In 1797, August Wilhelm Schlegel, then aged thirty, published the first
volume of his translation of Shakespeare. Rough drafts of several of
the plays in this edition have been found, and these faded, dusty
manuscripts not only enable us to follow the persevering, talented
translator in his self-imposed task, but, when carefully read, give us
direct insight into his and his wife's spiritual life, and indeed into
the intellectual life of the whole period.[1]
Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts
are not always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work upon
_Romeo and Juliet_ in the winter of 1795-96; in 1796 he married
Caroline Böhmer; and we have a complete copy of the first rough draft
of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with corrections in Schlegel's.
In September 1797, as her letters show, she copied _As You Like It_
from an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere
copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay on _Romeo and
Juliet_, which ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions on _Hamlet in
Wilhelm Meister_ as the best Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany
up to that time. We recognise her now and again in some outburst
of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of style than we are
accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding than her
contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was
the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German
literature. But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as
the manuscripts show us, survive the first year of her married life. At
first it is her handwriting which predominates, and, though it is less
frequently to be seen alongside of her husband's in the manuscripts of
those plays with which he was occupied during the years 1797-98, her
collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her pen in
the manuscript of the _Merchant of Venice_, which dates from the autumn
of 1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist
circle in Jena. Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is
discoverable.
Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea
of the progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two
different texts of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had
attempted to translate Shakespeare line for line. The two tame prose
translations by Wieland and Eschenburg were, in fact, all that
existed. As a student in Göttingen, Schlegel made the first attempt
to reproduce in German verse parts of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
From childhood he had been "an indefatigable verse-maker." His talent
was obviously inherited. Half a century before he and his brother made
their appearance, two brothers Schlegel had made a name for themselves
in literature--Johann Elias, who lived for many years in Copenhagen,
was a friend of Holberg, and, in everything connected with the stage, a
forerunner of Lessing, and Johann Adolph, father of August Wilhelm and
Friedrich, who, without much originality, possessed decided linguistic
and plastic talent.
As a young student, August Wilhelm, already distinguished by his
impressionableness as a stylist and opinionativeness as an author,
ardently desired to make the acquaintance of Bürger, who was leading a
lonely and unhappy life as professor at the University of Göttingen.
Bürger's fame as a poet procured him no consideration in a place where
learning alone was valued; his social position had, moreover, been
injured by the discovery of his relations with his wife's sister. With
the feelings of an exile, he warmly welcomed the distinguished and
talented young disciple, whose taste was more correct and whose stores
of knowledge were better ordered than his own. At this time Bürger was
still considered to be Germany's best lyric poet and most accomplished
versifier. Schlegel placed himself under his tuition, and learned all
his linguistic and metrical devices, all the methods of producing
artistic effects by careful choice and arrangement of words and use of
rhythm and metres. With his natural gift of imitation, he appropriated
as many of Bürger's characteristics as were at all compatible with his
entirely different temperament. His poem _Ariadne_ might have been
written by Bürger. Bürger had been particularly successful in the
sonnet, a form of poetry which had lately come into vogue in Germany.
So closely did the pupil follow in the footsteps of his master, that
when, many years later, a complete edition of Schlegel's works was
published, two of Bürger's sonnets were accidentally included among
them.
The master did homage to his remarkably promising pupil in a fine
sonnet, beginning:--
"Junger Aar, dein königlicher Flug
Wird den Druck der Wolken überwinden,
Wird die Bahn zum Sonnentempel finden,
Oder Phöbus' Wort in mir ist Lug,"[2]
and ending with the charmingly modest lines:--
"Dich zum Dienst des Sonnengotts zu krönen
Hielt ich nicht den eignen Kranz zu wert,
Doch--dir ist ein besserer beschert."[3]
Schlegel responded with a criticism of Bürger's frigidly grand _Das
hohe Lied von der Einzigen_, which he praises as a magnificent epic.
In collaboration with Bürger he now began a translation of the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, of which he did the greater part, Bürger
merely revising. He was still completely under his master's influence;
the manuscripts show that he always accepted Bürger's corrections and
deferred to his predilection for sonority and vigour. As a translator,
Bürger took no pains to reproduce Shakespeare's peculiarities as
closely as possible; he only manifested his own peculiarities, by
making all the coarse, wanton speeches, and the passages in which
misguided passions run riot, as prominent as possible; he emphasised
and exaggerated everything that appealed to his own liking for a coarse
jest, and destroyed the magic of the light and tender passages. In
spite of his own great and natural love of refinement, young Schlegel
strove in this matter also to follow in his master's steps, with the
result that he was not infrequently coarse and awkward where he meant
to be natural and vigorous.
A better guide would have been Herder, who, long before this, in the
fragments of Shakespeare plays in his _Stimmen der Völker_, had given
an example of the right method of translating from English into German.
If Schlegel had taken lessons from Herder in Shakespeare-translating,
he would never have rendered five-footed iambics by Alexandrines,
nor changed the metre of the fairy-songs. No one had realised the
inadequacy of Wieland's translation more clearly than Herder. And
now the spirit in which the latter aimed at Germanising Shakespeare
descended upon Schlegel, who, in spite of the faults of his first
attempts, soon surpassed Herder himself.
He was not long in shaking himself free from Bürger's influence. To
Bürger the highest function of art was to be national and popular.
In 1791, Schlegel, now no longer in Bürger's vicinity, but a tutor
in Amsterdam, devoted much attention to the works of Schiller. His
poetical attempts were henceforth more in the style of that master;
he wrote a sympathetic criticism of _Die Künstler_; and he was led
to a higher conception of art by the perusal of Schiller's æsthetic
writings. His metrical style began to acquire greater dignity. But
Schiller was almost as incapable as Bürger of developing in Schlegel
a true and full understanding of Shakespeare--Schiller, who, in his
translation of Macbeth, had transformed the witches into Greek Furies,
and changed the Porter's coarsely jovial monologue into an edifying
song. If Bürger's realism was one danger, Schiller's pomposity was
another.
But at the same time that Schiller enlightened Schlegel as to the
high significance of art, the newly-published Collected Works of
Goethe, whom he only now began to appreciate, stimulated his natural
inclination to study, interpret, and make poetical translations. As
already mentioned, this first edition of Goethe's collected works
met with but a poor reception. The chief reason of this was that
the public, understanding nothing of the poet's mental development,
had expected new works in the style of _Werther_ or _Götz_. But to
Schlegel's critical intellect, Goethe's wonderful many-sidedness was
now revealed. He understood and appreciated the artist's capacity of
forgetting himself for the moment, of surrendering himself entirely to
the influence of his subject, which in Goethe's case produced forms
that were never arbitrarily chosen, but invariably demanded by the
theme. He understood that he himself, as a poetical translator, must
practise the same self-abnegation and develop a similar capacity of
intellectual re-creation. Two things were required of the translator, a
feminine susceptibility to the subtlest characteristics of the foreign
original, and masculine capacity to re-create with the impression of
the whole in his mind; and both of these requirements were to be found
in Goethe; for his nature was multiplicity, his name "Legion," his
spirit Protean.
There still remained the technical, linguistic difficulties to
overcome; and in this, above all, Goethe was an epoch-making model. He
had remoulded the German language. In passing through his hands it had
gained so greatly in pliability and compass, had acquired such wealth
of expression both in the grand and the graceful style, that it offered
Schlegel exactly the well-tuned instrument of which he stood in need.
While under Bürger's influence he had looked upon technical perfection
as a purely external quality, which could be acquired by indefatigable
polishing; he now realised that perfect technique has an inward origin,
that it is in reality the unity of style which is conditioned by the
general cast of a mind. And he began to see that his life task was a
double one, namely, to reproduce the masterpieces of foreign races in
the German language, and to interpret critically for his countrymen
the best literary productions both of Germany and other lands.
Now, too, Schlegel acquired a quite new understanding of Fichte, the
friend and brother-in-arms whom the Romanticists had so quickly won for
their cause. He realised that Fichte's doctrine of the Ego contained
in extremely abstract terms the idea of the unlimited capacity of the
human mind to find itself in everything and to find everything in
itself. Round this powerful fundamental thought of Fichte's, August
Wilhelm's pliable mind twined itself.
At this time he was much influenced by the correspondence which he kept
up regularly with his younger brother. Friedrich had been drawn by
August Wilhelm into the stream of the new literary movement, and his
militant disposition made him the most reckless champion of the new
principles as soon as he felt assured of their truth. The brothers had
very different characters. The elder, in spite of the audacity of his
literary views, had the better regulated mind. He had early developed a
sense of form and of beauty. His chief gift was a capacity for moulding
language; and accuracy, dexterity, and the sense of proportion were
qualities he was born with. Except in cases of strong provocation,
he showed moderation in scientific and artistic controversy; he knew
comparatively early what he desired and what he was capable of; and
his determination and perseverance made him a successful pioneer of
the ideas and principles of which he had chosen to make himself the
spokesman. He became the founder of the Romantic School, an achievement
for which he possessed every qualification--this man whom his brother
jestingly called "the divine schoolmaster" or "the schoolmaster of the
universe."
Friedrich Schlegel was the more restless spirit, the genuine
sect-founder. He himself tells us, in one of his letters, that it was
his life-long desire "not only to preach and dispute like Luther, but
also, like Mohammed, to subjugate the spiritual realms of the earth
with the flaming sword of the word." He did not lack initiative, and
abounded in plans so colossal that there was a jarring disproportion
between them and his ability to carry them out. Eternally wavering,
without tenacity or fundamental conviction, fragmentary in the
extreme, but rich in both suggestive and disconcerting ideas and in
witty conceits, he was constantly beset by the temptation to silence
his opponents with mysterious terminology, and constantly liable to
relapse into platitudes and meaningless verbiage. What Novalis once
wrote to him was more correct than any one suspected: "The King of
Thule, dear Schlegel, was your progenitor; you are related to ruin." As
a critic, he was more impulsive and less impartial than August Wilhelm;
as a poet, he was only once or twice in his life genuinely natural,
and in his _Alarkos_ he plunged into an abyss of bathos into which
his brother, with his more correct taste, could never have fallen.
The elder brother had started the younger in his literary career; the
younger now drove the elder onward, and in the process put an end, by
his unamiability, to the latter's friendly relations with Schiller,
and, ultimately, even to his valued and long maintained friendship with
Goethe.
August Wilhelm now put his translation of Shakespeare aside for a time,
and turned his attention to the poets of the South. He experimented in
all directions, translated fragments of Homer, of the Greek elegiac,
lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poets, of almost all the Latin poets and
many of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. At a later period he even
translated Indian poetry, his aim being to make the German language
a Pantheon for the divine in every tongue. He lingered longest over
Dante, although he did not possess the mastery of form required to
render the _terza rima_; he rhymed only two lines of each triplet,
thus altering the character of the verse and doing away with the
intertwining of the stanzas.
After this he turned to _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_, sending
fragments of his translations to Friedrich, who showed them to
Caroline. Her judgment was favourable on the whole, but she found
fault with the style as being rather antiquated; this she ascribed to
Wilhelm's having been lately employed in translating Dante, his ear
having thereby become accustomed to obsolete words and expressions. The
fact was, that shortly before this he had awakened to the necessity of
being on his guard against the elaborate polish which he had made his
aim after giving up Bürger's style; he now fell into the other extreme,
became archaic, rugged, and hard.
In 1797 Schlegel sent the first samples of _Romeo and Juliet_ to
Schiller. They were printed in _Die Horen_; and in the same periodical
there presently also appeared his essay, _Etwas über William
Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters_. In _Wilhelm Meister_
Goethe had proclaimed the endeavour to understand Shakespeare to be an
important element in German culture. In its conversations on _Hamlet_
he had refuted the foolish theory that the great dramatist was an
uncultivated natural genius, destitute of artistic consciousness. Had
such been the case, the exact reproduction of his style would not have
been a matter of vital importance in a German translation. But with
so great an artist as the Shakespeare presented to us in _Wilhelm
Meister_, it was plain that the harmony between subject and form must
not be deranged. And yet even Goethe himself had, without any feeling
of unsuitability, given his quotations from _Hamlet_ in the old prose
translation; even he had not realised how inseparably matter and manner
are connected.
Slowly and laboriously Schlegel progresses. His judgment is still so
defective that he fancies it impossible to dispense with Alexandrines;
in _Romeo and Juliet_, he retains the five-footed iambics only "as far
as possible"; the scene between Romeo and Friar Laurence he renders in
Alexandrines, excusing himself with the remark that this metre is less
detrimental in speeches garnished with maxims and descriptions than in
the dialogue proper of the drama. The result is the loss of Romeo's
lyric fervour.
He feels this himself, and with iron industry and determined enthusiasm
sets to work again, rejects the Alexandrines, and compels himself, in
spite of the verbosity of the German language, to say in ten or eleven
syllables what he had said before in twelve or thirteen. For long it
appears to him an impossible task to reproduce each line by one line.
The translation swells in his hands as it did in Bürger's. Fourteen
English lines become nineteen or twenty German. It seems to him that it
is impossible to do with less; until at last he gains true insight, and
sees, from the very foundation, how Shakespeare raises the edifice of
his art. Now he renounces all amplitude and all redundancy that is not
in Shakespeare. Each line is rendered by a single line. He curses and
bewails the prolixity and inadequacy of German: his language has such
different limits, such different turns of expression from the English
language; he cannot reproduce Shakespeare's style; what he produces
is a stammer, a stutter, without resonance or fire--but he coerces
himself, he coerces the language, and produces his translation.
There is no great exaggeration in Scherer's dictum: "Schlegel's
Shakespeare takes its place beside the works given to the world by
Goethe and Schiller during the period when they worked in fellowship;
there is the inevitable distance between reproductive and productive
art, but there is the nearness of the perfect to the perfect."
Having acquired complete mastery of the style, Schlegel now began to
reap the fruits of his labour. He, the master, opened his hand, and
between the years 1797 and 1801 let fall from it into the lap of the
German people sixteen of Shakespeare's dramas, which, in spite of
occasional tameness or constraint of style, might, in their new form,
have been the work of a German poet of Shakespeare's rank.
Let us consider what this really means. It means not much less than
that Shakespeare, as well as Schiller and Goethe, saw the light in
Germany in the middle of last century. He was born in England in 1564;
he was born again, in his German translator, in 1767. _Romeo and
Juliet_ was published in London in 1597; it reappeared in Berlin as a
new work in 1797.
When Shakespeare thus returned to life in Germany, he acted with
full force upon a public which was in several ways more capable of
understanding him than his original public, though it was spiritually
less akin to him and though they were not the battles of its day
which he fought. He now began to feed the millions who did not
understand English with his spiritual bread. Not until now did
Central and Northern Europe discover him. Not until now did the whole
Germanic-Gothic world become his public.
But we have also seen how much went to the production of an apparently
unpretending literary work of this high rank. In its rough drafts and
manuscripts we may read great part of the intellectual history of a
whole generation. Before it could come into existence nothing less was
required than that Lessing's criticism and Wieland's and Eschenburg's
attempts should prepare the soil, and that a genius like Herder should
concentrate in himself all the receptivity and ingenuity of surmise
belonging to the German mind, and should, with the imperiousness
characteristic of him, oblige young Goethe to become his disciple. But
Goethe in his prose _Götz_ only imitated a prose Shakespeare. There
had to be born a man with the unique talent of A. W. Schlegel, and
he, with his hereditary linguistic and stylistic ability, had to be
placed in a position to acquire the greatest technical perfection of
the period. Then he had to free himself, by the influence of Schiller's
noble conception of art, from the tendency to coarseness which was the
result of Bürger's influence, and at the same time to steer clear of
Schiller's tendency to pomposity and dislike of wanton joviality, had
to gain a complete understanding of Goethe, to enter into possession,
as it were, of the language which Goethe had developed, and to attain
to an even clearer conviction than his of the essentiality of the
harmony of subject and style in Shakespeare. It was necessary, too,
that he should be stimulated by the ardour of a kindred talent and
assisted by the keen criticism of a woman. Hundreds of sources had to
flow into each other, hundreds of circumstances to coincide, of people
to make each other's acquaintance, of minds to meet and fertilise each
other, before this work, in its modest perfection, could be given to
the world; a small thing, the translation of a poet who had been dead
for two hundred years, it yet provided the most precious spiritual
nourishment for millions, and exercised a deep and lasting influence on
German poetry.
[1] M. Bernays: _Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen
Shakespeare_.
[2] "In thy kingly flight, young eagle, thou wilt pierce the thickness
of the clouds, and find the way to the temple of the sun-god--else his
word, spoken through me, is false."
[3] "I held not my own wreath too precious to crown thee with it to the
service of Apollo; but--a better is thy destiny."