For this long sterility and slow development of German literature various reasons are assigned. We need not here pretend to estimate how far they are severally true. We cannot refer all literary outbursts to causes independent of genius. Nor is it necessary always to demand an extensive national life as a condition of literary fertility. Looking at the golden-age literatures of Athens and Florence, we should rather hold that it is a free-spirited and cultured life pervading a community, small or great, which stimulates to literary productiveness and excellence. It is, in fact, the prevailing ideals in a community which determine whether it shall create a splendid literature or not. In Germany there were for centuries no communities pervaded with this spirited and cultured life; the prevailing ideals were not in the direction of any consummate artistic production. Till 1802 there existed, in name at least, as many as two hundred and fifty petty princedoms and paltry republics in Germany, for the most part little better than narrow feudal domains, struggling, ignoble, and selfish, as such disintegrated political atoms are wont to be. So long as these were really separate there was no grandeur of spirit, no high level of culture, in Germany. Nevertheless, for a generation before the end of the eighteenth century there had been growing up a wider and more national German sentiment and a considerable measure of union, political and social. It was not till this generation that Goethe and Schiller appeared. The wars which devastated Germany after the Reformation were of most hideous ferocity and unparalleled continuance, and had necessarily caused a dearth of literature as of other arts. What literature is to be found in Germany for two hundred years, from the time of our own Henry VIII down to the time of our George III—all those generations which include our Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray—is almost entirely a literature of controversy, religion, hymns, criticism, and learning. Then at length, with the growing feeling of a general Germanic nationality and a general Germanic spirit and culture, with religious freedom established and controversy worn out, with the ideals of learning homogeneously spread, the time has come when literary genius finds its apt environment, and the thought and feeling of Germany take shape in dramas, ballads, lyrics, novels, and all other wonted forms. And then, for a generation, German literature is the dominant literature of Europe. * * * * *