[Footnote C: Briefwechse Zwischen GOETHE und ZELTER. Berlin, 1834. Vol. vi. p. 318.]
That there is some truth in these severe remarks, the paltry personal squibs in the Leipzig Almanach for 1832, which called them forth, with regard to Augustus Schlegel at least, sufficiently show: but there is a general truth involved in them also, which the worthy fraternity of us who, in this paper age, wield the critical pen, would do well to take seriously to heart; and it is this, that great poets and philosophers have a natural aversion as much to be praised and patronized, as to be rated and railed at by great critics; and very justly so. For as a priest is a profane person, who makes use of his sacred office mainly to show his gods about, (so to speak,) that people may stare at them, and worship him; so a critic who forgets his inferior position in reference to creative genius, so far as to assume the air of legislation and dictatorship, when explanation and commentary are the utmost he can achieve, has himself only to blame, if, after his noisy trumpet has blared itself out, he reaps only ridicule from the really witty, and reproof from the substantially wise. Not that a true philosopher or poet shrinks from, and does not rather invite, true criticism. The evil is not in the deed, but in the manner of doing it. Here, as in all moral matters, the tone of the thing is the soul of the thing. And in this view, the blame which Fichte and Goethe attach to the Schlegels, amounts substantially to this, not that in their critical vocation the romantic brothers wanted either learning or judgment generally, but that they were too ambitious, too pretenceful, too dictatorial that they must needs talk on all subjects, and always as if they were the masters and the lions, when they were only the servants and the exhibitors; that they made a serious business of that which is often best done when it is done accidentally, viz. discussing what our neighbours are about, instead of doing something ourselves; and that they attempted to raise up an independent literary reputation, nay, and even to found a new poetical school, upon mere criticism—an attempt which, with all due respect for Aristarchus and the Alexandrians, is, and remains, a literary impossibility.
But was Frederick Schlegel merely a critic? No He was a philosopher also, and not a vulgar one; and herein lies the foundation of his fame. His criticism, also, was thoroughly and characteristically a philosophical criticism; and herein mainly, along with its vastness of erudition and comprehensiveness of view, lies the foundation of its fame. To understand the criticism thoroughly, one must first understand the philosophy. Will the _un_philosophical English reader have patience with us for a few minutes while we endeavour to throw off a short sketch of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel? If the philosophical system of a transcendental German and Viennese Romanist, can have small intrinsic practical value to a British Protestant, it may extrinsically be of use even to him as putting into his hands the key to one of the most intellectual, useful, an popular books of modern times—"The history of ancient and modern literature, by Frederick Von Schlegel,"—a book, moreover, which is not merely "a great national possession of the Germans," as by one of themselves it has been proudly designated, but has also, through the classical translation of Mr Lockhart,[D] been made the peculiar property of English literature.
[Footnote D: Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern.
Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1841.]
In the first chapter of his "Philosophie des Lebens," the Viennese lecturer states very clearly the catholic and comprehensive ground which all philosophy must take that would save itself from dangerous error. The philosopher must start from the complete living totality of man, formed as he is, not of flesh merely, a Falstaff—or of spirit merely, a Simon Pillarman and Total Abstinence Saint—but of both flesh and spirit, body and soul, in his healthy and normal condition. For this reason clearly—true philosophy is not merely sense-derived and material like the French philosophy of Helvetius, nor altogether ideal like that of Plotinus, and the pious old mathematical visionaries at Alexandria; but it stands on mother earth, like old Antaeus drinking strength therefrom, and filches fire at the same time, Prometheus-like, from heaven, feeding men with hopes—not, as Aeschylus says, altogether "blind," ([Greek: tuphlas d eu autois elôidas katôkioa)] but only blinking. Don't court, therefore, if you would philosophize wisely, too intimate an acquaintance with your brute brother, the baboon—a creature, whose nature speculative naturalists have most cunningly set forth by the theory, that it is a parody which the devil, in a fit of ill humour, made upon God's noblest work, man; and don't hope, on the other hand, as many great saints and sages have done, by prayer and fasting, or by study and meditation, to work yourself up to a god, and jump bodily out of your human skin. Assume as the first postulate, and lay it down as the last proposition of your "philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a very comprehensive and complex, but also, (to appearance at least,) in many points, a very contrary and contradictory creature, see that you take the whole man along with you into your metaphysical chamber; for if there be one paper that has a bearing in the case amissing out of your green bag, (which has happened only too often,) the evidence will be imperfect, and the sentence false or partial—shake your wig as you please. Remember, that though you may be a very subtle logician, the soul of man is not all made up of logic; remember that reason, (Vernunft,) the purest that Kant ever criticized withal, is not the proper vital soul in man; is not the creative and productive faculty in intellect at all, but is merely the tool of that which, in philosophers no less than in poets, is the proper inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth phrases it: Schlegel's word is fantasie. Remember that in more cases than academic dignities may be willing to admit, the heart (where a man has one) is the only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the head; and that a mere metaphysician, and solitary speculator, however properly trimmed,
"One to whose smooth-rubb'd soul can cling
Nor form nor feeling, great nor small;
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all-in-all,"
may write very famous books, profound even to unintelligibility, but can never be a philosopher. Therefore reject Hegel, "that merely thinking, on a barren heath speculating, self-sufficient, self-satisfied little EGO;"[E] and consider Kant as weighed in the balance and found wanting on his own showing: for if that critical portal of pure reason had indeed been sufficient, as it gave itself out to be, for all the purposes of a human philosophy, what need was there of the "practical back-door" which, at the categorical command of conscience, was afterwards laid open to all men in the "Metaphysic of Ethics?" As little will you allow your philosophical need to be satisfied with any thing you can get from SCHELLING; for however well it sounds to "throw yourself from the transcendental emptiness of ideal reason into the warm embrace of living and luxuriant nature," here also you will find yourself haunted by the intellectual phantom of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or in its best phasis a "pantheizing deification of nature." Strange enough as it may seem, the true philosophy is to be found any where rather than among philosophers. Each philosopher builds up a reasoned system of a part of existence; but life is based upon God-given instincts and emotions, with which reason has nothing to do; and nature contains many things which it is not given to mortal brain to comprehend, much less to systematize. True philosophy is not to be found in any intellectual system, much less in any of the Aristotelian quality, where the emotional element in man is excluded or subordinated; but in a living experience. To know philosophy, therefore, first know life. To learn to philosophize, learn to live; and live not partially, but with the full outspread vitality of human reason. You go to college, and, as if you were made altogether of head, expect some Peter Abelard forthwith, by academic disputation, to reason you into manhood; but neither manhood nor any vital WHOLE ever was learned by reasoning. Pray, therefore, to the Author of all good, in the first place, that you may be something rather than that you may know something. Get yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life, which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of void brought fulness, and out of chaos a world.
[Footnote E: This is Menzel's phrase, not Schlegel's. "Hegel's centrum war ein blos denkendes, auf öder Heide spekulirendes, kleines, suffisantes, selbstgenügsames Ichlein." The untranslatable beauty of the German is in the diminutive with which the sentence closes. It is difficult to say whether Menzel or Schlegel shows the greater hostility to the poor Berlin philosopher.]
Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the main scope, popularly stated, of Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his two first lectures on the philosophy of life, the first being titled, "Of the thinking soul, or the central point of consciousness;" and the second, "Of the loving soul, or the central point of moral life." The healthy-toned reader, who has been exercised in speculations of this kind, will feel at once that there is much that is noble in all this, and much that is true; but not a little also, when examined in detail, of that sublime-sounding sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,) which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "The younger brother wants clearness;" much that, when applied to practice, and consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and Popery, and what Goethe in German called a "chewing the cud of moral and religious absurdities." But we have neither space nor inclination, in this place, to make an analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set forth how much of it is true and how much of it is false. Our intention was merely to sketch a rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish which outline without extraneous remark, with the reader's permission, we now proceed.
If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zôon logikon] in his highest faculty, a ratiocinative, but rather an emotional and imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God, on whose existence alone humanity can confidently repose—who alone can give to the trembling arch of human speculation that keystone which it demands. The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that individual reason has first to strike out, so to speak, by the collision or combination of ideas, the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation of arguments. It is a living growth rather of our whole nature, a primary instinct of all moral beings, a necessary postulate of healthy humanity, which is given and received as our life and our breath is, and admits not of being reasoned into any soul that has it not already from other sources. And as no philosopher of Greek or German times that history tells of, ever succeeded yet in inventing a satisfactory theology, or establishing a religion in which men could find solace to their souls, therefore it is clear that that satisfactory Christian theology and Christian religion which we have, and not only that, but all the glimpses of great theological truth that are found twinkling through the darkness of a widespread superstition, came originally from God by common revelation, and not from man by private reasoning. The knowledge of God and a living theology is, in fact, a simple science of experience like any other, only of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower, on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation; while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul not reasoned into it—this is the gravitating point of the moral world, the only intelligible centre of any world; from which whatsoever is centrifugal errs, and to which whatsoever is opposed is the devil.