The Romanticists themselves were by no means satisfied with _Lucinde_.
Novalis has most to say in its favour. He is of opinion that there are
few such personal books; it seems to him that in it all the workings
of the author's mind may be observed as distinctly as the play of
chemical forces during the dissolution of a lump of sugar in a glass of
water. He is somewhat disturbed by the species of delusion prevailing
throughout the work, which makes man, the thinking being, a mere
natural force, and which takes such possession of the reader that he
finds himself deeply interested in what is simply sensual instinct.
Moreover, the whole is not simple enough, not sufficiently free from
pedantry. Yet "Romantic chords" are not lacking, and it is not so much
the matter as the form to which he objects.
He writes at once to Caroline Schlegel: "There is nothing to object to
in the ideas, but in the manner of expressing them there is a good deal
which strikes me as being borrowed from Krates [the cynic]. The cry,
'Be cynical!' is not yet heard among us, and even really advanced women
will blame the beautiful Athenian for having made the market-place her
bridal chamber."
Quite true; only it was not the luckless Dorothea who was to blame for
the profanation, even though she did not feel incensed by the public
exhibition, as we do on her behalf; her lord and master was alone to
blame.
We have seen that Caroline soon allowed her satirical wit free play in
writing of _Lucinde_; and A. W. Schlegel, Schelling, Steffens, and the
others privately regarded it as an _enfant terrible_, whatever their
public utterances may have been. A. W. Schlegel indeed wrote, in a
sonnet to Friedrich:--
"Dich führt zur Dichtung Andacht brünst'ger Liebe,
Du willst zum Tempel dir das Leben bilden,
Wo Götterrecht die Freiheit lös' und binde.
Und dass ohn' Opfer der Altar nicht bliebe,
Entführtest Du den himmlischen Gefilden,
Die hohe Gluth der leuchtenden Lucinde."[1]
And when Kotzebue published the comedy, _Der hyperboräische Esel_,
which satirises Friedrich and his book, August Wilhelm responded with
the witty satire, _Ehrenpforte für den Präsidenten von Kotzebue_;
but privately he called the book a "foolish rhapsody." Tieck called
it "eine wunderliche Chimäre," and even Schleiermacher attempted to
disavow his authorship of the _Letters on the Subject of Lucinde_,
after his inclination to a species of sensual mysticism had given place
to a Protestant-rationalistic tendency. Nevertheless, or rather, for
this very reason, it is of importance that we should inquire into the
nature of these letters, which were written with the aim of proving
_Lucinde_ to be, not merely an innocent, but a good and holy book, the
worth of which is testified to by the delight which high-minded women
take in it. On the letters of two such women, his sister, Ernestine,
and his friend, Eleonore Grunow, Schleiermacher's own are based.
There is little of general interest for us nowadays in these letters,
so we shall only notice their salient points. As _Lucinde_ is the
solitary contribution of Romanticism towards the solution of a social
problem, and as marriage is almost the only social question grappled
with by literature generally at the beginning of the century (Goethe's
_Wanderjahre_ alone, in the manner of Rousseau's romances, occupying
itself with a wider range of such questions), it will be of interest to
compare the utterances of the different European literatures on this
subject.
Schleiermacher's book is an attack upon prudery. At the very beginning
he writes: "I was almost inclined to believe that you had become a
prude; if you had, I should have entreated you to go and settle in
England, to which country I should like to banish the whole genus."
And one division of the book is entirely devoted to an analysis of
that false modesty which precludes true modesty, and causes so much
unnecessary misery.
"The anxious and narrow-minded modesty by which society at the present
day is characterised, has its root in the consciousness of a great and
general wrongheadedness and depravity. But where is it to end? It is
bound to spread farther and farther. If people are perpetually on the
lookout for what is immodest, they will end by discovering it in every
domain of thought, and all conversation and social intercourse must
cease.... utter depravation and the perfect education by which man
returns to innocence, both do away with modesty; in the first case true
modesty, as well as false, is destroyed; in the second, it ceases to be
a thing to which much attention is paid or much importance attached.[2]
"Is it not the case, dear child, that everything spiritual in man has
its beginning in an instinctive, vague, inward impulse, which only the
action of the individual, frequently repeated, develops into definite,
conscious will and a perfected faculty. Not until they have developed
so far can there be any question of a lasting connection between these
inward impulses and definite objects. Why should love be different from
everything else? Is it reasonable to expect the highest faculty of man
to be perfect from the first? Should it be easier to love than to eat
and drink? Surely in love too there must be preparatory attempts, from
which nothing permanent results, but which all tend to make the feeling
more distinct and more noble. The connection of these attempts with any
definite object is merely accidental, at first often purely imaginary,
and always ephemeral--as ephemeral as the feeling itself, which soon
gives place to one more clearly defined and intense. Inquire of the
most mature and highly cultivated men and women; you will find that
they smile at the thought of their first love as at any other laughable
childish performance, and often live in complete indifference side by
side with the object of it. According to the nature of things it must
be so, and to insist upon faithfulness and a lasting connection is as
dangerous as it is foolish."
Schleiermacher naturally warns his correspondent against what he
calls the chimera of the holiness of first love: "Do not believe
that everything depends upon something coming of it. The novels
which support this idea, and make love between the same two beings
develop uninterruptedly from its first raw beginning to its highest
perfection, are as hurtful as they are silly; and their authors, as
a rule, have as little understanding of love as they have of art....
When the more or less indefinite love longing settles upon a definite
object, there necessarily arises a definite connection, and a point
of closest approach. When this point has been reached and you feel
that it is not the right one, not one that can be held, what is there
left for you to do but to part again? Only after such an attempt has
been completed as an attempt, that is to say, after the connection has
been broken off, can the memory of it and reflection upon it produce a
truer understanding of the longing and feeling, and thus prepare for
another and better attempt. Is there any obligation to make the next
with the same person? Upon what can such an obligation be founded? _I,
for my part, consider this more unnatural than love between brother and
sister_. Allow yourself perfect liberty, then; endeavouring only to
preserve a pure-minded, clear feeling that it is merely an experiment,
so that you may be prevented from sanctioning and perpetuating that
which is not intended to be more, by that self-surrender which, from
its nature, ought to mark the end of experiments and the beginning of
a true and lasting love. Such a mistake, which is both the consequence
and the cause of the most miserable delusions, you must regard as the
most terrible thing that can happen to you; I would have you understand
that this is in reality allowing one's self to be seduced. When you
have found true love, and feel yourself to have reached the point at
which you can perfect your character and make your life beautiful
and worthy, diffidence and fear of the last and most precious seal of
union will seem to you pure affectation. The only danger lies in the
fact that every attempt, from its very nature, aims at reaching this
point. The point of sufficiency can only be discovered by satiety. But
if you are healthy in mind and heart, you will, as often as one of
these attempts to love approaches this point, feel an aversion which is
something far higher and holier than any law, or than what generally
goes by the name of modesty and chastity."
[Illustration: SCHLEIERMACHER]
Sound and sensible reflections, one and all, but neither exhaustive
nor applicable to what are the real difficulties of the case.
Schleiermacher warns against mistakes, but cannot remedy them, without
infringing upon the sanctity of marriage, which he never calls
in question. For what is to be done when the mistake has already
been made? And what when it has been on one side only, when only
the love of the one has grown cold, while that of the other still
endures? And he does not give a word or a thought to the fact that
marriage, as a social institution, does not exist for the sake of
the lovers, that its original intention was to secure the father's
property for the children, and that it has continued to exist
because it seemed to society the only means of protecting the rising
generation. Schleiermacher, the idealist, would fain discover a new
moral foundation, and entirely overlooks the real, the practical
difficulties. How characteristic of the nation to which the author
belongs is all this pondering over feeling! An Italian once said to me:
"What astonishes us most in the emotional life of the Teutonic nations
is their conception and cult of love. With them love is positively a
religion, something in which a good man is bound to believe. And this
religion has its theology, and its philosophy, and what not. We simply
love, and no more about it." I thought of this speech when reading
Schleiermacher. How much ingenuity he exhibits in proving that men
should not allow themselves to be disturbed by false theories when they
love, and what a steadfast belief in the love which is to "complete
and perfect the character," lies at the foundation of it all! It is
instructive to compare with Schleiermacher's some utterances by great
authors of other nations on the same subject; they throw what is
peculiarly national in his into more marked relief.
George Sand, whose first novels are the expression of the same movement
in France which _Lucinde_ inaugurates in Germany, says, by the mouth of
the principal characters in _Jacques_ and _Lucrezia Floriani_: "Paul
and Virginia were able to love each other steadily and undisturbedly;
for they were children brought up by the same mother. Our surroundings
have been too utterly unlike.... If two beings are to understand
each other always, and to be united by an unchangeable love, their
characters as children must have been formed by a similar education,
they must have the same beliefs, the same turn of mind, even the same
manners and habits. But we, the distressed offspring of a turbulent
and corrupt society, which behaves to her disunited children like a
stepmother, and is more cruel in her periods of savagery than actual
savages are, how can we wonder, after such great outward divisions,
at the perpetual divisions of hearts and the impossibility of inward
harmony."
Obviously George Sand is considerably less persuaded than
Schleiermacher of the probability or possibility of the individual's
meeting with that "right one," love for whom perfects. Jacques says:
"I am still persuaded that marriage is one of the most barbarous
institutions of society. I doubt not that it will be abolished when
the human race makes further progress towards justice and reason; a
more human and not less sacred tie will take its place and will ensure
the well-being of the children without fettering the freedom of the
parents. But as yet men are too barbarous and women too cowardly to
demand a nobler law than the iron one by which they are now ruled.
Beings destitute of conscience and virtue need heavy chains. The
improvements of which some generous spirits dream, cannot be realised
in such an age as ours; these spirits forget that they are a hundred
years in advance of their contemporaries, and that before they change
the law, they must change mankind." Jacques says to his bride on their
wedding day: "Society is about to dictate an oath to you. You are about
to swear to be faithful and obedient to me, that is to say, never to
love any one but me, and to obey me in all things. One of these vows is
an absurdity, the other a disgrace."
The idea expressed by George Sand in all these books is, that to
preserve the outward semblance of love, by caresses, &c., after it has
ceased to exist, is what constitutes real immorality in love. Jacques
says: "I have never forced my imagination to rekindle or reanimate a
feeling in my soul which I no longer found there. I have never looked
upon love as a duty, constancy as a rôle. When I have felt that love
was extinguished in my soul I have said so, without being either
ashamed or conscience-stricken." And _Lucrezia Floriani_ says, still
more emphatically: "Not one of all the passions to which I have yielded
naively and blindly, seemed to me so guilty as the one which I was
endeavouring, contrary to my feeling, to make lasting."
The French authoress looks upon unchangeable love for one and the same
person as a possibility only, dependent upon certain conditions; and
her idea of love is not, like Schleiermacher's, that it is the highest
educational force, but that, as an irresistible natural force, a
possessing passion, it is beautiful, the most beautiful thing in life.
Institutions must adapt themselves to it, since it cannot change its
nature to suit institutions. A disciple of Rousseau, she champions the
cause of nature.
Let us now glance at one of the works of a contemporary English writer
of the same tendencies, at Shelley's _Queen Mab_. In the notes he has
appended to this poem we come upon a third variation of the opposition
to prevailing opinions. Shelley says: "Love is inevitably consequent
upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its
very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience,
jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited,
where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.... A
husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each
other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment
after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny,
and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the
right of private judgment should that law be considered which should
make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices,
the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the
human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and
more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement
and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of
imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits
of the object.... Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same
woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed....
The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of
instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy
and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to
love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts
to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of
their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring: those of less
generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger
out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a
state of incurable bickering and hostility. The early education of
their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents;
they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and
falsehood.... The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out
the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without
restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life,
when they know that their victim is without appeal.... Prostitution
is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors.
Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a
natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies
of society. It is less venial than murder.... Has a woman obeyed the
instincts of unerring nature (_sic_!), society declares war against
her, pitiless and eternal war: she must be the tame slave, she must
make no reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty
of endurance. She lives a life of infamy: the loud and bitter laugh
of scorn scares her from all return. She dies of long and lingering
disease: yet _she_ is in fault, she is the criminal, and society the
pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from her
undefiled bosom!... Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of
chastity from the society of modest and accomplished women, associate
with these vicious and miserable beings.... Chastity is a monkish and
evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even
than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic
happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery,
that some few may monopolise according to law. A system could not well
have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than
marriage. I conceive that from the abolition of marriage the fit and
natural arrangement of sexual intercourse would result. I by no means
assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary,
it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is
generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity
and self-devotion.... In fact, religion and morality, as they now
stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude: the genius of
human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere
man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed
up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image,
should she look in the mirror of nature!"
Here again we have appeals to nature; but the standpoint is an
entirely different one. Shelley, the enthusiastic atheist, attributes
the principal miseries of social humanity to traditional religion.
"Unerring" nature is the divinity he substitutes for the God of the
Bible. He considers that man has the right to demand happiness, and,
like a true Englishman, contends, without troubling much about the
psychology of the matter, for the freedom of the individual from the
compulsion of external law. Schleiermacher warns against what is
_foolish_, because, once the foolish step is taken, it is binding;
but he, the Protestant pastor, only indirectly incites to revolt.
George Sand rebels against what is _dishonourable_. In the ethical
creed of the French authoress honour plays the same part that wisdom
does in Schleiermacher's; it is by the mouth of Jacques, her ideal
of manly honour, that she protests in the name of the honour of
humanity. Shelley stands forth as the champion of personal liberty;
it is _thraldom_ that he desires to abolish. The English apostle of
liberty, soon to be an exile, unhesitatingly attacks the institutions
of society. George Sand never directly attacked marriage. She actually
says in the introduction to _Mauprat_: "It is husbands I have attacked,
and if I am asked what I propose to substitute for them, I answer
--marriage." But Shelley, who takes cognisance of all evils from the
social and political standpoint, proposes to improve humanity by
legislation, being persuaded that the state is bound to secure as much
liberty of action as possible to the individual as citizen.
It is obvious that, of these three representatives of the same idea,
Schleiermacher is the most profound thinker and the most reserved. In
his estimation character is of the first importance, in George Sand's,
the heart, and in Shelley's, happiness. These three great writers are
the spokesmen of three great nations, and by comparing them we are
better able to understand the character of the whole movement which
begins at the beginning of the century, but which can neither settle
into shape nor produce good and tranquillising results until the
intellectual and social emancipation of woman has advanced so far that
she is independent of social prejudices, knows her own needs, and is in
a position to supply them.
[1] It is the sacred ardour of love that makes of thee a poet; thou
aimest at transforming life into a temple, where divine right binds and
looses. And that the altar may not lack a victim, thou hast stolen from
heaven the noble ardour of the glorious Lucinde.
[2] _Briefe über die Lucinde_, pp. 64, 83.