The foregoing may serve to show the only substantial ground for the charge of didacticism, frequently lodged by their critics against the writers of the school.  For it is beside the mark to speak of their opposition to romanticism as a ground for the charge in question.  They were all, to be sure, anti-Romanticists.  They declined to view life through roseate-hued spectacles or to escape the world of everyday reality by fairy-tale flights into the world of the imagination.  They called upon men to discover by clear-eyed vision not only the beauties but also the defects of contemporary social existence.  They would employ literature, not as an opiate to make us forget such defects, but as a stimulant to make us remedy them.  Hence their repeated exhortations to use the senses and to trust them as furnishing the best kind of raw material for legitimate art.  Hence also their protests against the bloodless abstractions of the Nazarene school of painting and to transcendental idealism in art and literature.  They cultivated art, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a fuller, saner, and freer human life.  In this sense they were didactic; but they were no more didactic than the Romanticists and the Pseudo-Classicists who had preceded them.  In their earnest contention for an organic connection between German life and German art and literature they were hewing more closely to the line of nature and truth than any other Germans since the time of Herder.

They are usually spoken of as free-thinkers and frequently as anti-religious in temper and conviction.  The charge of irreligion seems based upon the misconception or the misrepresentation of their orthodox critics.  It is, at any rate, undeserved, as far as Gutzkow, the leader of the school, is concerned.  It is true that they were liberal in the matter of religious and philosophical thought.  They were also skeptical as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and institutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church; their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism.  This attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the institutional state church as a weapon with which to combat the rising tide of popular discontent with existing social and political forms and functions.  This was especially true after the accession to the throne of Prussia of that romantic and reactionary prince, Frederick William IV., in 1840.

Critics have ascribed the negative, disintegrating, and cosmopolitan spirit of the group as a whole to the fact that Boerne and Heine were Jews.  In addition, however, to the abundant non-racial grounds for this spirit, already urged as inherent in the historic crisis under discussion, we should recall the fact that Heine, as a literary producer, is more closely allied with the Romanticists than with Young Germany, and that Boerne, who in his celebrated Letters from Paris (1830-34) and elsewhere went farther than all other members of the school in transforming art criticism into political criticism, was no cosmopolitan but an ardent, sincere, and consistent German patriot.  Moreover, while Boerne and Heine belong through sympathy and deliberate choice to Young Germany, the real spokesmen of the group, Wienbarg, Laube, Mundt, and Gutzkow, were non-Jewish Germans.