CHAPTER III.

GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

HAMANN—LICHTENBERG—HERDER—HIS DRAWBACKS OF TEDIOUSNESS, PEDAGOGY, AND “METEOROSOPHIA,” BUT GREAT MERITS—THE ‘FRAGMENTE’—THE ‘KRITISCHE WALDER’—THE ‘URSACHEN DES GESUNKNEN GESCHMACK,’ THE ‘IDEEN,’ ETC.— ‘AGE-, COUNTRY-, AND RACE-, CRITICISM’—SPECIMENS AND REMARKS— WIELAND—GOETHE—THE ‘HAMLET’ CRITICISM, ETC.—THE ‘SPRÜCHE IN PROSA’— THE STERNE PASSAGES—REVIEWS AND NOTICES—THE CONVERSATIONS—SOME MORE GENERAL THINGS: GOETHE ON SCOTT AND BYRON—ON THE HISTORIC AND COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE OF LITERATURE—SUMMING UP: THE MERITS OF GOETHE’S CRITICISM—ITS DRAWBACKS: TOO MUCH OF HIS AGE—TOO MUCH A UTILITARIAN OF CULTURE—UNDULY NEGLECTFUL OF LITERATURE AS LITERATURE—SCHILLER—HIS ÆSTHETIC DISCOURSES—THE BÜRGER REVIEW—THE ‘XENIEN’—THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH GOETHE—THE ‘NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY’—OTHERS: BÜRGER—RICHTER—THE ‘VORSCHULE DER ÆSTHETIK’—THE SO-CALLED “ROMANTIC SCHOOL”—NOVALIS—THE ‘HEINRICH’—THE EARLIER ‘FRAGMENTS’—THE LATER—HIS CRITICAL MAGNIFICENCE—TIECK—THE SCHLEGELS— THEIR GENERAL POSITION AND DRIFT—THE ‘CHARACTERISTIKEN’—A. W.: THE ‘KRITISCHE SCHRIFTEN’ OF 1828—ON VOSS—ON BÜRGER—THE ‘URTHEILE,’ ETC.—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DRAMATISCHE KUNST UND LITERATUR’—THEIR INITIAL AND OTHER MERIT—THE SCHLEGELIAN POSITION—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN ÜBER SCHÖNE LITERATUR UND KUNST’—ILLUSTRATED STILL MORE BY FRIEDRICH—UHLAND—SCHUBARTH—SOLGER—PERIODICALS, HISTORIES, ETC.

There is a difficulty in writing about German criticism, especially in the great period of Goethe’s productiveness, which hardly occurs in any other department of our subject. Not only is there much positive critical writing from all the writers, great and small, of the time, but almost all the writings of the great ones are criticism of an indirect and applied kind. The whole of German Literature from 1750 to 1830 is a sort of _Seminar_—a kind of enormous and multifarious Higher Education movement, pursued, with much more than half consciousness, by persons often of great talent and sometimes of great genius. To give an account of all this is impossible: if it were possible it would be really improper, because much of what the Germans found out with infinite labour was only what nations more fortunately situated in regard to literary position had inherited, if they sometimes neglected their inheritance. But they also found out certain things which other nations had not: nor is it easy to combine an indication of these with an account, full, but not too full, of the entire movement; and hardly any two persons are likely to agree on the point where fulness is reached but running over has not begun.

[Sidenote: _Hamann._]

An early and remarkable instance of this critical permeation is Hamann,[645] the “Magus of the North.” If Hamann had been anything but a German, superficial readers might take him for a quack; indeed, as it is, they have done so, and possibly may still do so. After an early visit to England—which was anything but fortunate, save that it imbued him with English literature—and after trying various occupations, he passed the greater part of his life in a very poor public employment. He wrote large numbers of letters to Lindner, Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and other persons, and published many short treatises, of the most miscellaneous in kind, and the most eccentric and occasionally apocalyptic in style and title. But he was in reality as deadly a foe of affectation and sham as Carlyle himself, who, no doubt, took not a little from him. His polemic with his friend, and townsman, and “high-honoured Herr-magister” Kant (whom, however, one shudders to find elsewhere described as “ein guter _homunculus_”) does not concern us. But it is almost impossible to read a few pages in his works without coming across some literary reference, more or less remarkable when its date is considered. As early as 1759 he writes[646] to Kant himself, “Wir schreiben für ein Volk das Maler und Dichter fordert”; three years later[647] he entitles two of his quaint little pieces “Author and Critic,” “Reader and Critic,” and fills them with ironic wisdom. Earlier than these last, in May 1761,[648] he has read Diderot, and, like Lessing,[649] has discovered in and with him that rules are all very well, but that there is something “more immediate, more intimate, obscurer, but more certain” than the Rule.

He is harsh, but by no means wholly unjust (as indeed we have seen), when he finds, in _The Elements of Criticism_, “Mehr Worte und Wendungen als Sachen”; he knows Burke; and he leaves his “Magus”-tower to discuss Baretti and Goldoni. Mystic as he is, he detects the emptiness of the new Æsthetic:[650] and consistently champions direct perception of literary and other beauty in individual cases. It is admitted that his Shakespeare study[651] transmitted itself to Herder, upon whom he had great influence: and, generally speaking, he may be said to have exercised at least as much power in the germinal and stimulating way upon the younger writers, who were to form the great generation, as Lessing did in the way of dogma and method. Against the mere _Aufklärung_ and against _Sturm und Drang_, Hamann was alike a conservative and preservative agency: and he is one of the authors, now getting terribly numerous, on whom I should like to spend much more time and space than can be afforded here.

[Sidenote: _Lichtenberg._]

There are rather strong points of resemblance between Hamann and the somewhat younger Lichtenberg. Both were very much influenced by visits to England, and both show the inspiration or English humourists— especially Swift—in their not exactly forced, but very decidedly _purposed_, eccentricity. Lichtenberg, however, was more a man of this world than the “Magus”: and he shows very much more of the passion of the time for physics. Never did any one’s writings better deserve the title of _Vermischte Schriften_[652] than his, consisting as they do, for the most part, of a bewildering assemblage of mote-articles, ranging from the question “Why Germany has no seaside watering-place,”[653] and from an account of a “Sausage-Procession”[654] (which gives a foretaste not merely of Jean Paul but of _Sartor Resartus_ itself) to serious mathematical and physical discussions. Lichtenberg is perhaps best known to English readers by his dealings with Garrick and other English theatrical persons: but there is not a little pure literature in him, outside as well as inside his two sets of titularly literary _Bemerkungen_.[655] He has actual animadversions on Pope, on Swift, on the early German drama even: but his most noteworthy critical achievements are to be found in more general maxims and judgments, many of them showing that creditable anxiety for the literary improvement of his country which the best men of his generation all felt, and which was rewarded in and by the next. He stigmatises that excessive _imitation_ which even here we have had to notice: he says plumply,[656] _Die Deutschen lesen zu viel_; he is prophetically, as well as actually, notable on the process of commenting and translating Shakespeare.[657] But perhaps his best judgment-epigram is on that critical vice which is the other extreme from general denigration. “Men call,” says he, “others by the name of genius, as wood-lice [_Kelleresel_] are called Millepedes. Not that they _have_ a thousand legs, but that people won’t take the trouble to count!”

[Sidenote: _Herder._]

With Herder himself a different form of difficulty besets the historian. Here there is no question of scattered literary _obiter dicta_ occurring in a range of obstinately miscellaneous thinking. Twenty volumes[658] of ostensibly and really literary work, of which something like a full half is actual criticism, present themselves to the inquirer; he knows, and everybody knows, that his author counts, as hardly anybody else, save Lessing and Goethe, has counted, in the literary development of one of the great “completely equipped”[659] literary nations of Europe; he can see, if he has any eyes at all, that Herder is, with Lessing, Diderot, and the shy and mainly apocryphal Gray, one of the very few leaders in the conversion of Europe at large to a catholic study of literature. And yet the arguments against any very full treatment of him in such a book as this are twenty-legion strong.[Sidenote: _His drawbacks of tediousness,_] In the first place, there is what I can only call a certain fearful _woolliness_ about Herder’s literary work. It scarcely ever compresses and crystallises itself into a solid and fiery thunderbolt of literary expression. He himself, in the very forefront of it,[660] speaks of “Die liebe Göttin Langeweile,” “the dear Goddess Ennui,” as having “hunted many, if not most people, into the arms of the Muses.” I am afraid it must be said that in his own case the dear Goddess did not understand where her mission as matchmaker ended, and is too frequently present at the interviews of man and Muse.

[Sidenote: _pedagogy,_]

In the second place, that pedagogic instinct which has been noted, which is so excusable and so praiseworthy in him and in his contemporaries, when we consider their circumstances and _milieu_, interferes somewhat disastrously with the freedom and the lasting interest of his writing. The Latin nations, by their inheritance of real or supposed prerogative from Latin itself, we English by our alleged national self-sufficiency, escape this in greater or less degree. All the four, Italians, French, Spaniards, English, take themselves in their different degrees and manners for granted; they are “men,” if only in the University sense. The Germans of the mid-eighteenth century are, and take themselves for, schoolboys: it is greatly to their credit, but it does not precisely make them good reading without a great deal of good will. [Sidenote: _and_ meteorosophia,] Lastly Herder, as it seems to me (though, no doubt, not to others), in consequence of this sense of dissatisfaction with his own literature, climbs too rapidly to generalisations about the relation of literature itself to national character, and to the connection of literature generally with the whole idea of humanity. All this is noble; but we are in a bad position for doing it. It will be a capital occupation for persons of a critical temperament when humanity has come to an end—which it has not even yet, and which it certainly had still less in Herder’s time.[661]

[Sidenote: _but great merits._]

These general disadvantages are indeed compensated by general merits of a very eminent kind. Stimulated by Hamann, by Lessing, and by his own soul, Herder betook himself, as nobody had done before him, to the comparative study of literature, to the appreciation of folksong (perhaps his best desert), to the examination of Ancient, Eastern, Foreign literature in comparison with German. This is his great claim to consideration in the history of literature and of criticism: and it is so great a one that in general one is loath to cavil even at the most extravagant expressions of admiration that have been lavished upon him.

[Sidenote: _The_ Fragmente.]

But individual examination of his works revives the objections taken above. For instance, the early _Fragmente zur Deutschen Litteratur_[662] has an almost unique _relative_ interest. I do not know where to look for anything like it as a survey (or rather a collection of studies) of a literature at a given period of its development. On the language; on the prosody;[663] on the “rhetoric” in the narrow-wide sense, of German after the close of the Seven Years’ War; on the chief authors and kinds of its literature; on a vast number of minor points, positive and comparative, in relation to it, Herder lavishes an amount of filial devotion, of learning, of ability, which is quite admirable. Taken _absolutely_, the value and the interest, and therefore the admiration, shrink a little.

[Sidenote: _The_ Kritische Walder.]

The _Kritische Wälder_, which followed the _Fragmente_ in a couple of years,[664] are occupied, first, with a sort of continuation of the work of Winckelmann and of Lessing in the _Laocoön_ (a continuation which, like its forerunners, busied itself chiefly with the arts other than literature), and then with some work of Lessing’s enemy, Klotz,[665] somewhat more directly literary in kind. Klotz, however, had busied himself, and Herder necessarily busies himself in turn, with general questions of the moral-literary type, especially in reference to Homer and Virgil. The book is full of those curious _Rettungen_ or “white-washings,” of which we have previously referred to an example in speaking of Lessing on Horace. But it has not very much for us.

[Sidenote: _The_ Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmack,]

There is some more, though the quality may be differently appreciated by different persons, in the Prize Essay of 1773 on the _Causes of the Decline of Taste in different Nations_:[666] and a great deal more in the twenty years later _Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und bildenden Künste_.[667] In the first, Herder develops (not of course for the first time, for Montesquieu had given the line long before, if he had not applied it much to literature, and Du Bos had started it before _him_, and Vico had in a manner anticipated both; but for the first time in a wide, and at the same time not loose, application to literature itself) the idea of Age- and Race-criticism—the close conjunction of a general conception of the characteristics of a time and a country with the phenomena observed or supposed to be observed in groups of literary production. In theg second, at once generalising further, and descending to further particulars, we have an attempt to connect literature with general characteristics of humanity, and almost innumerable critical experiments of this process, on different authors and schools and kinds.

[Sidenote: _the_ Ideen, _&c._]

Anything that has to be said in general on these processes is for the Interchapters; but we may here repeat that no one can well exaggerate their historical importance or the influence that they have exercised since. Further, the merit of their combined precept and example, in directing study at once to those features which are common in all literature, and to the individual bodies by comparison of which the general features are discernible, is quite beyond question. The Prize Essay has perhaps the main defects of its kind, that of “figuring away” in plausible gyration, without bringing home any very solid sheaves, or even leaving any definite path. But the immense Miscellany of the _Ideen_ more than makes up for this. Herder’s general scheme, here, in the _Adrastea_,[668] in that _Aurora_ (suggested by the dawn of the nineteenth century) which he only planned, and which was but a small part of the huge adventures for which he died lamenting his lack of time, may be described as that of a mediæval collection of _Quæstiones Quodlibetales_, methodised by the presence throughout of his leading practical and theoretic ideas. [Sidenote: Age-, Country-, and Race-, Criticism] These were, as has been said, the necessity of enriching German literature with material, and furnishing it with patterns, “plant,” and processes, by the study of _all_ literature, ancient and modern, as a practical and immediate aim; and the working out of the notions of literature, as connected with the country, and literature, as connected with the general race, for ultimate goal.

[Sidenote: _Specimens and Remarks._]

But, owing to the enormous _dissipation_,—the constant flitting from flower to flower which his task imposed on him,—Herder was not and could not be a very important critic on particular points. He was bound to share the over-valuation of _Ossian_[669]—for was not _Ossian_ exactly what was wanted to dissolve and lubricate the _sècheresse_ of French-German enlightenment, and did it not appear to give a brilliant new example of “national” literature? So we must not overblame him for this, any more than we must overpraise him—while praising him heartily— for having been undoubtedly the main agent in inoculating the Germans with Shakespeare.[670] Elias Schlegel had begun the process, and Hamann had continued it; but the first was cut off too early for him to do more than make a beginning, and Hamann’s mission was rather to send others, including Herder himself, than to work directly upon the general. It is also fair to say that, with all his soaring ideals and world-wide aspirations of mental travel, there was little _Schwärmerei_ about Herder, except in a few semi-poetical passages, which can easily be skipped. His judgment is a pretty sound and sensible one, if his taste is not infallible—see for instance his remarks on political poetry (xvi. 169, _op. cit._), and the equally modest and intelligent observations which follow on the impossibility of emulating or surpassing the special qualities of foreign literatures, however useful these literatures may be for study.[671] To any nation Herder must have been a useful and stimulating teacher; to the Germans at this time he was simply invaluable. But the definition of his general scope, and these few particulars of his procedure, must suffice us here.[672]

[Sidenote: _Wieland._]

Wieland, the other chief of German _belles lettres_ between Lessing and Goethe, is also one of those writers—necessarily thickening upon us as we proceed—who were very important to their own times and countries, but whose importance historically is here less a matter for detailed investigation than for general summary. His extensive work[673] is full of criticism; indeed his position as editor of the _Teutsche Merkur_ was one of the most responsible and not of the least influential in the great German period. The curious modernised-classical or classicalised-modern novels and miscellanies of which he was so fond— especially the _Abderiten_—abound in it, in a more or less dissolved and diffused state; the seven or eight volumes of his miscellaneous works[674] contain more in a precipitated and concentrated condition. Now he will ask—but perhaps not answer—the question, “Was ist eine schöne Seele?”[675] then discourse (after the fashion of Burke and Barnwell and Bulwer) on “the Relation of the Agreeable and Beautiful to the Useful”;[676] then come closer still to real practical criticism in the interesting “Sendschriften an einen Jungen Dichter” of 1784.[677] The alphabetically arranged reviews and notices which fill, or help to fill, the three last volumes deal with all manner of authors and books, from Aristophanes to the _Amadis_, and from Louise Labé to Luis Vivès. In all, modified to some extent by the influence which his greater juniors exercised latterly on him, there appears that somewhat rococo, but interesting, attractive, and very largely beneficent blend or coupling of wit and imagination (or at least fancy) which is Wieland’s characteristic, and which undoubtedly did much—very much—to raise the Germans out of another and much less attractive mixture of pedantry and horse-play and bombast. But his individual critical utterances are of less importance to us. And so to Goethe himself.

[Sidenote: _Goethe._]

In a certain sense the whole six-and-thirty volumes[678] of Goethe’s work, with all the _Letters_ and _Conversations_ added, may be said to be a record of his criticism: in this sense he certainly deserved the hackneyed “nothing if not—--” But for our purposes, though we may step beyond them now and then, the famous passages in _Wilhelm Meister_ and elsewhere (especially “Shakespeare und Keine Ende”) on Shakespeare, the _Sprüche in Prosa_, the collected papers on German and other literature, and the _Conversations_ with Eckermann, will give a sufficient collection of texts. The _Xenien_ will be more conveniently postponed till we deal with their other author.

[Sidenote: _The_ Hamlet _criticism, &c._]

One thing must or should have struck every reader (at all accustomed to draw conclusions from what he reads) about the _Hamlet_ passages in _Meister_.[679] _These passages might have been written by a man who was only acquainted with a prose translation of the piece into a language other than its own._ This may seem a little staggering: but it is true. Goethe handles—with extraordinary and for the most part unerring insight—the characters, the situations, the conduct of the play. But there he stops dead. Of its magnificent and ineffable poetical _expression_—of those phrases and passages which, read hundreds of times through scores of years, produce as much effect on the fit reader as at first, and more—he says nothing. “Shakespeare und Keine Ende” tells the same story: nearly all, if not all, the scattered references from the Frankfort speech of 1771, when he was just of age, to the last remark to Eckermann sixty years later, tell the same. It is at least a curious one. One begins to wonder whether the person who wrote Shakespeare was, not Bacon, but, say, Wieland.

[Sidenote: _The_ Sprüche in Prosa.]

Many things, however, might, and some perhaps shall, be said about this. Let us turn to the more miscellaneous and general utterances of the _Sprüche in Prosa_, which, with the parallel verse jottings, especially some of the _Zahme Xenien_, are recognised as supplying a sort of running accompaniment of Goethe’s thought, for all periods of his life. No one (again with the same slight goodwill to think) can read far in either of these divisions, much less in both of them, without perceiving the very strong, we might almost call it the overbearing, practical and ethical tendency, even of those passages which apparently bear most closely on literature. All the best things are _generalised_ as much as possible, with perhaps some forgetfulness of the writer’s own caution about _Allgemeine Begriffe_.[680] In these generalities there is much that is admirable, such as the famous “Superstition is the poetry of life,”[681] and the much less known but very striking “Rhythmical movement has something magical about it: it makes us believe that the Sublime is our own property.”[682] The danger appears in his often-quoted comparison of Classicism to Health and Romanticism to disease[683]—if he had said “Classicism is precaution against disease: Romanticism is making the best of that which must come,” there would have been something to say for him. But it is far off in the admirable, “There are pedants who are also scoundrels; and they are the worst of all.”[684]

But when we pass from these generalities—disputable sometimes, indisputable not seldom, almost always stimulating—to individual judgments, the case is a little altered. If he had oftener written such notes as “_Vis superba formæ_. _Ein schönes Wort von Johannes Secundus_,”[685] it had been better. What is the good of saying of _Henry IV._[686] that “If everything else extant of the kind were lost, we could restore poetry and rhetoric completely out of this alone”? Nobody shall outgo me in rational admiration of _Henry IV._ I will not give up a hair of Doll Tearsheet’s head, nor a blush of the page’s cheek. Everything in it is good: but to say that everything that is good is in it would deepen the inscrutable smile on Shakespeare’s face a little less inscrutably. The saying, however, may perhaps be allowed the credit, as well as the discredit, due to enthusiastic exaggerations. This is not the case with the passages on Sterne,[687] which are numerous, which form a tolerably complete context, and which are yet separated from each other, and returned upon, in a fashion which shows what a strong impression the subject had made on the writer’s mind.

[Sidenote: _The Sterne passages._]

We begin with the sufficiently round statement, “Yorick Sterne was the finest[688] spirit that ever worked. Whosoever reads him has at once the feeling of freedom and beauty; his humour is inimitable, and not every kind of Humour frees the soul.” Now, as a thing said once, this would be surprising enough, however well we may think of Sterne: but Goethe does not leave it alone. After the widest casts round to the general aspects of Poetry and Science, Art and Humour, he circles back to “Tristram.” “Even at this moment” (the context shows that this must have been pretty late in his life), “every man of culture should take his works once more in hand, that the nineteenth century may learn what we owe him already, and look out for what we may still owe him.” Another page and more of generalities, and he harks back again. “Sterne was born in 1713 and died in 1768. To comprehend him one must not leave out of consideration the moral and ecclesiastical state of his time: we should remember that he was Warburton’s contemporary.” And then a context of notes remarks on his “free spirit,” “his power of developing things from within,” of “distinguishing truth from falsehood,” his “hatred for the didactic-dogmatic, the pedantic tendencies of the serious”; his wide reading and discoveries of “the inadequate and the ridiculous”; his “boundless sagacity and penetration,” and a great many other things. Admitting that Sterne is “never a model,” he thinks him “always suggestive and stimulating,” and makes the charitable remark that “the element of coarseness in him, _in which he moves so carefully and elegantly_, might have spoilt many others.”

Now this is at first odder than the hyperbole about _Henry IV._, and takes one’s breath away more completely for the moment. One may have a very strong liking for “Atalanta’s better part,” for the lightness, grace, good sense, refreshing qualities of Shandyism, and a very great admiration for Sterne’s genius, especially for the uniqueness, if not exactly the impeccability, of its literary expression. But to make of him, even to the extent to which it is possible to make of his master Rabelais, an author to be turned over by day and night, a _vade mecum_, a great teacher, a literary discoverer and deliverer, the “finest spirit that ever worked”—this is really going rather too far. Yet the point of view is perfectly obvious, and it is equally obvious that it is not a literary point of view at all. Goethe felt severely the Philistinism of his own country, and he had—as most Continentals always have had, and as some dear good Englishmen think it proper still to have—the idea that England was specially dominated by the weaver’s beam. Sterne to him is a David: his jests and pranks are the small stones of the brook, and he thinks of nothing more than of the discomfiture of Goliath.

Yet he could be Philistine enough himself, as where, in _Shakespeare und Keine Ende_, having talked of the universality of Shakespeare[689] more mysteriously and pretentiously, but far less intelligently and forcibly, than Dryden a century and more earlier, he tells us that “Coriolanus is _pervaded throughout_ by the chagrin experienced at the refusal of the mob to recognise the choice of its betters.” In _Julius Cæsar_ “_everything rests on_ the idea that the leaders are averse to seeing the highest place filled, because they wrongly imagine that they can work successfully in co-operation.” _Antony and Cleopatra_ “declares with a thousand tongues [_plus_ a thousand copybook headings?] that idle enjoyment is incompatible with a life of activity.” We have all heard of Goethe as a great and true Apollo, a Philistine-slayer from youth to age. Was there ever more platitudinous and trivial chatter of Ashdod than in these three sentences? And how, again, when we find him, like a seventeenth-century Preceptist, dividing literary motives into Progressive, Retrogressive, Retardative, Retrospective, and Anticipatory, a list which yet once again sets one thinking, with a shameful joy, on possible Rabelaisian developments and parodies of it? Is our own poor Alison, with his Bandit unequally yoked to a Grecian nose[690]—are the poor Le Bossus and Rapins themselves—to be scoffed at, when we find this Jove of Weimar and Germany laying it down that “Christians contending with Christians will not, especially in later times, form a good picture,” but that “Christians conquering Turks” are admissible?

[Sidenote: _Reviews and Notices._]

The very numerous literary reviews and notices which fill nearly two volumes[691] of the Works in the edition we are using must, of course, be read by every one who desires to acquaint himself thoroughly with Goethe’s criticism: but they have not quite the importance which they might be expected to have, and very often, when they are at their best, that best comes to little or nothing more than we find condensed and quintessenced in a maxim of the _Sprüche_ or a sentence of the _Conversations_. This indeed could not be otherwise: for the most “panoramic intellect” (a phrase which Goethe acknowledged with rather sardonic politeness when it was applied to him by some English critic[692]) cannot see, and the most facund tongue cannot say, the same thing differently every time. Even in the earliest there are very neat things, as where[693] poor Sulzer’s _Die Schönen Künste_ is described in the opening sentence of the review as “Very suitable for translation into French: indeed it might very well have been translated _from_ French.” The very latest, such as that on Mérimée’s _La Guzla_,[694] display that combination of fresh interest, impartial judgment, and experienced knowledge which ought to be the reviewer’s equipment, but which unluckily few attain.

[Sidenote: _The_ Conversations.]

On the whole, however, the _Conversations with Eckermann_ are the richest _placer_ of Goethe’s criticism, and the most convenient for the general reader. There appears to be no reason for any exaggerated scruples about admitting them as genuine and trustworthy. Eckermann, no doubt, has some of the irritating qualities which are almost inseparable from the Boswellian temperament: one need not be ashamed of enjoying that characteristic Heinesquery, the regret

“Dass Goethe sei todt, Und Eckermann sei zu Leben.”

But this need not prevent our being thankful that Eckermann remained _zu Leben_ long enough to put these things on record. There is nothing in the least disloyal or disgusting about them: the sternest hater of eavesdropping need not be afraid or ashamed to take up the book. And Eckermann seems to have been very fairly in possession of the two positive and the one negative qualities required by his difficult and rather thankless art—exactness, intelligence up to a certain point, and the absence of the superfluous cleverness which might have tempted him to refine, and touch up, and overlay. Therefore some analysis of the chief critical utterances of the book should find a place here. It must, moreover, always be remembered that Goethe was a man soaked in literature, and that those who read him without having at least dipped in it are apt to make mistakes.[695] Pretty early we have one of those striking generalities which catch mankind, and which—in a sense not unjustly—have earned their author his immense reputation. “Fact must give the motive, the points that require expression the particular kernel; but to make a beautiful enlivened whole, _that_ is the business of the poet.”[696] The practical advice about a certain job of verse[697] is as good as it can be, and as we should expect it to be; to find a better and more _conscious_ craftsman of letters than Goethe, you may take the wings of the morning and put a girdle round the earth in vain. Nor perhaps is much more needed than mere quotation for the three words on the opposite page, _Ach, das Publikum!_ There is a very noteworthy passage[698] on Schiller and his philosophy, and a still more noteworthy one,[699] indeed one of the cardinal places of the whole, on the character of writers, with a context—accidental as far as dates go (for there is a full fortnight between them), but real in thought—on Style.

The classification of his enemies[700] is very interesting and curious, as are, both from the critical and the personal standpoint, the observations[701] on Klopstock and Herder. But what follows[702] immediately, on the contemporarily intimate relations between France and Germany in literature, is more noteworthy still, and so is, especially when we take account of the dates and of other places, Goethe’s dissuasion[703] of Eckermann from undertaking a _compte-rendu_ of German Literature for an English Review. At this very time[704] the _Globe_ was being founded in Paris: and Goethe’s admiration for the _Globe_ was unbounded. J. J. Ampère he knew personally: but the praise which so constantly recurs applies to Sainte-Beuve, Rémusat, and others almost more than to Ampère. In one place later, he expresses his surprise that these young French reviewers did not think it necessary, as the Germans did, to “hate one another” if they differed in opinion.[705] Alas! the disease was not, and is not, confined to Germany: and it certainly did not spare these same contributors to the _Globe_. But their width of range, their comparative spirit, their judicial and yet not pedagogic manner, justly enchanted Goethe. And it was doubtless because he did not, in 1824, think it possible for a reviewer to show them, that he bade Eckermann not “eat the beans” of reviewing.

The passage[706] which naturally and immediately follows on the connection of German and English literature, and the frank avowal of the enormous indebtedness of the former to the latter, is deservedly famous, and certainly shows Goethe most favourably in the light of that combined lamp of intelligence, learning, and character which he himself always liked to turn on his subject. But one does not read with so much satisfaction what follows at a little distance on the sufficiency of translation,[707] a passage at which, I feel sure, all the Muses wept. Scientifically, morally, practically, translation can do much: from the point of view of pure literature, all it can do is to supply something different from the original—good perhaps, bad perhaps, between the two most probably, but never _the_ original. Once more he refers valuably[708] to the great older contemporaries of his youth—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, as well as to Schiller. Always we may apply to Goethe when he speaks of Schiller what Thackeray says so well of Pope[709] when he speaks of Swift. His remarks on Menander in more places than one supply a very curious document, or item of a document, as to his criticism generally, when we reflect in what a fragmentary state the great New Comic has come down to us. Many notable passages on Shakespeare and Molière follow: indeed, the various contexts on Molière should be as carefully looked at and compared as those on Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. They will form, with these, the chief bases of our general estimate of Goethe’s criticism.

The judgment[710] of January 1827 on Hugo is famous and interesting. More favourable than later ones, it shows the critic’s eclecticism, if not quite his catholicity. He saw, and saw rightly, the connection with Chateaubriand: and we must not _now_ be too severe on him for thinking _then_ that Hugo “may be as important as Lamartine and Delavigne.” A less agreeable side of his criticism—one to which we have had, and shall have, to turn and return—is the remark on Flemming,[711] _er kann jetz nicht mehr helfen_. Now Flemming certainly was not a very great poet; he _has_ only “a very pretty talent, rather prosaic and _bourgeois_.” But the “er kann jetz nicht mehr _helfen_” is hard to forgive. It is a point of view which has done harm to many, notably to Mr. Arnold: but that is between the Muses and themselves. What concerns us, is that it is bad in itself. The idea that such and such a writer “won’t _pay_,” that you can’t “get culture” out of him, is the pure Philistinism of culture itself. It is the exact analogue to the theory and practice of “saving your own dirty soul” in religion. What does it matter whether he “helps” or not, if he is good and, in his own little or large measure, delights? This calculus of profit is mighty disgusting and, we may add, mighty dangerous: for it is at the root of much of the bad criticism in the world.

He is in his better mind, and in his own sphere, with the remark[712] that now, fifty years ago, and fifty years hence, it is, was, will be so that what men wrote when they were young will be best enjoyed by young men. And we may note in passing wise and witty things on destructive criticism,[713] on Smollett,[714] on _Lazaret-poesie_,[715] before leaving with a good taste in our mouth, the first and, for literary utterances I think the weightiest, volume of the _Conversations_.

A good example of that common-sense judgment which is perhaps Goethe’s chief claim as a critic is to be found early in vol. ii.,[716] where he speaks of Aristotle as “rash in his opinions.” At first sight this may seem not merely impertinent, but contradictory of the facts: and yet there is much in it. Undoubtedly Aristotle, great as he is, _was_ rash, with the peculiar Greek rashness of imagining that Greek facts were all facts: and this was nowhere more the case than in his literary criticism. We may be less happy—on the same page and the next—with a repetition of Philistinisms against Fouqué and the Middle Ages, about there being “nothing worth our fetching from these dim old German times,” or with an additional mistake (which again has done much harm) about the “miseries” of these said times and the uselessness of adding them to our own. How much better is a fresh application of “the apples of gold and pictures [frames] of silver,” a metaphor of which he was fond, a little later! “Die Frauen,” says he,[717] “sind silberne Schalen in die _wir_ goldene Aepfel legen.” In other words, their worth and their fairness are their fairness and their worth to _our_ imagination, which indeed is the conclusion of the whole matter, not merely in gynæcology. His statement as to Voltaire[718] that “everything which so great a talent writes is good,” is interesting to compare with the direct negative of Joubert. And it may repay anybody if he thinks a little about its connection with a more general and very important statement of Goethe’s, that “in Art and Poetry Personality is everything,”[719] wherewith also it were well to combine his frequent references[720] to his favourite idea of the “dæmonic.” His extreme and repeated[721] admiration of _Daphnis and Chloe_ (undoubtedly a charming thing) is to be noted.

The third volume, giving us[722] Eckermann’s second skimmings of his notes and memories, is, perhaps naturally, less fruitful, but it is far from barren. Another of the audacious and felicitous phrases which have done so much to establish Goethe’s fame is that[723] about Shakespeare’s “unflustered, innocent, _sleepwalkerish_ manner of production”: and the passage on Schlegel[724] is a good combination of magnanimity and veracity. One of the strangest blunders of interpretation ever made by such a man is that by which he makes[725] Macduff’s “He has no children” apply to Macbeth instead of to Malcolm, thereby not only making necessary a clumsy explaining-away of Lady Macbeth’s own words, but spoiling the poetry of the actual passage. In the same context comes the contradiction of himself, that Shakespeare thought mainly of the stage when he wrote.[726] On the other hand, the passage[727] on Burns, Béranger, and the effect on literary talent of an exciting atmosphere of various kinds, from the clash of sentiment and thought in a city like Paris to the inspiration of traditional ballad-literature, is all but consummate in a certain way.

Then read him on the _incommensurableness_ of poetry,[728] and (in a happier vein about Classic and Romantic than that which has been noticed) pronouncing[729] that, for all the fuss (_Lärme_) about the two, “a work that is good all through will be a classic sure enough,” and you may leave him in a state of reconciliation which, in wise persons, will not be disturbed by later utterances on French authors, Guizot, Villemain, Mérimée, Victor Hugo even, though on the latter you may think that he has got at a wrong angle. After all, one may say that Hugo and not Goethe was in that position: for few persons with a critical head now think of the author of _Marion de l’Orme_ as they think of the author of the _Contemplations_ and the _Légende_.

[Sidenote: _Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and Byron._]

To proceed from particulars to mediate generalities, a very instructive light on Goethe’s general critical attitude may be obtained by comparing his expressions in regard to Scott and to Byron.[730] He admires both. But in regard to Scott he justifies his admiration. His analysis to Eckermann[731] of _The Fair Maid of Perth_ is really critical: he points out how good this passage is, how cunningly that episode is worked in, how powerful is that other picture. He praises _Rob Roy_ in the same manner,[732] “going at the jugular,” selecting the truth of detail, the _unendliche Fleiss in den Vorstudien_ (the very thing which shallow critics deny to Scott), and so forth. Now, his eulogies of Byron are quite different. They are nearly all in generals; the most definite passage that I remember, about the wigshops and lamplighters in _Don Juan_, comes from Eckermann’s mouth, not Goethe’s. The great man himself is struck by Byron’s social and political position; he is lost in wonder at Byron’s real or supposed revolt against what he, like others, supposes to have been English Philistinism (the Philistinism of Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding!), and the like. It is never a phrase, a passage, a situation, hardly ever a book[733] that he praises. And I do not know a closer approach to the merely and purely _bête_ in a writer of the greatest literary, and of great critical, genius than the remark[734] that a few lines of _Don Juan_ “poison the whole _Gerusalemme_.” It would be as sensible to say that one stanza of Tasso is an antidote to the whole of _Don Juan_. The two things are “incommensurable,” and severed by a gulf.

[Sidenote: _On the historic and comparative estimate of literature._]

Another remarkable thing about Goethe’s criticism, which might be illustrated from the _Sprüche_, from Eckermann, and from other sources, may again surprise those who have simply adopted the common opinion of him as an apostle of universal culture. Curiously enough, he, the “Doctor Universalis” of nineteenth-century literature, as some would make him, distinctly discourages and disparages that historic study of Comparative Letters which is the distinguishing nineteenth-century principle. His warning to the Germans, that they have most to lose by the introduction of a “world-literature,” is no doubt true enough _ad hoc_ or _ad hos_: and when, close by, he emits the wish, “May the study of Greek and Roman literature remain the basis of the higher Culture,” we can only say “Amen, and Amen” ever-lastingly. But his stigmatisation of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian literatures as _Curiositäten_—useless for moral and æsthetic culture—is very tell-tale: and even the most experienced person may be slightly shocked when he finds Goethe extending this taboo to European-mediæval letters as well.[735]

[Sidenote: _Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism._]

I hope that it is not extravagant to think that this selection of the actual facts of the case, individual and grouped, may serve to base, with some solidity, a judgment of Goethe’s actual position as a critic. For a considerable time, let us say roundly the middle forty years of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870, this position, very mainly owing to the efforts of a large number of great men from Carlyle downwards, was exalted to the very skies: and even more recently it has been rather left alone than seriously attacked. The causes of this— causes which to some extent are true causes and must always operate—may be put shortly as follows. Goethe possessed, to an extraordinary degree, and later perhaps than any one else, that singular _wisdom_ which has been more than once animadverted upon as the property, in the strict sense, of the eighteenth century. He was, for half its length and for nearly two-thirds of his own life, a man of its own: and he never escaped, or wished to escape, entirely from its influence. He was always “in touch” with life and fact: there was “no nonsense about him,” to use an excellent vernacular phrase which, if somewhat double-edged, has a keen and heavily backed edge on the favourable side. There are no “Samothracian mysteries of bottled moonshine” in him; the most apparently dreamy parts of his loftiest and greatest things, such as the second part of _Faust_, are always, like natural and healthy dreams, merely sublimations of actual facts—experienced or capable of being experienced.

But further, and on the other hand, he had, from very early youth, and by the favour of those of “the Mothers” who allow men of great genius to anticipate and combine the gifts which most have only later and separately, a very strong infusion indeed of Romance _and_ of Science— the two apparently opposite characteristics of the century to which his last thirty years belonged. He had hardly a touch of the special stupidity which accompanied the special cleverness of his earlier century—the degeneration of “common-sense.” In him the fashionable and epidemic diseases of the Neo-classic period were neutralised by the appropriate agencies, without any of these turning to the morbid. The comparison of _Goetz_ with _The Robbers_ is an education in pathological criticism. Nobody ever served under two flags with such honour and credit as Goethe; he may even be said to have effected, if not alone, yet mainly, a reconciliation and junction of arms between his two masters. Yet again his almost unique mastery (just glanced at) of the tendencies of the morrow; his sympathy, in his age, and when he was in a way the greatest man of letters in Europe, with the ideas, tastes, aspirations of quite young men—not merely secured, but to no very small extent deserved, the enthusiastic adhesion of these latter. And when we add to these powerful general things his extraordinary literary gifts, the still more extraordinary range of his interests, the Olympian good-nature of his character, and his singular, and almost supra- or infra-human, avoidance of extremes, it ceases to be at all surprising that the position above noted should have seemed to good wits to be his: it may even seem ungracious, pedantic, absurd to take any exceptions to it.

[Sidenote: _Its drawbacks: too much of his age._]

Yet the exceptions must be taken, and, if possible, made good. The greatest of them—at least, according to those general lines which he himself loved and followed—is connected with that peculiarity of his which has been noticed a few lines previously. He is just a little too much of the day and the morrow combined—not enough of yesterdays and to-morrows far behind and far ahead. The least local and temporary of those who are for an age—possessor of the widest “age” perhaps of them all—he is still of that age, and, except in criticisms that are of life rather than of literature, not sufficiently of all time. As we have seen and shown, he cannot duly appreciate the Middle Ages; and the fact that others were over-appreciating them does not excuse him a whit. In his formative precepts he looks too much to what he thought the requirements of actual nineteenth-century literature—a modified Romanticism, not excluding Science. In other words, he keeps time without winding for a longer period than any other clock on record, but he is perhaps rather impossible to wind afresh. On that calculus of his own which we have disallowed and protested against, which we shall shortly disallow and protest against afresh, one might too often say that _he_ cannot “help us any more.” He is not as “rash in his opinions” as he thought Aristotle was, but he is more inadequate; we can nowadays allow for and discard Aristotle’s rashness, and find abundance of the eternal left in him, and we cannot quite do this with Goethe. We must sometimes, with Aristotle, have, and mark, the side-note, “This was a man of the fourth century B.C.”; we must always with Goethe have the other, “This was the cleverest man of 1770-1830.” Take him again with Longinus, and we find that Longinus needs hardly any side-note at all—only here and there in utterances such as that about the _Odyssey_. And I at least think that Coleridge, though he certainly needs it here and there, needs it seldomer, far seldomer, than Goethe.

[Sidenote: _Too much a utilitarian of Culture._]

But there is another count. Goethe, as everybody knows, had a private chapel (which has bred chantries and churches and cathedrals all over the world), with an ephod and teraphim and everything complete, dedicated to the great god, Cham-Chi-Thaungu, otherwise called Culture. It is ill to be joined to any idols: and this was well seen of him. “This cannot help us,” he says constantly; “we cannot fetch any good out of this.” “Such times, such books, such men have nothing to say for us.” Now, such sentences, from the point of view of the really higher criticism, are anathema, because they are _negative_. The corresponding positives are not condemnable at all. If a thing does help any one, if any can fetch good, or delight, out of it, it passes at once—in a low class perhaps, perhaps in a high—but it passes. That it does _not_ help any particular person proves nothing at all. If the work is good, on its own scale and specification, it can afford to wait for the persons whom it will help, to whom it will “give culture.” Its beauty is its sole duty. Indeed “What _is_ culture?” is a question to be asked not at all jestingly, and it will be hard to find the answer.

[Sidenote: _Unduly neglectful of literature as literature._]

Yet once more the specimens given (I believe quite fairly) above entitle us—and all but the most blindly fanatical _Goetheaner_ will find it hard to _dis_entitle us from the observation—to observe in them a constant deflection from strictly literary consideration of things. He likes to consider “poetry” rather than “poesy,” poets rather than poetry; and in poets he is always considering the not strictly poetical qualities. He extols, for instance, in a well-known passage, Byron’s “Keckheit, Kühnheit, Grandiosität.” Now the last, though a somewhat questionable, may be a real, poetical quality: but what is there essentially poetical in _Keckheit_ and _Kühnheit_? The occasion requiring them, it is good that a poet—as that a fox-hunter, a sub-lieutenant left in command of the regiment, a householder facing a fire or a burglar at two o’clock in the morning—should have them: but what is there specially _poetical_ about them? On the contrary, may not a man have them and be, in virtue of having them, a bad, and the worse, poet? Character, conduct, personality (the second construed in a liberal way), these things are what Goethe is always harping on. Now, ten generations of foes and friends have (with the good leave of some friends as well as foes of mine) been able to make out next to nothing at all about Shakespeare’s character, conduct, and personality. Yet most people think that Shakespeare was, let us say, one of the great poets of the world. Shelley’s character was rather weak; his conduct was sometimes disgusting; his personality, though generally amiable, is very vague; and some of us think him the “next poet,” not merely the next English poet, to Shakespeare. We may be wrong: but our case is a case.

Therefore, insolent absurdity as it may seem, I venture to doubt whether Goethe’s criticism is of the absolutely greatest value. We have met with many marks or notes of the true critic in our “journey across Chaos,” and some of them Goethe has. But there are most important ones which he lacks. That he is a great _dramatic_ critic I can very well admit: but his very greatness here, on the principle more than once referred to, makes him a dubious critic of literature. For the Goethe of _Faust_ (not least of the Second Part of it), of the best lyrics, and of some other things, I have, and for a great number of years have had, almost unlimited admiration: for the critical Goethe I feel very much less. That, assisted by natural xenomania, he was a great revelation to Englishmen seventy, eighty, even a hundred years ago, I can very well allow and believe: that he was a valuable populariser of a critical attitude, useful as an alterative to that of Neo-classicism, I know. But I am less sure that there is much in him, as he would himself say, for us now. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, are _creeds_: though the first and second are too succinct and the last too discursive and full of _lacunæ_. I can admit even Scaliger, even Boileau, to be of the calibre of a will-worship. But Goethe, the critical Goethe, has too much the character of a superstition, now rather stale.

[Sidenote: _Schiller._]

Schiller’s critical position, which some have estimated very highly, depends first upon the collection of small æsthetic treatises, and of a few actual reviews, which is included in his prose works;[736] secondly, in his share of the _Xenien_; and thirdly, in the critical utterances of his _Letters_, especially those in the correspondence with Goethe, though by no means neglecting those to others, especially Körner. With regard to the first part of the first division, extraordinary importance has been attached to it by some—importance which a wary person would be slow to accept on trust, when he remembers, not merely the remarks of A. W. Schlegel, a declared unfriend, but those of Goethe, Schiller’s unflinching defender, and those of Novalis, a very competent and apparently quite dispassionate observer.[737] Much, however, will of course depend on the estimation in which “æsthetic salt for putting on the tail of the Ideal”[738] is itself held.

[Sidenote: _His Æsthetic Discourses._]

The very strong inclination of the poet towards the abstract discussion is shown in his “Dissertation on the Connection of the Animal Nature of man with the Spiritual,” written and printed in his twenty-first year: as well as in others nearly as early. And few things of the kind can be more curious than the comparison of the “Briefe über _Don Carlos_” with such other defences of a man’s own work as Dryden’s or Corneille’s.[739] The Discourses on Tragedy,[740] which appeared in the _Thalia_ for 1792, of course have their interest. But Schiller’s most noteworthy exercises in this direction have, I believe, been generally thought to be the æsthetic discourses of the Fourteenth volume[741] and those on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,”[742] and on “The Sublime” in the Fifteenth.

[Sidenote: _The Bürger review._]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The_ Xenien.]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The Correspondence with Goethe._]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The_ Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.]

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

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

[Sidenote: _Others: Bürger._]

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

[Sidenote: _Richter._]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorschule der Æsthetik.]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: _Novalis._]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The_ Heinrich.]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The later._]

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

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

[Sidenote: _His critical magic._]

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

[Sidenote: _Tieck._]

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

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

[Sidenote: _The Schlegels._]

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

[Sidenote: _Their general position and drift._]

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

[Sidenote: _The_ Characteristiken.]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: _On Bürger._]

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: _Their initial and other merit._]

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

[Sidenote: _The Schlegelian position._]

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: _Illustrated still more by Friedrich._]

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: _Uhland._]

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

[Sidenote: _Schubarth._]

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

[Sidenote: _Solger._]

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

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

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

The Periodicals of this time are gradually shaking off the disguises and mannerisms which the _Spectator_ had imposed upon those of our last period. The most important of them, after Lessing’s _Dramaturgie_, are the _Frankfurter Gelehrten-Anzeigen_ of Merck, Herder, and Goethe (1772); the _Teutsche Merkur_ of Wieland, next year; the Berlin _Monatschrift_ (1783); the _Jena Allgemeine Literatur-zeitung_ (1785); Schiller’s _Horen_ (1795), and _Musenalmanach_, next year; the Schlegels’ _Athenæum_ (1798). Of literary historians from Bouterwek to Menzel, Schlosser,[803] and others, the list is almost too long to attempt.