His own strong, undivided feeling was unsettled and perplexed again and again. In conformance with the custom of his family, he became a Prussian officer; but family tradition and his own inclinations were at variance; he could not endure the discipline, and left the army. He fell in love and pledged himself. His feeling for Wilhelmine was strong, but his instinct of self-preservation as an artist was stronger; here, too, there was perplexity of feeling, and he broke off the engagement. He had the feeling that he was a poet, a genius, but the result of all his efforts was a conviction of his want of real capacity, and in dire perplexity he determined to enlist in the French army, hoping to find death in its next campaign. All this explains his perpetual circling round the theme of perplexity of feeling. We have the idea very plainly in the admirable little tale, Die Marquise von O. The Marquise knows as little as Alcmene who it is that has embraced her in the dark; her feelings, too, are perplexed and confused; her nearest and dearest suspect her; and when the Russian officer, whom she looks upon as her saviour, but who proves to be the delinquent, returns to her, loving and repentant, her innocent soul is rent by alternate paroxysms of hatred and love. In much the same manner, the sense of justice, originally so strong in the soul of Michael Kohlhaas, is confused by the wrongs he suffers.
Wounded pride led Kleist to quarrel with friends and acquaintances; a wounded sense of justice tempted him to insult Goethe. He sent his Penthesilea to the great master, whom he envied as much as he admired, and was bitterly disappointed when, as might have been expected, it was entirely disapproved of. Goethe, who, unfortunately, was only keen-sighted as regarded the repellent side of Kleist's character, said of him: "In spite of my honest intention to be sympathetic and judge mildly, Kleist aroused in me nothing but shuddering aversion, resembling that produced by a body which nature has made beautiful, but which is attacked by some incurable disease." When the comedy, Der zerbrochene Krug ("The Broken Jar"), failed in Weimar, owing to Goethe's arbitrary rearrangement of its acts, Kleist's feelings became entirely "confused," and he wrote epigrams on the great man's private life, among others the low, ugly one on the child, "the precocious genius," who wrote the epithalamium for his own parents' wedding-day.
It is this same confusion of feeling which gives their morbidness to all his productions. Even Michael Kohlhaas, that masterpiece of the art of story-telling, at the beginning of which each character is drawn with the precision of genius, ends in a kind of dream-like confusion. Towards the close of the story there appear two spectral figures—the sickly and at last half-insane Elector of Saxony, and an extraordinary gipsy woman, who, we are given to understand, is possessed by the spirit of Kohlhaas's dead wife—characters which contrast very forcibly with the simple, sane personages introduced to us at the beginning. Die heilige Cäcilie (St. Cecilia) is a Catholic legend, with a moral pointed against iconoclasm. The author revels here with a certain satisfaction in superstitious ideas; he makes the saint punish the haters and destroyers of the art treasures of the Church with sudden madness.
Kleist early became addicted to indulgence in opium, a fact of which some of these works remind us.
In the year 1809 the poet appears as an ardent political agitator. Now, for a time, his voice sounds clear and full. He reproaches his countrymen with not having sufficient confidence in the mysterious power of the heart. He calls Napoleon a sinner, whose iniquity it is beyond the power of human language to express. Such resistance as has been offered to the French seems to him contemptibly weak. He dislikes Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, sneers at Fichte himself as a pedant who talks but cannot act, and expresses unbounded contempt for the members of the Tugendbund and their puerile inactivity. He writes a tragedy, Die Hermannsschlacht, with the object of inciting his countrymen to treat Napoleon as Hermann (Arminius) treated Varus. The following lines in it are aimed at the laggard youth of the day:—
"Die schreiben, Deutschland zu befreien,
Mit Chiffren, schicken mit Gefahr des Lebens
Einander Boten, die die Römer hängen,
Versammeln sich um Zwielicht—essen, trinken,
Und schlafen, kommt die Nacht, bei ihren Frauen.
* * * * * * *
Die Hoffnung: morgen stirbt Augustus
Lockt sie, bedeckt mit Schmach und Schande,
Von einer Woche in die andere."[16]
So little care does he bestow on the historical colouring of this play that he makes Hermann talk of a "bill" (of exchange), and Varus compare the leader of the Cheruski to a Dervish.
He wanted such a war as the Spaniards used to wage, with murder and perjury, burning villages and poisoned wells.
The battle of Wagram shattered all his hopes. Aghast, he asked if there were no such thing as justice upon earth.
Things stood badly now with Kleist—no comfort in public life, no prospects in private life, no money, no employment, no approbation, no encouragement. His nearest and dearest did not appreciate him. Shortly before his death he writes to a motherly friend: "I would rather die ten times over than endure again what I lately endured in Frankfort, sitting at the dinner-table between my two sisters. The thought that what I have actually done, be it little or much, is not acknowledged by them at all, that I am looked upon as an utterly useless member of society, no longer worthy of the slightest sympathy, not only robs me of the future, but poisons the past to me."