There was a wider sphere for a literary revival in France than in any other European country, for in France in the eighteenth century literary art had developed into formalism. Social and academic culture had laced it in the iron corset of so-called good taste, into stiff, meagre, regulation proportions. France has long presented the contradiction of being a country with a feverish desire for change in all external arrangements, unable, once it determines to gratify this desire, to keep within the bounds of moderation, and of being at the same time remarkably stable in everything that regards literature--acknowledging authority, maintaining an academy, and placing rule and regularity above everything. Frenchmen had instituted a Republic and overturned Christianity before it occurred to them to dispute the authority of Boileau. Voltaire, who turns tradition upside down and uses tragedy as a weapon against the very powers whose chief support it had been, namely the autocracy and the Church, never ventures to allow his action to last more than twenty-four hours, or to pass in two different places in the same play. He, who has little respect for anything in heaven or earth, respects the uniform caesura of the Alexandrine. It was another people than the French, a people to whom Voltaire had scornfully wished more wit and fewer consonants, who remodelled literature and re-created poetry, while Frenchmen were overturning political systems and customs. The Germans of that day, of whom the French scarcely knew more than that, in humble, patriarchal submission to their petty princes, they drank their beer, smoked their pipes, and ate their _sauer-kraut_ in the corner by the stove, made far greater conquests in the intellectual world than Frenchmen achieved in the geographical. Of all the nations of Europe none save the Germans had had their literary blossoming time in the eighteenth century. It was the second half of that century which witnessed the notable development of poetry between Lessing and Goethe, and the energetic progress of metaphysics between Kant and Schelling. For in Germany nothing had been free save thought.