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

by Georg Brandes

In December 1798 he still feels, when he compares himself with his friend Just, that he is only the apostle of pure spirituality. He does not, like Just, rely "with childlike mind upon the unalterable words of a mysterious ancient document;" he will not be bound by the letter, and is inclined to find his own way to the primeval world; in the doctrines of Christianity he sees an emblematic pre-figurement of the coming universal religion. "You will not," he writes to Just, "fail to recognise in this conception of religion one of the finest elements in my composition—namely, fancy." In other words, he consciously admits fancy to be at the source of his religious development.

In the same year (1798) he sent some fragments to Wilhelm Schlegel for publication in the Athenæum, with the request that their author might be known as NOVALIS, "which is an old family name, and not altogether unsuitable."

Tieck met Novalis for the first time when he visited Jena in the summer of 1799. August Wilhelm Schlegel brought them together, and they were soon devoted friends. The three spent the first evening in earnest conversation, opening their hearts to each other At midnight they went out to enjoy the splendour of the summer night. "The full moon," says Köpke, "was shedding a magic glory upon the heights round Jena." Towards morning Tieck and Schlegel accompanied Novalis home. Tieck has commemorated this evening in Phantasus.

It was under Tieck's influence that Novalis wrote his principal work, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While he was still engaged upon it, his young life was put an end to by consumption. He died at the age of twenty-nine, only two years after the meeting with Tieck and A. W. Schlegel above described. This early death, a remarkable degree of originality, and great personal beauty have combined to shed a poetic halo round Novalis. The St. John of the new movement, he resembled the most spiritual of the apostles in outward appearance also. His forehead was almost transparent, and his brown eyes shone with remarkable brilliance. During the last three years of his life it could be read in his face that he was destined to an early death.

Novalis was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out. If one were asked to give a brief definition of the main idea of that great movement, one would say that it was the destruction of everything that was merely traditional, and the establishment of human existence upon a basis of pure reason, by means of a direct break with everything historic. The thinkers and heroes of the Revolution allow reason, as it were, to upset everything, in order that reason may put everything straight again. Although Novalis is deaf to all the social and political cries of the period, and blind to all its progressive movements, and although he ends in the most grim and repulsive reaction, he is, nevertheless, not merely influenced, but, all unconsciously, completely penetrated by the spirit of his age. Between him—the quiet, introspective, loyal Saxon assessor—and the poor sans-culottes who rushed from Paris to the frontiers, singing the "Marseillaise" and waving the tricolour flag, there is this fundamental resemblance, that they both desire the destruction of the whole outward and the construction of an inward world. Only, their inward world is reason, his is soul: for them, reason with its demands and formulæ—liberty, equality, and fraternity; for him, the soul, with its strange nocturnal gloom, in which he melts down everything, to find, at the bottom of the crucible, as the gold of the soul—night, disease, mysticism, and voluptuousness.[1]

Thus, in spite of his violent animosity to his age, Novalis belongs to it; the direct opponent of all its enlightened and beautiful ideas, he is, despite himself, possessed by its spirit.

What in Fichte and the men of the Revolution is clear reason, comprehending and testing everything, is in Novalis an all-absorbing self—perception, which becomes actual voluptuousness; for the new spirit has taken such a hold upon him that it is, as it were, entwined round his nerves, causing a species of voluptuous excitement. What with them is abstract liberty, liberty to begin everything from the beginning again, with him is lawless fancy, which changes everything, which resolves nature and history into emblems and myths, in order to be able to play at will with all that is external, and to revel unrestrainedly in self-perception. As Arnold Ruge puts it: "Mysticism, which is theoretical voluptuousness, and voluptuousness, which is practical mysticism, are present in Novalis in equally strong proportions."

Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its would-be spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the sensual. Writing to Caroline Schlegel on the subject of Lucinde, he says: "I know that imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I also know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He here affirms of imagination in general what applied particularly to his own.

Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us to feel feeling. Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He, whose aim is feeling, unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires to feel himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he seeks this self-enjoyment. Therefore to him sickness is preferable to health. For the sick man perpetually feels his own body, which the healthy man does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard, contented themselves with defining sickness as the Christian's natural condition. Novalis goes much further. To him the highest, the only true life, is the life of the sick man. "Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes" ("Life is a disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does the world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less highly than disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture. Why? Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure.... Does not all that is best begin as illness? Half-illness is an evil; real illness is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he writes elsewhere of a mystic power, "which seems to be the power of pleasure and pain, the enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly in the sensations of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of sickness corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness which is at the same time a voluptuous pleasure. Novalis himself is perfectly aware of this correspondence. He says: "The Christian religion is the most voluptuous of religions. Sin is the greatest stimulant to love of the Divine Being; the more sinful a man feels himself to be, the more Christian he is. Direct union with the Deity is the aim of sin and of love." And again: "It is curious that the evident association between sensuality, religion, and cruelty did not long ago draw men's attention to their close kinship and common tendencies."

And just as Novalis now prefers sickness to health, so he prefers night to day, with its "impudent light."