Chapter 9

Such is a general outline of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel--a philosophy belonging to the class theological and supernatural, to the genus Christian, to the species sacerdotal and Popish. Now, without stopping here to blame its sublime generalities and beautiful confusions, on the one hand, or to praise its elevated tendency, its catholic and reconciling tone on the other, we shall merely call attention, in a single sentence, physiologically, to its main and distinguishing character. It was, in fact, (in spirit and tendency, though not in outward accomplishment,) to German literature twenty years ago what Puseyism is now to the English church--it was a bold and grand attempt to get rid of those vexing doubts and disputes on the most important subjects that will ever disquiet minds of a certain constitution, so long as they have nothing to lean on but their own judgment; and as Protestantism, when consistently carried out, summarily throws a man back on his individual opinion, and subjects the vastest and most momentous questions to the scrutiny of reason and the torture of doubt, therefore Schlegel in literary Germany, and Pusey in ecclesiastical England, were equally forced, if they would not lose Christianity altogether, to renounce Protestantism, and to base their philosophy upon sacerdotal authority and ecclesiastical tradition. That Schlegel became a Romanist at Cologne, and Dr Pusey an Anglo-Catholic at Oxford, does not affect the kinship. Both, to escape from the anarchy of Protestant individualism, (as it was felt by them,) were obliged to assert not merely Christianity, but a hierarchy--not merely the Bible, but an authoritative interpretation of the Bible; and both found, or seemed to find, that authoritative interpretation and exorcism of doubt there, where alone in their circumstances, and intellectually constituted as they were, it was to be found. Dr Pusey did not become a Papist like Frederick Schlegel, for two plain reasons--first, because he was an Englishman, second, because he was an English churchman. The authority which he sought for lay at his door; why should he travel to Rome for it? Archbishop Laud had taught apostolical succession before--Dr Pusey might teach it again. But this convenient prop of Popery without the Pope was not prepared for Frederick Schlegel. There was no Episcopal church, no Oxford in Germany, into whose bosom he could throw himself, and find relief from the agony of religious doubt. He was a German, moreover, and a philosopher. To his searching eye and circumspective wariness, the general basis of tradition which might satisfy a Pusey, though sufficiently broad, did not appear sure enough. To his lofty architectural imagination a hierarchical aristocracy, untopped by a hierarchical monarch, did not appear sufficiently sublime. To his all-comprehending and all-combining historical sympathies, a Christian priesthood, with Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, but without Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface, would have presented the appearance of a fair landscape, with a black yawning chasm in the middle, into which whoever looked shuddered. Therefore Frederick Schlegel, spurning all half measures, inglorious compromises, and vain attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, vaulted himself at once, with a bold leap, into the central point of sacerdotal Christianity. The obstacles that would have deterred ordinary minds had no effect on him. All points of detail were sunk in the over-whelming importance of the general question. Transubstantiation or consubstantiation, conception, maculate or immaculate, were a matter of small moment with him. What he wanted was a divinely commissioned church with sacred mysteries--a spiritual house of refuge from the weary battle of intellectual east winds, blasting and barren, with which he saw Protestant Germany desolated. This house of refuge he found in Cologne, in Vienna; and having once made up his mind that spiritual unity and peace were to be found only in the one mother church of Christendom, not being one of those half characters who, "making _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_," are continually weaving a net of paltry external _no's_ to entangle the progress of every grand decided _yes_ of the inner man, Schlegel did not for a moment hesitate to make his thought a deed, and publicly profess his return to Romanism in the face of enlightened and "ultra-Protestant" Germany. To do this certainly required some moral courage; and no just judge of human actions will refuse to sympathize with the motive of this one, however little he may feel himself at liberty to agree with the result.

But Frederick Schlegel, a well informed writer has said,[F] "became Romanist in a way peculiar to himself, and had in no sense given up his right of private judgment." We have not been able to see, from a careful perusal of his works, (in all of which there is more or less of theology,) that there is any foundation for this assertion of Varnhagen. Frederick Schlegel, the German, was as honest and stout a Romanist in this nineteenth century as any Spanish Ferdinand Catholicus in the fifteenth. Freedom of speculation indeed, within certain known limits, and spirituality of creed above what the meagre charity of some Protestants may conceive possible in a Papist, we do find in this man; but these good qualities a St Bernard, a Dante, a Savonarola, a Fénélon, had exhibited in the Romish Church before Schlegel, and others as great may exhibit them again. Freedom of thought, however, in the sense in which it is understood by Protestants, was the very thing which Schlegel, Göres, Adam Müller, and so many others, did give up when they entered the Catholic Church. They felt as Wordsworth did when he wrote his beautiful ode to "Duty;" they had more liberty than they knew how to use--

"Me this uncharter'd freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires; My hopes no more must change their name-- I long for a repose that ever is the same."

And if it seem strange to any one that Frederick Schlegel, the learned, the profound, the comprehensive, should believe in Transubstantiation,[G] let him look at a broader aspect of history than that of German books, and ask himself--Did Isabella of Castile--the gentle, the noble, the generous--establish the Inquisition, or allow Ximenes to establish it? In a world which surrounds us on all sides with apparent contradictions, he who admits a real one now and then into his faith, or into his practice, is neither a fool nor a monster.

[Footnote F: Varnhagen Von Ense, Rahel's Umgang, i. p. 227. "Er war auf besondere Weise Katholisch, und hatte seine Geistesfreiheit dabei gar nicht aufgegeben."]

[Footnote G: The following is Schlegel's philosophy of transubstantiation--"Though it be true, that in the Holy Scriptures, in accordance with the symbolical nature of man, there is much that is generally symbolical, and symbolically to be understood; yet when a symbol proceeds immediately from God, it can in this case be nothing less than substantial; it cannot be a mere sign, it must also be something actual; otherwise it would be as if one would palm on the eternal LOGOS, who is the ground of all existence and all knowledge, words without meaning and without power. Quite natural, therefore, it must be regarded, i.e. quite suitable to the nature of the thing, although _per se_ certainly supernatural, and surpassing all comprehension, when that highest symbol which forms the proper principle of unity, and the living central point of Christianity, is perceived to possess this character, that it is at once the sign and the thing signified. For now, that on the high altar of divine love the one great sacrifice has been accomplished for ever, and no flame more can rise from it save the inspiration of a pure God-united will, that solemn act by which the bond formed between the soul and God is from time to time revealed, can consist in nothing else than this--that here the essential substance of the divine power and the divine love is in all its lively fullness communicated to, and received by man, as the miraculous sign of his union with God."--_Philosophie des Lebene_, p. 376. On the logic of this remarkable passage, those who are strong in Mill and Whately may decide; its orthodoxy belongs to the consideration of the Tridentine doctors.]

In his political opinions, Schlegel maintained the same grand consistency that characterizes his religious philosophy. He had more sense, however, and more of the spirit of Christian fraternity in him than, for the sake of absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, from some passages in the _Concordia_--a political journal, published by him and his friend Adam Müller, in 1820, and quoted by Mr Robertson--it would almost appear that he would have preferred a monarchy limited by states, conceived in the spirit of the middle ages, to the almost absolute form of monarchical government, under whose protection he lived and lectured at Vienna. To some such constitution as that which now exists in Sweden, for instance, we think he would have had no objections. At the same time, it is certain he gave great offence to the constitutional party in Germany, by the anti-popular tone of his writings generally, more perhaps than by any special absolutist abuses which he had publicly patronized. He was, indeed, a decided enemy to the modern system of representative constitutions, and popular checks; a king by divine right according to the idea of our English nonjurors, was as necessary a corner-stone to his political, as a pope by apostolical succession to his ecclesiastical edifice. And as no confessed corruption of the church, represented as it might be by the monstrous brutality of a Borgia, or the military madness of a Julius, was, in his view, sufficient to authorize any hasty Luther to make a profane bonfire of a papal bull; any hot Henry to usurp the trade of manufacturing creeds; so no "sacred right of insurrection," no unflinching patriotic opposition, no claim of rights, (by petitioners having _swords_ in their hands,) are admissible in his system of a Christian state. And as for the British constitution, and "the glorious Revolution of 1688," this latter, indeed, is one of the best of a bad kind, and that boasted constitution as an example of a house divided against itself, and yet _not_ falling, is a perfect miracle of dynamical art, a lucky accident of politics, scarcely to be looked for again in the history of social development, much less to be eagerly sought after and ignorantly imitated. Nay, rather, if we look at this boasted constitution a little more narrowly, and instruct ourselves as to its practical working, what do we see? "Historical experience, the great teacher of political science, manifestly shows that in these dynamical states, which exist by the cunningly devised balance and counter-balance of different powers, what is called governing is, in truth, a continual strife and contention between the Ministry and the Opposition, who seem to delight in nothing so much as in tugging and tearing the state and its resources to pieces between them, while the hallowed freedom of the hereditary monarch seems to serve only as an old tree, under whose shades the contending parties may the more comfortably choose their ground, and fight out their battles."[H] It is but too manifest, indeed, according to Schlegel's projection of the universe, that all constitutionalism is, properly speaking, a sort of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of the social body, having its origin (like the religious epidemic of the sixteenth century) in the private conceit of the individual, growing by violence and strife, and ending in dissolution. This is the ever-repeated refrain of his political discourses, puerile enough, it may be, to our rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful to polite and patriotic ears at Vienna, when the cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo beneath their towers. The propounder of such philosophy had not only the common necessity of all philosophers to pile up his political in majestic consistency with his ecclesiastical creed, but he had also to pay back the mad French liberalism with something more mad if possible, and more despotic. And if also Danton, and Mirabeau, and Robespierre, and other terrible Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had raised his naturally romantic temperament a little into the febrile and delirious now and then, what wonder? Shall the devil walk the public streets at noon day, and men not be afraid?

[Footnote H: _Philosophie des Lebens_, p.407.]

We said that Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, political and religious, but chiefly religious, was the grand key to his popular work on the history of literature. We may illustrate this now by a few instances. In the first place, the "many-sided" Goethe seems to be as little profound as he is charitable, when he sees nothing in the Sanscrit studies of the romantic brothers but a _pis aller_, and a vulgar ambition to bring forward something new, and make German men stare. We do not answer for the elder brother; but Frederick certainly made the cruise to the east, as Columbus did to the west, from a romantic spirit of adventure. He was not pleased with the old world--he wished to find a new world more to his mind, and, beyond the Indus, he found it. The Hindoos to him were the Greeks of the aboriginal world--"_diese Griechen der Urwelt_"--and so much better and more divine than the western Greeks, as the aboriginal world was better and more divine than that which came after it. If imagination was the prime, the creative faculty in man, here, in the holy Eddas, it had sat throned for thousands of years as high as the Himalayas. If repose was sought for, and rest to the soul from the toil and turmoil of religious wars in Europe, here, in the secret meditations of pious Yooges, waiting to be absorbed into the bosom of Brahma, surely peace was to be found. Take another matter. Why did Frederick Schlegel make so much talk of the middle ages? Why were the times, so dark to others, instinct to him with a steady solar effluence, in comparison of which the boasted enlightenment of these latter days was but as the busy exhibition of squibs by impertinent boys, the uncertain trembling of fire-flies in a dusky twilight? The middle ages were historically the glory of Germany; and those who had lived to see and to feel the Confederation of the Rhine, and the Protectorate of Napoleon, did not require the particular predilections of a Schlegel to carry them back with eager reaction to the days of the Henries, the Othos, and the Fredericks, when to be the German emperor was to be the greatest man in Europe, after the Pope. But to Schlegel the middle ages were something more. The glory of Germany to the patriot, they were the glory of Europe to the thinker. Modern wits have laughed at the enthusiasm of the Crusades. Did they weep over the perfidy of the partition of Poland? Do they really trust themselves to persuade a generous mind that the principle of mutual jealousy and mere selfishness, the meagre inspiration of the so called balance of power in modern politics, is, according to any norm of nobility in action, a more laudable motive for a public war, than a holy zeal against those who were at once the enemies of Christ, and (as future events but too clearly showed) the enemies of Europe? Modern wits sneer at the scholastic drivelling or the cloudy mistiness of the writers of the middle ages. Did they ever blush for the impious baseness of Helvetius, for the portentous scaffolding of notional skeletons in Hegel? But, alas! we talk of we know not what. What spectacle does modern life present equal to that of St Bernard, the pious monk of Clairvaux, the feeble, emaciated thinker, brooding, with his dove-like eyes, ("_oculos columbinos_,") over the wild motions of the twelfth century, and by the calm might of divine love, guiding the sceptre of the secular king, and the crosier of the spiritual pontiff alike? Was that a weak or a dark age, when the strength of mind and the light of love could triumph so signally over brute force, and that natural selfishness of public motive which has achieved its cold, glittering triumphs in the lives of so many modern heroes and heroines--a Louis, a Frederick, a Catharine, a Napoleon? But indeed here, as elsewhere, we see that the modern world has fallen altogether into a practical atheism by the idolatry of mere reason; whereas all true greatness comes not down from the head, but up from the heart of man. In which greatness of the heart, the Bernards and the Barbarossas of the middle ages excelled; and therefore they were better than we.

It is by no means necessary for the admirer of Schlegel to maintain that all this eulogium of the twelfth century, or this depreciation of the times we live in, is just and well-merited. Nothing is more cheap than to praise a pretty village perched far away amid the blue skies, and to rail at the sharp edges and corners of things that fret against our ribs. Let it be admitted that there is not a little of artistical decoration, and a great deal of optical illusion, in the matter; still there is some truth, some great truth, that lay in comparative neglect till Schlegel brought it into prominency. This is genuine literary merit; it is that sort of discovery, so to speak, which makes criticism original. And it was not merely with the bringing forward of new materials, but by throwing new lights on the old, that Frederick Schlegel enriched aesthetical science. If the criticism of the nineteenth century may justly boast of a more catholic sympathy, of a wider flight, of a more comprehensive view, and more various feast than that which it superseded, it owes this, with something that belongs to the spirit of the age generally, chiefly to the special captainship of Frederick Schlegel. If the grand spirit of combination and comprehension which distinguishes the "Lectures on Ancient and Modern Literature," be that quality which mainly distinguishes the so called Romantic from the Classical school of aesthetics, then let us profess ourselves Romanticists by all means immediately; for the one seems to include the other as the genus does the species. The beauty of Frederick Schlegel is, that his romance arches over every thing like a sky, and excludes nothing; he delights indeed to override every thing despotically, with one dominant theological and ecclesiastical idea, and now and then, of course, gives rather a rough jog to whatever thing may stand in his way; but generally he seeks about with cautious, conscientious care to find room for every thing; and for a wholesale dealer in denunciation (as in some views we cannot choose but call him) is really the most kind, considerate, and charitable Aristarchus that ever wielded a pen. Hear what Varnhagen Von Ense says on this point--"The inward character of this man, the fundamental impulses of his nature, the merit or the results of his intellectual activity, have as yet found none to describe them in such a manner as he has often succeeded in describing others. It is not every body's business to attempt an anatomy and re-combination of this kind. One must have courage, coolness, profound study, wide sympathies, and a free comprehensiveness, to keep a steady footing and a clear eye in the midst of this gigantic, rolling conglomeration of contradictions, eccentricities, and singularities of all kinds. Here every sort of demon and devil, genius and ghost, Lucinde and Charlemagne, Alarcos, Maria, Plato, Spinoza and Bonald, Goethe consecrated and Goethe condemned, revolution and hierarchy, reel about restlessly, come together, and, what is the strangest thing of all, do _not_ clash. For Schlegel, however many Protean shapes he might assume, never cast away any thing that had ever formed a substantial element in his intellectual existence, but found an _advocatus Dei_ to plead always with a certain reputable eloquence even for the most unmannerly of them; and with good reason too, for in his all-appropriating and curiously combining soul, there did exist a living connexion between the most apparently contradictory of his ideas. To point out this connexion, to trace the secret thread of unity through the most distant extremes, to mark the delicate shade of transition from one phasis of intellectual development to another, to remove, at every doubtful point, the veil and to expose the substance, that were a problem for the sagacity of no common critic."[I] We take the hint. It is not every Byron that finds a Goethe to take him to pieces and build him up again, and peruse him and admire him, as Cuvier did the Mammoth. Those who feel an inward vocation to do so by Schlegel may yet do so in Germany; if there be any in these busy times, even there, who may have leisure to applaud such a work. To us in Britain it may suffice to have essayed to exhibit the fruit and the final results, without attempting curiously to dissect the growth of Schlegel's criticism.

[Footnote I: RAHEL'S _Umgang_. FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL, vol. i. p. 325.]

The outward fates of this great critic's life may be found, like every thing else, in the famous "Conversations Lexicon;" but as very few readers of these remarks, or students of the history of ancient and modern literature, may be in a condition to refer to that most useful Cyclopaedia of literary reference, we may here sketch the main lines of Schlegel's biography from the sources supplied by Mr Robertson,[J] in the preface to his excellent translation of the "Lectures on the philosophy of history." Whatever we take from a different source will be distinctly noted.

[Footnote J: The authorities given by Mr Robertson are, (1.) _La Biographie des Vivans, Paris_. (2.) An article for July 1829, in the French _Globe_, apparently an abridgement of the account of Schlegel in the Conversations Lexicon. (3.) A fuller and truer account of the author, in a French work published several years ago at Paris, entitled "Memoirs of distinguished Converts." (4.) Some facts in _Le Catholique_, a journal, edited at Paris from 1826 to 1829, by Schlegel's friend, the Baron d'Echstein.]