The first number of the Athenaeum contained the manifesto of the new school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie.  The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic art is announced to be:  beauty for beauty’s sake, the union of poetry and life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself.  “Romantic poetry,” says Schlegel—­“and, in a certain sense, all poetry ought to be romantic—­should, in representing outward objects, also represent itself.”  There is nothing here to indicate the precise line which German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejection of authority, the same assertion of the right of original genius to break a path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the “Lyrical Ballads,” by Keats in “Sleep and Poetry,” and by Victor Hugo in the preface to “Cromwell.”

A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was in its thoroughgoing character.  It is the disposition of the German mind to synthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice.  Each of those imposing systems of philosophy, Kant’s, Fichte’s, Schelling’s, Hegel’s, has its own aesthetik as well as its own ethik.  It seeks to interpret all human activities from a central principle; to apply its highest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts, and society.  The English mind is practical rather than theoretical.  It is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike the logical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at all hazards; and the German habit of system-building.  The Englishman has no system, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency.  It is quite possible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, without wishing to restore them as an actual state of society.  It is hard for an Englishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or how Schelling’s transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, and Hegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism.  “Tragedies and romances,” wrote Mme. de Stael, “have more importance in Germany than in any other country.  They take them seriously there; and to read such and such a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny and the life.  What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into real life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an even greater empire over the Germans than nature and the passions.”  In proof of this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide in consequence of reading “Werther”; or took to highway robbery in emulation of “Die Raeuber.”