"I would not have you pin your faith too closely to these SCHLEGELS," said
FICHTE one day at Berlin to VARNHAGEN VON ENSE, or one of his friends, in
his own peculiar, cutting, commanding style--"I would not have you pin
your faith to these Schlegels. I know them well. The elder brother wants
depth, and the younger clearness. One good thing they both have--that is,
hatred of mediocrity; but they have also both a great jealousy of the
highest excellence; and, therefore, where they can neither be great
themselves nor deny greatness in others, they, out of sheer desperation,
fall into an outrageous strain of eulogizing. Thus they have bepraised
Goethe, and thus they have bepraised me."[B]
[Footnote B: _Denkwürdigkeiten_ von K. A. VARNHAGEN VON ENSE. Mannheim,
1837. Vol. ii. p. 60.]
Some people, from pride, don't like to be praised at all; and all
sensible people, from propriety, don't like to be praised extravagantly:
whether from pride or from propriety, or from a mixture of both,
philosopher Fichte seemed to have held in very small account the
patronage with which he was favoured at the hands of the twin aesthetical
dictators, the Castor and Pollux of romantic criticism; and, strange
enough also, poet Goethe, who had worship enough in his day, and is said
to have been somewhat fond of the homage, chimes in to the same tune
thus: "the Schlegels, with all their fine natural gifts, have been
unhappy men their life long, both the one and the other; they wished both
to be and do something more than nature had given them capacity for; and
accordingly they have been the means of bringing about not a little harm
both in art and literature. From their false principles in the fine
arts--principles which, however much trumpeted and gospeled about, were
in fact egotism united with weakness--our German artists have not yet
recovered, and are filling the exhibitions, as we see, with pictures
which nobody will buy. Frederick, the younger of these Dioscouri, choked
himself at last with the eternal chewing of moral and religious
absurdities, which, in his uncomfortable passage through life, he had
collected together from all quarters, and was eager to hawk about with
the solemn air of a preacher to every body: he accordingly betook
himself, as a last refuge, to Catholicism, and drew after him, as a
companion to his own views, a man of very fair but falsely overwrought
talent--Adam Müller.
"As for their Sanscrit studies again, that was at bottom only a _pis
aller_. They were clear-sighted enough to perceive that neither Greek nor
Latin offered any thing brilliant enough for them; they accordingly threw
themselves into the far East; and in this direction, unquestionably, the
talent of Augustus William manifests itself in the most honourable way.
All that, and more, time will show. Schiller never loved them: hated them
rather; and I think it peeps out of our correspondence how I did my best,
in our Weimar circles at least, to keep this dislike from coming to an
open difference. In the great revolution which they actually effected, I
had the luck to get off with a whole skin, (_sie liessen mich noth dürftig
stehen_,) to the great annoyance of their romantic brother Novalis, who
wished to have me _simpliciter_ deleted. 'Twas a lucky thing for me, in
the midst of this critical hubbub, that I was always too busy with myself
to take much note of what others were saying about me.
"Schiller had good reason to be angry with them. With their aesthetical
denunciations and critical club-law, it was a comparatively cheap matter
for them to knock him down in a fashion; but Schiller had no weapons that
could prostrate them. He said to me on one occasion, displeased with my
universal toleration even for what I did not like. 'KOTZEBUE, with his
frivolous fertility, is more respectable in my eyes than that barren
generation, who, though always limping themselves, are never content with
bawling out to those who have legs--STOP!'"[C]
[Footnote C: Briefwechse Zwischen GOETHE und ZELTER. Berlin, 1834. Vol. vi.
p. 318.]
That there is some truth in these severe remarks, the paltry personal
squibs in the _Leipzig Almanach_ for 1832, which called them forth, with
regard to Augustus Schlegel at least, sufficiently show: but there is a
general truth involved in them also, which the worthy fraternity of us
who, in this paper age, wield the critical pen, would do well to take
seriously to heart; and it is this, that great poets and philosophers have
a natural aversion as much to be praised and patronized, as to be rated
and railed at by great critics; and very justly so. For as a priest is a
profane person, who makes use of his sacred office mainly to show his gods
about, (so to speak,) that people may stare at them, and worship him; so a
critic who forgets his inferior position in reference to creative genius,
so far as to assume the air of legislation and dictatorship, when
explanation and commentary are the utmost he can achieve, has himself only
to blame, if, after his noisy trumpet has blared itself out, he reaps only
ridicule from the really witty, and reproof from the substantially wise.
Not that a true philosopher or poet shrinks from, and does not rather
invite, true criticism. The evil is not in the deed, but in the manner of
doing it. Here, as in all moral matters, the tone of the thing is the soul
of the thing. And in this view, the blame which Fichte and Goethe attach
to the Schlegels, amounts substantially to this, not that in their
critical vocation the romantic brothers wanted either learning or judgment
generally, but that they were too ambitious, too pretenceful, too
dictatorial that they must needs talk on all subjects, and always as if
they were the masters and the lions, when they were only the servants and
the exhibitors; that they made a serious business of that which is often
best done when it is done accidentally, viz. discussing what our
neighbours are about, instead of doing something ourselves; and that they
attempted to raise up an independent literary reputation, nay, and even to
found a new poetical school, upon mere criticism--an attempt which, with
all due respect for Aristarchus and the Alexandrians, is, and remains, a
literary impossibility.
But was Frederick Schlegel merely a critic? No He was a philosopher also,
and not a vulgar one; and herein lies the foundation of his fame. His
criticism, also, was thoroughly and characteristically a philosophical
criticism; and herein mainly, along with its vastness of erudition and
comprehensiveness of view, lies the foundation of its fame. To understand
the criticism thoroughly, one must first understand the philosophy. Will
the _un_philosophical English reader have patience with us for a few
minutes while we endeavour to throw off a short sketch of the philosophy
of Frederick Schlegel? If the philosophical system of a transcendental
German and _Viennese_ Romanist, can have small intrinsic practical value
to a British Protestant, it may extrinsically be of use even to him as
putting into his hands the key to one of the most intellectual, useful, an
popular books of modern times--"The history of ancient and modern
literature, by Frederick Von Schlegel,"--a book, moreover, which is not
merely "a great national possession of the Germans," as by one of
themselves it has been proudly designated, but has also, through the
classical translation of Mr Lockhart,[D] been made the peculiar property of
English literature.
[Footnote D: Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern.
Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1841.]
In the first chapter of his "_Philosophie des Lebens_," the Viennese
lecturer states very clearly the catholic and comprehensive ground which
all philosophy must take that would save itself from dangerous error. The
philosopher must start from the complete living totality of man, formed as
he is, not of flesh merely, a Falstaff--or of spirit merely, a Simon
Pillarman and Total Abstinence Saint--but of both flesh and spirit, body
and soul, in his healthy and normal condition. For this reason
clearly--true philosophy is not merely sense-derived and material like
the French philosophy of Helvetius, nor altogether ideal like that of
Plotinus, and the pious old mathematical visionaries at Alexandria; but
it stands on mother earth, like old Antaeus drinking strength therefrom,
and filches fire at the same time, Prometheus-like, from heaven, feeding
men with hopes--not, as Aeschylus says, altogether "blind," ([Greek:
tuphlas d eu autois elôidas katôkioa)] but only blinking. Don't court,
therefore, if you would philosophize wisely, too intimate an acquaintance
with your brute brother, the baboon--a creature, whose nature speculative
naturalists have most cunningly set forth by the theory, that it is a
parody which the devil, in a fit of ill humour, made upon God's noblest
work, man; and don't hope, on the other hand, as many great saints and
sages have done, by prayer and fasting, or by study and meditation, to
work yourself up to a god, and jump bodily out of your human skin. Assume
as the first postulate, and lay it down as the last proposition of your
"philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an
angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a
very comprehensive and complex, but also, (to appearance at least,) in
many points, a very contrary and contradictory creature, see that you
take the _whole_ man along with you into your metaphysical chamber; for
if there be one paper that has a bearing in the case amissing out of your
green bag, (which has happened only too often,) the evidence will be
imperfect, and the sentence false or partial--shake your wig as you
please. Remember, that though you may be a very subtle logician, the soul
of man is not all made up of logic; remember that reason, (_Vernunft_,)
the purest that Kant ever criticized withal, is not the proper vital soul
in man; is not the creative and productive faculty in intellect at all,
but is merely the tool of that which, in philosophers no less than in
poets, is the proper inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth phrases
it: Schlegel's word is _fantasie_. Remember that in more cases than
academic dignities may be willing to admit, the heart (where a man has
one) is the only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the head; and
that a mere metaphysician, and solitary speculator, however properly
trimmed,
"One to whose smooth-rubb'd soul can cling
Nor form nor feeling, great nor small;
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all-in-all,"
may write very famous books, profound even to unintelligibility, but can
never be a philosopher. Therefore reject Hegel, "that merely thinking, on
a barren heath speculating, self-sufficient, self-satisfied little EGO;"[E]
and consider Kant as weighed in the balance and found wanting on his own
showing: for if that critical portal of pure reason had indeed been
sufficient, as it gave itself out to be, for all the purposes of a human
philosophy, what need was there of the "practical back-door" which, at the
categorical command of conscience, was afterwards laid open to all men in
the "Metaphysic of Ethics?" As little will you allow your philosophical
need to be satisfied with any thing you can get from SCHELLING; for
however well it sounds to "throw yourself from the transcendental
emptiness of ideal reason into the warm embrace of living and luxuriant
nature," here also you will find yourself haunted by the intellectual
phantom of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or in its best
phasis a "pantheizing deification of nature." Strange enough as it may
seem, the true philosophy is to be found any where rather than among
philosophers. Each philosopher builds up a reasoned system of a part of
existence; but life is based upon God-given instincts and emotions, with
which reason has nothing to do; and nature contains many things which it
is not given to mortal brain to comprehend, much less to systematize. True
philosophy is not to be found in any intellectual system, much less in any
of the Aristotelian quality, where the emotional element in man is
excluded or subordinated; but in a living experience. To know philosophy,
therefore, first know life. To learn to philosophize, learn to live; and
live not partially, but with the full outspread vitality of human reason.
You go to college, and, as if you were made altogether of head, expect
some Peter Abelard forthwith, by academic disputation, to _reason_ you
into manhood; but neither manhood nor any vital WHOLE ever was learned by
reasoning. Pray, therefore, to the Author of all good, in the first place,
that you may _be_ something rather than that you may _know_ something. Get
yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life,
which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that
same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of
void brought fulness, and out of chaos a world.
[Footnote E: This is Menzel's phrase, not Schlegel's. "Hegel's _centrum war
ein blos denkendes, auf öder Heide spekulirendes, kleines, suffisantes,
selbstgenügsames Ichlein_." The untranslatable beauty of the German is in
the diminutive with which the sentence closes. It is difficult to say
whether Menzel or Schlegel shows the greater hostility to the poor Berlin
philosopher.]
Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the main scope, popularly
stated, of Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his two
first lectures on the philosophy of life, the first being titled, "Of the
thinking soul, or the central point of consciousness;" and the second, "Of
the loving soul, or the central point of moral life." The healthy-toned
reader, who has been exercised in speculations of this kind, will feel at
once that there is much that is noble in all this, and much that is true;
but not a little also, when examined in detail, of that sublime-sounding
sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,)
which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate
the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that
oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "_The younger
brother wants clearness_;" much that, when applied to practice, and
consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs
to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and
Popery, and what Goethe in German called a "_chewing the cud of moral and
religious absurdities_." But we have neither space nor inclination, in
this place, to make an analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set
forth how much of it is true and how much of it is false. Our intention
was merely to sketch a rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy
would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish which outline without
extraneous remark, with the reader's permission, we now proceed.
If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zôon logikon] in
his highest faculty, a _ratiocinative_, but rather an emotional and
imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in
human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a
procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of
a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper
and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the
deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke
of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we
see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have
been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out
of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on
the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our
philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God,
on whose existence alone humanity can confidently repose--who alone can
give to the trembling arch of human speculation that keystone which it
demands. The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that individual reason
has first to strike out, so to speak, by the collision or combination of
ideas, the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation of arguments. It
is a living growth rather of our whole nature, a primary instinct of all
moral beings, a necessary postulate of healthy humanity, which is given
and received as our life and our breath is, and admits not of being
reasoned into any soul that has it not already from other sources. And as
no philosopher of Greek or German times that history tells of, ever
succeeded yet in inventing a satisfactory theology, or establishing a
religion in which men could find solace to their souls, therefore it is
clear that that satisfactory Christian theology and Christian religion
which we have, and not only that, but all the glimpses of great
theological truth that are found twinkling through the darkness of a
widespread superstition, came originally from God by common revelation,
and not from man by private reasoning. The knowledge of God and a living
theology is, in fact, a simple science of experience like any other, only
of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in
moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower,
on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation;
while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride
of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at
once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and
beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always
would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral
God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of
nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul
not reasoned into it--this is the gravitating point of the moral world,
the only intelligible centre of any world; from which whatsoever is
centrifugal errs, and to which whatsoever is opposed is the devil.
Not private speculation, therefore, or famous philosophies of any kind,
but the living spiritual man, and the totality of the living flow of
sacred tradition on which he is borne, and with which he is encompassed,
are the two grand sources of "the philosophy of life." Let us follow these
principles, now, into a few of their wide-spread streams and multiform
historical branchings. First, the Bible clearly indicates what the
profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms,
that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow
and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half organic state into
apehood, and from apehood painfully into manhood; but he was created
perfect in the image of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory. This
is to be understood not only of the state of man before the Fall as
recorded in the two first chapters of Genesis; but every thing in the
Bible, and the early traditions of famous peoples, warrants us to believe,
that the first ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually enlightened
from one great common source of extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so
that the earliest ages of the world were not the most infantine and
ignorant to a comprehensive survey, as modern conceit so fondly imagines,
but the most gigantic and the most enlightened. That beautiful but
material and debasing heathenism, with which our Greek and Latin education
has made us so familiar, is only a defaced fragment of the venerable whole
which preceded it, that old and true heathenism of the holy aboriginal
fathers of our race. "There were GIANTS on the earth in those days." We
read this; but who believes it? We ought seriously to consider what it
means, and adopt it _bona fide_ into our living faith of man, and man's
history. Like the landscape of some Alpine country, where the primeval
granite Titans, protruding their huge shoulders every where above us and
around, make us feel how petty and how weak a thing is man; so ought our
imagination to picture the inhabitants of the world before the Flood.
Nobility precedes baseness always, and truth is more ancient than error.
Antediluvian man--antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as nobler in every
respect, more sublime and more pure than postdiluvian man, and
postdiluvian nature. But mighty energies, when abused, produce mighty
corruptions; hence the gigantic scale of the sins into which the
antediluvian men fell; and the terrible precipitation of humanity which
followed. This is a point of primary importance, in every attempt to
understand how to estimate the value of that world-famous Greek
philosophy, which is commonly represented as the crown and the glory of
the ancient world. All that Pythagoras and Plato ever wrote of noble and
elevating truths, are merely flashes of that primeval light, in the full
flood of which, man, in his more perfect antediluvian state, delighted to
dwell; and it is remarkable in the case of Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Thales,
and so many other of the Greek philosophers, that the further we trace
them back, we come nearer to the divine truth, which, in the systems of
Epicurus, Aristippus, Zeno, or the shallow or cold philosophers of later
origin, altogether disappears. Pythagoras and Plato were indeed divinely
gifted with a scientific presentiment of the great truths of Christianity
soon to be revealed, or say rather restored to the world; while Aristotle,
on the other hand, is to be regarded as the father of those unhappy
academical schismatics from the Great Church of living humanity, who
allowed the ministrant faculty of reason to assume an unlawful supremacy
over the higher powers of intellect, and gave birth to that voracious
despotism of barren dialectics, in the middle ages commonly called the
scholastic philosophy. The Greek philosophy, however, even its noblest
Avatar, Plato, much less in the case of a Zeno or an Aristotle, was never
able to achieve that which must be the practically proposed end of all
higher philosophy that is in earnest; viz. the coming out of the narrow
sphere of the school and the palaestra, uniting itself with actual life,
and embodying itself completely in the shape of that which we call a
CHURCH. This Platonism could not do. Christianity did it. Revelation did
it. God Incarnate did it. Now once again came humanity forth, fresh from
the bosom of the divine creativeness, conquering and to conquer. There was
no Aristotle and Plato--no Abelard and Bernard here--reason carping at
imagination, and imagination despising reason. But once, if but once in
four thousand years, man appeared in all the might of his living
completeness. Love walked hand in hand with knowledge, and both were
identified in life. The spirit of divine peace brooded in the inner
sanctuary of the heart, while the outer man was mailed for the sternest
warfare. Such was pure Christianity, so long as it lasted--for the
celestial plant was condemned to grow in a terrestrial atmosphere; and
there, alas! it could only grow with a stunted likeness of itself. It
was more than stunted also--it was tainted; for are not all things tainted
here? Do we not live in a tainted atmosphere? do we not live in a time out
of joint? Does not the whole creation literally groan? Too manifestly it
does, however natural philosophers may affect to speak of the book of
nature, as if it were the clear and uncorrupted text of the living book of
God. Not only man, but the whole environment of external nature, which
belongs to him, has been deranged by the Fall. In such a world as this,
wherein whoso will not believe a devil cannot believe a God, it was
impossible for Christianity to remain in that state of blissful vital
harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant
developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every
side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding
Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and
divisions of the middle ages--the one, that old dualism of the inner man,
the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have
so often alluded--the other, a no less serious strife of the outward
machinery of life, the strife between the spiritual and the temporal
powers, between the Pope and the Emperor. This was bad enough; that the
two vicars of God on earth should not know to keep the peace among
themselves, when the keeping of the peace among others was the very end
and aim of the appointment. But worse times were coming. For in the
middle ages, notwithstanding the rank evils of barren scholasticism,
secular-minded popes, and intrusive emperors, there was still a church, a
common Christian religion, a common faith of all Christians; but now,
since that anarchical and rebellious movement, commonly called the
Reformation, but more fitly termed the revolution, the overturning and
overthrowing of the religion of Christendom, we have no more a mere
internal strife and division to vex us, but there is an entire separation
and divorce of one part of the Christian church (so called) from the main
mother institution. The abode of peace has become the camp of war and the
arena of battles; that dogmatical theology of the Christian church,
which, if it be not the infallible pure mathematics of the moral world,
has been deceiving men for 1800 years, and is a liar--that theology is
now publicly discussed and denied, scorned and scouted by men who do not
blush to call themselves Christians; there is no universal peace any
longer to be found in that region where it is the instinct of humanity,
before all things, to seek repose; the only religious peace which the
present age recognises, is that of which the Indian talks, when he says
of certain epochs of the world's history, _Brahma sleeps_! Those who
sleep and are indifferent in spiritual matters find peace; but those who
are alive and awake must beat the wind, and battle, belike, with much
useless loss of strength, before they can arrive even at that first
postulate of all healthy thinking--there is a God. "_Ueber Gott werd ich
nie streiten_," said Herder. "About God I will never dispute." Yet look
at German rationalism, look at Protestant theology--what do you see
there? Reason usurping the mastery in each individual, without control of
the higher faculties of the soul, and of those institutions in life by
which those faculties are represented; and as one man's reason is as good
as another's, thence arises war of each self-asserted despotism against
that which happens to be next it, and of all against all--a spiritual
anarchy, which threatens the entire dissolution of the moral world, and
from which there is no refuge but in recurring to the old traditionary
faith of a revolted humanity, no redemption but in the venerable
repository of those traditions--the one and indivisible holy Catholic
church of Christ, of whom, as the inner and eternal keystone is God, so
the outer and temporal is the Pope.
Such is a general outline of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel--a
philosophy belonging to the class theological and supernatural, to the
genus Christian, to the species sacerdotal and Popish. Now, without
stopping here to blame its sublime generalities and beautiful confusions,
on the one hand, or to praise its elevated tendency, its catholic and
reconciling tone on the other, we shall merely call attention, in a single
sentence, physiologically, to its main and distinguishing character. It
was, in fact, (in spirit and tendency, though not in outward
accomplishment,) to German literature twenty years ago what Puseyism is
now to the English church--it was a bold and grand attempt to get rid of
those vexing doubts and disputes on the most important subjects that will
ever disquiet minds of a certain constitution, so long as they have
nothing to lean on but their own judgment; and as Protestantism, when
consistently carried out, summarily throws a man back on his individual
opinion, and subjects the vastest and most momentous questions to the
scrutiny of reason and the torture of doubt, therefore Schlegel in
literary Germany, and Pusey in ecclesiastical England, were equally
forced, if they would not lose Christianity altogether, to renounce
Protestantism, and to base their philosophy upon sacerdotal authority and
ecclesiastical tradition. That Schlegel became a Romanist at Cologne, and
Dr Pusey an Anglo-Catholic at Oxford, does not affect the kinship. Both,
to escape from the anarchy of Protestant individualism, (as it was felt by
them,) were obliged to assert not merely Christianity, but a
hierarchy--not merely the Bible, but an authoritative interpretation of
the Bible; and both found, or seemed to find, that authoritative
interpretation and exorcism of doubt there, where alone in their
circumstances, and intellectually constituted as they were, it was to be
found. Dr Pusey did not become a Papist like Frederick Schlegel, for two
plain reasons--first, because he was an Englishman, second, because he
was an English churchman. The authority which he sought for lay at his
door; why should he travel to Rome for it? Archbishop Laud had taught
apostolical succession before--Dr Pusey might teach it again. But this
convenient prop of Popery without the Pope was not prepared for Frederick
Schlegel. There was no Episcopal church, no Oxford in Germany, into whose
bosom he could throw himself, and find relief from the agony of religious
doubt. He was a German, moreover, and a philosopher. To his searching eye
and circumspective wariness, the general basis of tradition which might
satisfy a Pusey, though sufficiently broad, did not appear sure enough.
To his lofty architectural imagination a hierarchical aristocracy,
untopped by a hierarchical monarch, did not appear sufficiently sublime.
To his all-comprehending and all-combining historical sympathies, a
Christian priesthood, with Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, but without
Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface, would have presented the appearance
of a fair landscape, with a black yawning chasm in the middle, into which
whoever looked shuddered. Therefore Frederick Schlegel, spurning all half
measures, inglorious compromises, and vain attempts to reconcile the
irreconcilable, vaulted himself at once, with a bold leap, into the
central point of sacerdotal Christianity. The obstacles that would have
deterred ordinary minds had no effect on him. All points of detail were
sunk in the over-whelming importance of the general question.
Transubstantiation or consubstantiation, conception, maculate or
immaculate, were a matter of small moment with him. What he wanted was a
divinely commissioned church with sacred mysteries--a spiritual house of
refuge from the weary battle of intellectual east winds, blasting and
barren, with which he saw Protestant Germany desolated. This house of
refuge he found in Cologne, in Vienna; and having once made up his mind
that spiritual unity and peace were to be found only in the one mother
church of Christendom, not being one of those half characters who,
"making _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_," are continually weaving a net
of paltry external _no's_ to entangle the progress of every grand decided
_yes_ of the inner man, Schlegel did not for a moment hesitate to make
his thought a deed, and publicly profess his return to Romanism in the
face of enlightened and "ultra-Protestant" Germany. To do this certainly
required some moral courage; and no just judge of human actions will
refuse to sympathize with the motive of this one, however little he may
feel himself at liberty to agree with the result.
But Frederick Schlegel, a well informed writer has said,[F] "became
Romanist in a way peculiar to himself, and had in no sense given up his
right of private judgment." We have not been able to see, from a careful
perusal of his works, (in all of which there is more or less of
theology,) that there is any foundation for this assertion of Varnhagen.
Frederick Schlegel, the German, was as honest and stout a Romanist in
this nineteenth century as any Spanish Ferdinand Catholicus in the
fifteenth. Freedom of speculation indeed, within certain known limits,
and spirituality of creed above what the meagre charity of some
Protestants may conceive possible in a Papist, we do find in this man;
but these good qualities a St Bernard, a Dante, a Savonarola, a Fénélon,
had exhibited in the Romish Church before Schlegel, and others as great
may exhibit them again. Freedom of thought, however, in the sense in
which it is understood by Protestants, was the very thing which Schlegel,
Göres, Adam Müller, and so many others, did give up when they entered the
Catholic Church. They felt as Wordsworth did when he wrote his beautiful
ode to "Duty;" they had more liberty than they knew how to use--
"Me this uncharter'd freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name--
I long for a repose that ever is the same."
And if it seem strange to any one that Frederick Schlegel, the learned,
the profound, the comprehensive, should believe in Transubstantiation,[G]
let him look at a broader aspect of history than that of German books,
and ask himself--Did Isabella of Castile--the gentle, the noble, the
generous--establish the Inquisition, or allow Ximenes to establish it? In
a world which surrounds us on all sides with apparent contradictions, he
who admits a real one now and then into his faith, or into his practice,
is neither a fool nor a monster.
[Footnote F: Varnhagen Von Ense, Rahel's Umgang, i. p. 227. "Er war
auf besondere Weise Katholisch, und hatte seine Geistesfreiheit dabei
gar nicht aufgegeben."]
[Footnote G: The following is Schlegel's philosophy of
transubstantiation--"Though it be true, that in the Holy Scriptures, in
accordance with the symbolical nature of man, there is much that is
generally symbolical, and symbolically to be understood; yet when a
symbol proceeds immediately from God, it can in this case be nothing less
than substantial; it cannot be a mere sign, it must also be something
actual; otherwise it would be as if one would palm on the eternal LOGOS,
who is the ground of all existence and all knowledge, words without
meaning and without power. Quite natural, therefore, it must be regarded,
i.e. quite suitable to the nature of the thing, although _per se_
certainly supernatural, and surpassing all comprehension, when that
highest symbol which forms the proper principle of unity, and the living
central point of Christianity, is perceived to possess this character,
that it is at once the sign and the thing signified. For now, that on the
high altar of divine love the one great sacrifice has been accomplished
for ever, and no flame more can rise from it save the inspiration of a
pure God-united will, that solemn act by which the bond formed between
the soul and God is from time to time revealed, can consist in nothing
else than this--that here the essential substance of the divine power and
the divine love is in all its lively fullness communicated to, and
received by man, as the miraculous sign of his union with
God."--_Philosophie des Lebene_, p. 376. On the logic of this remarkable
passage, those who are strong in Mill and Whately may decide; its
orthodoxy belongs to the consideration of the Tridentine doctors.]
In his political opinions, Schlegel maintained the same grand consistency
that characterizes his religious philosophy. He had more sense, however,
and more of the spirit of Christian fraternity in him than, for the sake
of absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, from some passages in
the _Concordia_--a political journal, published by him and his friend
Adam Müller, in 1820, and quoted by Mr Robertson--it would almost appear
that he would have preferred a monarchy limited by states, conceived in
the spirit of the middle ages, to the almost absolute form of monarchical
government, under whose protection he lived and lectured at Vienna. To
some such constitution as that which now exists in Sweden, for instance,
we think he would have had no objections. At the same time, it is certain
he gave great offence to the constitutional party in Germany, by the
anti-popular tone of his writings generally, more perhaps than by any
special absolutist abuses which he had publicly patronized. He was,
indeed, a decided enemy to the modern system of representative
constitutions, and popular checks; a king by divine right according to
the idea of our English nonjurors, was as necessary a corner-stone to his
political, as a pope by apostolical succession to his ecclesiastical
edifice. And as no confessed corruption of the church, represented as it
might be by the monstrous brutality of a Borgia, or the military madness
of a Julius, was, in his view, sufficient to authorize any hasty Luther
to make a profane bonfire of a papal bull; any hot Henry to usurp the
trade of manufacturing creeds; so no "sacred right of insurrection," no
unflinching patriotic opposition, no claim of rights, (by petitioners
having _swords_ in their hands,) are admissible in his system of a
Christian state. And as for the British constitution, and "the glorious
Revolution of 1688," this latter, indeed, is one of the best of a bad
kind, and that boasted constitution as an example of a house divided
against itself, and yet _not_ falling, is a perfect miracle of dynamical
art, a lucky accident of politics, scarcely to be looked for again in the
history of social development, much less to be eagerly sought after and
ignorantly imitated. Nay, rather, if we look at this boasted constitution
a little more narrowly, and instruct ourselves as to its practical
working, what do we see? "Historical experience, the great teacher of
political science, manifestly shows that in these dynamical states, which
exist by the cunningly devised balance and counter-balance of different
powers, what is called governing is, in truth, a continual strife and
contention between the Ministry and the Opposition, who seem to delight
in nothing so much as in tugging and tearing the state and its resources
to pieces between them, while the hallowed freedom of the hereditary
monarch seems to serve only as an old tree, under whose shades the
contending parties may the more comfortably choose their ground, and
fight out their battles."[H] It is but too manifest, indeed, according to
Schlegel's projection of the universe, that all constitutionalism is,
properly speaking, a sort of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of
the social body, having its origin (like the religious epidemic of the
sixteenth century) in the private conceit of the individual, growing by
violence and strife, and ending in dissolution. This is the ever-repeated
refrain of his political discourses, puerile enough, it may be, to our
rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful to polite and patriotic ears
at Vienna, when the cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo
beneath their towers. The propounder of such philosophy had not only the
common necessity of all philosophers to pile up his political in majestic
consistency with his ecclesiastical creed, but he had also to pay back
the mad French liberalism with something more mad if possible, and more
despotic. And if also Danton, and Mirabeau, and Robespierre, and other
terrible Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had raised his
naturally romantic temperament a little into the febrile and delirious
now and then, what wonder? Shall the devil walk the public streets at
noon day, and men not be afraid?
[Footnote H: _Philosophie des Lebens_, p.407.]
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.]
* * * * *