IDEA OP LAW IX POETKY 703 



contradictory combination of qualities is visible in the characters of 

 many of the greatest Germans ; they are content that their bodies shall 

 never travel out of sight of their own hearth-smoke, if their souls have 

 freedom to soar through the Infinite. Luther, shaking the world from 

 his monastery, with his doctrine of Justification by Faith ; Kant 

 revolutionizing philosophy in his little provincial town, beyond whose 

 walls he rarely stirred ; both were true Germans. And hence it seems 

 to me quite natural that, when the Germans strive to express their 

 idea of the Universal in the sphere of creative imagination, they should 

 turn with the readiest sympathy to that one of the Fine Arts which 

 at once exerts the widest sway over the pure emotions, and is least 

 under the direction of Reason, least subject to the limitations of 

 plastic form; in other words, the German genius has closer affinities 

 with the Art of Music than with the Arts of Poetry and Painting. 



If, however, we look at the creative departments of Poetry, as 

 actually developed in Germany, we shall see how faithfully the 

 practice of the poets reflects the ideas of action proper to the 

 history of the German people. The political history of Germany 

 is the exact antithesis of the history of France, for while the prominent 

 feature of French history is an excessive centralization leading to 

 Absolutism, the character of German history is an excess of Individ- 

 ualism resulting in Anarchy. Until recently the Germans had 

 no political ideal of united action which could be reduced to prac- 

 tice. At a time when Spain, France, and England were all nations 

 with clearly defined interests and policies, Germany was a loose ag- 

 gregation of States, in which the old feudal, semi-tribal order was 

 still predominant; the Emperor being its impotent head, and against 

 that head all the other members, each in conflict with the other, being 

 in rebellion the Princes at war with their Sovereign, the Cities and 

 Knights with the Princes, the Peasantry with the Knights and the 

 Cities. From the midst of this caldron of chaos rose the Reformation, 

 and from the Reformation the Thirty Years' War. with its political 

 and spiritual divisions of Catholic against Protestant, and its fruits 

 of desolation, poverty, despair. When the wars were over, each petty 

 exhausted state settled down within its own limits, and began to culti- 

 vate civil arts in its own way, having cut itself off from the mediaeval 

 ideals of the Christian Republic, without having been able to a=>imi- 

 late the ideals of the modern Xation. 



Such was the state of politic? in Germany at the time when the 

 foundations of modern German literature were laid. The most char- 

 acteristic period of German Poetry i> the century between the Seven 

 Years' War and the French "Revolution of ISIS; and during that 

 period the most common complaint of German writers of genius is the 

 want of great central ideas of action to form a basis of national art. 

 Goethe, in his Diclr/ung unJ ~\Vtilir]/''it. describe? the prevailing condi- 



