Not even in Wilhelm Tell is his point of view a modern one; on the contrary, it is in every particular purely Hellenic. The subject is not conceived dramatically, but epically. The individual is marked by no special characteristic. It is merely an accident that raises Tell above the mass and makes him the leader of the movement. He is, as Goethe says, a "sort of Demos." Hence it is not the conflict between two great, irreconcilable historical ideas that is presented in this play; the men of Rütli have no sentimental attachment to liberty; it is neither the idea of liberty nor the idea of country that produces the insurrection. Private ideas and private interests, encroachments on family rights and rights of property, here provide the mainspring of action, or rather of event, which in the other dramas is provided by personal or dynastic ambition. It is explicitly signified to us that the peasants do not aim at acquiring new liberties, but at maintaining old inherited customs. On this point I may refer the reader to Lasalle, who develops the same view with his usual ingenuity in the interesting preface to his drama, Franz von Sickingen.
Thus, then, we see that even when Schiller, the most political and historical of the German poets, appears to be most interested in history and politics, he is dealing only to a limited extent with reality; and therefore it may be almost considered proved, that distaste for historical and present reality—in other words, subjectivism and idealism—were the characteristics of the whole literature of that day.
But the spirit of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller is only one of the motive powers of Romanticism. The other is the philosophy of Fichte. It was the Fichtean doctrine of the Ego which gave to the Romantic individuality its character and force. The axioms: All that is, is for us; What is for us can only be through us; Everything that is, both natural and supernatural, exists through the activity of the Ego, received an entirely new interpretation when transferred from the domain of metaphysics to that of psychology. All reality is contained in the Ego itself, hence the absolute Ego demands that the non-Ego which it posits shall be in harmony with it, and is itself simply the infinite striving to pass beyond its own limits. It was this conclusion of the Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Knowledge) which fired the young generation. By the absolute Ego they understood, as Fichte himself in reality did, though in a very different manner, not a divine being, but the thinking human being. And this new and intoxicating idea of the absolute freedom and power and self-sufficiency of the Ego, which, with the arbitrariness of an autocratic monarch, obliges the whole world to shrink into nothing before itself, is enthusiastically proclaimed by an absurdly arbitrary, ironical, and fantastic set of young geniuses, half-geniuses, and quarter-geniuses. The Sturm und Drang period, when the liberty men gloried in was the liberty of eighteenth—century "enlightenment," reappeared in a more refined and idealistic form; and the liberty now gloried in was nineteenth-century lawlessness.
Fichte's doctrine of a world-positing, world-creating Ego was at variance with "sound human reason." This was one of its chief recommendations in the eyes of the Romanticists. The Wissenschaftslehre was scientific paradox, but to them paradox was the fine flower of thought. Moreover, the fundamental idea of the doctrine was as radical as it was paradoxical. It had been evolved under the impression of the attempt made by the French Revolution to transform the whole traditional social system into a rational system (Vernunftstaat). The autocracy of the Ego was Fichte's conception of the order of the world, and therefore in this doctrine of the Ego the Romanticists believed that they possessed the lever with which they could lift the old world from its hinges.
The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun with Fichte. He explained the world as the result of an unconscious, yet to a thinker comprehensible, act of the free, yet at the same time limited, Ego. This act, he maintains, emanates from the creative imagination. By means of it the world which we apprehend with the senses first becomes to us a real world. The whole activity of the human mind, then, according to Fichte, springs from the creative imagination; it is the instinct which he regards as the central force of the active Ego. The analogy with the imaginative power which is so mighty in art is evident. But what Fichte himself failed to perceive is, that imagination is by no means a creative, but only a transforming, remodelling power, since what it acts upon is only the form of the things conceived of, not their substance.
Fichte says that he "does not require 'things,' and does not make use of them, because they prevent his self-dependence, his independence of all that is outside of himself." This saying is closely allied to Friedrich Schlegel's observation, "that a really philosophic human being should be able to tune himself at will in the philosophical or philological, the critical or poetical, the historical or rhetorical, the ancient or modern key, as one tunes an instrument, and this at any time and to any pitch."
According to the Romantic doctrine, the artistic omnipotence of the Ego and the arbitrariness of the poet can submit to no law. In this idea lies the germ of the notorious Romantic irony in art, the treating of everything as both jest and earnest, the eternal self-parody, the disturbing play with illusions alternately summoned up and banished, which destroys all directness of effect in many of the favourite works of the Romanticists.
The Romanticist's theory of art and life thus owes its existence to a mingling of poetry with philosophy, a coupling of the poet's dreams with the student's theories; it is a production of purely intellectual powers, not of any relation between these powers and real life. Hence the excessively intellectual character of Romanticism. Hence all the selfduplication, all the raising to higher powers, in this poetry about poetry and this philosophising on philosophy. Hence its living and moving in a higher world, a different nature. This too is the explanation of all the symbolism and allegory in these half-poetical, half-philosophical works. A literature came into being which partook of the character of a religion, and ultimately joined issue with religion, and which owed its existence rather to a life of emotion than a life of intellectual productiveness. Hence we understand how, as A. W. Schlegel himself says, "it was often rather the ethereal melody of the feelings that was lightly suggested than the feelings themselves that were expressed in all their strength and fulness." It was not the thing itself that the author wished to communicate to the reader, but a suggestion of the thing. It is not in bright sunlight, but in twilight or mysterious quivering moonlight, on a far horizon or in dreams, that we behold the figures of Romanticism. Hence too the Romantic dilution or diminution of the terms expressing what is perceived by the senses (Blitzeln, Aeugeln, Hinschatten), and also that interchange of the terms for the impressions of the different senses, which makes the imagery confusedly vague. In Zerbino Tieck writes of flowers:
"Die Farbe klingt; die Form ertönt, jedwede
Hat nach der Form und Farbe Zung' und Rede.
* * * * * * * * *
Sich Farbe, Duft, Gesang Geschwister nennen."[4]
The essential element in this literature is no longer the passion of the Sturm und Drang period, but the free play of fancy, an activity of the imagination which is neither restrained by the laws of reason nor by the relation of feeling to reality. The higher, poetic sequences of ideas now introduced declare war against the laws of thought, ridicule them as philistine. Their place is taken by caprices, conceits, and vagaries. Fancy determines to dispense with reality, but despised reality has its revenge in the unsubstantiality or anæmia of fancy; fancy defies reason, but in this defiance there is an awkward contradiction; it is conscious and premeditated—reason is to be expelled by reason. Seldom has any poetic school worked under such a weight of perpetual consciousness of its own character as did this. Conscious intention is the mark of its productions.
The intellectual inheritance to which the Romanticists succeeded was overpoweringly great. The School came into existence when literature stood at its zenith in Germany. This explains the early maturity of its members; their way was made ready for them. They assimilated in their youth an enormous amount of literary knowledge and of artistic technique, and thus started with an intellectual capital such as no other young generation in Germany had ever possessed. They clothed their first thoughts in the language of
