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LECTURE II
THE GENERAL COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY FROM A PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW
LECTURE II
THE GENERAL COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY FROM A PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW
For some months now I have been in the midst of this nervous, rushing American life. From every side one is impressed by the sense of vastness, of incalculable possibilities. I have peered into new forms of historical existence, which, though I may not altogether comprehend them, have yet been suspected and vaguely felt. Still the effect of this vastness, the impression it makes upon the mind, was hardly dreamed of before I left Europe three months ago.
But I wish to speak to you of the old world, not of the new; and not simply of the passing things of this old world; rather of its recent progress won by strenuous effort in a particular field, that of historical science -— possibly also of some labor of my own in this field. It is with the greatest diffidence that I venture in this company of trained specialists to treat historical problems of the first importance to us all. But after all, Uhland's line holds good for every German, — " The brave Swabian knows no fear." And as for the historian there is always one recourse open to him if he would make himself more easily understood, the one that was originally his first weapon: he can examine his subject and begin to describe.
And so let me introduce to-day the problems of recent historical science, of which I shall speak again in later lectures, by telling you the story of my own people, from about 500 B.C. up to the present time. "The story of the German nation in one hour?" I hear you ask. Yes, in one hour. And it depends a little on the nature of the questions that will occupy us in a later lecture (taking it for granted that the venture can be made), how the story can he told in a single hour.
In the last centuries before, and the first after, the birth of Christ we meet with the Germans, for the most part our common ancestors, in a psychic condition which on closer view is very amazing to us of later growth. Their imagination, to begin with this most symptomatic of all psychic functions, rich in accordance with the output of their strength, does not show itself in any poem, any drama, any musical composition, any piece of sculpture or painting. And yet it is active in the highest degree. It- includes, at bottom, all the above-named kinds of imaginative activity at one and the same time; there was no song that was not accompanied by gesticulation and plastic pose of the body, as by a musical handling of language; no solemn function that did not take a poetically musical form; no creation of plastic art in which mimic motifs suggesting speech and modulation had not made themselves felt. With this universality of imaginative activity, its forms of expression are of course always accompanied by all the lofty elements of existence; as, for instance, birth, betrothal, marriage, death ; the primitive economic life of the household, — of justice, morality,— the changes of nature in spring and autumn and the feelings they call forth ; above all, in the great festivals of intercourse with the gods. " Here were the gods themselves accounted as present on solemn occasions; they were greeted with joy and escorted to the villages and the dwellings of the people; they were offered hospitality and accompanied on their way. Sometimes a youth, sometimes a maid, was deemed worthy of the honor of representing in human form the super-hnman ; and where they fell short of such bold materialization, they at least led forth in solemn procession animals dedicated to the gods. The divinity was received with high honors when for the exercise of his divine calling on earth he became visible to human sense. Who has not heard of the chariot of the god of plenty, Nerthus, which, drawn by kinc, went through the land in spring to take possession of the newly awakened earth ? At every fresh landmark there greeted him the solemn procession of husbandmen, and to the accompaniment of rhythmic movements were attuned the songs of praise and gladness." 1
What was the underlying element of this wonderful psychic attitude, of this primitive unity of imagination, — which, though occasionally interrupted, was yet appearing everywhere, — with its influence evident in all phases of existence ?
1 K. Lamprecht, " German History, " Vol. I, 8d. ed., 1902, p. 177. To this period, to the Germans of the little tribal communities, of which there were about a hundred in the nation, to the warrior who lived contentedly in the setting made by the natural organization of his race, and in the fulfilment chielly of genealogic duties, — to him the world was not yet something conceivable, capable of portrayal, but only such as he saw before him, and hence the image of it in his mind was simple, palpable. No matter what important affair of life had to be dealt with psychically, it was not described in definite terms and made fast by convictions. It was reproduced allegorically, and its meaning repeated in psychic functions which expressed it externally by means of symbols. Let us describe otherwise this condition so foreign to our comprehension and therefore not easily accessible. The mental scaffolding of any sort of idea, or any sort of volition, was at once personified in a significant action, and appeared symbolized in the forms of an imaginative activity whose influence was as yet little refracted in rays. Thus intuition and thought coincided, and mental culture, the psychic existence of the time, took a symbolic form. Symbolism, therefore, in the sense just described, is the true mark, the characteristic peculiarity of these earlier periods of history. To this, as to all central phenomena, all single psychic activities are subordinate: thinking resolved itself into analogous conclusion, the proper intellectual function of symbolism; volition found expression in transactions before the court and the community, in the forrn of an elaborately developed symbolic jurisprudence; lastly, the emotions in their most exalted form, religion, put their stamp on the forms of the intuitive philosophy just described. And as the main functions, so were its derivations symbolic in their most important and permanent developments, — language, art, philosophy, morals, and customs. Legal symbolism took hold of morals; indeed, the latter was completely controlled by it. Philosophy melted into mythology, which transformed the most important phenomena of nature and human life into a world of gods, who lived behind these phenomena, creating and guiding them, — an exalted type of visible reality. Art, limited to simple cloth patterns, was made to express that element of the world of phenomena which, earliest of all, took shape in the minds of men,— rhythm, movement; and in moments of conscious exaltation, language fell in with this rhythmic usage in its peculiar Germanic fashion, by an interweaving of the parts, and by a heavy stress not so much on the beautiful in form as on significance of the contents.
Therefore, however difficult it may be to distinguish from among the meagre information of this time the earlier and later tendencies of development, there existed a great unity of the psychic life. And we can see how it finds expression in a particular personal ideal, whose acta in turn reacted powerfully upon the general thought of the community. In this world of symbolic life the individual vanishes ; he becomes at once the actor in a universal psychic life, becomes part of the whole, a coequal member of a community side by side with others of the same standing.
It is, in fact, What distinguishes the external Germanic culture, We see the nation without a bond that could hold it together politically become divided into a great number of tribal communities, — of clans. The approach toward intellectual equality of individuals brought no tendency to a closer union of the whole, as is certainly required by a division of labor and by labor unions ; and this was favorable to a differentiation of individual activities in the later stages of culture. Still, the tribal communities turn out to be not simple but complicated formations. They consist in a number of hundreds; and in these the German actually lived. And the hundreds bear distinctly a genealogic character, are at bottom great families or clans. In the family, therefore, is the German quite at home ; it encircles him with its uninterrupted life, and within this he is accounted only a specimen, not an individual; he is subject to the system of blood vengeance with the psychic point of view which puts every individual on exactly the same level; in his personal preferences, in friendship and enmity, he is bound by the bonds of family life; he appears to the outsider, and according to our views also in purely personal matters, as if he were interchangeable with any of his equals, as if he were but a function.
And this contraction, or rather almost complete negation, of what we call personality, in the natural division of the family, shows the manner in which the individual can be made use of in the building up of a state, in the constitution of the tribal community. The state is the army, and citizenship is comradeship, — comradeship in the sense of complete subjection to the whole ; in the sense of an almost complete loss of personality even for the prominent hero.
Upon this comrade-like and natural connection is based the most modern of all these institutions- the home of an agricultural unit.
According to families and hundreds land is apportioned out as booty among comrades ; hence the form taken by primitive farming strongly resftmbles communism. After all these impressions, can we wonder that the Romans thought the Germans in appearance scarcely distinguishable from each other, with great similarity of physiognomy ? that their greatest ethnographer, Tacitus, founded on this similarity in outward appearance the definite statement of a " gens propria et sincera et tantum sui similis " ?
But two or three centuries after Tacitus this little world was set in motion not only externally, but psychically. And five to six centuries later we find a markedly new psychic attitude, which lasts on into the eleventh century, and which is distinguished from the earlier in all respects, — a radical distinction. What did not the migration of nations mean for the German ? The breaking up of an old, the opening up, if not at once constructing, of a new world. The German language still bears in its broadest features, in the adoption of expressions for a better management in house and garden, in meat and drink, the ineradicable traces of the influences which emanated from the satiated culture of the empire into whose long-cherished peace the Germans burst with destruction in their hands. But side by side with these more common and even to-day occasionally controllable results, appear a countless number of the finer influences, perhaps on that account the more effectual in their operation on the Germanic soul. Prom the sad moral and intellectual conditions in the Merovingian kingdom, as in the Germanic dominions on the Mediterranean, we see that in the first place an almost complete dissociation of the psyche took place. What had been ordered and was pleasing in the eyes of the Lord came to naught. What had been significant with transcendentally symbolic conceptions passed away. Like a rushing flood carrying ruin upon ruin with it, the fierce waves of a foreign culture burst in, destroying what existed; these are far from being easily controlled and brought within new spheres of restraint. Only very gradually a new element eliminated itself and quiet is restored. And there appears above the floods of this older culture now vanishing, and finally oozing away altogether, a new world, a type not essentially Roman, but a derived Germanic culture brought up to a higher level.
Let us view this new culture a little more closely. The older age had known as its chief signs of imaginative activity, and at the same time, artistic reproduction of the physical and psychic world of phenomena, the dirge and embroidery. In the dirge they celebrated the deeds of the heroes by giving expression, mimic, musical, and poetic, to their feelings, as Tacitus reports of Armenius, " canitur adhuc bar-baras apud gentes." In the embroidery they had seized and held fast in the field of plastic art the rhythmic motifs of movement. In the place of these forms of imaginative activity we see, since the migration of nations, other forms appear and. flourish in certain internal changes down to the eleventh century, — the epic and the so-called symbolic decorative style. The oldest form of the epic is the heroic song, of which we have one still preserved in the " Ilildebrandslied," from the pre-renaissance, the ninth century, a tale of the great deeds of a hero, recited with voices uplifted and accompanied by gesticulations, a tale brief, terse, and almost dramatic in form. Such a form could only have developed in the time of the migration; the oldest names belong to the migration, the bearers of which are known to us in abundant tradition. But since the eighth, if not the seventh, century this form, already decaying, yields to another, the legend-song, which tells of gi-eat men and bold deeds, but with loving minuteness of detail in later times, not seldom with almost the precision of anecdote — very near in its whole conception to reality, which it reflects poetically. This is a form which flourished in the last centuries of the age with which we are now concerned, the height of its development being reached about the year 900 a.d. Later there arises the tendency to become more circumstantial; it is marked by a taste for animal-lore, and ends on the one side in the realistic rime chronicle devoted to the handling of the present, on the other in the jest-poem of the thirteenth century, as characterized by Gottfried Hagen's " Book of the Town of Cologne," and, though in Latin, by " Discourses on Marvels " by Casarius von Heisterbach, as also by the thousand legends of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
This development of the epic runs parallel in plastic art with that of symbolic decoration. Here we see how the embroidery pattern of the former age gradually took on animal shapes till snakes, quadrupeds, and birds come to be represented, though very much distorted in movement.
And then we can observe how, out of the transition forms, the animal gradually emerges and becomes plain to us ; in the beginning they appear only in general outlines, typical, however, in a positive sense of the word, so that quadruped and bird and fish — but not special families of these species — may be distinguished. But after the seventh and eighth centuries, as if bursting out of a protecting husk, certain types emerge from these representations of universal kinds ; out of the quadruped, a dog or a deer ; out of the bird, a goose or an eagle. Even these were by no means conceived realistically, as one would be led to expect from the heraldic designs of the age. Faint traces of something new appear, which, in the course of the tenth century, blossom out into a glorious art, — plant decoration. The typical rendering of the moving animal is followed by that of the immovable, — the vegetable ; again we note the general forms, so that leaf and stalk, though not of a particular species of. tree or plant, become recognizable, whereas the actuating motif of the decoration of the preceding age finds expression in the most graceful, wavelike movements of branches and twigs. Here also, in the course of the eleventh century, a more pronoivnced individualization sets in. Tree, bush, and plant, weedlike and slender up-springing forms, can be distinguished, till, in a time closely following, even flowers and trees — and amongst the trees, oaks and birches — stand out; the taste of the time finally rises high enough to choose for the tone of the object represented the local color rather than one taken at random, vivid and garish, and which in animal decorative work advances to the proportionally marked realism of the present-day heraldic figures.
One recognizes at once in how nearly parallel courses plastic art and poetry have developed, which, indeed, in these centuries were represented within the national development only by epic and decorative art. To one of the first periods of heroic song and animal decoration, there followed a second of the legendary lay and plant ornament, and the feature uniting them is that of an increasing nearness to reality, even when, at the close of the whole age, they first succeed in reproducing the symbols of the world of phenomena rather than that of individuals.
But is this feature not the same that distinguishes the whole imaginative activity of the new period from that of the preceding, prehistoric, Germanic age, except that the dividing line between the time before and after the migration is more marked than that of the seventh to the ninth century? For if the artistic conception of the world of facts had not advanced, even as far as to represent roughly the animal in motion, could it master anything besides the motif for movement in itself ?
We have a fair example of this when a child, before the age at which he reproduces man and beast, draws with the pencil nothing but representations of movement, the strokes which are due to the unconscious, rhythmic guidance of his hand, and yet characterizes them as certain definite animals, — cats, dogs, horses, etc. If the reproduction of the psychic world be not advanced to the point of narration, must not this appear in the symbolic recital of the feelings of the hero, and in the pathetic reproduction of these feelings by means of the dirge ? It was the correspondence of these feelings with the representation, that characterized primitive symbolism, just as the correspondence of visible movement, with the personal rhythm of the artist, belongs to this time. The following age, which we may now call that of symbolism, brings the resolving of feelings and movements into a shape of which the essence and kind appear in general outlines; it gives us the epic and decorative art. With these observations, rather minute and detailed, we have recognized at once the fundamental difference of the earlier and later periods. The prehistoric ages embraced centuries of unconscious living in and with nature, whether it be the nature of the external physical life of phenomena, or the inward stirrings of the psyche. In the later ages man begins to give forth from himself these phenomena in a slow dawning of consciousness, he begins to appreciate them as objective facts given from out of the ego, and starting from this appreciation he learns to dominate them as an objective. This is a stage in the evolutionary process which has come in the course of German development, and the single phases of which form the period of the more strictly national growth.
But was the prehistoric age really so entirely unconscious of the nature of things and of the psyche? Is its separation from later ages absolute ? All historical experience forces us to answer these questions in the negative. If we could know the conditions of still earlier ages of Germanic life than the so-called prehistoric age, we should find that there was an even greater unconsciousness of certain aspects of things, and it is only in its character as the earliest known period that the prehistoric age appears absolute, — from which we have to calculate as with a given thing that cannot be further resolved into parts.
If we return to the period of the third to the eleventh century, to the age of symbolism, a more careful scrutiny shows that all further phenomena of this time, internal and external, depend on the character of the psychic essence as we have known it hitherto.
Is there need now to say that persons and things lived and behaved after the very simplest fashion ? The statesman and warrior was a hero first, according to the ideal of the oldest epic song, and later, according to the demands of tradition and the art of poetry. The Teuton, just becoming the German, begins to appear as a type and to recognize himself as belonging to a peculiar race, at the same time plastic art had advanced to the complete reproduction of organic types. And these are the poles, hero and nation, within which developed the political history of the period treated, — a development and vitalization of psychic qualities which are never understood without a deep knowledge of historical culture. Hence at the time of the self-recognition, since the beginning of the ninth century, say, the Romance and Germanic nations begin to grow up independently, each drawing sustenance from the great Caro-lingian power. Political history resounds again with heroic deeds and heroic song; diplomatic transactions bear the impress of the personal relation between hero and hero; the relations of the Papacy to Charlemagne are regulated by the promises of the Carolingian monarch that he would always continue loyal to St. Peter, and the traditions of the foreign policy of this time would have become epic in form if the Church, in. keeping with the idea of Catholio. succession, had not turned men's attention toward the work of the annalist. For what do we learn of Charlemagne through the national epic ? Campaigns against the heathen and the Moslem, expeditions to Jerusalem, and a thousand other things which tradition, in so far as it corresponds to reality, rather surrounds with numberless illusive suggestions, than expresses in plain words. But between the individual and the national commonwealth, when it is, for the first time, built up from internal forces, even though weakly propped, there appear a thousand forms of activity that plainly show the coming in of a new period to succeed that of symbolism. The individual breaks the bonds of tutelage, if not of the family, at least of the clan; he gains more freedom, though, according to our view, he is still subordinate to the old influence to a marked degree. He begins, however, to manage for himself economically, in an organization which bears the stamp of communistic and clannish domination ; in political matters he is freer still. The state of the old tribal community with its close military comradeship exists no longer; it has given place to a more exLended state-system. And over this there stretches, at least in the last centuries of this period, the one great national state. This new and greater state is not, properly speaking, a creation of the people out of their own resources, but a formation which is due in large measure to admiration for the splendor of the Koman Empire, therefore it takes the name of an empire, and its great head surrounds himself with all the known forms and ceremonies of the departed Caesars, which is the reason it could never be of lasting benefit to the people living under it. Yet the emperor succeeded in buttressing up this state by winning to its support the one growing nation it embraced, so that it outlived even the times of symbolism. It was characteristic of this period that moral standards were still determined by the earlier notions of restraint, though to moderns they might appear free enough ; it was possible, therefore, to found upon this primitive morality an enduring relationship between the state and the nation : it was the principle of loyalty so characteristic of the Germans. Out of this grew feudalism, that unique system which depended so much upon the sense of devotion to one's superior — a system which proved to be one of the most enduring known to European history.
The period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries brought a tremendous social change; from early medievalism we pass to late mediaevalism,. out of the age of the typical to the conventional psychic life.
Would this new period which continues on into the fifteenth century appear in the light of a mass-psychological treatment (which deals radically and comprehensively with the narrower range of German history) as a period equally well defined and distinguished by real force and breadth of inner human interest; with that of symbolism ?
One may well doubt it, for a survey of German history leaves the question open whether these centuries are not to be considered as a last epoch, a transition period from the age of types to that of individualism, embracing the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Be that as it may, in German history this period is so full of life and so crowded with activity, that from the artistic point of view it would in any case be advisable to consider it by itself.
In order to come to a better understanding of the period, it would be well in this instance not to start with the statement of the psychic core of the new time, but with matters of its more external, economic, and political nature. Thus two great series of events demand our attention : one of which reaches back into the period just discussed — the development of territorial rule; the other is that of the early city life and conditions.
The first settlement of the Germans was in homesteads and villages ; peasant conditions were everywhere quite similar even to the extent of an almost equal distribution of the land, and thus things remained for a long period. But during the rule of the later Merovingians there began the breaking up of this comparatively fixed condition. There arose an aristocracy of great landowners, far superior to the great mass of average owners; and to be a large landowner was to be at the same time a territorial ruler; because for uniform cultivation of great tracts of land a rational economic life is necessary, which can only be reached by the employment of capital, which first makes its appearance in the higher stages of civilization. Great landed estates at the period now under consideration could only be made to pay by farming out the land to others. But these others, before the day of fairly plentiful capital, could not become independent fanners under contract of periodic payment for the land in use, but must meet their obligations by serving in person and paying in kind. Hence came their personal dependence on the lord of the soil, and, in consequence, their political standing became that of the serf. The development was not that of great landownership and subletting, but of territorial lordships and serfdom.
It was a process that had vast psychic consequences. A social change began to take place, in the course of which the favored lord of the soil had leisure to take up intellectual pursuits, to live more intensely from the psychic point of view. It was a state of things which embraced at least a part of the clerical landowners, above all, the monasteries, say, from the ninth and tenth centuries on.
And this movement runs parallel with, and was alike cause and result of, a genuine acceptance of Christianity. How extraordinary had been those earliest stirrings of Christian piety : a spirit of asceticism expressed in the strangest castigations of the flesh and a faith in the miraculous which, limited by no consciousness of causality, thought it could remove mountains ! And yet how mighty were the results of this spiritual current! It burst forth similarly in France and Italy and swelled the tide of living waters on the waves of which the awakening lust of dominion of the popes of the eleventh century was borne onward till it exceeded in importance that of the old western primate of the Roman curia. Then Gregory VII, with wonderful political foresight, formulated the programme of this power, and making use of the reform movement which had spread in the meantime, raised it, especially in Germany, with heavy pressure on the temporal powers to be the acknowledged system of the Church.
During this time a change had taken place in the domain of territorial supremacy and serfdom ; and this gave a political basis to a new intellectual life. The landlords had not been content with developing under their control a uniform class of farming sub-tenants. With the serfs bound to them by the obligations of service, they had classified these duties in grades and in this way set going a new movement. Hence there arose above the inferior cultivators a caste of superiors pledged to military service, who kept aloof from the lower order, strove to form a degree of nobilit in vassalage, gradually developing the ideal of the horseman, the military retainer. These are the good times of the rise of Ministerialism, the golden age of the first Stauffer period, when a Frederick I, with the help of his vassals, subjected northern Italy financially, and a Henry VI, with the same help, found himself able to rule over southern Italy and Sicily. But at a critical moment of German political history, when full of hastily formed plans for a campaign in the East and for the founding of imperial power along the Mediterranean, he died in the prime of life, to the great sorrow of the nation.
These were all events which must have aroused the great masses of the people and given them new conceptions of things ; above all, the Ministerials. What could seem unattainable when vassals of the empire, whose children received the Emperor's permission to marry, might become counts, princes, and dukes in the new wonderland, Italy ? All life had apparently become an adventure, and the more so because in the process of the development of territorial rule, even the subordinate peasants grew to be economically independent and responsible beings. And out of the villages of the fatherland thousands and thousands of the youngest and best suited for colonizing purposes were sent into the East, into the countries beyond the Elbe, and along the Danube, to found that new Germany which composes two-fifths of the national possessions of the present time.
These are events which followed each other in rapid succession- Having an agrarian basis, they were at once the forerunners of a last purely agrarian culture, the culture of the days of chivalry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
But these were not the exclusive tendencies of the time. Side by side with them other equally important events were occurring, out of which a primitive financial system, an early Burgertum, an early town culture, arose. It is impossible to show here in detail in what manner this second series of developments took shape, because almost every one of the known or supposed events has been variously described and estimated. To enter into a criticism of these statements and judgments would mean a reversal of the entire economy of these lectures, even if the remarks could be kept quite general. In such a case, moreover, our present conclusions would have to be tested by scrutinizing comparison with the results of careful investigation in similar fields outside the sphere of Western Europe, which, so far as the Germans are concerned, has not been done. So that in this connection it may suffice to say that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the towns had been by no means unimportant in mutual reaction with the above-mentioned changes of territorial rule, which had permitted a surplus to be produced, and so led the way to a primitive formation of capital. These towns, with their early patriciate, with their commercial guilds and industrial unions, arose as a noticeable element of new national life, and in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries developed for the first time a really middle-class culture.
If at this juncture we review the results of the great economic and political events of the new period, they can be summed up in the two words, chivalry and bourgeoisie. But who, at the sound of these words, will not think at once of the great intellectual value associated with them ? Here, on the one side, we have the times of knight-errantry and armed bands equipped for gallant adventure; on the other, resound the songs of Walther von der Vogehweide, — songs which tell of German customs and of the kingdom's pitiable plight; we have again the graver lines of "Wolfram von Eschenbach; and Hartmann von Aum tells his tale with the flowing ease and grace of his wonderfully adaptive rhythmic measure. And the ideas thus made known to us in lyric and epic poetry, and which serve a many-sided didactic purpose, also find expression in plastic art. In miniatures we are shown the knight and the lady in the gracefully conventional pose of the time, — a mass of delicate lines of beautifully falling drapery enfolding the form, which with all its power seems born for self-abnegation. And from lofty pedestals there look down upon us statues telling of a satiated existence, as, for instance, in those of the choir of Naumburg Cathedral of the later years of the period of love-minstrelsy, no longer adorned with the conventional smile alone, but rather showing the slight beginnings of portraiture, — already tending toward a more realistic expression. It is at once the period of clumsiness and grace, the latter becoming in the end the permanent element which marked the Romanesque (transition) style in architecture. With it came the decoratiye principle already strongly felt; e.g. the heraldic lion and the wreath of rue, from which sprang the virginal Gothic style, with its delicate features of early purely naturalistic decoration in imitation of the lesser plant forms. This period is followed by another not less important,— that of the early bourgeoisie. The town families gradually free themselves from the influences of chivalry which at first held them fast. Gottfried von Strassburg ceases to sing in his amorously frivolous way; the poetic prose of a pious mysticism resounds yet louder. For the old pietism of a formal asceticism, the religious fashion of the tenth and eleventh centuries, is past. It was superseded by contemplation and a belief in the working of miracles by human agency. So that a higher and final form of Gebundenheit gains sway; in a rapture of self-abnegation the soul tries to approach into the presence of God. Still the cares of this world remain as before, and out of these comes progress. Poetry descends to satire and farce and lends itself to coarsest and realistic description, however much in the folk-song the spirit of prehistoric times is retained. And plastic art, lending itself to the rapid development of Gothic architecture, begins in sculpture and painting to reproduce in detail the visible world, — almost to a primitive mastery of portraiture ; it even attempts, by a tentative linear perspective, to create space for the third dimension, and also to produce local color effect, chiefly in a complementary use of unbroken tones.
It is a new epoch ; a thousand signs announce it. And it is clear that chivalry and citizenship, knight and burgher, turn away from the older forms of expression and hence from the soul of the period of symbolism. But do they understand the world actually and individually in the sense of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the Reformation and the Renaissance ? Emphatically, no! Men are still separated from that great day by a world of progress.
Granted that men are no longer " typical," still less are they already "individual"; they move in the intermediate stage of the conventional. Political and social forms show it. Neither knighthood nor middle class of the fourteenth and a part of the fifteenth centuries is free, hut both are still in the leading-strings of the social forms of chivalry, and given over to stiperficial ideals of education. There arises here a tendency to emphasize the " maze," to be moderate as contrasted with the coarser outbursts of the primitive passion of the tenth and eleventh centuries. But this moderation is at first only superficially understood, and expresses itself in rules of eti-qxiette. The burgher is socially freer than the peasant of his time ; but their convivial habits are subjected to regulations compared with which the archaic drinking customs of the German student of to-day appear as the height of voluntary caprice. And how restrained by convention is every effort of the imagination ! Nothing is more characteristic than that men are not acquainted with the individual portrait, and the literary portrait in the form of biography and autobiography is almost unknown.
However, the psychic stirrings of the age press on to a progressive freedom. The fifteenth century rushes on like a torrent to where its waters fall into the abyss of a deeper and broader river-bed. The current becomes confused, whirlpools form; nearer and nearer is heard the roar of the cataract, till at last clouds of foam dash upwards as in a veil and, at the same time, proclaim the presence of the cataract. In fact we approach, in the eovirse of the fifteenth century, one of the most marked phases in the course of German national development : the age of individualism beginning to dominate the nine succeeding generations, — to the middle of the eighteenth century. And with it commences what we call modern times.
It is an age that can here be briefly described because it is better known. The true centre of its first period is the deliverance from the bonds of pietistic, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical conventions of the Middle Ages, while its second stage is dominated by the victory of the lumen naturale, of reason, in the movement which bears the name of the Aufklarung, and at the same time . by the first great development of the natural sciences. In what consists the principle that unites these two phases internally? Can it be characterized as an entire emancipation of reason to the full limit of its present active intellectual potentiality ? Is it a question of a complete breach with the earlier time, and with its articles of faith ? a rationalization of the world without exceptions ?
It is evident that in the development of thought a new stage has been reached. The analogical conclusion, the conclusion following on the comparison of only two things, even in the later Middle Ages, often the conclusion of even scientific thought, is no longer considered sufficient; accumulated experience demands comparisons which can be extended to a great number of objects. The inductional conclusion grows out of analogy, and causality expels the miraculous. But it is a process which in the course of the whole period is by no means closed.
As the mark of transition to a higher form of causal consciousness, these centuries experienced the horrible reactionary movement of the persecution of witches. Again and again mechanical science, then in its beginnings, had to assert itself with considerable strength against the idea of the miraculous. And as late as the eighteenth century even wide-awake minds believed in the uncanny power of good and evil spirits. It was, therefore, only a step forward to a higher causal consciousness which took place, not emancipation. Hence the most conservative among the new confessions and churches, the Lutheran, felt impelled to preserve intact the idea of the Sacrament as necessary for Christian salvation. Hence the more advanced Reformed Church did not at once take the final step of complete secession. And for the same reason even natural science continued to work in complete harmony with the highest conceptions of the Christian revelation, in particular with the conception of God as the extreme limit of thought.
If by means of all thesephenomena this period is sharply divided off from the years following 1750, it is clear, on the other hand, what its gains signify compared with earlier psychic conditions. Above all, the individual, now a child of God, has free intercourse with his Heavenly Father, limited only by the mediation of Christ, There was no longer any mediation through the clergy and the host of mediaeval saints, con fessors, and penitents. And still more, the individual, thrown back on himself, looked round him for the first time with unfettered gaze in this glorious and fruitful world. By the simple light of reason he tried to illuminate it; a natural law arose, a natural religion, and the doctrine of a common-sense education.
It is true that at the same time, under an increasingly one-sided development of the functions of a rapidly growing reason, the imaginative and poetic side of the mind and soul was neglected ; indeed, even the development of the will was retarded. So that the individual appeared by himself-—isolated—as a microcosm separated from all others. But were not the results stupendous, nevertheless ? The Aufkla-rung of the eighteenth century is indisputably marked by a pronounced levelling, a characteristic style of its own, which, properly speaking, was the sum total of the results of the period, and which, because in itself homogeneous, continues to work itself out with unabated strength in our minds to-day, far more than the majority of people suspect.
And, at least in the beginning, this new, later so purely intellectual, psychic life was alive and distinctly progressive in all other directions. The political history of the sixteenth century shows, in spite of all its conditioning by religious motives, a clearness in the working out of the will, which is lost later only in the increasingly complicated cunning of an intel-lectualistic diplomacy. In poetry it comes out in a reproduction of the psychic life which deals with satire of a realistic nature, on the socio-psychic side and with attempts at the psychic drama, on the individualistic side. In plastic art, especially in the true understanding of painting, the advance is extraordinary; linear perspective is developed almost to the point of a perfect mastery of its details; the light problem, at first very summarily considered, is, by the Dutch schools of the seventeenth century, at least in certain conditions of simple phenomena, artistically handled, and in the world of color we have accordingly a richness which had hitherto never been dreamed of.
If we inquire about the immediate causes of all these phenomena which we class together under the name of an individualistic psychic life, an almost exclamatory answer is forced upon us. What incredible upheavals of material and political culture, what extensions of the moral and mental horizon, have not the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought about! In the towns from the fourteenth century on, under the fertilizing influence of the nation's new connection with the great currents of the world's trade, an economic impulse was given which was second to nothing in the nineteenth century, and probably superior. And corresponding to this one sees a thousand new political phenomena, — the development of an early spirit of adventure; the breaking up of the socialistic character of the trade and craft unions ; a shifting of the lines of caste in the old patriciate and guilds ; the development of menial work in the shape of domestic service and apprenticeship ; the formation of a proletariat; the upheaval of constitutions ; the striving after the levelling process of a new policy and a coarse communism. Outside of the cities spring up numerous states which first assume the role of a patriarchal, then rationalistic, absolutism; dissatisfaction prevails among the people, and social revolutions come and go without effect; a reactionary servitude is finally forced on the lower classes, the duration of which would only be determined by the weakness or strength of the classes involved. Out of all this there developed a class of nobles which, carried away with the foreign ideal of Thomme du monde, sought the court of their gracious sovereigns, but without cherishing any state policy of their own. Add to this those events of universal significance, — the voyages to the Indian seas, the discovery of America ; the acquaintance with the peculiar mediaeval culture of Peru and Mexico ; the acceptance of the Copernican sys-tem ; the discoveries of Galileo; Huyghens's investigations ; Newton's explanation of the orbit of the planets; and finally Leibnitz's views of the world of nature and of history, and we have some of the dynamic forces underlying the new age.
These were impulses which brought to the universal psychic life, particularly of the earlier years of the new epoch, an untold amount of new stimuli, new possibilities of association, new developments of the will, new fields for the imagination. And we can well understand how they at first brought confusion. Not a new illumination, rather a dissociation of the existing psychic world was the first consequence. In the chaos of the struggle between old and new the intellect staggered, the passions became overheated, the conscience was disturbed, and untold conflicts occurred between existing and growing rights. But nevertheless, between the cracks and crevices of an exploded culture, the new civilization steadily pushed its way forward, though at first misunderstood, laughed at, ridiculed ; in the plastic and graphic arts there appears a new naturalism, a science of the lumen naturalc arises, and a belief in the filial relation to God which nearly approached transcendentalism takes the place of the old more dependent faith. And when these new phenomena had somewhat developed, new psychic values appear. Who would now wish to dispense with God's Word as seen in Luther's mind and doctrine ? who would leave out of the count the new knowledge of the state and nature, of man and the world ? As men became conscious of the new values, they used them industriously in accordance with the harmonious development of a cultural life which appeared to them infinitely higher than the old. A new psychic ideal rose victorious over the dissociative soul processes of the early time; the new idealism in art accepted the naturalistic gains of the time and applied them in its own way. New philosophies came to the front, and all the phenomena of this new world so transformed by science and discovery are subjected to them, and pietistic ceremonials grew out of the soil of the old as well as the new churches. In fact, the picture of a psychic revolution rises up before as, exorcised into existence by means of a new material and social culture, and a marked extension of the intellectual horizon; it is, moreover, the picture of contented accomplishment of victory won by the undisputed powers of the mind.
Quite different appear at first sight the processes which, about the middle of the eighteenth century, made the transition from the individualistic period to that which goes by the name of the age of Subjectivism, a new and more extended socio-psychic period. It is a period in which creative work still goes on; for such personalities as Herder and Goethe, Schiller and Kant, still live with and in us. This epoch, the first part of which begins with the appearance of the so-called sentimentality, continues on through the Sturm and Drang, Classicism and Romanticism, Realism and degenerate Imitation, down to the seventies of the nineteenth century, to be followed by the beginnings of a second subjective period, the psychic phenomena of our own time.
This new age was introduced by no sort of visible revolution. By the middle of the sixteenth century, at latest, the great international highways of trade had been turned aside from Germany. Central Europe sank economically into a lethargy, while the states and countries along the Atlantic coast began to rise economically. Hamburg and the Netherlands were the only German stales to profit by this change. The decline of the German character, above all of the German middle class, now sets in; it was hastened, and in a certain sense brought to a close, by the terrible losses of the Thirty Years' War. The age of powerful stimulus and universal historic achievement by the nation was past. People withdrew within themselves, and the sinking level of national culture gave rise to an invasion of Germany for generations to come of a foreign civilization with all its disorganizing effects.
But among all these characteristic phenomena there was formed, about 1650, the substratum of a new culture and of a future higher psychic existence. The middle-class citizen was deprived of an undivided interest in his economic calling, yet not impoverished ; living partially on capital which escaped the destructive hand of the Thirty Years War, he commanded many hours of leisure, and he made use of them for his own spiritual and intellectual improvement. Hence the rise, by degrees, of the greater part of the so-called cultivated class, who about the year 1700 had spread over all parts of Germany, the more important because, besides the purely bourgeois professions, the greater part of brain-workers, officials and savants, and not a few of the nobility contributed to its rise. It was not the purely political, rather, in many respects, it was a purety intellectual, soil of a new psychic life corresponding with the essential spirit of the time, to which were added more and more, chiefly by means of reading, an incalculable amount of new stimuli..
The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise in Germany of more than two hundred and fifty newspapers and magazines suited to the needs of an educated pxiblic. And what was not discussed in these magazines! Everything which was of interest to this age of improvement, — poetry and philosophy, the latter after the methods of Leibnitz, and things more practical and political, too. In the course of a thousand communications the curtain was drawn aside and the events and conditions of Europe began to come again into full view. The public was taught to search the globe with its gaze even to the farthest horizon of the ethnographical world.
There were stimuli from which arose by degrees a new psychic disposition ; the more so as it allied itself with strong reactionary feelings against the bald intellectual ism of the dying age. It is true that every period at its close tends to intellectualize the new achievements of its culture. Thus the later Middle Ages end with rationalization of the Gothic architecture in a flamboyant style; in music there was hardly anything left but counterpoint thematic work; and philosophy wound up in scholasticism. But the individualistic period, which is characterized by an innate leaning toward the cult of reason, inclined to this rationalization, seeking especially an understanding of the innermost soul-phenomena. What was more natural than that the reaction on the other hand should be the more pronounced and lead straight on to the new period ? Pietism, sentimentality, Storm and Stress, are some of the elements belonging here. They freed from long servitude the functions of the psychic life which sought a response in another psyche in feeling and will. Now they burst forth with enthusiasm and introduced the new period of Subjectivism. Now these were the psychic functions which first characterize the personality of the time as subject-matter. Its emotional life develops from the cult of friendship of the earlier days down to the all-embracing national enthusiasm of the nineteenth century ; and just as, from its cult of the will, arises at first the idea of the genius of power (Kraftgenies), so later follows the iron policy of Bismarck.
Thus we come to recognize with great clearness — for there are thousands of sources of tradition — the process of the transition from one age to another, and the impetus of psychic dissociation whence are derived the complete and characteristic dominant of modern times. We can see how individuals who are in the full current of the movement are subject to countless new stimuli, and, being particularly susceptible to them, are not at first able to control this overwhelming influence. Again we see how they change psychically. Being, so to speak, no longer their own masters, they become too easily open to suggestion, whether it be that they, if of a tolerably creative nature, succumb to autosuggestion, and become thereby a prey to the exaggerated conception of their own achievements, or yield to the stress of sentimental negation and romantic irony, to " Weltschmerz " and pessimistic tendencies; or, be it that they, inclining to socio-sonsations, are influenced by the new phenomena of the psychic life to such a degree that their judgment degenerates into the cult of genius, and their will becomes automatic in the direction of personal capricious imaginings and incomplete solutions of these moral problems which, with the appearance of every new psychic life, burst forth in overwhelming waves. But where such a strong and nearly pathologic action of new influences do not occur, we see the personality constantly weakened; with the self-sacrificing spirit of the investigator of new things, they yield completely to the new stimuli in order to master them.
These are conditions which chiefly characterized the years of 1750 to 1780, and again from 1800 to 1810 and even later. In them, just through this renunciation and readiness for suggestion, we gain a new, deeper insight than ever before into the world of nature and spirit. In art the first transitions to a realistic control of light appear; in poetry the more profound systematizing of the altruistic affectives, and, as the functions of the will are gained, these find expression chiefly in the new psychological drama; in the mental sciences the " folk soul," the popular psyche, Is revealed, which sets in motion expeditions into the domain of socio-psychic investigation, and with this discovery there runs parallel the endeavor to place psychology in general as a pure science outside of the domain of metaphysical influence. The beginnings of marked improvements in jurisprudence and politics are at once evident; the conception of individuality as a socio-psychical element leads to a new conception of public life, which, by means of the intermediate stage of personal control, is to work itself up to the constitutional forms of cooperative work for all. And legal procedure no longer appears as the fruit of a constitution imposed from above, but as the result of the operations of the popular mind.
A new life such as this bursts forth in a thousand shapes, and there was no side of the national development from the lowest to the loftiest that was not enriched by it.
The years are fast drawing near which will gather into sheaves the luxuriant, growing seedlings and store them safe in the granaries of national progress. After the Storm and Stress come the Classicism of Schiller and Goethe, the philosophy of Kant, and the state-reforms of Prussia following the collapse of the year 1S0G. Romanticism, which developed out of the long-continuing undercurrents of the Storm and Stress at the end of the eighteenth century, was succeeded by the Realism of the thirties and the political unification of the nation as wrought out in the years 1848 and 1866 to 1S70. Men began to understand themselves, and also this new subjective existence, which, so unmistakable and real, had grown out of the time of psychic dissociation of the earlier years of the century. And with it the great idealistic phenomena of the period began : the immortal creations of Schiller and Goethe, Ideal philosophy, realistic natural science, the unification of the nation to an economic life of unheard-of significance, the political and constitutional formation of the empire.
We have now reached our goal. The period just described, that of Subjectivism since the seventies of the century just past, must inevitably be followed by another just beginning. And that cannot now be discussed in full. But it is hoped that the contents of this lecture have been such as to give us a general survey of the development of the Germans as a nation. Another question has been raised, and all the more definitely, for we have advanced into later times with increasing material at command :_this will claim our attention at our next meeting. The question of greatest general interest, which arises here not only for Germany but also for other countries, is whether similar psychic processes mark their historical development, such as those described under the terms Symbolism, Typism, Conventionalism, Individualism, and Subjectivism.
It is plain, therefore, that we are now confronted with the problem of the psychic mechanism of the periods of culture. That such a question can be put, appears evident from the materials now available. How is it to be answered, and how solved ? The next lecture will be an attempt to show this by means of the material already in use, as well as by taking into consideration the latest socio-psychic changes. |
