" The
first Romanticists were held together by a common effort to formulate
or to attain a speculative philosophy. In the second group, there was
a decentralizing, catholicizing tendency, and, above all, a greater
individual creative ability. It was not merely the chance difference
of external fortunes that kept them apart, though they never held
together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each
projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a
common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been
done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded
works of real esthetic value.
Very significant of the differences between the schools is their
journalistic activity. The ideal of the first Romanticists was to work
without collaboration; but the very prospectus of Arnim's _Journal for
Hermits_ is signed by a company of editors. The early journals were
turned to the study of German literature through a renunciation of
the present; the later Germanic studies arose from a high idealism and
from a sincere desire to awaken the present to new national activity.
When, later in life, Goerres remarked of these journals that their
collaborators felt as if they were accompanying the Holy Roman Empire
to its grave, he was thinking of the year in which the most important
of them flourished, 1808. In this, Germany's darkest period, Kleist's
Phoebus, so cordially hated by many, and Arnim's _Journal for Hermits_
had their brief but influential career.
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