removal to Berlin and his establishment of the Athenaeum.  Although separated from his brother, Wilhelm’s part in the conduct of the journal was almost as important as Friedrich’s, and, in effect, they conducted the whole significant enterprise out of their own resources.  The opening essay, The Languages, is Wilhelm’s, and properly, for at this time he was by far the better versed in philological and literary matters.  His cultural acquisitions, his tremendous spoils of reading, were greater, and his judgment more trustworthy.  In all his work in the Athenaeum he presents a seasoned, many-sided sense of all poetical, phonetic and musical values:  rhythm, color, tone, the lightest breath and aroma of an elusive work of art.  One feels that Wilhelm overhauls the whole business of criticism, and clears the field for coming literary ideals.  Especially telling is his demolition of Klopstock’s violent “Northernism,” to which he opposes a far wider philosophy of grammar and style.  The universality of poetry, as contrasted with a narrow “German” clumsiness, is blandly defended, and a joyous abandon is urged as something better than the meticulous anxiety of chauvinistic partisanism.  In all his many criticisms of literature there are charm, wit, and elegance, an individuality and freedom in the reviewer, who, if less penetrating than his brother, displays a far more genial breadth and humanity, and more secure composure.  His translations, more masterly than those of Friedrich, carry out Herder’s demand for complete absorption and re-creation.

In 1801 Schlegel went to Berlin, where for three successive winters he lectured on art and literature.  His subsequent translations of Calderon’s plays (1803-1809) and of Romance lyrics served to naturalize a large treasure of southern poetry upon German soil.  In 1804, after having separated from his wife, he became attached to the household of Madame de Stael, and traversed Europe with her.  It is through this association that she was enabled to write her brilliant work, On Germany.  In 1808 he delivered a series of lectures on dramatic art and literature in Vienna, which enjoyed enormous popularity, and are still reckoned the crowning achievement of his career; perhaps the most significant of these is his discourse on Shakespeare.  In the first volume of the Athenaeum, Shakespeare’s universality had already been regarded as “the central point of romantic art.”  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.  In surveying the field, it was likewise incumbent upon him to demonstrate in what respects the classic drama differed from the independently developed modern play, and his still useful generalization regards antique art as limited, clear, simple, and perfected—­as typified by a work of sculpture; whereas romantic art delights in mingling its subjects—­as a painting, which embraces many objects and looks out into the widest vistas.  Apart from the clarity and smoothness of these Vienna discourses, their lasting merit lies in their searching observation of the import of dramatic works from their inner soul, and in a most discriminating sense of the relation of all their parts to an organic whole.