Two months of intense mental exertion in the seclusion of his island left Kleist exhausted, and he fell seriously ill; whereupon Ulrica, on receiving belated news of his plight, hastened to Bern to care for him. When a political revolution drove Ludwig Wieland from Bern, they followed the latter to Weimar, where the poet Wieland, the dean of the remarkable group of great authors gathered at Weimar, received Kleist kindly, and made him his guest at his country estate. With great difficulty Wieland succeeded in persuading his secretive visitor to reveal his literary plans; and when Kleist recited from memory some of the scenes of his unfinished Guiscard, the old poet was transported with enthusiasm; these fragments seemed to him worthy of the united genius of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, and he was convinced that Kleist had the power to "fill the void in the history of the German drama that even Goethe and Schiller had not filled." But in spite of Wieland's generous encouragement, Kleist found it impossible to complete this masterpiece, and his hopeless pursuit of the perfect ideal became an intolerable obsession to his ambitious and sensitive soul. He could not remain in Weimar. In Dresden old friends sought to cheer him in his desperate attempts to seize the elusive ideal; to more than one of them, in his despair, he proposed a joint suicide. Again he was driven to seek solace and inspiration in travel, a friend accompanying him to Switzerland. Arrived at Geneva in October, 1803, Kleist fell into the deepest despondency, and wrote Ulrica a letter full of hopeless renunciation. Half crazed by disappointment and wounded pride, he rushed madly through France to Paris, broke with his friend, who had again repelled a joint suicide, burned his manuscript of Guiscard, and made secretly for Boulogne, hoping to find an honorable death in Napoleon's projected invasion of England. Fortunately he fell in with an acquaintance who saved him from the risk of being arrested as a spy, and started him back on his homeward way. He was detained at Mentz by serious illness, but finally, in June, 1804, reappeared in Potsdam. The poet's spirit was broken, and he was glad to accept a petty civil post that took him to Königsberg. After a year of quiet work, he was enabled, by a small pension from Queen Louise, to resign his office and again devote himself to literature.
The two years spent in Königsberg were years of remarkable development in Kleist's literary power. Warned by the catastrophe of the earlier attempt to reach the heights at a single bound, he now schooled himself with simpler tasks: adaptations, from the French, of La Fontaine's poem, The two Pigeons, and of Molière's comedy, Amphitryon—both so altered in the interpretation that they seem more like originals than translations; prose tales that are admirable examples of this form—The Marquise of O., The Earthquake in Chili, and the first part of the masterly short story Michael Kohlhaas; and the recasting of the unique comedy The Broken Jug. Finally he attempted another great drama in verse, Penthesilea, embodying in the old classical story the tragedy of his own desperate struggle for Guiscard, and his crushing defeat.
Meanwhile the clouds were gathering about his beloved country, and in October, 1806, the thunderbolt fell in the rout of the Prussian army at Jena. Napoleon's victorious troops pressed on to Berlin and the Prussian court retreated with the tide of fugitives to Königsberg. Kleist was overwhelmed by the misery of this cataclysm, which, however, he had clearly foreseen and foretold. With a group of friends he started on foot for Dresden, but was arrested as a spy at the gates of Berlin and held for months as a prisoner in French fortresses, before the energetic efforts of Ulrica and others procured his release.
Late in July, 1807, he finally arrived in Dresden, where he remained until April, 1809. These were the happiest and the most prolific months of his fragmentary life. The best literary and social circles of the Saxon capital were open to him, his talent was recognized by the leading men of the city, a laurel wreath was placed upon his brow by "the prettiest hands in Dresden;" at last he found all his hopes being realized. With three friends he embarked on an ambitious publishing enterprise, which included the issuing of a sumptuous literary and artistic monthly, the Phoebus. This venture was foredoomed to failure by the inexperience of its projectors and by the unsettled condition of a time full of political upheaval and most unfavorable to any literary enterprise. Kleist's own contributions to this periodical were of the highest value; here appeared first in print generous portions of Penthesilea, The Broken Jug, and the new drama Kitty of Heilbronn, the first act of the ill-fated Robert Guiscard, evidently reproduced from memory, The Marquise of O., and part of Michael Kohlhaas. If we add to these works the great patriotic drama, Arminius (Die Hermannsschlacht), two tales, The Betrothal in San Domingo and The Foundling, and lyric and narrative poems, the production of the brief period in Dresden is seen to bulk very large.
In the stress of the times and in spite of the most strenuous efforts, the Phoebus went under with the first volume, and the publishing business was a total wreck. Kleist's joy at the acceptance of The Broken Jug by Goethe for the Weimar theatre was turned to bitterness when, because of unintelligent acting and stage management, this brilliant comedy failed wretchedly; the disappointed author held Goethe responsible for this fiasco and foolishly attacked him in a series of spiteful epigrams. He longed to have his Arminius performed at Vienna, but the Austrian authorities were too timid to risk the production of a play that openly preached German unity and a war of revenge against the "Roman tyranny" of Napoleon. Kleist then turned to lyric poetry and polemic tirades for the expression of his patriotic ardor. When Austria rose against Napoleon, he started for the seat of war and was soon the happy eye-witness of the Austrian victory at Aspern, in May, 1809. In Prague, with the support of the commandant, he planned a patriotic journal, for which he immediately wrote a series of glowing articles, mostly in the form of political satires. This plan was wrecked by the decisive defeat of the Austrians at Wagram in July.
Broken by these successive disasters, Kleist again fell seriously ill; for four months his friends had no word from him, and reports of his death were current. In November, 1809, he came to Frankfort-on-the-Oder to dispose of his share in the family home as a last means of raising funds, and again disappeared. In January, 1810, he passed through Frankfort on the way to Berlin, to which the Prussian court, now subservient to Napoleon, had returned. He found many old friends in Berlin, and even had prospects of recognition from the court, as the brave and beautiful Queen Louise was very kindly disposed toward him. Again he turned to dramatic production, and in the patriotic Prussian play, Prince Frederick of Homburg, created his masterpiece. Fortune seemed once more to be smiling upon the dramatist; the Prince of Homburg was to be dedicated to Queen Louise, and performed privately at the palace of Prince Radziwill, before being given at the National Theatre. But again the cup of success was dashed from the poet's lips. With the death of Queen Louise, in July, 1810, he lost his only powerful friend at court, and now found it impossible to get a hearing for his drama.
[Illustration: SARCOPHAGUS OF QUEEN LOUISE IN THE MAUSOLEUM AT
CHARLOTTENBURG Sculptor, Christian Rauch]
Other disappointments came in rapid succession. Kitty of Heilbronn, performed after many delays at Vienna, was not a success, and Iffland, the popular dramatist and director of the Berlin Theatre, rejected this play, while accepting all manner of commonplace works by inferior authors. The famous publisher Cotta did print Penthesilea, but was so displeased with it that he made no effort to sell the edition, and Kitty of Heilbronn, declined by Cotta, fell flat when it was printed in Berlin. Two volumes of tales, including some masterpieces in this form, hardly fared better; the new numbers in this collection were The Duel, The Beggar Woman of Locarno, and Saint Cecilia. Again the much-tried poet turned to journalism. From October, 1810, until March, 1811, with the assistance of the popular philosopher Adam Müller and the well-known romantic authors Arnim, Brentano, and Fouqué, he published a politico-literary journal appearing five times a week. The enterprise began well, and aroused a great deal of interest. Gradually, however, the censorship of a government that was at once timid and tyrannical limited the scope and destroyed the effectiveness of the paper, and Kleist spent himself in vain efforts to keep it alive. The poet now found himself in a desperate predicament, financially ruined by the failure of all his enterprises, and discredited with the government, from which he vainly sought some reparation for the violence done to his journal; worst of all, he found himself without honor at home, where he was looked upon as a ne'er-do-well and a disgrace to the reputation of a fine old military family. As a last resort he applied for reinstatement in the army, it being a time when Prussia seemed to be girding herself for another struggle with Napoleon. But the attempt to borrow enough money for his military equipment failed, and he found no sympathy or support on a final visit to his family in Frankfort. In October, 1811, the patriotic men who had been quietly preparing for the inevitable war of liberation were horrified by the movement of the Prussian government toward another alliance with Napoleon; and Kleist felt it impossible to enter an army that might at any moment be ordered to support the arch-enemy of his country. His case had become utterly hopeless.
At this juncture the unfortunate poet found what he had so often sought in his crises of despair—a companion in suicide. Through Adam Müller he had become acquainted with Henrietta Vogel, an intelligent woman of romantic temperament, who was doomed by an incurable disease to a life of suffering. She listened eagerly to Kleist's suggestions of an escape together from the intolerable ills of life. The two drove from Berlin to a solitary inn on the shore of the Wannsee, near Potsdam; here Kleist wrote a touching farewell letter to his sister, and, on the afternoon of November 21, 1811, after the most deliberate preparations, the companions strolled into the silent pine woods, where Kleist took Henrietta's life and then his own. In the same lonely place his grave was dug, and here the greatest Prussian poet lay forgotten, after the brief, though violent, sensation of his tragic end; half a century elapsed before a Prussian prince set up a simple granite monument to mark the grave. Ten years passed after Kleist's death before his last great dramas, Arminius and the Prince of Homburg, were published, edited by the eminent poet and critic Ludwig Tieck, who also brought out, in 1826, the first collection of Kleist's works. Long before this time, the patriotic uprising for which he had labored with desperate zeal in his later works, had brought liberation to Germany; it was on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Kleist's birth that Napoleon's power was shaken by the decisive Battle of Leipzig.
Heinrich von Kleist was born into a generation that was dominated by the spirit of Romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels were a few years older, Fouqué was of the same age as he, and Arnim and Brentano somewhat younger. His acquaintance was largely with the authors who represented this tendency. In his own works, however, Kleist was singularly independent of the romantic influence. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as his character had many traits in common with the ardent spirits of the Romantic group. His uncompromising individualism and overweening ambition, his love of travel, his enthusiastic acceptance of Rousseau's gospel of Nature, are characteristically Romantic, and so, we may say, is his passionate patriotism. Eccentricities he had in plenty; there was something morbid in his excessive reserve, his exaggerated secretiveness about the most important interests of his life, as there surely was in his moroseness, which deepened at times into black despair. Goethe was most unpleasantly impressed by this abnormal quality of Kleist's personality, and said of the younger poet: "In spite of my honest desire to sympathize with him, I could not avoid a feeling of horror and loathing, as of a body beautifully endowed by nature, but infected with an incurable disease." That this judgment was unduly harsh is evident enough from the confidence and affection that Kleist inspired in many of the best men of his time.