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

by Georg Brandes

"Gegründet ist das Reich der Ewigkeit;
In Lieb und Frieden endigt sich der Streit;
Vorüber ging der lange Traum der Schmerzen;
Sophie ist ewig Priesterin der Herzen."[2]

Sophia occupies the same place in this allegory that Beatrice does in Dante's great poem.

The glorification of the old Meistersinger is, of course, intended as a glorification of poetry in general, but his story, as told in the novel, is really the story of Hardenberg's own life and endeavour. Heinrich von Ofterdingen's home and quiet childhood remind us of Hardenberg's. A dream, which seems doubly rich in omen because his father as a youth had dreamed one like it, gives him a fore-feeling of the mysterious happiness of the poet's life, and shows him, in the form of a wonderful blue flower, the object of the poet's longing and endeavour.

In order that he may acquire some knowledge of the world, it is decided that Heinrich and his mother shall travel, in company with a number of merchants, to Augsburg. The incidents of the journey and the tales of his travelling companions enrich him with impressions, and fertilise the germs of poetical productivity that lie latent in his soul. For all their talk is of poetry and poets; they tell him the story of Arion, and popular legends in which poets are the equals of kings, and they philosophise on the subject of poetry and art, not like merchants of the most barbarous period of the Middle Ages, but like Romanticists of the year 1801. One of them, for example, gives the following pantheistic explanation of the instinctive impulse of mankind towards plastic art: "Nature, desiring to have some enjoyment of all the art that there is in her, has metamorphosed herself into human beings. In their minds, through them, she rejoices in her own glory, selects what is most pleasant and lovely, and reproduces it in such a manner that she may possess and enjoy it in manifold ways."

In a castle to which they come, Heinrich meets a captive Eastern girl, whose touching plaint it is interesting to compare with the song of the Oriental beauty (La Captive) in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales. In a book belonging to a mysterious hermit (the original of the charcoal-burner's book in Ingemann's Valdemar Sejer) he finds the history of his own life.

The travellers arrive at Augsburg, and here Heinrich makes the acquaintance of a poet and a fascinating young girl. In Klingsohr he has a noble example of the fully developed poet, a poet whose utterances in many ways remind us of Goethe's. Almost everything that Klingsohr says is surprisingly rational and wise; we can scarcely understand how Novalis himself failed to take any of it to heart. The following are some of his remarks: "I cannot too strongly recommend you to follow your natural inclination to penetrate into the reason of things, to study the laws of causation. Nothing is more indispensable to the poet than insight into the nature of every event, and knowledge of the means whereby to attain every aim.... Enthusiasm without understanding is useless and dangerous, and the poet will be able to effect few miracles if he is himself astonished by miracles.... The young poet cannot be too calm, too thoughtful. True, melodious eloquence demands a wide, calm, observing mind." Upon one point, however, Klingsohr and Novalis are entirely agreed, namely, that everything is, and must be, poetry. "It is a great misfortune that poetry should have a special name, and that poets should form a separate guild. There is nothing separate or special about poetry. It is the mode of action characteristic of the human mind. Do not all men aspire poetically every moment of their lives?"

All Heinrich's love longings are satisfied when he sees Klingsohr's daughter, Mathilde. He feels once more as he felt when he saw the vision of the "blue flower." But Mathilde is drowned. Heinrich loses her as Novalis had lost Sophie von Kühn. Utterly broken down, he leaves Augsburg. He is comforted in his sorrow by a vision (like the visions Novalis had at Sophie's grave) in which he sees the departed and hears her voice. In a distant monastery, the mission of whose monks it is to keep alive the sacred fire in young souls, and which seems to be a species of "spirit-colony," he lives "with the departed." He experiences all the sensations to which Novalis has given expression in the Hymns to Night. Then he returns from the spirit-world to life, and falls in love with a being no less wonderful than the object of his first passion. Mathilde's place is filled by Cyane.

The second part of the novel is only sketched. Heinrich wanders the whole world round. After going through every earthly experience, "he retires again into his soul, as to his old home." Things material now become transformed into things spiritual. "The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the world." Heinrich finds Mathilde again, but she is no longer distinguishable from Cyane—just as, in Novalis's own life, Julie was not Julie, but Sophie come to life again. And now "the festival of soul," of love and eternal fidelity, is celebrated. On this occasion allegory reigns supreme. The principle of good and the principle of evil appear in open competition, singing antiphonies; the sciences do the same, even mathematics. We hear much about Indian plants—probably the lotus-flower was made to play a part as partaking of the nature of the "blue flower."

The end of the story is merely indicated. Heinrich finds the "blue flower"—it is Mathilde. "Heinrich plucks the blue flower, and releases Mathilde from the spell which has bound her, but loses her again. Stunned by grief, he turns into a stone. Edda, who, besides being herself, is also the 'blue flower,' the Oriental captive, and Mathilde (fourfold 'Doppelgängerei'), sacrifices herself to the stone. It turns into a singing tree. Cyane hews down the tree, and burns herself along with it, upon which it turns into a golden ram. Edda-Mathilde is compelled to sacrifice the ram, and Heinrich becomes a man once more. During these transformations he has all manner of wonderful conversations." This we can readily believe.

In Danish literature the work most allied to Heinrich von Ofterdingen is Ingemann's De Sorte Riddere ("The Black Knights"). We learn from Ingemann's autobiography how exactly his frame of mind at the time he was writing this book corresponded to that of the German Romanticist. "I paid but little attention to all the great events that were happening in the outer world. Even the conflagration of Moscow, the destruction of the Great Army, and the fall of Napoleon were to me ephemeral phenomena ... even in the German War of Liberation I only saw a divided nation in conflict with itself, noble powers without any principle of unity and concord. Between the ideal life and human life there lay a yawning abyss, which only the heavenly rainbow of love and poetry could bridge over.... I wrote myself into a fairy labyrinth, in which love was my Ariadne-thread, and in which I hoped, with the great harp of the poetry of life, the strings of which are strung by genius from rock to rock over black abysses, to lull the monsters of existence to sleep, resolve the dissonances in the great world-harmony, and solve the world-mystery." The result of this attempt was woeful.