Those among my readers who have stood in a room lined with mirrors, and
seen themselves and everything else reflected _ad infinitum_, above,
below, on every side, have some idea of the vertigo which the study of
Romantic art at times produces.
Every one who has read Holberg's _Ulysses von Ithacia_ remembers how
droll the effect is when the characters, as they are perpetually doing,
make fun of themselves and what they represent--when, for example,
Ulysses exhibits the long beard which has grown during the ten years'
campaign, or when we read upon a screen, "This is Troy," or when, at
the close, the Jews rush in and tear off the actor's back the clothes
which he had borrowed to play Ulysses in. Histrionic art, as every
one knows, depends for its effect upon illusion. And illusion is an
aim common to many of the arts. A statue and a painting deceive quite
as much as a play, the illusion being contingent upon our momentarily
taking the stone for a human being, and the painted flat surface for
receding reality, in exactly the same way as we forget the actor in
his rôle. This illusion, however, is only complete for a moment. It
is, indeed, possible for the perfectly uneducated man to be entirely
deceived. An Indian soldier in Calcutta shot an actor who was playing
the part of Othello, exclaiming: "It shall never be said that a
negro murdered a white woman in my presence!" But in the case of the
educated man, the illusion comes and goes; it comes at the moment when
the tragedy brings tears into his eyes, and goes at the moment when
he draws out his pocket-handkerchief and looks at his neighbour. The
effect of the work of art is, as it were, focussed in this illusion.
The illusion is the reflection of the work of art in the spectator's
mind--the appearance, the play, by means of which the unreal becomes
reality to the spectator.
In the simple, straightforward work of art no special attention is
devoted to illusion; it is not aimed at; nothing is done to strengthen
it or to give it piquancy; but still less is anything done to destroy
it.
It is not difficult, however, to understand how a certain piquant
quality may be communicated to the illusion produced by any art. When,
for instance, a Hermes, or any idol, is represented on a bas-relief,
when a picture represents a studio or a room with pictures hanging on
the walls, a strong indication is hereby conveyed that the bas-relief
itself is not intended to affect us as statuary, nor the pictures as
painting. And the same sort of effect is produced when one or other of
the characters in a comedy cries: "Do you take me for a stage-uncle?"
The theatrical illusion is still further heightened, or, to be quite
correct, is still more entirely forgotten, when some of the characters
in a play themselves perform a play, as in _Hamlet_ or _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_. It seems extraordinary or impossible that the
spectators of this second play should also be acting. The illusion here
is artificially strengthened, and yet at the same time weakened, by
attention being drawn to it. It is plain that this play with illusions
had an immense attraction for Tieck; it was inevitable that it should
have. Since it is illusion which makes art serious reality to the
spectator, it is by the destroying of the illusion that he is made to
feel strongly that art is free, fanciful play.
So Tieck mocks ironically at things which are usually ignored in order
not to disturb the illusion. In _Puss in Boots_ the King says to Prince
Nathaniel: "But do tell me; how is it that you who live so far away can
speak our language so fluently?" Nathaniel: "Hush!" The King: "What?"
Nathaniel: "Hush, hush! For any sake be quiet, or the audience too
will be finding out how unnatural it is." And, sure enough, one of
the spectators presently remarks: "Why in the world can't the prince
talk a foreign language and have it translated by his interpreter?
What utter nonsense it all is!" This last speech is of course sarcasm,
aimed at that demand for realism in art of which Iffland and Kotzebue
were advocates. We have one expression of the demand in question in
the French misconception of the Aristotelian doctrine of the unity of
time and place. Writing on this subject, Schlegel, following Lessing's
example, remarked that, after one had taken the great plunge and agreed
to regard the stage as the world, it was surely easy to take the
lesser one and sometimes permit the said stage to represent different
localities. And the Romanticists were never weary of extolling the old
Shakespearian theatre (where the place represented was simply intimated
by a label attached to the scenes) as a higher development of art than
that of their own day. The champions of realism in art were at that
time advocating the substitution of solid walls for scenes; Schlegel
maintained that those who insisted on having three walls on the stage
were logically obliged to go a step farther and have a fourth wall, on
the side towards the audience.
It is out of pure defiance of the philistine conception of art that
Tieck amuses himself by seating an audience upon the stage and having
the play within the play performed to the accompaniment of their
critical remarks. They censure, they praise, now condemning a scene as
superfluous, now approving the author for his courage in introducing
horses upon the stage. While the learned man and the fool are disputing
in the palace before the king upon his throne, the former says: "The
gist of my argument is, that the new play _Puss in Boots_ is a good
play." "That is exactly what I deny," says the fool; whereupon one of
the audience cries in amazement: "What! the play itself is mentioned in
the play!"
A still more extraordinary state of matters prevails in _Die Verkehrte
Welt_ ("The Topsy-turvy World"). As Scaramouch is riding through
the forest on his donkey, a thunderstorm suddenly comes on. One
naturally expects him to take shelter. Not at all. "Where the deuce
does this storm come from?" he cries; "there's not a word about it in
my part. What absurd nonsense! My donkey and I are getting soaked.
Machinist! machinist! hi! in the devil's name stop it!" The machinist
enters and excuses himself, explains that the audience had expressed
a desire for stage-thunder, and that he had consequently met their
wishes. Scaramouch entreats the audience to change its mind, but to
no purpose; thunder they will have. "What! in a sedate historical
play?" It thunders again. "It's a very simple matter," says the
machinist; "I blow a little pounded colophony through aflame; that
makes the lightning; and at the same moment an iron ball is rolled
overhead, and there you have the thunder." Play with illusion cannot
be carried further than this except by introducing in the play which
the performing audience is witnessing, another play acted before
yet another audience. "How extraordinary it is!" says Scävola, the
blockhead; "we are an audience, and yonder sit people who are an
audience too." The plays are fitted into one another like puzzle-boxes.
The madness reached its climax when, within this new inmost play, there
appears yet another play. It is confusion worse confounded. "Nay, this
is too much," cries Scävola. "Just think of it, good people all! Here
we sit as an audience and watch a play; in that play sits another
audience watching a third play, and for the actors in that third play
yet another play is being acted." And he goes on to explain, like a
true Romanticist: "One often has _dreams_ like this, and they are
terrible; and thoughts, too, sometimes spin themselves in this fashion
ever farther and farther into the heart of things. And both the one and
the other are enough to drive a man crazy."
But the music between the acts contains the key to the whole work.
The lively Allegro says: "Do ye indeed know what ye desire, ye who
seek for coherence in all things? When the golden wine gleams in the
glass and ye are animated by its good spirit, when ye feel doubly full
of life and soul, and all the floodgates of your being are opened,
what do ye think of then? Can ye order and regulate then? Ye enjoy
yourselves and the harmonious confusion." And the Rondo says: "Whenever
the philosopher is surprised by a thing, and cannot understand it, he
exclaims: 'There is no reason in it.' Nay, when reason penetrates to
the heart of itself, when it has investigated its own inmost being and
carefully observed itself, it says: 'In this, too, there is no reason.'
... But the man who with reason despises reason, is a reasonable man.
Much poetry is prose gone mad, much prose is only crippled poetry; that
which lies between poetry and prose is not the best either. O music!
whither tend thy steps? Neither is there any reason in thee."
In his critical writings Tieck himself gives us the clue to his
procedure by averring that the aim of Romantic comedy is to lull the
spectator into a dreamy mood. "In the midst of a dream," he says, "the
soul often does not believe firmly in its visions; but if the dreamer
sleeps on, the endless succession of new magic appearances restores the
illusion, keeps him in a charmed world, makes him lose the standard
of reality, delivers him up at last completely to the dominion of the
incomprehensible."
Music is the formless deep to which the wearied imagination of the
Romanticist returns after contemplating itself reflected _ad infinitum_
in its mirror chamber. And the work of art may be likened to one of
those carved ivory balls which enclose a whole set of ivory balls, one
within the other.
This style of drama was amusingly parodied by J. L. Heiberg in his
witty satirical play, _Julespög og Nytaarslöjer_ ("Christmas Fun
and New Year's Drollery"). There is less freedom and originality in
Hoffmann's imitation, _Prinzessin Blandina_, in which, in scenes laid
behind the scenes, the Stage Manager and the Director discuss the
play. The Stage Manager says: "Machinist, give the signal for night."
Director: "Why, you are surely not going to have night already? It
will disturb the illusion. It is hardly three minutes since Roderick
breakfasted in the desert." Stage Manager: "It is the direction given
in the book." Director: "Then it is the book that is crazy, and the
play is written without the slightest understanding of dramatic art."
In a different department of literature, in the writings of our Danish
philosopher, Kierkegaard, we come upon the mirror chamber with its
repeated reflections psychologically applied. As the German Romanticist
ironically hovers above his own play, with its Chinese puzzle-box
scenes and figures, so the Danish psychologist draws further and
further away from his subject by putting one author, as it were, inside
another. Listen to his explanation in the _Afsluttende Efterskrift_
("Concluding Postscript"): "My position is even a more external one
than that of any author whose characters are imaginary, but who
appears personally in his preface. A prompter, impersonal, or personal
in the third degree, I have created authors whose prefaces, nay,
whose very names are their own production. In the pseudonymous books
there is not a word of my own; I judge them as an uninterested third
party, have no knowledge of their meaning except that of the ordinary
reader, and not the most remote private connection with them, as is
indeed impossible in the case of a doubly reflected communication.
A single word from me personally, in my own name, would be a piece
of presumptuous self-forgetfulness, and would, from the dialectical
point of view, destroy the pseudonymous character of the work. I am
no more the publisher, Victor Eremita, than I am the Seducer or the
Assessor in _Enten-Eller_; Eremita is the poetically real subjective
thinker, whom we meet again in _In Vino Veritas_. In _Frygt og Bæven_
("Fear and Trembling") I am no more Johannes de Silentio than I am the
Knight of Faith whom he depicts; and just as little am I the author
of the preface to the book, it being a characteristic utterance of a
poetically-real subjective thinker. In that tale of woe, Skyldig?--Ikke
Skyldig? ("Guilty or not Guilty?"), I am no more the experimenter
than I am the subject of the experiment, since the experimenter is
a poetically-real subjective thinker, and the being he experiments
on is his psychologically inevitable production. I am a negligeable
quantity, i.e. it is immaterial what I am.... I have all along been
sensible that my personality was an obstruction which the Pseudonymi
must involuntarily and inevitably long to be rid of, or to have made as
insignificant as possible, yet which they at the same time, regarding
the matter from the ironical and reflective standpoint, must desire to
retain as repellant opposition; for I stand to them in the ironically
combined relation of secretary and dialectically reduplicated author of
the author or authors."
However different the causes of the reduplication may be in this case,
the phenomenon itself is of near kin to the foregoing one. To keep
the general public at a distance, to avoid laying bare his heart,
and, most important of all, to avoid the tiresome responsibility
entailed by speaking in his own name, Kierkegaard places as many
authors between himself and the public as possible. Even taking his
reasons into consideration, I confess that to me the proceeding seems
super-subtle, a sort of reminiscence of the Romantic irony. For
although Kierkegaard, as regards his matter, is in many ways ahead
of Romanticism, he is still connected with it by his style. It is
natural enough that he cannot, or will not, bear the responsibility
for what his imaginary characters, the Assessor and the Seducer, say;
but it is pure imagination on his part to suppose himself capable of
producing his authors at second hand, to suppose, for instance, that
he has created the hero in the Engagement Story exactly as Frater
Taciturnus would have created him. Several of his would-be authors,
Constantin Constantius and Frater Taciturnus, for example, are scarcely
to be distinguished from one another, and there is nothing peculiarly
characteristic about their productions. The third part of Stadierne
("Stages on the Road of Life") was, as Kierkegaard's own memoranda
show, originally intended to form part of _Enten-Eller_. When he
remarks (in _Afstuttende Efterskrift_, p. 216) that the most attentive
reader will hardly succeed in finding in that work, either in language
or turn of thought, a single reminiscence of Enten-Eller, he betrays
great capability of self-deception. Both works show in every line that
they are written by the same author; in both we come upon the same
thoughts, often expressed in almost the same words. The Assessor in
_Stadierne_ judges Aladdin exactly as he is judged by the Æsthete in
_Enten-Eller_: "What makes Aladdin so great is the strength of his
desire."
Along with all this duplication and reduplication we have in the case
of the Romanticists the wildest caprices in the matter of the order
of presentation. _The Topsy-turvy World_ begins with the epilogue
and ends with the prologue; by such pranks imagination proclaims its
independence of all law. Frater Taciturnus records what happened to him
last year along with what is happening to him this year; every day at
noon he notes down what happened that day a year ago (What a memory!),
and at midnight what has occurred during the day. Naturally, it is
almost impossible to separate the two threads of event. In Hoffmann's
_Kater Murr_, the cat writes its memoirs on sheets of paper which have
its master's, Kapellmeister Kreisler's, memoranda on the other side.
Both sides of the sheets are printed, the one following the other, so
that we read two utterly unconnected manuscripts mixed up with each
other, often with interruptions in the middle of sentences or words.
Wilfulness, caprice, play with one's own production could scarcely
be carried farther. Yet the dissolution of established form did go
further, much further. The Romanticists did not rest content with
having shattered the conventions of art; they proceeded to decompose
the Human personality, and that in many different manners.
It was Novalis who led the way. In _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_ the hero
seems to have a foreknowledge of everything that happens to him. "Each
new thing that he saw and heard seemed only to shove back bolts, to
open secret doors in his soul." But the strangest impression of all is
produced on him by his discovery of a mysterious book in the cave of
the hermit Count of Hohenzollern, a book in which, although he is as
yet unable to interpret it, he finds the enigma of his existence, an
existence beginning before his birth and stretching into the future
after his death. Novalis's romance being an allegory and myth, his
design being to make a single individual represent the whole eternal
story of the soul, he turns to his purpose one of the oldest hypotheses
of humanity, the idea that the individual reappears generation after
generation. Thus the past and the future take part in the present,
in the shape of memory and prophetic intuition. He does not actually
believe in the transmigration of souls, but to him, the Romanticist who
lives in the contemplation of the eternal, time is of such subordinate
significance that, just as he recognises no difference between a
natural and a supernatural event, so he sees none between past,
present, and future. In this way the individual existence is extended
throughout an unlimited period of history.
In Danish literature we find this Romantic use of the idea of a
previous existence in Heiberg's _De Nygifte_. The mother is telling her
adopted son about the death of her real son:--
"Den Morgen, da ban led sin skrækkelige Dom,
Endnu var det neppe daget--
Traadte Slutteren ind og sagde: 'Kom!
Klokken er nu paa Slaget.'
"Da sank ban for sidste Gang til mit Bryst
Og udbröd: 'Et Ord du mig give,
Et kräftigt Ord, som kan vaere min Tröst
Paa min sidste Gang i Live!"
"Og jeg sagde ...
Men, Fredrik, du skræmmer mig! sig ...
Du rejser dig ... hvad bar du i Sinde?
Du stirrer paa mig saa bleg som et Lig ...
_Fredrik._
"O Moder! Moder! hold inde!
Du sagde: 'Naar du for din Frelser staar,
Da sig: Min Gud og min Broder,
Tilgiv mig for dine Martyrsaar,
For min Anger og for min Moder.'
_Gertrud._
"Ha! hvoraf ved du det?
_Fredrik._
"Mig det var,
Forst nu mig selv jeg fatter.
Det er din virkelige Sön, du har,
Og nu lever han Livet atter."[1]
Heiberg here makes a beautiful and ingenious use of the idea. But the
Romanticists are not content with this. It is not enough for them to
transpose the personality into the past, or to deck it with the bright
peacock's tail of future existences. They split the Ego into strips,
they resolve it into its elements. They scatter it abroad through
space, as they stretch it out through time. For the laws of space and
time affect them not.
Self-consciousness is self-duplication. But it is an unhealthy self
which cannot overcome and master this selfduplication. This we saw in
the case of Lovell and of Roquairol. There is no greater misery than
morbid self-contemplation. He who indulges in it separates himself from
himself, observes himself from the point of view of a spectator, and
ere long experiences the horrible feeling of the prisoner who, when he
looks up, sees the eye of the warder at the little glass pane in the
door of his cell. His own eye has become quite as terrible to him as
another man's. What tends to make this condition permanent is partly
the religious and moral feeling that one ought never to lose sight of,
but to be always labouring at and improving one's self, and partly
natural curiosity regarding the unknown; one looks upon one's self as
a country, the coast of which is known, but the interior of which is
still to be explored.
In the case of the man who is healthy in mind and body, this
exploration goes on slowly, almost imperceptibly. One fine day the poor
prisoner, looking up from his work, finds that the eye has disappeared
from the peep-hole. Only now does he begin to breathe, to live. Whether
his work be important or unimportant, divine or merely useful, whether
he be a Michael Angelo or a cork-cutter, from that moment there is
a feeling of balance and unity in his mind; he feels that he is an
entire being. In the case of sickly, inactive natures, the eye is never
removed from the peep-hole, and a long continuation of this condition
leads the individual to the verge of madness. But it is to this very
condition that the Romanticists cling. It is this which gives birth to
the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger,"[2] an idea which finds its
first expression in Jean Paul's _Leibgeber-Schoppe_ (in the meditation
on Fichte's Ego), and is to be found in almost all Hoffmann's tales,
reaching its climax in his chief work, _Die Elixire des Teufels_.
It crops up in the writings of all the Romanticists; we have it in
Kleist's _Amphitryon_, in Achim von Arnim's _Die beiden Waldemar_, in
Chamisso's poem, _Erscheinung_, and Brentano treats it comically in
_Die mehreren Wehmüller_. To Hoffmann the Ego is simply a disguise
worn on the top of another disguise, and he amuses himself by peeling
off these disguises one by one. He carries out what Roquairol only
suggested.
Theodor Hoffmann's life explains the peculiar form which Romantic
self-duplication took in his case. He was born in Königsberg in 1776,
the son of parents whose inharmonious union was soon dissolved. His
mother belonged to a painfully well-regulated and conventional family;
his father was as eccentric as he was clever, and had irregular habits
which were a great affliction to his wife's relations. Theodor lost his
mother early, and the pedantic severity with which his uncle brought
him up only made the gifted boy's occasional wild outbursts wilder and
madder. He found vent for his feelings in peculiar musical compositions
and remarkably clever caricatures. He studied law as a profession,
but at the same time devoted much attention to music. At an early age
he fell in love with a young married woman. Feeling that the violence
of this passion was undermining his reason, he cured himself of it by
tearing himself away from his native town, at the age of twenty.
Soon after this he received a government appointment in Posen. The
wild dissipation which prevailed in Poland in those days carried him
completely off his feet and materially altered his character. For
caricaturing one of his superiors he was removed to Plozk, where he led
a more regular life.
[Illustration: HOFFMANN]
In 1804 he was transferred to Warsaw, at that time a Prussian town;
and it was the full, varied, and, to a German, quite foreign life of
this important city which gave Hoffmann's literary tendencies their
decisive, final bent. Much that is mad and strange in his writings
may be attributed to the wild, reckless joviality of the Warsaw days.
In Warsaw he met Zacharias Werner, another author who was distinctly
influenced by the social life of Poland in the beginning of the
century. And here, whilst conscientiously fulfilling the duties of
his appointment, he not only found time to cultivate his favourite
art, music, and to frequent the society of other musical devotees,
but also managed to decorate several halls with frescoes, to ornament
a library with alto-reliefs executed in bronze, and to paint a room
in the Egyptian style, adroitly introducing amongst the extraordinary
representations of Egyptian gods, caricatures of his acquaintances,
whom he provided with tails and wings. It was in Warsaw too that he
conducted concerts for the first time.
In 1806, as every one knows, Prussian rule in Warsaw came to an end.
Hoffmann saw the streets of the town crowded, first with the vanguard
of the Russian army--Tartars, Cossacks, and Bashkirs--then with Murat's
troops, watched the migrations of the races set in motion by Napoleon's
campaign, and at last saw Napoleon himself, whom he, the good German,
abhorred as a tyrant. In Dresden, in 1813, he was eye-witness of
several small skirmishes and one battle; he walked over a battlefield,
lived through a famine and a species of plague which followed in the
train of the war--in short, his imagination was fertilised by all the
horrors of the period, the first result being, characteristically
enough, merely a set of funny caricatures of the French.
When still quite a young man, he had married a beautiful Polish lady,
who made him a devoted and patient wife; it was probably thanks to her
that, in spite of his overstrained nerves, he lived as long as he did.
His marriage by no means precluded many passionate attachments to other
women, but all these seem to have had their root rather in imagination
than in any real feeling. Three days after a young lady with whom he
was madly in love had engaged herself to another, he was perfectly
happy, having cured himself of his passion by satirising it. He was
helped to bear his woe by the pleasure of caricaturing it.
After figuring as a theatrical architect in Bamberg and conductor
of an orchestra in Dresden, he went to Berlin, where he spent the
last years of his life as a member of the Kammergericht (one of the
principal courts of justice). As was natural, the astonishingly gifted
man who could write books, improvise on the piano, compose operas, draw
caricatures, and scintillate wit when he was in the humour, became
a lion in social circles and a fêted frequenter of the taverns. He
devoted a great share of his energy and talent to the observation of
his own moods, which he watched closely and described day by day in a
kind of diary.
Wine, which he only regarded as an exciting stimulant, was in reality
much more than this to him. To it he owed much of his inspiration, his
visions, those hallucinations which at first were fanciful, but became
ever more serious. In his case intoxication actually produced a new
kind of fantastic poetry. When under the influence of alcohol, he saw
the darkness suddenly illuminated by phosphorescent light, or saw a
gnome rise through the floor, or saw himself surrounded by spectres and
terrible grimacing figures, which went on disappearing and reappearing
in all kinds of grotesque disguises.
It was almost inevitable that this painstaking observer of his own
moods and of the external peculiarities, more especially the oddities,
of other men, should care little about nature. If he took a walk in
summer, it was only to reach some place or other where he would be
certain to meet human beings; and he seldom passed a pastry-cook's or
a tavern without dropping in to see what kind of people frequented it.
This explains the striking want of any feeling for fresh, open-air
nature in his books. His mind was at home in a tavern, not in forest
solitudes. But if his sense of the beauties of nature was weak, his
enthusiasm for art was so much the more intense; genuine Romanticist
that he is, half of his productions treat of art.
The peculiar, Romantic theory of human personality held by a
poet of this temperament and this development was a product of
over-impressionable and over-strained nerves and of irregular living.
In his diary I find the following memoranda:--
"1804.--Drank Bischof at the new club from 4 to 10. Frightfully
agitated in the evening. Nerves excited by the spiced wine. Possessed
by thoughts of death and Doppelgänger.
"1809.--Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 6th; I imagine
myself looking at my Ego through a kaleidoscope--all the forms moving
round me are Egos, and annoy me by what they do and leave undone.
"1810.--Why do I think so much, sleeping and waking, about madness?"
It was a settled conviction with Hoffmann that when anything good
befalls a man, an evil power is always lurking in the background
to paralyse the action of the good power. As he expresses it: "The
devil thrusts his tail into everything." He was haunted, says his
biographer, Hitzig, by a fear of mysterious horrors, of "Doppelgänger"
and spectral apparitions of every kind. He used to look anxiously
round while writing about them; and if it was at night, he would often
wake his wife and beg her to keep him company till he had finished. He
imparted his own fear of ghosts to the characters he created; he drew
them "as he himself was drawn in the great book of creation." It does
not surprise us to learn that of his own works, he preferred those
which contain the most gruesome pictures of madness or the weirdest
caricatures--_Brambilla_, for instance.
He relies for effect, in a manner which soon becomes mannerism, upon
the sharp contrasts with which he ushers in his terrific or comical
scenes. From the commonest, most prosaic every-day life we are
suddenly transported into a perfectly distorted world, where miracles
and juggling tricks of every kind so bewilder us that in the end no
relation, no species of life, no personality, seems definite and
certain. We are always in doubt as to whether we are dealing with a
real person, with his spectre, with his essence in another form or
other power, or with his fantastic "Doppelgänger."
In one of the lighter tales of Hoffmann's last period, _Der
Doppelgänger_, the two principal characters resemble each other so
closely that one is constantly being taken for the other; the one
is wounded instead of the other; the betrothed of the one cannot
distinguish him from the other, &c., &c. All kinds of absurd mistakes
are made possible, and the dread of "Doppelgängerei" is turned to good
account. The common-sense explanation of the matter is insisted on
(much as it is in Brentano's _Die mehreren Wehmüller_), simply because
Hoffmann for once, by way of a change, fancied making some attempt at
explanation. The explanation, as a matter of fact, explains nothing.
All Hoffmann really cared for was the fantastically gruesome effect,
just as all Brentano cared for was the fantastically comical one. _Der
Doppelgänger_ possesses no artistic merit.
There is wittier and more audacious invention in the tale, _The
Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza_. In the first place, we are
left uncertain whether the dog is a metamorphosed human being or not;
he himself says: "It is possible that I am really Montiel, who was
punished by being compelled to assume the shape of a dog; if so, the
punishment has been a source of pleasure and amusement." In the second
place, even the dog, as dog, sees himself duplicated, and is conscious
of the dissolution of the unity of his being. "Sometimes I actually saw
myself lying in front of myself like another Berganza, another which
yet was myself; and I, Berganza, saw another Berganza maltreated by the
witches, and growled and barked at him."
Still greater is the audacity, still more extravagant the whimsicality
in the tale of _The Golden Jar_. In it an ugly old Dresden apple-woman
is at the same time the beautiful bronze knocker on Registrar
Lindhorst's door. The metal face of the door-knocker occasionally
wrinkles itself up into the old crone's crabbed smile. In addition to
this, she is the odious fortune-teller, Frau Rauerin, and good old
Lise, the fond nurse of the young heroine of the tale. She can (like
the fortune-teller in _Der Doppelgänger_) suddenly change dress,
shape, and features. When the matter of her parentage is cleared up, we
learn that her papa was a "shabby feather broom," made of feathers from
a dragon's wing, while her mamma was "a miserable beetroot."
Lindhorst, the stolid Registrar, who never seems to feel at home except
when sitting in his library in his flowered dressing-gown, surrounded
by old manuscripts, is also a great magician, who, in the middle of
an ordinary conversation, suddenly begins to relate the most insane
occurrences as if they were the most natural in the world. He tells,
for instance, that he was once invisibly present at a party--quite a
simple matter--he was in the punch-bowl. On another occasion he takes
off his dressing-gown, steps without more ado into a bowl of blazing
arrack, vanishes in the flames, and allows himself to be drunk.
In creating these doubled and trebled existences, the character,
for instance, of the Archive Keeper, who is a Registrar by day
and a salamander at night, Hoffmann obviously had in his mind the
strange contrast between his own official life, as the conscientious
criminal judge, severely rejecting all considerations of sentiment or
æstheticism, and his free night life as king of the boundless realm of
imagination--a life in which reality, as such, had no part.
But of all Hoffmann's tales, it is _Die Elixire des Teufels_ ("The
Elixir of Satan") which makes the most powerful impression. Let us
dwell for a moment on the hero of this romance, Brother Medardus; for
he is a typical character. It is impossible in a brief summary to
convey any idea of the mysterious, weird horror of the book; to feel
this one must read it. A work more saturated with voluptuousness and
horrors the Romantic School, with all its long practice in the style,
never produced.--In a certain monastery is preserved a flask of Satanic
elixir, which had belonged to St. Anthony. This elixir is believed to
possess magic properties. A monk who has tasted it becomes so eloquent
that ere long he is the most famous preacher of the monastery. But his
eloquence is not of a pious or healthy, but of a carnal, strangely
exciting, dæmonic description. Brother Medardus drinks from the flask.
A charming woman, his penitent, falls in love with him, and a longing
for the pleasures and delights of the world impels him to leave the
monastery. He finds a young man, Count Viktorin, asleep in the forest
on the edge of a precipice, and half accidentally pushes him over. From
this time onwards every one takes him for the Count.
"My own Ego, the sport of a cruel accident, was dissolved into strange
forms, and floated helplessly away upon the sea of circumstances. I
could not find myself again. Viktorin is undoubtedly pushed over the
precipice by the accident which directed my hand, not my will--I step
into his place." And as though this were not marvellous enough, he
adds: "But Reinhold knows Father Medardus, the preacher of the Capuchin
Monastery; and thus to him I am what I really am. Nevertheless, I am
obliged to take Viktorin's place with the Baroness, for I am Viktorin.
I am that which I appear to be, and I do not appear to be that which I
am. At strife with my own Ego, I am an unanswerable riddle to myself."
Medardus, in his own form, now enters into relations with Viktorin's
mistress, the Baroness, who has no idea that he is not Viktorin. He
is possessed by carnal desires; women fall in love with him; he gives
himself up to sensual pleasures, and in order to attain the fulfilment
of his wishes, commits crimes of every kind, including murder. Horrible
visions haunt him and drive him from place to place. In the end he is
denounced and imprisoned. In prison the confusion of individualities
reaches a climax. "I could not sleep; in the strange reflections cast
by the dull, wavering light of the lamp upon the walls and ceiling, I
saw all kinds of distorted faces grinning at me. I put out the lamp and
buried my head in my pillow of straw, only to be still more horribly
tormented by the hollow groans of the prisoners and the rattling of
their chains." It seems to him that he is listening to the death-rattle
of his victims. And now he plainly hears a gentle, measured knocking
beneath him. "I listened, the knocking continued, and sounds of strange
laughter came up through the floor. I sprang up and flung myself upon
the straw mattress, but the knocking went on, accompanied by laughter
and groans. Presently, an ugly, hoarse, stammering voice began calling
gently but persistently: 'Me-dar-dus, Me-dar-dus!' An icy shiver ran
through my veins, but I took courage and shouted: 'Who is there? Who
is there?'" Then the knocking and stammering begins directly beneath
his feet: "He, he, he! He, he, he! Lit-tle brother, lit-tle brother
Me-dar-dus ... I am here, am here ... le-let me in ... we will g-g-go
into the woo-woo-woods, to the woo-woo-woods." To his horror he seems
to recognise his own voice. Some of the flagstones of the floor are
pushed up, and his own face, in a monk's cowl, appears. This other
Medardus is, like him, imprisoned, has confessed, and is condemned to
death. Now everything happens as if in a dream. He no longer knows
whether he is really the hero of the events which he believes to have
happened, or whether the whole is a vivid dream. "I feel as if I had
been listening in a dream to the story of an unfortunate wretch, the
plaything of evil powers, who have driven him hither and thither, and
urged him on from crime to crime."
He is acquitted; the happiest moment of his life is at hand; he is to
be united to the woman he loves. It is their wedding day. "At that
very moment a dull sound rose from the street below; we heard the
shouting of hollow voices and the slow rumbling of a heavy vehicle.
I ran to the window. In front of the palace, a cart, driven by the
headsman's apprentice, was stopping; in it sat the Monk and a Capuchin
friar who was praying loudly and fervently with him. Though the Monk
was disfigured by fear and by a bristly beard, the features of my
terrible Doppelgänger were only too easily recognisable. Just as the
cart, which had been stopped for the moment by the throng, rolled on
again, he suddenly glared up at me with his horrible glistening eyes,
and laughed loud, and yelled: Bridegroom! Bridegroom! Come up on to the
housetop! There we will wrestle with one another, and he who throws the
other down is king and has the right to drink blood!' I cried: 'You
monster! What have I to do with you?' Aurelia flung her arms round me
and drew me forcibly away from the window, crying: 'For God and the
Holy Virgin's sake!... It is Medardus, my brother Leonard's murderer,
whom they are taking to execution.' ... Leonard! Leonard! The spirits
of hell awoke within me, and exerted all the power they possess over
the wicked, abandoned sinner. I seized Aurelia with such fury that she
shook with fear: 'Ha, ha, ha! mad, foolish woman! I, I, your lover,
your bridegroom, am Medardus, am your brother's murderer. You, the
Monk's bride, would call down vengeance upon him? Ho, ho, ho! I am
king--I will drink your blood.'"
He strikes her to the earth. His hands are covered with her blood.
He rushes out into the street, frees the Monk, deals blows right and
left with knife and fist, and escapes into the forest. "I had but
one thought left, the hunted animal's thought of escape. I rose, but
had not taken many steps before a man sprang upon my back and flung
his arms round my neck. In vain I tried to shake him off; I flung
myself down; I rubbed myself against the trees--all to no purpose--the
man only chuckled scornfully. Suddenly the moon shone clear through
the dark firs, and the horrible, deathly pale face of the Monk, the
supposed Medardus, the Doppelgänger, glared at me with the same
appalling glance he had shot at me from the cart. 'He, he, he! little
brother! I am w-w-with you still; I'll n-n-never let you go. I can't
r-r-run like you. Y-you must carry me. They were go-go-going to break
me on the wh-wh-wheel, but I got away.'" This situation is spun out
_ad infinitum_, but I forbear. To the end of the book one is uncertain
of the real significance of the events, of the ethical tendency of
the actions, so completely in this case has imagination disintegrated
personality.
The Scandinavian author, Ingemann, has followed Hoffmann in this path.
He turns to account, for instance, the eeriness in the idea of loudly
calling one's own name in a churchyard at midnight; see his tale, _The
Sphinx_, and others in the so-called Callot-Hoffmann style.
But, as already observed, Romanticism is not content with stretching
out and splitting up the Ego, with spreading it throughout time and
space. It dissolves it into its elements, takes from it here, adds to
it there, makes it the plaything of free fancy. Here, if anywhere,
Romanticism is profound; its psychology is correct, but one-sided; it
is always on the night side or on the inevitability of things that it
dwells; there is nothing emancipating or elevating about it.
In the old days the Ego, the soul, the personality, was regarded as
a being whose attributes were its so-called capacities and powers.
The words "capacity" and "power," however, only signify that there is
in me the possibility of certain events, of my seeing, reading, &c.
My true being does not consist of possibilities, but of these events
themselves, of my actual condition. My real being is a sequence of
inward events. For me, my Ego is composed of a long series of mental
pictures and ideas. Of this Ego, I constantly, daily, lose some part.
Forgetfulness swallows up gigantic pieces of it. Of all the faces I
saw on the street yesterday and the day before, of all the sensations
which were mine, only one or two remain in my memory. If I go still
farther back, only an exceptionally powerful sensation or thought
here and there emerges, like a solitary rocky island, from the ocean
of forgetfulness. We only keep together the ideas and pictures that
remain to us from our past lives by means of the association of these
ideas, that is to say, by the aid of the peculiar power they have, in
virtue of certain laws, of recalling each other. If we had no numerical
system, no dates, no almanacs, wherewith to give some coherence to our
different memories, we should have an extremely slight and indistinct
idea of our Ego. But however substantial the long inward chain may seem
(and it is strengthened, it gains in tenacity, every time we run over
its links in our memory), it happens that we at times introduce into it
a link which does not belong to it, at times take a link from it and
place it in another chain.[3]
The first of these actions, the introducing of new, incongruous links
into the chain of memory, happens in dreams. We dream we have done
many things which we have never done. It also happens when we have a
false recollection. He who has seen a white sheet blowing about in the
dark, and believes he has seen a ghost, has such a false recollection.
Most myths and legends, especially religious legends, come into
existence in this way.
It frequently happens, however, that, instead of adding links to the
chain of the Ego, we withdraw them. Thus the sick man, when his mind
is wandering, supposes that the words he hears are spoken by a strange
voice, or endows his inward visions with an outward reality, as Luther
did when he saw the devil in his room in the Wartburg; and the madman
not only partly, but entirely confuses himself with some one else.
In a state of reason, then, the Ego is an artificial production, the
result of association of ideas. I am certain of my own identity--in the
first place, because I associate my name, that sound which I call my
name, with the chain of my inward experiences, and secondly, because I
keep all the links of this chain connected by the association of ideas,
by virtue of which they produce each other. But, since the Ego is thus
not an innate but an acquired conception, founded upon an association
of ideas which has to maintain itself against the constant attacks of
sleep, dreams, imaginations, hallucinations, and mental derangement, it
is by its nature exposed to manifold dangers. Just as disease is ever
lying in wait for our bodies, so madness lies in wait at the threshold
of the Ego, and every now and again we hear it knock.
It is of this correct psychological theory, originally propounded
by Hume, that the Romanticists, though they do not define it
scientifically, nevertheless have a presentiment. Dreams, dipsomania,
hallucinations, madness, all the powers which disintegrate the Ego,
which disconnect its links, are their familiar friends. Read, for
instance, Hoffmann's tale, _The Golden Jar_, and you will hear voices
issue from the apple-baskets, and the leaves and flowers of the
elder-tree sing; you will see the door-knocker make faces, &c., &c. The
strange, striking effect is here specially due to the way in which
the apparitions suddenly emerge from a background of the most humdrum,
ordinary description, from piles of legal documents, or from tureens
and goblets. All Hoffmann's characters (like Andersen's Councillor
in _The Galoshes of Fortune_, which is an imitation of Hoffmann) are
considered by their neighbours to be either drunk or mad, because they
always treat their dreams and visions as realities.
Hoffmann created most of his principal characters in his own image.
His whole life resolved itself into moods. We see from his diary
how anxiously and minutely he observed these. We come on such
entries as: "Romantically religious mood; excitedly humorous mood,
leading finally to those thoughts of madness which so often force
themselves upon me; humorously discontented, highly-wrought musical,
romantic moods; extremely irritable mood, romantic and capricious in
the highest degree; strange, excited, but poetic gloominess; very
comfortable, brusque, ironical, overstrained, morose, perfectly weak
moods; extraordinary, but miserable moods; moods in which I felt
deep veneration for myself and praised myself immoderately; _senza
entusiasmo, senza esaltazione_, every-day moods," &c., &c.
We seem to see the man's spiritual life spread and split itself up
fan-wise into musical high and low spirits. It is easy to guess from
this register of moods that Hoffmann, genuine lover of night as he was,
was in the habit of going to bed towards morning, after having spent
the evening and night in a tavern.
Romanticism having thus dissolved the Ego, proceeds to form fantastic
Egos, adding here, taking away there.
Take, for an example, Hoffmann's _Klein Zaches_, the little monster who
has been endowed by a fairy with the peculiarity "that everything good
that others think, say, or do in his presence is attributed to him;
the result being that in the society of handsome, refined, intelligent
persons he also is taken to be handsome, refined, and cultured--is
taken, in short, for a model of every species of perfection with
which he comes in contact." When the student reads aloud his charming
poems, it is Zaches who is credited with them; when the musician
plays or the professor performs his experiments, it is Zaches who
gets the honour and the praise. He grows in greatness, becomes an
important man, is made Prime Minister, but ends his days by drowning
in a toilet-basin. Without overlooking the satiric symbolism of the
story, I draw attention to the fact that the author has here amused
himself by endowing one personality with qualities properly belonging
to others, in other words, by dissolving individuality and disregarding
its limits. With the same satirical intention, the same idea is worked
out more ingeniously, though more roughly, by Hostrup, the Dane, in his
comedy, _En Spurv i Tranedans_ ("A Sparrow among the Cranes" = a dwarf
among the giants), in which each one of the other characters attributes
to the comical young journeyman tailor the qualities which he himself
values most.
Here we have Romanticism amusing itself by adding qualities to human
nature; but it found subtracting them an equally attractive amusement.
It deprives the individual of attributes which would seem to form an
organic part of it; and by taking these away it divides the human being
as lower organisms, worms, for example, are divided into greater and
smaller parts, both of which live. It deprives the individual, for
instance, of his shadow. In Chamisso's _Peter Schlemihl_, the man in
the grey coat kneels down before Peter, and, with admirable dexterity,
strips the shadow off him and off the grass, rolls it up and pockets
it--and the story shows us the misfortunes which are certain to befall
the man who has lost his shadow.
This same tale of _Peter Schlemihl_ shows how Romanticism, as a
spiritual force, succeeded in impressing a uniform stamp on the
most heterogeneous talents. It would be difficult to imagine two
natures more unlike than Chamisso's and Hoffmann's; hence the plot of
Chamisso's tale is as simple and readily comprehensible as the plots of
Hoffmann's are morbidly extraordinary.
Adalbert von Chamisso was a Frenchman born, who acquired the German
character remarkably quickly and completely, to the extent even of
developing more than one quality which we are accustomed to consider
essentially German. The son of a French nobleman, he was born in
1781 in the castle of Boncourt, in Champagne. Driven from France as
a boy during the Reign of Terror, he became one of Queen Louisa of
Prussia's pages, and later, at the age of twenty, a lieutenant in
the Prussian army. He was a serious, almost painfully earnest, but
absolutely healthy-minded man of sterling worth, brave and honourable,
with a little of the heaviness of the German about him and much of the
liveliness of the Frenchman.
The reverse of Hoffmann, he was no lover of social pleasures, but all
the more ardent a lover of nature. He longed on hot summer days to
be able to go about naked in his garden with his pipe in his mouth.
Modern dress, modern domestic life and social formalities he regarded
in the light of burdensome fetters. His love of nature led him to
circumnavigate the globe, enamoured him of the South Sea Islands, and
is expressed in much of his poetry.
Nevertheless, the imperceptible intellectual compulsion exercised by
the age caused him, as author, to adopt Romantic theories and write in
the Romantic style. It is characteristic, however, that when in such a
poem as _Erscheinung_ ("The Apparition") he treats the Romantic idea of
the "Doppelgänger," he does it with a certain moral force which leaves
on the reader's mind the impression of genuine despair. The narrator
comes home at night and sees himself sitting at his desk. "Who are
you?" he asks. "Who disturbs me thus?" returns the "Doppelgänger":--
"Und er: 'So lass uns, wer du seist, erfahren!'
Und ich: 'Ein solcher bin ich, der getrachtet
Nur einzig nach dem Schönen, Guten, Wahren;
Der Opfer nie dem Götzendienst geschlachtet,
Und nie gefröhnt dein weltlich-eitlen Brauch,
Verkannt, verhöhnt, der Schmerzen nie geachtet:
Der irrend zwar und träumend oft den Rauch
Für Flamme hielt, doch mutig beim Erwachen
Das Rechte nur verfocht:--bist du das auch?'
Und er mit wildem kreischend-lautem Lachen:
'Der du dich rühmst zu sein, der bin ich nicht.
Gar anders ist's bestellt um meine Sachen.
Ich bin ein feiger, lügenhafter Wicht,
Ein Heuchler mir und ändern, tief im Herzen
Nur Eigennutz, und Trug im Angesicht.
Verkannter Edler du mit deinen Schmerzen,
Wer kennt sich nun? wer gab das rechte Zeichen?
Wer soll, ich oder du, sein Selbst verscherzen?
Tritt her, so du es wagst, ich will dir weichen!'
Drauf mit Entsetzen ich zu jenem Graus:
'Du bist es, bleib und lass hinweg mich schleichen!'
Und schlich zu weinen, in die Nacht hinaus."[4]
The painful moral self-recognition endows the ghost story with
marvellous significance.
Chamisso's double nationality was a source of much unhappiness to
him in his younger days, when there was violent enmity between the
land of his birth and his adopted country. In one of his letters to
Varnhagen (December 1805) he writes: "'No country, no people--each man
for himself!' These words of yours seemed to come straight from my
own heart. They almost startled me; I had to wipe away the tears that
rolled down my cheeks. Oh! the same sentiment must have made itself
felt in all my letters, every one!"
When, in 1806, Napoleon began the war with Prussia, he issued an order
that every Frenchman serving in the enemy's ranks should, when taken
prisoner, be tried by court-martial and shot within twenty-four hours.
Hence Chamisso, who had in vain demanded to be allowed to resign his
commission, was exposed to the chance of a disgraceful death.
He visited France in the following year, but in Paris there was nothing
to attract him. "Wherever I am," he complains, "I am countryless. Land
and people are foreign to me; hence I am perpetually longing." He was
one of the bravest and most capable of German officers (his behaviour
on the occasion of the surrender of Hameln proves this), but, as a
Frenchman born and an admirer of Napoleon, he would have preferred not
to have taken part in the war against France and the Emperor.
After his resignation was actually accepted, he spent some time
at the court of Madame de Staël, and made the acquaintance of her
international circle of friends. The year 1813, the year of Prussia's
declaration of war against France, was the most trying of all for the
unfortunate young Franco-German. His heart was divided; he desired
the fall of Napoleon because he hated despotism, but at the same time
he felt every humiliation which befell the French troops during their
retreat from Russia, and every insulting word spoken of the Emperor, as
if the misfortune had happened, the insult been offered, to himself.
And with this very natural feeling his German associates showed no
forbearance. He often cried despairingly: "No, the times have no sword
for me." "Action and inaction," he writes in May 1813, "are equally
painful to me."
This was the mood which produced his most notable work, _Peter
Schlemihl_. The great historical events which harrowed his feelings
made him intellectually productive; the summer of 1813 was a
turning-point in his life. "I had no longer a country," he says, "or as
yet no country." And so the man without a country writes the tale of
the man without a shadow. In spite of its intangibility, a man's shadow
is, like his country, like his home, one of his natural possessions,
a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which is, as it were,
part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so entirely
natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned
as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter
of course. Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great
sorrow of his life, in his daringly imagined fable. And strangely
enough, he not only figuratively gave in it the essence of all his past
experiences, but also prophetically imaged his future, his voyage round
the world and his scientific labours. After Schlemihl has escaped from
the temptations of the devil, he accidentally comes into possession of
the seven-leagued boots, which take him to every country in the world,
and enable him to pursue his favourite study to the greatest advantage.
Schlemihl himself says: "My future suddenly showed itself clearly to
the eyes of my soul. Banished from human society by the misdemeanours
of my youth, I was thrown into the arms of Nature, whom I had always
loved. The earth was given to me as a rich garden, study as the
directing influence and strength of my life, knowledge as its aim."
The originality of its plot and the remarkable clearness of its style
(this last a characteristic of all Chamisso's writing, and evidently
his intellectual inheritance as a Frenchman) made _Peter Schlemihl_ an
extraordinary success. It was translated into nearly every language.
Ten years after its publication a new kind of lamp, which cast no
shadow, was named the Schlemihl lamp.
Chamisso's success naturally roused Hoffmann to emulation. In the
clever little _Story of the Lost Reflection_, the hero leaves his
reflection in Italy with the entrancing Giulietta, who has bewitched
him, and returns home to his wife without it. His little son,
discovering suddenly one day that his father has no reflection, drops
the mirror he is holding, and runs weeping from the room. The mother
comes in with astonishment and fright written on every feature. "What
is this Rasmus has been telling me about you?" she asks. "That I have
no reflection, I suppose, my dear," answers Spikher with a forced
laugh, and proceeds to try to prove that it is foolish to believe that
a man can lose his reflection, but that even if the thing be possible,
it is a matter of no importance, seeing that a reflection is simply an
illusion. Self-contemplation only leads to vanity, and, moreover, such
an image splits up one's personality into truth and imagination.
Here we have the mirror chamber developed to such a point that the
reflections move about independently, instead of following their
originals. It is very amusing, very original and fantastic, and, as one
is at liberty to understand by the reflection whatever one chooses, it
may even be said to be very profound. I express no opinion, but simply
draw attention to fact.
We have seen that the Romanticist is instinctively, inevitably, the
enemy of clearly defined form in art. We have seen Hoffmann mixing
up the different parts of his book to the extent of having part of
one story on the front, part of quite a different one on the back of
the same leaf; have seen Tieck composing dramas like so many puzzle
balls one within the other, to prevent the reader taking them too
_seriously_, and Kierkegaard fitting one author inside another in
the Chinese box fashion, on the strength of the theory that truth
can only be imparted indirectly, a theory which he ended by treating
with scorn--we have seen, in a word, that the artistic standpoint
of Romanticism is the exact opposite of the artistic standpoint of
the ancients. And when, with their leaning to the supernatural, the
Romanticists extend the personality of the individual throughout
several successive generations, representing him as living before his
birth and after his death, or represent him as a day-dreamer, half
visionary and half madman, or humorously endow him with other men's
attributes and despoil him of his own, fantastically filching now a
shadow, now a reflection, they show by all this fantastic duplication
and imagination that their psychological standpoint too, is an
absolutely different one; for in the days of old both the work of art
and the personality were whole, were of one piece. The movement is a
perfectly consistent one, regarded as the antipodes of classicism, in
short, as Romanticism.
But, granted that man is of necessity, by his very nature, a
divided, complex being, he is nevertheless, as the healthy, vigorous
personality, one. Aim, will, resolve, make him a complete unit. If, as
a natural product, the human being is only a group held more or less
firmly together by association of ideas, as a mind he is a complete
whole; in his will all the elements of the mind are united. Romanticism
only understood and depicted human nature with genius from the natural,
from the night side. It made no closer approach in this than in any
other of its endeavours to intellectual collectedness, unity, and
liberty.
[1] "The morning he suffered his terrible sentence, ere yet it was
day, the warder entered and said: 'Come! the hour is about to strike.'
Then he fell on my breast for the last time, crying: 'Say a word, a
word of power, to strengthen me for the last steps I am to take on
earth!' And I said ... But, Fredrik, you frighten me. What is it? Why
do you rise and gaze on me thus, pale as a corpse? _Fredrik_--O mother!
mother! stop! You said: 'When you stand before your Creator, say: My
God and my Brother, forgive me for the sake of Thy passion, of my
repentance, and of my mother!' _Gertrud_--Oh, tell how you know this?
_Fredrik_--Because it was to me you spoke; not till this moment have I
understood myself; I am your own son, now living life over again."
[2] The apparition of a person, which appears to himself. There being
no exact English equivalent of "Doppelgänger" and "Doppelgängerei,"
these words are retained throughout in German.--_Transl_.
[3] Taine: _De l'Intelligence_, ii. 169.
[4] "_He_. Then tell who you are!
"_I_. I am a man whose one and only aim has been the beautiful, the
good, the true. I have never sacrificed to idols, never pandered to the
foolish requirements of fashion; the pain caused by misunderstanding
and scorn I have disregarded. In my wanderings, in my dreams, I have
indeed often taken smoke for flame, but the moment I awoke I upheld
what I knew to be the right. Can you say the same?
"_He_ (with a wild, loud, grating laugh). _I_ am not the man that you
boast yourself to be, but one of a very different character. I am a
cowardly, untruthful wretch, a hypocrite to myself and others; my heart
is the home of selfishness, deceit is on my tongue. You misunderstood
hero of the many sufferings, which of us is it that knows himself?
which of us has given the true description? which is the real man? Come
here and take my place if you dare? I am ready to make way for you.
"_I_ (with horrible conviction). You are the man! Stay here and let me
slink away!--And out into the night I went, to weep."