Prussian empire, of lines of
demarcation, of acquisitions of German territory, were the phantoms of
a policy, and even these were due to the pressure of Prussia.

The general political torpidity is surprisingly displayed, when one
remembers that Goethe (1749-1832), who lived through the French
Revolution, who was 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 provinci