had said in _Corinne_ that she only recognised two really distinct
classes of men--those who are capable of enthusiasm and those who
despise enthusiasts. It seemed to her that in the Germany of that day
she had found the native land of enthusiasm, the country in which it
was a religion, where it was more highly honoured than anywhere else
on earth. Hence it is that she ends her book with a dissertation on
enthusiasm. But this belief in enthusiasm, in the power of imagination
and the purely spiritual faculties, led her to many rash and narrow
conclusions. In her delight in the philosophic idealism of Germany, she
treats experimental natural science with the most naïve superiority--is
of opinion that it leads to nothing but a mechanical accumulation
of facts. Naturphilosophie, on the other hand, which has made the
discovery that the human mind can derive all knowledge from itself by
the conclusions of reason--which, in other words, regards all things as
formed after the pattern of the human mind--seems to her the wisdom of
Solomon. "It is a beautiful conception," she says, "that which finds a
resemblance between the laws of the human mind and the laws of nature,
and which looks upon the material world as an image of the spiritual."
In her pleasure in the beauty of this idea she fails to perceive how
untruthful it is, to foresee how barren of all result it is soon to
prove. She extols Franz Baader and Steffens at the expense of the great
English scientists, and, following the example of her Romantic friends,
has a good word to say for clairvoyance and astrology--for every
phenomenon, in short, which seems to prove the prevailing power of the
spirit.
Many years before this a French pamphlet written against Mme. de Staël
had been entitled _L'Antiromantique_. Her Romantic tendency had in the
interval become more and more marked. Spiritualism, as such, seemed to
her the good, the beautiful, the true, both in art and in philosophy.
This explains both her over-indulgence towards the abortions of the
Romantic school, especially the dramas of her friend Zacharias Werner,
and her misunderstanding of Goethe, whose greatness rather alarms than
delights her, and whom she now excuses, now quotes with the remark
that she cannot defend the spirit of his works. She prefaces her prose
translation of _Die Braut von Corinth_ with the words: "I can certainly
neither defend the aim of the poem nor the poem itself, but it seems
to me that no one can fail to be impressed by its fantastic power;"
and she concludes her otherwise excellent criticism of the first part
of Faust with these words: "This drama of 'Faust' is certainly not a
model work. Whether we look upon it as the outcome of a poetic frenzy
or of the life-weariness of the worshipper of reason, _our hope is
that such productions will not repeat themselves_;" adding only by
way of compensation a remark on Goethe's genius and the wealth of
thought displayed in the work. Thus irresistibly was even such a mind
as hers affected by the spirit of the day in her native country,
with its tendency to religious reaction. In the intellectual life of
Germany she had perception and sympathy for Romanticism alone; German
pantheism she neither sympathised with nor understood; it alarmed
her; the daring spirit which had sounded so many abysses, recoiled
tremblingly from the verge of this one.
And yet here lay the key to the whole new intellectual development in
Germany. Behind Lessing's brilliant attack upon ecclesiastical dogma
there had lain, unperceived by his contemporaries, the philosophy of
Spinoza. Immediately after the great critic's death the literary world
received a double surprise. The controversy between Mendelssohn and
Jacobi elicited the appalling fact that Lessing had lived and died a
Spinozist, and also showed that even Jacobi himself was of the opinion
that all philosophy logically carried out must inevitably lead to
Spinozism and pantheism. He endeavoured to extricate himself from the
difficulty by pointing out that there is another way of arriving at
knowledge of the truth than by conclusive argument, namely, the way of
direct intuitive perception. But from this time onwards pantheism was
in the air, and from the moment that Goethe, enraptured by his first
reading of Spinoza, declares himself a Spinozist (a faith from which
he never wavered to the end of his long life), it reigns in German
literature; and this spirit of the new age, with its rich dower of
poetry and philosophic thought, weds that antique beauty which has been
brought to life again; as Faust, in the most famous poetical work of
the period, weds Helen of Troy, who symbolises ancient Greece.
The great pagan renaissance which had been inaugurated in Italy by
such men as Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, and in England by such men
as Shakespeare and Bacon, now finds its way to Germany, and the new
intellectual tendency is strengthened by the enthusiasm for pagan-Greek
antiquity awakened by Winckelmann and Lessing. Schiller writes _Die
Götter Griechenlands_, Goethe, _Die Diana der Epheser_ and _Die Braut
von Corinth_. After the glory of Greece had departed, a mariner,
voyaging along her coast by night, heard from the woods the cry: "Great
Pan is dead!" But Pan was not dead; he had only fallen asleep. He awoke
again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance; he was acknowledged and
worshipped as a living god in the Germany of Schelling, Goethe, and
Hegel.
The new German spirit was even more pantheistic than the antique
spirit. When the ancient Greek stood by some beautiful waterfall, like
that of Tibur near Rome, he endowed what he saw with personality. His
eye traced the contours of beautiful naked women, the nymphs of the
place, in the falling waters of the cascade; the wreathing spray was
their waving hair; he heard their merry splashing and laughter in the
rush of the stream and the dashing of the foam against the rocks. In
other words, impersonal nature became personal to the antique mind. The
poet of old did not understand nature; his own personality stood in the
way; he saw it reflected everywhere, saw _persons_ wherever he looked.
Precisely the opposite is the case with a great modern poet like Goethe
or Tieck, whose whole emotional life is pantheistic. He, as it were,
strips himself of his personality in order to understand nature. When
he in his turn stands by the waterfall, he bursts the narrow bonds
of _self_. He feels himself glide and fall and spin round with the
whirling waters. His whole being streams out of the narrow confines of
the Ego and flows away with the stream he is gazing on. His elastic
consciousness widens, he absorbs unconscious nature into his being;
he forgets himself in what he sees, as those who listen to a symphony
are lost in what they hear. It is the same with everything. As his
being flows with the waves, so it flies and moans with the winds, sails
with the moon through the heavens, feels itself one with the formless
universal life.
This was the pantheism which Goethe indicated in the biting epigram:--
"Was soll mir euer Hohn
Ueber das All und Eine?
Der Professor ist eine Person,
Gott ist keine."
This was the pantheism to which he gave expression in _Faust_, and
which lies so deeply rooted in the German nature that even the Romantic
school, with its antagonism to the revival of the antique and its
secret leaning to Catholicism, is as pantheistic as Hölderlin and
Goethe. The worship of the universe is the unchecked undercurrent which
forces its way through all the embankments and between all the stones
with which an attempt is made to stay it.
Mme. de Staël did not perceive this. Her German acquaintances drew her
with them into the movement that was going on upon the surface, and
she saw and felt nothing else. This surface movement was the Romantic
reaction.
The violent attempt to be that which was really unnatural in the
modern German, namely antique and classical, produced a violent
counter-movement. Goethe's and Schiller's ever more determined and
strict adherence to the antique ideal in art led them at last, in their
attachment to severity and regularity of style, to take a step in the
direction of that school against which they had been the first to
rebel, namely French classical tragedy. Goethe translated Voltaire's
_Mahomet_, and Schiller, Racine's _Phèdre_; and thus, through the
action of these two greatest of German poets, the French and the German
conception of the classical entered into league with one another. But
this alliance, as was inevitable, gave the signal for revolt. The
antique was so severe; men longed for colour and variety. It was so
plastic; they longed for something fervent and musical. The antique was
so Greek, so cold, so foreign; who had the patience to read Goethe's
_Achilleïs_, or Schiller's _Die Braut von Messina_, with its solemn
antique chorus? Had they not a past of their own? They longed for
something national, something German. The antique was so aristocratic;
enthusiasm for the classical had actually led to the revival of the old
court poetry of the period of Louis XIV. But surely art should be for
all classes, should unite high and low? Men wanted something simple,
something popular.
These classical efforts were, in the last place, so very dull.
Lessing's genial rational religion had, under the treatment of Nicolai
the bookseller, turned into the same sort of insipid rationalism
which was in favour in Denmark at the close of the century. Goethe's
pantheism could not warm the hearts of the masses. Schiller's _Die
Sendung Moses_ could not but be an offence to every believer. And
after all, the word "poetic" did not necessarily mean "dull." Men
wanted to be roused, to be intoxicated, to be inspired; they wanted
once again to believe like children, to feel the enthusiasm of the
knight, the rapture of the monk, the frenzy of the poet, to dream
melodious dreams, to bathe in moonlight and hold mystic communion with
the spirits of the Milky Way; they wanted to hear the grass grow and
to understand what the birds sang, to penetrate into the depths of the
moonlit night, and into the loneliness of the forest.
It was something simple that was wanted. Weary of ancient culture, men
took refuge in the strange, rich, long-neglected world of the Middle
Ages. A thirst for the fantastic and marvellous took possession of
their souls, and fairy-tale and myth became the fashion. All the old,
popular fairy-tales and legends were collected, and were re-written
and imitated, often as excellently as by Tieck in his Fair Eckbert
and Story of the Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence,
but also often with a childish magnification of the poetical value
of superstitions which in reality possess only scientific value as
distorted remains of ancient myths. Novalis, in a spirited poem,
prophesied that the time would come when man would no longer look to
science to solve the riddles of life, but would find the explanation
of all in fairy tale and poetry; and when that time came, when the
mystic word was spoken, all perversity and foolishness and wrong would
vanish. All foolishness and wrong, all that the French Revolution in
its foolhardiness had sought to put an end to by wild destruction and
bloody wars, was to vanish as in a dream or a fairy-tale, at the sound
of a spoken word, when men had become children again! They were to be
regenerated by turning from ideas that were redolent of powder and
blood to ideas redolent of the nursery.
It was something popular that was wanted. The seed was sown of the
same popular movement which was started in Denmark by Grundtvig, after
he, like so many others, had been powerfully impressed by the youthful
ardour with which the doctrines of the new Romantic School were
proclaimed by Steffens and received by the rising generation, in those
days when there was still youth in Denmark. Men rightly regretted the
great gulf which had been fixed between the educated and the uneducated
by the extremely rapid advance of the vanguard and the exclusion of the
poorer classes from culture, and rightly appealed to the man of science
and the artist to clothe their thoughts and feelings in the simplest
and most easily comprehensible form. But the movement went astray, by
making the insane attempt to recall the advanced guard for the sake of
the laggards; they would hardly have minded sabring the foremost for
the sake of keeping the army together.
With the renunciation of the mainspring of action--belief in
progress--the fatalistic tragedy, with its follies and superstitions,
came into vogue. In Werner's tragedy, _The Twenty-Fourth of February_,
whatever happens on that particular day reminds the heroine of a
terrible crime and curse. This is carried so far that when a hen is
killed that day, she cries: "It seemed to scream a curse at me; it
reminded me of my father with the death-rattle in his throat." Yet this
play is praised by that usually discerning critic, the authoress of _De
l'Allemagne_! The affectedly childlike tone of the satirical dramas
gave them the character of puppet plays; naïveté became more and more
the fashion; in their terror of the salons of the eighteenth century
men took refuge in the nursery.
The leaders of the school were Protestants by birth, but their bias
towards the pious simplicity of the Middle Ages of necessity brought
about a movement in the direction of Catholicism.
In that essay on the difference between neo-classical and popular art
by which Mme. de Staël showed herself influenced both in _Corinne_
and _De l'Allemagne_, Friedrich Schlegel, after demonstrating that it
is impossible for genius to preserve its freshness, its impetuosity,
when it chooses subjects the treatment of which demands erudition and
exercise of the memory, observes: "It is not so with the subjects which
belong to our own religion. From them artists receive inspiration; they
feel what they paint; they paint what they have seen; life itself is
their model when they represent life. But when they attempt to return
to the antique, they must seek what they are to reproduce, not in the
life they see around them, but in books and pictures."
The false implication lies in the words "our own religion." Which was
"our own religion"? Protestantism had developed into an idealistic
philosophy that had long made common cause with the Revolution. In
the year 1795, two young men, whose names were to attain world-wide
celebrity, had gone out to a lonely field and, in their naïve
enthusiasm for the Revolution, planted a Tree of Liberty. These two
were Schelling and Hegel.
There was, then, a return to Catholicism. But the spirit of Italian
Catholicism was still too classic, too antique. A huge, light church
like St. Peter's at Rome was not sufficiently mysterious; it was, as
Lamartine observed, fitted, when all dogmatic religion should have
disappeared from Europe, to become the temple of humanity. In Italy it
was with the pre-Raphaelite painters alone that the Romanticists felt
themselves akin; in Spain they found a kindred spirit in Calderon,
whose mysticism they soon set high above their earlier favourite,
Shakespeare's, realism and liberal-mindedness. Even Heiberg ranks
Calderon above Shakespeare. There is a regular cult of the Gothic
in art. Men turn with renewed admiration to the great monuments of
their native land, to that style begotten of the deep feeling and the
superstitious terrors of northern barbarians--Frenchmen, however.
Albert Dürer, genuinely German, popular, simple-minded, but above all
(with his stags bearing crosses between their antlers, and all the
rest of his symbolical fancies) mystic, was canonised by the German
Romanticists; even with us, Oehlenschläger and his sister persisted in
seeing more in Dürer than other people could see. The infection was
so universal that even the poet of the Gulnares, Alis, and Gulhyndis
imagined himself a devotee of mysticism. Men's hearts were certainly
not agitated by the religious agonies and hopes of the old pious
times; but the strangeness of the Gothic style, and the extravagance
which betrays itself in its artistic symbolism, harmonised with the
unnaturalness and restlessness of their morbid modern imaginations. It
may be related, as not without significance, that when Oehlenschläger
first came into the presence of the leaders of the Romantic School,
in whom he had naïvely expected to find a set of eager, emaciated
ascetics, he was somewhat taken aback by the sight of Friedrich
Schlegel's "satirical fat face shining cheerfully at him."
It was, however, in the course of the ardent struggle against the
neo-classical tendency that Friedrich Schlegel rendered his one
true, and also really great, service to science: he introduced the
study of Sanscrit, and thereby opened up to Europeans an entirely
new intellectual domain. He laid the foundation, first of one new
linguistic science, the Indo-Oriental, which henceforth developed
alongside of the Greco-Roman, and then of a second, namely, comparative
philology.
For the moment it was Hindu indolence, the contemplative life, the
plant life, that was the ideal. It is this ideal which is extolled
in Schlegel's _Lucinde_ and which somewhat later is appropriated by
the French Romanticists, re-appearing with variations in Théophile
Gautier's _Fortunio_. We trace it in Oehlenschläger's inspired idler,
Aladdin, and it is the ideal always present to the mind of the æsthete
in _Enten-Eller_, who, like Kierkegaard himself, was brought up on the
German Romanticists. Note his words: "I divide my time thus: half the
time I sleep, the other half I dream. When I sleep I never dream, for
to sleep is the highest achievement of genius."
Goethe, as an old man, sought refuge in the East from the turmoil of
the day, and wrote his _West-östlicher Divan_. The Romanticists did
but follow in his track. Presently, however, their doctrines were
placed on a philosophical basis by Schelling, who had been alarmed and
converted by the religious and political aberrations of the French.
As Goethe had sought refuge in far-off Asia, Schelling sought refuge
from discordant surroundings in the far-off past, and discovered there
the sources of life and truth. In contradiction to the belief of the
"enlightenment" period that humanity had laboriously raised itself from
barbarism to culture, from instinct to reason, he maintained that it
had fallen--fallen, that is to say, from a higher state in which its
education had been superintended by higher beings, spiritual powers.
There was a fall; and in the degenerate times following upon that
fall, there appeared but few of those teachers, those higher beings,
prophets, geniuses of the Schelling type, who strove to lead men back
to the old, perfect life. We of to-day know that science has justified
the pre-Revolutionists and proved Schelling wrong; we, who live in the
age of Charles Darwin, no longer accept the possibility of an original
state of perfection and a fall. There is no doubt that the teaching of
Darwin means the downfall of orthodox ethics, exactly as the teaching
of Copernicus meant the downfall of orthodox dogma. The system of
Copernicus deprived the heaven of the Church of its "local habitation";
the Darwinian system will despoil the Church of its Paradisaic Eden.
But in those days this was not recognised, and Schelling directed men
back to that primeval world whose myths of gods and demigods were to
him historical facts; he ended by extolling mythology as the greatest
of all works of art, one which was capable of infinite interpretation;
and infinite in this context means arbitrary. We have here the
germ of Grundtvig's myth-interpretation--with its unscientific and
untrustworthy presentment of Scandinavian mythology.
But the loss of all interest in the life of the day is still more
markedly shown in Schelling's absorption in nature. As the mystics held
that it was the working of the imagination of God which created the
world, so Schelling held that it was the corresponding power in man
which alone gave ideal reality to the productions of his intellect.
It is, then, this essentially artistic force, the so-called
"intellectual intuition" (which may be defined as the entire
imagination working according to the laws of reason), of which
Schelling, clearly influenced by the æsthetic criticism of the day,
maintains that it alone opens the door to philosophy, to the perception
of the identity of thought and reality. Nay, this "intellectual
intuition" was not only the means, it was the end. This confusing of
the tool with the work marks the beginning of a general, complete
confusion in Romantic poetry and philosophy. Philosophy begins to
encroach on the domain of art; instead of research we have fancy and
conjecture; poetry and the fine arts, on the other hand, invade the
domain of philosophy and religion; poems become rhymed discussions
and their heroes booted and spurred ideas; works of art seek vainly
to disguise their lack of corporeal form by a cloak of Catholic piety
and love. Men imagined that the new Naturphilosophie was to make all
experimental study of nature superfluous henceforth and for ever; but
we, who have seen the absolute impotence of the _Naturphilosophie_,
and who live in an age in which experimental science has changed the
aspect of the earth and enriched human life by unparalleled discoveries
and inventions--we know that in this case also reactionary endeavours
led to defeat, and that life itself undertook the refutation of the
fallacy. The interest of the above doctrine to us Danes lies especially
in its energetic vindication of the divine imagination as the source of
creation, and of the human imagination as the source of all artistic
production; for here we have the idea that gave birth to Aladdin, and
feel the heart-beat which in 1803 drove the blood straight to that
extremity of the great Germanic-Gothic body which is known by the name
of Copenhagen.
It is easy to understand how inevitable it was that these new theories
should make a strong impression on Oehlenschläger. The Romanticists
exalted imagination above everything in the world--it was the
peculiarly divine gift. Whom could this impress more than the man
through whom inventive power had in Danish literature supplanted the
clever manipulation of language which had distinguished Baggesen and
the eighteenth century? The Romanticists looked upon the world of
myth as the highest, as the real world; there he was, with a whole new
mythology, the Scandinavian, ready to his hand, waiting to be used. Fr.
Schlegel and Novalis had cried in chorus: "We must find a mythology
which can be to us what the mythology of the Greeks and Romans was to
them!" But they sought in vain, or found only the old Catholic legends.
Oehlenschläger alone had no need to seek; "the orange fell into his
turban." The Romanticists believed in a greater past from which the
race had fallen; and he dwelt among a people whose past far outshone
its present, a people that desired to forget the darkness of to-day
and to see itself glorified in the glorification of the dreams of its
childhood and the achievements of its youth. Thus it was that it only
needed a word from Steffens to break (to the surprise of Steffens and
every one else) the spell by which his tongue was tied.