II THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY (continued 5)

Novalis is himself thoroughly conscious that, in spite of all its would-be spirituality, his hectic imagination inclines towards the sensual. Writing to Caroline Schlegel on the subject of Lucinde, he says: "I know that imagination (Fantasie) is most attracted by what is most immoral, most animal; but I also know how like a dream all imagination is, how it loves night, meaninglessness, and solitude." He here affirms of imagination in general what applied particularly to his own.

Tieck writes with enthusiasm of music, as teaching us to feel feeling. Novalis is a living interpretation of these words. He, whose aim is feeling, unrestrained, irresponsible feeling, desires to feel himself, and makes no secret of the fact that he seeks this self-enjoyment. Therefore to him sickness is preferable to health. For the sick man perpetually feels his own body, which the healthy man does not. Pascal, and our own Kierkegaard, contented themselves with defining sickness as the Christian's natural condition. Novalis goes much further. To him the highest, the only true life, is the life of the sick man. "Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes" ("Life is a disease of the spirit"). Why? Because only in living individuals does the world-spirit feel itself, attain to self-consciousness. And no less highly than disease does Novalis prize voluptuousness, sensual rapture. Why? Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure.... Does not all that is best begin as illness? Half-illness is an evil; real illness is a pleasure, and one of the highest." And he writes elsewhere of a mystic power, "which seems to be the power of pleasure and pain, the enrapturing effect of which we observe so distinctly in the sensations of voluptuousness." To Novalis's voluptuous feeling of sickness corresponds the pietist's conviction of sin, that spiritual sickness which is at the same time a voluptuous pleasure. Novalis himself is perfectly aware of this correspondence. He says: "The Christian religion is the most voluptuous of religions. Sin is the greatest stimulant to love of the Divine Being; the more sinful a man feels himself to be, the more Christian he is. Direct union with the Deity is the aim of sin and of love." And again: "It is curious that the evident association between sensuality, religion, and cruelty did not long ago draw men's attention to their close kinship and common tendencies."

And just as Novalis now prefers sickness to health, so he prefers night to day, with its "impudent light."

Aversion for day and daylight was general among the Romanticists. I drew attention to it in William Lovell. Novalis simply gives expression to a heightened degree of the general feeling in his famous Hymns to Night. That he should love the night is easy to understand. By hiding the surrounding world from it, night drives the Ego in upon itself; hence the feeling of night, and self-consciousness, are one and the same thing. The rapture of the feeling of night lies in its terror; first comes the fear of the individual, when everything round him disappears in the darkness, that he will himself disappear from himself; then comes the pleasant shudder when, out of this fear, self-consciousness emerges stronger than before.

In one of his fragments Novalis calls death a bridal night, a sweet mystery, and adds:—

"Ist es nicht klug, für die Nacht ein geselliges Lager zu suchen? Darum ist klüglich gesinnt, wer auch Entschlummerte liebt."[2]

So completely is this idea incorporated in the Romantic philosophy of life, that in Werner's drama, Die Kreuzesbrüder, the hero, immediately before he is led to the stake, says:—

"Den Neid verzeih' ich, Die Trauer nicht.—O unaussprechlich schwelg' ich In der Verwandlung Wonn', in dem Gefühl Des schönen Opfertodes!—O mein Bruder! Nicht wahr? es kommt die Zeit, we alle Menschen Den Tod erkennen—freudig ihn umarmen, Und fühlen werden, dass dies Leben nur Der Liebe Ahnung ist, der Tod ihr Brautkuss, Und sie, die mit der Inbrunst eines Gatten, Im Brautgemach, uns vom Gewand entkleidet— Verwesung, Gluterguss der Liebe ist!"[3]

Life and death are to Novalis only "relative ideas." The dead are half alive, the living half dead. It is this thought which in his case first gives zest to existence. In the first of his Hymns to Night he writes: "I turn to thee, holy, ineffable, mysterious Night! Far off lies the world, as if it had sunk into a deep grave; deserted and lonely is its place. My heart-strings vibrate with sorrow.... Dost thou find pleasure in us as we in thee, dark Night?... Costly balsam drips from thy hand, from thy poppy-sheaf. Thou unfoldest the heavy wings of the soul.... How poor, how childish seems the day, how joyful and blessed its departing!... More heavenly than those sparkling stars are the myriad eyes which Night opens in us. They see farther than the palest of those countless hosts; without the aid of light, they see into the depths of a loving soul, and its high places are filled with unspeakable rapture. Praised be the Queen of the earth, the august revealer of holy worlds, the guardian of blessed love! She sends me thee, my beloved, sweet sun of the night. Now I wake, for I am thine and mine. Thou hast proclaimed to me the life-giving gospel of Night, hast made of me a human being. Consume my body with the glowing flame of the spirit, that I may mingle yet more ethereally, yet more closely with thee, and the bridal-night be eternal."

One feels the feverish desire of the consumptive in this outburst. The parallel passage in Lucinde is: "O infinite longing! But a time is coming when the fruitless desire and vain delusions of the day will die away and disappear, and the great night of love bring eternal peace." The thoughts of these two Romantic lovers of the night meet in this idea of an eternal embrace.

In this enthusiasm for night lies the germ of religious mysticism. In the case of Justinus Kerner (which recalls that of Jung Stilling), bias towards the mysterious becomes belief in apparitions and fear of spirits. In certain of the writings of the later Romanticists, for instance in Achim von Arnim's Die schöne Isabella von Ægypten, half the characters are spirits. Mysticism is a fundamental element in the art of Clemens Brentano, even when he is at his best, and it gives charm and colour to his descriptions.

Novalis himself describes mysticism as voluptuousness—"ein wollüstiges Wesen." To understand this expression aright, we must study his hymns:—

"Hinüber wall' ich Und jede Pein Wird einst ein Stachel Der Wollust sein. Noch wenig Zeiten So bin ich los, Und liege trunken Der Lieb' im Schoss."[4]

Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the sensual Ego in a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of the Spiritual Songs): "Few know the secret of love, feel for ever unsatisfied, for ever athirst. The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes have been opened to fathom the unfathomable depths of heaven—he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more. Who has yet discerned the transcendent meaning of the earthly body? Who can say that he understands the blood? The day is coming when all body will be one body; then the beatified pair will float in heavenly blood. Oh! that the ocean were already reddening, that the rocks were softening into fragrant flesh! The sweet repast never ends, love is never satisfied. Never can it have the beloved near enough, close enough to its inmost self. By lips that are ever more tenderly amorous, the heavenly nutriment is ever more eagerly seized and transformed. Hotter and hotter burns the passion of the soul, thirstier, ever thirstier grows the heart; and so the feast of love endures from everlasting to everlasting. Had those who abstain but once tasted of it, they would forsake everything and seat themselves beside us at the table of longing, which is ever furnished with guests. They would comprehend the infinite fulness of love, and extol our feast of the Body and the Blood."[5]

These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main characteristics of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious forms, but it truly feels their significance; it speaks the same language as orthodoxy, but it changes a dead language into a living one. Herein lay the secret of its victory in the Middle Ages over that dry, formal scholasticism which it consumed in its glow. This made it the precursor of the Reformation. The mystic needs no external dogma; in his pious rapture he is his own priest. But, as his spiritual life is altogether an inward life, he does not abolish external dogma, and in the end actually becomes a sacerdotalist.

In mystically prophetic words Novalis foretells the coming of the new kingdom of sacred darkness:—

"Es bricht die neue Welt herein Und verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein. Man sieht nun aus bemoosten Trümmern Eine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern, Und was vordem alltäglich war, Scheint jetzo fremd und wunderbar. Der Liebe Reich ist aufgethan, Die Fabel fängt zu spinnen an. Das Urspiel jeder Natur beginnt, Auf kräftige Worte jedes sinnt, Und so das grosse Weltgemüth Ueberall sich regt und unendlich blüht. * * * * * * * Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt, Und was man glaubt, es sei geschehn, Kann mann von weitem erst kommen sehn; Frei soll die Phantasie erst schalten, Nach ihrem Gefallen die Fäden verweben, Hier manches verschleiern, dort manches entfalten, Und endlich in magischem Dunst verschweben. Wehmuth und Wollust, Tod und Leben Sind hier in innigster Sympathie,— Wer sich der höchsten Lieb' ergeben, Genest von ihren Wunden nie."[6]

Night, death, sensual rapture, heavenly bliss—these ideas are still more firmly interwoven in the verses above the churchyard gate, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The dead say:—

"Süsser Reiz der Mitternächte, Stiller Kreis geheimer Mächte, Wollust räthselhafter Spiele, Wir nur kennen euch. * * * * * * * Leiser Wünsche süsses Plaudern Hören wir allein, und schauen Immerdar in sel'ge Augen, Schmecken nichts als Mund und Kuss. Alles was wir nur berühren, Wird zu heissen Balsamfrüchten, Wird zu weichen zarten Brüsten, Opfern kühner Lust. Immer wächst und blüht Verlangen Am Geliebten festzuhangen, Ihn im Innern zu empfangen, Eins mit ihm zu sein. Seinem Durste nicht zu wehren, Sich im Wechsel zu verzehren, Von einander sich zu nähren, Von einander nur allein. So in Lieb' und hoher Wollust Sind wir immerdar versunken, Seit der wilde trübe Funken Jener Welt erlosch; Seit der Hügel sich geschlossen Und der Scheiterhaufen sprühte, Und dem schauernden Gemüthe Nun das Erdgesicht zerfloss."[7]

This mysticism, which deems the dead happy because it supposes them to be revelling in all sensual delights, becomes, in its practical application, a sort of quietism, that is, preference for a vegetating, plant-like life, the life extolled in Lucinde.

"The plants," says Novalis, "are the plainest speech of the earth; every new leaf, every remarkable flower is some mystery which is trying to reveal itself, and which remains motionless and dumb only because from very joy and love it can neither move nor speak. If one chances in solitude upon such a flower, does not everything around it seem transfigured? do not the little feathered songsters seem to seek its vicinity? One could weep for gladness, and, forgetting the world, could bury one's hands and feet in the ground, take root, and never leave that happy neighbourhood."

What an overdose of sentiment! It provides its own cruel parody in the insane situation which reminds us Danes of one in Holberg's Ulysses von Ithacia.

In another part of Ofterdingen we read: "Flowers exactly correspond to children ... like children they are found lowest down, nearest the earth; the clouds, again, are possibly revelations of the second, higher childhood, of Paradise regained; therefore it is that they shed such refreshing dews upon the children of earth." In the Romantic jargon there is even talk of the childlikeness of clouds. Naïveté aspires, and is not satisfied until it has reached the sky. O Polonius!—These naïve clouds are the true, the proper symbols of Romanticism.

But even in the plants and the clouds there is still too much endeavour and unrest to satisfy the Romantic soul. Even vegetation is not perfect abstraction, perfect quiescence; there is tendency upwards in the straining of the plant towards the light. Therefore even the plant life is not the highest. Novalis goes a step further than Friedrich Schlegel.

"The highest life is mathematics. Without enthusiasm no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. Pure mathematics is religion. It is arrived at only by revelation. The mathematician knows everything. All activity ceases when knowledge is attained. The state of knowledge is bliss (Eudämonie), rapturous peace of contemplation, heavenly abstraction."

Now we have reached the climax. All life is crystallised into dead mathematical figures.

At this point the life of the soul is condensed to such a degree that it comes to a standstill. It is as if the clock of the soul had ceased to strike. Every noble aspiration, every tendency towards independent action is forced back and stifled in the airless vaults of the soul.

It is at this point, therefore, that intense spirituality turns into gross materialism. When all capacity of producing new outward forms is not only despised, but actually destroyed, we have reached the turning-point, the point at which all established outward forms are recognised and accepted, and accepted the more gladly the more rigid they are, the closer they approach to crystallised petrifaction, the more certain it is that they only leave room for the life of vegetation. The step is taken by Novalis in a remarkable essay, Christendom in Europe, which Tieck by his erasures vainly tried to nullify, and which Friedrich Schlegel, by leaving out one most important passage, converted into a defence of Catholicism.

In this essay he writes as follows:—"These were happy, glorious days, when Europe was still a Christian continent, the home of the one, undivided Christian religion.... The wise head of the Church rightly set himself against the bold cultivation of the human mind at the cost of religious faith, and against untimely and dangerous discoveries in the domain of science. Thus he forbade the scientists to maintain openly that this earth is an insignificant planet, for he knew well that men would lose, along with their respect for their earthly home, respect for their heavenly home and their fellow-men, that they would choose limited knowledge in preference to unlimited faith, and would acquire the habit of despising everything great and wonderful, as being simply the result of lifeless law."

We could almost suppose ourselves to be listening to the sermonising of a parish-clerk of the eighteenth century. And yet we are sensible of the poet's consistency. Poetry, which led Schiller back to Greece, leads Novalis back to the Inquisition, and induces him, like Joseph de Maistre, to side with it against Galileo.

Of Protestantism he says: "This great spiritual disruption, which was accompanied by disastrous wars, was a notable proof of the harmfulness of knowledge, of culture—or at least of the temporary harmfulness of a certain degree of culture.... The schismatics separated the inseparable, divided the indivisible Church, and presumptuously dissociated themselves from the great Christian communion, in which, and through which alone, true, lasting regeneration was possible.... A religious peace was concluded, based upon principles which were as foolish as they were irreligious; for the continued existence of so-called Protestantism was equivalent to the establishment of a self-contradiction, namely, permanent revolutionary government.... Luther treated Christianity arbitrarily, mistook its spirit, and introduced a new letter, a totally new doctrine, that of the sacred and supreme authority of the Bible. This, unfortunately, meant the interference in religious matters of a perfectly foreign, entirely earthly science, namely, philology, the destructive influence of which is thenceforward unmistakable.... The popularisation of the Bible was now insisted upon, and its contemptible matter and the crude abstract sketch of a religion provided by its books had a remarkable effect in frustrating the inspiring, revealing activity of the Holy Spirit.... The Reformation was the death-blow of Christianity.... Fortunately for the Church, there came into existence at this time a new religious order, on which the expiring spirit of the hierarchy seemed to have bestowed its last gifts. This order gave new life to the old forms, and with wonderful intuition and determination set about the restoration of the Papal power. Never before in the world's history had such a society been known.... The Jesuits were well aware how much Luther owed to his demagogic arts and his knowledge of the common people.... From of old, the scholar has been the instinctive enemy of the priest; the learned and the ecclesiastical professions must carry on a war of extermination against each other so long as they are separated; for they are struggling for the same position.... To the outcome of modern thought men gave the name of philosophy; and under philosophy they comprehended everything that was hostile to the old order of things, consequently every attack upon religion. What was at first personal hatred of the Roman Catholic Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of the Christian faith, indeed of all religion."

We see how clearly Novalis understood that free-thought was a consequence of Protestantism. He continues:—

"Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed naturally and inevitably into a hatred of all enthusiasms, denounced imagination and feeling, morality and love of art, the past and the future, barely acknowledged man to be the highest among the animals, and reduced the creative music of the universe to the monotonous whirr of an enormous mill, driven by the stream of chance—a mill without a builder or miller, a true perpetuum mobile.... One enthusiasm was magnanimously left to mankind, enthusiasm for this glorious philosophy and its priests. France had the good fortune to be the seat of this new faith, which was patched together out of fragments of knowledge.... On account of its obedience to the laws of mathematics and its audacity, light was the idol of these men.... The history of modern unbelief is very remarkable, and is the key to all the monstrous phenomena of these later days. It only begins in this century, is little noticeable till the middle of it, and then quickly develops with incalculable force in every direction; a second, more comprehensive and more remarkable Reformation was inevitable, and of necessity came first in the country which was most modernised and had suffered longest from want of freedom.... During this anarchy religion was born again, true anarchy being its generating element.... To the reflective observer the overthrower of the state is a Sisyphus. No sooner does he reach the summit, where there is equipoise, than the mighty burden rolls down on the other side. It will never remain up there unless it is kept in position by an attraction towards heaven. All your supports are too weak as long as your state has a tendency towards the earth."

He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany we can already point to sure indications of a new world.... Here and there, and often in daring union, are to be found incomparable versatility, brilliant polish, extensive knowledge, and rich and powerful imagination. A strong feeling of the creative arbitrariness, the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness, the sacred originality, and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is taking possession of men.... Although these are only indications, disconnected and crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a universal individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of a loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a new Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's members. Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The child will be the express image of the father—a new golden age, with dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of the dissolving body."

After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. And what is the upshot of it all? What new being is the result of the embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised Church? What but a regenerated reaction, which in France restored Catholicism and (after Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led to that hateful tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that Catholicism exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the best writers of the day into exile.

Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world. It engulfed everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the counter-revolution; in it all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in it the Titanic powers of history were shut up and hypnotised. Night surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous joys of darkness and death; the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in the end they turned into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the spirit, but it was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized according to mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the inward parts of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down into the depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.

But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued their usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed because the poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to pieces in the inner world. For they did not go to work in the rough, material fashion of a Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated it inwardly in an inner world. When the poet, released by the spirits, came up from the mine again, he found the outer world, which he supposed he had resolved into its elements, exactly as it had been before. All that he had melted in his heart stood there, hard and cold; and, since the outer world had never really interested him, and since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and drowsy as his inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand.

The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty, his genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to compare him with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite lately, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Blaze de Bury drew attention to the resemblance. He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance to Novalis's, and the likeness between these two singular poets is not only a physical one; common to them both are close observation of nature, divination of all her little secrets, a choice combination of sentiment with philosophical thought, an utter want of tangibility, reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards, an aspiration, that leads nowhere."

These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these two poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives before, the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning of this century.

Think of Shelley's life in its main outlines. The son of a good family, he was sent to an aristocratic school, where, while yet a child, he was roused to wrath and opposition by the brutality of the boys and the cruelty of the masters. What especially kindled his indignation as he grew older was the hypocrisy with which those who gave free rein to their bad passions perpetually talked of God and Christianity. During his second year at Oxford, Shelley wrote an essay On the Necessity of Atheism, of which, with naïve straightforwardness, he sent copies to the Church and University authorities. He was summoned before them, and, on refusing to retract what he had written, was expelled for atheism. He went home, but his father received him with such contemptuous coldness that he soon left again, never to return. His whole life was a tissue of similar rebellions and similar misfortunes. In his twentieth year he was threatened with consumption, and though he recovered, he was thenceforward a delicate, nervously irritable man. The Court of Chancery refused him the guardianship of his own children (after the death of his first wife) on the ground that he had propagated immoral and irreligious doctrines in Queen Mab. After this he left England for ever, and lived in Italy in voluntary exile until sudden death put an end to his sad and homeless existence. His boat was capsized in a squall in the Gulf of Spezzia, and he was drowned, at the age of twenty-nine.

In contrast with such a life as this, Hardenberg's is a true German country-town idyll. At the age of twenty-five he received a Government appointment, an auditorship at one of the state saltworks, and a year or two later he was advanced to be "assessor" at the saltworks of Weissenfels. His Romanticism in no way interfered with his fulfilment of his duties as a good citizen. In his capacity of Government official he was zealous, conscientious, and steady—one of the men who do their duty and are guilty of no extravagances, and whose position is consequently assured. His republicanism was short-lived, and he is only saved by his naïveté from the charge of servility. He calls Frederick William and Louisa of Prussia "ein klassisches Menschenpaar;" in the revelation of these "geniuses" he sees an omen of a better world. Frederick William is, he says, the first king of Prussia; he crowns himself every day. A real "transubstantiation" has taken place; for the court has been transformed into a family, the throne into a sanctuary, a royal marriage into an eternal union of hearts. Only youthful prejudice, he maintains, inclines to a republic; the married man desires order, safety, quietness, a well-regulated household, a "real monarchy." "A constitution has for us only the interest of a dead letter. How different is the law which is the expression of the will of a beloved and revered person! We have no right to conceive of the monarch as the first officer of the state; he is not a citizen, and cannot therefore be an official. The king is a human being exalted to the position of an earthly providence."

If we compare such utterances as the above with those of Shelley's poems which were inspired by the tyranny prevailing in his native country, or those in which he glorifies the Italian revolutions and the Greek war of liberation, we have the sharpest imaginable contrast. And the same contrast meets us wherever we turn. Novalis sings the praises of sickness. Shelley says: "It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of this earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man."

Novalis says: "We picture God to ourselves as a person, just as we think of ourselves as persons. God is exactly as personal and individual as we are." Shelley says: "There is no God! This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.... It is impossible to believe that the Spirit which pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman, or is angered by the consequences of that necessity which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him."

Novalis sings the praises of the priesthood and of the Jesuits. Shelley says: "During many ages of darkness and misery this story" (the doctrine of the Bible) "gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspected it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men who derived, and still derive, immense emoluments from this opinion, told the vulgar that if they did not believe in the Bible they would be damned to all eternity; and burned, imprisoned, and poisoned all the unbiassed and unconnected inquirers who occasionally arose. They still oppress them, so far as the people, now become more enlightened, will allow.... The same means that have supported every popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood, deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity, have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe."

From these extracts, to which innumerable others of the same tendency might be added, we see how great was the distance between Novalis, with his introspective soul-life, and Shelley, with his practical enthusiasm for liberty.

These, then, are the two poets whom men have attempted to represent as twin spirits. They both rank high as lyric poets, though Shelley is a poetical genius of a far higher type than Novalis. But even if Novalis were more on a level with Shelley as a poet, how small is the measure of truth to be found in his works compared with that in Shelley's!

To Novalis, truth was poetry and dream; to Shelley, it was liberty. To Novalis it was a firmly established and powerful Church; to Shelley a struggling, sorely-pressed heresy; Novalis's truth sat on royal and papal thrones; Shelley's was despised and powerless.

To make any real impression on humanity, a truth, however great, must be made man, must become flesh and blood. In the early biographies of Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, we are told that in July 1703 he was condemned, as author of a certain pamphlet, first to have his ears cut off and then to be pilloried. The day came, the sentence was carried out, the man with the pale, mutilated face, dripping with blood, stood in the pillory, facing the assembled multitude. Then, strange to say, in place of the usual loud hooting, with its accompaniment of showers of rotten apples, eggs, potatoes, &c., there fell a dead silence; not an apple was thrown, not one abusive word was heard—Defoe was far too dear to the hearts of the people. Presently one of the crowd, hoisted on his neighbours' shoulders, placed a wreath upon the mutilated head. I read this when I was a boy, and though I know now that Defoe did not lose his ears, so that Pope was mistaken when he wrote—

"Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe;"

and though I also know that Defoe was not the pure character I took him to be at that time, still the picture remains a grand one, and it has burned itself into my soul. For it contains an eternal verity. As a general rule, truth upon this earth presents much such an appearance as did the condemned author in the pillory. And I remember thinking to myself at the time: "If a man chanced to find such a poor, despised, oppressed truth in the pillory, what a great moment in his life it would be if he might draw near and place the wreath upon its brow!" Shelley did this—Novalis did not.

XIII

LONGING—"THE BLUE FLOWER"

I have described Romantic "soul" as intensity, without endeavour or desire, as the glowing furnace in which liberty was asphyxiated and every tendency to outward action destroyed. But this is not the exact truth. One outward tendency remained, that which is known by the name of "longing" (Sehnsucht). Longing is the Romantic equivalent of endeavour, and the mother of all Romantic poetry. What is longing? It is a combination of lack and desire, without the determination or the means to attain what one lacks and desires. And what is the object of this longing? What but that which is the object of all longing and desire, in however fine or hypocritical words it may clothe itself—enjoyment and happiness. The Romanticist does not employ the word happiness, but it is what he means. He does not say happiness, he says "the ideal." But do not let us be deceived by words. The special characteristic of the Romanticist, however, is not his search after happiness, but his belief that it exists, that it must be in store for him, and that it will come to him when he least expects it. And since it is the gift of Heaven, since he himself is not its creator, he may lead as aimless a life as he will, guided only by his vague longing. All that is necessary is to preserve his faith that this longing will be satisfied. And it is a faith easy to preserve, for everything around him is full of omens and prophecies of the accomplishment of his desire.

It was Novalis who gave to the object of Romantic longing the famous, mystic name of "the blue flower." The expression is, of course, not to be understood literally. The "blue flower" is a mysterious symbol, something of the nature of ΙΧθΥΣ, the Fish of the early Christians. It is an abbreviation, a condensed formulation of all that infinitude of bliss for which a languishing human heart is capable of longing. Hence glimpses of it are caught long before it is reached; it is dreamed of long before it is seen; it is divined now here, now there, in what proves to be a delusion, is seen for a moment amongst other flowers, only to vanish immediately; but its fragrance is perceptible, at times only faint, at times strong, and the seeker is intoxicated by it. Though, like the butterfly, he flutters from flower to flower, settling now upon a violet, now upon some tropical plant, he is always seeking and longing for the one thing—perfect, ideal happiness.

It is with this longing and its object that Novalis's principal work deals. It is a work which we must study, and, to understand it aright, we must first see how it came into existence.

Its germ is contained in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and we can clearly trace the mental processes by which Wilhelm Meister is slowly transmuted into Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Wilhelm does not act, he is acted upon. He does not strive, he longs. He pursues ideals, seeking them first on the stage, then in real life. Wilhelm too, is the offspring of "soul." The book is pervaded by soul. It is not only that the characters, like those of many modern English novels (some of Dickens's, for instance), are full of soul, but there is, as it were, soul in the peculiar, hazy atmosphere which surrounds them. No feature is realistically coarse or decided; the children of soul have soft contours. Heiberg once summed up Goethe's philosophy, of which he himself was a disciple, in the following sentence: "Goethe is neither immoral nor irreligious, in the general acceptation of the word, but he shows that there are no unconditional laws of duty, and that we must place our religion on the same level as our poetry and philosophy." We are struck in reading Wilhelm Meister by the manner in which rigid school or text-book ethics, the narrow-minded, conventional ideas of morality and equity, are so re-moulded that morality is no longer regarded as the absolute law of life, but simply as an important principle of life, one among others all equally legitimate and equally under control—just as the brain of the animal, important as it is, is not, in the estimation of the physiologist, the one part of consequence, but simply an organ, fulfilling its task in association with the heart, the liver, and the other organs. Hence sensuality is not abused as animal, but (in Philine) simply and straightforwardly represented as pleasant and attractive. The harmonious development of Wilhelm's nature is arrived at by the aid of many doubtful experiences. In the female characters we are called on to admire well-bred self-possession and the innate nobility of a beautiful nature; the physical and mental superiority and freedom which are the result of a highly favoured and assured position, are sympathetically portrayed in the personages of rank. It may seem objectionable to us nowadays that "noble" and "aristocratic" are evidently often regarded as synonyms, but the reason for it is to be sought in the deplorable, straitened social conditions of the Germany of Goethe's day. As the tale is not the offspring of the union of imagination and reality, but of imagination and "soul," there is something unreal in its whole character; much is veiled, much refined away; everything is so idealised that the material world stands, as it were, in the shadow of the spiritual.

Only private circumstances and persons are dealt with. War is, indeed, alluded to, and in such a manner that we are enabled to conclude that the war following on the French Revolution is meant; but nothing definite is said about it. As to the locality, we are led to the conclusion that it is somewhere in Central Germany; but the landscape possesses no marked features, it only chimes in like a faint musical accompaniment to the mood. In the world depicted in the tale, art is regarded, in the perverted fashion of the day, as the school of life, instead of life as the school of art; national, historical events are but "etwas Theatergeräusch hinter den Koulissen" (a little noise behind the scenes).[1] None of the characters have any practical aim in view; they are simply driven onward by the current of their longings and moods; they wander about, untrammelled by circumstances, heedless of the boundaries of countries, leading "planless" existences.

Goethe's avoidance of all psychological extremes is a significant witness to the centripetal tendency of "soul." Such an extreme is crime, conceived of as criminal. Even where Goethe touches upon the horrible, as, for example, incestuous passion (the story of the Harper), his desire is only that we should be powerfully affected, not that we should judge; he does not bring the case before the moral, much less before the legal tribunal. And the story loses some of its painfulness from the manner in which it is communicated to us. We do not hear it from the Harper himself; his lips are sealed; it is told us after his death by a stranger.

It is in this highly idealised world, on which the poet's hand has set the seal of beauty, that Wilhelm wanders about, without a plan, but not without an aim. He is in pursuit of the ideal—an ideal profession, an ideal woman, ideal culture. He is first a merchant, then an actor, then a doctor; loves first Marianne, then the Countess, then Therese, then Nathalie. His first ideal of culture is experience, his second intellectual refinement; then he seeks it in renunciation; and he ends with experiments in social reform which made the Wanderjahre, in its day, one of the books to which socialistic revolutionaries most eagerly appealed. But the main thing to be noted is, that Wilhelm is constantly remoulding his ideal. He does not find it; he loses it, so to speak. It is not so much that he becomes the bourgeois, the philistine (Spiessbürger), as that the word loses its meaning for him.

It often happens to the young man who throws himself eagerly into the study of philosophy in search of enlightenment as to God, eternity, the aim of life, and the immortality of the soul, that, as he studies, these words lose the meaning he at first attributed to them; he obtains an answer to his questions, but an answer which teaches him that these questions must be differently put. The same thing happens in life to Wilhelm, with his longing for a preconceived ideal. Many have embraced the cloud instead of Juno; Wilhelm lets the cloud go, and presses Juno to his heart.

Wilhelm Meister had almost as much share as Die Herzensergiessungen eines Klosterbruders in the production of Tieck's Sternbald, which is throughout an echo of Goethe's great work. Immediately after the appearance of Wilhelm Meister, Tieck sketched the plot of a very interesting story, Der junge Tischlermeister ("The Young Carpenter"), which was not published until forty-one years later. The hero, an almost too accomplished and artistic young carpenter, goes through a process of development which exactly resembles Wilhelm Meister's, as far as the influence of aristocratic acquaintances, of dramatic art, and the theatre is concerned. A true Romanticist, he produces Shakespeare's comedies in a private theatre which is an exact imitation of the theatres of Shakespeare's day, and is the lover both on the stage and behind the scenes.

This work was set aside in favour of Sternbald. The modern tradesman had to give way to the artist of the Romantic period of Albert Dürer. Sternbald is the apotheosis of "soul," of pure soul, without admixture of reason and lucidity. Hence the sum and substance of the book is desire, pining desire; hence we are told of such an event as the Reformation, that, instead of generating a divine fulness of religion, it only generated the emptiness of reason, in which all hearts languish; hence the mild sensuality of Goethe's romance becomes brutal desire of the William Lovell type. The hero, when he looks within himself, sees, like Lovell, "a fathomless whirlpool, a rushing, deafening enigma." In the second edition Tieck thought it advisable to cut out some of the too numerous wanton bathing and drinking scenes amidst which the restless longing of the hero runs riot.

But the principal thing to which I would draw attention is, that reality is here refined and distilled in a manner unknown to Goethe. It is attenuated into vapour—emotional vapour; personality is drowned in landscape, action in the music of the woodman's horn. In Sternbald every day is a Sunday; a devotional feeling pervades the air; we seem to hear the church bells ring and to know that the world is at leisure. The following words of the hero contain the philosophy of the book: "In this world we can only desire, we can only live in intentions; real action belongs to the hereafter." Consequently there is no action in the story; the characters wander about with as little apparent purpose as comets; their lives consist of a series of accidental, unsought adventures; they are always travelling in search of the ideal, and as the ideal is generally supposed to have taken up its abode somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rome, the book ends there—the story is not brought to a conclusion, and is never continued.

It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that Novalis prefers Sternbald to Wilhelm Meister. "For," says he, "the kernel of my philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the absolutely real, and that the more poetical anything is, the truer it is. Therefore, the task of the poet is not to idealise, but to cast a spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true poetry. A fairy tale is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in its being exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." The world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos—chaos which prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be not a mere tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable. The real fairy tale writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel, is, as it were, free history, the mythology of history. And love, being the form of morality which implies the possibility of magic, is the soul of the novel, the foundation of all romances, all novels. For where true love is, there marvellous, miraculous things happen.

These obscure, yet in a manner unambiguous expressions of Novalis's opinions on the subject of the true nature of poetry and romance, make it easy for us to understand his judgment of Wilhelm Meister, a book he had greatly admired in early youth. For in Wilhelm Meister, as in Torquato Tasso, poetry has to give way to reality, the poetic conception of life to the practical. Novalis could imagine nothing more shameful than this; it was sin against the holy spirit of poetry. In the novel, in fiction, poetry is not to be done away with, not even to be restricted, but to be exalted and glorified.

So he determines to write a novel which shall be the direct antithesis of Wilhelm Meister. He even takes thought of such small matters as type and size, and determines that in them Heinrich von Ofterdingen shall be the exact counterpart of the book, the worldly philosophy of which it is to refute by its magic mysticism. He writes to Tieck: "My novel is in full swing; it is to be a deification of poetry. In the first part Heinrich von Ofterdingen ripens into a poet; in the second he is the glorified poet. The story will have many points of resemblance with your Sternbald but will lack its lightness. This want, however, may not be a disadvantage, considering the subject."

Goethe and Wilhelm Meister Novalis criticises thus: "Goethe is an altogether practical poet. His works are what English wares are—simple, neat, suitable to their purpose, and durable.... He has, like the Englishman, a natural sense of order and economy, and an acquired sense of what is fine and noble.... Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre is, in a way, altogether modern and prosaic. Romance perishes in it, and so does the poetry, the magic quality, of nature. The book only deals with everyday human affairs; nature, and the belief in her mysterious powers, are quite forgotten. It is a poetically written story of bourgeois domestic life, in which the marvellous is expressly treated as poetry and fancy. Artistic atheism is the spirit of the book. Wilhelm Meister is a Candide directed against poetry."

Novalis's aim, then, is to produce a work exactly the opposite of this, one in which everything is finally resolved into poetry, in which "the world becomes soul." For everything is soul. "Nature is to the soul what a solid body is to light. The solid substance stops light, breaks it up into wonderful colours, &c., &c. Human beings are soul prisms."

His novel is, then, an allegory, the key to which is contained in the fairy-tale introduced into the story. This fairy-tale is supposed to show how the true eternal world comes into existence; it is a description of the restoration of that kingdom of love and poetry in which the great "world-soul expands and blooms everlastingly." Novalis believes that, since the existing heaven and the existing earth are of a prosaic nature, and since our age is an age of utilitarianism, a poetical day of judgment must come, a spell must be broken, before the new life can blossom forth.—Arcturus and his daughter slumber, frozen in their palace of ice. They are released by Fable (i.e. Poetry) and her brother, Eros. Eros is the child of the restless father, Reason, and the faithful mother, the Heart. Fable owes her being to unfaithfulness on the part of Reason; she is born of Fancy, daughter of the Moon; her godmother is the guardian of the domestic altar, Sophia, Heavenly Wisdom.

Against the good powers in this allegory a conspiracy is formed by the Writer. The Writer is the spirit of prose, of narrow enlightenment; he is depicted as constantly writing. When Sophia dips what he has written into a bowl which stands upon the altar, a little of it sometimes remains legible, but often it is all washed out. If drops from the bowl happen to fall upon him, they fall from him again in the shape of numbers and geometric figures, which he eagerly collects, strings upon a thread, and wears round his neck as an ornament. The Writer is Novalis's Nureddin. The result of his plot is the imprisonment of the Father and Mother and the destruction of the altar.

But Fable has escaped. She descends into the realm of Evil, and exterminates Evil by delivering up the Passions to the power of the death-bringing Fates. Time and Mortality are now no more. "The last thread of the flax is spun; the lifeless is reanimated; life reigns." In a universal conflagration, the mother, the Heart, is burned to death, the sun disappears, and the ice is melted round the palace of Arcturus. Through a new, happy earth, stretching far and wide under a new heaven, Eros and Fable pass into the palace. Fable has fulfilled her mission; she has brought Eros to his beloved, the daughter of the king. The kingdom of poetry and love is established.

"Gegründet ist das Reich der Ewigkeit; In Lieb und Frieden endigt sich der Streit; Vorüber ging der lange Traum der Schmerzen; Sophie ist ewig Priesterin der Herzen."[2]

Sophia occupies the same place in this allegory that Beatrice does in Dante's great poem.

The glorification of the old Meistersinger is, of course, intended as a glorification of poetry in general, but his story, as told in the novel, is really the story of Hardenberg's own life and endeavour. Heinrich von Ofterdingen's home and quiet childhood remind us of Hardenberg's. A dream, which seems doubly rich in omen because his father as a youth had dreamed one like it, gives him a fore-feeling of the mysterious happiness of the poet's life, and shows him, in the form of a wonderful blue flower, the object of the poet's longing and endeavour.

In order that he may acquire some knowledge of the world, it is decided that Heinrich and his mother shall travel, in company with a number of merchants, to Augsburg. The incidents of the journey and the tales of his travelling companions enrich him with impressions, and fertilise the germs of poetical productivity that lie latent in his soul. For all their talk is of poetry and poets; they tell him the story of Arion, and popular legends in which poets are the equals of kings, and they philosophise on the subject of poetry and art, not like merchants of the most barbarous period of the Middle Ages, but like Romanticists of the year 1801. One of them, for example, gives the following pantheistic explanation of the instinctive impulse of mankind towards plastic art: "Nature, desiring to have some enjoyment of all the art that there is in her, has metamorphosed herself into human beings. In their minds, through them, she rejoices in her own glory, selects what is most pleasant and lovely, and reproduces it in such a manner that she may possess and enjoy it in manifold ways."

In a castle to which they come, Heinrich meets a captive Eastern girl, whose touching plaint it is interesting to compare with the song of the Oriental beauty (La Captive) in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales. In a book belonging to a mysterious hermit (the original of the charcoal-burner's book in Ingemann's Valdemar Sejer) he finds the history of his own life.

The travellers arrive at Augsburg, and here Heinrich makes the acquaintance of a poet and a fascinating young girl. In Klingsohr he has a noble example of the fully developed poet, a poet whose utterances in many ways remind us of Goethe's. Almost everything that Klingsohr says is surprisingly rational and wise; we can scarcely understand how Novalis himself failed to take any of it to heart. The following are some of his remarks: "I cannot too strongly recommend you to follow your natural inclination to penetrate into the reason of things, to study the laws of causation. Nothing is more indispensable to the poet than insight into the nature of every event, and knowledge of the means whereby to attain every aim.... Enthusiasm without understanding is useless and dangerous, and the poet will be able to effect few miracles if he is himself astonished by miracles.... The young poet cannot be too calm, too thoughtful. True, melodious eloquence demands a wide, calm, observing mind." Upon one point, however, Klingsohr and Novalis are entirely agreed, namely, that everything is, and must be, poetry. "It is a great misfortune that poetry should have a special name, and that poets should form a separate guild. There is nothing separate or special about poetry. It is the mode of action characteristic of the human mind. Do not all men aspire poetically every moment of their lives?"

All Heinrich's love longings are satisfied when he sees Klingsohr's daughter, Mathilde. He feels once more as he felt when he saw the vision of the "blue flower." But Mathilde is drowned. Heinrich loses her as Novalis had lost Sophie von Kühn. Utterly broken down, he leaves Augsburg. He is comforted in his sorrow by a vision (like the visions Novalis had at Sophie's grave) in which he sees the departed and hears her voice. In a distant monastery, the mission of whose monks it is to keep alive the sacred fire in young souls, and which seems to be a species of "spirit-colony," he lives "with the departed." He experiences all the sensations to which Novalis has given expression in the Hymns to Night. Then he returns from the spirit-world to life, and falls in love with a being no less wonderful than the object of his first passion. Mathilde's place is filled by Cyane.

The second part of the novel is only sketched. Heinrich wanders the whole world round. After going through every earthly experience, "he retires again into his soul, as to his old home." Things material now become transformed into things spiritual. "The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the world." Heinrich finds Mathilde again, but she is no longer distinguishable from Cyane—just as, in Novalis's own life, Julie was not Julie, but Sophie come to life again. And now "the festival of soul," of love and eternal fidelity, is celebrated. On this occasion allegory reigns supreme. The principle of good and the principle of evil appear in open competition, singing antiphonies; the sciences do the same, even mathematics. We hear much about Indian plants—probably the lotus-flower was made to play a part as partaking of the nature of the "blue flower."

The end of the story is merely indicated. Heinrich finds the "blue flower"—it is Mathilde. "Heinrich plucks the blue flower, and releases Mathilde from the spell which has bound her, but loses her again. Stunned by grief, he turns into a stone. Edda, who, besides being herself, is also the 'blue flower,' the Oriental captive, and Mathilde (fourfold 'Doppelgängerei'), sacrifices herself to the stone. It turns into a singing tree. Cyane hews down the tree, and burns herself along with it, upon which it turns into a golden ram. Edda-Mathilde is compelled to sacrifice the ram, and Heinrich becomes a man once more. During these transformations he has all manner of wonderful conversations." This we can readily believe.

In Danish literature the work most allied to Heinrich von Ofterdingen is Ingemann's De Sorte Riddere ("The Black Knights"). We learn from Ingemann's autobiography how exactly his frame of mind at the time he was writing this book corresponded to that of the German Romanticist. "I paid but little attention to all the great events that were happening in the outer world. Even the conflagration of Moscow, the destruction of the Great Army, and the fall of Napoleon were to me ephemeral phenomena ... even in the German War of Liberation I only saw a divided nation in conflict with itself, noble powers without any principle of unity and concord. Between the ideal life and human life there lay a yawning abyss, which only the heavenly rainbow of love and poetry could bridge over.... I wrote myself into a fairy labyrinth, in which love was my Ariadne-thread, and in which I hoped, with the great harp of the poetry of life, the strings of which are strung by genius from rock to rock over black abysses, to lull the monsters of existence to sleep, resolve the dissonances in the great world-harmony, and solve the world-mystery." The result of this attempt was woeful.

It is certain that in Heinrich von Ofterdingen Novalis succeeded in producing something as unlike Wilhelm Meister as possible. The "blue flower" was the emblem of the ideal. Here we have the real forgotten in the ideal, and the ideal in its emblem. Poetry is entirely separated from life. Novalis thinks that this is as it should be. In Ofterdingen he says of poets: "Many and important events would only disturb them. A simple life is their lot, and they must make acquaintance with the varied and numberless phenomena of the outer world only by means of tales and books. Only seldom during the course of their lives is it permissible for them to be drawn into the wild eddy of some great event, in order that they may acquire a more accurate knowledge of the position and character of men of action. Their receptive minds are quite sufficiently occupied with near and simple phenomena.... Here upon earth already in possession of the peace of heaven, untormented by vain desires, only inhaling the fragrance of earthly fruits, not devouring them, they are free guests, whose golden feet tread lightly, and whose presence causes all involuntarily to spread their wings.... If we compare the poet with the hero, we shall find that the poet's song has many a time awakened heroic courage in youthful hearts, but never that heroic deeds have called the spirit of poetry to life in any soul."

The fundamental error could not have been defined more clearly. According to this theory, poetry is not the expression of life and its deeds; no, life and its deeds have poetry as their origin. Poetry creates life. Undoubtedly there is poetry of which this may be true; but if there be any one kind of poetry of which it could never be true, it is the kind under consideration. To what possible deed could it incite? To the changing of one's self into a singing tree or a golden ram? There is no question of action in it at all, only of longing.

All the best of Novalis's work is simply an expression of this longing, which includes every desire, from the purely natural ones to the most transcendental aspiration. Perhaps the most beautiful things he has written are two songs—the one giving expression to the sensuous longings of the young girl, the other to the longing which is part and parcel of the enthusiastic friendship of young men.

The song in which the young girls complain of the hardships of their lot is charming. Here the "blue flower" is simply the forbidden fruit. But the longing is expressed with bewitching roguishness. In the poem "To a Friend," again, we have it expressed with fervency and solemnity:—

"Was passt, das muss sich ründen, Was sich versteht, sich finden, Was gut ist, sich verbinden, Was liebt, zusammen sein, Was hindert, muss entweichen, Was krumm ist, muss sich gleichen, Was fern ist, sich erreichen, Was keimt, das muss gedeihn. "Gieb treulich mir die Hände, Sei Bruder mir und wende Den Blick vor Deinem Ende Nicht wieder weg von mir. Ein Tempel, wo wir knieen, Ein Ort, wohin wir ziehen, Ein Glück, für das wir glühen, Ein Himmel mir und Dir!"

The longing here is almost that of the Crusader—a seeking in the far distance for something great and glorious. The "blue flower" melts into the blue of the horizon. Its very colour betokens distance.

Let us dwell for a moment longer on this flower. In Spielhagen's Problematische Naturen, one of the characters says: "You remember the blue flower in Novalis's tale? Do you know what it is? It is the flower which no mortal eye has seen, yet the fragrance of which fills the world. Not every creature is delicately enough organised to perceive its perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when she sings and wails and sobs in the moonlight and the grey dawn; and so were, and so are, all the foolish human beings who, in prose and verse, have poured, and are pouring, forth their woes to Heaven; and so, too, are millions more, to whom no God has granted the power to say what they suffer, and who look up in dumb anguish to the Heaven which has no mercy upon them. And alas! for this suffering there is no cure—none except death. For him who has once inhaled the fragrance of the blue flower there is not a peaceful hour left in life. Like a murderer, or like one who has turned away the Lord from his door, he is driven onward, ever onward, however much his tired limbs ache, and however fervently he longs to lay down his weary head. When he is tormented by thirst, he begs at some hut for a drink; but he hands back the empty vessel without a word of thanks, for it was dirty, or there was an ugly insect in the water—in any case, he had found no refreshment in it. Refreshment! Where are the eyes which have taken from us the desire ever to look into other, brighter, more ardent eyes? Where the breast upon which we have rested with the certain knowledge that we should never long to listen to the beating of a warmer, more loving heart? Where? Can you tell me where?"

"Love," so runs the reply, "is the fragrance of the blue flower, which, as you have said, fills the world; and in every being whom you love with your whole heart you have found the blue flower."

"I fear that is not a solution of the riddle," says the hero sorrowfully, "for this very condition, that we should love with our whole hearts ... we can never fulfil. Which of us can love with his whole heart? We are all so weary, so worn out, that we have neither the strength nor the courage essential to true, serious love—that love which does not rest until it has taken possession of every thought of a man's mind, every feeling of his heart, every drop of blood in his veins."

This interpretation is a beautiful one, and it is not incorrect, but it is not exhaustive. It is not only in love, but in every domain of life that the "blue flower" represents perfect, and hence to that extent ideal, but still purely personal happiness. The longing for this, from its nature unattainable, happiness is the constant, restless desire depicted by all the Romanticists.

Perhaps not one of the regular German Romanticists is so completely the poet of Romantic longing as Shack Staffeldt, who, though a German born, wrote in Danish. But he does not depict the longing which produced outward restlessness. His longing is far too deep to be satisfied by wandering about the world. It is in the writings of certain of the later Romanticists that longing appears as the restless desire which drives man from place to place.

Of this it seems to me that we have the most typical description in Eichendorff's novel, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ("The Life of a Ne'er-Do-Well"). Published in 1824, this book was written twenty years after Heinrich von Ofterdingen, though by a man only ten years Novalis's junior, a disciple of Tieck, an ultra-Romanticist of a pious, amiable disposition.

Joseph, Baron von Eichendorff, the son of a nobleman of high position, was born in Upper Silesia in 1788. His family being Catholic, his early education was superintended by a Catholic ecclesiastic. In 1805 he went to the University of Halle to study law, and, amongst other lectures, attended those of Professors Schleiermacher and Steffens, the latter of whom had a special attraction for him. It was here that he made his first acquaintance with Romantic literature; Novalis opened to him a new dream-world, rich in promise. In his very first holidays he went to Wandsbeck to visit old Claudius, whom he had loved from his early boyhood. Claudius's paper, the Wandsbecker Bote, had been his greatest comfort in the days when his tutor plagued him with instructive children's books. There is something of Claudius's mild humour in Eichendorffs own poetry.

The year 1807 found him at Heidelberg, where he made the acquaintance of the Romanticists living there, Arnim, Brentano, and Görres being the most notable. He assisted in editing Des Knaben Wunderhorn (a famous collection of popular songs and poetry), and collaborated with Görres in his work on the old popular literature. In 1809 he met Arnim and Brentano again in Berlin; here he also made the acquaintance of Adam Müller, who exercised a considerable influence upon him. He was strongly influenced, too, by Fichte's lectures.

As there seemed no prospect of a career for him in Prussia, he went in 1810 to Vienna, intending to enter the service of the Austrian Government. In Vienna he spent much of his time in the company of Friedrich Schlegel, formed a close friendship with Schlegel's stepson, Philipp Veit, the painter, and wrote his first, exaggeratedly Romantic story, Ahnung und Gegenwart, which is nothing but a collection of lyric dreams and fancies. Nevertheless, in this work, as well as in his later productions, it was his desire to contrast the "fervent harmony existing between healthy, fresh humanity and nature, in forest, stream, and mountain, shining mornings and dreamy starlit nights, with the empty pleasures of the great world, and the affected prudery or real depravity of the period." As in all his works, adventure predominates. As soon as he quits the domain of merry vagabond life and romantic adventure, he is in danger of relapsing into the supernatural and horrible.

Instead of entering the Austrian Government service as he had intended, he determined to take part in the war against Napoleon. He joined Lützow's famous Free Corps, and was attached to a militia battalion. He had just been discharged when the news came of Napoleon's return from Elba. He immediately enlisted again, and entered Paris with the German troops.

In course of time he received an appointment in the Prussian Kultusministerium (department of religion and education), and developed into a conscientious and capable official. In 1840, a dispute between the Government and the Roman Catholic bishops produced strained relations between him (the good Catholic) and the head of his department. He sent in his resignation, but it was not immediately accepted; he was commissioned to prepare a report on the restoration of the castle of Marienburg.

Having made himself master of the Spanish language, he translated some of Calderon's Autos Sacramentales. This pursuit led to a still closer connection between him and the leaders of the Ultramontane party. In his later years he criticised modern German literature in the spirit of orthodox Catholicism, writing of the Catholic tendency of the Romanticists as if it were the most important and best feature of the school, and treating the change of opinion of some of the leaders in regard to this matter as a falling away from the truth and a sign of literary decadence. He looked with contempt upon Schiller's heroes, with their "rhetorical ideality," and upon the symbolic "Naturpoesie" of Goethe's shorter poems. "How different," he says, "is the great idea of Romanticism, homesickness, longing for the lost home—that is to say, for the universal, the Catholic Church." With these unsound theories Eichendorff combined real and considerable lyrical talent. No one has given, in a condensed form, better representations of the longings and the ideals of Romanticism. In the little story, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, we seem to hear young Romanticism twittering and singing as if he had caught it bodily and shut it up in a cage. It is all there—the fragrance of the woods and the song of the birds; longing for travel and delight in it, especially when Italy is the goal; Sunday emotions and moonlight; genuine Romantic vagrancy and idleness—such idleness that from want of use the limbs actually begin to fall out of joint, and the hero begins to feel as though he "were tumbling to pieces."

The Ne'er-Do-Well is a miller's son, young and poor, whose only pleasure in life is to lie under the trees and look up into the sky, or to roam aimlessly about the country with his zither, singing such sad and beautiful songs that the hearts of all who hear him "long." "Every one," he says, "has his allotted place upon this earth, his warm hearth, his cup of coffee, his wife, his glass of wine of an evening, and is content. But I am content nowhere." He, the humble gardener (for such, when he does work, is his occupation), adores a high-born, lovely lady whom he has only seen once or twice; he addresses her in a beautiful and touching song:—

"Wohin ich geh' und schaue In Feld und Wald und Thal, Vom Berg hinab in die Aue, Vielschöne, hohe Fraue, Grüss ich dich tausendmal. In meinem Garten find' ich Viel Blumen, schön und fein, Viel Kränze wohl draus wind' ich, Und tausend Gedanken bind' ich Und Grüsse mit darein. "Ihr darf ich keinen reichen, Sie ist zu hoch und schön; Sie müssen alle verbleichen, Die Liebe nur ohne Gleichen Bleibt ewig im Herzen stehn. "Ich schein' wohl froher Dinge Und schaffe auf und ab, Und ob das Herz zerspringe, Ich grabe fort und singe Und grab' mir bald mein Grab."[3]

Through his lady's influence he is promoted to the post of rent-collector for the castle. He inherits from his predecessor a magnificent dressing-gown, red with yellow spots, a pair of green slippers, a nightcap, and some long-stemmed pipes.

Arrayed in his new splendour, and smoking the longest pipe he can find, he lives a quiet, easy life for some time, digging up all the potatoes and vegetables in his garden and planting flowers in their stead, listening with rapture to a distant hunting or post horn, and placing a bouquet every morning upon a stone table where his lady is certain to find it. This goes on until she vanishes from his horizon. As he is sitting alone one day over his account-book, his zither lying beside him, a sunbeam falls through the window upon its dusty strings. "It touched a string in my heart. 'Yes,' said I; 'come away, my faithful zither! Our kingdom is not of this world!'" So he leaves behind his account-book, dressing-gown, slippers, and pipe, and wanders out into the wide world; to Italy first.

This Ne'er-Do-Well is the most comical, awkward, childlike creature one can imagine; in mind he is about ten years old, and he never grows any older. Like Andersen's heroes, the Improvisatore and O.T., he is repeatedly saved from temptation simply by his ignorance and inexperience. He never realises what is going on around him. Things happen to him without his doing anything to bring them about. He is the central figure of a group of characters who all pursue callings which leave them as free as he is himself—painters travelling to Italy, an artist who runs away with his lady-love, musicians wandering from town to town, and roaming students, who trudge along, singing student songs. Compared with this life of wandering and seeking and expectation, ordinary, every-day life naturally appears excessively monotonous. When the hero returns to his native town, he finds the new rent-collector sitting at his door, wearing the same spotted dressing-gown, the same slippers, &c. After having spent his life seeking for his "blue flower," he finds it at last at home. His first rapture is described playfully, almost in Hans Andersen's manner, as follows: "It was such a pleasure to hear her talk so brightly and trustfully to me, that I could have listened to her till morning. I was as happy as I could be. I took a handful of almonds, which I had brought all the way from Italy, out of my pocket. She took some, and we sat and cracked them, and looked contentedly out over the peaceful scene."

The Ne'er-Do-Well may be regarded as the representative, the spokesman, of the ornamental, profitless arts, and of infinite longing. Infinite longing! Let us imprint these words in our memory, for they are the foundation-stone of Romantic poetry.

The longing took curiously morbid forms in the less healthy Romantic souls. The well-known German author, Franz Horn, informs us in his autobiography that at the age of three or four he was already capable of poetic longing and suffering, and of divining life in apparently dead things. He goes on to say that the child-like mysticism of a certain popular refrain had a perfectly magic attraction for him. He quotes the verse in question, and it proves to be none other than the good old rhyme: "Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home!"

"Maikäfer flieg! Dein Vater ist im Krieg, Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland, Und Pommerland ist abgebrannt, Maikäfer flieg!"[4]

The other children were hard-hearted enough to laugh at this poem, but to him it seemed most touching. The unhappy cockchafer was fatherless and motherless. His father was in the wars, and "what might not come of that?" And his mother? Of her "the news was still more uncertain." She was in far-off Pomerania, and Pomerania was on fire! What scope for fancy! And there was the poor cockchafer, too, borne on the wings of his longing out into the wide, wide world, seeking, ever seeking.—We positively feel as if we were turning into children again.

But let us return to the idea that underlies all this. The longing of the individual for infinite happiness rests, as has already been said, upon the belief that this infinite happiness is attainable by man. But this belief, in its turn, rests upon the individual's Romantic conviction of his own infinite importance. The doctrine of immortality itself is only a result of belief in the cosmic importance of the individual. And this belief in the infinite importance of each separate individual is genuinely medieval. Whole sciences, such as astrology, were founded upon it. The very stars of heaven were supposed to have a close connection with the destinies of individual men, and actually to occupy themselves with them. Heaven and earth and all that in them is, revolved round man. The Romanticists naturally feel the want of astrology, and would fain have the science restored. What they call the "blue flower" is what in astrology was called a man's planet, and in alchemy, the philosopher's stone.

In his lectures Upon the Literature, Art, and Spirit of the Age (1802), A. W. Schlegel writes: "In the same sense in which we may call Kepler the last astrologist, we may demand that astronomy should become astrology again. Astrology fell into disrepute because it made pretensions to science which it could not sustain; but the fact of its having made such pretensions does not take away the idea, the imperishable truths, which lie at its foundation. There is unquestionably something more sublime in the idea of the dynamic influence of the stars, in the supposition that they are animated by reason, and, like subordinate deities, exercise creative power in their appointed spheres, than in the theory that they are dead, mechanically governed masses." And in a letter to Buntzen, Heiberg writes: "It must be allowed that the Middle Ages, with their alchemistic and astrological superstitions, which, albeit superstitions, were based upon a belief in the unity of nature and mind ... possessed more of the true scientific spirit than the present day, with its deliberate renunciation of the one thing which in the long run is of any account." In the same strain (in his essay on Hveen) he praises astrology, as "based upon the profound mysticism of the Middle Ages." When even Heiberg could praise Tycho Brahe for his astrological bias, can we wonder that Grundtvig defended his hypothesis of the earth being the centre of the universe? O Romanticism! Romanticism!

The Romanticists aimed at founding a philosophy and a literature upon want and longing—that is to say, upon the idea of the infinite importance of the individual. The man who bases his philosophy of life upon want is certainly more reasonable than the man who bases it upon either present happiness or the pleasures and bliss of a future existence; for all the happiness we know is undermined by sorrow and by insufficiency, and thus it is on the whole better and safer to build upon want and desire. But the Romanticists do not build upon desire alone, but also upon its satisfaction; they yearn, they wander about in longing quest of the "blue flower," which beckons to them from afar.

Longing, however, is inactivity, is nourished and thrives upon inactivity. He who has left the Romantic philosophy behind him will not base his life upon such a foundation.

Longing engenders the impotent wish. But the Romantic wish is so instinct with genius, that its fulfilment is permitted—in the Romantic world. What desire promises, life fulfils. Fortune comes to the genuine Romantic hero while he sleeps. Romantic literature consequently leaves the simple-minded reader with the impression of a world where everything comes to those who know how to long and to desire ardently enough, where all hindrances are swept aside without labour, without understanding, without trouble.

It is eternally true that we long; and it is no less true that we must build upon something certain. Amidst all the uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt wherewith we are surrounded, there is one thing certain, one thing which cannot be explained away, and that is suffering. And equally certain is the good of the alleviation of suffering and of release from it. It is certain that it is extremely disagreeable to endure pain, to be fettered, or to be imprisoned; and it is equally certain that it is a great relief to be cured, to have one's fetters loosed, one's prison door flung wide open. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is a deed to be done, a stroke to be struck for liberty. We may wander about, full of uncertainty and doubt, not knowing what to believe or what to do; but from the moment we come upon a fellow-being with his fingers jammed in some heavy door that has shut upon them, there is no longer any doubt what we have to do. We must try to open the door and release the hand.

And, fortunately or unfortunately, it so happens that there are always plenty of human beings whose hands are caught fast, plenty who suffer, plenty who sit in all manner of chains—chains of ignorance, of dependence, of stupidity, of slavery. To free these must be the object of our lives. The Romanticist egotistically pursues his personal happiness, and believes himself to be of infinite importance. The child of the new age will neither scan the heavens in search of his star nor the far horizon in search of the "blue flower." Longing is inactivity. He will act. He will understand what Goethe meant by making Wilhelm Meister end his life as a physician.

If it is impossible to found a satisfactory philosophy of life upon longing, it is equally impossible to found upon it a literature which has any connection with life, and which is capable of satisfying in the long run. The task of literature in all ages is to give a condensed representation of the life of a people and an age. Romanticism contemptuously refused this task. Novalis in Germany and Shack Staffeldt in Denmark present the most typical examples of the manner in which it turned its back on outward reality, to create a poetico-philosophic system out of the mind and the poetical longing of the author. It does not represent human life in all its breadth and depth, but the dreams of a few highly intellectual individuals. The cloud-city of Aristophanes, with its air-castles, is the sacred city and goal of its longing.

XIV

ARNIM AND BRENTANO

Herder's Stimmen der Völker ("Voices of the Nations"), published in 1767, contained only twenty German "Volkslieder;" but at the time he brought it out, he expressed the wish that he might live to see the publication of a large collection of the old "Nationallieder," as he called them. In 1806 L. A. von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn; it contained 210 German popular songs and ballads, and was followed in 1808 by two more volumes of about the same size. This book was not only of the greatest historical interest, but was epoch-making in German lyric poetry and German literature generally. It struck that natural note which for many years gave freshness and sonority to both the Romantic and the ante-Romantic lyric poetry. Even when, in the case of Heine, the entirely modern had supplanted the Romantic theme, rhythm and form and many hardly noticeable turns of expression owed their simple charm to the inspiration of the Volkslied. The superiority of German to French lyric poetry in this century possibly lies chiefly in that absence of everything rhetorical which it owes to the influence of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Though the two publishers of this great collection were of one accord in their love for the old popular poetry of their country, and also as to the slightly modernised and carefully expurgated form in which the songs were to appear, and though both were thorough-going Romanticists in principle, they were men of very different characters.

Ludwig Achim von Arnim was born in Berlin in 1781. He studied natural science for some time in Göttingen, and then travelled all over Germany, to make himself acquainted with the country and the people and to collect popular songs and ballads. After this he settled for a time in Heidelberg, where he met Clemens Brentano and Görres. In company with them, in 1808, he started a literary periodical, the Einsiedlerzeitung ("Hermit's Chronicle"), amongst the contributors to which were Tieck, Uhland, Hölderlin, and Jacob Grimm. This periodical he continued at a later time under the title Trösteinsamkeit ("Consolation in Solitude").

In 1811 he married Brentano's sister, the famous Bettina, and thenceforward lived partly in Berlin and partly on his estate of Wiepersdorf in Brandenburg. He kept his Romanticism out of his private life; he was a sane, healthy human being, a clever farmer, a sober Protestant and Prussian. Eichendorff describes him as follows: "Handsome and distinguished looking, frank, ardent, and yet gentle, honourable and reliable in all things, faithful to his friends even when every one else deserted them, Arnim was in reality what others, by dint of a sort of mediæval polish, strove to appear—a knightly figure in the best sense of the word; but for this very reason it always seemed to his contemporaries that there was something strange and out of place about him."

Something strange there must certainly have been in his nature, for, staid and sober, calm and harmonious as was his life, his writings give us the impression of restlessness and complexity. He himself was cast in one piece, his works never are.

Besides plays, now unreadable, he wrote two long novels and a number of short tales, which all bear witness to the fantast in him. The epithet "fantast" may be equally suitably applied to Brentano. The first conspicuous difference between the two is, that, whereas Brentano's strength lies in his naïveté and his childlike fancies, Arnim is profoundly serious even in his wildest flights. With all his love for the popular, with all his eagerness to open the eyes of the cultured to the beauty of the simple and childlike, he remained the dignified aristocrat in his own writings; he never let himself go as Brentano did. When his muse has a paroxysm of madness, it is cold, almost severe insanity, not a fiery, merry frenzy, like that to which Brentano's muse is subject.

His power of plastic representation was great, but quickly exhausted. It shows to advantage in some of his short stories, and in some still shorter fragments of his long novels; but along with descriptions and figures which evince real talent, we are presented with a mass of padding—diffuse digressions from the subject, interpolated tales which have little or no connection with the tale proper, fantastic, impossible episodes, against which even the reader with the most undeveloped sense of realism must protest. Sometimes he lays the whole stock of popular superstitions under contribution, treating them with the utmost seriousness—clay figures are magically endowed with life; a mandrake develops into Field-Marshal Cornelius Nepos. At other times he has recourse to the stock-in-trade of the old-fashioned romances—fabulous parentage, recovery of long-lost children, disguises, strange meetings after the lapse of many years. He is also given to introducing ballads and songs, generally under the rather flimsy pretext that they are the composition of one or other of his characters: fluent, but not melodious, they interrupt the course of the action, momentarily attract the attention of the reader, and are immediately forgotten.

Arnim's principal novel with a modern plot, Armuth, Reichthum, Schuld und Busse der Gräfin Dolores: Eine wahre Geschichte zur lehrreichen Unterhaltung armer Fräulein aufgeschrieben ("Poverty, Wealth, Sin, and Penance of Countess Dolores: A True Story, Recorded for the Instruction and Amusement of Poor Young Ladies"), is, taken as a whole, quite as tedious as its title. This novel is another of Wilhelm Meister's progeny. It describes the inner life of gifted and distinguished individuals of very varied character, in very varied circumstances. But there is a smooth, pious strain throughout the whole, which is altogether unlike Wilhelm Meister.

The story opens with a description of a castle which has fallen almost into ruins because of its owner's poverty. This description is striking and good; it has its counterpart in French literature in the picture of the Chateau de la Misère in Th. Gautier's Capitaine Fracasse. We are made to feel all the melancholy associated with the idea of former grandeur and present decay. The somewhat frivolous and selfish character of the penniless young Countess Dolores is also drawn with a masterly hand. This lady succeeds in engaging the affections of a distinguished and rich young man, Count Karl, who falls passionately in love with her and marries her, after overcoming various outward and inward difficulties. In the character of Count Karl, Arnim has succeeded in doing what had perhaps never been done in German literature before, namely, depicting what the English call a perfect gentleman, a conception for which other nations have no corresponding expression. A gentleman is a man of honour, manly, serious, born to command; he is, moreover, a good Christian, conscientious, unselfish, the protector of those around him, not only good by natural disposition, but moral on principle. In this character Arnim seems to have embodied much of what was best in his own nature. Unfortunately he did not succeed in imparting to it sufficient life; a kind of dream-haze surrounds this man of fine feelings, who is always writing verses and who talks a language inspired by the spirit of romance.

The plot turns upon the seduction of the young Countess. She is ensnared by a Spanish duke, who, under a false name and title, gains admission to the house, flatters her vanity in every possible way, and gradually, by the help of magnetism and romantic mysticism, gains complete influence over her, and persuades her that he has some mysterious connection with higher, nay, actually with divine, powers. It seems almost as if Arnim must have had Zacharias Werner in his mind when he drew this character. In Werner's writings we have exactly this same mixture of impudent lust and sanctimonious mystery; and we know that with Werner's mother it became a fixed idea that she was the Virgin Mary and her son the Saviour of the world. We come upon a similar idea in the following somewhat ineffective description of the seduction of Dolores:—

"The Marquis looked up to the sky with an inspired gaze, held up his hands, and appeared to salute some superior being. He said something, but she could not hear what it was, and anxiously asked what he saw. He answered that he saw the blessed Virgin, that she was pressing her, Dolores, to his breast and placing a crown of roses on her head, saying: 'Follow me!' Dolores, startled, went close up to him, imagining that she felt herself pushed towards him; she felt his breath, imagined it to be the divine breath, and cried: 'I feel her, I feel her breath; it is warm as the sun of the East and as a mother's love.' Upon this, exclaiming: 'And I am her son!' he seized her in his arms, trembling convulsively. He had often talked to her before of a wonderful renewal of the holy myth; she seemed almost unconscious as she stammered the words: 'Yes, it is thou, the all-powerful, the most holy—who hast been given to me in the weakness of our human nature.' 'And thou,' he sobbed, 'art my eternal bride.'"

It would almost seem as though it had been Arnim's intention to describe with the aid of these fictitious characters, the mystic-sensual debaucheries of one of his fellow Romanticists, a Werner or a Brentano. He himself was almost the only one of the school who, in spite of the poetic attraction of Catholicism, remained all his life a staunch Protestant. He seems to be attempting to explain exactly that species of piety which mixed itself up with the licentiousness of his Romantic contemporaries when he gives the following diagnosis of the character of the hypnotising seducer: "We are not justified in altogether doubting the piety of this nobleman, which to his truly pious wife seemed so real. He too possessed the religious instinct; and it was Clelia's natural piety which attracted him to her, though the attraction did not last long.... Afterwards superstitious fear took possession of him. He had outlived his vices. It was now not merely his religious instinct which impelled him to visit all the places of pilgrimage in Sicily and all the famous priests; he was deluding himself into the piety which in his wife was genuine. It was a new stimulant, the strength of which he was obliged constantly to increase. Religion was to him a kind of opium; his nature craved for more and more of it, till all craving was at an end." (Gräfin Dolores, ii. 136, &c.)

But it is not only the excesses peculiar to the Romanticists which Arnim reprehends; he also sharply and wittily castigates the anti-Romanticist, Jens Baggesen. In Heidelberg, where he must have met Arnim, Baggesen had written a series of satirical sonnets directed against the Romanticists, "literary sansculottes on the German Parnassus," as he called them. These he published in the same year that Dolores appeared, under the title, Der Karfunkel- oder Klingklingel-Almanack, ein Taschenbuch für vollendete Romantiker und angehende Mystiker auf das Jahr der Gnade 1810. It was, however, undoubtedly less Baggesen's verses than his extraordinary instability of character which provoked Arnim's satire. The life of this enemy of Romanticism was more planless and capricious than the life of any one of the Romanticists; and Arnim, for whom everything strange and improbable had an attraction, could not fail to be interested in such a singular personality. In Dolores he caricatures him wittily and mercilessly in the person of the poet "Waller." But though, in this instance, the weaknesses of a special individual are caricatured, Arnim's general purpose unmistakably is to throw into salient relief characteristics which exemplify the lawlessness and levity of the emotional life of a whole generation.

His unfinished historical novel, Die Kronenwächter ("The Guardians of the Crown"), published in 1817, presents us, like Dolores, with several well-conceived and ably elaborated characters along with a mass of undigested mystic and lyric material. In the background of this tale looms a huge, mysterious, enchanted castle, the seven towers of which are absolutely transparent; they appear to be built of glass, for each of them projects a brilliant rainbow upon black rocks and upon distant water. In this castle the guardians of the crown of the Hohenstaufens have their lonely retreat, and hence they sally forth into the world, to act and to avenge. But it is not this mystical background which is of importance. What one really remembers are one or two characters portrayed with such virile force as probably no German author has exhibited since, unless it be Gottfried Keller, in his historical novels.

We have, for example, the hero's foster-mother, Frau Hildegard, to whom we are thus amusingly introduced at the beginning of the book:—"Martin, the new tower watchman, has to-day married his predecessor's widow, because she has grown too stout to come down the narrow corkscrew stair. We really could not pull the tower down for her sake, so she had to make up her mind to this marriage, though she would have preferred our clerk, Berthold. The priest has had to tie the knot up there." This story of the widow's corpulence is of course nonsense, but none the less it makes a very original beginning to the book.

The action passes in the days of Luther, and Luther's figure is seen in the background. It is rare to find a Romanticist writing of him with such warmth as this:—"As a mountain sends out streams to the east and to the west, so this man combined opposites, things that in others are never found together—humility and pride, conviction of the path he was bound to tread and willing acceptance of the advice of others, clear understanding and blind faith."

A prominent part in the action is taken by Dr. Faust, the Faustus of popular legend, the famous doctor and alchemist. He is represented with a fiery red face, white hair, and bald crown, wearing scarlet trunk hose and ten orders. He is half-genius, half-charlatan, and works miraculous cures.

The most beautifully drawn character is that of a woman, the hero's betrothed, Anna Zähringer, daughter of Apollonia, the love of his youth. She is the tall German maiden of powerful build and noble carriage, but she also possesses the sensuous attraction which Gottfried Keller has a special faculty of imparting to his young women. The hero of the story, Berthold, the burgomaster, is another personification of Arnim's personal ideal. He is of noble descent, but having grown up in humble circumstances, is simple and plain in all his ways, a good, upright, quiet citizen. Yet all the time he is at heart an aristocrat, who longs for armour and weapons and tournaments, and who actually, without previous training, wins the prize in the first tournament in which he takes part.