It was quite otherwise in Germany. Whilst
everywhere else the State might be compared to the body whose abundant
energy calls forth the creative development of the nation, in Germany,
since the Thirty Years' War, owing to the awakening popular energy, a
new national civilisation has gradually arisen in a shattered, decaying
government, under corrupting and humiliating political influences of
every kind,--first dependent upon strangers; then independent and free;
finally, a shining pattern for other people, producing blossoms of
poetry, and blossoms of science of the greatest beauty, of the highest
nobility, and the greatest inward freedom: it was developed by
individuals who were deficient in just that discipline of the mind and
character, which is only given to them when they are members of a great
State. The German culture of the eighteenth century was indeed the
wonderful creation of a soul with out a body.

It is still more remarkable that this new national cultivation helped,
in an indirect way, to turn the Germans into political men. From it the
enthusiasm and struggle for an endangered German State, passions,
parties, and at last political institutions were developed. Never did
literature play such a part or solve such great problems, as the
German, from 1750 to the present day. For it is thoroughly unlike the
modern endeavours of other nations, who from patriotism, that is to
say, from the need of political progress, mature an objective
literature. In these cases art and poetry serve, from the beginning, as
handmaids to politics; they are perhaps artificially fostered, and the
artistic and scientific worth is probably less than the patriotic aim.
In Germany, science, literature, and art only existed for their own
sake: the highest creative power and the warmest interests of the
educated classes were engrossed with them alone; they were always
German and patriotic, in opposition to the overpowering French taste;
but, with the exception of a few outbreaks of political anger or
popular enthusiasm, they had no other aim than to serve truth and
beauty. Nay, the greatest poets and scholars considered the political
condition under which they lived, as a common reality out of which art
alone could elevate mankind.

As therefore in Germany art and science desired nothing but honourable
exertion within their own sphere, their pure flames refined the
sensitive disposition of Germans till it was hardened for a great
polit