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by
Will Durant
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November 15 - December 10, 2019
the “Hegelian Right,” led by Johann Erdmann, Kuno Fischer, and Karl Rosenkranz; and the “Hegelian Left”—Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx.
“Man knows about God only insofar as God knows about himself within man”;
All in all, this age of Goethe, Beethoven, and Hegel was one of the high-water points in the history of Germany.
Civilization is a collaboration as well as a rivalry; therefore it is good that each nation has its own culture, government, economy, dress, and songs. It has taken many diverse forms of organization and expression to make the European spirit so subtle and diverse, and to make the Europe of today an endless fascination and an inexhaustible heritage.
“We cannot conceive how the head of one man could contain such a world of facts and dates. … It seems as if more than one man were taken from us.”
There were so many poets that they divided into two rival schools: the “Phosphorists,” who took their name from their magazine Phosphorus, and imported the more mystical elements of German Romanticism; and the “Gothics,” who strummed their lyres to heroic themes.
They reached the west coast of Jutland on March 17, sailed cautiously north and around the Skaggerak point of the peninsula, then south into the great bay of Kattegat to Sjaelland Island, then through the narrow strait between Swedish Hälsingborg and Danish Helsingör (Hamlet’s Elsinore), where they were fired upon by the batteries of Kronborg Castle.
An English account says that Nelson looked at the signal by deliberately putting the telescope to his blind eye; in any case he later swore that he never saw the call to retreat.
Labyrinthen eller Digtervandringer (Labyrinths of a Wandering Poet, 1792), which almost rivaled Laurence Sterne in humor and sentiment.
The Poles were Roman Catholics, fervent and dogmatic because that religion had supported them in their grief, had inspired them in their hopes, and had preserved social order amid the ruin of their state.
So they condemned heresy as treason, and their patriotism was intolerant.
“He thinks only of himself. He hates every great nationality, and still more the spirit of independence. He is a tyrant, and his only aim is to satisfy his own ambition.”
Greece had fallen to the Turks in 1452, and had now been so long under Ottoman rule that it had half forgotten its ancient pride.
Conquest by “Franks” and immigration by Slavs mingled bloods, racial memories, and dialects until the popular “demotic” speech had substantially diverged from the Greek of Plato’s days.
The Turkish government, so far as one can judge through the haze of time and space, of language and prejudice, was not clearly more oppressive than the governments of Europe before 1800.
The Turks were a philosophical and poetical, as well as a warlike, people; they took the day’s fate as Allah’s will, not to be changed by grumbling, and they considered a beautiful woman, properly disciplined and perfumed, as more precious than anything but gold.
Turkey survived as a state because none of them could afford to allow another to control the Bosporus.
Space can make history.
There is so much space in Russia that everything is lost in it, even the châteaux, even the population.
what czar, after Peter, ruled as successfully as Catherine II?
“In no other country,” wrote a French ambassador in 1820, “is corruption so general. It is, in a sense, organized, and there is, perhaps, not a single government official who could not be bought at a price.”
They agreed to this, knowing that a fait accompli is a convincing argument.
It is hard for minds immersed for years in the tale of the comet called Napoleon to realize that Alexander I (Aleksandr Pavlovich, 1777–1825) was as much beloved in Russia as Bonaparte in France;
Alexander realized that no reform could prosper unless supported and understood by a wide proportion of the people.
Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769–1844) was the Aesop, as Karamzin was the Herodotus, of this Alexandrian spring.
Krylov had rediscovered the secret of the great fabulist—that the only intelligible wisdom is that of the peasant, and its art is to find the ego behind the sham.
They came to power almost at the same time, and both by violence: Napoleon on November 9, 1799, Alexander on March 24, 1801.
Speranksy made the perceptive reply “We have better men, but they have better institutions.”
“It is possible, and even probable, that Napoleon will defeat us, but that will not bring him peace…. We have vast spaces into which to retreat…. We shall leave it to our climate, to our winter, to wage our war. … I shall withdraw to Kamchatka rather than cede any of my possessions.”
Only he, Alexander, backed by a God-intoxicated people and a God-given immensity of space, could stop this ravaging devil, save the independence and ancient order of Europe, and bring the nations back from Voltaire to Christ.
However, no nation, when its existence is at stake, can rely upon volunteers.
Rarely had so much military genius, or so many nationalities, met on any one field; this, as the Germans called it, was the Völkerschlacht —the Battle (literally the Slaughter) of the Nations.
The discontent of the Army was the strongest of the forces that opened a door for the return of the fascinating prodigal.
The proceedings would illustrate two not quite contrary principles: that guns speak louder than words, and that physical force is seldom victorious unless manipulated by mental power.
Alexander won the women and lost the diplomatic war.
Every end is a beginning; and on this March 20, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte began his Hundred Days.
“He has done me too much good that I should speak ill of him, and too much harm that I should speak well of him.”
“They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing”;
The great enemy of all the exiles was time, and, next, its child, ennui.
“No greater pain than to recall, in misery, a time of happiness”; a memory of pleasant days might soften, even while deepening, present grief.
I have been compelled to restrain and tame Europe with arms; today it must be convinced. I have saved the Revolution as it lay dying. I have cleansed it of its crimes, and have held it up to the people shining with fame.
“When we are dead, my dear Gourgaud, we are altogether dead.”
in the “Valley of the Geraniums”;
The love of Napoleon is the only passion that is left in me”; and he called Napoleon “the greatest man the world has seen since Caesar.”
His companions became his apostles.
“Let my son often read, and reflect on, history; this is the only true philosophy.”
“The world belongs to Napoleon,” wrote Chateaubriand; “… living, he failed to win the world; dead, he possesses it.”
Triumph of the Ashes
He was an exhausting force, a phenomenon of energy contained and explosive, a rising, burning, waning flame that consumed those who touched him intimately. We have not found in history another soul that burned so intensely and so long.
Here—first in France, then in Central Europe—was the Zeitgeist, or Spirit of the Time: the need and command for order, ending the disruptive excess of individualistic liberty and fragmented rule.
