Wackenroder's book, which, as it were, indicates the attitude of
Romanticism to music, also indicates what its attitude is to be towards
art. Just as Winckelmann, with his first enthusiastic writings, had
awakened the desire to study antique art, now Wackenroder enlists men's
sympathies for medievalism.
In his naïve enthusiasm he begins by translating and paraphrasing
those portions of Vasari's old biographies of the famous painters
which describe the greatness and nobility of mind of the Italian
masters. Amongst others he extols Leonardo; but he neither grasps the
characteristics of the man nor gives us intelligent criticism of his
art; he simply eulogises him under the heading: _Das Muster eines
kunstreichen und dabei tiefgelehrten Malers, vorgestellt in dem Leben
des Leonardo da Vinci_ (The Gifted and Erudite Painter, as exemplified
in the Life of Leonardo da Vinci). The essay begins with the following
impulsive assertion: "The period of the resurrection of the art of
painting in Italy produced men to whom the generation of to-day
should look up as to glorified saints." The fact, actually chronicled
by Vasari, that the great painters of the Italian Renaissance led
singularly unsaintly lives, is entirely ignored. In its very germ
the Romantic conception of art is poisoned by the reaction towards
sentiment. The critic folds his hands to worship, and forgets to open
his eyes to see.
Amongst the translated fragments Wackenroder introduces a short
original essay, entitled _Longing for Italy_, in which we have the
first appearance of that enthusiasm for Italy which afterwards becomes
not only general, but almost obligatory. Love and longing for Italy
was nothing new in Germany. Goethe's father, who was no enthusiast,
had known this feeling; but now idolatry of an Italy which had no
resemblance to the real one became a necessary clause in the creed
of every genuine Romanticist. In poetry the longing for Italy found
expression in a profusion of lyrical poems, dilutions and attenuations
of that divine song of Mignon's, which is a picture as well as a poem.
Mignon is content with saying:
"Die Myrthe _still_ und _hoch_ der Lorbeer steht"; the Romantic poets
express themselves in superlatives. The Italy of literature in general
may perhaps be best and most briefly defined as the Italy of Leopold
Robert (though even this definition is too exact), a country which
never existed on any map but that of the Romanticists. The real Italy,
with its bright colours and its cheerful life, is not to be found.
Colour is replaced by ideal forms; movement is petrified, that it may
not disturb an interplay of beautiful waving lines. To the Romanticists
Italy became what Dulcinea was to Don Quixote, an ideal of which they
knew almost nothing beyond what was conveyed by a few general, vapid
descriptive phrases. When a definite, real country is advanced to be
the object of men's longings, the home of beauty, it gradually loses,
in their depictions of it, all its real, living beauty. But it never
was the real, living beauty of Italy which the later Romanticists
loved; it was Italy as a ruin; it was Catholicism as a mummy; it was
the dwarfed and stunted spirit of the people (Volksgeist), which,
hermetically sealed up by a partly ignorant, partly ambitious and
designing priesthood, has remained unenlightened and naïve. What they
admired here, as elsewhere, was the feeble, lifeless poetry of a day
that was dead and gone.
But this cult of Italy and of the pious, or seemingly pious Italian
painters, is only the stepping-stone by which the "Friar" passes
to the worship of his own particular idol, Albert Dürer. With his
enthusiasm for this apostle of German art is combined enthusiasm for
ancient Nuremberg. When Tieck and Wackenroder travelled together
through Germany in 1793, Nuremberg was their chief place of pilgrimage.
The oftener they saw the town, the more affection, nay devotion, did
they conceive for it. "The art life of Germany revealed itself to
them there in all its fulness. That of which they had hitherto only
divined the possibility, had here long been a living reality. How rich
in monuments of all the arts was this town, with its churches of St.
Sebald and St. Lorenz, its works by Albert Dürer, Vischer, and Krafft!
Artistic feeling and ardent industry had here elevated handicraft
to the rank of art. Every house was a monument of the past; every
well, every bench, bore witness to the citizens of the quiet, simple,
thoughtful life of their forefathers. No whitewash had as yet reduced
the houses to uniformity. There they stood in all their stateliness,
each with its carven imagery, borrowed from poem and legend. Ottnit,
Siegenot, Dietrich, and other old heroes, were to be seen above the
doors, guarding and protecting the home. Over the old imperial city,
with its marvels and its oddities, hung a fragrance which in other
places had long ago been blown away by the winds of political change
and enlightenment."[1] Nuremberg is, in very deed, a splendid old town,
but it is easy to understand the special attraction there must have
been for two budding Romanticists in its medievalism, its old Catholic
churches, its old houses with the Nibelungen heroes above the doors.
Their enthusiasm over the treasures of beautiful Nuremberg is, truth
to say, far more natural than the long blindness of the eighteenth
century to them. As to Lessing the word "Gothic" had simply meant
"barbaric," so to Winckelmann the German Renaissance had been a closed
book. Now the splendours of Nuremberg were gazed on by eager eyes.
In a species of æsthetic intoxication the friends wandered round the
churches and the churchyards; they stood by the graves of Albert Dürer
and Hans Sachs; a vanished world rose before their eyes, and the life
of ancient Nuremberg became to them the romance of art. The chapter
in the _Herzensergüsse_ entitled _In Memory of Albert Dürer_ is the
first-fruits of these sentiments, and at the same time an expression
of the warm patriotic feeling of the young author. "In the days when
Albert was wielding the brush, the German still played a distinctly
characteristic and notable part on the stage of the world; and Dürer's
pictures faithfully reproduce the serious, straightforward, strong
German character, its spirit as well as its outward lineaments. In our
days this vigorous German character has vanished, in art as well as
in life.... The German art of those days was a pious youth, who had
received a homely upbringing in a small town, amongst his relations--it
has now become the conventional man of the world, who has lost the
stamp of the small town, and along with it his originality."
Yet this patriotic feeling in art is not Wackenroder's fundamental
feeling; it is based upon a more comprehensive one. The little book
inveighs throughout against all intolerance in art. Freedom from every
compulsory rule, a freedom based upon deep and genuine love of beauty,
is proclaimed in language which betrays the mimosa-like sensitiveness
of this prophet of the new gospel of art. "He," says Wackenroder,
"whose more sensitive nerves are keenly alive to the mysterious
attraction which lies hidden in art, will often be deeply moved by
what leaves another callous. He has the good fortune to have more
frequent opportunities than other men for healthy mental excitement and
activity."
Such excitement and activity were, as we have seen, most easily and
most naturally called forth by the musical treatment of poetry and by
music itself--much less naturally by clearly defined corporeal forms of
art.
If our supposition that Wackenroder's theory of art finds its true
and highest development in the distinctively musical type of poetry
be correct, it is easy to foretell what will be the result of Tieck's
determination to write (with the assistance of his friend's posthumous
papers) a tale embodying the "Friar's" longings and theories. The
letters written by the German painter in Rome to his friend in
Nuremberg became the germ of the new art-romance, _The Wanderings of
Franz Sternbald, a Story of Olden Germany_. The book takes its name
from its hero, a painter of the days of Albert Dürer. The delineation
of character is vague and weak; the action is swamped in dialogue;
events play as freely and fantastically as in dreams (and of dreams
we have any number) with the feeble talking figures who do duty
for heroes and heroines; and even the sequence of these events is
constantly interrupted by the insertion of songs improvised to order,
which may be best described by quoting a saying of Sternbald's friend,
Florestan, namely, that it ought to be possible to construct in words
and verse a whole conversation consisting of nothing but sound. When
the thread of event is most attenuated and the silk of the verse most
thinly spun, music proper is called in. The primitive strains of horn
or pipe are so frequently introduced that the author himself in a later
work, _Zerbino_, jests at this superfluity of horn music.
In one of Caroline Schlegel's letters we find Goethe's apt criticism
of the book. He said that it ought by rights to have been called
_Musical Wanderings_; that there was everything imaginable in it except
a painter; that if it were intended for an art-romance, art should
have received quite different and more comprehensive treatment; that
there was no real substance in the book, and that its artistic tendency
was an erroneous one; that there were beautiful sunsets in it, but
that they were repeated too often. Much severer, however, and more
penetrating is Caroline's own criticism. She writes: "As to Part First,
I shall only say that I am still in doubt whether Tieck did not intend
to represent Sternbald's devotion to art as something regrettable, a
mistaken, fruitless devotion, like Wilhelm Meister's. If this be the
case, then there is another fault, namely, the want of _human_ interest
in the story. Part Second throws no light on the matter. In it there is
the same vagueness, the same want of power. One is always hoping for
something decisive, always expecting Franz to make notable progress
in one direction or another; but he never does. Once more we read of
beautiful sunrises, the charms of spring, the alternation of day and
night, the light of sun, moon, and stars, the singing of birds. It
is all very charming, but there is a want of substance in it, and a
certain paltriness both in Sternbald's moods and emotions and in the
delineation of them. There are almost too many poems, and they have as
little connection with each other as have the loosely strung together
events and anecdotes, in many of which latter, moreover, one detects
all sorts of imitation."
But if there be no action in this book, what does it contain?
Reflections--in the first instance upon art, in the second upon nature.
First we have endless meditations and quantities of aphorisms on art
and poetry, interspersed with feeble lyric poems, which are hardly
distinguishable one from the other. Only one among the number, a
longish poem on Arion, is at all remarkable. It indicates the spirit
of the book. The three leaders of Romanticism, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck,
and Novalis, all sang the praises of Arion, and somewhat later he was
hymned in Danish by P. L. Möller. It was natural that the hearts of
the Romanticists should be stirred by the legend of the poet-subduer
of nature, who roused the enthusiasm of the very monsters of the sea,
rode upon dolphins, was invulnerable, invincible, of immortal fame.
He was their symbol, their hero. All their poetry is, in a certain
sense, an attempt to expound the legend of Arion; and what else are
all the echoes and imitations of their works, the books which glorify
poets, artists, actors, troubadours, heroic and irresistible tenors?
The figure of Narcissus would be the fitting frontispiece for all these
innumerable volumes.
As a matter of fact the main ingredients of _Sternbald_ are trite
refutations of the trite objection to art, that it is useless, trivial
reasons for art being national ("since we are not Italians, and an
Italian can never feel as a German does"), and hymns in praise of
Albert Dürer. It is their admiration for Dürer that first brings the
two lovers together, just as Werther and Lotte were first united
by their common enthusiasm for Klopstock. The same ideas found
expression in Danish in Sibbern's _Gabrielis_ and Oehlenschläger's
_Correggio_. Parts of the plot of _Correggio_ are anticipated; we
have, for instance, the artist painting his own wife as the Madonna,
and his grief at having to part with his work. A long word-symphony
in honour of Strasburg Cathedral is followed by bitter thrusts at
the "uncouth masses of stone in Milan and Pisa, and that disjointed
building, the Cathedral of Lucca." Then we have admiration and praise
of Till Eulenspiegel and Hans Wurst (these gentlemen being supposed to
represent fancy and irony), and great enthusiasm for Dürer's stag with
the cross between its antlers, and for the "simple-hearted, pious, and
touching" manner in which the knight in front of it bends his knees.
The picture in question is undoubtedly a beautiful, simple-minded
production, but we cannot help smiling at the serious attempt made to
prove that of all the ways in which the legs of a kneeling man can be
bent, this is by far the most Christian.
Again and again the idea recurs that all true art must be allegorical,
that is to say, marrowless and bloodless. Most of the poems are
allegories. The principal one is the long allegory of Phantasus,
wretched verse without one spark of imagination:
"Der launige Phantasus,
Ein wunderlicher Alter,
Folgt stets seiner närrischen Laune.
Sie haben ihn jetzt festgebunden,
Dass er nur seine Possen lässt,
Vernunft im Denken nicht stört,
Den armen Menschen nicht irrt," &c., &c.[2]
Reminiscences of this satire upon the attacks made on imagination
by the prosaic are to be found here and there in Andersen's _Fairy
Tales_. The poem, which is recited in the moonlight, indicates as an
ideal subject for the painter a pilgrim in the moonlight, the emblem
of humanity: "For what are we but wandering, erring pilgrims? Can
aught but the light from above illumine our path?" There are distinct
traces of this same tendency in our own poet, Hauch, with his perpetual
pointing "upwards" and his partiality for pilgrims and hermits.
But in Romanticism at this stage, in spite of all its bloodless
spirituality, sensuality still wells up strong and unrestrained. Franz
Sternbald, the trained artist, maintains the superiority of Titian
and Correggio to all other painters. Of Correggio, whom he especially
favours, he says: "Who would dare to vie with him, at least in the
representation of voluptuous love? To no other human spirit has there
been granted such a revelation of the glories of the realm of the
senses."
This standpoint was, as every one knows, soon relinquished, consistency
leading to the adoption of another. The brothers Sulpice and Melchior
Boisserée of Cologne were in Paris in 1802, when Friedrich Schlegel was
studying there, and they had private lectures from him. The old German
pictures in the Louvre reminded the young men of old paintings in their
native town, which the prevailing academic taste had consigned to
oblivion. In consequence of Napoleon's systematic pillage of pictures,
there was a good collection of German ones in Paris, which made the
study of them an easy matter.
The best idea of what the German medieval artists had produced was to
be obtained from the quantities of paintings and wood and stone carving
which came into the market after the suppression of monasteries and
charitable foundations. At that time men had lost all appreciation for
monuments of art; with the utmost indifference they saw churches turned
into quarries, and the most precious artistic treasures dispersed to
the four winds. Masterpieces were sold for a trifle, and the purchasers
of the supposed old rubbish were actually pitied. Altar-pieces
were made into window-shutters, dovecots, tables, and roofing; the
caretakers in the monasteries often used old paintings on wood as fuel,
for as a rule even the best were unrecognisable, from taper-smoke,
dust, and dirt.[3]
After Friedrich Schlegel, in his periodical, Europa, had drawn
attention to the wealth of old German paintings, the brothers Boisserée
began to collect the scattered treasures, travelling up and down the
Rhine and throughout the Netherlands to track out the long-despised
works. By 1805 a collection of Flemish and German masters had been
made, which exercised great influence on the history of art.
The revival of enthusiasm for early German art led to predilection for
the pre-Raphaelite Italian painters. All honour to the pre-Raphaelites!
From Fiesole and Giotto to Masaccio, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Luca
Signorelli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio, all Europe pays them the
homage that is their due. But Friedrich Schlegel, in his article in
_Europa_ on Raphael, exalts the pre-Raphaelite at the expense of the
succeeding period. He says: "With this newer school, typified by such
names as Raphael, Correggio, Giulio Romano, and Michael Angelo, begins
the decay of art." And this is considered to be so patent a fact that
Schlegel does not think it necessary to offer any justification of his
assertion; nay, two pages later he actually confesses that he has not
seen any of Michael Angelo's works. Here we have the perfection of
Romantic insolence. This paragon of an art critic, who, in order the
better to exalt the old monkish pictures, dates the decay of art from
Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michael Angelo, admits without the
slightest feeling of shame that he has not seen so much as one of the
works of the greatest of these men. Despising such a paltry thing as
knowledge, he judges him with his inner consciousness.
But it is unnecessary to anticipate; for in _Sternbald_ itself monkish
piety, with all its languishing fanaticism, has already come to life
again in an unctuousness without parallel. This it was which so
irritated Goethe. The idea that piety lies at the foundation of all
true art, a theory which was speedily adopted by the whole school
of neo-German "Nazarenic" painters, he constantly jeered at. An
expression he often used in speaking of the "Nazarenes" was, that they
Sternbaldised (_sternbaldisierten_).
The essay on Winckelmann which Goethe published about this time was a
direct attack upon the Romanticists. In it he writes: "This description
of the antique mind, with its concentration upon this world and its
blessings, leads directly to the reflection that such advantages
are only compatible with a pagan spirit. That self-confidence, that
living and acting in the present, that simple reverence for the
gods as ancestors and admiration for them as if they were works of
art, that resignation to an inevitable fate, and that belief in a
future of highly prized posthumous fame, all these things together
constitute such an indivisible whole, unite in such a manner to form
the human existence designed by nature herself, that those pagans show
themselves alike robust and sane in the supreme moment of enjoyment
and in the dread moment of self-sacrifice or annihilation. This pagan
spirit is apparent in all Winckelmann's actions and writings.... And
we must keep this frame of mind of his, this remoteness from, nay,
this actual antipathy to the Christian standpoint, in view when we
judge his so-called change of religion. Winckelmann felt that, in
order to be a Roman in Rome, in order really to live the life of the
place, it was necessary that he should become a member of the Catholic
Church, subscribe to its beliefs, and conform to its usages.... The
decision came all the more easily to him in that, born pagan as he
was, Protestant baptism had not availed to make a Christian of him....
There is no doubt that a certain opprobrium, which it seems impossible
to avoid, attaches to every man who changes his religion. This shows
us that what men set most store by is steadfastness; and they value it
the more because, themselves divided into parties, they have their own
peace and security always in view. Where destiny rather than choice
has placed us, there we are to remain.... So much for a very serious
side of the question; there is a much lighter and more cheerful one.
Certain positions taken up by others, of which we do not approve,
certain of their moral offences, have a peculiar attraction for our
imagination.... People whom we should otherwise think of as merely
notable, or amiable, now seem to us very mysterious, and it cannot be
denied that Winckelmann's change of religion has added greatly to the
_romance_ of his life and character."
We can fancy how such an utterance enraged the Romanticists, who
at that time were all on the point of going over to Catholicism.
Thenceforward there was no more worship of Goethe. Tieck was in Rome,
and the report spread that he was about to embrace the Catholic faith,
to which his wife and daughter had become converts. Friedrich Schlegel
was preparing to take the final step. He was lecturing at Cologne,
but making application for a regular appointment in every likely
quarter--Cologne, Paris, Würzburg, Munich, &c. "Given really tempting
conditions," he wrote in June 1804, "I should have gone even to Moscow
or Dorpat. But," he adds, "my preference was for the Rhine district."
Was this because it was a Catholic district? Not at all. "The salmon
here is unequalled, so are the crayfish, not to speak of the wine."
It was Metternich's pecuniary offer which finally induced him to take
the decisive step and join the Church of Rome. He was furious at the
essay on Winckelmann, though he expressed unbounded contempt for it.
What is most amusing of all, however, is to see how this little work
fell like a bomb among the genuine political reactionaries in Vienna.
Gentz was already approaching the stage which he had reached when
he wrote to Rahel (in 1814) that he had become terribly old and bad
(unendlich alt und schlecht), describing his condition thus: "I must
give you an idea of the form which my cynicism and egotism have taken.
As soon as I can throw down my pen, all my thoughts and time are given
to the arrangement of my rooms; I am constantly planning how to procure
more money for furniture, perfumes, and every refinement of so-called
luxury. My appetite, alas! is gone. Breakfast is the only meal I take
any interest in."
In 1805 Gentz writes to his worthy friend, Adam Müller: "What struck
me most in your letter was your criticism of Goethe's two latest
productions. I know them both, but should never have dared to write
as you do; though I will not deny that my opinion of them is the
same as yours, only still less favourable. The notes on _Rameau_ are
simply prosy and commonplace. To write such twaddle nowadays about
Voltaire and D'Alembert is really inexcusable in a Goethe. The essays
on Winckelmann are atheistic. I should never have credited Goethe with
such a bitter and perfidious hatred of Christianity, though I have long
suspected him of culpability in this matter. What indecent, cynical,
faun-like joy he seems to have felt on making the grand discovery that
it was really because Winckelmann was a "born pagan" that the different
forms of the Christian religion were a matter of such indifference to
him! No! even Goethe will not easily rise again in my estimation after
these two books!"[4]
Goethe's essay, we observe, had gone straight to the mark; the
Romanticists felt as if they had received a slap in the face, when he
declared himself hostile to their theory of art.
We must now dwell a little on the conception of nature which
corresponds to this conception of art. In _Sternbald_, as both Goethe
and Caroline indicate, the reader's interest is distracted from the
characters and the action by descriptions of scenery.
We have seen that it was Rousseau who rediscovered the feeling for
nature. As Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, playing upon Rousseau's own
words about the swallow which had built its nest under the eaves of
his first home: "He was the swallow that foretold the coming of summer
in literature." The same feeling for nature, as has also been shown,
reappears in _Werther_. The transformation which it now underwent
was this: Rousseau's point of view had been _emotional_, that of the
Romanticists was _fantastic_. Hence their return to legends and fairy
tales, to the elves and kobolds of popular superstition. Goethe had
said:
"Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
Alles ist sie mit einem Male."[5]
The Romanticists were determined to have to do only with the
kernel, with the mysterious inmost substance, which they attempted
to extricate, after having themselves inserted it. The mystic mind
mirrored itself in nature and saw in it nothing but mysteries. Tieck,
as every one knows, coined the word _Waldeinsamkeit_ (his friends
maintained that it ought to be _Waldeseinsamkeit_). Romanticism shouted
with quavering voice into the Waldeinsamkeit (forest solitude), and
echo returned quavering answers.
Alexander von Humboldt has pointed out how the ancients really only saw
beauty in nature when she was smiling, friendly, and _useful_ to man.
With the Romanticists it is the reverse. To them nature is unbeautiful
in proportion as she is useful, and most beautiful in her wildness, or
when she awakens a feeling of vague fear. They rejoice in the darkness
of night and of deep ravines, in the utter loneliness which produces a
shudder of terror; and Tieck's full moon shines as unchangeably over
the landscape as though it were a theatrical one of oiled paper with
a lamp behind it. I call it Tieck's moon, because it is incontestably
Tieck who is the originator of the Romantic moonlit landscape. Nor
is it difficult to understand how it should be he, rather than any
other of the young writers, who originates such expressions as "forest
solitude," "magic moonlit nights," &c., &c. Tieck was born in Berlin,
perhaps of all large towns the one whose surroundings possess the
fewest natural attractions. Those sandy heaths of Brandenburg, with
their tall, spare firs standing stiffly in rows like Prussian soldiers,
form as meagre a landscape as one could well find. Whilst Rousseau,
living amidst scenery of paradisaic beauty (the neighbourhood of
Geneva and Mont Blanc), was strongly, directly impressed by nature,
Tieck, in his unlovely surroundings, was seized by the city-dweller's
morbid longing for wood and mountain; and this longing gave birth to a
fantastic conception of nature. The cold daylight glare of Berlin, and
its modern, North German rationalism awoke longings for the primeval
forests and an inclination towards primitive poetry.
To prove the truth of this assertion, one has only to read such a
passage in the biography of Tieck as the following account of his stay
in Halle in 1792: "How entirely different was the nature which met
his eyes here in the green valley of the Saale, how much richer and
more friendly than the flat heaths surrounding Berlin! The feeling of
infinite longing seized him with redoubled force, and filled his heart
with almost painful excitement as he wandered through the woods in the
springtime. Once more he became intoxicated with nature; a mysterious
power seemed to drive him onwards. His favourite resting-place was the
Hölty bench near Giebichenstein, from which he overlooked the river and
the valley. How often did he watch the sun sink beneath the clouds and
the moon mirror herself with a thousand golden beams in the rippling
water, or gleam dreamily through the branches! Here he lay many a
summer night, drinking in nature in ample draughts."
Is not this the longing for nature of the man who is an exile from it,
the view of nature which has the city pavement as its background?
In the description given of the evening after a tiring walk taken
by Tieck and Wackenroder in the Fichtelgebirge, Tieck's conception
of nature is still more distinctly associated with his personal
impressions: "Wackenroder, unaccustomed to such fatigue, flung himself
at once upon the bed, but Tieck was too excited. He could not sleep
after all the experiences of that day. The spirits of nature awoke. He
opened the window. It was the mildest, most magnificent summer night.
The moon shed her soft, clear beams upon him. There it was before his
eyes, the moonlit, witching night, nature with her ancient, yet ever
new marvels and magic! His heart once again swelled high. To what far,
unknown goal was he being drawn with irresistible force? Softly and
soothingly the clear tones of a horn came floating through the night. A
feeling of sadness stole over him, and yet he was intensely happy."[6]
Observe that not even the horn is wanting. What is wanting, what
Tieck is destitute of, is any definite aim. We have the same thing
in _Sternbald_, where the wandering artist, led only by his longings
and his prophetic enthusiasm, is always, as he himself confesses,
forgetting his real aim. "It is not possible," says one of the
characters in the book, "to forget one's aim, for this reason, that the
sensible man arranges matters so that he has no aim." No one can fail
to see the close connection between this particular species of feeling
for nature and Romantic arbitrariness, nor how they mutually develop
each other.
Let us see the kind of landscapes which Franz Sternbald understands and
paints, and how he understands and paints them.
In one part of the book we read: "This was the landscape which Franz
intended to paint; but the real scene seemed very prosaic to him,
compared with its reflection in the water." Clear outlines, definite
forms, are dry prose; but the reflection in the water, the picture
as it were to its second power, is Romantic refinement, duplication,
glorification. In another part Franz says: "I should choose to paint
lonely, terrible scenes--ruinous, crumbling bridges spanning the space
between two precipitous rocks, with a foaming torrent raging in the
abyss below; strayed travellers whose cloaks flap in the wet wind;
horrid brigands rushing from their caves, stopping and plundering
carriages, and fighting with travellers." Real stage scenery this, with
melodrama into the bargain!
And in what spirit is nature apprehended? "Sometimes," says Franz, "my
imagination sets to work and will not rest until it has thought out
something quite unheard of. It would have me paint strange objects, of
complicated and almost incomprehensible construction--figures composed
of parts of all kinds of animals, their lower extremities being plants;
insects and reptiles with a strange humanness about them, expressing
human moods and passions in a wonderful and horrible manner."
What a picture! what a jumble of monstrosities! Can you not hear
Hoffmann fast approaching with his caravan of monsters? The elephant
stands on his head, and has a trunk which ends in a garfish; the cat
writes its memoirs; the door-knocker is really an old market-woman,
&c., &c. Are we not reminded here again, as in _Der Freischütz_, of the
temptations of St. Anthony, as painted by Teniers, or, better still,
by Höllen-Breughel, with a regular witches' Sabbath. To the genuine
Romanticist, nature, with all her myriads of living forms and beings,
seems a great toy-cupboard, and all the toys babble and chatter like
those in Andersen's fairy tale.
Read this description of a romantic landscape taken from Novalis's
_Heinrich von Ofterdingen_: "From a height they looked down upon a
romantic country, strewn with towns and castles, with temples and
tombs, a country which united the gentle charms of inhabited plains
with the terrible charms of deserts and precipitous mountains. The
most beautiful colours were happily blended. Mountain peaks gleamed
like fireworks in their coverings of ice and snow. The smiling plain
was clothed in the freshest of green. The distance decked itself in
every shade of blue, and the deep blue of the sea threw into relief the
innumerable bright pennons waving from the masts of numerous fleets.
In the background we could see a shipwreck, in the foreground a merry
country feast; far off the terribly beautiful eruption of a volcano
and the desolation wrought by an earthquake, and near at hand a pair
of lovers exchanging the sweetest caresses under sheltering trees. On
one side of this scene a frightful battle was raging, and at no great
distance from the battle was to be seen a theatre with a ludicrous play
going on. Upon the other side, in the foreground, the corpse of a young
girl lay upon a bier, with an inconsolable lover and weeping parents
kneeling by its side; in the background sat a sweet mother with her
child at her breast, angels nestling at her feet, and peeping through
the branches above her head."
What a pot-pourri! And over it all is shed the indispensable pale,
yellow light of that friend and well-wisher, protector and betrayer of
lovers, that supreme comforter and divinity of the Romanticists--the
man in the moon. He is their salvation. His round face and his profile
have exactly the degree of distinctness permissible or possible in a
Romantic countenance. All the knights of Romanticism wear his yellow
livery. And a truer knight of the moon than Franz Sternbald is not to
be found.
"I would," he says, "that I could fill the whole world with my song of
love, that I could move the moonlight and the rosy dawn, so that they
should echo my grief and happiness, until trees, branches, leaves,
and grass all took up the melody, repeating it as with millions of
tongues." Hereupon he sings a "moonlight song":
"Hinter'm Wasser wie flimmernde Flammen,
Berggipfel oben mit Gold beschienen,
Neigen rauschend und ernst die grünen
Gebüsche die blinkenden Häupter zusammen.
Welle, rollst du herauf den Schein,
Des Mondes rund freundlich Angesicht?
Es merkt's und freundlich bewegt sich der Hain,
Streckt die Zweig' entgegen dem Zauberlicht.
Fangen die Geister an auf den Fluthen zu springen,
Thun sich die Nachtblumen auf mit Klingen,
Wacht die Nachtigall im dicksten Baum,
Verkündigt dichterisch ihren Traum.
Wie helle, blendende Strahlen die Töne nieder fliessen,
Am Bergeshang den Wiederhall zu grüssen."[7]
Here we have it all! The glittering flames of the moon, bushes with
twinkling heads, rolling billows bearing onwards the face of the full
moon, spirits dancing upon waves, night as described by Novalis, night
flowers, and a nightingale whose song flows like clear, dazzling
moonbeams.
And exactly the same thing recurs again and again. Franz has a dream:
"Unperceived, he painted the hermit and his devotion, the forest and
its moonlight; he even succeeded, he himself knew not how, in getting
the nightingale's song into his picture." Oh, that musical pictorial
art! Was not Goethe right in saying that there is more music than
painting in the book?
It is very significant that the man who revelled thus in the fantastic
suggestions of a district where nature was poor and sterile, should
have altogether failed to appreciate the richness and luxuriance, the
abundance of healthy sap and vigour, which distinguish the south of
England. Shakespeare has had few such fervent admirers as Tieck; and
Tieck naturally had the desire to see with his own eyes the natural
surroundings amidst which his great teacher and master had spent his
life, and from which he had derived his earliest impressions. He
expected much. But, oh! what a disappointment! That mind which fancied
itself akin to Shakespeare's found nothing congenial in the scenery
round Shakespeare's home. The chief characteristic of these counties
is an almost incredible luxuriance and vigour of growth. But this
wealth of vegetation is unpoetical to the Romanticist, because it is
useful, because it has a purpose. Only the blossom which bears no
fruit is romantic. We understand his disappointment. Nowhere else does
one see such mighty, spreading oaks, nowhere such high and succulent
grass. As far as the eye can reach, the green carpet spreads over the
undulating fields and the rich meadows, where magnificent cattle graze
and ruminate. Quantities of white, yellow, and blue meadow and field
flowers break the monotony of colour, and breathe a perfume which the
moisture of the air keeps so fresh that it never palls. This vegetation
is above all else fresh, not, like that of the south, striking in its
contours. The watery, juicy plant does not live long; life streams
through it and is gone. The moist air envelops trees and plants in a
sort of luminous vapour which catches and tempers the sunbeams; and, as
in Denmark, banks of clouds constantly traverse the pale blue sky. When
this sky happens to be for a short time perfectly clear, and the sun
reaches the earth without passing through mist, the rain and dewdrops
sparkle on the green grass and upon the silken and velvet petals of
the myriads of gay flowers more brilliantly than diamonds. What matter
that the grass is destined to be eaten? Does not part of its beauty
lie in its nutritious look? What matter that the fruitful fields
are cultivated with the assistance of all the newest agricultural
machinery, or that the cattle are tended with the most intelligent
solicitude? Is not this the very reason why both animals and plants
look so strong, so well nourished, and so nourishing? What we have here
is certainly not the imposing beauty of the desert or the ocean, or of
Swiss scenery. But has not this landscape a poetry of its own? Who can
have spent an evening in Kew Gardens without mentally placing the elfin
dance from _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, or _The Merry Wives of Windsor_
in exactly this scenery, these beautiful parks, with their gigantic old
oaks? It was in these surroundings that Shakespeare wrote them. We can
divine with what eyes he looked upon the landscape. With what eyes does
Tieck look upon it? "Having seen London," says Köpke, "he wished to
make acquaintance with some other part of England. Where should he turn
his steps, if not to Shakespeare's birthplace? On the way he visited
Oxford. But neither was this scenery to his taste. The country they
drove through was luxuriantly green, splendidly cultivated; but it was
too well ordered, too artificial (No primitive poetry!); it had lost
its originality. It lacked that simplicity, that holiness, as he called
it, which touches the heart, and by which he had so often been moved in
the most sterile parts of his native land. Here industry had destroyed
the poetic aroma."
It is clear, then, that there must have been something in the scenery
of his own country which appealed to Tieck's personal predispositions.
The fantastic conception of nature would not have been carried to such
an extreme in this particular country, if there had not been something
fantastic in the scenery of the country. It is very evident that German
scenery must have met the fantastic spectator half way.
In the first volume of this work, I attempted, by means of a
description of Italian scenery, to show how unromantic even the
most beautiful of it is. Nor, in spite of the Black Forest and the
Blocksberg, can German scenery be called really fantastic; for, as
Taine says, it is only the beauty of art which is fantastic; that of
nature is more than fantastic; the fantastic does not exist except
in our human brain. Still, nature does provide excuses for a certain
amount of fantasy. It is especially to be born in mind that in
characteristically German scenery the sea is absent, and with it the
feeling of wideness and freeness which it alone gives. In river and
mountain scenery there is never the wide, open horizon to which we
Danes are accustomed.
But, not to lose myself in generalisations, let me give an idea of the
scenery amidst which Tieck himself lived longest--that district in the
neighbourhood of Dresden which goes by the name of Saxon Switzerland.
I shall describe in a few words how it impresses me, and then proceed
to show what impression it produces on a Romantic poet. This I can
do reliably and exactly, for I have personally known several Romantic
poets, and have recently travelled through the district in question in
company with an old poet of Romantic tendencies.
We had spent some days in the clear mountain air, looking out over the
high open country and rocky peaks of Bohemia, which resemble a sea,
with sharply outlined mountains emerging like islands--an interminable
stretch of fields and pine-clad rocks. We went through the Uttenwalder
Grund up to the Bastei. The valley is shut in by high, fantastic
sandstone rocks, piled up in layers, with pine trees clustering in
every crevice. The upper part of the rock often projects threateningly
over the lower, seeming as though about to fall. One sees many strange
freaks of nature--gateways, even triple gateways. In climbing up to
the Bastei, one has on the left that remarkable landscape with the
steep rocks standing out like giant gravestones--tragic, awe-inspiring
scenery, that would make a fitting background for the dance of the dead
nuns in _Robert le Diable_. Standing on the Bastei, one looks over
the great plain with its precipitous mountain islands (the fortress
of Königstein is built upon one of these), straight, hard lines,
absolutely unpicturesque. Kuhstall is an enormous dome of rock. The
whole scenery has the appearance of being designed by man, of being a
fantastic art production. The last time I saw it, in glorious sunlight,
the view was marvellously imposing. Over the great pine-forest which
clothed the lower heights, its tree-tops looking like felt or wool,
lay a bluish green haze, which spread up the sides of the surrounding
hills. The Bohemian villages lay in groups, shining like windows in the
sun--in the distance were basaltic mountains, nearer at hand pyramidal,
square, or obelisk-shaped rocks. Wherever a single deciduous tree stood
among the pines, its yellow autumnal leaves shone amidst their dark
surroundings like patches of gold. The only other yellow was that of
the lichen upon some of the rocks. These rocks looked as though giants
in the morning of time had pelted each other with them, as children
pelt each other with stones, or had played at heaping them one on the
top of another.
From the Wintersberg the hills look like the remains of a Cyclopean
city. An enormous rock, steep and smooth as a wall, stands, decked with
firs, in the centre of a wide landscape. Of all one sees, Prebischthor
is perhaps what strikes one as being most beautiful. Here again the
rocks have taken a fantastic shape, that of a gateway. A gigantic,
beam-like rock has laid itself like a lintel across two rock towers.
Sitting under it, one looks down upon two separate landscapes, one
through the arch to the left, the other an open one upon the right. As
I sat there in the evening, the first was hard, cold, austere; over the
other the sun was setting, red and glowing. The one was, as it were,
in a major, the other in a minor key; the one was like a face without
eyes, the other glowed and beamed.
Such was this scenery in the eyes of an ordinary, sober-minded
traveller. The Romanticist who was my companion seemed to me to be
less moved by the spectacle than I was; at least he said very little
about it during the course of the day. But when, towards night, we were
making our way down the mountain, his imagination was suddenly fired.
It was quite dark, and the darkness acted upon his nerves. It seemed
to him as if more and more of the spirits of nature came forth, the
darker it grew. And when, in the distance, we saw the first points of
light coming from the windows of houses on the mountain side, houses
which we could not distinguish on account of the darkness, he had the
feeling that these windows must be in the rock itself, and that we
could see in if we were only near enough. The illuminated panes were to
him great eyes, with which the spirit of the mountain looked out at us;
he felt as if the wooded hillside were watching us. He was in a weird,
eccentric, genuinely Romantic mood, and I could not follow him. But on
this occasion I had the opportunity of learning by personal observation
how a German Romanticist of the good old days viewed nature; how it
was not until night that it really became nature to him; how he did
not look at it, but to one side of it or behind it; and by observing
how much more, and yet how much less, my companion felt face to face
with nature than I did, I arrived at an understanding of the legitimacy
and the narrowness, the unnaturalness and the poetry of the Romantic
conception of nature.[8]
[1] Köpke: _Ludwig Tieck_, i. 139.
[2]
"Capricious Phantasus,
A strange old man,
Follows his foolish, wayward bent;
But now they have fettered him,
That he may cease from his trickery,
No longer confuse reasonable thought,
Nor lead poor man astray."
[3] Sepp: _Görres und seine Zeit_, 89, 90.
[4] _Briefwechsel zwischen Gentz und Adam Müller_, 48.
[5] "Nature has neither kernel nor shell, she is everything at one and
the same time."
[6] Köpke, i. 139, 163.
[7] "Beyond the lake there's a glittering and flaming; the
mountain-tops are tipped with gold; gravely the bushes rustle and bend,
and lay their twinkling green heads together. Wave, art thou rolling to
us the reflection of the round, friendly face of the moon? The trees
recognise it, and joyfully stretch forth their branches towards the
magic light. The spirits begin to dance on the waves; the flowers of
the night unfold their petals with melodious sound; where the leaves
are thickest the nightingale awakes and tells her dream; her notes flow
forth like clear, dazzling beams, to greet the echo on the mountain
side."
[8] The above is a faithful account of the effect produced by this
scenery upon the Danish poet M. Goldschmidt in the autumn of 1872.