Through his lady's influence he is promoted to the post of rent-collector for the castle. He inherits from his predecessor a magnificent dressing-gown, red with yellow spots, a pair of green slippers, a nightcap, and some long-stemmed pipes.
Arrayed in his new splendour, and smoking the longest pipe he can find, he lives a quiet, easy life for some time, digging up all the potatoes and vegetables in his garden and planting flowers in their stead, listening with rapture to a distant hunting or post horn, and placing a bouquet every morning upon a stone table where his lady is certain to find it. This goes on until she vanishes from his horizon. As he is sitting alone one day over his account-book, his zither lying beside him, a sunbeam falls through the window upon its dusty strings. "It touched a string in my heart. 'Yes,' said I; 'come away, my faithful zither! Our kingdom is not of this world!'" So he leaves behind his account-book, dressing-gown, slippers, and pipe, and wanders out into the wide world; to Italy first.
This Ne'er-Do-Well is the most comical, awkward, childlike creature one can imagine; in mind he is about ten years old, and he never grows any older. Like Andersen's heroes, the Improvisatore and O.T., he is repeatedly saved from temptation simply by his ignorance and inexperience. He never realises what is going on around him. Things happen to him without his doing anything to bring them about. He is the central figure of a group of characters who all pursue callings which leave them as free as he is himself—painters travelling to Italy, an artist who runs away with his lady-love, musicians wandering from town to town, and roaming students, who trudge along, singing student songs. Compared with this life of wandering and seeking and expectation, ordinary, every-day life naturally appears excessively monotonous. When the hero returns to his native town, he finds the new rent-collector sitting at his door, wearing the same spotted dressing-gown, the same slippers, &c. After having spent his life seeking for his "blue flower," he finds it at last at home. His first rapture is described playfully, almost in Hans Andersen's manner, as follows: "It was such a pleasure to hear her talk so brightly and trustfully to me, that I could have listened to her till morning. I was as happy as I could be. I took a handful of almonds, which I had brought all the way from Italy, out of my pocket. She took some, and we sat and cracked them, and looked contentedly out over the peaceful scene."
The Ne'er-Do-Well may be regarded as the representative, the spokesman, of the ornamental, profitless arts, and of infinite longing. Infinite longing! Let us imprint these words in our memory, for they are the foundation-stone of Romantic poetry.
The longing took curiously morbid forms in the less healthy Romantic souls. The well-known German author, Franz Horn, informs us in his autobiography that at the age of three or four he was already capable of poetic longing and suffering, and of divining life in apparently dead things. He goes on to say that the child-like mysticism of a certain popular refrain had a perfectly magic attraction for him. He quotes the verse in question, and it proves to be none other than the good old rhyme: "Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home!"
"Maikäfer flieg!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg,
Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland,
Und Pommerland ist abgebrannt,
Maikäfer flieg!"[4]
The other children were hard-hearted enough to laugh at this poem, but to him it seemed most touching. The unhappy cockchafer was fatherless and motherless. His father was in the wars, and "what might not come of that?" And his mother? Of her "the news was still more uncertain." She was in far-off Pomerania, and Pomerania was on fire! What scope for fancy! And there was the poor cockchafer, too, borne on the wings of his longing out into the wide, wide world, seeking, ever seeking.—We positively feel as if we were turning into children again.
But let us return to the idea that underlies all this. The longing of the individual for infinite happiness rests, as has already been said, upon the belief that this infinite happiness is attainable by man. But this belief, in its turn, rests upon the individual's Romantic conviction of his own infinite importance. The doctrine of immortality itself is only a result of belief in the cosmic importance of the individual. And this belief in the infinite importance of each separate individual is genuinely medieval. Whole sciences, such as astrology, were founded upon it. The very stars of heaven were supposed to have a close connection with the destinies of individual men, and actually to occupy themselves with them. Heaven and earth and all that in them is, revolved round man. The Romanticists naturally feel the want of astrology, and would fain have the science restored. What they call the "blue flower" is what in astrology was called a man's planet, and in alchemy, the philosopher's stone.
In his lectures Upon the Literature, Art, and Spirit of the Age (1802), A. W. Schlegel writes: "In the same sense in which we may call Kepler the last astrologist, we may demand that astronomy should become astrology again. Astrology fell into disrepute because it made pretensions to science which it could not sustain; but the fact of its having made such pretensions does not take away the idea, the imperishable truths, which lie at its foundation. There is unquestionably something more sublime in the idea of the dynamic influence of the stars, in the supposition that they are animated by reason, and, like subordinate deities, exercise creative power in their appointed spheres, than in the theory that they are dead, mechanically governed masses." And in a letter to Buntzen, Heiberg writes: "It must be allowed that the Middle Ages, with their alchemistic and astrological superstitions, which, albeit superstitions, were based upon a belief in the unity of nature and mind ... possessed more of the true scientific spirit than the present day, with its deliberate renunciation of the one thing which in the long run is of any account." In the same strain (in his essay on Hveen) he praises astrology, as "based upon the profound mysticism of the Middle Ages." When even Heiberg could praise Tycho Brahe for his astrological bias, can we wonder that Grundtvig defended his hypothesis of the earth being the centre of the universe? O Romanticism! Romanticism!
The Romanticists aimed at founding a philosophy and a literature upon want and longing—that is to say, upon the idea of the infinite importance of the individual. The man who bases his philosophy of life upon want is certainly more reasonable than the man who bases it upon either present happiness or the pleasures and bliss of a future existence; for all the happiness we know is undermined by sorrow and by insufficiency, and thus it is on the whole better and safer to build upon want and desire. But the Romanticists do not build upon desire alone, but also upon its satisfaction; they yearn, they wander about in longing quest of the "blue flower," which beckons to them from afar.