Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature – 3. The Reaction in France

We can fancy how such an utterance enraged the Romanticists, who at that time were all on the point of going over to Catholicism. Thenceforward there was no more worship of Goethe. Tieck was in Rome, and the report spread that he was about to embrace the Catholic faith, to which his wife and daughter had become converts. Friedrich Schlegel was preparing to take the final step. He was lecturing at Cologne, but making application for a regular appointment in every likely quarter – Cologne, Paris, Würzburg, Munich, &c. "Given really tempting conditions," he wrote in June 1804, "I should have gone even to Moscow or Dorpat. But," he adds, "my preference was for the Rhine district." Was this because it was a Catholic district? Not at all. "The salmon here is unequalled, so are the crayfish, not to speak of the wine." It was Metternich's pecuniary offer which finally induced him to take the decisive step and join the Church of Rome. He was furious at the essay on Winckelmann, though he expressed unbounded contempt for it. What is most amusing of all, however, is to see how this little work fell like a bomb among the genuine political reactionaries in Vienna. Gentz was already approaching the stage which he had reached when he wrote to Rahel (in 1814) that he had become terribly old and bad (unendlich alt und schlecht), describing his condition thus: "I must give you an idea of the form which my cynicism and egotism have taken. As soon as I can throw down my pen, all my thoughts and time are given to the arrangement of my rooms; I am constantly planning how to procure more money for furniture, perfumes, and every refinement of so-called luxury. My appetite, alas! is gone. Breakfast is the only meal I take any interest in."

In 1805 Gentz writes to his worthy friend, Adam Müller: "What struck me most in your letter was your criticism of Goethe's two latest productions. I know them both, but should never have dared to write as you do; though I will not deny that my opinion of them is the same as yours, only still less favourable. The notes on Rameau are simply prosy and commonplace. To write such twaddle nowadays about Voltaire and D'Alembert is really inexcusable in a Goethe. The essays on Winckelmann are atheistic. I should never have credited Goethe with such a bitter and perfidious hatred of Christianity, though I have long suspected him of culpability in this matter. What indecent, cynical, faun-like joy he seems to have felt on making the grand discovery that it was really because Winckelmann was a "born pagan" that the different forms of the Christian religion were a matter of such indifference to him! No! even Goethe will not easily rise again in my estimation after these two books!"⁴⁰

Goethe's essay, we observe, had gone straight to the mark; the Romanticists felt as if they had received a slap in the face, when he declared himself hostile to their theory of art.

We must now dwell a little on the conception of nature which corresponds to this conception of art. In Sternbald, as both Goethe and Caroline indicate, the reader's interest is distracted from the characters and the action by descriptions of scenery.

We have seen that it was Rousseau who rediscovered the feeling for nature. As Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, playing upon Rousseau's own words about the swallow which had built its nest under the eaves of his first home: "He was the swallow that foretold the coming of summer in literature." The same feeling for nature, as has also been shown, reappears in Werther. The transformation which it now underwent was this: Rousseau's point of view had been emotional, that of the Romanticists was fantastic. Hence their return to legends and fairy tales, to the elves and kobolds of popular superstition. Goethe had said:

 
"Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
Alles ist sie mit einem Male."⁴¹
 

The Romanticists were determined to have to do only with the kernel, with the mysterious inmost substance, which they attempted to extricate, after having themselves inserted it. The mystic mind mirrored itself in nature and saw in it nothing but mysteries. Tieck, as every one knows, coined the word Waldeinsamkeit (his friends maintained that it ought to be Waldeseinsamkeit). Romanticism shouted with quavering voice into the Waldeinsamkeit (forest solitude), and echo returned quavering answers.

Alexander von Humboldt has pointed out how the ancients really only saw beauty in nature when she was smiling, friendly, and useful to man. With the Romanticists it is the reverse. To them nature is unbeautiful in proportion as she is useful, and most beautiful in her wildness, or when she awakens a feeling of vague fear. They rejoice in the darkness of night and of deep ravines, in the utter loneliness which produces a shudder of terror; and Tieck's full moon shines as unchangeably over the landscape as though it were a theatrical one of oiled paper with a lamp behind it. I call it Tieck's moon, because it is incontestably Tieck who is the originator of the Romantic moonlit landscape. Nor is it difficult to understand how it should be he, rather than any other of the young writers, who originates such expressions as "forest solitude," "magic moonlit nights," &c., &c. Tieck was born in Berlin, perhaps of all large towns the one whose surroundings possess the fewest natural attractions. Those sandy heaths of Brandenburg, with their tall, spare firs standing stiffly in rows like Prussian soldiers, form as meagre a landscape as one could well find. Whilst Rousseau, living amidst scenery of paradisaic beauty (the neighbourhood of Geneva and Mont Blanc), was strongly, directly impressed by nature, Tieck, in his unlovely surroundings, was seized by the city-dweller's morbid longing for wood and mountain; and this longing gave birth to a fantastic conception of nature. The cold daylight glare of Berlin, and its modern, North German rationalism awoke longings for the primeval forests and an inclination towards primitive poetry.

To prove the truth of this assertion, one has only to read such a passage in the biography of Tieck as the following account of his stay in Halle in 1792: "How entirely different was the nature which met his eyes here in the green valley of the Saale, how much richer and more friendly than the flat heaths surrounding Berlin! The feeling of infinite longing seized him with redoubled force, and filled his heart with almost painful excitement as he wandered through the woods in the springtime. Once more he became intoxicated with nature; a mysterious power seemed to drive him onwards. His favourite resting-place was the Hölty bench near Giebichenstein, from which he overlooked the river and the valley. How often did he watch the sun sink beneath the clouds and the moon mirror herself with a thousand golden beams in the rippling water, or gleam dreamily through the branches! Here he lay many a summer night, drinking in nature in ample draughts."

Is not this the longing for nature of the man who is an exile from it, the view of nature which has the city pavement as its background?

In the description given of the evening after a tiring walk taken by Tieck and Wackenroder in the Fichtelgebirge, Tieck's conception of nature is still more distinctly associated with his personal impressions: "Wackenroder, unaccustomed to such fatigue, flung himself at once upon the bed, but Tieck was too excited. He could not sleep after all the experiences of that day. The spirits of nature awoke. He opened the window. It was the mildest, most magnificent summer night. The moon shed her soft, clear beams upon him. There it was before his eyes, the moonlit, witching night, nature with her ancient, yet ever new marvels and magic! His heart once again swelled high. To what far, unknown goal was he being drawn with irresistible force? Softly and soothingly the clear tones of a horn came floating through the night. A feeling of sadness stole over him, and yet he was intensely happy."⁴²

Observe that not even the horn is wanting. What is wanting, what Tieck is destitute of, is any definite aim. We have the same thing in Sternbald, where the wandering artist, led only by his longings and his prophetic enthusiasm, is always, as he himself confesses, forgetting his real aim. "It is not possible," says one of the characters in the book, "to forget one's aim, for this reason, that the sensible man arranges matters so that he has no aim." No one can fail to see the close connection between this particular species of feeling for nature and Romantic arbitrariness, nor how they mutually develop each other.

Let us see the kind of landscapes which Franz Sternbald understands and paints, and how he understands and paints them.

In one part of the book we read: "This was the landscape which Franz intended to paint; but the real scene seemed very prosaic to him, compared with its reflection in the water." Clear outlines, definite forms, are dry prose; but the reflection in the water, the picture as it were to its second power, is Romantic refinement, duplication, glorification. In another part Franz says: "I should choose to paint lonely, terrible scenes – ruinous, crumbling bridges spanning the space between two precipitous rocks, with a foaming torrent raging in the abyss below; strayed travellers whose cloaks flap in the wet wind; horrid brigands rushing from their caves, stopping and plundering carriages, and fighting with travellers." Real stage scenery this, with melodrama into the bargain!

And in what spirit is nature apprehended? "Sometimes," says Franz, "my imagination sets to work and will not rest until it has thought out something quite unheard of. It would have me paint strange objects, of complicated and almost incomprehensible construction – figures composed of parts of all kinds of animals, their lower extremities being plants; insects and reptiles with a strange humanness about them, expressing human moods and passions in a wonderful and horrible manner."

What a picture! what a jumble of monstrosities! Can you not hear Hoffmann fast approaching with his caravan of monsters? The elephant stands on his head, and has a trunk which ends in a garfish; the cat writes its memoirs; the door-knocker is really an old market-woman, &c., &c. Are we not reminded here again, as in Der Freischütz, of the temptations of St. Anthony, as painted by Teniers, or, better still, by Höllen-Breughel, with a regular witches' Sabbath. To the genuine Romanticist, nature, with all her myriads of living forms and beings, seems a great toy-cupboard, and all the toys babble and chatter like those in Andersen's fairy tale.

Read this description of a romantic landscape taken from Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen: "From a height they looked down upon a romantic country, strewn with towns and castles, with temples and tombs, a country which united the gentle charms of inhabited plains with the terrible charms of deserts and precipitous mountains. The most beautiful colours were happily blended. Mountain peaks gleamed like fireworks in their coverings of ice and snow. The smiling plain was clothed in the freshest of green. The distance decked itself in every shade of blue, and the deep blue of the sea threw into relief the innumerable bright pennons waving from the masts of numerous fleets. In the background we could see a shipwreck, in the foreground a merry country feast; far off the terribly beautiful eruption of a volcano and the desolation wrought by an earthquake, and near at hand a pair of lovers exchanging the sweetest caresses under sheltering trees. On one side of this scene a frightful battle was raging, and at no great distance from the battle was to be seen a theatre with a ludicrous play going on. Upon the other side, in the foreground, the corpse of a young girl lay upon a bier, with an inconsolable lover and weeping parents kneeling by its side; in the background sat a sweet mother with her child at her breast, angels nestling at her feet, and peeping through the branches above her head."

What a pot-pourri! And over it all is shed the indispensable pale, yellow light of that friend and well-wisher, protector and betrayer of lovers, that supreme comforter and divinity of the Romanticists – the man in the moon. He is their salvation. His round face and his profile have exactly the degree of distinctness permissible or possible in a Romantic countenance. All the knights of Romanticism wear his yellow livery. And a truer knight of the moon than Franz Sternbald is not to be found.

"I would," he says, "that I could fill the whole world with my song of love, that I could move the moonlight and the rosy dawn, so that they should echo my grief and happiness, until trees, branches, leaves, and grass all took up the melody, repeating it as with millions of tongues." Hereupon he sings a "moonlight song":

 
"Hinter'm Wasser wie flimmernde Flammen,
Berggipfel oben mit Gold beschienen,
Neigen rauschend und ernst die grünen
Gebüsche die blinkenden Häupter zusammen.
 
 
Welle, rollst du herauf den Schein,
Des Mondes rund freundlich Angesicht?
Es merkt's und freundlich bewegt sich der Hain,
Streckt die Zweig' entgegen dem Zauberlicht.
 
 
Fangen die Geister an auf den Fluthen zu springen,
Thun sich die Nachtblumen auf mit Klingen,
Wacht die Nachtigall im dicksten Baum,
Verkündigt dichterisch ihren Traum.
Wie helle, blendende Strahlen die Töne nieder fliessen,
Am Bergeshang den Wiederhall zu grüssen."⁴³
 

Here we have it all! The glittering flames of the moon, bushes with twinkling heads, rolling billows bearing onwards the face of the full moon, spirits dancing upon waves, night as described by Novalis, night flowers, and a nightingale whose song flows like clear, dazzling moonbeams.

And exactly the same thing recurs again and again. Franz has a dream: "Unperceived, he painted the hermit and his devotion, the forest and its moonlight; he even succeeded, he himself knew not how, in getting the nightingale's song into his picture." Oh, that musical pictorial art! Was not Goethe right in saying that there is more music than painting in the book?

It is very significant that the man who revelled thus in the fantastic suggestions of a district where nature was poor and sterile, should have altogether failed to appreciate the richness and luxuriance, the abundance of healthy sap and vigour, which distinguish the south of England. Shakespeare has had few such fervent admirers as Tieck; and Tieck naturally had the desire to see with his own eyes the natural surroundings amidst which his great teacher and master had spent his life, and from which he had derived his earliest impressions. He expected much. But, oh! what a disappointment! That mind which fancied itself akin to Shakespeare's found nothing congenial in the scenery round Shakespeare's home. The chief characteristic of these counties is an almost incredible luxuriance and vigour of growth. But this wealth of vegetation is unpoetical to the Romanticist, because it is useful, because it has a purpose. Only the blossom which bears no fruit is romantic. We understand his disappointment. Nowhere else does one see such mighty, spreading oaks, nowhere such high and succulent grass. As far as the eye can reach, the green carpet spreads over the undulating fields and the rich meadows, where magnificent cattle graze and ruminate. Quantities of white, yellow, and blue meadow and field flowers break the monotony of colour, and breathe a perfume which the moisture of the air keeps so fresh that it never palls. This vegetation is above all else fresh, not, like that of the south, striking in its contours. The watery, juicy plant does not live long; life streams through it and is gone. The moist air envelops trees and plants in a sort of luminous vapour which catches and tempers the sunbeams; and, as in Denmark, banks of clouds constantly traverse the pale blue sky. When this sky happens to be for a short time perfectly clear, and the sun reaches the earth without passing through mist, the rain and dewdrops sparkle on the green grass and upon the silken and velvet petals of the myriads of gay flowers more brilliantly than diamonds. What matter that the grass is destined to be eaten? Does not part of its beauty lie in its nutritious look? What matter that the fruitful fields are cultivated with the assistance of all the newest agricultural machinery, or that the cattle are tended with the most intelligent solicitude? Is not this the very reason why both animals and plants look so strong, so well nourished, and so nourishing? What we have here is certainly not the imposing beauty of the desert or the ocean, or of Swiss scenery. But has not this landscape a poetry of its own? Who can have spent an evening in Kew Gardens without mentally placing the elfin dance from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Merry Wives of Windsor in exactly this scenery, these beautiful parks, with their gigantic old oaks? It was in these surroundings that Shakespeare wrote them. We can divine with what eyes he looked upon the landscape. With what eyes does Tieck look upon it? "Having seen London," says Köpke, "he wished to make acquaintance with some other part of England. Where should he turn his steps, if not to Shakespeare's birthplace? On the way he visited Oxford. But neither was this scenery to his taste. The country they drove through was luxuriantly green, splendidly cultivated; but it was too well ordered, too artificial (No primitive poetry!); it had lost its originality. It lacked that simplicity, that holiness, as he called it, which touches the heart, and by which he had so often been moved in the most sterile parts of his native land. Here industry had destroyed the poetic aroma."

It is clear, then, that there must have been something in the scenery of his own country which appealed to Tieck's personal predispositions. The fantastic conception of nature would not have been carried to such an extreme in this particular country, if there had not been something fantastic in the scenery of the country. It is very evident that German scenery must have met the fantastic spectator half way.

In the first volume of this work, I attempted, by means of a description of Italian scenery, to show how unromantic even the most beautiful of it is. Nor, in spite of the Black Forest and the Blocksberg, can German scenery be called really fantastic; for, as Taine says, it is only the beauty of art which is fantastic; that of nature is more than fantastic; the fantastic does not exist except in our human brain. Still, nature does provide excuses for a certain amount of fantasy. It is especially to be born in mind that in characteristically German scenery the sea is absent, and with it the feeling of wideness and freeness which it alone gives. In river and mountain scenery there is never the wide, open horizon to which we Danes are accustomed.

But, not to lose myself in generalisations, let me give an idea of the scenery amidst which Tieck himself lived longest – that district in the neighbourhood of Dresden which goes by the name of Saxon Switzerland. I shall describe in a few words how it impresses me, and then proceed to show what impression it produces on a Romantic poet. This I can do reliably and exactly, for I have personally known several Romantic poets, and have recently travelled through the district in question in company with an old poet of Romantic tendencies.

We had spent some days in the clear mountain air, looking out over the high open country and rocky peaks of Bohemia, which resemble a sea, with sharply outlined mountains emerging like islands – an interminable stretch of fields and pine-clad rocks. We went through the Uttenwalder Grund up to the Bastei. The valley is shut in by high, fantastic sandstone rocks, piled up in layers, with pine trees clustering in every crevice. The upper part of the rock often projects threateningly over the lower, seeming as though about to fall. One sees many strange freaks of nature – gateways, even triple gateways. In climbing up to the Bastei, one has on the left that remarkable landscape with the steep rocks standing out like giant gravestones – tragic, awe-inspiring scenery, that would make a fitting background for the dance of the dead nuns in Robert le Diable. Standing on the Bastei, one looks over the great plain with its precipitous mountain islands (the fortress of Königstein is built upon one of these), straight, hard lines, absolutely unpicturesque. Kuhstall is an enormous dome of rock. The whole scenery has the appearance of being designed by man, of being a fantastic art production. The last time I saw it, in glorious sunlight, the view was marvellously imposing. Over the great pine-forest which clothed the lower heights, its tree-tops looking like felt or wool, lay a bluish green haze, which spread up the sides of the surrounding hills. The Bohemian villages lay in groups, shining like windows in the sun – in the distance were basaltic mountains, nearer at hand pyramidal, square, or obelisk-shaped rocks. Wherever a single deciduous tree stood among the pines, its yellow autumnal leaves shone amidst their dark surroundings like patches of gold. The only other yellow was that of the lichen upon some of the rocks. These rocks looked as though giants in the morning of time had pelted each other with them, as children pelt each other with stones, or had played at heaping them one on the top of another.

From the Wintersberg the hills look like the remains of a Cyclopean city. An enormous rock, steep and smooth as a wall, stands, decked with firs, in the centre of a wide landscape. Of all one sees, Prebischthor is perhaps what strikes one as being most beautiful. Here again the rocks have taken a fantastic shape, that of a gateway. A gigantic, beam-like rock has laid itself like a lintel across two rock towers. Sitting under it, one looks down upon two separate landscapes, one through the arch to the left, the other an open one upon the right. As I sat there in the evening, the first was hard, cold, austere; over the other the sun was setting, red and glowing. The one was, as it were, in a major, the other in a minor key; the one was like a face without eyes, the other glowed and beamed.

Such was this scenery in the eyes of an ordinary, sober-minded traveller. The Romanticist who was my companion seemed to me to be less moved by the spectacle than I was; at least he said very little about it during the course of the day. But when, towards night, we were making our way down the mountain, his imagination was suddenly fired. It was quite dark, and the darkness acted upon his nerves. It seemed to him as if more and more of the spirits of nature came forth, the darker it grew. And when, in the distance, we saw the first points of light coming from the windows of houses on the mountain side, houses which we could not distinguish on account of the darkness, he had the feeling that these windows must be in the rock itself, and that we could see in if we were only near enough. The illuminated panes were to him great eyes, with which the spirit of the mountain looked out at us; he felt as if the wooded hillside were watching us. He was in a weird, eccentric, genuinely Romantic mood, and I could not follow him. But on this occasion I had the opportunity of learning by personal observation how a German Romanticist of the good old days viewed nature; how it was not until night that it really became nature to him; how he did not look at it, but to one side of it or behind it; and by observing how much more, and yet how much less, my companion felt face to face with nature than I did, I arrived at an understanding of the legitimacy and the narrowness, the unnaturalness and the poetry of the Romantic conception of nature.⁴⁴