Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature – 3. The Reaction in France. Georg Brandes
had developed, and to attain to an even clearer conviction than his of the essentiality of the harmony of subject and style in Shakespeare. It was necessary, too, that he should be stimulated by the ardour of a kindred talent and assisted by the keen criticism of a woman. Hundreds of sources had to flow into each other, hundreds of circumstances to coincide, of people to make each other's acquaintance, of minds to meet and fertilise each other, before this work, in its modest perfection, could be given to the world; a small thing, the translation of a poet who had been dead for two hundred years, it yet provided the most precious spiritual nourishment for millions, and exercised a deep and lasting influence on German poetry.
IV
TIECK AND JEAN PAUL
An apprehensive disposition, predisposing to hallucinations, congenital melancholy, at times verging on insanity, a clear, sober judgment, ever inclined to uphold the claims of reason, and a very unusual capacity for living in and producing emotional moods – such were the principal characteristics of Ludwig Tieck. He was the most productive author of the Romantic School, and, after its disruption, he wrote a long series of excellent novels, depicting past and present more realistically than Romantic writers were in the habit of doing.
The son of a ropemaker, he was born in Berlin in 1773. Even as a school-boy he was profoundly influenced by classic writers like Goethe, Shakespeare, and Holberg. He early succeeded in imitating both Shakespeare's elfin songs and Ossian's melodious sadness; but during one period of his youth he weakly allowed himself to be exploited by elder men of letters, at whose instigation he produced quantities of carelessly written, unwholesome literature. Though the spirit and tendency of his writings were prescribed for him, his characteristic qualities are, nevertheless, discernible even in these valueless early works. Under the direction of his teacher, Rambach, he wrote, or re-modelled in the spirit of the "enlightenment" period, sentimental tales of noble brigands, and invented gruesome episodes in the style of the death-scene of Franz Moor. But now and again, in some ironical aside, we get a glimpse of his own more advanced ideas.
A little later we find the future Romanticist writing precocious stories for the almanacs published by Nicolai, that old firebrand of the "enlightenment" period – stories in which superstition is held up to ridicule, and in which we only very occasionally come upon a touch of irony, such as the selection of a particularly inane old man to express contempt for "the stupid Middle Ages" and "Shakespeare's ghosts." No doubt Tieck wrote these compositions principally because he had sold his pen; still they none the less betray the weariness of the desponder, who is so exhausted by his long struggle with questions and doubts of every kind, that he can, without any great reluctance, side with those who depreciate genius and sing the praises of the sensible, bourgeois golden mean. His unsettled mental condition is shown no less clearly in his rationalistic tales than in the supernaturalism, the voluptuous cruelty, and the cold cynicism of the novels and plays dating from the beginning of the Nineties, in which he seems to give us more of himself.
Tieck's first work of any importance is William Lovell. The first part of this novel, which he wrote at the age of twenty, appeared in 1795. In it, when treating of art, he already occasionally touched the strings upon which the Romantic School subsequently played.
William Lovell goes to Paris (which Tieck at that time had not seen), and is, of course, disgusted with everything there. "The town is a hideous, irregular pile of stones. One has the feeling of being in a great prison… People chatter and talk all day long without so much as once saying what they think… I occasionally went to the theatre, simply because time hung so heavily on my hands. The tragedies consist of epigrams, without action or passion, and tirades which produce much the same effect as the words issuing from the mouths of the figures in old drawings… The less natural an actor is, the more highly is he esteemed. In the great, world-renowned Paris Opera – I fell asleep." Such are the impressions made upon Lovell (an Englishman) by Paris at the time of the Revolution. It is nothing but an expression of the prevalent German contempt for the French character and French art, doubly unreasonable in this case because it has simply been learned by rote out of books. In the Théâtre Français, however, Lovell ejaculates: "O Sophocles! O divine Shakespeare!" and he characteristically observes: "I hate the men who, with their little imitation sun (namely, reason), light up all the pleasant twilight corners and chase away the fascinating shadow phantoms which dwelt so securely under the leafy canopies. There is, undoubtedly, a kind of daylight in our times, but the night and morning light of romance were more beautiful than this grey light from a cloudy sky."
With the exception of a few such touches, this work seems at the first glance to be distinguished by none of the peculiarities one is accustomed to associate with a Romantic production; but, as a matter of fact, there is no book which reveals to us more distinctly the foundations on which the Romantic movement rests. The main idea and the form of William Lovell (it is written in letters) were both borrowed from a French novel, Le Paysan Perverti, by the materialistic writer, Rétif de la Bretonne. The fact that we are able to trace the origin of a Romantic work directly to French materialism is not without significance; it is in reality from this materialism that the Romanticists derive their gloomy fatalism. Lovell is an extremely tedious book to read nowadays; the style is tiresomely diffuse, the characters are as if lost in mist. Some of the subordinate figures, the devoted old man-servant, for instance, are weak imitations of Richardson – there is not a trenchant trait nor a dramatic situation in the whole book. Its merit, which is as German as are its defects, lies in its psychology. The hero is a youth who is led, slowly and surely, to do away, as far as he himself is concerned, with all authority, to disregard every one of the traditional, accepted rules of life, until at last he is leading the life, not only of a confirmed egotist, but of a criminal.
It is a mistake to feel surprised that so young a man as Tieck could depict such a being. Is it not precisely at this early age, when his spiritual eyesight does not yet enable him to look abroad, that the youth is constantly occupied with all the strange things he sees when he looks into his own heart? Is it not then that he is impelled to unravel himself, to examine his own condition, to look at himself perpetually in the mirror held out to him by his own consciousness? With men of a certain disposition there is no more self-critical age than twenty or thereabouts. There is still so much of life before one then, so much time to do one's work in; one spends the days in learning to know the instrument upon which one is to play for the rest of one's life, in tuning it, or finding out how it is already tuned. The time is still distant when the mature man will seize upon that instrument, which is himself, and use it – as a violin or as a sledge-hammer, according to the requirements of the situation. And if surrounding circumstances offer neither tasks nor sustenance, and the Ego is obliged to go on living upon its own substance, the result will inevitably be the exhaustion, the demolition of the personality.
What is peculiarly characteristic of author, tendency, and period, is the sentimental extravagance to which this introspection leads. In all seriousness the individual dares to make his fortuitous Ego, which has disorganised everything that established custom requires men to respect, the standard of everything, the source of all laws. Here we have unmistakably a distortion of Fichte's fundamental idea. Read the following verses from Lovell and the succeeding reflection: —
"Willkommen, erhabenster Gedanke,
Der hoch zum Gotte mich erhebt.
Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten,
In trüber Ferne liegt die Welt,
Es fällt in ihre dunkeln Schachten
Ein Schimmer, den wir mit uns brachten.
Warum sie nicht in wide Trümmer fällt?
Wir sind das Schicksal, das sie aufrecht hält!
Den bangen Ketten froh entronnen
Geh' ich nun kühn durchs Leben him,
Den harten Pflichten abgewonnen,
Von feigen Thoren nur ersonnen.
Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich selber bin,
Ein Wiederschein in meinem innem Sinn.
Was kümmern mich Gestalten, deren matten
Lichtglanz ich selbst hervorgebracht?
Mag Tugend