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idea of nationality has superseded or modified the "humanity" ideal.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."