attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philology
and comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and
the brothers Grimm. Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitan
lines which German literary scholarship was to follow, with German
thoroughness and independence. And Heine acknowledges that "in
reproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to be
brought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities was
required; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegels
were far superior to Lessing." The one point at which the English
movement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour
and fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which the
romantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart.

The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated to
the English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere and
other dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel's
"Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." [21] Heine
denounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure to
comprehend the modern mind. "When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poet
Buerger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy
collection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more naive,
more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . . But death is not
more poetical than life. The old English ballads of the Percy collection
exhale the spirit of their age, and Buerger's ballads breathe the spirit
of _our_ time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . What
increased Schlegel's reputation still more was the sensation which he
excited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of the
French, . . . showed the French that their whole classical literature was
worthless, that Moliere was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise
was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of
the world, and that there is no poetry in France." It is well known that
Coleridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that he
undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the
language. The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess of
Teutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism.

The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied by
thei