Many years before this a French pamphlet written against Mme. de Staël had been entitled L'Antiromantique. Her Romantic tendency had in the interval become more and more marked. Spiritualism, as such, seemed to her the good, the beautiful, the true, both in art and in philosophy. This explains both her over-indulgence towards the abortions of the Romantic school, especially the dramas of her friend Zacharias Werner, and her misunderstanding of Goethe, whose greatness rather alarms than delights her, and whom she now excuses, now quotes with the remark that she cannot defend the spirit of his works. She prefaces her prose translation of Die Braut von Corinth with the words: "I can certainly neither defend the aim of the poem nor the poem itself, but it seems to me that no one can fail to be impressed by its fantastic power;" and she concludes her otherwise excellent criticism of the first part of Faust with these words: "This drama of 'Faust' is certainly not a model work. Whether we look upon it as the outcome of a poetic frenzy or of the life-weariness of the worshipper of reason, our hope is that such productions will not repeat themselves;" adding only by way of compensation a remark on Goethe's genius and the wealth of thought displayed in the work. Thus irresistibly was even such a mind as hers affected by the spirit of the day in her native country, with its tendency to religious reaction. In the intellectual life of Germany she had perception and sympathy for Romanticism alone; German pantheism she neither sympathised with nor understood; it alarmed her; the daring spirit which had sounded so many abysses, recoiled tremblingly from the verge of this one.
And yet here lay the key to the whole new intellectual development in Germany. Behind Lessing's brilliant attack upon ecclesiastical dogma there had lain, unperceived by his contemporaries, the philosophy of Spinoza. Immediately after the great critic's death the literary world received a double surprise. The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi elicited the appalling fact that Lessing had lived and died a Spinozist, and also showed that even Jacobi himself was of the opinion that all philosophy logically carried out must inevitably lead to Spinozism and pantheism. He endeavoured to extricate himself from the difficulty by pointing out that there is another way of arriving at knowledge of the truth than by conclusive argument, namely, the way of direct intuitive perception. But from this time onwards pantheism was in the air, and from the moment that Goethe, enraptured by his first reading of Spinoza, declares himself a Spinozist (a faith from which he never wavered to the end of his long life), it reigns in German literature; and this spirit of the new age, with its rich dower of poetry and philosophic thought, weds that antique beauty which has been brought to life again; as Faust, in the most famous poetical work of the period, weds Helen of Troy, who symbolises ancient Greece.
The great pagan renaissance which had been inaugurated in Italy by such men as Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, and in England by such men as Shakespeare and Bacon, now finds its way to Germany, and the new intellectual tendency is strengthened by the enthusiasm for pagan-Greek antiquity awakened by Winckelmann and Lessing. Schiller writes Die Götter Griechenlands, Goethe, Die Diana der Epheser and Die Braut von Corinth. After the glory of Greece had departed, a mariner, voyaging along her coast by night, heard from the woods the cry: "Great Pan is dead!" But Pan was not dead; he had only fallen asleep. He awoke again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance; he was acknowledged and worshipped as a living god in the Germany of Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel.
The new German spirit was even more pantheistic than the antique spirit. When the ancient Greek stood by some beautiful waterfall, like that of Tibur near Rome, he endowed what he saw with personality. His eye traced the contours of beautiful naked women, the nymphs of the place, in the falling waters of the cascade; the wreathing spray was their waving hair; he heard their merry splashing and laughter in the rush of the stream and the dashing of the foam against the rocks. In other words, impersonal nature became personal to the antique mind. The poet of old did not understand nature; his own personality stood in the way; he saw it reflected everywhere, saw persons wherever he looked.
Precisely the opposite is the case with a great modern poet like Goethe or Tieck, whose whole emotional life is pantheistic. He, as it were, strips himself of his personality in order to understand nature. When he in his turn stands by the waterfall, he bursts the narrow bonds of self. He feels himself glide and fall and spin round with the whirling waters. His whole being streams out of the narrow confines of the Ego and flows away with the stream he is gazing on. His elastic consciousness widens, he absorbs unconscious nature into his being; he forgets himself in what he sees, as those who listen to a symphony are lost in what they hear. It is the same with everything. As his being flows with the waves, so it flies and moans with the winds, sails with the moon through the heavens, feels itself one with the formless universal life.
This was the pantheism which Goethe indicated in the biting epigram:—
"Was soll mir euer Hohn
Ueber das All und Eine?
Der Professor ist eine Person,
Gott ist keine."
This was the pantheism to which he gave expression in Faust, and which lies so deeply rooted in the German nature that even the Romantic school, with its antagonism to the revival of the antique and its secret leaning to Catholicism, is as pantheistic as Hölderlin and Goethe. The worship of the universe is the unchecked undercurrent which forces its way through all the embankments and between all the stones with which an attempt is made to stay it.
Mme. de Staël did not perceive this. Her German acquaintances drew her with them into the movement that was going on upon the surface, and she saw and felt nothing else. This surface movement was the Romantic reaction.
The violent attempt to be that which was really unnatural in the modern German, namely antique and classical, produced a violent counter-movement. Goethe's and Schiller's ever more determined and strict adherence to the antique ideal in art led them at last, in their attachment to severity and regularity of style, to take a step in the direction of that school against which they had been the first to rebel, namely French classical tragedy. Goethe translated Voltaire's Mahomet, and Schiller, Racine's Phèdre; and thus, through the action of these two greatest of German poets, the French and the German conception of the classical entered into league with one another. But this alliance, as was inevitable, gave the signal for revolt. The antique was so severe; men longed for colour and variety. It was so plastic; they longed for something fervent and musical. The antique was so Greek, so cold, so foreign; who had the patience to read Goethe's Achilleïs, or Schiller's Die Braut von Messina, with its solemn antique chorus? Had they not a past of their own? They longed for something national, something German. The antique was so aristocratic; enthusiasm for the classical had actually led to the revival of the old court poetry of the period of Louis XIV. But surely art should be for all classes, should unite high and low? Men wanted something simple, something popular.