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.
[Illustration: 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.