HEINRICH VON KLEIST

(1777-1811)

BY CHARLES HARVEY GENUNG

EINRICH VON KLEIST is a tragic figure; an unhappy man born in an unhappy time. Endowed with supreme poetic powers which in a more fortunate age might have made him chief among the poets of Germany, he stood beneath the overmastering shadow of Shakespeare; he was hampered by the dominating genius of Goethe and Schiller; he was embittered by the neglect of his contemporaries, and finally was crushed by the ignominy of national disaster and disgrace. Born of a noble family, Kleist fell heir to all the inconveniences of rank; he was poor, but precluded by birth from any except a military or an official career. At strife with himself, richly gifted for one calling but obliged to adopt another, he consumed the energy of his younger years in an endeavor to attain a clear intellectual vision. It was the same struggle that took Alfieri's youthful strength, and caused Byron to bid farewell to his native land. But when at last Kleist had almost worked out his spiritual problem and had discovered the true sources of his strength, his country's liberties were crushed at Jena. "More deeply than most of his contemporaries," says Kuno Francke, "did Kleist feel the agony of an age which saw the creation of centuries sink into dust." And national dishonor followed close upon military defeat. Although the distant mutterings were already audible of the storm which was to sweep the French from German soil, Kleist was destined never to see the glorious outcome of that struggle. Hopeless but resigned, he fell by his own hand before the national uprising had taken shape. In less than two years after his death, the ultimate triumph of Germany had become assured by the victory at Leipsic. It was on the anniversary of Kleist's birthday that the battle was won. He would have been thirty-six years old.

HEINRICH VON KLEIST

The story of Kleist's life may be briefly told. He was born on October 18th, 1777, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder. An orphan at eleven,

he was educated by a clergyman in Berlin, and at the age of sixteen entered the guards and served in the Rhine campaign. When he left the army he took up the study of law, and obtained a position in the civil service which he lost after the battle of Jena. It was then that his genius was developed, and the next five years were those of his greatest productivity; but meanwhile an ignominious peace destroyed all his hopes for Germany. The despair of the poet without an audience, and of the patriot without a country, brought him to his last act. With Henriette Vogel, the high-strung wife of a Berlin merchant, he went to Potsdam; and in accordance with their romantic agreement, on November 21st, 1811, he shot first her and then himself. A simple stone marks the spot where the greatest of Prussian poets lies buried.

The works which Kleist has left behind are of the highest importance in German literature. His dramas hold the stage to-day beside those of Goethe, of Schiller, and of Lessing. The characters he has created have become indispensable members of that immortal company which peoples the imagination of the German race. Potentially he was the greatest dramatist that Germany has produced. Although he grew up among the extravagances of the Romantic school, Kleist was a realist. He had indeed sought in the realms of fancy, relief from the oppressive reality, and so it is that upon his most realistic pictures there falls a ray of weird light from dreamland; but as in all great works of art, realistic treatment is combined with ideal thought, so in Kleist. Each figure, each event, embodied itself before him in its actual material form; and what he saw he was able to draw with a firm and sure hand. His characters move with heavy tread; they are robust living creatures: but they pursue high aims, are moved by noble impulses, and are significant of lofty thoughts that can find expression only in symbols. If they are sometimes lightly clad in romantic garb, these garments are but transparent robes from the Erlking's chest, which only heighten the convincing reality of the figures they enwrap. Kleist's power of plastic presentation was not surpassed by either Goethe or Schiller. He painted "the thing as he saw it, for the God of things as they are."

Fate was the dominant note in Kleist's philosophy. The strands of his destiny were woven by the Norns, and no effort of the will could break the rope by which they had bound him. In all his works this inevitable succession of events reappears. It is fate not as a force from without but as a power from within, placed there at birth, relentless, from which there is no ultimate escape; even the struggle against it is only a part of the predestined plan, foredoomed to defeat. So Kleist struggled; so his characters struggle, but with this difference: these win a spiritual triumph, none ends as he ended.

The poet saw the way, but the Prussian nobleman could not follow. The characters in his dramas are involved without fault of their own in their tragic situations. In 'Das Käthchen von Heilbronn' (Kitty of Heilbronn) it is love, represented as an irresistible possession of the soul, that takes the form of fate. Not cruelty nor insult can shake Käthchen in her childlike devotion. So in the wonderland of 'Penthesilea,' in which the whole genius of Kleist is revealed, the heroine is relentlessly impelled to kill the man she loves, for the queen of the Amazons may not know love; then, by no act of violence but by a supreme effort of the will, she joins her lover in death. In the 'Prince of Homburg' fate takes the form of military discipline and obedience. The prince secures his spiritual triumph by recognizing at last the justice of the death sentence, and by urging its execution. It was the failure of this play to obtain a hearing that put the last bitter drop into the poet's cup of sorrow. This and the 'Hermannsschlacht' (Hermann's Battle) were not published until after Kleist's death, and they are his greatest works. The Battle of Hermann' is the embodiment of exuberant joy at the thought that now all other considerations may be laid aside, and that pitiless vengeance may at last be exacted. Kleist firmly believed in the ultimate overthrow of French domination, and he symbolized his belief in the splendid figure of the old Teutonic hero who threw off the Roman yoke. This is the most joyous note that Kleist ever struck. In all else the tragedy of his own life threw its shadow upon his work. Nothing in his external circumstances served to assist him in the attainment of his true ambition. Only one of his plays ever received so much as a respectful hearing during his lifetime; and for fifty years he lay in a forgotten grave.

One comedy appears in the brief list of Kleist's works: 'Der Zerbrochene Krug' (The Broken Jug). It is the most compact and effective one-act comedy in German literature. This vivid picture of a village judge sitting in judgment upon a crime which he has himself committed has been likened to a Dutch genre piece; its popularity is undiminished to-day. In prose narration also Kleist showed himself a supreme master; and his masterpiece is 'Michael Kohlhaas,' a tale of popular rebellion in the sixteenth century. It moves before the reader with the stern vividness of actual event. Kohlhaas's keen sense of justice, at first a virtue and guaranty of good citizenship, makes him at last a rebel and a scourge. It is a story of the most substantial realism; but this ordinary horse-dealer is at heart an idealist, carrying within him the picture of an impossible world in which absolute justice reigns. His acts are the inevitable outgrowth of this ideal. The tale is told with thrilling simplicity, objectivity, and strength; there are no superfluous trappings of historical romance; the characters triumph by their own force.

Slowly Kleist has won the place which he is destined to occupy in German literature, and to which the aged Wieland long ago assigned him,- beside Goethe whom he revered and Schiller from whom he revolted. As in the case of Byron, the imagination cannot refrain from the futile inquiry: What might he not have achieved, had he lived past the crisis? With the dawn of a happier time, Kleist's genius might, so far at least as the drama is concerned, have made good his audacious boast that he would one day tear the laurels from Goethe's brow.

A

MICHAEL KOHLHAAS

Translated by Francis Lloyd and William Newton

BOUT the middle of the sixteenth century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse-dealer named Michael Kohlhaas. He was the son of a schoolmaster, and was distinguished as at once the most right-feeling and most terrible man of his time. Up to his thirtieth year, he might have been selected as the model of a perfect citizen. In the village in which he dwelt, and which still bears his name, he possessed a farm, from the produce of which, together with his business, he derived a tranquil subsistence; he had several children, whom he brought up in the fear of God and the love of diligence and truth; and there was not one among his neighbors who was not witness either to his generosity or to his unswerving sense of justice. In a word, had he not carried to excess one virtue, posterity would have blessed his memory. Unluckily, however, his love of justice made him a robber and a murderer.

One day he started from home with a drove of young horses, all in high condition, with which he hoped to do great things at the fair he was about to visit; he rode on, thinking what use he would make of his gains, both in future investments and in little additions to the pleasures of the moment, and was lost in thought as he came to that part of the road which runs parallel with the Elbe: when just beneath a noble Saxon castle, his horse shied at a turnpike which in his previous journeys he had never encountered. He pulled up amid the pouring rain, and called

the pikeman, who soon presented his sulky visage at the window; the horse-dealer desired him to open.

"Where on earth has this rained from?" he asked, as the man made his appearance after a leisurely delay.

"It is a royal patent," the man replied as he opened the gate, "lately granted to my Lord Wenzel von Tronka."

"Indeed," said Kohlhaas: "is Wenzel the name?" and with that he gazed at the castle, whose glistening towers commanded the plain.

"What! is the old lord dead?" he asked.

"Dead of apoplexy," the pikeman answered, as he threw wide the gate.

"Well, well, it's a bad job," Kohlhaas replied: "he was a fine old fellow- a man that loved to see business, and lent a helping hand where it was needed. I remember he had a stone causeway built outside the village, because a mare of mine slipped there once and broke her leg.-Well, what's to pay?" he inquired, as he extracted the pence the old man demanded, from beneath his storm-tossed mantle. "Ay, old man," he added, as he caught an exhortation to haste, 'mid curses against the weather, "if the wood that gate is made of were still growing in the forest, it would be better for both you and me." And therewith he handed him the money, and essayed to proceed on his jour ney. He had but just passed the gate, when a loud cry of "Hold hard there, you horse-dealer!" came ringing from the tower; turning, he saw the castellan hastily close a window and hurry down the decline.

"Well, what's up now?" thought Kohlhaas, checking his cavalcade; the steward did not leave him long in doubt, but buttoning his vest over his ample person and thrusting his head cornerwise against the wind, he inquired for his passport.

"Passport?" repeated Kohlhaas; as far as he knew he had no idea that he had one, but if he would have the kindness to tell him what on earth it was, he might perchance be provided with it.

The castellan eyed him askance, and gruffly replied that without a government passport no horse-dealer could carry his cattle over the frontier.

Kohlhaas assured him that he had already crossed the frontier seventeen times without a line of writing by him, and that he had taken the trouble to study every by-law that concerned his business; further, that he was persuaded that there must be some