Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature – 3. The Reaction in France

In the description given of the evening after a tiring walk taken by Tieck and Wackenroder in the Fichtelgebirge, Tieck's conception of nature is still more distinctly associated with his personal impressions: "Wackenroder, unaccustomed to such fatigue, flung himself at once upon the bed, but Tieck was too excited. He could not sleep after all the experiences of that day. The spirits of nature awoke. He opened the window. It was the mildest, most magnificent summer night. The moon shed her soft, clear beams upon him. There it was before his eyes, the moonlit, witching night, nature with her ancient, yet ever new marvels and magic! His heart once again swelled high. To what far, unknown goal was he being drawn with irresistible force? Softly and soothingly the clear tones of a horn came floating through the night. A feeling of sadness stole over him, and yet he was intensely happy."[42 - Köpke, i. 139, 163.]

Observe that not even the horn is wanting. What is wanting, what Tieck is destitute of, is any definite aim. We have the same thing in Sternbald, where the wandering artist, led only by his longings and his prophetic enthusiasm, is always, as he himself confesses, forgetting his real aim. "It is not possible," says one of the characters in the book, "to forget one's aim, for this reason, that the sensible man arranges matters so that he has no aim." No one can fail to see the close connection between this particular species of feeling for nature and Romantic arbitrariness, nor how they mutually develop each other.

Let us see the kind of landscapes which Franz Sternbald understands and paints, and how he understands and paints them.

In one part of the book we read: "This was the landscape which Franz intended to paint; but the real scene seemed very prosaic to him, compared with its reflection in the water." Clear outlines, definite forms, are dry prose; but the reflection in the water, the picture as it were to its second power, is Romantic refinement, duplication, glorification. In another part Franz says: "I should choose to paint lonely, terrible scenes – ruinous, crumbling bridges spanning the space between two precipitous rocks, with a foaming torrent raging in the abyss below; strayed travellers whose cloaks flap in the wet wind; horrid brigands rushing from their caves, stopping and plundering carriages, and fighting with travellers." Real stage scenery this, with melodrama into the bargain!

And in what spirit is nature apprehended? "Sometimes," says Franz, "my imagination sets to work and will not rest until it has thought out something quite unheard of. It would have me paint strange objects, of complicated and almost incomprehensible construction – figures composed of parts of all kinds of animals, their lower extremities being plants; insects and reptiles with a strange humanness about them, expressing human moods and passions in a wonderful and horrible manner."

What a picture! what a jumble of monstrosities! Can you not hear Hoffmann fast approaching with his caravan of monsters? The elephant stands on his head, and has a trunk which ends in a garfish; the cat writes its memoirs; the door-knocker is really an old market-woman, &c., &c. Are we not reminded here again, as in Der Freischütz, of the temptations of St. Anthony, as painted by Teniers, or, better still, by Höllen-Breughel, with a regular witches' Sabbath. To the genuine Romanticist, nature, with all her myriads of living forms and beings, seems a great toy-cupboard, and all the toys babble and chatter like those in Andersen's fairy tale.

Read this description of a romantic landscape taken from Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen: "From a height they looked down upon a romantic country, strewn with towns and castles, with temples and tombs, a country which united the gentle charms of inhabited plains with the terrible charms of deserts and precipitous mountains. The most beautiful colours were happily blended. Mountain peaks gleamed like fireworks in their coverings of ice and snow. The smiling plain was clothed in the freshest of green. The distance decked itself in every shade of blue, and the deep blue of the sea threw into relief the innumerable bright pennons waving from the masts of numerous fleets. In the background we could see a shipwreck, in the foreground a merry country feast; far off the terribly beautiful eruption of a volcano and the desolation wrought by an earthquake, and near at hand a pair of lovers exchanging the sweetest caresses under sheltering trees. On one side of this scene a frightful battle was raging, and at no great distance from the battle was to be seen a theatre with a ludicrous play going on. Upon the other side, in the foreground, the corpse of a young girl lay upon a bier, with an inconsolable lover and weeping parents kneeling by its side; in the background sat a sweet mother with her child at her breast, angels nestling at her feet, and peeping through the branches above her head."

What a pot-pourri! And over it all is shed the indispensable pale, yellow light of that friend and well-wisher, protector and betrayer of lovers, that supreme comforter and divinity of the Romanticists – the man in the moon. He is their salvation. His round face and his profile have exactly the degree of distinctness permissible or possible in a Romantic countenance. All the knights of Romanticism wear his yellow livery. And a truer knight of the moon than Franz Sternbald is not to be found.

"I would," he says, "that I could fill the whole world with my song of love, that I could move the moonlight and the rosy dawn, so that they should echo my grief and happiness, until trees, branches, leaves, and grass all took up the melody, repeating it as with millions of tongues." Hereupon he sings a "moonlight song":

"Hinter'm Wasser wie flimmernde Flammen,
Berggipfel oben mit Gold beschienen,
Neigen rauschend und ernst die grünen
Gebüsche die blinkenden Häupter zusammen.

Welle, rollst du herauf den Schein,
Des Mondes rund freundlich Angesicht?
Es merkt's und freundlich bewegt sich der Hain,
Streckt die Zweig' entgegen dem Zauberlicht.

Fangen die Geister an auf den Fluthen zu springen,
Thun sich die Nachtblumen auf mit Klingen,
Wacht die Nachtigall im dicksten Baum,
Verkündigt dichterisch ihren Traum.
Wie helle, blendende Strahlen die Töne nieder fliessen,
Am Bergeshang den Wiederhall zu grüssen."[43 - "Beyond the lake there's a glittering and flaming; the mountain-tops are tipped with gold; gravely the bushes rustle and bend, and lay their twinkling green heads together. Wave, art thou rolling to us the reflection of the round, friendly face of the moon? The trees recognise it, and joyfully stretch forth their branches towards the magic light. The spirits begin to dance on the waves; the flowers of the night unfold their petals with melodious sound; where the leaves are thickest the nightingale awakes and tells her dream; her notes flow forth like clear, dazzling beams, to greet the echo on the mountain side."]

Here we have it all! The glittering flames of the moon, bushes with twinkling heads, rolling billows bearing onwards the face of the full moon, spirits dancing upon waves, night as described by Novalis, night flowers, and a nightingale whose song flows like clear, dazzling moonbeams.

And exactly the same thing recurs again and again. Franz has a dream: "Unperceived, he painted the hermit and his devotion, the forest and its moonlight; he even succeeded, he himself knew not how, in getting the nightingale's song into his picture." Oh, that musical pictorial art! Was not Goethe right in saying that there is more music than painting in the book?

It is very significant that the man who revelled thus in the fantastic suggestions of a district where nature was poor and sterile, should have altogether failed to appreciate the richness and luxuriance, the abundance of healthy sap and vigour, which distinguish the south of England. Shakespeare has had few such fervent admirers as Tieck; and Tieck naturally had the desire to see with his own eyes the natural surroundings amidst which his great teacher and master had spent his life, and from which he had derived his earliest impressions. He expected much. But, oh! what a disappointment! That mind which fancied itself akin to Shakespeare's found nothing congenial in the scenery round Shakespeare's home. The chief characteristic of these counties is an almost incredible luxuriance and vigour of growth. But this wealth of vegetation is unpoetical to the Romanticist, because it is useful, because it has a purpose. Only the blossom which bears no fruit is romantic. We understand his disappointment. Nowhere else does one see such mighty, spreading oaks, nowhere such high and succulent grass. As far as the eye can reach, the green carpet spreads over the undulating fields and the rich meadows, where magnificent cattle graze and ruminate. Quantities of white, yellow, and blue meadow and field flowers break the monotony of colour, and breathe a perfume which the moisture of the air keeps so fresh that it never palls. This vegetation is above all else fresh, not, like that of the south, striking in its contours. The watery, juicy plant does not live long; life streams through it and is gone. The moist air envelops trees and plants in a sort of luminous vapour which catches and tempers the sunbeams; and, as in Denmark, banks of clouds constantly traverse the pale blue sky. When this sky happens to be for a short time perfectly clear, and the sun reaches the earth without passing through mist, the rain and dewdrops sparkle on the green grass and upon the silken and velvet petals of the myriads of gay flowers more brilliantly than diamonds. What matter that the grass is destined to be eaten? Does not part of its beauty lie in its nutritious look? What matter that the fruitful fields are cultivated with the assistance of all the newest agricultural machinery, or that the cattle are tended with the most intelligent solicitude? Is not this the very reason why both animals and plants look so strong, so well nourished, and so nourishing? What we have here is certainly not the imposing beauty of the desert or the ocean, or of Swiss scenery. But has not this landscape a poetry of its own? Who can have spent an evening in Kew Gardens without mentally placing the elfin dance from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Merry Wives of Windsor in exactly this scenery, these beautiful parks, with their gigantic old oaks? It was in these surroundings that Shakespeare wrote them. We can divine with what eyes he looked upon the landscape. With what eyes does Tieck look upon it? "Having seen London," says Köpke, "he wished to make acquaintance with some other part of England. Where should he turn his steps, if not to Shakespeare's birthplace? On the way he visited Oxford. But neither was this scenery to his taste. The country they drove through was luxuriantly green, splendidly cultivated; but it was too well ordered, too artificial (No primitive poetry!); it had lost its originality. It lacked that simplicity, that holiness, as he called it, which touches the heart, and by which he had so often been moved in the most sterile parts of his native land. Here industry had destroyed the poetic aroma."

It is clear, then, that there must have been something in the scenery of his own country which appealed to Tieck's personal predispositions. The fantastic conception of nature would not have been carried to such an extreme in this particular country, if there had not been something fantastic in the scenery of the country. It is very evident that German scenery must have met the fantastic spectator half way.

In the first volume of this work, I attempted, by means of a description of Italian scenery, to show how unromantic even the most beautiful of it is. Nor, in spite of the Black Forest and the Blocksberg, can German scenery be called really fantastic; for, as Taine says, it is only the beauty of art which is fantastic; that of nature is more than fantastic; the fantastic does not exist except in our human brain. Still, nature does provide excuses for a certain amount of fantasy. It is especially to be born in mind that in characteristically German scenery the sea is absent, and with it the feeling of wideness and freeness which it alone gives. In river and mountain scenery there is never the wide, open horizon to which we Danes are accustomed.

But, not to lose myself in generalisations, let me give an idea of the scenery amidst which Tieck himself lived longest – that district in the neighbourhood of Dresden which goes by the name of Saxon Switzerland. I shall describe in a few words how it impresses me, and then proceed to show what impression it produces on a Romantic poet. This I can do reliably and exactly, for I have personally known several Romantic poets, and have recently travelled through the district in question in company with an old poet of Romantic tendencies.

We had spent some days in the clear mountain air, looking out over the high open country and rocky peaks of Bohemia, which resemble a sea, with sharply outlined mountains emerging like islands – an interminable stretch of fields and pine-clad rocks. We went through the Uttenwalder Grund up to the Bastei. The valley is shut in by high, fantastic sandstone rocks, piled up in layers, with pine trees clustering in every crevice. The upper part of the rock often projects threateningly over the lower, seeming as though about to fall. One sees many strange freaks of nature – gateways, even triple gateways. In climbing up to the Bastei, one has on the left that remarkable landscape with the steep rocks standing out like giant gravestones – tragic, awe-inspiring scenery, that would make a fitting background for the dance of the dead nuns in Robert le Diable. Standing on the Bastei, one looks over the great plain with its precipitous mountain islands (the fortress of Königstein is built upon one of these), straight, hard lines, absolutely unpicturesque. Kuhstall is an enormous dome of rock. The whole scenery has the appearance of being designed by man, of being a fantastic art production. The last time I saw it, in glorious sunlight, the view was marvellously imposing. Over the great pine-forest which clothed the lower heights, its tree-tops looking like felt or wool, lay a bluish green haze, which spread up the sides of the surrounding hills. The Bohemian villages lay in groups, shining like windows in the sun – in the distance were basaltic mountains, nearer at hand pyramidal, square, or obelisk-shaped rocks. Wherever a single deciduous tree stood among the pines, its yellow autumnal leaves shone amidst their dark surroundings like patches of gold. The only other yellow was that of the lichen upon some of the rocks. These rocks looked as though giants in the morning of time had pelted each other with them, as children pelt each other with stones, or had played at heaping them one on the top of another.

From the Wintersberg the hills look like the remains of a Cyclopean city. An enormous rock, steep and smooth as a wall, stands, decked with firs, in the centre of a wide landscape. Of all one sees, Prebischthor is perhaps what strikes one as being most beautiful. Here again the rocks have taken a fantastic shape, that of a gateway. A gigantic, beam-like rock has laid itself like a lintel across two rock towers. Sitting under it, one looks down upon two separate landscapes, one through the arch to the left, the other an open one upon the right. As I sat there in the evening, the first was hard, cold, austere; over the other the sun was setting, red and glowing. The one was, as it were, in a major, the other in a minor key; the one was like a face without eyes, the other glowed and beamed.

Such was this scenery in the eyes of an ordinary, sober-minded traveller. The Romanticist who was my companion seemed to me to be less moved by the spectacle than I was; at least he said very little about it during the course of the day. But when, towards night, we were making our way down the mountain, his imagination was suddenly fired. It was quite dark, and the darkness acted upon his nerves. It seemed to him as if more and more of the spirits of nature came forth, the darker it grew. And when, in the distance, we saw the first points of light coming from the windows of houses on the mountain side, houses which we could not distinguish on account of the darkness, he had the feeling that these windows must be in the rock itself, and that we could see in if we were only near enough. The illuminated panes were to him great eyes, with which the spirit of the mountain looked out at us; he felt as if the wooded hillside were watching us. He was in a weird, eccentric, genuinely Romantic mood, and I could not follow him. But on this occasion I had the opportunity of learning by personal observation how a German Romanticist of the good old days viewed nature; how it was not until night that it really became nature to him; how he did not look at it, but to one side of it or behind it; and by observing how much more, and yet how much less, my companion felt face to face with nature than I did, I arrived at an understanding of the legitimacy and the narrowness, the unnaturalness and the poetry of the Romantic conception of nature.[44 - The above is a faithful account of the effect produced by this scenery upon the Danish poet M. Goldschmidt in the autumn of 1872.]

XI

ROMANTIC DUPLICATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

Those among my readers who have stood in a room lined with mirrors, and seen themselves and everything else reflected ad infinitum, above, below, on every side, have some idea of the vertigo which the study of Romantic art at times produces.

Every one who has read Holberg's Ulysses von Ithacia remembers how droll the effect is when the characters, as they are perpetually doing, make fun of themselves and what they represent – when, for example, Ulysses exhibits the long beard which has grown during the ten years' campaign, or when we read upon a screen, "This is Troy," or when, at the close, the Jews rush in and tear off the actor's back the clothes which he had borrowed to play Ulysses in. Histrionic art, as every one knows, depends for its effect upon illusion. And illusion is an aim common to many of the arts. A statue and a painting deceive quite as much as a play, the illusion being contingent upon our momentarily taking the stone for a human being, and the painted flat surface for receding reality, in exactly the same way as we forget the actor in his rôle. This illusion, however, is only complete for a moment. It is, indeed, possible for the perfectly uneducated man to be entirely deceived. An Indian soldier in Calcutta shot an actor who was playing the part of Othello, exclaiming: "It shall never be said that a negro murdered a white woman in my presence!" But in the case of the educated man, the illusion comes and goes; it comes at the moment when the tragedy brings tears into his eyes, and goes at the moment when he draws out his pocket-handkerchief and looks at his neighbour. The effect of the work of art is, as it were, focussed in this illusion. The illusion is the reflection of the work of art in the spectator's mind – the appearance, the play, by means of which the unreal becomes reality to the spectator.

In the simple, straightforward work of art no special attention is devoted to illusion; it is not aimed at; nothing is done to strengthen it or to give it piquancy; but still less is anything done to destroy it.

It is not difficult, however, to understand how a certain piquant quality may be communicated to the illusion produced by any art. When, for instance, a Hermes, or any idol, is represented on a bas-relief, when a picture represents a studio or a room with pictures hanging on the walls, a strong indication is hereby conveyed that the bas-relief itself is not intended to affect us as statuary, nor the pictures as painting. And the same sort of effect is produced when one or other of the characters in a comedy cries: "Do you take me for a stage-uncle?"

The theatrical illusion is still further heightened, or, to be quite correct, is still more entirely forgotten, when some of the characters in a play themselves perform a play, as in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream. It seems extraordinary or impossible that the spectators of this second play should also be acting. The illusion here is artificially strengthened, and yet at the same time weakened, by attention being drawn to it. It is plain that this play with illusions had an immense attraction for Tieck; it was inevitable that it should have. Since it is illusion which makes art serious reality to the spectator, it is by the destroying of the illusion that he is made to feel strongly that art is free, fanciful play.

So Tieck mocks ironically at things which are usually ignored in order not to disturb the illusion. In Puss in Boots the King says to Prince Nathaniel: "But do tell me; how is it that you who live so far away can speak our language so fluently?" Nathaniel: "Hush!" The King: "What?" Nathaniel: "Hush, hush! For any sake be quiet, or the audience too will be finding out how unnatural it is." And, sure enough, one of the spectators presently remarks: "Why in the world can't the prince talk a foreign language and have it translated by his interpreter? What utter nonsense it all is!" This last speech is of course sarcasm, aimed at that demand for realism in art of which Iffland and Kotzebue were advocates. We have one expression of the demand in question in the French misconception of the Aristotelian doctrine of the unity of time and place. Writing on this subject, Schlegel, following Lessing's example, remarked that, after one had taken the great plunge and agreed to regard the stage as the world, it was surely easy to take the lesser one and sometimes permit the said stage to represent different localities. And the Romanticists were never weary of extolling the old Shakespearian theatre (where the place represented was simply intimated by a label attached to the scenes) as a higher development of art than that of their own day. The champions of realism in art were at that time advocating the substitution of solid walls for scenes; Schlegel maintained that those who insisted on having three walls on the stage were logically obliged to go a step farther and have a fourth wall, on the side towards the audience.

It is out of pure defiance of the philistine conception of art that Tieck amuses himself by seating an audience upon the stage and having the play within the play performed to the accompaniment of their critical remarks. They censure, they praise, now condemning a scene as superfluous, now approving the author for his courage in introducing horses upon the stage. While the learned man and the fool are disputing in the palace before the king upon his throne, the former says: "The gist of my argument is, that the new play Puss in Boots is a good play." "That is exactly what I deny," says the fool; whereupon one of the audience cries in amazement: "What! the play itself is mentioned in the play!"

A still more extraordinary state of matters prevails in Die Verkehrte Welt ("The Topsy-turvy World"). As Scaramouch is riding through the forest on his donkey, a thunderstorm suddenly comes on. One naturally expects him to take shelter. Not at all. "Where the deuce does this storm come from?" he cries; "there's not a word about it in my part. What absurd nonsense! My donkey and I are getting soaked. Machinist! machinist! hi! in the devil's name stop it!" The machinist enters and excuses himself, explains that the audience had expressed a desire for stage-thunder, and that he had consequently met their wishes. Scaramouch entreats the audience to change its mind, but to no purpose; thunder they will have. "What! in a sedate historical play?" It thunders again. "It's a very simple matter," says the machinist; "I blow a little pounded colophony through aflame; that makes the lightning; and at the same moment an iron ball is rolled overhead, and there you have the thunder." Play with illusion cannot be carried further than this except by introducing in the play which the performing audience is witnessing, another play acted before yet another audience. "How extraordinary it is!" says Scävola, the blockhead; "we are an audience, and yonder sit people who are an audience too." The plays are fitted into one another like puzzle-boxes.

The madness reached its climax when, within this new inmost play, there appears yet another play. It is confusion worse confounded. "Nay, this is too much," cries Scävola. "Just think of it, good people all! Here we sit as an audience and watch a play; in that play sits another audience watching a third play, and for the actors in that third play yet another play is being acted." And he goes on to explain, like a true Romanticist: "One often has dreams like this, and they are terrible; and thoughts, too, sometimes spin themselves in this fashion ever farther and farther into the heart of things. And both the one and the other are enough to drive a man crazy."

But the music between the acts contains the key to the whole work. The lively Allegro says: "Do ye indeed know what ye desire, ye who seek for coherence in all things? When the golden wine gleams in the glass and ye are animated by its good spirit, when ye feel doubly full of life and soul, and all the floodgates of your being are opened, what do ye think of then? Can ye order and regulate then? Ye enjoy yourselves and the harmonious confusion." And the Rondo says: "Whenever the philosopher is surprised by a thing, and cannot understand it, he exclaims: 'There is no reason in it.' Nay, when reason penetrates to the heart of itself, when it has investigated its own inmost being and carefully observed itself, it says: 'In this, too, there is no reason.' … But the man who with reason despises reason, is a reasonable man. Much poetry is prose gone mad, much prose is only crippled poetry; that which lies between poetry and prose is not the best either. O music! whither tend thy steps? Neither is there any reason in thee."

In his critical writings Tieck himself gives us the clue to his procedure by averring that the aim of Romantic comedy is to lull the spectator into a dreamy mood. "In the midst of a dream," he says, "the soul often does not believe firmly in its visions; but if the dreamer sleeps on, the endless succession of new magic appearances restores the illusion, keeps him in a charmed world, makes him lose the standard of reality, delivers him up at last completely to the dominion of the incomprehensible."

Music is the formless deep to which the wearied imagination of the Romanticist returns after contemplating itself reflected ad infinitum in its mirror chamber. And the work of art may be likened to one of those carved ivory balls which enclose a whole set of ivory balls, one within the other.

This style of drama was amusingly parodied by J. L. Heiberg in his witty satirical play, Julespög og Nytaarslöjer ("Christmas Fun and New Year's Drollery"). There is less freedom and originality in Hoffmann's imitation, Prinzessin Blandina, in which, in scenes laid behind the scenes, the Stage Manager and the Director discuss the play. The Stage Manager says: "Machinist, give the signal for night." Director: "Why, you are surely not going to have night already? It will disturb the illusion. It is hardly three minutes since Roderick breakfasted in the desert." Stage Manager: "It is the direction given in the book." Director: "Then it is the book that is crazy, and the play is written without the slightest understanding of dramatic art."

In a different department of literature, in the writings of our Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, we come upon the mirror chamber with its repeated reflections psychologically applied. As the German Romanticist ironically hovers above his own play, with its Chinese puzzle-box scenes and figures, so the Danish psychologist draws further and further away from his subject by putting one author, as it were, inside another. Listen to his explanation in the Afsluttende Efterskrift ("Concluding Postscript"): "My position is even a more external one than that of any author whose characters are imaginary, but who appears personally in his preface. A prompter, impersonal, or personal in the third degree, I have created authors whose prefaces, nay, whose very names are their own production. In the pseudonymous books there is not a word of my own; I judge them as an uninterested third party, have no knowledge of their meaning except that of the ordinary reader, and not the most remote private connection with them, as is indeed impossible in the case of a doubly reflected communication. A single word from me personally, in my own name, would be a piece of presumptuous self-forgetfulness, and would, from the dialectical point of view, destroy the pseudonymous character of the work. I am no more the publisher, Victor Eremita, than I am the Seducer or the Assessor in Enten-Eller; Eremita is the poetically real subjective thinker, whom we meet again in In Vino Veritas. In Frygt og Bæven ("Fear and Trembling") I am no more Johannes de Silentio than I am the Knight of Faith whom he depicts; and just as little am I the author of the preface to the book, it being a characteristic utterance of a poetically-real subjective thinker. In that tale of woe, Skyldig? – Ikke Skyldig? ("Guilty or not Guilty?"), I am no more the experimenter than I am the subject of the experiment, since the experimenter is a poetically-real subjective thinker, and the being he experiments on is his psychologically inevitable production. I am a negligeable quantity, i.e. it is immaterial what I am… I have all along been sensible that my personality was an obstruction which the Pseudonymi must involuntarily and inevitably long to be rid of, or to have made as insignificant as possible, yet which they at the same time, regarding the matter from the ironical and reflective standpoint, must desire to retain as repellant opposition; for I stand to them in the ironically combined relation of secretary and dialectically reduplicated author of the author or authors."

However different the causes of the reduplication may be in this case, the phenomenon itself is of near kin to the foregoing one. To keep the general public at a distance, to avoid laying bare his heart, and, most important of all, to avoid the tiresome responsibility entailed by speaking in his own name, Kierkegaard places as many authors between himself and the public as possible. Even taking his reasons into consideration, I confess that to me the proceeding seems super-subtle, a sort of reminiscence of the Romantic irony. For although Kierkegaard, as regards his matter, is in many ways ahead of Romanticism, he is still connected with it by his style. It is natural enough that he cannot, or will not, bear the responsibility for what his imaginary characters, the Assessor and the Seducer, say; but it is pure imagination on his part to suppose himself capable of producing his authors at second hand, to suppose, for instance, that he has created the hero in the Engagement Story exactly as Frater Taciturnus would have created him. Several of his would-be authors, Constantin Constantius and Frater Taciturnus, for example, are scarcely to be distinguished from one another, and there is nothing peculiarly characteristic about their productions. The third part of Stadierne ("Stages on the Road of Life") was, as Kierkegaard's own memoranda show, originally intended to form part of Enten-Eller. When he remarks (in Afstuttende Efterskrift, p. 216) that the most attentive reader will hardly succeed in finding in that work, either in language or turn of thought, a single reminiscence of Enten-Eller, he betrays great capability of self-deception. Both works show in every line that they are written by the same author; in both we come upon the same thoughts, often expressed in almost the same words. The Assessor in Stadierne judges Aladdin exactly as he is judged by the Æsthete in Enten-Eller: "What makes Aladdin so great is the strength of his desire."

Along with all this duplication and reduplication we have in the case of the Romanticists the wildest caprices in the matter of the order of presentation. The Topsy-turvy World begins with the epilogue and ends with the prologue; by such pranks imagination proclaims its independence of all law. Frater Taciturnus records what happened to him last year along with what is happening to him this year; every day at noon he notes down what happened that day a year ago (What a memory!), and at midnight what has occurred during the day. Naturally, it is almost impossible to separate the two threads of event. In Hoffmann's Kater Murr, the cat writes its memoirs on sheets of paper which have its master's, Kapellmeister Kreisler's, memoranda on the other side. Both sides of the sheets are printed, the one following the other, so that we read two utterly unconnected manuscripts mixed up with each other, often with interruptions in the middle of sentences or words. Wilfulness, caprice, play with one's own production could scarcely be carried farther. Yet the dissolution of established form did go further, much further. The Romanticists did not rest content with having shattered the conventions of art; they proceeded to decompose the Human personality, and that in many different manners.

It was Novalis who led the way. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen the hero seems to have a foreknowledge of everything that happens to him. "Each new thing that he saw and heard seemed only to shove back bolts, to open secret doors in his soul." But the strangest impression of all is produced on him by his discovery of a mysterious book in the cave of the hermit Count of Hohenzollern, a book in which, although he is as yet unable to interpret it, he finds the enigma of his existence, an existence beginning before his birth and stretching into the future after his death. Novalis's romance being an allegory and myth, his design being to make a single individual represent the whole eternal story of the soul, he turns to his purpose one of the oldest hypotheses of humanity, the idea that the individual reappears generation after generation. Thus the past and the future take part in the present, in the shape of memory and prophetic intuition. He does not actually believe in the transmigration of souls, but to him, the Romanticist who lives in the contemplation of the eternal, time is of such subordinate significance that, just as he recognises no difference between a natural and a supernatural event, so he sees none between past, present, and future. In this way the individual existence is extended throughout an unlimited period of history.

In Danish literature we find this Romantic use of the idea of a previous existence in Heiberg's De Nygifte. The mother is telling her adopted son about the death of her real son: —

"Den Morgen, da ban led sin skrækkelige Dom,
Endnu var det neppe daget —
Traadte Slutteren ind og sagde: 'Kom!
Klokken er nu paa Slaget.'

"Da sank ban for sidste Gang til mit Bryst
Og udbröd: 'Et Ord du mig give,