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

by Georg Brandes

To prove the truth of this assertion, one has only to read such a passage in the biography of Tieck as the following account of his stay in Halle in 1792: "How entirely different was the nature which met his eyes here in the green valley of the Saale, how much richer and more friendly than the flat heaths surrounding Berlin! The feeling of infinite longing seized him with redoubled force, and filled his heart with almost painful excitement as he wandered through the woods in the springtime. Once more he became intoxicated with nature; a mysterious power seemed to drive him onwards. His favourite resting-place was the Hölty bench near Giebichenstein, from which he overlooked the river and the valley. How often did he watch the sun sink beneath the clouds and the moon mirror herself with a thousand golden beams in the rippling water, or gleam dreamily through the branches! Here he lay many a summer night, drinking in nature in ample draughts."

Is not this the longing for nature of the man who is an exile from it, the view of nature which has the city pavement as its background?

In the description given of the evening after a tiring walk taken by Tieck and Wackenroder in the Fichtelgebirge, Tieck's conception of nature is still more distinctly associated with his personal impressions: "Wackenroder, unaccustomed to such fatigue, flung himself at once upon the bed, but Tieck was too excited. He could not sleep after all the experiences of that day. The spirits of nature awoke. He opened the window. It was the mildest, most magnificent summer night. The moon shed her soft, clear beams upon him. There it was before his eyes, the moonlit, witching night, nature with her ancient, yet ever new marvels and magic! His heart once again swelled high. To what far, unknown goal was he being drawn with irresistible force? Softly and soothingly the clear tones of a horn came floating through the night. A feeling of sadness stole over him, and yet he was intensely happy."[6]

Observe that not even the horn is wanting. What is wanting, what Tieck is destitute of, is any definite aim. We have the same thing in Sternbald, where the wandering artist, led only by his longings and his prophetic enthusiasm, is always, as he himself confesses, forgetting his real aim. "It is not possible," says one of the characters in the book, "to forget one's aim, for this reason, that the sensible man arranges matters so that he has no aim." No one can fail to see the close connection between this particular species of feeling for nature and Romantic arbitrariness, nor how they mutually develop each other.

Let us see the kind of landscapes which Franz Sternbald understands and paints, and how he understands and paints them.

In one part of the book we read: "This was the landscape which Franz intended to paint; but the real scene seemed very prosaic to him, compared with its reflection in the water." Clear outlines, definite forms, are dry prose; but the reflection in the water, the picture as it were to its second power, is Romantic refinement, duplication, glorification. In another part Franz says: "I should choose to paint lonely, terrible scenes—ruinous, crumbling bridges spanning the space between two precipitous rocks, with a foaming torrent raging in the abyss below; strayed travellers whose cloaks flap in the wet wind; horrid brigands rushing from their caves, stopping and plundering carriages, and fighting with travellers." Real stage scenery this, with melodrama into the bargain!

And in what spirit is nature apprehended? "Sometimes," says Franz, "my imagination sets to work and will not rest until it has thought out something quite unheard of. It would have me paint strange objects, of complicated and almost incomprehensible construction—figures composed of parts of all kinds of animals, their lower extremities being plants; insects and reptiles with a strange humanness about them, expressing human moods and passions in a wonderful and horrible manner."

What a picture! what a jumble of monstrosities! Can you not hear Hoffmann fast approaching with his caravan of monsters? The elephant stands on his head, and has a trunk which ends in a garfish; the cat writes its memoirs; the door-knocker is really an old market-woman, &c., &c. Are we not reminded here again, as in Der Freischütz, of the temptations of St. Anthony, as painted by Teniers, or, better still, by Höllen-Breughel, with a regular witches' Sabbath. To the genuine Romanticist, nature, with all her myriads of living forms and beings, seems a great toy-cupboard, and all the toys babble and chatter like those in Andersen's fairy tale.

Read this description of a romantic landscape taken from Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen: "From a height they looked down upon a romantic country, strewn with towns and castles, with temples and tombs, a country which united the gentle charms of inhabited plains with the terrible charms of deserts and precipitous mountains. The most beautiful colours were happily blended. Mountain peaks gleamed like fireworks in their coverings of ice and snow. The smiling plain was clothed in the freshest of green. The distance decked itself in every shade of blue, and the deep blue of the sea threw into relief the innumerable bright pennons waving from the masts of numerous fleets. In the background we could see a shipwreck, in the foreground a merry country feast; far off the terribly beautiful eruption of a volcano and the desolation wrought by an earthquake, and near at hand a pair of lovers exchanging the sweetest caresses under sheltering trees. On one side of this scene a frightful battle was raging, and at no great distance from the battle was to be seen a theatre with a ludicrous play going on. Upon the other side, in the foreground, the corpse of a young girl lay upon a bier, with an inconsolable lover and weeping parents kneeling by its side; in the background sat a sweet mother with her child at her breast, angels nestling at her feet, and peeping through the branches above her head."

What a pot-pourri! And over it all is shed the indispensable pale, yellow light of that friend and well-wisher, protector and betrayer of lovers, that supreme comforter and divinity of the Romanticists—the man in the moon. He is their salvation. His round face and his profile have exactly the degree of distinctness permissible or possible in a Romantic countenance. All the knights of Romanticism wear his yellow livery. And a truer knight of the moon than Franz Sternbald is not to be found.