thirty-seven years old when Frederick the Great died, and who lived through the whole flaming life of Napoleon, was scarcely more stirred by the political features of the time than though he had lived in Seringapatam. He was a superlatively great man, but he was as parochial in his politics as he was amateurish in his science, as he was a mixture of the coxcomb and the boor, in his love affairs. Lessing, who died in 1781, Klopstock, who died in 1803, Schiller, who died in 1805, Kant, who died in 1804, Hegel, who died in 1831, Fichte, who died in 1814, Wolf, who died in 1824, “Jean Paul” Friedrich Richter, who died in 1825, Voss, who died in 1826, Schelling, who died in 1854, the two Schlegels, August Wilhelm and Frederick, who died in 1845 and in 1829, Jacob Grimm, who died in 1863, Herder, Wieland, Kotzebue, what a list of names! What a blossoming of literary activity! But no one of them, these the leaders of thought in Germany, at the time when the world was approaching the birthday of democracy through pain and blood, no one of these was especially interested in politics.

There was theoretical writing about freedom. Heine mocked at his countrymen and at the world in general, and deified Napoleon, from his French mattress, on which he died, in 1856, only fifty-seven years old. Fichte ended a course of lectures on Duty, with the words: “This course of lectures is suspended till the end of the campaign. We shall resume if our country become free, or we shall have died to regain our liberty.” But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some of Voltaire’s literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed schooling in taste, if such were the opinions of her advisers. Such literary canons as these could only be accepted by minds long inured to provincial, literary, and social slavery.

Just as every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French literary men of that time.

Not even to-day has Germany escaped from this bondage. In Baden three words out of ten that you hear are French, and the German wherever he lives in Germany still invites you to Mittagessen at eight P. M. because he has no word in his own language for diner, and must still say anständiger or gebildeter Mensch for gentleman. To make the German even a German in speech and ideals and in independence has been a colossal task. One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of Germany even now, whether Herder’s caustic contempt, and Bismarck’s cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there.

Fichte’s lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself looked upon askance. The Schlegels spent a lifetime in giving Germany a translation of Shakespeare. Hegel wrote the last words of his philosophy to the sound of the guns at the battle of Jena. Goethe writes a paragraph about his meeting with Napoleon. Metternich, born three years before the American Revolution, and who died a year before the battle of Bull Run, declared: “The cause of all the trouble is the attempt of a small faction to introduce the sovereignty of the people under the guise of a representative system.”

If this was the attitude of the intellectual nobility of the time, what are we to suppose that Messrs. Muller and Schultze and Fischer and Kruger, the small shop-keepers and others of their ilk, and their friends thought? Even forty years later Friedrich Hebbel, in 1844, paid a visit to the Industrial Exposition in Paris. He writes in his diary: “Alle diese Dinge sind mir nicht allein gleichgültig; sic sind mir widerwärtig.” Germany had not awakened even then to any wide popular interest in the world that was doing things. As Voltaire phrased it, France ruled the land, England the sea, and Germany the clouds, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. This is the more worth noting, as giving a peg upon which to hang Germany’s astounding progress since that time. Even as late as Bismarck’s day he complained of the German: “It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Würtemberger, a Bavarian, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism.” The present ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: “The sluggishness shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety.” What kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long, disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in 1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a dreamer among them.

England was so nonchalantly free already, that the betting-book at White’s Club records that, “Lord Glengall bets Lord Yarmouth one hundred guineas to five that Buonaparte returns to Paris before Beau Brummel returns to London!” Burke and Pitt, and Fox and North, and Canning might look after politics; Hargreaves and Crompton would take care to keep English industries to the fore, and Watt, and the great canal-builder Brindley, would solve the problem of distributing coal; their lordships cracked their plovers’ eggs, unable to pronounce even the name of a single German town or philosopher, and showed their impartial interest, much as now they do, in contemporary history, by backing their opinions with guineas, with the odds on Caesar against the “Beau.”

Weimar was a sunny little corner where poetry and philosophy and literature were hatched, well out of reach of the political storms of the time. The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach with his tiny court, his Falstaffian army, his mint and his customs-houses, with his well-conducted theatre and his suite of littérateurs, was one of three hundred rulers in the Germany of that time.

The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon’s time, of Austria, Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or from Caesar’s victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.

This institution had no political power, was merely a theoretical political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states. This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon’s day it became a struggle between Prussia and Austria. Austria had only eight out of thirty-six million German population, while Prussia was practically entirely German, and Prussia used her army, politics, and commerce to gain control in Germany. Even to-day Austria-Hungary contains the most varied conglomeration of races of any nation in the world. Austria has 26,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 9,000,000 are Germans, 1,000,000 Italians and Rumanians, 6,000,000 Bohemians and Slovacs, 8,000,000 Poles and Ruthenians, 2,000,000 Slovenes and Croatians. Of the 19,000,000 of Hungary there are 9,000,000 Magyars, 2,000,000 Germans, 2,500,000