LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 329 



struction of the Past, over the shades of which our own Professor 

 Gildersleeve in his Oscillations and Nutations sheds a melodious 

 tear. Boeckh lived and lectured until 1867; and not until ten years 

 after his death was his famous Encyclopaedia and Methodology pub- 

 lished. It may be said by the specialists of the later portion of the 

 century that there is no science of antiquity, no unity of studies 

 but at the bottom of our hearts we still believe that there is such 

 a science, there is such unity: we say that they are not, because in 

 the more modest and necessary zeal for a little we have fallen away 

 from the whole ideal. We do not see the forest for the trees. Few 

 may handle the Encyclopaedia of Boeckh to-day; but no literary 

 historian can traverse the methods of Boeckh, and of his master, 

 Wolf, can be complacently topographical, or rigidly synchronistic, 

 or garrulously biographical, or flatly magisterial, without falling 

 foul of every critic encyclopedic or not to whom there is a drop 

 of method in the quill. 



History by movements, by types, and only then by countries, 

 lives, or schools, that is our legacy from the science of antiquity 

 and the methodology of all the sciences. Bernhardy, Teuffel, Karl 

 Otfried Miiller, Ribbeck, Ebert, Nicolai, Susemihl, Schanz, Christ, 

 Urlichs, Blass, Krumbacher, and in more modern literary history, 

 ten Brink, Wackernagel, Carriere, Scherer, Menzel, Diez, Tobler, 

 they have all followed such strands of the comprehensive method 

 as they could, and in so far as they have followed, have achieved 

 fulfillment. 



In poetics and literary criticism the movement which succeeded 

 the reconstruction of Lessing, Herder, and Schiller was in no slight 

 degree indebted for its origin to Solger's Vorlesungen uber Aesthetik. 

 This philosopher took as his central theme Fichte's principle of 

 ^Esthetic Irony: the mood of the artist, that impels him to represent 

 things eternal in terms of the phenomenal and evanescent. This is 

 the keynote of romanticism in literature the individual mood, the 

 urgency of impulse, the spirit ideal and universal, the poem piti- 

 fully inadequate, actual, particular, the creation of man's hands, 

 through which spirit escapes, but in escaping endows the mortal with 

 the nimbus of immortality. Construing this principle the inevit- 

 ableness and still the irony of the artistic struggle as dependent 

 upon the caprice of the artist, Wilhelm von Schlegel, in his Brief e 

 uber Poesie, 1795, in the periodical named Athendum, founded, in com- 

 pany with his brother Friedrich, 1798, and especially in his Lectures 

 on Dramatic Literature, 1809-1811, established in Germany the 

 Romantic School of Poetics. To this movement, Ludwig Tieck and 

 others contributed; and from France there came by way of Mme. 

 de Stael's intimacy with Wilhelm von Schlegel a confluent stream 

 of Rousseauism and the cosmopolitan ideal. The Oriental studies of 



