# **The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry**

# **ROGER PAULIN**

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## The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel

## Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry

*Roger Paulin*

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© 2016 Roger Paulin

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## Contents

*The true translator, one could state boldly, who is able to render not just the content of a masterpiece, but also to preserve its noble form, its peculiar idiom, is a herald of genius who, over and beyond the narrow confines set by the separation of language, spreads abroad its fame and broadcasts its high gifts. He is a messenger from nation to nation, who mediates mutual respect and admiration, where otherwise all is indifference or even enmity.*

August Wilhelm von Schlegel

The Schlegel Coat of Arms ('Schlegel von Gottleben'). © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved

Work on this project has been greatly assisted by my easy access to the large Schlegel holdings in Cambridge University Library and in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. David Lowe and Christian Staufenbiel of Cambridge University Library and Sandy Paul and the staff of the Wren Library have been of invaluable help in my researches.

I am grateful to the following institutions for allowing me to consult and/ or refer to unpublished material in their possession: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland (Murray Archives); Bonn, Universitätsbibliothek, Handschriftenabteilung; Bonn, Universitätsarchiv; Coburg, Landesarchiv; Dresden, Sächsische Staats- Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek; Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Hanover, Landeskirchliches Archiv; Hanover, Ev. Lutherische Stadtkirchenkanzlei; Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek; Jena, Universitätsarchiv; Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek. Hans-Joachim Dopfer (Sigmaringen) kindly permitted me to use the portrait drawing of Schlegel.

I am indebted to fellow scholars working in the same field: Claudia Becker, who generously placed Ernst Behler's *Nachlass* at my disposal; Anil Bhatti; Cornelia Bögel, who in addition gave me great assistance with my manuscript; Ralf Georg Czapla; Christoph Jamme; Stefan Knödler; Margaret Rose; Jochen Strobel; Rosane and Ludo Rocher kindly gave me much useful advice on Sanskrit and answered my questions; Roger Dawe gave me guidance in matters relating to Classics, Pat Boyde with regard to Italian. Stephen Fennell encouraged me to start writing; Julia Allen, David Blamires, Barry Nisbet, Helmut Pfotenhauer, and my wife, Traute, read all or part of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions towards its improvement. Responsibility for what is written lies with me alone.

Anne and Thomas Bürger extended kind hospitality to me during my various visits to Dresden; Rolf Herrfahrdt similarly in Hanover.

The Fellows' Research Fund of Trinity College kindly met the costs of my archival visits to Bonn, Dresden, Heidelberg and Hanover.

I wish to record my grateful thanks to Trinity College and to the Deparment of German, University of Cambridge (Schröder Fund) who made generous grants towards the production of this book.

A final word of cordial thanks to all at Open Book Publishers, who have seen this book through its various stages to its conclusion.

October 2015, Trinity College Cambridge

*Athenaeum*: *Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Friedrich Schlegel*, 3 vols (Berlin: Vieweg, 1798; Frölich, 1799-1800).

*Bonstettiana*: *Bonstettiana. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe der Briefkorrespondenzen Karl Viktor von Bonstettens und seines Kreises, 1753-1832*, ed. Doris and Peter Walser-Wilhelm, 14 vols in 27 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996-2011).

*Briefe*: *Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel*, ed. Josef Körner, 2 vols (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna: Amalthea, 1930).

*Carnets de voyage*: Simone Balayé (ed.), *Les carnets de voyage de Madame de Staël. Contribution à la genèse de ses oeuvres* (Geneva: Droz, 1971).

*Caroline*: *Caroline. Briefe aus der Frühromantik*. Nach Georg Waitz vermehrt hg. von Erich Schmidt, 2 vols (Leipzig: Insel, 1913).

*Correspondance générale*: Madame de Staël, *Correspondance générale*, ed. Béatrice W. Jasinski and Othenin d'Haussonville, 7 vols (Paris: Pauvert; Hachette; Klincksieck, 1962-; Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1962-2008).

*Die Horen: Die Horen eine Monatsschrift herausgegeben von Schiller* (Tübingen: Cotta, 1795-97*).*

Jenisch: *August Wilhelm Schlegels Briefwechsel mit seinen Heidelberger Verlegern*, ed. Erich Jenisch (Heidelberg: Winter, 1922).

*Journaux intimes*: Benjamin Constant, *Journaux intimes*, ed. Alfred Roulin and Charles Roth (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).

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

*KA: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe*, ed. Ernst Behler *et al*., 30 vols (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas, 1958- in progress). *KAV:* August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen* (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 1989- in progress): I: *Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I* (1798-1803), ed. Ernst Behler (1989); II, i: *Vorlesungen über Ästhetik* (1803-27), ed. Ernst Behler, then Georg Braungart (2007); III: *Vorlesungen über Encyklopädie* (1803), ed. Frank Jolles and Edith Höltenschmidt (2006).

*Krisenjahre*: *Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis*, ed. Josef Körner, 3 vols (Brno, Vienna, Leipzig: Rohrer, 1936-37; Berne: Francke, 1958).

Leitzmann: *Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm von Humboldt und August Wilhelm Schlegel*, ed. Albert Leitzman (Halle: Niemeyer, 1908).

 Briefe.* Auf der Grundlage der von Henry Lüdeke besorgten Edition neu herausgegeben und kommentiert von Edgar Lohner (Munich: Winkler, 1972).

Mix-Strobel: 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).

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

*Opuscula: Opuscula quae Augustus Guilelmus Schlegelius Latine scripta reliquit,*  ed. Eduardus Böcking (Lipsiae: Weidmann, 1848).

Pange: Comtesse Jean de Pange, née Broglie, *Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël. D'après des documents inédits*, doctoral thesis University of Paris (Paris: Albert, 1938).

Sulger-Gebing: Emil Sulger-Gebing, *Die Brüder A. W. und F. Schlegel in ihrem Verhältnisse zur bildenden Kunst*, Forschungen zur neueren Litteraturgeschichte, 3 (Munich: Haushalter, 1897).

*SW*: August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Sämmtliche Werke*, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846-47).

Walzel*: Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm*, ed. Oskar F. Walzel (Berlin: Speyer & Peters, 1890).

Wieneke: *August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel im Briefwechsel mit Schiller und Goethe*, ed. Josef Körner and Ernst Wieneke (Leipzig: Insel, 1926).

The idea for this biography arose out of a specific situation, the first conference ever devoted to August Wilhelm Schlegel, in Dresden in 2008.1 The relatively late date might suggest decades of neglect of Schlegel's life and works, an indifference or nescience in the academy and in general cultural consciousness. Despite a corpus of studies extending back well over a century, it is indeed true to say that August Wilhelm Schlegel, unlike his brother Friedrich, has not been in the forefront of German critical awareness and is in great need of a general reappraisal. My own task at the conference was to set out some thoughts on how one approaches writing Schlegel's life.2 I ended with the question: Who is to do it? My colleagues agreed that I should. This biography is the result.

There has never been a full-scale biography of Schlegel in any language. (The language factor is not irrelevant, for Schlegel wrote in French as well as German and lived for thirteen years in a French-speaking environment.) The first attempt in German so far, Bernhard von Brentano's short biography (originally 1943) was a popular account that restricted itself to printed sources,3 many of them available since the nineteenth century. There is also an enormous amount of information tucked away in the many editions

1 The proceedings of the conference were published by 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), esp. 1-10.

2 Roger Paulin, 'August Wilhelm Schlegel: Die Struktur seines Lebens', *ibid*., 309-318.

3 Bernhard von Brentano, *August Wilhelm Schlegel. Geschichte eines romantischen Gei*stes (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1943) and subsequently reprinted. See Konrad Feilchenfeldt, 'Bernhard von Brentanos August Wilhelm Schlegel-Biographie', Mix/Strobel, 295-307. An American master's thesis covers essentially the same material as Brentano (i.e. no unpublished sources). Effi Irmingard Kosin, 'Vorstudie zu einer Biographie von August Wilhelm Schlegel', M.A. thesis Stanford University 1965.

of his correspondence and lectures, as well as in major monographs on individual aspects of his life and works—Körner on the Vienna Lectures,4 Pange on Madame de Staël,5 Nagavajara on his reputation in France,6 Höltenschmidt on his medieval studies7 are but a few—that open up a wealth of intellectual and historical detail relevant to his life. Yet there is no account that joins up these spheres of activity as one narrative whole.

Perhaps the length of Schlegel's life (1767-1845) and the breadth of his interests, far from being a stimulus, have deterred potential biographers. It may seem on the face of it hard to define what makes him biographyworthy: there are simply so many sides to his intellectual interests and too many loose ends to his life. 'I have to admit to myself that I have undertaken a great deal and completed very little',8 says the man whose works in German take up twelve volumes in the standard edition. But proudly listing his achievements, he nevertheless is justified in calling himself a 'cosmopolitan of art and poetry'.9 For he is at once poet, dramatist, critic, translator, editor, philosopher, historian, philologist, an 'érudit' in the eighteenth century's sense of the word; and is it symptomatic that a French name seems best suited to sum up his character and achievement. Being a cosmopolitan meant publishing in German, French and Latin;10 his ideal biographer—and I certainly do not claim to fulfil that role—as well as being versed in the classical and Romance languages, should also know Sanskrit.

Might a man with such an extraordinary mind and range not spend his hours closeted with books and papers and have no real life to speak of? There are times when Schlegel seems to fit this description. Not, however, when he is visiting the capitals of Europe or rattling in a chaise across

4 Josef Körner, *Die Botschaft der deutschen Romantik an Europa*, Schriften zur deutschen Literatur für die Görresgesellschaft, 9 (Augsburg: Filser, 1929).

5 Comtesse Jean de Pange, née Broglie, *Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël. D'après des documents inédits*, doctoral thesis University of Paris (Paris: Albert, 1938).

6 Chetana Nagavajara, *August Wilhelm Schlegel in Frankreich. Sein Anteil an der französischen Literaturkritik 1807-1835*, intr. Kurt Wais, Forschungsprobleme der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte, 3 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966).

7 Edith Höltenschmidt, *Die Mittelalter-Rezeption der Brüder Schlegel* (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 2000).

8 'Je dois m'avouer à moi-même que j'ai beaucoup entrepris, et achevé peu de chose'. *Oeuvres de M. Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français*, ed. Édouard Böcking, 3 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846), I, 10.

9 'Kosmopolit der Kunst und Poesie/Verkündigt' ich in allen Formen sie'. August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Sämmtliche Werke* [*SW*], ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846-47), III, 3.

10 *Opuscula quae Augustus Guilelmus Schlegelius Latine scripta reliquit*, ed. Eduardus Böcking (Lipsiae: Weidmann, 1848).

the steppes with Madame de Staël (and her lover), having saved a copy of *De l'Allemagne* from Napoleon's censors, or when he joins Marshal Bernadotte's suite as a political pamphleteer. These are of course high moments, but the circumstances that brought about the works for which he is chiefly remembered today—his translation of Shakespeare, and the Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature that were read from 'Cadiz to Edinburgh, Stockholm and St Petersburg'11—are also the stuff of biography.

The main problem has nevertheless been his reputation in his own country. Despite a renewal of interest in him during the twentieth century and impressive editions of his lectures and correspondence—the initiatives of Josef Körner or Ernst Behler, to mention but two—Schlegel has generally not been well served by his fellow-countrymen. In the German lands, his reputation has never quite recovered from Heinrich Heine's devastating attack in *Die Romantische Schule* of 1835; memoirs in the later nineteenth century did him hardly better service. He failed to be enshrined in the national canon, being perceived as having sold his soul to France, the 'traditional enemy'. In the strident years after 1871, he became a symbol of effeteness, lacking 'vital forces'; even Brentano's biography, when speaking of his Shakespeare translation, can only find a 'feminine capacity for empathy', not life-giving originality.12

Writing a biography to counter prejudice and neglect is doubtless laudable, but it is not enough. Schlegel himself knew this. In the sole biographical essay from his own pen, a defence of his former mentor Gottfried August Bürger, he wrote that 'it is a forlorn hope to impute to a human work a higher reputation than it deserves, through keeping silent about its faults'.13 It is a warning against the temptation to compensate for perceived injustices. Schlegel nevertheless believed in preserving a self-image and was ever ready to justify himself. He wrote a total of four autobiographical pieces (two in German, one in French and one in Latin), setting out his credentials, respectively, as a poet,14 as a man of action and political conscience (not merely a sedentary man of letters),15 and a man

11 *SW*, VII, 285.

12 Sources set out in Paulin, 'Struktur', 312f.

13 August Wilhelm Schlegel, 'Bürger. 1800', *SW*, VIII, 64-139, ref. 73.

14 [Sketch of a Biography]. (undated).  Octobris anni MDCCCXXIV. deponeret habita', *Opuscula*, 385-392; 'Berichtigung einiger Mißdeutungen', *SW*, VIII, 239-258.

of mature reflection.16 The modern biographer will not wish to follow implicitly these directives from his biographical subject, but by the same token he will not wish to brush them aside as irrelevant.

The biographer also has the task of seeing his subject in his times. Politically, Schlegel was born in a part of that conglomeration of German states still owing allegiance to a Holy Roman Emperor (he still had the last Emperor's name on his doctoral diploma from the University of Jena). Growing up in the Hanover of George III, he experienced the last years of this political system, before the French Revolution, the Revolutionary Wars, and the rise of Napoleon destroyed the old order and imposed a new one on Europe. The circumstances of his thirteen-year association with Madame de Staël saw him in the opposite camp to Napoleon, forced with her into exile and a wandering existence. His travels with her took him to France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Russia, Sweden and England, all during times of political or military turmoil. The reaction in the German lands after the Restoration of 1815 left him culturally and intellectually oriented to France, despite his being a professor in Prussian service.

A life that extended from the reigns of Frederick the Great, George III and Louis XV in the 1760s to those of Frederick William IV, Victoria and Louis-Philippe in the 1840s involved not just political change and upheaval, but irreversible social and technological revolutions. Much of this was to occupy his two best-known pupils at the University of Bonn, Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine. (Not to be outdone, Schlegel himself wrote an ode in Latin marking the arrival of the first steamboat on the Rhine; in the year before he died, the railway reached Bonn.) He did not see all of this necessarily as progress. Towards the end of his life listing (in no particular order) the 'achievements' of the last half-century, he was wryly ambiguous as to their benefits: beet sugar, the free press, gas lighting, centralization, steam engines, lithography, daguerrotypes, metres and hectares, stearin candles, the rights of man, Chartism, socialism, and much else besides.17 He could have added: the July Revolution, the British Empire, the Carlsbad Decrees, the subject of trenchant comment elsewhere. The role of the intellectual, the scholar, the writer was, as he saw it, to preserve some integrity and selfesteem when everything else about him was restless and shifting.

Yet these factors alone do not necessarily warrant a biography. I believe Schlegel to have been an interesting man in his own right and a

16 'Fragments extraits du porte-feuille d'un solitaire contemplatif', *Oeuvres*, I, 189-194.

17 'Formule d'abjuration', *Oeuvres*, I, 83.

#### *Introduction 5*

leading intellectual in his day—not always likeable, but few of his great contemporaries, Goethe or Schiller, Madame de Staël or Heine, would necessarily qualify in those terms. I seek to strip away the accumulation of prejudices that have accompanied his reputation and present him, not as he was (that no biographer can do) but as he might reasonably be seen, with all of his faults and also his virtues. To this end, I make extensive use of a mass of archival material, much of which presents a Schlegel different from the image in printed sources.

This biography identifies the high points of Schlegel's life, the major influences on it, the places and persons affected by his presence and personality. These are, as I see it, the years in Jena, his Shakespeare translation, the Berlin and Vienna Lectures, and the years as a professor in Bonn. I have devoted over a quarter of my account to his association with Madame de Staël (1804-17), not least because that extraordinary woman said that she could not live without him, but also because Staël studies tend to sideline him in favour of other members of the 'Groupe de Coppet'. Thus I have drawn on the material afforded by recent Staël scholarship in order to place Schlegel more centrally in the account of her life and works. I regard his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature as commensurate with Staël's *De l'Allemagne*, part of the recognition of Schlegel's pivotal role as a representative figure of both German and European Romanticism, sometimes even as the man who held everything together when politics forced so much apart.

An equally long section is devoted to his years as a professor in Bonn, for here Schlegel achieved prominence—fame even—as a Sanskrit scholar, and it is a claim to eminence that in its time could compete with his renown as a translator and as the voice of Romanticism.

I see Schlegel as a professional writer for a large part of his career. His publications did not exist in a vacuum. His dealings with publishers, the sums that they paid, the position of the author in the book trade, the vicissitudes of publishing in Napoleonic Germany and also later: all these are concerns of special interest to the biographer.

Heinrich Heine grievously wronged Schlegel, and the victim has had very little opportunity for redress. I come to his defence against his calumniator-in-chief, endeavouring also to find some sympathy for the man, who without children of his own, showed genuine affection for the young and devoted much time and care to them. He was not only the travelling companion to Madame de Staël but also the tutor to her three children, all of whom have their part in this narrative.

His poetry—today little appreciated—I make use of, not so much for any intrinsic qualities that it may have, but as a accompaniment to the biography, and where I think it has merit, I also quote it.

Finally, a biography of August Wilhelm Schlegel must be in part also the life narrative of his brother Friedrich. The different trajectories of their respective reputations, the greater availability of printed sources for Friedrich, his subsequent advancement to spokesman and representative of German Romanticism, even to being hailed as a father of modern critical theory, mean that August Wilhelm sometimes is apportioned a secondary role. I have tried to give as balanced a narrative as I can of their relationship, its interactions, and its tensions.

## A Note on Sources

The textual situation with Schlegel is far from satisfactory. There has been no standard edition of his works since that produced by Eduard Böcking in 1846-48, and it is far from complete. It is, however, the main source from which I cite his poetry, his translations, and his criticism. His lectures, those given in Jena, Berlin, Vienna, and Bonn, are not yet edited in their entirety, and at least three of them I quote from the original manuscripts. Even the great Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature have not yet been the subject of a modern critical edition. Schlegel scholars are nevertheless grateful for the three volumes of Berlin Lectures edited in the 1880s by Jakob Minor,18 the Lectures on German Language edited by Josef Körner in 1913,19 the Lectures on Academic Study edited by Frank Jolles in 1971,20 and the three volumes of the *Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen* (*KA*V), originally under the aegis of Ernst Behler and subsequently of Georg Braungart, that have appeared so far (1989-2007)21 and of which further volumes are promised shortly.

18 August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst*, ed. Jakob Minor, Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 17-19 (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1884).

19 August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie. Vorlesungen, gehalten an der Universität Bonn seit dem Wintersemester 1818/19*, ed. Josef Körner, Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 147 (Berlin: Behr, 1913).

20 August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium*, ed. Frank Jolles, Bonner Vorlesungen, 1 (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1971).

21 August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I (1798-1803)*, ed. Ernst Behler, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen [*KAV*], I (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 1989); *Vorlesungen über Encyklopädie* [1803], ed. Frank Jolles and Edith Höltenschmidt, *KAV*, III (*ibid.*, 2006); *Vorlesungen über Ästhetik* II, i, ed. Ernst Behler, then Georg Braungart, *KAV*, II, i (*ibid.*, 2007).

#### *Introduction 7*

The Schlegel scholar faces a similar situation in respect of his correspondence. The great scholar-editor Josef Körner produced a twovolume collection of Schlegel's letters in 193022 which is still a standard tool, followed by the three-volume *Krisenjahre der Frühromantik* (1936-37, 1958).23 The *Kritische Ausgabe* of Friedrich Schlegel (1958-, in progress) brings together in a modern edition sources otherwise scattered and not of easy access.24 One is grateful for continuing editorial work on the correspondence, for instance the recent specialized editions of letters produced by Ralf Georg Czapla and Franca Victoria Schankweiler,25 Rosane and Ludo Rocher,26 and Cornelia Bögel,27 which cast light on important aspects of Schlegel's life and works. Above all, the Digital Edition of Schlegel's letters, under the aegis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and carried out at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Dresden (SLUB) in collaboration with the Universities of Marburg and Trier, will, when completed, give a complete conspectus and image of Schlegel's correspondence, as far as it is known.28 Much nevertheless remains unedited, but important tracts of correspondence, Madame de Staël's letters to Schlegel, for example, and most of his letters to his brother Friedrich, must unfortunately be considered lost.

Schlegel himself threw nothing away. His papers (*Nachlass*) in the SLUB in Dresden (Mscr. Dresd. e. 90), amounting to 78 sections, contain everything from personal items (such as tailors' bills) to large unpublished drafts of significant research projects (*Nibelungenlied*, Provençal) as well as the bulk of his correspondence. Further archival material, from Coppet and relating to the years 1804-12, was purchased by the SLUB in 1998 (Mscr. Dresd. App. 2712). Two specialized (on-line) catalogues itemize these

22 *Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel*, ed. Josef Körner [*Briefe*], 2 vols (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna: Amalthea, 1930).

23 *Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis*, ed. Josef Körner [*Krisenjahre*], 3 vols (Brno, Vienna, Leipzig: Rohrer, 1936-37; Berne: Francke, 1958).

24 *Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe*, ed. Ernst Behler *et al*., 30 vols [*KA*] (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas, 1958- in progress).

25 *'Meine liebe Marie' — 'Werthester Herr Professor'. Der Briefwechsel zwischen August Wilhelm von Schlegel und seiner Bonner Haushälterin Maria Löbel*. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ralf Georg Czapla and Franca Victoria Schankweiler (Bonn: Bernstein, 2012).

26 *Founders of Western Indology. August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Henry Thomas Colebrooke in Correspondence 1820-1837*, ed. Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 84 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013).

27 Cornelia Bögel, *'Geliebter Freund und Bruder'. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Christian Friedrich Tieck und August Wilhelm Schlegel in den Jahren 1804 bis 1811*, Tieck Studien 1 (Dresden, Thelem, 2015).

28 Jochen Strobel, 'Eine digitale Edition der Korrespondenzen August Wihelm Schlegels', *Athenäum*, 22 (2012), 145-151.

holdings.29 There is also a significant amount of archival material in Bonn University Library. I have made the fullest possible use of this corpus, in both Dresden and Bonn, and elsewhere.

## A Note on Money30

Money plays in important part in Schlegel's life, not least for his being a professional writer and translator for a part of his life. The standard currency in the German lands was the taler, a silver coin, also the coinage in which he was mainly paid. There were 24 groschen to one taler. Publishers also used the gold Friedrichsd'or, worth 5 talers, or the Louisd'or, also worth 5 talers. Other coins in use were the ducat (Dukaten), worth 31/2 talers, or the Carolin, worth 6 talers. In the southern territories and in Austria, the standard currency was the florin or Gulden, worth one half of a taler; there were 60 Kreutzer to one Gulden. During his years with Madame de Staël, Schlegel was paid in Louisd'or or francs. There were 20 francs to the Louis, 20 francs 80 centimes to one Friedrichsd'or and 3 francs to the taler. During his visits to England (1814, 1823, 1832), he was using pounds sterling or guineas (£1.1.0).

Schlegel's publishers paid him in most of these currencies, never in paper money. Some examples: in the 1790s Cotta (through Schiller) paid 4 Louisd'or per sheet for his contributions to the periodical *Die Horen*; 31 from Unger he received 120 talers per volume for his Shakespeare translation (1797-1810);32 in 1808, Mohr und Zimmer in Heidelberg could offer him 21/2 Carolins per sheet for his famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

29 *Rekonstruierter Spezialkatalog (Inhaltskonspekte der 78 Gruppen) des Nachlasses von August Wilhelm v. Schlegel*, ed. Helmut Deckert (Sächsische Landesbibliothek, 1981); August Wilhelm Schlegel, *Spezialkatalog zum schriftlichen Nachlass*, ed. Perk Loesch (SLUB Dresden, 2000); see Perk Loesch, 'Der Nachlass August Wilhelm Schlegels in der Handschriftensammlung der Sächsischen Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden', in: Ludger Syré (ed.), *Dichternachlässe. Literarische Sammlungen und Archive in den Regionalbibliotheken von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz* (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2009), 183-193.

30 Useful guides to currency and prices may be found in W. H. Bruford, *Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival* (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935), 329-332 (Bruford converts the sums of the late 18th century into the sterling equivalents of 1935); Bernd Sprenger, *Das Geld der Deutschen. Geldgeschichte Deutschlands von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart* (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 1991).

31 *Caroline. Briefe aus der Frühromantik*. Nach Georg Waitz vermehrt hg. von Erich Schmidt, 2 vols (Leipzig: Insel, 1913), I, 419.

32 *Krisenjahre*, I, 89.

(at 24 sheets per volume).33 Reimer paid 40 Friedrichsd'or or 200 talers for the collection called *Blumensträuße* in 1804.34 In 1828, he agreed with Reimer for 2 Friedrichsd'or per sheet (a total of 1,200 talers) for his *Kritische Schriften*. 35

These sums make no sense in themselves unless related to the cost of living. His brother Friedrich, never provident with money, suggested in 1793 that a single man in Dresden, with meals and a servant, would need 80 talers annually, a married couple 250 talers, to live as a professional writer and in the appropriate style.36 Schiller at the same time is said to have needed 1,400 talers, and that was in provincial Jena. In 1803, it was claimed that a family, with servants, clothing and entertaining, needed at least 2,000 talers per annum to live in Berlin.37 That was the sum that Schlegel received as a professor in Bonn, from 1817 onwards, augmented of course by the pension from the Staël estate. During Madame de Staël's lifetime, from 1804 to 1817, he had received 10 Carolins or 240 francs monthly.38

By contrast, in 1764, a manual labourer in Dresden earned 4 groschen per day; in 1829-31, it was 6 groschen.39 A bricklayer at the same time earned 6-7 groschen and later 8. The basic annual income for a working-class family in Berlin around 1800 was 200 talers. Preachers and teachers could expect 500 talers. A common soldier's pay was 24 talers (over and above lodgings and keep). Professors at the newly-founded University of Berlin in 1810 could expect a maximum of 2,500 talers (augmented of course by student fees for lectures). Goethe, as 'Exzellenz' and minister of state in Saxe-Weimar had an annual income of 3,000 talers in 1816.40

In Dresden in 1764 a kilo of butter cost 6 groschen (11 groschen in 1829- 31), 60 eggs 9 groschen (later, 25 groschen), a bushel of wheat cost 3 talers 4 groschen (later, 4 talers 12 groschen).41These do not differ greatly from prices in Weimar around 1790.42 In Berlin in 1802, one paid 3 talers for the

33 *August Wilhelm Schlegels Briefwechsel mit seinen Heidelberger Verlegern*, ed. Erich Jenisch (Heidelberg: Winter, 1922), 23, 38.

34 Doris Reimer, *Passion & Kalkül. Der Verleger Georg Andreas Reimer (1776-1842)* (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 278.

35 *Ibid*., 294.

36 *KA*, XXIII, 198.

37 Reimer, 31.

38 *Krisenjahre*, I, 88, 183; III, 68.

39 Sprenger, 150, 161.

40 These figures in Reimer, 29f.

41 Sprenger, 150, 161.

42 Bruford, 329-332.

two volumes of Novalis's works, edited by Friedrich Schlegel and Tieck and published by Reimer (4 talers 12 groschen on better paper). For just a little more money one could also purchase 45 kilos of white bread and 58 of rye bread, or 28 kilos of beef. A luxury item like an umbrella cost 101/2 talers.43 In 1820, a traveller in Ulm paid 1 Gulden 30 Kreuzer for a meal in his rooms, 1 Gulden 12 Kreuzer for a bottle of Neckar wine, 30 Kreuzer for coffee and bread, and 1 Gulden 15 Kreuzer for lodgings.44

For France or French-speaking Switzerland we have records of luxury items purchased by Schlegel. A beaver hat cost him 33 francs,45 four pairs of silk stockings (white) 48 francs, and two in black 30 francs.46 In London in 1832, he paid £1.3.0 for a hat, and £5.17.6 for lodgings from 11-17 March.47 For comparison, a carpenter's wages were 25/- (£1.5.0) per week, those of bookseller's apprentices 4/- and knitters' 5/-. An upper-middle class family would reckon to live on £5 per week (£300 per annum). The two volumes of Schlegel's Lectures, translated by John Black, cost 21/- (£1.1.0) unbound and 27/- (£1.7.0) bound.48 The subscription price for his *Râmâyana* edition was £4 for one volume in two parts.49

How well did Schlegel live? Unlike his brother Friedrich, he knew how to combine a comfortable life-style with some necessary economies. He supported his mother (until 1811), Sophie Tieck-Bernhardi (especially around 1804-05) and his brother Friedrich (up to 1818), later various nieces and nephews. As a professor in Bonn, he had his salary and his pension from Madame de Staël, but he had also purchased his own house (for 7,000 talers). In addition, he paid for the production and publication of his three Sanskrit editions, estimating in 1829 that he had spent 5,000 talers, while by 1844 he was talking of 30,000 francs, roughly the equivalent of 10,000 talers.50

43 Reimer, 30f.

44 Bill pasted into a copy of [Heinrich August Ottokar Reichard], *Guide des voyageurs en Allemagne, en Hongrie at à Constantinople* (Weimar: Bureau d'Industrie, 1817), Trinity College U. 8. 90.

45 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. App. 2712, B31, 36.

46 *Ibid*., B31, 61.

47 Mscr. Dresd. e. 90. II, 51.

48 This information in William St Clair, *The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period*  (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 194-196.

49 Advertisement to *Râmâyana, id est carmen epicum* […], issued by Treuttel & Würtz in London and dated 'London, November, 1823', 7.

50 *Briefe*, I, 612f.

## 1. Family, Childhood and Youth (1767-1794)

## Antecedents

August Wilhelm Schlegel was inordinately proud of his ancestry.1 Writing in 1828 to defend himself against allegations of crypto-Catholicism, he could lay claim to a two-hundred-year line of Protestant pastors.2 His niece, Auguste von Buttlar, incurring her uncle's displeasure for having converted to Catholicism, was similarly reminded in 1827 of those generations of Protestant ministers of word and sacrament, sober in Lutheran black.3

As we shall see, Schlegel invoked his Protestantism only when it suited him, and his ancestor-worship was similarly selective. Since 1813, he had been calling himself 'von Schlegel' (full title 'Schlegel von Gottleben'). He had had an ornate copy made of the letters patent of nobility issued in 1651 to his great-grandfather, 'Christophorus Schlegel a Gottleben', adding portraits of three clergymen, 'Martinus Schlegel', the said Christoph, and his own father, 'Johannes Adolphus Schlegel'. It suggested a pedigree of religious orthodoxy and ennoblement in office.4

Not all of this was strictly true. In one way, his family was even more interesting than Schlegel imagined. For his grandfather Johann Friedrich

1 On the Schlegel family see K. F. von Frank, 'Schlegel von Gottleben', *Seftenegger Monatsblatt für Genealogie und Heraldik* 5 (1960-65), col. 314.

2 [*SW*, VIII, 221, 263. On AWS's ancestry see Konrad Seeliger, 'Johann Elias Schlegel', *Mitteilungen des Vereins f. Geschichte der Stadt Meißen* 2, Heft 2 (1888), 145-188.

3 *Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel*, ed. Josef Körner, 2 vols (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna: Amalthea, 1930), I, 460f.

4 Bound in the Schlegel family psalter (Nuremberg, 1525), Bonn, Universitätsbibliothek, S 1640.

had married a descendant of the great German (and Protestant) painter, Lukas Cranach. His descendant August Wilhelm Schlegel would later, in 1797, pass unmoved though the Cranach collection in the Dresden gallery: it was not a good year for the appreciation of that kind of Renaissance painting by the Romantic generation.

Christoph Schlegel had most certainly been a Lutheran clergyman, and he had been ennobled by Emperor Ferdinand III, also king of Hungary. He had been court preacher, Gymnasium professor, doctor of theology, and pastor in Leutschau (today's Levoča in Slovakia), at that time in the kingdom of Hungary (whence came the ennoblement). The letters patent in Latin—were signed by the bishop of Nyitra and the archbishop of Esztergom, as well as by several Hungarian grandees, among them a Pálffy and a Batthyány. In 1808, descendants of these grand families were in the audience in Vienna when August Wilhelm Schlegel delivered his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. The crest of the family arms showed a male figure holding a miner's hammer: the German word for this tool is 'Schlegel'.

The next two generations saw the Schlegels in Saxony, but as jurists. Christoph's son Johann Elias—the double names start here—was a lawyer in Saxon service. His son held high legal titles ('Hof- und Justizrat'), becoming 'Stiftssyndikus' (senior jurist in the foundation) in Meissen cathedral in the electoral territory of Saxony, and it was with him that the family abandoned its noble title. Titles of nobility were useful in the seventeenth century, where a new *noblesse de robe* needed to be created. They mattered rather less in the eighteenth, when the middle classes dominated corporate and intellectual life, and towns like Leipzig or Hamburg—not royal residences—supplied so much of the intellectual energy, and the books that went with it. For August Wilhelm's generation, however, with greater upward mobility, with careers opening up that were hitherto unheard of, an ennoblement had its uses—or the revival of a lapsed title. August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel were the only members of the family to benefit, and with their deaths, the title also became extinct.

It was Johann Friedrich who married Rebekka Wilke, the descendant of Cranach. She died at the birth of their thirteenth child. August Wilhelm's grandfather was not cut out for a legal career, preferring instead the pleasures of his vineyard in Sörnewitz, near Meissen: the pretty little village produces a good crisp white wine still to this day. He spent the time with studies and country pursuits, among beehives. His superiors had less time for such Virgilian idylls and sacked him in 1741. Funds were to be short for his sons, August Wilhelm's father and his uncles, Johann Elias, Johann Heinrich and Johann August

Their lives showed no such disorder. There have been those who have seen in Johann Friedrich's grandson, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, shortened to Friedrich, and his unregulated lifestyle and frenetic bursts of intellectual energy, something of his grandfather's inheritance.5 True, Friedrich's life was a kind of fever chart; but outward circumstances also played their part in it. He stands out all the more when compared with the ordered lives of his older brothers.

Of Johann Friedrich's and Rebekka's thirteen children,6 we are concerned with three only, at a pinch four, all Saxons born in Meissen, three of them part of German literary history, one (Johann Heinrich) a mere footnote, while the other two (Johann Elias and Johann Adolf) are rather more substantially represented. Their nephews, August Wilhelm and Friedrich, found it convenient to cite them when it suited their purposes. August Wilhelm was from an early age conscious of the family legacy: as a Göttingen student he wrote to Johann Joachim Eschenburg, the earlier Shakespeare translator, with the pious wish that he might live up to the name;7 he kept a piece of paper on which he jotted down the names of the dramatists by the name of Schlegel,8 himself and his brother of course—the authors of those dismal failures, *Ion* and *Alarcos*—but also his two uncles Johann Elias and Johann Heinrich. Friedrich Schlegel, in 1796 sidling up to another member of his father's generation, Christoph Martin Wieland, expressed his pride in a family that had made its contribution to the 'dawn of German art' and the 'first formation of taste in Germany'.9 No matter that it was pure hypocrisy: the young Romantics all abhorred Wieland.

#### 'From One House Four Such Marvellous Minds'

'From one house four such marvellous minds' and 'paragons of taste and virtue' was how Christian Fürchtegott Gellert poet, writer of fables and sermons, later a professor in Leipzig, characterised the Schlegel brothers

5 Such as Ernst Behler, *Friedrich Schlegel in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten*, rowohlts monographien (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1966), 8.

6 Listed in Seeliger, 149f.

7 *Briefe*, I, 5f.

8 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 6 (VIa, VIII).

9 *Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe* [*KA*], ed. Ernst Behler *et al.*, 30 vols (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas, 1958– in progress), XXIII, 288.

whom he had met at the élite school of St Afra in Meissen or at the University of Leipzig in the 1730s and 1740s.10 In fact, only one (Johann Heinrich) was sent to St Afra, where Gellert—and more famously Lessing had been pupils. Two (Johann Elias and Johann Adolf) attended the no less renowned Pforta school in Naumburg, alma mater to Klopstock (and to Nietzsche). Much later, when delivering a Latin oration in Bonn, August Wilhelm Schlegel could not resist informing his audience that his own father had been a pupil and then a teacher at the Pforta.11 These schools produced scholars and young gentlemen (in that order) trained in the classics and rhetoric, Euclid and world history and much more besides. One is tempted to paraphrase Carl Justi's words in his great biography of Winckelmann, that attending these schools had 'nothing youthful about it except the ability to cope with work, and lots of it'.12

Johann Elias13 was by far the most interesting and the most talented of the three.  He had not been well served by embarking as a poet and critic under the tutelage of Johann Christoph Gottsched, the Leipzig pundit of French models of taste, or by being overshadowed by the young Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, his main rival as a writer of tragedies and comedies—and also Gottsched's nemesis. The German stage had not been receptive to him, forcing him to find employment in Copenhagen until his early death. His critical writings on the limits of imitation and on the formation of a national style have earned him the title of a 'pioneer in German aesthetics',14 and that is in good part true. He came closer to his nephew August Wilhelm as a translator (from the French and Danish) and as an adaptor of Greek drama; and closest as the first real German voice to attempt an appreciation of Shakespeare. In his review of Johann Friedrich von Borck's translation of *Julius Caesar* (1741), he rose above the conventional debates on merits and faults with a definition of genius as a 'spirit that grows within itself' ('selbstwachsender

10 Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, *Werke*, Sammlung der besten deutschen prosaischen Schriftsteller und Dichter, 10 parts (Carlsruhe: Schmieder, 1774), X, 43.

11 *Opuscula quae Augustus Guilelmus Schlegelius Latine scripta reliquit*, ed. Eduardus Böcking (Lipsiae: Weidmann, 1848), 416f.

12 Carl Justi, *Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen*, 3rd edn, 3 vols (Leipzig: Vogel, 1923), I, 49.

13 JES was born in 1718, not 1719, as is often assumed. For dating I rely on Seeliger, who consulted the relevant parish registers (153).

14 See Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, *Johann Elias Schlegel: a German Pioneer in Aesthetics* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1945).

Geist'), and pointed forward to Edward Young's notion of an '*Original*' that '*grows*; it is not *made*',15 and through him, to Herder's organicist thinking.

Johann Heinrich, a close friend of Lessing's at St Afra, was also a translator from the English;16 he, too, went to Copenhagen, becoming a professor of history and geography at the university and royal librarian and historian.17 To him we owe the edition of Johann Elias's works (1764-73)18 that also contains material about the family. There is also his footnote in literary history, a minuscule one perhaps, for the preface to his translation of James Thomson's *Sophonisba* (1758)19 was the first attempt to explain to the Germans the rudiments of English blank verse. Thomson's orderly neo-classical tragedy is a long way from Shakespeare, but the iambic pentameter of German classical drama has an Augustan ring, and August Wilhelm's translation of Shakespeare is not altogether free of it. Uncle and nephew never met, although their antiquarian interests were similar.20 The two cousins, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Johan Frederik Wilhelm Schlegel must have, as both were studying in Göttingen at the same time before the one became a law professor in Copenhagen, indeed the kind of professor that Schlegel might have become had Madame de Staël not entered his life. Later they found themselves on opposing sides as Denmark sided with Napoleon against Sweden (in 1800 he produced a memorandum on the boarding of neutral vessels, while August Wilhelm was to polemicize against the Continental System and specifically against Danish politics).21 The fourth brother, Johann August, from whom August

15 [Edward Young], *Conjectures on Original Composition* (London: Dodsley, 1759), 12.

16 He translated James Thomson's tragedies *Agamemnon*, *Sophonisba* and *Coriolanus*, and Edward Young's *The Brothers*.

17 On Johann Heinrich see *Dansk Biografisk Leksikon*, ed. C. F. Bricka, cont. Poul Engelstoft and Svend Dahl, 27 vols (Copenhagen: Schultz, 1887-1944), XXI, 190-194; Leopold Magon, *Ein Jahrhundert geistiger und literarischer Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Skandinavien 1750-1850* (Dortmund: Ruhfus, 1926), I, 268-274; J.W. Eaton, *The German Influence in Danish Literature in the Eighteenth Century: The German Circle in Copenhagen 1750-1770* (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1929), 148-151.

18 Johann Elias Schlegel, *Werke*, ed. Johann Heinrich Schlegel, 5 vols (Copenhagen and Leipzig: Mumm; Prost u. Rothens Erben, 1764-73).

19 *Jakob Thomson's Sophonisba ein Trauerspiel aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit Anmerkungen erläutert* […] von Johann Heinrich Schlegeln (Leipzig: Hahn, 1758), [xxif.].

20 Cf. *Ioannis Henrici Schlegelii observationes criticae et historicae in Cornelium Nepotem* […] (Havniae: Philibert, 1778).

21 J. F. W. Schlegel, *Sur la visite de vaisseaux neutres sous convoi* […] (Copenhagen: Cohen, 1800), subsequently in English. He also published the codex of Old Icelandic Law. On Johan Frederik Wilhelm see *Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen*, 14. Jg., 2 Th. (1836) (Weimar: Voigt, 1838), 936-943; *Dansk Biografisk Leksikon*, ed Cedergreen Beck, 16 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendahl, 1979-84), XIII, 122-123.

Wilhelm perhaps took his second name, was the kindly uncle who for a time took in his wayward nephew Friedrich in his country pastorate at Rehburg near Hanover.22

We need not dwell too long on the poetic merits of the ten-page elegy that Johann Adolf Schlegel wrote on his brother Johann Elias's death.23 Its biographical content is of interest, tracing as it does patterns of destitution: emotional (and economic) through the death of his father, then the departure of his university friends, and now the death of his brother. The 'friends' catch the eye.24 In the style of eighteenth-century poetry, they are named: Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Johann Arnold Ebert, Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener, Nikolaus Dietrich Giseke, Johann Andreas Cramer. They are members of the so-called 'Bremer Beiträger' [Bremen Contributors], the group of young writers in Leipzig who were the first to challenge Gottsched's authority. One name is missing: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, whose meteoric rise as Germany's greatest lyric and epic poet of his generation overshadowed all their efforts. They remained *poetae minores*, versatile in a variety of styles, grave and gay as the occasion demanded: his was the grand style alone and the inspired tone. Their names occur in an altogether different context, Klopstock's great Alcaic ode, 'Auf meine Freunde' [To My Friends] (1749). Here Klopstock is in grand Dionysian flight—at least as the eighteenth century understood it—and turns impeccably respectable friends into a herd of goat-footed, thyrsus-brandishing fauns. Johann Adolf Schlegel comes off more lightly; still we do not know whether he was comfortable with being apostrophised as a priest at the wine-god's altar.25 But friendship, 'Seul mouvement de l'âme où l'excès soit permis' [the sole emotion where excess is allowed],26 in Voltaire's formulation, surely permitted it.

Klopstock hoped—against all hope—to keep his friends assembled round him, as in his other great ode, on the Lake of Zurich (1750), 'Were you here, we would build tabernacles of friendship, we would live here forever'.27 The reality was different, although Klopstock asked Johann Adolf in 1754 whether he would consider exchanging his position in Zerbst

22 'Joh. Adolf Schlegel', Friedrich Schlichtegroll, *Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1793. Enthaltend Nachrichten von dem Leben merkwürdiger in diesem Jahre verstorbener Personen* (Gotha: Perthes, 1794), 71-121, ref. 91; Carl Enders, *Friedrich Schlegel. Die Quellen seines Wesens und Werdens* (Leipzig: Haessel, 1913), 169.

23 Johann Elias Schlegel, *Werke*, V, liii-lxiv; also in Johann Adolf Schlegel, *Vermischte Gedichte*, 2 vols (Carlsruhe: Schmieder, 1788-90), I, 222-243.

24 Johann Elias Schlegel, *Werke*, V, lviii.

25 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, *Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe*, ed. Horst Gronemeyer *et al*., 21 vols in 25 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1974- in progress), I, i, 28.

26 Voltaire, *Discours en vers sur l'homme* (1734-37).

27 Klopstock, I, i, 97.

for the pastorate of St Catherine in Hamburg: it would bring him nearer to Copenhagen, where Klopstock was (and Johann Heinrich).28 Johann Adolf remained loyal to his friends and they to him: there are several poems by him addressing them. They stayed together in word and spirit if not in body; they provided important networks. Towards the end of his life Johann Adolf was still in touch with Johann Arnold Ebert, one of 'the Poet's Friends' and now a professor in Brunswick and well-disposed to his son August Wilhelm, just out of university.29 And through Ebert, he knew his influential colleague, the Shakespeare translator Eschenburg. Even later, Klopstock himself, doubtless displeased at having his verse quantities criticised by a young upstart, may have been in some measure mollified in learning that the author was Johann Adolf's clever son, August Wilhelm.

Otherwise, these friends saw little of each other. Their letters tried to relive a lost presence and were passed on from hand to hand as sacred relics. The next generation, Goethe's, but especially the circle around August Wilhelm's later mentor, Gottfried August Bürger in Göttingen, outdid each other in an exuberance from which Klopstock's generation would have recoiled. For the Romantics, too, friendship was an uninhibiting factor, as their letters testify. Not August Wilhelm's, of course, but it is worth advancing the view that for him friendship was the closest he ever came to real intimacy, real exchange of minds, that the relationships that mattered and lasted were with friends, the Tieck brothers, Ludwig and Friedrich, later, Madame de Staël and her children; his dealings with his brother Friedrich ('my oldest and most exacting friend'),30 have elements of this. Even his wife Caroline's form of address to him, 'mein guter Freund' ['my good friend']31 may tell us something of the nature of their relationship.

#### Johann Adolf Schlegel

The Schlegel family reverted to type with Johann Adolf, the clergyman and theologian.32 He held on to the accepted tenets of the Christian faith and its Lutheran doctrinal basis—even accepting eternal damnation33—indeed

28 *Ibid*., III, Briefe 1753-58, 24f.

29 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (21), 5.

30 *KA*, XXIII, 298.

31 As in *Caroline. Briefe aus der Frühromantik*. Nach Georg Waitz vermehrt hg. v. Erich Schmidt, 2 vols (Leipzig: Insel, 1913), I, 432.

32 On JAS see Schlichtegroll, *Nekrolog*, and esp. the exhaustive study by Joyce S. Rutledge, *Johann Adolph Schlegel*, German Studies in America, 18 (Berne, Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang, 1974).

33 As instanced by his poem, 'Von der Hölle', *Vermischte Gedichte*, I, 130-133.

he would not have found high office without general orthodoxy in such matters. A typical eighteenth-century career unfolded, where church and state, poetry and criticism, the pulpit and the study, held a not always easy balance. But with this generation, as almost everywhere in Europe, an independent career as a writer was almost impossible without private means or patronage—or a prodigious industry that could compromise literary standards. The three greatest representatives of Johann Adolf's generation are instructive: Klopstock lived off a royal pension; Wieland had to write and write and write, and not all of it was good; as for Lessing, he was burnt up by projects and the fits and starts of a literary career. A generation on, Schiller could not exist without patronage, a university post, and a position at court, and he had to write for all he was worth. If the brothers Schlegel, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, like so many of their Romantic contemporaries, had to turn in later life to the state for their support, it is a measure of how much and how little had changed. In their father's generation, the state, universities (especially a small group in Protestant territories), the school and the church were distributors of security. Elsewhere, Edward Young and Thomas Gray in England knew this to be true, as did the host of abbés in France.

Johann Adolf knew hard grind and self-discipline, the drudgery of a house tutor, until he was appointed a teacher at his old school, the Pforta in Naumburg. There, he married Johanna Christiane Erdmuthe Hübsch, the daughter of the mathematics master Johann Georg Gotthelf Hübsch. Before becoming 'Mutter Schlegel' and the matriarch who bore ten children, she was briefly 'Muthchen' in letters from the Klopstock circle.34 In 1754 Johann Adolf accepted a post at the petty ducal residence of Zerbst in Anhalt (a Zerbst princess was to become Catherine the Great), with a church ministry and a professorship of theology and aesthetics at the Gymnasium. Gerlach Adolf von Münchhausen, first 'Kurator' of Göttingen university, then George III's minister of finance in Hanover, heard of Johann Adolf's powers as a preacher and in 1759 offered him either a pastorate at Göttingen or the Marktkirche in Hanover. He chose Hanover, bringing with him his brother Johann August to nearby Pattensen, then Rehburg. In 1775, he became 'Superintendent' and pastor of the Hof- und Stadtkirche, the court and city church in the Hanover New Town, later still adding the title of 'Generalsuperintendent' of Hoya (1782) and Calenberg (1787).35

34 Klopstock, III, Briefe 1753-58, 25.

35 See Rudolf Steinmetz, 'Die Generalsuperintendenten von Calenberg', *Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte* 13 (1908), 25-267, on JAS 192-201.

Yet these bare facts need qualifying and extending. Johann Adolf was called to these high ecclesiastical appointments on the strength of his skills as a preacher and as a writer of sermons. One of Hanover's sons, the great actor-dramatist August Wilhelm Iffland, much later to cross paths with our Schlegel, remembered Johann Adolf's oratorical powers—he preached from a memorised text, which he later published36—the warmth of his exposition, but also his Saxon dialect and his spare physical frame.37 His sermons follow orthodox teaching and homiletics, but they are not mere rhetorical exercises; the text of the day is central and its direct application to the faithful. August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel certainly picked up some tips for their own kind of secular predication, August Wilhelm's Shakespeare essay, Friedrich's 'sermon' on mythology, and the many courses of lectures that both brothers gave.

Two portraits of Johann Adolf represent the different sides of his personality: one, by Johann Gerhard Wilhelm Thielo, also the basis for the image in the family psalter, has him as a Lutheran pastor with preaching bands; the other, by Caroline Rehberg, shows high forehead and ascetic features, suggesting self-discipline, while the large eyes betoken a ready intelligence. A sober and scholarly figure, one who kept aloof where he could from the 'Connexionen' in the residence city,38 he retreated where possible to his 'Official-Garten' and was able to work impervious to children milling around him.39 But contemporaries also remembered his sense of duty, his application, his love of order, qualities that seem to recur in his secondyoungest son, August Wilhelm. He, in 1828 reaffirming his Protestant roots (if not their doctrinal stance) described his father as 'learned, pious, and a man of worth'.40 Learning and piety certainly characterised his collections of sermons and hymns, to which he devoted himself in later life, as an adjunct to his many pastoral duties. There was also a textbook for confirmands. At least two generations of Hanoverian worshippers would have sung the standard repertoire of German Protestant hymnody, like 'Ein' feste Burg' or 'Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern', in hymnals edited by Johann Adolf, shorn of much of their original theological content and poetic language and

36 As: *Neue Sammlung einiger Predigten über wichtige Glaubens- und Sittenlehren*, 2 vols (Leipzig: Crusius, 1778).

37 August Wilhelm Iffland, *Ueber meine theatralische Laufbahn*, ed. Hugo Holstein, Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 24 (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1886), 14.

38 Steinmetz, 196.

39 Schlichtegroll, 100.

40 *SW*, VIII, 221.

reduced to virtue and morality.41 His sons, the one in his Catholicising phase, the other in his outright conversion to Catholicism, would—like most of their generation—react against this Enlightenment theology.

Above all, he was known as a poet. The principle of versatility, poetic *silvae*, that characterised so much eighteenth-century poetry, applied in full measure to him: occasional poems (an ode to his temporal overlord, King George III, for instance, declaimed in 1770 'by one of my sons'),42 religious (on Christian devotion), didactic, fables, verse *contes*, and pastoral, fugitive, light-footed verse in the manner of Anacreon or Horace. It was restrained rococo, Phyllis never lifting her skirts indecorously. He was still issuing these poems as the young Goethe began to write in this vein. Then there was his translation of Charles Batteux's normative *Les beaux-arts réduits à un même principe* [The Fine Arts Reduced to One and the Same Principle] (1746), that came out in three editions, one as late as 1770, and which, despite his attempts to modify the Frenchman's rigidity, incurred Herder's thunderous ire.43 Such texts could no longer hold their own in the years of the 'Sturm und Drang'. Or his part-translation of Antoine Banier's *La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l'histoire* [Mythology and Fables Explained by History] (1754-64), that found Lessing's immediate approval and later Herder's. One might be permitted the fantasy of imagining the young August Wilhelm absorbing his later knowledge of comparative mythology from these volumes in his father's study. All this reflects both the contentments of ecclesiastical office and also the wider explorations of the intellect. Herder, later superintendent in Weimar, was to know their tensions; Johann Adolf was able to keep them in check.

#### Growing Up in Hanover

'I am a Hanoverian, born a subject of the king of Great Britain, who always showed great respect for my father'.44 Writing thus in 1813 from Stockholm to Count Sickingen, a high Austrian official, Schlegel was making two

41 On JAS's hymnody see John Julian, *A Dictionary of Hymnology* […] (London: Murray, 1892), 1009-1010; Inge Mager, 'Die Rezeption der Lieder Paul Gerhardts in niedersächsischen Gesangbüchern', *Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte* 80 (1982), 121-146, ref. 137-140.

42 'Auf die Geburtstagsfeyer Georg des Dritten […]', *Vermischte Gedichte*, II, 345-358.

43 Rutledge, 197-221.

44 Ludwig Schmidt, 'Ein Brief August Wilhelm v. Schlegels an Metternich' [*recte* Sickingen], *Mitteilungen des Instituts f. Österreichische Geschichtsforschung* 23 (1902), 490-495, ref. 495.

points. Despite being a 'cosmopolitan' in the close company of Madame de Staël, he maintained a sense of loyalty to Hanover, his birthplace, and to the kingdom of Hanover, that had been occupied by foreign forces during the Napoleonic troubles and whose fate as an integral German territory was his present concern. He had of course meanwhile moved on, to the great capitals of Europe, but his family name still remained linked to the administration and polity of the Hanoverian state,45 where his father had had high ecclesiastical office, his brother Moritz similarly, and his brother Karl was a jurist in the church consistory. His late brother Carl, too, had joined a Hanoverian regiment. It reminds us as well that Schlegel's life is part of a family chronicle: there were significant moments when family concerns overrode all else, when the dutiful and obedient son or the solicitous brother dropped everything and interrupted an otherwise orderly life; or when August Wilhelm and Friedrich almost assumed a common identity of aim and purpose.

Schlegel's childhood was spent within the confines of the residence town of Hanover, where on 5 September, 1767 he was born. Whereas Zerbst was a smallish ducal seat with a huge Schloss, Hanover was different. True: it was no longer the seat of the duke-electors of Brunswick-Lüneburg, for they were now kings of Great Britain and Ireland; but there was still a palace, the Leineschloss, where the viceroy resided, where he received royal visitors progressing through their German territories, such as the sons of King George III, who underwent their military training in Hanover or attended the university at Göttingen. Thus Hanover enjoyed a special status in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: in personal union with one of the great extraterritorial powers, but locally administered according to German conventions. The population was 18,000 (Weimar's: 8,000); there was a musical culture; there were frequent enough visits from theatre troupes to catch the young Iffland's imagination. Johann Adolf Schlegel, as a church dignitary ('Generalsuperintendent'), was in the hierarchy of the Hanoverian administration the ecclesiastical servant of King George III, and it was the same monarch who in 1775 signed the letters patent

45 Reinhard Oberschelp, *Niedersachsen 1760-1820. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur im Land Hannover und Nachbargebieten*, Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, XXXV (Quellen und Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Geschichte Niedersachsens in der Neuzeit, 4, i), 2 vols (Hildesheim: Lax, 1982), II, 261-264.

appointing him to the Court Church46 or who in 1786 'assures him of our affection' when granting him a pension of 200-300 talers.47

Not that this Hanoverian connection ever made his son August Wilhelm into an anglophile. Perhaps only his later visits to the country and his acquaintance with the solidity of its institutions enabled him in some measure to overcome his prejudices: against, as he saw them, English coldness and superficiality, their inadequate system of education, their commercial mentality, the 'impurity' of their language. The list may be extended. But then there was Shakespeare: the 'mixed' language would be worth learning for his sake. Also, Madame de Staël was a staunch anglophile; it was she who introduced him to the *haute volée* in London. When London became the greatest repository of Sanskrit manuscripts outside of India, Schlegel willingly went there and enjoyed being feted. He was the proud recipient of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order48 (the white horse of Hanover is visible among his many other decorations on Hohneck's portrait). And when in 1832 he was received by the Duke of Sussex, George III's only studious son,49 they had in common that both had studied at the illustrious University of Göttingen, founded by His Royal Highness's great-grandfather, King George II.

Rapid urbanisation and the Second World War mean that there is now but little to recognise of Schlegel's birthplace, today's city. The town itself then was dominated by its four main city churches and the elaborate gables of the old town hall. Johann Adolf's first appointment was to the big city church in Hanover, the Marktkirche, and it was in the pastorate that his younger children were born. This huge brick Gothic church of St George and St James was the tallest of the four spires that the beholder saw when approaching Hanover from outside. It still maintained its medieval character, dominating the market place and its old high-fronted houses.

The Old Town, with its fine medieval and Renaissance half-timbered fronts, lived in somewhat uneasy union with the ducal residence that Hanover had become when the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg made its seat there in 1636. This event had made it necessary to create a ducal palace, the Leineschloss, and indeed to extend the whole town across to the west of the river Leine. In the eighteenth century this was enclosed

46 Hanover, Landeskirchliches Archiv, A 07 Nr. 0892.

47 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, VI (5).

48 *Ibid*., II (5).

49 *Ibid*., XI, V (B).

within a system of defence walls, beyond which was open country. In this New Town, the Neustadt, was built in 1666-70 the Neustädter Hof- und Stadtkirche, to which Johann Adolf Schlegel was appointed as pastor and superintendent in 1775. It was the parish church for the court officials and employees, their tradesmen and servants. A baroque building designed by an Italian architect, it was a hall church with galleries, good for carrying the voice. Memorials to court officials, preachers and 'Generalsuperindenten' covered the floor; but none could compete with the grave of its most famous parishioner, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The young Iffland, whose father worked in the Hanoverian war chancellery,50 thus had not far to go to hear Johann Adolf Schegel, whose sermons so warmed his heart.51 There were close links with the families of other leading Hanoverian citizenry: Johann Adolf knew Karl August von Hardenberg, the future Prussian chancellor; later August Wilhelm was to use this connection as an entrée.52 Heinrich Christian Boie, one of the Göttingen circle around Bürger, was for a time the secretary to a general in Hanover53 and founded the influential periodical *Deutsches Museum*. This may well have forged the link with Bürger when August Wilhelm went to Göttingen to study.

#### Siblings

Thus far, men have been to the fore. Johanna Christiane Erdmuthe Schlegel, 'Mutter Schlegel', as she signed herself in letters, was the matriarch of this remarkable family, as 'Frau Generalsuperintendentin' part of the ruling administration of the city and aware of the 'Connexionen' this afforded.54 Johann Adolf was absorbed by his pastoral duties, latterly, by his religious poetry. The practical concerns he left to his wife. It was she who held things together. The touches of Saxon dialect in her letters bring her speech alive. August Wilhelm, in his turn, did everything to support his widowed mother, whom he saw but rarely in the later years of her life. But in 1808, on his return from the triumph of the Vienna Lectures, despite rumours of war and armies on the move, he made a quick dash across from Weimar to Hanover just to see her.

50 Iffland, vi.

51 *Ibid*., 6.

52 *Briefe*, I, 65, II, 25f.

53 Enders, 83.

54 As she writes. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (21), 16.

According to Schlichtegroll's *Nekrolog*, 55 there were ten children, of whom four predeceased their parents: if this is true, there are records only of nine.56 The pattern (for the sons at least) of lawyers, theologians, and writer-academics that applied to Johann Adolf's generation, seemed to be perpetuated in Moritz the pastor, Karl the jurist, August Wilhelm the academic, but then there was Carl August the soldier—and Friedrich, not trained for anything. The two eldest, born in Zerbst, were Karl August Moritz, known as Moritz, and Johann Karl Fürchtegott, known as Karl (Fürchtegott a tribute to Gellert). Moritz was first a pastor in Bothfeld near Hanover, then superintendent in Göttingen, finally superintendent-general in Harburg. Friedrich Schlegel, the 'problem child', found a kind of second father in Moritz. Moritz surprised everyone by producing a volume of sermons to mark the political events leading up to 1814.57 It was his mentally disturbed son Johann August Adolph for whom his uncle August Wilhelm later accepted responsibility in Bonn. His wife Charlotte survived all of the Schlegels of this generation. Karl was a 'Konsistorialrat', a jurist in the church administration in Hanover: their family circumstances, especially the letters written by his wife Julie during the Napoleonic occupation of Hanover tell us much of its cost to the civilian population. His history of the church in Hanover, not least of the Reformation, will not have pleased his younger brother Friedrich (August Wilhelm subscribed to a set on finer paper),58 while his compendium of church law in Hanover59 set out the respective spheres of competence of the spiritual and secular authorities (Karl knew from close observation of his father what the responsibilities of a pastor were). Karl's works are still cited.

But what of Carl August Schlegel, the brother who embodied tragically—the link between Hanover and England? This mathematically

55 Schlichtegroll, 119.

56 I have only been able to trace records of two sons who predeceased their parents, in Hanover: Georg Adolph Bonaventura, died 20 April 1782, and Friedrich Anton Heinrich, died 31 July 1784. Hanover, Ev. Luth. Stadtkirchenkanzlei. A third is Carl Christian August (1762-89), who died at Madras.

57 Karl August Moriz [*sic*] Schlegel, *Auswahl einiger Predigten in Beziehung auf die bisherigen Zeitereignisse, und nach wichtigen Zeitbedürfnissen* (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1814).

58 Johann Karl Fürchtegott Schlegel, *Kirchen- und Reformationsgeschichte von Norddeutschland und den Hannoverschen Staaten*, 3 vols (Hanover: Helwing, 1828-32). AWS's order I, xviii. A short characteristic of JAS III, 471, 486.

59 Johann Karl Fürchtegott Schlegel, *Churhannöversches Kirchenrecht*, 5 vols (Hanover: Hahn, 1801-06).

and technically endowed brother (the grandson of a mathematician on his mother's side, the nephew of an officer of engineers on his father's)60 became a lieutenant in a Hanoverian regiment in 1782, while his young brothers were still at school. With it, he travelled to India in the service of the East India Company.61 Behind these bare facts stands a personal link with wider historical and political developments that was to colour August Wilhelm Schlegel's view of European involvement in India.

To augment the forces available for their wars against the French and against insurgent Indian rulers, the British in 1781 raised two infantry regiments in Hanover. They consisted of volunteers, who in their turn had to sign up for eight years, seven of these to be spent in India. They went in ships inadequately protected first against cold and then heat, the men packed in like sardines, illness and shipwreck a constant threat during the six months' journey. Once arrived, they were prey to the extreme climate, pests and wild animals. The pay was good, if one survived, and only one in three did. General Stuart, commanding at Fort St George, immediately used his Hanoverians against the French, against the great Tipu Sultan and against mutinying Indian troops.

Carl Schlegel's commanding general, realising his talents, sent him on a surveying expedition from Madras into the Carnatic, as far as the mountain region (his cartographic survey is today in Göttingen university library). All was not well with the young Hanoverian lieutenant: a charge of misconduct (later quashed) caused him distress and depression. Like so many Europeans, he was fired by the adventure of India; like so many, he never returned. He fell victim to a tropical disease and died at Madras, aged only twenty-eight. The letter of condolence from his superior officer calls him 'extremely esteemed, and equally regretted by his brother Officers and friends', and 'Lines written on the death of Lieutenant Schlegel' appeared in the *Madras Courier* for 21 October 1789.62

60 A brother of his father's, Johann Karl Schlegel (born 1727), is said to have been an officer of engineers. Seeliger, 150.

61 Carl Schlegel served in the 14th Regiment, commanded first by Colonel Reinbold, then by Colonel von Wangenheim. Information about Hanoverians in the service of the East India Company in E. von dem Knesebeck, *Geschichte der churhannoverschen Truppen in Gibraltar, Minorca und Ostindien* (Hanover: Helwing, 1845), 123-183, ref. 182f.; also Oberschelp, *Niedersachsen*, I, 350-352.

62 *SW*, II, 13; *Briefe*, I, 6-9; see Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher*, Founders of Western Indology. August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Henry Thomas Colebrooke in Correspondence 1820-1837*, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 84 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 1f.

Carl had found time to write affectionately to his younger brother Wilhelm, encouraging him in his poetry, rather as Johann Adolf might have, promising him funds out of the bounty that he was never to receive, and, from Fort St George, describing a Brahmin funeral.63 Eleven years later, when the death of his step-daughter Auguste Böhmer plunged him into grief, August Wilhelm extended the mourning process to include his brother, in the elegy 'Neoptolemus an Diocles'. It would be reductive and simplistic to attribute the two younger brothers' fascination with India solely to this family link, yet Carl Schlegel found mention in the preface to Friedrich's *Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier* [On the language and Wisdom of the Indians] of 1808,64 while August Wilhelm referred to his brother in his first letter to the great Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke.65 Schlegel, not surprisingly, hardly ever had a good word to say about the East India Company. Coleridge and Schlegel, otherwise associated through a common way of seeing creative processes in art (those 'borrowings' with which Coleridge is taxed) were further linked, in that both lost an older brother, lieutenants in the Company service.66

Schlegel's two sisters, Henriette and Charlotte, married two brothers Ernst. Charlotte's husband Ludwig Emanuel, a secretary in the Dresden court bursary and later second court chamberlain there, moved with the Saxon royal household between its residences in Dresden and Pillnitz. Their daughter was the talented painter Auguste von Buttlar, the niece for whom her uncle Wilhelm did so much in the 1820s. The Ernst household in Dresden was a place of refuge and repose for brothers ever on the move, Friedrich especially. Charlotte was intelligent, and a shrewd judge of character; she knew what drove her brothers, even if they did not. She was level-headed and sensible; she needed to be when one brother (August Wilhelm) married a 'lady with a past' (Caroline) or when another (Friedrich) was living in open liaison with a divorcee who happened also to be Jewish (Dorothea).

63 Oskar Walzel, 'Neue Quellen zur Geschichte der älteren romantischen Schule', *Zeitschrift für die Österreichischen Gymnasien* 43 (1892), 289-296.

64 Friedrich Schlegel, *Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier* (Heidelberg: Mohr u. Zimmer, 1808), xiif.

65 Rocher and Rocher, 30.

66 Richard Holmes, *Coleridge: Early Visions* (London, etc.: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), 10.

#### Childhood and Schooling

August Wilhelm's birth was recorded in the parish register of the Marktkirche on 5 September, 1767.67 Godparents were his uncle Johann August's wife, and a daughter of the mayor of Zerbst. In September, 1813, in the uniform of a Swedish 'Regeringsråd', Schlegel found his aged godmother still alive in Zerbst, now blind and arthritic. She reminded him of his nurse's prophecy that he would travel abroad: the tide of war had swept him back to the place where his father had ministered.68

How does one write the childhood of a man about whom the only anecdotes or other sources are scholastic, who seemed almost by parthenogenesis to have become a scholar, to emerge from a chrysalis as a fully-formed savant? Must one not move on swiftly to the Man? Already his position in the family, as the studious and industrious and talented second-youngest son, contrasted with the youngest sibling, Friedrich, the problem child of already elderly parents, handed over for a while, first to his uncle, then to his much older brother Moritz in his country parish.69 August Wilhelm, or Wilhelm, as he was more commonly called, secured a special place in his mother's affections. He was reliable, orderly, punctual, particularly when after Johann Adolf's death in 1793 the sons needed to support their mother financially (and Friedrich was constantly in debt).

We have to begin with education. The latter part of the eighteenth century was dominated by debates about the 'bud-time of childhood', as Jean Paul's treatise *Levana* (1807) called it. The educational theorists of the day, Johann Bernhard Basedow and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi especially, proceeded directly or indirectly from engagement with Rousseau's *Émile*; all reacted in some way against the incarceration of children in former monastic buildings, their early years spent in drudgery, rote learning, hardly seeing the light of day, the miserable childhood suffered by two of

67 'Pastoris Joh. Adolph Schlegel Söhnlein August Wilhelm. Paten Frau Wilhelmine Sophie Pastor: Schlegel in Rehburg Eheliebste. Demoiselle Auguste Sophie Weissen Oberbürgermeister in Zerbst dritte Tochter'. Hanover, Ev. Lutherische Stadtkirchenkanzlei.

68 Comtesse Jean de Pange née Broglie, *Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël. D'Après des documents inédits*, doctoral thesis University of Paris (Paris: Albert, 1938), 458.

69 Enders, 169.

Schlegel's scholarly mentors, one, Johann Joachim Winckelmann by proxy, the other, the great Göttingen classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne, directly.

Schlegel's was a privileged childhood, and he would not disappoint that line of pastors and lawmen whose spiritual presence others might find daunting. In that sense he conformed to type: he did not shift radically from the family's traditions; he was not like his Romantic contemporaries for whom the reformed Gymnasium in Berlin meant social change or social mobility, like Ludwig Tieck or Achim von Arnim; or like those remarkable brothers Humboldt, whose private tutoring extended to its limits the range of their intellectual and physical pursuits. But neither was he presumably a '*Monstrum eruditionis'*: the great eighteenth-century macrobiotic physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland warned his readers in 1797 that their children would become this if closeted with books too early.70

A 'monstrum' he was certainly was not, but doubtless a kind of prodigy. His father Johann Adolf taught his own sons (there is no mention of his daughters) until they were ready for the Lyceum. There seems also to have been a tutor.71 From his own translations of Batteux and also of the French children's writer Marie Leprince de Beaumont, we can extrapolate a kind of direct method that appealed to the senses as well as to the intellect, that taught social forms of behaviour as well as facts, that tried to bring grammar and language paradigms alive. Not all of his sons may have needed this. When briefly a professor in Jena, then in Berlin and Bonn, August Wilhelm was to express thoughts on language, its origin and acquisition. The effortless assimilation of language by children72—like wet clay ready to receive all impressions, as he was to write much later73—even by imitation, was a sign of unconscious and innate powers at work; in each child were repeated the earliest processes of human language invention. In another context, he criticised Rousseau's educational theories for their emphasis on sensory connotations and their neglect of moral and religious inculcation under parental guidance. But he did concede Rousseau's concern for children's physical welfare.74 He doubtless came closer to personal experience when

70 Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, *Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern*, 2 parts (Vienna, Prague: Haas, 1797), II, 108.

71 'August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel', *Zeitgenossen. Biographieen und Charakteristiken*, vol. 1 (Leipzig and Altenburg: Brockhaus, 1816), 80.

72 Walter Jesinghaus, 'August Wilhelm von Schlegels Meinungen über die Ursprache', doctoral thesis University of Leipzig (Düsseldorf: C. Jesinghaus, 1913), 41.

73 *Indische Bibliothek*, 3 vols (Bonn: Weber, 1820-30), II (1827), 17.

74 *Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium*, ed. Frank Jolles, Bonner Vorlesungen, 1 (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1971), 49-52.

he recommended the early acquisition of languages, and stressed the need to train the memory from childhood, to profit from the child's natural aptitude for learning, by teaching him the classical languages:75 there was no royal road to Latin à la Comenius or Basedow, and Latin was the basis of the Gymnasium, the foundation of grammar and rhetoric—and of good style in the vernacular. Schlegel's crisp, elegant, well-modulated sentences owed much to this, and Latin remained for him the vehicle for much of his scholarly discourse.

All this was doubtless reflected in the curriculum of the old Lyceum in Hanover, founded in 1583, the Gymnasium that Schlegel attended, like before him Iffland, like Karl Philipp Moritz, the novelist and aesthetician.76 To reach it, he would have to cross the river Leine and walk into the Old Town, where a somewhat dilapidated half-timbered building stood next to the Marktkirche. It is not clear at what age his father released his sons for further schooling (Friedrich was never sent at all), but they would have experienced the Lyceum essentially as the Latin school that its name suggests. The old curriculum—it is worth listing it in its entirety—had been theology, catechism, Latin, Greek, universal history, Bible history, geography, arithmetic, logic, oratory, classical antiquities, Hebrew, writing and reading. French was added in 1761, English in 1773. In 1774, there were 170 pupils (including Karl Philipp Moritz and Iffland). The new rector, Johann Daniel Schumann, preferred over Herder's head, complained of too much learning by rote. (It was the same Schumann who had an exchange with Lessing over the tenets of Christianity against perceived threats to the authenticity of revelation.) A directive of 1775 called for more lessons in the mother tongue and more 'Realien'. These latter were supplied by the abbé Pluche's *Spectacle de la nature*, in Johann Georg Sulzer's version. Schumann taught English privately, and there was a French instructor. His successor, Julius Bernhard Ballenstedt, won the post in 1780 in contention with the schoolman, poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voss, and Karl Philipp Moritz. Competition indeed! The last rector in Schlegel's time, Christian

75 *Ibid*., 55; see also his 'Abriß vom Studium der classischen Philologie', published by Josef Körner, 'Ein philologischer Studienplan August Wilhelm Schlegels', *Die Erziehung* 7 (1932), 373-379.

76 For what follows see Franz Bertram, *Geschichte des Ratsgymnasiums (vormals Lyceum) zu Hannover*, Veröffentlichungen zur niedersächsischen Geschichte, 10 (Hanover: Gersbach, 1915), 256-284; also Hugo Eybisch, *Anton Reiser. Untersuchungen zur Lebensgeschichte von K. Ph. Moritz und zur Kritik seiner Autobiographie*, Probefahrten, 14 (Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1909), 18-53; Oberschelp, *Niedersachsen*, II, 183-191.

Friedrich Rühlmann, continued the move from excessive teaching of the classics to more geography and history. In his semi-autobiographical novel *Anton Reiser* (1785), Karl Philipp Moritz left his undisguised memories of his time under Schumann and his predecessor (1771-76), the sheer joy of being taught well and being encouraged, but also the miseries inflicted by insensitive pedagogues.

As good Hanoverians, the school, its staff and pupils, celebrated the king's birthday with poems, music and orations. On one of these occasions, the young Schlegel recited his own history of German literature in hexameters.77 There were also theatrical performances, no doubt fired by the great actors Friedrich Ludwig Schröder and Johann Franz Brockmann visiting Hanover and playing Hamlet in guest roles. Moritz's *Anton Reiser* told of the draw of the theatre on the young and excitable mind; Iffland needed no encouragement.78 We learn that schoolboys performed Fresny's *Die Widersprecherin* [The Lady Contradicts] in Luise Gottsched's translation.79 No-one was bothered that the nine-year-old Schlegel's father had once been an adversary of Gottsched's: the boy was given a female role in the performance.

The boy's powers of concentration were such that his tutor had trouble rousing him to take exercise.80 Thus one can only hope that there was ample use of the 'Official-Garten', or excursions outside the city ramparts and into the open country, perhaps with the children of other officials, or even an expedition to Bothfeld, where his brother Moritz was the pastor. We have no evidence at this stage: only later, when he did walking tours in the Alps with the Staël boys, or took seriously to horse-riding, do we see another, less bookish side to Schlegel.

#### Göttingen

For Schlegel, Göttingen would always mean two things: an idea of scholarship, an institution of minds, a notion of method, a school of thought; but also the plain and unadorned university town of the kingdom

77 *Zeitgenossen*, 180; Enders, 181f.

78 Cf. Doris Olsen, Linda Bock, Ralf Lubnow, 'Theaterleidenschaft', in: 'Eine Jugend in Niedersachsen im 18. Jahrhundert', in: Silvio Vietta (ed.), *Romantik in Niedersachsen. Der Beitrag des protestantischen Nordens zur Entstehung der literarischen Romantik in Deutschland* (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms, 1986), 100-111.

79 Iffland, ix.

80 *Zeitgenossen*, 180.

of Hanover, and its professors. It was set, as German universities then were, at a suitable distance from the royal or ducal residence, to keep student rowdiness at bay: Schlegel's matriculation diploma of 3 May 1786 adjured him in the king's name to 'piety, sobriety, modesty', to abstain from duelling and debts; should he commit any of these things ('which heaven forfend')81 he was to be relegated in perpetuity. For him, it was to be a place associated with scholarly mentors, one or two of whom welcomed him into their closer circles; but also the place where he first caught sight of a bright and intelligent professor's daughter, Caroline Michaelis. He was later to marry her.

He would have known from his older brothers' example that Göttingen, like German universities in general, was a place where one received one's training in law or theology for a later career in administration or in the church. He may specifically have known that Münchhausen, the 'Kurator' of the university, had offered his father, Johann Adolf, the choice of either a pastorate at Göttingen or one in Hanover; and he would have shared in the family honour when the university awarded his father an honorary doctorate in 1787.82 It was August Wilhelm's good fortune that Göttingen was Germany's premier university: for a Hanoverian subject there was little or no choice. As it was, he was inscribed as a student of theology,83 moving gradually and decisively over into philology and philosophy.84 Later, his ever practical mother wished that he had studied something useful like law, but by then it was too late.

And yet this Göttingen had a double aspect. It was a small town (8,600), its numbers swollen by 850 students. If its professors were guaranteed greater freedom of opinion in teaching than elsewhere, there was also a care for public morals.85 The 'Kurator' of the kingdom of Hanover was also the 'Prorektor' of the university. It was not good when professors (like Gottfried August Bürger) involved themselves in marital scandal;

81 'quod DEVS avertat', SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, VI (7).

82 Schlichtegroll, 104; Rutledge, 30.

83 'August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hannoveranus, theol.' Götz von Selle, *Die Matrikel der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen 1734-1837*, 2 vols, Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Hannover, Oldenburg, Braunschweig, Schaumburg-Lippe und Bremen, 9 (Hildesheim, Leipzig: Lax, 1937), I, 294.

84 'in Göttingen dem Studium der Theologie durch den Reitz des Sprachstudiums entzogen'. Cornelia Bögel, 'Fragment einer unbekannten autobiographischen Skizze aus dem Nachlass August Wilhelm Schlegels', *Athenäum*, 22 (2012), 165-180, ref. 168.

85 Luigi Marino, *Praeceptores Germaniae. Göttingen 1770-1820*, Göttinger Universitätsschriften, A, 10 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek u. Ruprecht, 1995), 61.

or when professors' daughters were wittingly or unwittingly caught up in revolution (like Therese Forster, née Heyne, or Caroline Böhmer, née Michaelis). But that was only one side. Göttingen had Germany's largest university library, with the great classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne as its director. It had some international flair, with its contingents of English, Russian or French students, British royal princes among them: in 1813, Prince Adolphus, duke of Cambridge told Madame de Staël that he had known Schlegel in Göttingen and had formed a high opinion of him.86 It was home to Germany's premier scholarly review, the *Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen*, to which the young Schlegel was to contribute. And there was the 'Göttingen school', a branch of the international community of savants, the republic of letters; institutionalised, it is true, but linked by correspondence and contact with its peers throughout Europe. There had of course been German scholars who were independent of the university, Winckelmann or Lessing or Herder among them, but they formed part of this wider confraternity nevertheless.

Put at its simplest, the 'Göttingen school' stood for history.87 That did not merely mean those lectures on 'Historische Enzyklopädie' that the Kurator Münchhausen had made compulsory back in 1756 and that the historian Johann Christoph Gatterer would have been delivering in August Wilhelm's time.88 It had to do rather with a general insight that all academic disciplines, whether law or politics or geography or classical philology, grew out of an awareness of human origins and development; that none was an end in itself but conformed to general patterns of knowledge about mankind. Thus all forms of historical knowledge were intrinsically of worth, whether Gatterer's or August Ludwig von Schlözer's great systemisations of the historical method (or the details, the historical documents and relics, the archaeological remains, works of art, in short, any testimony of human activity). Two of Göttingen's greatest humanities scholars, Gatterer and Heyne, shared this largeness of view, as did Johann David Michaelis (Schlegel's future father-in-law) or Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, both

86 *Lettres inédites de Mme. de Staël*, ed. Paul Usteri and Eugène Ritter (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 261.

87 Antony Grafton, *What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 190-193; Gerhard Oexle, 'Aufklärung und Historismus: Zur Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen um 1800', in: Antje Middeldorf Kosegarten (ed.), *Johann Domenicus Fiorillo und die romantische Bewegung um 1800* (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997), 28-56.

88 Marino, 261; Horst Walter Blanke, *Historiographiegeschichte als Historie*, Fundamenta Historica, 3 (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991), 136.

propounders of historical biblical criticism, even the 'German Buffon', the great comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, with his 'vital energy', whose work on fossils and crania Schlegel was later to cite (and whose *laudatio* he was to write in Latin for the university in Bonn).89

Thus the Seminarium Philologicum that Schlegel joined, Johann Matthias Gesner's creation and now Heyne's inheritance,90 was not merely a place of textual study (it was certainly that); it was also a workshop of historical method, historical fact, historical commentary; the creative use of the old antiquarian sources—which of course one had to know91—but expanding them in all directions, giving them system, understanding their relationships and rapports. Winckelmann, free of the academy's restraints, had had no other aim when he subjected classical archaeology to factors like climate and *moeurs* and historical contingency. Mythology, too, would be of interest to the classical scholar, not only for learned commentary, but for its opening up of 'primitive', 'ancient' cultures.

It was Göttingen that made Schlegel a scholar and a historian (Gatterer himself signed the pass that admitted him to the Historical Institute of Göttingen and permitted him use of maps, inscriptions etc.).92 It also made him a critic. This involved sheer expertise, be it linguistic, textual, archaeological, as those later formidable reviews of Winckelmann, Grimm and Niebuhr testify (and which some waspish comments in the earliest reviews from his student years already demonstrated), but also the requisites of good style. The smooth, elegant prose, with just the right touch of emotion, that carried along his *Nibelungenlied* lecture in Berlin is written by the same man who laboriously collated antiquarian notes and sources on the identical epic.

He was, as his 'Zeitrechnung' (a rough chronological guide up to 1812) records,93 eighteen and a half when he became a student at the place that seemed so promising for his talents. With little evidence of anything but a studious boyhood and youth, it comes as a relief to read in letters (a little later) of a walking tour in the Harz (including the ascent of the Brocken), or of riding part of the way home when accompanying a student friend.94 His

89 *Opuscula*, 397-399.

90 Grafton, 190f.

91 Marino, 269-273.

92 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, VI (8).

93 Bögel (2012), 179.

94 *Briefe*, I, 10.

first letter from Göttingen, to his brother Karl,95 was a mixture of nature observation, conventional with 'fresh' and 'green' and 'prospect' (perhaps it would be read to his father); a castle ruin evoked echoes of Goethe's *Götz von Berlichingen*, and he had been reading Homer and Ossian (in that order), regretting the passing of the heroic age. Just the sort of thing that this Romantic generation, force-fed on books, was prone to writing. But he had taken his lodgings in the town, where he had a good view of the gardens and the hills beyond; he had even heard a nightingale. Nature was however never enough: he looked forward to the discipline of new rules of conduct, which his brother the jurist will have noted with satisfaction. He had presented the letter of recommendation that his father had written to the great Heyne, but even the son of Johann Adolf Schlegel must earn his place in the Seminarium Philologicum and serve a trial period of six months.

He certainly proved himself worthy. From 1788 until his departure in the summer of 1790, he actually lived in Heyne's house,96 something not uncommon in the eighteenth century, and became a kind of personal assistant. The Heyne and Michaelis houses in the Mühlenpforte (today's Prinzenstrasse) stood in close proximity: the daughters of both families, Therese Heyne and Caroline Michaelis, were extremely well read and knew all the eligible (and ineligible) young men who passed through their fathers' houses. In Heyne's seminar Schlegel met Wilhelm von Humboldt, born in the same year, later a Sanskritist and much else besides, but also a strict linguistician in the way Schlegel never was to be. His circumstances were different from Schlegel's: he was wealthy, noble, not dependent on patronage or office (although he would accept high positions within the Prussian monarchy). Privately educated, he was for the first time free of the tutor who shadowed him.97 He moved in and out of the Heyne household as a matter of right; he consorted with British royal princes and nobles; he knew

95 *Ibid*., 3f.

96 Achim Hölter,'August Wilhelm Schlegels Göttinger Mentoren', 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), 13-29, ref. 16f. Another source has AWS living first in the Alleestrasse 15, then in Heyne's house, Papendiek 17, then as tutor, in the Buchstrasse (today's Prinzenstrasse) 6. Ida Hakemeyer, *Das Michaelis-Haus zu Göttingen* (Göttingen: Kaestner, 1947), 20.

97 Paul Robinson Sweet, *Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography*, 2 vols (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1979-80), I, 35; Wilhelm von Humboldt, *Gesammelte Schriften*, ed. Albert Leitzmann *et al.* for Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 17 vols in 18 (Berlin: Behr, 1903-36), XIV (=Tagebücher, I), 66-75.

women and was sexually experienced. From Göttingen, he would embark on a Grand Tour that took in Paris and Switzerland. He and Heyne's other daughter Marianne found Schlegel rather dull. There is no record of Schlegel having met Alexander von Humboldt, the other near-contemporary, whom he was to single out for praise and admiration and whose explorations were a model for his later studies on the origins of humanity.

By contrast, Schlegel found himself with several others helping Heyne to index his great Virgil edition of 1788-89: Heyne praised him to the skies in his preface,98 for what was essentially learned hackwork (Johann Adolf had also known such drudgery with an index to Bayle's *Dictionnaire*),99 but he could learn how editions are made and how they in their turn depend on other editions. He had had to sort out the incomplete work of two predecessors, and there had been inconsistencies to surmount. As late as 1827, defending such indices for Sanskrit texts, he pleaded indulgence for the young 'accessory of learning' ['Handlanger der Gelehrsamkeit'].100

Towards the end of his studies, from Easter 1790, Schlegel became tutor to a fifteen-year-old Englishman named George Thomas Smith.101 It had been arranged through 'Connexionen', this time with another prominent Hanoverian, Johann Georg Zimmermann, personal physician to King George III and author of the much-read *On Solitude*. All had not gone well. In a letter to a Mr Hutton (whether the famous geologist James Hutton is not clear),102 Zimmermann explained why. Young Smith had come to Göttingen to study Persian. Heyne had recommended Schlegel as a tutor, but Smith had given 'M. Schlegel' nothing but trouble.103 An undated and unsigned letter, in halting English, 'You will excuse, I hope, my troubling you', was Schlegel's account to Mrs Smith of these burdensome matters.104 Zimmermann knew Schlegel to be 'as virtuous as he is reasonable and wellbred' and hinted that he would be happy to add to his already considerable knowledge by coming to England. Mr Hutton did not take the hint. Schlegel

98 'Debetur autem ille studio *Aug. Guil. Schlegel*, Hannoverani, ad praeclarum laudem exquisitioris doctrinae eximiis ingenii et animi viribus annitentis'. *P. Virgilii Maronis Opera, varietate lectionis et perpetua adnotatione illustrata a Christ. Gottl. Heyne* […], 4 vols (Londini: Rickaby, 1793), IV, [vi].

99 Schlichtegroll, 83; Enders, 6.

100 *Indische Bibliothek*, II, 5f.

101 Selle, I, 321.

102 J. H. Scholte assumes that it is he. 'August Wilhelm Schlegel in Amsterdam', *Jaarboek van het Genootschap Amstelodamum* 41 (Amsterdam: de Bussy, 1949), 102-146, ref. 123.

103 *Briefe*, II, 3f.

104 *Ibid*., I, 625-627.

was tutor to two further young gentlemen, the one English, the other French, and seems to have tutored them in their own languages, Josiah Dornford, lawyer and translator,105 and Count Ferdinand de Broglie, the son of a distinguished French general and diplomat, from a junior branch of the family Schlegel would know through Madame de Staël, and a soldier under Louis XVI.106 Dornford knew German sufficiently well to translate into English the huge work on the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire by the Göttingen jurist Johann Stephan Pütter.107

Clearly, however, Schlegel was profiting from Heyne's classical seminar and the methods being practised there. In June 1787, he was runner-up to the prize-winner in the competition set by the Philosophical Society in Göttingen, with the dissertation *De geographia Homerica commentatio*.

Fig. 1 August Wilhelm Schlegel, *De geographia Homerica* (Hanover, 1788). Title page. © and by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0

105 'jur., ex ac. Oxford.' 1786. Selle, I, 295.

106 Broglie came in 1788 from Paris to Göttingen. Selle, I, 309.

107 As: *An Historical Development of the Present Constitution of the Germanic Empire*, 3 vols (London: Payne etc.; Oxford: Fletcher, 1790). Letters of Dornford to AWS SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (6), 19-20; see also Oskar Walzel, 'Neue Quellen zur Geschichte der älteren romantischen Schule', *Zeitschrift für die Österreichischen Gymnasien* 42 (1891), 486-493, ref. 490.

This duly came out in a small duodecimo volume of 198 pages with the publisher Schmid in Hanover in 1788, his first substantial independent publication.108 One should not approach this treatise with too high expectations: it is essentially a listing of the ships in *Iliad* Book Two, their putative origins, and of the peoples and places mentioned in the *Odyssey.* There is heavy reliance on Strabo as an external source. But one notes in the preface the name of 'vir illustris Gatterer',109 acknowledging his work on Herodotus and Thucydides and the new standards of historical enquiry set in it. The names of the Homeric scholars Robert Wood and Thomas Blackwell show that the young scholar was using the resources of Europe's finest classical seminar; both were noted for their historical and geographical approach to Homer. What strikes us is his early interest in the origins and movements of peoples, their overlaps and admixtures. Who were the Pelasgians or the Scythians? What was the status in the Mediterranean of the Phoenicians and Egyptians and Libyans? What cultures converged on Sicily; which peoples sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules out into 'Oceanus'? Later, in a much wider context of the origins of mankind's civilisation, languages and religion, Schlegel came back to the basic questions which his early dissertation had posed: those Pelasgians are there almost at the end of his Bonn lectures on general world history (1821), and the same issues were raised in his unpublished review of Alexander von Humboldt's *Vues des cordillères*. (1817). When in 1797 he was supplicating for a doctorate *honoris causa* from Jena university and for the right to lecture there, he cited *De geographia Homerica* in support of his application. As well he might.

#### Gottfried August Bürger: 'Young Eagle'

With Gottfried August Bürger, whose acquaintance he seems to have made soon after his arrival in Göttingen, Schlegel entered a world where the spheres of the academy and poetry merged in personal union. Bürger was *the* poet of the German Sturm und Drang, or more accurately the German Sturm und Drang without Goethe. Bürger, and the poets of the Göttingen *Musenalmanach* of the 1770s—Ludwig Heinrich Hölty, Johann Heinrich

108 Full title: Augusti Guilelmi Schlegel, Hannoverani, seminarii philologici sodalis, *De geographia Homerica commentatio quae in concertatione civium academiae Georgiae Augustae IV Junii clc lccclxxxvii ab illustri philosophorum ordine proxime ad praemium accessisse pronuntiata est* (Hanoverae: Schmid, 1788). *Opuscula*, 1-144. The winner of the competition wrote on the geography of the Argonauts.

109 *Opuscula*, 3.

Voss, Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg, and others—had been less inventive than Goethe and represented a kind of 'middle tone' in German poetry. Bürger had followed Thomas Percy—and Herder—in bringing both the form and tone of folk poetry into the stream of the German lyric; Hölty and Voss had seized on Klopstock's formal experiments with Greek and Latin ode stanzas and had made them into a vehicle for the poetry of sentiment and friendship. Goethe had advanced, they rather less, although Voss was to be a highly innovative translator of Homer to whom Goethe in the 1790s was much indebted. Bürger the folk balladeer had not changed greatly, but he had experimented widely: with the Petrarchan sonnet, with a translation of the *Iliad* (in iambic verse), with a prose version of *Macbeth*. A classical scholar and popular philosopher in his own right, he had secured the right to teach in Göttingen. There was much here that was congenial to the young Schlegel. It was the other side of Göttingen, the place where poetry was forged and published, in a town where otherwise learning dominated. The attractions of poetry and learning had kept Bürger in Göttingen, where Voss, Stolberg and the others had moved on, as indeed Schlegel in his turn was to do.

This was but one side of Bürger. The other side was unfortunate—or unedifying—depending on how one looked at it. His life seemed to be one set of contradictions. Though a trained jurist, Bürger was saddled with debt; a Petrarchan lover in his own poetry, he lived—in small-town Göttingen in a ménage à trois (with sisters, both of whom died in childbirth) and then contracted a marriage, which ended in disaster. Everyone knew about these irregularities; gossipy letters between friends made sure of that. Heyne did what he could on the university front, and it was not much. Help from outside was not forthcoming. Goethe showed the stiff, glacial ministerial aspect that he adopted when it suited him: there were to be no more lame-duck Sturm und Drang poets in Weimar. What then came was even worse. In 1791 Schiller, unprompted by Goethe, for the period of their close association had not yet begun, took upon himself to review the revised edition of Bürger's poems brought out by Dieterich in Göttingen in 1789. It so happens that the young August Wilhelm Schlegel had done a brief unsigned notice of the same edition in the G*öttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen* in the year of its publication.110

110 *Göttinger Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen* 109 (1789), 1089-1092 (not in *SW*).

Much has been written about Schiller's devastating review of Bürger. It may be that Bürger's poetry reminded him uncomfortably of a period in his own development, but that is surely only one factor. Comparing it with another famous review of another *poète maudit*, Samuel Johnson's Life of Richard Savage, one might say that human compassion was in short supply in Schiller's Jena (or in nearby Weimar). While Johnson was not making a case for Savage's poetry, he was pleading for a sympathetic understanding of the man. The later reactions by the English Romantics to the 'marvellous boy' Chatterton would not differ in this respect. Schiller duly reviewed the poetry, but he also introduced the fatal juxtaposition of 'sittlich' and 'aesthetisch', the 'moral' and the 'aesthetic'. Not that he suggested for one moment that Bürger's poetry was, by virtue of being its author's own expression, morally compromised; but readers—and that is *all* readers would have known the truth about Bürger's private catastrophes. The word, once spoken, the association once hinted at, was enough.

As a masterly demolition, Schiller's review shows that the fine art of trashing literary reputations, so expertly exemplified by Lessing's stilettowork on Gottsched in 1759, was not dead. It takes its place among the line that would lead eventually to Heine's assassination of Platen (and of Schlegel himself). For Schiller's readers of 1791, there was the common, if tacit, understanding that a tribune of the people's sentiments ['Wortführer der Volksgefühle'] should also prove worthy of that office. Schlegel noted this life-and-works definition. It made him wary of Schiller, but also of the hagiography practised in his own day: Lessing panegyrized as a latter-day Elijah, Winckelmann deified by Goethe, or Novalis sanctified by Ludwig Tieck. His own answer to Schiller would have to wait until he had won his first spurs as a critic, but even then he refused to eulogise Bürger. As yet, it was but an early encounter in the uneasy relationship with Schiller that was to extend beyond the great dramatist's death.111

In his review, Schiller mentioned Schlegel as one of Bürger's friends and a 'fellow devotee of the Pythian oracle'. It was a reference to the sonnet 'An August Wilhelm Schlegel', proclaiming to the world that Schlegel was Bürger's 'disciple'. Such vocabulary was typical of the Göttingen fraternity of the 1770s; its use in 1789 was a sign that some brothers had not quite grown up. 'My beloved son in whom I am well pleased' was another

111 A succinct account of their relationship in: *Friedrich Schiller-August Wilhelm Schlegel. Der Briefwechsel*, ed. Norbert Oellers (Cologne: DuMont, 2005), 5-15.

appellation with which Bürger invested Schlegel;112 changing mythologies, Schlegel became 'junger Aar' (young eagle).113 This was hardly Schlegel's style, then or later. Leaving aside Bürger's extravagant imagery, he did learn all that could be learned about the craft of the Petrarchan sonnet. All this indicated that Schlegel, in a relatively short space of time since his arrival in Göttingen, had found his way into the literary world with some ease and alacrity. Nor would this surprise one in Johann Adolf's son and the pupil of a leading Latin school, a young man who, it seemed, had already read everything.

In addition to indexing Virgil and investigating Homeric geography, this young man, hardly more than twenty years old, had added poetry and criticism to his list of attainments. He had Bürger's active encouragement for all this. There is no documentary evidence, but we may safely assume that it was Bürger's influence that induced him to pick up Italian along the way, not just from any source, but from Dante himself. Then Bürger, whose English was excellent, saw in this student a likely collaborator in a translation of Shakespeare. Entering Bürger's world involved indulging in the occasionally forced jokiness and infantilism of their discourse ('Ew. Poetisirlichkeit' [Your Poetedness]) and the like.114 More importantly, it meant accepting the older poet's willingly proffered hand, first of all on his terms, then—if the 'young eagle' image is not too far-fetched—taking to his own wings.

Bürger, whatever his marital and monetary disarray, was still the editor of the influential Göttingen *Musenalmanach*, and had been since 1777.115 He had had trouble with his publisher Dieterich over the monetary side, but he alone had the running of the publication and secured its contributors. We need to note the term *Musenalmanach*. Under its various guises—and these can be *Taschenbuch*, *Taschenkalender*, *Blumenlese—*it was essentially an anthology of what was best and most entertaining (or edifying) by way of poetic production in a given year. It took short poems—the Muses preferred these—and in the variety that the later eighteenth century and the early nineteenth found so agreeable. Everybody had a go at it. It

112 *Briefe von und an Gottfried August Bürger. Ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte seiner Zeit*. Aus dem Nachlasse Bürger's und anderen, meist handschriftlichen Quellen hg. von Adolf Strodtmann, 4 vols (Berlin: Paetel, 1874), III, 211.

113 *Ibid*., 268.

114 *Ibid*., IV, 102.

115 York-Gothart Mix, *Die deutschen Musenalmanache des 18. Jahrhunderts* (Munich: Beck, 1987), 52.

brought Schlegel into the company of such shaky talents as Caroline von Dacheröden, later married to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmidt von Werneuchen, whom Schlegel was to parody, or Friedrich Ludwig Wilhelm Meyer, to whom Caroline Michaelis poured out her soul and wit in letters. It was the title that Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck chose for their miscellany of 1802, which was also a Romantic memorial to the early dead. As late as the 1830s, Schlegel was joined by a younger generation of poets when he published satirical verse in periodicals still calling themselves *Musenalmanach*.

Much of Bürger's poetic output—ballads, Lieder, romances, epigrams had first been published in the *Musenalmanach* with which he is usually associated. Why not encourage a young man, a 'junger Aar' indeed, with poetic talent, a good ear for rhyme, a sense of metre, and a head full of classical and mythological *loci*? None of these qualities alone, not even their totality, necessarily makes a good poet. No-one was ever going to call Schlegel that; a competent one perhaps, a correct one, a learned one these are the qualities that spring to mind. They are also useful ones for the translator, who needs to rise above the limited store of his own poetic inspiration. Although he did not yet know it, this was to be his forte.

The poetry by Schlegel that got published in Bürger's *Musenalmanach* or allied almanacs116—mainly narrative poems with the light eroticism that the late rococo still enjoyed—showed him mastering the models available, nothing more.117 He did not emulate Bürger at his most innovative, the ballad in the mode of Percy's *Reliques*, or the Lied, perhaps rightly sensing that it was better to restrict oneself to 'safe' subjects, bosky shades, Bacchus and Ariadne, sibyls, ruminations on the poetic office. The sonnet was a very different proposition altogether.

Bürger may take much of the credit for the reintroduction of the sonnet into the mainstream of German literature. It had once enjoyed a vogue in the seventeenth century, but critical opinion early in the eighteenth century inimical to the baroque style had ensured its virtual disappearance from the assortment of available lyrical forms (there were hardly any by Johann Adolf Schlegel and his contemporaries). Thus it was not by chance that Bürger's preface to his *Gedichte* of 1789 (the edition reviewed by Schiller)

116 *SW*, I, 7-27, 180-203, 328; II, 345-357, 360-364.

117 Hans Grantzow, *Geschichte des Göttinger und des Vossischen Musenalmanachs*, Berliner Beiträge zur germanischen und romanischen Philologie, 22 (Berlin: Ebering, 1909), 149-166.

paid tribute to young Schlegel, his 'beloved disciple' (that tiresome vocabulary again), who with 'poetic talent, taste and criticism' had given him the necessary encouragement. He quoted in full a sonnet by Schlegel, 'Das Lieblichste' [The Most Pleasing] and one admires its neatness. 'A very satisfactory form for presenting material in brief compass' and 'very agreeable withal'; suitable for the lyric or the didactic veins, for 'occasional poems for friends of both sexes'. This was Bürger's version of 'Scorn not the Sonnet', and it is a very reasonable working definition, too. Both master and pupil only ever used the Petrarchan model: Schlegel was never really interested in Shakespeare's sonnets. It was in the form of a sonnet, from 1810, 'An Bürgers Schatten' [To Bürger's Shade], that he acknowledged his debt to the older man, his inner awareness of Bürger's lasting legacy but also his own poetic apostasy.

There was much in these early poems that pointed towards the future. The sonnet on Guido Reni's Cleopatra, for instance, or the poem 'Adonis',118 on a mythological and painterly subject, suggested that he was absorbing some of the lessons given by the university's drawing instructor, Johann Dominik Fiorillo. The three metrical translations of Spanish romances showed that things Hispanic were being cultivated in Göttingen:119 it was here that this generation, that included Ludwig Tieck and the Humboldt brothers, gained their facility in the language. The poem, 'Die Bestattung des Braminen' [The Brahmin's Funeral],120 in regular eight-line stanzas, addressed to his brother in India (Carl Schlegel had supplied the material for his young brother to commit to verse),121 is, together with his reference to *Śakuntalâ,* the first indication of Schlegel's interest in things Indian and his respect for Brahmanic wisdom.

This was not a young man merely willing to try out any literary genre that entered his head, unlike his younger contemporaries, or his younger brother Friedrich, who was about to begin omnivorously ingesting all the latest philosophy. There is no evidence of his having attended Bürger's much-frequented lectures on Kant, the first offered in the university and a

118 *SW*, I, 328; II, 352-354. Cf. Emil Sulger-Gebing, *Die Brüder A. W. und F. Schlegel in ihrem Verhältnisse zur bildenden Kunst*, Forschungen zur neueren Litteraturgeschichte, 3 (Munich: Haushalter, 1897), 16f.

119 *SW*, IV, 169-171; see Wilhelm Schwartz, *August Wilhelm Schlegels Verhältnis zur spanischen und portugiesischen Literatur*, Romanistische Arbeiten, 3 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1914), 6f.

120 *SW*, I, 82-86.

121 Writing from Fort St George in Madras 1 February 1784. Oskar Walzel, 'Neue Quellen zur Geschichte der älteren romantischen Schule', *Zeitschrift für die Österreichischen Gymnasien* 43 (1892), 289-296, ref. 291-293.

source of envy among his academic colleagues. That would change when he himself became a professor, but in the Kant-charged atmosphere of the university in Jena.

For the time being, he stuck to what came naturally, poetry of course, but also increasingly criticism and translation. As a critic, he was prepared to take on anything, however obscure—or however well-known. It also meant making use of one connections: Heyne's good offices secured him access to the *Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen*. In 1789, he reviewed that new edition of Bürger's poems,122 favourably of course ('one of our bestloved poets'), taking note of the older man's use of metre.123 His review of Bürger's long love poem 'Das Hohe Lied' [Song of Songs] in Heinrich Christian Boie's *Neues Deutsches Museum*, 124 was, however, set up by Bürger himself, showing off his young prodigy to as wide a circle of his literary friends as possible. Boie was told of Schlegel's 'youth, power, imagination, language and versification';125 in his turn, he paid well (17 Reichstaler and 17 Groschen) which was money from a more congenial employ than looking after Master Smith. The review itself satisfied both Bürger's and Schlegel's priorities, doing justice to this love elegy and also analysing how this 'monument to passion' is also an enshrinement of poetic form.

The review appeared in two sections. Between these, Boie the editor inserted an account of the French Revolution. It seemed very remote from Göttingen, where Bürger's latest misadventure was of greater interest to its academic citizenry. Schlegel would have an opportunity to observe the ever-widening circles of the Revolution after his departure for Holland the following Easter. Meanwhile, his Göttingen mentors, Heyne and Bürger, were enabling him to cast a critical eye over the literary production in Germany as a whole, even of Europe. For the twenty-five reviews that he provided for *Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen* between 1789 and 1791126 dealt with books in four different languages (German, French, Italian, English), with some names then resonant in German literature but now less so (Langbein, Thümmel), but also with Wieland, Goethe and Schiller.

122 'Gedichte von Gottfried August Bürger', *Göttinger Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen*, 109 (1789), 1089.

123 *Ibid*., 1091.

124 'Ueber Bürgers hohes Lied', *Neues Deutsches Museum* 11 (Leipzig: Göschen, 1790), 205- 214, 306-348 (not *SW*).

125 Strodtmann, IV, 42.

126 *SW*, X, 3-56.

A 'young eagle' could scarcely mount higher—even as a reviewer. In view of the Schlegel brothers' later plans for an 'annihilation' of Wieland, the older man came off quite lightly in 1790. How Wieland felt when told that his revised translation of Horace's *Epistles* had gained in 'poise, correctness and exactness',127 is not recorded. In the manner of the young, Schlegel spotted an error. He reviewed Wieland's Lucian translation almost as one expert to another. What of Goethe, whose works, his *Schriften* of 1787-91, announced that he had returned from Italy and was back in the literary scene? Of Volume Eight Schlegel noted that Goethe had carried out welcome revisions to his poetry, not least in matters metrical. Goethe's 'individuality', that which rendered his poetry immortal, could be seen both in poems that were fully worked through or only just 'hingeschüttet' ('thrown off'), a compliment capable of two different readings.128 In his review of *Torquato Tasso* he was on sure ground, knowing the biographical sources and notes.129 It conferred on him, in his eyes, the right to be fairly dismissive of the play itself. This was the first of his several reviews of Goethe, that recorded his continuing deference and then his gradual disenchantment.

Schiller was a different proposition, especially when Schlegel, already in Amsterdam, was pushing Bürger to reply to the infamous review.130 His *Musenalmanach* poem 'An einen Kunstrichter' [To a Critic] can be read as a stiff address to Schiller to stick to his métier and not involve himself in moral issues.131 By then, however, there were indications enough that he needed to go beyond Bürger's intellectual and poetic ambit and step out of the narrow confines of Göttingen. By the time Bürger died, in 1794, Schlegel had moved on, closer to Schiller. Given that Schiller was only eight years older than Schlegel and that he enjoyed a very cordial relationship with Schlegel's exact contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt, there is no reason on the face of it why Schiller and this older Romantic generation should not have made common cause, or at least in part. Their collaboration in Schiller's periodical *Die Horen* was such an indication. Schlegel had much to share with the concerns of the older generation in general—Voss, Bürger, and others—in their search for new rhythms in poetic language, their