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

by Georg Brandes

This work was set aside in favour of Sternbald. The modern tradesman had to give way to the artist of the Romantic period of Albert Dürer. Sternbald is the apotheosis of "soul," of pure soul, without admixture of reason and lucidity. Hence the sum and substance of the book is desire, pining desire; hence we are told of such an event as the Reformation, that, instead of generating a divine fulness of religion, it only generated the emptiness of reason, in which all hearts languish; hence the mild sensuality of Goethe's romance becomes brutal desire of the William Lovell type. The hero, when he looks within himself, sees, like Lovell, "a fathomless whirlpool, a rushing, deafening enigma." In the second edition Tieck thought it advisable to cut out some of the too numerous wanton bathing and drinking scenes amidst which the restless longing of the hero runs riot.

But the principal thing to which I would draw attention is, that reality is here refined and distilled in a manner unknown to Goethe. It is attenuated into vapour—emotional vapour; personality is drowned in landscape, action in the music of the woodman's horn. In Sternbald every day is a Sunday; a devotional feeling pervades the air; we seem to hear the church bells ring and to know that the world is at leisure. The following words of the hero contain the philosophy of the book: "In this world we can only desire, we can only live in intentions; real action belongs to the hereafter." Consequently there is no action in the story; the characters wander about with as little apparent purpose as comets; their lives consist of a series of accidental, unsought adventures; they are always travelling in search of the ideal, and as the ideal is generally supposed to have taken up its abode somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rome, the book ends there—the story is not brought to a conclusion, and is never continued.

It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that Novalis prefers Sternbald to Wilhelm Meister. "For," says he, "the kernel of my philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the absolutely real, and that the more poetical anything is, the truer it is. Therefore, the task of the poet is not to idealise, but to cast a spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true poetry. A fairy tale is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in its being exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." The world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos—chaos which prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be not a mere tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable. The real fairy tale writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel, is, as it were, free history, the mythology of history. And love, being the form of morality which implies the possibility of magic, is the soul of the novel, the foundation of all romances, all novels. For where true love is, there marvellous, miraculous things happen.

These obscure, yet in a manner unambiguous expressions of Novalis's opinions on the subject of the true nature of poetry and romance, make it easy for us to understand his judgment of Wilhelm Meister, a book he had greatly admired in early youth. For in Wilhelm Meister, as in Torquato Tasso, poetry has to give way to reality, the poetic conception of life to the practical. Novalis could imagine nothing more shameful than this; it was sin against the holy spirit of poetry. In the novel, in fiction, poetry is not to be done away with, not even to be restricted, but to be exalted and glorified.

So he determines to write a novel which shall be the direct antithesis of Wilhelm Meister. He even takes thought of such small matters as type and size, and determines that in them Heinrich von Ofterdingen shall be the exact counterpart of the book, the worldly philosophy of which it is to refute by its magic mysticism. He writes to Tieck: "My novel is in full swing; it is to be a deification of poetry. In the first part Heinrich von Ofterdingen ripens into a poet; in the second he is the glorified poet. The story will have many points of resemblance with your Sternbald but will lack its lightness. This want, however, may not be a disadvantage, considering the subject."

Goethe and Wilhelm Meister Novalis criticises thus: "Goethe is an altogether practical poet. His works are what English wares are—simple, neat, suitable to their purpose, and durable.... He has, like the Englishman, a natural sense of order and economy, and an acquired sense of what is fine and noble.... Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre is, in a way, altogether modern and prosaic. Romance perishes in it, and so does the poetry, the magic quality, of nature. The book only deals with everyday human affairs; nature, and the belief in her mysterious powers, are quite forgotten. It is a poetically written story of bourgeois domestic life, in which the marvellous is expressly treated as poetry and fancy. Artistic atheism is the spirit of the book. Wilhelm Meister is a Candide directed against poetry."

Novalis's aim, then, is to produce a work exactly the opposite of this, one in which everything is finally resolved into poetry, in which "the world becomes soul." For everything is soul. "Nature is to the soul what a solid body is to light. The solid substance stops light, breaks it up into wonderful colours, &c., &c. Human beings are soul prisms."

His novel is, then, an allegory, the key to which is contained in the fairy-tale introduced into the story. This fairy-tale is supposed to show how the true eternal world comes into existence; it is a description of the restoration of that kingdom of love and poetry in which the great "world-soul expands and blooms everlastingly." Novalis believes that, since the existing heaven and the existing earth are of a prosaic nature, and since our age is an age of utilitarianism, a poetical day of judgment must come, a spell must be broken, before the new life can blossom forth.—Arcturus and his daughter slumber, frozen in their palace of ice. They are released by Fable (i.e. Poetry) and her brother, Eros. Eros is the child of the restless father, Reason, and the faithful mother, the Heart. Fable owes her being to unfaithfulness on the part of Reason; she is born of Fancy, daughter of the Moon; her godmother is the guardian of the domestic altar, Sophia, Heavenly Wisdom.

Against the good powers in this allegory a conspiracy is formed by the Writer. The Writer is the spirit of prose, of narrow enlightenment; he is depicted as constantly writing. When Sophia dips what he has written into a bowl which stands upon the altar, a little of it sometimes remains legible, but often it is all washed out. If drops from the bowl happen to fall upon him, they fall from him again in the shape of numbers and geometric figures, which he eagerly collects, strings upon a thread, and wears round his neck as an ornament. The Writer is Novalis's Nureddin. The result of his plot is the imprisonment of the Father and Mother and the destruction of the altar.

But Fable has escaped. She descends into the realm of Evil, and exterminates Evil by delivering up the Passions to the power of the death-bringing Fates. Time and Mortality are now no more. "The last thread of the flax is spun; the lifeless is reanimated; life reigns." In a universal conflagration, the mother, the Heart, is burned to death, the sun disappears, and the ice is melted round the palace of Arcturus. Through a new, happy earth, stretching far and wide under a new heaven, Eros and Fable pass into the palace. Fable has fulfilled her mission; she has brought Eros to his beloved, the daughter of the king. The kingdom of poetry and love is established.