The German Tributary
Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in
Great Britain had been self-developed and independent of foreign
influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in
the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But
now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from
abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind
which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have
been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer
hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great
(1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit
for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably
employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he
had not read a German book.[1]
But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of
the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school,
under the leadership of the Züricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a
national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought
under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of
"Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles.
In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous,"
1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired
imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons
and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. _Deutscheit,
Volkspoesie_, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the
_Kaiserzeit_ and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As
early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in
1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a
more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just
before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle
High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a
pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the
Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing,
in his preface to Gleim's 'War-songs,' called attention to the Middle
High German poets, of whom he continued to be throughout his life an
ardent admirer. Justus Möser took great interest in the Minnesingers.
About the time when 'Götz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German
poetry was at its strongest, and Bürger, Voss, Miller, and Höltz wrote
Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773
Gleim published 'Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after
Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the
Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Bürger, who vied hard with the
rest, but without much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on
dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a
few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character.
Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, 'Mein
Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the
song of the old Swabian knight--'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem
Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this
enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the
feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Müller, began to show the
Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the
Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Müller was only following in Herder's
steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its
pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages
the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring
life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid
thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and
strong patriotic feeling."[2]
When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose
from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the
translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by
Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was
merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister.
Mention has already been made of Bürger's and Herder's renderings from
Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Göttingen in
1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by
MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found--besides the Viennese
Denis--another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism
so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's
"Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy
Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's _Spectator_ papers.
Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in
England; and Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the
first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire de Dannemarc,"
preceded by two years the publication--though not the composition--of
Gray's poems from the Norse.
But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature
was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been
practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von
Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated "Julius Caesar."
This was followed, a few years later, by a version of "Romeo and Juliet."
In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two
Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long
superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe
first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic,
through the detached passages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere."[5]
He afterward got hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to
Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with
his own enthusiasm for "Ossian," and the _Volkslieder_, and led him to
study Shakspere in the original.
Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist
with passionate conviction. He became an object of worship, an article
of faith. The Shakspere _cultus_ dominated the whole _Sturm- und
Drangperoide_. The stage domesticated him: the poets imitated him: the
critics exalted him into the type and representative (_Urbild_) of
Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin
races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a
recognition of the essential kinships between the two separated branches
of the great Teutonic stock. The enthusiastic young patriots of the
Göttinger _Hain_,--who hated everything French and called each other by
the names of ancient bards,--accustomed themselves to the use of
Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the
dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the
police and spent the night in the lockup. In Goethe's circle at
Strassburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L.
Wagner, this Shakspere mania was _de rigueur_. Lenz, particularly, who
translated "Love's Labour's Lost," excelled in whimsical imitations of
"such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to
Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his father's house
(October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the "Will of all
Wills," and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. "The
first page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of this oration,
"made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I
stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant's
miracle. I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had
been expanded a whole infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my
eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8]
Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische
Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement
between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than
between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of
the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took
Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came
in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his
manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen"
conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The
unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the
scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six;
tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley
variety of figures, humors, and conditions--knights, citizens, soldiers,
horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages
were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan
metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable
Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom
he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia
Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give
it a more independent form.
Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in
German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" entitled
"Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blätter" ("Some Loose
Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained
essays by Justus Möser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as
a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits
of popular song, advocated a collection of the German _Volkslieder_,
extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a
German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg
Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "asserted that art,
to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which
this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and
with a friendly attitude toward England. . . This great movement was, in
fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from
the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and
rationalism to feeling and faith, from _a priori_ notions[11] to history,
from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's
'Götz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much
attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the
publication of 'Götz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even
Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate
talent but shallow genius, the representative of the _Aufklärung_
(_Éclaircissement_, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of
tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride _ins alte romantische
Land_. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count
Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and
Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his
vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales,
chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin"
and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and
best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of
materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French
romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12]
From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second
hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth
century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English
most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the
_Aufklärung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical,
common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical
writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the
department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like
Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most
brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to
this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to
recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and
popular superstitions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in God and
the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these
beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches.
In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break
with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which
had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more
violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence
had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the
vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because
Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of
the Queen Anne classics in England. It was easy for the new school of
German poets and critics to brush aside _perruques_ like Opitz,
Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift
and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We
have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as
Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend
older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen
that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with
literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In
England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton,
and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval
poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany
there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind
and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere
for this.
In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic
revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the
appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck,
Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouqué, Von Arnim, Brentano,
and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than
to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and
Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone,
Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy
Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and
Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual
nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative
importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his
life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many
buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came
too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism.
In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest
intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the
movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader
tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many
contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German
romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_,
which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided
unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one
element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other
products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocoön," "Faust," and "Wilhelm
Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and
Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and
Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents,
too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be
classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Götz" and "Die
Räuber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they
passed on presently into other regions of thought and art.
In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische
Reise_, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of
the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which
expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und
Dorothea," and the "Schöne Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht"
episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a
love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many.
Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids
and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for
the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In
Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical
antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe
were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the
first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the
mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the
dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe
and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of
classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age
was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical
prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the
century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads,
like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and
"Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf
mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer."
On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in
Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the
original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement
had greater momentum. The _Gründlichkeit_, the depth and thoroughness of
the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in
politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its
practice a theoria, an _aesthetik_. In the later history of German
romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with
a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made
accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and
Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the
eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical,
learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred
movement in England. The English mind, in the act of creation, works
practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks to bring questions of
taste or art under the domain of scientific laws. During the classical
period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it
broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons,
or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant
dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish
when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant,
Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going _Abhandlungen_ like the
"Laocoön," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber
naïve and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the analysis of Hamlet's
character in "Wilhelm Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in
England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to
compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg,
Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eighteenth-century
Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray. He had the
requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic
breadth and depth for a fundamental and _eingehend_ treatment of
underlying principles.
Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit
England with the initiative. Hettner[15] mentions three English critics,
in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular
poetry. These were Edward Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," whose
"Conjectures on Original Composition" was published in 1759: Robert Wood,
whose "Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer" (1768) was
translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth,
Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there
in 1753 his "Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum," translated into
English and German in 1793. The significance of Young's brilliant little
essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of "Sir Charles
Grandison," lay in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning
and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities. It was
a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in
substance, the question asked in Emerson's "Nature": "Why should not we
also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his
"Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature,
learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and
Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the
renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . .
Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed
examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius
often owes its supreme glory. . . Born _originals_, how comes it to pass
that we die _copies_?. . . Let not great examples or authorities
browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While
the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground;
he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the
sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot
saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that Shakspere is equal in
greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse
in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of
statuary."
Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya,
took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the
track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with
Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a fresher apprehension of
Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through
the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in
Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even
barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and
popular character (_Ursprünglichkeit, Volksthümlichkeit_) of the Homeric
poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or
ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations
as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's
"nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may
have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating
when propounded in 1768.
Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was
postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had
spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found
an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and
had just attained his majority.
"Romance who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing,
To _him_ a painted paroquet
Had been--a most familiar bird--
Taught _him_ his alphabet to say,
To lisp his very earliest word."[19]
He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already
learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making
his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes,
border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in
search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages
from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English
poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and
witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal,
from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the
Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating
to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that
year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the
study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter
he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland
by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by
Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most
sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of
Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius
in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly
force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which
dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the
English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to
admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a
race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming
boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old
Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities,
sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to
present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all
its boundless variety of character. . . Their fictitious narratives,
their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are
particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the
supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British
literati." Scott's German studies were much assisted by Alexander Frazer
Tytler, whose version of Schiller's "Robbers" was one of the earliest
English translations from the German theater.[20]
In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a
party at Dugald Stewart's by reading a translation of Bürger's ghastly
ballad "Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it
had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a manuscript
copy. Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the
performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that
he borrowed a volume of Burger's poems from his young kinswoman by
marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Brühl of Martkirchen,
formerly Saxon ambassador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second
wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 1795 to
make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in
pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private
circulation in the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year he
published his version under the title "William and Helen," together with
"The Chase," a translation of Bürger's "Der Wilde Jäger." The two poems
made a thin quarto volume. It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous,
and was Walter Scott's first published book. Meanwhile Taylor had given
his rendering to the public in the March number of the _Monthly
Magazine_, introducing it with a notice of Burger's poems; and the very
same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J.
T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the
poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,--author of
"Beth Gelert." "Too Late I Stayed," etc.,--with designs by Lady Diana
Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum,
sold at Christie's in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev.
James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800;
and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the most faithful, if
not the best, English version of the ballad.[21]
The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the
varied titles "Lenore," "Leonore," "Leonora," "Lenora," "Ellenore,"
"Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In the original, it remains
Bürger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained
perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Göttingen in
Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of
Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who
came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her
off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they
ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to
a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops
from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within,
and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and
her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to
some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are
clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened;
was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost
really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed,
with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient
Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and
the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs
whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer
form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives
common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet
William's Ghost," as an English example of the class.
Scott's friends assured him that his translation was superior to
Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his
appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer."
But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness
and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished
rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the _Grobheit_, the
rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will
illustrate the difference:
[From Scott's "William and Helen."]
"Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:--
Dost fear to ride with me?
Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"--
"O William, let them be!"
"See there! see there! What yonder swings
And creaks 'mid whistling rain?"
"Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel;
A murd'rer in his chain.
"Halloa! Thou felon, follow here:
To bridal bed we ride;
And thou shalt prance a fetter dance
Before me and my bride."
And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash!
The wasted form descends,[23]
And fleet as wind through hazel bush
The wild career attends.[23]
Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash, splash! along the sea:
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.
[From Taylor's "Lenora."]
Look up, look up, an airy crewe
In roundel dances reele.
The moone is bryghte and blue the night,
May'st dimly see them wheel.[24]
"Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe,
Come to and follow me.
And daunce for us the wedding daunce
When we in bed shall be."
And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew
Come wheeling o'er their heads,
All rustling like the withered leaves
That wyde the whirlwind spreads.
Halloo! halloo! Away they goe
Unheeding wet or drye,
And horse and rider snort and blowe,
And sparkling pebbles flye.
And all that in the moonshine lay
Behynde them fled afar;
And backward scudded overhead
The skye and every star.
Tramp, tramp across the land they speede,
Splash, splash across the sea:
"Hurrah! the dead can ride apace,
Dost fear to ride with me?"
It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr.
Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There
is no mention of the sea in Bürger, whose hero is killed in the battle of
Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and
individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the
Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made
his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Bürger's poem was
written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the
common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the
best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and
Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the
effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and,
indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German."
Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Bürger's next most
popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in
the _Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of
"The Lass of Fair Wone."
Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his
translations and critical papers in the _Monthly Magazine_ and _Monthly
Review_, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England.
When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia,
and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe
at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England.
"When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin,
"there was probably no English translation of any German author but
through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the
first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Bürger
in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora"
he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan
der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30
he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them
together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was
rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the
_Edinburgh Review_. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say
eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought;
his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in
unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by
the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant
talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and
interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be
gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German
poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27]
The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German
romantic movements. It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius
as Walter Scott should have made his _dèbut_ in an exhibition of the
horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood,
as reading his "William and Helen" over to that gentleman "in a very slow
and solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence and presently
exclaiming. "I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones."
Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell,
surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and mounted upon the
poet's bookcase. During the next few years, Scott continued to make
translations of German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas. These
remained for the present in manuscript; and some of them, indeed, such as
his versions of Babo's "Otto von Wittelsbach" (1796-97) and Meier's
"Wolfred von Dromberg" (1797) were never permitted to see the light. His
second publication (February, 1799) was a free translation of Goethe's
tragedy, "Götz von Berlichingen mit der Eisernen Hand." The original was
a most influential work in Germany. It had been already twenty-six years
before the public and had produced countless imitations, with some of
which Scott had been busy before he encountered this, the fountain head
of the whole flood of _Ritterschauspiele_.[28] Götz was an historical
character, a robber knight of Franconia in the fifteenth century, who had
championed the rights of the free knights to carry on private warfare and
had been put under the ban of the empire for engaging in feuds. "It
would be difficult," wrote Carlyle, "to name two books which have
exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of
Europe"--than "The Sorrows of Werther" and "Gotz." "The fortune of
'Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,' though less sudden"--than
Werther's--"was by no means less exalted. In his own country 'Götz,'
though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an
innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and
poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made
noise enough in their day and generation; and with ourselves his
influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's
first literary enterprise was a translation of 'Götz von Berlichingen';
and if genius could be communicated, like instruction, we might call this
work of Goethe's the prime cause of 'Marmion' and 'The Lady of the Lake,'
with all that has since followed from the same creative hand. . . How
far 'Götz von Berlichingen' actually affected Scott's literary
destination, and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the
prose romances of the author of Waverly, would not have followed as they
did, must remain a very obscure question; obscure and not important. Of
the fact, however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which
may be named Götzism and Wertherism, of the former of which Scott was
representative with us, have made and are still in some quarters making
the tour of all Europe. In Germany, too, there was this affectionate,
half-regretful looking-back into the past: Germany had its buff-belted,
watch-tower period in literature, and had even got done with it before
Scott began."[29]
Elsewhere Carlyle protests against the common English notion that German
literature dwells "with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined
towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, specters, and
banditti. . . If any man will insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardinghello'
and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above
all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature,
he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of
Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed
moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge
whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained
sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious
characters will be found in abundance. We are little read in this
bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one
time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be
mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that
selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,'
Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or
the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of
us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more
unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the
ghost that walks in it."[31]
Now for the works here named, as for the whole class of melodramas and
melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of
the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating
libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two
plays were remotely responsible: Goethe's "Götz" (1773), with its robber
knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent
peasants; and Schiller's "Die Räuber" (1781), with its still more violent
situations and more formidable _dramatis personae_. True, this spawn of
the _Sturm- und Drangzeit_, with its dealings in banditti, monks,
inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, dungeon and rack, the
haunted tower, the yelling ghost, and the solitary cell, had been
anticipated in England by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and "Mysterious
Mother"; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the
turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine.
Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources. In 1794 she made
the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the
year following. The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed;
Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the
Lürlei; nor Byron mused upon "the castled crag of Drachenfels." The
French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all
along the border. But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already
sacred to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven
Mountains. She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes,
carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps
of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic
valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south.
Lockhart says that Scott's translations of "Götz" should have been
published ten years sooner to have had its full effect. For the English
public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of
Kotzebue and the other German _Kraftmänner_; and the clever parody of
"The Robbers," under the title of "The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis
had published in the _Anti-Jacobin_, had covered the entire species with
ridicule. The vogue of this class of fiction, the chivalry romance, the
feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the
ghost story (_Ritterstück, Ritteroman, Räuberstuck, Räuberroman,
Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied_) both in Germany and England,
satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom,
adventure, strong action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the
transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to
get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their
improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had
not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by
the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement,
and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They
appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof
Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their
demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of
the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic
emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the
department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction
in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like
Beckford's "Vathek," Godwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs.
Shelley's "Frankenstein," Shelley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the
Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and
"Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and
ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or
who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in
their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying
their burning hearts in their hands.
Lockhart, however, denies that "Götz von Berlichingen" had anything in
common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the
_Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most
picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He
thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon
each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the
captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord,"
Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its
moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's
"Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Götz"
prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the
passage from "Götz" where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers
who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further
progress of the battle; and he asks "who does not recognize in Goethe's
drama the true original of the death scene in 'Marmion' and the storm in
'Ivanhoe'?"
A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis,
commonly nicknamed "Monk" Lewis, from the title of his famous romance.
It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter
Scott's should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like
Lewis. His "Monk" had been published in 1795, when the author was only
twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London.
The latter was collecting materials for his "Tales of Wonder," and when
Erskine showed him Scott's "William and Helen" and "The Wild Huntsman,"
and told him that he had other things of the kind in manuscript, Lewis
begged that Scott would contribute to his collection. Erskine
accordingly put him in communication with Scott, who felt highly
flattered by the Monk's request, and wrote to him that his ballads were
quite at his service. Lewis replied, thanking him for the offer. "A
ghost or a witch," he wrote, "is a _sine qua non_ ingredient in all the
dishes of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast." Later in the
same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and was introduced to Scott, who found
him an odd contrast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a
cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of fashion and an
assiduous tuft-hunter. "Mat had queerish eyes," writes his _protégé_:
"they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the
orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish--he was indeed the
least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made. . . This
boyishness went through life with him. He was a child and a spoiled
child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost
stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met
with--finer than Byron's."
Byron, by the way, had always a kindly feeling for Lewis, though he
laughed at him in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers":
"O wonder-working Lewis, Monk or Bard,
Who fain would'st make Parnassus a churchyard;
Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow;
Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou;
Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand,
By gibbering specters hailed, thy kindred band,
Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page,
To please the females of our modest age--
All hail, M. P.,[32] from whose infernal brain
Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
At whose command grim women thron in crowds,
And kings of fire, of water and of clouds,
With 'small gray men,' wild yagers and what not,
To crown with honor thee and Walter Scott!"
In 1816, while on his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned for a space with
Byron and Shelley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company
composing goblin stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer
symposium was Mrs. Shelley's abnormal romance, "Frankenstein." The
signatures of Byron and Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil
to Lewis' will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati,
Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical document in which he provided for the
protection of the slaves on his Jamaica plantations. It was two years
after this, and on his return voyage from a visit to these West Indian
estates, that Lewis died of yellow fever and was buried at sea. Byron
made this note of it in his diary:
"I'd give the lands of Deloraine
Dark Musgrave were alive again,"
that is,
"I would give many a sugar cane
Monk Lewis were alive again."
Scott's modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with
Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of
their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for
rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and
his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out
of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos
which distinguishes his poetry:
"A toad still alive in the liquor she threw,
And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew:
And ever, the cauldron as over she bent,
She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:"
or this from the same ballad:[33]
"Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor,
Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore;
A little jet ring from her finger then drew,
Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view."
Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a
sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken
for Mat's sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels. The
poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to
literary honors. Lewis' devotion to her is very charming, and the
elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. But he had a
dislike of "female authorship": and the rumor having reached his ear that
his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print
them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand. "I hold
that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in
proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always
consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He was also, quite
properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed "The Monk," to his
mother instead of to his mother's son.
We read in the "Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2
vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil
on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of
Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and
furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World"
(1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and
whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night
in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of
"The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's
pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly
the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr.
Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging
to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood,
there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years,"
says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at
night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his
dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting
to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose
some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the
ghastly machinery of his works."
Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk"
(1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal
descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792,
describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of
'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to
Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to
Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the
_Sturm- und Drangperiode_. For years Lewis was one of the most active
intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the
English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas,
and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35]
Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and
finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he
wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in
my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been
published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any
resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I
confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness
between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic
personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by
Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had
ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was
half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with
all this, the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand
to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general
voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why,
that picture's like a man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now
familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines
of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and
gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted
wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted
chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and
ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies
of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock
tolled one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand.
There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions;
beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering
harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading
down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were
immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the
loathsome relics of the dead.
With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a
certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of
"The Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue
and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's
romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which
distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is nothing strictly
mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the
historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical
features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though
but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher
of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in
the vaults of Lindisfarne--a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's
part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of
Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title page of "The Monk" sums up
its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's writings,
prose and verse--
"Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures portentaque."
The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis' Capuchin monastery in
Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy
prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees
through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he
finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the
Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, subscribing the agreement, in approved
fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from
his own veins. The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over
whose shoulders "waved two enormous sable wings," and whose hair "was
supplied by living snakes," then snatches up his victim and soars with
him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of
torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera
moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoarsely and "the shrill
cry of mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and makes an end
of him.
A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will
illustrate Lewis' wonder-working arts: "A faint glimmering of light
which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the
surrounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell;
and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I
might possibly effect my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my
hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and advanced it toward the
light. Almighty God! what was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of
its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted
human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months
before. . . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron
chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon. Emblems of death were
seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics
of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . . As I shrunk from
the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the
change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . .
Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the
poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my
bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy
track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and
matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the
long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant."
"The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted
no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend
himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed
from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the _Guardian_ (No. 148). But
the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney
General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion
so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions.
Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14,
1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting
play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is
strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play
is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised
the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been
said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not
advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have
exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr.
Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance":
"The moonstruck child of genius and of woe,"
who
"--Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light:
The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night
Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp
Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp,
Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers,
Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours."
The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl
Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an
incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus
soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because
my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those
pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by
Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding
ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'--Peace, stormy
heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is
still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's
brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had
murdered him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had
recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary
confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long
period of sixteen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, in
coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain
bound round his body."
Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. Evelina is
Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter in "white and flowing garments,
spotted with blood," appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with
the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the
portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is
uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it
every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the
chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great
hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who
affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who
guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the
"Otranto" pattern.
A few poems were scattered through the pages of "The Monk," including a
ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish. But the most
famous of these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," original
with Lewis, though evidently suggested by "Lenore." It tells how a lover
who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his
faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned
blue. At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor
and discloses a skeleton head:
"All present then uttered a terrified shout;
All turned with disgust from the scene;
The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out,
And sported his eyes and his temples about
While the spectre addressed Imogene."
He winds his arms about her and sinks with his prey through the yawning
ground; and
"At midnight four times in each year does her sprite,
When mortals in slumber are bound.
Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white,
Appear in the hall with a skeleton knight
And shriek as he whirls her around.
"While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave,
Dancing round them pale spectres are seen.
Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave
They how: 'To the health of Alonzo the Brave
And his consort, the Fair Imogene!'"
Lewis' own contributions to his "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Wonder,"
were of his same raw-head and bloody-bones variety. His imagination
rioted in physical horrors. There are demons who gnash with iron fangs
and brandish gore-fed scorpions; maidens are carried off by the Winter
King, the Water King, the Cloud King, and the Sprite of the Glen; they
are poisoned or otherwise done to death, and their wraiths revisit their
guilty lovers in their shrouds at midnight's dark hour and imprint clammy
kisses upon them with livid lips; gray friars and black canons abound;
requiem and death knell sound through the gloom of the cloisters; echo
roars through high Gothic arches; the anchorite mutters in his mossy
cell; tapers burn dim, torches cast a red glare on vaulted roofs; the
night wind blows through dark aisles; the owl hoots in the turret, and
dying groans are heard in the lonely house upon the heath, where the
black and tattered arras molders on the wall.
The "Tales of Wonder" included translations by Lewis from Goethe's
"Fisher" and "Erl-King," and from German versions of Runic ballads in
Herder's "Stimmen der Völker." Scott's "Wild Huntsman," from Bürger, was
here reprinted, and he contributed, in addition, "Frederick and Alice,"
paraphrased from a romance-fragment in Goethe's opera "Claudina von Villa
Bella"; and three striking ballads of his own, "The Fire King," a story
of the Crusades, and "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," Scottish
tales of "gramarye." There were two or three old English ballads in the
collection, such as "Clerk Colvin" and "Tam Lin"; a contribution from
George Colman, Jr., the dramatist, and one from Scott's eccentric friend
Leyden; and the volume concluded with Taylor's "Lenora."[37]
It is comical to read that the Monk gave Scott lectures in the art of
versification and corrected the Scotticisms and false rhymes in his
translations from Bürger; and that Scott respectfully deferred to his
advice. For nothing can be in finer contrast with Lewis' penny dreadful,
than the martial ring of the verse and the manly vigor of the style in
Scott's part of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, _e.g._:
"All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb,
Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan;
A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom
And each charm of beauty was faded and gone."
And this is how Scott writes them:
"He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand,
He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . .
For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood,
And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood."
It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace
Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in
the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous
enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these
_facetiae_--"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally
Green," etc.--diversify his "Tales of Wonder."
Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German
ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to
these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The Noble
Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at
Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a
_rifacimento_ of a melodrama entitles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's
"Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after
(1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the title of "The House of
Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht
or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic
Survey," Taylor said that "Götz von Berlichingen" was "translated into
English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same
person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since
become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This
amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott's
"Götz," where the translator's name is given as _William_ Scott. But it
led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the
Norwich reviewer.[38]
The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the
century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting
tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are
still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in
error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad,
'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German
sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and
when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the
language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in
Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in
winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and
took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had
never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers'
for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt."
He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or
January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by
--"The famished father's cry
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,"
and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve--
"Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood."
Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein";
and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in
his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"--of which Scott made some use in
"Peveril of the Peak"--and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as
"Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights.
It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt
for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read
it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the
manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints
from Lewis' "Monk."
But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The
Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the
grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia
Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert
Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and
incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it
has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under
the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was
the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as _such_
did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play." Coleridge
avows that "The Robbers" and its countless imitations were due to the
popularity in Germany of the translations of Young's "Night Thoughts,"
Hervey's "Meditations," and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the
ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the
flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern
author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle of Otranto,' the
translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid,
were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their
originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these
ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called _German_ Drama,"
which "is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by
readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole
breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of
romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries
of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in
their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own
shoulders."
Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under these influences for a
time the favored country of romance. English tale-writers chose its
forests and dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of
brigandage and assassination. One of the best of a bad class of
fictions, _e.g._, was Harriet Lee's "The German's Tale: Kruitzner," in
the series of "Canterbury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister
Sophia (1797-1805). Byron read it when he was fourteen, was profoundly
impressed by it, and made it the basis of "Werner," the only drama of his
which had any stage success. "Kruitzner" is conceived with some power,
but monotonously and ponderously written. The historic period is the
close of the Thirty Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect
upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though it makes a moderate use
of the sliding panel and secret passage once again.
We are come to the gate of the new century, to the date of the "Lyrical
Ballads" (1798) and within sight of the Waverly novels. Looking back
over the years elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 1726, we
ask ourselves what the romantic movement in England had done for
literature; if indeed that deserves to be called a "movement" which had
no leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little
coherence. True, as we have learned from the critical writings of the
time, the movement, such as it was, was not all unconscious of its own
aims and directions. The phrase "School of Warton" implies a certain
solidarity, and there was much interchange of views and some personal
contact between men who were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too,
between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason constitute a group,
encouraging each other's studies in their correspondence and occasional
meetings. Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, and
Gray in Warton's "History of English Poetry." Akenside read Dyer's
"Fleece," and Gray read Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were
friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of Thomson; and Thomson
a frequent visitor at Hagley and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put
Rowley under Walpole's protection, and had his verses examined by Mason
and Gray. Still, upon the whole, the English romanticists had little
community; they worked individually and were scattered and isolated as to
their residence, occupations, and social affiliation. It does not appear
that Gray ever met Collins, or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor
that MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatterton ever saw
each other or any of those first mentioned. There was none of that
united purpose and that eager partisanship which distinguished the
Parisian _cénacle Romantische Schule_ whose members have been so
brilliantly sketched by Heine.
But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for
literature? In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal. It had
relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a
curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary
mind into a receptive, expectant attitude favorable to original creative
activity. There never was a generation more romantic in temper than that
which stepped upon the stage at the close of the eighteenth century: a
generation fed upon "Ossian" and Rousseau and "The Sorrows of Werther"
and Percy's "Reliques" and Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. Again, in the
department of literary and antiquarian scholarship much had been
accomplished. Books like Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Warton's "History of
English Poetry" had a real importance, while the collection and
preservation of old English poetry, before it was too late, by scholars
like Percy, Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor.
But if we inquire what positive additions had been made to the modern
literature of England, the reply is disappointing. No one will maintain
that the Rowley poems, "Caractacus," "The Monk," "The Grave of King
Arthur," "The Friar of Orders Gray," "The Castle of Otranto," and "The
Mysteries of Udolpho" are things of permanent value: or even that "The
Bard," "The Castle of Indolence," and the "Poems of Ossian" take rank
with the work done in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats,
Rossetti, and William Morris. The two leading British poets of the _fin
du siècle_, Cowper and Burns, were not among the romanticists. It was
left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the
eighteenth only prophesied.
[1] Scherer's "History of German Literature," Conybeare's Translation,
Vol. II, p. 26.
[2] Scherer, Vol. II. pp. 123-24.
[3] See _ante_, pp. 300-301.
[4] See _ante_, pp. 337-38.
[5] "The Beauties of Shakspere. Regularly selected from each Play. With
a general index. Digesting them under proper heads." By the Rev. Wm.
Dodd, 1752.
[6] "Es war nicht blos die Tiefe der Poesie, welche sie zu Shakespeare
zog, es war ebenso sehr das sichere Gefühl, das hier germanische Art und
Kunst sei."--_Hettner's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur_, 3.3.1. s.
51. "Ist zu sagen, dass die Abwendung von den Franzosen zu den
stammverwandten Engländern . . . in ihrem geschichtlichen Ursprung und
Wachsthum wesentlich die Auflehnung des erstarkten germanischen
Volksnaturells gegen die erdrückende Uebermacht der romanischen
Formenwelt war," etc.--_Ibid._ s. 47. See also, ss. 389-95, for a review
of the interpretation of the great Shaksperian roles by German actors
like Schröder and Fleck.
[7] "Wir hören einen Nachklang jener fröhlichen Unterhaltungen, in denen
die Freunde sich ganz und gar in Shakepear'schen Wendungen und Wortwitzen
ergingen, in seiner Uebersetzung von Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's
Lost'"--_Hettner_, s. 244.
[8] See the whole oration (in Hettner, s. 120,) which gives a most vivid
expression of the impact of Shakspere upon the newly aroused mind of
Germany.
[9] "German Literature," Vol. II. pp. 82-83
[10] "Unter allen Menschen des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts war Geothe wieder
der Erste, weicher die lang verachtete Herrlichkeit der gothischen
Baukunst empfand und erfasste."--_Hettner_, 3.3.1., s. 120.
[11] _Construirtes Ideal_.
[12] Scherer, II. 129-31. "Oberon" was englished by William Sotheby in
1798.
[13] "Vor den classischen Dichtarten fängt mich bald an zu ekeln," wrote
Bürger in 1775. "Charakteristiken": von Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) s.
205. "O, das verwünschte Wort: Klassisch!" exclaims Herder. "Dieses
Wort war es, das alle wahre Bildung nach den Alten als noch lebenden
Mustern verdrangte. . . Dies Wort hat manches Genie unter einen Schutt
von Worten vergraben. . . Es hat dem Vaterland blühende Fruchtbäume
entzogen!"--_Hettner_ 3.3.1. s. 50.
[14] "German Literature," Vol. II. p. 230.
[15] "Literaturegeschichte," 3.3.1. s. 30-31.
[16] See _ante_, p. 48.
[17] "Our polite neighbors the French seem to be most offended at certain
pictures of primitive simplicity, so unlike those refined modes of modern
life in which they have taken the lead; and to this we may partly impute
the rough treatment which our poet received from them"--_Essay on Homer_
(Dublin Edition, 1776), p. 127.
[18] See Francis W. Newman's "Iliad" (1856) and Arnold's "Lectures on
Translating Homer" (1861).
[19] "Romance," Edgar Poe.
[20] "Lockhart's Life of Scott," Vol. I. p. 163.
[21] For full titles and descriptions of these translations, as well as
for the influence of Bürger's poems in England, see Alois Brandl: "Lenore
in England," in "Charakteristiken," by Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) ss.
244-48. Taylor said in 1830 that no German poem had been so often
translated: "eight different versions are lying on my table and I have
read others." He claimed his to be the earliest, as written in 1790,
though not printed till 1796. "Lenore" won at once the honors of
parody--surest proof of popularity. Brandl mentions two--"Miss Kitty,"
Edinburgh, 1797, and "The Hussar of Magdeburg, or the Midnight Phaeton,"
Edinburgh, 1800, and quotes Mathias' satirical description of the piece
("Pursuits of Literature," 1794-97) as "diablerie tudesque" and a "'Blue
Beard' story for the nursery." The bibliographies mention a new
translation in 1846 by Julia M. Cameron, with illustrations by Maclise;
and I find a notice in Allibone of "The Ballad of Lenore: a Variorum
Monograph," 4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English,
announced as about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles
Lukens. _Quaere_ whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic
Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New York,
1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book which I
have not seen.
[22] "History of German Literature," Vol. II. p. 123.
[23] These are book phrases, not true ballad diction.
[24] _Cf_. The "Ancient Mariner":
"The feast is set, the guests are met,
May'st hear the merry din."
[25] "Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich," by J. W. Robberds (1843), Vol. II.
p. 573.
[26] For Taylor's opinion of Carlyle's papers on Goethe in the _Foreign
Review_, see "Historic Survey," Vol. III. pp. 378-79.
[27] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 255.
[28] Among the most notable of these was "Maler" (Friedrich) Müller's
"Golo und Genoveva" (written 1781; published 1811); Count Törring's
"Agnes Bernauerin" (1780); and Jacob Meyer's "Sturm von Borberg" (1778),
and "Fust von Stromberg" (1782). Several of these were very successful
on the stage.
[29] "Essay on Walter Scott."
[30] Kotzebue's "The Stranger" ("Menschenhass und Reue") still keeps the
English stage. Sheridan's "Pizarro"--a version of Katzebue's "Spaniards
in Peru"-was long a favorite; and "Monk" Lewis made another translation
of the same in 1799, entitled "Rolla," which, however, was never acted.
[31] "State of German Literature."
[32] Lewis sat in Parliament for Hindon, Wilts, succeeding Beckford of
"Vathek" and Fonthill Abbey fame.
[33] "The Grim White Woman," in "Tales of Wonder."
[34] Matthew Arnold's lovely "Scholar Gypsy" was suggested by a passage in
this.
[35] The following is a list of his principal translations: "The Minister"
(1797), from Schiller's "Kabale and Liebe"; played at Covent Garden in
1803, as "The Harper's Daughter." "Rolla" (1799), from Kotzebue's
"Spaniards in Peru." "Adelmorn, or the Outlaw" (1800), played at Drury
Lane, 1801. "Tales of Terror" (1801) and "Tales of Wonder" (1801).
(There seems to be some doubt as to the existence of the alleged Kelso
editions of these in 1799 and 1800, respectively. See article on Lewis
in the "Dict. Nat. Biog.") "The Bravo of Venice" (1804), a prose
romance, dramatized and played at Covent Garden, as "Rugantino," in 1805.
"Feudal Tyrants" (1807), a four-volume romance. "Romantic Tales" (1808),
4 vols. From German and French.
[36] The printed play had reached its eleventh edition in 1803.
[37] The "Tales of Terror," and "Tales of Wonder" are reprinted in a
single volume of "Morley's Universal Library," 1887.
[38] See "Memoir of Wm. Taylor," Vol. II. Pp. 533-38.
[39] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 223.
[40] This was one of the latest successes of the kind. It was played at
Drury Lane in 1816 for twenty-two nights, bringing the author 1000
pounds, and the printed play reached the seventh edition within the year.
Among Maturin's other works were "The Fatal Revenge" (1807), "Manuel"
(Drury Lane, 1817) "Fredolfo" (Covent Garden, 1817), and his once famous
romance, "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820), see _ante_, p. 249.
[41] Mrs. Radcliffe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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less, all that have been read or consulted in the preparation of the
work.]
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