the nobility soon lost its importance and the Papacy rose through the anti-dynastic cities to political supremacy; even though at the last there was but a tangle of predatory states whose "Renaissance"-politics opposed the soaring world-policy of the Gothic Empire, as Milan of old had defied the will of Frederick Barbarossa — yet the ideal of Una Italia, the ideal for which Dante sacrificed the peace of his life, was a pure dynastic creation of the great Germany emperors. The Renaissance, whose historical horizon was that of the urban patriciate, led the nation as far out of the path of self-fulfilment as it is possible to imagine. All through the Baroque and Rococo the land was depressed to the state of being a mere pawn in the power-politics of alien houses. And not until after 1800 did Romanticism arise and reawaken the Gothic feeling with an intensity that made of it a political power.
The French people was forged out of Franks and Visigoths by its kings. It learned to feel itself as a whole for the first time at Bouvines in 1214.[1] Still more significant is the creation of the House of Habsburg, which, out of a population linked neither by speech nor folk-feeling nor tradition caused to arise the Austrian nation, which proved its nationhood in defending Maria Theresa and in resisting Napoleon — its first tests, and its last. The political history of the Baroque age is in essentials the history of the Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg. The rise of the House of Wettin in place of that of Welf is the reason why "Saxony" was on the Weser in 800, and is on the Elbe to-day. Dynastic events, and finally the intervention of Napoleon, brought it about that half of Bavaria has shared in the history of Austria and that the Bavarian State consists for the most part of Franconia and Suabia.
The latest nation of the West is the Prussian, a creation of the Hohenzollerns as the Roman was the last creation of the Classical Polis-feeling, and the Arabian the last product of a religious consensus. At Fehbellin[2] the young nation gained its recognition; at Rossbach[3] it won for Germany. It was Goethe who with his infallible eye for historic turning-points described the then new "Minna von Barnhelm" as the first German poetry of specifically national content. It is one more example, and a deeply significant one, to show how dynastically the Western nations defined themselves, that Germany thus at one stroke re-discovered her poetic language. The collapse of the Hohenstaufen rule had been accompanied by that of Germany's Gothic literature also. What did emerge here and there in the following centuries — the golden age of all the Western literatures — was undeserving of the name. But with the victories of Frederick the Great a new poesy began. "From Lessing to Hebbel" means the same as "from Rossbach to Sedan." The attempts that were made to restore the lost connexion by consciously leaning upon, first the French, and then Shakespeare,
