1912] on the Effects of the Thirty Years' War. 389 



classical and historical, and more especially scientific studies, helped 

 to stir the current, it remained languid for a long time. The day 

 seemed to have passed, although it was to dawn again, when Germany, 

 instead of barely keeping pace with the literary and scientific advance 

 of other nations, held a position of intellectual leadership, as she did 

 in the days when the currents of Renascence and Reformation joined 

 together. Under the direct influence of the War, which on the one 

 hand accustomed the Germans to a long and benumbing domination 

 of foreign influence, and on the other cut them off from ampler, 

 easier and kindly conditions of Ufe in which princes and cities vied 

 with one another in the endowment of art, learning and research, 

 there began an age of intellectual dependence. Not only do we 

 notice that many Germans— many of them under the pressure of 

 necessity — acquired the scholarship or other learning by which they 

 afterwards gained distinction in the great foreign centres of intel- 

 lectual activity ; but the same was the case in art, where in sculpture, 

 painting and architecture Germany sought its models in France and 

 Italy, and in music, the native art par exceUence, in which original 

 productivity seemed to have dried up. Most of all was it the case 

 in literature, in which the Germans passed through a century and a 

 half of bondage, first to classical examples, then to Italian, French 

 and Dutch and (in the eighteenth century) to English fashions. 

 And yet, while this state of things continued, and in its intellectual 

 life the country seemed more and more to depend upon wliat it could 

 borrow and assimilate from others, it was sinking more and more 

 into the narrow ways and ideas of an inland territory, shut up in its 

 own inherited conditions which the War had fastened down upon it, 

 while France, Holland and England were expanding their relations 

 into an ever-widening sphere, and stimulating and heightening in 

 the process the observing and reproducing powers of their sons. It 

 is this effect of the War which is perhaps the most familiar to us of 

 all, and it is this long period of dependence and pettiness in German 

 national life which German historians have justly regarded as a debt, 

 of which a large proportion was due to the memory of that long tale 

 of warfare and of woe. 



But while I repeat these truisms, I should add that the associa- 

 tion of the results in question with the great war, as distinct from 

 the general course of the national history, may again l)e carried too 

 far. The condition of dependence upon foreign nations into which 

 Germany fell for a long period of her history, and which she was not 

 to cast oft' till after experiences such as few other great nations have 

 undergone — this dependence was largely due to the war — to the 

 renewal which it witnessed of an intimate alliance between the 

 Austrian and Spanish branches of the house of Habsburg, to the long 

 protracted intervention of Sweden and the decisive one of France, and 

 to the relations in which those powers were left towards the Empire 

 bv the peace that concluded the war. Sweden was now a State in the 

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