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No. 51. Vienna, 23 December 1898. Second Year.

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Judaism and Romanticism.

By S. Lublinski.

Exactly a hundred years ago the Romantic school established itself in Germany under the aegis of Friedrich Schlegel, and the intellectual life of Germany, at the very summit of its development, received a shock whose widening circles tremble on to this day and at times overflow. The new school was born out of the womb of the age of Humanity, with which nevertheless it entered at the same time into the most decided opposition.

"All men are equal," ran the watchword in the days of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. Men laboured after universally valid norms of aesthetics and of the conduct of life, which they believed themselves to have found among the Hellenes. The German, who only a moment before had risen up, full of national sensitiveness, against the overmastering influence of French culture, now put off altogether his original, rough Nordic garment and wrapped himself in the mantle of Plato, which was supposed to represent the infallible standard dress for the whole of mankind. Honest pains were taken to force modern society and literature, philosophy and belles-lettres, into these allegedly universally human forms, and it cannot be denied that significant works and imperishable deeds of the spirit proceeded from this struggle. But why precisely the Greeks? And why only the Greeks? It would by no means enter the heads of the first Romanticists that a single small people should be destined to be the bearer of the absolutely universal-human, while other peoples and nations had supposedly contributed nothing at all to the common possession of human culture. Rather they developed the fruitful thought that in the creations of culture and of fancy of all nations elements of, and contributions toward, a culture-bearing people of all mankind lay preserved; and out of the fundamentally divergent outward forms of the Oriental and Occidental, Nordic and Romance mythologies they sought, by comparison and reinterpretation, slowly to disengage that which was of one kind. The Hellenic Hercules, the Phoenician Melkart, the Nordic Thor and sundry figures of Indian mythology were set side by side as equals, and a thoroughly extravagant Romanticist such as Zacharias Werner even ventured the comparison between Isis and Mary. A particular attention was directed to the mystical secret doctrines of the several religions, since at all times subterranean superstition remained wholly the same, whether it came to flower in Hellas and Rome, or in Egypt, or on the Ganges, or among the Malays, or in the primeval forests of Germania. Hence the Romanticists, who in their early period sought above all things after the eternally human and the equivalent among all peoples and nations, could not but cherish a peculiarly tender predilection for this mystical night in which, as Hegel scoffed, all cows were of course black. In any case this is to be held fast: the Romanticists originally accepted the principle of the age of Enlightenment and Humanity, that all men are equal and that laws and norms must therefore be laid down which should hold good for all peoples and nations. But they were free enough of prejudice and comprehensive enough to seek this universally human norm not only among the Hellenes, but also among the Orientals, nay even among the half-savages. Wherever a human mouth had sung songs and a human brain had brooded upon the riddle of the world, there the Romanticist was already at hand to translate, to enter into the feeling of it, and to compare it carefully with the wholly differently constituted products of other nations, until a universally human law revealed itself to his searching eye. His comparisons and studies encircled the globe from Polynesia to the heart of Germany, and the Romanticist was thereby only the descendant, transposed into the region of the spirit, of the great travellers of the eighteenth century, and one who felt in advance the great travellers of the nineteenth.

In the eighteenth century the colonial wars began: then the English conquered India, then