FREDERICK SCHLEGEL.[1]
[Footnote A: 1. Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur von FRIEDRICH
SCHLEGEL. Neue auflage. Berlin, 1842.
2. Lectures on the History of Ancient and Modern Literature, from the German of Frederick Schlegel. New edition. Blackwood: Edinburgh and London, 1841.
3. The Philosophy of History, translated from the German of FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL, with a Memoir of the Author, by JAMES BURTON ROBERTSON, Esq. In two vols. London, 1835. Reprinted in America, 1841.
4. Philosophie des Lebens von FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL. Wien, 1828.]
"I would not have you pin your faith too closely to these SCHLEGELS," said FICHTE one day at Berlin to VARNHAGEN VON ENSE, or one of his friends, in his own peculiar, cutting, commanding style—"I would not have you pin your faith to these Schlegels. I know them well. The elder brother wants depth, and the younger clearness. One good thing they both have—that is, hatred of mediocrity; but they have also both a great jealousy of the highest excellence; and, therefore, where they can neither be great themselves nor deny greatness in others, they, out of sheer desperation, fall into an outrageous strain of eulogizing. Thus they have bepraised Goethe, and thus they have bepraised me."[B]
[Footnote B: Denkwürdigkeiten von K. A. VARNHAGEN VON ENSE. Mannheim, 1837. Vol. ii. p. 60.]
Some people, from pride, don't like to be praised at all; and all sensible people, from propriety, don't like to be praised extravagantly: whether from pride or from propriety, or from a mixture of both, philosopher Fichte seemed to have held in very small account the patronage with which he was favoured at the hands of the twin aesthetical dictators, the Castor and Pollux of romantic criticism; and, strange enough also, poet Goethe, who had worship enough in his day, and is said to have been somewhat fond of the homage, chimes in to the same tune thus: "the Schlegels, with all their fine natural gifts, have been unhappy men their life long, both the one and the other; they wished both to be and do something more than nature had given them capacity for; and accordingly they have been the means of bringing about not a little harm both in art and literature. From their false principles in the fine arts—principles which, however much trumpeted and gospeled about, were in fact egotism united with weakness—our German artists have not yet recovered, and are filling the exhibitions, as we see, with pictures which nobody will buy. Frederick, the younger of these Dioscouri, choked himself at last with the eternal chewing of moral and religious absurdities, which, in his uncomfortable passage through life, he had collected together from all quarters, and was eager to hawk about with the solemn air of a preacher to every body: he accordingly betook himself, as a last refuge, to Catholicism, and drew after him, as a companion to his own views, a man of very fair but falsely overwrought talent—Adam Müller.
"As for their Sanscrit studies again, that was at bottom only a pis aller. They were clear-sighted enough to perceive that neither Greek nor Latin offered any thing brilliant enough for them; they accordingly threw themselves into the far East; and in this direction, unquestionably, the talent of Augustus William manifests itself in the most honourable way. All that, and more, time will show. Schiller never loved them: hated them rather; and I think it peeps out of our correspondence how I did my best, in our Weimar circles at least, to keep this dislike from coming to an open difference. In the great revolution which they actually effected, I had the luck to get off with a whole skin, (sie liessen mich noth dürftig stehen,) to the great annoyance of their romantic brother Novalis, who wished to have me simpliciter deleted. 'Twas a lucky thing for me, in the midst of this critical hubbub, that I was always too busy with myself to take much note of what others were saying about me.
"Schiller had good reason to be angry with them. With their aesthetical denunciations and critical club-law, it was a comparatively cheap matter for them to knock him down in a fashion; but Schiller had no weapons that could prostrate them. He said to me on one occasion, displeased with my universal toleration even for what I did not like. 'KOTZEBUE, with his frivolous fertility, is more respectable in my eyes than that barren generation, who, though always limping themselves, are never content with bawling out to those who have legs—STOP!'"[C]