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But the ever recurring burden of his discourse was Er war ein praechtiger Mensch. The death of Goethe, in 1832, brought to an end conspicuously the epoch of the Weimarian poets. Indeed it had ended virtually long before, but it was not until Goethe too had become a memory that its significance was fully realized.
Naturally enough the individualism and aestheticism of the Weimarian poets were not welcome doctrine to an excited generation that had caught a glimpse of an immense work to be done for the fatherland. The ever increasing pressure of social emotions made it seem a selfish and unmanly thing to be so concerned about one's own spiritual equipoise.
In a work upon Russia, a land which had been brought closer to the Schiller household by the appointment of Wilhelm von Wolzogen as Weimarian envoy to the Czar, he read anew the history of the 'false Dmitri', and was struck by its dramatic capabilities. In 'Warbeck' he had thought to portray a pretender who knew that his claims were fraudulent; in Dmitri he found one who believed in himself.
And even those who were too wise to be thus completely misled as to the significance and the value of the Weimarian legacy could not help feeling that for the present, at least, it were better regarded as a dead issue. One can understand the sentiment with which Gervinus closed his great history of the national literature: 'The rival contest of the arts is finished.
This feeling finds frequent expression in the literature of the time; and so much was it harped on, and so feebly were the countervailing considerations presented, that many people, both in Germany and outside of it, got into their heads a radically wrong conception of the Weimarian Dioscuri; a conception which quite forgot that both of them, all their lives long, were very strenuous workers, strongly possessed by the social sentiment.
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