A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 11

[25] "From Shakespeare to Pope." See also Sidney Colvin's "Keats." New York, 1887, pp. 61-64.

[26] _Vide supra_, p. 70.

[27] That he knew Pope's version is evident from a letter to Haydon of May, 1817, given in Lord Houghton's "Life."

[28] He could have known extremely little of mediaeval literature; yet there is nothing anywhere, even in the far more instructed Pre-Raphaelite school which catches up the whole of the true mediaeval romantic spirit--the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, and make no small figure in mediaeval theology--as does the short piece of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. (Saintsbury: "A Short History of English Literature," p. 673).

[29] _Vide supra_, p. 85. And for Keats' interest in Chatterton see vol.

i., pp. 370-72.

[30] The Dict. Nat. Biog. mentions doubtfully an earlier edition in 1795.

[31] See "Sonnet on Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of Rimini.'" Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 229.

[32] See Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 334.

[33] "New Essays toward a Critical Method," London, 1897, p. 256.

[34] "Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto, Per mensola talvolta una figura Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, La qual fa del non ver vera rancura Nascere in chi la vede."

--"Purgatorio," Canto x., 130-34.

[35] _Vide supra_, p. 85.

[36] Rossetti, Colvin, Gates, Robertson, Forman, and others.

[37] Leigh Hunt. It has been objected to this pa.s.sage that moonlight is not strong enough to transmit _colored_ rays, like sunshine (see Colvin's "Keats," p. 160). But the mistake--if it is one--is shared by Scott.

"The moonbeam kissed the holy pane And threw on the pavement a b.l.o.o.d.y stain."

--"Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto ii., xi.

[38] It is interesting to learn that the line

"For o'er the Southern moors I have a home for thee"

read in the original draught "Over the bleak Dartmoor," etc. Dartmoor was in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once spent two months; but he cancelled the local allusion in obedience to a correct instinct.

[39] "Ode to a Nightingale,"

[40] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," London, 1885, p. 181.

[41] "Studies and Appreciations." Lewis G. Gates. New York, 1890, p. 17.

[42] See vol. i., p. 371, and for c.u.mberland's poem, on the same superst.i.tion, _ibid._, 177.

CHAPTER IV.

The Romantic School in Germany.[1]

Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is as necessary in the life of a literature as in that of an animal or a plant. English romanticism, though it started independently, did not remain an isolated phenomenon; it was related to the general literary movement in Europe.

Even Italy had its romantic movement; Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, by translating Burger's "Lenore" and "Wild Huntsman", and afterwards, like Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the cla.s.sical entrenchments in his "Discourse of the Three Unities." It is no part of our undertaking to write the history of the romantic schools in Germany and France. But in each of those countries the movement had points of likeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our own; and an outline sketch of the German and French schools will help the reader better to understand both what English romanticism was, and what it was not.

In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth century, the history of romanticism is a history of arrested development. Romanticism existed in solution, but was not precipitated and crystallised until the closing years of the period. The current set flowing by Burger's ballads and Goethe's "Gotz," was met and checked by a counter-current, the new enthusiasm for the antique promoted by Winckelmann's[2] works on cla.s.sic art, by the neo-paganism of Goethe's later writings, and by the influence of Lessing's[3] clear, rationalising, and thoroughly Protestant spirit.[4]

We may note, at the outset, the main features in which the German romanticism differed from the English. First, then, it was more definitely a _movement_. It was organised, self-conscious, and critical.

Indeed, it was in criticism and not in creative literature that its highest successes were won. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like their English forerunners in the eighteenth century,[5] worked independently of one another. They did not conspire to a common end; had little personal contact--were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school." But the German romanticists const.i.tuted a compact group with coherent aims. They were intimate friends and a.s.sociates; travelled, lived, and worked together; edited each other's books and married each other's sisters.[6]

They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressive and polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satirical tales,[7] poems, and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, "the central point," says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated.

I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the art productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the future." Their organ was the _Athenaeum_, established by Friedrich Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of English and German romanticism.

The first number of the _Athenaeum_ contained the manifesto of the new school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie.

The terms of this p.r.o.nunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself.

"Romantic poetry," says Schlegel--"and, in a certain sense, all poetry ought to be romantic--should, in representing outward objects, also represent itself." There is nothing here to indicate the precise line which German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejection of authority, the same a.s.sertion of the right of original genius to break a path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads," by Keats in "Sleep and Poetry,"

and by Victor Hugo in the preface to "Cromwell."

A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was in its thoroughgoing character. It is the disposition of the German mind to synthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each of those imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Sch.e.l.ling's, Hegel's, has its own _aesthetik_ as well as its own _ethik_. It seeks to interpret all human activities from a central principle; to apply its highest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts, and society. The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. It is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike the logical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at all hazards; and the German habit of system-building. The Englishman has no system, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. It is quite possible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, without wishing to restore them as an actual state of society. It is hard for an Englishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or how Sch.e.l.ling's transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, and Hegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. "Tragedies and romances," wrote Mme. de Stael, "have more importance in Germany than in any other country. They take them seriously there; and to read such and such a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny and the life. What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into real life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an even greater empire over the Germans than nature and the pa.s.sions." In proof of this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide in consequence of reading "Werther"; or took to highway robbery in emulation of "Die Rauber."

In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution and kept strictly within the domain of art. Scott's political conservatism was indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory. And as to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in 1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in his behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's reactionary politics had nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be going too far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time in the English church and const.i.tution may have had its root in the same temper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like "Christabel" and "The Dark Ladye." But in Germany "throne and altar"

became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined the Catholic Church, and the new literature rallied to the side of aristocracy and privilege.

A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English is partly implied in what has been said above. In Germany the romantic revival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development which influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time. Hence the mysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, and particularly in the writings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple of Sch.e.l.ling, and Sch.e.l.ling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of the German romantic school. The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom of the actual world; the right of the Ego to a.s.sert itself fully; the principle formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that "the caprice of the poet knows no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte's objective idealism.[8] It is needless to say that, while romantic art usually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of this philosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists.

If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the mediator between German and English thought. But Coleridge's poetry was mainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with the systems of Kant and Sch.e.l.ling; and in proportion as his speculative activity increased, his creative force declined. There is enough of the marvellous and the unexplained in "Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner"; but the "mystic ruby" and the "blue flower" of the Teutonic symbolists are not there.

The German romantic school, in the limited and precise sense of the term, consisted of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, Tieck's friend Wackenroder, and--at a distance--Zacharias Werner, the dramatist; besides a few others, their a.s.sociates or disciples, whose names need not here be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal friends, they began to be heard of about 1795; and their quarters were at Jena and Berlin. A later or younger group (_Spatromantiker_) gathered in 1808 about the _Zeitung fur Einsiedler_, published at Heidelberg. These were Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Gorres, and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Arnim, Brentano, and Gorres were residing at the time at Heidelberg; the others contributed from a distance. Arnim edited the _Einsiedler_; Gorres was teaching in the university. There were, of course, many other adherents of the school, working individually at different times and places, scattered indeed all over Germany, and of various degrees of importance or unimportance, of whom I need mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, the popular novelist and author of "Undine."

The history of German romanticism has been repeatedly told. There are exhaustive treatments of the subject by Julian Schmidt, Koberstein, Hettner ("Die Romantische Schule," Braunschweig, 1850); Haym ("Die Romantische Schule," Berlin, 1870); by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes ("Den Romantiske Skole i Tydskland"). But the most famous review of this pa.s.sage of literary history is the poet Heine's brilliant little book, "Die Romantische Schule," [9] published at Paris in 1833. This was written as a kind of supplement to Mme. de Stael's "L'Allemagne" (1813), and was intended to instruct the French public as to some misunderstandings in Mme. de Stael's book, and to explain what German romanticism really was. Professor Boyesen cautions us to be on our guard against the injustice and untrustworthiness of Heine's report. The warning is perhaps not needed, for the animus of his book is sufficiently obvious. Heine had begun as a romantic poet, but he had parted company with the romanticists because of the reactionary direction which the movement took. He had felt the spell, and he renders it with wonderful vividness in his history of the school. But, at the same time, the impatience of the political radical and the religious sceptic--the "valiant soldier in the war for liberty"--and the bitterness of the exile for opinion's sake, make themselves felt. His sparkling and malicious wit turns the whole literature of romanticism into sport; and his abuse of his former teacher, A. W. Schlegel, is personal and coa.r.s.e beyond description. Twenty years ago, he said, when he was a lad, what overflowing enthusiasm he would have lavished upon Uhland! He used to sit on the ruins of the old castle at Dusseldorf declaiming Uhland's poem

"A wandering shepherd young and fair Beneath the royal castle strayed."

"But so much has happened since then! What then seemed to me so grand; all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at each other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless pa.s.sion, dignified by the high-sounding t.i.tle of renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the 'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!"

And--of Fouque's romances--"But our age turns away from all fairy pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, this continual praise of the n.o.bility, this incessant glorification of the feudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash . . . this everlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born virgins, honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, wearied us."

It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of romance should have been precisely the one to compose the most popular of all romantic ballads; and that the most current of all his songs should have been the one in which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine,

"Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten Da.s.s ich so traurig bin."

The "Loreley" is translated into many tongues, and is sung everywhere.

In Germany it is a really national song. And yet the tale on which it is founded is not an ancient folk legend--"ein Mahrchen aus alten Zeiten"--but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first published it in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in one of his novels:

"Zu Bacharach am Rheine Wohnt' eine Zauberin: Sie war so schon und feine Und riss viel Herzen hin."

A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a lyrical tale out of it in 1821, and Heine composed his ballad in 1824, afterwards set to the mournful air in which it is now universally familiar.

It has been mentioned that Heine's "Romantische Schule" was a sort of continuation and correction of Mme. de Stael's "L'Allemagne." That very celebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence in Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France. It has been compared in its purpose to the "Germania" of Tacitus, in which the historian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson and a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. de Stael had arranged to publish her book in 1810, and the first impression of ten thousand copies had already been printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by the police, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-four hours. All this, of course, was at the instance of Napoleon, who was by no means above resenting the hostility of a lady author. But the Minister of Police, General Savary, a.s.sumed the responsibility of the affair; and to Mme. de Stael's remonstrance he wrote in reply: "It appeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire [the Germans]. Your last work is not French." It was not, accordingly, until 1813 that Mme. de Stael's suppressed work on Germany saw the light.

The only pa.s.sages in it that need engage our attention are those in which the author endeavours to interpret to a cla.s.sical people the literature of a Gothic race. In her chapter ent.i.tled "Of Cla.s.sic and Romantic Poetry," she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity." She mentions the comparison--evidently derived from Schlegel's lectures which she had attended--of ancient poetry to sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French incline towards cla.s.sic poetry, and the English--"the most ill.u.s.trious of the Germanic nations"--towards "that which owes its birth to chivalry and romance." "The English poets of our times, without entering into concert with the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry has given place to the fictions of the Middle Ages." She observes that simplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality and externality--or what in modern critical dialect we would call objectivity--are notes of antique art; while variety and shading of colour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity [subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity in the arts would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation.

Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes--that romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied."

Mme. de Stael's a.n.a.lysis here does not go very deep, and her expression is lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious to those who have well considered the various definitions and expositions of these contrasted terms with which we set out. Without deciding between the comparative merits of modern cla.s.sic and romantic work, Mme. de Stael points out that the former must necessarily be imitative. "The literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplanted literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous. . . . The literature of romance is alone capable of further improvement, because, being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire fresh life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our history." Hence she notes the fact that while the Spaniards of all cla.s.ses know by heart the verses of Calderon; while Shakspere is a popular and national poet among the English; and the ballads of Goethe and Burger are set to music and sung all over Germany, the French cla.s.sical poets are quite unknown to the common people, "because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed." In her review of German poetry she gives a brief description, among other things, of the "Nibelungen Lied," and a long a.n.a.lysis of Burger's "Leonora" and "Wilde Jager." She says that there are four English translations of "Leonora," of which William Spenser's is the best. "The a.n.a.logy between the English and German allows a complete transfusion of the originality of style and versification of Burger. . . . It would be difficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange or odd seems natural." She points out that terror is "an inexhaustible source of poetical effect in Germany. . . . Stories of apparitions and sorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of more enlightened minds." She notes the fondness of the new school for Gothic architecture, and describes the principles of Schlegelian criticism. She transcribes A. W. Schlegel's praises of the ages of faith and the generous brotherhood of chivalry, and his lament that "the n.o.ble energy of ancient times is lost," and that "our times alas! no longer know either faith or love." The German critics affirm that the best traits of the French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV.; that "literature, in ages which are called cla.s.sical, loses in originality what it gains in correctness"; that the French tragedies are full of pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules clad only in his lion's skin--but always with the perruque. Heine complains that Mme. de Stael fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany, and that her account of German literature was coloured by their prejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort at all the capitals of Europe and won great _eclat_ thereby