VI.

HERDER.

1744-1803.

AMONG the greater divinities of the German literary Olympus, Goethe is generally the one selected to stand for Jove, the monarch of them all. This, if regard be had chiefly to supremacy of fame and of influence, is, of course, an arrangement of the hierarchy not to be quarreled with. We, however, imagine that Goethe's noble personal presence, "the front of Jove himself," has, by natural, if illogical, associative effect, had something to do with the instinctive and almost universal acclamation which has crowned this elect favorite of fortune the German literary Zeus.

Herder was a less impressive-looking physical man than was Goethe; but, if physical qualities were to be carefully denied any influence, and if moral qualities were to weigh, and to weigh equally with intellectual, in making their possessor a candidate for pre-eminent place; if a certain inborn kingliness of soul, a certain proud consciousness imprinted on the brow, of inalienable native right to reign, were to be accepted in evidence of title-in one word, if ethical height as well as mental breadth were to be measured, in finding out the true Jove among German literary men, then Herder, and not Goethe, would undoubtedly be that monarch. In our own opinion, at least, the erectest, the stateliest, in short, seen by the eye of the morally-judging mind, the kingliest, of all his peers is he.

But this majestic man was not, like Goethe, born to ease and leisure. The mien of courtliness and command, the grace of elegance in manner, which in Herder so well comported with his fame, were not the fruit to him of early habit and example. Herder was of poor, almost squalid, extraction. Burke proudly told the Duke of Bedford: “Nitor in adversum ['I struggle against adverse circumstance'] is the

motto for a man like me.'

With much more force of truth,

A

Herder might have said the same concerning himself. Herder's life was still bound in shallows and in miseries, when, from the great tide in affairs created by Frederick the Great, a sudden flush flowed into his native village, which bore the eager youth unexpectedly out into sea-room. regiment returning from the Seven Years' War was quartered at Mohrungen. The regimental surgeon got his eye on Herder, and proposed making him a student of surgery. The beneficiary was in return to translate a professional treatise of his patron's into Latin. This was done; but the first surgical operation witnessed by the student settled the business for him. He fainted away at the sight, and renounced the profession forever. He was destined, as will presently appear, to be, later, a subject, instead of a practitioner, of surgery. Then, suffering such as he could not see in another, he endured himself with stoic fortitude. His imagination, more sensitive than his nerves, made sympathy to him more painful than pain.

Herder was fairly out in the world now; alas, however,the business of surgery abandoned-with nothing to do, but starve or return to Mohrungen. He chose starving; and remained at Königsberg, whither he had gone with his friend the surgeon. His acquaintances in Königsberg helping him a little, and his kindred helping him a little from home, he entered the University of Königsberg, to study theology. "Plain living and high thinking " sustained him—sometimes it would seem to have been more the "high thinking " than the "plain living"; the living was so very plain, and therewithal so scant―mere bread, and short rations of that. This lofty spirit, when, toward the end of life, he felt himself sinking, sighed and said, "O, if some grand new thought would come and pierce my soul through and through, I should be well in a moment." Who knows? That may have been a wind of reminiscence out of his own past. Perhaps he unconsciously remembered "nourishing a youth sublime" on that nobler than Olympian fare, the diet of "high thinking," when

he was a penniless student at the University of Königsberg.

At Königsberg, he fell upon the time of the great philosopher Kant.

Not Kant, however, but a man far less known than Kant, a man in fact scarcely known at all except to the specialist in German literature, exerted in Königsberg the leading influence on Herder's intellectual development and history. Hamann was nothing less than an indispensable factor in the making of Herder into what he became. Herder became one of the acknowledged chief ruling powers in the world of German thought and German letters; and this without writing any single work that can justly be called a masterpiece of literature. His fame was greater than any literary achievement to which it could appeal, and his influence' was still greater than his fame. Herder taught his countrymen to study the literatures of the East, Herder taught his countrymen to explore the treasures of popular poetry among different peoples; and the teacher was really Hamann through Herder. Unconsciously, Hamann had moved a mind that was to move the world-the world, that is, of German literature. The character, in especial, of breadth, of catholicity, of open hospitality to ideas, which we have already attributed to German letters, was an impression and impulse received more from Herder than from any other hand. Herder was, early, by personal contact, as well as through the influence of his books, one of the chief teachers of Goethe. Later, the growing moral separation between them left Goethe less capable of receiving the elevating influence which Herder was not less, but more and more, capable of imparting. A letter of Herder's on the subject of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister makes dignified but melancholy note of this. It is a letter addressed to a lady, the Countess Bandissin, who seems to have applied to Herder for his opinion of that production of Goethe's. Herder writes:

I owe you an answer respecting Goethe's novel (Wilhelm Meister). Do not reproach me as though I were myself the author, for I have only

read it the other day, later than most people. Many years ago, indeed, he read us some passages that pleased us, although we even then regretted the bad company that his hero keeps so long. But then the story was quite a different thing. We made the young man's acquaintance in his childhood, and conceived an interest in him that gradually increased, even when he went astray. Now it has quite another cast; we see the hero from the first where we had rather not see him at all, and are left to find out for ourselves how he got there, while at the same time he is no longer sufficiently interesting in himself to merit our sympathy. I have expostulated without effect, and none of the scenes where Philina appears were shown to me in manuscript. My own opinion of all that part is the same as yours, and, I should imagine, as that of all right-thinking people. Goethe thinks otherwise; truthfulness of scene is to him all in all, and he troubles himself extremely little about elevation of sentiment or moral gracefulness. In fact, this is the fault of many of his writings, and the difference of our sentiments has caused him to deşist from taking my opinion on any of them. I hate the whole generation of his Marianas and Philinas; and neither in life nor the representation of it can I endure any sacrifice of actual morality to mere talent, or what people call by that name.

Herder, widely and brilliantly famous as a preacher, had been drawn to Weimar by the invitation of the Grand Duke— to become in the end "superintendent" of the clergy of his realm. He there of course knew Goethe well, had in fact known him before going there, and he in due time became acquainted with Schiller, when Schiller also came, first to Jena, near by, and afterward to Weimar; but his relation to them was never quite easy. That Herder was felt by those two great reigning powers of Weimar to be, in example and in sentiment, a rebuke to such license as Goethe practiced and as Schiller allowed, was reason enough why that pure and strenuous spirit should be, as he was, under some cloud of disfavor with them. Schiller, for example, writing to Körner, condescended again and again to peddle out, to the disadvantage of Herder, the spiteful gossip of the frivolous, current in that corrupt little capital, Weimar. Here is one of his stories, amusing undoubtedly, and, however self-evidently unverifiable, having a certain likeness to life. It seems at least to illustrate the unwillingly reverent

popular conception, prevailing in the time and the place, with regard to the character of Herder; as well as the relation which could not but subsist between a man so chaste and so serious, and the producer, or the encourager, of a literature libidinous like the Roman Elegies of Goethe published by Schiller in his magazine The Hours. ("Some of the coarsest of Goethe's Elegies were purposely omitted, not to shock decency too much," Schiller writes to Körner.) Schiller's story:

Herder and his wife live in selfish retirement, from which they exclude every other son of earth. But as both are proud and violent, these selfelected deities often dispute with each other. When this is the case they retire to their respective apartments, and letters go up-stairs and downstairs between the two, until the lady enters her husband's room and recites some portion of his writings, adding the words, "He who wrote that must be a god, and anger cannot touch him." Whereupon the appeased Herder throws his arms round her neck and the quarrel is made up. Praise the Almighty that ye are immortal!

The story reminds us that Herder has previously found a wife, without our having taken note of the fact. His marriage was a nearly ideal one. The wife he found will be spoken of in a passage presently to be shown from the autobiography of Goethe. Meantime, one or two more bits of

allusion to Herder out of the letters of Schiller to Körner. These will help still further to set out in distinctness, by contrast, that noble severity in Herder, the firm outline of which not even the enervating softness of Weimar could prevail to subdue. Schiller says:

Herder was cut out for a distinguished dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church, genially insipid and oratorically pliant when he wishes to please.

Schiller says again:

What disgusts me most with him [Herder] is an indolent carelessness, accompanied by sarcastic impudence. He shows a venomous envy toward all that is good and energetic, and affects to protect what is middling. He made the most offensive remarks to Goethe about his Meister. His heart is overloaded with bile against Kant and the philosophers of the new school.