Immermann, in spite of his unremitting endeavor, failed to attain literary or moral greatness. He lacked the fundamental and organic unity of great natures. He had more qualities of mind than most of his important contemporaries, but in not one of these qualities did he attain to the degree which assures distinction. In his Merlin he treated a conflict which was fundamentally similar to that of Grillparzer's Libussa. Yet Grillparzer, much more one-sided than he, possessed the true Romantic-mystic quality, whereas Immermann had to elaborate his symbolism with the patchwork of careful, allegoric analysis. He had a richer contact with social forces than Heine, yet his realizations of them were awkward and meagre, his humor wooden, his imagery derived. He had much greater intellectual force than Platen, yet he lacked the incisive and controlled critical sense of the latter. Having no one faculty to a distinguished degree, he constantly had to substitute the strained labor of one faculty for the spontaneous production of another. Predominantly rationalistic, he labored at the symbolistic vision of Romanticism; preëminently a man of prose, he endeavored all his life to be a great poet. He mistook the responsive excitement produced by the ideas and visions of others for authentic inspiration, the vivacity of a sociable and conversational gift for the creative force of genius, and the immobility of obvious and established conventional judgments for an extraordinary soundness and incisiveness of fundamental analysis.
There was in him, as he himself once said, a certain "aftertaste of a worthy philistinism." The dominant bent of his mind was toward the immediate actualities, and this bent in the end, as in his antagonism against the radical students in Halle, always overcame his endeavor to grasp the more remote realities of a larger vision.
The purposes of his literary works, like the beginning and purpose of his intimacy with Elisa, are always large, comprehensive, and idealistic, but they always, even in his most important work, Merlin, dwindle to petty details of actuality. His significance for the present age does not so much rest on his objective achievement, as on some of his qualities which prevented achievement. He was perhaps the most considerable representative of the literary "Epigones" intervening between the esthetic individualistic humanism of the eighteenth, and the economic-coöperative humanism of the nineteenth century. He, more fully perhaps than any of his contemporaries, represented the peculiar border-type of literary personality which is both compounded and torn asunder by all the principal conflicting forces of a period of historic transition. He was a victim of the manifold division of impulses, the ill-related patchwork of impressions, and the disconcerting refractions of vision, which characterized his contemporaries. It is in the fact that he united in himself the principal factors which made up the complexion of his age, to an extraordinary degree, that he has his strongest claim upon the sympathetic and studious interest of the modern age.
MERLIN: A MYTH
The principal dramatic agencies in Merlin are Satan, Klingsor, Titurel, King Artus and his Round Table, Niniana, and Merlin. In them, Immermann tried to embody the dominant moral and intellectual tendencies, as he saw them in history and his own times. Satan, the demiurgos, is to him no theological devil, but a princely character, the "Lord of Necessity," the non-moral, irresistible, cosmic force of physical creation. He demands, expressing the faith of Young-Germany:
"O! naked bodies, insolent art,
O! wrath of heroes, and heroic voice!"
The pride of life in him and in Lucifer, who personifies the creative fire, is aroused against the narrow asceticism of orthodox Christianity, embodied in the wan and feeble Titurel. Satan decides to imitate the Lord of Christianity, by begetting upon a virgin, Candida, a son who is to save the world from the sterility of asceticism. Candida is briefly introduced, acknowledging the power of the mighty spirit and bewailing her fate in one of the finest passages in the play. Merlin is born, combining the supernatural creative powers of his father with the tenderness and sympathy of his mother. His purpose is to reconcile the true principles of primitive Christianity with the natural impulses of life. Merlin thus is opposed to his father as well as to Titurel and his dull and narrow "guild" who keep the true spirit of humanity captive. He is both anti-Satan and anti-Christ.
He next comes into conflict with the third fundamental force, Klingsor. The latter is really only a variant of Satan and, while interesting, is somewhat less fundamental, being more a philosophic and literary, than an active, antagonist. His symbol is the circled serpent, the embodiment of permanence within the changing world of actuality. He represents the nature-philosophy of Romanticism and especially of Schelling, a philosophy so vast and unsubstantial that all values of conduct and all incentives to action disappeared in its featureless abyss. Immermann intensely disliked it. He was, as he said, a lover of men; the worship of nature drained and exhausted the sympathies, the wills and the spirits of men. The passages in which Klingsor himself, in his moments of despair, and Merlin expose the emptiness of this philosophy, are among the best philosophic statements of the play. They are, how ever, too exhaustive. But they are good philosophy, if they are bad drama and poetry. Klingsor says of the "nature book"
"It asserts: all is vain; nought but stale mediocrity—while we are shaken from, shell to core by the breath of the times." He is worshipped by the dwarfs because he has opened the mysteries of inanimate nature, and he commands the spirits of classical life represented by Antinous, and the pagan' gods and demi-gods, the personifications of the naïve impulses of nature. But he realizes that his wisdom, while it makes dwarfs happy, is inadequate for human beings.
The teaching of Merlin is essentially the humanism of the moderate liberalism of Baron von Stein and his followers. Klingsor, voicing the sentiments of Romantic aristocratism, accuses him: