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

Sophie's bright, hospitable home presented a striking contrast to young Hardenberg's own; he was fascinated (as was his elder brother) by the whole family; and the young girl, who, had she lived, would perhaps have disappointed him by turning out worldly or insignificant, became his muse, his Beatrice, his ideal. When we remember that, almost at the same time with Sophie, Hardenberg lost his brother Erasmus, to whom he was united by an intimate and beautiful friendship, we cannot think it strange that life should have seemed to him to have lost all its charms. He regarded death not merely in the light of a release; his mystical tendency led him, as already mentioned, to speak of it as "a free-will offering." He wrote in his diary at this time: "My death will be a proof of my understanding and appreciation of what is highest; it will be a real sacrifice, not a flight nor a makeshift." It is at this crisis that he begins to turn in the direction of positive Christianity. Not that he dreamed of declaring allegiance to any particular Church, or belief in any particular set of dogmas, but his pagan longing for death assumed a Christian colouring. His inmost spiritual life had long been of such a nature that, had it not been for the influence of the spirit of the times, he might just as easily have become a determined opponent of all ecclesiastical doctrine. His state of mind seems to have been that indicated by Friedrich Schlegel when he wrote to him a year later: "Possibly you still have the choice, my friend, between being the last Christian, the Brutus of the old religion, or the Christ of the new gospel." Shortly after this his choice was made.

In December 1798 he still feels, when he compares himself with his friend Just, that he is only the apostle of pure spirituality. He does not, like Just, rely "with childlike mind upon the unalterable words of a mysterious ancient document;" he will not be bound by the letter, and is inclined to find his own way to the primeval world; in the doctrines of Christianity he sees an emblematic pre-figurement of the coming universal religion. "You will not," he writes to Just, "fail to recognise in this conception of religion one of the finest elements in my composition – namely, fancy." In other words, he consciously admits fancy to be at the source of his religious development.

In the same year (1798) he sent some fragments to Wilhelm Schlegel for publication in the Athenæum, with the request that their author might be known as NOVALIS, "which is an old family name, and not altogether unsuitable."

Tieck met Novalis for the first time when he visited Jena in the summer of 1799. August Wilhelm Schlegel brought them together, and they were soon devoted friends. The three spent the first evening in earnest conversation, opening their hearts to each other At midnight they went out to enjoy the splendour of the summer night. "The full moon," says Köpke, "was shedding a magic glory upon the heights round Jena." Towards morning Tieck and Schlegel accompanied Novalis home. Tieck has commemorated this evening in Phantasus.

It was under Tieck's influence that Novalis wrote his principal work, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While he was still engaged upon it, his young life was put an end to by consumption. He died at the age of twenty-nine, only two years after the meeting with Tieck and A. W. Schlegel above described. This early death, a remarkable degree of originality, and great personal beauty have combined to shed a poetic halo round Novalis. The St. John of the new movement, he resembled the most spiritual of the apostles in outward appearance also. His forehead was almost transparent, and his brown eyes shone with remarkable brilliance. During the last three years of his life it could be read in his face that he was destined to an early death.

Novalis was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out. If one were asked to give a brief definition of the main idea of that great movement, one would say that it was the destruction of everything that was merely traditional, and the establishment of human existence upon a basis of pure reason, by means of a direct break with everything historic. The thinkers and heroes of the Revolution allow reason, as it were, to upset everything, in order that reason may put everything straight again. Although Novalis is deaf to all the social and political cries of the period, and blind to all its progressive movements, and although he ends in the most grim and repulsive reaction, he is, nevertheless, not merely influenced, but, all unconsciously, completely penetrated by the spirit of his age. Between him – the quiet, introspective, loyal Saxon assessor – and the poor sans-culottes who rushed from Paris to the frontiers, singing the "Marseillaise" and waving the tricolour flag, there is this fundamental resemblance, that they both desire the destruction of the whole outward and the construction of an inward world. Only, their inward world is reason, his is soul: for them, reason with its demands and formulæ – liberty, equality, and fraternity; for him, the soul, with its strange nocturnal gloom, in which he melts down everything, to find, at the bottom of the crucible, as the gold of the soul – night, disease, mysticism, and voluptuousness.[49 - A. Ruge, Werke, i. 247, &c.]

Thus, in spite of his violent animosity to his age, Novalis belongs to it; the direct opponent of all its enlightened and beautiful ideas, he is, despite himself, possessed by its spirit.

What in Fichte and the men of the Revolution is clear reason, comprehending and testing everything, is in Novalis an all-absorbing self – perception, which becomes actual voluptuousness; for the new spirit has taken such a hold upon him that it is, as it were, entwined round his nerves, causing a species of voluptuous excitement. What with them is abstract liberty, liberty to begin everything from the beginning again, with him is lawless fancy, which changes everything, which resolves nature and history into emblems and myths, in order to be able to play at will with all that is external, and to revel unrestrainedly in self-perception. As Arnold Ruge puts it: "Mysticism, which is theoretical voluptuousness, and voluptuousness, which is practical mysticism, are present in Novalis in equally strong proportions."

Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its would-be spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the sensual. Writing to Caroline Schlegel on the subject of Lucinde, he says: "I know that imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I also know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He here affirms of imagination in general what applied particularly to his own.

Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us to feel feeling. Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He, whose aim is feeling, unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires to feel himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he seeks this self-enjoyment. Therefore to him sickness is preferable to health. For the sick man perpetually feels his own body, which the healthy man does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard, contented themselves with defining sickness as the Christian's natural condition. Novalis goes much further. To him the highest, the only true life, is the life of the sick man. "Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes" ("Life is a disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does the world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less highly than disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture. Why? Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure… Does not all that is best begin as illness? Half-illness is an evil; real illness is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he writes elsewhere of a mystic power, "which seems to be the power of pleasure and pain, the enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly in the sensations of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of sickness corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness which is at the same time a voluptuous pleasure. Novalis himself is perfectly aware of this correspondence. He says: "The Christian religion is the most voluptuous of religions. Sin is the greatest stimulant to love of the Divine Being; the more sinful a man feels himself to be, the more Christian he is. Direct union with the Deity is the aim of sin and of love." And again: "It is curious that the evident association between sensuality, religion, and cruelty did not long ago draw men's attention to their close kinship and common tendencies."

And just as Novalis now prefers sickness to health, so he prefers night to day, with its "impudent light."

Aversion for day and daylight was general among the Romanticists. I drew attention to it in William Lovell. Novalis simply gives expression to a heightened degree of the general feeling in his famous Hymns to Night. That he should love the night is easy to understand. By hiding the surrounding world from it, night drives the Ego in upon itself; hence the feeling of night, and self-consciousness, are one and the same thing. The rapture of the feeling of night lies in its terror; first comes the fear of the individual, when everything round him disappears in the darkness, that he will himself disappear from himself; then comes the pleasant shudder when, out of this fear, self-consciousness emerges stronger than before.

In one of his fragments Novalis calls death a bridal night, a sweet mystery, and adds: —

"Ist es nicht klug, für die Nacht ein geselliges Lager zu suchen? Darum ist klüglich gesinnt, wer auch Entschlummerte liebt."[50 - "We deem that man wise who seeks a companion for his nightly couch; then he also is wise who has a beloved among the dead."]

So completely is this idea incorporated in the Romantic philosophy of life, that in Werner's drama, Die Kreuzesbrüder, the hero, immediately before he is led to the stake, says: —

"Den Neid verzeih' ich,
Die Trauer nicht. – O unaussprechlich schwelg' ich
In der Verwandlung Wonn', in dem Gefühl
Des schönen Opfertodes! – O mein Bruder!
Nicht wahr? es kommt die Zeit, we alle Menschen
Den Tod erkennen – freudig ihn umarmen,
Und fühlen werden, dass dies Leben nur
Der Liebe Ahnung ist, der Tod ihr Brautkuss,
Und sie, die mit der Inbrunst eines Gatten,
Im Brautgemach, uns vom Gewand entkleidet —
Verwesung, Gluterguss der Liebe ist!"[51 - "I forgive envy; pity I cannot forgive. It is beyond my power to tell how I revel in the thought of my approaching transfiguration, my sacrificial death. O brother! the time is surely drawing nigh when all men, truly understanding death, will welcome him with glad embrace, will feel that life is but the anticipation of love, that death is the bridal kiss, and dissolution, which with a bridegroom's ardour disrobes us in the bridal chamber, the hottest fire of love."]

Life and death are to Novalis only "relative ideas." The dead are half alive, the living half dead. It is this thought which in his case first gives zest to existence. In the first of his Hymns to Night he writes: "I turn to thee, holy, ineffable, mysterious Night! Far off lies the world, as if it had sunk into a deep grave; deserted and lonely is its place. My heart-strings vibrate with sorrow… Dost thou find pleasure in us as we in thee, dark Night?.. Costly balsam drips from thy hand, from thy poppy-sheaf. Thou unfoldest the heavy wings of the soul… How poor, how childish seems the day, how joyful and blessed its departing!.. More heavenly than those sparkling stars are the myriad eyes which Night opens in us. They see farther than the palest of those countless hosts; without the aid of light, they see into the depths of a loving soul, and its high places are filled with unspeakable rapture. Praised be the Queen of the earth, the august revealer of holy worlds, the guardian of blessed love! She sends me thee, my beloved, sweet sun of the night. Now I wake, for I am thine and mine. Thou hast proclaimed to me the life-giving gospel of Night, hast made of me a human being. Consume my body with the glowing flame of the spirit, that I may mingle yet more ethereally, yet more closely with thee, and the bridal-night be eternal."

One feels the feverish desire of the consumptive in this outburst. The parallel passage in Lucinde is: "O infinite longing! But a time is coming when the fruitless desire and vain delusions of the day will die away and disappear, and the great night of love bring eternal peace." The thoughts of these two Romantic lovers of the night meet in this idea of an eternal embrace.

In this enthusiasm for night lies the germ of religious mysticism. In the case of Justinus Kerner (which recalls that of Jung Stilling), bias towards the mysterious becomes belief in apparitions and fear of spirits. In certain of the writings of the later Romanticists, for instance in Achim von Arnim's Die schöne Isabella von Ægypten, half the characters are spirits. Mysticism is a fundamental element in the art of Clemens Brentano, even when he is at his best, and it gives charm and colour to his descriptions.

Novalis himself describes mysticism as voluptuousness – "ein wollüstiges Wesen." To understand this expression aright, we must study his hymns: —

"Hinüber wall' ich
Und jede Pein
Wird einst ein Stachel
Der Wollust sein.
Noch wenig Zeiten
So bin ich los,
Und liege trunken
Der Lieb' im Schoss."[52 - "Thither I go, and there every pain will be a thrill of rapture. Ere long I shall be free, be lying, intoxicated with ecstasy, in the bosom of love."]

Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the sensual Ego in a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of the Spiritual Songs): "Few know the secret of love, feel for ever unsatisfied, for ever athirst. The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes have been opened to fathom the unfathomable depths of heaven – he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more. Who has yet discerned the transcendent meaning of the earthly body? Who can say that he understands the blood? The day is coming when all body will be one body; then the beatified pair will float in heavenly blood. Oh! that the ocean were already reddening, that the rocks were softening into fragrant flesh! The sweet repast never ends, love is never satisfied. Never can it have the beloved near enough, close enough to its inmost self. By lips that are ever more tenderly amorous, the heavenly nutriment is ever more eagerly seized and transformed. Hotter and hotter burns the passion of the soul, thirstier, ever thirstier grows the heart; and so the feast of love endures from everlasting to everlasting. Had those who abstain but once tasted of it, they would forsake everything and seat themselves beside us at the table of longing, which is ever furnished with guests. They would comprehend the infinite fulness of love, and extol our feast of the Body and the Blood."[53 - "Wenige wissenDas Geheimnis der Liebe,Fühlen UnersättlichkeitUnd ewigen Durst.Des AbendmahlsGöttliche BedeutungIst den irdischen Sinnen Rätsel;Aber wer jemalsVon heissen, geliebten LippenAtem des Lebens sog,Wem heilige GlutIn zitternden Wellen das Herz schmolzWem das Auge aufging,Dass er des HimmelsUnergründliche Tiefe mass,Wird essen von seinem LeibeUnd trinken von seinem BluteEwiglich.Wer hat des irdischen LeibesHohen Sinn erraten?Wer kann sagenDass er das Blut versteht?Einst ist Alles Leib —Ein Leib,In himmlischem BluteSchwimmt das selige Paar.O! dass das WeltmeerSchon errötete,Und in duftiges FleischAufquölle der Fels!Nie endet das süsse Mahl,Nie sättigt die Liebe sich;Nicht innig, nicht eigen genugKann sie haben den Geliebten.Von immer zarteren LippenVerwandelt wird das GenosseneInniglicher und näher.Heissere WollustDurchbebt die Seele,Durstiger und durstigerWird das Herz:Und so währet der Liebe GenussVon Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit.Hätten die NüchternenEinmal gekostet,Alles verliessen sie,Und setzten sich zu unsAn den Tisch der Sehnsucht,Der nie leer wird.Sie erkännten der LiebeUnendliche Fülle,Und priesen die NahrungVon Leib und Blut."]

These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main characteristics of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious forms, but it truly feels their significance; it speaks the same language as orthodoxy, but it changes a dead language into a living one. Herein lay the secret of its victory in the Middle Ages over that dry, formal scholasticism which it consumed in its glow. This made it the precursor of the Reformation. The mystic needs no external dogma; in his pious rapture he is his own priest. But, as his spiritual life is altogether an inward life, he does not abolish external dogma, and in the end actually becomes a sacerdotalist.

In mystically prophetic words Novalis foretells the coming of the new kingdom of sacred darkness: —

"Es bricht die neue Welt herein
Und verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein.
Man sieht nun aus bemoosten Trümmern
Eine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern,
Und was vordem alltäglich war,
Scheint jetzo fremd und wunderbar.
Der Liebe Reich ist aufgethan,
Die Fabel fängt zu spinnen an.
Das Urspiel jeder Natur beginnt,
Auf kräftige Worte jedes sinnt,
Und so das grosse Weltgemüth
Ueberall sich regt und unendlich blüht.

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Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt,
Und was man glaubt, es sei geschehn,
Kann mann von weitem erst kommen sehn;
Frei soll die Phantasie erst schalten,
Nach ihrem Gefallen die Fäden verweben,
Hier manches verschleiern, dort manches entfalten,
Und endlich in magischem Dunst verschweben.
Wehmuth und Wollust, Tod und LebenSind hier in innigster Sympathie,—
Wer sich der höchsten Lieb' ergeben,
Genest von ihren Wunden nie."[54 - "The new world appears, and darkens the brightest sunshine. Among moss-grown ruins one sees a marvellous future glistening; and what used to be common and everyday, now seems miraculous. The kingdom of love has come; the fable has begun to weave itself. Every soul is born again; words of power are heard again; the great world-soul moves, and puts forth bud and blossom without end…"The world becomes a dream, our dream the world; and what we believed to have happened long ago, we now see only coming, as yet far off. Imagination must have free play, must weave her web as seems best to her, here veiling, there discovering, at last dissolving all into magic vapour. Sadness and rapture, death and life, are here by inmost sympathy but one: he who has known the highest love never recovers from its wounds."]

Night, death, sensual rapture, heavenly bliss – these ideas are still more firmly interwoven in the verses above the churchyard gate, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The dead say: —

"Süsser Reiz der Mitternächte,
Stiller Kreis geheimer Mächte,
Wollust räthselhafter Spiele,
Wir nur kennen euch.

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