lly constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and
sustaining atmosphere of great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided
learning and the long and widely combined critical effort of Germany
formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of
life and thought there, as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
Elizabeth. That was the poet's weakness. But there was a sort of
equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a
large body of Germans. That was his strength. In the England of the first
quarter of this century there was neither a national glow of life and
thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a
force of learning and criticism such as were to be found in Germany.
Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest
sense, materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was
necessarily denied to it.

At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French
Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius
equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of
Greece, or out of that of the Renaissance, with its powerful episode, the
Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took
a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as
these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual
movements; movements in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction
in itself and in the increased play of its own activity; the French
Revolution took a political, practical character. This Revolution--the
object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred--found, indeed, its
motive-power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense.
This is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the
First's time; this is what makes it a more spiritual event than our
Revolution, an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, though
practically less successful--it appeals to an order of ideas which are
universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642
asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according
to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated,
within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within
its own sphere, has been prodigious.

But what is law in one place is not