The Project Gutenberg eBook, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. II (of 6): The Romantic School in Germany, by Georg Brandes, Translated by Diana White and Mary Morison

MAIN CURRENTS IN

NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

BY

GEORGE BRANDES

IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED

II

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

MCMVI

LIST OF PORTRAITS

A. W. SCHLEGEL
LUDWIG TIECK
FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
SCHLEIERMACHER
W. HOFFMANN
NOVALIS

"Allen Gewalten
Zum Trutz sich erhalten,
Nimmer sich beugen ..."
—GOETHE.

"Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren, ist vivissciren."
—NOVALIS.

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

INTRODUCTION

The task of giving a connected account of the German Romantic School is, for a Dane, an arduous and disheartening one. In the first place, the subject is overwhelmingly vast; in the second, it has been treated again and again by German writers; and, lastly, these writers, in their division of labour, have entered so learnedly into every detail, that it is impossible for a foreigner, one, moreover, to whom the sources are not always accessible, to compete with them in exhaustive knowledge. From their childhood they have been familiar with a literature with which he first makes acquaintance at an age when assimilation, in any quantity, has become a much more difficult process. What the foreigner must rely on is, partly the decision with which he takes up and maintains his personal standpoint, partly the possibility that he may display qualities which are not characteristic of the native author. Such a quality in the case in point is the artistic faculty, the faculty, I mean, of representation, of externalisation. The German nature is so intense and profound that this faculty is comparatively rare. The foreigner has, moreover, this advantage over the native, that it is easier for him to detect the mark of race—that in the German author which stamps him as a German. The German critic is too apt to consider "German" synonymous with "human being," for the reason that the human beings he deals with are almost always Germans. The foreigner is struck by characteristics which are overlooked by the native, sometimes because he is so accustomed to them, more frequently because he himself possesses them.

There are many works to be criticised and classified, many personalities to describe. My aim will be to present these personalities and works in as firm and sharp outline as possible, and, without giving undue attention to detail, to throw light upon the whole in such a manner that its principal features will stand out and arrest the eye. I shall endeavour, on the one hand, to treat the history of literature as humanly as possible, to go as deep down as I can, to seize upon the remotest, innermost psychological movements which prepared for and produced the various literary phenomena; and on the other hand, I shall try to present the result in as plastic and tangible a form as possible. If I can succeed in giving shape, clear and accurate, to the hidden feeling, the idea, which everywhere underlies the literary phenomenon, my task will be accomplished. By preference, I shall always, when possible, embody the abstract in the personal.

First and foremost, therefore, I everywhere trace the connection between literature and life. This is at once proved by the fact that, whereas earlier Danish literary controversies (that between Heiberg and Hauch, for example, or even the famous one between Baggesen and Oehlenschläger) were kept entirely within the domain of literature and dealt exclusively with literary principles, the controversy aroused by the first volume of this work has entailed, quite as much from the nature of the work as from the irrationality of its opponents, the discussion of a multitude of moral, social, and religious questions. The Danish reaction, feeling itself to be akin to the one I am about to depict and unmask, has attempted to suppress the movement which it recognised to be antagonistic to itself—but so far with little prospect of success. A French proverb says: Nul prince n'a tué son successeur.

When, however, the connection between literature and life is thus emphasised, the delineations and interpretations of men and their books by no means produce what we may call drawing-room history of literature. I go down to the foundations of real life, and show how the emotions which find their expression in literature arise in the human heart. And this same human heart is no still pool, no idyllic mountain lake. It is an ocean, with submarine vegetation and terrible inhabitants. Drawing-room history of literature, like drawing-room poetry, sees in human life a drawing-room, a decorated ball-room—the furniture and the people alike polished, the brilliant illumination excluding all possibility of dark corners. Let those who choose to do so look at things thus; it is not my point of view. Just as the botanist must handle nettles as well as roses, so the student of literature must accustom himself to look, with the unflinching gaze of the naturalist or the physician, upon all the forms taken by human nature, in their diversity and their inward affinity. It makes the plant neither more nor less interesting that it smells sweet or stings; but the dispassionate interest of the botanist is often accompanied by the purely human pleasure in the beauty of the flower.

As I follow the more important literary movements from country to country, studying their psychology, I attempt to condense the fluid material by showing how, from time to time, it crystallises into one or other definite and intelligible type. The attempt is attended with extraordinary difficulty in this particular period of German literature, from the fact that the chief characteristic of the period is an absence of distinctly typical forms. This literature is not plastic; it is musical. French Romanticism produces clearly defined figures; the ideal of German Romanticism is not a figure, but a melody, not definite form, but infinite aspiration. Is it obliged to name the object of its longing? It designates it by such terms as "ein geheimes Wort," "eine blaue Blume," "der Zauber der Waldeinsamkeit" (a mystic word—a blue flower—the magic of the lonely woods). These expressions are, however, definitions of moods, and each mood has a corresponding psychological condition, my task is to trace back each mood, emotion, or longing to the group of psychological conditions to which it belongs. This group in combination constitutes a soul; and such a soul, with strongly marked individuality, represents in literature the many who were unable to depict their own character, but who recognised it when thus placed before them. I may possibly succeed in proving that the type does not escape us because the author may have chosen to paint landscape after landscape in place of delineating characteristic personalities, or because he confounds literature with music to the extent of at last entitling his poems simply Allegro or Rondo; but that, on the contrary, the distinctly peculiar qualities of these landscapes and the character of this word-music are symptomatic of a psychological condition which may be determined with considerable accuracy.

In the general introduction to this work I have sketched the plan which I have proposed to myself. It is my intention to describe the first great literary movement of the century, the germinating and growing reaction, first elucidating its nature, then following it to its climax. Afterwards I shall show how this reaction was met by a breeze of liberalism blowing from the eighteenth century, which swells into a gale and sweeps away all opposition. Not that the liberal views of the nineteenth century are ever identical with those of the eighteenth, or that its literary forms or scientific ideas ever bear the eighteenth century stamp. Neither Voltaire, nor Rousseau, nor Diderot, neither Lessing nor Schiller, neither Hume nor Godwin, rise from the dead; but they are one and all avenged upon their enemies.

Regarded as a whole, German Romanticism is reaction. Nevertheless, as an intellectual, poetico-philosophical reaction, it contains many germs of new development, unmistakable productions of that spirit of progress which, by remoulding the old, creates the new, and by altering boundaries gains territory.

The older Romanticists begin, without exception, as the apostles of "enlightenment." They introduce a new tone into German poetry, give their works a new colour, and, in addition to this, revive both the spirit and the substance of the old fairy-tale, Volkslied, and legend. They exercise at first a fertilising influence upon German science; research in the domains of history, ethnography, and jurisprudence, the study of German antiquity, Indian and Greek-Latin philology, and the systems and dreams of the Naturphilosophie all receive their first impulse from Romanticism. They widened the emotional range of German poetry, though the emotions to which they gave expression were more frequently morbid than healthy. As critics, they originally, and with success, aimed at enlarging the spiritual horizon. In their social capacity they vowed undying hatred to all dead conventionality in the relations between the sexes. The best among them in their youth laboured ardently for the intensification of that spiritual life which is based upon a belief in the supernatural. In politics, when not indifferent, they generally began as very theoretical republicans; who, however, in spite of their cosmopolitanism, strove to elevate and strengthen German patriotism.

Unfortunately, their pursuit of all these worthy aims ended in comparative failure. Of all that the German Romanticists produced, little will endure—some masterly translations by A. W. Schlegel, a few of Tieck's productions, a handful of Hardenberg's and another of Eichendorff's lyrics, some of Friedrich Schlegel's essays, a few of Arnim's and Brentano's smaller works, a select number of Hoffmann's tales, and some very remarkable dramas and tales from the pen of that eccentric but real genius, Heinrich von Kleist. The rest of the life-work of the Romanticists has disappeared from the memory of the present generation. Looking back on it from this distance, most of their endeavour seems to have ended in smoke. In the matter of language, with their intangible imagery, their misuse of words in expressing the strange, weird, and mysterious, their archaisms, and their determination to be unintelligible to the ordinary reader, they rather diminished than enriched the poetic vocabulary, rather corrupted than improved literary style. In the domain of poetry, Romanticism ended in hysterical piety and vapouring. In the social domain it occupied itself with only one question, that of the relations between the sexes; and its ideas on this subject were, for the most part, so abnormal and morbidly unhealthy, that most of its passionate blows were dealt in the air. In dealing them, it was not humanity at large that the Romanticists had in view, but a few favoured, aristocratic, artistic natures. In religious matters, these men, whose moral and poetical theories were at first so revolutionary, bowed their necks to the yoke the moment they saw it. And in politics it was they who directed the proceedings of the Congress of Vienna and prepared its manifestoes, abolishing liberty of thought in the interval between a religious festival in St. Stephen's and an oyster supper with Fanny Elsler.

I shall touch but seldom and briefly upon Danish literature, only now and again piercing in the canvas of the panorama I am unrolling a hole through which the situation in Denmark may be seen. Not that I forget or lose sight of Danish literature. On the contrary, it is ever present with me. Whilst trying to present to my readers the inner history of a foreign literature, I am all the time making indirect contributions to the history of our own. I am painting the background which is required to throw its characteristics into relief. I am working at the foundation upon which, according to my conviction, the history of modern Danish literature rests. My method may be indirect, but it is the more thorough for that. I should like, however, in a few words, to indicate the general conclusion to which a comparison between Danish and foreign literature at this period has led me.

The relative positions of Germany and Denmark may be defined as follows: German literature is at this period comparatively original in its aims and its productions; Danish literature either continues the working out of a peculiarly Scandinavian vein, or builds upon German foundations. The Danish authors have, as a rule, read and assimilated the German; the German authors have neither read nor been in any way influenced by the Danes. Steffens, through whom we receive the impetus from Germany, is the devoted disciple of Schelling. Witness the following passage from one of his letters to that philosopher: "I am your pupil, absolutely and entirely your pupil. All that I produce was originally yours. This is no passing feeling; it is my firm conviction that such is the case, and I do not think the less of myself for it. Therefore, when once I have produced a really great work which I should gladly call mine, I shall, as soon as it has been recognised, publicly, enthusiastically, proclaim you to be my teacher, and hand over to you my laurel wreath."[1]

In German literature there is more life, in the corresponding Danish literature more art. It is Germany which produces, which unearths, the material. That literature of which Romanticism is the first development, lives and moves and revels in intense emotions, struggles with problems, creates forms which it dashes to pieces again. Danish literature takes German material and ideas, instinct with life, and often succeeds in moulding them more artistically, giving them clearer expression than their German producers do. (Note, for example, the case of Tieck and Heiberg.) The Danes apply and remodel, or they embody kindred ideas in more favourable and more plastic material, such, or instance, as that provided by the Scandinavian mythology and legends.

The result, as I have elsewhere shown, is that Romanticism acquired more lucidity and clearer contours on Danish soil. It became less a thing of the night; it ventured, veiled, into the light of the sun. It felt that it had come to a sedate, sober-minded people, a people who were not yet quite sure that moonlight was not unnatural and sentimental. It came up from the deep mine shafts from which Novalis had been the first to conjure it, and, with Oehlenschläger's Vaulundur, hammered on the mountain-side till the mountain burst open and laid all its treasures bare to the light of day. It felt that it had come to another, a more serene and idyllic clime; it shook off all its weirdness; its thick, shapeless mists condensed into slender river nymphs; it forgot the Harz and the Blocksberg, and took up its abode one beautiful Midsummer Eve in the Deer Park near Copenhagen.[2]

Aladdin is a finer and more intelligible literary work than Tieck's Kaiser Oktavianus, but Oehlenschläger could not deny that Aladdin would never have been written if Oktavianus had not been in existence. Heiberg's Julespög og Nytaarslöjer is to the full as witty as Tieck's Aristophanic satires, but the whole idea—the play within the play, the literary satire, and the blending of the sentimental with the ironical—is borrowed from Tieck, and, what is worse, is only comprehensible from Tieck's standpoint. In short, there is in Oehlenschläger, Hauch, and Heiberg more form than in Novalis, Tieck, and Fr. Schlegel, but less substance—that is to say, less direct connection with real life. German literature has too often formed the connecting link. We Danes have too often refused to occupy ourselves, in literature, with the great problems of life, have simply dismissed them when we could not succeed in giving them correct literary form.

Looked at from the psychological point of view, the position may be described as follows. The Danish Romantic authors have, generally speaking, been the superiors of the Germans as regards art, their inferiors as regards intellect. As a rule, every production of the German author, however small, though it be formless, weak, nay, actually a failure, yet expresses a whole philosophy of life, and that no fanciful philosophy, but one evolved and matured by personal experience, and stamped with the whole astonishingly many-sided culture which distinguishes the educated German. A poem by Novalis, a tale by Tieck or Hoffmann, or a play by Kleist, contains a poetico-philosophical theory of life; and it is the theory not only of a poet, but of a man. A tragedy by Oehlenschläger again, or a fairy tale by Andersen, or a vaudeville by Hostrup, will almost invariably be distinguished by such distinctly poetical qualities as fancy, feeling, whimsicality, gaiety, youthful freshness and aplomb, but the philosophy is too often as primitive as a child's. Heiberg is almost the only writer in whose works there is any sign of a philosophy based upon science, and acquiring ever more profundity from the experiences of life. Of real development there are often only faint traces. The youthful works of such authors as Oehlenschläger, Winther, and Andersen are as perfect as those of their maturity. Sometimes, as in the case of Oehlenschläger, advancing years produce in the talent a suspicion of corpulence, of unctuousness. Sometimes, as in the case of Paludan-Müller, the ideal grows more and more attenuated. When a change does take place, it rarely signifies that the author has gradually evolved for himself a new philosophy of life; no—after treading the narrow path of poetry for a time, he strikes into one of the two great highroads, either the road of middle-class respectability or the road of orthodox piety. The dressing-gown or the cassock—one or other of these garments almost inevitably supersedes the Spanish cloak of poetic youth.

It may, then, generally speaking, be asserted that, in those cases where it is possible to compare the German Romanticists with the Danish, the former have the more original philosophy of life, and are greater as personalities, whatever they may be as poets.

Let us look at the subject from a third point of view. To the Danish authors, as a body, may be attributed the merit of avoiding the fantastic, tasteless extravagances of which the Germans are frequently guilty. The Danes stop in time; they avoid paradox or do not carry it to its logical conclusion; they have the steadiness due to naturally well-balanced minds and naturally phlegmatic dispositions; they are hardly ever indecent, audacious, blasphemous, revolutionary, wildly fantastic, utterly sentimental, utterly unreal, or utterly sensual; they seldom run amuck, they never tilt at the clouds, and they never fall into a well. This is what makes them so popular with their own countrymen. Unerring taste and elegance, such as distinguish Heiberg's poetry and Gade's music, vigorous, healthy originality, such as characterises Oehlenschläger's and Hartmann's best works, will always be prized by Danes as the expression of noble and self-controlled art. What a contrast is presented by the overstrained, extravagant personalities peopling the Romantic hospital of Germany! A phthisical Moravian Brother with the consumptive's sensuality and the consumptive's mystic yearnings—Novalis. A satirical hypochondriac, subject to hallucinations and with morbid leanings to Catholicism—Tieck. A genius, impotent to produce, but with the propensity of genius to revolt and the imperative craving of impotence to subject itself to outward authority—Friedrich Schlegel. A dissipated fantast with the half-insane imagination of the drunkard—Hoffmann. A foolish mystic like Werner, and a genius like the suicide Kleist. Think of Hoffmann, and his pupil, Hans Andersen, and observe how sane, but also how sober and subdued, Andersen appears compared with his first master.

It is, then, certain that there is more of the quality of harmony among the Danes. And it is easy to understand that those who regard harmony, even when meagre, as the highest quality of art, will inevitably rank the Danish literature of the first decades of this century above the German. It has, however, to a great extent attained to this harmony by means of caution, by lack of artistic courage. The Danish poets never fell, because they never mounted to a height from which there was any danger of falling. They left it to others to ascend Mont Blanc. They escaped breaking their necks, but they never gathered the Alpine flowers which only bloom on the giddy heights or on the brink of precipices. The quality in literature which, it seems to me, we Danes have never sufficiently prized, is boldness, that quality in the author which incites him, regardless of consequences, to give expression to his artistic ideal. The daring development of what is typical in his literary tendency, often constitutes the beauty of his work; or, to put it more plainly, when a literary tendency like Romanticism develops in the direction of pure fancy, that author seems to me the most interesting, who rises to the most daring heights of fantastic extravagance—as, for instance, Hoffmann. The more madly fantastic he is, the finer he is, just as the poplar is finer the taller it is, and the beech finer the more stately and wide-spreading it is. The fineness lies in the daring and vigour with which that which is typical is expressed. He who discovers a new country may, in the course of his explorations, be stranded on a reef. It is an easy matter to avoid the reef and leave the country undiscovered. The Danish Romanticists are never insane like Hoffmann, but neither are they ever dæmonic like him. They lose in thrilling, overpowering life and energy what they gain in lucidity and readableness. They appeal to a greater number and a more varied class of readers, but they do not enthral them. The more vigorous originality alarms the many, but fascinates the few. In Danish Romanticism there is none of Friedrich Schlegel's audacious immorality, but neither is there anything like that spirit of opposition which in him amounts to genius; his ardour melts, and his daring moulds into new and strange shapes, much that we accept as unalterable. Nor do the Danes become Catholic mystics. Protestant orthodoxy in its most petrified form flourishes with us: so do supernaturalism and pietism; and in Grundtvigianism we slide down the inclined plane which leads to Catholicism; but in this matter, as in every other, we never take the final step; we shrink back from the last consequences. The result is that the Danish reaction is far more insidious and covert than the German. Veiling itself as vice does, it clings to the altars of the Church, which have always been a sanctuary for criminals of every species. It is never possible to lay hold of it, to convince it then and there that its principles logically lead to intolerance, inquisition, and despotism. Kierkegaard, for example, is in religion orthodox, in politics a believer in absolutism, towards the close of his career a fanatic. Yet—and this is a genuinely Romantic trait—he all his life long avoids drawing any practical conclusions from his doctrines; one only catches an occasional glimpse of such a feeling as admiration for the Inquisition, or hatred of natural science.

Let us take, by way of contrast, another supporter of orthodoxy and absolutism, Joseph de Maistre, as high-minded and sincere a believer as Kierkegaard, and equally philanthropic. De Maistre pursues all his theories to their clear conclusions, shirking nothing which must be regarded as a direct consequence of his beliefs. Like Kierkegaard, he is a man of brilliant parts and solid culture, but whereas Kierkegaard, when it comes to practical applications, is as afraid of "public scandal" as any old maid, De Maistre boldly accepts all necessary consequences. The famous passage in praise of the executioner in the sixth conversation of the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of plain speaking. The executioner is a "sublime being," "the corner-stone of society;" along with him "all social order disappears." According to De Maistre's theory, two powers are required to quell the rebellious spirits—the spirit of unbelief and the spirit of disobedience—let loose by the French Revolution, and these two are the Pope and the executioner. The Pope and the executioner are the two main props of society; the one crushes the revolutionary thought with his bull, the other cuts off the revolutionary head with his axe. It is a pleasure to read such argument. Here we have vigour and determination, effectual expression of a clear thought, energetic and undisguised reaction. And De Maistre is the same in everything. He is not, like Danish reactionaries who call themselves Liberals, reactionary in social matters and religion, and liberal or half-liberal in politics. He loathes political liberty; he jeers (in his letters) at the emancipation of women; in a special essay he deliberately and warmly defends the Spanish Inquisition; and in all trueheartedness and manly seriousness he desires the reinstitution of the auto-da-fé, and is not ashamed to say it, seeing that he thinks it. Look well at such a man as this—gifted and eminent, great as a statesman, great as an author, who sacrifices his whole fortune sooner than make the least concession to the Revolution, which he abhors, or to Napoleon, whom he detests; who frankly adores the executioner as the indispensable upholder of order; who gives the gallows the most important place in his statute-book, and counsels the Church to have recourse to the axe and the faggot—there is a figure worthy of note; a proud, bold countenance, which expresses an unmistakable mental bent, and which one does not forget. This is a type one takes pleasure in, as the naturalist takes pleasure in a fine specimen of a species of which he has hitherto only met with imperfect and unsatisfactory examples. Looking at the matter from a practical point of view, it may be considered fortunate that such personalities are not to be found in Danish literature, but their absence gives a less plastic character to its history.

It is all very well to say that we Danes only assimilated the good and healthy elements of German Romanticism. When we see how the German Romanticists end, we comprehend that from the very beginning there was concealed in Romanticism a reactionary principle which prescribed the course—the curve—of their careers.

Friedrich Schlegel, the author of Lucinde, the free-thinking admirer of Fichte, who, in his Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (Essay on the Idea of Republicanism), called the democratic republic, with female suffrage, the only reasonable form of government, is converted to Catholicism, becomes a mystic and a faithful servant of the Church, and in his later writings endeavours to promote the cause of reactionary absolutism. Novalis and Schleiermacher, who in their early writings display a mixture of pantheism and pietism, of Spinoza and Zinzendorf, steadily drift away from Spinoza and approach orthodoxy. In his later life Schleiermacher recants those Letters on Lucinde which he had written in a spirit of the purest youthful enthusiasm. Novalis, who in his youthful letters declares himself "prepared for any sort of enlightenment," and hopes that he may live to see "a new massacre of St. Bartholemew, a wholesale destruction of despotisms and prisons," who desires a republic, and who, at the time when Fichte is prosecuted for atheism, remarks, "Brave Fichte is really fighting for us all,"—this same Novalis ends by looking on the king in the light of an earthly Providence, condemning Protestantism as revolutionary, defending the temporal power of the Pope, and extolling the spirit of Jesuitism. Fouqué, the knight without fear and without reproach, becomes in the end a pietist Don Quixote, whose great desire is a return to the conditions of feudalism. Clemens Brentano, in his youth the most mettlesome of poets, who both in life and literature made war upon every species of convention, becomes the credulous secretary of a nun, a hysterical visionary; does nothing for the space of five years but fill volume after volume with the sayings of Anna Katharina Emmerich. Zacharias Werner is a variant of the same Romantic type. He starts in his career as a friend of "enlightenment"; but soon a process of moral dissolution begins; he first extols Luther, then turns Roman Catholic and recants his eulogy; in the end he becomes a priest, and as such displays, both in his life and in his sentimentally gross writings and sermons, a combination of coarse sensuality and priestly unction.

And Steffens—he who stormed the heaven of German Romanticism, carried the sacred fire to Denmark, and set men's minds in such violent uproar that he was compelled to leave his country—what of him? what was he? An upright, weak character, with a brain charged with confused enthusiasms; all feeling and imitative fancy; no lucidity of thought or pregnant concision of style. It is literally impossible to read the so-called scientific writings of his later period; one runs the risk of being drowned in watery sentimentality or smothered by ennui. "When," says Julian Schmidt, "he expounded the Naturphilosophie in his broken German from the professorial chair, his mathematical calculations came out wrong and his experiments failed, but his audience was carried away by his earnestness, his almost religious solemnity, his naïve, child-like enthusiasm." Naïveté was a quality that the Northerner of those days seldom lacked. In his best days, Steffens, captivated by the theories of the Naturphilosophie, took an innocent pleasure in tracing the attributes of the human mind in minerals, in humanising geology and botany. But the Revolution of July turned his head. Inflamed by pietism, that elderly lady who for the last thirteen years had been the object of his affections, and for whose sake he had already more than once entered the lists, he closed his literary career with a series of feeble attacks upon the young writers of post-revolutionary Germany.

In this he was only following in the footsteps of his master, Schelling. Schelling, who, in marked contrast to Fichte with his clear doctrine of the Ego, dwells upon the mysterious nature of the mind, and bases not only philosophy, but also art and religion, upon the perception of genius, the so-called "intellectual intuition," displays both in his doctrine and in his want of method the arbitrariness, the lawlessness, which is the kernel of Romanticism. As early as 1802, in his Bruno, he used the significant expression and future catchword, "Christian philosophy," though he still maintained that, in genuine religious value, the Bible is not to be compared with the sacred books of India—a theory which even Görres champions in the early stage of his literary career. Having, like Novalis, at Tieck's instigation, made a close study of Jakob Böhme and the other mystics, Schelling began to philosophise mystically on the subject of "Nature in God," an expression appropriated by Martensen in his Spekulative Dogmatik. But when, shortly afterwards, a patent of nobility was conferred on him (as professor at the University of Munich), and he was made President of the Academy of Science in Catholic and clerical Bavaria, the famous "Philosophy of Revelation" (Offenbarungsphilosophie) commenced to germinate in his mind. Soon the transformation was complete; the fiery enthusiast had become a courtier, the prophet a charlatan. With his mysteries, his announcements of a marvellous science, "which had hitherto been considered impossible," his refusal to print his wisdom, to do anything but communicate it verbally, and even then not in its entirety, he qualified himself for being called, after Hegel's death, to Berlin, to lend a helping hand to State religion in the "Christian-Germanic" police-governed Prussia of the day, and to teach a State philosophy, for which, as he himself said, the only suitable name is Christology. Here it was that the young generation, the Hegelians of the Left, fell upon him and tore his mystic cobweb into a thousand pieces.

Yet Schelling is the least irrational of the Romantic philosophers. He is vehemently accused of heresy by Franz Baader, the reincarnated Jakob Böhme, the object of Kierkegaard's admiration, who reproaches him with setting the Trinity upon a logical balance-pole, and, still worse, with daring to deny the existence of a personal devil. The utterances of the others are in keeping with this. Schubert writes The Symbolism of Dreams—was not the dream the ideal of Romanticism?—occupies himself in all seriousness with interpreting them, happy in his persuasion that clairvoyance and visions are the highest sources of knowledge. The vision-seer of Prevorst, whom Strauss, characteristically enough, begins his public career by exposing, plays an important part in those days. Then there is Görres, who at the time of the great Revolution was "inspired to triumphal song by the fall of Rome and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire," and who afterwards took an active and honourable part in rousing German patriotic spirit during the struggle against Napoleon; this same Görres becomes the author of Christian Mysticism (a book which Kierkegaard read with shudders of awe), revels in the blood of martyrs, gloats over the agonies and ecstasies of the saints, enumerates the different aureoles, nail-prints, and wounds in the side by which they are distinguished, and prostrates himself in the dust, he, the old Jacobin, before the one true Catholic Church, chanting the praises of the Holy Alliance. To these add the politicians: Adam Müller, who, as Gotschall has aptly said, pursues in politics the quest of Novalis's "blue flower," who would fain fuse State, Science, Church, and Stage into one marvellous unit; Haller, who concealed his conversion to Catholicism in order to retain his appointments, and who, in his Restauration der Staatswissenschaften (Revival of the Science of Statesmanship), bases this science upon theocracy; Leo (scathingly criticised by Ruge), who, in the same spirit, inveighs against the humanity of the age and its reluctance to shed the blood of Radicals; and Stahl, who, in his Philosophy of Law, compares marriage to the relation between Christ and the Church, the family to the Trinity, and the earthly right of succession to man's right to the heavenly inheritance. Taking all this together, one feels as if Romanticism ended in a sort of witches' Sabbath, in which the philosophers play the part of the old crones, amidst the thunders of the obscurantists, the insane yells of the mystics, and the shouts of the politicians for temporal and ecclesiastical despotism, while theology and theosophy fall upon the sciences and suffocate them with their caresses.

I

THE PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM

Any one who makes acquaintance with the Germany of to-day, either by travelling in the country or by reading about it, and then compares it with the Germany of the beginning of the century, is astounded by the contrast. What a distance between then and now! Who would believe that this Realistic Germany had ever been a Romantic Germany!

Public utterances, private conversation, the very physiognomy of the towns, bear in our days a distinct stamp of realism. Walk along any street in Berlin, and you meet men in uniform, officers and privates, erect, decorated. The literature in the windows of the bookshops has for the most part a practical tendency. Even the furniture and ornaments are influenced by the new spirit. One cannot imagine anything more prosaic and warlike than the shop of a Berlin dealer in fancy articles. On the clocks, where of old a knight in armour knelt and kissed his lady's finger-tips, Uhlans and Cuirassiers now stand in full uniform. Conical bullets hang as trinkets from watch-chains, and piled muskets form candelabra. The metal in fashion is iron. The word in fashion is also iron. The present occupation of this nation of philosophers and poets is assuredly not poetry-writing and philosophising. Even highly cultured Germans know little about philosophy now-a-days—not one German student in twenty has read a word of Hegel; interest in poetry, as such, is practically dead; political and social questions rouse a hundred times more attention than problems of culture or psychical conundrums.

And this is the people which once was lost in Romantic reveries and speculations, and saw its prototype in Hamlet! Hamlet and Bismarck! Bismarck and Romanticism! Unquestionably the great German statesman succeeded in carrying all Germany with him chiefly because he offered to his country in his own person the very qualities of which it had so long felt the want. Through him politics have been substituted for æsthetics. Germany has been united; the military monarchy has swallowed up the small States, and with them all their feudal idylls; Prussia has become the Piedmont of Germany, and has impressed its orderly and practical spirit upon the new empire; and simultaneously with this, natural science has supplanted or metamorphosed philosophy, and the idea of nationality has superseded or modified the "humanity" ideal. The War of Liberation of 1813 was pre-eminently a result of enthusiasm; the victories of 1870 were pre-eminently a result of the most careful calculation.

The idea which is the guiding star of the new Germany is the idea of organising itself as a whole. It pervades both life and literature. The expression "In Reih' und Glied"—In Ordered Ranks—(the title of a novel by Spielhagen) might be the universal watchword. The national aim is to gather together that which has been scattered, to diffuse the culture which has been the possession of too few, to found a great state, a great society; and it is required of the individual that he shall sacrifice his individuality for the sake of adding to the power of the whole, of the mass. The power of the mass! This idea may be traced in all the most remarkable phenomena of the age. Belief in it underlies the calculations of Bismarck, the agitation of Lassalle, the tactics of Moltke, and the music of Wagner. A desire to educate the people and unite them in a common aim is the mainspring of the literary activity of the prose authors of the period. A common feature of all the works which most clearly reflect the times is that they keep to the subject, to the matter in hand. The influence of the great idea, "the power of the mass," makes itself felt here too. In the new literature the relation of the individual to the State, the sacrifice of personal volition and originality entailed by the yoking of the Ego to the State chariot, presents itself in marked contrast to the Romanticist worship of the talented individual with all his peculiarities, and the Romanticist indifference to everything historical and political. Romantic literature was always pre-eminently drawing-room literature, the ideal of Romanticism being intellectual society and æsthetic tea-parties (vide the conversations in Tieck's Fantasus).

How different everything was in those old days! In both life and literature the detached Ego, in its homeless independence, is omnipresent. The guiding star here is, indeed, nought else but the free, unhistorical Ego. The country is divided into a multitude of small States, ruled by three hundred sovereigns and fifteen hundred semi-sovereigns. In these States the so-called "enlightened" despotism of the eighteenth century prevails, with its narrow, petrified social conditions and relations. The nobleman is lord and master of his serfs, the father, lord and master of his family—everywhere stern justice, but no equity. There are in reality no great tasks for the individual, hence there is no room for genius. The theatre is the only place where those who are not of princely birth can gain any experience of all the manifold phases of human life, hence the stage mania of literature. Lacking any social field in which to work, all activity necessarily takes the form either of war with reality or flight from it. Flight is prepared for by the influence of the rediscovered antique and of Winckelmann's writings; war, by the influence of the sentimentally melancholy English writers (Young, Sterne) and of Rousseau, reverenced as the apostle of nature, who, as Schiller expressed it, "would fain out of Christians make men."

Our first proceeding must be to trace the rising of this star, the genesis of this free, Romantic Ego, to whom, be it remembered, all the greatest intellects of Germany stood sponsor.

It was Lessing who laid the foundations of the intellectual life of modern Germany. Clear of thought, strong of will, indefatigably active, he was a reformer in every matter in which he interested himself. With perfect consciousness of what he was doing, he enlightened and educated the German mind. He was the embodiment of manly independence and vigorous, tireless militancy. His personal ideal, as it is revealed in his life and writings, was proud independence in combination with a wise love of his fellow-men, which overcame all differences of creed. Hence, solitary as he stood in his own day, his Ego became a source of light. He was the "Prometheus of German prose." His great achievement was that of freeing German culture for all time from the swaddling bands of theology, as Luther had freed it from those of Catholicism. His life and his criticism were action, and to him the essence of poetry too was action. All his characters are instinct with dramatic passion. In opposition to the theological doctrine of punishment and reward, he maintained that to do right for the sake of doing right is the highest morality. And for him the history of the world became the history of the education of the human race. To a certain extent the word "education" is employed by him merely as a concession to his readers, who, he knew, could not conceive of any development without a divine educator; but, all the same, the idea of natural development is not an idea with which he was familiar. To him, history is the record of "enlightenment." The Ego to him is not nature, but pure mind.

In reality, all that was best in Lessing was entirely unsympathetic to the new group of Romanticists; they had less in common with him than with any other of the great German authors, Schiller not excepted. Nevertheless, it was natural enough that they should refuse to acknowledge any connection between Lessing and those of his disciples (men such as Nicolai, Engel, Garve, and Schütz), who were, from the "enlightenment" standpoint, their bitter enemies and ruthless persecutors. This was done by Friedrich Schlegel in an essay in which, while praising the power and the width of Lessing's grasp, he lays chief stress upon everything in him that is irregular, boldly revolutionary, unsystematic, and paradoxical, dwells on his bellicose wit, and draws attention to everything that can be construed into cynicism. The Romanticists could not possibly claim a champion of reason, pure and simple, as their forerunner, hence they attempted to characterise the nutritive element in Lessing's works as mere seasoning, as the salt which preserves from corruption.

They owed far more to Herder. They evidence their descent from him both by their continuation of the Sturm und Drang period and by their capacity of understanding and reproducing the poetry of all countries. In Herder the new century germinated, as in Lessing the old had come to its close. Herder sets genesis and growth above thought and action. To him the true man is not only a thinking and moral being, but a portion of nature. He loves and sets most store by the original; he prefers intuition to reason, and would overcome narrow-mindedness, not by reason, but by originality. The man of intuitions is to him the most human. His own genius was the genius of receptivity. He expanded his Ego until it comprehended every kind of originality, but it was by virtue of feeling that he comprehended, that he absorbed into his soul a wealth of life, human and national.

From Herder the Romanticists derive that which is most valuable in their literary criticism—the universal receptivity which finds expression in the impulse to translate and explain; from him they derive the first stimulus to a scientific study of both European and Asiatic languages; from him comes their love for what is national in both their own and foreign literature, their love of Spanish romance and of Shakespeare's plays. Herder grasped things in their entirety as did Goethe after him. His profound comprehension of national peculiarities becomes in Goethe the genius's intuition of the typical in nature, and is exalted by Schelling under the name of "intellectual intuition." The objection of the Romanticists to the idea of aim or purpose may be traced back to Herder. His theory of history excluded the idea of purpose: what happens has a cause and is subject to laws, but cannot be explained by anything which has not yet happened, i.e. by a purpose. The Romanticists transferred this theory into the personal, the psychical domain. To them purposelessness is another name for Romantic genius; the man of genius lives without a definite purpose; purposelessness is idleness, and idleness is the mark and privilege of the elect. In this caricature of a philosophy there is not much resemblance to Herder's. But he is the originator of a new conception of genius, of the belief, namely, that genius is intuitive, that it consists in a certain power of perceiving and apprehending without any resort to abstract ideas. It is this conception which, with the Romanticists, becomes scorn of experimental methods in science, and approbation of extraordinary vagaries in art.

Goethe was the fulfilment of all that Herder had promised. To him man was not merely theoretically the last link in nature's chain; the men in his works were themselves natures; and in his scientific research he discerned with the eye of genius the universal laws of evolution. His own Ego was a microcosm, and produced the effect of such on the most discerning of his younger contemporaries. "Goethe and life are one," says Rahel. So profound was his insight into nature, so entirely was he a living protest against every supernatural belief, that he did what in him lay to deprive genius of its character of apparent incomprehensibility and contrariety to reason, by explaining (in his autobiography, Wahrheit und Dichtung) his own genius, the most profound and universal of the age, as a natural product developed by circumstances—thereby creating the type of literary criticism to which the Romanticists were strongly opposed.

From Goethe the young generation derived their theory of the rights and the importance of the great, free personality. He had always lived his own life, and had always lived it fully and freely. Without making any attack whatever on the existing conditions of society, he had remoulded, according to his own requirements, the social relations in which he found himself placed. He becomes the soul of the youthful and joyous court of Weimar, with the audacity of youth and genius drawing every one with him into a whirl of gaiety—fêtes, picnics, skating expeditions, masquerades—animated by a wild joy in nature, which is now "lightened," now "darkened" by love affairs of a more or less dubious character. Jean Paul writes to a friend that he can only describe the morals of Weimar to him by word of mouth. When we hear that even skating was a scandal to the worthy Philistines of that town, we are not surprised by old Wieland's ill-natured remark, that the circle in question appeared to him to be aiming at "brutalising animal nature." Thus it was that the sweet, refined coquette, Frau von Stein, became Goethe's muse for ten whole years, the original of Leonore and Iphigenia; and later he created a still greater scandal by taking into his house Christiane Vulpius (the young girl whose presence had become a necessity to him, and who, in spite of her faults, never embittered his life by making any demands upon him), and living with her for eighteen years before obtaining the sanction of the Church to their union.

Goethe's as well as Schiller's youthful works had been inspired by what the Germans call the "Freigeisterei" of passion, its demand for freedom, its instinct of revolt. Both breathe one and the same spirit, the spirit of defiance. Goethe's Die Geschwister treats of the passion of brother for sister. The conclusion of Stella, in its original form, is a justification of bigamy; and Jean Paul, too, in his Siebenkäs, treats of bigamy as a thing perfectly permissible in the case of a genius to whom the first tie has become burdensome. Götz represents the tragic fate of the man of genius who rises in revolt against a lukewarm and corrupt age. Schiller's Die Räuber, with its device In Tyrannos, and its motto from Hippocrates, "That which medicine cannot cure iron cures, and that which iron cannot cure fire cures," is a declaration of war against society. Karl Moor is the noble-hearted idealist, who in "the castrated century" is inevitably doomed to perish as a criminal. Schiller's robbers are not highwaymen, but revolutionaries. They do not plunder, but punish. They have separated themselves from society to revenge themselves upon it for the wrongs it has done them. Schiller's defiance is still more personally expressed in those poems of his first period which were written under the influence of his relations with Frau von Kalb, poems re-written and entirely altered in the later editions. In the one which ultimately received the title Der Kampf, but which was originally called Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft, he writes:—

"Woher dies Zittern, dies unnennbare Entsetzen,
Wenn mich dein liebevoller Arm umschlang?
Weil Dich ein Eid, den auch nur Wallungen verletzen,
In fremde Fesseln zwang?

"Weil ein Gebrauch, den die Gesetze heilig prägen,
Des Zufalls schwere Missethat geweiht?
Nein—unerschrocken trotz ich einem Bund entgegen,
Den die erröthende Natur bereut.

"O zittre nicht—Du hast als Sünderin geschworen,
Ein Meineid ist der Reue fromme Pflicht,
Das Herz war mein, das Du vor dem Altar verloren,
Mit Menschenfreuden spielt der Himmel nicht."[1]

Comical as this naïve sophistry sounds, and unreliable as is the assurance that Heaven will not permit itself now and again to play with human happiness, the spirit of the verses is unmistakable; and, as Hettner aptly observes, Don Carlos uses almost the same words: "The rights of my love are older than the ceremonies at the altar."

The model for Schiller's young Queen Elizabeth was Charlotte von Kalb. This lady, the passion of the poet's youth, had been unwillingly forced into matrimony by her parents. She and Schiller met in 1784, and in 1788 they were still meditating a permanent union of their destinies. Soon after Schiller left her, she became Jean Paul's mistress. (Caroline Schlegel jestingly calls her Jeannette Pauline.) Jean Paul characterises her thus: "She has two great possessions: great eyes (I never saw their like) and a great soul." He himself confesses that it is she whom he has described in one of his principal works as the Titaness, Linda. In Titan (118 Zykel) we are told of Linda that she must be tenderly treated, not only on account of her delicacy, but also in the matter of her aversion to matrimony, which is extreme. She cannot even accompany a friend to the altar, which she calls the scaffold of woman's liberty, the funeral pyre of the noblest, freest love. To take, she says, the best possible view of it, the heroic epic of love is there transformed into the pastoral of marriage. Her sensible friend vainly insists that her aversion to marriage can have no other ground than her hatred of priests; that wedlock only signifies everlasting love, and all true love regards itself as everlasting; that there are as many unhappy free-love connections as marriages, if not more, &c.

Frau von Kalb herself writes to Jean Paul: "Why all this talk about seduction? Spare the poor creatures, I beg of you, and alarm their hearts and consciences no more. Nature is petrified enough already. I shall never change my opinion on this subject; I do not understand this virtue, and cannot call any one blessed for its sake. Religion here upon earth is nothing else than the development and maintenance of the powers and capacities with which our natures have been endowed. Man should not submit to compulsion, but neither should he acquiesce in wrongful renunciation. Let the bold, powerful, mature human nature, which knows and uses its strength, have its way. But in our generation human nature is weak and contemptible. Our laws are the outcome of wretchedness and dire necessity, seldom of wisdom. Love needs no laws."

A vigorous mind speaks to us in this letter. The leap from this to the idea of Lucinde is not a long one, but the fall to the very vulgar elaboration of Lucinde is great. We do not, however, rightly understand these outbursts until we understand the social conditions which produced them, and realise that they are not isolated and accidental tirades, but are conditioned by the position in which the majority of poetic natures stood to society at that time.

Weimar was then the headquarters and gathering-place of Germany's classical authors. It is not difficult to understand how they came to gather in this little capital of a little dukedom. Of Germany's two great monarchs, Joseph the Second was too much occupied with his efforts at reform, too eager for the spread of "enlightenment," to have any attention to spare for German poetry; and the Voltairean Frederick of Prussia was too French in his tastes and intellectual tendencies to take any interest in German poets. It was at the small courts that they were welcomed. Schiller lived at Mannheim, Jean Paul at Gotha, Goethe at Weimar. Poetry had had no stronghold in Germany for many a long year, but now Weimar became one. Thither Goethe summoned Herder; Wieland had been there since 1772. Schiller received an appointment in the adjacent Jena. Weimar was, then, the place where passion, as poetical, compared with the prosaic conventions of society, was worshipped most recklessly and with least prejudice, in practice as well as theory. "Ah! here we have women!" cries Jean Paul when he comes to Weimar. "Everything is revolutionarily daring here; that a woman is married signifies nothing." Wieland "revives himself" by taking his former mistress, Sophie von la Roche, into his house, and Schiller invites Frau von Kalb to accompany him to Paris.

We thus understand how it was that Jean Paul, when in Weimar, and under the influence of Frau von Kalb's personality, exclaimed: "This much is certain; the heart of the world is beating with a more spiritual and greater revolution than the political, and one quite as destructive."

What revolution? The emancipation of feeling from the conventions of society; the heart's audacious assumption of its right to regard its own code of laws as the new moral code, to re-cast morals in the interests of morality, and occasionally in the interests of inclination. The Weimar circle had no desire, no thought for anything beyond this, had neither practical nor social reforms in view. It is a genuinely German trait that outwardly they made deep obeisance to the laws which they privately evaded. In conversation, Goethe, in his riper years, invariably maintained that the existing conventions regulating the relations of the sexes were absolutely necessary in the interests of civilisation; and in their books authors gave expression to revolutionary sentiments which were more or less their own, only to recant at the end of the book. The hero either confesses his error, or commits suicide, or is punished for his defiance of society, or renounces society altogether (Karl Moor, Werther, Tasso, Linda). It is exactly the proceeding of the heretical authors of the Middle Ages, who concluded their books with a notice that everything in them must of course be interpreted in harmony with the doctrines and decrees of Holy Mother Church.

Into this Weimar circle of gifted women Madame de Staël, "the whirlwind in petticoats," as she has been called, is introduced when she comes to Germany. In the midst of them she produces the effect of some strange wild bird. What a contrast between her aims and their predilections I With them everything is personal, with her by this time everything is social. She has appeared before the public; she is striking doughty blows in the cause of social reform. For such deeds even the most advanced of these German women of the "enlightenment" period are of much too mild a strain. Her aim is to revolutionise life politically, theirs to make it poetical. The idea of flinging the gauntlet to a Napoleon would never have entered the mind of any one of them. What a use to make of a lady's glove, a pledge of love! It is not the rights of humanity, but the rights of the heart which they understand; their strife is not against the wrongs of life but against its prose. The relation of the gifted individual to society does not here, as in France, take the form of a conflict between the said individual's rebellious assertion of his liberty and the traditional compulsion of society, but of a conflict between the poetry of the desires of the individual and the prose of political and social conventions. Hence the perpetual glorification in Romantic literature of capacity and strength of desire, of wish; a subject to which Friedrich Schlegel in particular perpetually recurs. It is in reality the one outwardly directed power that men possess—impotence itself conceived as a power.

We find the same admiration of wish in Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller (Either-Or). "The reason why Aladdin is so refreshing is that we feel the childlike audacity of genius in its wildly fantastic wishes. How many are there in our day who dare really wish?" &c. The childlike, for ever the childlike! But who can wonder that wish, the mother of religions, the outward expression of inaction, became the catchword of the Romanticists? Wish is poetry; society as it exists, prose. It is only when we judge them from this standpoint that we rightly understand even the most serene, most chastened works of Germany's greatest poets. Goethe's Tasso, with its conflict between the statesman and the poet (i.e. between reality and poetry), its delineation of the contrast between these two who complete each other, and are only unlike "because nature did not make one man of them," is, in spite of its crystalline limpidity of style and its keynote of resignation, a product of the self-same long fermentation which provides the Romantic School with all its fermentative matter. The theme of Wilhelm Meister is in reality the same. It, too, represents the gradual, slow reconciliation and fusion of the dreamed of ideal and the earthly reality. But only the greatest minds rose to this height; the main body of writers of considerable, but less lucid intellect never got beyond the inward discord. The more poetry became conscious of itself as a power, the more the poet realised his dignity, and literature became a little world in itself with its own special technical interests, the more distinctly did the conflict with reality assume the subordinate form of a conflict with philistinism (see, for instance, Eichendorff's Krieg den Philistern). Poetry no longer champions the eternal rights of liberty against the tyranny of outward circumstances; it champions itself as poetry against the prose of life. This is the Teutonic, the German-Scandinavian, that is to say, the narrow literary conception of the service that poetry is capable of rendering to the cause of liberty.

"We must remember," says Kierkegaard (Begrebet Ironi, p. 322), "that Tieck and the entire Romantic School entered, or believed they entered, into relations with a period in which men were, so to speak, petrified, in final, unalterable social conditions. Everything was perfected and completed, in a sort of divine Chinese perfection, which left no reasonable longing unsatisfied, no reasonable wish unfulfilled. The glorious principles and maxims of 'use and wont' were the objects of a pious worship; everything, including the absolute itself, was absolute; men refrained from polygamy; they wore peaked hats; nothing was without its significance. Each man felt, with the precise degree of dignity that corresponded to his position, what he effected, the exact importance to himself and to the whole, of his unwearied endeavour. There was no frivolous indifference to punctuality in those days; all ungodliness of that kind tried to insinuate itself in vain. Everything pursued its tranquil, ordered course; even the suitor went soberly about his business; he knew that he was going on a lawful errand, was taking a most serious step. Everything went by clockwork. Men waxed enthusiastic over the beauties of nature on Midsummer Day; were overwhelmed by the thought of their sins on the great fast-days; fell in love when they were twenty, went to bed at ten o'clock. They married and devoted themselves to domestic and civic duties; they brought up families; in the prime of their manhood notice was taken in high places of their honourable and successful efforts; they lived on terms of intimacy with the pastor, under whose eye they did the many generous deeds which they knew he would recount in a voice trembling with emotion when the day came for him to preach their funeral sermon. They were friends in the genuine sense of the word, ein wirklicher Freund, wie man wirklicher Kanzleirat war."

I fail to see anything typical in this description. Except that we wear round hats instead of peaked ones, every word of it might apply to the present day; there is nothing especially indicative of one period more than another. No; the distinctive feature of the period in question is the gifted writer's, the Romanticist's, conception of philistinism. In my criticism of Johan Ludvig Heiberg's first Romantic attempts, I wrote: "They (the Romanticists) looked upon it from the philosophical point of view as finality, from the intellectual, as narrow-mindedness; not, like us, from the moral point of view, as contemptibility. With it they contrasted their own infinite longing.... They confronted its prose with their own youthful poetry; we confront its contemptibility with our virile will" (Samlede Skrifter, i. p. 467). As a general rule, then, they, with their thoughts and longings, fled society and reality, though now and again, as already indicated, they attempted, if not precisely to realise their ideas in life, at least to sketch a possible solution of the problem how to transform reality in its entirety into poetry.

Not that they show a spark of the indignation or the initiative which we find in the French Romantic author (George Sand, for instance); they merely amuse themselves with elaborating revolutionary, or at least startling fancies.

That which Goethe had attained to, namely, the power of moulding his surroundings to suit his own personal requirements, was to the young generation the point of departure. In this particular they from their youth saw the world from Goethe's point of view; they made the measure of freedom which he had won for himself and the conditions which had been necessary for the full development of his gifts and powers, the average, or more correctly the minimum, requirement of every man with talent, no matter how little. They transformed the requirements of his nature into a universal rule, ignored the self-denial he had laboriously practised and the sacrifices he had made, and not only proclaimed the unconditional rights of passion, but, with tiresome levity and pedantic lewdness, preached the emancipation of the senses. And another influence, very different from that of Goethe's powerful self-assertion, also made itself felt, namely, the influence of Berlin. To Goethe's free, unrestrained humanity there was added in Berlin an ample alloy of the scoffing, anti-Christian spirit which had emanated from the court of Frederick the Great, and the licence which had prevailed at that of his successor.

But both Goethe and Schiller paved the way for Romanticism not only positively, by their proclamation of the rights of passion, but also negatively, by the conscious attitude of opposition to their own age which they assumed in their later years. In another form, the Romanticist's aversion to reality is already to be found in them. I adduce two famous instances of the astonishing lack of interest shown by Goethe, the greatest creative mind of the day, in political realities; they prove at the same time how keen was his interest in science. Writing of the campaign against France during the French Revolution, a campaign in which he took part, he mentions that he spent most of his time in observing "various phenomena of colour and of personal courage." And after the battle of Jena Knebel writes: "Goethe has been busy with optics the whole time. We study osteology under his guidance, the times being well adapted to such study, as all the fields are covered with preparations." The bodies of his fallen countrymen did not inspire the poet with odes; he dissected them and studied their bones.

Such instances as these give us some impression of the attitude of aloofness which Goethe as a poet maintained towards the events of his day. But we must not overlook the fine side of his refusal to write patriotic war-songs during the struggle with Napoleon. "Would it be like me to sit in my room and write war-songs? In the night bivouacs, when we could hear the horses of the enemy's outposts neighing, then I might possibly have done it. But it was not my life, that, and not my affair; it was Theodor Körner's. Therefore his war-songs become him well. I have not a warlike nature nor warlike tastes, and war-songs would have been a mask very unbecoming to me. I have never been artificial in my poetry." Goethe, like his disciple Heiberg, was in this case led to refrain by the strong feeling that he only cared to write of what he had himself experienced; but he also tells us that he regarded themes of a historical nature as "the most dangerous and most thankless."

His ideal, and that of the whole period, is humanity pure and simple—a man's private life is everything. The tremendous conflicts of the eighteenth century and the "enlightenment" period are all, in consonance with the human idealism of the day, contained in the life story, the development story, of the individual. But the cult of humanity does not only imply lack of interest in history, but also a general lack of interest in the subject for its own sake. In one of his letters to Goethe, Schiller writes that two things are to be demanded of the poet and of the artist—in the first place, that he shall rise above reality, and in the second, that he shall keep within the bounds of the material, the natural. He explains his meaning thus: The artist who lives amidst unpropitious, formless surroundings, and consequently ignores these surroundings in his art, runs the risk of altogether losing touch with the tangible, of becoming abstract, or, if his mind is not of a robust type, fantastic; if, on the other hand, he keeps to the world of reality, he is apt to be too real, and, if he has little imagination, to copy slavishly and vulgarly. These words indicate, as it were, the watershed which divides the German literature of this period. On the one side we have the unnational art-poetry of Goethe and Schiller, with its continuation in the fantasies of the Romanticists, and on the other side the merely sensational or entertaining literature of the hour (Unterhaltungslitteratur), which is based on reality, but a philistine reality, the literature of which Lafontaine's sentimental bourgeois romances, and the popular, prosaic family dramas of Schröder, Iffland, and Kotzebue, are the best known examples. It was a misfortune for German literature that such a division came about. But, although the rupture of the better literature with reality first showed itself in a startling form in the writings of the Romanticists, we must not forget that the process had begun long before. Kotzebue had been the antipodes of Schiller and Goethe before he stood in that position to the Romanticists. Of this we get a vivid impression from the following anecdote.[2]