glory of Europe is extinguished forever.  Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.  The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!  It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.” [11]

But Burke’s reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy was by no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany.  It was manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a practical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their entirety.  Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticists dream of this.  They appealed, however, to the knightly principles of devotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and of personal loyalty to the suzerain and the nobility.  It was these political and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine.  He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the vapid imitations of antique classic art, “so also do we now behold a reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were being inculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . .  For when the artists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . the only explanation of their superiority that could be given was that these men believed in that which they depicted. . . .  Hence the artists who were honest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious distortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of those marvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those olden works . . . made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was to re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses’ milk.”

A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth.  There was Joseph von Eichendorff, e.g., who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages, wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel entitled “Ahnung und Gegenwart,” the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery.  And Joseph Goerres, who published a work on German Volksbuecher[12] (1807); a follower of Schelling and editor of Der Rheinische Merkur, a violent anti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation.  Goerres, according to Heine, “threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits,” and became the “chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich”; lecturing