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

by Georg Brandes

"I would," he says, "that I could fill the whole world with my song of love, that I could move the moonlight and the rosy dawn, so that they should echo my grief and happiness, until trees, branches, leaves, and grass all took up the melody, repeating it as with millions of tongues." Hereupon he sings a "moonlight song":

"Hinter'm Wasser wie flimmernde Flammen,
Berggipfel oben mit Gold beschienen,
Neigen rauschend und ernst die grünen
Gebüsche die blinkenden Häupter zusammen.
Welle, rollst du herauf den Schein,
Des Mondes rund freundlich Angesicht?
Es merkt's und freundlich bewegt sich der Hain,
Streckt die Zweig' entgegen dem Zauberlicht.
Fangen die Geister an auf den Fluthen zu springen,
Thun sich die Nachtblumen auf mit Klingen,
Wacht die Nachtigall im dicksten Baum,
Verkündigt dichterisch ihren Traum.
Wie helle, blendende Strahlen die Töne nieder fliessen,
Am Bergeshang den Wiederhall zu grüssen."[7]

Here we have it all! The glittering flames of the moon, bushes with twinkling heads, rolling billows bearing onwards the face of the full moon, spirits dancing upon waves, night as described by Novalis, night flowers, and a nightingale whose song flows like clear, dazzling moonbeams.

And exactly the same thing recurs again and again. Franz has a dream: "Unperceived, he painted the hermit and his devotion, the forest and its moonlight; he even succeeded, he himself knew not how, in getting the nightingale's song into his picture." Oh, that musical pictorial art! Was not Goethe right in saying that there is more music than painting in the book?

It is very significant that the man who revelled thus in the fantastic suggestions of a district where nature was poor and sterile, should have altogether failed to appreciate the richness and luxuriance, the abundance of healthy sap and vigour, which distinguish the south of England. Shakespeare has had few such fervent admirers as Tieck; and Tieck naturally had the desire to see with his own eyes the natural surroundings amidst which his great teacher and master had spent his life, and from which he had derived his earliest impressions. He expected much. But, oh! what a disappointment! That mind which fancied itself akin to Shakespeare's found nothing congenial in the scenery round Shakespeare's home. The chief characteristic of these counties is an almost incredible luxuriance and vigour of growth. But this wealth of vegetation is unpoetical to the Romanticist, because it is useful, because it has a purpose. Only the blossom which bears no fruit is romantic. We understand his disappointment. Nowhere else does one see such mighty, spreading oaks, nowhere such high and succulent grass. As far as the eye can reach, the green carpet spreads over the undulating fields and the rich meadows, where magnificent cattle graze and ruminate. Quantities of white, yellow, and blue meadow and field flowers break the monotony of colour, and breathe a perfume which the moisture of the air keeps so fresh that it never palls. This vegetation is above all else fresh, not, like that of the south, striking in its contours. The watery, juicy plant does not live long; life streams through it and is gone. The moist air envelops trees and plants in a sort of luminous vapour which catches and tempers the sunbeams; and, as in Denmark, banks of clouds constantly traverse the pale blue sky. When this sky happens to be for a short time perfectly clear, and the sun reaches the earth without passing through mist, the rain and dewdrops sparkle on the green grass and upon the silken and velvet petals of the myriads of gay flowers more brilliantly than diamonds. What matter that the grass is destined to be eaten? Does not part of its beauty lie in its nutritious look? What matter that the fruitful fields are cultivated with the assistance of all the newest agricultural machinery, or that the cattle are tended with the most intelligent solicitude? Is not this the very reason why both animals and plants look so strong, so well nourished, and so nourishing? What we have here is certainly not the imposing beauty of the desert or the ocean, or of Swiss scenery. But has not this landscape a poetry of its own? Who can have spent an evening in Kew Gardens without mentally placing the elfin dance from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Merry Wives of Windsor in exactly this scenery, these beautiful parks, with their gigantic old oaks? It was in these surroundings that Shakespeare wrote them. We can divine with what eyes he looked upon the landscape. With what eyes does Tieck look upon it? "Having seen London," says Köpke, "he wished to make acquaintance with some other part of England. Where should he turn his steps, if not to Shakespeare's birthplace? On the way he visited Oxford. But neither was this scenery to his taste. The country they drove through was luxuriantly green, splendidly cultivated; but it was too well ordered, too artificial (No primitive poetry!); it had lost its originality. It lacked that simplicity, that holiness, as he called it, which touches the heart, and by which he had so often been moved in the most sterile parts of his native land. Here industry had destroyed the poetic aroma."

It is clear, then, that there must have been something in the scenery of his own country which appealed to Tieck's personal predispositions. The fantastic conception of nature would not have been carried to such an extreme in this particular country, if there had not been something fantastic in the scenery of the country. It is very evident that German scenery must have met the fantastic spectator half way.

In the first volume of this work, I attempted, by means of a description of Italian scenery, to show how unromantic even the most beautiful of it is. Nor, in spite of the Black Forest and the Blocksberg, can German scenery be called really fantastic; for, as Taine says, it is only the beauty of art which is fantastic; that of nature is more than fantastic; the fantastic does not exist except in our human brain. Still, nature does provide excuses for a certain amount of fantasy. It is especially to be born in mind that in characteristically German scenery the sea is absent, and with it the feeling of wideness and freeness which it alone gives. In river and mountain scenery there is never the wide, open horizon to which we Danes are accustomed.

But, not to lose myself in generalisations, let me give an idea of the scenery amidst which Tieck himself lived longest—that district in the neighbourhood of Dresden which goes by the name of Saxon Switzerland. I shall describe in a few words how it impresses me, and then proceed to show what impression it produces on a Romantic poet. This I can do reliably and exactly, for I have personally known several Romantic poets, and have recently travelled through the district in question in company with an old poet of Romantic tendencies.

We had spent some days in the clear mountain air, looking out over the high open country and rocky peaks of Bohemia, which resemble a sea, with sharply outlined mountains emerging like islands—an interminable stretch of fields and pine-clad rocks. We went through the Uttenwalder Grund up to the Bastei. The valley is shut in by high, fantastic sandstone rocks, piled up in layers, with pine trees clustering in every crevice. The upper part of the rock often projects threateningly over the lower, seeming as though about to fall. One sees many strange freaks of nature—gateways, even triple gateways. In climbing up to the Bastei, one has on the left that remarkable landscape with the steep rocks standing out like giant gravestones—tragic, awe-inspiring scenery, that would make a fitting background for the dance of the dead nuns in Robert le Diable. Standing on the Bastei, one looks over the great plain with its precipitous mountain islands (the fortress of Königstein is built upon one of these), straight, hard lines, absolutely unpicturesque. Kuhstall is an enormous dome of rock. The whole scenery has the appearance of being designed by man, of being a fantastic art production. The last time I saw it, in glorious sunlight, the view was marvellously imposing. Over the great pine-forest which clothed the lower heights, its tree-tops looking like felt or wool, lay a bluish green haze, which spread up the sides of the surrounding hills. The Bohemian villages lay in groups, shining like windows in the sun—in the distance were basaltic mountains, nearer at hand pyramidal, square, or obelisk-shaped rocks. Wherever a single deciduous tree stood among the pines, its yellow autumnal leaves shone amidst their dark surroundings like patches of gold. The only other yellow was that of the lichen upon some of the rocks. These rocks looked as though giants in the morning of time had pelted each other with them, as children pelt each other with stones, or had played at heaping them one on the top of another.

From the Wintersberg the hills look like the remains of a Cyclopean city. An enormous rock, steep and smooth as a wall, stands, decked with firs, in the centre of a wide landscape. Of all one sees, Prebischthor is perhaps what strikes one as being most beautiful. Here again the rocks have taken a fantastic shape, that of a gateway. A gigantic, beam-like rock has laid itself like a lintel across two rock towers. Sitting under it, one looks down upon two separate landscapes, one through the arch to the left, the other an open one upon the right. As I sat there in the evening, the first was hard, cold, austere; over the other the sun was setting, red and glowing. The one was, as it were, in a major, the other in a minor key; the one was like a face without eyes, the other glowed and beamed.