The book was the boast of a youth liberated before reaching the age of reason. In 1797 he published a short story, “Der blonde Eckhert,” which won the admiration of the brothers Schlegel. At their invitation he moved to Jena, which was now the Romantic citadel; Tieck, however, left in 1801 to live on a friend’s estate in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. He devoted himself for a time to translating Elizabethan plays; then to editing, with brilliant critiques, the works of his contemporaries Novalis and Kleist. Following in Lessing’s steps, he filled for seventeen years (1825–42), the pilloried post of Dramaturg—dramatic critic and manager—at the Dresden Theater; his forthright essays there brought him some enemies, but also a national renown second only to Goethe’s and August von Schlegel’s in the field of literary criticism. In 1842 King Frederick William IV (who had never heard of Lovell) invited him to Berlin; Tieck (having long outlived Lovell) accepted, and spent his remaining years as a pillar of literature in the Prussian capital.
Novalis (1772–1801) was not given so many years in which to recover from the ideas of his youth. He had, for literature, the uncertain advantage of noble birth: his father, director of the salt works in Saxony, was cousin to Prince Karl von Hardenberg, of the Prussian ministry. The poet’s real name was Freiherr Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg; he used “Novalis” as a pseudonym, but it had been the actual name of his ancestors in the thirteenth century. His family belonged to the Herrnhut community of Pietists; he held to their strong religious bent, but toward the end he sought a reconciliation of Catholicism with Protestantism as a step toward European unity. In his nineteenth year he entered the University of Jena, developed a warm friendship with Tieck, Schiller, and Friedrich von Schlegel, and probably took some of Fichte’s courses, which were scattering sparks from Jena to Weimar.
After a year at the University of Wittenberg he followed his father into business at Arnstadt in Thuringia. At nearby Grüningen he met Sophie von Kuhn, whose beauty of form and character so moved him that he asked her parents for her hand in marriage. In 1795 he and Sophie were formally engaged, though she was only fourteen. Soon thereafter she fell ill of an incurable ailment of the liver. Two operations further weakened her, and in 1797 she died. Novalis never recovered from this Liebestod. His most famous poems, six Hymnen an die Nacht (1800), were somber memories of Sophie. In 1798 he became engaged to Julie von Charpentier, but this betrothal too failed to reach marriage; tuberculosis had joined with grief in consuming the poet; and on March 25, 1801, Novalis died, aged twenty-eight.
He left behind him a novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1798–1800), which gave intense expression to the longing for religious peace. He had once praised Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as a realistic yet wholesome description of a man’s development; now he condemned it as idealizing a prosaic adjustment to earthly tasks. The hero of his own novel was presented as an historical character, the real author of the Nibelungenlied, a Galahad devoted to pursuit of a blue flower symbolizing the transformation of death into an opening to infinite understanding. “It is the blue flower that I long to see,” says Heinrich; “it lies constantly in my mind, and I can imagine and think of nothing else.”20 Here, and in a once famous essay on “Christendom in Europe,” Novalis idealized the Middle Ages (even to defending the Inquisition) as having realized Europe’s recurring aspiration—political unity under one religious faith. It was (he felt) wise and right for the Church to resist the growth of materialistic science and secular philosophy; in this perspective the Enlightenment was a tragic setback for the European soul. As death beckoned to him Novalis rejected all earthly aims and delights, and dreamed of a coming life in which there would be no sickness and no grief, and love would never end.
VI. THE BROTHERS SCHLEGEL
August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) and Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) made a remarkable brotherhood: different in temperament and love, diverging in studies and creeds, and united at last in Sanskrit and philology. Born in Hanover to a Protestant pastor, they became theologians at puberty, and heretics at twenty. At Göttingen August Wilhelm was charmed into studying the transmigrations of words by the lectures and personality of Christian Heyne, translator of Virgil, and into Elizabethan lore by Gottfried Bürger, translator of Shakespeare and author of the ballad Lenore.21 The same university received Friedrich von Schlegel five years after his brother; he began as a student of law, and wandered into literature, art, and philosophy. He ripened rapidly, joined his brother at Jena in 1796, and shared with him in founding the Athenäum, which for two years (1798–1800) was the mouthpiece and lodestar of the Romantic movement in Germany. Novalis and Schleiermacher contributed; Tieck came; Fichte and Schelling added their philosophies; and the lively circle was rounded out by some talented women romantically free.
Friedrich von Schlegel was the intellectual pacemaker of the coterie, if only because he moved faster than the others in adopting and discarding ideas. In 1799 he issued a novel, Lucinde, which became a red flag leading the attack upon aging creeds and troublesome taboos. Theoretically it was (like Shelley’s Defence) a plea for the rights of poetry as an interpreter and guide of life. How wise, for example, is the poet’s scorn of the pursuit of riches? “Why this constant striving and pushing without rest and repose? Industry and utility are the angels of death.”22 The hero proclaims also “the divine gospel of joy and love,” by which he means the joy of loving without the bonds of matrimony. When Friedrich tried to visit his brother, then teaching at Göttingen (1800), the authorities at Hanover sent a worried order to the university rector: “Should the Professor’s brother, Friedrich Schlegel, notorious for the immoral tendency of his writings, come to Göttingen, for the purpose of staying there for any time, this is not to be permitted; you will be so good as to intimate to him that he must leave the town.”23
The woman who had served as Schlegel’s inspiration for Lucinde was Caroline Michaelis. Born in 1763, she married a university professor (1784), became unhappy with him, was freed by his death, and enjoyed for several years the pleasures of a widow celebrated for both intellect and beauty. August von Schlegel, while a student at Göttingen, fell in love with her, and proposed marriage. She refused him as four years her junior. When he left to tutor in Amsterdam (1791) she entered upon a series of adventures, in one of which she was surprised with motherhood. She joined a revolutionary group in Mainz, was arrested, was freed by her parents, and went to Leipzig to give birth. There August von Schlegel appeared, proposed again, married her (1796), adopted her child, and went with them to Jena.
There her education, her vivacity, and her intelligent conversation made her the favorite hostess of the liberals. Wilhelm von Humboldt called her the cleverest woman he had ever known.24 Goethe and Herder came over from Weimar to sit at her table and enjoy her company.25 Friedrich von Schlegel, who was then living with his brother, took his turn falling in love with her. He made her the Lucinde of his novel, and raised such paeans to her that his passion was suffocated with words. Meanwhile August, whose passion had cooled to chivalry, went off to lecture in Berlin (1801). There he formed an attachment with Sophie Bernhardi, who divorced her husband to live with her new love. Returning to Jena, August found Caroline enamored of Schelling, and amiably agreed to a divorce. Caroline married Schelling (1804), and stayed with him till her death (1809). Schelling, though he married again, felt her influence through many years. “Even if she had not been to me what she was, I should mourn the human being, should lament that this intellectual paragon no longer exists, this rare woman who, to masculine strength of soul and the keenest intellect, united the tenderest, most womanly, loving heart.”26
Quite as remarkable was Dorothea von Schlegel (1763–1839), nee Brendel Mendelssohn. To please her famous father, she married in 1783 the banker Simon Veit. She bore him a son, Philipp Veit, who became a prominent painter in the next generation. Having plenty of money, she lost interest in it, ventured into the still more uncertain game of philosophy, and became an intellectual luminary
in Rachel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin. There Friedrich von Schlegel found her, and straightway fell in love with her; and she, who was enamored of ideas, found him swimming in them. He was then twenty-five, she was thirty-two; but the volatile author was captivated by the complex charms of this femme de trente ans and more. She was not strikingly beautiful, but she gave him a sustaining appreciation of his mind, she could accompany him understandingly in his philosophical and philological explorations, and she offered him a devotion that survived all quarrels till his death. Her husband, feeling that she was lost to him, gave her a divorce (1798). She lived contentedly in unregistered union with Schlegel, accompanied him to Paris in 1802, accepted baptism, was renamed Dorothea, and became Friedrich’s legal wife in 1804.
Brother August had by that time become the most famous lecturer on the Continent, and had made progress with that remarkable translation of Shakespeare which soon made the great Elizabethan almost as popular in Germany as in England. Though August has been called “the founder of the Romantic school in Germany,”27 he had many qualities of the classic mind and character: order, clarity, proportion, moderation, and a steady procession toward a defined goal. His lectures “On Dramatic Literature,” given in various cities and years, excel in those qualities; and those on Shakespeare abound in illuminating comments—sometimes bravely critical of his beloved bard. These lectures, wrote William Hazlitt in 1817, “give by far the best account of the plays that has hitherto appeared…. We confess to some little jealousy… that it should be reserved for a foreign critic to give reasons for the faith which we English have in Shakespeare.”28
Mme. de Staël, touring Germany in quest of material for a book, persuaded August (1804), for twelve thousand francs a year, to go with her to Coppet as tutor for her children, and reference encyclopedia for herself. Later he traveled with her in Italy, France, and Austria, returned with her to Coppet, and stayed with her till 1811, when the Swiss authorities, obeying Napoleon, ordered him to leave Switzerland. He went to Vienna, and was surprised to find his brother lecturing there on the Middle Ages as the golden era of European faith and unity.
Vienna was the Catholic capital of Germany, and Friedrich and Dorothea had been converted to Catholicism in 1808. Years ago she had said: “These pictures [of saints] and the Catholic music touch me so, that I am determined, if I become a Christian, to be a Catholic.”29 Friedrich von Schlegel ascribed his own conversion to a “prédilection d’artiste”; and in many ways Catholicism—so hospitable to imagination, feeling, and beauty—seemed the natural ally and fulfillment of Romantic sentiment. The rationalist, buffeted by mystery and humiliated by mortality, grew weary of reasoning. The individualist, lonely in the insecurity of self, turned to the Church as a communal shelter and comforting home. So Friedrich von Schlegel, cleverest of reasoners, the most ardent of the young individualists, the most reckless of the rebels, turned now back of Voltaire, back of Luther and Calvin, to medieval Europe and its omnipotent Church. He mourned the replacement of inspiring myths with desolating science, and declared that “the deepest want and deficiency of all modern art is the fact that the artists have no mythology.”30
Perhaps his respect for mythology had been widened by his researches in the literature and myths of ancient India. Begun in Paris in 1802, these researches had culminated in a scholarly and seminal treatise Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (On the Language and Wisdom of the Hindus, 1808), which shared in establishing the comparative philology of the Indo-European languages. Presumably Friedrich discussed this aspect of his life when his brother joined him for a while in the Vienna of 1811. August, recalling his work with Christian Heyne in philology, resumed his interest in that field; and the combined contribution of the brothers to Sanskrit studies was the most solid and lasting result of their lives.
Friedrich had made quite a place for himself in the cultural and political life of Vienna. He had won a secretarial post in the Austrian government, and had helped to write the anti-Napoleonic blast which Archduke Karl Ludwig had issued as part of the 1809 campaign. In 1810 and 1812 he delivered, in Vienna, outstanding lectures on European history and literature; in these discourses he expounded his theories of literary criticism and scholarship, and gave a classic analysis of Romanticism. In 1820 he became editor of the right-wing Catholic journal Concordia; his repudiation, in this, of the beliefs that he had so lustily defended in his Jena days led to a lasting alienation from his brother. He gave his final course of lectures in Dresden in 1828, and died there in the following year. Dorothea treasured his memory, and followed him, in thought and deed, till her end in 1839.
August outlived both of them. In May, 1812, he was reunited with Mme. de Staël; he guided her through Austria and Russia to St. Petersburg, and went on with her to Stockholm. There, through Madame’s influence, he was appointed secretary to Bernadotte, crown prince of Sweden, and accompanied him in the campaign of 1813 against Napoleon. For his services he was ennobled by the Swedish government. In 1814 he rejoined Mme. de Staël at Coppet, and he stayed with her till her death. Then, his remarkable devotion to her having been fulfilled, he accepted a professorship in literature at the University of Bonn (1818). He resumed his studies of Sanskrit, set up a Sanskrit press, edited and published the text of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Ramayana, and labored for ten years on an Indische Bibliothek, or library of Hindu literature. He died in 1845, aged seventy-eight, leaving behind him a treasure of Shakespeare painstakingly transformed into German, and, in his lectures, a harvest of literary memories and ideas for Coleridge to glean from on his way to German philosophy. It was a good life.
CHAPTER XXXII
German Philosophy
1789–1815
OUR approach to the idealistic philosophy of Kant and his successors is obstructed by the current preemption of the word ideal for moral excellence, and by our habit, in an age of science and industry, of thinking of things perceived, and seldom of the process of perception itself. The opposite attitudes competed in Greek philosophy, where Democritus took atoms as his starting point, and Plato took ideas. In modern philosophy Bacon stressed knowledge of the world, Descartes began with the thinking self. Hobbes reduced everything to matter, Berkeley to mind. Kant gave German philosophy its distinctive character by arguing that its prime task is the study of the process by which we form ideas. He admitted the reality of external objects, but insisted that we can never know what they objectively are, since we know them only as changed by the organs and processes of perception into our ideas. Philosophical “idealism” is therefore the theory that nothing is known to us except ideas, and that therefore matter is a form of mind.*
I FICHTE: 762–1814
1. The Radical
Here, as so often in literary history, the man has proved more interesting than his books. These suffer erosion by the flux of fashions in ideas and forms, but the study of a soul picking its way through the labyrinth of life is a living lesson in philosophy, an ever moving picture of experience molding character and transforming thought.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte crowded a brave variety of experience into his fifty-two years. His father was a Saxon ribbon weaver. His mother prayed that her boy should be a pastor; he agreed, and after some local schooling he was sent to Jena to study theology. The more he studied the more he wondered and doubted. A village preacher gave him a Refutation of the Errors of Spinoza; Fichte was charmed by the errors,2 and decided that he was not fit for a pastorate. Nevertheless he graduated in the faculty of theology. Almost penniless, he walked from Jena to Zurich to secure a post as tutor. There he fell in love with Johanna Maria Rahn, and was formally betrothed to her; but they agreed not to marry till he was financially adult.
He moved to Leipzig, tutored, read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and was fascinated. He made his way to Königsberg, and presented Kant a Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Essay toward a Critique of All Revelation, 1792). The old philosopher balked at Fichte’s request for a loan, but helped him to find
a publisher for his treatise. The printer neglected to state the author’s name; when a critic ascribed the essay to Kant, Kant named the author and praised the book; Fichte was at once received into the not quite “serene brotherhood of philosophes.”3 He did not do so well with the theologians, for the argument of his treatise was that although revelation does not prove the existence of God, we must ascribe our moral code to God, if that code is to be accepted and obeyed by mankind.
On Kant’s recommendation Fichte found remunerative employment as a tutor in Danzig. His betrothed now agreed to add her savings to his income, and on that basis they were married in 1793. He further signalized the year by publishing, anonymously, two vigorous essays. In the Restoration of Freedom of Thought by the Princes of Europe he began by praising some enlightened rulers, and berated princes who obstructed the progress of the human mind; and he mourned the wave of repression that had followed the death of Frederick the Great. Reform is better than revolution, for a revolution can throw man back into barbarism; and yet a successful revolution can advance mankind as much in half a century as reform could have done in a thousand years. Then Fichte addressed his readers—at a time when feudalism was still in force through most of Germany:
Hate not your princes but yourselves. One of the sources of your misery is your exaggerated estimate of these personages, whose minds are warped by an enervating education, indulgence, and superstition…. These are the men who are exhorted to suppress freedom of thought…. Cry aloud to your princes that you will never permit your freedom of thought to be filched from you….