406 Uhland. — Literature in Austria [1808-50

of the group, was a lyric and ballad poet of exceptional gifts; he adapted the ballad-form as it had been handed down from Goethe and Schiller, to the popular tone of the Volkslied, and introduced into it a characteristically Romantic note of medieval wonder; he attempted to create a historical drama in accordance with the new creed; he devoted himself to the study of the German Middle Ages with an ardour and zeal to which Arnim and Brentano could not pretend, and he published a collection of Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder (1844), which, as a literal reproduction of the popular tradition, is superior to the Wunderhorn. But, in spite of these merits, Uhland's attitude towards literature was in many respects that of the amateur who has other and weightier pursuits in life; he was a university professor, and for a time a practical and even a leading politician. And what is true of Uhland was true in an even higher degree of his Swabian colleagues. All the members of the group, with the exception, perhaps, of the unhappy Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804-30), were only poets by the way; this was forced upon them by the fact that literature, nowhere at that time a lucrative pursuit, was virtually impossible under the provincial conditions which prevailed inWiirttemberg. They were doctors,lawyers,professors, clergymen — Romanticists, who, in strange contrast to the earlier school, had nothing of what we now call Bohemianism in their blood. This explains perhaps a certain practical, matter-of-fact tone in their poetry, but it is also responsible for the provincial dilettantism which at times makes itself felt in even the most gifted of these poets.

The two men who were perhaps furthest removed from this reproach were Wilhelm Hauff (1802-27), whose career, cut short at the age of twenty-five, was full of such extraordinary promise, and Eduard Morike (1804-75). Morike has left one novel, Maler Nolten (1832), which is worthy of a place beside the best subjective novels of German Romanticism; he has written a few short stories of the first rank, and, above all, a volume of lyrics, the intensity and unsophisticated simplicity of which justify us in regarding him as a lyric poet of the first rank. But his genius was cramped by the provincialism of Stuttgart; and one feels that in a more liberal atmosphere, like that of Weimar, he might have risen to greater things.

In Austria, which was further removed from the Romantic focus, new elements make their appearance in the literary development. From the Romantic movement, which reached Vienna before that capital had time to forget the glamour of the age of Joseph II, the Austrians extracted what appealed to their temperament; but they were far from accepting Romanticism as a whole. They listened with respectful attention to Schlegel's famous lectures on the drama (1809—11), applauded his enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and took specially to heart his words on the great Spanish dramatists. But Gottsched's classicism was still too near them; they had, as a nation, participated too little in the classicism

1809-48] Grillparzer.— The Romanticists and Goethe 407

of Weimar to see eye to eye with the Romanticists in Germany; and consequently much in Tieck's doctrine, and still more in that of Novalis, Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schlegel, meant nothing to them. The best in the Austrian literature of this time was peculiarly Austrian. Nikolaus Lenau (1802—50), for instance, obviously learned from Uhland and his friends; however, it was not through them that he became Austria's greatest modern singer, but by virtue of a pessimism, which circumstances outward and inward had stamped upon his supersensitive soul; his lyric, coloured as it is by the melancholy landscape of the Hungarian pusta, expresses a despair no less intense than that of his Italian contemporary, Leopardi. Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), again, Austria's chief dramatist, and one of the master-dramatists of the nineteenth century, had at Schlegel's feet learned to love Lope de Vega and imitate Calderon ; but he saw the Spanish poets with Austrian, not Romantic, eyes, and introduced a Spanish element into German tragedy which the northern poets, with all their admiration for Calderon, could neither have understood nor approved of. It is manifestly unjust to regard Grillparzer, as has often been done, merely as a belated follower of Goethe and Schiller; he did not, it is true, break rudely with the classical poets, as Kleist before him and Hebbel after him did; but his drama is no less peculiarly his own. He gave his countrymen, in Konig Ottokars Gliick und Ende (1825), a national historical tragedy; in Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831), Der Traum ein Lelen (183-1), and Libussa (published 1872), dramas of marvellous poetic beauty, filled with the quintessence of the Austrian national spirit; and he wrote in Weh de.m der lugt (1838) a comedy which surpasses all that the Weimar epoch produced in this genre. Compared with Goethe and Schiller, Grillparzer thinks in a specifically modern way; and he was profoundly influenced by the great wave of pessimism which swept across Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Goethe was a contemporary of the whole of the vast Romantic movement. At the first glance the testimony to his relations with the Romantic circles and the Romantic literature is strangely at variance. On the one hand the old poet was unanimously accepted by the school itself as its leader and model; the brothers Schlegel learned more, as critics, from Schiller than from Goethe ; but they were instinctively repelled by Schiller's attitude to their methods and theories, whereas for Goethe their respect and admiration never wavered. Tieck, again, passed through many phases of sympathies and antipathies, but he remained alxvays constant to Goethe, from his delight as a child in Glitz and Werther to the rapt Goethe-worship of the hero of his story Der Mondmchtige ; while Novalis, despite much that was unsympathetic to him in Goethe's work, saw in Goethe what he finely called " den Statthalter der Poesie auf Erden." The later Romanticists accepted Goethe almost as a matter of course; Arnim and Brentano dedicated

408 Goethe and Romanticism [1798-1832

the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn to him and received from him kindly and appreciative encouragement; and, as has already been mentioned, Goethe's name was the watchword of the many Berlin coteries which pinned their faith to Romanticism. This unreserved admiration of Goethe was one of the essential points in the Romantic credo.

That, however, was only the Romantic side of the question. On the other side we find that, in those very days when the principles of the new school were being enunciated in the Athenaum, Goethe was discussing in his correspondence with Schiller doctrines which formed the most uncompromising antithesis to those principles. Nowhere, indeed, is the sharp and even embittered conflict between Classicism and Romanticism more significantly expressed than in these letters; there is no question that the Romantic innovations were a thorn in the flesh of both Schiller and Goethe, when they formulated their demands for law and order in the world of art, and proclaimed with a zeal worthy of a Boileau or a Gottsched the crying need of an absolute criterion of good taste. If they insisted on what seems to-day the strangely one-sided and reactionary dogma, that the highest in modern literature is only attainable by the imitation of the Greek classics, it was because they saw in such imitation the only hope of salvation from the confused phantasmagories of the Middle Ages, in which the Romanticists revelled. Hermann und Dorothea and Pandora were written as bulwarks against the Romantic barbarians; and Goethe's art review, Die Propylden (1798-1800), was founded to counteract the spirit which finds its expression in the Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. Clearly, so far as such testimony is concerned, Goethe's opposition to the Romantic movement stands beyond question. Tieck and his friends might worship him as they would; Goethe's own criticism and creations in the years of his friendship with Schiller were the complete abnegation of Romanticism. He may have viewed the Wunderhorn with goodwill, but he was himself a denizen of the Europe before the French Revolution and had little sympathy with what seemed to him only the national Chauvinism — if we may use the word of a later age — of Germany's rising against Napoleon. And when his long life had almost reached its close, he uttered to Eckermann the significant and unambiguous words: "The Romantic I call the sick, the Classic the healthy."

But to infer from this that Goethe repudiated all that the new movement fought for and achieved, would be to ignore his many-sided character; it would be to forget a feature in Goethe's mind which has already been mentioned, and which distinguishes him from all his contemporaries without exception, that is, his complete independence of party and faction. There was undoubtedly much in the Romantic movement, especially in its early manifestations, of which Goethe could not approve, which he regarded as unhealthy, but Goethe was far too

1805-32] Goethe's later years 409

liberally minded a critic to be oblivious to its vital significance for the new century. None of his contemporaries — not even the Romanticists themselves —saw so clearly as he just what was of abiding and inestimable worth in the Romantic ideas. And the proof of it is to be sought in the poet's extraordinarily varied activity during the last twenty-five years of his life; the ground-tone of Goethe's life in this epoch — an epoch that still awaits adequate treatment at the hands of Goethe's biographers — is assuredly in harmony with the best aspirations of Romanticism. It is impossible here to dwell on the importance of Goethe's scientific investigations for the theory which Darwin was to formulate a generation later, or even on the significance of his theory of colour; it would be equally impossible to do justice to the critical sympathies, which no classical-romantic controversy was allowed to warp; but one need have merely a superficial acquaintance with his writings on these subjects to see that they were in essential agreement with the wider aims of nineteenth century Romanticism. And it is no exaggeration to say that all his poetical creations in these years fitted without exception into the general scheme of a Romantic German literature. Die Wahlverwandtschqften (1809), for instance, bears ample testimony to what Goethe had learned in the school of classicism ; it is planned with architectural symmetry, and each character and motive is viewed in the perspective of the whole; but, on the other hand, it treats one of those delicate psychological problems in which the Romanticists delighted, and it is written from a subjective and personal point of view, which the older classical critics would not have approved. Or, to take Goethe's autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-4) — none of his books was better fitted than this to be a corner-stone of the new Romantic literature; here the younger generation found portrayed with ripe literary art that young Romantic genius of Frankfort, Strassburg, and Wetzlar, whom each of them cherished in his heart as the ideal of the man of letters. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821-9)—fragmentary and disappointing be it compared with the Lehrjahre — is, in its attitude toward questions of social and individual ethics, above all to that problem of "renunciation" which had exerted so strong a fascination over the Romantic mind, a book entirely after the heart of the Romanticists. In the same way the splendid outburst of lyric poetry, Der westostliche Divan (1819), opened up to German poetry a new oriental world when the Middle Ages had begun to lose their power to thrill. Lastly, the completed Faust, which has been already referred to, was an essentially Romantic product, and demonstrates perhaps more clearly than any other of Goethe's riper works the desire which dominated the last twenty years of his life, to attain a harmonious ideal of national poetry by the fusion of Classicism and Romanticism. Thus, to regard Goethe as an antagonist of the Romantic movement in German poetry

410 Hegel.— Schopenhauer [1807-35

either implies a very narrow conception of the meaning of Romanticism, or it is unjust to one of the most catholic-minded of all the great poets of the world.

But, long before Goethe's death in 1832, the disintegration of Romanticism had set in ; the philosophical movement of the time — just as in the later days of Sturm und Drang—was opposed to the Romantic outlook upon life; in other words, the rise of Hegelianism was fatal to it. In recent years Germany has been strangely silent on the subject of Hegel; there has been little attempt to view his philosophy from a modern standpoint, to understand why this extraordinarily potent thinker, who himself sprang from the heart of Romantic idealism, should have exerted so blighting an influence on the literature of Romanticism. Rightly understood, this phenomenon is perhaps the best proof of how intimately the literary movement was bound up with individualism. For notwithstanding his Romantic training, Hegel had an essentially synthetic type of mind; he was no less of a system-builder than Christian Wolff; his transcendentalism advanced by means of generalisations which recall the methods of Kant, and the centre of the world to him was not, as to Fichte or even Schelling, the individual man, but the human race. The individualism and subjectivity which was so vital to German Romanticism found little favour in the eyes of this master of metaphysic. Even so early as 1819 Germany was so completely bound by the spell of Hegelianism that she had no interest in a book which, a generation later, helped to dethrone Hegel and to reinstate the Romantic ideas—Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, by Arthur Schopenhauer.

While the Hegelian metaphysics was thus undermining Romanticism, the actual death-blow to the movement in Germany was given by a political event, the Revolution of July, 1830. This was the first convincing proof that the intellectual and political freedom which, since the Carlsbad Decrees, had been regarded by the advanced German theorists as an unrealisable dream of their more simple-minded countrymen, was after all within the realm of possibility; what France had done, Germany too might do. The Revolution in the streets of Paris was the signal for the young German writers of the day to throw themselves into politics, to devote themselves to social, economic, and political questions, to look at life nationally and socially, instead of, as hitherto, subjectively and personally. The men of the new generation — Heinrich Heine (17971856), whose Buch der Lieder (1827) and Harzreise (1826) had already spread like wild-fire over Germany; KarlGutzkow (1811-78), whose first famous or rather notorious novel, Wally die Zweiflerin (1835), shows unmistakably its descent from Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde; and the quick-witted, unromantic, Ludwig Borne (1786-1837) — had all begun in a somewhat half-hearted way in the train of Romanticism, but no sooner did the tidings of the July Revolution reach them than with one