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

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 of Lucinde, 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 to feel 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 in William Lovell. Novalis simply gives expression to a heightened degree of the general feeling in his famous Hymns 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."50

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!"51

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 in Lucinde is: "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's Die 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."52

Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the sensual Ego in a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of the Spiritual 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."53

These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main characteristics of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious forms, but it truly feels their 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."54

Night, death, sensual rapture, heavenly bliss – these ideas are still more firmly interwoven in the verses above the churchyard gate, in Heinrich 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."55

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 in Lucinde.

"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's Ulysses von Ithacia.

In another part of Ofterdingen we 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 true perpetuum 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 the Revue 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."