[1]"The morning he suffered his terrible sentence, ere yet it was day, the warder entered and said: 'Come! the hour is about to strike.' Then he fell on my breast for the last time, crying: 'Say a word, a word of power, to strengthen me for the last steps I am to take on earth!' And I said ... But, Fredrik, you frighten me. What is it? Why do you rise and gaze on me thus, pale as a corpse?Fredrik—O mother! mother! stop! You said: 'When you stand before your Creator, say: My God and my Brother, forgive me for the sake of Thy passion, of my repentance, and of my mother!'Gertrud—Oh, tell how you know this?Fredrik—Because it was to me you spoke; not till this moment have I understood myself; I am your own son, now living life over again."
[1]"The morning he suffered his terrible sentence, ere yet it was day, the warder entered and said: 'Come! the hour is about to strike.' Then he fell on my breast for the last time, crying: 'Say a word, a word of power, to strengthen me for the last steps I am to take on earth!' And I said ... But, Fredrik, you frighten me. What is it? Why do you rise and gaze on me thus, pale as a corpse?Fredrik—O mother! mother! stop! You said: 'When you stand before your Creator, say: My God and my Brother, forgive me for the sake of Thy passion, of my repentance, and of my mother!'Gertrud—Oh, tell how you know this?Fredrik—Because it was to me you spoke; not till this moment have I understood myself; I am your own son, now living life over again."
[2]The apparition of a person, which appears to himself. There being no exact English equivalent of "Doppelgänger" and "Doppelgängerei," these words are retained throughout in German.—Transl.
[2]The apparition of a person, which appears to himself. There being no exact English equivalent of "Doppelgänger" and "Doppelgängerei," these words are retained throughout in German.—Transl.
[3]Taine:De l'Intelligence, ii. 169.
[3]Taine:De l'Intelligence, ii. 169.
[4]"He. Then tell who you are!"I. I am a man whose one and only aim has been the beautiful, the good, the true. I have never sacrificed to idols, never pandered to the foolish requirements of fashion; the pain caused by misunderstanding and scorn I have disregarded. In my wanderings, in my dreams, I have indeed often taken smoke for flame, but the moment I awoke I upheld what I knew to be the right. Can you say the same?"He(with a wild, loud, grating laugh).Iam not the man that you boast yourself to be, but one of a very different character. I am a cowardly, untruthful wretch, a hypocrite to myself and others; my heart is the home of selfishness, deceit is on my tongue. You misunderstood hero of the many sufferings, which of us is it that knows himself? which of us has given the true description? which is the real man? Come here and take my place if you dare? I am ready to make way for you."I(with horrible conviction). You are the man! Stay here and let me slink away!—And out into the night I went, to weep."
[4]"He. Then tell who you are!
"I. I am a man whose one and only aim has been the beautiful, the good, the true. I have never sacrificed to idols, never pandered to the foolish requirements of fashion; the pain caused by misunderstanding and scorn I have disregarded. In my wanderings, in my dreams, I have indeed often taken smoke for flame, but the moment I awoke I upheld what I knew to be the right. Can you say the same?
"He(with a wild, loud, grating laugh).Iam not the man that you boast yourself to be, but one of a very different character. I am a cowardly, untruthful wretch, a hypocrite to myself and others; my heart is the home of selfishness, deceit is on my tongue. You misunderstood hero of the many sufferings, which of us is it that knows himself? which of us has given the true description? which is the real man? Come here and take my place if you dare? I am ready to make way for you.
"I(with horrible conviction). You are the man! Stay here and let me slink away!—And out into the night I went, to weep."
The traveller who visits a mine is let down into a subterranean shaft in company with a man who carries a lamp, by the uncertain light of which they explore the hidden depths. It is on such an expedition that I now invite my readers to accompany me. The shaft to which we are about to descend is that of the German "soul," a mine as deep, as dark, as strange, as rich in precious metal and in worthless refuse as any other. We shall note the imprint received by this soul in the days of Romanticism, for this purpose dwelling at length on the Romanticist who above all others is the poet of the soul—Novalis.
No word in any other language is the exact equivalent of the German word "Gemüth," here translated "soul." "Gemüth" is something peculiarly German. It is the inward flame, the inward crucible. In the famous words of the "Wanderer's Sturmlied":—
"Innre Wärme,Seelenwärme,Mittelpunkt!Glüh entgegenPhöb-Apollon,Kalt wird sonstSein FürstenblickUeber dich vorübergleiten," $/
Goethe has described soul, and its significance in the poet's life. With those who have soul, everything tends inwards; soul is the centripetal force of the spiritual life. To the man who sets soul above all else in human life, fervour becomes a patent of nobility. In their conception of soul, as in everything else, the Romanticists rush to extremes. They magnify all that is mysterious, dark, and unexplained in the soul, at the expense of what is clear and beautiful. Goethe is to them the greatest of all poets, not because of his plastic power, but because of the obscurity, the dæmonic mystery, surrounding such characters as the Harper and Mignon, and because of the pregnant intensity of his smaller poems. Lessing and Schiller, on the other hand, are not deemed poets at all, and are sneered at and disparagingly criticised because of the outward direction taken by their keen, energetic thought. For enthusiasm, strength of character, and all such qualities are not soul. Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the sword and goes forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is he who has most soul.
The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the turning of Goethe's "Seelenwärme"—warmth of soul—into heat, a heat which rises to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity consumes all established forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic poet is the heat and passion of the emotion which burns within him. What Novalis does is done with the force of his whole being. Intense, reckless feeling is his motto.
Friedrich von Hardenberg, a scion of an ancient house, was born at Wiederstedt, in the County of Mansfeld, in May 1772. His father, a man of a vigorous, ardent nature, had, after "leading a very worldly life," been converted at the age of thirty-one, when in great distress because of his first wife's death, to the faith of the English Methodists. At a later period he fell under the influence of the Moravian Brethren, more particularly of Count Zinzendorf; and he was at all times strongly influenced by his elder brother, a bigoted and somewhat ignorant aristocrat of pietistic leanings. The elder brother's will was law in the younger's household after the latter's second marriage; his strict principles forbade the family all social intercourse, and the children were obliged to keep their youthful amusements carefully concealed. In 1787 Novalis's father was appointed director of the saltworks in the little town of Weissenfels.
NOVALIS
NOVALIS
Tieck became acquainted with the Hardenberg family in 1799, and they made a profound impression on him. Köpke says: "It was a quiet, serious life that they led, a life of unostentatious but sincere piety. The family belonged to the sect of the Moravian Brethren, and set forth its doctrines in their lives. Old Hardenberg, a high-minded, honourable man, who had been a fine soldier in his day, lived like a patriarch among his talented sons and charming daughters. Change and enlightenment in any form were his detestation; he loved and lauded the good old, misjudged days, and on occasion could express his views very decidedly and defiantly, or blaze up in sudden anger."
The following little domestic scene speaks for itself: —one day heard the old gentleman fuming and scolding in the adjoining room. "What has happened?" he anxiously asked a servant who entered. "Nothing," was the dry response; "it is only the master giving a Bible lesson." Old Hardenberg was in the habit of conducting the devotional exercises of the family, and at the same time examining the younger children on religious subjects, and this not infrequently meant a domestic storm.
Such was Friedrich von Hardenberg's home. He was a dreamy, delicate child, an intelligent, ambitious youth. In 1791 he went to Jena to study law. Those were the palmy days of that university, which then numbered amongst its professors such men as Reinhold, Fichte, and Schiller. Novalis found Schiller's lectures specially spirit-stirring, and the poet himself was to the young man "the perfect pattern of humanity." Fichte, whose acquaintance he also made, he enthusiastically called "the legislator of the new world-order." No one at that time could have foreseen in young Hardenberg the future high priest of obscurantism.
We see him in those youthful days intensely absorbed in the study of his own Ego. His plans are constantly changing; at one time he determines to be the diligent, ardent student, at another to throw up the pursuit of science and be a soldier. Strange as it may sound, the men whom he at this time regards as his models are those friends of freedom who were at the same time apostles of the gospel of utilitarianism. He writes to his brother: "Buy Franklin's autobiography, and let the genius of this book be your guide." We occasionally hear of a little youthful folly; he is now and again in trouble because of debts he has contracted; but he reasons very sensibly with his father, when the latter is inclined to take his peccadilloes too seriously.
Father and uncle naturally regarded the French Revolution with horror and loathing, but Friedrich and his elder brother were its ardent partisans.
Things in Saxony being on too small a scale to suit Friedrich's taste, his kinsman, the Prussian Minister (afterwards Chancellor) von Hardenberg, offered him an appointment in Prussia; this, however, he was unable to accept, owing to his father's unwillingness to allow him to become a member of the liberal-minded Berlin cousin's household. He was finally sent to Tennstedt, near Erfurt, to acquire practical experience of the administration of the laws of the Electorate of Saxony under the excellent district magistrate, Just.
Novalis's first friend among the Romanticists was Friedrich Schlegel, whose acquaintance he made at Jena. The two had much in common, and Novalis at once fell under Schlegel's influence. At the age of twenty-five he writes to him: "To me you have been the high priest of Eleusis; you have revealed heaven and hell to me; through you I have tasted of the tree of knowledge." Young Hardenberg shows himself to be entirely free from political prejudice; he takes a great fancy to Schlegel's landlord, because of the man's "honest republicanism," and jokes at Schlegel's severity in blaming him and the said landlord for their loyalty to the princely house. He has an extremely high opinion of Friedrich Schlegel as a critic, admires the fineness of the meshes of his critical net, which allows no fish, however small, to escape, and calls him "einen dephlogistisirten Lessing."
When, in 1797, Schlegel visited Hardenberg at his home, he found him utterly broken down. A young girl, Sophie von Kühn, to whom he had been passionately and absorbingly devoted, had just died. His despair took the form of longing for death, and he fully believed that his body must succumb to this desire and to his longing for the departed. Though he had no definite plans of suicide, he called the desire for annihilation by which he was possessed, "a firm determination, which would make of his death a free-will offering." It was under the influence of these thoughts that he wrote hisHymns to Night.
This excess of despair, and also the singular circumstance that Sophie, who died at the age of fifteen, was only twelve years old when he fell in love with her, seem to testify to something unhealthy and abnormal in Novalis's character. The impression is strengthened when we find him, only one year later, betrothed to a daughter of Von Charpentier, superintendent of mines. It is quite true, as La Rochefoucauld says, that the strength of our passions has no relation to their durability; nevertheless it is strange that Hardenberg could suddenly console himself with another, after finding his one pleasure for a whole year in the thought of death, talking for a whole year as if the grave held everything that was dear to him. It was a somewhat lame excuse that Julie seemed to him a reincarnation of Sophie, though the fancy was not a surprising one, considering how much the Romanticists dwelt on the idea of a previous existence. But here, as elsewhere in Hardenberg's life, much that is apparently unnatural is easily explainable when the circumstances are rightly understood. Sophie von Kühn seems, like Auguste Böhmer, to have been a most precocious child. When the youth of twenty-three made her acquaintance, she possessed all the attractions of the child combined with those of the maiden. Her features were fine, her curly head was lightly poised, and there was a whole world in her large, dark, expressive eyes. More impartial judges than Hardenberg have called her "a heavenly creature."
Sophie's bright, hospitable home presented a striking contrast to young Hardenberg's own; he was fascinated (as was his elder brother) by the whole family; and the young girl, who, had she lived, would perhaps have disappointed him by turning out worldly or insignificant, became his muse, his Beatrice, his ideal. When we remember that, almost at the same time with Sophie, Hardenberg lost his brother Erasmus, to whom he was united by an intimate and beautiful friendship, we cannot think it strange that life should have seemed to him to have lost all its charms. He regarded death not merely in the light of a release; his mystical tendency led him, as already mentioned, to speak of it as "a free-will offering." He wrote in his diary at this time: "My death will be a proof of my understanding and appreciation of what is highest; it will be a real sacrifice, not a flight nor a makeshift." It is at this crisis that he begins to turn in the direction of positive Christianity. Not that he dreamed of declaring allegiance to any particular Church, or belief in any particular set of dogmas, but his pagan longing for death assumed a Christian colouring. His inmost spiritual life had long been of such a nature that, had it not been for the influence of the spirit of the times, he might just as easily have become a determined opponent of all ecclesiastical doctrine. His state of mind seems to have been that indicated by Friedrich Schlegel when he wrote to him a year later: "Possibly you still have the choice, my friend, between being the last Christian, the Brutus of the old religion, or the Christ of the new gospel." Shortly after this his choice was made.
In December 1798 he still feels, when he compares himself with his friend Just, that he is only the apostle of pure spirituality. He does not, like Just, rely "with childlike mind upon the unalterable words of a mysterious ancient document;" he will not be bound by the letter, and is inclined to find his own way to the primeval world; in the doctrines of Christianity he sees an emblematic pre-figurement of the coming universal religion. "You will not," he writes to Just, "fail to recognise in this conception of religion one of the finest elements in my composition—namely, fancy." In other words, he consciously admits fancy to be at the source of his religious development.
In the same year (1798) he sent some fragments to Wilhelm Schlegel for publication in theAthenæum, with the request that their author might be known as NOVALIS, "which is an old family name, and not altogether unsuitable."
Tieck met Novalis for the first time when he visited Jena in the summer of 1799. August Wilhelm Schlegel brought them together, and they were soon devoted friends. The three spent the first evening in earnest conversation, opening their hearts to each other At midnight they went out to enjoy the splendour of the summer night. "The full moon," says Köpke, "was shedding a magic glory upon the heights round Jena." Towards morning Tieck and Schlegel accompanied Novalis home. Tieck has commemorated this evening inPhantasus.
It was under Tieck's influence that Novalis wrote his principal work,Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While he was still engaged upon it, his young life was put an end to by consumption. He died at the age of twenty-nine, only two years after the meeting with Tieck and A. W. Schlegel above described. This early death, a remarkable degree of originality, and great personal beauty have combined to shed a poetic halo round Novalis. The St. John of the new movement, he resembled the most spiritual of the apostles in outward appearance also. His forehead was almost transparent, and his brown eyes shone with remarkable brilliance. During the last three years of his life it could be read in his face that he was destined to an early death.
Novalis was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out. If one were asked to give a brief definition of the main idea of that great movement, one would say that it was the destruction of everything that was merely traditional, and the establishment of human existence upon a basis of pure reason, by means of a direct break with everything historic. The thinkers and heroes of the Revolution allow reason, as it were, to upset everything, in order that reason may put everything straight again. Although Novalis is deaf to all the social and political cries of the period, and blind to all its progressive movements, and although he ends in the most grim and repulsive reaction, he is, nevertheless, not merely influenced, but, all unconsciously, completely penetrated by the spirit of his age. Between him—the quiet, introspective, loyal Saxon assessor—and the poorsans-culotteswho rushed from Paris to the frontiers, singing the "Marseillaise" and waving the tricolour flag, there is this fundamental resemblance, that they both desire the destruction of the whole outward and the construction of an inward world. Only, their inward world is reason, his is soul: for them, reason with its demands and formulæ—liberty, equality, and fraternity; for him, the soul, with its strange nocturnal gloom, in which he melts down everything, to find, at the bottom of the crucible, as the gold of the soul—night, disease, mysticism, and voluptuousness.[1]
Thus, in spite of his violent animosity to his age, Novalis belongs to it; the direct opponent of all its enlightened and beautiful ideas, he is, despite himself, possessed by its spirit.
What in Fichte and the men of the Revolution is clear reason, comprehending and testing everything, is in Novalis an all-absorbing self—perception, which becomes actual voluptuousness; for the new spirit has taken such a hold upon him that it is, as it were, entwined round his nerves, causing a species of voluptuous excitement. What with them is abstract liberty, liberty to begin everything from the beginning again, with him is lawless fancy, which changes everything, which resolves nature and history into emblems and myths, in order to be able to play at will with all that is external, and to revel unrestrainedly in self-perception. As Arnold Ruge puts it: "Mysticism, which is theoretical voluptuousness, and voluptuousness, which is practical mysticism, are present in Novalis in equally strong proportions."
Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its would-be spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the sensual. Writing to Caroline Schlegel on the subject ofLucinde, he says: "I know that imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I also know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He here affirms of imagination in general what applied particularly to his own.
Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us tofeel feeling. Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He, whose aim is feeling, unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires to feel himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he seeks this self-enjoyment. Therefore to him sickness is preferable to health. For the sick man perpetually feels his own body, which the healthy man does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard, contented themselves with defining sickness as the Christian's natural condition. Novalis goes much further. To him the highest, the only true life, is the life of the sick man. "Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes" ("Life is a disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does the world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less highly than disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture. Why? Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure.... Does not all that is best begin as illness? Half-illness is an evil; real illness is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he writes elsewhere of a mystic power, "which seems to be the power of pleasure and pain, the enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly in the sensations of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of sickness corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness which is at the same time a voluptuous pleasure. Novalis himself is perfectly aware of this correspondence. He says: "The Christian religion is the most voluptuous of religions. Sin is the greatest stimulant to love of the Divine Being; the more sinful a man feels himself to be, the more Christian he is. Direct union with the Deity is the aim of sin and of love." And again: "It is curious that the evident association between sensuality, religion, and cruelty did not long ago draw men's attention to their close kinship and common tendencies."
And just as Novalis now prefers sickness to health, so he prefers night to day, with its "impudent light."
Aversion for day and daylight was general among the Romanticists. I drew attention to it inWilliam Lovell. Novalis simply gives expression to a heightened degree of the general feeling in his famousHymns to Night. That he should love the night is easy to understand. By hiding the surrounding world from it, night drives the Ego in upon itself; hence the feeling of night, and self-consciousness, are one and the same thing. The rapture of the feeling of night lies in its terror; first comes the fear of the individual, when everything round him disappears in the darkness, that he will himself disappear from himself; then comes the pleasant shudder when, out of this fear, self-consciousness emerges stronger than before.
In one of his fragments Novalis calls death a bridal night, a sweet mystery, and adds:—
"Ist es nicht klug, für die Nacht ein geselliges Lager zu suchen? Darum ist klüglich gesinnt, wer auch Entschlummerte liebt."[2]
So completely is this idea incorporated in the Romantic philosophy of life, that in Werner's drama,Die Kreuzesbrüder, the hero, immediately before he is led to the stake, says:—
"Den Neid verzeih' ich,Die Trauer nicht.—O unaussprechlich schwelg' ichIn der Verwandlung Wonn', in dem GefühlDes schönen Opfertodes!—O mein Bruder!Nicht wahr? es kommt die Zeit, we alle MenschenDen Tod erkennen—freudig ihn umarmen,Und fühlen werden, dass dies Leben nurDer Liebe Ahnung ist, der Tod ihr Brautkuss,Und sie, die mit der Inbrunst eines Gatten,Im Brautgemach, uns vom Gewand entkleidet—Verwesung, Gluterguss der Liebe ist!"[3]
Life and death are to Novalis only "relative ideas." The dead are half alive, the living half dead. It is this thought which in his case first gives zest to existence. In the first of his Hymns to Night he writes: "I turn to thee, holy, ineffable, mysterious Night! Far off lies the world, as if it had sunk into a deep grave; deserted and lonely is its place. My heart-strings vibrate with sorrow.... Dost thou find pleasure in us as we in thee, dark Night?... Costly balsam drips from thy hand, from thy poppy-sheaf. Thou unfoldest the heavy wings of the soul.... How poor, how childish seems the day, how joyful and blessed its departing!... More heavenly than those sparkling stars are the myriad eyes which Night opens in us. They see farther than the palest of those countless hosts; without the aid of light, they see into the depths of a loving soul, and its high places are filled with unspeakable rapture. Praised be the Queen of the earth, the august revealer of holy worlds, the guardian of blessed love! She sends me thee, my beloved, sweet sun of the night. Now I wake, for I am thine and mine. Thou hast proclaimed to me the life-giving gospel of Night, hast made of me a human being. Consume my body with the glowing flame of the spirit, that I may mingle yet more ethereally, yet more closely with thee, and the bridal-night be eternal."
One feels the feverish desire of the consumptive in this outburst. The parallel passage inLucindeis: "O infinite longing! But a time is coming when the fruitless desire and vain delusions of the day will die away and disappear, and the great night of love bring eternal peace." The thoughts of these two Romantic lovers of the night meet in this idea of an eternal embrace.
In this enthusiasm for night lies the germ of religious mysticism. In the case of Justinus Kerner (which recalls that of Jung Stilling), bias towards the mysterious becomes belief in apparitions and fear of spirits. In certain of the writings of the later Romanticists, for instance in Achim von Arnim'sDie schöne Isabella von Ægypten, half the characters are spirits. Mysticism is a fundamental element in the art of Clemens Brentano, even when he is at his best, and it gives charm and colour to his descriptions.
Novalis himself describes mysticism as voluptuousness—"ein wollüstiges Wesen." To understand this expression aright, we must study his hymns:—
"Hinüber wall' ichUnd jede PeinWird einst ein StachelDer Wollust sein.Noch wenig ZeitenSo bin ich los,Und liege trunkenDer Lieb' im Schoss."[4]
Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the sensual Ego in a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of theSpiritual Songs): "Few know the secret of love, feel for ever unsatisfied, for ever athirst. The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes have been opened to fathom the unfathomable depths of heaven—he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more. Who has yet discerned the transcendent meaning of the earthly body? Who can say that he understands the blood? The day is coming when all body will be one body; then the beatified pair will float in heavenly blood. Oh! that the ocean were already reddening, that the rocks were softening into fragrant flesh! The sweet repast never ends, love is never satisfied. Never can it have the beloved near enough, close enough to its inmost self. By lips that are ever more tenderly amorous, the heavenly nutriment is ever more eagerly seized and transformed. Hotter and hotter burns the passion of the soul, thirstier, ever thirstier grows the heart; and so the feast of love endures from everlasting to everlasting. Had those who abstain but once tasted of it, they would forsake everything and seat themselves beside us at the table of longing, which is ever furnished with guests. They would comprehend the infinite fulness of love, and extol our feast of the Body and the Blood."[5]
These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main characteristics of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious forms, but it trulyfeelstheir significance; it speaks the same language as orthodoxy, but it changes a dead language into a living one. Herein lay the secret of its victory in the Middle Ages over that dry, formal scholasticism which it consumed in its glow. This made it the precursor of the Reformation. The mystic needs no external dogma; in his pious rapture he is his own priest. But, as his spiritual life is altogether an inward life, he does not abolish external dogma, and in the end actually becomes a sacerdotalist.
In mystically prophetic words Novalis foretells the coming of the new kingdom of sacred darkness:—
"Es bricht die neue Welt hereinUnd verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein.Man sieht nun aus bemoosten TrümmernEine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern,Und was vordem alltäglich war,Scheint jetzo fremd und wunderbar.Der Liebe Reich ist aufgethan,Die Fabel fängt zu spinnen an.Das Urspiel jeder Natur beginnt,Auf kräftige Worte jedes sinnt,Und so das grosse WeltgemüthUeberall sich regt und unendlich blüht.* * * * * * *Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt,Und was man glaubt, es sei geschehn,Kann mann von weitem erst kommen sehn;Frei soll die Phantasie erst schalten,Nach ihrem Gefallen die Fäden verweben,Hier manches verschleiern, dort manches entfalten,Und endlich in magischem Dunst verschweben.Wehmuth und Wollust, Tod und LebenSind hier in innigster Sympathie,—Wer sich der höchsten Lieb' ergeben,Genest von ihren Wunden nie."[6]
Night, death, sensual rapture, heavenly bliss—these ideas are still more firmly interwoven in the verses above the churchyard gate, inHeinrich von Ofterdingen. The dead say:—
"Süsser Reiz der Mitternächte,Stiller Kreis geheimer Mächte,Wollust räthselhafter Spiele,Wir nur kennen euch.* * * * * * *Leiser Wünsche süsses PlaudernHören wir allein, und schauenImmerdar in sel'ge Augen,Schmecken nichts als Mund und Kuss.Alles was wir nur berühren,Wird zu heissen Balsamfrüchten,Wird zu weichen zarten Brüsten,Opfern kühner Lust.Immer wächst und blüht VerlangenAm Geliebten festzuhangen,Ihn im Innern zu empfangen,Eins mit ihm zu sein.Seinem Durste nicht zu wehren,Sich im Wechsel zu verzehren,Von einander sich zu nähren,Von einander nur allein.So in Lieb' und hoher WollustSind wir immerdar versunken,Seit der wilde trübe FunkenJener Welt erlosch;Seit der Hügel sich geschlossenUnd der Scheiterhaufen sprühte,Und dem schauernden GemütheNun das Erdgesicht zerfloss."[7]
This mysticism, which deems the dead happy because it supposes them to be revelling in all sensual delights, becomes, in its practical application, a sort of quietism, that is, preference for a vegetating, plant-like life, the life extolled inLucinde.
"The plants," says Novalis, "are the plainest speech of the earth; every new leaf, every remarkable flower is some mystery which is trying to reveal itself, and which remains motionless and dumb only because from very joy and love it can neither move nor speak. If one chances in solitude upon such a flower, does not everything around it seem transfigured? do not the little feathered songsters seem to seek its vicinity? One could weep for gladness, and, forgetting the world, could bury one's hands and feet in the ground, take root, and never leave that happy neighbourhood."
What an overdose of sentiment! It provides its own cruel parody in the insane situation which reminds us Danes of one in Holberg'sUlysses von Ithacia.
In another part ofOfterdingenwe read: "Flowers exactly correspond to children ... like children they are found lowest down, nearest the earth; the clouds, again, are possibly revelations of the second, higher childhood, of Paradise regained; therefore it is that they shed such refreshing dews upon the children of earth." In the Romantic jargon there is even talk of the childlikeness of clouds. Naïveté aspires, and is not satisfied until it has reached the sky. O Polonius!—These naïve clouds are the true, the proper symbols of Romanticism.
But even in the plants and the clouds there is still too much endeavour and unrest to satisfy the Romantic soul. Even vegetation is not perfect abstraction, perfect quiescence; there is tendency upwards in the straining of the plant towards the light. Therefore even the plant life is not the highest. Novalis goes a step further than Friedrich Schlegel.
"The highest life is mathematics. Without enthusiasm no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. Pure mathematics is religion. It is arrived at only by revelation. The mathematician knows everything. All activity ceases when knowledge is attained. The state of knowledge is bliss (Eudämonie), rapturous peace of contemplation, heavenly abstraction."
Now we have reached the climax. All life is crystallised into dead mathematical figures.
At this point the life of the soul is condensed to such a degree that it comes to a standstill. It is as if the clock of the soul had ceased to strike. Every noble aspiration, every tendency towards independent action is forced back and stifled in the airless vaults of the soul.
It is at this point, therefore, that intense spirituality turns into gross materialism. When all capacity of producing new outward forms is not only despised, but actually destroyed, we have reached the turning-point, the point at which all established outward forms are recognised and accepted, and accepted the more gladly the more rigid they are, the closer they approach to crystallised petrifaction, the more certain it is that they only leave room for the life of vegetation. The step is taken by Novalis in a remarkable essay,Christendom in Europe, which Tieck by his erasures vainly tried to nullify, and which Friedrich Schlegel, by leaving out one most important passage, converted into a defence of Catholicism.
In this essay he writes as follows:—"These were happy, glorious days, when Europe was still a Christian continent, the home of the one, undivided Christian religion.... The wise head of the Church rightly set himself against the bold cultivation of the human mind at the cost of religious faith, and against untimely and dangerous discoveries in the domain of science. Thus he forbade the scientists to maintain openly that this earth is an insignificant planet, for he knew well that men would lose, along with their respect for their earthly home, respect for their heavenly home and their fellow-men, that they would choose limited knowledge in preference to unlimited faith, and would acquire the habit of despising everything great and wonderful, as being simply the result of lifeless law."
We could almost suppose ourselves to be listening to the sermonising of a parish-clerk of the eighteenth century. And yet we are sensible of the poet's consistency. Poetry, which led Schiller back to Greece, leads Novalis back to the Inquisition, and induces him, like Joseph de Maistre, to side with it against Galileo.
Of Protestantism he says: "This great spiritual disruption, which was accompanied by disastrous wars, was a notable proof of the harmfulness of knowledge, of culture—or at least of the temporary harmfulness of a certain degree of culture.... The schismatics separated the inseparable, divided the indivisible Church, and presumptuously dissociated themselves from the great Christian communion, in which, and through which alone, true, lasting regeneration was possible.... A religious peace was concluded, based upon principles which were as foolish as they were irreligious; for the continued existence of so-called Protestantism was equivalent to the establishment of a self-contradiction, namely, permanent revolutionary government.... Luther treated Christianity arbitrarily, mistook its spirit, and introduced a new letter, a totally new doctrine, that of the sacred and supreme authority of the Bible. This, unfortunately, meant the interference in religious matters of a perfectly foreign, entirely earthly science, namely, philology, the destructive influence of which is thenceforward unmistakable.... The popularisation of the Bible was now insisted upon, and its contemptible matter and the crude abstract sketch of a religion provided by its books had a remarkable effect in frustrating the inspiring, revealing activity of the Holy Spirit.... The Reformation was the death-blow of Christianity.... Fortunately for the Church, there came into existence at this time a new religious order, on which the expiring spirit of the hierarchy seemed to have bestowed its last gifts. This order gave new life to the old forms, and with wonderful intuition and determination set about the restoration of the Papal power. Never before in the world's history had such a society been known.... The Jesuits were well aware how much Luther owed to his demagogic arts and his knowledge of the common people.... From of old, the scholar has been the instinctive enemy of the priest; the learned and the ecclesiastical professions must carry on a war of extermination against each other so long as they are separated; for they are struggling for the same position.... To the outcome of modern thought men gave the name of philosophy; and under philosophy they comprehended everything that was hostile to the old order of things, consequently every attack upon religion. What was at first personal hatred of the Roman Catholic Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of the Christian faith, indeed of all religion."
We see how clearly Novalis understood that free-thought was a consequence of Protestantism. He continues:—
"Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed naturally and inevitably into a hatred of all enthusiasms, denounced imagination and feeling, morality and love of art, the past and the future, barely acknowledged man to be the highest among the animals, and reduced the creative music of the universe to the monotonous whirr of an enormous mill, driven by the stream of chance—a mill without a builder or miller, a trueperpetuum mobile.... One enthusiasm was magnanimously left to mankind, enthusiasm for this glorious philosophy and its priests. France had the good fortune to be the seat of this new faith, which was patched together out of fragments of knowledge.... On account of its obedience to the laws of mathematics and its audacity, light was the idol of these men.... The history of modern unbelief is very remarkable, and is the key to all the monstrous phenomena of these later days. It only begins in this century, is little noticeable till the middle of it, and then quickly develops with incalculable force in every direction; a second, more comprehensive and more remarkable Reformation was inevitable, and of necessity came first in the country which was most modernised and had suffered longest from want of freedom.... During this anarchy religion was born again, true anarchy being its generating element.... To the reflective observer the overthrower of the state is a Sisyphus. No sooner does he reach the summit, where there is equipoise, than the mighty burden rolls down on the other side. It will never remain up there unless it is kept in position by an attraction towards heaven. All your supports are too weak as long as your state has a tendency towards the earth."
He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany we can already point to sure indications of a new world.... Here and there, and often in daring union, are to be found incomparable versatility, brilliant polish, extensive knowledge, and rich and powerful imagination. A strong feeling of the creative arbitrariness, the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness, the sacred originality, and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is taking possession of men.... Although these are only indications, disconnected and crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a universal individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of a loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a new Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's members. Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The child will be the express image of the father—a new golden age, with dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of the dissolving body."
After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. And what is the upshot of it all? What new being is the result of the embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised Church? What but a regenerated reaction, which in France restored Catholicism and (after Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led to that hateful tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that Catholicism exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the best writers of the day into exile.
Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world. It engulfed everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the counter-revolution; in it all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in it the Titanic powers of history were shut up and hypnotised. Night surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous joys of darkness and death; the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in the end they turned into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the spirit, but it was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized according to mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the inward parts of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down into the depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.
But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued their usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed because the poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to pieces in the inner world. For they did not go to work in the rough, material fashion of a Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated it inwardly in an inner world. When the poet, released by the spirits, came up from the mine again, he found the outer world, which he supposed he had resolved into its elements, exactly as it had been before. All that he had melted in his heart stood there, hard and cold; and, since the outer world had never really interested him, and since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and drowsy as his inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand.
The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty, his genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to compare him with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite lately, in theRevue des Deux Mondes, Blaze de Bury drew attention to the resemblance. He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance to Novalis's, and the likeness between these two singular poets is not only a physical one; common to them both are close observation of nature, divination of all her little secrets, a choice combination of sentiment with philosophical thought, an utter want of tangibility, reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards, an aspiration, that leads nowhere."
These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these two poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives before, the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning of this century.
Think of Shelley's life in its main outlines. The son of a good family, he was sent to an aristocratic school, where, while yet a child, he was roused to wrath and opposition by the brutality of the boys and the cruelty of the masters. What especially kindled his indignation as he grew older was the hypocrisy with which those who gave free rein to their bad passions perpetually talked of God and Christianity. During his second year at Oxford, Shelley wrote an essayOn the Necessity of Atheism, of which, with naïve straightforwardness, he sent copies to the Church and University authorities. He was summoned before them, and, on refusing to retract what he had written, was expelled for atheism. He went home, but his father received him with such contemptuous coldness that he soon left again, never to return. His whole life was a tissue of similar rebellions and similar misfortunes. In his twentieth year he was threatened with consumption, and though he recovered, he was thenceforward a delicate, nervously irritable man. The Court of Chancery refused him the guardianship of his own children (after the death of his first wife) on the ground that he had propagated immoral and irreligious doctrines inQueen Mab. After this he left England for ever, and lived in Italy in voluntary exile until sudden death put an end to his sad and homeless existence. His boat was capsized in a squall in the Gulf of Spezzia, and he was drowned, at the age of twenty-nine.
In contrast with such a life as this, Hardenberg's is a true German country-town idyll. At the age of twenty-five he received a Government appointment, an auditorship at one of the state saltworks, and a year or two later he was advanced to be "assessor" at the saltworks of Weissenfels. His Romanticism in no way interfered with his fulfilment of his duties as a good citizen. In his capacity of Government official he was zealous, conscientious, and steady—one of the men who do their duty and are guilty of no extravagances, and whose position is consequently assured. His republicanism was short-lived, and he is only saved by his naïveté from the charge of servility. He calls Frederick William and Louisa of Prussia "ein klassisches Menschenpaar;" in the revelation of these "geniuses" he sees an omen of a better world. Frederick William is, he says, the first king of Prussia; he crowns himself every day. A real "transubstantiation" has taken place; for the court has been transformed into a family, the throne into a sanctuary, a royal marriage into an eternal union of hearts. Only youthful prejudice, he maintains, inclines to a republic; the married man desires order, safety, quietness, a well-regulated household, a "real monarchy." "A constitution has for us only the interest of a dead letter. How different is the law which is the expression of the will of a beloved and revered person! We have no right to conceive of the monarch as the first officer of the state; he is not a citizen, and cannot therefore be an official. The king is a human being exalted to the position of an earthly providence."
If we compare such utterances as the above with those of Shelley's poems which were inspired by the tyranny prevailing in his native country, or those in which he glorifies the Italian revolutions and the Greek war of liberation, we have the sharpest imaginable contrast. And the same contrast meets us wherever we turn. Novalis sings the praises of sickness. Shelley says: "It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of this earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man."
Novalis says: "We picture God to ourselves as a person, just as we think of ourselves as persons. God is exactly as personal and individual as we are." Shelley says: "There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.... It is impossible to believe that the Spirit which pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman, or is angered by the consequences of that necessity which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him."
Novalis sings the praises of the priesthood and of the Jesuits. Shelley says: "During many ages of darkness and misery this story" (the doctrine of the Bible) "gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men who derived, and still derive, immense emoluments from this opinion, told the vulgar that if they did not believe in the Bible they would be damned to all eternity; and burned, imprisoned, and poisoned all the unbiassed and unconnected inquirers who occasionally arose. They still oppress them, so far as the people, now become more enlightened, will allow.... The same means that have supported every popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood, deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe."
From these extracts, to which innumerable others of the same tendency might be added, we see how great was the distance between Novalis, with his introspective soul-life, and Shelley, with his practical enthusiasm for liberty.
These, then, are the two poets whom men have attempted to represent as twin spirits. They both rank high as lyric poets, though Shelley is a poetical genius of a far higher type than Novalis. But even if Novalis were more on a level with Shelley as a poet, how small is the measure of truth to be found in his works compared with that in Shelley's!
To Novalis, truth was poetry and dream; to Shelley, it was liberty. To Novalis it was a firmly established and powerful Church; to Shelley a struggling, sorely-pressed heresy; Novalis's truth sat on royal and papal thrones; Shelley's was despised and powerless.
To make any real impression on humanity, a truth, however great, must be made man, must become flesh and blood. In the early biographies of Defoe, the author ofRobinson Crusoe, we are told that in July 1703 he was condemned, as author of a certain pamphlet, first to have his ears cut off and then to be pilloried. The day came, the sentence was carried out, the man with the pale, mutilated face, dripping with blood, stood in the pillory, facing the assembled multitude. Then, strange to say, in place of the usual loud hooting, with its accompaniment of showers of rotten apples, eggs, potatoes, &c., there fell a dead silence; not an apple was thrown, not one abusive word was heard—Defoe was far too dear to the hearts of the people. Presently one of the crowd, hoisted on his neighbours' shoulders, placed a wreath upon the mutilated head. I read this when I was a boy, and though I know now that Defoe did not lose his ears, so that Pope was mistaken when he wrote—
"Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe;"
and though I also know that Defoe was not the pure character I took him to be at that time, still the picture remains a grand one, and it has burned itself into my soul. For it contains an eternal verity. As a general rule, truth upon this earth presents much such an appearance as did the condemned author in the pillory. And I remember thinking to myself at the time: "If a man chanced to find such a poor, despised, oppressed truth in the pillory, what a great moment in his life it would be if he might draw near and place the wreath upon its brow!" Shelley did this—Novalis did not.