Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany

by Georg Brandes

First we have endless meditations and quantities of aphorisms on art and poetry, interspersed with feeble lyric poems, which are hardly distinguishable one from the other. Only one among the number, a longish poem on Arion, is at all remarkable. It indicates the spirit of the book. The three leaders of Romanticism, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis, all sang the praises of Arion, and somewhat later he was hymned in Danish by P. L. Möller. It was natural that the hearts of the Romanticists should be stirred by the legend of the poet-subduer of nature, who roused the enthusiasm of the very monsters of the sea, rode upon dolphins, was invulnerable, invincible, of immortal fame. He was their symbol, their hero. All their poetry is, in a certain sense, an attempt to expound the legend of Arion; and what else are all the echoes and imitations of their works, the books which glorify poets, artists, actors, troubadours, heroic and irresistible tenors? The figure of Narcissus would be the fitting frontispiece for all these innumerable volumes.

As a matter of fact the main ingredients of Sternbald are trite refutations of the trite objection to art, that it is useless, trivial reasons for art being national ("since we are not Italians, and an Italian can never feel as a German does"), and hymns in praise of Albert Dürer. It is their admiration for Dürer that first brings the two lovers together, just as Werther and Lotte were first united by their common enthusiasm for Klopstock. The same ideas found expression in Danish in Sibbern's Gabrielis and Oehlenschläger's Correggio. Parts of the plot of Correggio are anticipated; we have, for instance, the artist painting his own wife as the Madonna, and his grief at having to part with his work. A long word-symphony in honour of Strasburg Cathedral is followed by bitter thrusts at the "uncouth masses of stone in Milan and Pisa, and that disjointed building, the Cathedral of Lucca." Then we have admiration and praise of Till Eulenspiegel and Hans Wurst (these gentlemen being supposed to represent fancy and irony), and great enthusiasm for Dürer's stag with the cross between its antlers, and for the "simple-hearted, pious, and touching" manner in which the knight in front of it bends his knees. The picture in question is undoubtedly a beautiful, simple-minded production, but we cannot help smiling at the serious attempt made to prove that of all the ways in which the legs of a kneeling man can be bent, this is by far the most Christian.

Again and again the idea recurs that all true art must be allegorical, that is to say, marrowless and bloodless. Most of the poems are allegories. The principal one is the long allegory of Phantasus, wretched verse without one spark of imagination:

"Der launige Phantasus,
Ein wunderlicher Alter,
Folgt stets seiner närrischen Laune.
Sie haben ihn jetzt festgebunden,
Dass er nur seine Possen lässt,
Vernunft im Denken nicht stört,
Den armen Menschen nicht irrt," &c., &c.[2]

Reminiscences of this satire upon the attacks made on imagination by the prosaic are to be found here and there in Andersen's Fairy Tales. The poem, which is recited in the moonlight, indicates as an ideal subject for the painter a pilgrim in the moonlight, the emblem of humanity: "For what are we but wandering, erring pilgrims? Can aught but the light from above illumine our path?" There are distinct traces of this same tendency in our own poet, Hauch, with his perpetual pointing "upwards" and his partiality for pilgrims and hermits.

But in Romanticism at this stage, in spite of all its bloodless spirituality, sensuality still wells up strong and unrestrained. Franz Sternbald, the trained artist, maintains the superiority of Titian and Correggio to all other painters. Of Correggio, whom he especially favours, he says: "Who would dare to vie with him, at least in the representation of voluptuous love? To no other human spirit has there been granted such a revelation of the glories of the realm of the senses."

This standpoint was, as every one knows, soon relinquished, consistency leading to the adoption of another. The brothers Sulpice and Melchior Boisserée of Cologne were in Paris in 1802, when Friedrich Schlegel was studying there, and they had private lectures from him. The old German pictures in the Louvre reminded the young men of old paintings in their native town, which the prevailing academic taste had consigned to oblivion. In consequence of Napoleon's systematic pillage of pictures, there was a good collection of German ones in Paris, which made the study of them an easy matter.

The best idea of what the German medieval artists had produced was to be obtained from the quantities of paintings and wood and stone carving which came into the market after the suppression of monasteries and charitable foundations. At that time men had lost all appreciation for monuments of art; with the utmost indifference they saw churches turned into quarries, and the most precious artistic treasures dispersed to the four winds. Masterpieces were sold for a trifle, and the purchasers of the supposed old rubbish were actually pitied. Altar-pieces were made into window-shutters, dovecots, tables, and roofing; the caretakers in the monasteries often used old paintings on wood as fuel, for as a rule even the best were unrecognisable, from taper-smoke, dust, and dirt.[3]

After Friedrich Schlegel, in his periodical, Europa, had drawn attention to the wealth of old German paintings, the brothers Boisserée began to collect the scattered treasures, travelling up and down the Rhine and throughout the Netherlands to track out the long-despised works. By 1805 a collection of Flemish and German masters had been made, which exercised great influence on the history of art.

The revival of enthusiasm for early German art led to predilection for the pre-Raphaelite Italian painters. All honour to the pre-Raphaelites! From Fiesole and Giotto to Masaccio, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Luca Signorelli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio, all Europe pays them the homage that is their due. But Friedrich Schlegel, in his article in Europa on Raphael, exalts the pre-Raphaelite at the expense of the succeeding period. He says: "With this newer school, typified by such names as Raphael, Correggio, Giulio Romano, and Michael Angelo, begins the decay of art." And this is considered to be so patent a fact that Schlegel does not think it necessary to offer any justification of his assertion; nay, two pages later he actually confesses that he has not seen any of Michael Angelo's works. Here we have the perfection of Romantic insolence. This paragon of an art critic, who, in order the better to exalt the old monkish pictures, dates the decay of art from Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michael Angelo, admits without the slightest feeling of shame that he has not seen so much as one of the works of the greatest of these men. Despising such a paltry thing as knowledge, he judges him with his inner consciousness.