Enlightenment, a convenient name for a period in which there was a
noticeable attempt to face the obvious, external facts of life in a
clear-eyed and courageous way. The centralizing of political power in
the hands of Louis XIV. of France and his successors had been
accompanied by a "standardizing" of human affairs which favored
practical efficiency and the easier running of the social machine, but
which was far from helpful to the self-expression of distinctly-marked
individuals.

The French became sovereign arbiters of taste and form, but their
canons of art were far from nature and the free impulses of mankind.
The particular development of this spirit of clarity in Berlin, the
centre of German influence, lay in the tendency to challenge all
historic continuity, and to seek uniformity based upon practical
needs.

Rousseau's revolutionary protests against inequality and
artificiality--particularly his startling treatise _On the Origin and
Foundations of Inequality among Men_ (1754)--and his fervent preaching
of the everlasting superiority of the heart to the head, constitute
the most important factor in a great revolt against regulated social
institutions, which led, at length, to the "Storm and Stress" movement
in Germany, that boisterous forerunner of Romanticism, yet so unlike
it that even Schlegel compared its most typical representatives to the
biblical herd of swine which stampeded--into oblivion. Herder,
proclaiming the vital connection between the soul of a whole nation
and its literature, and preaching a religion of the feelings rather
than a gospel of "enlightenment;" young Goethe, by his daring and
untrammeled Shakespearian play, _Goetz von Berlichingen_, and by his
open defiance, announced in _Werther_, of the authority of all