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

Kleist was the most intractable character in the intellectual world of the Germany of that day; he had, moreover, too much heart, too strong feelings. After he had given up all hope of attaining to a knowledge of the truth, he tried to build upon the foundation of feeling. As author he was able to do it; his Michael Kohlhaas is based upon the feeling of justice, Käthchen von Heilbronn upon the feeling of absolute devotion. But the real world to which he himself belonged had no use for strong, unmixed feeling such as his. He did not find it in others, and wherever he followed it himself, the consequences were disastrous. Alas! no; nothing was quite certain on this earth, not even his own vocation!

No one could prize decision, unity of character, more than he did, and never was there a more uncertain, divided, morbid man. He was always despairing, always wavering between the highest endeavour and the inclination to commit suicide. This explains how it is that we see him, the greatest of the Romanticists, liable to almost all the errors which distinguish his contemporaries. His own really fine, noble nature was spoiled very much as are most of the characters in his works, by sinister, disastrous peculiarities, which slacken the will and destroy the elasticity of the mind. Yet Heinrich von Kleist has assured himself a place in literature, like all others who have won places there, by the vigour and the passion with which he lived and wrote.[82 - Adolf Wilbrandt, Heinrich von Kleist, 1863; Otto Brehm, Heinrich von Kleist, 1884.]

In the other notable dramatist of the Romantic School there was far less to disintegrate. He was the genuine Romanticist from the very first.

Zacharias Werner was born in Königsberg in 1768. He was the son of a professor at the University, who also held the post of dramatic censor. Hence, even as a child, Zacharias had the opportunity of seeing plays almost daily, and in his earliest youth he was able to make himself acquainted with all the technicalities of the stage. His mother, according to Hoffmann, "was richly endowed with both intellect and imagination." Her mind inclined to earnest, highly imaginative mysticism, and she exercised no inconsiderable influence upon her son's ardent imagination; but in course of time she became insane, one of her delusions being that she herself was the Virgin Mary, and her son the Saviour of the world.

As a student, Zacharias, who was of a sanguine, sensual temperament, led an exceedingly dissolute life. In his twentieth year he published a volume of lyric poems, which, like the earliest writings of Friedrich Schlegel and the other Romanticists, are entirely untouched by mysticism; they inveigh, in the style of the eighteenth century, against "sanctimoniousness, pious stupidity, hypocrisy, and Jesuitism." Nevertheless, while still comparatively young, he himself adopted the sanctimonious style. Though he continued to be dissipated, he cannot exactly be called a hypocrite, for he sinned and repented alternately. The distinguishing feature of his character was instability, as he himself confesses in his last poem, Unstäts Morgenpsalm ("The Unstable Man's Morning Hymn"); and long before, in the prologue to Söhne des Thals ("Sons of the Vale"), he had called himself an inconstant creature, "perpetually erring, lamenting, warning."

Religious motives induced Werner to join the Freemasons; he believed that this order would prove the means of diffusing throughout the whole world a new and more sincere spirit of piety. Pecuniary motives induced him to accept a Government secretaryship; and in 1795, not long after addressing three enthusiastic poems (a war song, a call to arms, and a lament) to the unfortunate Poles, he took up his abode in the capacity of a Prussian Government official in the conquered city of Warsaw, where he spent ten pleasant years. He married three times during the course of those ten years. The first two marriages were so ill-advised that in both cases the divorce promptly followed the wedding; the third, with a particularly charming Polish lady, lasted for some years. From her he was divorced in 1805. On this occasion Werner took all the blame upon himself. "I am not," he writes to Hitzig at the time, "a bad man, but I am in many ways a weakling, though in others God grants me strength. I am timid, capricious, miserly, uncleanly. You know it yourself." Not a flattering portrait.

Schleiermacher's Lectures on Religion and, following on these, the writings of Jakob Böhme made no small impression on him. Art and religion now became to him one and the same thing. "Why," he writes to Hitzig, "have we not one name for these two synonyms?" They signify to him what he at one time calls the "vivid sense of the nearness of great Nature," at another, "the simple, humble outpouring of the pure soul into the pure stream (of Nature)." His literary opinions are, he declares, "exactly those of Tieck." In Warsaw he still writes coldly of the Catholic Church; he defends it, not as "a system of faith, but as a newly reopened mine of mythology."

Death bereft him on one day, the 24th of February, 1804, of his mother and his most intimate friend, Mnioch, a Pole – hence the title of his fatalistic tragedy, The Twenty-Fourth of February, written ten years later.

Having solicited all his patrons and friends in turn to procure him an appointment with as little work and as much remuneration as possible, he finally obtained an easy and profitable post in Berlin, through the influence of a minister who was deeply interested in both religion and freemasonry. He gave himself up for a time to all the amusements and dissipations of the capital; but, after the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon, he threw up his appointment and began to lead a wandering life. He was alone and free, for all his marriages had been childless, and he had inherited a fortune at his mother's death. He travelled through Germany and Austria, that "blessed land," as he calls it, made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël, and visited her at Coppet. In Weimar he succeeded in obtaining a pension from the Prince-Primate (Fürst-Primas) Dalberg. Professor Passow, who made his acquaintance in Weimar, wrote to Voss: "I dislike Werner exceedingly, for the reason that I have never seen him twice the same. This is the consequence of his insufferable anxiety to please every one. It depends entirely upon his company whether he is the low libertine or the pious devotee of the most modern, most spiritual type." A clergyman named Christian Mayr obtained great influence over him. Mayr was a fanatic and an eccentric. In order to realise one of the visions in the Book of Revelations and to attain heavenly wisdom, he swallowed the greater part of a Bible, and was dangerously ill in consequence; he shot with a pistol at any member of his congregation who fell asleep when he was preaching; and he believed that he could, during the celebration of the sacrament, produce real flesh and blood. This man was desirous that Werner should join a great secret society, the "Kreuzesbrüder im Orient." At first Werner was very enthusiastic in the matter, then he began to entertain doubts, and these doubts partly led to his conversion to Catholicism.

In November 1809, after paying a visit at Coppet, he went to Rome, where he spent several years. His conversion took place in 1810. During his years of wandering he had led the maddest of lives, dividing each day between low debauchery and religious excitement, between gross sensual indulgence and solemn intercourse with the Deity. The fragments of his diary, published in two small volumes by Schütz, betray a coarse immorality, an obscenity of thought, and a shamelessness of expression, which are rendered only the more repulsive by the outbursts of miserable remorse and self-accusation which interrupt the detailed descriptions of erotic experiences.

In a testamentary epistle to his friends (dated September 1812) he mentions the two motives which withhold him from a public confession. "The one is, that to open a plague pit is dangerous to the health of the still uninfected bystanders; the other, that, in my writings (for which God forgive me), among a wilderness of poisonous fungi and noxious weeds there is to be found here and there a healing herb, from which the poor sick people to whom it might be useful would assuredly shrink back in horror if they knew the pestilential spot in which it had grown."

When Werner had (characteristically enough after his conversion) studied theology and made himself acquainted with the Catholic ritual, he was ordained priest. It was in Vienna, in 1814, at the time of the Congress, that he made his first appearance as a preacher. He was most successful. People were impressed by his tall, spare, ascetic figure and his long thin face, with the prominent nose and the dark brown eyes gleaming under heavy eyebrows. He preached to enormous crowds sermons of which the Monk's sermon in Wallenstein's Lager may serve to give a faint idea. They were full of high-flown bombast and disgusting obscenities, united wit and wisdom with ascetic nonsense and tiresome twaddle, overflowed with denunciations of heretics and eulogies of the rosary.[83 - Hitzig, Lebens-Abriss Zacharias Werners, 1823; Schütz, Zacharias Werner, Biographie und Charakteristik, 1841.]

Werner died in Vienna in 1823. He is the representative-in-chief of mysticism in literature. His life is the key to his works – works which profoundly impressed his contemporaries, but which interest us chiefly from the pathological point of view. He undoubtedly possessed considerable poetic gifts.

His verse is melodious and falls caressingly on the ear, like the church music of southern lands. His characters are generally well planned (take, for example, Franz von Brienne in the first and second acts of Die Templer auf Cypern– "The Knights Templar in Cyprus"), and the action interests and keeps us in suspense; but the core and kernel of it all, the threefold kernel of sensuality, religion, and cruelty, is ill-flavoured and unwholesome.

His first important work, Die Söhne des Thals, which is in two parts, of six acts each, deals with the Order of the Templars. He was obviously inspired to it by the ideas of freemasonry, ideas which had impressed Schubert, had played a part in Wilhelm Meister, and had considerably influenced his own private life.

In this work the encasing of one idea within another – from the very beginning a favourite device of the Romanticists – takes the form of everything circling round a central mystery, the mystery of the secret society; we penetrate ever farther and farther in, but as we do so, it seems to retreat from us. The Order of the Templars has its own particular mysteries, and we witness every detail of the initiation of the neophytes into these – in gloomy vaults, with all the paraphernalia of colossal skeletons, cryptic books, curtains, swords, palms, &c., &c. The meaning underlying it all is: "Aus Blut und Dunkel quillt Erlösung" (From blood and darkness issues redemption). But the order of Knights Templar is only a branch order; the great mother-order, "das Thal" (the Vale), is in possession, as we learn in the second part of the work, of all the higher mysteries and the higher power. But its inmost mystery, too, is only the purely negative idea of renunciation and sacrifice. Hidden voices proclaim "in a hollow, chanting tone" —

"Alles ist zum Seyn erkoren,
Alles wird durch Tod geboren,
Und kein Saatkorn geht verloren.
"Wer durch Blut und Nacht geschwommen,
Ist den Aengsten bald entnommen,
Blutiger, sei uns willkommen!"[84 - "Life is the destiny of everything; through death comes birth; not one grain of seed is lost. He who has struggled through blood and darkness has overcome. All hail, O bleeding knight!"]

We gain some idea of the extent to which the mysteries are utilised in the elaboration of stage decoration and costumes from the fact that in the twelfth scene of the fifth act, which consists of sixty-four lines, only six are dialogue, the remainder being devoted to directions regarding "a great burial mound, covered with roses, with transparencies of an angel, a lion, a bull, and an eagle, disposed at the four corners" – the costumes to be worn by the dignitaries of the "Vale," of which some are to be cloth of gold, some silver, some sky blue, some blood red – and the incense, the harps, the bells, the crowns and crowns of thorns, the banners, and the "colossal statue of Isis," required in the scene.

The Order of Knights Templar has degenerated. The mother-order determines to abolish it altogether, and condemns its Grand Master, the noble and heroic Molay, to be burned, although he is entirely guiltless of the decadence of his order – has, in fact, striven hard to arrest it. The Archbishop, who tries him, is convinced of the injustice of the accusations brought against him, and loves and admires him, but is compelled to obey orders. Molay faces death with as great calm as Paludan-Müller's Kalanus; in fact, he longs for the "purifying flames." The bystanders sympathise with him, and cry to him to make his escape; but, like Kalanus, he resists all entreaties. The Archbishop's feeling for him is shared by every one; he is surrounded by a crowd of sentimental executioners, who consign him to the flames with expressions of the utmost admiration and esteem. They are cruel, sentimental fanatics, like Werner himself. Every character in the play is tainted with repulsive sentimentality. Molay's old comrade in arms, when prevented from rescuing him, says: —

"Du böser Jakob Du! – Pfui! sterben will er,
Verlassen seinen Waffenbruder! – Jakob!
Du musst nicht sterben! hörst Du?"[85 - "You wicked Jacques! What? Die and leave your old comrade? No, no, Jacques – you must not do it."]

But the guiltless Molay dies. There is the same play upon the Christian mystery here as in Kleist's drama. Molay is venerated like a second Christ, even by his executioners. After his death a miracle happens. "Sunlight gilds the scene. Above the entrance to the Vale cavern, below the brightly illuminated name 'Jesus' there appear the names 'John,' 'J. B. Molay,' and 'Andrew,' also in bright transparencies." All the crusaders fall upon their knees. "Long, solemn pause, during which there come from the interior of the cavern the muffled sounds of the 'Holy! Holy! Holy!' sung by the elders of the Order of the Vale to the usual tune, with an accompaniment of harps and bells."

Martyrdom is Werner's specialty. He is at home in such subjects as beating to death with clubs, boiling in oil, and the tortures of the rack. He revels in agonies, as does Görres, whose satisfaction we almost seem to feel as we read of all the mysteries of martyrdom in the first part of his Christian Mysticism. "The sacrificial victims are stretched upon the rack or the wheel, and all their limbs are twisted out of joint by means of screws … while the lictors scorch their sides with torches or tear them with iron claws. Chains are sometimes drawn round their bodies until their ribs are broken; their chests and eyes are pierced with pointed reeds; their jaws are broken with heavy blows of the torturer's fist; and, though the victims are now hardly drawing breath, nails are hammered through their feet and red-hot iron rods are laid upon their tenderest parts and allowed to burn themselves in," &c., &c.

In Werner's drama, Attila, a young man whom Attila loves is accused of perjury and confesses his guilt. Attila, who is an emotional, sentimental enthusiast, embraces him, shedding burning tears, and then orders him to be torn asunder by horses. Cruel sentimentality, fanatic brutality, is Romantic wont. Along with Attila we have Pope Leo, another character who seems to have escaped from the pages of Görres' Mysticism– this time undoubtedly from the chapter treating of the height from the ground to which the enthusiast in his religious rapture is at times raised; for, while he is praying, Leo "raises himself higher and higher, until he is resting only on the tips of his toes." He sympathises with Attila, and has a sort of magnetic influence over him.

In Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft ("The Consecration of Strength"), the mystery of religious consecration is the subject. The play opens significantly with a scene of the Novalis type, miners going down into and being drawn up from a mine. The representation of Luther is more suggestive of a Catholic saint than of the Protestant reformer. Of Katharina von Bora, too, a saintly character is made. Luther and she are accompanied throughout the play by guardian angels, Luther by the boy Theobald, who is really art in the shape of a seraph, and Katharina by a girl named Therese, who represents faith. A few years after Werner had thus sung the praises of the Reformation, he was converted; whereupon he wrote a poem, Die Weihe der Unkraft, full of such sentiments regarding his drama as: "Durch dies Gaukelblendwerk sprach ich der Wahrheit Hohn!" (With this delusive mummery I set at nought the truth.)

The subject of his last tragedy, Die Mutter der Makkabäer, offered glorious opportunities for introducing all the tortures described in the legends of the martyrs; it abounds in physical suffering and religious ecstasies. The sons of Salome must either eat of the flesh of the sacrifice offered to Jupiter or die the most cruel death. The comical idea of its being a matter of life and death whether children taste certain food or not, is treated with the most overwhelming solemnity. In a state of supernatural excitement, Salome entreats her children, one by one, to allow themselves to be impaled, flayed, burned, &c. The sentimental chief torturer, Antiochus, admires Salome intensely; he actually falls upon his knees before her, crying —

"Du bist kein irdisch Weib! – Solch Opfer spendet

Kein menschlich Wesen! – Segne mich, Du, vom Olymp gesendet!"[86 - "Thou art not of this earth! No mortal offers such a sacrifice! Bless me, thou daughter of Olympian gods!"]

And the equally sentimental Salome blesses him. Her son Benoni, too, blesses his murderer, immediately after which his hands and feet are cut off, and he is boiled in oil. Presently two loud axe-strokes are heard – Abir's feet have been cut off. Juda is tortured next; and so on it goes. Antiochus, the barbarous king, or Werner, the equally barbarous poet, has the children broken on the wheel joint by joint, and their limbs torn off. The mother, who is compelled to witness it all, feels nothing but the rapturous bliss of martyrdom; and when Antiochus, in his insane sentimentality, bows before her a second time, "deeply moved," crying: "Willst, grosse Niobe, Du Dich von mir im Zorne trennen?" ("And must thou part from me in wrath, great Niobe?"), she lays her right hand on his head, and says "very solemnly": "Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebt! – Lern' sterbend ihn erkennen!" ("I know that my Redeemer liveth! – Ere death come, mayst thou know him too!").

In the last scene the background opens, and we see the instruments of torture and the huge copper full of boiling oil, in which Benoni lies. His wife is staring down into it. The flames of the stake are still blazing. Salome's spirit appears above them and extinguishes them.

And there was a time when this was considered poetry! Goethe took a warm interest in Werner, and had several of his plays performed in the court theatre at Weimar. In 1808 he wrote of him to Jacobi: "It seems strange to an old pagan like me, that I can see the cross planted on my own territory, and hear Christ's blood and wounds preached poetically, without its being actually offensive to me. The standpoint to which philosophy has raised us makes this degree of tolerance obligatory. We have learned to value the ideal, even when it manifests itself in the strangest forms."

Few educated men will be inclined to take so mild and tolerant a view of the matter to-day. The development is utterly repugnant to us. For we have seen to what it led. We have seen that this "Christian poetry" helped to bring about the worst intellectual reaction of modern times. Men played so long with the idea of the purifying flames of the stake that they began to extol them in sober earnest. It is but a step from Werner to Görres, who ardently defends exorcism of evil spirits and punishment of witchcraft; and the distance is no greater between Görres and Joseph de Maistre, who writes: "In many a well-governed country in Europe they say of a man who has set fire to an inhabited house and been burned with it: 'It is only what he deserved.' Is a human being who has been guilty of any amount of theoretical and practical (i.e. religious) evil-doing less deserving of being burned? When one reflects that it was undoubtedly in the power of the Inquisition to have prevented the French Revolution, one cannot feel certain that the sovereign who calmly discarded such a weapon did not deal a fatal blow to humanity."

If Romantic Christianity is, as Ruge says, the Christianity which cannot be resolved into humanitarianism, then Joseph de Maistre is a genuine Romanticist.

The whole history of Romanticism substantiates Ruge's famous definition: "A Romanticist is an author who, aided by all the intellectual advantages of our day, assails the periods of 'enlightenment' and of revolution, and reprobates and combats the principle of pure humanitarianism in the domains of science, art, morality, and politics."

XVI

ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND POLITICS

In its first period, Romanticism is distinctly non-political. It exalts the established order of things (vide Novalis), it submissively acknowledges the authority of the king and of the Church, but in its purely literary productions it is, generally speaking, politically colourless.

Take Tieck's satiric comedies. In their outward form there is something Aristophanic; but their satire is never directed against any political character or tendency. It is aimed at "enlightenment;" and from Tieck's biographer we learn exactly what the poet understood by this word. At that time, says Köpke, the most prominent and respected men in Berlin, those who were still the leaders of public opinion, were of the school of Frederick the Great. The prevailing opinions of the eighteenth century had become their second nature. They were moral, conscientious men, who, in all the different departments of administration, science, and literature, devoted themselves zealously, and often with extraordinary industry, to their duties. Whether government officials, theologians, teachers, critics, popular philosophers, or poets, they all aimed at making religion and science useful, and at educating mankind by external provisions and rules. Intelligibility and popularity being to them all-important, they naturally diluted and levelled everything to one general plane of mediocrity. A certain blameless philistinism became their moral ideal, an ideal which seemed poor and tame in comparison with the old fervour of faith. Lessing was their prophet, and they believed themselves to be perpetuating his tradition. We can readily understand that they fell foul of Goethe, which indeed Lessing himself had done, and that they had a narrow conception of the significance and value of imagination. To them it was only the handmaid of utility, and of no value except as an instrument in the service of morality.

Everywhere throughout Tieck's writings we come upon mockery of this moral literary tendency. Take, for instance, Der Gestiefelte Kater ("Puss in Boots"). – Hinze, the cat, is taking an evening walk, absorbed in melancholy thought. He begins to sing a hunting song. A nightingale strikes up in a bush close at hand. "She sings magnificently, this songstress of the groves," says Hinze; "but think how delicious she must taste! Happy indeed are the great of the earth; they can eat as many nightingales and larks as they fancy. We poor common people have to be content with the song, with the beauty, with the indescribably sweet harmony. – It is terrible that I cannot hear anything sing without wanting to eat it."

Hisses from the pit. The worthy audience is shocked by the cat's ignoble train of thought. So Hinze lets the nightingale alone; but presently, when a rabbit comes bounding by, he catches him adroitly and puts him into his bag. It is his intention, by the gift of this rabbit, to win the king's heart for his master. "The creature," he reflects aloud, "is a sort of cousin of mine; but it's the way of the world nowadays – kinsman against kinsman, brother against brother!" He is presently strongly tempted to eat the rabbit himself, but overcomes the desire, and cries: "Fie! for shame, Hinze! Is it not the duty of the truly noble to sacrifice themselves and their inclinations to the happiness of their fellow-creatures? It is the end for which we were created, and he who cannot do it – oh! it were better for him that he had never been born!" He is about to retire, but loud applause and cries of Da Capo! oblige him to repeat the last speech, after which he bows, and goes off with the rabbit. The audience is in the seventh heaven of delight – Hinze's speech is as effective as one of Iffland's tirades.

The satire in Tieck's Däumling ("Hop o' my Thumb") is also of a literary nature, being directed against the neo-classic tendency, and in particular against Goethe. Such a theme, treated, as it was in part, in the dignified metre of Greek tragedy, afforded many opportunities for drollery. All the incidents of the medieval fairy-tale are viewed from the antique standpoint. Of the seven-league boots, for instance, we read: "Trust me; I see quite well that these boots have come down to us from old Greek times. No man in our day produces work like that – so strong, so simple, such noble lines, such stitching! No, no! this is the work of Phidias, there is no doubt about it. Look! When I place the one in this position – how noble, how plastic, how grand in its simplicity! No superfluity, no ornament, no Gothic detail, none of the romantic medley of our days – when sole, leather, flaps, folds, blacking, varnish, must all contribute to produce variety, brilliancy, a dazzling resplendence in which there is nothing ideal. Nowadays the leather must shine, the sole must creak when one sets one's foot down: wretched rhyming trickery of which the ancients knew nothing." Several of Goethe's favourite words are employed in this more sarcastic than witty description.

Tieck shows most wit in defending himself against the accusation of exaggerated sentimentality. His satire might quite well apply to the modern admirers of Prosper Mérimée. He revenges himself upon his critics by placing their objections in the mouth of Leidgast, the cannibal, who comes home, smells human flesh, and determines to eat Hop o' my Thumb and his brothers and sisters for breakfast next morning. In the meantime they are to be kept in the garret. "But what if your own three little ones should awake?" objects his wife. "Well, what then?" "The strange children would not be safe. Yours are so eager for human flesh that they have lately actually tried to suck my blood." "You don't say so? I should never have credited them with so much sense and understanding." His wife weeps. "Be done with this sentimentality, wife. I cannot bear an effeminate education. I have strictly forbidden them all these prejudices, superstitions, and enthusiasms. Untutored, unadulterated nature! that's the thing for me."

However varied the objects of Tieck's satire may be, it is always literary satire; it never crosses the boundary between literature and life. Iffland and Kotzebue, the bombastic classic style and narrow-minded philistine criticism, the text of The Magic Flute, Nicolai's travellers' tales, academic pedantry and the Litteraturzeitung– these are the unfailing scapegoats.

Occasionally, in striking at "enlightenment" and everything thereto pertaining, he has a half accidental thrust at the powers that be. The king in Puss in Boots, for instance, who places the court scientist on the same level with the court fool, who lives for military parades, loves to listen to repetitions of the figures arrived at in astronomical calculations, and bestows his favour in return for a tasty rabbit, certainly does not represent royalty in the most advantageous light. But this happened half accidentally. In the same play the law goes by the name of Popanz (the bogey-man), is changed into a mouse, creeps into a mouse-hole, and is eaten by Hinze, who, not long after, shouts: 'Long live the Tiers Etat!' But this is no more nor less than a specimen of real Romantic nonsense, with no meaning in it at all. The only trace of real political satire to be found, is in one of Tieck's early works, Hanswurst als Emigrant, Hanswurst being no other than the Prince d'Artois, who, in his character of poor, stupid emigrant, has to ride on his servant's back for want of a horse. But this work remained unpublished during Tieck's lifetime.

It does not surprise us that Kotzebue failed in his attempts to get Tieck into disgrace for writing political satire. Having succeeded, in 1802, in gaining admission to the court, he, Kotzebue, endeavoured to revenge himself on his adversary by reading the parade scene from Zerbino to the king, interspersing malicious hints. It was an ineffectual endeavour, for the king took no notice. And Tieck was pleased and proud to be able to prove his innocence – the play had been written in 1790, under totally different conditions, and was founded entirely upon youthful impressions. His satisfaction was so far justifiable; for abusive personal satire is out of place in art. Nevertheless, the anecdote affects us tragi-comically. The poetry was harmless enough, heaven knows. There was no cause for any king or government in the world to be in the least disturbed by such satire. Unluckily, the best satirical poetry is not of the kind that leaves every one unscathed. The comedies of Aristophanes, with which Tieck's admirers thought his worthy of comparison, were considerably less innocent and innocuous; and all the really great satirical works of later days, such as Molière's Tartuffe or Beaumarchais' Figaro, have one characteristic in common – their action does not take place in the moon; they make war on something besides inept poets and moralising poetry.

Romanticism, however, did not long maintain this aloofness from life and politics.

The year 1806 was a critical year for Prussia and Germany.[87 - Ruge, Werke, ii. 60, &c.] The country was entirely in the power of the foreign conqueror. But this is the very reason why all the great reforms trace their origin to this year. The depth of adversity reached was so great that an energetic upward struggle had become imperative. The indefatigable Baron von Stein began the reorganisation of Prussian public institutions; Scharnhorst remodelled the army; the state of the universities was inquired into; and as one result of this last proceeding Fichte was called to Berlin in 1807. The appointment was a remarkable one in many respects. It was intended to show that henceforth a new and different spirit was to rule. When, in 1792, Fichte wrote his first work, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ("An Attempt at a Criticism of all Revelation"), he was afraid to publish it otherwise than anonymously. When, somewhat later, he brought out his Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit ("Demand for the Restoration of Freedom of Thought"), he dared not even name the town in which the book was printed. It was published in "Heliopolis" – also anonymously. From his post of professor at Jena he was dismissed on a charge of atheism. But now that the day of need had come, he was suddenly appealed to, to rouse the youth of Germany. As every one is aware, his Reden an die Deutsche Nation ("Addresses to the German Nation") surpassed all expectation. It had been no bad idea, this thrusting of the German flag into the hand of the persecuted philosopher. At the University of Berlin, with French bayonets gleaming outside the windows and French drums drowning his words, he delivered the memorable addresses which sounded the réveille in the ears of Germany, and did their part in driving those drums and bayonets out of the country. For from these lectures a general and powerful revulsion of feeling may be dated. In them Fichte's philosophy became a kind of national poetry. And what wonder that this poetry proved a torch, at which many other poetical torches were kindled – Körner's, Schenkendorf's, and Arndt's among the rest?