upon the Volkslied, and finally (in Romanticism) upon the poetry of the age of chivalry, produced at least the unique phenomenon of an art-history which, though it never really attained one aim, was constituted, for the greater part, of flashes of genius.
The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the accomplishment of that remarkable turn with which national consciousness sought to emancipate itself from the dynastic principle. To all appearance this had happened in England long before; In this connexion Magna Charta (1215) will occur to most readers, but some will not have failed to observe that on the contrary, the very recognition of the nation involved in the recognition of its representatives gave the dynastic feeling a fresh-enforced depth and refinement to which the peoples of the Continent remained almost utter strangers. If the modern Englishman is (without appearing so) the most conservative human being in the world, and if in consequence his political management solves its problems so much by wordless harmony of national pulse instead of express discussion, and therefore has been the most successful up to now, the underlying cause is the early emancipation of the dynastic feeling from its expression in monarchical power.
The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a victory of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the concept of the nation. The dynastic has penetrated into the blood of the Western races, and on that very account it is a vexation to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history, it is the history-become-flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and unhistorical. The ideas of the Revolution were all "eternal" and "true." Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature and abstraction and not facts. Call all this republican if you will, in reality it was one more case of a minority striving in the name of all to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact. It became a power, but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace the old felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century; by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in France itself and even to-day is unconsciously dynastic; and by the concept of the fatherland as dynastic unit which emerged first in the Spanish and Prussian uprisings against Napoleon and then in the German and Italian wars of dynastic unification. Out of the opposition of race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically Western ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal — that of the mother tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace the unifying force of the Emperor- and King-idea by the linking of republic and poetry — something of the "return to nature" in this, but a return of history to nature. In place of the wars of succession came language-struggles, in which one nation sought to force its language and therewith its nationality upon the fragments of another. But no one will fail to observe that even the rationalistic conception of a nation as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish, the dynastic feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly over-
