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"On changerait plutôt le coeur de place, Que de changer la vieille Alsace." The German, Karl Lamprecht, in his valuable history of contemporary Germany, is more hopeful of the situation than are other writers and observers.
See for this Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vols. i. and ii., and Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, iii., 304-324, and iv., 134-142. A common desire to avoid calamity bound together the warring classes and rival districts of Flanders, as they had never been united before.
This conception is also at the bottom of the theory regarding the soul of society which Lamprecht has expounded. After the rejection of these mystical conceptions there remains a vague but incontrovertible fact, the "solidarity" which exists between the different habits of one and the same people.
One can readily imagine how such men as Hegel, or Ranke, or Mommsen, who lectured at Berlin; or Liebig or Döllinger, at Munich; or Ewald, at Göttingen; or Sybel, at Bonn; or Leibnitz or Schlegel, in their day, or Kuno Fischer, in my day, at Heidelberg, must have drawn students from all parts of Germany; just as do Harnack, and Schmidt, and Lamprecht, and Adolph Wagner, Schmoller, or Gierke, or Schiemann, or Wach, Haeckel, List, Deitsch, Hering, or Verworm, in these days.
There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the individual and the social life. Lamprecht of all German writers seems to have appreciated this. In Lamprecht's opinion, this period of excitement, this strong tendency to the enjoyment of excitation in general, is a form of socio-psychic dissociation.
This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the novel and the extraordinary, the suggestibility and the receptivity of the masses, automatic action of the will and the emotions all this Lamprecht thinks will pass. It is a stage in the process of a new formation.
On the other hand, men whose information is all that could be desired, whose monographs intended for specialists are full of merit, sometimes show themselves capable, when they write for the public, of grave offences against scientific method. The Germans are habitual offenders: consider Mommsen, Droysen, Curtius, and Lamprecht.
He named this a diapason. Lamprecht had never read Comte, and he imagined that this principle, on which he based his kulturhistorische Methode, was original.
But Germany, let us help Lamprecht to say, since he does not himself draw this conclusion, has failed to emerge upon the level of an exalted ecstasy, failed to produce the philosophical, the moral and religious fruit of its new impulses, failed, in a word, to find its dominant on a high level, precisely as often the promising individual fails and has expressed his truly great nature in low forms of activity.
It is a very disagreeable and difficult task, which Germany infinitely prefers to leave to Austria rather than to assume herself. And it is a task for which, as Professor Lamprecht, the national historian, is compelled to admit, the Austrian German seems far more qualified than the Prussian German.