Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/762

Rh 728 his pet ideas of school reform. Yet the social atmosphere of the place did not suit him. His personal relations with Goethe again and again became embittered. He had not tli3 poet-minister s liking for the elegant frivolities of court life, while the efforts of Goethe and Schiller to make Weimar a dramatic centre repelled his austerely moral nature. All this, added to ill-health, served to intensify a natural irrita bility of temperament, and the history of his latter Weimar days is a rather dreary page in the chronicles of literary life. He had valued more than anything else a teacher s influence over other minds, and as he began to feel that he was losing it he grew jealous of the success of those who had outgrown this influence. Yet while presenting these unlovely traits, Herder s character was on the whole a worthy and attractive one. This seems to be sufficiently attested by the fact that he was greatly liked and esteemed, not only in the pulpit but in private intercourse, by culti vated women like the countess of Biickeburg, the duchess of Weimar, and Frau von Stein, and, what perhaps is more, was exceedingly popular among the gymnasium pupils, in whose education he took so lively an interest. While during the last years of his life he produced much that is of little value, he wrote also some of his best works, among others his collection of popular poetry, Stimmen der Volker ; his most notible original poem, the Cid ; his celebrated work on Hebrew poetry, Vom Geist der hebrdischen Poesie ; and his opus magnum, the Ideen zur Philosophic der Ge- schichte. Towards the close of his life he occupied himself lika Lessing with speculative questions in philosophy and theology. The boldness of some of his ideas cost him some valuable friendships, as that of Jacobi, Lavater, and even of his early teacher Hamann. He died in the year 1803, full of new literary plans up to the very last. Herder s writings were for a long time regarded as of temporary value only, and fell into neglect. Recent criticism, however, has tended very much to raise their value by tracing out their wide and far-reaching influence. The number of publications relating to Herder that have appeared during the last few years shows that there is a revival of interest in this writer. His writings are very voluminous, and to a large extent fragmentary and devoid of artistic finish ; nevertheless they are nearly always worth investigating for the brilliant suggestions in which they abound. His place in German literature has already been faintly indicated in tracing his mental development. Like Lessing, whose work he immediately continued, he was a pioneer of the golden age of this literature. Lessing had given the first impetus to the formation of a national literature by exposing the folly of the current imitation of French writers. But in doing this he did not so much call his fellow-countrymen to develop freely their own national sentiments and ideas as send them back to classical example and principle. Herder on the contrary fought against all imitation as such, and bade German writers be true to themselves and their national antecedents. As a sort of theoretic basis for this adhesion to national type in litera ture, he conceived the idea that literature and art, together with language and national culture as a whole, are evolved by a natural process, and that the intellectual and emotional life of each people is correlated with peculiarities of physical temperament and of material environment. In this way he became the originator of that genetic or historical method which has since been applied to all human ideas and insti tutions. Herder was thus an evolutionist, but an evolu tionist still under the influence of Rousseau. That is to say, in tracing back the later acquisitions of civilization to im pulses which are as old as the dawn of primitive culture, he did not, as the modern evolutionist does, lay stress on the superiority of the later to the earlier stages of human development, but rather became enamoured of the simplicity and spontaneity of those early impulses which, since they are the oldest, easily come to look like the most real and precious. Yet even in this way he helped to found the historical school in literature and science, for it was only after an excessive and sentimental interest in primitive human culture had been awakened that this subject would receive the amount of attention which was requisite for the genetic explanation of the later acquisitions of the species. This historical idea was carried by Herder into the regions of poetry, art, religion, language, and finally into human culture as a whole. It colours all his writings, and is inti mately connected with some of the most characteristic attri butes of his mind, a quick sympathetic imagination, a fine feeling for local differences, and a scientific instinct for seizing the sequences of cause and effect. Herder s works easily arrange themselves in an ascending series, corresponding to the way in which the genetic or historical idea was developed and extended. First come the works on poetic literature, art, language, and religion as special regions of develop ment. Secondly, we have in the Ideen a general account of the pro cess of human evolution. Thirdly, there are a number of writings which, though inferiorin interest to the others, may be said to supply the philosophic basis of his leading ideas. (1) In the region of poetry Herder sought to persuade his countrymen, both by example and precept, to return to a natural and spontaneous form of utterance His own poetry is voluminous, and as a whole has but little value. Herder was a skilful verse-maker but hardly a creative poet. His best poetry consists of translations of popular song, in which he shows a rare sympathetic insight into the various feelings and ideas of peoples as unlike as Greeulanders and Spaniards, Indians and Scotch. In the Fraijmente he aims at nationalizing German poetry and freeing it from all extraneous influence. He ridicules the ambition of German writers to be classic, as Lessing had ridiculed their eager ness to be French. &quot; Let us,&quot; he says, &quot;be idiotistic writers, adapt ing ourselves to the peculiarities of our people and our language ; whether we are classic posterity may find out.&quot; In his sweeping condemnation of contemporary writers, he does not exempt even Klopstock, with whose feeling for nature lie has so much sympathy, but whose poems appear to him exotic in sentiment and ideas. He looked at poetry as a kind of &quot; proteus among the people, which changes its form according to language, manners, habits, according to temperament and climate, nay, even according to the accent of different nations.&quot; This fact of the idiosyncrasy of national poetry he illustrated with great fulness and richness in the case of Homer, the nature of whose works he was one of tjie first to elucidate, the Hebrew poets (Gcist der hebrdischen Poesie), and the poetry of the north as typified in &quot;Ossian.&quot; This same idea of necessary re lation to national character and circumstance is also applied to dramatic poetry, and more especially to Shakespeare. Lessing had done much to make Shakespeare known to Germany, but he had regarded him in contrast to the French dramatists with whom he also contrasted the Greek dramatic poets, and accordingly did not bring out his essentially modern and Teutonic character. Herder does this, and in doing so shows a far deeper understanding of Shake speare s genius than his predecessor had shown. His appreciative criticisms of Hamlet, Othello, and other plays are worthy of being read along with those of later German critics. (2) The views on art contained in Herder s Silvoe, Plastik, &c., are chiefly valuable as a correction of the excesses into which reverence for Greek art had betrayed Winckelmann and Lessing, by help of his fundamental idea of national idiosyncrasy. He argues against the setting up of classic art as an unchanging type, valid for all peoples and all times. He was one of the first to bring to light the characteristic excel lences of Gothic art. Beyond this, he eloquently pleaded the cause of painting as a distinct art, which Lessing in his desire to mark off the formative arts from poetry and music had confounded with sculp ture. He regarded this as the art of the eye, while sculpture was rather the art of the organ of touch. Painting being less real than sculpture, because lacking the third dimension of space, and a kind of dream, admitted of much greater freedom of treatment than this last. Herder had a genuine appreciation for early German painters, and helped to awaken the modern interest in Albrecht Diircr. (3) 15y his work on language Ucber den Ur sprung der Sprachc, Herder may be said to have laid the first rude foundations of the science of com parative philology and that deeper science of the ultimate nature and origin of language. It was specially directed against the supposition of a divine communication of language, to man. Its main argument is that speech is a necessary outcome of that special arrangement of mental forces which distinguishes man, and more particularly from his habits of reflexion. &quot;If,&quot; Herder says, &quot;it is incomprehensible to others how a human mind could invent language, it is as incom prehensible to me how a human mind could be what it is without discovering language for itself.&quot; The writer does not make that