The Romantic School and the Beginnings of Germanic Philology.

The last in the series of lectures delivered by members of the German department took place yesterday afternoon in Sever 11, when Professor von Jagemann spoke about the Romantic school and the beginning of Germanic Philology. The lecturer said in brief that the Romantic movement which affected German literature in the beginning of this century was a reaction against the classicism and rationalism of the preceding period. Instead of addressing themselves only to the cold understanding of their readers, the writers of the Romantic school appealed to the imagination, the faith, and the superstition of the people. Instead of a onesided worship of Latin and Greek literature they proclaimed the universality of literature in all ages and among all nations. The great works of Schiller and Goethe, white lifting German literature to a higher plane, had tended to remove it further and further away from the understanding of the masses. The Romantic School endeavored to restore literature to the place it held in the Middle Ages when almost the whole intellectual activity of the nation centered in its poetry. The Middle Ages became the ideal of the Romanticists; mediaeval subjects were chosen by preface and mediaeval forms of expression were affected. In so far as the movement corrected a prevading one-sidedness in favor of certain ideas, it was useful and successful; in so far as it endeavored to replace a one-sided tendency by another it was injurious and a failure.

The endeavour to combine the beauties of all literature in one produced heterogeneousness in form and matter. It was a mistake to transplant the poetic life of the middle ages into the present, and instead of giving a poetic hue to our modern life, to make poetry the focus of all human activity. A modern liter ature which deals exclusively in mediaeval ideas may be popular for a time as a curiosify, but it can not satisfy the taste of a modern nation for a long time.

The Romantic movement, however, produced a lasting effect in the powerful impulse which it gave to the study of mediaeval literatures. Many of the poetic treasurers of the middle ages which had been buried for centuries were now brought to light and the side of the Romantic tendency in literature then arose to a parallel tendency in philology, most conspicuously represented in its early beginnings by the two Grimm brothers, the founders of the new science of Germanic philology.