A COURSE OF LECTURES ON DRAMATIC ART AND LITERATURE, BY AUGUSTUS WILLIAM SCHLEGEL. TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL GERMAN BY JOHN BLACK. Second Edition. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I LONDON: J. TEMPLEMAN, 248, REGENT STREET; J. R. SMITH, 4, OLD COMPTON STREET, SOHO. MDCCCXL. NAT INTRODUCTION. It is a peculiar feature in English Literature, that the application of analysis as a means of reasoning and judging unduly predominating at all times-has more than ever predominated during the last eight or ten years, over every other mental process. This has been occasioned, in addition to the natural bias of the average order of minds, by the political, scientific, mechanical, and generally investigating spirit of the period. It has led to immense advantages in practical and material things, and also to baneful abuses in many abstract matters, more especially with reference to the idealisms of the Fine Arts. Prose, poetry, history, novels, from the highest to the lowest share the same fate with the subjects laid prone on the tables of our schools of anatomy (without the ulterio purposes which ennoble the latter); the same animus with regard to music is displayed to the full extent of scientific or other knowledge possessed by the various critics; and nothing but the want of sufficient quickness of eye and acquaintance with technicalities, has prevented the steps of a dancer from being counted, squared, balanced, and "exposed." In the overwhelming preponderance of critical literature over all original production, analysis has become the almost invariable characteristic of a general and established method of arriving at a true estimate of all things. The same principle is now apparent in the discussions of private life. When an individual says, "I have analysed !" he thinks he has done the utmost and the best for the discovery of truth, and that granting his analysis correct, it is unnecessary to dwell any longer on a subject so completely dissected. That a substantially false estimate is thus commonly obtained, or at best but a vague and disconnected perception of the whole, is no more surprising than the natural sequence of cause and effect. The analytic mind is not the highest order of mind for the accomplishment of any great object. A great object must first exist in the imagination and the feelings, where it is comprehended as a whole. The whole is not accomplished and attained by the separation, but by the union of parts...For the purposes of criticism, analysis constitutes only one part of: the required process; and certainly, the secondary and lesser part. Standing alone in its mest perfect fitness for dividing, classifying, scrutinizing, weighing, and measuring, it can still only exercise those functions upon things produced or discovered by a deeper and more comprehensive faculty. The critic, however acute and expert in the use of analysis, who does not possess, or who does ... |