One day in the early spring of 1802, the little town of Weimar was in the greatest excitement over an event which was the talk of high and low. It had long been apparent that some special festivity was in preparation. It was known that a very famous and highly respected man, President von Kotzebue, had applied privately to the Burgomaster for the use of the newly decorated Town Hall. The most distinguished ladies of the town had for a month past done nothing but order and try on fancy dresses. Fräulein 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 ofMenschenhass 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 Kleinstädter, 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 finallyThe Bellwas to be recited to an accompaniment 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. The Kotzebue party, however, had reckoned without their host, that is to say, without Goethe. 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 fête 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" entertainment.
This is only a small piece of provincial town scandal. But what is really remarkable, what constitutes the kernel of the story, is the fact that the whole company of distinguished ladies who had hitherto upheld the fame of Goethe (Countess Henriette von Egloffstein; the beautiful lady of honour and poetess Amalie von Imhof, at a later period the object of Gentz's adoration, whose fifty gold guldens had been wasted, &c., &c.) took offence, and deserted his camp for that of Kotzebue. 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 concerned 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 inGötzandWerther, Schiller inDie Räuber. But afterGötzhad set the fashion of romances of chivalry and highway robbery,Wertherof suicide, both in real life and in fiction, andDie Räuberof such productions asAbällino, der grosse Bandit, the great writers, finding the reading world unable to discriminate between originals and imitations, withdrew from the arena. 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—give them orders, so to speak. 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 pennilessness, was regarded as a writer of most unfortunate antecedents. During the epigram war (Xenienkampf) of 1797, both Goethe and Schiller were uniformly treated as poets of doubtful talent. One of the pamphlets against them is dedicated to "die zwei Sudelköche 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: "Voilà un homme!" which greatly helped to establish Goethe's reputation in Germany. A Prussian staff-officer, who was quartered about this time in the poet's house, had never heard his name. His publisher 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 ofRinaldo Rinaldini).TassoandIphigeniacould not compete with works of such European fame as Kotzebue'sMenschenhass 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 unpopularity. Only two of Goethe's works were distinct successes,WertherandHermann 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 development the subject of plastic poetic treatment. But finding it impossible, so long as he absorbed himself in modern humanity, to attain to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks, he began to purge his works of the personal; he composed symbolical poems and allegories, wroteDie Natürliche Tochter, in which the characters simply bear the names of their callings, King, Ecclesiastic, &c.; and the neo-classic studies,Achilleis, Pandora, Palæophron und Neoterpe, Epimenides, and theSecond Part of Faust. He began to employ Greek mythology much as it had been employed in French classical literature, namely, as a universally understood metaphorical language. He no longer, as in theFirst Part of Faust, treated the individual as a type, but produced types which were supposed to be individuals. His ownIphigeniawas 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. W. Schlegel'sIonon the stage—a professedly original play, in reality an unnatural adaptation from Euripides, suggested byIphigenia. Nay, he actually insisted, merely for the sake of exercising the actors in reciting verse, on producing Friedrich Schlegel'sAlarkos, an utterly worthless piece, which might have been written by a talentless schoolboy, and was certain to be laughed off the stage.[3]To such an extent as this did he gradually sacrifice everything to external artistic form.
It is easy, then, to see how Goethe's one-sidedness prepared 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. The French Revolution ferments inDie Räuber(the play which procured for "Monsieur Gille" the title of honorary citizen of the French Republic), and, as Gottschall observes, "the eighteenth Brumaire is anticipated inFiesko, the eloquence of the Girondists inPosa, the Cæsarian soldier-spirit inWallenstein, and the Wars of Liberation inDie Jungfrau von OrleansandWilhelm Tell." But in reality it is only in his first dramas that Schiller allows himself to be influenced, without second thought or ulterior purpose, by his theme. 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 ofDie 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 1798 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.Der Ring des Polykrates, Der Taucher, andWallensteinare dominated by the idea of Nemesis. Maria Stuart is modelled upon theŒdipus Rexof Sophocles, and this particular historical episode is chosen with the object of having a theme in which the tragic end, the appointed doom, is foreknown, so that the drama merely gradually develops that which is inevitable from the beginning. The subject of theJungfrau 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.
It was only in keeping with his general unrealistic tendency that Schiller, though he was not in the least musical, should extol the opera at the expense of the drama, and maintain the antique chorus to be far more awe-inspiring than modern tragic dialogue. InDie Braut von Messinahe himself produced a "destiny" tragedy, which to all intents and purposes is a study in the manner of Sophocles. Not even inWilhelm Tellis 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." Hence it is not the conflict between two great, irreconcilable historical ideas that is presented in this play; the men of Rütli have no sentimental attachment to liberty; it is neither the idea of liberty nor the idea of country that produces the insurrection. Private ideas and private interests, encroachments on family rights and rights of property, here provide the mainspring 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. The axioms: All that is, is for us; What is for us can only be through us; Everything that is, both natural and supernatural, exists through theactivity of the Ego, received an entirely new interpretation when transferred from the domain of metaphysics to that of psychology. 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. It was this conclusion of theWissenschaftslehre(Doctrine of Knowledge) which fired the young generation. 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. TheSturm und Drangperiod, 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." This was one of its chief recommendations in the eyes of the Romanticists. TheWissenschaftslehrewas scientific paradox, but to them paradox was the fine flower of thought. Moreover, 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 lift the old world from its hinges.
The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun with Fichte. He explained the world as the result of an unconscious, yet to a thinker comprehensible, act of the free, yet at the same time limited, Ego. This act, he maintains, 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 imagination 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-dependence, his independence of all that is outside of himself." This saying is closely allied to Friedrich Schlegel's observation, "that a really philosophic human being should be able to tune himself at will in the philosophical or philological, the critical or poetical, the historical or rhetorical, the ancient or modern key, as one tunes an instrument, and this at any time and to any pitch."
According to the Romantic doctrine, the artistic omnipotence of the Ego and the arbitrariness of the poet can submit to no law. 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 disturbing 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 selfduplication, 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. This too is the explanation of all the symbolism and allegory in these half-poetical, half-philosophical works. 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. W. Schlegel himself says, "it was often rather the ethereal melody of the feelings that was lightly suggested than the feelings themselves that were expressed in all their strength and fulness." It was not the thing itself that the author wished to communicate to the reader, but a suggestion of the thing. 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. InZerbinoTieck writes of flowers:
"Die Farbe klingt; die Form ertönt, jedwedeHat nach der Form und Farbe Zung' und Rede.* * * * * * * * *Sich Farbe, Duft, Gesang Geschwister nennen."[4]
The essential element in this literature is no longer the passion of theSturm und Drangperiod, but the free play of fancy, an activity of the imagination which is neither restrained by the laws of reason nor by the relation of feeling to reality. The higher, poetic sequences of ideas now introduced 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 anæmia of fancy; fancy defies reason, but in this defiance 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 of perpetual consciousness of its own character as did this. 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 Germany. 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 possessed. They clothed their first thoughts in the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare, and, beginning thus, proceeded to create what Goethe called "the period of forced talents." For the study of real human character and the execution of definite artistic ideas they substituted the high-handedness of turbulent fancy. Common to all the very dissimilar endeavours and productions of the Romanticists—to Wackenroder'sKlosterbruder, with its spiritual enthusiasm for art and ideal beauty, toLucinde, 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. Nevertheless 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 universal 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. They were impelled partly by the necessity felt by great and strong natures to impart one will and one mind to a whole band of fellow-combatants, and partly by the inclination of men of talent, whose talent is attacked and contested, to confront the overwhelming numbers of their opponents with a small but superior force. 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 collective strength, begot the endeavour to imbue the leading spirits of the aristocracy of intellect with a new rallying principle.
[1]Whence this trembling, this nameless horror, when thy loving arms encircle me? 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.O tremble not!—thine oath was a sin; perjury is the sacred duty of the repentant sinner; the heart thou gavest away at the altar was mine; Heaven does not play with human happiness.
[1]Whence this trembling, this nameless horror, when thy loving arms encircle me? 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.
O tremble not!—thine oath was a sin; perjury is the sacred duty of the repentant sinner; the heart thou gavest away at the altar was mine; Heaven does not play with human happiness.
[2]Goethe,Tag- und Jahreshefte, 1802; G. Waitz,Caroline, ii. 207;Goethe-Jahrbuch, vi. 59, &c.
[2]Goethe,Tag- und Jahreshefte, 1802; G. Waitz,Caroline, ii. 207;Goethe-Jahrbuch, vi. 59, &c.
[3]"Your opinion ofAlarkosis mine; nevertheless I think that we must dare everything, outward success or non-success being of no consequence whatever. 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."—Goethe.
[3]"Your opinion ofAlarkosis mine; nevertheless I think that we must dare everything, outward success or non-success being of no consequence whatever. 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."—Goethe.
[4]"Their colours sing, their forms resound; each, according to its form and colour finds voice and speech.... Colour, fragrance, song, proclaim themselves one family."
[4]"Their colours sing, their forms resound; each, according to its form and colour finds voice and speech.... Colour, fragrance, song, proclaim themselves one family."
Outside the group which represents the transition from the Hellenism of Goethe and Schiller to Romanticism stands a solitary figure, that of Hölderlin, one of the noblest and most refined intellects of the day. Although their contemporary, 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.
Hölderlin was born in 1770, and became insane in 1802. Hence, although he survived himself forty years, his life as an author is very little longer than Hardenberg's or Wackenroder'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 Schelling, 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. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, embarks on his career with the hope of being for literature all that Winckelmann has been for art. In his essays "On Diotima" and "On the Study of Greek Poetry," he proclaims the superiority of Greek culture and Greek poetry to all other. 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 GreekNaturpoesie.
A similar but more enduring enthusiasm for ancient Greece was the very essence of Hölderlin'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, Hölderlin was the gifted lyric poet, that and nothing else. Haym has aptly observed of his romances: "Joy in the ideal, the collapse of the ideal, and grief over that collapse, constitute the theme which the Letters of Hyperion develop with a force which never weakens and a fervour which is always alike intense.... It is the irretrievable that is the cause of his suffering." And since the ideal was embodied for him in Greek life, such as he dreamed it to have been, his whole literary production is one longing lament over lost Hellas. Nothing could be less Greek or more Romantic than this longing; it is of exactly the same exaggerated character as Schack Staffeldt's enthusiasm for ancient Scandinavia and Wackenroder's devotion to German antiquity. Hölderlin's landscapes are as un-Greek as his modern Greeks inHyperion, 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. Concerning his own position to the Greeks he writes to his brother: "In spite of all my good-will, I too, in all that I do and think, merely stumble along in the track of these unique beings; and am often the more awkward and foolish in deed and word because, like the geese, I stand flat-footed in the water of modernity, impotently endeavouring to wing my flight upward towards the Greek heaven." And at the close ofHyperionhe says of the Germans: "They have been barbarians from time immemorial, and industry, science, even religion itself, has only made them still more barbarous, incapable of every divine feeling, too utterly depraved to enjoy the happiness conferred by the Graces. With their extravagances and their pettinesses, they are insupportable to every rightly constituted mind, dead and discordant as the fragments of a broken vase." Of German poets and artists he writes, that they present a distressing spectacle. "They live in the world like strangers in their own house ... they grow up full of love and life and hope, and twenty years later one sees them wandering about like shadows, silent and cold."
Therefore Hölderlin rejoices over the victories of the French, over the "gigantic strides of the Republic," scoffs at all "the petty trickeries of political and ecclesiastical Würtemberg and Germany and Europe," derides the "narrow-minded domesticity" of the Germans, and bewails their lack of any feeling of common honour and common property. "I cannot," he exclaims, "imagine a people more torn asunder than are the Germans. You see artisans, but not men, philosophers, but not men, priests, but not men, servants and masters, young and old, but not men."
The conception of the State which we find inHyperionis also quite in harmony with the spirit of the age, and quite un-Hellenic. "The State dare not demand what it cannot take by force. 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! Good God! 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."
Utterly un-Greek, wholly Romantic, is the love which Hyperion cherishes for his Diotima. It is the same deep and tragic feeling which bound Hölderlin, the poor tutor, to the mother of his pupils, Frau Susette Gontard, and determined his fate. No Greek ever spoke of the woman he loved with the religious adoration which Hölderlin expresses for his "fair Grecian." "Dear friend, there is a being upon this earth in whom my spirit can and will repose for untold centuries, and then still feel how puerile, face to face with nature, all our thought and understanding is." And exactly the same Romantic, Petrarchian note is struck by Hyperion when he speaks of Diotima. Diotima is "the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars." She is beauty itself, the incarnation of the ideal. 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 æsthetic point of view, Hölderlin 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 Romantic 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 hisEmpedokleswe come upon the following significant reply of the hero to the priest Hermokrates:—
"Du weisst es ja, ich hab es dir bedeutet,Ich kenne dich und deine schlimme Zunft.Und lange Avar's ein Räthsel mir, wie euchIn ihrem Runde duldet die Natur.Ach, als ich noch ein Knabe war, da miedEuch Allverderber schon mein frommes Herz,Das unbestechbar, innig liebend hingAn Sonn' und Aether und den Boten allenDer grossen ferngeahndeten Natur;Denn wohl hab ich's gefühlt in meiner Furcht,Dass ihr des Herzens freie GötterliebeBereden möchtet zu gemeinem Dienst,Und dass ich's treiben sollte so, wie ihr.Hinweg! ich kann vor mir den Mann nicht sehn,Der Göttliches wie ein Gewerbe treibt,Sein Angesicht ist falsch und kalt und todt,Wie seine Götter sind."[1]
There is not a trace in Hölderlin of the sanctimonious piety developed by the other Romanticists, who, to begin with, were far more decided free-thinkers than he. Yet his Hellenism is not pagan in the manner of Schiller's and Goethe's. There is a fervency in it which is akin to Christian devotion; his poetic prayers to the sun, the earth, and the air are those of a believer; and when, as inEmpedokles, he handles a purely pagan subject, the spirit of the treatment is such that we feel (as we do in a later work, Kleist'sAmphitryon) the Christian legend behind the heathen. 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 resemble those of the devout Christian.
In Hölderlin 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.
[1]"'Tis nothing new; this I have told you oft;I know you well, you and your evil kind.And long it was a mystery to meHow Nature could endure you in her realm.Corrupters of mankind! Even as a child,My guileless heart shrank from you with distrust—That honest, fervent heart, that loved the sun,The cool fresh air, and all the messengersOf Nature, dimly discerned and great.For even then I timidly perceivedHow ye would take our true love of the godsAnd make it serve some baser, selfish end—And that in this ye would that I should follow you.Begone! I cannot look upon the manWho practises religion as a trade;His countenance is false and cold and dead,As are his gods."
[1]"'Tis nothing new; this I have told you oft;I know you well, you and your evil kind.And long it was a mystery to meHow Nature could endure you in her realm.Corrupters of mankind! Even as a child,My guileless heart shrank from you with distrust—That honest, fervent heart, that loved the sun,The cool fresh air, and all the messengersOf Nature, dimly discerned and great.For even then I timidly perceivedHow ye would take our true love of the godsAnd make it serve some baser, selfish end—And that in this ye would that I should follow you.Begone! I cannot look upon the manWho practises religion as a trade;His countenance is false and cold and dead,As are his gods."
In 1797, August Wilhelm Schlegel, then aged thirty, published the first volume of his translation of Shakespeare. Rough drafts of several of the plays in this edition have been found, and these faded, dusty manuscripts not only enable us to follow the persevering, talented translator in his self-imposed task, but, when carefully read, give us direct insight into his and his wife's spiritual life, and indeed into the intellectual life of the whole period.[1]
Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts are not always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work uponRomeo and Julietin the winter of 1795-96; in 1796 he married Caroline Böhmer; and we have a complete copy of the first rough draft of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with corrections in Schlegel's. In September 1797, as her letters show, she copiedAs You Like Itfrom an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay onRomeo and Juliet, which ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions onHamlet in Wilhelm Meisteras the best Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany up to that time. We recognise her now and again in some outburst of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of style than we are accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding than her contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German literature. But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as the manuscripts show us, survive the first year of her married life. At first it is her handwriting which predominates, and, though it is less frequently to be seen alongside of her husband's in the manuscripts of those plays with which he was occupied during the years 1797-98, her collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her pen in the manuscript of theMerchant of Venice, which dates from the autumn of 1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist circle in Jena. Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is discoverable.
Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea of the progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two different texts of theMidsummer Night's Dream.
Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had attempted to translate Shakespeare line for line. The two tame prose translations by Wieland and Eschenburg were, in fact, all that existed. As a student in Göttingen, Schlegel made the first attempt to reproduce in German verse parts of theMidsummer Night's Dream. From childhood he had been "an indefatigable verse-maker." His talent was obviously inherited. Half a century before he and his brother made their appearance, two brothers Schlegel had made a name for themselves in literature—Johann Elias, who lived for many years in Copenhagen, was a friend of Holberg, and, in everything connected with the stage, a forerunner of Lessing, and Johann Adolph, father of August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who, without much originality, possessed decided linguistic and plastic talent.
As a young student, August Wilhelm, already distinguished by his impressionableness as a stylist and opinionativeness as an author, ardently desired to make the acquaintance of Bürger, who was leading a lonely and unhappy life as professor at the University of Göttingen. Bürger's fame as a poet procured him no consideration in a place where learning alone was valued; his social position had, moreover, been injured by the discovery of his relations with his wife's sister. With the feelings of an exile, he warmly welcomed the distinguished and talented young disciple, whose taste was more correct and whose stores of knowledge were better ordered than his own. At this time Bürger was still considered to be Germany's best lyric poet and most accomplished versifier. Schlegel placed himself under his tuition, and learned all his linguistic and metrical devices, all the methods of producing artistic effects by careful choice and arrangement of words and use of rhythm and metres. With his natural gift of imitation, he appropriated as many of Bürger's characteristics as were at all compatible with his entirely different temperament. His poemAriadnemight have been written by Bürger. Bürger had been particularly successful in the sonnet, a form of poetry which had lately come into vogue in Germany. So closely did the pupil follow in the footsteps of his master, that when, many years later, a complete edition of Schlegel's works was published, two of Bürger's sonnets were accidentally included among them.
The master did homage to his remarkably promising pupil in a fine sonnet, beginning:—
"Junger Aar, dein königlicher FlugWird den Druck der Wolken überwinden,Wird die Bahn zum Sonnentempel finden,Oder Phöbus' Wort in mir ist Lug,"[2]
and ending with the charmingly modest lines:—
"Dich zum Dienst des Sonnengotts zu krönenHielt ich nicht den eignen Kranz zu wert,Doch—dir ist ein besserer beschert."[3]
Schlegel responded with a criticism of Bürger's frigidly grandDas hohe Lied von der Einzigen, which he praises as a magnificent epic. In collaboration with Bürger he now began a translation of theMidsummer Night's Dream, of which he did the greater part, Bürger merely revising. He was still completely under his master's influence; the manuscripts show that he always accepted Bürger's corrections and deferred to his predilection for sonority and vigour. As a translator, Bürger took no pains to reproduce Shakespeare's peculiarities as closely as possible; he only manifested his own peculiarities, by making all the coarse, wanton speeches, and the passages in which misguided passions run riot, as prominent as possible; he emphasised and exaggerated everything that appealed to his own liking for a coarse jest, and destroyed the magic of the light and tender passages. In spite of his own great and natural love of refinement, young Schlegel strove in this matter also to follow in his master's steps, with the result that he was not infrequently coarse and awkward where he meant to be natural and vigorous.
A better guide would have been Herder, who, long before this, in the fragments of Shakespeare plays in hisStimmen der Völker, had given an example of the right method of translating from English into German. If Schlegel had taken lessons from Herder in Shakespeare-translating, he would never have rendered five-footed iambics by Alexandrines, nor changed the metre of the fairy-songs. No one had realised the inadequacy of Wieland's translation more clearly than Herder. And now the spirit in which the latter aimed at Germanising Shakespeare descended upon Schlegel, who, in spite of the faults of his first attempts, soon surpassed Herder himself.
He was not long in shaking himself free from Bürger's influence. To Bürger the highest function of art was to be national and popular. In 1791, Schlegel, now no longer in Bürger's vicinity, but a tutor in Amsterdam, devoted much attention to the works of Schiller. His poetical attempts were henceforth more in the style of that master; he wrote a sympathetic criticism ofDie Künstler; and he was led to a higher conception of art by the perusal of Schiller's æsthetic writings. His metrical style began to acquire greater dignity. But Schiller was almost as incapable as Bürger of developing in Schlegel a true and full understanding of Shakespeare—Schiller, who, in his translation of Macbeth, had transformed the witches into Greek Furies, and changed the Porter's coarsely jovial monologue into an edifying song. If Bürger's realism was one danger, Schiller's pomposity was another.
But at the same time that Schiller enlightened Schlegel as to the high significance of art, the newly-published Collected Works of Goethe, whom he only now began to appreciate, stimulated his natural inclination to study, interpret, and make poetical translations. As already mentioned, this first edition of Goethe's collected works met with but a poor reception. The chief reason of this was that the public, understanding nothing of the poet's mental development, had expected new works in the style ofWertherorGötz. But to Schlegel's critical intellect, Goethe's wonderful many-sidedness was now revealed. He understood and appreciated the artist's capacity of forgetting himself for the moment, of surrendering himself entirely to the influence of his subject, which in Goethe's case produced forms that were never arbitrarily chosen, but invariably demanded by the theme. He understood that he himself, as a poetical translator, must practise the same self-abnegation and develop a similar capacity of intellectual re-creation. Two things were required of the translator, a feminine susceptibility to the subtlest characteristics of the foreign original, and masculine capacity to re-create with the impression of the whole in his mind; and both of these requirements were to be found in Goethe; for his nature was multiplicity, his name "Legion," his spirit Protean.
There still remained the technical, linguistic difficulties to overcome; and in this, above all, Goethe was an epoch-making model. He had remoulded the German language. In passing through his hands it had gained so greatly in pliability and compass, had acquired such wealth of expression both in the grand and the graceful style, that it offered Schlegel exactly the well-tuned instrument of which he stood in need. While under Bürger's influence he had looked upon technical perfection as a purely external quality, which could be acquired by indefatigable polishing; he now realised that perfect technique has an inward origin, that it is in reality the unity of style which is conditioned by the general cast of a mind. And he began to see that his life task was a double one, namely, to reproduce the masterpieces of foreign races in the German language, and to interpret critically for his countrymen the best literary productions both of Germany and other lands.
Now, too, Schlegel acquired a quite new understanding of Fichte, the friend and brother-in-arms whom the Romanticists had so quickly won for their cause. He realised that Fichte's doctrine of the Ego contained in extremely abstract terms the idea of the unlimited capacity of the human mind to find itself in everything and to find everything in itself. Round this powerful fundamental thought of Fichte's, August Wilhelm's pliable mind twined itself.
At this time he was much influenced by the correspondence which he kept up regularly with his younger brother. Friedrich had been drawn by August Wilhelm into the stream of the new literary movement, and his militant disposition made him the most reckless champion of the new principles as soon as he felt assured of their truth. The brothers had very different characters. The elder, in spite of the audacity of his literary views, had the better regulated mind. He had early developed a sense of form and of beauty. His chief gift was a capacity for moulding language; and accuracy, dexterity, and the sense of proportion were qualities he was born with. Except in cases of strong provocation, he showed moderation in scientific and artistic controversy; he knew comparatively early what he desired and what he was capable of; and his determination and perseverance made him a successful pioneer of the ideas and principles of which he had chosen to make himself the spokesman. He became the founder of the Romantic School, an achievement for which he possessed every qualification—this man whom his brother jestingly called "the divine schoolmaster" or "the schoolmaster of the universe."
Friedrich Schlegel was the more restless spirit, the genuine sect-founder. He himself tells us, in one of his letters, that it was his life-long desire "not only to preach and dispute like Luther, but also, like Mohammed, to subjugate the spiritual realms of the earth with the flaming sword of the word." He did not lack initiative, and abounded in plans so colossal that there was a jarring disproportion between them and his ability to carry them out. Eternally wavering, without tenacity or fundamental conviction, fragmentary in the extreme, but rich in both suggestive and disconcerting ideas and in witty conceits, he was constantly beset by the temptation to silence his opponents with mysterious terminology, and constantly liable to relapse into platitudes and meaningless verbiage. What Novalis once wrote to him was more correct than any one suspected: "The King of Thule, dear Schlegel, was your progenitor; you are related to ruin." As a critic, he was more impulsive and less impartial than August Wilhelm; as a poet, he was only once or twice in his life genuinely natural, and in hisAlarkoshe plunged into an abyss of bathos into which his brother, with his more correct taste, could never have fallen. The elder brother had started the younger in his literary career; the younger now drove the elder onward, and in the process put an end, by his unamiability, to the latter's friendly relations with Schiller, and, ultimately, even to his valued and long maintained friendship with Goethe.
August Wilhelm now put his translation of Shakespeare aside for a time, and turned his attention to the poets of the South. He experimented in all directions, translated fragments of Homer, of the Greek elegiac, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poets, of almost all the Latin poets and many of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. At a later period he even translated Indian poetry, his aim being to make the German language a Pantheon for the divine in every tongue. He lingered longest over Dante, although he did not possess the mastery of form required to render theterza rima; he rhymed only two lines of each triplet, thus altering the character of the verse and doing away with the intertwining of the stanzas.
After this he turned toRomeo and JulietandHamlet, sending fragments of his translations to Friedrich, who showed them to Caroline. Her judgment was favourable on the whole, but she found fault with the style as being rather antiquated; this she ascribed to Wilhelm's having been lately employed in translating Dante, his ear having thereby become accustomed to obsolete words and expressions. The fact was, that shortly before this he had awakened to the necessity of being on his guard against the elaborate polish which he had made his aim after giving up Bürger's style; he now fell into the other extreme, became archaic, rugged, and hard.
In 1797 Schlegel sent the first samples ofRomeo and Julietto Schiller. They were printed inDie Horen; and in the same periodical there presently also appeared his essay,Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters. InWilhelm MeisterGoethe had proclaimed the endeavour to understand Shakespeare to be an important element in German culture. In its conversations onHamlethe had refuted the foolish theory that the great dramatist was an uncultivated natural genius, destitute of artistic consciousness. Had such been the case, the exact reproduction of his style would not have been a matter of vital importance in a German translation. But with so great an artist as the Shakespeare presented to us inWilhelm Meister, it was plain that the harmony between subject and form must not be deranged. And yet even Goethe himself had, without any feeling of unsuitability, given his quotations fromHamletin the old prose translation; even he had not realised how inseparably matter and manner are connected.
Slowly and laboriously Schlegel progresses. His judgment is still so defective that he fancies it impossible to dispense with Alexandrines; inRomeo and Juliet, he retains the five-footed iambics only "as far as possible"; the scene between Romeo and Friar Laurence he renders in Alexandrines, excusing himself with the remark that this metre is less detrimental in speeches garnished with maxims and descriptions than in the dialogue proper of the drama. The result is the loss of Romeo's lyric fervour.
He feels this himself, and with iron industry and determined enthusiasm sets to work again, rejects the Alexandrines, and compels himself, in spite of the verbosity of the German language, to say in ten or eleven syllables what he had said before in twelve or thirteen. For long it appears to him an impossible task to reproduce each line by one line. The translation swells in his hands as it did in Bürger's. Fourteen English lines become nineteen or twenty German. It seems to him that it is impossible to do with less; until at last he gains true insight, and sees, from the very foundation, how Shakespeare raises the edifice of his art. Now he renounces all amplitude and all redundancy that is not in Shakespeare. Each line is rendered by a single line. He curses and bewails the prolixity and inadequacy of German: his language has such different limits, such different turns of expression from the English language; he cannot reproduce Shakespeare's style; what he produces is a stammer, a stutter, without resonance or fire—but he coerces himself, he coerces the language, and produces his translation.
There is no great exaggeration in Scherer's dictum: "Schlegel's Shakespeare takes its place beside the works given to the world by Goethe and Schiller during the period when they worked in fellowship; there is the inevitable distance between reproductive and productive art, but there is the nearness of the perfect to the perfect."
Having acquired complete mastery of the style, Schlegel now began to reap the fruits of his labour. He, the master, opened his hand, and between the years 1797 and 1801 let fall from it into the lap of the German people sixteen of Shakespeare's dramas, which, in spite of occasional tameness or constraint of style, might, in their new form, have been the work of a German poet of Shakespeare's rank.
Let us consider what this really means. It means not much less than that Shakespeare, as well as Schiller and Goethe, saw the light in Germany in the middle of last century. He was born in England in 1564; he was born again, in his German translator, in 1767.Romeo and Julietwas published in London in 1597; it reappeared in Berlin as a new work in 1797.
When Shakespeare thus returned to life in Germany, he acted with full force upon a public which was in several ways more capable of understanding him than his original public, though it was spiritually less akin to him and though they were not the battles of its day which he fought. He now began to feed the millions who did not understand English with his spiritual bread. Not until now did Central and Northern Europe discover him. Not until now did the whole Germanic-Gothic world become his public.
But we have also seen how much went to the production of an apparently unpretending literary work of this high rank. In its rough drafts and manuscripts we may read great part of the intellectual history of a whole generation. Before it could come into existence nothing less was required than that Lessing's criticism and Wieland's and Eschenburg's attempts should prepare the soil, and that a genius like Herder should concentrate in himself all the receptivity and ingenuity of surmise belonging to the German mind, and should, with the imperiousness characteristic of him, oblige young Goethe to become his disciple. But Goethe in his proseGötzonly imitated a prose Shakespeare. There had to be born a man with the unique talent of A. W. Schlegel, and he, with his hereditary linguistic and stylistic ability, had to be placed in a position to acquire the greatest technical perfection of the period. Then he had to free himself, by the influence of Schiller's noble conception of art, from the tendency to coarseness which was the result of Bürger's influence, and at the same time to steer clear of Schiller's tendency to pomposity and dislike of wanton joviality, had to gain a complete understanding of Goethe, to enter into possession, as it were, of the language which Goethe had developed, and to attain to an even clearer conviction than his of the essentiality of the harmony of subject and style in Shakespeare. It was necessary, too, that he should be stimulated by the ardour of a kindred talent and assisted by the keen criticism of a woman. Hundreds of sources had to flow into each other, hundreds of circumstances to coincide, of people to make each other's acquaintance, of minds to meet and fertilise each other, before this work, in its modest perfection, could be given to the world; a small thing, the translation of a poet who had been dead for two hundred years, it yet provided the most precious spiritual nourishment for millions, and exercised a deep and lasting influence on German poetry.