e was, as he calls himself,
a "Child of the French Revolution," an "Initiator," because he
vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not counters or marbles,
to be played with for their own sake; because he exhibited in literature
modern ideas applied with the utmost freedom, clearness, and
originality. And therefore he declared that the great task of his life
had been the endeavor to establish a cordial relation between France and
Germany. It is because he thus operates a junction between the French
spirit and German ideas and German culture, that he founds something
new, opens a fresh period, and deserves the attention of criticism far
more than the German poets his contemporaries, who merely continue an
old period till it expires. It may be predicted that in the literature
of other countries, too, the French spirit is destined to make its
influence felt,--as an element, in alliance with the native spirit, of
novelty and movement,--as it has made its influence felt in German
literature; fifty years hence a critic will be demonstrating to our
grandchildren how this phenomenon has come to pass.

We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty
years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit,
as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the
reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas,
nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass
of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that
Philistinism,--to use the German nickname,--which reacts even on the
individual genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary
epoch, that of the Elizabethan age,[154] English society at large was
accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them, to a
degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique
greatness in English literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
They were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation;
they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas,--the ideas of
the Renascence and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great
English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose
intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of
Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred
years. _He enlargeth a nation_, says Job, _and straiteneth it again._
[155]

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