you do not remember that, whereas the German
of the sixteenth century was fully on a par
with the Englishman, Frenchman, and Italian, in
material and intellectual, as well as in moral and
social, respects, the German of the seventeenth
century was thrown back into utter barbarism by
the Thirty Years' War. When our country, at
the end of that cruel time, towards 1650, set out
on a new career, she had everything to rebuild
anew; state and religion, wealth and society,
science and literature, language, even, and mo-
rality. The start of two hundred years, which
western Europe thus had over Germany, is still
apparent in our society and manners, in our



78 THE STAETING-POINT.

wealth and comfort. We have the presumption
to believe that intellectually and morally — politi-
cally, also, since 1866, if we do not cling to the
prejudice that parliamentary government is the
only one worthy of a civilised nation — we have
again come up with our western neighbours in
the great race of civilisation, in which men are
not rivals but fellow-workers.



79



LECTUEB III.

THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.
(1760-1770.)

It was during, and shortly after, the Seven Years'
War (1756 to 1763) that the first generation of
the great founders of our national culture made

their appearance.

There are three generations, indeed, which
followed each other at twenty years' distance, and
which almost entirely did the great work
of German culture, of which I have genera-

T • 1 tions.

undertaken to trace the outlines in these
short lectures. The first, born between 1715 and
1735, the generation of Klopstock, Wieland, Winc-
kelmann, Kant, Mendelssohn, above all, Lessing,
whose principal works were published between
1750 and 1770, when these men were from thirty
to fifty years old. The second generation, born in
the middle of the century, included Herder and
Voss, Klinger and Biirger, Goethe and Schiller,



80 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.

whose greatest and most fertile activity displayed
itself equally during tlieir'fuU manhood, from 1770
to 1800. Finally, in the third generation, born be-
tween ] 760 and 1780, the most conspicuous names
were those of the two Schlegels, the two Humboldts,
Tieck, Rahel, Schleiermacher, Niebuhr, Savigny
and Schelling, whose followers acted more parti-
cularly in the first quarter of the present century.
The two schools which, from 1825, to 1850,
influenced the German mind most powerfully, the
school of Hegel and that of Gervinus, only con-
tinued, developed, summed up, applied, or contra-
dicted the main ideas of the three preceding great
generations ; they did not properly put forth and
circulate new ideas.

It was a manly and robust generation, the
generation of Klopstock, Wieland, Lessing, which
was also that of Frederick, Winckelmann, and
Kant. They almost all were born in the humblest
stations of life, and fought their way through
direst privation ; but the struggle for life was not
capable of stifling in them the sense of the ideal.

You all know how Klopstock was formed by
Kio stock English, Wieland by French models.
bom 1724. "pjjgy -were, however, no servile imitators ;
and they are thus distinguished from the Brookes



KLOPSTOCK. 81

and Gottsclieds of the preceding age. TLey
filled their works with a spirit of their own, and
modified even the forms which they borrowed, so
as to accommodate them to the genius of their
own language. The tendency of their age was
still that of the beginning of the century : a
deeply religious spirit, but one which believed more
in the continuous revelation of God throuorh con-
science than in the historical revelation of the
Orthodox, or the argumentation of the Deists,
rejDresenting God as the great architect of this
material machine. It was partly because Klopstock
gave a poetical expression to this feeling that his
poem acted so powerfully ; and partly also because
its form seemed an entirely German one, although
the verse was the classical hexameter of the
ancients, now for the first time quite assimilated
and mastered, as that generation believed. Ger-
many imagined that she too possessed a * Paradise
Lost,' and welcomed in the bard of the * Messiah '
the interpreter of its innermost thought. Then at
last Germany had a German poem, both in sub-
stance and form ; and neither substance nor form
was of the mediocre, prosy, and humble kind to
which German genius seemed till then condemned.
Thought and language soai'ed high — too high,

G



82 THE SEEDS OP GERMAN THOUGHT.

perhaps, for us to follow it still with our clipped
wings — yet it proved to the nation that she might
attempt what other nations had successfully at-
tempted before her.

Whilst Klopstock's inspiration was Christian

and Teutonic, that of Wieland was more ration-

Wieiand alistic and cosmopolitan. If Klopstock

born 1733. -j^g^^gi^^ ^j^g German language strength

and flight, Wieland gave it fluency and elegance.
He became, indeed, the very creator of a simple,
easy, and natural prose, the most necessary instru-
ment of culture. German prose before Wieland
was pedantic, stiff, intricate : with some writers
it is so still. Wieland gave it the tone of polite
society ; taught it how to handle iron}^ how
to be witty with grace and decorum. He him-
self had belonged entirely to the school of the
French, particularly to that of Yoltaire, and
among the English, Shaftesbury, the virtuoso, had
been the chief object of his study and predilection.
When he wrote his philosophical novels and minor
poems in Voltaire's manner, Germany seemed at
first astonished to see that her heavy language
could be capable of such charming, jDrattling talk.
Wieland won over to it the higher classes, then
exclusively bred in French ; he made German Ian-



WIELAND. 83

guage and literature 7iq^d7% (admissible at Court).
At the same time lie popularised the English and
French philosophy of the time. The popular
philosophers of Berlin, such as Mendelssohn and
Nicolai, the friends of Lessing, would have been
impossible without Wieland ; and their influence
was great. As Klopstock and his followers had
given a poetical expression to the religious feeling
of the nation, independent of, and superior to,
dogma and outward w^orship, so Wieland directed
the war of the century against sacerdotalism and
theology with the somewhat blunted, but not less
effective, arms, which German free-thought has
ever since used against Church and dogma ; for
Germany seemed to have found at least the proper
vehicle to enable her to join in the movement of
Western culture, instead of following it at a dis-
tance. Now, only, she seemed to have made that
culture completely her own.

This was necessary ; but it was not suffi-
cient. She wanted also to be able to go on alone
and without anybody's help. She was no longer
the province of a foreign civilisation, but she was
still a tributary. And she had to be freed from this
allegiance also, and to be received on an equal foot-
ing in the intellectual society of Europe, before she

G 2



84 THE REEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.

could work on lier own account. More than this :
after having obtained an entire command over
foreign culture, after having not only accepted
but digested and assimilated it, it became neces-
sary that she should react against it : for all life-
brinoingf movement is action and reaction.

Lessing undertook the task. It was he who

founded the literary independence of Germany

Lessinff ^J rebelling against the foreign laws,

bora 1729. ^yj^j^^j^ j^g^^j remained even after the foreign

rulers had yielded the place to home-born leaders ;
and he freed, not Germany alone, but the whole
world, when he gave the deadly blow to the con-
ventional classicism of the French. For it is hard to
believe that Byron, Manzoni, Victor Hugo himself
could have written what they wrote, without
Lessing's ' Dramaturgic ' ? When Lessing attacked
the French poetical laws and rules, they were still
universally acknowledged. Addison had written
his ' Cato ' in conformity with them, and Pope
recognised no higher authority ; and, long after
them, Moratin preferred Racine to his own Cal-
deron, as they had placed Corneille over Shake-
speare. Nay, even after Lessing, but before his
influence could be felt on the other side of the
Alps, Alfieri, the Misogallo, cast his impetuous



LESSING. 85

thought in the French mould. Lessing was the
first revolt against that law, and to show that it was
entirely conventional and arbitrai'j, adhering to
outward and accidental forms, instead of to the
essence of ancient poetry. From Boileau's theories
he appealed to Aristotle, from Corneille's practice
to that of Shakespeare, whom he proved to be a
truer, although unconscious, follower of Sophocles
than Corneille. But Aristotle himself and Shake-
speare he treated as a true Protestant treats the
Bible : with the spirit of free inquiry. He did
not submit to Aristotle because he was Aristotle,
but because he discovered in him ' truth as sure
as that of Euclid. '

At the same time, adding example to theory,
he gave to Germany literary works of his own at
once popular and refined, such as she had yearned
for so long. He united Wieland's realism with
Klopstock's idealism in works which have survived,
whilst those of Klopstock and Wieland can scarcely
be said to be still living. He gave a model of the
free dramatic form, which he wanted to substitute
for the French pattern, in his ' Emilia Galotti.'
He gave words to the first national enthusiasm
felt by modern Germany at Frederick's deeds in
his ' Minna von Barnhelm.' Nay, the whole re-



86 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.

ligious and pliilosopliieal creed of his generation
he expressed in his ' Nathan,' for which his friend
Mendelssohn sat as model, and which he left as
a legacy to the nation, to the world. The spirit
of toleration, together with a firm belief in a good
and just Deity, breathes in every page of that
wonderful work, in which the best ideas of the age
are summed up. For what he had done for litera-
ture he did for religion ; what he had done for
Aristotle he did for Luther. ' The true Lu-
theran,' he exclaimed, ' does not want to be
protected by Luther's writings, but by Luther's
spirit, and Luther's spirit exacts absolutely that
no man should be prevented from communicating
his progress in knowledge to others.' He would
not allow the Protestant clergy to assume an
authority which the spirit of Protestantism for-
bids them to claim, and declared loudly that he
would be ' the first to take back the Pope for the
pox^elings ' if they should put a stop to free
inquiry. And as his * Nathan ' showed religious
feeling to be independent of, and superior to,
established forms of religion, so in his ' Education
of Mankind ' he showed that morality is indepen-
dent even of religious belief; and that the good done
for the satisfaction of one's own conscience is



"WIXCKELMANN". 87

superior to that wliicli is done with a hope of re-
compense in a future life, the preoccupation of
such a life being rather an impediment than a
furtherance towards making the best use of this
existence. 'Why not quietly wait for a future
life, as one waits for the morrow ? ' without wish-
ing to investigate what cannot be investigated,
the things which it will bring? Who knows
whether there will not come ' a new eternal gospel,'
promised in the New Testament, and which will
be to Christianity what Christianity was to Juda-
ism, a third stage in the long education of man-
kind by God, for whom ' the shortest line is not
always a straight line ' ? In such ideas, however,
Lessing was far in advance of his generation, for
he not only gave the last expression to the past,
but he also opened the door for the coming age.
He, as well as Kant and Winckelmann, stood
with his feet in the eighteenth century ; with
his head he already reached the nineteenth.

Winckelmann had published his ' History of
Art ' in 1764 ; so had Kant his ' Observations on
the Sublime.' In 1766, just a hundred years
before the auspicious birthday of the German
State, appeared his ' Dreams of a Visionary,'
W^inckelmann's ' Allegory,' Lessing's ' Laocoon,'



88 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.

and the most suggestive book perhaps ever written,
Herder's ' Fragments,' They announced to the
world that the years of apprenticeship were over
for Germany, and that she had begun to work
on her own account.

The medium through which the modern
classicaj writers of the Italian and French type
View of looked at antiquity was Roman civilisa-
antiquity. ^j^j^^ Ever since the Jesuits had become
masters of public education in the neo-Latin coun-
tries, they had seen how easy it would be in nations,
whose Church, whose language, and whose legal
traditions were Roman, to put the Latin literature
in the foreground. They felt at the same time
how important for their aim it would be to mould
men's minds by Roman antiquity, the spirit of which
is discipline, instead of feeding them with Greek
antiquity, the essence of which is freedom. While
the contemporaries of Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio
Ficino still lived under the charm of the Hellenic
civilisation, those of Bembo and Alamanni were
already under the spell of Latin Alexandrinism.

Lessing had been as attentive a reader of
Sophocles as of Shakespeare ; and when he pro-
posed the latter instead of Corneille as a model
to the future dramatic poets of Germany, it was



WINCEELMANN'S ' HISTORY OF ART.' 89

because he saw in him, in spite of his irregular
form, a more faithful, if not a more systematic fol-
lower of the ancients, than in Racine and Corneille.
Here also it was not the letter which he preached,
but the spirit. He protested against the whole
way of looking at the ancients, which had reigned
ever since Trissino and Tasso, as against a sort of
third Alexandrinism. For, according to him, they
saw the importance of ancient literature where it
was not, in accidental outward forms ; and sacri-
ficed to these that which had really inspired the
ancients — natural beauty. He wished his age
and his nation to do what the great artists of the
Renaissance had done, before academical classicism
had set in, viz., to look on Nature and Man
directly with clear, sound, unprejudiced eyes, such
as the Greeks had brought to the contemplation of
things ; and to create, if necessary, new forms for
new thoughts and feelings. It is highly important
to notice that a new view of antiquity, entirely
opposed to the academical one, was the basis of
the literary edifice which Germany was about to
build. Hence also the importance of Winckel-
niann's ' History of Art,' which, as I have said,
appeared in 1764, and of his ' Allegory ' which was
published in 1766,



90 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.

Winckelmann's ' History of Art ' is at once a

system of aesthetics and a history. There may be,

and there are, many points on which we

Winckel-

mann, born are at variance with Winckelmann, and

1717.

the fundamental idea even of his sreat
book — that the aim of art is the creation of ideal
forms — is no longer, I hope, admitted by SBsthetic
criticism. Nevertheless, his book acted as if it
was a revelation of the Hellenic world. Winckel-
mann had himself something of the s^^irit of the
Greeks, and so became naturally their most elo-
quent interpreter. It was as if he had brushed
away the dust from the ancients, and revealed
to view the purity of their outlines, buried as they
were under a dense layer of rubbish. He en-
deavoured to show in language hitherto unparal-
leled — a prose lofty and noble, nay, majestic, with-
out affectation, and correct without purism — in a
language worthy of the ancients, that the Greek
art of the time of Pericles rested on the same basis
as the Platonic philosophy ; the basis of idealism,
contemplating the real world as a reflection of the
world of ideas, and trying to reconstruct for the
senses, as Plato tried to do for the intellect, those
ideas which were like the lost types of the created
world. Against the unquiet, overladen style of
his own time, he invoked the calm and sim^^Hcity



INFLUENCE OF WINCKELMANN". 91

of Greek art, even introducing into painting the
rules of sculpture. Although this reaction against
rococo degenerated soon — as all reactions will do —
and degenerated into the cold and dry school of a
new Academy, almost worse than the Berninesque
school which it superseded, yet it was a necessary
reaction, and one which, if it has done no good in
the domain of the fine arts, has had most fertile re-
sults for poetry. Goethe's ' Iphigenia,' and ' Alexis
and Dora,' would never have been written, if
Winckelmann had not first unveiled the ideal
beauty of Greek antiquity. The powdered and
patched Greek heroines of Voltaire's tragedy be-
came henceforward as impossible as the senti-
mental or raging heroes of Crebillon. For they
were totally devoid of that ' noble simplicity and
calm grandeur' which Winckelmann had estab-
lished as the first principle of Greek art. If men
like David and Ingres, Canova and Thorwaldsen,
who were directly or indirectly disciples of
Winckelmann, proved themselves unable to create
an Iphigenia, at once Greek and modern, ideal
and real, full of life and full of measure, it was
because the generation to which they belonged
entirely lacked the natural disposition which
makes great artists, that spontaneous, direct
intuition, which is unbiassed by abstract thought



92 THE SEEDS OP GEHMAN THOUGHT.

and abstract systems. It was also — I will not
deny it — because the new theory could not be ac-
cepted throughout. Sculpture had tried to produce
the effects of painting. Winckelmann went into
the other extreme by introducing into painting
the rules of sculpture. But, we have not to
ask ourselves here whether the action of Winckel-
mann was beneficial or not ; only what it was, and
how far it reached.

But Winckelmann did even more in his History
than reveal the principle of Greek Art. He
gave the first example of modern historical
method. All histories of Art, like those of
literature, had been till then collections of biogra-
phies, lists of titles, and analyses or descriptions
of difi'erent works, with an account of their vicissi-
tudes. Winckelmann was not only the first to dis-
tinguish the difi'erent periods of Art as coinciding
with the different styles; he also described its
growth and decay as if it were a natural vegetation,
showed the causes of this growth and decay —
climate, national character and national manners,
political history, religion, race — and thus restored
the unity of History. Thus Winckelmann first
introduced, not in theory, but in practice, the idea
of organic and historical development, which is pro-



FEENCH CULTURE. 93

perly the German idea. In his hands the history
of the infancy, adolescence, youth, maturity, and
old age of Art became a system of the different
styles, and vice versa. He expelled the concep-
tion of arbitrary creation by intellects independent
of circumstances from the domain of Art-history ;
and it was only after Winckelmann had shown Fine
Arts to be the result of the general condition of a
given civilisation, that other writers began to apply
the same idea to Poetry, Philosophy, Religion and
the State. The first seed of the German idea was
thrown into the world.

But althouo-h Winckelmann had awakened the
sense for the ' noble simplicity and calm grandeur *
of ancient Art, he had not been able to Lessin^-g
divest himself of certain intellectual '-^^ocoon.'
habits of his time. As he had proposed ideal
forms as the highest aim of Art, ix. forms which
do not exist in nature, but are the product of the
idealising mind, and had combined the fruits of his
various observations into one patchwork called
ideal beauty, so he had raised no objection against
abstract thought becoming the object of Art, in
other words, against allegory. This was the
legacy of the French rationalistic culture of the
first half of the century against which Lessing



9.4 THE SEEDS OP GEEMAN THOUGHT.

Avas to lead the reaction. The French of that
time approached Poetry as they approached Re-
ligion, as they approached the State, with the
conviction that the organ of understanding was
able to produce intentionally and consciously what
in reality has always been the joroduct of other
human faculties acting almost unconsciously ; they
believed in inventors of religion as in inventors
of constitutions. Hence a confusion of all the
activities of the human mind. People believed
that the Fine Arts could serve to explain abstract
thought, which is allegory, and again that words
might paint objects, which produced descriptive
poetry. The simple explanation that words, sounds,
forms, and colours are different languages for
different orders of mental activity had been entirely
lost sight of. Experience taught that none of these
mental faculties could work when isolated, without
the aid of the others ; the inference was drawn that
each might do the work of the other. People
wanted to express in forms and colours, that is, in
the language of the Fine Arts, what can only be
expressed in words ; and they wanted to express
in words what can only be expressed in sounds, i.e.
music. The great historical importance of Les-
sing's ' Laocoon ' lies in the fact that it put a stop



rUKCTIONS OF THE ARTS. 95

once for all to that confusion — once foi' all, if eveiy-
body had known how to read it, or had consented
to read it as it was written. We should not have
musicians who are content to interpret words, or
painters who condescend to illustrate novels and
poems, if the necessary consequences had been
drawn from Lessing's premises. For in his com-
parison between Virgil's description of Laocoon's
death and the famous group in the Vatican,
he traced the impassable boundary which sepa-
rates Fine Arts and Poetry. The Fine Arts
have to show things in space and to the eyes.
Poetry in time and through the ears to the in-
tellect : the inference is that the subjects of the
Fine Arts must be circumscribed objects, or,
at least, lasting situations as extended in space
and capable of being embraced in one glance,
whereas the subjects of poetry must be actions
accomplished in time, and conveyed to the
intellect in their successive stages. When, con-
sequently, the poet wants to treat the same subject
as the artist, he must first transform it into action,
as Homer did with Achilles' shield and Helen's
beauty (her appearance before and impression on
the old men of Troy) ; or Goethe, when he describes
the gardens of Hermann's father, by following



96 THE SEEDS OF GERMAN THOUGHT.

the steps of his mother from one part to the
other. If, on the contrary, the artist wishes to
treat a poetical subject, he must first transform
the action into a situation of some duration. As a
rule it would be better still to avoid such a subject
altogether ; but if he does take it he must first
modify it, choosing in the action that moment
which is most lasting and at the same time most
pregnant, i.e. in which there is contained most of
the past and of the coming moment.

There is much to object to in this theory which
would condemn altogether such masterpieces as
Eubens' Lionhunt or Gericault's Hussars, and is
not only, as it seems to me, a most insufficient defi-
nition of the artistic object, but also leaves un-
touched the far more important side of the question,
viz., the subjective origin of a work of art. On
the whole we should be justified in saying that
Lessing's artistic education was very incomplete,
his artistic organisation, if he had any, hardly at
all developed. This, in fact, is somcAvhat the fault
of all the German aesthetic theories which have been
brought forward during the last hundred years ;
nay, Lessing, who saw the point in poetry so ad-
mirably, still harboured the false and hollow con-
ception of the ideal which was the principal mis-



LESSING ON POETRY. 97

take of Winckelmann. Be this, however, as it
may, I am not here to criticise, but to explain,
and I turn again to Lessing's proper field, litera-
ture, where his thought was to bear fruit a hun-
dredfold. The essence of poetry, Lessing taught,
is action ; but action which reveals the complete-
ness of human nature, and which must therefore
show man in the free movement of passion.
The aim of poetry, then, is to reproduce human
passions, and to inspire sympathy with them,
but a sympathy purely human, free from all