, which afterwards became the
seat of pietism ; nor can I enumerate the
schools, the charitable institutions, the secularisa-
tion of worship, the collective working establish-
ments which owed their existence to Count Zin-
zendorf and his Herrnhuter (Moravian bi'ethren).
Suffice it to say that the mild charity, the demo-
cratic simplicity of these men, won over hundreds
and thousands of souls, and that the movement
which spread from Halle became a general one in
the first half of the past century. Goethe tells
us indeed, that ' at this time a certain religious
disposition of mind was rife in Germany. In many
princely houses there was a genuine religious
life ; noblemen were not rare who aimed at true
holiness, and in the lower classes this feeling was
widely spread.' So it came about that pietism grew
into a real power in a very short time. Even the
' monarchs ' began to dread it. The Margrave of
Bayreuth was admonished and rebuked for his
vices by a pietist preacher in presence of the
62 THE STAETING-POINT.
whole congregation, and publicly promised better
conduct, and all that was required before he could
obtain absolution. When Frederic William I.,
the king-corporal, was dying, his chaplain, a
pietist also, reproached him severely with his
accesses of wrath, his armies, the corvees he had
inflicted on the peasants, and with his failure to do
what he might have done for his poor subjects.
However wholesome and fertile pietism might
be, it was unable to make good the losses which
Scientific ^^^ reformation of the sixteenth century
revival. j^^^ sustained by not bringing about a
political and national reorganisation. This work
was reserved for others. Besides, pietism degene-
rated but too soon and became in its turn inanimate
and incapable of free action. The inner life,
however, had been awakened, and it was not to
fall asleep again, because those who stopped at
the starting-point claimed the name and inherit-
ance of the initiators. On the other hand the
reigning philosophy was not without influence
on religion ; but the reigning philosophy was
not yet that of Locke and Shaftesbury ; it was
the theistic philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz,
and WolfiP. The difference is great. The French
and English amis des lumieres were Deists, that
SCIENTIFIC REVIVAL. 63
is to saj, they arrived by the application of
the law of causality in the outward world {i.e. by
reasoning and mechanical explanation) at the First
Cause or Deity. The German Theists started from
Conscience and tried to prove the Deity by the
inward revelation of the moral law as it speaks in
the bosom of men ; and they invoked the authority
of Cartesianism as developed by Leibnitz, and
set forth and commented upon by Wolff, which
appealed to the innate idea of a Deity as the
strongest proof of its existence ; whereas Goethe
rightly said of the French of the eighteenth
century what he might also have said of the
English Deists, — ' They do not understand that
there can be anything in man which has not come
into him from without.'
The philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, and
Wolff influenced science and moral life before it
influenced religion. It was the sight of a superior
foreign literature which first awoke the desire of
a richer intellectual life in Germany. So the ad-
miration of foreign culture became the impulse to
the creation of a national one. For this, however,
it was necessary to emancipate science from
theology, as religion had been emancipated from
it already.
64 THE STAETING-POINT.
Tlie liberation of man from the yoke of
authority, which was properly the idea of the
eighteenth century had been aimed at everywhere
as early as the end of the preceding century, even
in Germany. Whilst Wolff's moral philosophy,
which was only that of Leibnitz in a popularised
form, emancij^ated morality from theology, it im-
parted also a freer view of legislation. Puffendorf
followed in the footsteps of Hugo G rotius. He drove
the theologians out of political science and founded
a purely lay theory of the state ; and although
individually the German Lichtfreunde of that time
were certainly inferior to a Locke and a Bayle, their
immediate practical influence was perhaps greater.
Thomasius not only revolutionised law by his
teaching, putting it on a natural and rational
basis ; he revolutionised teaching itself by the in-
troduction of the German language into the uni-
versities ; he founded the German Press by his
weekly papers ; he j)ut a stop by his agitation to
that shame of the age, the trials for sorcery and
witchcraft ; he introduced a better tone amongst
professors and students ; he dared to say to
Frederick the Great's grandfather that the one
thing wanting for an intellectual and moral
revival in his states was liberty. ' If I must say it
SCIENTIFIC REVIVAL. 65
in one word,' he wound up his address to King
Frederick, prompting him already to take the lead
of Germany by restoring liberty, ' if I must say it
in one word it is liberty which gives to all spirit
the right life ; and without it human understand-
ing, whatever may be its advantages, is, as it were,
dead and inanimate. . . . This is the one thing
which has given to the Dutch and English so
many learned men, whereas the want of this
liberty has oppressed the inborn sagacity of the
Italians, and the high-flowing mind of the
Spaniards. Such liberty would justify the hope
that in our Germany also noble minds might
apply themselves to wash away that shamefiil
spot — the belief in her own incapacity to invent
and do anything good and great.' These words
were spoken in 1705.
The University of Halle had been founded
under the protection of the first king of Prussia,
Sophia Charlotte's husband, by the regenerators
of religion, the pietists,who had been persecuted in
Saxony. These, however, had soon fallen them-
selves into the intolerance from which they had
suffered so much, and waged a terrible war against
Thomasius, to whom the king had offered an
asylum in Halle when he in turn had been driven
Â¥
66 THE STARTING-POINT.
out of Leipzig. Did lie not dare together witli
Wolff to preach rationalism in those halls which
the unworthy followers of Spener and Francke con-
sidered as their own realm ? Thomasius died
opportunely; Wolff was obliged to leave, when
the persecutors got the better of Frederick I.'s
successor. Then it was that Miinchhausen founded
the University of Gottingen, which henceforward
became the stronghold of rationalistic science. It
became also the hearth of that new philology
which paved the way for a freer assimilation of
profane antiquity. Gesner was the first to call the
attention of his pupils to the beauty of ancient
literature, which, till then, had been nothing more
than a drilling instrument; Christ insisted upon
the substance of it, the political, religious, above all
the artistical life of the ancients, and thus became
the creator of modern archseology ; whilst Michaelis
through his more methodical study of the eastern
languages, and Heine by his sesthetical commen-
taries, widened the ground and enlivened the
spirit of classical philology.
Meanwhile the material and social life of the
nation began to improve. The process, however, was
very slow, for many of the old hindrances still re-
mained. There was no national centre, no industry,
THE LITERARY REVIVAL. 67
no commerce. The middle classes might be said
to vegetate rather than to live, excluded from all
participation in the State, shut up in the petty
existence of their small towns, contented in their
poverty, and unacquainted with the great currents
of life which were flowing elsewhere. Out of their
prose of every-day life they fled into the ideal
world until they thought that this inner world
alone had reality. As soon as the xheUterary
wounds began to heal, the interest in ^^'""^^^•
moral and intellectual things was at once re-
awakened. First it was religion, soon science and
poetry, which became the great aflPair of the nation,
not a pastime for leisure-hours but the one serious
thing, not an ornament of life but the national life
itself. There were no courts to protect literature,
as we have seen, or to guide it. The new literature
sprang from the spontaneous activity of the
nation. It freed the courts themselves from
foreign manners and foreign culture, and forced
the national tongue upon them.
Ruhmend darfs der Deutsche sagen,
Hoher darf das Herz ihm schlagen,
Selbst erschuf er sich den Werth.'
* The German has a right to boast of it, his heart may beat
higher : for he gave to himself his riches.
p 2
68 THE STAETIXG-POINT.
There was no return, however, to the popular
movement of the sixteenth century, the bridge
which might have served for this purpose being
irreparably broken. It was a new spirit which
rose, individual, not national, but awakening at
least, though late, the national spirit, instead of
being awakened by it, as was the case elsewhere.
Other nations indeed have had a national history
and tradition, a centre and a society, wealth
and comfort, before they possessed a literature ;
in Germany it was the reverse. Literature came
first, and gave its character to the slowly
forming society instead of i^eceiving it from a
society already formed. The impulse came from
a concourse of isolated and individual forces and
efforts which ran into the same bed. There
was no political life, or, if there was any, it was
beyond the reach of the middle classes ; but there
arose a literary life, in which there was no
division into states and provinces, governed and
governing, upper and middle classes. Therein,
at least, the nation was one ; therein everybody
felt himself a German. What a man of talent
wrote became at once the property of the nation,
whether it was published in Strasburg or in
Konigsberg, in Frankfort or in Dresden. All the
THE LITEEART REVIVAL. 69
eminent writers of the age travelled from one end
of the country to the other, and settled -where
they pleased. Nobody thought of asking whether
Lessing was a Saxon, Herder a Prussian,
Schiller a Wiirtemberger. They all formed one
nation. Thus national unity existed in literature
long before its political existence was felt as a
necessity; but it prepared and brought about
political unity in the end. Moreover, and this
specially concerns us here, this literature worked
out an ensemble of views which became the lay
creed of every cultivated German, whether Catholic
or Protestant, a creed which is still held by
many, I might say, by the whole elite, of
the nation, if not outspokenly, at least as the
tacitly accepted foundation ground of all their
ideas. My object here is to explain what this
creed was.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century
serious attempts had been made to endow
Germany with a national literature ; but every-
thing was wanting for original production, form
as well as substance. The language was still,
or rather had become, an unwieldy, awkward
engine, composed of fragments of French, Italian,
Latin, and legal phraseology. There was nothing
70 THE STARTING-POINT.
in the common life of the nation to furnish
the subject or the matter of a literature ; no
original thought, no great action. The con-
sequence was that the new literature continued
to be what the literature of the preceding age
had been — a stammering imitation of French,
Italian, and English models; for Germany had gone
through all the phases through which the western
literatures had passed in the preceding centuries,
following them closely, but without being able to
give any life to its servile copies. Yet the writers
had an instinctive feeling of the task which they
had to fulfil, viz., the creation of a literature at
once popular and refined, national and up to the
mark of western culture. At the same time
they differed as to the way by which this aim
was -to be obtained, one side thinking Boileau's
* Art Poetique ' the last word of literary legis-
lation, the others invoking the authority of
English examples. Their appeal, however, was
not made so much to Addison and Pope, rational-
ists fed with Locke and Shaftesbury, as to
Milton, the poet of enthusiasm, and Richard-
son the sentimentalist. No doubt they also were
liberal Protestants, but they were not ration-
alists in the English and French sense of the
THE NEW LITEEATURE. 71
word; they were believers, not in tlie letter
but in the spirit, and even the letter they com-
bated with respect. And this was still the spirit
even of the great literary generation which
followed them, and began to enter the lists
during and shortly after the Seven Years' War
(1756 to 1763).
In the first third of the eighteenth century,
French models still ruled uncontested, and their
advocate, Professor Gottsched, in Leipzig,
Character
was still the absolute sovereign of the of the new
literatura
German Parnassus. It was against his
pedantic and despotic sway that the so-called
English school arose in Zurich. A whole library
might be filled, not only with the weekly papers,
which for the last twenty years had been trying
awkwardly enough to fill the place of German ' Tat-
lers ' and ' Spectators,' but with the heavy volumes
in which the conflicting schools expressed their
theories and attacked those of their adversaries.
Even when an original literature had begun to
spring up, these literary and sesthetical discussions
still continued ; in fact, they continued almost to
our day. Modern German literature, you see, was
not born in a simple, spontaneous, unconscious age,
but in an age of criticism ; the war of theories
72 THE STAETHSTG-POINT.
raged over its cradle, and with theories it was
reared. No wonder that, even when it had
reached manhood, it still retained something of
these early habits of self-conscious, self-critical
production, and appeared somewhat —
Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of tliovight ;
which does not mean that the German poet, bom
in a library, was not to become capable of the fresh-
est and most thrilling: utterances as often as he fled
from the dust of his book-shelves into the forests
and the fields of Franconia and Swabia. Yet you
must not forget that this literature was the work
of the learned middle-classes, not of idle and
wealthy gentlemen, but of needy and hard-work-
ing schoolmasters and clergymen. As there was
no great national Court, so there was no rich no-
bility and gentry to cultivate letters. Nor
was there a noblesse de robe, as in France, or
a class of well-to-do merchants, as in England,
who might have filled up their leisure hours
with literary pursuits. Germany boasts of no
Montaigne or Montesquieu, no Shaftesbury or
Bolingbroke. Men of the social position of
Addison and Fielding, of Hume and Gibbon, did
not exist, and, when they existed, did not think of
literature. This, and the seclusion from political
THE NEW LITEKATUEE. 73
life, and tlie absence of publicity, gave German
literature its particular character, its wonderful
freedom from all general fashion, form, style, con-
ventionality, its unique individualism, its daring
thought and imagination ; and also its somewhat
abstract nature. It sometimes strikes one as a soul
without a body. We at once feel that its writers
have never known great life, whether social or po-
litical. It betrays at the same time a general aver-
sion to action and practical aims, as if the inner
life alone had any worth and reality. It was
only after the terrible blows which in the begin-
ning of this century awoke them from their drea,my
or ideal life, that the Germans began to compre-
hend that their new intellectual liberty could live
and last only in an independent and respected
State.
To revert, however, to the literary strifes of
the first half of the past century, it was the
English tendency which got the better TheEns-
of the contest ; and Richardson was, per-
haps, next to Thomson, the writer who contri-
buted most to this result. Clumsy translations of
Young's ' Night Thoughts,' followed the heavy
metrical versions of ' Paradise Lost,' and the
' Seasons.' Their inspiration was, after all, more
74 THE STAETIXG-POIN'T.
congenial to tlie G-emian nature, and more adapted
to the social and moral state of the German
middle-class than Eacine and Corneille, or even
Moliere and Lesage. Under this influence — for it
is a strange fact that the foundation of a national
culture was stOl sought through imitation —
and under the tutorship of theoretical criticism,
arose a tame and modest, half-sentimental, half-
moralising sort of literature, wliich reflected the
petty, prosy, every-day life of the small cities of
Germany, and which pleased because it reflected
it. This humble, timid collection of satires, fables,
and idyls, had, howerer, the one merit, till now
wanting in all the literary productions of the
country, the merit of depicting German life and
giving expression to German feelings, instead of
describing French and Italian manners, ideas,
and characters. This literature was certainly as
poor I dare not say poetically, but at least in
rhyme and style as the life it depicted — the
petty customs, defects, weaknesses, and interests
of the poor tutored German middle-class. A host
of Dr. Primroses came forward even before the
English Dr. Primrose came to life ; but they were
Primroses without the delightful irony, if not
without the benevolence, of Olivia's father; and
THE SETE^' TEAES' WAR. 75
who had never come into contact witli gentlemen
like Sir William Thomliill. Few people read
GeUert's novels, Eabener's satires, Zacharia's
comic poems nowadays ; still the historian will find
nowhere a tmer image of the modest conditions
of the time than in these pale pictures, which
resemble the bleached old photographs of 18-50,
to which we still grant a place in onr sitting-
room.
The Seven Tears' "War soon roused the national
spirit to new life after centuries of slumber. For
the first time Germans might once more -j^g seyen
feel proud of their deeds, and boast of a y^=^"^^-
national hero ; and Gleim's ' Grenadiersongs '
(1758) gave vent to this feeling. The German
'Tvrtseus,' as he was ambitiouslv called, was a
very mild Tyrtseus, if you like ; still his inspiration
was a more visrorous one than that of the timid
^sdrsentimental friends of his vouth. Together
with him, however, appeared on the field the
somewhat younger generation of the great in-
tellectual warriors who definitively freed the
German mind from the foreign yoke and the
bondage of narrow tradition, and who cleared
the ground upon which those who followed were
to build.
76 THE STARTING-POINT.
Our new literature only began properly to-
wards 1760. The hundred precedmg years were
Recapituia- entirely filled with the slow and weari-
some process of recovery from the material
misery and the intellectual, as well as moral decay
in which the Thirty Years' War had left us. It
required these hundred years before people could
attain even that modest degree of well-being which
allowed them to give a thought to something
else than the care for material existence. It
required these hundred years to free German
Religion, as well as German Science, from the
thraldom of orthodox theology. It required these
hundred years to create the beginnings only of a
national State, and to reform some, at least, of
the abuses of the Empire. It required yet a
hundred years more of incessant toil, and four
generations of men of genius and of talent, to bring
about a really national literature and a really
national State, looked up to and respected by the
world. No doubt, as this our new State still
bears the stamp of its origin — the bureaucratical
and military monarchy of Frederick the Great, —
so our new literature, very different in this respect
from our literature of the Middle Ages, as well as
from that of the sixteenth century, is a literature
EECAPITULATION. 77
of scholars and officials. It reflects tlie intellectual
and moral life of that class. It does not depict a
large social and public life, which did not exist
when it sprang up, and which has scarcely come
even now, when all has been done that was neces-
sary to clear the ground for it — perhaps because our
history, our intellectual and moral aptitudes, make
us less fit than other nations for such a life, and
assign to us other and by no means lower fields of
activity. Be this as it may, you will never under-
stand our political and literary conditions if you
forget the starting-point of modern Germany ; if