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Although Heine had become a very altered person at the time of writing his Romantic School , this book throws a scintillating illumination upon certain sides of Schlegel's temperament, and offers a vivid impression of his living personality.
When all discount has been made on the side of a lack of specific gravity in Wilhelm Schlegel's character, it is only just to assert that throughout his long and prolific life he wrought with incalculable effect upon the civilization of modern Europe as a humanizer of the first importance.
To us in Britain it may suffice to have essayed to exhibit the fruit and the final results, without attempting curiously to dissect the growth of Schlegel's criticism. Whatever we take from a different source will be distinctly noted. The brothers Schlegel belonged to what Frederick in his lectures calls the third generation of modern German literature.
The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His "Odyssey" , his "Iliad" , and his "Luise" , were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse.
Have you read Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," and Schlegel's "Translations of Shakspeare"? People have so much leisure in the country, that perhaps you would like me to send you these works? It happens that I have an acquaintance in your neighborhood; so perhaps you may see me some morning early for half an hour, after which I must be off again.
Kendal had read aloud to his wife in the evening during the stay at the sea-side, and she was anxious not to let the habit drop. He liked it, and read beautifully, and she thought it good for the children. She therefore begged him to read, catching him on the way to his study, and coaxing him to stay no longer than to find a book. He brought Schlegel's Philosophy of History.
As Romanticist, it was Schlegel's office to portray the independent development of the modern English stage, and to defend Shakespeare against the familiar accusations of barbaric crudity and formlessness.
Wilhelm Schlegel married a divorced woman who was destined in due time to transfer herself without legal formalities to Schelling. Goethe had set the example by his conscience marriage with Christiane Vulpius. It remains only to be said that the most of Friedrich Schlegel's intimates, including his brother Wilhelm, advised against the publication of Lucinda.
Friedrich Schlegel's philosophy of life was based upon the theory of supremacy of the artist, the potency of poetry, with its incidental corollaries of disregard for the Kantian ideal of Duty, and aversion to all Puritanism and Protestantism.
In 1808 Frederick Schlegel's work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, first 'boldly faced the facts and conclusions of Sanscrit scholarship, and became, with all its faults, the 'foundation for the science of language. Its great result may be given in one sentence it embraced at a glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Northern Europe, and riveted them by the simple name 'Indo-Germanic. Then in this school, begun by English industry and shaped by German genius, came Franz Bopp, with his great comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic tongues, and the enormous labors of Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, and W. von Humboldt a man to whose incredible ability of every kind, as to his secret diplomatic influence, history has never done justice.
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