1806-8] The Heidelbery Romanticists 401

are only fragments; and Tieck's writings — not to mention Wackenroder's — have long ceased to be read even by cultured Germans. But the positive value of Romanticism is not to be measured by tangible results. We may owe to the movement no supremely great drama or romance, at most, perhaps, a handful of matchless lyrics; but we do owe to it ideas — ethical, social ideas, ideas in art and philosophy — of an extraordinarily suggestive character. The Romantic School produced the yeast which fermented the whole intellectual life, not merely of Germany, but, through Madame de StaeTs De VAllemagne and the later French Ecole romantique, that of Europe. The Romantic ideas were not restricted to the little band of men whose work has just been considered ; they are to be seen permeating, by means of the influence of the Romantic theologian, Schleiermacher, the religious life of Germany, Catholic as well as Protestant; the philosophy of Fichte is essentially Romantic, and, in a still higher degree, that fervid gospel of the " worldsoul" which was preached by Schelling.

The Romantic School, however, was short-lived; it was only a matter of a few years, or even months. Novalis died of consumption in 1801, and the little circle which had met together in Jena in 1798 was soon scattered; Friedrich Schlegel went to Vienna, Tieck, somewhat later, to Rome. The next group, in which Romantic ideas found concentrated expression, gathered round the University of Heidelberg in the years 1806 to 1808. Here, again, the men whose voices counted, were few in number — in the first instance only three, Klemens Brentano (1778-1842), Ludwig von Arnim (1781-1831), and Joseph von Gorres (1776-1848). There was no talk of a "school," no formulating of principles, in Heidelberg, but the Zeitung filr Einsiedler (1808) formed a bond not unlike that formed by the Athenaum in Berlin and Jena. A noticeable feature of this second phase of Romanticism is its apparent independence of the first; there is no question of these younger men being the docile pupils of the earlier Romanticists, and still less of their continuing the work begun by the latter. It would seem rather as if they purposely ignored the high poetic ideals of the Romantic School, and had gone back to the earlier, more primitive stage of the movement to be found in pioneers like Herder. A closer study of the Heidelberg writers shows, however, that the disparity between the two phases of Romanticism is more apparent than real, and that we have to deal with a clearly thought-out advance on the first phase, effected with the aid of the older Sturm und Drang. A brief comparison will make this relationship more apparent.

Tieck had in his early writings broken a lance for the old Volksbiicher, which the unimaginative Aufklarung had spurned as fit only for childish, uncultured minds ; but in practice Tieck regarded the Volksbuch rather as a source of poetic possibilities, as a framework on which to hang the rich creations of his Romantic imagination, than as an end in

c. M. H. x. 26

402 Comparison of the two phases of Romanticism [1798-1817

itself. He loved the Volksbuch for what it could suggest, not for what it actually was; his own Marchen are decked out with an unreal poetic mysticism and rendered so piquant by that Romantic irony on which the school set store, that they cease to be Volksmarchen. The younger generation, on the other hand, proclaimed the worth of the popular literature in its original form; they preferred it — as is to be seen in Giirres' Teutsche Volksbiicher (1807) and the Kinder- und Hausmarchen (1812—5) of the brothers Grimm — deprived of all the magic light and music with which Tieck and Novalis surrounded it. The same contrast is to be seen, if we compare the somewhat sparing lyrics of the first school with Des Knaben Wunderhom (1805—8), that magnificent collection of folk-songs with which the Heidelberg poets enriched German literature. Arnim and Brentano were in their day accused of having tampered with the originals of their Volkslieder, yet Des Knaben Wunderhorn is a faithful, if not always literal, reproduction of the lyric spirit of the people. Here, too, the spiritual idealism of the first school descends to earth, and a poetry of simple realism takes the place of purely imaginative flights. Lastly — to take still another example — there is an exactly analogous relation between the dreamy and wholly unhistorical medievalism of Novalis and the more or less definite historical outline of Arnim's novels, and particularly of Die Kronenwdchter (1817), which, like so many masterpieces of the fickle romantic temperament, has remained a fragment. Here are to be found the beginnings of a national form of German historical fiction, the development of which was unfortunately checked a few years later by a new force, which no nation in Europe was strong enough to resist—the influence of Sir Walter Scott.

In the drama alone did the Heidelberg writers fail to make any conspicuous advance on their immediate predecessors; they have nothing to place beside Schlegel's monumental translation of Shakespeare, and, when they tried to write original dramas, these were, like Brentano's Die Griindung Drags (1815), only echoes of the formless Romantic plays of Tieuk^ But, outside of all schools, the Romantic drama was making significant progress, and finding a way for itself between the epic fairyplays of Tieck and the classic tragedy of Schiller. In the historical or pseudo-historical dramas of Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), for instance, a writer who has been somewhat harshly treated by the literary historian, we may detect an advance upon the Octavianus and Genoveva of Tieck, which has much in common with the reforms introduced by the Heidelberg poets into other forms of Romantic literature. The great dramatist of these years, however, was not Werner, but Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811); and Kleist's drama, without being specifically or in any narrow sense Romantic, is strictly parallel to the literary movement in the second phase of Romanticism. Like the Heidelberg writers, he was in entire sympathy with the subjective principles of the Sturm

1803-18] Heinrich von Kleist. — The patriotic lyric 403

und Drang; his first drama, Die Familie Schroffemtein (1803), might have been a direct imitation of Klinger's restless tragedies, and there is more of the old Ritterdrama in Das Kiithehen von Jleilbronn (1810) than of Tieck. Kleist's own life was, on the other hand, too bitter a struggle with untoward circumstances for him to feel attracted by the unworldly idealism of the Romantic School. Both by temperament and education he was a realist; his masterly novel Michael Kohlhaas (1810) is in actuality and poetic strength superior to the best of Arnim's stories; and his graceful one-act comedy, Der zerbrochene Krug (1808), delights in the minute details of every-day life. Even in his relations to the antique, as seen in the passionate tragedy of revenge, Penthesilea (1808), his attitude towards the theme is—to use Schiller's term—"naive," not, like Friedrich Schlegel's and Holderlin's love of antiquity, "sentimental." Kleist's all too short life—he died by his own hand in 1811—culminates in the historical drama, Prim Friedrich von Homburg and the tragedy of Die Mermannschlacht (neither published till 1821), in which the national and political aspiration of the German people is reflected as in no other German tragedy up to this time. Thus, although in the literal sense of the word, not a Romanticist, Kleist demonstrates in a very marked way the development of the movement towards realism and practical common sense.

The political spirit, which has just been mentioned as characteristic of Die Hermannschlacht, appears in its most pronounced form in the patriotic lyric, inspired by the national rising against Napoleon. Theodor Korner (1791-1813), Max von Schenkendorf (1783-1817), Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the chief representatives of this lyric, were none of them poets of the first rank—an intense political poetry is rarely, when judged by the calmer aesthetic criteria of a later age, of a very high order—but, better perhaps than any other group of writers at this time, they show the metamorphosis which the Romantic spirit was undergoing. Taken all in all, this literary transformation was no less phenomenal than the political development of the German people; the short span of years between the birth of the Romantic School in 1798 and the battle of Leipzig in 1813, is in both these respects unique in the life-history of the German, and perhaps of any, people.

It was a long way from the unworldly, musical lyrics of Tieck or the personal outpourings of Novalis to the " Gott der Eisen wachsen liess " of 1813; from the poetic medievalism of Franz Sternbald's Italy, or of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, wandering with his chorus-singing merchants to Augsburg, to the every-day realities of Seume's Spaziergang nach Syrakus (1803), or the practical political spirit of Arndt's Geist der Zeit (1806-18). The idle dreamers and idealists of Heinse, Goethe, Novalis, and Wackenroder, had given place to very real and active heroes, to men who were incited to action by the mighty figure of Napoleon; the dolce far niente of the early Romanticists, the contemplative, personal

404 Developments from the Romantic movement [1808-30

poetry, the ecstasy of medieval Catholicism, all disappeared in the second phase of the movement, or were at least adapted to other and more utilitarian ends. The idealism of an art that altogether ignored the world of reality had given place to a poetry of the German Volk in the sense of Herder and Justus Moser; the brilliant phantasmagory of medieval Catholicism had paled, not perhaps before Protestantism—the Heidelberg school was still for the most part Catholic in its tendencies — but at least before a common-sense view of religion, which contrasted with Schleiermacher's mystic spiritualism. And, although Fichte and Schelling still dominated philosophy, one must at least recognise in both thinkers, and more particularly in Fichte, whose Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808) helped no less than the songs of Korner and Arndt to awaken the German national consciousness, a tendency towards practical endeavour and national utilitarianism. The Romantic medieval world —a world as vague and undefined as the " Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" itself—disappeared, one might say, with the last fiction of that Empire and gave place to a feeling the Germans had never known before in so intense and peculiar a sense —patriotism. At the same time a deep-seated and serious desire to know and understand the Middle Ages took its place ; and from this desire arose the new sciences of medieval scholarship, law, and history, in which throughout the nineteenth century Germany has led the way. Karl Lachmann, the brothers Grimm, Savigny, Niebuhr, Ranke, are the great names in this new academic movement.

When the little Heidelberg group separated in 1808 its chief members, Arnim and Brentano, found their way to Berlin, where their later work was, to some extent, merged in that of the literary group dominated by the rather uninspired imagination of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (1777-1843), and Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). Both in the novels of Fouque and in the ballads of Chamisso there are frequent concessions to that uninspired homeliness of tone which, in all ages, has had a peculiar attraction for the German mind. In Berlin, however, there was a good enough soil for Romantic poetry; there were literary societies and " aesthetic teas " enough, which joined in the enthusiastic admiration of Goethe, an essential element in Berlin Romanticism; the old Frederician " enlightenment" was for the time forgotten in the wider intellectual ideals of the Prussian capital. To the Berlin circle, or at least to the north-German circle, belonged one great singer, the Silesian Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), perhaps the greatest lyric poet of the whole Romantic movement. The lyric of Eichendorff is even still fresher, more " naive," more in harmony with the voices of nature than that of the Heidelberg circle; it bears additional testimony to the fact that under Romantic influence the German lyric was finding its way back to that elemental expression of sympathy between man and nature, which is characteristic of the early Minnesang. As a

1815-30] Decay of Romanticism. — The Swabian poets 405

novelist, Eichendorff illustrates what the members of the Heidelberg circle — if we except Brentano's youthful and immature romance Godwi — had not illustrated, the development of the " artist novel" under the new conditions; the equivalent of Franz Sternbald and Heinrich von Ofterdingen in the later Romantic period is Eichendorffs Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815), and — most concentrated and delightful of all —Am dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826). Here the real, every-day world has taken the place of the Middle Ages, and the natural magic of the forest has ousted the mystic supernaturalism of Tieck and Novalis. But in one respect Eichendorff remained a Romanticist of the old type ; he was a faithful adherent of the Catholic Church, a fact which blinded him to the importance of the north-German Protestant spirit for the later developments of the movement.

Forebodings of Romantic decay are to be traced at an early stage; the theatrical effects of the so-called Schicksalsdramatiker, the curious delight in the oriental lyric, the influence of Byron in Germany, the cynical irony of Heine, are phenomena which emphasised the effeteness of Romanticism. Decay, too, is to be traced in the morbid, although powerful, fantasy of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (Amadeus) Hoffmann (1776-1822), whose novels combine a fertility of imagination with a realism and a power of plastic reproduction never excelled by any German writer. Hoffmann's real greatness lies not in the weird horrors and daring fancies he conceived, but in his manner of reproducing them; he discovered what Arnim and so many of his contemporaries had sought for in vain, the art of telling a story simply and directly. And it was precisely this quality that made him one of the few creative artists of German Romanticism who influenced the literary movement of Europe.

The Romantic traditions continued to dominate literature in southern Germany long after disintegration had set in in the north. In Swabia a group of writers, several of whom were immediate disciples of the Heidelberg school, remained staunchly faithful to the Romantic ideals, and kept them alive all through the epoch of " Young Germany." This was the true mission of Uhland and his friends, one of much more importance for the history of German poetry than the literature they produced. To them we owe it, for instance, that the traditional Romantic novel was not forgotten, and rose, a generation later, in Keller's Der grime Heinrich to heights it had never touched before; it was Swabian influence that brought German literature back again so rapidly to the Volk, and inspired the sympathetic literature of peasant life from Auerbach to Anzengruber. The Swabians, too, were the real mediators between north-Germans like Theodor Storm and the early phases of Romanticism. Even Friedrich Hebbel looked up to Uhland as the inspirer and master of his early manhood.

Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), the head and chief literary personality