The intellectual inheritance to which the Romanticists succeeded was overpoweringly great. The School came into existence when literature stood at its zenith in Germany. This explains the early maturity of its members; their way was made ready for them. They assimilated in their youth an enormous amount of literary knowledge and of artistic technique, and thus started with an intellectual capital such as no other young generation in Germany had ever possessed. They clothed their first thoughts in the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare, and, beginning thus, proceeded to create what Goethe called "the period of forced talents." For the study of real human character and the execution of definite artistic ideas they substituted the high-handedness of turbulent fancy. Common to all the very dissimilar endeavours and productions of the Romanticists--to Wackenroder's _Klosterbruder_, with its spiritual enthusiasm for art and ideal beauty, to _Lucinde_, with its sensual worship of the flesh, to Tieck's melancholy romances and tales, in which capricious fate makes sport of man, and to Tieck's dramas and Hoffmann's stories, in which all form is lost and its place supplied by the caprices and arabesques of whimsical fancy--common to them all, is that law-defying self-assertion or assertion of the absolutism of the individual, which is a result of war with narrowing prose, of the urgent demand for poetry and freedom. The absolute independence of the Ego isolates. Nevertheless these men soon founded a school, and after its speedy disintegration several interesting groups were formed. This is to be ascribed to their determination to make common cause in procuring the victory, insuring the universal dominion, of the philosophy of life which had been evolved by the great minds of Germany. They desired to introduce this philosophy of the geniuses into life itself, to give it expression in criticism, in poetry, in art theories, in religious exhortation, in the solution of social, and even of political problems; and their first step towards this was violent literary warfare. They were impelled partly by the necessity felt by great and strong natures to impart one will and one mind to a whole band of fellow-combatants, and partly by the inclination of men of talent, whose talent is attacked and contested, to confront the overwhelming numbers of their opponents with a small but superior force. In the case of the best men, the formation of a school or a party was the result of exactly that lack of state organisation which was the first condition of their isolating independence. The consciousness of belonging to a people without unity as a nation, and without collective strength, begot the endeavour to imbue the leading spirits of the aristocracy of intellect with a new rallying principle.