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”!
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.
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 “unhübsches 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.