"Doch, wie dies alles zugegangen,
Erzähl' ich euch zur ändern Zeit,
Dazu bin ich zu eilig heut.[17]
"Farewell, my dear friends! And do not forget to think, in joy and in
sorrow, of the two strange beings who are now about to set out on the
great voyage of discovery." HENRIETTE."
(In Kleist's handwriting)--"Written in the green room, on the 21st of
November, 1811. H. v. K."
Kleist was the most intractable character in the intellectual world of
the Germany of that day; he had, moreover, too much heart, too strong
feelings. After he had given up all hope of attaining to a knowledge of
the truth, he tried to build upon the foundation of feeling. As author
he was able to do it; his _Michael Kohlhaas_ is based upon the feeling
of justice, _Käthchen von Heilbronn_ upon the feeling of absolute
devotion. But the real world to which he himself belonged had no use
for strong, unmixed feeling such as his. He did not find it in others,
and wherever he followed it himself, the consequences were disastrous.
Alas! no; nothing was quite certain on this earth, not even his own
vocation!
No one could prize decision, unity of character, more than he did,
and never was there a more uncertain, divided, morbid man. He was
always despairing, always wavering between the highest endeavour and
the inclination to commit suicide. This explains how it is that we see
him, the greatest of the Romanticists, liable to almost all the errors
which distinguish his contemporaries. His own really fine, noble nature
was spoiled very much as are most of the characters in his works, by
sinister, disastrous peculiarities, which slacken the will and destroy
the elasticity of the mind. Yet Heinrich von Kleist has assured himself
a place in literature, like all others who have won places there, by
the vigour and the passion with which he lived and wrote.[18]
In the other notable dramatist of the Romantic School there was far
less to disintegrate. He was the genuine Romanticist from the very
first.
Zacharias Werner was born in Königsberg in 1768. He was the son of
a professor at the University, who also held the post of dramatic
censor. Hence, even as a child, Zacharias had the opportunity of
seeing plays almost daily, and in his earliest youth he was able to
make himself acquainted with all the technicalities of the stage. His
mother, according to Hoffmann, "was richly endowed with both intellect
and imagination." Her mind inclined to earnest, highly imaginative
mysticism, and she exercised no inconsiderable influence upon her son's
ardent imagination; but in course of time she became insane, one of her
delusions being that she herself was the Virgin Mary, and her son the
Saviour of the world.
As a student, Zacharias, who was of a sanguine, sensual temperament,
led an exceedingly dissolute life. In his twentieth year he published
a volume of lyric poems, which, like the earliest writings of
Friedrich Schlegel and the other Romanticists, are entirely untouched
by mysticism; they inveigh, in the style of the eighteenth century,
against "sanctimoniousness, pious stupidity, hypocrisy, and Jesuitism."
Nevertheless, while still comparatively young, he himself adopted the
sanctimonious style. Though he continued to be dissipated, he cannot
exactly be called a hypocrite, for he sinned and repented alternately.
The distinguishing feature of his character was instability, as he
himself confesses in his last poem, _Unstäts Morgenpsalm_ ("The
Unstable Man's Morning Hymn"); and long before, in the prologue
to Söhne des Thals ("Sons of the Vale"), he had called himself an
inconstant creature, "perpetually erring, lamenting, warning."
Religious motives induced Werner to join the Freemasons; he believed
that this order would prove the means of diffusing throughout the whole
world a new and more sincere spirit of piety. Pecuniary motives induced
him to accept a Government secretaryship; and in 1795, not long after
addressing three enthusiastic poems (a war song, a call to arms, and a
lament) to the unfortunate Poles, he took up his abode in the capacity
of a Prussian Government official in the conquered city of Warsaw,
where he spent ten pleasant years. He married three times during the
course of those ten years. The first two marriages were so ill-advised
that in both cases the divorce promptly followed the wedding; the
third, with a particularly charming Polish lady, lasted for some years.
From her he was divorced in 1805. On this occasion Werner took all the
blame upon himself. "I am not," he writes to Hitzig at the time, "a
bad man, but I am in many ways a weakling, though in others God grants
me strength. I am timid, capricious, miserly, uncleanly. You know it
yourself." Not a flattering portrait.
Schleiermacher's _Lectures on Religion_ and, following on these, the
writings of Jakob Böhme made no small impression on him. Art and
religion now became to him one and the same thing. "Why," he writes to
Hitzig, "have we not one name for these two synonyms?" They signify
to him what he at one time calls the "vivid sense of the nearness of
great Nature," at another, "the simple, humble outpouring of the pure
soul into the pure stream (of Nature)." His literary opinions are, he
declares, "exactly those of Tieck." In Warsaw he still writes coldly of
the Catholic Church; he defends it, not as "a system of faith, but as a
newly reopened mine of mythology."
Death bereft him on one day, the 24th of February, 1804, of his mother
and his most intimate friend, Mnioch, a Pole--hence the title of his
fatalistic tragedy, _The Twenty-Fourth of February_, written ten years
later.
Having solicited all his patrons and friends in turn to procure him an
appointment with as little work and as much remuneration as possible,
he finally obtained an easy and profitable post in Berlin, through the
influence of a minister who was deeply interested in both religion and
freemasonry. He gave himself up for a time to all the amusements and
dissipations of the capital; but, after the defeat of the Prussians by
Napoleon, he threw up his appointment and began to lead a wandering
life. He was alone and free, for all his marriages had been childless,
and he had inherited a fortune at his mother's death. He travelled
through Germany and Austria, that "blessed land," as he calls it,
made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël, and visited her at Coppet.
In Weimar he succeeded in obtaining a pension from the Prince-Primate
(Fürst-Primas) Dalberg. Professor Passow, who made his acquaintance in
Weimar, wrote to Voss: "I dislike Werner exceedingly, for the reason
that I have never seen him twice the same. This is the consequence of
his insufferable anxiety to please every one. It depends entirely upon
his company whether he is the low libertine or the pious devotee of the
most modern, most spiritual type." A clergyman named Christian Mayr
obtained great influence over him. Mayr was a fanatic and an eccentric.
In order to realise one of the visions in the Book of Revelations and
to attain heavenly wisdom, he swallowed the greater part of a Bible,
and was dangerously ill in consequence; he shot with a pistol at any
member of his congregation who fell asleep when he was preaching; and
he believed that he could, during the celebration of the sacrament,
produce real flesh and blood. This man was desirous that Werner should
join a great secret society, the "Kreuzesbrüder im Orient." At first
Werner was very enthusiastic in the matter, then he began to entertain
doubts, and these doubts partly led to his conversion to Catholicism.
In November 1809, after paying a visit at Coppet, he went to Rome,
where he spent several years. His conversion took place in 1810. During
his years of wandering he had led the maddest of lives, dividing each
day between low debauchery and religious excitement, between gross
sensual indulgence and solemn intercourse with the Deity. The fragments
of his diary, published in two small volumes by Schütz, betray a
coarse immorality, an obscenity of thought, and a shamelessness of
expression, which are rendered only the more repulsive by the outbursts
of miserable remorse and self-accusation which interrupt the detailed
descriptions of erotic experiences.
In a testamentary epistle to his friends (dated September 1812) he
mentions the two motives which withhold him from a public confession.
"The one is, that to open a plague pit is dangerous to the health
of the still uninfected bystanders; the other, that, in my writings
(for which God forgive me), among a wilderness of poisonous fungi and
noxious weeds there is to be found here and there a healing herb, from
which the poor sick people to whom it might be useful would assuredly
shrink back in horror if they knew the pestilential spot in which it
had grown."
When Werner had (characteristically enough _after_ his conversion)
studied theology and made himself acquainted with the Catholic ritual,
he was ordained priest. It was in Vienna, in 1814, at the time of the
Congress, that he made his first appearance as a preacher. He was most
successful. People were impressed by his tall, spare, ascetic figure
and his long thin face, with the prominent nose and the dark brown eyes
gleaming under heavy eyebrows. He preached to enormous crowds sermons
of which the Monk's sermon in _Wallenstein's Lager_ may serve to give
a faint idea. They were full of high-flown bombast and disgusting
obscenities, united wit and wisdom with ascetic nonsense and tiresome
twaddle, overflowed with denunciations of heretics and eulogies of the
rosary.[19]
Werner died in Vienna in 1823. He is the representative-in-chief of
mysticism in literature. His life is the key to his works--works
which profoundly impressed his contemporaries, but which interest us
chiefly from the pathological point of view. He undoubtedly possessed
considerable poetic gifts.
His verse is melodious and falls caressingly on the ear, like the
church music of southern lands. His characters are generally well
planned (take, for example, Franz von Brienne in the first and second
acts of _Die Templer auf Cypern_--"The Knights Templar in Cyprus"), and
the action interests and keeps us in suspense; but the core and kernel
of it all, the threefold kernel of sensuality, religion, and cruelty,
is ill-flavoured and unwholesome.
His first important work, _Die Söhne des Thals_, which is in two
parts, of six acts each, deals with the Order of the Templars. He was
obviously inspired to it by the ideas of freemasonry, ideas which had
impressed Schubert, had played a part in _Wilhelm Meister_, and had
considerably influenced his own private life.
In this work the encasing of one idea within another--from the very
beginning a favourite device of the Romanticists--takes the form of
everything circling round a central mystery, the mystery of the secret
society; we penetrate ever farther and farther in, but as we do so,
it seems to retreat from us. The Order of the Templars has its own
particular mysteries, and we witness every detail of the initiation of
the neophytes into these--in gloomy vaults, with all the paraphernalia
of colossal skeletons, cryptic books, curtains, swords, palms, &c.,
&c. The meaning underlying it all is: "_Aus Blut und Dunkel quillt
Erlösung_" (From blood and darkness issues redemption). But the order
of Knights Templar is only a branch order; the great mother-order,
"_das Thal_" (the Vale), is in possession, as we learn in the second
part of the work, of all the higher mysteries and the higher power.
But its inmost mystery, too, is only the purely negative idea of
renunciation and sacrifice. Hidden voices proclaim "in a hollow,
chanting tone"--
"Alles ist zum Seyn erkoren,
Alles wird durch Tod geboren,
Und kein Saatkorn geht verloren.
"Wer durch Blut und Nacht geschwommen,
Ist den Aengsten bald entnommen,
Blutiger, sei uns willkommen!"[20]
We gain some idea of the extent to which the mysteries are utilised
in the elaboration of stage decoration and costumes from the fact
that in the twelfth scene of the fifth act, which consists of
sixty-four lines, only six are dialogue, the remainder being devoted to
directions regarding "a great burial mound, covered with roses, with
transparencies of an angel, a lion, a bull, and an eagle, disposed at
the four corners"--the costumes to be worn by the dignitaries of the
"Vale," of which some are to be cloth of gold, some silver, some sky
blue, some blood red--and the incense, the harps, the bells, the crowns
and crowns of thorns, the banners, and the "colossal statue of Isis,"
required in the scene.
The Order of Knights Templar has degenerated. The mother-order
determines to abolish it altogether, and condemns its Grand Master,
the noble and heroic Molay, to be burned, although he is entirely
guiltless of the decadence of his order--has, in fact, striven hard
to arrest it. The Archbishop, who tries him, is convinced of the
injustice of the accusations brought against him, and loves and
admires him, but is compelled to obey orders. Molay faces death with
as great calm as Paludan-Müller's Kalanus; in fact, he longs for the
"purifying flames." The bystanders sympathise with him, and cry to him
to make his escape; but, like Kalanus, he resists all entreaties. The
Archbishop's feeling for him is shared by every one; he is surrounded
by a crowd of sentimental executioners, who consign him to the flames
with expressions of the utmost admiration and esteem. They are cruel,
sentimental fanatics, like Werner himself. Every character in the play
is tainted with repulsive sentimentality. Molay's old comrade in arms,
when prevented from rescuing him, says:--
"Du böser Jakob Du!--Pfui! sterben will er,
Verlassen seinen Waffenbruder!--Jakob!
Du musst nicht sterben! hörst Du?"[21]
But the guiltless Molay dies. There is the same play upon the Christian
mystery here as in Kleist's drama. Molay is venerated like a second
Christ, even by his executioners. After his death a miracle happens.
"Sunlight gilds the scene. Above the entrance to the Vale cavern, below
the brightly illuminated name 'Jesus' there appear the names 'John,'
'J. B. Molay,' and 'Andrew,' also in bright transparencies." All the
crusaders fall upon their knees. "Long, solemn pause, during which
there come from the interior of the cavern the muffled sounds of the
'Holy! Holy! Holy!' sung by the elders of the Order of the Vale to the
usual tune, with an accompaniment of harps and bells."
Martyrdom is Werner's specialty. He is at home in such subjects as
beating to death with clubs, boiling in oil, and the tortures of the
rack. He revels in agonies, as does Görres, whose satisfaction we
almost seem to feel as we read of all the mysteries of martyrdom in the
first part of his _Christian Mysticism_. "The sacrificial victims are
stretched upon the rack or the wheel, and all their limbs are twisted
out of joint by means of screws ... while the lictors scorch their
sides with torches or tear them with iron claws. Chains are sometimes
drawn round their bodies until their ribs are broken; their chests and
eyes are pierced with pointed reeds; their jaws are broken with heavy
blows of the torturer's fist; and, though the victims are now hardly
drawing breath, nails are hammered through their feet and red-hot iron
rods are laid upon their tenderest parts and allowed to burn themselves
in," &c., &c.
In Werner's drama, _Attila_, a young man whom Attila loves is accused
of perjury and confesses his guilt. Attila, who is an emotional,
sentimental enthusiast, embraces him, shedding burning tears, and then
orders him to be torn asunder by horses. Cruel sentimentality, fanatic
brutality, is Romantic wont. Along with Attila we have Pope Leo,
another character who seems to have escaped from the pages of Görres'
_Mysticism_--this time undoubtedly from the chapter treating of the
height from the ground to which the enthusiast in his religious rapture
is at times raised; for, while he is praying, Leo "raises himself
higher and higher, until he is resting only on the tips of his toes."
He sympathises with Attila, and has a sort of magnetic influence over
him.
In _Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft_ ("The Consecration of
Strength"), the mystery of religious consecration is the subject. The
play opens significantly with a scene of the Novalis type, miners going
down into and being drawn up from a mine. The representation of Luther
is more suggestive of a Catholic saint than of the Protestant reformer.
Of Katharina von Bora, too, a saintly character is made. Luther and she
are accompanied throughout the play by guardian angels, Luther by the
boy Theobald, who is really art in the shape of a seraph, and Katharina
by a girl named Therese, who represents faith. A few years after
Werner had thus sung the praises of the Reformation, he was converted;
whereupon he wrote a poem, _Die Weihe der Unkraft_, full of such
sentiments regarding his drama as: "Durch dies Gaukelblendwerk sprach
ich der Wahrheit Hohn!" (With this delusive mummery I set at nought the
truth.)
The subject of his last tragedy, _Die Mutter der Makkabäer_, offered
glorious opportunities for introducing all the tortures described
in the legends of the martyrs; it abounds in physical suffering and
religious ecstasies. The sons of Salome must either eat of the flesh
of the sacrifice offered to Jupiter or die the most cruel death. The
comical idea of its being a matter of life and death whether children
taste certain food or not, is treated with the most overwhelming
solemnity. In a state of supernatural excitement, Salome entreats
her children, one by one, to allow themselves to be impaled, flayed,
burned, &c. The sentimental chief torturer, Antiochus, admires Salome
intensely; he actually falls upon his knees before her, crying--
"Du bist kein irdisch Weib!--Solch Opfer spendet
Kein menschlich Wesen!--Segne mich, Du, vom Olymp gesendet!"[22]
And the equally sentimental Salome blesses him. Her son Benoni, too,
blesses his murderer, immediately after which his hands and feet are
cut off, and he is boiled in oil. Presently two loud axe-strokes
are heard--Abir's feet have been cut off. Juda is tortured next; and
so on it goes. Antiochus, the barbarous king, or Werner, the equally
barbarous poet, has the children broken on the wheel joint by joint,
and their limbs torn off. The mother, who is compelled to witness it
all, feels nothing but the rapturous bliss of martyrdom; and when
Antiochus, in his insane sentimentality, bows before her a second time,
"deeply moved," crying: "Willst, grosse Niobe, Du Dich von mir im Zorne
trennen?" ("And must thou part from me in wrath, great Niobe?"), she
lays her right hand on his head, and says "very solemnly": "Ich weiss,
dass mein Erlöser lebt!--Lern' sterbend ihn erkennen!" ("I know that my
Redeemer liveth!--Ere death come, mayst thou know him too!").
In the last scene the background opens, and we see the instruments of
torture and the huge copper full of boiling oil, in which Benoni lies.
His wife is staring down into it. The flames of the stake are still
blazing. Salome's spirit appears above them and extinguishes them.
And there was a time when this was considered poetry! Goethe took a
warm interest in Werner, and had several of his plays performed in the
court theatre at Weimar. In 1808 he wrote of him to Jacobi: "It seems
strange to an old pagan like me, that I can see the cross planted on my
own territory, and hear Christ's blood and wounds preached poetically,
without its being actually offensive to me. The standpoint to which
philosophy has raised us makes this degree of tolerance obligatory. We
have learned to value the ideal, even when it manifests itself in the
strangest forms."
Few educated men will be inclined to take so mild and tolerant a view
of the matter to-day. The development is utterly repugnant to us. For
we have seen to what it led. We have seen that this "Christian poetry"
helped to bring about the worst intellectual reaction of modern times.
Men played so long with the idea of the purifying flames of the stake
that they began to extol them in sober earnest. It is but a step from
Werner to Görres, who ardently defends exorcism of evil spirits and
punishment of witchcraft; and the distance is no greater between
Görres and Joseph de Maistre, who writes: "In many a well-governed
country in Europe they say of a man who has set fire to an inhabited
house and been burned with it: 'It is only what he deserved.' Is
a human being who has been guilty of any amount of theoretical
and practical (i.e. religious) evil-doing less deserving of being
burned? When one reflects that it was undoubtedly in the power of the
Inquisition to have prevented the French Revolution, one cannot feel
certain that the sovereign who calmly discarded such a weapon did not
deal a fatal blow to humanity."
If Romantic Christianity is, as Ruge says, the Christianity which
cannot be resolved into humanitarianism, then Joseph de Maistre is a
genuine Romanticist.
The whole history of Romanticism substantiates Ruge's famous
definition: "A Romanticist is an author who, aided by all the
intellectual advantages of our day, assails the periods of
'enlightenment' and of revolution, and reprobates and combats the
principle of pure humanitarianism in the domains of science, art,
morality, and politics."
[1] "It is not, then, so much religion that influences me, as strong
affection for the olden times, and grief that we of to-day are so
unlike those heroes of the faith."
[2] "What I had taken to be ravine and mountain, wood, meadow, and
cliff, was one great head, the forest its hair and beard. The giant
smiles to see his children happy at their play. He beckons, and
straightway through the forest is heard a rustle of holy awe. I fell
upon my knees, trembling with fear. I whispered to the little child:
'What is that great being yonder?' The child replied: 'The fear of him
comes upon thee because thou hast been permitted to see him without
warning; that is our father, our preserver; his name is Pan.'"
[3]
"Beloved, thou hast pierced my heart,
Oh, bitterer this than hell's worst smart!"
[4]
"The child, a heavy weight, you have borne;
Flap your wings at the mother, all forlorn;
A weary way you have had to bear it,
Catch hold of her cheek with your bill, and tear it," &c., &c.
[5]
"In my irritation,
In the journey's agitation,
I crushed the child," &c., &c.
[6] Cf. Otto Brahm, _Heinrich von Kleist_.
[7] This speech is taken from the early edition. "To think that he
could crush this breast, Prothoe! a breast so full of song, Asteria! At
every touch upon its strings it gave forth melody."
[8] "The utmost that human powers can do, I have done; setting my all
upon one throw of the dice, I have attempted the impossible. There
the dice lie--and I have lost, have lost; 'tis this that I must force
myself to understand."
[9] "Set all the dogs upon him! Drive on the elephants with firebrands,
that they may crush him under foot! Press on the chariots, that their
scythes may mow his lusty limbs!"
[10] "'At him, good dogs!' she cries, 'at him, good Tigris, Leäne,
Sphinx, Melampus, Dirke, and Hyrkaon!' and, shouting thus, she rushes
madly at him with the pack, and, like a dog among the dogs, catches him
by the plume of his helmet and pulls him down, the earth shuddering at
his fall. One has him by the neck, one by the breast. Weltering in his
blood, he touches her soft cheek and cries: 'Penthesilea! sweet love!
art thou beside thyself? Is this the bridal festival thou promisedst?'
The lioness, the hungry lioness roaring for her prey on the barren
plain, would have listened to him--but she--she tears the breastplate
from his breast, and sets her teeth deep in his flesh--she and her
hounds in rivalry; Oxus and Sphinx have him by the right breast, she by
the left. When I arrived, the blood was streaming from her mouth and
hands."
[11] "Many is the woman who, with her arms round her lover's neck, has
said: 'I love thee so, that I could eat thee.' If the fool tried, she
was disgusted. It was not so with me, beloved. When I hung upon thy
neck I said it not; I did it. I was not so mad as I seemed to thee to
be."
[12] "Kisses and bites--the two words rhyme (in German); and when one
loves with all one's heart, it often happens that one confuses them."
[13] Jul. Schmidt, _Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur_, ii. 307.
[14]
"Art thou not conscious of him in the world, his work?
Dost thou not see him in the sunset glow
That falls so softly on the silent woods?
Dost thou not hear him in the rippling stream,
And in the nightingale's melodious notes?
Is it in vain the heaven-high mountains speak,
And hissing foam of rock-torn waterfall?
When bright the sun into his temple shines,
And all created life pulsates with joy,
And magnifies its great Creator's name,
Dost thou not seek the shrine of thy pure heart
And worship there thine idol?"
[15] "Thou art armed in adamant, thou holy one, against every approach
of evil. The highly-favoured one embraced by thee leaves thee still
innocent and pure."
[16] "They write their plans for liberating Germany in cipher, and send
them to each other by messengers whom the Romans catch and hang; they
meet in the dusk, they eat, they drink, and sleep, when night comes,
with their wives.... The hope that Augustus may die to-morrow leads
them to live on thus, covered with shame, from one week to another."
[17] "How it all happened I'll tell you again; to-day I'm in too great
a hurry."
[18] Adolf Wilbrandt, _Heinrich von Kleist_, 1863; Otto Brehm,
_Heinrich von Kleist_, 1884.
[19] Hitzig, _Lebens-Abriss Zacharias Werners_, 1823; Schütz,
_Zacharias Werner, Biographie und Charakteristik_, 1841.
[20] "Life is the destiny of everything; through death comes birth;
not one grain of seed is lost. He who has struggled through blood and
darkness has overcome. All hail, O bleeding knight!"
[21] "You wicked Jacques! What? Die and leave your old comrade? No, no,
Jacques--you must not do it."
[22] "Thou art not of this earth! No mortal offers such a sacrifice!
Bless me, thou daughter of Olympian gods!"