by Will Durant
The universities of Germany required and received a vigorous examination, for many of them were suffering from the neglect that usually befalls old age. Heidelberg’s had been founded in 1386, Cologne’s in 1388, Erfurt’s in 1379, Leipzig’s in 1409, Rostok’s in 1419, Mainz’s in 1476, Tübingen’s in 1477, Wittenberg’s in 1502. Now they were all in straits and need. The University of Künigsberg, begun in 1544, was flourishing with Immanuel Kant. The University of Jena, established in 1558, became the cultural capital of Germany, with Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, the brothers Schlegel, and the poet Hölderlin; there the faculty almost rivaled the students in welcoming the French Revolution. The University of Halle (1604) was “the first modern university” in three senses: it vowed itself to freedom of thought and teaching, and required no pledge of religious orthodoxy from its faculty; it made room for science and modern philosophy; and it became a center of original scholarship and a workshop of scientific research.13 The University of Göttingen, founded so lately as 1736, had by 1800 become “the greatest school in Europe,”14 rivaled only by the University of Leiden in Holland. “All the north of Germany,” said Mme. de Staël, roaming there in 1804, “is filled with the most learned universities in Europe.”15
Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Francis Bacon of this revival of learning, was one of the great emancipated minds of the age. Though born in the nobility, he described it as “once a necessary and now an unnecessary evil.” He concluded from the study of history that almost every institution, however defective and obstructive it had become, had once been beneficent. “What kept freedom alive in the Middle Ages? The system of fiefs. What preserved the sciences in the centuries of the barbarians? Monasticism.”16 This was written at the age of twenty-four. A year later (1792) he judged with prophetic wisdom the new constitution enacted by France in 1791; it contained, he thought, many admirable proposals, but the French people, excitable and passionate, would be unable to live up to it, and would transform their country into chaos. A generation afterward, wandering with a fellow philologist over the battlefield of Leipzig, where Napoleon had met disaster in 1813, he remarked, “Kingdoms and empires, as we see here, perish; but a fine poem endures forever.”17 Perhaps he was thinking of Pindar, whose poems he had translated from their exceptionally difficult Greek.
He failed as a diplomat because he was too enthralled by the revolution of ideas to absorb himself in the ephemera of politics. Uncomfortable on the public stage, he retired to an almost solitary life of study. He was fascinated by philology, and followed the adventures of words as they traveled from one country to another. He had no faith in the use of government to solve the social problem, for better laws would be frustrated by the unchanged nature of man. He concluded that the best hope for man lay in the development of a minority whose social dedication might serve as a beacon for the young, even in a despondent generation.
So, at the age of forty-two he came out of his privacy to serve as minister of education; and in 1810 the government commissioned him to organize the University of Berlin. There he effected a change that influenced European and American universities till our own time: the professors were chosen not so much for their ability to teach as for their reputation or willingness for original research in science or scholarship. The Berlin Academy of Sciences (founded in 1711), the national observatory, botanical garden, museum, and library were incorporated into the new university. Hither came Fichte the philosopher, Schleiermacher the theologian, Savigny the jurist, and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), the classical scholar whose Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) had startled Hellenists with the illuminating suggestion that “Homer” had been not one poet but a succession of singers gradually putting together the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the University of Berlin Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) gave the lectures that became his pathfinding History of Rome (Römische Geschichte, 1811–32). He surprised the scholastic world by rejecting Livy’s early chapters as not history but legend. —Henceforth in classical scholarship, in philology, in historiography, as well as in philosophy, Germany led the world. Its supremacy in science had still to come.
VI. SCIENCE
It had been retarded in Germany by its almost Siamese connection with philosophy. Through most of this period it was regarded as a part of philosophy, and was included in it, along with scholarship and historiography, under the term Wissenschaftslehre, the study of knowledge. This association with philosophy damaged science, for German philosophy was then an exercise in theoretical logic soaring proudly above research, or verification, by experiment.
Two men especially brought scientific honors to Germany in this age-Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Gauss was born in a peasant cottage in Brunswick, to a gardener-bricklayer-canal-tender father who disapproved of education as a passport to hell.18 Karl’s mother, however, noticed his delight and skill in numbers, and scrimped and saved to send him to school and then to Gymnasium. There his swift progress in mathematics led his teacher to secure an audience for him with Duke Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick; the Duke was impressed, and paid for the boy’s tuition for a three-year course in the Collegium Carolinum of Brunswick. Thence Karl Friedrich passed to the University of Göttingen (1795). After he had spent a year there his mother, quite unable to understand her son’s work and play with numbers and diagrams, asked a teacher whether her son gave promise of excellence. The answer was, “He will be the greatest mathematician in Europe.”19 Before the mother died she might have heard Laplace’s statement that Gauss had already verified that prediction. He is now ranked with Archimedes and Newton.20
We shall not pretend to understand, much less to expound, the discoveries —in number theory, imaginary numbers, quadratic residues, the method of least squares, the infinitesimal calculus—by which Gauss transformed mathematics from what it had been in Newton’s time into an almost new science, which became a tool of the scientific miracles of our time. He himself turned his mathematics to fruition in half a dozen fields. His observations of the orbit of Ceres (the first planetoid, discovered on January 1, 1801) led him to formulate a new and expeditious method of determining planetary orbits. He made researches which placed the theory of magnetism and electricity upon a mathematical basis. He was a burden and blessing to all scientists, who believe that nothing is science until it can be stated in mathematical terms.
He was as interesting as his work. While remaking a science, he remained a model of modesty. He was in no hurry to publish his discoveries, so that credit for them did not come to him till after his death. He brought his aged mother to live with him and his family; and in the last four of her ninety-seven years, when she was totally blind, he served as her nurse, and allowed no one else to wait on her.21
The other hero of German science in this age was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s younger brother Alexander. After graduating from Göttingen he entered the mining academy at Freiberg, and distinguished himself by his studies of subterranean vegetation. As director of mines at Bayreuth he discovered the effects of terrestrial magnetism on rock deposits, founded a school of mines, and improved the conditions of labor. He studied mountain formations with H.-B. de Saussure in Switzerland, and electrical phenomena with Alessandro Volta at Pavia. In 1796 he began, by accident, the long tour of scientific discovery (rivaling Darwin’s on the Beagle) whose results made him, according to a contemporary quip, “the most famous man in Europe next to Napoleon.”22
With his botanist friend Aimé Bonpland, he started from Marseilles hoping to join Napoleon in Egypt; circumstances deflected them to Madrid, where the unexpected patronage of the Prime Minister encouraged them to explore Spanish America. They sailed in 1799, and made a six-day stop at Tenerife, largest of the Canary Islands; there they climbed the Peak (12,192 feet), and witnessed a meteoric shower that led Humboldt to study the periodicity of such phenomena. In 1800, starting from Caracas in Venezuela, they spent four months studying the plant and animal life of the savannas and rain
forests along the Orinoco, until they reached the common sources of both that river and the Amazon. In 1801 they forged their way through the Andes from Cartagena (a seaport of Colombia) to Bogotá and Quito, and climbed Mount Chimborazo (18,893 feet), setting a world record that held for the next thirty-six years. Traveling along the Pacific coast to Lima, Humboldt measured the temperature of the ocean current that now bears his name. He observed the transit of the planet Mercury. He made a chemical study of guano, saw its possibilities as fertilizer, and sent some of this sea-fowl excrement to Europe for further analysis; so began one of South America’s richest exports. The indefatigable researchers, having almost reached Chile, turned back north, spent a year in Mexico and a short time in the United States, and touched European soil in 1804. It was one of the most fruitful scientific tours in history.
Humboldt stayed for almost three years in Berlin, studying his masses of notes, and writing his Ansichten der Natur (1807). A year later he moved to Paris to be near scientific records and aides; he remained there for nineteen years, enjoying the friendship of France’s leading savants, and the life and literature of the salons; he was one of Nietzsche’s “good Europeans.” He witnessed with the calm of a geologist those superficial disturbances known as the rise and fall of states. He accompanied Frederick William III on the visit of the victorious kings to London in 1814, but mainly he was occupied in developing old sciences or creating new ones.
He discovered (1804) that the earth’s magnetic force decreases in intensity from the poles to the equator. He enriched geology with his studies of the igneous origin of certain rocks, the formation of mountains, the geographical distribution of volcanoes. He provided the earliest clues to the laws governing atmospheric disturbances, and thereby shed light on the origin and direction of tropical storms. He made classic studies of air and ocean currents. He was the first (1817) to establish for geography the isothermal lines uniting places with the same mean annual temperature despite their difference in latitude; cartographers were surprised to see, on Humboldt’s map, that London, though as far north as Labrador, had the same mean temperature as Cincinnati, which is as far south as Lisbon. His Essai sur la géographie des plantes began the science of biogeography—the study of plant distribution as affected by the physical conditions of the terrain. These and a hundred other contributions, modest in appearance but of wide and lasting influence, were published in thirty volumes from 1805 to 1834 as Voyages de Humboldt et Bonpland aux régions equinoxiales du nouveau continent.
Finally, having exhausted his fortune in his work, he accepted a salaried post as chamberlain at the Prussian court (1827). Soon after his redomestication he delivered in Berlin the public lectures which later formed the substance of his many-volumed Kosmos (1845–62), which was among the most famous books in European ken. The preface spoke with the modesty of a mature mind:
In the later evening of an active life I offer to the German public a work whose undefined image has floated before my mind for about half a century. I have frequently looked upon its completion as impracticable; but as often I have been disposed to relinquish the undertaking, I have again—though perhaps imprudently—resumed the task…. The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent Nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal force.23
As translated into English in 1849, the book ran to almost two thousand pages, covering astronomy, geology, meteorology, and geography, and revealing a physical world vivid in surprises, yet governed by the laws of mathematics and the regularities of physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, the general picture is one of a vast scene generated not by an inanimate mechanism but by the inexhaustible vitality, expansion, and inventiveness of inherent life.
Humboldt’s own vitality was inspiring. Hardly had he settled in Berlin when he accepted a call from Czar Nicholas I to lead a scientific expedition into Central Asia (1829). It spent half a year gathering meteorological data and studying mountain formation, and, on the way, discovered diamond mines in the Urals. Back in Berlin, he used his position as chamberlain to improve the educational system, and to help artists and scientists. He was working on Volume V of Kosmos when death caught up with him in his ninetieth year. Prussia gave him a state funeral.
VII. ART
In Germany the age was favorable neither to science nor to art. War, current or expected, consumed enthusiasm, emotion, and wealth. Private patronage of art was rare and timid. Public galleries at Leipzig, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and especially Dresden and Berlin, were displaying masterpieces, but Napoleon siphoned them to the Louvre.
Nevertheless, German art produced some memorable works amid the turmoil. While Paris was dancing with chaos Berlin boldly raised the Brandenburg Gate. Karl Gotthard Langhans (1732–1808) designed it in fluted Doric columns and grave pediment as if to announce the death of baroque and rococo; but chiefly the stately structure proclaimed the might of the Hohenzollerns, and their resolve that no enemy should enter Berlin. Napoleon entered in 1806, the Russians in 1945.
Sculpture fared well. It is an essentially classic art, depending on line and (since antiquity) avoiding color; alien to its spirit were baroque irregularity and rococo playfulness. Johann von Dannecker chiseled a Sappho, and Catullus’ Girl with the Bird, for the Stuttgart Museum, an Ariadne for the Bethmann Museum in Frankfurt, and a famous bust of Schiller for the library at Weimar. Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), after studying with Canova in Rome, returned to his native Berlin and, in 1793, caught the attention of the capital by placing, atop the Brandenburg Gate, a carved Quadriga of four horses guided by a Winged Victory in a Roman chariot. For Stettin he carved a marble figure of Frederick the Great standing in martial array and burning enemies with his eyes, but with two thick tomes at his feet to attest his work as an author; his flute was forgotten. Tenderer is the pair of Princesses Luise and Friederike (1797), half drowned in drapery but moving quietly, arm in arm, to exaltation and grief. The Queen inspired artists by her beauty, her passionate patriotism, and her death. Heinrich Gentz (1766–1811) dedicated to her a somber mausoleum at Charlottenburg, and for that resting place Christian Rauch (1777–1857) carved for her a tomb worthy of her body and soul.
German painting was still suffering from the anemia of neoclassicism trying to live on the ashes of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the treatises of Lessing and Winckelmann, the pale faces of Mengs and David, and the Roman reveries of Angelica Kauffmann and countless Tischbeins. But that imported decoloration had no nourishing roots in German history or character; German painters of this age shrugged off neoclassicism, went back to Christianity, back beyond the Reformation and its hostility or indifference to art, and—long before the English Pre-Raphaelites—listened to voices like Wilhelm Wackenroder and Friedrich Schlegel calling to them to go behind Raphael to the medieval art that had painted, carved, and composed in the simplicity and happiness of unquestioning faith. So rose the school of painters known as the Nazarenes.
Its leader was Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869). Born in Lübeck, he carried with him through eighty years the sturdy seriousness of the old merchant families, and the pervasive mists coming in from the Baltic Sea. Sent to Vienna to study art, he found no nourishment in the neoclassicism fed to him there. In 1809 he and his friend Franz Pforr founded the “Lucan [St. Luke’s] Brotherhood,” pledged to the revitalization of art by dedicating it to renewed faith as it had existed in the days of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). In 1819 they migrated to Rome, seeking to study Perugino and other fifteenth-century painters. They were joined in 1811 by Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867), and later by Philipp Veit, Wilhelm von Schadow-Godenhaus, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.
They lived like vegetarian saints in the deserted Monastery of San Isidoro on Monte Pincio. “We led a truly monastic life,” Overbeck later recalled. “In the morning we worked together; at midday we took turns to cook our dinner, which was composed of n
othing but soup and a pudding, or some tasty vegetable.” They took turns in posing for each other. They passed by St. Peter’s as containing too much “pagan” art, and went rather to old churches, and to the cloisters of St. John Lateran and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. They traveled to Orvieto to study Signorelli, to Sienna for Duccio and Simone Martini, and above all to Florence and Fiesole for Fra Angelico.
They resolved to avoid portraiture, or any painting for adornment’s sake, and to restore the pre-Raphael purpose of painting as an encouragement of Christian piety and a patriotism bound up with the Christian creed.
Their special opportunity came in 1816, when the Prussian consul in Rome, J. S. Bartholdy, commissioned them to decorate his villa with frescoes on the story of Joseph and his brethren. The “Nazarenes” had mourned the replacement of frescoes with painting on canvas with oil; now they studied chemistry to make receptive surfaces for enduring colors; and they so far succeeded that their frescoes, removed from Rome and installed in the Berlin National Gallery, took rank among the proudest possessions of the Prussian capital. But old Goethe, hearing of these ecstasies, condemned them as imitations of fourteenth-century Italian styles, just as the neoclassicists imitated pagan art. The Nazarenes ignored that criticism, but quietly left the scene as science, scholarship, and philosophy slowly eroded the ancient faith.