426 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



more practical interests were at work at the same time. 

 These were more intimately connected with the political 

 and social revolutions of the age. 



Quite a separate succession of thinkers arose in 

 France, and has continued there during the greater part 

 of the nineteenth century. We may with some propriety 

 characterise the difference of thought which ran through 

 the whole of their writings as compared with that which 

 animated the contemporaneous succession of German 

 thinkers and scholars by saying that the former was 



always brought history into connec- 

 tion with psychology, a study which 

 the metaphysical interest of the age 

 had pushed into the background 

 (see ante, vol. ii. p. 531 sqq. ). But 

 before leaving Herder we must note 

 that he was the pioneer in another 

 and most important branch of litera- 

 ture, which has given so much light 

 and so much interest to the early 

 history of living and bygone nation- 

 alities, and links the study of pre- 

 historic times with the most recent 

 and some of the most perfect crea- 

 tions of modern poetry, art, and 

 composition. Herder is truly the 

 centre of the researches into poetry 

 and song of the early peoples, and of 

 that stratum of a healthy popula- 

 tion which lives in immediate con- 

 tact with nature, and out of which 

 the higher, more intellectual, and 

 more cultivated classes always re- 

 cruit themselves. In his ' Stimmen 

 der Volker ' we find one of those 

 beautiful garlands of flowers and 

 gems to which Haym refers, and 

 which has been followed by in- 

 numerable subsequent collections, 

 and led to valuable discoveries and 

 the restoration and preservation 

 of legends and stories which would 

 otherwise have been forgotten. 

 The history of this unique product 

 in the classical literature of Ger- 



many forms an interesting and 

 romantic episode in Haym's work. 

 Some appreciative pages on it form 

 one of the finest passages in Prof. 

 C. E. Vaughan's volume on ' The 

 Romantic Revolt ' (vol. x. of Saints- 

 bury's " Periods of European Litera- 

 ture," 1907). This line of study, 

 among many others, but always 

 connected with them, occupied 

 Herder from his seventeenth year 

 (1761) up to the end, when he 

 published a translation of ' The 

 Cid.' It is interesting to note that 

 the Epics of Homer, the poetry of 

 Job, the lyrics of Shakespeare, the 

 ' Percy Ballads ' and, mirabile dictu, 

 the poems of Ossian in their early 

 German translations, first awakened 

 in Herder the idea of a collection 

 of primitive and original poetry, 

 turned him aside from learned criti- 

 cism, and induced him to follow 

 with undying interest the discovery, 

 at the end of the last years of his 

 life, of "the new world of oriental 

 poetry which Sir William Jones and 

 other scholars were just beginning 

 to lay open. In this direction he 

 may fairly claim to have prepared 

 the way for the Schlegels, . . . 

 and even to have cast the seed 

 which was ultimately to bear fruit 

 in Goethe's 'West-ostlicher Divan.'" 

 (Vaughan, p. 212.) 



