But Herder was more volatile in his emotions than either Rousseau or Fichte. Writing from Nantes, he confessed to his former teacher Hamann (a Francophobe who on a trip to London had experienced his own revulsion from complacently rationalist Westerners): ‘I am getting to know the French language, French habits and the French way of thinking – getting to know but not getting to embrace, for the closer my acquaintance with them is, the greater my sense of alienation becomes.’ In Paris, ‘festooned with luxury, vanity and French nothingness’, a ‘decadent den of vice’, Herder failed to meet any of the philosophes he had fantasized meeting. His fervent desire to wear the French identity of a sociable man and be a charming salon wit shaded into premature and acute disappointment. ‘Magnificence in arts and institutions are in the centre of attention,’ he wrote. ‘But since taste is only the most superficial conception of beauty and magnificence only an illusion – and frequently a surrogate for beauty – France can never satisfy, and I am heartily tired of it.’
Defensive Goths
Herder, like many other provincials, had been attracted, appalled and demoralized by the French capital of cosmopolitanism, and the superior airs of its thinkers. He attacked Enlightenment intellectuals with the peculiar intensity of the spurned lover who thinks he has seen through his own illusions, and found that there is not much there behind dazzling appearances. One of his targets was Rousseau’s jaunty old enemy: ‘Voltaire may have spread,’ Herder conceded, ‘the light, the so-called philosophy of humanity, tolerance, ease in thinking for oneself.’ But:
at the same time what wretched recklessness, weakness, uncertainty, and chill! What shallowness, lack of design, distrust of virtue, of happiness, and merit! What was laughed off by his wit, sometimes without any such intention! Our gentle, pleasant, and necessary bonds have been dissolved with a shameless hand, yet those of us who do not reside at the Chateau de Fernay [Voltaire’s residence near Geneva] have been given nothing at all in their stead.
Having established Voltaire’s incorrigible frivolity in his own mind, Herder moved rapidly from what he called ‘a way of thinking without morals and solid human feeling’ to the assertion that French lacks what German has: a true moral freedom and connection with sense experience. In his poem ‘To the Germans’ he exhorted his fellow countrymen to ‘Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O you German!’
Many Germans followed Herder’s intellectual journey. They moved from being, in Lessing’s mordant words, ‘subservient admirers of the never sufficiently admired French’ to a willed feeling of superiority, and on to a fervent desire to beat the adversary at his own game. In 1807, as French troops occupied Berlin, Fichte, once a self-proclaimed Jacobin, would argue in ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ that the Germans were lucky to hold on to their language while the French ‘only want to destroy everything that exists and to create everywhere … a void, in which they can reproduce their own image and never anything else’. Aurelie tells Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s eponymous novel, ‘I hate the French language’, and then, praising German as a ‘strong, honest, heartfelt’ language, sneers that French is ‘worthy of being the universal language with which people can lie and deceive one another’.
The need to affirm a sense of national identity that was the exact opposite of the frivolity, refinement, irony and facetiousness of cosmopolitan and wealthy France drove the Germans into continuous idealizations and falsifications. The poet Klopstock, who called for a return to the Volk through the study of peasant legends, claimed that corruption flourished among the rich and the sophisticated while moral purity thrived among the humble.
Gothic style, identified by the French philosophes with barbarism, came to be celebrated for its alleged Germanness. Herder himself played a crucial role in its revival. Returning from France, he met Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770 – one of the most fateful encounters in the history of culture – and found a vulnerable object of indoctrination. The young Goethe was soon working himself up into ecstasy before the Gothic minster of Strasbourg: ‘This is German architecture, our architecture! Something of which the Italian cannot boast, far less the Frenchman!’
In Herder’s anthology On German Art and Character (1773), Goethe attacked ‘Frenchmen of all nations’ and made France seem a byword for imitative, pseudo-rational thought. The rebellion against the narrow intellectualism of the French Enlightenment, led by Herder, and popularized by the young Goethe and Schiller, turned into the movement known as Sturm und Drang, ‘stress and strain’, the essential precursor of the Romantic Revolution that transformed the world with its notion of a dynamic subjectivity. Many of its adherents were students – with their rakish dress, long hair, and narcotic and sexual indulgences, they were prototypes for the counter-cultural figures of our age. These young men upheld feeling and sensibility against the tyranny of reason, natural expression against French refinement, and a determination to find and enshrine a uniquely German spirit.
Herder challenged the Enlightenment assumption that progress in history had been made inevitable by the accumulation and refinement of rational knowledge. He argued that the histories of nations operated according to their own principles and could not be judged by the standards of the Enlightenment. He contended that Europeans living in large cities are neither more virtuous nor happier than the ‘Oriental patriarch’ who achieves virtue and felicity by upholding the beliefs and values of his natural and social milieu.
Herder went on to develop a vision of history with a Rousseauian emphasis: an original social setting of simplicity, truthfulness and self-sufficiency had been ruined by luxury and a cosmopolitan culture of insincerity and dubious morality. In place of Sparta, Herder invoked the Germanic tribes of what he called ‘the North’, which preceded and followed the Roman Empire, and created a society marked by social harmony and moral clarity. ‘In the patriarch’s hut, the humble homestead, or the local community,’ he explained, ‘people knew and clearly perceived what they talked about, since the way they looked at things, and acted, was through the human heart.’ Introducing educated Germans to folk poetry and the cultural values of humble folk, Herder hoped that a literature emancipated from classical French rules would unleash a national spirit among the politically divided Germans. Even the German discovery of the classical past could not remain free of its obsession with their allegedly shallow neighbour. The French had proclaimed themselves as the heirs of the Roman tradition. So it was up to the art, architecture and poetry of Greece to stimulate a cultural renaissance in Germany.
According to Winckelmann, the son of a cobbler who became the most famous art historian of his time, ‘the only way for us to become great, indeed to become inimitable, if that were possible, is through the imitation of the Greeks’; and, he might have added, the rejection of everything French. In German hands, literary and classical scholarship and the brand-new discipline of history received the imprint, ineradicable to this day, of cultural defensiveness.
Quietly Desperate in the Provinces