The Classical Aesthetics of Schlegel's Lucinde

Summary

DESPITE HIS REPUTATION as a classical scholar, Friedrich Schlegel's novel, Lucinde (1799), has been interpreted from the time of its publication as advocating and displaying an anticlassical aesthetic. While some of its detractors focused on the scandal of the novel's autobiographical connections and its flouting of bourgeois sexual morality, Friedrich Schiller's reaction, expressed in a letter to Goethe, is typical in basing its condemnation of Lucinde on the novel's failure to adhere to certain aesthetic principles that were frequently associated with classical antiquity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:

Nach den Rodomontaden von Griechheit, und nach der Zeit, die Schlegel auf das Studium derselben gewendet, hätte ich gehofft, doch ein klein wenig an die Simplicität und Naivetät der Alten erinnert zu werden; aber diese Schrift ist der Gipfel moderner Unform und Unnatur, man glaubt ein Gemengsel aus Woldemar, aus Sternbald, und aus einem frechen französischen Roman zu lesen. (letter of July 19, 1799)

[After all of Schlegel's boasting about his study of Greek and after all the time he spent on it, I would have hoped to find some trace of the simplicity and naïvety of the ancients; but this writing is the pinnacle of modern formlessness and unnaturalness; it seems to be a mixture of Woldemar, Sternbald, and a provocative French novel.]

Schiller associates a classically influenced aesthetic with “Simplicität und Naivität” (simplicity and naïvety), in accord with the view of antiquity expressed in his essay “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry). His letter also echoes Winckelmann's attribution of “eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Größe” (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) to Greek art. For Schiller, a work such as Lucinde that embraces chaos, fragmentation, and change cannot be classical; rather, he associates the mixing of genres advocated and practiced by Schlegel with a modernity that he considers to be grotesque.

Later critics have tended to adhere to Schiller's descriptive categorization of antiquity and modernity, even if they do not accept his aesthetic judgment of Lucinde, and they tend to emphasize the novel's modern aesthetic orientation— for example, its affinity with experimental novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Cervantes's Don Quixote and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which play with temporal structure and defy readers’ expectations of coherent plot and character.