He commenced his literary career in 1794, with a short essay on the different schools of Greek poetry. It is curious to watch in this little piece the buddings of his mind. Here we see, as it were, the germ of the first part of the great work on ancient and modern literature, which he published nearly twenty years afterwards. We are astonished to find in a youth of twenty-two an erudition so extensive--an acquaintance not only with the more celebrated poets and philosophers of ancient Greece, but also with the obscure, recondite Alexandrian poets, known to comparatively few scholars even of a maturer age. We admire, too, the clearness of analytic arrangement--the admirable method of classification, in which the author and his brother have ever so far outshone the generality of German writers. The essay displays, also, a delicacy of observation and an originality of views, which announce the great critic. It is, in short, the labour of an infant Hercules.
As this essay gives promise of a mighty critic; so two treatises, which the author wrote in the following years, 1795 and 1796--one entitled "Diotima," and which treats of the condition of the female sex in ancient Greece--the other, a parallel between Cæsar and Alexander, not published, however, till twenty-six years afterwards--both show the dawnings of his great historical genius. Rarely have the promises of youth been so amply fulfilled--rarely has the green foliage of Spring been followed by fruits so rich and abundant. It is interesting to observe the fine, organic development of Schlegel's mental powers--to trace in these early productions, the germs of those great historical works which it was reserved for his manhood and age to achieve. In the latter and most remarkable of these essays, he examines the respective merits of Cæsar and Alexander, considered as men, as generals, and as statesmen. To the Macedonian he assigns greater tenderness of feeling, a more generous and lofty disinterestedness of character--and a finer power of perception for the beauties of art. To the Roman he ascribes greater coolness and sobriety of judgment, an extraordinary degree of self-controul, a mind tenacious of its purpose, but careless as to the means by which it was accomplished, an exquisite sense of fitness and propriety in the smallest as in the greatest things, yet little susceptibility for the beautiful in art. With respect to military genius, he shows that Cæsar united to the fire and rapidity of the Macedonian, greater constancy and perseverance; yet that the temerity of Alexander was not always the effect of impetuous passion, but sometimes the result at once of situation and deliberate reflection. As regards the political capacities of these two great conquerors, he shows that Cæsar possessed an over-mastering ascendancy over the minds of men--the talent of guiding their wills, and making them subservient to his own views and interests--in short, a consummate skill in the tactics of a party-leader. Yet he thinks him destitute of the wisdom of a law-giver, or what he emphatically calls, the _organic genius of state_--the power to found, or renovate a constitution. To Alexander, on the contrary, he attributes the plastic genius of legislation--the will and the ability to diffuse among nations the blessings of civilization--to plant cities, and establish free, flourishing and permanent communities.