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

The principal masculine character in the play, the whimpering, whining villain Golo, is William Lovell over again, and William not in the least improved by being dressed up as a dramatic figure in a medieval tragedy.

Octavianus, the allegorical style of which has been strongly influenced by Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is, if possible, still more shapeless and incoherent than Genoveva. It strikes one as resembling nothing so much as a splendid collection of samples of all kinds of metres, those of Southern as well as of Northern Europe, and is in reality simply a fatiguing succession of carefully elaborated descriptions of impressions produced, moods inspired, by nature.

In the introduction to Phantasus, Tieck has himself described how all definite impressions of the surrounding world blend in his mind into a sort of mystic pantheism: —

"Was ich für Grott' und Berg gehalten,
Für Wald und Flur und Felsgestalten,
Das war ein einzigs grosses Haupt,
Statt Haar und Bart mit Wald umlaubt.
Still lächelt er, dass seine Kind'
In Spielen glücklich vor ihm sind
Er winkt und ahndungsvolles Brausen
Wogt her in Waldes heil'gem Sausen.
Da fiel ich auf die Kniee nieder
Mir zitterten in Angst die Glieder.
Ich sprach zum Kleinen nur das Wort:
Sag an, was ist das Grosse dort?
Der Kleine sprach: Dich fasst sein Graun,
Weil Du ihn darfst so plötzlich schaun,
Das ist der Vater, unser Alter,
Heisst Pan, von Allem der Erhalter."[66 - "What I had taken to be ravine and mountain, wood, meadow, and cliff, was one great head, the forest its hair and beard. The giant smiles to see his children happy at their play. He beckons, and straightway through the forest is heard a rustle of holy awe. I fell upon my knees, trembling with fear. I whispered to the little child: 'What is that great being yonder?' The child replied: 'The fear of him comes upon thee because thou hast been permitted to see him without warning; that is our father, our preserver; his name is Pan.'"]

And Tieck looked at and apprehended human nature exactly as he looked at and apprehended forest and mountain. In describing it, too, he drowns all definiteness and character in the flood of mystic pantheism. And this mystic pantheism in his plays paves the way for the Christian mysticism distinguishing the Romantic drama.

Arnim and Brentano are hardly to be taken into account as dramatists. The latter, in his mad comedy, Ponce de Leon, the dialogue of which is loaded with wearisome play upon words, is the would-be disciple of Shakespeare, who has only succeeded in imitating the affectations of the master's youthful style. In his great Romantic drama, Die Gründung Prags ("The Founding of Prague"), he gives us sorcery and miracles, visions and prophecies, magic rings and curses, instead of real human beings and real action; the course of events is indicated by strange forebodings and unerring second-sight.

There is some resemblance between the manner in which Brentano has dramatised Slavonic legend in this play, and the Polish Romanticist Slowacki's treatment (in Lilla Weneda, for instance) of similar themes. Both, out of crude myths and traditions, have produced pictures of Slavonic heathendom which display a certain gift of intuition. The fact is that the Romantic authors of all lands had a keener sense for religious mysticism than for dramatic truth and effect. This play of Brentano's is actually declared to have influenced the mythological theories of his contemporaries, the brothers Grimm.

Arnim's Halle und Jerusalem, the "tragedy in two comedies," as he himself styled it, in which the legend of the Wandering Jew is interwoven with the story of Cardenio and Celinde, is one of the most intolerable productions of German Romanticism. It is a reading-drama of four hundred large octavo pages, which begins as a wild student's comedy in Halle, and develops into a pilgrim-mystery in Jerusalem. It turns upon the medieval idea of the Holy Sepulchre being the centre of the world; and it ends with an apparition of three crosses of fire above the graves of the three principal characters.

In one of the scenes Celinde attempts in the dead of night to cut the heart out of her dead lover's breast, that with its assistance she may perform certain magic rites which will ensure her possession of the heart of her living lover. The dead man, the blood pouring from his breast, rises out of his coffin, and complains of her treatment in such verse as: —

"Geliebte, du durchbohrst mein Herz,
Das ist bittrer als der Hölle Schmerz."[67 - "Beloved, thou hast pierced my heart,Oh, bitterer this than hell's worst smart!"]

Immediately after this, the sexton unmasks himself, reveals himself as the devil, and carries off Celinde's wicked mother to be his bride.

In another scene Celinde is supposed to be about to give birth to a child in a mountain cavern. A stork appears on the stage carrying a child in its beak, and flies into the cavern. Then come a whole flight of storks, which direct their course southwards, singing: —

"Hast du schwer am Kind getragen,
Musst sie mit den Flügeln schlagen,
Hast du müssen lange reisen,
Musst sie mit dem Schnabel beissen," &c.[68 - "The child, a heavy weight, you have borne;Flap your wings at the mother, all forlorn;A weary way you have had to bear it,Catch hold of her cheek with your bill, and tear it," &c., &c.]

The child is born dead, and the wretched mother is in despair. This fact also is communicated to us by a stork: —

"In meiner Wut,
In der Reiseglut,
Hab ich das Kind erdrückt," &c., &c.[69 - "In my irritation,In the journey's agitation,I crushed the child," &c., &c.]

Immediately on the head of this follow would-be pathetic, but in reality revoltingly horrible scenes, like the one entitled "The Temptation in the Desert," in which Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who is starving, struggles against the temptation to eat a little boy, who has been saved along with himself from shipwreck. Ahasuerus says: "How terrible is my desire for his flesh! I already feel the juicy morsel rolling between tongue and palate…" He is on the point of committing the crime, when the child cries: "Father! father!" on which the old man hastily absorbs himself in his book.

Almost at the end of the play, in the middle of a religious service held by the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, an attack is suddenly made upon those Romanticists whose piety is not sincere. A traveller says: "I will deliver the Holy Sepulchre out of the hands of the Turks." One of the author's favourite characters retorts: "Do it first, and then speak of it." Hereupon follows this incredibly undramatic parenthesis: "The traveller turns away ashamed; he goes out into the wide world and pleads the cause of Christianity in thousands of words; but his words have not the power of eternal life, for his is love without deeds. From him are descended all the new, poetic Christians, those, I mean, who are only Christians in their poems." When it comes the length of the author's "I" appearing in a parenthesis in the middle of a play, we may regard dramatic form as practically non-existent. Even Tieck and Hoffmann never went as far as this.

German Romanticism produced only two real dramatists – Zacharias Werner and Heinrich von Kleist. Of these, the latter is incomparably the greater; indeed his poetic gifts are so great that one may unhesitatingly assign him the highest place among all the poets of his school. He has a clearer, more plastic style than any of them, and pathos such as we do not find even in Goethe. His finest works are full of soul, heart, and burning passion, and yet the style is simple and lucid. Kleist is Germany's Mérimée; and a study of his characteristics will show us what the German Romantic tendency could make of a Mérimée. We shall see how the clearness, the definiteness, which was the natural quality of his genius, was disturbed and deranged by the poetical insanity of Romanticism.

Thirty steps from the Wannsee, a little lake near Berlin, and fifty from the wayside inn, stands a gravestone bearing the inscription: "Heinrich von Kleist."

Upon this spot, on the 20th of November, 1811, at the age of thirty-four, the greatest German poet of the younger generation of that day, shot, with unerring aim, first the woman he loved and then himself. It was long believed that the two were united simply by a calm, reasonable friendship. But when, in 1873, their correspondence was published, its unhealthy passion made it evident that there was extravagantly strong feeling on both sides, and that the reason of both was undermined. Kleist addresses his friend, Frau Henriette Vogel, in such terms as these: "My Jette, my all, my castle, land, meadows, and vineyards, sun of my life, my wedding, baptism of my children, my tragedy, my fame, my guardian angel, my cherub and seraph!" and she replies: "My defence, my guard, my sword, my spear, my buckler, my shield," &c.

Heinrich von Kleist was of noble birth, the scion of an old Prussian military family, which in the eighteenth century had already produced a poet. Heinrich had been through one campaign, as a young ensign, when military life became distasteful to him, and a dim consciousness of his unusual powers impelled him to turn to study. In 1799 he matriculated at the university of his native town, Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and was soon working hard at philosophy, mathematics, and classics, living, in spite of his youth, a very sober life, entirely occupied with his own ardent introspective thoughts. In an awkward, pedantic way he attempted to educate his sister, and to cultivate the mind of his fiancée, so that she might really understand him. In the course of a year he left Frankfort to pursue his studies in Berlin. He early developed a fatal inclination to stake everything on one card. His biographer, Wilbrandt, has aptly compared his character to Werther's. He had Werther's gloomy dissatisfaction and cynical reserve, his vivid imagination, his habit of brooding and reasoning, and of dwelling upon everything painful, his overpowering outbursts of emotion.

It was clear to Kleist himself that his was the poet's vocation long before he dared confide the thought to his friends; he left them, he isolated himself, until he was certain of his powers. When for the first time he felt the plan of a work taking shape in his mind, it seemed to him as though "something like earthly happiness" were smilingly beckoning him on. Impetuous and audacious, he expected to produce a masterpiece at once. The immature beginner's attempt was unsuccessful. When, a year later, he planned Robert Guiscard, the tragedy which occupied his thoughts throughout the rest of his youth, it was with the distinct intention of surpassing the classical works of Goethe and Schiller "by the aid of a new art principle." In his art Æschylus and Shakespeare, the best qualities of antiquity and the Renaissance, were to be fused together, the cult of the beautiful was to be combined with truth to nature, and irreproachable style with the extreme of tragic horror.

His powers were as yet inadequate to the task of producing a complete work, and he was obliged to lay the tragedy aside.

In the discouragement produced by the failure of this attempt he turned to philosophy. His desire was to find, not truths, but the truth. With the naïve confidence of the self-taught man he expected to discover at once the full, perfect truth which would guide him both in life and death.

It was the philosophy of Kant which he set himself to study, and the impression it made upon him was distinctly depressing. He had expected to find a religion in philosophy, and Kant's Theory of Cognition taught him that we cannot attain to the truth, can never know what things are in themselves, but only see them as our own organs show them to us – that is to say, he who has green spectacles sees things green, and he who has red, sees them red. When he recognised that knowledge of the truth, as he had represented it to himself, was not possible, it seemed to the young man as if his highest, his only aim were gone.

In this state of spiritual disorganisation he, like other Romanticists, felt the inclination to seek the support of a system of dogmas, either that of orthodox Protestantism or that of the older and more authoritative Catholic Church. He writes from Dresden: "Nothing could have been better calculated to entice me away from the melancholy domain of science than the treasures of art collected in this town… But nowhere did I feel so deeply moved as in the Catholic church, where the most sublime music leagues itself with the other arts to touch the heart. Our divine service is nothing at all in comparison; it only appeals to cold reason, but a Catholic festival appeals to all the senses… Oh, for one drop of forgetfulness! then I should with joy become a Catholic."

Though he overcomes these fancies, he is unable to force himself to work, now that he has made the discovery that truth is not to be found upon earth. To put an end to this painful aimlessness, he determines, though with no particular object in view, to go to Paris. His letters from Paris show how fruitless this new attempt at discovering his real vocation in life proved. He breaks off his engagement, because his fiancée will not blindly and obediently follow him to Switzerland, there to live the life of a peasant's wife. His pride will not permit him to return to his native town before he has accomplished something in the way of fulfilment of his ambitious projects. He goes to Weimar with the intention of completing Robert Guiscard there, is much in Wieland's society, and finally takes up his abode in his house. The old man's goodness and his daughter's quiet tenderness keep him there, but he remains reserved and absent-minded. At last he confesses to the lovable, sympathetic old poet that he is at work upon a tragedy, but that his ideal is so high that he has as yet found it impossible to transfer his conception to paper.

One afternoon Wieland, taking advantage of a favourable opportunity, persuaded his guest to repeat some fragments of the principal scenes from memory. The old poet's admiration knew no bounds; he asserted that if it were possible for the spirits of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare to combine in creating a tragedy, it would be such a tragedy as Robert Guiscard, provided that the whole fulfilled the promise of the parts he had heard.

Kleist's joy was great, but short-lived. Circumstances soon unsettled him again. He went first to Leipzig, then to Dresden. It was in Dresden, to a girl who was in distress because of the supposed indifference of her lover, that he first made the proposal (a proposal which he afterwards often repeated to friends of both sexes), that he should take a pistol and shoot her and himself. Not long afterwards he made a similar offer to his faithful friend, Von Pfuel. Pfuel came to the conclusion that travel would be the best thing possible for Kleist and his tragedy. Kleist caught eagerly at the idea. Shortly before he started for Switzerland he received a letter from Wieland which gave him fresh courage, and was for a long time his greatest comfort. Wieland wrote that it was impossible to him to believe that any external hindrance could prevent the completion of Kleist's masterpiece: "To the Holy Muse who inspires you nothing is impossible. You must complete your Guiscard; yes, even if the whole Caucasus were weighing you down."

During his travels in Switzerland and Northern Italy, which occupied the summer and autumn of 1803, Kleist wrote nothing. Despairing of the sufficiency of his powers, coming to the conclusion that he possessed only a "half talent," he temporarily gave up all idea of literary work. All the time tormented by thoughts of death, he travelled by Lyons to Paris. There he burned Guiscard and all his papers, and determined to enter the army of France (a nation he hated) and take part in the great expedition preparing at Boulogne, in the confident hope that the undertaking would fail, and that he and the whole army would find graves in England. He tried to enlist as a common soldier, but was refused. An acquaintance whom he accidentally met, put him in a position to return to Germany, where, after many mishaps and disappointments, he obtained a small official appointment at Königsberg.

Kleist had announced his intention of competing with Goethe. "I will tear the wreath from his brow," was early the burden of his confidences and his dreams. It sounds like the utterance of a madman. And yet, when we read the one fragment that remains to us of the never-completed drama, Guiscard, we are filled with astonishment. It was as little within the power of this work as of any other to remove the crown of honour from the brow of the genius whose spirit dominates two centuries; but the fact remains that the fragment of it which we possess stands on a level with much of the best produced by Goethe.

Kleist has drawn on his imagination for the picture of a great man, a great leader; and he at once successfully impresses us with his hero's greatness by showing how much depends upon him, upon his life, how thousands upon thousands look up to him as their ruler and only saviour.

The great adventurer, Robert Guiscard, son of Tancred de Hauteville, is lying with his army before Constantinople, which city he has vowed to take and keep. But fate is against him; the plague has broken out in his camp and is committing terrible ravages.

Kleist himself had encountered just such overwhelming misfortune on the path of victory which his imagination had painted; and his delineation of a hero struggling against an overpowering destiny which he has long borne consciously within himself is grand. For Guiscard himself is plague-stricken; the mortal sickness is raging in his intestines; its poison is consuming his very bones. He who till now has been everywhere victorious, the conqueror of Southern Italy, of Rome, of Venice, and of Greece, knows, feels, that his end is at hand. A crowd of Normans are besieging his tent, calling on him to lead the army away from this terrible camping-ground, where they feel the poisonous breath of the plague blowing in their faces. A rumour that he is ill has already begun to spread, but as yet the truth is not to be divulged; Guiscard is too proud to let any one know what he is suffering.

His tent is thrown open, and the man in whose breast a consuming fire is burning, whose throat is parched with unquenchable thirst, and whose hand is so weak that all through the night he has not been able to lift it, steps forth erect and proud, and shows himself to the crowd. So strong and gay and masterful does he seem, that even those who before were certain of the worst, no longer know what to believe.

And there is profound meaning as well as grandeur in this conception of Kleist's. This Guiscard, who stands there erect and unflinching while mortal disease is gnawing at his vitals, who is he but Kleist himself, his whole unhappy life long? He himself is the great genius whose plans are foiled by the pestilence without and within him.

Kleist soon resigned his Government appointment and returned to the calling of literature. It is most interesting to observe the dramatic characters now produced by a man in reality full of productive energy. Our study of the psychological peculiarities and doctrines of the Romanticists has shown us how their predilection for disintegrating personality led them to lay special weight upon all that has a disintegrating effect – dreams, hallucinations, and madness. What distinguishes Kleist's characters from those of the other Romanticists is that there is nothing blurred and vague about them; the essential quality which his and theirs have in common is morbidity. In every passion Kleist seizes upon that feature which betrays kinship with the fixed idea or with helpless insanity; he probes every mind, however sound, till he finds the diseased point where it loses control over itself – somnambulistic tendency, overpowering animal appetites, absent-mindedness, cowardice in the face of death. Take such a passion as love; it is certainly not of a rational nature, but it has a side from which it may be seen to be connected with reason and intellect. Kleist almost invariably, and with admirable skill, depicts it as of the nature of disease, as mania.

When Käthchen of Heilbronn sees Count Walter von Strahl for the first time, she drops everything she is carrying, food, wine, and glasses, and, pale as death, with folded hands, falls at his feet as if she had been struck by lightning. The Count speaks a friendly word to her. Presently, from her window, she sees him mounting his horse to ride away. In her haste to follow him, she jumps from the window, thirty feet high, on to the street, and breaks both her legs. Barely recovered from six weeks' fever, she rises from her bed, collects a small bundle of belongings, and deserts her home to seek the Count and follow him in blind devotion from place to place, led "by the rays which shine from his face and twine themselves round her heart like a five-stranded cord." She wanders after him, her bare feet bleeding on the stony roads, her scanty skirt fluttering in the wind, a straw hat her only protection against the heat of the sun and the pelting of the rain. Through mountain mists, across desert tracts scorched by the sun, through the darkness of thick forests, she follows, like a dog on its master's track; and she, who had been accustomed to lay her head on soft pillows, disturbed by each little knot spun inadvertently by herself into the thread of the sheets, now, when night comes, sleeps in the Count's stables like the meanest servant, sinking exhausted upon the straw spread for his horses.

There is the ring of truth in this description, given by her father, of the young girl's flight. The Count, who knows that he is in no way to blame, tries every method of alienating her. Coming upon her in his stable one night, he thrusts her aside with his foot, and more than once he threatens her with his dog-whip. He allows her to sacrifice herself for his bride, who orders her to rush into a burning house to save his miniature, and when she has brought it, sends her back again for the case. With joy and deep humility she does and bears all. The more refined, but weaker, representation of an overpowering, unrequited passion given us by Henrik Hertz in The House of Svend Dyring is modelled upon Kleist's Käthchen. Side by side with much that is ridiculous and repulsive, Käthchen von Heilbronn contains much that is really grand. It is plain enough that this passion, which comes on as suddenly as a fit of apoplexy – which, moreover, as a fixed idea, destroys every other idea, and, itself a miracle, performs miracles with the aid of an angel – oversteps the bounds of the natural and the healthy. Yet there is something fine in it. It gave intense satisfaction to Kleist, who had such a rooted aversion for mere phrases, to represent a loving woman, in whom everything was truth and reality which in other women is mere words. It was thus that he himself had desired to be loved by his Wilhelmine; and at a later period he had demanded such excessive devotion from a young girl whose acquaintance he had made at the Körners' house in Dresden, and who had become attached to him, that all relations between them were broken off. Now he had taken refuge with his ideal in poetry.