by Steven Moore
Combining elements of Gothic fiction—a secret society, a mysterious figure who turns out to be a conman, crimes and visions—with the theme of corruption from recent French epistolary novels like Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Restif’s Perverted Peasant—Tieck dramatizes what might be called the mid-youth crisis of four overeducated young men trying to understand their place in the adult world: two of them, the title character and Balder, torture themselves with Wertherian doubts and delusions and come to a bad end; the other two, a wag named Wilmont and a slightly older, no-nonsense gent named Mortimer, marry nice girls and settle down to become rural gentry. These four and a dozen other related characters (parents, friends, lovers, servants) exchange letters over a three-year period (1793–95) explaining themselves to each other, debating (in effect) the tenets of Romanticism, and struggling with decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. Only the reader gets the complete story: unlike most epistolary novels of the period, there’s no fictitious editor who explains how he came by all these letters and how we should interpret them.
William Lovell is like Werther on acid, a highly imaginative dreamer who expresses himself in plumes of purple prose. With the imperious confidence of a 20-year-old pseudointellectual who has overdosed on Shakespearean tragedies and Gothic thrillers, William is convinced, as he sets out on his European tour, that “a dark and dubious foreboding has assailed me, as if these present moments were marking one of the epochs of my life; it is as though I were being bidden a tearful farewell by my [guardian] angel, who now abandons me to the play of relations—as I am thrust into a dark wilderness, wherein I now and then discern the fluctuating forms of malevolent demons among the twilit shadows” (1.2) The victim of a vivid imagination and premonitions of doom ever since childhood (see the remarkable letter at 5.10), William enlivens his dispatches on the road to ruin with flamboyant rhetoric, extended metaphors pushing the limits of prose and sometimes metamorphosing from poetic prose into formal poetry. The reader’s initial sympathy for this “stormy and stressful” aesthete quickly fades as William embraces the dark side of Romanticism—Satanic egotism, self-destructive behavior, cold-heartedness—but his language keeps us enthralled; after his father forbids William’s jejune plans for marriage, he compares his imminent loss of self-control to horses in harness: “Already I can see the wild horses tearing free of their reins; with a terrible clatter they gallop down the steep mountain path, trailing the carriage behind them; then, the vehicle lies smashed to pieces on the crags, and he stands there bemoaning the damage. He has willed it; let it be!” (3.29). Later, he observes, “Everything that I used to term my emotions lies slaughtered and lifeless all around me, a brutally dismantled plaything of my unripe youth, the shattered magic lantern with which I frittered away my time” (6.12). There are gorgeous paeans to wine, to lust, to nature. Like Werther, William is a writer of extraordinary power.
If, like Werther, we had only William’s letters, William Lovell would be one of the bleakest, most despairing novels ever written. But Tieck begins the novel with a witty letter by Wilmont, and interleaves the dark epistles of William and Balder with a wide enough variety of other letters to put these romantic egotists into perspective. Tieck also cleverly juxtaposes letters for ironic effect so that, for example, William’s lofty opinion of Paris is undercut by his servant Willy’s street-level view, and William’s attraction to a false friend immediately follows one from his father warning him against false friends. But these other letters aren’t enough to offset the pessimistic tendency of the novel. As in earlier Gothic novels, the machinations of the mysterious man who stalks and corrupts William is explained away at the end, but there’s no return to normalcy, perhaps because in the revolutionary 1790s, normalcy was in ruins. It’s interesting that even though book 2 of William Lovell takes place in Paris in 1793, there isn’t a single reference to the terrors going on; the novel’s compromised idealism, secret betrayals, and moral degradation effectively evoke the times without resorting to any topical references.
Tieck leaves open the question of how one should gain “sovereignty over [the] soul,” as William puts it (3.7), meaning control over one’s emotions. The more conventional characters do so by submitting themselves, like blinkered horses, to comfortable conformity, while William and Balder, on the other hand, indulge their emotions, explore the nature of the soul to its darkest depths, and become a criminal and a hermit, respectively. The first group suffers from a lack of imagination, the second pair from an excess. Tieck’s intentions aren’t clear: he clearly condemns his melancholy misanthropes in their own damning words, but, as Roger Paulin notes, Tieck seems “only half-heartedly on the side of virtue, going through the motions of moral outrage” (58). At any rate, William Lovell is largely about the power of the imagination, capable of soaring insights or dangerous deceptions. Like William’s wild horses, the imagination is something that he, like Phaeton in the Greek myth, isn’t strong enough to control, and he perishes as a result. Tieck, on the other hand, keeps the horses of his imagination well under control for this exemplary work of Romanticism.119
Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) disagreed. “He considered it boring,” Blackall reports, “thin in characterization, nihilistic in both its prose and its poetry, and deemed the whole ‘a duel between poetry and prose’ in which the prose is trampled and the poetry kills itself.”120 But Schlegel is unfair to Tieck because he had a radically different idea of what a novel should be. It should focus not on stories and public life but on reflections and the inner life; it should be frankly realistic,121 but it should also be metaphoric, allegorical, metaphysical, a “formed, artificial chaos” that includes “conversations, dreams, letters, recollection. Fine loquaciousness.”122 It should progress by way of “arabesques”: ornamental digressions and variations that comment elliptically on the novel’s themes. A novel should be “a colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit,” “a mixture of storytelling, song, and other forms,” and should present “a sentimental theme in a fantastic form.” Schlegel felt “what is best in the best of novels is nothing but a more or less veiled confession of the author, the profit of his experience, the quintessence of his originality.”123 He put theory into practice in his short novel Lucinde (1799), perhaps the most daringly experimental novel of the 18th century, even more so than Tristram Shandy or the eccentric novels of Schlegel’s countryman Jean Paul (the closing act of our German cabaret) because Schlegel works without their safety nets of whimsy and sentimentalism. It fell flat with critics and readers alike, as most unconventional artworks do upon first appearance, but as Emmel notes, Lucinde is “ripe for discussion in connection with the novelistic experiments of the twentieth century” (92).
Like good poetry, Lucinde resists paraphrase because the plot is buried beneath reflections, fancies, and allegories, and because the language is gnomic, hieroglyphic. Essentially it’s the story of how a restless artist named Julius found the love of his life: a zaftig, free-spirited artist named Lucinde, who had a child in a previous relationship (not necessarily a marriage). At a time when “sensual” and “spiritual” were considered antonyms, Julius and Lucinde fuse the two into a religion of love, enabling Julius to unite not with abstractions like the infinite or the godhead but with the earthy natural world: the novel is overgrown with plants, gardens, and flowers, and in one arabesque Julius concludes the “most perfect mode of life would actually be nothing more than pure vegetating.”124 Their vegetable love produces a daughter, but she and Lucinde’s other child die (apparently), and in the final sections of the novel, their relationship starts to expand to include others—male friends, a woman named Juliane—as Julius meditates on “the most meaningful blossoms of lovely life” (130).
Again like good poetry, Lucinde generates meaning not through dramatic incidents but via symbols and metaphors. Structured in thirds like the life of a person or a plant (“to blossom, to ripen, and to wilt” [104]), only the middle third, entitled “Apprenticeship for Manhood,” resemb
les a conventional novel, and even it is told in compressed form. Schlegel tosses out the baggage and furniture that slow down most novels for a brisk account of a young man not unlike William Lovell: “He became sensual from spiritual despair, committed imprudent acts out of spite against fate, and was genuinely immoral in an almost innocent way” (78). Writing in third person, Julius runs through the other women he knew before he met Lucinde, notes how his own painting blossomed under her influence—“The shapes themselves perhaps did not always conform to the conventional rules of artistic beauty” (101), self-consciously commenting on the novel he’s writing—and how they come “to unfold themselves into the most beautiful religion” (103). This section is preceded by six short sections—in which Julius meditates on their current relationship by way of letters, fantasies, and allegories—and followed by six more sections in a variety of genres, resulting in an achronological, seemingly chaotic narrative, but in fact “a formed, artificial chaos,” just as Schlegel called for. Thumbing his nose at conventional form, Julius/Schlegel likewise ignores conventional morality: living with (rather than marrying) his beloved, forsaking the kingdom of heaven for the plant kingdom’s more organic lessons, reversing sex roles, and luxuriating in sensuality—which earned Lucinde an undeserved reputation as pornography.
As Julius’s remark about “pure vegetating” should suggest, a subtle sense of irony is at work in Lucinde, famously misread by Kierkegaard in his Concept of Irony (1841). Not only did the Danish philosopher condemn Schlegel for mocking the sanctity of Christian marriage and promoting sensuality, atheism, and immorality in his little novel, but he charged that Schlegel’s irony entails rejection of the world rather than reconciliation, even though Julius’s ironic proposal to live like a plant represents an admirable reconciliation with the actual world (as opposed to the spiritual world, which Kierkegaard privileged).125 Of course, Schlegel is not suggesting we live like plants—he certainly didn’t—only that we consider the lilies of the field along with the customs of society when choosing a way of life.
Actually, Kierkegaard hits upon a better way of reading Lucinde, only to reject it. Referring to Julius and Lucinde’s two-year-old daughter, the melancholy Dane asks,
Were it possible to imagine that the whole of Lucinde were merely a caprice, an arbitrarily fashioned child of whim and fancy gesticulating with both her legs like the little Wilhelmine without a care for her dress or the world’s judgment; were it but a light-headed whimsicality that found pleasure in setting everything on its head, in turning everything upside down; were it merely a witty irony over the total ethic identified with custom and use: who then would be so ridiculous as not to laugh at it, who would be such a distempered grouch that he could not even gloat over it? (306)
Convinced, however, that Lucinde is a “doctrinaire” work that “seeks to abrogate all ethics, not simply in the sense of custom and usage, but that ethical totality which is the validity of mind, the domination of the spirit over the flesh” (306), this distempered grouch doesn’t realize Schlegel’s concerns are aesthetic, not ethical. He wanted to turn the novel on its head, not Christian civilization, and merely drew upon his own relationship with his mistress, Dorothea Viet, for an experiment in creating an impressionistic, collagelike account of an unconventional love affair. An unconventional affair might best be rendered in unconventional form, and Julius wants to convey how their affair felt to him, the wild flights of imagination it inspired, not to recommend it to others. Lucinde is an object (as Barthelme would say), not an object lesson; Schlegel even subtitles the novel “Confessions of a Blunderer,” hardly an epithet for a cultural revolutionary.
“I want at least to suggest to you in divine symbols what I can’t tell you in words,” Julius tells Lucinde (104), and Schlegel’s novel is less a calculated affront to “the prejudices of society” (87) than a challenge to novelists to incorporate the methodology of poetry into their novels, to narrate with symbols rather than mere words, to render “the inspired poetry of fleeting life” (56). Leaving Lucinde unfinished—what we have is only the first of a projected four-part novel; some sketches and poems are as far as he got with the second part—Schlegel left it to others to elevate the novel to the same realm as poetry.
That goal was gloriously achieved by the great poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843); the same year Lucinde appeared, he published the second half of Hyperion (1797, 1799), an epistolary novel in lyrical prose of surpassing beauty. Subtitled “The Hermit in Greece,” the novel’s title character responds to a request from a German named Bellarmin to tell his life story, and in a series of undated letters Hyperion offers a poetic, meditative account of his idyllic childhood in his native Greece, his early training under Adamas— who inspires the lad with the ideals of ancient Greece—and then his first, uncomfortable time with an older man named Alabanda, who belongs to a secret society (yet again!) plotting to overthrow Turkish rule. Too unworldly to join Alabanda’s mysterious world—there are homosexual overtones to their relationship—Hyperion returns home, falls in love with a splendid young woman named Diotima, and with her visits the ruins of Athens: “Like an immense shipwreck when the hurricanes have fallen silent and the sailors have fled and the corpse of the shattered fleet lies unrecognizable on the sandbank.”126 Hyperion ignores Diotima’s suggestion to educate others and instead rejoins Alabanda’s rebel band, and in 1770 takes part in several Russian-backed Greek battles against the Turks. Disgusted at the unidealistic actions of his countrymen, who are more interested in looting their fellow Greeks than in winning independence, idealistic Hyperion becomes suicidal, writes Diotima that he’s unworthy of her (who consequently withers away and dies, but not before delivering a moving Liebestod), recovers and travels to Germany (which disgusts him),127 then returns to Greece to live in solitude, eventually receiving Bellarmin’s request to explain himself.
Hölderlin daringly ignores the chief appeal of the epistolary form—its you-are-there immediacy—to focus on Hyperion’s current feelings about his past. Like Wordsworth, he recollects in tranquility the powerful feelings he experienced earlier and transforms them into poetry—that is, into candenced prose with iterative imagery, as in this exultant description of Hyperion and Alabanda’s reunion:
O sun who reared us! cried Alabanda, you shall watch when our courage grows through work, when our project takes shape under the blows of destiny like iron under the hammer.
Each of us inflamed the other.
And may no stain remain, I cried, no nonsense with which the century paints us as the rabble does the walls! O, cried Alabanda, that is why war is so good—
Yes, Alabanda, I cried, as is all great work fostered by man’s strength and spirit and no crutch and no waxen wing. Thereby we cast off the slave garments on which destiny stamped us with its crest—
Thereby nothing vain and nothing imposed holds sway any longer, cried Alabanda, thereby we go unadorned, unfettered, naked as in the race at Nemea, to the goal.
To the goal, I cried, where the young free state dawns and the pantheon of all that is beautiful rises from Greek soil.
Alabanda fell silent for a while. A new red rose in his face, and his figure grew like a refreshed plant into the heights.
O youth! youth! he cried, then I will drink from your wellspring, then I will live and love. I am very joyful, sky of the night, he went on, as if intoxicated, while he walked to the window, like the foliage of a vine you overarch me, and your stars hang down like grapes. (144–45)
OK, a bit stilted (and kinda gay) out of context, but as Hyperion claimed earlier, “the heart exercised its right to poetize” (94). The older Hyperion realizes his true vocation was not to be a rebel but a poet, not to restore Greece’s political independence (which wouldn’t happen until 1830) but its literary glory. The mid-story breaks between many of the letters seem unnecessary until one realizes Hyperion is taking his time to convert each episode into a prose poem. The final letter ends with a prosaic “More soon”: we are readi
ng the work-in-progress of a poet, not the memoirs of a failed idealist. Poetry has allowed Hyperion to recover the connection with nature he felt as a child—plants and flower imagery are as rampant here as in Lucinde—to offer the inspiring example of ancient Greece to “barbaric” modern Germany, and to achieve “the resolution of dissonances” in himself, which Hölderlin in his brief preface says is the point of the novel.
The heightened, hieratic language, beautifully sustained throughout the novel, is rich in allusion—to classic Greek literature, of course, but also to the Lutheran Bible and Macpherson’s Ossian—and allows Hyperion to operate simultaneously on several levels, blurring the distinctions between ancient and modern Greece; between revolutionary activities in Greece in the 1770s and France in the 1790s (which Hölderlin supported); between Hyperion’s past and present (achieved by the minimal use of quotation marks); and between Hyperion’s life and Hölderlin’s: The German never even visited Greece, and Hyperion can be read as a poeticized account of Hölderlin’s own troubled life, especially his relationship to Susette Gontard, whom he called “Diotima.” Nevertheless, the story is timeless, mythic. It’s a sublime, elegiac achievement, and like Lucinde it was panned by the critics.