ABSTRACT
IF Tieck was the first well-known practising German romantic author, who established the Märchen as the distinctive romantic contribution to German literature, it was Friedrich Schlegel who effectively made himself the first and greatest law-giver of the movement and devised a theoretical code of romantic tenets, though in an appropriately unsystematic way, in fragmentary axioms and digressive essays. In many ways his theory matched Tieck’s practice, but he did not refer to Tieck in his æsthetic essays as to a great exemplar of romanticism, of the new movement; instead he spoke of it as something that was still to come, ‘the literature of the future \ Apart from his theoretical æsthetic works he was a mediocre writer; Lucinde(1799), which he calls a novel, is in fact a formless, rhapsodic production with interpolated gallant episodes, and his drama, Alarcos(1802) is a colourless pseudo-classicist work. The same is true of the drama Ion(1803), by his brother, August Wilhelm, whose important contribution, apart from his theoretical writing, is his translation of some of Shakespeare’s plays, which had an incalculable effect on the development of German literature. The most important of Friedrich SchlegePs pronouncements on romantic theory were published in the Athenäum, the periodical which he and his brother edited from 1798 until 1800, and which functioned as the official organ of the Jena romantic group. The Schlegels justly regarded their fraternal union as the nucleus of the new group, and planned the Athenâum as a memorial to the unique relationship. They were prepared to act, not merely as its editors, but as its main contributors, too, though in the event Novalis was deemed worthy to share in the fraternal debut, with a contribution of aphorisms or ‘seed-thoughts' entitled Blütenstaub (Pollen, or Flower-dust) which were the product of a process of ’sym-philosophizing’, or discussion with Friedrich on æsthetics and philosophy, taking as their basic texts the works of Goethe and Fichte, as æsthetic and ethical models, and devoting themselves to the ideal of a universal and ever-evolving literature. Yet, as Friedrich’s preliminary letter to August Wilhelm shows, the editors were to be on the look-out for ’ masterpieces of higher criticism and polemics, wherever they might be found. And indeed everything that is distinguished by sublime insolence, and is too good for other periodicals.' 1
