Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 7.djvu/186

 154 until the campaign had victoriously ended in the battle of Leipzig. He joined, however, after Napoleon's escape from Elba, the second campaign, in which he took part in two battles. At the end of the war, having retired as an officer of the reserves, he returned to Halle to finish his study of the law.

He found a new spirit dominant among the students. This spirit, characterized by a strongly democratic desire for national unity, pride of race, and impatience with external and conventional restraints, had a rich network of roots in the immediate past: in the individualism and the humanism of the Storm and Stress Movement and the Classic Era of the eighteenth century; in the subjective idealism of the Romantic school; in the nationalism of Klopstock, Herder, Schiller, and Fichte, and in the self-reliant transcendentalism of Kant's philosophy and Schleiermacher's theology. This spirit had received its political direction principally through the genius of the Baron von Stein, the Prussian statesman, whose aim was the restoration of German national unity. He believed that the political unity of Germany must rest on the soundness of the common people, rather than on the pretensions of the aristocracy whose corruption he held responsible for the decadence of the nation. Following the example of Frederick the Great, he tried to foster the simple virtues of the common man. He was, however, opposed to radicalism, seeing permanent progress only in order, self-discipline, and moderation. His leading idea, which was shared by such men as Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Niebuhr, and others, was that the principal task of the time was to arouse the whole nation to independent political thinking and activity, in order to develop self-confidence, courage, and devotion to a great unselfish ideal. These ideas became a national ideal, an active passion, under the pressure and stress of the Napoleonic usurpation and in the heat and fervor of war and victory.

It was unavoidable that this spirit produced among the