Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany. Georg Brandes

German Romanticism. When we see how the German Romanticists end, we comprehend that from the very beginning there was concealed in Romanticism a reactionary principle which prescribed the course—the curve—of their careers.

      Friedrich Schlegel, the author of Lucinde, the free-thinking admirer of Fichte, who, in his Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (Essay on the Idea of Republicanism), called the democratic republic, with female suffrage, the only reasonable form of government, is converted to Catholicism, becomes a mystic and a faithful servant of the Church, and in his later writings endeavours to promote the cause of reactionary absolutism. Novalis and Schleiermacher, who in their early writings display a mixture of pantheism and pietism, of Spinoza and Zinzendorf, steadily drift away from Spinoza and approach orthodoxy. In his later life Schleiermacher recants those Letters on Lucinde which he had written in a spirit of the purest youthful enthusiasm. Novalis, who in his youthful letters declares himself "prepared for any sort of enlightenment," and hopes that he may live to see "a new massacre of St. Bartholemew, a wholesale destruction of despotisms and prisons," who desires a republic, and who, at the time when Fichte is prosecuted for atheism, remarks, "Brave Fichte is really fighting for us all,"—this same Novalis ends by looking on the king in the light of an earthly Providence, condemning Protestantism as revolutionary, defending the temporal power of the Pope, and extolling the spirit of Jesuitism. Fouqué, the knight without fear and without reproach, becomes in the end a pietist Don Quixote, whose great desire is a return to the conditions of feudalism. Clemens Brentano, in his youth the most mettlesome of poets, who both in life and literature made war upon every species of convention, becomes the credulous secretary of a nun, a hysterical visionary; does nothing for the space of five years but fill volume after volume with the sayings of Anna Katharina Emmerich. Zacharias Werner is a variant of the same Romantic type. He starts in his career as a friend of "enlightenment"; but soon a process of moral dissolution begins; he first extols Luther, then turns Roman Catholic and recants his eulogy; in the end he becomes a priest, and as such displays, both in his life and in his sentimentally gross writings and sermons, a combination of coarse sensuality and priestly unction.

      And Steffens—he who stormed the heaven of German Romanticism, carried the sacred fire to Denmark, and set men's minds in such violent uproar that he was compelled to leave his country—what of him? what was he? An upright, weak character, with a brain charged with confused enthusiasms; all feeling and imitative fancy; no lucidity of thought or pregnant concision of style. It is literally impossible to read the so-called scientific writings of his later period; one runs the risk of being drowned in watery sentimentality or smothered by ennui. "When," says Julian Schmidt, "he expounded the Naturphilosophie in his broken German from the professorial chair, his mathematical calculations came out wrong and his experiments failed, but his audience was carried away by his earnestness, his almost religious solemnity, his naïve, child-like enthusiasm." Naïveté was a quality that the Northerner of those days seldom lacked. In his best days, Steffens, captivated by the theories of the Naturphilosophie, took an innocent pleasure in tracing the attributes of the human mind in minerals, in humanising geology and botany. But the Revolution of July turned his head. Inflamed by pietism, that elderly lady who for the last thirteen years had been the object of his affections, and for whose sake he had already more than once entered the lists, he closed his literary career with a series of feeble attacks upon the young writers of post-revolutionary Germany.

      In this he was only following in the footsteps of his master, Schelling. Schelling, who, in marked contrast to Fichte with his clear doctrine of the Ego, dwells upon the mysterious nature of the mind, and bases not only philosophy, but also art and religion, upon the perception of genius, the so-called "intellectual intuition," displays both in his doctrine and in his want of method the arbitrariness, the lawlessness, which is the kernel of Romanticism. As early as 1802, in his Bruno, he used the significant expression and future catchword, "Christian philosophy," though he still maintained that, in genuine religious value, the Bible is not to be compared with the sacred books of India—a theory which even Görres champions in the early stage of his literary career. Having, like Novalis, at Tieck's instigation, made a close study of Jakob Böhme and the other mystics, Schelling began to philosophise mystically on the subject of "Nature in God," an expression appropriated by Martensen in his Spekulative Dogmatik. But when, shortly afterwards, a patent of nobility was conferred on him (as professor at the University of Munich), and he was made President of the Academy of Science in Catholic and clerical Bavaria, the famous "Philosophy of Revelation" (Offenbarungsphilosophie) commenced to germinate in his mind. Soon the transformation was complete; the fiery enthusiast had become a courtier, the prophet a charlatan. With his mysteries, his announcements of a marvellous science, "which had hitherto been considered impossible," his refusal to print his wisdom, to do anything but communicate it verbally, and even then not in its entirety, he qualified himself for being called, after Hegel's death, to Berlin, to lend a helping hand to State religion in the "Christian-Germanic" police-governed Prussia of the day, and to teach a State philosophy, for which, as he himself said, the only suitable name is Christology. Here it was that the young generation, the Hegelians of the Left, fell upon him and tore his mystic cobweb into a thousand pieces.

      Yet Schelling is the least irrational of the Romantic philosophers. He is vehemently accused of heresy by Franz Baader, the reincarnated Jakob Böhme, the object of Kierkegaard's admiration, who reproaches him with setting the Trinity upon a logical balance-pole, and, still worse, with daring to deny the existence of a personal devil. The utterances of the others are in keeping with this. Schubert writes The Symbolism of Dreams—was not the dream the ideal of Romanticism?—occupies himself in all seriousness with interpreting them, happy in his persuasion that clairvoyance and visions are the highest sources of knowledge. The vision-seer of Prevorst, whom Strauss, characteristically enough, begins his public career by exposing, plays an important part in those days. Then there is Görres, who at the time of the great Revolution was "inspired to triumphal song by the fall of Rome and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire," and who afterwards took an active and honourable part in rousing German patriotic spirit during the struggle against Napoleon; this same Görres becomes the author of Christian Mysticism (a book which Kierkegaard read with shudders of awe), revels in the blood of martyrs, gloats over the agonies and ecstasies of the saints, enumerates the different aureoles, nail-prints, and wounds in the side by which they are distinguished, and prostrates himself in the dust, he, the old Jacobin, before the one true Catholic Church, chanting the praises of the Holy Alliance. To these add the politicians: Adam Müller, who, as Gotschall has aptly said, pursues in politics the quest of Novalis's "blue flower," who would fain fuse State, Science, Church, and Stage into one marvellous unit; Haller, who concealed his conversion to Catholicism in order to retain his appointments, and who, in his Restauration der Staatswissenschaften (Revival of the Science of Statesmanship), bases this science upon theocracy; Leo (scathingly criticised by Ruge), who, in the same spirit, inveighs against the humanity of the age and its reluctance to shed the blood of Radicals; and Stahl, who, in his Philosophy of Law, compares marriage to the relation between Christ and the Church, the family to the Trinity, and the earthly right of succession to man's right to the heavenly inheritance. Taking all this together, one feels as if Romanticism ended in a sort of witches' Sabbath, in which the philosophers play the part of the old crones, amidst the thunders of the obscurantists, the insane yells of the mystics, and the shouts of the politicians for temporal and ecclesiastical despotism, while theology and theosophy fall upon the sciences and suffocate them with their caresses.

[1] G. L. Plitt: Aus Schelling's Leben, i. 309.

[2] G. Brandes: Samlede Skrifter, i. 464.

      I

      THE PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM

      Any one who makes acquaintance with the Germany of to-day, either by travelling in the country or by reading about it, and then compares it with the Germany of the beginning of the century, is astounded by the contrast. What a distance between then and now! Who would believe that this Realistic Germany had ever been a Romantic Germany!

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