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

sind nur Dunst und Nebelschatten,

      Das Licht aus mir fällt in die finstre Nacht.

      Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich sie gedacht."11

      "My outer self thus rules the material, my inner self the spiritual world. Everything is subject to my will; I can call every phenomenon, every action what I please; the animate and the inanimate world are in leading-strings which are controlled by my mind; my whole life is only a dream, the many forms in which I mould according to my will. I myself am the only law in all nature, and everything obeys this law."

      When Friedrich Schlegel exclaims, "Fichte is not a sufficiently absolute idealist … I and Hardenberg (Novalis) are more what idealists ought to be," we remember that ten years previously, and long before there was any talk of Romanticism and Romanticists, Tieck had perceived what were to be the characteristics of the new school, i.e. personal lawlessness, and the glorification of this lawlessness, under the name of imagination, as the source of life and art. Lovell is an extravagant personification of these characteristics. Kierkegaard's Johannes the Seducer, the most perfect and the last example of the type in Danish literature, always keeps within certain bounds; he evades ethical questions, looking upon morality as a tiresome, troublesome power, and never attacking it directly; but Lovell, the more many-sided, the more boldly planned, if less skilfully worked-out character, recoils neither from treachery, nor bloodshed, nor poison. He is one of this period's many variations of the Don Juan-Faust type, with a touch of Schiller's Franz Moor. Satiety of self-contemplation has, in his case, led to a boundless contempt for mankind, to a ruthless sweeping away of all illusions; the one and only consolation being that thus hypocrisy is unveiled and the ugly truth seen. There is a close analogy with much that the Romanticists subsequently wrote in such an utterance as this: "Voluptuousness is undoubtedly the great mystery of our being; even the purest and most fervent love dives into this pool… Only ruthlessness, only a clear perception of the illusion can save us; Amalie is, therefore, nothing to me, now that I see that poetry, art, and even love, are only draped and veiled sensuality… Sensuality is the driving-wheel of the whole machinery … voluptuousness is the inspiration of music, of painting, of all the arts; all human desires flutter round this magnetic pole, like moths round a candle;… hence it is that Boccaccio and Ariosto are the greatest poets, and that Titian and the wanton Correggio stand high above Domenichino and pious Raphael. Even religious devotion I consider to be only a diverted course of that sensual instinct which is refracted in a thousand different colours." One would expect this Lovell, in whose meditations sensuality plays so great a part, to be represented as a man whose instincts lead him far astray. Not at all! He is as cold as ice, as cold as Kierkegaard's shadow of a seducer, whom he in this particular anticipates. He does not commit his excesses with his flesh and blood, but with his fantastically excited brain. He is a purely intellectual being, a North German of the purest water. And there is one particular in which he is, in anticipation, astonishingly Romantic. When he has, so to speak, burned himself out, when every spark of conviction is extinguished in his mind, and all his feelings lie "slain and dead" around him, he seeks refuge in the supernatural and places his trust in mystic revelations, of which an old impostor has held out the prospect. This trait, which, significantly enough, is not to be found in his French prototype, was necessary to complete the character.

      The personality here is so hollow, weighs so light in its own estimation, that the impression it produces on itself is, that it is both real and unreal; it has become unfamiliar to itself, and has as little confidence in itself as in any exterior power. It stands outside its own experiences, and when it acts, feels as if it were playing a part. Lovell tells us how he seduced a young girl, Emily Burton: "I suddenly cast myself at her feet, and confessed that it was nothing but my passionate love for her which had brought me to the castle; I declared that this was to be my last attempt to learn if there were any human heart that would still come to my aid and reconcile me to life and fate. She was beautiful, and I acted my part with wonderful inspiration, exactly as if it were a congenial rôle in a play; every word I said told; I spoke with fire and yet without affectation." And later he remarks: "She has herself to reproach for any temporary loss of home happiness; I am not to blame because, in accordance with conventional ideas, she is at present disgraced in the eyes of many. I played one part, she answered with another; we acted the play of a very stupid writer with great seriousness, and now we regret having wasted our time." The whole was nothing but a scene from a play.

      In this fictitious character there are already developed those qualities which we find later in real characters, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Gentz; and in this one man's habit of mind we have all that, which, transferred to art, became the notorious irony of Romanticism. Here, in the character, is the undisguised egotism which looks upon life as a rôle; there, in art, the misconception and exaggeration of Schiller's idea that artistic activity is "a game," a play, i.e. an activity without any outward aim – in short, the belief that true art is that which perpetually shatters its own edifice, renders illusion impossible, and ends, like Tieck's comedies, in self-parody. There is the very closest resemblance between the manner in which the hero acts and the manner in which the comedy is written. The irony is one and the same; it may all be traced back to the same egotism and unreality.12

      In order really to understand the psychological condition depicted in Lovell, we must not only see its ultimate consequences, but must also, as in the case of René, see how it originates and what conditions it. It is conditioned by the ferment of lawlessness distinctive of the period. Hence the most diverse creative minds co-operate in the production of the type. As a Titan of satiety, of tædium vitæ, Lovell is only one of a race of Titans.

      Two years before Lovell was planned, Jean Paul, who was ten years older than Tieck and four years younger than Schiller, began a description of this race in his so-called "Faustiade," the novel Titan. Jean Paul is in many ways the forerunner of Romanticism; in the Romantic School Hoffmann recalls him to us, as Tieck recalls Goethe. He is a thorough Romanticist in the absolute arbitrariness with which, as an artist, he sets to work. As Auerbach says, he has "in readiness studies of men, moods, traits of character, psychological complications, and miscellaneous imagery, which he introduces at random, adjusting them to given characters or situations." He thrusts all kinds of irrelevant matter into the elastic framework of his story. He is, further, a Romanticist in his absorption in self – for it is himself, always himself, who speaks by the mouth of his characters, whatever they may be; in the famous humour which with him lords it over all else, respecting none of the conventions of style; and, finally, in the fact that he is the antipodes of classical culture. But, whatever he may have been in art, in life he was not the defender of lawlessness, but the ardent champion of liberty, Fichte's equal in enthusiastic persistence. He was neither the foe of enlightenment, nor of reason, nor of the Reformation, nor of the Revolution; he was convinced of the historical value and the full validity of the ideas which it is the glory of the eighteenth century to have produced and championed. Therefore he uplifted a warning voice against the futile, demoralising fantasticality of the Romanticists.

      Titan contains the most powerful of Jean Paul's ideal characters, Roquairol. His strength did not lie in the delineation of ideal characters; he was first and foremost the admirable, realistic idyll-writer.

      Roquairol is a prototype of the form in which the age moulded its passion and its despair. He is burning, conscious desire, which develops into fantastic eccentricity, because circumstances have no use for it, and because it does not possess the power to take hold of reality, re-mould it and subject it to itself; it becomes a disease, which strikes inwards and leads to morbid self-contemplation and suicide. Roquairol describes himself in a letter (Titan, iii. Zykel, 88)

      "Look at me when I take off my mask! My face twitches convulsively, like the face of a man who has taken poison. I have indeed taken poison; I have swallowed the great poison ball, the ball called Earth… I am like a hollow tree, charred by a fantastic fire. When the worms in the intestines of the Ego – anger, ecstasy, love, and the like – begin to crawl about in me and devour each other, I look down upon them from the height of my Ego, I cut them in pieces as if they were polypi and fasten them into each other. Then I look on at myself looking on. This repeats itself ad infinitum. What is the use

11

"Welcome, sublime thought, that makes of me a god! Things are, because we have thought them. – In the dim distance lies the world; into its dark caverns falls a ray of light, which we brought with us. Why does this world not fall into atoms? Because the power of our will holds it together! – Glad at heart because I have escaped from my chains, I now go boldly forward in the path of life, absolved from those irksome duties which were the invention of cowardly fools. Virtue is, because I am; it is but the reflection of my inner self. – What care I for forms which borrow their dim splendour from myself? Let virtue wed with vice! They are but shadows in the mist. The light that illumines the dark night comes from me. Virtue is, because I have thought it."

12

Tieck: William Lovell, i. 49, 52, 172, 178, 212; ii. 110.