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

His own strong, undivided feeling was unsettled and perplexed again and again. In conformance with the custom of his family, he became a Prussian officer; but family tradition and his own inclinations were at variance; he could not endure the discipline, and left the army. He fell in love and pledged himself. His feeling for Wilhelmine was strong, but his instinct of self-preservation as an artist was stronger; here, too, there was perplexity of feeling, and he broke off the engagement. He had the feeling that he was a poet, a genius, but the result of all his efforts was a conviction of his want of real capacity, and in dire perplexity he determined to enlist in the French army, hoping to find death in its next campaign. All this explains his perpetual circling round the theme of perplexity of feeling. We have the idea very plainly in the admirable little tale, Die Marquise von O. The Marquise knows as little as Alcmene who it is that has embraced her in the dark; her feelings, too, are perplexed and confused; her nearest and dearest suspect her; and when the Russian officer, whom she looks upon as her saviour, but who proves to be the delinquent, returns to her, loving and repentant, her innocent soul is rent by alternate paroxysms of hatred and love. In much the same manner, the sense of justice, originally so strong in the soul of Michael Kohlhaas, is confused by the wrongs he suffers.

Wounded pride led Kleist to quarrel with friends and acquaintances; a wounded sense of justice tempted him to insult Goethe. He sent his Penthesilea to the great master, whom he envied as much as he admired, and was bitterly disappointed when, as might have been expected, it was entirely disapproved of. Goethe, who, unfortunately, was only keen-sighted as regarded the repellent side of Kleist's character, said of him: "In spite of my honest intention to be sympathetic and judge mildly, Kleist aroused in me nothing but shuddering aversion, resembling that produced by a body which nature has made beautiful, but which is attacked by some incurable disease." When the comedy, Der zerbrochene Krug ("The Broken Jar"), failed in Weimar, owing to Goethe's arbitrary rearrangement of its acts, Kleist's feelings became entirely "confused," and he wrote epigrams on the great man's private life, among others the low, ugly one on the child, "the precocious genius," who wrote the epithalamium for his own parents' wedding-day.

It is this same confusion of feeling which gives their morbidness to all his productions. Even Michael Kohlhaas, that masterpiece of the art of story-telling, at the beginning of which each character is drawn with the precision of genius, ends in a kind of dream-like confusion. Towards the close of the story there appear two spectral figures – the sickly and at last half-insane Elector of Saxony, and an extraordinary gipsy woman, who, we are given to understand, is possessed by the spirit of Kohlhaas's dead wife – characters which contrast very forcibly with the simple, sane personages introduced to us at the beginning. Die heilige Cäcilie (St. Cecilia) is a Catholic legend, with a moral pointed against iconoclasm. The author revels here with a certain satisfaction in superstitious ideas; he makes the saint punish the haters and destroyers of the art treasures of the Church with sudden madness.

Kleist early became addicted to indulgence in opium, a fact of which some of these works remind us.

In the year 1809 the poet appears as an ardent political agitator. Now, for a time, his voice sounds clear and full. He reproaches his countrymen with not having sufficient confidence in the mysterious power of the heart. He calls Napoleon a sinner, whose iniquity it is beyond the power of human language to express. Such resistance as has been offered to the French seems to him contemptibly weak. He dislikes Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, sneers at Fichte himself as a pedant who talks but cannot act, and expresses unbounded contempt for the members of the Tugendbund and their puerile inactivity. He writes a tragedy, Die Hermannsschlacht, with the object of inciting his countrymen to treat Napoleon as Hermann (Arminius) treated Varus. The following lines in it are aimed at the laggard youth of the day: —

"Die schreiben, Deutschland zu befreien,Mit Chiffren, schicken mit Gefahr des LebensEinander Boten, die die Römer hängen,Versammeln sich um Zwielicht – essen, trinken,Und schlafen, kommt die Nacht, bei ihren Frauen.* * * * * * *Die Hoffnung: morgen stirbt AugustusLockt sie, bedeckt mit Schmach und Schande,Von einer Woche in die andere."80

So little care does he bestow on the historical colouring of this play that he makes Hermann talk of a "bill" (of exchange), and Varus compare the leader of the Cheruski to a Dervish.

He wanted such a war as the Spaniards used to wage, with murder and perjury, burning villages and poisoned wells.

The battle of Wagram shattered all his hopes. Aghast, he asked if there were no such thing as justice upon earth.

Things stood badly now with Kleist – no comfort in public life, no prospects in private life, no money, no employment, no approbation, no encouragement. His nearest and dearest did not appreciate him. Shortly before his death he writes to a motherly friend: "I would rather die ten times over than endure again what I lately endured in Frankfort, sitting at the dinner-table between my two sisters. The thought that what I have actually done, be it little or much, is not acknowledged by them at all, that I am looked upon as an utterly useless member of society, no longer worthy of the slightest sympathy, not only robs me of the future, but poisons the past to me."

Unwilling as he was to return to a profession he had given up twelve years before, it at last seemed to him that the only possible way in which he could earn his bread was by re-entering the army. He did not even own money enough to procure an officer's outfit. An appeal to Hardenberg for assistance was left unanswered. It was exactly at this time that Prussia was compelled to enter into an alliance with Napoleon against Russia. Can one imagine greater "confusion of feeling" than was now the lot of the unhappy patriot? The author of the Hermannsschlacht, the mortal enemy of Napoleon, forced, as a Prussian officer, to fight for the humiliator of his country!

This last collision of duties broke his heart. "My soul is so spent," he writes, "that I feel as if the very daylight that shines on me when I put my head out at the window hurts me."

He was ripe for the irrevocable decision. Through Müller he had made the acquaintance of Frau Henriette Vogel, a gifted woman, who, like himself, suffered from melancholia, and who imagined that she had an incurable disease. This lady reminded him one day, that in an early stage of their friendship he had promised to do anything she might require of him, let it be what it might. He replied that he was ready at any moment to fulfil his promise. "Then kill me," she said. "My sufferings are so great that I can no longer endure life. I don't believe, though, for a moment that you will do it – the men of to-day are not men at all." This was enough for Kleist. In November 1811 he and Henrietta drove together to a little inn on the shore of the Wannsee, a small lake near Potsdam. They were apparently in the best of spirits, full of jest and merriment all that day and until the afternoon of the next, when they went down to a retired spot on the shore, and Kleist shot his friend through the left breast and himself through the head. They had previously written a strange, mournfully humorous letter to Adam Müller's wife. It runs as follows: —

"Heaven knows, my dear, good friend, what strange feeling, half sorrowful, half glad, moves us to write to you at this hour – when our souls, like two lightsome aërial voyagers, are preparing to take flight from the world. For you must know that we had determined to leave no p.p.c. cards upon our friends and acquaintances. The reason probably is, that we have thought of you a thousand times in as many happy moments, and pictured to ourselves a thousand times how you would have laughed good-naturedly if you had seen us together in the green or the red room. Yes, the world is a strange place! It is not unfitting that we two, Jette and I, two sorrowful, melancholy beings, who have always complained of each other's coldness, should have come to love each other dearly, the best proof of which is, that we are now about to die together.

"Farewell, our dear, dear friend! May you be happy here upon earth, as it is doubtless possible to be! As for us, we have no desire for the joys of this world; our dream is of the plains of heaven and the heavenly suns, in whose light we shall wander with long wings upon our shoulders. Adieu! A kiss from me, the writer, to Müller. Tell him to think of me sometimes, and to continue to be a brave soldier of God, fighting against the devil of foolishness, who holds the world in his chains."

Postscript in Henriette's writing: —

"Doch, wie dies alles zugegangen,Erzähl' ich euch zur ändern Zeit,Dazu bin ich zu eilig heut.81

"Farewell, my dear friends! And do not forget to think, in joy and in sorrow, of the two strange beings who are now about to set out on the great voyage of discovery."

HENRIETTE."

(In Kleist's handwriting) – "Written in the green room, on the 21st of November, 1811. H. v. K."

Kleist was the most intractable character in the intellectual world of the Germany of that day; he had, moreover, too much heart, too strong feelings. After he had given up all hope of attaining to a knowledge of the truth, he tried to build upon the foundation of feeling. As author he was able to do it; his Michael Kohlhaas is based upon the feeling of justice, Käthchen von Heilbronn upon the feeling of absolute devotion. But the real world to which he himself belonged had no use for strong, unmixed feeling such as his. He did not find it in others, and wherever he followed it himself, the consequences were disastrous. Alas! no; nothing was quite certain on this earth, not even his own vocation!

No one could prize decision, unity of character, more than he did, and never was there a more uncertain, divided, morbid man. He was always despairing, always wavering between the highest endeavour and the inclination to commit suicide. This explains how it is that we see him, the greatest of the Romanticists, liable to almost all the errors which distinguish his contemporaries. His own really fine, noble nature was spoiled very much as are most of the characters in his works, by sinister, disastrous peculiarities, which slacken the will and destroy the elasticity of the mind. Yet Heinrich von Kleist has assured himself a place in literature, like all others who have won places there, by the vigour and the passion with which he lived and wrote.82

In the other notable dramatist of the Romantic School there was far less to disintegrate. He was the genuine Romanticist from the very first.

Zacharias Werner was born in Königsberg in 1768. He was the son of a professor at the University, who also held the post of dramatic censor. Hence, even as a child, Zacharias had the opportunity of seeing plays almost daily, and in his earliest youth he was able to make himself acquainted with all the technicalities of the stage. His mother, according to Hoffmann, "was richly endowed with both intellect and imagination." Her mind inclined to earnest, highly imaginative mysticism, and she exercised no inconsiderable influence upon her son's ardent imagination; but in course of time she became insane, one of her delusions being that she herself was the Virgin Mary, and her son the Saviour of the world.

As a student, Zacharias, who was of a sanguine, sensual temperament, led an exceedingly dissolute life. In his twentieth year he published a volume of lyric poems, which, like the earliest writings of Friedrich Schlegel and the other Romanticists, are entirely untouched by mysticism; they inveigh, in the style of the eighteenth century, against "sanctimoniousness, pious stupidity, hypocrisy, and Jesuitism." Nevertheless, while still comparatively young, he himself adopted the sanctimonious style. Though he continued to be dissipated, he cannot exactly be called a hypocrite, for he sinned and repented alternately. The distinguishing feature of his character was instability, as he himself confesses in his last poem, Unstäts Morgenpsalm ("The Unstable Man's Morning Hymn"); and long before, in the prologue to Söhne des Thals ("Sons of the Vale"), he had called himself an inconstant creature, "perpetually erring, lamenting, warning."

Religious motives induced Werner to join the Freemasons; he believed that this order would prove the means of diffusing throughout the whole world a new and more sincere spirit of piety. Pecuniary motives induced him to accept a Government secretaryship; and in 1795, not long after addressing three enthusiastic poems (a war song, a call to arms, and a lament) to the unfortunate Poles, he took up his abode in the capacity of a Prussian Government official in the conquered city of Warsaw, where he spent ten pleasant years. He married three times during the course of those ten years. The first two marriages were so ill-advised that in both cases the divorce promptly followed the wedding; the third, with a particularly charming Polish lady, lasted for some years. From her he was divorced in 1805. On this occasion Werner took all the blame upon himself. "I am not," he writes to Hitzig at the time, "a bad man, but I am in many ways a weakling, though in others God grants me strength. I am timid, capricious, miserly, uncleanly. You know it yourself." Not a flattering portrait.

Schleiermacher's Lectures on Religion and, following on these, the writings of Jakob Böhme made no small impression on him. Art and religion now became to him one and the same thing. "Why," he writes to Hitzig, "have we not one name for these two synonyms?" They signify to him what he at one time calls the "vivid sense of the nearness of great Nature," at another, "the simple, humble outpouring of the pure soul into the pure stream (of Nature)." His literary opinions are, he declares, "exactly those of Tieck." In Warsaw he still writes coldly of the Catholic Church; he defends it, not as "a system of faith, but as a newly reopened mine of mythology."

Death bereft him on one day, the 24th of February, 1804, of his mother and his most intimate friend, Mnioch, a Pole – hence the title of his fatalistic tragedy, The Twenty-Fourth of February, written ten years later.

Having solicited all his patrons and friends in turn to procure him an appointment with as little work and as much remuneration as possible, he finally obtained an easy and profitable post in Berlin, through the influence of a minister who was deeply interested in both religion and freemasonry. He gave himself up for a time to all the amusements and dissipations of the capital; but, after the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon, he threw up his appointment and began to lead a wandering life. He was alone and free, for all his marriages had been childless, and he had inherited a fortune at his mother's death. He travelled through Germany and Austria, that "blessed land," as he calls it, made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël, and visited her at Coppet. In Weimar he succeeded in obtaining a pension from the Prince-Primate (Fürst-Primas) Dalberg. Professor Passow, who made his acquaintance in Weimar, wrote to Voss: "I dislike Werner exceedingly, for the reason that I have never seen him twice the same. This is the consequence of his insufferable anxiety to please every one. It depends entirely upon his company whether he is the low libertine or the pious devotee of the most modern, most spiritual type." A clergyman named Christian Mayr obtained great influence over him. Mayr was a fanatic and an eccentric. In order to realise one of the visions in the Book of Revelations and to attain heavenly wisdom, he swallowed the greater part of a Bible, and was dangerously ill in consequence; he shot with a pistol at any member of his congregation who fell asleep when he was preaching; and he believed that he could, during the celebration of the sacrament, produce real flesh and blood. This man was desirous that Werner should join a great secret society, the "Kreuzesbrüder im Orient." At first Werner was very enthusiastic in the matter, then he began to entertain doubts, and these doubts partly led to his conversion to Catholicism.

In November 1809, after paying a visit at Coppet, he went to Rome, where he spent several years. His conversion took place in 1810. During his years of wandering he had led the maddest of lives, dividing each day between low debauchery and religious excitement, between gross sensual indulgence and solemn intercourse with the Deity. The fragments of his diary, published in two small volumes by Schütz, betray a coarse immorality, an obscenity of thought, and a shamelessness of expression, which are rendered only the more repulsive by the outbursts of miserable remorse and self-accusation which interrupt the detailed descriptions of erotic experiences.

In a testamentary epistle to his friends (dated September 1812) he mentions the two motives which withhold him from a public confession. "The one is, that to open a plague pit is dangerous to the health of the still uninfected bystanders; the other, that, in my writings (for which God forgive me), among a wilderness of poisonous fungi and noxious weeds there is to be found here and there a healing herb, from which the poor sick people to whom it might be useful would assuredly shrink back in horror if they knew the pestilential spot in which it had grown."

When Werner had (characteristically enough after his conversion) studied theology and made himself acquainted with the Catholic ritual, he was ordained priest. It was in Vienna, in 1814, at the time of the Congress, that he made his first appearance as a preacher. He was most successful. People were impressed by his tall, spare, ascetic figure and his long thin face, with the prominent nose and the dark brown eyes gleaming under heavy eyebrows. He preached to enormous crowds sermons of which the Monk's sermon in Wallenstein's Lager may serve to give a faint idea. They were full of high-flown bombast and disgusting obscenities, united wit and wisdom with ascetic nonsense and tiresome twaddle, overflowed with denunciations of heretics and eulogies of the rosary.83

Werner died in Vienna in 1823. He is the representative-in-chief of mysticism in literature. His life is the key to his works – works which profoundly impressed his contemporaries, but which interest us chiefly from the pathological point of view. He undoubtedly possessed considerable poetic gifts.

His verse is melodious and falls caressingly on the ear, like the church music of southern lands. His characters are generally well planned (take, for example, Franz von Brienne in the first and second acts of Die Templer auf Cypern– "The Knights Templar in Cyprus"), and the action interests and keeps us in suspense; but the core and kernel of it all, the threefold kernel of sensuality, religion, and cruelty, is ill-flavoured and unwholesome.

His first important work, Die Söhne des Thals, which is in two parts, of six acts each, deals with the Order of the Templars. He was obviously inspired to it by the ideas of freemasonry, ideas which had impressed Schubert, had played a part in Wilhelm Meister, and had considerably influenced his own private life.

In this work the encasing of one idea within another – from the very beginning a favourite device of the Romanticists – takes the form of everything circling round a central mystery, the mystery of the secret society; we penetrate ever farther and farther in, but as we do so, it seems to retreat from us. The Order of the Templars has its own particular mysteries, and we witness every detail of the initiation of the neophytes into these – in gloomy vaults, with all the paraphernalia of colossal skeletons, cryptic books, curtains, swords, palms, &c., &c. The meaning underlying it all is: "Aus Blut und Dunkel quillt Erlösung" (From blood and darkness issues redemption). But the order of Knights Templar is only a branch order; the great mother-order, "das Thal" (the Vale), is in possession, as we learn in the second part of the work, of all the higher mysteries and the higher power. But its inmost mystery, too, is only the purely negative idea of renunciation and sacrifice. Hidden voices proclaim "in a hollow, chanting tone" —

"Alles ist zum Seyn erkoren,Alles wird durch Tod geboren,Und kein Saatkorn geht verloren."Wer durch Blut und Nacht geschwommen,Ist den Aengsten bald entnommen,Blutiger, sei uns willkommen!"84

We gain some idea of the extent to which the mysteries are utilised in the elaboration of stage decoration and costumes from the fact that in the twelfth scene of the fifth act, which consists of sixty-four lines, only six are dialogue, the remainder being devoted to directions regarding "a great burial mound, covered with roses, with transparencies of an angel, a lion, a bull, and an eagle, disposed at the four corners" – the costumes to be worn by the dignitaries of the "Vale," of which some are to be cloth of gold, some silver, some sky blue, some blood red – and the incense, the harps, the bells, the crowns and crowns of thorns, the banners, and the "colossal statue of Isis," required in the scene.

The Order of Knights Templar has degenerated. The mother-order determines to abolish it altogether, and condemns its Grand Master, the noble and heroic Molay, to be burned, although he is entirely guiltless of the decadence of his order – has, in fact, striven hard to arrest it. The Archbishop, who tries him, is convinced of the injustice of the accusations brought against him, and loves and admires him, but is compelled to obey orders. Molay faces death with as great calm as Paludan-Müller's Kalanus; in fact, he longs for the "purifying flames." The bystanders sympathise with him, and cry to him to make his escape; but, like Kalanus, he resists all entreaties. The Archbishop's feeling for him is shared by every one; he is surrounded by a crowd of sentimental executioners, who consign him to the flames with expressions of the utmost admiration and esteem. They are cruel, sentimental fanatics, like Werner himself. Every character in the play is tainted with repulsive sentimentality. Molay's old comrade in arms, when prevented from rescuing him, says: —

"Du böser Jakob Du! – Pfui! sterben will er,Verlassen seinen Waffenbruder! – Jakob!Du musst nicht sterben! hörst Du?"85

But the guiltless Molay dies. There is the same play upon the Christian mystery here as in Kleist's drama. Molay is venerated like a second Christ, even by his executioners. After his death a miracle happens. "Sunlight gilds the scene. Above the entrance to the Vale cavern, below the brightly illuminated name 'Jesus' there appear the names 'John,' 'J. B. Molay,' and 'Andrew,' also in bright transparencies." All the crusaders fall upon their knees. "Long, solemn pause, during which there come from the interior of the cavern the muffled sounds of the 'Holy! Holy! Holy!' sung by the elders of the Order of the Vale to the usual tune, with an accompaniment of harps and bells."

Martyrdom is Werner's specialty. He is at home in such subjects as beating to death with clubs, boiling in oil, and the tortures of the rack. He revels in agonies, as does Görres, whose satisfaction we almost seem to feel as we read of all the mysteries of martyrdom in the first part of his Christian Mysticism. "The sacrificial victims are stretched upon the rack or the wheel, and all their limbs are twisted out of joint by means of screws … while the lictors scorch their sides with torches or tear them with iron claws. Chains are sometimes drawn round their bodies until their ribs are broken; their chests and eyes are pierced with pointed reeds; their jaws are broken with heavy blows of the torturer's fist; and, though the victims are now hardly drawing breath, nails are hammered through their feet and red-hot iron rods are laid upon their tenderest parts and allowed to burn themselves in," &c., &c.

In Werner's drama, Attila, a young man whom Attila loves is accused of perjury and confesses his guilt. Attila, who is an emotional, sentimental enthusiast, embraces him, shedding burning tears, and then orders him to be torn asunder by horses. Cruel sentimentality, fanatic brutality, is Romantic wont. Along with Attila we have Pope Leo, another character who seems to have escaped from the pages of Görres' Mysticism– this time undoubtedly from the chapter treating of the height from the ground to which the enthusiast in his religious rapture is at times raised; for, while he is praying, Leo "raises himself higher and higher, until he is resting only on the tips of his toes." He sympathises with Attila, and has a sort of magnetic influence over him.