the philosophers play the part of the old crones, amidst the thunders of the obscurantists, the insane yells of the mystics, and the shouts of the politicians for temporal and ecclesiastical despotism, while theology and theosophy fall upon the sciences and suffocate them with their caresses. [1] G. L. Plitt: _Aus Schelling's Leben_, i. 309. [2] G. Brandes: _Samlede Skrifter_, i. 464. I THE PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM Any one who makes acquaintance with the Germany of to-day, either by travelling in the country or by reading about it, and then compares it with the Germany of the beginning of the century, is astounded by the contrast. What a distance between then and now! Who would believe that this Realistic Germany had ever been a Romantic Germany! Public utterances, private conversation, the very physiognomy of the towns, bear in our days a distinct stamp of realism. Walk along any street in Berlin, and you meet men in uniform, officers and privates, erect, decorated. The literature in the windows of the bookshops has for the most part a practical tendency. Even the furniture and ornaments are influenced by the new spirit. One cannot imagine anything more prosaic and warlike than the shop of a Berlin dealer in fancy articles. On the clocks, where of old a knight in armour knelt and kissed his lady's finger-tips, Uhlans and Cuirassiers now stand in full uniform. Conical bullets hang as trinkets from watch-chains, and piled muskets form candelabra. The metal in fashion is iron. The word in fashion is also iron. The present occupation of this nation of philosophers and poets is assuredly not poetry-writing and philosophising. Even highly cultured Germans know little about philosophy now-a-days--not one German student in twenty has read a word of Hegel; interest in poetry, as such, is practically dead; political and social questions rouse a hundred times more attention than problems of culture or psychical conundrums. And this is the people which once was lost in Romantic reveries and speculations, and saw its prototype in Hamlet! Hamlet and Bismarck! Bismarck and Romanticism! Unquestionably the great German statesman succeeded in carrying all Germany with him chiefly because he offered to his country in his own person the very qualities of which it had so long felt the want. Through him politics have been substituted for æsthetics. Germany has been united; the military monarchy has swallowed up the small States, and with them all their feudal idylls; Prussia has become the Piedmont of Germany, and has impressed its orderly and practical spirit upon the new empire; and simultaneously with this, natural science has supplanted or metamorphosed philosophy, and the idea of nationality has superseded or modified the "humanity" ideal. The War of Liberation of 1813 was pre-eminently a result of enthusiasm; the victories of 1870 were pre-eminently a result of the most careful calculation.