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

The action passes in the days of Luther, and Luther's figure is seen in the background. It is rare to find a Romanticist writing of him with such warmth as this: – "As a mountain sends out streams to the east and to the west, so this man combined opposites, things that in others are never found together – humility and pride, conviction of the path he was bound to tread and willing acceptance of the advice of others, clear understanding and blind faith."

A prominent part in the action is taken by Dr. Faust, the Faustus of popular legend, the famous doctor and alchemist. He is represented with a fiery red face, white hair, and bald crown, wearing scarlet trunk hose and ten orders. He is half-genius, half-charlatan, and works miraculous cures.

The most beautifully drawn character is that of a woman, the hero's betrothed, Anna Zähringer, daughter of Apollonia, the love of his youth. She is the tall German maiden of powerful build and noble carriage, but she also possesses the sensuous attraction which Gottfried Keller has a special faculty of imparting to his young women. The hero of the story, Berthold, the burgomaster, is another personification of Arnim's personal ideal. He is of noble descent, but having grown up in humble circumstances, is simple and plain in all his ways, a good, upright, quiet citizen. Yet all the time he is at heart an aristocrat, who longs for armour and weapons and tournaments, and who actually, without previous training, wins the prize in the first tournament in which he takes part.

Mystic incidents are, of course, not lacking. If Arnim could not forego them in his modern novel, in which we read of a priest who, with one look, imparted to childless wives the power of conception, they were certain to occur much more frequently, and to be of an even more surprising nature, in a tale of times long past. Faust, for instance, cures Berthold by injecting into his veins some of the blood of a stalwart young man, Anton by name, and ever after this, Berthold has the feeling that Anton has somehow acquired a right of possession in his, Berthold's, lady-love, Anna; and Anton himself immediately feels mysteriously attracted to Anna. Die Kronenwächter, like all Arnim's longer productions, is a piece of patchwork, though it must be allowed that the patchwork does not lack poetic value.

It was only in his short tales that he succeeded in producing the effect of unity. Philander is a clever and pleasing imitation of the style of Moscherosch, a writer who lived in the days of the Thirty Years' War. In Fürst Ganzgott und Sänger Halbgott, we have a humorous variation of the favourite Romantic "Doppelgänger" theme, based upon an extraordinary likeness between two half-brothers who do not know each other; the story is at the same time a travesty of the stiffness and burdensome conventions of small courts. But Arnim's best and most characteristic work is the short tale, Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau. In it we have all his quaint extravagance, without any breach of the laws of possibility; and the central idea is touchingly human.

The story, like most of Arnim's, has a whimsically grotesque introduction. The old Commandant of Marseilles, Count Durande, is sitting in the evening by his crackling fire, shoving olive branches into the flames with his wooden leg, and dreaming of the construction of new kinds of fireworks, when he suddenly awakens to the fact that his leg is on fire. He shouts for help, and a strange woman, who is in the act of entering the room, rushes up to him and attempts to stifle the flames with her apron; the burning wooden leg sets fire to the apron, but the two are saved by people rushing in from the street with buckets of water. The woman's errand is to present a petition on behalf of her husband, whose behaviour has been peculiar ever since he received a wound in the head. He is a most capable, deserving sergeant, only at times so irritable that it is impossible to get on with him. Partly out of compassion, partly because the case interests him, the Commandant gives this sergeant charge of a fort which only requires a garrison of three men, where, therefore, he runs no great danger of falling out with those about him.

Hardly has he entered the fort before he has an attack of furious madness; he turns out his good wife, refuses to admit his two subordinates, declares war against the Commandant, and opens fire upon Marseilles from his high, inaccessible nest upon the cliffs. For three days he keeps the town in a state of terror. Preparations are made for the storming of the fort, in spite of the certain prospect of loss of life and the fear that the madman may blow up the powder magazine. His brave wife, who loves him, mad as he is, begs that she may first be allowed to try to get into the fort, and, if possible, disarm her husband. He fires upon her, but, led by her love, she climbs undismayed up the narrow rocky path at the top of which two loaded cannons face her. And now, as the result of this terrible excitement, the old wound in the madman's head bursts open again; he comes to his senses, totters to meet his wife – he and she and the town are saved.

The effect of this little work is rather weakened by the introduction of supernatural agencies; the whole calamity, namely, is explained to be the result of a stepmother's foolish curse; still, the story in its simplicity is a glorification of that strong, beautiful love which has power to drive out even the devil himself.

And in this, as in several of his other tales, Arnim evinces a humane sympathy with the lower classes which becomes the aristocratic Romanticist well. It is the same feeling of affection for those who are simple of heart as that which led him to collect and publish the popular songs and ballads, and which finds expression in Dolores in the following words of the hero: "I swear to you that often, when I had to pay a couple of thalers for a few lines containing some utterly superfluous formality, I felt a furious desire to take up the inkpot and knock in the lawyer's teeth with it. I should not have been the least surprised to see a flash of lightning come straight from heaven and burn up all his musty documents. And if I feel thus, how much more grievous must such an outlay seem to the poor man who has perhaps to work a whole week from morning till late at night to scrape the money together." We come on this same idea again in his essay Von Volksliedern, where he declares that the people have come "to look on the law as they look upon a hurricane, or any other superhuman power, against which they must defend themselves, or from which they must hide, or which leaves them nothing to do but despair."

His aristocratic bias is perceptible in all his Romantic vagaries.

With Arnim's name is always coupled that of Clemens Brentano (1778-1849), his partner in the work of collecting and publishing the German popular songs and ballads. Brentano resembles Arnim in his habit of giving free rein to a vivid imagination, but differs from him in being an unstable, unreliable personality. His talent is more sparkling and supple, he is more of an intellectual prodigy; but it is as a psychological phenomenon that he awakens our interest, not as a man. His only claim upon our sympathy is, that he does not, like his spiritual kinsman, Zacharias Werner, degrade himself by sentimental obscenity. He does not act basely, but he is never truthful in the strictest sense of the word, until, intellectually dulled, he renounces the calling of poet, or even of author, and lives entirely for his religious enthusiasms. His case has a certain resemblance to that of Hölderlin, who became insane at such an early age – the last twenty-five years of his life are lost to literature.

In his young days Brentano is the jester of the Romanticists, the wayward knave and wag who cannot refrain from doing what he knows will cost him the friends he has made, nor from disturbing and destroying the emotions and illusions which he himself has skilfully produced. With the quality, rare among the Romanticists, of grace in art, he combines a certain simple pathos. Like many other men of productive intellect, when he took pen in hand he became more profound, more serious, and, above all, more warm-hearted than he was in real life. Hence he not unfrequently as an artist produces the impression of genuineness, though he was insincere as a man.

As an intellectual personality he had no backbone. Destitute of firm convictions, he could only conceive of two attitudes towards the principle of authority in matters of belief – wild revolt or unqualified submission. His intellect oscillated between these two extremes until it found rest in submission.

Of all his gifts and capacities, he, the arch-Romanticist, had only sought to develop that of imagination. Palpably true is the following confession extracted from one of his letters: "Oh, my child! we had nourished nothing but imagination, and it, in return, had half devoured us." Unbridled imagination, developed without any counterbalancing quality, is distinctly akin to mendacity; and, as a matter of fact, Brentano in his youth was an incorrigible liar, whose favourite amusement it was to move ladies to tears by accounts of his entirely imaginary woes.

He was the enfant perdu of the Romantic School. He might also be called the prodigal son of poetry. Like the young man in the New Testament, he was a spendthrift. He squandered all the many good and witty ideas that occurred to him, all the fertile situations which he invented, upon works destitute of definite plan and form, and consequently destitute of the power to withstand time, which so soon sweeps away everything formless. Before he was forty he had exhausted his intellectual capital, had squandered his substance, and was fain, like the young man of the Bible, "to fill his belly with the husks that the swine did eat" – the husks that were the food of only ignorant and superstitious human beings. In other words, he relapsed into foolish bigotry. In the year 1817 he began to go to confession again, as in the days of his earliest youth, and in the following year withdrew from all intercourse with his fellows, to pass the next six years of his life in devout contemplation by the sick-bed of the nun, Catharina Emmerich, who bore on her body the marks of the wounds of Christ. He regarded the bodily infirmities of this pious, single-minded, but perfectly hysterical girl, as so many wonderful signs of grace, believed in the miraculousness of the supposed imprints of the Saviour's wounds, and with awe-strick'en compassion watched them bleed from time to time. Catharina's words convinced him that she possessed a mysterious, supernatural gift of second-sight, and he carefully noted down every one of her visions and hallucinations. He wrote the story of her life, edited her reflections, and wrote to her dictation The Life of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. After her death, which happened in 1824, practically his only occupation was the preparing for publication of the fourteen volumes of manuscript containing her various utterances.

Brentano's life is a remarkable exemplification of the truth of the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust: —

"Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
Des Menschen aller höchste Kraft,
Lass nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken
Dich von dem Lügengeist bestärken,
So hab' ich dich schon unbedingt."[60 - "Yes, despise reason and science, the highest possessions of man, let yourself be persuaded by the spirit of lies to believe in hallucinations and magic, and you are mine without fail."]

Hallucinations and magic played no small part in his existence, and the man who had begun by sneering at rationalism as dull and barren, fell a prey to ideas far duller and more barren than the emptiest rationalism. He was no more a hypocrite than the good soul, Catharina Emmerich, was an impostor. But the craving for some firm, external support for his weak, wavering Ego, now still farther enfeebled by remorse for the recklessness of his youth, led him to cling with all the fanatical enthusiasm of his soul to the Church and its miracles, just as he had clung in earlier days to poetry with its fairy-tales and magic.

In his later years he was possessed by a kind of religious mania, though on a rare occasion he showed a trace of his old inclination to waggery. He declared, for instance, that he had drawn the apostles who appeared to Catharina Emmerich in her visions exactly as she had described them to him; but Bettina discovered that he had been unable to resist hanging round the apostle Paul's neck, in lieu of a scrip, a curious old tobacco pouch, which had belonged to himself in former days, and about which many funny stories were in circulation among his acquaintances.

On his father's side Clemens Brentano was of Italian descent. His grandfather, a successful Frankfort merchant, was a native of Tremezzo on the Lake of Como. Through his mother he was descended from the authoress Sophie Laroche, Wieland's friend.

In personal appearance he was the popular ideal poet, handsome, pale, and slight, with a confusion of curly black hair. He had a Southern complexion and sparkling, restless brown eyes shadowed by long lashes. His voice was deep and beautiful, and he was fond of singing his own songs, accompanying himself on the guitar.

He was apprenticed to a merchant, but the experiment proved totally unsuccessful, and in 1797 he went to Jena, where he made the acquaintance of the most famous of the Romanticists, Fr. Schlegel, Steffens, and others. These friends often threatened to thrash him for his mad tricks and "not unfrequently malicious boasts and lies," and the threat was more than once actually carried out. But he could not refrain from offending; it was impossible to him to restrain a caprice. While still quite young, he fell in love with a very gifted woman, Sophie Mereau, wife of one of the Jena professors. In the course of this love affair the couple had many wonderful adventures, some of which we find reproduced in his first book, Godwi, or the Mother's Statue. When, in 1802, Fr. Tieck executed a marble bust of Brentano, Frau Mereau described the impression it produced on her in the following beautiful sonnet, inspired by genuine admiration and love: —

"Welch süsses Bild erschuf der Künstler hier?
Von welchem milden Himmelsstrich erzeuget?
Nennt keine Inschrift seinen Namen mir,
Da diese todte Lippe ewig schweiget?

Nach Hohem loht im Auge die Begier,
Begeistrung auf die Stirne niedersteiget,
Um die, nur von der schönen Locken Zier
Geschmücket, noch kein Lorbeerkranz sich beuget.

Ein Dichter ist es. Seine Lippen prangen
Von Lieb' umwebt, mit wunderselgem Leben,
Die Augen gab ihm sinnend die Romanze!

Und schalkhaft wohnt der Scherz auf seinen Wangen;
Den Namen wird der Ruhm ihm einstens geben,
Das Haupt ihm schmückend mit dem Lorbeerkranze."[61 - "What beautiful image is this that the artist has created? Under what genial sky was this man born? Is there no inscription to tell me his name, since these dead lips are dumb for ever? The eye glows with noble desire; enthusiasm shines from that fair brow, surmounted only by clustering curls, not yet by the laurel wreath. He is a poet. The wondrous smile of love, of life, is on his lips; romance dwells in these thoughtful eyes, drollery in the cheeks' roguish curves. Fame will ere long proclaim his name, and set the crown of laurel on his brow."]

Happiness came to Brentano before fame. In 1803 he married Sophie Mereau, who had been divorced from her husband, and they lived most happily together till 1806, when she died in childbirth.

In Heidelberg Brentano collaborated with Arnim in the publication of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and with Görres in Die Geschichte des Uhrmachers BOGS ("Story of Bogs, the Watchmaker"). He had already published several works on his own account —Ponce de Leon, die lustigen Musikanten ("The Merry Musicians"), Chronika eines fahrenden Schülers ("Chronicles of a Roving Student"). In Frankfort he became entangled in a love affair, which led to one of the many tragi-comic episodes in his life. He ran away with a young girl who had fallen violently in love with him, Auguste Busmann, a niece of the famous banker, Bethmann. They went to Cassel, where he married her. It is said that he tried to escape from her on the way to church, but that the energetic bride held him fast. A few days after the ceremony she threw her wedding-ring out of the window. One of her fancies was to dash through the town on horseback, the long plumes of her hat and the scarlet trappings of her horse floating in the wind. She plagued her husband in many ways. We are told that one of the worst tortures he had to endure was caused by her skill in beating a tattoo with her feet against the footboard of the bed, a performance invariably followed by a skilful pizzicato played with her toe-nails upon the sheet.[62 - Gödeke: Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, iii., Erste Abth., 31.] This and other things grew so unendurable that he ran away. The valiant lady procured a divorce the same year, and was ere long married again.

Brentano settled in Berlin, and was soon in great request in social circles there, on account of his powers of conversation, his whimsicality, and his rocket-like sallies of wit. It was in Berlin that he wrote his fairy-tales and most of his Romanzen vom Rosenkranz ("Romances of the Rosary"). His play, The Founding of Prague, was written in Bohemia, where lay the family estate, Bukowan, of which the younger brother, Christian, took charge. After his return to Berlin in 1816, he wrote the famous tale, Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und der schönen Nannerl ("Story of Brave Kasperl and Fair Nannerl"), also Die mehreren Wehmüller, and Die drei Nüsse ("The Three Nuts"). Then his conversion took place, and he no longer lived for literature. The profits of anything he wrote subsequently were devoted to charitable objects.

Steffens remarks of Brentano that he is the only one of the Romanticists who seems to be thoroughly aware that he has no aim. He calls him an ironical, sportive Kronos, who fantastically demolishes every one of his definite utterances by means of its successor, in this manner devouring his own children. Still, as a lyric poet, a writer of fairy-tales, and a novelist, Brentano has produced works of art, few in number, but of permanent value.

In his poetry there is something touching, simple, and caressingly sweet. He understands the art of condensing an emotion, but he generally dilutes it again, and spoils his effect by repetitions, refrains, or the introduction of inarticulate sounds, such as "Ru, ku, ku, kuh," and the like. Almost all his poems contain single verses of great excellence, but almost all are too long. He has appropriated the diffuseness of the Volkslied. He is distinctly original in such untranslatable verses as the following, taken from the Dichters Blumenstrauss ("Poet's Garland"): —

"Ein verstimmend Fühlgewächschen
Ein Verlangen abgewandt,
Ein erstarrend Zitterhexchen,
Zuckeflämmchen, nie verbrannt.

Offnes Räthsel, nie zu lösen,
Steter Wechsel, fest gewöhnt,
Wesen, wie noch keins gewesen,
Leicht verhöhnt und schwer versöhnt.

* * * * * * *

Auf dem Kehlchen wiegt das Köpfchen,
Blumenglöckchen auf dem Stiel,
Seelchen, selig Thaueströpfchen,
Das hinein vom Himmel fiel."

The highly artificial style of this poem is very characteristic of Brentano. Both as lyric poet and story-teller he is artificial; but his mannerism seldom gives the impression of affectation, it only witnesses to the almost morbid sensibility of his temperament.

In Der Spinnerin Lied we have a simple and touching expression of the pain of the long separation from Sophie Mereau. It begins: —

"Es sang vor langen Jahren
Wohl auch die Nachtigall,