No wonder, then, that thinking men, like Heine and Gutzkow, were fairly forced by circumstances into playing the game. No wonder that their tales, novels, and dramas became in many cases editorials to stimulate and guide public thought and feeling in one direction or another. This swirl of agitation put a premium upon a sort of rapid-fire work and journalistic tone, quite incompatible with the highest type of artistic performance. While the Young Germans were all politically liberal and opposed to the Confederate Council and to the Metternich program, they were in many ways more cosmopolitan than national in temper. The foregoing may serve to show the only substantial ground for the charge of didacticism, frequently lodged by their critics against the writers of the school. For it is beside the mark to speak of their opposition to romanticism as a ground for the charge in question. They were all, to be sure, anti-Romanticists. They declined to view life through roseate-hued spectacles or to escape the world of everyday reality by fairy-tale flights into the world of the imagination. They called upon men to discover by clear-eyed vision not only the beauties but also the defects of contemporary social existence. They would employ literature, not as an opiate to make us forget such defects, but as a stimulant to make us remedy them. Hence their repeated exhortations to use the senses and to trust them as furnishing the best kind of raw material for legitimate art. Hence also their protests against the bloodless abstractions of the Nazarene school of painting and to transcendental idealism in art and literature. They cultivated art, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a fuller, saner, and freer human life. In this sense they were didactic; but they were no more didactic than the Romanticists and the Pseudo-Classicists who had preceded them. In their earnest contention for an organic connection between German life and German art and literature they were hewing more closely to the line of nature and truth than any other Germans since the time of Herder.