I have described Romantic "soul" as intensity, without endeavour or
desire, as the glowing furnace in which liberty was asphyxiated and
every tendency to outward action destroyed. But this is not the exact
truth. One outward tendency remained, that which is known by the
name of "longing" (Sehnsucht). Longing is the Romantic equivalent of
endeavour, and the mother of all Romantic poetry. What is longing? It
is a combination of lack and desire, without the determination or the
means to attain what one lacks and desires. And what is the object
of this longing? What but that which is the object of all longing
and desire, in however fine or hypocritical words it may clothe
itself--enjoyment and happiness. The Romanticist does not employ the
word happiness, but it is what he means. He does not say happiness, he
says "the ideal." But do not let us be deceived by words. The special
characteristic of the Romanticist, however, is not his search after
happiness, but his belief that it exists, that it must be in store for
him, and that it will come to him when he least expects it. And since
it is the gift of Heaven, since he himself is not its creator, he may
lead as aimless a life as he will, guided only by his vague longing.
All that is necessary is to preserve his faith that this longing will
be satisfied. And it is a faith easy to preserve, for everything around
him is full of omens and prophecies of the accomplishment of his desire.
It was Novalis who gave to the object of Romantic longing the famous,
mystic name of "the blue flower." The expression is, of course, not
to be understood literally. The "blue flower" is a mysterious symbol,
something of the nature of ΙΧθΥΣ, the Fish of the early Christians. It
is an abbreviation, a condensed formulation of all that infinitude of
bliss for which a languishing human heart is capable of longing. Hence
glimpses of it are caught long before it is reached; it is dreamed of
long before it is seen; it is divined now here, now there, in what
proves to be a delusion, is seen for a moment amongst other flowers,
only to vanish immediately; but its fragrance is perceptible, at times
only faint, at times strong, and the seeker is intoxicated by it.
Though, like the butterfly, he flutters from flower to flower, settling
now upon a violet, now upon some tropical plant, he is always seeking
and longing for the one thing--perfect, ideal happiness.
It is with this longing and its object that Novalis's principal work
deals. It is a work which we must study, and, to understand it aright,
we must first see how it came into existence.
Its germ is contained in Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and we can clearly
trace the mental processes by which _Wilhelm Meister_ is slowly
transmuted into _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_. Wilhelm does not act,
he is acted upon. He does not strive, he longs. He pursues ideals,
seeking them first on the stage, then in real life. Wilhelm too, is
the offspring of "soul." The book is pervaded by soul. It is not only
that the characters, like those of many modern English novels (some
of Dickens's, for instance), are full of soul, but there is, as it
were, soul in the peculiar, hazy atmosphere which surrounds them. No
feature is realistically coarse or decided; the children of soul
have soft contours. Heiberg once summed up Goethe's philosophy, of
which he himself was a disciple, in the following sentence: "Goethe
is neither immoral nor irreligious, in the general acceptation of
the word, but he shows that there are no unconditional laws of duty,
and that we must place our religion on the same level as our poetry
and philosophy." We are struck in reading _Wilhelm Meister_ by the
manner in which rigid school or text-book ethics, the narrow-minded,
conventional ideas of morality and equity, are so re-moulded that
morality is no longer regarded as the absolute law of life, but
simply as an important principle of life, one among others all equally
legitimate and equally under control--just as the brain of the animal,
important as it is, is not, in the estimation of the physiologist,
the one part of consequence, but simply an organ, fulfilling its
task in association with the heart, the liver, and the other organs.
Hence sensuality is not abused as animal, but (in Philine) simply
and straightforwardly represented as pleasant and attractive. The
harmonious development of Wilhelm's nature is arrived at by the aid of
many doubtful experiences. In the female characters we are called on to
admire well-bred self-possession and the innate nobility of a beautiful
nature; the physical and mental superiority and freedom which are the
result of a highly favoured and assured position, are sympathetically
portrayed in the personages of rank. It may seem objectionable to us
nowadays that "noble" and "aristocratic" are evidently often regarded
as synonyms, but the reason for it is to be sought in the deplorable,
straitened social conditions of the Germany of Goethe's day. As the
tale is not the offspring of the union of imagination and reality,
but of imagination and "soul," there is something unreal in its
whole character; much is veiled, much refined away; everything is so
idealised that the material world stands, as it were, in the shadow of
the spiritual.
Only private circumstances and persons are dealt with. War is, indeed,
alluded to, and in such a manner that we are enabled to conclude that
the war following on the French Revolution is meant; but nothing
definite is said about it. As to the locality, we are led to the
conclusion that it is somewhere in Central Germany; but the landscape
possesses no marked features, it only chimes in like a faint musical
accompaniment to the mood. In the world depicted in the tale, art is
regarded, in the perverted fashion of the day, as the school of life,
instead of life as the school of art; national, historical events are
but "etwas Theatergeräusch hinter den Koulissen" (a little noise behind
the scenes).[1] None of the characters have any practical aim in view;
they are simply driven onward by the current of their longings and
moods; they wander about, untrammelled by circumstances, heedless of
the boundaries of countries, leading "planless" existences.
Goethe's avoidance of all psychological extremes is a significant
witness to the centripetal tendency of "soul." Such an extreme is
crime, conceived of as criminal. Even where Goethe touches upon the
horrible, as, for example, incestuous passion (the story of the
Harper), his desire is only that we should be powerfully affected, not
that we should judge; he does not bring the case before the moral,
much less before the legal tribunal. And the story loses some of its
painfulness from the manner in which it is communicated to us. We do
not hear it from the Harper himself; his lips are sealed; it is told us
after his death by a stranger.
It is in this highly idealised world, on which the poet's hand has set
the seal of beauty, that Wilhelm wanders about, without a plan, but not
without an aim. He is in pursuit of the ideal--an ideal profession,
an ideal woman, ideal culture. He is first a merchant, then an actor,
then a doctor; loves first Marianne, then the Countess, then Therese,
then Nathalie. His first ideal of culture is experience, his second
intellectual refinement; then he seeks it in renunciation; and he ends
with experiments in social reform which made the _Wanderjahre_, in its
day, one of the books to which socialistic revolutionaries most eagerly
appealed. But the main thing to be noted is, that Wilhelm is constantly
remoulding his ideal. He does not find it; he loses it, so to speak.
It is not so much that he becomes the bourgeois, the philistine
(Spiessbürger), as that the word loses its meaning for him.
It often happens to the young man who throws himself eagerly into the
study of philosophy in search of enlightenment as to God, eternity,
the aim of life, and the immortality of the soul, that, as he studies,
these words lose the meaning he at first attributed to them; he obtains
an answer to his questions, but an answer which teaches him that these
questions must be differently put. The same thing happens in life to
Wilhelm, with his longing for a preconceived ideal. Many have embraced
the cloud instead of Juno; Wilhelm lets the cloud go, and presses Juno
to his heart.
_Wilhelm Meister_ had almost as much share as _Die Herzensergiessungen
eines Klosterbruders_ in the production of Tieck's _Sternbald_, which
is throughout an echo of Goethe's great work. Immediately after the
appearance of _Wilhelm Meister_, Tieck sketched the plot of a very
interesting story, _Der junge Tischlermeister_ ("The Young Carpenter"),
which was not published until forty-one years later. The hero, an
almost too accomplished and artistic young carpenter, goes through
a process of development which exactly resembles Wilhelm Meister's,
as far as the influence of aristocratic acquaintances, of dramatic
art, and the theatre is concerned. A true Romanticist, he produces
Shakespeare's comedies in a private theatre which is an exact imitation
of the theatres of Shakespeare's day, and is the lover both on the
stage and behind the scenes.
This work was set aside in favour of _Sternbald_. The modern tradesman
had to give way to the artist of the Romantic period of Albert Dürer.
_Sternbald_ is the apotheosis of "soul," of pure soul, without
admixture of reason and lucidity. Hence the sum and substance of the
book is desire, pining desire; hence we are told of such an event
as the Reformation, that, instead of generating a divine fulness of
religion, it only generated the emptiness of reason, in which all
hearts languish; hence the mild sensuality of Goethe's romance becomes
brutal desire of the William Lovell type. The hero, when he looks
within himself, sees, like Lovell, "a fathomless whirlpool, a rushing,
deafening enigma." In the second edition Tieck thought it advisable to
cut out some of the too numerous wanton bathing and drinking scenes
amidst which the restless longing of the hero runs riot.
But the principal thing to which I would draw attention is, that
reality is here refined and distilled in a manner unknown to Goethe. It
is attenuated into vapour--emotional vapour; personality is drowned in
landscape, action in the music of the woodman's horn. In _Sternbald_
every day is a Sunday; a devotional feeling pervades the air; we
seem to hear the church bells ring and to know that the world is
at leisure. The following words of the hero contain the philosophy
of the book: "In this world we can only desire, we can only live
in intentions; real action belongs to the hereafter." Consequently
there is no action in the story; the characters wander about with as
little apparent purpose as comets; their lives consist of a series
of accidental, unsought adventures; they are always travelling in
search of the ideal, and as the ideal is generally supposed to have
taken up its abode somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rome, the book
ends there--the _story_ is not brought to a conclusion, and is never
continued.
It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that
Novalis prefers _Sternbald_ to _Wilhelm Meister_. "For," says he,
"the kernel of my philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the
absolutely real, and that the more poetical anything is, the truer it
is. Therefore, the task of the poet is not to idealise, but to cast a
spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true poetry. A fairy tale
is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in its being
exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." The
world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos--chaos
which prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be
not a mere tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable.
The real fairy tale writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel,
is, as it were, free history, the mythology of history. And love, being
the form of morality which implies the possibility of magic, is the
soul of the novel, the foundation of all romances, all novels. For
where true love is, there marvellous, miraculous things happen.
These obscure, yet in a manner unambiguous expressions of Novalis's
opinions on the subject of the true nature of poetry and romance, make
it easy for us to understand his judgment of _Wilhelm Meister_, a book
he had greatly admired in early youth. For in _Wilhelm Meister_, as
in _Torquato Tasso_, poetry has to give way to reality, the poetic
conception of life to the practical. Novalis could imagine nothing more
shameful than this; it was sin against the holy spirit of poetry. In
the novel, in fiction, poetry is not to be done away with, not even to
be restricted, but to be exalted and glorified.
So he determines to write a novel which shall be the direct antithesis
of _Wilhelm Meister_. He even takes thought of such small matters as
type and size, and determines that in them _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_
shall be the exact counterpart of the book, the worldly philosophy
of which it is to refute by its magic mysticism. He writes to Tieck:
"My novel is in full swing; it is to be a deification of poetry. In
the first part Heinrich von Ofterdingen ripens into a poet; in the
second he is the glorified poet. The story will have many points of
resemblance with your _Sternbald_ but will lack its lightness. This
want, however, may not be a disadvantage, considering the subject."
Goethe and _Wilhelm Meister_ Novalis criticises thus: "Goethe is
an altogether practical poet. His works are what English wares
are--simple, neat, suitable to their purpose, and durable.... He
has, like the Englishman, a natural sense of order and economy, and
an acquired sense of what is fine and noble.... _Wilhelm Meister's
Lehrjahre_ is, in a way, altogether modern and prosaic. Romance
perishes in it, and so does the poetry, the magic quality, of nature.
The book only deals with everyday human affairs; nature, and the belief
in her mysterious powers, are quite forgotten. It is a poetically
written story of bourgeois domestic life, in which the marvellous is
expressly treated as poetry and fancy. Artistic atheism is the spirit
of the book. _Wilhelm Meister_ is a _Candide_ directed against poetry."
Novalis's aim, then, is to produce a work exactly the opposite of this,
one in which everything is finally resolved into poetry, in which "the
world becomes soul." For everything is soul. "Nature is to the soul
what a solid body is to light. The solid substance stops light, breaks
it up into wonderful colours, &c., &c. Human beings are soul prisms."
His novel is, then, an allegory, the key to which is contained in the
fairy-tale introduced into the story. This fairy-tale is supposed
to show how the true eternal world comes into existence; it is a
description of the restoration of that kingdom of love and poetry in
which the great "world-soul expands and blooms everlastingly." Novalis
believes that, since the existing heaven and the existing earth are
of a prosaic nature, and since our age is an age of utilitarianism,
a poetical day of judgment must come, a spell must be broken, before
the new life can blossom forth.--Arcturus and his daughter slumber,
frozen in their palace of ice. They are released by Fable (i.e. Poetry)
and her brother, Eros. Eros is the child of the restless father,
Reason, and the faithful mother, the Heart. Fable owes her being to
unfaithfulness on the part of Reason; she is born of Fancy, daughter of
the Moon; her godmother is the guardian of the domestic altar, Sophia,
Heavenly Wisdom.
Against the good powers in this allegory a conspiracy is formed by the
Writer. The Writer is the spirit of prose, of narrow enlightenment; he
is depicted as constantly writing. When Sophia dips what he has written
into a bowl which stands upon the altar, a little of it sometimes
remains legible, but often it is all washed out. If drops from the
bowl happen to fall upon him, they fall from him again in the shape
of numbers and geometric figures, which he eagerly collects, strings
upon a thread, and wears round his neck as an ornament. The Writer is
Novalis's Nureddin. The result of his plot is the imprisonment of the
Father and Mother and the destruction of the altar.
But Fable has escaped. She descends into the realm of Evil, and
exterminates Evil by delivering up the Passions to the power of the
death-bringing Fates. Time and Mortality are now no more. "The last
thread of the flax is spun; the lifeless is reanimated; life reigns."
In a universal conflagration, the mother, the Heart, is burned to
death, the sun disappears, and the ice is melted round the palace of
Arcturus. Through a new, happy earth, stretching far and wide under a
new heaven, Eros and Fable pass into the palace. Fable has fulfilled
her mission; she has brought Eros to his beloved, the daughter of the
king. The kingdom of poetry and love is established.
"Gegründet ist das Reich der Ewigkeit;
In Lieb und Frieden endigt sich der Streit;
Vorüber ging der lange Traum der Schmerzen;
Sophie ist ewig Priesterin der Herzen."[2]
Sophia occupies the same place in this allegory that Beatrice does in
Dante's great poem.
The glorification of the old Meistersinger is, of course, intended as
a glorification of poetry in general, but his story, as told in the
novel, is really the story of Hardenberg's own life and endeavour.
Heinrich von Ofterdingen's home and quiet childhood remind us of
Hardenberg's. A dream, which seems doubly rich in omen because his
father as a youth had dreamed one like it, gives him a fore-feeling
of the mysterious happiness of the poet's life, and shows him, in the
form of a wonderful blue flower, the object of the poet's longing and
endeavour.
In order that he may acquire some knowledge of the world, it is decided
that Heinrich and his mother shall travel, in company with a number of
merchants, to Augsburg. The incidents of the journey and the tales of
his travelling companions enrich him with impressions, and fertilise
the germs of poetical productivity that lie latent in his soul. For all
their talk is of poetry and poets; they tell him the story of Arion,
and popular legends in which poets are the equals of kings, and they
philosophise on the subject of poetry and art, not like merchants of
the most barbarous period of the Middle Ages, but like Romanticists
of the year 1801. One of them, for example, gives the following
pantheistic explanation of the instinctive impulse of mankind towards
plastic art: "Nature, desiring to have some enjoyment of all the art
that there is in her, has metamorphosed herself into human beings. In
their minds, through them, she rejoices in her own glory, selects what
is most pleasant and lovely, and reproduces it in such a manner that
she may possess and enjoy it in manifold ways."
In a castle to which they come, Heinrich meets a captive Eastern girl,
whose touching plaint it is interesting to compare with the song of
the Oriental beauty (La Captive) in Victor Hugo's _Les Orientales_.
In a book belonging to a mysterious hermit (the original of the
charcoal-burner's book in Ingemann's _Valdemar Sejer_) he finds the
history of his own life.
The travellers arrive at Augsburg, and here Heinrich makes the
acquaintance of a poet and a fascinating young girl. In Klingsohr
he has a noble example of the fully developed poet, a poet whose
utterances in many ways remind us of Goethe's. Almost everything
that Klingsohr says is surprisingly rational and wise; we can
scarcely understand how Novalis himself failed to take any of it to
heart. The following are some of his remarks: "I cannot too strongly
recommend you to follow your natural inclination to penetrate into
the reason of things, to study the laws of causation. Nothing is
more indispensable to the poet than insight into the nature of every
event, and knowledge of the means whereby to attain every aim....
Enthusiasm without understanding is useless and dangerous, and the
poet will be able to effect few miracles if he is himself astonished
by miracles.... The young poet cannot be too calm, too thoughtful.
True, melodious eloquence demands a wide, calm, observing mind." Upon
one point, however, Klingsohr and Novalis are entirely agreed, namely,
that everything is, and must be, poetry. "It is a great misfortune
that poetry should have a special name, and that poets should form a
separate guild. There is nothing separate or special about poetry. It
is the mode of action characteristic of the human mind. Do not all men
aspire poetically every moment of their lives?"
All Heinrich's love longings are satisfied when he sees Klingsohr's
daughter, Mathilde. He feels once more as he felt when he saw the
vision of the "blue flower." But Mathilde is drowned. Heinrich loses
her as Novalis had lost Sophie von Kühn. Utterly broken down, he
leaves Augsburg. He is comforted in his sorrow by a vision (like the
visions Novalis had at Sophie's grave) in which he sees the departed
and hears her voice. In a distant monastery, the mission of whose monks
it is to keep alive the sacred fire in young souls, and which seems
to be a species of "spirit-colony," he lives "with the departed." He
experiences all the sensations to which Novalis has given expression in
the _Hymns to Night_. Then he returns from the spirit-world to life,
and falls in love with a being no less wonderful than the object of his
first passion. Mathilde's place is filled by Cyane.
The second part of the novel is only sketched. Heinrich wanders the
whole world round. After going through every earthly experience, "he
retires again into his soul, as to his old home." Things material now
become transformed into things spiritual. "The world becomes a dream,
the dream becomes the world." Heinrich finds Mathilde again, but she
is no longer distinguishable from Cyane--just as, in Novalis's own
life, Julie was not Julie, but Sophie come to life again. And now "the
festival of soul," of love and eternal fidelity, is celebrated. On
this occasion allegory reigns supreme. The principle of good and the
principle of evil appear in open competition, singing antiphonies;
the sciences do the same, even mathematics. We hear much about Indian
plants--probably the lotus-flower was made to play a part as partaking
of the nature of the "blue flower."
The end of the story is merely indicated. Heinrich finds the "blue
flower"--it is Mathilde. "Heinrich plucks the blue flower, and releases
Mathilde from the spell which has bound her, but loses her again.
Stunned by grief, he turns into a stone. Edda, who, besides being
herself, is also the 'blue flower,' the Oriental captive, and Mathilde
(fourfold 'Doppelgängerei'), sacrifices herself to the stone. It turns
into a singing tree. Cyane hews down the tree, and burns herself
along with it, upon which it turns into a golden ram. Edda-Mathilde
is compelled to sacrifice the ram, and Heinrich becomes a man once
more. During these transformations he has all manner of wonderful
conversations." This we can readily believe.
In Danish literature the work most allied to _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_
is Ingemann's _De Sorte Riddere_ ("The Black Knights"). We learn
from Ingemann's autobiography how exactly his frame of mind at the
time he was writing this book corresponded to that of the German
Romanticist. "I paid but little attention to all the great events that
were happening in the outer world. Even the conflagration of Moscow,
the destruction of the Great Army, and the fall of Napoleon were to me
ephemeral phenomena ... even in the German War of Liberation I only
saw a divided nation in conflict with itself, noble powers without
any principle of unity and concord. _Between the ideal life and human
life there lay a yawning abyss_, which only the heavenly rainbow of
love and poetry could bridge over.... I wrote myself into a fairy
labyrinth, in which love was my Ariadne-thread, and in which I hoped,
with the great harp of the poetry of life, the strings of which are
strung by genius from rock to rock over black abysses, _to lull the
monsters of existence to sleep_, resolve the dissonances in the great
world-harmony, and solve the world-mystery." The result of this attempt
was woeful.
It is certain that in _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_ Novalis succeeded
in producing something as unlike Wilhelm Meister as possible. The
"blue flower" was the emblem of the ideal. Here we have the real
forgotten in the ideal, and the ideal in its emblem. Poetry is entirely
separated from life. Novalis thinks that this is as it should be.
In _Ofterdingen_ he says of poets: "Many and important events would
only disturb them. A simple life is their lot, and they must make
acquaintance with the varied and numberless phenomena of the outer
world only by means of tales and books. Only seldom during the course
of their lives is it permissible for them to be drawn into the wild
eddy of some great event, in order that they may acquire a more
accurate knowledge of the position and character of men of action.
Their receptive minds are quite sufficiently occupied with near and
simple phenomena.... Here upon earth already in possession of the peace
of heaven, untormented by vain desires, only inhaling the fragrance of
earthly fruits, not devouring them, they are free guests, whose golden
feet tread lightly, and whose presence causes all involuntarily to
spread their wings.... If we compare the poet with the hero, we shall
find that the poet's song has many a time awakened heroic courage in
youthful hearts, but never that heroic deeds have called the spirit of
poetry to life in any soul."
The fundamental error could not have been defined more clearly.
According to this theory, poetry is not the expression of life and its
deeds; no, life and its deeds have poetry as their _origin_. Poetry
creates life. Undoubtedly there is poetry of which this may be true;
but if there be any one kind of poetry of which it could never be true,
it is the kind under consideration. To what possible deed could it
incite? To the changing of one's self into a singing tree or a golden
ram? There is no question of action in it at all, only of longing.
All the best of Novalis's work is simply an expression of this longing,
which includes every desire, from the purely natural ones to the
most transcendental aspiration. Perhaps the most beautiful things he
has written are two songs--the one giving expression to the sensuous
longings of the young girl, the other to the longing which is part and
parcel of the enthusiastic friendship of young men.
The song in which the young girls complain of the hardships of their
lot is charming. Here the "blue flower" is simply the forbidden
fruit. But the longing is expressed with bewitching roguishness. In
the poem "To a Friend," again, we have it expressed with fervency and
solemnity:--
"Was passt, das muss sich ründen,
Was sich versteht, sich finden,
Was gut ist, sich verbinden,
Was liebt, zusammen sein,
Was hindert, muss entweichen,
Was krumm ist, muss sich gleichen,
Was fern ist, sich erreichen,
Was keimt, das muss gedeihn.
"Gieb treulich mir die Hände,
Sei Bruder mir und wende
Den Blick vor Deinem Ende
Nicht wieder weg von mir.
Ein Tempel, wo wir knieen,
Ein Ort, wohin wir ziehen,
Ein Glück, für das wir glühen,
Ein Himmel mir und Dir!"
The longing here is almost that of the Crusader--a seeking in the far
distance for something great and glorious. The "blue flower" melts into
the blue of the horizon. Its very colour betokens distance.
Let us dwell for a moment longer on this flower. In Spielhagen's
_Problematische Naturen_, one of the characters says: "You remember the
blue flower in Novalis's tale? Do you know what it is? It is the flower
which no mortal eye has seen, yet the fragrance of which fills the
world. Not every creature is delicately enough organised to perceive
its perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when she sings
and wails and sobs in the moonlight and the grey dawn; and so were,
and so are, all the foolish human beings who, in prose and verse, have
poured, and are pouring, forth their woes to Heaven; and so, too, are
millions more, to whom no God has granted the power to say what they
suffer, and who look up in dumb anguish to the Heaven which has no
mercy upon them. And alas! for this suffering there is no cure--none
except death. For him who has once inhaled the fragrance of the blue
flower there is not a peaceful hour left in life. Like a murderer,
or like one who has turned away the Lord from his door, he is driven
onward, ever onward, however much his tired limbs ache, and however
fervently he longs to lay down his weary head. When he is tormented by
thirst, he begs at some hut for a drink; but he hands back the empty
vessel without a word of thanks, for it was dirty, or there was an ugly
insect in the water--in any case, he had found no refreshment in it.
Refreshment! Where are the eyes which have taken from us the desire
ever to look into other, brighter, more ardent eyes? Where the breast
upon which we have rested with the certain knowledge that we should
never long to listen to the beating of a warmer, more loving heart?
Where? Can you tell me where?"
"Love," so runs the reply, "is the fragrance of the blue flower, which,
as you have said, fills the world; and in every being whom you love
with your whole heart you have found the blue flower."
"I fear that is not a solution of the riddle," says the hero
sorrowfully, "for this very condition, that we should love with our
whole hearts ... we can never fulfil. Which of us can love with his
whole heart? We are all so weary, so worn out, that we have neither the
strength nor the courage essential to true, serious love--that love
which does not rest until it has taken possession of every thought of
a man's mind, every feeling of his heart, every drop of blood in his
veins."
This interpretation is a beautiful one, and it is not incorrect, but it
is not exhaustive. It is not only in love, but in every domain of life
that the "blue flower" represents perfect, and hence to that extent
ideal, but still purely personal happiness. The longing for this, from
its nature unattainable, happiness is the constant, restless desire
depicted by all the Romanticists.
Perhaps not one of the regular German Romanticists is so completely the
poet of Romantic longing as Shack Staffeldt, who, though a German born,
wrote in Danish. But he does not depict the longing which produced
outward restlessness. His longing is far too deep to be satisfied by
wandering about the world. It is in the writings of certain of the
later Romanticists that longing appears as the restless desire which
drives man from place to place.
Of this it seems to me that we have the most typical description in
Eichendorff's novel, _Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts_ ("The Life of
a Ne'er-Do-Well"). Published in 1824, this book was written twenty
years after _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_, though by a man only ten years
Novalis's junior, a disciple of Tieck, an ultra-Romanticist of a pious,
amiable disposition.
Joseph, Baron von Eichendorff, the son of a nobleman of high position,
was born in Upper Silesia in 1788. His family being Catholic, his
early education was superintended by a Catholic ecclesiastic. In 1805
he went to the University of Halle to study law, and, amongst other
lectures, attended those of Professors Schleiermacher and Steffens, the
latter of whom had a special attraction for him. It was here that he
made his first acquaintance with Romantic literature; Novalis opened
to him a new dream-world, rich in promise. In his very first holidays
he went to Wandsbeck to visit old Claudius, whom he had loved from
his early boyhood. Claudius's paper, the _Wandsbecker Bote_, had been
his greatest comfort in the days when his tutor plagued him with
instructive children's books. There is something of Claudius's mild
humour in Eichendorffs own poetry.
The year 1807 found him at Heidelberg, where he made the acquaintance
of the Romanticists living there, Arnim, Brentano, and Görres being
the most notable. He assisted in editing _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_ (a
famous collection of popular songs and poetry), and collaborated with
Görres in his work on the old popular literature. In 1809 he met Arnim
and Brentano again in Berlin; here he also made the acquaintance of
Adam Müller, who exercised a considerable influence upon him. He was
strongly influenced, too, by Fichte's lectures.
As there seemed no prospect of a career for him in Prussia, he went
in 1810 to Vienna, intending to enter the service of the Austrian
Government. In Vienna he spent much of his time in the company of
Friedrich Schlegel, formed a close friendship with Schlegel's stepson,
Philipp Veit, the painter, and wrote his first, exaggeratedly Romantic
story, _Ahnung und Gegenwart_, which is nothing but a collection of
lyric dreams and fancies. Nevertheless, in this work, as well as in his
later productions, it was his desire to contrast the "fervent harmony
existing between healthy, fresh humanity and nature, in forest, stream,
and mountain, shining mornings and dreamy starlit nights, with the
empty pleasures of the great world, and the affected prudery or real
depravity of the period." As in all his works, adventure predominates.
As soon as he quits the domain of merry vagabond life and romantic
adventure, he is in danger of relapsing into the supernatural and
horrible.
Instead of entering the Austrian Government service as he had intended,
he determined to take part in the war against Napoleon. He joined
Lützow's famous Free Corps, and was attached to a militia battalion. He
had just been discharged when the news came of Napoleon's return from
Elba. He immediately enlisted again, and entered Paris with the German
troops.
In course of time he received an appointment in the Prussian
Kultusministerium (department of religion and education), and
developed into a conscientious and capable official. In 1840, a
dispute between the Government and the Roman Catholic bishops produced
strained relations between him (the good Catholic) and the head of his
department. He sent in his resignation, but it was not immediately
accepted; he was commissioned to prepare a report on the restoration of
the castle of Marienburg.
Having made himself master of the Spanish language, he translated some
of Calderon's _Autos Sacramentales_. This pursuit led to a still closer
connection between him and the leaders of the Ultramontane party. In
his later years he criticised modern German literature in the spirit
of orthodox Catholicism, writing of the Catholic tendency of the
Romanticists as if it were the most important and best feature of the
school, and treating the change of opinion of some of the leaders in
regard to this matter as a falling away from the truth and a sign of
literary decadence. He looked with contempt upon Schiller's heroes,
with their "rhetorical ideality," and upon the symbolic "Naturpoesie"
of Goethe's shorter poems. "How different," he says, "is the great
idea of Romanticism, _homesickness_, longing for the lost home--that
is to say, for the universal, the Catholic Church." With these unsound
theories Eichendorff combined real and considerable lyrical talent.
No one has given, in a condensed form, better representations of the
longings and the ideals of Romanticism. In the little story, _Aus dem
Leben eines Taugenichts_, we seem to hear young Romanticism twittering
and singing as if he had caught it bodily and shut it up in a cage. It
is all there--the fragrance of the woods and the song of the birds;
longing for travel and delight in it, especially when Italy is the
goal; Sunday emotions and moonlight; genuine Romantic vagrancy and
idleness--such idleness that from want of use the limbs actually begin
to fall out of joint, and the hero begins to feel as though he "were
tumbling to pieces."
The Ne'er-Do-Well is a miller's son, young and poor, whose only
pleasure in life is to lie under the trees and look up into the sky,
or to roam aimlessly about the country with his zither, singing such
sad and beautiful songs that the hearts of all who hear him "long."
"Every one," he says, "has his allotted place upon this earth, his warm
hearth, his cup of coffee, his wife, his glass of wine of an evening,
and is content. But I am content nowhere." He, the humble gardener
(for such, when he does work, is his occupation), adores a high-born,
lovely lady whom he has only seen once or twice; he addresses her in a
beautiful and touching song:--
"Wohin ich geh' und schaue
In Feld und Wald und Thal,
Vom Berg hinab in die Aue,
Vielschöne, hohe Fraue,
Grüss ich dich tausendmal.
In meinem Garten find' ich
Viel Blumen, schön und fein,
Viel Kränze wohl draus wind' ich,
Und tausend Gedanken bind' ich
Und Grüsse mit darein.
"Ihr darf ich keinen reichen,
Sie ist zu hoch und schön;
Sie müssen alle verbleichen,
Die Liebe nur ohne Gleichen
Bleibt ewig im Herzen stehn.
"Ich schein' wohl froher Dinge
Und schaffe auf und ab,
Und ob das Herz zerspringe,
Ich grabe fort und singe
Und grab' mir bald mein Grab."[3]
Through his lady's influence he is promoted to the post of
rent-collector for the castle. He inherits from his predecessor a
magnificent dressing-gown, red with yellow spots, a pair of green
slippers, a nightcap, and some long-stemmed pipes.
Arrayed in his new splendour, and smoking the longest pipe he can find,
he lives a quiet, easy life for some time, digging up all the potatoes
and vegetables in his garden and planting flowers in their stead,
listening with rapture to a distant hunting or post horn, and placing
a bouquet every morning upon a stone table where his lady is certain
to find it. This goes on until she vanishes from his horizon. As he is
sitting alone one day over his account-book, his zither lying beside
him, a sunbeam falls through the window upon its dusty strings. "It
touched a string in my heart. 'Yes,' said I; 'come away, my faithful
zither! Our kingdom is not of this world!'" So he leaves behind his
account-book, dressing-gown, slippers, and pipe, and wanders out into
the wide world; to Italy first.
This Ne'er-Do-Well is the most comical, awkward, childlike creature
one can imagine; in mind he is about ten years old, and he never
grows any older. Like Andersen's heroes, the Improvisatore and O.T.,
he is repeatedly saved from temptation simply by his ignorance and
inexperience. He never realises what is going on around him. Things
happen to him without his doing anything to bring them about. He is the
central figure of a group of characters who all pursue callings which
leave them as free as he is himself--painters travelling to Italy, an
artist who runs away with his lady-love, musicians wandering from town
to town, and roaming students, who trudge along, singing student songs.
Compared with this life of wandering and seeking and expectation,
ordinary, every-day life naturally appears excessively monotonous. When
the hero returns to his native town, he finds the new rent-collector
sitting at his door, wearing the same spotted dressing-gown, the
same slippers, &c. After having spent his life seeking for his "blue
flower," he finds it at last at home. His first rapture is described
playfully, almost in Hans Andersen's manner, as follows: "It was such
a pleasure to hear her talk so brightly and trustfully to me, that I
could have listened to her till morning. I was as happy as I could be.
I took a handful of almonds, which I had brought all the way from
Italy, out of my pocket. She took some, and we sat and cracked them,
and looked contentedly out over the peaceful scene."
The Ne'er-Do-Well may be regarded as the representative, the spokesman,
of the ornamental, profitless arts, and of infinite longing. _Infinite
longing!_ Let us imprint these words in our memory, for they are the
foundation-stone of Romantic poetry.
The longing took curiously morbid forms in the less healthy Romantic
souls. The well-known German author, Franz Horn, informs us in his
autobiography that at the age of three or four he was already capable
of poetic longing and suffering, and of divining life in apparently
dead things. He goes on to say that the child-like mysticism of a
certain popular refrain had a perfectly magic attraction for him. He
quotes the verse in question, and it proves to be none other than the
good old rhyme: "Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home!"
"Maikäfer flieg!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg,
Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland,
Und Pommerland ist abgebrannt,
Maikäfer flieg!"[4]
The other children were hard-hearted enough to laugh at this poem, but
to him it seemed most touching. The unhappy cockchafer was fatherless
and motherless. His father was in the wars, and "what might not come
of that?" And his mother? Of her "the news was still more uncertain."
She was in far-off Pomerania, and Pomerania was on fire! What scope for
fancy! And there was the poor cockchafer, too, borne on the wings of
his longing out into the wide, wide world, seeking, ever seeking.--We
positively feel as if we were turning into children again.
But let us return to the idea that underlies all this. The longing of
the individual for infinite happiness rests, as has already been said,
upon the belief that this infinite happiness is attainable by man.
But this belief, in its turn, rests upon the individual's Romantic
conviction of his own infinite importance. The doctrine of immortality
itself is only a result of belief in the cosmic importance of the
individual. And this belief in the infinite importance of each separate
individual is genuinely medieval. Whole sciences, such as astrology,
were founded upon it. The very stars of heaven were supposed to have
a close connection with the destinies of individual men, and actually
to occupy themselves with them. Heaven and earth and all that in them
is, revolved round man. The Romanticists naturally feel the want of
astrology, and would fain have the science restored. What they call the
"blue flower" is what in astrology was called a man's planet, and in
alchemy, the philosopher's stone.
In his lectures _Upon the Literature, Art, and Spirit of the Age_
(1802), A. W. Schlegel writes: "In the same sense in which we may
call Kepler the last astrologist, we may demand that _astronomy
should become astrology_ again. Astrology fell into disrepute because
it made pretensions to science which it could not sustain; but the
fact of its having made such pretensions does not take away the
idea, the imperishable truths, which lie at its foundation. There
is unquestionably something more sublime in the idea of the dynamic
influence of the stars, in the supposition that they are animated by
reason, and, like subordinate deities, exercise creative power in their
appointed spheres, than in the theory that they are dead, mechanically
governed masses." And in a letter to Buntzen, Heiberg writes: "It
must be allowed that the Middle Ages, with their alchemistic and
astrological superstitions, which, albeit superstitions, were based
upon a belief in the unity of nature and mind ... possessed more of
the _true scientific spirit than the present day_, with its deliberate
renunciation of the one thing which in the long run is of any account."
In the same strain (in his essay on Hveen) he praises astrology, as
"based upon the profound mysticism of the Middle Ages." When even
Heiberg could praise Tycho Brahe for his astrological bias, can we
wonder that Grundtvig defended his hypothesis of the earth being the
centre of the universe? O Romanticism! Romanticism!
The Romanticists aimed at founding a philosophy and a literature
upon want and longing--that is to say, upon the idea of the infinite
importance of the individual. The man who bases his philosophy of
life upon want is certainly more reasonable than the man who bases it
upon either present happiness or the pleasures and bliss of a future
existence; for all the happiness we know is undermined by sorrow and by
insufficiency, and thus it is on the whole better and safer to build
upon want and desire. But the Romanticists do not build upon desire
alone, but also upon its satisfaction; they yearn, they wander about in
longing quest of the "blue flower," which beckons to them from afar.
Longing, however, is inactivity, is nourished and thrives upon
inactivity. He who has left the Romantic philosophy behind him will not
base his life upon such a foundation.
Longing engenders the impotent wish. But the Romantic wish is so
instinct with genius, that its fulfilment is permitted--in the
Romantic world. What desire promises, life fulfils. Fortune comes
to the genuine Romantic hero while he sleeps. Romantic literature
consequently leaves the simple-minded reader with the impression of
a world where everything comes to those who know how to long and to
desire ardently enough, where all hindrances are swept aside without
labour, without understanding, without trouble.
It is eternally true that we long; and it is no less true that we must
build upon something certain. Amidst all the uncertainty, insecurity,
and doubt wherewith we are surrounded, there is one thing certain,
one thing which cannot be explained away, and that is suffering. And
equally certain is the good of the alleviation of suffering and of
release from it. It is certain that it is extremely disagreeable to
endure pain, to be fettered, or to be imprisoned; and it is equally
certain that it is a great relief to be cured, to have one's fetters
loosed, one's prison door flung wide open. _Hic Rhodus, hic salta_!
Here is a deed to be done, a stroke to be struck for liberty. We may
wander about, full of uncertainty and doubt, not knowing what to
believe or what to do; but from the moment we come upon a fellow-being
with his fingers jammed in some heavy door that has shut upon them,
there is no longer any doubt what we have to do. We must try to open
the door and release the hand.
And, fortunately or unfortunately, it so happens that there are
always plenty of human beings whose hands are caught fast, plenty who
suffer, plenty who sit in all manner of chains--chains of ignorance,
of dependence, of stupidity, of slavery. To free these must be the
object of our lives. The Romanticist egotistically pursues his personal
happiness, and believes himself to be of infinite importance. The child
of the new age will neither scan the heavens in search of his star nor
the far horizon in search of the "blue flower." Longing is inactivity.
He will act. He will understand what Goethe meant by making Wilhelm
Meister end his life as a physician.
If it is impossible to found a satisfactory philosophy of life upon
longing, it is equally impossible to found upon it a literature which
has any connection with life, and which is capable of satisfying
in the long run. The task of literature in all ages is to give
a condensed representation of the life of a people and an age.
Romanticism contemptuously refused this task. Novalis in Germany and
Shack Staffeldt in Denmark present the most typical examples of the
manner in which it turned its back on outward reality, to create a
poetico-philosophic system out of the mind and the poetical longing of
the author. It does not represent human life in all its breadth and
depth, but the dreams of a few highly intellectual individuals. The
cloud-city of Aristophanes, with its air-castles, is the sacred city
and goal of its longing.
[1] Auerbach: _Deutsche Abende_.
[2] "The everlasting kingdom is firmly established; strife ends in love
and peace; the long and painful dream is at an end; Sophia is priestess
of all hearts henceforward and for ever."
[3] "From wherever I am, field, forest, valley, meadow, or
mountain-top, I send a thousand greetings to my fair and noble lady. In
my garden I gather the loveliest flowers that blow; I bind them into
wreaths, and bind along with them a thousand thoughts and greetings.
I may not give her my flowers; she is too great and beautiful; they
wither, every one, but love lives eternally in my heart. In seeming
cheerfulness I go about my daily task; my heart is breaking, but I dig
and sing, and soon I'll dig my grave."
[4] "Fly, cockchafer, fly! Your father is in the wars; your mother is
in Pommerland, and Pommerland is on fire. Fly, cockchafer, fly!"