As early as 1826, Joseph de Maistre declares that Görres, as author of Der Kampf der Kirchenfreiheit mit der Staatsgewalt in der Katholischen Schweiz ("The Struggle of the Church with State Despotism in Catholic Switzerland"), has championed the cause of the Church with both genius and justice, and yet more boldly and effectually than it has ever been done before. Such praise from such lips carries weight; it indicates, moreover, that we have reached the point at which German Romanticism passes into French, or rather, general European reaction.
In 1827 Görres published a work which is of interest as forming a prelude to his Mysticism, namely, Emanuel Swedenborg, his Visions and his Relations to the Church.
In 1833 Clemens Brentano moved to Munich, where Görres had already settled. The old school friends met once more, and Brentano's influence over Görres was great. Brentano was now entirely given over to superstitious fanaticism. Even Schelling's new philosophy of revelation was not pious enough for him. Talking with some young theologians, he shouted: "It is of no use praising it to me! One drop of holy water is more precious to me than the whole of Schelling's philosophy." He had brought all his memoranda of Catharina Emmerich's visions and outpourings to Munich with him; he no longer needed the Gospels; from her he had learned more of Christ's sayings and journeyings than is to be found in the Scriptures. The saint had even revealed a map of Palestine to him. Görres was soon as firm a believer in miracles and myths as Brentano. Between 1836 and 1842 he wrote the four volumes of his Mysticism, the most insane book produced by German Romanticism.
The farther Görres penetrated into the mysteries of witchcraft and sorcery, the more fanciful and peculiar did he himself become. He believed that he was possessed by an evil spirit. On one occasion he complained that the devil, provoked by his interference in Satanic affairs, had stolen one of his manuscripts; it was, however, found some time afterwards in his bookcase.
When the religious disturbances broke out in Cologne, Görres came forward as the spokesman of the Ultramontanes in their dispute with the Prussian Ministry. His passionate diatribes against Protestantism were couched in Biblical language—his opponents were a brood of vipers, the Prussian State was possessed by an evil spirit, &c. This particular demon he describes as a horrible ghost, "whom it is honouring too much to call a spirit;" it is, he says, the ghost of the demon which in the Prussian army of our grandfathers' days handled the whip which flogged seven backs at a time.
Görres won the admiration of Count Montalembert, the leader of the French Catholics, by his polemical feats. In Catholic Germany he was regarded as a father of the Church, and called "the Catholic Luther." He succeeded in drawing the Bavarian Government into the movement; the opponents of the Protestant Prussian Government were allowed to publish their lucubrations unchecked in the Bavarian press, and it was Görres' hope that Bavaria, as an important Catholic power, would openly take up the contest.
No expression of politico-religious fanaticism was too outrageous for him. He went the length of declaring that the Government, by permitting mixed marriages, compelled the Catholic parent to bring up "twofold bastards"—and this in the face of the fact that the King of Bavaria was the son of a Protestant mother and had married a Protestant wife.
At the time of the violent dispute as to the authenticity of the coat of the Saviour preserved at Trèves, Görres was highly delighted with the success of a pilgrimage to Trèves, which was promptly organised, and in which the Rhinelanders, to the number of a million, took part, in order to annoy the Protestant Prussians. To him this pilgrimage was "the triumph of the victorious Church." The argument that the holy garment could not be genuine, seeing that several other places possessed similar coats, he dismissed with a reference to the miraculous multiplication of loaves recorded in the New Testament.[1]
The Romantic literary theory that manner is something absolutely independent of matter, was a theory put into practice in politics by Friedrich von Gentz. We called Kleist the German Mérimée; for several reasons Gentz might be called the German Talleyrand. In his mature years he might, like Metternich, have written under his own portrait: "Nur kein Pathos!" ("Anything except pathos!") He is the very embodiment of Romantic irony, the incarnate spirit of Lucinde. He does not, however, become a typical figure until he is over forty, at the time when a period of diplomatic activity succeeded to revolutionary upheavals and the Napoleonic wars, the time when the watchword was reaction, that is to say, quiet—quiet at any price, extinction of all the European conflagrations, and rest, profound rest for the sick, the weary, and the convalescent peoples; when consequently, as in a sick room, the great aim was to get rid as quietly as possible of disturbers of the peace and prevent all noise and uproar. "Gentz," says Gottschall, "understood how to give to the official publications that indescribable polish, that classic smoothness, that Olympian dignity which, untouched by the fate of mortals, allows no drop of nectar and ambrosia to be spilled from the cup of the gods, though blood may be flowing in torrents in the regions below. This distinguished manner of passing lightly over the small shocks by which nations were shattered into fragments, gave a complexion of mildness and grace to the despotic policy of the day. One heard only a puff, not a report; it was the noiseless slaughter of the air-gun."
To outward seeming, Legitimist principles were being vindicated; in point of fact, their vindicators were not Legitimists when their interests bade them be the reverse. In them Goethe's words were fulfilled: "None are so Legitimist as those who can legitimise themselves." The cause Gentz championed was a bad cause, but even the champion of a bad cause is interesting if possessed of remarkable talent. And Gentz was talented in an extraordinary degree. Varnhagen rightly said of him: "Never has the dust of German scholarship been stirred up with greater éclat; never has learning been displayed to such advantage."