The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University/Address by Kuno Francke

The Chairman: Ladies and Gentlemen, I was obliged to confess to you that some of us had occasionally felt that the project of a Germanic Museum here was almost too great to be capable of realization. There was, however, one member of the German Department whose enthusiasm and persistence never flagged, and to whose devotion to this cause the success of it is almost entirely due,—the Curator of the Germanic Museum, Professor Kuno Francke.

ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR FRANCKE.

There are moments in the history of an institution as well as in the life of an individual, when forces which slowly and for a long time almost imperceptibly have been accumulating suddenly take shape in some new impetus, some new accomplishment, some new and inspiring thought. Such a moment, if I mistake not, came to Harvard University, and through Harvard to American universities at large, when the German Emperor decided to give to it the remarkable collection of casts, embracing some of the great landmarks in the development of German architecture and sculpture, which now forms the principal treasure of our Germanic Museum.

The idea of a Germanic Museum at Harvard University is not of yesterday. It is fully ten years old. It was engendered by the existence of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology, and by the successful efforts of the Semitic Department to illustrate the life of ancient Babylon and Judea through a collection of monuments embodying the results of scientific exploration to Asia Minor. It was taken up by the Committee of Visitors to the Germanic Department, who very unselfishly and earnestly devoted themselves to its furtherance. It was subsequently helped by the Germanic Museum Association, through whose propaganda it first became widely known. It was brought within sight of tentative realization through the grant by the President and Fellows of a building well suited to its immediate purposes. But not until the truly princely gift of the German Emperor came to us could we feel assured—as we do feel now—that this 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 in full-size reproductions by the German Emperor, cannot help being a revelation to American students.

In the next place, this museum, it seems to me, is destined to form a bond of union between the various studies relating to different phases of national life. Modern scholarship suffers from over-specialization. The historical student, the philologist, the student of art, the literary critic, each cultivates his own field, often quite unaware of what is going on in neighboring pastures, quite forgetful of the fact that national life is a unit, that it is the common soil from which spring forth the most diversified and yet allied activities, and that only by considering all these activities in their relation to each other and to this common soil can we arrive at a just estimate of their significance. This museum, I trust, will help to counteract this narrow specialization, by becoming a meeting ground for the art student and the philologist, the student of political as well as of literary history. It is not to set up a new specialty; it is to embrace national civilization as a whole by bringing before our eyes the outward forms of this civilization in its successive stages. How the lake-dwellers lived in prehistoric Switzerland; what kind of armaments and household utensils were used by the Germanic tribes of the era of the migrations; in what kind of boats the Anglo-Saxons and the Norsemen crossed the seas; how they buried their dead; what were the types of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian, the Frankish, the Bavarian, the Swabian farmhouse; what was the development of religious sculpture in Germany during the Middle Ages; what was the scheme and the development of the mediaeval castle; what was the architectural character of the German city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its fortifications, its public buildings, its private houses; what was the stage of the miracle-plays and moralities; what was the development of book-printing; what was the Wittenberg of Luther's time, the Weimar of Goethe's—these are some of the sights which our Museum will offer, and in a measure already offers, partly through models and photographs, but largely through plaster casts and other full-size reproductions of the original works of art and industry.

Let me illustrate by one or two examples from Emperor William's collection how such a museum as this appeals to a variety of scientific interests, how it will force upon the historical student and the social philosopher, the art critic and the literary and linguistic investigator the consciousness of the fundamental unity of their tasks, how it will tend to deepen, to widen and to vivify the conception of national civilization.

Since Burckhardt's “Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,” it has been a popular axiom that modern individualism had its origin in the era of the “rinascimento.” Unquestionably, there is a good deal of truth in this axiom. Broadly speaking, the Middle Ages were an era of collectivism, while the modern world, beginning with Humanism and the Reformation, is dominated by subjective thought and feeling. That, however, Burckhardt's phrase of “the discovery of the individual” by the great Italians of the quatro-cento is misleading, that, in other words, the Middle Ages themselves contain the germs of modern individualism, is an insight gaining more and more ground among historical students. Our museum contains one of the most striking illustrations of the correctness of this view in the remarkable array of plastic figures from Naumburg Cathedral, belonging to the height of mediaeval German sculpture in the thirteenth century. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the art of the renaissance which surpasses these twelve portrait statues in fulness, distinctness and vigor of individual life. Every one of these figures is a type by itself, a fully rounded personality. The Canoness standing erect, but with slightly inclined head, thoughtfully gazing down upon a book which she supports with one hand while the other turns over its leaves; the two pairs of princely husband and wife, one of the men full of power and determination, the other of youthfully sanguine appearance, one of the women broadly smiling, the other, with a gesture full of reserved dignity, drawing her garment to her face; the young ecclesiastic, with his carefully arranged hair flowing from his tonsure, holding the missal in front of him; the various knights, one looking out from behind his shield, another leaning upon his sword, others in still different postures and moods—there is not a figure among them which did not represent a particular individual at a particular moment, and which did not, without losing itself in capricious imitation of accidental trifles, reproduce life as it is. It is impossible in the face of such works of sculpture as these not to feel that they proceeded from artists deeply versed in the study of human character, fully alive to the problems of human conduct, keenly sensitive to impressions of any sort, in other words fully developed, highly organized, complicated individuals. If with some such thoughts as these in mind we turn to the works of literature of the same epoch, if we think of such characters as Hagen or Kriemhild, Parzival or Tristan, we shall be inclined, I think, to observe in them also more distinctly than before those traits which stamp them as belonging to the sphere of actual life, which make them sharply individualized types. And we shall be more ready to acknowledge in the whole drift of those times, in their religious, intellectual, social conditions, the same tendency toward individuality.

Or, to take an example illustrating the connections between political history and art, what could be more instructive to the historical student than Schluter's equestrian statue of the Great Elector of Brandenburg, also given to us in full-size reproduction by the German Emperor. Frederick William, the founder of the Prussian monarchy, was a remarkable mixture of autocratic arbitrariness and single-minded devotion to the common weal. Ruthlessly overriding time-honored class privileges and local statutes, he established the sovereignty of the modern State in his widely scattered territories, and thus welded them together into a political whole. Obstinately adhering to a military absolutism even in matters of civil administration, he was also keenly alive to the demands of industrial progress and commercial expansion. A Prussian from foot to crown, zealously maintaining the prerogatives of his principality against other States of the empire, he was also the only German prince of his time who deeply felt for the national honor, the only one willing to risk his own State in defence of Germany. Could the sturdy greatness of this man, could the condition of the Prussia of his time be more concretely and impressively brought before us than by this statue erected in front of his castle at Berlin a few years after his death? Clad in the costume of a Roman imperator, the marshal's staff in his right hand, with the left tightly grasping the reins and holding his horse in check, his head slightly thrown back so that the aquiline nose and the commanding eyes are in full sight, while the mane-like hair flows in bold masses over neck and shoulders, he seems the very embodiment of seventeenth century absolutism. But there is nothing vain-glorious in this man, nothing that savors of a Charles II. or a Louis XV. His horse is not a showy thing of parade, but a doughty animal of tough sinews and heavy limbs; he rides it free and without stirrups; he knows what he is about; he is carrying his destiny in himself; and a victorious future seems to hover before his eyes.

It remains to say a few words about a third service which, I feel assured, this museum will render to American university life. This institution is not a German museum; it is a Germanic Museum; it is to bring together representative monuments of the Germanic past on English, Dutch, Scandinavian, Swiss and Austrian soil as well as German. It seems inevitable that one result of the existence of such a museum will be a strengthened feeling of the unity of the Germanic race; and I doubt not that Germanic studies at large will be benefited and broadened by the growth of this feeling. There is reason to think that it is this very feeling which has given strength to our cause thus far, which has made the museum what it now is. Americans both of English and German blood first supported and promoted it. The Swiss Government has signified its intention to follow up its generous gift from the Landes-Museum at Zurich by regular and continuous supplies from the same source; and a committee of leading citizens of Berlin and other German cities is now preparing for us a superb collection of German gold and silver work from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries—a collection which will be a most welcome and worthy counterpart to the Emperor's donation. It is a matter of especial gratification that a scion of Puritan stock, a Harvard graduate, and a Harvard teacher of history, has chosen the day of the opening of our museum to announce a gift which will serve not only as a lasting memorial of the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia to Harvard University, but also as an enduring incentive for the pursuit of Germanic studies in the broadest sense.

And so let me close with renewed expressions of gratitude—gratitude toward the exalted ruler whom we may acclaim as the virtual founder of this museum; gratitude toward the governing boards of the university who have given it a temporary abode; gratitude toward the numerous friends who have assisted it; gratitude to the workmen through whose skill its treasures were installed. May its career justify the care and generosity bestowed upon it by so many. May it come to be an embodiment of the spirit held before us by the names of the three great men to whose memory this day, the 10th of November, is sacred: St. Martin, the representative of mediaeval charity and civic devotion; Luther, the apostle of modern independence and individual striving; Schiller, the prophet of the society of the future.