In passages of this kind A. W. Schlegel is little more than the popularizer of the ideas of his brother Friedrich. Perhaps no one in the whole romantic movement showed a greater genius for confusion than Friedrich Schlegel; no one, in Nietzsche’s phrase, had a more intimate knowledge of all the bypaths to chaos. Now it is from the German group of which Friedrich Schlegel was the chief theorist that romanticism as a distinct and separate movement takes its rise. We may therefore pause appropriately at this point to consider briefly how the epithet romantic of which I have already sketched the early history came to be applied to a distinct school. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, it will be remembered, romantic had become a fairly frequent word in English and also (under English influence) a less frequent, though not rare word, in French and German; it was often used favorably in all these countries as applied to nature, and usually indeed in this sense in France and Germany; but in England, when applied to human nature and as the equivalent of the French _romanesque_, it had ordinarily an unfavorable connotation; it signified the “dangerous prevalence of imagination” over “sober probability,” as may be seen in Foster’s essay “On the Epithet Romantic.” One may best preface a discussion of the next step--the transference of the word to a distinct movement--by a quotation from Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann (21 March, 1830): “This division of poetry into classic and romantic,” says Goethe, “which is to-day diffused throughout the whole world and has caused so much argument and discord, comes originally from Schiller and me. It was my principle in poetry always to work objectively. Schiller on the contrary wrote nothing that was not subjective; he thought his manner good, and to defend it he wrote his article on naïve and sentimental poetry. … The Schlegels got hold of this idea, developed it and little by little it has spread throughout the whole world. Everybody is talking of romanticism and classicism. Fifty years ago nobody gave the matter a thought.”