The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Iv Part 4

Society is to be developed only by "wit," which is seriously put into comparison with G.o.d Almighty. As to practical ethics, one is told that the most perfect life is but a pure vegetation; the right to indolence is that which really makes the discrimination between choice and common beings, and is the determining principle of n.o.bility. "The divine art of being indolent" and "the blissful bosom of half-conscious self-forgetfulness" naturally lead to the thesis that the empty, restless exertion of men in general is nothing but Gothic perversity, and "boots naught but _ennui_ to ourselves and others."

Man is by nature "a serious beast; one must labor to counteract this shameful tendency." Schleiermacher ventured, it is true, to raise the question as to whether the hero ought not to have some trace of the chivalrous about him, or ought not to do something effective in the outer world--and posterity has fully supported this inquiry.

Friedrich's next most important move was to Paris (1802), where he gave lectures on philosophy, and attempted another journal. Here he began his enthusiastic studies of the Sanskrit language and literature, which proved to have an important influence on the development of modern philology. This is eminently true of his work _On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians_ (1808). In 1804 he removed to Cologne, where he entered with great eagerness into the work of re-discovering the medieval Lower Rhenish School of religious art and Gothic architecture. In 1808 he, with his wife Dorothea (the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who years before this time had left her home and family to become his partner for life), entered the Roman Catholic church, the interests of which engaged much of his energies for the remainder of his life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: #A HERMIT WATERING HORSES# MORITZ VON SCHWIND]

He lived most of the time in Vienna, partly engaged in the literary service of the Austrian government, partly in lecturing on history and literature. He died in 1829 in Dresden, whither he had gone to deliver a course of lectures.

Friedrich Schlegel's philosophy of life was based upon the theory of supremacy of the artist, the potency of poetry, with its incidental corollaries of disregard for the Kantian ideal of Duty, and aversion to all Puritanism and Protestantism. "There is no great world but that of artists," he declared in the _Athenaeum_; "artists form a higher caste; they should separate themselves, even in their way of living, from other people." Poetry and philosophy formed in his thought an inseparable unit, forever joined, "though seldom together--like Castor and Pollux." His interest is in "Humanity," that is to say, a superior type of the species, with a corresponding contempt for "commonness,"

especially for the common man as a mere machine of "duty." On performances he set no great store: "Those countenances are most interesting to me in which Nature seems to have indicated a great design without taking time to carry it out."

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), more simply known as "Wilhelm," was the more balanced, dignified, and serene nature, and possessed in a far higher degree than Friedrich the art of steering his course smoothly through life. Of very great significance in his training were his university years at Gottingen, and his acquaintance there with the poet Burger, that early apostle of revolt from a formal literature, whose own life had become more and more discredited and was destined to go out in wretchedness and ignominy; the latter's fecundating activities had never been allowed full scope, but something of his spirit of adventure into new literary fields was doubtless caught by the younger man. Burger's attempts at naturalizing the sonnet, for instance, are interesting in view of the fact that Wilhelm Schlegel became the actual creator of this literary form among the Germans. Schlegel's own pursuits as a student were prevailingly in the field of h.e.l.lenism, in which his acquisitions were astounding; his influence was especially potent in giving a philological character to much of the work of the Romanticists. In Gottingen he became acquainted with one of the most gifted women which Germany has ever produced, Caroline, the daughter of the Gottingen professor Michaelis, at the time a young widow in the home of her father, and destined to become not only his wife, but the Muse of much of his most important work. This office she performed until the time of their unfortunate separation.

After finishing his university studies, Wilhelm was for a while private tutor in a wealthy family at Amsterdam, where conditions of living were most agreeable, but where a suitable stimulus to the inborn life of his mind was lacking. He accordingly gave up this position and returned, with little but hopes, to Germany. Then came a call which was both congenial and honorable. Schiller's attention had been drawn, years before, to a review of his own profound philosophical poem, _The Artists_, by an unknown young man, whom he at once sought to secure as a regular contributor to his literary journal, _The New Thalia_. Nothing came of this, chiefly because of Schlegel's intimate relations to Burger at the time. Schiller had published, not long before, his annihilatory review of Burger's poems, which did so much to put that poet out of serious consideration for the remainder of his days. In the meantime Schiller had addressed himself to his crowning enterprise, the establishing of a literary journal which should be the final dictator of taste and literary criticism throughout the German-speaking world. In 1794 the plan for _The Hours_ was realized under favorable auspices, and in the same year occurred the death of Burger. In 1796 Schiller invited Wilhelm to become one of the regular staff of _The Hours_, and this invitation Schlegel accepted, finding in it the opportunity to marry Caroline, with whom he settled in Jena in July of that year. His first contribution to _The Hours_ was a masterful and extended treatise on _Dante_, which was accompanied by translations which were clearly the most distinguished in that field which the German language had ever been able to offer. Schlegel also furnished elaborated poems, somewhat in Schiller's grand style, for the latter's _Almanac of the Muses_.

During the years of his residence at Jena (which continued until 1801) Schlegel, with the incalculable a.s.sistance of his wife, published the first eight volumes of those renderings of Shakespeare's plays into German which doubtless stand at the very summit of the art of transferring a poet to an alien region, and which have, in actual fact, served to make the Bard of Avon as truly a fellow-citizen of the Germans as of the Britons. Wilhelm's brother Friedrich had remained but a year with him in Jena, before his removal to Berlin and his establishment of the _Athenaeum_. Although separated from his brother, Wilhelm's part in the conduct of the journal was almost as important as Friedrich's, and, in effect, they conducted the whole significant enterprise out of their own resources. The opening essay, _The Languages_, is Wilhelm's, and properly, for at this time he was by far the better versed in philological and literary matters. His cultural acquisitions, his tremendous spoils of reading, were greater, and his judgment more trustworthy. In all his work in the _Athenaeum_ he presents a seasoned, many-sided sense of all poetical, phonetic and musical values: rhythm, color, tone, the lightest breath and aroma of an elusive work of art. One feels that Wilhelm overhauls the whole business of criticism, and clears the field for coming literary ideals. Especially telling is his demolition of Klopstock's violent "Northernism," to which he opposes a far wider philosophy of grammar and style. The universality of poetry, as contrasted with a narrow "German" clumsiness, is blandly defended, and a joyous abandon is urged as something better than the meticulous anxiety of chauvinistic partisanism. In all his many criticisms of literature there are charm, wit, and elegance, an individuality and freedom in the reviewer, who, if less penetrating than his brother, displays a far more genial breadth and humanity, and more secure composure. His translations, more masterly than those of Friedrich, carry out Herder's demand for complete absorption and re-creation.

In 1801 Schlegel went to Berlin, where for three successive winters he lectured on art and literature. His subsequent translations of Calderon's plays (1803-1809) and of Romance lyrics served to naturalize a large treasure of southern poetry upon German soil. In 1804, after having separated from his wife, he became attached to the household of Madame de Stael, and traversed Europe with her. It is through this a.s.sociation that she was enabled to write her brilliant work, _On Germany_. In 1808 he delivered a series of lectures on dramatic art and literature in Vienna, which enjoyed enormous popularity, and are still reckoned the crowning achievement of his career; perhaps the most significant of these is his discourse on Shakespeare. In the first volume of the _Athenaeum_, Shakespeare's universality had already been regarded as "the central point of romantic art." As Romanticist, it was Schlegel's office to portray the independent development of the modern English stage, and to defend Shakespeare against the familiar accusations of barbaric crudity and formlessness. In surveying the field, it was likewise inc.u.mbent upon him to demonstrate in what respects the cla.s.sic drama differed from the independently developed modern play, and his still useful generalization regards antique art as limited, clear, simple, and perfected--as typified by a work of sculpture; whereas romantic art delights in mingling its subjects--as a painting, which embraces many objects and looks out into the widest vistas. Apart from the clarity and smoothness of these Vienna discourses, their lasting merit lies in their searching observation of the import of dramatic works from their inner soul, and in a most discriminating sense of the relation of all their parts to an organic whole.

In 1818 Schlegel accepted a professorship at the University of Bonn, in which place he exercised an incalculable influence upon one of the rising stars of German literature, young Heinrich Heine, who derived from him (if we may judge from his own testimony at the time; Heine's later mood is a very different matter) an inspiration amounting to captivation. The brilliant young student discovered here a stimulating leader whose wit, finish, and elegance responded in full measure to the hitherto unsatisfied cravings of his own nature. Although Heine had become a very altered person at the time of writing his _Romantic School_ (1836), this book throws a scintillating illumination upon certain sides of Schlegel's temperament, and offers a vivid impression of his living personality.

In these last decades of his life Schlegel turned, as had his younger brother, to the inviting field of Sanskrit literature and philology, and extracted large and important treasures which may still be reckoned among mankind's valued resources. When all discount has been made on the side of a lack of specific gravity in Wilhelm Schlegel's character, it is only just to a.s.sert that throughout his long and prolific life he wrought with incalculable effect upon the civilization of modern Europe as a humanizer of the first importance.

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) is reckoned by many students of the Romantic period to be the best and most lasting precipitate which the entire movement has to show. For full sixty years a most prolific writer, and occupied in the main with purely literary production, it is not strange that he came to be regarded as the poetic mouthpiece of the school.

His birth was in a middle-cla.s.s family of Berlin. A full university training at Halle, Gottingen and Erlangen was accorded him, during which he cannot be said to have distinguished himself by any triumph in the field of formal studies, but in the course of which he a.s.similated at first hand the chief modern languages of culture, without any professional guidance. At an early stage in his growth he discovered and fed full upon Shakespeare. As a university student he also fell in love with the homely lore of German folk-poetry. In 1794 he came back to Berlin, and turned to rather ba.n.a.l hack-writing for the publisher Nicolai, chief of all exponents of rationalism.

Significant was his early rehabilitation of popular folk-tales and chapbooks, as in _The Wonderful Love-Story of Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence_ (1797). The stuff was that of one of the prose chivalry-stories of the middle ages, full of marvels, seeking the remote among strange hazards by land and sea. The tone of Tieck's narrative is childlike and nave, with rainbow-glows of the bliss of romantic love, glimpses of the poetry and symbolism of Catholic tradition, and a somewhat sugary admixture of the spirit of the _Minnelied_, with plenty of refined and delicate sensuousness. With the postulate that song is the true language of life, the story is sprinkled with lyrics at every turn. The whole adventure is into the realm of dreams and vague sensations.

Tieck must have been liberally baptized with Spree-water, for the instantaneous, corrosive Berlin wit was a large part of his endowment.

His cool irony a.s.sociated him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, _Puss in Boots_ (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the nave and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain complacent standards is neatly excoriated.

Such publications as the two mentioned were hailed with rejoicing by the Schlegels, who at once adopted Tieck as a natural ally. Even more after their own hearts was the long novel, _Franz Sternbald's Wanderings_ (1798), a vibrant confession, somewhat influenced by _Wilhelm Meister_, of the Religion of Art (or the Art of Religion): "Devout worship is the highest and purest joy in Art, a joy of which our natures are capable only in their purest and most exalted hours."

[Ill.u.s.tration: #A WANDERER LOOKS INTO A LANDSCAPE# MORITZ VON SCHWIND]

Sternbald, a pupil of Albrecht Durer, makes a roving journey to the Low Countries, the Rhine, and Italy, in order to deepen his artistic nature. The psychology of the novel is by no means always true to the spirit of the sixteenth century; in fact a good part of the story reflects aristocratic French chateau-life in the eighteenth century.

The intensities of romantic friendship give a sustained thrill, and the style is rhythmic, though the action is continually interrupted by episodes, lyrics, and discourses. In the unworldliness, the delicacy of sensibility, and the somewhat vague outlines of the story one may be reminded, at times, of _The Marble Faun_. Its defense of German Art, as compared with that of the Italian Renaissance, is its chief message.

This novel has been dwelt upon because of its direct influence upon German painting and religion. A new verb, "_sternbaldisieren_," was coined to parody a new movement in German art toward the medieval, religious spirit. It is this book which Heine had in mind when he ridiculed Tieck's "silly plunge into medieval navete." Overbeck and Cornelius in Rome, with their pre-Raphaelite, old-German and catholicizing tendencies, became the leaders of a productive school.

Goethe scourged it for its "mystic-religious" aspirations, and demanded a more vigorous, cheerful and progressive outlook for German painting.

Having already formed a personal acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel in Berlin, Tieck moved to Jena in 1799, came into very close relations with Fichte, the Schlegels, and Novalis, and continued to produce works in the spirit of the group, notably the tragedy _Life and Death of Saint Genoveva_ (1800). His most splendid literary feat at this period, however, was the translation of _Don Quixote_ (1799-1801), a triumph over just those subtle difficulties which are well-nigh insurmountable, a rendering which went far beyond any mere literalness of text, and reproduced the very tone and aura of its original.

In 1803 he published a graceful little volume of typical _Minnelieder_, renewed from the middle high-German period. The note of the book (in which Runge's copperplate outlines are perhaps as significant as the poems) is spiritualized s.e.x-love: the utterance of its fragrance and delicacy, its unique place in the universe as a pathway to the Divine--a point of view to which the modern mind is p.r.o.ne to take some exceptions, considering a religion of erotics hardly firm enough ground to support an entire philosophy of living.

All the motives of the old court-lyric are well represented--the torments and rewards of love, the charm of spring, the refinements of courtly breeding--and the sophisticated metrical forms are handled with great virtuosity. Schiller, it is true, compared them to the chatter of sparrows, and Goethe also paid his compliments to the "sing-song of the Minnesingers," but it was this same little book which first gave young Jakob Grimm the wish to become acquainted with these poets in their original form.

That eminently "Romantic" play, _Emperor Octavian_ (1804), derived from a familiar medieval chap-book, lyric in tone and loose in form, is a pure epitome of the movement, and the high-water mark of Tieck's apostleship and service. Here Tieck shows his intimate sense of the poetry of inanimate nature; ironic mockery surrenders completely to religious devotion; the piece is bathed in--

The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream.

It is in the prologue to this play that personified Romance declares her descent from Faith, her father, and Love, her mother, and introduces the action by the command:

"Moonshine-lighted magic night Holding every sense in thrall; World, which wondrous tales recall, Rise, in ancient splendors bright!"

During a year's residence in Italy Tieck applied himself chiefly to reading old-German ma.n.u.scripts, in the Library of the Vatican, and wavered upon the edge of a decision to devote himself to Germanic philology.

[Ill.u.s.tration: #A CHAPEL IN THE FOREST# MORITZ VON SCHWIND]

The loss to science is not serious, for Tieck hardly possessed the grasp and security which could have made him a peer of the great pioneers in this field. From the time of his leaving for Italy, Tieck's importance for the development of Romanticism becomes comparatively negligible.

After a roving existence of years, during which he lived in Vienna, Munich, Prague and London, he made a settled home in Dresden. Here he had an enviable place in the very considerable literary and artistic group, and led an existence of almost suspiciously "reasonable"

well-being, from a Romantic view-point. The "dramatic evenings" at his home, in which he read plays aloud before a brilliant gathering, were a feature of social life. For seventeen years he had an influential position as "dramaturg" of the Royal Theatre, it being his duty to pa.s.s on plays to be performed and to decide upon suitable actors for the parts.

During his long residence in Dresden Tieck produced a very large number of short stories (_Novellen_) which had a decided vogue, though they differ widely from his earlier writings in dealing with real, contemporary life.

It is pleasant to record that the evening of Tieck's long life was made secure from anxieties by a call to Berlin from Friedrich Wilhelm IV., the "Romantic king." His last eleven years were spent there in quiet and peace, disturbed only by having to give dramatic readings before a self-sufficient court circle which was imperfectly equipped for appreciating the merits of Tieck's performances.

The early Romantic movement found its purest expression in the person and writings of Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known under his a.s.sumed literary name Novalis (1772-1801). Both his father, Baron von Hardenberg (chief director of the Saxon salt-works), and his mother belonged to the Moravians, that devoted group of mystical pietists whose sincere consecration to the things of the spirit has achieved a deathless place in the annals of the religious history of the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, determined the beginnings and the essential character of the world-wide Methodist movement. His gentle life presents very little of dramatic incident: he was a reserved, somewhat unsocial boy, greatly devoted to study and to the reading of poetry. He was given a most thorough education, and, while completing his university career, became acquainted with Friedrich Schlegel, and remained his most intimate friend. He also came to know Fichte, and eagerly absorbed his _Doctrine of Science_. A little later he came into close relations with Wilhelm Schlegel and Tieck in Jena.

He experienced a seraphic love for a delicate girl of thirteen, whose pa.s.sing away at the age of fifteen served to transport the youth's interests almost exclusively to the invisible world: "Life is a sickness of the spirit, a pa.s.sionate Doing." His chief conversation lay in solitude, in seeking for a mystic inner solution of the secrets of external nature. He loved to discourse on these unseen realms, and to create an ideal connection between them all. The testimony of his friend Tieck, who in company with Friedrich Schlegel edited his works in a spirit of almost religious piety, runs: "The common life environed him like some tale of fiction, and that realm which most men conceive as something far and incomprehensible was the very Home of his Soul." He was not quite twenty-nine years old at the time of his peaceful death, which plunged the circle of his Romantic friends into deepest grief.

The envelope of his spiritual nature was so tenuous that he seemed to respond to all the subtler influences of the universe; a sensitive chord attuned to poetic values, he appeared to exercise an almost mediumistic refraction and revelation of matters which lie only in the realm of the transcendental--

"Weaving about the commonplace of things The golden haze of morning's blushing glow."

In reading Novalis, it is hardly possible to discriminate between discourse and dreaming; his pa.s.sion was for remote, never-experienced things--

"Ah, lonely stands, and merged in woe, Who loves the past with fervent glow!"

His homesickness for the invisible world became an almost sensuous yearning for the joys of death.

In the first volume of the _Athenaeum_ (1798) a place of honor was given to his group of apothegms, _Pollen_ (rather an unromantic translation for "_Bluthenstaub_"); these were largely supplemented by materials found after his death, and republished as _Fragments_. In the last volume of the same journal (1800) appeared his _Hymns to Night_. Practically all of his other published works are posthumous: his unfinished novel, _Henry of Ofterdingen_; a set of religious hymns; the beginnings of a "physical novel," _The Novices at Sas_.

Novalis's aphoristic "seed-thoughts" reveal Fichte's transcendental idealistic philosophy as the fine-spun web of all his observations on life. The external world is but a shadow; the universe is in us; there, or nowhere, is infinity, with all its systems, past or future; the world is but a precipitate of human nature.

_The Novices at Sas_, a mystical contemplation of nature reminding us of the discourses of Jakob Bohme, has some suggestion of the symbolistic lore of parts of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and proves a most racking riddle to the uninitiated. The penetration into the meaning of the Veiled Image of Nature is attempted from the point of view that all is symbolic: only poetic, intuitive souls may enter in; the merely physical investigator is but searching through a charnel-house. Nature, the countenance of Divinity, reveals herself to the childlike spirit; to such she will, at her own good pleasure, disclose herself spontaneously, though gradually. This seems to be the inner meaning of the episodic tale, _Hyacinth and Rose-Blossom_. The rhythmic prose _Hymns to Night_ exhale a delicate melancholy, moving in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above life. In his _Spiritual Poems_ we feel a simple, pa.s.sionate intensity of adoration, a yearning sympathy for the hopeless and the heavy-laden; in their ardent a.s.surance of love, peace, and rest, they are surely to be reckoned among the most intimate doc.u.ments in the whole archives of the "varieties of religious experience."

The unfinished novel _Henry of Ofterdingen_ reaches a depth of obscurity which is saved from absurdity only by the genuinely fervent glow of a soul on the quest for its mystic ideals: "The blue flower it is that I yearn to look upon!" No farcical romance of the nursery shows more truly the mingled stuff that dreams are made on, yet the intimation that the dream is not all a dream, that the spirit of an older day is symbolically struggling for some expression in words, gave it in its day a serious importance at which our own age can merely marvel. It brings no historical conviction; it is altogether free from such conventional limits as Time and s.p.a.ce. Stripped of its dreamy diction, there is even a tropical residue of sensuousness, to which the English language is p.r.o.ne to give a plainer name. It develops into a fantastic _melange_ which no American mind can possibly reckon with; what its effect would be upon a person relegated to reading it in close confinement, it would not be safe to a.s.sert, but it is quite certain that "this way madness lies."

To generalize about the Romantic movement, may seem about as practical as to attempt to make a trigonometrical survey of the Kingdom of Dreams. No epoch in all literary history is so hopelessly entangled in the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most complex sources. To deal with the facts of cla.s.sic art, which is concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school which waged war upon "the deadliness of ascertained facts" and immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be. Its most authorized exponent declared it to be "the delineation of sentimental matter in fantastic form." A more elaborated authoritative definition is given in the first volume of the _Athenaeum_:

"Romantic poetry is a progressive universal-poetry. Its aim is not merely to reunite all the dispersed cla.s.ses of poetry, and to place poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric; it aims and ought to aim to mingle and combine poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic and natural poetry; to make poetry lively and social, to make life and society poetic; to poetize wit, to saturate all the forms of art with worthy materials of culture and enliven them by the sallies of humor.

It embraces everything that is poetic, from the greatest and most inclusive system of art, to the sigh, the kiss, that the poetic child utters in artless song. Other cla.s.ses of poetry are complete, and may now be exhaustively dissected; romantic poetry is still in process of becoming--in fact this is its chief characteristic, that it forever can merely become, but never be completed. It can never be exhausted by any theory, and only an intuitive criticism could dare to attempt to characterize its ideals. It alone is endless, as it alone is free, and a.s.serts as its first law that the whim of the poet tolerates no law above itself. Romantic poetry is the only sort which is more than a cla.s.s, and, as it were, the art of poetry itself."

We may in part account for Romanticism by recalling that it was the product of an age which was no longer in sympathy with its own tasks, an age of political miseries and restrained powers, which turned away from its own surroundings and sought to be free from all contact with them, striving to benumb its sensations by an auto-intoxication of dreams.

Romanticism is built upon the imposing corner-stone of the unique importance of the Individual: "To become G.o.d, to be man, to develop one's own being, these are expressions for the same thing." As personality is supreme, it is natural that there should follow a contempt for the mediocrity of current majorities, standards and opinions. It abhorred universal abstractions, as opposed to the truth and meaning of individual phenomena. It stoutly believed in an inexpugnable right to Illusions, and held clarity and earnestness to be foes of human happiness. "The poem gained great applause, because it had so strange, so well-nigh unintelligible a sound. It was like music itself, and for that very reason attracted so irresistibly.

Although the hearers were awake, they were entertained _as though in a dream_."

Hence a purely lyric att.i.tude toward life, which was apprehended only on transcendent, musical valuations. Poetry was to be the heart and centre of actual living; modern life seemed full of "prose and pettiness" as compared with the Middle Ages; it was the doctrine of this Mary in the family of Bethany to leave to the Martha of dull externalists the care of many things, while she "chose the better part" in contemplative lingering at the vision of what was essentially higher. A palpitant imagination outranks "cold intelligence;"

sensation, divorced from all its bearings or functions, is its own excuse for being. Of responsibility, hardly a misty trace; realities are playthings and to be treated allegorically.