reaction against the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the cynicism of Nietzsche, the soulless monotony of scientific specialization. Herman Grimm's own life-work, his incessant insistence on artistic culture, on a free, noble, reverent personality, was perhaps the initial force in this spiritual reawakening. But other and younger men have followed in his steps. The signs of the time are full of promise. The extraordinary success of such a book as Harnack's Essence of Christianity; the widespread influence of such a university teacher, such a wise, free, kindly man of ideals as Friedrich Paulsen; the devoted efforts of Rudolf Eucken, Eugen Kühnemann, Friedrich Naumann, Bruno Wille, Wilhelm Bölsche, and others, to win the masses back to spiritual hope and an enlightened faith; the new life kindled in poetry, the novel, and the drama, all this is conclusive evidence that we are on the very verge of a new era of German idealism. And if it comes, there will come with it the demand: less Nietzsche and more Emerson; and a new intellectual bond between America and Germany will have been established. THE EVOLUTIONARY TREND OF GERMAN LITERARY CRITICISM IN following out the influence exerted upon German literary criticism by the doctrine of evolution, one is confronted at the outset by the fact that the roots of the Darwinian theory are to be found on German soil. Long before the theory of a continuous and uninterrupted development of the physical world had been scientifically formulated, German poets and historians had accustomed themselves to conceive of the moral world as an organic whole living itself out according to its own immanent laws. Long before the struggle for bodily existence had been discovered as the prime cause of differentiation of racial types, the realization of the Idea through evolution from mere identity with itself to the most highly organized intellectual life had become a household word in German philosophy. It is clearly impossible, then, to trace Darwinian ideas in German literary criticism without discovering that to a large extent these ideas are at bottom pre-Darwinian. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the great ascendency of the natural sciences, which set in with the middle of the nineteenth century, exerted a profound influence upon the mental sciences also. The idea of intellectual development, which thus far had borne a metaphysical appearance, now assumed scientific features, and literary criticism, no less than history or philosophy, was affected by this change. Before 1850, literary criticism had been in the main speculative; after 1850, it became either kulturhistorisch (there is no English equivalent for this word), or philological, or psychological, terms which, every one of them, emphasize the scientific aspect of evolution. Here, then, seem to be mapped out. the natural divisions of my inquiry. I shall first speak of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas in German literary criticism from Herder to Hegel; next, I shall consider the critical views of men, like Wilhelm Riehl and Jacob Burckhardt, who looked upon literature primarily as an index of the advance or decay of civilization; thirdly, I shall examine the philological method of research, now dominating the aca |