Enthusiasm for musical intensity and fervour having thus found its way into literature, Tieck soon arrives at the point of regarding emotional, melodious sound as the only true, the only pure poetry. His Love Story of Fair Magelone is a good example of this. Even in the prose portions of the tale everything rings and resounds—the hero's emotions and the landscape which serves as a background for them. The Count hears none of the sounds around him; for "the music within him drowned the rustling of the trees and the splashing of the fountains." But this inward music in its turn is drowned by the sweet strains of real instruments. "The music flowed like a murmuring brook, and he saw the charm of the Princess come floating upon the silver stream, saw its waves kiss the hem of her garment.... Music was now the only movement, the only life in nature." Then the music dies away. "Like a stream of blue light" it disappears into the void; and forthwith the knight himself begins to sing.
In the "Garden of Poesy," of which we read in Zerbino, roses and tulips, birds and the azure of the skies, fountains and storms, streams and spirits, all sing. We read in Bluebeard that "the flowers kissed each other melodiously." In this literature everything has its music—the moonlight, scents, painting; and then on the other hand we read of the beams, the fragrance, and the shapes of music: "They sang with melodious throats, keeping time with the music of the moonbeams." The Romanticists had turned their backs upon material reality. Definite, corporeal form, nay, even a distinct representation of mental conditions was impossible to them. This was not what they aimed at. In their eyes tangibility was coarse and vulgar. Every distinct feature melts away in a sort of dissolving view. They are afraid of losing in profundity and infinity what they might possibly gain in restraint and plastic power.
All the masters of the school agree on this point. First and foremost we have Novalis. His Hymns to Night, and indeed all his lyrics, are night and twilight poetry, in the dusk of which no distinct outlines are possible. His psychological aim was, as he himself says, to fathom the nameless, unconscious powers of the soul. Therefore his æsthetic theory is, that language ought to become musical, to become song again; and he also maintains that in a poetical work there need be no unity except that of spirit, that unity of idea or action is unnecessary. "One can imagine," he says, "tales without more coherence than the different stages of a dream, poems which are melodious and full of beautiful words, but destitute of meaning or connection; at most, comprehensible stanzas here and there, like fragments of perfectly unrelated things. This true poetry can of course only have a general allegorical significance and an indirect effect, like music."
How entirely this harmonises with the theories of Friedrich Schlegel! Schlegel, whose nature was a series of moods, who had not strength of will to carry out any plan, whose own career resembles an arabesque beginning with a thyrsus and ending with a cross composed of a knife and fork, says: "The arabesque, the simple musical swaying of the line itself, is the oldest, the original form in which human imagination takes shape. Its contours are no more definite than those of the clouds in the evening sky."
The saying is apt when applied, not to imagination in general, but to the imagination of the Romanticists. Tieck's lyrics resemble Goethe's as the clouds on the horizon resemble snow-clad mountains. Our attitude to the lyric poetry of the Romanticists resembles that of Polonius to the cloud: "Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?—By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.—Methinks it is like a weasel.—It is backed like a weasel.—Or like a whale?—Very like a whale." In Novalis, in the poems at any rate, we have still tangible, distinct artistic form, in Tieck's writings everything floats in a sort of mist or vapour of form supposed to correspond to the mysterious, expectant fervour of the theme. The work of art is stayed and fixed in its first, embryonic, vapour-ball stage. This elementary product of the imagination is designated primitive poetry. In order to reduce clearly defined poetic art once more to primeval poetry, all definite forms must be dissolved and kneaded together. Tieck preferred those works of the great poets which they wrote before their style was developed, or which they chose to leave tolerably formless (he confesses that not one of Shakespeare's plays produced such an impression on him as Pericles, only part of which is genuine), and he himself, following in the track of Pericles, produced such works as Genoveva and Octavian, in which the epic, lyric, and dramatic styles are all minced up together.
This medley of styles was adopted in Denmark. It was well suited to the subject of Oehlenschläger's St. Hans Aßen Spil and fairly so to that of his Aladdin; sometimes it produced very unsuccessful results, as in the case of Hauch's Hamadryaden.
So great is Tieck's formlessness, so impossible is it to him (in his Romantic period) to condense, that he is inefficient even in pure lyric poetry. He may talk much of music and of the music of words, but he is wanting in the gift of rhythm; he does not seem to have had a correct ear. A. W. Schlegel was infinitely Tieck's superior in this respect, as is proved by his admirable translations of the songs in As You Like It. But of Tieck and most of the Romanticists it is true that, in spite of all their talk of melodious style, they themselves were only melodious when they reverted to those southern measures, to the exact rules of which they were obliged to conform. They filled in the framework of sonnet and canzonet as ladies fill in with embroidery an outline designed upon canvas, crowding in rhymes in such superabundance that the meaning was often swamped by them. Tieck writes in Magelone:—
"Errungen,
Bezwungen
Von Lieb ist das Glück,
Verschwunden
Die Stunden,
Sie fliehen zurück;
Und selige Lust
Sie stillet,
Erfüllet
Die trunkene, wonneklopfende Brust."
In Baggesen's Faust we find the following rather overdone parody of this Romantic jingle:—
"Mit Ahnsinn Wahnsinn, lächelndweinend,
Einend—
Mit Schiefe, Tiefe, dunkelmeinend,
Scheinend—
Der Enge Läng' entflammt in weiten Breiten,
Muss licht der Dichter durch die Zeiten gleiten."