[XIV]
ARNIM AND BRENTANO
Herder's Stimmen der Völker ("Voices of the Nations"), published in 1767, contained only twenty German "Volkslieder;" but at the time he brought it out, he expressed the wish that he might live to see the publication of a large collection of the old "Nationallieder," as he called them. In 1806 L. A. von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn; it contained 210 German popular songs and ballads, and was followed in 1808 by two more volumes of about the same size. This book was not only of the greatest historical interest, but was epoch-making in German lyric poetry and German literature generally. It struck that natural note which for many years gave freshness and sonority to both the Romantic and the ante-Romantic lyric poetry. Even when, in the case of Heine, the entirely modern had supplanted the Romantic theme, rhythm and form and many hardly noticeable turns of expression owed their simple charm to the inspiration of the Volkslied. The superiority of German to French lyric poetry in this century possibly lies chiefly in that absence of everything rhetorical which it owes to the influence of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
Though the two publishers of this great collection were of one accord in their love for the old popular poetry of their country, and also as to the slightly modernised and carefully expurgated form in which the songs were to appear, and though both were thorough-going Romanticists in principle, they were men of very different characters.
Ludwig Achim von Arnim was born in Berlin in 1781. He studied natural science for some time in Göttingen, and then travelled all over Germany, to make himself acquainted with the country and the people and to collect popular songs and ballads. After this he settled for a time in Heidelberg, where he met Clemens Brentano and Görres. In company with them, in 1808, he started a literary periodical, the Einsiedlerzeitung ("Hermit's Chronicle"), amongst the contributors to which were Tieck, Uhland, Hölderlin, and Jacob Grimm. This periodical he continued at a later time under the title Trösteinsamkeit ("Consolation in Solitude").
In 1811 he married Brentano's sister, the famous Bettina, and thenceforward lived partly in Berlin and partly on his estate of Wiepersdorf in Brandenburg. He kept his Romanticism out of his private life; he was a sane, healthy human being, a clever farmer, a sober Protestant and Prussian. Eichendorff describes him as follows: "Handsome and distinguished looking, frank, ardent, and yet gentle, honourable and reliable in all things, faithful to his friends even when every one else deserted them, Arnim was in reality what others, by dint of a sort of mediæval polish, strove to appear—a knightly figure in the best sense of the word; but for this very reason it always seemed to his contemporaries that there was something strange and out of place about him."
Something strange there must certainly have been in his nature, for, staid and sober, calm and harmonious as was his life, his writings give us the impression of restlessness and complexity. He himself was cast in one piece, his works never are.
Besides plays, now unreadable, he wrote two long novels and a number of short tales, which all bear witness to the fantast in him. The epithet "fantast" may be equally suitably applied to Brentano. The first conspicuous difference between the two is, that, whereas Brentano's strength lies in his naïveté and his childlike fancies, Arnim is profoundly serious even in his wildest flights. With all his love for the popular, with all his eagerness to open the eyes of the cultured to the beauty of the simple and childlike, he remained the dignified aristocrat in his own writings; he never let himself go as Brentano did. When his muse has a paroxysm of madness, it is cold, almost severe insanity, not a fiery, merry frenzy, like that to which Brentano's muse is subject.
His power of plastic representation was great, but quickly exhausted. It shows to advantage in some of his short stories, and in some still shorter fragments of his long novels; but along with descriptions and figures which evince real talent, we are presented with a mass of padding—diffuse digressions from the subject, interpolated tales which have little or no connection with the tale proper, fantastic, impossible episodes, against which even the reader with the most undeveloped sense of realism must protest. Sometimes he lays the whole stock of popular superstitions under contribution, treating them with the utmost seriousness—clay figures are magically endowed with life; a mandrake develops into Field-Marshal Cornelius Nepos. At other times he has recourse to the stock-in-trade of the old-fashioned romances—fabulous parentage, recovery of long-lost children, disguises, strange meetings after the lapse of many years. He is also given to introducing ballads and songs, generally under the rather flimsy pretext that they are the composition of one or other of his characters: fluent, but not melodious, they interrupt the course of the action, momentarily attract the attention of the reader, and are immediately forgotten.
Arnim's principal novel with a modern plot, Armuth, Reichthum, Schuld und Busse der Gräfin Dolores: Eine wahre Geschichte zur lehrreichen Unterhaltung armer Fräulein aufgeschrieben ("Poverty, Wealth, Sin, and Penance of Countess Dolores: A True Story, Recorded for the Instruction and Amusement of Poor Young Ladies"), is, taken as a whole, quite as tedious as its title. This novel is another of Wilhelm Meister's progeny. It describes the inner life of gifted and distinguished individuals of very varied character, in very varied circumstances. But there is a smooth, pious strain throughout the whole, which is altogether unlike Wilhelm Meister.