Romantic Style: Schlegel's Critical Essays ((Western Tradition: Classics and Interpretations))

Author: Schlegel
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Tragedy inspires the audience, elevating their taste and thus preventing the degeneration of their taste for as long as possible. Comedy, on the other hand, tempts the audience to descend, accelerating the degeneration of their taste. The manner in which midstream writers treat a small book as if it were a grand work is something that literary censors should force them to inscribe on their works: "This is the largest elephant in the world, except for the one from which it came." Everything that becomes tiresome may have been flawed or mediocre from the beginning. To feel amazed by beauty or greatness is not refined; it seems as if they should be something else. Mythology has a great advantage: whatever consciousness can never grasp can be seen and preserved through the senses and spirit in mythology, just as a soul remains in the body that surrounds it. And it is through the body that the soul flashes into our eyes and speaks to our ears.