museum is destined to be one of the great centres in America for the study of national civilization.
To-day, as we stand on the threshold of so promising and momentous a career, it seems proper that we should clearly formulate the essential function which such a museum of Germanic civilization has to fulfil within the organism of an American university, that we should define its place in the larger whole of historical, philological and literary studies. This is the general subject from the sphere of which I desire to select a few brief considerations.
The most immediate and obvious as well as the most general service rendered to the student by such a museum is its appeal to the eye. Goethe somewhere says: “What we have not seen with our own eyes is really no concern of ours.” Although not meant as such, this word of Goethe's is a severe and just indictment of much of what passes for critical scholarship. All too often critics forget that their first and fundamental task is to see a given object, be it a drama, a statue, or a social fact, to become familiar with its dimensions, its outline, its proportion; to take it in, so to speak, as a whole. All too often the real significance of such an object is lost sight of over investigations which have to do with some slight detail, some question of authorship, some relation to other works or facts, some theory connected with it—investigations, in other words, which have to do with everything except the object itself. The primary office, then, of such a museum as this is to force the objects themselves upon the attention of the college student, to engender the habit in him of gazing and re-gazing, to adapt his sensuous perception to the objects of his study. It is clear why the sight of such objects as are exhibited in our Germanic Museum is of particular value to the American student. Most American students have no opportunity of familiarizing themselves by travel abroad with the outward aspect of mediaeval civilization; very few of them have seen Nuremberg or Hildesheim; very few can form a conception of what a Romanesque or a Gothic cathedral really is. The mere sight, then, of such wonderful and imposing monuments as the Naumburg rood-screen or the golden gate of Freiberg, both given to us
