[21] "You wicked Jacques! What? Die and leave your old comrade? No, no, Jacques—you must not do it."
[22] "Thou art not of this earth! No mortal offers such a sacrifice! Bless me, thou daughter of Olympian gods!"
[XVI]
ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND POLITICS
In its first period, Romanticism is distinctly non-political. It exalts the established order of things (vide Novalis), it submissively acknowledges the authority of the king and of the Church, but in its purely literary productions it is, generally speaking, politically colourless.
Take Tieck's satiric comedies. In their outward form there is something Aristophanic; but their satire is never directed against any political character or tendency. It is aimed at "enlightenment;" and from Tieck's biographer we learn exactly what the poet understood by this word. At that time, says Köpke, the most prominent and respected men in Berlin, those who were still the leaders of public opinion, were of the school of Frederick the Great. The prevailing opinions of the eighteenth century had become their second nature. They were moral, conscientious men, who, in all the different departments of administration, science, and literature, devoted themselves zealously, and often with extraordinary industry, to their duties. Whether government officials, theologians, teachers, critics, popular philosophers, or poets, they all aimed at making religion and science useful, and at educating mankind by external provisions and rules. Intelligibility and popularity being to them all-important, they naturally diluted and levelled everything to one general plane of mediocrity. A certain blameless philistinism became their moral ideal, an ideal which seemed poor and tame in comparison with the old fervour of faith. Lessing was their prophet, and they believed themselves to be perpetuating his tradition. We can readily understand that they fell foul of Goethe, which indeed Lessing himself had done, and that they had a narrow conception of the significance and value of imagination. To them it was only the handmaid of utility, and of no value except as an instrument in the service of morality.
Everywhere throughout Tieck's writings we come upon mockery of this moral literary tendency. Take, for instance, Der Gestiefelte Kater ("Puss in Boots").—Hinze, the cat, is taking an evening walk, absorbed in melancholy thought. He begins to sing a hunting song. A nightingale strikes up in a bush close at hand. "She sings magnificently, this songstress of the groves," says Hinze; "but think how delicious she must taste! Happy indeed are the great of the earth; they can eat as many nightingales and larks as they fancy. We poor common people have to be content with the song, with the beauty, with the indescribably sweet harmony.—It is terrible that I cannot hear anything sing without wanting to eat it."
Hisses from the pit. The worthy audience is shocked by the cat's ignoble train of thought. So Hinze lets the nightingale alone; but presently, when a rabbit comes bounding by, he catches him adroitly and puts him into his bag. It is his intention, by the gift of this rabbit, to win the king's heart for his master. "The creature," he reflects aloud, "is a sort of cousin of mine; but it's the way of the world nowadays—kinsman against kinsman, brother against brother!" He is presently strongly tempted to eat the rabbit himself, but overcomes the desire, and cries: "Fie! for shame, Hinze! Is it not the duty of the truly noble to sacrifice themselves and their inclinations to the happiness of their fellow-creatures? It is the end for which we were created, and he who cannot do it—oh! it were better for him that he had never been born!" He is about to retire, but loud applause and cries of Da Capo! oblige him to repeat the last speech, after which he bows, and goes off with the rabbit. The audience is in the seventh heaven of delight—Hinze's speech is as effective as one of Iffland's tirades.
The satire in Tieck's Däumling ("Hop o' my Thumb") is also of a literary nature, being directed against the neo-classic tendency, and in particular against Goethe. Such a theme, treated, as it was in part, in the dignified metre of Greek tragedy, afforded many opportunities for drollery. All the incidents of the medieval fairy-tale are viewed from the antique standpoint. Of the seven-league boots, for instance, we read: "Trust me; I see quite well that these boots have come down to us from old Greek times. No man in our day produces work like that—so strong, so simple, such noble lines, such stitching! No, no! this is the work of Phidias, there is no doubt about it. Look! When I place the one in this position—how noble, how plastic, how grand in its simplicity! No superfluity, no ornament, no Gothic detail, none of the romantic medley of our days—when sole, leather, flaps, folds, blacking, varnish, must all contribute to produce variety, brilliancy, a dazzling resplendence in which there is nothing ideal. Nowadays the leather must shine, the sole must creak when one sets one's foot down: wretched rhyming trickery of which the ancients knew nothing." Several of Goethe's favourite words are employed in this more sarcastic than witty description.