great danseuse Taglioni, which were then setting out on their triumphal progress through Europe. The chief representative of the reactionary spirit in Prussia, the Hofmarschall and future diplomatist, General Theodor Heinrich von Rochow, writes in May 1832 to von Nagler, the Postmaster-General: "She is to dance, consequently there is great rejoicing, and occupation in abundance.... Taglioni's mimetic grace has dispelled the threatening signs of the times."[6] The word occupation here is significant. The performance did not merely please, it occupied.[7]

As regards literature, the generation of that day luxuriated in an idolisation of the octogenarian Goethe, which accepted everything that the aged master wrote or said as wisdom, and beauty, and inspired poetry. All his life long he had had to struggle against hatred and misunderstanding; now the reverence for him verged on the ridiculous; in Berlin it verged on idiocy.[8] In Zelter's Letters to Goethe he writes, on the subject of the latter's Elpenor: "Posterity will not believe that the sun of our days beheld the forthcoming of such a work."[9] All those who had obstructed Goethe's path so long as his name still belonged to combatant literature, became his votaries from the moment that that name conveyed undisputed authority, and could be employed as a sort of Conservative and national emblem. Otherwise literature languished. The day of romantic poetical fancy was at an end—Raupach and Müllner ruled the stage, Clauren fiction. Light literature sank deeper and deeper into the slough of vulgarity and pruriency.

II

PHILOSOPHY AND REACTION

German philosophy, all the branches of which shot out vigorously after the flood of Romanticism had fertilised the ground with its deposit, at the same time changed colour. Through the unpropitiousness of circumstances, it became farther removed from reality than heretofore, though more closely bound up with existing conditions.

Hegel is the great example. In March 1819, Karl Sand murdered Kotzebue; on the 22nd of October of the preceding year, Hegel entered on his professorial duties at the University of Berlin. From the programme which he gave his audience in his opening address, it could be clearly deduced that Hegel's philosophy and the Prussian State in its existing form were closely connected; for the said philosophy was based on the omnipotence of the Idea, the State on the power of intelligence and culture. Of the fact that Prussia, allowing herself to be led by Austria, was at this very time proving false to her character and traditions by entering on a policy of spiritual and political reaction, no account was taken. Yet the Resolutions of Carlsbad were already drafted, and it was Prussia that took the initiative in issuing all the petty tyrannical regulations which soon placed the whole of Germany under police surveillance. But the sentimental politics of the students were as obnoxious to Hegel as sentimental philosophy; the Wartburg rendezvous was to him a piece of romantic foolery, and Sand's poniard-thrust an abomination. In the preface to the Philosophy of Right, the first and most important work he produced in Berlin, he not only condescended to defend the persecution of the demagogues, but demeaned himself by playing police agent, and denouncing his former colleague, Fries, to the Governments: "It is to be hoped that neither office nor title will serve as a talisman for principles destructive both of morality and public order." From this time onward