and “Essays” of the Wartons are mere dilettantism.  To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philology and comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and the brothers Grimm.  Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitan lines which German literary scholarship was to follow, with German thoroughness and independence.  And Heine acknowledges that “in reproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to be brought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities was required; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegels were far superior to Lessing.”  The one point at which the English movement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour and fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which the romantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart.

The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated to the English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel’s “Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur.” [21] Heine denounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure to comprehend the modern mind.  “When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poet Buerger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy collection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more naive, more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . .  But death is not more poetical than life.  The old English ballads of the Percy collection exhale the spirit of their age, and Buerger’s ballads breathe the spirit of our time.  The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . .  What increased Schlegel’s reputation still more was the sensation which he excited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of the French, . . . showed the French that their whole classical literature was worthless, that Moliere was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of the world, and that there is no poetry in France.”  It is well known that Coleridge detested the French, as “a light but cruel race”, that he undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the language.  The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess of Teutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism.

The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied by their disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the “Maehrchen,” or popular traditionary tale, his peculiar province.  It was Wackenroder who first drew his attention to “those old, poorly printed Volksbuecher, with their coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among the peasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of the Leipzig fairs.” [22] Tieck’s volume of “Volksmaehrchen” (1797) gave reproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the “Haimonskinder,” the “Schoene Magelone,” “Tannhaeuser,” and the “Schildbuerger.”  His “Phantasus” (1812) contained original tales conceived in the same spirit.  Scherer says that Tieck uttered the manifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overture of his “Kaiser Octavianus”: