s of learning been so completely
sacrificed to the means of learning, nowhere has that Dulcinea,--knowledge
for its own sake,--with her dark veil and her barren heart, numbered so
many admirers; nowhere have so many windmills been fought, and so many
real enemies been left unhurt, as in Germany, particularly during the last
two centuries. New universities have been founded: Marburg, in 1527;
Koenigsberg, in 1547; Jena, in 1558; Helmstaedt, in 1575; Giessen, in 1607.
And the more the number and the power of the professors increased, the
more they forgot that they and their learning, their universities and
their libraries, were for the benefit of the people; that a professor
might be very learned, and very accurate, and very laborious, yet worse
than useless as a member of our toiling society. It was considered more
learned and respectable to teach in Latin, and all lectures at the
universities were given in that language. Luther was sneered at because of
his little German tracts which "any village clerk might have written."
Some of the best poets in the sixteenth century were men such as Eoban
Hessius (1540), who composed their poetry in Latin. National poems, for
instance, Brant's "Ship of Fools," were translated into Latin in order to
induce the German professors to read them. The learned doctors were
ashamed of their honest native names. Schwarzerd must needs call himself
Melancthon; Meissel Celtes, Schnitter Agricola; Hausschein, OEcolampadius!
All this might look very learned, and professorial, and imposing; but it
separated the professors from the people at large; it retarded the
progress of national education, and blighted the prospects of a national
policy in Germany. Everything promised well at the time of the
Reformation; and a new Germany might have risen before a new France, if,
like Luther, the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling.
But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German,
when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to
digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the
professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the
knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent
in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, and
political prostration, before a new national spirit could rise again in
men like Lessing, and Schiller, and Fichte, and Stein. Ambitious