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.

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.

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. 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.