Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/636

 632 Lessing 360 ff. It is, of course a trifle for Mr. B. to ascribe to Goethe "the very classical definition of genius:" "Du nur, Genius, mehrst in der Natur die Natur." We find it in Schiller's Votivtafeln, No. 38. While Goethe is at least granted some extenuating circum- stances in that he," at his best shows an ethical realism worthy of Dr. Johnson" (!), Kant's doom is complete. Since, as our author would have it, Kant failed to associate genius in art and literature with a strict discipline of the imagination to a "pur- pose," "the central impotence of the whole Kantian system" is conclusively proven (p. 42). Mr. Babbitt does not know what Kant meant by "Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck." He does not know of the difference between an esthetic purpose and an ethical purpose. He attributes to the most rigorous of all moralists a lack of moral purpose. 1 Mr. Babbitt never heard of the categorical imperative. He never read the words: "Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten konne." If known to Mr. B. this one sentence could have filled the hollow shell of his negative inner check with the sadly missing core of wholesome substance. Instead, the inquisitorial method of arbitrary selection of evidence has once more turned a fact into its very opposite. Let the Christian reader's wondering eyes gaze again on the decree of Salem: "The central impotence of the whole Kantian system." For was it not a Moralist far greater than the sage of Konigsberg, whose ethical principles reappeared in the philosophical terminology of Kant? (cf . Math. 7, 12). Does the advocate of the inner check dare declare His system impotent too? The relations of the storm and stress movement to roman- ticism are complex and have not as yet received an adequate treatment. It is to be hoped, however, that this urgent demand will be met by Rudolf linger in his forthcoming new work on romanticism. No other scholar, indeed, may be relied upon with greater confidence to do justice to so difficult a subject than the author of Hamann und die Aufklarung, a work of truly classical perfection. Mr. B., unfamiliar with that as with so much other essential material, lightly assumes an identity between the two movements regardless of historical facts. It is not given to him to see things in the perspective proportions of historical evolution. Thus his chapters: Romantic Genius, Imagination, Morality (The Ideal; The Real), Love, Irony, Romanticism and Nature, Melancholy, The Present Outlook, are so many unfermented concoctions of half-truths and errors with the same, insipid, flavor of the inner check. Nowhere has there been made an effort to get at the facts in their historical con- 1 The moralist Ibsen fares equally badly, cf. p. 330.