influential writers that Germany has produced, was born in Mohrungen, a
small town in East Prussia, on the 25th of August 1744. Like his
contemporary Lessing, Herder had throughout his life to struggle against
adverse circumstances. His father was poor, having to put together a
subsistence by uniting the humble offices of sexton, choir-singer and
petty schoolmaster. After receiving some rudimentary instruction from
his father, the boy was sent to the grammar school of his native town.
The mode of discipline practised by the pedantic and irritable old man
who stood at the head of this institution was not at all to the young
student's liking, and the impression made upon him stimulated him later
on to work out his projects of school reform. The hardships of his early
years drove him to introspection and to solitary communion with nature,
and thus favoured a more than proportionate development of the
sentimental and poetic side of his mind. When quite young he expressed a
wish to become a minister of the gospel, but his aspirations were
discouraged by the local clergyman. In 1762, at the age of eighteen, he
went up to Konigsberg with the intention of studying medicine, but
finding himself unequal to the operations of the dissecting-room, he
abandoned this object, and, by the help of one or two friends and his
own self-supporting labours, followed out his earlier idea of the
clerical profession by joining the university. There he came under the
influence of Kant, who was just then passing from physical to
metaphysical problems. Without becoming a disciple of Kant, young Herder
was deeply stimulated to fresh critical inquiry by that thinker's
revolutionary ideas in philosophy. To Kant's lectures and conversations
he further owed something of his large interest in cosmological and
anthropological problems. Among the writers whom he most carefully read
were Plato, Hume, Shaftesbury, Leibnitz, Diderot and Rousseau. Another
personal influence under which he fell at Konigsberg, and which was
destined to be far more permanent, was that of J. G. Hamann, "the
northern Mage." This writer had already won a name, and in young Herder
he found a mind well fitted to be the receptacle and vehicle of his new
ideas on literature. From this vague, incoherent, yet gifted writer our
author acquired some of his strong feeling for the naive element in
poetry, and for the earliest developments of national literature. Even
before he went to Konigsberg he had begun to compose verses, and at the
age of twenty he took up the pen as a chief occupation. His first
published writings were occasional poems and reviews contributed to the
_Konigsbergische Zeitung_. Soon after this he got an appointment at
Riga, as assistant master at the cathedral school, and a few years
later, became assistant pastor. In this busy commercial town, in
somewhat improved pecuniary and social circumstances, he developed the
main ideas of his writings. In the year 1767 he published his first
considerable work _Fragmente uber die neuere deutsche Literatur_, which
at once made him widely known and secured for him the favourable
interest of Lessing. From this time he continued to pour forth a number
of critical writings on literature, art, &c. His bold ideas on these
subjects, which were a great advance even on Lessing's doctrines,
naturally excited hostile criticism, and in consequence of this
opposition, which took the form of aspersions on his religious
orthodoxy, he resolved to leave Riga. He was much carried away at this
time by the idea of a radical reform of social life in Livonia, which
(after the example of Rousseau) he thought to effect by means of a
better method of school-training. With this plan in view he began (1769)
a tour through France, England, Holland, &c., for the purpose of
collecting information respecting their systems of education. It was
during the solitude of his voyage to France, when on deck at night, that
he first shaped his idea of the genesis of primitive poetry, and of the
gradual evolution of humanity. Having received an offer of an
appointment as travelling tutor and chaplain to the young prince of
Eutin-Holstein, he abandoned his somewhat visionary scheme of a social
reconstruction of a Russian province. He has, however, left a curious
sketch of his projected school reforms. His new duties led him to
Strassburg, where he met the young Goethe, on whose poetical development
he exercised so potent an influence. At Darmstadt he made the
acquaintance of Caroline Flachsland, to whom he soon became betrothed,
and who for the rest of his life supplied him with that abundance of
consolatory sympathy which his sensitive and rather querulous nature
appeared to require. The engagement as tutor did not prove an agreeable
one, and he soon threw it up (1771) in favour of an appointment as court
preacher and member of the consistory at Buckeburg. Here he had to
encounter bitter opposition from the orthodox clergy and their
followers, among whom he was regarded as a freethinker. His health
continued poor, and a fistula in the eye, from which he had suffered
from early childhood, and to cure which he had undergone a number of
painful operations, continued to trouble him. Further, pecuniary
difficulties, from which he never long managed to keep himself free, by
delaying his marriage, added to his depression. Notwithstanding these
trying circumstances he resumed literary work, which his travels had
interrupted. For some time he had been greatly interested by the poetry
of the north, more particularly Percy's _Reliques_, the poems of
"Ossian" (in the genuineness of which he like many others believed) and
the works of Shakespeare. Under the influence of this reading he now
finally broke with classicism and became one of the leaders of the new
_Sturm und Drang_ movement. He co-operated with a band of young writers
at Darmstadt and Frankfort, including Goethe, who in a journal of their
own sought to diffuse the new ideas. His marriage took place in 1773. In
1776 he obtained through Goethe's influence the post of general
superintendent and court preacher at Weimar, where he passed the rest of
his life. There he enjoyed the society of Goethe, Wieland, Jean Paul
(who came to Weimar in order to be near Herder), and others, the
patronage of the court, with whom as a preacher he was very popular, and
an opportunity of carrying out some of his ideas of school reform. Yet
the social atmosphere of the place did not suit him. His personal
relations with Goethe again and again became embittered. This, added to
ill-health, served to intensify a natural irritability of temperament,
and the history of his later Weimar days is a rather dreary page in the
chronicles of literary life. He had valued more than anything else a
teacher's influence over other minds, and as he began to feel that he
was losing it he grew jealous of the success of those who had outgrown
this influence. Yet while presenting these unlovely traits, Herder's
character was on the whole a worthy and attractive one. This seems to be
sufficiently attested by the fact that he was greatly liked and
esteemed, not only in the pulpit but in private intercourse, by
cultivated women like the countess of Buckeburg, the duchess of Weimar
and Frau von Stein, and, what perhaps is more, was exceedingly popular
among the gymnasium pupils, in whose education he took so lively an
interest. While much that Herder produced after settling in Weimar has
little value, he wrote also some of his best works, among others his
collection of popular poetry on which he had been engaged for many
years, _Stimmen der Volker in Liedern_ (1778-1779); his translation of
the Spanish romances of the _Cid_ (1805); his celebrated work on Hebrew
poetry, _Vom Geist der hebraischen Poesie_ (1782-1783); and his _opus
magnum_, the _Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit_
(1784-1791). Towards the close of his life he occupied himself, like
Lessing, with speculative questions in philosophy and theology. The
boldness of some of his ideas cost him some valuable friendships, as
that of Jacobi, Lavater and even of his early teacher Hamann. He died on
the 18th of December 1803, full of new literary plans up to the very
last.
Herder's writings were for a long time regarded as of temporary value
only, and fell into neglect. Recent criticism, however, has tended very
much to raise their value by tracing out their wide and far-reaching
influence. His works are very voluminous, and to a large extent
fragmentary and devoid of artistic finish; nevertheless they are nearly
always worth investigating for the brilliant suggestions in which they
abound. His place in German literature has already been indicated in
tracing his mental development. Like Lessing, whose work he immediately
continued, he was a pioneer of the golden age of this literature.
Lessing had given the first impetus to the formation of a national
literature by exposing the folly of the current imitation of French
writers. But in doing this he did not so much call his fellow-countrymen
to develop freely their own national sentiments and ideas as send them
back to classical example and principle. Lessing was the exponent of
German classicism; Herder, on the contrary, was a pioneer of the
romantic movement. He fought against all imitation as such, and bade
German writers be true to themselves and their national antecedents. As
a sort of theoretic basis for this adhesion to national type in
literature, he conceived the idea that literature and art, together with
language and national culture as a whole, are evolved by a natural
process, and that the intellectual and emotional life of each people is
correlated with peculiarities of physical temperament and of material
environment. In this way he became the originator of that genetic or
historical method which has since been applied to all human ideas and
institutions. Herder was thus an evolutionist, but an evolutionist still
under the influence of Rousseau. That is to say, in tracing back the
later acquisitions of civilization to impulses which are as old as the
dawn of primitive culture, he did not, as the modern evolutionist does,
lay stress on the superiority of the later to the earlier stages of
human development, but rather became enamoured of the simplicity and
spontaneity of those early impulses which, since they are the oldest,
easily come to look like the most real and precious. Yet even in this
way he helped to found the historical school in literature and science,
for it was only after an excessive and sentimental interest in primitive
human culture had been awakened that this subject would receive the
amount of attention which was requisite for the genetic explanation of
later developments. This historical idea was carried by Herder into the
regions of poetry, art, religion, language, and finally into human
culture as a whole. It colours all his writings, and is intimately
connected with some of the most characteristic attributes of his mind, a
quick sympathetic imagination, a fine feeling for local differences, and
a scientific instinct for seizing the sequences of cause and effect.
Herder's works may be arranged in an ascending series, corresponding
to the way in which the genetic or historical idea was developed and
extended. First come the works on poetic literature, art, language and
religion as special regions of development. Secondly, we have in the
_Ideen_ a general account of the process of human evolution. Thirdly,
there are a number of writings which, though inferior in interest to
the others, may be said to supply the philosophic basis of his leading
ideas.
1. In the region of poetry Herder sought to persuade his countrymen,
both by example and precept, to return to a natural and spontaneous
form of utterance. His own poetry has but little value; Herder was a
skilful verse-maker but hardly a creative poet. He was most successful
in his translation of popular song, in which he shows a rare
sympathetic insight into the various feelings and ideas of peoples as
unlike as Greenlanders and Spaniards, Indians and Scots. In the
_Fragmente_ he aims at nationalizing German poetry and freeing it from
all extraneous influence. He ridicules the ambition of German writers
to be classic, as Lessing had ridiculed their eagerness to be French.
He looked at poetry as a kind of "proteus among the people, which
changes its form according to language, manners, habits, according to
temperament and climate, nay, even according to the accent of
different nations." This fact of the idiosyncrasy of national poetry
he illustrated with great fulness and richness in the case of Homer,
the nature of whose works he was one of the first to elucidate, the
Hebrew poets, and the poetry of the north as typified in "Ossian."
This same idea of necessary relation to national character and
circumstance is also applied to dramatic poetry, and more especially
to Shakespeare. Lessing had done much to make Shakespeare known to
Germany, but he had regarded him in contrast to the French dramatists
with whom he also contrasted the Greek dramatic poets, and accordingly
did not bring out his essentially modern and Teutonic character.
Herder does this, and in doing so shows a far deeper understanding of
Shakespeare's genius than his predecessor had shown.
2. The views on art contained in Herder's _Kritische Walder_ (1769),
_Plastik_ (1778), &c., are chiefly valuable as a correction of the
excesses into which reverence for Greek art had betrayed Winckelmann
and Lessing, by help of his fundamental idea of national idiosyncrasy.
He argues against the setting up of classic art as an unchanging type,
valid for all peoples and all times. He was one of the first to bring
to light the characteristic excellences of Gothic art. Beyond this, he
eloquently pleaded the cause of painting as a distinct art, which
Lessing in his desire to mark off the formative arts from poetry and
music had confounded with sculpture. He regarded this as the art of
the eye, while sculpture was rather the art of the organ of touch.
Painting being less real than sculpture, because lacking the third
dimension of space, and a kind of dream, admitted of much greater
freedom of treatment than this last. Herder had a genuine appreciation
for early German painters, and helped to awaken the modern interest in
Albrecht Durer.
3. By his work on language _Uber den Ursprung der Sprache_ (1772),
Herder may be said to have laid the first rude foundations of the
science of comparative philology and that deeper science of the
ultimate nature and origin of language. It was specially directed
against the supposition of a divine communication of language to man.
Its main argument is that speech is a necessary outcome of that
special arrangement of mental forces which distinguishes man, and more
particularly from his habits of reflection. "If," Herder says, "it is
incomprehensible to others how a human mind could invent language, it
is as incomprehensible to me how a human mind could be what it is
without discovering language for itself." The writer does not make
that use of the fact of man's superior organic endowments which one
might expect from his general conception of the relation of the
physical and the mental in human development.
4. Herder's services in laying the foundations of a comparative
science of religion and mythology are even of greater value than his
somewhat crude philological speculations. In opposition to the general
spirit of the 18th century he saw, by means of his historic sense, the
naturalness of religion, its relation to man's wants and impulses.
Thus with respect to early religious beliefs he rejected Hume's notion
that religion sprang out of the fears of primitive men, in favour of
the theory that it represents the first attempts of our species to
explain phenomena. He thus intimately associated religion with
mythology and primitive poetry. As to later forms of religion, he
appears to have held that they owe their vitality to their embodiment
of the deep-seated moral feelings of our common humanity. His high
appreciation of Christianity, which contrasts with the contemptuous
estimate of the contemporary rationalists, rested on a firm belief in
its essential humanity, to which fact, and not to conscious deception,
he attributes its success. His exposition of this religion in his
sermons and writings was simply an unfolding of its moral side. In his
later life, as we shall presently see, he found his way to a
speculative basis for his religious beliefs.
5. Herder's masterpiece, the _Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte_,
has the ambitious aim of explaining the whole of human development in
close connexion with the nature of man's physical environment. Man is
viewed as a part of nature, and all his widely differing forms of
development as strictly natural processes. It thus stands in sharp
contrast to the anthropology of Kant, which opposes human development
conceived as the gradual manifestation of a growing faculty of
rational free will to the operations of physical nature. Herder
defines human history as "a pure natural history of human powers,
actions and propensities, modified by time and place." The _Ideen_
shows us that Herder is an evolutionist after the manner of Leibnitz,
and not after that of more modern evolutionists. The lower forms of
life prefigure man in unequal degrees of imperfection; they exist for
his sake, but they are not regarded as representing necessary
antecedent conditions of human existence. The genetic method is
applied to varieties of man, not to man as a whole. It is worth
noting, however, that Herder in his provokingly tentative way of
thinking comes now and again very near ideas made familiar to us by
Spencer and Darwin. Thus in a passage in book xv. chap, ii., which
unmistakably foreshadows Darwin's idea of a struggle for existence, we
read: "Among millions of creatures whatever could preserve itself
abides, and still after the lapse of thousands of years remains in the
great harmonious order. Wild animals and tame, carnivorous and
graminivorous, insects, birds, fishes and man are adapted to each
other." With this may be compared a passage in the _Ursprung der
Sprache_, where there is a curious adumbration of Spencer's idea that
intelligence, as distinguished from instinct, arises from a growing
complexity of action, or, to use Herder's words, from the substitution
of a more for a less contracted sphere. Herder is more successful in
tracing the early developments of particular peoples than in
constructing a scientific theory of evolution. Here he may be said to
have laid the foundations of the science of primitive culture as a
whole. His account of the first dawnings of culture, and of the ruder
Oriental civilizations, is marked by genuine insight. On the other
hand the development of classic culture is traced with a less skilful
hand. Altogether this work is rich in suggestion to the philosophic
historian and the anthropologist, though marked by much vagueness of
conception and hastiness of generalization.
6. Of Herder's properly metaphysical speculations little needs to be
said. He was too much under the sway of feeling and concrete
imagination to be capable of great things in abstract thought. It is
generally admitted that he had no accurate knowledge either of
Spinoza, whose monism he advocated, or of Kant, whose critical
philosophy he so fiercely attacked. Herder's Spinozism, which is set
forth in his little work, _Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen
Seele_ (1778), is much less logically conceived than Lessing's. It is
the religious aspect of it which attracts him, the presentation in God
of an object which at once satisfies the feelings and the intellect.
With respect to his attacks on the critical philosophy in the
_Metakritik_ (1799), it is easy to understand how his concrete mind,
ever alive to the unity of things, instinctively rebelled against that
analytic separation of the mental processes which Kant attempted.
However crude and hasty this critical investigation, it helped to
direct philosophic reflection to the unity of mind, and so to develop
the post-Kantian line of speculation. Herder was much attracted by
Schelling's early writings, but appears to have disliked Hegelianism
because of the atheism it seemed to him to involve. In the _Kalligone_
(1800), work directed against Kant's _Kritik der Urteilskraft_, Herder
argues for the close connexion of the beautiful and the good. To his
mind the content of art, which he conceived as human feeling and human
life in its completeness, was much more valuable than the form, and so
he was naturally led to emphasize the moral element in art. Thus his
theoretic opposition to the Kantian aesthetics is but the reflection
of his practical opposition to the form-idolatry of the Weimar poets.
(J. S.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--An edition of Herder's _Samtliche Werke_ in 45 vols.
was published after his death by his widow (1805-1820); a second in 60
vols. followed in 1827-1830; a third in 40 vols. in 1852-1854. There
is also an edition by H. Duntzer (24 vols., 1869-1879). But these have
all been superseded by the monumental critical edition by B. Suphan
(32 vols., 1877 _sqq._). Of the many "selected works," mention may be
made of those by B. Suphan (4 vols., 1884-1887); by H. Lambel, H.
Meyer and E. Kuhnemann in Kurschner's _Deutsche Nationalliteratur_ (10
vols., 1885-1894). For Herder's correspondence, see _Aus Herders
Nachlass_ (3 vols., 1856-1857), _Herders Reise nach Italien_ (1859),
_Von und an Herder: Ungedruckte Briefe_ (3 vols., 1861-1862)--all
three works edited by H. Duntzer and F. G. von Herder. Herder's
_Briefwechsel mit Nicolai_ and his _Briefe an Hamann_ have been edited
by O. Hoffmann (1887 and 1889). For biography and criticism, see
_Erinnerungen aus dem Leben Herders_, by his wife, edited by J. G.
Muller (2 vols., 1820); _J. G. von Herders Lebensbild_ (with his
correspondence), by his son, E. G. von Herder (6 vols., 1846); C.
Joret, _Herder et la renaissance litteraire en Allemagne au XVIII^e
siecle_ (1875); F. von Barenbach, _Herder als Vorganger Darwins_
(1877); R. Haym, _Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken_ (2
vols., 1880-1885); H. Nevinson, _A Sketch of Herder and his Times_
(1884); M. Kronenberg, _Herders Philosophie nach ihrem
Entwicklungsgang_ (1889); E. Kuhnemann, _Herders Leben_ (1895); R.
Burkner, _Herder, sein Leben und Wirken_ (1904).
HEREDIA, JOSE MARIA DE (1842-1905), French poet, the modern master of
the French sonnet, was born at Fortuna Cafeyere, near Santiago de Cuba,
on the 22nd of November 1842, being in blood part Spanish Creole and
part French. At the age of eight he came from the West Indies to France,
returning thence to Havana at seventeen, and finally making France his
home not long afterwards. He received his classical education with the
priests of Saint Vincent at Senlis, and after a visit to Havana he
studied at the Ecole des Chartes at Paris. In the later 'sixties, with
Francois Coppee, Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine and others less
distinguished, he made one of the band of poets who gathered round
Leconte de Lisle, and received the name of Parnassiens. To this new
school, form--the technical side of their art--was of supreme
importance, and, in reaction against the influence of Musset, they
rigorously repressed in their work the expression of personal feeling
and emotion. "True poetry," said M. de Heredia in his discourse on
entering the Academy--"true poetry dwells in nature and in humanity,
which are eternal, and not in the heart of the creature of a day,
however great." M. de Heredia's place in the movement was soon assured.
He wrote very little, and published even less, but his sonnets
circulated in MS., and gave him a reputation before they appeared in
1893, together with a few longer poems, as a volume, under the title of
_Les Trophees_. He was elected to the Academy on the 22nd of February
1894, in the place of Louis de Mazade-Percin the publicist. Few purely
literary men can have entered the Academy with credentials so small in
quantity. A small volume of verse--a translation, with introduction, of
Diaz del Castillo's _History of the Conquest of New Spain_
(1878-1881)--a translation of the life of the nun Alferez (1894), de
Quincey's "Spanish Military Nun"--and one or two short pieces of
occasional verse, and an introduction or so--this is but small literary
baggage, to use the French expression. But the sonnets are of their kind
among the most superb in modern literature. "A _Legende des siecles_ in
sonnets" M. Francois Coppee called them. Each presents a picture,
striking, brilliant, drawn with unfaltering hand--the picture of some
characteristic scene in man's long history. The verse is flawless,
polished like a gem; and its sound has distinction and fine harmony. If
one may suggest a fault, it is that each picture is sometimes too much
of a picture only, and that the poetical line, like that of M. de
Heredia's master, Leconte de Lisle himself, is occasionally overcrowded.
M. de Heredia was none the less one of the most skilful craftsmen who
ever practised the art of verse. In 1901 he became librarian of the
Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal at Paris. He died at the Chateau de Bourdonne
(Seine-et-Oise) on the 3rd of October 1905, having completed his
critical edition of Andre Chenier's works.