The drama represents the thought which seeks to become a deed through action or suffering. The narrative is really not a pure form, but a combination of the lyric and dramatic elements,—a combination which differs from the drama in that it develops the outer life from the inner, whereas in the drama the inner proceeds from the outer.
Let us now examine what Theodor Körner and Heinrich von Kleist have accomplished, in the first place, as lyric poets. Kleist (unhappily) has left us very little in this field, Körner (again unhappily) all the more. Körner's war-songs have, in this stage of our investigation, the precedence over his other lyric productions, for two reasons: in the first place, they found the largest public and earned for their author, beside the royalties, the title of a German Tyrtaeus; and in the second place, Theodor Körner's soul was most ardently engrossed with the supposed and the real sufferings of his time, with the dignity and the misfortune of his people, and with the necessity and sacredness of the war. Let no one scent any bombast in all this, but, on the contrary, let him admire my cleverness in condensing into three lines, everything that Theodor Körner expressed in a whole volume, in Lyre and Sword! If, therefore, his war-songs are bad, we shall be justified in concluding that we need expect still less from his other poems, in which he is concerned with sentiments which certainly affected him more slightly than those which placed the sword in his hand. I turn over the index of his war-songs, and find Call to the German Nation, Before the Battle, Germany,—in short, titles that all point to material very often handled, and therefore grown trivial. I do not, indeed, immediately conclude therefrom that the poems are trivial, but I have the right to conclude that the man who attempts such worn out subjects must be either a very great or a very small poet. May I be permitted to analyze one of these poems? I will choose, as the most significant, the well known Battle Song of the Confederation. In this poem the poet has striven to collect everything that could serve to make the soldiers who were to take part in the battle of Danneberg more indifferent to the bullets. I should not, however, have liked to advise the commanding general actually to use it for this purpose. Mr. Körner quite forgets with what sort of people he is dealing when, in the third strophe, he expects the soldiers to let themselves be slaughtered for German art and German song. This is more than a joke, for I have the right to demand that a Battle-Song of the Confederation shall be comprehensible and intelligible to all who are to take part in the battle; and art and song are, in any case, not important enough to be named together with the causes that made the fighting of a battle necessary, together with the enslavement of a people; quite apart from the fact that both, art and song, belong to those national treasures which are most secure in the time of hostile invasion. But in order not to give my logic a bad reputation, I will begin at the beginning. Mr. Körner not only began there but even ended there—this in parenthesis. The first strophe aims to give the picture of a battle; but it is fortunate that we already know, from the superscription, with what battle we are concerned; we should scarcely find it out from this first strophe, which finishes, but does not complete the picture. In the second strophe we learn rather more; we learn that the beloved German oak is broken, that the language—thank God, not the women—has been violated, and we find it quite natural that revenge should blaze up at last, even though we cannot escape a slight feeling of surprise that dishonor, shame and such like, already lay behind those heroes, and therefore had been endured. We have already tasted of the sweets of the third strophe; in spite of this, we see there is a great deal still remaining in this strophe, a happy hope, a golden future, a whole heaven, etc., etc.—it must be the fault of my eyes that, notwithstanding, I can see nothing at all in it. In the fourth strophe courage comes along on regular seven league boots, and I wish the critic had as much reason to be satisfied with its contents, as had the Fatherland, to which a splendid vow is sworn therein. The fifth strophe contains a real human sentiment; it might exclaim with Falstaff, "Heaven send me better company!" In the sixth strophe we learn that the poet was not blustering in the fourth strophe, but that the fighting is really going to begin: at the same time it contains the principal beauty of the song, namely the end. Now, I ask, apart from the school-boyish, crude composition of the poem, which throws suspicion merely on the taste, not precisely on the power, of a poet—where is even the faintest tinge of poetry? And the muse was a battle!
We have finished, then, with the poetic part of this poem; it now remains to investigate in how far it is a real German product, that is to say, such an one as could have been produced only on German soil by a German. Every one will find that it might very easily have been written by some person from the Sultan's seraglio, and used by any people who found themselves in a like situation. Even the French, although it is directed against them, could gain inspiration from it, if their good taste did not preserve them from doing so. Let no one throw the German oaks (strophe four) in my way; I must stumble along over whole oak trees.
Let us now compare with Körner's Battle-Song of the Confederation, Kleist's poem To Germany, as I believe it is called. I am glad that I am not able to characterize the separate strophes of this poem; they are, what the divisions of a poem should be, nothing, when they are detached from the whole. "Germans," exclaims the poet—"Your forests have long been cleared, serpents and foxes ye have destroyed, only the Frenchman I still see slinking!" This is a folk song; the vast, the great, is associated with the simplest and most familiar objects, and the figures chosen are not only beautiful, but at the same time inevitable.
I will pass on to consider the achievements of Körner and Heinrich von Kleist in the field of the drama. In this both have been very active, but in order to avoid boredom for a time at least, I shall begin with the analysis of a piece by Kleist, choosing first a tragedy, his Prince of Homburg which, to be sure, is entitled simply "a drama" by its author. I do not know whether he did this because of the circumstances that the Prince, as the hero of the piece, happily escapes with his life, or, what is more likely, in order to humor the public, who think the tragic can only exist where there are rivers of blood; neither will I censure it, but only call attention to the fact that in my opinion that which makes a tragedy lies only in the struggle of the individual, never in the outcome of this struggle. The outcome is in the hands of the gods, says an old proverb, well then, acts of the gods—as events may very well be called which are the effects of fate—can never be anything else for the dramatic poet than what curtain and wings are for the stage; they limit without completing. I defined drama, above, as a representation of the thought which seeks to become a deed through action or suffering. What this thought may be like—upon that very little depends; but that it really should be there, that it should fill the entire man, so much, of a surety, is necessary. What is, then, the thought that, in the play under discussion, fills the soul of the Prince o£ Homburg, the chief hero? We find it expressed in scene two of the second act, in the place where the Prince says to Kottwitz, who reminds him, the man thirsting for deeds, of the Elector's orders:
"Orders? Eh, Kottwitz, do you ride so slow?
Have you not heard the orders of your heart?"
The thought is this: strength stands above the law, and courage recognizes no other barrier but itself. Kleist, in the fifth scene of the first act, with which the fifth scene of the fifth act corresponds, appears to have taken pains to set up as the lever of the piece, not so much this thought as rather a mere accident, namely the inattention of the Prince when the plan of battle was being dictated, but it is really only in appearance. For though he makes Hohenzollern, properly enough, lay great stress on this circumstance, that signifies little; only if the Prince himself—a thing which never happens—had laid stress upon it, could it have had an influence on the economy of the piece. Let us proceed to a more detailed development of the tragedy.
The historical part of it is based on the famous battle which the Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg fought against the Swedes at Fehrbellin. The story of the play is briefly as follows: The Prince of Homburg, to whom has been confided the commandment of the cavalry of the Mark of Brandenburg, arbitrarily disobeys the orders given him, and advances too soon. He wins the battle, but is placed on trial before a court martial by Frederick William and condemned to death for insubordination.
And truly—I should add, if I did not know that poetic enthusiasm is very ridiculous in a criticism—the action is brought before us with such power that this tragedy may very well be compared to a German oak, on which every branch flourishes luxuriantly, and whose summit is nearer to heaven than to earth. The whole play contains nothing but characters, not a single puppet—which can seldom be said of the work of even the greatest master—and I regret that I can develop in detail only the character of the Prince of Homburg, and, for the others, can merely touch upon those sides which come into contact with him.
I am not inclined, like Zimmermann, to see in the first scene simply an endeavor on the part of the poet to provide a mystic background for his picture. I do not see why a young man, who happens to be afflicted with the sleep-walking malady, should not walk in his sleep even on the night before a battle, and why a young hero who has long been nursing the most high-flown thoughts concerning glory and immortality, should not, on such a night, make himself an oak-wreath. In the day time, to be sure, an occupation of that sort would not look very well, but night is the realm of phantasy and the wreath is the emblem of glory. Then, too, I find that this first scene—the naturalness of which I hope I have proved—is of deep significance for the play. In order to explain psychologically the Prince's headstrong disobedience of the Elector's express order, a great excitement of mind was needed. Now I really do not know where Kleist could better have derived this than precisely from a half-waking dream, in which the Prince supposedly received in advance all that constituted the highest goal of his hopes, and which should have been the most valued fruit of his endeavors—the making of the wreath points to this, and the fourth scene of the first act confirms it. The absent-mindedness which this dream causes in the Prince in the fifth scene, and particularly the monologue with which the first act closes, prove that I am not mistaken in my opinion concerning the significance which the poet placed upon the scene in question.