Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/638

 634 Lessing with a misunderstood quotation from Friedrich Schlegel, he remarks passim that "the romanticist inclines to measure his own distinction by his remoteness from any possible centre" and concludes that eccentricity, i. e. the loss of the soul's terra firma is the secret of romantic irony, paradox, and striving for endlessness. "Can anyone maintain seriously that there is aught in common between the striving for endlessness of the German romanticists and the supreme and perfect Centre that Dante glimpses at the end of the Divine Comedy and in the presence of which he becomes dumb?" (p. 259). Professor Walzel indeed maintains this seriously on the ground of irre- futable testimony which our inquisitor prefers to ignore; cf. Walzel, 1. c., p. 19 f., especially:. . . "uns dem Gottlichen zu nahern, eine sehnsuchtsvolle Liebe zum Gottlichen, eine re- ligiose Liebe zum Unendlichen, wie Schleiermacher sie vertritt" ... If Mr. B. translates the German word "Das Unendliche" by a mathematical endlessness, he misses entirely its religious symbolism. Instead of weighing the actual facts as found in Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, etc. Mr. B takes erratic excursions to Nietzsche and Freud. "According to the Freudians the personality that has become incapable of any conscious aim is not left entirely rudderless. The guidance that it is unable to give itself is supplied to it by some "wish" usually obscene, from the subconscious realm of dreams." Now, what has Professor Freud's theory of the unconscious (why did Mr. B. not mention Jung and Keller as antidotes?) to do with Schlegel's theory of irony or with Novalis's symboli- cal dreams and Marchen? Is it worthy of a scholar to sling the mud of obscenity, even by way of indirections, on such earnest seekers for truth as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel? In the same spirit of hostility the insanity of Holderlin and Lenau is utilized as bearing witness against the centrifugal power of romantic philosophy. As to the problem of a centre Mr. B. should have known there is no excuse for not knowing facts which ought to be familiar to any graduate student in the literary departments of Harvard University that caprice, paradox, and irony in Schlegel's sense are unthinkable without a centre. Irony is the faculty of the mind to travel at will from the centre to the periphery and back again. How does Mr. B. imagine a periphery without a centre to look? Let Mr. B. read with some care certain "fragments" by Schlegel, e. g. Ideen, 155: "Ich habe einige Ideen ausgesprochen, die aufs Centrum deuten, ich habe die Morgenrote begriisst nach meiner Ansicht, aus meinem Standpunkt. Wer den Weg kennt, tue desgleichen nach seiner Ansicht, aus seinem Standpunkt." Again in his chapter on Romantic Love our inquisitor revels in pharisaic condemnation. "This lack of definite object appears just as clearly in the German symbol of romantic love