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."