>>14
Wow. Top marks for choosing 'The Athenaeum' - as opposed to some pissy little modern (or even, God forbid, post-modern) theoretical periodical written in 'lean, unlovely English' - as one of the many achievements that I CAN'T lay claim to. If you know and appreciate the Schlegels, then you're surely an educated man yourself.
But on the other hand familiarity with such generally neglected and near-forgotten cultural-historical terrain should also make it easier for you to recognize the limitations of the thesis you propose here.
The accusation of 'sterility' and 'inability to bring anything to completion' was one which was often flung against the Schlegels themselves, particularly against Friedrich, the more brilliant of the two brothers. He was frequently unfavourably contrasted with Goethe in this respect (sometimes by Goethe himself). He was a decidedly minor poet and even as a critic he was a man of shreds and fragments. His one novel, 'Lucinde' is famous for being an utter failure as a novel: a text which can't make up its mind whether it is indeed a novel and not rather maybe an essay or a philosophical tractate instead. It may not be 'tl;dr' in comparison to huge tomes like 'Wilhelm Meister', but it's certainly been 'dr' for 99 per cent of the reading public throughout all the two hundred years since its publication.
Schlegel, in short, very arguably 'achieved nothing'. The Romantics, indeed, as a whole symbolized and incarnated fragmentation, failure and disaster, as opposed to the aspiration toward serene integrality and palpable worldly success represented by the Classicists Goethe and Schiller.
In this respect, one thing I CAN lay claim to is being one of the 'last Romantics' (I think my 'fat girl' senses this, which is why we still have a very close relationship even though I've been able to pay her absolutely nothing since I've moved to Paris).
You're right about the factors that 'grinch'd' me yesterday - to the extent, at least, that it was a very bitter dispute in the CH Tinychat about 'Romantic' and entirely 'un-Romantic' values in this sense that left me so down on the Crackyverse in general and on Camel, Dolly and their pitiable Faggot Goats in particular.
In that debate as so often before, I found myself confronted with that fundamentally un-Romantic nature of the typical /b/tard that contrasts so oddly with the implied iconoclastic, indeed suggestedly 'revolutionary' nature of 4chan culture.
Again and again in my dealings with the Crackyfags, I'm forced to recognize how totally lacking you people are in that Romantic spirit that was the deepest and most nourishing of all the wells that Marxism; Anarchism and all true revolutionary movements have drawn on. The /b/tard type - with whom Camel and her FGs can certainly be classified on the strength of THAT 'conversation' at least - cannot brave or tolerate the risk of total failure that every true rebel must necessarily take. In your hearts, despite all the symbolically patricidal shock-tactics of your boards, none of you can wait to flee back into the bosoms of your salary-drawing, condominium-owning papas. And you ALREADY - at age 18 or 25 - feel the same contempt and fear vis-a-vis someone like myself - a homeless, ally-less outcast fighting on broken barricades against odds everyone sees must inevitably defeat him utterly in the end - as is felt by these well-appointed papas at age 45 or 50.