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"Wir sehen jetzt durch einen Spiegel 'n einem dunkeln Worte, daun aber von Angesicht zu Angesicht."

August. Mamles

Fug for the New Englander by D.C.Hmman

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THE

NEW ENGLANDER.

No. VI.

APRIL, 1844.

A MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS WILLIAM SCHLEGEL.*

Nun ist der Vorzeit hohe Kraft zerronnen,
Man wagt es, sie der Barbarey zu zeihen.
Sie haben enge Weisheit sich ersonnen,
Was Ohnmacht nicht begreift, sind Treumereyen.

Or that numerous and eminent literary family, of which Lessing was the first-born, and Göthe the chief, and which, at the close of the last century and the commencement of the present, shed such glory over Germany, there now remain but three members: an aged philosopher, Schelling; an aged poet, Tieck; an aged critic, a poet also, but more particularly a critic, Augustus William Schlegel.

If you visit Germany, and, passing through the pleasant city of Bonn, inquire concerning the curiosities which it contains, you will certainly be shown a small, elegant old man, in a light peruke, who bears well the weight of seventy five winters, and who is there closing, amid profound silence, a career commenced and pursued amid great noise.

It must be a sad thing to survive

our age, to see the ideas which we have promulgated with difficulty, and for which we have contended

* From the "Galerie des Contemporains Illustres, 45e livraison, 1842. Vol. II. 24

Schlegel. (1803.)

with renown, become in part common-places, after having been bold paradoxes, and circulate peacefully among a new generation, which takes from them whatever suits it, which glories in what it takes, as if it were its own creation, and which, in its joy at running without restraint, in a field more vast than that of its predecessors, forgets to turn back and thank those who opened the path.

Here is a man whom perhaps half of our readers know only by name, a man whom Germany itself seems to have forgotten; and yet, if all that modern literature, which has long been distinguished by the epithet romantic,* were grateful, it

*It may not be useless to remark here, that this word, romantic, brought from Germany and so often perverted among us, was originally only a simple generic term, applied by the German critics to all the literary or artistic works, produced

since the introduction of Christianity, and independent of Greek and Roman tradi tion, in opposition to the epithet classic, which they applied to antique art, or imitations of the antique.

would erect statues to Schlegel; for he was, after Lessing, its first, its most vigorous and most illustrious champion.

The great literary epoch of Germany was the result, we know, of a reaction of the German mind from the French mind. The splendors of the reign of Louis Fourteenth had dazzled Europe. The language, ideas, manners, tastes, fashions, and books of France, overran all nations. Even those, which, like England and Spain, already possessed a completely formed in digenous literature, cast it aside and vied with each other in French imitation.

Germany was, at that time, in point of intellectual culture, far behind the other western nations. Absorbed, at the close of the middle ages, by religious dissensions; ruined, ravaged, and above all, denationalized by the thirty years' war, it had been unable to develope the precious germ, deposited in the songs of its Minnesingers and Mastersingers; and native genius had languished, stifled under a gross confusion of languages and manners, borrowed from all the nations who had trodden the German soil. "At this time," says Menzel, "they dressed in the Dutch style, ate in the Swedish, romanced in the Spanish, swore in the Hungarian and Turkish, and the most eloquent discourse was that which contained the greatest number of foreign ingredients." From this chaos, a few learned Protestants, unable to found a national literature, withdrew in solitude to the philological and barren study of the ancients.

In this condition was Germany, when the French mind, which, since the revival of letters, had removed each day farther from the German element, to turn towards the GrecoLatin element, and which, while advancing rapidly in this path, had arrived at the highest point of its culture, penetrated the higher class

es, and experienced no difficulty in replacing all other influences by its own. The Gallomania then became general. During nearly a century, Germany drank to satiety of a second-hand literature-a literature insipid, without originality, without color, without genius. The reaction commenced towards the middle of the eighteenth century: some, considering the French literature itself as a false copy, undertook to go back to the original source and place themselves in direct communication with the Greek genius; others declared for the productions of the English genius, as more conformable to the German: in short, Germany, still destitute of an indigenous literature, was fluctuating between translations and imitations, when there suddenly arose a kind of literary Arminius, Ephraim Lessing, with a mind enlarged, acute and vigorous, formed for controversy, who, while acknowledging his preference for the English school, contended against all foreign invasions, cleared the ground and prepared the triumphal path, through which a brilliant and varied train of original poets and prose writers soon defiled. Nev ertheless, in his zeal for destruction, in his furious sallies against the French literature of the grand age, Lessing, exclusively pre-occupied by negative criticism, accomplished only half his task; the other half was reserved for his immediate suc. cessors, the two brothers Schlegel, and especially, in whatever relates to dramatic literature, for him who is the subject of this memoir.

It was W. Schlegel, who first, agitating effectually the great ques tion of liberty in art, and discussing, from a point of view much more elevated than that of La Mothe, the famous dramatic legislation attribu ted to Aristotle,* traced with a bold

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