In the other notable dramatist of the Romantic School there was far less to disintegrate. He was the genuine Romanticist from the very first.
Zacharias Werner was born in Königsberg in 1768. He was the son of a professor at the University, who also held the post of dramatic censor. Hence, even as a child, Zacharias had the opportunity of seeing plays almost daily, and in his earliest youth he was able to make himself acquainted with all the technicalities of the stage. His mother, according to Hoffmann, "was richly endowed with both intellect and imagination." Her mind inclined to earnest, highly imaginative mysticism, and she exercised no inconsiderable influence upon her son's ardent imagination; but in course of time she became insane, one of her delusions being that she herself was the Virgin Mary, and her son the Saviour of the world.
As a student, Zacharias, who was of a sanguine, sensual temperament, led an exceedingly dissolute life. In his twentieth year he published a volume of lyric poems, which, like the earliest writings of Friedrich Schlegel and the other Romanticists, are entirely untouched by mysticism; they inveigh, in the style of the eighteenth century, against "sanctimoniousness, pious stupidity, hypocrisy, and Jesuitism." Nevertheless, while still comparatively young, he himself adopted the sanctimonious style. Though he continued to be dissipated, he cannot exactly be called a hypocrite, for he sinned and repented alternately. The distinguishing feature of his character was instability, as he himself confesses in his last poem, Unstäts Morgenpsalm ("The Unstable Man's Morning Hymn"); and long before, in the prologue to Söhne des Thals ("Sons of the Vale"), he had called himself an inconstant creature, "perpetually erring, lamenting, warning."
Religious motives induced Werner to join the Freemasons; he believed that this order would prove the means of diffusing throughout the whole world a new and more sincere spirit of piety. Pecuniary motives induced him to accept a Government secretaryship; and in 1795, not long after addressing three enthusiastic poems (a war song, a call to arms, and a lament) to the unfortunate Poles, he took up his abode in the capacity of a Prussian Government official in the conquered city of Warsaw, where he spent ten pleasant years. He married three times during the course of those ten years. The first two marriages were so ill-advised that in both cases the divorce promptly followed the wedding; the third, with a particularly charming Polish lady, lasted for some years. From her he was divorced in 1805. On this occasion Werner took all the blame upon himself. "I am not," he writes to Hitzig at the time, "a bad man, but I am in many ways a weakling, though in others God grants me strength. I am timid, capricious, miserly, uncleanly. You know it yourself." Not a flattering portrait.
Schleiermacher's Lectures on Religion and, following on these, the writings of Jakob Böhme made no small impression on him. Art and religion now became to him one and the same thing. "Why," he writes to Hitzig, "have we not one name for these two synonyms?" They signify to him what he at one time calls the "vivid sense of the nearness of great Nature," at another, "the simple, humble outpouring of the pure soul into the pure stream (of Nature)." His literary opinions are, he declares, "exactly those of Tieck." In Warsaw he still writes coldly of the Catholic Church; he defends it, not as "a system of faith, but as a newly reopened mine of mythology."
Death bereft him on one day, the 24th of February, 1804, of his mother and his most intimate friend, Mnioch, a Pole—hence the title of his fatalistic tragedy, The Twenty-Fourth of February, written ten years later.
Having solicited all his patrons and friends in turn to procure him an appointment with as little work and as much remuneration as possible, he finally obtained an easy and profitable post in Berlin, through the influence of a minister who was deeply interested in both religion and freemasonry. He gave himself up for a time to all the amusements and dissipations of the capital; but, after the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon, he threw up his appointment and began to lead a wandering life. He was alone and free, for all his marriages had been childless, and he had inherited a fortune at his mother's death. He travelled through Germany and Austria, that "blessed land," as he calls it, made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël, and visited her at Coppet. In Weimar he succeeded in obtaining a pension from the Prince-Primate (Fürst-Primas) Dalberg. Professor Passow, who made his acquaintance in Weimar, wrote to Voss: "I dislike Werner exceedingly, for the reason that I have never seen him twice the same. This is the consequence of his insufferable anxiety to please every one. It depends entirely upon his company whether he is the low libertine or the pious devotee of the most modern, most spiritual type." A clergyman named Christian Mayr obtained great influence over him. Mayr was a fanatic and an eccentric. In order to realise one of the visions in the Book of Revelations and to attain heavenly wisdom, he swallowed the greater part of a Bible, and was dangerously ill in consequence; he shot with a pistol at any member of his congregation who fell asleep when he was preaching; and he believed that he could, during the celebration of the sacrament, produce real flesh and blood. This man was desirous that Werner should join a great secret society, the "Kreuzesbrüder im Orient." At first Werner was very enthusiastic in the matter, then he began to entertain doubts, and these doubts partly led to his conversion to Catholicism.
In November 1809, after paying a visit at Coppet, he went to Rome, where he spent several years. His conversion took place in 1810. During his years of wandering he had led the maddest of lives, dividing each day between low debauchery and religious excitement, between gross sensual indulgence and solemn intercourse with the Deity. The fragments of his diary, published in two small volumes by Schütz, betray a coarse immorality, an obscenity of thought, and a shamelessness of expression, which are rendered only the more repulsive by the outbursts of miserable remorse and self-accusation which interrupt the detailed descriptions of erotic experiences.
In a testamentary epistle to his friends (dated September 1812) he mentions the two motives which withhold him from a public confession. "The one is, that to open a plague pit is dangerous to the health of the still uninfected bystanders; the other, that, in my writings (for which God forgive me), among a wilderness of poisonous fungi and noxious weeds there is to be found here and there a healing herb, from which the poor sick people to whom it might be useful would assuredly shrink back in horror if they knew the pestilential spot in which it had grown."
When Werner had (characteristically enough after his conversion) studied theology and made himself acquainted with the Catholic ritual, he was ordained priest. It was in Vienna, in 1814, at the time of the Congress, that he made his first appearance as a preacher. He was most successful. People were impressed by his tall, spare, ascetic figure and his long thin face, with the prominent nose and the dark brown eyes gleaming under heavy eyebrows. He preached to enormous crowds sermons of which the Monk's sermon in Wallenstein's Lager may serve to give a faint idea. They were full of high-flown bombast and disgusting obscenities, united wit and wisdom with ascetic nonsense and tiresome twaddle, overflowed with denunciations of heretics and eulogies of the rosary.[19]