art in which art is not a part but an aspect of the common life,
and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the
passion and power of beauty in the whole community. “Such
art,” says Hegel, “is the common good and the work of all.
Each generation hands it on beautified to the next; each has
done something to give utterance to the universal thought.
Those who are said to have genius have acquired some special
aptitude by which they render the general shapes of the nation
their own work, one in one point, another in another. What
they produce is not their invention, but the invention of the whole
nation; or rather, what they find is that the whole nation has
found its true nature. Each, as it were, piles up his stone.
So too does the artist. Somehow he has the good fortune to
come last, and when he places his stone the arch stands self-supported.”
Hegel, as we have already seen, was fully aware
of the change that was coming over the world. “A new epoch,”
he says, “has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit had now
succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence,
and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.” These words
come from lectures on the history of philosophy, which laid
the foundation for his Phänomenologie des Geistes (Bamberg,
1807).
On the 14th of October 1806 Napoleon was at Jena. Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic shudder at the national disaster, and in Prussia he saw only a corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to his friend F. J. Niethammer (1766–1848) on the day before the battle, he speaks with admiration of the “world-soul,” the emperor, and with satisfaction of the probable overthrow of the Prussians. The scholar’s wish was to see the clouds of war pass away, and leave thinkers to their peaceful work. His manuscripts were his main care; and doubtful of the safety of his last despatch to Bamberg, and disturbed by the French soldiers in his lodgings, he hurried off, with the last pages of the Phänomenologie, to take refuge in the pro-rector’s house. Hegel’s fortunes were now at the lowest ebb. Without means, and obliged to borrow from Niethammer, he had no further hopes from the impoverished university. He had already tried to get away from Jena. In 1805, when several lecturers left in consequence of diminished classes, he had written to Johann Heinrich Voss (q.v.), suggesting that his philosophy might find more congenial soil in Heidelberg; but the application bore no fruit. He was, therefore, glad to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung (1807–1808). Of his editorial work there is little to tell; no leading articles appeared in his columns. It was not a suitable vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the Aegidien-gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post which he held from December 1808 to August 1816. Bavaria at this time was modernizing her institutions. The school system was reorganized by new regulations, in accordance with which Hegel wrote a series of lessons in the outlines of philosophy—ethical, logical and psychological. They were published in 1840 by Rosenkranz from Hegel’s papers.
As a teacher and master Hegel inspired confidence in his pupils, and maintained discipline without pedantic interference in their associations and sports. On prize-days his addresses summing up the history of the school year discussed some topic of general interest. Five of these addresses are preserved. The first is an exposition of the advantages of a classical training, when it is not confined to mere grammar. “The perfection and grandeur of the master-works of Greek and Roman literature must be the intellectual bath, the secular baptism, which gives the first and unfading tone and tincture of taste and science.” In another address, speaking of the introduction of military exercises at school, he says: “These exercises, while not intended to withdraw the students from their more immediate duty, so far as they have any calling to it, still remind them of the possibility that every one, whatever rank in society he may belong to, may one day have to defend his country and his king, or help to that end. This duty, which is natural to all, was formerly recognized by every citizen, though whole ranks in the state have become strangers to the very idea of it.”
On the 16th of September 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher (twenty-two years his junior) of Nuremberg. She brought her husband no fortune, but the marriage was entirely happy. The husband kept a careful record of income and expenditure. His income amounted at Nuremberg to 1500 gulden (£130) and a house; at Heidelberg, as professor, he received about the same sum; at Berlin about 3000 thalers (£300). Two sons were born to them; the elder, Karl, became eminent as a historian. The younger, Immanuel, was born on the 24th of September 1816. Hegel’s letters to his wife, written during his solitary holiday tours to Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, breathe of kindly and happy affection. Hegel the tourist—recalling happy days spent together; confessing that, were it not because of his sense of duty as a traveller, he would rather be at home, dividing his time between his books and his wife; commenting on the shop windows at Vienna; describing the straw hats of the Parisian ladies—is a contrast to the professor of a profound philosophical system. But it shows that the enthusiasm which in his days of courtship moved him to verse had blossomed into a later age of domestic bliss.
In 1812 appeared the first two volumes of his Wissenschaft der Logik, and the work was completed by a third in 1816. This work, in which his system was for the first time presented in what, with a few minor alterations, was its ultimate shape, found some audience in the world. Towards the close of his eighth session three professorships were almost simultaneously put within his reach—at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg. The Prussian offer expressed a doubt that his long absence from university teaching might have made him rusty, so he accepted the post at Heidelberg, whence Fries had just gone to Jena (October 1816). Only four hearers turned up for one of his courses. Others, however, on the encyclopaedia of philosophy and the history of philosophy drew classes of twenty to thirty. While he was there Cousin first made his acquaintance, but a more intimate relation dates from Berlin. Among his pupils was Hermann F. W. Hinrichs (q.v.), to whose Religion in its Inward Relation to Science (1822) Hegel contributed an important preface. The strangest of his hearers was an Esthonian baron, Boris d’Yrkull, who after serving in the Russian army came to Heidelberg to hear the wisdom of Hegel. But his books and his lectures were alike obscure to the baron, who betook himself by Hegel’s advice to simpler studies before he returned to the Hegelian system.
At Heidelberg Hegel was active in a literary way also. In 1817 he brought out the Encyklopädie d. philos. Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (4th ed., Berlin, 1817; new ed., 1870) for use at his lectures. It is the only exposition of the Hegelian system as a whole which we have direct from Hegel’s own hand. Besides this work he wrote two reviews for the Heidelberg Jahrbücher—the first on F. H. Jacobi, the other a political pamphlet which called forth violent criticism. It was entitled a Criticism on the Transactions of the Estates of Württemberg in 1815–1816. On the 15th of March 1815 King Frederick of Württemberg, at a meeting of the estates of his kingdom, laid before them the draft of a new constitution, in accordance with the resolutions of the congress of Vienna. Though an improvement on the old constitution, it was unacceptable to the estates, jealous of their old privileges and suspicious of the king’s intentions. A decided majority demanded the restitution of their old laws, though the kingdom now included a large population to which the old rights were strange. Hegel in his essay, which was republished at Stuttgart, supported the royal proposals, and animadverted on the backwardness of the bureaucracy and the landed interests. In the main he was right; but he forgot too much the provocation they had received, the usurpations and selfishness of the governing family, and the unpatriotic character of the king.
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, vacant since the death of Fichte. The hopes which this offer raised of a position less precarious than that of a university teacher of philosophy were in one sense disappointed; for more than a professor Hegel never became. But his influence upon his pupils, and his solidarity with the
