d and after 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all authority,
even all law and rule, in order to put in their stead the absolute
self-government of genius, freed from all tutorship--the foremost were
the two greatest German poets, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe's _Goetz_ and
_Werther_, Schiller's _Brigands_ and _Cabal and Love_, were greeted as
the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their
subjects were German and modern, not French or classic; in their plan
they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once
familiar, strong, and original; in their inspiration they were protests
against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement
outbursts of individuality against convention.

Not twenty years had passed away, when both the revolutionists had
become calm and resigned liberal conservatives, who understood and
taught that liberty is possible only under the empire of law; that the
real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world,
which knows no frontiers; that to be completely free man must fly into
the ideal sphere of art, science, or formless religion. Not that they
abjured "the dreams of their youth." The nucleus of their new creed was
contained in their first belief; but it had been developed into a system
of social views more in harmony with society and its exigencies, of
aesthetic opinions more independent of reality and its accidents, of
philosophical ideas more speculative and methodical. In other words,
Goethe and Schiller never ceased to believe, as they had done at twenty,
that all vital creations in nature as in society are the result of
growth and organic development, not of intentional, self-conscious
planning, and that individuals on their part act powerfully only through
their nature in its entirety, not through one faculty alone, such as
reason or will, separated from instinct, imagination, temperament,
passion, etc. Only they came to the conviction that here existed general
laws which presided over organic development, and that there was a means
of furthering in the individual the harmony between temperament,
character, understanding, and imagination, without sacrificing one to
the others. Hence they shaped for themselves a general view of nature
and mankind, society and history, which may not have become the
permanent view of the whole nation; but which for a time was
predominant, which even now is still held by many,