Part 17

It was something popular that was wanted. The seed was sown of the same popular movement which was started in Denmark by Grundtvig, after he, like so many others, had been powerfully impressed by the youthful ardour with which the doctrines of the new Romantic School were proclaimed by Steffens and received by the rising generation, in those days when there was still youth in Denmark. Men rightly regretted the great gulf which had been fixed between the educated and the uneducated by the extremely rapid advance of the vanguard and the exclusion of the poorer classes from culture, and rightly appealed to the man of science and the artist to clothe their thoughts and feelings in the simplest and most easily comprehensible form. But the movement went astray, by making the insane attempt to recall the advanced guard for the sake of the laggards; they would hardly have minded sabring the foremost for the sake of keeping the army together.

With the renunciation of the mainspring of action--belief in progress--the fatalistic tragedy, with its follies and superstitions, came into vogue. In Werner's tragedy, _The Twenty-Fourth of February_, whatever happens on that particular day reminds the heroine of a terrible crime and curse. This is carried so far that when a hen is killed that day, she cries: "It seemed to scream a curse at me; it reminded me of my father with the death-rattle in his throat." Yet this play is praised by that usually discerning critic, the authoress of _De l'Allemagne_! The affectedly childlike tone of the satirical dramas gave them the character of puppet plays; naïveté became more and more the fashion; in their terror of the salons of the eighteenth century men took refuge in the nursery.

The leaders of the school were Protestants by birth, but their bias towards the pious simplicity of the Middle Ages of necessity brought about a movement in the direction of Catholicism.

In that essay on the difference between neo-classical and popular art by which Mme. de Staël showed herself influenced both in _Corinne_ and _De l'Allemagne_, Friedrich Schlegel, after demonstrating that it is impossible for genius to preserve its freshness, its impetuosity, when it chooses subjects the treatment of which demands erudition and exercise of the memory, observes: "It is not so with the subjects which belong to our own religion. From them artists receive inspiration; they feel what they paint; they paint what they have seen; life itself is their model when they represent life. But when they attempt to return to the antique, they must seek what they are to reproduce, not in the life they see around them, but in books and pictures."

The false implication lies in the words "our own religion." Which was "our own religion"? Protestantism had developed into an idealistic philosophy that had long made common cause with the Revolution. In the year 1795, two young men, whose names were to attain world-wide celebrity, had gone out to a lonely field and, in their naïve enthusiasm for the Revolution, planted a Tree of Liberty. These two were Schelling and Hegel.

There was, then, a return to Catholicism. But the spirit of Italian Catholicism was still too classic, too antique. A huge, light church like St. Peter's at Rome was not sufficiently mysterious; it was, as Lamartine observed, fitted, when all dogmatic religion should have disappeared from Europe, to become the temple of humanity. In Italy it was with the pre-Raphaelite painters alone that the Romanticists felt themselves akin; in Spain they found a kindred spirit in Calderon, whose mysticism they soon set high above their earlier favourite, Shakespeare's, realism and liberal-mindedness. Even Heiberg ranks Calderon above Shakespeare. There is a regular cult of the Gothic in art. Men turn with renewed admiration to the great monuments of their native land, to that style begotten of the deep feeling and the superstitious terrors of northern barbarians--Frenchmen, however. Albert Dürer, genuinely German, popular, simple-minded, but above all (with his stags bearing crosses between their antlers, and all the rest of his symbolical fancies) mystic, was canonised by the German Romanticists; even with us, Oehlenschläger and his sister persisted in seeing more in Dürer than other people could see. The infection was so universal that even the poet of the Gulnares, Alis, and Gulhyndis imagined himself a devotee of mysticism. Men's hearts were certainly not agitated by the religious agonies and hopes of the old pious times; but the strangeness of the Gothic style, and the extravagance which betrays itself in its artistic symbolism, harmonised with the unnaturalness and restlessness of their morbid modern imaginations. It may be related, as not without significance, that when Oehlenschläger first came into the presence of the leaders of the Romantic School, in whom he had naïvely expected to find a set of eager, emaciated ascetics, he was somewhat taken aback by the sight of Friedrich Schlegel's "satirical fat face shining cheerfully at him."

It was, however, in the course of the ardent struggle against the neo-classical tendency that Friedrich Schlegel rendered his one true, and also really great, service to science: he introduced the study of Sanscrit, and thereby opened up to Europeans an entirely new intellectual domain. He laid the foundation, first of one new linguistic science, the Indo-Oriental, which henceforth developed alongside of the Greco-Roman, and then of a second, namely, comparative philology.

For the moment it was Hindu indolence, the contemplative life, the plant life, that was the ideal. It is this ideal which is extolled in Schlegel's _Lucinde_ and which somewhat later is appropriated by the French Romanticists, re-appearing with variations in Théophile Gautier's _Fortunio_. We trace it in Oehlenschläger's inspired idler, Aladdin, and it is the ideal always present to the mind of the æsthete in _Enten-Eller_, who, like Kierkegaard himself, was brought up on the German Romanticists. Note his words: "I divide my time thus: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. When I sleep I never dream, for to sleep is the highest achievement of genius."

Goethe, as an old man, sought refuge in the East from the turmoil of the day, and wrote his _West-östlicher Divan_. The Romanticists did but follow in his track. Presently, however, their doctrines were placed on a philosophical basis by Schelling, who had been alarmed and converted by the religious and political aberrations of the French. As Goethe had sought refuge in far-off Asia, Schelling sought refuge from discordant surroundings in the far-off past, and discovered there the sources of life and truth. In contradiction to the belief of the "enlightenment" period that humanity had laboriously raised itself from barbarism to culture, from instinct to reason, he maintained that it had fallen--fallen, that is to say, from a higher state in which its education had been superintended by higher beings, spiritual powers. There was a fall; and in the degenerate times following upon that fall, there appeared but few of those teachers, those higher beings, prophets, geniuses of the Schelling type, who strove to lead men back to the old, perfect life. We of to-day know that science has justified the pre-Revolutionists and proved Schelling wrong; we, who live in the age of Charles Darwin, no longer accept the possibility of an original state of perfection and a fall. There is no doubt that the teaching of Darwin means the downfall of orthodox ethics, exactly as the teaching of Copernicus meant the downfall of orthodox dogma. The system of Copernicus deprived the heaven of the Church of its "local habitation"; the Darwinian system will despoil the Church of its Paradisaic Eden.

But in those days this was not recognised, and Schelling directed men back to that primeval world whose myths of gods and demigods were to him historical facts; he ended by extolling mythology as the greatest of all works of art, one which was capable of infinite interpretation; and infinite in this context means arbitrary. We have here the germ of Grundtvig's myth-interpretation--with its unscientific and untrustworthy presentment of Scandinavian mythology.

But the loss of all interest in the life of the day is still more markedly shown in Schelling's absorption in nature. As the mystics held that it was the working of the imagination of God which created the world, so Schelling held that it was the corresponding power in man which alone gave ideal reality to the productions of his intellect.

It is, then, this essentially artistic force, the so-called "intellectual intuition" (which may be defined as the entire imagination working according to the laws of reason), of which Schelling, clearly influenced by the æsthetic criticism of the day, maintains that it alone opens the door to philosophy, to the perception of the identity of thought and reality. Nay, this "intellectual intuition" was not only the means, it was the end. This confusing of the tool with the work marks the beginning of a general, complete confusion in Romantic poetry and philosophy. Philosophy begins to encroach on the domain of art; instead of research we have fancy and conjecture; poetry and the fine arts, on the other hand, invade the domain of philosophy and religion; poems become rhymed discussions and their heroes booted and spurred ideas; works of art seek vainly to disguise their lack of corporeal form by a cloak of Catholic piety and love. Men imagined that the new Naturphilosophie was to make all experimental study of nature superfluous henceforth and for ever; but we, who have seen the absolute impotence of the _Naturphilosophie_, and who live in an age in which experimental science has changed the aspect of the earth and enriched human life by unparalleled discoveries and inventions--we know that in this case also reactionary endeavours led to defeat, and that life itself undertook the refutation of the fallacy. The interest of the above doctrine to us Danes lies especially in its energetic vindication of the divine imagination as the source of creation, and of the human imagination as the source of all artistic production; for here we have the idea that gave birth to Aladdin, and feel the heart-beat which in 1803 drove the blood straight to that extremity of the great Germanic-Gothic body which is known by the name of Copenhagen.

It is easy to understand how inevitable it was that these new theories should make a strong impression on Oehlenschläger. The Romanticists exalted imagination above everything in the world--it was the peculiarly divine gift. Whom could this impress more than the man through whom inventive power had in Danish literature supplanted the clever manipulation of language which had distinguished Baggesen and the eighteenth century? The Romanticists looked upon the world of myth as the highest, as the real world; there he was, with a whole new mythology, the Scandinavian, ready to his hand, waiting to be used. Fr. Schlegel and Novalis had cried in chorus: "We must find a mythology which can be to us what the mythology of the Greeks and Romans was to them!" But they sought in vain, or found only the old Catholic legends. Oehlenschläger alone had no need to seek; "the orange fell into his turban." The Romanticists believed in a greater past from which the race had fallen; and he dwelt among a people whose past far outshone its present, a people that desired to forget the darkness of to-day and to see itself glorified in the glorification of the dreams of its childhood and the achievements of its youth. Thus it was that it only needed a word from Steffens to break (to the surprise of Steffens and every one else) the spell by which his tongue was tied.

It was one of the unmistakable deserts of the Romantic School that it endeavoured to widen the narrow circle of subjects provided by classical literature, and to teach men to appreciate what was admirable and characteristic in modern foreign nations as well as in their own country. This made the school a patriotic school, and patriotic in every country. It is to be observed that there already existed in Germany that inclination to make excursions into foreign regions which characterised French Romanticism in the days of Victor Hugo. We notice it first in Herder, with his admirable appreciation of the characteristically national intellectual productions of different countries. Then came A. W. Schlegel, with his criticism and translations. Schlegels famous lectures on dramatic literature, published just before the entry of the Powers into Paris, expound the Greek, English, and Spanish drama sympathetically, but contain the most violent, bitter attacks upon French taste and the French drama. Not content with attacking the tragedians, he treats even Molière with foolish contempt. It is instructive to compare this book with Mme. de Staël's _De l'Allemagne_. Schlegel's misunderstanding and dislike of France are as great as Mme. de Staël's understanding and appreciation of Germany. He makes amends by expounding both Shakespeare and his own discovery, Calderon, with profound and subtle sympathy. His criticism of these two poets has, however, along with one great merit, one great defect.

The merit is, that every characteristic, however small, has justice done to it. Schlegel's own masterly translations of many of Shakespeare's and some of Calderon's plays show what progress has been made in the comprehension of foreign poetry since Schiller, in his translation of _Macbeth_, cut up the play to suit the classical fancies of the day, and in so doing cut away all its boldness and realism.

The defect, which is the defect of the whole school (and in Denmark does not pass away with the school, but is to be observed in the following period too), lies in the conception of poetry, which, marked by German one-sidedness, is so sweepingly transcendental that it quite shuts out the historical interpretation. One model, unquestioned, absolute, follows the other. The French had found their models in the Greeks and Aristotle; now it is, say, Shakespeare who is alone absolutely worthy of imitation in poetry, Mozart (as Kierkegaard maintains in _Enten-Eller_) who is the perfect model in music. The sober, trustworthy, historical view of the matter, which recognises no perfect models, is entirely disregarded. The great work is the model for a whole new style, is in itself a code of laws. To our Heiberg, for instance, _St. Hansaften-Spil_ is "the perfect realisation of the drama proper in lyrical form." Instead of studying poetry in connection with history, with the whole of life, men evolve systems in which schools of poetry and poetic works grow out of each other like branches on a tree. They believe, for instance, that English tragedy is descended in a direct line from Greek tragedy, not perceiving that the tragedy of one nation is not the offspring of that of other nations, but the production of the environment, the civilisation, the intellectual life in the midst of which it comes into being.

But, in the meantime, barriers were broken down, the world lay open to the poet's gaze, and he was free to choose his subject wherever his fancy led him. We have in our own literature a spirited confession of this new faith in Oehlenschläger's beautiful poem, _Digterens Hjem_ (_The Home of the Poet_)--

"Det strækker sig fra Spitzbergs hvide Klipper, For Syndflods ældste Lig en heilig Grav, Til hvor den sidste Tange slipper I Söndrepolens öde Hav."[1]

This was the emancipating watchword sounded by the Romantic critic.

The brief résumé here given of the aims of the school which was flourishing in Germany at the time _De l'Allemagne_ was written, has already indicated to the reader the points upon which Mme. de Staël was in sympathy with this school, and how far it may be said to have influenced the direction of her later literary career. The strenuous opposition of the Romanticists to the philosophy of the eighteenth century had her full sympathy; Schelling himself had called his whole system a reaction against the enlightening, clarifying processes of the age of reason. Their profound respect for poetic inspiration and their broad-mindedness harmonised with her own tendencies and prejudices. The Romantic doctrine of the all-importance of imagination won her approbation, but the Romanticists' conception of the nature of imagination was incomprehensible to her. They started from the hypothesis that at the foundation of everything lay a perpetually producing imagination, a species of juggling imagination, which with divine irony perpetually destroyed its own creations as the sea engulfs its own billows; and they held that the poet, that creator on a small scale, should take up the same ironical position towards the creatures of his imagining, towards his whole work, and deliberately destroy the illusion of it. Mme. de Staël had too practical a mind to be able to accept this far-fetched theory, on the subject of which she had many hot arguments with her Romantic friends. But on another very important point she was in harmony with them:

Like all the authors involved in the first reaction against the eighteenth century, she became as time went on more and more positively religious. The philosophical ideas of the revolutionary times were gradually effaced in her mind, and their place was supplied by ever more serious attempts to imbue herself with the new pious ideas of the day. She, who in her youth had eagerly controverted Chateaubriand's theory of the superiority of Christian subjects in art, now becomes a convert to his æsthetic views. She accepts unreservedly the Romanticist doctrine that modern poetry and art must build upon Christianity, as the antique had built upon the Greco-Roman mythology; and, living, listening, talking herself into ever greater certainty that the eighteenth century was completely astray, and constantly meeting men who have returned to the pious belief of the past, she finally herself comes to believe that idealism in philosophy, which to her, as a woman, is the good principle, and inspiration in poetry, which to her, as an authoress, is the saving, emancipating principle, must necessarily restore its authority to revealed religion, seeing that sensationalism, the principles of which in both philosophy and art are antipathetic to her, has opposed religion as an enemy. Thus it is that in her book on Germany she actually comes to range herself on the side of that passionate, prejudiced, and often painfully narrow reaction against the eighteenth-century spirit of intellectual liberty, which had broken out on the other side of the Rhine, and was to reach its climax in France itself.

[1] It stretches from the white cliffs of Spitzbergen, the grave of that which walked the earth before the flood, to where the last sea-wrack vanishes in the dreary waters round the Southern Pole.

XIV

BARANTE

Mme. de Staël's book on Germany was a glance into the future, a glimpse of what was going on beyond the frontiers of France; it was in many ways a prophecy of the nature of the literature of the nineteenth century. But the group of writers to which she belonged would have left its task unfulfilled, if it had not supplemented its prognostications by a backward glance over the intellectual life of the eighteenth century.

This retrospect was supplied by Barante (1809) in his remarkable book, _Tableau de la Littérature Française au Dix-huitième Siècle_.

Prosper de Barante, born in 1782 of an old and distinguished bureaucrat family of Auvergne, is the one member of our group who cannot be described as an _émigré_; for he took office under the Empire as Prefect in La Vendée. His book, however, partakes of the general character of the Emigrant Literature; nor is this surprising, for he lived far from Paris, was on intimate terms with the exiles, especially with Mme. de Staël, and in disfavour with the Government on account of his frequent visits to Coppet. He also shared Mme. de Staël's partiality for foreign, more particularly German, literature, which was another offence in the days of the Empire. He translated all Schiller's plays. After the restoration of the monarchy, he acquired political influence as a member of the moderate Liberal party.

The work on France in the eighteenth century with which, at the age of twenty-seven, Barante made his début in literature, reveals a maturity and moderation surprising in so young an author, but which may be explained, partly by a certain lack of warmth in his nature, partly by his official position. In all the books which we have just glanced at, there lay an implicit judgment of the eighteenth century; in this we have the first connected survey and estimate of it. The survey is a brief but excellent one; the general conception of the period is philosophically based; the presentment is clear and passionless; but the estimate is very faulty, on every side conditioned and hampered by those limits beyond which the authors of the Emigrant Literature were incapable of seeing. This settlement with the past century, in which the new generation renounces all connection with the old, is not a final settlement, and is far from being as unprejudiced as it is passionless. Barante has the honest desire to judge impartially, and emphasises the fact that he is the better qualified to do so since he does not belong to the generation which took immediate part in the Revolution as destroyers or defenders of the old social order; but his intellect is not as unbiassed as his will; his whole development is, though he does not know it, conditioned by the reaction against that century the character of which he, as observer and thinker, undertakes to explain.