A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 12

Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind the English reader of the famous pa.s.sage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette.

"Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and s.e.x, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chast.i.ty of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which enn.o.bled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." [11]

But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy was by no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany. It was manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a practical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their entirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticists dream of this. They appealed, however, to the knightly principles of devotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and of personal loyalty to the suzerain and the n.o.bility. It was these political and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine.

He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the vapid imitations of antique cla.s.sic art, "so also do we now behold a reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were being inculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . . For when the artists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . the only explanation of their superiority that could be given was that these men believed in that which they depicted. . . . Hence the artists who were honest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious distortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of those marvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those olden works . . . made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was to re-invigorate consumptive German art with a.s.ses' milk."

A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. There was Joseph von Eichendorff, _e.g._, who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages, wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel ent.i.tled "Ahnung und Gegenwart," the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. And Joseph Gorres, who published a work on German _Volksbucher_[12] (1807); a follower of Sch.e.l.ling and editor of _Der Rheinische Merkur_, a violent anti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation. Gorres, according to Heine, "threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits," and became the "chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich"; lecturing there on universal history to an audience consisting chiefly of pupils from the Romish seminaries. Another _Spatromantiker_, born Catholic, was Clemens Brentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as having lived at Frankfort for the last fifteen years in hermit-like seclusion, as a corresponding member of the propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano was constantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, at Dulmen. She was a "stigmatic," afflicted, _i.e._, with a mysterious disease which impressed upon her body marks thought to be miraculous counterfeits of the wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, and uttered revelations which Brentano recorded and afterwards published in several volumes, that were translated into French and Italian and widely circulated among the faithful.

As adherents of the romantic school who were born and bred Protestants, but became converts to the Catholic faith, Heine enumerates Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Werner, Schutz, Carove, Adam Muller, and Count s...o...b..rg. This list, he says, includes only authors, "the number of painters who in swarms simultaneously abjured Protestantism and reason was much larger." But Tieck and Novalis never formally abjured Protestantism. They detested the Reformation and loved the mediaeval Church, but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate system. Their position here was something like that of the English Tractarians in the earlier stages of the Oxford movement. Novalis composed "Marienlieder."

Tieck complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and theology, and said that in the Middle Ages there was a unity (_Einheit_) which ought to be again recovered. All Europe was then one fatherland with a single faith. The period of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance, the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and--sorcery! He pleaded for the creation of a new Christian, Catholic mythology.

In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic--or, as Heine puts it--"went to Vienna, where he attended ma.s.s daily and ate broiled fowl."

His wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, followed her husband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias Werner, author of a number of romantic melodramas, the heroes of which are described as monkish ascetics, religious mystics, and "spirits who wander on earth in the guise of harp-players"--Zacharias Werner also went to Vienna and joined the order of Ligorians. This conversion made a prodigious noise in Germany. It occurred at Rome in 1811, and the convert afterwards witnessed the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, that annual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm a belief. Werner then spent two years in the study of theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel at Loretto in 1813; was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; and preached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity of worldly pleasures, with fastings many, with castigations and mortifications of the flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothing but a poetic coquetting with G.o.d, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the holy carbuncle (_Karfunkelstein_). He had been a man of dissolute life and had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for the restoration of the Middle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias died in 1823, after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world."

Carlyle contributed to the _Foreign Review_ in 1828 an essay on "Werner's Life and Writings," with translations of pa.s.sages from his drama, "The Templars in Cyprus."

But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of Count Friedrich s...o...b..rg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friend Voss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet ent.i.tled "Wie ward Fritz s...o...b..rg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that "s...o...b..rg had secretly joined an a.s.sociation of the n.o.bility which had for its purpose to counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these n.o.bles entered into a league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishment of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the n.o.bility." [13]

The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak of romanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the resumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it was furthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by the Bonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flat mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller and editor. Into this mere Philistinism had narrowed itself the n.o.bler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of _Traumerei_ and _Schwarmerei_--of superst.i.tion and fanaticism. "Dry light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has looked too steadily on the _lumen sicc.u.m_ of the reason; and then imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into beauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason.

Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind into a posture of child-like a.s.sent to the marvellous. Tieck's "Mahrchen" and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this "renascence of wonder," like Lewis' "Tales of Terror," Scott's "Demonology," and Coleridge's "Christabel" in England. "The tendencies of 1770 to 1780," says Scherer, "which had now quite disappeared, a.s.serted themselves with new and increased force. The nations which were groaning under Napoleon's oppression sought comfort in the contemplation of a fairer and grander past. Patriotism and mediaevalism became for a long time the watchwords and the dominating fas.h.i.+on of the day."

Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic movements in England and Germany offer, as might be expected, many interesting parallels.

Carlyle, writing in 1827,[14] says that the recent change in German literature is only a part of a general change in the whole literature of Europe. "Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise of Shakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and French philosophy? Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature; the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of Queen Anne's; and the inquiry whether Pope was a poet? A similar temper is breaking out in France itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be against all foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be entertained, and even expressed, about Corneille and the three unities. It seems to be substantially the same thing which has occurred in Germany, and been attributed to Tieck and his a.s.sociates; only that the revolution which is here proceeding, and in France commencing, appears in Germany to be completed."

In Germany, as in England--in Germany more than in England--other arts beside literature partook of the new spirit. The brothers Boisseree agitated for the completion of the "Kolner Dom," and collected their famous picture gallery to ill.u.s.trate the German, Dutch, and Flemish art of the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into fas.h.i.+on in England largely in consequence of the writings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin.

Like our own later Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began to praise the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spirituality of feeling in the old Florentine painters, and German artists strove to paint like Fra Angelico. Friedrich Schlegel gave a strong impulse to the study of mediaeval art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friend Joseph Gorres, rummaging about "among the ancient Rhine cities for the remains of old German pictures and statuary which were superst.i.tiously wors.h.i.+pped as holy relics." Tieck and his friend Wackenroder brought back from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a kind of sentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madonnas of Raphael and Holbein in the Dresden gallery; and from their explorations in Nurnberg, that _Perle des Mittelalters_, an enthusiasm for Albrecht Durer. This found expression in Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders"; and in Tieck's novel, "Sternbald's Wanderungen," in which he accompanies a pupil of Durer to Rome. Wackenroder, like Tieck's other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhat womanish const.i.tution of mind and body, and died young. Tieck edited his remains, including letters on old German art. The standard editions of their joint writings are ill.u.s.trated by engravings after Durer, one of which in particular, the celebrated "Knight, Death, and the Devil,"

symbolizes the mysterious terrors of Tieck's own tales, and of German romance in general. The knight is in complete armour, and is riding through a forest. On a hilltop in the distance are the turrets of a castle; a lean hound follows the knight; on the ground between his horse's hoofs sprawls a lizard-like reptile; a figure on horseback approaches from the right, with the face half obliterated or eaten away to the semblance of a skull, and snakes encircling the temples. Behind comes on a demon or goblin shape, with a tall curving horn, which is "neither man nor woman, neither beast nor human," but one of those grotesque and obscene monsters which the mediaeval imagination sculptured upon the cathedrals. This famous copperplate prompted Fouque's romance, "Sintram and his Companions." He had received a copy of it for a birthday gift, and brooded for years over its mysterious significance; which finally shaped itself in his imagination into an allegory of the soul's conflict with the powers of darkness. His whole narrative leads up to the description of Durer's picture, which occupies the twenty-seventh and climacteric chapter. The school of young German Pre-Raphaelite art students, a.s.sociated at Rome in 1810 under the leaders.h.i.+p of Overbeck and Cornelius, was considerably influenced by Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen."

Music, too, and particularly church music, was affected by the new taste.

The ancient music of the "Dies Irae" and other Latin hymns was revived; and it would not be far wrong to say that the romantic school sowed the seed of Wagner's great music-dramas, profoundly Teutonic and romantic in their subject matter and handling and in their application of the united arts of poetry, music, and scene-painting to old national legends such as "Parzival," "Tannhauser," [15] "The Knight of the Swan," and the "Nibelungen h.o.a.rd."

History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse from this fresh interest in the past. Johannes Muller, in his "History of the Swiss Confederation" (1780-95), drew the first appreciative picture of mediaeval life, and caught, in his diction, something of the manner of the old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folklore and popular poetry were gathered and put forth by Percy, Ritson, Ellis, Scott, and others, so in Germany the Grimm brothers' universally known collections of fairy tales, legends, and mythology began to appear.[16]

Tieck published in 1803 his "Minnelieder aus dem Schwabischen Zeitalter."

Karl Simrock made modern versions of Middle High German poetry. Uhland, whose "Walther von der Vogelweide," says Scherer, "gave the first complete picture of an old German singer," carried the war into Africa by going to Paris in 1810 and making a study of the French Middle Age. He introduced the old French epics to the German public, and is regarded, with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance philology in Germany.

A pupil of Bodmer,[17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued a complete edition of the "Nibelungenlied" in 1784-85. The romantic school now took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland gave a great deal of study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2.

Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der Hagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four editions of it, and a version in modern German. "For a long time," testifies Heine, "the 'Nibelungenlied' was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It is difficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even of the language in which it is written. It is a language of stone, and the verses are, as it were, blocks of granite." By way of giving his French readers a notion of the gigantic pa.s.sions and rude, primitive strength of the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe on some vast plain, and adds, "But no! even then you can form no conception of the chief characters of the 'Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high, no stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful Chrimhilde."

Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy's "Reliques," as the "Nibelungenlied" with Macpherson's "Ossian," was "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"

(The Boy's Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe. This was a three-volume collection of German songs, and although it came much later than Percy's, and after the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was already well under way, so that its relation to German romanticism is not of an initial kind, like that of Percy's collection in England; still its importance was very great. It influenced all the lyrical poetry of the Romantic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland. "I cannot sufficiently extol this book," says Heine. "It contains the sweetest flowers of German poesy. . . . On the t.i.tle page . . . is the picture of a lad blowing a horn; and when a German in a foreign land views this picture, he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, and homesickness steals over him. . . . In these ballads one feels the beating of the German popular heart. Here is revealed all its sombre merriment, all its droll wit. Here German wrath beats furiously the drum; here German satire stings, here German love kisses. Here we behold the sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine German tears."

The German romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly and systematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by _motifs_ drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norse mythology and from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: Gray's versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian: Southey's "Chronicles of the Cid" and Lockhart's translations of the Spanish ballads are paralleled in Germany by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others'

studies in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck's translation of "Don Quixote" [18] and by Johann Dietrich Gries' of Calderon. The romanticists, indeed, and especially Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were most accomplished translators. Schlegel's great version of Shakspere is justly esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue. Heine affirms that it was undertaken solely for polemical purposes and at a time (1797) when the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages had not yet reached an extravagant height, "Later, when this did occur, Calderon was translated and ranked far above Shakespeare. . . . For the works of Calderon bear most distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages, particularly of the two princ.i.p.al epochs, knight-errantry and monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the fas.h.i.+on to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in 'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in 'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is superannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried up. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth." Heine adds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of the mediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child again and fell to lisping.

There is a suggestive a.n.a.logy between the position of the Warton brothers in England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany. The Schlegels, like the Wartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country, and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs were alike also in that their best service was done in the field of literary history, criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and of comparatively small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance "Lucinde" is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectures on the "History of Literature" and the "Wisdom and Languages of India";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist and translator, was not successful in original verse. But this resemblance between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far. Here, as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. The Wartons were men of elegant scholars.h.i.+p after their old-fas.h.i.+oned kind, a kind which joined the usual cla.s.sical culture of the English universities to a liberal--and in their century somewhat paradoxical--enthusiasm in antiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning and of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method and grasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons are mere dilettantism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philology and comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and the brothers Grimm. Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitan lines which German literary scholars.h.i.+p was to follow, with German thoroughness and independence. And Heine acknowledges that "in reproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to be brought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities was required; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegels were far superior to Lessing." The one point at which the English movement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour and fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which the romantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart.

The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated to the English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel's "Vorlesungen uber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." [21] Heine denounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure to comprehend the modern mind. "When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poet Burger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy collection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more nave, more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . . But death is not more poetical than life. The old English ballads of the Percy collection exhale the spirit of their age, and Burger's ballads breathe the spirit of _our_ time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . What increased Schlegel's reputation still more was the sensation which he excited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of the French, . . . showed the French that their whole cla.s.sical literature was worthless, that Moliere was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of the world, and that there is no poetry in France." It is well known that Coleridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that he undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the language. The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess of Teutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic cla.s.sicism.

The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied by their disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the "Mahrchen," or popular traditionary tale, his peculiar province. It was Wackenroder who first drew his attention to "those old, poorly printed _Volksbucher_, with their coa.r.s.e wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among the peasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of the Leipzig fairs." [22] Tieck's volume of "Volksmahrchen" (1797) gave reproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the "Haimonskinder," the "Schone Magelone," "Tannhauser," and the "Schildburger." His "Phantasus" (1812) contained original tales conceived in the same spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered the manifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overture of his "Kaiser Octavia.n.u.s":

"Mondbeglanzte Zaubernacht, Die den Sinn gefangen halt, Wundervolle Mahrchenwelt, Steig auf in der alten Pracht!"

"Forest solitude" [_Waldeinsamkeit_], says Boyesen,[23] "churchyards at midnight, ruins of convents and baronial castles; in fact, all the things which we are now apt to call romantic, are the favourite haunts of Tieck's muse. . . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight and literally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; therefore moonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a hero to make a declaration of love without a near or distant accompaniment of a bugle (_Schalmei_ or _Waldhorn_); accordingly the bugle is called a romantic instrument."

"The true tone of that ancient time," says Carlyle,[24] "when man was in his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where human pa.s.sion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humble graces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers, again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will smile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and doggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet."

"In these works," says Heine, "there reigns a mysterious intenseness, a peculiar sympathy with nature, especially with the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The reader feels himself transported into an enchanted forest; he hears the melodious gurgling of subterranean waters; at times he seems to distinguish his own name in the rustling of the trees. Ever and anon a nameless dread seizes upon him as the broad-leaved tendrils entwine his feet; strange and marvellous wild flowers gaze at him with their bright, languis.h.i.+ng eyes; invisible lips mockingly press tender kisses on his cheeks; gigantic mushrooms, which look like golden bells, grow at the foot of the trees; large silent birds sway to and fro on the branches overhead, put on a sapient look and solemnly nod their heads. Everything seems to hold its breath; all is hushed in awed expectation; suddenly the soft tones of a hunter's horn are heard, and a lovely female form, with waving plumes on head and falcon on wrist, rides swiftly by on a snow-white steed. And this beautiful damsel is so exquisitely lovely, so fair; her eyes are of the violet's hue, sparkling with mirth and at the same time earnest, sincere, and yet ironical; so chaste and yet so full of tender pa.s.sion, like the fancy of our excellent Ludwig Tieck. Yes, his fancy is a charming, high-born maiden, who in the forests of fairyland gives chase to fabulous wild beasts; perhaps she even hunts the rare unicorn, which may only be caught by a spotless virgin."

In 1827 Carlyle[25] published translations of five of Tieck's "Mahrchen,"

viz.: "The Fair-Haired Eckbert," "The Trusty Eckart," "The Elves," "The Runenberg," and "The Goblet." He mentioned that another tale had been already Englished--"The Pictures" (Die Gemalde). This version was by Connop Thirwall, who had also rendered "The Betrothal" in 1824. In spite of Carlyle's recommendations, Tieck's stories seem to have made small impression in England. Doubtless they came too late, and the romantic movement, by 1827, had spent its first force in a country already sated with Scott's poems and novels. Sarah Austin, a daughter of William Taylor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German literature in this same year 1827. In her "Fragments from German Prose Writers" (1841), she speaks of the small success of Tieck's stories in England, but testifies that A. W. Schlegel's dramatic lectures had been translated early and the translation frequently reprinted. Another of the Norwich Taylors--Edgar--was the translator of Grimm's "Haus- und Kinder-Mahrchen." Julius Hare, who was at school at Weimar in the winter of 1804-5, rendered three of Tieck's tales, as well as Fouque's "Sintram"

(1820).

It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to Hawthorne and Poe. The latter mentions his "Journey into the Blue Distance" in his "Fall of the House of Usher", and in an early review of Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" (1842) and "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846), at a time when their author was still, in his own words, "the obscurest man of letters in America." Poe acutely pointed out a resemblance between Hawthorne and Tieck; "whose manner," he a.s.serts, "in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that _habitual_ to Hawthorne." One finds a confirmation of this _apercu_--or finds, at least, that Hawthorne was attracted by Tieck--in pa.s.sages of the "American Note-Books," where he speaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sitting, by the aid of a German dictionary. Colonel Higginson ("Short Studies"), _a propos_ of Poe's sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary citations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fascinatingly ent.i.tled "Journey into the Blue Distance"; and to having been laughed at for his pains by a friend who a.s.sured him that Poe could scarcely read a word of German. But Tieck did really write this story, "Das Alte Buch: oder Reise ins Blaue hinein," which Poe misleadingly refers to under its alternate t.i.tle. There is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck's "Mahrchen"--which are far from being mere fairy tales--that reminds one frequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art--of such things as "Ethan Brand,"

or "The Minister's Black Veil," or "The Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains." There is, _e.g._, "The Elves," in which a little girl does but step across the foot-bridge over the brook that borders her father's garden, to find herself in a magic land where she stays, as it seems to her, a few hours, but returns home to learn that she has been absent seven years. Or there is "The Runenberg," where a youth wandering in the mountains, receives from a sorceress, through the cas.e.m.e.nt of a ruined castle, a wondrous tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and years afterward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home and friends to search for fairy jewels, only to return again to his village, an old and broken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to him the most precious stones. And there is the story of "The Goblet,"

where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's "Shaker Bridal," a pair of lovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when too late, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is left to mock their youthful hope.

But the mystic, _par excellence_, among the German romanticists was Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the _Foreign Review_ for 1829. Novalis' "Hymns to the Night," written in Ossianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voices of the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance "Heinrich von Ofterdingen." The hero was a legendary poet of the time of the Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg.

But in Novalis' romance there is no firm delineation of mediaeval life--everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism and allegory. The story opens with the words: "I long to see the blue flower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else."

Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and a fountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towards him, the petals showing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a lovely face." This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the real object, pa.s.sion, and vocation of young Heinrich." Boyesen gives a subtler interpretation. "This blue flower," he says, "is the watchword and symbol of the school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with longing; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, but a dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kins.h.i.+p with the infinite,[26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of happiness which the world has to offer. The object of the romantic longing, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . . The blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fills the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic rapture." [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England transcendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' blue flower in such a poem as Emerson's "Forerunners," or Lowell's "Footpath," or Whittier's "Vanishers," or in Th.o.r.eau's little parable about the horse, the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking.

And again one is reminded of Tieck when Th.o.r.eau says: "I had seen the red election birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' strings and fancied that their plumage would a.s.sume stranger and more dazzling colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest." Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to visit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowy persons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who represent respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry of history, and the spirit of the Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poet Klingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full development). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face is that same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals of the blue flower. Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and disappear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in a strange land and asks where the river is. "Seest thou not its blue waves above us?" she answers. "He looked up and the blue river was flowing softly over their heads." "This image of Death, and of the river being the sky in that other and eternal country" [28]--does it not once more remind us of the well-known line in Channing's "A Poet's Hope"--

"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea";

or of Emerson's "Two Rivers":

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through Concord plain"?

But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we may dismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, once published at Concord, took for its motto a sentence from his "Bluthenstaub" (Flower-pollen): "Philosophy can bake no bread, but she can procure for us G.o.d, freedom, and immortality." [29]

Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England.

Brentano's most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under the t.i.tle, "Honour, or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl: With an Introduction and Biographical Notice" (London, 1847). The same story was rendered into French in the _Correspondant_ for 1859 ("Le Brave Kasperl et la Belle Annerl"). Three tales of Arnim were translated by Theophile Gautier, as "Contes Bizarres" (Paris, 1856). Arnim's best romance is "Die Kronenwachter" (1817). Scherer testifies that this "combined real knowledge of the Reformation period with graphic power"; and adds: "It was Walter Scott's great example which, in the second decade of this century, first made conscientious faithfulness and study of details the rule in historical novel-writing." Longfellow's "German Poets and Poetry" (1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano. Nor did Thomas Roscoe's "German Novelists" (four volumes), nor George Soane's "Specimens of German Romance," both of which appeared in 1826.

The most popular of the German romanticists was Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouque, the descendant of a family exiled from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussian army in the war of liberation. Fouque's numerous romances, in all of which he upholds the ideal of Christian knighthood, have been, many of them, translated into English. "Aslauga's Knight" appeared in Carlyle's "Specimens of German Romance" (1827); "Sintram," "Undine," and "Der Zauberring" had been translated even earlier. "Thiodolf the Icelander"

and others have also been current in English circulating libraries.

Carlyle acknowledges that Fouque's notes are few, and that he is possessed by a single idea. "The chapel and the tilt yard stand in the background or the foreground in all the scenes of his universe. He gives us knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they stand before us in their mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire and dame. . . . Change of scene and person brings little change of subject; even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence of its unseen presence. Nor can it be said that in this solitary department his success is of the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of Christian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old _sentiment_ to modern _thoughts_, was a task which he could not attempt.

He has turned rather to the fictions and machinery of former days."

Heine says that Fouque's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of a hundred lions and the sense of two a.s.ses. But Fouque's "Undine" (1811) is in its way a masterpiece and a cla.s.sic. This story of the lovely water-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight, and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance to the conception of Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." Coleridge was greatly fascinated by it. He read the original several times, and once the American translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it was beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's Caliban in being a literal _creation_.

But in general Fouque's chivalry romances, when compared with Scott's, have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higher spirituality and a softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid with a right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour to make the Middle Ages real. The people are there, as well as chevaliers and their ladies. The history of the times is there. But in Fouque the Middle Ages become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in our imaginations. There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, and enchantment. Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the Lion Heart in "Der Zauberring" with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." A wavering moons.h.i.+ne lies all over the world of the Fouque romances, like the magic light which illumines the Druda's castle in "Der Zauberring," on whose battlements grow tall white flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from the perpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On the romantic side," wrote Richter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the _Heidelberg Jahrbucher_ for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us; for the Briton--to whom nothing is so poetical as the common weal--requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured b.u.t.terfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something."

Another _Spatromantiker_ who has penetrated to the English literary consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet of the romantic school. Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse sagas, the "Nibelungenlied" and German hero legends, the Spanish romances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treated motives from all these varied sources. His true field, however, was the ballad, as Tieck's was the popular tale; and many of Uhland's ballads are favourites with English readers, through excellent translations. Sarah Austin's version of one of them is widely familiar:

"Many a year is in its grave Since I crossed this restless wave," etc.

Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight," "The Luck of Edenhall,"

and "The Castle by the Sea." It is to be feared that the last-named belongs to what Scherer calls that "trivial kind of romanticism, full of sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantles and golden crowns, kings' daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers, monks, and nuns play a great part." But it has a haunting beauty, and a dreamy melody like Goethe's "Es war ein Konig in Thule." The mocking Heine, who stigmatises Fouque's knights as combinations of iron and sentimentality, complains that in Uhland's writings too "the naive, rude, powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealised fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental melancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's poems are only beautiful shadows, embodied moons.h.i.+ne; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears in their eyes, _i.e._, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the former were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled with flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers."

Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of England by German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795 to 1810, in the days of Burger and "Gotz," and "The Robbers," and Monk Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael's book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his articles in the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, and by his translations from German romance. But he found among English readers an invincible prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. The romantic _chiaroscuro_, which puzzled Southey even in "The Ancient Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Mahrchen" and midnight darkness in the visionary Novalis. The _Weichheit_, _Wehmuth_, and _Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit_ of the German romanticists were moods not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feeling infinite," sings Byron.

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain,"