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”[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.
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!