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]]
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.
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.
The so-called “Romantic School.”