[In the following excerpt, Hughes summarizes Schlegel's literary criticism, principally concentrating on the writer's influential formulation of Romantic theory, and notes his accomplishments as a translator of Shakespeare.]

August Wilhelm studied at Göttingen, where he came into close and fruitful contact with the great classical scholar Heyne and with the poet Bürger, both of whom thought highly of him. After four years as tutor to a Dutch family he married Caroline as a kind of rescue operation and moved with her to Jena, where he lectured in aesthetics and made ends meet by reviewing. In 1801 he went to Berlin to lecture on literature and art, and the series of lectures he delivered there between then and 1804, although not published as a whole until 1884, may be said to have schematized and tamed Romantic doctrine for the educated German public. He had been divorced from Caroline in 1803 and in the following year he was persuaded by Mme de Staël to become tutor to her son and to join her at her home at Coppet near Geneva and on her wanderings around Europe. He appears to have been part literary adviser, part resident lion, part henpecked lover, but came into his own during a visit to Vienna in the spring of 1808, when he delivered a course of lectures, Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, that made his name throughout Europe. Published in 1809-11, and in a second edition in 1817, they were almost immediately translated into French, English and Italian, and somewhat later into Polish, Dutch and Russian. Their influence may be traced in Coleridge and Hazlitt (who reviewed them in the Edinburgh Review in February 1815), in Hugo and Manzoni, Mickiewicz and Pushkin; more than any other single book they disseminated Romantic aesthetics among the general public. Mme de Staël's own De l'Allemagne (1810, but not effectively issued until 1813) helped to draw attention to the Vienna lectures but, in fact, contains rather less about August Wilhelm's ideas than one might have expected.¹

Schlegel became increasingly patriotic and anti-French, going well beyond Mme de Staël's feud with Napoleon, and between 1812 and 1814 he attempted to make his mark as a diplomat and political publicist, mainly in the service of Bernadotte in Sweden. Still following Mme de Staël he visited England and then, after Napoleon's fall, Paris, where in the winter of 1814-15 he became one of the first to give proper attention to the Troubadour manuscripts. After further travels and the death of Mme de Staël in 1817 he returned to Germany, where from 1818 he was Professor of the History of Art and Literature and then of Indology at Bonn. His scholarly activities in the study of medieval literature, particularly the Nibelungenlied, and in the virtual founding of German Sanscrit studies, now took first place in his life—closely followed by his personal vanity. Students called him the ‘Herr Pariser’, and it is not easy to forget Heine's description in Die romantische Schule of Schlegel lecturing in Bonn, perfumed, wearing kid gloves, referring to ‘my friend the Lord Chancellor of England’, accompanied by a liveried servant to trim the candles in their silver stands. When foreign visitors came he would ask them whether they wished to converse in Latin, English, French, Italian or German. Thus his life ends on a note of pedantry and farce.

Yet the solid achievements of August Wilhelm Schlegel are quite remarkable. His scholarly initiatives, never wholly developed by him, were imaginative and scrupulous. His creative work, though without depth of commitment, was not wholly negligible. Its main value lies in the introduction of new metrical forms (among the innovations are iambic rhythms in the sonnet and a widespread use of Romance strophic systems). Even in his own day the poetry was considered to be too artificial, too verbose, too contrived; but Goethe and other contemporaries were ready enough to learn something from his formal mastery. A drama Ion (1803) is certainly a lifeless adaptation of Euripides and owed its initial success almost exclusively to Goethe's interest and staging,² and most of the satires and parodies now seem stilted and predictable. But there is some bite to the parody of Schiller's ‘Würde der Frauen’ (‘Ehret die Frauen! Sie stricken die Strümpfe, Wollig und warm, zu durchwaten die Sümpfe … Flicken zerrissne Pantalons aus’) and a remarkable persistence about the long piece Ehrenpforte und Triumphbogen für den Theaterpräsidenten von Kotzebue bei seiner gehofften Rückkehr ins Vaterland (1800). Kotzebue was then in prison in Siberia and Schlegel is getting his own back for the attack on him and his brother in a one-act drama Der hyperboreische Esel (1799), in which one character speaks solely in phrases pieced together from Friedrich's Fragments and from Lucinde, a device also used by Friedrich Nicolai in his anonymous satirical novel Vertraute Briefe von Adelheid B∗∗ an ihre Freundin Julie S∗∗ (also 1799).

The attack on Kotzebue, marginally interesting in itself, does however suggest one of Schlegel's chief virtues: a rigid insistence on standards. Although his critical position is much closer to Herder than to Lessing, in its stress on the danger of establishing despotic norms and the necessity for universality and flexibility in a critic, he avoids a shapeless relativism. A work is to be understood in its context and from within its own structure, and there are different kinds of achievement; neo-classical exclusiveness is rejected. Nevertheless value judgements are possible and necessary, and the frivolities of Kotzebue and Iffland, the conventional lyrics of Matthisson, the idylls of Voß or Pfarrer Schmidt of Werneuchen, the sentimental novels of A. H. J. Lafontaine or Friederike Unger all require rebuke. It is a feature of the three hundred or so reviews written by Schlegel for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung of Jena between January 1796 and his final break with the periodical in October 1799 that the claims not merely of the Romantics but also of Weimar Classicism and of idealist philosophers are constantly upheld against fashionable littérateurs and against the blinkered representatives of the end of the Enlightenment. This constant stream of elegant, epigrammatic, learned publicizing ensured that the ‘new school’ could not be permanently dismissed as the ravings of hot-headed visionaries, but had to be taken as a serious subject of debate.

The Berlin and Vienna lectures thus systematized Romantic doctrines within a historical framework. In the Berlin series, which moves from an exposition of a new poetic through a polemical analysis of the decay of modern culture (partly an attack on the Enlightenment's limitations, partly regret at Germany's political situation, partly a sketchy condemnation of Gutenberg, gunpowder and imperialism) to a historical account of medieval literature, we may distinguish three important elements. First the recognition of the antinomy of ancient and modern taste and the critic's obligation to be impartial as between them, in that they both represent the unfolding of the poetic spirit under their own particular conditions. Then the rehabilitation of ‘romantic’ literature from the Nibelungenlied, here compared with the Iliad, to Calderón. What Schlegel does is to create a Romantic mythology from medieval material, tracing Christianity and chivalry through the Arthurian legend, Charlemagne and the Spanish Romances to Dante's allegorical representation of the universe, and not wholly avoiding the impression that the new mythology is an eclectic compilation of exotic subjects. The third and perhaps the most influential formulation is that of the relationship of the poet to nature. Poetry as imitation of nature is only meaningful if we recognize that everything is in a continual state of becoming, an incessant creation. The poet must become aware of this creative power at work within himself, as in nature, and his work must display the same organic properties. The distinction between mechanical form, arbitrarily imposed from without, and organic form, unfolding from within according to the requirements of the whole, was elaborated in the Vienna lectures. It was by no means new but, formulated with as much precision as can be expected in these matters, it had a great deal of influence, though the belief that Coleridge's concept of organic form was entirely dependent on it is still the subject of vigorous debate.³ In these various echoes of Schelling some distinctions become blurred, notably that between conscious and unconscious activity; and we find ourselves faced, too, with the ‘Infinite’ and with the nature of the ‘Idea’. To impart meaning to things the artist must present those ultimates that form the foundation of the phenomenal world. This can only be done in signs or pictures, ‘art is a continual symbolizing’. Language itself has a symbolist function; when this becomes petrified, poetry must restore it and must re-establish that ‘mutual linking of all things by an unbroken process of symbolizing’ [Kritische Schriften und Briefe. 7 vols., ed. Edgar Lohner, Stuttgart, 1962-74. Hereafter KSB, II, 83], which was the first basis of the growth of language. The importance of this associative process, both for the Romantics and in later literature, scarcely needs stressing.

Otherwise the Vienna lectures do not add a great deal, except in historical exemplification and in relating the whole development of drama to the contrast between classical and romantic, the former finite, the latter yearning for the infinite, Greek tragedy concerned with man's struggle with fate, modern ‘mixed’ drama portraying the development of character towards that which transcends human life, ancient tragedy resembling a sculptural group, romantic drama to be viewed as a large picture. The whole of ancient art and poetry is ‘as it were a rhythmical nomos, a harmonious proclamation of the immutable laws of a world already set in order and mirroring the eternal archetypes of things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of the secret attraction to the chaos that is continually striving to produce new and marvellous creations’ (KSB VI, 112). Feeling (Gefühl), the motive force of romantic poetry, holds the parts of the universe together and grasps the most subtle and shifting relationships.

The historical demonstration of these philosophical propositions gives due weight to Greek tragedy but essentially consists of a glorification of English and Spanish drama, particularly Shakespeare and Calderón. Schlegel's translations from Romance literatures (notably Dante and Petrarch in Italian and Calderón in Spanish) were of considerable importance;⁴ and one may add the impact of his critical appreciations—evident also in his praise of Cervantes, of whom he planned a complete translation, though only Tieck's Don Quixote emerged, apart from a fragment of the play Numancia.

In both his translations and his criticism, however, the permanent revelation is Shakespeare. The main critical discussions are in two essays in Schiller's Horen: on Hamlet in 1796 (‘Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters’) and ‘Uber Romeo und Julia’ in 1797. The Romeo essay attempts to demonstrate the inner unity, the artistry of form in this apparently formless play; Shakespeare is a supremely conscious artist. Schlegel is here fighting on two fronts: against what remained of the rationalist view of Shakespeare as hopelessly formless and the Storm and Stress glorification of him as an artless intuitive genius. Working with the concepts of organic form and self-conscious reflection, he provides in the Vienna lectures remarkable analyses of the individual plays, and places Shakespeare at the rich and exuberant juncture of the medieval and modern worlds. His plays are the highest expression of romantic poetry (the term is still, of course, being used typologically). August Wilhelm is not free from some absurdities in his glorification of Shakespeare, and we must not forget that Lessing and Herder had prepared the ground for adequate appreciation and that Goethe had sustained an enthusiasm for the plays. Yet, for all that, Schlegel's Shakespeare criticism is a substantial achievement and one which remained influential in Germany and England throughout the nineteenth century.

The translation of Shakespeare goes beyond that; it is his incomparable monument. His first attempts at translating one of the plays date from his student days at Göttingen 1799, where he worked with Bürger on a translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. A recent comparison of this version with that of 1797 shows clearly how, by the year in which the publication of his translations began, he had overcome the disparities of style inherent in the linguistic patterns of the Storm and Stress, the Anacreontics and Sensibility, and had evolved his own coherent picture of Shakespeare and thus a unified imagery and rhythm.⁵ Schlegel's translations appeared regularly until 1801, by which time thirteen plays (sixteen if one counts the parts of the histories) had appeared, and in 1810 he added Richard III to these. Then, after a long interval, Tieck's daughter Dorothea and Graf Wolf von Baudissin completed the translation (1825-33). Tieck himself had some supervisory part in the more difficult ones.

The translations were not without their critics. Neither Wieland's translations nor those of Eschenburg retained their hold, but Voß and his sons produced their own versions between 1806 and 1829, with lively accusations of plagiarism against the others. Yet the Schlegel-Tieck translations were the ones that convincingly established themselves. Why was this so? Part of the answer, no doubt, lies in August Wilhelm's astounding technical mastery and the breadth of his vocabulary. Although there are innumerable minor errors (some, in the early plays, apparently the result of Caroline's emendations) they are, in the last analysis, insignificant. What matters is that it is a valid re-creation of Shakespeare and not an interesting exercise. Shakespeare was alive for the Romantics in the way that the Bible was alive when the Authorized Version was produced and, in both cases, the translation came just when the language had leapt to life. Without the linguistic achievements of Weimar Classicism the Schlegel translation would not have been possible. One could go on to say that, without August Wilhelm's own additions to the language, the Tieck-Baudissin translations are barely conceivable. Schlegel took the new resources of German and harnessed them to his own exceptional knowledge of levels of speech, shifts of vocabulary, speech rhythms, syntactical forms and metrical patterns. He was thus able to achieve what Schleiermacher, in another context, called ‘parodistic’ (as opposed to ‘identifying’) translation; he brought the reader to the language of Shakespeare, he magnificently altered German to fit the demands of the Renaissance Englishman. The translation has been criticized for being too lyrical, not sinewy enough, and there is some truth in this; but any strictures are heavily outweighed by the new understanding of the play of the imagination and wit in Shakespeare, by the feeling for his great variety and use of contrasts, and by the ability to sense the movement of the line and the scene.

August Wilhelm Schlegel made Shakespeare part of the German experience. He was also one of the first modern literary critics, producing formulations that we have now come to take for granted.⁶ He was the most universal of scholars and readers, the first European comparatist. And for Jena Romanticism, that most philosophically abstruse and élitist clique (to use the disobliging language of their adversaries) he performed the incalculable service of making sense of their doctrines and anchoring them, revolutionary though they were, in the Western literary tradition. What he could not do, though, was to arouse in us the intellectual excitement that comes from reading Novalis or Friedrich Schlegel. August Willhelm casts a clear light; they burn.

Notes

1. For Mme de Staël see: Countes Jean de Pange, August Wilhelm Schlegel und Frau von Stael. Eine schicksalhafte Begegnung, Hamburg, Goverts, 1940, 496 pp. (originally Paris, 1938, as Auguste-Guilleaume Schlegel et Madame de Stael), and her introduction to De l'Allemagne, Paris, Hachette, 5 vols, 1958-60. The life at Coppet emerges vividly from Benjamin Constant's Journaux Intimes, full of jealousy and denigratory asides. For a wide-ranging account of August Wilhelm's influence see Chetana Nagavajara, August Wilhelm Schlegel in Frankreich. Sein Anteil an der französischen Literatur 1807-1835, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1966. The basic study of the influence of the Vienna lectures is, however, still Josef Körner's Die Botschaft der deutschen Romantik an Europa, Augsburg, Benno Filser, 1929, 152 pp.

2. See Uwe Petersen, Goethe und Euripides: Untersuchungen zur Euripides-Rezeption in der Goethezeit, Heidelberg, Winter, 1974, 235 pp.

3. For the Coleridge controversy see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, Oxford, Clarendon, 1969, pp. 256-61, and Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel, New York, Braziller, 1971, and London, Allen & Unwin, 1972, pp. 158-61 and 209-14, with subsequent refutation of Fruman by McFarland in Yale Review, lxiii (1974), 252-86, and a splendid row in countless journals.

4. The Italians principally in the Blumensträuße italiänischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie, Berlin, 1804. Spanish drama in Spanisches Theater, Berlin, 1803-9, edited by Schlegel and with five of Calderón's dramas translated by him.

5. See A. W. Schlegels Sommernachtstraum. In der ersten Fassung vom Jahre 1789 nach den Handschriften herausgegeben (by Frank Jolles), Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967, 248 pp. (=Palaestra, 244); Peter Gebhardt, A. W. Schlegels Shakespeare-Übersetzung. Untersuchungen zu seinem Übersetzungsverfahren am Beispiel des Hamlet, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970, 265 pp. (=Palaestra, 257); Margaret E. Atkinson, A. W. Schlegel as a Translator of Shakespeare: A Comparison of Three Plays [Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar] with the Original, Oxford, Blackwell, 1958, ix, 67 pp. For Shakespeare and Schlegel generally one should still consult Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, Berlin, Bondi, 1914, viii, 359 pp., and in many subsequent editions, and R. Pascal, Shakespeare in Germany 1740-1815, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1937, x, 199 pp. An interesting and relevant study in detail is Hans Georg Heun, Shakespeares ‘Romeo und Julia’ in Goethes Bearbeitung. Eine Stiluntersuchung, Berlin, Erich Schmidt, 1965, 86 pp.

6. For an unenthusiastic view of his contribution to modern literary theory, however, see Klaus Lindemann, ‘Theorie—Geschichte—Kritik. August Wilhelm Schlegels Prinzipienreflexion als Ansatz für eine neue Literaturtheorie?’, ZDP [Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik], xciii (1974), 560-79.