Russian province. He has, however, left a curious sketch of
his projected school reforms. His new duties led him to Strassburg,
where he met the young Goethe, on whose poetical development
he exercised so potent an influence. At Darmstadt he
made the acquaintance of Caroline Flachsland, to whom he soon
became betrothed, and who for the rest of his life supplied him
with that abundance of consolatory sympathy which his sensitive
and rather querulous nature appeared to require. The engagement
as tutor did not prove an agreeable one, and he soon threw
it up (1771) in favour of an appointment as court preacher
and member of the consistory at Bückeburg. Here he had to
encounter bitter opposition from the orthodox clergy and their
followers, among whom he was regarded as a freethinker. His
health continued poor, and a fistula in the eye, from which he
had suffered from early childhood, and to cure which he had
undergone a number of painful operations, continued to trouble
him. Further, pecuniary difficulties, from which he never
long managed to keep himself free, by delaying his marriage,
added to his depression. Notwithstanding these trying circumstances
he resumed literary work, which his travels had interrupted.
For some time he had been greatly interested by the
poetry of the north, more particularly Percy’s Reliques, the
poems of “Ossian” (in the genuineness of which he like many
others believed) and the works of Shakespeare. Under the
influence of this reading he now finally broke with classicism
and became one of the leaders of the new Sturm und Drang
movement. He co-operated with a band of young writers at
Darmstadt and Frankfort, including Goethe, who in a journal
of their own sought to diffuse the new ideas. His marriage took
place in 1773. In 1776 he obtained through Goethe’s influence
the post of general superintendent and court preacher at Weimar,
where he passed the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the society
of Goethe, Wieland, Jean Paul (who came to Weimar in order
to be near Herder), and others, the patronage of the court, with
whom as a preacher he was very popular, and an opportunity
of carrying out some of his ideas of school reform. Yet the social
atmosphere of the place did not suit him. His personal relations
with Goethe again and again became embittered. This, added
to ill-health, served to intensify a natural irritability of temperament,
and the history of his later Weimar days is a rather
dreary page in the chronicles of literary life. He had valued
more than anything else a teacher’s influence over other minds,
and as he began to feel that he was losing it he grew jealous of
the success of those who had outgrown this influence. Yet
while presenting these unlovely traits, Herder’s character was
on the whole a worthy and attractive one. This seems to be
sufficiently attested by the fact that he was greatly liked and
esteemed, not only in the pulpit but in private intercourse,
by cultivated women like the countess of Bückeburg, the duchess
of Weimar and Frau von Stein, and, what perhaps is more,
was exceedingly popular among the gymnasium pupils, in whose
education he took so lively an interest. While much that Herder
produced after settling in Weimar has little value, he wrote
also some of his best works, among others his collection of popular
poetry on which he had been engaged for many years, Stimmen
der Völker in Liedern (1778–1779); his translation of the Spanish
romances of the Cid (1805); his celebrated work on Hebrew
poetry, Vom Geist der hebräischen Poesie (1782–1783); and his
opus magnum, the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (1784–1791). Towards the close of his life he occupied
himself, like Lessing, with speculative questions in philosophy
and theology. The boldness of some of his ideas cost him some
valuable friendships, as that of Jacobi, Lavater and even of
his early teacher Hamann. He died on the 18th of December
1803, full of new literary plans up to the very last.
Herder’s writings were for a long time regarded as of temporary value only, and fell into neglect. Recent criticism, however, has tended very much to raise their value by tracing out their wide and far-reaching influence. His works are very voluminous, and to a large extent fragmentary and devoid of artistic finish; nevertheless they are nearly always worth investigating for the brilliant suggestions in which they abound. His place in German literature has already been indicated in tracing his mental development. Like Lessing, whose work he immediately continued, he was a pioneer of the golden age of this literature. Lessing had given the first impetus to the formation of a national literature by exposing the folly of the current imitation of French writers. But in doing this he did not so much call his fellow-countrymen to develop freely their own national sentiments and ideas as send them back to classical example and principle. Lessing was the exponent of German classicism; Herder, on the contrary, was a pioneer of the romantic movement. He fought against all imitation as such, and bade German writers be true to themselves and their national antecedents. As a sort of theoretic basis for this adhesion to national type in literature, he conceived the idea that literature and art, together with language and national culture as a whole, are evolved by a natural process, and that the intellectual and emotional life of each people is correlated with peculiarities of physical temperament and of material environment. In this way he became the originator of that genetic or historical method which has since been applied to all human ideas and institutions. Herder was thus an evolutionist, but an evolutionist still under the influence of Rousseau. That is to say, in tracing back the later acquisitions of civilization to impulses which are as old as the dawn of primitive culture, he did not, as the modern evolutionist does, lay stress on the superiority of the later to the earlier stages of human development, but rather became enamoured of the simplicity and spontaneity of those early impulses which, since they are the oldest, easily come to look like the most real and precious. Yet even in this way he helped to found the historical school in literature and science, for it was only after an excessive and sentimental interest in primitive human culture had been awakened that this subject would receive the amount of attention which was requisite for the genetic explanation of later developments. This historical idea was carried by Herder into the regions of poetry, art, religion, language, and finally into human culture as a whole. It colours all his writings, and is intimately connected with some of the most characteristic attributes of his mind, a quick sympathetic imagination, a fine feeling for local differences, and a scientific instinct for seizing the sequences of cause and effect.
Herder’s works may be arranged in an ascending series, corresponding to the way in which the genetic or historical idea was developed and extended. First come the works on poetic literature, art, language and religion as special regions of development. Secondly, we have in the Ideen a general account of the process of human evolution. Thirdly, there are a number of writings which, though inferior in interest to the others, may be said to supply the philosophic basis of his leading ideas.
1. In the region of poetry Herder sought to persuade his countrymen, both by example and precept, to return to a natural and spontaneous form of utterance. His own poetry has but little value; Herder was a skilful verse-maker but hardly a creative poet. He was most successful in his translation of popular song, in which he shows a rare sympathetic insight into the various feelings and ideas of peoples as unlike as Greenlanders and Spaniards, Indians and Scots. In the Fragmente he aims at nationalizing German poetry and freeing it from all extraneous influence. He ridicules the ambition of German writers to be classic, as Lessing had ridiculed their eagerness to be French. He looked at poetry as a kind of “proteus among the people, which changes its form according to language, manners, habits, according to temperament and climate, nay, even according to the accent of different nations.” This fact of the idiosyncrasy of national poetry he illustrated with great fulness and richness in the case of Homer, the nature of whose works he was one of the first to elucidate, the Hebrew poets, and the poetry of the north as typified in “Ossian.” This same idea of necessary relation to national character and circumstance is also applied to dramatic poetry, and more especially to Shakespeare. Lessing had done much to make Shakespeare known to Germany, but he had regarded him in contrast to the French dramatists with whom he also contrasted the Greek dramatic poets, and accordingly did not bring out his essentially modern and Teutonic character. Herder does this, and in doing so shows a far deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s genius than his predecessor had shown.
2. The views on art contained in Herder’s Kritische Wälder (1769), Plastik (1778), &c., are chiefly valuable as a correction of the excesses into which reverence for Greek art had betrayed Winckelmann and Lessing, by help of his fundamental idea of national idiosyncrasy. He argues against the setting up of classic art as an unchanging type,
