Chapter THE SECOND (4)

We said that Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, political and religious, but chiefly religious, was the grand key to his popular work on the history of literature. We may illustrate this now by a few instances. In the first place, the "many-sided" Goethe seems to be as little profound as he is charitable, when he sees nothing in the Sanscrit studies of the romantic brothers but a _pis aller_, and a vulgar ambition to bring forward something new, and make German men stare. We do not answer for the elder brother; but Frederick certainly made the cruise to the east, as Columbus did to the west, from a romantic spirit of adventure. He was not pleased with the old world--he wished to find a new world more to his mind, and, beyond the Indus, he found it. The Hindoos to him were the Greeks of the aboriginal world--"_diese Griechen der Urwelt_"--and so much better and more divine than the western Greeks, as the aboriginal world was better and more divine than that which came after it. If imagination was the prime, the creative faculty in man, here, in the holy Eddas, it had sat throned for thousands of years as high as the Himalayas. If repose was sought for, and rest to the soul from the toil and turmoil of religious wars in Europe, here, in the secret meditations of pious Yooges, waiting to be absorbed into the bosom of Brahma, surely peace was to be found. Take another matter. Why did Frederick Schlegel make so much talk of the middle ages? Why were the times, so dark to others, instinct to him with a steady solar effluence, in comparison of which the boasted enlightenment of these latter days was but as the busy exhibition of squibs by impertinent boys, the uncertain trembling of fire-flies in a dusky twilight? The middle ages were historically the glory of Germany; and those who had lived to see and to feel the Confederation of the Rhine, and the Protectorate of Napoleon, did not require the particular predilections of a Schlegel to carry them back with eager reaction to the days of the Henries, the Othos, and the Fredericks, when to be the German emperor was to be the greatest man in Europe, after the Pope. But to Schlegel the middle ages were something more. The glory of Germany to the patriot, they were the glory of Europe to the thinker. Modern wits have laughed at the enthusiasm of the Crusades. Did they weep over the perfidy of the partition of Poland? Do they really trust themselves to persuade a generous mind that the principle of mutual jealousy and mere selfishness, the meagre inspiration of the so called balance of power in modern politics, is, according to any norm of nobility in action, a more laudable motive for a public war, than a holy zeal against those who were at once the enemies of Christ, and (as future events but too clearly showed) the enemies of Europe? Modern wits sneer at the scholastic drivelling or the cloudy mistiness of the writers of the middle ages. Did they ever blush for the impious baseness of Helvetius, for the portentous scaffolding of notional skeletons in Hegel? But, alas! we talk of we know not what. What spectacle does modern life present equal to that of St Bernard, the pious monk of Clairvaux, the feeble, emaciated thinker, brooding, with his dove-like eyes, ("_oculos columbinos_,") over the wild motions of the twelfth century, and by the calm might of divine love, guiding the sceptre of the secular king, and the crosier of the spiritual pontiff alike? Was that a weak or a dark age, when the strength of mind and the light of love could triumph so signally over brute force, and that natural selfishness of public motive which has achieved its cold, glittering triumphs in the lives of so many modern heroes and heroines--a Louis, a Frederick, a Catharine, a Napoleon? But indeed here, as elsewhere, we see that the modern world has fallen altogether into a practical atheism by the idolatry of mere reason; whereas all true greatness comes not down from the head, but up from the heart of man. In which greatness of the heart, the Bernards and the Barbarossas of the middle ages excelled; and therefore they were better than we.

It is by no means necessary for the admirer of Schlegel to maintain that all this eulogium of the twelfth century, or this depreciation of the times we live in, is just and well-merited. Nothing is more cheap than to praise a pretty village perched far away amid the blue skies, and to rail at the sharp edges and corners of things that fret against our ribs. Let it be admitted that there is not a little of artistical decoration, and a great deal of optical illusion, in the matter; still there is some truth, some great truth, that lay in comparative neglect till Schlegel brought it into prominency. This is genuine literary merit; it is that sort of discovery, so to speak, which makes criticism original. And it was not merely with the bringing forward of new materials, but by throwing new lights on the old, that Frederick Schlegel enriched aesthetical science. If the criticism of the nineteenth century may justly boast of a more catholic sympathy, of a wider flight, of a more comprehensive view, and more various feast than that which it superseded, it owes this, with something that belongs to the spirit of the age generally, chiefly to the special captainship of Frederick Schlegel. If the grand spirit of combination and comprehension which distinguishes the "Lectures on Ancient and Modern Literature," be that quality which mainly distinguishes the so called Romantic from the Classical school of aesthetics, then let us profess ourselves Romanticists by all means immediately; for the one seems to include the other as the genus does the species. The beauty of Frederick Schlegel is, that his romance arches over every thing like a sky, and excludes nothing; he delights indeed to override every thing despotically, with one dominant theological and ecclesiastical idea, and now and then, of course, gives rather a rough jog to whatever thing may stand in his way; but generally he seeks about with cautious, conscientious care to find room for every thing; and for a wholesale dealer in denunciation (as in some views we cannot choose but call him) is really the most kind, considerate, and charitable Aristarchus that ever wielded a pen. Hear what Varnhagen Von Ense says on this point--"The inward character of this man, the fundamental impulses of his nature, the merit or the results of his intellectual activity, have as yet found none to describe them in such a manner as he has often succeeded in describing others. It is not every body's business to attempt an anatomy and re-combination of this kind. One must have courage, coolness, profound study, wide sympathies, and a free comprehensiveness, to keep a steady footing and a clear eye in the midst of this gigantic, rolling conglomeration of contradictions, eccentricities, and singularities of all kinds. Here every sort of demon and devil, genius and ghost, Lucinde and Charlemagne, Alarcos, Maria, Plato, Spinoza and Bonald, Goethe consecrated and Goethe condemned, revolution and hierarchy, reel about restlessly, come together, and, what is the strangest thing of all, do _not_ clash. For Schlegel, however many Protean shapes he might assume, never cast away any thing that had ever formed a substantial element in his intellectual existence, but found an _advocatus Dei_ to plead always with a certain reputable eloquence even for the most unmannerly of them; and with good reason too, for in his all-appropriating and curiously combining soul, there did exist a living connexion between the most apparently contradictory of his ideas. To point out this connexion, to trace the secret thread of unity through the most distant extremes, to mark the delicate shade of transition from one phasis of intellectual development to another, to remove, at every doubtful point, the veil and to expose the substance, that were a problem for the sagacity of no common critic."[I] We take the hint. It is not every Byron that finds a Goethe to take him to pieces and build him up again, and peruse him and admire him, as Cuvier did the Mammoth. Those who feel an inward vocation to do so by Schlegel may yet do so in Germany; if there be any in these busy times, even there, who may have leisure to applaud such a work. To us in Britain it may suffice to have essayed to exhibit the fruit and the final results, without attempting curiously to dissect the growth of Schlegel's criticism.

[Footnote I: RAHEL'S _Umgang_. FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL, vol. i. p. 325.]

The outward fates of this great critic's life may be found, like every thing else, in the famous "Conversations Lexicon;" but as very few readers of these remarks, or students of the history of ancient and modern literature, may be in a condition to refer to that most useful Cyclopaedia of literary reference, we may here sketch the main lines of Schlegel's biography from the sources supplied by Mr Robertson,[J] in the preface to his excellent translation of the "Lectures on the philosophy of history." Whatever we take from a different source will be distinctly noted.

[Footnote J: The authorities given by Mr Robertson are, (1.) _La Biographie des Vivans, Paris_. (2.) An article for July 1829, in the French _Globe_, apparently an abridgement of the account of Schlegel in the Conversations Lexicon. (3.) A fuller and truer account of the author, in a French work published several years ago at Paris, entitled "Memoirs of distinguished Converts." (4.) Some facts in _Le Catholique_, a journal, edited at Paris from 1826 to 1829, by Schlegel's friend, the Baron d'Echstein.]

The brothers Schlegel belonged to what Frederick in his lectures calls the third generation of modern German literature. The whole period from 1750 to 1800, being divided into three generations, the first comprehends all those whose period of greatest activity falls into the first decade, from 1750 to 1760, and thereabout. Its chief heroes are Wieland, Klopstock, and Lessing. These men of course were all born before the year 1730. The second generation extends from 1770 to 1790, and thereabouts, and presents a development, which stands to the first in the relation of summer to spring--Goethe and Schiller are the two names by which it will be sent down to posterity. Of these the one was born in 1749, and the other in 1759. Then follows that third generation to which Schlegel himself belongs, and which is more generally known in literary history as the era of the Romantic school--a school answering both in chronology, and in many points of character also, to what we call the Lake school in England. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, are contemporaries of Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegels. Their political contemporaries are Napoleon and Wellington. The event which gave a direction to their literary development, no less decidedly than it did to the political history of Europe, was the French Revolution. Accordingly, we find that all these great European characters--for so they all are more or less--made the all-important passage from youth into manhood during the ferment of the years that followed that ominous date, 1789. This coincidence explains the celebrity of the famous biographical year 1769--Walter Scott was born in that year, Wellington and Napoleon, as every body knows--and the elder Aristarchus of the Romantic school, _the_ translator of Shakspeare, Augustus William Von Schlegel was born in 1767. At Hanover, five years later, was born his brother Frederick, that is to say, in May 1772, and our Coleridge in the same year--and to carry on the parallel for another year, Ludwig Tieck, Henry Steffens, and Novalis, were all born in 1773. These dates are curious; when taken along with the great fact of the age--the French Revolution--they may serve to that family likeness which we have noted in characterizing the Romanticists in Germany and the Lake school in England. When Coleridge here was dreaming of America and Pantisocracy, Frederick Schlegel was studying Plato, and scheming republics there.[K] In the first years of his literary career Schlegel devoted himself chiefly to classical literature; and between 1794 and 1797 published several works on Greek and Roman poetry and philosophy, the substance of which was afterwards concentrated into the four first lectures on the history of literature. About this time he appears to have lived chiefly by his literary exertions--a method of obtaining a livelihood very precarious, (as those know best who have tried it,) and to men of a turn of mind more philosophical than popular, even in philosophical Germany, exceedingly irksome. Schlegel felt this as deeply as poor Coleridge--"to live by literature," says he, in one of those letters to Rahel from which we have just quoted--"is to me _je länger je unerträglicher_--the longer I try it the more intolerable." Happily, to keep him from absolute starvation, he married the daughter of Moses Mendelsohn, the Jewish philosopher, who, it appears, had a few pence in her pocket, but not many;[L] and between these, and the produce of his own pen, which could move with equal facility in French as in German, he managed not merely to keep himself and his wife alive, but to transport himself to Paris in the year 1802, and remain there for a year or two, laying the foundation for that oriental evangel which, in 1808, he proclaimed to his countrymen in the little book, _Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier_. Meanwhile, in the year 1805, he had returned from France to his own Germany--alas, then about to be _one_ Germany no more! And while the sun of Austerlitz was rising brightly on the then Emperor of France, and soon to be protector of the Rhine, the future secretary of the Archduke Charles, and literary evangelist of Prince Metternich, was prostrating himself before the three holy kings, and swearing fealty to the shade of Charlemagne in Catholic Cologne. There were some men in those days base enough to impeach the purity of Schlegel's motives in the public profession thus made of the old Romish faith. Such men wherever they are to be found now or then, ought to be whipped out of the world. If mere worldly motives could have had any influence on such a mind, the gates of Berlin were as open to him as the gates of Vienna. As it was, not wishing to expatriate himself, like Winkelmann, he had nowhere to go to but Vienna; in those days, indeed, mere patriotism and Teutonic feeling, (in which the Romantic school was never deficient,) independently altogether of Popery, could lead him nowhere else. To Vienna, accordingly, he went; and Vienna is not a place--whatever Napoleon, after Mack's affair, might say of the "stupid Austrians"--where a man like Schlegel will ever be neglected. Prince Metternich and the Archduke Charles had eyes in their head; and with the latter, therefore, we find the great Sanscrit scholar marching to share the glory of Aspern and the honour of Wagram; while the former afterwards decorated him with what of courtly remuneration, in the shape of titles and pensions, it is the policy alike and the privilege of politicians to bestow on poets and philosophers who can do them service. Nay, with some diplomatic missions and messages to Frankfurt also, we find the Romantic philosopher entrusted and even in the great European Congress of Vienna in 1815, he appears exhibiting himself, in no undignified position, alongside of Gentz, Cardinal Gonsalvi, and the Prince of Benevento.[M] We are not to imagine, however, from this, either that the comprehensive philosopher of history had any peculiar talent for practical diplomacy, or that he is to be regarded as a thorough Austrian in politics. For the nice practical problems of diplomacy, he was perhaps the very worst man in the world; and what Varnhagen states in the place just referred to, that Schlegel was, what we should call in England, far too much of a high churchman for Prince Metternich, is only too manifest from the well-known ecclesiastical policy of the Austrian government, contrasted as it is with the ultramontane and Guelphic views propounded by the Viennese lecturer in his philosophy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Frederick Schlegel wished to see the state, with relation to the church, in the attitude that Frederick Barbarossa assumed before Alexander III. at Venice--kneeling, and holding the stirrup.

"An emperor tramples where an emperor knelt."

Joseph II., in his estimation, had inverted the poles of the moral world, making the state supreme, and the church subordinate--that degrading position, which the Non-intrusionsts picture to themselves when they talk of ERASTIANISM, and which Schlegel would have denominated simply--PROTESTANTISM.

[Footnote K: "_Das republikanishe Werk erscheint gewiss nicht vor Zwei Jahren_."--Letters to Rahel--1802. Varnhagen, as above. Vol. I. p. 234.]

[Footnote L: "_Das kleine Vermogen meiner Frau_."--Letters to Rahel. Paris: 1803.]

[Footnote M: _Das Wiener Congress_ in 1814-15, by VARNHAGEN VON ENSE, in the fifth volume of his _Denkwürdigkeiten_, p. 51. By the way here, Mr Robertson in his list of famous Catholics in Germany, (p. 19,) includes Gentz. Now, Varnhagen, who knew well, says that Gentz was only politically an Austrian, and always remained Protestant in his religious opinions; which is doubtless the fact.]

During his long residence at Vienna, from 1806 to 1828, Schlegel delivered four courses of public lectures in the following order:--One-and-twenty lectures on Modern History,[N] delivered in the year 1810; sixteen lectures on Ancient and Modern Literature, delivered in the spring of 1812, fifteen lectures on the Philosophy of Life, delivered in 1827; and lastly, eighteen lectures on the Philosophy of History, delivered in 1828. Of these, the Philosophy of life contains the theory, as the lectures on literature and on history do the application, of Schlegel's catholic and combining system of human intellect, and, altogether, they form a complete and consistent body of Schlegelism. Three works more speculatively complete, and more practically useful in their way, the production of one consistent architectural mind, are, in the history of literature, not easily to be found.

[Footnote N: _Ueber die neuere Geschichte Vorlesungen gehalten zu Wien im Jahre 1810; Wien, 1811_.]

Towards the close of the year 1828, Schlegel repaired to Dresden, a city endeared to him by the recollections of enthusiastic juvenile studies. Here he delivered nine lectures _Ueber die Philosophie der Sprache, und des Worts_, on the Philosophy of Language, a work which the present writer laments much that he has not seen; as it is manifest that the prominency given in Schlegel's Philosophy of Life above sketched to living experience and primeval tradition, must, along with his various accomplishments as a linguist, have eminently fitted him for developing systematically the high significance of human speech. On Sunday the 11th January 1829, he was engaged in composing a lecture which was to be delivered on the following Wednesday, and had just come to the significant words--"_Das ganz vollendete und voll-kommene Verstehen selbst, aber_"--"The perfect and complete understanding of things, however"--when the mortal palsy suddenly seized his hand, and before one o'clock on the same night he had ceased to philosophize. The words with which his pen ended its long and laborious career, are characteristic enough, both of the general imperfection of human knowledge, and of the particular quality of Schlegel's mind. The Germans have a proverb:--"_Alles wäre gut wäre kein ABER dabei_"--"every thing would be good were it not for an ABER--for a HOWEVER--for a BUT." This is the general human vice that lies in that significant ABER. But Schlegel's part in it is a virtue--one of his greatest virtues--a conscientious anxiety never to state a general proposition in philosophy, without, at the same time, stating in what various ways the eternal truth comes to be limited and modified in practice. Great, indeed, is the virtue of a Schlegelian ABER. Had it not been for that, he would have had his place long ago among the vulgar herds of erudite and intellectual dogmatists.

Heinrich Steffens, a well-known literary and scientific character in Germany, in his personal memoirs recently published,[O] describes Frederick Schlegel, at Jena in 1798, as "a remarkable man, slenderly built, but with beautiful regular features, and a very intellectual expression"--(_im höchsten Grade gisntreich_.) In his manner there was something remarkably calm and cool, almost phlegmatic. He spoke with great slowness and deliberation, but often with much point, and a great deal of reflective wit. He was thus a thorough German in his temperament; so at least as Englishmen and Frenchmen, of a more nimble blood, delight to picture the Rhenish Teut, not always in the most complimentary contrast with themselves. As it is, his merit shines forth only so much the more, that being a German of the Germans, he should by one small work, more of a combining than of a creative character, have achieved an European reputation and popularity with a certain sphere, that bids fair to last for a generation or two, at least, even in this book-making age. Such an earnest devotedness of research; such a gigantic capacity of appropriation, such a kingly faculty of comprehension, will rarely be found united in one individual. The multifarious truths which the noble industry of such a spirit either evolved wisely or happily disposed, will long continue to be received as a welcome legacy by our studious youth; and as for his errors in a literary point of view, and with reference to British use, practically considered they are the mere breadth of fantastic colouring, which, being removed, does not destroy the drawing.

[Footnote O: _Was Ich Erlebte_, von HEINRICH STEFFENS. Breslau, 1840-2. Vol. iv. p. 303.]

* * * * *

MARSTON; OR THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN.