Continued from Sunday's post Book Award and last
midnight's post Holding the Frame—
The nineteenth-century German writer Rudolf Haym on
German romantic Hellenism—
"In the enjoyment of this fair picture-world, our nation must
needs delude itself a moment with the dream of Greek felicity
and Greek repose to awaken directly poorer and more restless
than before. To Poetry such a delusion was indeed natural, and
who would dispute it with her after she had offered to our
enjoyment what was sweetest and most perfect! But we see
now all at once Metaphysic seized with the same illusion.
Turning aside from the strait path of sober inquiry and from the
labour of deliverance through the most conscientious criticism,
Hegel begins to expand over our spiritual world his ideal that
was found in Hellas, that was strengthened by exhaustive
penetration into the ultimate grounds of all religion. A dreamed-of
and yearned-for future is treated as present. A system tricked
out with the entire dignity of the science of truth raises itself
beside our poetry, and with diamond net spins us into an idea
with which the want, the incompleteness, and the unbeauty of
our political and historical actuality is at every point in contradiction."
— Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), 91-92, translated
and quoted in The Secret of Hegel , by James Hutchison Stirling
(1898 edition, p. 626)
