Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany — Text and Context

all that Herder had promised. To him man was not merely theoretically the last link in nature's chain; the men in his works were themselves natures; and in his scientific research he discerned with the eye of genius the universal laws of evolution. His own Ego was a microcosm, and produced the effect of such on the most discerning of his younger contemporaries. "Goethe and life are one," says Rahel. So profound was his insight into nature, so entirely was he a living protest against every supernatural belief, that he did what in him lay to deprive genius of its character of apparent incomprehensibility and contrariety to reason, by explaining (in his autobiography, _Wahrheit und Dichtung_) his own genius, the most profound and universal of the age, as a natural product developed by circumstances--thereby creating the type of literary criticism to which the Romanticists were strongly opposed.

From Goethe the young generation derived their theory of the rights and the importance of the great, free personality. He had always lived his own life, and had always lived it fully and freely. Without making any attack whatever on the existing conditions of society, he had remoulded, according to his own requirements, the social relations in which he found himself placed. He becomes the soul of the youthful and joyous court of Weimar, with the audacity of youth and genius drawing every one with him into a whirl of gaiety--fêtes, picnics, skating expeditions, masquerades--animated by a wild joy in nature, which is now "lightened," now "darkened" by love affairs of a more or less dubious character. Jean Paul writes to a friend that he can only describe the morals of Weimar to him by word of mouth. When we hear that even skating was a scandal to the worthy Philistines of that town, we are not surprised by old Wieland's ill-natured remark, that the circle in question appeared to him to be aiming at "brutalising animal nature." Thus it was that the sweet, refined coquette, Frau von Stein, became Goethe's muse for ten whole years, the original of Leonore and Iphigenia; and later he created a still greater scandal by taking into his house Christiane Vulpius (the young girl whose presence had become a necessity to him, and who, in spite of her faults, never embittered his life by making any demands upon him), and living with her for eighteen years before obtaining the sanction of the Church to their union.

Goethe's as well as Schiller's youthful works had been inspired by what the Germans call the "Freigeisterei" of passion, its demand for freedom, its instinct of revolt. Both breathe one and the same spirit, the spirit of defiance. Goethe's _Die Geschwister_ treats of the passion of brother for sister. The conclusion of _Stella_, in its original form, is a justification of bigamy; and Jean Paul, too, in his _Siebenkäs_, treats of bigamy as a thing perfectly permissible in the case of a genius to whom the first tie has become burdensome. _Götz_ represents the tragic fate of the man of genius who rises in revolt against a lukewarm and corrupt age. Schiller's _Die Räuber_, with its device _In Tyrannos_, and its motto from Hippocrates, "That which medicine cannot cure iron cures, and that which iron cannot cure fire cures," is a declaration of war against society. Karl Moor is the noble-hearted idealist, who in "the castrated century" is inevitably doomed to perish as a criminal. Schiller's robbers are not highwaymen, but revolutionaries. They do not plunder, but punish. They have separated themselves from society to revenge themselves upon it for the wrongs it has done them. Schiller's defiance is still more personally expressed in those poems of his first period which were written under the influence of his relations with Frau von Kalb, poems re-written and entirely altered in the later editions. In the one which ultimately received the title _Der Kampf_, but which was originally called _Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft_, he writes:--

"Woher dies Zittern, dies unnennbare Entsetzen, Wenn mich dein liebevoller Arm umschlang? Weil Dich ein Eid, den auch nur Wallungen verletzen, In fremde Fesseln zwang?

"Weil ein Gebrauch, den die Gesetze heilig prägen, Des Zufalls schwere Missethat geweiht? Nein--unerschrocken trotz ich einem Bund entgegen, Den die erröthende Natur bereut.

"O zittre nicht--Du hast als Sünderin geschworen, Ein Meineid ist der Reue fromme Pflicht, Das Herz war mein, das Du vor dem Altar verloren, Mit Menschenfreuden spielt der Himmel nicht."[1]