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

Romanticism having thus dissolved the Ego, proceeds to form fantastic Egos, adding here, taking away there.

Take, for an example, Hoffmann's Klein Zaches, the little monster who has been endowed by a fairy with the peculiarity "that everything good that others think, say, or do in his presence is attributed to him; the result being that in the society of handsome, refined, intelligent persons he also is taken to be handsome, refined, and cultured – is taken, in short, for a model of every species of perfection with which he comes in contact." When the student reads aloud his charming poems, it is Zaches who is credited with them; when the musician plays or the professor performs his experiments, it is Zaches who gets the honour and the praise. He grows in greatness, becomes an important man, is made Prime Minister, but ends his days by drowning in a toilet-basin. Without overlooking the satiric symbolism of the story, I draw attention to the fact that the author has here amused himself by endowing one personality with qualities properly belonging to others, in other words, by dissolving individuality and disregarding its limits. With the same satirical intention, the same idea is worked out more ingeniously, though more roughly, by Hostrup, the Dane, in his comedy, En Spurv i Tranedans ("A Sparrow among the Cranes" = a dwarf among the giants), in which each one of the other characters attributes to the comical young journeyman tailor the qualities which he himself values most.

Here we have Romanticism amusing itself by adding qualities to human nature; but it found subtracting them an equally attractive amusement. It deprives the individual of attributes which would seem to form an organic part of it; and by taking these away it divides the human being as lower organisms, worms, for example, are divided into greater and smaller parts, both of which live. It deprives the individual, for instance, of his shadow. In Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, the man in the grey coat kneels down before Peter, and, with admirable dexterity, strips the shadow off him and off the grass, rolls it up and pockets it – and the story shows us the misfortunes which are certain to befall the man who has lost his shadow.

This same tale of Peter Schlemihl shows how Romanticism, as a spiritual force, succeeded in impressing a uniform stamp on the most heterogeneous talents. It would be difficult to imagine two natures more unlike than Chamisso's and Hoffmann's; hence the plot of Chamisso's tale is as simple and readily comprehensible as the plots of Hoffmann's are morbidly extraordinary.

Adalbert von Chamisso was a Frenchman born, who acquired the German character remarkably quickly and completely, to the extent even of developing more than one quality which we are accustomed to consider essentially German. The son of a French nobleman, he was born in 1781 in the castle of Boncourt, in Champagne. Driven from France as a boy during the Reign of Terror, he became one of Queen Louisa of Prussia's pages, and later, at the age of twenty, a lieutenant in the Prussian army. He was a serious, almost painfully earnest, but absolutely healthy-minded man of sterling worth, brave and honourable, with a little of the heaviness of the German about him and much of the liveliness of the Frenchman.

The reverse of Hoffmann, he was no lover of social pleasures, but all the more ardent a lover of nature. He longed on hot summer days to be able to go about naked in his garden with his pipe in his mouth. Modern dress, modern domestic life and social formalities he regarded in the light of burdensome fetters. His love of nature led him to circumnavigate the globe, enamoured him of the South Sea Islands, and is expressed in much of his poetry.

Nevertheless, the imperceptible intellectual compulsion exercised by the age caused him, as author, to adopt Romantic theories and write in the Romantic style. It is characteristic, however, that when in such a poem as Erscheinung ("The Apparition") he treats the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger," he does it with a certain moral force which leaves on the reader's mind the impression of genuine despair. The narrator comes home at night and sees himself sitting at his desk. "Who are you?" he asks. "Who disturbs me thus?" returns the "Doppelgänger": —

"Und er: 'So lass uns, wer du seist, erfahren!'
Und ich: 'Ein solcher bin ich, der getrachtet
Nur einzig nach dem Schönen, Guten, Wahren;
Der Opfer nie dem Götzendienst geschlachtet,
Und nie gefröhnt dein weltlich-eitlen Brauch,
Verkannt, verhöhnt, der Schmerzen nie geachtet:
Der irrend zwar und träumend oft den Rauch
Für Flamme hielt, doch mutig beim Erwachen
Das Rechte nur verfocht: – bist du das auch?'
Und er mit wildem kreischend-lautem Lachen:
'Der du dich rühmst zu sein, der bin ich nicht.
Gar anders ist's bestellt um meine Sachen.
Ich bin ein feiger, lügenhafter Wicht,
Ein Heuchler mir und ändern, tief im Herzen
Nur Eigennutz, und Trug im Angesicht.
Verkannter Edler du mit deinen Schmerzen,
Wer kennt sich nun? wer gab das rechte Zeichen?
Wer soll, ich oder du, sein Selbst verscherzen?
Tritt her, so du es wagst, ich will dir weichen!'
Drauf mit Entsetzen ich zu jenem Graus:
'Du bist es, bleib und lass hinweg mich schleichen!'
Und schlich zu weinen, in die Nacht hinaus."[48 - "He. Then tell who you are!"I. I am a man whose one and only aim has been the beautiful, the good, the true. I have never sacrificed to idols, never pandered to the foolish requirements of fashion; the pain caused by misunderstanding and scorn I have disregarded. In my wanderings, in my dreams, I have indeed often taken smoke for flame, but the moment I awoke I upheld what I knew to be the right. Can you say the same?"He (with a wild, loud, grating laugh). I am not the man that you boast yourself to be, but one of a very different character. I am a cowardly, untruthful wretch, a hypocrite to myself and others; my heart is the home of selfishness, deceit is on my tongue. You misunderstood hero of the many sufferings, which of us is it that knows himself? which of us has given the true description? which is the real man? Come here and take my place if you dare? I am ready to make way for you."I (with horrible conviction). You are the man! Stay here and let me slink away! – And out into the night I went, to weep."]

The painful moral self-recognition endows the ghost story with marvellous significance.

Chamisso's double nationality was a source of much unhappiness to him in his younger days, when there was violent enmity between the land of his birth and his adopted country. In one of his letters to Varnhagen (December 1805) he writes: "'No country, no people – each man for himself!' These words of yours seemed to come straight from my own heart. They almost startled me; I had to wipe away the tears that rolled down my cheeks. Oh! the same sentiment must have made itself felt in all my letters, every one!"

When, in 1806, Napoleon began the war with Prussia, he issued an order that every Frenchman serving in the enemy's ranks should, when taken prisoner, be tried by court-martial and shot within twenty-four hours. Hence Chamisso, who had in vain demanded to be allowed to resign his commission, was exposed to the chance of a disgraceful death.

He visited France in the following year, but in Paris there was nothing to attract him. "Wherever I am," he complains, "I am countryless. Land and people are foreign to me; hence I am perpetually longing." He was one of the bravest and most capable of German officers (his behaviour on the occasion of the surrender of Hameln proves this), but, as a Frenchman born and an admirer of Napoleon, he would have preferred not to have taken part in the war against France and the Emperor.

After his resignation was actually accepted, he spent some time at the court of Madame de Staël, and made the acquaintance of her international circle of friends. The year 1813, the year of Prussia's declaration of war against France, was the most trying of all for the unfortunate young Franco-German. His heart was divided; he desired the fall of Napoleon because he hated despotism, but at the same time he felt every humiliation which befell the French troops during their retreat from Russia, and every insulting word spoken of the Emperor, as if the misfortune had happened, the insult been offered, to himself. And with this very natural feeling his German associates showed no forbearance. He often cried despairingly: "No, the times have no sword for me." "Action and inaction," he writes in May 1813, "are equally painful to me."

This was the mood which produced his most notable work, Peter Schlemihl. The great historical events which harrowed his feelings made him intellectually productive; the summer of 1813 was a turning-point in his life. "I had no longer a country," he says, "or as yet no country." And so the man without a country writes the tale of the man without a shadow. In spite of its intangibility, a man's shadow is, like his country, like his home, one of his natural possessions, a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which is, as it were, part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so entirely natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter of course. Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great sorrow of his life, in his daringly imagined fable. And strangely enough, he not only figuratively gave in it the essence of all his past experiences, but also prophetically imaged his future, his voyage round the world and his scientific labours. After Schlemihl has escaped from the temptations of the devil, he accidentally comes into possession of the seven-leagued boots, which take him to every country in the world, and enable him to pursue his favourite study to the greatest advantage. Schlemihl himself says: "My future suddenly showed itself clearly to the eyes of my soul. Banished from human society by the misdemeanours of my youth, I was thrown into the arms of Nature, whom I had always loved. The earth was given to me as a rich garden, study as the directing influence and strength of my life, knowledge as its aim."

The originality of its plot and the remarkable clearness of its style (this last a characteristic of all Chamisso's writing, and evidently his intellectual inheritance as a Frenchman) made Peter Schlemihl an extraordinary success. It was translated into nearly every language. Ten years after its publication a new kind of lamp, which cast no shadow, was named the Schlemihl lamp.

Chamisso's success naturally roused Hoffmann to emulation. In the clever little Story of the Lost Reflection, the hero leaves his reflection in Italy with the entrancing Giulietta, who has bewitched him, and returns home to his wife without it. His little son, discovering suddenly one day that his father has no reflection, drops the mirror he is holding, and runs weeping from the room. The mother comes in with astonishment and fright written on every feature. "What is this Rasmus has been telling me about you?" she asks. "That I have no reflection, I suppose, my dear," answers Spikher with a forced laugh, and proceeds to try to prove that it is foolish to believe that a man can lose his reflection, but that even if the thing be possible, it is a matter of no importance, seeing that a reflection is simply an illusion. Self-contemplation only leads to vanity, and, moreover, such an image splits up one's personality into truth and imagination.

Here we have the mirror chamber developed to such a point that the reflections move about independently, instead of following their originals. It is very amusing, very original and fantastic, and, as one is at liberty to understand by the reflection whatever one chooses, it may even be said to be very profound. I express no opinion, but simply draw attention to fact.

We have seen that the Romanticist is instinctively, inevitably, the enemy of clearly defined form in art. We have seen Hoffmann mixing up the different parts of his book to the extent of having part of one story on the front, part of quite a different one on the back of the same leaf; have seen Tieck composing dramas like so many puzzle balls one within the other, to prevent the reader taking them too seriously, and Kierkegaard fitting one author inside another in the Chinese box fashion, on the strength of the theory that truth can only be imparted indirectly, a theory which he ended by treating with scorn – we have seen, in a word, that the artistic standpoint of Romanticism is the exact opposite of the artistic standpoint of the ancients. And when, with their leaning to the supernatural, the Romanticists extend the personality of the individual throughout several successive generations, representing him as living before his birth and after his death, or represent him as a day-dreamer, half visionary and half madman, or humorously endow him with other men's attributes and despoil him of his own, fantastically filching now a shadow, now a reflection, they show by all this fantastic duplication and imagination that their psychological standpoint too, is an absolutely different one; for in the days of old both the work of art and the personality were whole, were of one piece. The movement is a perfectly consistent one, regarded as the antipodes of classicism, in short, as Romanticism.

But, granted that man is of necessity, by his very nature, a divided, complex being, he is nevertheless, as the healthy, vigorous personality, one. Aim, will, resolve, make him a complete unit. If, as a natural product, the human being is only a group held more or less firmly together by association of ideas, as a mind he is a complete whole; in his will all the elements of the mind are united. Romanticism only understood and depicted human nature with genius from the natural, from the night side. It made no closer approach in this than in any other of its endeavours to intellectual collectedness, unity, and liberty.

XII

ROMANTIC SOUL. NOVALIS

The traveller who visits a mine is let down into a subterranean shaft in company with a man who carries a lamp, by the uncertain light of which they explore the hidden depths. It is on such an expedition that I now invite my readers to accompany me. The shaft to which we are about to descend is that of the German "soul," a mine as deep, as dark, as strange, as rich in precious metal and in worthless refuse as any other. We shall note the imprint received by this soul in the days of Romanticism, for this purpose dwelling at length on the Romanticist who above all others is the poet of the soul – Novalis.

No word in any other language is the exact equivalent of the German word "Gemüth," here translated "soul." "Gemüth" is something peculiarly German. It is the inward flame, the inward crucible. In the famous words of the "Wanderer's Sturmlied": —

"Innre Wärme,
Seelenwärme,
Mittelpunkt!
Glüh entgegen
Phöb-Apollon,
Kalt wird sonst
Sein Fürstenblick
Ueber dich vorübergleiten," $/

Goethe has described soul, and its significance in the poet's life. With those who have soul, everything tends inwards; soul is the centripetal force of the spiritual life. To the man who sets soul above all else in human life, fervour becomes a patent of nobility. In their conception of soul, as in everything else, the Romanticists rush to extremes. They magnify all that is mysterious, dark, and unexplained in the soul, at the expense of what is clear and beautiful. Goethe is to them the greatest of all poets, not because of his plastic power, but because of the obscurity, the dæmonic mystery, surrounding such characters as the Harper and Mignon, and because of the pregnant intensity of his smaller poems. Lessing and Schiller, on the other hand, are not deemed poets at all, and are sneered at and disparagingly criticised because of the outward direction taken by their keen, energetic thought. For enthusiasm, strength of character, and all such qualities are not soul. Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the sword and goes forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is he who has most soul.

The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the turning of Goethe's "Seelenwärme" – warmth of soul – into heat, a heat which rises to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity consumes all established forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic poet is the heat and passion of the emotion which burns within him. What Novalis does is done with the force of his whole being. Intense, reckless feeling is his motto.

Friedrich von Hardenberg, a scion of an ancient house, was born at Wiederstedt, in the County of Mansfeld, in May 1772. His father, a man of a vigorous, ardent nature, had, after "leading a very worldly life," been converted at the age of thirty-one, when in great distress because of his first wife's death, to the faith of the English Methodists. At a later period he fell under the influence of the Moravian Brethren, more particularly of Count Zinzendorf; and he was at all times strongly influenced by his elder brother, a bigoted and somewhat ignorant aristocrat of pietistic leanings. The elder brother's will was law in the younger's household after the latter's second marriage; his strict principles forbade the family all social intercourse, and the children were obliged to keep their youthful amusements carefully concealed. In 1787 Novalis's father was appointed director of the saltworks in the little town of Weissenfels.

Tieck became acquainted with the Hardenberg family in 1799, and they made a profound impression on him. Köpke says: "It was a quiet, serious life that they led, a life of unostentatious but sincere piety. The family belonged to the sect of the Moravian Brethren, and set forth its doctrines in their lives. Old Hardenberg, a high-minded, honourable man, who had been a fine soldier in his day, lived like a patriarch among his talented sons and charming daughters. Change and enlightenment in any form were his detestation; he loved and lauded the good old, misjudged days, and on occasion could express his views very decidedly and defiantly, or blaze up in sudden anger."

The following little domestic scene speaks for itself: – one day heard the old gentleman fuming and scolding in the adjoining room. "What has happened?" he anxiously asked a servant who entered. "Nothing," was the dry response; "it is only the master giving a Bible lesson." Old Hardenberg was in the habit of conducting the devotional exercises of the family, and at the same time examining the younger children on religious subjects, and this not infrequently meant a domestic storm.

Such was Friedrich von Hardenberg's home. He was a dreamy, delicate child, an intelligent, ambitious youth. In 1791 he went to Jena to study law. Those were the palmy days of that university, which then numbered amongst its professors such men as Reinhold, Fichte, and Schiller. Novalis found Schiller's lectures specially spirit-stirring, and the poet himself was to the young man "the perfect pattern of humanity." Fichte, whose acquaintance he also made, he enthusiastically called "the legislator of the new world-order." No one at that time could have foreseen in young Hardenberg the future high priest of obscurantism.

We see him in those youthful days intensely absorbed in the study of his own Ego. His plans are constantly changing; at one time he determines to be the diligent, ardent student, at another to throw up the pursuit of science and be a soldier. Strange as it may sound, the men whom he at this time regards as his models are those friends of freedom who were at the same time apostles of the gospel of utilitarianism. He writes to his brother: "Buy Franklin's autobiography, and let the genius of this book be your guide." We occasionally hear of a little youthful folly; he is now and again in trouble because of debts he has contracted; but he reasons very sensibly with his father, when the latter is inclined to take his peccadilloes too seriously.

Father and uncle naturally regarded the French Revolution with horror and loathing, but Friedrich and his elder brother were its ardent partisans.

Things in Saxony being on too small a scale to suit Friedrich's taste, his kinsman, the Prussian Minister (afterwards Chancellor) von Hardenberg, offered him an appointment in Prussia; this, however, he was unable to accept, owing to his father's unwillingness to allow him to become a member of the liberal-minded Berlin cousin's household. He was finally sent to Tennstedt, near Erfurt, to acquire practical experience of the administration of the laws of the Electorate of Saxony under the excellent district magistrate, Just.

Novalis's first friend among the Romanticists was Friedrich Schlegel, whose acquaintance he made at Jena. The two had much in common, and Novalis at once fell under Schlegel's influence. At the age of twenty-five he writes to him: "To me you have been the high priest of Eleusis; you have revealed heaven and hell to me; through you I have tasted of the tree of knowledge." Young Hardenberg shows himself to be entirely free from political prejudice; he takes a great fancy to Schlegel's landlord, because of the man's "honest republicanism," and jokes at Schlegel's severity in blaming him and the said landlord for their loyalty to the princely house. He has an extremely high opinion of Friedrich Schlegel as a critic, admires the fineness of the meshes of his critical net, which allows no fish, however small, to escape, and calls him "einen dephlogistisirten Lessing."

When, in 1797, Schlegel visited Hardenberg at his home, he found him utterly broken down. A young girl, Sophie von Kühn, to whom he had been passionately and absorbingly devoted, had just died. His despair took the form of longing for death, and he fully believed that his body must succumb to this desire and to his longing for the departed. Though he had no definite plans of suicide, he called the desire for annihilation by which he was possessed, "a firm determination, which would make of his death a free-will offering." It was under the influence of these thoughts that he wrote his Hymns to Night.

This excess of despair, and also the singular circumstance that Sophie, who died at the age of fifteen, was only twelve years old when he fell in love with her, seem to testify to something unhealthy and abnormal in Novalis's character. The impression is strengthened when we find him, only one year later, betrothed to a daughter of Von Charpentier, superintendent of mines. It is quite true, as La Rochefoucauld says, that the strength of our passions has no relation to their durability; nevertheless it is strange that Hardenberg could suddenly console himself with another, after finding his one pleasure for a whole year in the thought of death, talking for a whole year as if the grave held everything that was dear to him. It was a somewhat lame excuse that Julie seemed to him a reincarnation of Sophie, though the fancy was not a surprising one, considering how much the Romanticists dwelt on the idea of a previous existence. But here, as elsewhere in Hardenberg's life, much that is apparently unnatural is easily explainable when the circumstances are rightly understood. Sophie von Kühn seems, like Auguste Böhmer, to have been a most precocious child. When the youth of twenty-three made her acquaintance, she possessed all the attractions of the child combined with those of the maiden. Her features were fine, her curly head was lightly poised, and there was a whole world in her large, dark, expressive eyes. More impartial judges than Hardenberg have called her "a heavenly creature."