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'V
OCT It 1918 ^■lOOiC M.
S
Division
Section
DD66
PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
HISTORICAL SERIES, No. XXV.
Germany in the Nineteenth Century
Published by the University of Manchester at The University Press (H. M. McKechnie, Secretary) 12 Lime Grove, Oxford Road, Manchester
Longmans, Green & Co.
London : 39 Paternoster Row New York : 443-449 Fourth Avenue, and Thirtieth Street
Bombay : 8 Hornby Road Calcutta : 303 Bowbazar Street Madras : 1 67 Mount Road
[ALE RIGHTS RESERVED].
Germany
Nineteenth
A S cries of Lectures
EDITED BY
C. H. HERFORD
MANCHESTER
At the University Press
Longmans, Green & Co. London, New York, Bombay, &c. 19L5
University of Manchester Publications
No. XCVI.
Pages 1 to 127 constituting the First Seines of these Lectures may be had separately at the price of 2 /6 net ; pages 128 to end (the Second Series ) at the price of 3/6 net.
Sherratt & Hughes, Printers, Manchester and London.
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
This book, first published in 1912, was based upon a course of lectures delivered in 19 n in the University, largely through the initiative of Professor Herford. The relations between England and Germany had long left much to be desired, and it was believed that appreciations by British scholars of the part played by Germany in the development of modern civilisation might serve to promote more friendly feelings between the two nations. The welcome given to the volume by the press of both countries, the exhaustion of two large editions within less than two years, and the issue of a German translation by Professor Breul, of Cambridge, suggested that this expectation was not wholly a vain one.
The studies embraced in the earlier editions were designedly drawn upon broad lines, and omitted much. Accordingly, when, in the early part of 1914, it was clear that a third edition would soon be wanted, three other scholars were invited to contribute additional studies from fresh points of view. The University was fortunate in securing the co-operation of experts, such as Dr. Bernard Bosanquet, who has written on philosophy, of Professor Peake, who has contributed a study on theology, and of Mr. Ferruccio Bonavia, who has treated of music. The lectures on these subjects were delivered in the University during the course of last spring, and by the summer of this year, all three studies were in type. The sudden outbreak of the present calamitous war frustrated the hopes of those who had steadily believed that the best method to promote international
VI
Note to the Third Edition
goodwill was to dispel the cloud of suspicion by the spread of sound knowledge. It seemed as if the book had failed in its objects, and might quietly be put aside as no longer possessing any practical value. On the other hand, the demand for copies has continued on both sides of the Atlantic, and a refusal to reissue the work might well give rise to misconception. The writers can no longer take the optimistic line which they so recently felt justified in assuming, yet they do not regret that, in their anxiety to take a favourable view of Germany’s attitude, they under-estimated the sinister influences which for the present have proved triumphant. For this reason they offer to the public this edition. If no longer a friendly eirenicon, the book remains as an historical document, which retains whatever validity it ever possessed, notwithstanding the frustration of the hopes with which it was originally put forth. It may still have its value as suggesting what a group of British scholars, trained in various schools of learning and different branches of knowledge, thought, and in essentials still think, was a just tribute to pay to the activities of the German nation. The Germany of militant aggression, of violated faith, of cynical self- seeking and disregard of the honourable traditions of civilised warfare is new to them, as, in its extremest manifestations it is to the world at large. So far as it may have been latent, it lay outside their purpose.
The studies are, with the consent of the writers, reprinted in the form in which they originally appeared. No doubt there are passages in more than one of the chapters, which the authors, were they writing now, would have phrased differently. Substantially, however, the writers are content to have written what they have
Note to the Third Edition
Vll
written, and they prefer that some touches of optimism should remain, rather than that misconceptions should be aroused by any attempt to “ bring up to date ” the original essays. No alterations whatever have been admitted to the text, and the only addition is a brief note at the beginning of the paper of Dr. Holland Rose.
We have also to look forward to the time when an honourable settlement becomes possible without relin¬ quishing the objects for which we have reluctantly drawn the sword. It can at least be hoped that a book aiming at the appreciation of the saner and salutary aspects of the German nation and the German state may not stand in the way of the terribly difficult task of building up once more mutual good-will and respect between nations which, in the future, as in the past, will have somehow to live and work together.
T. F. TOUT.
io th November , 1914.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The present volume is based upon a short course of public lectures delivered during the Lent Term of 19 n in the University of Manchester. The course was one of a series upon salient topics of modern history and literature, arranged by the University, at the instance of the representatives of journalism in South-east Lancashire, for the benefit, primarily, of the younger journalists of the district. Al¬ though actually attended by a much larger and more general audience, the lectures had thus no merely academic aim. In choosing the subject of the course the promoters felt that the diffusion of a better understanding of the history of the German people during the last century may almost be called a matter of practical urgency. They were impressed by the fact that, while the last forty years of that history are comparatively familiar to Englishmen, the two generations which lie between the opening of the century and the foundation of the empire are involved, to a quite exceptional degree, in the obscurity and neglect which commonly attach to the period immediately preceding our own. The consequence has been two-fold. For want of the historic background indispensable to true proportion and perspective, even that relatively familiar recent period has been, and must be, in many ways misconceived and mis¬ judged. The work of Bismarck wears a very different aspect according as we have, or have not, read the entire chapter of which he wrote the decisive closing page. And, further, the place of Germany in the civilisation of to-day, great and conspicuous as it unquestionably is, must still be im¬ perfectly measured unless we realise at how many points
X
Preface
that civilisation itself bears the impress of her intellectual fecundity and of her elaborating mind. It is the aim of the present lectures to make more generally accessible some of the materials for a juster estimate of contemporary Germany from both these points of view. Of completeness there could naturally be no question. The four or five aspects of German history which have been singled out might easily have been multiplied ; but circumstances compelled selection, and it may be claimed for the aspects chosen that they are both particularly liable to misunderstanding, and particularly fruitful when understood.
The lectures have been revised for publication by their authors, who have also supplied notes with, in several cases, considerable additions to the text. No uniformity of plan has been attempted, and the four lecturers are severally and solely responsible for what appears under their names. We are indebted for the Index to Miss M. Woodcock, B.A., of the John Rylands Library.
It is hoped in future years to arrange similar courses upon the more recent history of other European peoples.
‘ University Extension ’ work of this sort has long ceased to need defence ; but one may venture to suggest that those branches of it which seek to enlarge and deepen the sense of citizenship are nowhere more in place than in a great civic university, for which the townsman in the next street and the scholar in the antipodes are equally neighbours, and where the local tie is vital in proportion as it furthers the catholicity of knowledge.
2 otk February , 1912.
C. H. H.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Note to the Third Edition. By Professor T. F. Tout v Preface to the First Edition ----- ix Short Summary ------ xiii-xxiii
I. The Political History. By J. HOLLAND ROSE, Litt.D. Author of “ The Life of Napoleon I,” “The Life of Pitt,” “The Development of the European Nations,”
&C. ------- i — 22
II. & III. The Intellectual and Literary History.
By C. PI. IlERFORD, Litt.D., Professor of English Literature in the University of Manchester ------ 23 — 77
IV. The Economic History. By E. C. K.
Conner, M.A., Professor of Economics
in the University of Liverpool - - 79 — 99
V. The History of Education. By M. E. Sadler,
M.A., LL.D., C.B., Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds ; late Professor of the History of Education in the Univer¬ sity of Manchester - - - - 101-127
VI. The History of Theology. By A. S. Peake,
D.D., Professor of Biblical Exegesis in
the University of Manchester - -131-184
VII. The History of Philosophy. By Bernard
Bosanquet, LL.D., P'.B.A. - - - 185-215
VIII. The History of Music. By F. BONAVIA -217-242
Index . 243-266
GERMANY IN THE 19th CENTURY.
SHORT SUMMARY.
I. THE POLITICAL HISTORY.
By Dr. J. Holland Rose.
Political unity achieved in different ways by different peoples, and with different degrees of facility and speed. In Germany the process was peculiarly difficult and slow. Various grounds for this : the Individualism of German Character ; Feudal Customs ; the Reformation. The division of the people between Catholic and Protestant faiths in nearly equal proportions, culminated in the rivalry of Austria and Prussia. Assailed by revolutionary France, — a compact, historic, and democratic state, — Germany made a half-hearted resistance ; her people largely in sympathy with the Revolution, and her rulers compromising for a share in the spoils. Futile attempts at unity. Francis II. as “ Emperor of Austria.” Napoleon as a “new Charlemagne.” Impossibility in the 18th century of a permanent world state composed of different nationalities. His financial policy parti¬ cularly fatal. The hopes of German unity gradually centred upon Prussia. Her collapse at Jena the beginning of her re¬ generation. The reforms of Stein and Scharnhorst. Their effect seen in the national rising of 1813. The settlement after the fall of Napoleon. Germany now consisted of 39 states instead of 200 ; but the process of further unification not facilitated by the change. The German Confederation of 1815 — 66 perpetu¬ ated some of the worst defects of the old Holy Roman Empire. National disappointment, uprisings and demonstrations. Two events prepare the ground for the future union : the Zoll- verein, bringing the smaller German states into commercial unity with Prussia ; and the separation of Hanover from Eng¬ land. The national movement of 1848 — 9- Its temporary fail¬ ure, and threatening results for Prussia. But the failure only temporary. The success of Austria increases the number of her enemies. Cavour ; Napoleon III ; Bismarck. The Prussian triumph of 1866 conditioned by the events of 1859 and 1864.
XIV
Summary of Contents
The war with Denmark misunderstood in England. Bismarck’s policy in 1866. Napoleon’s clumsy effort at intervention merely attached South Germany to Prussia. The crisis of 1870 — 1. Important bearing upon it of the secret mission of the French General Lebrun to Vienna, in June, 1870, to arrange an attack upon Prussia in the following spring. This probably became known to Bismarck and decided his action. True interpretation of his policy of “ blood and iron”; not the best, but the best possible under the circumstances. Grounds for the annexation of Elsass-Lothringen. Foundation of the German Empire, a reversion to the union vainly sought in 1814 — 5. Its constitu¬ tion. The functions of the Kaiser ; and of the Reichstag. The latter without Executive power. Increasing friction, due to this disability, in internal affairs. But the foreign policy of the empire has consistently made for peace. The Triple Alliance, of 1882. The Dual Alliance (France and Russia) of 1894. Germany’s colonial movement, a necessity of her rapid growth in population and limited territory. Expansion of her foreign trade ; involving a great navy. Beginnings of friction with England in the colonies, terminated by mutual concessions. Policy and justice of these concessions on the part of England. The agreement of 1890, received with anger in both countries, and therefore presumably in the main equitable. The subse¬ quent situation between England and Germany. Geographical weakness of Germany, compared with France. Caution inevi¬ tably the policy of Germany so long as the Dual Alliance holds. Great advantages to England and to Europe of the unity of Germany . p. 1
II. &III. THE INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY HISTORY.
By Professor C. H. Herford.
Enormous extent and intricacy of the subject. The lecture attempts merely to distinguish and illustrate the main currents of the history.
I. The close oj the eighteenth century in Germany , France, and England. Contrast of the political impotence of Germany at this date with her intellectual greatness. Outstripped for at least 200 years by France and England, and deriving her culture and ideas mainly from one or the other, she began, about 1760, to add astonishing new developments of her own to their cul¬ tural acquisitions and results. Hume, Rousseau — Kant ; Burke, Turgot, Gibbon — the German historical school ; and other
Summary of Contents
xv
examples. These new developments due to (l) a more wide¬ spread and systematic Wissensdrang ; (2) a peculiar aptitude for knowledge in three domains, ignored or incompletely investi¬ gated by the French and English precursors ; in the primitive or elemental , the organic or evolutionary , and the psychical, modes of existence. Important bearing of all three, both upon poetry, upon philosophy, and upon the historical and natural sciences. Hence, while in England and France at this time the "literary” and the specifically less " intellectual history ran mainly in widely distinct channels, in Germany they constantly touched, frequently mingled, and were sometimes completely fused.
II. Goethe. All these tendencies summed up in Goethe, whose work at once completes the German eighteenth century, and provides the key to the Germany of the nineteenth. His poetry and science ; Erlebnis and experiment ; his elemental lyric ; his evolutionary thinking : Metamorphose der Pflanzen ; his studies of soul history : Wilhelm Meister ; Faust .
III. After Goethe. (i) The Scientific Movement. German Griindlichkeit. Historic science. Critical handling of sources and authorities: L. v. Ranke (1795 — 1886). The Natural Sciences. Combined mastery of facts and fertility in ideas.
IV. (ii) The movement towards the elemental , primitive, naive, in historic research and in literature. The "simplicity” of German character. Exploration of German antiquities : J. Grimm (1785 — 1863). Comparative mythology and philology. Folk-tales and folk-song. The place of song in modern German life ; its folk-song basis. Heine (1797 — 1851). Tales of peasant-life: B. Auerbach (1812 — 1882), F. Reuter (1810 — 1874), G. Keller (1819 — 1890). His Fin Romeo und Julia des Dorfes.
V. (iii.) The application of evolutionary ideas in philosophy and history. Sketch of the rise of these ideas. Fruitful union of the biological conception of organism with the political and social doctrine of progress. Strong and weak points of organic analogies applied to society. G. F. Hegel (1770 — 1831) and the philosophy of history. F. Schleiermacher and the philoso¬ phy of religion. Evolutionary ideas applied to history : Savigny (1779 — 1 86 1 ). Niebuhr (1776 — 1831). G. Freytag. Influence on the methods of later historians : T. Mommsen (1817 — 1907) ; Town-biology: F. Gregorovius (1 821 — 1891). History of ideas : J. Burckhardt (1818 — 1897).
VI. (iv.) The prestige of mind. Effects, for better or worse, upon German civilisation of the high value set upon thought as thought, upon ideas as ideas. Worship of Bildung. Literary criticism. The idealist systems. Deep self-consciousness of the German race, repeatedly emerging at the great moments of its history, and in its greatest men, culminates in the colossal ideal-
XVI
Summary of Contents
isms of the early nineteenth century. Hegel, Fichte, Schopen¬ hauer. — Wagner, Nietzsche. Strongly marked individuality of their thought ; yet national or universal in its ultimate scope. — The decline of idealism necessarily lowered the “ prestige of mind,” which is partly restored by the steady advance of psycho¬ logy. W. Wundt. But thought, or reason, now subordinated to will. The worship of will in the Bismarckian age and state. H. v. Treitschke (1834 — 1896). Yet, with all the defects of that state, it is will illuminated with high intelligence and powerful, if incomplete, social sense. English and German ideals of freedom. The peculiar achievement of Germany to have proximately reconciled the stubborn individuality of the race with civilisation, profound inner life with a highly organised state --- - ------ p. 23
IV. THE ECONOMIC HISTORY.
By Professor E. C. K. Gonner.
I. During the nineteenth century Germany passes from one industrial system to another. A century of transition. The chief change occurs late and is due largely to forces retarded by certain causes and finally operating with great effect. Three features of the last part of the century : (1) Conscious and auto¬ cratic state action ; (2) Use made of the experience of other nations as to similar changes ; (3) Position occupied by other nations when Germany enters into competition.
In addition, the agrarian interests of Germany must be borne in mind.
These various points best illustrated by a sketch of the history which divides itself into three Periods : Period of Pre¬ paration, Period of Tentative Growth, Period of Conscious Development.
II. First Period lasting to the Forties — little active develop¬ ment, but considerable preparation for change.
(a) Economic condition of Germany at the beginning as com¬ pared with that of England. Germany largely under the influence of bygone times, mainly feudal, both as to country and town organisation, and little affected by new economic forces.
( b ) Causes accounting for this and delaying development ; Political difficulties ; Want of union between the States, espe¬ cially on the economic side, e.g., tariffs, etc. ; Lack of mobility of labour owing to systems of land ownership and cultivation and restrictive trade regulations ; Lack of capital.
Summary of Contents xvii
(c) On the other hand, opportunity for future development achieved by (1) Stein-Hardenberg land reforms, 1807 — 1850; (2) early Zollverein, 1834 — 1845.
(d) Position of country at close of period evident from many tests, e.g., comparatively uniform distribution of population — handwork — backward state of mineral development.
Factory system in infancy, but introduced and not without results.
III. Second Period to 1870 — 1. Change coming over the country. Trade and industry affected by (l) Political conditions after constitutional settlement, (2) Rise in prices owing to the gold discoveries, (3) Removal of restrictions on industrial action.
(a) Change seen in rapid growth of Banks and Companies about 1850; railway development and entry of Germany as an industrial competitor in the world’s markets.
( b ) On other hand, its position weak as against foreign rivalry, especially against England. Activity of the fifties not continued in succeeding decade.
IV Third Period after 1871. The great growth of industrial Germany. Certain immediate effects of the war. Strength of German unity and influence of the state. The use of the French indemnity in new coinage, relief of debt ; it provides a fund of ready capital.
(«) Difficulties, however, grave: (1) Transition in industry and suffering, (2) strong foreign competitors, (3) Agrarian debt.
( b ) Sources of strength — the lessons of adversity — education and science — sense of discipline.
(c) The new policy : (1) Its aims, development of rich mineral wealth, freedom from foreign industrial dependence and mitiga¬ tion of social difficulties ; (2) its means firstly, State assistance to industry. Protectionist Policy from 1879 (duties on imports of manufactures accompanied by duties on imports of food stuffs). State ownership of railways. State subsidies ; secondly , social reform and State socialism.
(d) The magnitude of recent German development. Its particular characteristics.
V. The nature of the economic change in Germany during the nineteenth century. Its resemblance to that experienced by other countries. Its special features. This illustrated by comparison and contrast with England. Differences between the two nations in (1) condition before and at the time of change, (2) method in which it is treated, (3) results - p. 79
XV111
Summary of Contents
V. THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION. By Professor M. E. Sadler.
The three periods in the educational history of Germany in the Nineteenth Century ; and in that of England. The two series nearly coincident in date, but widely different in character.
I. Germany. — Prussia, since the outset of the century, has been the dominant force in German education ; but the smaller German states have contributed both to enrich and to sustain the common educational ideal. The rapid advance of German education during the century due chiefly to three circumstances :
(a) The tradition, in several states, of compulsory education ;
(b) The still more widespread tradition of intellectual freedom ; unrestricted teaching during the Eighteenth Century at the universities of Halle and Gottingen. Kant ; Romanticism ; (c) The disasters of 1806. The policy of regeneration through education: Stein; W. v. Humboldt. First Period (1800 — 1840). Universities founded or reorganised. The Greek ideal of life ; foundation of the Gymnasien. Technical education. Elementary education. Second Period (1840 — 1870). Check to liberal education ; advance of science and of scientific education. Third Period (1870 — ). Immense progress at all points. The present position. Local diversities. German education a federal unity. Demand for further educational facilities for the workers, and for women. Revolt against over-intellectualism.
II. England. — German education based on system, English, on compromise. The Civil War bequeathed to us a division, never since healed, in our social ideals. All attempts at a national system of education, before 1870, foiled by the resist¬ ance of a powerful minority. Importance of the influence of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The example of Scotland gradu¬ ally overcame English hostility to government intervention. Ireland the field in which government control and assistance were first energetically carried out. Intermediate education in Wales. Distinctive marks of the three periods in England.
III. Contrasts between German and English education. — Defects and advantages of each type.
Summary of Contents
xix
IV. German influence on English education — The channels ol influence : Coleridge, Carlyle, Prince Albert. Impression made by the War of 1866. Matthew Arnold. All branches of English education have been affected. Froebel and the Kindergarten. Herbart. Modern language teaching: Vietor. Continuation schools: Kerschensteiner. Effect of German theory and practice in enlarging the English recognition of the scope and power of the State in education.
V. Summary. — The educational policy of a nation the focus of
its ideals. English and German education have pursued opposite courses, yet are rooted in closely related ideas of life and duty. The influence of English education in Germany. Efforts to cultivate character, self-government, and sense of responsibility. School-games. Country boarding schools. Training in Art. The fundamental forces in German education : (1) belief in the power of training and imparted ideas to develop mind and character ; (2) demand for inner freedom won through discipline. Intercourse between representatives of the two types of educa¬ tion of great value. But both systems are deeply rooted in history, and much that is finest in each cannot be superadded to the other - - - - - - - - - p. 101
VI.— THE HISTORY OF THEOLOGY. By Professor A. S. Peake.
Limitations of the discussion. Schleiermaclier the most influential theologian of the century. His personality and train¬ ing. His Speeches on Religion. Orthodox and rationalist identified religion with a series of doctrines. Schleiermaclier found its essence in feeling, the realisation that we are one with the Infinite. His religion had a pantheistic basis. While intensely individualist he emphasised the social quality of religion. “ Natural Religion ” repudiated. His system of theology. Religion as feeling of dependence. The Christian consciousness as the source of theology. Theology Christo-centric. His treat¬ ment of Theology as an organic whole. General estimate of Schleiermaclier. The breach with rationalism involved in his emphasis on history and estimate of Jesus, and with orthodoxy
XX
Summary of Contents
involved in his free attitude to Scripture, raised the problem by what right Schleiermacher accorded Christ a central place in his system. Strauss forced this into prominence by his Life of fesus. He regarded the Christian religion as independent of its Founder. The eternal ideas gain by being disengaged from dubious history. The historical Jesus becomes the Christ of the Gospels by mythical accretion due to Messianic dogma. F. C. Baur com¬ pared with Strauss. Baur said The Life of Jesus gave a criticism of the Gospel history without a criticism of the Gospels. The growth of the Tubingen criticism. Sketch of the theory. The objections by which it has been discredited. Why, nevertheless, Baur has an epoch-making significance. Other New Testament scholars of the century. The course of Pentateuch criticism and the chief contributions to the generally accepted theory. The criticism of other parts of the Old Testament. Other leading Old Testament scholars. Strauss in his Christian Doctrine seeks to prove the bankruptcy of Christianity. The successors of Schleiermacher. The Liberal, Confessional, and Mediating theologians. Ritschl and his theological development. Ritsch- lianism designed to meet the widespread lapse from faith. Judgments of value. Ritschl’s greatness as a system-builder. Emphasises uniqueness of Christianity, and impossibility of understanding it except from the inside. Only members of the Christian community qualified to estimate the religion. The community, which is to be distinguished from the empirical church, is the object of justification. The Gospel the guarantee of the Christian consciousness. The Gospel to be found in the New Testament, since its writers understood the religion of the Old Testament and were free from the influence of Greek thought and Jewish Rabbinism. The apostolic testimony is necessary as well as the utterances of the Founder. Yet the Gospel is distilled from the New Testament not identified with it. It thus becomes possible to use it as a test of traditional theology, of which much is swept aside. Ritschl’s definition of Christianity, Redemption and the Kingdom of God. Hatred of Mysticism, Pietism, Emotionalism. Pietism regarded as an attenuated form of Catholicism masquerading as Protestantism. Ritschlianism and metaphysics. Ritschl’ s attitude to the New Testament controlled by presuppositions now largely abandoned by his own followers - - - - - - p. 129
Summary of Contents
xxi
VII.— THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Dr. Bernard Bosanquet.
Although it is hopeless in a single lecture to give an idea of the detail, it may be possible to convey some impression of the main rhythm and direction, of the philosophical growth in question.
One might suggest the common triple rhythm, Creation, Dis¬ integration, Recovery, or, including the direction. Metaphysic, Positivism, and Metaphysic again ; or to put a point on it : Hegelian, neo-Kantian ( = anti Hegelian), neo-Hegelian. This would be repudiated in Germany to-day ; but we might try " Post-Kantian ; neo-Kantian; post-neo-Kantian.”
This would divide roughly thus : —
1. Post-Kantian, Beginnings of Fichte to recognition of
Schopenhauer (say) 1794-1844;
2. Neo-Kantian, Liebmann’s " Back to Kant,” to (say)
Avenarius’ "Critique of Pure Experience,” 1865-1888 ;
3. The final stage of neo-Kantianism, and parallel movements,
1888 to the present day.
Many great men, just because above their time, hardly fit into this scheme, e.g., Fechner, Lotze, Wundt. Of course. Experi¬ mental Psychology and Voluntarism came largely from them.
In speaking of Phase 1.
Begin with a letter of Hegel in 1795, showing his initial anticipations in relation to the formative influences of the day : Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schiller and Goethe. Estimate his method and Fichte’s, which has been much misapprehended. The essence of this philosophy is the forward, adventurous and realising interpretation of Kant. How "critical.” It affirms reality of perfection, identity of real and ideal, in sense of Religion.
Phase 2.
The new situation — dates — a reaction to defensive interpreta¬ tion of Kant ; Metaphysic is replaced by Epistemology, which
xxii Summary of Contents
has vogue till almost to day — i.e. reality is cut down to what is given in consciousness, and what can be got out of that. “ Limits of Knowledge” the problem. Real and Ideal separated. Lange. Kant’s ‘ought,’ in contrast to fis,’ reinstated. Open future, with infinite progress in universe, maintained ; new ideas which come to aid of this. Point of view of morality made absolute against that of religion. Illustrated by Vaihinger’s “ As if” — doctrine of fictions and ideal. “ Critical ” Philosophies in sense of anti¬ metaphysical. “ Positivism,” &c.
Phase S.
Experience treated more systematically. Avenarius’ C( full experience.” More talk of at least preparing for a metaphysic. Distinction between in consciousness and for consciousness. Idealism and realism both more solid. Natorp, Cassirer, Husserl, Kiilpe, Driesch, Nelson. A reasonable aphorism. Hopes for metaphysic - - - - - - - - p. 185
VIII.— THE HISTORY OF MUSIC. By F. Bonavia.
(a) The Symphony. German music at the close of the eigh¬ teenth century. Conventionality in the theme of opera. Neglect of polyphony. Bad influence of court patronage. Vienna the centre of European music. The lines of musical advance. Beethoven and Wagner the two most important figures of the century. Beethoven’s predecessors not essentially national. German and Austrian. Mozart and the end of patronage. Beet¬ hoven in Vienna. The main qualities of Beethoven’s symphonies. First hints of the new style. The Eroica Symphony. Dissonance and rhythm used as means to dramatic effect. The C Minor Symphony, first musical composition indissolubly connected with spirit of the time. Pastoral symphonies and the beginning of the feeling for Nature. The result of the nine symphonies in Germany, France and Italy. Schubert. Growth of romantic feeling with Mendelssohn and Schumann. Foundations of musical criticism. “ Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik.” Brahms the last of great com¬ posers of symphonies.
Summary of Contents xxiii
(p) The Opera. Rivalry between Italian and German schools is also the rivalry between an essentially melodic and a polyphonic style. Vocalists, their influence on composers. Weber’s victory over Spontini. Fidelio. Oberon and Euryanthe. Wagner’s themes. Simplicity of the story essential to Wagnerian opera. The use of the leit-motif. Relation of words to music. The poetic genius of Wagner. Ideal of self-sacrifice and ideal of the Ueber- mensch ! ” Parsifal as the typical Wagnerian hero. Novalis and Overbeck — like Wagner, drew inspiration from religious themes. More comprehensive feeling for Nature. Critical writings. Liszt and the symphonic poem. Certain limitations of Liszt’s music. Historians and teachers in Germany. Their influence abroad. Excellence of German organisation. Close of the century and the future outlook - - - - p. 217
I.— THE POLITICAL HISTORY
BY
J. HOLLAND ROSE, Litt.D.
Note added to the Third Edition.
Dr. Rose wishes to make it clear that the views stated in this lecture have necessarily been profoundly modified by later events, which render it impossible to take the same favourable view of German policy, that seemed fully tenable early in the year 1911. The later evidence is set forth in Dr. Rose’s lecture delivered at Cambridge in the Michaelmas Term, 1914, about to be published under the title “ The Origins of the Present War.”
THE POLITICAL HISTORY.
Some peoples easily win their way to political unity; others attain it only by long and desperate efforts ; while in some cases that boon is forced upon cognate tribes by pressure from without. In very few cases has the unifying process been rapid and easy. Perhaps the consolidation of the Italian tribes by ancient Rome is an example of comparatively speedy union ; that of the people inhabiting the British Isles took a longer time and came about more doubtfully. But Ancient Italy and Great Britain forged ahead more quickly than the Teutons of Central Europe.
The reasons are not far to seek. The strong indivi¬ dualism of the Teutonic nature ever made for division ; and the centrifugal tendency was strengthened by the struggles between Pope and Emperor in the Middle Ages. Further, this disastrous dualism was to be reduplicated in the spheres of law and religion : in lawq by the feudal custom which enjoined the division of fiefs equally among the sons of a baron : in religion, by the Reformation, which sundered Germans more profoundly and more equally than any other people. Then, in the Eighteenth Century, began the long feud between the Houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, that is, in the main between the Southern and Catholic domains against the smaller but more compact and better organized Protestant States of the North. For ages these divulsive forces worked havoc with Germany, sundering the allegiance of her people, sifting her States into feudal dust ; making her one vast cockpit for the bloodiest of the Religious Wars; and finally arraying against each other the greatest of her component monarchies. What wonder that such a
4 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
land, lacking all natural frontiers, and beset by jarring interests, was the prey of smaller but better organized peoples on lier frontiers? Union seemed a mere dream. And when in 1792 Austria and Prussia joined hands to overthrow Revolutionary France, their efforts, palsied by distrust, served merely to goad France to those astonishing efforts which made her the arbitress of the continent.
The French then had everything which the Germans lacked : a compact territory, a single national organiza¬ tion, an inspiring tradition, and the thrilling summons of democracy calling them to overthrow the despotism around them. Germans heard that summons, sympathized with it, and made but a half-hearted resistance to the liberators. Had France and Napoleon realized that the strength of the French lay in their mission to renovate Central Europe, their supremacy might have been lasting. At first they had the support of Prussia; and in that important hut shabby transaction of the year 180T, the secularization of the ecclesiastical states, the House of Hohenzollern gained the lion’s share ; or, in that case it would be more correct to say the jackal’s share; for in reality it was Napoleon who did the slaying while Prussia gorged on the bishoprics and abbacies which he threw' to her.
Thus the Nineteenth Century opened with scenes which even now bring a blush to the cheek of every patriotic Teuton. The two chief German states were engaged in a game of grab at the expense of the Church domains, which were allotted mainly by the secret influence of Bonaparte and Talleyrand. Russia for the time was quiescent. The sole regulating impulse was that which came forth from the West. And when, a year later, Napoleon took the title “Emperor of the French,” Francis II of Austria was fain to copy him and to proclaim himself “ Hereditary Emperor of Austria.” The words were a singular perver¬ sion of the simple and august title “ the Emperor,” i.e., elective head of the Holy Roman Empire; and Professor
The Political History 5
Freeman often upbraided Francis for forgetting who he was.* Nevertheless, pace Professor Freeman, something may be said for the act of Francis. By that time the Holy Homan Empire fully deserved the gibe of Yoltaire, that it was neither Holy, nor Itoman, nor an Empire. One thousand and four years had passed since the crown¬ ing of the first Emperor, Charlemagne, by Leo III at Home; and the link with the Eternal City had long been broken. Further, Francis II, now sated with the plunder of the Church, had no special claim to holiness. And could that be called an Empire which everyone, including its chief, plundered, and no one obeyed? Surely it was well for Francis to exchange that moth-eaten robe of purple for a suit of armour; and such a panoply he believed he had found in the hereditary States of his House which he intended now to solidify and enrich. Had he been an able and determined ruler, he could have taken the lead in reorganizing Germany on a new basis.
Germans wanted a leader and looked about in vain to find one. For a time Napoleon played the part of the new Charlemagne and seemed about to call that people to a life of political activity. Goethe, as we know, hoped for a time that the French Emperor would give that lead, and would merge all the States of Central and Western Europe in a beneficent unity. Possibly the contrast between the first and second parts of Faust may have derived added emphasis from his hopes in the ruler who seemed destined to lead that long distracted and mesmer¬ ized people to the beneficent conquests of Knowledge and Science. But it was not to be. Napoleon did much for the states of the Confederation of the Hhine which he founded on the ruins of the Holy Homan Empire in the year 1806 ; and for a time the middle and South Germans looked to Paris rather than Vienna or Berlin as their capital. But that interesting experiment of gallicizing,
* E.g., “General Historical Sketch,” p. 333; and p. xiv of Preface to Leger’s “Hist, of Austro- Hungary ” (Eng. transl.).
6
Germany in the Nineteenth Century
or denationalizing, those peoples failed when his policy became more and more warlike, especially when the burdens entailed by his Continental System ruined German commerce and emptied every larder.* It is questionable whether any great people could have been denationalized in the Nineteenth Century, when the instinct of race every year became more potent. Certainly it was in vain for Napoleon to found a great international State, extending from the Elbe to the Ebro, rivalling the Empire of Charlemagne both in extent and in the diversity of its peoples, unless he could still that instinct by the magic of peace, prosperity and good government. Good laws he gave them; but peace and prosperity con¬ sorted not with him.t In his train there stalked war and want. Nearly 150,000 Germans were haled away from their homes to fight for him in Russia in 1812 for a cause which they could not understand; and as for the idealists, who in their studies blessed his enlightened sway, their panegyrics grew cold when coffee and tobacco were merely fumes of fond recollection. In such a case, even Teufels- drockh is wont to cease his musings on the Everlasting No and become a domestic economist; and when he traces the absence of the berries of Mocha to the economic methods of the new Charlemagne, ill will it betide that ruler. Cosmopolitanism is a grand ideal; but it must be brought about by means other than those used by Napoleon in the years 1807 — 1812. Napoleon the fiscal experimenter ruined Napoleon the new Charlemagne.
The German people therefore turned its gaze away from Paris and more and more towards Vienna or Berlin. In 1809 the House of Hapsburg made a bold bid for supremacy in Germany but failed; and Francis thence¬ forth went back to the reactionary policy and trimming devices natural to his narrow and timid character. He
* See my chapter “ The Continental System,” in “ Camb. Mod. History,” vol. ix.
t See H. A. L. Fisher, “ Napoleonic Statesmanship : Germany,” ch. 13, 17.
The Political History
7
shelved the reformer Stadion, took Metternich into favour, and sacrificed his daughter, Marie Louise, on the marriage altar to Napoleon. Thenceforth the future of Germany was bound up with the fortunes of the House of Hohen- zollern. As we saw, the policy of that House had been spiritless in the extreme; but, seeing the error of its ways, it tried a fall with Napoleon in the campaign of Jena with results that are well known. The symbol of the Hohen- zollerns should be the phoenix; for in the death agonies that followed, they found new life. Frederick William III of Prussia was the most uninspiring of monarchs, but he had a beautiful and spirited consort (Queen Louisa), whose bearing in the dark years 1807 — 10, when she sank to rest, left an ineffaceable impression on her people. Then, too, the grand traditions of the days of Frederick the Great had brought the Prussian service the ablest of German administrators; the Fhinelander, Stein, the Hanoverian, Scharnhorst, and several others who were not Prussians by birth, now came to reconstruct that State on broader and more truly national foundations. It was due especially to the initiative and hardihood of Stein that reforms of far-reaching importance now took effect. Serfdom was abolished in Prussia, municipal self-govern¬ ment was established ; restrictions on the sale and the tenure of land on a curious class-basis — all were swept away : a national military system took the place of the lack of system of the older period; and education received a great impulse both in the University and the elementary schools .*
This is a lifeless enumeration of changes which altered the whole life of the Prussian people. Consider what they implied. In the years 1807-13 the serf's of Prussia became freeholders on the land and self-governing citizens. They gained a new outlook on life. What had before been a narrow and almost hopeless existence now became an exhilarating struggle, almost a career. The
* See Lecture V on this subject.
8 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
results were seen at the end of the year 1812. When the ghastly relics of Napoleon’s Grand Army re-crossed the Niemen and Vistula, the Prussian people called aloud to he led against Napoleon ; and despite the freezing caution of their King, they had their way. Professors and students added dignity and ardour to the national move¬ ment; and a people which numbered 4^ millions rushed to arms against an Empire which numbered some 60 millions. Probably the efforts of Russia and Prussia would not have sufficed to liberate Central Europe from Napoleon’s sway; but Austria, after long balancing, threw* in her lot with the national cause; and at Leipzig the new Charlemagne was decisively overthrown. The cam¬ paign of 1814 in Eastern France completed his ruin ; and Prussian patriots hoped that what the peoples of the Continent had achieved would redound to their political emancipation.
They were grievously disappointed. As I just now hinted, the siding of Austria with Russia and Prussia was the decisive event of the campaign of 1813; and the Court of Vienna contrived to secure a rich harvest in the field of diplomacy. In the closing months of 1813 it made treaties with Bavaria and other States with a view to the restoration of the old order of things, or at least, of its equivalent. Of course it was impossible to restore the old Holy Roman Empire, or the petty States, lay or ecclesiastical, which perished at the Secularizations. The grinding process which Napoleon and the German sove¬ reigns found so profitable, had made a new Germany of moderate sized States. The result may be realized from the statement that whereas old Germany comprised more than 200 States, now, after the reconstruction of the years 1814-15, there were but 39. All the Ecclesiastical States had gone : the Imperial Knights had vanished. Of the Free Cities only four survived, Hamburg, Bremen, Liibeck and Frankfurt. But though the historical student welcomes the work of clearance and simplification, it
The Political History
9
did not altogether simplify the political problem, the unification of Germany. It is easier to swallow at your leisure a bishop, an abbess, a Free City and three or four petty Knights, than to gulp down a State which has already made a meal of them. The problem resembles that of the raptores, who make short work of moths and small birds, but find it no easy matter to dispose of a carrion crow. Thus, the missing of the opportunity in 1814-15 was the greatest possible misfortune for the cause of German unity.
Moreover, the constitution of the new German Con¬ federation (1815—1866) had many of the defects of the old Holy Homan Empire and far more than its strength and vitality. The worst defect, that of the dualism of German interests, was perpetuated in a worse form than ever. Austria was the predominant Power in the new Confederation; and yet her gains of Italian territory made her less of a Germanic State than formerly. Prussia had to take a secondary place ; yet she had gained largely, not only in Posen, but also in Westphalia and the Rhine Province: so that now her territories stretched (albeit with annoying gaps at Hesse-Cassel and Brunswick) from the Russian kingdom of Poland to the frontier of France. She became the natural champion of Central Europe against France and Russia. But, all the same, she occupied a second place in the Diet and the Committees of the German Confederation ; while polyglot Austria sought to keep the first place which the skilful diplomacy of Metternich had won for her. Thus the peace of 1814—15 was, for Germany, no peace. She was saddled with a Constitution which curbed the aspirations of her people for liberty and unity ; and she was still a prey to the old feud between Ilapsburg and Hohenzollern, South and North. Had not Frederick William III and the statesmen of Berlin been incurable pedants, they would have over¬ thrown this unfair settlement. As it was, they accepted it grudgingly, and even made common cause with
10 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
Metternioli in crushing the popular risings of 1821 and 1830. It is not surprising that the University students, who on the Continent were always in the vanguard of the Reform Movement, burnt in their demonstrations Prussian military pigtails and Prussian military stays as symbols of the soulless despotism which then cramped the life of Germany.
We need not dwell on that dreary time of reaction, 1815 — 1848, save to remark two noteworthy changes. In the thirties was formed the famous Zollverein, or Customs’ Union. Originating in two separate Unions (Prussia and Hesse Darmstadt, and Bavaria and Wiirtemberg), it attained almost national importance by the merging of these two systems in the year 1833. Not long afterwards most of the other German States joined this Customs' Union; and in 1851, when Hanover gave in its adhesion, the German fiscal system was almost complete. Why the Austrian Empire did not oppose this commercial union of the smaller German States with Prussia is hard to say. Certainly it was one of the many blunders that have marked Austrian policy ; for even then it became probable that political union would follow the trend of fiscal union.
The other event concerns England and Germany alike. In 1837 the accession of Queen Victoria necessitated the severance of Hanover from the British connexion; for there the Salic law held sway : thanks to that relic of a barbarous past the link that bound England and Hanover in a most cramped three-legged race was severed. How much British policy had suffered from the drag of Hanover is known to all students of our history; and people who knew no history were devoutly thankful when these islands gained Queen Victoria and the Duke of Cumberland went to Hanover. The gravitation of that petty Kingdom towards the Prussian or German Zoll¬ verein marked out the course of political events, which came about in 1866.
It is impossible here to attempt to unravel the appalling
The Political History-
11
tangles of the democratic and national movements in Germany in the years 1848, 1849. Suffice it to say that all the efforts of German democrats to gain liberty and unity utterly collapsed. Certain sons of Belial declare that the failure was due entirely to the fact that the Vorparlament at Frankfurt was led by professors and barristers ; hut that is an argument which I do not wish to discuss in this place. Others, let us hope more reason¬ ably, point to the fact that the ruler to whom the deputies offered the crown of the German Empire of their dreams, was Frederick William IV of Prussia, in the main a dreamer and rhetorician, who for once showed some sense of prudence by declining the bauble. What is certain is that the German democrats themselves, and Prussia as well, were far too weak to brave the wrath of Austria. For a time she was helpless with her troublesome Yiennese, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Italian subjects; but, thanks to the help of Pussia, she restored order in her own house, and then resolved to set things to rights in her Germanic preserves. Finally, Prussia and the democrats had to bow the knee to her and accept her ruling on all the questions in dispute. Well was it for Prussia that she did so in the Convention of Olmtitz (Nov. 29, 1850). Otherwise Austria and Pussia would have pushed her to the wall and indefinitely postponed national union.*
Thus, after all the futile strivings of 1848 — 9, Austria rounds off the Germans to their several folds and resumes the role of guardian for order. So far off was German unity that the German federal fleet was sold by auction,! as if those warships were so many London County Council steamboats. Patriots gnashed their teeth when they saw Austria favouring the cause of the Danes in the Elbe Duchies and handing over the Germans of that border¬ land to what was (in Schleswig at least) a state almost of servitude to the Danes.
* “ Camb. Mod. Hist.,” xi, 231, 393; “Mems. of Count Beust,” ch. 9.
t C. Lowe, “Bismarck,” i, 186.
12 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
But the great lesson of the Nineteenth Century is that all such reactions and humiliations, are temporary, and finally redound to the harm of those who inflict them. Sooner or later the aggrieved race produces a leader, who, if the omens are favourable, helps it to burst its bonds and retaliate on the would-be warder. Such was the role of Bismarck in Germany and Cavour in Italy. Their careers run a curiously parallel course : at certain points their methods are similar. They eschew revolutionary plans and make use of old dynasties and well drilled armies ; they seek to unite their peoples to the old monarchies; they make unscrupulous use of diplomacy; and both of them seek the friendship of Napoleon III in order to compass the overthrow of the national foe, Austria. Strange to say, they succeed; for Napoleon III, unlike his uncle, is at times a dreamer, obsessed by Quixotic visions ; and he foresees good to mankind and glory and gain to himself from the liberation of oppressed peoples, among them being the Italians and the North Germans. Thus, Austria is the foe against whom this Imperial knight-errant longs to tilt. With a little guile on the part of Cavour and Bismarck the quest is started; for Austria has latterly been too successful, and all Europe longs to see her horn depressed. The result is her over¬ throw, first in Italy in 1859, and in Germany in the Bohemian campaign of 1866. This last alone concerns us here ; but we must remember that even the diplomacy of Bismarck, the splendid organization of the Prussian army by Boon, and the masterly strategy of Moltke would assuredly have failed, had not Denmark and Austria successively put themselves in the wrong in their treat¬ ment of Germany and Prussia at that time.
The English public thought differently ; but the English public was misinformed by its newspapers, and in a fit of sentiment believed that because little Denmark had a quarrel with two great German States, she must be in the right and they in the wrong; — an assumption quite as
The Political History
13
disputable as that in a street quarrel the little boy must be the champion of justice and the big boy be merely a bully. The fact is that little States, like little boys, sometimes rely on their littleness to move some ill- informed and sentimental bystander to side with them. In this particular instance Denmark did not gain the support from England which she expected ; but it is fairly certain that that help would have been forthcoming had not Queen Victoria objected to the pro-Danish proposals of Palmerston.* So that miserable dispute ran its deplorable course, the result being ruin for Denmark, discredit to Great Britain, temporary gain both to Austria and Prussia, and a good cause of dispute for Prussia against Austria in the near future.
Two years later, in 1866, the dispute respecting the ownership of Schleswig and Holstein came to a head ; but in reality the question at issue was — which of the rival Powers should be supreme in Germany. Again the omens favoured Prussia. Or rather, we ought to say that Bismarck had carefully prepared his ground. He had the friendship of Russia (which still resented Austria’s ingra¬ titude after 1849) ; and he believed that he had the friendship of Napoleon III, on behalf of Italy, now allied to Prussia. In point of fact the French Emperor had “ hedged ” so as to come off well in the event of an Austrian triumph.
But Austria did not triumph. The Prussian armies, superbly handled in the Bohemian campaign, won not only the battle of Koniggratx but the campaign by the staggering blow dealt to their rival on July 3, 1866. Now it was too late for Napoleon III, or rather his ministers, to interfere in a way ostensibly friendly to Prussia’s ally, Italy, but in reality highly threatening to Prussia. The threat of intervention was nevertheless made by France in the clumsiest manner conceivable. Its only result was to
* Sir Spencer Walpole, “Life of Lord J. Russell,” ii, 406; “ Camb. Mod. Hist.,” xi, 338; Sybel, “Deutsche Reich,” iii, 87 — 165.
14 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
bind to the cause of Prussia the South and Central German States with which she had been at war. At the prospect of French aggressions on Bavaria and Hesse Darmstadt the Court of Munich came to a secret under¬ standing with the Court of Berlin. The fratricidal strifes of Germans were in fact not only ended by the French menace, but there was laid the basis of that compact of North and South Germans which helped on the wider union of the year 1871.
That union, as we know, came about through the threat¬ ening attitude of the French Emperor, and still more of his Empress and his Ministers, during the diplomatic quarrel of July, 1870. The general details of that dispute are well known. What is far less known is a factor vital to the wdiole discussion, namely, that by order of the French Emperor, a French general, Lebrun, had in the month of June, 1870, gone to Vienna to discuss plans for a Franco- Austrian alliance with a view to a joint attack upon the North German Confederation in the spring of the next year. It is probable (though decisive proofs on the question are wanting) that Prussian statesmen became aware of some such plan.* The secret may have been divulged by some Hungarian or Slav in the Austrian war office. Or again the proposals of Napoleon to Victor Emmanuel to bring Italy into line with Austria and France may have alarmed some friend of Prussia at the Italian capital, Florence ; and the secret may have leaked out thence to Berlin. t In any case Bismarck determined to precipitate a conflict with France which was certain to come. The Napoleonic dynasty was in too precarious a condition to adopt a cool and dignified attitude; and its champions, both lay and clerical, military and journal¬ istic, thought well to play a game of bluff as a means of strengthening the dynasty. The “Mamelukes” at the
*J. H. Rose, “Development of the European Nations,” pp. 33-5.
t Dr. Roloff and M. Albert Thomas, in “ Camb. Mod. Hist.,” xi, 462, 493, do not give any details.
The Political History
15
French Court, encouraged by the Empress Eugenie, the IJltramontanes in the (Ecumenical Council then being held at Rome, and Chauvinists of all creeds and stations, clamoured for a spirited policy, and thus played into the hands of the cool silent man at Berlin who saw that war, immediate war, alone could save Prussia and the North German Confederation from an attack in the near future by France and Austria, perhaps from Italy as well.
Prussia, under any other sovereign than William I, under any other Chancellor than Bismarck, would have hesitated and have met the doom of those who hesitate. But now the dictates of diplomacy and the instincts of the whole people bade her strike while she had the national sense strong on her side, while Russia was distinctly friendly, and while Austria and Italy hesitated, or, at least, were not ready to take up arms for France. It was the unique opportunity in the recent history of Modern Germany. If it had been lost, France would have seized the Rhine Frontier, Austria would have dissolved the North German Confederation, and, besides annexing part or the whole of Silesia, would have imposed on Central Europe the old deadening order of things. Prussia, the one possible organizer of German life, would have sunk into comparative insignificance; and the general result must have been the weakening of the central part of Europe, the weakness of which in former ages wras a perpetual cause of unrest and war. Whatever we may think of the diplomatic finesse of Bismarck in helping to bring about the war of 1870 (and on diplomatic grounds much more can be said for him than is generally known) we ought to accept with satisfaction the results of that war, so far as concerns Germany. We may desire — we must desire — that the union of that long divided people had come about by less forceful means : that the ballot- box, not the sword, had been the agent of unification ; but that was not to be. The experiment was tried in 1848-9 and failed, mainly because the enemies of Germany were
16 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
too strong. There was truth in those terrible words of Bismarck: “ It is not by speechifying and majorities that the great questions of the time will have to be decided — that was the mistake in 1848 and 1849 — but by blood and iron.” The words are generally quoted without the parenthesis which gives significance to them : and Bis¬ marck is termed “ the man of blood and iron.” Well ! he was so; but only because, after the sad experiences of 1848-9, there was no other alternative, at least none that a practical statesman could wait for. In view of a probable attack by three States in 1871, lie determined to deal the blow at the most aggressive of them in 1870; and on the lower plane of expediency, on which statesmen must act, his act is thoroughly defensible. We who live behind the rampart of the sea know little (save in times of panic) of the fear that besets a State which has no natural frontiers and which then had to reckon with three great military empires on its borders.
We must therefore not be too hard on the statesmen of the German Empire which was proclaimed at Versailles on January 18, 1871, for seeking to guard their western territory by annexing the old German lands, Elsass- Lothringen, the latter comprising only about a quarter of the province of Lorraine. True, this annexation out¬ raged the sentiment of the inhabitants of those districts, who had become thoroughly French at heart at the time of the great Revolution and have remained so despite all the masterful but far from attractive energy of their new masters. But those masters, after all, were bent on build¬ ing a barrier against French aggressions ; and one must admit that the experience of the past, especially of the time of Napoleon the Great, bade them beware of France above all nations. Look at the course of historv since the time of Louis XIII, and you will find that the efforts of British, Austrian, Spanish, and Dutch statesmen were directed mainly to building up Barrier-Systems against French aggressions. In the main their efforts were
The Political History-
17
directed to Flanders and Brabant; and we were quite ready, even down to the year 1794, to arrange plans for annexing French Flanders in order to keep within bounds that “ most wicked and unprincipled nation,” as George III styled the French. If we f'or a century and a half were intent on weakening our “ natural enemy,” is it surprising that the Germans, after their infinitely harder experiences, decided that it was time to end the French menace by retaining Strassburg and Metz ? Probably, if we had been in their place, we should have done the same.
Still less surprising is it that the Germans determined to form the effective union out of which they had been cheated in the years 1814, 1815. In 1871 there was a good basis on which to work. The North German Confedera¬ tion, formed in 1866 on the basis of Prussian supremacy and the hereditary headship of the House of Hohenzollern, had worked so effectively and triumphantly that the South Germans now decided to join it, thereby forming the German Empire. The lesser States required certain safe¬ guards and reservations which the Unionists somewhat grudgingly conceded ; and the resulting constitution is in several respects of a distinctly federal character. While all national and international affairs are subjected to central control, the component States have wide local powers and can in several ways make their influence felt at the Imperial capital, Berlin. On the whole, the con¬ stitution is well suited to the needs of that great Con¬ federation.* The Reichstag, or Parliament, is elected by universal suffrage; but the executive power is kept entirely within the hands of the Kaiser and his Ministers ; they are responsible to him alone ; he and they, as well as the Bundesrath or Reichstag can initiate laws; and this lack of control of the Ministers by the people’s House occasions a good deal of friction. The Imperial machine works with increasing difficulty; but it is questionable
*For its chief articles see C. Lowe, “Life of Bismarck,” vol. ii, ad jin.
B
18 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
whether the Kaiser will give way on the point of the responsibility of his Ministers. For he and they and the influential classes in Germany feel acutely the risks bf their position. Their Empire is not a single State : it is a Confederation and has some of the weaknesses of a Confederation. Only by keeping a firm grip on the Executive can the needed firmness be maintained in diplomatic, military, and naval affairs . Of late years the growth of Socialism has furnished another cause why the authorities cling, as for dear life, to the control of every wheel of the administrative machine. They believe that control by Parliament would impair the efficiency and the fidelity of the services. It would be impertinent for a foreigner to dogmatise as to the wisdom or unwisdom of this procedure. Time alone can show whether it is con¬ sonant with the wishes of the German people and whether it corresponds to the needs imposed on them by their situation in Europe.
One thing is tolerably certain, that the aims of the German rulers and of their Chancellors have been on the whole peaceful. This lay in the nature of things so far as concerns Europe. By 1871 Germany had gained all that she could hope to gain unless some great convulsion came to shatter the Austrian Empire, or endanger the existence of Holland and Belgium. The break-up of the Austrian Empire is a thing which has constantly been prophesied; but it never happens; and therefore I beg to be excused from discussing it here. Equally unlikely in my judgment is the absorption of Holland or Belgium, or both, by the German Empire. Every other Great Power has a reason to oppose any such act of aggrandisement ; and it must be remembered that the Balance of Power on the Continent is so delicately poised that no one State is likely to begin a reckless game of grab. The great fact of the decades of the eighties and nineties was the formation of the Triple and Dual Alliances, on which I must say a few words.
The Political History 19
In 1878 during the Congress of Berlin Bismarck supported the British and Austrian claims as against those of Russia on the Eastern Question ; — a fact generally forgotten, hut which proves that German policy was far from being as anti-British as was often believed. His bias in favour of Austria and England greatly offended Russia, the result being that Germany and Austria soon came to an understanding which ripened into alliance, and that alliance was in 1882 solidified by the accession of Italy. For various reasons France and Russia were much slower in coming to terms : in fact not until after the accession of the Czar Nicholas II in 1894 did the Dual Alliance of France and Russia come to pass. The interval therefore was the time when German policy, if it had been warlike, would have shown itself so. True in 1882-5 Germany put forth great activity in colonial questions; and it is worth noting that this activity began as soon as Germany enjoyed the alliance of Austria and Italy, while France was completely isolated. Very naturally, then, Germany threw herself into the colonising efforts to which her high birth-rate and restricted territory compel her to resort. In this connection it is worth noting that in the last forty years the population of that Empire has increased from 41,000,000 to 65,000,000;* and in this fact alone there is ample justification for the adoption of a forward colonial policy, or what is termed Welt-PolitiJc. A people which increases fifty per cent, in a generation must be a colonising people, must have a great overseas commerce, must therefore have a great navy.
The colonial impulse, I repeat, became marked in the year 1882 when Germany felt secured by her new alliances. Accordingly, the next three or four years saw a vigorous expansion in the new lands, viz., the Cameroons, S.W. Africa, the hinterland of Zanzibar, New Guinea, and Samoa, attempts being also made to get a foothold at St. Lucia Bay in Zululand and other points * Prof . Oncken, in “ Camb. Mod. Hist.,” xi, 168.
20 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
not far distant. There seem to be good grounds for believing that the colonial party at Berlin made great efforts to push German claims both through Zululand and Damaraland so as to cut off Britain’s northward progress. The whole truth about this is not known : what we know is that- Sir Charles Warren’s expedition to Bechuanaland led to the ejection of the raiding Boers and the annexa¬ tion of that most valuable territory to the British Empire (1885). At several other points the friction between us and the Germans was for a time acute; but it is desirable to remember that that friction did not end in flame. The German colonial party accepted defeat in South Africa; but it had its way at other points; and loud was the wailing of nervous Britons as to the decadence of our race
and the approaching end of the British Empire. The disputes with Germany were terminated by mutual con¬ cessions ; and our concessions, though certainly extensive, did but register the fact that our Government recognized the naturalness and the justice of the claims of Germans to have some share in the last courses of that world- banquet on which in earlier and less strenuous ages we had so plentifully and profitably dined. After all, it was only the leavings which were in dispute in the eighties ; and it was both dignified and just not to haggle about them too obstinately.
As is well known, these disputes were finally disposed of by the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 which aroused equally angry comment on both sides of the North Sea, and may therefore be considered fairly just. The hopes entertained by Germans as to the productiveness of their colonies have been in the main disappointed; and S.W. Africa involved them in a long and annoying strife with the natives, the consequences being decidedly chastening to the ardent hopes of the colonial party.
In the main it is unquestionable that the formation of the German Empire has conduced to the peace of the world. The statement will appear strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present; for whom
The Political History
21
history is an ever shifting dazzling cinematograph. History ought to be something more. It ought to throw the light of the past cn the turmoil of the present ; and in that serener light, things which seem irritating will appear natural. For if we look at the past, we find that our forefathers dreaded France far more than the wildest alarmists now fear Germany. And their dread was with reason. The position of France gave her great advantages for an attack on England and English commerce. She has ports in the North Sea, the English Channel, the Hay of Biscay, and the Mediterranean ; and the observation of her many harbours and extensive littoral was a task far harder than that which would await the British navy in case of a war between us and Germany. When France and Spain were leagued together against us, as was often the case, the blockade of their combined fleets was well nigh impossible. That of the German naval ports is a far simpler task.
Further, the geographical position of Germany is far weaker than that of France. She has no natural frontiers on the East, and poor harriers on the South and West. Her policy is therefore almost necessarily defensive. And ever since the formation of the Franco-Bussian Alliance in 1895 her attitude has been cautious. Her ruler might make warlike speeches and send fiery telegrams : but those speeches and telegrams led to no hostile action. The man to he feared is, not he who makes speeches and sends telegrams, but rather he who methodically prepares a blow and deals it swiftly, without warning. We can merely speculate as to the motive which prompted the Kaiser’s words in 1895 ; hut they were followed by no aggressive acts in 1899. Either, then, his attitude to this country was less unfriendly than it seemed, or he did not feel prepared to take action. Again, it is open to question which of these possible causes operated in favour of peace ; but it is worth remembering that that was the time when the Franco-Bussian Alliance altered the whole situation ; and
22 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
it is highly probable that the new Balance of Power was so even, so threatening to Germany, as to impose caution.
Caution, not to say apprehension, is the prevalent atti¬ tude on the part of responsible men in that land. In fact, Germany cannot well be an aggressive Power so long as the Franco-Russian alliance endures. For the hostility of France to Germany is lasting; and therefore the Franco-Russian compact must be more or less directed against the House of Hohenzollern. Germany accom¬ plished a wonderful work in unifying her people (or rather Bismarck and his compeers did it for her) ; but even so she has not escaped from the disadvantages of her situa¬ tion ; by land she is easily assailable on three sides ; by sea she is less vulnerable; but there she labours under a great disadvantage, viz., that her oceanic commerce has to pass through the Straits of Dover and down the English Channel, within easy striking distance of the French and British fleets at Brest, Plymouth, Cherbourg, Portsmouth, and Dover. This is what makes her nervous about her mercantile marine. This is what makes her build a great fleet ; and again, I say, were we in her situation we should do the same.
To sum up, then, it is demonstrable that the formation of the German Empire has been a gain to Europe and therefore to Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866 — 1871 put an end, once for all, to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the hitherto unguarded centre of the Continent, thereby removing a temptation to war which had so often lured France into false courses in the previous centuries ; they enabled the German people to develop its hitherto stunted political capacities; and they helped to build up on a sure basis a new European System which has maintained the peace for 40 years. That boon has resulted from the fact that German unification effected at one stroke what Great Britain, with all her expenditure of blood and treasure, had never been able to effect, namely, to assure the Balance of Power in so decisive a way as to make a great war the most risky of ventures.
II.— THE INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY HISTORY
BY
C. H. HERFORD, Litt.D.
THE INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY HISTORY.
Any attempt to give, witliin tlie present limits, even the most meagre connected narrative of the intellectual and literary history of Germany in the Nineteenth Century must necessarily fail, even if it did not demand a competence, in virtually every department of knowledge, which is now beyond the reach of any individual. The present essay seeks merely to distinguish some of the main currents in this vast stream of thought, and to define a few of the more decisive points of their course. All detail is purely illustrative; there is nowhere an attempt at even proximate completeness. And vast tracts both of the “ intellectual,” and more especially of the ‘‘literary,” history are ignored altogether; some because they contributed little of lasting value to the total output; others because they were either too deriva¬ tive, or too original, too European or too provincial, to illustrate those “ main currents ” of German achievement with which we are here concerned; yet others merely because the writer found illustrations, with which he was less incompetent to deal, elsewhere.
I.
It is one of the commonplaces of philosophic history that the ages of great intellectual expansion in a people’s development have followed great expansions of its political power. Athens under Pericles, Rome under Augustus, England under Elizabeth — such examples might tempt us to think that poetry is invariably, as Hobbes said of laughter, a “sudden glory,” called forth by an exulting sense of our own superiority. Nothing in
26 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
modern times more effectually belies such a belief than a comparison of tbe intellectual with the political situation of Germany at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. I need but refer to the vivid picture, drawn in the previous lecture, of the Germany of those years; — a series of dis¬ cordant states, ruthlessly trampled on and dismembered, now the writhing victim, now the helpless spectator of the world-conflict waged between the two great compact historic polities, England and France. Yet these years of outward impotence and humiliation mark, it is not too much to say, one of the two or three culminating moments in the entire intellectual history of Europe, and one of the three or four culminating moments of its literature. And while elsewhere political greatness was one of the sources of the inner expansion, in Germany, on the contrary, the intel¬ lectual energies of those years created the fruitful soil out of which political greatness was finally, by the hand of a mighty tiller, to be won.1 Like the brooding East, in Arnold’s poem, she
“ bowed low before the blast In patient, deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again ;”
but her thought, too, was pregnant with the forces which mould faiths and transform peoples.
Naturally, from this standpoint of inner development, the relation of Germany to the rest of civilised Europe assumes quite another aspect. The poor, ragged Cinderella of Jena and Eylau reappeared as the radiant queen of the ball, outshining both the proud elder sisters, though they were too proud, and she, as yet, too humble to
1. Cf. W. Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19ten J ahrkunderte , p. 6. These five lectures afford an admirably lucid survey of the intellectual history of Germany during the century. The present essay, though quite different in aim and plan, owes much to their guidance and suggestion.
The Intellectual and Literary History 27
be aware of it. The matter may be summarily stated thus. The great movement of critical and constructive intelligence which is the chief distinction of the eighteenth century, had been pre-eminently the work of France and England. France under Louis XI Y had succeeded to the intellectual hegemony of Europe, held till towards 1600 by Italy, as well as to the political hegemony, exercised by Spain; until, about 1700, this position, doubly chal¬ lenged by the England of Newton and Locke, and by the England of Marlborough, passed into a divided leader¬ ship, of the two nations, in both kinds. During the greater part of the century their relation is one at once of comradeship and of rivalry; the deadly struggle of two great military powers being carried on without the least prejudice to the concurrent and immensely fruitful exchange of ideas between two great and original civilisa¬ tions.1 Germany, on the other hand, slowly recovering from the frightful ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, was still, in 1700, far in the rear, and continued, till about 1760, to play a quite secondary part, fed largely on what she gathered from their rich tables. But from Lessing onward she begins to unfold original qualities in astonish¬ ing abundance, and with all the freshness of unspoilt youth. And at the same time, both in England and France, many lines of intellectual exploration hitherto pursued, appear to lose their zest, and are given up as barren or left to inferior workers. The most striking case is famous. The English study of the mind was carried to a kind of deadlock by the acutest of British thinkers,
1. The facts are generally familiar; it will suffice to refer to one important example of what may be called cross-fertilisation, — an English literary development originating in a French movement itself due to an English stimulus. Thus Hume, as a historian, is a child of Voltaire, whose own attempts to rationalise historical writing were inspired by the scientific enthusiasm he had caught in the country of Newton. J. Texte’s J. J. Rousseau et le cosmopolitisme litter aire is still the best book on the subject. Buckle thought “the union of the English and French mind ” the most important fact of the eighteenth century.
28 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
David Hume. The political thinking of France reached both a climax and a terminus, in one direction with Rousseau, the most original and fertile French philoso¬ pher, in another with Turgot, the most sagacious and beneficent.1 Burke, the first Englishman to think organi¬ cally upon politics, had no direct English successors.2 Gibbon’s great work, which made an epoch both in the comprehension of history and in the writing of it, roused in England, for the time, little but barren admiration relieved by the shrill anger of bishops.3 Rousseau’s great creation, the romance of passion and scenery, after putting forth one frail, exquisite shoot, the idyll of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, remained barren till Chateau¬ briand and Mme. de Stael. Lowth and Wood virtually initiated the literary appreciation of the Old Testament, and of Homer; Burke 4 nearly at the same time inau-
1. Rousseau’s Contrat Social was in a great measure translated into practice in the Revolution, but had otherwise, in France, no sequel. The complete collapse of Turgot’s scheme of reform was a national disaster of the first magnitude.
2. Burke’s political ideas, nowhere systematically expressed, and liable to be discounted by his change of front, had no apparent effect upon any English thinker of the next generation. The whole weight of Bentham and his school naturally told against them. Malthus supported similar practical conclusions but by radically different- arguments. Burke’s only direct disciples were the German reactionaries after the war, particularly Gentz. Coleridge, the first Englishman whose political thinking recalls Burke’s, drew directly from his German masters.
3. The Nouvelle Heloise was published in 1761, Paul et Virginie in 1787. Its influence upon novel- writing in England also went little beyond Bage’s Barham Downs (1788) and the landscape backgrounds of Mrs. Radcliffe. Emile (1762), on the other hand, and the Contrat Social produced a flood of educational and political novels, beginning with Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766-70).
4. Burke in his Inquiry into the origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) referred these ‘ideas’ to particular forms of pain or pleasure, in other words to psychological states, the particular quality and conditions of which he acutely analysed. Burke’s psycho¬ logical treatment of aesthetics probably had some share in determining
The Intellectual and Literary History 29
gurated psychological aesthetics; but none of the aesthetic studies produced in England during the remainder of the century, marked any appreciable further advance.
Now in every one of these cases, and in others, the unfinished fabric of English or French speculation served as basis and starting-point for new and vast architectural developments by the builders of Germany. Kant — a king of builders as Schiller called 1 him — learned from Rousseau to recognise the dignity of man, and from Hume to admit the limits of his intelligence : but to those thoughts he gave the amazing transformation which he justly compared to that effected by Copernicus in our conception of the universe. The ideals of the historian and the historical thinker, pursued in their different fields by Montesquieu and Turgot, by Burke and Gibbon, had their true sequel and fulfilment in the great historical school of Germany, in the Wolfs and Niebuhrs, the Eich- horns and Savignys.2 Burke’s essay in aesthetics, received with delight by Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, preluded the vast development carried out in one direction by Kant and his followers, in another, long after, by Fechner. Rousseau’s educational ideas were developed by Pestalozzi ;
1. Cf. Schiller’s epigram on the commentators of Kant : Wenn die Konige bau’n, haben die Karrner zu thun.
2. Gibbon’s luminous survey of the Roman law {D. and F., ch. 44) was translated into German in 1789, with a preface by Prof. Hugo of Gottingen, laying down the historical principles afterwards developed by Savigny. Paul, Gesch. d. german. Phil., p. 65, in his Grundriss.
the essentially psychological method of the Laolcoon (1766) where the distinction between painting and poetry is based upon the simultaneous and successive presentation of images. Kant and his successors accen¬ tuated the ideal and transcendental aspects of beauty, and both Schiller and Hegel made permanent contributions of vast importance to the theory of art and poetry. But they neglected the senses ; and the psychological point of view of Burke was more precisely resumed after the decline of idealism, by G. T. Fechner in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (1876), with the aid of experimental methods of which Burke naturally never dreamed.
30 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
his speculative exaltation of primitive man reappeared, transformed by insight and first-hand knowledge, in the ideal U rsprunglichkeit of Herder. Percy, with the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry f provoked in England much elegant verse, but little indeed, before Scott and Coleridge, that reaches the poignant simplicity to which it possibly helped Burger in Lenore ; and neither Percy nor Lowth 1 nor any other Englishmen of the century equalled Herder 2 in comprehension of the genius of primitive poetry and primitive speech. And the national significance of his vrork was — until the Reliques stirred the genius of Scott — far greater. Percv extended the limits of English taste; Herder provideTanew organ for the German spirit. An analogous transformation took place, finally, in Hellenic studies. England, from Bentley to Porson, had here held indisputably the first place. But at the very moment when Porson flung off his scornful epigram about the Germans in Greek being sadly to seek, German scholarship was about to assume the still more indisputable lead which it has never lost. Wood’s 3 essay heralded the yet more epoch-making Homeric work of Wolf; and the Greek ideals of art and life became with Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, as the ideals of primeval song had done with Herder, instru-
1. Lowth’s lectures on Hebrew poetry ( De sacra poesi Hebrceorum, 1753) were the starting point both for the rationalist criticism of the Old Testament, led by Michaelis, and for Herder’s literary study of Hebrew song. R. Wood’s Essay on the Original genius and writings of Homer (1769) applied the results of a close study of Greek localities to the illustration of the Homeric poems.
2. Herder’s V olhslieder appeared 1778-9.
3. Wood’s Essay appeared in German translation in 1773, and deeply impressed the young Goethe. The enthusiastic review of it in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, commonly ascribed to him (Wke. ed. Hempel, xxix, 86 f.), is a valuable document for the English cultural influences of those critical years. Long afterwards ( Dichtung und Wahrheit, Bk. xii) his mature judgment expressed the debt of Homeric studies to Wood with undiminished emphasis. “We no longer saw in these poems an exaggerated and bombastic heroism, but the reflected reality of a primeval present, and we did our utmost to assimilate it.”
The Intellectual and Literary History 31
ments upon wliicli the German spirit found its way to a new music which was yet fundamentally its own.
What was the secret of these German builders P Put in the fewest words merely this : a peculiarly widespread, strenuous and whole-hearted pursuit of truth, combined with a peculiar sensibility to certain forms of it. To the favoured elite among the countrymen of Descartes and of Newton the temper of science was assuredly known; but the passion for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German scholars working fifteen hours a day, often in homely attics and garrets. But while their range of theoretic interest was unlimited it was drawn with especially fruitful effect towards three beacons, — three illuminating and controlling conceptions — which I may denote by the watchwords : elemental , organic , psychical. It was by his immeasurably finer insight into the ways of elemental humanity — of primitive or naive peoples, that Herder went beyond Percy; it was
ion of organic or evolutionary conceptions to enormously increased knowledge, that the German historic school went beyond Hume and Voltaire, and in some respects even beyond Gibbon ; it was by his vastly more adequate appreciation of mind, in its heights and depths, in its reason and its unreason, its clear discourse and its unfathomable intuitions, that Kant went beyond Hume.
Moreover, each of these three developments of intel¬ lectual outlook was a result of the pressure of just those less rational elements of mind upon the springs of faith. Imagination, feeling, will, asserted their right to be heard, by the side of or above the reason; and the universe became vaster, deeper, and more wonderful under their transforming touch. The irrational was recognised as a source of illumination; wisdom was gathered from the child and from the flower ; science, philosophy and poetry drew together. With us in England, this recovery of imagination created a noble poetry, but left the sciences
by the applicat
32 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to the comprehension of the entire period is the fact that whereas in England and France the poetic, philosophic and scientific movements ran largely in different channels, in Germany they mingled or fused. Wordsworth chanted and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the meshes of logic; and the thought which discovers and interprets and the imagination which creates wrought together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.
II.
In Goethe indeed, pre-eminently, all the main aspects of the complex transformation I have spoken of were present together. In his long career, stretching from the Seven Years’ War to our first Reform Bill, the German eighteenth century is completed and summed up; while the German nineteenth century is in almost every signifi¬ cant point reflected or foretold. What M. Legouis has said of Wordsworth is even truer of Goethe: “ To learn how, in his case, manhood was developed out of early youth, is to learn how the nineteenth century was born from the eighteenth, so different, yet with so manifest a family likeness.” 1 The intellectual energy which seeks to discover continuity in the teeming multiplicity of Nature, was united in him with a noble and profound naivete in which Nature herself was imaged with pellucid fidelity, like the pebbles seen in the water of a clear brook.2 His poetry was the expression of a wonderfully intense and luminous eye for facts; it grew directly out of some¬ thing that he had himself gone through; the experience gathering in his mind, thought and imagery and language,
1. Legouis, The Youth of Wordsworth, p. 253.
2. Cf. Xenien, No. 72 (doubtless by Schiller) : ‘Reiner Bach du entstellst nicht den Kiesel, du bringst ihn dem. Auge Naher; so seh’ ich die Welt, . . . wenn du sie beschreibst.’
The Intellectual and Literary History 33
clarifying itself of disturbing accidents, but retaining its essential truth.1 And somewhat in the same way his mind itself underwent a perpetual unfolding through the eighty years of his life, gathering new elements without losing the old. “Das grosse Kind” he called himself; and indeed the child in him never sank to sleep; the wonderful eyes of his portrait as an old man look out at you under the Olympian brow with a rapt serenity like that of the two seraphic children at the feet of the Sistine Madonna; and long after his sixtieth year the thrill of beauty, of passion, of meeting and separation, evoked from him lyric utterance (as in the Marienbader Elegie) as ravishing in its simple intensity as the songs of his magnificent youth themselves.
But with this elemental simplicity, as of a child, there went a deep comprehension of the complexity of life. Never has the continuity of organism, the implication of all the parts in the whole, and of the whole in the parts, been more pregnantly expressed than in his “ Natur hat weder Kern noch Scliale, Alles ist sie mit einem Male.” 2
1. Cf. his pregnant little essay : Bedeutende Fordernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort {Wke. Bd. 27, 351), on the remark of his friend Heinroth that his thought was “ gegenstandlich,” objective; ‘that is,’ he explains, ‘ that my thought does not detach itself from objects, that the elements of objects, the presentations, enter into my thought and are intimately penetrated by it; that my intuition (A ns chaining) is itself a thinking, and my thinking an intuition.’ And he goes on to tell how certain great motives and legends like that of the Braut von Korinth, remained, alive and active, in his mind for forty or fifty years, altering only towards greater clarity and definiteness, without changing their character. His nearest English analogue in this is without doubt Wordsworth.
2. In his Allerdings (Morphologie, 1820). The saying was a retort upon the doctrine that the inner reality of Nature was wholly withdrawn from knowledge, expressed by Haller in the quatrain : “ Ins Innre der Natur dringt kein erschaffner Geist; Gliickselig wem sie nur die aussre Schale weist !” Goethe’s conviction that the sensuous intuition revealed the depth as well as the surface of Nature, was the source both of his strength and of his weakness in science. It helped him to his divining
34 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
Tliis profound persuasion led to at least two notable discoveries. In a beautiful and famous poem be set forth the then novel doctrine that the flower is a metamorphosed leaf; and the finding of a sheep’s neckbone at Venice led him to the analogous divination that the brain is an expanded vertebra.1 The human form itself was the culminating point of a vast organic process ; the key to the entire structure of Nature, as well as the source of the most perfect Art;2 he saw the statue with the eye of a morphologist, and the skeleton with the eye of the
1. At the same time, the strictly historic sense, like the sense of nationality which it so powerfully stimulates, was but faintly developed in Goethe. Even his Hellenism was enthusiasm not for a people but for an artistic ideal which they had achieved. The Italienische Reise, when published in 1817, offended Niebuhr not merely by its paganism but by its purely aesthetic valuations. But the two men deeply revered each other, and Goethe gives us an accurate measure of the relative strength of his interest in the character of men and of politics, when he writes, after reading Niebuhr’s Roman History-. ‘It was, strictly, Niebuhr and not the history of Rome, which occupied me. . . . The whole body of agrarian laws concerns me not at all ; but the way he explains them, and makes these complicated relations clear to me, this is what helps me, and lays the obligation on me to proceed with equal scruple in the affairs I myself undertake.’ Quoted by Julian Schmidt, Gesch. der deutschen Litt. seit Lessing’s Tod. iii, 81.
2. Both these discoveries belong to the period of Goethe’s most intense and fruitful occupation with the scientific interpretation of the world, and especially of organic life, — the years following his first Italian journey. The Metamorphose cler Pfianzen was written in 1790; in the same year, when visiting the Jewish cemetery at Venice, his servant brought him the broken sheep-skull, which led him to the solution of the osteological problem. Twenty years later, as is well known, it was solved independently by Oken. The scientific work of Goethe has been critically discussed by Virchow and by Helmholtz. Excellent apprecia¬ tions of it are given by Kalischer in Werke, ed. Hempel, Bd. 33, and by R. M. Meyer in his Goethe , ch. 33 and 34.
glimpses into the coherence of organic nature; it also made him the fierce assailant of Newton for declaring sunlight not to be primitive and elemental.
The Intellectual and Literary History 35
sculptor. To the yet more complex continuities and evolutions of mental life lie brought an insight in which understanding was quickened by experience, and enriched by sympathy ; the soul for him was always growing, as his own soul had always grown; life was an education, and his ripest wisdom and loftiest poetry spring from this infinitely rich and fertile thought. Wilhelm Meister serves his apprenticeship in the school of life, slowly moulded by error and illusion towards an end he could not foresee, as Saul went out to seek his father’s asses and found a kingdom. And the steps in his education are marked by the women whom he successively loves : — the lowborn actress; the elegant but frivolous countess; then Therese, with her radiant intelligence and her large heart, and Natalie with her finer and subtler gifts of soul. It is Natalie wTho finally becomes Wilhelm’s wife, and some sentences near the close point the direction in which, for Goethe, the advance towards higher things in educa¬ tion lies. Where Therese has insight, we are told, Natalie has faith; where Therese has persistence, Natalie has love; where Therese has confidence, Natalie has hope. And it is Natalie who carries out the ideal expressed in the profound words, which Therese can only admire but not put into practice : “If we treat men as being what they are, we make them worse; but if we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we bring them as far as they are capable of being brought.” 1 Such sayings attest Goethe’s sense of something deeper than reason in the growing soul as in all other kinds of growth. The enlightened intellects of the 18th century saw everything clear and reduced everything to system : Goethe’s eye reaches forth across that which can be put into words to that which evades them ; across that which can be taught, to that which must be discovered. “ Whoever half knows an art, is always astray and always talking : whoever possesses it entire seeks only to act it out, and talks seldom
1. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, viii, 4.
36 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
or late. The others have po mysteries, and no power; their teaching is like baked bread, succulent and satisfying for a single day; but the meal cannot be sown, and the seed-grain must not be ground.” 1 The mysterious, silent, forces of Nature have to co-operate, and hers is the vital part.
In the growth of Faust, other phases of Goethe’s thought come into more distinct expression. From the Dionysiac tumult of the senses he is borne to the Apolline clarity of art, and thence finally, to the sober energy of social service. Gretchen is forgotten in the stately presence of Helen of Troy, the embodiment of all that Goethe revered in the art of Greece.
But art, though an element in all the highest human development, could not for Goethe suffice. Matthew Arnold never said anything more gravely misleading than when he summed up Goethe’s message in the words : “Art still has truth , find refuge there A 2 Art was not for Goethe the resource of the pessimist, as it was for Schopen¬ hauer; it was an energy which, like the giant Antaeus in ancient fable, needed incessant contact with earth, with experience, with reality; and the greatest of all the arts was the art of living. And so the crown of Faust’s career, the final phase by which he wins exemption from his compact with Mephistopheles, is strenuous, unrelaxing service to men, where epicurean self-indulgence is lost, and joy is only the foretaste of the diffused happiness his efforts have helped to bring about. “ One who strives without ceasing we can deliver,” cry the angels, as they pluck him away from the expectant arms of Mephisto¬ pheles. And Faust himself sums up the last conclusion of Goethe’s wisdom, that he only wins freedom, as lie only wins life, who has daily to conquer it for himself. In this final Faust we have prefigured the latter-day Ger- manv of strenuous will and action, and we can the better
1. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, vii, 9.
2. Arnold, Memorial Verses, 1850.
The Intellectual and Literary History 37
understand how the great cosmopolitan, for whom state and nationality were secondary and sometimes mischievous ideals, yet holds his unassailable place as the supreme poet of the German empire, beside Bismarck its creator.
Such was in substance, the work of Goethe. In that vast complex we find, as I have hinted, the German Nineteenth Century foretold. Here are already present, though not in equal degree, all the traits which make that century significant. Here we have the passion for truth, the clear-eyed fidelity to fact ; here the apprehension of naive and simple things, side by side with the most consummate art ; here the fundamentally organic thinking, the instinct for continuity and development; here the profound self- consciousness, the eager psychical and cultural interests, the daemonic personality; here, the demand for action, for service, for duty; here, finally, a brilliant and memor¬ able literary vesture for all these various moods of mind. Let me now attempt summarily to follow up these clues in turn .
III.
First, then, the fidelity to fact. In the developed form which it has received in the Nineteenth Century this may be defined as an instinct which makes, in knowledge, for what is spontaneous and erlebt; in administration, for what answers with minute accuracy to a given set of needs; in conduct, for what is frank and true. No German words are fuller of the sap of national ethics than those which denote these things : wahr , grundlich , trcu. They stand for instincts which master indolence and get the better of politeness, or take its place. When a French reviewer points out a misstatement he says : <k That is inexact ” ; a German, no worse disposed to his author, says : “ That is false.” The heroes of the German nation have been men of colossal directness, like Luther, with his “ ich kann nicht anders,” like Bismarck “the honest broker,” like Lessing whose life was a ceaseless battle for truth ; and sincerity became the very essence of heroism in the
38 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
thought of the great Scottish apostle of German idealism, Carlyle. The reverse side of this quality must, however, also be recognised. German literature is confessedly poor in the kinds of creative work which originate in an ironical or humorous detachment from life. It has no Rabelais or Moliere, no Cervantes, no Swift, no Fielding, no Ariosto. Irony, theoretically exalted by the Romantics to the very summit of all literary excellences, nay, pro¬ claimed as the very essence of good literature, failed in practice to inspire anything of more permanent value than the arabesque romances of J ean Paul ; while the two or three brilliant masters of irony, a Heine, a Nietzsche, owe very little of their acceptance in Germany, so far as they are accepted, to this quality. The “ sardonic smile ” at “ the absurdities of men, their vaunts, their feats,” which wandered over the lips of the World-spirit in the thirties and forties may have been Heine, as Arnold says, but it was certainly not Germany. Her wTay with absurdi¬ ties which do more than froth the surface of life is rather the impatience of the intellectual realist ; of the same intellectual realist whose demand for knowledge first¬ hand, precise and complete, more than any commanding originality has made German science, in al] its vast ramifications, what it is.
The results of this scientific realism have often been revolutionary; to English conservatism they have some¬ times seemed anarchic ; the application of more rigorous standards of research naturally, as a rule, disturbing the results obtained by laxer ones. They have often amounted to the creation of a new study. Winckelmann wrote the first history of antique sculpture because he was the first to study its monuments at first-hand.1 A generation
1. Winckelmann, Gescliichte der Kunst des Alterthums , 1764. His discussion of the Laokoon gave the original provocation, as is well known, to Lessing’s famous book. Goethe took exception to his con¬ ception of beauty in sculpture (cf. Italienische Reise passim) ; but recognised in him the Columbus of his subject, who anticipated what he did not discover. ‘ Man lemt nichts wenn man ihn lieset, aber man wird etwas.’ (Eckermann, Gespr., Feb. 16, 1827.)
The Intellectual and Literary History 39
later, Boeckh built up the economic history of Athens upon a no less original use of monuments literary and other.1 It was keener criticism of the sources, not the prompting of a fertile inner consciousness, which led Niebuhr to rebuild the time-honoured fabric of early Eoman history.2 And it was a closer and more penetrat¬ ing scrutiny of the linguistic and literary facts of the Homeric poems, not a passion for literary disruption, which led Wolf to his no less memorable theory of their composite origin;3 a theory, let us remember, which convinced against his will the great master of organic unity, Goethe.4 Yet again a generation, and Leopold v. Ranke revolutionised the writing of the history of modern Europe.5 But his bombshell was merely the proposition that history, being intended to describe what happened, must be founded on the reports of those immediately con¬ cerned, as agents or as witnesses. He was the first to go systematically to the archives, to construct his narrative upon MS. sources, on the reports of ambassadors, accounts of expenditure, legal documents. He was a great realist among historians; he had the realist’s joy in the fact, in the sheer happening of a thing as such ; and a famous saying of his incisively crystallises the temper of historical realism : “ I do not aspire to know how things were bound to happen : I am contented to know how they did happen.”
1. Aug. Boeckh, Staatshmishaltung der Athener, 1817.
2. Niebuhr, Romische Geschichte, 1814.
3. F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum, 1795.
4. Goethe's attitude towards Wolf’s work was not consistently main¬ tained. He hailed the discoverer with the utmost emphasis in the Elegie Hermann und Dorothea (Dec. 1796). In 1821, however, he returned to the traditional theory (the poem Homer wieder Homer). His final view is expressed repeatedly in the conversations with Eckennann, e.g., on Feb. 1st, 1827 : In der Poesie ist die vernich- tende Kritik nicht so schadlich [as in the Old Testament]. Wolf hat den Homer zerstort, doch dem Gedichte hat er nichts anhaben konnen.
5. L. von Ranke, (1795-1886). His Zur KritiJc neuerer Geschiehts- srhreiber appeared in 1824; in the following year he became Professor at Berlin.
40 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
That might seem to he the formula of a matter-of-fact chronicler, who had no ambition but to report notable occurrences in exact detail as they would appear to an observant onlooker. But Ranke’s formula meant, for him, and he made it mean for others, vastly more than this. His demand to know how things happened was the demand of one who wras at bottom chiefly concerned with the things which the most observant onlooker overlooks or cannot possibly discover; of one who grasped the com¬ plexity of the forces of which event is the visible sign, and had an almost un approached skill in unravelling their intricate web. He was not specially the historian of civilisation, of letters, of political or other ideas; they did not, as such, interest him, and he dismissed rather impatiently the methods of historical writing which these literary or ideal interests sometimes inspire ; as when he disposed of the superb style of Michelet as one “ in which the truth cannot be told.” But there was no fact of national life, however ideal, however picturesque, which he would not call in when he needed it to throw light on the play of forces which determined the movement of parties, the development of policies, the evolution of states. Partisans abused him for his coldness; his detached analysis of the Reformation age angered Catholics and Protestants alike ; but his rigorous critical methods, his scientific grasp and his scientific vision secured for historic studies a definite place among the sciences of mind, and even gave these sciences for a time the leading place in the entire scientific movement of Germany.
Ranke stood, in fact, in temper and method, nearer than any other great master of humane studies to the men who built up the vast and many-sided edifice of the sciences of Nature. The Romantic philosophers had invested humanity and Nature alike with the glamour of idealism. Ranke’s sober eye saw history in the light of common day ; and the rapid strides of the sciences of Nature, in the forties and fifties, marked not only the scornful rejection
The Intellectual and Literary History 41
of the Romantic “ Natur philo sophie,” — long a byword of intellectual ignominy, — but the temporary submergence of idealism itself. The middle years of the century dis¬ pelled many illusions, and frustrated many hopes, poli¬ tical, intellectual, ethical, religious; the brilliant promise of a new era was shattered in ’48 ; those for whom philo¬ sophy was still an intellectual need closed their Hegel, where Reason was the moving principle of the world, and opened their Schopenhauer, where daemonic Will, blind and insatiable, compelled all things to share in its own futile unrest. Rut the reverse side of this sobered outlook was the immense force and diffusion of the desire to interpret the phenomena of the natural world, by physics, chemistry and biology.
In no one of these sciences whether of Nature or of Man has Germany since 1830 stood below the front rank of the nations ; in mass of production she has far surpassed all others. One of the cardinal scientific discoveries of the century is due to her, — Mayer’s law of the Conserva¬ tion of Energy.1 In some sciences, such as organic and technical chemistry, she has taken an enormously prepon¬ derating part. Some, like Economics, which had already been carried to a high degree of cultivation elsewhere, she brilliantly developed; or even like the critical study of the Bible, completely transformed. Others, like com¬ parative philology and comparative mythology, are virtually her own creation. English and French scholars have done more for the discovery and original decipher¬ ment of new languages; of Sanskrit and Assyrian; of Egyptian and Chinese. But the science of language, the conversion of a study in which, Voltaire said, the vowels mattered nothing, and the consonants very little, into one in which every change in a word’s form is explained by
1. Robert Mayer set forth his discovery in his Die orgahische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel (1845). Mayer’s place in the intellectual history of the century is lucidly set forth by Hoffding, Hist, of Mod. Philosophy , Bk. x, ch. 1.
42 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
recognised phonetic laws, now of bewildering intricacy, — this is essentially a German achievement.1 If the develop¬ ment of our own language is now, especially in its earliest stages, of an almost weird lucidity, if the trained Anglist will tell you how the ancestors of King Alfred spoke centuries before the earliest scrap of extant writing, — this is essentially a German work.
In all this vast scientific achievement of Germany, what I have called fidelity to fact, a strenuous and impassioned realism, was the standing, the decisive condition. But this passion owed much both of its direction and of its driving force to the specific sensibilities of which I spoke. The feeling for the primeval stimulated the scientific study of origins, and powerfully nourished the assumption that in the origin of a people, or an institution, lies the clue to its nature. The sense of organism kept the passion for fact charged with the sense of the richness of reality, the complexity, and the interrelatedness, of the knowable wTorld. And the psychical bias of Germany, if it has, in the mechanical and physical regions of facts, at times directly Unvaried the scientific impulse, and substituted romantic dream for scrutiny and experiment, lias in all the human or partially human studies enormously stimulated and guided discovery. It is not in German economics that “ things " could ever have been said to “ ride mankind.” It remains to illustrate the operation of these specific sensibilities in more detail, and in the literature of “ power ” as well as of “ knowledge.’’
1. The school of the so-called ‘ Junggrammatiker ’ emerged in the later seventies. It attacked the problems of the history of language through the direct observation of the living tongues, and especially by the scientific cultivation of phonetics. It greatly promoted the rigorous treatment of sound-change by the doctrine (first laid down by Leskien in 1876) that exceptions to the laws of sound-change were inadmissible. Cf. Paul, Grundriss der german. Philologie, i, 121.
The Intellectual and Literary History 43
IV.
If tlie call of the primitive and elemental, fertilised scientific curiosity, it touched German life more directly at a hundred other points. A vein of instinctive Rousseauism lurks somewhere in almost every German breast. There is an old Adam in them all, as Morike sang; an innocent Adam, whom any hint of the unspoilt freshness of the world, — the breath of the woodland, the Waldgeruch, or the blitheness of a May morning — trans¬ ports back into Paradise and touches anew with the joy of creation.1 Englishmen may have contributed more to the literature of travel and discoverv, and more to the loftier poetry of Nature; but the simple poetry of Wan¬ derlust, of joyous roving, is almost as characteristically German as the bewitching music which Schubert and others have found for it.
“ W em Gott will rechte Gunst erweisen Den schickt er in die weite Welt,”
that is the text of a whole cycle of German song.2 Ger¬ man life itself is still in many points simpler than that of France or England, notwithstanding the enormous growth of wealth and luxury there during the last forty years. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century the contrast was far greater; and many a modern German looks back with humiliation, as a distinguished thinker has recently confessed,3 at the unpretending homeliness of that old- world Germany, which achieved such vast things in the kingdom of mind. Goethe himself, the minister of a grand-duke, lived in a house, the stateliest indeed in Weimar, but simple enough to modern ideas; and he loved to escape from it to his wooden gardenhouse by the quiet
1. Morike, Gedichte : ‘ Fussreise.’
2. Eichendorff : Aus clem Leben eines Tmigeniehts.
3. Windelband, Die Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19ten J ahrhunderbs , p. 5.
44 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
Ilm ; or to that lonely hilt among the mountains, where he wrote the wonderful traveller’s song: “ZJeber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh.”
And some of those vast achievements in the kingdom of the mind were in keeping with this homely society. The ingathering of folktales and folksongs from the lips of the peasant, the eager study of primitive German institutions and folklore, and of the primitive institutions of other peoples, — all this was, and could not but be, the work of men in whom the instinct for the primitive ran far deeper than the intellect. Think of the wonderful clear-eyed tenderness with which Jacob Grimm explores the soul of Old German custom and of Old German speech and myth, in those masterpieces of science informed wTith the very spirit of poetry, which in the first generation of the 19th century laid the foundations of German philology.1 Aou feel in Grimm, with all his wealth of exact know¬ ledge, something of the simplicity of the child. His German speech is a song, flowing from the heart of the primeval Germany which he interprets because he possesses it and it possesses him. How rich is the very word urs'ptunglich in German, compared with our original. Poetry and science, literary and philosophic impulses, cross and blend strangely throughout the movement. The “ LTrmensch ” and the “ Urzustand ” still wore for Herder the glamour from which Rousseau’s mature thinking had gradually and partially emancipated him, but which, in virtue of a few glowing phrases of his youth, we still call Rousseauesque. But already in Herder this passion for the primitive was illuminated and controlled by a historic sense and a feeling for the varying genius of race and
1. The great Deutsche GrammatiJc of Jacob Grimm, which served as model for several other famous grammars, especially Diez’s of the Romance, and Miklosich’s of the Slavonic languages, appeared, in four parts, from 1819 to 1837; his Deutsche Mythologie, 1835; his Deutsche Bechtsaltertiimer , 1828. Cf. Paul, Geschiclite der germ. Phil., p. 81f, Grundriss.
\
The Intellectual and Literary History 45
nationality. The essay on the “ Origin of Language/’ which virtually opened his career, was at once a hymn to the glory of the dawn of humanity when speech and poetry were one, and a treatise, full of pregnant ideas, in justifica¬ tion of this conception as historic fact. Among the Romantics of the next generation we watch the actual burgeoning of poetic idealists into philologists and scholars. To the eyes of Friedrich Schlegel the land of the newly discovered Yedas presented itself as the cradle of the Aryan races, an Eden of indefeasible reality; and he threw himself upon Sanskrit and became the first German master of Indian lore. Again a generation, and the scholars are in the ascendant. The Friedrich Schlegels are succeeded by the Franz Bopps. It is the day of the Grimms, and of the Lachmanns. Romantic idealism pointed the way, hut they guided their own steps by the torch of historic conscience and historic sense.
After all deductions have been made, the German Mytho¬ logy of Grimm and his German Rechtsaltertiimer remain unsurpassed examples of consummate erudition penetrated with historic imagination. And if Grimm’s exquisite instinct for the ways of the folk-soul in his poetical moods led him to disparage or ignore in his primitive world what was not poetry or was not of the folk, the defects of his synthetic imagination were supplemented by the incisive analytic criticism of his great contemporary Earl Lachmann. Trained in classic philology, the author of epoch-making editions of Propertius and Lucretius, Lachmann did more than anyone else to make the editing and study of the Old and Middle High German poets, also, a scholarly discipline. For half a century his ideas and methods inspired and dominated scientific philology ; and the achievements of his school culminated in the vast torso of a history of German antiquities, Deutsche Alter - tumskunde (1870-87), left incomplete by his greatest disciple Karl Mullenhotf.
To pass from the sciences which interpret primitive
46 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
society to the literature which is itself touched with primitive or elemental quality, or which seeks directly to render these aspects of life, is no difficult transition; the scientific and the literary impulse here lay specially near together. Not every investigator of early song and story wrote German like Jacob Grimm’s. But the instinct for song and for folksong is almost universal in the German people, and counts for not a little in their manifold achievement. Rare indeed is the German professor, however formidable his apparatus of erudition, who has not a tender place in his heart for the folksong. It was blood and iron and song which shattered the power of imperial France in 1870, and planted the new empire on its ruins. And Luther was not a whit more himself nor a whit more German when he was evolving the doctrinal intricacies which still torment the German catechist, than when he broke into that joyous stave which declares that not to love woman, wine and song, is to be a fool for life. German music would not be the supreme thing it is if the lyric strain, the temper which answers and thrills to song, were not an almost universal heritage of the German people; nor is there any more humiliating experience for an Englishman in Germany than to meet a throng of peasants and soldiers, singing in chorus as they go home, and to reflect what the same class would be singing, if they sang at all, in our folksongless land.1
It is partly because the instinct for song is so elemental in the German nature, that the German lyric, even in the hands of the most accomplished and literary persons, or even especially in their hands, is so deeply imbued with the folksong ideal, and precisely in its greatest moments reaches that profound impassioned simplicity towards which the finest folksong points. The great example of Goethe here unmistakably pointed the way. In spite of
1. Observers of the London crowd during the long vigil incident to a recent occasion were struck by the ‘ pathos ’ of people who wanted to sing and had no coronation song.
The Intellectual and Literary History 47
the greater popularity of Schiller, in spite of the attrac¬ tion, precisely for his countrymen, of writing alive with explicit culture and explicit ideas, it was not the noble intellectualised eloquence of poems like Schiller’s “ Die Ideale " which counted for the future of1 German lyric, but the pregnant simplicity of lines like Mignon’s song : “ Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, Weiss was ich leide.”
Neither in French nor English lyric is there anything quite parallel. French lyric poetry has in the Nineteenth Century done marvellous things : but its instruments have been either a prodigious virtuosity of imaginative appeal, as in Hugo, of plastic expression, as in the Parnassiens, or of symbolic suggestion, as in the Symbolistes. In England, the great poet who most resolutely strove for a simple and natural lyric speech, attained simplicity and nature, in a sense, but at the cost of failing altogether to be lyric. The “ Lyrical Ballads ” cannot be sung. The might of lyric was indeed in Wordsworth, but what evoked it was the majestic stanza and the sublime philo¬ sophic inspiration of an Immortality Ode. Tennyson, almost alone, w^as a master of the simple song.
But in the German Nineteenth Century, the folk¬ song note is the very point de repere of lyric poetry; no matter what its reach of thought and range of fancy, that is where it comes home, that is where it fetches its strength. Heine was an immeasurably more complex, brilliant, and versatile being than our homely Words¬ worth ; his prose is a scintillating woof of incessant wit- play; but his finest songs, — and lyric poetry has nothing finer, — are of an enthralling simplicity of phrase and thought. “ In the wondrous month of May, when all the birds were singing, then I told her my longing and desire.” Or the Lorelei ; or the passionate hero-worship of The Two Grenadiers ; or the quiet stoical intensity of the Asra, — the slave who, pining away with secret passion for the princess, answers her inquiry with these words
48 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
only : “ My name is Mohamed, I come from Yemen,
“ IJnd mein Stamm sind jene Asra Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.”
Story, as also, despite some magnificent exceptions, drama, is a less congenial product of the German soil than song. Nowhere is the theatre, as an institution, more alive. But how little of the work of the Nine¬ teenth Century masters of German drama, — even of a Hebbel or a Grillparzer- — is intimately German, like the First Part of Faust , or as Moliere is French? In secure mastery of narrative Germany cannot match the long and brilliant series of English and French masters. But if she has had no Fielding and no Scott, no Merimee and no Flaubert, she has achieved many considerable, and a few consummate things, in kinds pre-eminently her own. And one source of her special strength here has been that profound grasp of elementary natures, of the primitive grounds of character, which we have seen as one of' the springs of German lyric. But even more rarely than in the lyric does this instinct for the primitive appear without alloy in the story. Song of elemental quality may burst forth from the midst of a com¬ plex and artificial society, as water from a mountain lake breaks from the fountains of a great city, as Shelley’s song burst forth in the England of Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh. But the prose tale detaches itself less lightly from society, and its character is in part controlled by the character of the society it represents. And German society was that of an old historic land, whose primitive traits had been much overlaid by the slow accumulations of the ages, much defaced by the scars of war, and not a little transformed by its own creative energy. Yet with all this, it retained more traces of primitive structure by far than the society of either England or France. No great metropolis imposed its mundane complexities and corruptions, as a standard to be lived up to, upon the nation at large. The small town, the village, remained,
The Intellectual and Literary History 49
even in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, quaintly old-fashioned, old-world ; clothed with their heritage of custom and song and legend, as old walls with ivy : so that as late as the twenties and thirties the brothers Grimm could gather their immortal household tales. The novel of metropolitan society, so native to Paris or London, is still, in spite of a Fontane, a Heyse, a Bohlau, and others, something of an exotic in Germany. The novel of the province, on the other hand, of the village, of the types of character and of sentiment which linger longest in these regions, is there peculiarly at home. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, one of the finest of all German tales, is the story of a man whose inborn sense of justice is so powerful and so simple that he cannot believe the state will not help him to recover his wrongly detained horses, and when it fails him, without hesitation goes to war with it. The tragedy of great simple natures — of a Prince von Homburg, a Thusnelda, a Kathchen von Heilbronn — is also the central theme of his plays, which include some of the greatest dramatic work of the century. The naive marvel of the Mdrchen , again, was interwoven by the Romantics with threads of quite another origin — fantastic, cultural, realistic — into the changeful taffeta of their tales. In Fouque it makes the staple of the pattern, and even in the phantasmagoria of Hoffmann it is not completely over¬ powered by the lurid blue and red glare of decadent horror and crime and whimsicality.1 With the passing of Romanticism the attraction of marvel subsided, making room for a more quietly observant presentation of peasant and village life. Norway and Russia are richer in primitive peasant types. But Bjornson hardly equalled, and even Tolstoy, that Titan with the child’s soul, and Turgenjev, hardly surpassed, the finest German work of this kind, far less familiar though this be to the world.
Precisely the greatest, indeed, are with us the least
1. Hoffmann has from the first, characteristically, been extremely popular in France. He is full of European elements.
D
50 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
known. Bertliold Auerbach, a man of universal charm, who brought literature to the peasants, and culture to the courts, is probably the next name that the educated Englishman will think of among German men of letters after the inevitable Heine. But Fritz Reuter, and Klaus Groth, and Hebei, and Gottfreid Keller, are almost wholly unknown. The prestige of Auerbach's Dorfgeschichten is indeed somewhat faded ; the insurgent realism of the last twenty-five years has accustomed our eyes to strident colouring beside which their delicate hues seem lifeless. The talk of his Schwarzwald peasants, with its subtle tincture of Spinoza, is far indeed from the crass dialect of Hauptmann’s Silesian weavers. But realism is not the only way to truth ; and Auerbach, by literary processes which seemed to promise merely idealising glamour, succeeded in conveying an extraordinarily life-like picture of the village folk he loved. And as Auerbach interprets these peasants of the hills and forests in language rather more subtle and exquisite than their own, so Klaus Groth renders in his simple poignant verse the dwellers on the level Dithmarschen, beside the melancholy dunes of the North Sea.
But the first place among these painters of the peasant, the first place even among all German masters of story since Goethe, belongs to the old Stadtschreiber of Zurich, Gottfried Keller. Like Meredith with us, he is the poet of a distinguished rather than a wide audience. Like Auerbach he offers little to the harsher type of realist, and absolutely nothing to the fin de siecle decadent. Rottenness and degeneration he paints with fearless brush, but his own temper is a large, radiant, and sound-hearted humour. “ Freedom, and light, and harmony, — to these three his heart beat time,” he sang of another; “what he did, he did with all his might, and struck the iron when it was hot.” He had the German passion for thoroughness, the exacting conscience of the true crafts¬ man, who will endure no slovenliness, no make-believe.
The Intellectual and Literary History 51
The peasant, doing his daily work at the plough, silently, unhasting, unresting, becomes under his hands, without a single false or adorning touch, as impressive as the sowers and reapers of Millet. But there was a vein of poetry in him which went deeper than this. He could look with genial irony upon that world of sober and honest workers which he so deeply respected ; and he could describe, with penetrating insight, the demeanour of original characters and daemonic passions in this prosaic world. Such is the motive of his masterpiece, the collection of tales called the “ Leute von Seldwyla ” : a Cervantean picture, drawn with a blend of naivete and consummate art. In the greatest of these tales, “ A Village Borneo and Juliet,” one yet greater than Cervantes is expressly recalled. Among the literary adaptations of Shaksperean motives, Turgenjev’s “ A King Lear of the Steppe ” can alone be matched with this tragic tale. What Shakspere does by enthralling lyrical music and imagery, Keller effects by the quiet continuous illumination of his transparent prose, where the story unfolds itself visibly before us. The exaltation of a love which annihilates all other emotions, memories and desires, stands out no less intensely from the background of commonplace when we watch this peasant boy and girl dance, oblivious of all around them, among the scoffing or envious couples in the village festival than when we pass from the chamber of Juliet to the clatter of the Capulet’s feast. And the horror-fraught death scene in the ghostly vault is not more steeped in poetry than the quiet consummation of the village tragedy, — the boat, on which they have found their last refuge, floating down the great river all night between its woods and sleeping villages. “ And in the chill of the autumn morning, two pale forms, in close embrace, glided from the dark hull into the cold waters.”
Of the lyric exaltation of the death of Romeo and J uliet there is nothing here; these peasant children have no splendour of phrase. But this quiet catastrophe, the
52 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
deliberately sought, foreseen, and inevitable solution of their story, has also a harmonious beauty and coherence which the tragedy in the Capulet vault, the result of mere accident and misunderstanding, less completely possesses.
III. THE INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY HISTORY.
( Continued).
THE INTELLECTUAL AND LITERARY HISTORY.
( Continued .)
Y.
Keller’s tale may help us, without too violent a transi¬ tion, to take a further step in our course. The love of Shakspere’s Romeo and Juliet blazes out, a sudden intense flame, at the moment of their first meeting; three days later they lie dead in each other’s arms. Why does Keller choose to bring his Romeo and Juliet before us first as little boy and girl, playing together in the meadow between their fathers’ farms P Why does he show us the shy first beginnings of passion, its fluctuating hopes and fears, its persistence through outward estrangement, and then the ecstatic heights of that last consummate day? Because he had what no Elizabethan had or could have, what few moderns had before the middle of the Eighteenth Century, a feeling for growth, for the simple unfolding of a passion, or of a soul.
It is easy to trace the fortunes of your hero from the cradle to the grave — -or at least to the altar, like the old romancers, or like Fielding in Tom Jones , without giving in any striking degree that feeling of continuity through change which Wordsworth so profoundly expressed in his saying : “ The child is father of the man.” The temper which seeks to penetrate and study these transformations is characteristically German ; and the word Entwicldung , “ unfolding,” is accordingly, like the word ursprunglich, saturated with German mentality. Long before Darwin
56 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
the conception had taken root in the German intellect, and exercised its powerful stimulus in every field of thought. Darwin’s book itself, though by no means German in its methods, was hailed in Germany with an acclamation singularly in contrast with the hubbub of angry protests which qualified the scientific welcome at home. In Germany Darwin confirmed deeply-rooted persuasions ; in England he seemed to cut at their roots.
To understand the ferment wrought by the idea of evolution in the German intellect, we must recall that in it met two lines of thought, which had been separately evolved and pursued by the advanced intellects of the Eighteenth Century, and both of extraordinary synthetic value.1 The one centred in the conception of progress, the other in the conception of organism. The conviction that there is in human society a movement towards an ideal goal, took the place, as the dogmatic theologies faded into the background, of the supernatural belief in a millen¬ nium. In Leibniz it appears as an optimist’s solution of the problem of evil ; the worse state is the necessary condi¬ tion of the better. In Lessing it appears in the guise of a divine “ education ” of the human race by a more and more complete disclosure of truth. In the French encyclo¬ paedists, especially in Turgot and in Condorcet, it grew out of the more positive study of political and social conditions prevalent in the mother country of sociology. Progress is here due wholly to man himself, the result of the steady labour of human intelligence, accumulated through suc¬ cessive generations.
But at the same time and sometimes by the same
1. Of the difficult subject attempted in the following paragraphs no connected account seems to exist. But much light is thrown on it by Mr. Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State, by Mr. Gooch’s chapter on historical methods at the close of the Cambridge Modern History, and by Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution ; from all of which this section, though independently worked out, has derived valuable hints.
The Intellectual and Literary History 57
thinkers another line of thought was being elaborated. To the new scientific age the State was a phenomenon needing explanation, reducible to scientific law. Montes¬ quieu, in the Esprit des Lois (1748), showed that its insti¬ tutions, its legislation, are the expression of its needs, and sought to account for the greatness and for the decline of Rome by an analysis of her outer and inner conditions. The idea of a social organism is already foreshadowed in the terms of an alien philosophy. A little later it struggles for expression through the obstruction not only of inadequate terms hut of radically inconsistent ideas, in the Contrat Social of Rousseau. More clearly, and not less eloquently than in either, it emerges in the great disciple of the one and the hitter enemy of the other, Edmund Burke. But nowhere was the organic concep¬ tion of the State more completely, more fatally, detached from the doctrine and the faith in progress than in this great mouthpiece of philosophic conservatism.
In the second half of the Eighteenth Century these ideas through several different channels began to permeate the German mind, setting up in it intellectual currents of amazing energy and fertility. For they here found, it is difficult not to recognise, not merely receptive intelligence, hut an ingrained way of apprehending reality to which organic conceptions were extraordinarily congenial. It was not for nothing that while in mathematical and mech¬ anical studies Germany still, at the end of the century, stood decidedly in the rear of France and England, she had anticipated both of them in absorbing and making her own the idealist and organic thought of Greece. The more mechanical conceptions of progress impressed her little ; the reactionary suggestions of organism appealed only to her reactionary minds; but on progress conceived as organic growth, and organism conceived as perpetual advance, all the idealistic passion of the race fastened as the congenial expression of its temper and its needs; and “ Entwicldung development, the term which denoted
58 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
that organic progress, became that key-word and that watchword which, under whatever change of interpreta¬ tion, it has ever since remained.
Even in the study of Nature, it was the more organic classes of phenomena which most powerfully allured the German intellect. Here, confessedly, philosophy, a cloudy pillar, led infant science into a wilderness of illu¬ sion. Nevertheless, its guidance was not wholly mischie¬ vous; its too spiritual interpretations of the mystery of growth stood in the way of too material ones, and however abortive as solutions of the problem, at least kept its real complexity in full view. Johannes Muller, “ the father of physiology,” was a Moses whom the cloudy pillar led to the verge of the Promised Land ; he furnished the premises from which the modern school of physiologists, in the words of one of its chiefs, merely drew the conclusions. It is no accident that while, as regards mathematics and physics, Germany merely took a brilliant, if tardy, share in the scientific activities of France and England, biology is, in Huxley’s words, “ a German science.” 1
Applied to the immeasurably more complex phenomena of Man, evolutionary conceptions had yet greater possi¬ bilities both of discovery and of illusion. The author of the most magnificent of these applications, Hegel, operated with a theory of evolution so uncompromisingly spiritual as gravely to prejudice the mass of pregnant thought and observation which his powerful and many- sided intellect threw out by the way. To resolve the entire growth of humanity into the unfolding, by inevitable steps, under infinite forms, of a timeless spirit, was to invest it with a totality both more impressive to the imagination and nearer to the rich concrete detail of history than had ever been approached before. The Ency-
1. Du Bois Reymond, quoted by Merz, Hist, of Thought in Nineteenth Century, i, 195. The decisive step in biology was made by Schleiden’s discovery of the cell-structure of plants in 1838.
The Intellectual and Literary History 59
clopsedist and Humanist cosmopolitanisms of the previous ago were too deeply imbued with somewhat abstract ideals of perfection to bo just to all the phases of the past; but in the plastic and Protean transformations of the Hegelian idea the clashing antagonisms of age and nation found a common shelter and a common significance, like that which belongs to the jarring thoughts of the same mind. The same Protean Idea brought into organic inter-relation apparently unconnected sides of civilisation, disclosing itself, variously disguised, in art, in religion, in science, in custom and institution, in the State. The logical mechanism of Hegel’s synthesis has long ago broken down ; the framework of his “ shelter” is sapped; but over large portions of his vast field his logic merely provided a clue to brilliant intuitions and solid discoveries, which remained when the clue was withdrawn. His sesthetics and his politics, in particular, are still to be reckoned with; and no one can mistake the part which they have played, respectively, in shaping two of the most striking English books of our generation : Mr. Bradley’s Shahsperean Tragedy and Mr. Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State. And of the pregnant ideas which emerged from his method itself, and the value of which is not neutral¬ ised by the ease with which this may be abused, these two may be specified : First, that relative worth and truth belong to every serious cause ; to opposed positions in poli¬ tics, to conflicting creeds in religion. And secondly, the profound conception that true growth involves a kind of death, the abnegation of a lower self that the higher may arise. The seed must perish as seed in order to survive as w'heat ; the child must lose its naive innocence before it can reach the genuine goodness which rests upon know¬ ledge and mastery of evil. But all that is valuable in the seed survives in the wheat, and all that is valuable in the innocence survives in the goodness ; and whatever tenacity has been shown in the Nineteenth Century, in regions far beyond the control of dogmatic theology, by the faith in
60 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
the permanence of spiritual values is due not a little to what a philosophic historian of quite another school has called the most magnificent attempt ever made to extend the law of the conservation of force and of worth to the spiritual sphere. 1 And this same historian, Hoffding, has since, in a remarkable book, declared the conservation of spiritual values to he the central problem of religion. 2
But more direct and on the whole more signal service was done to the idealism which finds expression in religion, by Hegel’s great contemporary Friedrich Schleiermacher. In the memorable kt Addresses on religion to the cultured among those who disdain it," delivered in 1799, he sought to reconcile the culture of his time with religion. But it was with a religion so transformed by philosophic think¬ ing, so enriched with cultural elements, and so boldly disengaged from the obstructions of dogma, that his claim was no longer difficult, from the side of culture, to admit, when he declared religion to be the central power which can alone give organic unity and harmony to all the complex activities of civilised man. To feel in all life the indwelling infinity, to consecrate every moment with the light of eternity, this was for him the secret which gives totality to life. It at least dissolved, for his genera¬ tion, the barren antagonism of reason and the super¬ natural. And by laying the essence of religion in feeling, and finding the worth of doctrinal conceptions simply in their capacity to symbolise emotion, a capacity they retain even when their claims to logical value have been shat¬ tered by criticism, he laid the foundation of a deeper than doctrinal unity in religion and in the Church. And every variety of religious thought in Germany, from the extremest Lutheran orthodoxy to the advanced criticism of a Strauss, has owed to the synthetic genius of Schleier¬ macher added intellectual substance and psychological truth .
1. Hoffding, Hist, of Modern Philosophy, ii, 181.
2. Ib., The Philosophy of Religion.
The Intellectual and Literary History 61
With the decay of the vast speculative systems of the early century, the organic conceptions which had played so large a part in them inevitably suffered some discredit. Had they been merely theoretic doctrines, entertained by the intellect, they would have been dismissed with other theories. But they attached themselves, as has been said, to something more inveterate than intellectual conviction ; and the way of apprehending fact for which they had pro¬ vided an alluring if not finally adequate formula, remained, subtly contributing to mould both the methods and the aims of the sciences which dealt with human society and human history. It contributed to keep before the eyes of the scholar and the investigator in these studies a scientific ideal, then, and perhaps still, far more habi¬ tually approached in Germany than elsewhere ; an ideal equally removed from matter-of-fact empiricism and from shallow generalisation. The empiricism which prides itself on sticking to facts and disdaining theory and which for better, or worse, makes many English books a jumble of unorganised observation, rests upon a no less elliptical view of reality than that of the doctrinaire, more common in France, who thinks in large formulas and brilliant apergus. The one treats the individual object of his scrutiny as an aggregate of loosely connected units, each of which can be completely studied in isolation. The other treats them as points in a rigid and symmetrical pattern, each completely determined when the whole is known. No one now imagines either of these implicit conceptions to be adequate to the rich complexity, the vital inter-related- ness, of human society, or of social growth. The concep¬ tion of society as an organism was doubtless, in its turn, too simple and too summary. None the less, the way of apprehending social and historic fact which grew up under the fertilising influence of organic ideas in Germany was at that time wholly salutary, and had immense and endur¬ ing results. The individual object was subjected to a
62 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
more intimate scrutiny than liad satisfied the empiricist, because it was seen not in isolation but in vital touch with the rest, reciprocally determining and determined. And this vital grasp of detail itself prepared the way for a pre¬ sentment of the character and coherence of a whole polity or period as clear as any achieved by the masters of generalisation : only it was the clearness not of the formula or a phrase, but of an expressive portrait, elicited by an infinitv of detailed strokes.
t j
It was more especially as applied to history that organic analogies thus bore fruit. They were not altogether true, but they drew into prominence the neglected part of the truth. History contains a good deal of mere accident, something even of sheer chaos ; but these aspects of it had been abundantly represented in the historical writing of the past : it was not amiss that it should be restudied in the light of a conviction that apparent chaos was cosmos in disguise; that every apparent new beginning was the climax of a long preparation, every revolution the simple disclosure of slowly accumulated forces ; and every feature, every activity, of a given social community vitally
interrelated with everv other. It was not amiss that “ the
«/
Renaissance,” for instance, should be pushed further and further back, till some modern scholars deny its very exist¬ ence, and others declare that it was there all the time. It was not amiss that the frontiers, the “ hard and fast lines ” as we say, that delimitate those old-established provinces — Ancient Times, Modern Times, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages — should dissolve under the stress of imperious continuities. What is certain is, that these assumptions, if not wholly true, were enormously fruitful in discovery. They impelled to a scrutiny of precisely those obscure rudi¬ ments of facts which being neither bits of an interesting story, nor details in a telling picture, escaped the atten¬ tions both of the chronicler and of the picturesque histo¬ rian, until at length the Grimm or the Savigny or the Niebuhr showed what they meant. The famous contro-
The Intellectual and Literary History 63
versy between Savigny and Thibaut 1 upon the nature and origin of law, like that between Geotfroy de Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier 2 about the classification of animals, was thus a conflict not merely between one doctrine and another, but between the spirit of history and the spirit of abstract theory; and the victory, enduring as well as immediate, went in both cases to the champion of evolution. Savigny’s demonstration that the Roman law was the prolonged growth of centuries, bearing everywhere the impress of Roman institutions and traditions, and not a mere applica¬ tion of the theory of Natural Right to practice, made an epoch in the intellectual history of Europe. The evolu¬ tionary conception of national life was one of the springs of the fuller consciousness and more intimate instinct of nationality which has in the Nineteenth Century pro¬ duced so many historical romances and so many changes in the map. Napoleon, trampling on nationality; Sir Waiter Scott, investing it with imaginative charm; Wil¬ helm von Humboldt interpreting national character through the national speech; Fichte, summoning the German nation to fulfil the destiny to which its history and spiritual heritage pointed ; — all these concurred : but it was in minds permeated with the evolutionary concep¬ tions of national growth brilliantly applied by Wolf and Eichhorn, by Savigny, by Grimm, by Boeckh, that the temper of German nationality took shape.
But a gulf, rarely passed, and still of formidable dimen-
1. The controversy was provoked by Thibaut’s demand for a civic code, constructed on the principles of Natural Law. Baron Carl v. Savigny replied with his pamphlet Vom Beruf unserer Zeit fwr Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (1814), restating the doctrine of Montesquieu that laws grow organically out of social conditions ; that the legislator’s task can then only be to sift and order the legislation already in existence. Cf. Paul, Gesch. d. germcinischen Phil., p. 65 (in his Grundriss ).
2. July, 1830, in the Paris academy. The fall of the Bourbons, which happened at the same moment, was for Goethe, as is well known, of quite secondary interest in comparison.
64 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
sions to-day, has always divided the great specialists of scholarship from the mass of the nation ; and the permeat¬ ing process was immensely furthered by a brilliant but learned literary mediator. No one probably did more to quicken the national consciousness of the generation which was about to create the empire than Gustav Freytag. The title of his most famous hook, “ Pictures from the German Past/’ does slight justice to its quality. It is, in fact, a biography of the German people, as reflected in the development of its customs and institutions, its beliefs and its ideals, its master spirits and its representative types. In the closing pages Freytag set forth with enthusiastic emphasis this idee mere of his hook. “ Like the indivi¬ dual man, the people evolves its intellectual content in the course of time, furthered or impeded, with character and originality, hut on a vaster and sublimer scale. A people consists of millions of individuals, and its life flows on through millions of souls; hut the co-operation, conscious and unconscious, of millions creates an intellectual content in which the individual’s share is often for us impercep¬ tible. . . . Religion, language, custom, law, polity, are for us no longer results of individual effort, but organic creations of a higher life, which always manifests itself through individuals, and always comprehends the intellec¬ tual contents of individuals in one mighty whole. . . . And while the individual calculates and chooses, the inner force of the people works continually with the obscure com¬ pulsion of an elemental power, and its intellectual pro¬ ducts often strikingly resemble the silently creative pro¬ cesses of Nature, which evolve the stalk, leaves, and blossoms of a plant from its seed.” 1 This conception is familiar enough to us to-day; but rarely has it been applied to the life of any nation with so vivid a sense of concrete facts. We watch the people in its daily course,
1. Freytag, Bilder aus der d. Vergangenhett. 2nd ed., 1860, p. 406f. In later editions this imagery was greatly qualified.
The Intellectual and Literary History 65
buying and selling, eating and drinking, fighting, and making love ; the journal of a Court lady, or of a sea cap¬ tain, makes us breathe the very air of the boudoir, or of the Baltic ; while ever and anon an incisive comment throws all this brilliant detail into its place in the total picture. Not even Carlyle understood more profoundly the supreme exaltations and agonies of nations. Untouched by Pro¬ testant fanaticism, he saw in Luther’s Reformation a colossal and impassive effort of the national soul to trans¬ form all life by a deep apprehension of the Eternal; an effort which calling out its utmost powers to the point of utter exhaustion, delayed for centuries its political concen¬ tration. Untouched by political absolutism, he saw in the militant and organised Prussia of the great Frederick the striving of a great people, torn by discord, towards the political unity which it finally received from Bismarck. Yet the figures of these heroes themselves, far from being overpowered by the background of national storm and stress, are drawn with the realistic precision of a Velas¬ quez; as has been said, you are inclined to brush away the snuff on Frederick’s waistcoat. As for Luther, you hear the very tones of his mighty voice, passionate, jesting, denouncing, heartening, and witness the inmost pulsing of his infantine-Titanie soul.
Few perhaps of the historians of a severer school who were Freytag’s contemporaries would have invoked that comparison of national life to a plant. Romanticism, which saw everywhere in history mysterious and instinc¬ tive process, had faded into the background ; and its repu¬ diation was hastened by the very advance in the national self-consciousness which it had done so much to further. The revolution, only outwardly suppressed, of forty-eight, began a new epoch. A people roused to its own import¬ ance, concerned to control, or to influence the control of, its own fortunes, loud with discussion of statesmen and of policies, and no longer inclined, with two of the greatest Germans of 1806, Goethe and Hegel, to turn away from a
E
66 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
supreme national crisis to metaphysics or to poetry, — for this Germany of the fifties and sixties, the instinctive and gradual processes of organic growth were no longer an obvious analogy. And the brilliant group of historians who emerge during these years, — a Droysen, a Mommsen, a von Sybel, a Treitschke, — exhibit this changed spirit in the energy of their political interests, in their acute, even passionate, participation in the problems of historic state¬ craft, not merely as involved in the scientific study of the past, but as of vital interest and relevance for the citizens of to-day. They sought, as one of them, v. Sybel, said in his famous lecture on the “ position of modern German historic writing ” (1856), they sought “ to judge the states¬ man according to the actual conditions of his art, and to measure this art always by the standard of human and eternal right.” 1 Yet with all this the influence of evolu¬ tionary conceptions persisted. The inner continuity and the inner coherence of the life of a nation were tacitly postulated. The Roman History of Mommsen (1854-6), the most brilliant single achievement of German historical writing, is a grandiose portrait of the Roman people, elicited with consummate skill from an infinity of details. Law and ritual, coinage and field-measuring, legends and superstitions, proverbs and personal anecdotes, become expressive signs of the immensely potent national life which ramified through these several organs, resisting with tenacity the intrusion of alien influence. Read, for instance, the luminous chapter in which he allows us to watch, as eye-witnesses, the lofty speculative philosophies of the Stoic and the Epicurean converting themselves help¬ lessly into vulgar superstition and vulgar luxury in the grip of a race which “speculated only in stocks.” Rome is not Mommsen’s hero; her portrait is Rembrandtesque,
1. Quoted by R. M. Meyer, Die deutsche Literatur dcs neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, p. 385. The present essay owes much incidental sugges¬ tion to this brilliant, if somewhat disproportioned, book.
The Intellectual and Literary History 67
with the shadows even fiercely underlined. His hero is the mighty statesman and soldier at whose fall he laid down his pen, as if “ there was nothing more significant beneath the wandering moon,” — “ the first, the only, imperator, Caesar.” But Caesar, the supreme Homan, was made possible by Rome.
When, three years after Mommsen’s great book, Fer¬ dinand Gregorovius issued the first volume of his History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1859), he was in some sense merely continuing Mommsen within a limited sphere. But he was in reality initiating a new kind of life-history, the history of the Town. That a Town has a biology of its own has been, since Freeman and Green, a familiar idea to us. But it was not in England, with its old-established central governments, that the idea was likely to arise ; and we know what the local history of our old antiquaries was like. Germany, on the other hand, with its crowd of quasi-independent cities, each in the main conditioned by its own habitat, thriving by its own stamina, ruined by its own decay, was the natural birth¬ place of Town-biology. Like so much else in the German Nineteenth Century, it is foreshadowed in Goethe.1 When he travelled among the old towns of the Rhineland or Suabia he would climb to some point of vantage from which he could look down on street and market place ; or wander round the walls, noting the quality of the masonry and the temper of the mortar, like Browning’s poet of Yalladolid. Out of such keen and loving interpretation grew the luminous and beautiful rendering of a little town in Hermann und Dorothea , — in its secluded side-valley near the Rhine, with its pleasant vineyards and fruit trees ; surely the first town in poetry whose economy we perfectly understand. That little town, where trading and farming go hand in hand, is the true starting-point not
1. Cf. his Reise in die Schweiz , 1797; the notes on Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Heilbronn, Stuttgart.
68 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
only of books like Gregorovius’s, whose eye for localities was as fine as Goethe’s own, but of such massive studies of the growth and structure of town governments, as the great Verfassungsgeschichte of Georg Waitz, the oldest and most distinguished pupil of Ranke.
But the field in which evolutionary conceptions were most fruitful was the history of ideas ; and of periods, like the Renaissance or the passage from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century, in which vast and complex trans¬ formations of thought and feeling impressed themselves deeply on civilised society. Here, once more, it is the union of consummate mastery of the facts with brilliant power of co-ordinating them, which made the finest German work of this kind unapproached until, after 1870, France, and more slowly England, began to learn the lesson. Such work was Zeller’s monumental history of Greek philosophy; such Kuno Fischer’s History of Euro¬ pean philosophy at large; such, the colossal study of cor¬ poration ( Genossenschaft ), in which Otto Gierke throws into luminous order the perplexed wilderness of the poli¬ tical ideas of mediaeval society.1 Such work, covering not a special province only but the whole compass of the intel¬ lectual and social culture of an age, was the finished masterpiece of Jakob Burckliardt : The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The last named, one of the most beautiful of the masterpieces of German erudition, was exactly contemporaneous with Buckle’s History of Civilisation (1859-62), a book of grandiose conception, characteristically English in its strength and in its weak¬ ness. Burckhardt makes no pretence to Buckle’s vast generalisations ; but he comprehends civilisation better because he comprehends man better; and while Buckle’s powerful analysis tends to reduce human history
1. A section of this great work was translated by Professor Maitland, under the title : Political Ideas of the Middle Ages, with a valuable introduction. The latter gives an illuminating account of the history of the study of law and of legal theory in modern Germany.
The Intellectual and Literary History 69
to a function of economics, Burckhardt reproduces the great age he handles, in all the teeming complexity of its ideals, its dreams, its business, its love, its hate, its glorious art, its crafty politics ; an age which had “ dis¬ covered the world ” and had “ discovered man,” and was intoxicated with the discovery ; for the doomed descendant of Adam was now seen to be a creature of infinite possi¬ bilities, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god. If Buckle was excessively pre-occupied with man as he eats and drinks, Burckhardt, far more just to all the con¬ stituents of civilisation, yet made it turn essentially upon what he thinks and feels. No one better exemplifies, in its most salutary effects, the operation of that third con¬ trolling bias of the German Nineteenth Century, which I have ventured to call the 'prestige of Mind.
YI.
We here enter the inner sanctuary, it is hardly hazar¬ dous to affirm, of the German spirit ; the scene of its most glorious dreams, of its most imperishable extravagances, of its most unassailable achievements. By the prestige of mind I mean that the value attached to thought as thought, to ideas as ideas, the estimate of their scope and potency, as elements of experience, is extraordinarily high ; and that the part which they in consequence have played in modern German civilisation is extraordinarily large. We speak, half ironically, of the people of thinkers, of the land of Bildung, and when we find their learning oppressive we like to remember that they evolve their camels from their inner consciousness. And this great and noble confidence in mind has inevitably had some drawbacks.
In art and literature the authority and the fascination of ideas and ideals have sometimes exercised a dangerous spell, impairing the willingness, and perhaps also the power, to see and to render with naked veracity the unideal
70 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
sides of life. Nature has not often, under such condi¬ tions, taken the pen from the hand of the German artist and written for him “ with her own sheer bare impene¬ trable power.” The great realism of Tolstoy, of Flaubert, of Dostoievsky, made little headway in Germany till the last quarter of the century. The gross, material humour of the Porter in Macbeth was long replaced on the German stage by Schiller’s lofty morning hymn.1 The healthy muscular animation of Fielding’s books, which provoked Tain© to the protest that if there are boxers and fighters there are also poets and artists, would have been a strange phenomenon in Germany.
Hardly any German had seen harsh and grinding misery as Hauptmann saw it in Die Weber, fewer still had dared to paint it ; even Hauptmann’s miserable homes are apt to have openings into a world of marvel and eternal beauty, where you hear the song of mountain elves or Hannele’s angel chorus. And as Hauptmann escapes from realism into folklore, so Auerbach half a century before tempered its harshness with the glamour of Spinozan wisdom which invests his little barefoot maid.
On the other hand, this kind of sensibility, this shrink¬ ing from the rawness of an atmosphere denuded of the perfume of culture and the zest of ideas, becomes a singular virtue when culture and ideas are the business in hand . And these are in fact a frequent pre-occupation of the German novel. Goethe in Wilhelm Meister had created the romance of culture; in the Wahlverivandt- schaften , the problem-romance. Keller, in whom the eye for the primitive and the elemental was associated with the finest artistic sense, produced in his Griine Heinrich an original and beautiful “ culture ” romance for his own generation. And Paul Heyse, inheriting Goethe’s fasti¬ dious aestheticism with more than his novelistic art, pro-
1. This morning hymn was provided by Schiller, in his adaptation of Macbeth for the German stage. Schiller has been the principal strong¬ hold of this somewhat shallow aestheticism in Germany.
The Intellectual and Literary History 71
duced a vast gallery of story, hardly matched for mastery of all the sources of noble and beautiful effect.
In the critical interpretation, again, of art and litera¬ ture the fascination of ideas has had a like twofold effect. It is hardly to be denied that a large body of German criti¬ cism has suffered from the fault of being too intellectual ; of fastening with absorbed interest upon whate , cr offers a problem, and neglecting, often with disdain, the critic’s primary task of defining an impression. “ JEsthetic criticism ” was for long a damning phrase on German lips. The Nemesis whereof is the comparative rarity of the highest quality of such criticism among the countrymen of Lessing and Goethe.
The work achieved, nevertheless, within its chosen sphere by the critical intellect of Germany, has been enor¬ mous, and much of it is of enduring value. The discovery and analysis of “ sources ” and of “ motives ” is virtually a German science. That vast proportion of the work of every artist which is made up of tradition, manner, imitative adaptation, this at least has been, in countless examples, explored and defined with inexhaustible patience and admirable precision. And if we miss the subtle phrase which seizes the last nuance of a particular aesthetic impression, the analysis of the aesthetic conscious¬ ness itself, has been pursued during the Nineteenth Cen¬ tury with enormous wealth of intellectual power. “ ^Esthetics,” too, is essentially, for better or worse, a German study.1
But these and other similarly implicit naive confessions of the faith in mind belong merely to the vestibule of the sublime temple of that faith, the Idealism of the successors of Kant. Germany is the home of philosophic idealism
1. In the recent literature of ^Esthetic theory a foremost place belongs to the work of Volkelt, System der sEsthetik and Msthetfrk des Tragischen. Among books of a more limited scope may be mentioned Viktor Hehn’s Gedanken iiber Goethe and W. Dilthey’s Bausteine einer /Esthetik, both of the highest distinction.
72 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
in the modern world, and for the reason that her people has for centuries been more persistently than any other haunted by the call of spirit. A brooding self-conscious¬ ness emerges early in their history; it glimmers in the stubborn individuality of the primitive tribesmen; in the passion for freedom, so finely blent in them with the joy of faithful service; in the mysticism which so early infused an intense personal note into the large abstractions of Catholic dogma. At the supreme moments of their history this self-consciousness reveals itself with astonishing effect ; it is an element of the greatness of their finest and choicest souls. In Wolfram von Eschenbach it appears as the child-like absorption in the goings-on of the soul which makes his Parsifal the first psychological romance; in Luther, as the passionate assertion of the power of the simplest soul to receive the divine grace ; in Leibniz, as the sense of something unique and irreducible in personality, which compelled him, against all the bias of his scientific genius, to except it from the reign of mechanical law, as a fragment of the infinite mind of God. A hundred years after Leibniz, the conflict with the mechanical theory of the universe which so long perplexed him was, for Ger¬ many, completely and triumphantly settled; in the words of a great German historian, Karl Lamprecht : “ The rationalistic conception of the soul as a blank surface receiving impressions from without was now replaced by that of an unfathomable ocean containing within itself hidden treasures and countless wonders; . . . the bars erected between man and the rest of creation were torn down; the universe was a living organism, and man’s part in it that of a free spiritual agency mysteriously connected with the sources of all life, and drawing from its inmost self the assurance of an ideal world underlying all reality.”
It was while struggling, with the help of Goethe and Eichte, towards such a faith, that Carlyle in Leith Walk defied the menacing summons of the Eternal No; it was
The Intellectual and Literary History 73
his final achievement of it that he affirmed in the Ever¬ lasting Yea.1
But for Carlyle the No, however successfully defied, was eternal; some irreducible reluctant stub remained in the universe, which spirit could only defeat, and not destroy. “ Do you believe in the devil now ? ” he asked Emerson as they paced the Strand at midnight. The magnificent faith of the German idealists was not content with these half¬ measures. The principle of their universe, whatever it was, had to annihilate, or else to penetrate and transform, everything not itself. Hegel, after all deductions one of the mightiest thinkers of all time, expelled unreason from existence in the name of absolute thought; Eichte, one of the noblest and most heroic, drove from the sphere of reality whatever did not bear the talisman of moral will. And in the doleful universe of Schopenhauer nothing is ultimately real but the striving of insatiable impulse, veiled by the glamour of illusive beauty. Again and again a like sublime assurance of mind and will asserts itself, if in less metaphysical accents. With the Romantics, to imagine and portray beauty was alone to truly live, and the world where men acted and toiled became a dim unhallowed vestibule of the studio, where they dreamed and painted. The genius of Wagner drew all the life of his time into the compass of his art, but only to proclaim that music was the explicit truth which life unconsciously embodied. And in Wagner’s most brilliant disciple and fiercest assailant, Friedrich Nietzsche, the prepossession of mind and will expanded into a passion for personality ; and state and church, law and order, crumbled under the tread of the godlike Uebermensch.
It is easy for the dispassionate onlooker to ridicule the fervour of these intellectual athletes who in their different ways make such havoc of our comfortable conventions about the world we live in. The practical-minded
1. Sartor Resartus, ii, chap. 7 and 9.
74 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
Englishman, half-convinced that after all the Germans do some things better, reflects with satisfaction that his rules of thumb, whatever their defects, at least never persuaded him that Being and not-Being are the same. And it is true, that up to a certain point, cool commonsense will always have the better of the impassioned and high-strung brain. The critic is more versatile than the artist, and listens with a smile to the battles of opposite schools, con¬ scious that he sees the good, and understands the error, of both. Yet who does not feel that impassioned concentra¬ tion gets, in the last resort, to the deeper truth about the whole matter? That, if it is profound and sincere, it even gets the better of its own initial limitations? And so, these seeming negations of the ordinary world con¬ tained, in reality, the promise of far-reaching transforma¬ tions of it. Every one of these soaring idealisms, which seem so like wanton indulgences of personal idiosyncrasies, proves to be charged with national and social thinking. Fichte was chaffingly styled the great Ego by the Weimar poets ; but after Jena it was the ideas of the great Ego, and not theirs, which became to the ruined nation the trumpet of a prophecy.
Fichte’s “ Addresses to the German Nation ” (1807), given in Berlin, almost under the eyes of the French gar¬ rison, resemble in their occasion those great outbursts of Milton’s Satan in the first stunning moment of the fall from Paradise: “What tho’ the field be lost? All is not lost.” But the resource in which Satan finds help, “the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield,” — that sublime yet blank and negative idealism, was not Fichte’s. What he turned to was the spiritual heritage of the German people. The sense of nationality, elsewhere so largely grounded upon stubborn egoisms and ancestral feud, was thus in Germany, as I said at the outset, to an amazing degree the creation of inspirations at once historic and ethical, the consciousness of fellowship among those who inherited the
The Intellectual and Literary History 75
German tongue, the consciousness of an ideal task which had to be achieved in and through the conditions of German life in the German land.
And so even Schopenhauer's egoism provided a sanc¬ tuary for weary humanity in the serenity of Art; even Nietzsche’s despotism of the “ Overman was but the necessary preliminary to the ideal Over-humanity, which he foresaw. The decay of the grandiose structures of idealism brought with it, no doubt, a decided decline in the prestige of mind. The vast development of the Natural Sciences after 1840 was both cause and conse¬ quence of a revival of mechanical conceptions. Materialism became in the ’50’s the ruling doctrine of the educated world. But nowhere was its sway so brief as in Germany. The study of mind was resumed on a lower plane, with more stringent methods ; psychology took the place of meta¬ physics, and psychology struck at the roots of materialism with yet more deadly effect. The famous book in which Friedrich Lange, in 1865, wrote its history reduced it henceforth, as a philosophical creed, to a merely historical significance. And the most striking feature in the development of the mental sciences during the remainder of the century is the steady growth in the scope of psycho¬ logy ; in other words, the expansion of the part allowed to mind as a factor in experience. The career of the great master of living psychologists, Wilhelm Wundt, which covers those forty years, has been the gradual development of a more psychical out of a more physiological point of view ; the senses count for less, the transforming and crea¬ tive energies of mind for more. No doubt this partial recovery of the prestige of mind was not in the same degree a recovery of the prestige of thought. On the contrary, the accent is now laid upon that element of mind which the whole temper of the age of Bismarck exultantly empha¬ sized, — upon will. Ideas had failed to fashion the German state in .1848, blood and iron and masterful will succeeded in 1871 ; and masterful will was for that genera-
76 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
tion the saving formula, the guiding clue, in politics, in history, in science. It spoke in the strident diatribes of the champion of Germanism Treitsclike; it spoke in the pregnant and impassioned poetry of Nietzsche; it spoke in the severe accents of the psychological laboratory, in the “ voluntarism ” of Wundt, which interpreted all the varied play of our perception as the result of subtle operations of desire. Yet this masterful will has never, in modern Germany, ventured to emancipate itself from thought. The autocratic Bismarckian state has some crying defects ; and its rigid frame is much better fitted to resist, than to assimilate, movements like social democracy which embody unfulfilled national needs. But that this autocratic will is inspired, even in the anomalies of its electoral law, even in the extravagances of its militarism, and directed by a powerful if incomplete social sense, and precise, if incom¬ plete, social ideas, is as little to be questioned as is the intellectual competence with which, proverbially, it is carried out. The administration of law, of education, the government of towns, the provision for poverty, disease, unemployment, may strike us as dictatorial or intrusive ; but can its worst intrusions compare with those still often perpetrated in our workhouses, sometimes even in our hospitals, by the triple alliance of ignorance, stupidity, and red-tape?
Let us beware of believing that Germany is less free than we in proportion as she is more controlled. Freedom, as ordinarily understood by us, is chiefly a negative idea, adequately conveyed in the assurance that we never will be slaves : German freedom is a positive and complex ideal, achieved by the individual in and through the organised state in which he plays his due part, and only fully enjoyed, as Goethe so finely said, when it is daily won. The indomitable personality of the primitive Teuton has lost nothing of its vigour or of its originality in the Germany of Fichte and of Bismarck. It has been the task, and in a great degree the achievement, of modern
The Intellectual and Literary History 77
Germany to reconcile the demand for the free development of individuality which was rooted in the deepest instincts of the race, with the needs of a many-sided and highly- organised civilisation. If Germany is to-day the greatest example of a scientifically administered state, it is also the country which has most deeply felt and fathomed and most highly prized, the life of the soul. If the nineteenth cen¬ tury is strewn with the wreckage of her sublime philo¬ sophies, if the race for wealth and luxury and power seems to absorb her more and more, it is still to Germany that we turn for an assurance that the thought which wanders through eternity and wrestles, however vainly, with the enigmas of the universe, is a permanent factor of civilisa¬ tion; aud through all the roar of her forges, and the clangour of her dockyards, the answer rings back clear.
IV.— THE ECONOMIC HISTORY
BY
E. C. K. GONNER, M.A.
THE ECONOMIC HISTORY.*
The Nineteenth. Century is remarkable for the great change experienced by many nations in their economic system. They pass from one system of organisation to another. New forces and methods tending to the more rapid development of new wants and to the more complete adaptation of means to satisfy wants take the place of old forces and methods which pursued their course under the restraining influence of slowly changing customs and of institutions which endured in substance even when modi¬ fied in form. The economic history of Germany, like the economic history of other European nations, records this common change, but in the case of Germany the change occurs under particular conditions which lend it distinc¬ tive features and introduce elements of difference into the development of that country as compared with other countries .
In the first place the change in economic conditions from the beginning to the close of the century is very marked, not so much perhaps by reason of the stage reached at the end as because at the beginning the country as compared with others was more completely under the sway of the past. Both in agriculture and in industry, methods neces¬ sitated by the needs and circumstances of the middle ages were still dominant.
In the second place, the critical period in the transition occurs late, a fact of great importance not only because it invests the recent growth with an appearance of startling
* Several of the points mentioned in this lecture are dealt with in great detail in “Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft,” by Werner Sombart. Another modern book well worth consulting is “Deutsche Politik,” by Ernst Hasse.
82 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
rapidity and magnitude but because the change, long deferred as it was, takes place when it does take place under particular and very potent influences. In reality, however, the causes of change had been long in progress. On different sides the new forces had been growing in strength, though their interaction and their consequent result had been retarded by circumstances in large measure political rather than economic. When these obstacles were removed the causes tending to a new growth came together, interacted and operated with great effect and suddenness.
In the third place, influences prominent at the time of transition call for notice, since to them must be ascribed many of the most characteristic features. The economic growth in Germany was singularly conscious. This was owing to twTo things. On the one hand it was late, thus following after similar alterations in other countries ; on the other hand it occurred at a time when the position and power of the state had attained unusual dimensions. Not only did the nation realise its needs, not only was it con¬ scious of the methods employed by other nations, but owing to the autocratic organisation of the country, and at that time, at any rate, an autocracy enthusiastically supported by the large body of opinion, it could act consciously and with some system. Further than that the state in its action had the experience of other nations to guide it. Their methods, when good, could be imitated; the mistakes involved in the working out of their methods could be avoided. There is one thing more. As the manufac¬ turing development of Germany was comparatively late, she came to the world’s market to find powerful competitors already present if not in possession. Foreign manufac¬ tures, indeed, were well established in the home markets, and against them the nascent industries struggled hard.
An account, even in brief outline, of the particular con¬ ditions affecting Germany at this period in her history would be incomplete without some allusion to the position
83
The Economic History
of agriculture in the ecenomic life. Owing to physical conditions, rural pursuits throughout the whole century were a dominant interest in very large regions. Their importance at the beginning is even less significant than at the end, when a third of the population were directly dependent on agriculture. To some extent Germany still is an Agrarian State. Its position in this respect is emphasized by the large number of people interested in landed property : with several million holdings agriculture means far more to the people of Germany than it can mean to the people of this country.
The various features to which allusion has been made will be the better realised both in their importance and their proportion if we turn for a short time to consider more in detail the course taken by the economic history of the century. Speaking broadly, that history may be divided into three periods; that of Preparation, that of Tentative Growth, and that of Conscious Development.
The first period comprises some forty years or more, stretching from the close of the eighteenth century into the forties .
Judged by a modern standard, the condition of the country was extremely backward. As yet the wave of change generated in other countries had produced little if any effect upon the economic life and occupations of the people. These latter in the main followed traditional lines associated with earlier ages. In agriculture, which formed the employment of the very great majority of the people, systems of common cultivation and of partial villeinage ruled. The agricultural community was the basis of cultivation and the manor in large measure the unit of administration. Though in Prussia the personal burdens borne by the peasants, whether free or in villein¬ age, had been relieved of much of their harshness during the reign of Frederick the Great, the system as a system had been defined and unified by his action, the needs of fhe kingdom and his desire for administrative regu-
84 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
larity leading liim to reorganize the semi-feudal system according to which the land was held. While in other German states conditions differed, in most the important features indicated above prevailed in some degree. Such systems, however they may be judged from other points of view, are essentially unprogressive. As was but natural, a system devised to meet the needs of a time when stability was the one essential, and when change, if it presented itself as a possibility, was fraught with peril, was eminently unfit for a time when change was essential and when the possibilities of more progressive farming were opening up. Again, under it labour was necessarily tied both to place and in grade. It could not move and it could not rise. So far, indeed, as Prussia was concerned, the obstacles to progress did not end there. The old division of land into demesne and that belonging to the tenants still remained, though in a somewhat altered form. Land was divided into three classes, noble land, peasant land, and burgher land, and in the hands of holders of tlieir respective classes the specific land was bound to remain. Land was not more free than labour. Such a system was not even justified by the comfort of the peasant and cultivating class. Travellers in England contrast the lot and intelligence of the peasantry in that country wfith those prevailing in their own North Germany, to the great advantage of England.
In industry, in like manner, customs and restrictions derived from mediaeval times controlled and confined life. Trade, other than that involved in local home life, was chiefly in the towns where guild regulations continued in force.
Moreover, the country was poor. So far as general agri¬ culture is concerned, it must be remembered that through¬ out a very large portion of Germany the soil is anything but rich. On the other hand, during the eighteenth century Germany, unlike England, had not reaped the advantages of a large and profitable trade. Its stock of capital was
85
The Economic History
not great, and what there had been, had suffered much from the devastating effects of the Napoleonic wars.
The causes operating to the detriment of the country, both at the time and during the first period, may be briefly summarised. Though improvement appears in certain directions, the growth of Germany is retarded both by poli¬ tical and economic circumstances.
In the first place, political difficulties hampered and embarrassed the country. It is true that during the first half of the century actual external danger by wTar was less, but on the other hand the disturbances due to political com¬ plications and to the revolutionary spirit in Europe created internal difficulties in the administration of the various states. At each important epoch these or the more im¬ portant of these shared in and suffered from the general unrest. Constitutional difficulties were recurrent and did much to unsettle administration.
In the second place, any great development, and espe¬ cially any great industrial development, could hardly be expected while the various states remained so wholly separated and thus lacking in unity for any important purpose. Even travelling was rendered difficult by the differences which existed between the various parts. This was still more the case with trade, which was hopelessly obstructed not only by the tariff barriers which hedged in each state, whether great or small, but also by differences in measures and money, and in customs and laws.
In the third place, owing to causes already dealt with above, the two great conditions of modern economic growth were lacking. On the one hand, there was no free supply of labour. The choice of occupation was restricted even where industries were plied in the town, while the large mass of the people were tied not only to agriculture but to particular places, at one time by law and when the law was relaxed by the habits engendered under the law and continuing even after its alteration. On the other hand,
86 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
capital was lacking*, and the new industrial movement above everything required capital.
Still change was in preparation. Of this, three illus¬ trations may be chosen.
Few measures of reform have been more influential for good and more obviously effective than those which are grouped together under the name of the Stein-Hardenberg reforms. These reforms embodied in the legislation of three dates, namely, 1807, 1811, and 1850, were concerned directly with alterations in the system of land holding and agrarian cultivation in Prussia. Their results, however, extended far beyond the sphere of landed property and agriculture, affecting, as they did, the body of labour throughout the kingdom. By them free exchange in land was established, such villeinage as existed was abolished, many rights com¬ muted, and common fields allotted. No doubt the rural population still remained subject to disabilities, many of which were defined and even emphasized by the law of 1854; but despite these, essential progress was achieved. Land could be employed with comparative freedom, while labour, if not completely freed while on the land, was free to move from the land and into new occupations where its freedom would be more complete. The record of the measures effecting this change is one of extraordinary interest, and deserves a more detailed account than can be given here. The results are what concern our purpose. Of these two stand out in bold relief. On the one hand, the way w^as opened to a reasonable and progressive system of cultivation. Individual rights supplied a motive for energy, while the relaxation of restrictions enabled the energetic cultivator to pursue his aim unhindered by the ignorance or indolence of those surrounding him. On the other hand, labour could escape from its fetters. Thus a new supply was created of the labour necessary to the development of the new industries.
Secondly, in 1834-5, the first Zollverein is formed by the union of Prussia, Bavaria, Wiirtemburg, Saxony, Baden,
The Economic History 87
Hess© Nassau, Thuringia, and Frankfurt, to b© strength¬ ened in a few years by th© accession of Brunswick and Hanover, and later still by that of the Mecklenburgs. While some degree of isolation still remained, the import¬ ance of the union cannot be over-estimated. Not only does it mark the first great step towards a politically united Germany — but in the economic sense it is a stride onwards in the progress which makes Germany one country. From that time German industry and German trade bear a new and a real meaning.
Thirdly, the foundations of the educational system were being laid with consequences to the economic position long delayed in their fulfilment, but to be realised when the time of active growth occurs and when Germany forces its way into the forefront of the manufacturing nations of the world.
At the moment, however, the effect of these changes was little apparent. Though not without immediate results, these results were but an imperfect measure of the change in progress. Tested by various standards Germany remained far behind the other countries in Western Europe, and in particular behind England. Though popu¬ lation had increased, the country was still sparsely peopled ; not only so, but the more or less uniform distribu¬ tion of the population in the various States exhibits a marked contrast to the condition at the end of the century and to the condition even then evident in England. Again, handwork was still a controlling factor in many branches of industry. In 1846, though there were nearly as many cotton looms in the factory as in the home, by far the greater number of the former were handlooms, while in the case of wool, home looms were more than double those in factories. In spinning the comparison was naturally even more striking, little wool and far less linen yarn being spun outside the home. Of those engaged in the textile weaving trade over 12 per cent, of those employed in wool
88 Germany in the Nineteenth Century
and over 80 per cent, of those employed in linen were partly engaged in agriculture.
The rich stores of minerals remained almost undis¬ turbed, a source of wealth and power for the future, hut of little practical use for the present. Even in 1860 the coal raised amounted to 12 million tons, while pig-iron only reached half a million.
Towns had, it is true, increased, hut they were small, and many if not most of them agricultural rather than industrial. In many cases barns and farm buildings stood in numbers among the houses. Two sets of figures will illustrate the position. Of the whole population, in 1850, under 30 per cent, lived in towns of all kinds whether rural or urban (2,000 inhabitants), whereas in 1900 over 54 per cent, were so resident; while in large towns, that is in towns with 50,000 inhabitants, in 1850, only 3'5 per cent, of the population were resident, a percentage which in 1900 was close on 22 per cent. (2T9). Taking occupa¬ tions, it has been estimated that in 1843, of all persons earning a livelihood, some 60 per cent, were employed in actual rural pursuits, a figure which has now fallen to 35 per cent.
While it is true, as has been pointed out already, that some start had been made in the direction of factory organisation, progress there had been slight. When it occurred, distress among the poorly paid home workers had been accentuated, with the result that the time was one of severe suffering; but this form of employment, soon to dominate in the future, was in its early infancy. Its development was abnormal to the general condition of the country, and was in part, at any rate, under instigations received from outside, the actual direction in many cases falling into the hands of enterprising Englishmen.
In general, Germany was a rural country and its indus¬ tries home industries. Its foreign trade was that of a country (about 1840) only just emerging from the grade in which exports were mainly raw products or partially
89
The Economic History
manufactured products of home growth, and imports wholly or nearly wholly of manufactured goods, with the addition of Eastern products as sugar, colfee, and silk. It produced from the laud more than it required; it was dependent on foreign nations for its supplies of such things as iron goods and cotton yarns. It was a poor country with very low wages and small incomes.
About the middle of the century a change passes over the scene. With the constitutional settlement after the stormy year of 1848, a new~ opportunity for peaceful industrial growth presents itself. Equally important was the sudden stimulus applied to trade and industry by the rising prices, which ensued in the gold discoveries. While this influ¬ ence was common to Europe, it was felt with peculiar force in Germany, which had just reached the stage when such an impetus was the one thing necessary to bring into action the various forces which had been gathering strength. Not only was the capital required but capital in a ready form.