The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries/Volume 6/The Romantic School
UT what was the Romantic School in Germany? It was nothing else but the reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages, as it had shown itself in its songs, images, and architecture, in art and in life. But this poetry had risen from Christianity; it was a passion-flower which had sprung from the blood of Christ. I do not know whether the melancholy passion-flower of Germany is known by that name in France, or whether popular legend attributes to it the same mystical origin. It is a strange, unpleasantly colored blossom, in whose calyx we see set forth the implements which were used in the crucifixion of Christ, such as the hammer, pincers, and nails—a flower which is not so much ugly as ghostly, and even whose sight awakens in our soul a shuddering pleasure, like the convulsively agreeable sensations which come from pain itself. From this view the flower was indeed the fittest symbol for Christianity itself, whose most thrilling chain was the luxury of pain.
Though in France only Roman Catholicism is understood by the word Christianity, I must specially preface that I speak only of the latter. I speak of that religion in whose first dogmas there is a damnation of all flesh, and which not only allows to the spirit power over the flesh, but will also kill this to glorify the spirit. I speak of that religion by whose unnatural requisitions sin and hypocrisy really came into the world, in that by the condemnation of the flesh the most innocent sensuous pleasures became sins, and because the impossibility of a man's becoming altogether spiritual naturally created hypocrisy. I speak of that religion which, by teaching the doctrine of the casting away of all earthly goods and of cultivating a dog-like, abject humility and angelic patience, became the most approved support of despotism. Men have found out the real life and meaning (Wesen) of this religion, and do not now content themselves with promises of supping in Paradise; they know that matter has also its merits, and is not all the devil's, and they now defend the delights of this world, this beautiful garden of God, our inalienable inheritance. And therefore, because we have grasped so entirely all the consequences of that absolute spiritualism, we may believe that the Christian Catholic view of the world has reached its end. Every age is a sphinx, which casts itself into the abyss when man has guessed its riddle.
Yet we do in no wise deny the good results which this Christian Catholic view of the world established in Europe. It was necessary as a wholesome reaction against the cruelly colossal materialism which had developed itself in the Roman realm and threatened to destroy all spiritual human power. As the lascivious memoirs of the last century form the pieces justificatives of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comité du salut public seems to be necessary physic when we read the confessions of the aristocratic world of France, so we recognize the wholesomeness of ascetic spiritualism when we read Petronius or Apuleius, which are to be regarded as the pieces justificatives of Christianity. The flesh had become so arrogant in this Roman world that it required Christian discipline to chasten it. After the banquet of a Trimalchion, such a hunger-cure as Christianity was a necessity.
Or was it that as lascivious old men seek by being whipped to excite new power of enjoyment, so old Rome endured monkish chastisement to find more exquisite delight in torture and voluptuous rapture in pain? Evil excess of stimulant! it took from the body of the state of Rome its last strength. It was not by division into two realms that Rome perished. On the Bosphorus, as by the Tiber, Rome was devoured by the same Jewish spiritualism, and here, as there, Roman history was that of a long dying agony which lasted for centuries. Did murdered Judea, in leaving to Rome its spiritualism, wish to revenge itself on the victorious foe, as did the dying centaur who craftily left to the son of Hercules the deadly garment steeped in his own blood? Truly Rome, the Hercules among races, was so thoroughly devoured by Jewish poison that helm and harness fell from its withered limbs, and its imperial war-voice died away into the wailing cadences of monkish prayer and the soft trilling of castrated boys.
But what weakens old age strengthens youth. That spiritualism had a healthy action on the too sound and strong races of the North; the too full-blooded barbarous bodies were spiritualized by Christianity, and European civilization began. The Catholic Church has in this respect the strongest claims on our regard and admiration, for it succeeded by subduing with its great genial institutions the bestiality of Northern barbarians and by mastering brutal matter.
The Art-work of the Middle Ages manifests this mastery of mere material by mind, and it is very often its only mission. The epic poems of this period may be easily classed according to the degree of this subjection or influence. There can be no discussion here of lyrical and dramatic poems, for the latter did not exist, and the former are as like in every age as are the songs of nightingales in spring.
Although the epic poetry of the Middle Ages was divided into sacred and profane, both were altogether Christian according to their kind; for if sacred poesy sang of the Jewish race and its history, the only race which was regarded as holy, or of the heroes and legends of the Old and New Testaments, and, in brief, the Church—still all the life of the time was reflected in profane poetry with its Christian views and action. The flower of the religious poetic art in the German Middle Ages is perhaps Barlaam and Josaphat, in which the doctrine of abnegation, of abstinence, and the denial and contempt of all worldly glory, is set forth most consistently. Next to this I would class the The Eulogium of St. Hanno (Lobgesang auf den heiligen Anno) as the best of the religious kind; but this is of a far more secular character, differing from the first as the portrait of a Byzantine saint differs from an old German one. As in those Byzantine pictures, so we see in Barlaam and Josaphat the utmost simplicity; there is no perspective side-work, and the long, lean, statue-like forms and the idealistic serious faces come out strongly drawn, as if from a mellow gold ground. On the other hand, in the song of praise of St. Hanno, the side-work or accessories are almost the subject, and, notwithstanding the grandeur of the plan, the details are treated in the minutest manner, so that we know not whether to admire in it the conception of a giant or the patience of a dwarf. But the evangel-poem of Ottfried, which is generally praised as the masterpiece of sacred poetry, is far less admirable than the two which I have mentioned.
In profane poetry we find, as I have already signified, first the cycle of sagas of the Nibelungen and the Heldenbuch, or Book of Heroes. In them prevails all the preChristian manner of thought and of feeling; in them rude strength has not as yet been softened by chivalry. There the stern Kempe-warriors of the North stand like stone images, and the gentle gleam and the more refined breath of Christianity have not as yet penetrated their iron armor. But little by little a light dawns in the old Teutonic forest; the ancient idolatrous oak-trees are felled, and we see a brighter field of battle where Christ wars with the heathen. This appears in the saga-cycle of Charlemagne, in which what we really see is the Crusades reflecting themselves with their religious influences. And now from the spiritualizing power of Christianity, chivalry, the most characteristic feature of the Middle Ages, unfolds itself, and is at last sublimed into a spiritual knighthood. This secular knighthood appears most attractively glorified in the saga-cycle of King Arthur, in which the sweetest gallantry, the most refined courtesy, and the most adventurous passion for combat prevail. Among the charmingly eccentric arabesques and fantastic flower-pictures of this poem we are greeted by the admirable Iwain, the all-surpassing Lancelot du Lac, and the bold, gallant, and true, but somewhat tiresome, Wigalois. Nearly allied and interwoven with this cyclus of sagas is that of the Holy Grail, in which the spiritual knighthood is glorified; and in this epoch we meet three of the grandest poems of the Middle Ages, the Titurel, the Parsifal, and the Lohengrin. Here indeed we find ourselves face to face with Romantic Poetry. We look deeply into her great sorrowing eyes; she twines around us, unsuspectingly, her fine scholastic nets, and draws us down into the bewildering, deluding depths of medieval mysticism.
At last, however, we come to poems of that age which are not unconditionally devoted to Christian spiritualism; nay, it is often indirectly reflected on, where the poet disentangles himself from the bonds of abstract Christian virtues and plunges delighted into the world of pleasure and of glorified sensuousness; and it is not the worst poet, by any means, who has left us the principal work thus inspired. This is Tristan and Isolde; and I must declare that Gottfried von Strassburg, the composer of this most beautiful poem of the Middle Ages, is perhaps also its greatest poet, towering far above all the splendor of Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom we so admire in Parsifal and the fragments of Titurel. We are at last permitted to praise Gottfried unconditionally, though in his own time his book was certainly regarded as godless, and similar works, among them the Lancelot, were considered as dangerous. And some very serious results did indeed ensue. The fair Francesca da Polenta and her handsome friend had to pay dearly for the pleasure of reading on a summer day in such a book; but the trouble came not from the reading, but from their suddenly ceasing to read.
There is in all these poems of the Middle Ages a marked character which distinguishes them from those of Greece and Rome. We characterize this difference by calling the first Romantic and the other Classic. Yet these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of "Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be the main desideratum in modern Romantic art, quite as much as in the ancient. And are not the figures in the Divina Commedia of Dante or in the pictures of Raphael as plastic as those in Virgil? The difference lies in this, that the plastic forms in ancient art are absolutely identical with the subject or the idea which the artist would set forth, as, for example, that the wanderings of Ulysses mean nothing else than the journeyings of a man named Odysseus, who was son of Laërtes and husband of Penelope; and further, that the Bacchus which we see in the Louvre is nothing else than the graceful, winsome son of Semele, with audacious melancholy in his eyes and sacred voluptuousness on his soft and arching lips. It is quite otherwise in Romantic art, in which the wild wanderings of a knight have ever an esoteric meaning, symbolizing perhaps the erring course of life. The dragon whom he overcomes is sin; the almond which from afar casts comforting perfume to the traveler is the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, which are three in one, as shell, fibre, and kernel make one nut. When Homer describes the armor of a hero, it is a good piece of work, worth such and such a number of oxen; but when a monk of the Middle Ages describes in his poems the garments of the Mother of God, one may be sure that by this garb he means as many virtues, and a peculiar significance lies hidden under this holy covering of the immaculate virginity of Maria, who, as her son is the almond-kernel, is naturally sung as the almond-flower. That is the character of the medieval poetry which we call Romantic.
Classic art had only to represent the finite or determined, and its forms could be one and the same with the idea of the artist. Romantic art had to set forth, or rather signify, the infinite and purely spiritual, and it took refuge in a system of traditional, or rather of parabolistic symbols, as Christ himself had sought to render clear his spiritualistic ideas by all kinds of beautiful parables. Hence the mystical, problematic, marvelous, and transcendental in the artwork of the Middle Ages, in which fantasy makes her most desperate efforts to depict the purely spiritual by means of sensible images, and invents colossal follies, piling Pelion on Ossa and Parsifal on Titurel to attain to heaven.
Among other races where poetry attempted to display the infinite, and where monstrous fancies appeared, as, for instance, among the Scandinavians and Indians, we find poems which, being romantic, are given that classification.
We cannot say much as to the music of the Middle Ages, for original documents, which might have served for our guidance, are wanting. It was not till late in the sixteenth century that the masterpieces of Catholic church music, which cannot be too highly praised, appeared. These express in the most exquisite manner pure Christian spirituality. The recitative arts, which are spiritual from their very nature, could indeed flourish fairly in Christianity, yet it was less favorable to those of design, for as these had to represent the victory of mind over matter, and yet must use matter as the means wherewith to work, they had to solve a problem against Nature. Hence we find in sculpture and painting those revolting subjects—martyrdoms, crucifixions, dying saints, and the flesh crushed in every form. Such themes were martyrdom for sculpture; and when I contemplate those distorted images in which Christian asceticism and renunciation of the senses are expressed by distorted, pious heads, long thin arms, starveling legs, and awkwardly fitting garments, I feel an indescribable compassion for the artists of that time. The painters were indeed more favored, for the material for their work, because of its susceptivity to varied play of color, did not antagonize spirituality so obstinately as the material of the sculptors, and yet they were obliged to load the sighing canvas with the most repulsive forms of suffering. In truth, when we regard many galleries which contain nothing but scenes of bloodshed, scourging, and beheading, one might suppose that the old masters had painted for the collection of an executioner.
But human genius can transform and glorify even the unnatural; many painters solved this problem of making what was revolting beautiful and elevating—the Italians, especially, succeeding in paying tribute to beauty at the expense of spirituality, and in rising to that ideality which attained perfection in so many pictures of the Madonna. As regards this subject the Catholic clergy always made some concession to the physical. This image of immaculate beauty which is glorified by maternal love and suffering had the privilege of being made famous by poets and painters, and adorned with all charms of the sense, for it was a magnet which could attract the multitude to the lap of Christianity. Madonna Maria was the beautiful dame du comptoir of the Catholic Church, who, with her beautiful eyes, attracted and held fast its customers, especially the barbarians of the North.
Architecture had in the Middle Ages the same character as the other arts, as indeed all the manifestations of life then harmonized so marvelously with one another. The tendency to parable shows itself here, as in poetry. When we now enter a Gothic cathedral, we hardly suspect the esoteric sense of its stone symbolism; only a general impression pierces our soul; we realize an elevation of feeling and mortification of the flesh. The interior is a hollow cross, and we wander among the instruments of martyrdom itself; the variegated windows cast on us red and green light, like blood and corruption; funeral songs wail about us; under our feet are mortuary tablets and decay; and the soul soars with the colossal columns to a giddy height, tearing itself with pain from the body, which falls like a weary, worn-out garment to the ground. But when we behold the exteriors of these Gothic cathedrals, these enormous buildings which are wrought so aerially, so finely, delicately, transparently, cut as it were into such open work that one might take them for Brabant lace in marble, then we feel truly the power of that age which could so master stone itself that it seems spectrally transfused with spiritual life, and thus even the hardest material declares Christian spirituality.
But arts are only the mirror of life, and, as Catholicism died away, so its sounds grew fainter and its lights dimmer in art. During the Reformation Catholic song gradually disappeared in Europe, and in its place we see the long-slumbering poetry of Greece re-awakening to life. But it was only an artificial spring, a work of the gardener, not of the sun, and the trees and flowers were in close pots, and a glass canopy protected them from cold and northern winds.
In the world's history no event is the direct result of another; all events rather exert a mutual influence. It was by no means due only to the Greek scholars who emigrated to Europe after the fall of Byzantium that a love for Grecian culture and the desire to imitate it became so general among us; a similar Protestantism prevailed then in art as well as in life. Leo X., that splendid Medici, was as zealous a Protestant as Luther, and as there was a Latin prose protest in Wittenberg, so they protested poetically in Rome in stone, color, and ottaverime. And do not the mighty marble images of Michelangelo, the laughing nymphs of Giulio Romano, and the joyous intoxication of life in the verses of Ludovico Ariosto form a protesting opposition to the old, gloomy, worn-out Catholicism? The painters of Italy waged a polemic against priestdom which was perhaps more effective than that of the Saxon theologian. The blooming rosy flesh in the pictures of Titian is all Protestantism. The limbs of his Venus are more thorough theses than those which the German monk pasted on the church door of Wittenberg. Then it was that men felt as if suddenly freed from the force and pressure of a thousand years; the artists, most of all, again breathed freely as the nightmare of Christianity seemed to spin whirling from their breasts, and they threw themselves with enthusiasm into the sea of Greek joyousness from whose foam rose to them goddesses of beauty. Painters once more limned the ambrosial joys of Olympus; sculptors carved, with the joy of yore, old heroes from the marble; poets again sang the house of Atreus and Laius; and so the age of new classic poetry began.
As modern life was most perfectly developed in France under Louis XIV., so the new classic poetry received there its most finished perfection, and, in a measure, an independent originality. Through the political influence of that great king this poetry spread over Europe; in Italy, its home, it assumed a French color, and thence the heroes of French tragedy went with the Anjous to Spain; it passed with Henrietta Maria to England, and we Germans, as a matter of course, built our clumsy temples to the powdered Olympus of Versailles. The most famous high-priest of this religion was Gottsched, that wonderful long wig whom our dear Goethe has so admirably described in his memoirs.
Lessing was the literary Arminius who delivered our theatre from this foreign rule. He showed us the nothingness, the laughableness, the flat and faded folly of those imitations of the French theatre, which were in turn imitated from the Greek. But he became the founder of modern German literature, not only by his criticism, but by his own works of art. This man pursued with enthusiasm and sincerity art, theology, antiquity, and archaeology, the art of poetry, history—all with the same zeal and to the same purpose. There lives and breathes in all his works the same great social idea, the same progressive humanity, the same religion of reason, whose John he was, and whose Messiah we await. This religion he always preached, but, alas! too often alone and in the desert. And there was one art only of which he knew nothing—that of changing stones into bread, for he consumed the greatest part of his life in poverty and under hard pressure—a curse which clings to nearly all great German geniuses, and will last, it may be, till ended by political freedom. Lessing was more inspired by political feelings than men supposed, a peculiarity which we do not find among his contemporaries, and we can now see for the first time what he meant in sketching the duodespotism in Emilia Galotti. He was regarded then as a champion of freedom of thought and against clerical intolerance; for his theological writings were better understood. The fragments On the Education of the Human Race, which Eugene Rodrigue has translated into French, may give an idea of the vast comprehensiveness of Lessing's mind. The two critical works which exercised the most influence on art are his Hamburg Dramatic Art (Hamburgische Dramaturgie), and his Laokoon, or the Limits of Painting and Poetry. His most remarkable theatrical pieces are Emilia Galotti, Minna von Barnhelm, and Nathan the Wise.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born at Camenz in Lausitz, January 22, 1729, and died in Brunswick, February 15, 1781. He was a thorough-going man who, when he destroyed something old in a battle, at the same time always created something new and better. "He was," says a German author, "like those pious Jews, who, during the second building of the Temple, were often troubled by attacks of the enemy, and so fought with one hand while with the other they worked at the house of God." This is not the place where I can say more of Lessing, but I cannot refrain from remarking that he is, of all who are recorded in the whole history of literature, the writer whom I love best.
I will here mention another author who worked in the same spirit, with the same object, as Lessing, and who maybe regarded as his successor. It is true that his eulogy is here also out of place, since he occupies an altogether peculiar position in literature, and a unique relation to his time and to his contemporaries. It is Johann Gottfried Herder, born in 1744 at Mohrungen, in East Prussia, and who died at Weimar in the year 1803.
Literary history is the great "Morgue" where every one seeks his dead, those whom he loves or to whom he is related. When I see there, among so many dead who were of little interest, a Lessing or a Herder, with their noble, manly countenances, my heart throbs; I cannot pass them by without hastily kissing their dead lips.
Yet if Lessing did so much to destroy the habit of imitating French second-hand Greekdom, he still, by calling attention to the true works of art of Greek antiquity, gave an impulse to a new kind of ridiculous imitations. By his battling with religious superstition he advanced the sober search for clearer views which spread widely in Berlin, which had in the late blessed Nicolai its chief organ, and in the General German Library its arsenal. The most deplorable mediocrity began to show itself more repulsively than ever, and flatness and insipidity blew themselves up like the frog in the fable.
It is a great mistake to suppose that Goethe, who had already come before the world, was at once universally recognized as a writer of commanding genius. His Gotz von Berlichingen and his Werther were received with a degree of enthusiasm, to be sure; but so, too, were the works of common bunglers, and Goethe had but a small niche in the temple of literature. As I have said, Götz and Werther had a spirited reception, but more on account of the subject-matter than their artistic merits, which very few appreciated in these masterworks. Götz was a dramatized romance of chivalry, and such writings were then the rage. In Werther the world saw the reproduction of a true story, that of young Jerusalem, who shot himself dead for love, and thereby, in those dead-calm days, made a great noise. People read with tears his touching letters; some shrewdly observed that the manner in which Werther had been banished from aristocratic society had increased his weariness of life. The discussion of suicide caused the book to be still more discussed; it occurred to several fools on this occasion to make away with themselves, and the book, owing to its subject, went off like a shot. The novels of August Lafontaine were just as much read, and, as this author wrote incessantly, he was more famous than Wolfgang von Goethe. Wieland was the great poet then, with whom perhaps might be classed the ode-maker, Rambler of Berlin. Wieland was honored idolatrously, far more at that time than Goethe. Iffland ruled the theatre with his dreary bourgeois dramas, and Kotzebue with his flat and frivolously witty jests.
It was in opposition to this literature that there sprang up in Germany, at the end of the last century, a school which we call the Romantic, and of which August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel have presented themselves as managing agents. Jena, where these and many other souls in like accord found themselves "off and on," was the centre from which the new esthetic doctrine spread. I say doctrine, for this school began with judgments of the artworks of the past and recipes for art-works of the future, and in both directions the Schlegel school rendered great service to esthetic criticism. By judging of such works of art as already existed, either their faults and failures were indicated, or their merits and beauties brought to light. In controversy and in indicating artistic shortcomings, the Schlegels were entirely imitators of old Lessing; they obtained possession of his great battle-blade, but the arm of August William Schlegel was too tenderly weak and the eyes of his brother Friedrich too mystically clouded for the former to strike so strongly and the latter so keenly and accurately as Lessing. True, in descriptive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art are to be set forth—where it came to a delicate detection of its characteristics and bringing them home to our intelligence—then, compared to the Schlegels, old Lessing was nowhere. But what shall I say as to their recipes for preparing works of art? There we find in the Schlegels a weakness which we think may also be detected in Lessing; for the latter is as weak in affirming as he is strong in denying. He rarely succeeds in laying down a fundamental principle, still more seldom a correct one. He wants the firm basis of a philosophy or of a philosophical system. And this is still more sadly the case with the brothers Schlegel.
Much is fabled as to the influence of Fichtean Idealism and Schelling's Philosophy of Nature on the Romantic school, which is even declared to have sprung from it. But I see here, at the most, only the influence of certain fragments of thoughts from Fichte and Schelling, and not at all that of a philosophy. This may be explained on the simple ground that Fichte's philosophy had lost its hold, and Fichte himself had made it lose its interest by a mingling of tenets and ideas from Schelling; and because, on the other hand, Schelling had never set forth a philosophy, but only a vague philosophizing, an unsteady, vacillating improvisation of poetical philosophemes. It may be that it was from the Fichtean Idealism—that deeply ironical system, where the I is opposed to the not-I and annihilates it—that the Romantic school took the doctrine of irony which the late Solger especially developed, and which the Schlegels at first regarded as the soul of art, but which they subsequently found to be fruitless and exchanged for the more positive axioms of the Theory of Identity of Schelling. Schelling, who then taught in Jena, had indeed a great personal influence on the Romantic school; he is, what is not generally known in France, also a bit of a poet; and it is said that he was in doubt whether he should not deliver all his philosophical doctrines in a poetic or even metrical form. This doubt characterizes the man.
- ↑ Permission William Heinemann, London.