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

Still greater is the audacity, still more extravagant the whimsicality in the tale of The Golden Jar. In it an ugly old Dresden apple-woman is at the same time the beautiful bronze knocker on Registrar Lindhorst's door. The metal face of the door-knocker occasionally wrinkles itself up into the old crone's crabbed smile. In addition to this, she is the odious fortune-teller, Frau Rauerin, and good old Lise, the fond nurse of the young heroine of the tale. She can (like the fortune-teller in Der Doppelgänger) suddenly change dress, shape, and features. When the matter of her parentage is cleared up, we learn that her papa was a "shabby feather broom," made of feathers from a dragon's wing, while her mamma was "a miserable beetroot."

Lindhorst, the stolid Registrar, who never seems to feel at home except when sitting in his library in his flowered dressing-gown, surrounded by old manuscripts, is also a great magician, who, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, suddenly begins to relate the most insane occurrences as if they were the most natural in the world. He tells, for instance, that he was once invisibly present at a party – quite a simple matter – he was in the punch-bowl. On another occasion he takes off his dressing-gown, steps without more ado into a bowl of blazing arrack, vanishes in the flames, and allows himself to be drunk.

In creating these doubled and trebled existences, the character, for instance, of the Archive Keeper, who is a Registrar by day and a salamander at night, Hoffmann obviously had in his mind the strange contrast between his own official life, as the conscientious criminal judge, severely rejecting all considerations of sentiment or æstheticism, and his free night life as king of the boundless realm of imagination – a life in which reality, as such, had no part.

But of all Hoffmann's tales, it is Die Elixire des Teufels ("The Elixir of Satan") which makes the most powerful impression. Let us dwell for a moment on the hero of this romance, Brother Medardus; for he is a typical character. It is impossible in a brief summary to convey any idea of the mysterious, weird horror of the book; to feel this one must read it. A work more saturated with voluptuousness and horrors the Romantic School, with all its long practice in the style, never produced. – In a certain monastery is preserved a flask of Satanic elixir, which had belonged to St. Anthony. This elixir is believed to possess magic properties. A monk who has tasted it becomes so eloquent that ere long he is the most famous preacher of the monastery. But his eloquence is not of a pious or healthy, but of a carnal, strangely exciting, dæmonic description. Brother Medardus drinks from the flask. A charming woman, his penitent, falls in love with him, and a longing for the pleasures and delights of the world impels him to leave the monastery. He finds a young man, Count Viktorin, asleep in the forest on the edge of a precipice, and half accidentally pushes him over. From this time onwards every one takes him for the Count.

"My own Ego, the sport of a cruel accident, was dissolved into strange forms, and floated helplessly away upon the sea of circumstances. I could not find myself again. Viktorin is undoubtedly pushed over the precipice by the accident which directed my hand, not my will – I step into his place." And as though this were not marvellous enough, he adds: "But Reinhold knows Father Medardus, the preacher of the Capuchin Monastery; and thus to him I am what I really am. Nevertheless, I am obliged to take Viktorin's place with the Baroness, for I am Viktorin. I am that which I appear to be, and I do not appear to be that which I am. At strife with my own Ego, I am an unanswerable riddle to myself."

Medardus, in his own form, now enters into relations with Viktorin's mistress, the Baroness, who has no idea that he is not Viktorin. He is possessed by carnal desires; women fall in love with him; he gives himself up to sensual pleasures, and in order to attain the fulfilment of his wishes, commits crimes of every kind, including murder. Horrible visions haunt him and drive him from place to place. In the end he is denounced and imprisoned. In prison the confusion of individualities reaches a climax. "I could not sleep; in the strange reflections cast by the dull, wavering light of the lamp upon the walls and ceiling, I saw all kinds of distorted faces grinning at me. I put out the lamp and buried my head in my pillow of straw, only to be still more horribly tormented by the hollow groans of the prisoners and the rattling of their chains." It seems to him that he is listening to the death-rattle of his victims. And now he plainly hears a gentle, measured knocking beneath him. "I listened, the knocking continued, and sounds of strange laughter came up through the floor. I sprang up and flung myself upon the straw mattress, but the knocking went on, accompanied by laughter and groans. Presently, an ugly, hoarse, stammering voice began calling gently but persistently: 'Me-dar-dus, Me-dar-dus!' An icy shiver ran through my veins, but I took courage and shouted: 'Who is there? Who is there?'" Then the knocking and stammering begins directly beneath his feet: "He, he, he! He, he, he! Lit-tle brother, lit-tle brother Me-dar-dus … I am here, am here … le-let me in … we will g-g-go into the woo-woo-woods, to the woo-woo-woods." To his horror he seems to recognise his own voice. Some of the flagstones of the floor are pushed up, and his own face, in a monk's cowl, appears. This other Medardus is, like him, imprisoned, has confessed, and is condemned to death. Now everything happens as if in a dream. He no longer knows whether he is really the hero of the events which he believes to have happened, or whether the whole is a vivid dream. "I feel as if I had been listening in a dream to the story of an unfortunate wretch, the plaything of evil powers, who have driven him hither and thither, and urged him on from crime to crime."

He is acquitted; the happiest moment of his life is at hand; he is to be united to the woman he loves. It is their wedding day. "At that very moment a dull sound rose from the street below; we heard the shouting of hollow voices and the slow rumbling of a heavy vehicle. I ran to the window. In front of the palace, a cart, driven by the headsman's apprentice, was stopping; in it sat the Monk and a Capuchin friar who was praying loudly and fervently with him. Though the Monk was disfigured by fear and by a bristly beard, the features of my terrible Doppelgänger were only too easily recognisable. Just as the cart, which had been stopped for the moment by the throng, rolled on again, he suddenly glared up at me with his horrible glistening eyes, and laughed loud, and yelled: Bridegroom! Bridegroom! Come up on to the housetop! There we will wrestle with one another, and he who throws the other down is king and has the right to drink blood!' I cried: 'You monster! What have I to do with you?' Aurelia flung her arms round me and drew me forcibly away from the window, crying: 'For God and the Holy Virgin's sake!.. It is Medardus, my brother Leonard's murderer, whom they are taking to execution.' … Leonard! Leonard! The spirits of hell awoke within me, and exerted all the power they possess over the wicked, abandoned sinner. I seized Aurelia with such fury that she shook with fear: 'Ha, ha, ha! mad, foolish woman! I, I, your lover, your bridegroom, am Medardus, am your brother's murderer. You, the Monk's bride, would call down vengeance upon him? Ho, ho, ho! I am king – I will drink your blood.'"

He strikes her to the earth. His hands are covered with her blood. He rushes out into the street, frees the Monk, deals blows right and left with knife and fist, and escapes into the forest. "I had but one thought left, the hunted animal's thought of escape. I rose, but had not taken many steps before a man sprang upon my back and flung his arms round my neck. In vain I tried to shake him off; I flung myself down; I rubbed myself against the trees – all to no purpose – the man only chuckled scornfully. Suddenly the moon shone clear through the dark firs, and the horrible, deathly pale face of the Monk, the supposed Medardus, the Doppelgänger, glared at me with the same appalling glance he had shot at me from the cart. 'He, he, he! little brother! I am w-w-with you still; I'll n-n-never let you go. I can't r-r-run like you. Y-you must carry me. They were go-go-going to break me on the wh-wh-wheel, but I got away.'" This situation is spun out ad infinitum, but I forbear. To the end of the book one is uncertain of the real significance of the events, of the ethical tendency of the actions, so completely in this case has imagination disintegrated personality.

The Scandinavian author, Ingemann, has followed Hoffmann in this path. He turns to account, for instance, the eeriness in the idea of loudly calling one's own name in a churchyard at midnight; see his tale, The Sphinx, and others in the so-called Callot-Hoffmann style.

But, as already observed, Romanticism is not content with stretching out and splitting up the Ego, with spreading it throughout time and space. It dissolves it into its elements, takes from it here, adds to it there, makes it the plaything of free fancy. Here, if anywhere, Romanticism is profound; its psychology is correct, but one-sided; it is always on the night side or on the inevitability of things that it dwells; there is nothing emancipating or elevating about it.

In the old days the Ego, the soul, the personality, was regarded as a being whose attributes were its so-called capacities and powers. The words "capacity" and "power," however, only signify that there is in me the possibility of certain events, of my seeing, reading, &c. My true being does not consist of possibilities, but of these events themselves, of my actual condition. My real being is a sequence of inward events. For me, my Ego is composed of a long series of mental pictures and ideas. Of this Ego, I constantly, daily, lose some part. Forgetfulness swallows up gigantic pieces of it. Of all the faces I saw on the street yesterday and the day before, of all the sensations which were mine, only one or two remain in my memory. If I go still farther back, only an exceptionally powerful sensation or thought here and there emerges, like a solitary rocky island, from the ocean of forgetfulness. We only keep together the ideas and pictures that remain to us from our past lives by means of the association of these ideas, that is to say, by the aid of the peculiar power they have, in virtue of certain laws, of recalling each other. If we had no numerical system, no dates, no almanacs, wherewith to give some coherence to our different memories, we should have an extremely slight and indistinct idea of our Ego. But however substantial the long inward chain may seem (and it is strengthened, it gains in tenacity, every time we run over its links in our memory), it happens that we at times introduce into it a link which does not belong to it, at times take a link from it and place it in another chain.⁴⁷

The first of these actions, the introducing of new, incongruous links into the chain of memory, happens in dreams. We dream we have done many things which we have never done. It also happens when we have a false recollection. He who has seen a white sheet blowing about in the dark, and believes he has seen a ghost, has such a false recollection. Most myths and legends, especially religious legends, come into existence in this way.

It frequently happens, however, that, instead of adding links to the chain of the Ego, we withdraw them. Thus the sick man, when his mind is wandering, supposes that the words he hears are spoken by a strange voice, or endows his inward visions with an outward reality, as Luther did when he saw the devil in his room in the Wartburg; and the madman not only partly, but entirely confuses himself with some one else.

In a state of reason, then, the Ego is an artificial production, the result of association of ideas. I am certain of my own identity – in the first place, because I associate my name, that sound which I call my name, with the chain of my inward experiences, and secondly, because I keep all the links of this chain connected by the association of ideas, by virtue of which they produce each other. But, since the Ego is thus not an innate but an acquired conception, founded upon an association of ideas which has to maintain itself against the constant attacks of sleep, dreams, imaginations, hallucinations, and mental derangement, it is by its nature exposed to manifold dangers. Just as disease is ever lying in wait for our bodies, so madness lies in wait at the threshold of the Ego, and every now and again we hear it knock.

It is of this correct psychological theory, originally propounded by Hume, that the Romanticists, though they do not define it scientifically, nevertheless have a presentiment. Dreams, dipsomania, hallucinations, madness, all the powers which disintegrate the Ego, which disconnect its links, are their familiar friends. Read, for instance, Hoffmann's tale, The Golden Jar, and you will hear voices issue from the apple-baskets, and the leaves and flowers of the elder-tree sing; you will see the door-knocker make faces, &c., &c. The strange, striking effect is here specially due to the way in which the apparitions suddenly emerge from a background of the most humdrum, ordinary description, from piles of legal documents, or from tureens and goblets. All Hoffmann's characters (like Andersen's Councillor in The Galoshes of Fortune, which is an imitation of Hoffmann) are considered by their neighbours to be either drunk or mad, because they always treat their dreams and visions as realities.

Hoffmann created most of his principal characters in his own image. His whole life resolved itself into moods. We see from his diary how anxiously and minutely he observed these. We come on such entries as: "Romantically religious mood; excitedly humorous mood, leading finally to those thoughts of madness which so often force themselves upon me; humorously discontented, highly-wrought musical, romantic moods; extremely irritable mood, romantic and capricious in the highest degree; strange, excited, but poetic gloominess; very comfortable, brusque, ironical, overstrained, morose, perfectly weak moods; extraordinary, but miserable moods; moods in which I felt deep veneration for myself and praised myself immoderately; senza entusiasmo, senza esaltazione, every-day moods," &c., &c.

We seem to see the man's spiritual life spread and split itself up fan-wise into musical high and low spirits. It is easy to guess from this register of moods that Hoffmann, genuine lover of night as he was, was in the habit of going to bed towards morning, after having spent the evening and night in a tavern.

Romanticism having thus dissolved the Ego, proceeds to form fantastic Egos, adding here, taking away there.

Take, for an example, Hoffmann's Klein Zaches, the little monster who has been endowed by a fairy with the peculiarity "that everything good that others think, say, or do in his presence is attributed to him; the result being that in the society of handsome, refined, intelligent persons he also is taken to be handsome, refined, and cultured – is taken, in short, for a model of every species of perfection with which he comes in contact." When the student reads aloud his charming poems, it is Zaches who is credited with them; when the musician plays or the professor performs his experiments, it is Zaches who gets the honour and the praise. He grows in greatness, becomes an important man, is made Prime Minister, but ends his days by drowning in a toilet-basin. Without overlooking the satiric symbolism of the story, I draw attention to the fact that the author has here amused himself by endowing one personality with qualities properly belonging to others, in other words, by dissolving individuality and disregarding its limits. With the same satirical intention, the same idea is worked out more ingeniously, though more roughly, by Hostrup, the Dane, in his comedy, En Spurv i Tranedans ("A Sparrow among the Cranes" = a dwarf among the giants), in which each one of the other characters attributes to the comical young journeyman tailor the qualities which he himself values most.

Here we have Romanticism amusing itself by adding qualities to human nature; but it found subtracting them an equally attractive amusement. It deprives the individual of attributes which would seem to form an organic part of it; and by taking these away it divides the human being as lower organisms, worms, for example, are divided into greater and smaller parts, both of which live. It deprives the individual, for instance, of his shadow. In Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, the man in the grey coat kneels down before Peter, and, with admirable dexterity, strips the shadow off him and off the grass, rolls it up and pockets it – and the story shows us the misfortunes which are certain to befall the man who has lost his shadow.

This same tale of Peter Schlemihl shows how Romanticism, as a spiritual force, succeeded in impressing a uniform stamp on the most heterogeneous talents. It would be difficult to imagine two natures more unlike than Chamisso's and Hoffmann's; hence the plot of Chamisso's tale is as simple and readily comprehensible as the plots of Hoffmann's are morbidly extraordinary.

Adalbert von Chamisso was a Frenchman born, who acquired the German character remarkably quickly and completely, to the extent even of developing more than one quality which we are accustomed to consider essentially German. The son of a French nobleman, he was born in 1781 in the castle of Boncourt, in Champagne. Driven from France as a boy during the Reign of Terror, he became one of Queen Louisa of Prussia's pages, and later, at the age of twenty, a lieutenant in the Prussian army. He was a serious, almost painfully earnest, but absolutely healthy-minded man of sterling worth, brave and honourable, with a little of the heaviness of the German about him and much of the liveliness of the Frenchman.

The reverse of Hoffmann, he was no lover of social pleasures, but all the more ardent a lover of nature. He longed on hot summer days to be able to go about naked in his garden with his pipe in his mouth. Modern dress, modern domestic life and social formalities he regarded in the light of burdensome fetters. His love of nature led him to circumnavigate the globe, enamoured him of the South Sea Islands, and is expressed in much of his poetry.

Nevertheless, the imperceptible intellectual compulsion exercised by the age caused him, as author, to adopt Romantic theories and write in the Romantic style. It is characteristic, however, that when in such a poem as Erscheinung ("The Apparition") he treats the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger," he does it with a certain moral force which leaves on the reader's mind the impression of genuine despair. The narrator comes home at night and sees himself sitting at his desk. "Who are you?" he asks. "Who disturbs me thus?" returns the "Doppelgänger": —

 
"Und er: 'So lass uns, wer du seist, erfahren!'
Und ich: 'Ein solcher bin ich, der getrachtet
Nur einzig nach dem Schönen, Guten, Wahren;
Der Opfer nie dem Götzendienst geschlachtet,
Und nie gefröhnt dein weltlich-eitlen Brauch,
Verkannt, verhöhnt, der Schmerzen nie geachtet:
Der irrend zwar und träumend oft den Rauch
Für Flamme hielt, doch mutig beim Erwachen
Das Rechte nur verfocht: – bist du das auch?'
Und er mit wildem kreischend-lautem Lachen:
'Der du dich rühmst zu sein, der bin ich nicht.
Gar anders ist's bestellt um meine Sachen.
Ich bin ein feiger, lügenhafter Wicht,
Ein Heuchler mir und ändern, tief im Herzen
Nur Eigennutz, und Trug im Angesicht.
Verkannter Edler du mit deinen Schmerzen,
Wer kennt sich nun? wer gab das rechte Zeichen?
Wer soll, ich oder du, sein Selbst verscherzen?
Tritt her, so du es wagst, ich will dir weichen!'
Drauf mit Entsetzen ich zu jenem Graus:
'Du bist es, bleib und lass hinweg mich schleichen!'
Und schlich zu weinen, in die Nacht hinaus."⁴⁸
 

The painful moral self-recognition endows the ghost story with marvellous significance.

Chamisso's double nationality was a source of much unhappiness to him in his younger days, when there was violent enmity between the land of his birth and his adopted country. In one of his letters to Varnhagen (December 1805) he writes: "'No country, no people – each man for himself!' These words of yours seemed to come straight from my own heart. They almost startled me; I had to wipe away the tears that rolled down my cheeks. Oh! the same sentiment must have made itself felt in all my letters, every one!"

When, in 1806, Napoleon began the war with Prussia, he issued an order that every Frenchman serving in the enemy's ranks should, when taken prisoner, be tried by court-martial and shot within twenty-four hours. Hence Chamisso, who had in vain demanded to be allowed to resign his commission, was exposed to the chance of a disgraceful death.

He visited France in the following year, but in Paris there was nothing to attract him. "Wherever I am," he complains, "I am countryless. Land and people are foreign to me; hence I am perpetually longing." He was one of the bravest and most capable of German officers (his behaviour on the occasion of the surrender of Hameln proves this), but, as a Frenchman born and an admirer of Napoleon, he would have preferred not to have taken part in the war against France and the Emperor.

After his resignation was actually accepted, he spent some time at the court of Madame de Staël, and made the acquaintance of her international circle of friends. The year 1813, the year of Prussia's declaration of war against France, was the most trying of all for the unfortunate young Franco-German. His heart was divided; he desired the fall of Napoleon because he hated despotism, but at the same time he felt every humiliation which befell the French troops during their retreat from Russia, and every insulting word spoken of the Emperor, as if the misfortune had happened, the insult been offered, to himself. And with this very natural feeling his German associates showed no forbearance. He often cried despairingly: "No, the times have no sword for me." "Action and inaction," he writes in May 1813, "are equally painful to me."

This was the mood which produced his most notable work, Peter Schlemihl. The great historical events which harrowed his feelings made him intellectually productive; the summer of 1813 was a turning-point in his life. "I had no longer a country," he says, "or as yet no country." And so the man without a country writes the tale of the man without a shadow. In spite of its intangibility, a man's shadow is, like his country, like his home, one of his natural possessions, a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which is, as it were, part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so entirely natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter of course. Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great sorrow of his life, in his daringly imagined fable. And strangely enough, he not only figuratively gave in it the essence of all his past experiences, but also prophetically imaged his future, his voyage round the world and his scientific labours. After Schlemihl has escaped from the temptations of the devil, he accidentally comes into possession of the seven-leagued boots, which take him to every country in the world, and enable him to pursue his favourite study to the greatest advantage. Schlemihl himself says: "My future suddenly showed itself clearly to the eyes of my soul. Banished from human society by the misdemeanours of my youth, I was thrown into the arms of Nature, whom I had always loved. The earth was given to me as a rich garden, study as the directing influence and strength of my life, knowledge as its aim."

The originality of its plot and the remarkable clearness of its style (this last a characteristic of all Chamisso's writing, and evidently his intellectual inheritance as a Frenchman) made Peter Schlemihl an extraordinary success. It was translated into nearly every language. Ten years after its publication a new kind of lamp, which cast no shadow, was named the Schlemihl lamp.

Chamisso's success naturally roused Hoffmann to emulation. In the clever little Story of the Lost Reflection, the hero leaves his reflection in Italy with the entrancing Giulietta, who has bewitched him, and returns home to his wife without it. His little son, discovering suddenly one day that his father has no reflection, drops the mirror he is holding, and runs weeping from the room. The mother comes in with astonishment and fright written on every feature. "What is this Rasmus has been telling me about you?" she asks. "That I have no reflection, I suppose, my dear," answers Spikher with a forced laugh, and proceeds to try to prove that it is foolish to believe that a man can lose his reflection, but that even if the thing be possible, it is a matter of no importance, seeing that a reflection is simply an illusion. Self-contemplation only leads to vanity, and, moreover, such an image splits up one's personality into truth and imagination.

Here we have the mirror chamber developed to such a point that the reflections move about independently, instead of following their originals. It is very amusing, very original and fantastic, and, as one is at liberty to understand by the reflection whatever one chooses, it may even be said to be very profound. I express no opinion, but simply draw attention to fact.

We have seen that the Romanticist is instinctively, inevitably, the enemy of clearly defined form in art. We have seen Hoffmann mixing up the different parts of his book to the extent of having part of one story on the front, part of quite a different one on the back of the same leaf; have seen Tieck composing dramas like so many puzzle balls one within the other, to prevent the reader taking them too seriously, and Kierkegaard fitting one author inside another in the Chinese box fashion, on the strength of the theory that truth can only be imparted indirectly, a theory which he ended by treating with scorn – we have seen, in a word, that the artistic standpoint of Romanticism is the exact opposite of the artistic standpoint of the ancients. And when, with their leaning to the supernatural, the Romanticists extend the personality of the individual throughout several successive generations, representing him as living before his birth and after his death, or represent him as a day-dreamer, half visionary and half madman, or humorously endow him with other men's attributes and despoil him of his own, fantastically filching now a shadow, now a reflection, they show by all this fantastic duplication and imagination that their psychological standpoint too, is an absolutely different one; for in the days of old both the work of art and the personality were whole, were of one piece. The movement is a perfectly consistent one, regarded as the antipodes of classicism, in short, as Romanticism.

But, granted that man is of necessity, by his very nature, a divided, complex being, he is nevertheless, as the healthy, vigorous personality, one. Aim, will, resolve, make him a complete unit. If, as a natural product, the human being is only a group held more or less firmly together by association of ideas, as a mind he is a complete whole; in his will all the elements of the mind are united. Romanticism only understood and depicted human nature with genius from the natural, from the night side. It made no closer approach in this than in any other of its endeavours to intellectual collectedness, unity, and liberty.