by Will Durant
In him the Romantic surrender to feeling reached its highest point in uncontrolled intensity, in power of imagination, and in brilliance of style. He seems at times to have been more French than German, antipodal to Goethe and brother to Baudelaire, or rather to Rimbaud. He almost justified Goethe’s unsympathetic judgment: “The classic is healthy, the romantic is sickly.” Let us see.
CHAPTER XXXI
German Literature 1789–1815
I. REVOLUTION AND RESPONSE
THE German literature of the age of Napoleon was affected by the natural rebelliousness of youth, the lingering waves of Sturm und Drang, the echoes of English Romantic poetry and Richardson’s novels, the classical tradition in Lessing and the later Goethe, the successful revolt of the American colonies, the heresies of the French Enlightenment, above all by the daily impact of the French Revolution, and, toward the end, by the drama of Napoleon’s rise and fall. Many educated Germans had read—some in French—works by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and a lesser number had felt the sting of Helvétius, d’Holbach, and La Mettrie. The French philosophes had helped to form rulers like Frederick the Great, Joseph II of Austria, Duke Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick, and Duke Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar; and, if only through these men, those writers had left their mark on German civilization. The French Revolution seemed, at first, a logical development of the Enlightenment philosophy: a happy end to feudalism and class privileges, a lusty proclamation of universal human rights, an invigorating liberation of speech, press, worship, conduct, and thought. These ideas—many of them independently developed in Germany —crossed the Rhine on the wings of news or with the armies of the Revolution, and swept over the heartland of Europe even to distant Königsberg.
So the molders of the German mind, and the makers of German literature, welcomed the French Revolution in its first three years. Gentlemen Freemasons, mystic Rosicrucians, proud Illuminati, hailed it as the dawn of the golden age they had awaited so long and ardently. Peasants staged revolts against feudal lords, “Imperial Knights,” and the episcopal rulers of Trier and Speyer.1 Bourgeois Hamburg applauded the Revolution as an uprising of businessmen against arrogant aristocrats. Klopstock, the old poet domiciled in Hamburg, read his poems at a festival of freedom, and cried with joy over his lines. Scholars, journalists, poets, and philosophers broke out in a cappella hymns of praise. Johann Voss, translator of Homer, Johannes von Müller, historian, Friedrich von Gentz, diplomat at large, Friedrich Hölderlin, poet, Friedrich Schleiermacher, theologian, the philosophers from Kant to Hegel—all sang litanies to the Revolution. “It is glorious,” wrote Georg Forster (who had accompanied Captain Cook around the world), “to see what philosophy has ripened in the brain and realized in the state.”2 Everywhere, even in the ranks of royalty (as in Prince Henry, surviving brother of Frederick the Great), Germany, for an ecstatic while, raised lauds to revolutionary France. In that ecstasy German literature, after so long hibernating from religious strife, adding the Revolution to the victories of Frederick, rose in thirty years (1770–1800) to such vigor, diversity, and brilliance as to rival the ripe literatures of England and France. And that revival, astonishing in its pace, went to play its part in rousing Germany to throw off the yoke of France, and enter into the politically, industrially, scientifically, philosophically richest century in its history.
Of course that joyous mood did not last. Stories came of the assault upon the Tuileries, of the September Massacres and the Terror, of the imprisonment and execution of the King and the Queen. Then came the French occupation of German states, the mounting levies of money and men to pay for imperial protection and the martial cost of spreading liberty. Year by year German fervor for the Revolution waned, and one by one the defenders (excepting Kant) turned into disillusioned skeptics, and some of them into angry foes.
II. WEIMAR
The men who made a constellation of genius at the court of Weimar served as an intellectual anchor for the wits of Germans during the unsettling impact of the Revolution and Napoleon. Duke Charles Augustus himself was a volatile mixture of talents and moods. He inherited the duchy at the age of one, and became its actual ruler at eighteen (1775). He derived his general education from a tutor, and further instruction from the responsibilities of administration, the whims of a mistress, the dangers of war and the hunt. Not the least of his schools was the salon of his mother. There he met poets, generals, scientists, philosophers, divines, and men of affairs, together with some of the most cultivated but undenatured women of Germany, who seasoned their ancestral wisdom with wit and charm, and counted that day lost which had not been warmed with some discreet amour. “Ah, here we have women!” reported Jean Paul Richter. “Everything is revolutionarily daring here; that a woman is married signifies nothing.”3
In 1772 the Duchess (herself a model of cheerful virtue) invited the scholar, poet, and novelist Christoph Wieland to come and tutor her sons Charles Augustus and Konstantin.*He fulfilled his duties with modesty and competence, and remained at Weimar till his death. He was fifty-six when the Revolution came; he welcomed it, but (in a “Cosmopolitan Address” of October, 1789), he asked the National Assembly of France to guard against mob rule:
The nation is suffering from liberty fever, which makes the Parisians—the politest people in the world—thirst for the blood of aristocrats…. When the people, sooner or later, comes to itself, will it not see that it is led by the nose by 1,200 petty tyrants, instead of being governed by a king?… Yet you cannot be more deeply convinced than I that your nation was wrong to bear such misgovernment so long; that the best form of government is the separation and equilibrium of the executive, legislative, and judiciary; that every people has an indefeasible right to as much freedom as can coexist with order; and that each must be taxed in proportion to his income.4
In 1791 he wrote that he had never expected his dream of political justice to be so nearly realized as in the person of Louis XVI.5 The execution of the King in January, 1792, turned him against the Revolution; the Terror sickened him. Later in that year he published “Words in Season,” which reached some modest conclusions: “One must go on preaching, till men listen, that mankind can grow happier only by becoming more reasonable and more moral. … Reform must begin not with constitutions but with the individual. The conditions of happiness are in our own hands.”6
Johann Gottfried von Herder—the last of the Weimar quartet to settle there and the first to die—commended the Revolution till the Queen was guillotined; thereafter he renounced the Revolution as a cruel abortion of humane ideals. In his final years he recovered hope; despite its dementia praecox the Revolution, he felt, marked an advance only second to the Reformation in the history of modern Europe; it would end feudal ownership of bodies as the Reformation had ended papal power over minds; now men would lay less stress on birth and rank; ability, wherever born, would be free to develop and create. The advance, however, would cost Europe dearly, and Herder was glad that the experiment had been made in France rather than in his beloved Germany, where men did not so soon take fire and burn up, but where quiet labor and patient scholarship would guide the growth of youth with a mild but steady and spreading light.
Friedrich Schiller—the Romantic soul fondly guarded by the classic three—had come to Weimar (1795) after exciting ventures in drama, poetry, history, and philosophy. Romantically imaginative, painfully sensitive, he had found little to love in the Württemberg of his youth. He responded to oppression by worshiping Rousseau, and writing a revolutionary play. Karl Moor, hero of Die Räuber (1781), denounced the exploitation of man by man with an ardor that left nothing for Marx to add but scholarship. Still more revolutionary was Schiller’s third play, Kabale und Liebe (Cabal and Love, 1784); it exposed the corruption, extravagance, and fierce tenure of unearned privilege, and praised the steady, patient, and productive life of the German bourgeoisie. In the best of his pre-Revolution dramas, Don Carlos (1787), Schiller, now twenty-eight, appealed less to the wrath o
f the poor than to some potential nobility in power; he put into the mouth of Marquis Posa lines summoning Philip II to be the “father of his people,” to “let happiness flow from your horn of plenty,” to “let man’s mind ripen in your vast empire, to become, amid a thousand kings, a king indeed.”7
Passing from youth to middle age, Schiller naturally passed from radicalism to liberalism. He discovered ancient Greece, and was deepened by its dramatists. He read Kant, and dulled his poetry with philosophy. In 1787 he visited Weimar, was excited by its women, and calmed by Wieland and Herder. (Goethe was then in Italy.) In 1788 he published Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande (History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands), and checked his philosophy with history. In 1789, on Goethe’s recommendation to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Schiller was appointed professor of history at Jena. In October of that year he wrote to a friend: “It is a petty ideal to write for a single nation; and for a philosopher such a barrier is intolerable…. The historian can only kindle for a nation insofar as it is an essential element in the progress of civilization.”8
When the news of the Revolution reached Jena it found Schiller enjoying a middle-age spread of income and outlook, public acceptance, and tolerant understanding. His correspondence with Goethe, across the gaps of twelve miles in space and ten years in age, had helped the poet in Goethe to survive the prose of administration and the cautions of prosperity, and had helped Schiller to realize that human nature has changed too little in history to make political revolutions profitable for the poor. He sympathized with the King and Queen captured at Versailles in 1789, arrested in Varennes in 1791, and evicted from their prison palace in 1792. Shortly thereafter the revolutionary Convention unanimously conferred upon “le sieur Gilles” the title of citoyen français. A week later the September Massacres announced the sovereignty of an armed crowd; in December Louis XVI was put on trial. Schiller began to write a pamphlet in his defense; before he could finish it the King had been guillotined.
Goethe smiled at the vicissitudes of his friend’s political faith, but he himself had traveled far from the certainties of his youth. He had had an ample fling with women sweet and sour before being invited in 1775, aged twenty-six, to leave Frankfurt and live in Weimar as Duke Charles Augustus’ poet in ordinary and comrade in both forms of venery. During the next twelve years he absorbed economic and political realities, and grew apace; the Romantic author of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) disappeared in the privy councilor who saw a new age in European history take form at Valmy in 1792. The disorderly deterioration of the Revolution in that year led him to conclude that slow reforms under “enlightened despots” touched by philosophy—and under local rulers of education and goodwill like his own Duke of Weimar—would cost the people less than a sudden overturn in which the precarious bases and habits of social order might collapse into a decade of passion and violence. One of his Venetian Epigrams had expressed this fear as early as 1790:
Let our rulers take warning betimes from France’s misfortune;
But, men of little degree, you should take warning still more.
Great men go to destruction; but who gives the people protection
When the rough mob becomes tyrant over us all?
He applauded when Napoleon ended the chaos of the Revolution by seizing power and establishing a constitution that allowed the people to enjoy an occasional plebiscite without too much interference with a decisive and competent government. His appreciation of the Corsican was not diminished by Napoleon’s flattering reception of him at Erfurt in 1807; and the report of that interview shared considerably in giving the poet-councilor an international reputation.
Some Romantic tremors persisted beneath his developing classic steadiness of judgment and taste. Faust, Part I (1808) was a love story as well as a medieval “morality”; and Elective Affinities (1809) seemed to justify the rising cry of the new generation for mating by mutual attraction rather than by parental finance or legal bond. The councilor become philosopher continued to flutter about young women even after reaching threescore years and ten. But his studies of ancient art in Italy, his developing interest in science, his reading of Spinoza, and his declining physical vigor made for unhurried judgment and a wide-ranging view. The change was pronounced in his autobiography (1811), which looked upon its hero with remarkable objectivity. Romantic Germany—agitated by the emotional Wackenroder and Novalis, the free-love Schlegels, the insane Hölderlin, and the mercy-killer-suicide Kleist—resented his rising criticism of the French Revolution, and hardly noticed that he had belabored the ruling class too. During the German War of Liberation he found it hard to hate Napoleon and the French. He explained to Eckermann:
How could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated on earth, and to which I owe so great a part of my own possessions? There is a stage where national hatred vanishes altogether, and where one stands to a certain extent above the nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people as if it were one’s own.9
His generation in Germany never forgave him, and seldom read him. It ranked Schiller above him,10 and preferred Kotzebue to either.11 Goethe’s plays were seldom performed at Weimar, and his publishers deplored the poor sale of his collected works. Nevertheless an Englishman, Lord Byron, in 1820, dedicated Marino Faltero to him as “by far the first literary character which has existed in Europe since the death of Voltaire.”12 He could not bear to read Kant, but he was the wisest man of his time.
III. THE LITERARY SCENE
Germany was busy, as never before, writing, printing, and publishing newspapers, periodicals, books. In 1796 Aloys Senefelder, at Munich, stumbled upon the process later called lithography, by scratching his mother’s laundry list upon a stone; it occurred to him that words and pictures, in various colors, could be engraved or embossed (in reverse as in a mirror) upon a smooth stone or metal plate, from which innumerable copies could be printed. Hence rose an ocean of prints from Goya and Hiroshige to Currier and Ives and Picasso.
Newspapers were many, small, partisan, and censored. The Allgemeine Zeitung, founded at Tübingen in 1798, moved to Stuttgart, then to Ulm, then to Augsburg, then to Munich, to escape the local police. The Kölnische Zeitung, established in 1804, had a quieter career, being patriotically Catholic, and then Napoleonic. Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Nuremberg had journals antedating the Revolution, and still serving time today. Periodicals abounded. We have noted one of the finest, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, published at Leipzig by the firm of Breitkopf and Härtel from one revolution to another, 1795 to 1849. The most brilliant was the Athenäum, founded by the Schlegel brothers in 1798. Publishers were numerous. The annual exhibition of their products made the Leipzig book fair the literary event of the year.
A special class of writers, loosely classed as publicists, earned wide influence by their vigorously partisan but well-informed discussion of the basic issues of the age. Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832) hailed the fall of the Bastille, but cooled when he met the skeptical mind of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and read and translated Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. Having risen in the Prussian civil service to be a counselor in the War Ministry, he led a literary campaign against such ideas as the rights of man, liberty and equality, sovereignty of the people, and liberty of the press. He was not appeased by Napoleon’s taming of the Revolution. He attacked Napoleon as a militarist whose conquests were destroying that balance of power upon which, in the view of most diplomats, the peace, order, and sanity of Europe depended. He became the most eloquent of the voices urging the King of Prussia to lead a crusade against Napoleon, and when Frederick William III hesitated Gentz passed into the service of Austria (1802). After Napoleon overwhelmed the Austrians at Austerlitz Gentz took refuge in Bohemia, but in 1809 he was back in Vienna, promoting the new war upon Napoleon. He served as secretary and aide to Metternich at the Congress of Vienna, and supported him in the postwar dip
lomacy of crushing every liberal development. He lived on, old and ill, through the revolts of 1830, and died convinced that he had served well the interests of mankind.
Joseph von Görres was a more sensitive spirit, half Italian and all emotion, hardly fit for a rough arena crowded with gladiators of the pen. Born a Catholic, he left the Church to support the Revolution. He helped in the French conquest of the left bank of the Rhine, and applauded Napoleon’s transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into the Rheinbund. He hailed the French occupation of Rome with the cry “Rome is free.” But the arrogance of the French troops, the exactions of the French administrators, aroused the resentment of the young revolutionary. In 1798 he founded a frail journal, Das rothes Blatt (The Red Leaf), as the voice of a republican loving the Revolution but distrusting the French. He recognized in Napoleon’s seizure of the French government the end of the Revolution, and in Napoleon himself a dangerous appetite for power. He married, and took a vacation from politics. When Germany rose to her War of Liberation, Görres joined in the campaign with a newspaper, the Rheinische Merkur, but when, after Napoleon’s removal, the victors enforced political reaction wherever they could, Görres attacked them so vigorously that he had to take refuge in Switzerland, where he lived in extreme poverty. All other lights having failed him, he returned in sad repentance to the Catholic Church (1824). Ludwig I of Bavaria raised him from indigence by appointing him professor of history at Munich. There, writing his four-volume Christliche Mystik (1836–42), he solaced his days with imaginative scholarship, and darkened his nights with satanic visions. Thirty-four years after his death the Görres Gesellschaft was established (1876) to continue his researches in the history of the Christian Church.
