Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

These classical efforts were, in the last place, so very dull. Lessing's genial rational religion had, under the treatment of Nicolai the bookseller, turned into the same sort of insipid rationalism which was in favour in Denmark at the close of the century. Goethe's pantheism could not warm the hearts of the masses. Schiller's Die Sendung Moses could not but be an offence to every believer. And after all, the word "poetic" did not necessarily mean "dull." Men wanted to be roused, to be intoxicated, to be inspired; they wanted once again to believe like children, to feel the enthusiasm of the knight, the rapture of the monk, the frenzy of the poet, to dream melodious dreams, to bathe in moonlight and hold mystic communion with the spirits of the Milky Way; they wanted to hear the grass grow and to understand what the birds sang, to penetrate into the depths of the moonlit night, and into the loneliness of the forest.

It was something simple that was wanted. Weary of ancient culture, men took refuge in the strange, rich, long-neglected world of the Middle Ages. A thirst for the fantastic and marvellous took possession of their souls, and fairy-tale and myth became the fashion. All the old, popular fairy-tales and legends were collected, and were re-written and imitated, often as excellently as by Tieck in his Fair Eckbert and Story of the Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence, but also often with a childish magnification of the poetical value of superstitions which in reality possess only scientific value as distorted remains of ancient myths. Novalis, in a spirited poem, prophesied that the time would come when man would no longer look to science to solve the riddles of life, but would find the explanation of all in fairy tale and poetry; and when that time came, when the mystic word was spoken, all perversity and foolishness and wrong would vanish. All foolishness and wrong, all that the French Revolution in its foolhardiness had sought to put an end to by wild destruction and bloody wars, was to vanish as in a dream or a fairy-tale, at the sound of a spoken word, when men had become children again! They were to be regenerated by turning from ideas that were redolent of powder and blood to ideas redolent of the nursery.

It was something popular that was wanted. The seed was sown of the same popular movement which was started in Denmark by Grundtvig, after he, like so many others, had been powerfully impressed by the youthful ardour with which the doctrines of the new Romantic School were proclaimed by Steffens and received by the rising generation, in those days when there was still youth in Denmark. Men rightly regretted the great gulf which had been fixed between the educated and the uneducated by the extremely rapid advance of the vanguard and the exclusion of the poorer classes from culture, and rightly appealed to the man of science and the artist to clothe their thoughts and feelings in the simplest and most easily comprehensible form. But the movement went astray, by making the insane attempt to recall the advanced guard for the sake of the laggards; they would hardly have minded sabring the foremost for the sake of keeping the army together.

With the renunciation of the mainspring of action—belief in progress—the fatalistic tragedy, with its follies and superstitions, came into vogue. In Werner's tragedy, The Twenty-Fourth of February, whatever happens on that particular day reminds the heroine of a terrible crime and curse. This is carried so far that when a hen is killed that day, she cries: "It seemed to scream a curse at me; it reminded me of my father with the death-rattle in his throat." Yet this play is praised by that usually discerning critic, the authoress of De l'Allemagne! The affectedly childlike tone of the satirical dramas gave them the character of puppet plays; naïveté became more and more the fashion; in their terror of the salons of the eighteenth century men took refuge in the nursery.

The leaders of the school were Protestants by birth, but their bias towards the pious simplicity of the Middle Ages of necessity brought about a movement in the direction of Catholicism.

In that essay on the difference between neo-classical and popular art by which Mme. de Staël showed herself influenced both in Corinne and De l'Allemagne, Friedrich Schlegel, after demonstrating that it is impossible for genius to preserve its freshness, its impetuosity, when it chooses subjects the treatment of which demands erudition and exercise of the memory, observes: "It is not so with the subjects which belong to our own religion. From them artists receive inspiration; they feel what they paint; they paint what they have seen; life itself is their model when they represent life. But when they attempt to return to the antique, they must seek what they are to reproduce, not in the life they see around them, but in books and pictures."

The false implication lies in the words "our own religion." Which was "our own religion"? Protestantism had developed into an idealistic philosophy that had long made common cause with the Revolution. In the year 1795, two young men, whose names were to attain world-wide celebrity, had gone out to a lonely field and, in their naïve enthusiasm for the Revolution, planted a Tree of Liberty. These two were Schelling and Hegel.

There was, then, a return to Catholicism. But the spirit of Italian Catholicism was still too classic, too antique. A huge, light church like St. Peter's at Rome was not sufficiently mysterious; it was, as Lamartine observed, fitted, when all dogmatic religion should have disappeared from Europe, to become the temple of humanity. In Italy it was with the pre-Raphaelite painters alone that the Romanticists felt themselves akin; in Spain they found a kindred spirit in Calderon, whose mysticism they soon set high above their earlier favourite, Shakespeare's, realism and liberal-mindedness. Even Heiberg ranks Calderon above Shakespeare. There is a regular cult of the Gothic in art. Men turn with renewed admiration to the great monuments of their native land, to that style begotten of the deep feeling and the superstitious terrors of northern barbarians—Frenchmen, however. Albert Dürer, genuinely German, popular, simple-minded, but above all (with his stags bearing crosses between their antlers, and all the rest of his symbolical fancies) mystic, was canonised by the German Romanticists; even with us, Oehlenschläger and his sister persisted in seeing more in Dürer than other people could see. The infection was so universal that even the poet of the Gulnares, Alis, and Gulhyndis imagined himself a devotee of mysticism. Men's hearts were certainly not agitated by the religious agonies and hopes of the old pious times; but the strangeness of the Gothic style, and the extravagance which betrays itself in its artistic symbolism, harmonised with the unnaturalness and restlessness of their morbid modern imaginations. It may be related, as not without significance, that when Oehlenschläger first came into the presence of the leaders of the Romantic School, in whom he had naïvely expected to find a set of eager, emaciated ascetics, he was somewhat taken aback by the sight of Friedrich Schlegel's "satirical fat face shining cheerfully at him."

It was, however, in the course of the ardent struggle against the neo-classical tendency that Friedrich Schlegel rendered his one true, and also really great, service to science: he introduced the study of Sanscrit, and thereby opened up to Europeans an entirely new intellectual domain. He laid the foundation, first of one new linguistic science, the Indo-Oriental, which henceforth developed alongside of the Greco-Roman, and then of a second, namely, comparative philology.

For the moment it was Hindu indolence, the contemplative life, the plant life, that was the ideal. It is this ideal which is extolled in Schlegel's Lucinde and which somewhat later is appropriated by the French Romanticists, re-appearing with variations in Théophile Gautier's Fortunio. We trace it in Oehlenschläger's inspired idler, Aladdin, and it is the ideal always present to the mind of the æsthete in Enten-Eller, who, like Kierkegaard himself, was brought up on the German Romanticists. Note his words: "I divide my time thus: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. When I sleep I never dream, for to sleep is the highest achievement of genius."