Georg Gottfried Gervinus
[1] The same year brought his expulsion from Göttingen in consequence of his protest, in conjunction with six of his colleagues, against the violation of the constitution by Ernest Augustus, king of Hanover and duke of Cumberland.
He zealously took up in the following year the cause of the German Catholics, hoping it would lead to a union of all the Christian confessions, and to the establishment of a national church.
[1] The latter work caused some stir in the literary and political world, owing to the circumstance that the government of Baden imprudently instituted a prosecution against the author for high treason.
[1] Arraigned before a tribunal, Gervinus defended himself with a great display of ability and courage, but was nevertheless condemned to an imprisonment of two months, and all the copies of the "seditious publication" were to be destroyed.
The ill-success of this publication, and the indifference with which the latter volumes of his History of the 19th Century were received by his countrymen, together with the feeling of disappointment that the unity of Germany had been brought about in another fashion and by other means than he wished to see employed, embittered his later years,[1] though it did not sour his kindly and humane disposition, nor did it in the least affect his sociable temper, and he cultivated refined society to the last.
"When she [Helene] was 16," Marianne Weber writes, "a chaste, closed bud of a girl, Gervinus, whom she respected as a teacher, loved like a father, and had trusted for years, one day lost control of himself.
His judgment was sincere and independent, although his criticism often assumed a censorious and pedantic tone against the most prominent poets of Germany, for example Goethe, Schiller and Jean Paul.
Notwithstanding this criticism, the German people, without allowing themselves to be misguided in their judgment regarding the merits of these poets, gratefully accepted his work as a national homage to the subject.
He endeavoured to show that Germany, having already attained great eminence in literature, should henceforth exclusively devote herself to political activity, and surpass other nations also in this respect.
This work is not so much a philological or aesthetical commentary as a treatise pointing out the ethical or moral precepts which may be deduced from Shakespeare's productions, and this circumstance makes it of considerable value and interest also to English readers.
The object for which he wrote, that is the moral improvement of his readers from a practical point of view, seemed to him the easier to be accomplished through the productions of Shakespeare, because the poet was descended from a kindred race, and the fructifying seeds of his thoughts and sentiments, falling upon a congenial soil, would be sure to take root there kindly.
He confined himself, therefore, chiefly to taking into account the political events and their results just as they lay on the surface; and, not consulting the state archives for the secret springs which set them in motion, he based his historical narratives almost entirely on his subjective judgment.
[5] Gervinus entertained a kindly feeling towards England, which he called the land of political mastery; and though he was rather a cosmopolitan, he nevertheless remained a German patriot to the core.
