Critical Introduction

The Age of Romanticism:
Schlegel From Antiquity to Modernity

 
 

              It often comes as a surprise to learn that Friedrich Schlegel--who is widely understood to have been not only at the forefront of European Romanticism as one of its earliest practitioners but also at the forefront of the effort to provide Romanticism with its own aesthetics--was an ardent enthusiast of the classics.  Indeed, his enthusiasm was such that even that representative of what came to be called German Classicism, Friedrich Schiller, was prompted to characterize it--albeit unfairly--as indicative of a "Graecomania."1  The association at first seems so odd and uncharacteristic that it is very tempting to dismiss it as mere apprenticeship work on the part of a budding critic and artist.  To do this, however, would be a grave mistake.  For the mature work of Schlegel must remain to a great extent inexplicable if it is not foregrounded in this earlier period.  This is because, simply put, the writings of the "classicist" Schlegel pose the question to which the writings of the Romantic Schlegel attempt to provide the answer.
 
 

             In order to understand this seeming paradox, it is helpful to contextualize it with some brief biographical considerations.  Schlegel was born on March 10, 1772 in Hannover. He was the youngest son in a family of seven children.  Schlegel was a difficult, brooding child; yet he was fortunate to have had August Wilhelm for an older brother.  Throughout his life, August Wilhelm served as both friend and mentor.  At the age of fifteen, Schlegel was apprenticed to a banker in Leipzig.  This soon proved to be thoroughly unsuitable for Schlegel and so, two years later in 1790, he joined August Wilhelm in Göttingen to study law.  He moved a year later, however, to continue his study of the law in Leipzig.  There he began the important friendship with Novalis.  It did not take long for Schlegel to realize that literature was of far greater interest to him than the law.  In 1794 he moved to Dresden, where he began to study the literature and culture of antiquity with incredible zeal.  Dresden was the natural place to undertake this venture for it had one of the best collections of plaster casts of antiquities north of the Alps.  In fact, it had been in Dresden that Winckelmann--who was very much an inspiration for Schlegel--began to lay the groundwork for his study of Greek art.  What Winckelmann accomplished in the study of the plastic arts of antiquity, Schlegel hoped to accomplish in the study of literature of antiquity.  In the years 1794-1795--at the advanced age of twenty-two and twenty-three--he wrote numerous essays on Greek literature.  Among these is the essay On the Study of Greek Poetry,which was intended to serve as the introduction to a larger study entitled The Greeks and Romans. The study, however, was never completed.  Schlegel sent On the Study of Greek Poetry to his publisher in 1795, where it languished for some time and was finally published two years later in 1797.  By an unfortunate coincidence, Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry--which addresses many of the same issues as Schlegel's study--was published shortly before his own study appeared.  Schlegel took care later to point out that he had no knowledge of this work during the composition of his essay.  Indeed, he notes that if had had knowledge of it, he might have been able to spare himself several infelicities.2
         It is within this context, then, that the Romantic Schlegel took shape.  A year after the publication of On the Study of Greek Poetry,Schlegel moved to Jena, where he made several important friendships, including those with Tieck and Schleiermacher.  By the time the essay was actually published, Schlegel was concerning himself more and more with modern literature, with what he termed "Romantic" literature.  Indeed, a year after its publication, Schlegel was publishing the Athenäum,the signal document and organ of the early Romantic movement.  It was during this time--and by means of the Athenäum--that much of what came to define the Romantic sensibility was mapped out.  Virtually all of the texts for which Schlegel is justly famous appeared in the Athenäum--a journal that lasted only two years.
         At first glance, this period of transition would seem to constitute a remarkable about-face.  Indeed, values, orientations, and goals would appear to be completely altered.  Schlegel is usually characterized as a thinker of absolute self-reflexivity.  Romanticism in turn is characterized as a completely new and radically distinct brand of literature. Schlegel's earlier work seems so markedly different from the common understanding of Schlegel that it is often simply ignored.  Given the general impulse to present Schlegel as the embodiment and representative of Romanticism, the very question of a classicist Schlegel is a critical complication that many would prefer to avoid.3  One must also consider the effect of the range of texts available in English by Schlegel.  Despite the staggering array of studies Schlegel authored--the Critical Friedrich Schlegel Edition [Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe] runs to thirty-five volumes--only two slim volumes of Schlegel's work are available in English.  The contents of these volumes are drawn exclusively from Schlegel's Romanticist phase.  As a result, a rather distorted and somewhat simplified understanding of both Schlegel and Romanticism has been made possible.4  Nonetheless, the relation between the classical and Romantic writings constitutes a dimension to Schlegel's oeuvre that must be born in mind.5  Not only must the existence of these "classicist" writings be acknowledged, but their relation to early Romanticism must also be studied.6
         As a preliminary observation, it should be noted that even a superficial perusal of Schlegel's work suggests that a strictly "Romantic" assessment of Schlegel misses the mark.  A remarkable number of the writings of the Athenäum period, for instance, deal directly with classical antiquity--and not in disparaging terms either.7  For instance, Schlegel notes in one of the Ideas: "All the classical poems of the ancients are coherent, inseparable; they form an organic whole, they constitute, properly viewed, only a single poem, the only one in which poetry itself appears in perfection" (p. 102).  Statements such as these are no doubt glossed over in the rush to make Schlegel conform to a pre-existant understanding of Romanticism.  Yet they are by no means anomalous and are evidence of not only an often neglected dimension but also a surprising continuity in Schlegel's work.  Indeed, throughout the writings of the Romantic period, classical antiquity remains a persistent point of reference.  Nor does this interest stop here.  In the lectures on the history of European literature of 1803-1804, Schlegel devoted more than half of his time to considering Greek and Roman literature.8  And in the History of Ancient and Modern Literature of 1812, the literature of antiquity still holds a prominent place.  As Schlegel notes there: "our intellectual development is so utterly based in that of the ancients, that it is indeed incredibly difficult to discuss literature without beginning at this point."9  It is not simply that Schlegel never lost his love of ancient literature.  Rather, antiquity remained an integral part of Schlegel's understanding of literature.  Moreover, antiquity was not something to be transcended and cast aside.  Antiquity continued to define the parameters and standards according to which the achievement of modern literature was to be measured.  In fact, modern literature was only truly modern in as much as it stood in relation to antiquity.10
        The question of the relation of modernity to antiquity, of course, did not originate with Schlegel.11  The so-called querelle des anciens et des modernes had been a focal point of critical concern for some time in Europe.  It first took shape in the seventeenth century in the efforts of Descartes and Bacon and their followers to outline and defend a new experimental science.  In order to do so, it was necessary to challenge and dispute the enormous authority of Aristotle.  This quickly assumed the form of a debate on the relative superiority of the ancients versus the moderns.  The essence of this debate was soon transferred to the literary realm, where it was bruted that the ancients could no longer serve as absolute standards of artistic production.  For instance, Charles Perrault--whose reading of The Century of Louis XIV [Le siècle de Louis le Grand] in 1687 before the French academy is considered one of the major skirmishes in the querelle--argued that the ancient writers were full of errors that later ages had rendered obvious.12  Fontenelle argued that not only were the ancients essentially no different than the moderns, and hence not unsurpassable, but that they suffered from the lack of accumulated wisdom and knowledge that the moderns possess.  Despite such attacks, the ancients had a formidable defender in Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, who emphasized the constant exemplary role the ancients played for various cultures throughout history.
         A similar debate took place in England, beginning with writers such as Sir William Temple and William Wotton, who debated the ability of the moderns to improve upon the ancients.  The debate reached its literary apogee in Swift's An Account of the Battle between the Antient and Modern Books in St. James's Library (1704), in which the books of the two camps literally do battle.  Swift also addressed the topic in his A Tale of the Tub (1704), which ridiculed the pedantic pretentions of modern critics.  More temperate writers such as Pope attempted to reconcile the two poles of the debate by suggesting in An Essay in Criticismthat, as the ancients were exemplary imitators of nature, to imitate them would be to be faithful to nature.
        The notion that antiquity provided the prototype for contemporary literary production became an increasingly vexed issue.  With the collapse of mythology and the gradual erosion of Christianity's ability to substitute for a mythology, it became clear that the gap between antiquity and modernity was unbridgeable.  Indeed, the insistence on the adherence to a classical background and context seemed to propel literature unavoidably towards the mock-heroic and satiric.  To many this seemed the most straightforward way to acknowledge the incommensurability between these two cultural domains.  Even Swift, in his defense of the ancients, assumed the mock heroic form.  Thus, far from establishing the superiority of either, the debates in France and England confirmed the thoroughgoing distinctiveness of ancient and modern culture.
        In Germany the querelle took a slightly different turn.  Undergirding the debate in England and France were certain assumptions about the ease of accessibility and translatability that obtained between modernity and antiquity.  In Germany, however, antiquity and modernity came to be seen as irrevocably distinct from one another.  The work of Herder did much to facilitate this development as he emphasized that a radical cultural relativism was at work throughout history.  As each culture was unique and operated according to its own specific rules, it was pointless to turn to another culture for models to be imitated.  What was to be imitated was the inimitable.  This position ironically secured the status of the ancients to a considerable extent, for the ancients were inimitable.  Thus, for instance, Homer can figure as an Ossian-like writer worthy of adulation in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.  Winckelmann likewise served to strengthen the position of the ancients as a paradoxically inimitable model. Hence the ancients were secured in their status to such an extent that it seemed to amount to--as E.M. Butler memorably phrased it--the tyranny of Greece over Germany.  The querelle in Germany culminated in Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795-6).  Yet, while Schiller accorded exemplarity to the ancients, his discussion was predicated upon the thoroughgoing distinctness of antiquity and modernity.  Modernity was conditioned by an utterly unique set of circumstances; it could not simply imitate nature because it had entered the philosophically inaugurated era of self-reflexivity.  Moreover, these traits are not to be wished away; they comprise the very task of modernity--to account for the self-reflexivity of consciousness.  While Schiller did much to justify a post-Kantian aesthetic theory vis-à-vis the ancients, he did not draw out the radical implications it contained for the understanding of modernity. Schiller could not resolve the antinomy between antiquity and modernity. It was Schlegel who assessed this large-scale historical dilemma and drew from it radical conclusions about literary and cultural production.13
         This search for a modern culture, however, should not blind us to the fact that no theory emerges de novo.  Modernity could only be conceptualized within the vocabulary of antiquity; it could only be articulated in relation to antiquity.  Even writings that seem to focus exclusively on antiquity or modernity often have the relation between the two--and thus both antiquity and modernity--as their founding premise.  This relation must be born in mind when considering Schlegel's early work.  It is indeed tempting to assume that, because he relentlessly focused on the literature of antiquity in his early writings, modernity is simply not a matter of concern.  If modernity is alluded to it is usually in the most disparaging and dismissive of tones.14  According to this logic, then, Schlegel sided entirely with the ancients in this debate and then for some reason made a complete about-face, rejected antiquity and embraced modernity.15   If this assessment were accurate, it would certainly relegate the early writings to the status of muddled juvenalia.  It would also tend to simplify Romanticism itself.  Yet any careful consideration of these early writings of Schlegel must come to the conclusion that they derive their full meaning from this larger debate about modernity--to which Romanticism itself was one response.16  As Richard Brinkmann notes of On the Study of Greek Poetry: "From the outset this text is very decidedly concerned with modern literature and nothing else right up until the end."17  This subtextual and contextual perspective must be taken into account in any consideration of Schlegel's writings from his "classicist" phase.18
         It is this large-scale, historical perspective that characterizes Schlegel's approach to questions of literature from his "classicist" phase to his Romantic phase and on through his so-called Catholic-Conservative phase.19  It would be easy to conclude from much of the secondary literature in English that Schlegel, when he was not thinking obsessively about irony, only considered literature in a vacuum.  Yet, despite what some critics have implied, Schlegel did not think of literature in purely abstract terms.  As Schlegel commented to his brother, August Wilhem, he found any theory not founded in history to be ridiculous.20  Schlegel's conception of literature was, from beginning to end, profoundly historical.  Whatever pronouncements Schlegel did make about literature as such were always based upon detailed and rigorous historical study.21  Hence it is not just that the literature of antiquity consistently played a role in Schlegel's thought.  Rather, it is that Schlegel's notion of Romanticism was from the outset predicated upon a broad, historical study of literature.  Romanticism, accordingly, was not seen simply as a moment within which literature became conscious of itself; it was also seen as the fruition of the history of Western literature itself.  Indeed, the very impetus for the conceptualization of the Romantic--which On the Study of Greek Poetry articulates--was the search for a resolution to a cultural dilemma of massive historical proportions between classical and post-classical literature.  It is tempting to think of Romanticism as a complete departure from the past, as a "new class of poetry," as Wordsworth termed it in the preface to Lyrical Ballads.  Yet one should recall that, for many artists (such as Hölderlin, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Shelley, and Keats among others), antiquity often provided the medium within which to articulate a literature that would be truly modern.22  Thus Romanticism--precisely because of its ambition to define modernity--is predicated upon an exegetical reading of the past. On the Study of Greek Poetry was part of this larger struggle to recast classical literature to such a radical extent that modernity would thereby be made possible.
         As many have noted, On the Study of Greek Poetry is an essay at odds with itself.  The essay seeks to defend antiquity at the same time that it seeks to offer a corrective to the development of contemporary literature.  It argues that the crisis of modernity begins already with the collapse of classical culture.  With the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the abandonment of Latin as a lingua franca, European culture began to fragment into more and more particular and idiosyncratic forms.  While it initially seemed that Christianity might be able to provide a unifying medium, eventually particularity won out.  Before the implications of the historical contours of the essay can be teased out, it is necessary to clarify what may appear to be some of the conceptual idiosyncrasies intrinsic to this essay.  Romanticism, for instance, here designates not a literary movement that came to prominence at the end of the eighteenth century; rather, it designates a large historical period--essentially, post-antiquity.  In this sense, the term derives from the conceptual link to the breakdown of Latin into various vernacular languages, that is, the Romance languages.23
         The difficulty inherent in the relation between classical and post-classical culture according to Schlegel is that it is not characterized by a break or rupture in development.  Rather, both antiquity and modernity are governed by two distinct and incommensurable principles of development (or Bildung).24  What Schlegel presents is the conflict between two different types of Bildung. Antiquity is governed by a natural Bildung.  It is characterized by a consistent fidelity to nature itself.  This fidelity, however, is tempered by a commitment to the characteristic as opposed to the idiosyncratic.  In the process of its development, natural Bildung is oriented therefore to what is essential to nature.  The culture that thereby results is as authentic and true to nature as it is possible for culture to be.  Indeed, it may bring to presence what is only implicit within nature itself.  While natural Bildung does achieve a perfection, it follows an organicist logic that dictates that such perfection can only be fleeting.  A natural decay and decline necessarily follow perfection.  Accordingly, antiquity is a closed and completed cycle, an evolutionary process come to full fruition.
 Modernity is characterized by an artificial Bildung, which is led by concepts and not nature.  To a great extent, modernity has been dominated by a sterile neo-classicism that attempted to dictate terms to culture on the basis of an inaccurately interpreted antiquity.  When modernity does turn to consider nature, it focuses on the individual and idiosyncratic and thus deviates more and more from nature.  As a result, much of modern culture is anarchic, incapable of establishing a modern form of art that could become the basis for a broad-based culture in general.  Despite these apparent limitations, however, modernity is capable of endless progress.  Thus Schlegel remains optimistic in the essay that this is just a passing crisis even though he himself concedes that it is an apparently hopeless imbroglio.25  Indeed, Schlegel pins great hopes on a coming aesthetic revolution that will transform modern culture.26
         Interestingly, one of the main factors in this revolution is criticism.  Criticism is one of the defining features of modern culture and it does not necessarily have to produce false concepts to guide artistic production--as it does in neo-classicism.  In fact, criticism could produce correct concepts for artistic production.  Criticism then offers itself as a third term, a point of possible synthesis.  This possibility is not fully explored in this essay, but the foundation for a solution to the dilemma between antiquity and modernity is outlined.  Criticism thus is a possible way to resolve the deadlock between antiquity and modernity; it also proposes the way to establish an aesthetically valid culture.  Criticism , moreover, should not be the distilled abstraction of this dilemma.  Rather, criticism should be the historically-informed comprehension of this dilemma.  The difficulty within the essay is that the solution is sought for within one of the constituent elements of the debate.  Whereas the only solution is to be found within the process of the study and critique of the issues.
 
 

         As Kant lays much of the foundation for Schlegel's thought, it is worthwhile to consider briefly his aesthetics.27  In the Critique of Judgment Kant argued that the judgment involved in the assessment of beauty was of a distinct order.  Although it took the form of a judgment, it did not lead to knowledge.  Unlike epistemologically motivated judgments, which proceed by means of determinative judgment, that is, the application of an existing concept to a particular instance, aesthetic judgments proceed by means of reflective judgment.  Reflective judgment begins with a particular instance--an instance of beauty--and searches for an appropriate concept, which it does not find.  As a result, the imagination--which usually renders an image to which the understanding can apply a concept---is put into a state of free play.  In this state of free play the mind is made aware of the constitutive role it plays in the production of knowledge.  More importantly, because this judgment is based on disinterested pleasure, it allows mind to become aware of itself as a subjective universality.  That is, mind becomes aware of the universal aspect of mind.  It is this dimension of aesthetic judgment that allows it to become the bridge between epistemology and ethics.  Aesthetic judgment is the propadeutic for the universalist thinking necessary for ethical action.  This is because, for Kant, ethical action is dependent upon the reflection as to whether a particular action would make the basis for a valid, universal law for all of humanity.  Aesthetic judgment thus assumes the form and structure of ethics.  While many aspects of Kant's aesthetics were recast, the notion of the aesthetic being the philosophical bridge to ethics was widely taken up by many writers.  Indeed, even twentieth-century critics, who inaccurately accused Kant of being the progenitor of a formalist and apolitical aesthetics, accepted this notion without reservation.
         Kant's notion of aesthetics rested upon the Enlightenment assumption of a universal reason.  Two distinct re-interpretations were made of this assumption during the eighteenth century.  The first emerged out of the counter-Enlightenment current prevalent in many of the German-speaking parts of Europe, which introduced the notion of the non-universal character of reason.  That is, reason was characterized as being fragmented into distinct historical periods and cultures.  Accordingly, reason was not universal but contingent and relative.  Once these notions were incorporated into a historically informed aesthetic theory, contemplating Greek culture became a more complicated affair.  It no longer seemed that the Greeks established a cultural standard that could simply be replicated by another culture.  Thus, even though the Greeks remained a cultural ideal, they essentially became a frustratingly unattainable ideal.  The problem then became how to redirect modern culture using Greek culture as a point of orientation.  This accounts for the supposition of two incommensurable cultural realms present in many treatises on aesthetics at this time.  Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and  Schlegel's On the Study of Greek Poetry are perhaps the most well-known instances of this predicament.  This explains the perhaps confusing presence of an almost neo-classical yearning for antiquity together with the firm conviction that contemporary culture is irrevocably distinct from antiquity.
         The second re-interpretation emerged out of the transformation of Kant's philosophy at the hands of such thinkers as Fichte and Schelling.  It soon came to be seen as intolerable that Kant had banished elements that normally were an integral part of philosophy to the realm of the unknowable.  Two elements in particular--God and the world--were reduced by Kant to mere regulative ideas.  They were forever closed off from philosophy and served merely a heuristic function.  An effort was thus undertaken to reintegrate these elements into philosophy.  Fichte found a compromise that granted reality to the world but made it merely the externalization of a transcendental ego.  Soon this seemed to grant only an intangible reality to the natural world.  Schelling responded with a philosophy of nature that granted much more autonomy to the natural world.  These reformulations within German Idealism were to have an impact on the aesthetic theories of the time.  Indeed, as Schelling suggested in the final chapter of his System of Transcendental Idealism,art constituted not simply an element but the full realization of idealism.  This is because art comes closest to the world-producing activity of the Absolute.28
         Schlegel for his part historicizes Kantian aesthetics by means of antiquity.29  For Kant, disinterested pleasure was to allow apprehension of the formal purposeless purposiveness of a work of art.  This state--which is essentially transhistorical in nature--permits the free play that the suspension of determinative judgment allows.  Schlegel projects this state into antiquity, where a disinterested pleasure supposedly ruled.  Such a move allows Schlegel to historicize what is otherwise just a subjective state.  It also allows Schlegel to render this Kantian aesthetic ideal unattainable because it has been situated within an irrecoverable past.  For Schlegel it is not a matter of reinstating a transhistorical aesthetic disposition.  The only way to this state is by means of the study of antiquity.  For the study of antiquity--the study of that phase of culture in which culture was characterized by disinterested pleasure--provides the historical content for aesthetic contemplation.  Thus not only is Kantian aesthetics historicized but the Fichtean notion of the formal reflexivity of the transcendental subject is given a concrete ground in something truly beyond it.  What Schlegel adds here is that self-reflexivity is a difficult venture in that the transcendental subject does not externalize itself in a not-I that can be dispensed with once its provenance is realized.  The externalized other to the transcendental subject remains resistant because it forms a complex historical web that does not yield to a purely formal analysis.30
         Modernity also has an impact on this historico-philosophical vision of literature.  For modernity becomes characterized by the subject's awareness of its fall from a harmonious--albeit deluded--conjunction with an objective world.  Modernity is thus the endless self-reflection upon the unattainable.31  Much like Schelling, Schlegel was clearly dissatisfied with the notion of nature, the empirical, being simply the empty negation of the subject that has been posited by the subject itself so that it might come to know its own transcendental activity.  Schlegel did not conceive of the empirical as an objective externalization of a transcendental subjectivity.  Rather, in Schlegel's thought the empirical acquires its own relative autonomy; it acquires a distinct history.  In fact, as Ernst Behler has persuasively argued, Schlegel anticipates Hegel's resolutions to the dilemmas of Fichtean idealism.  Like Hegel, Schlegel injects a profoundly historical dimension into German Idealism.32  If a transcendental subject has externalized itself into the empirical, resolution cannot be accomplished by means of a contentless, formalistic analysis such as Fichte's.33  Instead, it is the content, nature, and evolution of the empirical that must be accounted for.  It is precisely by means of a philosophy that embraces and accounts for the empirical that the consciousness of the empirical comes into being, or, rather, that an objectified subjectivity reclaims its status as subjectivity.  Culture, accordingly, acquires a historico-philosophical dimension; it is the temporally contoured inter-subjective expression and manifestation of subjectivity in general.34 Yet the culture of antiquity--by being so historically distant--has assumed the status of nature.  Despite being the product of subjectivity, it stands opposed to subjectivity as something distant, external, and objective.35  This is why too much emphasis cannot be made on the "study" in On the Study of Greek Poetry.36  For this essay truly turns on the notion of the study of antiquity.  It is the study of antiquity--which is only possible in modernity--that truly brings antiquity to completion.37
 
 

         While On the Study of Greek Poetrymay seem to be a conflicted and self-contradictory essay--which in fact it is--it is so for compelling and logical reasons.  Schlegel attempts to think through to the necessarily contradictory conclusion the contemporary understanding of antiquity and modernity.38  Schlegel's treatment of antiquity does indeed take part in the cultural nostalgia of the time.  Yet, in Schlegel's case, this nostalgia is tempered by a historical and  theoretical perspicacity.  It is this awareness that leads to the realization that antiquity cannot be recreated.  Schlegel consistently argues against a neo-classicism as it was practiced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Instead, Schlegel attempts to reconceptualize modernity via antiquity.  Modernity is predicated upon a revaluation of antiquity.  This is an important perspective to bear in mind for the relation to antiquity in the essay can easily be confusing.  Any text so strongly in favor of the culture of antiquity and so despairing of the culture of modernity would seem to be culturally reactionary.  At the same time, however, the essay laments the destructive influence of the culture of antiquity on modernity and retains hope for a culture yet to come.  According to the essay, modernity was predicated upon a re-interpretation, a re-description of antiquity.  A valid modernity required the reassessment of the past.  Indeed, the future could only come to be if the past was altered.
         This revaluation was made possible by the ongoing work of reception as well as continuing archaeological discoveries.  The discovery of Herculaneum, for instance, stimulated a renewed interest in the art of antiquity in the eighteenth century.39  Most importantly, however, antiquity began to be examined with a greater attention to historical and artifactual detail.  This necessitated the conceptualization of Greek art as a distinct entity within antiquity.  To discuss Greek art in terms more appropriate for the culture of antiquity as a whole was increasingly seen to falsify Greek art.  As Ernst Behler points out:

This revaluation also brought about a decisive change in the prevalent relationship to classical antiquity, which can be described as a departure from the dominant Roman and Aristotelian influence upon European criticism in exchange for a closer bond with the Greeks and especially with the Platonic tradition.  Previously, the Greeks had maintained their impact on the history of aesthetics chiefly through the Romans as well as through various adaptations of Aristotle's Poetics.  Following Winckelmann and the tradition of German humanism, the Schlegels attempted to terminate this form of classicism by establishing a close connection with the aesthetic world of the Greeks and by referring directly to pronouncements on poetry by Plato and the Greek rhetoricians.40

   A cursory reading of Schlegel's essay could easily conclude that all of modern culture is to be abandoned in favor of a culture modeled on that of antiquity's.  A good deal of attention is devoted to modernity in On the Study of Greek Poetry.  It is often decried and shown in poor comparison with antiquity.  Accordingly, modern literature seems to be catering increasingly to a jaded sensibility that requires ever more violent stimulants. To conclude, however, that this is the sum total of this essay's view of modernity does not do justice to the complexities of Schlegel's historico-philosophical vision.  For not only does Schlegel disclose that the simple imitation of antiquity is pointless, but he clearly indicates that modern culture might be on the brink of a sudden transformation.   Moreover, there are harbingers of what such a transformed culture might look like.  Shakespeare, for instance, provides an indication of the possible vitality of modern culture.42  The essential task of modernity, therefore, is to diagnose and move beyond both antiquity and what has up until then defined modernity.  Indeed, as Schlegel commented to his brother August in 1794, the fundamental task of modernity is to synthesize what is essentially classical and modern.
         For the most part, however, On the Study of Greek Poetry does not successfully outline how a synthesis between antiquity and modernity might be achieved.  It remains very much caught up in outlining the thesis and antithesis that antiquity and modernity present.  Indeed, the antinomy between the two seems irreconcilable in the essay.  It is not difficult to see Romanticism--as Schlegel was later to conceive it--as this synthesis.43  In this sense Romanticism is to be seen as founded on the diagnosis and analysis of antiquity and modernity.44  As such, it is not founded--as it is often assumed to be--upon an empty and formal self-reflexivity but upon a critical history. Schlegel thereby expands and complicates the ambitions of post-Kantian thinkers to reconcile the Kantian Ding-an-sich with a transcendental subject by insisting upon the reinscription of the products of mind.45
         Romanticism, as literature's own production of a theory of itself, provides a resolution to the theoretical dilemma Schlegel outlines in On the Study of Greek Poetry.  As Schlegel acknowledges in this essay, there is no real possibility of returning to a pre-critical state.  There can be no direct and immediate relation to the world once the notion of phenomenality has taken root.46  The only real relation possible is a mediate one, one achieves awareness of the medium of its access.  While the Kantian subject suffers an apparently permanent separation from the world, an isotropic affinity is created in post-Kantian thought between the mediated relation between the subject and world and the endless self-mediation of a transcendental subject and the material world.  For Schlegel, this isotropic affinity is evidenced most clearly in the work of art.  For the work of art--by means of criticism--reveals a structural relation to the infinitude of such transcendental activity.  As Walter Benjamin phrases it: "Criticism is thus the medium in which the limitedness of the individual work relates itself methodically to the endlessness of art and into which it is ultimately transposed, for art--as it itself understands itself--is a medium of endless reflection."47  The completion, the true realization of antiquity can only happen in modernity--more precisely, in the literary theory and literary history that is possible in modernity.48   Accordingly, Romanticism itself--as a literally literary theory--is the realization of antiquity.
 
 

       On the Study of Greek Poetry raises more issues and problems than it can possibly solve.  It is a process of struggle, a conceptual Laocöon statuary.  As Peter Szondi has suggested, the essay is the document not so much of a standpoint as of an evolution.49  For this reason, it may seem to contradict not only the later Schlegel but its own argument as well.  Nonetheless, the essay remains an incisive and penetrating examination of issues central to the aesthetic and philosophical debates at the turn of the nineteenth century.  What the patient reader is rewarded with is a deeper understanding of the effort to define and elaborate a modern culture in the eighteenth century.  The historical dimension is doubly important here in that one gains in the course of the essay a broader appreciation of the historical origins of Romanticism in addition to an appreciation of the importance of history for Romanticism.  Indeed, what Schlegel presents here in crucible form is an etiology of the profound cultural transformation that was taking place at the end of the eighteenth century and that would culminate in Romanticism.  It is, as Ernst Behler has justly suggested, the "Oldest System Program of Romanticism."50
 

NOTES

      1 Xenion, "Die Zwei Fieber."  Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Vol 1 (Leipzig: Temple, 1911), p. 319.
      2 See Hans Eichner, "The Supposed Influence of Schilller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung on F. Schlegel's Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie," Germanic Review 30(1955), pp. 260-264.  Eichner carefully details how the essay was written in ignorance of Schiller's text, while the preface was clearly written under its influence.  For a discussion of the relation of Schlegel's work to Schiller--as well as a thorough analysis of Schlegel's aesthetics--see Leonard P. Wessell, Jr., "The Antinomic Structure of Friedrich Schlegel's 'Romanticism,'" Studies in Romanticism 47(1972), pp. 243-58.
      3 We should ponder the question Blanchot posed: "which is the true Schlegel? Is the later the realization of the earlier?"  (p. 164). "The Athenaeum," trans. Deborah Esch and Ian Balfour, Studies in Romanticism 22(Summer 1983), pp. 163-172.  One must also consider to what extent Schlegel presents a full-fledged championing of the ancients in On the Study of Greek Poetry.  As Raymond Immerwahr notes: "The essay itself, and especially the preface, which was written later, far from being a confident championing of the ancients against the moderns, are an agonized, at times even desperate, effort to reconcile the grandeur of Dante, the beauty, depth, and richness of Shakespeare, and the exciting promise of Goethe, with the ideal of classical harmony achieved by the Greeks" (p. 379).  "Classicist Values in the Critical Thought of Friedrich Schlegel," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 79(1980), pp. 376-389.
      4 As Victor Lange observes: "Few European writers have been so ceaselessly and so brilliantly concerned with the large philosophical assumptions as well as the specific means and purposes of literary criticism as was Friedrich Schlegel, and among them there is none whose achievement is more elusive and more difficult to assess" (289).   "Friedrich Schlegel's Literary Criticism," Comparative Literature 7.4(1955), pp. 289-305.  Geoffrey Hartman has characterized him as a "playboy philosopher."  Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 280.  Kevin Newmark summarizes the questions criticism often leaves us about Schlegel: "Was Friedrich Schlegel a serious philosopher or a mere littérateur, a diletante, or worse, a farceur, an intellectual practical joker, a pretentiously literate buffoon?" (pp. 905-6).  "L'absolu littéraire: Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony," MLN 107(1992), pp. 905-930.  For further discussion of these issues, see Marcus Bullock, "Eclipse of the Sun: Mystical Terminology, Revolutionary Method and Ecstatic Prose in Friedrich Schlegel," MLN 98(1983), pp. 454-483.  Setting off these ruminations was no doubt Wilhelm Dilthey's scathing comment: "His philosophy was dilettantism."  Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), p. 249.  See also Raymond Immerwahr, "The Subjectivity or Objectivity of Friedrich Schlegel's Irony," Germanic Review 26(1951), pp. 173-191.  This difficulty in assessing Schlegel is not merely confined to the problem of coming to terms with his earlier work.  In fact, it is characteristic of the understanding of Schlegel in general.
      5 The tacit consensus seems to be that, since Schlegel argued for the prime importance of the fragment, it is acceptable to not even look for any systematic aspect to Schlegel's thought.  Instead, one may browse through texts such as the Fragments or Ideas and take whatever suits one's purposes.
      6 It should be pointed out that a great deal of work has helped to make it clear the extent to which the work of the Romantic Schlegel is predicated upon the earlier phase of classicism.  Unfortunately, much of this work remains confined to German-speaking scholars of Romanticism.  Although many critics rightfully ought to be cited here, I refer the reader to the important work of Ernst Behler, Manfred Frank, and Peter Szondi.
      7 Schlegel comments in one of the Critical Fragments: "In the ancients we see the perfected letter of all poetry; in the moderns we see its growing spirit" (p. 11).
      8 See Friedrich Schlegel, Wissenschaft der Europäische Literatur, ed. Ernst Behler.  (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958),  pp. 3-188.
      9 Friedrich Schlegel, Geschichte der Alten und Neuen Literatur, ed. Hans Eichner.  (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958), p. 18.
      10 Brinkmann rightly points out that this has nothing to do with the imitation of Greek poetry.  Rather, what is at stake is the search for a transcendental principle of modern poetry (p. 367).  "Romantische Dichtungstheorie in Friedrich Schlegels Frühschriften und Schillers Begriffe des Naiven und Sentimentalischen," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 32(1958), pp. 344-371.
      11 For more extensive treatment of this issue, see Hans Robert Jauss, "Fr. Schlegels und Fr. Schillers Replik of die 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" in Hugo Friedrich and Fritz Schalk, Europäische Aufklärung.  Herbert Diekman zum 60. Geburtstag (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1967).
      12 For further discussion of the Querelle in France, see Hubert Gillot, La Quarelle des Anciens et des Modernes en France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1914) and Hippolyte Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Hachette, 1856).  For a concise overview, see Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 42-66.  For an overview of these issues in relation to Germany, see Karl Menges, "Herder and the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes," Eighteenth-Century German Authors and Their Aesthetic Theories: Literature and the Other Arts, ed. Richard Critchfield and Wulf Kupke (Columbia: Camden House, 1988), pp. 147-183.
      13 Behind all these debates that were seemingly restricted to literary criticism lie large-scale philosophical issues.  For what is at stake is the very conception of the development and growth of knowledge.  The resistance to the abandonment of the ancients as a cultural model is a resistance to the shock of modernity.  For the essence of modernity is a mode of culture and knowledge production that acknowledges no model.  The ancients, accordingly, have to be surpassed because knowledge progresses, and builds upon and exceeds previous achievements.  For most in the eighteenth century this was defined by a vision of progress that was cumulative and linear.  Lurking in the German vision of the debate, however, is a more suspicious understanding of the linearity of progress.  The sensitivity to the issues of cultural relativism creates a greater awareness of the nonlinearity that revolutions in knowledge and cultural production create.
       14 As Raymond Immerwahr notes: "The essay itself, and especially the preface, which was written later, far from being a confident champion of the ancients against the moderns, are an agonized, at times even desperate, effort to reconcile the grandeur of Dante, the beauty, depth, and richness of Shakespeare and the exciting promise of Goethe, with the ideal of classical harmony achieved by the Greeks" (379).  Immerwahr, "Classicist Values in the Critical Thought of Friedrich Schlegel," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 79(1980): 376-389.
      15 This reading of Schlegel was lent considerable authority by two influential essays by Arthur O. Lovejoy published early in the twentieth century--"The Meaning of 'Romantic' in Early German Romanticism" and "Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism."  Both were collected in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Putnam, 1960).
      16 Certainly the fact that it is impossible to forget that Schlegel is one of the founders of the aesthetics of Romanticism colors the reading of his early work.  It may encourage a surprised overreaction to the praise of antiquity. If it were possible to forget the later Schlegel, it would perhaps be possible to see more clearly the extent to which On the Study of Greek Poetry is genuinely concerned about modern culture.
      17 Brinkmann, "Romantische Dichtungstheorie," p. 353.  Peter Szonid also notes that Schlegel's concern in this essay is the study of the developmental laws of ancient and modern culture and the difference between the two--in other words, a theory of both antiquity and modernity (p. 105).  Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie.  Vol. 1. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980).
      18 As Franz Nobert Mennemeier suggests, "Schlegel does not seek to oppose Greek and modern literature; rather, he seeks to produce a critical, productive reflexion."  Friedrich Schlegels Poesiebegriff Dargestellt anhand der Literaturkritischen Schriften (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 22-23.
      19 The pontification and condescension one hears about the last phase of Schlegel's work is the result of people incapable of conceiving of a more heinous act than having the wrong opinion.  It is also moral hypocrisy on the part of those incapable of understanding the political complexities of the history of Europe.  One wonders what the average American would say, if--because, like Germany, we were an unaffiliated collection of states--a Canadian Napoleon were able to defeat and invade us, dragging many of us off to a futile and fatal campaign against Mexico.  Would it be that strange to call for a United States of America, so that we might form a more perfect union and ward off a repetition of such events?
      20 As Eberhard Huge notes, Schlegel's guiding assumption in the essay is that the presentation of the story of the history of Greek poetry would achieve a theory of beauty.  Poesie und Reflexion in der Aesthetik des frühen Friedrich Schlegel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), p. 11.
       21 Victor Lange: "There exists for Schlegel no categorical distinction between literary criticism and literary history" ("Friedrich Schlegel's Literary Criticism," p. 304).
       22 For further discussion, see Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, (Cambridge: Belknap, 1970) and Jochen Schmidt, "Griechenland als Ideal und Utopie bei Winckelmann, Goethe, und Hölderlin," Hölderlin Jahrbuch 28(1992-93): 94-110.
      23 As Hans Eichner notes: "its primary reference was chronological, so that it included all poetry written in the European vernacular (as distinct from classical Latin) from the earliest times through and beyond the sixteenth century" (p. 103).  Eichner adds: "until 1797 Friedrich Schlegel employed the phrase exclusively in this sense" (p. 103).  "Germany/Romantisch-Romantik-Romantiker," in 'Romantic' And Its Cognates.  The European History of a Word, Hans Eichner, ed. (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972).  See also Eichner's discussion of the term in in "Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Romantic Poetry," PMLA 71(1956), pp. 1018-1041.
      24 Clemens Menze observes of this notion: "The basis of the doctrine of Bildung is the infinite perfectibility of human nature.  The notion of Bildung, however, is not tantamount to a form of humanism.  For Bildung is part of the self-articulation of the divine."  Der Bildungsbegriff des jungen Schlegels (Rutingen: Henn, 1964),p. 15.
      25 Kathleen Wheeler defines Schlegel's new conception of modernity as a resolution of an earlier antinomy: "Friedrich Schlegel then transformed the original meaning of his term 'romantic' to signify the characteristic synthesis of these pairs of opposites common to all great art,where before 'romantic' had been used merely as a historical term in relation to modern literature" (pp. 7-8).  From this shift, Wheeler argues, Schlegel concludes: "All truly great modern art is close to Greek literature in its essential aesthetic principles" (p. 7).  "Introduction." German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe.  Kathleen Wheeler, ed.  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.)  However, as Heinz-Dieter Weber suggests, one should not draw hasty parallels: "One cannot speak of a indentification of 'Romantic poetry' with the earlier 'interesting poetry' in the sense of a simple reversal.  Already in the early studies Schlegel is concerned with a transcendental principle of poetry as well with the conception of a 'dynamic that would extend into the infinite,' in the sense of a progressive universal poetry."  Friedrich Schlegels "Transzendentalpoesie."  Untersuchungen zum Funktionswandel der Literaturkritik im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1973), p. 141.
      26 As Ingrid Oesterele suggests, the dichotomy between antiquity and modernity becomes transformed into a struggle within modernity itself.  Thus the issue concerns not antiquity and modernity but modernity and futurity (p. 174).  See "Der 'glückliche Anstoß': ästhetischer Revolution und die Anstoßigkeit politischer Revolution.  Ein Denk- und Belegversuch zum Zusammenhang von politischer Formveränderung und kultereller Revolution im Studium-Aufsatz Friedrich Schlegels" in Zur Modernität der Romantik, Dieter Bansch, ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler), pp. 167-216.
      27 For further discussion of the relation between Kant and Schlegel, see Rodolphe Gasché's "Forward: Ideality in Fragmentation," in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), vii-xxxii.
      28 As Anne K. Mellor notes: "Schlegel thus defines divinity with human consciousness" (p. 73).  English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980).  While Mellor's study as a whole deals with the English Romantic tradition, the initial chapter, "The Paradigm of Romantic Irony," contains an extended and incisive discussion of Schlegel.
      29 In this regard, see Robert S. Leventhal, The Disciplines of Interpretation.  Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750-1800 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994).  Leventhal notes: "Schlegel utilizes the notion of 'disinterestedness' in Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft and historicizes it precisely by rendering it the guiding principle of Antiquity" (p. 263).
      30 As Ernst Behler notes: "One way of 'fichtesizing' in artistic fashion was pursued by Friedrich Schlegel with his theory of irony.  Schlegel's early writings of 1795-1798 on Greek literature already reflect this process.  They are dominated by that axiom the transcendental idealism postulating a strong antagonism of nature and human freedom which marks the early phase of idealistic thought as represented by Kant, Schiller, and finally Fichte.  Schlegel depicted the entire course of Greek literature as a dramatic exemplification of this process" (p. 59).  Ernst Behler, "The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism," in Romantic Irony, Frederick Garber, ed.  (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988).  See also Marike Finlay, The Romantic Irony of Semiotics: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988).  As Finlay notes: "Poetry's self-grounding is romantic irony's revolt against philosophical domination, a revolt which takes the basic form of Fichtean transcendence, but which is not the representation of the philosophical ego's extra-discursive transcendence" (pp. 135-136).
      31 As Eberhard Huge suggests, Schlegel does not want to dismantle modern principles of understanding; rather, they should be led to their completion (p. 42).  Poesie und Reflexion in der Aesthetik des frühen Friedrich Schlegel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971).
      32 Ernst Behler notes with regard to the relation to Hegel: "Historical reality provided him with concrete models and perceptions for the formation of this theory, and one of his most basic convictions was that of a complementary relationship between historical investigations on the one hand and theoretical and systematic ones on the other.  As I see it, Schlegel was the first among the idealistic philosophers to develop an historical consciousness out of speculative idealism and to affirm the complementary relationship between history and theory which was later to become  the essence of Hegel's philosophy."  (p. 58-9.)  Behler, "Origins of Romantic Aesthetics in Friedrich Schlegel," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (1980), pp. 47-66.  For further discussion, see Behler's "Friedrich Schlegel und Hegel," Hegel-Studien 2(1963), pp. 203-250.
      33 For further discussion of the relation between Schlegel and Fichte, see Werner Hamacher, "Der Satz der Gattung: Friedrich Schlegels poetologische Umsetzung von Fichtes unbedingtem Grundsatz," MLN 95(1980), pp. 1155-1180.  (Published in English in Premises: Essays in Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).) "Kurt Röttgers, "Fichtes Wirkung auf die Frühromantiker, am Beispiel Friedrich Schlegels.  Ein Beitrag zur 'Theoriepragmatik,'" DVLG, 51(1977), pp. 55-77.
      34 For further discussion of the relation of the cultural debate about modernity to German philosophy, see Walter Jaeschke, "Early German Idealist Reinterpretations of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns," CLIO 12.4(1983), pp. 313-331.
      35 Mennemeier suggests that a universal poetry faces art much as the Fichtean ego faces the non-ego.  Friedrich Schlegels Poesiebegriff, p. 324.
      36 Timothy Clark notes in relation to this issue: "Consciousness is engaged in a ceaseless transcendence of its finite dimensions, a process undergone as the very movement of reading" (p. 234).  "Modern Transformations of German Romanticism: Blanchot and Derrida on the Fragment, the Aphorism and the Archictectural," Paragraph, 15.3(1992), pp. 232-47.
      37 As Jauss notes: "The perfection of a determination of the pure beauty of ancient art became the specific character of a completed history of this art" ("Replik," p. 130).  In "Vom Wert des Studiums der Griechen und der Römer," Schlegel characterizes antiquity as possessing a cyclical system.  Yet history itself is characterized by a system of infinite progress.  Thus a natural Bildung is a necessary prerequisite for artificial Bildung, indeed, for historical progress itself.
      38 The contradictory nature of the essay may, in fact, merely indicate the precision of thought at work in it.  The essay is part of a larger attempt in German culture to articulate a post-Kantian philosophy by means of cultural history.  For a well known and intriguiging example, see  Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater," trans. Carol Jacobs, Connecticut Review 44.1(1997), pp. 49-55.
      39 A Roman town destroyed in AD 79 along with Pompei by the eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius.  It was discovered in 1709.  Regular excavations began in 1738.  The exploration of the site continued in an unfortunately haphazard and often secretive manner.  Winckelmann, who visited the site, was provoked to write a tract denouncing the procedures employed there.
      40 Ernst Behler, "The Impact of Classical Antiquity on the Formation of the Romantic Literary Theory of the Schlegel Brothers," in Classical Models in Literature, Zoran Konstantinovic, Warren Anderson, and Walter Dietze, eds. (Innsbruck: Amoe, 1981), p. 139.
      41 For an overview of the issues surrounding Winckelmann's death, see Lionel Gossman, "Death in Trieste," Journal of European Studies, 22(1992), pp. 207-240.
      42 Particularly in the German-speaking parts of Europe Shakespeare presented an example of clear achievement in modernity that no longer met the demands and requirements of a literary theory derived from Aristotelian doctrines. Lessing, Herder, Schlegel, and Goethe all worked to establish Shakespeare as a model of modernity.  This necessitated in turn the search for an aesthetic theory that would establish the validity of a distinctly modern culture.  Klopstock, Schiller and Goethe are further, more contemporary, examples of what is aesthetically sound in modernity.
      43 Richard Brinkman argues that there is no break between the classicist Schlegel and the Romantic Schlegel.  Rather, Schlegel's Romanticism is simply the result of thinking through a problem to its logical conclusion ("Romantische Dichtungstheorie," p. 358).  One should also relate these issues to Schlegel's notion of universal poetry.  For further discussion of this topic, see Ernst Behler, "Friedrich Schlegels Theorie der Universalpoesie," Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 1(1957), pp. 211-252.
      44 For a further discussion of these issues, see Ernst Behler, "The Impact of Classical Antiquity on the Formation of the Romantic Literary Theory of the Schlegel Brothers," Classical Moderls in Literature, Zoran Konstantinovic, Warren Anderson, and Walter Dietze, eds. (Innsbruck: Amoe, 1981), pp. 139-143.
      45 Further discussion of Schlegel's philosophy and aesthetics, see Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989).
      46 These issues are closely tied to Schlegel's understanding of language.  As Winfried Menninghaus notes: "The Romantic discovers the magic, the magical power, of language precisely in its arbitrariness ["Willkur"] and instead of being interested in a pre-arbitrary language is interested instead in the post-originary motivational structures of arbitrariness itself" (p. 57).  "Die frühromantische Theorie von Zeichen und Metapher," The German Quarterly 62.1(1989).  See also Menninghaus's Unendliche Verdoppelung.  Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987).
      47 Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 62.
      48 As Walter Benjamin explains: "For the Romantics, criticism is much less the judgment of a work than the method of its completion" (Kunstkritik, p. 13).
      49 Szondi, p. 116.
      50 Ernst Behler, "Einleitung," Friedrich Schlegel, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie, p. 2 7.

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