Tales From the "Phantasus," etc. of Ludwig Tieck

by Ludwig Tieck

"Egbert," "Eckhart," and the "Runenberg," naturally form into a group together. They are different exhibitions of very similar ideas, and it will be enough to explain one. I should advise people, however, to read the three together straightforward, and then try to analyse for themselves the impression left upon their minds. Perhaps it may be something of this sort: that a single sin unrepented of and unatoned for becomes a destiny; a seed from which, however diminutive and trifling it may look, a whole life of crime and wickedness shoots up as a matter of course, perhaps inevitably. Cause and effect, effect and cause, going on producing and reproducing each other, each successive step leading further and deeper into the mire, return becoming more and more difficult, and at last impossible.

Look at Christian in the "Runenberg." He is born to a calm and serene life of tranquillity and peace; affectionate parents—a simple routine of the gentlest and most beautiful of all nature's choicest occupations—far away from all temptation—secure from every danger—a home that ought to have given him all, and more than all, of enjoyment and content,—whose life could promise more happily than his? Yet he has no love, no heart, no feeling for it. His sense of duty is not strong enough to set him to work; he finds it dull and uninteresting; he craves for excitement, for something new. The plain life is not grand enough to suit his exalted aspirations: he must go to the mountains, to the ups and downs, and rough and rugged ways of the world, where he may climb, and hunt, and seek a broader range for activity and enjoyment; he does not think of asking leave—he goes; he never regrets leaving home; and at first finds all bright, and gay, and delightful sunshine. The happy, happy hunting-time; and who so happy in it as Christian? But it soon palls—it does not satisfy. The cup is poisoned, there is a gall and wormwood in the taste the sweet leaves behind; and again he thinks of home. He sings his old song; but the words come wearily and listlessly—he has no heart for hunting any more. He wishes to be at home again; but he makes no effort. The mysterious mandrake in sympathy with his old life wakes up and speaks to him. It is the warning-voice of conscience; but he dreams on. The tempter comes, and he is lost irretrievably. The moment of return is offered—now or never! and he refuses. He does not stay among the mountains; he flies away to the plains beyond; he flings off, as he fondly believes, the dark mysterious incidents of that night, as a wild and impious dream; he thinks he is what he was; away he goes again to the plains to his old employment, and he is happy, industrious, contented in it. Every thing again looks smooth, and bright, and beautiful; but he has not gone back, and now he may not. What should have been for his peace, now is but a further snare to make him fancy all is right with him. He does indeed set out to seek his father, but wearily and unwillingly. His way would have led him back over the mountains; but there he is not permitted to go. The object of his journey comes to meet him; they go back together; he becomes more and more prosperous, and sinks deeper and deeper into his fatal delusion. Yet the fatal tablet is in his heart, the bond by which he is bound to evil; even on his wedding-night he cannot forget the giver. At length the long-smothered poison burst out with all its fury, and flowers touch his heart no more. He curses them and nature; the warning mandrake, instead of the voice of conscience, is but a revelation of the power of evil. It has but taught him to despair, and seek his friends elsewhere; and he is lost for ever.

Of the more awful person in this fearful story I will not speak; but for the outline of the fate of Christian, who can look round him into the most ordinary life, and not see innumerable instances of it? The burden of the other two stories is very similar: the way to understand them is to try and analyse the feelings left on our mind by the whole, and not distract ourselves by assuming a fancied meaning, and speculating with the particulars to make each fragment fit our theory. Do not let us perplex ourselves to find out what the little dog is, what is the meaning of the bird, and the old woman. They may have many meanings; but we shall never find them by beginning at that end. It is only by the light of the whole that the parts become intelligible.

"The Love-charm" is a work of a different nature; it is one of the most remarkable of all Tieck's writings, and, as far as we know, stands alone among the productions of modern art. With the help of a popular German superstition, he has woven a tragedy out of the ordinary events of every-day life, the spirit of which approaches as near as modern thought can be made to approach to the fatalism of the Greek drama. A destiny of some kind, either moral or external, is essential to tragedy. What we mean by "the terrible" as applied to human action, is, that the free will of man is laid under the influence of some external power, which he has little or no ability to resist, which hurries him on through a series of action and incident, from which, if in full possession of his self-control, he would shrink in horror. Thus, in common life the crimes men commit under the influence of any of the loftier passions, such as love or revenge, or when goaded on by famine or despair, or which men do in ignorance, when the ignorance may partially, but not entirely, be their own fault, are terrible, and therefore tragic. The individual seems to be sacrificed, not to deserve all that has fallen on him; his fate becomes one of the startling mysteries of life. The meaner or more selfish the passion under which the crime is committed, or the cooler and more deliberate the action, the more what he does loses the character of tragic, and becomes merely disgusting. Pity goes with terror, and in such cases there can be no pity. The destiny in Shakspere's tragedies is a moral one; not an external power constraining, but an internal power impelling; working not against, but in and through the will. Such was the influence of his father's spirit on Hamlet, Hecate and the Witches on Macbeth, Iago's intellect on Othello, and so on with the rest. The Greek destiny, though in our way of thinking less human, is more terrible even than that of Shakspere. The sins of the fathers visited on the children, curses continuing to work generation after generation, and the helpless struggle of the victim only precipitating him into a darker doom—there is a stern grandeur about this form of thought; it is a feature of a broader philosophy than ours to bear to see the individual sacrificed, and believe that in some mysterious way the well-being of the whole is furthered by it, "with calm self-surrender to hear the murderer's hand upon a brother's throat, yet stand with upturned unquailing eyes before the everlasting Providence." It is a scheme of thought so unlike ours that we can hardly realise it, it is so like a monster to us. Yet this Love-charm is an attempt to do it; and although the spell is but over a single person, and forms no portion of a broad scheme of Providence; although for the stately forms of kings and heroes stalking across the stage, we have but the ball-going ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century, and but an old witch for the Delphic oracle, or the gods appearing in visible form; few people can rise from reading it without having been made to feel that this life, after all, is a stranger thing than they have been in the habit of imagining.

Emilius's character is eminently tragic. He has every feature which can interest us, without that moral or religious force in him which would make us feel shocked at his fate. The Greeks felt that good and holy men were no fitter subjects of tragedy than very wicked ones. There is something revolting (μιαρόν) in the idea that a good man can be allowed even in ignorance to fall into crime. Whatever be the mysterious ways of Providence; whatever fearful power there may be abroad, working on and influencing the destinies of mankind; what indeed is the meaning of the prince of the power of the air, or whether there be really such an element as chance; this, at least, we must believe, that the good man is in the hands of the Highest, and that the laws of nature would sooner be reversed than he be let fall from His hands. But Emilius is a dreamer, whose power exhausts itself in speculation, and never acts at all except on impulse: without firmness, without will to give oneness of design and consistency to his actions, this character—which is no law to itself, which will not command itself, no matter how pure may be in general its purposes, or how lofty its aspirations—is exactly the one most open to be laid under the spell of some other force. Every man's life, taken from beginning to end, looked back upon presents an exhibition of some one law or principle; whatever it be, in the end it is found to be tolerably uniform and consistent: its principle may be an internal one of will and conscience; if it is not this, if it grows not out of self-command, it is pretty sure to be some more fatally perilous one.

Emilius is admirably worked throughout. Contrast his feelings towards man and nature, and life and love, as they appear in the first short poem, and what they have become a few hours later, merely from the excitement and irritation produced by the ball. The scene of the village-marriage, the young man's warmth and nobleness, and exquisite susceptibility, are introduced to heighten our pity for his fate; while the way in which he is led to it, in a dreamy mood, listlessly yielding to the caprice of a wayward companion, and not from any real wish to find out want and relieve suffering, reduces the value of the action to a mere gratification of a passion, and thus, while it deepens our sympathy, adds nothing to our respect. The concluding scene is so magnificent, that we cannot run the risk of injuring its effect by offering any criticism on it; and with these few words we leave the "Love-charm."

In "Eckhart" and the "Runenberg" we have seen some of the moral trials which meet men on first starting into life. In the "Friends" we have the lighter kind of speculative. A very little philosophy serves to teach us how very unreal every thing is that passes before our eyes; how it all takes a colouring from our spirits; how the very same thing appears almost contradictory to different people, or to the same person in different moods; that we do not so much see things themselves, as our own image thrown into them. Accordingly, men begin to crave for a truer insight; they try to clear their intellect of the gauzy film of feeling, and see things as they are. Ludwig, a young indolent dreamer, full of all this kind of sentimental longing to be rid of sentimentality, is on his way to visit a sick friend. He sits down in the heat of the day under a tree to indulge in the pleasure of a little disconsolate reflection on his friend's melancholy letter, and insensibly falls off into a sleep, and dreams. At once he finds all the difficulties of the world solved for him, all his highest aspirations satisfied. The chasm that divides the worlds of sense and spirit is bridged over; his mind meets its true objects. The earth he despised he is now relieved from; the deceptions of nature all vanish; he sees things as they are; he is in the real world of truth and beauty; nothing is subjective any longer; he breathes a real genuine objectivity; all mortal weaknesses, and with them love, may not enter here; the phantoms of his childhood flit before him again, but no longer as they were; they are transfigured into the cold sublimity of Grecian goddesses. Alas! he is far from satisfied; after the first few days of rapture, he would gladly be on earth again. He wished to be as the gods; his wish is granted, and among the gods he cannot live. This cold world may be a very grand place, but it is not for such as him. Like Lessing's Phœnix, at first sight the dwellers here seem beautiful beyond all conception; the second glance shews that if a man will be like them he must be content to be the only one of his race, with none to love him and none that he can love. "He is like the spirits he can comprehend, not like them." The truth he sought, he finds he has left behind; the old earth is his true home; and men, be they what they will, are his brothers. His friend comes to meet him; but he does not know him again, because here for the first time he sees him as he is, while before he had only seen in him the image of himself. If this be truth, he is sick of it; he sighs for the deception again, if deception it was that had been so delightful; he wakes to find his vision but a dream, in the sweet reality of his friend's embrace.

The "Elves," the last story which we shall notice, is of a far more solemn character; with all its beauty, it has a sad dirge-like tone. Written fourteen years later than the others, it is now the true poet's lament over the hard insensibility of the world to its true good. The world of spirit lies stretched out under the eyes of the children of earth; the invisible visible; but from earth and to earthly perceptions, dull, gloomy, unattractive. To the busy practical man of business, to the prudential economist, the man of understanding, the workers in it seem but idle, worthless vagabonds; these lazy good-for-nothings, that scarcely till the ground, are never seen at church, and shew no symptom of respectability; why do they cumber the earth? the talk is of cage and pillory for them; no child of theirs may approach the unhallowed precincts. Accident leads a young girl beyond the boundary, and then how changed is every thing! The dull scene has become more brilliant than the gardens of Aladdin; scales fall from her eyes; now it is the old world that is dark and gloomy. Down among the mysteries of the fountains of Nature, she sees her now no longer yielding reluctantly an unwilling pittance to the sweat of the labour of man, but uncursed. At the word of the dwellers in that enchanted land, her choicest fruits and flowers she pours out in lavish abundance. The spirits of the elements work visibly there, and the mortal sees them, and knows now who are the true benefactors of mankind. Time and space exist not for these pure beings. Seven years are gone in one night, and the narrow fir-clump contains the garden of Eden.

The mortal goes back to earth: what she has seen she may not tell. These esoteric secrets of the poet are not for the crawling animal who cannot hold himself upright, nor turn his eyes to heaven, and who only knows the sun by the sight of his own shadow: but one of them she weds; and the child of these two—oh, what may we not hope from that child! Alas, in vain! In vain, from the secret labours of these beautiful beings, the brooks run fresh and full, and the fields overflow with plenty. Men will not see; in the midst of their abundance they curse the author of it. In an evil hour of weakness the initiated betrays the secret, and then all is gone. The gloom of the fir-clump vanishes; it becomes like any other. The gipsy rabble are gone; what all men hated, they are relieved of; but with this comes the loss, too, of all they prized—their corn, their wine, and fruitful trees. Famine comes, and drought and pestilence; the elfin child dies, and all is ruin and disaster. They see not their tokens. There is not one prophet more. What a deep philosophy runs through all this!

Have we heard our prophets? At the end of the last century one said:—