Herder's _Stimmen der Völker_ ("Voices of the Nations"), published in
1767, contained only twenty German "Volkslieder;" but at the time he
brought it out, he expressed the wish that he might live to see the
publication of a large collection of the old "Nationallieder," as he
called them. In 1806 L. A. von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published
the first volume of _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_; it contained 210 German
popular songs and ballads, and was followed in 1808 by two more
volumes of about the same size. This book was not only of the greatest
historical interest, but was epoch-making in German lyric poetry and
German literature generally. It struck that natural note which for
many years gave freshness and sonority to both the Romantic and the
ante-Romantic lyric poetry. Even when, in the case of Heine, the
entirely modern had supplanted the Romantic theme, rhythm and form and
many hardly noticeable turns of expression owed their simple charm to
the inspiration of the Volkslied. The superiority of German to French
lyric poetry in this century possibly lies chiefly in that absence of
everything rhetorical which it owes to the influence of Des Knaben
Wunderhorn.
Though the two publishers of this great collection were of one accord
in their love for the old popular poetry of their country, and also as
to the slightly modernised and carefully expurgated form in which the
songs were to appear, and though both were thorough-going Romanticists
in principle, they were men of very different characters.
Ludwig Achim von Arnim was born in Berlin in 1781. He studied natural
science for some time in Göttingen, and then travelled all over
Germany, to make himself acquainted with the country and the people
and to collect popular songs and ballads. After this he settled for
a time in Heidelberg, where he met Clemens Brentano and Görres. In
company with them, in 1808, he started a literary periodical, the
Einsiedlerzeitung ("Hermit's Chronicle"), amongst the contributors to
which were Tieck, Uhland, Hölderlin, and Jacob Grimm. This periodical
he continued at a later time under the title _Trösteinsamkeit_
("Consolation in Solitude").
In 1811 he married Brentano's sister, the famous Bettina, and
thenceforward lived partly in Berlin and partly on his estate of
Wiepersdorf in Brandenburg. He kept his Romanticism out of his
private life; he was a sane, healthy human being, a clever farmer, a
sober Protestant and Prussian. Eichendorff describes him as follows:
"Handsome and distinguished looking, frank, ardent, and yet gentle,
honourable and reliable in all things, faithful to his friends even
when every one else deserted them, Arnim was in reality what others, by
dint of a sort of mediæval polish, strove to appear--a knightly figure
in the best sense of the word; but for this very reason it always
seemed to his contemporaries that there was something strange and out
of place about him."
Something strange there must certainly have been in his nature, for,
staid and sober, calm and harmonious as was his life, his writings give
us the impression of restlessness and complexity. He himself was cast
in one piece, his works never are.
Besides plays, now unreadable, he wrote two long novels and a number
of short tales, which all bear witness to the fantast in him. The
epithet "fantast" may be equally suitably applied to Brentano. The
first conspicuous difference between the two is, that, whereas
Brentano's strength lies in his naïveté and his childlike fancies,
Arnim is profoundly serious even in his wildest flights. With all his
love for the popular, with all his eagerness to open the eyes of the
cultured to the beauty of the simple and childlike, he remained the
dignified aristocrat in his own writings; he never let himself go as
Brentano did. When his muse has a paroxysm of madness, it is cold,
almost severe insanity, not a fiery, merry frenzy, like that to which
Brentano's muse is subject.
His power of plastic representation was great, but quickly exhausted.
It shows to advantage in some of his short stories, and in some still
shorter fragments of his long novels; but along with descriptions
and figures which evince real talent, we are presented with a mass
of padding--diffuse digressions from the subject, interpolated tales
which have little or no connection with the tale proper, fantastic,
impossible episodes, against which even the reader with the most
undeveloped sense of realism must protest. Sometimes he lays the
whole stock of popular superstitions under contribution, treating
them with the utmost seriousness--clay figures are magically endowed
with life; a mandrake develops into Field-Marshal Cornelius Nepos. At
other times he has recourse to the stock-in-trade of the old-fashioned
romances--fabulous parentage, recovery of long-lost children,
disguises, strange meetings after the lapse of many years. He is also
given to introducing ballads and songs, generally under the rather
flimsy pretext that they are the composition of one or other of his
characters: fluent, but not melodious, they interrupt the course of
the action, momentarily attract the attention of the reader, and are
immediately forgotten.
Arnim's principal novel with a modern plot, _Armuth, Reichthum, Schuld
und Busse der Gräfin Dolores: Eine wahre Geschichte zur lehrreichen
Unterhaltung armer Fräulein aufgeschrieben_ ("Poverty, Wealth, Sin, and
Penance of Countess Dolores: A True Story, Recorded for the Instruction
and Amusement of Poor Young Ladies"), is, taken as a whole, quite as
tedious as its title. This novel is another of _Wilhelm Meister's_
progeny. It describes the inner life of gifted and distinguished
individuals of very varied character, in very varied circumstances.
But there is a smooth, pious strain throughout the whole, which is
altogether unlike _Wilhelm Meister_.
The story opens with a description of a castle which has fallen almost
into ruins because of its owner's poverty. This description is striking
and good; it has its counterpart in French literature in the picture
of the Chateau de la Misère in Th. Gautier's _Capitaine Fracasse_.
We are made to feel all the melancholy associated with the idea of
former grandeur and present decay. The somewhat frivolous and selfish
character of the penniless young Countess Dolores is also drawn with
a masterly hand. This lady succeeds in engaging the affections of a
distinguished and rich young man, Count Karl, who falls passionately
in love with her and marries her, after overcoming various outward
and inward difficulties. In the character of Count Karl, Arnim
has succeeded in doing what had perhaps never been done in German
literature before, namely, depicting what the English call a _perfect
gentleman_, a conception for which other nations have no corresponding
expression. A _gentleman_ is a man of honour, manly, serious, born
to command; he is, moreover, a good Christian, conscientious,
unselfish, the protector of those around him, not only good by natural
disposition, but moral on principle. In this character Arnim seems to
have embodied much of what was best in his own nature. Unfortunately
he did not succeed in imparting to it sufficient life; a kind of
dream-haze surrounds this man of fine feelings, who is always writing
verses and who talks a language inspired by the spirit of romance.
The plot turns upon the seduction of the young Countess. She is
ensnared by a Spanish duke, who, under a false name and title, gains
admission to the house, flatters her vanity in every possible way,
and gradually, by the help of magnetism and romantic mysticism, gains
complete influence over her, and persuades her that he has some
mysterious connection with higher, nay, actually with divine, powers.
It seems almost as if Arnim must have had Zacharias Werner in his mind
when he drew this character. In Werner's writings we have exactly
this same mixture of impudent lust and sanctimonious mystery; and we
know that with Werner's mother it became a fixed idea that she was
the Virgin Mary and her son the Saviour of the world. We come upon a
similar idea in the following somewhat ineffective description of the
seduction of Dolores:--
"The Marquis looked up to the sky with an inspired gaze, held up his
hands, and appeared to salute some superior being. He said something,
but she could not hear what it was, and anxiously asked what he saw.
He answered that he saw the blessed Virgin, that she was pressing
her, Dolores, to his breast and placing a crown of roses on her head,
saying: 'Follow me!' Dolores, startled, went close up to him, imagining
that she felt herself pushed towards him; she felt his breath, imagined
it to be the divine breath, and cried: 'I feel her, I feel her breath;
it is warm as the sun of the East and as a mother's love.' Upon this,
exclaiming: 'And I am her son!' he seized her in his arms, trembling
convulsively. He had often talked to her before of a wonderful renewal
of the holy myth; she seemed almost unconscious as she stammered the
words: 'Yes, it is thou, the all-powerful, the most holy--who hast
been given to me in the weakness of our human nature.' 'And thou,' he
sobbed, 'art my eternal bride.'"
It would almost seem as though it had been Arnim's intention
to describe with the aid of these fictitious characters, the
mystic-sensual debaucheries of one of his fellow Romanticists, a Werner
or a Brentano. He himself was almost the only one of the school who, in
spite of the poetic attraction of Catholicism, remained all his life
a staunch Protestant. He seems to be attempting to explain exactly
that species of piety which mixed itself up with the licentiousness
of his Romantic contemporaries when he gives the following diagnosis
of the character of the hypnotising seducer: "We are not justified in
altogether doubting the piety of this nobleman, which to his truly
pious wife seemed so real. He too possessed the religious instinct;
and it was Clelia's natural piety which attracted him to her, though
the attraction did not last long.... Afterwards superstitious fear
took possession of him. He had outlived his vices. It was now not
merely his religious instinct which impelled him to visit all the
places of pilgrimage in Sicily and all the famous priests; he was
deluding himself into the piety which in his wife was genuine. It was
a new stimulant, the strength of which he was obliged constantly to
increase. Religion was to him a kind of opium; his nature craved for
more and more of it, till all craving was at an end." (Gräfin Dolores,
ii. 136, &c.)
But it is not only the excesses peculiar to the Romanticists
which Arnim reprehends; he also sharply and wittily castigates
the anti-Romanticist, Jens Baggesen. In Heidelberg, where he must
have met Arnim, Baggesen had written a series of satirical sonnets
directed against the Romanticists, "literary sansculottes on the
German Parnassus," as he called them. These he published in the same
year that _Dolores_ appeared, under the title, _Der Karfunkel- oder
Klingklingel-Almanack, ein Taschenbuch für vollendete Romantiker und
angehende Mystiker auf das Jahr der Gnade_ 1810. It was, however,
undoubtedly less Baggesen's verses than his extraordinary instability
of character which provoked Arnim's satire. The life of this enemy
of Romanticism was more planless and capricious than the life of any
one of the Romanticists; and Arnim, for whom everything strange and
improbable had an attraction, could not fail to be interested in such
a singular personality. In _Dolores_ he caricatures him wittily and
mercilessly in the person of the poet "Waller." But though, in this
instance, the weaknesses of a special individual are caricatured,
Arnim's general purpose unmistakably is to throw into salient relief
characteristics which exemplify the lawlessness and levity of the
emotional life of a whole generation.
His unfinished historical novel, _Die Kronenwächter_ ("The Guardians
of the Crown"), published in 1817, presents us, like _Dolores_, with
several well-conceived and ably elaborated characters along with a mass
of undigested mystic and lyric material. In the background of this tale
looms a huge, mysterious, enchanted castle, the seven towers of which
are absolutely transparent; they appear to be built of glass, for each
of them projects a brilliant rainbow upon black rocks and upon distant
water. In this castle the guardians of the crown of the Hohenstaufens
have their lonely retreat, and hence they sally forth into the world,
to act and to avenge. But it is not this mystical background which is
of importance. What one really remembers are one or two characters
portrayed with such virile force as probably no German author has
exhibited since, unless it be Gottfried Keller, in his historical
novels.
We have, for example, the hero's foster-mother, Frau Hildegard,
to whom we are thus amusingly introduced at the beginning of the
book:--"Martin, the new tower watchman, has to-day married his
predecessor's widow, because she has grown too stout to come down the
narrow corkscrew stair. We really could not pull the tower down for her
sake, so she had to make up her mind to this marriage, though she would
have preferred our clerk, Berthold. The priest has had to tie the knot
up there." This story of the widow's corpulence is of course nonsense,
but none the less it makes a very original beginning to the book.
The action passes in the days of Luther, and Luther's figure is seen in
the background. It is rare to find a Romanticist writing of him with
such warmth as this:--"As a mountain sends out streams to the east and
to the west, so this man combined opposites, things that in others are
never found together--humility and pride, conviction of the path he was
bound to tread and willing acceptance of the advice of others, clear
understanding and blind faith."
A prominent part in the action is taken by Dr. Faust, the Faustus of
popular legend, the famous doctor and alchemist. He is represented
with a fiery red face, white hair, and bald crown, wearing scarlet
trunk hose and ten orders. He is half-genius, half-charlatan, and works
miraculous cures.
The most beautifully drawn character is that of a woman, the hero's
betrothed, Anna Zähringer, daughter of Apollonia, the love of his
youth. She is the tall German maiden of powerful build and noble
carriage, but she also possesses the sensuous attraction which
Gottfried Keller has a special faculty of imparting to his young
women. The hero of the story, Berthold, the burgomaster, is another
personification of Arnim's personal ideal. He is of noble descent, but
having grown up in humble circumstances, is simple and plain in all his
ways, a good, upright, quiet citizen. Yet all the time he is at heart
an aristocrat, who longs for armour and weapons and tournaments, and
who actually, without previous training, wins the prize in the first
tournament in which he takes part.
Mystic incidents are, of course, not lacking. If Arnim could not forego
them in his modern novel, in which we read of a priest who, with one
look, imparted to childless wives the power of conception, they were
certain to occur much more frequently, and to be of an even more
surprising nature, in a tale of times long past. Faust, for instance,
cures Berthold by injecting into his veins some of the blood of a
stalwart young man, Anton by name, and ever after this, Berthold has
the feeling that Anton has somehow acquired a right of possession in
his, Berthold's, lady-love, Anna; and Anton himself immediately feels
mysteriously attracted to Anna. _Die Kronenwächter_, like all Arnim's
longer productions, is a piece of patchwork, though it must be allowed
that the patchwork does not lack poetic value.
It was only in his short tales that he succeeded in producing the
effect of unity. _Philander_ is a clever and pleasing imitation of the
style of Moscherosch, a writer who lived in the days of the Thirty
Years' War. In _Fürst Ganzgott und Sänger Halbgott_, we have a humorous
variation of the favourite Romantic "Doppelgänger" theme, based upon
an extraordinary likeness between two half-brothers who do not know
each other; the story is at the same time a travesty of the stiffness
and burdensome conventions of small courts. But Arnim's best and most
characteristic work is the short tale, _Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort
Ratonneau_. In it we have all his quaint extravagance, without any
breach of the laws of possibility; and the central idea is touchingly
human.
The story, like most of Arnim's, has a whimsically grotesque
introduction. The old Commandant of Marseilles, Count Durande, is
sitting in the evening by his crackling fire, shoving olive branches
into the flames with his wooden leg, and dreaming of the construction
of new kinds of fireworks, when he suddenly awakens to the fact that
his leg is on fire. He shouts for help, and a strange woman, who is
in the act of entering the room, rushes up to him and attempts to
stifle the flames with her apron; the burning wooden leg sets fire to
the apron, but the two are saved by people rushing in from the street
with buckets of water. The woman's errand is to present a petition on
behalf of her husband, whose behaviour has been peculiar ever since he
received a wound in the head. He is a most capable, deserving sergeant,
only at times so irritable that it is impossible to get on with him.
Partly out of compassion, partly because the case interests him, the
Commandant gives this sergeant charge of a fort which only requires a
garrison of three men, where, therefore, he runs no great danger of
falling out with those about him.
Hardly has he entered the fort before he has an attack of furious
madness; he turns out his good wife, refuses to admit his two
subordinates, declares war against the Commandant, and opens fire upon
Marseilles from his high, inaccessible nest upon the cliffs. For three
days he keeps the town in a state of terror. Preparations are made for
the storming of the fort, in spite of the certain prospect of loss of
life and the fear that the madman may blow up the powder magazine.
His brave wife, who loves him, mad as he is, begs that she may first
be allowed to try to get into the fort, and, if possible, disarm her
husband. He fires upon her, but, led by her love, she climbs undismayed
up the narrow rocky path at the top of which two loaded cannons face
her. And now, as the result of this terrible excitement, the old wound
in the madman's head bursts open again; he comes to his senses, totters
to meet his wife--he and she and the town are saved.
The effect of this little work is rather weakened by the introduction
of supernatural agencies; the whole calamity, namely, is explained to
be the result of a stepmother's foolish curse; still, the story in its
simplicity is a glorification of that strong, beautiful love which has
power to drive out even the devil himself.
And in this, as in several of his other tales, Arnim evinces a humane
sympathy with the lower classes which becomes the aristocratic
Romanticist well. It is the same feeling of affection for those who
are simple of heart as that which led him to collect and publish the
popular songs and ballads, and which finds expression in _Dolores_ in
the following words of the hero: "I swear to you that often, when I
had to pay a couple of thalers for a few lines containing some utterly
superfluous formality, I felt a furious desire to take up the inkpot
and knock in the lawyer's teeth with it. I should not have been the
least surprised to see a flash of lightning come straight from heaven
and burn up all his musty documents. And if I feel thus, how much more
grievous must such an outlay seem to the poor man who has perhaps
to work a whole week from morning till late at night to scrape the
money together." We come on this same idea again in his essay _Von
Volksliedern_, where he declares that the people have come "to look on
the law as they look upon a hurricane, or any other superhuman power,
against which they must defend themselves, or from which they must
hide, or which leaves them nothing to do but despair."
His aristocratic bias is perceptible in all his Romantic vagaries.
With Arnim's name is always coupled that of Clemens Brentano
(1778-1849), his partner in the work of collecting and publishing the
German popular songs and ballads. Brentano resembles Arnim in his
habit of giving free rein to a vivid imagination, but differs from
him in being an unstable, unreliable personality. His talent is more
sparkling and supple, he is more of an intellectual prodigy; but it is
as a psychological phenomenon that he awakens our interest, not as a
man. His only claim upon our sympathy is, that he does not, like his
spiritual kinsman, Zacharias Werner, degrade himself by sentimental
obscenity. He does not act basely, but he is never truthful in the
strictest sense of the word, until, intellectually dulled, he renounces
the calling of poet, or even of author, and lives entirely for his
religious enthusiasms. His case has a certain resemblance to that of
Hölderlin, who became insane at such an early age--the last twenty-five
years of his life are lost to literature.
In his young days Brentano is the jester of the Romanticists, the
wayward knave and wag who cannot refrain from doing what he knows will
cost him the friends he has made, nor from disturbing and destroying
the emotions and illusions which he himself has skilfully produced.
With the quality, rare among the Romanticists, of grace in art, he
combines a certain simple pathos. Like many other men of productive
intellect, when he took pen in hand he became more profound, more
serious, and, above all, more warm-hearted than he was in real life.
Hence he not unfrequently as an artist produces the impression of
genuineness, though he was insincere as a man.
As an intellectual personality he had no backbone. Destitute of firm
convictions, he could only conceive of two attitudes towards the
principle of authority in matters of belief--wild revolt or unqualified
submission. His intellect oscillated between these two extremes until
it found rest in submission.
Of all his gifts and capacities, he, the arch-Romanticist, had only
sought to develop that of imagination. Palpably true is the following
confession extracted from one of his letters: "Oh, my child! we had
nourished nothing but imagination, and it, in return, had half devoured
us." Unbridled imagination, developed without any counterbalancing
quality, is distinctly akin to mendacity; and, as a matter of fact,
Brentano in his youth was an incorrigible liar, whose favourite
amusement it was to move ladies to tears by accounts of his entirely
imaginary woes.
He was the _enfant perdu_ of the Romantic School. He might also be
called the prodigal son of poetry. Like the young man in the New
Testament, he was a spendthrift. He squandered all the many good and
witty ideas that occurred to him, all the fertile situations which
he invented, upon works destitute of definite plan and form, and
consequently destitute of the power to withstand time, which so soon
sweeps away everything formless. Before he was forty he had exhausted
his intellectual capital, had squandered his substance, and was
fain, like the young man of the Bible, "to fill his belly with the
husks that the swine did eat"--the husks that were the food of only
ignorant and superstitious human beings. In other words, he relapsed
into foolish bigotry. In the year 1817 he began to go to confession
again, as in the days of his earliest youth, and in the following
year withdrew from all intercourse with his fellows, to pass the next
six years of his life in devout contemplation by the sick-bed of
the nun, Catharina Emmerich, who bore on her body the marks of the
wounds of Christ. He regarded the bodily infirmities of this pious,
single-minded, but perfectly hysterical girl, as so many wonderful
signs of grace, believed in the miraculousness of the supposed imprints
of the Saviour's wounds, and with awe-strick'en compassion watched
them bleed from time to time. Catharina's words convinced him that
she possessed a mysterious, supernatural gift of second-sight, and
he carefully noted down every one of her visions and hallucinations.
He wrote the story of her life, edited her reflections, and wrote to
her dictation _The Life of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary_. After her
death, which happened in 1824, practically his only occupation was
the preparing for publication of the fourteen volumes of manuscript
containing her various utterances.
Brentano's life is a remarkable exemplification of the truth of the
words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's _Faust_:--
"Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
Des Menschen aller höchste Kraft,
Lass nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken
Dich von dem Lügengeist bestärken,
So hab' ich dich schon unbedingt."[1]
Hallucinations and magic played no small part in his existence, and the
man who had begun by sneering at rationalism as dull and barren, fell a
prey to ideas far duller and more barren than the emptiest rationalism.
He was no more a hypocrite than the good soul, Catharina Emmerich, was
an impostor. But the craving for some firm, external support for his
weak, wavering Ego, now still farther enfeebled by remorse for the
recklessness of his youth, led him to cling with all the fanatical
enthusiasm of his soul to the Church and its miracles, just as he had
clung in earlier days to poetry with its fairy-tales and magic.
In his later years he was possessed by a kind of religious mania,
though on a rare occasion he showed a trace of his old inclination to
waggery. He declared, for instance, that he had drawn the apostles
who appeared to Catharina Emmerich in her visions exactly as she had
described them to him; but Bettina discovered that he had been unable
to resist hanging round the apostle Paul's neck, in lieu of a scrip,
a curious old tobacco pouch, which had belonged to himself in former
days, and about which many funny stories were in circulation among his
acquaintances.
On his father's side Clemens Brentano was of Italian descent. His
grandfather, a successful Frankfort merchant, was a native of Tremezzo
on the Lake of Como. Through his mother he was descended from the
authoress Sophie Laroche, Wieland's friend.
In personal appearance he was the popular ideal poet, handsome, pale,
and slight, with a confusion of curly black hair. He had a Southern
complexion and sparkling, restless brown eyes shadowed by long lashes.
His voice was deep and beautiful, and he was fond of singing his own
songs, accompanying himself on the guitar.
He was apprenticed to a merchant, but the experiment proved totally
unsuccessful, and in 1797 he went to Jena, where he made the
acquaintance of the most famous of the Romanticists, Fr. Schlegel,
Steffens, and others. These friends often threatened to thrash him
for his mad tricks and "not unfrequently malicious boasts and lies,"
and the threat was more than once actually carried out. But he could
not refrain from offending; it was impossible to him to restrain a
caprice. While still quite young, he fell in love with a very gifted
woman, Sophie Mereau, wife of one of the Jena professors. In the course
of this love affair the couple had many wonderful adventures, some of
which we find reproduced in his first book, _Godwi, or the Mother's
Statue_. When, in 1802, Fr. Tieck executed a marble bust of Brentano,
Frau Mereau described the impression it produced on her in the
following beautiful sonnet, inspired by genuine admiration and love:--
"Welch süsses Bild erschuf der Künstler hier?
Von welchem milden Himmelsstrich erzeuget?
Nennt keine Inschrift seinen Namen mir,
Da diese todte Lippe ewig schweiget?
Nach Hohem loht im Auge die Begier,
Begeistrung auf die Stirne niedersteiget,
Um die, nur von der schönen Locken Zier
Geschmücket, noch kein Lorbeerkranz sich beuget.
Ein Dichter ist es. Seine Lippen prangen
Von Lieb' umwebt, mit wunderselgem Leben,
Die Augen gab ihm sinnend die Romanze!
Und schalkhaft wohnt der Scherz auf seinen Wangen;
Den Namen wird der Ruhm ihm einstens geben,
Das Haupt ihm schmückend mit dem Lorbeerkranze."[2]
Happiness came to Brentano before fame. In 1803 he married Sophie
Mereau, who had been divorced from her husband, and they lived most
happily together till 1806, when she died in childbirth.
In Heidelberg Brentano collaborated with Arnim in the publication
of _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_ and with Görres in _Die Geschichte des
Uhrmachers BOGS_ ("Story of Bogs, the Watchmaker"). He had already
published several works on his own account--_Ponce de Leon, die
lustigen Musikanten_ ("The Merry Musicians"), _Chronika eines fahrenden
Schülers_ ("Chronicles of a Roving Student"). In Frankfort he became
entangled in a love affair, which led to one of the many tragi-comic
episodes in his life. He ran away with a young girl who had fallen
violently in love with him, Auguste Busmann, a niece of the famous
banker, Bethmann. They went to Cassel, where he married her. It is
said that he tried to escape from her on the way to church, but that
the energetic bride held him fast. A few days after the ceremony she
threw her wedding-ring out of the window. One of her fancies was to
dash through the town on horseback, the long plumes of her hat and the
scarlet trappings of her horse floating in the wind. She plagued her
husband in many ways. We are told that one of the worst tortures he had
to endure was caused by her skill in beating a tattoo with her feet
against the footboard of the bed, a performance invariably followed by
a skilful _pizzicato_ played with her toe-nails upon the sheet.[3] This
and other things grew so unendurable that he ran away. The valiant lady
procured a divorce the same year, and was ere long married again.
Brentano settled in Berlin, and was soon in great request in social
circles there, on account of his powers of conversation, his
whimsicality, and his rocket-like sallies of wit. It was in Berlin that
he wrote his fairy-tales and most of his _Romanzen vom Rosenkranz_
("Romances of the Rosary"). His play, _The Founding of Prague_, was
written in Bohemia, where lay the family estate, Bukowan, of which the
younger brother, Christian, took charge. After his return to Berlin
in 1816, he wrote the famous tale, _Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und
der schönen Nannerl_ ("Story of Brave Kasperl and Fair Nannerl"), also
_Die mehreren Wehmüller_, and _Die drei Nüsse_ ("The Three Nuts"). Then
his conversion took place, and he no longer lived for literature. The
profits of anything he wrote subsequently were devoted to charitable
objects.
Steffens remarks of Brentano that he is the only one of the
Romanticists who seems to be thoroughly aware that he has no aim. He
calls him an ironical, sportive Kronos, who fantastically demolishes
every one of his definite utterances by means of its successor, in this
manner devouring his own children. Still, as a lyric poet, a writer of
fairy-tales, and a novelist, Brentano has produced works of art, few in
number, but of permanent value.
In his poetry there is something touching, simple, and caressingly
sweet. He understands the art of condensing an emotion, but he
generally dilutes it again, and spoils his effect by repetitions,
refrains, or the introduction of inarticulate sounds, such as "Ru, ku,
ku, kuh," and the like. Almost all his poems contain single verses of
great excellence, but almost all are too long. He has appropriated
the diffuseness of the Volkslied. He is distinctly original in such
untranslatable verses as the following, taken from the _Dichters
Blumenstrauss_ ("Poet's Garland"):--
"Ein verstimmend Fühlgewächschen
Ein Verlangen abgewandt,
Ein erstarrend Zitterhexchen,
Zuckeflämmchen, nie verbrannt.
Offnes Räthsel, nie zu lösen,
Steter Wechsel, fest gewöhnt,
Wesen, wie noch keins gewesen,
Leicht verhöhnt und schwer versöhnt.
* * * * * * * *
Auf dem Kehlchen wiegt das Köpfchen,
Blumenglöckchen auf dem Stiel,
Seelchen, selig Thaueströpfchen,
Das hinein vom Himmel fiel."
The highly artificial style of this poem is very characteristic of
Brentano. Both as lyric poet and story-teller he is artificial; but his
mannerism seldom gives the impression of affectation, it only witnesses
to the almost morbid sensibility of his temperament.
In _Der Spinnerin Lied_ we have a simple and touching expression of the
pain of the long separation from Sophie Mereau. It begins:--
"Es sang vor langen Jahren
Wohl auch die Nachtigall,
Das war wohl süsser Schall,
Da wir zusammen waren.
Ich sing und kann nicht weinen,
Und spinne so allein
Den Faden klar und rein,
So lang der Mond wird scheinen.
Da wir zusammen waren,
Da sang die Nachtigall,
Nun mahnet mich ihr Schall
Dass du von mir gefahren.
So oft der Mond mag scheinen
Gedenk ich dein allein;
Mein Herz ist klar und rein,
Gott wolle uns vereinen."[4]
It is right to give Brentano all honour as the creator, in his ballad
"Loreley," of a figure which, under the treatment of other poets,
notably Heine, has become so living, so truly popular, that one can
hardly believe that it is not a genuine legendary figure. It is wrong
to do what Griesebach and Scherer have done, namely, turn this praise
into a depreciation of Heine's merits, credit him only with the greater
literary dexterity, Brentano with the greater capacity of invention.
It seems particularly unjust when we remember that Brentano's own
finest lyrics are adaptations of popular songs. Read, for example, his
beautiful _Es ist ein Schnitter, der heisst Tod._ The poem is to be
found under the name _Erntelied_ in _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_, and begins
thus:--
"Es ist ein Schnitter, der heisst Tod,
Hat Gewalt vom höchsten Gott,
Heut wetzt er das Messer,
Es schneid't schon viel besser,
Bald wird er drein schneiden,
Wir müssen's nur leiden;
Hüte dich, schön's Blümelein!"