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

Frau von Kalb herself writes to Jean Paul: "Why all this talk about seduction? Spare the poor creatures, I beg of you, and alarm their hearts and consciences no more. Nature is petrified enough already. I shall never change my opinion on this subject; I do not understand this virtue, and cannot call any one blessed for its sake. Religion here upon earth is nothing else than the development and maintenance of the powers and capacities with which our natures have been endowed. Man should not submit to compulsion, but neither should he acquiesce in wrongful renunciation. Let the bold, powerful, mature human nature, which knows and uses its strength, have its way. But in our generation human nature is weak and contemptible. Our laws are the outcome of wretchedness and dire necessity, seldom of wisdom. Love needs no laws."

A vigorous mind speaks to us in this letter. The leap from this to the idea of Lucinde is not a long one, but the fall to the very vulgar elaboration of Lucinde is great. We do not, however, rightly understand these outbursts until we understand the social conditions which produced them, and realise that they are not isolated and accidental tirades, but are conditioned by the position in which the majority of poetic natures stood to society at that time.

Weimar was then the headquarters and gathering-place of Germany's classical authors. It is not difficult to understand how they came to gather in this little capital of a little dukedom. Of Germany's two great monarchs, Joseph the Second was too much occupied with his efforts at reform, too eager for the spread of "enlightenment," to have any attention to spare for German poetry; and the Voltairean Frederick of Prussia was too French in his tastes and intellectual tendencies to take any interest in German poets. It was at the small courts that they were welcomed. Schiller lived at Mannheim, Jean Paul at Gotha, Goethe at Weimar. Poetry had had no stronghold in Germany for many a long year, but now Weimar became one. Thither Goethe summoned Herder; Wieland had been there since 1772. Schiller received an appointment in the adjacent Jena. Weimar was, then, the place where passion, as poetical, compared with the prosaic conventions of society, was worshipped most recklessly and with least prejudice, in practice as well as theory. "Ah! here we have women!" cries Jean Paul when he comes to Weimar. "Everything is revolutionarily daring here; that a woman is married signifies nothing." Wieland "revives himself" by taking his former mistress, Sophie von la Roche, into his house, and Schiller invites Frau von Kalb to accompany him to Paris.

We thus understand how it was that Jean Paul, when in Weimar, and under the influence of Frau von Kalb's personality, exclaimed: "This much is certain; the heart of the world is beating with a more spiritual and greater revolution than the political, and one quite as destructive."

What revolution? The emancipation of feeling from the conventions of society; the heart's audacious assumption of its right to regard its own code of laws as the new moral code, to re-cast morals in the interests of morality, and occasionally in the interests of inclination. The Weimar circle had no desire, no thought for anything beyond this, had neither practical nor social reforms in view. It is a genuinely German trait that outwardly they made deep obeisance to the laws which they privately evaded. In conversation, Goethe, in his riper years, invariably maintained that the existing conventions regulating the relations of the sexes were absolutely necessary in the interests of civilisation; and in their books authors gave expression to revolutionary sentiments which were more or less their own, only to recant at the end of the book. The hero either confesses his error, or commits suicide, or is punished for his defiance of society, or renounces society altogether (Karl Moor, Werther, Tasso, Linda). It is exactly the proceeding of the heretical authors of the Middle Ages, who concluded their books with a notice that everything in them must of course be interpreted in harmony with the doctrines and decrees of Holy Mother Church.

Into this Weimar circle of gifted women Madame de Staël, "the whirlwind in petticoats," as she has been called, is introduced when she comes to Germany. In the midst of them she produces the effect of some strange wild bird. What a contrast between her aims and their predilections I With them everything is personal, with her by this time everything is social. She has appeared before the public; she is striking doughty blows in the cause of social reform. For such deeds even the most advanced of these German women of the "enlightenment" period are of much too mild a strain. Her aim is to revolutionise life politically, theirs to make it poetical. The idea of flinging the gauntlet to a Napoleon would never have entered the mind of any one of them. What a use to make of a lady's glove, a pledge of love! It is not the rights of humanity, but the rights of the heart which they understand; their strife is not against the wrongs of life but against its prose. The relation of the gifted individual to society does not here, as in France, take the form of a conflict between the said individual's rebellious assertion of his liberty and the traditional compulsion of society, but of a conflict between the poetry of the desires of the individual and the prose of political and social conventions. Hence the perpetual glorification in Romantic literature of capacity and strength of desire, of wish; a subject to which Friedrich Schlegel in particular perpetually recurs. It is in reality the one outwardly directed power that men possess – impotence itself conceived as a power.

We find the same admiration of wish in Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller (Either-Or). "The reason why Aladdin is so refreshing is that we feel the childlike audacity of genius in its wildly fantastic wishes. How many are there in our day who dare really wish?" &c. The childlike, for ever the childlike! But who can wonder that wish, the mother of religions, the outward expression of inaction, became the catchword of the Romanticists? Wish is poetry; society as it exists, prose. It is only when we judge them from this standpoint that we rightly understand even the most serene, most chastened works of Germany's greatest poets. Goethe's Tasso, with its conflict between the statesman and the poet (i.e. between reality and poetry), its delineation of the contrast between these two who complete each other, and are only unlike "because nature did not make one man of them," is, in spite of its crystalline limpidity of style and its keynote of resignation, a product of the self-same long fermentation which provides the Romantic School with all its fermentative matter. The theme of Wilhelm Meister is in reality the same. It, too, represents the gradual, slow reconciliation and fusion of the dreamed of ideal and the earthly reality. But only the greatest minds rose to this height; the main body of writers of considerable, but less lucid intellect never got beyond the inward discord. The more poetry became conscious of itself as a power, the more the poet realised his dignity, and literature became a little world in itself with its own special technical interests, the more distinctly did the conflict with reality assume the subordinate form of a conflict with philistinism (see, for instance, Eichendorff's Krieg den Philistern). Poetry no longer champions the eternal rights of liberty against the tyranny of outward circumstances; it champions itself as poetry against the prose of life. This is the Teutonic, the German-Scandinavian, that is to say, the narrow literary conception of the service that poetry is capable of rendering to the cause of liberty.

"We must remember," says Kierkegaard (Begrebet Ironi, p. 322), "that Tieck and the entire Romantic School entered, or believed they entered, into relations with a period in which men were, so to speak, petrified, in final, unalterable social conditions. Everything was perfected and completed, in a sort of divine Chinese perfection, which left no reasonable longing unsatisfied, no reasonable wish unfulfilled. The glorious principles and maxims of 'use and wont' were the objects of a pious worship; everything, including the absolute itself, was absolute; men refrained from polygamy; they wore peaked hats; nothing was without its significance. Each man felt, with the precise degree of dignity that corresponded to his position, what he effected, the exact importance to himself and to the whole, of his unwearied endeavour. There was no frivolous indifference to punctuality in those days; all ungodliness of that kind tried to insinuate itself in vain. Everything pursued its tranquil, ordered course; even the suitor went soberly about his business; he knew that he was going on a lawful errand, was taking a most serious step. Everything went by clockwork. Men waxed enthusiastic over the beauties of nature on Midsummer Day; were overwhelmed by the thought of their sins on the great fast-days; fell in love when they were twenty, went to bed at ten o'clock. They married and devoted themselves to domestic and civic duties; they brought up families; in the prime of their manhood notice was taken in high places of their honourable and successful efforts; they lived on terms of intimacy with the pastor, under whose eye they did the many generous deeds which they knew he would recount in a voice trembling with emotion when the day came for him to preach their funeral sermon. They were friends in the genuine sense of the word, ein wirklicher Freund, wie man wirklicher Kanzleirat war."

I fail to see anything typical in this description. Except that we wear round hats instead of peaked ones, every word of it might apply to the present day; there is nothing especially indicative of one period more than another. No; the distinctive feature of the period in question is the gifted writer's, the Romanticist's, conception of philistinism. In my criticism of Johan Ludvig Heiberg's first Romantic attempts, I wrote: "They (the Romanticists) looked upon it from the philosophical point of view as finality, from the intellectual, as narrow-mindedness; not, like us, from the moral point of view, as contemptibility. With it they contrasted their own infinite longing… They confronted its prose with their own youthful poetry; we confront its contemptibility with our virile will" (Samlede Skrifter, i. p. 467). As a general rule, then, they, with their thoughts and longings, fled society and reality, though now and again, as already indicated, they attempted, if not precisely to realise their ideas in life, at least to sketch a possible solution of the problem how to transform reality in its entirety into poetry.

Not that they show a spark of the indignation or the initiative which we find in the French Romantic author (George Sand, for instance); they merely amuse themselves with elaborating revolutionary, or at least startling fancies.

That which Goethe had attained to, namely, the power of moulding his surroundings to suit his own personal requirements, was to the young generation the point of departure. In this particular they from their youth saw the world from Goethe's point of view; they made the measure of freedom which he had won for himself and the conditions which had been necessary for the full development of his gifts and powers, the average, or more correctly the minimum, requirement of every man with talent, no matter how little. They transformed the requirements of his nature into a universal rule, ignored the self-denial he had laboriously practised and the sacrifices he had made, and not only proclaimed the unconditional rights of passion, but, with tiresome levity and pedantic lewdness, preached the emancipation of the senses. And another influence, very different from that of Goethe's powerful self-assertion, also made itself felt, namely, the influence of Berlin. To Goethe's free, unrestrained humanity there was added in Berlin an ample alloy of the scoffing, anti-Christian spirit which had emanated from the court of Frederick the Great, and the licence which had prevailed at that of his successor.

But both Goethe and Schiller paved the way for Romanticism not only positively, by their proclamation of the rights of passion, but also negatively, by the conscious attitude of opposition to their own age which they assumed in their later years. In another form, the Romanticist's aversion to reality is already to be found in them. I adduce two famous instances of the astonishing lack of interest shown by Goethe, the greatest creative mind of the day, in political realities; they prove at the same time how keen was his interest in science. Writing of the campaign against France during the French Revolution, a campaign in which he took part, he mentions that he spent most of his time in observing "various phenomena of colour and of personal courage." And after the battle of Jena Knebel writes: "Goethe has been busy with optics the whole time. We study osteology under his guidance, the times being well adapted to such study, as all the fields are covered with preparations." The bodies of his fallen countrymen did not inspire the poet with odes; he dissected them and studied their bones.

Such instances as these give us some impression of the attitude of aloofness which Goethe as a poet maintained towards the events of his day. But we must not overlook the fine side of his refusal to write patriotic war-songs during the struggle with Napoleon. "Would it be like me to sit in my room and write war-songs? In the night bivouacs, when we could hear the horses of the enemy's outposts neighing, then I might possibly have done it. But it was not my life, that, and not my affair; it was Theodor Körner's. Therefore his war-songs become him well. I have not a warlike nature nor warlike tastes, and war-songs would have been a mask very unbecoming to me. I have never been artificial in my poetry." Goethe, like his disciple Heiberg, was in this case led to refrain by the strong feeling that he only cared to write of what he had himself experienced; but he also tells us that he regarded themes of a historical nature as "the most dangerous and most thankless."

His ideal, and that of the whole period, is humanity pure and simple – a man's private life is everything. The tremendous conflicts of the eighteenth century and the "enlightenment" period are all, in consonance with the human idealism of the day, contained in the life story, the development story, of the individual. But the cult of humanity does not only imply lack of interest in history, but also a general lack of interest in the subject for its own sake. In one of his letters to Goethe, Schiller writes that two things are to be demanded of the poet and of the artist – in the first place, that he shall rise above reality, and in the second, that he shall keep within the bounds of the material, the natural. He explains his meaning thus: The artist who lives amidst unpropitious, formless surroundings, and consequently ignores these surroundings in his art, runs the risk of altogether losing touch with the tangible, of becoming abstract, or, if his mind is not of a robust type, fantastic; if, on the other hand, he keeps to the world of reality, he is apt to be too real, and, if he has little imagination, to copy slavishly and vulgarly. These words indicate, as it were, the watershed which divides the German literature of this period. On the one side we have the unnational art-poetry of Goethe and Schiller, with its continuation in the fantasies of the Romanticists, and on the other side the merely sensational or entertaining literature of the hour (Unterhaltungslitteratur), which is based on reality, but a philistine reality, the literature of which Lafontaine's sentimental bourgeois romances, and the popular, prosaic family dramas of Schröder, Iffland, and Kotzebue, are the best known examples. It was a misfortune for German literature that such a division came about. But, although the rupture of the better literature with reality first showed itself in a startling form in the writings of the Romanticists, we must not forget that the process had begun long before. Kotzebue had been the antipodes of Schiller and Goethe before he stood in that position to the Romanticists. Of this we get a vivid impression from the following anecdote.4

One day in the early spring of 1802, the little town of Weimar was in the greatest excitement over an event which was the talk of high and low. It had long been apparent that some special festivity was in preparation. It was known that a very famous and highly respected man, President von Kotzebue, had applied privately to the Burgomaster for the use of the newly decorated Town Hall. The most distinguished ladies of the town had for a month past done nothing but order and try on fancy dresses. Fräulein von Imhof had given fifty gold guldens for hers. Astonished eyes had beheld a carver and gilder carrying a wonderful helmet and banner across the street in broad daylight. What could such things be required for? Were there to be theatricals at the Town Hall? It was known that an enormous bell mould made of pasteboard had been ordered. For what was it to be used? The secret soon came out. Some time before this, Kotzebue, famous throughout Europe as the author of Menschenhass und Reue, had returned, laden with Russian roubles and provided with a patent of nobility, to his native town, to make a third in the Goethe and Schiller alliance. He had succeeded in gaining admission to the court, and the next thing was to obtain admission to Goethe's circle, which was also a court, and a very exclusive one. The private society of intimates for whom Goethe wrote his immortal convivial songs (Gesellschaftslieder) met once a week at his house. Kotzebue had himself proposed for election by some of the lady members, but Goethe added an amendment to the rules of the society which excluded the would-be intruder, and prevented his even appearing occasionally as a guest. Kotzebue determined to revenge himself by paying homage to Schiller in a manner which he hoped would thoroughly annoy Goethe. The latter had just suppressed some thrusts at the brothers Schlegel in Kotzebue's play, Die Kleinstädter, which was one of the pieces in the repertory of the Weimar theatre; so, to damage the theatre, Kotzebue determined to give a grand performance in honour of Schiller at the Town Hall. Scenes from all his plays were to be acted, and finally The Bell was to be recited to an accompaniment of tableaux vivants. At the close of the poem, Kotzebue, dressed as the master-bellfounder, was to shatter the pasteboard mould with a blow of his hammer, and there was to be disclosed, not a bell, but a bust of Schiller. The Kotzebue party, however, had reckoned without their host, that is to say, without Goethe. In all Weimar there was only one bust of Schiller, that which stood in the library. When, on the last day, a messenger was sent to borrow it, the unexpected answer was given, that never in the memory of man had a plaster cast lent for a fête been returned in the condition in which it had been sent, and that the loan must therefore be unwillingly refused. And one can imagine the astonishment and rage of the allies when they heard that the carpenters, arriving at the Town Hall with their boards, laths, and poles, had found the doors locked and had received an intimation from the Burgomaster and Council that, as the hall had been newly painted and decorated, they could not permit it to be used for such a "riotous" entertainment.

This is only a small piece of provincial town scandal. But what is really remarkable, what constitutes the kernel of the story, is the fact that the whole company of distinguished ladies who had hitherto upheld the fame of Goethe (Countess Henriette von Egloffstein; the beautiful lady of honour and poetess Amalie von Imhof, at a later period the object of Gentz's adoration, whose fifty gold guldens had been wasted, &c., &c.) took offence, and deserted his camp for that of Kotzebue. Even the Countess Einsiedel, whom Goethe had always specially distinguished, went over to the enemy. This shows how little real hold the higher culture had as yet taken even on the highest intellectual and social circles, and how powerful the man of letters still was who concerned himself with real life and sought his subjects in his surroundings.

There had, most undoubtedly, been a time when Goethe and Schiller themselves were realists. To both, in their first stage of restless ferment, reality had been a necessity. Both had given free play to nature and feeling in their early productions, Goethe in Götz and Werther, Schiller in Die Räuber. But after Götz had set the fashion of romances of chivalry and highway robbery, Werther of suicide, both in real life and in fiction, and Die Räuber of such productions as Abällino, der grosse Bandit, the great writers, finding the reading world unable to discriminate between originals and imitations, withdrew from the arena. Their interest in the subject was lost in their interest in the form. The study of the antique led them to lay ever-increasing weight upon artistic perfection. It was not their lot to find a public which understood them, much less a people that could present them with subjects, make demands of them – give them orders, so to speak. The German people were still too undeveloped. When Goethe, at Weimar, was doing what he could to help Schiller, he found that the latter, on account of his wild life at Mannheim, his notoriety as a political refugee, and especially his pennilessness, was regarded as a writer of most unfortunate antecedents. During the epigram war (Xenienkampf) of 1797, both Goethe and Schiller were uniformly treated as poets of doubtful talent. One of the pamphlets against them is dedicated to "die zwei Sudelköche in Weimar und Jena" (the bunglers of Weimar and Jena). It was Napoleon's recognition of Goethe, his wish to see and converse with him, his exclamation: "Voilà un homme!" which greatly helped to establish Goethe's reputation in Germany. A Prussian staff-officer, who was quartered about this time in the poet's house, had never heard his name. His publisher complained bitterly of the small demand for the collected edition of his works; there was a much better sale for those of his brother-in-law, Vulpius (author of Rinaldo Rinaldini). Tasso and Iphigenia could not compete with works of such European fame as Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue; Goethe himself tells us that they were only performed in Weimar once every three or four years. Clearly enough it was the stupidity of the public which turned the great poets from the popular path to glory; but it is equally clear that the new classicism, which they so greatly favoured, was an ever-increasing cause of their unpopularity. Only two of Goethe's works were distinct successes, Werther and Hermann und Dorothea.

What were the proceedings of the two great poets after they turned their backs upon their surroundings? Goethe made the story of his own strenuous intellectual development the subject of plastic poetic treatment. But finding it impossible, so long as he absorbed himself in modern humanity, to attain to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks, he began to purge his works of the personal; he composed symbolical poems and allegories, wrote Die Natürliche Tochter, in which the characters simply bear the names of their callings, King, Ecclesiastic, &c.; and the neo-classic studies, Achilleis, Pandora, Palæophron und Neoterpe, Epimenides, and the Second Part of Faust. He began to employ Greek mythology much as it had been employed in French classical literature, namely, as a universally understood metaphorical language. He no longer, as in the First Part of Faust, treated the individual as a type, but produced types which were supposed to be individuals. His own Iphigenia was now too modern for him. Ever more marked became that addiction to allegory which led Thorvaldsen too away from life in his art. In his art criticism Goethe persistently maintained that it is not truth to nature, but truth to art which is all-important; he preferred ideal mannerism (such as is to be found in his own drawings preserved in his house in Frankfort) to ungainly but vigorous naturalism. As theatrical director he acted on these same principles; grandeur and dignity were everything to him. He upheld the conventional tragic style of Calderon and Alfieri, Racine and Voltaire. His actors were trained, in the manner of the ancients, to stand like living statues; they were forbidden to turn profile or back to the audience, or to speak up the stage; in some plays, in defiance of the customs of modern mimic art, they wore masks. In spite of public opposition, he put A. W. Schlegel's Ion on the stage – a professedly original play, in reality an unnatural adaptation from Euripides, suggested by Iphigenia. Nay, he actually insisted, merely for the sake of exercising the actors in reciting verse, on producing Friedrich Schlegel's Alarkos, an utterly worthless piece, which might have been written by a talentless schoolboy, and was certain to be laughed off the stage.5 To such an extent as this did he gradually sacrifice everything to external artistic form.