The madness reached its climax when, within this new inmost play, there appears yet another play. It is confusion worse confounded. "Nay, this is too much," cries Scävola. "Just think of it, good people all! Here we sit as an audience and watch a play; in that play sits another audience watching a third play, and for the actors in that third play yet another play is being acted." And he goes on to explain, like a true Romanticist: "One often has dreams like this, and they are terrible; and thoughts, too, sometimes spin themselves in this fashion ever farther and farther into the heart of things. And both the one and the other are enough to drive a man crazy."
But the music between the acts contains the key to the whole work. The lively Allegro says: "Do ye indeed know what ye desire, ye who seek for coherence in all things? When the golden wine gleams in the glass and ye are animated by its good spirit, when ye feel doubly full of life and soul, and all the floodgates of your being are opened, what do ye think of then? Can ye order and regulate then? Ye enjoy yourselves and the harmonious confusion." And the Rondo says: "Whenever the philosopher is surprised by a thing, and cannot understand it, he exclaims: 'There is no reason in it.' Nay, when reason penetrates to the heart of itself, when it has investigated its own inmost being and carefully observed itself, it says: 'In this, too, there is no reason.' ... But the man who with reason despises reason, is a reasonable man. Much poetry is prose gone mad, much prose is only crippled poetry; that which lies between poetry and prose is not the best either. O music! whither tend thy steps? Neither is there any reason in thee."
In his critical writings Tieck himself gives us the clue to his procedure by averring that the aim of Romantic comedy is to lull the spectator into a dreamy mood. "In the midst of a dream," he says, "the soul often does not believe firmly in its visions; but if the dreamer sleeps on, the endless succession of new magic appearances restores the illusion, keeps him in a charmed world, makes him lose the standard of reality, delivers him up at last completely to the dominion of the incomprehensible."
Music is the formless deep to which the wearied imagination of the Romanticist returns after contemplating itself reflected ad infinitum in its mirror chamber. And the work of art may be likened to one of those carved ivory balls which enclose a whole set of ivory balls, one within the other.
This style of drama was amusingly parodied by J. L. Heiberg in his witty satirical play, Julespög og Nytaarslöjer ("Christmas Fun and New Year's Drollery"). There is less freedom and originality in Hoffmann's imitation, Prinzessin Blandina, in which, in scenes laid behind the scenes, the Stage Manager and the Director discuss the play. The Stage Manager says: "Machinist, give the signal for night." Director: "Why, you are surely not going to have night already? It will disturb the illusion. It is hardly three minutes since Roderick breakfasted in the desert." Stage Manager: "It is the direction given in the book." Director: "Then it is the book that is crazy, and the play is written without the slightest understanding of dramatic art."
In a different department of literature, in the writings of our Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, we come upon the mirror chamber with its repeated reflections psychologically applied. As the German Romanticist ironically hovers above his own play, with its Chinese puzzle-box scenes and figures, so the Danish psychologist draws further and further away from his subject by putting one author, as it were, inside another. Listen to his explanation in the Afsluttende Efterskrift ("Concluding Postscript"): "My position is even a more external one than that of any author whose characters are imaginary, but who appears personally in his preface. A prompter, impersonal, or personal in the third degree, I have created authors whose prefaces, nay, whose very names are their own production. In the pseudonymous books there is not a word of my own; I judge them as an uninterested third party, have no knowledge of their meaning except that of the ordinary reader, and not the most remote private connection with them, as is indeed impossible in the case of a doubly reflected communication. A single word from me personally, in my own name, would be a piece of presumptuous self-forgetfulness, and would, from the dialectical point of view, destroy the pseudonymous character of the work. I am no more the publisher, Victor Eremita, than I am the Seducer or the Assessor in Enten-Eller; Eremita is the poetically real subjective thinker, whom we meet again in In Vino Veritas. In Frygt og Bæven ("Fear and Trembling") I am no more Johannes de Silentio than I am the Knight of Faith whom he depicts; and just as little am I the author of the preface to the book, it being a characteristic utterance of a poetically-real subjective thinker. In that tale of woe, Skyldig?—Ikke Skyldig? ("Guilty or not Guilty?"), I am no more the experimenter than I am the subject of the experiment, since the experimenter is a poetically-real subjective thinker, and the being he experiments on is his psychologically inevitable production. I am a negligeable quantity, i.e. it is immaterial what I am.... I have all along been sensible that my personality was an obstruction which the Pseudonymi must involuntarily and inevitably long to be rid of, or to have made as insignificant as possible, yet which they at the same time, regarding the matter from the ironical and reflective standpoint, must desire to retain as repellant opposition; for I stand to them in the ironically combined relation of secretary and dialectically reduplicated author of the author or authors."
However different the causes of the reduplication may be in this case, the phenomenon itself is of near kin to the foregoing one. To keep the general public at a distance, to avoid laying bare his heart, and, most important of all, to avoid the tiresome responsibility entailed by speaking in his own name, Kierkegaard places as many authors between himself and the public as possible. Even taking his reasons into consideration, I confess that to me the proceeding seems super-subtle, a sort of reminiscence of the Romantic irony. For although Kierkegaard, as regards his matter, is in many ways ahead of Romanticism, he is still connected with it by his style. It is natural enough that he cannot, or will not, bear the responsibility for what his imaginary characters, the Assessor and the Seducer, say; but it is pure imagination on his part to suppose himself capable of producing his authors at second hand, to suppose, for instance, that he has created the hero in the Engagement Story exactly as Frater Taciturnus would have created him. Several of his would-be authors, Constantin Constantius and Frater Taciturnus, for example, are scarcely to be distinguished from one another, and there is nothing peculiarly characteristic about their productions. The third part of Stadierne ("Stages on the Road of Life") was, as Kierkegaard's own memoranda show, originally intended to form part of Enten-Eller. When he remarks (in Afstuttende Efterskrift, p. 216) that the most attentive reader will hardly succeed in finding in that work, either in language or turn of thought, a single reminiscence of Enten-Eller, he betrays great capability of self-deception. Both works show in every line that they are written by the same author; in both we come upon the same thoughts, often expressed in almost the same words. The Assessor in Stadierne judges Aladdin exactly as he is judged by the Æsthete in Enten-Eller: "What makes Aladdin so great is the strength of his desire."
Along with all this duplication and reduplication we have in the case of the Romanticists the wildest caprices in the matter of the order of presentation. The Topsy-turvy World begins with the epilogue and ends with the prologue; by such pranks imagination proclaims its independence of all law. Frater Taciturnus records what happened to him last year along with what is happening to him this year; every day at noon he notes down what happened that day a year ago (What a memory!), and at midnight what has occurred during the day. Naturally, it is almost impossible to separate the two threads of event. In Hoffmann's Kater Murr, the cat writes its memoirs on sheets of paper which have its master's, Kapellmeister Kreisler's, memoranda on the other side. Both sides of the sheets are printed, the one following the other, so that we read two utterly unconnected manuscripts mixed up with each other, often with interruptions in the middle of sentences or words. Wilfulness, caprice, play with one's own production could scarcely be carried farther. Yet the dissolution of established form did go further, much further. The Romanticists did not rest content with having shattered the conventions of art; they proceeded to decompose the Human personality, and that in many different manners.
It was Novalis who led the way. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen the hero seems to have a foreknowledge of everything that happens to him. "Each new thing that he saw and heard seemed only to shove back bolts, to open secret doors in his soul." But the strangest impression of all is produced on him by his discovery of a mysterious book in the cave of the hermit Count of Hohenzollern, a book in which, although he is as yet unable to interpret it, he finds the enigma of his existence, an existence beginning before his birth and stretching into the future after his death. Novalis's romance being an allegory and myth, his design being to make a single individual represent the whole eternal story of the soul, he turns to his purpose one of the oldest hypotheses of humanity, the idea that the individual reappears generation after generation. Thus the past and the future take part in the present, in the shape of memory and prophetic intuition. He does not actually believe in the transmigration of souls, but to him, the Romanticist who lives in the contemplation of the eternal, time is of such subordinate significance that, just as he recognises no difference between a natural and a supernatural event, so he sees none between past, present, and future. In this way the individual existence is extended throughout an unlimited period of history.
In Danish literature we find this Romantic use of the idea of a previous existence in Heiberg's De Nygifte. The mother is telling her adopted son about the death of her real son:—