finally, there are also the older men who have already said their say.  In the same way every public is made up of people of all ages.  These make different demands of their poets; youth wishes to conquer, manhood to fortify, old age merely not to lose.  It is self-evident that points of conformity are to be found between the most widely differing fields:  as, for example, conservative tendencies are present in the camp of the destroyers, revolutionary tendencies in that of the conservatives.  In other words, in every community of men, no matter of what description, who are united by any kind of higher interest, new ideals grow up out of this very community of interest.  Men who happen to be thrown together mutually cause one another’s demands to increase; those who work in common try to outdo one another.  Out of their midst personalities arise, who, brought up with the loftiest ideals, or often spurred on by the supineness of the public, with passionate earnestness make what merely filled up the leisure hours of others the sole purpose of their lives.  Thus, in Germany above all, the new ideal has been born again and again, constituting the strongest motive power which exists, besides the personality of genius itself.

Of the greatest importance, to begin with, is the ideal of a national literature itself.  Gottsched was the first in Germany, if not to apprehend it, at least to ponder it and to advocate it with persistent zeal.  The literature of antiquity and the literature of France offered types of fixed national units.  The affinity between the two as national units had been pointed out in France and England by means of the celebrated “Combat of the ancients and moderns,” which also first gave living writers sufficient courage to think of comparing modern art with ancient.

Gottsched presented a program which he systematically strove to carry out, and in which one of the most important places is given to the building up of an artistic theatre, after the model of the great civilized nations.  He surely had as much right to show some intolerance toward the harlequin and the popular stage as Lessing (who supplanted him while continuing his work) had to indulge in a like prejudice against the classical theatre of the French.  Lessing, however, as we have already seen, goes at the same time more deeply into the matter by proposing not only a systematic but also an organic construction of the separate genres, and Herder took the last step when he demanded an autochthonous growth—­that is to say, a development of art out of the inner necessity of personalities on the one hand, and of nationalities on the other.  To be sure, the great poets who now appeared were not included in the program, and Gottsched did not appreciate Haller, nor did Lessing form a correct estimate of Goethe, or Herder of Schiller.  There is, however, a mysterious connection between the aspirations of the nation and the appearance of genius.