like their
English forerunners in the eighteenth century,[5] worked independently of
one another. They did not conspire to a common end; had little personal
contact--were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school." But the
German romanticists constituted a compact group with coherent aims. They
were intimate friends and associates; travelled, lived, and worked
together; edited each other's books and married each other's sisters.[6]
They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressive
and polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satirical
tales,[7] poems, and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, "the
central point," says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated.
I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the art
productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the
future." Their organ was the _Athenaeum_, established by Friedrich
Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's
"Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of English and German
romanticism.

The first number of the _Athenaeum_ contained the manifesto of the new
school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie.
The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental;
but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic
art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and
life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself.
"Romantic poetry," says Schlegel--"and, in a certain sense, all poetry
ought to be romantic--should, in representing outward objects, also
represent itself." There is nothing here to indicate the precise line
which German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejection
of authority, the same assertion of the right of original genius to break
a path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworth
and Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads," by Keats in "Sleep and Poetry,"
and by Victor Hugo in the preface to "Cromwell."

A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was in
its thoroughgoing character. It is the disposition of the German mind to
synthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each of
those imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's,
Hegel's, has its own _aesthetik_ as well as its own _ethik_. It seeks to
interpret all human activities