The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05

The external link connecting the two schools as well as the Romantic groups in general and the object of their star-worship, Goethe, was Clemens Maria Brentano (1778-1842), in many ways the most typical Romantic figure of either school. Brentano's grandmother, Sophie La Roche, had been the friend of Wieland; his mother, Maximiliane, played a not unimportant rôle in the life of the young Goethe and is immortalized in the latter part of Werther. Maximiliane married Brentano, an Italian from the Como region, and Clemens was the third child of this loveless union. Brentano's early life was not happy; he was destined for a business career but was a failure in it, and then studied at various universities but with no great application or success. From 1797-1800 he was at Jena, where he succeeded in making himself hated by the Schlegels in spite of his defense of them in his satirical play, Gustav Wasa (1800). This play, in the manner of Tieck's Puss in Boots, attempts to ridicule Kotzebue. The method is the same as Tieck's: there is the play within the play, the gagged officer (to take the place of the critic Böttger), the puns, of which, perhaps, the one on Lucinde (Lux inde) is the best, and which, as often in Brentano, go beyond and surpass Tieck. Romantic irony flourishes: the whole world of the theatre, the author, the very lights, the building, the working day and the musical instruments in the orchestra are dramatized in turn. The dialogue of the latter far more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. Wasa, unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be compared with August von Schlegel's Gate of Honor as a satire on the same subject.

Brentano's Godwi (1801), the sub-title of which, "An Unmanageable Novel by Maria," shows its character, is a far better production. It has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent tendency toward that point of view. The plot of Godwi runs wild, but the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading. Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the author's own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding parts of the work are referred to by page and line—"This is the pond into which I fall on page so and so."

If Brentano's Rosary cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as The Lore-Lay, the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use of the refrain in all phases and genres, especially to emphasize and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the French adage, "Quand le coeur chante, c'est toujours un refrain." Brentano surrenders himself passionately to his mood. His surrender and his distorting irony, like Heine's, arise from his desire to assimilate all of the outside world; it explains, in part, the Romantic desire to mediate, to translate, to bridge the cleft between oneself and the world. In part, too, it explains the desire for musical imitation so apparent in both Tieck and Brentano. It is an attempt to express in terms of one sense the ideas or apperceptions of another. But where Tieck falls into meaningless jingle, Brentano succeeds, not merely in suggesting but in producing the effect, as in his Merry Musicians (1803), or in bringing about its latent mood, as in his Spinner's Song or in his version of the old folk-epithalamium, "Come out, come out, thou lovely, lovely bride."

Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized latter part of The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf (1816) to the simple and homely Kasper and Annie (1817), with its elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, but the fancy is exuberant and the interest well maintained. Brentano's discovery of the Rhine as an object of poetry and veneration is completely summarized in Radlauf, where the Rhine lyrics are often of wonderful beauty and definiteness and the river becomes a benevolent deus ex machina, who—significantly—in dreams, guides and aids the simple, honest miller in his search for a bride.

Later in life, Brentano returned to the Roman Church into which he had been baptized as a child, and gradually withdrew from literary activity. Long before his death in 1842, he had renounced his earlier life as wicked and abhorrent, and had given himself over entirely to the Church. But his career with its constant wanderings, its lack of permanency of occupation, of family ties, and of a real home, his inability to grow old, his inner unreality, his excessive productivity-in short, all that is incomplete, over-stimulated, destructive of self, make him the most typical figure of the later Romantic group.

Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) is by no means so bizarre a figure. Born in Berlin of a noble family, he inherited a peculiar patriotism and his love of culture, and developed these without the eccentricities which characterized his brother-in-law. The main influences of his early years were Goethe and Jena, but, as a direct inspiration, Tieck must also be mentioned. Arnim's early works lie largely in the field of natural science, especially in physics. He had little of Brentano's lyric gift; indeed, his poems, where not wooden, are often merely reminiscent. They show, too, in an unusual degree, the ability to adapt himself to another's mood and assimilate it—that which the Germans call "Nachempfinden," a quality which stood him in excellent stead in his work on The Boy's Magic Horn.

The drama Halle and Jerusalem (1810) is an amalgamation of the story of Cardenio and Celinde used by Gryphius and Immermann, with the story of the Wandering Jew. The first four acts take place in Halle where Cardenio is a teacher and where he is living in incestuous relation with Olympia. He is a Faust-nature and his father is Ahasuerus. The fifth act is taken up with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where the romantic fates of the characters are decided. The play abounds in contemporary satire and, as in all of Arnim's work, there is distinct emphasis on action, the goal of human endeavor.

Arnim's prose is better than his verse. Soon, in The Guardians of the Crown (1817; volume 2 unfinished and published in his literary remains, 1854), he strikes an individual note. This novel is one of the best products of German Romanticism. The Guardians are a mysterious secret organization who guard the imperial crown in a fairy castle and are favorable to the ancient house of Hohenstaufen but inimical to the ruling Habsburgs. The basis is the newly awakening ideal of German unity but Arnim fails to express this clearly, and the concluding motif, that Germany's crown is to be spiritually won, resolves the whole into a frosty allegory. The progress of the story is, however, extremely interesting; the whole spacious and varied scene of medieval life is there, and as Tieck and Wackenroder discovered Nuremberg, and Brentano the Rhine, so Arnim may be said to have shown in its full activity the Ghibelline city of Waiblingen. It is, to be sure, a Romantic Waiblingen, and not the real city, as Arnim himself was afterward forced to admit with some disappointment when he actually saw it. But as Arnim portrays it, it rises to typical value without losing any of its poetic individuality. It is the city of the Hohenstaufens, the last stand of medievalism against the encroachment of a new civilization. The echoes from Gotz von Berlichingen are at once apparent to the reader. But Arnim's city of the sixteenth century does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also. Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall, thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty—a scene which shows Arnim's power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, but with money mysteriously given him builds a cloth-mill on the site of his ancestral palace and becomes the mayor of the city. How different a picture from the hazy cities of Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen! It is a part of the new spirit in Romanticism to point the way for the people of Germany to go forward—to leave mysticism and dreams, and to grapple with the life around them.

A similar impulse toward popularization actuated Arnim and Brentano in their joint work, The Boy's Magic Horn (1806-8). This is the achievement upon which their greatest fame will always rest. It is one of the best collections of folk-songs and popular ballads in any language, and has been of the greatest influence upon Germany. There was no desire on the part of the editors to write a learned treatise; they simply wished to gather together and record the folk-songs of the Fatherland before they were lost forever. In Arnim's own words: "The richness of this our national song cannot fail to attract universal attention; it will surprise many; it will supplement many an effort of our own times, or will render such effort needless. We expect a great deal from the joyous happy life in these songs—a manifold, full tone in poetry, an echo of very definite ideas, or an impulse to arouse many a half-forgotten youthful memory. These poems will not only be read, they will be remembered and sung. They embrace in their content, perhaps the greatest portion of German poetry. They will thus set free many an indefinite longing—a something which is not satisfied by much re-reading."

Goethe greeted the new undertaking with enthusiasm and urged the editors to "keep their poetic archives clean, strict, and in good order." He, too, urged that "this book should be in every house where joyful humans dwell, by the window, under the mirror, or where song book and cook book lie. There it should remain, ready to be opened, and there something should be found for every varying mood." While this fate has not been granted the work, it has grown deservedly popular. Philological criticism has caviled at the free hand which Arnim, especially, used in remolding the songs, but the editors are freed of any possible charge of intellectual dishonesty toward reader and source in that their object was to present artistic unities and not material for further study and dissection.

A folk-song is a song which has become a part of the lyric consciousness of the people; often the singers do not know that what they are singing has a literary origin—they have thoroughly assimilated it. In the best sense of the term, the songs of The Boy's Magic Horn are folk-songs. They are both narrative and dramatic as well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in expression. They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a crude version of the Lay of Hildebrant to the riddles, lullabies, and counting-out rhymes of children. Pictures of the moral and social life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the supernatural. Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems about tailors—a favorite butt of the peasant past. Ballads of popular origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here. Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the future. Of the work as a whole Heine says, "I cannot praise the book enough. It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit, and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat of the German folk. It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness, all their foolish reason. Here German anger beats its drum, here is the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love."

The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is definite and well-recognized. The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power: The Romantic longing for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but induced a tremendous patriotism as well. The cosmopolitan temper which caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became a propaganda. It was also precipitated in verse and prose. The spark came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of the German people a large cultural fact. Fichte, like a true German, emphasized education as the means of progress: Arnim grasped the problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on those sprung from the soil. In him, as well as in Fichte, dawns the ideal of the German people as an entity, as a nation.

There are three poets whose main value lies in the appeal they made to the belligerent spirit of the day. They represent three phases of the German character. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the eldest of the group, is the pamphleteer, the politician, and the teacher, as well as the poet. He is the hard-headed, earnest intellectual whose lyric poetry, whatever its esthetic weaknesses, arouses to action by its deadly insistence on an idea, on hatred of the French, on salvation by the sword. Arndt is all virility and fire.

The life of Theodor Körner (1791-1813), the son of Schiller's intimate friend, shows that mixture of idealism and practicality for which the Germans are becoming more and more noted. Körner was aroused from his poetic diletantism by the alarms of war. He enlisted in the famous Lützow corps and died a soldier's death, thus becoming the symbol of all that was ideal for the patriotic youth of his day, the hero and the poet, the man of "Lyre and Sword." His patriotic poems, often composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the roll of cannon and the beat of drum. The trace of Schiller's rhetoric in Körner's poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals. Like Arndt's lyrics, Körner's poems are actual documents in the struggle for liberty-verses which affected men.

The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817). His was a quieter nature, which loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past. Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty, tenderness, and fortitude had endeared her to the people as well as to the poets.

Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however, followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrived a day too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful title by no means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie outside the confines of the Romantic spirit.

Eichendorff is a thorough pleinairiste, filled with the atmosphere of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart from its landscape. His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the ultimate background of all his nature-poetry. Here must be localized the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle. Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and the splashing of the fountain; here he was grounded in the strong and pious, if somewhat narrow, Catholicism of his race. It was a Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's beautiful poems on the death of his child. It is interesting to see how, in this spiritual poetry, there is a constant melting of nature into religion, a dissolving of the Romantic atmosphere, of that youthful fervor which Eichendorff never really outgrew but continued to draw upon for inspiration for all his later work, into a broad, deep, manly piety.

Eichendorff's poetry began with Tieckian notes; it was influenced by Brentano, and, unfortunately, was colored by the productions of Count Otto von Löben (1786-1825), a pseudo-Romanticist of less than mediocre ability. But Eichendorff's individuality, with its constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in—an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry has become a permanent part of the musical life of the nation. The Broken Ring has passed into a folk-song, and "O valleys wide!" with Mendelssohn's music is a popular choral of deep religious import.

Yet Eichendorff does not attract either by the variety of his themes or of his rhymes. It is his very repetitions which so endear him to the popular heart. His is not passionate poetry, nor does it subjectively portray the soul-life of its author. In fact, it is saved from monotony of content at times only by its extreme honesty and its lovable simplicity. There is none of Goethe's power of suggesting landscape in a few touches, none of Goethe's logic of description, none of Goethe's clear inner objectivity, but a certain haze lies over Eichendorff's landscapes—the haze of a lyric Corot; at the same time, this landscape has the power of suggestion to the German mind. Paul Heyse, himself a poet, makes one of his characters say, "I have always carried Eichendorff Is book of songs with me on my travels. Whenever a feeling of strangeness comes over me in the variegated days, or I feel a longing for home, I turn its leaves and am at home again. None of our poets has the same magic reminiscence of home which captures our hearts with such touching monotony, with so few pictures and notes. * * * He is always new, as the voices of Nature itself, and never oppresses, but rather lulls one to sweet dreams as if a mother were singing her child to sleep."

The one novel of Eichendorff which has lived, From the Life of a Good-for-nothing (1826), is a last Romantic shoot of Friedrich Schlegel's doctrine of divine laziness—a delightful story, abounding in those elements which perennially endear Romanticism to the young heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings. What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more naïve than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground. There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions; the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, but she is of his own rank. The pseudo-Romanticism of modern novels is avoided; the hero neither wins a kingdom nor is he the long-lost heir of some potentate—he remains just what he was, a lovable good-for-nothing. The weather-eye on probability is what in later times has helped the Romanticists to slip so easily into Realism—and to reactionary views.

Of all the great mass of material left by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843), only a lyric or two and the fairy tale Undine have any value for the present day. Fouqué represents the talent which develops in the glare of the world, is popular for a decade, but soon withers when the sun is set. His relations to Romanticism are largely external; he frequented the salons of Rachel Levin and Henrietta Herz in Berlin, was aided by August von Schlegel, and was praised by Jean Paul; but in his heart he was not inspired by any of the deeper longings that characterize the true Romantic spirit. Even though he is to be credited with the first modern dramatization of the Nibelungen story, The Hero of the North (1810), and though he took subjects from the Germanic past and from the chivalric days, he brought no new life to his rehabilitations. Fouqué was too productive, too facile, too external, too indifferent to psychological motivation to be real. He diluted Romanticism and sentimentalized it. In him patriotism becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The strength and the indigenousness of Arnim are gone, and that power to throw a Romantic glamor over life which Tieck and Hoffmann had, is lacking.

Only in his charming fairy-tale, Undine (1811), does Fouqué rise above his milieu. Undine, the source of which, according to Fouqué himself, is to be found in a work of Paracelsus on supernatural beings, remains one of the best creations of the Romantic school and, like Eichendorff's novel, has become international, not only in its original form but in the opera by Lortzing (first performance, Hamburg, 1845). The value of the story lies in the author's power to make the reader believe in Undine, the water sprite, and in the presentation of a new nature-mythology. All Romanticists have consciously or unconsciously attempted to satisfy Friedrich Schlegel's demand for anew mythology: Fouqué's earth, air, and water spirits people the elements with graceful forms from the world of nature; the nymph Undine in the form of a flowing stream embraces even in death the grave of her lover.

Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) was not fundamentally a Romantic personality. He is called "the classicist of Romanticism," and with justice. The term shows that he is felt to have something of completion, of inner perfection, of harmony of form and content which was lacking in the truer Romanticists. Uhland was without their early cosmopolitanism. Political life as manifested in him was, first of all, Suabian—for Uhland was a Suabian and most intimately associated with that section of Germany. He was actively and practically interested in the politics of his native land as a member of its legislative bodies and as delegate to the national parliament at Frankfurt in 1848. Uhland had a conservative love for the "good old Suabian law." He felt the doubtful position of the South German states in the struggle against Napoleon, and it was only when Würtemberg took its stand with the allies in the final conflict that the embarrassment of his position was relieved, and Uhland's patriotic verse assumed its full tone. But his poetry never became a spur to national achievement like the verse of Arndt, that other German poet-professor. As a member of the national parliament, Uhland was opposed to the exclusion of Austria from the hegemony, and to the two-chamber system of legislation. But Uhland's conservatism is unalterably honest without any reactionary traits; he resigned his professorship rather than be hindered in his political activities, and refused, with the peasant's dourness, all the orders and distinctions that were offered him.