Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/195

Rh to the great classical poets, a new generation of ambitious young men began to appear upon the scene. You must remember that, in 1800, Goethe was fifty-one and Schiller forty-one years old; and at such an age men who have become early famous are certain to find themselves surrounded by circles of eager and often envious youth, whose hearts have been set on fire by the example of the elder geniuses, and who themselves are minded to do even better than their betters. So it was with Goethe and Schiller. The young generation already swarmed all about them in Jena and in Weimar. It was a matter of course, in that day and region, that if you were young, and were anybody at all, you were a genius. The only question was what sort of a genius, in your lordly spiritual freedom, you had chosen to be. Four sorts of geniuses were especially popular, and all four sorts were as plenty as blackberries. There was the romancer of genius, who was plotting to outdo Wilhelm Meister. There was the dramatist of genius, who was disposed to banish Schiller’s plays into oblivion, so soon as he himself had learned his trade. There was the critic of genius, who had grasped the meaning and lesson of the literature of the ages, and who was especially fond of contrasting the Greek tragedy with Shakespeare, and of laying down poetical laws for all future time. And finally there was the philosopher of genius, whose business it was first of all to transcend Kant, and secondly to transcend everybody else. Best indeed was your lot in case you chose to exemplify in your person all four sorts of genius at once, as, for instance, the young Friedrich Schlegel for a while delighted to do. Your inner experiences were then simply inimitable. In brief, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

We may smile a little at all this ferment of ambitious hopes, but we can never be too grateful for what that brief period accomplished for us. It gave us philosophi-