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

Leiser Wünsche süsses Plaudern
Hören wir allein, und schauen
Immerdar in sel'ge Augen,
Schmecken nichts als Mund und Kuss.
Alles was wir nur berühren,
Wird zu heissen Balsamfrüchten,
Wird zu weichen zarten Brüsten,
Opfern kühner Lust.

Immer wächst und blüht Verlangen
Am Geliebten festzuhangen,
Ihn im Innern zu empfangen,
Eins mit ihm zu sein.
Seinem Durste nicht zu wehren,
Sich im Wechsel zu verzehren,
Von einander sich zu nähren,
Von einander nur allein.

So in Lieb' und hoher Wollust
Sind wir immerdar versunken,
Seit der wilde trübe Funken
Jener Welt erlosch;

Seit der Hügel sich geschlossen
Und der Scheiterhaufen sprühte,
Und dem schauernden Gemüthe
Nun das Erdgesicht zerfloss."[55 - "Sweet joys of midnight, silent company of mysterious powers, strange revelries of passion, 'tis we alone who know you…"We alone hear the whispered prayers of sweet desire, and look for ever into-blissful eyes, taste for ever mouth and kiss. All that we touch turns into balsamic fruits, into soft and lovely breasts, ripe food for our desire."Anew and ever anew awakes our longing to embrace, to be one with, the beloved, to give him whate'er he asks, sweetly to consume each other, to feed on each other, and on nought else."In this voluptuous passion we have revelled ever since the glaring light of earthly life was extinguished, since the faggot flamed, the grave closed on us, and the sights of earth were hidden from the shuddering soul."]

This mysticism, which deems the dead happy because it supposes them to be revelling in all sensual delights, becomes, in its practical application, a sort of quietism, that is, preference for a vegetating, plant-like life, the life extolled in Lucinde.

"The plants," says Novalis, "are the plainest speech of the earth; every new leaf, every remarkable flower is some mystery which is trying to reveal itself, and which remains motionless and dumb only because from very joy and love it can neither move nor speak. If one chances in solitude upon such a flower, does not everything around it seem transfigured? do not the little feathered songsters seem to seek its vicinity? One could weep for gladness, and, forgetting the world, could bury one's hands and feet in the ground, take root, and never leave that happy neighbourhood."

What an overdose of sentiment! It provides its own cruel parody in the insane situation which reminds us Danes of one in Holberg's Ulysses von Ithacia.

In another part of Ofterdingen we read: "Flowers exactly correspond to children … like children they are found lowest down, nearest the earth; the clouds, again, are possibly revelations of the second, higher childhood, of Paradise regained; therefore it is that they shed such refreshing dews upon the children of earth." In the Romantic jargon there is even talk of the childlikeness of clouds. Naïveté aspires, and is not satisfied until it has reached the sky. O Polonius! – These naïve clouds are the true, the proper symbols of Romanticism.

But even in the plants and the clouds there is still too much endeavour and unrest to satisfy the Romantic soul. Even vegetation is not perfect abstraction, perfect quiescence; there is tendency upwards in the straining of the plant towards the light. Therefore even the plant life is not the highest. Novalis goes a step further than Friedrich Schlegel.

"The highest life is mathematics. Without enthusiasm no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. Pure mathematics is religion. It is arrived at only by revelation. The mathematician knows everything. All activity ceases when knowledge is attained. The state of knowledge is bliss (Eudämonie), rapturous peace of contemplation, heavenly abstraction."

Now we have reached the climax. All life is crystallised into dead mathematical figures.

At this point the life of the soul is condensed to such a degree that it comes to a standstill. It is as if the clock of the soul had ceased to strike. Every noble aspiration, every tendency towards independent action is forced back and stifled in the airless vaults of the soul.

It is at this point, therefore, that intense spirituality turns into gross materialism. When all capacity of producing new outward forms is not only despised, but actually destroyed, we have reached the turning-point, the point at which all established outward forms are recognised and accepted, and accepted the more gladly the more rigid they are, the closer they approach to crystallised petrifaction, the more certain it is that they only leave room for the life of vegetation. The step is taken by Novalis in a remarkable essay, Christendom in Europe, which Tieck by his erasures vainly tried to nullify, and which Friedrich Schlegel, by leaving out one most important passage, converted into a defence of Catholicism.

In this essay he writes as follows: – "These were happy, glorious days, when Europe was still a Christian continent, the home of the one, undivided Christian religion… The wise head of the Church rightly set himself against the bold cultivation of the human mind at the cost of religious faith, and against untimely and dangerous discoveries in the domain of science. Thus he forbade the scientists to maintain openly that this earth is an insignificant planet, for he knew well that men would lose, along with their respect for their earthly home, respect for their heavenly home and their fellow-men, that they would choose limited knowledge in preference to unlimited faith, and would acquire the habit of despising everything great and wonderful, as being simply the result of lifeless law."

We could almost suppose ourselves to be listening to the sermonising of a parish-clerk of the eighteenth century. And yet we are sensible of the poet's consistency. Poetry, which led Schiller back to Greece, leads Novalis back to the Inquisition, and induces him, like Joseph de Maistre, to side with it against Galileo.

Of Protestantism he says: "This great spiritual disruption, which was accompanied by disastrous wars, was a notable proof of the harmfulness of knowledge, of culture – or at least of the temporary harmfulness of a certain degree of culture… The schismatics separated the inseparable, divided the indivisible Church, and presumptuously dissociated themselves from the great Christian communion, in which, and through which alone, true, lasting regeneration was possible… A religious peace was concluded, based upon principles which were as foolish as they were irreligious; for the continued existence of so-called Protestantism was equivalent to the establishment of a self-contradiction, namely, permanent revolutionary government… Luther treated Christianity arbitrarily, mistook its spirit, and introduced a new letter, a totally new doctrine, that of the sacred and supreme authority of the Bible. This, unfortunately, meant the interference in religious matters of a perfectly foreign, entirely earthly science, namely, philology, the destructive influence of which is thenceforward unmistakable… The popularisation of the Bible was now insisted upon, and its contemptible matter and the crude abstract sketch of a religion provided by its books had a remarkable effect in frustrating the inspiring, revealing activity of the Holy Spirit… The Reformation was the death-blow of Christianity… Fortunately for the Church, there came into existence at this time a new religious order, on which the expiring spirit of the hierarchy seemed to have bestowed its last gifts. This order gave new life to the old forms, and with wonderful intuition and determination set about the restoration of the Papal power. Never before in the world's history had such a society been known… The Jesuits were well aware how much Luther owed to his demagogic arts and his knowledge of the common people… From of old, the scholar has been the instinctive enemy of the priest; the learned and the ecclesiastical professions must carry on a war of extermination against each other so long as they are separated; for they are struggling for the same position… To the outcome of modern thought men gave the name of philosophy; and under philosophy they comprehended everything that was hostile to the old order of things, consequently every attack upon religion. What was at first personal hatred of the Roman Catholic Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of the Christian faith, indeed of all religion."

We see how clearly Novalis understood that free-thought was a consequence of Protestantism. He continues: —

"Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed naturally and inevitably into a hatred of all enthusiasms, denounced imagination and feeling, morality and love of art, the past and the future, barely acknowledged man to be the highest among the animals, and reduced the creative music of the universe to the monotonous whirr of an enormous mill, driven by the stream of chance – a mill without a builder or miller, a true perpetuum mobile… One enthusiasm was magnanimously left to mankind, enthusiasm for this glorious philosophy and its priests. France had the good fortune to be the seat of this new faith, which was patched together out of fragments of knowledge… On account of its obedience to the laws of mathematics and its audacity, light was the idol of these men… The history of modern unbelief is very remarkable, and is the key to all the monstrous phenomena of these later days. It only begins in this century, is little noticeable till the middle of it, and then quickly develops with incalculable force in every direction; a second, more comprehensive and more remarkable Reformation was inevitable, and of necessity came first in the country which was most modernised and had suffered longest from want of freedom… During this anarchy religion was born again, true anarchy being its generating element… To the reflective observer the overthrower of the state is a Sisyphus. No sooner does he reach the summit, where there is equipoise, than the mighty burden rolls down on the other side. It will never remain up there unless it is kept in position by an attraction towards heaven. All your supports are too weak as long as your state has a tendency towards the earth."

He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany we can already point to sure indications of a new world… Here and there, and often in daring union, are to be found incomparable versatility, brilliant polish, extensive knowledge, and rich and powerful imagination. A strong feeling of the creative arbitrariness, the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness, the sacred originality, and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is taking possession of men… Although these are only indications, disconnected and crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a universal individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of a loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a new Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's members. Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The child will be the express image of the father – a new golden age, with dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of the dissolving body."

After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. And what is the upshot of it all? What new being is the result of the embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised Church? What but a regenerated reaction, which in France restored Catholicism and (after Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led to that hateful tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that Catholicism exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the best writers of the day into exile.

Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world. It engulfed everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the counter-revolution; in it all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in it the Titanic powers of history were shut up and hypnotised. Night surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous joys of darkness and death; the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in the end they turned into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the spirit, but it was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized according to mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the inward parts of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down into the depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.

But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued their usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed because the poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to pieces in the inner world. For they did not go to work in the rough, material fashion of a Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated it inwardly in an inner world. When the poet, released by the spirits, came up from the mine again, he found the outer world, which he supposed he had resolved into its elements, exactly as it had been before. All that he had melted in his heart stood there, hard and cold; and, since the outer world had never really interested him, and since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and drowsy as his inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand.

The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty, his genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to compare him with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite lately, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Blaze de Bury drew attention to the resemblance. He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance to Novalis's, and the likeness between these two singular poets is not only a physical one; common to them both are close observation of nature, divination of all her little secrets, a choice combination of sentiment with philosophical thought, an utter want of tangibility, reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards, an aspiration, that leads nowhere."

These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these two poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives before, the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning of this century.

Think of Shelley's life in its main outlines. The son of a good family, he was sent to an aristocratic school, where, while yet a child, he was roused to wrath and opposition by the brutality of the boys and the cruelty of the masters. What especially kindled his indignation as he grew older was the hypocrisy with which those who gave free rein to their bad passions perpetually talked of God and Christianity. During his second year at Oxford, Shelley wrote an essay On the Necessity of Atheism, of which, with naïve straightforwardness, he sent copies to the Church and University authorities. He was summoned before them, and, on refusing to retract what he had written, was expelled for atheism. He went home, but his father received him with such contemptuous coldness that he soon left again, never to return. His whole life was a tissue of similar rebellions and similar misfortunes. In his twentieth year he was threatened with consumption, and though he recovered, he was thenceforward a delicate, nervously irritable man. The Court of Chancery refused him the guardianship of his own children (after the death of his first wife) on the ground that he had propagated immoral and irreligious doctrines in Queen Mab. After this he left England for ever, and lived in Italy in voluntary exile until sudden death put an end to his sad and homeless existence. His boat was capsized in a squall in the Gulf of Spezzia, and he was drowned, at the age of twenty-nine.

In contrast with such a life as this, Hardenberg's is a true German country-town idyll. At the age of twenty-five he received a Government appointment, an auditorship at one of the state saltworks, and a year or two later he was advanced to be "assessor" at the saltworks of Weissenfels. His Romanticism in no way interfered with his fulfilment of his duties as a good citizen. In his capacity of Government official he was zealous, conscientious, and steady – one of the men who do their duty and are guilty of no extravagances, and whose position is consequently assured. His republicanism was short-lived, and he is only saved by his naïveté from the charge of servility. He calls Frederick William and Louisa of Prussia "ein klassisches Menschenpaar;" in the revelation of these "geniuses" he sees an omen of a better world. Frederick William is, he says, the first king of Prussia; he crowns himself every day. A real "transubstantiation" has taken place; for the court has been transformed into a family, the throne into a sanctuary, a royal marriage into an eternal union of hearts. Only youthful prejudice, he maintains, inclines to a republic; the married man desires order, safety, quietness, a well-regulated household, a "real monarchy." "A constitution has for us only the interest of a dead letter. How different is the law which is the expression of the will of a beloved and revered person! We have no right to conceive of the monarch as the first officer of the state; he is not a citizen, and cannot therefore be an official. The king is a human being exalted to the position of an earthly providence."

If we compare such utterances as the above with those of Shelley's poems which were inspired by the tyranny prevailing in his native country, or those in which he glorifies the Italian revolutions and the Greek war of liberation, we have the sharpest imaginable contrast. And the same contrast meets us wherever we turn. Novalis sings the praises of sickness. Shelley says: "It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of this earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man."

Novalis says: "We picture God to ourselves as a person, just as we think of ourselves as persons. God is exactly as personal and individual as we are." Shelley says: "There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken… It is impossible to believe that the Spirit which pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman, or is angered by the consequences of that necessity which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him."

Novalis sings the praises of the priesthood and of the Jesuits. Shelley says: "During many ages of darkness and misery this story" (the doctrine of the Bible) "gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men who derived, and still derive, immense emoluments from this opinion, told the vulgar that if they did not believe in the Bible they would be damned to all eternity; and burned, imprisoned, and poisoned all the unbiassed and unconnected inquirers who occasionally arose. They still oppress them, so far as the people, now become more enlightened, will allow… The same means that have supported every popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood, deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe."

From these extracts, to which innumerable others of the same tendency might be added, we see how great was the distance between Novalis, with his introspective soul-life, and Shelley, with his practical enthusiasm for liberty.

These, then, are the two poets whom men have attempted to represent as twin spirits. They both rank high as lyric poets, though Shelley is a poetical genius of a far higher type than Novalis. But even if Novalis were more on a level with Shelley as a poet, how small is the measure of truth to be found in his works compared with that in Shelley's!

To Novalis, truth was poetry and dream; to Shelley, it was liberty. To Novalis it was a firmly established and powerful Church; to Shelley a struggling, sorely-pressed heresy; Novalis's truth sat on royal and papal thrones; Shelley's was despised and powerless.

To make any real impression on humanity, a truth, however great, must be made man, must become flesh and blood. In the early biographies of Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, we are told that in July 1703 he was condemned, as author of a certain pamphlet, first to have his ears cut off and then to be pilloried. The day came, the sentence was carried out, the man with the pale, mutilated face, dripping with blood, stood in the pillory, facing the assembled multitude. Then, strange to say, in place of the usual loud hooting, with its accompaniment of showers of rotten apples, eggs, potatoes, &c., there fell a dead silence; not an apple was thrown, not one abusive word was heard – Defoe was far too dear to the hearts of the people. Presently one of the crowd, hoisted on his neighbours' shoulders, placed a wreath upon the mutilated head. I read this when I was a boy, and though I know now that Defoe did not lose his ears, so that Pope was mistaken when he wrote —

"Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe;"

and though I also know that Defoe was not the pure character I took him to be at that time, still the picture remains a grand one, and it has burned itself into my soul. For it contains an eternal verity. As a general rule, truth upon this earth presents much such an appearance as did the condemned author in the pillory. And I remember thinking to myself at the time: "If a man chanced to find such a poor, despised, oppressed truth in the pillory, what a great moment in his life it would be if he might draw near and place the wreath upon its brow!" Shelley did this – Novalis did not.

XIII

LONGING – "THE BLUE FLOWER"

I have described Romantic "soul" as intensity, without endeavour or desire, as the glowing furnace in which liberty was asphyxiated and every tendency to outward action destroyed. But this is not the exact truth. One outward tendency remained, that which is known by the name of "longing" (Sehnsucht). Longing is the Romantic equivalent of endeavour, and the mother of all Romantic poetry. What is longing? It is a combination of lack and desire, without the determination or the means to attain what one lacks and desires. And what is the object of this longing? What but that which is the object of all longing and desire, in however fine or hypocritical words it may clothe itself – enjoyment and happiness. The Romanticist does not employ the word happiness, but it is what he means. He does not say happiness, he says "the ideal." But do not let us be deceived by words. The special characteristic of the Romanticist, however, is not his search after happiness, but his belief that it exists, that it must be in store for him, and that it will come to him when he least expects it. And since it is the gift of Heaven, since he himself is not its creator, he may lead as aimless a life as he will, guided only by his vague longing. All that is necessary is to preserve his faith that this longing will be satisfied. And it is a faith easy to preserve, for everything around him is full of omens and prophecies of the accomplishment of his desire.

It was Novalis who gave to the object of Romantic longing the famous, mystic name of "the blue flower." The expression is, of course, not to be understood literally. The "blue flower" is a mysterious symbol, something of the nature of ΙΧθΥΣ, the Fish of the early Christians. It is an abbreviation, a condensed formulation of all that infinitude of bliss for which a languishing human heart is capable of longing. Hence glimpses of it are caught long before it is reached; it is dreamed of long before it is seen; it is divined now here, now there, in what proves to be a delusion, is seen for a moment amongst other flowers, only to vanish immediately; but its fragrance is perceptible, at times only faint, at times strong, and the seeker is intoxicated by it. Though, like the butterfly, he flutters from flower to flower, settling now upon a violet, now upon some tropical plant, he is always seeking and longing for the one thing – perfect, ideal happiness.

It is with this longing and its object that Novalis's principal work deals. It is a work which we must study, and, to understand it aright, we must first see how it came into existence.