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

Its germ is contained in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and we can clearly trace the mental processes by which Wilhelm Meister is slowly transmuted into Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Wilhelm does not act, he is acted upon. He does not strive, he longs. He pursues ideals, seeking them first on the stage, then in real life. Wilhelm too, is the offspring of "soul." The book is pervaded by soul. It is not only that the characters, like those of many modern English novels (some of Dickens's, for instance), are full of soul, but there is, as it were, soul in the peculiar, hazy atmosphere which surrounds them. No feature is realistically coarse or decided; the children of soul have soft contours. Heiberg once summed up Goethe's philosophy, of which he himself was a disciple, in the following sentence: "Goethe is neither immoral nor irreligious, in the general acceptation of the word, but he shows that there are no unconditional laws of duty, and that we must place our religion on the same level as our poetry and philosophy." We are struck in reading Wilhelm Meister by the manner in which rigid school or text-book ethics, the narrow-minded, conventional ideas of morality and equity, are so re-moulded that morality is no longer regarded as the absolute law of life, but simply as an important principle of life, one among others all equally legitimate and equally under control – just as the brain of the animal, important as it is, is not, in the estimation of the physiologist, the one part of consequence, but simply an organ, fulfilling its task in association with the heart, the liver, and the other organs. Hence sensuality is not abused as animal, but (in Philine) simply and straightforwardly represented as pleasant and attractive. The harmonious development of Wilhelm's nature is arrived at by the aid of many doubtful experiences. In the female characters we are called on to admire well-bred self-possession and the innate nobility of a beautiful nature; the physical and mental superiority and freedom which are the result of a highly favoured and assured position, are sympathetically portrayed in the personages of rank. It may seem objectionable to us nowadays that "noble" and "aristocratic" are evidently often regarded as synonyms, but the reason for it is to be sought in the deplorable, straitened social conditions of the Germany of Goethe's day. As the tale is not the offspring of the union of imagination and reality, but of imagination and "soul," there is something unreal in its whole character; much is veiled, much refined away; everything is so idealised that the material world stands, as it were, in the shadow of the spiritual.

Only private circumstances and persons are dealt with. War is, indeed, alluded to, and in such a manner that we are enabled to conclude that the war following on the French Revolution is meant; but nothing definite is said about it. As to the locality, we are led to the conclusion that it is somewhere in Central Germany; but the landscape possesses no marked features, it only chimes in like a faint musical accompaniment to the mood. In the world depicted in the tale, art is regarded, in the perverted fashion of the day, as the school of life, instead of life as the school of art; national, historical events are but "etwas Theatergeräusch hinter den Koulissen" (a little noise behind the scenes).[56 - Auerbach: Deutsche Abende.] None of the characters have any practical aim in view; they are simply driven onward by the current of their longings and moods; they wander about, untrammelled by circumstances, heedless of the boundaries of countries, leading "planless" existences.

Goethe's avoidance of all psychological extremes is a significant witness to the centripetal tendency of "soul." Such an extreme is crime, conceived of as criminal. Even where Goethe touches upon the horrible, as, for example, incestuous passion (the story of the Harper), his desire is only that we should be powerfully affected, not that we should judge; he does not bring the case before the moral, much less before the legal tribunal. And the story loses some of its painfulness from the manner in which it is communicated to us. We do not hear it from the Harper himself; his lips are sealed; it is told us after his death by a stranger.

It is in this highly idealised world, on which the poet's hand has set the seal of beauty, that Wilhelm wanders about, without a plan, but not without an aim. He is in pursuit of the ideal – an ideal profession, an ideal woman, ideal culture. He is first a merchant, then an actor, then a doctor; loves first Marianne, then the Countess, then Therese, then Nathalie. His first ideal of culture is experience, his second intellectual refinement; then he seeks it in renunciation; and he ends with experiments in social reform which made the Wanderjahre, in its day, one of the books to which socialistic revolutionaries most eagerly appealed. But the main thing to be noted is, that Wilhelm is constantly remoulding his ideal. He does not find it; he loses it, so to speak. It is not so much that he becomes the bourgeois, the philistine (Spiessbürger), as that the word loses its meaning for him.

It often happens to the young man who throws himself eagerly into the study of philosophy in search of enlightenment as to God, eternity, the aim of life, and the immortality of the soul, that, as he studies, these words lose the meaning he at first attributed to them; he obtains an answer to his questions, but an answer which teaches him that these questions must be differently put. The same thing happens in life to Wilhelm, with his longing for a preconceived ideal. Many have embraced the cloud instead of Juno; Wilhelm lets the cloud go, and presses Juno to his heart.

Wilhelm Meister had almost as much share as Die Herzensergiessungen eines Klosterbruders in the production of Tieck's Sternbald, which is throughout an echo of Goethe's great work. Immediately after the appearance of Wilhelm Meister, Tieck sketched the plot of a very interesting story, Der junge Tischlermeister ("The Young Carpenter"), which was not published until forty-one years later. The hero, an almost too accomplished and artistic young carpenter, goes through a process of development which exactly resembles Wilhelm Meister's, as far as the influence of aristocratic acquaintances, of dramatic art, and the theatre is concerned. A true Romanticist, he produces Shakespeare's comedies in a private theatre which is an exact imitation of the theatres of Shakespeare's day, and is the lover both on the stage and behind the scenes.

This work was set aside in favour of Sternbald. The modern tradesman had to give way to the artist of the Romantic period of Albert Dürer. Sternbald is the apotheosis of "soul," of pure soul, without admixture of reason and lucidity. Hence the sum and substance of the book is desire, pining desire; hence we are told of such an event as the Reformation, that, instead of generating a divine fulness of religion, it only generated the emptiness of reason, in which all hearts languish; hence the mild sensuality of Goethe's romance becomes brutal desire of the William Lovell type. The hero, when he looks within himself, sees, like Lovell, "a fathomless whirlpool, a rushing, deafening enigma." In the second edition Tieck thought it advisable to cut out some of the too numerous wanton bathing and drinking scenes amidst which the restless longing of the hero runs riot.

But the principal thing to which I would draw attention is, that reality is here refined and distilled in a manner unknown to Goethe. It is attenuated into vapour – emotional vapour; personality is drowned in landscape, action in the music of the woodman's horn. In Sternbald every day is a Sunday; a devotional feeling pervades the air; we seem to hear the church bells ring and to know that the world is at leisure. The following words of the hero contain the philosophy of the book: "In this world we can only desire, we can only live in intentions; real action belongs to the hereafter." Consequently there is no action in the story; the characters wander about with as little apparent purpose as comets; their lives consist of a series of accidental, unsought adventures; they are always travelling in search of the ideal, and as the ideal is generally supposed to have taken up its abode somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rome, the book ends there – the story is not brought to a conclusion, and is never continued.

It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that Novalis prefers Sternbald to Wilhelm Meister. "For," says he, "the kernel of my philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the absolutely real, and that the more poetical anything is, the truer it is. Therefore, the task of the poet is not to idealise, but to cast a spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true poetry. A fairy tale is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in its being exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." The world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos – chaos which prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be not a mere tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable. The real fairy tale writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel, is, as it were, free history, the mythology of history. And love, being the form of morality which implies the possibility of magic, is the soul of the novel, the foundation of all romances, all novels. For where true love is, there marvellous, miraculous things happen.

These obscure, yet in a manner unambiguous expressions of Novalis's opinions on the subject of the true nature of poetry and romance, make it easy for us to understand his judgment of Wilhelm Meister, a book he had greatly admired in early youth. For in Wilhelm Meister, as in Torquato Tasso, poetry has to give way to reality, the poetic conception of life to the practical. Novalis could imagine nothing more shameful than this; it was sin against the holy spirit of poetry. In the novel, in fiction, poetry is not to be done away with, not even to be restricted, but to be exalted and glorified.

So he determines to write a novel which shall be the direct antithesis of Wilhelm Meister. He even takes thought of such small matters as type and size, and determines that in them Heinrich von Ofterdingen shall be the exact counterpart of the book, the worldly philosophy of which it is to refute by its magic mysticism. He writes to Tieck: "My novel is in full swing; it is to be a deification of poetry. In the first part Heinrich von Ofterdingen ripens into a poet; in the second he is the glorified poet. The story will have many points of resemblance with your Sternbald but will lack its lightness. This want, however, may not be a disadvantage, considering the subject."

Goethe and Wilhelm Meister Novalis criticises thus: "Goethe is an altogether practical poet. His works are what English wares are – simple, neat, suitable to their purpose, and durable… He has, like the Englishman, a natural sense of order and economy, and an acquired sense of what is fine and noble… Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre is, in a way, altogether modern and prosaic. Romance perishes in it, and so does the poetry, the magic quality, of nature. The book only deals with everyday human affairs; nature, and the belief in her mysterious powers, are quite forgotten. It is a poetically written story of bourgeois domestic life, in which the marvellous is expressly treated as poetry and fancy. Artistic atheism is the spirit of the book. Wilhelm Meister is a Candide directed against poetry."

Novalis's aim, then, is to produce a work exactly the opposite of this, one in which everything is finally resolved into poetry, in which "the world becomes soul." For everything is soul. "Nature is to the soul what a solid body is to light. The solid substance stops light, breaks it up into wonderful colours, &c., &c. Human beings are soul prisms."

His novel is, then, an allegory, the key to which is contained in the fairy-tale introduced into the story. This fairy-tale is supposed to show how the true eternal world comes into existence; it is a description of the restoration of that kingdom of love and poetry in which the great "world-soul expands and blooms everlastingly." Novalis believes that, since the existing heaven and the existing earth are of a prosaic nature, and since our age is an age of utilitarianism, a poetical day of judgment must come, a spell must be broken, before the new life can blossom forth. – Arcturus and his daughter slumber, frozen in their palace of ice. They are released by Fable (i.e. Poetry) and her brother, Eros. Eros is the child of the restless father, Reason, and the faithful mother, the Heart. Fable owes her being to unfaithfulness on the part of Reason; she is born of Fancy, daughter of the Moon; her godmother is the guardian of the domestic altar, Sophia, Heavenly Wisdom.

Against the good powers in this allegory a conspiracy is formed by the Writer. The Writer is the spirit of prose, of narrow enlightenment; he is depicted as constantly writing. When Sophia dips what he has written into a bowl which stands upon the altar, a little of it sometimes remains legible, but often it is all washed out. If drops from the bowl happen to fall upon him, they fall from him again in the shape of numbers and geometric figures, which he eagerly collects, strings upon a thread, and wears round his neck as an ornament. The Writer is Novalis's Nureddin. The result of his plot is the imprisonment of the Father and Mother and the destruction of the altar.

But Fable has escaped. She descends into the realm of Evil, and exterminates Evil by delivering up the Passions to the power of the death-bringing Fates. Time and Mortality are now no more. "The last thread of the flax is spun; the lifeless is reanimated; life reigns." In a universal conflagration, the mother, the Heart, is burned to death, the sun disappears, and the ice is melted round the palace of Arcturus. Through a new, happy earth, stretching far and wide under a new heaven, Eros and Fable pass into the palace. Fable has fulfilled her mission; she has brought Eros to his beloved, the daughter of the king. The kingdom of poetry and love is established.

"Gegründet ist das Reich der Ewigkeit;
In Lieb und Frieden endigt sich der Streit;
Vorüber ging der lange Traum der Schmerzen;
Sophie ist ewig Priesterin der Herzen."[57 - "The everlasting kingdom is firmly established; strife ends in love and peace; the long and painful dream is at an end; Sophia is priestess of all hearts henceforward and for ever."]

Sophia occupies the same place in this allegory that Beatrice does in Dante's great poem.

The glorification of the old Meistersinger is, of course, intended as a glorification of poetry in general, but his story, as told in the novel, is really the story of Hardenberg's own life and endeavour. Heinrich von Ofterdingen's home and quiet childhood remind us of Hardenberg's. A dream, which seems doubly rich in omen because his father as a youth had dreamed one like it, gives him a fore-feeling of the mysterious happiness of the poet's life, and shows him, in the form of a wonderful blue flower, the object of the poet's longing and endeavour.

In order that he may acquire some knowledge of the world, it is decided that Heinrich and his mother shall travel, in company with a number of merchants, to Augsburg. The incidents of the journey and the tales of his travelling companions enrich him with impressions, and fertilise the germs of poetical productivity that lie latent in his soul. For all their talk is of poetry and poets; they tell him the story of Arion, and popular legends in which poets are the equals of kings, and they philosophise on the subject of poetry and art, not like merchants of the most barbarous period of the Middle Ages, but like Romanticists of the year 1801. One of them, for example, gives the following pantheistic explanation of the instinctive impulse of mankind towards plastic art: "Nature, desiring to have some enjoyment of all the art that there is in her, has metamorphosed herself into human beings. In their minds, through them, she rejoices in her own glory, selects what is most pleasant and lovely, and reproduces it in such a manner that she may possess and enjoy it in manifold ways."

In a castle to which they come, Heinrich meets a captive Eastern girl, whose touching plaint it is interesting to compare with the song of the Oriental beauty (La Captive) in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales. In a book belonging to a mysterious hermit (the original of the charcoal-burner's book in Ingemann's Valdemar Sejer) he finds the history of his own life.

The travellers arrive at Augsburg, and here Heinrich makes the acquaintance of a poet and a fascinating young girl. In Klingsohr he has a noble example of the fully developed poet, a poet whose utterances in many ways remind us of Goethe's. Almost everything that Klingsohr says is surprisingly rational and wise; we can scarcely understand how Novalis himself failed to take any of it to heart. The following are some of his remarks: "I cannot too strongly recommend you to follow your natural inclination to penetrate into the reason of things, to study the laws of causation. Nothing is more indispensable to the poet than insight into the nature of every event, and knowledge of the means whereby to attain every aim… Enthusiasm without understanding is useless and dangerous, and the poet will be able to effect few miracles if he is himself astonished by miracles… The young poet cannot be too calm, too thoughtful. True, melodious eloquence demands a wide, calm, observing mind." Upon one point, however, Klingsohr and Novalis are entirely agreed, namely, that everything is, and must be, poetry. "It is a great misfortune that poetry should have a special name, and that poets should form a separate guild. There is nothing separate or special about poetry. It is the mode of action characteristic of the human mind. Do not all men aspire poetically every moment of their lives?"

All Heinrich's love longings are satisfied when he sees Klingsohr's daughter, Mathilde. He feels once more as he felt when he saw the vision of the "blue flower." But Mathilde is drowned. Heinrich loses her as Novalis had lost Sophie von Kühn. Utterly broken down, he leaves Augsburg. He is comforted in his sorrow by a vision (like the visions Novalis had at Sophie's grave) in which he sees the departed and hears her voice. In a distant monastery, the mission of whose monks it is to keep alive the sacred fire in young souls, and which seems to be a species of "spirit-colony," he lives "with the departed." He experiences all the sensations to which Novalis has given expression in the Hymns to Night. Then he returns from the spirit-world to life, and falls in love with a being no less wonderful than the object of his first passion. Mathilde's place is filled by Cyane.

The second part of the novel is only sketched. Heinrich wanders the whole world round. After going through every earthly experience, "he retires again into his soul, as to his old home." Things material now become transformed into things spiritual. "The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the world." Heinrich finds Mathilde again, but she is no longer distinguishable from Cyane – just as, in Novalis's own life, Julie was not Julie, but Sophie come to life again. And now "the festival of soul," of love and eternal fidelity, is celebrated. On this occasion allegory reigns supreme. The principle of good and the principle of evil appear in open competition, singing antiphonies; the sciences do the same, even mathematics. We hear much about Indian plants – probably the lotus-flower was made to play a part as partaking of the nature of the "blue flower."

The end of the story is merely indicated. Heinrich finds the "blue flower" – it is Mathilde. "Heinrich plucks the blue flower, and releases Mathilde from the spell which has bound her, but loses her again. Stunned by grief, he turns into a stone. Edda, who, besides being herself, is also the 'blue flower,' the Oriental captive, and Mathilde (fourfold 'Doppelgängerei'), sacrifices herself to the stone. It turns into a singing tree. Cyane hews down the tree, and burns herself along with it, upon which it turns into a golden ram. Edda-Mathilde is compelled to sacrifice the ram, and Heinrich becomes a man once more. During these transformations he has all manner of wonderful conversations." This we can readily believe.

In Danish literature the work most allied to Heinrich von Ofterdingen is Ingemann's De Sorte Riddere ("The Black Knights"). We learn from Ingemann's autobiography how exactly his frame of mind at the time he was writing this book corresponded to that of the German Romanticist. "I paid but little attention to all the great events that were happening in the outer world. Even the conflagration of Moscow, the destruction of the Great Army, and the fall of Napoleon were to me ephemeral phenomena … even in the German War of Liberation I only saw a divided nation in conflict with itself, noble powers without any principle of unity and concord. Between the ideal life and human life there lay a yawning abyss, which only the heavenly rainbow of love and poetry could bridge over… I wrote myself into a fairy labyrinth, in which love was my Ariadne-thread, and in which I hoped, with the great harp of the poetry of life, the strings of which are strung by genius from rock to rock over black abysses, to lull the monsters of existence to sleep, resolve the dissonances in the great world-harmony, and solve the world-mystery." The result of this attempt was woeful.

It is certain that in Heinrich von Ofterdingen Novalis succeeded in producing something as unlike Wilhelm Meister as possible. The "blue flower" was the emblem of the ideal. Here we have the real forgotten in the ideal, and the ideal in its emblem. Poetry is entirely separated from life. Novalis thinks that this is as it should be. In Ofterdingen he says of poets: "Many and important events would only disturb them. A simple life is their lot, and they must make acquaintance with the varied and numberless phenomena of the outer world only by means of tales and books. Only seldom during the course of their lives is it permissible for them to be drawn into the wild eddy of some great event, in order that they may acquire a more accurate knowledge of the position and character of men of action. Their receptive minds are quite sufficiently occupied with near and simple phenomena… Here upon earth already in possession of the peace of heaven, untormented by vain desires, only inhaling the fragrance of earthly fruits, not devouring them, they are free guests, whose golden feet tread lightly, and whose presence causes all involuntarily to spread their wings… If we compare the poet with the hero, we shall find that the poet's song has many a time awakened heroic courage in youthful hearts, but never that heroic deeds have called the spirit of poetry to life in any soul."

The fundamental error could not have been defined more clearly. According to this theory, poetry is not the expression of life and its deeds; no, life and its deeds have poetry as their origin. Poetry creates life. Undoubtedly there is poetry of which this may be true; but if there be any one kind of poetry of which it could never be true, it is the kind under consideration. To what possible deed could it incite? To the changing of one's self into a singing tree or a golden ram? There is no question of action in it at all, only of longing.

All the best of Novalis's work is simply an expression of this longing, which includes every desire, from the purely natural ones to the most transcendental aspiration. Perhaps the most beautiful things he has written are two songs – the one giving expression to the sensuous longings of the young girl, the other to the longing which is part and parcel of the enthusiastic friendship of young men.

The song in which the young girls complain of the hardships of their lot is charming. Here the "blue flower" is simply the forbidden fruit. But the longing is expressed with bewitching roguishness. In the poem "To a Friend," again, we have it expressed with fervency and solemnity: —

"Was passt, das muss sich ründen,
Was sich versteht, sich finden,
Was gut ist, sich verbinden,
Was liebt, zusammen sein,
Was hindert, muss entweichen,
Was krumm ist, muss sich gleichen,
Was fern ist, sich erreichen,
Was keimt, das muss gedeihn.

"Gieb treulich mir die Hände,
Sei Bruder mir und wende
Den Blick vor Deinem Ende
Nicht wieder weg von mir.
Ein Tempel, wo wir knieen,
Ein Ort, wohin wir ziehen,
Ein Glück, für das wir glühen,
Ein Himmel mir und Dir!"

The longing here is almost that of the Crusader – a seeking in the far distance for something great and glorious. The "blue flower" melts into the blue of the horizon. Its very colour betokens distance.

Let us dwell for a moment longer on this flower. In Spielhagen's Problematische Naturen, one of the characters says: "You remember the blue flower in Novalis's tale? Do you know what it is? It is the flower which no mortal eye has seen, yet the fragrance of which fills the world. Not every creature is delicately enough organised to perceive its perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when she sings and wails and sobs in the moonlight and the grey dawn; and so were, and so are, all the foolish human beings who, in prose and verse, have poured, and are pouring, forth their woes to Heaven; and so, too, are millions more, to whom no God has granted the power to say what they suffer, and who look up in dumb anguish to the Heaven which has no mercy upon them. And alas! for this suffering there is no cure – none except death. For him who has once inhaled the fragrance of the blue flower there is not a peaceful hour left in life. Like a murderer, or like one who has turned away the Lord from his door, he is driven onward, ever onward, however much his tired limbs ache, and however fervently he longs to lay down his weary head. When he is tormented by thirst, he begs at some hut for a drink; but he hands back the empty vessel without a word of thanks, for it was dirty, or there was an ugly insect in the water – in any case, he had found no refreshment in it. Refreshment! Where are the eyes which have taken from us the desire ever to look into other, brighter, more ardent eyes? Where the breast upon which we have rested with the certain knowledge that we should never long to listen to the beating of a warmer, more loving heart? Where? Can you tell me where?"

"Love," so runs the reply, "is the fragrance of the blue flower, which, as you have said, fills the world; and in every being whom you love with your whole heart you have found the blue flower."

"I fear that is not a solution of the riddle," says the hero sorrowfully, "for this very condition, that we should love with our whole hearts … we can never fulfil. Which of us can love with his whole heart? We are all so weary, so worn out, that we have neither the strength nor the courage essential to true, serious love – that love which does not rest until it has taken possession of every thought of a man's mind, every feeling of his heart, every drop of blood in his veins."

This interpretation is a beautiful one, and it is not incorrect, but it is not exhaustive. It is not only in love, but in every domain of life that the "blue flower" represents perfect, and hence to that extent ideal, but still purely personal happiness. The longing for this, from its nature unattainable, happiness is the constant, restless desire depicted by all the Romanticists.

Perhaps not one of the regular German Romanticists is so completely the poet of Romantic longing as Shack Staffeldt, who, though a German born, wrote in Danish. But he does not depict the longing which produced outward restlessness. His longing is far too deep to be satisfied by wandering about the world. It is in the writings of certain of the later Romanticists that longing appears as the restless desire which drives man from place to place.

Of this it seems to me that we have the most typical description in Eichendorff's novel, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ("The Life of a Ne'er-Do-Well"). Published in 1824, this book was written twenty years after Heinrich von Ofterdingen, though by a man only ten years Novalis's junior, a disciple of Tieck, an ultra-Romanticist of a pious, amiable disposition.

Joseph, Baron von Eichendorff, the son of a nobleman of high position, was born in Upper Silesia in 1788. His family being Catholic, his early education was superintended by a Catholic ecclesiastic. In 1805 he went to the University of Halle to study law, and, amongst other lectures, attended those of Professors Schleiermacher and Steffens, the latter of whom had a special attraction for him. It was here that he made his first acquaintance with Romantic literature; Novalis opened to him a new dream-world, rich in promise. In his very first holidays he went to Wandsbeck to visit old Claudius, whom he had loved from his early boyhood. Claudius's paper, the Wandsbecker Bote, had been his greatest comfort in the days when his tutor plagued him with instructive children's books. There is something of Claudius's mild humour in Eichendorffs own poetry.

The year 1807 found him at Heidelberg, where he made the acquaintance of the Romanticists living there, Arnim, Brentano, and Görres being the most notable. He assisted in editing Des Knaben Wunderhorn (a famous collection of popular songs and poetry), and collaborated with Görres in his work on the old popular literature. In 1809 he met Arnim and Brentano again in Berlin; here he also made the acquaintance of Adam Müller, who exercised a considerable influence upon him. He was strongly influenced, too, by Fichte's lectures.

As there seemed no prospect of a career for him in Prussia, he went in 1810 to Vienna, intending to enter the service of the Austrian Government. In Vienna he spent much of his time in the company of Friedrich Schlegel, formed a close friendship with Schlegel's stepson, Philipp Veit, the painter, and wrote his first, exaggeratedly Romantic story, Ahnung und Gegenwart, which is nothing but a collection of lyric dreams and fancies. Nevertheless, in this work, as well as in his later productions, it was his desire to contrast the "fervent harmony existing between healthy, fresh humanity and nature, in forest, stream, and mountain, shining mornings and dreamy starlit nights, with the empty pleasures of the great world, and the affected prudery or real depravity of the period." As in all his works, adventure predominates. As soon as he quits the domain of merry vagabond life and romantic adventure, he is in danger of relapsing into the supernatural and horrible.