![]() The new Romantic movement was soon to have its own necrology: two promising young men of the new generation died, respectively, in 17, Wackenroder and Novalis Caroline was often ill, surely a contributory factor to the breakdown of her marriage with Schlegel Ludwig Tieck ruined his health in damp and insanitary Jena. Georg Forster’s death, in the clash of critical and political forces, had been a warning example but even Schiller, who insisted on keeping politics out of critical discourse, found his creativity constantly interrupted by chronic bouts of illness Goethe’s otherwise robust frame almost succumbed. And Goethe’s lightness of touch is often the fruit of immense diligence and great strain’, 2 was the advice Friedrich Schlegel gave to his brother on 17 August 1795, at the outset of that decade of professional writing. Schiller has to pump the thoughts up out of himself with the greatest effort. ‘Do not distract yourself with reading literary trifles. Movements involve real people, competing and jostling, urging themselves to bursts of creativity, sparing neither their nerves nor their physical energies, nor those closest to them. Kinderjahre, Marburger und Landshuter Zeit Friedrich Karl von Savig (.)Ģ There was a human side to all this, and a human cost. 2 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed.This is what the modern historian Reinhold Koselleck meant when he saw this period as a ‘Sattelzeit’, rising up to an ‘eminence’, or as the threshold to a new age (‘Epochenschwelle’). It is proper to mention the titles of Goethe’s and Schiller’s works in one breath with the Schlegel brothers’: they all share in the creativity, the desire to achieve new standards and perceive new norms, the ‘aesthetic revolution’ (Friedrich Schlegel’s phrase), the zest for all things new. This Classical and Romantic decade is rightly seen as the great time of intellectual and poetic ferment that produced the Letters on Aesthetic Education, Wallenstein, Wilhelm Meister and Hermann und Dorothea, Die Horen and Athenaeum, to cite but a few. The decision to live by his pen involved to some extent hitching his wagon to their star, exploiting the openings that they afforded, pursuing aims that coincided with theirs, and using them, Goethe especially, as tutelary geniuses. The reality was of course different: these years brought Schlegel into close contact with the great Dioscuri of Weimar and Jena, Goethe and Schiller. ![]() 1 1828 was by coincidence also the year in which Goethe began issuing his correspondence with Schiller, documents that suggested a wide disparity of interest between them and Schlegel’s generation. 1 In the preface to his Kritische Schriften of 1828, taking stock of his career as a critic, Schlegel identified the years 1795 to 1804 as those in which he had ‘devoted himself solely to writing as a profession’ (‘wo ich mich ausschließend dem Schriftstellerberuf widmete’).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |