any feeling of common honour and common property. "I cannot," he exclaims, "imagine a people more torn asunder than are the Germans. You see artisans, but not men, philosophers, but not men, priests, but not men, servants and masters, young and old, but not men."
The conception of the State which we find in Hyperion is also quite in harmony with the spirit of the age, and quite un-Hellenic. "The State dare not demand what it cannot take by force. But what love and intellect give cannot be taken by force. It must keep its hands off that, else we will take its laws and pillory them! Good God! They who would make the State a school of morals do not know what a crime they are committing. The State has always become a hell when man has tried to make it his heaven."
Utterly un-Greek, wholly Romantic, is the love which Hyperion cherishes for his Diotima. It is the same deep and tragic feeling which bound Hölderlin, the poor tutor, to the mother of his pupils, Frau Susette Gontard, and determined his fate. No Greek ever spoke of the woman he loved with the religious adoration which Hölderlin expresses for his "fair Grecian." "Dear friend, there is a being upon this earth in whom my spirit can and will repose for untold centuries, and then still feel how puerile, face to face with nature, all our thought and understanding is." And exactly the same Romantic, Petrarchian note is struck by Hyperion when he speaks of Diotima. Diotima is "the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars." She is beauty itself, the incarnation of the ideal. Love is to him religion, and his religion is love of beauty. Beauty is the highest, the absolute ideal; it belongs, as a conception, to the world of reason, and as a symbol, to the world of imagination. From his æsthetic point of view, Hölderlin does not perceive that boundary line drawn by Kant between the domains of reason and imagination. His theory, a species of poetic—philosophic ecstasy, having points in common with both Schiller's Hellenism and Schelling's transcendental idealism, is Romantic before the days of Romanticism.
Germinating Romanticism is also to be traced in the gleam of Christian feeling which tinges his half-modern pantheism. He had been originally destined for the Church, and had suffered much from the severe discipline of the monastery where he was educated. In spite, however, of the many evidences of a pious disposition which we find in his letters, he was a pagan in his poems. He disliked priests, and steadily withstood his family's desire that he should become one. In his Empedokles we come upon the following significant reply of the hero to the priest Hermokrates:—
"Du weisst es ja, ich hab es dir bedeutet,
Ich kenne dich und deine schlimme Zunft.
Und lange Avar's ein Räthsel mir, wie euch
In ihrem Runde duldet die Natur.
Ach, als ich noch ein Knabe war, da mied
Euch Allverderber schon mein frommes Herz,
Das unbestechbar, innig liebend hing
An Sonn' und Aether und den Boten allen
Der grossen ferngeahndeten Natur;
Denn wohl hab ich's gefühlt in meiner Furcht,
Dass ihr des Herzens freie Götterliebe
Bereden möchtet zu gemeinem Dienst,
Und dass ich's treiben sollte so, wie ihr.
Hinweg! ich kann vor mir den Mann nicht sehn,
Der Göttliches wie ein Gewerbe treibt,
Sein Angesicht ist falsch und kalt und todt,
Wie seine Götter sind."[1]
There is not a trace in Hölderlin of the sanctimonious piety developed by the other Romanticists, who, to begin with, were far more decided free-thinkers than he. Yet his Hellenism is not pagan in the manner of Schiller's and Goethe's. There is a fervency in it which is akin to Christian devotion; his poetic prayers to the sun, the earth, and the air are those of a believer; and when, as in Empedokles, he handles a purely pagan subject, the spirit of the treatment is such that we feel (as we do in a later work, Kleist's Amphitryon) the Christian legend behind the heathen. The position of Empedokles to the Pharisees of his day and country is exactly that of Jesus to the Pharisees of Judea. Empedokles, like Jesus, is the great prophet, and both his willing sacrificial death and the worship of which he is the object awake feelings which remotely resemble those of the devout Christian.
In Hölderlin we find in outline, light and delicate as if traced by a spirit, symbols and emotions which the Romantic School develops, exaggerates, caricatures, or simply obliterates.
[1] "'Tis nothing new; this I have told you oft; I know you well, you and your evil kind. And long it was a mystery to me How Nature could endure you in her realm. Corrupters of mankind! Even as a child, My guileless heart shrank from you with distrust— That honest, fervent heart, that loved the sun, The cool fresh air, and all the messengers Of Nature, dimly discerned and great. For even then I timidly perceived How ye would take our true love of the gods And make it serve some baser, selfish end— And that in this ye would that I should follow you. Begone! I cannot look upon the man Who practises religion as a trade; His countenance is false and cold and dead, As are his gods."
III
A. W. SCHLEGEL
In 1797, August Wilhelm Schlegel, then aged thirty, published the first volume of his translation of Shakespeare. Rough drafts of several of the plays in this edition have been found, and these faded, dusty manuscripts not only enable us to follow the persevering, talented translator in his self-imposed task, but, when carefully read, give us direct insight into his and his wife's spiritual life, and indeed into the intellectual life of the whole period.[1]
Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts are not always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work upon Romeo and Juliet in the winter of 1795–96; in 1796 he married Caroline Böhmer; and we have a complete copy of the first rough draft of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with corrections in Schlegel's. In September 1797, as her letters show, she copied As You Like It from an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay on Romeo and Juliet, which ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister as the best Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany up to that time. We recognise her now and again in some outburst of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of style than we are accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding than her contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German literature. But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as the manuscripts show us, survive the first year of her married life. At first it is her handwriting which predominates, and, though it is less frequently to be seen alongside of her husband's in the manuscripts of those plays with which he was occupied during the years 1797–98, her collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her pen in the manuscript of the Merchant of Venice, which dates from the autumn of 1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist circle in Jena. Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is discoverable.
Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea of the progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two different texts of the Midsummer Night's Dream.
Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had attempted
