_Schlemihl_ is
genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first
person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to
its climax. It does not make mood--it has mood.
The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are the products of Romantic
scholarship; they represent the highest type of scholarly attainment
and of scholarly personality. They are always thought of together, for
they shared all possessions alike and were not drawn apart by the fact
that William married and Jacob remained a bachelor. Their fidelity to
each other is touching, and no more lovable story is told than that
of Jacob's breaking down in a lecture and crying, "My brother is so
sick!"
Jacob (1785-1863) was the philologist, the inductive gatherer of
scientific material, the close logical deducer of facts. He "presented
Germany with its mythology, with its history of legal antiquities,
with its grammar and its history of language." He is the author of
Grimm's law of consonant permutation which laid the foundations of
modern philological science and is the founder of philological science
in general.
Wilhelm (1786-1859), no less exact a scientist, was more a Romantic
nature, with a greater power of synthesis under poetic stress. The
two brothers began their collecting activities under the influence
of Arnim, and their work with folk-tales in prose corresponds to _The
Boy's Magic Horn_ in verse.
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