It was in opposition to this literature that there sprang up in Germany, at the end of the last century, a school which we call the Romantic, and of which August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel have presented themselves as managing agents.  Jena, where these and many other souls in like accord found themselves “off and on,” was the centre from which the new esthetic doctrine spread.  I say doctrine, for this school began with judgments of the art-works of the past and recipes for art-works of the future, and in both directions the Schlegel school rendered great service to esthetic criticism.  By judging of such works of art as already existed, either their faults and failures were indicated, or their merits and beauties brought to light.  In controversy and in indicating artistic shortcomings, the Schlegels were entirely imitators of old Lessing; they obtained possession of his great battle-blade, but the arm of August William Schlegel was too tenderly weak and the eyes of his brother Friedrich too mystically clouded for the former to strike so strongly and the latter so keenly and accurately as Lessing.  True, in descriptive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art are to be set forth—­where it came to a delicate detection of its characteristics and bringing them home to our intelligence—­then, compared to the Schlegels, old Lessing was nowhere.  But what shall I say as to their recipes for preparing works of art?  There we find in the Schlegels a weakness which we think may also be detected in Lessing; for the latter is as weak in affirming as he is strong in denying.  He rarely succeeds in laying down a fundamental principle, still more seldom a correct one.  He wants the firm basis of a philosophy or of a philosophical system.  And this is still more sadly the case with the brothers Schlegel.

Much is fabled as to the influence of Fichtean Idealism and Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature on the Romantic school, which is even declared to have sprung from it.  But I see here, at the most, only the influence of certain fragments of thoughts from Fichte and Schelling, and not at all that of a philosophy.  This may be explained on the simple ground that Fichte’s philosophy had lost its hold, and Fichte himself had made it lose its interest by a mingling of tenets and ideas from Schelling; and because, on the other hand, Schelling had never set forth a philosophy, but only a vague philosophizing, an unsteady, vacillating improvisation of poetical philosophemes.  It may be that it was from the Fichtean Idealism—­that deeply ironical system, where the I is opposed to the not—­I and annihilates it—­that the Romantic school took the doctrine of irony which the late Solger especially developed, and which the Schlegels at first regarded as the soul of art, but which they subsequently found to be fruitless and exchanged for the more positive axioms of the Theory of Identity of Schelling.  Schelling, who then taught in Jena, had indeed a great personal influence on the Romantic school; he is, what is not generally known in France, also a bit of a poet; and it is said that he was in doubt whether he should not deliver all his philosophical doctrines in a poetic or even metrical form.  This doubt characterizes the man.