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

There is the ring of truth in this description, given by her father, of the young girl's flight. The Count, who knows that he is in no way to blame, tries every method of alienating her. Coming upon her in his stable one night, he thrusts her aside with his foot, and more than once he threatens her with his dog-whip. He allows her to sacrifice herself for his bride, who orders her to rush into a burning house to save his miniature, and when she has brought it, sends her back again for the case. With joy and deep humility she does and bears all. The more refined, but weaker, representation of an overpowering, unrequited passion given us by Henrik Hertz in The House of Svend Dyring is modelled upon Kleist's Käthchen. Side by side with much that is ridiculous and repulsive, Käthchen von Heilbronn contains much that is really grand. It is plain enough that this passion, which comes on as suddenly as a fit of apoplexy – which, moreover, as a fixed idea, destroys every other idea, and, itself a miracle, performs miracles with the aid of an angel – oversteps the bounds of the natural and the healthy. Yet there is something fine in it. It gave intense satisfaction to Kleist, who had such a rooted aversion for mere phrases, to represent a loving woman, in whom everything was truth and reality which in other women is mere words. It was thus that he himself had desired to be loved by his Wilhelmine; and at a later period he had demanded such excessive devotion from a young girl whose acquaintance he had made at the Körners' house in Dresden, and who had become attached to him, that all relations between them were broken off. Now he had taken refuge with his ideal in poetry.

There is something satisfying and pleasing in the realisation of the well-known phrases: To see and love was one and the same thing – to follow the beloved to the ends of the earth – to be more devoted to him than his dog – to go through fire and water for him. But yet all this properly belongs to the domain of pathology; these are morbid manifestations. Then, too, we have the Romantic reason of it all. Käthchen's violent agitation when she sees the Count is explained by the fact of his having previously appeared to her in a dream. At the moment when she sees him in this dream, the Count is in reality lying dangerously ill with typhus fever. Stretched like a corpse on his bed, he himself has the feeling that he is entering Käthchen's room. And when he hears of the strange coincidence, he cannot help exclaiming anxiously —

"Help me, ye gods! Now am I double!A spirit I, who wander in the night."

Here we have the favourite idea of Romanticism, "Doppelgängerei," in close connection with somnambulism.

Somnambulism plays a similar part in Der Prinz von Homburg, the finest of Kleist's dramas – probably the finest drama produced by the Romantic School. In it all the important characters stand out as if hewn in stone. The dialogue is vigorous and clear; every word tells. The young cavalry leader commits an unpardonable breach of discipline; he is victorious in an engagement which he has brought about in a manner forbidden in his instructions. The Elector condemns him to death. Not for a moment imagining that the sentence will be carried out, the young hero treats it as a mere matter of form. When it dawns upon him that it is sober earnest, a sudden fear of death takes possession of him, and he abjectly begs for his life. Kleist's genius shows itself in the delineation of the mental process by which the Prince becomes himself again, and demands death as his right. Here once more it is the night side of the mind to which attention is drawn. The Prince is nervous, ill, and absent-minded. In the first act he walks in his sleep. In the last we have the realisation of one of his visions. He transgresses orders, not, like the son of Manlius Torquatus, in youthful audacity and martial ardour, but because, in his nervous, dreamy absent-mindedness he has not heard the orders given, and consequently dashes recklessly on.

Kleist had been deeply interested by G. H. von Schubert's Die Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft ("The Night Side of the Science of Nature"). This book, written by the most popular "Naturphilosoph" of the day, is one of the most extravagant works of the whole period. The night side of a planet is that which is turned away from the sun, and only glimmers faintly in the darkness, with a light destitute of warmth, a light in which all objects look strange, and totally different from what they do in the light of the sun. Schubert considers that he succeeds, in his "Science of Nature," in demonstrating the existence of such a night side. The first half of the work is "Naturphilosophie," much as Steffens understood it. "This is certainly not philosophy for the world," says the author, "but it is much older than the world and all its philosophies, and will last much longer." Most of it is on the same lines as the so-called occult sciences of to-day. Man, like the nature which surrounds him, is a "prophetic hieroglyph." In animal magnetism, in somnambulism, in presentiment, and in so-called prescience, proofs are sought of a predestined harmony between the life of the individual and that of the whole.

According to Schubert's theory, man originally had the power of working miracles. Sin bereft him of his power over nature, and after this there was always something dark and dæmonic connected with the miracle-working gift – with the oracles of Greece, for instance, and with all heathen sorcery. The old, natural miraculous power was revived in Christ. In its dæmonic form it has reappeared among the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons (the secret societies which played so important a part in the imagination of Schubert's day); and it is also observable in such phenomena as animal magnetism, clairvoyance, &c. Adam Müller writes: "Schubert's book seems to me the best which the 'Naturphilosophie' has produced; its author, though not superior to Schelling in polemical and critical talent, is certainly his superior in feeling, in sincerity, and above all in erudition… In Schubert's writings I find a glorified, yet in all essentials accurate presentment of an earlier stage of my development, when my one longing was, that all that was human and personal in my power of achievement might, as it were, dissolve into the smoke of a sweet incense, an offering to the God I worshipped. How I longed to be able to divest myself of name and personality, and become the most devoted of martyrs or the most priestly of priests" (der geistlichste Geistliche). Every one read the book, and even a mind like Kleist's allowed itself, as we have seen, to be engrossed by all this pretentious foolishness. Mysticism was the order of the day, and it is curious to see how the mystic element, the strange trinity of sensuality, religion, and cruelty, insinuates itself into all Kleist's dramas. Take, for example, that remarkable tragedy, Penthesilea. The heroine is the wild queen of the Amazons, who is waging a victorious war upon both the Greeks and the Trojans. It is a law among the Amazons that each must capture in battle the man who is to be her husband; then, when the war is over, she lives with him in peace and happiness. Penthesilea has conceived quite as fatal a passion for Achilles as Käthchen's for Count Strahl. But in Penthesilea love shows itself in a different way; it takes the form of cruelty. In every battle she pursues Achilles, thirsting for his blood. If Käthchen loved like a dog, Penthesilea loves like a tigress escaped from a Bacchanalian procession.

It is plain that it is his own temperament with which Kleist has endowed the Amazon queen. She cares for nothing, will take nothing, but Achilles, just as he refused to aim at anything, to be content with anything, but the highest place of honour. Her wild haste to conquer her beloved corresponds with his desire to attain his aim at one blow, with his drama, Robert Guiscard. Like Kleist, she can only live when she is striving after what her soul desires. She says, what her author might have said:[6] "I should go mad if I did not attempt all that is within the bounds of possibility."

She hates Achilles as fervently as Kleist in dark hours must have hated and cursed the destiny which forbade his winning the highest fame. She kills him in an access of detestation, as Kleist, in an access of desperation, destroyed his beloved work, his Guiscard. Yet she loves him, loves him helplessly, with a consuming passion.70 When Achilles has wounded her in battle, she complains in words which seem to refer to the poet himself: —

"Mir diesen Busen zu zerschmettern, Prothoe!Die Brust, so voll Gesang, Asteria!Ein Lied, jedweder Saitengriff auf ihn!"71

When she is on the point of giving up everything, she says, as Kleist did in so many of his letters to his sister: —

"Das Aeusserste, das Menschenkräfte leistenHab ich gethan, Unmögliches versucht,Mein Alles hab ich an den Wurf gesetzt;Der Würfel, der entscheidet, liegt, er liegt:Begreifen muss ich's – und dass ich verlor!"72

We can readily understand how it was that Pfuel, Kleist's faithful friend, found him sitting weeping after writing the description of Penthesilea's death. Indeed, the poet himself wrote of the play to a friend: "It is true; you have divined it with the glance of a seer; my inmost self is in it, my soul in its glory and its anguish."

Yet this personal element does not preclude Romantic mysticism; the story is impregnated with it. Penthesilea's love expresses itself in such words as the following: —

"Hetzt alle Hund' auf ihn! mit FeuerbrandenDie Elephanten peitschet auf ihn los!Mit Sichelwagen schmettert auf ihn einUnd mähet seine üpp'gen Glieder ab!"73

This last repulsive wish, to see Achilles' limbs mowed off by the scythes of the chariots, is, as we learn at the conclusion of the play, no feigned desire. The Amazons are defeated, and their wearied and wounded queen falls into Achilles' hands. He loves her, and, to keep her from grieving and despairing, he attempts to make her believe that she has been victorious, and that he is her captive. She soon, however, discovers the truth. Then Achilles challenges her to single combat, with the intention of allowing her to defeat him, and in this manner becoming her husband. When Penthesilea receives the challenge, she does not understand its meaning. She is seized by a sort of Berserker fury, throws herself upon her horse, cries to her hounds, and dashes off. He sees her coming and is afraid. She bends her bow "till the ends kiss," takes aim, and sends an arrow through his neck. He falls, but, with the death rattle in his throat, struggles to rise again; then she urges on her hounds to tear him to pieces, and, following their example, sets her teeth in his breast and bites until the blood drips from her mouth and hands.

"Doch hetz! schon ruft sie: Tigris! hetz, Leäne!Hetz, Sphinx! Melampus! Dirke! hetz, Hyrkaon!Und stürzt – stürzt mit der ganzen Meut, o Diana!Sich über ihn, und reisst – reisst ihn beim HelmbuschGleich einer Hündin, Hunden beigesellt,Der greift die Brust ihm, dieser greift den Nacken,Dass von dem Fall der Boden bebt, ihn nieder!Er, in dem Purpur seines Bluts sich wälzend,Rührt ihre sanfte Wange an, und ruft:Penthesilea! meine Braut! was thust du?Ist dies das Rosenfest, das du versprachst?Doch sie – die Löwin hätte ihn gehört,Die hungrige, die wild nach Raub umherAuf öden Schneegefilden heulend treibt —Sie schlägt, die Rüstung ihm vom Leibe reissend,Den Zahn schlägt sie in seine weisse Brust,Sie und die Hunde, die wetteifernden,Oxus und Sphinx den Zahn in seine rechte,In seine linke sie; als ich erschien,Troff Blut von Mund und Händen ihr herab."74

It is long before she comes to her senses and realises what she has done. Her first feeling is utter despair, but presently she says: —

"Wie manche, die am Hals des Freundes hängt,Sagt wohl das Wort: sie lieb'ihn, o so sehr,Dass sie vor Liebe gleich ihn fressen könnte;Und hinterher, das Wort geprüft, die Närrin!Gesättigt sein zum Ekel ist sie schon.Nun, du Geliebter, so verfuhr ich nicht;Sieh her: als ich an deinem Halse hing,Hab ich's wahrhaftig Wort für Wort gethan;Ich war nicht so verrückt, als es wohl schien."75

She is not so mad as she seems. It is the same here as in Käthchen von Heilbronn– what with most women is only a figure of speech, is in Penthesilea's case reality. Many a woman says she loves her lover with a passion so wild that she could eat him; Penthesilea does it. She says: —

"Küsse, Bisse,Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt,Kann schon das eine für das andere greifen."76

But even this is not the complete explanation. As yet we have only the two elements, sensuality and cruelty; the third, religion, is present also. It appears as the supplementary colour when we look carefully at the first two. Remember Novalis's words, already quoted: "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 … he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more." The great Christian mystery was a subject occupying all minds at this time, Kleist's among the rest. One of his intimate friends was the most notable mystic of the day, the ingenious sophist, Adam Müller. It may astonish us, or offend us, to find traces of Christian mystic dogma in a pagan drama which has the Queen of the Amazons for heroine; but to understand this, and many other kindred phenomena, we must take the relative truth and justifiableness of this mysticism into consideration. These men could not shut their religious ideas into a cupboard, and keep them altogether apart from their lives and actions. It was not only twice, or possibly three times, a year that such a subject as the Lord's Supper occupied their minds; it pervaded all their thoughts; they strove to see life in the light of this great mystery. In the complete edition of Friedrich von Baader's collected works (vol. iv. Anthropology), amongst a number of short essays, such as: On the Ecstatic Rapture of those who Talk in Magnetic Sleep, The Vision Seer of Prevorst, Forty Tenets of Religious Love, &c., &c., we find one entitled: That, in the Spiritual, Good or Evil Meaning of the Word, all Men are Anthropophagi. It begins: "Man at heart, or, to use the language of Scripture, the inner man, does not live on tangible nourishment, on material bread; he lives, and that not in the symbolical, but in the most real meaning of the word, entirely upon other inner men, whose hearts and words are his food."

The great religious mystery ultimately became the centre round which even philosophical thought revolved. Henrik Steffens may serve as an example. This writer, in whose character, as Julian Schmidt77 aptly remarks, "there is an undeniable strain of innate servility," was appointed to conduct the trial of the demagogues in Breslau. It was a task which he accomplished in a spirit at variance with sound human reason and the natural sense of justice, and during its performance he gave expression to the most reactionary religious sentiments, entirely forgetful of the pantheism of his youth. In the essay, How I Once More Became a Lutheran, he writes: "The Holy Sacrament is the chief individualising process in Christianity; by its means the whole mystery of the redemption enters in all its fulness into the receptive personality. The fertilising stream of grace, which, since the day of the great regeneration, has flowed through all nature and all history, and which matures us for a blessed future, here takes the form of the Saviour, in order that that which is all in all may be completely present… By means of the satisfying personal presence of the Saviour, that which the Christian truly believes, that which pervades his whole life, and overcomes death, yet at the same time forces him back into the domain of the senses, here becomes certainty, enjoyment, nourishment. … To me the communion of the Lord's Supper is the highest, most important, most mysterious of all religious acts; so important does it seem to me, that through it every doctrine acquires unfathomable significance."

We see, then, how tremendously important a part this sacrament plays in the Christian mysticism of the period under consideration. There existed a tender, almost an erotic, relation between the faithful and the consecrated elements. True believers were declared to be sensible of the presence of these elements at an extraordinary distance. Read what Görres writes on the subject in the second part of his Mystik. "To begin with what is holiest – " he says, "all who have attained to the higher spiritual life are aware, at a prodigious distance, of the presence of the Host." A number of examples of this are given, and we are told in the preface that all the facts instanced are vouched for by numerous witnesses, that these witnesses were the most reliable imaginable, either priests or pious laymen, and that they were particularly favourably situated for making the necessary observations. And we not only learn that saintly believers can detect the Host, no matter where it may be hidden, but that the Host feels such an attraction towards them, that it springs from the priest's hand into their mouths. Sometimes the priest actually feels that it is violently torn out of his hands, drawn like steel by a magnet; and the saintly, in their turn, are so forcibly attracted to the holy substance that they are carried through the air to it.

Nowhere in all Kleist's writings has mysticism taken such strange possession of a perfectly pagan, not to say wanton, theme as in his Amphitryon, which is an adaptation of Molière's well-known comedy. The story, not a very easy one to treat, is as follows. During Amphitryon's absence, Jupiter assumes his form and visits his wife, Alcmene, who believes the god to be her husband. Amphitryon returns, and a whole series of comical confusions ensue between the real and the pretended husband, the real slave, Sosias, and Mercury as Sosias. At last the true state of affairs is explained, and Amphitryon has to console himself with the consideration that there is nothing dishonourable in such a relationship with Jupiter, – a moral theory which it must have been very much to the interest of Louis the Fourteenth to defend and propagate.

"Mon nom, qu'incessamment toute la terre adore,étouffe ici le bruit, qui pouvait éclater;Un partage avec JupiterN'a rien du tout qui déshonore."

In genuine French fashion, Molière makes the collision between the husband and the lover the main point in his play; and when Alcmene upbraids Jupiter for the hard words he (i.e. Amphitryon) has used to her, the god takes refuge in the following fine distinction: —

"L'époux, Alcmène, a commis tout le mal;C'est l'époux qu'il vous faut regarder en coupable:L'amant n'a point de part à ce transport brutal,Et de vous offenser son cœur n'est point capable.Il a de vous, ce cœur, pour jamais y penser,Trop de respect et de tendresse;Et si de faire rien à vous pouvoir blesserIl avait eu la coupable faiblesse,De cent coups à vos yeux il voudrait le percer.Mais l'époux est sorti de ce respect soumisOu pour vous on doit toujours être;A son dur procédé l'époux s'est fait connaître,Et par le droit d'hymen il s'est cru tout permis."

Jupiter expresses himself, we see, with the polished gallantry of a courtier. At the close of the play the bystanders congratulate the wretched Amphitryon, and Sosias recites an epilogue, in which the whole matter is treated from the comical point of view, and the moral pointed that the less said about such affairs the better.

Kleist naturally saw the subject in quite a different light. It is obvious that his Romantic mind was attracted first and foremost by the "Doppelgängerei;" then came the possibility of playing, faintly but clearly, on one of the most important mysteries of the Christian faith. Alcmene's husband is not the father of Hercules, yet the conception was no violation of her marriage vow; it was immaculate; the being to which she gives birth is not the child of a man, but of a god. Therefore, in the most important scene between Jupiter and Alcmene, the former is pantheistically exalted to the rank of the great world-spirit; he is not the wanton Olympian of the Greeks, he is as divine and spiritual as the "Absolute" of the Naturphilosophie. He says to Alcmene: —

"Nimmst Du die Welt, sein grosses Werk, wohl wahr?Siehst Du ihn in der Abendröthe Schimmer,Wenn sie durch schweigende Gebüsche fällt?Hörst Du ihn beim Gesaüsel der Gewässer,Und bei dem Schlag der üpp'gen Nachtigall?Verkündigt nicht umsonst der Berg ihn Dir,Gethürmt gen Himmel, nicht umsonst ihnDer felszerstiebten Katarakten Fall?Wenn hoch die Sonn' in seinen Tempel strahlt,Und, von der Freude Pulsschlag eingeläutet,Ihn alle Gättungen Erschaff'ner preisen,Steigst Du nicht in des Herzens Schacht hinabUnd betest Deinen Götzen an?"78

Therefore, also, Alcmene is repeatedly addressed as "Thou Holy One!"

"Du bist, Du Heilige, vor jedem ZutrittMit diamantnem Gürtel angethan.Auch selbst der Glückliche, den Du empfängst,Entlässt Dich schuldlos noch und rein."…79

Adam Müller wrote an enthusiastic, mystical preface to the play. And in one of his letters to Gentz he writes: "Hartmann has painted a grand picture, 'The Three Marys at the Sepulchre.' This and Amphitryon seem to me to herald a new period in art. For Amphitryon unmistakably treats of the immaculate conception of the Holy Virgin as well as of the mystery of love in general." Even Goethe felt this. He said: "The play contains nothing less than a new, Christian interpretation of the myth as a parallel to the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Ghost."

In 1806 Kleist had resigned his appointment and left Königsberg. When the war broke out between France and Prussia, he was, from a misunderstanding, imprisoned for a time by the French. In 1808 he went to Dresden, where he became acquainted with Adam Müller. It was now Müller's ambition, as it had previously been Fr. Schlegel's, to influence men's minds in the capacity of prophet and apostle of Romanticism. He professed ardent admiration for Kleist, and, unfortunately, succeeded in gaining considerable power over him. Müller was a phrasemonger, who had acquired some little knowledge of several sciences, and was at this moment on the point of announcing a new philosophy, in which there was (so he maintained) none of the one-sidedness characteristic of all previous systems. Its distinguishing doctrine was the doctrine of "opposites," of the constantly changing, constantly renewed and superseded "opposite." According to Müller, the spirit of the eighteenth century and the spirit of Romanticism were only disguises of one and the same truth – a truth of which he no doubt believed himself to have entered into complete and enduring possession when he joined the Church of Rome in 1805.

For some time after his conversion to Catholicism, Müller's whole intellectual life resolved itself into mysticism. He studied "the mysterious life of the clouds," regarded his nervous fear of thunder and lightning as a special gift bestowed on him by Heaven, and believed himself able to foretell the intellectual development of genius by mathematical calculations. In course of time, in fellowship with Gentz, he entered the field of practical politics, beginning as a Prussian progressive patriot, ending as a reactionary in the service of Metternich.

In Dresden, in 1808, Müller and Kleist started the periodical, Phöbus, in which several of Kleist's best works first saw the light.

It is characteristic that what pleased Müller most in Amphitryon was exactly that element of Pagan – Christian mysticism, already referred to, which reveals itself in such a speech as the following almost literal reproduction of the words announcing the birth of Christ: —

"Dir wird ein Sohn geboren, dess Name Hercules."

He did not penetrate into the spirit of the work. The interest of the play centres in the character of Alcmene, the interest of her character in the vigour with which she refuses to allow her peace of mind to be disturbed and her feelings confused, and the interest of her tragic story in the anguish she suffers when, in spite of herself, her inmost feelings are agitated and perplexed by the appearance of her husband in different forms.

Goethe, whose genius enabled him, though he did not understand Kleist's character, to understand much of the working of his mind, made the profound remark that what he chiefly aimed at was "confusion of feeling" (Verwirrung des Gefühls). Kleist was in an abnormal degree dependent upon security of feeling. Confusion of feeling was to him the truest tragedy.