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

by Georg Brandes

When, in 1806, Napoleon began the war with Prussia, he issued an order that every Frenchman serving in the enemy's ranks should, when taken prisoner, be tried by court-martial and shot within twenty-four hours. Hence Chamisso, who had in vain demanded to be allowed to resign his commission, was exposed to the chance of a disgraceful death.

He visited France in the following year, but in Paris there was nothing to attract him. "Wherever I am," he complains, "I am countryless. Land and people are foreign to me; hence I am perpetually longing." He was one of the bravest and most capable of German officers (his behaviour on the occasion of the surrender of Hameln proves this), but, as a Frenchman born and an admirer of Napoleon, he would have preferred not to have taken part in the war against France and the Emperor.

After his resignation was actually accepted, he spent some time at the court of Madame de Staël, and made the acquaintance of her international circle of friends. The year 1813, the year of Prussia's declaration of war against France, was the most trying of all for the unfortunate young Franco-German. His heart was divided; he desired the fall of Napoleon because he hated despotism, but at the same time he felt every humiliation which befell the French troops during their retreat from Russia, and every insulting word spoken of the Emperor, as if the misfortune had happened, the insult been offered, to himself. And with this very natural feeling his German associates showed no forbearance. He often cried despairingly: "No, the times have no sword for me." "Action and inaction," he writes in May 1813, "are equally painful to me."

This was the mood which produced his most notable work, Peter Schlemihl. The great historical events which harrowed his feelings made him intellectually productive; the summer of 1813 was a turning-point in his life. "I had no longer a country," he says, "or as yet no country." And so the man without a country writes the tale of the man without a shadow. In spite of its intangibility, a man's shadow is, like his country, like his home, one of his natural possessions, a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which is, as it were, part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so entirely natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter of course. Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great sorrow of his life, in his daringly imagined fable. And strangely enough, he not only figuratively gave in it the essence of all his past experiences, but also prophetically imaged his future, his voyage round the world and his scientific labours. After Schlemihl has escaped from the temptations of the devil, he accidentally comes into possession of the seven-leagued boots, which take him to every country in the world, and enable him to pursue his favourite study to the greatest advantage. Schlemihl himself says: "My future suddenly showed itself clearly to the eyes of my soul. Banished from human society by the misdemeanours of my youth, I was thrown into the arms of Nature, whom I had always loved. The earth was given to me as a rich garden, study as the directing influence and strength of my life, knowledge as its aim."

The originality of its plot and the remarkable clearness of its style (this last a characteristic of all Chamisso's writing, and evidently his intellectual inheritance as a Frenchman) made Peter Schlemihl an extraordinary success. It was translated into nearly every language. Ten years after its publication a new kind of lamp, which cast no shadow, was named the Schlemihl lamp.

Chamisso's success naturally roused Hoffmann to emulation. In the clever little Story of the Lost Reflection, the hero leaves his reflection in Italy with the entrancing Giulietta, who has bewitched him, and returns home to his wife without it. His little son, discovering suddenly one day that his father has no reflection, drops the mirror he is holding, and runs weeping from the room. The mother comes in with astonishment and fright written on every feature. "What is this Rasmus has been telling me about you?" she asks. "That I have no reflection, I suppose, my dear," answers Spikher with a forced laugh, and proceeds to try to prove that it is foolish to believe that a man can lose his reflection, but that even if the thing be possible, it is a matter of no importance, seeing that a reflection is simply an illusion. Self-contemplation only leads to vanity, and, moreover, such an image splits up one's personality into truth and imagination.

Here we have the mirror chamber developed to such a point that the reflections move about independently, instead of following their originals. It is very amusing, very original and fantastic, and, as one is at liberty to understand by the reflection whatever one chooses, it may even be said to be very profound. I express no opinion, but simply draw attention to fact.

We have seen that the Romanticist is instinctively, inevitably, the enemy of clearly defined form in art. We have seen Hoffmann mixing up the different parts of his book to the extent of having part of one story on the front, part of quite a different one on the back of the same leaf; have seen Tieck composing dramas like so many puzzle balls one within the other, to prevent the reader taking them too seriously, and Kierkegaard fitting one author inside another in the Chinese box fashion, on the strength of the theory that truth can only be imparted indirectly, a theory which he ended by treating with scorn—we have seen, in a word, that the artistic standpoint of Romanticism is the exact opposite of the artistic standpoint of the ancients. And when, with their leaning to the supernatural, the Romanticists extend the personality of the individual throughout several successive generations, representing him as living before his birth and after his death, or represent him as a day-dreamer, half visionary and half madman, or humorously endow him with other men's attributes and despoil him of his own, fantastically filching now a shadow, now a reflection, they show by all this fantastic duplication and imagination that their psychological standpoint too, is an absolutely different one; for in the days of old both the work of art and the personality were whole, were of one piece. The movement is a perfectly consistent one, regarded as the antipodes of classicism, in short, as Romanticism.

But, granted that man is of necessity, by his very nature, a divided, complex being, he is nevertheless, as the healthy, vigorous personality, one. Aim, will, resolve, make him a complete unit. If, as a natural product, the human being is only a group held more or less firmly together by association of ideas, as a mind he is a complete whole; in his will all the elements of the mind are united. Romanticism only understood and depicted human nature with genius from the natural, from the night side. It made no closer approach in this than in any other of its endeavours to intellectual collectedness, unity, and liberty.

[1] "The morning he suffered his terrible sentence, ere yet it was day, the warder entered and said: 'Come! the hour is about to strike.' Then he fell on my breast for the last time, crying: 'Say a word, a word of power, to strengthen me for the last steps I am to take on earth!' And I said ... But, Fredrik, you frighten me. What is it? Why do you rise and gaze on me thus, pale as a corpse? Fredrik—O mother! mother! stop! You said: 'When you stand before your Creator, say: My God and my Brother, forgive me for the sake of Thy passion, of my repentance, and of my mother!' Gertrud—Oh, tell how you know this? Fredrik—Because it was to me you spoke; not till this moment have I understood myself; I am your own son, now living life over again."