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Title: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic
School in Germany

Author: Georg Brandes

Translator: Mary Morison
Diana White

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature,
Vol. II (of 6): The Romantic School in Germany, by Georg Brandes, Translated
by Diana White and Mary Morison

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MAIN CURRENTS IN
NINETEENTH CENTURY
LITERATURE
BY

GEORGE BRANDES
IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED

II

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

MCMVI

A. W. SCHLEGEL

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. THE PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM
II. HÖLDERLIN
III. A. W. SCHLEGEL
IV. TIECK AND JEAN PAUL
SOCIAL ENDEAVOURS OF THE ROMANTICISTS:
V.
LUCINDE
VI. ROMANTIC PURPOSELESSNESS
VII. "LUCINDE" IN REAL LIFE
VIII. SCHLEIERMACHER'S LETTERS
IX. WACKENRODER: ROMANTICISM AND MUSIC
X. ATTITUDE OF ROMANTICISM TO ART AND NATURE
XI. ROMANTIC DUPLICATION AND PSYCHOLOGY
XII. ROMANTIC SOUL. NOVALIS
XIII. LONGING—"THE BLUE FLOWER"
XIV. ARNIM AND BRENTANO
XV. MYSTICISM IN THE ROMANTIC DRAMA
XVI. ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND POLITICS
XVII. ROMANTIC POLITICIANS

LIST OF PORTRAITS

A. W. SCHLEGEL
LUDWIG TIECK
FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
SCHLEIERMACHER
W. HOFFMANN
NOVALIS

"Allen Gewalten
Zum Trutz sich erhalten,
Nimmer sich beugen ..."
—GOETHE.

"Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren, ist vivissciren."
—NOVALIS.

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

INTRODUCTION

The task of giving a connected account of the German Romantic School is, for a
Dane, an arduous and disheartening one. In the first place, the subject is
overwhelmingly vast; in the second, it has been treated again and again by
German writers; and, lastly, these writers, in their division of labour, have entered
so learnedly into every detail, that it is impossible for a foreigner, one, moreover,
to whom the sources are not always accessible, to compete with them in
exhaustive knowledge. From their childhood they have been familiar with a
literature with which he first makes acquaintance at an age when assimilation, in
any quantity, has become a much more difficult process. What the foreigner must
rely on is, partly the decision with which he takes up and maintains his personal
standpoint, partly the possibility that he may display qualities which are not
characteristic of the native author. Such a quality in the case in point is the artistic
faculty, the faculty, I mean, of representation, of externalisation. The German
nature is so intense and profound that this faculty is comparatively rare. The
foreigner has, moreover, this advantage over the native, that it is easier for him to
detect the mark of race—that in the German author which stamps him as a
German. The German critic is too apt to consider "German" synonymous with
"human being," for the reason that the human beings he deals with are almost
always Germans. The foreigner is struck by characteristics which are overlooked
by the native, sometimes because he is so accustomed to them, more frequently
because he himself possesses them.
There are many works to be criticised and classified, many personalities to
describe. My aim will be to present these personalities and works in as firm and
sharp outline as possible, and, without giving undue attention to detail, to throw
light upon the whole in such a manner that its principal features will stand out
and arrest the eye. I shall endeavour, on the one hand, to treat the history of
literature as humanly as possible, to go as deep down as I can, to seize upon the
remotest, innermost psychological movements which prepared for and produced
the various literary phenomena; and on the other hand, I shall try to present the
result in as plastic and tangible a form as possible. If I can succeed in giving
shape, clear and accurate, to the hidden feeling, the idea, which everywhere
underlies the literary phenomenon, my task will be accomplished. By preference,
I shall always, when possible, embody the abstract in the personal.
First and foremost, therefore, I everywhere trace the connection between
literature and life. This is at once proved by the fact that, whereas earlier Danish

literary controversies (that between Heiberg and Hauch, for example, or even the
famous one between Baggesen and Oehlenschläger) were kept entirely within the
domain of literature and dealt exclusively with literary principles, the controversy
aroused by the first volume of this work has entailed, quite as much from the
nature of the work as from the irrationality of its opponents, the discussion of a
multitude of moral, social, and religious questions. The Danish reaction, feeling
itself to be akin to the one I am about to depict and unmask, has attempted to
suppress the movement which it recognised to be antagonistic to itself—but so
far with little prospect of success. A French proverb says: Nul prince n'a tué son
successeur.
When, however, the connection between literature and life is thus emphasised,
the delineations and interpretations of men and their books by no means produce
what we may call drawing-room history of literature. I go down to the
foundations of real life, and show how the emotions which find their expression
in literature arise in the human heart. And this same human heart is no still pool,
no idyllic mountain lake. It is an ocean, with submarine vegetation and terrible
inhabitants. Drawing-room history of literature, like drawing-room poetry, sees in
human life a drawing-room, a decorated ball-room—the furniture and the people
alike polished, the brilliant illumination excluding all possibility of dark corners.
Let those who choose to do so look at things thus; it is not my point of view. Just
as the botanist must handle nettles as well as roses, so the student of literature
must accustom himself to look, with the unflinching gaze of the naturalist or the
physician, upon all the forms taken by human nature, in their diversity and their
inward affinity. It makes the plant neither more nor less interesting that it smells
sweet or stings; but the dispassionate interest of the botanist is often accompanied
by the purely human pleasure in the beauty of the flower.
As I follow the more important literary movements from country to country,
studying their psychology, I attempt to condense the fluid material by showing
how, from time to time, it crystallises into one or other definite and intelligible
type. The attempt is attended with extraordinary difficulty in this particular
period of German literature, from the fact that the chief characteristic of the
period is an absence of distinctly typical forms. This literature is not plastic; it is
musical. French Romanticism produces clearly defined figures; the ideal of
German Romanticism is not a figure, but a melody, not definite form, but infinite
aspiration. Is it obliged to name the object of its longing? It designates it by such
terms as "ein geheimes Wort," "eine blaue Blume," "der Zauber der
Waldeinsamkeit" (a mystic word—a blue flower—the magic of the lonely
woods). These expressions are, however, definitions of moods, and each mood
has a corresponding psychological condition, my task is to trace back each mood,

emotion, or longing to the group of psychological conditions to which it belongs.
This group in combination constitutes a soul; and such a soul, with strongly
marked individuality, represents in literature the many who were unable to depict
their own character, but who recognised it when thus placed before them. I may
possibly succeed in proving that the type does not escape us because the author
may have chosen to paint landscape after landscape in place of delineating
characteristic personalities, or because he confounds literature with music to the
extent of at last entitling his poems simply Allegro or Rondo; but that, on the
contrary, the distinctly peculiar qualities of these landscapes and the character of
this word-music are symptomatic of a psychological condition which may be
determined with considerable accuracy.
In the general introduction to this work I have sketched the plan which I have
proposed to myself. It is my intention to describe the first great literary
movement of the century, the germinating and growing reaction, first elucidating
its nature, then following it to its climax. Afterwards I shall show how this
reaction was met by a breeze of liberalism blowing from the eighteenth century,
which swells into a gale and sweeps away all opposition. Not that the liberal
views of the nineteenth century are ever identical with those of the eighteenth, or
that its literary forms or scientific ideas ever bear the eighteenth century stamp.
Neither Voltaire, nor Rousseau, nor Diderot, neither Lessing nor Schiller, neither
Hume nor Godwin, rise from the dead; but they are one and all avenged upon
their enemies.
Regarded as a whole, German Romanticism is reaction. Nevertheless, as an
intellectual, poetico-philosophical reaction, it contains many germs of new
development, unmistakable productions of that spirit of progress which, by
remoulding the old, creates the new, and by altering boundaries gains territory.
The older Romanticists begin, without exception, as the apostles of
"enlightenment." They introduce a new tone into German poetry, give their works
a new colour, and, in addition to this, revive both the spirit and the substance of
the old fairy-tale, Volkslied, and legend. They exercise at first a fertilising
influence upon German science; research in the domains of history, ethnography,
and jurisprudence, the study of German antiquity, Indian and Greek-Latin
philology, and the systems and dreams of the Naturphilosophie all receive their
first impulse from Romanticism. They widened the emotional range of German
poetry, though the emotions to which they gave expression were more frequently
morbid than healthy. As critics, they originally, and with success, aimed at
enlarging the spiritual horizon. In their social capacity they vowed undying
hatred to all dead conventionality in the relations between the sexes. The best

among them in their youth laboured ardently for the intensification of that
spiritual life which is based upon a belief in the supernatural. In politics, when
not indifferent, they generally began as very theoretical republicans; who,
however, in spite of their cosmopolitanism, strove to elevate and strengthen
German patriotism.
Unfortunately, their pursuit of all these worthy aims ended in comparative failure.
Of all that the German Romanticists produced, little will endure—some masterly
translations by A. W. Schlegel, a few of Tieck's productions, a handful of
Hardenberg's and another of Eichendorff's lyrics, some of Friedrich Schlegel's
essays, a few of Arnim's and Brentano's smaller works, a select number of
Hoffmann's tales, and some very remarkable dramas and tales from the pen of
that eccentric but real genius, Heinrich von Kleist. The rest of the life-work of the
Romanticists has disappeared from the memory of the present generation.
Looking back on it from this distance, most of their endeavour seems to have
ended in smoke. In the matter of language, with their intangible imagery, their
misuse of words in expressing the strange, weird, and mysterious, their
archaisms, and their determination to be unintelligible to the ordinary reader, they
rather diminished than enriched the poetic vocabulary, rather corrupted than
improved literary style. In the domain of poetry, Romanticism ended in hysterical
piety and vapouring. In the social domain it occupied itself with only one
question, that of the relations between the sexes; and its ideas on this subject
were, for the most part, so abnormal and morbidly unhealthy, that most of its
passionate blows were dealt in the air. In dealing them, it was not humanity at
large that the Romanticists had in view, but a few favoured, aristocratic, artistic
natures. In religious matters, these men, whose moral and poetical theories were
at first so revolutionary, bowed their necks to the yoke the moment they saw it.
And in politics it was they who directed the proceedings of the Congress of
Vienna and prepared its manifestoes, abolishing liberty of thought in the interval
between a religious festival in St. Stephen's and an oyster supper with Fanny
Elsler.
I shall touch but seldom and briefly upon Danish literature, only now and again
piercing in the canvas of the panorama I am unrolling a hole through which the
situation in Denmark may be seen. Not that I forget or lose sight of Danish
literature. On the contrary, it is ever present with me. Whilst trying to present to
my readers the inner history of a foreign literature, I am all the time making
indirect contributions to the history of our own. I am painting the background
which is required to throw its characteristics into relief. I am working at the
foundation upon which, according to my conviction, the history of modern
Danish literature rests. My method may be indirect, but it is the more thorough

for that. I should like, however, in a few words, to indicate the general conclusion
to which a comparison between Danish and foreign literature at this period has
led me.
The relative positions of Germany and Denmark may be defined as follows:
German literature is at this period comparatively original in its aims and its
productions; Danish literature either continues the working out of a peculiarly
Scandinavian vein, or builds upon German foundations. The Danish authors have,
as a rule, read and assimilated the German; the German authors have neither read
nor been in any way influenced by the Danes. Steffens, through whom we receive
the impetus from Germany, is the devoted disciple of Schelling. Witness the
following passage from one of his letters to that philosopher: "I am your pupil,
absolutely and entirely your pupil. All that I produce was originally yours. This is
no passing feeling; it is my firm conviction that such is the case, and I do not
think the less of myself for it. Therefore, when once I have produced a really
great work which I should gladly call mine, I shall, as soon as it has been
recognised, publicly, enthusiastically, proclaim you to be my teacher, and hand
over to you my laurel wreath."[1]
In German literature there is more life, in the corresponding Danish literature
more art. It is Germany which produces, which unearths, the material. That
literature of which Romanticism is the first development, lives and moves and
revels in intense emotions, struggles with problems, creates forms which it
dashes to pieces again. Danish literature takes German material and ideas,
instinct with life, and often succeeds in moulding them more artistically, giving
them clearer expression than their German producers do. (Note, for example, the
case of Tieck and Heiberg.) The Danes apply and remodel, or they embody
kindred ideas in more favourable and more plastic material, such, or instance, as
that provided by the Scandinavian mythology and legends.
The result, as I have elsewhere shown, is that Romanticism acquired more
lucidity and clearer contours on Danish soil. It became less a thing of the night; it
ventured, veiled, into the light of the sun. It felt that it had come to a sedate,
sober-minded people, a people who were not yet quite sure that moonlight was
not unnatural and sentimental. It came up from the deep mine shafts from which
Novalis had been the first to conjure it, and, with Oehlenschläger's Vaulundur,
hammered on the mountain-side till the mountain burst open and laid all its
treasures bare to the light of day. It felt that it had come to another, a more serene
and idyllic clime; it shook off all its weirdness; its thick, shapeless mists
condensed into slender river nymphs; it forgot the Harz and the Blocksberg, and

took up its abode one beautiful Midsummer Eve in the Deer Park near
Copenhagen.[2]
Aladdin is a finer and more intelligible literary work than Tieck's Kaiser
Oktavianus, but Oehlenschläger could not deny that Aladdin would never have
been written if Oktavianus had not been in existence. Heiberg's Julespög og
Nytaarslöjer is to the full as witty as Tieck's Aristophanic satires, but the whole
idea—the play within the play, the literary satire, and the blending of the
sentimental with the ironical—is borrowed from Tieck, and, what is worse, is
only comprehensible from Tieck's standpoint. In short, there is in Oehlenschläger,
Hauch, and Heiberg more form than in Novalis, Tieck, and Fr. Schlegel, but less
substance—that is to say, less direct connection with real life. German literature
has too often formed the connecting link. We Danes have too often refused to
occupy ourselves, in literature, with the great problems of life, have simply
dismissed them when we could not succeed in giving them correct literary form.
Looked at from the psychological point of view, the position may be described as
follows. The Danish Romantic authors have, generally speaking, been the
superiors of the Germans as regards art, their inferiors as regards intellect. As a
rule, every production of the German author, however small, though it be
formless, weak, nay, actually a failure, yet expresses a whole philosophy of life,
and that no fanciful philosophy, but one evolved and matured by personal
experience, and stamped with the whole astonishingly many-sided culture which
distinguishes the educated German. A poem by Novalis, a tale by Tieck or
Hoffmann, or a play by Kleist, contains a poetico-philosophical theory of life;
and it is the theory not only of a poet, but of a man. A tragedy by Oehlenschläger
again, or a fairy tale by Andersen, or a vaudeville by Hostrup, will almost
invariably be distinguished by such distinctly poetical qualities as fancy, feeling,
whimsicality, gaiety, youthful freshness and aplomb, but the philosophy is too
often as primitive as a child's. Heiberg is almost the only writer in whose works
there is any sign of a philosophy based upon science, and acquiring ever more
profundity from the experiences of life. Of real development there are often only
faint traces. The youthful works of such authors as Oehlenschläger, Winther, and
Andersen are as perfect as those of their maturity. Sometimes, as in the case of
Oehlenschläger, advancing years produce in the talent a suspicion of corpulence,
of unctuousness. Sometimes, as in the case of Paludan-Müller, the ideal grows
more and more attenuated. When a change does take place, it rarely signifies that
the author has gradually evolved for himself a new philosophy of life; no—after
treading the narrow path of poetry for a time, he strikes into one of the two great
highroads, either the road of middle-class respectability or the road of orthodox

piety. The dressing-gown or the cassock—one or other of these garments almost
inevitably supersedes the Spanish cloak of poetic youth.
It may, then, generally speaking, be asserted that, in those cases where it is
possible to compare the German Romanticists with the Danish, the former have
the more original philosophy of life, and are greater as personalities, whatever
they may be as poets.
Let us look at the subject from a third point of view. To the Danish authors, as a
body, may be attributed the merit of avoiding the fantastic, tasteless
extravagances of which the Germans are frequently guilty. The Danes stop in
time; they avoid paradox or do not carry it to its logical conclusion; they have the
steadiness due to naturally well-balanced minds and naturally phlegmatic
dispositions; they are hardly ever indecent, audacious, blasphemous,
revolutionary, wildly fantastic, utterly sentimental, utterly unreal, or utterly
sensual; they seldom run amuck, they never tilt at the clouds, and they never fall
into a well. This is what makes them so popular with their own countrymen.
Unerring taste and elegance, such as distinguish Heiberg's poetry and Gade's
music, vigorous, healthy originality, such as characterises Oehlenschläger's and
Hartmann's best works, will always be prized by Danes as the expression of noble
and self-controlled art. What a contrast is presented by the overstrained,
extravagant personalities peopling the Romantic hospital of Germany! A
phthisical Moravian Brother with the consumptive's sensuality and the
consumptive's mystic yearnings—Novalis. A satirical hypochondriac, subject to
hallucinations and with morbid leanings to Catholicism—Tieck. A genius,
impotent to produce, but with the propensity of genius to revolt and the
imperative craving of impotence to subject itself to outward authority—Friedrich
Schlegel. A dissipated fantast with the half-insane imagination of the drunkard—
Hoffmann. A foolish mystic like Werner, and a genius like the suicide Kleist.
Think of Hoffmann, and his pupil, Hans Andersen, and observe how sane, but
also how sober and subdued, Andersen appears compared with his first master.
It is, then, certain that there is more of the quality of harmony among the Danes.
And it is easy to understand that those who regard harmony, even when meagre,
as the highest quality of art, will inevitably rank the Danish literature of the first
decades of this century above the German. It has, however, to a great extent
attained to this harmony by means of caution, by lack of artistic courage. The
Danish poets never fell, because they never mounted to a height from which there
was any danger of falling. They left it to others to ascend Mont Blanc. They
escaped breaking their necks, but they never gathered the Alpine flowers which
only bloom on the giddy heights or on the brink of precipices. The quality in

literature which, it seems to me, we Danes have never sufficiently prized, is
boldness, that quality in the author which incites him, regardless of
consequences, to give expression to his artistic ideal. The daring development of
what is typical in his literary tendency, often constitutes the beauty of his work;
or, to put it more plainly, when a literary tendency like Romanticism develops in
the direction of pure fancy, that author seems to me the most interesting, who
rises to the most daring heights of fantastic extravagance—as, for instance,
Hoffmann. The more madly fantastic he is, the finer he is, just as the poplar is
finer the taller it is, and the beech finer the more stately and wide-spreading it is.
The fineness lies in the daring and vigour with which that which is typical is
expressed. He who discovers a new country may, in the course of his
explorations, be stranded on a reef. It is an easy matter to avoid the reef and leave
the country undiscovered. The Danish Romanticists are never insane like
Hoffmann, but neither are they ever dæmonic like him. They lose in thrilling,
overpowering life and energy what they gain in lucidity and readableness. They
appeal to a greater number and a more varied class of readers, but they do not
enthral them. The more vigorous originality alarms the many, but fascinates the
few. In Danish Romanticism there is none of Friedrich Schlegel's audacious
immorality, but neither is there anything like that spirit of opposition which in
him amounts to genius; his ardour melts, and his daring moulds into new and
strange shapes, much that we accept as unalterable. Nor do the Danes become
Catholic mystics. Protestant orthodoxy in its most petrified form flourishes with
us: so do supernaturalism and pietism; and in Grundtvigianism we slide down the
inclined plane which leads to Catholicism; but in this matter, as in every other,
we never take the final step; we shrink back from the last consequences. The
result is that the Danish reaction is far more insidious and covert than the
German. Veiling itself as vice does, it clings to the altars of the Church, which
have always been a sanctuary for criminals of every species. It is never possible
to lay hold of it, to convince it then and there that its principles logically lead to
intolerance, inquisition, and despotism. Kierkegaard, for example, is in religion
orthodox, in politics a believer in absolutism, towards the close of his career a
fanatic. Yet—and this is a genuinely Romantic trait—he all his life long avoids
drawing any practical conclusions from his doctrines; one only catches an
occasional glimpse of such a feeling as admiration for the Inquisition, or hatred
of natural science.
Let us take, by way of contrast, another supporter of orthodoxy and absolutism,
Joseph de Maistre, as high-minded and sincere a believer as Kierkegaard, and
equally philanthropic. De Maistre pursues all his theories to their clear
conclusions, shirking nothing which must be regarded as a direct consequence of

his beliefs. Like Kierkegaard, he is a man of brilliant parts and solid culture, but
whereas Kierkegaard, when it comes to practical applications, is as afraid of
"public scandal" as any old maid, De Maistre boldly accepts all necessary
consequences. The famous passage in praise of the executioner in the sixth
conversation of the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, leaves nothing to be desired in
the matter of plain speaking. The executioner is a "sublime being," "the corner-
stone of society;" along with him "all social order disappears." According to De
Maistre's theory, two powers are required to quell the rebellious spirits—the spirit
of unbelief and the spirit of disobedience—let loose by the French Revolution,
and these two are the Pope and the executioner. The Pope and the executioner are
the two main props of society; the one crushes the revolutionary thought with his
bull, the other cuts off the revolutionary head with his axe. It is a pleasure to read
such argument. Here we have vigour and determination, effectual expression of a
clear thought, energetic and undisguised reaction. And De Maistre is the same in
everything. He is not, like Danish reactionaries who call themselves Liberals,
reactionary in social matters and religion, and liberal or half-liberal in politics. He
loathes political liberty; he jeers (in his letters) at the emancipation of women; in
a special essay he deliberately and warmly defends the Spanish Inquisition; and
in all trueheartedness and manly seriousness he desires the reinstitution of the
auto-da-fé, and is not ashamed to say it, seeing that he thinks it. Look well at
such a man as this—gifted and eminent, great as a statesman, great as an author,
who sacrifices his whole fortune sooner than make the least concession to the
Revolution, which he abhors, or to Napoleon, whom he detests; who frankly
adores the executioner as the indispensable upholder of order; who gives the
gallows the most important place in his statute-book, and counsels the Church to
have recourse to the axe and the faggot—there is a figure worthy of note; a
proud, bold countenance, which expresses an unmistakable mental bent, and
which one does not forget. This is a type one takes pleasure in, as the naturalist
takes pleasure in a fine specimen of a species of which he has hitherto only met
with imperfect and unsatisfactory examples. Looking at the matter from a
practical point of view, it may be considered fortunate that such personalities are
not to be found in Danish literature, but their absence gives a less plastic
character to its history.
It is all very well to say that we Danes only assimilated the good and healthy
elements of German Romanticism. When we see how the German Romanticists
end, we comprehend that from the very beginning there was concealed in
Romanticism a reactionary principle which prescribed the course—the curve—of
their careers.

Friedrich Schlegel, the author of Lucinde, the free-thinking admirer of Fichte,
who, in his Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (Essay on the Idea of
Republicanism), called the democratic republic, with female suffrage, the only
reasonable form of government, is converted to Catholicism, becomes a mystic
and a faithful servant of the Church, and in his later writings endeavours to
promote the cause of reactionary absolutism. Novalis and Schleiermacher, who in
their early writings display a mixture of pantheism and pietism, of Spinoza and
Zinzendorf, steadily drift away from Spinoza and approach orthodoxy. In his later
life Schleiermacher recants those Letters on Lucinde which he had written in a
spirit of the purest youthful enthusiasm. Novalis, who in his youthful letters
declares himself "prepared for any sort of enlightenment," and hopes that he may
live to see "a new massacre of St. Bartholemew, a wholesale destruction of
despotisms and prisons," who desires a republic, and who, at the time when
Fichte is prosecuted for atheism, remarks, "Brave Fichte is really fighting for us
all,"—this same Novalis ends by looking on the king in the light of an earthly
Providence, condemning Protestantism as revolutionary, defending the temporal
power of the Pope, and extolling the spirit of Jesuitism. Fouqué, the knight
without fear and without reproach, becomes in the end a pietist Don Quixote,
whose great desire is a return to the conditions of feudalism. Clemens Brentano,
in his youth the most mettlesome of poets, who both in life and literature made
war upon every species of convention, becomes the credulous secretary of a nun,
a hysterical visionary; does nothing for the space of five years but fill volume
after volume with the sayings of Anna Katharina Emmerich. Zacharias Werner is
a variant of the same Romantic type. He starts in his career as a friend of
"enlightenment"; but soon a process of moral dissolution begins; he first extols
Luther, then turns Roman Catholic and recants his eulogy; in the end he becomes
a priest, and as such displays, both in his life and in his sentimentally gross
writings and sermons, a combination of coarse sensuality and priestly unction.
And Steffens—he who stormed the heaven of German Romanticism, carried the
sacred fire to Denmark, and set men's minds in such violent uproar that he was
compelled to leave his country—what of him? what was he? An upright, weak
character, with a brain charged with confused enthusiasms; all feeling and
imitative fancy; no lucidity of thought or pregnant concision of style. It is literally
impossible to read the so-called scientific writings of his later period; one runs
the risk of being drowned in watery sentimentality or smothered by ennui.
"When," says Julian Schmidt, "he expounded the Naturphilosophie in his broken
German from the professorial chair, his mathematical calculations came out
wrong and his experiments failed, but his audience was carried away by his
earnestness, his almost religious solemnity, his naïve, child-like enthusiasm."

Naïveté was a quality that the Northerner of those days seldom lacked. In his best
days, Steffens, captivated by the theories of the Naturphilosophie, took an
innocent pleasure in tracing the attributes of the human mind in minerals, in
humanising geology and botany. But the Revolution of July turned his head.
Inflamed by pietism, that elderly lady who for the last thirteen years had been the
object of his affections, and for whose sake he had already more than once
entered the lists, he closed his literary career with a series of feeble attacks upon
the young writers of post-revolutionary Germany.
In this he was only following in the footsteps of his master, Schelling. Schelling,
who, in marked contrast to Fichte with his clear doctrine of the Ego, dwells upon
the mysterious nature of the mind, and bases not only philosophy, but also art and
religion, upon the perception of genius, the so-called "intellectual intuition,"
displays both in his doctrine and in his want of method the arbitrariness, the
lawlessness, which is the kernel of Romanticism. As early as 1802, in his Bruno,
he used the significant expression and future catchword, "Christian philosophy,"
though he still maintained that, in genuine religious value, the Bible is not to be
compared with the sacred books of India—a theory which even Görres
champions in the early stage of his literary career. Having, like Novalis, at Tieck's
instigation, made a close study of Jakob Böhme and the other mystics, Schelling
began to philosophise mystically on the subject of "Nature in God," an expression
appropriated by Martensen in his Spekulative Dogmatik. But when, shortly
afterwards, a patent of nobility was conferred on him (as professor at the
University of Munich), and he was made President of the Academy of Science in
Catholic and clerical Bavaria, the famous "Philosophy of Revelation"
(Offenbarungsphilosophie) commenced to germinate in his mind. Soon the
transformation was complete; the fiery enthusiast had become a courtier, the
prophet a charlatan. With his mysteries, his announcements of a marvellous
science, "which had hitherto been considered impossible," his refusal to print his
wisdom, to do anything but communicate it verbally, and even then not in its
entirety, he qualified himself for being called, after Hegel's death, to Berlin, to
lend a helping hand to State religion in the "Christian-Germanic" police-governed
Prussia of the day, and to teach a State philosophy, for which, as he himself said,
the only suitable name is Christology. Here it was that the young generation, the
Hegelians of the Left, fell upon him and tore his mystic cobweb into a thousand
pieces.
Yet Schelling is the least irrational of the Romantic philosophers. He is
vehemently accused of heresy by Franz Baader, the reincarnated Jakob Böhme,
the object of Kierkegaard's admiration, who reproaches him with setting the
Trinity upon a logical balance-pole, and, still worse, with daring to deny the

existence of a personal devil. The utterances of the others are in keeping with
this. Schubert writes The Symbolism of Dreams—was not the dream the ideal of
Romanticism?—occupies himself in all seriousness with interpreting them, happy
in his persuasion that clairvoyance and visions are the highest sources of
knowledge. The vision-seer of Prevorst, whom Strauss, characteristically enough,
begins his public career by exposing, plays an important part in those days. Then
there is Görres, who at the time of the great Revolution was "inspired to
triumphal song by the fall of Rome and the dissolution of the Holy Roman
Empire," and who afterwards took an active and honourable part in rousing
German patriotic spirit during the struggle against Napoleon; this same Görres
becomes the author of Christian Mysticism (a book which Kierkegaard read with
shudders of awe), revels in the blood of martyrs, gloats over the agonies and
ecstasies of the saints, enumerates the different aureoles, nail-prints, and wounds
in the side by which they are distinguished, and prostrates himself in the dust, he,
the old Jacobin, before the one true Catholic Church, chanting the praises of the
Holy Alliance. To these add the politicians: Adam Müller, who, as Gotschall has
aptly said, pursues in politics the quest of Novalis's "blue flower," who would
fain fuse State, Science, Church, and Stage into one marvellous unit; Haller, who
concealed his conversion to Catholicism in order to retain his appointments, and
who, in his Restauration der Staatswissenschaften (Revival of the Science of
Statesmanship), bases this science upon theocracy; Leo (scathingly criticised by
Ruge), who, in the same spirit, inveighs against the humanity of the age and its
reluctance to shed the blood of Radicals; and Stahl, who, in his Philosophy of
Law, compares marriage to the relation between Christ and the Church, the
family to the Trinity, and the earthly right of succession to man's right to the
heavenly inheritance. Taking all this together, one feels as if Romanticism ended
in a sort of witches' Sabbath, in which the philosophers play the part of the old
crones, amidst the thunders of the obscurantists, the insane yells of the mystics,
and the shouts of the politicians for temporal and ecclesiastical despotism, while
theology and theosophy fall upon the sciences and suffocate them with their
caresses.

[1] G. L. Plitt: Aus Schelling's Leben, i. 309.
[2] G. Brandes: Samlede Skrifter, i. 464.

I

THE PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM

Any one who makes acquaintance with the Germany of to-day, either by
travelling in the country or by reading about it, and then compares it with the
Germany of the beginning of the century, is astounded by the contrast. What a
distance between then and now! Who would believe that this Realistic Germany
had ever been a Romantic Germany!
Public utterances, private conversation, the very physiognomy of the towns, bear
in our days a distinct stamp of realism. Walk along any street in Berlin, and you
meet men in uniform, officers and privates, erect, decorated. The literature in the
windows of the bookshops has for the most part a practical tendency. Even the
furniture and ornaments are influenced by the new spirit. One cannot imagine
anything more prosaic and warlike than the shop of a Berlin dealer in fancy
articles. On the clocks, where of old a knight in armour knelt and kissed his lady's
finger-tips, Uhlans and Cuirassiers now stand in full uniform. Conical bullets
hang as trinkets from watch-chains, and piled muskets form candelabra. The
metal in fashion is iron. The word in fashion is also iron. The present occupation
of this nation of philosophers and poets is assuredly not poetry-writing and
philosophising. Even highly cultured Germans know little about philosophy now-
a-days—not one German student in twenty has read a word of Hegel; interest in
poetry, as such, is practically dead; political and social questions rouse a hundred
times more attention than problems of culture or psychical conundrums.
And this is the people which once was lost in Romantic reveries and speculations,
and saw its prototype in Hamlet! Hamlet and Bismarck! Bismarck and
Romanticism! Unquestionably the great German statesman succeeded in carrying
all Germany with him chiefly because he offered to his country in his own person
the very qualities of which it had so long felt the want. Through him politics have
been substituted for æsthetics. Germany has been united; the military monarchy
has swallowed up the small States, and with them all their feudal idylls; Prussia
has become the Piedmont of Germany, and has impressed its orderly and
practical spirit upon the new empire; and simultaneously with this, natural
science has supplanted or metamorphosed philosophy, and the idea of nationality
has superseded or modified the "humanity" ideal. The War of Liberation of 1813
was pre-eminently a result of enthusiasm; the victories of 1870 were pre-
eminently a result of the most careful calculation.
The idea which is the guiding star of the new Germany is the idea of organising
itself as a whole. It pervades both life and literature. The expression "In Reih' und
Glied"—In Ordered Ranks—(the title of a novel by Spielhagen) might be the

universal watchword. The national aim is to gather together that which has been
scattered, to diffuse the culture which has been the possession of too few, to
found a great state, a great society; and it is required of the individual that he
shall sacrifice his individuality for the sake of adding to the power of the whole,
of the mass. The power of the mass! This idea may be traced in all the most
remarkable phenomena of the age. Belief in it underlies the calculations of
Bismarck, the agitation of Lassalle, the tactics of Moltke, and the music of
Wagner. A desire to educate the people and unite them in a common aim is the
mainspring of the literary activity of the prose authors of the period. A common
feature of all the works which most clearly reflect the times is that they keep to
the subject, to the matter in hand. The influence of the great idea, "the power of
the mass," makes itself felt here too. In the new literature the relation of the
individual to the State, the sacrifice of personal volition and originality entailed
by the yoking of the Ego to the State chariot, presents itself in marked contrast to
the Romanticist worship of the talented individual with all his peculiarities, and
the Romanticist indifference to everything historical and political. Romantic
literature was always pre-eminently drawing-room literature, the ideal of
Romanticism being intellectual society and æsthetic tea-parties (vide the
conversations in Tieck's Fantasus).
How different everything was in those old days! In both life and literature the
detached Ego, in its homeless independence, is omnipresent. The guiding star
here is, indeed, nought else but the free, unhistorical Ego. The country is divided
into a multitude of small States, ruled by three hundred sovereigns and fifteen
hundred semi-sovereigns. In these States the so-called "enlightened" despotism of
the eighteenth century prevails, with its narrow, petrified social conditions and
relations. The nobleman is lord and master of his serfs, the father, lord and master
of his family—everywhere stern justice, but no equity. There are in reality no
great tasks for the individual, hence there is no room for genius. The theatre is the
only place where those who are not of princely birth can gain any experience of
all the manifold phases of human life, hence the stage mania of literature.
Lacking any social field in which to work, all activity necessarily takes the form
either of war with reality or flight from it. Flight is prepared for by the influence
of the rediscovered antique and of Winckelmann's writings; war, by the influence
of the sentimentally melancholy English writers (Young, Sterne) and of
Rousseau, reverenced as the apostle of nature, who, as Schiller expressed it,
"would fain out of Christians make men."
Our first proceeding must be to trace the rising of this star, the genesis of this
free, Romantic Ego, to whom, be it remembered, all the greatest intellects of
Germany stood sponsor.

It was Lessing who laid the foundations of the intellectual life of modern
Germany. Clear of thought, strong of will, indefatigably active, he was a reformer
in every matter in which he interested himself. With perfect consciousness of
what he was doing, he enlightened and educated the German mind. He was the
embodiment of manly independence and vigorous, tireless militancy. His
personal ideal, as it is revealed in his life and writings, was proud independence
in combination with a wise love of his fellow-men, which overcame all
differences of creed. Hence, solitary as he stood in his own day, his Ego became a
source of light. He was the "Prometheus of German prose." His great
achievement was that of freeing German culture for all time from the swaddling
bands of theology, as Luther had freed it from those of Catholicism. His life and
his criticism were action, and to him the essence of poetry too was action. All his
characters are instinct with dramatic passion. In opposition to the theological
doctrine of punishment and reward, he maintained that to do right for the sake of
doing right is the highest morality. And for him the history of the world became
the history of the education of the human race. To a certain extent the word
"education" is employed by him merely as a concession to his readers, who, he
knew, could not conceive of any development without a divine educator; but, all
the same, the idea of natural development is not an idea with which he was
familiar. To him, history is the record of "enlightenment." The Ego to him is not
nature, but pure mind.
In reality, all that was best in Lessing was entirely unsympathetic to the new
group of Romanticists; they had less in common with him than with any other of
the great German authors, Schiller not excepted. Nevertheless, it was natural
enough that they should refuse to acknowledge any connection between Lessing
and those of his disciples (men such as Nicolai, Engel, Garve, and Schütz), who
were, from the "enlightenment" standpoint, their bitter enemies and ruthless
persecutors. This was done by Friedrich Schlegel in an essay in which, while
praising the power and the width of Lessing's grasp, he lays chief stress upon
everything in him that is irregular, boldly revolutionary, unsystematic, and
paradoxical, dwells on his bellicose wit, and draws attention to everything that
can be construed into cynicism. The Romanticists could not possibly claim a
champion of reason, pure and simple, as their forerunner, hence they attempted to
characterise the nutritive element in Lessing's works as mere seasoning, as the
salt which preserves from corruption.
They owed far more to Herder. They evidence their descent from him both by
their continuation of the Sturm und Drang period and by their capacity of
understanding and reproducing the poetry of all countries. In Herder the new
century germinated, as in Lessing the old had come to its close. Herder sets

genesis and growth above thought and action. To him the true man is not only a
thinking and moral being, but a portion of nature. He loves and sets most store by
the original; he prefers intuition to reason, and would overcome narrow-
mindedness, not by reason, but by originality. The man of intuitions is to him the
most human. His own genius was the genius of receptivity. He expanded his Ego
until it comprehended every kind of originality, but it was by virtue of feeling
that he comprehended, that he absorbed into his soul a wealth of life, human and
national.
From Herder the Romanticists derive that which is most valuable in their literary
criticism—the universal receptivity which finds expression in the impulse to
translate and explain; from him they derive the first stimulus to a scientific study
of both European and Asiatic languages; from him comes their love for what is
national in both their own and foreign literature, their love of Spanish romance
and of Shakespeare's plays. Herder grasped things in their entirety as did Goethe
after him. His profound comprehension of national peculiarities becomes in
Goethe the genius's intuition of the typical in nature, and is exalted by Schelling
under the name of "intellectual intuition." The objection of the Romanticists to
the idea of aim or purpose may be traced back to Herder. His theory of history
excluded the idea of purpose: what happens has a cause and is subject to laws,
but cannot be explained by anything which has not yet happened, i.e. by a
purpose. The Romanticists transferred this theory into the personal, the psychical
domain. To them purposelessness is another name for Romantic genius; the man
of genius lives without a definite purpose; purposelessness is idleness, and
idleness is the mark and privilege of the elect. In this caricature of a philosophy
there is not much resemblance to Herder's. But he is the originator of a new
conception of genius, of the belief, namely, that genius is intuitive, that it consists
in a certain power of perceiving and apprehending without any resort to abstract
ideas. It is this conception which, with the Romanticists, becomes scorn of
experimental methods in science, and approbation of extraordinary vagaries in
art.
Goethe was the fulfilment of all that Herder had promised. To him man was not
merely theoretically the last link in nature's chain; the men in his works were
themselves natures; and in his scientific research he discerned with the eye of
genius the universal laws of evolution. His own Ego was a microcosm, and
produced the effect of such on the most discerning of his younger
contemporaries. "Goethe and life are one," says Rahel. So profound was his
insight into nature, so entirely was he a living protest against every supernatural
belief, that he did what in him lay to deprive genius of its character of apparent
incomprehensibility and contrariety to reason, by explaining (in his

autobiography, Wahrheit und Dichtung) his own genius, the most profound and
universal of the age, as a natural product developed by circumstances—thereby
creating the type of literary criticism to which the Romanticists were strongly
opposed.
From Goethe the young generation derived their theory of the rights and the
importance of the great, free personality. He had always lived his own life, and
had always lived it fully and freely. Without making any attack whatever on the
existing conditions of society, he had remoulded, according to his own
requirements, the social relations in which he found himself placed. He becomes
the soul of the youthful and joyous court of Weimar, with the audacity of youth
and genius drawing every one with him into a whirl of gaiety—fêtes, picnics,
skating expeditions, masquerades—animated by a wild joy in nature, which is
now "lightened," now "darkened" by love affairs of a more or less dubious
character. Jean Paul writes to a friend that he can only describe the morals of
Weimar to him by word of mouth. When we hear that even skating was a scandal
to the worthy Philistines of that town, we are not surprised by old Wieland's ill-
natured remark, that the circle in question appeared to him to be aiming at
"brutalising animal nature." Thus it was that the sweet, refined coquette, Frau von
Stein, became Goethe's muse for ten whole years, the original of Leonore and
Iphigenia; and later he created a still greater scandal by taking into his house
Christiane Vulpius (the young girl whose presence had become a necessity to
him, and who, in spite of her faults, never embittered his life by making any
demands upon him), and living with her for eighteen years before obtaining the
sanction of the Church to their union.
Goethe's as well as Schiller's youthful works had been inspired by what the
Germans call the "Freigeisterei" of passion, its demand for freedom, its instinct of
revolt. Both breathe one and the same spirit, the spirit of defiance. Goethe's Die
Geschwister treats of the passion of brother for sister. The conclusion of Stella, in
its original form, is a justification of bigamy; and Jean Paul, too, in his Siebenkäs,
treats of bigamy as a thing perfectly permissible in the case of a genius to whom
the first tie has become burdensome. Götz represents the tragic fate of the man of
genius who rises in revolt against a lukewarm and corrupt age. Schiller's Die
Räuber, with its device In Tyrannos, and its motto from Hippocrates, "That which
medicine cannot cure iron cures, and that which iron cannot cure fire cures," is a
declaration of war against society. Karl Moor is the noble-hearted idealist, who in
"the castrated century" is inevitably doomed to perish as a criminal. Schiller's
robbers are not highwaymen, but revolutionaries. They do not plunder, but
punish. They have separated themselves from society to revenge themselves upon
it for the wrongs it has done them. Schiller's defiance is still more personally

expressed in those poems of his first period which were written under the
influence of his relations with Frau von Kalb, poems re-written and entirely
altered in the later editions. In the one which ultimately received the title Der
Kampf, but which was originally called Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft, he writes:
—
"Woher dies Zittern, dies unnennbare Entsetzen,
Wenn mich dein liebevoller Arm umschlang?
Weil Dich ein Eid, den auch nur Wallungen verletzen,
In fremde Fesseln zwang?

"Weil ein Gebrauch, den die Gesetze heilig prägen,
Des Zufalls schwere Missethat geweiht?
Nein—unerschrocken trotz ich einem Bund entgegen,
Den die erröthende Natur bereut.

"O zittre nicht—Du hast als Sünderin geschworen,
Ein Meineid ist der Reue fromme Pflicht,
Das Herz war mein, das Du vor dem Altar verloren,
Mit Menschenfreuden spielt der Himmel nicht."[1]
Comical as this naïve sophistry sounds, and unreliable as is the assurance that
Heaven will not permit itself now and again to play with human happiness, the
spirit of the verses is unmistakable; and, as Hettner aptly observes, Don Carlos
uses almost the same words: "The rights of my love are older than the ceremonies
at the altar."
The model for Schiller's young Queen Elizabeth was Charlotte von Kalb. This
lady, the passion of the poet's youth, had been unwillingly forced into matrimony
by her parents. She and Schiller met in 1784, and in 1788 they were still
meditating a permanent union of their destinies. Soon after Schiller left her, she
became Jean Paul's mistress. (Caroline Schlegel jestingly calls her Jeannette
Pauline.) Jean Paul characterises her thus: "She has two great possessions: great
eyes (I never saw their like) and a great soul." He himself confesses that it is she
whom he has described in one of his principal works as the Titaness, Linda. In
Titan (118 Zykel) we are told of Linda that she must be tenderly treated, not only
on account of her delicacy, but also in the matter of her aversion to matrimony,
which is extreme. She cannot even accompany a friend to the altar, which she
calls the scaffold of woman's liberty, the funeral pyre of the noblest, freest love.
To take, she says, the best possible view of it, the heroic epic of love is there
transformed into the pastoral of marriage. Her sensible friend vainly insists that

her aversion to marriage can have no other ground than her hatred of priests; that
wedlock only signifies everlasting love, and all true love regards itself as
everlasting; that there are as many unhappy free-love connections as marriages, if
not more, &c.
Frau von Kalb herself writes to Jean Paul: "Why all this talk about seduction?
Spare the poor creatures, I beg of you, and alarm their hearts and consciences no
more. Nature is petrified enough already. I shall never change my opinion on this
subject; I do not understand this virtue, and cannot call any one blessed for its
sake. Religion here upon earth is nothing else than the development and
maintenance of the powers and capacities with which our natures have been
endowed. Man should not submit to compulsion, but neither should he acquiesce
in wrongful renunciation. Let the bold, powerful, mature human nature, which
knows and uses its strength, have its way. But in our generation human nature is
weak and contemptible. Our laws are the outcome of wretchedness and dire
necessity, seldom of wisdom. Love needs no laws."
A vigorous mind speaks to us in this letter. The leap from this to the idea of
Lucinde is not a long one, but the fall to the very vulgar elaboration of Lucinde is
great. We do not, however, rightly understand these outbursts until we understand
the social conditions which produced them, and realise that they are not isolated
and accidental tirades, but are conditioned by the position in which the majority
of poetic natures stood to society at that time.
Weimar was then the headquarters and gathering-place of Germany's classical
authors. It is not difficult to understand how they came to gather in this little
capital of a little dukedom. Of Germany's two great monarchs, Joseph the Second
was too much occupied with his efforts at reform, too eager for the spread of
"enlightenment," to have any attention to spare for German poetry; and the
Voltairean Frederick of Prussia was too French in his tastes and intellectual
tendencies to take any interest in German poets. It was at the small courts that
they were welcomed. Schiller lived at Mannheim, Jean Paul at Gotha, Goethe at
Weimar. Poetry had had no stronghold in Germany for many a long year, but now
Weimar became one. Thither Goethe summoned Herder; Wieland had been there
since 1772. Schiller received an appointment in the adjacent Jena. Weimar was,
then, the place where passion, as poetical, compared with the prosaic conventions
of society, was worshipped most recklessly and with least prejudice, in practice
as well as theory. "Ah! here we have women!" cries Jean Paul when he comes to
Weimar. "Everything is revolutionarily daring here; that a woman is married
signifies nothing." Wieland "revives himself" by taking his former mistress,

Sophie von la Roche, into his house, and Schiller invites Frau von Kalb to
accompany him to Paris.
We thus understand how it was that Jean Paul, when in Weimar, and under the
influence of Frau von Kalb's personality, exclaimed: "This much is certain; the
heart of the world is beating with a more spiritual and greater revolution than the
political, and one quite as destructive."
What revolution? The emancipation of feeling from the conventions of society;
the heart's audacious assumption of its right to regard its own code of laws as the
new moral code, to re-cast morals in the interests of morality, and occasionally in
the interests of inclination. The Weimar circle had no desire, no thought for
anything beyond this, had neither practical nor social reforms in view. It is a
genuinely German trait that outwardly they made deep obeisance to the laws
which they privately evaded. In conversation, Goethe, in his riper years,
invariably maintained that the existing conventions regulating the relations of the
sexes were absolutely necessary in the interests of civilisation; and in their books
authors gave expression to revolutionary sentiments which were more or less
their own, only to recant at the end of the book. The hero either confesses his
error, or commits suicide, or is punished for his defiance of society, or renounces
society altogether (Karl Moor, Werther, Tasso, Linda). It is exactly the proceeding
of the heretical authors of the Middle Ages, who concluded their books with a
notice that everything in them must of course be interpreted in harmony with the
doctrines and decrees of Holy Mother Church.
Into this Weimar circle of gifted women Madame de Staël, "the whirlwind in
petticoats," as she has been called, is introduced when she comes to Germany. In
the midst of them she produces the effect of some strange wild bird. What a
contrast between her aims and their predilections I With them everything is
personal, with her by this time everything is social. She has appeared before the
public; she is striking doughty blows in the cause of social reform. For such
deeds even the most advanced of these German women of the "enlightenment"
period are of much too mild a strain. Her aim is to revolutionise life politically,
theirs to make it poetical. The idea of flinging the gauntlet to a Napoleon would
never have entered the mind of any one of them. What a use to make of a lady's
glove, a pledge of love! It is not the rights of humanity, but the rights of the heart
which they understand; their strife is not against the wrongs of life but against its
prose. The relation of the gifted individual to society does not here, as in France,
take the form of a conflict between the said individual's rebellious assertion of his
liberty and the traditional compulsion of society, but of a conflict between the
poetry of the desires of the individual and the prose of political and social

conventions. Hence the perpetual glorification in Romantic literature of capacity
and strength of desire, of wish; a subject to which Friedrich Schlegel in particular
perpetually recurs. It is in reality the one outwardly directed power that men
possess—impotence itself conceived as a power.
We find the same admiration of wish in Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller (Either-Or).
"The reason why Aladdin is so refreshing is that we feel the childlike audacity of
genius in its wildly fantastic wishes. How many are there in our day who dare
really wish?" &c. The childlike, for ever the childlike! But who can wonder that
wish, the mother of religions, the outward expression of inaction, became the
catchword of the Romanticists? Wish is poetry; society as it exists, prose. It is
only when we judge them from this standpoint that we rightly understand even
the most serene, most chastened works of Germany's greatest poets. Goethe's
Tasso, with its conflict between the statesman and the poet (i.e. between reality
and poetry), its delineation of the contrast between these two who complete each
other, and are only unlike "because nature did not make one man of them," is, in
spite of its crystalline limpidity of style and its keynote of resignation, a product
of the self-same long fermentation which provides the Romantic School with all
its fermentative matter. The theme of Wilhelm Meister is in reality the same. It,
too, represents the gradual, slow reconciliation and fusion of the dreamed of ideal
and the earthly reality. But only the greatest minds rose to this height; the main
body of writers of considerable, but less lucid intellect never got beyond the
inward discord. The more poetry became conscious of itself as a power, the more
the poet realised his dignity, and literature became a little world in itself with its
own special technical interests, the more distinctly did the conflict with reality
assume the subordinate form of a conflict with philistinism (see, for instance,
Eichendorff's Krieg den Philistern). Poetry no longer champions the eternal
rights of liberty against the tyranny of outward circumstances; it champions itself
as poetry against the prose of life. This is the Teutonic, the German-
Scandinavian, that is to say, the narrow literary conception of the service that
poetry is capable of rendering to the cause of liberty.
"We must remember," says Kierkegaard (Begrebet Ironi, p. 322), "that Tieck and
the entire Romantic School entered, or believed they entered, into relations with a
period in which men were, so to speak, petrified, in final, unalterable social
conditions. Everything was perfected and completed, in a sort of divine Chinese
perfection, which left no reasonable longing unsatisfied, no reasonable wish
unfulfilled. The glorious principles and maxims of 'use and wont' were the
objects of a pious worship; everything, including the absolute itself, was
absolute; men refrained from polygamy; they wore peaked hats; nothing was
without its significance. Each man felt, with the precise degree of dignity that

corresponded to his position, what he effected, the exact importance to himself
and to the whole, of his unwearied endeavour. There was no frivolous
indifference to punctuality in those days; all ungodliness of that kind tried to
insinuate itself in vain. Everything pursued its tranquil, ordered course; even the
suitor went soberly about his business; he knew that he was going on a lawful
errand, was taking a most serious step. Everything went by clockwork. Men
waxed enthusiastic over the beauties of nature on Midsummer Day; were
overwhelmed by the thought of their sins on the great fast-days; fell in love when
they were twenty, went to bed at ten o'clock. They married and devoted
themselves to domestic and civic duties; they brought up families; in the prime of
their manhood notice was taken in high places of their honourable and successful
efforts; they lived on terms of intimacy with the pastor, under whose eye they did
the many generous deeds which they knew he would recount in a voice trembling
with emotion when the day came for him to preach their funeral sermon. They
were friends in the genuine sense of the word, ein wirklicher Freund, wie man
wirklicher Kanzleirat war."
I fail to see anything typical in this description. Except that we wear round hats
instead of peaked ones, every word of it might apply to the present day; there is
nothing especially indicative of one period more than another. No; the distinctive
feature of the period in question is the gifted writer's, the Romanticist's,
conception of philistinism. In my criticism of Johan Ludvig Heiberg's first
Romantic attempts, I wrote: "They (the Romanticists) looked upon it from the
philosophical point of view as finality, from the intellectual, as narrow-
mindedness; not, like us, from the moral point of view, as contemptibility. With it
they contrasted their own infinite longing.... They confronted its prose with their
own youthful poetry; we confront its contemptibility with our virile will"
(Samlede Skrifter, i. p. 467). As a general rule, then, they, with their thoughts and
longings, fled society and reality, though now and again, as already indicated,
they attempted, if not precisely to realise their ideas in life, at least to sketch a
possible solution of the problem how to transform reality in its entirety into
poetry.
Not that they show a spark of the indignation or the initiative which we find in
the French Romantic author (George Sand, for instance); they merely amuse
themselves with elaborating revolutionary, or at least startling fancies.
That which Goethe had attained to, namely, the power of moulding his
surroundings to suit his own personal requirements, was to the young generation
the point of departure. In this particular they from their youth saw the world from
Goethe's point of view; they made the measure of freedom which he had won for

himself and the conditions which had been necessary for the full development of
his gifts and powers, the average, or more correctly the minimum, requirement of
every man with talent, no matter how little. They transformed the requirements of
his nature into a universal rule, ignored the self-denial he had laboriously
practised and the sacrifices he had made, and not only proclaimed the
unconditional rights of passion, but, with tiresome levity and pedantic lewdness,
preached the emancipation of the senses. And another influence, very different
from that of Goethe's powerful self-assertion, also made itself felt, namely, the
influence of Berlin. To Goethe's free, unrestrained humanity there was added in
Berlin an ample alloy of the scoffing, anti-Christian spirit which had emanated
from the court of Frederick the Great, and the licence which had prevailed at that
of his successor.
But both Goethe and Schiller paved the way for Romanticism not only positively,
by their proclamation of the rights of passion, but also negatively, by the
conscious attitude of opposition to their own age which they assumed in their
later years. In another form, the Romanticist's aversion to reality is already to be
found in them. I adduce two famous instances of the astonishing lack of interest
shown by Goethe, the greatest creative mind of the day, in political realities; they
prove at the same time how keen was his interest in science. Writing of the
campaign against France during the French Revolution, a campaign in which he
took part, he mentions that he spent most of his time in observing "various
phenomena of colour and of personal courage." And after the battle of Jena
Knebel writes: "Goethe has been busy with optics the whole time. We study
osteology under his guidance, the times being well adapted to such study, as all
the fields are covered with preparations." The bodies of his fallen countrymen did
not inspire the poet with odes; he dissected them and studied their bones.
Such instances as these give us some impression of the attitude of aloofness
which Goethe as a poet maintained towards the events of his day. But we must
not overlook the fine side of his refusal to write patriotic war-songs during the
struggle with Napoleon. "Would it be like me to sit in my room and write war-
songs? In the night bivouacs, when we could hear the horses of the enemy's
outposts neighing, then I might possibly have done it. But it was not my life, that,
and not my affair; it was Theodor Körner's. Therefore his war-songs become him
well. I have not a warlike nature nor warlike tastes, and war-songs would have
been a mask very unbecoming to me. I have never been artificial in my poetry."
Goethe, like his disciple Heiberg, was in this case led to refrain by the strong
feeling that he only cared to write of what he had himself experienced; but he
also tells us that he regarded themes of a historical nature as "the most dangerous
and most thankless."

His ideal, and that of the whole period, is humanity pure and simple—a man's
private life is everything. The tremendous conflicts of the eighteenth century and
the "enlightenment" period are all, in consonance with the human idealism of the
day, contained in the life story, the development story, of the individual. But the
cult of humanity does not only imply lack of interest in history, but also a general
lack of interest in the subject for its own sake. In one of his letters to Goethe,
Schiller writes that two things are to be demanded of the poet and of the artist—
in the first place, that he shall rise above reality, and in the second, that he shall
keep within the bounds of the material, the natural. He explains his meaning thus:
The artist who lives amidst unpropitious, formless surroundings, and
consequently ignores these surroundings in his art, runs the risk of altogether
losing touch with the tangible, of becoming abstract, or, if his mind is not of a
robust type, fantastic; if, on the other hand, he keeps to the world of reality, he is
apt to be too real, and, if he has little imagination, to copy slavishly and vulgarly.
These words indicate, as it were, the watershed which divides the German
literature of this period. On the one side we have the unnational art-poetry of
Goethe and Schiller, with its continuation in the fantasies of the Romanticists,
and on the other side the merely sensational or entertaining literature of the hour
(Unterhaltungslitteratur), which is based on reality, but a philistine reality, the
literature of which Lafontaine's sentimental bourgeois romances, and the popular,
prosaic family dramas of Schröder, Iffland, and Kotzebue, are the best known
examples. It was a misfortune for German literature that such a division came
about. But, although the rupture of the better literature with reality first showed
itself in a startling form in the writings of the Romanticists, we must not forget
that the process had begun long before. Kotzebue had been the antipodes of
Schiller and Goethe before he stood in that position to the Romanticists. Of this
we get a vivid impression from the following anecdote.[2]
One day in the early spring of 1802, the little town of Weimar was in the greatest
excitement over an event which was the talk of high and low. It had long been
apparent that some special festivity was in preparation. It was known that a very
famous and highly respected man, President von Kotzebue, had applied privately
to the Burgomaster for the use of the newly decorated Town Hall. The most
distinguished ladies of the town had for a month past done nothing but order and
try on fancy dresses. Fräulein von Imhof had given fifty gold guldens for hers.
Astonished eyes had beheld a carver and gilder carrying a wonderful helmet and
banner across the street in broad daylight. What could such things be required
for? Were there to be theatricals at the Town Hall? It was known that an
enormous bell mould made of pasteboard had been ordered. For what was it to be
used? The secret soon came out. Some time before this, Kotzebue, famous

throughout Europe as the author of Menschenhass und Reue, had returned, laden
with Russian roubles and provided with a patent of nobility, to his native town, to
make a third in the Goethe and Schiller alliance. He had succeeded in gaining
admission to the court, and the next thing was to obtain admission to Goethe's
circle, which was also a court, and a very exclusive one. The private society of
intimates for whom Goethe wrote his immortal convivial songs
(Gesellschaftslieder) met once a week at his house. Kotzebue had himself
proposed for election by some of the lady members, but Goethe added an
amendment to the rules of the society which excluded the would-be intruder, and
prevented his even appearing occasionally as a guest. Kotzebue determined to
revenge himself by paying homage to Schiller in a manner which he hoped would
thoroughly annoy Goethe. The latter had just suppressed some thrusts at the
brothers Schlegel in Kotzebue's play, Die Kleinstädter, which was one of the
pieces in the repertory of the Weimar theatre; so, to damage the theatre, Kotzebue
determined to give a grand performance in honour of Schiller at the Town Hall.
Scenes from all his plays were to be acted, and finally The Bell was to be recited
to an accompaniment of tableaux vivants. At the close of the poem, Kotzebue,
dressed as the master-bellfounder, was to shatter the pasteboard mould with a
blow of his hammer, and there was to be disclosed, not a bell, but a bust of
Schiller. The Kotzebue party, however, had reckoned without their host, that is to
say, without Goethe. In all Weimar there was only one bust of Schiller, that which
stood in the library. When, on the last day, a messenger was sent to borrow it, the
unexpected answer was given, that never in the memory of man had a plaster cast
lent for a fête been returned in the condition in which it had been sent, and that
the loan must therefore be unwillingly refused. And one can imagine the
astonishment and rage of the allies when they heard that the carpenters, arriving
at the Town Hall with their boards, laths, and poles, had found the doors locked
and had received an intimation from the Burgomaster and Council that, as the
hall had been newly painted and decorated, they could not permit it to be used for
such a "riotous" entertainment.
This is only a small piece of provincial town scandal. But what is really
remarkable, what constitutes the kernel of the story, is the fact that the whole
company of distinguished ladies who had hitherto upheld the fame of Goethe
(Countess Henriette von Egloffstein; the beautiful lady of honour and poetess
Amalie von Imhof, at a later period the object of Gentz's adoration, whose fifty
gold guldens had been wasted, &c., &c.) took offence, and deserted his camp for
that of Kotzebue. Even the Countess Einsiedel, whom Goethe had always
specially distinguished, went over to the enemy. This shows how little real hold
the higher culture had as yet taken even on the highest intellectual and social

circles, and how powerful the man of letters still was who concerned himself with
real life and sought his subjects in his surroundings.
There had, most undoubtedly, been a time when Goethe and Schiller themselves
were realists. To both, in their first stage of restless ferment, reality had been a
necessity. Both had given free play to nature and feeling in their early
productions, Goethe in Götz and Werther, Schiller in Die Räuber. But after Götz
had set the fashion of romances of chivalry and highway robbery, Werther of
suicide, both in real life and in fiction, and Die Räuber of such productions as
Abällino, der grosse Bandit, the great writers, finding the reading world unable to
discriminate between originals and imitations, withdrew from the arena. Their
interest in the subject was lost in their interest in the form. The study of the
antique led them to lay ever-increasing weight upon artistic perfection. It was not
their lot to find a public which understood them, much less a people that could
present them with subjects, make demands of them—give them orders, so to
speak. The German people were still too undeveloped. When Goethe, at Weimar,
was doing what he could to help Schiller, he found that the latter, on account of
his wild life at Mannheim, his notoriety as a political refugee, and especially his
pennilessness, was regarded as a writer of most unfortunate antecedents. During
the epigram war (Xenienkampf) of 1797, both Goethe and Schiller were
uniformly treated as poets of doubtful talent. One of the pamphlets against them
is dedicated to "die zwei Sudelköche in Weimar und Jena" (the bunglers of
Weimar and Jena). It was Napoleon's recognition of Goethe, his wish to see and
converse with him, his exclamation: "Voilà un homme!" which greatly helped to
establish Goethe's reputation in Germany. A Prussian staff-officer, who was
quartered about this time in the poet's house, had never heard his name. His
publisher complained bitterly of the small demand for the collected edition of his
works; there was a much better sale for those of his brother-in-law, Vulpius
(author of Rinaldo Rinaldini). Tasso and Iphigenia could not compete with works
of such European fame as Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue; Goethe himself
tells us that they were only performed in Weimar once every three or four years.
Clearly enough it was the stupidity of the public which turned the great poets
from the popular path to glory; but it is equally clear that the new classicism,
which they so greatly favoured, was an ever-increasing cause of their
unpopularity. Only two of Goethe's works were distinct successes, Werther and
Hermann und Dorothea.
What were the proceedings of the two great poets after they turned their backs
upon their surroundings? Goethe made the story of his own strenuous intellectual
development the subject of plastic poetic treatment. But finding it impossible, so
long as he absorbed himself in modern humanity, to attain to the beautiful

simplicity of the old Greeks, he began to purge his works of the personal; he
composed symbolical poems and allegories, wrote Die Natürliche Tochter, in
which the characters simply bear the names of their callings, King, Ecclesiastic,
&c.; and the neo-classic studies, Achilleis, Pandora, Palæophron und Neoterpe,
Epimenides, and the Second Part of Faust. He began to employ Greek mythology
much as it had been employed in French classical literature, namely, as a
universally understood metaphorical language. He no longer, as in the First Part
of Faust, treated the individual as a type, but produced types which were
supposed to be individuals. His own Iphigenia was now too modern for him.
Ever more marked became that addiction to allegory which led Thorvaldsen too
away from life in his art. In his art criticism Goethe persistently maintained that it
is not truth to nature, but truth to art which is all-important; he preferred ideal
mannerism (such as is to be found in his own drawings preserved in his house in
Frankfort) to ungainly but vigorous naturalism. As theatrical director he acted on
these same principles; grandeur and dignity were everything to him. He upheld
the conventional tragic style of Calderon and Alfieri, Racine and Voltaire. His
actors were trained, in the manner of the ancients, to stand like living statues;
they were forbidden to turn profile or back to the audience, or to speak up the
stage; in some plays, in defiance of the customs of modern mimic art, they wore
masks. In spite of public opposition, he put A. W. Schlegel's Ion on the stage—a
professedly original play, in reality an unnatural adaptation from Euripides,
suggested by Iphigenia. Nay, he actually insisted, merely for the sake of
exercising the actors in reciting verse, on producing Friedrich Schlegel's Alarkos,
an utterly worthless piece, which might have been written by a talentless
schoolboy, and was certain to be laughed off the stage.[3] To such an extent as this
did he gradually sacrifice everything to external artistic form.
It is easy, then, to see how Goethe's one-sidedness prepared the way for that of
the Romanticists; it is not so easy to show that the same was the case with
Schiller. Schiller's dramas seem like prophecies of actual events. The French
Revolution ferments in Die Räuber (the play which procured for "Monsieur
Gille" the title of honorary citizen of the French Republic), and, as Gottschall
observes, "the eighteenth Brumaire is anticipated in Fiesko, the eloquence of the
Girondists in Posa, the Cæsarian soldier-spirit in Wallenstein, and the Wars of
Liberation in Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Wilhelm Tell." But in reality it is
only in his first dramas that Schiller allows himself to be influenced, without
second thought or ulterior purpose, by his theme. In all the later plays the
competent critic at once feels how largely the choice of subject has been
influenced by considerations of form. Henrik Ibsen once drew my attention to
this in speaking of Die Jungfrau von Orleans; he maintained that there is no

"experience" in that play, that it is not the result of powerful personal
impressions, but is a composition. And Hettner has shown this to be the relation
of the author to his work in all the later plays. From the year 1798 onwards,
Schiller's admiration for Greek tragedy led him to be always on the search for
subjects in which the Greek idea of destiny prevailed. Der Ring des Polykrates,
Der Taucher, and Wallenstein are dominated by the idea of Nemesis. Maria Stuart
is modelled upon the Œdipus Rex of Sophocles, and this particular historical
episode is chosen with the object of having a theme in which the tragic end, the
appointed doom, is foreknown, so that the drama merely gradually develops that
which is inevitable from the beginning. The subject of the Jungfrau von Orleans,
in appearance so romantic, is chosen because Schiller desired to deal with an
episode in which, after the antique manner, a direct divine message reached the
human soul—in which there is a direct material interposition of the divinity, and
yet the human being who is the organ of the divinity can be ruined, in genuine
Greek fashion, by her human weakness.
It was only in keeping with his general unrealistic tendency that Schiller, though
he was not in the least musical, should extol the opera at the expense of the
drama, and maintain the antique chorus to be far more awe-inspiring than modern
tragic dialogue. In Die Braut von Messina he himself produced a "destiny"
tragedy, which to all intents and purposes is a study in the manner of Sophocles.
Not even in Wilhelm Tell is his point of view a modern one; on the contrary, it is
in every particular purely Hellenic. The subject is not conceived dramatically, but
epically. The individual is marked by no special characteristic. It is merely an
accident that raises Tell above the mass and makes him the leader of the
movement. He is, as Goethe says, a "sort of Demos." Hence it is not the conflict
between two great, irreconcilable historical ideas that is presented in this play;
the men of Rütli have no sentimental attachment to liberty; it is neither the idea
of liberty nor the idea of country that produces the insurrection. Private ideas and
private interests, encroachments on family rights and rights of property, here
provide the mainspring of action, or rather of event, which in the other dramas is
provided by personal or dynastic ambition. It is explicitly signified to us that the
peasants do not aim at acquiring new liberties, but at maintaining old inherited
customs. On this point I may refer the reader to Lasalle, who develops the same
view with his usual ingenuity in the interesting preface to his drama, Franz von
Sickingen.
Thus, then, we see that even when Schiller, the most political and historical of the
German poets, appears to be most interested in history and politics, he is dealing
only to a limited extent with reality; and therefore it may be almost considered
proved, that distaste for historical and present reality—in other words,

subjectivism and idealism—were the characteristics of the whole literature of that
day.
But the spirit of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller is only one of the motive powers of
Romanticism. The other is the philosophy of Fichte. It was the Fichtean doctrine
of the Ego which gave to the Romantic individuality its character and force. The
axioms: All that is, is for us; What is for us can only be through us; Everything
that is, both natural and supernatural, exists through the activity of the Ego,
received an entirely new interpretation when transferred from the domain of
metaphysics to that of psychology. All reality is contained in the Ego itself, hence
the absolute Ego demands that the non-Ego which it posits shall be in harmony
with it, and is itself simply the infinite striving to pass beyond its own limits. It
was this conclusion of the Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Knowledge) which
fired the young generation. By the absolute Ego they understood, as Fichte
himself in reality did, though in a very different manner, not a divine being, but
the thinking human being. And this new and intoxicating idea of the absolute
freedom and power and self-sufficiency of the Ego, which, with the arbitrariness
of an autocratic monarch, obliges the whole world to shrink into nothing before
itself, is enthusiastically proclaimed by an absurdly arbitrary, ironical, and
fantastic set of young geniuses, half-geniuses, and quarter-geniuses. The Sturm
und Drang period, when the liberty men gloried in was the liberty of eighteenth
—century "enlightenment," reappeared in a more refined and idealistic form; and
the liberty now gloried in was nineteenth-century lawlessness.
Fichte's doctrine of a world-positing, world-creating Ego was at variance with
"sound human reason." This was one of its chief recommendations in the eyes of
the Romanticists. The Wissenschaftslehre was scientific paradox, but to them
paradox was the fine flower of thought. Moreover, the fundamental idea of the
doctrine was as radical as it was paradoxical. It had been evolved under the
impression of the attempt made by the French Revolution to transform the whole
traditional social system into a rational system (Vernunftstaat). The autocracy of
the Ego was Fichte's conception of the order of the world, and therefore in this
doctrine of the Ego the Romanticists believed that they possessed the lever with
which they could lift the old world from its hinges.
The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun with Fichte. He
explained the world as the result of an unconscious, yet to a thinker
comprehensible, act of the free, yet at the same time limited, Ego. This act, he
maintains, emanates from the creative imagination. By means of it the world
which we apprehend with the senses first becomes to us a real world. The whole
activity of the human mind, then, according to Fichte, springs from the creative

imagination; it is the instinct which he regards as the central force of the active
Ego. The analogy with the imaginative power which is so mighty in art is
evident. But what Fichte himself failed to perceive is, that imagination is by no
means a creative, but only a transforming, remodelling power, since what it acts
upon is only the form of the things conceived of, not their substance.
Fichte says that he "does not require 'things,' and does not make use of them,
because they prevent his self-dependence, his independence of all that is outside
of himself." This saying is closely allied to Friedrich Schlegel's observation, "that
a really philosophic human being should be able to tune himself at will in the
philosophical or philological, the critical or poetical, the historical or rhetorical,
the ancient or modern key, as one tunes an instrument, and this at any time and to
any pitch."
According to the Romantic doctrine, the artistic omnipotence of the Ego and the
arbitrariness of the poet can submit to no law. In this idea lies the germ of the
notorious Romantic irony in art, the treating of everything as both jest and
earnest, the eternal self-parody, the disturbing play with illusions alternately
summoned up and banished, which destroys all directness of effect in many of
the favourite works of the Romanticists.
The Romanticist's theory of art and life thus owes its existence to a mingling of
poetry with philosophy, a coupling of the poet's dreams with the student's
theories; it is a production of purely intellectual powers, not of any relation
between these powers and real life. Hence the excessively intellectual character
of Romanticism. Hence all the selfduplication, all the raising to higher powers, in
this poetry about poetry and this philosophising on philosophy. Hence its living
and moving in a higher world, a different nature. This too is the explanation of all
the symbolism and allegory in these half-poetical, half-philosophical works. A
literature came into being which partook of the character of a religion, and
ultimately joined issue with religion, and which owed its existence rather to a life
of emotion than a life of intellectual productiveness. Hence we understand how,
as A. W. Schlegel himself says, "it was often rather the ethereal melody of the
feelings that was lightly suggested than the feelings themselves that were
expressed in all their strength and fulness." It was not the thing itself that the
author wished to communicate to the reader, but a suggestion of the thing. It is
not in bright sunlight, but in twilight or mysterious quivering moonlight, on a far
horizon or in dreams, that we behold the figures of Romanticism. Hence too the
Romantic dilution or diminution of the terms expressing what is perceived by the
senses (Blitzeln, Aeugeln, Hinschatten), and also that interchange of the terms for

the impressions of the different senses, which makes the imagery confusedly
vague. In Zerbino Tieck writes of flowers:
"Die Farbe klingt; die Form ertönt, jedwede
Hat nach der Form und Farbe Zung' und Rede.
* * * * * * * * *
Sich Farbe, Duft, Gesang Geschwister nennen."[4]
The essential element in this literature is no longer the passion of the Sturm und
Drang period, but the free play of fancy, an activity of the imagination which is
neither restrained by the laws of reason nor by the relation of feeling to reality.
The higher, poetic sequences of ideas now introduced declare war against the
laws of thought, ridicule them as philistine. Their place is taken by caprices,
conceits, and vagaries. Fancy determines to dispense with reality, but despised
reality has its revenge in the unsubstantiality or anæmia of fancy; fancy defies
reason, but in this defiance there is an awkward contradiction; it is conscious and
premeditated—reason is to be expelled by reason. Seldom has any poetic school
worked under such a weight of perpetual consciousness of its own character as
did this. Conscious intention is the mark of its productions.
The intellectual inheritance to which the Romanticists succeeded was
overpoweringly great. The School came into existence when literature stood at its
zenith in Germany. This explains the early maturity of its members; their way
was made ready for them. They assimilated in their youth an enormous amount of
literary knowledge and of artistic technique, and thus started with an intellectual
capital such as no other young generation in Germany had ever possessed. They
clothed their first thoughts in the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare,
and, beginning thus, proceeded to create what Goethe called "the period of forced
talents." For the study of real human character and the execution of definite
artistic ideas they substituted the high-handedness of turbulent fancy. Common to
all the very dissimilar endeavours and productions of the Romanticists—to
Wackenroder's Klosterbruder, with its spiritual enthusiasm for art and ideal
beauty, to Lucinde, with its sensual worship of the flesh, to Tieck's melancholy
romances and tales, in which capricious fate makes sport of man, and to Tieck's
dramas and Hoffmann's stories, in which all form is lost and its place supplied by
the caprices and arabesques of whimsical fancy—common to them all, is that
law-defying self-assertion or assertion of the absolutism of the individual, which
is a result of war with narrowing prose, of the urgent demand for poetry and
freedom.
The absolute independence of the Ego isolates. Nevertheless these men soon
founded a school, and after its speedy disintegration several interesting groups

were formed. This is to be ascribed to their determination to make common cause
in procuring the victory, insuring the universal dominion, of the philosophy of
life which had been evolved by the great minds of Germany. They desired to
introduce this philosophy of the geniuses into life itself, to give it expression in
criticism, in poetry, in art theories, in religious exhortation, in the solution of
social, and even of political problems; and their first step towards this was violent
literary warfare. They were impelled partly by the necessity felt by great and
strong natures to impart one will and one mind to a whole band of fellow-
combatants, and partly by the inclination of men of talent, whose talent is
attacked and contested, to confront the overwhelming numbers of their opponents
with a small but superior force. In the case of the best men, the formation of a
school or a party was the result of exactly that lack of state organisation which
was the first condition of their isolating independence. The consciousness of
belonging to a people without unity as a nation, and without collective strength,
begot the endeavour to imbue the leading spirits of the aristocracy of intellect
with a new rallying principle.

[1] Whence this trembling, this nameless horror, when thy loving arms encircle me? Is
it because an oath, which, remember, even a thought is sufficient to break, has forced
strange fetters on thee?
Because a ceremony, which the laws have decreed to be sacred, has hallowed an
accidental, grievous crime? Nay—fearlessly defy a covenant of which blushing nature
repents.
O tremble not!—thine oath was a sin; perjury is the sacred duty of the repentant sinner;
the heart thou gavest away at the altar was mine; Heaven does not play with human
happiness.
[2] Goethe, Tag- und Jahreshefte, 1802; G. Waitz, Caroline, ii. 207; Goethe-Jahrbuch,
vi. 59, &c.
[3] "Your opinion of Alarkos is mine; nevertheless I think that we must dare
everything, outward success or non-success being of no consequence whatever. Our
gain seems to me to lie principally in the fact that we accustom our actors to repeat,
and ourselves to hear, this extremely accurate metre."—Goethe.
[4] "Their colours sing, their forms resound; each, according to its form and colour
finds voice and speech.... Colour, fragrance, song, proclaim themselves one family."

II

HÖLDERLIN

Outside the group which represents the transition from the Hellenism of Goethe
and Schiller to Romanticism stands a solitary figure, that of Hölderlin, one of the
noblest and most refined intellects of the day. Although their contemporary, he
was a pioneer of the German Romanticists, in much the same way as Andre
Chenier, another Hellenist, was a pioneer of French Romanticism. He was
educated with the future philosopher of the Romantic School, Schelling, and with
Hegel, the great thinker, who came after Romanticism, and he was the friend of
both of these, but had made acquaintance with none of the Romanticists proper
when insanity put an end to his intellectual activity.
Hölderlin was born in 1770, and became insane in 1802. Hence, although he
survived himself forty years, his life as an author is very little longer than
Hardenberg's or Wackenroder's.
That enmity to Hellenism, which to posterity appears one of the chief
characteristics of the Romantic movement, was not one of its original elements.
On the contrary, with the exception of Tieck, who certainly had no appreciation
of the Hellenic spirit, all the early Romanticists, but more especially the Schlegel
brothers, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, were enthusiastic admirers of ancient
Greece. It was their desire to enter into every feeling of humanity, and it was
among the Greeks that they at first found humanity in all its fulness. They longed
to break down the artificial social barriers of their time and escape to nature, and
at first they found nature among the Greeks alone. To them the genuinely human
was at the same time the genuinely Greek. Friedrich Schlegel, for example,
embarks on his career with the hope of being for literature all that Winckelmann
has been for art. In his essays "On Diotima" and "On the Study of Greek Poetry,"
he proclaims the superiority of Greek culture and Greek poetry to all other. There
is an indication of the later Schlegel in the attempt made to combat the false
modesty of modern times, and to prove that beauty is independent of moral laws,
which in no way concern art. Characteristic also is his demonstration of
Aristotle's lack of appreciation of the Greek Naturpoesie.
A similar but more enduring enthusiasm for ancient Greece was the very essence
of Hölderlin's being; and this enthusiasm did not find its expression in studies and
essays, but took lyric form, in prose as well as verse. Even as dramatist and
novelist, Hölderlin was the gifted lyric poet, that and nothing else. Haym has
aptly observed of his romances: "Joy in the ideal, the collapse of the ideal, and
grief over that collapse, constitute the theme which the Letters of Hyperion
develop with a force which never weakens and a fervour which is always alike
intense.... It is the irretrievable that is the cause of his suffering." And since the
ideal was embodied for him in Greek life, such as he dreamed it to have been, his

whole literary production is one longing lament over lost Hellas. Nothing could
be less Greek or more Romantic than this longing; it is of exactly the same
exaggerated character as Schack Staffeldt's enthusiasm for ancient Scandinavia
and Wackenroder's devotion to German antiquity. Hölderlin's landscapes are as
un-Greek as his modern Greeks in Hyperion, who are noble German enthusiasts,
strongly influenced by Schiller. We cannot doubt that he was aware of this
himself. But the lot of the solitary chosen spirits in Germany seemed to him a
terrible one. Although he shows himself in his poems to be an ardent patriot, and
although he sings the charms of romantic Heidelberg in antique strophes, yet
Germany and Greece to him represent barbarism and culture. Concerning his own
position to the Greeks he writes to his brother: "In spite of all my good-will, I
too, in all that I do and think, merely stumble along in the track of these unique
beings; and am often the more awkward and foolish in deed and word because,
like the geese, I stand flat-footed in the water of modernity, impotently
endeavouring to wing my flight upward towards the Greek heaven." And at the
close of Hyperion he says of the Germans: "They have been barbarians from time
immemorial, and industry, science, even religion itself, has only made them still
more barbarous, incapable of every divine feeling, too utterly depraved to enjoy
the happiness conferred by the Graces. With their extravagances and their
pettinesses, they are insupportable to every rightly constituted mind, dead and
discordant as the fragments of a broken vase." Of German poets and artists he
writes, that they present a distressing spectacle. "They live in the world like
strangers in their own house ... they grow up full of love and life and hope, and
twenty years later one sees them wandering about like shadows, silent and cold."
Therefore Hölderlin rejoices over the victories of the French, over the "gigantic
strides of the Republic," scoffs at all "the petty trickeries of political and
ecclesiastical Würtemberg and Germany and Europe," derides the "narrow-
minded domesticity" of the Germans, and bewails their lack of any feeling of
common honour and common property. "I cannot," he exclaims, "imagine a
people more torn asunder than are the Germans. You see artisans, but not men,
philosophers, but not men, priests, but not men, servants and masters, young and
old, but not men."
The conception of the State which we find in Hyperion is also quite in harmony
with the spirit of the age, and quite un-Hellenic. "The State dare not demand what
it cannot take by force. But what love and intellect give cannot be taken by force.
It must keep its hands off that, else we will take its laws and pillory them! Good
God! They who would make the State a school of morals do not know what a
crime they are committing. The State has always become a hell when man has
tried to make it his heaven."

Utterly un-Greek, wholly Romantic, is the love which Hyperion cherishes for his
Diotima. It is the same deep and tragic feeling which bound Hölderlin, the poor
tutor, to the mother of his pupils, Frau Susette Gontard, and determined his fate.
No Greek ever spoke of the woman he loved with the religious adoration which
Hölderlin expresses for his "fair Grecian." "Dear friend, there is a being upon this
earth in whom my spirit can and will repose for untold centuries, and then still
feel how puerile, face to face with nature, all our thought and understanding is."
And exactly the same Romantic, Petrarchian note is struck by Hyperion when he
speaks of Diotima. Diotima is "the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the
perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars." She is beauty itself, the
incarnation of the ideal. Love is to him religion, and his religion is love of beauty.
Beauty is the highest, the absolute ideal; it belongs, as a conception, to the world
of reason, and as a symbol, to the world of imagination. From his æsthetic point
of view, Hölderlin does not perceive that boundary line drawn by Kant between
the domains of reason and imagination. His theory, a species of poetic—
philosophic ecstasy, having points in common with both Schiller's Hellenism and
Schelling's transcendental idealism, is Romantic before the days of Romanticism.
Germinating Romanticism is also to be traced in the gleam of Christian feeling
which tinges his half-modern pantheism. He had been originally destined for the
Church, and had suffered much from the severe discipline of the monastery
where he was educated. In spite, however, of the many evidences of a pious
disposition which we find in his letters, he was a pagan in his poems. He disliked
priests, and steadily withstood his family's desire that he should become one. In
his Empedokles we come upon the following significant reply of the hero to the
priest Hermokrates:—
"Du weisst es ja, ich hab es dir bedeutet,
Ich kenne dich und deine schlimme Zunft.
Und lange Avar's ein Räthsel mir, wie euch
In ihrem Runde duldet die Natur.
Ach, als ich noch ein Knabe war, da mied
Euch Allverderber schon mein frommes Herz,
Das unbestechbar, innig liebend hing
An Sonn' und Aether und den Boten allen
Der grossen ferngeahndeten Natur;
Denn wohl hab ich's gefühlt in meiner Furcht,
Dass ihr des Herzens freie Götterliebe
Bereden möchtet zu gemeinem Dienst,
Und dass ich's treiben sollte so, wie ihr.
Hinweg! ich kann vor mir den Mann nicht sehn,

Der Göttliches wie ein Gewerbe treibt,
Sein Angesicht ist falsch und kalt und todt,
Wie seine Götter sind."[1]
There is not a trace in Hölderlin of the sanctimonious piety developed by the
other Romanticists, who, to begin with, were far more decided free-thinkers than
he. Yet his Hellenism is not pagan in the manner of Schiller's and Goethe's. There
is a fervency in it which is akin to Christian devotion; his poetic prayers to the
sun, the earth, and the air are those of a believer; and when, as in Empedokles, he
handles a purely pagan subject, the spirit of the treatment is such that we feel (as
we do in a later work, Kleist's Amphitryon) the Christian legend behind the
heathen. The position of Empedokles to the Pharisees of his day and country is
exactly that of Jesus to the Pharisees of Judea. Empedokles, like Jesus, is the
great prophet, and both his willing sacrificial death and the worship of which he
is the object awake feelings which remotely resemble those of the devout
Christian.
In Hölderlin we find in outline, light and delicate as if traced by a spirit, symbols
and emotions which the Romantic School develops, exaggerates, caricatures, or
simply obliterates.

[1] "'Tis nothing new; this I have told you oft;
I know you well, you and your evil kind.
And long it was a mystery to me
How Nature could endure you in her realm.
Corrupters of mankind! Even as a child,
My guileless heart shrank from you with distrust—
That honest, fervent heart, that loved the sun,
The cool fresh air, and all the messengers
Of Nature, dimly discerned and great.
For even then I timidly perceived
How ye would take our true love of the gods
And make it serve some baser, selfish end—
And that in this ye would that I should follow you.
Begone! I cannot look upon the man
Who practises religion as a trade;
His countenance is false and cold and dead,
As are his gods."

III

A. W. SCHLEGEL

In 1797, August Wilhelm Schlegel, then aged thirty, published the first volume of
his translation of Shakespeare. Rough drafts of several of the plays in this edition
have been found, and these faded, dusty manuscripts not only enable us to follow
the persevering, talented translator in his self-imposed task, but, when carefully
read, give us direct insight into his and his wife's spiritual life, and indeed into the
intellectual life of the whole period.[1]
Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts are not
always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work upon Romeo and Juliet in
the winter of 1795-96; in 1796 he married Caroline Böhmer; and we have a
complete copy of the first rough draft of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with
corrections in Schlegel's. In September 1797, as her letters show, she copied As
You Like It from an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere
copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay on Romeo and Juliet, which
ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister as the best
Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany up to that time. We recognise her
now and again in some outburst of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of
style than we are accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding
than her contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was
the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German literature.
But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as the manuscripts show us,
survive the first year of her married life. At first it is her handwriting which
predominates, and, though it is less frequently to be seen alongside of her
husband's in the manuscripts of those plays with which he was occupied during
the years 1797-98, her collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her
pen in the manuscript of the Merchant of Venice, which dates from the autumn of
1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist circle in Jena.
Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is discoverable.
Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea of the
progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two different texts of
the Midsummer Night's Dream.
Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had attempted to
translate Shakespeare line for line. The two tame prose translations by Wieland
and Eschenburg were, in fact, all that existed. As a student in Göttingen, Schlegel
made the first attempt to reproduce in German verse parts of the Midsummer
Night's Dream. From childhood he had been "an indefatigable verse-maker." His
talent was obviously inherited. Half a century before he and his brother made
their appearance, two brothers Schlegel had made a name for themselves in
literature—Johann Elias, who lived for many years in Copenhagen, was a friend

of Holberg, and, in everything connected with the stage, a forerunner of Lessing,
and Johann Adolph, father of August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who, without much
originality, possessed decided linguistic and plastic talent.
As a young student, August Wilhelm, already distinguished by his
impressionableness as a stylist and opinionativeness as an author, ardently
desired to make the acquaintance of Bürger, who was leading a lonely and
unhappy life as professor at the University of Göttingen. Bürger's fame as a poet
procured him no consideration in a place where learning alone was valued; his
social position had, moreover, been injured by the discovery of his relations with
his wife's sister. With the feelings of an exile, he warmly welcomed the
distinguished and talented young disciple, whose taste was more correct and
whose stores of knowledge were better ordered than his own. At this time Bürger
was still considered to be Germany's best lyric poet and most accomplished
versifier. Schlegel placed himself under his tuition, and learned all his linguistic
and metrical devices, all the methods of producing artistic effects by careful
choice and arrangement of words and use of rhythm and metres. With his natural
gift of imitation, he appropriated as many of Bürger's characteristics as were at all
compatible with his entirely different temperament. His poem Ariadne might
have been written by Bürger. Bürger had been particularly successful in the
sonnet, a form of poetry which had lately come into vogue in Germany. So
closely did the pupil follow in the footsteps of his master, that when, many years
later, a complete edition of Schlegel's works was published, two of Bürger's
sonnets were accidentally included among them.
The master did homage to his remarkably promising pupil in a fine sonnet,
beginning:—
"Junger Aar, dein königlicher Flug
Wird den Druck der Wolken überwinden,
Wird die Bahn zum Sonnentempel finden,
Oder Phöbus' Wort in mir ist Lug,"[2]
and ending with the charmingly modest lines:—
"Dich zum Dienst des Sonnengotts zu krönen
Hielt ich nicht den eignen Kranz zu wert,
Doch—dir ist ein besserer beschert."[3]
Schlegel responded with a criticism of Bürger's frigidly grand Das hohe Lied von
der Einzigen, which he praises as a magnificent epic. In collaboration with
Bürger he now began a translation of the Midsummer Night's Dream, of which he
did the greater part, Bürger merely revising. He was still completely under his

master's influence; the manuscripts show that he always accepted Bürger's
corrections and deferred to his predilection for sonority and vigour. As a
translator, Bürger took no pains to reproduce Shakespeare's peculiarities as
closely as possible; he only manifested his own peculiarities, by making all the
coarse, wanton speeches, and the passages in which misguided passions run riot,
as prominent as possible; he emphasised and exaggerated everything that
appealed to his own liking for a coarse jest, and destroyed the magic of the light
and tender passages. In spite of his own great and natural love of refinement,
young Schlegel strove in this matter also to follow in his master's steps, with the
result that he was not infrequently coarse and awkward where he meant to be
natural and vigorous.
A better guide would have been Herder, who, long before this, in the fragments of
Shakespeare plays in his Stimmen der Völker, had given an example of the right
method of translating from English into German. If Schlegel had taken lessons
from Herder in Shakespeare-translating, he would never have rendered five-
footed iambics by Alexandrines, nor changed the metre of the fairy-songs. No
one had realised the inadequacy of Wieland's translation more clearly than
Herder. And now the spirit in which the latter aimed at Germanising Shakespeare
descended upon Schlegel, who, in spite of the faults of his first attempts, soon
surpassed Herder himself.
He was not long in shaking himself free from Bürger's influence. To Bürger the
highest function of art was to be national and popular. In 1791, Schlegel, now no
longer in Bürger's vicinity, but a tutor in Amsterdam, devoted much attention to
the works of Schiller. His poetical attempts were henceforth more in the style of
that master; he wrote a sympathetic criticism of Die Künstler; and he was led to a
higher conception of art by the perusal of Schiller's æsthetic writings. His
metrical style began to acquire greater dignity. But Schiller was almost as
incapable as Bürger of developing in Schlegel a true and full understanding of
Shakespeare—Schiller, who, in his translation of Macbeth, had transformed the
witches into Greek Furies, and changed the Porter's coarsely jovial monologue
into an edifying song. If Bürger's realism was one danger, Schiller's pomposity
was another.
But at the same time that Schiller enlightened Schlegel as to the high significance
of art, the newly-published Collected Works of Goethe, whom he only now began
to appreciate, stimulated his natural inclination to study, interpret, and make
poetical translations. As already mentioned, this first edition of Goethe's collected
works met with but a poor reception. The chief reason of this was that the public,
understanding nothing of the poet's mental development, had expected new

works in the style of Werther or Götz. But to Schlegel's critical intellect, Goethe's
wonderful many-sidedness was now revealed. He understood and appreciated the
artist's capacity of forgetting himself for the moment, of surrendering himself
entirely to the influence of his subject, which in Goethe's case produced forms
that were never arbitrarily chosen, but invariably demanded by the theme. He
understood that he himself, as a poetical translator, must practise the same self-
abnegation and develop a similar capacity of intellectual re-creation. Two things
were required of the translator, a feminine susceptibility to the subtlest
characteristics of the foreign original, and masculine capacity to re-create with
the impression of the whole in his mind; and both of these requirements were to
be found in Goethe; for his nature was multiplicity, his name "Legion," his spirit
Protean.
There still remained the technical, linguistic difficulties to overcome; and in this,
above all, Goethe was an epoch-making model. He had remoulded the German
language. In passing through his hands it had gained so greatly in pliability and
compass, had acquired such wealth of expression both in the grand and the
graceful style, that it offered Schlegel exactly the well-tuned instrument of which
he stood in need. While under Bürger's influence he had looked upon technical
perfection as a purely external quality, which could be acquired by indefatigable
polishing; he now realised that perfect technique has an inward origin, that it is in
reality the unity of style which is conditioned by the general cast of a mind. And
he began to see that his life task was a double one, namely, to reproduce the
masterpieces of foreign races in the German language, and to interpret critically
for his countrymen the best literary productions both of Germany and other lands.
Now, too, Schlegel acquired a quite new understanding of Fichte, the friend and
brother-in-arms whom the Romanticists had so quickly won for their cause. He
realised that Fichte's doctrine of the Ego contained in extremely abstract terms
the idea of the unlimited capacity of the human mind to find itself in everything
and to find everything in itself. Round this powerful fundamental thought of
Fichte's, August Wilhelm's pliable mind twined itself.
At this time he was much influenced by the correspondence which he kept up
regularly with his younger brother. Friedrich had been drawn by August Wilhelm
into the stream of the new literary movement, and his militant disposition made
him the most reckless champion of the new principles as soon as he felt assured
of their truth. The brothers had very different characters. The elder, in spite of the
audacity of his literary views, had the better regulated mind. He had early
developed a sense of form and of beauty. His chief gift was a capacity for
moulding language; and accuracy, dexterity, and the sense of proportion were

qualities he was born with. Except in cases of strong provocation, he showed
moderation in scientific and artistic controversy; he knew comparatively early
what he desired and what he was capable of; and his determination and
perseverance made him a successful pioneer of the ideas and principles of which
he had chosen to make himself the spokesman. He became the founder of the
Romantic School, an achievement for which he possessed every qualification—
this man whom his brother jestingly called "the divine schoolmaster" or "the
schoolmaster of the universe."
Friedrich Schlegel was the more restless spirit, the genuine sect-founder. He
himself tells us, in one of his letters, that it was his life-long desire "not only to
preach and dispute like Luther, but also, like Mohammed, to subjugate the
spiritual realms of the earth with the flaming sword of the word." He did not lack
initiative, and abounded in plans so colossal that there was a jarring disproportion
between them and his ability to carry them out. Eternally wavering, without
tenacity or fundamental conviction, fragmentary in the extreme, but rich in both
suggestive and disconcerting ideas and in witty conceits, he was constantly beset
by the temptation to silence his opponents with mysterious terminology, and
constantly liable to relapse into platitudes and meaningless verbiage. What
Novalis once wrote to him was more correct than any one suspected: "The King
of Thule, dear Schlegel, was your progenitor; you are related to ruin." As a critic,
he was more impulsive and less impartial than August Wilhelm; as a poet, he was
only once or twice in his life genuinely natural, and in his Alarkos he plunged
into an abyss of bathos into which his brother, with his more correct taste, could
never have fallen. The elder brother had started the younger in his literary career;
the younger now drove the elder onward, and in the process put an end, by his
unamiability, to the latter's friendly relations with Schiller, and, ultimately, even
to his valued and long maintained friendship with Goethe.
August Wilhelm now put his translation of Shakespeare aside for a time, and
turned his attention to the poets of the South. He experimented in all directions,
translated fragments of Homer, of the Greek elegiac, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic
poets, of almost all the Latin poets and many of the Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese. At a later period he even translated Indian poetry, his aim being to
make the German language a Pantheon for the divine in every tongue. He
lingered longest over Dante, although he did not possess the mastery of form
required to render the terza rima; he rhymed only two lines of each triplet, thus
altering the character of the verse and doing away with the intertwining of the
stanzas.

After this he turned to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, sending fragments of his
translations to Friedrich, who showed them to Caroline. Her judgment was
favourable on the whole, but she found fault with the style as being rather
antiquated; this she ascribed to Wilhelm's having been lately employed in
translating Dante, his ear having thereby become accustomed to obsolete words
and expressions. The fact was, that shortly before this he had awakened to the
necessity of being on his guard against the elaborate polish which he had made
his aim after giving up Bürger's style; he now fell into the other extreme, became
archaic, rugged, and hard.
In 1797 Schlegel sent the first samples of Romeo and Juliet to Schiller. They
were printed in Die Horen; and in the same periodical there presently also
appeared his essay, Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm
Meisters. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe had proclaimed the endeavour to understand
Shakespeare to be an important element in German culture. In its conversations
on Hamlet he had refuted the foolish theory that the great dramatist was an
uncultivated natural genius, destitute of artistic consciousness. Had such been the
case, the exact reproduction of his style would not have been a matter of vital
importance in a German translation. But with so great an artist as the Shakespeare
presented to us in Wilhelm Meister, it was plain that the harmony between subject
and form must not be deranged. And yet even Goethe himself had, without any
feeling of unsuitability, given his quotations from Hamlet in the old prose
translation; even he had not realised how inseparably matter and manner are
connected.
Slowly and laboriously Schlegel progresses. His judgment is still so defective
that he fancies it impossible to dispense with Alexandrines; in Romeo and Juliet,
he retains the five-footed iambics only "as far as possible"; the scene between
Romeo and Friar Laurence he renders in Alexandrines, excusing himself with the
remark that this metre is less detrimental in speeches garnished with maxims and
descriptions than in the dialogue proper of the drama. The result is the loss of
Romeo's lyric fervour.
He feels this himself, and with iron industry and determined enthusiasm sets to
work again, rejects the Alexandrines, and compels himself, in spite of the
verbosity of the German language, to say in ten or eleven syllables what he had
said before in twelve or thirteen. For long it appears to him an impossible task to
reproduce each line by one line. The translation swells in his hands as it did in
Bürger's. Fourteen English lines become nineteen or twenty German. It seems to
him that it is impossible to do with less; until at last he gains true insight, and
sees, from the very foundation, how Shakespeare raises the edifice of his art.

Now he renounces all amplitude and all redundancy that is not in Shakespeare.
Each line is rendered by a single line. He curses and bewails the prolixity and
inadequacy of German: his language has such different limits, such different
turns of expression from the English language; he cannot reproduce
Shakespeare's style; what he produces is a stammer, a stutter, without resonance
or fire—but he coerces himself, he coerces the language, and produces his
translation.
There is no great exaggeration in Scherer's dictum: "Schlegel's Shakespeare takes
its place beside the works given to the world by Goethe and Schiller during the
period when they worked in fellowship; there is the inevitable distance between
reproductive and productive art, but there is the nearness of the perfect to the
perfect."
Having acquired complete mastery of the style, Schlegel now began to reap the
fruits of his labour. He, the master, opened his hand, and between the years 1797
and 1801 let fall from it into the lap of the German people sixteen of
Shakespeare's dramas, which, in spite of occasional tameness or constraint of
style, might, in their new form, have been the work of a German poet of
Shakespeare's rank.
Let us consider what this really means. It means not much less than that
Shakespeare, as well as Schiller and Goethe, saw the light in Germany in the
middle of last century. He was born in England in 1564; he was born again, in his
German translator, in 1767. Romeo and Juliet was published in London in 1597;
it reappeared in Berlin as a new work in 1797.
When Shakespeare thus returned to life in Germany, he acted with full force upon
a public which was in several ways more capable of understanding him than his
original public, though it was spiritually less akin to him and though they were
not the battles of its day which he fought. He now began to feed the millions who
did not understand English with his spiritual bread. Not until now did Central and
Northern Europe discover him. Not until now did the whole Germanic-Gothic
world become his public.
But we have also seen how much went to the production of an apparently
unpretending literary work of this high rank. In its rough drafts and manuscripts
we may read great part of the intellectual history of a whole generation. Before it
could come into existence nothing less was required than that Lessing's criticism
and Wieland's and Eschenburg's attempts should prepare the soil, and that a
genius like Herder should concentrate in himself all the receptivity and ingenuity
of surmise belonging to the German mind, and should, with the imperiousness
characteristic of him, oblige young Goethe to become his disciple. But Goethe in

his prose Götz only imitated a prose Shakespeare. There had to be born a man
with the unique talent of A. W. Schlegel, and he, with his hereditary linguistic and
stylistic ability, had to be placed in a position to acquire the greatest technical
perfection of the period. Then he had to free himself, by the influence of
Schiller's noble conception of art, from the tendency to coarseness which was the
result of Bürger's influence, and at the same time to steer clear of Schiller's
tendency to pomposity and dislike of wanton joviality, had to gain a complete
understanding of Goethe, to enter into possession, as it were, of the language
which Goethe had developed, and to attain to an even clearer conviction than his
of the essentiality of the harmony of subject and style in Shakespeare. It was
necessary, too, that he should be stimulated by the ardour of a kindred talent and
assisted by the keen criticism of a woman. Hundreds of sources had to flow into
each other, hundreds of circumstances to coincide, of people to make each other's
acquaintance, of minds to meet and fertilise each other, before this work, in its
modest perfection, could be given to the world; a small thing, the translation of a
poet who had been dead for two hundred years, it yet provided the most precious
spiritual nourishment for millions, and exercised a deep and lasting influence on
German poetry.

[1] M. Bernays: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare.
[2] "In thy kingly flight, young eagle, thou wilt pierce the thickness of the clouds, and
find the way to the temple of the sun-god—else his word, spoken through me, is false."
[3] "I held not my own wreath too precious to crown thee with it to the service of
Apollo; but—a better is thy destiny."

IV

TIECK AND JEAN PAUL

An apprehensive disposition, predisposing to hallucinations, congenital
melancholy, at times verging on insanity, a clear, sober judgment, ever inclined to
uphold the claims of reason, and a very unusual capacity for living in and
producing emotional moods—such were the principal characteristics of Ludwig
Tieck. He was the most productive author of the Romantic School, and, after its
disruption, he wrote a long series of excellent novels, depicting past and present
more realistically than Romantic writers were in the habit of doing.

The son of a ropemaker, he was born in Berlin in 1773. Even as a school-boy he
was profoundly influenced by classic writers like Goethe, Shakespeare, and
Holberg. He early succeeded in imitating both Shakespeare's elfin songs and
Ossian's melodious sadness; but during one period of his youth he weakly
allowed himself to be exploited by elder men of letters, at whose instigation he
produced quantities of carelessly written, unwholesome literature. Though the
spirit and tendency of his writings were prescribed for him, his characteristic
qualities are, nevertheless, discernible even in these valueless early works. Under
the direction of his teacher, Rambach, he wrote, or re-modelled in the spirit of the
"enlightenment" period, sentimental tales of noble brigands, and invented
gruesome episodes in the style of the death-scene of Franz Moor. But now and
again, in some ironical aside, we get a glimpse of his own more advanced ideas.
A little later we find the future Romanticist writing precocious stories for the
almanacs published by Nicolai, that old firebrand of the "enlightenment" period
—stories in which superstition is held up to ridicule, and in which we only very
occasionally come upon a touch of irony, such as the selection of a particularly
inane old man to express contempt for "the stupid Middle Ages" and
"Shakespeare's ghosts." No doubt Tieck wrote these compositions principally
because he had sold his pen; still they none the less betray the weariness of the
desponder, who is so exhausted by his long struggle with questions and doubts of
every kind, that he can, without any great reluctance, side with those who
depreciate genius and sing the praises of the sensible, bourgeois golden mean.
His unsettled mental condition is shown no less clearly in his rationalistic tales
than in the supernaturalism, the voluptuous cruelty, and the cold cynicism of the
novels and plays dating from the beginning of the Nineties, in which he seems to
give us more of himself.
Tieck's first work of any importance is William Lovell. The first part of this novel,
which he wrote at the age of twenty, appeared in 1795. In it, when treating of art,
he already occasionally touched the strings upon which the Romantic School
subsequently played.
William Lovell goes to Paris (which Tieck at that time had not seen), and is, of
course, disgusted with everything there. "The town is a hideous, irregular pile of
stones. One has the feeling of being in a great prison.... People chatter and talk all
day long without so much as once saying what they think.... I occasionally went
to the theatre, simply because time hung so heavily on my hands. The tragedies
consist of epigrams, without action or passion, and tirades which produce much
the same effect as the words issuing from the mouths of the figures in old
drawings.... The less natural an actor is, the more highly is he esteemed. In the

great, world-renowned Paris Opera—I fell asleep." Such are the impressions
made upon Lovell (an Englishman) by Paris at the time of the Revolution. It is
nothing but an expression of the prevalent German contempt for the French
character and French art, doubly unreasonable in this case because it has simply
been learned by rote out of books. In the Théâtre Français, however, Lovell
ejaculates: "O Sophocles! O divine Shakespeare!" and he characteristically
observes: "I hate the men who, with their little imitation sun (namely, reason),
light up all the pleasant twilight corners and chase away the fascinating shadow
phantoms which dwelt so securely under the leafy canopies. There is,
undoubtedly, a kind of daylight in our times, but the night and morning light of
romance were more beautiful than this grey light from a cloudy sky."

LUDWIG TIECK

With the exception of a few such touches, this work seems at the first glance to
be distinguished by none of the peculiarities one is accustomed to associate with
a Romantic production; but, as a matter of fact, there is no book which reveals to
us more distinctly the foundations on which the Romantic movement rests. The
main idea and the form of William Lovell (it is written in letters) were both
borrowed from a French novel, Le Paysan Perverti, by the materialistic writer,
Rétif de la Bretonne. The fact that we are able to trace the origin of a Romantic
work directly to French materialism is not without significance; it is in reality

from this materialism that the Romanticists derive their gloomy fatalism. Lovell
is an extremely tedious book to read nowadays; the style is tiresomely diffuse, the
characters are as if lost in mist. Some of the subordinate figures, the devoted old
man-servant, for instance, are weak imitations of Richardson—there is not a
trenchant trait nor a dramatic situation in the whole book. Its merit, which is as
German as are its defects, lies in its psychology. The hero is a youth who is led,
slowly and surely, to do away, as far as he himself is concerned, with all
authority, to disregard every one of the traditional, accepted rules of life, until at
last he is leading the life, not only of a confirmed egotist, but of a criminal.
It is a mistake to feel surprised that so young a man as Tieck could depict such a
being. Is it not precisely at this early age, when his spiritual eyesight does not yet
enable him to look abroad, that the youth is constantly occupied with all the
strange things he sees when he looks into his own heart? Is it not then that he is
impelled to unravel himself, to examine his own condition, to look at himself
perpetually in the mirror held out to him by his own consciousness? With men of
a certain disposition there is no more self-critical age than twenty or thereabouts.
There is still so much of life before one then, so much time to do one's work in;
one spends the days in learning to know the instrument upon which one is to play
for the rest of one's life, in tuning it, or finding out how it is already tuned. The
time is still distant when the mature man will seize upon that instrument, which is
himself, and use it—as a violin or as a sledge-hammer, according to the
requirements of the situation. And if surrounding circumstances offer neither
tasks nor sustenance, and the Ego is obliged to go on living upon its own
substance, the result will inevitably be the exhaustion, the demolition of the
personality.
What is peculiarly characteristic of author, tendency, and period, is the
sentimental extravagance to which this introspection leads. In all seriousness the
individual dares to make his fortuitous Ego, which has disorganised everything
that established custom requires men to respect, the standard of everything, the
source of all laws. Here we have unmistakably a distortion of Fichte's
fundamental idea. Read the following verses from Lovell and the succeeding
reflection:—
"Willkommen, erhabenster Gedanke,
Der hoch zum Gotte mich erhebt.

Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten,
In trüber Ferne liegt die Welt,
Es fällt in ihre dunkeln Schachten

Ein Schimmer, den wir mit uns brachten.
Warum sie nicht in wide Trümmer fällt?
Wir sind das Schicksal, das sie aufrecht hält!

Den bangen Ketten froh entronnen
Geh' ich nun kühn durchs Leben him,
Den harten Pflichten abgewonnen,
Von feigen Thoren nur ersonnen.
Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich selber bin,
Ein Wiederschein in meinem innem Sinn.

Was kümmern mich Gestalten, deren matten
Lichtglanz ich selbst hervorgebracht?
Mag Tugend sich und Laster gatten!
Sie sind nur Dunst und Nebelschatten,
Das Licht aus mir fällt in die finstre Nacht.
Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich sie gedacht."[1]
"My outer self thus rules the material, my inner self the spiritual world.
Everything is subject to my will; I can call every phenomenon, every action what
I please; the animate and the inanimate world are in leading-strings which are
controlled by my mind; my whole life is only a dream, the many forms in which I
mould according to my will. I myself am the only law in all nature, and
everything obeys this law."
When Friedrich Schlegel exclaims, "Fichte is not a sufficiently absolute idealist
... I and Hardenberg (Novalis) are more what idealists ought to be," we remember
that ten years previously, and long before there was any talk of Romanticism and
Romanticists, Tieck had perceived what were to be the characteristics of the new
school, i.e. personal lawlessness, and the glorification of this lawlessness, under
the name of imagination, as the source of life and art. Lovell is an extravagant
personification of these characteristics. Kierkegaard's Johannes the Seducer, the
most perfect and the last example of the type in Danish literature, always keeps
within certain bounds; he evades ethical questions, looking upon morality as a
tiresome, troublesome power, and never attacking it directly; but Lovell, the more
many-sided, the more boldly planned, if less skilfully worked-out character,
recoils neither from treachery, nor bloodshed, nor poison. He is one of this
period's many variations of the Don Juan-Faust type, with a touch of Schiller's
Franz Moor. Satiety of self-contemplation has, in his case, led to a boundless
contempt for mankind, to a ruthless sweeping away of all illusions; the one and
only consolation being that thus hypocrisy is unveiled and the ugly truth seen.

There is a close analogy with much that the Romanticists subsequently wrote in
such an utterance as this: "Voluptuousness is undoubtedly the great mystery of
our being; even the purest and most fervent love dives into this pool.... Only
ruthlessness, only a clear perception of the illusion can save us; Amalie is,
therefore, nothing to me, now that I see that poetry, art, and even love, are only
draped and veiled sensuality.... Sensuality is the driving-wheel of the whole
machinery ... voluptuousness is the inspiration of music, of painting, of all the
arts; all human desires flutter round this magnetic pole, like moths round a
candle;... hence it is that Boccaccio and Ariosto are the greatest poets, and that
Titian and the wanton Correggio stand high above Domenichino and pious
Raphael. Even religious devotion I consider to be only a diverted course of that
sensual instinct which is refracted in a thousand different colours." One would
expect this Lovell, in whose meditations sensuality plays so great a part, to be
represented as a man whose instincts lead him far astray. Not at all! He is as cold
as ice, as cold as Kierkegaard's shadow of a seducer, whom he in this particular
anticipates. He does not commit his excesses with his flesh and blood, but with
his fantastically excited brain. He is a purely intellectual being, a North German
of the purest water. And there is one particular in which he is, in anticipation,
astonishingly Romantic. When he has, so to speak, burned himself out, when
every spark of conviction is extinguished in his mind, and all his feelings lie
"slain and dead" around him, he seeks refuge in the supernatural and places his
trust in mystic revelations, of which an old impostor has held out the prospect.
This trait, which, significantly enough, is not to be found in his French prototype,
was necessary to complete the character.
The personality here is so hollow, weighs so light in its own estimation, that the
impression it produces on itself is, that it is both real and unreal; it has become
unfamiliar to itself, and has as little confidence in itself as in any exterior power.
It stands outside its own experiences, and when it acts, feels as if it were playing
a part. Lovell tells us how he seduced a young girl, Emily Burton: "I suddenly
cast myself at her feet, and confessed that it was nothing but my passionate love
for her which had brought me to the castle; I declared that this was to be my last
attempt to learn if there were any human heart that would still come to my aid
and reconcile me to life and fate. She was beautiful, and I acted my part with
wonderful inspiration, exactly as if it were a congenial rôle in a play; every word
I said told; I spoke with fire and yet without affectation." And later he remarks:
"She has herself to reproach for any temporary loss of home happiness; I am not
to blame because, in accordance with conventional ideas, she is at present
disgraced in the eyes of many. I played one part, she answered with another; we

acted the play of a very stupid writer with great seriousness, and now we regret
having wasted our time." The whole was nothing but a scene from a play.
In this fictitious character there are already developed those qualities which we
find later in real characters, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Gentz; and in this one
man's habit of mind we have all that, which, transferred to art, became the
notorious irony of Romanticism. Here, in the character, is the undisguised
egotism which looks upon life as a rôle; there, in art, the misconception and
exaggeration of Schiller's idea that artistic activity is "a game," a play, i.e. an
activity without any outward aim—in short, the belief that true art is that which
perpetually shatters its own edifice, renders illusion impossible, and ends, like
Tieck's comedies, in self-parody. There is the very closest resemblance between
the manner in which the hero acts and the manner in which the comedy is written.
The irony is one and the same; it may all be traced back to the same egotism and
unreality.[2]
In order really to understand the psychological condition depicted in Lovell, we
must not only see its ultimate consequences, but must also, as in the case of René,
see how it originates and what conditions it. It is conditioned by the ferment of
lawlessness distinctive of the period. Hence the most diverse creative minds co-
operate in the production of the type. As a Titan of satiety, of tædium vitæ, Lovell
is only one of a race of Titans.
Two years before Lovell was planned, Jean Paul, who was ten years older than
Tieck and four years younger than Schiller, began a description of this race in his
so-called "Faustiade," the novel Titan. Jean Paul is in many ways the forerunner
of Romanticism; in the Romantic School Hoffmann recalls him to us, as Tieck
recalls Goethe. He is a thorough Romanticist in the absolute arbitrariness with
which, as an artist, he sets to work. As Auerbach says, he has "in readiness
studies of men, moods, traits of character, psychological complications, and
miscellaneous imagery, which he introduces at random, adjusting them to given
characters or situations." He thrusts all kinds of irrelevant matter into the elastic
framework of his story. He is, further, a Romanticist in his absorption in self—for
it is himself, always himself, who speaks by the mouth of his characters,
whatever they may be; in the famous humour which with him lords it over all
else, respecting none of the conventions of style; and, finally, in the fact that he is
the antipodes of classical culture. But, whatever he may have been in art, in life
he was not the defender of lawlessness, but the ardent champion of liberty,
Fichte's equal in enthusiastic persistence. He was neither the foe of
enlightenment, nor of reason, nor of the Reformation, nor of the Revolution; he
was convinced of the historical value and the full validity of the ideas which it is

the glory of the eighteenth century to have produced and championed. Therefore
he uplifted a warning voice against the futile, demoralising fantasticality of the
Romanticists.
Titan contains the most powerful of Jean Paul's ideal characters, Roquairol. His
strength did not lie in the delineation of ideal characters; he was first and
foremost the admirable, realistic idyll-writer.
Roquairol is a prototype of the form in which the age moulded its passion and its
despair. He is burning, conscious desire, which develops into fantastic
eccentricity, because circumstances have no use for it, and because it does not
possess the power to take hold of reality, re-mould it and subject it to itself; it
becomes a disease, which strikes inwards and leads to morbid self-contemplation
and suicide. Roquairol describes himself in a letter (Titan, iii. Zykel, 88)
"Look at me when I take off my mask! My face twitches convulsively, like the
face of a man who has taken poison. I have indeed taken poison; I have
swallowed the great poison ball, the ball called Earth.... I am like a hollow tree,
charred by a fantastic fire. When the worms in the intestines of the Ego—anger,
ecstasy, love, and the like—begin to crawl about in me and devour each other, I
look down upon them from the height of my Ego, I cut them in pieces as if they
were polypi and fasten them into each other. Then I look on at myself looking on.
This repeats itself ad infinitum. What is the use of it all? Mine is not the usual
idealism, the idealism of faith; mine is an idealism of the heart, peculiar to those
who have often experienced all the emotions, on the stage, on paper, or in real
life. But of what good is it?... I often look upon the mountains and the rivers and
the ground round about me, and feel as if at any moment they might dissolve and
disappear, and I with them.... There is in man a callous, bold spirit, which asserts
its independence of everything, even of virtue. Man chooses virtue if he will; he
is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced a storm at sea, when the raging,
foaming waters lashed themselves into great crested billows, while from a calm
sky the sun serenely looked on. So be it with you! The heart is the storm, the sky
the Ego!... Do you believe that the authors of tragedies and novels, or at any rate
the geniuses among them, who a thousand times over have aped everything
human and divine, are different from me? What really sustains them and the
others is their hunger for money and renown.... The apes are the geniuses
amongst the beasts, and geniuses are apes in their æsthetic mimicry, in
heartlessness, malignity, sensuality, and—gaiety."
He relates how an inclination which was simply the result of ennui had led him to
seduce his friend's sister. "I lost nothing; in me there is no innocence. I gained
nothing, for I hate sensual pleasure. The broad black shadow which some call

remorse quickly blotted out the fleeting bright picture of the magic-lantern; but is
the black worse for the eyes than the bright?"
He who reflects carefully upon even these short extracts from Jean Paul's huge
four-volume novel will see how here again a connecting line is drawn between
life and art. Without premeditation, but very significantly, Roquairol takes the
nature of the productive artist as an image of his own, and the expressions
"charred by fantastic fire" and "the idealism of the heart" are as accurate as
scientific definitions. There was no doubt in the author's mind as to what it was
he wished to delineate. Roquairol, after committing his last and most abominable
crime, namely, visiting Linda by night, disguised as his friend and her lover,
Albano, is made to die by his own hand on the stage. He is playing a part which
ends in suicide, and he shoots himself dead. He lives to the last moment in a
world of appearances and make-believe, confusing or blending the real with the
imaginary. And this determination to make reality fantastic or poetical is the
distinguishing feature of the succeeding generation, the task to which it set itself,
the problem which all its productions were attempts to solve. To understand this
is to understand and excuse the blunders it makes in its schemes for the
remoulding of reality, such a scheme, for instance, as we find in Friedrich
Schlegel's Lucinde.
The great question of the relation of poetry to life, despair over the deep, bitter
discord between them, the unwearied struggle to bring about a reconciliation—
this is what lies at the foundation of the whole of German literature from the
Sturm und Drang period to the death of Romanticism. In order, therefore, to
understand Lucinde, as well as Lovell, it is necessary to look back. We understand
both better by the help of Jean Paul's Titan. Lovell's predecessor is the Titan
Roquairol, Lucinde's the Titaness Linda.

[1] "Welcome, sublime thought, that makes of me a god! Things are, because we
have thought them.—In the dim distance lies the world; into its dark caverns
falls a ray of light, which we brought with us. Why does this world not fall into
atoms? Because the power of our will holds it together!—Glad at heart because I
have escaped from my chains, I now go boldly forward in the path of life,
absolved from those irksome duties which were the invention of cowardly fools.
Virtue is, because I am; it is but the reflection of my inner self.—What care I for
forms which borrow their dim splendour from myself? Let virtue wed with vice!
They are but shadows in the mist. The light that illumines the dark night comes
from me. Virtue is, because I have thought it."
[2] Tieck: William Lovell, i. 49, 52, 172, 178, 212; ii. 110.

V

SOCIAL ENDEAVOURS OF THE ROMANTICISTS: LUCINDE

At the University of Jena, in June 1801, a young candidate for the degree of
doctor stood on the rostrum delivering his thesis. Everything possible was
done to put him out and annoy him; the unprecedented step was taken of
providing opponents. One of these, a somewhat inept young man, desiring
to distinguish himself, began: "In tractatu tuo erotico Lucinda dixisti," &c.,
&c. To this the candidate shortly responded by calling his opponent a fool.
A regular uproar ensued, and one of the professors indignantly declared that
it was thirty years since the platform of the school of philosophy had been
profaned by such disgraceful behaviour. The candidate retorted that it was
thirty years since any one had been so disgracefully treated. This candidate
was Friedrich Schlegel, in those days so much dreaded on account of his
terrible opinions that he was sometimes refused permission to spend a night
in a town. In a rescript from the Universitets-Kuratorium of the Electorate
of Hanover to the Pro-Rector of Göttingen, dated September 26, 1800, we
read: "Should the Professor's brother, Friedrich Schlegel, notorious for the
immoral tendency of his writings, come to Göttingen, purposing to stay
there for any time, this is not to be permitted; you will be so good as to
intimate to him that he must leave the town."
Somewhat harsh justice this—and all the to-do was on account of Lucinde!

It is not the creative power displayed in it which makes Lucinde one of the
most important works of the Romantic School, for, in spite of all the
"fleshly" talk in the book, there is no flesh and blood in it, no real body.
Neither is it depth of thought. There is more philosophy in the few
paradoxical pages written by Schopenhauer under the title Metaphysik der
Liebe than in pretentious Lucinde from beginning to end. It is not even a
bacchantic joy in nature, in life. If we compare it with Heine's Ardinghello,
a book glowing with genuine Southern joy of life, we see clearly how
anæmic and theoretic Lucinde is. It is as a manifesto and programme that
the book is valuable. Its main idea is to proclaim the unity and harmony of
life as revealed to us most clearly and most comprehensibly in the passion
of love, which gives a sensual expression to the spiritual emotion, and
spiritualises the sensual pleasure. What it aims at depicting is the
transformation of real life into poetry, into art, into Schiller's "play" of
powers, into a dreamy, imaginative existence, with every longing satisfied,
a life in which man, acting with no aim, living for no purpose, is initiated
into the mysteries of nature, "understands the plaint of the nightingale, the
smile of the new-born babe, and all that is mysteriously revealed in the
hieroglyphics of flowers and stars."
This book is totally misunderstood by those who, like Kierkegaard, arm
themselves with a whole set of dogmatic principles, and fall upon it,
exclaiming: "What it aims at is the unmitigated sensuality which excludes
the element of spirituality; what it combats is the spirituality which includes
an element of sensuality." One can scarcely realise the blindness implied by
such an utterance—but there are no better blinders than those provided by
orthodoxy. Nor is it possible really to understand Lucinde so long as, like
Gutzkow, we only see in it a vindication of the doctrine of free love, or, like
Schleiermacher, a protest against incorporeal spirituality, a denunciation of
the affected foolishness that denies and explains away flesh and blood. The
fundamental idea of the book is the Romantic doctrine of the identity of life
and poetry. This serious thought, however, is presented in a form expressly
calculated to win the laurels of notoriety. Our admiration is aroused by the
bold, defiant tone of the author's challenge, by the courage, born of
conviction, with which he exposes himself to personal insult, and to public,
ill-natured discussion of his private life.

F. SCHLEGEL.

Worthy of admiration, too, is the skill with which the different views and
watchwords of Romanticism are collected and presented to us in small
compass; for all the various tendencies of the movement, developed by so
many different individuals, are to be seen in this one book, spreading fan-
wise from a centre. But we are disgusted by the artistic impotence to which
the so-called novel, in reality a mere sketch, bears witness, by its many
beginnings that end in nothing, and by all the feeble self-worship which
seeks to disguise barrenness by producing an artificial and unhealthy heat in
which to hatch its unfertile eggs. Caroline Schlegel has preserved for us the
following biting epigram, written soon after the book came out—
"Der Pedantismus bat die Phantasie
Um einen Kuss, sie wies ihn an die Sünde;
Frech, ohne Kraft, umarmt er die,
Und sie genas mit einem todten Kinde,
Genannt Lucinde."[1]
Beyond considering the word "sin" inappropriate—for Lucinde only sins
against good taste and true poetry—I have no fault to find with this cruel

satire.
At the very core of Lucinde we have once again subjectivity, self-
absorption, in the form of an arbitrariness which may develop into anything
—revolution, effrontery, bigotry, reaction—because it is not from the
beginning associated with anything that is a power, because the Ego does
not act in the service of an idea which could give to its endeavour stability
and value; it acts neither in the service of civil nor of intellectual liberty.
This arbitrariness or lawlessness, which, in the domain of art, becomes the
Friedrich Schlegelian "irony," the artist's attitude of aloofness from his
subject, his free play with it (resulting, as far as poetry is concerned, in the
dictatorship of pure form, which mocks at its own substance and destroys
its own illusions), becomes in the domain of real life an irony which is the
dominant feature in the characters and lives of the gifted few, the
aristocracy of intellect. This irony is a riddle to the profane, who "lack the
sense of it." It is "the freest of all licences," because by its means a man sets
himself outside of and above himself; yet it is also the most subject to law,
being, we are told, unqualified and inevitable. It is a perpetual self-parody,
incomprehensible to "the harmonious vulgar" (harmonisch Platten—the
name bestowed by the Romanticists on those who live contentedly in a
trivial, common-place harmony), who mistake its earnest for jest and its jest
for earnest.
It is not merely in name that this irony bears a fundamental resemblance to
Kierkegaard's, which also aristocratically "chooses to be misunderstood."
The Ego of genius is the truth, if not in the sense in which Kierkegaard
would have us understand his proposition, "Subjectivity is the truth," still in
the sense that the Ego has every externally valid commandment and
prohibition in its power; and, to the astonishment and scandal of the world,
invariably expresses itself in paradoxes. Irony is "divine audacity." In
audacity thus comprehended there are endless possibilities. It is freedom
from prejudice, yet it suggests the possibility of the most audacious defence
of all possible kinds of prejudices. It is more easily attainable, we are told,
by woman than by man. "Like the feminine garb, the feminine intellect has
this advantage over the masculine, that its possessor by a single daring
movement can rise above all the prejudices of civilisation and bourgeois
conventionality, at once transporting herself into the state of innocence and
the lap of Nature." The lap of Nature! There is an echo of Rousseau's voice

even in this wanton tirade. We seem to hear the trumpet-call of revolution;
what we really hear is only the proclamation of reaction. Rousseau desired
to return to the state of nature, when men roamed naked through the
pathless forests and lived upon acorns. Schelling wished to turn the course
of evolution back to the primeval ages, to the days before man had fallen.
Schlegel blows revolutionary melodies on the great romantic "wonder-
horn." But, as we read in Des Knaben Wunderhorn: "Es blies ein Jäger wohl
in sein Horn—Und Alles was er blies, das war verlorn."[2] The result is not
intellectual emancipation, but simply a refinement of pleasure. The whole
wide domain of love is transformed into the domain of art. As Romantic
poetry is poetry to the second power, poetry about poetry, refined and
chastened poetry, so the love of the Romanticists is refined and chastened
love, "the art of love." The different degrees of the higher sensuality are
described and classified. I refer the reader to Lucinde, which does not, like
Ardinghello, present us with voluptuous descriptions, but merely with dry,
pedantic theory, the empty framework of which it is left to the reader's
experience and imagination to fill. Romantic audacity is, in one of its
aspects, idleness, the indolence of genius. Idleness is described as "the life-
atmosphere of innocence and inspiration." In its highest expression it is
pure passivity, the life of the plant. "The highest, most perfect life is a life
of pure vegetation." The Romanticists return to nature to such good purpose
that they revert to the plant. Passive enjoyment of the eternally enduring
moment would be their idea of perfection. "I meditated seriously," says
Julius to Lucinde, "upon the possibility of an eternal embrace." As genius,
which is independent of toil and trouble, and voluptuous enjoyment, which
in itself is passive bliss, have nothing to do with aim, action, or utility, so
idleness, dolce far niente, comes to be regarded as the best that life can
offer, and purpose, which leads to systematic action, is denounced as
ridiculous and philistine. The principal utterance to this effect in Lucinde is
the following: "Industry and utility are the angels of death with the flaming
swords, who stand in the way of man's return to Paradise." Yes, that is
exactly what they are! Industry and utility bar the way back to all the
Paradises which lie behind us. Therefore we hold them sacred! Utility is
one of the main forms of good; and what is industry but the renunciation of
distracting pleasures, the enthusiasm, the power, whereby this good is
attained!

Return to perfection is, in art, a return to the lawlessness of genius, to the
stage at which the artist may do one thing, or may do another which is
exactly the opposite. In life it is the retrogression of idleness, for he who is
idle goes back, back to passive pleasure. In philosophy it is the return to
intuitive beliefs, beliefs to which Schlegel applies the name of religion;
which religion in its turn leads back to Catholicism. As far as nature and
history are concerned, it is retrogression towards the conditions of the
primeval Paradise.[3] Thus it is the central idea of Romanticism itself—
retrogression—which explains how it was that even the heaven-storming
Lucinde, like all the other heaven-stormers of the Romanticists, had not the
slightest practical outcome.
[1] "Pedantry asked Fancy for a kiss; she sent him to Sin; audaciously but
impotently he embraces Sin; she bears him a dead child, by name Lucinde."
[2] "A hunter blew into his horn, and all that he blew the wind carried away."
[3] A. Ruge: Gesammelte Schriften, i. 328, &c.

VI

ROMANTIC PURPOSELESSNESS

In Lucinde, then, as in a nutshell, are to be found all the theories which,
later in the history of Romanticism, are developed and illustrated by
examples. In such an essay as that on the Instinct of Change by the Æsthete
in Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller ("Either-Or") idleness is systematised. "Never
adopt any calling or profession. By so doing a man becomes simply one of
the mob, a tiny bolt in the great machinery of the state; he ceases to be
master.... But though we hold aloof from all regular callings, we ought not
to be inactive, but to attach great importance to occupation which is
identical with idleness.... The whole secret lies in the independence, the
absence of restraint. We are apt to believe that there is no art in acting
unrestrained by any law; in reality the most careful calculation is required,
if we are not to go astray, but to obtain enjoyment from it...."

Idleness, lawlessness, enjoyment! This is the threeleaved clover which
grows all over the Romanticist's field. In such a book as Eichendorff's Das
Leben eines Taugenichts ("Life of a Ne'er-do-Well") idleness is idealised
and exalted in the person of the hero. And purposelessness is another
important item, which must on no account be overlooked. It is another
designation for the genius of Romanticism. "To have a purpose, to act
according to that purpose, artificially to combine purpose with purpose, and
thereby create new purposes, is a bad habit, which has become so deeply
rooted in the foolish nature of godlike man, that he is obliged, when for
once it is his desire to float aimlessly upon the stream of constantly
changing images and emotions, to do even this of settled purpose.... It is
very certain, my friend, that man is by nature a serious animal." (Julius to
Lucinde.)
On the subject of this utterance, even that orthodox Christian, Kierkegaard,
says: "In order not to misjudge Schlegel, we must bear in mind the
perverted ideas which had insinuated themselves into men's minds in regard
to many of the relations of life, and which had specially and indefatigably
striven to make love as tame, well broken-in, heavy, sluggish, useful, and
obedient, as any other domestic animal—in short, as unerotic as possible....
There is a very narrow-minded morality, a policy of expediency, a futile
teleology, which many men worship as an idol, an idol that claims every
infinite aspiration as its legitimate offering. Love is considered nothing in
itself; it only acquires importance from the purpose it is made to serve in
the paltry play which holds the stage of family life." It is perhaps admissible
to conclude that what Kierkegaard says about "the tame, well broken-in,
sluggish, and useful domestic animal, love," found its most apt application
in Germany, which at that time was undoubtedly the home of the old-
fashioned womanliness. The satirical sallies in Tieck's comedies
occasionally point in the same direction. In his Däumling ("Hop-o'-my-
thumb") a husband complains of his wife's craze for knitting, which gives
him no peace; a complaint which, perhaps, can only be understood in
Germany, where to this day ladies are to be seen knitting even in places of
public entertainment—at the concerts on the Brühlsche Terrasse in Dresden,
for example. Herr Semmelziege says:—
"Des Hauses Sorge nahm zu sehr den Sinn ihr ein,
Die Sauberkeit, das Porzellan, die Wäsche gar:

Wenn ich ihr wohl von meiner ew'gen Liebe sprach,
Nahm sie der Bürste vielbehaartes Brett zur Hand,
Um meinem Rock die Fäden abzukehren still.
* * * * * * * * * *
Doch hätt' ich gern geduldet Alles, ausser Eins:
Dass, we sie stand, und we sie ging, auswärts, im Haus,
Auch im Concert, wenn Tongewirr die Schöpfung schuf,
* * * * * * * * * *
Da zaspelnd, haspelnd, heftig rauschend, nimmer still,
Ellnbogen fliegend, schlagend Seiten und Geripp,
Sie immerdar den Strickstrumpf eifrig handgehabt."[1]
The most comical part of this satire is the passage which, whether
intentionally or unintentionally on the author's part, reads like a parody of
the well-known Roman Elegy in which Goethe drums the hexameter
measure, "leise mit fingernder Hand," upon his mistress's back:—
"Einst als des Thorns heilig Lager uns umfing,
Am Himmel glanzvoll prangte Lunas keuscher Schein,
Der goldnen Aphrodite Gab' erwünschend mir,
Von silberweissen Armen ich umflochten lag.
Schon denkend, welch ein Wunderkind so holder Nacht,
Welch Vaterlandserretter, kraftgepanzert, soll
Dem zarten Leib entspriessen nach der Horen Tanz,
Fühl' ich am Rücken hinter mir gar sanften Schlag:
Da wähn ich, Liebsgekose neckt die Schulter mir,
Und lächle fromm die süsse Braut und sinnig an:
Bald naht mir der Enttäuschung grauser Höllenschmerz
Das Strickzeug tanzt auf meinem Rücken thätig fort;
Ja, stand das Werk just in der Ferse Beugung, wo
Der Kundigste, ob vielem Zählen, selber pfuscht."[2]
When the cult of the useful is carried as far as this, we can understand
advocacy of purposelessness.
But purposelessness and idleness are inseparable. "Only Italians," we are
told, "know how to walk, and only Orientals how to lie; and where has the
mind developed with more refinement and sweetness than in India? And in

every clime it is idleness which distinguishes the noble from the simple, and
which is, therefore, the essence of nobility."
This last assertion is outrageous, but its very audacity is significant. It
shows the attitude of Romanticism towards the masses. To have the means
to do nothing is, in its estimation, the true patent of nobility. Its heroes are
those who cultivate the unremunerative arts, and are supported by others—
kings and knights like those in Fouqué's and Ingemann's books, artists and
poets like those in Tieck's and Novalis's. It separates itself from humanity,
will do nothing for it, but only for the favoured few. The hero and heroine
in Lucinde are the gifted artist and the woman of genius; it is not the
ordinary union, but the "nature-marriage" or the "art-marriage" (Naturehe,
Kunstehe) for which our interest is claimed. Observe how Julius at once
asks Lucinde whether her child, if a girl, shall be trained as a portrait or as a
landscape painter. Only as a member of the fraternity of artists do her
parents take any interest in her. Only authors and artists have part and lot in
the poetry of life.
It is not difficult to understand how it was that Lucinde was barren of any
social results. But though the book had no practical outcome, though it was
too feeble to effect any kind of reform, there was, nevertheless, something
practical underlying it.
Let us cast a glance at the principal characters. They stand out in strong
relief upon a background of the profoundest scorn for all the prose of real
life and all the conventions of society. The book is in no wise ashamed of its
erotic theories; in its conscious purity it feels itself elevated above the
judgment of the vulgar: "It is not only the kingly eagle which dares to scorn
the screaming of the ravens; the swan, too, is proud, and pays as little heed.
Its only care is that its white wings shall not lose their brightness; its only
desire, to cling, unruffled, to Leda's breast, and breathe forth all that is
mortal in it in song."
The image is pretty and daring, but is it true? The story of Leda and the
swan has been treated in so many ways.
Julius is a pessimistic (zerrissener) young man, an artist, of course. We are
told in the Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit, the chapter containing what
Flaubert has called l'éducation sentimentale, that it was strikingly
characteristic of him that he could play faro with apparently passionate

eagerness, and yet in reality be absent-minded and careless; he would dare
everything in the heat of the moment, and as soon as he had lost would turn
indifferently away. Such a trait may not excite our admiration, but it at all
events produces a pretty distinct impression of a pleasure-loving, blasé
young man, who, feeling no powerful impulse towards action, seeks for
excitement while leading a life of careless, coldly despairing idleness. The
history of his development is indicated, as is often the case with quite
young men, simply by a succession of female names.
Of the women in question we have only very slight sketches, like the
pencil-drawings in an album. One of these introductory portraits is rather
more elaborated than the rest, that of a dame aux camélias sunk in Oriental
indolence, who, like the original dame aux camélias, is raised above her
position by a true passion, and dies when she is neither understood nor
believed. She dies by her own hand, makes a brilliant exit from life, and
seems to us, as she is described sitting in her boudoir with her hands in her
lap, surrounded by great mirrors and inhaling perfumes, like a living image
of the æsthetic stupor of self-contemplation and self-absorption, which was
the final development of Romanticism. After passing through numbers of
erotic experiences, all equally and exceedingly repulsive, Julius finally
makes the acquaintance of his feminine counterpart, Lucinde, whose
impression is never effaced. "In her he met a youthful artist" (Of course!),
"who, like himself, passionately worshipped beauty and loved nature and
solitude. In her landscapes one felt a fresh breath of real air. She painted not
to gain a living or to perfect herself in an art" (On no account any purpose
or utility!) "but simply for pleasure" (Dilettantism and irony!). "Her
productions were slight water-colour sketches. She had lacked the patience
and industry required to learn oil-painting." (No industry!) ... "Lucinde had
a decided leaning towards the romantic" (Of course she had; she is romance
incarnate!). "She was one of those who do not live in the ordinary world,
but in one created by themselves.... With courageous determination she had
broken with all conventions, cast off all bonds, and lived in perfect freedom
and independence." From the time when Julius meets her, his art too
becomes more fervid and inspired. He paints the nude "in a flood of
vitalising light;" his figures "were like animated plants in human shapes."
With Julius and Lucinde life flows on smoothly and melodiously, "like a
beautiful song," in perpetually aroused and satisfied longing. The action

passes, as it were, in a studio where the easel stands close to the alcove.
Lucinde becomes a mother, and their union is now the "marriage of nature"
(die Naturehe). "What united us before was love and passion. Now nature
has united us more closely." The birth of the child gives the parents "civic
rights in the state of nature" (probably Rousseau's), the only civic rights
they seem to have valued. The Romanticists were as indifferent to social
and political rights as Kierkegaard's hero, who was of opinion that we ought
to be glad that there are some who care to rule, thereby freeing the rest of us
from the task.
[1] "Her mind was occupied with household cares—
The washing, and the china, and the cook:
Did I begin to speak of endless love,
She took the bristled clothes-brush in her hand,
And calmly turned me round and brushed my coat.

All this I bore quite placidly, but not
That, sitting, standing, everywhere we went,
Yes, even at concerts, when sweet strains beguiled,

Entwining, clicking, rustling, never still,
Her elbows flying, thumping on her side,
Her knitting-needles vigorously she plied."
"The sacred hymeneal couch had received us; Luna's chaste beams illumined our
chamber. Encircled by white arms I lay, praying for Aphrodite's favour, dreaming
of the marvellous child that needs must be the offspring of a night like this, the
mighty hero who in fulness of time shall see the light. Soft taps upon my
shoulder rouse me from my dream; 'tis my sweet bride caressing me; I thank her
silently, with tender, meaning smile. One moment later, and my heart is torn by
hellish pangs of disillusionment; it is her knitting that is dancing on my back;
worse still—she is at the turning of the heel, that point when the most skilful,
despite their counting, often blunder."

VII

"LUCINDE" IN REAL LIFE

Behind this indistinct picture lay a far more definitely outlined reality. The
youthful life of the hero corresponded pretty accurately, as Friedrich
Schlegel's letters show, with that of the author. In those days Berlin had not

yet become pious, but was, according to the evidence of contemporaries, a
species of Venusberg, which none approached with impunity. The example
of the throne sanctioned every species of moral licence. Enthusiasm for art
and literature superseded the official morality which a short time before had
been so powerful, but from which men were rapidly emancipating
themselves.
In the autumn of 1799, the year in which Lucinde was published, Friedrich
Schlegel wrote to Schleiermacher: "People here have been behaving so
outrageously that Schelling has had a fresh attack of his old enthusiasm for
irreligion, in which I support him with all my might. He has composed an
epicurean confession of faith in the Hans Sachs-Goethe style." This was
Der Widerporst.
"Kann es fürwahr nicht länger ertragen,
Muss wieder einmal um mich schlagen,
Wieder mich rühren mit allen Sinnen,
So mir dachten zu entrinnen
Von den hohen, überirdischen Lehren,
Dazu sie mich wollten mit Gewalt bekehren
Darum, so will auch ich bekennen
Wie ich in mir es fühle brennen,
Wie mir's in allen Adern schwillt,
Mein Wort so viel wie anderes gilt,
Da ich in bös' und guten Stunden
Mich habe gar trefflich befunden,
Seit ich gekommen in's Klare,
Die Materie sei das einzig Wahre.
Halte nichts vom Unsichtbaren,
Halt' mich allein am Offenbaren,
Was ich kann riechen, schmecken, fühlen,
Mit allen Sinnen drinnen wühlen.
Mein einzig' Religion ist die,
Dass ich liebe ein schönes Knie,
Volle Brust und schlanke Hüften,
Dazu Blumen mit süssen Düften,
Aller Lust volle Nährung,
Aller Liebe süsse Gewährung.

D'rum, sollt's eine Religion noch geben
(Ob ich gleich kann ohne solche leben),
Könnte mir vor den andern allen
Nur die katholische gefallen,
Wie sie war in den alten Zeiten,
Da es gab weder Zanken noch Streiten,
Waren alle ein Mus und Kuchen,
Thäten's nicht in der Ferne suchen,
Thäten nicht nach dem Himmel gaffen,
Hatten von Gott'nen lebend'gen Affen,
Hielten die Erde für's Centrum der Welt,
Zum Centrum der Erde Rom bestellt,
Darin der Statthalter residirt
Und der Welttheile Scepter führt,
Und lebten die Laien und die Pfaffen
Zusammen wie im Land der Schlaraffen,
Dazu sie im hohen Himmelhaus
Selber lebten in Saus und Braus,
War ein täglich Hochzeithalten
Zwischen der Jungfrau und dem Alten."[1]
Such a poem from such a hand is a genuine proof of the spirit of the times;
and it is instructive to observe that when Wilhelm Schlegel (acting upon
Goethe's advice) refuses to publish the poem in the Athenæum, Novalis,
against whom it was especially directed, writes: "I cannot understand why
Der Widerporst should not be printed. Is it on account of its atheism? Just
think of Die Götter Griechenlands!"
The fashions were revolutionary—uncovered bosoms, orientally flowing
garments. The tone of the most notable young women of the day was
excessively free. No one was more talked of for her beauty at this time than
Pauline Wiesel. She was the wife of a highly intellectual man, whose
scepticism and satirical, cynical wit made a deep and disturbing impression
upon young Tieck (he was the model for Abdallah and William Lovell); and
she was one of Prince Louis Ferdinand's many mistresses. The attachment
of the dashing young prince, in this case a real passion, still glows in his
letters. A contemporary wrote of her: "I look upon her in the light of a
phenomenon of Greek mythology." Alexander von Humboldt walked more

than thirty miles to see her. It is characteristic of the times that the
connection by which Pauline Wiesel compromised herself roused no
disapprobation among her more advanced women friends. The
irreproachable Rahel, for example, has not a word of blame for it; one
might almost imagine that she envied Pauline. As a young girl she writes
despondently: "Every means, every possible preparation for living, and yet
one must never live; I never shall, and those who dare to do so have the
wretched world, the whole world, against them."
The original of Lucinde, however, was certainly superior to her portrait, a
woman of an altogether nobler type. She belonged to Rahel's circle, that
group of clever young Jewesses who then represented the noblest, freest
intellectual life of Berlin—a circle historically important from the fact that
it was the only one in which as yet Goethe's fame was really established and
true homage paid him.[2] The lady in question was Moses Mendelssohn's
clever, self-reliant daughter, Dorothea, who, to please her parents, had
bestowed her hand upon the well-known banker, Veit. It was not by beauty
but by her wit and her keen intellectuality that she captivated Friedrich
Schlegel. He was at the time twenty-five years of age, she thirty-two. There
was nothing sensuous or frivolous in either her appearance or manner; she
had large piercing eyes and a masculine severity of expression. In his letters
to his brother Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel praises "her sterling worth." "She
is," he says, "very straightforward, and cares for nothing but love, music,
wit, and philosophy." In 1789 Dorothea was divorced from her husband and
followed Schlegel to Jena. The latter writes at this time: "It has never been
our intention to bind ourselves to each other by any marriage contract,
though I have long considered it impossible that anything but death should
part us. The calculation and adjustment of present and future is antipathetic
to me, yet if the detested ceremony were the necessary condition of
inseparableness, I should act according to the requirement of the moment
and sacrifice my most cherished opinions."
In the arranging of their relations, none of their intimates helped Friedrich
and Dorothea more than their clerical friend, Schleiermacher. On none of
Schlegel's friends had Lucinde had such a powerful effect. Schleiermacher
was at this time chaplain of the Charité Church in Berlin. He had long
followed Friedrich's emancipatory endeavours with warm sympathy, and
even admiration. In his essay On Diotima, as well as in his harsh criticism

of Schiller's Würde der Frauen, Friedrich had attacked the traditional
conception of woman's position in society. He had held up to contempt the
ordinary marriage, in which the wedded pair "live together with a feeling of
mutual contempt, he seeing in her only her sex, she in him his social
position, and both in their children their own production and property."
What he desired was the moral and intellectual emancipation of women.
Intellect and culture, combined with enthusiasm, were the qualities which in
his eyes made a woman lovable. The ordinary ideal of womanliness he
scorned. He writes with bitterness of the stupidity and criminality of the
men who demand ignorance and innocence in women, thereby compelling
them to be prudish. Prudery is false pretence of innocence. True innocence
in woman he maintains to be perfectly compatible with intellectual culture.
It exists wherever there is religion, i.e. capacity for enthusiasm. The idea
that noble, enlightened free-thought is less becoming in the case of women
than of men is only one of the many generally accepted platitudes set in
circulation by Rousseau. "The thraldom of woman" is one of the curses of
humanity. His highest desire as an author was, as he naively puts it, "to
found a system of morality" (eine Moral zu stiften). He calls opposition to
positive law and conventional ideas of right, "the first moral impulse" felt
by man.
In his Vernunftkatechismus für edle Frauen ("Catechism of Reason for
Noble-minded Women"), a fragment which appeared in the Athenæum,
Schleiermacher writes in exactly the same strain, calling upon women to
free themselves from the bonds of their sex. Nay, incredible as it may
sound, it is quite possible (as Haym has proved) that the frequently quoted
saying of Friedrich Schlegel, that there is nothing of serious importance to
be urged against a marriage à quatre, really emanated from Schleiermacher.
It is levelled at the many degrading and unreal marriages, at the
"unsuccessful attempts at marriage," which the State in its foolishness
makes binding, and which prevent the possibility of a true marriage. The
writer of the fragment in which the saying occurs observes that most
marriages are only preparatory and distant approximations to the true
marriage; and Schleiermacher, in his Letters, writes that many attempts are
necessary, and that "if four or five couples were taken together, really good
marriages might result, provided they were allowed to exchange."

The underlying reason for the warm personal interest taken by
Schleiermacher in Friedrich and Dorothea is, no doubt, to be found in his
own position and circumstances at that time. A devoted attachment existed
between him and Eleonore Grunow, the childless and most unhappy wife of
a Berlin clergyman.
It seemed to Schleiermacher that the popular indignation roused by Lucinde
was largely compounded of philistine and Pharisaical ignorance. The very
people who abused it were revelling in Wieland's and Crébillon's immoral
tales. "It reminds me," he says, "of the trials for witchcraft, where malice
formulated the charge, and pious stupidity carried out the sentence." But
what especially led to his ardent championship of the persecuted pair was,
he tells us himself, the fact that most of those who complained loudly of
offended morality were simply seeking a pretext for a private personal
attack on Schlegel.
An invincible spirit dwelt in Dorothea's frail body. She bore unfalteringly
all that her violation of conventional morality brought upon her—private
condemnation and public defamation in the shape of innuendoes in the
attacks on Lucinde. She displayed the most enduring devotion and the most
self-sacrificing faithfulness to the man she had chosen. She not only shares
his interests and aims, but bears with his unreasonableness and resigns
herself uncomplainingly to the caprices of the most capricious of lovers.
Nay, more than this, her good sense and cheerfulness scatter all the clouds
of despondency that gather round herself and others. Her merry laughter
brings relief from Schleiermacher's subtle argumentativeness and
Friedrich's transcendental irony. Free in every other respect from feminine
sentimentality, she is completely engrossed in admiration of the man she
loves, and, with touching modesty, centres all her pride in him. When her
novel Florentin is published, a book in which, in spite of its many
weaknesses, there is more creative power than in any of Friedrich Schlegel's
productions, what makes her happiest and proudest is that his name (as
editor) stands on the title-page. She jests merrily on the subject of her
literary activity. Blushing and with a beating heart, she sends the first
volume of her book to Schleiermacher, and she smiles at the numerous red
strokes which adorn the returned manuscript. "There is always the deuce in
it where the dative and accusative ought to be." The fact that she too felt
impelled to write at the time (about the year 1800) when all the

Romanticists, even Schleiermacher and Schelling, were committing literary
sins, marks her as one of the German Romantic literary circle; and,
moreover, her novel is, in reality, an expression of all the prevailing ideas,
an imitation of Wilhelm Meister and Franz Sternbald, an exaltation of the
harmoniously cultivated few at the expense of the vulgar crowd, a
glorification of the free Bohemian life, of idleness and admirable frivolity,
of purposelessness in the midst of the prose of reality.
Dorothea has endowed her hero with characteristics which obviously
correspond to Friedrich's as they appeared to her admiring woman's eyes.
"In spite of a peculiar and often repellent manner, he has the gift of making
himself popular, and wins all hearts without caring whether he does or not.
It is of no avail to arm one's self against him with all one's pride; somehow
or other he gains entire possession of one. It is often most exasperating not
to be able to withstand him, as he himself is not to be won. At times it
seems as if he attached another meaning to his words than their obvious
one; sometimes when the most flattering things are said to him, he looks
utterly indifferent, as if it were a matter of course; at other times, quite
unexpectedly, some chance word, let fall without any special intention,
affords him the greatest pleasure; he either finds in it or puts into it some
peculiar meaning.... But you can imagine how often he gives offence in
society."
Florentin's confessions, too, especially those relating to his wild life as a
youth in Venice, remind us of Friedrich's youthful experiences in Leipzig.
Although Florentin is an Italian, he feels himself strongly attracted by
German art and German artists. He teaches himself to draw and paint, and
makes his living, now as the gifted Romantic dilettante artist, now as the no
less Romantic musician, roaming from village to village. His birth is wrapt
in mystery. He is, as he himself says, "the solitary, the outcast, the child of
chance. Something indescribable, which I can only call my destiny, drives
me on." He avoids all ties of affection: "Alone will I bear the curse which
has been laid upon me."[3]
It is unnecessary to criticise this characterisation in detail and point out how
naïve and excessively Romantic it is. None the less, its writer is in many
ways superior to her surroundings. Not for nothing was she the daughter of
the sober, sagacious Moses Mendelssohn.

She would like, she says, to see Friedrich the literary artist, but she would
love him better still if she could see in him the worthy citizen of a well-
ordered state; it seems to her, indeed, that the character and desires of all
her revolutionary friends make literary occupations, reviewing and such-
like, as unsuitable for them as a child's cradle for a giant: her ideal is Götz
von Berlichingen, who only took up the pen as a rest from the sword.[4]
Here again we are impressed by what strikes us in reading of Frau von
Kalb, namely, that the women of this period display more virile and more
concentrated power than the men, and that they persist in treating from the
social standpoint questions which the men desire to treat only from the
literary. They feel the oppression of existing circumstances more strongly,
are less enervated by overmuch book-learning, and look at things more
practically than the men.
The first important event in the life of the young couple was Fichte's
coming to live with them. Fichte had been accused of teaching atheism, and
his position as a professor was in jeopardy. Caroline Schlegel writes to a
friend: "I must answer your questions about the Fichte affair, though it is a
very painful one to me and to all admirers of honourable, frank behaviour.
You know pretty well yourself what to think of the first accusation, made by
a bigoted sovereign and his counsellors, half of them Catholics, the rest
Moravian Brethren.... But Fichte is so exasperated by all sorts of reports
from Weimar, about things looking bad for him there, &c. &c., that he
declares he will resign if they reprimand him, or put any restriction on his
teaching.... All who would stand well at court, and the professors whom
Fichte has outshone, denounce his boldness and precipitancy. He is
abandoned, actually avoided."
In a letter written jointly by Friedrich, Schleiermacher, and Dorothea, the
last-mentioned says: "Things are going well with Fichte here; he is left in
peace. Nicolai has intimated that no notice whatever will be taken of him so
long as he does not attempt to give public lectures; this would not be well
received.... I get on excellently with Fichte, and feel as much at home in this
gathering of philosophers as if I had never been accustomed to anything
inferior. Though I am still a little timid, this has nothing to do with Fichte
personally, but rather with my own position to the world and to Friedrich—I
am afraid—yet possibly I am mistaken. I cannot write another word, dear,

for my philosophers are pacing up and down the room so incessantly that I
am quite giddy."
Here we have a little domestic scene from Dorothea's life in Berlin. The
three were so comfortable together that Fichte was desirous to make the
arrangement permanent. He writes to his wife that he is trying to persuade
Friedrich to remain in Berlin, and August Wilhelm and his wife to remove
there. "If my plan succeeds, the two Schlegels, Schelling, who must also be
persuaded to come, and we ourselves will form one family, take a large
house, have only one cook, &c., &c."[5] The plan was not carried out. The
wives of the two Schlegels did not get on with each other. But is it not like a
breath from another world to come, in the midst of all this solicitude for
Fichte and indignation at the wrong done him, upon such a passage in one
of Dorothea's letters as the following: "I heartily thank your mother for the
sweet picture of the saint. I keep it where I can always see it. She is the very
saint I should have chosen for myself; she suits me exactly. These pictures
and the Catholic music touch me so, that I am determined, if I become a
Christian, to be a Catholic."[6] Nowhere is the religious confusion which
distinguishes the Romantic School more plainly displayed.
But Dorothea is not the only female portrait in Lucinde. During the course
of his development Julius makes the acquaintance of an admirable woman,
who is described as follows: "This disease was cured, was expelled, by the
very first sight of a woman who was quite unique, and who was the first to
exercise complete influence over his mind.... She had made her choice, and
had given herself to one who was his friend as well as hers, and who was
worthy of her love. Julius was the confidant. He knew exactly what it was
that made him unhappy, and sternly judged his own baseness.... He forced
all his love back into his inmost heart and let passion rage and burn and
consume there. But his outward man was quite changed. So successful was
he in counterfeiting the most childlike frankness and innocence, and in
assuming a sort of fraternal brusqueness to prevent his melting into
tenderness, that she never entertained the slightest suspicion. She was gay
and genial in her happiness; suspecting nothing, she shunned nothing, but
gave her mood and wit free play when she found him unamiable. All the
nobility and all the grace, all the divinity and all the waywardness of the
feminine character found in her their most refined, their most womanly
expression. Each quality was allowed to develop as freely and vigorously as

if it were the only one; and the daring mixture of dissimilar elements did
not produce confusion, for a spirit inspired it which was a living breath of
harmony and love. In the course of the same hour she would reproduce
some comic episode with the refined abandon of the accomplished actress,
and read a great poem with simple, touching dignity. At one time it pleased
her fancy to shine and trifle in society, at another she was all enthusiasm
and ardour, and presently she would be assisting others by word and deed,
serious, unassuming, and gentle as a tender mother. Her manner of relating
it made any trifling incident as entertaining as a delightful fairy tale. She
embellished everything with feeling and wit; she had a power of
comprehending everything, and of ennobling everything she touched.
Nothing great or good was too holy or too common for her passionate
sympathy. She understood the slightest suggestion, and answered even the
question that was not asked. It was not possible to make long speeches to
her; they turned naturally into interesting conversations, during which an
ever-varying music of intelligent glances and sweet expressions played over
her delicate features. One seemed to see these glances and expressions
while reading her letters, so lucidly and genially did she write, as if talking
with her correspondent. Those who only knew this side of her might think
that she was merely lovable, that she would make an enchanting actress,
that nothing but metre and rhyme were wanting to make her winged words
exquisite poetry. But this same woman showed on every occasion that
called for it the most astonishing courage and energy; and it was from this
side of her character, by her own heroic standard, that she judged men."
There is more praise than art in this portrait. Sainte-Beuve would have
given us a very different delineation. The original of the picture is a woman
who, after the publication of her letters under the title Caroline, was known,
as if she had been a queen, only by this, her Christian name. It simplified
matters, too, to designate her thus, for she had had so many surnames that it
was difficult to know by which to call her. She was a daughter of the well-
known German philologist, Michaelis; her first husband was a Dr. Böhmer;
after his death she married A. W. Schlegel, and her third husband was
Schelling. These two last marriages placed her in the centre of the Romantic
circle, which seems naturally to group itself round her. She was its own
special muse. Grier, the gifted translator of Calderon and Ariosto, says of
her that she is by far the cleverest woman he has known. Steffens and
Wilhelm von Humboldt use similar expressions. A. W. Schlegel writes of

several of his essays, that they are "in part the work of a highly gifted
woman, who possessed all the qualifications of a successful author, but
whose ambition did not lie in that direction." Schelling writes at the time of
her death: "Even had she not been to me what she was, I should mourn the
human being, should lament that this intellectual paragon no longer exists,
this rare woman, who to masculine strength of soul and the keenest intellect
united the tenderest, most womanly, most loving heart. We shall never see
her like again." Her portrait is very striking—fascinating, refined, roguish,
and yet tender. She is quite in Leonardo's style. Dorothea is far less
complex.
Caroline was born in 1763, and was twenty-one at the time of her first
marriage. A. W. Schlegel made her acquaintance whilst he was a student at
Göttingen, and fell in love with her, but she refused to marry him.
Intercourse between them was broken off for a time, but was carried on by
correspondence while Schlegel was at Amsterdam, where he went as a tutor
in 1791. Here various amorous episodes, amongst them one serious love
affair, threw Caroline for a time into the shade. Meanwhile, she was
entangling herself in a net of the strangest relations. In 1799 she had gone to
Mainz, where she lived in the house of Georg Forster, Humboldt's teacher, a
man equally distinguished as a scientist and an author. When this gifted and
admirable, but far too sanguine man, embarked on revolutionary enterprises
and attempted to extend French republicanism to the Rhine districts,
Caroline enthusiastically aided and abetted him. She was in communication
with the members of the Republican Club in Mainz, and she was unjustly
suspected of communicating with the enemy through her brother-in-law, G.
Böhmer, who was Custine's secretary. When Mainz was reconquered by the
German troops, she was arrested, and spent several months in barbarous
imprisonment, sharing a room with seven other people. From prison she
wrote to A. W. Schlegel for assistance.
Her position was even worse than it appeared to be. In Mainz, in
desperation at the disappointment of her dearest hopes (she had expected
that the manly, energetic Tatter would offer her his hand), she had thrown
herself into the arms of her adorer for the moment, a Frenchman, and the
results of this connection would inevitably compromise her for ever, if she
were not freed from prison in time. Schlegel's influence and her own
brother's unremitting endeavours procured her release. With quiet chivalry

August Wilhelm placed Caroline, now forsaken by all her other friends,
under the protection of his younger brother, Friedrich. It was in these
singularly unpropitious circumstances that Friedrich made her
acquaintance. He was by no means prepossessed in her favour, in fact, was
inclined to look upon her with contempt; yet this is how he writes: "I had
certainly not expected simplicity and a positively divine truthfulness.... She
made a profound impression upon me. I longed to be in a position to win
her confidence and friendship; but the moment she showed some return of
the feeling I saw very clearly that the bare attempt would lead to the most
painful struggles, and that if a friendship between us were possible at all, it
could only be the fruit of much that was unjustifiable.... Thenceforward
every selfish desire was abandoned. The relation in which I stood to her was
perfectly innocent and simple. In my behaviour there was the reverence of a
son, the candour of a brother, the frankness of a child, and the
unobtrusiveness of a stranger."[7]
In 1796 A. W. Schlegel married his somewhat deeply compromised friend.
Her circle soon included all the leading men of the day. She was in constant
intercourse with Goethe, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Tieck,
Schleiermacher, and Hardenberg. This was the time of Goethe's intimate
connection with the young school. It was in the process of formation, and
its members held their first meetings at Jena. Caroline breakfasts with
Goethe, dines with Fichte, and is soon only too inseparable from Schelling.
The following extract from one of her letters to Schelling (March 1, 1801)
affords an example of the vigour and the subtlety of this remarkable
woman's criticism: "You surely do not expect me, dearest friend, to
enlighten you as to the compass of Fichte's mind, though you almost
express yourself as if you did. It has always seemed to me as if, in spite of
his incomparable reasoning powers, the soundness of his deductions, his
lucidity and accuracy, his direct intuition of the Ego, and his discoverer's
enthusiasm—as if in spite of all this he were limited. My explanation of the
matter is, that the divine spark is lacking in him; and if you have broken
through a circle from which he has not been able to escape, I believe that
you have done it not so much as the philosopher—don't scold me if I am
using the word wrongly—but rather because there is poetry in you and none
in him. Poetical inspiration led you directly to productiveness; keenness of
apprehension led him to knowledge. He has light, the clearest and brightest,

but you have warmth as well; and light can only illuminate, while warmth
produces. Now, have I not seen all this cleverly?—just as one sees a
boundless landscape through a keyhole."
In another letter we find an amusing reference to Hegel, which shows us
that philosopher in a novel light: "Hegel is playing the beau and general
gallant" (Hegel macht den Galanten und allgemeinen Cicisbeo).[8]
Caroline shares enthusiastically in all the efforts of the Romantic School;
she revises, reviews anonymously, writes herself, influences other writers
directly and indirectly. She is obliged to expend that politico-revolutionary
ardour, of which she possesses a far larger share than the men, on literary
skirmishes and intrigues. We find her, for instance, writing an anonymous
and tolerably sharp review of Schlegel's Ion; Schlegel replies, also
anonymously, criticising her criticism; then Caroline calls Schelling to her
assistance, and he, acting as her champion, falls upon Schlegel still more
heavily in a third anonymous article, written in an extremely polished
manner—at the same time writing privately to him that he hopes he will not
take it amiss. It is to Caroline that the misunderstanding and final rupture
between Schiller and Schlegel is due; she sets the brothers against the poet
by her extremely witty but unfair mockery of his style; Schiller, on his side,
cannot be acquitted of having treated them with considerable haughtiness at
the beginning of their literary career. His name for Caroline is "Dame
Lucifer."
Caroline's worst side was displayed in her small-minded hatred of poor
Dorothea Veit, whom she positively persecuted. This hatred disturbed the
beautiful relation between August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who were
intimate friends as well as brothers. At one time it threatened to separate
them altogether. Observe the way in which she speaks of Dorothea:
"Friedrich was present at the performance of Alarkos, and immediately
afterwards got into a post-chaise and set off for France, where it is his
intention to be married in republican fashion. Under Robespierre, drowning
in the Loire went by the name of noces republicaines; such a wedding for
one half of the couple I should not object to."
Her best qualities were called forth by her daughter, that remarkable child,
Auguste Böhmer, whose name, although she died at the age of fifteen, has a
place in the history of German literature. All who read this child's criticism

of Friedrich or of Dorothea, or her rhymed letters to Tieck and
Schleiermacher, are astounded by her precociousness. Her death was a
turning-point in Caroline's life. Schelling, who very possibly had been first
attracted by the daughter, drew nearer to the mother in her sudden and sad
bereavement. He was then quite young, labouring ardently at his earliest
works, glowing with passion, sparkling with genius, the favourite of
Goethe. Caroline and he had a great common sorrow and need of
consolation. Their feeling for each other soon assumed the character of
passionate love. The publication by the unscrupulous opponents of the
Romanticists of a pamphlet in which it was asserted that Schelling, with his
crazy Naturphilosophie and the treatment he had recommended, had
shortened the child's life, only drew them closer together. The charge was a
pure fabrication. It was in his reply to this pamphlet that Schelling made use
of the violent language quoted in the introduction to Lassalle's Capital and
Labour. Caroline's relations with Schlegel had long been of the coldest; he
and she lived in different towns. Had she been of a jealous disposition, she
would have found abundant cause for complaint. After his separation from
Caroline, Schlegel formed a connection with Tieck's sister, Sophie
Bernhardi, who divorced her husband for his sake. His last attempt at
marriage, with the daughter of Paulus, the rationalist, was not a success, and
ended in a divorce.
When Schelling and Caroline had become so indispensable to each other
that it was necessary to break the tie which bound her to Schlegel, the latter,
with perfect chivalry, gave his consent. Writing of the divorce, Caroline
says: "We broke a tie which neither of us had ever considered permanently
binding."[9] Her new marriage was a perfectly happy one.
The way in which Schlegel takes Caroline's decision enlightens us not only
as to the theories of the Romanticists, but as to the manner in which the
leaders of the school applied them in their own lives. August Wilhelm not
only gives his consent, but continues to keep up a friendly correspondence
with Schelling, and in literary matters the two men render each other
valuable assistance. Caroline herself maintains the friendliest relations with
Schlegel long after he is aware of the relation in which she stands to
Schelling. She writes to him in May 1801: "Will you, please, decide a
dispute between Schelling and me? Are these hexameters (Schelling's)
worth anything? I consider the last lines awkward, but he maintains that

they are good." Schlegel actually visited the couple at Munich, in company
with Madame de Staël.
Thus even very serious personal disagreements and ruptures could not
divide those whom fellowship of ideas and a common endeavour to
promote them, united. The Romanticists considered personal liberty an
inalienable right, and respected it in others while demanding it for
themselves.
But we learn something else besides the fact that the Romanticists were
very changeable in their loves, and perfectly regardless of social ties; and
that something is, that their women were superior to them in everything but
talent, and that what the men did was to drag them down to their own level.
We see the strong-minded, energetic Dorothea, who is so keenly sensible of
the pettiness of the purely literary endeavours of the Romanticists, slowly
change, see her reluctantly admire Lucinde, then write novels herself in the
prescribed style, and finally follow Friedrich to Vienna and become a
Catholic along with him. Or look at the high-spirited, enthusiastic, resolute
Caroline, who, as a young widow not much over twenty, attempts to
revolutionise the Rhineland. So unflinching is she then, that she
compromises herself recklessly, and risks the life and well-being of those
dearest to her with absolute regardlessness. Friedrich writes to August
Wilhelm: "I shall never forgive her heartlessness in being ready to beguile
you, her friend, into that vortex of ignoble dangers and worthless
characters." Only a few years later we see this same woman writing
anonymous reviews, favourable or unfavourable, of her husband's wretched
dramas, and entirely absorbed in literary intrigues. Ever and anon her spirit
is momentarily stirred by a breath wafted from the old times. Then we feel
how changed she is. Writing to her daughter in October 1799, after giving
her a quantity of family news, the last item of which is: "Hofrath Hufeland
has returned, with wife and children," she exclaims: "But what sorry trash is
all this! Buonaparte is in Paris! Think of that, child! All will go well again.
The Russians have been driven out of Switzerland; they and the English
will be obliged to capitulate with disgrace in Holland; the French are
making way in Swabia; and now comes Buonaparte. Rejoice with me, or I
shall think that you are entirely taken up with frivolities and have no serious
thoughts at all." Then, almost in the same breath, literary gossip: "Tieck is
here and we are much together. You would never believe all that these men

take it into their heads to do. I will send you a sonnet on Merkel. He has
been running about Berlin, telling that the Schlegels have received a
reprimand from the Duke on account of the Athenæum, &c. So Wilhelm and
Tieck set to work the other evening and wrote a wicked sonnet in his
honour. It was splendid to see the two pairs of brown eyes flashing at each
other, and the wild merriment with which the perfectly justifiable squib was
concocted. Dorothea and I almost rolled on the floor with laughter. She
knows how to laugh, which will recommend her to you. Merkel is done for;
he will never recover it. There will be a terrible uproar.... Schelling is
attacking the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung with all his might. These
quarrels, however, are of no importance to you; but Buonaparte and the
Russians most certainly are." It is as though she strove to keep the larger
interests alive in her daughter, feeling that they were dying in herself. Soon
she marries Schelling, and conforms to all the established conventions of
that great clerical stronghold, Bavaria.
Many great men have vainly attempted to teach the women they loved to
share their interests. To my mind no worse accusation can be brought
against gifted men, no surer sign of their weakness adduced than this, that,
far from raising the women who have given themselves to them and
followed them, they have dragged them down, taken from them their
highest interests and noblest sympathies, and given them small and mean
ones in exchange. From such a charge the Romanticists cannot free
themselves. They treated the great women given them by the gods as they
did the great ideas which were their own heritage; they took from them the
noble, liberal-minded social and political enthusiasm by which they were
naturally characterised, and made them, first Romantic and literary, then
remorseful, and finally Catholic.
[1] Plitt: Aus Schelling's Leben, i. 282. "I can bear it no longer; I must live once
more, must let my senses have free play—these senses of which I have well-nigh
been robbed by the grand transcendental theories to which they have done their
utmost to convert me. But I too will now confess how my heart leaps and the hot
blood rushes through my veins; my word is as good as any man's; and of good
cheer have I been, in fair weather and in foul, since I became persuaded that
there is nothing real but matter. I care not for the invisible; I keep to the tangible,
to what I can taste and smell, and feel, and satisfy all my senses with. I have no
religion but this, that I love a well-shaped knee, a fair, plump bosom, a slender
waist, flowers with the sweetest odours, full satisfaction of all desires, the
granting of all sweet love can ask. If I am obliged to have a religion (though I
can live most happily without it), then it must be the Catholic, such as it was in
the olden days, when there was no scolding and quarrelling, when all were

kneaded of one dough. They did not trouble about the far-off, did not look
longingly up to heaven; they had a living image of God. The earth they held to
be the centre of the universe, and the centre of the earth was Rome. There the
great vicegerent sat enthroned, and wielded the sceptre of the world; and priests
and laity lived together as they live in the land of Cocagne; and in the house of
God itself high revelry was held."
[2] Köpke: Tieck's Leben, i. 193.
[3] Florentin, pp. 65, 80, 170, 195, 230, 310.
[4] Haym, Die romantische Schule, 509, 525, 663, &c.
[5] Caroline, i. 254, 259, 261.
[6] Caroline, i. 393.
[7] Caroline, i. 347, 348.
[8] Caroline, ii. 2.
[9] Caroline, ii. 237.

VIII

SCHLEIERMACHER'S LETTERS

The Romanticists themselves were by no means satisfied with Lucinde.
Novalis has most to say in its favour. He is of opinion that there are few
such personal books; it seems to him that in it all the workings of the
author's mind may be observed as distinctly as the play of chemical forces
during the dissolution of a lump of sugar in a glass of water. He is
somewhat disturbed by the species of delusion prevailing throughout the
work, which makes man, the thinking being, a mere natural force, and
which takes such possession of the reader that he finds himself deeply
interested in what is simply sensual instinct. Moreover, the whole is not
simple enough, not sufficiently free from pedantry. Yet "Romantic chords"
are not lacking, and it is not so much the matter as the form to which he
objects.
He writes at once to Caroline Schlegel: "There is nothing to object to in the
ideas, but in the manner of expressing them there is a good deal which
strikes me as being borrowed from Krates [the cynic]. The cry, 'Be cynical!'

is not yet heard among us, and even really advanced women will blame the
beautiful Athenian for having made the market-place her bridal chamber."
Quite true; only it was not the luckless Dorothea who was to blame for the
profanation, even though she did not feel incensed by the public exhibition,
as we do on her behalf; her lord and master was alone to blame.
We have seen that Caroline soon allowed her satirical wit free play in
writing of Lucinde; and A. W. Schlegel, Schelling, Steffens, and the others
privately regarded it as an enfant terrible, whatever their public utterances
may have been. A. W. Schlegel indeed wrote, in a sonnet to Friedrich:—
"Dich führt zur Dichtung Andacht brünst'ger Liebe,
Du willst zum Tempel dir das Leben bilden,
Wo Götterrecht die Freiheit lös' und binde.
Und dass ohn' Opfer der Altar nicht bliebe,
Entführtest Du den himmlischen Gefilden,
Die hohe Gluth der leuchtenden Lucinde."[1]
And when Kotzebue published the comedy, Der hyperboräische Esel,
which satirises Friedrich and his book, August Wilhelm responded with the
witty satire, Ehrenpforte für den Präsidenten von Kotzebue; but privately he
called the book a "foolish rhapsody." Tieck called it "eine wunderliche
Chimäre," and even Schleiermacher attempted to disavow his authorship of
the Letters on the Subject of Lucinde, after his inclination to a species of
sensual mysticism had given place to a Protestant-rationalistic tendency.
Nevertheless, or rather, for this very reason, it is of importance that we
should inquire into the nature of these letters, which were written with the
aim of proving Lucinde to be, not merely an innocent, but a good and holy
book, the worth of which is testified to by the delight which high-minded
women take in it. On the letters of two such women, his sister, Ernestine,
and his friend, Eleonore Grunow, Schleiermacher's own are based.
There is little of general interest for us nowadays in these letters, so we
shall only notice their salient points. As Lucinde is the solitary contribution
of Romanticism towards the solution of a social problem, and as marriage is
almost the only social question grappled with by literature generally at the
beginning of the century (Goethe's Wanderjahre alone, in the manner of
Rousseau's romances, occupying itself with a wider range of such

questions), it will be of interest to compare the utterances of the different
European literatures on this subject.
Schleiermacher's book is an attack upon prudery. At the very beginning he
writes: "I was almost inclined to believe that you had become a prude; if
you had, I should have entreated you to go and settle in England, to which
country I should like to banish the whole genus." And one division of the
book is entirely devoted to an analysis of that false modesty which
precludes true modesty, and causes so much unnecessary misery.
"The anxious and narrow-minded modesty by which society at the present
day is characterised, has its root in the consciousness of a great and general
wrongheadedness and depravity. But where is it to end? It is bound to
spread farther and farther. If people are perpetually on the lookout for what
is immodest, they will end by discovering it in every domain of thought,
and all conversation and social intercourse must cease.... utter depravation
and the perfect education by which man returns to innocence, both do away
with modesty; in the first case true modesty, as well as false, is destroyed;
in the second, it ceases to be a thing to which much attention is paid or
much importance attached.[2]
"Is it not the case, dear child, that everything spiritual in man has its
beginning in an instinctive, vague, inward impulse, which only the action of
the individual, frequently repeated, develops into definite, conscious will
and a perfected faculty. Not until they have developed so far can there be
any question of a lasting connection between these inward impulses and
definite objects. Why should love be different from everything else? Is it
reasonable to expect the highest faculty of man to be perfect from the first?
Should it be easier to love than to eat and drink? Surely in love too there
must be preparatory attempts, from which nothing permanent results, but
which all tend to make the feeling more distinct and more noble. The
connection of these attempts with any definite object is merely accidental,
at first often purely imaginary, and always ephemeral—as ephemeral as the
feeling itself, which soon gives place to one more clearly defined and
intense. Inquire of the most mature and highly cultivated men and women;
you will find that they smile at the thought of their first love as at any other
laughable childish performance, and often live in complete indifference side
by side with the object of it. According to the nature of things it must be so,

and to insist upon faithfulness and a lasting connection is as dangerous as it
is foolish."
Schleiermacher naturally warns his correspondent against what he calls the
chimera of the holiness of first love: "Do not believe that everything
depends upon something coming of it. The novels which support this idea,
and make love between the same two beings develop uninterruptedly from
its first raw beginning to its highest perfection, are as hurtful as they are
silly; and their authors, as a rule, have as little understanding of love as they
have of art.... When the more or less indefinite love longing settles upon a
definite object, there necessarily arises a definite connection, and a point of
closest approach. When this point has been reached and you feel that it is
not the right one, not one that can be held, what is there left for you to do
but to part again? Only after such an attempt has been completed as an
attempt, that is to say, after the connection has been broken off, can the
memory of it and reflection upon it produce a truer understanding of the
longing and feeling, and thus prepare for another and better attempt. Is there
any obligation to make the next with the same person? Upon what can such
an obligation be founded? I, for my part, consider this more unnatural than
love between brother and sister. Allow yourself perfect liberty, then;
endeavouring only to preserve a pure-minded, clear feeling that it is merely
an experiment, so that you may be prevented from sanctioning and
perpetuating that which is not intended to be more, by that self-surrender
which, from its nature, ought to mark the end of experiments and the
beginning of a true and lasting love. Such a mistake, which is both the
consequence and the cause of the most miserable delusions, you must
regard as the most terrible thing that can happen to you; I would have you
understand that this is in reality allowing one's self to be seduced. When
you have found true love, and feel yourself to have reached the point at
which you can perfect your character and make your life beautiful and
worthy, diffidence and fear of the last and most precious seal of union will
seem to you pure affectation. The only danger lies in the fact that every
attempt, from its very nature, aims at reaching this point. The point of
sufficiency can only be discovered by satiety. But if you are healthy in mind
and heart, you will, as often as one of these attempts to love approaches this
point, feel an aversion which is something far higher and holier than any
law, or than what generally goes by the name of modesty and chastity."

SCHLEIERMACHER

Sound and sensible reflections, one and all, but neither exhaustive nor
applicable to what are the real difficulties of the case. Schleiermacher warns
against mistakes, but cannot remedy them, without infringing upon the
sanctity of marriage, which he never calls in question. For what is to be
done when the mistake has already been made? And what when it has been
on one side only, when only the love of the one has grown cold, while that
of the other still endures? And he does not give a word or a thought to the
fact that marriage, as a social institution, does not exist for the sake of the
lovers, that its original intention was to secure the father's property for the
children, and that it has continued to exist because it seemed to society the
only means of protecting the rising generation. Schleiermacher, the idealist,
would fain discover a new moral foundation, and entirely overlooks the
real, the practical difficulties. How characteristic of the nation to which the

author belongs is all this pondering over feeling! An Italian once said to me:
"What astonishes us most in the emotional life of the Teutonic nations is
their conception and cult of love. With them love is positively a religion,
something in which a good man is bound to believe. And this religion has
its theology, and its philosophy, and what not. We simply love, and no more
about it." I thought of this speech when reading Schleiermacher. How much
ingenuity he exhibits in proving that men should not allow themselves to be
disturbed by false theories when they love, and what a steadfast belief in the
love which is to "complete and perfect the character," lies at the foundation
of it all! It is instructive to compare with Schleiermacher's some utterances
by great authors of other nations on the same subject; they throw what is
peculiarly national in his into more marked relief.
George Sand, whose first novels are the expression of the same movement
in France which Lucinde inaugurates in Germany, says, by the mouth of the
principal characters in Jacques and Lucrezia Floriani: "Paul and Virginia
were able to love each other steadily and undisturbedly; for they were
children brought up by the same mother. Our surroundings have been too
utterly unlike.... If two beings are to understand each other always, and to
be united by an unchangeable love, their characters as children must have
been formed by a similar education, they must have the same beliefs, the
same turn of mind, even the same manners and habits. But we, the
distressed offspring of a turbulent and corrupt society, which behaves to her
disunited children like a stepmother, and is more cruel in her periods of
savagery than actual savages are, how can we wonder, after such great
outward divisions, at the perpetual divisions of hearts and the impossibility
of inward harmony."
Obviously George Sand is considerably less persuaded than Schleiermacher
of the probability or possibility of the individual's meeting with that "right
one," love for whom perfects. Jacques says: "I am still persuaded that
marriage is one of the most barbarous institutions of society. I doubt not
that it will be abolished when the human race makes further progress
towards justice and reason; a more human and not less sacred tie will take
its place and will ensure the well-being of the children without fettering the
freedom of the parents. But as yet men are too barbarous and women too
cowardly to demand a nobler law than the iron one by which they are now
ruled. Beings destitute of conscience and virtue need heavy chains. The

improvements of which some generous spirits dream, cannot be realised in
such an age as ours; these spirits forget that they are a hundred years in
advance of their contemporaries, and that before they change the law, they
must change mankind." Jacques says to his bride on their wedding day:
"Society is about to dictate an oath to you. You are about to swear to be
faithful and obedient to me, that is to say, never to love any one but me, and
to obey me in all things. One of these vows is an absurdity, the other a
disgrace."
The idea expressed by George Sand in all these books is, that to preserve
the outward semblance of love, by caresses, &c., after it has ceased to exist,
is what constitutes real immorality in love. Jacques says: "I have never
forced my imagination to rekindle or reanimate a feeling in my soul which I
no longer found there. I have never looked upon love as a duty, constancy
as a rôle. When I have felt that love was extinguished in my soul I have said
so, without being either ashamed or conscience-stricken." And Lucrezia
Floriani says, still more emphatically: "Not one of all the passions to which
I have yielded naively and blindly, seemed to me so guilty as the one which
I was endeavouring, contrary to my feeling, to make lasting."
The French authoress looks upon unchangeable love for one and the same
person as a possibility only, dependent upon certain conditions; and her idea
of love is not, like Schleiermacher's, that it is the highest educational force,
but that, as an irresistible natural force, a possessing passion, it is beautiful,
the most beautiful thing in life. Institutions must adapt themselves to it,
since it cannot change its nature to suit institutions. A disciple of Rousseau,
she champions the cause of nature.
Let us now glance at one of the works of a contemporary English writer of
the same tendencies, at Shelley's Queen Mab. In the notes he has appended
to this poem we come upon a third variation of the opposition to prevailing
opinions. Shelley says: "Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception
of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is
compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure,
perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and
unreserve.... A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they
love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one
moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable
tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of

the right of private judgment should that law be considered which should
make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the
inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human
mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more
unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and
capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination,
and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object.... Love
is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than
to promise to believe the same creed.... The present system of constraint
does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open
enemies. Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they
find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in
unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the
feelings of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of
less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and
linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a
state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of their
children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed
in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood.... The
conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all
temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and
all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is
without appeal.... Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its
accompanying errors. Women, for no other crime than having followed the
dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and
sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder.... Has a woman obeyed
the instincts of unerring nature (sic!), society declares war against her,
pitiless and eternal war: she must be the tame slave, she must make no
reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. She
lives a life of infamy: the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her from all
return. She dies of long and lingering disease: yet she is in fault, she is the
criminal, and society the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an
abortion from her undefiled bosom!... Young men, excluded by the fanatical
idea of chastity from the society of modest and accomplished women,
associate with these vicious and miserable beings.... Chastity is a monkish
and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than
unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and

consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may
monopolise according to law. A system could not well have been devised
more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. I conceive that
from the abolition of marriage the fit and natural arrangement of sexual
intercourse would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be
promiscuous: on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to
child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all
others with generosity and self-devotion.... In fact, religion and morality, as
they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude: the
genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of
God ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality,
dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image,
should she look in the mirror of nature!"
Here again we have appeals to nature; but the standpoint is an entirely
different one. Shelley, the enthusiastic atheist, attributes the principal
miseries of social humanity to traditional religion. "Unerring" nature is the
divinity he substitutes for the God of the Bible. He considers that man has
the right to demand happiness, and, like a true Englishman, contends,
without troubling much about the psychology of the matter, for the freedom
of the individual from the compulsion of external law. Schleiermacher
warns against what is foolish, because, once the foolish step is taken, it is
binding; but he, the Protestant pastor, only indirectly incites to revolt.
George Sand rebels against what is dishonourable. In the ethical creed of
the French authoress honour plays the same part that wisdom does in
Schleiermacher's; it is by the mouth of Jacques, her ideal of manly honour,
that she protests in the name of the honour of humanity. Shelley stands forth
as the champion of personal liberty; it is thraldom that he desires to abolish.
The English apostle of liberty, soon to be an exile, unhesitatingly attacks the
institutions of society. George Sand never directly attacked marriage. She
actually says in the introduction to Mauprat: "It is husbands I have
attacked, and if I am asked what I propose to substitute for them, I answer
—marriage." But Shelley, who takes cognisance of all evils from the social
and political standpoint, proposes to improve humanity by legislation, being
persuaded that the state is bound to secure as much liberty of action as
possible to the individual as citizen.

It is obvious that, of these three representatives of the same idea,
Schleiermacher is the most profound thinker and the most reserved. In his
estimation character is of the first importance, in George Sand's, the heart,
and in Shelley's, happiness. These three great writers are the spokesmen of
three great nations, and by comparing them we are better able to understand
the character of the whole movement which begins at the beginning of the
century, but which can neither settle into shape nor produce good and
tranquillising results until the intellectual and social emancipation of
woman has advanced so far that she is independent of social prejudices,
knows her own needs, and is in a position to supply them.
[1] It is the sacred ardour of love that makes of thee a poet; thou aimest at
transforming life into a temple, where divine right binds and looses. And that the
altar may not lack a victim, thou hast stolen from heaven the noble ardour of the
glorious Lucinde.
[2] Briefe über die Lucinde, pp. 64, 83.

IX

WACKENRODER: ROMANTICISM AND MUSIC

In his Letters on Lucinde, Schleiermacher, the high-minded and honourable,
brought all his intelligence to bear upon the task of finding something
complete, something sensible, in the book. He read his personal opinions
into it. But his position was a false one. He was trying, by means of the
discussion of an unreal book, to settle a real question, trying to base a freer,
higher moral code upon a work which, instead of doing what it professed to
do, namely, proving the possibility of transforming life into poetry, simply
retailed the fantastic performances of a few talented individuals,
interspersing reflections on the poetry in a wild, extravagant reality.
Lucinde was hollow at the core. And this hollow, empty idealism is a
feature common to all the many ramifications of Romanticism. Goethe's
Prometheus cries to Zeus: "Didst thou imagine that I would loathe life, that
I would flee into the wilderness, because all my dream-blossoms did not
mature?" Thus speaks a Prometheus, thus a Goethe. But it was only natural

that this emotional, inactive young generation should produce a group of
authors who, just because "all their dream-blossoms did not mature," in
desperate dissatisfaction with reality grasped at empty air and pursued
shadows, which they obstinately persisted in trying to endow with corporeal
existence, maintaining that art and poetry and their element and organ,
imagination, are alone essential and living, but that all else (in other words,
real life) is, as vulgar prose, meaningless, nay evil, in the eyes of genius.[1]
And yet the earliest preachers of this new doctrine were far from being wild
or defiant. The first countenance which meets our gaze is, on the contrary,
peculiarly gentle, one of the purest and mildest in all modern literature—the
pale, noble face of Wackenroder.
The Romantic enthusiasm for art first found expression in a delicate little
work from the pen of an ardent youth, whose life was shortened by the
conflict between his burning desire to live for art, and the obligation laid
upon him by his father to pursue a practical calling. He died, his powers
entirely exhausted, in his twenty-fifth year. His life was like the mild, gentle
breeze, which on a day in the early spring warms the air, and tempts forth
the first flowers. His letters to Tieck, who was his intimate friend, and for
whom he had an unbounded admiration, reveal an almost girlish affection
for that more virile and notable man.
In every library of any importance one is sure to find a small, beautifully
printed and bound book, published in 1797, entitled Herzensergiessungen
eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders ("Heart Outpourings of an Art-Loving
Friar"). The author's name is not given. As vignette there is a head of
Raphael, who, with the great eyes, full lips, and slender neck given him in
this portrait, looks like some highly intellectual Christian devotee of Venus,
far advanced in consumption. The inscription below the picture is not
simply Raphael, but "the divine Raphael," i.e. the Raphael of the
Romanticists. This dainty little book is, as it were, the primary cell of the
whole Romantic structure; round it the later productions group themselves.
Though not the offspring of a vigorous creative power, its germinative force
proved wonderfully great. It is a book which contains nothing but ivy-like,
twining ideas, nothing but passive impressions; but the wax upon which
these impressions are stamped is so pure that the impressions are firm and
clear. The title does not mislead; the author pours out his heart in a stream
of fervent and religious enthusiasm for art, giving expression to a few

simple ideas in a simple, untheoretical manner. The book is not the product
of a great or epoch-making mind; but it has one great virtue, it is original.
To the Friar the only allowable attitude towards art is that of devotion; great
artists are in his eyes blessed, holy saints. His admiration for them is that of
an adoring child.
More than once in the course of the book Tieck has collaborated with
Wackenroder; but the simple autobiography of the young musician, Joseph
Berglinger, is entirely Wackenroder's work. The delicate refinement of
Berglinger's character reminds us of Joseph Delorme, the fictitious
personage in whom the young, Romantic, Sainte-Beuve described himself.
Berglinger is Wackenroder. Like Wackenroder he opposes the determination
of his father that he is not to become an artist, and simultaneously carries on
an even harder struggle with himself in the matter of his position towards
art. What troubles him is a fear, which curiously enough meets young
Romanticism here on the very threshold, like the shadow of its fate, the fear
of being incapacitated for real life by too entire absorption in art. Rückert
has given masterly expression to the idea in the following lines:—
"Die Kinder, lieber Sohn, der Gaukelschwertverschlucker
In Madras üben sich nicht an Confekt und Zucker,
Von Bambus lernen sie die Spitzen zu verschlingen,
Um wachsend in der Kunst es his zum Schwert zu bringen.
Willst Du als Mann das Schwert der Wissenschaft verdaun,
Musst Du als Jüngling nicht Kunstzuckerbrödchen kaun."[2]
Joseph expresses it thus: Art is a tempting, forbidden fruit; he who has once
tasted its sweet, innermost juice is irrevocably lost to the acting, living
world. The soul which art has enervated is perplexed and helpless face to
face with reality. Joseph himself is only delivered from this distressing
mental condition when glorious music raises him high above the troubles of
this earth. But he is at the mercy of his moods, and fittingly likens his soul
to the "Æolian harp, whose strings vibrate to a breath that comes one knows
not whence, and on which the changing breezes play at will." Music was
the art Wackenroder loved and understood best; in his posthumous Fancies
on the Subject of Art he places it above all the others.
Wackenroder resembled Novalis in constitution, but had even less capacity
for resistance to the storms of life. He was good-natured and credulous to a

degree, with a genuine Romantic credulity, which saw mysteries and
miracles everywhere. This inclination of his led to practical jokes being
played upon him by his comrades—though they too were all more or less
liable to hallucinations and disposed to put faith in miracles. An account of
one such trick has been preserved, such an anecdote as only the biography
of a Romanticist could supply. Indeed, to understand the theories of the
Romanticists, it is necessary to see the men themselves in their everyday
life and at their desks.—Wackenroder was a diligent student, and never
willingly missed a lecture. Two of his less conscientious friends went to his
room during the hour of a certain lecture, knowing that he would be absent,
and tied a dog, in a sitting posture, to the chair in front of the writing-table.
Both paws were carefully placed on a huge folio which lay open on the
table. The clever animal, accustomed to such performances, sat quietly in
this ludicrous position while the two friends hid in an adjoining room to
watch the development of their plot. Returning earlier than usual to fetch
some papers he had forgotten, Wackenroder stood motionless with
astonishment, gazing at the dog and its learned occupation. Fearful of
neglecting his duty, and unwilling to put an end to the marvellous
apparition, he gently lifted his papers from the table and left the room. In
the evening, no one else seeming inclined to talk, he suddenly broke the
silence by saying impressively: "Friends, I must tell you a most marvellous
thing. Our Stallmeister (the dog) can read."[3] Does not this read like a
scene from Tieck's Puss in Boots or Hoffmann's story of the dog Berganza?
Do not these books, grotesquely unreal as they are, seem actual transcripts
from the private lives of the Romanticists? In Kater Murr, the cat says:
"Nothing in my master's room attracted me more than the writing-table,
which was strewn with books, manuscripts, and all manner of remarkable
instruments. I might call this table the magic circle into which I was
irresistibly drawn, all the time feeling a kind of holy awe, which prevented
me from at once yielding to my inclination. At last, one day, when my
master was absent, I overcame my fear and sprang upon the table. What joy
to sit in the midst of the papers and books and rummage about amongst
them!" Then the cat dexterously opens a large book with its paws and
endeavours to comprehend the printed signs. At the very moment, however,
when it seems to feel a wonderful spirit taking possession of it, it is
surprised by its master who, with the cry: "Confounded animal!" rushes at it
with uplifted stick. But he immediately starts back, exclaiming: "Cat! cat!

you are reading! Nay, that I may not and will not forbid. What a marvellous
desire for knowledge you have been born with!"
Such a scene cannot strike us as unnatural in a purely fanciful tale, when we
have learned what could happen in real life. We seem to see the rainbow of
fantastic imagination stretching its arch over the whole Romantic
movement, from its first mild, though earnest, herald to its last weird,
mannered exponent, from Wackenroder to Hoffmann. When, in the Life of
Tieck, we find innumerable records of similar hallucinations, we begin to
suspect that there is nothing, however fantastic, to be found in the
Romanticists' writings which their fevered vision did not persuade them that
they saw in real life.
It is exceedingly interesting to observe, not only the influence which
Wackenroder's moods and emotions exercise upon Tieck, but also the part
which the latter, thus influenced, takes in Wackenroder's work. The first
thing which strikes one is, that Tieck, hitherto able only during the
emancipating moments of production to rouse himself out of dark, William
Lovell-like moods and give his rich talent free play, learns from
Wackenroder to believe in imagination and art as mighty powers in human
life, thereby arriving at the only firm basis for a philosophy of life to which
he ever attained. The second is, that he, the less independent spirit of the
two, following in Wackenroder's footsteps, accentuates all his tendencies,
carrying them to wildly fantastic, yet natural conclusions.
It is in those portions of the Herzensergiessungen in which Tieck
collaborated, that the Roman Catholic tendency appears undisguisedly. It
was Tieck who made the painter Antonio worship, not art alone, but also
"the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Apostles"; and Tieck's is the dictum, that
true love of art must be a "religious love or a beloved religion." But most
remarkable of all as a biographical document is a letter, which, though
repudiated by Tieck, was certainly written by him, the letter in which a
young man, a disciple of Albert Dürer, who has come to Rome to study art,
describes his conversion to Catholicism. It takes place in St. Peter's. "The
sonorous Latin chants, which, rising and falling, penetrated the swelling
waves of music like ships making their way through the waves of the sea,
raised my soul higher and ever higher. When the music had pervaded my
entire being and was flowing through all my veins, I roused myself from
inward contemplation and looked around me, and the whole temple seemed

to me to be alive, so intoxicated was I with the music. At this moment it
ceased; a priest advanced to the high-altar, and with impressive gesture
lifted high the Host in view of the assembled multitude. All sank upon their
knees, and trumpets and I know not what mighty instruments crashed and
boomed the spirit of adoration into my very soul. Then all at once it seemed
to me as though that whole kneeling multitude were praying for the
salvation of my soul, and I mingled my prayer with theirs."
This passage is of peculiar importance because it contains a conclusive
proof (one overlooked by that most thorough of observers and critics,
Hettner) that the tendency to Catholicism had its root in the very first
principle of the Romantic movement. Both Hettner and Julian Schmidt
attach too much importance to the fact that Schlegel, as an old man, in his
well-known letter to a French lady, ascribes this Catholic tendency simply
to a prédilection d'artiste. For the reason, the origin, of the artistic
predilection is to be found in the original revulsion from the rational.
But the tendency in the direction of Catholicism was not the only one of
Wackenroder's tendencies which was immediately seized upon and
exaggerated by Tieck and his school. In the Fantasien über die Kunst
Wackenroder praises music as the art of arts, the art which above all others
is capable of condensing and preserving the emotions of the human heart, of
teaching us "to feel feeling." What else, what more, did the Romanticists
feel? This exactly suited Tieck. Wackenroder proclaims the superiority of
music over poetry, and affirms that the language of music is the richer of
the two. To whom could this appeal as much as to the man whose poems are
rather an expression of the moods in which poetry is written than poetry
itself, rather moods of art than works of art?
Tieck goes further than Wackenroder, and from music selects instrumental
music as that in which alone art is really free, emancipated from all the
restraints of the outer world. Hoffman too, musician as well as poet, calls
instrumental music the most romantic of all the arts; and it may be
mentioned as a striking instance of the coherence which invariably exists
between the great intellectual phenomena of an age, as a proof of the fact
that the Romanticists, with all their supposed and all their real
independence and spontaneity, were unconsciously yielding to and
following an inevitable general tendency, that it is just at this time that

Beethoven emancipates instrumental music, and raises it to its highest
development.
Enthusiasm for musical intensity and fervour having thus found its way into
literature, Tieck soon arrives at the point of regarding emotional, melodious
sound as the only true, the only pure poetry. His Love Story of Fair
Magelone is a good example of this. Even in the prose portions of the tale
everything rings and resounds—the hero's emotions and the landscape
which serves as a background for them. The Count hears none of the sounds
around him; for "the music within him drowned the rustling of the trees and
the splashing of the fountains." But this inward music in its turn is drowned
by the sweet strains of real instruments. "The music flowed like a
murmuring brook, and he saw the charm of the Princess come floating upon
the silver stream, saw its waves kiss the hem of her garment.... Music was
now the only movement, the only life in nature." Then the music dies away.
"Like a stream of blue light" it disappears into the void; and forthwith the
knight himself begins to sing.
In the "Garden of Poesy," of which we read in Zerbino, roses and tulips,
birds and the azure of the skies, fountains and storms, streams and spirits,
all sing. We read in Bluebeard that "the flowers kissed each other
melodiously." In this literature everything has its music—the moonlight,
scents, painting; and then on the other hand we read of the beams, the
fragrance, and the shapes of music: "They sang with melodious throats,
keeping time with the music of the moonbeams." The Romanticists had
turned their backs upon material reality. Definite, corporeal form, nay, even
a distinct representation of mental conditions was impossible to them. This
was not what they aimed at. In their eyes tangibility was coarse and vulgar.
Every distinct feature melts away in a sort of dissolving view. They are
afraid of losing in profundity and infinity what they might possibly gain in
restraint and plastic power.
All the masters of the school agree on this point. First and foremost we have
Novalis. His Hymns to Night, and indeed all his lyrics, are night and
twilight poetry, in the dusk of which no distinct outlines are possible. His
psychological aim was, as he himself says, to fathom the nameless,
unconscious powers of the soul. Therefore his æsthetic theory is, that
language ought to become musical, to become song again; and he also
maintains that in a poetical work there need be no unity except that of spirit,

that unity of idea or action is unnecessary. "One can imagine," he says,
"tales without more coherence than the different stages of a dream, poems
which are melodious and full of beautiful words, but destitute of meaning or
connection; at most, comprehensible stanzas here and there, like fragments
of perfectly unrelated things. This true poetry can of course only have a
general allegorical significance and an indirect effect, like music."
How entirely this harmonises with the theories of Friedrich Schlegel!
Schlegel, whose nature was a series of moods, who had not strength of will
to carry out any plan, whose own career resembles an arabesque beginning
with a thyrsus and ending with a cross composed of a knife and fork, says:
"The arabesque, the simple musical swaying of the line itself, is the oldest,
the original form in which human imagination takes shape. Its contours are
no more definite than those of the clouds in the evening sky."
The saying is apt when applied, not to imagination in general, but to the
imagination of the Romanticists. Tieck's lyrics resemble Goethe's as the
clouds on the horizon resemble snow-clad mountains. Our attitude to the
lyric poetry of the Romanticists resembles that of Polonius to the cloud:
"Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?—By the mass,
and 'tis like a camel, indeed.—Methinks it is like a weasel.—It is backed
like a weasel.—Or like a whale?—Very like a whale." In Novalis, in the
poems at any rate, we have still tangible, distinct artistic form, in Tieck's
writings everything floats in a sort of mist or vapour of form supposed to
correspond to the mysterious, expectant fervour of the theme. The work of
art is stayed and fixed in its first, embryonic, vapour-ball stage. This
elementary product of the imagination is designated primitive poetry. In
order to reduce clearly defined poetic art once more to primeval poetry, all
definite forms must be dissolved and kneaded together. Tieck preferred
those works of the great poets which they wrote before their style was
developed, or which they chose to leave tolerably formless (he confesses
that not one of Shakespeare's plays produced such an impression on him as
Pericles, only part of which is genuine), and he himself, following in the
track of Pericles, produced such works as Genoveva and Octavian, in which
the epic, lyric, and dramatic styles are all minced up together.
This medley of styles was adopted in Denmark. It was well suited to the
subject of Oehlenschläger's St. Hans Aßen Spil and fairly so to that of his

Aladdin; sometimes it produced very unsuccessful results, as in the case of
Hauch's Hamadryaden.
So great is Tieck's formlessness, so impossible is it to him (in his Romantic
period) to condense, that he is inefficient even in pure lyric poetry. He may
talk much of music and of the music of words, but he is wanting in the gift
of rhythm; he does not seem to have had a correct ear. A. W. Schlegel was
infinitely Tieck's superior in this respect, as is proved by his admirable
translations of the songs in As You Like It. But of Tieck and most of the
Romanticists it is true that, in spite of all their talk of melodious style, they
themselves were only melodious when they reverted to those southern
measures, to the exact rules of which they were obliged to conform. They
filled in the framework of sonnet and canzonet as ladies fill in with
embroidery an outline designed upon canvas, crowding in rhymes in such
superabundance that the meaning was often swamped by them. Tieck writes
in Magelone:—
"Errungen,
Bezwungen
Von Lieb ist das Glück,
Verschwunden
Die Stunden,
Sie fliehen zurück;
Und selige Lust
Sie stillet,
Erfüllet
Die trunkene, wonneklopfende Brust."
In Baggesen's Faust we find the following rather overdone parody of this
Romantic jingle:—
"Mit Ahnsinn Wahnsinn, lächelndweinend,
Einend—
Mit Schiefe, Tiefe, dunkelmeinend,
Scheinend—
Der Enge Läng' entflammt in weiten Breiten,
Muss licht der Dichter durch die Zeiten gleiten."
And it was not only metres that the Romanticists borrowed from the
Spaniards and Italians, but all kinds of technical tricks. They naively set to

work to produce a lyrical picture with the assistance of assonances and
tragic vowel sounds. Every vowel and consonant in the alphabet was
pressed into the service in turn. Forty sonorous as in succession are
supposed to induce a cheerful frame of mind in the reader, and a score or so
of sombre, mournful us make his flesh creep. Take as an example Tieck's
melancholy U-Romance of old Sir Wulf, who is carried off by the devil. In
it he goes the length of using begunnte instead of begann for the sake of
tragic effect. When the reader's nerves have been narcotised for half-an-
hour by such terminations as Unke—Sturme—hinunter—begunnte—
verdunkeln —verschlungen—Wulfen—Münze gulden—grossen Kluften-
rucke, Drucke—thuen, Zünften—lugen—bedunken—tiefen Brünsten—
vielen Unken, die heulten und wunken—zu dem Requiem des todten
Wulfen, den der dunkle Satan mit vielen Wunden—erschlüge—when
nothing but u-tu-tu is sounding in his ears, he has reached the climax,
language has become music, and he floats off on the stream of an emotional
mood. It is in drama that this vowel-music is most comical. In Friedrich
Schlegel's Alarkos, that arsenal of assonances and alliterations, the hero
sometimes for two or three pages in succession ends every line with the
same vowel:—
"Ihr Männer all', Pilaster dieser alten Burg,
Genossen, Tapfre! die umkränzt mein Ritterthum,
Dess Glorie wir oft neu gefärbt mit hoher Lust
In unsres kühnen Herzens eignem heissen Blut—
Die alte Ehr' in tiefer Brust, der lichte Ruhm,
Dem festen Aug' in Nacht der einzig helle Punkt,
So folgten Einem Stern wir all' vereint im Bund;
Der Bund ist nun zerschlagen durch den herben Fluch,
Der mich im Strudel fortreisst fremd' und eigner Schuld.—
Mich zwingt, von hier zu eilen, ein geheimer Ruf,
Nach fernen Orten muss ich in drei Tagen, muss
Ein gross Geschäft vollenden, und die Frist ist kurz."
And on it goes—Burg, Lust, Muth, Schutz, Kund, Brust, Furcht, und,
Ruhms, thun, Bund, uns, &c., &c. One derives quite as much satisfaction
from the assonances alone as from the complete lines. When Alarkos was
performed in Weimar and the audience burst into uproarious laughter,
Goethe rose from his place in the stalls, cried in a voice of thunder: "Man

lache nicht!" and signalled to the police that all who continued to laugh
were to be turned out. We who read Alarkos now, are thankful that no one
has the right to turn us out.
The reason why the Romanticists subjected themselves to all this metrical
restraint is not far to seek. These compulsory, cold metres exactly suit
writers in whom metrical skill is combined with a complete lack of
inventive power. But terza rima, ottava rima, and sonnets are an insufficient
disguise for the formlessness of their matter. When the mist is so thick that
it can be cut with a knife, the Romanticists cut it into fourteen pieces and
call it a sonnet.
In the unrestricted metres, formlessness and prosiness reach a climax. What,
for instance, can be said for such lines as the following, from Tieck's
Römische Reise?—
"Weit hinter uns liegt Rom,
Auch mein Freund ist ernst,
Der mit mir nach Deutschland kehrt,
Der mit allen Lebens Kräften
Sich in alte und neue Kunst gesenkt,
Der edle Rumohr,
Dess Freundschaft ich in mancher kranken Stunde
Trost und Erheiterung danke."[4]
That well-known drastic critic of the Romanticists, Arnold Ruge, supplied
an appendix to this, which runs:—
"Hochgeehrter Herr Hofrath!
Dieser unmittelbaren Lyrik,
Das verzeihn Sie gütigst, weiss ich
Mit dem besten Willen,
Sowohl in alter als in neuer Poesie,
Nichts zur Seite zu stellen,
Als etwa diesen
Schwachen Versuch einer freien Nachbildung."[5]
But the attempt to make away with language in favour of music reaches a
climax when Tieck goes so far as to endow music itself, or musical
instruments, with the power of speech. Occasionally the result is comical,

as in Sternbald (first edition), where the instruments all talk, the flute
saying:—
"Unser Geist ist himmelblau,
Führt Dich in die blaue Ferne.
Zarte Klänge locken Dich,
Ein Gemisch von andern Tönen.
Lieblich sprechen wir hinein,
Wenn die ändern munter singen,
Deuten blaue Berge, Wolken,
Lieben Himmel sänftlich an,
Wie der letzte leise Grund
Hinter grünen frischen Baümen."[6]
This train of thought received its most classic expression in the poem with
which Phantasus ends, the theme of which is, in the manner of Calderon,
repeated with innumerable variations:—
"Liebe denkt in süssen Tönen,
Denn Gedanken stehn zu fern,
Nur in Tönen mag sie gern
Alles, was sie will, verschönen.

Drum ist ewig uns zugegen,
Wenn Musik mit Klängen spricht,
Ihr die sprache nicht gebricht,
Holde Lieb' auf allen Wegen;
Liebe kann sich nicht bewegen,
Leihet sie den Odem nicht."[7]
This superhuman love, which differs from ordinary human love in being
unable to employ language as an organ, finds absolutely appropriate
expression in music; language is only employed to condemn itself and to
declare that it cedes its place to music. To such a degree of subtlety and
ultrarefinement does the Romantic spirit gradually lead.
The next step is that which Tieck takes in his comedy, Die verkehrte Welt
("The Topsy-Turvy World"), namely, the employing of language exclusively
on account of its musical qualities. To this comedy there is prefixed as
overture a symphony, which, in its essentially musical vagueness, displays

really classic originality. Music had never been paraphrased into words in
this manner before; hence the experiment is to this day regarded as
distinctly typical. The man who has the courage to carry his madness to its
final consequence, by doing so endows this madness, in which there is
method, with living vigour.
SYMPHONY

Andante in D Major.
"If we desire to enjoy ourselves, it is not of so much
consequence how we do it, as that we really do it. From gravity
we turn to gaiety; then, weary of gaiety, return to gravity; but let
us observe ourselves too closely, in either case have our aim too
constantly in view, and there's an end as well to real seriousness
as to unaffected gaiety."
Piano.
"But are reflections such as these appropriate in a symphony?
Why begin so sedately? No! no indeed! I will rather at once set
all the instruments to play together."
Crescendo.
"I have only to will, but to will with intelligence; for the storm
does not rise all at once, in a moment; it announces itself, it
grows, thus awaking sympathy, awe, fear, and joy; otherwise it
would but occasion empty amazement and fright. It is difficult
to read at sight, how much more difficult, then, to hear at sight.
But now we are right in the midst of the tumult. Bang, ye kettle-
drums! Trumpets, crash!"
Fortissimo.
"Ha! the turmoil, the onslaughts, the desperate strife of sounds!
Whither are ye rushing? Whence do ye come? They plunge like
heroes into the thickest of the fray; these fall, and expire; those
return, wounded and faint, seeking consolation and friendship.
Hark, the galloping, snorting horses! The organ rolls, like
thunder among the mountains. There is a rush and a roar as
when a cataract, despairingly seeking its own destruction, flings

itself over the naked ledge and rages down, deeper and ever
deeper down, into the bottomless abyss."
* * * * * * * * * *
Violino Primo Solo.
"What! It is not permissible, not possible, to think in sounds,
and to make music in words and thoughts? Were it so, how hard
would be the fate of us artists! What poor language, and still
poorer music! Do ye not think many thoughts so delicate, so
spiritual, that in despair they take refuge in music, there at last to
find rest? How often does a whole day spent in racking thought
leave nought behind but a buzz and a hum, which time alone
changes into melody?"
* * * * * * * * * *
Forte.
All is in order, the stage is arranged, the prompter in his place,
the audience has arrived. Expectation is aroused, curiosity
stirred; but few think of the end of the piece, and how they will
then say, "Was it anything out of the ordinary?" Give good heed!
You must, or 'twill all be confusion. Yet be not too eager, lest
you should see and hear more than is meant! Hear and give
heed! But give heed as you ought! O hark! Hark! Hark!! Hark!!!
[8]

One sees that Kierkegaard, in his well-known essay on Don Juan (in the
concluding chorus of which we seem to hear the footsteps of the
Commandant—"Hör, hör, hör Mozart's Don Juan!"), is merely going a little
farther in the direction indicated by Tieck; and it is very evident how close
the relation is between Tieck's first conception of the romantic ideal and
Hoffmann's transformations of music into the emotional outbursts and
weird visions of Kreisleriana.
But Hoffmann, who possessed such great and original musical gifts that he
can hardly be considered an author pure and simple, but must be treated as a
poet-musician, was far more in earnest than Tieck in this matter of making
music in words. He lived and moved and had his being in music; he was as

fertile a composer as he was an author, and many of his writings are
fantasies on the subject of music or of the great composers. When ill he was
wont, in his feverish wanderings, to confuse his attendants with musical
instruments. Of one who had a soft, languishing voice, he said: "I have been
tormented to-day by the flute." Of another, with a deep bass voice: "That
insufferable bassoon has been plaguing me the whole afternoon."
When he introduces Gluck into his Fantasiestücke, he makes him speak of
the intervals as if they were living beings. "Once again it was night. Two
giants in shining cuirasses rushed upon me—the Keynote and the Fifth!
They seized me, but their eyes beamed mildly on me: 'I know what fills thy
breast with longing; that gentle, winning youth, the Third, will soon appear
among the giants.'" Kreisler too is made to talk of stabbing himself with a
gigantic Fifth. What in the other Romanticists is fantastic sentimentality, in
Hoffmann becomes weird burlesque.
In the sketch entitled Kreisler's musikalisch poetischer Klub, he gives to the
characteristic qualities of certain notes the names of colours, and thereby
produces a picture of a connected series of mental impressions. He had the
keen perception peculiar to certain delicately organised, nervous
temperaments, of the relationship which undoubtedly exists between sounds
and colours.
As an example of Hoffmann's advance on Tieck's attempts to express pure
music in words, note the passage which describes how, after Kreisler has
played, a marvellous rush of magnificent chords and runs is heard within
the pianoforte itself. There is a genuinely Romantic blending of the
impressions of the different senses in the attempt made to give some idea of
this music: "Its fragrance shimmered in flaming, mysteriously interwoven
circles." On this follows a representation, in emotional language, of the
various keys and chords, a thing hitherto unattempted.

Chord of A Flat Minor (mezzo forte).
"Ah!—they bear me away to the land of eternal longing; but as
they lay hold of me, anguish awakes and rends my breast."
E Major Sixth (ancora piu forte).
"Stand steadfast, my heart! Break not, struck by the scorching
ray that has pierced my breast. Be of good courage, my soul!

Mount high into the element which gave thee birth and is thy
home!"
E Major Third (forte).
"They have crowned me with a glorious crown, but the sparkles
and flashes of its diamonds are the thousand tears I have shed,
and in its gold gleam the flames that have consumed me.
Courage and power, confidence and strength befit him who is
called to reign in the spiritual realm."
A Minor (harpeggiando dolce).
"Why wouldst thou flee, lovely maiden? Thou canst not, for
thou art held fast by invisible bands. Nor canst thou tell what it
is that has taken up its abode in thy breast. 'Tis like a gnawing
pain, yet it makes thee tremble with joy. But thou wilt know all
when I talk to thee fondly in that spirit language which I can
speak and thou canst understand...."
E Flat Major (forte).
"Follow him! follow him! His raiment is green like the green of
the forest; the sweet tones of the horn echo in his wistful words!
List to the rustling in the bushes, list to the horn blasts, full of
rapture and pain! It is he! Let us hasten to meet him!"

Then finally we have the parody of all this in Kater Murr, where Hoffmann
reproduces caterwauling in verse, a glossary of the different sounds being
provided.
It is in this entirely musical poetry that Wackenroder's idea of art attains to
its truest and highest expression. The vigorous pantheism which in Goethe's
case is plastic, and finds expression in the creation of the Diana der
Epheser, here becomes musical. In all Tieck's early works, with their piety,
their sensuality, their reminiscences of Wackenroder and of Goethe, we feel
the rush of a strong, broad wave of Romantic pantheism. In Sternbald, for
example, he writes: "We often listen intently and peer into the future, in
eager expectation of the new phenomena that will soon pass before us in
motley, magic garb. At such times we feel as if the mountain stream were
trying to sing its melody more clearly, as if the tongues of the trees were

loosened, that their rustling might be to us intelligible song. Soon the flute-
like notes of love are heard in the distance; our hearts beat high at his
coming; time stands still as if arrested by a magic word; the shining
moments dare not flee. We are enclosed, as it were, in a magic circle of
melody, and rays of a new, transfigured existence penetrate like mysterious
moonlight into our actual life." And again: "O impotent Art! how
stammering and childish are thine accents compared with the full swelling
organ tones that well forth from the inmost depths, from mountain and
valley, forest and stream! I hear, I feel how the eternal World Spirit sweeps
all the strings of the terrible harp with constraining fingers, how all the most
diverse forms are born of his playing and speed throughout nature upon
spirit wings. My little human heart in wild enthusiasm takes up the contest
and fights itself weary and faint in its rivalry with the highest.... The eternal
melody, jubilant and exultant, storms past me."
Both life and poetry are here resolved into music.
In all ages, and in every domain of art, the artist has at times been tempted
to display his mastery over his material by defying it while using it. In the
history of sculpture came a period when, irritated by the heaviness of stone,
sculptors endeavoured to compel it to express lightness and airiness; or else,
like the mannerists of the rococo period, imitated the art of the painter. In
like manner the Romanticists would fain have language regarded only as a
thing akin to music; their endeavour is to use words more for their sound
than their meaning. They tried to make word-music, much as the prose
authors of our own day try, with more or less success, to make word-
pictures. It is not difficult to see what led to this particular crotchet. Their
antipathy to purpose, their devotion to irony, naturally induced the desire
not to be bound by, not to be responsible for, their words. They use them
ironically, in such a manner that they can retract them. They will not have
them standing solidly before them, indicating an aim, a purpose. Just as, by
conceiving of liberty as licence, they succeeded in returning to a point
where it was possible for them to do this, or to do that, as the fancy took
them, so they succeeded, by conceiving of language simply as sound, in
making it the vehicle of emotion without tendency, that is, without relation
to life and action. They did not really escape tendency; that is an
impossibility; but, as theirs was not the tendency upwards and onwards,
they gravitated downwards and backwards. And, since they were

perpetually compelling words to declare themselves incompetent and to
abdicate in favour of music, it was only natural that the musical composers
also, influenced by the spirit of the times, should endeavour to express the
Romantic ideal in their art, with those means to which the poets in their
impotence had constantly attempted to recur.
Tieck's dramatised fairy-tales, of which Bluebeard may be taken as a
specimen, have a great resemblance to opera libretti. The fantastic, legend-
like productions of the Romanticists are, indeed, precisely the sort of thing
demanded by opera. There would have been a future for Tieck as a writer of
opera libretti. As a matter of fact, he only wrote one, and that one was never
set to music. The theories of Romanticism nevertheless found due
expression in music. E. T. A. Hoffmann represents the transition from
Romantic authorship to Romantic musical composition. As an operatic
composer, he is not only the musical interpreter of Calderon, the poet of
past days most admired by the Romanticists, but also collaborates
fraternally with contemporary Romanticists. He writes music for Brentano's
Die lustige Musikanten and Zacharias Werner's Das Kreuz an der Ostsee,
and bases an excellent three-act opera on Fouqué's Undine.
As an operatic writer he is, however, less the musical genius than the gifted
translator of poetry into the language of music. In the opinion of the most
competent judges, he was only thoroughly successful with subjects which
harmonised with his own literary leaning to the terrible and the
supernatural. We have him at his best, for instance, in the songs of the wild,
inhuman Teutons in Das Kreuz an der Ostsee, with their expression of
untamable passions, and in the fairy tale-like, supernatural scenes of
Undine, which produce a feeling of agreeable eeriness.
No less an authority than Karl Maria von Weber bestowed hearty praise
upon the last-mentioned opera. And Weber himself is, beyond comparison,
the greatest of the composers who succeeded in giving expression in music
to the Romantic theory of art. In his choice of themes he follows closely in
the track of the Romanticists. In Preciosa the joys of a free, vagabond life
are extolled, just as they are in Tieck's Franz Sternbald and Eichendorff's
Leben eines Taugenichts ("Life of a Ne'er-Do-Well"). In Oberon we are
transported into the fairy world of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's
Dream, the play which served as the point of departure for all Tieck's
fantastic comedies. And in Der Freischütz, Weber, like the Romanticists in

their later periods, has recourse to the popular in his art, makes use of
national, popular melodies, just as the Romanticists of Germany and
Denmark made use of national, popular songs, and, like them, introduces
popular traditions and superstitions. No one witnessing a performance of
Der Freischütz in a German theatre could be for a moment in doubt, even
though he were deaf, of its being a Romantic opera. He sees the gloomy
ravine where the spirits of nature dwell, the weird moonlight dance (scenes
that remind one of the temptations of St. Anthony in old Dutch paintings),
and, finally, the wild chase in which, with a marvellously illusive effect,
shadows projected by a species of magic lantern pursue each other through
the air. But to the listening connoisseur the real interest lies in the attitude of
the composer to all these external conditions. He feels that Weber treats his
subject much as the Romanticists do theirs, only with greater genius. He too
drives his art to one of its extremes. Just as the Romanticists are inclined to
conceive of speech as only sound and rhythm, he is inclined to treat music
as if it were simply rhythm. Samiel's Motiv, for example, is more rhythmic
than melodic, and consequently produces a coarser, more realistic, but also
more picturesque effect. The Romanticists write musical poetry; Weber
composes pictorial music. While Beethoven presents us with a purely
psychological picture, represents nothing tangible, nothing but his own
soul, Weber gives us physical characterisation. He always relies upon
unmistakable outward phenomena, on something of which his audience
already have a preconceived idea, as, for instance, fairies. Except in the
Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven only paints the impression; Weber paints the
thing itself. He imitates the sounds of nature. He makes the violins moan to
represent the moaning of the trees; the rising of the moon is announced and
depicted by a chord. When he gives us a rhythmic succession of non-
resonant beats instead of waves of sound, i.e. makes a perfectly arbitrary
abstract use of the vehicle of his art; when he confines himself to song and
the simplest of harmonies, i.e. elects to be naïve and popular; or when, in
order to obtain a grotesque, wild, or spectral effect, he gives instruments
parts which lie outside their natural province and compass (for instance
deep tones to the clarinets), i.e. employs the mediums of his art in a more
strange and eccentric manner than they had ever been employed before—in
all these cases he is a thorough-going Romanticist, one who, with his
greater genius and far more suitable medium, supplies the shortcomings of
which we are invariably conscious in the works of the Romantic poets.[9]

[1] Hettner, Die romantische Schule, 48.
[2] "The children of those Indian jugglers who swallow swords do not, my son,
learn the art by gulping down confectionery; they are trained to swallow the
sharp points of the bamboo, and by degrees arrive at swords. If it be your desire,
as a man, to digest the sword of science, you must not, as a youth, feed on art
confectionery."
[3] Köpke: Tieck's Leben, i. 177.
[4]
"Far behind us lies Rome.
My friend too is grave,
The friend who returns with me to Germany,
After devoting all his powers
To the study of ancient and modern art—
The noble Rumohr,
To whose friendship I have owed comfort and cheer
In many a suffering hour."
[5]
"Honoured Herr Hofrath!
I pray you to excuse me, but,
With the best will in the world
I cannot find,
In ancient or in modern poetry,
Anything to match this lyric outburst
Except perhaps
My own weak imitation of the same."
[6] "Our spirit, which is azure blue, transports thee to blue distances. Sweet tones
allure thee, a mingling of many sounds. When the others sing bravely, we chime
sweetly in, telling softly of blue mountains, clouds, fair skies; we are like the
faint, clear background behind fresh green leaves."
[7] "Love thinks in melodious sounds; thoughts are too far to seek; 'tis with
sweet sounds it beautifies its longings. Therefore love is ever present with us
when sweet music speaks; it needs no language, but is helpless till it borrows the
voice of music."
[8] Tieck, v. 285.
[9] Cf. George Sand: Introduction to Mouny Robin.

X

ATTITUDE OF ROMANTICISM TO ART AND NATURE

Wackenroder's book, which, as it were, indicates the attitude of
Romanticism to music, also indicates what its attitude is to be towards art.
Just as Winckelmann, with his first enthusiastic writings, had awakened the
desire to study antique art, now Wackenroder enlists men's sympathies for
medievalism.
In his naïve enthusiasm he begins by translating and paraphrasing those
portions of Vasari's old biographies of the famous painters which describe
the greatness and nobility of mind of the Italian masters. Amongst others he
extols Leonardo; but he neither grasps the characteristics of the man nor
gives us intelligent criticism of his art; he simply eulogises him under the
heading: Das Muster eines kunstreichen und dabei tiefgelehrten Malers,
vorgestellt in dem Leben des Leonardo da Vinci (The Gifted and Erudite
Painter, as exemplified in the Life of Leonardo da Vinci). The essay begins
with the following impulsive assertion: "The period of the resurrection of
the art of painting in Italy produced men to whom the generation of to-day
should look up as to glorified saints." The fact, actually chronicled by
Vasari, that the great painters of the Italian Renaissance led singularly
unsaintly lives, is entirely ignored. In its very germ the Romantic
conception of art is poisoned by the reaction towards sentiment. The critic
folds his hands to worship, and forgets to open his eyes to see.
Amongst the translated fragments Wackenroder introduces a short original
essay, entitled Longing for Italy, in which we have the first appearance of
that enthusiasm for Italy which afterwards becomes not only general, but
almost obligatory. Love and longing for Italy was nothing new in Germany.
Goethe's father, who was no enthusiast, had known this feeling; but now
idolatry of an Italy which had no resemblance to the real one became a
necessary clause in the creed of every genuine Romanticist. In poetry the
longing for Italy found expression in a profusion of lyrical poems, dilutions
and attenuations of that divine song of Mignon's, which is a picture as well
as a poem. Mignon is content with saying:
"Die Myrthe still und hoch der Lorbeer steht"; the Romantic poets express
themselves in superlatives. The Italy of literature in general may perhaps be
best and most briefly defined as the Italy of Leopold Robert (though even
this definition is too exact), a country which never existed on any map but
that of the Romanticists. The real Italy, with its bright colours and its
cheerful life, is not to be found. Colour is replaced by ideal forms;

movement is petrified, that it may not disturb an interplay of beautiful
waving lines. To the Romanticists Italy became what Dulcinea was to Don
Quixote, an ideal of which they knew almost nothing beyond what was
conveyed by a few general, vapid descriptive phrases. When a definite, real
country is advanced to be the object of men's longings, the home of beauty,
it gradually loses, in their depictions of it, all its real, living beauty. But it
never was the real, living beauty of Italy which the later Romanticists
loved; it was Italy as a ruin; it was Catholicism as a mummy; it was the
dwarfed and stunted spirit of the people (Volksgeist), which, hermetically
sealed up by a partly ignorant, partly ambitious and designing priesthood,
has remained unenlightened and naïve. What they admired here, as
elsewhere, was the feeble, lifeless poetry of a day that was dead and gone.
But this cult of Italy and of the pious, or seemingly pious Italian painters, is
only the stepping-stone by which the "Friar" passes to the worship of his
own particular idol, Albert Dürer. With his enthusiasm for this apostle of
German art is combined enthusiasm for ancient Nuremberg. When Tieck
and Wackenroder travelled together through Germany in 1793, Nuremberg
was their chief place of pilgrimage. The oftener they saw the town, the
more affection, nay devotion, did they conceive for it. "The art life of
Germany revealed itself to them there in all its fulness. That of which they
had hitherto only divined the possibility, had here long been a living reality.
How rich in monuments of all the arts was this town, with its churches of
St. Sebald and St. Lorenz, its works by Albert Dürer, Vischer, and Krafft!
Artistic feeling and ardent industry had here elevated handicraft to the rank
of art. Every house was a monument of the past; every well, every bench,
bore witness to the citizens of the quiet, simple, thoughtful life of their
forefathers. No whitewash had as yet reduced the houses to uniformity.
There they stood in all their stateliness, each with its carven imagery,
borrowed from poem and legend. Ottnit, Siegenot, Dietrich, and other old
heroes, were to be seen above the doors, guarding and protecting the home.
Over the old imperial city, with its marvels and its oddities, hung a
fragrance which in other places had long ago been blown away by the
winds of political change and enlightenment."[1] Nuremberg is, in very
deed, a splendid old town, but it is easy to understand the special attraction
there must have been for two budding Romanticists in its medievalism, its
old Catholic churches, its old houses with the Nibelungen heroes above the
doors. Their enthusiasm over the treasures of beautiful Nuremberg is, truth

to say, far more natural than the long blindness of the eighteenth century to
them. As to Lessing the word "Gothic" had simply meant "barbaric," so to
Winckelmann the German Renaissance had been a closed book. Now the
splendours of Nuremberg were gazed on by eager eyes. In a species of
æsthetic intoxication the friends wandered round the churches and the
churchyards; they stood by the graves of Albert Dürer and Hans Sachs; a
vanished world rose before their eyes, and the life of ancient Nuremberg
became to them the romance of art. The chapter in the Herzensergüsse
entitled In Memory of Albert Dürer is the first-fruits of these sentiments,
and at the same time an expression of the warm patriotic feeling of the
young author. "In the days when Albert was wielding the brush, the German
still played a distinctly characteristic and notable part on the stage of the
world; and Dürer's pictures faithfully reproduce the serious,
straightforward, strong German character, its spirit as well as its outward
lineaments. In our days this vigorous German character has vanished, in art
as well as in life.... The German art of those days was a pious youth, who
had received a homely upbringing in a small town, amongst his relations—
it has now become the conventional man of the world, who has lost the
stamp of the small town, and along with it his originality."
Yet this patriotic feeling in art is not Wackenroder's fundamental feeling; it
is based upon a more comprehensive one. The little book inveighs
throughout against all intolerance in art. Freedom from every compulsory
rule, a freedom based upon deep and genuine love of beauty, is proclaimed
in language which betrays the mimosa-like sensitiveness of this prophet of
the new gospel of art. "He," says Wackenroder, "whose more sensitive
nerves are keenly alive to the mysterious attraction which lies hidden in art,
will often be deeply moved by what leaves another callous. He has the good
fortune to have more frequent opportunities than other men for healthy
mental excitement and activity."
Such excitement and activity were, as we have seen, most easily and most
naturally called forth by the musical treatment of poetry and by music itself
—much less naturally by clearly defined corporeal forms of art.
If our supposition that Wackenroder's theory of art finds its true and highest
development in the distinctively musical type of poetry be correct, it is easy
to foretell what will be the result of Tieck's determination to write (with the
assistance of his friend's posthumous papers) a tale embodying the "Friar's"

longings and theories. The letters written by the German painter in Rome to
his friend in Nuremberg became the germ of the new art-romance, The
Wanderings of Franz Sternbald, a Story of Olden Germany. The book takes
its name from its hero, a painter of the days of Albert Dürer. The delineation
of character is vague and weak; the action is swamped in dialogue; events
play as freely and fantastically as in dreams (and of dreams we have any
number) with the feeble talking figures who do duty for heroes and
heroines; and even the sequence of these events is constantly interrupted by
the insertion of songs improvised to order, which may be best described by
quoting a saying of Sternbald's friend, Florestan, namely, that it ought to be
possible to construct in words and verse a whole conversation consisting of
nothing but sound. When the thread of event is most attenuated and the silk
of the verse most thinly spun, music proper is called in. The primitive
strains of horn or pipe are so frequently introduced that the author himself
in a later work, Zerbino, jests at this superfluity of horn music.
In one of Caroline Schlegel's letters we find Goethe's apt criticism of the
book. He said that it ought by rights to have been called Musical
Wanderings; that there was everything imaginable in it except a painter; that
if it were intended for an art-romance, art should have received quite
different and more comprehensive treatment; that there was no real
substance in the book, and that its artistic tendency was an erroneous one;
that there were beautiful sunsets in it, but that they were repeated too often.
Much severer, however, and more penetrating is Caroline's own criticism.
She writes: "As to Part First, I shall only say that I am still in doubt whether
Tieck did not intend to represent Sternbald's devotion to art as something
regrettable, a mistaken, fruitless devotion, like Wilhelm Meister's. If this be
the case, then there is another fault, namely, the want of human interest in
the story. Part Second throws no light on the matter. In it there is the same
vagueness, the same want of power. One is always hoping for something
decisive, always expecting Franz to make notable progress in one direction
or another; but he never does. Once more we read of beautiful sunrises, the
charms of spring, the alternation of day and night, the light of sun, moon,
and stars, the singing of birds. It is all very charming, but there is a want of
substance in it, and a certain paltriness both in Sternbald's moods and
emotions and in the delineation of them. There are almost too many poems,
and they have as little connection with each other as have the loosely strung

together events and anecdotes, in many of which latter, moreover, one
detects all sorts of imitation."
But if there be no action in this book, what does it contain? Reflections—in
the first instance upon art, in the second upon nature.
First we have endless meditations and quantities of aphorisms on art and
poetry, interspersed with feeble lyric poems, which are hardly
distinguishable one from the other. Only one among the number, a longish
poem on Arion, is at all remarkable. It indicates the spirit of the book. The
three leaders of Romanticism, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis, all sang
the praises of Arion, and somewhat later he was hymned in Danish by P. L.
Möller. It was natural that the hearts of the Romanticists should be stirred
by the legend of the poet-subduer of nature, who roused the enthusiasm of
the very monsters of the sea, rode upon dolphins, was invulnerable,
invincible, of immortal fame. He was their symbol, their hero. All their
poetry is, in a certain sense, an attempt to expound the legend of Arion; and
what else are all the echoes and imitations of their works, the books which
glorify poets, artists, actors, troubadours, heroic and irresistible tenors? The
figure of Narcissus would be the fitting frontispiece for all these
innumerable volumes.
As a matter of fact the main ingredients of Sternbald are trite refutations of
the trite objection to art, that it is useless, trivial reasons for art being
national ("since we are not Italians, and an Italian can never feel as a
German does"), and hymns in praise of Albert Dürer. It is their admiration
for Dürer that first brings the two lovers together, just as Werther and Lotte
were first united by their common enthusiasm for Klopstock. The same
ideas found expression in Danish in Sibbern's Gabrielis and
Oehlenschläger's Correggio. Parts of the plot of Correggio are anticipated;
we have, for instance, the artist painting his own wife as the Madonna, and
his grief at having to part with his work. A long word-symphony in honour
of Strasburg Cathedral is followed by bitter thrusts at the "uncouth masses
of stone in Milan and Pisa, and that disjointed building, the Cathedral of
Lucca." Then we have admiration and praise of Till Eulenspiegel and Hans
Wurst (these gentlemen being supposed to represent fancy and irony), and
great enthusiasm for Dürer's stag with the cross between its antlers, and for
the "simple-hearted, pious, and touching" manner in which the knight in
front of it bends his knees. The picture in question is undoubtedly a

beautiful, simple-minded production, but we cannot help smiling at the
serious attempt made to prove that of all the ways in which the legs of a
kneeling man can be bent, this is by far the most Christian.
Again and again the idea recurs that all true art must be allegorical, that is
to say, marrowless and bloodless. Most of the poems are allegories. The
principal one is the long allegory of Phantasus, wretched verse without one
spark of imagination:
"Der launige Phantasus,
Ein wunderlicher Alter,
Folgt stets seiner närrischen Laune.
Sie haben ihn jetzt festgebunden,
Dass er nur seine Possen lässt,
Vernunft im Denken nicht stört,
Den armen Menschen nicht irrt," &c., &c.[2]
Reminiscences of this satire upon the attacks made on imagination by the
prosaic are to be found here and there in Andersen's Fairy Tales. The poem,
which is recited in the moonlight, indicates as an ideal subject for the
painter a pilgrim in the moonlight, the emblem of humanity: "For what are
we but wandering, erring pilgrims? Can aught but the light from above
illumine our path?" There are distinct traces of this same tendency in our
own poet, Hauch, with his perpetual pointing "upwards" and his partiality
for pilgrims and hermits.
But in Romanticism at this stage, in spite of all its bloodless spirituality,
sensuality still wells up strong and unrestrained. Franz Sternbald, the
trained artist, maintains the superiority of Titian and Correggio to all other
painters. Of Correggio, whom he especially favours, he says: "Who would
dare to vie with him, at least in the representation of voluptuous love? To no
other human spirit has there been granted such a revelation of the glories of
the realm of the senses."
This standpoint was, as every one knows, soon relinquished, consistency
leading to the adoption of another. The brothers Sulpice and Melchior
Boisserée of Cologne were in Paris in 1802, when Friedrich Schlegel was
studying there, and they had private lectures from him. The old German
pictures in the Louvre reminded the young men of old paintings in their
native town, which the prevailing academic taste had consigned to oblivion.

In consequence of Napoleon's systematic pillage of pictures, there was a
good collection of German ones in Paris, which made the study of them an
easy matter.
The best idea of what the German medieval artists had produced was to be
obtained from the quantities of paintings and wood and stone carving which
came into the market after the suppression of monasteries and charitable
foundations. At that time men had lost all appreciation for monuments of
art; with the utmost indifference they saw churches turned into quarries, and
the most precious artistic treasures dispersed to the four winds.
Masterpieces were sold for a trifle, and the purchasers of the supposed old
rubbish were actually pitied. Altar-pieces were made into window-shutters,
dovecots, tables, and roofing; the caretakers in the monasteries often used
old paintings on wood as fuel, for as a rule even the best were
unrecognisable, from taper-smoke, dust, and dirt.[3]
After Friedrich Schlegel, in his periodical, Europa, had drawn attention to
the wealth of old German paintings, the brothers Boisserée began to collect
the scattered treasures, travelling up and down the Rhine and throughout the
Netherlands to track out the long-despised works. By 1805 a collection of
Flemish and German masters had been made, which exercised great
influence on the history of art.
The revival of enthusiasm for early German art led to predilection for the
pre-Raphaelite Italian painters. All honour to the pre-Raphaelites! From
Fiesole and Giotto to Masaccio, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Luca Signorelli,
Perugino, and Pinturicchio, all Europe pays them the homage that is their
due. But Friedrich Schlegel, in his article in Europa on Raphael, exalts the
pre-Raphaelite at the expense of the succeeding period. He says: "With this
newer school, typified by such names as Raphael, Correggio, Giulio
Romano, and Michael Angelo, begins the decay of art." And this is
considered to be so patent a fact that Schlegel does not think it necessary to
offer any justification of his assertion; nay, two pages later he actually
confesses that he has not seen any of Michael Angelo's works. Here we
have the perfection of Romantic insolence. This paragon of an art critic,
who, in order the better to exalt the old monkish pictures, dates the decay of
art from Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michael Angelo, admits without
the slightest feeling of shame that he has not seen so much as one of the

works of the greatest of these men. Despising such a paltry thing as
knowledge, he judges him with his inner consciousness.
But it is unnecessary to anticipate; for in Sternbald itself monkish piety,
with all its languishing fanaticism, has already come to life again in an
unctuousness without parallel. This it was which so irritated Goethe. The
idea that piety lies at the foundation of all true art, a theory which was
speedily adopted by the whole school of neo-German "Nazarenic" painters,
he constantly jeered at. An expression he often used in speaking of the
"Nazarenes" was, that they Sternbaldised (sternbaldisierten).
The essay on Winckelmann which Goethe published about this time was a
direct attack upon the Romanticists. In it he writes: "This description of the
antique mind, with its concentration upon this world and its blessings, leads
directly to the reflection that such advantages are only compatible with a
pagan spirit. That self-confidence, that living and acting in the present, that
simple reverence for the gods as ancestors and admiration for them as if
they were works of art, that resignation to an inevitable fate, and that belief
in a future of highly prized posthumous fame, all these things together
constitute such an indivisible whole, unite in such a manner to form the
human existence designed by nature herself, that those pagans show
themselves alike robust and sane in the supreme moment of enjoyment and
in the dread moment of self-sacrifice or annihilation. This pagan spirit is
apparent in all Winckelmann's actions and writings.... And we must keep
this frame of mind of his, this remoteness from, nay, this actual antipathy to
the Christian standpoint, in view when we judge his so-called change of
religion. Winckelmann felt that, in order to be a Roman in Rome, in order
really to live the life of the place, it was necessary that he should become a
member of the Catholic Church, subscribe to its beliefs, and conform to its
usages.... The decision came all the more easily to him in that, born pagan
as he was, Protestant baptism had not availed to make a Christian of him....
There is no doubt that a certain opprobrium, which it seems impossible to
avoid, attaches to every man who changes his religion. This shows us that
what men set most store by is steadfastness; and they value it the more
because, themselves divided into parties, they have their own peace and
security always in view. Where destiny rather than choice has placed us,
there we are to remain.... So much for a very serious side of the question;
there is a much lighter and more cheerful one. Certain positions taken up by

others, of which we do not approve, certain of their moral offences, have a
peculiar attraction for our imagination.... People whom we should otherwise
think of as merely notable, or amiable, now seem to us very mysterious, and
it cannot be denied that Winckelmann's change of religion has added greatly
to the romance of his life and character."
We can fancy how such an utterance enraged the Romanticists, who at that
time were all on the point of going over to Catholicism. Thenceforward
there was no more worship of Goethe. Tieck was in Rome, and the report
spread that he was about to embrace the Catholic faith, to which his wife
and daughter had become converts. Friedrich Schlegel was preparing to
take the final step. He was lecturing at Cologne, but making application for
a regular appointment in every likely quarter—Cologne, Paris, Würzburg,
Munich, &c. "Given really tempting conditions," he wrote in June 1804, "I
should have gone even to Moscow or Dorpat. But," he adds, "my preference
was for the Rhine district." Was this because it was a Catholic district? Not
at all. "The salmon here is unequalled, so are the crayfish, not to speak of
the wine." It was Metternich's pecuniary offer which finally induced him to
take the decisive step and join the Church of Rome. He was furious at the
essay on Winckelmann, though he expressed unbounded contempt for it.
What is most amusing of all, however, is to see how this little work fell like
a bomb among the genuine political reactionaries in Vienna. Gentz was
already approaching the stage which he had reached when he wrote to
Rahel (in 1814) that he had become terribly old and bad (unendlich alt und
schlecht), describing his condition thus: "I must give you an idea of the
form which my cynicism and egotism have taken. As soon as I can throw
down my pen, all my thoughts and time are given to the arrangement of my
rooms; I am constantly planning how to procure more money for furniture,
perfumes, and every refinement of so-called luxury. My appetite, alas! is
gone. Breakfast is the only meal I take any interest in."
In 1805 Gentz writes to his worthy friend, Adam Müller: "What struck me
most in your letter was your criticism of Goethe's two latest productions. I
know them both, but should never have dared to write as you do; though I
will not deny that my opinion of them is the same as yours, only still less
favourable. The notes on Rameau are simply prosy and commonplace. To
write such twaddle nowadays about Voltaire and D'Alembert is really
inexcusable in a Goethe. The essays on Winckelmann are atheistic. I should

never have credited Goethe with such a bitter and perfidious hatred of
Christianity, though I have long suspected him of culpability in this matter.
What indecent, cynical, faun-like joy he seems to have felt on making the
grand discovery that it was really because Winckelmann was a "born
pagan" that the different forms of the Christian religion were a matter of
such indifference to him! No! even Goethe will not easily rise again in my
estimation after these two books!"[4]
Goethe's essay, we observe, had gone straight to the mark; the Romanticists
felt as if they had received a slap in the face, when he declared himself
hostile to their theory of art.
We must now dwell a little on the conception of nature which corresponds
to this conception of art. In Sternbald, as both Goethe and Caroline indicate,
the reader's interest is distracted from the characters and the action by
descriptions of scenery.
We have seen that it was Rousseau who rediscovered the feeling for nature.
As Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, playing upon Rousseau's own words
about the swallow which had built its nest under the eaves of his first home:
"He was the swallow that foretold the coming of summer in literature." The
same feeling for nature, as has also been shown, reappears in Werther. The
transformation which it now underwent was this: Rousseau's point of view
had been emotional, that of the Romanticists was fantastic. Hence their
return to legends and fairy tales, to the elves and kobolds of popular
superstition. Goethe had said:
"Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
Alles ist sie mit einem Male."[5]
The Romanticists were determined to have to do only with the kernel, with
the mysterious inmost substance, which they attempted to extricate, after
having themselves inserted it. The mystic mind mirrored itself in nature and
saw in it nothing but mysteries. Tieck, as every one knows, coined the word
Waldeinsamkeit (his friends maintained that it ought to be
Waldeseinsamkeit). Romanticism shouted with quavering voice into the
Waldeinsamkeit (forest solitude), and echo returned quavering answers.
Alexander von Humboldt has pointed out how the ancients really only saw
beauty in nature when she was smiling, friendly, and useful to man. With

the Romanticists it is the reverse. To them nature is unbeautiful in
proportion as she is useful, and most beautiful in her wildness, or when she
awakens a feeling of vague fear. They rejoice in the darkness of night and
of deep ravines, in the utter loneliness which produces a shudder of terror;
and Tieck's full moon shines as unchangeably over the landscape as though
it were a theatrical one of oiled paper with a lamp behind it. I call it Tieck's
moon, because it is incontestably Tieck who is the originator of the
Romantic moonlit landscape. Nor is it difficult to understand how it should
be he, rather than any other of the young writers, who originates such
expressions as "forest solitude," "magic moonlit nights," &c., &c. Tieck
was born in Berlin, perhaps of all large towns the one whose surroundings
possess the fewest natural attractions. Those sandy heaths of Brandenburg,
with their tall, spare firs standing stiffly in rows like Prussian soldiers, form
as meagre a landscape as one could well find. Whilst Rousseau, living
amidst scenery of paradisaic beauty (the neighbourhood of Geneva and
Mont Blanc), was strongly, directly impressed by nature, Tieck, in his
unlovely surroundings, was seized by the city-dweller's morbid longing for
wood and mountain; and this longing gave birth to a fantastic conception of
nature. The cold daylight glare of Berlin, and its modern, North German
rationalism awoke longings for the primeval forests and an inclination
towards primitive poetry.
To prove the truth of this assertion, one has only to read such a passage in
the biography of Tieck as the following account of his stay in Halle in 1792:
"How entirely different was the nature which met his eyes here in the green
valley of the Saale, how much richer and more friendly than the flat heaths
surrounding Berlin! The feeling of infinite longing seized him with
redoubled force, and filled his heart with almost painful excitement as he
wandered through the woods in the springtime. Once more he became
intoxicated with nature; a mysterious power seemed to drive him onwards.
His favourite resting-place was the Hölty bench near Giebichenstein, from
which he overlooked the river and the valley. How often did he watch the
sun sink beneath the clouds and the moon mirror herself with a thousand
golden beams in the rippling water, or gleam dreamily through the
branches! Here he lay many a summer night, drinking in nature in ample
draughts."

Is not this the longing for nature of the man who is an exile from it, the
view of nature which has the city pavement as its background?
In the description given of the evening after a tiring walk taken by Tieck
and Wackenroder in the Fichtelgebirge, Tieck's conception of nature is still
more distinctly associated with his personal impressions: "Wackenroder,
unaccustomed to such fatigue, flung himself at once upon the bed, but Tieck
was too excited. He could not sleep after all the experiences of that day. The
spirits of nature awoke. He opened the window. It was the mildest, most
magnificent summer night. The moon shed her soft, clear beams upon him.
There it was before his eyes, the moonlit, witching night, nature with her
ancient, yet ever new marvels and magic! His heart once again swelled
high. To what far, unknown goal was he being drawn with irresistible force?
Softly and soothingly the clear tones of a horn came floating through the
night. A feeling of sadness stole over him, and yet he was intensely happy."
[6]

Observe that not even the horn is wanting. What is wanting, what Tieck is
destitute of, is any definite aim. We have the same thing in Sternbald, where
the wandering artist, led only by his longings and his prophetic enthusiasm,
is always, as he himself confesses, forgetting his real aim. "It is not
possible," says one of the characters in the book, "to forget one's aim, for
this reason, that the sensible man arranges matters so that he has no aim."
No one can fail to see the close connection between this particular species
of feeling for nature and Romantic arbitrariness, nor how they mutually
develop each other.
Let us see the kind of landscapes which Franz Sternbald understands and
paints, and how he understands and paints them.
In one part of the book we read: "This was the landscape which Franz
intended to paint; but the real scene seemed very prosaic to him, compared
with its reflection in the water." Clear outlines, definite forms, are dry
prose; but the reflection in the water, the picture as it were to its second
power, is Romantic refinement, duplication, glorification. In another part
Franz says: "I should choose to paint lonely, terrible scenes—ruinous,
crumbling bridges spanning the space between two precipitous rocks, with a
foaming torrent raging in the abyss below; strayed travellers whose cloaks
flap in the wet wind; horrid brigands rushing from their caves, stopping and

plundering carriages, and fighting with travellers." Real stage scenery this,
with melodrama into the bargain!
And in what spirit is nature apprehended? "Sometimes," says Franz, "my
imagination sets to work and will not rest until it has thought out something
quite unheard of. It would have me paint strange objects, of complicated
and almost incomprehensible construction—figures composed of parts of
all kinds of animals, their lower extremities being plants; insects and
reptiles with a strange humanness about them, expressing human moods
and passions in a wonderful and horrible manner."
What a picture! what a jumble of monstrosities! Can you not hear
Hoffmann fast approaching with his caravan of monsters? The elephant
stands on his head, and has a trunk which ends in a garfish; the cat writes its
memoirs; the door-knocker is really an old market-woman, &c., &c. Are we
not reminded here again, as in Der Freischütz, of the temptations of St.
Anthony, as painted by Teniers, or, better still, by Höllen-Breughel, with a
regular witches' Sabbath. To the genuine Romanticist, nature, with all her
myriads of living forms and beings, seems a great toy-cupboard, and all the
toys babble and chatter like those in Andersen's fairy tale.
Read this description of a romantic landscape taken from Novalis's
Heinrich von Ofterdingen: "From a height they looked down upon a
romantic country, strewn with towns and castles, with temples and tombs, a
country which united the gentle charms of inhabited plains with the terrible
charms of deserts and precipitous mountains. The most beautiful colours
were happily blended. Mountain peaks gleamed like fireworks in their
coverings of ice and snow. The smiling plain was clothed in the freshest of
green. The distance decked itself in every shade of blue, and the deep blue
of the sea threw into relief the innumerable bright pennons waving from the
masts of numerous fleets. In the background we could see a shipwreck, in
the foreground a merry country feast; far off the terribly beautiful eruption
of a volcano and the desolation wrought by an earthquake, and near at hand
a pair of lovers exchanging the sweetest caresses under sheltering trees. On
one side of this scene a frightful battle was raging, and at no great distance
from the battle was to be seen a theatre with a ludicrous play going on.
Upon the other side, in the foreground, the corpse of a young girl lay upon a
bier, with an inconsolable lover and weeping parents kneeling by its side; in

the background sat a sweet mother with her child at her breast, angels
nestling at her feet, and peeping through the branches above her head."
What a pot-pourri! And over it all is shed the indispensable pale, yellow
light of that friend and well-wisher, protector and betrayer of lovers, that
supreme comforter and divinity of the Romanticists—the man in the moon.
He is their salvation. His round face and his profile have exactly the degree
of distinctness permissible or possible in a Romantic countenance. All the
knights of Romanticism wear his yellow livery. And a truer knight of the
moon than Franz Sternbald is not to be found.
"I would," he says, "that I could fill the whole world with my song of love,
that I could move the moonlight and the rosy dawn, so that they should
echo my grief and happiness, until trees, branches, leaves, and grass all took
up the melody, repeating it as with millions of tongues." Hereupon he sings
a "moonlight song":
"Hinter'm Wasser wie flimmernde Flammen,
Berggipfel oben mit Gold beschienen,
Neigen rauschend und ernst die grünen
Gebüsche die blinkenden Häupter zusammen.

Welle, rollst du herauf den Schein,
Des Mondes rund freundlich Angesicht?
Es merkt's und freundlich bewegt sich der Hain,
Streckt die Zweig' entgegen dem Zauberlicht.

Fangen die Geister an auf den Fluthen zu springen,
Thun sich die Nachtblumen auf mit Klingen,
Wacht die Nachtigall im dicksten Baum,
Verkündigt dichterisch ihren Traum.
Wie helle, blendende Strahlen die Töne nieder fliessen,
Am Bergeshang den Wiederhall zu grüssen."[7]
Here we have it all! The glittering flames of the moon, bushes with
twinkling heads, rolling billows bearing onwards the face of the full moon,
spirits dancing upon waves, night as described by Novalis, night flowers,
and a nightingale whose song flows like clear, dazzling moonbeams.

And exactly the same thing recurs again and again. Franz has a dream:
"Unperceived, he painted the hermit and his devotion, the forest and its
moonlight; he even succeeded, he himself knew not how, in getting the
nightingale's song into his picture." Oh, that musical pictorial art! Was not
Goethe right in saying that there is more music than painting in the book?
It is very significant that the man who revelled thus in the fantastic
suggestions of a district where nature was poor and sterile, should have
altogether failed to appreciate the richness and luxuriance, the abundance of
healthy sap and vigour, which distinguish the south of England.
Shakespeare has had few such fervent admirers as Tieck; and Tieck
naturally had the desire to see with his own eyes the natural surroundings
amidst which his great teacher and master had spent his life, and from
which he had derived his earliest impressions. He expected much. But, oh!
what a disappointment! That mind which fancied itself akin to
Shakespeare's found nothing congenial in the scenery round Shakespeare's
home. The chief characteristic of these counties is an almost incredible
luxuriance and vigour of growth. But this wealth of vegetation is unpoetical
to the Romanticist, because it is useful, because it has a purpose. Only the
blossom which bears no fruit is romantic. We understand his
disappointment. Nowhere else does one see such mighty, spreading oaks,
nowhere such high and succulent grass. As far as the eye can reach, the
green carpet spreads over the undulating fields and the rich meadows,
where magnificent cattle graze and ruminate. Quantities of white, yellow,
and blue meadow and field flowers break the monotony of colour, and
breathe a perfume which the moisture of the air keeps so fresh that it never
palls. This vegetation is above all else fresh, not, like that of the south,
striking in its contours. The watery, juicy plant does not live long; life
streams through it and is gone. The moist air envelops trees and plants in a
sort of luminous vapour which catches and tempers the sunbeams; and, as
in Denmark, banks of clouds constantly traverse the pale blue sky. When
this sky happens to be for a short time perfectly clear, and the sun reaches
the earth without passing through mist, the rain and dewdrops sparkle on
the green grass and upon the silken and velvet petals of the myriads of gay
flowers more brilliantly than diamonds. What matter that the grass is
destined to be eaten? Does not part of its beauty lie in its nutritious look?
What matter that the fruitful fields are cultivated with the assistance of all
the newest agricultural machinery, or that the cattle are tended with the

most intelligent solicitude? Is not this the very reason why both animals and
plants look so strong, so well nourished, and so nourishing? What we have
here is certainly not the imposing beauty of the desert or the ocean, or of
Swiss scenery. But has not this landscape a poetry of its own? Who can
have spent an evening in Kew Gardens without mentally placing the elfin
dance from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Merry Wives of Windsor in
exactly this scenery, these beautiful parks, with their gigantic old oaks? It
was in these surroundings that Shakespeare wrote them. We can divine with
what eyes he looked upon the landscape. With what eyes does Tieck look
upon it? "Having seen London," says Köpke, "he wished to make
acquaintance with some other part of England. Where should he turn his
steps, if not to Shakespeare's birthplace? On the way he visited Oxford. But
neither was this scenery to his taste. The country they drove through was
luxuriantly green, splendidly cultivated; but it was too well ordered, too
artificial (No primitive poetry!); it had lost its originality. It lacked that
simplicity, that holiness, as he called it, which touches the heart, and by
which he had so often been moved in the most sterile parts of his native
land. Here industry had destroyed the poetic aroma."
It is clear, then, that there must have been something in the scenery of his
own country which appealed to Tieck's personal predispositions. The
fantastic conception of nature would not have been carried to such an
extreme in this particular country, if there had not been something fantastic
in the scenery of the country. It is very evident that German scenery must
have met the fantastic spectator half way.
In the first volume of this work, I attempted, by means of a description of
Italian scenery, to show how unromantic even the most beautiful of it is.
Nor, in spite of the Black Forest and the Blocksberg, can German scenery
be called really fantastic; for, as Taine says, it is only the beauty of art
which is fantastic; that of nature is more than fantastic; the fantastic does
not exist except in our human brain. Still, nature does provide excuses for a
certain amount of fantasy. It is especially to be born in mind that in
characteristically German scenery the sea is absent, and with it the feeling
of wideness and freeness which it alone gives. In river and mountain
scenery there is never the wide, open horizon to which we Danes are
accustomed.

But, not to lose myself in generalisations, let me give an idea of the scenery
amidst which Tieck himself lived longest—that district in the
neighbourhood of Dresden which goes by the name of Saxon Switzerland. I
shall describe in a few words how it impresses me, and then proceed to
show what impression it produces on a Romantic poet. This I can do
reliably and exactly, for I have personally known several Romantic poets,
and have recently travelled through the district in question in company with
an old poet of Romantic tendencies.
We had spent some days in the clear mountain air, looking out over the high
open country and rocky peaks of Bohemia, which resemble a sea, with
sharply outlined mountains emerging like islands—an interminable stretch
of fields and pine-clad rocks. We went through the Uttenwalder Grund up to
the Bastei. The valley is shut in by high, fantastic sandstone rocks, piled up
in layers, with pine trees clustering in every crevice. The upper part of the
rock often projects threateningly over the lower, seeming as though about to
fall. One sees many strange freaks of nature—gateways, even triple
gateways. In climbing up to the Bastei, one has on the left that remarkable
landscape with the steep rocks standing out like giant gravestones—tragic,
awe-inspiring scenery, that would make a fitting background for the dance
of the dead nuns in Robert le Diable. Standing on the Bastei, one looks over
the great plain with its precipitous mountain islands (the fortress of
Königstein is built upon one of these), straight, hard lines, absolutely
unpicturesque. Kuhstall is an enormous dome of rock. The whole scenery
has the appearance of being designed by man, of being a fantastic art
production. The last time I saw it, in glorious sunlight, the view was
marvellously imposing. Over the great pine-forest which clothed the lower
heights, its tree-tops looking like felt or wool, lay a bluish green haze,
which spread up the sides of the surrounding hills. The Bohemian villages
lay in groups, shining like windows in the sun—in the distance were
basaltic mountains, nearer at hand pyramidal, square, or obelisk-shaped
rocks. Wherever a single deciduous tree stood among the pines, its yellow
autumnal leaves shone amidst their dark surroundings like patches of gold.
The only other yellow was that of the lichen upon some of the rocks. These
rocks looked as though giants in the morning of time had pelted each other
with them, as children pelt each other with stones, or had played at heaping
them one on the top of another.

From the Wintersberg the hills look like the remains of a Cyclopean city. An
enormous rock, steep and smooth as a wall, stands, decked with firs, in the
centre of a wide landscape. Of all one sees, Prebischthor is perhaps what
strikes one as being most beautiful. Here again the rocks have taken a
fantastic shape, that of a gateway. A gigantic, beam-like rock has laid itself
like a lintel across two rock towers. Sitting under it, one looks down upon
two separate landscapes, one through the arch to the left, the other an open
one upon the right. As I sat there in the evening, the first was hard, cold,
austere; over the other the sun was setting, red and glowing. The one was,
as it were, in a major, the other in a minor key; the one was like a face
without eyes, the other glowed and beamed.
Such was this scenery in the eyes of an ordinary, sober-minded traveller.
The Romanticist who was my companion seemed to me to be less moved
by the spectacle than I was; at least he said very little about it during the
course of the day. But when, towards night, we were making our way down
the mountain, his imagination was suddenly fired. It was quite dark, and the
darkness acted upon his nerves. It seemed to him as if more and more of the
spirits of nature came forth, the darker it grew. And when, in the distance,
we saw the first points of light coming from the windows of houses on the
mountain side, houses which we could not distinguish on account of the
darkness, he had the feeling that these windows must be in the rock itself,
and that we could see in if we were only near enough. The illuminated
panes were to him great eyes, with which the spirit of the mountain looked
out at us; he felt as if the wooded hillside were watching us. He was in a
weird, eccentric, genuinely Romantic mood, and I could not follow him.
But on this occasion I had the opportunity of learning by personal
observation how a German Romanticist of the good old days viewed nature;
how it was not until night that it really became nature to him; how he did
not look at it, but to one side of it or behind it; and by observing how much
more, and yet how much less, my companion felt face to face with nature
than I did, I arrived at an understanding of the legitimacy and the
narrowness, the unnaturalness and the poetry of the Romantic conception of
nature.[8]

[1] Köpke: Ludwig Tieck, i. 139.
[2]
"Capricious Phantasus,
A strange old man,
Follows his foolish, wayward bent;
But now they have fettered him,
That he may cease from his trickery,
No longer confuse reasonable thought,
Nor lead poor man astray."
[3] Sepp: Görres und seine Zeit, 89, 90.
[4] Briefwechsel zwischen Gentz und Adam Müller, 48.
[5] "Nature has neither kernel nor shell, she is everything at one and the same
time."
[6] Köpke, i. 139, 163.
[7] "Beyond the lake there's a glittering and flaming; the mountain-tops are
tipped with gold; gravely the bushes rustle and bend, and lay their twinkling
green heads together. Wave, art thou rolling to us the reflection of the round,
friendly face of the moon? The trees recognise it, and joyfully stretch forth their
branches towards the magic light. The spirits begin to dance on the waves; the
flowers of the night unfold their petals with melodious sound; where the leaves
are thickest the nightingale awakes and tells her dream; her notes flow forth like
clear, dazzling beams, to greet the echo on the mountain side."
[8] The above is a faithful account of the effect produced by this scenery upon
the Danish poet M. Goldschmidt in the autumn of 1872.

XI

ROMANTIC DUPLICATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

Those among my readers who have stood in a room lined with mirrors, and
seen themselves and everything else reflected ad infinitum, above, below,
on every side, have some idea of the vertigo which the study of Romantic
art at times produces.
Every one who has read Holberg's Ulysses von Ithacia remembers how
droll the effect is when the characters, as they are perpetually doing, make
fun of themselves and what they represent—when, for example, Ulysses
exhibits the long beard which has grown during the ten years' campaign, or

when we read upon a screen, "This is Troy," or when, at the close, the Jews
rush in and tear off the actor's back the clothes which he had borrowed to
play Ulysses in. Histrionic art, as every one knows, depends for its effect
upon illusion. And illusion is an aim common to many of the arts. A statue
and a painting deceive quite as much as a play, the illusion being contingent
upon our momentarily taking the stone for a human being, and the painted
flat surface for receding reality, in exactly the same way as we forget the
actor in his rôle. This illusion, however, is only complete for a moment. It
is, indeed, possible for the perfectly uneducated man to be entirely
deceived. An Indian soldier in Calcutta shot an actor who was playing the
part of Othello, exclaiming: "It shall never be said that a negro murdered a
white woman in my presence!" But in the case of the educated man, the
illusion comes and goes; it comes at the moment when the tragedy brings
tears into his eyes, and goes at the moment when he draws out his pocket-
handkerchief and looks at his neighbour. The effect of the work of art is, as
it were, focussed in this illusion. The illusion is the reflection of the work of
art in the spectator's mind—the appearance, the play, by means of which the
unreal becomes reality to the spectator.
In the simple, straightforward work of art no special attention is devoted to
illusion; it is not aimed at; nothing is done to strengthen it or to give it
piquancy; but still less is anything done to destroy it.
It is not difficult, however, to understand how a certain piquant quality may
be communicated to the illusion produced by any art. When, for instance, a
Hermes, or any idol, is represented on a bas-relief, when a picture
represents a studio or a room with pictures hanging on the walls, a strong
indication is hereby conveyed that the bas-relief itself is not intended to
affect us as statuary, nor the pictures as painting. And the same sort of effect
is produced when one or other of the characters in a comedy cries: "Do you
take me for a stage-uncle?"
The theatrical illusion is still further heightened, or, to be quite correct, is
still more entirely forgotten, when some of the characters in a play
themselves perform a play, as in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream. It
seems extraordinary or impossible that the spectators of this second play
should also be acting. The illusion here is artificially strengthened, and yet
at the same time weakened, by attention being drawn to it. It is plain that
this play with illusions had an immense attraction for Tieck; it was

inevitable that it should have. Since it is illusion which makes art serious
reality to the spectator, it is by the destroying of the illusion that he is made
to feel strongly that art is free, fanciful play.
So Tieck mocks ironically at things which are usually ignored in order not
to disturb the illusion. In Puss in Boots the King says to Prince Nathaniel:
"But do tell me; how is it that you who live so far away can speak our
language so fluently?" Nathaniel: "Hush!" The King: "What?" Nathaniel:
"Hush, hush! For any sake be quiet, or the audience too will be finding out
how unnatural it is." And, sure enough, one of the spectators presently
remarks: "Why in the world can't the prince talk a foreign language and
have it translated by his interpreter? What utter nonsense it all is!" This last
speech is of course sarcasm, aimed at that demand for realism in art of
which Iffland and Kotzebue were advocates. We have one expression of the
demand in question in the French misconception of the Aristotelian doctrine
of the unity of time and place. Writing on this subject, Schlegel, following
Lessing's example, remarked that, after one had taken the great plunge and
agreed to regard the stage as the world, it was surely easy to take the lesser
one and sometimes permit the said stage to represent different localities.
And the Romanticists were never weary of extolling the old Shakespearian
theatre (where the place represented was simply intimated by a label
attached to the scenes) as a higher development of art than that of their own
day. The champions of realism in art were at that time advocating the
substitution of solid walls for scenes; Schlegel maintained that those who
insisted on having three walls on the stage were logically obliged to go a
step farther and have a fourth wall, on the side towards the audience.
It is out of pure defiance of the philistine conception of art that Tieck
amuses himself by seating an audience upon the stage and having the play
within the play performed to the accompaniment of their critical remarks.
They censure, they praise, now condemning a scene as superfluous, now
approving the author for his courage in introducing horses upon the stage.
While the learned man and the fool are disputing in the palace before the
king upon his throne, the former says: "The gist of my argument is, that the
new play Puss in Boots is a good play." "That is exactly what I deny," says
the fool; whereupon one of the audience cries in amazement: "What! the
play itself is mentioned in the play!"

A still more extraordinary state of matters prevails in Die Verkehrte Welt
("The Topsy-turvy World"). As Scaramouch is riding through the forest on
his donkey, a thunderstorm suddenly comes on. One naturally expects him
to take shelter. Not at all. "Where the deuce does this storm come from?" he
cries; "there's not a word about it in my part. What absurd nonsense! My
donkey and I are getting soaked. Machinist! machinist! hi! in the devil's
name stop it!" The machinist enters and excuses himself, explains that the
audience had expressed a desire for stage-thunder, and that he had
consequently met their wishes. Scaramouch entreats the audience to change
its mind, but to no purpose; thunder they will have. "What! in a sedate
historical play?" It thunders again. "It's a very simple matter," says the
machinist; "I blow a little pounded colophony through aflame; that makes
the lightning; and at the same moment an iron ball is rolled overhead, and
there you have the thunder." Play with illusion cannot be carried further
than this except by introducing in the play which the performing audience is
witnessing, another play acted before yet another audience. "How
extraordinary it is!" says Scävola, the blockhead; "we are an audience, and
yonder sit people who are an audience too." The plays are fitted into one
another like puzzle-boxes.
The madness reached its climax when, within this new inmost play, there
appears yet another play. It is confusion worse confounded. "Nay, this is too
much," cries Scävola. "Just think of it, good people all! Here we sit as an
audience and watch a play; in that play sits another audience watching a
third play, and for the actors in that third play yet another play is being
acted." And he goes on to explain, like a true Romanticist: "One often has
dreams like this, and they are terrible; and thoughts, too, sometimes spin
themselves in this fashion ever farther and farther into the heart of things.
And both the one and the other are enough to drive a man crazy."
But the music between the acts contains the key to the whole work. The
lively Allegro says: "Do ye indeed know what ye desire, ye who seek for
coherence in all things? When the golden wine gleams in the glass and ye
are animated by its good spirit, when ye feel doubly full of life and soul,
and all the floodgates of your being are opened, what do ye think of then?
Can ye order and regulate then? Ye enjoy yourselves and the harmonious
confusion." And the Rondo says: "Whenever the philosopher is surprised by
a thing, and cannot understand it, he exclaims: 'There is no reason in it.'

Nay, when reason penetrates to the heart of itself, when it has investigated
its own inmost being and carefully observed itself, it says: 'In this, too, there
is no reason.' ... But the man who with reason despises reason, is a
reasonable man. Much poetry is prose gone mad, much prose is only
crippled poetry; that which lies between poetry and prose is not the best
either. O music! whither tend thy steps? Neither is there any reason in thee."
In his critical writings Tieck himself gives us the clue to his procedure by
averring that the aim of Romantic comedy is to lull the spectator into a
dreamy mood. "In the midst of a dream," he says, "the soul often does not
believe firmly in its visions; but if the dreamer sleeps on, the endless
succession of new magic appearances restores the illusion, keeps him in a
charmed world, makes him lose the standard of reality, delivers him up at
last completely to the dominion of the incomprehensible."
Music is the formless deep to which the wearied imagination of the
Romanticist returns after contemplating itself reflected ad infinitum in its
mirror chamber. And the work of art may be likened to one of those carved
ivory balls which enclose a whole set of ivory balls, one within the other.
This style of drama was amusingly parodied by J. L. Heiberg in his witty
satirical play, Julespög og Nytaarslöjer ("Christmas Fun and New Year's
Drollery"). There is less freedom and originality in Hoffmann's imitation,
Prinzessin Blandina, in which, in scenes laid behind the scenes, the Stage
Manager and the Director discuss the play. The Stage Manager says:
"Machinist, give the signal for night." Director: "Why, you are surely not
going to have night already? It will disturb the illusion. It is hardly three
minutes since Roderick breakfasted in the desert." Stage Manager: "It is the
direction given in the book." Director: "Then it is the book that is crazy, and
the play is written without the slightest understanding of dramatic art."
In a different department of literature, in the writings of our Danish
philosopher, Kierkegaard, we come upon the mirror chamber with its
repeated reflections psychologically applied. As the German Romanticist
ironically hovers above his own play, with its Chinese puzzle-box scenes
and figures, so the Danish psychologist draws further and further away
from his subject by putting one author, as it were, inside another. Listen to
his explanation in the Afsluttende Efterskrift ("Concluding Postscript"):
"My position is even a more external one than that of any author whose

characters are imaginary, but who appears personally in his preface. A
prompter, impersonal, or personal in the third degree, I have created authors
whose prefaces, nay, whose very names are their own production. In the
pseudonymous books there is not a word of my own; I judge them as an
uninterested third party, have no knowledge of their meaning except that of
the ordinary reader, and not the most remote private connection with them,
as is indeed impossible in the case of a doubly reflected communication. A
single word from me personally, in my own name, would be a piece of
presumptuous self-forgetfulness, and would, from the dialectical point of
view, destroy the pseudonymous character of the work. I am no more the
publisher, Victor Eremita, than I am the Seducer or the Assessor in Enten-
Eller; Eremita is the poetically real subjective thinker, whom we meet again
in In Vino Veritas. In Frygt og Bæven ("Fear and Trembling") I am no more
Johannes de Silentio than I am the Knight of Faith whom he depicts; and
just as little am I the author of the preface to the book, it being a
characteristic utterance of a poetically-real subjective thinker. In that tale of
woe, Skyldig?—Ikke Skyldig? ("Guilty or not Guilty?"), I am no more the
experimenter than I am the subject of the experiment, since the
experimenter is a poetically-real subjective thinker, and the being he
experiments on is his psychologically inevitable production. I am a
negligeable quantity, i.e. it is immaterial what I am.... I have all along been
sensible that my personality was an obstruction which the Pseudonymi must
involuntarily and inevitably long to be rid of, or to have made as
insignificant as possible, yet which they at the same time, regarding the
matter from the ironical and reflective standpoint, must desire to retain as
repellant opposition; for I stand to them in the ironically combined relation
of secretary and dialectically reduplicated author of the author or authors."
However different the causes of the reduplication may be in this case, the
phenomenon itself is of near kin to the foregoing one. To keep the general
public at a distance, to avoid laying bare his heart, and, most important of
all, to avoid the tiresome responsibility entailed by speaking in his own
name, Kierkegaard places as many authors between himself and the public
as possible. Even taking his reasons into consideration, I confess that to me
the proceeding seems super-subtle, a sort of reminiscence of the Romantic
irony. For although Kierkegaard, as regards his matter, is in many ways
ahead of Romanticism, he is still connected with it by his style. It is natural
enough that he cannot, or will not, bear the responsibility for what his

imaginary characters, the Assessor and the Seducer, say; but it is pure
imagination on his part to suppose himself capable of producing his authors
at second hand, to suppose, for instance, that he has created the hero in the
Engagement Story exactly as Frater Taciturnus would have created him.
Several of his would-be authors, Constantin Constantius and Frater
Taciturnus, for example, are scarcely to be distinguished from one another,
and there is nothing peculiarly characteristic about their productions. The
third part of Stadierne ("Stages on the Road of Life") was, as Kierkegaard's
own memoranda show, originally intended to form part of Enten-Eller.
When he remarks (in Afstuttende Efterskrift, p. 216) that the most attentive
reader will hardly succeed in finding in that work, either in language or turn
of thought, a single reminiscence of Enten-Eller, he betrays great capability
of self-deception. Both works show in every line that they are written by the
same author; in both we come upon the same thoughts, often expressed in
almost the same words. The Assessor in Stadierne judges Aladdin exactly as
he is judged by the Æsthete in Enten-Eller: "What makes Aladdin so great
is the strength of his desire."
Along with all this duplication and reduplication we have in the case of the
Romanticists the wildest caprices in the matter of the order of presentation.
The Topsy-turvy World begins with the epilogue and ends with the prologue;
by such pranks imagination proclaims its independence of all law. Frater
Taciturnus records what happened to him last year along with what is
happening to him this year; every day at noon he notes down what
happened that day a year ago (What a memory!), and at midnight what has
occurred during the day. Naturally, it is almost impossible to separate the
two threads of event. In Hoffmann's Kater Murr, the cat writes its memoirs
on sheets of paper which have its master's, Kapellmeister Kreisler's,
memoranda on the other side. Both sides of the sheets are printed, the one
following the other, so that we read two utterly unconnected manuscripts
mixed up with each other, often with interruptions in the middle of
sentences or words. Wilfulness, caprice, play with one's own production
could scarcely be carried farther. Yet the dissolution of established form did
go further, much further. The Romanticists did not rest content with having
shattered the conventions of art; they proceeded to decompose the Human
personality, and that in many different manners.

It was Novalis who led the way. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen the hero
seems to have a foreknowledge of everything that happens to him. "Each
new thing that he saw and heard seemed only to shove back bolts, to open
secret doors in his soul." But the strangest impression of all is produced on
him by his discovery of a mysterious book in the cave of the hermit Count
of Hohenzollern, a book in which, although he is as yet unable to interpret
it, he finds the enigma of his existence, an existence beginning before his
birth and stretching into the future after his death. Novalis's romance being
an allegory and myth, his design being to make a single individual represent
the whole eternal story of the soul, he turns to his purpose one of the oldest
hypotheses of humanity, the idea that the individual reappears generation
after generation. Thus the past and the future take part in the present, in the
shape of memory and prophetic intuition. He does not actually believe in
the transmigration of souls, but to him, the Romanticist who lives in the
contemplation of the eternal, time is of such subordinate significance that,
just as he recognises no difference between a natural and a supernatural
event, so he sees none between past, present, and future. In this way the
individual existence is extended throughout an unlimited period of history.
In Danish literature we find this Romantic use of the idea of a previous
existence in Heiberg's De Nygifte. The mother is telling her adopted son
about the death of her real son:—
"Den Morgen, da ban led sin skrækkelige Dom,
Endnu var det neppe daget—
Traadte Slutteren ind og sagde: 'Kom!
Klokken er nu paa Slaget.'

"Da sank ban for sidste Gang til mit Bryst
Og udbröd: 'Et Ord du mig give,
Et kräftigt Ord, som kan vaere min Tröst
Paa min sidste Gang i Live!"

"Og jeg sagde ...
Men, Fredrik, du skræmmer mig! sig ...
Du rejser dig ... hvad bar du i Sinde?
Du stirrer paa mig saa bleg som et Lig ...

Fredrik.

"O Moder! Moder! hold inde!

Du sagde: 'Naar du for din Frelser staar,
Da sig: Min Gud og min Broder,
Tilgiv mig for dine Martyrsaar,
For min Anger og for min Moder.'

Gertrud.

"Ha! hvoraf ved du det?

Fredrik.

"Mig det var,
Forst nu mig selv jeg fatter.
Det er din virkelige Sön, du har,
Og nu lever han Livet atter."[1]
Heiberg here makes a beautiful and ingenious use of the idea. But the
Romanticists are not content with this. It is not enough for them to
transpose the personality into the past, or to deck it with the bright
peacock's tail of future existences. They split the Ego into strips, they
resolve it into its elements. They scatter it abroad through space, as they
stretch it out through time. For the laws of space and time affect them not.
Self-consciousness is self-duplication. But it is an unhealthy self which
cannot overcome and master this selfduplication. This we saw in the case of
Lovell and of Roquairol. There is no greater misery than morbid self-
contemplation. He who indulges in it separates himself from himself,
observes himself from the point of view of a spectator, and ere long
experiences the horrible feeling of the prisoner who, when he looks up, sees
the eye of the warder at the little glass pane in the door of his cell. His own
eye has become quite as terrible to him as another man's. What tends to
make this condition permanent is partly the religious and moral feeling that
one ought never to lose sight of, but to be always labouring at and
improving one's self, and partly natural curiosity regarding the unknown;

one looks upon one's self as a country, the coast of which is known, but the
interior of which is still to be explored.
In the case of the man who is healthy in mind and body, this exploration
goes on slowly, almost imperceptibly. One fine day the poor prisoner,
looking up from his work, finds that the eye has disappeared from the peep-
hole. Only now does he begin to breathe, to live. Whether his work be
important or unimportant, divine or merely useful, whether he be a Michael
Angelo or a cork-cutter, from that moment there is a feeling of balance and
unity in his mind; he feels that he is an entire being. In the case of sickly,
inactive natures, the eye is never removed from the peep-hole, and a long
continuation of this condition leads the individual to the verge of madness.
But it is to this very condition that the Romanticists cling. It is this which
gives birth to the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger,"[2] an idea which
finds its first expression in Jean Paul's Leibgeber-Schoppe (in the
meditation on Fichte's Ego), and is to be found in almost all Hoffmann's
tales, reaching its climax in his chief work, Die Elixire des Teufels. It crops
up in the writings of all the Romanticists; we have it in Kleist's Amphitryon,
in Achim von Arnim's Die beiden Waldemar, in Chamisso's poem,
Erscheinung, and Brentano treats it comically in Die mehreren Wehmüller.
To Hoffmann the Ego is simply a disguise worn on the top of another
disguise, and he amuses himself by peeling off these disguises one by one.
He carries out what Roquairol only suggested.
Theodor Hoffmann's life explains the peculiar form which Romantic self-
duplication took in his case. He was born in Königsberg in 1776, the son of
parents whose inharmonious union was soon dissolved. His mother
belonged to a painfully well-regulated and conventional family; his father
was as eccentric as he was clever, and had irregular habits which were a
great affliction to his wife's relations. Theodor lost his mother early, and the
pedantic severity with which his uncle brought him up only made the gifted
boy's occasional wild outbursts wilder and madder. He found vent for his
feelings in peculiar musical compositions and remarkably clever
caricatures. He studied law as a profession, but at the same time devoted
much attention to music. At an early age he fell in love with a young
married woman. Feeling that the violence of this passion was undermining
his reason, he cured himself of it by tearing himself away from his native
town, at the age of twenty.

Soon after this he received a government appointment in Posen. The wild
dissipation which prevailed in Poland in those days carried him completely
off his feet and materially altered his character. For caricaturing one of his
superiors he was removed to Plozk, where he led a more regular life.

HOFFMANN

In 1804 he was transferred to Warsaw, at that time a Prussian town; and it
was the full, varied, and, to a German, quite foreign life of this important
city which gave Hoffmann's literary tendencies their decisive, final bent.
Much that is mad and strange in his writings may be attributed to the wild,
reckless joviality of the Warsaw days. In Warsaw he met Zacharias Werner,
another author who was distinctly influenced by the social life of Poland in
the beginning of the century. And here, whilst conscientiously fulfilling the
duties of his appointment, he not only found time to cultivate his favourite
art, music, and to frequent the society of other musical devotees, but also

managed to decorate several halls with frescoes, to ornament a library with
alto-reliefs executed in bronze, and to paint a room in the Egyptian style,
adroitly introducing amongst the extraordinary representations of Egyptian
gods, caricatures of his acquaintances, whom he provided with tails and
wings. It was in Warsaw too that he conducted concerts for the first time.
In 1806, as every one knows, Prussian rule in Warsaw came to an end.
Hoffmann saw the streets of the town crowded, first with the vanguard of
the Russian army—Tartars, Cossacks, and Bashkirs—then with Murat's
troops, watched the migrations of the races set in motion by Napoleon's
campaign, and at last saw Napoleon himself, whom he, the good German,
abhorred as a tyrant. In Dresden, in 1813, he was eye-witness of several
small skirmishes and one battle; he walked over a battlefield, lived through
a famine and a species of plague which followed in the train of the war—in
short, his imagination was fertilised by all the horrors of the period, the first
result being, characteristically enough, merely a set of funny caricatures of
the French.
When still quite a young man, he had married a beautiful Polish lady, who
made him a devoted and patient wife; it was probably thanks to her that, in
spite of his overstrained nerves, he lived as long as he did. His marriage by
no means precluded many passionate attachments to other women, but all
these seem to have had their root rather in imagination than in any real
feeling. Three days after a young lady with whom he was madly in love had
engaged herself to another, he was perfectly happy, having cured himself of
his passion by satirising it. He was helped to bear his woe by the pleasure of
caricaturing it.
After figuring as a theatrical architect in Bamberg and conductor of an
orchestra in Dresden, he went to Berlin, where he spent the last years of his
life as a member of the Kammergericht (one of the principal courts of
justice). As was natural, the astonishingly gifted man who could write
books, improvise on the piano, compose operas, draw caricatures, and
scintillate wit when he was in the humour, became a lion in social circles
and a fêted frequenter of the taverns. He devoted a great share of his energy
and talent to the observation of his own moods, which he watched closely
and described day by day in a kind of diary.

Wine, which he only regarded as an exciting stimulant, was in reality much
more than this to him. To it he owed much of his inspiration, his visions,
those hallucinations which at first were fanciful, but became ever more
serious. In his case intoxication actually produced a new kind of fantastic
poetry. When under the influence of alcohol, he saw the darkness suddenly
illuminated by phosphorescent light, or saw a gnome rise through the floor,
or saw himself surrounded by spectres and terrible grimacing figures, which
went on disappearing and reappearing in all kinds of grotesque disguises.
It was almost inevitable that this painstaking observer of his own moods
and of the external peculiarities, more especially the oddities, of other men,
should care little about nature. If he took a walk in summer, it was only to
reach some place or other where he would be certain to meet human beings;
and he seldom passed a pastry-cook's or a tavern without dropping in to see
what kind of people frequented it. This explains the striking want of any
feeling for fresh, open-air nature in his books. His mind was at home in a
tavern, not in forest solitudes. But if his sense of the beauties of nature was
weak, his enthusiasm for art was so much the more intense; genuine
Romanticist that he is, half of his productions treat of art.
The peculiar, Romantic theory of human personality held by a poet of this
temperament and this development was a product of over-impressionable
and over-strained nerves and of irregular living. In his diary I find the
following memoranda:—

"1804.—Drank Bischof at the new club from 4 to 10. Frightfully
agitated in the evening. Nerves excited by the spiced wine.
Possessed
by thoughts of death and Doppelgänger.

"1809.—Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 6th; I
imagine
myself looking at my Ego through a kaleidoscope—all the
forms moving
round me are Egos, and annoy me by what they do and leave
undone.

"1810.—Why do I think so much, sleeping and waking, about
madness?"

It was a settled conviction with Hoffmann that when anything good befalls
a man, an evil power is always lurking in the background to paralyse the
action of the good power. As he expresses it: "The devil thrusts his tail into
everything." He was haunted, says his biographer, Hitzig, by a fear of
mysterious horrors, of "Doppelgänger" and spectral apparitions of every
kind. He used to look anxiously round while writing about them; and if it
was at night, he would often wake his wife and beg her to keep him
company till he had finished. He imparted his own fear of ghosts to the
characters he created; he drew them "as he himself was drawn in the great
book of creation." It does not surprise us to learn that of his own works, he
preferred those which contain the most gruesome pictures of madness or the
weirdest caricatures—Brambilla, for instance.
He relies for effect, in a manner which soon becomes mannerism, upon the
sharp contrasts with which he ushers in his terrific or comical scenes. From
the commonest, most prosaic every-day life we are suddenly transported
into a perfectly distorted world, where miracles and juggling tricks of every
kind so bewilder us that in the end no relation, no species of life, no
personality, seems definite and certain. We are always in doubt as to
whether we are dealing with a real person, with his spectre, with his essence
in another form or other power, or with his fantastic "Doppelgänger."
In one of the lighter tales of Hoffmann's last period, Der Doppelgänger, the
two principal characters resemble each other so closely that one is
constantly being taken for the other; the one is wounded instead of the
other; the betrothed of the one cannot distinguish him from the other, &c.,
&c. All kinds of absurd mistakes are made possible, and the dread of
"Doppelgängerei" is turned to good account. The common-sense
explanation of the matter is insisted on (much as it is in Brentano's Die
mehreren Wehmüller), simply because Hoffmann for once, by way of a
change, fancied making some attempt at explanation. The explanation, as a
matter of fact, explains nothing. All Hoffmann really cared for was the
fantastically gruesome effect, just as all Brentano cared for was the
fantastically comical one. Der Doppelgänger possesses no artistic merit.

There is wittier and more audacious invention in the tale, The Latest
Adventures of the Dog Berganza. In the first place, we are left uncertain
whether the dog is a metamorphosed human being or not; he himself says:
"It is possible that I am really Montiel, who was punished by being
compelled to assume the shape of a dog; if so, the punishment has been a
source of pleasure and amusement." In the second place, even the dog, as
dog, sees himself duplicated, and is conscious of the dissolution of the unity
of his being. "Sometimes I actually saw myself lying in front of myself like
another Berganza, another which yet was myself; and I, Berganza, saw
another Berganza maltreated by the witches, and growled and barked at
him."
Still greater is the audacity, still more extravagant the whimsicality in the
tale of The Golden Jar. In it an ugly old Dresden apple-woman is at the
same time the beautiful bronze knocker on Registrar Lindhorst's door. The
metal face of the door-knocker occasionally wrinkles itself up into the old
crone's crabbed smile. In addition to this, she is the odious fortune-teller,
Frau Rauerin, and good old Lise, the fond nurse of the young heroine of the
tale. She can (like the fortune-teller in Der Doppelgänger) suddenly change
dress, shape, and features. When the matter of her parentage is cleared up,
we learn that her papa was a "shabby feather broom," made of feathers from
a dragon's wing, while her mamma was "a miserable beetroot."
Lindhorst, the stolid Registrar, who never seems to feel at home except
when sitting in his library in his flowered dressing-gown, surrounded by old
manuscripts, is also a great magician, who, in the middle of an ordinary
conversation, suddenly begins to relate the most insane occurrences as if
they were the most natural in the world. He tells, for instance, that he was
once invisibly present at a party—quite a simple matter—he was in the
punch-bowl. On another occasion he takes off his dressing-gown, steps
without more ado into a bowl of blazing arrack, vanishes in the flames, and
allows himself to be drunk.
In creating these doubled and trebled existences, the character, for instance,
of the Archive Keeper, who is a Registrar by day and a salamander at night,
Hoffmann obviously had in his mind the strange contrast between his own
official life, as the conscientious criminal judge, severely rejecting all
considerations of sentiment or æstheticism, and his free night life as king of

the boundless realm of imagination—a life in which reality, as such, had no
part.
But of all Hoffmann's tales, it is Die Elixire des Teufels ("The Elixir of
Satan") which makes the most powerful impression. Let us dwell for a
moment on the hero of this romance, Brother Medardus; for he is a typical
character. It is impossible in a brief summary to convey any idea of the
mysterious, weird horror of the book; to feel this one must read it. A work
more saturated with voluptuousness and horrors the Romantic School, with
all its long practice in the style, never produced.—In a certain monastery is
preserved a flask of Satanic elixir, which had belonged to St. Anthony. This
elixir is believed to possess magic properties. A monk who has tasted it
becomes so eloquent that ere long he is the most famous preacher of the
monastery. But his eloquence is not of a pious or healthy, but of a carnal,
strangely exciting, dæmonic description. Brother Medardus drinks from the
flask. A charming woman, his penitent, falls in love with him, and a longing
for the pleasures and delights of the world impels him to leave the
monastery. He finds a young man, Count Viktorin, asleep in the forest on
the edge of a precipice, and half accidentally pushes him over. From this
time onwards every one takes him for the Count.
"My own Ego, the sport of a cruel accident, was dissolved into strange
forms, and floated helplessly away upon the sea of circumstances. I could
not find myself again. Viktorin is undoubtedly pushed over the precipice by
the accident which directed my hand, not my will—I step into his place."
And as though this were not marvellous enough, he adds: "But Reinhold
knows Father Medardus, the preacher of the Capuchin Monastery; and thus
to him I am what I really am. Nevertheless, I am obliged to take Viktorin's
place with the Baroness, for I am Viktorin. I am that which I appear to be,
and I do not appear to be that which I am. At strife with my own Ego, I am
an unanswerable riddle to myself."
Medardus, in his own form, now enters into relations with Viktorin's
mistress, the Baroness, who has no idea that he is not Viktorin. He is
possessed by carnal desires; women fall in love with him; he gives himself
up to sensual pleasures, and in order to attain the fulfilment of his wishes,
commits crimes of every kind, including murder. Horrible visions haunt
him and drive him from place to place. In the end he is denounced and
imprisoned. In prison the confusion of individualities reaches a climax. "I

could not sleep; in the strange reflections cast by the dull, wavering light of
the lamp upon the walls and ceiling, I saw all kinds of distorted faces
grinning at me. I put out the lamp and buried my head in my pillow of
straw, only to be still more horribly tormented by the hollow groans of the
prisoners and the rattling of their chains." It seems to him that he is
listening to the death-rattle of his victims. And now he plainly hears a
gentle, measured knocking beneath him. "I listened, the knocking
continued, and sounds of strange laughter came up through the floor. I
sprang up and flung myself upon the straw mattress, but the knocking went
on, accompanied by laughter and groans. Presently, an ugly, hoarse,
stammering voice began calling gently but persistently: 'Me-dar-dus, Me-
dar-dus!' An icy shiver ran through my veins, but I took courage and
shouted: 'Who is there? Who is there?'" Then the knocking and stammering
begins directly beneath his feet: "He, he, he! He, he, he! Lit-tle brother, lit-
tle brother Me-dar-dus ... I am here, am here ... le-let me in ... we will g-g-
go into the woo-woo-woods, to the woo-woo-woods." To his horror he
seems to recognise his own voice. Some of the flagstones of the floor are
pushed up, and his own face, in a monk's cowl, appears. This other
Medardus is, like him, imprisoned, has confessed, and is condemned to
death. Now everything happens as if in a dream. He no longer knows
whether he is really the hero of the events which he believes to have
happened, or whether the whole is a vivid dream. "I feel as if I had been
listening in a dream to the story of an unfortunate wretch, the plaything of
evil powers, who have driven him hither and thither, and urged him on from
crime to crime."
He is acquitted; the happiest moment of his life is at hand; he is to be united
to the woman he loves. It is their wedding day. "At that very moment a dull
sound rose from the street below; we heard the shouting of hollow voices
and the slow rumbling of a heavy vehicle. I ran to the window. In front of
the palace, a cart, driven by the headsman's apprentice, was stopping; in it
sat the Monk and a Capuchin friar who was praying loudly and fervently
with him. Though the Monk was disfigured by fear and by a bristly beard,
the features of my terrible Doppelgänger were only too easily recognisable.
Just as the cart, which had been stopped for the moment by the throng,
rolled on again, he suddenly glared up at me with his horrible glistening
eyes, and laughed loud, and yelled: Bridegroom! Bridegroom! Come up on
to the housetop! There we will wrestle with one another, and he who throws

the other down is king and has the right to drink blood!' I cried: 'You
monster! What have I to do with you?' Aurelia flung her arms round me and
drew me forcibly away from the window, crying: 'For God and the Holy
Virgin's sake!... It is Medardus, my brother Leonard's murderer, whom they
are taking to execution.' ... Leonard! Leonard! The spirits of hell awoke
within me, and exerted all the power they possess over the wicked,
abandoned sinner. I seized Aurelia with such fury that she shook with fear:
'Ha, ha, ha! mad, foolish woman! I, I, your lover, your bridegroom, am
Medardus, am your brother's murderer. You, the Monk's bride, would call
down vengeance upon him? Ho, ho, ho! I am king—I will drink your
blood.'"
He strikes her to the earth. His hands are covered with her blood. He rushes
out into the street, frees the Monk, deals blows right and left with knife and
fist, and escapes into the forest. "I had but one thought left, the hunted
animal's thought of escape. I rose, but had not taken many steps before a
man sprang upon my back and flung his arms round my neck. In vain I tried
to shake him off; I flung myself down; I rubbed myself against the trees—
all to no purpose—the man only chuckled scornfully. Suddenly the moon
shone clear through the dark firs, and the horrible, deathly pale face of the
Monk, the supposed Medardus, the Doppelgänger, glared at me with the
same appalling glance he had shot at me from the cart. 'He, he, he! little
brother! I am w-w-with you still; I'll n-n-never let you go. I can't r-r-run like
you. Y-you must carry me. They were go-go-going to break me on the wh-
wh-wheel, but I got away.'" This situation is spun out ad infinitum, but I
forbear. To the end of the book one is uncertain of the real significance of
the events, of the ethical tendency of the actions, so completely in this case
has imagination disintegrated personality.
The Scandinavian author, Ingemann, has followed Hoffmann in this path.
He turns to account, for instance, the eeriness in the idea of loudly calling
one's own name in a churchyard at midnight; see his tale, The Sphinx, and
others in the so-called Callot-Hoffmann style.
But, as already observed, Romanticism is not content with stretching out
and splitting up the Ego, with spreading it throughout time and space. It
dissolves it into its elements, takes from it here, adds to it there, makes it
the plaything of free fancy. Here, if anywhere, Romanticism is profound; its
psychology is correct, but one-sided; it is always on the night side or on the

inevitability of things that it dwells; there is nothing emancipating or
elevating about it.
In the old days the Ego, the soul, the personality, was regarded as a being
whose attributes were its so-called capacities and powers. The words
"capacity" and "power," however, only signify that there is in me the
possibility of certain events, of my seeing, reading, &c. My true being does
not consist of possibilities, but of these events themselves, of my actual
condition. My real being is a sequence of inward events. For me, my Ego is
composed of a long series of mental pictures and ideas. Of this Ego, I
constantly, daily, lose some part. Forgetfulness swallows up gigantic pieces
of it. Of all the faces I saw on the street yesterday and the day before, of all
the sensations which were mine, only one or two remain in my memory. If I
go still farther back, only an exceptionally powerful sensation or thought
here and there emerges, like a solitary rocky island, from the ocean of
forgetfulness. We only keep together the ideas and pictures that remain to us
from our past lives by means of the association of these ideas, that is to say,
by the aid of the peculiar power they have, in virtue of certain laws, of
recalling each other. If we had no numerical system, no dates, no almanacs,
wherewith to give some coherence to our different memories, we should
have an extremely slight and indistinct idea of our Ego. But however
substantial the long inward chain may seem (and it is strengthened, it gains
in tenacity, every time we run over its links in our memory), it happens that
we at times introduce into it a link which does not belong to it, at times take
a link from it and place it in another chain.[3]
The first of these actions, the introducing of new, incongruous links into the
chain of memory, happens in dreams. We dream we have done many things
which we have never done. It also happens when we have a false
recollection. He who has seen a white sheet blowing about in the dark, and
believes he has seen a ghost, has such a false recollection. Most myths and
legends, especially religious legends, come into existence in this way.
It frequently happens, however, that, instead of adding links to the chain of
the Ego, we withdraw them. Thus the sick man, when his mind is
wandering, supposes that the words he hears are spoken by a strange voice,
or endows his inward visions with an outward reality, as Luther did when
he saw the devil in his room in the Wartburg; and the madman not only
partly, but entirely confuses himself with some one else.

In a state of reason, then, the Ego is an artificial production, the result of
association of ideas. I am certain of my own identity—in the first place,
because I associate my name, that sound which I call my name, with the
chain of my inward experiences, and secondly, because I keep all the links
of this chain connected by the association of ideas, by virtue of which they
produce each other. But, since the Ego is thus not an innate but an acquired
conception, founded upon an association of ideas which has to maintain
itself against the constant attacks of sleep, dreams, imaginations,
hallucinations, and mental derangement, it is by its nature exposed to
manifold dangers. Just as disease is ever lying in wait for our bodies, so
madness lies in wait at the threshold of the Ego, and every now and again
we hear it knock.
It is of this correct psychological theory, originally propounded by Hume,
that the Romanticists, though they do not define it scientifically,
nevertheless have a presentiment. Dreams, dipsomania, hallucinations,
madness, all the powers which disintegrate the Ego, which disconnect its
links, are their familiar friends. Read, for instance, Hoffmann's tale, The
Golden Jar, and you will hear voices issue from the apple-baskets, and the
leaves and flowers of the elder-tree sing; you will see the door-knocker
make faces, &c., &c. The strange, striking effect is here specially due to the
way in which the apparitions suddenly emerge from a background of the
most humdrum, ordinary description, from piles of legal documents, or
from tureens and goblets. All Hoffmann's characters (like Andersen's
Councillor in The Galoshes of Fortune, which is an imitation of Hoffmann)
are considered by their neighbours to be either drunk or mad, because they
always treat their dreams and visions as realities.
Hoffmann created most of his principal characters in his own image. His
whole life resolved itself into moods. We see from his diary how anxiously
and minutely he observed these. We come on such entries as: "Romantically
religious mood; excitedly humorous mood, leading finally to those thoughts
of madness which so often force themselves upon me; humorously
discontented, highly-wrought musical, romantic moods; extremely irritable
mood, romantic and capricious in the highest degree; strange, excited, but
poetic gloominess; very comfortable, brusque, ironical, overstrained,
morose, perfectly weak moods; extraordinary, but miserable moods; moods

in which I felt deep veneration for myself and praised myself immoderately;
senza entusiasmo, senza esaltazione, every-day moods," &c., &c.
We seem to see the man's spiritual life spread and split itself up fan-wise
into musical high and low spirits. It is easy to guess from this register of
moods that Hoffmann, genuine lover of night as he was, was in the habit of
going to bed towards morning, after having spent the evening and night in a
tavern.
Romanticism having thus dissolved the Ego, proceeds to form fantastic
Egos, adding here, taking away there.
Take, for an example, Hoffmann's Klein Zaches, the little monster who has
been endowed by a fairy with the peculiarity "that everything good that
others think, say, or do in his presence is attributed to him; the result being
that in the society of handsome, refined, intelligent persons he also is taken
to be handsome, refined, and cultured—is taken, in short, for a model of
every species of perfection with which he comes in contact." When the
student reads aloud his charming poems, it is Zaches who is credited with
them; when the musician plays or the professor performs his experiments, it
is Zaches who gets the honour and the praise. He grows in greatness,
becomes an important man, is made Prime Minister, but ends his days by
drowning in a toilet-basin. Without overlooking the satiric symbolism of the
story, I draw attention to the fact that the author has here amused himself by
endowing one personality with qualities properly belonging to others, in
other words, by dissolving individuality and disregarding its limits. With
the same satirical intention, the same idea is worked out more ingeniously,
though more roughly, by Hostrup, the Dane, in his comedy, En Spurv i
Tranedans ("A Sparrow among the Cranes" = a dwarf among the giants), in
which each one of the other characters attributes to the comical young
journeyman tailor the qualities which he himself values most.
Here we have Romanticism amusing itself by adding qualities to human
nature; but it found subtracting them an equally attractive amusement. It
deprives the individual of attributes which would seem to form an organic
part of it; and by taking these away it divides the human being as lower
organisms, worms, for example, are divided into greater and smaller parts,
both of which live. It deprives the individual, for instance, of his shadow. In
Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, the man in the grey coat kneels down before

Peter, and, with admirable dexterity, strips the shadow off him and off the
grass, rolls it up and pockets it—and the story shows us the misfortunes
which are certain to befall the man who has lost his shadow.
This same tale of Peter Schlemihl shows how Romanticism, as a spiritual
force, succeeded in impressing a uniform stamp on the most heterogeneous
talents. It would be difficult to imagine two natures more unlike than
Chamisso's and Hoffmann's; hence the plot of Chamisso's tale is as simple
and readily comprehensible as the plots of Hoffmann's are morbidly
extraordinary.
Adalbert von Chamisso was a Frenchman born, who acquired the German
character remarkably quickly and completely, to the extent even of
developing more than one quality which we are accustomed to consider
essentially German. The son of a French nobleman, he was born in 1781 in
the castle of Boncourt, in Champagne. Driven from France as a boy during
the Reign of Terror, he became one of Queen Louisa of Prussia's pages, and
later, at the age of twenty, a lieutenant in the Prussian army. He was a
serious, almost painfully earnest, but absolutely healthy-minded man of
sterling worth, brave and honourable, with a little of the heaviness of the
German about him and much of the liveliness of the Frenchman.
The reverse of Hoffmann, he was no lover of social pleasures, but all the
more ardent a lover of nature. He longed on hot summer days to be able to
go about naked in his garden with his pipe in his mouth. Modern dress,
modern domestic life and social formalities he regarded in the light of
burdensome fetters. His love of nature led him to circumnavigate the globe,
enamoured him of the South Sea Islands, and is expressed in much of his
poetry.
Nevertheless, the imperceptible intellectual compulsion exercised by the
age caused him, as author, to adopt Romantic theories and write in the
Romantic style. It is characteristic, however, that when in such a poem as
Erscheinung ("The Apparition") he treats the Romantic idea of the
"Doppelgänger," he does it with a certain moral force which leaves on the
reader's mind the impression of genuine despair. The narrator comes home
at night and sees himself sitting at his desk. "Who are you?" he asks. "Who
disturbs me thus?" returns the "Doppelgänger":—

"Und er: 'So lass uns, wer du seist, erfahren!'
Und ich: 'Ein solcher bin ich, der getrachtet
Nur einzig nach dem Schönen, Guten, Wahren;
Der Opfer nie dem Götzendienst geschlachtet,
Und nie gefröhnt dein weltlich-eitlen Brauch,
Verkannt, verhöhnt, der Schmerzen nie geachtet:
Der irrend zwar und träumend oft den Rauch
Für Flamme hielt, doch mutig beim Erwachen
Das Rechte nur verfocht:—bist du das auch?'
Und er mit wildem kreischend-lautem Lachen:
'Der du dich rühmst zu sein, der bin ich nicht.
Gar anders ist's bestellt um meine Sachen.
Ich bin ein feiger, lügenhafter Wicht,
Ein Heuchler mir und ändern, tief im Herzen
Nur Eigennutz, und Trug im Angesicht.
Verkannter Edler du mit deinen Schmerzen,
Wer kennt sich nun? wer gab das rechte Zeichen?
Wer soll, ich oder du, sein Selbst verscherzen?
Tritt her, so du es wagst, ich will dir weichen!'
Drauf mit Entsetzen ich zu jenem Graus:
'Du bist es, bleib und lass hinweg mich schleichen!'
Und schlich zu weinen, in die Nacht hinaus."[4]
The painful moral self-recognition endows the ghost story with marvellous
significance.
Chamisso's double nationality was a source of much unhappiness to him in
his younger days, when there was violent enmity between the land of his
birth and his adopted country. In one of his letters to Varnhagen (December
1805) he writes: "'No country, no people—each man for himself!' These
words of yours seemed to come straight from my own heart. They almost
startled me; I had to wipe away the tears that rolled down my cheeks. Oh!
the same sentiment must have made itself felt in all my letters, every one!"
When, in 1806, Napoleon began the war with Prussia, he issued an order
that every Frenchman serving in the enemy's ranks should, when taken
prisoner, be tried by court-martial and shot within twenty-four hours. Hence
Chamisso, who had in vain demanded to be allowed to resign his
commission, was exposed to the chance of a disgraceful death.

He visited France in the following year, but in Paris there was nothing to
attract him. "Wherever I am," he complains, "I am countryless. Land and
people are foreign to me; hence I am perpetually longing." He was one of
the bravest and most capable of German officers (his behaviour on the
occasion of the surrender of Hameln proves this), but, as a Frenchman born
and an admirer of Napoleon, he would have preferred not to have taken part
in the war against France and the Emperor.
After his resignation was actually accepted, he spent some time at the court
of Madame de Staël, and made the acquaintance of her international circle
of friends. The year 1813, the year of Prussia's declaration of war against
France, was the most trying of all for the unfortunate young Franco-
German. His heart was divided; he desired the fall of Napoleon because he
hated despotism, but at the same time he felt every humiliation which befell
the French troops during their retreat from Russia, and every insulting word
spoken of the Emperor, as if the misfortune had happened, the insult been
offered, to himself. And with this very natural feeling his German associates
showed no forbearance. He often cried despairingly: "No, the times have no
sword for me." "Action and inaction," he writes in May 1813, "are equally
painful to me."
This was the mood which produced his most notable work, Peter Schlemihl.
The great historical events which harrowed his feelings made him
intellectually productive; the summer of 1813 was a turning-point in his
life. "I had no longer a country," he says, "or as yet no country." And so the
man without a country writes the tale of the man without a shadow. In spite
of its intangibility, a man's shadow is, like his country, like his home, one of
his natural possessions, a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which
is, as it were, part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so
entirely natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned
as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter of course.
Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great sorrow of his life,
in his daringly imagined fable. And strangely enough, he not only
figuratively gave in it the essence of all his past experiences, but also
prophetically imaged his future, his voyage round the world and his
scientific labours. After Schlemihl has escaped from the temptations of the
devil, he accidentally comes into possession of the seven-leagued boots,
which take him to every country in the world, and enable him to pursue his

favourite study to the greatest advantage. Schlemihl himself says: "My
future suddenly showed itself clearly to the eyes of my soul. Banished from
human society by the misdemeanours of my youth, I was thrown into the
arms of Nature, whom I had always loved. The earth was given to me as a
rich garden, study as the directing influence and strength of my life,
knowledge as its aim."
The originality of its plot and the remarkable clearness of its style (this last
a characteristic of all Chamisso's writing, and evidently his intellectual
inheritance as a Frenchman) made Peter Schlemihl an extraordinary
success. It was translated into nearly every language. Ten years after its
publication a new kind of lamp, which cast no shadow, was named the
Schlemihl lamp.
Chamisso's success naturally roused Hoffmann to emulation. In the clever
little Story of the Lost Reflection, the hero leaves his reflection in Italy with
the entrancing Giulietta, who has bewitched him, and returns home to his
wife without it. His little son, discovering suddenly one day that his father
has no reflection, drops the mirror he is holding, and runs weeping from the
room. The mother comes in with astonishment and fright written on every
feature. "What is this Rasmus has been telling me about you?" she asks.
"That I have no reflection, I suppose, my dear," answers Spikher with a
forced laugh, and proceeds to try to prove that it is foolish to believe that a
man can lose his reflection, but that even if the thing be possible, it is a
matter of no importance, seeing that a reflection is simply an illusion. Self-
contemplation only leads to vanity, and, moreover, such an image splits up
one's personality into truth and imagination.
Here we have the mirror chamber developed to such a point that the
reflections move about independently, instead of following their originals. It
is very amusing, very original and fantastic, and, as one is at liberty to
understand by the reflection whatever one chooses, it may even be said to
be very profound. I express no opinion, but simply draw attention to fact.
We have seen that the Romanticist is instinctively, inevitably, the enemy of
clearly defined form in art. We have seen Hoffmann mixing up the different
parts of his book to the extent of having part of one story on the front, part
of quite a different one on the back of the same leaf; have seen Tieck
composing dramas like so many puzzle balls one within the other, to

prevent the reader taking them too seriously, and Kierkegaard fitting one
author inside another in the Chinese box fashion, on the strength of the
theory that truth can only be imparted indirectly, a theory which he ended
by treating with scorn—we have seen, in a word, that the artistic standpoint
of Romanticism is the exact opposite of the artistic standpoint of the
ancients. And when, with their leaning to the supernatural, the Romanticists
extend the personality of the individual throughout several successive
generations, representing him as living before his birth and after his death,
or represent him as a day-dreamer, half visionary and half madman, or
humorously endow him with other men's attributes and despoil him of his
own, fantastically filching now a shadow, now a reflection, they show by all
this fantastic duplication and imagination that their psychological
standpoint too, is an absolutely different one; for in the days of old both the
work of art and the personality were whole, were of one piece. The
movement is a perfectly consistent one, regarded as the antipodes of
classicism, in short, as Romanticism.
But, granted that man is of necessity, by his very nature, a divided, complex
being, he is nevertheless, as the healthy, vigorous personality, one. Aim,
will, resolve, make him a complete unit. If, as a natural product, the human
being is only a group held more or less firmly together by association of
ideas, as a mind he is a complete whole; in his will all the elements of the
mind are united. Romanticism only understood and depicted human nature
with genius from the natural, from the night side. It made no closer
approach in this than in any other of its endeavours to intellectual
collectedness, unity, and liberty.
[1] "The morning he suffered his terrible sentence, ere yet it was day, the warder
entered and said: 'Come! the hour is about to strike.' Then he fell on my breast
for the last time, crying: 'Say a word, a word of power, to strengthen me for the
last steps I am to take on earth!' And I said ... But, Fredrik, you frighten me.
What is it? Why do you rise and gaze on me thus, pale as a corpse? Fredrik—O
mother! mother! stop! You said: 'When you stand before your Creator, say: My
God and my Brother, forgive me for the sake of Thy passion, of my repentance,
and of my mother!' Gertrud—Oh, tell how you know this? Fredrik—Because it
was to me you spoke; not till this moment have I understood myself; I am your
own son, now living life over again."
[2] The apparition of a person, which appears to himself. There being no exact
English equivalent of "Doppelgänger" and "Doppelgängerei," these words are
retained throughout in German.—Transl.
[3] Taine: De l'Intelligence, ii. 169.

[4] "He. Then tell who you are!
"I. I am a man whose one and only aim has been the beautiful, the good, the true.
I have never sacrificed to idols, never pandered to the foolish requirements of
fashion; the pain caused by misunderstanding and scorn I have disregarded. In
my wanderings, in my dreams, I have indeed often taken smoke for flame, but
the moment I awoke I upheld what I knew to be the right. Can you say the same?
"He (with a wild, loud, grating laugh). I am not the man that you boast yourself
to be, but one of a very different character. I am a cowardly, untruthful wretch, a
hypocrite to myself and others; my heart is the home of selfishness, deceit is on
my tongue. You misunderstood hero of the many sufferings, which of us is it that
knows himself? which of us has given the true description? which is the real
man? Come here and take my place if you dare? I am ready to make way for
you.
"I (with horrible conviction). You are the man! Stay here and let me slink away!
—And out into the night I went, to weep."

XII

ROMANTIC SOUL. NOVALIS

The traveller who visits a mine is let down into a subterranean shaft in
company with a man who carries a lamp, by the uncertain light of which
they explore the hidden depths. It is on such an expedition that I now invite
my readers to accompany me. The shaft to which we are about to descend is
that of the German "soul," a mine as deep, as dark, as strange, as rich in
precious metal and in worthless refuse as any other. We shall note the
imprint received by this soul in the days of Romanticism, for this purpose
dwelling at length on the Romanticist who above all others is the poet of the
soul—Novalis.
No word in any other language is the exact equivalent of the German word
"Gemüth," here translated "soul." "Gemüth" is something peculiarly
German. It is the inward flame, the inward crucible. In the famous words of
the "Wanderer's Sturmlied":—
"Innre Wärme,
Seelenwärme,
Mittelpunkt!

Glüh entgegen
Phöb-Apollon,
Kalt wird sonst
Sein Fürstenblick
Ueber dich vorübergleiten," $/
Goethe has described soul, and its significance in the poet's life. With those
who have soul, everything tends inwards; soul is the centripetal force of the
spiritual life. To the man who sets soul above all else in human life, fervour
becomes a patent of nobility. In their conception of soul, as in everything
else, the Romanticists rush to extremes. They magnify all that is mysterious,
dark, and unexplained in the soul, at the expense of what is clear and
beautiful. Goethe is to them the greatest of all poets, not because of his
plastic power, but because of the obscurity, the dæmonic mystery,
surrounding such characters as the Harper and Mignon, and because of the
pregnant intensity of his smaller poems. Lessing and Schiller, on the other
hand, are not deemed poets at all, and are sneered at and disparagingly
criticised because of the outward direction taken by their keen, energetic
thought. For enthusiasm, strength of character, and all such qualities are not
soul. Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the sword and goes
forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is he who has most soul.
The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the turning
of Goethe's "Seelenwärme"—warmth of soul—into heat, a heat which rises
to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity consumes all established
forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic poet is the heat and passion of
the emotion which burns within him. What Novalis does is done with the
force of his whole being. Intense, reckless feeling is his motto.
Friedrich von Hardenberg, a scion of an ancient house, was born at
Wiederstedt, in the County of Mansfeld, in May 1772. His father, a man of
a vigorous, ardent nature, had, after "leading a very worldly life," been
converted at the age of thirty-one, when in great distress because of his first
wife's death, to the faith of the English Methodists. At a later period he fell
under the influence of the Moravian Brethren, more particularly of Count
Zinzendorf; and he was at all times strongly influenced by his elder brother,
a bigoted and somewhat ignorant aristocrat of pietistic leanings. The elder
brother's will was law in the younger's household after the latter's second
marriage; his strict principles forbade the family all social intercourse, and

the children were obliged to keep their youthful amusements carefully
concealed. In 1787 Novalis's father was appointed director of the saltworks
in the little town of Weissenfels.

NOVALIS

Tieck became acquainted with the Hardenberg family in 1799, and they
made a profound impression on him. Köpke says: "It was a quiet, serious
life that they led, a life of unostentatious but sincere piety. The family
belonged to the sect of the Moravian Brethren, and set forth its doctrines in
their lives. Old Hardenberg, a high-minded, honourable man, who had been
a fine soldier in his day, lived like a patriarch among his talented sons and
charming daughters. Change and enlightenment in any form were his
detestation; he loved and lauded the good old, misjudged days, and on
occasion could express his views very decidedly and defiantly, or blaze up
in sudden anger."
The following little domestic scene speaks for itself: —one day heard the
old gentleman fuming and scolding in the adjoining room. "What has
happened?" he anxiously asked a servant who entered. "Nothing," was the
dry response; "it is only the master giving a Bible lesson." Old Hardenberg

was in the habit of conducting the devotional exercises of the family, and at
the same time examining the younger children on religious subjects, and
this not infrequently meant a domestic storm.
Such was Friedrich von Hardenberg's home. He was a dreamy, delicate
child, an intelligent, ambitious youth. In 1791 he went to Jena to study law.
Those were the palmy days of that university, which then numbered
amongst its professors such men as Reinhold, Fichte, and Schiller. Novalis
found Schiller's lectures specially spirit-stirring, and the poet himself was to
the young man "the perfect pattern of humanity." Fichte, whose
acquaintance he also made, he enthusiastically called "the legislator of the
new world-order." No one at that time could have foreseen in young
Hardenberg the future high priest of obscurantism.
We see him in those youthful days intensely absorbed in the study of his
own Ego. His plans are constantly changing; at one time he determines to
be the diligent, ardent student, at another to throw up the pursuit of science
and be a soldier. Strange as it may sound, the men whom he at this time
regards as his models are those friends of freedom who were at the same
time apostles of the gospel of utilitarianism. He writes to his brother: "Buy
Franklin's autobiography, and let the genius of this book be your guide." We
occasionally hear of a little youthful folly; he is now and again in trouble
because of debts he has contracted; but he reasons very sensibly with his
father, when the latter is inclined to take his peccadilloes too seriously.
Father and uncle naturally regarded the French Revolution with horror and
loathing, but Friedrich and his elder brother were its ardent partisans.
Things in Saxony being on too small a scale to suit Friedrich's taste, his
kinsman, the Prussian Minister (afterwards Chancellor) von Hardenberg,
offered him an appointment in Prussia; this, however, he was unable to
accept, owing to his father's unwillingness to allow him to become a
member of the liberal-minded Berlin cousin's household. He was finally
sent to Tennstedt, near Erfurt, to acquire practical experience of the
administration of the laws of the Electorate of Saxony under the excellent
district magistrate, Just.
Novalis's first friend among the Romanticists was Friedrich Schlegel,
whose acquaintance he made at Jena. The two had much in common, and
Novalis at once fell under Schlegel's influence. At the age of twenty-five he

writes to him: "To me you have been the high priest of Eleusis; you have
revealed heaven and hell to me; through you I have tasted of the tree of
knowledge." Young Hardenberg shows himself to be entirely free from
political prejudice; he takes a great fancy to Schlegel's landlord, because of
the man's "honest republicanism," and jokes at Schlegel's severity in
blaming him and the said landlord for their loyalty to the princely house. He
has an extremely high opinion of Friedrich Schlegel as a critic, admires the
fineness of the meshes of his critical net, which allows no fish, however
small, to escape, and calls him "einen dephlogistisirten Lessing."
When, in 1797, Schlegel visited Hardenberg at his home, he found him
utterly broken down. A young girl, Sophie von Kühn, to whom he had been
passionately and absorbingly devoted, had just died. His despair took the
form of longing for death, and he fully believed that his body must succumb
to this desire and to his longing for the departed. Though he had no definite
plans of suicide, he called the desire for annihilation by which he was
possessed, "a firm determination, which would make of his death a free-will
offering." It was under the influence of these thoughts that he wrote his
Hymns to Night.
This excess of despair, and also the singular circumstance that Sophie, who
died at the age of fifteen, was only twelve years old when he fell in love
with her, seem to testify to something unhealthy and abnormal in Novalis's
character. The impression is strengthened when we find him, only one year
later, betrothed to a daughter of Von Charpentier, superintendent of mines.
It is quite true, as La Rochefoucauld says, that the strength of our passions
has no relation to their durability; nevertheless it is strange that Hardenberg
could suddenly console himself with another, after finding his one pleasure
for a whole year in the thought of death, talking for a whole year as if the
grave held everything that was dear to him. It was a somewhat lame excuse
that Julie seemed to him a reincarnation of Sophie, though the fancy was
not a surprising one, considering how much the Romanticists dwelt on the
idea of a previous existence. But here, as elsewhere in Hardenberg's life,
much that is apparently unnatural is easily explainable when the
circumstances are rightly understood. Sophie von Kühn seems, like Auguste
Böhmer, to have been a most precocious child. When the youth of twenty-
three made her acquaintance, she possessed all the attractions of the child
combined with those of the maiden. Her features were fine, her curly head

was lightly poised, and there was a whole world in her large, dark,
expressive eyes. More impartial judges than Hardenberg have called her "a
heavenly creature."
Sophie's bright, hospitable home presented a striking contrast to young
Hardenberg's own; he was fascinated (as was his elder brother) by the
whole family; and the young girl, who, had she lived, would perhaps have
disappointed him by turning out worldly or insignificant, became his muse,
his Beatrice, his ideal. When we remember that, almost at the same time
with Sophie, Hardenberg lost his brother Erasmus, to whom he was united
by an intimate and beautiful friendship, we cannot think it strange that life
should have seemed to him to have lost all its charms. He regarded death
not merely in the light of a release; his mystical tendency led him, as
already mentioned, to speak of it as "a free-will offering." He wrote in his
diary at this time: "My death will be a proof of my understanding and
appreciation of what is highest; it will be a real sacrifice, not a flight nor a
makeshift." It is at this crisis that he begins to turn in the direction of
positive Christianity. Not that he dreamed of declaring allegiance to any
particular Church, or belief in any particular set of dogmas, but his pagan
longing for death assumed a Christian colouring. His inmost spiritual life
had long been of such a nature that, had it not been for the influence of the
spirit of the times, he might just as easily have become a determined
opponent of all ecclesiastical doctrine. His state of mind seems to have been
that indicated by Friedrich Schlegel when he wrote to him a year later:
"Possibly you still have the choice, my friend, between being the last
Christian, the Brutus of the old religion, or the Christ of the new gospel."
Shortly after this his choice was made.
In December 1798 he still feels, when he compares himself with his friend
Just, that he is only the apostle of pure spirituality. He does not, like Just,
rely "with childlike mind upon the unalterable words of a mysterious
ancient document;" he will not be bound by the letter, and is inclined to find
his own way to the primeval world; in the doctrines of Christianity he sees
an emblematic pre-figurement of the coming universal religion. "You will
not," he writes to Just, "fail to recognise in this conception of religion one
of the finest elements in my composition—namely, fancy." In other words,
he consciously admits fancy to be at the source of his religious
development.

In the same year (1798) he sent some fragments to Wilhelm Schlegel for
publication in the Athenæum, with the request that their author might be
known as NOVALIS, "which is an old family name, and not altogether
unsuitable."
Tieck met Novalis for the first time when he visited Jena in the summer of
1799. August Wilhelm Schlegel brought them together, and they were soon
devoted friends. The three spent the first evening in earnest conversation,
opening their hearts to each other At midnight they went out to enjoy the
splendour of the summer night. "The full moon," says Köpke, "was
shedding a magic glory upon the heights round Jena." Towards morning
Tieck and Schlegel accompanied Novalis home. Tieck has commemorated
this evening in Phantasus.
It was under Tieck's influence that Novalis wrote his principal work,
Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While he was still engaged upon it, his young
life was put an end to by consumption. He died at the age of twenty-nine,
only two years after the meeting with Tieck and A. W. Schlegel above
described. This early death, a remarkable degree of originality, and great
personal beauty have combined to shed a poetic halo round Novalis. The St.
John of the new movement, he resembled the most spiritual of the apostles
in outward appearance also. His forehead was almost transparent, and his
brown eyes shone with remarkable brilliance. During the last three years of
his life it could be read in his face that he was destined to an early death.
Novalis was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out. If one were
asked to give a brief definition of the main idea of that great movement, one
would say that it was the destruction of everything that was merely
traditional, and the establishment of human existence upon a basis of pure
reason, by means of a direct break with everything historic. The thinkers
and heroes of the Revolution allow reason, as it were, to upset everything,
in order that reason may put everything straight again. Although Novalis is
deaf to all the social and political cries of the period, and blind to all its
progressive movements, and although he ends in the most grim and
repulsive reaction, he is, nevertheless, not merely influenced, but, all
unconsciously, completely penetrated by the spirit of his age. Between him
—the quiet, introspective, loyal Saxon assessor—and the poor sans-culottes
who rushed from Paris to the frontiers, singing the "Marseillaise" and
waving the tricolour flag, there is this fundamental resemblance, that they

both desire the destruction of the whole outward and the construction of an
inward world. Only, their inward world is reason, his is soul: for them,
reason with its demands and formulæ—liberty, equality, and fraternity; for
him, the soul, with its strange nocturnal gloom, in which he melts down
everything, to find, at the bottom of the crucible, as the gold of the soul—
night, disease, mysticism, and voluptuousness.[1]
Thus, in spite of his violent animosity to his age, Novalis belongs to it; the
direct opponent of all its enlightened and beautiful ideas, he is, despite
himself, possessed by its spirit.
What in Fichte and the men of the Revolution is clear reason,
comprehending and testing everything, is in Novalis an all-absorbing self—
perception, which becomes actual voluptuousness; for the new spirit has
taken such a hold upon him that it is, as it were, entwined round his nerves,
causing a species of voluptuous excitement. What with them is abstract
liberty, liberty to begin everything from the beginning again, with him is
lawless fancy, which changes everything, which resolves nature and history
into emblems and myths, in order to be able to play at will with all that is
external, and to revel unrestrainedly in self-perception. As Arnold Ruge
puts it: "Mysticism, which is theoretical voluptuousness, and
voluptuousness, which is practical mysticism, are present in Novalis in
equally strong proportions."
Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its would-be
spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the sensual. Writing to
Caroline Schlegel on the subject of Lucinde, he says: "I know that
imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what is most immoral, most
animal; but I also know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves
night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He here affirms of imagination in
general what applied particularly to his own.
Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us to feel feeling.
Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He, whose aim is feeling,
unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires to feel himself, and makes no
secret of the fact that he seeks this self-enjoyment. Therefore to him
sickness is preferable to health. For the sick man perpetually feels his own
body, which the healthy man does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard,
contented themselves with defining sickness as the Christian's natural

condition. Novalis goes much further. To him the highest, the only true life,
is the life of the sick man. "Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes" ("Life is a
disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does the
world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less highly than
disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture. Why? Because
it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-
consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could
man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps
in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the
highest positive pleasure.... Does not all that is best begin as illness? Half-
illness is an evil; real illness is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he
writes elsewhere of a mystic power, "which seems to be the power of
pleasure and pain, the enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly
in the sensations of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of
sickness corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness
which is at the same time a voluptuous pleasure. Novalis himself is
perfectly aware of this correspondence. He says: "The Christian religion is
the most voluptuous of religions. Sin is the greatest stimulant to love of the
Divine Being; the more sinful a man feels himself to be, the more Christian
he is. Direct union with the Deity is the aim of sin and of love." And again:
"It is curious that the evident association between sensuality, religion, and
cruelty did not long ago draw men's attention to their close kinship and
common tendencies."
And just as Novalis now prefers sickness to health, so he prefers night to
day, with its "impudent light."
Aversion for day and daylight was general among the Romanticists. I drew
attention to it in William Lovell. Novalis simply gives expression to a
heightened degree of the general feeling in his famous Hymns to Night.
That he should love the night is easy to understand. By hiding the
surrounding world from it, night drives the Ego in upon itself; hence the
feeling of night, and self-consciousness, are one and the same thing. The
rapture of the feeling of night lies in its terror; first comes the fear of the
individual, when everything round him disappears in the darkness, that he
will himself disappear from himself; then comes the pleasant shudder when,
out of this fear, self-consciousness emerges stronger than before.

In one of his fragments Novalis calls death a bridal night, a sweet mystery,
and adds:—
"Ist es nicht klug, für die Nacht ein geselliges Lager zu suchen? Darum ist
klüglich gesinnt, wer auch Entschlummerte liebt."[2]
So completely is this idea incorporated in the Romantic philosophy of life,
that in Werner's drama, Die Kreuzesbrüder, the hero, immediately before he
is led to the stake, says:—
"Den Neid verzeih' ich,
Die Trauer nicht.—O unaussprechlich schwelg' ich
In der Verwandlung Wonn', in dem Gefühl
Des schönen Opfertodes!—O mein Bruder!
Nicht wahr? es kommt die Zeit, we alle Menschen
Den Tod erkennen—freudig ihn umarmen,
Und fühlen werden, dass dies Leben nur
Der Liebe Ahnung ist, der Tod ihr Brautkuss,
Und sie, die mit der Inbrunst eines Gatten,
Im Brautgemach, uns vom Gewand entkleidet—
Verwesung, Gluterguss der Liebe ist!"[3]
Life and death are to Novalis only "relative ideas." The dead are half alive,
the living half dead. It is this thought which in his case first gives zest to
existence. In the first of his Hymns to Night he writes: "I turn to thee, holy,
ineffable, mysterious Night! Far off lies the world, as if it had sunk into a
deep grave; deserted and lonely is its place. My heart-strings vibrate with
sorrow.... Dost thou find pleasure in us as we in thee, dark Night?... Costly
balsam drips from thy hand, from thy poppy-sheaf. Thou unfoldest the
heavy wings of the soul.... How poor, how childish seems the day, how
joyful and blessed its departing!... More heavenly than those sparkling stars
are the myriad eyes which Night opens in us. They see farther than the
palest of those countless hosts; without the aid of light, they see into the
depths of a loving soul, and its high places are filled with unspeakable
rapture. Praised be the Queen of the earth, the august revealer of holy
worlds, the guardian of blessed love! She sends me thee, my beloved, sweet
sun of the night. Now I wake, for I am thine and mine. Thou hast
proclaimed to me the life-giving gospel of Night, hast made of me a human
being. Consume my body with the glowing flame of the spirit, that I may

mingle yet more ethereally, yet more closely with thee, and the bridal-night
be eternal."
One feels the feverish desire of the consumptive in this outburst. The
parallel passage in Lucinde is: "O infinite longing! But a time is coming
when the fruitless desire and vain delusions of the day will die away and
disappear, and the great night of love bring eternal peace." The thoughts of
these two Romantic lovers of the night meet in this idea of an eternal
embrace.
In this enthusiasm for night lies the germ of religious mysticism. In the case
of Justinus Kerner (which recalls that of Jung Stilling), bias towards the
mysterious becomes belief in apparitions and fear of spirits. In certain of the
writings of the later Romanticists, for instance in Achim von Arnim's Die
schöne Isabella von Ægypten, half the characters are spirits. Mysticism is a
fundamental element in the art of Clemens Brentano, even when he is at his
best, and it gives charm and colour to his descriptions.
Novalis himself describes mysticism as voluptuousness—"ein wollüstiges
Wesen." To understand this expression aright, we must study his hymns:—
"Hinüber wall' ich
Und jede Pein
Wird einst ein Stachel
Der Wollust sein.
Noch wenig Zeiten
So bin ich los,
Und liege trunken
Der Lieb' im Schoss."[4]
Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the sensual Ego in
a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of the Spiritual Songs): "Few know the secret
of love, feel for ever unsatisfied, for ever athirst. The divine significance of
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he
who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips,
whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes
have been opened to fathom the unfathomable depths of heaven—he will
eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more. Who has yet
discerned the transcendent meaning of the earthly body? Who can say that
he understands the blood? The day is coming when all body will be one

body; then the beatified pair will float in heavenly blood. Oh! that the ocean
were already reddening, that the rocks were softening into fragrant flesh!
The sweet repast never ends, love is never satisfied. Never can it have the
beloved near enough, close enough to its inmost self. By lips that are ever
more tenderly amorous, the heavenly nutriment is ever more eagerly seized
and transformed. Hotter and hotter burns the passion of the soul, thirstier,
ever thirstier grows the heart; and so the feast of love endures from
everlasting to everlasting. Had those who abstain but once tasted of it, they
would forsake everything and seat themselves beside us at the table of
longing, which is ever furnished with guests. They would comprehend the
infinite fulness of love, and extol our feast of the Body and the Blood."[5]
These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main characteristics
of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious forms, but it truly feels
their significance; it speaks the same language as orthodoxy, but it changes
a dead language into a living one. Herein lay the secret of its victory in the
Middle Ages over that dry, formal scholasticism which it consumed in its
glow. This made it the precursor of the Reformation. The mystic needs no
external dogma; in his pious rapture he is his own priest. But, as his
spiritual life is altogether an inward life, he does not abolish external
dogma, and in the end actually becomes a sacerdotalist.
In mystically prophetic words Novalis foretells the coming of the new
kingdom of sacred darkness:—
"Es bricht die neue Welt herein
Und verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein.
Man sieht nun aus bemoosten Trümmern
Eine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern,
Und was vordem alltäglich war,
Scheint jetzo fremd und wunderbar.
Der Liebe Reich ist aufgethan,
Die Fabel fängt zu spinnen an.
Das Urspiel jeder Natur beginnt,
Auf kräftige Worte jedes sinnt,
Und so das grosse Weltgemüth
Ueberall sich regt und unendlich blüht.
* * * * * * *
Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt,

Und was man glaubt, es sei geschehn,
Kann mann von weitem erst kommen sehn;
Frei soll die Phantasie erst schalten,
Nach ihrem Gefallen die Fäden verweben,
Hier manches verschleiern, dort manches entfalten,
Und endlich in magischem Dunst verschweben.
Wehmuth und Wollust, Tod und Leben
Sind hier in innigster Sympathie,—
Wer sich der höchsten Lieb' ergeben,
Genest von ihren Wunden nie."[6]
Night, death, sensual rapture, heavenly bliss—these ideas are still more
firmly interwoven in the verses above the churchyard gate, in Heinrich von
Ofterdingen. The dead say:—
"Süsser Reiz der Mitternächte,
Stiller Kreis geheimer Mächte,
Wollust räthselhafter Spiele,
Wir nur kennen euch.
* * * * * * *
Leiser Wünsche süsses Plaudern
Hören wir allein, und schauen
Immerdar in sel'ge Augen,
Schmecken nichts als Mund und Kuss.
Alles was wir nur berühren,
Wird zu heissen Balsamfrüchten,
Wird zu weichen zarten Brüsten,
Opfern kühner Lust.

Immer wächst und blüht Verlangen
Am Geliebten festzuhangen,
Ihn im Innern zu empfangen,
Eins mit ihm zu sein.
Seinem Durste nicht zu wehren,
Sich im Wechsel zu verzehren,
Von einander sich zu nähren,
Von einander nur allein.

So in Lieb' und hoher Wollust
Sind wir immerdar versunken,
Seit der wilde trübe Funken
Jener Welt erlosch;

Seit der Hügel sich geschlossen
Und der Scheiterhaufen sprühte,
Und dem schauernden Gemüthe
Nun das Erdgesicht zerfloss."[7]
This mysticism, which deems the dead happy because it supposes them to
be revelling in all sensual delights, becomes, in its practical application, a
sort of quietism, that is, preference for a vegetating, plant-like life, the life
extolled in Lucinde.
"The plants," says Novalis, "are the plainest speech of the earth; every new
leaf, every remarkable flower is some mystery which is trying to reveal
itself, and which remains motionless and dumb only because from very joy
and love it can neither move nor speak. If one chances in solitude upon such
a flower, does not everything around it seem transfigured? do not the little
feathered songsters seem to seek its vicinity? One could weep for gladness,
and, forgetting the world, could bury one's hands and feet in the ground,
take root, and never leave that happy neighbourhood."
What an overdose of sentiment! It provides its own cruel parody in the
insane situation which reminds us Danes of one in Holberg's Ulysses von
Ithacia.
In another part of Ofterdingen we read: "Flowers exactly correspond to
children ... like children they are found lowest down, nearest the earth; the
clouds, again, are possibly revelations of the second, higher childhood, of
Paradise regained; therefore it is that they shed such refreshing dews upon
the children of earth." In the Romantic jargon there is even talk of the
childlikeness of clouds. Naïveté aspires, and is not satisfied until it has
reached the sky. O Polonius!—These naïve clouds are the true, the proper
symbols of Romanticism.
But even in the plants and the clouds there is still too much endeavour and
unrest to satisfy the Romantic soul. Even vegetation is not perfect
abstraction, perfect quiescence; there is tendency upwards in the straining

of the plant towards the light. Therefore even the plant life is not the
highest. Novalis goes a step further than Friedrich Schlegel.
"The highest life is mathematics. Without enthusiasm no mathematics. The
life of the gods is mathematics. Pure mathematics is religion. It is arrived at
only by revelation. The mathematician knows everything. All activity
ceases when knowledge is attained. The state of knowledge is bliss
(Eudämonie), rapturous peace of contemplation, heavenly abstraction."
Now we have reached the climax. All life is crystallised into dead
mathematical figures.
At this point the life of the soul is condensed to such a degree that it comes
to a standstill. It is as if the clock of the soul had ceased to strike. Every
noble aspiration, every tendency towards independent action is forced back
and stifled in the airless vaults of the soul.
It is at this point, therefore, that intense spirituality turns into gross
materialism. When all capacity of producing new outward forms is not only
despised, but actually destroyed, we have reached the turning-point, the
point at which all established outward forms are recognised and accepted,
and accepted the more gladly the more rigid they are, the closer they
approach to crystallised petrifaction, the more certain it is that they only
leave room for the life of vegetation. The step is taken by Novalis in a
remarkable essay, Christendom in Europe, which Tieck by his erasures
vainly tried to nullify, and which Friedrich Schlegel, by leaving out one
most important passage, converted into a defence of Catholicism.
In this essay he writes as follows:—"These were happy, glorious days,
when Europe was still a Christian continent, the home of the one, undivided
Christian religion.... The wise head of the Church rightly set himself against
the bold cultivation of the human mind at the cost of religious faith, and
against untimely and dangerous discoveries in the domain of science. Thus
he forbade the scientists to maintain openly that this earth is an insignificant
planet, for he knew well that men would lose, along with their respect for
their earthly home, respect for their heavenly home and their fellow-men,
that they would choose limited knowledge in preference to unlimited faith,
and would acquire the habit of despising everything great and wonderful, as
being simply the result of lifeless law."

We could almost suppose ourselves to be listening to the sermonising of a
parish-clerk of the eighteenth century. And yet we are sensible of the poet's
consistency. Poetry, which led Schiller back to Greece, leads Novalis back
to the Inquisition, and induces him, like Joseph de Maistre, to side with it
against Galileo.
Of Protestantism he says: "This great spiritual disruption, which was
accompanied by disastrous wars, was a notable proof of the harmfulness of
knowledge, of culture—or at least of the temporary harmfulness of a certain
degree of culture.... The schismatics separated the inseparable, divided the
indivisible Church, and presumptuously dissociated themselves from the
great Christian communion, in which, and through which alone, true,
lasting regeneration was possible.... A religious peace was concluded, based
upon principles which were as foolish as they were irreligious; for the
continued existence of so-called Protestantism was equivalent to the
establishment of a self-contradiction, namely, permanent revolutionary
government.... Luther treated Christianity arbitrarily, mistook its spirit, and
introduced a new letter, a totally new doctrine, that of the sacred and
supreme authority of the Bible. This, unfortunately, meant the interference
in religious matters of a perfectly foreign, entirely earthly science, namely,
philology, the destructive influence of which is thenceforward
unmistakable.... The popularisation of the Bible was now insisted upon, and
its contemptible matter and the crude abstract sketch of a religion provided
by its books had a remarkable effect in frustrating the inspiring, revealing
activity of the Holy Spirit.... The Reformation was the death-blow of
Christianity.... Fortunately for the Church, there came into existence at this
time a new religious order, on which the expiring spirit of the hierarchy
seemed to have bestowed its last gifts. This order gave new life to the old
forms, and with wonderful intuition and determination set about the
restoration of the Papal power. Never before in the world's history had such
a society been known.... The Jesuits were well aware how much Luther
owed to his demagogic arts and his knowledge of the common people....
From of old, the scholar has been the instinctive enemy of the priest; the
learned and the ecclesiastical professions must carry on a war of
extermination against each other so long as they are separated; for they are
struggling for the same position.... To the outcome of modern thought men
gave the name of philosophy; and under philosophy they comprehended
everything that was hostile to the old order of things, consequently every

attack upon religion. What was at first personal hatred of the Roman
Catholic Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of the Christian
faith, indeed of all religion."
We see how clearly Novalis understood that free-thought was a
consequence of Protestantism. He continues:—
"Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed naturally and inevitably into a
hatred of all enthusiasms, denounced imagination and feeling, morality and
love of art, the past and the future, barely acknowledged man to be the
highest among the animals, and reduced the creative music of the universe
to the monotonous whirr of an enormous mill, driven by the stream of
chance—a mill without a builder or miller, a true perpetuum mobile.... One
enthusiasm was magnanimously left to mankind, enthusiasm for this
glorious philosophy and its priests. France had the good fortune to be the
seat of this new faith, which was patched together out of fragments of
knowledge.... On account of its obedience to the laws of mathematics and
its audacity, light was the idol of these men.... The history of modern
unbelief is very remarkable, and is the key to all the monstrous phenomena
of these later days. It only begins in this century, is little noticeable till the
middle of it, and then quickly develops with incalculable force in every
direction; a second, more comprehensive and more remarkable Reformation
was inevitable, and of necessity came first in the country which was most
modernised and had suffered longest from want of freedom.... During this
anarchy religion was born again, true anarchy being its generating
element.... To the reflective observer the overthrower of the state is a
Sisyphus. No sooner does he reach the summit, where there is equipoise,
than the mighty burden rolls down on the other side. It will never remain up
there unless it is kept in position by an attraction towards heaven. All your
supports are too weak as long as your state has a tendency towards the
earth."
He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany we can
already point to sure indications of a new world.... Here and there, and often
in daring union, are to be found incomparable versatility, brilliant polish,
extensive knowledge, and rich and powerful imagination. A strong feeling
of the creative arbitrariness, the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness,
the sacred originality, and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is
taking possession of men.... Although these are only indications,

disconnected and crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a
universal individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of
a loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a new
Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's members.
Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The child will be
the express image of the father—a new golden age, with dark, fathomless
eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the
flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up
his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to
the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine,
embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song,
received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the
inmost recesses of the dissolving body."
After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion,
night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be
suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's
love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of
day, is not without significance. And what is the upshot of it all? What new
being is the result of the embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised
Church? What but a regenerated reaction, which in France restored
Catholicism and (after Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led
to that hateful tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that
Catholicism exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the
best writers of the day into exile.
Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world. It engulfed
everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the counter-revolution; in it
all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in it the Titanic powers of history were
shut up and hypnotised. Night surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous
joys of darkness and death; the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in
the end they turned into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the
spirit, but it was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized
according to mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the
inward parts of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down
into the depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.
But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued their
usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed because the

poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to pieces in the inner
world. For they did not go to work in the rough, material fashion of a
Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated it inwardly in an inner
world. When the poet, released by the spirits, came up from the mine again,
he found the outer world, which he supposed he had resolved into its
elements, exactly as it had been before. All that he had melted in his heart
stood there, hard and cold; and, since the outer world had never really
interested him, and since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and
drowsy as his inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand.
The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty, his
genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to compare him
with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite lately, in the
Revue des Deux Mondes, Blaze de Bury drew attention to the resemblance.
He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance to Novalis's, and the
likeness between these two singular poets is not only a physical one;
common to them both are close observation of nature, divination of all her
little secrets, a choice combination of sentiment with philosophical thought,
an utter want of tangibility, reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards,
an aspiration, that leads nowhere."
These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental
unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these two
poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives before,
the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning of this century.
Think of Shelley's life in its main outlines. The son of a good family, he was
sent to an aristocratic school, where, while yet a child, he was roused to
wrath and opposition by the brutality of the boys and the cruelty of the
masters. What especially kindled his indignation as he grew older was the
hypocrisy with which those who gave free rein to their bad passions
perpetually talked of God and Christianity. During his second year at
Oxford, Shelley wrote an essay On the Necessity of Atheism, of which, with
naïve straightforwardness, he sent copies to the Church and University
authorities. He was summoned before them, and, on refusing to retract what
he had written, was expelled for atheism. He went home, but his father
received him with such contemptuous coldness that he soon left again,
never to return. His whole life was a tissue of similar rebellions and similar
misfortunes. In his twentieth year he was threatened with consumption, and

though he recovered, he was thenceforward a delicate, nervously irritable
man. The Court of Chancery refused him the guardianship of his own
children (after the death of his first wife) on the ground that he had
propagated immoral and irreligious doctrines in Queen Mab. After this he
left England for ever, and lived in Italy in voluntary exile until sudden death
put an end to his sad and homeless existence. His boat was capsized in a
squall in the Gulf of Spezzia, and he was drowned, at the age of twenty-
nine.
In contrast with such a life as this, Hardenberg's is a true German country-
town idyll. At the age of twenty-five he received a Government
appointment, an auditorship at one of the state saltworks, and a year or two
later he was advanced to be "assessor" at the saltworks of Weissenfels. His
Romanticism in no way interfered with his fulfilment of his duties as a good
citizen. In his capacity of Government official he was zealous,
conscientious, and steady—one of the men who do their duty and are guilty
of no extravagances, and whose position is consequently assured. His
republicanism was short-lived, and he is only saved by his naïveté from the
charge of servility. He calls Frederick William and Louisa of Prussia "ein
klassisches Menschenpaar;" in the revelation of these "geniuses" he sees an
omen of a better world. Frederick William is, he says, the first king of
Prussia; he crowns himself every day. A real "transubstantiation" has taken
place; for the court has been transformed into a family, the throne into a
sanctuary, a royal marriage into an eternal union of hearts. Only youthful
prejudice, he maintains, inclines to a republic; the married man desires
order, safety, quietness, a well-regulated household, a "real monarchy." "A
constitution has for us only the interest of a dead letter. How different is the
law which is the expression of the will of a beloved and revered person! We
have no right to conceive of the monarch as the first officer of the state; he
is not a citizen, and cannot therefore be an official. The king is a human
being exalted to the position of an earthly providence."
If we compare such utterances as the above with those of Shelley's poems
which were inspired by the tyranny prevailing in his native country, or those
in which he glorifies the Italian revolutions and the Greek war of liberation,
we have the sharpest imaginable contrast. And the same contrast meets us
wherever we turn. Novalis sings the praises of sickness. Shelley says: "It is
certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present

state of the climates of this earth, health, in the true and comprehensive
sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man."
Novalis says: "We picture God to ourselves as a person, just as we think of
ourselves as persons. God is exactly as personal and individual as we are."
Shelley says: "There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to
affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with
the universe, remains unshaken.... It is impossible to believe that the Spirit
which pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish
woman, or is angered by the consequences of that necessity which is a
synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an
Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is
irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers
have borne witness against him."
Novalis sings the praises of the priesthood and of the Jesuits. Shelley says:
"During many ages of darkness and misery this story" (the doctrine of the
Bible) "gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected it was
a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was
only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men who derived, and
still derive, immense emoluments from this opinion, told the vulgar that if
they did not believe in the Bible they would be damned to all eternity; and
burned, imprisoned, and poisoned all the unbiassed and unconnected
inquirers who occasionally arose. They still oppress them, so far as the
people, now become more enlightened, will allow.... The same means that
have supported every popular belief have supported Christianity. War,
imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood, deeds of unexampled and
incomparable atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the
votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his
religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the
habitable globe."
From these extracts, to which innumerable others of the same tendency
might be added, we see how great was the distance between Novalis, with
his introspective soul-life, and Shelley, with his practical enthusiasm for
liberty.
These, then, are the two poets whom men have attempted to represent as
twin spirits. They both rank high as lyric poets, though Shelley is a poetical

genius of a far higher type than Novalis. But even if Novalis were more on
a level with Shelley as a poet, how small is the measure of truth to be found
in his works compared with that in Shelley's!
To Novalis, truth was poetry and dream; to Shelley, it was liberty. To
Novalis it was a firmly established and powerful Church; to Shelley a
struggling, sorely-pressed heresy; Novalis's truth sat on royal and papal
thrones; Shelley's was despised and powerless.
To make any real impression on humanity, a truth, however great, must be
made man, must become flesh and blood. In the early biographies of Defoe,
the author of Robinson Crusoe, we are told that in July 1703 he was
condemned, as author of a certain pamphlet, first to have his ears cut off
and then to be pilloried. The day came, the sentence was carried out, the
man with the pale, mutilated face, dripping with blood, stood in the pillory,
facing the assembled multitude. Then, strange to say, in place of the usual
loud hooting, with its accompaniment of showers of rotten apples, eggs,
potatoes, &c., there fell a dead silence; not an apple was thrown, not one
abusive word was heard—Defoe was far too dear to the hearts of the
people. Presently one of the crowd, hoisted on his neighbours' shoulders,
placed a wreath upon the mutilated head. I read this when I was a boy, and
though I know now that Defoe did not lose his ears, so that Pope was
mistaken when he wrote—
"Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe;"
and though I also know that Defoe was not the pure character I took him to
be at that time, still the picture remains a grand one, and it has burned itself
into my soul. For it contains an eternal verity. As a general rule, truth upon
this earth presents much such an appearance as did the condemned author in
the pillory. And I remember thinking to myself at the time: "If a man
chanced to find such a poor, despised, oppressed truth in the pillory, what a
great moment in his life it would be if he might draw near and place the
wreath upon its brow!" Shelley did this—Novalis did not.
[1] A. Ruge, Werke, i. 247, &c.
[2] "We deem that man wise who seeks a companion for his nightly couch; then
he also is wise who has a beloved among the dead."
[3] "I forgive envy; pity I cannot forgive. It is beyond my power to tell how I
revel in the thought of my approaching transfiguration, my sacrificial death. O
brother! the time is surely drawing nigh when all men, truly understanding death,

will welcome him with glad embrace, will feel that life is but the anticipation of
love, that death is the bridal kiss, and dissolution, which with a bridegroom's
ardour disrobes us in the bridal chamber, the hottest fire of love."
[4] "Thither I go, and there every pain will be a thrill of rapture. Ere long I shall
be free, be lying, intoxicated with ecstasy, in the bosom of love."
[5]
"Wenige wissen
Das Geheimnis der Liebe,
Fühlen Unersättlichkeit
Und ewigen Durst.
Des Abendmahls
Göttliche Bedeutung
Ist den irdischen Sinnen Rätsel;
Aber wer jemals
Von heissen, geliebten Lippen
Atem des Lebens sog,
Wem heilige Glut
In zitternden Wellen das Herz schmolz
Wem das Auge aufging,
Dass er des Himmels
Unergründliche Tiefe mass,
Wird essen von seinem Leibe
Und trinken von seinem Blute
Ewiglich.
Wer hat des irdischen Leibes
Hohen Sinn erraten?
Wer kann sagen
Dass er das Blut versteht?
Einst ist Alles Leib—
Ein Leib,
In himmlischem Blute
Schwimmt das selige Paar.
O! dass das Weltmeer
Schon errötete,
Und in duftiges Fleisch
Aufquölle der Fels!
Nie endet das süsse Mahl,
Nie sättigt die Liebe sich;
Nicht innig, nicht eigen genug
Kann sie haben den Geliebten.
Von immer zarteren Lippen
Verwandelt wird das Genossene
Inniglicher und näher.
Heissere Wollust
Durchbebt die Seele,
Durstiger und durstiger
Wird das Herz:
Und so währet der Liebe Genuss
Von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit.

Hätten die Nüchternen
Einmal gekostet,
Alles verliessen sie,
Und setzten sich zu uns
An den Tisch der Sehnsucht,
Der nie leer wird.
Sie erkännten der Liebe
Unendliche Fülle,
Und priesen die Nahrung
Von Leib und Blut."
[6] "The new world appears, and darkens the brightest sunshine. Among moss-
grown ruins one sees a marvellous future glistening; and what used to be
common and everyday, now seems miraculous. The kingdom of love has come;
the fable has begun to weave itself. Every soul is born again; words of power are
heard again; the great world-soul moves, and puts forth bud and blossom without
end....
"The world becomes a dream, our dream the world; and what we believed to
have happened long ago, we now see only coming, as yet far off. Imagination
must have free play, must weave her web as seems best to her, here veiling, there
discovering, at last dissolving all into magic vapour. Sadness and rapture, death
and life, are here by inmost sympathy but one: he who has known the highest
love never recovers from its wounds."
[7] "Sweet joys of midnight, silent company of mysterious powers, strange
revelries of passion, 'tis we alone who know you....
"We alone hear the whispered prayers of sweet desire, and look for ever into-
blissful eyes, taste for ever mouth and kiss. All that we touch turns into balsamic
fruits, into soft and lovely breasts, ripe food for our desire.
"Anew and ever anew awakes our longing to embrace, to be one with, the
beloved, to give him whate'er he asks, sweetly to consume each other, to feed on
each other, and on nought else.
"In this voluptuous passion we have revelled ever since the glaring light of
earthly life was extinguished, since the faggot flamed, the grave closed on us,
and the sights of earth were hidden from the shuddering soul."

XIII

LONGING—"THE BLUE FLOWER"

I have described Romantic "soul" as intensity, without endeavour or desire,
as the glowing furnace in which liberty was asphyxiated and every tendency
to outward action destroyed. But this is not the exact truth. One outward

tendency remained, that which is known by the name of "longing"
(Sehnsucht). Longing is the Romantic equivalent of endeavour, and the
mother of all Romantic poetry. What is longing? It is a combination of lack
and desire, without the determination or the means to attain what one lacks
and desires. And what is the object of this longing? What but that which is
the object of all longing and desire, in however fine or hypocritical words it
may clothe itself—enjoyment and happiness. The Romanticist does not
employ the word happiness, but it is what he means. He does not say
happiness, he says "the ideal." But do not let us be deceived by words. The
special characteristic of the Romanticist, however, is not his search after
happiness, but his belief that it exists, that it must be in store for him, and
that it will come to him when he least expects it. And since it is the gift of
Heaven, since he himself is not its creator, he may lead as aimless a life as
he will, guided only by his vague longing. All that is necessary is to
preserve his faith that this longing will be satisfied. And it is a faith easy to
preserve, for everything around him is full of omens and prophecies of the
accomplishment of his desire.
It was Novalis who gave to the object of Romantic longing the famous,
mystic name of "the blue flower." The expression is, of course, not to be
understood literally. The "blue flower" is a mysterious symbol, something
of the nature of ΙΧθΥΣ, the Fish of the early Christians. It is an
abbreviation, a condensed formulation of all that infinitude of bliss for
which a languishing human heart is capable of longing. Hence glimpses of
it are caught long before it is reached; it is dreamed of long before it is seen;
it is divined now here, now there, in what proves to be a delusion, is seen
for a moment amongst other flowers, only to vanish immediately; but its
fragrance is perceptible, at times only faint, at times strong, and the seeker
is intoxicated by it. Though, like the butterfly, he flutters from flower to
flower, settling now upon a violet, now upon some tropical plant, he is
always seeking and longing for the one thing—perfect, ideal happiness.
It is with this longing and its object that Novalis's principal work deals. It is
a work which we must study, and, to understand it aright, we must first see
how it came into existence.
Its germ is contained in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and we can clearly trace
the mental processes by which Wilhelm Meister is slowly transmuted into
Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Wilhelm does not act, he is acted upon. He does

not strive, he longs. He pursues ideals, seeking them first on the stage, then
in real life. Wilhelm too, is the offspring of "soul." The book is pervaded by
soul. It is not only that the characters, like those of many modern English
novels (some of Dickens's, for instance), are full of soul, but there is, as it
were, soul in the peculiar, hazy atmosphere which surrounds them. No
feature is realistically coarse or decided; the children of soul have soft
contours. Heiberg once summed up Goethe's philosophy, of which he
himself was a disciple, in the following sentence: "Goethe is neither
immoral nor irreligious, in the general acceptation of the word, but he
shows that there are no unconditional laws of duty, and that we must place
our religion on the same level as our poetry and philosophy." We are struck
in reading Wilhelm Meister by the manner in which rigid school or text-
book ethics, the narrow-minded, conventional ideas of morality and equity,
are so re-moulded that morality is no longer regarded as the absolute law of
life, but simply as an important principle of life, one among others all
equally legitimate and equally under control—just as the brain of the
animal, important as it is, is not, in the estimation of the physiologist, the
one part of consequence, but simply an organ, fulfilling its task in
association with the heart, the liver, and the other organs. Hence sensuality
is not abused as animal, but (in Philine) simply and straightforwardly
represented as pleasant and attractive. The harmonious development of
Wilhelm's nature is arrived at by the aid of many doubtful experiences. In
the female characters we are called on to admire well-bred self-possession
and the innate nobility of a beautiful nature; the physical and mental
superiority and freedom which are the result of a highly favoured and
assured position, are sympathetically portrayed in the personages of rank. It
may seem objectionable to us nowadays that "noble" and "aristocratic" are
evidently often regarded as synonyms, but the reason for it is to be sought
in the deplorable, straitened social conditions of the Germany of Goethe's
day. As the tale is not the offspring of the union of imagination and reality,
but of imagination and "soul," there is something unreal in its whole
character; much is veiled, much refined away; everything is so idealised
that the material world stands, as it were, in the shadow of the spiritual.
Only private circumstances and persons are dealt with. War is, indeed,
alluded to, and in such a manner that we are enabled to conclude that the
war following on the French Revolution is meant; but nothing definite is
said about it. As to the locality, we are led to the conclusion that it is

somewhere in Central Germany; but the landscape possesses no marked
features, it only chimes in like a faint musical accompaniment to the mood.
In the world depicted in the tale, art is regarded, in the perverted fashion of
the day, as the school of life, instead of life as the school of art; national,
historical events are but "etwas Theatergeräusch hinter den Koulissen" (a
little noise behind the scenes).[1] None of the characters have any practical
aim in view; they are simply driven onward by the current of their longings
and moods; they wander about, untrammelled by circumstances, heedless of
the boundaries of countries, leading "planless" existences.
Goethe's avoidance of all psychological extremes is a significant witness to
the centripetal tendency of "soul." Such an extreme is crime, conceived of
as criminal. Even where Goethe touches upon the horrible, as, for example,
incestuous passion (the story of the Harper), his desire is only that we
should be powerfully affected, not that we should judge; he does not bring
the case before the moral, much less before the legal tribunal. And the story
loses some of its painfulness from the manner in which it is communicated
to us. We do not hear it from the Harper himself; his lips are sealed; it is
told us after his death by a stranger.
It is in this highly idealised world, on which the poet's hand has set the seal
of beauty, that Wilhelm wanders about, without a plan, but not without an
aim. He is in pursuit of the ideal—an ideal profession, an ideal woman,
ideal culture. He is first a merchant, then an actor, then a doctor; loves first
Marianne, then the Countess, then Therese, then Nathalie. His first ideal of
culture is experience, his second intellectual refinement; then he seeks it in
renunciation; and he ends with experiments in social reform which made
the Wanderjahre, in its day, one of the books to which socialistic
revolutionaries most eagerly appealed. But the main thing to be noted is,
that Wilhelm is constantly remoulding his ideal. He does not find it; he
loses it, so to speak. It is not so much that he becomes the bourgeois, the
philistine (Spiessbürger), as that the word loses its meaning for him.
It often happens to the young man who throws himself eagerly into the
study of philosophy in search of enlightenment as to God, eternity, the aim
of life, and the immortality of the soul, that, as he studies, these words lose
the meaning he at first attributed to them; he obtains an answer to his
questions, but an answer which teaches him that these questions must be
differently put. The same thing happens in life to Wilhelm, with his longing

for a preconceived ideal. Many have embraced the cloud instead of Juno;
Wilhelm lets the cloud go, and presses Juno to his heart.
Wilhelm Meister had almost as much share as Die Herzensergiessungen
eines Klosterbruders in the production of Tieck's Sternbald, which is
throughout an echo of Goethe's great work. Immediately after the
appearance of Wilhelm Meister, Tieck sketched the plot of a very interesting
story, Der junge Tischlermeister ("The Young Carpenter"), which was not
published until forty-one years later. The hero, an almost too accomplished
and artistic young carpenter, goes through a process of development which
exactly resembles Wilhelm Meister's, as far as the influence of aristocratic
acquaintances, of dramatic art, and the theatre is concerned. A true
Romanticist, he produces Shakespeare's comedies in a private theatre which
is an exact imitation of the theatres of Shakespeare's day, and is the lover
both on the stage and behind the scenes.
This work was set aside in favour of Sternbald. The modern tradesman had
to give way to the artist of the Romantic period of Albert Dürer. Sternbald
is the apotheosis of "soul," of pure soul, without admixture of reason and
lucidity. Hence the sum and substance of the book is desire, pining desire;
hence we are told of such an event as the Reformation, that, instead of
generating a divine fulness of religion, it only generated the emptiness of
reason, in which all hearts languish; hence the mild sensuality of Goethe's
romance becomes brutal desire of the William Lovell type. The hero, when
he looks within himself, sees, like Lovell, "a fathomless whirlpool, a
rushing, deafening enigma." In the second edition Tieck thought it advisable
to cut out some of the too numerous wanton bathing and drinking scenes
amidst which the restless longing of the hero runs riot.
But the principal thing to which I would draw attention is, that reality is
here refined and distilled in a manner unknown to Goethe. It is attenuated
into vapour—emotional vapour; personality is drowned in landscape, action
in the music of the woodman's horn. In Sternbald every day is a Sunday; a
devotional feeling pervades the air; we seem to hear the church bells ring
and to know that the world is at leisure. The following words of the hero
contain the philosophy of the book: "In this world we can only desire, we
can only live in intentions; real action belongs to the hereafter."
Consequently there is no action in the story; the characters wander about
with as little apparent purpose as comets; their lives consist of a series of

accidental, unsought adventures; they are always travelling in search of the
ideal, and as the ideal is generally supposed to have taken up its abode
somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rome, the book ends there—the story
is not brought to a conclusion, and is never continued.
It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that Novalis
prefers Sternbald to Wilhelm Meister. "For," says he, "the kernel of my
philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the absolutely real, and that the
more poetical anything is, the truer it is. Therefore, the task of the poet is
not to idealise, but to cast a spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true
poetry. A fairy tale is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in
its being exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." The
world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos—chaos which
prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be not a mere
tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable. The real fairy tale
writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel, is, as it were, free
history, the mythology of history. And love, being the form of morality
which implies the possibility of magic, is the soul of the novel, the
foundation of all romances, all novels. For where true love is, there
marvellous, miraculous things happen.
These obscure, yet in a manner unambiguous expressions of Novalis's
opinions on the subject of the true nature of poetry and romance, make it
easy for us to understand his judgment of Wilhelm Meister, a book he had
greatly admired in early youth. For in Wilhelm Meister, as in Torquato
Tasso, poetry has to give way to reality, the poetic conception of life to the
practical. Novalis could imagine nothing more shameful than this; it was sin
against the holy spirit of poetry. In the novel, in fiction, poetry is not to be
done away with, not even to be restricted, but to be exalted and glorified.
So he determines to write a novel which shall be the direct antithesis of
Wilhelm Meister. He even takes thought of such small matters as type and
size, and determines that in them Heinrich von Ofterdingen shall be the
exact counterpart of the book, the worldly philosophy of which it is to
refute by its magic mysticism. He writes to Tieck: "My novel is in full
swing; it is to be a deification of poetry. In the first part Heinrich von
Ofterdingen ripens into a poet; in the second he is the glorified poet. The
story will have many points of resemblance with your Sternbald but will

lack its lightness. This want, however, may not be a disadvantage,
considering the subject."
Goethe and Wilhelm Meister Novalis criticises thus: "Goethe is an
altogether practical poet. His works are what English wares are—simple,
neat, suitable to their purpose, and durable.... He has, like the Englishman, a
natural sense of order and economy, and an acquired sense of what is fine
and noble.... Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre is, in a way, altogether modern
and prosaic. Romance perishes in it, and so does the poetry, the magic
quality, of nature. The book only deals with everyday human affairs; nature,
and the belief in her mysterious powers, are quite forgotten. It is a
poetically written story of bourgeois domestic life, in which the marvellous
is expressly treated as poetry and fancy. Artistic atheism is the spirit of the
book. Wilhelm Meister is a Candide directed against poetry."
Novalis's aim, then, is to produce a work exactly the opposite of this, one in
which everything is finally resolved into poetry, in which "the world
becomes soul." For everything is soul. "Nature is to the soul what a solid
body is to light. The solid substance stops light, breaks it up into wonderful
colours, &c., &c. Human beings are soul prisms."
His novel is, then, an allegory, the key to which is contained in the fairy-tale
introduced into the story. This fairy-tale is supposed to show how the true
eternal world comes into existence; it is a description of the restoration of
that kingdom of love and poetry in which the great "world-soul expands and
blooms everlastingly." Novalis believes that, since the existing heaven and
the existing earth are of a prosaic nature, and since our age is an age of
utilitarianism, a poetical day of judgment must come, a spell must be
broken, before the new life can blossom forth.—Arcturus and his daughter
slumber, frozen in their palace of ice. They are released by Fable (i.e.
Poetry) and her brother, Eros. Eros is the child of the restless father,
Reason, and the faithful mother, the Heart. Fable owes her being to
unfaithfulness on the part of Reason; she is born of Fancy, daughter of the
Moon; her godmother is the guardian of the domestic altar, Sophia,
Heavenly Wisdom.
Against the good powers in this allegory a conspiracy is formed by the
Writer. The Writer is the spirit of prose, of narrow enlightenment; he is
depicted as constantly writing. When Sophia dips what he has written into a

bowl which stands upon the altar, a little of it sometimes remains legible,
but often it is all washed out. If drops from the bowl happen to fall upon
him, they fall from him again in the shape of numbers and geometric
figures, which he eagerly collects, strings upon a thread, and wears round
his neck as an ornament. The Writer is Novalis's Nureddin. The result of his
plot is the imprisonment of the Father and Mother and the destruction of the
altar.
But Fable has escaped. She descends into the realm of Evil, and
exterminates Evil by delivering up the Passions to the power of the death-
bringing Fates. Time and Mortality are now no more. "The last thread of the
flax is spun; the lifeless is reanimated; life reigns." In a universal
conflagration, the mother, the Heart, is burned to death, the sun disappears,
and the ice is melted round the palace of Arcturus. Through a new, happy
earth, stretching far and wide under a new heaven, Eros and Fable pass into
the palace. Fable has fulfilled her mission; she has brought Eros to his
beloved, the daughter of the king. The kingdom of poetry and love is
established.
"Gegründet ist das Reich der Ewigkeit;
In Lieb und Frieden endigt sich der Streit;
Vorüber ging der lange Traum der Schmerzen;
Sophie ist ewig Priesterin der Herzen."[2]
Sophia occupies the same place in this allegory that Beatrice does in
Dante's great poem.
The glorification of the old Meistersinger is, of course, intended as a
glorification of poetry in general, but his story, as told in the novel, is really
the story of Hardenberg's own life and endeavour. Heinrich von
Ofterdingen's home and quiet childhood remind us of Hardenberg's. A
dream, which seems doubly rich in omen because his father as a youth had
dreamed one like it, gives him a fore-feeling of the mysterious happiness of
the poet's life, and shows him, in the form of a wonderful blue flower, the
object of the poet's longing and endeavour.
In order that he may acquire some knowledge of the world, it is decided that
Heinrich and his mother shall travel, in company with a number of
merchants, to Augsburg. The incidents of the journey and the tales of his
travelling companions enrich him with impressions, and fertilise the germs

of poetical productivity that lie latent in his soul. For all their talk is of
poetry and poets; they tell him the story of Arion, and popular legends in
which poets are the equals of kings, and they philosophise on the subject of
poetry and art, not like merchants of the most barbarous period of the
Middle Ages, but like Romanticists of the year 1801. One of them, for
example, gives the following pantheistic explanation of the instinctive
impulse of mankind towards plastic art: "Nature, desiring to have some
enjoyment of all the art that there is in her, has metamorphosed herself into
human beings. In their minds, through them, she rejoices in her own glory,
selects what is most pleasant and lovely, and reproduces it in such a manner
that she may possess and enjoy it in manifold ways."
In a castle to which they come, Heinrich meets a captive Eastern girl, whose
touching plaint it is interesting to compare with the song of the Oriental
beauty (La Captive) in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales. In a book belonging to
a mysterious hermit (the original of the charcoal-burner's book in
Ingemann's Valdemar Sejer) he finds the history of his own life.
The travellers arrive at Augsburg, and here Heinrich makes the
acquaintance of a poet and a fascinating young girl. In Klingsohr he has a
noble example of the fully developed poet, a poet whose utterances in many
ways remind us of Goethe's. Almost everything that Klingsohr says is
surprisingly rational and wise; we can scarcely understand how Novalis
himself failed to take any of it to heart. The following are some of his
remarks: "I cannot too strongly recommend you to follow your natural
inclination to penetrate into the reason of things, to study the laws of
causation. Nothing is more indispensable to the poet than insight into the
nature of every event, and knowledge of the means whereby to attain every
aim.... Enthusiasm without understanding is useless and dangerous, and the
poet will be able to effect few miracles if he is himself astonished by
miracles.... The young poet cannot be too calm, too thoughtful. True,
melodious eloquence demands a wide, calm, observing mind." Upon one
point, however, Klingsohr and Novalis are entirely agreed, namely, that
everything is, and must be, poetry. "It is a great misfortune that poetry
should have a special name, and that poets should form a separate guild.
There is nothing separate or special about poetry. It is the mode of action
characteristic of the human mind. Do not all men aspire poetically every
moment of their lives?"

All Heinrich's love longings are satisfied when he sees Klingsohr's
daughter, Mathilde. He feels once more as he felt when he saw the vision of
the "blue flower." But Mathilde is drowned. Heinrich loses her as Novalis
had lost Sophie von Kühn. Utterly broken down, he leaves Augsburg. He is
comforted in his sorrow by a vision (like the visions Novalis had at Sophie's
grave) in which he sees the departed and hears her voice. In a distant
monastery, the mission of whose monks it is to keep alive the sacred fire in
young souls, and which seems to be a species of "spirit-colony," he lives
"with the departed." He experiences all the sensations to which Novalis has
given expression in the Hymns to Night. Then he returns from the spirit-
world to life, and falls in love with a being no less wonderful than the
object of his first passion. Mathilde's place is filled by Cyane.
The second part of the novel is only sketched. Heinrich wanders the whole
world round. After going through every earthly experience, "he retires again
into his soul, as to his old home." Things material now become transformed
into things spiritual. "The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the
world." Heinrich finds Mathilde again, but she is no longer distinguishable
from Cyane—just as, in Novalis's own life, Julie was not Julie, but Sophie
come to life again. And now "the festival of soul," of love and eternal
fidelity, is celebrated. On this occasion allegory reigns supreme. The
principle of good and the principle of evil appear in open competition,
singing antiphonies; the sciences do the same, even mathematics. We hear
much about Indian plants—probably the lotus-flower was made to play a
part as partaking of the nature of the "blue flower."
The end of the story is merely indicated. Heinrich finds the "blue flower"—
it is Mathilde. "Heinrich plucks the blue flower, and releases Mathilde from
the spell which has bound her, but loses her again. Stunned by grief, he
turns into a stone. Edda, who, besides being herself, is also the 'blue flower,'
the Oriental captive, and Mathilde (fourfold 'Doppelgängerei'), sacrifices
herself to the stone. It turns into a singing tree. Cyane hews down the tree,
and burns herself along with it, upon which it turns into a golden ram.
Edda-Mathilde is compelled to sacrifice the ram, and Heinrich becomes a
man once more. During these transformations he has all manner of
wonderful conversations." This we can readily believe.
In Danish literature the work most allied to Heinrich von Ofterdingen is
Ingemann's De Sorte Riddere ("The Black Knights"). We learn from

Ingemann's autobiography how exactly his frame of mind at the time he
was writing this book corresponded to that of the German Romanticist. "I
paid but little attention to all the great events that were happening in the
outer world. Even the conflagration of Moscow, the destruction of the Great
Army, and the fall of Napoleon were to me ephemeral phenomena ... even
in the German War of Liberation I only saw a divided nation in conflict
with itself, noble powers without any principle of unity and concord.
Between the ideal life and human life there lay a yawning abyss, which only
the heavenly rainbow of love and poetry could bridge over.... I wrote myself
into a fairy labyrinth, in which love was my Ariadne-thread, and in which I
hoped, with the great harp of the poetry of life, the strings of which are
strung by genius from rock to rock over black abysses, to lull the monsters
of existence to sleep, resolve the dissonances in the great world-harmony,
and solve the world-mystery." The result of this attempt was woeful.
It is certain that in Heinrich von Ofterdingen Novalis succeeded in
producing something as unlike Wilhelm Meister as possible. The "blue
flower" was the emblem of the ideal. Here we have the real forgotten in the
ideal, and the ideal in its emblem. Poetry is entirely separated from life.
Novalis thinks that this is as it should be. In Ofterdingen he says of poets:
"Many and important events would only disturb them. A simple life is their
lot, and they must make acquaintance with the varied and numberless
phenomena of the outer world only by means of tales and books. Only
seldom during the course of their lives is it permissible for them to be
drawn into the wild eddy of some great event, in order that they may
acquire a more accurate knowledge of the position and character of men of
action. Their receptive minds are quite sufficiently occupied with near and
simple phenomena.... Here upon earth already in possession of the peace of
heaven, untormented by vain desires, only inhaling the fragrance of earthly
fruits, not devouring them, they are free guests, whose golden feet tread
lightly, and whose presence causes all involuntarily to spread their wings....
If we compare the poet with the hero, we shall find that the poet's song has
many a time awakened heroic courage in youthful hearts, but never that
heroic deeds have called the spirit of poetry to life in any soul."
The fundamental error could not have been defined more clearly. According
to this theory, poetry is not the expression of life and its deeds; no, life and
its deeds have poetry as their origin. Poetry creates life. Undoubtedly there

is poetry of which this may be true; but if there be any one kind of poetry of
which it could never be true, it is the kind under consideration. To what
possible deed could it incite? To the changing of one's self into a singing
tree or a golden ram? There is no question of action in it at all, only of
longing.
All the best of Novalis's work is simply an expression of this longing,
which includes every desire, from the purely natural ones to the most
transcendental aspiration. Perhaps the most beautiful things he has written
are two songs—the one giving expression to the sensuous longings of the
young girl, the other to the longing which is part and parcel of the
enthusiastic friendship of young men.
The song in which the young girls complain of the hardships of their lot is
charming. Here the "blue flower" is simply the forbidden fruit. But the
longing is expressed with bewitching roguishness. In the poem "To a
Friend," again, we have it expressed with fervency and solemnity:—
"Was passt, das muss sich ründen,
Was sich versteht, sich finden,
Was gut ist, sich verbinden,
Was liebt, zusammen sein,
Was hindert, muss entweichen,
Was krumm ist, muss sich gleichen,
Was fern ist, sich erreichen,
Was keimt, das muss gedeihn.

"Gieb treulich mir die Hände,
Sei Bruder mir und wende
Den Blick vor Deinem Ende
Nicht wieder weg von mir.
Ein Tempel, wo wir knieen,
Ein Ort, wohin wir ziehen,
Ein Glück, für das wir glühen,
Ein Himmel mir und Dir!"
The longing here is almost that of the Crusader—a seeking in the far
distance for something great and glorious. The "blue flower" melts into the
blue of the horizon. Its very colour betokens distance.

Let us dwell for a moment longer on this flower. In Spielhagen's
Problematische Naturen, one of the characters says: "You remember the
blue flower in Novalis's tale? Do you know what it is? It is the flower which
no mortal eye has seen, yet the fragrance of which fills the world. Not every
creature is delicately enough organised to perceive its perfume; but the
nightingale is intoxicated with it when she sings and wails and sobs in the
moonlight and the grey dawn; and so were, and so are, all the foolish
human beings who, in prose and verse, have poured, and are pouring, forth
their woes to Heaven; and so, too, are millions more, to whom no God has
granted the power to say what they suffer, and who look up in dumb
anguish to the Heaven which has no mercy upon them. And alas! for this
suffering there is no cure—none except death. For him who has once
inhaled the fragrance of the blue flower there is not a peaceful hour left in
life. Like a murderer, or like one who has turned away the Lord from his
door, he is driven onward, ever onward, however much his tired limbs ache,
and however fervently he longs to lay down his weary head. When he is
tormented by thirst, he begs at some hut for a drink; but he hands back the
empty vessel without a word of thanks, for it was dirty, or there was an ugly
insect in the water—in any case, he had found no refreshment in it.
Refreshment! Where are the eyes which have taken from us the desire ever
to look into other, brighter, more ardent eyes? Where the breast upon which
we have rested with the certain knowledge that we should never long to
listen to the beating of a warmer, more loving heart? Where? Can you tell
me where?"
"Love," so runs the reply, "is the fragrance of the blue flower, which, as you
have said, fills the world; and in every being whom you love with your
whole heart you have found the blue flower."
"I fear that is not a solution of the riddle," says the hero sorrowfully, "for
this very condition, that we should love with our whole hearts ... we can
never fulfil. Which of us can love with his whole heart? We are all so
weary, so worn out, that we have neither the strength nor the courage
essential to true, serious love—that love which does not rest until it has
taken possession of every thought of a man's mind, every feeling of his
heart, every drop of blood in his veins."
This interpretation is a beautiful one, and it is not incorrect, but it is not
exhaustive. It is not only in love, but in every domain of life that the "blue

flower" represents perfect, and hence to that extent ideal, but still purely
personal happiness. The longing for this, from its nature unattainable,
happiness is the constant, restless desire depicted by all the Romanticists.
Perhaps not one of the regular German Romanticists is so completely the
poet of Romantic longing as Shack Staffeldt, who, though a German born,
wrote in Danish. But he does not depict the longing which produced
outward restlessness. His longing is far too deep to be satisfied by
wandering about the world. It is in the writings of certain of the later
Romanticists that longing appears as the restless desire which drives man
from place to place.
Of this it seems to me that we have the most typical description in
Eichendorff's novel, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ("The Life of a
Ne'er-Do-Well"). Published in 1824, this book was written twenty years
after Heinrich von Ofterdingen, though by a man only ten years Novalis's
junior, a disciple of Tieck, an ultra-Romanticist of a pious, amiable
disposition.
Joseph, Baron von Eichendorff, the son of a nobleman of high position, was
born in Upper Silesia in 1788. His family being Catholic, his early
education was superintended by a Catholic ecclesiastic. In 1805 he went to
the University of Halle to study law, and, amongst other lectures, attended
those of Professors Schleiermacher and Steffens, the latter of whom had a
special attraction for him. It was here that he made his first acquaintance
with Romantic literature; Novalis opened to him a new dream-world, rich in
promise. In his very first holidays he went to Wandsbeck to visit old
Claudius, whom he had loved from his early boyhood. Claudius's paper, the
Wandsbecker Bote, had been his greatest comfort in the days when his tutor
plagued him with instructive children's books. There is something of
Claudius's mild humour in Eichendorffs own poetry.
The year 1807 found him at Heidelberg, where he made the acquaintance of
the Romanticists living there, Arnim, Brentano, and Görres being the most
notable. He assisted in editing Des Knaben Wunderhorn (a famous
collection of popular songs and poetry), and collaborated with Görres in his
work on the old popular literature. In 1809 he met Arnim and Brentano
again in Berlin; here he also made the acquaintance of Adam Müller, who

exercised a considerable influence upon him. He was strongly influenced,
too, by Fichte's lectures.
As there seemed no prospect of a career for him in Prussia, he went in 1810
to Vienna, intending to enter the service of the Austrian Government. In
Vienna he spent much of his time in the company of Friedrich Schlegel,
formed a close friendship with Schlegel's stepson, Philipp Veit, the painter,
and wrote his first, exaggeratedly Romantic story, Ahnung und Gegenwart,
which is nothing but a collection of lyric dreams and fancies. Nevertheless,
in this work, as well as in his later productions, it was his desire to contrast
the "fervent harmony existing between healthy, fresh humanity and nature,
in forest, stream, and mountain, shining mornings and dreamy starlit nights,
with the empty pleasures of the great world, and the affected prudery or real
depravity of the period." As in all his works, adventure predominates. As
soon as he quits the domain of merry vagabond life and romantic adventure,
he is in danger of relapsing into the supernatural and horrible.
Instead of entering the Austrian Government service as he had intended, he
determined to take part in the war against Napoleon. He joined Lützow's
famous Free Corps, and was attached to a militia battalion. He had just been
discharged when the news came of Napoleon's return from Elba. He
immediately enlisted again, and entered Paris with the German troops.
In course of time he received an appointment in the Prussian
Kultusministerium (department of religion and education), and developed
into a conscientious and capable official. In 1840, a dispute between the
Government and the Roman Catholic bishops produced strained relations
between him (the good Catholic) and the head of his department. He sent in
his resignation, but it was not immediately accepted; he was commissioned
to prepare a report on the restoration of the castle of Marienburg.
Having made himself master of the Spanish language, he translated some of
Calderon's Autos Sacramentales. This pursuit led to a still closer connection
between him and the leaders of the Ultramontane party. In his later years he
criticised modern German literature in the spirit of orthodox Catholicism,
writing of the Catholic tendency of the Romanticists as if it were the most
important and best feature of the school, and treating the change of opinion
of some of the leaders in regard to this matter as a falling away from the
truth and a sign of literary decadence. He looked with contempt upon

Schiller's heroes, with their "rhetorical ideality," and upon the symbolic
"Naturpoesie" of Goethe's shorter poems. "How different," he says, "is the
great idea of Romanticism, homesickness, longing for the lost home—that
is to say, for the universal, the Catholic Church." With these unsound
theories Eichendorff combined real and considerable lyrical talent. No one
has given, in a condensed form, better representations of the longings and
the ideals of Romanticism. In the little story, Aus dem Leben eines
Taugenichts, we seem to hear young Romanticism twittering and singing as
if he had caught it bodily and shut it up in a cage. It is all there—the
fragrance of the woods and the song of the birds; longing for travel and
delight in it, especially when Italy is the goal; Sunday emotions and
moonlight; genuine Romantic vagrancy and idleness—such idleness that
from want of use the limbs actually begin to fall out of joint, and the hero
begins to feel as though he "were tumbling to pieces."
The Ne'er-Do-Well is a miller's son, young and poor, whose only pleasure
in life is to lie under the trees and look up into the sky, or to roam aimlessly
about the country with his zither, singing such sad and beautiful songs that
the hearts of all who hear him "long." "Every one," he says, "has his allotted
place upon this earth, his warm hearth, his cup of coffee, his wife, his glass
of wine of an evening, and is content. But I am content nowhere." He, the
humble gardener (for such, when he does work, is his occupation), adores a
high-born, lovely lady whom he has only seen once or twice; he addresses
her in a beautiful and touching song:—
"Wohin ich geh' und schaue
In Feld und Wald und Thal,
Vom Berg hinab in die Aue,
Vielschöne, hohe Fraue,
Grüss ich dich tausendmal.

In meinem Garten find' ich
Viel Blumen, schön und fein,
Viel Kränze wohl draus wind' ich,
Und tausend Gedanken bind' ich
Und Grüsse mit darein.

"Ihr darf ich keinen reichen,

Sie ist zu hoch und schön;
Sie müssen alle verbleichen,
Die Liebe nur ohne Gleichen
Bleibt ewig im Herzen stehn.

"Ich schein' wohl froher Dinge
Und schaffe auf und ab,
Und ob das Herz zerspringe,
Ich grabe fort und singe
Und grab' mir bald mein Grab."[3]
Through his lady's influence he is promoted to the post of rent-collector for
the castle. He inherits from his predecessor a magnificent dressing-gown,
red with yellow spots, a pair of green slippers, a nightcap, and some long-
stemmed pipes.
Arrayed in his new splendour, and smoking the longest pipe he can find, he
lives a quiet, easy life for some time, digging up all the potatoes and
vegetables in his garden and planting flowers in their stead, listening with
rapture to a distant hunting or post horn, and placing a bouquet every
morning upon a stone table where his lady is certain to find it. This goes on
until she vanishes from his horizon. As he is sitting alone one day over his
account-book, his zither lying beside him, a sunbeam falls through the
window upon its dusty strings. "It touched a string in my heart. 'Yes,' said I;
'come away, my faithful zither! Our kingdom is not of this world!'" So he
leaves behind his account-book, dressing-gown, slippers, and pipe, and
wanders out into the wide world; to Italy first.
This Ne'er-Do-Well is the most comical, awkward, childlike creature one
can imagine; in mind he is about ten years old, and he never grows any
older. Like Andersen's heroes, the Improvisatore and O.T., he is repeatedly
saved from temptation simply by his ignorance and inexperience. He never
realises what is going on around him. Things happen to him without his
doing anything to bring them about. He is the central figure of a group of
characters who all pursue callings which leave them as free as he is himself
—painters travelling to Italy, an artist who runs away with his lady-love,
musicians wandering from town to town, and roaming students, who trudge
along, singing student songs. Compared with this life of wandering and
seeking and expectation, ordinary, every-day life naturally appears

excessively monotonous. When the hero returns to his native town, he finds
the new rent-collector sitting at his door, wearing the same spotted dressing-
gown, the same slippers, &c. After having spent his life seeking for his
"blue flower," he finds it at last at home. His first rapture is described
playfully, almost in Hans Andersen's manner, as follows: "It was such a
pleasure to hear her talk so brightly and trustfully to me, that I could have
listened to her till morning. I was as happy as I could be. I took a handful of
almonds, which I had brought all the way from Italy, out of my pocket. She
took some, and we sat and cracked them, and looked contentedly out over
the peaceful scene."
The Ne'er-Do-Well may be regarded as the representative, the spokesman,
of the ornamental, profitless arts, and of infinite longing. Infinite longing!
Let us imprint these words in our memory, for they are the foundation-stone
of Romantic poetry.
The longing took curiously morbid forms in the less healthy Romantic
souls. The well-known German author, Franz Horn, informs us in his
autobiography that at the age of three or four he was already capable of
poetic longing and suffering, and of divining life in apparently dead things.
He goes on to say that the child-like mysticism of a certain popular refrain
had a perfectly magic attraction for him. He quotes the verse in question,
and it proves to be none other than the good old rhyme: "Ladybird,
Ladybird, fly away home!"
"Maikäfer flieg!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg,
Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland,
Und Pommerland ist abgebrannt,
Maikäfer flieg!"[4]
The other children were hard-hearted enough to laugh at this poem, but to
him it seemed most touching. The unhappy cockchafer was fatherless and
motherless. His father was in the wars, and "what might not come of that?"
And his mother? Of her "the news was still more uncertain." She was in far-
off Pomerania, and Pomerania was on fire! What scope for fancy! And there
was the poor cockchafer, too, borne on the wings of his longing out into the
wide, wide world, seeking, ever seeking.—We positively feel as if we were
turning into children again.

But let us return to the idea that underlies all this. The longing of the
individual for infinite happiness rests, as has already been said, upon the
belief that this infinite happiness is attainable by man. But this belief, in its
turn, rests upon the individual's Romantic conviction of his own infinite
importance. The doctrine of immortality itself is only a result of belief in
the cosmic importance of the individual. And this belief in the infinite
importance of each separate individual is genuinely medieval. Whole
sciences, such as astrology, were founded upon it. The very stars of heaven
were supposed to have a close connection with the destinies of individual
men, and actually to occupy themselves with them. Heaven and earth and
all that in them is, revolved round man. The Romanticists naturally feel the
want of astrology, and would fain have the science restored. What they call
the "blue flower" is what in astrology was called a man's planet, and in
alchemy, the philosopher's stone.
In his lectures Upon the Literature, Art, and Spirit of the Age (1802), A. W.
Schlegel writes: "In the same sense in which we may call Kepler the last
astrologist, we may demand that astronomy should become astrology again.
Astrology fell into disrepute because it made pretensions to science which it
could not sustain; but the fact of its having made such pretensions does not
take away the idea, the imperishable truths, which lie at its foundation.
There is unquestionably something more sublime in the idea of the dynamic
influence of the stars, in the supposition that they are animated by reason,
and, like subordinate deities, exercise creative power in their appointed
spheres, than in the theory that they are dead, mechanically governed
masses." And in a letter to Buntzen, Heiberg writes: "It must be allowed
that the Middle Ages, with their alchemistic and astrological superstitions,
which, albeit superstitions, were based upon a belief in the unity of nature
and mind ... possessed more of the true scientific spirit than the present day,
with its deliberate renunciation of the one thing which in the long run is of
any account." In the same strain (in his essay on Hveen) he praises
astrology, as "based upon the profound mysticism of the Middle Ages."
When even Heiberg could praise Tycho Brahe for his astrological bias, can
we wonder that Grundtvig defended his hypothesis of the earth being the
centre of the universe? O Romanticism! Romanticism!
The Romanticists aimed at founding a philosophy and a literature upon
want and longing—that is to say, upon the idea of the infinite importance of

the individual. The man who bases his philosophy of life upon want is
certainly more reasonable than the man who bases it upon either present
happiness or the pleasures and bliss of a future existence; for all the
happiness we know is undermined by sorrow and by insufficiency, and thus
it is on the whole better and safer to build upon want and desire. But the
Romanticists do not build upon desire alone, but also upon its satisfaction;
they yearn, they wander about in longing quest of the "blue flower," which
beckons to them from afar.
Longing, however, is inactivity, is nourished and thrives upon inactivity. He
who has left the Romantic philosophy behind him will not base his life
upon such a foundation.
Longing engenders the impotent wish. But the Romantic wish is so instinct
with genius, that its fulfilment is permitted—in the Romantic world. What
desire promises, life fulfils. Fortune comes to the genuine Romantic hero
while he sleeps. Romantic literature consequently leaves the simple-minded
reader with the impression of a world where everything comes to those who
know how to long and to desire ardently enough, where all hindrances are
swept aside without labour, without understanding, without trouble.
It is eternally true that we long; and it is no less true that we must build
upon something certain. Amidst all the uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt
wherewith we are surrounded, there is one thing certain, one thing which
cannot be explained away, and that is suffering. And equally certain is the
good of the alleviation of suffering and of release from it. It is certain that it
is extremely disagreeable to endure pain, to be fettered, or to be imprisoned;
and it is equally certain that it is a great relief to be cured, to have one's
fetters loosed, one's prison door flung wide open. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Here is a deed to be done, a stroke to be struck for liberty. We may wander
about, full of uncertainty and doubt, not knowing what to believe or what to
do; but from the moment we come upon a fellow-being with his fingers
jammed in some heavy door that has shut upon them, there is no longer any
doubt what we have to do. We must try to open the door and release the
hand.
And, fortunately or unfortunately, it so happens that there are always plenty
of human beings whose hands are caught fast, plenty who suffer, plenty
who sit in all manner of chains—chains of ignorance, of dependence, of

stupidity, of slavery. To free these must be the object of our lives. The
Romanticist egotistically pursues his personal happiness, and believes
himself to be of infinite importance. The child of the new age will neither
scan the heavens in search of his star nor the far horizon in search of the
"blue flower." Longing is inactivity. He will act. He will understand what
Goethe meant by making Wilhelm Meister end his life as a physician.
If it is impossible to found a satisfactory philosophy of life upon longing, it
is equally impossible to found upon it a literature which has any connection
with life, and which is capable of satisfying in the long run. The task of
literature in all ages is to give a condensed representation of the life of a
people and an age. Romanticism contemptuously refused this task. Novalis
in Germany and Shack Staffeldt in Denmark present the most typical
examples of the manner in which it turned its back on outward reality, to
create a poetico-philosophic system out of the mind and the poetical
longing of the author. It does not represent human life in all its breadth and
depth, but the dreams of a few highly intellectual individuals. The cloud-
city of Aristophanes, with its air-castles, is the sacred city and goal of its
longing.

[1] Auerbach: Deutsche Abende.
[2] "The everlasting kingdom is firmly established; strife ends in love and peace;
the long and painful dream is at an end; Sophia is priestess of all hearts
henceforward and for ever."
[3] "From wherever I am, field, forest, valley, meadow, or mountain-top, I send a
thousand greetings to my fair and noble lady. In my garden I gather the loveliest
flowers that blow; I bind them into wreaths, and bind along with them a
thousand thoughts and greetings. I may not give her my flowers; she is too great
and beautiful; they wither, every one, but love lives eternally in my heart. In
seeming cheerfulness I go about my daily task; my heart is breaking, but I dig
and sing, and soon I'll dig my grave."
[4] "Fly, cockchafer, fly! Your father is in the wars; your mother is in
Pommerland, and Pommerland is on fire. Fly, cockchafer, fly!"

XIV

ARNIM AND BRENTANO

Herder's Stimmen der Völker ("Voices of the Nations"), published in 1767,
contained only twenty German "Volkslieder;" but at the time he brought it
out, he expressed the wish that he might live to see the publication of a
large collection of the old "Nationallieder," as he called them. In 1806 L. A.
von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published the first volume of Des
Knaben Wunderhorn; it contained 210 German popular songs and ballads,
and was followed in 1808 by two more volumes of about the same size.
This book was not only of the greatest historical interest, but was epoch-
making in German lyric poetry and German literature generally. It struck
that natural note which for many years gave freshness and sonority to both
the Romantic and the ante-Romantic lyric poetry. Even when, in the case of
Heine, the entirely modern had supplanted the Romantic theme, rhythm and
form and many hardly noticeable turns of expression owed their simple
charm to the inspiration of the Volkslied. The superiority of German to
French lyric poetry in this century possibly lies chiefly in that absence of
everything rhetorical which it owes to the influence of Des Knaben
Wunderhorn.

Though the two publishers of this great collection were of one accord in
their love for the old popular poetry of their country, and also as to the
slightly modernised and carefully expurgated form in which the songs were
to appear, and though both were thorough-going Romanticists in principle,
they were men of very different characters.
Ludwig Achim von Arnim was born in Berlin in 1781. He studied natural
science for some time in Göttingen, and then travelled all over Germany, to
make himself acquainted with the country and the people and to collect
popular songs and ballads. After this he settled for a time in Heidelberg,
where he met Clemens Brentano and Görres. In company with them, in
1808, he started a literary periodical, the Einsiedlerzeitung ("Hermit's
Chronicle"), amongst the contributors to which were Tieck, Uhland,
Hölderlin, and Jacob Grimm. This periodical he continued at a later time
under the title Trösteinsamkeit ("Consolation in Solitude").
In 1811 he married Brentano's sister, the famous Bettina, and thenceforward
lived partly in Berlin and partly on his estate of Wiepersdorf in
Brandenburg. He kept his Romanticism out of his private life; he was a
sane, healthy human being, a clever farmer, a sober Protestant and Prussian.
Eichendorff describes him as follows: "Handsome and distinguished
looking, frank, ardent, and yet gentle, honourable and reliable in all things,
faithful to his friends even when every one else deserted them, Arnim was
in reality what others, by dint of a sort of mediæval polish, strove to appear
—a knightly figure in the best sense of the word; but for this very reason it
always seemed to his contemporaries that there was something strange and
out of place about him."
Something strange there must certainly have been in his nature, for, staid
and sober, calm and harmonious as was his life, his writings give us the
impression of restlessness and complexity. He himself was cast in one
piece, his works never are.
Besides plays, now unreadable, he wrote two long novels and a number of
short tales, which all bear witness to the fantast in him. The epithet "fantast"
may be equally suitably applied to Brentano. The first conspicuous
difference between the two is, that, whereas Brentano's strength lies in his
naïveté and his childlike fancies, Arnim is profoundly serious even in his
wildest flights. With all his love for the popular, with all his eagerness to

open the eyes of the cultured to the beauty of the simple and childlike, he
remained the dignified aristocrat in his own writings; he never let himself
go as Brentano did. When his muse has a paroxysm of madness, it is cold,
almost severe insanity, not a fiery, merry frenzy, like that to which
Brentano's muse is subject.
His power of plastic representation was great, but quickly exhausted. It
shows to advantage in some of his short stories, and in some still shorter
fragments of his long novels; but along with descriptions and figures which
evince real talent, we are presented with a mass of padding—diffuse
digressions from the subject, interpolated tales which have little or no
connection with the tale proper, fantastic, impossible episodes, against
which even the reader with the most undeveloped sense of realism must
protest. Sometimes he lays the whole stock of popular superstitions under
contribution, treating them with the utmost seriousness—clay figures are
magically endowed with life; a mandrake develops into Field-Marshal
Cornelius Nepos. At other times he has recourse to the stock-in-trade of the
old-fashioned romances—fabulous parentage, recovery of long-lost
children, disguises, strange meetings after the lapse of many years. He is
also given to introducing ballads and songs, generally under the rather
flimsy pretext that they are the composition of one or other of his
characters: fluent, but not melodious, they interrupt the course of the action,
momentarily attract the attention of the reader, and are immediately
forgotten.
Arnim's principal novel with a modern plot, Armuth, Reichthum, Schuld
und Busse der Gräfin Dolores: Eine wahre Geschichte zur lehrreichen
Unterhaltung armer Fräulein aufgeschrieben ("Poverty, Wealth, Sin, and
Penance of Countess Dolores: A True Story, Recorded for the Instruction
and Amusement of Poor Young Ladies"), is, taken as a whole, quite as
tedious as its title. This novel is another of Wilhelm Meister's progeny. It
describes the inner life of gifted and distinguished individuals of very
varied character, in very varied circumstances. But there is a smooth, pious
strain throughout the whole, which is altogether unlike Wilhelm Meister.
The story opens with a description of a castle which has fallen almost into
ruins because of its owner's poverty. This description is striking and good; it
has its counterpart in French literature in the picture of the Chateau de la
Misère in Th. Gautier's Capitaine Fracasse. We are made to feel all the

melancholy associated with the idea of former grandeur and present decay.
The somewhat frivolous and selfish character of the penniless young
Countess Dolores is also drawn with a masterly hand. This lady succeeds in
engaging the affections of a distinguished and rich young man, Count Karl,
who falls passionately in love with her and marries her, after overcoming
various outward and inward difficulties. In the character of Count Karl,
Arnim has succeeded in doing what had perhaps never been done in
German literature before, namely, depicting what the English call a perfect
gentleman, a conception for which other nations have no corresponding
expression. A gentleman is a man of honour, manly, serious, born to
command; he is, moreover, a good Christian, conscientious, unselfish, the
protector of those around him, not only good by natural disposition, but
moral on principle. In this character Arnim seems to have embodied much
of what was best in his own nature. Unfortunately he did not succeed in
imparting to it sufficient life; a kind of dream-haze surrounds this man of
fine feelings, who is always writing verses and who talks a language
inspired by the spirit of romance.
The plot turns upon the seduction of the young Countess. She is ensnared
by a Spanish duke, who, under a false name and title, gains admission to the
house, flatters her vanity in every possible way, and gradually, by the help
of magnetism and romantic mysticism, gains complete influence over her,
and persuades her that he has some mysterious connection with higher, nay,
actually with divine, powers. It seems almost as if Arnim must have had
Zacharias Werner in his mind when he drew this character. In Werner's
writings we have exactly this same mixture of impudent lust and
sanctimonious mystery; and we know that with Werner's mother it became a
fixed idea that she was the Virgin Mary and her son the Saviour of the
world. We come upon a similar idea in the following somewhat ineffective
description of the seduction of Dolores:—
"The Marquis looked up to the sky with an inspired gaze, held up his hands,
and appeared to salute some superior being. He said something, but she
could not hear what it was, and anxiously asked what he saw. He answered
that he saw the blessed Virgin, that she was pressing her, Dolores, to his
breast and placing a crown of roses on her head, saying: 'Follow me!'
Dolores, startled, went close up to him, imagining that she felt herself
pushed towards him; she felt his breath, imagined it to be the divine breath,

and cried: 'I feel her, I feel her breath; it is warm as the sun of the East and
as a mother's love.' Upon this, exclaiming: 'And I am her son!' he seized her
in his arms, trembling convulsively. He had often talked to her before of a
wonderful renewal of the holy myth; she seemed almost unconscious as she
stammered the words: 'Yes, it is thou, the all-powerful, the most holy—who
hast been given to me in the weakness of our human nature.' 'And thou,' he
sobbed, 'art my eternal bride.'"
It would almost seem as though it had been Arnim's intention to describe
with the aid of these fictitious characters, the mystic-sensual debaucheries
of one of his fellow Romanticists, a Werner or a Brentano. He himself was
almost the only one of the school who, in spite of the poetic attraction of
Catholicism, remained all his life a staunch Protestant. He seems to be
attempting to explain exactly that species of piety which mixed itself up
with the licentiousness of his Romantic contemporaries when he gives the
following diagnosis of the character of the hypnotising seducer: "We are not
justified in altogether doubting the piety of this nobleman, which to his
truly pious wife seemed so real. He too possessed the religious instinct; and
it was Clelia's natural piety which attracted him to her, though the attraction
did not last long.... Afterwards superstitious fear took possession of him. He
had outlived his vices. It was now not merely his religious instinct which
impelled him to visit all the places of pilgrimage in Sicily and all the
famous priests; he was deluding himself into the piety which in his wife
was genuine. It was a new stimulant, the strength of which he was obliged
constantly to increase. Religion was to him a kind of opium; his nature
craved for more and more of it, till all craving was at an end." (Gräfin
Dolores, ii. 136, &c.)
But it is not only the excesses peculiar to the Romanticists which Arnim
reprehends; he also sharply and wittily castigates the anti-Romanticist, Jens
Baggesen. In Heidelberg, where he must have met Arnim, Baggesen had
written a series of satirical sonnets directed against the Romanticists,
"literary sansculottes on the German Parnassus," as he called them. These
he published in the same year that Dolores appeared, under the title, Der
Karfunkel- oder Klingklingel-Almanack, ein Taschenbuch für vollendete
Romantiker und angehende Mystiker auf das Jahr der Gnade 1810. It was,
however, undoubtedly less Baggesen's verses than his extraordinary
instability of character which provoked Arnim's satire. The life of this

enemy of Romanticism was more planless and capricious than the life of
any one of the Romanticists; and Arnim, for whom everything strange and
improbable had an attraction, could not fail to be interested in such a
singular personality. In Dolores he caricatures him wittily and mercilessly
in the person of the poet "Waller." But though, in this instance, the
weaknesses of a special individual are caricatured, Arnim's general purpose
unmistakably is to throw into salient relief characteristics which exemplify
the lawlessness and levity of the emotional life of a whole generation.
His unfinished historical novel, Die Kronenwächter ("The Guardians of the
Crown"), published in 1817, presents us, like Dolores, with several well-
conceived and ably elaborated characters along with a mass of undigested
mystic and lyric material. In the background of this tale looms a huge,
mysterious, enchanted castle, the seven towers of which are absolutely
transparent; they appear to be built of glass, for each of them projects a
brilliant rainbow upon black rocks and upon distant water. In this castle the
guardians of the crown of the Hohenstaufens have their lonely retreat, and
hence they sally forth into the world, to act and to avenge. But it is not this
mystical background which is of importance. What one really remembers
are one or two characters portrayed with such virile force as probably no
German author has exhibited since, unless it be Gottfried Keller, in his
historical novels.
We have, for example, the hero's foster-mother, Frau Hildegard, to whom
we are thus amusingly introduced at the beginning of the book:—"Martin,
the new tower watchman, has to-day married his predecessor's widow,
because she has grown too stout to come down the narrow corkscrew stair.
We really could not pull the tower down for her sake, so she had to make up
her mind to this marriage, though she would have preferred our clerk,
Berthold. The priest has had to tie the knot up there." This story of the
widow's corpulence is of course nonsense, but none the less it makes a very
original beginning to the book.
The action passes in the days of Luther, and Luther's figure is seen in the
background. It is rare to find a Romanticist writing of him with such
warmth as this:—"As a mountain sends out streams to the east and to the
west, so this man combined opposites, things that in others are never found
together—humility and pride, conviction of the path he was bound to tread

and willing acceptance of the advice of others, clear understanding and
blind faith."
A prominent part in the action is taken by Dr. Faust, the Faustus of popular
legend, the famous doctor and alchemist. He is represented with a fiery red
face, white hair, and bald crown, wearing scarlet trunk hose and ten orders.
He is half-genius, half-charlatan, and works miraculous cures.
The most beautifully drawn character is that of a woman, the hero's
betrothed, Anna Zähringer, daughter of Apollonia, the love of his youth.
She is the tall German maiden of powerful build and noble carriage, but she
also possesses the sensuous attraction which Gottfried Keller has a special
faculty of imparting to his young women. The hero of the story, Berthold,
the burgomaster, is another personification of Arnim's personal ideal. He is
of noble descent, but having grown up in humble circumstances, is simple
and plain in all his ways, a good, upright, quiet citizen. Yet all the time he is
at heart an aristocrat, who longs for armour and weapons and tournaments,
and who actually, without previous training, wins the prize in the first
tournament in which he takes part.
Mystic incidents are, of course, not lacking. If Arnim could not forego them
in his modern novel, in which we read of a priest who, with one look,
imparted to childless wives the power of conception, they were certain to
occur much more frequently, and to be of an even more surprising nature, in
a tale of times long past. Faust, for instance, cures Berthold by injecting
into his veins some of the blood of a stalwart young man, Anton by name,
and ever after this, Berthold has the feeling that Anton has somehow
acquired a right of possession in his, Berthold's, lady-love, Anna; and Anton
himself immediately feels mysteriously attracted to Anna. Die
Kronenwächter, like all Arnim's longer productions, is a piece of
patchwork, though it must be allowed that the patchwork does not lack
poetic value.
It was only in his short tales that he succeeded in producing the effect of
unity. Philander is a clever and pleasing imitation of the style of
Moscherosch, a writer who lived in the days of the Thirty Years' War. In
Fürst Ganzgott und Sänger Halbgott, we have a humorous variation of the
favourite Romantic "Doppelgänger" theme, based upon an extraordinary
likeness between two half-brothers who do not know each other; the story is

at the same time a travesty of the stiffness and burdensome conventions of
small courts. But Arnim's best and most characteristic work is the short tale,
Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau. In it we have all his quaint
extravagance, without any breach of the laws of possibility; and the central
idea is touchingly human.
The story, like most of Arnim's, has a whimsically grotesque introduction.
The old Commandant of Marseilles, Count Durande, is sitting in the
evening by his crackling fire, shoving olive branches into the flames with
his wooden leg, and dreaming of the construction of new kinds of
fireworks, when he suddenly awakens to the fact that his leg is on fire. He
shouts for help, and a strange woman, who is in the act of entering the
room, rushes up to him and attempts to stifle the flames with her apron; the
burning wooden leg sets fire to the apron, but the two are saved by people
rushing in from the street with buckets of water. The woman's errand is to
present a petition on behalf of her husband, whose behaviour has been
peculiar ever since he received a wound in the head. He is a most capable,
deserving sergeant, only at times so irritable that it is impossible to get on
with him. Partly out of compassion, partly because the case interests him,
the Commandant gives this sergeant charge of a fort which only requires a
garrison of three men, where, therefore, he runs no great danger of falling
out with those about him.
Hardly has he entered the fort before he has an attack of furious madness;
he turns out his good wife, refuses to admit his two subordinates, declares
war against the Commandant, and opens fire upon Marseilles from his high,
inaccessible nest upon the cliffs. For three days he keeps the town in a state
of terror. Preparations are made for the storming of the fort, in spite of the
certain prospect of loss of life and the fear that the madman may blow up
the powder magazine. His brave wife, who loves him, mad as he is, begs
that she may first be allowed to try to get into the fort, and, if possible,
disarm her husband. He fires upon her, but, led by her love, she climbs
undismayed up the narrow rocky path at the top of which two loaded
cannons face her. And now, as the result of this terrible excitement, the old
wound in the madman's head bursts open again; he comes to his senses,
totters to meet his wife—he and she and the town are saved.
The effect of this little work is rather weakened by the introduction of
supernatural agencies; the whole calamity, namely, is explained to be the

result of a stepmother's foolish curse; still, the story in its simplicity is a
glorification of that strong, beautiful love which has power to drive out
even the devil himself.
And in this, as in several of his other tales, Arnim evinces a humane
sympathy with the lower classes which becomes the aristocratic
Romanticist well. It is the same feeling of affection for those who are
simple of heart as that which led him to collect and publish the popular
songs and ballads, and which finds expression in Dolores in the following
words of the hero: "I swear to you that often, when I had to pay a couple of
thalers for a few lines containing some utterly superfluous formality, I felt a
furious desire to take up the inkpot and knock in the lawyer's teeth with it. I
should not have been the least surprised to see a flash of lightning come
straight from heaven and burn up all his musty documents. And if I feel
thus, how much more grievous must such an outlay seem to the poor man
who has perhaps to work a whole week from morning till late at night to
scrape the money together." We come on this same idea again in his essay
Von Volksliedern, where he declares that the people have come "to look on
the law as they look upon a hurricane, or any other superhuman power,
against which they must defend themselves, or from which they must hide,
or which leaves them nothing to do but despair."
His aristocratic bias is perceptible in all his Romantic vagaries.
With Arnim's name is always coupled that of Clemens Brentano (1778-
1849), his partner in the work of collecting and publishing the German
popular songs and ballads. Brentano resembles Arnim in his habit of giving
free rein to a vivid imagination, but differs from him in being an unstable,
unreliable personality. His talent is more sparkling and supple, he is more of
an intellectual prodigy; but it is as a psychological phenomenon that he
awakens our interest, not as a man. His only claim upon our sympathy is,
that he does not, like his spiritual kinsman, Zacharias Werner, degrade
himself by sentimental obscenity. He does not act basely, but he is never
truthful in the strictest sense of the word, until, intellectually dulled, he
renounces the calling of poet, or even of author, and lives entirely for his
religious enthusiasms. His case has a certain resemblance to that of
Hölderlin, who became insane at such an early age—the last twenty-five
years of his life are lost to literature.

In his young days Brentano is the jester of the Romanticists, the wayward
knave and wag who cannot refrain from doing what he knows will cost him
the friends he has made, nor from disturbing and destroying the emotions
and illusions which he himself has skilfully produced. With the quality, rare
among the Romanticists, of grace in art, he combines a certain simple
pathos. Like many other men of productive intellect, when he took pen in
hand he became more profound, more serious, and, above all, more warm-
hearted than he was in real life. Hence he not unfrequently as an artist
produces the impression of genuineness, though he was insincere as a man.
As an intellectual personality he had no backbone. Destitute of firm
convictions, he could only conceive of two attitudes towards the principle
of authority in matters of belief—wild revolt or unqualified submission. His
intellect oscillated between these two extremes until it found rest in
submission.
Of all his gifts and capacities, he, the arch-Romanticist, had only sought to
develop that of imagination. Palpably true is the following confession
extracted from one of his letters: "Oh, my child! we had nourished nothing
but imagination, and it, in return, had half devoured us." Unbridled
imagination, developed without any counterbalancing quality, is distinctly
akin to mendacity; and, as a matter of fact, Brentano in his youth was an
incorrigible liar, whose favourite amusement it was to move ladies to tears
by accounts of his entirely imaginary woes.
He was the enfant perdu of the Romantic School. He might also be called
the prodigal son of poetry. Like the young man in the New Testament, he
was a spendthrift. He squandered all the many good and witty ideas that
occurred to him, all the fertile situations which he invented, upon works
destitute of definite plan and form, and consequently destitute of the power
to withstand time, which so soon sweeps away everything formless. Before
he was forty he had exhausted his intellectual capital, had squandered his
substance, and was fain, like the young man of the Bible, "to fill his belly
with the husks that the swine did eat"—the husks that were the food of only
ignorant and superstitious human beings. In other words, he relapsed into
foolish bigotry. In the year 1817 he began to go to confession again, as in
the days of his earliest youth, and in the following year withdrew from all
intercourse with his fellows, to pass the next six years of his life in devout
contemplation by the sick-bed of the nun, Catharina Emmerich, who bore

on her body the marks of the wounds of Christ. He regarded the bodily
infirmities of this pious, single-minded, but perfectly hysterical girl, as so
many wonderful signs of grace, believed in the miraculousness of the
supposed imprints of the Saviour's wounds, and with awe-strick'en
compassion watched them bleed from time to time. Catharina's words
convinced him that she possessed a mysterious, supernatural gift of second-
sight, and he carefully noted down every one of her visions and
hallucinations. He wrote the story of her life, edited her reflections, and
wrote to her dictation The Life of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. After her
death, which happened in 1824, practically his only occupation was the
preparing for publication of the fourteen volumes of manuscript containing
her various utterances.
Brentano's life is a remarkable exemplification of the truth of the words of
Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust:—
"Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
Des Menschen aller höchste Kraft,
Lass nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken
Dich von dem Lügengeist bestärken,
So hab' ich dich schon unbedingt."[1]
Hallucinations and magic played no small part in his existence, and the man
who had begun by sneering at rationalism as dull and barren, fell a prey to
ideas far duller and more barren than the emptiest rationalism. He was no
more a hypocrite than the good soul, Catharina Emmerich, was an impostor.
But the craving for some firm, external support for his weak, wavering Ego,
now still farther enfeebled by remorse for the recklessness of his youth, led
him to cling with all the fanatical enthusiasm of his soul to the Church and
its miracles, just as he had clung in earlier days to poetry with its fairy-tales
and magic.
In his later years he was possessed by a kind of religious mania, though on
a rare occasion he showed a trace of his old inclination to waggery. He
declared, for instance, that he had drawn the apostles who appeared to
Catharina Emmerich in her visions exactly as she had described them to
him; but Bettina discovered that he had been unable to resist hanging round
the apostle Paul's neck, in lieu of a scrip, a curious old tobacco pouch,

which had belonged to himself in former days, and about which many
funny stories were in circulation among his acquaintances.
On his father's side Clemens Brentano was of Italian descent. His
grandfather, a successful Frankfort merchant, was a native of Tremezzo on
the Lake of Como. Through his mother he was descended from the
authoress Sophie Laroche, Wieland's friend.
In personal appearance he was the popular ideal poet, handsome, pale, and
slight, with a confusion of curly black hair. He had a Southern complexion
and sparkling, restless brown eyes shadowed by long lashes. His voice was
deep and beautiful, and he was fond of singing his own songs,
accompanying himself on the guitar.
He was apprenticed to a merchant, but the experiment proved totally
unsuccessful, and in 1797 he went to Jena, where he made the acquaintance
of the most famous of the Romanticists, Fr. Schlegel, Steffens, and others.
These friends often threatened to thrash him for his mad tricks and "not
unfrequently malicious boasts and lies," and the threat was more than once
actually carried out. But he could not refrain from offending; it was
impossible to him to restrain a caprice. While still quite young, he fell in
love with a very gifted woman, Sophie Mereau, wife of one of the Jena
professors. In the course of this love affair the couple had many wonderful
adventures, some of which we find reproduced in his first book, Godwi, or
the Mother's Statue. When, in 1802, Fr. Tieck executed a marble bust of
Brentano, Frau Mereau described the impression it produced on her in the
following beautiful sonnet, inspired by genuine admiration and love:—
"Welch süsses Bild erschuf der Künstler hier?
Von welchem milden Himmelsstrich erzeuget?
Nennt keine Inschrift seinen Namen mir,
Da diese todte Lippe ewig schweiget?

Nach Hohem loht im Auge die Begier,
Begeistrung auf die Stirne niedersteiget,
Um die, nur von der schönen Locken Zier
Geschmücket, noch kein Lorbeerkranz sich beuget.

Ein Dichter ist es. Seine Lippen prangen

Von Lieb' umwebt, mit wunderselgem Leben,
Die Augen gab ihm sinnend die Romanze!

Und schalkhaft wohnt der Scherz auf seinen Wangen;
Den Namen wird der Ruhm ihm einstens geben,
Das Haupt ihm schmückend mit dem Lorbeerkranze."[2]
Happiness came to Brentano before fame. In 1803 he married Sophie
Mereau, who had been divorced from her husband, and they lived most
happily together till 1806, when she died in childbirth.
In Heidelberg Brentano collaborated with Arnim in the publication of Des
Knaben Wunderhorn and with Görres in Die Geschichte des Uhrmachers
BOGS ("Story of Bogs, the Watchmaker"). He had already published
several works on his own account—Ponce de Leon, die lustigen Musikanten
("The Merry Musicians"), Chronika eines fahrenden Schülers ("Chronicles
of a Roving Student"). In Frankfort he became entangled in a love affair,
which led to one of the many tragi-comic episodes in his life. He ran away
with a young girl who had fallen violently in love with him, Auguste
Busmann, a niece of the famous banker, Bethmann. They went to Cassel,
where he married her. It is said that he tried to escape from her on the way
to church, but that the energetic bride held him fast. A few days after the
ceremony she threw her wedding-ring out of the window. One of her
fancies was to dash through the town on horseback, the long plumes of her
hat and the scarlet trappings of her horse floating in the wind. She plagued
her husband in many ways. We are told that one of the worst tortures he had
to endure was caused by her skill in beating a tattoo with her feet against
the footboard of the bed, a performance invariably followed by a skilful
pizzicato played with her toe-nails upon the sheet.[3] This and other things
grew so unendurable that he ran away. The valiant lady procured a divorce
the same year, and was ere long married again.
Brentano settled in Berlin, and was soon in great request in social circles
there, on account of his powers of conversation, his whimsicality, and his
rocket-like sallies of wit. It was in Berlin that he wrote his fairy-tales and
most of his Romanzen vom Rosenkranz ("Romances of the Rosary"). His
play, The Founding of Prague, was written in Bohemia, where lay the
family estate, Bukowan, of which the younger brother, Christian, took
charge. After his return to Berlin in 1816, he wrote the famous tale,

Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und der schönen Nannerl ("Story of Brave
Kasperl and Fair Nannerl"), also Die mehreren Wehmüller, and Die drei
Nüsse ("The Three Nuts"). Then his conversion took place, and he no
longer lived for literature. The profits of anything he wrote subsequently
were devoted to charitable objects.
Steffens remarks of Brentano that he is the only one of the Romanticists
who seems to be thoroughly aware that he has no aim. He calls him an
ironical, sportive Kronos, who fantastically demolishes every one of his
definite utterances by means of its successor, in this manner devouring his
own children. Still, as a lyric poet, a writer of fairy-tales, and a novelist,
Brentano has produced works of art, few in number, but of permanent
value.
In his poetry there is something touching, simple, and caressingly sweet. He
understands the art of condensing an emotion, but he generally dilutes it
again, and spoils his effect by repetitions, refrains, or the introduction of
inarticulate sounds, such as "Ru, ku, ku, kuh," and the like. Almost all his
poems contain single verses of great excellence, but almost all are too long.
He has appropriated the diffuseness of the Volkslied. He is distinctly
original in such untranslatable verses as the following, taken from the
Dichters Blumenstrauss ("Poet's Garland"):—
"Ein verstimmend Fühlgewächschen
Ein Verlangen abgewandt,
Ein erstarrend Zitterhexchen,
Zuckeflämmchen, nie verbrannt.

Offnes Räthsel, nie zu lösen,
Steter Wechsel, fest gewöhnt,
Wesen, wie noch keins gewesen,
Leicht verhöhnt und schwer versöhnt.
* * * * * * *
Auf dem Kehlchen wiegt das Köpfchen,
Blumenglöckchen auf dem Stiel,
Seelchen, selig Thaueströpfchen,
Das hinein vom Himmel fiel."