There is one form of literature in which men and women are, for the
most part, portrayed as essentially intellectual beings, endowed with
freedom of will and action. That form is the drama. In lyric poetry
emotion reigns; in epic the character is partly lost sight of in
the broad painting of the circumstances and powers which determine
it; but the subject of the drama is action; and because the human
character, acting and willing, is in itself something absolutely
definite, it compels the author to give clear, well-defined form to
his production. The drama demands lucidity and intellect; in it, where
there is a reason for everything, the forces of nature must be either
the servants or the masters of the mind; but, above all, they must
be comprehended; they cannot appear as dark, mysterious despots, who
are not expected to give any explanation of their nature or business.
Tieck's two Romantic dramas, the tragedy, _Leben und Tod der heiligen
Genoveva_ ("Life and Death of St. Genevieve"), and the ten act comedy,
_Kaiser Octavianus_, are really only dramas in name. His admiration of
Shakespeare's _Pericles_ and _Winter's Tale_ and Calderon's lyrical
and musical interludes betrayed him into a lyric-epic formlessness
unequalled in the history of literature. It would be difficult to find
dramatic works more destitute of plan and style. All their author's
care is lavished upon what he calls the "climate" of events, their
atmosphere and fragrance, tone and colour, the mood they inspire,
the shadow they cast, the light in which they are seen, which is
invariably that of the moon. His medieval characters are possessed by
the spirit which the study of old legends has induced in himself. It
was a kind of religious impression which imparted this tendency to
his productivity. Schleiermacher's _Reden über Religion_ ("Lectures on
Religion") had had a profound influence on him. He had begun to read
Jakob Böhme's _Morgenröthe_ ("Dawn"), expecting to find it a perfect
mine of absurdities, and from a scoffer had turned into an enthusiastic
disciple. It was about this time, too, that he met Novalis and fell
under his influence.
Nevertheless, if we read Genoveva observantly, we soon find what Tieck
himself admits, that its religion, the pious emotion which was intended
to give it artistic unity, is no more than the Romantic longing for
religion. Many traces of this longing are to be found in the play.
The old days, the days of faith, are represented as sighing, like
Tieck's own, for still older, far more believing days; their religion,
too, is but a longing for religion. Golo says to Sir Wolf, who to him
represents the good old times: "How could I dream of jeering at thy
childlike spirit!" Genoveva looks back to the past; like Tieck himself,
she spends her time reading old legends. She says, with a touch of
genuine Romanticism:--
"Drum ist es nicht so Andacht, die mich treibt,
Wie inn'ge Liebe zu den alten Zeiten,
Die Rührung, die mich fesselt, dass wir jetzt
So wenig jenen grossen Gläub'gen gleichen."[1]
The principal masculine character in the play, the whimpering, whining
villain Golo, is William Lovell over again, and William not in the
least improved by being dressed up as a dramatic figure in a medieval
tragedy.
_Octavianus_, the allegorical style of which has been strongly
influenced by _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_, is, if possible, still
more shapeless and incoherent than _Genoveva_. It strikes one as
resembling nothing so much as a splendid collection of samples of all
kinds of metres, those of Southern as well as of Northern Europe, and
is in reality simply a fatiguing succession of carefully elaborated
descriptions of impressions produced, moods inspired, by nature.
In the introduction to _Phantasus_, Tieck has himself described how all
definite impressions of the surrounding world blend in his mind into a
sort of mystic pantheism:--
"Was ich für Grott' und Berg gehalten,
Für Wald und Flur und Felsgestalten,
Das war ein einzigs grosses Haupt,
Statt Haar und Bart mit Wald umlaubt.
Still lächelt er, dass seine Kind'
In Spielen glücklich vor ihm sind
Er winkt und ahndungsvolles Brausen
Wogt her in Waldes heil'gem Sausen.
Da fiel ich auf die Kniee nieder
Mir zitterten in Angst die Glieder.
Ich sprach zum Kleinen nur das Wort:
Sag an, was ist das Grosse dort?
Der Kleine sprach: Dich fasst sein Graun,
Weil Du ihn darfst so plötzlich schaun,
Das ist der Vater, unser Alter,
Heisst Pan, von Allem der Erhalter."[2]
And Tieck looked at and apprehended human nature exactly as he looked
at and apprehended forest and mountain. In describing it, too, he
drowns all definiteness and character in the flood of mystic pantheism.
And this mystic pantheism in his plays paves the way for the Christian
mysticism distinguishing the Romantic drama.
Arnim and Brentano are hardly to be taken into account as dramatists.
The latter, in his mad comedy, _Ponce de Leon_, the dialogue of which
is loaded with wearisome play upon words, is the would-be disciple of
Shakespeare, who has only succeeded in imitating the affectations of
the master's youthful style. In his great Romantic drama, _Die Gründung
Prags_ ("The Founding of Prague"), he gives us sorcery and miracles,
visions and prophecies, magic rings and curses, instead of real human
beings and real action; the course of events is indicated by strange
forebodings and unerring second-sight.
There is some resemblance between the manner in which Brentano has
dramatised Slavonic legend in this play, and the Polish Romanticist
Slowacki's treatment (in _Lilla Weneda_, for instance) of similar
themes. Both, out of crude myths and traditions, have produced pictures
of Slavonic heathendom which display a certain gift of intuition. The
fact is that the Romantic authors of all lands had a keener sense for
religious mysticism than for dramatic truth and effect. This play of
Brentano's is actually declared to have influenced the mythological
theories of his contemporaries, the brothers Grimm.
Arnim's _Halle und Jerusalem_, the "tragedy in two comedies," as
he himself styled it, in which the legend of the Wandering Jew is
interwoven with the story of Cardenio and Celinde, is one of the most
intolerable productions of German Romanticism. It is a reading-drama
of four hundred large octavo pages, which begins as a wild student's
comedy in Halle, and develops into a pilgrim-mystery in Jerusalem. It
turns upon the medieval idea of the Holy Sepulchre being the centre
of the world; and it ends with an apparition of three crosses of fire
above the graves of the three principal characters.
In one of the scenes Celinde attempts in the dead of night to cut the
heart out of her dead lover's breast, that with its assistance she may
perform certain magic rites which will ensure her possession of the
heart of her living lover. The dead man, the blood pouring from his
breast, rises out of his coffin, and complains of her treatment in such
verse as:--
"Geliebte, du durchbohrst mein Herz,
Das ist bittrer als der Hölle Schmerz."[3]
Immediately after this, the sexton unmasks himself, reveals himself as
the devil, and carries off Celinde's wicked mother to be his bride.
In another scene Celinde is supposed to be about to give birth to a
child in a mountain cavern. A stork appears on the stage carrying a
child in its beak, and flies into the cavern. Then come a whole flight
of storks, which direct their course southwards, singing:--
"Hast du schwer am Kind getragen,
Musst sie mit den Flügeln schlagen,
Hast du müssen lange reisen,
Musst sie mit dem Schnabel beissen," &c.[4]
The child is born dead, and the wretched mother is in despair. This
fact also is communicated to us by a stork:--
"In meiner Wut,
In der Reiseglut,
Hab ich das Kind erdrückt," &c., &c.[5]
Immediately on the head of this follow would-be pathetic, but in
reality revoltingly horrible scenes, like the one entitled "The
Temptation in the Desert," in which Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who
is starving, struggles against the temptation to eat a little boy, who
has been saved along with himself from shipwreck. Ahasuerus says: "How
terrible is my desire for his flesh! I already feel the juicy morsel
rolling between tongue and palate...." He is on the point of committing
the crime, when the child cries: "Father! father!" on which the old man
hastily absorbs himself in his book.
Almost at the end of the play, in the middle of a religious service
held by the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, an attack is suddenly made
upon those Romanticists whose piety is not sincere. A traveller says:
"I will deliver the Holy Sepulchre out of the hands of the Turks." One
of the author's favourite characters retorts: "Do it first, and then
speak of it." Hereupon follows this incredibly undramatic parenthesis:
"The traveller turns away ashamed; he goes out into the wide world and
pleads the cause of Christianity in thousands of words; but his words
have not the power of eternal life, for his is love without deeds.
From him are descended all the new, poetic Christians, those, I mean,
who are only Christians in their poems." When it comes the length of
the author's "I" appearing in a parenthesis in the middle of a play, we
may regard dramatic form as practically non-existent. Even Tieck and
Hoffmann never went as far as this.
German Romanticism produced only two real dramatists--Zacharias
Werner and Heinrich von Kleist. Of these, the latter is incomparably
the greater; indeed his poetic gifts are so great that one may
unhesitatingly assign him the highest place among all the poets of his
school. He has a clearer, more plastic style than any of them, and
pathos such as we do not find even in Goethe. His finest works are full
of soul, heart, and burning passion, and yet the style is simple and
lucid. Kleist is Germany's Mérimée; and a study of his characteristics
will show us what the German Romantic tendency could make of a Mérimée.
We shall see how the clearness, the definiteness, which was the natural
quality of his genius, was disturbed and deranged by the poetical
insanity of Romanticism.
Thirty steps from the Wannsee, a little lake near Berlin, and fifty
from the wayside inn, stands a gravestone bearing the inscription:
"Heinrich von Kleist."
Upon this spot, on the 20th of November, 1811, at the age of
thirty-four, the greatest German poet of the younger generation of
that day, shot, with unerring aim, first the woman he loved and then
himself. It was long believed that the two were united simply by a
calm, reasonable friendship. But when, in 1873, their correspondence
was published, its unhealthy passion made it evident that there was
extravagantly strong feeling on both sides, and that the reason of both
was undermined. Kleist addresses his friend, Frau Henriette Vogel,
in such terms as these: "My Jette, my all, my castle, land, meadows,
and vineyards, sun of my life, my wedding, baptism of my children, my
tragedy, my fame, my guardian angel, my cherub and seraph!" and she
replies: "My defence, my guard, my sword, my spear, my buckler, my
shield," &c.
Heinrich von Kleist was of noble birth, the scion of an old Prussian
military family, which in the eighteenth century had already produced a
poet. Heinrich had been through one campaign, as a young ensign, when
military life became distasteful to him, and a dim consciousness of his
unusual powers impelled him to turn to study. In 1799 he matriculated
at the university of his native town, Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and was
soon working hard at philosophy, mathematics, and classics, living, in
spite of his youth, a very sober life, entirely occupied with his own
ardent introspective thoughts. In an awkward, pedantic way he attempted
to educate his sister, and to cultivate the mind of his _fiancée_, so
that she might really understand him. In the course of a year he left
Frankfort to pursue his studies in Berlin. He early developed a fatal
inclination to stake everything on one card. His biographer, Wilbrandt,
has aptly compared his character to Werther's. He had Werther's gloomy
dissatisfaction and cynical reserve, his vivid imagination, his habit
of brooding and reasoning, and of dwelling upon everything painful, his
overpowering outbursts of emotion.
It was clear to Kleist himself that his was the poet's vocation long
before he dared confide the thought to his friends; he left them,
he isolated himself, until he was certain of his powers. When for
the first time he felt the plan of a work taking shape in his mind,
it seemed to him as though "something like earthly happiness" were
smilingly beckoning him on. Impetuous and audacious, he expected to
produce a masterpiece at once. The immature beginner's attempt was
unsuccessful. When, a year later, he planned _Robert Guiscard_, the
tragedy which occupied his thoughts throughout the rest of his youth,
it was with the distinct intention of surpassing the classical works
of Goethe and Schiller "by the aid of a new art principle." In his
art Æschylus and Shakespeare, the best qualities of antiquity and the
Renaissance, were to be fused together, the cult of the beautiful was
to be combined with truth to nature, and irreproachable style with the
extreme of tragic horror.
His powers were as yet inadequate to the task of producing a complete
work, and he was obliged to lay the tragedy aside.
In the discouragement produced by the failure of this attempt he turned
to philosophy. His desire was to find, not truths, but the truth. With
the naïve confidence of the self-taught man he expected to discover at
once the full, perfect truth which would guide him both in life and
death.
It was the philosophy of Kant which he set himself to study, and the
impression it made upon him was distinctly depressing. He had expected
to find a religion in philosophy, and Kant's Theory of Cognition taught
him that we cannot attain to the truth, can never know what things
are in themselves, but only see them as our own organs show them to
us--that is to say, he who has green spectacles sees things green, and
he who has red, sees them red. When he recognised that knowledge of the
truth, as he had represented it to himself, was not possible, it seemed
to the young man as if his highest, his only aim were gone.
In this state of spiritual disorganisation he, like other Romanticists,
felt the inclination to seek the support of a system of dogmas,
either that of orthodox Protestantism or that of the older and more
authoritative Catholic Church. He writes from Dresden: "Nothing could
have been better calculated to entice me away from the melancholy
domain of science than the treasures of art collected in this town....
But nowhere did I feel so deeply moved as in the Catholic church, where
the most sublime music leagues itself with the other arts to touch the
heart. Our divine service is nothing at all in comparison; it only
appeals to cold reason, but a Catholic festival appeals to all the
senses.... Oh, for one drop of forgetfulness! then I should with joy
become a Catholic."
Though he overcomes these fancies, he is unable to force himself to
work, now that he has made the discovery that truth is not to be found
upon earth. To put an end to this painful aimlessness, he determines,
though with no particular object in view, to go to Paris. His letters
from Paris show how fruitless this new attempt at discovering his real
vocation in life proved. He breaks off his engagement, because his
_fiancée_ will not blindly and obediently follow him to Switzerland,
there to live the life of a peasant's wife. His pride will not permit
him to return to his native town before he has accomplished something
in the way of fulfilment of his ambitious projects. He goes to Weimar
with the intention of completing _Robert Guiscard_ there, is much in
Wieland's society, and finally takes up his abode in his house. The
old man's goodness and his daughter's quiet tenderness keep him there,
but he remains reserved and absent-minded. At last he confesses to the
lovable, sympathetic old poet that he is at work upon a tragedy, but
that his ideal is so high that he has as yet found it impossible to
transfer his conception to paper.
One afternoon Wieland, taking advantage of a favourable opportunity,
persuaded his guest to repeat some fragments of the principal scenes
from memory. The old poet's admiration knew no bounds; he asserted
that if it were possible for the spirits of Æschylus, Sophocles, and
Shakespeare to combine in creating a tragedy, it would be such a
tragedy as _Robert Guiscard_, provided that the whole fulfilled the
promise of the parts he had heard.
Kleist's joy was great, but short-lived. Circumstances soon unsettled
him again. He went first to Leipzig, then to Dresden. It was in
Dresden, to a girl who was in distress because of the supposed
indifference of her lover, that he first made the proposal (a proposal
which he afterwards often repeated to friends of both sexes), that he
should take a pistol and shoot her and himself. Not long afterwards
he made a similar offer to his faithful friend, Von Pfuel. Pfuel came
to the conclusion that travel would be the best thing possible for
Kleist and his tragedy. Kleist caught eagerly at the idea. Shortly
before he started for Switzerland he received a letter from Wieland
which gave him fresh courage, and was for a long time his greatest
comfort. Wieland wrote that it was impossible to him to believe that
any external hindrance could prevent the completion of Kleist's
masterpiece: "To the Holy Muse who inspires you nothing is impossible.
You must complete your _Guiscard_; yes, even if the whole Caucasus were
weighing you down."
During his travels in Switzerland and Northern Italy, which occupied
the summer and autumn of 1803, Kleist wrote nothing. Despairing of the
sufficiency of his powers, coming to the conclusion that he possessed
only a "half talent," he temporarily gave up all idea of literary
work. All the time tormented by thoughts of death, he travelled by
Lyons to Paris. There he burned _Guiscard_ and all his papers, and
determined to enter the army of France (a nation he hated) and take
part in the great expedition preparing at Boulogne, in the confident
hope that the undertaking would fail, and that he and the whole army
would find graves in England. He tried to enlist as a common soldier,
but was refused. An acquaintance whom he accidentally met, put him
in a position to return to Germany, where, after many mishaps and
disappointments, he obtained a small official appointment at Königsberg.
Kleist had announced his intention of competing with Goethe. "I will
tear the wreath from his brow," was early the burden of his confidences
and his dreams. It sounds like the utterance of a madman. And yet, when
we read the one fragment that remains to us of the never-completed
drama, _Guiscard_, we are filled with astonishment. It was as little
within the power of this work as of any other to remove the crown
of honour from the brow of the genius whose spirit dominates two
centuries; but the fact remains that the fragment of it which we
possess stands on a level with much of the best produced by Goethe.
Kleist has drawn on his imagination for the picture of a great man, a
great leader; and he at once successfully impresses us with his hero's
greatness by showing how much depends upon him, upon his life, how
thousands upon thousands look up to him as their ruler and only saviour.
The great adventurer, Robert Guiscard, son of Tancred de Hauteville, is
lying with his army before Constantinople, which city he has vowed to
take and keep. But fate is against him; the plague has broken out in
his camp and is committing terrible ravages.
Kleist himself had encountered just such overwhelming misfortune on the
path of victory which his imagination had painted; and his delineation
of a hero struggling against an overpowering destiny which he has long
borne consciously within himself is grand. For Guiscard himself is
plague-stricken; the mortal sickness is raging in his intestines; its
poison is consuming his very bones. He who till now has been everywhere
victorious, the conqueror of Southern Italy, of Rome, of Venice, and
of Greece, knows, feels, that his end is at hand. A crowd of Normans
are besieging his tent, calling on him to lead the army away from this
terrible camping-ground, where they feel the poisonous breath of the
plague blowing in their faces. A rumour that he is ill has already
begun to spread, but as yet the truth is not to be divulged; Guiscard
is too proud to let any one know what he is suffering.
His tent is thrown open, and the man in whose breast a consuming fire
is burning, whose throat is parched with unquenchable thirst, and whose
hand is so weak that all through the night he has not been able to lift
it, steps forth erect and proud, and shows himself to the crowd. So
strong and gay and masterful does he seem, that even those who before
were certain of the worst, no longer know what to believe.
And there is profound meaning as well as grandeur in this conception of
Kleist's. This Guiscard, who stands there erect and unflinching while
mortal disease is gnawing at his vitals, who is he but Kleist himself,
his whole unhappy life long? He himself is the great genius whose plans
are foiled by the pestilence without and within him.
Kleist soon resigned his Government appointment and returned to the
calling of literature. It is most interesting to observe the dramatic
characters now produced by a man in reality full of productive energy.
Our study of the psychological peculiarities and doctrines of the
Romanticists has shown us how their predilection for disintegrating
personality led them to lay special weight upon all that has a
disintegrating effect--dreams, hallucinations, and madness. What
distinguishes Kleist's characters from those of the other Romanticists
is that there is nothing blurred and vague about them; the essential
quality which his and theirs have in common is morbidity. In every
passion Kleist seizes upon that feature which betrays kinship with the
fixed idea or with helpless insanity; he probes every mind, however
sound, till he finds the diseased point where it loses control over
itself--somnambulistic tendency, overpowering animal appetites,
absent-mindedness, cowardice in the face of death. Take such a passion
as love; it is certainly not of a rational nature, but it has a side
from which it may be seen to be connected with reason and intellect.
Kleist almost invariably, and with admirable skill, depicts it as of
the nature of disease, as mania.
When Käthchen of Heilbronn sees Count Walter von Strahl for the first
time, she drops everything she is carrying, food, wine, and glasses,
and, pale as death, with folded hands, falls at his feet as if she
had been struck by lightning. The Count speaks a friendly word to
her. Presently, from her window, she sees him mounting his horse to
ride away. In her haste to follow him, she jumps from the window,
thirty feet high, on to the street, and breaks both her legs. Barely
recovered from six weeks' fever, she rises from her bed, collects a
small bundle of belongings, and deserts her home to seek the Count and
follow him in blind devotion from place to place, led "by the rays
which shine from his face and twine themselves round her heart like
a five-stranded cord." She wanders after him, her bare feet bleeding
on the stony roads, her scanty skirt fluttering in the wind, a straw
hat her only protection against the heat of the sun and the pelting of
the rain. Through mountain mists, across desert tracts scorched by the
sun, through the darkness of thick forests, she follows, like a dog on
its master's track; and she, who had been accustomed to lay her head
on soft pillows, disturbed by each little knot spun inadvertently by
herself into the thread of the sheets, now, when night comes, sleeps in
the Count's stables like the meanest servant, sinking exhausted upon
the straw spread for his horses.
There is the ring of truth in this description, given by her father, of
the young girl's flight. The Count, who knows that he is in no way to
blame, tries every method of alienating her. Coming upon her in his
stable one night, he thrusts her aside with his foot, and more than
once he threatens her with his dog-whip. He allows her to sacrifice
herself for his bride, who orders her to rush into a burning house
to save his miniature, and when she has brought it, sends her back
again for the case. With joy and deep humility she does and bears
all. The more refined, but weaker, representation of an overpowering,
unrequited passion given us by Henrik Hertz in The _House of Svend
Dyring_ is modelled upon Kleist's Käthchen. Side by side with much
that is ridiculous and repulsive, _Käthchen von Heilbronn_ contains
much that is really grand. It is plain enough that this passion,
which comes on as suddenly as a fit of apoplexy--which, moreover,
as a fixed idea, destroys every other idea, and, itself a miracle,
performs miracles with the aid of an angel--oversteps the bounds of the
natural and the healthy. Yet there is something fine in it. It gave
intense satisfaction to Kleist, who had such a rooted aversion for mere
phrases, to represent a loving woman, in whom everything was truth and
reality which in other women is mere words. It was thus that he himself
had desired to be loved by his Wilhelmine; and at a later period he had
demanded such excessive devotion from a young girl whose acquaintance
he had made at the Körners' house in Dresden, and who had become
attached to him, that all relations between them were broken off. Now
he had taken refuge with his ideal in poetry.
There is something satisfying and pleasing in the realisation of the
well-known phrases: To see and love was one and the same thing--to
follow the beloved to the ends of the earth--to be more devoted to
him than his dog--to go through fire and water for him. But yet all
this properly belongs to the domain of pathology; these are morbid
manifestations. Then, too, we have the Romantic reason of it all.
Käthchen's violent agitation when she sees the Count is explained by
the fact of his having previously appeared to her in a dream. At the
moment when she sees him in this dream, the Count is in reality lying
dangerously ill with typhus fever. Stretched like a corpse on his bed,
he himself has the feeling that he is entering Käthchen's room. And
when he hears of the strange coincidence, he cannot help exclaiming
anxiously--
"Help me, ye gods! Now am I double!
A spirit I, who wander in the night."
Here we have the favourite idea of Romanticism, "Doppelgängerei," in
close connection with somnambulism.
Somnambulism plays a similar part in _Der Prinz von Homburg_, the
finest of Kleist's dramas--probably the finest drama produced by
the Romantic School. In it all the important characters stand out
as if hewn in stone. The dialogue is vigorous and clear; every word
tells. The young cavalry leader commits an unpardonable breach of
discipline; he is victorious in an engagement which he has brought
about in a manner forbidden in his instructions. The Elector condemns
him to death. Not for a moment imagining that the sentence will be
carried out, the young hero treats it as a mere matter of form. When
it dawns upon him that it is sober earnest, a sudden fear of death
takes possession of him, and he abjectly begs for his life. Kleist's
genius shows itself in the delineation of the mental process by which
the Prince becomes himself again, and demands death as his right.
Here once more it is the night side of the mind to which attention is
drawn. The Prince is nervous, ill, and absent-minded. In the first
act he walks in his sleep. In the last we have the realisation of one
of his visions. He transgresses orders, not, like the son of Manlius
Torquatus, in youthful audacity and martial ardour, but because, in his
nervous, dreamy absent-mindedness he has not heard the orders given,
and consequently dashes recklessly on.
Kleist had been deeply interested by G. H. von Schubert's _Die
Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft_ ("The Night Side of the Science of
Nature"). This book, written by the most popular "Naturphilosoph" of
the day, is one of the most extravagant works of the whole period.
The night side of a planet is that which is turned away from the sun,
and only glimmers faintly in the darkness, with a light destitute
of warmth, a light in which all objects look strange, and totally
different from what they do in the light of the sun. Schubert considers
that he succeeds, in his "Science of Nature," in demonstrating
the existence of such a night side. The first half of the work is
"Naturphilosophie," much as Steffens understood it. "This is certainly
not philosophy for the world," says the author, "but it is much older
than the world and all its philosophies, and will last much longer."
Most of it is on the same lines as the so-called occult sciences of
to-day. Man, like the nature which surrounds him, is a "prophetic
hieroglyph." In animal magnetism, in somnambulism, in presentiment, and
in so-called prescience, proofs are sought of a predestined harmony
between the life of the individual and that of the whole.
According to Schubert's theory, man originally had the power of
working miracles. Sin bereft him of his power over nature, and after
this there was always something dark and dæmonic connected with the
miracle-working gift--with the oracles of Greece, for instance, and
with all heathen sorcery. The old, natural miraculous power was
revived in Christ. In its dæmonic form it has reappeared among the
Rosicrucians and the Freemasons (the secret societies which played so
important a part in the imagination of Schubert's day); and it is also
observable in such phenomena as animal magnetism, clairvoyance, &c.
Adam Müller writes: "Schubert's book seems to me the best which the
'Naturphilosophie' has produced; its author, though not superior to
Schelling in polemical and critical talent, is certainly his superior
in feeling, in sincerity, and above all in erudition.... In Schubert's
writings I find a glorified, yet in all essentials accurate presentment
of an earlier stage of my development, when my one longing was, that
all that was human and personal in my power of achievement might, as
it were, dissolve into the smoke of a sweet incense, an offering to
the God I worshipped. How I longed to be able to divest myself of name
and personality, and become the most devoted of martyrs or the most
priestly of priests" (der geistlichste Geistliche). Every one read the
book, and even a mind like Kleist's allowed itself, as we have seen,
to be engrossed by all this pretentious foolishness. Mysticism was the
order of the day, and it is curious to see how the mystic element,
the strange trinity of sensuality, religion, and cruelty, insinuates
itself into all Kleist's dramas. Take, for example, that remarkable
tragedy, _Penthesilea_. The heroine is the wild queen of the Amazons,
who is waging a victorious war upon both the Greeks and the Trojans.
It is a law among the Amazons that each must capture in battle the man
who is to be her husband; then, when the war is over, she lives with
him in peace and happiness. Penthesilea has conceived quite as fatal a
passion for Achilles as Käthchen's for Count Strahl. But in Penthesilea
love shows itself in a different way; it takes the form of cruelty. In
every battle she pursues Achilles, thirsting for his blood. If Käthchen
loved like a dog, Penthesilea loves like a tigress escaped from a
Bacchanalian procession.
It is plain that it is his own temperament with which Kleist has
endowed the Amazon queen. She cares for nothing, will take nothing, but
Achilles, just as he refused to aim at anything, to be content with
anything, but the highest place of honour. Her wild haste to conquer
her beloved corresponds with his desire to attain his aim at one blow,
with his drama, _Robert Guiscard_. Like Kleist, she can only live when
she is striving after what her soul desires. She says, what her author
might have said:[6] "I should go mad if I did not attempt all that is
within the bounds of possibility."
She hates Achilles as fervently as Kleist in dark hours must have hated
and cursed the destiny which forbade his winning the highest fame.
She kills him in an access of detestation, as Kleist, in an access of
desperation, destroyed his beloved work, his _Guiscard_. Yet she loves
him, loves him helplessly, with a consuming passion.[6] When Achilles
has wounded her in battle, she complains in words which seem to refer
to the poet himself:--
"Mir diesen Busen zu zerschmettern, Prothoe!
Die Brust, so voll Gesang, Asteria!
Ein Lied, jedweder Saitengriff auf ihn!"[7]
When she is on the point of giving up everything, she says, as Kleist
did in so many of his letters to his sister:--
"Das Aeusserste, das Menschenkräfte leisten
Hab ich gethan, Unmögliches versucht,
Mein Alles hab ich an den Wurf gesetzt;
Der Würfel, der entscheidet, liegt, er liegt:
Begreifen muss ich's--und dass ich verlor!"[8]
We can readily understand how it was that Pfuel, Kleist's faithful
friend, found him sitting weeping after writing the description of
Penthesilea's death. Indeed, the poet himself wrote of the play to a
friend: "It is true; you have divined it with the glance of a seer; my
inmost self is in it, my soul in its glory and its anguish."
Yet this personal element does not preclude Romantic mysticism; the
story is impregnated with it. Penthesilea's love expresses itself in
such words as the following:--
"Hetzt alle Hund' auf ihn! mit Feuerbranden
Die Elephanten peitschet auf ihn los!
Mit Sichelwagen schmettert auf ihn ein
Und mähet seine üpp'gen Glieder ab!"[9]
This last repulsive wish, to see Achilles' limbs mowed off by the
scythes of the chariots, is, as we learn at the conclusion of the play,
no feigned desire. The Amazons are defeated, and their wearied and
wounded queen falls into Achilles' hands. He loves her, and, to keep
her from grieving and despairing, he attempts to make her believe that
she has been victorious, and that he is her captive. She soon, however,
discovers the truth. Then Achilles challenges her to single combat,
with the intention of allowing her to defeat him, and in this manner
becoming her husband. When Penthesilea receives the challenge, she does
not understand its meaning. She is seized by a sort of Berserker fury,
throws herself upon her horse, cries to her hounds, and dashes off. He
sees her coming and is afraid. She bends her bow "till the ends kiss,"
takes aim, and sends an arrow through his neck. He falls, but, with the
death rattle in his throat, struggles to rise again; then she urges on
her hounds to tear him to pieces, and, following their example, sets
her teeth in his breast and bites until the blood drips from her mouth
and hands.
"Doch hetz! schon ruft sie: Tigris! hetz, Leäne!
Hetz, Sphinx! Melampus! Dirke! hetz, Hyrkaon!
Und stürzt--stürzt mit der ganzen Meut, o Diana!
Sich über ihn, und reisst--reisst ihn beim Helmbusch
Gleich einer Hündin, Hunden beigesellt,
Der greift die Brust ihm, dieser greift den Nacken,
Dass von dem Fall der Boden bebt, ihn nieder!
Er, in dem Purpur seines Bluts sich wälzend,
Rührt ihre sanfte Wange an, und ruft:
Penthesilea! meine Braut! was thust du?
Ist dies das Rosenfest, das du versprachst?
Doch sie--die Löwin hätte ihn gehört,
Die hungrige, die wild nach Raub umher
Auf öden Schneegefilden heulend treibt--
Sie schlägt, die Rüstung ihm vom Leibe reissend,
Den Zahn schlägt sie in seine weisse Brust,
Sie und die Hunde, die wetteifernden,
Oxus und Sphinx den Zahn in seine rechte,
In seine linke sie; als ich erschien,
Troff Blut von Mund und Händen ihr herab."[10]
It is long before she comes to her senses and realises what she has
done. Her first feeling is utter despair, but presently she says:--
"Wie manche, die am Hals des Freundes hängt,
Sagt wohl das Wort: sie lieb'ihn, o so sehr,
Dass sie vor Liebe gleich ihn fressen könnte;
Und hinterher, das Wort geprüft, die Närrin!
Gesättigt sein zum Ekel ist sie schon.
Nun, du Geliebter, so verfuhr ich nicht;
Sieh her: als ich an deinem Halse hing,
Hab ich's wahrhaftig Wort für Wort gethan;
Ich war nicht so verrückt, als es wohl schien."[11]
She is not so mad as she seems. It is the same here as in _Käthchen
von Heilbronn_--what with most women is only a figure of speech, is
in Penthesilea's case reality. Many a woman says she loves her lover
with a passion so wild that she could eat him; Penthesilea does it. She
says:--
"Küsse, Bisse,
Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt,
Kann schon das eine für das andere greifen."[12]
But even this is not the complete explanation. As yet we have only the
two elements, sensuality and cruelty; the third, religion, is present
also. It appears as the supplementary colour when we look carefully at
the first two. Remember Novalis's words, already quoted: "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 ... he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever
more." The great Christian mystery was a subject occupying all minds
at this time, Kleist's among the rest. One of his intimate friends
was the most notable mystic of the day, the ingenious sophist, Adam
Müller. It may astonish us, or offend us, to find traces of Christian
mystic dogma in a pagan drama which has the Queen of the Amazons for
heroine; but to understand this, and many other kindred phenomena, we
must take the relative truth and justifiableness of this mysticism
into consideration. These men could not shut their religious ideas
into a cupboard, and keep them altogether apart from their lives and
actions. It was not only twice, or possibly three times, a year that
such a subject as the Lord's Supper occupied their minds; it pervaded
all their thoughts; they strove to see life in the light of this great
mystery. In the complete edition of Friedrich von Baader's collected
works (vol. iv. Anthropology), amongst a number of short essays, such
as: _On the Ecstatic Rapture of those who Talk in Magnetic Sleep, The
Vision Seer of Prevorst, Forty Tenets of Religious Love, &c., &c_.,
we find one entitled: _That, in the Spiritual, Good or Evil Meaning
of the Word, all Men are Anthropophagi_. It begins: "Man at heart,
or, to use the language of Scripture, the inner man, does not live on
tangible nourishment, on material bread; he lives, and that not in the
symbolical, but in the most real meaning of the word, entirely upon
other inner men, whose hearts and words are his food."
The great religious mystery ultimately became the centre round which
even philosophical thought revolved. Henrik Steffens may serve as an
example. This writer, in whose character, as Julian Schmidt[13] aptly
remarks, "there is an undeniable strain of innate servility," was
appointed to conduct the trial of the demagogues in Breslau. It was a
task which he accomplished in a spirit at variance with sound human
reason and the natural sense of justice, and during its performance
he gave expression to the most reactionary religious sentiments,
entirely forgetful of the pantheism of his youth. In the essay, _How
I Once More Became a Lutheran_, he writes: "The Holy Sacrament is
the chief individualising process in Christianity; by its means the
whole mystery of the redemption enters in all its fulness into the
receptive personality. The fertilising stream of grace, which, since
the day of the great regeneration, has flowed through all nature and
all history, and which matures us for a blessed future, here takes the
form of the Saviour, in order that that which is all in all may be
completely present.... By means of the satisfying personal presence
of the Saviour, that which the Christian truly believes, that which
pervades his whole life, and overcomes death, yet at the same time
forces him back into the domain of the senses, here becomes certainty,
enjoyment, nourishment. ... To me the communion of the Lord's Supper is
the highest, most important, most mysterious of all religious acts; so
important does it seem to me, that through it every doctrine acquires
unfathomable significance."
We see, then, how tremendously important a part this sacrament plays
in the Christian mysticism of the period under consideration. There
existed a tender, almost an erotic, relation between the faithful and
the consecrated elements. True believers were declared to be sensible
of the presence of these elements at an extraordinary distance. Read
what Görres writes on the subject in the second part of his _Mystik_.
"To begin with what is holiest--" he says, "all who have attained to
the higher spiritual life are aware, at a prodigious distance, of the
presence of the Host." A number of examples of this are given, and we
are told in the preface that all the facts instanced are vouched for
by numerous witnesses, that these witnesses were the most reliable
imaginable, either priests or pious laymen, and that they were
particularly favourably situated for making the necessary observations.
And we not only learn that saintly believers can detect the Host,
no matter where it may be hidden, but that the Host feels such an
attraction towards them, that it springs from the priest's hand into
their mouths. Sometimes the priest actually feels that it is violently
torn out of his hands, drawn like steel by a magnet; and the saintly,
in their turn, are so forcibly attracted to the holy substance that
they are carried through the air to it.
Nowhere in all Kleist's writings has mysticism taken such strange
possession of a perfectly pagan, not to say wanton, theme as in his
_Amphitryon_, which is an adaptation of Molière's well-known comedy.
The story, not a very easy one to treat, is as follows. During
Amphitryon's absence, Jupiter assumes his form and visits his wife,
Alcmene, who believes the god to be her husband. Amphitryon returns,
and a whole series of comical confusions ensue between the real and
the pretended husband, the real slave, Sosias, and Mercury as Sosias.
At last the true state of affairs is explained, and Amphitryon has
to console himself with the consideration that there is nothing
dishonourable in such a relationship with Jupiter,--a moral theory
which it must have been very much to the interest of Louis the
Fourteenth to defend and propagate.
"Mon nom, qu'incessamment toute la terre adore,
étouffe ici le bruit, qui pouvait éclater;
Un partage avec Jupiter
N'a rien du tout qui déshonore."
In genuine French fashion, Molière makes the collision between the
husband and the lover the main point in his play; and when Alcmene
upbraids Jupiter for the hard words he (i.e. Amphitryon) has used to
her, the god takes refuge in the following fine distinction:--
"L'époux, Alcmène, a commis tout le mal;
C'est l'époux qu'il vous faut regarder en coupable:
L'amant n'a point de part à ce transport brutal,
Et de vous offenser son cœur n'est point capable.
Il a de vous, ce cœur, pour jamais y penser,
Trop de respect et de tendresse;
Et si de faire rien à vous pouvoir blesser
Il avait eu la coupable faiblesse,
De cent coups à vos yeux il voudrait le percer.
Mais l'époux est sorti de ce respect soumis
Ou pour vous on doit toujours être;
A son dur procédé l'époux s'est fait connaître,
Et par le droit d'hymen il s'est cru tout permis."
Jupiter expresses himself, we see, with the polished gallantry of a
courtier. At the close of the play the bystanders congratulate the
wretched Amphitryon, and Sosias recites an epilogue, in which the
whole matter is treated from the comical point of view, and the moral
pointed that the less said about such affairs the better.
Kleist naturally saw the subject in quite a different light. It is
obvious that his Romantic mind was attracted first and foremost by the
"Doppelgängerei;" then came the possibility of playing, faintly but
clearly, on one of the most important mysteries of the Christian faith.
Alcmene's husband is not the father of Hercules, yet the conception was
no violation of her marriage vow; it was immaculate; the being to which
she gives birth is not the child of a man, but of a god. Therefore, in
the most important scene between Jupiter and Alcmene, the former is
pantheistically exalted to the rank of the great world-spirit; he is
not the wanton Olympian of the Greeks, he is as divine and spiritual as
the "Absolute" of the _Naturphilosophie_. He says to Alcmene:--
"Nimmst Du die Welt, sein grosses Werk, wohl wahr?
Siehst Du ihn in der Abendröthe Schimmer,
Wenn sie durch schweigende Gebüsche fällt?
Hörst Du ihn beim Gesaüsel der Gewässer,
Und bei dem Schlag der üpp'gen Nachtigall?
Verkündigt nicht umsonst der Berg ihn Dir,
Gethürmt gen Himmel, nicht umsonst ihn
Der felszerstiebten Katarakten Fall?
Wenn hoch die Sonn' in seinen Tempel strahlt,
Und, von der Freude Pulsschlag eingeläutet,
Ihn alle Gättungen Erschaff'ner preisen,
Steigst Du nicht in des Herzens Schacht hinab
Und betest Deinen Götzen an?"[14]