lso their protests against the
bloodless abstractions of the Nazarene school of painting and to
transcendental idealism in art and literature. They cultivated art, not
for its own sake, but for the sake of a fuller, saner, and freer human
life. In this sense they were didactic; but they were no more didactic
than the Romanticists and the Pseudo-Classicists who had preceded them.
In their earnest contention for an organic connection between German
life and German art and literature they were hewing more closely to the
line of nature and truth than any other Germans since the time of
Herder.

They are usually spoken of as free-thinkers and frequently as
anti-religious in temper and conviction. The charge of irreligion seems
based upon the misconception or the misrepresentation of their orthodox
critics. It is, at any rate, undeserved, as far as Gutzkow, the leader
of the school, is concerned. It is true that they were liberal in the
matter of religious and philosophical thought. They were also skeptical
as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and
institutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church;
their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against
religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism. This
attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the
institutional state church as a weapon with which to combat the rising
tide of popular discontent with existing social and political forms and
functions. This was especially true after the accession to the throne of
Prussia of that romantic and reactionary prince, Frederick William IV.,
in 1840.

Critics have ascribed the negative, disintegrating, and cosmopolitan
spirit of the group as a whole to the fact that Boerne and Heine were
Jews. In addition, however, to the abundant non-racial grounds for this
spirit, already urged as inherent in the historic crisis under
discussion, we should recall the fact that Heine, as a literary
producer, is more closely allied with the Romanticists than with Young
Germany, and that Boerne, who in his celebrated _Letters from Paris_
(1830-34) and elsewhere went farther than all other members of the
school in transforming art criticism into political criticism, was no
cosmopolitan but an ardent, sincere, and consistent German patriot.
Moreover, while Boerne and Heine belong through sympathy and deliberate
choice to Young Germany, the real spokesmen of the