Page:The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University p18.jpg

18 is impossible in the face of such works of sculpture as these not to feel that they proceeded from artists deeply versed in the study of human character, fully alive to the problems of human conduct, keenly sensitive to impressions of any sort, in other words fully developed, highly organized, complicated individuals. If with some such thoughts as these in mind we turn to the works of literature of the same epoch, if we think of such characters as Hagen or Kriemhild, Parzival or Tristan, we shall be inclined, I think, to observe in them also more distinctly than before those traits which stamp them as belonging to the sphere of actual life, which make them sharply individualized types. And we shall be more ready to acknowledge in the whole drift of those times, in their religious, intellectual, social conditions, the same tendency toward individuality.

Or, to take an example illustrating the connections between political history and art, what could be more instructive to the historical student than Schluter's equestrian statue of the Great Elector of Brandenburg, also given to us in full-size reproduction by the German Emperor. Frederick William, the founder of the Prussian monarchy, was a remarkable mixture of autocratic arbitrariness and single-minded devotion to the common weal. Ruthlessly overriding time-honored class privileges and local statutes, he established the sovereignty of the modern State in his widely scattered territories, and thus welded them together into a political whole. Obstinately adhering to a military absolutism even in matters of civil administration, he was also keenly alive to the demands of industrial progress and commercial expansion. A Prussian from foot to crown, zealously maintaining the prerogatives of his principality against other States of the empire, he was also the only German prince of his time who deeply felt for the national honor, the only one willing to risk his own State in defence of Germany. Could the sturdy greatness of this man, could the condition of the Prussia of his time be more concretely and impressively brought before us than by this statue erected in front of his castle at Berlin a few years after his death? Clad in the costume of a Roman imperator, the marshal's staff in his right hand, with the left tightly grasping the reins and holding his horse in check, his head slightly thrown back so that the