by Will Durant
Prose literature was dominated by the Romantics, but one writer eluded them and remained indefinable and unique. Jean Paul Richter began life in Bayreuth in 1763. He took his Christian names from a grandfather, Johann Paul Kuhn; till 1793 he was simply Hans. His father was a schoolteacher and organist who became pastor of a church in Joditz on the Saale. There Hans spent his first thirteen years in a happiness from which he never recovered; that simple rural place marked his mood through all economic worries and theological storms. When the family moved to Schwarzenbach, on the same quiet river, he enjoyed the library of a neighboring clergyman, who recognized the boy’s possibilities but not his doubts. There Richter’s father died (1779), leaving his numerous brood to short rations. At twenty Hans entered the school of theology at Leipzig; but his reading had weakened his faith; he soon withdrew, and gave hostages to fortune by undertaking to live by his pen. He reached publication in 1783, aged twenty, then not again till 1789, in both cases with a brand of satire that seasoned sympathy with caustic wit. In 1793 he issued Die unsichtbare Loge (The Invisible Lodge) under the pseudonym “Jean Paul,” taken through love of Rousseau. The book pleased a small audience, which grew with his sentimental novel Hesperus (1795). Charlotte von Kalb, friend of Schiller, invited the rising author to Weimar, and was so well pleased with him that she became his mistress.13 There he began his four-volume novel Titan (1800–03), whose real hero was the French Revolution.
He passionately defended it in its formative years, but charged Marat with corrupting it into mob rule, and praised Charlotte Corday as another Jeanne d’Arc. He welcomed Napoleon’s seizure of power as a necessary restoration of order; he could not help admiring this youth of thirty, who had nothing but iron will and laser eyes with which to lower the towering stature of his subordinates. Eight years later Richter was quite willing to see all Europe united by this man who could hold a continent in his mind and hand, and legislate for France from Berlin and Moscow. But at heart Jean Paul remained a republican, seeing in every martial victory the seed of another war. He pitied the conscripted youths and the mourning families, and argued that “the people alone should decide on war, as they alone cull its bitter fruits.” He shot one of his sharpest shafts at rulers who sold their troops to foreign potentates. He demanded freedom from censorship, for some power outside of the government should be free to expose that government’s faults and to explore the possibilities of progress.14
In 1801, aged thirty-eight, Jean Paul took a wife, and in 1804 he settled down in Bayreuth. After some living experiments he wrote a book on education, Levana, one of the classics of libertarian pedagogy. He issued a stream of novels and essays, some of which were admiringly translated by Carlyle. His mixture of realistic satire and Romantic sentiment won him a larger reading public than Goethe’s or Schiller’s. He died in 1825, leaving unfinished an essay on the immortality of the soul; his time had come to explore the matter at first hand. His reputation as one of Germany’s foremost authors survived in Europe till the middle of the nineteenth century; and after it had died there it migrated to America, where Longfellow was one of his devotees. Hardly anyone, even in Germany, reads him today, but nearly every German recalls his famous epigram, which aims a shaft at German philosophy, and sums up the age of Napoleon more briefly than this book: “Providence has given to the English the empire of the sea, to the French that of the land, and to the Germans that of the air.”15
Two other writers of fiction won a wide audience. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822)—who in 1813, in ecstasy over Mozart, changed “Wilhelm” to “Amadeus”—was one of the most unusual and versatile of all Germans: he painted pictures, composed and conducted music, staged an opera (Undine), practiced law, and wrote stories of mystery and romance which inspired Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann (1881). Unique in life, if not in letters, was Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838). Born a French nobleman, he fled from the Revolution, received most of his schooling in Germany, enlisted in a Prussian regiment, and fought in the battle of Jena. In 1813, haunted by his lack of a fatherland and by his divided loyalties in the War of Liberation, he wrote, as an allegory, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, the bizarre tale of a man who had sold his shadow to Satan. As a botanist of established reputation he accompanied Otto von Kotzebue’s scientific voyage around the world (1815–18); he recorded his findings in the once famous Reise um die Welt. He divided the remainder of his life between serving as curator of Berlin’s Botanical Garden and writing Romantic poetry. Heinrich Heine praised the poems, and Robert Schumann put to music Chamisso’s verse sequence Frauenliebe und-leben.
Poets abounded, many of them still cherished by the German people, but gifting their words with music and sentiment difficult to transmit to another language, land, or time. Pitiful among them was Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), whose poetic sensitivity proved too keen for his sanity. Sent to Tübingen to study for the ministry, he developed a stimulating friendship with Georg Hegel, who was then questioning Christianity. News of the French Revolution excited the youth to visions of human happiness. He read Rousseau, composed a “Hymn to Liberty,” and in 1792, over the top of the dying century, he thought he saw a wonderful dawn of justice and nobility. When war broke out he wrote to his sister: “Pray for the French, the champions of human rights.” When the Revolution foundered in blood, he clung desperately to his dream:
My love is the human race—not, of course, the corrupt, servile, idle race that we too often meet. I love the great, fine possibilities, even in a corrupt people. I love the race of the centuries to come…. We live in a time when everything is working toward amelioration. These seeds of enlightenment, these silent wishes and strivings toward the education of the race,… will yield glorious fruit. This is the sacred goal of my wishes and my activity—to plant the seeds which will ripen in another generation.16
The past too allowed for dreams. Like his contemporary Keats he fell in love with the heroes and divinities of classic Greece, and began a prose epic, Hyperion, about a Greek revolutionist. He made his way to Jena, studied under Fichte, learned to revere Kant, and met the gods of Weimar when they too were Hellenizing. Schiller secured a post for him as tutor to a son of Charlotte von Kalb. In 1796 he found a richer tutorial berth in the home of the banker J. F. Gotthard at Frankfurt-am-Main. He fell in love with the banker’s wife, who so appreciated his verses that he was dismissed and forced to leave the city. The ecstasy and the exile brought on a degree of mental derangement; yet at this time (1799) he wrote a fragment, Der Tod des Empedokles, which is among the masterpieces of German verse. For several years he wandered from town to town, seeking bread and themes. He asked Schiller to recommend him for a lectureship in Greek literature, but Schiller found him too unstable for a professorial chair. Tutoring at Bordeaux, Hölderlin received word that Mme. Gotthard had died. He left his employment and walked across France into Germany, where friends, seeing that he was mentally deranged beyond cure, took care of him (1802). He lived on till 1843, his poems long forgotten even by himself. They were restored to public attention in 1890; Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George acclaimed him; and now the cognoscenti rank him only below Goethe and Schiller.
Many others sang. Karl Theodor Körner (1791–1813), son of the Christian Gottfried Körner who had been so helpful to Schiller,17 threw himself, pen and sword, into the War of Liberation from Napoleon, aroused the Germans with his call to arms, and died in battle, August 26, 1813. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) lived through three revolutions in his ninety-one years. He secured the abolition of feudalism in Pomerania by describing it realistically in Versuche einer Geschichte (Essays toward a History, 1803); and in Die Geist der Zeit (1806) he sounded so powerful a cry against Napoleon that he was forced to take refuge in Sweden from the victor of Jena. In 1812 he was called to St. Petersburg by Stein to help stir the Russian people to throw back the French invaders. After 1815, in Prussia, he strove to counter the conservative reaction, and was briefly jailed. In 1848 he wa
s elected to the national assembly at Frankfurt. When that revolution too flickered out he turned his Muse to terminal piety. —Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), a Catholic nobleman, wrote simple lyrics that can still move us, like “Auf meines Kindes Tod” (On the Death of My Child); here even an alien skeptic can feel the music, share the feeling, and envy the hope:
Von fern die Uhren schlagen,
Es is schon tiefe Nacht,
Die Lampe breunt so düster,
Dein Bettlein ist gemacht.
Die Winde nur noch gehen
Wehklagend um das Haus
Wir sitzen einsam drinne,
Und lauscben oft hinaus.
Es ist als müsstest leise
Du klopfen an die Tur,
Du hätt dich nur verirret,
Und kämst nun müd zurück.
Wir armen, armen Toren!
Wir irren ja im Graus
Des Dunkels noch verloren—
Du fändst dich langst nach Haus.
Afar the hours strike;
It is so soon deep night;
The lamp so dimly burns;
Your little bed is made.
Only the winds still go
Wailing around the house;
We sit alone within,
And often listen out.
It is as if you lightly tried
To knock upon the door,
As if you had but lost your way
And came now weary back.
We poor, poor simpletons!
We wander, yes, in fright
Of darkness still forlorn—
You found long since your home.
IV. THE ROMANTIC ECSTASY
The most brilliant writers of this German heyday were those who startled their time with cries for the emancipation of instinct from reason, of feeling from intellect, of youth from age, of the individual from the family and the state. Few of us read them today, but in their generation they were tongues of flame setting fire to dry-as-dust philosophies and social bonds imprisoning the expanding self in use and wont, taboo, command, and law.
The source of the revolt was the natural resentment with which any vital adolescent views the restraints imposed by parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, preachers, policemen, grammarians, logicians, moralists. Had not the current philosopher, Fichte, proved that the basic reality for each of us is his individual conscious self? If that is so, the universe has no meaning for any of us except in its effects upon himself, and each of us may justly sit in judgment upon every tradition, prohibition, law, or creed and bid it show cause why it should be obeyed. One might fearfully submit to commandments issued and upheld by God, or by a man of God dressed in divinity; but what had become of God now that Diderot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, d’Holbach, La Mettrie, had reduced him to the impersonal laws of the universe?
To the proud and liberating Enlightenment had now been added the Revolution. Class divisions were melting away; those lords who had once given laws and exacted obedience were now in hectic flight, leaving no barrier between classes, no bogey of tradition to buttress laws; now every man was free to compete for any place or power, chancing the guillotine; career was open to talent, to talons. Never before, in the known history of civilization, had the individual been so free—free to choose his occupation, his enterprise, his mate, his religion, his government, his moral code. If nothing exists but individual entities, what is the state, the army, the Church, the university, but conspiracies of privileged individuals to frighten and control, to form and deform, to rule and tax, to herd to slaughter the indoctrinated rest? Rare is the genius that can come to fulfillment under such restraints. And yet is not one genius worth a dozen pedagogues, generals, pontiffs, kings, or a hundred crowds?
However, in the new free-for-all, among the liberated souls, there were many sensitive spirits who felt that reason had exacted too high a price for liberation. It was “reason” that had attacked the old religion, with its saintly legends, its fragrant ceremonies and moving music, its mediating Madonna and its saving Christ; it was “reason” that had replaced this exalted vision with a dismal procession of masses of matter moving aimlessly to destruction; and it was “reason” that replaced the picture of men and women living in daily contact with deity by a view of male and female masses of matter moving daily nearer, automatically, stupidly, to a painful, degrading, and everlasting death. Imagination has its rights, even though unsanctioned by syllogisms; and we can more readily and justly think of ourselves as souls dominating matter than as machines operating souls. Feeling has its rights, and delves more deeply than intellect; poor wandering, wondering Jean-Jacques may have felt more wisely than the brilliant imp of Ferney thought.
Germany had known and heard both Rousseau and Voltaire, and was choosing Rousseau. It had read and felt Emile and Héloïse, and preferred them to the Philosophical Dictionary and Candide. It followed Lessing in putting romantic Shakespeare above classic Racine; it took more readily to Clarissa Harlowe, Tristram Shandy and Macpherson’s “Ossian” than to the philosophes and salonnières of France. It rejected the rules that Boileau had laid down as the laws of classic style. It resented the emphasis on clarity and moderation; these did not go well with enthusiasm and the reaching toward the Orient and the infinite.
German Romanticism respected truth if this could be found, but it was suspicious of “scientific truth” that darkened the face of life. It kept a warm place in its memory for the myths and fables and fairy tales that Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) and Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) were gathering into Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08), and that the brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785–1863, and Wilhelm, 1786–1859) were collecting for their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812); these echoes of the nation’s and the individual’s childhood were a part of the good German’s soul, perhaps of his “subconscious” self.
If that heritage of the imagination led back beyond the Revolution to medieval Catholicism, the spirit of romance would follow it to the mossy old cathedrals and the unquestioning faith and merry artisans that had raised them; to the prayers and chants and bells and processions that brought deity daily into human life, and merged the tired individualist restfully with the group; to the saints whose lives made a sacred epic of the Christian calendar; to the Virgin Mother who had sanctified the maiden’s wise innocence and the matron’s dedication to the family, the nation, and the race. All this, of course, was an enthusiastic blurring of medieval faiths and terrors, of hunted heretics and haunted souls; but it brought many German Romantics to the peak of their fervor, and some of them, in exhaustion and penitence, to the foot of the altar and into the warm embrace of Mother Church.
V. THE VOICES OF FEELING
German Romanticism affected almost every phase of the nation’s life: music in Beethoven, Weber, and Felix Mendelssohn; the novel in Hoffmann and Tieck; philosophy in Fichte and Schelling; religion in Schleiermacher and a hundred such conversions as those of Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Mendelssohn. Five men in particular led the movement in German literature; and we should commemorate with them the Romantic women who snared or shared them in love free or bound, and in an intellectual companionship that shocked modest matrons from one Frankfurt to the Oder.
Flickering near the fountainhead of the movement was Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98), frail and shy, uneasy with reality and reason, comforted with religion, happy with art. In the artist’s power of conception and execution he saw an almost godlike faculty of creation. He phrased his new religion in worshipful essays on Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer … At the Universities of Göttingen and Erlangen he found support from Ludwig Tieck; this enthusiastic fellow student proposed a jolly title for his friend’s writings: Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Heart Outpourings of an Art-loving Christian Brother). So christened, it found a publisher in 1797. Wackenroder ridiculed the rationalism of Lessing and the classicism of Winckelmann almost as much as the impermeability of the German bourgeois soul to artistic exaltat
ion, and he summoned his time to recapture the medieval brotherhood of artist and workman under their common name of artisan. Typhoid ended Wackenroder’s life at the age of twenty-four.
His friend Tieck (1773–1853) played through eighty years the risky game of feeling versus reason, of imagination versus reality. Together with Wackenroder he studied Elizabethan drama and medieval art, and rejoiced over the fall of the Bastille. Unlike Wackenroder he had a sense of humor and a flair for play; he felt that life was a game played by the gods with kings and queens, bishops and knights, castles and cathedrals and humble pawns. Returning to his native Berlin after his university days, he published in 1795–96 a three-volume novel, Die Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell, written in Richardsonian letter form, and describing in sensuous detail the sexual and intellectual wanderings of a young man who has emptied the Christian ethic with the Christian theology, and who concludes from the Fichtean epistemology that if the self is the only reality directly known to us, it should be lord of morals and doctor of laws:
All things exist only because I think them; virtue exists only because I think it…. In truth, lust is the great secret of our existence. Poetry, art, even religion, are lust in disguise. The works of the sculptor, the figures of the poet, the paintings before which devoutness kneels, are nothing but introductions to sensuous enjoyment….
I pity the fools who are forever babbling about the depravity of our senses. Blind wretches, they offer sacrifice to an impotent deity, whose gifts cannot satisfy a human heart…. No, I have pledged myself to the service of a higher deity, before which all living nature bows, which unites in itself every feeling, which is rapture, love, everything…. Only in the embraces of Louisa have I come to know what love is; the memory of Amelia appears to me now in a dim, misty distance.18