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In personal appearance he was the popular ideal poet, handsome, pale, and slight, with a confusion of curly black hair. He had a Southern complexion and sparkling, restless brown eyes shadowed by long lashes. His voice was deep and beautiful, and he was fond of singing his own songs, accompanying himself on the guitar.

He was apprenticed to a merchant, but the experiment proved totally unsuccessful, and in 1797 he went to Jena, where he made the acquaintance of the most famous of the Romanticists, Fr. Schlegel, Steffens, and others. These friends often threatened to thrash him for his mad tricks and "not unfrequently malicious boasts and lies," and the threat was more than once actually carried out. But he could not refrain from offending; it was impossible to him to restrain a caprice. While still quite young, he fell in love with a very gifted woman, Sophie Mereau, wife of one of the Jena professors. In the course of this love affair the couple had many wonderful adventures, some of which we find reproduced in his first book, Godwi, or the Mother's Statue. When, in 1802, Fr. Tieck executed a marble bust of Brentano, Frau Mereau described the impression it produced on her in the following beautiful sonnet, inspired by genuine admiration and love: —

 
"Welch süsses Bild erschuf der Künstler hier?
Von welchem milden Himmelsstrich erzeuget?
Nennt keine Inschrift seinen Namen mir,
Da diese todte Lippe ewig schweiget?
 
 
Nach Hohem loht im Auge die Begier,
Begeistrung auf die Stirne niedersteiget,
Um die, nur von der schönen Locken Zier
Geschmücket, noch kein Lorbeerkranz sich beuget.
 
 
Ein Dichter ist es. Seine Lippen prangen
Von Lieb' umwebt, mit wunderselgem Leben,
Die Augen gab ihm sinnend die Romanze!
 
 
Und schalkhaft wohnt der Scherz auf seinen Wangen;
Den Namen wird der Ruhm ihm einstens geben,
Das Haupt ihm schmückend mit dem Lorbeerkranze."⁶¹
 

Happiness came to Brentano before fame. In 1803 he married Sophie Mereau, who had been divorced from her husband, and they lived most happily together till 1806, when she died in childbirth.

In Heidelberg Brentano collaborated with Arnim in the publication of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and with Görres in Die Geschichte des Uhrmachers BOGS ("Story of Bogs, the Watchmaker"). He had already published several works on his own account —Ponce de Leon, die lustigen Musikanten ("The Merry Musicians"), Chronika eines fahrenden Schülers ("Chronicles of a Roving Student"). In Frankfort he became entangled in a love affair, which led to one of the many tragi-comic episodes in his life. He ran away with a young girl who had fallen violently in love with him, Auguste Busmann, a niece of the famous banker, Bethmann. They went to Cassel, where he married her. It is said that he tried to escape from her on the way to church, but that the energetic bride held him fast. A few days after the ceremony she threw her wedding-ring out of the window. One of her fancies was to dash through the town on horseback, the long plumes of her hat and the scarlet trappings of her horse floating in the wind. She plagued her husband in many ways. We are told that one of the worst tortures he had to endure was caused by her skill in beating a tattoo with her feet against the footboard of the bed, a performance invariably followed by a skilful pizzicato played with her toe-nails upon the sheet.⁶² This and other things grew so unendurable that he ran away. The valiant lady procured a divorce the same year, and was ere long married again.

Brentano settled in Berlin, and was soon in great request in social circles there, on account of his powers of conversation, his whimsicality, and his rocket-like sallies of wit. It was in Berlin that he wrote his fairy-tales and most of his Romanzen vom Rosenkranz ("Romances of the Rosary"). His play, The Founding of Prague, was written in Bohemia, where lay the family estate, Bukowan, of which the younger brother, Christian, took charge. After his return to Berlin in 1816, he wrote the famous tale, Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und der schönen Nannerl ("Story of Brave Kasperl and Fair Nannerl"), also Die mehreren Wehmüller, and Die drei Nüsse ("The Three Nuts"). Then his conversion took place, and he no longer lived for literature. The profits of anything he wrote subsequently were devoted to charitable objects.

Steffens remarks of Brentano that he is the only one of the Romanticists who seems to be thoroughly aware that he has no aim. He calls him an ironical, sportive Kronos, who fantastically demolishes every one of his definite utterances by means of its successor, in this manner devouring his own children. Still, as a lyric poet, a writer of fairy-tales, and a novelist, Brentano has produced works of art, few in number, but of permanent value.

In his poetry there is something touching, simple, and caressingly sweet. He understands the art of condensing an emotion, but he generally dilutes it again, and spoils his effect by repetitions, refrains, or the introduction of inarticulate sounds, such as "Ru, ku, ku, kuh," and the like. Almost all his poems contain single verses of great excellence, but almost all are too long. He has appropriated the diffuseness of the Volkslied. He is distinctly original in such untranslatable verses as the following, taken from the Dichters Blumenstrauss ("Poet's Garland"): —

 
"Ein verstimmend Fühlgewächschen
Ein Verlangen abgewandt,
Ein erstarrend Zitterhexchen,
Zuckeflämmchen, nie verbrannt.
 
 
Offnes Räthsel, nie zu lösen,
Steter Wechsel, fest gewöhnt,
Wesen, wie noch keins gewesen,
Leicht verhöhnt und schwer versöhnt.
 

* * * * * * *

 
Auf dem Kehlchen wiegt das Köpfchen,
Blumenglöckchen auf dem Stiel,
Seelchen, selig Thaueströpfchen,
Das hinein vom Himmel fiel."
 

The highly artificial style of this poem is very characteristic of Brentano. Both as lyric poet and story-teller he is artificial; but his mannerism seldom gives the impression of affectation, it only witnesses to the almost morbid sensibility of his temperament.

In Der Spinnerin Lied we have a simple and touching expression of the pain of the long separation from Sophie Mereau. It begins: —

 
"Es sang vor langen Jahren
Wohl auch die Nachtigall,
Das war wohl süsser Schall,
Da wir zusammen waren.
 
 
Ich sing und kann nicht weinen,
Und spinne so allein
Den Faden klar und rein,
So lang der Mond wird scheinen.
 
 
Da wir zusammen waren,
Da sang die Nachtigall,
Nun mahnet mich ihr Schall
Dass du von mir gefahren.
 
 
So oft der Mond mag scheinen
Gedenk ich dein allein;
Mein Herz ist klar und rein,
Gott wolle uns vereinen."⁶³
 

It is right to give Brentano all honour as the creator, in his ballad "Loreley," of a figure which, under the treatment of other poets, notably Heine, has become so living, so truly popular, that one can hardly believe that it is not a genuine legendary figure. It is wrong to do what Griesebach and Scherer have done, namely, turn this praise into a depreciation of Heine's merits, credit him only with the greater literary dexterity, Brentano with the greater capacity of invention. It seems particularly unjust when we remember that Brentano's own finest lyrics are adaptations of popular songs. Read, for example, his beautiful Es ist ein Schnitter, der heisst Tod. The poem is to be found under the name Erntelied in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and begins thus: —

 
"Es ist ein Schnitter, der heisst Tod,
Hat Gewalt vom höchsten Gott,
Heut wetzt er das Messer,
Es schneid't schon viel besser,
Bald wird er drein schneiden,
Wir müssen's nur leiden;
Hüte dich, schön's Blümelein!"
 

Brentano's lines are more polished: —

 
"Es ist ein Schnitter, der heisst Tod,
Er mäht das Korn, wenn Gott's gebot,
Schon wetzt er die Sense,
Dass schneidend sie glänze;
Bald wird er dich schneiden,
Du musst es nur leiden;
Musst in den Erntekranz hinein;
Hüte dich, schönes Blümelein!"
 

In their original form the following lines are not only simpler, but more beautiful than in Brentano's version: —

 
"Viel hundert Tausend ungezählt,
Was nur unter die Sichel fällt,
Ihr Rosen, Ihr Liljen,
Euch wird er austilgen.
Auch die Kaiserkronen
Wird er nicht verschonen.
Hüte dich, schönes Blümelein!"
 

Brentano's run thus: —

 
"Viel hunderttausend ohne Zahl,
Ihr sinket durch der Sense Strahl;
Weh' Rosen, weh' Lilien,
Weh' krause Basilien!
Selbst euch Kaiserkronen
Wird er nicht verschonen.
Ihr müsst zum Erntekranz hinein.
Hüte dich, schönes Blümelein!"
 

He spins out the six verses of the old song to fourteen by the aid of a long list of flowers and plants; we are out of breath before we get to the end of them. The volume of poems entitled Die Romanzen vom Rosenkranz ("Romances of the Rosary") is a romantic variation of the Faust legend, showing the evil of thirst for knowledge and pride of it. Faust himself is transformed into the Mephistophelian evil principle. In this work, as well as in "Loreley," Brentano prepares the way for Heinrich Heine. The romances are written in four-footed trochees, which in their cadence and whole character anticipate Heine's trochaic verse, especially in the droll juxtaposition of light, graceful lines and lines consisting of learned names, obscure legal matter, and scraps of mediæval mystic jargon.

As a prose writer, Brentano began, with his Godwi, in the style of Lucinde. The first part of the book assumes that true morality consists in allowing the sensual instincts free play, and immorality in repressing or ignoring them. With bacchantic wildness the heroine preaches the gospel of free love, and denounces marriage and every species of compulsory virtue. The second part, in genuine Romantic fashion, satirises the first part and the characters delineated in it. Godwi, the hero of the first volume, retires into the background, and the author himself, under the pseudonym Maria, takes his place. We learn that it was simply with the view of obtaining the hand of the daughter of one of the personages in the first part of the book, that the author managed to gain possession of the correspondence of which that first part consists. He had hoped by publishing it to attain this end. But, as the first volume is not approved of, he takes it to Godwi, the principal character, and begs him to tell what other love adventures he has had. The astounded Godwi reads his own story. Book in hand, he conducts the author round his garden, and says, pointing to a pond: "This is the pond into which I fall on page 266 of the first volume." Thus in Godwi we have Romantic sensual licence in combination with Romantic irony and selfduplication.

The revulsion from revolutionary ardour and passion was even more complete in Brentano's case than in Fr. Schlegel's; it became positive renunciation of reason. And his conversion, like Zacharias Werner's, was of the species accompanied by a tearful conviction of sin. In his Sketch of the Life of Anna Catharina Emmerich he tells, without giving a thought to any possible physiological explanation of the fact, that her longing for the Holy Sacrament was so great, that often at night, feeling herself irresistibly drawn to it, she left her cell, and was found in the morning kneeling with outstretched arms outside the locked church door. It never occurred to him that her condition might be a morbid one, not even when she told him all the particulars of the appearance of the stigmata on her body as if the whole thing had happened to another nun of the neighbourhood.

But during the middle period of his literary career, Brentano produced some prose works which are of more than merely historical literary interest; for example, the fairy-tale, Gockel, Hinkel, und Gackeleia, which he first wrote in a pithy, condensed form, but at a later period diluted with holy water and greatly expanded. This tale gives us an idea of the inexhaustible supply of amusing and grotesque conceits to which his conversation doubtless owed its great charm. In it Brentano reveals himself as a master of the prose which, while playing with words and ideas and connecting things which have not the remotest connection, nevertheless dexterously refrains from mixing metaphors, and never breaks the link in the chain of ideas. It may be a perfect trifle, some accidental reminiscence (Brentano's remembering, for instance, that in his childhood he had heard Goethe's mother say: "Dies ist keine Puppe, sondern nur eine schöne Kunstfigur"), which sets him weaving the chain. But with the inexorable artistic severity of a contrapuntist, he holds to his fugitive motive throughout the whole length of his composition, varying and enriching it. As a specimen of this style, take the following paragraph from Gockel, Hinkelund Gackeleia, that tale in which, throughout several hundred pages, words and ideas undergo a transformation which fits them for their place in the hen-world: —

"Die Franzosen haben das Schloss so übel mitgenommen, dass sie es recht abscheulich zurückliessen. Ihr König Hahnri hatte gesagt, jeder Franzose solle Sonntags ein Huhn, und wenn keins zu haben sei, ein Hinkel in den Topf stecken und sich eine Suppe kochen. Darauf hielten sie streng, und sahen sich überall um, wie jeder zu seinem Huhn kommen könne. Als sie nun zu Haus mit den Hühnern fertig waren, machten sie nicht viel Federlesens und hatten bald mit diesem, bald mit jenem Nachbarn ein Hühnchen zu pflücken. Sie sahen die Landkarte wie einen Speisezettel an; we etwas von Henne, Huhn oder Hahn stand, das strichen sie mit rother Tinte an und giengen mit Küchenmesser und Bratspiess darauf los. So giengen sie über den Hanebach, steckten Gross- und Kleinhüningen in den Topf, und dann kamen his in das Hanauer Land. Als sie nun Gockelsruh, das herrliche Schloss der Raugrafen von Hanau, im Walde fanden, statuirten sie ein Exempel, schnitten allen Hühnern die Hälse ab, steckten sie in den Topf und den rothen Hahn auf das Dach, das heisst, sie machten ein so gutes Feuerchen unter den Topf, dass die lichte Lohe zum Dach herausschlug und Gockelsruh darüber verbrannte. Dann giengen sie weiter nach Hünefeld und Hunhaun."

This fairy-tale style, with its perpetual farcical play upon words, almost reminds one of the manner in which the young men in some of Shakespeare's plays give vent to their overflowing humour.

Much graver, if not less mannered, is the style of Brentano's most famous story, Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl ("The Story of Brave Kasperl and Fair Annerl").

The subject is taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. In the second volume of the collection, p. 204, is to be found a short ballad, Weltlich Recht ("Earthly Justice"), which tells the tale of the execution of Fair Nanerl, who is glad to die and go to her child: —

 
"Der Fähndrich kam geritten und schwenket seine Fahn:
'Halt still mit der schönen Nanerl, ich bringe Pardon.'
 
 
'Fähndrich, lieber Fähndrich, sie ist ja schon todt.
'Gute nacht, meine schöne Nanerl, deine Seel ist bei Gott.'"⁶⁴
 

In Brentano's version the whole story is told in the street, on a long summer evening, by a poor old woman of eighty-eight, the beautiful Annerl or Nanerl's grandmother. He has been so successful in reproducing this aged, pious, and very superstitious woman's language, that we seem to see her before us all the time. With consummate art, he manages to keep the reader in constant suspense by the erratic manner in which she tells her story, hurrying onward and then turning back to catch up the thread she has let fall. We are never told enough during the course of the narration to give us a clear understanding of the whole position of affairs, but always enough to keep up our interest and make us anxious to know the answer of the riddle, to get at the explanation of the story-teller's mysterious hints. Seldom have the veils concealing a series of incidents from the reader been raised so skilfully, one by one.

Another of the merits of the tale is the vigour with which its main idea, honour (the true and the false sense of honour, the shame of wounded pride and the real shame and infamy to which ambition may lead), is presented to us and developed in the actions and experiences of the two principal characters. Kasperl, the brave Uhlan, whose sense of honour is so keen that it amounts to sentimental weakness, is driven to despair by the dishonourable conduct of his father and stepbrother. He commits suicide, and is thereby saved the anguish of knowing the fate of his sweetheart, fair Annerl. Annerl's whole life has been controlled by a cruel fate. The poet, in his gloomy superstition, has taken real pleasure in driving her onwards to calamity and death with the irresistible, mysterious power of predestination. Annerl's mother in her day had loved a huntsman. This huntsman is to be executed for murder. When the child comes near the executioner, his sword trembles in its scabbard – an unmistakable sign that it thirsts for her blood. The huntsman's head, when it is cut off, flies towards her, and the teeth grip her frock. Of the power that draws her on to wrong-doing and misfortune we are constantly told: "It drew her with its teeth" ("Es hat sie mit den Zähnen dazu gerissen"). Ambition leads to disgrace; Annerl is seduced by a young officer under a false promise of marriage; in her anguish and madness she strangles her new-born child, then gives herself up to justice and pays the penalty of her crime with her young life – her seducer, the ensign, arriving too late with a pardon.

This epitome of the tale shows to what extent Brentano, in this particular case, has done homage to the doctrines of Romanticism. Supernatural warnings play an important part. The career of the heroine is regarded from the standpoint of Oriental fatalism; but at the same time, and without any attempt to smooth away the contradiction, we have the genuinely Catholic persuasion that a sin is being punished, the sin committed by the chief character in setting the purely human principle of honour above the Church's doctrine of heavenly grace. Nevertheless, the little tale has both artistic style and a genuine popular ring. The spirit of the popular ballad from which its theme is borrowed hovers over it. And, what is still more worthy of note, it is in so far an epoch-making work in German literature, that, long before the appearance of Immermann's Der Oberhof it heralds the age of the peasant-story, striking in its naïve if somewhat artificial style the chord of which we hear the echo so long afterwards in Auerbach and others.

XV
MYSTICISM IN THE ROMANTIC DRAMA

There is one form of literature in which men and women are, for the most part, portrayed as essentially intellectual beings, endowed with freedom of will and action. That form is the drama. In lyric poetry emotion reigns; in epic the character is partly lost sight of in the broad painting of the circumstances and powers which determine it; but the subject of the drama is action; and because the human character, acting and willing, is in itself something absolutely definite, it compels the author to give clear, well-defined form to his production. The drama demands lucidity and intellect; in it, where there is a reason for everything, the forces of nature must be either the servants or the masters of the mind; but, above all, they must be comprehended; they cannot appear as dark, mysterious despots, who are not expected to give any explanation of their nature or business. Tieck's two Romantic dramas, the tragedy, Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva ("Life and Death of St. Genevieve"), and the ten act comedy, Kaiser Octavianus, are really only dramas in name. His admiration of Shakespeare's Pericles and Winter's Tale and Calderon's lyrical and musical interludes betrayed him into a lyric-epic formlessness unequalled in the history of literature. It would be difficult to find dramatic works more destitute of plan and style. All their author's care is lavished upon what he calls the "climate" of events, their atmosphere and fragrance, tone and colour, the mood they inspire, the shadow they cast, the light in which they are seen, which is invariably that of the moon. His medieval characters are possessed by the spirit which the study of old legends has induced in himself. It was a kind of religious impression which imparted this tendency to his productivity. Schleiermacher's Reden über Religion ("Lectures on Religion") had had a profound influence on him. He had begun to read Jakob Böhme's Morgenröthe ("Dawn"), expecting to find it a perfect mine of absurdities, and from a scoffer had turned into an enthusiastic disciple. It was about this time, too, that he met Novalis and fell under his influence.

Nevertheless, if we read Genoveva observantly, we soon find what Tieck himself admits, that its religion, the pious emotion which was intended to give it artistic unity, is no more than the Romantic longing for religion. Many traces of this longing are to be found in the play. The old days, the days of faith, are represented as sighing, like Tieck's own, for still older, far more believing days; their religion, too, is but a longing for religion. Golo says to Sir Wolf, who to him represents the good old times: "How could I dream of jeering at thy childlike spirit!" Genoveva looks back to the past; like Tieck himself, she spends her time reading old legends. She says, with a touch of genuine Romanticism: —

 
"Drum ist es nicht so Andacht, die mich treibt,
Wie inn'ge Liebe zu den alten Zeiten,
Die Rührung, die mich fesselt, dass wir jetzt
So wenig jenen grossen Gläub'gen gleichen."⁶⁵
 

The principal masculine character in the play, the whimpering, whining villain Golo, is William Lovell over again, and William not in the least improved by being dressed up as a dramatic figure in a medieval tragedy.

Octavianus, the allegorical style of which has been strongly influenced by Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is, if possible, still more shapeless and incoherent than Genoveva. It strikes one as resembling nothing so much as a splendid collection of samples of all kinds of metres, those of Southern as well as of Northern Europe, and is in reality simply a fatiguing succession of carefully elaborated descriptions of impressions produced, moods inspired, by nature.

In the introduction to Phantasus, Tieck has himself described how all definite impressions of the surrounding world blend in his mind into a sort of mystic pantheism: —

 
"Was ich für Grott' und Berg gehalten,
Für Wald und Flur und Felsgestalten,
Das war ein einzigs grosses Haupt,
Statt Haar und Bart mit Wald umlaubt.
Still lächelt er, dass seine Kind'
In Spielen glücklich vor ihm sind
Er winkt und ahndungsvolles Brausen
Wogt her in Waldes heil'gem Sausen.
Da fiel ich auf die Kniee nieder
Mir zitterten in Angst die Glieder.
Ich sprach zum Kleinen nur das Wort:
Sag an, was ist das Grosse dort?
Der Kleine sprach: Dich fasst sein Graun,
Weil Du ihn darfst so plötzlich schaun,
Das ist der Vater, unser Alter,
Heisst Pan, von Allem der Erhalter."⁶⁶
 

And Tieck looked at and apprehended human nature exactly as he looked at and apprehended forest and mountain. In describing it, too, he drowns all definiteness and character in the flood of mystic pantheism. And this mystic pantheism in his plays paves the way for the Christian mysticism distinguishing the Romantic drama.

Arnim and Brentano are hardly to be taken into account as dramatists. The latter, in his mad comedy, Ponce de Leon, the dialogue of which is loaded with wearisome play upon words, is the would-be disciple of Shakespeare, who has only succeeded in imitating the affectations of the master's youthful style. In his great Romantic drama, Die Gründung Prags ("The Founding of Prague"), he gives us sorcery and miracles, visions and prophecies, magic rings and curses, instead of real human beings and real action; the course of events is indicated by strange forebodings and unerring second-sight.

There is some resemblance between the manner in which Brentano has dramatised Slavonic legend in this play, and the Polish Romanticist Slowacki's treatment (in Lilla Weneda, for instance) of similar themes. Both, out of crude myths and traditions, have produced pictures of Slavonic heathendom which display a certain gift of intuition. The fact is that the Romantic authors of all lands had a keener sense for religious mysticism than for dramatic truth and effect. This play of Brentano's is actually declared to have influenced the mythological theories of his contemporaries, the brothers Grimm.

Arnim's Halle und Jerusalem, the "tragedy in two comedies," as he himself styled it, in which the legend of the Wandering Jew is interwoven with the story of Cardenio and Celinde, is one of the most intolerable productions of German Romanticism. It is a reading-drama of four hundred large octavo pages, which begins as a wild student's comedy in Halle, and develops into a pilgrim-mystery in Jerusalem. It turns upon the medieval idea of the Holy Sepulchre being the centre of the world; and it ends with an apparition of three crosses of fire above the graves of the three principal characters.

In one of the scenes Celinde attempts in the dead of night to cut the heart out of her dead lover's breast, that with its assistance she may perform certain magic rites which will ensure her possession of the heart of her living lover. The dead man, the blood pouring from his breast, rises out of his coffin, and complains of her treatment in such verse as: —

 
"Geliebte, du durchbohrst mein Herz,
Das ist bittrer als der Hölle Schmerz."⁶⁷
 

Immediately after this, the sexton unmasks himself, reveals himself as the devil, and carries off Celinde's wicked mother to be his bride.

In another scene Celinde is supposed to be about to give birth to a child in a mountain cavern. A stork appears on the stage carrying a child in its beak, and flies into the cavern. Then come a whole flight of storks, which direct their course southwards, singing: —

 
"Hast du schwer am Kind getragen,
Musst sie mit den Flügeln schlagen,
Hast du müssen lange reisen,
Musst sie mit dem Schnabel beissen," &c.⁶⁸
 

The child is born dead, and the wretched mother is in despair. This fact also is communicated to us by a stork: —

 
"In meiner Wut,
In der Reiseglut,
Hab ich das Kind erdrückt," &c., &c.⁶⁹
 

Immediately on the head of this follow would-be pathetic, but in reality revoltingly horrible scenes, like the one entitled "The Temptation in the Desert," in which Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who is starving, struggles against the temptation to eat a little boy, who has been saved along with himself from shipwreck. Ahasuerus says: "How terrible is my desire for his flesh! I already feel the juicy morsel rolling between tongue and palate…" He is on the point of committing the crime, when the child cries: "Father! father!" on which the old man hastily absorbs himself in his book.

Almost at the end of the play, in the middle of a religious service held by the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, an attack is suddenly made upon those Romanticists whose piety is not sincere. A traveller says: "I will deliver the Holy Sepulchre out of the hands of the Turks." One of the author's favourite characters retorts: "Do it first, and then speak of it." Hereupon follows this incredibly undramatic parenthesis: "The traveller turns away ashamed; he goes out into the wide world and pleads the cause of Christianity in thousands of words; but his words have not the power of eternal life, for his is love without deeds. From him are descended all the new, poetic Christians, those, I mean, who are only Christians in their poems." When it comes the length of the author's "I" appearing in a parenthesis in the middle of a play, we may regard dramatic form as practically non-existent. Even Tieck and Hoffmann never went as far as this.

German Romanticism produced only two real dramatists – Zacharias Werner and Heinrich von Kleist. Of these, the latter is incomparably the greater; indeed his poetic gifts are so great that one may unhesitatingly assign him the highest place among all the poets of his school. He has a clearer, more plastic style than any of them, and pathos such as we do not find even in Goethe. His finest works are full of soul, heart, and burning passion, and yet the style is simple and lucid. Kleist is Germany's Mérimée; and a study of his characteristics will show us what the German Romantic tendency could make of a Mérimée. We shall see how the clearness, the definiteness, which was the natural quality of his genius, was disturbed and deranged by the poetical insanity of Romanticism.

Thirty steps from the Wannsee, a little lake near Berlin, and fifty from the wayside inn, stands a gravestone bearing the inscription: "Heinrich von Kleist."

Upon this spot, on the 20th of November, 1811, at the age of thirty-four, the greatest German poet of the younger generation of that day, shot, with unerring aim, first the woman he loved and then himself. It was long believed that the two were united simply by a calm, reasonable friendship. But when, in 1873, their correspondence was published, its unhealthy passion made it evident that there was extravagantly strong feeling on both sides, and that the reason of both was undermined. Kleist addresses his friend, Frau Henriette Vogel, in such terms as these: "My Jette, my all, my castle, land, meadows, and vineyards, sun of my life, my wedding, baptism of my children, my tragedy, my fame, my guardian angel, my cherub and seraph!" and she replies: "My defence, my guard, my sword, my spear, my buckler, my shield," &c.

Heinrich von Kleist was of noble birth, the scion of an old Prussian military family, which in the eighteenth century had already produced a poet. Heinrich had been through one campaign, as a young ensign, when military life became distasteful to him, and a dim consciousness of his unusual powers impelled him to turn to study. In 1799 he matriculated at the university of his native town, Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and was soon working hard at philosophy, mathematics, and classics, living, in spite of his youth, a very sober life, entirely occupied with his own ardent introspective thoughts. In an awkward, pedantic way he attempted to educate his sister, and to cultivate the mind of his fiancée, so that she might really understand him. In the course of a year he left Frankfort to pursue his studies in Berlin. He early developed a fatal inclination to stake everything on one card. His biographer, Wilbrandt, has aptly compared his character to Werther's. He had Werther's gloomy dissatisfaction and cynical reserve, his vivid imagination, his habit of brooding and reasoning, and of dwelling upon everything painful, his overpowering outbursts of emotion.