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

by Georg Brandes

He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany we can already point to sure indications of a new world.... Here and there, and often in daring union, are to be found incomparable versatility, brilliant polish, extensive knowledge, and rich and powerful imagination. A strong feeling of the creative arbitrariness, the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness, the sacred originality, and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is taking possession of men.... Although these are only indications, disconnected and crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a universal individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of a loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a new Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's members. Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The child will be the express image of the father—a new golden age, with dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of the dissolving body."

After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. And what is the upshot of it all? What new being is the result of the embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised Church? What but a regenerated reaction, which in France restored Catholicism and (after Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led to that hateful tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that Catholicism exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the best writers of the day into exile.

Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world. It engulfed everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the counter-revolution; in it all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in it the Titanic powers of history were shut up and hypnotised. Night surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous joys of darkness and death; the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in the end they turned into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the spirit, but it was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized according to mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the inward parts of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down into the depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.

But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued their usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed because the poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to pieces in the inner world. For they did not go to work in the rough, material fashion of a Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated it inwardly in an inner world. When the poet, released by the spirits, came up from the mine again, he found the outer world, which he supposed he had resolved into its elements, exactly as it had been before. All that he had melted in his heart stood there, hard and cold; and, since the outer world had never really interested him, and since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and drowsy as his inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand.

The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty, his genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to compare him with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite lately, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Blaze de Bury drew attention to the resemblance. He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance to Novalis's, and the likeness between these two singular poets is not only a physical one; common to them both are close observation of nature, divination of all her little secrets, a choice combination of sentiment with philosophical thought, an utter want of tangibility, reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards, an aspiration, that leads nowhere."

These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these two poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives before, the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning of this century.

Think of Shelley's life in its main outlines. The son of a good family, he was sent to an aristocratic school, where, while yet a child, he was roused to wrath and opposition by the brutality of the boys and the cruelty of the masters. What especially kindled his indignation as he grew older was the hypocrisy with which those who gave free rein to their bad passions perpetually talked of God and Christianity. During his second year at Oxford, Shelley wrote an essay On the Necessity of Atheism, of which, with naïve straightforwardness, he sent copies to the Church and University authorities. He was summoned before them, and, on refusing to retract what he had written, was expelled for atheism. He went home, but his father received him with such contemptuous coldness that he soon left again, never to return. His whole life was a tissue of similar rebellions and similar misfortunes. In his twentieth year he was threatened with consumption, and though he recovered, he was thenceforward a delicate, nervously irritable man. The Court of Chancery refused him the guardianship of his own children (after the death of his first wife) on the ground that he had propagated immoral and irreligious doctrines in Queen Mab. After this he left England for ever, and lived in Italy in voluntary exile until sudden death put an end to his sad and homeless existence. His boat was capsized in a squall in the Gulf of Spezzia, and he was drowned, at the age of twenty-nine.

In contrast with such a life as this, Hardenberg's is a true German country-town idyll. At the age of twenty-five he received a Government appointment, an auditorship at one of the state saltworks, and a year or two later he was advanced to be "assessor" at the saltworks of Weissenfels. His Romanticism in no way interfered with his fulfilment of his duties as a good citizen. In his capacity of Government official he was zealous, conscientious, and steady—one of the men who do their duty and are guilty of no extravagances, and whose position is consequently assured. His republicanism was short-lived, and he is only saved by his naïveté from the charge of servility. He calls Frederick William and Louisa of Prussia "ein klassisches Menschenpaar;" in the revelation of these "geniuses" he sees an omen of a better world. Frederick William is, he says, the first king of Prussia; he crowns himself every day. A real "transubstantiation" has taken place; for the court has been transformed into a family, the throne into a sanctuary, a royal marriage into an eternal union of hearts. Only youthful prejudice, he maintains, inclines to a republic; the married man desires order, safety, quietness, a well-regulated household, a "real monarchy." "A constitution has for us only the interest of a dead letter. How different is the law which is the expression of the will of a beloved and revered person! We have no right to conceive of the monarch as the first officer of the state; he is not a citizen, and cannot therefore be an official. The king is a human being exalted to the position of an earthly providence."

If we compare such utterances as the above with those of Shelley's poems which were inspired by the tyranny prevailing in his native country, or those in which he glorifies the Italian revolutions and the Greek war of liberation, we have the sharpest imaginable contrast. And the same contrast meets us wherever we turn. Novalis sings the praises of sickness. Shelley says: "It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of this earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man."

Novalis says: "We picture God to ourselves as a person, just as we think of ourselves as persons. God is exactly as personal and individual as we are." Shelley says: "There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.... It is impossible to believe that the Spirit which pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman, or is angered by the consequences of that necessity which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him."