Whatever may have been Kleist's personal peculiarities, his works give evidence of the finest artistic sanity and conscience. His acute sense of literary form sets him off from the whole generation of Romanticists, who held the author's personal caprice to be the supreme law of poetry, and most of whose important works were either medleys or fragments. He was his own severest critic, and labored over his productions, as he did over his own education, with untiring energy and intense concentration. A less scrupulous author would not have destroyed the manuscript of Robert Guiscard because he could not keep throughout its action the splendid promise of the first act. His works are usually marked by rare logical and artistic consistency. Seldom is there any interruption of the unity and simple directness of his actions by sub-plots or episodes, and he scorned the easy theatrical devices by which the successful playwrights of his day gained their effects. Whether in drama or story, his action grows naturally out of the characters and the situations. Hence the marvelous fact that his dramas can be performed with hardly an alteration, though the author, never having seen any of them on the stage, lacked the practical experience by which most dramatists learn the technique of their art.
Kleist evidently studied the models of classical art with care. His unerring sense of form, his artistic restraint in a day when caprice was the ruling fashion, and the conciseness of his expression, are doubtless due to classical influence. But, at the same time, he was an innovator, one of the first forerunners of modern realism. He describes and characterizes with careful, often microscopic detail; his psychological analysis is remarkably exact and incisive; and he fearlessly uses the ugly or the trivial when either better serves his purpose.
In all the varied volume of Kleist's works, there is very little that is mediocre or negligible. The Schroffenstein Family, to be sure, is prentice work, but it can bear comparison with the first plays of the greatest dramatists. The fragment of Robert Guiscard is masterly in its rapid cumulative exposition, representing the hero, idolized by his troops, as stricken with the plague when the crowning glory of his military career seems to be within his grasp; while the discord between Guiscard's son and nephew presages an irrepressible family conflict. The style, as Wieland felt when he listened with rapture to the author's recital, is a blend of classical and Elizabethan art. The opening chorus of the people, the formal balanced speeches, the analytical action, beginning on the verge of the catastrophe, are traits borrowed from Greek tragedy. On the other hand, there is much realistic characterization and a Shakespearian variety and freedom of tone. The Broken Jug, too, is analytical in its conduct. Almost from the first it is evident that Adam, the village judge, is himself the culprit in the case at trial in his court, and the comic efforts of the arch-rascal to squirm out of the inevitable discovery only serve to make his guilt the surer. In this comedy the blank verse adapts itself to all the turns of familiar humorous dialogue, and the effect of the Dutch genre-paintings of Teniers or Jan Steen is admirably reproduced in dramatic form. The slowly moving action, constantly reverting to past incidents, makes a successful performance difficult; the fate of this work on the stage has depended upon finding an actor capable of bringing out all the possibilities in the part of Adam, who is a masterpiece of comic self-characterization.
Penthesilea is a work apart. Passionate, headlong, almost savage, is the character of the queen of the Amazons, yet wonderfully sweet in its gentler moods and glorified with the golden glow of high poetry. Nothing could be further removed from the pseudo-classical manner of the eighteenth century than this modern and individual interpretation of the old mythical story of Penthesilea and Achilles, between whom love breaks forth in the midst of mortal combat. The clash of passions creates scenes in this drama that transcend the humanly and dramatically permissible. Yet there is a wealth of imaginative beauty and emotional melody in this tragedy beyond anything in Kleist's other works. It was written with his heart's blood; in it he uttered all the yearning and frenzy of his first passion for the unattainable and ruined masterpiece Guiscard.
Kitty of Heilbronn stands almost at the opposite pole from Penthesilea. The pathos of Griselda's unquestioning self-abnegation is her portion; she is the extreme expression of the docile quality that Kleist sought in his betrothed. Instead of the fabled scenes of Homeric combat, we have here as a setting the richly romantic and colorful life of the age of chivalry. The form, too, is far freer and more expansive, with an unconventional mingling of verse and prose.
The last two plays were born of the spirit that brought forth the War of Liberation. In them Kleist gave undying expression to his ardent patriotism; it was his deepest grief that these martial dramas were not permitted to sound their trumpet-call to a humbled nation yearning to be free. Arminius is a great dramatized philippic. The ancient Germanic chiefs Marbod and Arminius, representing in Kleist's intention the Austria and Prussia of his day, are animated by one common patriotic impulse, rising far above their mutual rivalries, to cast off the hateful and oppressive yoke of Rome; and after the decisive victory over Varus in the Teutoburg Forest, each of these strong chiefs is ready in devoted self-denial to yield the primacy to the other, in order that all Germans may stand together against the common foe. Prince Frederick of Homburg is a dramatic glorification of the Prussian virtues of discipline and obedience. But the finely drawn characters of this play are by no means rigid martinets. They are largely, frankly, generously human, confessing the right of feeling as well as reason to direct the will. Never has there been a more sympathetic literary exposition of the soldierly character than this last tribute of a devoted patriot to his beloved Brandenburg.
The narrative works of Kleist maintain the same high level as his dramas. Michael Kohlhaas is a good example of this excellent narrative art, for which Kleist found no models in German literature. Unity is a striking characteristic; the action can usually be summed up in a few words, such as the formula for this story, given expressly on its first page: "His sense of justice made him a robber and a murderer." There is no leisurely exposition of time, place, or situation; all the necessary elements are given concisely in the first sentences. The action develops logically, with effective use of retardation and climax, but without disturbing episodes; and the reader is never permitted to forget the central theme. The descriptive element is realistic, with only pertinent details swiftly presented, often in parentheses, while the action moves on. The characterization is skilfully indirect, through unconscious action and speech. The author does not shun the trivial or even the repulsive in detail, nor does he fear the most tragic catastrophes. He is scrupulously objective, and, in an age of expansive lyric expression, he is most chary of comment. The sentence structure, as in the dramas, is often intricate, but never lax. The whole work in all its parts is firmly and finely forged by a master workman.
Kleist has remained a solitary figure in German literature. Owing little to the dominant literary influences of his day, he has also found few imitators. Two generations passed before he began to come into his heritage of legitimate fame. Now that a full century has elapsed since his tragic death, his place is well assured among the greatest dramatic and narrative authors of Germany. A brave man struggling desperately against hopeless odds, a patriot expending his genius with lavish unselfishness for the service of his country in her darkest days, he has been found worthy by posterity to stand as the most famous son of a faithful Prussian family of soldiers.
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS (1808)
A Tale from an Old Chronicle