The traveller who visits a mine is let down into a subterranean shaft
in company with a man who carries a lamp, by the uncertain light of
which they explore the hidden depths. It is on such an expedition that
I now invite my readers to accompany me. The shaft to which we are
about to descend is that of the German "soul," a mine as deep, as dark,
as strange, as rich in precious metal and in worthless refuse as any
other. We shall note the imprint received by this soul in the days of
Romanticism, for this purpose dwelling at length on the Romanticist who
above all others is the poet of the soul--Novalis.
No word in any other language is the exact equivalent of the German
word "Gemüth," here translated "soul." "Gemüth" is something peculiarly
German. It is the inward flame, the inward crucible. In the famous
words of the "Wanderer's Sturmlied":--
"Innre Wärme,
Seelenwärme,
Mittelpunkt!
Glüh entgegen
Phöb-Apollon,
Kalt wird sonst
Sein Fürstenblick
Ueber dich vorübergleiten,"
Goethe has described soul, and its significance in the poet's life.
With those who have soul, everything tends inwards; soul is the
centripetal force of the spiritual life. To the man who sets soul above
all else in human life, fervour becomes a patent of nobility. In their
conception of soul, as in everything else, the Romanticists rush to
extremes. They magnify all that is mysterious, dark, and unexplained
in the soul, at the expense of what is clear and beautiful. Goethe is
to them the greatest of all poets, not because of his plastic power,
but because of the obscurity, the dæmonic mystery, surrounding such
characters as the Harper and Mignon, and because of the pregnant
intensity of his smaller poems. Lessing and Schiller, on the other
hand, are not deemed poets at all, and are sneered at and disparagingly
criticised because of the outward direction taken by their keen,
energetic thought. For enthusiasm, strength of character, and all such
qualities are not soul. Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the
sword and goes forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is
he who has most soul.
The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the
turning of Goethe's "Seelenwärme"--warmth of soul--into heat, a heat
which rises to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity
consumes all established forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic
poet is the heat and passion of the emotion which burns within him.
What Novalis does is done with the force of his whole being. Intense,
reckless feeling is his motto.
Friedrich von Hardenberg, a scion of an ancient house, was born at
Wiederstedt, in the County of Mansfeld, in May 1772. His father, a man
of a vigorous, ardent nature, had, after "leading a very worldly life,"
been converted at the age of thirty-one, when in great distress because
of his first wife's death, to the faith of the English Methodists. At
a later period he fell under the influence of the Moravian Brethren,
more particularly of Count Zinzendorf; and he was at all times strongly
influenced by his elder brother, a bigoted and somewhat ignorant
aristocrat of pietistic leanings. The elder brother's will was law in
the younger's household after the latter's second marriage; his strict
principles forbade the family all social intercourse, and the children
were obliged to keep their youthful amusements carefully concealed. In
1787 Novalis's father was appointed director of the saltworks in the
little town of Weissenfels.
[Illustration: NOVALIS]
Tieck became acquainted with the Hardenberg family in 1799, and they
made a profound impression on him. Köpke says: "It was a quiet,
serious life that they led, a life of unostentatious but sincere
piety. The family belonged to the sect of the Moravian Brethren, and
set forth its doctrines in their lives. Old Hardenberg, a high-minded,
honourable man, who had been a fine soldier in his day, lived like a
patriarch among his talented sons and charming daughters. Change and
enlightenment in any form were his detestation; he loved and lauded the
good old, misjudged days, and on occasion could express his views very
decidedly and defiantly, or blaze up in sudden anger."
The following little domestic scene speaks for itself: --one day heard
the old gentleman fuming and scolding in the adjoining room. "What has
happened?" he anxiously asked a servant who entered. "Nothing," was
the dry response; "it is only the master giving a Bible lesson." Old
Hardenberg was in the habit of conducting the devotional exercises of
the family, and at the same time examining the younger children on
religious subjects, and this not infrequently meant a domestic storm.
Such was Friedrich von Hardenberg's home. He was a dreamy, delicate
child, an intelligent, ambitious youth. In 1791 he went to Jena to
study law. Those were the palmy days of that university, which then
numbered amongst its professors such men as Reinhold, Fichte, and
Schiller. Novalis found Schiller's lectures specially spirit-stirring,
and the poet himself was to the young man "the perfect pattern of
humanity." Fichte, whose acquaintance he also made, he enthusiastically
called "the legislator of the new world-order." No one at that time
could have foreseen in young Hardenberg the future high priest of
obscurantism.
We see him in those youthful days intensely absorbed in the study
of his own Ego. His plans are constantly changing; at one time
he determines to be the diligent, ardent student, at another to
throw up the pursuit of science and be a soldier. Strange as it
may sound, the men whom he at this time regards as his models are
those friends of freedom who were at the same time apostles of the
gospel of utilitarianism. He writes to his brother: "Buy Franklin's
autobiography, and let the genius of this book be your guide." We
occasionally hear of a little youthful folly; he is now and again
in trouble because of debts he has contracted; but he reasons very
sensibly with his father, when the latter is inclined to take his
peccadilloes too seriously.
Father and uncle naturally regarded the French Revolution with horror
and loathing, but Friedrich and his elder brother were its ardent
partisans.
Things in Saxony being on too small a scale to suit Friedrich's
taste, his kinsman, the Prussian Minister (afterwards Chancellor) von
Hardenberg, offered him an appointment in Prussia; this, however, he
was unable to accept, owing to his father's unwillingness to allow him
to become a member of the liberal-minded Berlin cousin's household.
He was finally sent to Tennstedt, near Erfurt, to acquire practical
experience of the administration of the laws of the Electorate of
Saxony under the excellent district magistrate, Just.
Novalis's first friend among the Romanticists was Friedrich Schlegel,
whose acquaintance he made at Jena. The two had much in common,
and Novalis at once fell under Schlegel's influence. At the age of
twenty-five he writes to him: "To me you have been the high priest of
Eleusis; you have revealed heaven and hell to me; through you I have
tasted of the tree of knowledge." Young Hardenberg shows himself to
be entirely free from political prejudice; he takes a great fancy to
Schlegel's landlord, because of the man's "honest republicanism," and
jokes at Schlegel's severity in blaming him and the said landlord for
their loyalty to the princely house. He has an extremely high opinion
of Friedrich Schlegel as a critic, admires the fineness of the meshes
of his critical net, which allows no fish, however small, to escape,
and calls him "einen dephlogistisirten Lessing."
When, in 1797, Schlegel visited Hardenberg at his home, he found him
utterly broken down. A young girl, Sophie von Kühn, to whom he had been
passionately and absorbingly devoted, had just died. His despair took
the form of longing for death, and he fully believed that his body must
succumb to this desire and to his longing for the departed. Though he
had no definite plans of suicide, he called the desire for annihilation
by which he was possessed, "a firm determination, which would make of
his death a free-will offering." It was under the influence of these
thoughts that he wrote his _Hymns to Night_.
This excess of despair, and also the singular circumstance that Sophie,
who died at the age of fifteen, was only twelve years old when he fell
in love with her, seem to testify to something unhealthy and abnormal
in Novalis's character. The impression is strengthened when we find
him, only one year later, betrothed to a daughter of Von Charpentier,
superintendent of mines. It is quite true, as La Rochefoucauld says,
that the strength of our passions has no relation to their durability;
nevertheless it is strange that Hardenberg could suddenly console
himself with another, after finding his one pleasure for a whole year
in the thought of death, talking for a whole year as if the grave held
everything that was dear to him. It was a somewhat lame excuse that
Julie seemed to him a reincarnation of Sophie, though the fancy was not
a surprising one, considering how much the Romanticists dwelt on the
idea of a previous existence. But here, as elsewhere in Hardenberg's
life, much that is apparently unnatural is easily explainable when
the circumstances are rightly understood. Sophie von Kühn seems, like
Auguste Böhmer, to have been a most precocious child. When the youth of
twenty-three made her acquaintance, she possessed all the attractions
of the child combined with those of the maiden. Her features were fine,
her curly head was lightly poised, and there was a whole world in her
large, dark, expressive eyes. More impartial judges than Hardenberg
have called her "a heavenly creature."
Sophie's bright, hospitable home presented a striking contrast to young
Hardenberg's own; he was fascinated (as was his elder brother) by the
whole family; and the young girl, who, had she lived, would perhaps
have disappointed him by turning out worldly or insignificant, became
his muse, his Beatrice, his ideal. When we remember that, almost at
the same time with Sophie, Hardenberg lost his brother Erasmus, to
whom he was united by an intimate and beautiful friendship, we cannot
think it strange that life should have seemed to him to have lost all
its charms. He regarded death not merely in the light of a release;
his mystical tendency led him, as already mentioned, to speak of it
as "a free-will offering." He wrote in his diary at this time: "My
death will be a proof of my understanding and appreciation of what is
highest; it will be a real sacrifice, not a flight nor a makeshift."
It is at this crisis that he begins to turn in the direction of
positive Christianity. Not that he dreamed of declaring allegiance to
any particular Church, or belief in any particular set of dogmas, but
his pagan longing for death assumed a Christian colouring. His inmost
spiritual life had long been of such a nature that, had it not been
for the influence of the spirit of the times, he might just as easily
have become a determined opponent of all ecclesiastical doctrine. His
state of mind seems to have been that indicated by Friedrich Schlegel
when he wrote to him a year later: "Possibly you still have the choice,
my friend, between being the last Christian, the Brutus of the old
religion, or the Christ of the new gospel." Shortly after this his
choice was made.
In December 1798 he still feels, when he compares himself with his
friend Just, that he is only the apostle of pure spirituality. He does
not, like Just, rely "with childlike mind upon the unalterable words
of a mysterious ancient document;" he will not be bound by the letter,
and is inclined to find his own way to the primeval world; in the
doctrines of Christianity he sees an emblematic pre-figurement of the
coming universal religion. "You will not," he writes to Just, "fail to
recognise in this conception of religion one of the finest elements in
my composition--namely, fancy." In other words, he consciously admits
fancy to be at the source of his religious development.
In the same year (1798) he sent some fragments to Wilhelm Schlegel for
publication in the _Athenæum_, with the request that their author might
be known as NOVALIS, "which is an old family name, and not altogether
unsuitable."
Tieck met Novalis for the first time when he visited Jena in the summer
of 1799. August Wilhelm Schlegel brought them together, and they were
soon devoted friends. The three spent the first evening in earnest
conversation, opening their hearts to each other At midnight they
went out to enjoy the splendour of the summer night. "The full moon,"
says Köpke, "was shedding a magic glory upon the heights round Jena."
Towards morning Tieck and Schlegel accompanied Novalis home. Tieck has
commemorated this evening in _Phantasus_.
It was under Tieck's influence that Novalis wrote his principal work,
_Heinrich von Ofterdingen_. While he was still engaged upon it, his
young life was put an end to by consumption. He died at the age of
twenty-nine, only two years after the meeting with Tieck and A. W.
Schlegel above described. This early death, a remarkable degree of
originality, and great personal beauty have combined to shed a poetic
halo round Novalis. The St. John of the new movement, he resembled the
most spiritual of the apostles in outward appearance also. His forehead
was almost transparent, and his brown eyes shone with remarkable
brilliance. During the last three years of his life it could be read in
his face that he was destined to an early death.
Novalis was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out. If one
were asked to give a brief definition of the main idea of that great
movement, one would say that it was the destruction of everything that
was merely traditional, and the establishment of human existence upon
a basis of pure reason, by means of a direct break with everything
historic. The thinkers and heroes of the Revolution allow reason,
as it were, to upset everything, in order that reason may put
everything straight again. Although Novalis is deaf to all the social
and political cries of the period, and blind to all its progressive
movements, and although he ends in the most grim and repulsive
reaction, he is, nevertheless, not merely influenced, but, all
unconsciously, completely penetrated by the spirit of his age. Between
him--the quiet, introspective, loyal Saxon assessor--and the poor
_sans-culottes_ who rushed from Paris to the frontiers, singing the
"Marseillaise" and waving the tricolour flag, there is this fundamental
resemblance, that they both desire the destruction of the whole
outward and the construction of an inward world. Only, their inward
world is reason, his is soul: for them, reason with its demands and
formulæ--liberty, equality, and fraternity; for him, the soul, with its
strange nocturnal gloom, in which he melts down everything, to find, at
the bottom of the crucible, as the gold of the soul--night, disease,
mysticism, and voluptuousness.[1]
Thus, in spite of his violent animosity to his age, Novalis belongs to
it; the direct opponent of all its enlightened and beautiful ideas, he
is, despite himself, possessed by its spirit.
What in Fichte and the men of the Revolution is clear reason,
comprehending and testing everything, is in Novalis an all-absorbing
self--perception, which becomes actual voluptuousness; for the new
spirit has taken such a hold upon him that it is, as it were, entwined
round his nerves, causing a species of voluptuous excitement. What
with them is abstract liberty, liberty to begin everything from the
beginning again, with him is lawless fancy, which changes everything,
which resolves nature and history into emblems and myths, in order
to be able to play at will with all that is external, and to revel
unrestrainedly in self-perception. As Arnold Ruge puts it: "Mysticism,
which is theoretical voluptuousness, and voluptuousness, which
is practical mysticism, are present in Novalis in equally strong
proportions."
Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its
would-be spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the
sensual. Writing to Caroline Schlegel on the subject of _Lucinde_, he
says: "I know that imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what
is most immoral, most animal; but I also know how like a dream all
imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He
here affirms of imagination in general what applied particularly to his
own.
Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us to _feel
feeling_. Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He,
whose aim is feeling, unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires
to feel himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he seeks this
self-enjoyment. Therefore to him sickness is preferable to health. For
the sick man perpetually feels his own body, which the healthy man
does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard, contented themselves with
defining sickness as the Christian's natural condition. Novalis goes
much further. To him the highest, the only true life, is the life of
the sick man. "_Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes_" ("Life is a
disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does
the world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less
highly than disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture.
Why? Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes
diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and
pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering,
he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture,
and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure.... Does not all
that is best begin as illness? Half-illness is an evil; real illness
is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he writes elsewhere of a
mystic power, "which seems to be the power of pleasure and pain, the
enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly in the sensations
of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of sickness
corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness
which is at the same time a voluptuous pleasure. Novalis himself
is perfectly aware of this correspondence. He says: "The Christian
religion is the most voluptuous of religions. Sin is the greatest
stimulant to love of the Divine Being; the more sinful a man feels
himself to be, the more Christian he is. Direct union with the Deity is
the aim of sin and of love." And again: "It is curious that the evident
association between sensuality, religion, and cruelty did not long ago
draw men's attention to their close kinship and common tendencies."
And just as Novalis now prefers sickness to health, so he prefers night
to day, with its "impudent light."
Aversion for day and daylight was general among the Romanticists.
I drew attention to it in _William Lovell_. Novalis simply gives
expression to a heightened degree of the general feeling in his famous
_Hymns to Night_. That he should love the night is easy to understand.
By hiding the surrounding world from it, night drives the Ego in
upon itself; hence the feeling of night, and self-consciousness, are
one and the same thing. The rapture of the feeling of night lies in
its terror; first comes the fear of the individual, when everything
round him disappears in the darkness, that he will himself disappear
from himself; then comes the pleasant shudder when, out of this fear,
self-consciousness emerges stronger than before.
In one of his fragments Novalis calls death a bridal night, a sweet
mystery, and adds:--
"Ist es nicht klug, für die Nacht ein geselliges Lager zu suchen?
Darum ist klüglich gesinnt, wer auch Entschlummerte liebt."[2]
So completely is this idea incorporated in the Romantic philosophy
of life, that in Werner's drama, _Die Kreuzesbrüder_, the hero,
immediately before he is led to the stake, says:--
"Den Neid verzeih' ich,
Die Trauer nicht.--O unaussprechlich schwelg' ich
In der Verwandlung Wonn', in dem Gefühl
Des schönen Opfertodes!--O mein Bruder!
Nicht wahr? es kommt die Zeit, we alle Menschen
Den Tod erkennen--freudig ihn umarmen,
Und fühlen werden, dass dies Leben nur
Der Liebe Ahnung ist, der Tod ihr Brautkuss,
Und sie, die mit der Inbrunst eines Gatten,
Im Brautgemach, uns vom Gewand entkleidet--
Verwesung, Gluterguss der Liebe ist!"[3]
Life and death are to Novalis only "relative ideas." The dead are half
alive, the living half dead. It is this thought which in his case
first gives zest to existence. In the first of his Hymns to Night he
writes: "I turn to thee, holy, ineffable, mysterious Night! Far off
lies the world, as if it had sunk into a deep grave; deserted and
lonely is its place. My heart-strings vibrate with sorrow.... Dost
thou find pleasure in us as we in thee, dark Night?... Costly balsam
drips from thy hand, from thy poppy-sheaf. Thou unfoldest the heavy
wings of the soul.... How poor, how childish seems the day, how joyful
and blessed its departing!... More heavenly than those sparkling stars
are the myriad eyes which Night opens in us. They see farther than the
palest of those countless hosts; without the aid of light, they see
into the depths of a loving soul, and its high places are filled with
unspeakable rapture. Praised be the Queen of the earth, the august
revealer of holy worlds, the guardian of blessed love! She sends me
thee, my beloved, sweet sun of the night. Now I wake, for I am thine
and mine. Thou hast proclaimed to me the life-giving gospel of Night,
hast made of me a human being. Consume my body with the glowing flame
of the spirit, that I may mingle yet more ethereally, yet more closely
with thee, and the bridal-night be eternal."
One feels the feverish desire of the consumptive in this outburst. The
parallel passage in _Lucinde_ is: "O infinite longing! But a time is
coming when the fruitless desire and vain delusions of the day will die
away and disappear, and the great night of love bring eternal peace."
The thoughts of these two Romantic lovers of the night meet in this
idea of an eternal embrace.
In this enthusiasm for night lies the germ of religious mysticism. In
the case of Justinus Kerner (which recalls that of Jung Stilling),
bias towards the mysterious becomes belief in apparitions and fear of
spirits. In certain of the writings of the later Romanticists, for
instance in Achim von Arnim's _Die schöne Isabella von Ægypten_, half
the characters are spirits. Mysticism is a fundamental element in the
art of Clemens Brentano, even when he is at his best, and it gives
charm and colour to his descriptions.
Novalis himself describes mysticism as voluptuousness--"ein
wollüstiges Wesen." To understand this expression aright, we must study
his hymns:--
"Hinüber wall' ich
Und jede Pein
Wird einst ein Stachel
Der Wollust sein.
Noch wenig Zeiten
So bin ich los,
Und liege trunken
Der Lieb' im Schoss."[4]
Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the
sensual Ego in a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of the _Spiritual Songs_):
"Few know the secret of love, feel for ever unsatisfied, for ever
athirst. The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper
is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the
breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the
quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes have been opened to fathom
the unfathomable depths of heaven--he will eat of His body and drink of
His blood for ever more. Who has yet discerned the transcendent meaning
of the earthly body? Who can say that he understands the blood? The day
is coming when all body will be one body; then the beatified pair will
float in heavenly blood. Oh! that the ocean were already reddening,
that the rocks were softening into fragrant flesh! The sweet repast
never ends, love is never satisfied. Never can it have the beloved near
enough, close enough to its inmost self. By lips that are ever more
tenderly amorous, the heavenly nutriment is ever more eagerly seized
and transformed. Hotter and hotter burns the passion of the soul,
thirstier, ever thirstier grows the heart; and so the feast of love
endures from everlasting to everlasting. Had those who abstain but once
tasted of it, they would forsake everything and seat themselves beside
us at the table of longing, which is ever furnished with guests. They
would comprehend the infinite fulness of love, and extol our feast of
the Body and the Blood."[5]
These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main
characteristics of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious
forms, but it truly _feels_ their significance; it speaks the same
language as orthodoxy, but it changes a dead language into a living
one. Herein lay the secret of its victory in the Middle Ages over that
dry, formal scholasticism which it consumed in its glow. This made it
the precursor of the Reformation. The mystic needs no external dogma;
in his pious rapture he is his own priest. But, as his spiritual life
is altogether an inward life, he does not abolish external dogma, and
in the end actually becomes a sacerdotalist.
In mystically prophetic words Novalis foretells the coming of the new
kingdom of sacred darkness:--
"Es bricht die neue Welt herein
_Und verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein_.
Man sieht nun aus bemoosten Trümmern
Eine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern,
Und was vordem alltäglich war,
Scheint jetzo fremd und wunderbar.
Der Liebe Reich ist aufgethan,
Die Fabel fängt zu spinnen an.
Das Urspiel jeder Natur beginnt,
Auf kräftige Worte jedes sinnt,
Und so das grosse Weltgemüth
Ueberall sich regt und unendlich blüht.
* * * * * * * * * *
Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt,
Und was man glaubt, es sei geschehn,
Kann mann von weitem erst kommen sehn;
Frei soll die Phantasie erst schalten,
Nach ihrem Gefallen die Fäden verweben,
Hier manches verschleiern, dort manches entfalten,
_Und endlich in magischem Dunst verschweben_.
_Wehmuth und Wollust, Tod und Leben
Sind hier in innigster Sympathie,_--
Wer sich der höchsten Lieb' ergeben,
Genest von ihren Wunden nie."[6]
Night, death, sensual rapture, heavenly bliss--these ideas are still
more firmly interwoven in the verses above the churchyard gate, in
_Heinrich von Ofterdingen_. The dead say:--
"Süsser Reiz der Mitternächte,
Stiller Kreis geheimer Mächte,
Wollust räthselhafter Spiele,
Wir nur kennen euch.
* * * * * * * *
Leiser Wünsche süsses Plaudern
Hören wir allein, und schauen
Immerdar in sel'ge Augen,
Schmecken nichts als Mund und Kuss.
Alles was wir nur berühren,
Wird zu heissen Balsamfrüchten,
Wird zu weichen zarten Brüsten,
Opfern kühner Lust.
Immer wächst und blüht Verlangen
Am Geliebten festzuhangen,
Ihn im Innern zu empfangen,
Eins mit ihm zu sein.
Seinem Durste nicht zu wehren,
Sich im Wechsel zu verzehren,
Von einander sich zu nähren,
Von einander nur allein.
So in Lieb' und hoher Wollust
Sind wir immerdar versunken,
Seit der wilde trübe Funken
Jener Welt erlosch;
Seit der Hügel sich geschlossen
Und der Scheiterhaufen sprühte,
Und dem schauernden Gemüthe
Nun das Erdgesicht zerfloss."[7]
This mysticism, which deems the dead happy because it supposes them
to be revelling in all sensual delights, becomes, in its practical
application, a sort of quietism, that is, preference for a vegetating,
plant-like life, the life extolled in _Lucinde_.
"The plants," says Novalis, "are the plainest speech of the earth;
every new leaf, every remarkable flower is some mystery which is trying
to reveal itself, and which remains motionless and dumb only because
from very joy and love it can neither move nor speak. If one chances
in solitude upon such a flower, does not everything around it seem
transfigured? do not the little feathered songsters seem to seek its
vicinity? One could weep for gladness, and, forgetting the world, could
bury one's hands and feet in the ground, take root, and never leave
that happy neighbourhood."
What an overdose of sentiment! It provides its own cruel parody in the
insane situation which reminds us Danes of one in Holberg's _Ulysses
von Ithacia_.
In another part of _Ofterdingen_ we read: "Flowers exactly correspond
to children ... like children they are found lowest down, nearest
the earth; the clouds, again, are possibly revelations of the
second, higher childhood, of Paradise regained; therefore it is that
they shed such refreshing dews upon the children of earth." In the
Romantic jargon there is even talk of the childlikeness of clouds.
Naïveté aspires, and is not satisfied until it has reached the sky.
O Polonius!--These naïve clouds are the true, the proper symbols of
Romanticism.
But even in the plants and the clouds there is still too much endeavour
and unrest to satisfy the Romantic soul. Even vegetation is not perfect
abstraction, perfect quiescence; there is tendency upwards in the
straining of the plant towards the light. Therefore even the plant life
is not the highest. Novalis goes a step further than Friedrich Schlegel.
"The highest life is mathematics. Without enthusiasm no mathematics.
The life of the gods is mathematics. Pure mathematics is religion. It
is arrived at only by revelation. The mathematician knows everything.
All activity ceases when knowledge is attained. The state of knowledge
is bliss (Eudämonie), rapturous peace of contemplation, heavenly
abstraction."
Now we have reached the climax. All life is crystallised into dead
mathematical figures.
At this point the life of the soul is condensed to such a degree that
it comes to a standstill. It is as if the clock of the soul had ceased
to strike. Every noble aspiration, every tendency towards independent
action is forced back and stifled in the airless vaults of the soul.
It is at this point, therefore, that intense spirituality turns into
gross materialism. When all capacity of producing new outward forms
is not only despised, but actually destroyed, we have reached the
turning-point, the point at which all established outward forms are
recognised and accepted, and accepted the more gladly the more rigid
they are, the closer they approach to crystallised petrifaction,
the more certain it is that they only leave room for the life of
vegetation. The step is taken by Novalis in a remarkable essay,
_Christendom in Europe_, which Tieck by his erasures vainly tried
to nullify, and which Friedrich Schlegel, by leaving out one most
important passage, converted into a defence of Catholicism.
In this essay he writes as follows:--"These were happy, glorious days,
when Europe was still a Christian continent, the home of the one,
undivided Christian religion.... The wise head of the Church rightly
set himself against the bold cultivation of the human mind at the cost
of religious faith, and against untimely and dangerous discoveries
in the domain of science. Thus he forbade the scientists to maintain
openly that this earth is an insignificant planet, for he knew well
that men would lose, along with their respect for their earthly home,
respect for their heavenly home and their fellow-men, that they would
choose limited knowledge in preference to unlimited faith, and would
acquire the habit of despising everything great and wonderful, as being
simply the result of lifeless law."
We could almost suppose ourselves to be listening to the sermonising
of a parish-clerk of the eighteenth century. And yet we are sensible
of the poet's consistency. Poetry, which led Schiller back to Greece,
leads Novalis back to the Inquisition, and induces him, like Joseph de
Maistre, to side with it against Galileo.
Of Protestantism he says: "This great spiritual disruption, which was
accompanied by disastrous wars, was a notable proof of the harmfulness
of knowledge, of culture--or at least of the temporary harmfulness
of a certain degree of culture.... The schismatics separated the
inseparable, divided the indivisible Church, and presumptuously
dissociated themselves from the great Christian communion, in which,
and through which alone, true, lasting regeneration was possible....
A religious peace was concluded, based upon principles which were
as foolish as they were irreligious; for the continued existence of
so-called Protestantism was equivalent to the establishment of a
self-contradiction, namely, permanent revolutionary government....
Luther treated Christianity arbitrarily, mistook its spirit, and
introduced a new letter, a totally new doctrine, that of the sacred
and supreme authority of the Bible. This, unfortunately, meant the
interference in religious matters of a perfectly foreign, entirely
earthly science, namely, philology, the destructive influence of which
is thenceforward unmistakable.... The popularisation of the Bible was
now insisted upon, and its contemptible matter and the crude abstract
sketch of a religion provided by its books had a remarkable effect in
frustrating the inspiring, revealing activity of the Holy Spirit....
The Reformation was the death-blow of Christianity.... Fortunately for
the Church, there came into existence at this time a new religious
order, on which the expiring spirit of the hierarchy seemed to have
bestowed its last gifts. This order gave new life to the old forms, and
with wonderful intuition and determination set about the restoration of
the Papal power. Never before in the world's history had such a society
been known.... The Jesuits were well aware how much Luther owed to his
demagogic arts and his knowledge of the common people.... From of old,
the scholar has been the instinctive enemy of the priest; the learned
and the ecclesiastical professions must carry on a war of extermination
against each other so long as they are separated; for they are
struggling for the same position.... To the outcome of modern thought
men gave the name of philosophy; and under philosophy they comprehended
everything that was hostile to the old order of things, consequently
every attack upon religion. What was at first personal hatred of the
Roman Catholic Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of the
Christian faith, indeed of all religion."
We see how clearly Novalis understood that free-thought was a
consequence of Protestantism. He continues:--
"Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed naturally and inevitably
into a hatred of all enthusiasms, denounced imagination and feeling,
morality and love of art, the past and the future, barely acknowledged
man to be the highest among the animals, and reduced the creative
music of the universe to the monotonous whirr of an enormous mill,
driven by the stream of chance--a mill without a builder or miller,
a true _perpetuum mobile_.... One enthusiasm was magnanimously left
to mankind, enthusiasm for this glorious philosophy and its priests.
France had the good fortune to be the seat of this new faith, which
was patched together out of fragments of knowledge.... On account of
its obedience to the laws of mathematics and its audacity, light was
the idol of these men.... The history of modern unbelief is very
remarkable, and is the key to all the monstrous phenomena of these
later days. It only begins in this century, is little noticeable till
the middle of it, and then quickly develops with incalculable force
in every direction; a second, more comprehensive and more remarkable
Reformation was inevitable, and of necessity came first in the country
which was most modernised and had suffered longest from want of
freedom.... During this anarchy religion was born again, true anarchy
being its generating element.... To the reflective observer the
overthrower of the state is a Sisyphus. No sooner does he reach the
summit, where there is equipoise, than the mighty burden rolls down
on the other side. It will never remain up there unless it is kept in
position by an attraction towards heaven. All your supports are too
weak as long as your state has a tendency towards the earth."
He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany
we can already point to sure indications of a new world.... Here
and there, and often in daring union, are to be found incomparable
versatility, brilliant polish, extensive knowledge, and rich and
powerful imagination. A strong feeling of the creative arbitrariness,
the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness, the sacred originality,
and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is taking possession
of men.... Although these are only indications, disconnected and
crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a universal
individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of a
loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a
new Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's
members. Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The
child will be the express image of the father--a new golden age, with
dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age,
which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a
saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only
be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable
forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved,
inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with
voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of
the dissolving body."
After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss,
religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!"
We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft
of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red
lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. And
what is the upshot of it all? What new being is the result of the
embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised Church? What but a
regenerated reaction, which in France restored Catholicism and (after
Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led to that hateful
tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that Catholicism
exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the best
writers of the day into exile.
Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world.
It engulfed everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the
counter-revolution; in it all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in
it the Titanic powers of history were shut up and hypnotised. Night
surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous joys of darkness and death;
the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in the end they turned
into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the spirit, but it
was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized according to
mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the inward parts
of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down into the
depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.
But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued
their usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed
because the poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to
pieces in the inner world. For they did not go to work in the rough,
material fashion of a Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated
it inwardly in an inner world. When the poet, released by the spirits,
came up from the mine again, he found the outer world, which he
supposed he had resolved into its elements, exactly as it had been
before. All that he had melted in his heart stood there, hard and
cold; and, since the outer world had never really interested him, and
since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and drowsy as his
inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand.
The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty,
his genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to
compare him with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite
lately, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, Blaze de Bury drew attention to
the resemblance. He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance
to Novalis's, and the likeness between these two singular poets is
not only a physical one; common to them both are close observation of
nature, divination of all her little secrets, a choice combination of
sentiment with philosophical thought, an utter want of tangibility,
reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards, an aspiration, that leads
nowhere."
These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental
unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these
two poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives
before, the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning
of this century.
Think of Shelley's life in its main outlines. The son of a good family,
he was sent to an aristocratic school, where, while yet a child, he
was roused to wrath and opposition by the brutality of the boys and
the cruelty of the masters. What especially kindled his indignation as
he grew older was the hypocrisy with which those who gave free rein to
their bad passions perpetually talked of God and Christianity. During
his second year at Oxford, Shelley wrote an essay _On the Necessity
of Atheism_, of which, with naïve straightforwardness, he sent copies
to the Church and University authorities. He was summoned before
them, and, on refusing to retract what he had written, was expelled
for atheism. He went home, but his father received him with such
contemptuous coldness that he soon left again, never to return. His
whole life was a tissue of similar rebellions and similar misfortunes.
In his twentieth year he was threatened with consumption, and though
he recovered, he was thenceforward a delicate, nervously irritable
man. The Court of Chancery refused him the guardianship of his own
children (after the death of his first wife) on the ground that he had
propagated immoral and irreligious doctrines in _Queen Mab_. After this
he left England for ever, and lived in Italy in voluntary exile until
sudden death put an end to his sad and homeless existence. His boat was
capsized in a squall in the Gulf of Spezzia, and he was drowned, at the
age of twenty-nine.
In contrast with such a life as this, Hardenberg's is a true German
country-town idyll. At the age of twenty-five he received a Government
appointment, an auditorship at one of the state saltworks, and a year
or two later he was advanced to be "assessor" at the saltworks of
Weissenfels. His Romanticism in no way interfered with his fulfilment
of his duties as a good citizen. In his capacity of Government official
he was zealous, conscientious, and steady--one of the men who do
their duty and are guilty of no extravagances, and whose position
is consequently assured. His republicanism was short-lived, and he
is only saved by his naïveté from the charge of servility. He calls
Frederick William and Louisa of Prussia "ein klassisches Menschenpaar;"
in the revelation of these "geniuses" he sees an omen of a better
world. Frederick William is, he says, the first king of Prussia; he
crowns himself every day. A real "transubstantiation" has taken place;
for the court has been transformed into a family, the throne into a
sanctuary, a royal marriage into an eternal union of hearts. Only
youthful prejudice, he maintains, inclines to a republic; the married
man desires order, safety, quietness, a well-regulated household, a
"real monarchy." "A constitution has for us only the interest of a dead
letter. How different is the law which is the expression of the will
of a beloved and revered person! We have no right to conceive of the
monarch as the first officer of the state; he is not a citizen, and
cannot therefore be an official. The king is a human being exalted to
the position of an earthly providence."
If we compare such utterances as the above with those of Shelley's
poems which were inspired by the tyranny prevailing in his native
country, or those in which he glorifies the Italian revolutions and
the Greek war of liberation, we have the sharpest imaginable contrast.
And the same contrast meets us wherever we turn. Novalis sings the
praises of sickness. Shelley says: "It is certain that wisdom is not
compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates
of this earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word,
is out of the reach of civilized man."
Novalis says: "We picture God to ourselves as a person, just as
we think of ourselves as persons. God is exactly as personal and
individual as we are." Shelley says: "There is no God! This negation
must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of
a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken....
It is impossible to believe that the Spirit which pervades this
infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman, or is
angered by the consequences of that necessity which is a synonym
of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an
Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is
irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his
fingers have borne witness against him."
Novalis sings the praises of the priesthood and of the Jesuits.
Shelley says: "During many ages of darkness and misery this story"
(the doctrine of the Bible) "gained implicit belief; but at length
men arose who suspected it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus
Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a
numerous set of men who derived, and still derive, immense emoluments
from this opinion, told the vulgar that if they did not believe in the
Bible they would be damned to all eternity; and burned, imprisoned, and
poisoned all the unbiassed and unconnected inquirers who occasionally
arose. They still oppress them, so far as the people, now become
more enlightened, will allow.... The same means that have supported
every popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment,
assassination, and falsehood, deeds of unexampled and incomparable
atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of
the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his religion,
would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the
habitable globe."
From these extracts, to which innumerable others of the same tendency
might be added, we see how great was the distance between Novalis, with
his introspective soul-life, and Shelley, with his practical enthusiasm
for liberty.
These, then, are the two poets whom men have attempted to represent as
twin spirits. They both rank high as lyric poets, though Shelley is a
poetical genius of a far higher type than Novalis. But even if Novalis
were more on a level with Shelley as a poet, how small is the measure
of truth to be found in his works compared with that in Shelley's!
To Novalis, truth was poetry and dream; to Shelley, it was liberty. To
Novalis it was a firmly established and powerful Church; to Shelley a
struggling, sorely-pressed heresy; Novalis's truth sat on royal and
papal thrones; Shelley's was despised and powerless.
To make any real impression on humanity, a truth, however great, must
be made man, must become flesh and blood. In the early biographies
of Defoe, the author of _Robinson Crusoe_, we are told that in July
1703 he was condemned, as author of a certain pamphlet, first to have
his ears cut off and then to be pilloried. The day came, the sentence
was carried out, the man with the pale, mutilated face, dripping
with blood, stood in the pillory, facing the assembled multitude.
Then, strange to say, in place of the usual loud hooting, with its
accompaniment of showers of rotten apples, eggs, potatoes, &c., there
fell a dead silence; not an apple was thrown, not one abusive word was
heard--Defoe was far too dear to the hearts of the people. Presently
one of the crowd, hoisted on his neighbours' shoulders, placed a wreath
upon the mutilated head. I read this when I was a boy, and though I
know now that Defoe did not lose his ears, so that Pope was mistaken
when he wrote--
"Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe;"
and though I also know that Defoe was not the pure character I took
him to be at that time, still the picture remains a grand one, and it
has burned itself into my soul. For it contains an eternal verity. As
a general rule, truth upon this earth presents much such an appearance
as did the condemned author in the pillory. And I remember thinking to
myself at the time: "If a man chanced to find such a poor, despised,
oppressed truth in the pillory, what a great moment in his life it
would be if he might draw near and place the wreath upon its brow!"
Shelley did this--Novalis did not.
[1] A. Ruge, _Werke_, i. 247, &c.
[2] "We deem that man wise who seeks a companion for his nightly couch;
then he also is wise who has a beloved among the dead."
[3] "I forgive envy; pity I cannot forgive. It is beyond my power to
tell how I revel in the thought of my approaching transfiguration, my
sacrificial death. O brother! the time is surely drawing nigh when all
men, truly understanding death, will welcome him with glad embrace,
will feel that life is but the anticipation of love, that death is the
bridal kiss, and dissolution, which with a bridegroom's ardour disrobes
us in the bridal chamber, the hottest fire of love."
[4] "Thither I go, and there every pain will be a thrill of rapture.
Ere long I shall be free, be lying, intoxicated with ecstasy, in the
bosom of love."
[5]
"Wenige wissen
Das Geheimnis der Liebe,
Fühlen Unersättlichkeit
Und ewigen Durst.
Des Abendmahls
Göttliche Bedeutung
Ist den irdischen Sinnen Rätsel;
Aber wer jemals
Von heissen, geliebten Lippen
Atem des Lebens sog,
Wem heilige Glut
In zitternden Wellen das Herz schmolz
Wem das Auge aufging,
Dass er des Himmels
Unergründliche Tiefe mass,
Wird essen von seinem Leibe
Und trinken von seinem Blute
Ewiglich.
Wer hat des irdischen Leibes
Hohen Sinn erraten?
Wer kann sagen
Dass er das Blut versteht?
Einst ist Alles Leib--
Ein Leib,
In himmlischem Blute
Schwimmt das selige Paar.
O! dass das Weltmeer
Schon errötete,
Und in duftiges Fleisch
Aufquölle der Fels!
Nie endet das süsse Mahl,
Nie sättigt die Liebe sich;
Nicht innig, nicht eigen genug
Kann sie haben den Geliebten.
Von immer zarteren Lippen
Verwandelt wird das Genossene
Inniglicher und näher.
Heissere Wollust
Durchbebt die Seele,
Durstiger und durstiger
Wird das Herz:
Und so währet der Liebe Genuss
Von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit.
Hätten die Nüchternen
Einmal gekostet,
Alles verliessen sie,
Und setzten sich zu uns
An den Tisch der Sehnsucht,
Der nie leer wird.
Sie erkännten der Liebe
Unendliche Fülle,
Und priesen die Nahrung
Von Leib und Blut."
[6] "The new world appears, _and darkens the brightest sunshine_. Among
moss-grown ruins one sees a marvellous future glistening; and what
used to be common and everyday, now seems miraculous. The kingdom of
love has come; the fable has begun to weave itself. Every soul is born
again; words of power are heard again; the great world-soul moves, and
puts forth bud and blossom without end....
"The world becomes a dream, our dream the world; and what we believed
to have happened long ago, we now see only coming, as yet far off.
Imagination must have free play, must weave her web as seems best to
her, here veiling, there discovering, at last dissolving all into
magic vapour. Sadness and rapture, death and life, are here by inmost
sympathy but one: he who has known the highest love never recovers from
its wounds."
[7] "Sweet joys of midnight, silent company of mysterious powers,
strange revelries of passion, 'tis we alone who know you....
"We alone hear the whispered prayers of sweet desire, and look for ever
into-blissful eyes, taste for ever mouth and kiss. All that we touch
turns into balsamic fruits, into soft and lovely breasts, ripe food for
our desire.
"Anew and ever anew awakes our longing to embrace, to be one with, the
beloved, to give him whate'er he asks, sweetly to consume each other,
to feed on each other, and on nought else.
"In this voluptuous passion we have revelled ever since the glaring
light of earthly life was extinguished, since the faggot flamed,
the grave closed on us, and the sights of earth were hidden from the
shuddering soul."