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

by Georg Brandes

LONGING—"THE BLUE FLOWER"

I have described Romantic "soul" as intensity, without endeavour or desire, as the glowing furnace in which liberty was asphyxiated and every tendency to outward action destroyed. But this is not the exact truth. One outward tendency remained, that which is known by the name of "longing" (Sehnsucht). Longing is the Romantic equivalent of endeavour, and the mother of all Romantic poetry. What is longing? It is a combination of lack and desire, without the determination or the means to attain what one lacks and desires. And what is the object of this longing? What but that which is the object of all longing and desire, in however fine or hypocritical words it may clothe itself—enjoyment and happiness. The Romanticist does not employ the word happiness, but it is what he means. He does not say happiness, he says "the ideal." But do not let us be deceived by words. The special characteristic of the Romanticist, however, is not his search after happiness, but his belief that it exists, that it must be in store for him, and that it will come to him when he least expects it. And since it is the gift of Heaven, since he himself is not its creator, he may lead as aimless a life as he will, guided only by his vague longing. All that is necessary is to preserve his faith that this longing will be satisfied. And it is a faith easy to preserve, for everything around him is full of omens and prophecies of the accomplishment of his desire.

It was Novalis who gave to the object of Romantic longing the famous, mystic name of "the blue flower." The expression is, of course, not to be understood literally. The "blue flower" is a mysterious symbol, something of the nature of ΙΧθΥΣ, the Fish of the early Christians. It is an abbreviation, a condensed formulation of all that infinitude of bliss for which a languishing human heart is capable of longing. Hence glimpses of it are caught long before it is reached; it is dreamed of long before it is seen; it is divined now here, now there, in what proves to be a delusion, is seen for a moment amongst other flowers, only to vanish immediately; but its fragrance is perceptible, at times only faint, at times strong, and the seeker is intoxicated by it. Though, like the butterfly, he flutters from flower to flower, settling now upon a violet, now upon some tropical plant, he is always seeking and longing for the one thing—perfect, ideal happiness.

It is with this longing and its object that Novalis's principal work deals. It is a work which we must study, and, to understand it aright, we must first see how it came into existence.

Its germ is contained in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and we can clearly trace the mental processes by which Wilhelm Meister is slowly transmuted into Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Wilhelm does not act, he is acted upon. He does not strive, he longs. He pursues ideals, seeking them first on the stage, then in real life. Wilhelm too, is the offspring of "soul." The book is pervaded by soul. It is not only that the characters, like those of many modern English novels (some of Dickens's, for instance), are full of soul, but there is, as it were, soul in the peculiar, hazy atmosphere which surrounds them. No feature is realistically coarse or decided; the children of soul have soft contours. Heiberg once summed up Goethe's philosophy, of which he himself was a disciple, in the following sentence: "Goethe is neither immoral nor irreligious, in the general acceptation of the word, but he shows that there are no unconditional laws of duty, and that we must place our religion on the same level as our poetry and philosophy." We are struck in reading Wilhelm Meister by the manner in which rigid school or text-book ethics, the narrow-minded, conventional ideas of morality and equity, are so re-moulded that morality is no longer regarded as the absolute law of life, but simply as an important principle of life, one among others all equally legitimate and equally under control—just as the brain of the animal, important as it is, is not, in the estimation of the physiologist, the one part of consequence, but simply an organ, fulfilling its task in association with the heart, the liver, and the other organs. Hence sensuality is not abused as animal, but (in Philine) simply and straightforwardly represented as pleasant and attractive. The harmonious development of Wilhelm's nature is arrived at by the aid of many doubtful experiences. In the female characters we are called on to admire well-bred self-possession and the innate nobility of a beautiful nature; the physical and mental superiority and freedom which are the result of a highly favoured and assured position, are sympathetically portrayed in the personages of rank. It may seem objectionable to us nowadays that "noble" and "aristocratic" are evidently often regarded as synonyms, but the reason for it is to be sought in the deplorable, straitened social conditions of the Germany of Goethe's day. As the tale is not the offspring of the union of imagination and reality, but of imagination and "soul," there is something unreal in its whole character; much is veiled, much refined away; everything is so idealised that the material world stands, as it were, in the shadow of the spiritual.

Only private circumstances and persons are dealt with. War is, indeed, alluded to, and in such a manner that we are enabled to conclude that the war following on the French Revolution is meant; but nothing definite is said about it. As to the locality, we are led to the conclusion that it is somewhere in Central Germany; but the landscape possesses no marked features, it only chimes in like a faint musical accompaniment to the mood. In the world depicted in the tale, art is regarded, in the perverted fashion of the day, as the school of life, instead of life as the school of art; national, historical events are but "etwas Theatergeräusch hinter den Koulissen" (a little noise behind the scenes).[1] None of the characters have any practical aim in view; they are simply driven onward by the current of their longings and moods; they wander about, untrammelled by circumstances, heedless of the boundaries of countries, leading "planless" existences.

Goethe's avoidance of all psychological extremes is a significant witness to the centripetal tendency of "soul." Such an extreme is crime, conceived of as criminal. Even where Goethe touches upon the horrible, as, for example, incestuous passion (the story of the Harper), his desire is only that we should be powerfully affected, not that we should judge; he does not bring the case before the moral, much less before the legal tribunal. And the story loses some of its painfulness from the manner in which it is communicated to us. We do not hear it from the Harper himself; his lips are sealed; it is told us after his death by a stranger.

It is in this highly idealised world, on which the poet's hand has set the seal of beauty, that Wilhelm wanders about, without a plan, but not without an aim. He is in pursuit of the ideal—an ideal profession, an ideal woman, ideal culture. He is first a merchant, then an actor, then a doctor; loves first Marianne, then the Countess, then Therese, then Nathalie. His first ideal of culture is experience, his second intellectual refinement; then he seeks it in renunciation; and he ends with experiments in social reform which made the Wanderjahre, in its day, one of the books to which socialistic revolutionaries most eagerly appealed. But the main thing to be noted is, that Wilhelm is constantly remoulding his ideal. He does not find it; he loses it, so to speak. It is not so much that he becomes the bourgeois, the philistine (Spiessbürger), as that the word loses its meaning for him.

It often happens to the young man who throws himself eagerly into the study of philosophy in search of enlightenment as to God, eternity, the aim of life, and the immortality of the soul, that, as he studies, these words lose the meaning he at first attributed to them; he obtains an answer to his questions, but an answer which teaches him that these questions must be differently put. The same thing happens in life to Wilhelm, with his longing for a preconceived ideal. Many have embraced the cloud instead of Juno; Wilhelm lets the cloud go, and presses Juno to his heart.

Wilhelm Meister had almost as much share as Die Herzensergiessungen eines Klosterbruders in the production of Tieck's Sternbald, which is throughout an echo of Goethe's great work. Immediately after the appearance of Wilhelm Meister, Tieck sketched the plot of a very interesting story, Der junge Tischlermeister ("The Young Carpenter"), which was not published until forty-one years later. The hero, an almost too accomplished and artistic young carpenter, goes through a process of development which exactly resembles Wilhelm Meister's, as far as the influence of aristocratic acquaintances, of dramatic art, and the theatre is concerned. A true Romanticist, he produces Shakespeare's comedies in a private theatre which is an exact imitation of the theatres of Shakespeare's day, and is the lover both on the stage and behind the scenes.