Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is as necessary in the life of a literature as in that of an animal or a plant.  English romanticism, though it started independently, did not remain an isolated phenomenon; it was related to the general literary movement in Europe.  Even Italy had its romantic movement; Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, by translating Buerger’s “Lenore” and “Wild Huntsman”, and afterwards, like Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the classical entrenchments in his “Discourse of the Three Unities.”  It is no part of our undertaking to write the history of the romantic schools in Germany and France.  But in each of those countries the movement had points of likeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our own; and an outline sketch of the German and French schools will help the reader better to understand both what English romanticism was, and what it was not.

In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth century, the history of romanticism is a history of arrested development.  Romanticism existed in solution, but was not precipitated and crystallised until the closing years of the period.  The current set flowing by Buerger’s ballads and Goethe’s “Goetz,” was met and checked by a counter-current, the new enthusiasm for the antique promoted by Winckelmann’s[2] works on classic art, by the neo-paganism of Goethe’s later writings, and by the influence of Lessing’s[3] clear, rationalising, and thoroughly Protestant spirit.[4]

We may note, at the outset, the main features in which the German romanticism differed from the English.  First, then, it was more definitely a movement.  It was organised, self-conscious, and critical.  Indeed, it was in criticism and not in creative literature that its highest successes were won.  Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like their English forerunners in the eighteenth century,[5] worked independently of one another.  They did not conspire to a common end; had little personal contact—­were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a “school.”  But the German romanticists constituted a compact group with coherent aims.  They were intimate friends and associates; travelled, lived, and worked together; edited each other’s books and married each other’s sisters.[6] They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressive and polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satirical tales,[7] poems, and plays.  Their headquarters were at Jena, “the central point,” says Heine, “from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated.  I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the art productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the future.”  Their organ was the Athenaeum, established by Friedrich Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s “Lyrical Ballads,” and the climacteric year of English and German romanticism.