This it was, gentlemen, that at the close of these addresses I felt compelled to impress upon you as representatives of the nation and, through you, upon the nation as a whole.
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A Speech on the Celebration of the 12th October, 1807, as the Name-Day of His Majesty the King of Bavaria
Delivered before the Public Assembly of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Munich
Plastic Art, according to the most ancient expression, is silent Poetry. The inventor of this definition no doubt meant thereby that the former, like the latter, is to express spiritual thoughts—conceptions whose source is the soul; only not by speech, but, like silent Nature, by shape, by form, by corporeal, independent works.
Plastic Art, therefore, evidently stands as a uniting link between the soul and Nature, and can be apprehended only in the living centre of both. Indeed, since Plastic Art has its relation to the soul in common with every other art, and particularly with Poetry, that by which it is connected with Nature, and, like Nature, a productive force, remains as its sole peculiarity; so that to this alone can a theory relate which shall be satisfactory to the understanding, and helpful and profitable to Art itself.
We hope, therefore, in considering Plastic Art in relation to its true prototype and original source, Nature, to be able to contribute something new to its theory—to give some additional exactness or clearness to the conceptions of it; but, above all, to set forth the coherence of the whole structure of Art in the light of a higher necessity.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING Carl Begas]
But has not Science always recognized this relation? Has not indeed every theory of modern times taken its departure from this very position, that Art should be the imitator of Nature? Such has indeed been the case. But what should this broad general proposition profit the artist, when the notion of Nature is of such various interpretation, and when there are almost as many differing views of it as there are various modes of life? Thus, to one, Nature is nothing more than the lifeless aggregate of an indeterminable crowd of objects, or the space in which, as in a vessel, he imagines things placed; to another, only the soil from which he draws his nourishment and support; to the inspired seeker alone, the holy, ever-creative original energy of the world, which generates and busily evolves all things out of itself.
The proposition would indeed have a high significance, if it taught Art to emulate this creative force; but the sense in which it was meant can scarcely be doubtful to one acquainted with the universal condition of Science at the time when it was first brought forward. Singular enough that the very persons who denied all life to Nature should set it up for imitation in Art! To them might be applied the words of a profound writer:[5] "Your lying philosophy has put Nature out of the way; and why do you call upon us to imitate her? Is it that you may renew the pleasure by perpetrating the same violence on the disciples of Nature?"
Nature was to them not merely a dumb, but an altogether lifeless image, in whose inmost being even no living word dwelt; a hollow scaffolding of forms, of which as hollow an image was to be transferred to the canvas, or hewn out of stone.
This was the proper doctrine of those more ancient and savage nations, who, as they saw in Nature nothing divine, fetched idols out of her; whilst, to the susceptive Greeks, who everywhere felt the presence of a vitally efficient principle, genuine gods arose out of Nature.
But is, then, the disciple of Nature to copy everything in Nature without distinction?—and, of everything, every part? Only beautiful objects should be represented; and, even in these, only the Beautiful and Perfect.
Thus is the proposition further determined, but, at the same time, this asserted, that, in Nature, the perfect is mingled with the imperfect, the beautiful with the unbeautiful. Now, how should he who stands in no other relation to Nature than that of servile imitation, distinguish the one from the other? It is the way of imitators to appropriate the faults of their model sooner and easier than its excellences, since the former offer handles and tokens more easily grasped; and thus we see that imitators of Nature in this sense have imitated oftener, and even more affectionately, the ugly than the beautiful.
If we regard in things, not their principle, but the empty abstract form, neither will they say anything to our soul; our own heart, our own spirit we must put to it, that they answer us.
But what is the perfection of a thing? Nothing else than the creative life in it, its power to exist. Never, therefore, will he, who fancies that Nature is altogether dead, be successful in that profound process (analogous to the chemical) whence proceeds, purified as by fire, the pure gold of Beauty and Truth.
Nor was there any change in the main view of the relation of Art to Nature, even when the unsatisfactoriness of the principle began to be more generally felt; no change, even by the new views and new knowledge so nobly established by John Winckelmann. He indeed restored to the soul its full efficiency in Art, and raised it from its unworthy dependence into the realm of spiritual freedom. Powerfully moved by the beauty of form in the works of antiquity, he taught that the production of ideal Nature, of Nature elevated above the Actual, together with the expression of spiritual conceptions, is the highest aim of Art.
But if we examine in what sense this surpassing of the Actual by Art has been understood by the most, it turns out that, with this view also, the notion of Nature as mere product, of things as a lifeless result, still continued; and the idea of a living creative Nature was in no wise awakened by it. Thus these ideal forms also could be animated by no positive insight into their nature; and if the forms of the Actual were dead for the dead beholder, these were not less so. Were no independent production of the Actual possible, neither would there be of the Ideal. The object of the imitation was changed; the imitation remained. In the place of Nature were substituted the sublime works of Antiquity, whose outward forms the pupils busied themselves in imitating, but without the spirit that fills them. These forms, however, are as unapproachable, nay, more so, than the works of Nature, and leave us yet colder if we bring not to them the spiritual eye to penetrate through the veil and feel the stirring energy within.
On the other hand, artists, since that time, have indeed received a certain ideal impetus, and notions of a beauty superior to matter; but these notions were like fair words, to which the deeds do not correspond. While the previous method in Art produced bodies without soul, this view taught only the secret of the soul, but not that of the body. The theory had, as usual, passed with one hasty stride to the opposite extreme; but the vital mean it had not yet found.
Who can say that Winckelmann had not penetrated into the highest beauty? But with him it appeared in its dissevered elements only: on the one side as beauty in idea, and flowing out from the soul; on the other, as beauty of forms.
But what is the efficient link that connects the two? Or by what power is the soul created together with the body, at once and as if with one breath? If this lies not within the power of Art, as of Nature, then it can create nothing whatever. This vital connecting link, Winckelmann did not determine; he did not teach how, from the idea, forms can be produced. Thus Art went over to that method which we would call the retrograde, since it strives from the form to come at the essence. But not thus is the Unlimited reached; it is not attainable by mere enhancement of the Limited. Hence, such works as have had their beginning in form, with all elaborateness on that side, show, in token of their origin, an incurable want at the very point where we expect the consummate, the essential, the final. The miracle by which the Limited should be raised to the Unlimited, the human become divine, is wanting; the magic circle is drawn, but the spirit that it should inclose, appears not, being disobedient to the call of him who thought a creation possible through mere form.
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Nature meets us everywhere, at first with reserve, and in form more or less severe. She is like that quiet and serious beauty, that excites not attention by noisy advertisement, nor attracts the vulgar gaze.
How can we, as it were, spiritually melt this apparently rigid form, so that the pure energy of things may flow together with the force of our spirit and both become one united mold? We must transcend Form, in order to gain it again as intelligible, living, and truly felt. Consider the most beautiful forms; what remains behind after you have abstracted from them the creative principle within? Nothing but mere unessential qualities, such as extension and the relations of space. Does the fact that one portion of matter exists near another, and distinct from it, contribute anything to its inner essence? or does it not rather contribute nothing? Evidently the latter. It is not mere contiguous existence, but the manner of it, that makes form; and this can be determined only by a positive force, which is even opposed to separateness, and subordinates the manifoldness of the parts to the unity of one idea—from the force that works in the crystal to the force which, comparable to a gentle magnetic current, gives to the particles of matter in the human form that position and arrangement among themselves, through which the idea, the essential unity and beauty, can become visible.
Not only, however, as active principle, but as spirit and effective science, must the essence appear to us in the form, in order that we may truly apprehend it. For all unity must be spiritual in nature and origin; and what is the aim of all investigation of Nature but to find science therein? For that wherein there is no Understanding cannot be the object of Understanding; the Unknowing cannot be known. The science by which Nature works is not, however, like human science, connected with reflection upon itself; in it, the conception is not separate from the act, nor the design from the execution. Therefore, rude matter strives, as it were, blindly, after regular shape, and unknowingly assumes pure stereometric forms, which belong, nevertheless, to the realm of ideas, and are something spiritual in the material.
The sublimest arithmetic and geometry are innate in the stars, and unconsciously displayed by them in their motions. More distinctly, but still beyond their grasp, the living cognition appears in animals; and thus we see them, though wandering about without reflection, bring about innumerable results far more excellent than themselves: the bird that, intoxicated with music, transcends itself in soul-like tones; the little artistic creature, that, without practise or instruction, accomplishes light works of architecture; but all directed by an overpowering spirit, that lightens in them already with single flashes of knowledge, but as yet appears nowhere as the full sun, as in Man.
This formative science in Nature and Art is the link that connects idea and form, body and soul. Before everything stands an eternal idea, formed in the Infinite Understanding; but by what means does this idea pass into actuality and embodiment? Only through the creative science that is as necessarily connected with the Infinite Understanding, as in the artist the principle that seizes the idea of unsensuous Beauty is linked with that which sets it forth to the senses.
If that artist be called happy and praiseworthy before all to whom the gods have granted this creative spirit, then that work of art will appear excellent which shows to us, as in outline, this unadulterated energy of creation and activity of Nature.
It was long ago perceived that, in Art, not everything is performed with consciousness; that, with the conscious activity, an unconscious action must combine; and that it is of the perfect unity and mutual interpenetration of the two that the highest in Art is born.
Works that want this seal of unconscious science are recognized by the evident absence of life self-supported and independent of the producer; as, on the contrary, where this acts, Art imparts to its work, together with the utmost clearness to the understanding, that unfathomable reality wherein it resembles a work of Nature.
It has often been attempted to make clear the position of the artist in regard to Nature, by saying that Art, in order to be such, must first withdraw itself from Nature, and return to it only in the final perfection. The true sense of this saying, it seems to us, can be no other than this—that in all things in Nature, the living idea shows itself only blindly active; were it so also in the artist, he would be in nothing distinct from Nature. But, should he attempt consciously to subordinate himself altogether to the Actual, and render with servile fidelity the already existing, he would produce larvae, but no works of Art. He must therefore withdraw himself from the product, from the creature, but only in order to raise himself to the creative energy, spiritually seizing the same. Thus he ascends into the realm of pure ideas; he forsakes the creature, to regain it with thousandfold interest, and in this sense certainly to return to Nature. This spirit of Nature working at the core of things, and speaking through form and shape as by symbols only, the artist must certainly follow with emulation; and only so far as he seizes this with genial imitation has he himself produced anything genuine. For works produced by aggregation, even of forms beautiful in themselves, would still be destitute of all beauty, since that, through which the work on the whole is truly beautiful, cannot be mere form. It is above form—it is Essence, the Universal, the look and expression of the indwelling spirit of Nature.
Now it can scarcely be doubtful what is to be thought of the so-called idealizing of Nature in Art, so universally demanded. This demand seems to arise from a way of thinking, according to which not Truth, Beauty, Goodness, but the contrary of all these, is the Actual. Were the Actual indeed opposed to Truth and Beauty, it would be necessary for the artist, not to elevate or idealize it, but to get rid of and destroy it, in order to create something true and beautiful. But how should it be possible for anything to be actual except the True; and what is Beauty, if not full, complete Being?
What higher aim, therefore, could Art have, than to represent that which in Nature actually is? Or how should it undertake to excel so-called actual Nature, since it must always fall short of it?
For does Art impart to its works actual, sensuous life? This statue breathes not, is stirred by no pulsation, warmed by no blood.
But both the pretended excelling and the apparent falling short show themselves as the consequences of one and the same principle, as soon as we place the aim of Art in the exhibiting of that which truly is.
Only on the surface have its works the appearance of life; in Nature, life seems to reach deeper, and to be wedded entirely with matter. But does not the continual mutation of matter and the universal lot of final dissolution teach us the unessential character of this union, and that it is no intimate fusion? Art, accordingly, in the merely superficial animation of its works, but represents Nothingness as non-existing.
How comes it that, to every tolerably cultivated taste, imitations of the so-called Actual, even though carried to deception, appear in the last degree untrue—nay, produce the impression of spectres; whilst a work in which the idea is predominant strikes us with the full force of truth, conveying us then only to the genuinely actual world? Whence comes it, if not from the more or less obscure feeling which tells us that the idea alone is the living principle in things, but all else unessential and vain shadow?
On the same ground may be explained all the opposite cases which are brought up as instances of the surpassing of Nature by Art. In arresting the rapid course of human years; in uniting the energy of developed manhood with the soft charm of early youth; or exhibiting a mother of grown-up sons and daughters in the full possession of vigorous beauty—what does Art except to annul what is unessential, Time?
If, according to the remark of a discerning critic, every growth in Nature has but an instant of truly complete beauty, we may also say that it has, too, only an instant of full existence. In this instant it is what it is in all eternity; besides this, it has only a coming into and a passing out of existence. Art, in representing the thing at that instant, removes it out of Time, and sets it forth in its pure Being, in the eternity of its life.
After everything positive and essential had once been abstracted from Form, it necessarily appeared restrictive, and, as it were, hostile, to the Essence; and the same theory that had reproduced the false and powerless Ideal, necessarily tended to the formless in Art. Form would indeed be a limitation of the Essence if it existed independent of it. But if it exists with and by means of the Essence, how could this feel itself limited by that which it has itself created? Violence would indeed be done it by a form forced upon it, but never by one proceeding from itself. In this, on the contrary, it must rest contented, and feel its own existence to be perfect and complete.
Determinateness of form is in Nature never a negation, but ever an affirmation. Commonly, indeed, the shape of a body seems a confinement; but could we behold the creative energy it would reveal itself as the measure that this energy imposes upon itself, and in which it shows itself a truly intelligent force; for in everything is the power of self-rule allowed to be an excellence, and one of the highest.
In like manner most persons consider the particular in a negative manner—i.e., as that which is not the whole or all. Yet no particular exists by means of its limitation, but through the indwelling force with which it maintains itself as a particular Whole, in distinction from the Universe.
This force of particularity, and thus also of individuality, showing itself as vital character, the negative conception of it is necessarily followed by an unsatisfying and false view of the characteristic in Art. Lifeless and of intolerable hardness would be the Art that should aim to exhibit the empty shell or limitation of the Individual. Certainly we desire to see not merely the individual, but, more than this, its vital Idea. But if the artist has seized the inward creative spirit and essence of the Idea, and sets this forth, he makes the individual a world in itself, a class, an eternal prototype; and he who has grasped the essential character needs not to fear hardness and severity, for these are the conditions of life. Nature, that in her completeness appears as the utmost benignity, we see, in each particular, aiming even primarily and principally at severity, seclusion and reserve. As the whole creation is the work of the utmost externization and renunciation [Entäusserung], so the artist must first deny himself and descend into the Particular, without shunning isolation, nor the pain, the anguish of Form.
Nature, from her first works, is throughout characteristic; the energy of fire, the splendor of light, she shuts up in hard stone, the tender soul of melody in severe metal; even on the threshold of Life, and already meditating organic shape, she sinks back overpowered by the might of Form, into petrifaction.
The life of the plant consists in still receptivity, but in what exact and severe outline is this passive life inclosed! In the animal kingdom the strife between Life and Form seems first properly to begin; her first works Nature hides in hard shells, and, where these are laid aside, the animated world attaches itself again through its constructive impulse to the realm of crystallization. Finally she comes forward more boldly and freely, and vital, important characteristics show themselves, being the same through whole classes. Art, however, cannot begin so far down as Nature. Though Beauty is spread everywhere, yet there are various grades in the appearance and unfolding of the Essence, and thus of Beauty. But Art demands a certain fulness, and desires not to strike a single note or tone, nor even a detached accord, but at once the full symphony of Beauty.
Art, therefore, prefers to grasp immediately at the highest and most developed, the human form. For since it is not given it to embrace the immeasurable whole, and as in all other creatures only single fulgurations, in Man alone full entire Being appears without abatement, Art is not only permitted but required to see the sum of Nature in Man alone. But precisely on this account—that she here assembles all in one point—Nature repeats her whole multiformity, and pursues again in a narrower compass the same course that she had gone through in her wide circuit.
Here, therefore, arises the demand upon the artist first to be true and faithful in detail, in order to come forth complete and beautiful in the whole. Here he must wrestle with the creative spirit of Nature (which in the human world also deals out character and stamp in endless variety), not in weak and effeminate, but stout and courageous conflict.
Persevering exercise in the study of that by virtue of which the characteristic in things is a positive principle, must preserve him from emptiness, weakness, inward inanity, before he can venture to aim, by ever higher combination and final melting together of manifold forms, to reach the extremest beauty in works uniting the highest simplicity with infinite meaning.
Only through the perfection of form can Form be made to disappear; and this is certainly the final aim of Art in the Characteristic. But as the apparent harmony that is even more easily reached by the empty and frivolous than by others, is yet inwardly vain; so in Art the quickly attained harmony of the exterior, without inward fulness. And if it is the part of theory and instruction to oppose the spiritless copying of beautiful forms, especially must they oppose the tendency toward an effeminate characterless Art, which gives itself, indeed, higher names, but therewith only seeks to hide its incapacity to fulfil the fundamental conditions.
That lofty Beauty in which the fulness of form causes Form itself to disappear, was adopted by the modern theory of Art, after Winckelmann, not only as the highest, but as the only standard. But as the deep foundation upon which it rests was overlooked, it resulted that a negative conception was formed even of that which is the sum of all affirmation.
Winckelmann compares Beauty with water drawn from the bosom of the spring, which, the less taste it has, the wholesomer it is esteemed. It is true that the highest Beauty is characterless, but so we say of the Universe that it has no determinate dimension, neither length, breadth nor depth, since it has all in equal infinity; or that the Art of creative Nature is formless, because she herself is subjected to no form.
In this and in no other sense can we say that Grecian art in its highest development rises into the characterless; but it did not aim immediately at this. It was from the bonds of Nature that it struggled upward to divine freedom. From no lightly scattered seed, but only from a deeply infolded kernel, could this heroic growth spring up. Only mighty emotions, only a deep stirring of the fancy through the impression of all-enlivening, all-commanding energies of Nature, could stamp upon Art that invincible vigor with which from the rigid, secluded earnestness of earlier productions up to the period of works overflowing with sensuous grace, it ever remained faithful to truth, and produced the highest spiritual Reality which it is given to mortals to behold.
In like manner, as their Tragedy commences with the grandest characteristicness in morals, so the beginning of their Plastic Art was the earnestness of Nature, and the stern goddess of Athens its first and only Muse.
This epoch is marked by that style which Winckelmann describes as the still harsh and severe, from which the next or lofty style was able to develop itself by the mere enhancement of the Characteristic into the Sublime and the Simple.
For in the statues of the most perfect or divine natures not only all the complexity of form of which human nature is capable had to be united, but moreover the union must be such as may be conceived to exist in the system of the Universe itself—the lower forms, or those relating to inferior attributes, being comprehended under higher, and all at last under one supreme form, in which they indeed extinguish one another as separately existing, but still continue in Essence and efficiency.
Thus, though we cannot call this high and self-sufficing Beauty characteristic, so far as herewith is connected the notion of limitation or conditionality in the manifestation, yet still the characteristic continues efficient, though indistinguishable, within; as in the crystal, although transparent, the texture nevertheless remains; each characteristic element has its weight, however slight, and helps to bring about the sublime equipoise of Beauty.
The outer side or basis of all Beauty is beauty of form. But as Form cannot exist without Essence, wherever Form is, there also is Character, whether in visible presence or only perceptible in its effects. Characteristic Beauty, therefore, is Beauty in the root, from which alone Beauty can arise as the fruit. Essence may, indeed, outgrow Form, but even then the Characteristic remains as the still efficient groundwork of the Beautiful.
That most excellent critic,[6] to whom the gods have given sway over Nature as well as Art, compares the Characteristic in its relation to Beauty, with the skeleton in its relation to the living form. Were we to interpret this striking simile in our sense, we should say that the skeleton, in Nature, is not, as in our thought, detached from the living whole; that the firm and the yielding, the determining and the determined, mutually presuppose each other, and can exist only together; thus that the vitally Characteristic is already the whole form, the result of the action and reaction of bone and flesh, of Active and Passive. And although Art, like Nature, in its higher developments, thrusts inward the previously visible skeleton, yet the latter can never be opposed to Shape and Beauty, since it has always a determining share in the production of the one as well as of the other.
But whether that high and independent Beauty should be the only standard in Art, as it is the highest, seems to depend on the degree of fulness and extent that belongs to the particular Art.
Nature, in her wide circumference, ever exhibits the higher with the lower; creating in Man the godlike, she elaborates in all her other productions only its material and foundation, which must exist in order that in contrast with it the Essence as such may appear. And even in the higher world of Man the great mass serves again as the basis upon which the godlike that is preserved pure in the few, manifests itself in legislation, government, and the establishment of Religion. So that wherever Art works with more of the complexity of Nature, it may and must display, together with the highest measure of Beauty, also its groundwork and raw material, as it were, in distinct appropriate forms.
Here first prominently unfolds itself the difference in Nature of the forms of Art.
Plastic Art, in the more exact sense of the term, disdains to give Space outwardly to the object, but bears it within itself. This, however, narrows its field; it is compelled, indeed, to display the beauty of the Universe almost in a single point. It must therefore aim immediately at the highest, and can attain complexity only separately and in the strictest exclusion of all conflicting elements. By isolating the purely animal in human nature it succeeds in forming inferior creations too, harmonious and even beautiful, as we are taught by the beauty of numerous Fauns preserved from antiquity; yea, it can, parodying itself like the merry spirit of Nature, reverse its own Ideal, and, for instance, in the extravagance of the Silenic figures, by light and sportive treatment appear freed again from the pressure of matter.
But in all cases it is compelled strictly to isolate the work, in order to make it self-consistent and a world in itself; since for this form of Art there is no higher unity, in which the dissonance of particulars should be melted into harmony.
Painting, on the contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic of Nature and History!
Here the Particular scarcely counts anything by itself; the Universe takes its place, and that, which by itself would not be beautiful, becomes so in the harmony of the whole. If in an extensive painting, uniting forms by the allotted space, by light, by shade, by reflection, the highest measure of Beauty were everywhere employed, the result would be the most unnatural monotony; for, as Winckelmann says, the highest idea of Beauty is everywhere one and the same, and scarcely admits of variation. The detail would be preferred to the whole, where, as in every case in which the whole is formed by multiplicity, the detail must be subordinate to it.
[Illustration: THE JUNGFRAU From the Painting by Moritz von Schwind]
In such a work, therefore, a gradation of Beauty must be observed, by which alone the full Beauty concentrated in the focus becomes visible; and from an exaggeration of particulars proceeds an equipoise of the whole. Here, then, the limited and characteristic finds its place; and theory at least should direct the painter, not so much to the narrow space in which the entire Beauty is concentrically collected, as to the characteristic complexity of Nature, through which alone he can impart to an extensive work the full measure of living significance.
Thus thought, among the founders of modern art, the noble Leonardo; thus Raphael, the master of high Beauty, who shunned not to exhibit it in smaller measure, rather than to appear monotonous, lifeless, and unreal—though he understood not only how to produce it, but also how to break up uniformity by variety of expression.
For, although Character can show itself also in rest and equilibrium of form, it is only in action that it becomes truly alive.
By character we understand a unity of several forces, operating constantly to produce among them a certain equipoise and determinate proportion, to which, if undisturbed, a like equipoise in the symmetry of the forms corresponds. But if this vital Unity is to display itself in act and operation, this can only be when the forces, excited by some cause to rebellion, forsake their equilibrium. Every one sees that this is the case in the Passions.
Here we are met by the well-known maxim of the theorists, which demands that Passion should be moderated as far as possible, in its actual outburst, that beauty of Form may not be injured. But we think this maxim should rather be reversed, and read thus—that Passion should be moderated by Beauty itself. For it is much to be feared that this desired moderation too may be taken in a negative sense—whereas, what is really requisite is to oppose to Passion a positive force. For as Virtue consists, not in the absence of passions, but in the mastery of the spirit over them, so Beauty is preserved, not by their removal or abatement, but by the mastery of Beauty over them.
The forces of Passion must actually show themselves—it must be seen that they are prepared to rise in mutiny, but are kept down by the power of Character, and break against the forms of firmly-founded Beauty, as the waves of a stream that just fills, but cannot overflow its banks. Otherwise, this striving after moderation would resemble only the method of those shallow moralists, who, the more readily to dispose of Man, prefer to mutilate his nature; and who have so entirely removed every positive element from actions that the people gloat over the spectacle of great crimes, in order to refresh themselves at last with the view of something positive.
In Nature and Art the Essence strives first after actualization, or exhibition of itself in the Particular. Thus in each the utmost severity is manifested at the commencement; for without bound, the boundless could not appear; without severity, gentleness could not exist; and if unity is to be perceptible, it can only be through particularity, detachment, and opposition. In the beginning, therefore, the creative spirit shows itself entirely lost in the Form, inaccessibly shut up, and even in its grandeur still harsh. But the more it succeeds in uniting its entire fulness in one product, the more it gradually relaxes from its severity; and where it has fully developed the form, so as to rest contented and self-collected in it, it seems to become cheerful and begins to move in gentle lines. This is the period of its fairest maturity and blossom, in which the pure vessel has arrived at perfection; the spirit of Nature becomes free from its bonds, and feels its relationship to the soul. By a gentle morning blush stealing over the whole form, the coming soul announces itself; it is not yet present, but everything prepares for its reception by the delicate play of gentle movements; the rigid outlines melt and temper themselves into flexibility; a lovely essence, neither sensuous nor spiritual, but which cannot be grasped, diffuses itself over the form, and intwines itself with every outline, every vibration of the frame.
This essence, not to be seized, as we have already remarked, but yet perceptible to all, is what the language of the Greeks designated by the name Charis, ours as Grace.
Wherever, in a fully developed form, Grace appears, the work is complete on the side of Nature; nothing more is wanting; all demands are satisfied. Here, already, soul and body are in complete harmony; Body is Form, Grace is Soul, although not Soul in itself, but the Soul of Form, or the Soul of Nature.
Art may linger, and remain stationary at this point; for already, on one side at least, its whole task is finished. The pure image of Beauty arrested at this point is the Goddess of Love.
But the beauty of the Soul in itself, joined to sensuous Grace, is the highest apotheosis of Nature.
The spirit of Nature is only in appearance opposed to the Soul; essentially, it is the instrument of its revelation; it brings about indeed the antagonism that exists in all things, but only that the one essence may come forth, as the utmost benignity, and the reconciliation of all the forces.
All other creatures are driven by the mere force of Nature, and through it maintain their individuality; in Man alone, as the central point, arises the soul, without which the world would be like the natural universe without the sun. The Soul in Man, therefore, is not the principle of individuality, but that whereby he raises himself above all egoism, whereby he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of disinterested love, and (which is the highest) of the contemplation and knowledge of the Essence of things, and thus of Art.
In him it is no longer concerned about Matter nor has it immediate concern with it, but with the spirit only as the life of things. Even while appearing in the body, it is yet free from the body, the consciousness of which hovers in the soul in the most beauteous shapes only as a light, undisturbing dream. It is no quality, no faculty, nor anything special of the sort; it knows not, but is Science; it is not good, but Goodness; it is not beautiful, as body even may be, but Beauty itself.
In the first instance, it is true, in a work of art, the soul of the artist is seen as invention in the detail, and in the total result as the unity that hovers over the work in serene stillness. But the Soul must be visible in objective representation, as the primeval energy of thought, in portraitures of human beings, altogether filled by an idea, by a noble contemplation; or as indwelling, essential Goodness.
Each of these finds its distinct expression even in the completest repose, but a more living one where the Soul can reveal itself in activity and antagonism; and since it is by the passions mainly that the peace of life is interrupted, it is the generally received opinion that the beauty of the Soul shows itself especially in its quiet supremacy amid the storm of the passions.
But here an important distinction is to be made. For the Soul must not be called upon to moderate those passions which are only an outbreak of the lower spirits of Nature, nor can it be displayed in antithesis with these; for where calm considerateness is still in contention with them, the Soul has not yet appeared; they must be moderated by unassisted Nature in Man, by the might of the Spirit. But there are cases of a higher sort, in which not a single force alone, but the intelligent Spirit itself breaks down all barriers—cases, indeed, where even the Soul is subjected by the bond that connects it with sensuous existence, to pain, which should be foreign to its divine nature; where Man feels himself hard fought and attacked in the root of his existence, not by mere powers of Nature, but by moral forces; where innocent error hurries him into crime, and thus into misery; where deep-felt injustice excites to rebellion the holiest feelings of humanity.
This is the case in all situations, truly, and, in a high sense, tragic, such as the Tragedy of the ancients brings before our eyes. Where blindly passionate forces are aroused, the collected Spirit is present as the guardian of Beauty; but if the Spirit itself be carried away, as by an irresistible might, what power shall watch over and protect sacred beauty? Or, if even the soul participate in the struggle, how shall it save itself from pain and from desecration?
Arbitrarily to restrain the power of pain, of feeling in revolt, would be to sin against the very meaning and aim of Art, and would betray a want of feeling and soul in the artist himself.
Already therein, that Beauty, based on grand and firmly established forms, has become Character, Art has provided the means of displaying without injury to symmetry the whole intensity of Feeling. For where Beauty rests on mighty forms, as upon immovable pillars, even a slight change in its relations, scarcely touching the form, causes us to infer the great force that was necessary in order to provide it. Still more does Grace sanctify pain. It is the essential nature of Grace that it does not know itself; but not being wilfully acquired, it also cannot be wilfully lost. When intolerable anguish, when even madness, sent by avenging gods, takes away consciousness and reason, Grace stands as a protecting demon by the suffering person, and prevents it from manifesting anything unseemly, anything discordant to Humanity, but sees to it that, if the person falls, it falls at least a pure and unspotted victim.
Although not yet the Soul itself, but its forebodings only, Grace accomplishes by natural means what the Soul does by a divine power, in transforming pain, torpor, even death itself, into Beauty.
Yet Grace, which thus maintained itself in the extremest adversity, would be dead, without its transfiguration by the Soul. But what expression can belong to the Soul in this situation? It delivers itself from pain, and comes forth conquering, not conquered, by relinquishing its connection with sensuous existence.
It is for the natural Spirit to exert its energies for the preservation of sensuous existence; the Soul enters not into this contest, but its presence moderates even the storms of painfully-struggling life. Outward force can take away only outward goods, but not reach the Soul; it can tear asunder a temporal bond, not dissolve the eternal one of a truly divine love. Not hard and unfeeling, nor giving up love itself, on the contrary the Soul displays in pain this love alone, as the sentiment that outlasts sensuous existence, and thus raises itself above the ruins of outward life or fortune in divine glory.
It is this expression of the Soul that the creator of the Niobe has presented to us. All the means by which Art tempers even the Terrible, are here made use of. Mightiness of form, sensuous Grace, nay, even the nature of the subject-matter itself, soften the expression, through this, that Pain, transcending all expression, annihilates itself, and Beauty, which it seemed impossible to preserve from destruction when alive, is protected from injury by the commencing torpor.
But what would it all be without the Soul, and how does this manifest itself?
We see on the countenance of the mother, not grief alone for the already prostrated flower of her children; not alone deadly anxiety for the preservation of those yet remaining, and of the youngest daughter, who has fled for safety to her bosom; nor resentment against the cruel deities; least of all, as is pretended, cool defiance-all these we see, indeed, but not these alone; for, through grief, anxiety, and resentment streams, like a divine light, eternal love, as that which alone remains; and in this is preserved the mother, as one who was not, but now is a mother, and who remains united with the beloved ones by an eternal bond.
Every one acknowledges that greatness, purity, and goodness of Soul have also their sensuous expressions. But how is this conceivable, unless the principle that acts in Matter be itself cognate and similar to Soul?
For the representation of the Soul there are again gradations in Art, according as it is joined with the merely Characteristic, or in visible union with the Charming and Graceful.
Who perceives not already, in the tragedies of Æschylus, the presence of that lofty morality which is predominant in the works of Sophocles? But in the former it is enveloped in a bitter rind, and passes less into the whole work, since the bond of sensuous Grace is still wanting. But out of this severity, and the still rude charms of earlier Art, could proceed the grace of Sophocles, and with it the complete fusion of the two elements, which leaves us doubtful whether it is more moral or sensuous Grace that enchants us in the works of this poet.
The same is true of the plastic productions of the early and severe style, in comparison with the gentleness of the later.
If Grace, besides being the transfiguration of the spirit of Nature, is also the medium of connection between moral Goodness and sensuous Appearance, it is evident how Art must tend from all points toward it as its centre. This Beauty, which results from the perfect interpenetration of moral Goodness and sensuous Grace, seizes and enchants us when we meet it, with the force of a miracle. For, whilst the spirit of Nature shows itself everywhere else independent of the Soul, and, indeed, in a measure opposed to it, here, it seems, as if by voluntary accord, and the inward fire of divine love, to melt into union with it; the remembrance of the fundamental unity of the essence of Nature and the essence of the Soul comes over the beholder with sudden clearness—the conviction that all antagonism is only apparent, that Love is the bond of all things, and pure Goodness the foundation and substance of the whole Creation.
Here Art, as it were, transcends itself, and again becomes means only. On this summit sensuous Grace becomes in turn only the husk and body of a higher life; what was before a whole is treated as a part, and the highest relation of Art and Nature is reached in this—that it makes Nature the medium of manifesting the soul which it contains.
But though in this blossoming of Art, as in the blossoming of the vegetable kingdom, all the previous stages are repeated, yet, on the other hand, we may see in what various directions Art can proceed from this centre. Especially does the difference in nature of the two forms of Plastic Art here show itself most strongly. For Sculpture, representing its ideas by corporeal things, seems to reach its highest point in the complete equilibrium of Soul and Matter—if it give a preponderance to the latter it sinks below its own idea—but it seems altogether impossible for it to elevate the Soul at the expense of Matter, since it must thereby transcend itself. The perfect sculptor indeed, as Winckelmann remarks apropos of the Belvedere Apollo, will use no more material than is needful to accomplish his spiritual purpose; but also, on the other hand, he will put into the Soul no more energy than is at the same time expressed in the material; for precisely upon this, fully to embody the spiritual, depends his art. Sculpture, therefore, can reach its true summit only in the representation of those natures in whose constitution it is implied that they actually embody all that is contained in their Idea or Soul; thus only in divine natures. So that Sculpture, even if no Mythology had preceded it, would of itself have come upon gods, and have invented such if it found none.
Moreover as the Spirit, on this lower platform, has again the same relation to Matter that we have ascribed to the Soul (being the principle of activity and motion, as Matter is that of rest and inaction), the law that regulates Expression and Passion must be a fundamental principle of its nature.
But this law must be applicable not only to the lower passions, but also equally to those higher and godlike passions, if it is permitted so to call them, by which the Soul is affected in rapture, in devotion, in adoration. Hence, since from these passions the gods alone are exempt, Sculpture is inclined from this side also to the imaging of divine natures.
The nature of Painting, however, seems to differ entirely from that of Sculpture. For the former represents objects, not like the latter, by corporeal things, but by light and color, through a medium therefore itself incorporeal and in a measure spiritual. Painting, moreover, gives out its productions nowise as the things themselves, but expressly as pictures. From its very nature therefore it does not lay as much stress on the material as Sculpture, and seems indeed for this reason, while exalting the material above the spirit, to degrade itself more than Sculpture in a like case; on the other hand to be so much more justified in giving a clear preponderance to the Soul.
Where it aims at the highest it will indeed ennoble the passions by Character, or moderate them by Grace, or manifest in them the power of the Soul: but on the other hand it is precisely those higher passions, depending on the relationship of the Soul with a Supreme Being, that are entirely suited to the nature of Painting. Indeed, while Sculpture maintains an exact balance between the force whereby a thing exists outwardly and acts in Nature and that by virtue of which it lives inwardly and as Soul, and excludes mere suffering even from Matter, Painting may soften in favor of the Soul the characteristicness of the force and activity in Matter, and transform it into resignation and endurance, making it apparent that Man becomes more generally susceptible to the inspirations of the Soul, and to higher influences in general.
This diametrical difference explains of itself not only the necessary predominance of Sculpture in the ancient, and of Painting in the modern world (since in the former the tone of mind was thoroughly plastic, whereas the latter makes even the Soul the passive instrument of higher revelations); but this also is evident—that it is not enough to strive after the Plastic in form and manner of representation, but that it is requisite, before all, to think and to feel plastically, that is, antiquely.
And as the deviation of Sculpture into the picturesque is destructive to Art, so the narrowing down of Painting to the conditions and forms belonging to Sculpture is an arbitrarily imposed limitation. For while Sculpture, like gravitation, acts toward one point, it is permitted to Painting, as to light, to fill all space with its creative energy.
This unlimited universality of Painting is demonstrated by History itself, and by the examples of the greatest masters, who, without injury to the essential character of their art, have developed to perfection each particular stage by itself, so that we can find also in the history of Art the same sequence that may be pointed out in its nature—not indeed in exact order of time, but yet substantially. For thus is represented in Michelangelo the oldest and mightiest epoch of liberated Art, that in which it displays its yet uncontrolled strength in gigantic progeny; as in the fables of the symbolic Fore-world, the Earth, after the embrace of Uranus, brought forth at first Titans and heaven-storming giants before the mild reign of the serene gods began.
Thus the painting of the Last Judgment, with which, as the sum of his art, that giant spirit filled the Sistine Chapel, seems to remind us more of the first ages of the Earth and its products, than of its last. Attracted toward the most hidden abysses of organic, particularly of the human form, he shuns not the Terrible; nay, he seeks it purposely, and startles it from its repose in the dark workshops of Nature. Want of delicacy, grace, pleasingness, he balances by the extremest energy; and if he excites horror by his representations, it is the terror that, according to fable, the ancient god Pan spreads around him when he suddenly appears in the assemblies of men.
It is the method of Nature to produce the extraordinary by isolation and the exclusion of opposed qualities. Thus, it was necessary that, in Michelangelo, earnestness and the deep significant energy of Nature should prevail, rather than a sense of the grace and sensibility that belong to the Soul, in order to display the extreme of pure plastic force in the painting of modern times.
After the earlier violence and the vehement impulse of birth is assuaged, the spirit of Nature is transfigured into Soul, and Grace is born. This point Art reached, after Leonardo da Vinci, in Correggio, in whose works the sensuous Soul is the active principle of Beauty.
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As the modern fable of Psyche closes the circle of the old mythology; so Painting, by giving a preponderance to the Soul, attained a new, though not a higher step of Art.
This Guido Reni strove after, and became the proper painter of the Soul. Such seems to us to be the necessary interpretation of his whole endeavor, often uncertain, and, in many of his works, losing itself in the vague.
This is shown, as, perhaps, in few of his other pictures, in the masterpiece that is offered to the admiration of all in the great collection of our king.
In the figure of the heavenward-ascending Virgin, all harshness and sternness are effaced, even to the last trace; and, indeed, does not Painting itself seem in it to soar upward, transfigured on its own pinions, as the liberated Psyche delivered from the severity of Form?
Here nothing outward remains, with separate natural force; everything expresses receptivity and still endurance, even the perishable flesh, the character of which the Italian language designates by the term morbidezza, altogether unlike that with which Raphael invests the descending Queen of Heaven, as she appears to the adoring pope and a saint.
Though the remark be well-founded, that the original of Guido's female heads is the Niobe of antiquity, yet the ground of this similarity is surely no mere intentional imitation; perhaps a like aim led to like means.
As the Florentine Niobe is an extreme in Sculpture, and the representation in it of the Soul, so this well-known picture is an extreme in Painting, which here ventures to lay aside even the requisite of shade and the obscure, and to work almost with pure Light.
Even though it might be permitted to Painting, from its peculiar nature, to give a distinct preponderance to the Soul, yet theory and instruction will do best constantly to aim at that original Centre, whence alone Art may be produced ever anew; whereas, at the stage last mentioned, it must necessarily stand still, or degenerate into cramped mannerism. For even that higher passion is opposed to the idea of having reached the acme of energy, whose image and reflex Art is called upon to display.
A right intelligence will ever enjoy seeing a creature worthily, and, as far as possible, also individually, represented; yea, Deity itself would look down with pleasure on a being that, gifted with a pure soul, should stoutly assert the dignity of its nature outwardly also, and by its sensually efficient existence.
We have seen how the work of Art, springing up out of the depths of Nature, begins with determinateness and limitation, unfolds its inward plenitude and infinity, is finally transfigured in Grace, and at last attains to Soul. But we can conceive only in detail what, in the creative act of mature Art, is but one operation. No theory and no rules can give this spiritual, creative power. It is the pure gift of Nature, which here, for the second time, makes a close; for, having fully actualized herself, she invests the creature with her creative energy. But as, in the grand progress of Art, these different stages appeared successively, until, at the highest, all joined in one; so also, in particulars, sound culture can spring up only where it has unfolded itself regularly from the germ and root to the blossom.
The requirement that Art, like everything living, should commence from the first rudiments, and, to renew its youth, constantly return to them, may seem a hard doctrine to an age that has so often been assured that it has only to take from works of Art already in existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed?
Had the great founders of modern Art thought thus, we should never have seen their miracles. Before them also stood the creations of the ancients, round statues and works in relief, which they might have transferred immediately to their canvas. But such an appropriation of a Beauty not self-won, and therefore unintelligible, would not satisfy an artistic instinct that aimed throughout at the fundamental, and from which the Beautiful was again to create itself with free original energy. They were not afraid, therefore, to appear simple, artless, dry, beside those exalted ancients; nor to cherish Art for a long time in the undistinguished bud, until the period of Grace had arrived.
Whence comes it that we still look upon these works of the older masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect and admiration.
The same relation that they held to the ancients, the present generation holds to them. Their time and ours are joined by no living transmission, no link of continuous, organic growth; we must reproduce Art in the way they did, but with energy of our own, in order to be like them.
Even that Indian-summer of Art, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, could call forth only a few new blossoms on the old stem, but no productive germs, still less plant a new tree of Art. But to set aside the works of perfected Art, and to seek out its scanty and simple beginnings, as some have desired, would be a new and perhaps greater mistake; it would be no real return to the fundamental; simplicity would be affectation, and grow into hypocritical show.
But what prospect does the present time offer for an Art springing from a vigorous germ, and growing up from the root? For it is in a great measure dependent on the character of its time; and who would promise the approbation of the present time to such earnest beginnings, when Art, on the one hand, scarcely obtains equal consideration with other instruments of prodigal luxury, and, on the other, artists and amateurs, with entire want of ability to grasp Nature, praise and demand the Ideal?
Art springs only from that powerful striving of the inmost powers of the heart and the spirit, which we call Inspiration. Everything that from difficult or small beginnings has grown up to great power and height, owes its growth to Inspiration. Thus spring empires and states, thus arts and sciences. But it is not the power of the individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and together all those great spirits.
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It is only when the public life is actuated by the same forces through whose energy Art is elevated, that the latter can derive any advantage from it; for Art cannot, without giving up the nobility of its nature, aim at anything outward.
Art and Science can move only on their own axes; the artist, like every spiritual laborer, can follow only the law that God and Nature have written in his heart. None can help him—he must help himself; nor can he be outwardly rewarded, since anything that he should produce for the sake of aught out of itself, would thereby become a nullity; hence, too, no one can direct him, nor prescribe the path he is to tread. Is he to be pitied if he have to contend against his time, he is deserving of contempt if he truckle to it. But how should it be even possible for him to do this? Without great general enthusiasm there are only sects—no public opinion; not an established taste, not the great ideas of a whole people, but the voices of a few arbitrarily-appointed judges, determine as to merit; and Art, which in its elevation is self-sufficing, courts favor, and serves where it should rule.
To different ages are given different inspirations. Can we expect none for this age, since the new world now forming itself, as it exists in part already outwardly, in part inwardly and in the hearts of men, can no longer be measured by any standard of previous opinion, and since everything, on the contrary, loudly demands higher standards and an entire renovation?
Should not the sense to which Nature and History have more livingly unfolded themselves, restore to Art also its great arguments? The attempt to draw sparks from the ashes of the Past, and fan them again into universal flame, is a vain endeavor. Only a revolution in the ideas themselves is able to raise Art from its exhaustion; only new Knowledge, new Faith, can inspire it for the work by which it can display, in a renewed life, a splendor like the past.
An Art in all respects the same as that of foregoing centuries, will never return; for Nature never repeats herself. Such a Raphael will never be again, but another, who shall have reached in an equally original manner the summit of Art. Only let the fundamental conditions be fulfilled, and renewed Art will show, like that which preceded it, in its first works, its aim and intent. In the production of the distinctly characteristic, if it proceed from a fresh original energy, Grace is already present, even though hidden, and in both the advent of the Soul already determined. Works produced in this manner, even in their rudimentary imperfection, are necessary and eternal. * * *
By George H. Danton, PH.D
Professor of German, Butler College
The group of later Romanticists is distinguished from the earlier pioneers by less emphasis on speculative philosophy, by greater spontaneity, and by more creative ability. The later school was less interested in questions primarily esthetic and was more democratic. Both groups were enemies of the aristocratic Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; but where the earlier group worked with the Kantian understanding and with a supersensuous philosophy, the younger men lived in the world and were of it; they used the people to carry on their propaganda. Thus, though later Romanticism contains nearly all the ideas of earlier Romanticism, it displays in addition also, political, national, and social tendencies which were in the main foreign to the earlier writers.
There was in the later group a deeper sense of religion and a firmer belief in the spiritual foundations of experience than is shown by their predecessors, though all Romanticism tried to penetrate the mysteries of life and all Romanticists were seers as well as prophets. In the later school, too, there appears a development of the nature-sense far beyond anything shown in the first group. Indeed, the Schlegels may be said to have been without a sense for nature; in Tieck there is a great discrepancy between the man, his beliefs, and his practise, and Novalis' nature-feeling is not attached to any specific place. But Brentano loves the Rhine, and Eichendorff's landscape is genuinely Silesian. Caroline and Dorothea know nothing of the mood which makes Bettina throw herself prone in the grass to watch an insect crawl over her hand.
A keener appreciation of natural beauty led to a study of natural science; thence it was but a step to the "night-sides" of nature; and spiritism, mesmerism, occultism, and abnormal psychology fill the minds of such men as the Romantic philosopher Schubert, and of the physicians Carus and Passavant. Justinus Kerner wrote of the Seeress of Prevorst, and Clemens Brentano watched for years at the bedside of a stigmatized nun. On the other hand, from nature comes a love for home and country, and this love serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically German, express the Romantic spirit fully as well as the delicate, spiritual, and thoroughly sane fancies of Philip Otto Runge, the artist of early Romanticism.
As the earlier men centred in Jena, so the later Romanticists flourished in Heidelberg, that city which Eichendorff called "itself a magnificent Romanticism." The earlier group was largely North German and brought with it clear perception and a certain power of analysis, an ability to dissect and to reason. With the Heidelberg group the South begins to play a larger part, though there were a number of North Germans in it. The richer fancy, the longer literary tradition, now add color to their productions. It is significant, too, that though "castle Romanticism" does not die out, a new note is struck with the celebration of the Rhine in song, story, and legend. The river begins with Romantic tradition and in a Romantic milieu, but rises to political significance as "Germany's stream and not Germany's boundary." The southward tendency of the movement reached its climax when its centre shifted to Munich, with a culture-loving king, an Academy of Sciences and a new University. Munich was fortunately not destined to become like Vienna, that other South German city, "a Capua of the spirit."
Though certain members of the later Romantic group were closely associated with each other in a way that was unknown to the older set, Arnim and Savigny having each married a sister of Brentano, there was less real solidarity among them than in their forerunners. By no means all the men treated within the confines of the present article had the close personal association which, when combined with intellectual or literary activity, goes by the rather loose name of a "school." The first Romanticists were held together by a common effort to formulate or to attain a speculative philosophy. In the second group, there was a decentralizing, catholicizing tendency, and, above all, a greater individual creative ability. It was not merely the chance difference of external fortunes that kept them apart, though they never held together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded works of real esthetic value.
Very significant of the differences between the schools is their journalistic activity. The ideal of the first Romanticists was to work without collaboration; but the very prospectus of Arnim's Journal for Hermits is signed by a company of editors. The early journals were turned to the study of German literature through a renunciation of the present; the later Germanic studies arose from a high idealism and from a sincere desire to awaken the present to new national activity. When, later in life, Görres remarked of these journals that their collaborators felt as if they were accompanying the Holy Roman Empire to its grave, he was thinking of the year in which the most important of them flourished, 1808. In this, Germany's darkest period, Kleist's Phoebus, so cordially hated by many, and Arnim's Journal for Hermits had their brief but influential career.
Such a journal as the Athenaeum, with its over-emphasis on the esthetic, with its fighting spirit, its excoriating, inexorable wit, its constructive and destructive criticism, its complete and total silence on Schiller, would have been an impossibility in the later period. The feeling for and thinking in Fragments, as practised by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, was foreign to the new school. They had no illusions that such thinking would become the daily custom of the people; they kept their eyes open to that which went on about them, and though they no more dared than the earlier group to work directly upon the political conditions of the day as did Görres later (1814) in his Rheinischer Merkur, they attempted indirectly to react on the broad mass by branching out into religion and other folk-interests as the earlier school never cared to do. Perhaps this is an excuse for the shallowness of some of the product, especially of the fiction; at any rate, the attempt at dissemination was not without its success.
The external link connecting the two schools as well as the Romantic groups in general and the object of their star-worship, Goethe, was Clemens Maria Brentano (1778-1842), in many ways the most typical Romantic figure of either school. Brentano's grandmother, Sophie La Roche, had been the friend of Wieland; his mother, Maximiliane, played a not unimportant rôle in the life of the young Goethe and is immortalized in the latter part of Werther. Maximiliane married Brentano, an Italian from the Como region, and Clemens was the third child of this loveless union. Brentano's early life was not happy; he was destined for a business career but was a failure in it, and then studied at various universities but with no great application or success. From 1797-1800 he was at Jena, where he succeeded in making himself hated by the Schlegels in spite of his defense of them in his satirical play, Gustav Wasa (1800). This play, in the manner of Tieck's Puss in Boots, attempts to ridicule Kotzebue. The method is the same as Tieck's: there is the play within the play, the gagged officer (to take the place of the critic Böttger), the puns, of which, perhaps, the one on Lucinde (Lux inde) is the best, and which, as often in Brentano, go beyond and surpass Tieck. Romantic irony flourishes: the whole world of the theatre, the author, the very lights, the building, the working day and the musical instruments in the orchestra are dramatized in turn. The dialogue of the latter far more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. Wasa, unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be compared with August von Schlegel's Gate of Honor as a satire on the same subject.
Brentano's Godwi (1801), the sub-title of which, "An Unmanageable Novel by Maria," shows its character, is a far better production. It has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent tendency toward that point of view. The plot of Godwi runs wild, but the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading. Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the author's own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding parts of the work are referred to by page and line—"This is the pond into which I fall on page so and so."
If Brentano's Rosary cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as The Lore-Lay, the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use of the refrain in all phases and genres, especially to emphasize and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the French adage, "Quand le coeur chante, c'est toujours un refrain." Brentano surrenders himself passionately to his mood. His surrender and his distorting irony, like Heine's, arise from his desire to assimilate all of the outside world; it explains, in part, the Romantic desire to mediate, to translate, to bridge the cleft between oneself and the world. In part, too, it explains the desire for musical imitation so apparent in both Tieck and Brentano. It is an attempt to express in terms of one sense the ideas or apperceptions of another. But where Tieck falls into meaningless jingle, Brentano succeeds, not merely in suggesting but in producing the effect, as in his Merry Musicians (1803), or in bringing about its latent mood, as in his Spinner's Song or in his version of the old folk-epithalamium, "Come out, come out, thou lovely, lovely bride."
Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized latter part of The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf (1816) to the simple and homely Kasper and Annie (1817), with its elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, but the fancy is exuberant and the interest well maintained. Brentano's discovery of the Rhine as an object of poetry and veneration is completely summarized in Radlauf, where the Rhine lyrics are often of wonderful beauty and definiteness and the river becomes a benevolent deus ex machina, who—significantly—in dreams, guides and aids the simple, honest miller in his search for a bride.
Later in life, Brentano returned to the Roman Church into which he had been baptized as a child, and gradually withdrew from literary activity. Long before his death in 1842, he had renounced his earlier life as wicked and abhorrent, and had given himself over entirely to the Church. But his career with its constant wanderings, its lack of permanency of occupation, of family ties, and of a real home, his inability to grow old, his inner unreality, his excessive productivity-in short, all that is incomplete, over-stimulated, destructive of self, make him the most typical figure of the later Romantic group.
Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) is by no means so bizarre a figure. Born in Berlin of a noble family, he inherited a peculiar patriotism and his love of culture, and developed these without the eccentricities which characterized his brother-in-law. The main influences of his early years were Goethe and Jena, but, as a direct inspiration, Tieck must also be mentioned. Arnim's early works lie largely in the field of natural science, especially in physics. He had little of Brentano's lyric gift; indeed, his poems, where not wooden, are often merely reminiscent. They show, too, in an unusual degree, the ability to adapt himself to another's mood and assimilate it—that which the Germans call "Nachempfinden," a quality which stood him in excellent stead in his work on The Boy's Magic Horn.