himself entirely to the influence of his subject, which in Goethe's case produced forms that were never arbitrarily chosen, but invariably demanded by the theme. He understood that he himself, as a poetical translator, must practise the same self-abnegation and develop a similar capacity of intellectual re-creation. Two things were required of the translator, a feminine susceptibility to the subtlest characteristics of the foreign original, and masculine capacity to re-create with the impression of the whole in his mind; and both of these requirements were to be found in Goethe; for his nature was multiplicity, his name "Legion," his spirit Protean.
There still remained the technical, linguistic difficulties to overcome; and in this, above all, Goethe was an epoch-making model. He had remoulded the German language. In passing through his hands it had gained so greatly in pliability and compass, had acquired such wealth of expression both in the grand and the graceful style, that it offered Schlegel exactly the well-tuned instrument of which he stood in need. While under Bürger's influence he had looked upon technical perfection as a purely external quality, which could be acquired by indefatigable polishing; he now realised that perfect technique has an inward origin, that it is in reality the unity of style which is conditioned by the general cast of a mind. And he began to see that his life task was a double one, namely, to reproduce the masterpieces of foreign races in the German language, and to interpret critically for his countrymen the best literary productions both of Germany and other lands.
Now, too, Schlegel acquired a quite new understanding of Fichte, the friend and brother-in-arms whom the Romanticists had so quickly won for their cause. He realised that Fichte's doctrine of the Ego contained in extremely abstract terms the idea of the unlimited capacity of the human mind to find itself in everything and to find everything in itself. Round this powerful fundamental thought of Fichte's, August Wilhelm's pliable mind twined itself.
At this time he was much influenced by the correspondence which he kept up regularly with his younger brother. Friedrich had been drawn by August Wilhelm into the stream of the new literary movement, and his militant disposition made him the most reckless champion of the new principles as soon as he felt assured of their truth. The brothers had very different characters. The elder, in spite of the audacity of his literary views, had the better regulated mind. He had early developed a sense of form and of beauty. His chief gift was a capacity for moulding language; and accuracy, dexterity, and the sense of proportion were qualities he was born with. Except in cases of strong provocation, he showed moderation in scientific and artistic controversy; he knew comparatively early what he desired and what he was capable of; and his determination and perseverance made him a successful pioneer of the ideas and principles of which he had chosen to make himself the spokesman. He became the founder of the Romantic School, an achievement for which he possessed every qualification – this man whom his brother jestingly called "the divine schoolmaster" or "the schoolmaster of the universe."
Friedrich Schlegel was the more restless spirit, the genuine sect-founder. He himself tells us, in one of his letters, that it was his life-long desire "not only to preach and dispute like Luther, but also, like Mohammed, to subjugate the spiritual realms of the earth with the flaming sword of the word." He did not lack initiative, and abounded in plans so colossal that there was a jarring disproportion between them and his ability to carry them out. Eternally wavering, without tenacity or fundamental conviction, fragmentary in the extreme, but rich in both suggestive and disconcerting ideas and in witty conceits, he was constantly beset by the temptation to silence his opponents with mysterious terminology, and constantly liable to relapse into platitudes and meaningless verbiage. What Novalis once wrote to him was more correct than any one suspected: "The King of Thule, dear Schlegel, was your progenitor; you are related to ruin." As a critic, he was more impulsive and less impartial than August Wilhelm; as a poet, he was only once or twice in his life genuinely natural, and in his Alarkos he plunged into an abyss of bathos into which his brother, with his more correct taste, could never have fallen. The elder brother had started the younger in his literary career; the younger now drove the elder onward, and in the process put an end, by his unamiability, to the latter's friendly relations with Schiller, and, ultimately, even to his valued and long maintained friendship with Goethe.
August Wilhelm now put his translation of Shakespeare aside for a time, and turned his attention to the poets of the South. He experimented in all directions, translated fragments of Homer, of the Greek elegiac, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poets, of almost all the Latin poets and many of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. At a later period he even translated Indian poetry, his aim being to make the German language a Pantheon for the divine in every tongue. He lingered longest over Dante, although he did not possess the mastery of form required to render the terza rima; he rhymed only two lines of each triplet, thus altering the character of the verse and doing away with the intertwining of the stanzas.
After this he turned to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, sending fragments of his translations to Friedrich, who showed them to Caroline. Her judgment was favourable on the whole, but she found fault with the style as being rather antiquated; this she ascribed to Wilhelm's having been lately employed in translating Dante, his ear having thereby become accustomed to obsolete words and expressions. The fact was, that shortly before this he had awakened to the necessity of being on his guard against the elaborate polish which he had made his aim after giving up Bürger's style; he now fell into the other extreme, became archaic, rugged, and hard.
In 1797 Schlegel sent the first samples of Romeo and Juliet to Schiller. They were printed in Die Horen; and in the same periodical there presently also appeared his essay, Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe had proclaimed the endeavour to understand Shakespeare to be an important element in German culture. In its conversations on Hamlet he had refuted the foolish theory that the great dramatist was an uncultivated natural genius, destitute of artistic consciousness. Had such been the case, the exact reproduction of his style would not have been a matter of vital importance in a German translation. But with so great an artist as the Shakespeare presented to us in Wilhelm Meister, it was plain that the harmony between subject and form must not be deranged. And yet even Goethe himself had, without any feeling of unsuitability, given his quotations from Hamlet in the old prose translation; even he had not realised how inseparably matter and manner are connected.
Slowly and laboriously Schlegel progresses. His judgment is still so defective that he fancies it impossible to dispense with Alexandrines; in Romeo and Juliet, he retains the five-footed iambics only "as far as possible"; the scene between Romeo and Friar Laurence he renders in Alexandrines, excusing himself with the remark that this metre is less detrimental in speeches garnished with maxims and descriptions than in the dialogue proper of the drama. The result is the loss of Romeo's lyric fervour.
He feels this himself, and with iron industry and determined enthusiasm sets to work again, rejects the Alexandrines, and compels himself, in spite of the verbosity of the German language, to say in ten or eleven syllables what he had said before in twelve or thirteen. For long it appears to him an impossible task to reproduce each line by one line. The translation swells in his hands as it did in Bürger's. Fourteen English lines become nineteen or twenty German. It seems to him that it is impossible to do with less; until at last he gains true insight, and sees, from the very foundation, how Shakespeare raises the edifice of his art. Now he renounces all amplitude and all redundancy that is not in Shakespeare. Each line is rendered by a single line. He curses and bewails the prolixity and inadequacy of German: his language has such different limits, such different turns of expression from the English language; he cannot reproduce Shakespeare's style; what he produces is a stammer, a stutter, without resonance or fire – but he coerces himself, he coerces the language, and produces his translation.
There is no great exaggeration in Scherer's dictum: "Schlegel's Shakespeare takes its place beside the works given to the world by Goethe and Schiller during the period when they worked in fellowship; there is the inevitable distance between reproductive and productive art, but there is the nearness of the perfect to the perfect."
Having acquired complete
