In Werner's drama, Attila, a young man whom Attila loves is accused of perjury and confesses his guilt. Attila, who is an emotional, sentimental enthusiast, embraces him, shedding burning tears, and then orders him to be torn asunder by horses. Cruel sentimentality, fanatic brutality, is Romantic wont. Along with Attila we have Pope Leo, another character who seems to have escaped from the pages of Görres' Mysticism—this time undoubtedly from the chapter treating of the height from the ground to which the enthusiast in his religious rapture is at times raised; for, while he is praying, Leo "raises himself higher and higher, until he is resting only on the tips of his toes." He sympathises with Attila, and has a sort of magnetic influence over him.
In Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft ("The Consecration of Strength"), the mystery of religious consecration is the subject. The play opens significantly with a scene of the Novalis type, miners going down into and being drawn up from a mine. The representation of Luther is more suggestive of a Catholic saint than of the Protestant reformer. Of Katharina von Bora, too, a saintly character is made. Luther and she are accompanied throughout the play by guardian angels, Luther by the boy Theobald, who is really art in the shape of a seraph, and Katharina by a girl named Therese, who represents faith. A few years after Werner had thus sung the praises of the Reformation, he was converted; whereupon he wrote a poem, Die Weihe der Unkraft, full of such sentiments regarding his drama as: "Durch dies Gaukelblendwerk sprach ich der Wahrheit Hohn!" (With this delusive mummery I set at nought the truth.)
The subject of his last tragedy, Die Mutter der Makkabäer, offered glorious opportunities for introducing all the tortures described in the legends of the martyrs; it abounds in physical suffering and religious ecstasies. The sons of Salome must either eat of the flesh of the sacrifice offered to Jupiter or die the most cruel death. The comical idea of its being a matter of life and death whether children taste certain food or not, is treated with the most overwhelming solemnity. In a state of supernatural excitement, Salome entreats her children, one by one, to allow themselves to be impaled, flayed, burned, &c. The sentimental chief torturer, Antiochus, admires Salome intensely; he actually falls upon his knees before her, crying—
"Du bist kein irdisch Weib!—Solch Opfer spendet
Kein menschlich Wesen!—Segne mich, Du, vom Olymp gesendet!"[22]
And the equally sentimental Salome blesses him. Her son Benoni, too, blesses his murderer, immediately after which his hands and feet are cut off, and he is boiled in oil. Presently two loud axe-strokes are heard—Abir's feet have been cut off. Juda is tortured next; and so on it goes. Antiochus, the barbarous king, or Werner, the equally barbarous poet, has the children broken on the wheel joint by joint, and their limbs torn off. The mother, who is compelled to witness it all, feels nothing but the rapturous bliss of martyrdom; and when Antiochus, in his insane sentimentality, bows before her a second time, "deeply moved," crying: "Willst, grosse Niobe, Du Dich von mir im Zorne trennen?" ("And must thou part from me in wrath, great Niobe?"), she lays her right hand on his head, and says "very solemnly": "Ich weiss, dass mein Erlöser lebt!—Lern' sterbend ihn erkennen!" ("I know that my Redeemer liveth!—Ere death come, mayst thou know him too!").
In the last scene the background opens, and we see the instruments of torture and the huge copper full of boiling oil, in which Benoni lies. His wife is staring down into it. The flames of the stake are still blazing. Salome's spirit appears above them and extinguishes them.
And there was a time when this was considered poetry! Goethe took a warm interest in Werner, and had several of his plays performed in the court theatre at Weimar. In 1808 he wrote of him to Jacobi: "It seems strange to an old pagan like me, that I can see the cross planted on my own territory, and hear Christ's blood and wounds preached poetically, without its being actually offensive to me. The standpoint to which philosophy has raised us makes this degree of tolerance obligatory. We have learned to value the ideal, even when it manifests itself in the strangest forms."
Few educated men will be inclined to take so mild and tolerant a view of the matter to-day. The development is utterly repugnant to us. For we have seen to what it led. We have seen that this "Christian poetry" helped to bring about the worst intellectual reaction of modern times. Men played so long with the idea of the purifying flames of the stake that they began to extol them in sober earnest. It is but a step from Werner to Görres, who ardently defends exorcism of evil spirits and punishment of witchcraft; and the distance is no greater between Görres and Joseph de Maistre, who writes: "In many a well-governed country in Europe they say of a man who has set fire to an inhabited house and been burned with it: 'It is only what he deserved.' Is a human being who has been guilty of any amount of theoretical and practical (i.e. religious) evil-doing less deserving of being burned? When one reflects that it was undoubtedly in the power of the Inquisition to have prevented the French Revolution, one cannot feel certain that the sovereign who calmly discarded such a weapon did not deal a fatal blow to humanity."
If Romantic Christianity is, as Ruge says, the Christianity which cannot be resolved into humanitarianism, then Joseph de Maistre is a genuine Romanticist.
The whole history of Romanticism substantiates Ruge's famous definition: "A Romanticist is an author who, aided by all the intellectual advantages of our day, assails the periods of 'enlightenment' and of revolution, and reprobates and combats the principle of pure humanitarianism in the domains of science, art, morality, and politics."