"Geliebte, du durchbohrst mein Herz,
Das ist bittrer als der Hölle Schmerz."[3]
Immediately after this, the sexton unmasks himself, reveals himself as the devil, and carries off Celinde's wicked mother to be his bride.
In another scene Celinde is supposed to be about to give birth to a child in a mountain cavern. A stork appears on the stage carrying a child in its beak, and flies into the cavern. Then come a whole flight of storks, which direct their course southwards, singing:—
"Hast du schwer am Kind getragen,
Musst sie mit den Flügeln schlagen,
Hast du müssen lange reisen,
Musst sie mit dem Schnabel beissen," &c.[4]
The child is born dead, and the wretched mother is in despair. This fact also is communicated to us by a stork:—
"In meiner Wut,
In der Reiseglut,
Hab ich das Kind erdrückt," &c., &c.[5]
Immediately on the head of this follow would-be pathetic, but in reality revoltingly horrible scenes, like the one entitled "The Temptation in the Desert," in which Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who is starving, struggles against the temptation to eat a little boy, who has been saved along with himself from shipwreck. Ahasuerus says: "How terrible is my desire for his flesh! I already feel the juicy morsel rolling between tongue and palate...." He is on the point of committing the crime, when the child cries: "Father! father!" on which the old man hastily absorbs himself in his book.
Almost at the end of the play, in the middle of a religious service held by the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, an attack is suddenly made upon those Romanticists whose piety is not sincere. A traveller says: "I will deliver the Holy Sepulchre out of the hands of the Turks." One of the author's favourite characters retorts: "Do it first, and then speak of it." Hereupon follows this incredibly undramatic parenthesis: "The traveller turns away ashamed; he goes out into the wide world and pleads the cause of Christianity in thousands of words; but his words have not the power of eternal life, for his is love without deeds. From him are descended all the new, poetic Christians, those, I mean, who are only Christians in their poems." When it comes the length of the author's "I" appearing in a parenthesis in the middle of a play, we may regard dramatic form as practically non-existent. Even Tieck and Hoffmann never went as far as this.
German Romanticism produced only two real dramatists—Zacharias Werner and Heinrich von Kleist. Of these, the latter is incomparably the greater; indeed his poetic gifts are so great that one may unhesitatingly assign him the highest place among all the poets of his school. He has a clearer, more plastic style than any of them, and pathos such as we do not find even in Goethe. His finest works are full of soul, heart, and burning passion, and yet the style is simple and lucid. Kleist is Germany's Mérimée; and a study of his characteristics will show us what the German Romantic tendency could make of a Mérimée. We shall see how the clearness, the definiteness, which was the natural quality of his genius, was disturbed and deranged by the poetical insanity of Romanticism.
Thirty steps from the Wannsee, a little lake near Berlin, and fifty from the wayside inn, stands a gravestone bearing the inscription: "Heinrich von Kleist."