In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution and kept strictly within the domain of art.  Scott’s political conservatism was indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory.  And as to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in 1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in his behalf against the Hanoverian king.  Coleridge’s reactionary politics had nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be going too far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time in the English church and constitution may have had its root in the same temper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like “Christabel” and “The Dark Ladye.”  But in Germany “throne and altar” became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined the Catholic Church, and the new literature rallied to the side of aristocracy and privilege.

A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English is partly implied in what has been said above.  In Germany the romantic revival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development which influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time.  Hence the mysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, and particularly in the writings of Novalis.  Novalis was a disciple of Schelling, and Schelling the continuator of Fichte.  Fichte’s “Wissenschaftslehre” (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of the German romantic school.  The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom of the actual world; the right of the Ego to assert itself fully; the principle formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that “the caprice of the poet knows no law”; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte’s objective idealism.[8] It is needless to say that, while romantic art usually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of this philosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists.  If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the mediator between German and English thought.  But Coleridge’s poetry was mainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with the systems of Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his speculative activity increased, his creative force declined.  There is enough of the marvellous and the unexplained in “Christabel,” and “The Ancient Mariner”; but the “mystic ruby” and the “blue flower” of the Teutonic symbolists are not there.