in which Werther had
been banished from aristocratic society had increased his weariness of
life. The discussion of suicide caused the book to be still more
discussed; it occurred to several fools on this occasion to make away
with themselves, and the book, owing to its subject, went off like a
shot. The novels of August Lafontaine were just as much read, and, as
this author wrote incessantly, he was more famous than Wolfgang von
Goethe. Wieland was the great poet then, with whom perhaps might be
classed the ode-maker, Rambler of Berlin. Wieland was honored
idolatrously, far more at that time than Goethe. Iffland ruled the
theatre with his dreary _bourgeois_ dramas, and Kotzebue with his flat
and frivolously witty jests.

It was in opposition to this literature that there sprang up in Germany,
at the end of the last century, a school which we call the Romantic, and
of which August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel have presented themselves
as managing agents. Jena, where these and many other souls in like
accord found themselves "off and on," was the centre from which the new
esthetic doctrine spread. I say doctrine, for this school began with
judgments of the art-works of the past and recipes for art-works of the
future, and in both directions the Schlegel school rendered great
service to esthetic criticism. By judging of such works of art as
already existed, either their faults and failures were indicated, or
their merits and beauties brought to light. In controversy and in
indicating artistic shortcomings, the Schlegels were entirely imitators
of old Lessing; they obtained possession of his great battle-blade, but
the arm of August William Schlegel was too tenderly weak and the eyes of
his brother Friedrich too mystically clouded for the former to strike so
strongly and the latter so keenly and accurately as Lessing. True, in
descriptive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art are to be set
forth--where it came to a delicate detection of its characteristics
and bringing them home to our intelligence--then, compared to the
Schlegels, old Lessing was nowhere. But what shall I say as to their
recipes for preparing works of art? There we find in the Schlegels a
weakness which we think may also be detected in Lessing; for the latter
is as weak in affirming as he is strong in denying. He rarely succeeds
in laying down a fundamental principle, still more seldom a correct one.
He wants the firm basis of a philosophy or