from a central principle; to apply its
highest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts,
and society. The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. It
is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike the
logical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at all
hazards; and the German habit of system-building. The Englishman has no
system, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. It is quite
possible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, without
wishing to restore them as an actual state of society. It is hard for an
Englishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller,
was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or how
Schelling's transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, and
Hegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. "Tragedies and
romances," wrote Mme. de Stael, "have more importance in Germany than in
any other country. They take them seriously there; and to read such and
such a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny
and the life. What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into real
life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an even
greater empire over the Germans than nature and the passions." In proof
of this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide in
consequence of reading "Werther"; or took to highway robbery in emulation
of "Die Raeuber."

In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution and
kept strictly within the domain of art. Scott's political conservatism
was indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his
fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory. And as
to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in
1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in
his behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's reactionary politics
had nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be going
too far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time in
the English church and constitution may have had its root in the same
temper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like
"Christabel" and "The Dark Ladye." But in Germany "throne and altar"
became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined the
Catholic Chur