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."
[Illustration: 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