prudence of aged sagacity. The wild days at Weimar which Klopstock looked
at askance, and not without good reason; the excess of passion and action
in Schiller's "Robbers;" the turbulence of the young Romanticists, with
long hair and red waistcoats, crowding the Theatre Francais to compel the
acceptance of "Hernani,"--these stormy dawns of the new day in art are
always captivating to the imagination. Their interest lies, however, not
in their turbulence and disorder, but in their promise. If real
achievements do not follow the early outbreak, the latter are soon
forgotten; if they herald a new birth of power, they are fixed in the
memory of a world which, however slow and cold, loves to feel the fresh
impulse of the awakening human spirit. The wild days at Weimar were the
prelude to a long life of sustained energy and of the highest
productivity; "The Robbers" was soon distanced and eclipsed by the noble
works of one of the noblest of modern spirits; and to the extravagance of
the ardent French Romanticists of 1832 succeeded those great works in
verse and prose which have made the last half-century memorable in French
literary history.

It is the fruitage of work, not the wild play of undirected energy, which
gives an epoch its decisive influence and a man his place and power. Both
aspects of the "storm and stress" period need to be kept in mind. When it
is tempted to condemn too sternly the extravagance of such a period,
society will do well to recall how often this undirected or ill-directed
play of energy has been the forerunner of a noble putting forth of
creative power. And those who are involved in such an outpouring of new
life, on the other hand, will do well to remember that extravagance is
never the sign of art; that licence is never the liberty which sets free
the creative force; that "storm and stress" is, at the best, only a
promise of sound work; and that its importance and reality depend entirely
upon the fruit it bears.