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

"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. Jean Paul writes to a friend that he can only describe the morals of Weimar to him by word of mouth. When we hear that even skating was a scandal to the worthy Philistines of that town, we are not surprised by old Wieland's ill-natured remark, that the circle in question appeared to him to be aiming at "brutalising animal nature." Thus it was that the sweet, refined coquette, Frau von Stein, became Goethe's muse for ten whole years, the original of Leonore and Iphigenia; and later he created a still greater scandal by taking into his house Christiane Vulpius (the young girl whose presence had become a necessity to him, and who, in spite of her faults, never embittered his life by making any demands upon him), and living with her for eighteen years before obtaining the sanction of the Church to their union.

      Goethe's as well as Schiller's youthful works had been inspired by what the Germans call the "Freigeisterei" of passion, its demand for freedom, its instinct of revolt. Both breathe one and the same spirit, the spirit of defiance. Goethe's Die Geschwister treats of the passion of brother for sister. The conclusion of Stella, in its original form, is a justification of bigamy; and Jean Paul, too, in his Siebenkäs, treats of bigamy as a thing perfectly permissible in the case of a genius to whom the first tie has become burdensome. Götz represents the tragic fate of the man of genius who rises in revolt against a lukewarm and corrupt age. Schiller's Die Räuber, with its device In Tyrannos, and its motto from Hippocrates, "That which medicine cannot cure iron cures, and that which iron cannot cure fire cures," is a declaration of war against society. Karl Moor is the noble-hearted idealist, who in "the castrated century" is inevitably doomed to perish as a criminal. Schiller's robbers are not highwaymen, but revolutionaries. They do not plunder, but punish. They have separated themselves from society to revenge themselves upon it for the wrongs it has done them. Schiller's defiance is still more personally expressed in those poems of his first period which were written under the influence of his relations with Frau von Kalb, poems re-written and entirely altered in the later editions. In the one which ultimately received the title Der Kampf, but which was originally called Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft, he writes:—

      "Woher dies Zittern, dies unnennbare Entsetzen,

       Wenn mich dein liebevoller Arm umschlang?

       Weil Dich ein Eid, den auch nur Wallungen verletzen,

       In fremde Fesseln zwang?

       "Weil ein Gebrauch, den die Gesetze heilig prägen,

       Des Zufalls schwere Missethat geweiht?

       Nein—unerschrocken trotz ich einem Bund entgegen,

       Den die erröthende Natur bereut.

       "O zittre nicht—Du hast als Sünderin geschworen,

       Ein Meineid ist der Reue fromme Pflicht,

       Das Herz war mein, das Du vor dem Altar verloren,

Mit Menschenfreuden spielt der Himmel nicht."[1]

      Comical as this naïve sophistry sounds, and unreliable as is the assurance that Heaven will not permit itself now and again to play with human happiness, the spirit of the verses is unmistakable; and, as Hettner aptly observes, Don Carlos uses almost the same words: "The rights of my love are older than the ceremonies at the altar."

      The model for Schiller's young Queen Elizabeth was Charlotte von Kalb. This lady, the passion of the poet's youth, had been unwillingly forced into matrimony by her parents. She and Schiller met in 1784, and in 1788 they were still meditating a permanent union of their destinies. Soon after Schiller left her, she became Jean Paul's mistress. (Caroline Schlegel jestingly calls her Jeannette Pauline.) Jean Paul characterises her thus: "She has two great possessions: great eyes (I never saw their like) and a great soul." He himself confesses that it is she whom he has described in one of his principal works as the Titaness, Linda. In Titan (118 Zykel) we are told of Linda that she must be tenderly treated, not only on account of her delicacy, but also in the matter of her aversion to matrimony, which is extreme. She cannot even accompany a friend to the altar, which she calls the scaffold of woman's liberty, the funeral pyre of the noblest, freest love. To take, she says, the best possible view of it, the heroic epic of love is there transformed into the pastoral of marriage. Her sensible friend vainly insists that her aversion to marriage can have no other ground than her hatred of priests; that wedlock only signifies everlasting love, and all true love regards itself as everlasting; that there are as many unhappy free-love connections as marriages, if not more, &c.

      Frau von Kalb herself writes to Jean Paul: "Why all this talk about seduction? Spare the poor creatures, I beg of you, and alarm their hearts and consciences no more. Nature is petrified enough already. I shall never change my opinion on this subject; I do not understand this virtue, and cannot call any one blessed for its sake. Religion here upon earth is nothing else than the development and maintenance of the powers and capacities with which our natures have been endowed. Man should not submit to compulsion, but neither should he acquiesce in wrongful renunciation. Let the bold, powerful, mature human nature, which knows and uses its strength, have its way. But in our generation human nature is weak and contemptible. Our laws are the outcome of wretchedness and dire necessity, seldom of wisdom. Love needs no laws."

      A vigorous mind speaks to us in this letter. The leap from this to the idea of Lucinde is not a long one, but the fall to the very vulgar elaboration of Lucinde is great. We do not, however, rightly understand these outbursts until we understand the social conditions which produced them, and realise that they are not isolated and accidental tirades, but are conditioned by the position in which the majority of poetic natures stood to society at that time.

      Weimar was then the headquarters and gathering-place of Germany's classical authors. It is not difficult to understand how they came to gather in this little capital of a little dukedom. Of Germany's two great monarchs, Joseph the Second was too much occupied with his efforts