Eschenburg's response was gracious, but he did not neglect to mention the forthcoming revision of his own translation, which duly appeared between 1798 and 1806. Not only that: his friend Friedrich Nicolai in Berlin, the particular abhorrence of Goethe and Schiller and soon of the young Romantics, had been supplying him with material for the updated apparatus to this edition, including information about Schlegel's own extracts in *Die Horen*. 118 The indefatigable Eschenburg even went on to write a whole book on the Ireland Shakespeare forgery; its preface is the proud statement of a Shakespeare scholar 'whose annotations have never been bettered', and who accepts the challenge of 'another and more able hand'.119

112 *Die Horen*, Jg. 1796, 3. Stück, 92.

113 *Briefe*, I, 33.

114 *Ibid*., II, 17f.

115 *Ibid*., I, 43.

116 As indeed is made clear in AWS's letter to Eschenburg, Bernays, 255-259.

117 Eschenburg responding with his new edition, Bernays, 259f.

118 Nicolai to Eschenburg 24 June, 1796. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 622 Novi.

119 Johann Joachim Eschenburg, *Ueber den vorgeblichen Fund Shakspearischer Handschriften* (Leipzig: Sommer, 1797), 3.

It needs to be said that readers who wanted a complete Shakespeare were still dependent on Eschenburg's prose version and made-up editions like that of the entrepreneur Carl Joseph Meyer, until the syndicate of Voss father and sons finished their verse translation in 1829.120 By then Schlegel had given up any idea of a whole version.

Even if Schlegel's emerges from all this ruck as better than those of his rivals, it is because time has dealt less kindly with them, who were once very present and active and vociferous. Pushing Eschenburg aside was one thing, and here Schiller was only too willing to abet Schlegel by publishing his extracts in *Die Horen*. Anything that suggested a new beginning, a Weimar-sponsored break with the past, was to be encouraged, while Eschenburg, in Schiller's eyes, stood for 'mediocrity', mere 'scholarship' that failed to differentiate genius, that espoused parity and relativeness of esteem, comprehensiveness, not the high points of excellence. It was to know no mercy; only the creative forces of the century were to have recognition. The Schlegel brothers, the one exalting Lessing and Kant, the other extolling Shakespeare, both elevating Goethe, gladly joined in this chorus until they found a voice of their own. At no stage, however, did they admit how useful they had found the corpus of knowledge patiently collated by painstaking scholars like Eschenburg, whom Goethe and Schiller were in the process of excoriating. Herder was to write ruefully and resignedly to Eschenburg in 1799 that they both now belonged to a past era in literature and taste, and for the moment, that was true.121

As it was, Schlegel turned to Johann Friedrich Unger in Berlin to publish *Shakespeare's dramatische Werke*. Unger already had some interesting authors: Goethe had entrusted *Wilhelm Meister* to him, while two young men in Berlin, Tieck and Wackenroder, lightly disguised as a self-effacing and art-loving friar, had brought out their *Herzensergiessungen* with him, a work that was to change the nature of art appreciation. Unger was also in the process of enshrining himself in the history of book production and printing, having developed a new clean and elegant face for the German black-letter type, known as 'Unger-Fraktur'.122 These things mattered.

120 On this see Christine Roger, *La Réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850. Propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère*, Theatrica, 24 (Berne, etc.: Peter Lang, 2008), esp. 363-369.

121 Johann Gottfried Herder, *Briefe. Gesamtausgabe*, ed. Karl-Heinz Hahn *et al.* for Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der Klassischen Deutschen Literatur in Weimar (Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv), 16 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1977- in progress), VIII, 51.

122 Georg Kurt Schauer, 'Schrift und Typologie', in: Ernst L. Hauswedell and Christian Voigt (eds), *Buchkunst und Litteratur, 1750 bis 1850*, 2 vols (Hamburg: Maximilian-Gesellschaft, 1977), I, 7-57, esp. 29.

When Eschenburg saw the first volume of Schlegel's Shakespeare, he initially asked Orell, Füssli to use Roman type instead for his revised edition. Despite hesitations, it came out in 'Fraktur',123 and so it was two Shakespeare editions in black-letter type, Schlegel's and Eschenburg's, that were to vie for the reading public's favour.

The transition process from writing-desk to readable typeface was, however, seemingly chaotic and haphazard. The manuscripts of the twelve plays that have survived, tell their own tale.124 Schlegel folded down a margin on his manuscript sheet to allow for corrections, but the frenetic hatchings, scorings, overwritings (doodlings) speak of late vigils, candles burning low, the desperate hours spent in search of the right word (as he wrote to Schiller),125 the dissatisfactions and self-doubts as the Shakespeare text seemed to prove intractable. The creative process can be seen in the successive drafts. Attached to the manuscript of *The Tempest* is the version of 1796 printed in *Die Horen*. 126 There, Schlegel does not even attempt a literal 'Full fathom five', and is content with the rather lame 'Tief in Meeres Grund gefallen', but for the 'final' version, the one published in 1798, he is more precise. Is 'fathom' German 'Klafter' (which can also mean 'a cord of wood')? 'Faden' is the nautical term (and the cognate of Shakespeare's word). Yet the manuscript still shows the translator's indecision: both words are left standing there, but it is 'Faden' that goes into the printed version. In *King John*, there are new sections pasted over. The two *Midsummer Night's Dream* manuscripts reflect the heavy reworkings of the old Göttingen text now to emerge as Schlegel's own in 1797.127 *Romeo and Juliet*, by contrast, is less heavily annotated or crossed out. Did the 'ideal' Shakespeare, that this play seemed to represent for Schlegel, also pose fewer linguistic problems? (In fact he left out some intractable punnings and some ruderies.) Caroline made a clean copy for the printer. We also recognize her hand on the manuscripts of *As You Like It*, *Hamlet*, *The Merchant of Venice* and *Julius Caesar*. Ludwig Tieck

123 Thomas Bürger, *Aufklärung in Zürich. Die Verlagsbuchhandlung Orell, Gessner, Füssli & Comp. in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mit einer Bibliographie der Verlagswerke 1761-1798* (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung GmbH, 1997), 74.

124 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XXII, 1-14.

125 Wieneke, 29.

126 *Die Horen*, Jg. 1796, 6. Stück, 77f.

127 The older text published by Frank Jolles, *A. W. Schlegels Sommernachtstraum in der ersten Fassung vom Jahre 1798 nach den Handschriften herausgegeben*, Palaestra, 244 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1967), 55-135.

much later at least had the grace to admit that a 'friend' had helped him with his revision of Shakespeare (his daughter Dorothea): Schlegel never made even that concession. And so 'Übersetzt [Translated] von August Wilhelm Schlegel' on the title page should rightly read 'Translated with Caroline Schlegel's assistance'.

Fig. 5 Manuscript page of Schlegel's and Caroline's translation of Shakespeare's *Romeo and Juliet* (1797), in Caroline's hand, open at Act 2, Scene 1 ('O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?'). © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

Fig. 6 Manuscript page of Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare's *The Tempest* (1798), open at Act 1, Scene 2 ('Full fathom five'). © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

Friedrich, too, had his part in this family enterprise. In Berlin from July 1797 until September 1799, he was sent the manuscript packages and passed them on to Unger. He seems even to have done the proof-reading.128 Or maybe there was none, for this historic translation is marred by printer's errors.129 It is from Friedrich that we learn of the first enthusiastic reactions from leading figures in the Berlin cultural scene, Schleiermacher the preacher, Alois Hirt the classicist, Johann Gottfried Schadow the sculptor, Friedrich Fleck the actor. August Wilhelm, as well, had been assiduous in self-promotion. Putting first things first, he sent a copy of Volume One (*Romeo and Juliet*, *A Midsummer Night's Dream*) to Duke Carl August in Weimar, but also to his fellow-Hanoverian, Karl August von Hardenberg, now Prussian minister in charge of Ansbach-Bayreuth and much later Prussian chancellor. Wieland, Herder and Böttiger in Weimar, Eschenburg in Brunswick, Heyne in Göttingen, were other 'strategic' recipients.130 In due course, another son of Hanover, the actor-producer Iffland, expressed his admiration.131 It was to begin Schlegel's never trouble-free association with the theatre.

#### The *Wilhelm Meister* Essay

Schlegel nevertheless felt the need to establish his credentials beyond the scope of mere translation. He wished to set out his translation principles, not in any systematic way, but in the free flow of critical writing. If the Voss review had been closely argued, rigorous, stiff (pedantic, too), he would treat Shakespeare in more associative and accessible fashion. Schiller's *Die Horen*, now less demanding after its taxing debut in 1795, provided the adequate forum. What better way to cause pleasure in both Jena and Weimar than by invoking Goethe himself? Thus came about Schlegel's essay *Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters* [Some Remarks on William Shakespeare Occasioned by Wilhelm Meister], 'classic' for its stylistic elegance, its freedom from factual ballast, and its claims for both writer and translator.132 In the 1796 volume of *Die Horen*, it is nicely balanced between the continuation and conclusion of Schiller's *On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry* and Schlegel's own *Letters on Poetry*, both of them

128 *KA*, XXIV, 4f.

129 Bernays, 173-216.

130 *Briefe*, I, 61f., 65; Bernays, 254.

131 *Briefe*, I, 74.

132 *Die Horen*, Jg. 1796, 4. Stück, 57-112; *SW*, VII, 24-70.

theoretical, occasionally abstract, and Schlegel's own first sample of *Romeo and Juliet*, and his second example, from *The Tempest*. There is no evidence that Schiller, ever desirous of copy, had planned it this way, but it worked fortuitously to Schlegel's advantage. Observers might also remark that the essay was interspersed between sections of Goethe's version of Benvenuto Cellini's life, that had elicited Friedrich's insolent remarks about the journal's 'translation phase'. Unlike Shakespeare, who could not be turned out to order, this was hackwork, if hackwork with Goethe's own touch.

Like so many programmatic statements, especially those from the 1790s, the *Wilhelm Meister* essay dealt in absolutes and was short on nuances. There was Schlegel's opening gambit: *Wilhelm Meister* had caused Shakespeare to 'rise from the dead and walk among the living'.133 It was manifestly untrue, or at most half true, a formulation whose ultimate analogies may not have resonated well with Wieland or Eschenburg, neither of whom saw themselves in such salvific terms (and who in the essay were dealt with fairly perfunctorily). The assertion that Shakespeare was not a 'mere episode' in the novel was, to say the least, open to challenge,134 indeed it soon became clear that Schlegel was not primarily concerned with Wilhelm Meister or even with his obsession, Hamlet. The view that *Hamlet* was a 'Gedankenschauspiel' ['thought play],135brought no incisively new insights to Shakespeare criticism. Rather, Schlegel was concerned with the nature of creative genius itself: he invoked that quasi-mystical language of 'divine spark', 'deep waters', 'sounding depths' that goes some way towards explaining the essence and mystery of genius.136 These processes Schlegel was concerned to align with the métier of criticism: it was not judgmental or atomising, not Johnsonian (and for Johnson read also Eschenburg):

What it best does is to seize and give meaning to the real sense that creative genius places in its works and which is there as they take body in their essential shape, in complete, untainted form, in sharp profile, and thus to raise beholders who are less acute, but are receptive, to a higher state of perception. But only rarely has it achieved this. And why? Because perceiving the essential make-up of others in close and direct contemplation, as if it were a very part of one's own consciousness, is bound up as one with the capacity for creation itself.137

133 *SW*, VII, 24f.

134 *Ibid*., 24.

There is here some of that distinction between mere 'philological' and 'interpretative' criticism, that informs the later Vienna Lectures, itself based on the opposites of 'mechanical' and 'organic'. But in 1796 this proud formulation both defined limits, those of a finite mind like Wilhelm Meister's, and opened up the limitless spaces of genius, the 'forces' (Herder's favourite word, 'Kräfte') and secrets of nature.138 These could not be compromised. Thus, in an essay ostensibly devoted to Wilhelm Meister the man of the theatre, we learn that genius imparts itself through the integrated whole work of art, not through its 'contaminated' form on the stage.139

Two thirds of the essay were devoted to the means of transferring to an alien medium the expressive powers of consummate genius. The Germans need have no fear, for Shakespeare was 'completely ours' ('ganz unser');140 no other nation had such a sense of identification with him, had studied and admired him in such depth. Intrinsic to the German language must therefore be the capacity to express this affinity through a translation that observed and respected the structures and nuances of the original, in verse where verse was required, not in a prose approximation; stretching to its limits the native tongue and its range and inner resources, but always within due limits ('alles im Deutschen Thunliche') [everything feasible in German].141 The translator would have to compromise and compensate, but he (or she: Caroline) would be motivated by what he could do, not discouraged by what ultimately eluded him.

All this needed to be restated, for there were restraining and sceptical voices, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt's, writing to Schlegel on 23 July 1796 from Berlin, having just read the two extracts in *Die Horen*, and counselling caution.142 Translation was an elusive and ultimately impossible undertaking, and Schlegel should concentrate instead on an original work, not the mere transmission of the alien. In this matter, the two were never to see eye to eye, Humboldt never diverging from his conviction that translation (if one were to do it at all) must always contain a 'tinge of the foreign' ('Farbe der Fremdheit'), Schlegel forever stressing the resources of the native language. Indeed Schlegel's later view, stated with some nobility, that the translator

138 *Ibid*., 30.

139 *Ibid*., 36.

140 *Ibid*., 38.

141 *Ibid.*, 62.

142 Anton Klette, *Verzeichniss der von A. W. v. Schlegel nachgelassenen Briefsammlung* (Bonn: [n.p.], 1868), vf.

is the ultimate ambassador and mediator between cultures, was written in response to Humboldt's sceptical utterances in the *Indische Bibliothek* in 1827,143 when Shakespeare and his like were far from his mind.

Only the manuscripts of Schlegel's translation reveal the struggles and agonizings over the alien text, with Caroline offering her voice, both discerning and reasonable. We must imagine them at a table strewn with the untidy harvest of a day's or week's work, scratching out and overwriting until the result sounded like the 'nearest best' that it would always be. The printed text was final, if the result of those compromises and accommodations, compensations and approximations. Only in critical reviews was Schlegel willing to pass on insights into the actual translation process. Reviewing Tieck's version of *The Tempest*, he remarked that Tieck had translated 'lord of weak remembrance' with 'Angedenken', where it should be 'Gedächtnis' (both can mean 'memory'). He knew this from translating *Hamlet* (but did not say so).144 There, the original's word-play on 'remember' and 'remembrance' foundered on the preciser distinctions of its German equivalents, but for readers of German this was of course an added enrichment. In 1797, in a review of a periodical devoted to language,145 he rejected the linguistic purism that would not sanction in German the phrase 'mein tiefstes Herz' ['my deepest heart'] and asked what the author would have made of Hamlet's

In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart

Schlegel had already translated this line as

Im Herzensgrund, ja in des Herzens Herzen146

a more regular line that Shakespeare's (as is often the case), but notable for that 'Herzensgrund' whose religious and mystical echoes opened up associations that the original did not. When on the other hand 'Not a mouse stirring' at the opening of *Hamlet* became 'Alles mausestill',147 with a commendable neatness and naturalness in the German, the omission

146 *Shakespeare's dramatische Werke*, III, 243.

143 *Indische Bibliothek. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm von Schlegel*, 3 vols (Bonn: Weber, 1820-30), II, 254f.

144 *SW*, XI, 19. In fact he translates it as 'Erinnrung'. *Shakespeare's dramatische Werke*, III, 57. 145 *SW*, XI, 169f.

147 *Ibid*., 140.

of 'stirring' blurred the sense that another 'Thing' was on the move. But let Shakespeare scholars concern themselves with these nuances. The translation can still stand up to any kind of analysis, the most favourable and even the most stringent or unfriendly. Wherever translated poetry is recognized as poetry in its own right, Schlegel's name must always be in the first rank, and with this translation he enters into the main stream of the German poetic tradition.

Schlegel was, however, not content merely to postulate criticism as part of the creative process. He must deliver an example: it was *Ueber Shakespeares Romeo und Julia* [On Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet], the last contribution that he was to send to *Die Horen*. 148 Everyone seemed to be reacting to *Romeo and Juliet*. Caroline had copied it out for the printer; it opened the first volume of the Shakespeare translation in 1797. August Wilhelm, temporarily in Dresden, asked his brother Friedrich to present Schiller with a copy.149 It was despatched in mid-May 1797, only a matter of days before Schiller's terrible letter of the 30th of the same month. Schiller did not react, and his correspondence with Goethe did not mention it; it was also not one of the Shakespeare plays with which he felt a close bond. Goethe, who had known it from his formative years, noted it for a possible stage adaptation in 1797, but the death of the designated actress caused him to defer the idea, eventually until 1812.150

In May, Friedrich had sent his precious presentation copy of *Romeo and Juliet* to his friend Novalis in Tennstedt in Thuringia. It went accompanied by his intense feelings about the play, 'like a lowering thunderstorm amid the splendours of the spring day', full of antitheses: the 'rose of life' but also the thorn that goes to the quick.151 Re-reading it (he had Eschenburg among his books) Novalis confessed to Shakespeare's 'powers of divination'.152 Of greater interest were two letters from Caroline to August Wilhelm, that have survived only in a fragmentary state.153 Why she should be writing is unclear, and the dating is uncertain, but these letters were essentially a draft of his *Horen* essay, disposed differently and with other emphases,

148 *Die Horen*, Jg. 1797, 6. Stück, 18-48; *SW*, VII, 71-97 (where the title has 'Shakspeares').

149 *KA*, XXIII, 366.

150 Heinrich Huesmann, *Shakespeare-Inszenierungen unter Goethe in Weimar*, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 258, Bd. 2, 2. Abh. (Vienna: Böhlau, 1968), 148-154.

151 *KA*, XXIII, 364.

152 Novalis, *Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs*, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 6 vols in 7 [*HKA*] (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960-2006), IV, 227f.

153 *Caroline*, I, 426-432.

meaning that Caroline was not acting merely as an amanuensis, but as a co-author.

For her it was a play that broke with all modern notions of dramatic economy and overflowed in all directions, yet with study, one could uncover its inner harmony (what he calls its 'inner unity'). It contained discords and dark melancholy154 (Schlegel saw instead 'gentle enthusiasm'). His concern in the essay was a 'creative criticism' that 'fathomed' (German 'ergründen')155 the process of composition and laid down notions of the organic, unified whole that is the work of art, bringing out Shakespeare's artistry, the conscious inventions that held everything in place. Where we see clashes and disharmonies, Shakespeare employs the contrasting 'devices' of romantic passion (Romeo) and innocent simplicity (Juliet), balancing one against the other. True, the tragic outcome was inevitable, but so was the resolution and reconciliation of the action beyond the grave.

The 'antitheses' that had seized his brother Friedrich could not of course be wished away. August Wilhelm was, however, concerned to resolve them. One way was to place the lovers in some kind of capsule, emotionally, spiritually, linguistically set apart from the world and its conventions, even from the machinations of fate. Their language, which may strike others as mannered and self-indulgent, makes sense only to them; it is part of their fulfilled 'white-hot passion'. For Schlegel, it was not the dark, wild, doomridden strand of the play that was in the foregound, rather 'Love was the poetry of life'.156 He used Friedrich's image of the thunderstorm, but left out the 'thorn' that went with it.157 Among their contemporaries, Ludwig Tieck had already acknowledged the play's sombre aspect in notes made in Göttingen in 1792, while Coleridge was later to diverge radically from Schlegel's interpretation.

How much of this reading was informed by the desire to enter into the creative processes of composition through his newly-formulated 'better criticism', finding resolutions and hidden harmonies where others stressed 'There never was a story of more woe'; and how much was motivated by the wish to believe in young, unadulterated and ideal love that lived in its own world and was oblivious to real circumstances? Seen in terms of their life together, his and Caroline's, did it mean that despite the strand of practical realism in his relationship with her, he believed nevertheless in a romantic love that rose above actualities? Not just the use made of

154 *Ibid*., 429.

155 *SW*, VII, 76.

156 *Ibid*., 94.

157 *Ibid*., 77.

Caroline's draft is interesting (or that Caroline took the initiative in writing it); it was also her sense that Romeo's and Juliet's love, which she defended, was subjected to 'dissonances' ('Mislaute' [*sic*]), even 'asperities' ('Härten') and yet emerged triumphant. She concluded: 'You two [sc. presumably August Wilhelm and Friedrich] will have to decide whether or not Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy'.158 There could be no answer to all these questions. The fascination with *Romeo and Juliet* did not end with *Die Horen*.

Schlegel, concurrently with his criticism and translation, had also been writing poetry. It was part of the professional writer's métier, especially one who had gone through Bürger's school. As already remarked, little of Schlegel's poetry warms the heart, uplifts the senses, raises the hopes. Perhaps it is wrong in the first place to apply Wordsworthian (or Goethean) criteria to it. It was not just a question of the formal devices that he used: when Goethe used regular metrical verse like the classical elegy—a favoured form in the 1790s—he never abandoned the personal note, while Schlegel, in this and other metres, was correct, learned—and soulless.159 Where Schiller brought his own moral and philosophical energy to bear in didactic poetry, Schlegel lacked the other man's essential dynamism. The correspondence with Schiller over the poem *Prometheus*—in the *terza rima* so recently displayed in the Dante translation—is not agreeable reading and shows Schlegel trying to worst Schiller with pedantry and pedagoguery.160 Schiller, who was also editing a *Musenalmanach* and needed copy, did eventually accept it, the same Schiller whose versification Schlegel had openly criticised. Schlegel the poet did not shine with general subjects, those so current in aesthetic and poetological debate, like the role of the artist as creator and shaper of higher truth. Occasional poems, those dedicated to a person or object, did however bring out the best of his poetic powers, as indeed translation also did. His poetic powers looked different to aspiring poets: the young Friedrich Hölderlin, after so much disparagement from Schiller, was greatly heartened by a few encouraging words by Schlegel in a review,161 and it may have been one spur among many for him to write some of the finest elegies in the language.

158 *Caroline*, I, 431, 429, 432.

159 On AWS's poetry see Klaus Manger, 'Statt "Kotzebuesieen" nur Poesie? Zu den lyrischen Dichtungen August Wilhelm Schlegels', in: York-Gothart Mix and Jochen Strobel (eds), *Der Europäer August Wilhelm Schlegel. Romantischer Kulturtransfer romantische Wissenswelten*, Quellen und Forschungen, 62 (296) (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 77-92.

160 Wieneke, 42-48.

161 *SW,* XI, 363-365; Friedrich Hölderlin, *Stuttgarter Ausgabe*, ed. Friedrich Beissner *et al.*, 8 vols in 15 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946-85), XI, 11-13.

It was verse directed at an object that found Schiller's approval for his *Musenalmanach* for 1798 (issued in late 1797): *Zueignung des Trauerspiels Romeo und Julia* [Dedication of the Tragedy Romeo and Juliet], written in correct *ottava rima*—and actually a good poem:162

#### *Zueignung des Trauerspiels Romeo und Julia*

Nimm dieß Gedicht, gewebt aus Lieb' und Leiden, Und drück' es sanft an deine zarte Brust. Was *dich* erschüttert, regt sich in uns beiden, Was *du* nicht sagst, es ist mir schon bewußt. Unglücklich Paar! und dennoch zu beneiden; Sie kannten ja des Daseins höchste Lust. Laß süß und bitter denn uns Thränen mischen, Und mit dem Thau der Treuen Grab erfrischen.

Den Sterblichen ward nur ein flüchtig Leben: Dieß flücht'ge Leben, welch ein matter Traum! Sie tappen, auch bei ihrem kühnsten Streben, Im Dunkel hin, und kennen selbst sich kaum. Das Schicksal mag sie drücken oder heben: Wo findet ein unendlich Sehnen Raum? Nur Liebe kann den Erdenstaub beflügeln, Nur sie allein der Himmel Thor entsiegeln.

Und ach! sie selbst, die Königin der Seelen, Wie oft erfährt sie des Geschickes Neid! Manch liebend Paar zu trennen und zu quälen Ist Haß und Stolz verschworen und bereit. Sie müßen schlau die Augenblicke stehlen, Und wachsam lauschen in der Trunkenheit, Und, wie auf wilder Well' in Ungewittern, Vor Todesangst und Götterwonne zittern.

Doch der Gefahr kann Zagheit nur erliegen, Der Liebe Muth erschwillt, je mehr sie droht. Sich innig fest an den Geliebten schmiegen, Sonst kennt sie keine Zuflucht in der Noth. Entschloßen sterben, oder glücklich siegen Ist ihr das erste, heiligste Gebot. Sie fühlt, vereint, noch frei sich in den Ketten, Und schaudert nicht bei Todten sich zu betten.

Ach! schlimmer droh'n ihr lächelnde Gefahren, Wenn sie des Zufalls Tücken überwand. Vergänglichkeit muß jede Blüth' erfahren: Hat aller Blüthen Blüthe mehr Bestand? Die wie durch Zauber fest geschlungen waren, Löst Glück und Ruh und Zeit mit leiser Hand, Und, jedem fremden Widerstand entronnen, Ertränkt sich Lieb' im Becher eigner Wonnen.

Viel seliger, wenn seine schönste Habe Das Herz mit sich in's Land der Schatten reißt, Wenn dem Befreier Tod zur Opfergabe Der süße Kelch, noch kaum gekostet, fleußt. Ein Tempel wird aus der Geliebten Grabe, Der schimmernd ihren heil'gen Bund umschleußt.

 Wir fühlen beid' in freudig stillem Schauer, Wir sagen es mit schnell begriffnem Blick: Wie unsers Werths ist unsers Bundes Dauer, Ein schön Geheimniß sichert unser Glück.

[Dedication of the Tragedy Romeo and Juliet

Receive this poem, woven of love and travail, And press it gently to your tender breast. What moves your soul is feeling that we share, What you withhold, I know it all the same. Unhappy pair! And yet one to be envied; They knew the heights of joy that life can give. Then let us mingle sweet and bitter tears, And with this dew refresh these true ones' grave.

 They feel their way, even in their boldest strivings, In darkness, and themselves they hardly know. Fate may oppress them or it may inspire them: Can longing without end be once contained? Love can alone give wing to earthly dust, And she alone unseal the door to heaven.

Alas, for her, the monarch of the souls, How often is she prone to envious fate! To part and to torment so many pairs Hate and pride conspire time and again. They must use stealth to seize a moment's bliss, When drunk with love be watchful and alert, And, like on storm-tossed waves mid peals of thunder, Tremble in deathly fear and heavenly joy.

Danger, though, the weak will overcomes, While love is bold and full, when dangers press. To nestle close in the beloved's arms Is the sole refuge when all else oppresses. To will to die, or rise victorious, Is love's command, its first and its most sacred, It feels, when joint, still free in fetters' bonds, And knows no terrors bedded in the grave.

But smiling dangers threaten her with worse, When she has conquered all the wiles of chance, And every flower learns of transience: Is there a hope then for the flower of flowers? They, as by magic caught in soft embrace, By fortune, peace and time are drawn apart, And, slipping free when others bear them down, Love drowns in bliss inside its very chalice.

But greater joys, when what one treasures most The heart tears with it to the realm of shades, And like a sacrifice to all-releasing death, The cup of joy, scarce touched, is poured away. The lovers' grave becomes their only temple And is the shining tomb to sacred vows. They die, but in their very dying breath Love takes them up into the higher spheres.

All this may help you to assuage your sorrow, The poem brings us back into ourselves. We feel it both, the thrill and joy of love, We speak it, knowing what the other kens: Together, bonded, is our lasting worth, A secret known to us secures our bliss. May distant future hide behind its veil, We celebrate forever love's fair youth.]

Is it because of the distinctly Goethean echoes, associations with a poem written in that same stanzaic form but not yet published, *Warum gabst du uns die tiefen Blicke* [Why did you gaze on us so deeply], Goethe's confession of love to Frau von Stein from the 1770s, or with one not yet written, *Urworte. Orphisch* [Deep Orphic Words]? If so, it shows both poets operating within similar conventions, while at the same time transcending them. We recognize Schlegel's own emphases. He could not resist the chance of transfiguring the Shakespearean lovers' untimely deaths, but there is also an underlying antithesis between the erotic language of longing and ecstasy ('Ertränkt sich Lieb' im Becher eigner Wonnen' ['Love drowned in the chalice of its own bliss'], and the lexis of fate, chance, and transience. Schlegel was in reality dedicating this poem to Caroline: the final stanza told of *their* love, *their* union, *their* mystery, *their* youthful passion that would never die. The threefold anaphoric 'We' in the final stanza brings them, as it says, from the realm of poetry into the reality of their present lives. Professor Schlegel in love? It seems so. But Caroline? Of that we can be less certain.

#### The Jena Group

Conventional sociological wisdom informs us that groups are both cohesive and fissiparous entities, held together by a consensus and a common identity, but they are also fluid and fragile, subject to inner tensions and threats to unity.163 Often cliquish, they rarely speak in unison. A joint bond of sympathy and purpose unites them, but strong personalities can unfold and dominate the common endeavour. Does this describe the association in Jena from 1798 to 1800? Can one even legitimately speak of a 'Jena group'? Older scholarship had no hesitation in positing (a French example) 'Frédéric Schlegel et son groupe', even 'la doctrine de l'Athenaeum'.164 Today, we might wish rather to content ourselves with words like 'circle' or 'association' and might be less eager to identify a unifying 'doctrine', for even words such as this have their own problems. Yet what was it that enabled people of the most disparate backgrounds to coalesce; what was the cement

163 Cf. Friedhelm Neidhardt, 'Das innere System sozialer Gruppen', *Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie* 31 (1979), 639-660, esp. 642, 644, 649.

164 Alfred Schlagdenhauffen, *Frédéric Schlegel et son groupe. La doctrine de l'Athenaeum, 1798- 1800*, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Strasbourg, 64 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934).

that bonded them socially and intellectually: one a ribbon-weaver's son (Fichte), another the son of a poor Silesian preacher (Schleiermacher), yet another an impoverished Thuringian aristocrat (Novalis), two of them sons of a Hanoverian superintendent and poet (the Schlegel brothers), another the product of a Swabian vicarage (Schelling), yet another the scion of a Berlin rope-maker, now *embourgeoisé* (Tieck), not to speak of a Göttingen professor's daughter (Caroline Schlegel) or the daughter of the celebrated Berlin Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn (Dorothea Veit)? What was there that transcended this disparity of background, religion—Dorothea in 1799 still had to pay a 'toll for Jews' if she crossed from Prussia to Saxony education, dialect even (think of Dorothea's written Berlinisms or the thick Swabian that Schelling must have spoken)?

On the intellectual level, there seemed to be a common meeting of minds. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis favoured words prefixed by 'sym-', 'Symphilosophieren', 'Symbiblismen', 'Sympoesie', 'Symphysik', 'Sympraxis', even 'symfaulenzen' ('sym'-lazing),165 that connoted not only some kind of togetherness but also a universal range of mind and spirit, bespeaking 'community' in its widest sense. As Novalis's *Athenaeum* fragment put it, an intellectual association of persons of spirit.166 Indeed Friedrich's famous 116th *Athenaeum* Fragment that sought to define 'romantic poetry' did this inclusively, in terms of the most audacious combinations, mixes, syntheses, extensions and linkings.167

The biographical facts, with which we are alone concerned here, suggest a much looser and more extemporised association. It is not even possible to bring all these characters together in one place (unless we use the convenient—if endearing—chronological liberties and rearrangements that Penelope Fitzgerald employs for Novalis in her novel *The Blue Flower*). Fichte had already been dismissed from his university post in Jena before the association had even begun to form and had moved to Berlin; Schleiermacher never left his post as preacher at the Charité hospital there. Novalis was based at the mining academy in Freiberg in Saxony, then the salt inspectorate in Weissenfels, and was only an occasional visitor in Jena. Moreover he knew practical science where Friedrich Schlegel wrote gaseously of 'Chemie' and 'Physik'.168 Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit

165 *Caroline*, I, 453f., 481, 518.

166 *KA*, II, 182f.

167 *Athenaeum*, I, i, 86.

168 Theodore Ziolkowsi, *German Romanticism and Its Institutions* (Princeton UP, 1990), 27-63.

were resident in Berlin until the autumn of 1799, Ludwig Tieck similarly. Only August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel and Schelling were actually domiciled in Jena for the whole period of 1798 to 1800.

These dates, 1798 to 1800, are decisive, for they saw the production and publication of the enterprise that served as a focus and a common purpose for this circle: the periodical *Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel*. 169 Some words of caution are needed. Fichte, Tieck and Schelling actually wrote nothing for it, Schleiermacher and Dorothea Veit relatively little, Caroline contributed only anonymously, leaving Novalis and above all the brothers Schlegel as authors, with a few associated friends joining in towards the end. The original contexts and contiguities were soon lost sight of. In the course of publication history the three original octavo volumes of the *Athenaeum* were recontextualised and their contents scattered. Enshrined in editions of Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, as we have them now, it is often hard to envisage the mixture of plan and improvisation that is the essence of a literary periodical. For all that, the *Athenaeum* concentrated the energies of the brothers and their closest associates and gave them a method and a tone and a way of seeing that, almost by accident, became known as 'Romantic'. That word, meaning—depending on its context—'Romance' in the linguistic sense, therefore modern, post-medieval, 'romantick', fantastic, pertaining to the 'romance' of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, then to the novel ('Roman'), became in the usage of the group a universal term for everything progressive, modern, inclusive, universal, poetic.170 The *Athenaeum* was not a mere general hold-all for Romantic writing; it

169 AWS's contributions to the *Athenaeum* were as follows (original titles): 'Die Sprachen. Ein Gespräch über Klopstocks grammatische Gespräche' (I, i, 3-69), 'Elegien aus dem Griechischen' (with Friedrich Schegel) (I, i, 107-140), 'Beyträge zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachen' (I, i, 141-177), 'Fragmente' (with Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher) (I, ii, 179-322), 'Die Gemählde. Gespräch' (with Caroline Schlegel) (II, i, 39-151), 'Die Kunst der Griechen. An Goethe. Elegie' (II, ii, 181-192), 'Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman's Umrisse' (II, ii, 193-246), 'Der rasende Roland. Eilfter Gesang' (II, ii, 247-284), 'Notizen' (with Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit, Karl Gustav von Brinkman) (II, ii, 285-327), 'Literarischer Reichsanzeiger oder Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks' (II, ii, 328- 340), [Matthisson, Voss und Schmidt] (III, i, 139-164), 'Vollständiges Verzeichniß meiner zur Allg. Lit. Zeit. beygetragenen Rezensionen' (III, i, [165-168]), 'Idyllen aus dem Griechischen' (with Friedrich Schlegel) (III, ii, 216-232), 'Sonette, Von A. W. Schlegel' (III, ii, 233-237), 'Notizen' (with Dorothea Veit, Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Ferdinand Bernhardi) [AWS did 'Parny's Guerre des Dieux'], 252-268, ['Soltau's Don Quixote'], 297-329, ['Notiz'], 329- 336).

defined itself primarily as a focal point for critical and creative forces. Readers searching for instance for a corpus of original poetry (as opposed to translation), narrative fiction or systematic philosophy, would have to look elsewhere, for there were only occasional glimpses of these, a notable example being Novalis's poetic *Hymnen an die Nacht* [Hymns to the Night].

Friedrich Schlegel, apart from the calamitous interlude in Jena in the summer of 1796 to July 1797 that forfeited Schiller's goodwill, was with short interruptions based on Berlin until the autumn of 1799. It was in Berlin that he had the oversight of the Shakespeare translation and where he negotiated with Unger, its publisher. In fact, he had more dealings with Unger's wife, Friederike Helene, who featured in his letters under various disrespectful appellations.171 His initial task in Berlin was to assist Johann Friedrich Reichardt with his periodical *Lyceum*, and it was in that short-lived journal (1797) that his essays on Lessing and on Georg Forster appeared, as well as his first collection of 'fragments', the aphorisms that were to characterise him and his circle. Reichardt himself was persona non grata in Berlin, but his house at Giebichenstein near Halle, romantically overlooking the river Saale, was, as already mentioned, a meeting-place at various times for most of the Romantics. He doubtless gave Schlegel recommendations to various societies in Berlin, and Schlegel, gregarious and sociable by nature, would have taken them up. These contacts in themselves showed that Berlin was quite a different place from Jena or even Weimar: with its 170,000 inhabitants it was a royal capital, an administrative and cultural centre, and as such it put provincial Thuringian ducal residences in the shade.

Where Jena had tea-parties and Weimar even small literary and philosophical societies, these were inevitably limited to, respectively, the university professors and their wives, and the senior court officials or prominent residents.172 Berlin, as yet without a university, still offered a wider range of intellectual and cultural circles. Some, like those restricted to the aristocracy, admitted only their own kind. The 'Mittwochsgesellschaft' [Wednesday Club] only received high state administrators or leading intellectuals. Yet to this last-named Schlegel secured an entrée. It was no doubt there that he met the redoubtable and influential Friedrich Nicolai, publisher and sturdy defender of the Enlightenment, ever on the lookout for young talent. When in October 1797 Friedrich reported that

171 Cf. *KA*, XXIV, 355.

172 Bruford, *Culture and Society*, 380-388.

the 'Mitwochsgesellschaft' was reading his brother's Shakespeare, we notice the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher had come from being an impoverished military chaplain's son, then associated with the Moravian Brethren, to the position of preacher at the Charité hospital in Berlin. Schleiermacher and Schlegel found an immediate bond of companionship—indeed for a while they lived together in Schleiermacher's quarters at the Charité near the Oranienburg Gate—and shared with each other questions of ethics, friendship and love, in their widest philosophical and moral connotations. Whereas Friedrich saw in Schleiermacher all 'Sinn und Tiefe' [depth of mind],173 this closeness of association was not shared by August Wilhelm, either in Jena or later in Berlin. The most one can say is that he was loyal to his brother's friends.

Berlin had at that time around 3,600 Jews, still subject to social restrictions and discriminations, but already dominant in the mercantile and banking life of the city. 'Pluralist' Berlin might be as a city, but it was not until two salons, or societies, were created by Jewish hostesses, that aristocrats, intellectuals, artists, writers and cognoscenti were able to meet on a basis of equality.174 These were the salons of Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin (later Varnhagen). At their soirees, respectively in the Neue Friedrichsstrasse and the Jägerstrasse, one could rub shoulders with Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia or the Humboldt brothers or the Swedish envoy Karl Gustav von Brinkman and the intellectual *haute volée* of the city. It was here that Friedrich Schlegel first met the three Tiecks, Ludwig, Sophie and Friedrich, who were to play a prominent part in the affairs of the extended Schlegel family. Ludwig, who was to survive them all, was also the closest associate of both Schlegel brothers, but Sophie the writer and Friedrich the sculptor would intervene disproportionately in the artistic and emotional life of August Wilhelm.

The Berlin salons were places of liberality and social ease, where barriers of class counted as little, and wit and soul and an ability to converse were all that mattered. Yet the tone in Friedrich's letters to his brother in Jena is that of the clique or the conventicle, the 'ecclesia pressa' (his own phrase),175 turned inwards, satisfied, sometimes insufferably so, with its own resources

173 *KA*, XXIV, 22.

174 Peter Seibert, *Der literarische Salon. Literatur und Gesellschaft zwischen Aufklärung und Vormärz* (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1993), 151-161; Petra Wilhelmy, *Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (1780-1914)*, Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin, 73 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 868-873.

175 *KA*, XXIV, 42.

and its own cleverness. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in his attitude to Ludwig Tieck, outwardly friendly, but in private letters condescending to an extreme ('only half a gentleman', 'does not know Henriette Herz' etc.).176 This may surprise, given that Tieck had been early initiated into social decorum by Reichardt when Kapellmeister in Berlin, and after study in Halle and Göttingen was now a young man very much talked about in Berlin literary circles. Of course only initiates would know that he was the author of the 800-page *roman noir William Lovell*, the ironically titled *Volksmährchen* [Folk Tales] that included the witty and satirical comedy *Der gestiefelte Kater* [Puss in Boots], was the co-author of those extraordinary effusions on art, the *Herzensergiessungen*, and had translated *The Tempest*. For all of these works appeared anonymously. It may be that Friedrich was too preoccupied with his intellectual exchange with Schleiermacher, or Tieck with his close friend and co-writer of those outpourings, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, soon to die tragically young and to be the first in that Romantic necrology.

August Wilhelm meanwhile had reviewed the *Herzensergiessungen*, Tieck's Bluebeard adaptation (*Ritter Blaubart*), the *Kater*, and *The Tempest*, all for the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*, their first serious publicity.177 The *Herzensergiessungen* he had greeted with an enthusiasm tempered with some misgivings about its religious tone. On Tieck's version of *The Tempest* he was more severe, for this was a prose version in the style of Eschenburg and a competitor with his own, one moreover that took liberties with the text. But the author of the comedies—he did not know that it was Tieck was a 'poet among poets' ('ein dichtender Dichter')178 equipped with wit and verve and a nice disrespect. Writing in 1828, Schlegel would claim that he was the first to draw attention to Tieck and give him his due, and this was largely true. A lively correspondence ensued between Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel, from December 1797. Tieck, who knew his Shakespeare at least as well as the older man, asked deferential questions about points of text or matters of authorship; while Schlegel, punctiliously 'inaugurating' their exchange on 11 December 1797,179 encouraged Tieck in his planned translation of *Don Quixote*. Tieck would have agreed with his

176 *Ibid*., 41.

177 *SW*, X, 363-371; XI, 16-22, 136-146.

178 *Ibid*., 136.

179 *Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe.* Auf der Grundlage der von Henry Lüdeke besorgten Edition neu herausgegeben und kommentiert von Edgar Lohner (Munich: Winkler, 1972), 22.

correspondent that the English had no real idea of Shakespeare, but he may have been less prepared when Schlegel dropped his guard and asked: 'How ever did he chance among the frigid and stupid souls on that brutal island?'180

Friedrich's view of Tieck *de haut en bas* (no 'character', 'no intelligence or inner worth')181 may also have been conditioned by his elevation of another person in the scale of his esteem and affections. This was Dorothea Veit, née Mendelssohn. He had met her in the summer of 1797 in the salon of Henriette Herz. Chafing under a loveless marriage—she had been married off to the banker Simon Veit and had two sons (both in their turn to become leading Romantic painters)—she had been attracted to this witty and brilliant younger man, while he, crushed since his teens under the weight of books, suddenly felt the forces of a belated youth bursting forth. Writing in February 1798, not to his brother, but to his sympathetic sister-in-law Caroline, he set out Dorothea's qualities: simplicity, a heart and mind open to love, music, wit and philosophy (he was later to add: religion).182 That was as yet seeing her very much in his own terms.  One would expect no less from Moses Mendelssohn's daughter. As yet there was no question of separation or even divorce. Friedrich and Dorothea lived in open liaison (not yet under one roof: even Berlin's tolerance had its limits). If there were not enough scandal adhering to a relationship with a married woman seven years older than himself, her being Jewish added an extra element of piquancy.

#### The Genesis of the *Athenaeum*

It was clear that Friedrich would not long be content with writing for Reichardt or correcting his brother's Shakespeare proofs. He needed an outlet for his own writings, now that *Die Horen*—to which he had no access as it was—had finally collapsed. In a long letter of 31 October, 1797 to August Wilhelm, he set out his views on a remedy to the situation. It was, he averred, a 'sin and shame' that people like them were reduced to writing for the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*. 183 What was needed was a periodical

180 *Ibid*. 23.

181 *KA*, XXIV, 85f.

182 *Ibid*., 86.

183 *Ibid*., 29-35.

produced by themselves. It should run to six parts annually, each of twelve sheets (and at three Louisd'ors a sheet). He had a publisher in mind, Friedrich Vieweg in Berlin. That was the practical part. As for the content, the tone was to be one of 'sublime insolence', 'open war', establishing them as 'critical dictators' and working the destruction of the *Literatur-Zeitung*. Who were to be the contributors? Themselves of course, perhaps Fichte or Novalis or Schleiermacher; they were to ask Tieck and hoped for Goethe.184 What was it to be called? 'Herkules' perhaps (clubbing its adversaries or cleansing the Augean stable), or 'Freya' (with her chariot), 'Dioskuren' (the twins, now stars in the firmament) or 'Parzen' (the Fates dealing out life and death). 'Schlegeleum' was briefly considered,185 then finally rejected in favour of the eventual title 'Athenaeum', the ever-prudent August Wilhelm's suggestion.

Fig. 7 *Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel* (Berlin, 1798-1800). Title page of vol. 2. Image in the public domain.

184 *Ibid*., 55.

185 General strategy, *ibid*., 48-54, 72-76; 'Herkules', 'Freya', 37; 'Dioskuren', 'Parzen', 43; 'Schlegeleum', 'Athenaeum', 53.

By December of 1797, Friedrich was giving thought to the journal's organisation. It was to represent the closest association, the union of two minds. There was to be an absolute consensus between them on matters of content (perhaps with Caroline mediating in cases of disagreement). No form or subject was in principle to be excluded, but the pieces accepted should be units in themselves, not extracts from some larger or more extensive 'work in progress'. That would explain why even the groups of fragments that are a distinguishing feature of the *Athenaeum*, form entities in themselves, in the same way that the disparate items of criticism are marshalled into a coherent corpus. Above all—and this is crucial for our understanding of this extraordinary journal—it meant that August Wilhelm, whose style and approach tended rather towards the systematic and the critical, effectively placed his seal of approval on the more open, radical, experimental, 'revolutionary' contributions of his brother and his associates,186 and was prepared, even where it was not his personal preference, to sanction any combination of ideas, any synthesis, any extension of the intellect. It did not mean that the brothers put their all into this enterprise. There was clearly enough copy available for the 1798 number without the need for them to extend themselves.187 Soon it had to jostle in competition with Friedrich's novel *Lucinde* (1799) or with August Wilhelm's continued reviewing for the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung* (until late 1799), his Shakespeare translation, and his courses of lectures at the university in Jena. Whatever its claims, and the 'Vorerinnerung' [Preliminary Note] to the reader suggested that these were of the widest degree,188 it could only represent one side of a movement, many of whose representatives—Fichte, Schelling, Wackenroder, Tieck—never found their way into its pages and whose important works ran parallel with it. This might suggest a publication that took notice only of its own kind. There would however be plenty of references to contemporary literature, those 'Notizen', most of them disrespectful, it is true: Schiller was punished with total silence, Wieland was threatened with a 'massacre' (which in the event never happened), Voss was ridiculed, while Goethe was to be elevated at every possible opportunity.

The proofs of the first part of the 1798 number were ready by the end of March of that year, containing August Wilhelm's *Die Sprachen* [Languages],

186 *Ibid*., 102-106.

187 *Ibid*., 110.

188 *Athenaeum*, I, [i and ii].

a critique of Klopstock's theories on language, Novalis's collection of aphorisms entitled *Blütenstaub* [Pollen], Friedrich and August Wilhelm's translations of Greek elegies, and August Wilhelm's conspectus of the latest literature, with its significant review of Tieck. There, August Wilhelm had stressed how different their own enterprise was from the run-of themill 'critical institutes' (Nicolai's *Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek* or, by implication, the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*), with their levelling 'tone'.189 The 'Vorerinnerung' would in any case have made this clear.

If one were to apply to the *Athenaeum* the distinction later made by Thomas De Quincey between the 'literature of knowledge' (mere information) and 'the literature of power' (universal and timeless insights),190 one would find both, comments on an ephemeral contemporary literary scene, and—more prominently and memorably—wide-ranging statements about poetry, about art, about their relationship to philosophy. There would be much however that reminded one of *Die Horen*, of so recent expiry, the confident statements of intent, the bold opening forays—and the gradual loss of élan. In style, it used programmatically the same letters and conversations that characterised Schiller's publication. It did not share his stated aim of breaking down the barriers between learned and literary discourse. Instead, readers must be 'à la hauteur' (one of Friedrich's expressions) and expect 'rhapsodic reflexions and aphoristic fragments', the general and the particular, theory and history, national German aspirations and those of other nations, the present and the past, not least classical antiquity. The focus was to be on art and philosophy, not, by implication, on political affairs, history, or religion, although these might feature under different guises. There was no interdict on contemporary events such as Schiller had imposed, although the journal was in no direct sense political, either. Thus the famous aphorism 216 in the first part for 1798, 'The French Revolution, Fichte's Doctrine of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the major tendencies of our age',191 that upset Friedrich Nicolai and so many others, challenged the reader to consider the meaning of the word 'tendency' itself, rather than merely summon up the recent cataclysm. The mention of the Revolution, here and in other fragments, even once or twice the naming of Robespierre or Bonaparte, was part of the desire to affront,

189 *Ibid*., I, i, 144-145.

190 Thomas De Quincey, *The Collected Writings*, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (London: A. & C. Black, 1889-90), XI, 59.

191 *KA*, II, 198; *Athenaeum*, I, ii, 232.

to cock a snook, *épater le bourgeois*. There is much in the *Athenaeum* that is impudent, much that contemporaries did not like and said so, but nothing that is directly seditious.

Above all, August Wilhelm's prefatory statement made it clear that this was a journal BY August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, not merely edited by them. Thus it differed from Schiller's *Horen*. It was also different from another periodical with the same dates and duration as *Athenaeum*, *Propyläen*, that came out in 1798-1800 under Goethe's editorship. Unlike Goethe's and Schiller's journals, and notably unlike the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*, there was to be no anonymity; one was to know the identity of the contributors immediately from the contents page. The author no longer spoke for a collective, such as Schiller's 'Societät' or Goethe's 'friends united', but in his own name.192

At first there was general satisfaction with the *Athenaeum* on the brothers' part. A copy of the first issue went of course to Goethe, then to Fichte, Schütz, Hufeland. The whole Jena establishment, Schiller even, received theirs.193 Whereas Schiller claimed to feel almost physically ill at the 'overclever, discriminatory, cutting and one-sided manner of the fragments',194 Goethe had every reason to be pleased with it, as with subsequent parts.195 It was not merely that the *Athenaeum*, in its three yearly issues, plied him with gross flattery, Friedrich Schlegel reviewing *Wilhelm Meister*, August Wilhelm elevating him in verse to the successor of the ancient elegists (*Die Kunst der Griechen* [The Art of the Greeks]) and Friedrich offering a conspectus of Goethe's poetic development; there was more to it than plurality of mention. By placing emphasis on the autonomy of art, on an ironic, worldly-wise 'hovering' above events, on the renewal in modern guise of ancient form, on Goethe's protean recreations of his own self, the brothers, separately and jointly, were presenting Goethe as a universal manifestation. This was set out in 1798 in Friedrich's Fragment 247:

Dante's prophetic poem is the sole system of transcendental poetry, still the highest of its kind. Shakespeare's universality is the focal point of romantic art. Goethe's purely poetic poetry is the utterest poetry of poetry. This is

192 Stefan Matuschek, 'Epochenschwelle und prozessuale Verknüpfung. Zur Position der *Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung* zwischen Aufklärung und Frühromantik', in: Stefan Matuschek (ed.), *Organisation der Kritik. Die* Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung *in Jena 1785- 1803* (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), 7-21.

193 *KA*, XXIV, 141f.

194 Schiller to Goethe 23 July, 1798; Gräf-Leitzmann, II, 120.

195 *Caroline*, I, 455-462.

the great triad of modern poetry, the inmost and most sacred circle of the classics of modern poesy.196

Here, Goethe was being elevated to one of those 'archpoets' (Tieck's word)197 of the Romantic canon. He was not entirely averse to this odorous incense offering, displeased as he was at the otherwise unenthusiastic reception of *Wilhelm Meister* (which the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung* had taken no notice of). While the Schlegels furthered their ambitions of being Germany's 'kritische Dictatoren', he believed that his *Propyläen* would dominate discourse in the arts.198

None of them took to heart the recent warning example of *Die Horen* and its demise. For Friedrich was fast learning that running an avantgarde periodical involved not only the high ground of an elite and its intellectual risk-taking. One had to contend with more mundane matters, the tergiversations of a publisher, a diminishing stock of copy, and the hostility of the general public. The new king of Prussia, Frederick William III, nonplussed at the political manifesto, *Glaube und Liebe* [Faith and Love], that Novalis had dedicated to him, claimed that one of the Schlegels must have been the author, for 'what a Schlegel writes is incomprehensible'.199 Friedrich complained of a 'Berlin clique' and the threat of stricter censorship there.200 The publisher Vieweg was causing trouble, having printed too many copies, not having enough of the right paper, and being under suspicion of sharp practice.201 By November, Friedrich was putting to August Wilhelm the possibility of changing publishers. The choice fell on Heinrich Frölich, also in Berlin.

Yet, with the appearance of Volume One of the *Athenaeum*, the brothers had every reason to be satisfied with the first products of their 'Fraternität'.202 It could nevertheless be said of it that it was heavily unrelievedly—literary, critical, philosophical, and its prefatory statement had promised nothing different. Volume Two, once the practical matters

196 *KA*, II, 206; *Athenaeum*, I, ii, 244.

197 Lohner, 25.

198 Sengle, *Das Genie und sein Fürst*, 147; Kurt Krolop, 'Geteiltes Publikum, geteilte Publizität: "Wilhelm Meisters" Aufnahme im Vorfeld des "Athenaeums" (1795-1797)', in: Hans-Dieter Dahnke and Bernd Leistner (eds), *Debatten und Kontroversen. Literarische Auseinandersetzungen in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts*, 2 vols (Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau, 1989), I, 270-384.

199 *KA*, XXIV, 154; *HKA*, IV, 497.

200 *KA*, XXIII, 159.

201 *Ibid.*, 186f., 193.

202 *Ibid.*, 133.

were sorted out, was to be more varied, with more poetry and a large section of art criticism. This criticism, the larger portion of which, *Die Gemälde* [The Paintings], was written by August Wilhelm and Caroline (if published under his name only), was ready by November 1798 but had to wait until quite late in 1799 to make its appearance.203 This had certain unexpected advantages: inside the Romantic camp, there was now Tieck's novel *Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen* [Franz Sternbald's Journeyings] that Unger in Berlin had brought out in the autumn of 1798. Written by the co-author of the *Herzensergiessungen* and of its sequel *Phantasien über die Kunst*, it concentrated on the development of a young painter living in the age of Raphael and Dürer, and stressed atmosphere, inner visions, the right religious frame of mind, rather than technicalities or historical frameworks. There was also Goethe's periodical, *Propyläen*, appearing concurrently with the *Athenaeum*. Its message, set out stringently in the introduction (and in larger print, for emphasis) was mastery of the aesthetic and artistic basics, entering the temple forecourt (propylea), before proceeding to the inner sanctum of art, which could only be achieved by a proper study of ancients and moderns alike.204 The art criticism of the *Athenaeum* would stand somewhere between these two positions, the one consciously religious and Catholicizing, the other neo-classical and pagan. This would, as said, not become evident until late in 1799.

#### The Group Meets in Dresden

There was meanwhile a general wish to look at works of painting and sculpture in situ. This led to the first Romantic gathering, not in Jena, but in Dresden, and it was to involve Caroline, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Diederich Gries, Novalis, and Schelling. That the choice fell on Dresden comes as no surprise, for this 'Florence on the Elbe' held one of the finest art collections north of the Alps. It was also where the Schlegels' sister lived, the hospitable and long-suffering Charlotte Ernst, with her husband, the court official, and their small daughter Auguste. Moving as

203 *HKA*, IV, 514.

204 *Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift herausgegeben von Goethe*, 3 vols (Tübingen: Cotta, 1798-1800), I, iii-xxxviii; Richard Benz, *Goethe und die romantische Kunst* (Munich: Piper, 1940), 69. A full documentation of the respective views on art of Goethe and the Romantics in: Christoph Perels (ed.), *'Ein Dichter hatte uns alle geweckt'. Goethe und die literarische Romantik*, exhibition catalogue (Frankfurt am Main: Freies Deutsches Hochstift Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, 1999), esp. 72-103.

they did between the main residence in Dresden and the summer palace at Pillnitz, a few miles upstream, the Ernsts somehow provided a base for their extended family.205 They knew the Dresden painters and academy professors;206 the inspector of the antique collection was the same Wilhelm Gottlieb Becker who in a different guise had published so much of August Wilhelm's works. They knew the same aristocratic circle of friends that Novalis frequented. It was in such company that Caroline met Germany's most popular novelist, Jean Paul Richter, and made polite conversation over dinner (his popularity did not extend to the *Athenaeum*). The group around Schiller's friends, the Körners, kept their distance.207

First, however, August Wilhelm left in May for Berlin to spend five weeks in the Prussian capital. Passing through Leipzig, he met the young Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling who was successfully negotiating for a post as professor extrordinarius of philosophy at Jena.208 Schelling would discover that Schlegel, too, had been appointed to a similar position in literature and aesthetics and that from the winter semester of 1798-99 they would be colleagues—and, as it turned out, much else besides.

Schlegel was introduced to Dorothea Veit, meeting his brother's friends Schleiermacher and especially Ludwig Tieck, now the author of *Sternbald*, with whom he had been corresponding for six months. As an experienced critic, he encouraged him to send a copy of the novel to Goethe.209 Cutting a figure in the salons,210 August Wilhelm allowed himself to be feted as the translator of Shakespeare and the co-editor of the *Athenaeum*. Sensing the historic moment of Frederick William III's and Queen Louise's accession to the throne, he produced the first of his several poems in homage to the Prussian royal house.211 It was also a necessary corrective to the reputation the Schlegels enjoyed. His main business in Berlin was, however, to negotiate with his fellow-Hanoverian and now famous actor-producer August Wilhelm Iffland. He had renewed his acquaintance with Iffland

205 Günter Jäckel (ed.), *Dresden zur Goethezeit 1760-1815* (Hanau: Dausien, 1988), 234; *KA*, XXIV, 312; *Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis*, ed. Josef Körner, 3 vols (Brno, Vienna, Leipzig: Röhrer, 1936-37; Berne: Francke, 1958), III, 12.

206 *Ibid*.

207 *Caroline*, I, 723.

208 F. W. J. Schelling, *Briefe und Dokumente*, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, 3 vols (Bonn: Bouvier, 1962-75), I, 154.

209 Lohner, 227.

at a guest performance earlier that year in Weimar.212 Now, he sought to interest him in a stage performance of *Hamle*t, reading him his translation.213 It was another year, October 1799, before this came about and then without any success.214 Meanwhile, he had to make do with the present reality of the Berlin theatre, Gotter's adaptation of *The Tempest*, with music by Reichardt.215 He paid court to and flirted with Friederike Unzelmann, the premier actress in Berlin: Caroline accepted these tendernesses for the 'Diabolino' (her soubriquet for Unzelmann)216 as part of the realistic view of their partnership.

It was not until July that August Wilhelm arrived in Dresden for the gallery visit, bringing with him his brother Friedrich, without Dorothea. The moment for introductions was not yet opportune, and there was the 'Jews' tax' to consider. At the beginning of August, Schelling announced his intention of coming,217 whereupon Friedrich wrote to Novalis, a day's journey away at the mining academy in Freiberg.218 Caroline and Auguste had been accompanied to Dresden by Johann Diederich Gries, then a student at Jena but soon to be the standard translator of Ariosto, Tasso and Calderón. On 25 and 26 August, for just two days, the circle was united in Dresden. We only have Gries's account of the hoped-for 'philosophisches Convent',219 but Novalis jotted down aphorisms on art that went beyond personal details.220 Friedrich and Novalis did not become converts overnight to Schelling's notion of the 'Weltseele';221 while August Wilhelm and Caroline were more interested in art, indeed that was the primary reason for their coming.222

Their visits to the Dresden gallery and their social life in general in the city differed somewhat from the later stylised art conversations in

212 *Krisenjahre*, III, 12.

213 *Caroline*, I, 450, 452.

214 15 October, 1799. See Ella Horn, 'Zur Geschichte der ersten Aufführung von Schlegel's Hamlet-Übersetzung auf dem Kgl. Nationaltheater zu Berlin. Mit unveröffentlichten Briefen Ifflands und seiner Frau an A. W. Schlegel', *Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft*, 51 (1915), 34-52. AWS also issued *Hamlet* separately, with Iffland's needs in mind. *Shakspeare's Hamlet. Übersetzt von A. W. Schlegel* (Berlin: Unger, 1800).

215 *KA*, XXIV, 143-144.

216 *Caroline*, I, 452.

217 Fuhrmans, I, 155, 157.

*Die Gemälde*. There, as in so many reactions to the Dresden collections, the beholders saw only what seemed essential, what struck the senses, what seized and overpowered the beholder with awe and reverence and the frisson of religious devotion. Others' reactions were no different, not least Goethe's. Thirty years earlier, the Dresden gallery had been for him a 'temple, a 'house of God'. Such paintings as he had had 'eyes to see' had not been Italian,223 and although a young devotee of Winckelmann, he had not walked the mile or so to see the antique sculptures (until 1785 outhoused).224 Writing of this in 1813 in his autobiography, he was passing on the insight that young temple worshippers see only what they wish to see, and these remarks would be directed at the devotees of Romantic art appreciation. Still, it was clear that Goethe, in 1798 so wryly dismissive of youthful ardour and recommending those 'forecourts' (*Propyläen*), had himself not always been subject to the dictates of balanced maturity. Thus in 1793 Wackenroder and Tieck had in Dresden seen the Sistine Madonna: little else mattered. Again Goethe in 1794 made a long list of the Dresden paintings and included almost none that the Schlegel group was impressed by.225 Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1797 was struck by the contrast that the gallery afforded between ancient and modern, 'ideal and individual'.226 Schiller, slightly later, felt more at home in the world of ancient sculpture than among the paintings.

The aesthetic arguments of the century—sculpture versus painting, repose versus movement, plasticity versus colour—were rehearsed, as it were, in front of the Dresden collections. The lighting could contribute. Inspecting the statuary by torchlight, as the Romantics and also Schiller did, softened contours and accentuated forms.227 One could overlook the physical surroundings, the so-called 'stablings' ('Stallgebäude', today's Johanneum), where the paintings were hung according to a rough approximation of historical schools and where the jewel, the Sistine Madonna herself, was grouped among works from different Italian periods.228 If one was, like Schlegel, a pupil of Fiorillo in Göttingen, and had studied Caylus and

223 *Dichtung und Wahrheit*, Part 2, book 8. Goethe, *Gedenkausgabe*, X, 352f., 355.

224 Carl Justi, *Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen*, 3rd edn, 3 vols (Leipzig: Vogel, 1923), I, 296.

225 Goethe, *Gedenkausgabe*, XIII, 91-108.

226 Jäckel, 191.

227 *Ibid*., 192f.; Lothar Müller in AWS, *Die Gemählde. Gespräch*, ed. Lothar Müller, Fundus-Bücher, 143 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), 176.

228 Angelo Walter, 'Die Hängung der Dresdner Gemäldegalerie zwischen 1765 und 1832', *Dresdner Kunstblätter* 29 (1981), 76-87, ref. 78; Justi, III, 89-103.

Winckelmann (while not always acknowledging their authority), one knew what belonged where.

Did it really matter? The collection assembled by the Electors of Saxony, mainly up to 1763, was an eighteenth-century creation and as such suitably eclectic. It had benefited from the connoisseurship of Francesco Algarotti, known to so many courts in Europe; it was strong on colour, with not just Raphael's masterpiece, but also Correggio, Veronese, Guido Reni, Palma, Maratta. There was much that the late eighteenth century had as yet no eye for—the Cranachs, the Dürers—or the Mannerists, or Velásquez or the French pastellists. There was little sense that the gallery formed part of a baroque residence, as captured by Bellotto's famous panorama of 1748, where the court was Catholic, the citizenry Protestant, or that its most famous Catholic convert, Winckelmann, had written his epoch-making Gedanken, his thoughts on the works of the ancients, in this very city.229 Winckelmann had of course not converted out of spiritual considerations: his dogma was aesthetic, his longing for Rome pagan.230 Nevertheless, the visit of the Schlegel brothers did coincide with their renewed interest in religion. *Die Gemälde* is the most Catholicisizing (as opposed to religious) text in the *Athenaeum*. It coincided with August Wilhelm's remarkable poem on the *Union of the Church with the Arts*, that came out in 1800. Yet it would be Friedrich, motivated by urges quite different from Winckelmann's, who found his way to Rome, not August Wilhelm. The other convert from the Schlegel family was to be the daughter of the staunchly Protestant Ernsts in Dresden, Auguste von Buttlar. It was in Dresden that Friedrich died in 1829, in the arms of his niece, and it is here that he is buried.

#### Professor in Jena

The efficient team of August Wilhelm and Caroline had *Die Gemälde* ready by November of 1798.231 The Dresden circle had dispersed, Friedrich back to Berlin, Novalis to Freiberg, Gries to Göttingen. In Jena, there were August Wilhelm and Caroline—and Schelling. In a letter to Novalis, of some considerable frankness, Caroline dropped her guard and took stock of the situation. The *Athenaeum* had in her view come to a standstill. It had in any case been a mistake for the brothers to have got involved with a journal,

229 *Ibid*., I, 359.

230 *Ibid*., 323f.

231 *Caroline*, I, 473f.; *HKA*, IV, 505.

and August Wilhelm should not have become a professor. Lecturing consumed his energies, so that there was little time for the journal, indeed, she would have been content to offer *Die Gemälde* to Goethe's *Propyläen* (Goethe was, as always, at the centre of her admiration). There was also the 'cussed' [trotzig] Schelling. This young academic, whom Caroline a month earlier had characterised as an 'Urnatur' [a piece of primal nature], a 'chip of granite', was now their midday guest and needed, as she put it, 'taking in hand'.232

Caroline had never been keen on what Friedrich called his brother's 'professorale Energie und Expansivität',233 and it is hard not to share her point of view. The *Athenaeum* became more and more Friedrich's concern, until he too found other and more pressing outlets for his restless energy, notably the novel *Lucinde*. Ultimately, all this was to cost August Wilhelm his health and his marriage. For even a free and tolerant association like theirs could not survive such multitudinousness, where one partner was translating Shakespeare, writing lectures, reviewing, editing his poems, never able to resist additional tasks on the side (such as helping Fiorillo with his proofs,234 or, most unnecessary of all, translating a selection of Horace Walpole's writings).235 Where Caroline was increasingly being taken for granted as an amanuesis or even a ghost-writer (she wrote most of *Die Gemälde*), was it surprising that she sought ways of bringing about a chemical change in that 'chip of granite'?

The *Athenaeum*, despite its declared universal scope, could never possibly provide more than 'échappées de vue', in one of Friedrich's more famous formulations.236 It could never satisfy the urge to systematise knowledge, to expand encyclopaedically, to bring scholarly and scientific discourse alive, to broaden the limits of the academy. In August Wilhelm's case, he could not easily shake off his Göttingen experience. There was something of Heyne, of Fiorillo, above all of Bürger, in his nature. It was Bürger, after all, who had provided the model of a professional writer with one foot

232 *Caroline*, I, 459; Fuhrmans, I, 154f.

233 *KA*, XXIV, 199.

234 See above.

235 *Historische literarische und unterhaltende Schriften von Horatio Walpole, übersetzt von A. W. Schlegel* (Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1800). The preface is in *SW*, VIII, 58-63. See *Briefe*, II, 33. The Hartknoch edition is a one-volume selection based on the five-volume folio edition, *The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford*, 5 vols (London: C. G. & J. Robertson, & J. Edwards, 1798). AWS's main interest in Walpole seems to have been in his remarks on garden design.

236 *Athenaeum*, I, ii, 234.

in the university, Schiller likewise. Readers of the letters on language in *Die Horen* or of the Dante sections there, readers of Schlegel's reviews, too, could sense that there was a corpus of knowledge kept in check only by the dictates of the journal medium, while much of *Die Gemälde* would need only to be systematised to take on the lineaments of a lecture. This expansiveness of communication, that reached its height in Berlin in 1801- 04 or in Vienna in 1808 and that went far beyond a student audience, sat perhaps uneasily with the polished and elegantly crafted essay—the *Horen* articles or the Bürger review of 1801—and it might be said that Schlegel only reconciled these two approaches later in his great reviews for the *Heidelberger Jahrbücher*. For all that, university lecturing was not merely a matter of holding forth. It involved a rapport with one's hearers, something that Fichte and Schelling in Jena excelled at, using transcriptions of their lecture notes as a means of disseminating their ideas.237 They were of course not poets, or if so, only rarely. One did not go to their lectures, as one might to Schlegel's, to hear a professional translator or the co-editor of an avantgarde journal discoursing on the history of German poetry or on aesthetics.

It seems that Schlegel's negotiations with the university began already in 1797, ultimately through the minister Voigt and always in consultation with Goethe.238 One learns here something of the creaking mechanisms of the eighteenth-century university. During the spring and summer of 1798 a series of florid communications went to and fro between the rector's and dean's offices and those *Serenissimi nutritores* in the Thuringian courts.239 Schlegel was well enough known in Saxe-Weimar, but perhaps not in Saxe-Meiningen, where he had to present his scholarly credentials. A warm testimonial on his behalf by Schütz stressed his mastery of German style as a poet and translator, his solidity as a classical scholar (*De geographia Homerica*), his 'Genialität' [touch of genius] and 'Fleiß' [studiousness].240 Although the subjects he hoped to profess in Jena were not new to the institution (German poetry, and aesthetics), he would stand in nicely for 'Hofrat Schiller' whose health no longer permitted him to lecture.241 There

237 Ziolkowski, *German Romanticism*, 254.

238 *Goethes Briefwechsel mit Christian Gottlob Voigt*, 4 vols, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 53-56 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1949-62). I, 353.

239 *Ibid*, II, 80. Jena, Universitätsarchiv, A 621; Coburg, Staatsarchiv, Min K Nr. 35 and LA E Nr. 2059.

240 Jena, Universitätsarchiv, A 621, M 208, 5-7, 18; also SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, VI (11).

241 Jena, Universitätsarchiv A 621, M 208, 18; hand-written list of proposed lectures *ibid.*, M 210, 75.

is an irony in that Schlegel was to quarrel spectacularly with Schütz in 1799, and that the imperial diploma ('Auctoritate Sacrae Caesareae Maiestatis') granting him the style of doctor of philosophy and professor extraordinarius was in the name of the pro-rector Eberhard Gottlob Paulus,242 later his father-in-law in his calamitous second marriage.

As was quite common at the time, Schlegel held his lectures in a colleague's house, that of the jurist Gottlieb Hufeland (with whom he also fell out) in the 'Döderlein house in the Leutragasse', the same building in fact in which he and Caroline lived.243 Between the winter semester of 1798- 99 and the summer of 1801 he gave courses of lectures on the history of German poetry, German style, the history of Greek and Roman literature, Horace's Epistles and satires, and on aesthetics, overlapping with other professors such as Schütz and Eichstädt and standing in as it were for the absent Schiller. When lecturing on aesthetics, he appeared on the lecture lists under philosophy with Fichte and Schelling.244 Yet Schlegel, unlike them, never seems to have had more than twelve listeners,245 and the effort he put into his lectures—they were said to be in publishable form—was out of all proportion to their intellectual or even financial benefits.246 Friedrich Hölderlin's friend Friedrich Muhrbeck, writing in September, 1799, found Schlegel's content 'half intellect, half spirit, without emphasis and without feeling and life'.247 But two, possibly three, of his auditors later went on to greater things, the distinguished jurist Carl Friedrich von Savigny,248 Friedrich Ast, the Platonist and aesthetician,249 and most likely also August Klingemann, now agreed to be the anonymous author of the black and nihilistic *Nachtwachen des Bonaventura* [Bonaventura's Night Watches]. Ast

242 *Ibid*., M 209, 23; SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, VI (12).

243 *Briefe*, II, 31; I, 78-81: Jena, Universitätsarchiv M 210, 75; Ute Fritsch, 'Wohnorte der Dichter und Gelehrten in Jena um 1800', in: Friedrich Strack (ed.), *Evolution des Geistes: Jena um 1800. Natur und Kunst, Philosophie und Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld der Geschichte*, Deutscher Idealismus, 17 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994), 689-717.

244 Horst Neuper *et al*. (ed.), *Das Vorlesungsangebot an der Universität Jena von 1749 bis 1854* (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2003), I, 312-328.

245 Ernst Behler, 'August Wilhelm Schlegels Vorlesungen über philosophische Kunstlehre Jena 1798, 1799', in: Strack, 412-433.

246 *Ibid*., 219.

247 Hölderlin, *GStA*, VII, i, 142.

248 Stoll, I, 118f.

249 Rudolf Haym, *Die romantische Schule.  Akademie der Wissenschaften, 56 vols (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875-1912), XVI, 187.

handed his notes over to Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, later a philosopher influential in the Hispanic world, and these are the only full transcripts to survive.250 Yet another, Heinrich Schmidt, left a disrespectful account of Schlegel proudly listing his poetic ancestors.251 Ast's transcription of Schlegel's lectures may not be verbatim, for comparing it with a short sample from Savigny we find agreement in subject-matter if not in formulation. Given Schlegel's unwillingness to discard the merest scrap of paper, it is possible that he used the material of his Jena lectures on German poetry and Greek and Roman literature for similar lectures in Bonn after 1819, but of that we cannot be certain. The other lectures we must assume to be lost.

It was Savigny, too, who noted Schlegel's physical appearance. The 'handsome young man' was no more: one saw instead marked on his face 'over-exertion' and its 'destructive force'. Thus it comes as no surprise that once *Die Gemälde* and the closely related essay on Flaxman had been delivered to Friedrich, August Wilhelm's contributions to the *Athenaeum* became more sparse and that the original resolve of fraternal collaboration had to undergo some accommodation. It is even fair to say that these two pieces of art criticism are what put his personal stamp on the periodical. It was small wonder, too, that Caroline complained to Novalis that she had hardly been out of her husband's study since the beginning of the year, translating 'the second play of Shakespeare' (there were four, *The Merchant of Venice*, *As You Like It*, *King John* and *King Richard II*, that came out in 1799, not counting the reviews for the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*).

#### The Fichte Affair

A further distraction from the 'main task' came with the Fichte affair in 1799,252 the so-called 'atheism controversy' that demonstrated how much the University of Jena, despite the distinction of its professors—Schiller, Paulus, Hufeland, Schelling, above all Fichte himself—was an eighteenth-century

250 These were published as: *Aug. Wilhelm Schlegels Vorlesungen über Philosophische Kunstlehre* [...], ed. Aug. Wünsche (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1911), then AWS, *Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen* [*KAV*], ed. Ernst Behler *et al*., 3 vols (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 1989- in progress), I (Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, I), 3-177.

251 Heinrich Schmidt, *Erinnerungen eines Weimarer Veteranen aus dem geselligen, literarischen und Theater-Leben* [...] (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1856), 53f.

252 Set out by Waldtraut Beyer, 'Der Atheismusstreit um Fichte', in: Dahnke and Leistner, II, 154-245; Sengle (1993), 168-175.

institution and subject to the political will of its ruler, Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar. Of course this was not essentially to change under the so-called 'reformed' university of the nineteenth century, as Schlegel's own agitated correspondence with the Prussian minister Altenstein over the Carlsbad Decrees attests, and as the 'Göttingen Seven' were to learn from hard experience. Officially, Carl August was subject to the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor (the last of his kind), whose name appeared at the top of the university's decrees and diplomas,253 The 'affair' was, however, more about the issue of censorship and the right to publish, ultimately the question of academic freedom. Whereas academic freedom was something that the nineteenth-century universities had to fight hard to achieve, Fichte in the eighteenth believed it was already his by right. None of these was an issue to which the Schlegel brothers, one already a professor and the other aspiring to be one, could be indifferent.

It needs also to be said that Fichte had not always displayed prudence as a professor in Jena. The Weimar publisher Bertuch remarked in 1799 that those professing wisdom ('Weltweise', philosophers) were seldom worldly-wise.254 It was all very well for Fichte to play the public intellectual and appeal to an audience of reasonable, enlightened and tolerant men and women beyond the university confines. Carl August had never been happy with his appointment, and Fichte's debut in Jena, lecturing on a Sunday and on the subject of the French Revolution—had required all of Goethe's diplomatic skills to placate his blunt and forthright sovereign and master. This was only the beginning.

The background, briefly, is this. Fichte had seized the opportunity of becoming co-editor of the *Philosophisches Journal* in 1797. In 1798 his former colleague Friedrich Karl Forberg sent him a contribution that seemed to postulate a moral and religious existence without the necessity of a belief in God. Alarmed at what seemed to be the reduction of faith to a mere incidental, but reluctant to stifle philosophical debate, Fichte decided to append an essay of his own, setting out the notion of a world order dependent on the idea of God.

The ideas set out here and their dependence (or not) on Kant are not the issue. No sooner had the journal appeared, than the Lutheran consistory in Dresden apprised the Elector of Saxony of the 'irreligious' nature of

253 As on another diploma granting AWS his honorary doctorate of philosophy, 'Auctoritate Sacrae Caesareae Maiestatis Francisci II. Imperatoris Romano-Germanici'. Jena, Universitätsarchiv, M 213, 7.

254 *KA*, XXIV, 271.

Forberg's article and recommended not only the confiscation of the journal but the censure of those at the university in Jena responsible for teaching philosophy. Otherwise, Saxon students would be forbidden attendance at Jena. This was the main Saxon ducal house dictating to its Ernestine laterals in Thuringia. Like Tsar Paul's similar decree recalling Russian students home from Germany's 'nest of sedition',255 this was a provocative and even extortionate step, directed against a fellow ruler but also the material existence of the Jena academy. On hearing the words 'Fichtean atheism' being used, Fichte set out to justify and defend himself. In considerable haste, he penned a brochure, extending to 114 pages of print, his *Appellation an das Publikum* that came out in January 1799, in 2,500 copies and with a double impress, Jena and Leipzig. It appeared also in Tübingen, Fichte having brought the mighty South German publisher Cotta on to his side and thereby securing the widest possible dissemination in the Germanspeaking lands.256 To make his point, Fichte ensured that copies were sent to Germany's rulers and to leading intellectuals, Goethe and Schiller among them. August Wilhelm and Caroline each received one, accompanied by a printed but hand-signed letter appealing to the 'thinking public' and alluding to the gravity of the issue.257

There is no record of any immediate action by Schlegel, but those more wary of the ways of courts, like Schiller,258 may have sensed that Fichte's rhetoric had got somewhat out of hand. As it was, only Hanover followed the example of the Saxon and Thuringian courts. The ban on Hanoverian students studying in Jena, and the possible silencing of its star professor, would still have serious consequences for the university, the town, and the state at large. Above all, Fichte chose badly his time to appeal over the heads of rulers to some notional 'Volk', some popular mandate. In 1808, with his famous *Speeches to the German Nation*, events would be on his side, but not now.

It was his political naivete that was to cost him his post in Jena. He wrote to the minister Voigt stating that he would rather seek dismissal than accept censure. Carl August, a dislike of intellectual demagoguery deep in his heart, found this a convenient means of being rid of a turbulent professor. And so,

255 *Briefe*, I, 79.

256 *J. G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften*, ed. Reinhard Lauth *et al*., 42 vols in 4 sections (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann, 1962-2012), III, iii, 174f.

257 *Ibid*., 183f.

258 Cf. Schiller to Goethe 14 June, 1799; Gräf-Leitzmann, II, 223.

on 1 April 1799, having had 400 students in the previous semester, Fichte found himself dismissed, shunned and humiliated.259 Caroline divined correctly the duke's hand in the affair and Voigt's duplicity (he need not have treated Fichte's letter as an official document), while Friedrich rightly noted Fichte's general lack of political astuteness. He wondered, too, about Goethe's role. As well he might, for Goethe, while not doing nothing, had done little and had effectively bowed to his ducal master's will. It was, as Caroline averred, 'bad for all friends of frank and courageous bearing'.260 Friedrich contemplated a counter-brochure, even wrote a few draft pages, but it was essentially too late.261 Friedrich and Dorothea could offer practical help. The authorities in late-Enlightenment Berlin saw no threat to church and state in Fichte's writings and welcomed him in the Prussian capital. For a while, until he found suitable quarters for his family, Fichte actually shared lodgings with Dorothea in the Ziegelstrasse, an act of kindness but also of some forbearance, for Fichte held strongly anti-Semitic opinions.262

Nobody emerged very well from the 'atheism controversy'. Life returned to normal in Jena (and Weimar). Nobody resigned in protest, although Fichte's dismissal was the first step towards the grand exodus from Jena that by 1803 saw most of the university's luminaries—Paulus, Hufeland the medical professor, and Schelling among them—depart elsewhere. The *Athenaeum* circle's adulation of Goethe was undiminished. They could conveniently separate out the 'archpoet' from the courtier and minister of state. Other pressing plans, of which part two of the *Athenaeum* was but one, crowded in. Schlegel took note of one thing. When in his later Berlin lectures on 'encylopedia' he cited Fichte as one of the models for his own approach to knowledge and its systematisation, he was referring not only to the other man's metaphysical and epistemological system but also to his appeal beyond a purely academic audience to an imagined 'nation' of auditors.

#### The Scandal of *Lucinde*

There was no direct connection between the 'atheism affair' and the continuing fortunes of the *Athenaeum* except in the sense that the unity of purpose that had given the original enterprise its nerve and energy and

259 *KA*, XXIV, 278.

260 *Caroline*, I, 535-538.

261 *KA*, XVIII, 522-525.

262 *Caroline*, I, 738.

drive, was now sheering off in all directions. In August Wilhelm's case, it had always been in competition with the multiform commitments of the professional writer, whereas Friedrich, charged with the energy of his intellectual friendships with Schleiermacher and Novalis, regenerated by his love for Dorothea, had put his heart and soul into the journal. Under different circumstances, this had also been the pattern of *Die Horen*. The problem was sustaining the élan, keeping the pace going. In the brothers' letters from 1799, Friedrich's especially, we see their minds already running ahead to projects that would mature in 1800 or even 1802, their collected essays, to be published as *Charakteristiken und Kritiken*, August Wilhelm's edition of his own poems, and the *Musen-Almanach*, the tone and purport of which were to be transformed by the tragic events of the summer of 1800. Above all, for six months, the *Athenaeum* had to compete with Friedrich's novel *Lucinde*.

On a pragmatic level, Friedrich took advantage of the switch from Vieweg to Frölich to interest his new publisher in something quite different, what was to become the 300 pages of *Lucinde. Ein Roman von Friedrich Schlegel*. Intellectually, philosophically, the novel belongs in the world that Schleiermacher, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel himself inhabited, where history, science and nature (Novalis), religion and morals (Schleiermacher) and love (Schlegel) were elevated to universals and absolutes. In one sense it is right to associate *Lucinde* with Schleiermacher's *Reden über die Religion* [Discourses on Religion] that came out in the same year, in that Schleiermacher was seeking to free religion from rationalism and morals, from institutions, to present it as the 'sense of the universal', here and now, in the embrace of the eternal in an all-feeling sense of love and dependence. Such ideas were to the fore when Schleiermacher produced his defence of his friend's novel in 1800, the *Vertraute Briefe über Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde* [Private Letters] and employed quasi-mystical language to express love growing into endlessness [wachsende Unendlichkeit].263 Similarly, if one reduced the novel to its philosophical import, it would propound a unity of spiritual and sensual love, a synthesis of these two main forces of existence, above human sanctions and conventional morals, the elevation of love to a religious as well as a physical experience; culturally, the breaking down of gender barriers, equal respect for the sexes.264

263 [Friedrich Schleiermacher], *Vertraute Briefe über Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde* (Lübeck and Leipzig: Bohn, 1800), 141.

264 Paul Kluckhohn, *Die Auffassung der Liebe in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts und in der deutschen Romantik*, 3rd edn (Halle: Niemeyer 1966), 362-365.

Clearly this novel was not *Wilhelm Meister* or, closer to hand, even Tieck's *William Lovell*, with its cold and cynical seductions, or *Sternbald*, ever aware of the perils to the artist of fleshly allurements. These novels had plots (of a sort), whereas *Lucinde* was episodic and unsequent. The reader might be drawn inexorably to scenes where the newly emancipated flesh and sportive sexual encounters caught the attention, not the philosophical and Intellectual arguments. Would it not, feared Novalis, remind readers of *Ardinghello*, Wilhelm Heinse's novel of 1785, noted for its amorous high jinks (for the prudish Coleridge an 'abomination')?265 Did it not show up as hypocritical the Romantics' moral indignation at the hetaerist world of Wieland—whom the *Athenaeum* circle vowed to 'annihilate'266—or the lascivious Frenchmen Crébillon and Parny?

Above all, there was the autobiographical factor. It did not require much ingenuity to recognize Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit as the main protagonists, but the discerning would also spot Caroline, even little Auguste Ernst, Friedrich's niece. Dorothea had given up everything for the man whom she adored and worshipped,267 her civil status, her reputation and her material security. Caught between her religion and his, she did not wish to affront further her family by baptism, the necessary step to marriage. Moreover her estranged husband demanded custody of both of their sons should she take this step.268 It was all very well for Friedrich to write to Novalis of her 'religious nature'—she would choose Indian-style self-immolation if ever she lost him269—and then put this straight into the text of the novel. Both Caroline and Dorothea wished that the novel had never been published, setting out as it did what was intimate and private and beyond articulation.270 The eventual scandal that the novel produced—Schiller spoke for many in seeing 'modern lack of form and contrary to nature'271—affected them personally and was easily transferred to the *Athenaeum*, involving the whole Romantic circle in polemics, libel and slander.272

265 *Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge*, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), IV, 793.

266 *Caroline*, I, 465; Friedrich Sengle, *Wieland* (Tübingen: Metzler, 1949), 510-513.

267 *KA*, XXIV, 249.

268 *Ibid*., 202.

269 *Ibid.*, 215.

270 *Ibid*., 266; *Caroline*, I, 732; *Lucinde ein Roman von Friedrich Schlegel* (Berlin: Frölich, 1799), 23, 26.

271 Schiller to Goethe, 19 July, 1799; Gräf-Leitzmann, II, 242.

272 Kluckhohn, *Auffassung der Liebe*, 414-424.

A common sense of purpose, the awareness of a 'good cause', a sharing in the fate of a journal to which no-one could be indifferent, putting on a bold front to charges of incomprehension or even immorality: all of these factors convinced the *Athenaeum* circle—the Romantics—that they should not merely form a coalition of the mind and spirit but should constitute a living community in one place, under one roof. This was the germ of the Jena circle. It was the Berlin fraction that was initially so much in favour of this togetherness, for they were already accepted in the circles that mattered to them and—not insignificantly—they were dealing with publishers there. Fichte even called for 'one big family' in Berlin,273 but of course he had by then shaken the dust of Jena off his feet; while Schleiermacher had his chaplain's duties—and, a subject of some malicious comment—was involved in a platonic attachment with the Jewish *salonnière* Henriette Herz. Caroline, no doubt speaking for all in Jena, had no intention of removing to a city that she did not know, with her husband a professor in Jena, as was Schelling. They had their own circle of friends and acquaintances, the publisher Frommann and his open hospitality, or the Paulus family. In Jena, one could meet Goethe, usually over from Weimar on visits of two weeks at a time.274 Novalis, moving around in the course of his professional duties, was now in Weissenfels, but a short journey away.

#### Foregathering in Jena

Thus it was agreed that they should foregather in Jena. Friedrich entrusted the *Athenaeum* to Schleiermacher, and it is in letters to him that we learn the most of events in Jena. Nearly all of the 1799 number was ready by July of that year, and the rest, for the remainder of its short existence, was effectively edited from a distance. Friedrich arrived in Jena on 2 September, Dorothea and her small son Philipp on 6 October, the Tieck family on 17 October, while Novalis was in Jena only from 11-14 November. Friedrich and Dorothea shared part of the house in the Leutragasse, while the Tiecks had quarters in the Fischergasse, and Schelling in the Fürstengraben, all short distances in a small university town like Jena.275 There was open house in the Leutragasse and meals were taken there. The young Norwegian nature philosopher Henrik Steffens moved in and out of this

273 *Caroline*, I, 740.

274 Thomas Pester, 'Goethe und Jena. Eine Chronik seines Schaffens in der Universitätsstadt', in: Strack (1994), 663-688, esp. 672f.

275 Peer Kösling, 'Die Wohnungen der Gebrüder Schlegel in Jena', *Athenäum*, 8 (1998), 97-110; *KA*, XXIV, 300f.

Romantic circle, sensing the 'ferment of a new age', although for him it was the galvanic experiments by the young physical chemist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, to whom Friedrich and Novalis were also drawn, that was the main attraction.276 For an impressionable young man at the outset of his scientific and literary career, it was still 'bliss to be alive'.

Doubtless that was true: one could hear Tieck reading from his own works or from Holberg (taking all the roles) or listen to one of the discourses on religion or poetry or galvanism (or all three) that dominated proceedings. Religion was to be the keynote of Jena. Already in May of that year Friedrich had told his brother August Wilhelm that the time had come to found a new religion.277 The years of travail that had brought forth the French Revolution would accomplish it. This, somewhat toned down, merged into his call for a new poetic mythology that the *Gespräch über die Poesie* [Conversation on Poetry] in the last part of the *Athenaeum* would adumbrate. Novalis's much more radical rewriting of history, finished early in 1800 but held back from publication on Goethe's advice, his *Die Christenheit oder Europa* [Christendom or Europe] demanded the emphatic reinstatement of the Christian Middle Ages into the historical narrative, with vast visions of a Golden Age to come.278 Like this religious homily by Novalis, two other overtly Catholicizing works by members of the circle did not appear in the journal: August Wilhelm's *Der Bund der Kirche mit den Künsten* [The Church's Alliance with the Arts], the long ottava rima poem that later caused him some embarrassment,279 and Tieck's archly medievalising martyr tragedy on the life and death of St Genevieve, *Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva*, with its sophisticated religiosity. Two works that the journal did publish, the poems appended to *Die Gemälde,* harked back to times when religion and the arts had been under one hierarchical aegis, and the section of the *Gespräch* called *Epochen der Dichtkunst* [Periods of Poetry] placed Dante in a similar cultural context.

Dorothea Veit, her attention often drawn to more mundane matters, commented wryly to Schleiermacher: 'Christianity is à l'ordre du jour; the gentlemen are slightly crazed'.280 With so many strong and productive personalities—a 'Despoten Republik'281—it was not surprising that the

276 Henrich Steffens, *Was ich erlebte*, 10 vols (Breslau: Max, 1840-44), IV, 83.

277 *KA*, XXIV, 273, 284.

278 *KA*, XXV, 23.

279 AWS, 'Berichtigung einiger Mißdeutungen', *SW*, VIII, 225.

280 *KA*, XXV, 23.

281 *Ibid*., 71.

Jena circle began to fray from its inception. The two 'grandes dames'—the professor's daughter and the philosopher's daughter—at first sized each other up warily and were initially on their best behaviour.282 Both agreed that Tieck's wife Amalia, the hapless 'Mad. Tieck', a pastor's daughter, was not in their class.283 There were soon tensions between Friedrich and Caroline. Despite the loose bonds of Caroline's and August Wilhelm's marriage arrangements, it was evident that she was making advances to Schelling— 'strong, rough, noble, intractable, like a French general', in Dorothea's words284—and that her husband either did not notice or chose not to notice. There were children milling around in the extended households, some to go on to greater things, like Philipp Veit, the Nazarene painter (and cousin of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy) or Dorothea Tieck, the Shakespeare translator, some whose lives were tragic, like Sophie Paulus or short, like Caroline's daughter Auguste Böhmer. There were compensations: Goethe, the god of their idolatry—'die alte göttliche Excellenz'285—was gracious and gave sound advice to the editors of the *Athenaeum*. Ludwig Tieck in December of 1799 read his drama *Genoveva* to a spellbound Goethe who was still working on his *Faust*, in its way also a 'romantic tragedy'. Schiller they did not visit, and they affected indifference to the first performance of his *Wallenstein* in Weimar, while the whole group fell out of their chairs with laughter at his *Lied von der Glocke* [Song of the Bell].286 Later, the group would add Schiller's *Macbeth* translation to its objects of ridicule, for how could someone with so little English presume to such heights? Yet Schiller's *Macbeth* has its moments, and it is at least better than the *Macbeth* that Schlegel never got round to doing.

It was all very well to poke fun at Schiller's old-fashioned and homespun views on the family and its traditional hierarchies (August Wilhelm had already parodied the even more crass *Würde der Frauen* [Women's Worth]), considering that the same Schlegel was prepared to exalt the identical domestic virtues when they were formulated by Goethe, in his reverential review of *Hermann und Dorothea*. Were Fichte's views on the role of women more progressive? Hardly. Was not Friedrich Schlegel luxuriating in Dorothea's devoted submission (while not averse to a *petite*

282 *Caroline*, I, 564.

283 *Ibid*., 569; *KA*, XXV, 18.

284 *Ibid*., 17.

285 *Ibid*., 23, 26.

286 *Caroline*, I, 570.

*amie* on the side), setting her to work as a translator (for that is what literate women did),287 even publishing her novel *Florentin* in his own name when it came out in 1801 (in many ways a better read than *Lucinde*)? What of Novalis's, for his time, unexceptionable child bride, Sophie von Kühn,288 now mystically transformed with death fantasies and visions in *Hymnen an die Nacht*, the last major work in the *Athenaeum*? At her death she was hardly older than Caroline's Auguste (fourteen), who the malicious believed was to be 'procured' for Schelling?289 At least Caroline knew what she wanted, a lustier man and one who would free her from the treadmill of being her husband's secretary. Everyone seems to have known except August Wilhelm himself. He maintained excellent outward relations with Schelling, the man who was in reality cuckolding him.290

There would be those, like Goethe when later less well-disposed to the Romantics, who drew conclusions from the *Athenaeum* or from *Lucinde* about their views on love and marriage. What was one to expect when Friedrich Schlegel in a fragment declared nearly all marriages to be but concubinage?291 Yet that same journal found (qualified) praise for Mary Wollstonecraft, even (from Schleiermacher) a celebration of love in marriage.292 Clearly an experimental journal was not intended to establish guidelines for marital behaviour, any more than Schleiermacher's important essay of 1799 on social decorum and the balance of discourse (*Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens* [An Essay on the Theory of Social Behaviour]) was a prescription for real gregarious behaviour. It said nothing about the realities of communal living, the debts that Friedrich and Dorothea had run up (selling their 'meubles' to Fichte), the real quarrels, the bitterly cold Jena winter that caused Ludwig Tieck to go down with a rheumatic complaint from which he never recovered, effectively ruining his health. In an alarmingly frank letter to his sister Sophie in Berlin he reduced the whole Jena circle to a 'pigsty'.293 For his part, August Wilhelm wrote a poem lampooning Tieck's 'free-loading' tendencies,294 for everyone was expected to contribute to a common exchequer and not all did.

291 *Athenaeum*, I, ii, 187f.

287 *KA*, XXV, 63.

288 Kluckhohn, *Auffassung*, 465.

289 *Caroline*, I, 755f.

290 *KA*, XXV, 65.

292 *Ibid*., II, ii, 312f.

293 Gotthold Klee, 'Ein Brief Ludwig Tiecks aus Jena vom 6. Dezember 1799', *Euphorion*, 3. Ergänzungsheft (1897), 211-215, ref. 212.

294 Josef Körner, 'Romantiker unter sich. Ein Spottgedicht A. W. Schlegels auf L. Tieck', *Die Literatur* 26 (1923), 271-273, ref. 272.

#### The First Strains

What now held the *Athenaeum* circle together intellectually and emotionally was less the celebration of a 'good cause' than an embattled gathering of ranks against an increasingly hostile reading public, both in Jena and outside. We need however to see all this in perspective. The literary feuds of the years 1795 to about 1803—and we are not concerned here with rehearsing all of their tiresome and repetitive details—were just that: literary. They were a Battle of the Books brought up to date. They bore only the most tenuous of links with those seditious political *libelles* that both scandalized and delighted pre-Revolutionary France or with the hurly-burly of Grub Street in London. Goethe and Schiller in their *Horen* had wanted to be above the political fray. The most political contribution to their journal, Goethe's *Literarischer Sansculottismus*, used a word charged with political associations to make a point about literature and its national, classical status. The *Xenien* waged war inside the Republic of Letters, while the *Athenaeum* steered clear of politics altogether, at most wrapping its historical and social discourse in poetry and myth. This was all to change once the Romantics had dispersed, the Schlegel brothers to France, and especially after 1806, when poetry and art would be invoked to counter the humiliations visited by Napoleon on the German nation. But one is tempted to adapt Heinrich Heine's later *mot* that the *Xenien*—and by extension the Romantics' literary polemics—were but the 'Kartoffelkrieg' (the 'potato war', the popular name for the War of the Bavarian Succession, when the armies never fired a shot) before the great political events supervened.295

As it was, the case of Fichte showed what could happen when one was perceived to be a threat to church, state and public morals, and August Wilhelm, among all his literary attainments also a professor, had no wish to be thus tainted. His poem of homage to the royal house of Prussia was opportunistic enough, but writing a sonnet to Bonaparte in 1800 (and in Italian) for his friend Friedrich Tieck to hand to the First Consul in Paris, was keeping one's political options very wide open indeed.296 It was in fact

295 Heinrich Heine, *Säkularausgabe*, hg. von den Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar und dem Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, 27 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1970-), XX, 385.

296 Josef Körner, 'Neues von August Wilhelm und Caroline Schlegel', *Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde* NF 17 (1925), 143-145, ref. 144; Barbara Besslich, *Der deutsche Napoleon-Mythos. Literatur und Erinnerung 1800-1945* (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 52f.

the threat of disapproval from on high that first nerved him into polemical action. The hack-writer Garlieb Merkel had spread a rumour that Duke Carl August had reprimanded the editors of the *Athenaeum.* 297 August Wilhelm had sixty copies of a sonnet rushed off the press in which the originator of the canard found his name rhymed with 'Ferkel' [swine].298 Friedrich Nicolai's *roman à clef Vertraute Briefe von Adelheid B\*\* an ihre Freundinn Julie S\*\** [Private Letters of Adelheid B\*\* to her Friend Julie S\*\*] of 1799 was also one of the first anti-Romantic voices, but then again Nicolai had been writing satirical novels for decades about things that he did not like. Already in 1799 the Romantics in Jena and Berlin had a foretaste of more scurrilous lampoons when Daniel Jenisch in his *Diogenes Laterne*, with singular nastiness, caricatured Friedrich and Schleiermacher for their association with Jewish women (Dorothea and Henriette Herz, respectively).

It was different when their opponent was August von Kotzebue, Germany's—Europe's—most-performed dramatist (the *Athenaeum* carried a report on a performance in Paris).299 He was also its most disliked. Unscrupulous, treacherous, servile to princes—the attributes which eventually earned him the assassin's knife—Kotzebue captured Europe's stages through a mixture of sentiment and dubious morality. It says much that the German Romantics' aversion was also shared by Coleridge.300 August Wilhelm did not care much for Kotzebue's nearest rival Iffland either, with the actor-producer's well-attested penchant for young men; but Iffland was a Shakespearean actor and must be cultivated. Kotzebue had a history of calumniations, and to these he now added Friedrich Schlegel. It was Kotzebue in satirical and largely non-offensive mode, for his play, *Der hyperboräische Esel* [The Hyperboreal Ass] (1799) featured a young man who, to everyone's consternation, quoted passages verbatim from the *Athenaeum* and from *Lucinde*. Friedrich Schlegel should of course never be quoted out of context, and this Kotzebue knew. It was not good for the Romantics' self-esteem to know that this lampoon was being performed with some success in Leipzig; even worse to learn that Schütz, the editor of the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*, had had it performed in his own house in

297 *KA*, XXV, 11, 377, 381.

298 *SW,* II, 201; Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, *Kritische Gesamtausgabe*, ed. Hans-Joachim Birkner and Gerhard Ebeling, 22 vols in 5 sections (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1980- in progress), V, iii, 227.

299 *Athenaeum*, II, ii, 321.

300 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, *Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature*, ed. Reginald Foakes, 2 vols (*The Collected Works of STC*, Bollingen Series, LXXV, 5) (Princeton: Princeton UP; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), I, 514.

Jena, but a few streets away.301 It led August Wilhelm abruptly to end his association with the *Literatur-Zeitung*, a relationship that had been strained to breaking-point more than once already. His swansong for it had been a review of Tieck's translation of *Don Quixote*, an act of friendship but also part of the Romantics' elevation of Cervantes to classical status.302 His response to Kotzebue, his piece of 'devilment' as he called it, would have to wait until the end of 1800.

Schlegel owed much to the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*, and he had given much to it in his turn. At its best, it had a wide distribution (2,000 subscribers) and had maintained high standards of writing, as opposed to specialised scholarly discourse; and it had been a major force in the dissemination of Kant. For all Schlegel's later strained relationship with the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeiltung*, and his acrimonious correspondence with Schütz, its co-editor, it had been Schiller's anonymous review of Bürger in the journal that had first brought Schlegel's name before a discerning reading public. He in his turn had taken over most of the journal's belleslettres reviewing, including the pieces on Voss and *Hermann und Dorothea*, and to make his point, he listed all of these reviews in the *Athenaeum*. 303 It was time to free himself from the tutelage of editors and 'house style': the *Athenaeum* placed no such constraints upon its reviewers.304 Things were not helped when Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, Caroline's erstwhile friend from Mainz days,305 did an unflattering anonymous review, first of the *Athenaeum*, then of *Lucinde*, in the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung*. Schlegel initially considered seeking redress from Schütz through the courts, only to be told by Goethe that such 'public recriminations' were forbidden by decree.306

As it was, Schlegel was no longer interested in piecemeal reviewing. Both he and Fichte came up with ideas, with slightly different emphases,

301 Rainer Schmitz (ed.), *Die ästhetische Prügeley. Streitschriften der antiromantischen Bewegung* (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992), 318; Heinz Härtl, '"Athenaeum"-Polemiken', in: *Dahnke and Leistner*, I, esp. 292-357; Steffens, *Was ich erlebte*, IV, 264; *Caroline*, I, 577-580, 749f.

302 *SW*, XI, 427-430; *Briefe*, I, 99f.

303 *Athenaeum*, III, i, [165-168].

304 Stefan Matuschek, 'Epochenschwelle und prozessuale Verknüpfung. Zur Position der *Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung* zwischen Aufklärung und Frühromantik', in: Stefan Matuschek (ed.), *Organisation der Kritik*. Die Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung *in Jena 1785- 1803* (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004) 9-11.

305 *Caroline*, I, 577-580.

306 *Goethes Briefwechsel mit Christian Gottlob Voigt,* II, 452; *KA*, XXV, 459.

for a so-called *Kritisches Institut*, a review journal that would reflect a more systematic ordering of knowledge and would accommodate the various encyclopaedic ambitions that the Jena circle entertained.307 These *Jahrbücher der Wissenschaft und Kunst für Deutschland* [Yearbooks of Science and the Arts] were without doubt the most ambitious plan to emanate from Jena. Its editorial board was to consist of both Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Tieck, and August Ferdinand Bernhardi, the Berlin schoolman and husband of Sophie Tieck, who was proving himself useful as an editor and reviewer. The break-up of the Jena circle put paid to the project. It would in any case have been difficult to tie some of its editorial board down, notably Tieck, who had promised contributions for the *Athenaeum* and had never delivered. Schlegel, for his part, was to find himself setting out the order and subdivisions of knowledge, not in a review journal, but in his lectures in Jena and Berlin.

Dorothea Veit rightly sensed that the *Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung* affair simply consumed misspent energy.308 Even as the Jena circle began to dissolve, it was augmented by the young Clemens Brentano, a 'witty scatterbrain',309 caught between the study of medicine and his real avocation of poetry. The last part of the *Athenaeum* appeared in March of 1800.  Caroline then fell seriously ill. Dorothea, a shrewd, although hardly objective observer of humanity and its frailties, tried to be even-handed towards her sister-in-law. Despite the differences in their personalities and backgrounds, Caroline had been the first to recognize Dorothea publicly and to ensure her acceptance in Jena circles. She conceded to Caroline wit and spirit, but no understanding of art (she had clearly not read *Die Gemälde*). August Wilhelm, she continued, had not been an easy partner to live with, but he loved Caroline after his own fashion and in a way that she never did in return. She had never been open about her relationship with Schelling, who had kept up a front of politeness to August Wilhelm while disliking him in private.310 Was August Wilhelm 'surfeitet, preoccupied or blind?

#### The Death of Auguste Böhmer

The events of the spring and summer of 1800 throw light on human relationships and emotional entanglements, but also on the sheer precariousness of life itself at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Caroline's illness,312 described as 'Nervenfieber', the catch-all name for dysenteric infections, refused to improve. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, the great Jena doctor and father of macrobiotics, treated her according to his tried and conventional methods, but Schelling, who in addition to the nature philosophy that he professed also had some knowledge of medicine, insisted that Hufeland try the fashionable therapeutics of the Brownian method. Brownism or Brunonism, named after the Scottish doctor John Brown,313 saw health as the median state of excitability, based on the fundamental doctrine of life as a state of excitation produced by external agents upon the body, and perceived disease as consisting in excess or deficiency of such stimulants. Novalis was also a Brownian. His recommendation to Tieck that he try 'electricity, guaiacum, tafia, acids and mercurial substances' for his rheumatism314 was essentially Brownist but also typical of the insouciance with which contemporaries passed on their patent cures, or doctors sent prescriptions without first having seen the patient.

Caroline did not respond to counter-stimulants. It was agreed that she should take the waters in Bad Bocklet in Franconia, known for their curative qualities for women's complaints; while Schelling, to acquaint himself further with Brownian medicine, should go to nearby Bamberg to study. An elaborate charade was set up, with Schelling leaving first for Saalfeld, a convenient half-way house. On May 5, Caroline and Auguste left, accompanied as far as Saalfeld by Schlegel, after which they were to proceed independently to Bamberg. Schlegel returned to Jena, taking a detour via Leipzig, while Schelling, of course, was waiting in Saalfeld and saw Caroline and Auguste to quarters in Bamberg. Early in July, all three of them were in Bocklet, the Paulus family from Jena also. There was no

312 Documentation in: Wulf Segebrecht *et al*., *Romantische Liebe und romantischer Tod. Über den Bamberger Aufenthalt von Caroline Schlegel, Auguste Böhmer, August Wilhelm Schlegel und Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling im Jahre 1800*, Fussnoten zur Literatur, 48 (Bamberg: Universität Bamberg, 2001).

313 Cf. John Neubauer, 'Dr. John Brown (1735-88) and Early German Romanticism', *Journal of the History of Ideas* 28 (1967), 367-382, esp. 372f.

314 *HKA*, IV, 521f.

secrecy, for on 6 July Schelling wrote to Schlegel that Auguste had taken ill. The words 'Ruhr' and 'Nervenfieber' were used, indicating diarrhoea. Schelling apparently used Brownian methods, including the standard stimulant of opium, to try to bring her back to health. It was to no avail. On 12 July, 1800 she died, aged 15. She was buried in the churchyard at Bocklet. One will not find there either of the two monuments commissioned from sculptors of European rank in her memory and executed by both of them (Friedrich Tieck's is in Copenhagen, Schadow's is lost): she is only memorialised in poetry.

Caroline had buried her sole surviving child. She returned to Bamberg with Schelling, Schlegel hurrying there as soon as he heard the news.315 He made a 'pilgrimage' to Auguste's grave, today a remote and romantic spot, for him then merely a country churchyard, 'narrow and mean'. It was in the territory of the prince-bishop of Würzburg and subject to Catholic jurisdiction. Very much later, at the distance of thirty-eight years, writing to Albertine de Broglie, Madame de Staël's daughter, he recalled seeking solace 'in an episcopal seat'316 (Bamberg) and finding some consolation in the high mass performed there. The accident of this Franconian journey, calamitous for all who took part in it, had brought him to the same South German cultural landscape that Wackenroder and Tieck had already experienced in 1793, both of them Berlin Protestants brought face to face with the aesthetic splendours of the rite. For Schlegel, if one excludes Mainz in 1793, when visits to cathedrals were far from his mind, this was effectively the first visit to a Catholic environment (Dresden was decidedly Protestant apart from the Catholic court) where he could see 'religion majestically clad in its best finery, instead of the monotonous mourning that it wears in Protestant churches'.317 We have no reason to doubt the genuineness of these sentiments as here expressed, and it may be that the sound and pomp was a distraction for his thoughts, rather than the meditative silence that churches may also offer. It was however a far cry from this brief soul-enrichment to the flirtations with Catholicism that his poems, issued in April 1800, evidenced and which were later, to his indignation, to nourish his alleged reputation as 'half-Catholic'.318

315 *Caroline*, I, 606f.

316 *Oeuvres de M. Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français*, ed. Édouard Böcking, 3 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846), I, 191.

317 *Ibid*.

318 *SW*, VIII, 220.

He had known all three of Caroline's children to various degrees. Therese Böhmer, who had died eleven years previously, he knew only at a distance.  Auguste he had loved as his own daughter and it was to him that the extended Jena circle expressed their condolences. Now was the time for his friends to recollect his genuine paternal affection, not to consider whether this had been on his side only. The brief notes to Auguste from her step-father and her step-uncle 'Fritz' that we have are documents of their time and as such are not safe indicators of feeling. Yet this stiff, formal, professorial man loved children and wished to have children of his own. It was the hope of founding a family after his *années de pèlerinage* with Madame de Staël that motivated his unhappy decision to marry in 1818. As it was, his affections had to be lavished on others' children, Willem Muilman, the Staëls, the Colebrooke and Johnston boys in Bonn, his niece Auguste von Buttlar, even his unfortunate nephew Johann August Adolph, and there is no doubt that Auguste de Staël and Albertine de Broglie, née Staël, later saw him as a kind of second father.