Such a journal as the Athenaeum, with its over-emphasis on the esthetic, with its fighting spirit, its excoriating, inexorable wit, its constructive and destructive criticism, its complete and total silence on Schiller, would have been an impossibility in the later period.  The feeling for and thinking in Fragments, as practised by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, was foreign to the new school.  They had no illusions that such thinking would become the daily custom of the people; they kept their eyes open to that which went on about them, and though they no more dared than the earlier group to work directly upon the political conditions of the day as did Goerres later (1814) in his Rheinischer Merkur, they attempted indirectly to react on the broad mass by branching out into religion and other folk-interests as the earlier school never cared to do.  Perhaps this is an excuse for the shallowness of some of the product, especially of the fiction; at any rate, the attempt at dissemination was not without its success.

The external link connecting the two schools as well as the Romantic groups in general and the object of their star-worship, Goethe, was Clemens Maria Brentano (1778-1842), in many ways the most typical Romantic figure of either school.  Brentano’s grandmother, Sophie La Roche, had been the friend of Wieland; his mother, Maximiliane, played a not unimportant role in the life of the young Goethe and is immortalized in the latter part of Werther.  Maximiliane married Brentano, an Italian from the Como region, and Clemens was the third child of this loveless union.  Brentano’s early life was not happy; he was destined for a business career but was a failure in it, and then studied at various universities but with no great application or success.  From 1797-1800 he was at Jena, where he succeeded in making himself hated by the Schlegels in spite of his defense of them in his satirical play, Gustav Wasa (1800).  This play, in the manner of Tieck’s Puss in Boots, attempts to ridicule Kotzebue.  The method is the same as Tieck’s:  there is the play within the play, the gagged officer (to take the place of the critic Boettger), the puns, of which, perhaps, the one on Lucinde (Lux inde) is the best, and which, as often in Brentano, go beyond and surpass Tieck.  Romantic irony flourishes:  the whole world of the theatre, the author, the very lights, the building, the working day and the musical instruments in the orchestra are dramatized in turn.  The dialogue of the latter far more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. Wasa, unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be compared with August von Schlegel’s Gate of Honor as a satire on the same subject.