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

he shall sacrifice his individuality for the sake of adding to the power of the whole, of the mass. The power of the mass! This idea may be traced in all the most remarkable phenomena of the age. Belief in it underlies the calculations of Bismarck, the agitation of Lassalle, the tactics of Moltke, and the music of Wagner. A desire to educate the people and unite them in a common aim is the mainspring of the literary activity of the prose authors of the period. A common feature of all the works which most clearly reflect the times is that they keep to the subject, to the matter in hand. The influence of the great idea, "the power of the mass," makes itself felt here too. In the new literature the relation of the individual to the State, the sacrifice of personal volition and originality entailed by the yoking of the Ego to the State chariot, presents itself in marked contrast to the Romanticist worship of the talented individual with all his peculiarities, and the Romanticist indifference to everything historical and political. Romantic literature was always pre-eminently drawing-room literature, the ideal of Romanticism being intellectual society and æsthetic tea-parties (vide the conversations in Tieck's Fantasus).

      How different everything was in those old days! In both life and literature the detached Ego, in its homeless independence, is omnipresent. The guiding star here is, indeed, nought else but the free, unhistorical Ego. The country is divided into a multitude of small States, ruled by three hundred sovereigns and fifteen hundred semi-sovereigns. In these States the so-called "enlightened" despotism of the eighteenth century prevails, with its narrow, petrified social conditions and relations. The nobleman is lord and master of his serfs, the father, lord and master of his family – everywhere stern justice, but no equity. There are in reality no great tasks for the individual, hence there is no room for genius. The theatre is the only place where those who are not of princely birth can gain any experience of all the manifold phases of human life, hence the stage mania of literature. Lacking any social field in which to work, all activity necessarily takes the form either of war with reality or flight from it. Flight is prepared for by the influence of the rediscovered antique and of Winckelmann's writings; war, by the influence of the sentimentally melancholy English writers (Young, Sterne) and of Rousseau, reverenced as the apostle of nature, who, as Schiller expressed it, "would fain out of Christians make men."

      Our first proceeding must be to trace the rising of this star, the genesis of this free, Romantic Ego, to whom, be it remembered, all the greatest intellects of Germany stood sponsor.

      It was Lessing who laid the foundations of the intellectual life of modern Germany. Clear of thought, strong of will, indefatigably active, he was a reformer in every matter in which he interested himself. With perfect consciousness of what he was doing, he enlightened and educated the German mind. He was the embodiment of manly independence and vigorous, tireless militancy. His personal ideal, as it is revealed in his life and writings, was proud independence in combination with a wise love of his fellow-men, which overcame all differences of creed. Hence, solitary as he stood in his own day, his Ego became a source of light. He was the "Prometheus of German prose." His great achievement was that of freeing German culture for all time from the swaddling bands of theology, as Luther had freed it from those of Catholicism. His life and his criticism were action, and to him the essence of poetry too was action. All his characters are instinct with dramatic passion. In opposition to the theological doctrine of punishment and reward, he maintained that to do right for the sake of doing right is the highest morality. And for him the history of the world became the history of the education of the human race. To a certain extent the word "education" is employed by him merely as a concession to his readers, who, he knew, could not conceive of any development without a divine educator; but, all the same, the idea of natural development is not an idea with which he was familiar. To him, history is the record of "enlightenment." The Ego to him is not nature, but pure mind.

      In reality, all that was best in Lessing was entirely unsympathetic to the new group of Romanticists; they had less in common with him than with any other of the great German authors, Schiller not excepted. Nevertheless, it was natural enough that they should refuse to acknowledge any connection between Lessing and those of his disciples (men such as Nicolai, Engel, Garve, and Schütz), who were, from the "enlightenment" standpoint, their bitter enemies and ruthless persecutors. This was done by Friedrich Schlegel in an essay in which, while praising the power and the width of Lessing's grasp, he lays chief stress upon everything in him that is irregular, boldly revolutionary, unsystematic, and paradoxical, dwells on his bellicose wit, and draws attention to everything that can be construed into cynicism. The Romanticists could not possibly claim a champion of reason, pure and simple, as their forerunner, hence they attempted to characterise the nutritive element in Lessing's works as mere seasoning, as the salt which preserves from corruption.

      They owed far more to Herder. They evidence their descent from him both by their continuation of the Sturm und Drang period and by their capacity of understanding and reproducing the poetry of all countries. In Herder the new century germinated, as in Lessing the old had come to its close. Herder sets genesis and growth above thought and action. To him the true man is not only a thinking and moral being, but a portion of nature. He loves and sets most store by the original; he prefers intuition to reason, and would overcome narrow-mindedness, not by reason, but by originality. The man of intuitions is to him the most human. His own genius was the genius of receptivity. He expanded his Ego until it comprehended every kind of originality, but it was by virtue of feeling that he comprehended, that he absorbed into his soul a wealth of life, human and national.

      From Herder the Romanticists derive that which is most valuable in their literary criticism – the universal receptivity which finds expression in the impulse to translate and explain; from him they derive the first stimulus to a scientific study of both European and Asiatic languages; from him comes their love for what is national in both their own and foreign literature, their love of Spanish romance and of Shakespeare's plays. Herder grasped things in their entirety as did Goethe after him. His profound comprehension of national peculiarities becomes in Goethe the genius's intuition of the typical in nature, and is exalted by Schelling under the name of "intellectual intuition." The objection of the Romanticists to the idea of aim or purpose may be traced back to Herder. His theory of history excluded the idea of purpose: what happens has a cause and is subject to laws, but cannot be explained by anything which has not yet happened, i.e. by a purpose. The Romanticists transferred this theory into the personal, the psychical domain. To them purposelessness is another name for Romantic genius; the man of genius lives without a definite purpose; purposelessness is idleness, and idleness is the mark and privilege of the elect. In this caricature of a philosophy there is not much resemblance to Herder's. But he is the originator of a new conception of genius, of the belief, namely, that genius is intuitive, that it consists in a certain power of perceiving and apprehending without any resort to abstract ideas. It is this conception which, with the Romanticists, becomes scorn of experimental methods in science, and approbation of extraordinary vagaries in art.

      Goethe was the fulfilment of all that Herder had promised. To him man was not merely theoretically the last link in nature's chain; the men in his works were themselves natures; and in his scientific research he discerned with the eye of genius the universal laws of evolution. His own Ego was a microcosm, and produced the effect of such on the most discerning of his younger contemporaries. "Goethe and life are one," says Rahel. So profound was his insight into nature, so entirely was he a living protest against every supernatural belief, that he did what in him lay to deprive genius of its character of apparent incomprehensibility and contrariety to reason, by explaining (in his autobiography, Wahrheit und Dichtung) his own genius, the most profound and universal of the age, as a natural product developed by circumstances – thereby creating the type of literary criticism to which the Romanticists were strongly opposed.

      From Goethe the young generation derived their theory of the rights and the importance of the great, free personality. He had always lived his own life, and had always lived it fully and freely. Without making any attack whatever on the existing conditions of society, he had remoulded, according to his own requirements, the social relations in which he found himself placed. He becomes the soul of the youthful and joyous court of Weimar, with the audacity of youth and genius drawing every one with him into a whirl of gaiety – fêtes, picnics, skating expeditions, masquerades – animated by a wild joy in nature, which is now "lightened," now "darkened" by love affairs of a more or less dubious character.