Part 5

The absolute independence of the Ego isolates. Nevertheless these men soon founded a school, and after its speedy disintegration several interesting groups were formed. This is to be ascribed to their determination to make common cause in procuring the victory, insuring the universal dominion, of the philosophy of life which had been evolved by the great minds of Germany. They desired to introduce this philosophy of the geniuses into life itself, to give it expression in criticism, in poetry, in art theories, in religious exhortation, in the solution of social, and even of political problems; and their first step towards this was violent literary warfare. They were impelled partly by the necessity felt by great and strong natures to impart one will and one mind to a whole band of fellow-combatants, and partly by the inclination of men of talent, whose talent is attacked and contested, to confront the overwhelming numbers of their opponents with a small but superior force. In the case of the best men, the formation of a school or a party was the result of exactly that lack of state organisation which was the first condition of their isolating independence. The consciousness of belonging to a people without unity as a nation, and without collective strength, begot the endeavour to imbue the leading spirits of the aristocracy of intellect with a new rallying principle.

[1] Whence this trembling, this nameless horror, when thy loving arms encircle me? Is it because an oath, which, remember, even a thought is sufficient to break, has forced strange fetters on thee?

Because a ceremony, which the laws have decreed to be sacred, has hallowed an accidental, grievous crime? Nay--fearlessly defy a covenant of which blushing nature repents.

O tremble not!--thine oath was a sin; perjury is the sacred duty of the repentant sinner; the heart thou gavest away at the altar was mine; Heaven does not play with human happiness.

[2] Goethe, _Tag- und Jahreshefte_, 1802; G. Waitz, _Caroline_, ii. 207; _Goethe-Jahrbuch_, vi. 59, &c.

[3] "Your opinion of _Alarkos_ is mine; nevertheless I think that we must dare everything, outward success or non-success being of no consequence whatever. Our gain seems to me to lie principally in the fact that we accustom our actors to repeat, and ourselves to hear, this extremely accurate metre."--_Goethe_.

[4] "Their colours sing, their forms resound; each, according to its form and colour finds voice and speech.... Colour, fragrance, song, proclaim themselves one family."

II

HÖLDERLIN

Outside the group which represents the transition from the Hellenism of Goethe and Schiller to Romanticism stands a solitary figure, that of Hölderlin, one of the noblest and most refined intellects of the day. Although their contemporary, he was a pioneer of the German Romanticists, in much the same way as Andre Chenier, another Hellenist, was a pioneer of French Romanticism. He was educated with the future philosopher of the Romantic School, Schelling, and with Hegel, the great thinker, who came after Romanticism, and he was the friend of both of these, but had made acquaintance with none of the Romanticists proper when insanity put an end to his intellectual activity.

Hölderlin was born in 1770, and became insane in 1802. Hence, although he survived himself forty years, his life as an author is very little longer than Hardenberg's or Wackenroder's.

That enmity to Hellenism, which to posterity appears one of the chief characteristics of the Romantic movement, was not one of its original elements. On the contrary, with the exception of Tieck, who certainly had no appreciation of the Hellenic spirit, all the early Romanticists, but more especially the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, were enthusiastic admirers of ancient Greece. It was their desire to enter into every feeling of humanity, and it was among the Greeks that they at first found humanity in all its fulness. They longed to break down the artificial social barriers of their time and escape to nature, and at first they found nature among the Greeks alone. To them the genuinely human was at the same time the genuinely Greek. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, embarks on his career with the hope of being for literature all that Winckelmann has been for art. In his essays "On Diotima" and "On the Study of Greek Poetry," he proclaims the superiority of Greek culture and Greek poetry to all other. There is an indication of the later Schlegel in the attempt made to combat the false modesty of modern times, and to prove that beauty is independent of moral laws, which in no way concern art. Characteristic also is his demonstration of Aristotle's lack of appreciation of the Greek _Naturpoesie_.

A similar but more enduring enthusiasm for ancient Greece was the very essence of Hölderlin's being; and this enthusiasm did not find its expression in studies and essays, but took lyric form, in prose as well as verse. Even as dramatist and novelist, Hölderlin was the gifted lyric poet, that and nothing else. Haym has aptly observed of his romances: "Joy in the ideal, the collapse of the ideal, and grief over that collapse, constitute the theme which the Letters of Hyperion develop with a force which never weakens and a fervour which is always alike intense.... It is the irretrievable that is the cause of his suffering." And since the ideal was embodied for him in Greek life, such as he dreamed it to have been, his whole literary production is one longing lament over lost Hellas. Nothing could be less Greek or more Romantic than this longing; it is of exactly the same exaggerated character as Schack Staffeldt's enthusiasm for ancient Scandinavia and Wackenroder's devotion to German antiquity. Hölderlin's landscapes are as un-Greek as his modern Greeks in _Hyperion_, who are noble German enthusiasts, strongly influenced by Schiller. We cannot doubt that he was aware of this himself. But the lot of the solitary chosen spirits in Germany seemed to him a terrible one. Although he shows himself in his poems to be an ardent patriot, and although he sings the charms of romantic Heidelberg in antique strophes, yet Germany and Greece to him represent barbarism and culture. Concerning his own position to the Greeks he writes to his brother: "In spite of all my good-will, I too, in all that I do and think, merely stumble along in the track of these unique beings; and am often the more awkward and foolish in deed and word because, like the geese, I stand flat-footed in the water of modernity, impotently endeavouring to wing my flight upward towards the Greek heaven." And at the close of _Hyperion_ he says of the Germans: "They have been barbarians from time immemorial, and industry, science, even religion itself, has only made them still more barbarous, incapable of every divine feeling, too utterly depraved to enjoy the happiness conferred by the Graces. With their extravagances and their pettinesses, they are insupportable to every rightly constituted mind, dead and discordant as the fragments of a broken vase." Of German poets and artists he writes, that they present a distressing spectacle. "They live in the world like strangers in their own house ... they grow up full of love and life and hope, and twenty years later one sees them wandering about like shadows, silent and cold."

Therefore Hölderlin rejoices over the victories of the French, over the "gigantic strides of the Republic," scoffs at all "the petty trickeries of political and ecclesiastical Würtemberg and Germany and Europe," derides the "narrow-minded domesticity" of the Germans, and bewails their lack of any feeling of common honour and common property. "I cannot," he exclaims, "imagine a people more torn asunder than are the Germans. You see artisans, but not men, philosophers, but not men, priests, but not men, servants and masters, young and old, but not men."

The conception of the State which we find in _Hyperion_ is also quite in harmony with the spirit of the age, and quite un-Hellenic. "The State dare not demand what it cannot take by force. But what love and intellect give cannot be taken by force. It must keep its hands off that, else we will take its laws and pillory them! Good God! They who would make the State a school of morals do not know what a crime they are committing. The State has always become a hell when man has tried to make it his heaven."

Utterly un-Greek, wholly Romantic, is the love which Hyperion cherishes for his Diotima. It is the same deep and tragic feeling which bound Hölderlin, the poor tutor, to the mother of his pupils, Frau Susette Gontard, and determined his fate. No Greek ever spoke of the woman he loved with the religious adoration which Hölderlin expresses for his "fair Grecian." "Dear friend, there is a being upon this earth in whom my spirit can and will repose for untold centuries, and then still feel how puerile, face to face with nature, all our thought and understanding is." And exactly the same Romantic, Petrarchian note is struck by Hyperion when he speaks of Diotima. Diotima is "the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars." She is beauty itself, the incarnation of the ideal. Love is to him religion, and his religion is love of beauty. Beauty is the highest, the absolute ideal; it belongs, as a conception, to the world of reason, and as a symbol, to the world of imagination. From his æsthetic point of view, Hölderlin does not perceive that boundary line drawn by Kant between the domains of reason and imagination. His theory, a species of poetic--philosophic ecstasy, having points in common with both Schiller's Hellenism and Schelling's transcendental idealism, is Romantic before the days of Romanticism.

Germinating Romanticism is also to be traced in the gleam of Christian feeling which tinges his half-modern pantheism. He had been originally destined for the Church, and had suffered much from the severe discipline of the monastery where he was educated. In spite, however, of the many evidences of a pious disposition which we find in his letters, he was a pagan in his poems. He disliked priests, and steadily withstood his family's desire that he should become one. In his _Empedokles_ we come upon the following significant reply of the hero to the priest Hermokrates:--

"Du weisst es ja, ich hab es dir bedeutet, Ich kenne dich und deine schlimme Zunft. Und lange Avar's ein Räthsel mir, wie euch In ihrem Runde duldet die Natur. Ach, als ich noch ein Knabe war, da mied Euch Allverderber schon mein frommes Herz, Das unbestechbar, innig liebend hing An Sonn' und Aether und den Boten allen Der grossen ferngeahndeten Natur; Denn wohl hab ich's gefühlt in meiner Furcht, Dass ihr des Herzens freie Götterliebe Bereden möchtet zu gemeinem Dienst, Und dass ich's treiben sollte so, wie ihr. Hinweg! ich kann vor mir den Mann nicht sehn, Der Göttliches wie ein Gewerbe treibt, Sein Angesicht ist falsch und kalt und todt, Wie seine Götter sind."[1]

There is not a trace in Hölderlin of the sanctimonious piety developed by the other Romanticists, who, to begin with, were far more decided free-thinkers than he. Yet his Hellenism is not pagan in the manner of Schiller's and Goethe's. There is a fervency in it which is akin to Christian devotion; his poetic prayers to the sun, the earth, and the air are those of a believer; and when, as in _Empedokles_, he handles a purely pagan subject, the spirit of the treatment is such that we feel (as we do in a later work, Kleist's _Amphitryon_) the Christian legend behind the heathen. The position of Empedokles to the Pharisees of his day and country is exactly that of Jesus to the Pharisees of Judea. Empedokles, like Jesus, is the great prophet, and both his willing sacrificial death and the worship of which he is the object awake feelings which remotely resemble those of the devout Christian.

In Hölderlin we find in outline, light and delicate as if traced by a spirit, symbols and emotions which the Romantic School develops, exaggerates, caricatures, or simply obliterates.

[1]

"'Tis nothing new; this I have told you oft; I know you well, you and your evil kind. And long it was a mystery to me How Nature could endure you in her realm. Corrupters of mankind! Even as a child, My guileless heart shrank from you with distrust-- That honest, fervent heart, that loved the sun, The cool fresh air, and all the messengers Of Nature, dimly discerned and great. For even then I timidly perceived How ye would take our true love of the gods And make it serve some baser, selfish end-- And that in this ye would that I should follow you. Begone! I cannot look upon the man Who practises religion as a trade; His countenance is false and cold and dead, As are his gods."

III

A. W. SCHLEGEL

In 1797, August Wilhelm Schlegel, then aged thirty, published the first volume of his translation of Shakespeare. Rough drafts of several of the plays in this edition have been found, and these faded, dusty manuscripts not only enable us to follow the persevering, talented translator in his self-imposed task, but, when carefully read, give us direct insight into his and his wife's spiritual life, and indeed into the intellectual life of the whole period.[1]

Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts are not always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work upon _Romeo and Juliet_ in the winter of 1795-96; in 1796 he married Caroline Böhmer; and we have a complete copy of the first rough draft of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with corrections in Schlegel's. In September 1797, as her letters show, she copied _As You Like It_ from an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay on _Romeo and Juliet_, which ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions on _Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister_ as the best Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany up to that time. We recognise her now and again in some outburst of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of style than we are accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding than her contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German literature. But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as the manuscripts show us, survive the first year of her married life. At first it is her handwriting which predominates, and, though it is less frequently to be seen alongside of her husband's in the manuscripts of those plays with which he was occupied during the years 1797-98, her collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her pen in the manuscript of the _Merchant of Venice_, which dates from the autumn of 1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist circle in Jena. Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is discoverable.

Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea of the progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two different texts of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had attempted to translate Shakespeare line for line. The two tame prose translations by Wieland and Eschenburg were, in fact, all that existed. As a student in Göttingen, Schlegel made the first attempt to reproduce in German verse parts of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. From childhood he had been "an indefatigable verse-maker." His talent was obviously inherited. Half a century before he and his brother made their appearance, two brothers Schlegel had made a name for themselves in literature--Johann Elias, who lived for many years in Copenhagen, was a friend of Holberg, and, in everything connected with the stage, a forerunner of Lessing, and Johann Adolph, father of August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who, without much originality, possessed decided linguistic and plastic talent.

As a young student, August Wilhelm, already distinguished by his impressionableness as a stylist and opinionativeness as an author, ardently desired to make the acquaintance of Bürger, who was leading a lonely and unhappy life as professor at the University of Göttingen. Bürger's fame as a poet procured him no consideration in a place where learning alone was valued; his social position had, moreover, been injured by the discovery of his relations with his wife's sister. With the feelings of an exile, he warmly welcomed the distinguished and talented young disciple, whose taste was more correct and whose stores of knowledge were better ordered than his own. At this time Bürger was still considered to be Germany's best lyric poet and most accomplished versifier. Schlegel placed himself under his tuition, and learned all his linguistic and metrical devices, all the methods of producing artistic effects by careful choice and arrangement of words and use of rhythm and metres. With his natural gift of imitation, he appropriated as many of Bürger's characteristics as were at all compatible with his entirely different temperament. His poem _Ariadne_ might have been written by Bürger. Bürger had been particularly successful in the sonnet, a form of poetry which had lately come into vogue in Germany. So closely did the pupil follow in the footsteps of his master, that when, many years later, a complete edition of Schlegel's works was published, two of Bürger's sonnets were accidentally included among them.

The master did homage to his remarkably promising pupil in a fine sonnet, beginning:--

"Junger Aar, dein königlicher Flug Wird den Druck der Wolken überwinden, Wird die Bahn zum Sonnentempel finden, Oder Phöbus' Wort in mir ist Lug,"[2]

and ending with the charmingly modest lines:--

"Dich zum Dienst des Sonnengotts zu krönen Hielt ich nicht den eignen Kranz zu wert, Doch--dir ist ein besserer beschert."[3]

Schlegel responded with a criticism of Bürger's frigidly grand _Das hohe Lied von der Einzigen_, which he praises as a magnificent epic. In collaboration with Bürger he now began a translation of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, of which he did the greater part, Bürger merely revising. He was still completely under his master's influence; the manuscripts show that he always accepted Bürger's corrections and deferred to his predilection for sonority and vigour. As a translator, Bürger took no pains to reproduce Shakespeare's peculiarities as closely as possible; he only manifested his own peculiarities, by making all the coarse, wanton speeches, and the passages in which misguided passions run riot, as prominent as possible; he emphasised and exaggerated everything that appealed to his own liking for a coarse jest, and destroyed the magic of the light and tender passages. In spite of his own great and natural love of refinement, young Schlegel strove in this matter also to follow in his master's steps, with the result that he was not infrequently coarse and awkward where he meant to be natural and vigorous.

A better guide would have been Herder, who, long before this, in the fragments of Shakespeare plays in his _Stimmen der Völker_, had given an example of the right method of translating from English into German. If Schlegel had taken lessons from Herder in Shakespeare-translating, he would never have rendered five-footed iambics by Alexandrines, nor changed the metre of the fairy-songs. No one had realised the inadequacy of Wieland's translation more clearly than Herder. And now the spirit in which the latter aimed at Germanising Shakespeare descended upon Schlegel, who, in spite of the faults of his first attempts, soon surpassed Herder himself.

He was not long in shaking himself free from Bürger's influence. To Bürger the highest function of art was to be national and popular. In 1791, Schlegel, now no longer in Bürger's vicinity, but a tutor in Amsterdam, devoted much attention to the works of Schiller. His poetical attempts were henceforth more in the style of that master; he wrote a sympathetic criticism of _Die Künstler_; and he was led to a higher conception of art by the perusal of Schiller's æsthetic writings. His metrical style began to acquire greater dignity. But Schiller was almost as incapable as Bürger of developing in Schlegel a true and full understanding of Shakespeare--Schiller, who, in his translation of Macbeth, had transformed the witches into Greek Furies, and changed the Porter's coarsely jovial monologue into an edifying song. If Bürger's realism was one danger, Schiller's pomposity was another.

But at the same time that Schiller enlightened Schlegel as to the high significance of art, the newly-published Collected Works of Goethe, whom he only now began to appreciate, stimulated his natural inclination to study, interpret, and make poetical translations. As already mentioned, this first edition of Goethe's collected works met with but a poor reception. The chief reason of this was that the public, understanding nothing of the poet's mental development, had expected new works in the style of _Werther_ or _Götz_. But to Schlegel's critical intellect, Goethe's wonderful many-sidedness was now revealed. He understood and appreciated the artist's capacity of forgetting himself for the moment, of surrendering himself entirely to the influence of his subject, which in Goethe's case produced forms that were never arbitrarily chosen, but invariably demanded by the theme. He understood that he himself, as a poetical translator, must practise the same self-abnegation and develop a similar capacity of intellectual re-creation. Two things were required of the translator, a feminine susceptibility to the subtlest characteristics of the foreign original, and masculine capacity to re-create with the impression of the whole in his mind; and both of these requirements were to be found in Goethe; for his nature was multiplicity, his name "Legion," his spirit Protean.

There still remained the technical, linguistic difficulties to overcome; and in this, above all, Goethe was an epoch-making model. He had remoulded the German language. In passing through his hands it had gained so greatly in pliability and compass, had acquired such wealth of expression both in the grand and the graceful style, that it offered Schlegel exactly the well-tuned instrument of which he stood in need. While under Bürger's influence he had looked upon technical perfection as a purely external quality, which could be acquired by indefatigable polishing; he now realised that perfect technique has an inward origin, that it is in reality the unity of style which is conditioned by the general cast of a mind. And he began to see that his life task was a double one, namely, to reproduce the masterpieces of foreign races in the German language, and to interpret critically for his countrymen the best literary productions both of Germany and other lands.

Now, too, Schlegel acquired a quite new understanding of Fichte, the friend and brother-in-arms whom the Romanticists had so quickly won for their cause. He realised that Fichte's doctrine of the Ego contained in extremely abstract terms the idea of the unlimited capacity of the human mind to find itself in everything and to find everything in itself. Round this powerful fundamental thought of Fichte's, August Wilhelm's pliable mind twined itself.