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THE
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY;
IN A
COURSE OF LECTURES,
DELIVERED AT VIENNA,
BY FREDERICK VON SCHLEGEL.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN,
WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR,
BY JAMES BURTON ROBERTSON, ESQ.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON
SAUNDERS AND OTLEY, CONDUIT STREET.
MDCCCXXXV.
B. BENSLEY, PRINTER.
MEMOIR
OF THE LITERARY LIFE
of
FREDERICK VON SCHLEGEL.
In the following sketch of the literary life of the late Frederick Von
Schlegel, it is the intention of the writer to take a rapid review of
that author's principal productions, noticing the circumstances out of
which they grew, and the influence they exerted on his age; giving at
the same time a fuller analysis of his political and metaphysical
systems:--an analysis which is useful, nay almost necessary to the
elucidation of very many passages in the work, to which this memoir is
prefixed. Of the inadequacy of his powers to the due execution of such a
task, none can be more fully sensible than the writer himself; but he
trusts that he will experience from the kindness of the reader, an
indulgence proportionate to the difficulty of the undertaking.
In offering to the British public a translation of one of the last
works of one among the most illustrious of German writers, the
Translator is aware, that after the excellent translation which
appeared in 1818 of this author's "History of Literature," and also
after the admirable translation of his brother's "Lectures on
Dramatic Literature," by Mr. Black, his own performance must appear
in a very disadvantageous point of view. But this is a circumstance
which only gives it additional claims to indulgent consideration.
The family of the Schlegels seem to have been peculiarly favoured by
the Muses. Elias Schlegel, a member of this family, was a
distinguished dramatic writer in his own time; and some of his plays
are, I believe, acted in Germany at the present day. Adolphus
Schlegel, the father of the subject of the present biography, was a
minister of the Lutheran church, distinguished for his literary
talents, and particularly for eloquence in the pulpit. His eldest
son, Charles Augustus Schlegel, entered with the Hanoverian regiment
to which he belonged into the service of our East India Company, and
had begun to prosecute with success his studies in Sanscrit
literature--a field of knowledge in which his brothers have since
obtained so much distinction--when his youthful career was unhappily
terminated by the hand of death. Augustus William Schlegel, the
second son, who was destined to carry to so high a pitch the
literary glory of his family, was born at Hanover in 1769--a year so
propitious to the birth of genius. Frederick Schlegel was born at
Hanover in 1772. Though destined for commerce, he received a highly
classical education; and in his sixteenth year prevailed on his
father to allow him to devote himself to the Belles Lettres. After
completing his academical course at Gottingen and Leipzig, he
rejoined his brother, and became associated with him in his literary
labours. He has himself given us the interesting picture of his own
mind at this early period. "In my first youth," says he, "from the
age of seventeen and upwards, the writings of Plato, the Greek
tragedians, and Winkelmann's enthusiastic works, formed the
intellectual world in which I lived, and where I often strove in a
youthful manner, to represent to my soul the ideas and images of
ancient gods and heroes. In the year 1789, I was enabled, for the
first time, to gratify my inclination in that capital so highly
refined by art--Dresden; and I was as much surprised as delighted to
see really before me those antique figures of gods I had so long
desired to behold. Among these I often tarried for hours, especially
in the incomparable collection of Mengs's casts, which were then to
be found, disposed in a state of little order in the Bruehl garden,
where I often let myself be shut up, in order to remain without
interruption. It was not the consummate beauty of form alone, which
satisfied and even exceeded the expectation I had secretly formed;
but it was still more the life--the animation in those Olympic
marbles, which excited my astonishment; for the latter qualities I
had been less able to picture to myself in my solitary musings.
These first indelible impressions were in succeeding years, the
firm, enduring ground-work for my study of classical antiquity."[1]
Here he found the sacred fire, at which his genius lit the torch
destined to blaze through his life with inextinguishable brightness.
He commenced his literary career in 1794, with a short essay on the
different schools of Greek poetry. It is curious to watch in this little
piece the buddings of his mind. Here we see, as it were, the germ of the
first part of the great work on ancient and modern literature, which he
published nearly twenty years afterwards. We are astonished to find in a
youth of twenty-two an erudition so extensive--an acquaintance not only
with the more celebrated poets and philosophers of ancient Greece, but
also with the obscure, recondite Alexandrian poets, known to
comparatively few scholars even of a maturer age. We admire, too, the
clearness of analytic arrangement--the admirable method of
classification, in which the author and his brother have ever so far
outshone the generality of German writers. The essay displays, also, a
delicacy of observation and an originality of views, which announce the
great critic. It is, in short, the labour of an infant Hercules.
As this essay gives promise of a mighty critic; so two treatises, which
the author wrote in the following years, 1795 and 1796--one entitled
"Diotima," and which treats of the condition of the female sex in
ancient Greece--the other, a parallel between Caesar and Alexander, not
published, however, till twenty-six years afterwards--both show the
dawnings of his great historical genius. Rarely have the promises of
youth been so amply fulfilled--rarely has the green foliage of Spring
been followed by fruits so rich and abundant. It is interesting to
observe the fine, organic development of Schlegel's mental powers--to
trace in these early productions, the germs of those great historical
works which it was reserved for his manhood and age to achieve. In the
latter and most remarkable of these essays, he examines the respective
merits of Caesar and Alexander, considered as men, as generals, and as
statesmen. To the Macedonian he assigns greater tenderness of feeling, a
more generous and lofty disinterestedness of character--and a finer
power of perception for the beauties of art. To the Roman he ascribes
greater coolness and sobriety of judgment, an extraordinary degree of
self-controul, a mind tenacious of its purpose, but careless as to the
means by which it was accomplished, an exquisite sense of fitness and
propriety in the smallest as in the greatest things, yet little
susceptibility for the beautiful in art. With respect to military
genius, he shows that Caesar united to the fire and rapidity of the
Macedonian, greater constancy and perseverance; yet that the temerity of
Alexander was not always the effect of impetuous passion, but sometimes
the result at once of situation and deliberate reflection. As regards
the political capacities of these two great conquerors, he shows that
Caesar possessed an over-mastering ascendancy over the minds of men--the
talent of guiding their wills, and making them subservient to his own
views and interests--in short, a consummate skill in the tactics of a
party-leader. Yet he thinks him destitute of the wisdom of a law-giver,
or what he emphatically calls, the _organic genius of state_--the power
to found, or renovate a constitution. To Alexander, on the contrary, he
attributes the plastic genius of legislation--the will and the ability
to diffuse among nations the blessings of civilization--to plant cities,
and establish free, flourishing and permanent communities.
In the year 1797, Schlegel published his first important work,
entitled "the Greeks and the Romans." This work was two or three
years afterwards followed by another, entitled "History of Greek
Poetry." These two writings in their original form are no longer to
be met with--for in the new edition of the author's works, they not
only have undergone various alterations and additions, but have
been, as it were, melted into one work. Winkelmann's history of art
was the model which Schlegel proposed to himself in this history of
Greek poetry; and we must allow that the noble school which that
illustrious man, as well as Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had founded
in Germany, never received a richer acquisition than in the work
here spoken of. Prior to the illustrious writers I have named,
Germany had produced a multitude of scholars distinguished for
profound learning and critical acuteness; but their labours may be
considered as only ancillary and preliminary to the works of men
who, with an erudition and a perspicacity never surpassed, united a
poetical sense and a philosophic discernment that could catch the
spirit of antiquity, reanimate her forms, and place them in all
their living freshness before our eyes.
In the first chapter of the "History of Greek Poetry," Schlegel
speaks of the religious rites and mysteries of the primitive Greeks,
and of the Orphic poetry to which they gave rise. Contrary to the
opinion of many scholars who, though they admit the present form of
the Orphic hymns to be the work of a later period, yet refer their
substance to a very remote antiquity, Schlegel assigns their origin
to the age of Hesiod. "Enthusiasm," he says, "is the characteristic
of the Orphic poetry--repose that of the Homeric poems." His
observations however on the early religion of the Greeks, form, in
my humble opinion, the least satisfactory portion of this work. He
next gives an interesting account of the state of society in Greece
in the age of Homer, as well as in the one preceding, and shews by a
long process of inductive evidence, how the Homeric poetry was the
crown and perfection of a long series of Bardic poems.
He then examines, at great length, the opinions of the ancients from
the earliest Greek to the latest Roman critics, on the plan, the
diction and poetical merits of the Iliad and the Odyssey;
interweaving in this review of ancient criticism his own remarks,
which serve either to correct the errors, supply the deficiencies,
or illustrate the wisdom of those ancient judges of art. After this
survey of ancient criticism, he proceeds to point out some of the
characteristic features of the Homeric poems. He enquires what is
understood by natural poetry, or the poetry of nature; shews that it
is perfectly compatible with art--that there is a wide difference
between the natural and the rude--that Homer is distinguished as
much for delicacy of perception, accuracy of delineation, and
sagacity of judgment, as for fertility of fancy and energy of
passion. The author next passes in review the Hesiodic epos, the
middle epos, or the works of the Cyclic poets, and lastly, the
productions of the Ionic, AEolic, and Doric schools of lyric poetry.
The fragments on the lyric poetry of Greece are particularly
beautiful, and comprise not only excellent criticisms on the genius
of the different lyrists themselves, but also most interesting
observations on the character, manners, and social institutions of
the races that composed the Hellenic confederacy.
It was Schlegel's intention to have given a complete history of
Greek poetry; but the execution of this task was abandoned, not from
any want of perseverance, as some have imagined, but from some
peculiar circumstances in the world of letters at that period. The
literary scepticism of Wolf, supported with so much learning and
ability, was then convulsing the German mind; and while the purity
of the Homeric text, and the unity and integrity of the Homeric
poems themselves were so ably contested, Schlegel deemed it a
hazardous task to attempt to draw public attention to any aesthetic
enquiries on the elder Greek poetry. Hence the second part of this
work, which treats of the lyric poets, remained unfinished. The
general qualities, which must strike all in this history of Greek
poetry are, a masterly acquaintance with classical literature--a
wariness and circumspection of judgment, rare in any writer,
especially in one so young--a critical perspicacity, that draws its
conclusions from the widest range of observation--and a poetic
flexibility of fancy, that can transport itself into the remotest
periods of antiquity. In a word, the author analyzes as a critic,
feels as a poet, and observes like a philosopher.
But a new career now expanded before the ardent mind of Schlegel. The
enterprising spirit of British scholars had but twenty years before
opened a new intellectual world to European inquiry:--a world many of
whose spiritual productions, disguised in one shape or another, the
Western nations had for a long course of ages admired and enjoyed,
ignorant as they were of the precise region from which they were
brought. For the knowledge of the Sanscrit tongue and literature--an
event in literary importance inferior only to the revival of Greek
learning, and in a religious and philosophic point of view, pregnant,
perhaps, with greater results;--mankind have been indebted to the
influence of British commerce; and it is not one of the least services
which that commerce has rendered to the cause of civilization. In the
promotion of Sanscrit learning, the merchant princes of Britain emulated
the noble zeal displayed four centuries before by the merchant princes
of Florence, in the encouragement and diffusion of Hellenic literature.
By dint of promises and entreaties, they extorted from the Brahmin the
mystic key, which has opened to us so many wonders of the primitive
world. And as a great Christian philosopher of our age[2] has observed,
it is fortunate that India was not then under the dominion of the
French; for during the irreligious fever which inflamed and maddened
that great people, their insidious guides--those detestable sophists of
the eighteenth century--would most assuredly have leagued with the
Brahmins to suppress the truth, to mutilate the ancient monuments of
Sanscrit lore, and thus would have for ever poisoned the sources of
Indian learning. A British society was established at Calcutta--whose
object it was to investigate the languages, historical antiquities,
sciences, and religious and philosophical systems of Asia, and more
especially of Hindostan. Sir William Jones--a name that will be revered
as long as genius, learning, and Christian philosophy command the
respect of mankind--was the soul of this enterprise. He brought to the
investigation of Indian literature and history, a mind stored with the
treasures of classical and oriental scholarship--a spirit of
indefatigable activity--and a clear, methodical and capacious intellect.
No man, too, so fully understood the religious bearings of these
inquiries, and had so well seized the whole subject of Asiatic
antiquities in its connection with the Bible. But at the period at which
we have arrived, this great spirit had already taken its departure; nor
in its flight had it dropped its mantle of inspiration on any of the
former associates of its labours. For among the academicians of
Calcutta, though there were men of undoubted talent and learning, there
were none who inherited the philosophic mind of Jones. At this period,
too, the fanciful temerity of a Wilford was bringing discredit on the
Indian researches--a temerity which would necessarily provoke a
re-action, and lead, as in some recent instances, to a prosaic
narrow-mindedness, that would seek to bring down the whole system of
Indian civilization to the dull level of its own vulgar conceptions.
Schlegel saw that the moment was critical. He saw that the edifice
of oriental learning, raised at the cost of so much labour by Sir
William Jones, was in danger of falling to pieces--that all the
mighty results which Christian philosophy had anticipated from these
inquiries, would be, if not frustrated, at least indefinitely
postponed--that a wild, uncritical, extravagant fancifulness on the
one hand, or a dull and dogged Rationalism on the other--(equally
adverse as both are to the cause of historic truth)--would soon
bring these researches into inextricable confusion; in short, that
the time had arrived when they should be fairly brought before the
more enlarged philosophy of Germany. Filled with this idea, and
animated by that pure zeal for science, which is its own best
reward, Schlegel resolves to betake him to the study of the Sanscrit
tongue. But for the considerations I have ventured to suggest, such
a resolution on the part of such a man would be surely calculated to
excite regret. We should be inclined to lament that a mind so
original, already saturated with so much elegant literature and
solid learning, should be thus doomed in the bloom of its existence,
to consume years in the toilsome acquisition of the most difficult
of all languages.
In prosecution of his undertaking, Schlegel repaired in the year 1802,
to Paris, which had been long celebrated for her professors in the
Eastern tongues, and where the national library presented to the
oriental scholar, inexhaustible stores of wealth. Here, with the able
assistance of those distinguished orientalists, M. M. de Langles and
Chezy, Schlegel made considerable progress in the study of Persian and
Sanscrit literature. But while engaged in these laborious pursuits, he
contrives to find time to plunge into the then almost unexplored mines
of Provencal poesy--to undertake profound researches into the history of
the middle age, and to deliver lectures on Metaphysics in the French
language. If these lectures did not meet with all the success which
might have been hoped for, this cannot surprise us, when we consider
that the gross materialism which had long weighed on the Parisian mind,
and from which it was then but slowly emerging, could ill accord with
the lofty Platonism of the German; nor when we add to the disadvantage
under which every one labours when speaking in a foreign tongue, the
fact that nature had not favoured this extraordinary man with a happy
delivery. From Paris, he wrote a series of articles on the early
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Provencal poetry. The article on
Portuguese poetry is singularly beautiful, and contains, among other
things, some remarks as new as they are just, on the influence of
climate and locality in the formation of dialects. It comprises, too, an
admirable critique on the noble poem of the Lusiad, which in allusion to
the great national catastrophe that so soon followed on its publication,
and by which the ancient power, energy, and glory of Portugal were for
ever destroyed, he calls "the swan-like cry of a people of heroes prior
to its downfall." This essay and others of the same period furnish also
a proof how very soon Frederick Schlegel had framed his critical views
and opinions on the various works of art. His aesthetic system seems to
have been formed at a single cast--we might almost say, that from the
head of this intellectual Jove, the Pallas of criticism had leaped all
armed. His metaphysical theories, on the contrary, appear to have been
slowly elaborated--to have undergone many modifications and improvements
in the lapse of years, and never to have been moulded into a form of
perfect symmetry, until the last years of his life.
During his abode in France, he addressed to a friend in Germany, a
series of beautiful letters on the different schools and epochs of
Christian painting. The pictorial treasures of a large part of Europe
were then concentrated in the French capital; and Schlegel, availing
himself of this golden opportunity, gave an account of the various
master-pieces of modern art, contained in the public and private
collections of Paris; interweaving in these notices, general views on
the nature, object, and limits of Christian painting. These letters the
author has since revised and enlarged; and they now form one of the most
delightful volumes in the general collection of his works.
The three arts, sculpture, music, and painting, correspond, according to
the author, to the three parts of human consciousness, the body--the
soul--and the mind. Sculpture, the most material of the fine arts, best
represents the beauty of form, and the properties of sense: Music
explores and gives utterance to the deepest feelings of the human soul:
but it is reserved for the most spiritual of the arts--Painting, to
express all the mysteries of intelligence--all the divine symbolism in
nature and in man. He shows that the three arts have objects very
distinct, and which must by no means be confounded. But the respective
limits of these arts have not always been duly observed. Hence,
confining his observation to painting, there are some artists, whom he
calls sculpture-painters, like the great Angelo--others again musical
painters, like Correggio and Murillo.
The various schools of art--the elder Italian--the later Italian--the
Spanish--the old German--and the Flemish, pass successively under
review. The distinctive qualities of the mighty masters in each
school--the fantastic and truly Dantesque wildness of Giotto--the soft
outline of Perugino--the depth of feeling that characterises Leonardo da
Vinci--the ideal beauty--the various, the infinite charm of Raphael--the
gigantic conception of Angelo--the glowing reality of Titian--the
harmonious elegance of Correggio--the bold vigour of Julio Romano--the
noble effort of the Caraccis to revive in a declining age the style of
the great masters--the true Spanish earnestness and concentrated energy
of Murillo--the deep-toned piety of Velasquez--the profound and
comprehensive understanding which distinguishes his own Duerer, whom he
calls the Shakspeare of painting--the distinctive qualities of these
great masters, (to name but a few of the more eminent) are analysed with
incomparable skill, and set forth with charming diction. I regret that
the limits of this introductory memoir will not allow me to give an
analysis of these enchanting letters; but I cannot forbear observing in
conclusion, that at the present moment, when there seems to be an
earnest wish on all sides to revive the higher art among ourselves,
whoever would undertake a translation of these letters, would, I think,
confer a service on the public generally, and on our artists in
particular. To the friends and followers of art, such a work is the more
necessary, as the illustrious author has in a manner taken up the
subject where Winkelmann had left off. These letters are followed by
others equally admirable on Gothic architecture, where the
characteristic qualities of the different epochs in the civil and
ecclesiastical architecture of the middle age are set forth with the
same masterly powers of fancy and discrimination. This sublime art
seemed to respond best to Schlegel's inmost feelings.
But I am now approaching a passage in the life of Schlegel, which will
be viewed in a different light according to the different feelings and
convictions of my readers. By some his conduct will be considered a
blameable apostacy from the faith of his fathers--by others, a generous
sacrifice of early prejudices on the altar of truth. To disguise my own
approbation of his conduct, would be to do violence to my feelings, and
wrong to my principles; but to enter into a justification of his
motives, would be to engage in a polemical discussion, most unseemly in
an introduction to a work which is perfectly foreign to inquiries of
that nature. I shall therefore confine myself to a brief statement of
facts: noticing at the same time, the intellectual condition of the two
great religious parties of Germany, immediately prior and subsequent to
Schlegel's change of religion.
It was on his return from France in the year 1805, and in the ancient
city of Cologne, that the subject of this memoir was received into the
bosom of the Catholic church. There--in that venerable city, which
was so often honoured by the abode of the great founder of
Christendom--Charlemagne--which abounds with so many monuments of the
arts, the learning, the opulence and political greatness of the middle
age--where the great Christian Aristotle of the thirteenth
century--Aquinas--had passed the first years of his academic
course--there, in that venerable minster, too, one of the proudest
monuments of Gothic architecture--was solemnized in the person of this
illustrious man, the alliance between the ancient faith and modern
science of Germany--an alliance that has been productive of such
important consequences, and is yet pregnant with mightier results.
The purity of the motives which directed Schlegel in this, the most
important act of his life, few would be ignorant or shameless enough to
impeach. His station--his character--his virtues--all suffice to repel
the very suspicion of unworthy motives; and the least reflection will
shew, that while in a country circumstanced like Germany, his change of
religion could not procure for him greater honours and emoluments than
under any circumstances, his genius would be certain to command; that
change would too surely expose him to obloquy, misrepresentation, and
calumny--and what to a heart so sensitive as his, must have been still
more painful--the alienation, perhaps, of esteemed friends. Had he
remained a Protestant, he would instead of engaging in the service of
Austria, have in all probability taken to that of Prussia, and there
doubtless have received the same honours and distinctions which have
been so deservedly bestowed on his illustrious brother. We may suppose,
also, that a man of his mind and character, would not on slight and
frivolous grounds, have taken a step so important; nor in a matter so
momentous, have come to a decision, without a full and anxious
investigation. In fact, his theological learning was extensive--he was
well-read in the ancient fathers--the schoolmen of the middle age, and
the more eminent modern divines; and though I am not aware that he has
devoted any special treatise to theology, yet the remarks scattered
through his works, whether on Biblical exegesis, or dogmatic divinity,
are so pregnant, original and profound, that we plainly see it was in
his power to have given to the world a "_systema theologicum_," no less
masterly than that of his great predecessor--Leibnitz. The works of the
early Greek fathers, indeed, he appears to have made a special object of
scientific research, well knowing what golden grains of philosophy may
be picked up in that sacred stream. The conversion of Schlegel was
hailed with enthusiasm by the Catholics of Germany. This event occurred
indeed, at a moment equally opportune to himself and to the Catholic
body. To himself--for though his noble mind would never have run
a-ground amid the miserable shallows of Rationalism, yet had it not then
taken refuge in the secure haven of Catholicism, it might have been
sucked down in the rapid eddies of Pantheism. To the Catholic body in
Germany, this event was no less opportune; and for the reasons that
shall now be stated.
Germany, which in the middle age had produced so many distinguished
poets, artists, and philosophers, was, at the Reformation, shorn of much
of her intellectual strength. In the disastrous thirty years' war, which
that event brought about, she saw her universities robbed of their most
distinguished ornaments, and the lights, which ought to have adorned her
at home, shedding their lustre on foreign lands. The general languor and
exhaustion of the German mind, consequent on that fearful and convulsive
struggle, was apparent enough in the literature of the age, which ensued
after the treaty of Westphalia. To these causes, which produced this
general declension of German intellect, must be added one which
specially applies to the Catholic portion of Germany.
Every great abuse of human reason, by a natural revulsion of feeling,
inspires a certain dread and distrust of its powers. This has been more
than once exemplified in the history of the church. So, at this
momentous period, some of the German Catholic powers sought in
obscurantism, a refuge and security against religious and political
innovations, and denied to science that encouragement which she had a
right to look for at their hands:--a policy as infatuated as it is
culpable, for, while ignorance draws down contempt and disgrace on
religion, it begets in its turn, as a melancholy experience has proved,
those very errors and that very unbelief, against which it was designed
as a protection.
Had the court of Austria acceded to the proposal of Leibnitz for
establishing at Vienna that academy of sciences which he afterwards
succeeded in founding at Berlin, the glory of that great resuscitation
of the German mind, which occurred in the middle of the eighteenth
century, would have then probably redounded to Catholic, rather than to
Protestant, Germany. But the German Catholics, though they started later
in the career of intellectual improvement, have at length reached, and
even outstripped, their Protestant brethren in the race.
Three or four years before Schlegel embraced the Catholic faith, the
signal for a return to the ancient church was given by the illustrious
Count Stolberg. The religious impulse, which this great man imparted to
German literature, was simultaneous with that Christian regeneration of
philosophy, commenced in France by the Viscount de Bonald. And these two
illustrious men, in the noble career which five and thirty years' ago
they opened in their respective countries, have been followed by a
series of gigantic intellects, who have restored the empire of faith,
regenerated art and science, and renovated, if I may so speak, the human
mind itself.[3]
Forty years' ago, the Catholics of Germany, as I said, were in a state
of the most humiliating intellectual inferiority to their Protestant
brethren--they could point to few writers of eminence in their own
body--Protestantism was the lord of the ascendant in every department of
German letters:--and yet so well have the Catholics employed the
intervening time, they now furnish the most valuable portion of a
literature, in many respects the most valuable in Europe. In every
branch of knowledge, they can now shew writers of the highest order. To
name but a few of the most distinguished, they have produced the two
greatest Biblical critics of the age--Hug and Scholz--profound Biblical
exegetists, like Alber, Ackermann, and, recently, Molitor, who has
created a new era not only in Biblical literature, but in the Philosophy
of History--divines, like Wiest, Dobmayer, Schwarz, Zimmer, Brenner,
Liebermann, and Moehler, distinguished as they are for various and
extensive learning, and understandings as comprehensive as they are
acute--an ecclesiastical historian pre-eminent for genius, erudition,
and celestial suavity, like Count Stolberg--philosophic archaiologists,
like Hammer and Schlosser--admirable publicists, like Gentz, Adam
Mueller, and the Swiss Haller--and two philosophers, possessed of vast
acquirements and colossal intellects, like Goerres, and the subject of
this memoir. In Germany and elsewhere, Catholic genius seems only to
have slumbered during the eighteenth century, in order to astonish the
world by a new and extraordinary display of strength. It is undoubtedly
true that several of the above-named individuals originally belonged to
the Protestant church--and that that church should have given birth to
men of such exalted genius, refined sensibility, and moral worth, is a
circumstance which furnishes our Protestant brethren with additional
claims to our love and respect. We hail these first proselytes as the
pledges of a more general, and surely not a very distant, re-union.
The vigorous graft of talent, which the Catholic thus received from the
Protestant community, was imparted to a stock, where the powers of
vegetation, long dormant, began now to revive with renovated strength.
The old Catholics zealously co-operated with the new in the regeneration
of all the sciences--and the effects of their joint labours have been
apparent, not only in the transcendent excellence of individual
productions, but in the new life and energy infused into the learned
corporations--the universities as well as the institutes of science. The
mixed universities, like those of Bonn, Freyburg, and others, are in a
great degree supported by Catholic talent; and the great Catholic
University of Munich, which the present excellent King of Bavaria
founded in 1826, already by the celebrity of its professors, the number
of its scholars, and the admirable direction of the studies, bids fair
to rival the most celebrated Universities in Germany.[4]
Gratifying as it must have been to Schlegel to see by how many
distinguished spirits his example had been followed, and to witness the
rapid literary improvement of that community in Germany to which he had
now united himself, he could not expect to escape those crosses and
contradictions which are, in this world, the heritage of the just. The
rancorous invectives which the fanatic Rationalist--Voss, had never
ceased to pour out on his own early friend and benefactor--the
heavenly-minded Stolberg, excited the contempt and disgust of every
well-constituted mind in the Protestant community. This Cerberus of
Rationalism opened his deep-mouthed cry on Schlegel also, as he set his
foot on the threshold of the Catholic church. In this instance, the
religious bigotry of Voss was inflamed and exasperated by literary
jealousy. By his criticisms, and masterly translation of Homer and other
Greek poets, this highly gifted man had not only rendered imperishable
service to German literature, but had contributed to infuse a new life
into the study of classical antiquity. Jealous, therefore of his Greeks,
whom he worshipped with a sort of exclusive idolatry, he looked with
distrust and aversion on every attempt to introduce the orientals to the
literary notice of the Germans. He ran down Asiatic literature of every
age and nation with the most indiscriminate and unsparing
violence--denounced the intentions of its admirers as evil and sinister;
and, in allusion to the noble use which Stolberg, Schlegel, and others
had made of their oriental learning in support of Christianity,
petulantly exclaimed on one occasion, "The Brahmins have leagued with
the Jesuits, in order to subvert the Protestant, or (as we should
translate that word in this country) the Rationalist religion."
It was in 1808, after several years spent in the study of Sanscrit
literature, Schlegel published the result of his researches and
meditations in the celebrated work entitled the "Language and Wisdom of
the Indians." This work, the first part of which is occupied with a
comparative examination of the etymology and grammatical structure of
the Sanscrit, Persian, Greek, Roman, and German languages, the second
whereof traces the filiation and connection of the different religious
and philosophical systems that have prevailed in the ancient oriental
world, and the last of which consists of metrical versions from the
sacred and didactic poems of the Hindoos--this work, I say, might not be
inaptly termed a grammar, syntax, and prosody of philosophy.
With respect to etymology, Schlegel points out the number of Sanscrit
words identical in sound and signification with words in the Persian, or
the Greek, or the Latin, or the German, or sometimes even in all those
languages put together. He excludes words which are imitations of
natural sounds, and which therefore might have been adopted
simultaneously by nations unknown to each other; and selects those words
only which are of the most simple and primitive signification, such as
relate to those intellectual and physical objects most closely allied to
man; as also auxiliary verbs, pronouns, nouns of number, and
prepositions:--words which are less exposed than any to those casual and
partial changes which conquest, commerce, and religion, introduce into
language. With respect to grammatical structure, the author shows that
the mode of declining nouns, and conjugating verbs, of forming the
degrees of comparison in adjectives, of marking the gender and number of
substantives, of changing or modifying the signification of words by
prefixed particles, is common to the Sanscrit, and the other derivative
languages above-mentioned. It is from this strong external and internal
resemblance, these languages have received the appellation of the
Indo-Germanic. The prior antiquity of the Sanscrit the author infers
from the greater length and fulness of its words, and the richness and
refinement of its grammatical forms; for, to use his own expression,
"words, like coin, are clipped by use, and the languages, where
abbreviation prevails, are ever the most recent."
The prescient genius of Leibnitz had foretold a century and a half ago,
that the study of languages would be found one day to throw a great
light on history. No one better realized this prediction than Schlegel.
In the first part of this work, he has proved, by his own example, that
language is not a mere instrument of knowledge, but a science in itself;
and when I consider the noble use he has made of his Sanscrit learning;
when I contemplate all the great and brilliant results of his oriental
researches, I must recal the sort of regret I expressed a few pages
above. While in the course of the last fifty years, a number of
distinguished naturalists have carried the torch of science into the
dark caverns of the earth, traced by its light the physical revolutions
of our globe, and discovered the remains of an extinct world of nature;
many illustrious philologists have at the same time explored the inmost
recesses of language, and, by their profound researches, brought to
light the fossil remains of early history, discovered the migrations of
nations and the changes of empire, and regained the lost traces of
portions of our species. This remarkable parallelism in the moral and
physical inquiries of the age will be considered fortuitous by those
only, who have not watched the luminous course of that loving
Providence, whose hand is equally visible in the progress of science, as
in every other department of human activity.
But on no branch of historical knowledge have the recent philological
researches thrown more light than on mythology--a science which the
present age may be said to have created. While illustrious defenders of
the Christian religion--a Count Stolberg[5] in Germany, and still more,
an abbe de la Mennais[6] in France, treading in the footsteps of the
ancient fathers, and of the abler modern apologists, like Grotius, Huet
and others, have victoriously proved the existence of a primeval
revelation, the diffusion and perpetuity of its doctrines among all the
nations of the world, civilized and barbarous--the compatibility of a
belief in the unity of the God-head with the crime of idolatry, ranked
by the apostle, "among the works of the flesh,"--the local nature and
object of the Mosaic law, destined by the Almighty for the special use
of a people charged with maintaining, in its purity, that worship of
Jehovah mostly abandoned or neglected by the nations, who "though they
knew God, did not glorify him as God"--and favoured also with the
promises of "the good things to come," intrusted with the prophetic
records of the life and ministry of that Messiah, of whose future coming
the Gentiles had only a vague and obscure anticipation:--while these
illustrious defenders of religion, I say, were proving the agreement of
all the Heathen nations in the great dogmas of the primitive revelation;
another class of inquirers (and among these was Schlegel) laboured to
shew the points of divergence in the different systems of Heathenism,
studied the peculiar genius of each, and traced the influence which
climate, circumstance, and national character have exerted over all. The
object of the former was to point out the general threads of primeval
truth in the fabric of Paganism--that of the latter to trace the later
and fanciful intertexture of superstition. For in that fantastic web,
which we call mythology, truth and fiction, poetry and history, physics
and philosophy, are all curiously interwoven. Hence the arduous nature
of these researches--hence the difficulties and perils which await the
investigator at almost every step.
Of the second part of this work on India, which treats of the religious
and philosophical systems of the early Asiatic nations, it is the less
necessary here to speak, as the reader will find the subject amply
discussed in the course of the following sheets. It may be proper,
however, to observe that the different philosophic errors mentioned by
Schlegel, as prevalent in the ancient Asiatic world, may all be resolved
to two systems--Dualism and Pantheism--the two earliest heresies in the
history of religion--the two gulfs, into which dark, but presumptuous,
reason fell, when, rejecting the light of revelation, she attempted to
explain those unfathomable mysteries--the origin of evil on the one
hand, and the co-existence of the finite and the infinite on the other.
On the whole, the "Wisdom of the Indians" is an admirable little book,
whether we consider the profound and extensive philological knowledge it
displays--the rich variety of historical perceptions it discloses--the
clearness of its arrangement, and the elegant simplicity of the style.
In the seven and twenty years which have elapsed since this production
saw the light, the subjects discussed in it have undergone ample
investigation--many of its observations have passed into the current
coin of the learned world--truths which it vaguely surmised, have since
been fully established--and the knowledge of Indian literature and
philosophy has been vastly extended; yet this is one of those works
which will be always read with a lively interest. It is thus that, in
despite of the progress of classical philology, the writings of the
great critical restorers of ancient literature have, after the lapse of
three centuries, retained their place in public estimation. It is
pleasing to watch the stream of learning in its various meanderings--to
trace it as it winds through a broader, but not always a deeper,
channel, sullied and disturbed not unfrequently by accidental
pollutions--it is pleasing to trace it to its source, where, from
underneath the rock, it wells out in all its limpid purity. Prior to the
publication of this work, the Semitic languages of the East were alone,
I believe, cultivated with much ardour in Germany; its appearance had
the effect of directing the national energies towards an intellectual
region, where they were destined to meet with the most brilliant
success; and, if Germany may now boast with reason of her illustrious
professors of Sanscrit; if France, under the Restoration made such rapid
progress in oriental literature; if England, roused from her inglorious
apathy, has at last founded an Asiatic society in London, and more
recently, the Boden professorship at Oxford--these events are, in a
great degree, attributable to the enthusiasm which this little book
excited.
In the year 1810, Schlegel delivered, at Vienna, a course of lectures on
"Modern History." This book, which was in two volumes, 8vo., has long
been out of print; and the volumes destined to contain it in the general
collection of the author's works, have not yet been published. Hence no
account of it can be here given--a circumstance which I the more regret,
as, in the opinion of some, it is Schlegel's masterpiece. It embodied in
a systematic form the views and opinions contained in a variety of the
author's earlier historical essays, which are also out of print, and
have not yet been re-published. In it, I know, are to be found the
detailed proofs and evidences of many positions advanced in the second
volume of the work, to which this Memoir is prefixed.
We should, however, form a very inadequate estimate of the services this
great writer has rendered to literature, and of the influence he has
exerted on his age, were we to confine our attention solely to his
larger works. Throughout his whole life, he was an assiduous contributor
to periodical literature--a species of writing which, in the present
age, has been cultivated with signal success in England, France and
Germany. At the commencement of the present century, he edited in
conjunction with Tieck, Novalis and his brother, a literary journal,
entitled the Athenaeum; and afterwards successively conducted political
and philosophical journals, such as the "Europa,"--the "German
Museum,"--and lastly the "Concordia;" giving latterly, also, his zealous
support to the Vienna Quarterly Review. Some of his earlier critiques
have already been noticed. Among the shorter literary essays, which
appeared in the twelve years that elapsed from 1800 to 1812, I may
notice the one entitled "the Epochs of Literature," 1800; and which may
be considered the first rude outline of those immortal lectures on the
"History of Literature," which he delivered in 1812. Often as he has
occasion to treat the same subject, yet such is the inexhaustible wealth
of his intellect, he seldom tires by repetition. Thus his minutest
fragments, like the sketches of Raphael, are full of interest and
variety. Another essay of the same year, "on the different style in
Goethe's earlier and later works," shews with what a discriminating eye
the young critic had already scanned all the heights and the depths of
this wonderful poet. Of this great writer, the moral direction of some
of whose writings he reprobated in the strongest degree, he did not
hesitate to say that, like Dante in the middle age, he was the founder
of a new order of poetry--that he had been the first to restore the art
to the elevation from which, since the commencement of the seventeenth
century, it had sunk--that he united the amenity of Homer--the ideal
beauty of Sophocles--and the wit of Aristophanes. The opinion which in
youth he had formed of the great national poet of Germany, his maturer
experience fully confirmed. Eight years afterwards he published a long
and elaborate critique on Goethe's lays, songs, elegies, and
miscellaneous poems. Pre-eminently great as Goethe is in every branch of
poetry, in songs he is allowed to stand perfectly unrivalled. "From the
shores of the Baltic to the frontiers of Alsace," says the Baron
d'Eckstein, "the lyric poetry of Goethe lives in the hearts and on the
lips of an enthusiastic people." In this reviewal we find, among other
things, a learned and ingenious dissertation on the various species of
lyric poetry--the lay, the romance, the ballad, and the occasional poem;
on the nature, object, and limits of each--their points of resemblance,
and points of difference, together with observations on the fitness of
certain metres for certain kinds of poetry.