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

It was clear to Kleist himself that his was the poet's vocation long before he dared confide the thought to his friends; he left them, he isolated himself, until he was certain of his powers. When for the first time he felt the plan of a work taking shape in his mind, it seemed to him as though "something like earthly happiness" were smilingly beckoning him on. Impetuous and audacious, he expected to produce a masterpiece at once. The immature beginner's attempt was unsuccessful. When, a year later, he planned Robert Guiscard, the tragedy which occupied his thoughts throughout the rest of his youth, it was with the distinct intention of surpassing the classical works of Goethe and Schiller "by the aid of a new art principle." In his art Æschylus and Shakespeare, the best qualities of antiquity and the Renaissance, were to be fused together, the cult of the beautiful was to be combined with truth to nature, and irreproachable style with the extreme of tragic horror.

His powers were as yet inadequate to the task of producing a complete work, and he was obliged to lay the tragedy aside.

In the discouragement produced by the failure of this attempt he turned to philosophy. His desire was to find, not truths, but the truth. With the naïve confidence of the self-taught man he expected to discover at once the full, perfect truth which would guide him both in life and death.

It was the philosophy of Kant which he set himself to study, and the impression it made upon him was distinctly depressing. He had expected to find a religion in philosophy, and Kant's Theory of Cognition taught him that we cannot attain to the truth, can never know what things are in themselves, but only see them as our own organs show them to us – that is to say, he who has green spectacles sees things green, and he who has red, sees them red. When he recognised that knowledge of the truth, as he had represented it to himself, was not possible, it seemed to the young man as if his highest, his only aim were gone.

In this state of spiritual disorganisation he, like other Romanticists, felt the inclination to seek the support of a system of dogmas, either that of orthodox Protestantism or that of the older and more authoritative Catholic Church. He writes from Dresden: "Nothing could have been better calculated to entice me away from the melancholy domain of science than the treasures of art collected in this town… But nowhere did I feel so deeply moved as in the Catholic church, where the most sublime music leagues itself with the other arts to touch the heart. Our divine service is nothing at all in comparison; it only appeals to cold reason, but a Catholic festival appeals to all the senses… Oh, for one drop of forgetfulness! then I should with joy become a Catholic."

Though he overcomes these fancies, he is unable to force himself to work, now that he has made the discovery that truth is not to be found upon earth. To put an end to this painful aimlessness, he determines, though with no particular object in view, to go to Paris. His letters from Paris show how fruitless this new attempt at discovering his real vocation in life proved. He breaks off his engagement, because his fiancée will not blindly and obediently follow him to Switzerland, there to live the life of a peasant's wife. His pride will not permit him to return to his native town before he has accomplished something in the way of fulfilment of his ambitious projects. He goes to Weimar with the intention of completing Robert Guiscard there, is much in Wieland's society, and finally takes up his abode in his house. The old man's goodness and his daughter's quiet tenderness keep him there, but he remains reserved and absent-minded. At last he confesses to the lovable, sympathetic old poet that he is at work upon a tragedy, but that his ideal is so high that he has as yet found it impossible to transfer his conception to paper.

One afternoon Wieland, taking advantage of a favourable opportunity, persuaded his guest to repeat some fragments of the principal scenes from memory. The old poet's admiration knew no bounds; he asserted that if it were possible for the spirits of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare to combine in creating a tragedy, it would be such a tragedy as Robert Guiscard, provided that the whole fulfilled the promise of the parts he had heard.

Kleist's joy was great, but short-lived. Circumstances soon unsettled him again. He went first to Leipzig, then to Dresden. It was in Dresden, to a girl who was in distress because of the supposed indifference of her lover, that he first made the proposal (a proposal which he afterwards often repeated to friends of both sexes), that he should take a pistol and shoot her and himself. Not long afterwards he made a similar offer to his faithful friend, Von Pfuel. Pfuel came to the conclusion that travel would be the best thing possible for Kleist and his tragedy. Kleist caught eagerly at the idea. Shortly before he started for Switzerland he received a letter from Wieland which gave him fresh courage, and was for a long time his greatest comfort. Wieland wrote that it was impossible to him to believe that any external hindrance could prevent the completion of Kleist's masterpiece: "To the Holy Muse who inspires you nothing is impossible. You must complete your Guiscard; yes, even if the whole Caucasus were weighing you down."

During his travels in Switzerland and Northern Italy, which occupied the summer and autumn of 1803, Kleist wrote nothing. Despairing of the sufficiency of his powers, coming to the conclusion that he possessed only a "half talent," he temporarily gave up all idea of literary work. All the time tormented by thoughts of death, he travelled by Lyons to Paris. There he burned Guiscard and all his papers, and determined to enter the army of France (a nation he hated) and take part in the great expedition preparing at Boulogne, in the confident hope that the undertaking would fail, and that he and the whole army would find graves in England. He tried to enlist as a common soldier, but was refused. An acquaintance whom he accidentally met, put him in a position to return to Germany, where, after many mishaps and disappointments, he obtained a small official appointment at Königsberg.

Kleist had announced his intention of competing with Goethe. "I will tear the wreath from his brow," was early the burden of his confidences and his dreams. It sounds like the utterance of a madman. And yet, when we read the one fragment that remains to us of the never-completed drama, Guiscard, we are filled with astonishment. It was as little within the power of this work as of any other to remove the crown of honour from the brow of the genius whose spirit dominates two centuries; but the fact remains that the fragment of it which we possess stands on a level with much of the best produced by Goethe.

Kleist has drawn on his imagination for the picture of a great man, a great leader; and he at once successfully impresses us with his hero's greatness by showing how much depends upon him, upon his life, how thousands upon thousands look up to him as their ruler and only saviour.

The great adventurer, Robert Guiscard, son of Tancred de Hauteville, is lying with his army before Constantinople, which city he has vowed to take and keep. But fate is against him; the plague has broken out in his camp and is committing terrible ravages.

Kleist himself had encountered just such overwhelming misfortune on the path of victory which his imagination had painted; and his delineation of a hero struggling against an overpowering destiny which he has long borne consciously within himself is grand. For Guiscard himself is plague-stricken; the mortal sickness is raging in his intestines; its poison is consuming his very bones. He who till now has been everywhere victorious, the conqueror of Southern Italy, of Rome, of Venice, and of Greece, knows, feels, that his end is at hand. A crowd of Normans are besieging his tent, calling on him to lead the army away from this terrible camping-ground, where they feel the poisonous breath of the plague blowing in their faces. A rumour that he is ill has already begun to spread, but as yet the truth is not to be divulged; Guiscard is too proud to let any one know what he is suffering.

His tent is thrown open, and the man in whose breast a consuming fire is burning, whose throat is parched with unquenchable thirst, and whose hand is so weak that all through the night he has not been able to lift it, steps forth erect and proud, and shows himself to the crowd. So strong and gay and masterful does he seem, that even those who before were certain of the worst, no longer know what to believe.

And there is profound meaning as well as grandeur in this conception of Kleist's. This Guiscard, who stands there erect and unflinching while mortal disease is gnawing at his vitals, who is he but Kleist himself, his whole unhappy life long? He himself is the great genius whose plans are foiled by the pestilence without and within him.

Kleist soon resigned his Government appointment and returned to the calling of literature. It is most interesting to observe the dramatic characters now produced by a man in reality full of productive energy. Our study of the psychological peculiarities and doctrines of the Romanticists has shown us how their predilection for disintegrating personality led them to lay special weight upon all that has a disintegrating effect – dreams, hallucinations, and madness. What distinguishes Kleist's characters from those of the other Romanticists is that there is nothing blurred and vague about them; the essential quality which his and theirs have in common is morbidity. In every passion Kleist seizes upon that feature which betrays kinship with the fixed idea or with helpless insanity; he probes every mind, however sound, till he finds the diseased point where it loses control over itself – somnambulistic tendency, overpowering animal appetites, absent-mindedness, cowardice in the face of death. Take such a passion as love; it is certainly not of a rational nature, but it has a side from which it may be seen to be connected with reason and intellect. Kleist almost invariably, and with admirable skill, depicts it as of the nature of disease, as mania.

When Käthchen of Heilbronn sees Count Walter von Strahl for the first time, she drops everything she is carrying, food, wine, and glasses, and, pale as death, with folded hands, falls at his feet as if she had been struck by lightning. The Count speaks a friendly word to her. Presently, from her window, she sees him mounting his horse to ride away. In her haste to follow him, she jumps from the window, thirty feet high, on to the street, and breaks both her legs. Barely recovered from six weeks' fever, she rises from her bed, collects a small bundle of belongings, and deserts her home to seek the Count and follow him in blind devotion from place to place, led "by the rays which shine from his face and twine themselves round her heart like a five-stranded cord." She wanders after him, her bare feet bleeding on the stony roads, her scanty skirt fluttering in the wind, a straw hat her only protection against the heat of the sun and the pelting of the rain. Through mountain mists, across desert tracts scorched by the sun, through the darkness of thick forests, she follows, like a dog on its master's track; and she, who had been accustomed to lay her head on soft pillows, disturbed by each little knot spun inadvertently by herself into the thread of the sheets, now, when night comes, sleeps in the Count's stables like the meanest servant, sinking exhausted upon the straw spread for his horses.

There is the ring of truth in this description, given by her father, of the young girl's flight. The Count, who knows that he is in no way to blame, tries every method of alienating her. Coming upon her in his stable one night, he thrusts her aside with his foot, and more than once he threatens her with his dog-whip. He allows her to sacrifice herself for his bride, who orders her to rush into a burning house to save his miniature, and when she has brought it, sends her back again for the case. With joy and deep humility she does and bears all. The more refined, but weaker, representation of an overpowering, unrequited passion given us by Henrik Hertz in The House of Svend Dyring is modelled upon Kleist's Käthchen. Side by side with much that is ridiculous and repulsive, Käthchen von Heilbronn contains much that is really grand. It is plain enough that this passion, which comes on as suddenly as a fit of apoplexy – which, moreover, as a fixed idea, destroys every other idea, and, itself a miracle, performs miracles with the aid of an angel – oversteps the bounds of the natural and the healthy. Yet there is something fine in it. It gave intense satisfaction to Kleist, who had such a rooted aversion for mere phrases, to represent a loving woman, in whom everything was truth and reality which in other women is mere words. It was thus that he himself had desired to be loved by his Wilhelmine; and at a later period he had demanded such excessive devotion from a young girl whose acquaintance he had made at the Körners' house in Dresden, and who had become attached to him, that all relations between them were broken off. Now he had taken refuge with his ideal in poetry.

There is something satisfying and pleasing in the realisation of the well-known phrases: To see and love was one and the same thing – to follow the beloved to the ends of the earth – to be more devoted to him than his dog – to go through fire and water for him. But yet all this properly belongs to the domain of pathology; these are morbid manifestations. Then, too, we have the Romantic reason of it all. Käthchen's violent agitation when she sees the Count is explained by the fact of his having previously appeared to her in a dream. At the moment when she sees him in this dream, the Count is in reality lying dangerously ill with typhus fever. Stretched like a corpse on his bed, he himself has the feeling that he is entering Käthchen's room. And when he hears of the strange coincidence, he cannot help exclaiming anxiously —

 
"Help me, ye gods! Now am I double!
A spirit I, who wander in the night."
 

Here we have the favourite idea of Romanticism, "Doppelgängerei," in close connection with somnambulism.

Somnambulism plays a similar part in Der Prinz von Homburg, the finest of Kleist's dramas – probably the finest drama produced by the Romantic School. In it all the important characters stand out as if hewn in stone. The dialogue is vigorous and clear; every word tells. The young cavalry leader commits an unpardonable breach of discipline; he is victorious in an engagement which he has brought about in a manner forbidden in his instructions. The Elector condemns him to death. Not for a moment imagining that the sentence will be carried out, the young hero treats it as a mere matter of form. When it dawns upon him that it is sober earnest, a sudden fear of death takes possession of him, and he abjectly begs for his life. Kleist's genius shows itself in the delineation of the mental process by which the Prince becomes himself again, and demands death as his right. Here once more it is the night side of the mind to which attention is drawn. The Prince is nervous, ill, and absent-minded. In the first act he walks in his sleep. In the last we have the realisation of one of his visions. He transgresses orders, not, like the son of Manlius Torquatus, in youthful audacity and martial ardour, but because, in his nervous, dreamy absent-mindedness he has not heard the orders given, and consequently dashes recklessly on.

Kleist had been deeply interested by G. H. von Schubert's Die Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft ("The Night Side of the Science of Nature"). This book, written by the most popular "Naturphilosoph" of the day, is one of the most extravagant works of the whole period. The night side of a planet is that which is turned away from the sun, and only glimmers faintly in the darkness, with a light destitute of warmth, a light in which all objects look strange, and totally different from what they do in the light of the sun. Schubert considers that he succeeds, in his "Science of Nature," in demonstrating the existence of such a night side. The first half of the work is "Naturphilosophie," much as Steffens understood it. "This is certainly not philosophy for the world," says the author, "but it is much older than the world and all its philosophies, and will last much longer." Most of it is on the same lines as the so-called occult sciences of to-day. Man, like the nature which surrounds him, is a "prophetic hieroglyph." In animal magnetism, in somnambulism, in presentiment, and in so-called prescience, proofs are sought of a predestined harmony between the life of the individual and that of the whole.

According to Schubert's theory, man originally had the power of working miracles. Sin bereft him of his power over nature, and after this there was always something dark and dæmonic connected with the miracle-working gift – with the oracles of Greece, for instance, and with all heathen sorcery. The old, natural miraculous power was revived in Christ. In its dæmonic form it has reappeared among the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons (the secret societies which played so important a part in the imagination of Schubert's day); and it is also observable in such phenomena as animal magnetism, clairvoyance, &c. Adam Müller writes: "Schubert's book seems to me the best which the 'Naturphilosophie' has produced; its author, though not superior to Schelling in polemical and critical talent, is certainly his superior in feeling, in sincerity, and above all in erudition… In Schubert's writings I find a glorified, yet in all essentials accurate presentment of an earlier stage of my development, when my one longing was, that all that was human and personal in my power of achievement might, as it were, dissolve into the smoke of a sweet incense, an offering to the God I worshipped. How I longed to be able to divest myself of name and personality, and become the most devoted of martyrs or the most priestly of priests" (der geistlichste Geistliche). Every one read the book, and even a mind like Kleist's allowed itself, as we have seen, to be engrossed by all this pretentious foolishness. Mysticism was the order of the day, and it is curious to see how the mystic element, the strange trinity of sensuality, religion, and cruelty, insinuates itself into all Kleist's dramas. Take, for example, that remarkable tragedy, Penthesilea. The heroine is the wild queen of the Amazons, who is waging a victorious war upon both the Greeks and the Trojans. It is a law among the Amazons that each must capture in battle the man who is to be her husband; then, when the war is over, she lives with him in peace and happiness. Penthesilea has conceived quite as fatal a passion for Achilles as Käthchen's for Count Strahl. But in Penthesilea love shows itself in a different way; it takes the form of cruelty. In every battle she pursues Achilles, thirsting for his blood. If Käthchen loved like a dog, Penthesilea loves like a tigress escaped from a Bacchanalian procession.

It is plain that it is his own temperament with which Kleist has endowed the Amazon queen. She cares for nothing, will take nothing, but Achilles, just as he refused to aim at anything, to be content with anything, but the highest place of honour. Her wild haste to conquer her beloved corresponds with his desire to attain his aim at one blow, with his drama, Robert Guiscard. Like Kleist, she can only live when she is striving after what her soul desires. She says, what her author might have said:[6] "I should go mad if I did not attempt all that is within the bounds of possibility."

She hates Achilles as fervently as Kleist in dark hours must have hated and cursed the destiny which forbade his winning the highest fame. She kills him in an access of detestation, as Kleist, in an access of desperation, destroyed his beloved work, his Guiscard. Yet she loves him, loves him helplessly, with a consuming passion.⁷⁰ When Achilles has wounded her in battle, she complains in words which seem to refer to the poet himself: —

 
"Mir diesen Busen zu zerschmettern, Prothoe!
Die Brust, so voll Gesang, Asteria!
Ein Lied, jedweder Saitengriff auf ihn!"⁷¹
 

When she is on the point of giving up everything, she says, as Kleist did in so many of his letters to his sister: —

 
"Das Aeusserste, das Menschenkräfte leisten
Hab ich gethan, Unmögliches versucht,
Mein Alles hab ich an den Wurf gesetzt;
Der Würfel, der entscheidet, liegt, er liegt:
Begreifen muss ich's – und dass ich verlor!"⁷²
 

We can readily understand how it was that Pfuel, Kleist's faithful friend, found him sitting weeping after writing the description of Penthesilea's death. Indeed, the poet himself wrote of the play to a friend: "It is true; you have divined it with the glance of a seer; my inmost self is in it, my soul in its glory and its anguish."

Yet this personal element does not preclude Romantic mysticism; the story is impregnated with it. Penthesilea's love expresses itself in such words as the following: —

 
"Hetzt alle Hund' auf ihn! mit Feuerbranden
Die Elephanten peitschet auf ihn los!
Mit Sichelwagen schmettert auf ihn ein
Und mähet seine üpp'gen Glieder ab!"⁷³
 

This last repulsive wish, to see Achilles' limbs mowed off by the scythes of the chariots, is, as we learn at the conclusion of the play, no feigned desire. The Amazons are defeated, and their wearied and wounded queen falls into Achilles' hands. He loves her, and, to keep her from grieving and despairing, he attempts to make her believe that she has been victorious, and that he is her captive. She soon, however, discovers the truth. Then Achilles challenges her to single combat, with the intention of allowing her to defeat him, and in this manner becoming her husband. When Penthesilea receives the challenge, she does not understand its meaning. She is seized by a sort of Berserker fury, throws herself upon her horse, cries to her hounds, and dashes off. He sees her coming and is afraid. She bends her bow "till the ends kiss," takes aim, and sends an arrow through his neck. He falls, but, with the death rattle in his throat, struggles to rise again; then she urges on her hounds to tear him to pieces, and, following their example, sets her teeth in his breast and bites until the blood drips from her mouth and hands.

 
"Doch hetz! schon ruft sie: Tigris! hetz, Leäne!
Hetz, Sphinx! Melampus! Dirke! hetz, Hyrkaon!
Und stürzt – stürzt mit der ganzen Meut, o Diana!
Sich über ihn, und reisst – reisst ihn beim Helmbusch
Gleich einer Hündin, Hunden beigesellt,
Der greift die Brust ihm, dieser greift den Nacken,
Dass von dem Fall der Boden bebt, ihn nieder!
Er, in dem Purpur seines Bluts sich wälzend,
Rührt ihre sanfte Wange an, und ruft:
Penthesilea! meine Braut! was thust du?
Ist dies das Rosenfest, das du versprachst?
Doch sie – die Löwin hätte ihn gehört,
Die hungrige, die wild nach Raub umher
Auf öden Schneegefilden heulend treibt —
Sie schlägt, die Rüstung ihm vom Leibe reissend,
Den Zahn schlägt sie in seine weisse Brust,
Sie und die Hunde, die wetteifernden,
Oxus und Sphinx den Zahn in seine rechte,
In seine linke sie; als ich erschien,
Troff Blut von Mund und Händen ihr herab."⁷⁴
 

It is long before she comes to her senses and realises what she has done. Her first feeling is utter despair, but presently she says: —

 
"Wie manche, die am Hals des Freundes hängt,
Sagt wohl das Wort: sie lieb'ihn, o so sehr,
Dass sie vor Liebe gleich ihn fressen könnte;
Und hinterher, das Wort geprüft, die Närrin!
Gesättigt sein zum Ekel ist sie schon.
Nun, du Geliebter, so verfuhr ich nicht;
Sieh her: als ich an deinem Halse hing,
Hab ich's wahrhaftig Wort für Wort gethan;
Ich war nicht so verrückt, als es wohl schien."⁷⁵
 

She is not so mad as she seems. It is the same here as in Käthchen von Heilbronn– what with most women is only a figure of speech, is in Penthesilea's case reality. Many a woman says she loves her lover with a passion so wild that she could eat him; Penthesilea does it. She says: —

 
"Küsse, Bisse,
Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt,
Kann schon das eine für das andere greifen."⁷⁶
 

But even this is not the complete explanation. As yet we have only the two elements, sensuality and cruelty; the third, religion, is present also. It appears as the supplementary colour when we look carefully at the first two. Remember Novalis's words, already quoted: "The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire … he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more." The great Christian mystery was a subject occupying all minds at this time, Kleist's among the rest. One of his intimate friends was the most notable mystic of the day, the ingenious sophist, Adam Müller. It may astonish us, or offend us, to find traces of Christian mystic dogma in a pagan drama which has the Queen of the Amazons for heroine; but to understand this, and many other kindred phenomena, we must take the relative truth and justifiableness of this mysticism into consideration. These men could not shut their religious ideas into a cupboard, and keep them altogether apart from their lives and actions. It was not only twice, or possibly three times, a year that such a subject as the Lord's Supper occupied their minds; it pervaded all their thoughts; they strove to see life in the light of this great mystery. In the complete edition of Friedrich von Baader's collected works (vol. iv. Anthropology), amongst a number of short essays, such as: On the Ecstatic Rapture of those who Talk in Magnetic Sleep, The Vision Seer of Prevorst, Forty Tenets of Religious Love, &c., &c., we find one entitled: That, in the Spiritual, Good or Evil Meaning of the Word, all Men are Anthropophagi. It begins: "Man at heart, or, to use the language of Scripture, the inner man, does not live on tangible nourishment, on material bread; he lives, and that not in the symbolical, but in the most real meaning of the word, entirely upon other inner men, whose hearts and words are his food."

The great religious mystery ultimately became the centre round which even philosophical thought revolved. Henrik Steffens may serve as an example. This writer, in whose character, as Julian Schmidt⁷⁷ aptly remarks, "there is an undeniable strain of innate servility," was appointed to conduct the trial of the demagogues in Breslau. It was a task which he accomplished in a spirit at variance with sound human reason and the natural sense of justice, and during its performance he gave expression to the most reactionary religious sentiments, entirely forgetful of the pantheism of his youth. In the essay, How I Once More Became a Lutheran, he writes: "The Holy Sacrament is the chief individualising process in Christianity; by its means the whole mystery of the redemption enters in all its fulness into the receptive personality. The fertilising stream of grace, which, since the day of the great regeneration, has flowed through all nature and all history, and which matures us for a blessed future, here takes the form of the Saviour, in order that that which is all in all may be completely present… By means of the satisfying personal presence of the Saviour, that which the Christian truly believes, that which pervades his whole life, and overcomes death, yet at the same time forces him back into the domain of the senses, here becomes certainty, enjoyment, nourishment. … To me the communion of the Lord's Supper is the highest, most important, most mysterious of all religious acts; so important does it seem to me, that through it every doctrine acquires unfathomable significance."

We see, then, how tremendously important a part this sacrament plays in the Christian mysticism of the period under consideration. There existed a tender, almost an erotic, relation between the faithful and the consecrated elements. True believers were declared to be sensible of the presence of these elements at an extraordinary distance. Read what Görres writes on the subject in the second part of his Mystik. "To begin with what is holiest – " he says, "all who have attained to the higher spiritual life are aware, at a prodigious distance, of the presence of the Host." A number of examples of this are given, and we are told in the preface that all the facts instanced are vouched for by numerous witnesses, that these witnesses were the most reliable imaginable, either priests or pious laymen, and that they were particularly favourably situated for making the necessary observations. And we not only learn that saintly believers can detect the Host, no matter where it may be hidden, but that the Host feels such an attraction towards them, that it springs from the priest's hand into their mouths. Sometimes the priest actually feels that it is violently torn out of his hands, drawn like steel by a magnet; and the saintly, in their turn, are so forcibly attracted to the holy substance that they are carried through the air to it.

Nowhere in all Kleist's writings has mysticism taken such strange possession of a perfectly pagan, not to say wanton, theme as in his Amphitryon, which is an adaptation of Molière's well-known comedy. The story, not a very easy one to treat, is as follows. During Amphitryon's absence, Jupiter assumes his form and visits his wife, Alcmene, who believes the god to be her husband. Amphitryon returns, and a whole series of comical confusions ensue between the real and the pretended husband, the real slave, Sosias, and Mercury as Sosias. At last the true state of affairs is explained, and Amphitryon has to console himself with the consideration that there is nothing dishonourable in such a relationship with Jupiter, – a moral theory which it must have been very much to the interest of Louis the Fourteenth to defend and propagate.