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

by Georg Brandes

During his travels in Switzerland and Northern Italy, which occupied the summer and autumn of 1803, Kleist wrote nothing. Despairing of the sufficiency of his powers, coming to the conclusion that he possessed only a "half talent," he temporarily gave up all idea of literary work. All the time tormented by thoughts of death, he travelled by Lyons to Paris. There he burned Guiscard and all his papers, and determined to enter the army of France (a nation he hated) and take part in the great expedition preparing at Boulogne, in the confident hope that the undertaking would fail, and that he and the whole army would find graves in England. He tried to enlist as a common soldier, but was refused. An acquaintance whom he accidentally met, put him in a position to return to Germany, where, after many mishaps and disappointments, he obtained a small official appointment at Königsberg.

Kleist had announced his intention of competing with Goethe. "I will tear the wreath from his brow," was early the burden of his confidences and his dreams. It sounds like the utterance of a madman. And yet, when we read the one fragment that remains to us of the never-completed drama, Guiscard, we are filled with astonishment. It was as little within the power of this work as of any other to remove the crown of honour from the brow of the genius whose spirit dominates two centuries; but the fact remains that the fragment of it which we possess stands on a level with much of the best produced by Goethe.

Kleist has drawn on his imagination for the picture of a great man, a great leader; and he at once successfully impresses us with his hero's greatness by showing how much depends upon him, upon his life, how thousands upon thousands look up to him as their ruler and only saviour.

The great adventurer, Robert Guiscard, son of Tancred de Hauteville, is lying with his army before Constantinople, which city he has vowed to take and keep. But fate is against him; the plague has broken out in his camp and is committing terrible ravages.

Kleist himself had encountered just such overwhelming misfortune on the path of victory which his imagination had painted; and his delineation of a hero struggling against an overpowering destiny which he has long borne consciously within himself is grand. For Guiscard himself is plague-stricken; the mortal sickness is raging in his intestines; its poison is consuming his very bones. He who till now has been everywhere victorious, the conqueror of Southern Italy, of Rome, of Venice, and of Greece, knows, feels, that his end is at hand. A crowd of Normans are besieging his tent, calling on him to lead the army away from this terrible camping-ground, where they feel the poisonous breath of the plague blowing in their faces. A rumour that he is ill has already begun to spread, but as yet the truth is not to be divulged; Guiscard is too proud to let any one know what he is suffering.

His tent is thrown open, and the man in whose breast a consuming fire is burning, whose throat is parched with unquenchable thirst, and whose hand is so weak that all through the night he has not been able to lift it, steps forth erect and proud, and shows himself to the crowd. So strong and gay and masterful does he seem, that even those who before were certain of the worst, no longer know what to believe.

And there is profound meaning as well as grandeur in this conception of Kleist's. This Guiscard, who stands there erect and unflinching while mortal disease is gnawing at his vitals, who is he but Kleist himself, his whole unhappy life long? He himself is the great genius whose plans are foiled by the pestilence without and within him.

Kleist soon resigned his Government appointment and returned to the calling of literature. It is most interesting to observe the dramatic characters now produced by a man in reality full of productive energy. Our study of the psychological peculiarities and doctrines of the Romanticists has shown us how their predilection for disintegrating personality led them to lay special weight upon all that has a disintegrating effect—dreams, hallucinations, and madness. What distinguishes Kleist's characters from those of the other Romanticists is that there is nothing blurred and vague about them; the essential quality which his and theirs have in common is morbidity. In every passion Kleist seizes upon that feature which betrays kinship with the fixed idea or with helpless insanity; he probes every mind, however sound, till he finds the diseased point where it loses control over itself—somnambulistic tendency, overpowering animal appetites, absent-mindedness, cowardice in the face of death. Take such a passion as love; it is certainly not of a rational nature, but it has a side from which it may be seen to be connected with reason and intellect. Kleist almost invariably, and with admirable skill, depicts it as of the nature of disease, as mania.

When Käthchen of Heilbronn sees Count Walter von Strahl for the first time, she drops everything she is carrying, food, wine, and glasses, and, pale as death, with folded hands, falls at his feet as if she had been struck by lightning. The Count speaks a friendly word to her. Presently, from her window, she sees him mounting his horse to ride away. In her haste to follow him, she jumps from the window, thirty feet high, on to the street, and breaks both her legs. Barely recovered from six weeks' fever, she rises from her bed, collects a small bundle of belongings, and deserts her home to seek the Count and follow him in blind devotion from place to place, led "by the rays which shine from his face and twine themselves round her heart like a five-stranded cord." She wanders after him, her bare feet bleeding on the stony roads, her scanty skirt fluttering in the wind, a straw hat her only protection against the heat of the sun and the pelting of the rain. Through mountain mists, across desert tracts scorched by the sun, through the darkness of thick forests, she follows, like a dog on its master's track; and she, who had been accustomed to lay her head on soft pillows, disturbed by each little knot spun inadvertently by herself into the thread of the sheets, now, when night comes, sleeps in the Count's stables like the meanest servant, sinking exhausted upon the straw spread for his horses.

There is the ring of truth in this description, given by her father, of the young girl's flight. The Count, who knows that he is in no way to blame, tries every method of alienating her. Coming upon her in his stable one night, he thrusts her aside with his foot, and more than once he threatens her with his dog-whip. He allows her to sacrifice herself for his bride, who orders her to rush into a burning house to save his miniature, and when she has brought it, sends her back again for the case. With joy and deep humility she does and bears all. The more refined, but weaker, representation of an overpowering, unrequited passion given us by Henrik Hertz in The House of Svend Dyring is modelled upon Kleist's Käthchen. Side by side with much that is ridiculous and repulsive, Käthchen von Heilbronn contains much that is really grand. It is plain enough that this passion, which comes on as suddenly as a fit of apoplexy—which, moreover, as a fixed idea, destroys every other idea, and, itself a miracle, performs miracles with the aid of an angel—oversteps the bounds of the natural and the healthy. Yet there is something fine in it. It gave intense satisfaction to Kleist, who had such a rooted aversion for mere phrases, to represent a loving woman, in whom everything was truth and reality which in other women is mere words. It was thus that he himself had desired to be loved by his Wilhelmine; and at a later period he had demanded such excessive devotion from a young girl whose acquaintance he had made at the Körners' house in Dresden, and who had become attached to him, that all relations between them were broken off. Now he had taken refuge with his ideal in poetry.