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

Et kräftigt Ord, som kan vaere min Tröst
Paa min sidste Gang i Live!"

"Og jeg sagde …
Men, Fredrik, du skræmmer mig! sig …
Du rejser dig … hvad bar du i Sinde?
Du stirrer paa mig saa bleg som et Lig …

Fredrik

"O Moder! Moder! hold inde!

Du sagde: 'Naar du for din Frelser staar,
Da sig: Min Gud og min Broder,
Tilgiv mig for dine Martyrsaar,
For min Anger og for min Moder.'

Gertrud

"Ha! hvoraf ved du det?

Fredrik

"Mig det var,
Forst nu mig selv jeg fatter.
Det er din virkelige Sön, du har,
Og nu lever han Livet atter."[45 - "The morning he suffered his terrible sentence, ere yet it was day, the warder entered and said: 'Come! the hour is about to strike.' Then he fell on my breast for the last time, crying: 'Say a word, a word of power, to strengthen me for the last steps I am to take on earth!' And I said … But, Fredrik, you frighten me. What is it? Why do you rise and gaze on me thus, pale as a corpse? Fredrik– O mother! mother! stop! You said: 'When you stand before your Creator, say: My God and my Brother, forgive me for the sake of Thy passion, of my repentance, and of my mother!' Gertrud– Oh, tell how you know this? Fredrik– Because it was to me you spoke; not till this moment have I understood myself; I am your own son, now living life over again."]

Heiberg here makes a beautiful and ingenious use of the idea. But the Romanticists are not content with this. It is not enough for them to transpose the personality into the past, or to deck it with the bright peacock's tail of future existences. They split the Ego into strips, they resolve it into its elements. They scatter it abroad through space, as they stretch it out through time. For the laws of space and time affect them not.

Self-consciousness is self-duplication. But it is an unhealthy self which cannot overcome and master this selfduplication. This we saw in the case of Lovell and of Roquairol. There is no greater misery than morbid self-contemplation. He who indulges in it separates himself from himself, observes himself from the point of view of a spectator, and ere long experiences the horrible feeling of the prisoner who, when he looks up, sees the eye of the warder at the little glass pane in the door of his cell. His own eye has become quite as terrible to him as another man's. What tends to make this condition permanent is partly the religious and moral feeling that one ought never to lose sight of, but to be always labouring at and improving one's self, and partly natural curiosity regarding the unknown; one looks upon one's self as a country, the coast of which is known, but the interior of which is still to be explored.

In the case of the man who is healthy in mind and body, this exploration goes on slowly, almost imperceptibly. One fine day the poor prisoner, looking up from his work, finds that the eye has disappeared from the peep-hole. Only now does he begin to breathe, to live. Whether his work be important or unimportant, divine or merely useful, whether he be a Michael Angelo or a cork-cutter, from that moment there is a feeling of balance and unity in his mind; he feels that he is an entire being. In the case of sickly, inactive natures, the eye is never removed from the peep-hole, and a long continuation of this condition leads the individual to the verge of madness. But it is to this very condition that the Romanticists cling. It is this which gives birth to the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger,"[46 - The apparition of a person, which appears to himself. There being no exact English equivalent of "Doppelgänger" and "Doppelgängerei," these words are retained throughout in German. —Transl.] an idea which finds its first expression in Jean Paul's Leibgeber-Schoppe (in the meditation on Fichte's Ego), and is to be found in almost all Hoffmann's tales, reaching its climax in his chief work, Die Elixire des Teufels. It crops up in the writings of all the Romanticists; we have it in Kleist's Amphitryon, in Achim von Arnim's Die beiden Waldemar, in Chamisso's poem, Erscheinung, and Brentano treats it comically in Die mehreren Wehmüller. To Hoffmann the Ego is simply a disguise worn on the top of another disguise, and he amuses himself by peeling off these disguises one by one. He carries out what Roquairol only suggested.

Theodor Hoffmann's life explains the peculiar form which Romantic self-duplication took in his case. He was born in Königsberg in 1776, the son of parents whose inharmonious union was soon dissolved. His mother belonged to a painfully well-regulated and conventional family; his father was as eccentric as he was clever, and had irregular habits which were a great affliction to his wife's relations. Theodor lost his mother early, and the pedantic severity with which his uncle brought him up only made the gifted boy's occasional wild outbursts wilder and madder. He found vent for his feelings in peculiar musical compositions and remarkably clever caricatures. He studied law as a profession, but at the same time devoted much attention to music. At an early age he fell in love with a young married woman. Feeling that the violence of this passion was undermining his reason, he cured himself of it by tearing himself away from his native town, at the age of twenty.

Soon after this he received a government appointment in Posen. The wild dissipation which prevailed in Poland in those days carried him completely off his feet and materially altered his character. For caricaturing one of his superiors he was removed to Plozk, where he led a more regular life.

In 1804 he was transferred to Warsaw, at that time a Prussian town; and it was the full, varied, and, to a German, quite foreign life of this important city which gave Hoffmann's literary tendencies their decisive, final bent. Much that is mad and strange in his writings may be attributed to the wild, reckless joviality of the Warsaw days. In Warsaw he met Zacharias Werner, another author who was distinctly influenced by the social life of Poland in the beginning of the century. And here, whilst conscientiously fulfilling the duties of his appointment, he not only found time to cultivate his favourite art, music, and to frequent the society of other musical devotees, but also managed to decorate several halls with frescoes, to ornament a library with alto-reliefs executed in bronze, and to paint a room in the Egyptian style, adroitly introducing amongst the extraordinary representations of Egyptian gods, caricatures of his acquaintances, whom he provided with tails and wings. It was in Warsaw too that he conducted concerts for the first time.

In 1806, as every one knows, Prussian rule in Warsaw came to an end. Hoffmann saw the streets of the town crowded, first with the vanguard of the Russian army – Tartars, Cossacks, and Bashkirs – then with Murat's troops, watched the migrations of the races set in motion by Napoleon's campaign, and at last saw Napoleon himself, whom he, the good German, abhorred as a tyrant. In Dresden, in 1813, he was eye-witness of several small skirmishes and one battle; he walked over a battlefield, lived through a famine and a species of plague which followed in the train of the war – in short, his imagination was fertilised by all the horrors of the period, the first result being, characteristically enough, merely a set of funny caricatures of the French.

When still quite a young man, he had married a beautiful Polish lady, who made him a devoted and patient wife; it was probably thanks to her that, in spite of his overstrained nerves, he lived as long as he did. His marriage by no means precluded many passionate attachments to other women, but all these seem to have had their root rather in imagination than in any real feeling. Three days after a young lady with whom he was madly in love had engaged herself to another, he was perfectly happy, having cured himself of his passion by satirising it. He was helped to bear his woe by the pleasure of caricaturing it.

After figuring as a theatrical architect in Bamberg and conductor of an orchestra in Dresden, he went to Berlin, where he spent the last years of his life as a member of the Kammergericht (one of the principal courts of justice). As was natural, the astonishingly gifted man who could write books, improvise on the piano, compose operas, draw caricatures, and scintillate wit when he was in the humour, became a lion in social circles and a fêted frequenter of the taverns. He devoted a great share of his energy and talent to the observation of his own moods, which he watched closely and described day by day in a kind of diary.

Wine, which he only regarded as an exciting stimulant, was in reality much more than this to him. To it he owed much of his inspiration, his visions, those hallucinations which at first were fanciful, but became ever more serious. In his case intoxication actually produced a new kind of fantastic poetry. When under the influence of alcohol, he saw the darkness suddenly illuminated by phosphorescent light, or saw a gnome rise through the floor, or saw himself surrounded by spectres and terrible grimacing figures, which went on disappearing and reappearing in all kinds of grotesque disguises.

It was almost inevitable that this painstaking observer of his own moods and of the external peculiarities, more especially the oddities, of other men, should care little about nature. If he took a walk in summer, it was only to reach some place or other where he would be certain to meet human beings; and he seldom passed a pastry-cook's or a tavern without dropping in to see what kind of people frequented it. This explains the striking want of any feeling for fresh, open-air nature in his books. His mind was at home in a tavern, not in forest solitudes. But if his sense of the beauties of nature was weak, his enthusiasm for art was so much the more intense; genuine Romanticist that he is, half of his productions treat of art.

The peculiar, Romantic theory of human personality held by a poet of this temperament and this development was a product of over-impressionable and over-strained nerves and of irregular living. In his diary I find the following memoranda: —

"1804. – Drank Bischof at the new club from 4 to 10. Frightfully agitated in the evening. Nerves excited by the spiced wine. Possessed by thoughts of death and Doppelgänger.

"1809. – Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 6th; I imagine myself looking at my Ego through a kaleidoscope – all the forms moving round me are Egos, and annoy me by what they do and leave undone.

"1810. – Why do I think so much, sleeping and waking, about madness?"

It was a settled conviction with Hoffmann that when anything good befalls a man, an evil power is always lurking in the background to paralyse the action of the good power. As he expresses it: "The devil thrusts his tail into everything." He was haunted, says his biographer, Hitzig, by a fear of mysterious horrors, of "Doppelgänger" and spectral apparitions of every kind. He used to look anxiously round while writing about them; and if it was at night, he would often wake his wife and beg her to keep him company till he had finished. He imparted his own fear of ghosts to the characters he created; he drew them "as he himself was drawn in the great book of creation." It does not surprise us to learn that of his own works, he preferred those which contain the most gruesome pictures of madness or the weirdest caricatures —Brambilla, for instance.

He relies for effect, in a manner which soon becomes mannerism, upon the sharp contrasts with which he ushers in his terrific or comical scenes. From the commonest, most prosaic every-day life we are suddenly transported into a perfectly distorted world, where miracles and juggling tricks of every kind so bewilder us that in the end no relation, no species of life, no personality, seems definite and certain. We are always in doubt as to whether we are dealing with a real person, with his spectre, with his essence in another form or other power, or with his fantastic "Doppelgänger."

In one of the lighter tales of Hoffmann's last period, Der Doppelgänger, the two principal characters resemble each other so closely that one is constantly being taken for the other; the one is wounded instead of the other; the betrothed of the one cannot distinguish him from the other, &c., &c. All kinds of absurd mistakes are made possible, and the dread of "Doppelgängerei" is turned to good account. The common-sense explanation of the matter is insisted on (much as it is in Brentano's Die mehreren Wehmüller), simply because Hoffmann for once, by way of a change, fancied making some attempt at explanation. The explanation, as a matter of fact, explains nothing. All Hoffmann really cared for was the fantastically gruesome effect, just as all Brentano cared for was the fantastically comical one. Der Doppelgänger possesses no artistic merit.

There is wittier and more audacious invention in the tale, The Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza. In the first place, we are left uncertain whether the dog is a metamorphosed human being or not; he himself says: "It is possible that I am really Montiel, who was punished by being compelled to assume the shape of a dog; if so, the punishment has been a source of pleasure and amusement." In the second place, even the dog, as dog, sees himself duplicated, and is conscious of the dissolution of the unity of his being. "Sometimes I actually saw myself lying in front of myself like another Berganza, another which yet was myself; and I, Berganza, saw another Berganza maltreated by the witches, and growled and barked at him."

Still greater is the audacity, still more extravagant the whimsicality in the tale of The Golden Jar. In it an ugly old Dresden apple-woman is at the same time the beautiful bronze knocker on Registrar Lindhorst's door. The metal face of the door-knocker occasionally wrinkles itself up into the old crone's crabbed smile. In addition to this, she is the odious fortune-teller, Frau Rauerin, and good old Lise, the fond nurse of the young heroine of the tale. She can (like the fortune-teller in Der Doppelgänger) suddenly change dress, shape, and features. When the matter of her parentage is cleared up, we learn that her papa was a "shabby feather broom," made of feathers from a dragon's wing, while her mamma was "a miserable beetroot."

Lindhorst, the stolid Registrar, who never seems to feel at home except when sitting in his library in his flowered dressing-gown, surrounded by old manuscripts, is also a great magician, who, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, suddenly begins to relate the most insane occurrences as if they were the most natural in the world. He tells, for instance, that he was once invisibly present at a party – quite a simple matter – he was in the punch-bowl. On another occasion he takes off his dressing-gown, steps without more ado into a bowl of blazing arrack, vanishes in the flames, and allows himself to be drunk.

In creating these doubled and trebled existences, the character, for instance, of the Archive Keeper, who is a Registrar by day and a salamander at night, Hoffmann obviously had in his mind the strange contrast between his own official life, as the conscientious criminal judge, severely rejecting all considerations of sentiment or æstheticism, and his free night life as king of the boundless realm of imagination – a life in which reality, as such, had no part.

But of all Hoffmann's tales, it is Die Elixire des Teufels ("The Elixir of Satan") which makes the most powerful impression. Let us dwell for a moment on the hero of this romance, Brother Medardus; for he is a typical character. It is impossible in a brief summary to convey any idea of the mysterious, weird horror of the book; to feel this one must read it. A work more saturated with voluptuousness and horrors the Romantic School, with all its long practice in the style, never produced. – In a certain monastery is preserved a flask of Satanic elixir, which had belonged to St. Anthony. This elixir is believed to possess magic properties. A monk who has tasted it becomes so eloquent that ere long he is the most famous preacher of the monastery. But his eloquence is not of a pious or healthy, but of a carnal, strangely exciting, dæmonic description. Brother Medardus drinks from the flask. A charming woman, his penitent, falls in love with him, and a longing for the pleasures and delights of the world impels him to leave the monastery. He finds a young man, Count Viktorin, asleep in the forest on the edge of a precipice, and half accidentally pushes him over. From this time onwards every one takes him for the Count.

"My own Ego, the sport of a cruel accident, was dissolved into strange forms, and floated helplessly away upon the sea of circumstances. I could not find myself again. Viktorin is undoubtedly pushed over the precipice by the accident which directed my hand, not my will – I step into his place." And as though this were not marvellous enough, he adds: "But Reinhold knows Father Medardus, the preacher of the Capuchin Monastery; and thus to him I am what I really am. Nevertheless, I am obliged to take Viktorin's place with the Baroness, for I am Viktorin. I am that which I appear to be, and I do not appear to be that which I am. At strife with my own Ego, I am an unanswerable riddle to myself."

Medardus, in his own form, now enters into relations with Viktorin's mistress, the Baroness, who has no idea that he is not Viktorin. He is possessed by carnal desires; women fall in love with him; he gives himself up to sensual pleasures, and in order to attain the fulfilment of his wishes, commits crimes of every kind, including murder. Horrible visions haunt him and drive him from place to place. In the end he is denounced and imprisoned. In prison the confusion of individualities reaches a climax. "I could not sleep; in the strange reflections cast by the dull, wavering light of the lamp upon the walls and ceiling, I saw all kinds of distorted faces grinning at me. I put out the lamp and buried my head in my pillow of straw, only to be still more horribly tormented by the hollow groans of the prisoners and the rattling of their chains." It seems to him that he is listening to the death-rattle of his victims. And now he plainly hears a gentle, measured knocking beneath him. "I listened, the knocking continued, and sounds of strange laughter came up through the floor. I sprang up and flung myself upon the straw mattress, but the knocking went on, accompanied by laughter and groans. Presently, an ugly, hoarse, stammering voice began calling gently but persistently: 'Me-dar-dus, Me-dar-dus!' An icy shiver ran through my veins, but I took courage and shouted: 'Who is there? Who is there?'" Then the knocking and stammering begins directly beneath his feet: "He, he, he! He, he, he! Lit-tle brother, lit-tle brother Me-dar-dus … I am here, am here … le-let me in … we will g-g-go into the woo-woo-woods, to the woo-woo-woods." To his horror he seems to recognise his own voice. Some of the flagstones of the floor are pushed up, and his own face, in a monk's cowl, appears. This other Medardus is, like him, imprisoned, has confessed, and is condemned to death. Now everything happens as if in a dream. He no longer knows whether he is really the hero of the events which he believes to have happened, or whether the whole is a vivid dream. "I feel as if I had been listening in a dream to the story of an unfortunate wretch, the plaything of evil powers, who have driven him hither and thither, and urged him on from crime to crime."

He is acquitted; the happiest moment of his life is at hand; he is to be united to the woman he loves. It is their wedding day. "At that very moment a dull sound rose from the street below; we heard the shouting of hollow voices and the slow rumbling of a heavy vehicle. I ran to the window. In front of the palace, a cart, driven by the headsman's apprentice, was stopping; in it sat the Monk and a Capuchin friar who was praying loudly and fervently with him. Though the Monk was disfigured by fear and by a bristly beard, the features of my terrible Doppelgänger were only too easily recognisable. Just as the cart, which had been stopped for the moment by the throng, rolled on again, he suddenly glared up at me with his horrible glistening eyes, and laughed loud, and yelled: Bridegroom! Bridegroom! Come up on to the housetop! There we will wrestle with one another, and he who throws the other down is king and has the right to drink blood!' I cried: 'You monster! What have I to do with you?' Aurelia flung her arms round me and drew me forcibly away from the window, crying: 'For God and the Holy Virgin's sake!.. It is Medardus, my brother Leonard's murderer, whom they are taking to execution.' … Leonard! Leonard! The spirits of hell awoke within me, and exerted all the power they possess over the wicked, abandoned sinner. I seized Aurelia with such fury that she shook with fear: 'Ha, ha, ha! mad, foolish woman! I, I, your lover, your bridegroom, am Medardus, am your brother's murderer. You, the Monk's bride, would call down vengeance upon him? Ho, ho, ho! I am king – I will drink your blood.'"

He strikes her to the earth. His hands are covered with her blood. He rushes out into the street, frees the Monk, deals blows right and left with knife and fist, and escapes into the forest. "I had but one thought left, the hunted animal's thought of escape. I rose, but had not taken many steps before a man sprang upon my back and flung his arms round my neck. In vain I tried to shake him off; I flung myself down; I rubbed myself against the trees – all to no purpose – the man only chuckled scornfully. Suddenly the moon shone clear through the dark firs, and the horrible, deathly pale face of the Monk, the supposed Medardus, the Doppelgänger, glared at me with the same appalling glance he had shot at me from the cart. 'He, he, he! little brother! I am w-w-with you still; I'll n-n-never let you go. I can't r-r-run like you. Y-you must carry me. They were go-go-going to break me on the wh-wh-wheel, but I got away.'" This situation is spun out ad infinitum, but I forbear. To the end of the book one is uncertain of the real significance of the events, of the ethical tendency of the actions, so completely in this case has imagination disintegrated personality.

The Scandinavian author, Ingemann, has followed Hoffmann in this path. He turns to account, for instance, the eeriness in the idea of loudly calling one's own name in a churchyard at midnight; see his tale, The Sphinx, and others in the so-called Callot-Hoffmann style.

But, as already observed, Romanticism is not content with stretching out and splitting up the Ego, with spreading it throughout time and space. It dissolves it into its elements, takes from it here, adds to it there, makes it the plaything of free fancy. Here, if anywhere, Romanticism is profound; its psychology is correct, but one-sided; it is always on the night side or on the inevitability of things that it dwells; there is nothing emancipating or elevating about it.

In the old days the Ego, the soul, the personality, was regarded as a being whose attributes were its so-called capacities and powers. The words "capacity" and "power," however, only signify that there is in me the possibility of certain events, of my seeing, reading, &c. My true being does not consist of possibilities, but of these events themselves, of my actual condition. My real being is a sequence of inward events. For me, my Ego is composed of a long series of mental pictures and ideas. Of this Ego, I constantly, daily, lose some part. Forgetfulness swallows up gigantic pieces of it. Of all the faces I saw on the street yesterday and the day before, of all the sensations which were mine, only one or two remain in my memory. If I go still farther back, only an exceptionally powerful sensation or thought here and there emerges, like a solitary rocky island, from the ocean of forgetfulness. We only keep together the ideas and pictures that remain to us from our past lives by means of the association of these ideas, that is to say, by the aid of the peculiar power they have, in virtue of certain laws, of recalling each other. If we had no numerical system, no dates, no almanacs, wherewith to give some coherence to our different memories, we should have an extremely slight and indistinct idea of our Ego. But however substantial the long inward chain may seem (and it is strengthened, it gains in tenacity, every time we run over its links in our memory), it happens that we at times introduce into it a link which does not belong to it, at times take a link from it and place it in another chain.[47 - Taine: De l'Intelligence, ii. 169.]

The first of these actions, the introducing of new, incongruous links into the chain of memory, happens in dreams. We dream we have done many things which we have never done. It also happens when we have a false recollection. He who has seen a white sheet blowing about in the dark, and believes he has seen a ghost, has such a false recollection. Most myths and legends, especially religious legends, come into existence in this way.

It frequently happens, however, that, instead of adding links to the chain of the Ego, we withdraw them. Thus the sick man, when his mind is wandering, supposes that the words he hears are spoken by a strange voice, or endows his inward visions with an outward reality, as Luther did when he saw the devil in his room in the Wartburg; and the madman not only partly, but entirely confuses himself with some one else.

In a state of reason, then, the Ego is an artificial production, the result of association of ideas. I am certain of my own identity – in the first place, because I associate my name, that sound which I call my name, with the chain of my inward experiences, and secondly, because I keep all the links of this chain connected by the association of ideas, by virtue of which they produce each other. But, since the Ego is thus not an innate but an acquired conception, founded upon an association of ideas which has to maintain itself against the constant attacks of sleep, dreams, imaginations, hallucinations, and mental derangement, it is by its nature exposed to manifold dangers. Just as disease is ever lying in wait for our bodies, so madness lies in wait at the threshold of the Ego, and every now and again we hear it knock.

It is of this correct psychological theory, originally propounded by Hume, that the Romanticists, though they do not define it scientifically, nevertheless have a presentiment. Dreams, dipsomania, hallucinations, madness, all the powers which disintegrate the Ego, which disconnect its links, are their familiar friends. Read, for instance, Hoffmann's tale, The Golden Jar, and you will hear voices issue from the apple-baskets, and the leaves and flowers of the elder-tree sing; you will see the door-knocker make faces, &c., &c. The strange, striking effect is here specially due to the way in which the apparitions suddenly emerge from a background of the most humdrum, ordinary description, from piles of legal documents, or from tureens and goblets. All Hoffmann's characters (like Andersen's Councillor in The Galoshes of Fortune, which is an imitation of Hoffmann) are considered by their neighbours to be either drunk or mad, because they always treat their dreams and visions as realities.

Hoffmann created most of his principal characters in his own image. His whole life resolved itself into moods. We see from his diary how anxiously and minutely he observed these. We come on such entries as: "Romantically religious mood; excitedly humorous mood, leading finally to those thoughts of madness which so often force themselves upon me; humorously discontented, highly-wrought musical, romantic moods; extremely irritable mood, romantic and capricious in the highest degree; strange, excited, but poetic gloominess; very comfortable, brusque, ironical, overstrained, morose, perfectly weak moods; extraordinary, but miserable moods; moods in which I felt deep veneration for myself and praised myself immoderately; senza entusiasmo, senza esaltazione, every-day moods," &c., &c.

We seem to see the man's spiritual life spread and split itself up fan-wise into musical high and low spirits. It is easy to guess from this register of moods that Hoffmann, genuine lover of night as he was, was in the habit of going to bed towards morning, after having spent the evening and night in a tavern.