A common feature of all the works which most clearly reflect the times is that they keep to the subject, to the matter in hand. The influence of the great idea, " the power of the mass," makes itself felt here too. How different everything was in those old days! In both life and literature the detached Ego, in its homeless inde- pendence, is omnipresent.
The guiding star here is, indeed, nought else but the free, unhistorical Ego. The country is divided into a multitude of small States, ruled by three hundred sovereigns and fifteen hundred semi-sovereigns. In these States the so-called " enlightened " despotism of the eighteenth century prevails, with its narrow, petrified social conditions and relations. The nobleman is lord and master of his serfs, the father, lord and master of his family — every- where stern justice, but no equity.
There are in reality no great tasks for the individual, hence there is no room for genius. The theatre is the only place where those who are not of princely birth can gain any experience of all the mani- fold phases of human life, hence the stage mania of literature. Lacking any social field in which to work, all activity neces- sarily takes the form either of war with reality or flight from it. Flight is prepared for by the influence of the rediscovered antique and of Winckelmann's writings ; war, by the influ- ence of the sentimentally melancholy English writers Young, Sterne and of Rousseau, reverenced as the apostle of nature, who, as Schiller expressed it, " would fain out of Christians make men.
It was Lessing who laid the foundations of the intellec- tual life of modern Germany. Clear of thought, strong of will, indefatigably active, he was a reformer in every matter in which he interested himself. With perfect consciousness of what he was doing, he enlightened and educated the German mind. He was the embodiment of manly independence and vigorous, tireless militancy. Hence, solitary as he stood in his own day, his Ego became a source of light.
He was the " Prometheus of German prose. His life and his criticism were action, and to him the essence of poetry too was action. All his characters are instinct with dramatic passion. In opposition to the theological doctrine of punishment and reward, he maintained that to do right for the sake of doing right is the highest morality. And for him the history of the world became the history of the education of the human race.
To a certain extent the word " education " is employed by him merely as a concession to his readers, who, he knew, could not conceive of any development without a divine educator ; but, all the same, the idea of natural development is not an idea with which he was familiar. To him, history is the record of " enlightenment. In reality, all that was best in Lessing was entirely un- sympathetic to the new group of Romanticists ; they had less in common with him than with any other of the great German authors, Schiller not excepted.
Nevertheless, it was natural enough that they should refuse to acknowledge any connection between Lessing and those of his disciples men such as Nicolai, Engel, Garve, and Schiitz , who were, from the " enlightenment " standpoint, their bitter enemies and ruthless persecutors. This was done by Friedrich Schlegel in an essay in which, while praising the power and the width of Lessing's grasp, he lays chief stress upon everything in him that is irregular, boldly revolutionary, unsystematic, and paradoxical, dwells on his bellicose wit, and draws attention to everything that can be construed into cynicism.
The Romanticists could not possibly claim a champion of reason, pure and simple, as their forerunner, hence they attempted to characterise the nutritive element in Lessing's works as mere seasoning, as the salt which preserves from corruption. They evidence their descent from him both by their continuation of the Sturm und Drang period and by their capacity of understanding and reproducing the poetry of all countries. In Herder the new century germinated, as in Lessing the old had come to its close. Herder sets genesis and growth above thought and action.
To him the true man is not only a thinking and moral being, but a portion of nature. He loves and sets most store by the original ; he prefers intuition to reason, and would overcome narrow-mindedness, not by reason, but by originality. The man of intuitions is to him the most human. His own genius was the genius of receptivity. He expanded his Ego until it comprehended every kind of originality, but it was by virtue of feeling that he com- prehended, that he absorbed into his soul a wealth of life, human and national.
From Herder the Romanticists derive that which is most valuable in their literary criticism — the universal receptivity which finds expression in the impulse to translate and explain ; from him they derive the first stimulus to a scientific study of both European and Asiatic languages ; from him comes their love for what is national in both their own and foreign literature, their love of Spanish romance and of Shakespeare's plays. Herder grasped things in their entirety as did Goethe after him.
His profound compre- hension of national peculiarities becomes in Goethe the genius's intuition of the typical in nature, and is exalted by Schelling under the name of " intellectual intuition. His theory of history excluded the idea of purpose: The Romanticists transferred this theory into the personal, the psychical domain.
To them purposelessness is another name for Romantic genius ; the man of genius lives without a definite purpose; purpose- lessness is idleness, and idleness is the mark and privilege of the elect. But he is the origi- nator of a new conception of genius, of the belief, namely, that genius is intuitive, that it consists in a certain power of perceiving and apprehending without any resort to abstract ideas.
It is this conception which, with the Romanticists, becomes scorn of experimental methods in science, and approbation of extraordinary vagaries in art. Goethe was the fulfilment of all that Herder had pro- mised. To him man was not merely theoretically the last link in nature's chain ; the men in his works were them- selves natures ; and in his scientific research he discerned with the eye of genius the universal laws of evolution. His own Ego was a microcosm, and produced the effect of such on the most discerning of his younger contemporaries. So profound was his insight into nature, so entirely was he a living protest against every supernatural belief, that he did what in him lay to deprive genius of its character of apparent incom- prehensibility and contrariety to reason, by explaining in his autobiography, Wahrheit und Dichtinig his own genius, the most profound and universal of the age, as a natural product developed by circumstances — thereby creating the type of literary criticism to which the Romanticists were strongly opposed.
From Goethe the young generation derived their theory of the rights and the importance of the great, free personality. He had always lived his own life, and had always lived it fully and freely. Without making any attack whatever on the existing conditions of society, he had remoulded, accord- ing to his own requirements, the social relations in which he found himself placed. He becomes the soul of the youthful and joyous court of Weimar, with the audacity of youth and genius drawing every one with him into a whirl of gaiety — fetes, picnics, skating expeditions, masque- rades — animated by a wild joy in nature, which is now " lightened," now " darkened " by love affairs of a more or less dubious character.
When we hear that even skating was a scandal to the worthy Philistines of that town, we are not surprised by old Wieland's ill-natured remark, that the circle in question appeared to him to be aiming at " brutalising animal nature. Goethe's as well as Schiller's youthful works had been inspired by what the Germans call the " Freigeisterei " of passion, its demand for freedom, its instinct of revolt. Both breathe one and the same spirit, the spirit of defiance.
Goethe's Die Geschwister treats of the passion of brother for sister. The conclusion of Stella, in its original form, is a justification of bigamy ; and Jean Paul, too, in his Siebenkas, treats of bigamy as a thing perfectly permissible in the case of a genius to whom the first tie has become burdensome.
Investigations
Gdtz represents the tragic fate of the man of genius who rises in revolt against a lukewarm and corrupt age. Schiller's Die Rciuber, with its device In Tyrannos, and its motto from Hippocrates, "That which medicine cannot cure iron cures, and that which iron cannot cure fire cures," is a declaration of war against society.
Karl Moor is the noble-hearted idealist, who in "the castrated century " is inevitably doomed to perish as a criminal. Schiller's robbers are not highwaymen, but revolutionaries. They do not plunder, but punish. They have separated themselves from society to revenge themselves upon it for the wrongs it has clone them.
Schiller's defiance is still more perse mally expressed in those poems of his first period which were written under the influence of his relations with Frau von Kalb, poems re-written and entirely altered in the later editions. Nein — unerschrocken trotz ich einem Bund entgegen, Den die errbthende Natur bereut. This lady, the passion of the poet's youth, had been unwillingly forced into matrimony by her parents.
She and Schiller met in , and in they were still meditating a permanent union of their destinies. Soon after Schiller left her, she became Jean Paul's mistress. Caroline Schlegel jestingly calls her Jeannette Pauline. Jean Paul characterises her thus: Is it because an oath, which, remember, even a thought is sufficient to break, has forced strange fetters on thee?
Because a ceremony, which the laws have decreed to be sacred, has hallowed an accidental, grievous crime? Nay— fearlessly defy a covenant of which blushing nature repents. In Titan Zykel we are told of Linda that she must be tenderly treated, not only on account of her delicacy, but also in the matter of her aversion to matri- mony, which is extreme. She cannot even accompany a friend to the altar, which she calls the scaffold of woman's liberty, the funeral pyre of the noblest, freest love.
To take she says, the best possible view of it, the heroic epic of love is there transformed into the pastoral of marriage. Frau von Kalb herself writes to Jean Paul: Spare the poor creatures, I beg of you, and alarm their hearts and consciences no more. Nature is petrified enough already. I shall never change my opinion on this subject ; I do not understand this virtue, and cannot call any one blessed for its sake.
Religion here upon earth is nothing else than the development and main- tenance of the powers and capacities with which our natures have been endowed. Man should not submit to compulsion, but neither should he acquiesce in wrongful renunciation. Let the bold, powerful, mature human nature, which knows and uses its strength, have its way. But in our generation human nature is weak and contemptible.
Our laws are the outcome of wretchedness and dire necessity, seldom of wisdom. Love needs no laws. The leap from this to the idea of Lucinde is not a long one, but the fall to the very vulgar elaboration of Lucinde is great. We do not, however, rightly understand these outbursts until we understand the social conditions which produced them, and realise that they are not isolated and accidental tirades, but are conditioned by the position in which the majority of poetic natures stood to society at that time. Weimar was then the headquarters and gathering-place of Germany's classical authors.
Of Germany's two great monarchs, Joseph the Second was too much occupied with his efforts at reform, too eager for the spread of " enlightenment," to have any attention to spare for German poetry ; and the Voltairean Frederick of Prussia was too French in his tastes and in- tellectual tendencies to take any interest in German poets. It was at the small courts that they were welcomed. Poetry had had no stronghold in Germany for many a long year, but now Weimar became one. Thither Goethe sum- moned Herder; Wieland had been there since Schiller received an appointment in the adjacent Jena.
Weimar was, then, the place where passion, as poetical, compared with the prosaic conventions of society, was worshipped most reck- lessly and with least prejudice, in practice as well as theory. We thus understand how it was that Jean Paul, when in Weimar, and under the influence of Frau von Kalb's personality, exclaimed: The emancipation of feeling from the conventions of society ; the heart's audacious assump- tion of its right to regard its own code of laws as the new moral code, to re-cast morals in the interests of morality, and occasionally in the interests of inclination.
The Weimar circle had no desire, no thought for anything beyond this, had neither practical nor social reforms in view. It is a genuinely German trait that outwardly they made deep obeisance to the laws which they privately evaded. The hero either confesses his error, or commits suicide, or is punished for his defiance of society, or renounces society altogether Karl Moor, Werther, Tasso, Linda. It is exactly the proceeding of the heretical authors of the Middle Ages, who concluded their books with a notice that every- thing in them must of course be interpreted in harmony with the doctrines and decrees of Holy Mother Church.
Into this Weimar circle of gifted women Madame de Stael, " the whirlwind in petticoats," as she has been called, is introduced when she comes to Germany. In the midst of them she produces the effect of some strange wild bird. What a contrast between her aims and their predilections! With them everything is personal, with her by this time everything is social. She has appeared before the public ; she is striking doughty blows in the cause of social reform.
For such deeds even the most advanced of these German women of the "enlightenment" period are of much too mild a strain. Her aim is to revolutionise life politically, theirs to make it poetical.
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The idea of flinging the gauntlet to a Napoleon would never have entered the mind of any one of them. Wliat a use to make of a lady's glove, a pledge of love! It is not the rights of humanity, but the rights of the heart which they understand ; their strife is not against the wrongs of life but against its prose. The relation of the gifted individual to society does not here, as in France, take the form of a conflict between the said individual's rebellious assertion of his liberty and the traditional com- pulsion of society, but of a conflict between the poetry of the desires of the individual and the prose of political and social conventions.
Hence the perpetual glorification in Romantic literature of capacity and strength of desire, of wish ; a subject to which Friedrich Schlegel in particular perpetually recurs. It is in reality the one outwardly directed power that men possess — impotence itself conceived as a power.
How many are there in our day who dare really wish? The childlike, for ever the childlike! But who can wonder that wish, the mother of religions, the outward expression of inaction, became the catchword of the Romanticists 1 Wish is poetry ; society as it exists, prose. It is only when we judge them from this standpoint that we rightly understand even the most serene, most chastened works of Germany's greatest poets.
The theme of Wilhelm Meister is in reality the same. It, too, represents the gradual, slow reconciliation and fusion of the dreamed of ideal and the earthly reality. But only the greatest minds rose to this height ; the main body of writers of considerable, but less lucid intellect never got beyond the inward discord.
The more poetry became conscious of itself as a power, the more the poet realised his dignity, and literature became a little world in itself with its own special technical interests, the more distinctly did the conflict with reality assume the subordinate form of a conflict with philistinism see, for instance, Eichendorff's Krieg den Philistern. Poetry no longer champions the eternal rights of liberty against the tyranny of outward circumstances ; it champions itself as poetry against the prose of life. This is the Teutonic, the German-Scandinavian, that is to say, the narrow literary conception of the service that poetry is capable of rendering to the cause of liberty.
The glorious principles and maxims of ' use and wont ' were the objects of a pious worship ; everything, including the absolute itself, was absolute ; men refrained from polygamy ; they wore peaked hats ; nothing was without its significance. Each man felt, with the precise degree of dignity that corre- sponded to his position, what he effected, the exact importance to himself and to the whole, of his unwearied endeavour.
There was no frivolous indifference to punctuality in those days ; all ungodliness of that kind tried to insinuate itself in vain. Everything pursued its tranquil, ordered course ; even the suitor went soberly about his business ; he knew that he was going on a lawful errand, was taking a most serious step. Everything went by clockwork.
Men waxed enthusi- astic over the beauties of nature on Midsummer Day ; were overwhelmed by the thought of their sins on the great fast- days ; fell in love when they were twenty, went to bed at ten o'clock. They married and devoted themselves to domestic and civic duties ; they brought up families ; in the prime of their manhood notice was taken in high places of their honourable and successful efforts ; they lived on terms of intimacy with the pastor, under whose eye they did the many generous deeds which they knew he would recount in a voice trembling with emotion when the day came for him to preach their funeral sermon.
They were friends in the genuine sense of the word, ein wirklicher Freund, wie man wirklicher Kanzleirat war. Except that we wear round hats instead of peaked ones, every word of it might apply to the present day ; there is nothing especially indicative of one period more than another. No ; the distinctive feature of the period in question is the gifted writer's, the Romanticist's, conception of philistinism.
They confronted its prose with their own youthful poetry ; we confront its contemptibility with our virile will " Samlede Skrifter, i. As a general rule, then, they, with their thoughts and longings, fled society and reality, though now and again, as already indicated, they attempted, if not precisely to realise their ideas in life, at least to sketch a possible solution of the problem how to transform reality in its entirety into poetry. Not that they show a spark of the indignation or the initiative which we find in the French Romantic author George Sand, for instance ; they merely amuse themselves with elaborating revolutionary, or at least startling fancies.
That w r hich Goethe had attained to, namely, the power of moulding his surroundings to suit his own personal re- quirements, was to the young generation the point of depar- ture. In this particular they from their youth saw the world from Goethe's point of view ; they made the measure of freedom which he had won for himself and the conditions which had been necessary for the full development of his gifts and powers, the average, or more correctly the mini- mum, requirement of every man with talent, no matter how little.
They transformed the requirements of his nature into a universal rule, ignored the self-denial he had labori- ously practised and the sacrifices he had made, and not only proclaimed the unconditional rights of passion, but, with tiresome levity and pedantic lewdness, preached the emancipa- tion of the senses.
And another influence, very different from that of Goethe's powerful self-assertion, also made itself felt, namely, the influence of Berlin. To Goethe's free, unrestrained humanity there was added in Berlin an ample alloy of the scoffing, anti-Christian spirit which had emanated from the court of Frederick the Great, and the licence which had prevailed at that of his successor. In another form, the Romanticist's aversion to reality is already to be found in them.
I adduce two famous instances of the astonishing lack of interest shown by Goethe, the greatest creative mind of the day, in political realities ; they prove at the same time how keen was his interest in science. Writing of the campaign against France during the French Revolution, a campaign in which he took part, he mentions that he spent most of his time in observing " various phenomena of colour and of personal courage.
We study osteology under his guidance, the times being well adapted to such study, as all the fields are covered with preparations. Such instances as these give us some impression of the attitude of aloofness which Goethe as a poet maintained to- wards the events of his day. But we must not overlook the fine side of his refusal to write patriotic war-songs during the struggle with Napoleon. In the night bivouacs, when we could hear the horses of the enemy's outposts neighing, then I might possibly have done it.
But it was not my life, that, and not my affair ; it was Theodor Korner's. Therefore his war-songs become him well. I have not a warlike nature nor warlike tastes, and war-songs would have been a mask very unbecoming to me. I have never been artificial in my poetry. The tremendous conflicts of the eighteenth century and the 'enlightenment" period are all, in consonance with the human idealism of the day, contained in the life story, the development story, of the individual. In one of his letters to Goethe, Schiller writes that two things are to be demanded of the poet and of the artist — in the first place, that he shall rise above reality, and in the second, that he shall keep within the bounds of the material, the natural.
He explains his meaning thus: The artist who lives amidst unpropitious, formless surroundings, and consequently ignores these surroundings in his art, runs the risk of altogether losing touch with the tangible, of becoming abstract, or, if his mind is not of a robust type, fantastic ; if, on the other hand, he keeps to the world of reality, he is apt to be too real, and, if he has little imagination, to copy slavishly and vulgarly. These words indicate, as it were, the watershed which divides the German literature of this period.
On the one side we have the unnational art-poetry of Goethe and Schiller, with its con- tinuation in the fantasies of the Romanticists, and on the other side the merely sensational or entertaining literature of the hour Unterhaltungslitteratur , which is based on reality, but a philistine reality, the literature of which Lafontaine's sentimental bourgeois romances, and the popular, prosaic family dramas of Schroder, Iffland, and Kotzebue, are the best known examples.
It was a misfortune for German literature that such a division came about. But, although the rupture of the better literature with reality first showed itself in a startling form in the writings of the Romanticists, we must not forget that the process had begun long before.
Kotzebue had been the antipodes of Schiller and Goethe before he stood in that position to the Romanticists. Of this we get a vivid impression from the following anecdote. It had long been apparent that some special festivity was in preparation. It was known that a very famous and highly respected man, President 1 Goethe, Tag- und Jahresheflt, ; G.
The most distinguished ladies of the town had for a month past done nothing but order and try on fancy dresses. Fraulein von Imhof had given fifty gold guldens for hers. Astonished eyes had beheld a carver and gilder carrying a wonderful helmet and banner across the street in broad daylight. What could such things be required for?
Were there to be theatricals at the Town Hall? It was known that an enormous bell mould made of pasteboard had been ordered. For what was it to be used? The secret soon came out. Some time before this, Kotzebue, famous throughout Europe as the author of Menschenhass und Reue, had returned, laden with Russian roubles and provided with a patent of nobility, to his native town, to make a third in the Goethe and Schiller alliance.
He had succeeded in gaining admission to the court, and the next thing was to obtain admission to Goethe's circle, which was also a court, and a very exclusive one. The private society of intimates for whom Goethe wrote his immortal convivial songs Gesellschaftslieder met once a week at his house. Kotzebue had himself proposed for election by some of the lady members, but Goethe added an amendment to the rules of the society which excluded the would-be intruder, and prevented his even appearing occasionally as a guest.
Kotzebue determined to revenge himself by paying homage to Schiller in a manner which he hoped would thoroughly annoy Goethe. The latter had just suppressed some thrusts at the brothers Schlegel in Kotzebue's play, Die Kleinstadter, which was one of the pieces in the repertory of the Weimar theatre ; so, to damage the theatre, Kotzebue determined to give a grand performance in honour of Schiller at the Town Hall. Scenes from all his plays were to be acted, and finally The Bell was to be recited to an accompani- ment of tableaux vivants.
At the close of the poem, Kotzebue, dressed as the master-bellfounder, was to shatter the pasteboard mould with a blow of his hammer, and there was to be disclosed, not a bell, but a bust of Schiller. In all Weimar there was only one bust of Schiller, that which stood in the library. When, on the last day, a messenger was sent to borrow it, the unexpected answer was given, that never in the memory of man had a plaster cast lent for a fete been returned in the condition in which it had been sent, and that the loan must therefore be unwillingly refused.
And one can imagine the astonishment and rage of the allies when they heard that the carpenters, arriving at the Town Hall with their boards, laths, and poles, had found the doors locked and had received an intimation from the Burgomaster and Council that, as the hall had been newly painted and decorated, they could not permit it to be used for such a " riotous " enter- tainment. This is only a small piece of provincial town scandal. Even the Countess Einsiedel, whom Goethe had always specially distinguished, went over to the enemy.
This shows how little real hold the higher culture had as yet taken even on the highest intellectual and social circles, and how powerful the man of letters still was who con- cerned himself with real life and sought his subjects in his surroundings. There had, most undoubtedly, been a time when Goethe and Schiller themselves were realists. To both, in their first stage of restless ferment, reality had been a necessity. Both had given free play to nature and feeling in their early productions, Goethe in Gutz and Werther, Schiller in Die Raiiber.
Their interest in the subject was lost in their interest in the form. The study of the antique led them to lay ever - increasing weight upon artistic perfection. It was not their lot to find a public which understood them, much less a people that could present them with subjects, make demands of them.
The German people were still too undeveloped. When Goethe, at Weimar, was doing what he could to help Schiller, he found that the latter, on account of his wild life at Mannheim, his notoriety as a political refugee, and especially his penniless- ness, was regarded as a writer of most unfortunate ante- cedents. During the epigram war Xenienkampf of , both Goethe and Schiller were uniformly treated as poets of doubtful talent. One of the pamphlets against them is dedicated to " die zwei Sudelkoche in Weimar und Jena " the bunglers of Weimar and Jena. It was Napoleon's recognition of Goethe, his wish to see and converse with him, his exclamation: A Prussian staff-officer, who was quartered about this time in the poet's house, had never heard his name.
His pub- lisher complained bitterly of the small demand for the collected edition of his works ; there was a much better sale for those of his brother-in-law, Vulpius author of Rinaldo Rinaldini. Tasso and Iphigenia could not compete with works of such European fame as Kotzebue's Men- schenhass und Reue ; Goethe himself tells us that they were only performed in Weimar once every three or four years. Clearly enough it was the stupidity of the public which turned the great poets from the popular path to glory ; but it is equally clear that the new classicism, which they so greatly favoured, was an ever-increasing cause of their un- popularity.
Only two of Goethe's works were distinct suc- cesses, Werther and Hermann und Dorothea. What were the proceedings of the two great poets after they turned their backs upon their surroundings? Goethe made the story of his own strenuous intellectual develop- ment the subject of plastic poetic treatment. He began to employ Greek mythology much as it had been employed in French classical literature, namely, as a universally understood meta- phorical language. He no longer, as in the First Part of Faust, treated the individual as a type, but produced types which were supposed to be individuals.
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His own Iphigenia was now too modern for him. Ever more marked became that addiction to allegory which led Thorvaldsen too away from life in his art. In his art criticism Goethe persistently maintained that it is not truth to nature, but truth to art which is all-important ; he preferred ideal mannerism such as is to be found in his own drawings preserved in his house in Frankfort to ungainly but vigorous naturalism. As theatrical director he acted on these same principles ; grandeur and dignity were everything to him. He upheld the conventional tragic style of Calderon and Alfieri, Racine and Voltaire.
His actors were trained, in the manner of the ancients, to stand like living statues ; they were forbidden to turn profile or back to the audience, or to speak up the stage ; in some plays, in defiance of the customs of modern mimic art, they wore masks. In spite of public opposition, he put A. Schlegel's Ion on the stage — a professedly original play, in reality an unnatural adaptation from Euripides, suggested by Iphigenia.
Nay, he actually insisted, merely for the sake of exercising the actors in reciting verse, on producing Friedrich Schlegel's Alarkos, an utterly worthless piece, which might have been written by a talentless schoolboy, and was certain to be laughed off the stage. Our gain seems to me to lie principally in the fact that we accustom our actors to repeat, and ourselves to hear, this extremely accurate metre. It is easy, then, to see how Goethe's one-sidedness pre- pared the way for that of the Romanticists ; it is not so easy to show that the same was the case with Schiller.
Schiller's dramas seem like prophecies of actual events. In all the later plays the competent critic at once feels how largely the choice of subject has been influenced by considerations of form. Henrik Ibsen once drew my attention to this in speaking of Die Jungfrau von Orleans; he maintained that there is no " experience " in that play, that it is not the result of powerful personal impressions, but is a composition. And Hettner has shown this to be the relation of the author to his work in all the later plays. From the year onwards, Schiller's admiration for Greek tragedy led him to be always on the search for subjects in which the Greek idea of destiny prevailed.
Maria Stuart is modelled upon the Edipus Rex of Sophocles, and this parti- cular historical episode is chosen with the object of having a theme in which the tragic end, the appointed doom, is fore- known, so that the drama merely gradually develops that which is inevitable from the beginning. The subject of the Jungfrau von Orleans, in appearance so romantic, is chosen because Schiller desired to deal with an episode in which, after the antique manner, a direct divine message reached the human soul — in which there is a direct material interposition of the divinity, and yet the human being who is the organ of the divinity can be ruined, in genuine Greek fashion, by her human weakness.
In Die Braut von Messina he himself produced a " destiny " tragedy, which to all intents and purposes is a study in the manner of Sophocles. Not even in Wilhelm Tell is his point of view a modern one ; on the contrary, it is in every particular purely Hellenic. The subject is not conceived dramatically, but epically. The individual is marked by no special characteristic. It is merely an accident that raises Tell above the mass and makes him the leader of the movement. He is, as Goethe says, a " sort of Demos. Private ideas and private interests, encroachments on family rights and rights of property, here provide the main- spring of action, or rather of event, which in the other dramas is provided by personal or dynastic ambition.
It is explicitly signified to us that the peasants do not aim at acquiring new liberties, but at maintaining old inherited customs. On this point I may refer the reader to Lasalle, who develops the same view with his usual ingenuity in the interesting preface to his drama, Franz von Sickingen. Thus, then, we see that even when Schiller, the most political and historical of the German poets, appears to be most interested in history and politics, he is dealing only to a limited extent with reality ; and therefore it may be almost considered proved, that distaste for historical and present reality — in other words, subjectivism and idealism — were the characteristics of the whole literature of that day.
But the spirit of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller is only one of the motive powers of Romanticism. The other is the philosophy of Fichte. It was the Fichtean doctrine of the Ego which gave to the Romantic individuality its character and force. All reality is contained in the Ego itself, hence the absolute Ego demands that the non-Ego which it posits shall be in harmony with it, and is itself simply the infinite striving to pass beyond its own limits.
By the absolute Ego they understood, as Fichte himself in reality did, though in a very different manner, not a divine being, but the thinking human being. And this new and intoxicating idea of the absolute freedom and power and self-sufficiency of the Ego, which, with the arbitrariness of an autocratic monarch, obliges the whole world to shrink into nothing before itself, is enthusiastically proclaimed by an absurdly arbitrary, ironical, and fantastic set of young geniuses, half-geniuses, and quarter-geniuses.
The Sturm und Drang period, when the liberty men gloried in was the liberty of eighteenth-century "enlightenment," reappeared in a more refined and idealistic form ; and the liberty now gloried in was nineteenth-century lawlessness. Fichte's doctrine of a world-positing, world-creating Ego was at variance with " sound human reason. The Wissenschaftslehre was scientific paradox, but to them paradox was the fine flower of thought.
More- over, the fundamental idea of the doctrine was as radical as it was paradoxical. It had been evolved under the impression of the attempt made by the French Revolution to transform the whole traditional social system into a rational system Vernunftstaat. The autocracy of the Ego was Fichte's conception of the order of the world, and therefore in this doctrine of the Ego the Romanticists believed that they possessed the lever with which they could hft the old world from its hinges.
The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun With Fichte. This act, he main- tains, emanates from the creative imagination. By means of it the world which we apprehend with the senses first becomes to us a real world. The whole activity of the human mind, then, according to Fichte, springs from the creative imagination ; it is the instinct which he regards as the central force of the active Ego. The analogy with the imaginative power which is so mighty in art is evident. But what Fichte himself failed to perceive is, that imagi- nation is by no means a creative, but only a transforming, remodelling power, since what it acts upon is only the form of the things conceived of, not their substance.
Fichte says that he " does not require ' things,' and does not make use of them, because they prevent his self-depen- dence, his independence of all that is outside of himself. In this idea lies the germ of the notorious Romantic irony in art, the treating of everything as both jest and earnest, the eternal self-parody, the dis- turbing play with illusions alternately summoned up and banished, which destroys all directness of effect in many of the favourite works of the Romanticists.
The Romanticist's theory of art and life thus owes its existence to a mingling of poetry with philosophy, a coupling of the poet's dreams with the student's theories ; it is a production of purely intellectual powers, not of any relation between these powers and real life. Hence the excessively intellectual character of Romanticism.
Hence all the self- duplication, all the raising to higher powers, in this poetry about poetry and this philosophising on philosophy. Hence its living and moving in a higher world, a different nature. A literature came into being which partook of the character of a religion, and ultimately joined issue with religion, and which owed its existence rather to a life of emotion than a life of intellectual productiveness.
Hence we understand how, as A.
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Schlegel himself says, " it was often rather the ethereal melody of the feelings that was lightly sug- gested than the feelings themselves that were expressed in all their strength and fulness. It is not in bright sunlight, but in twilight or mysterious quivering moonlight, on a far horizon or in dreams, that we behold the figures of Romanticism. Hence too the Romantic dilution or diminution of the terms expressing what is perceived by the senses Blitzeln, Aeugeln, Hinschatten , and also that interchange of the terms for the impressions of the different senses, which makes the imagery confusedly vague.
In Zerbino Tieck writes of flowers: Sich Farbe, Duft, Gesang Geschwister nennen. The higher, poetic sequences of ideas now intro- duced declare war against the laws of thought, ridicule them as philistine. Their place is taken by caprices, conceits, and vagaries. Fancy determines to dispense with reality, but despised reality has its revenge in the unsubstantiality or anaemia of fancy ; fancy defies reason, but in this de- fiance there is an awkward contradiction ; it is conscious and premeditated — reason is to be expelled by reason.
Seldom has any poetic school worked under such a weight " Their colours sing, their forms resound ; each, according to its form and colour, nnds voice and speech. Colour, fragrance, song, proclaim themselves one family. Conscious intention is the mark of its productions.
The intellectual inheritance to which the Romanticists succeeded was overpoweringly great. The School came into existence when literature stood at its zenith in Ger- many. This explains the early maturity of its members ; their way was made ready for them. They assimilated in their youth an enormous amount of literary knowledge and of artistic technique, and thus started with an intellectual capital such as no other young generation in Germany had ever pos- sessed.
They clothed their first thoughts in the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare, and, beginning thus, pro- ceeded to create what Goethe called " the period of forced talents. Common to all the very dissimilar endeavours and productions of the Romanticists — to Wackenroder's Klosterbruder, with its spiritual enthusiasm for art and ideal beauty, to Lucinde, with its sensual worship of the flesh, to Tieck's melancholy romances and tales, in which capricious fate makes sport of man, and to Tieck's dramas and Hoffmann's stories, in which all form is lost and its place supplied by the caprices and arabesques of whimsical fancy — common to them all, is that law-defying self-assertion or assertion of the absolutism of the individual, which is a result of war with narrowing prose, of the urgent demand for poetry and freedom.
The absolute independence of the Ego isolates. Never- theless these men soon founded a school, and after its speedy disintegration several interesting groups were formed. This is to be ascribed to their determination to make common cause in procuring the victory, insuring the uni- versal dominion, of the philosophy of life which had been evolved by the great minds of Germany. They desired to introduce this philosophy of the geniuses into life itself, to give it expression in criticism, in poetry, in art theories, in religious exhortation, in the solution of social, and even of political problems ; and their first step towards this was violent literary warfare.
In the case of the best men, the formation of a school or a party was the result of exactly that lack of state organisation which was the first condition of their isolating independence. The consciousness of belonging to a people without unity as a nation, and without col- lective strength, begot the endeavour to imbue the leading spirits of the aristocracy of intellect with a new rallying principle.
Although their contem- porary, he was a pioneer of the German Romanticists, in much the same way as Andre Chenier, another Hellenist, was a pioneer of French Romanticism. He was educated with the future philosopher of the Romantic School, Schelling, and with Hegel, the great thinker, who came after Romanticism, and he was the friend of both of these, but had made acquaintance with none of the Romanticists proper when insanity put an end to his intellectual activity. Holderlin was born in , and became insane in Hence, although he survived himself forty years, his life as an author is very little longer than Hardenberg's or Wacken- roder's.
That enmity to Hellenism, which to posterity appears one of the chief characteristics of the Romantic movement, was not one of its original elements. On the contrary, with the exception of Tieck, who certainly had no appreciation of the Hellenic spirit, all the early Romanticists, but more especially the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, and Schel- ling, were enthusiastic admirers of ancient Greece. It was their desire to enter into every feeling of humanity, and it was among the Greeks that they at first found humanity in all its fulness.
They longed to break down the artificial social barriers of their time and escape to nature, and at first they found nature among the Greeks alone. To them the genuinely human was at the same time the genuinely Greek. There is an indication of the later Schlegel in the attempt made to combat the false modesty of modern times, and to prove that beauty is independent of moral laws, which in no way concern art. Characteristic also is his demonstration of Aristotle's lack of appreciation of the Greek Naturpoesie. A similar but more enduring enthusiasm for ancient Greece was the very essence of Holderlin's being ; and this enthusiasm did not find its expression in studies and essays, but took lyric form, in prose as well as verse.
Even as dramatist and novelist, Holderlin was the gifted lyric poet, that and nothing else. Haym has aptly observed of his romances: It is the irretrievable that is the cause of his suffering. Nothing could be less Greek or more Romantic than this longing ; it is of exactly the same exaggerated character as Schack Staff eldt's enthusiasm for ancient Scandinavia and Wackenroder's devo- tion to German antiquity.
Holderlin's landscapes are as un-Greek as his modern Greeks in Hyperion, who are noble German enthusiasts, strongly influenced by Schiller. We cannot doubt that he was aware of this himself. But the lot of the solitary chosen spirits in Germany seemed to him a terrible one.
Although he shows himself in his poems to be an ardent patriot, and although he sings the charms of romantic Heidelberg in antique strophes, yet Germany and Greece to him represent barbarism and culture. Con- cerning his own position to the Greeks he writes to his brother: With their extravagances and their pettinesses, they are insupportable to every rightly constituted mind, dead and discordant as the fragments of a broken vase.
You see artisans, but not men, philosophers, but not men, priests, but not men, servants and masters, young and old, but not men. But what love and intellect give cannot be taken by force. It must keep its hands off that, else we will take its laws and pillory them! They who would make the State a school of morals do not know what a crime they are committing. The State has always become a hell when man has tried to make it his heaven.
No Greek ever spoke of the woman he loved with the religious adoration which Holderlin expresses for his " fair Grecian. Diotima is " the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars. Love is to him religion, and his religion is love of beauty. Beauty is the highest, the absolute ideal ; it belongs, as a conception, to the world of reason, and as a symbol, to the world of imagination.
From his aesthetic point of view, Holderlin does not perceive that boundary line drawn by Kant between the domains of reason and imagination. His theory, a species of poetic - philosophic ecstasy, having points in common with both Schiller's Hellenism and Schelling's transcendental idealism, is Roman- tic before the days of Romanticism. Germinating Romanticism is also to be traced in the gleam of Christian feeling which tinges his half-modern pantheism. He had been originally destined for the Church, and had suffered much from the severe discipline of the monastery where he was educated.
In spite, however, of the many evidences of a pious disposition which we find in his letters, he was a pagan in his poems. He disliked priests, and steadily withstood his family's desire that he should become one. In his Empedokles we come upon the following significant reply of the hero to the priest Hermokrates: Und lange war's ein Kiithsel mir, vvie euch In ihrem Runde duidet die Natur. Yet his Hellenism is not pagan in the manner of Schiller's and Goethe's.
Full text of "The Romantic School In Germany"
The position of Empedokles to the Pharisees of his day and country is exactly that of Jesus to the Pharisees of Judea. Empedokles, like Jesus, is the great prophet, and both his willing sacrificial death and the worship of which he is the object awake feelings which remotely re- semble those of the devout Christian. In Holderlin we find in outline, light and delicate as if traced by a spirit, symbols and emotions which the Romantic School develops, exaggerates, caricatures, or simply obliterates.
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