Goethe says of himself, that the first sight of a work of genuine art
was always displeasing to him. There was no correspondence between his
own mind and the object he was contemplating. It would not fit--became
galling. He was made conscious of a deficiency in himself; and the
result was, a feeling of annoyance and irritation at the cause of it.
Yet if he could overcome this aversion, and set himself to work to
understand it, in faith that ultimately he would find himself repaid,
he never failed to make the most delightful discoveries; new powers
developed themselves in himself, and beauty after beauty came out in
the object.
It is to this cause that we attribute the comparatively small success
which the works of Ludwig Tieck have hitherto met with in
England--just because they are genuine; and we venture to affirm, with
some confidence, that if people will take the same pains, they will
find their efforts attended with a similar result to that above
mentioned. There is nothing strange in all this: there is a deep
gloomy earnestness about Tieck, an unprepossessing sternness, which
makes people feel uncomfortable, without exactly knowing why. They
cannot make out his way of thought. They feel it is deep and strong;
but as they do not start with any confidence in him as a teacher, it
serves only to make them painfully conscious of their own dimensions,
and afraid of what the strong man may do with them. For all they know,
he may be a tyrant, using his powers only for destruction; breaking in
and wasting all their beautiful gardens, and leaving them nothing but
ashes, and torn-off leaves, and withering flowers.
More or less, there is always something awful in a purely ethical
writer. Tieck's works do not profess to be religious writings. He is
concerned wholly with the nature of man as he finds him, and with the
working of the moral laws, the natural tendencies of virtue and vice
in the system of the universe; and in this way he contrasts strikingly
with writers like Fouque, whose works have so much of a distinct
religious character. The wild preternatural spirit which breathes
through all his tales forms but a subservient part. It does but
represent the elements in which our moral nature hangs; and is, in
fact, nothing more than the very element in which we all live, only
held in a certain light that we may see it. Why he does not introduce
the real influences of the other world as revelation makes them known
to us, is a question which we need not ask ourselves; it is enough
that it was not his purpose.
But perhaps we shall find the clue to the general tone of his mind in
the state of things in Germany, and the general condition of European
feeling at the time in which he was brought up.
His mind broke into consciousness at the stormy close of the
eighteenth century, when Europe was rocking to her foundation, and all
faith in God was dead. The seven thousand who would not bow the knees
to the Deity of man were hanging off in fear and trembling, and
watching for the doom of the world. In France, old Voltaire worshipped
as a god. In Germany, the students at the universities caricaturing
the sacrifice of the mass at the doors of the beerhouses, and one
riding through the streets of Goettingen upon an ass, to try, as he
said, what must have been the feelings of the Saviour (Goethe,
_Wahrheit und Dichtung_). It was a time of which Jean Paul said, "Now
strikes the twelfth hour of the night; and the foul birds of night are
screaming, and spectres dance; the dead walk abroad, the living
dream."
Tieck was born in the Roman Catholic Church; but he was brought up
without any religious teaching; and the Church herself in those dark
hours possessed but few or none of those outward marks of holiness
which could make him feel safe in trusting himself implicitly to her
guidance: the poison of infidelity was in her very heart; disgraced by
the grossest idolatry, her enemies battering furiously at her from
without, and she apparently helpless to resist them. It is not so now:
she too has felt the warm breath of spring that has since swept over
the face of the earth, and is waking her up to new life and energy;
yet, if even now such scenes as those of last summer at Treves can
shock the senses of the cultivated world, what must it have been then?
She was like a cracked bell that would not ring when it was struck.
In a country, then, where there was no religion to which he could
trust,--no philosophy but an infidel one; in despair of external
guidance, Tieck was forced to the bold step of trying for himself what
all these systems were made of; of going down himself, and searching
the foundations on which they rested; what this nature of his really
was. He dared stand boldly up before the world, and look it in the
face, and ask it what it was. And the still more awful questions he
asked of his own heart: What am I? How came I here? What is my
business here? It is a fiery trial; and woe to him who fails! Better
he had never been born! It is a sphinx he has to answer: if he find
not the solution of the riddle, the monster will devour him. And few
hearts but will quail, and few cheeks but will blanch, and few heads
but will reel, with those bottomless abysses of scepticism yawning
round. But it is like the Catholic legend of the purgatory of St.
Patrick. Few of those who ventured in ever returned to tell the tale;
but those who did were safe for ever. A man knows too well the value
of the true, when he has been at such cost in the pursuit of it, to
risk the losing of it again. "Abdallah" and "William Lovell," the two
first books of any importance which Tieck published, shew him in the
centre of the fearful struggle, wrestling with those two first
unanswerable questions. And so at last he was content to leave them.
To the last question he wrung out an answer from the depths of his own
being; he comes now to offer it to us--a true teacher, if a stern one:
and we shall do well to listen to his words; for the solemn
earnestness which breathes through every line he has written shews how
deeply he has read the mystery of life. The tales in the present
volume were written in the first period after he emerged into a calmer
and clearer light; and to these for the rest of this Preface we shall
confine ourselves. We have said enough to account for their peculiar
character externally; and the consideration of his later writings had
better be left to another opportunity: to speak of them now would be
but criticism without an object; before long some of them will be
produced before the public, and what is to be said will be said then.
Great things have happened in Germany since that time: a literature
has sprung up almost without parallel for depth, and richness, and
originality; and schools of poetry and philosophy various as those of
Athens. Tieck has led one school, Goethe another; and if officious
followers attempted to push them into rivalry, each knew his own place
too well for such unnatural feud to endure.
The first startling feature, then, in all the characters in these
tales is their terrible reality. In all the circumstances of the wild
and wonderful, the supernatural working visibly, and interfering in
the direction and control for good and evil of the affairs of the
world; instead of finding the persons of the same fantastic character,
such as we might naturally expect, as harmonising better with the
elements in which they work; instead of saints with power of working
miracles, or the ideal heroes of the age of chivalry,--we have the
very men and women which we ourselves are, and such as we see every
day around us. Excepting, perhaps, Goethe, no one knew his own age
better than Tieck: he is a modern poet in every sense of the word; and
that is why we claim so high a place for him.
The true poet of any time is he who can make that time
transparent--who can let his readers in behind the curtain of their
own souls and that of the society in which they live, and shew them
what they are all doing, hoping, fearing--clear up their cloudy
perceptions, and say for them what they would say for themselves if
they could. This is exactly what Tieck does. His Emilius's, Egberts,
Ludwigs,--what are they all, but the very men of whom every day he
walked into the street he saw thousands? No matter what the conditions
be under which he pictures them working, his men are real men, not
fantastic; and that is all we have any right to require.
Yet I may say something about these marvellous conditions in which
they appear; for perhaps even they are not so unreal as they seem.
It is only because we are used to them that this world and the beings
that inhabit it do not seem wonderful. There is nothing in the
phenomena which surround us abstractedly more reasonable than any
other set might be which worked by fixed rules. As a matter of fact we
experience one class, but that is all. It is not that one is wonderful
and the other simple, as people seem to assume. This world we live in
is, indeed, teeming with wonders. The poet has but to hold a
magnifying-glass before it, and forthwith a thousand new forms of
beauty start out before our eyes; and what before seemed most
beautiful has become a monster. There are, indeed, poets who can
produce the highest effect without any such magnifying; and the world
as mirrored in their minds appears transfigured, its form and
proportions continuing all the same. Yet the number of such spirits
as have appeared on this planet of ours we may count upon our fingers,
and of those who are fit to read and understand them the ratio is the
same. Even Shakspere does not at times disdain the aid of the
supernatural; and the idea of nature, as Tieck offers it, even its
wildest and most fantastic form, is far deeper and nearer the truth
than is the dull, common-place, lifeless thing which most men seem to
regard it as. The question, however, is one which he will best qualify
people to answer for themselves.
Most of the tales in the present volume belong to the "Phantasus." A
party of persons meet together for conversation on various subjects of
art and literature, and these stories, with sundry other dramas, are
read aloud by different members of the society. They are introduced
with the following prefatory dialogue:--
"It is not at every moment, nor every time we choose to turn to her,"
said Antony, "that Nature will unfold her secrets to us; or rather, it
is not always that we are in the mood to feel her sacredness. There
must first be a harmony in ourselves, if we are to find what surrounds
us harmonious; otherwise we do but cheat ourselves with empty phrases,
without ever rising to a true enjoyment of beauty. It may be, perhaps,
that there are times when unexpectedly some blessed influence descends
out of Heaven upon our hearts, and unlocks the door of inspiration;
but towards this we can add nothing. We have no right, no means of
looking for it; it is a revelation within us we know not how. So much
is certain, that it is not above twice, or at most three times, in a
man's life that he has the fortune, in any true sense, to see a
sunrise. When we do see it, it does not pass away like a summer cloud
before our minds; rather it forms one of the great epochs in our
lives. From such ecstatic feelings as we receive then it is long and
long ere we recover; by the side of these exalted moments years
dwindle into nothingness. But it is only in the calmness of solitude
that these high gifts can descend upon us. A party collecting itself
to see it as a sight on the top of a mountain, is only standing as it
were before an exhibition at a theatre, and can bring from it nothing
but the same kind of empty pleasure and foolish criticisms."
"Still stranger is it," said Ernest, "that the great majority of men
are so dead to that awe and wonder, that fearful amazement with which
Nature often fills some minds. If they can feel it, it is only as an
obscure bewildered sensation of they know not what."
"It is not only on the dreary peaks of the St. Gothard that we can
feel the terribleness of Nature. There are times when the most
beautiful scene is full of spectres that fly shrieking and screaming
across our hearts. Such strange shadowy forms, such wild forebodings,
go often hunting up and down our fancy, that we are fain to fly from
them in terror, and rid ourselves of our phantom rider, by plunging
into the dissipations of the world. While under such influences wild
poems and stories often rise up in us to people the dreary chaos of
desolation, and adorn it with creations of art; and these forms and
figures will be unconscious betrayers of the tone and temper of the
mind in which they spring. In these kind of stories the beautiful
mingles itself with the terrible, the sublime with the childish,
goading our fancy into a kind of poetic madness, and then turning it
to roam at will through the entire fabric of our souls."
"Are the stories you are going to read to us of this kind?" asked
Clara.
"Perhaps," replied Ernest.
"And not allegorical?"
"As you please to call them. There is not, and there cannot be any
creation of art which has not some kind of allegory at the bottom of
it, however little it may let itself be seen. The two forms of good
and evil appear in every poem; they meet us at every turn, in every
thing man produces, as the one eternal riddle in an endless
multiplicity of forms, which he is for ever struggling to resolve. As
there are particular aspects in which the most every-day life appears
like a myth, so it is possible to feel oneself in as close connexion
with, as much at home in the middle of the wildest wonders as the
ordinary incidents of life. One may go so far as to say, that the
commonest, simplest, pleasantest things, as well as the most
marvellous, can only be said to be true, can only exert an influence
on our minds, in so far as they contain some allegory as their
groundwork, as the link which connects them with the system of the
universe. This is why Dante's allegories come so home to us, because
they pierce through and through to the very heart and centre of
reality. Novalis says, there is no real history, except what might be
fable. Of course, there are many weak and sickly poems of this kind,
which merely drag wearily on to the moral, without taking the
imagination along with them; and these of all the different sorts of
instruction or entertainment are the most tiresome. But it is time to
proceed to our tales."
* * * * *
And here we would gladly leave this matter, and let the tales tell
their own story. What their idea is as a whole, they speak plainly
enough; and it would be to destroy their effect, as well as to
misunderstand the whole theory of this kind of fiction, to translate
them into a series of moral reflections, and append a didactic
sentiment to them as to one of AEsop's fables. And yet English readers
will not be content with a suggestion of allegory; they will be asking
for meanings, and requiring to have the whole matter laid out before
them in fair, plain characters of black and white; so that
notwithstanding my full consciousness of the general undesirableness
and the unphilosophical nature of such a proceeding, I will offer a
few general remarks, in the way of elucidation, for three or four of
these stories, which shall put people on the scent to find the real
meaning, not only of these stories in particular, but in general of
any such as may be brought before them. Consoling myself, therefore,
with the reflection that a preface is always read, as it is written,
the last thing in a book, and that in that case my explanation can
hurt no one, and may be of some profit to those who have failed to see
any thing for themselves, I proceed.
"Egbert," "Eckhart," and the "Runenberg," naturally form into a group
together. They are different exhibitions of very similar ideas, and it
will be enough to explain one. I should advise people, however, to
read the three together straightforward, and then try to analyse for
themselves the impression left upon their minds. Perhaps it may be
something of this sort: that a single sin unrepented of and unatoned
for becomes a destiny; a seed from which, however diminutive and
trifling it may look, a whole life of crime and wickedness shoots up
as a matter of course, perhaps inevitably. Cause and effect, effect
and cause, going on producing and reproducing each other, each
successive step leading further and deeper into the mire, return
becoming more and more difficult, and at last impossible.
Look at Christian in the "Runenberg." He is born to a calm and serene
life of tranquillity and peace; affectionate parents--a simple routine
of the gentlest and most beautiful of all nature's choicest
occupations--far away from all temptation--secure from every danger--a
home that ought to have given him all, and more than all, of enjoyment
and content,--whose life could promise more happily than his? Yet he
has no love, no heart, no feeling for it. His sense of duty is not
strong enough to set him to work; he finds it dull and uninteresting;
he craves for excitement, for something new. The _plain_ life is not
grand enough to suit his exalted aspirations: he must go to the
mountains, to the ups and downs, and rough and rugged ways of the
world, where he may climb, and hunt, and seek a broader range for
activity and enjoyment; he does not think of asking leave--he goes; he
never regrets leaving home; and at first finds all bright, and gay,
and delightful sunshine. The happy, happy hunting-time; and who so
happy in it as Christian? But it soon palls--it does not satisfy. The
cup is poisoned, there is a gall and wormwood in the taste the sweet
leaves behind; and again he thinks of home. He sings his old song; but
the words come wearily and listlessly--he has no heart for hunting any
more. He wishes to be at home again; but he makes no effort. The
mysterious mandrake in sympathy with his old life wakes up and speaks
to him. It is the warning-voice of conscience; but he dreams on. The
tempter comes, and he is lost irretrievably. The moment of return is
offered--now or never! and he refuses. He does not stay among the
mountains; he flies away to the plains beyond; he flings off, as he
fondly believes, the dark mysterious incidents of that night, as a
wild and impious dream; he thinks he is what he was; away he goes
again to the plains to his old employment, and he is happy,
industrious, contented in it. Every thing again looks smooth, and
bright, and beautiful; but he has not _gone back_, and now he may not.
What should have been for his peace, now is but a further snare to
make him fancy all is right with him. He does indeed set out to seek
his father, but wearily and unwillingly. His way would have led him
back over the mountains; but there he is not permitted to go. The
object of his journey comes to meet him; they go back together; he
becomes more and more prosperous, and sinks deeper and deeper into his
fatal delusion. Yet the fatal tablet is in his heart, the bond by
which he is bound to evil; even on his wedding-night he cannot forget
the giver. At length the long-smothered poison burst out with all its
fury, and flowers touch his heart no more. He curses them and nature;
the warning mandrake, instead of the voice of conscience, is but a
revelation of the power of evil. It has but taught him to despair, and
seek his friends elsewhere; and he is lost for ever.
Of the more awful person in this fearful story I will not speak; but
for the outline of the fate of Christian, who can look round him into
the most ordinary life, and not see innumerable instances of it? The
burden of the other two stories is very similar: the way to understand
them is to try and analyse the feelings left on our mind by the whole,
and not distract ourselves by assuming a fancied meaning, and
speculating with the particulars to make each fragment fit our theory.
Do not let us perplex ourselves to find out what the little dog is,
what is the meaning of the bird, and the old woman. They may have many
meanings; but we shall never find them by beginning at that end. It is
only by the light of the whole that the parts become intelligible.
"The Love-charm" is a work of a different nature; it is one of the
most remarkable of all Tieck's writings, and, as far as we know,
stands alone among the productions of modern art. With the help of a
popular German superstition, he has woven a tragedy out of the
ordinary events of every-day life, the spirit of which approaches as
near as modern thought can be made to approach to the fatalism of the
Greek drama. A destiny of some kind, either moral or external, is
essential to tragedy. What we mean by "the terrible" as applied to
human action, is, that the free will of man is laid under the
influence of some external power, which he has little or no ability to
resist, which hurries him on through a series of action and incident,
from which, if in full possession of his self-control, he would shrink
in horror. Thus, in common life the crimes men commit under the
influence of any of the loftier passions, such as love or revenge, or
when goaded on by famine or despair, or which men do in ignorance,
when the ignorance may partially, but not entirely, be their own
fault, are terrible, and therefore tragic. The individual seems to be
sacrificed, not to deserve all that has fallen on him; his fate
becomes one of the startling mysteries of life. The meaner or more
selfish the passion under which the crime is committed, or the cooler
and more deliberate the action, the more what he does loses the
character of tragic, and becomes merely disgusting. Pity goes with
terror, and in such cases there can be no pity. The destiny in
Shakspere's tragedies is a moral one; not an external power
constraining, but an internal power impelling; working not against,
but in and through the will. Such was the influence of his father's
spirit on Hamlet, Hecate and the Witches on Macbeth, Iago's intellect
on Othello, and so on with the rest. The Greek destiny, though in our
way of thinking less human, is more terrible even than that of
Shakspere. The sins of the fathers visited on the children, curses
continuing to work generation after generation, and the helpless
struggle of the victim only precipitating him into a darker
doom--there is a stern grandeur about this form of thought; it is a
feature of a broader philosophy than ours to bear to see the
individual sacrificed, and believe that in some mysterious way the
well-being of the whole is furthered by it, "with calm self-surrender
to hear the murderer's hand upon a brother's throat, yet stand with
upturned unquailing eyes before the everlasting Providence." It is a
scheme of thought so unlike ours that we can hardly realise it, it is
so like a monster to us. Yet this Love-charm is an attempt to do it;
and although the spell is but over a single person, and forms no
portion of a broad scheme of Providence; although for the stately
forms of kings and heroes stalking across the stage, we have but the
ball-going ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century, and but an
old witch for the Delphic oracle, or the gods appearing in visible
form; few people can rise from reading it without having been made to
feel that this life, after all, is a stranger thing than they have
been in the habit of imagining.
Emilius's character is eminently tragic. He has every feature which
can interest us, without that moral or religious force in him which
would make us feel shocked at his fate. The Greeks felt that good and
holy men were no fitter subjects of tragedy than very wicked ones.
There is something revolting ([Greek: miarhon]) in the idea that a
good man can be allowed even in ignorance to fall into crime. Whatever
be the mysterious ways of Providence; whatever fearful power there may
be abroad, working on and influencing the destinies of mankind; what
indeed is the meaning of the prince of the power of the air, or
whether there be really such an element as chance; this, at least, we
must believe, that the good man is in the hands of the Highest, and
that the laws of nature would sooner be reversed than he be let fall
from His hands. But Emilius is a dreamer, whose power exhausts itself
in speculation, and never acts at all except on impulse: without
firmness, without will to give oneness of design and consistency to
his actions, this character--which is _no law_ to itself, which will
not command itself, no matter how pure may be in general its purposes,
or how lofty its aspirations--is exactly the one most open to be laid
under the spell of some other force. Every man's life, taken from
beginning to end, looked back upon presents an exhibition of some one
law or principle; whatever it be, in the end it is found to be
tolerably uniform and consistent: its principle may be an internal one
of will and conscience; if it is not this, if it grows not out of
self-command, it is pretty sure to be some more fatally perilous one.
Emilius is admirably worked throughout. Contrast his feelings towards
man and nature, and life and love, as they appear in the first short
poem, and what they have become a few hours later, merely from the
excitement and irritation produced by the ball. The scene of the
village-marriage, the young man's warmth and nobleness, and exquisite
susceptibility, are introduced to heighten our pity for his fate;
while the way in which he is led to it, in a dreamy mood, listlessly
yielding to the caprice of a wayward companion, and not from any real
wish to find out want and relieve suffering, reduces the value of the
action to a mere gratification of a passion, and thus, while it
deepens our sympathy, adds nothing to our respect. The concluding
scene is so magnificent, that we cannot run the risk of injuring its
effect by offering any criticism on it; and with these few words we
leave the "Love-charm."
In "Eckhart" and the "Runenberg" we have seen some of the moral trials
which meet men on first starting into life. In the "Friends" we have
the lighter kind of speculative. A very little philosophy serves to
teach us how very unreal every thing is that passes before our eyes;
how it all takes a colouring from our spirits; how the very same thing
appears almost contradictory to different people, or to the same
person in different moods; that we do not so much see things
themselves, as our own image thrown into them. Accordingly, men begin
to crave for a truer insight; they try to clear their intellect of the
gauzy film of feeling, and see things as they are. Ludwig, a young
indolent dreamer, full of all this kind of sentimental longing to be
rid of sentimentality, is on his way to visit a sick friend. He sits
down in the heat of the day under a tree to indulge in the pleasure of
a little disconsolate reflection on his friend's melancholy letter,
and insensibly falls off into a sleep, and dreams. At once he finds
all the difficulties of the world solved for him, all his highest
aspirations satisfied. The chasm that divides the worlds of sense and
spirit is bridged over; his mind meets its true objects. The earth he
despised he is now relieved from; the deceptions of nature all vanish;
he sees things as they are; he is in the real world of truth and
beauty; nothing is subjective any longer; he breathes a real genuine
objectivity; all mortal weaknesses, and with them love, may not enter
here; the phantoms of his childhood flit before him again, but no
longer as they were; they are transfigured into the cold sublimity of
Grecian goddesses. Alas! he is far from satisfied; after the first few
days of rapture, he would gladly be on earth again. He wished to be as
the gods; his wish is granted, and among the gods he cannot live. This
cold world may be a very grand place, but it is not for such as him.
Like Lessing's Phoenix, at first sight the dwellers here seem
beautiful beyond all conception; the second glance shews that if a man
will be like them he must be content to be the only one of his race,
with none to love him and none that he can love. "He is like the
spirits he can comprehend, not like them." The truth he sought, he
finds he has left behind; the old earth is his true home; and men, be
they what they will, are his brothers. His friend comes to meet him;
but he does not know him again, because here for the first time he
sees him as he is, while before he had only seen in him the image of
himself. If this be truth, he is sick of it; he sighs for the
deception again, if deception it was that had been so delightful; he
wakes to find his vision but a dream, in the sweet reality of his
friend's embrace.
The "Elves," the last story which we shall notice, is of a far more
solemn character; with all its beauty, it has a sad dirge-like tone.
Written fourteen years later than the others, it is now the true
poet's lament over the hard insensibility of the world to its true
good. The world of spirit lies stretched out under the eyes of the
children of earth; the invisible visible; but from earth and to
earthly perceptions, dull, gloomy, unattractive. To the busy practical
man of business, to the prudential economist, the man of
understanding, the workers in it seem but idle, worthless vagabonds;
these lazy good-for-nothings, that scarcely till the ground, are never
seen at church, and shew no symptom of respectability; why do they
cumber the earth? the talk is of cage and pillory for them; no child
of theirs may approach the unhallowed precincts. Accident leads a
young girl beyond the boundary, and then how changed is every thing!
The dull scene has become more brilliant than the gardens of Aladdin;
scales fall from her eyes; now it is the old world that is dark and
gloomy. Down among the mysteries of the fountains of Nature, she sees
her now no longer yielding reluctantly an unwilling pittance to the
sweat of the labour of man, but _uncursed_. At the word of the
dwellers in that enchanted land, her choicest fruits and flowers she
pours out in lavish abundance. The spirits of the elements work
visibly there, and the mortal sees them, and knows now who are the
true benefactors of mankind. Time and space exist not for these pure
beings. Seven years are gone in one night, and the narrow fir-clump
contains the garden of Eden.
The mortal goes back to earth: what she has seen she may not tell.
These esoteric secrets of the poet are not for the crawling animal who
cannot hold himself upright, nor turn his eyes to heaven, and who only
knows the sun by the sight of his own shadow: but one of them she
weds; and the child of these two--oh, what may we not hope from that
child! Alas, in vain! In vain, from the secret labours of these
beautiful beings, the brooks run fresh and full, and the fields
overflow with plenty. Men will not see; in the midst of their
abundance they curse the author of it. In an evil hour of weakness the
initiated betrays the secret, and then all is gone. The gloom of the
fir-clump vanishes; it becomes like any other. The gipsy rabble are
gone; what all men hated, they are relieved of; but with this comes
the loss, too, of all they prized--their corn, their wine, and
fruitful trees. Famine comes, and drought and pestilence; the elfin
child dies, and all is ruin and disaster. They see not their tokens.
There is not one prophet more. What a deep philosophy runs through all
this!