Such a journal as the _Athenaeum_, with its over-emphasis on the
esthetic, with its fighting spirit, its excoriating, inexorable wit,
its constructive and destructive criticism, its complete and total
silence on Schiller, would have been an impossibility in the later
period. The feeling for and thinking in Fragments, as practised by
Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, was foreign to the new school. They
had no illusions that such thinking would become the daily custom
of the people; they kept their eyes open to that which went on about
them, and though they no more dared than the earlier group to work
directly upon the political conditions of the day as did Goerres later
(1814) in his _Rheinischer Merkur_, they attempted indirectly to
react on the broad mass by branching out into religion and other
folk-interests as the earlier school never cared to do. Perhaps this
is an excuse for the shallowness of some of the product, especially of
the fiction; at any rate, the attempt at dissemination was not without
its success.
The external link connecting the two schools as well as the Romantic
groups in general and the object of their star-worship, Goethe, was
Clemens Maria Brentano (1778-1842), in many ways the most typical
Romantic figure of either school. Brentano's grandmother, Sophie La
Roche, had been the friend of Wieland; his mother, Maximiliane,
played a not unimportant role in the life of the young Goethe and
is immortalized in the latter part of _Werther_.
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