Chapter III: Goethe and His Contemporaries (2)

This also contains the few reviews preserved. Of these, the most remarkable is the unlucky one on Bürger, as to which I can only say that, having first read it when I had not read A. W. Schlegel’s reply,[743] and did not know the tenor of this, I had anticipated Schlegel’s verdict, that it is “an offence against literary morality.” In one case, therefore, however humble, Schiller’s later plea,[744] that posterity would do justice to the uprightness of his intentions, has not itself been justified: and I cannot think that it can have been so in many others. For, though the ill side of human nature will always rejoice in its own likeness, and though, even putting this aside, there is still a singular notion abroad that an abusive review must be an honest and well-intentioned one, _this_ review is one of the worst ever written, and in one of its own latter sentences it writes itself down so. Bürger, we are told, has “wealth of poetical painting, the glowing and energetic language of the heart, a streamer of poetry, now waving gorgeously, now caressingly floating, and [finally] an honest heart that speaks from every line.” If it were possible to imagine a reader who did not know _Lenore_ or anything of the rest, and who had worked patiently through the pages on pages of carping and sneering which lead up to this astonishing confession, we can only suppose that he would gasp for breath, and wonder whether he had turned over half a dozen sheets at once and come upon the end of a quite different paper.

The truth appears to be that Schiller, with all his talent, all his genius, was something of a prig: and a prig is capable of almost any discreditable act. It has often been pointed out that for the author of _Die Räuber_ to find fault with Bürger as not being strictly proper is “rather too rich”: but it must be remembered that when Schiller wrote _Die Räuber_ he was a prig too, though a prig in a fit of unconventional, Bohemian, and _Sturm-und-Drang_ priggishness. _Here_ the cold fit had followed the hot. The poet of the Moors is now busied with “the man of culture,” with “Idealising art which collects and mirrors all the morality, all the character, all the wisdom of the time,” and which of course rejects equally raptures about “Molly,” and childish things about the dead riding fast. He informs us, with the true superior air, that Bürger “not seldom mingles with the People, to whom he should only let himself condescend.” And he has succeeded, marvellous to say, in reducing _ad absurdum_ the argument against popularity as a test of poetry, in his very endeavour to reduce thereto the argument _for_ it. “’Tis as much as to say,” cries he with lofty scorn, “‘What pleases excellent judges is good: what pleases all without distinction is better.’” “Why, so it is, oh well-born Court-Counsellor and Professor at Jena,” one may reply.[745]

[Sidenote: _The_ Xenien.]

As for the _Xenien_, I am afraid I am still more out of accord with Schiller’s admirers here. The ill-nature of them is very suspicious when we find that, in this collaboration, it communicated itself to Goethe, who was certainly not ill-natured as a rule, though he was rather selfish. But the ill-nature is not the worst part. This kind of thing, whether it is done by a Pope, or by a Firm of Goethe, Schiller, & Company, has some of the disgustfulness of pigeon-shooting or even rabbit-coursing. There is hardly any real sport in it; the victims are nearly always rather defenceless, and generally quite harmless: their destruction does little, if any, good to anybody; and the spectacle is demoralising.[746]

These _Xenien_, I confess, appear to me to be one of those superstitions of literature which it is certainly the business of the critic, and the historian of Criticism, to protest against and demolish if he can. I never thought very much of them: and I think still less of them after a very careful study for the purposes of this book.[747] They corresponded, of course, in a certain sense, to the nearly contemporary, but much less famous and, as far as their authors are concerned, much less remarkable _battues_ of Rivarol and Gifford in France and England. Goethe and Schiller were not only much more formidable sportsmen, but had much better game—or worse vermin if anybody likes—for quarry. The imperfections of German literature were, as they always have been, much greater than those of French, and much more easily got at than those of English. It is rather ridiculous, and more than rather disgusting, to find even such men treating such others as Wieland and Jean Paul (Herder himself seems only to have escaped because of his personal connection with Weimar) as if they were “Tom Sternhold or Tom Shadwell.” But this is not the worst of it. The _Xenien_ are not, as a rule or in any large proportion, particularly _good_: and if they did not appeal to the ill-nature of mankind, and had not great names attached to them, few people would think them so. Schiller’s are often very lumbering verse and phrase, regarded merely as phrase and verse: Goethe’s are less often so, but seldom very brilliant as either.[748] If more people would read them in comparison with Martial himself, their lameness and awkwardness could hardly fail to be made clear. It would need a rather wider reading (though I at least have as little doubt of the result) to show not merely their pervading ill-nature and arrogance but their frequent miss-fires.

[Sidenote: _The Correspondence with Goethe._]

Most fortunately, however, we are not left either in the cold with the Æsthetic treatises, or in hot water with the Bürger review and the _Xenien_. The _Letters of Schiller and Goethe_[749] are a twice-blest book. Nowhere does one _like_ Goethe so much as in them: nowhere is it possible to understand, and therefore to like, Schiller better than in parts of them. It is true that the sense of his being fundamentally a prig of genius remains—that even the sense of his having something of that “bad blood,” of which Milton, Racine, and perhaps Wordsworth, are the chief other examples among persons of genius of the Upper House, remains likewise. But Goethe meets him with such an amiable _camaraderie_, he softens his asperities with such a never offensive but always effective blend of cordiality and irony, that, after the first few letters, Schiller begins to talk almost like a man of this world, and yet neither loses his predominant interest in literature. It is true that when we come to the _Xenien_ the offence returns. It is not pleasant to find two men of genius calmly plotting how to put, into the smallest space and the neatest form, most envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness towards the greatest number of persons obnoxious to them. And Schiller’s remarks on the necessity of “giving it hot” to a certain unlucky Reichardt, who had had the impudence not merely to praise the _Horen_ lukewarmly, but to praise the wrong things in them, can only be matched with Macaulay in reference to Croker, while there is much more deliberate malice in them. It is no excuse to say that severe criticisms are sometimes necessary. The reviewer is a policeman who may sometimes have to use his staff: the _Xenien_-writer is a bravo who chooses the stiletto. But enough of that matter.

And, as has been said, the book as a whole is very interesting to us. Schiller’s criticisms on _Meister_ never reach the concentrated justice of Novalis (_v. inf._) But they are by no means without _parrhesia_: and the picture they give us of the successive results of the instalments, on an eagerly receptive and extraordinarily sensitive literary wit-gauge, is not readily to be paralleled, except by the companion remarks of Goethe on _Wallenstein_ later. And Goethe’s practised _Weltweisheit_ deprives his observations of the naïve character which Schiller always, for good or for bad, retains. The latter, however, always retains likewise his porcupine attitude towards contemporary men of letters who are not quite of “ours.” From Richter to Bouterwek he cannot away with them in one sense, and would like to away with them very much in the other. Where this disturbing element does not come in, he is better; but seldom quite satisfactory. He was right not to think much of Darwin, and not wrong to think something of Restif’s _Monsieur Nicolas_: but this last, at least, has little to do with literature. His Shakespeare criticisms are always informing from the ethical-æsthetic side; they hardly even attempt the literary. But the elaborate character of the Index to these letters, which exhibits all the literary judgments of both the poets under separate reasoned catalogues, makes it almost unnecessary to pursue our usual process of sampling, the task being done to hand.

[Sidenote: _The_ Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.]

Of the definite critical treatises, by far the most important for our purpose (the “Æsthetic Education” being omitted, on the showing of its chief admirers, as of a more general bearing) is the tract on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” It has even been claimed for this, that here, for the first time, is a distinction made out between ancient and modern poets, on the score of their objective and subjective character respectively. The distinction is not quite real, and it is not critically made out. In support of the first demurrer (which is something too wide for us here), let me request anybody who really knows the Greek choruses, and especially those of Æschylus, to say whether, on his soul and conscience, he can deny them “sentimentality” in the good sense, subjectivity in any. Goethe and Browning will be hard put to it to fight this prize against the choruses of the _Agamemnon_ alone. The other point is more relevant. At the time[750] when Schiller wrote this essay we know, from a subsequent letter of his[751] to Goethe, that he had not read the _Poetics_; this is dangerous, but it is not fatal. What is, as it seems to me, fatal is that nearly all his literary citations are of a general and second-hand character. I can see nowhere any direct evidence of “contact” with the texts. He knows Kant at first hand certainly; he probably knows Lessing and Herder; he of course knows Kleist and Wieland. But did he know, at first hand and in the originals, besides the ancients, Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Ariosto, Rabelais and Molière? I cannot see much evidence of it.

In fact, though I know well to what danger I am, once more, exposing myself, I must once more say that Schiller does not seem to me a great critic, or even a good one. He was a man of letters who, as such, possessed genius, and a philosopher who at least had a very great talent for philosophy; and so much of a critic as can be made by these two qualifications he was. To put it in other ways, and perhaps to go even a little further, he was, as a merely _a priori_ critic, or a critic furnished with such _a posteriori_ knowledge as can be supplied at second-hand, very clever indeed. He could spin out of his interior more criticism, and of a better quality, than most men could. But he was excessively deficient in Love—that first and greatest fulfilling of the law of the true critic: and, partly without his own fault (for, as is well known, his life was short and not altogether favoured by fortune), partly by it, he did not give himself, or was not given, sufficient opportunity to warm his hands before that immortal fire of literature which each generation keeps burning, to soften what is harsh, feed what is starved, anoint and cheer and clean what is stiffened and saddened and soiled in the nature of man. The best of life might yet have been for him in criticism, as in other things: the _Versöhnung_, the time of the “calmed and calming _mens adepta_,” might have come. But it did not so please the Gods; and the most illogical form of playing Providence perhaps, though not the most mischievous and impertinent, is to refuse to accept the fact of what the Gods did _not_ choose to do.

[Sidenote: _Others: Bürger._]

Others of the greatest men of this Augustan period of German literature were more or less given to criticism, while not deriving their chief titles from it. Bürger himself was not at all contemptible in this respect. His answer to Schiller[752] is not undignified, and a little more of that wisdom of the serpent, which Molly’s adorer never possessed, would have made it very damaging. As we have said, it was Schiller’s ridicule of his theory of popularity that was ridiculous, not the theory in itself: and several things worth attention will be found in the two _Prefaces_ to his _Poems_, in his “Thoughts on translating Homer,” and in his Prose Fragments. In these last, indeed, there are some critical utterances of real weight on the extreme sensuous and individualist side of theoretical Poetic. Bürger says boldly that “among people to whom asafœtida gives a more charming scent than roses the poet ought to celebrate asafœtida”; and I am bound to say I think he is right.[753]

[Sidenote: _Richter._]

There is a note to the Preface of the second edition of Jean Paul’s[754] _Vorschule der Æsthetik_ which expresses my own opinions on its subject so completely that I must give it in full. “A collection of Wieland’s reviews in the _Teutsche Merkur_, or, in short, any honest selection of the best æsthetic reviews from newspapers and periodicals, would be a better bargain for the artist than any newest _Æsthetic_. In every good review there is, hidden or revealed, a good 'Æsthetic,' and, more than that, an applied one, and a free, and the shortest of all, and (by dint of the examples) the best.”

No one, of course, who has the slightest knowledge of Richter will suppose that the whole book is written in such a straight-forward and common-sense style as this. But it is very far indeed from being one of his thorniest or most acrobatical: and Carlyle[755] need scarcely have feared that it might “astonish many an honest brother of our craft were he to read it, and altogether perplex and dash his maturest counsels if he chanced to understand it.” Nobody who can understand the _Biographia Litteraria_ could have the faintest difficulty with the _Vorschule_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorschule der Æsthetik.]

Such Richterisms as do appear are chiefly in the appendix lectures, the “_Miserikordia_-Lecture for Stylists,” the “_Jubilate_-Lecture for Poetical Persons,” and the “_Kantate_-Lecture on Poetical Poetry,” which, nevertheless, do contain excellent things. In the main body of the book there are only occasional flings (such as, “according to Kant, the formation of the heavenly bodies is easier to deduce than the formation of a caterpillar”), while the famous and very just description of a certain thing as “like a lighthouse, high, shining, empty,” is mere justice lighted up itself by wit. The fact is, that the book is one of the best of its kind, and deserves to be reserved from that exclusion of titular Æsthetics which prevails in this part of our History, not more by the large intermixture of actual criticism in it than by the sanity, combined with inspiration, of the rest. From its separation at the beginning of the “Nihilists” of Poetry (those who generalise everything) and the Materialists (who abide wholly in the sensuous) to the fragments on Style and Language at the end, it is a really excellent book, and if it has not been translated into English it ought to have been, and to be.

[Sidenote: _The so-called “Romantic School.”_]

The German “Romantic School”[756] has been the occasion of divers solid books[757] (and famous booklets) all to itself, and I do not consider it necessary to say much about it generally here. In a certain justifiable sense it may be said to have begun with Klopstock and only died, if it died even then, with Heine, who, on a calculus to me, I own, incomprehensible in any other sense than this, is thought by some to have killed it. But its usual connotation in literary histories, a connotation responsible, I think, for this and other errors, is that of a period extending from the latest years of the eighteenth century over about the first quarter (or the first thirty or forty years) of the nineteenth, and dominated by a remarkable quartette of friends—the two younger Schlegels, “Novalis,” and Tieck. The work of all the four is saturated with literary criticism of the polemic and propagandist kind, but it is rendered more troublesome to handle than it need be by the pestilent habit (which the Germans took from Rousseau, and from Goethe downwards indulged after the most intemperate fashion) of throwing polemic and propagandist thought into the forms of prose romance.

[Sidenote: _Novalis._]

Of these four the _greatest_ critic is, in my humble judgment, Novalis— though he wrote the least criticism. Indeed, there is a sense in which one might, without absurdity, call Novalis the greatest critic of Germany. He is, in fact, the Shelley of criticism; and it may be left to the Devil’s Advocates to suggest that, like Shelley, he had time to indicate, at least, all that was of truth in him, and had no time to turn it into, or muddle it with, error. He, very much more than Jean Paul, is _der Einzige_: though his uniqueness is such that, while it does not adjust itself to all times or temperaments, it will, when once apprehended, always re-present itself at some time or other with some slight assistance of fortune.

It would hardly have assisted his critical position if he had carried out the intention, which we are told[758] he entertained (under the influence of the above-noted delusion, as to the suitableness of the Romance for such purposes), of writing seven documents of the kind, on Poetry, Physics, the Civic Life, Commerce, History, Politics, and Love! _Wilhelm Meister_, which (see below) he judged so well, would have had much to answer for if this had been done. As it is, the existing but unfinished _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_ represents the first of these, and the not much more than begun _Lehrlinge zu Sais_ is believed to represent the second: but the rest remained bodiless and in the gloom. It was much better so: for neither the partly completed nor the hardly begun book approaches in value the _Fragmente_ which follow. In fact, even if the scheme were really practicable (which, despite certain imposing instances, may be very much doubted), it is pretty clear that Friedrich von Hardenberg was not the man for it.

[Sidenote: _The_ Heinrich.]

It can hardly, on the other hand, rejoice any reader of _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_, whether he be philosopher, critic, or simple reader for reading’s sake, when the Quest of the Blue Flower, and all the other agreeable Fouqué-like “swarmeries,” are interrupted by a discourse of three pages from the poet Klingsohr on the _Überschwenglichkeit_ of certain subjects for poetry. Even if you are a poet, and a Middle-High-German, and the father of Matilda, you must not talk like that in a novel. And your poetry, and your Middle-High-Germanship, and your fatherhood of Matilda are very distinctly _überschwenglich_ for you in your character as a critic. From Heinrich, therefore, we shall chiefly get (though there are tempting _aperçus_ in it here and there) a somewhat vague notion of the _clair-de-lune_ Poetic of the central Romantic school. [Sidenote: _The earlier_ Fragments.] The _Disciples at Sais_ hardly concern us. But the _Fragments_ that remain give much less unsubstantial food. Here is that witty and appallingly accurate judgment of Klopstock, which applies to a whole class of poets as well, that “His works appear to be, for the most part, free translations and workings up of an unknown Poet by a very talented but unpoetical philologist.” Here, too, is that remarkable judgment of Goethe’s work in general, and of _Wilhelm Meister_ in particular, of which Carlyle bravely gave the gist,[759] though it certainly did not coincide with his own opinion, and which remains almost a pattern of independent and solid judgment, unspoilt by any petulance or jealousy of youth, from a young man of letters on the living leader of his country’s literature. Here also are some almost equally remarkable things on Shakespeare, not quite showing the _adequacy_[760] of those on Goethe, but very acute and especially valuable because they enter a protest against the exaggeration—a reaction, of course, from the opposite exaggeration of Voltaire & Co.—of Shakespeare’s deliberate artistry. And these individual judgments occur side by side, in the æsthetic and literary division of these _Fragments_, with more general dicta of astonishing profundity and beauty.

The most pregnant of all the sayings, as it seems to me, though the æstheticians may not like it, is this,[761] “Æsthetic is absolutely independent of Poetry”; and I should pair with it the other,[762] “May not poetry be nothing but _inner_ painting and music, freely modified by the nature of [the individual’s?] feeling (Gemüth)?” The further Shakespearian remarks[763] on the blending of contradictories in our poet, with the remarkable approximation of his style to Boccaccio’s and Cervantes’ prose, as “gründlich, elegant, nett, _pedantisch_ und vollständig,” may puzzle some people, but they do not puzzle me. What a critical genius must a German have had who, about 1800 and before he himself was thirty, combined[764] with the above-cited judgments of Klopstock and Goethe, recognition of the facts that Wieland and Richter sin from formlessness, and from having “not æsthetic or comic _spirit_, but only æsthetic or comic _moods_,” _and_ that Schiller “starts from too definite a point, and draws in too sharp and hard an outline.” “Man ist allein mit allem was man liebt”[765] may be said, by any one who likes, to be mere “dropping into poetry” in feeling as in form. Again: it is not so to me. And the postil[766] on a highly aggressive text, “Die Welt muss _romanticisirt_ werden,” is not so aggressive as it looks.

[Sidenote: _The later._]

I am, however, inclined to think that there is still further improvement in the fragments and thoughts of the _third_ volume. This was not published till nearly twenty years after Carlyle wrote the Essay by which, in all probability, most Englishmen know Novalis. But I should venture to recommend, to any one who wishes to understand him, the reading of it both first and last. The biographical article, written many years before by his old friend and chief, Just, gives, I think, a fuller and truer notion of the man than Tieck’s _Vorrede_ in the first collection. The Diaries, Letters, and oddments of various kinds help to fill out this portrait, and the _Fragmente_, themselves, from p. 160 onward, contain most admirable things. This third volume, in fact, forms a much earlier pendant to Amiel’s _Journal_, with, as some people may be excused for thinking, much less _Katzenjammer_, a much manlier tone, and far more positive genius.

How much more critical and more informing is the confession[767] that “Shakespeare is darker to him than Greece”—that he is more at home with Aristophanes’ jokes than with Shakespeare’s—not merely than the old abuse, but than certain kinds of laudation! What a combination (on a par with the sentence on Klopstock, elsewhere cited) of _giustizia_, _potestate_, _sapienzia_, _e amore_ (not a bad definition, by the way, if I may dare to borrow it, of the qualifications of the critic) is there in the saying[768] that Goethe is “der wahre _Statthalter_ des Poetischen Geistes auf Erden”! The words—idle paradox as they may seem to some—“Moments may occur when A B C books and Compendia seem to us poetical,”[769] are a better text for a whole æsthetic—or, at least, for a whole theory of real criticism—than _oratio sensitiva perfecta_ or any of its clan. So is this:[770] “By industrious and intelligent study of the classics of the Ancients, there arises for us a classical literature which the Ancients themselves had not.” How just the observation[771] that “Lessing saw too clearly: and so missed the feeling of the _undefined_ Whole”!

[Sidenote: _His critical magic._]

These are but specimens. But I shall venture to say of them that for awaking the critical power, and qualifying the critical taste where it exists—as examples of that critical unity of subject and object which has been so often spoken of—they are specimens of some significance. There is only one other person who can, I think, be yoked with Friedrich von Hardenberg. If you want critical system, range of actual critical examination, and the like, you must go elsewhere. But for critical _magic_—for the critical “Open sesame!”—go to the two contemporaries, Novalis and Joubert.

[Sidenote: _Tieck._]

Tieck, at one time very famous as a critic, and not undeservedly so, need occupy us less than his friends: for he has less intensity than Novalis, and less extension than the Schlegels. Survey of his critical work may, therefore, with advantage be confined to the actual collection of his _Kritische Schriften_,[772] which he issued in his last years: for the _Nachgelassene Schriften_,[773] the two thin volumes of which appeared after his death, contain only an eristic or apologetic piece, “Über Parteilichkeit, Dummheit, und Bosheit”—an “_un_hübsches Lied” which we all feel inclined to sing now and then—and some fragments and sketches for his great projected Shakespeare-book. It need hardly be said that Tieck occupies a very important position in the succession of German Shakespeare critics, or that some of the most interesting of his criticisms belong to the subject. Three out of the four earliest articles of the _Kritische Schriften_, all dated before 1800, concern the Master—the first being a perhaps excusably ill-tempered one on the engravings of the too famous Shakespeare Gallery; the second, the really valuable discussion of his “Handling of the Marvellous”; and the third, “Letters” on him. Tieck, as is again matter of common knowledge, was an early student of the Pre-Shakespearian drama, dealing with it at intervals in 1811, 1823, and 1828. His criticism is generally appreciative: but his textual suggestions are not always fortunate.[774]

As an example of what may be called the Romantic _potpourri_, Tieck’s work is very interesting and symptomatic. It ranges from Early German drama through Kleist to Goethe at home, and from Espinel to the history of the _Novella_ abroad. It is all sensitive, appreciative, catholic; and there is a remarkably sound sense of Literary History (which it must be remembered was still in its infancy) in an article on “Criticism and German Bookishness” (_Buchwesen_). On the whole, however, that subordinate position, from the historical point of view, which I have assigned to him, in comparison with the other members of the quartette, seems to me not unjustifiable.

[Sidenote: _The Schlegels._]

There are not many better known names in the History of Criticism than those of the (younger) Schlegels. They may even be said to be, in a vague and general manner, more associated with the idea of “Romantic” criticism than any other persons: and the question of the exact relationship of both to Coleridge, or of Coleridge to them, is one of those which seem to have more power than anything else to conciliate the attention to critical persons, though, as has been confessed repeatedly, the attraction is rather repulsive to the present writer. Of their influence on Madame de Staël—who at least served as a most influential vulgariser of the new critical ideas in Europe—there is no question at all: the later critical Corinne is mainly, if not merely, as much Schlegel as could go clothed in French petticoats, and remember itself there. Those who adopt the common, but to my thinking quite erroneous, idea that Romanticism began to wane towards the middle of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, probably mean Schlegelian Romanticism, and are so, perhaps, not quite wrong. In any case, the name, if shadowy and in a sense antiquated, is still imposing, if only as having once imposed.[775]

[Sidenote: _Their general position and drift._]

The work of the Schlegels generally—for not a little of it was done in common, and almost all expresses a common tendency—may be described as a continuation of that of Herder, with a still more definitely literary intent, and with what may be called a _complexion_ to that intent which was most definite of all. Criticism in Germany had been a long time focussing itself, and it may perhaps even be questioned whether the period of actual focus which it had now reached lasted very long; but for a time it did last. The somewhat wool-gathering and tentative efforts of Bodmer and his school had started the movement: and those of Gottsched, with, in a less utterly perverse direction, those of the half-French school—of whom Wieland is the representative, “too good for such a breed”—had wholly failed to divert it; the keen-edged strength of Lessing had given it movement and penetration; the immense literary excursions of Herder and others had opened up the widest fields to it. Nay, the Æsthetics, from Baumgarten to Schiller, with the imminent or accomplished transcendence of their transcendentalism in the minds, if not yet on the pens, of such men as Fichte and Hegel, had in a dangerous balloon-like fashion given new motive and vehicle; and the amiable if excessive Chauvinism of those about Klopstock had its good side likewise. If the extraordinary critical insight and sureness of hand which we have seen in the fragments of Novalis could have been allowed to preside over the concentration of all these, and had taken into partnership the practical wisdom of Goethe, and the exact scholarship of the great German school of philologists from Reiske downwards, there is no knowing how great the things done in consequence might have been. As it was, these two friends of Novalis were not quite equal to so mighty a task: but they did what they could, and it was a good deal.

[Sidenote: _The_ Characteristiken.]

On the whole, Carlyle, I think, showed a right _flair_, due not merely to the fact that he had probably made his own first acquaintance with them in it, by selecting the _Characteristiken_[776] as more than titularly characteristic. No matter what article we take, or which brother, the eulogies of Lessing and of Meister, or the apology for Bürger, the “Romeo and Juliet,” an admirable thing in all but its title,[777] or the capital “Letters on Poetry” (in which A. W., unhampered by the connection with a heretic on the subject which afterwards hampered Coleridge, puts the indissolubility of the marriage between metre and poetry with the greatest force), the “Bluebeard and Puss in Boots,” or the “Don Quixote,” there is noticeable, in all, the peculiar modern blend of criticism—moral, æsthetic, verbal, and purely literary—compounded and applied with the utmost freshness, vigour, and skill. I do not know that they ever did better work, though, no doubt, there is observable, here as elsewhere, the great fault of Romantic criticism generally—that the critic is, so to say, too much at the mercy of the last speaker. The actual goose, on pool or grass, is always not only a swan, but _the_ swan. Shakespeare and Calderon, Indian Literature and Chamfort, rule the roost so absolutely and exclusively for the time that one has twinges and qualms of doubt as to the legitimacy of the kinghood of any one of them.

[Sidenote: _A. W.: the_ Kritische Schriften _of_ 1828.]

But henceforward we may separate the brothers for a moment and take the elder first. His _Kritische Schriften_, mentioned in the note above, have the advantage, which it is nearly impossible to exaggerate, of containing not merely reviews and critical writings of different periods, but also later annotations on the earlier ones.[778] There can be no better test of a man’s critical quality than this: and Schlegel comes out of it very well, though the result no doubt does not place him quite as high as his friend Corinne and some others would do. The two best examples are the long and early review of Voss’s Homer,[779] and that (later but still early) of Bürger’s _Poems_. There is perhaps a slightly excessive patriotism in the author’s contention that German is better suited than any other language for the purpose of translating Homer; one is almost tempted to echo Garrick to Goldsmith: “Come, come! you are perhaps the worst ... eh, eh?” in certain respects, though no doubt not in all. Yet even here there is force as well as ingenuity in the contention that the very fact of Germany possessing no large amount of great literature at the time prevented German phrase from being hackneyed in, and, as it were, _ascript_ to, certain contexts and associations, as was the case with Italian, French, and even English, while the enormous and unquestioned xenomania with which the Germans had for generations been refreshing and stocking their speech and their culture was another advantage.[Sidenote: _On Voss._] There is, moreover, too much distinct animus against Pope as a coryphæus of the English Neo-classics; but this itself marks Schlegel’s attitude, which, let it be remembered, was fresh and novel. Nor is it surprising that, as the author tells us with pride, both Goethe and Schiller, personages not always well disposed to him, warmly approved the metrical part of the essay. It is now pretty generally admitted, both that Schlegel was a very sound critic on this all-important subject, and that the importance of it was almost greater in Germany than elsewhere owing to the extreme laxity and cacophony, descending at times nearly to the level of the horse-fiddle, in which men not merely like Klopstock but like Bürger had indulged. And the whole is one of the first examples I know of a full modern review of the best kind, neither “puff” nor “slate” (though there is a good deal of severe criticism in it), neither mere _compte-rendu_ nor mere divagation from the subject into some general discussion which happens to interest the reviewer.

[Sidenote: _On Bürger._]

The Bürger article[780] has the additional interest of being an answer, and a crushing one, to a precedent criticism. I have said[781] something earlier of Schiller’s unlucky production, and need not return to it: but it may fairly be observed that this is as good an instance of obedience to literary morality as that was of offence against it. Bürger had been a friend of Schlegel’s, and he was one of the poetical protagonists of the cause for which Schlegel himself was fighting. Yet there is no unfair praise here: and, what is more, there is no abstinence from just censure. Indeed Schlegel may be thought to be even a little too hard on the unlucky _Lenardo und Blandine_, though this piece has nearly all the faults of “Monk” Lewis and other imitators.

If, however, these and other pieces of themselves place Schlegel in a high position as a critic, the volumes do not fail to show his shortcomings. The system of self-annotation, though possessing some advantages, is dangerous, as giving opportunity for those egotistical displays of which Schlegel has been commonly accused: but this does not matter so very much. [Sidenote: _The_ Urtheile, _&c._] The batch of _Urtheile_, _Gedanken_, &c., which closes the first volume, and which originally appeared in the _Athenæum_ (the periodical which the two brothers had founded in 1798, the very year of the _Lyrical Ballads_[782]), do not raise our opinion of Schlegel’s talent, and they certainly do not, as do the corresponding _Fragments_ of Novalis, give us any idea of critical genius. The one exception[783] is not at all like the others, and _is_ very like Novalis himself. But even this is rather an amusing and well-aimed “fling” than a real critical plummet suddenly let down to the bottom of the well of critical Truth. The rest are quite ordinary and commonplace things, by no means unrespectable but nothing more. Now, no one is bound to isolate his critical judgments and set them up in specimen-cases for examination after this fashion. But if he does so, they should be something more than commonplace, and ordinary, and respectable.[784]

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur.]

There is no doubt that Schlegel’s best-known work is, as sometimes, though not always, happens, his best, and by a very long way. The _Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature_, which he delivered at Vienna in 1808, printed next year, and issued finally in book form three years later, undoubtedly deserve a place, not merely in any library of critical literature, but on any shelf devoted to criticism which will hold, say, a score of volumes. They have indeed faults, and grave ones. The attitude towards French Drama, and especially towards Corneille and Molière, does not sin merely by an excess of party spirit. There would be some excuse for that, especially in face of the absolutely ridiculous over-valuation of themselves by the French, who had held the critical ear of Europe for a hundred and fifty years. Moreover, as has been, I think, hinted more than once here, there are worse things than thorough-going advocacy, prosecuting as well as defending, in criticism, provided only that it observes literary manners and literary morals, that it is well informed, and that it is intelligent. Schlegel is not exactly guilty under the first count, but he is under the two last. He ought to have seen that Corneille is really a Romantic Samson in the mill of the classical Gaza. And as to Molière the case is even worse. Further, to confine ourselves to really large and important matters, the complete omission of the mediæval drama in the earlier part of the book, where we stride straight from Seneca to the Renaissance, and the very inadequate treatment of it later, form a really serious draw-back. I have myself little doubt that the almost incomprehensible blunder of those who deny the influence of this mediæval drama on our Elizabethans, is in some cases due to the blunderers having taken their notions on the subject from Schlegel. And it would be extremely easy to pick out a small number of great errors, and a great number of small ones, to supplement these two.

[Sidenote: _Their initial and other merit._]

Yet they are but little to be considered—they are certainly not to be considered as at all fatal—in face of the merits of the book. To me the greatest of all these is contained in its very first page, where the whole question of the kinds, or parts, or phases of criticism, and of their relation to each other, is treated with a completeness and sureness which I do not know where to find before, and which I wish I had found oftener since. On the one hand, says Schlegel, there is the general _History_ of Art—indispensable, but not always easy to understand. On the other, there is the _Theory_ of Art in general, and the arts in particular—extremely important to the philosopher, necessary to some extent for the artist himself, but inadequate by itself. Between these two, connecting them, completing them, making them fruitful, is actual criticism—the comparison and judging of existing productions. There is really little or nothing to add to this: and if no other line of the book had ever been written, it would give Schlegel an abiding and important place in our history. But the book itself, though necessarily in other parts somewhat antiquated, though of the kind which has to be done afresh for itself, if not by every generation yet by every century or so, remains excellent and masterly—one of the best individual summaries of the critical struggle for independence of the eighteenth century, and by no means merely dead or exhausted after the end of the nineteenth.

[Sidenote: _The Schlegelian position._]

We should draw from this book the idea that though Goethe’s contemptuous dismissal of August von Schlegel (almost in his presence) as _kein Mann_[785] is not borne out by it in the critical respect,—though the accompanying compensation-prize of “learning and service” to literature certainly _is_—there remains to be added, if in the favourable sense an acknowledgment of the completeness, and value of his playing of his part, and of the part itself, yet also a further limitation. We have seen and acknowledged the truth throughout, though we have protested against the common exaggeration of it, that “old critics are like old moons.” Perhaps the Schlegels are the most eminent examples of this. They did yeoman’s service in their own time and to their own country— perhaps even at that time they did service to other countries, too, in preaching and spreading the Romantic gospel. But they were diffusers and popularisers, not origins: and they did not give to their diffusion and popularisation quite that touch of pure literary genius which will save anything and anybody. They thus rank rather with Addison among ourselves than with Dryden or Johnson, though in thoroughness and width of critical knowledge and practice they are ahead of all three. If I were writing this History of Criticism in German, and for Germans, I should give them much more space than I give them here, of course. But even if I were a German, “writing on this German matter in the German tongue for German men,” I should never put them on a level with Coleridge, any more than I should with Aristotle or Longinus in one class of critics, with Novalis or with Joubert in another.

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorlesungen über Schöne Literatur und Kunst.]

The long unpublished Berlin _Lectures on Art and Belles Lettres_, in the three first years of the nineteenth century, supply a document of A. W. Schlegel’s criticism which is of the very greatest value. It is true that they are “half-done work”—in some cases bare notes for lectures, in others detached pieces of them, in only a very few (which were separately published) finished even as parts. But it would be very unwise of a writer to put his readers, and very unbenevolent of readers to put their author, in either of the two classes to whom “half-done work” is taboo. In fact, the book is as much finished as not a few of the contemporary documents for Coleridge: and its great bulk and very extensive range promise well enough. Nor is the performance to be evil spoken of. Ambitious as is his scope, Schlegel nowhere shows that shyness of detail which we shall have to notice in his brother: and his width of knowledge, which would be unusual even at the present day, is quite astounding when we remember that it was shown by a man of not much over thirty a hundred years ago. The first volume, or course, deals with Æsthetics generally, though from a peculiar point of view: and only a few things in it need be noted, the most remarkable of which is Schlegel’s scorn for Longinus on the one hand,[786] and on the other his very ample acknowledgment of the dangers of Æsthetics themselves.[787] The second deals with Ancient Literature (not without ample reference to modern classics), and the third, which is in the least complete state, with Modern Literature itself.

The Longinus passage just referred to is partly a corrupt following out of the critic’s usual and very healthy distrust of such generalities as “_The_ Sublime,” “_The_ Tender,” and the like; but it has a worse side to it. As we have already seen, Schlegel is guilty of excess of party spirit: and I have little doubt that, if Boileau and others of the objects of eighteenth-century-worship had not expressed admiration for the Περὶ Ὕψους, he would have judged it more wisely. In fact, his judgments, which, either in the straight way of his courses or as _obiter dicta_, are extremely numerous, are, though always interesting, a curious mishmash of hit and miss, and the misses may be too generally accounted for as the effects of that “trying to be different” which so often besets young men of talent. The severity with which he treats Burke[788] has some justification. But his handling of, for instance, Opitz[789] is quite out of the right tone, and has all the faults that beset the “company of warm young men.” Some of his English judgments—for instance, those on Milton’s verse and on Thomson[790]—suggest, besides this, an uncomfortable suspicion that his actual knowledge of our language was not very perfect. In Greek he fails to respond quite satisfactorily to the test of Æschylus. And in regard to a person very different from Milton and from Æschylus, Ariosto, it is remarkable that, where he praises him, he is doing it to disparage Wieland, and that in the preserved heads of an intended fuller treatment he is most unsatisfactory. No doubt much of this mere will-worship and “will-blasphemy” (to invent a counter-word) would have disappeared in a final redaction for press; but unfortunately it is there.

Fortunately there are also many better things, and on the whole the book bears out, with evidence of a class peculiarly cogent, the praise which has been given to Schlegel of being freer than any German critic from a temptation to “speak off book,” to shirk and jilt the Book itself, for expatiatory flirtations with so-called Ideas. He is in the main faithful to Literature, and there is no higher praise.

[Sidenote: _Illustrated still more by Friedrich._]

Friedrich, though a very important person for us in general, has a good deal less for us here, and has to a certain extent been already touched and dealt with in the remarks on his brother. He seems very early to have launched out into the expanse—I shall not here by any means say the _inane_—of general literary outline and survey; and when he arranged his collected works not so very long before his death,[791] he showed the way in which he would himself have wished to have them regarded by putting the _Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur_[792] first, though it was nothing like the first written; and by arranging after it, in the position of fillings-up or developments, the studies on Greek[793] and on Romantic[794] poetry, the book on Indian Literature,[795] and the smaller critical pieces.[796] Of these smaller pieces he reproduced but few, and the actual reviews or definite criticisms which they contain are of slight importance.

In fact, “judging of books”, and even “judging of authors,” was not Friedrich’s forte at all. The _Ancient and Modern Literature_ is from some points of view a book more curious than entirely edifying. When we find Greek literature dashed off in some sixty pages, which include a great deal of preliminary and general matter; Roman in another sixty, which have likewise to provide for Hebrew and Persian; five-and-thirty doing duty for the rise of the Novel, all English _belles lettres_ from Spenser to Milton, _and_ the Spanish and French dramas, it is surely not carping to say “this is either too little or too much.”

Nor, when we turn to what we have called the “fillings,” do we find much more satisfaction in some directions. Here Greek has something like three volumes and seven or eight hundred pages to itself—and not a volume or a page too much—as no one can add more heartily and whole-souledly than the present writer. But even in this ample room or verge we find that Schlegel blenches at the book—still more at the passage and the phrase. What he likes to talk about is matter such as the Pelasgians; as epic (specially Homeric) and lyric poetry in general; as this and that “school”; as “The Artistic Worth of the Old Comedy” and “The Presentation of Female Character in Greek”; as “The Connection and Contrast of the Interesting and the Beautiful.” In presence of the actual literary integer he seems like a shy person at a _tête-à-tête_, though he is perfectly at home when he is addressing himself, _ex cathedrâ_, on generals to a large audience. People of his kind are, in their place and at their time, most useful: the Schlegels were really born to burst up the old narrowness, to encourage catholic (Friedrich does not seem to me to have been quite fairly charged with turning this into _Roman_ Catholic) views: to cheer the student on to the discovery and appropriation of the enormous and far-flung wealth which had been so long neglected. Their doctrines were so widely diffused in the middle of the nineteenth century that at the end thereof they came to be regarded as truisms and almost “falsisms.” But their place is still honourable, though it is a place rather in the museum of Criticism than in her living-room of study.

We may conclude this chapter—since an exhaustive examination of the German work of this period is here impossible, and, if it were possible, would be of very little service—by noticing one or two authors and books of different kinds, specimen-fashion.

[Sidenote: _Uhland._]

The best known in England of German lyric poets next to Bürger and Goethe, and (in time) before Heine, Uhland, was a man forty years younger than the author of _Lenore_, and did not die till Heine himself was dead. But his most important work[797] in verse was done quite in this period,[798] and one of his most important works in connection with, if not strictly within, our subject, the excellent Essay on “Walther von der Vogelweide,” appeared as early as 1822. Uhland’s critical dealings with northern poetic literature are of no inconsiderable bulk,[799] and they are very important for the history of literary taste. Not merely in time, but in character, they stand between the earlier, most creditable and stimulating, but often insufficiently informed, and still more often too discursive and popular handlings, of Herder and even the Schlegels, and the modern method of pure philology, from which all literary appreciation is too often deliberately left out. Uhland combines real scholarship, for his time and means, with poetical and critical appreciation in almost the exactly desirable blend. Would there were more such!

[Sidenote: _Schubarth._]

The work of Schubarth, _Zur Beurtheilung Goethe’s_,[800] may be worth a short notice as an early and by no means contemptible example of a kind of book which has been very largely written during the nineteenth century, but which we can only here take by sample. A contemporary cannot often have been handled earlier on so great a scale: for there are some nine hundred pages in the second edition, and the author makes the widest possible casts round his subject. He is not in the least satisfied with the consideration of particular works (which he gives mainly in two batches, on the earlier and the later respectively), or on his author’s general literary characteristics. He has long excursus on the personages, especially Mephistopheles. He can never refuse himself what he modestly calls a “glance” (_Hinblick_), but what is generally a very durable and substantial stare, at things that occur in passing,— some criticisms of A. W. Schlegel’s, the literary contrasts of Christianity and Heathenism, Lessing and the Education of the World, the great succession of German philosophers from Kant to Schelling, the Historical Method, Shakespeare, Poetry and Criticism in our day, the Nibelungen Lied, the Devil in the Middle Ages, the Moral and the Immoral in Art and Poetry. In short, the book is a sort of _Quodlibeta_—a treatise upon “Goethe and Things in General.” We have seen many like it since: let them appear here by it their foreman.

[Sidenote: _Solger._]

Solger’s _Vorlesungen_[801] are an early and good example of the defect of Æsthetic from the standpoint of this book. He often says true things; but they are generally not the whole or final truth, and they are almost always too abstract. Thus, for instance: “Oft verwechselt man das Interessante mit dem Schönen.”[802] The truth of this is constantly exemplified both in life and in criticism; but, laid down too isolatedly, it blinks the question whether, in certain degree, matter, and circumstance, the Interesting _is_ not the Beautiful: and it has an obvious and possibly dangerous connection with the very important critical question of the “Unity of Interest.” So, too, distinctions of Heavenly and Earthly Beauty are full of snares: and the danger of generalisation perhaps reaches its highest in the dictum, “In Epic and Lyric, matter is the important thing: in the Drama, form and the pure activity of fancy.” One might almost make out “twenty-nine distinct damnations” involved in this, with hardly more than a thirtieth and single way of salvation and escape!

[Sidenote: _Periodicals, Histories, &c._]

To complete the notice of this remarkable division, which has, by authorities respectable and more than respectable, been pronounced to be the greatest of all, and which is certainly most important, something should be said of the critical publications which, in Germany as elsewhere, but almost earlier there than anywhere, played so important a part, and of the immense industry in literary history which came to supply perhaps the greatest of critical needs. Of the Translations, which some would rank with these, I shall say nothing more than that they seem to me to have been a great misfortune for Germany—encouraging the tendency of the nation to keep aloof from the pure literary integer of the book-as-it-is; assimilating the literature of other nations insensibly but unduly to German ideals; and so making even the general judgment of authors untrustworthy and unsound.